Contents

Cover

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

RED KNIGHT

MOURNING IN RAINHOLLOW

BLOOD DROUGHT

THE NEFARIOUS ANTIPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

The Fleshstink Procession

The Edict of The Tower

The Conclave of Zhurn

The Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus

ROADWARDEN

TRAIL OF ASH

NO MATTER THE COST

MOURNCLAW

RIVER OF DEATH

WATCHERS OF BATTLE

THE MANSE OF MIRRORS

THE FOURFOLD WOUND

I

II

III

IV

THE SERPENT’S BARGAIN

THE UNLAMENTED ARCHPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

IN THE MISTS OF CHAOS

THE BOOK OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Prologue

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

FROM THE DEEP

FAITH IN THUNDER

TIES OF BLOOD

NO HONOUR AMONG VERMIN

THE PATH TO GLORY

Sulla

Kaslon

Livius

Kaslon

Livius

Sulla

Livius

Kaslon

Sulla

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Dominion’

A Black Library Publication

The Mortal Realms have been despoiled. Ravaged by the followers of the Chaos Gods, they stand on the brink of utter destruction.

The fortress-cities of Sigmar are islands of light in a sea of darkness. Constantly besieged, their walls are assailed by maniacal hordes and monstrous beasts. The bones of good men are littered thick outside the gates. These bulwarks of Order are embattled within as well as without, for the lure of Chaos beguiles the citizens with promises of power.

Still the champions of Order fight on. At the break of dawn, the Crusader’s Bell rings and a new expedition departs. Storm-forged knights march shoulder to shoulder with resolute militia, stoic duardin and slender aelves. Bedecked in the splendour of war, the Dawnbringer Crusades venture out to found civilisations anew. These grim pioneers take with them the fires of hope. Yet they go forth into a hellish wasteland.

Out in the wilds, hardy colonists restore order to a crumbling world. Haunted eyes scan the horizon for tyrannical reavers as they build upon the bones of ancient empires, eking out a meagre existence from cursed soil and ice-cold seas. By their valour, the fate of the Mortal Realms will be decided.

The ravening terrors that prey upon these settlers take a thousand forms. Cannibal barbarians and deranged murderers crawl from hidden lairs. Martial hosts clad in black steel march from skull-strewn castles. The savage hordes of Destruction batter the frontier towns until no stone stands atop another. In the dead of night come howling throngs of the undead, hungry to feast upon the living.

Against such foes, courage is the truest defence and the most effective weapon. It is something that Sigmar’s chosen do not lack. But they are not always strong enough to prevail, and even in victory, each new battle saps their souls a little more.

This is the time of turmoil. This is the era of war.

This is the Age of Sigmar

RED KNIGHT

Miles A Drake

Golden clouds shimmered, iridescent in the harsh light of the fading sun. Filtering through the metallic thorn trees behind them, the glittering mirage cloaked the advance of three dozen men. Striding over the fissures radiating from the quicksilver geysers marring the landscape, Saroglek kept ahead of the others, even though he was the most heavily armoured. Such hindrances were nothing to a man of his stature. He was Amarkhaian. His people were giants among men, the fiercest warriors in all of the Beholden Demesne.

Ahead, the Atrogai fortress loomed, its squat, mesa-like structure built to withstand the regular tectonic spasms of the region. It was the last bastion of a foul people that had despoiled the land for far too long.

Saroglek scarcely remembered what life had been like before the Atrogai reavers had come, and before his liege had unified the disparate tribes and petty kingdoms of the Sykarix Peninsula. With that unity, the newly formed Beholden Demesne had brought judgement to the Atrogai. With one great army, they had seized eleven forts and cleansed their land of the raiders.

Each had been a bloody effort. A frenzied climb followed by a furious battle. A true test of mettle against mettle. Saroglek was eager to test himself once more. While he relished the honour of leading the final assault, he lamented that he could not share his glory with his king… For the king had chosen to remain behind with the main army. The Beholden Legion was camped in one of the Sykarix rifts, safe from the fearsome Atrogai siege engines. Allowing Saroglek to lead had been one of the many selfless gestures of the Unbeholden King, allowing another the sole glory of the conquest. It was not one Saroglek would soon forget.

His vanguard came to a halt as they reached the edge of the thorn forest, invisible to the fortress’ sentries in the glimmering sunset. Saroglek turned to his men, forty hardened veterans from across the demesne. Pale-skinned Karixian riftmen stood beside shaggy Saradkol hill warriors. A group of ebon-skinned Marakht scouts, with golden eyes and tattoos, flanked a trio of Saroglek’s fellow Amarkhaians. The latter towered over the other men, fearsome in their baroque red warplate and grilled visors. Each man amongst the warband bore a red sash across his armour, and a stripe of crimson painted across his face. They were the banderium, the elite of the Beholden Demesne.

Saroglek walked among them, clapping Valaku, one of his Amarkhaians, on the shoulder. The excitement and anticipation was almost palpable in the tangy air. ‘Today, we end the Atrogai threat,’ he growled with a grin. ‘We make for the throne room. The false despot, Nashan, will kneel, or he will find himself a head shorter.’

His men chuckled.

‘We are the hand of the true king! We cannot fail!’

The men raised their weapons, and pounded their fists onto their chests in salute. Saroglek gestured with his left gauntlet towards the fractured no man’s land before them. Several burbling quicksilver geysers belched acrid plumes of red smoke.

‘No sound until we reach the walls. I will not stand to see another servant of the demesne fall to cowards’ arrows or accursed Atrogai engines. Once we are among them…’ He grinned again. ‘Then we shall let the barbarian curs bask in our glory!’ He raised his flanged, crimson-runed mace towards the wall.

‘Aldasht.’ He looked back at the dark-skinned, heavily tattooed Marakht chieftain. ‘Take your scouts. Flank right. Silence those engines before they turn on us.’

Aldasht nodded, clanking his long, hooked knives together.

Saroglek turned to the rest of his men. ‘Remember, we are justice. This is no sack. If the enemy surrenders, grant him quarter. If he does not… Well…’ He shrugged, and without a further word, he began to run.

Dozens of boots quietly pattered across the cracked earth behind him, and plumes of copper dust, kicked up by their silent charge, swirled in the red haze of the geysers’ smoke, haloing the banderium in a blinding mirage.

Gritting his teeth, Saroglek felt the rush of coming battle pump through him. Familiar bloodlust boiled as he saw the Atrogai sentries atop the palisade, completely unaware of what was coming. He longed for vengeance. For justice against the barbarian marauders. In the reverie of his building adrenaline, he felt his blood begin to simmer, a fierce rage threatening to set his spirit alight. It was a frenzy, a caged storm contained within the heart of every warrior. Some used it, like the Atrogai, to stoke the flames into a roaring bonfire of primal fury. Other cultures were more refined. They controlled it, repressed it, lest it overwhelm them. Saroglek fought it down, remembering the cold clarity of finely honed martial prowess, rather than sating the red haze of wanton bloodlust.

In a matter of moments, his main force reached the base of the wall, the mirage of acrid smoke and red dust preventing the sentries from seeing them at all. Saroglek could see Aldasht’s raiders already climbing. He looped his flanged mace into his belt and gripped the uneven stonework, hoisting his heavily armoured bulk upward. Quickly scaling the slope, he reached the battlements, gripping the palisade points and vaulting over, straight in between two fur-clad sentries.

Saroglek expected them to be surprised, even shocked, for the sudden appearance of a giant, red-armoured knight in their midst was certain to inspire such a reaction. But the terror in their eyes was something else. It was obvious that these warriors were the last dregs of the Atrogai. Novices who had never seen real battle. Saroglek felt some remorse in what came next…

With no time to draw his mace, he grabbed the first man and hurled him back. The barbarian crashed through the flimsy fence and tumbled off the wall, screaming, into the courtyard. Saroglek punched his gauntlet into the face of the other, shattering his jaw and sending the barbarian staggering out from under the awning. Striding forward, he took hold of the man’s head and snapped his neck in an instant, hurling his twitching corpse onto the sheet-metal roof of a shelter below.

By now, most of his warriors were atop the battlements, and the falling corpses and screams had sounded the alarm well enough. One sentry, further down, managed a single note on a horn before he was silenced by an Amarkhaian’s morning star.

Surveying the interior of the fortress, Saroglek saw that a squat, circular keep dominated most of the space, alongside an ironwood barracks. Improvised shelters made from rusted sheet metal shared the space with smithies and stables along the main wall, but gave some room for an open square of glittering copper-veined flagstones between the barracks and the keep. At the heart of the square, a three-pronged tuning fork rose twenty feet into the air, gleaming a brilliant gold in the dying light. Two Atrogai warriors rushed towards it from the shelters to begin clanging on it with metal rods. After a few strikes, it created an eerily pitched whine that resonated through the wind.

Ropes hung with strange, hollow metal objects shaped like gourds were strung up between the central keep and a few of the prominent structures within the fortress, amplifying the resonance.

Saroglek knew all too well that the sound would carry over the landscape, singing off the metallic rock and vibrating through the ferrous trees. It would alert any Atrogai reinforcements beyond the fortress’ walls.

But there were none.

The Unbeholden King had dispatched several parties of Marakht scouts to clear the surrounding lands of any and all Atrogai patrols.

This truly was their last bastion.

But it was well protected from a full-scale assault. Three multi-barrelled cannons, undoubtedly stolen from more civilised lands, loomed atop improvised turrets on the walls. The Atrogai were already scrambling about, panic and confusion in their eyes.

Pointing with his mace towards the cannons, he turned to Valaku. ‘Silence those infernal engines before they turn on us!’

Those engines were the reason the Unbeholden King had sent Saroglek and his banderium. What could make short work of massed infantry formations would have much more trouble with a small band of elite skirmishers.

The stair down to the courtyard was a good thirty paces away, and his banderium was already hacking into the defenders there. Realising that the path would take too long, Saroglek grit his teeth and jumped. His iron-shod boots crunched into the crawling man he’d thrown from the wall, partly absorbing the bone-jarring impact, and silencing the barbarian’s cries with a sickening squelch.

Recovering, Saroglek roared a challenge to a trio of Atrogai that emerged from a nearby shelter. Their confusion turned to horror, and their panicked gazes looked for an avenue of retreat.

Saroglek snarled. ‘Kneel or fight, cowards!’

They turned to flee, but he covered the distance in a few strides, arcing his flanged mace down onto the one that stood and raised his shield. It shattered it in a mess of splintered ironwood, bone and pulped meat. The man screamed at his mangled arm as Saroglek slammed a gauntleted fist into his face, silencing him. Another barbarian tripped as he fled, and without breaking stride, Saroglek pulped his shoulder and ribcage with his mace. The third barbarian fled straight into Tamasz. The grey-bearded Saradkol warrior skewered the man in the gut with a short sword, and plunged his off-hand dagger into his eye.

Grinning and bloodied, Tamasz and three other banderium warriors fell in behind Saroglek as he rushed towards another pack of barbarians. A dozen of them had emerged from one of the interior tunnels in the wall, the first rank kneeling and raising shields, the second aiming their iron-veined horn bows.

Saroglek roared in rage as they loosed, feeling a few arrows clatter off his armour. He felt each impact like a hammer blow, but they did nothing.

Tamasz fell to the volley, alongside a Karixian warrior, and a red haze misted around the edges of Saroglek’s vision as he barrelled into the Atrogai, crashing through the shield wall. His first swing sent one barbarian sprawling and shattered the leg of an archer in the second line. His backswing obliterated the jaw of another Atrogai even before the two other banderium warriors hacked into the barbarian formation, their falchions and mauls sending up crimson sprays.

Saroglek grabbed a fleeing archer by the throat, lifting him high. He roared as he crushed the man’s neck, lashing out with his mace to implode the ribcage of another. Casting the corpse aside, he spun, the runes on his weapon flaring crimson as it sent a mauled tribesman ten paces from the melee in a halo of splattered gore. An archer drew a dirk and thrust it into Saroglek’s shoulder, but it deflected off his pauldron, and he caved in the man’s skull with a savage fist. Spinning again, he brought his mace up, shattering an archer’s jaw and wrenching his head off in a gruesome tear of mangled flesh and sinew. The few barbarians that survived fled straight into Aldasht’s raiders, who slid down the ladders, leaving the mangled corpses of the cannon’s crew in their wake.

In the distance, Saroglek saw the red-armoured forms of Kavhost and Valaku reach the other cannon, hurling the gunners from the wall just as they’d managed to turn it towards the courtyard. Saroglek raised his weapon to Valaku, putting a fist to his mouth in the traditional Amarkhaian salute, before turning to see the bloodied ruins of the Atrogai warriors behind him. The red haze retreated from his vision, and Saroglek paled, startled at the sight.

He shook his head in disgust. The slaughter had been excessive. Too excessive. He pushed back the bloodlust, grimacing at those he’d killed. Given his brutality, it was only natural that the Atrogai were so terrified of him. To them, he was undoubtedly no bringer of justice, no knight. To them, he was a butcher.

Shaking off his discontent, he pointed towards the keep, where a throng of barbarians clustered before its ironbark gate, taking battle lines. Armoured warriors stood among them, their horned barbutes and scavenged warplate marking them as Nashan’s chosen.

Advancing, the Marakht raiders joined him, along with a few other banderium warriors. Corpses already littered the ground. Most were Atrogai, but a few weren’t. By now, the defenders on the wall were dead, crushed by the Amarkhaians and Saradkol. Several banderium warriors descended into the shelters along the walls, cutting free horses and sowing pandemonium as they flanked the amassing barbarians. The few Atrogai that had managed to retreat from the tents and walls joined their comrades before the gate.

This wouldn’t be some surprise attack or massacre of confused, unprepared men. This would be a proper battle. He signalled his own lines to form up, intentionally giving the Atrogai ample time to do the same.

Saroglek’s heart thundered as his breath heaved. He fought the rage, the haze, struggling to keep his mind clear. Pointing his mace towards the barbarians, his face curled into a snarling rictus as he advanced.

One of the barbarians roared commands to his fellows, gesturing with a longaxe, his back adorned with two skull-pointed flags, his crude breastplate spiked with severed hands. Disgust roiled in Saroglek, feeding off his bloodlust, amplifying his rage. He longed to bring righteous judgement down upon the unwholesome men before him. His banderium roared, rattling their weapons as they postured against the Atrogai.

The enemy looked terrified. It was clear that these were not experienced warriors, for they gripped their weapons with white knuckles, and they stood on shaking knees. Only the chosen seemed to control their fear, standing upright and armoured amidst the less courageous rabble. Saroglek wondered what they saw before them. Were they terrified because they knew the banderium was the inevitable hammer of the justice they’d evaded for so long? Or were they terrified because they’d just emerged into a senseless bloodbath?

Saroglek raised his arm to calm his men. His men were the armoured fist of civilisation. They were not savages. And he would ensure they acted the part.

‘I am Lord Saroglek!’ he roared to the barbarians, causing them to flinch away from his booming voice. ‘I am the Duke of Amarkhai, marshal of the Beholden Demesne, and the right hand of the Unbeholden King! You have despoiled our realm, and savaged our people! And now, I am your judgement!’

He gazed over the opposing line. They were fifty strong, at least, outnumbering his banderium. But that didn’t matter. His warriors were the elite of the Beholden Demesne, and Saroglek and his Amarkhaians would more than make up the difference in numbers.

‘But I am not without mercy, and the Unbeholden King is a generous ruler! You have impressed him, and he will allow you to join his victory feast, providing you kneel…’ He paused to let his words sink in. The barbarians still looked terrified. He gestured to the keep. ‘Bring this message to your k–’

They charged with a mad roar, terror-borne abandon driving them into a reckless, suicidal frenzy. Arrows whistled over the rush, thudding into the banderium. Several men screamed and fell.

Saroglek hesitated for a moment, perplexed. He’d just offered them a chance to live, and they’d responded like cornered beasts… He shook his head, disgusted. ‘So be it!’ He roared, and counter-charged. ‘Then death is your judgement!’

The banderium followed as his flankers darted through the tents to pile into the undefended Atrogai bowmen. The lines met with bone-jarring impact. An axe crushed into his pauldron, denting the metal and staggering him, but Saroglek recovered and tore into the bowels of the axeman with his blade-fingered gauntlet, swiping his mace to turn another warrior’s head into a mess of grey and crimson. Saroglek ripped the axeman’s innards free as the red haze seeped into his vision. He swung again, pulping the ribcage of another warrior, before shattering the shield and arm of a third with his backswing. Both men were immediately torn down by the banderium warriors that swarmed through the gap he’d made in their line.

To the left, Kamar beat a barbarian down with his warhammer, deftly parrying another warrior’s attack, before kneeing the second man in the groin and spinning the spike-head of the hammer into his temple. To the right, Mavar, a shaggy Saradkol warrior, disembowelled an Atrogai with a dirk and ducked under the swinging sword of another, shouldering into the tribesman and giving one of the Marakht a clear angle to thrust a blade into his spine.

Blood sprayed and screams resounded as the slaughter unfolded.

In the midst of his swings, Saroglek saw one of his Amarkhaians brought down. A group of Atrogai archers untouched by the flankers released a volley of close-ranged needlepoints. Two arrows punched through the Amarkhaian’s leather gorget, and he lurched forward, taking two of the archers with him with one swipe of his morning star as he fell.

Several barbarians cut through the banderium line, but instead of exploiting the advantage, they fled towards the gate. Saroglek ignored them, grabbing another Atrogai that tried to slip past him, lifting him up before him and staring into his eyes.

The man screamed, thrashing in terror.

‘Why?’ Saroglek roared. ‘Why do you not yield? Why do you wish to die?’

The man shrieked.

A blade pierced up under Saroglek’s breastplate. With an insensate roar, Saroglek crushed the throat of the barbarian, and brought his forearm down on the man that had stabbed him, sending him to the bloodied earth with a shattered collarbone. Saroglek’s iron-shod boot pulped his skull as streaks of crimson weaved around the edges of his vision. The sounds of metal on metal and cries of rage and agony overwhelmed his senses, becoming one hideous note, one cacophony beating to the savage rhythm of his own heart. Amidst so much death and suffering, he felt so alive… Somewhere, in the corner of his mind, restraint and disgust drowned in the tide of blood.

Saroglek advanced, an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction, each stride accompanied by a swing, each swing accompanied by crunching bone and splattering flesh. The haze took him wholly as he killed, and killed… and killed…

Somehow, he was among the chosen, and he noticed a pick-hammer punching clean through his breastplate. He howled, vomiting blood into his own helm, headbutting the warrior back before tearing his claw-gauntlet deep into the man’s neck.

The other Amarkhaians and the Marakht had cut into the chosen, occupying them and giving Saroglek an avenue to face their champion… alone. The wound hardly bothered him as he singled out the Atrogai leader.

A duel, Saroglek thought. The order inherent in that concept was enough to lift the haze slightly.

‘Yield…’ he rasped through his heaving, bloodied breaths. ‘Yield or die…’

The champion lunged in with his longaxe. Saroglek parried, haft meeting haft. He shoved, forcing the barbarian into the keep’s gate. Bouncing back, the champion thrust the head of his weapon out with admirable speed, catching Saroglek in the jaw. The blow rang off his helmet, momentarily stunning him, allowing the Atrogai to slam another blow into his greave. Roaring as the armour dented, Saroglek grabbed the champion by the shoulder just as another blow struck him in the side. Dropping his elbow, he pinned the axe under his arm.

With a bestial snarl, Saroglek pushed, finding purchase on the warrior’s pauldron and shoving him up against the rattling gate. The Atrogai champion roared, putting all of his strength into shoving Saroglek off. He was rewarded with a headbutt that silenced his efforts. Helm rang against helm, and Saroglek felt the impact jarring his neck and jaw. The battle raged around him as he bashed again, and again, bouncing the champion’s head up against the gate with his own, until he felt something cave.

The Atrogai champion collapsed as his body convulsed, his helm dented halfway into his skull, red and grey oozing from its eye slits.

A sense of psychotic invigoration flooded Saroglek, and he struggled to keep it back. Adrenaline numbed the pain of his wound such that even his ragged breath was only a minor inconvenience.

It took him a few moments to realise the battle was over. Several Atrogai attempted to crawl away, but they didn’t make it far. The banderium relentlessly hacked down the wounded and fleeing barbarians, even as they attempted to open the gates to escape. The haze retreated.

‘Let them go!’ Saroglek roared, disgust drowning his bloodlust. But his commands came too late… No Atrogai had survived. ‘Banderium! To me!’ he called out angrily.

Snapping out of their frenzy, the men abandoned their butchery and slunk back to him. He could see rage and guilt alike in their bloodshot eyes. Each of them was spattered in crimson. Several were wounded, but they stood strong, their resilience and sense of greater purpose overcoming their pain.

‘Control yourselves!’ Saroglek scolded them. ‘We are not animals! We are not orruks! And we are not Atrogai! We are the Beholden Legion! And we will act like it!’ His words were as much a reminder to himself as they were to his men.

Downcast eyes and guilty affirmations met him. Several other banderium warriors were already in formation around him. They had controlled their savage impulses better. He nodded approvingly to them, even if such would be meaningless praise, given what he had done.

In a way, he was glad his king was not present to see this mess. Saroglek never lost control when fighting beside his liege, and to do so now only showed how much the supposedly reformed tribes of the Beholden Demesne still had to learn.

He snarled, shoving the doubt away as he regarded the keep. The only way to atone for this callous butchery was through ending the Atrogai swiftly, and decisively.

‘Their despot cowers within!’ Saroglek roared. ‘He kneels, or he dies!’

The gate was barred, but Saroglek and his remaining Amarkhaians bludgeoned it inward with a few dozen blows, splintering the ironwood and gouging out the entire locking mechanism.

The doors creaked open, and Saroglek glanced into the gloom, surprised and confused to find the gatehouse devoid of resistance. The remnants of the banderium, now three dozen, followed him into the dark, musty hall.

‘Be vigilant,’ he growled. ‘This isn’t over. Expect an ambush.’

Advancing into the throne room, he met no opposition. The chamber itself was small, and dominated by an ornate chair, carved of ferrous wood. Silver-beaked skulls and strings of the glittering golden feathers of Amarkhaian condors, prizes claimed from his homeland, decorated the walls while a central hearth glowed with simmering flux-stones, their colours and shapes continuously shifting as they gave off a halo of warm, magnetic pressure. Low feasting tables, made from spell-warped Karixian glass, still bore abandoned meals on silver plates. The entire hall was arranged so that the king might look down on his subjects.

Saroglek shook his head. The Unbeholden King had no need for such petty displays. The feast tables of his noble realm were wide and round, and the king would dine with courtier, knight and commoner alike, providing they had proven themselves.

There would undoubtedly be another such feast this night, to celebrate Saroglek’s victory. He would have his place of honour beside the Unbeholden King once more. Saroglek had hoped that some of the Atrogai would join them, for the Beholden Demesne was made stronger by the assimilation of other nations. But clearly, these barbarians didn’t know what was best for them.

‘Search the halls,’ he directed Aldasht and his ebon-skinned Marakht. ‘Find where they are hiding, but do not engage. I will remain here, in case their despot decides to grow a spine and face us.’

The Marakht scattered into the halls as Saroglek paced around the throne room. Swords, axes and shields hung from the walls attached to massive, spiked chains. The Atrogai were a warrior folk. For all their savage ways, they would have made a fine addition to the Beholden Demesne. Savages could be reformed, after all. The Saradkol and Marakht had not been so different once…

Even his own Amarkhaians had resisted the Unbeholden King at the beginning. Saroglek could scarcely remember that war. That had been another life, so long ago.

He shook his head, a flush of shame passing through him. He had fought against his king, but he had learned. They had been ignorant then, and refused to see the glory and prosperity of the Beholden Demesne. He had eventually seen it. And he had knelt.

And his people had knelt with him. And they were all stronger for it.

‘My lord.’ Aldasht had returned, breaking Saroglek’s reverie. ‘We found them. They lurk in the reliquary chamber, cowering.’

‘Good,’ Saroglek replied. ‘Then lead us. Your scouts will dine at the king’s table tonight.’

Led by the Marakht, Saroglek found the last Atrogai deep in the bowels of the keep, cowering in a long hall lit by candelabras. A large open space ran from the doorway all the way to the far end, flanked by all manner of stolen artefacts. Saroglek saw sconces full of Saradkian Lodestones, obsidian black but casting golden light from within their porous surfaces. A row of strange, silvered mirrors loomed at the far end of the chamber, and several chests overflowed with precious metals. Racks of arcane implements were built into the walls themselves, and their shelves sported golden cartographical sextants, strange sundials and all manner of apparatus Saroglek could not define the purpose of. Banners hung from the walls, both foreign and familiar. A tattered flag of dull crimson, marked with a black clawed gauntlet, represented the very reason Saroglek was here. The banner of his people. He would avenge the Amarkhaians slaughtered by the Atrogai, honour his oath to his king, and end the Atrogai terror once and for all.

His eyes drifted to the end of the chamber, where the very last vestige of Atrogai resistance held their shields before the entrance to a narrow escape tunnel. This would be the end.

Shouts rang out as the Atrogai formed up. Amidst the line of shield bearers, one stood out from the rest. Armoured in ornate demi-plate and a barbute helm adorned by golden horns, the despot waited, a cape of exotic white fur affixed to his shoulders. Clutching a greatsword, its point down in defiance, he almost looked like a true knight.

The despot called out, and his men raised their shields higher.

Saroglek removed his grilled helm as the banderium filed in around him. He revealed his aquiline features and braided black hair. It would give the Atrogai a face to regard this time. Perhaps that would help them see him as someone that could be reasoned with.

‘King Nashan,’ Saroglek began. The man was no true king, but he would honour his adversary with the title. ‘You have fought well. The Unbeholden King will allow you to surrender. Kneel, and you may join him in feast to discuss the terms of your vassalage.’

The Atrogai warlord raised his greatsword, pointing at Saroglek across the chamber. He roared something in his barbarian tongue, and Saroglek pieced a few words together.

The warlord called the invaders before him monsters. He said the Atrogai would never be taken alive.

But the warlord was hardly even addressing Saroglek; he was shouting to his own men. They were the shouts of one final moment of defiance before the end.

And Saroglek remembered those words… from somewhere else…

A moment of intense vertigo swept over him as he saw the reflections in the mirrors looming along the Atrogai flank. He saw ranks of mailed warriors with feather-crested helms and shields emblazoned with celestial heraldry. He saw a huddle of elderly folk, women and children, shoving to enter the tunnel behind them.

Momentarily stunned, fracture lines wound around the edges of Saroglek’s vision like crimson serpents. ‘What?’ he growled. His voice sounded distorted, barely like a voice at all. ‘What sorcery is this?’

The Atrogai charged.

The crimson cracks disappeared as he blinked the bizarre reflections away. Saroglek barely had time to react as his warriors counter-charged, surging around him. In a moment of disoriented, confused rage, Saroglek joined them.

If some vile, barbarian shaman had attempted to bewitch him, he would not succumb so easily. He raged at such cowardly tactics just as he raged at himself, knowing that he was the reason they did not surrender. They saw a monster. They saw the terror he became in battle, the merciless engine of destruction that left only mangled corpses in his wake.

He would have to become the monster they’d made of him. Again.

He rushed directly for their king, his mace’s runes flaring a baleful crimson as he barrelled through the line, knocking aside barbarian shield bearers. ‘You forced my hand!’ he roared, his mace shattering shields and bones alike. Men scattered under the impacts, and the banderium surged through the gap, tearing into the shield bearers with daggers, hatchets and clubs.

One of the shield bearers thrust a silvered blade at him. It skipped across his breastplate, finding the gap the barbarian pick had made.

Saroglek howled in agony as he reached forward, his claw grabbing the man’s arm as he swatted another aside with his mace. He twisted, feeling the limb wrench free from its socket. The barbarian roared as Saroglek pulled him close and delivered a brutal headbutt.

Somehow, he eviscerated the man’s throat, and a tide of crimson spurted in through the grille of Saroglek’s helm. He felt the familiar tang of blood in his mouth, even as it burned his eyes. Swinging madly, hateful of the fact that he was forced to, once again, be the butcher his enemies proclaimed him to be, he smashed two more shield bearers aside that sought to impede his progress towards the Atrogai despot.

As the last shield bearer ducked under his swing and lashed out, denting Saroglek’s greave inward with a hammer swing, Saroglek reached low, clawing out the man’s innards clean through the mail, before crushing his skull and shoulder into pulp with his mace.

The despot sought to scrabble away, as the rest of the banderium fighters gave Saroglek the space to strike the decisive blow to end the war himself. Saroglek advanced, covering the distance of the despot’s retreat in a few strides. The man thrust with his sword, but Saroglek effortlessly batted away the feeble strike, and clasped his claw around the man’s throat and lifted him high. As he stared into the Atrogai king’s eyes, crimson coils wreathed his vision and the vertigo returned, nearly toppling him.

In the man’s eyes, he saw a reflection. Something monstrous… something terrible.

He hurled the king away, sending him sprawling behind the battle line, crashing right in front of one of the mirrors.

Clearing the gap, Saroglek brought his boot down on the Atrogai despot to pin him to the ground.

His strides brought him directly before the blood-spattered mirror. And within its reflection… Saroglek saw madness.

Delusion seized his mind as that madness became reality. As the coils worming their way into his vision tightened, and a reddish fog began to blanket his field of view, the Atrogai became the mailed warriors he’d seen for an instant before. There was terror in their eyes, but it was held at bay not by bloodlust but by courage and desperation.

In the reflection, Saroglek saw hideous, hunched degenerates loping about behind him, their flesh threaded by bones, their tangled hair matted with gore and entrails. The sanguine fog seemed to trail them, distorting their images as they raked at the mailed warriors with septic talons and clubs fashioned from sharpened bone, and in a moment of deranged understanding Saroglek realised they were his banderium. Where his two Amarkhaians had stood only moments before, he now saw two abominable giants, shrouded in red mist, towering over the hunched horrors below them, wielding massive clubs.

He saw his own form in the mirror, pale-fleshed and hideously scarred, wracked by deformity and caked in gore from head to toe. The blood billowed from him, cloaking him in the haze. A savage club fashioned from the bone of some gigantic monster replaced his runed mace, and elongated hooked talons jutted from his other hand.

‘What is this?’ he roared. ‘What have you done to me?’ But there were no words. There was only a revolting, abhorrent screech of madness and confusion.

Wracked by horror, Saroglek pressed his clawed foot down on the Atrogai despot. The barbarian monarch was naught but an old man in ceremonial armour, an ancient king who had to watch his people die. The armour cracked as assuredly as the ribs beneath. With a sickening crunch, the king’s torso collapsed, gore erupting from his mouth.

His breath heaving in panic, Saroglek wheeled around, seeing a pack of ghoulish black-skinned monsters tear through the last remnants of the Atrogai line, and into the throng of those attempting to flee down the tunnels.

Red mist hazed their forms, cloaking the things that had been the Marakht and the fleeing Atrogai alike. Within that mist, Saroglek saw…

There were no routing warriors, broken by their cowardice. There were only common folk, helpless and terrified, the last vestiges of a people that had been butchered by a raging horde of deranged cannibals. They screamed in terror as the hunched, black-skinned monsters tore into them, a frenzy of claws and bone clubs sending crimson sprays in all directions.

Saroglek shook his head. It was all lies.

‘Is this how you see us?’ Saroglek’s words came out as an anguished roar.

He could not bear to see the carnage wreaked upon helpless folk. It was too real. It spoke to the bloodlust within him too well. Even if it was a lie, he knew… It could have been true… if he ever gave into that beast coiled within him.

‘Let them go!’ he roared at the Marakht, thundering forward. They scattered.

‘We… are not… monsters!’ he shrieked as he saw the carnage. Many of the commoners had been shredded, the wounds inflicted by teeth and claws, not by falchions and axes. The entire escape tunnel was slick with gore. The last few scattered away from him, the terror in their eyes and the screams echoing down the tunnel cutting deep into his soul.

He frantically searched the room for anything that might be the source of his affliction. With each passing heartbeat, the delusion became more and more unbearable. Frantically, Saroglek spun, searching for–

He saw it.

He saw his reflection in one of the blood-spattered mirrors.

He saw the pale, grotesque monster. He saw the ghoulish degenerates scampering about, tearing at the fallen warriors, ripping through mail to sink their claws and fangs into their flesh. The two giants, much akin to his own reflection, stared at him with deformed, brutish faces. He shook his head, willing the illusion away. But it wouldn’t dissipate.

‘What have you done to me?’ he roared. He refused to accept what he saw. It could not possibly be reality even if… He ran his claw across his chest, gouging open a wound. It burned. It was no gauntlet scraping over plate.

‘No no no no…’ he tried to say. But his words were a pathetic, broken snarl.

And then he realised… The delusion began with the mirrors. This horrid distortion had only happened because he had stared into them. Understanding dawned on him.

‘The mirrors! Twisted… mirrors! They bewitch us!’ His words came out as savage howls, but he ignored it. He knew how to end the vile Atrogai spell.

He lunged forward, smashing his face into the mirror, shattering it. As the shards fell to the copper-veined stones, he saw the reflection in the broken glass. He saw red armour.

Hope returned in full force.

It had been a lie.

A terrible, deceptive spell created by vile shamans, bound into the mirrors to break his spirit. They must have known how he’d struggled with his internal bloodlust.

With a roar of triumph, he wheeled around, bringing the bone that was his mace through another mirror, scattering shards across the hall. He heard calls of triumph instead of rabid barks as the red haze retreated. The images of his loyal banderium began to flicker back into reality, the foul distortions shattering away just as the glass from the final mirror did, as he thrust his mace through it.

As the last shards fell to the ground, salvation came. The red fractures and the bewitching crimson haze retreated to the edges of his vision, then faded entirely. The vertigo subsided, and in a moment of profound relief, he held up his hands to find crimson gauntlets, not pale, deformed claws.

Embracing the return of his sanity as tightly as he could, he felt tears of relief pour down his cheeks.

The men around him became themselves again. His banderium… The Amarkhaians, the Marakht. All of them. They looked to him with a mix of concern and relief. They’d clearly noticed something had vexed him.

The bodies on the ground became the savage, fur-clad tribesmen, felled by weapons, not torn down by teeth and claws. And most relieving of all, the mess of corpses at the mouth of the escape tunnel became the felled warriors that had tried to flee, not the mutilated bodies of common folk.

The Atrogai spell had broken.

The shouting that echoed from the tunnel, from the fleeing survivors, was that of men. Warriors. Cowards who had chosen to run.

Cowards who had left foul sorcery to bewitch those that came to punish them. It filled Saroglek with disgust, and he felt a moment of guilt for calling off those running them down.

He rectified his mistake, looking to Aldasht and the Marakht. ‘Let no cowards live…’ His voice had returned: a low growl, angry and shaken, but noble and human all the same.

Aldasht nodded, thankful to have his leader back, before sprinting down the tunnel to hunt the cravens.

All of his warriors looked relieved. Perhaps they had believed he’d gone mad…

But it had been a spell. A momentary madness. Nothing more. ‘I am here,’ he assured them.

Valaku clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come, let us signal the king!’ the Amarkhaian said. ‘He will be most pleased by this victory.’

Saroglek nodded, eager to leave this foul chamber and its depraved witchcraft behind. The remaining banderium, now little over twenty men in strength, followed him into the halls.

There, he heard the echo of screams emanating from the tunnel far behind him. At this distance… the pitch of the screams sounded too… high to be coming from men. He paused, feeling a dull, burning ache across his chest, like he’d suffered some manner of deep slash. His hackles rose as he clacked his gauntlet across his breastplate. But there was no wound. There were no wounds at all.

He’d come through the battle completely unscathed.

No further screams came. He shook his head, realising it must have been an after-effect of the barbarians’ spell.

Valaku kept pace alongside him. ‘My lord, what happened there? You suddenly became… unwell.’

‘The Atrogai cast some curse upon me,’ Saroglek hissed. ‘I saw things that shouldn’t have been…’

‘Visions?’

‘Delusions,’ Saroglek returned with certainty. ‘But they are gone now.’

Without a further word, they left the keep and entered the courtyard. In the distance, overhead, he could already see the shape of his king approaching, soaring high atop the back of his golden drake. The noble beast circled the fortress once, the dying light glimmering off its scales as assuredly as it shone off its rider’s silver armour. The drake roared in triumph before landing in the courtyard amidst the men.

Everyone knelt as the Unbeholden King dismounted. Resplendent in his warplate, the monarch strode through the warriors, giving nods and claps to shoulders in praise for their valour. Saroglek felt his chest swell with pride, for he had led the final victory. The glory was his and he could see the approval in his liege’s grey eyes as he approached.

Saroglek would have towered over his king, but he knelt. He was only barely shorter then.

Reaching him, the Unbeholden King removed his gilded, plumed sallet, revealing his noble features and a mane of black hair. He placed a gauntleted hand on Saroglek’s pauldron.

‘Rise, my marshal, you have fought well!’ His voice soothed away the horror Saroglek had just endured. ‘The keep is claimed, and so many yet live. Your victory would be astonishing for an ordinary man, but from you, this seems only the norm.’ He smiled as Saroglek bowed his head at the praise.

The king motioned for his marshal to follow him up the walls. ‘But what of the Atrogai?’ he enquired as they ascended one of the corpse-strewn stairs.

Saroglek felt his heart sink.

‘Did any surrender? Were you able to persuade any to join our feast?’ the king continued.

Shame curdled the marshal’s pride. He shook his head, those awful moments returning for a brief instant. ‘No, my lord… They refused to submit.’

He said no more. His king did not need to worry about the failings of his courtier. Saroglek would deal with his own discipline problem in due course, and that of his men…

‘No matter.’ The king turned to him, his noble features bearing a sad but accepting smile. ‘And please, Lord Saroglek, how many times must I tell you that you of all people may use my name? I am your friend. Not merely your master.’

Saroglek nodded, smiling through his shame. ‘Yes, King Vlagorescu. But please remember… I am stubborn.’

The king grunted. ‘Stubborn, stalwart and unstoppable…’ They reached the top of the stairs, and Vlagorescu gazed out over the red mountains, the Koridamarkh Peaks, their glimmering, jagged slopes shining in the fading light. ‘And I will have need of that soon. With the Atrogai threat dealt with, I believe it is time to expand our realm again.’ He panned his vision over the ferrous landscape. ‘There are so many petty kingdoms and tribes out there, eking out their livings in the wasteland, squabbling among themselves. Imagine how much stronger we would all be under one banner… The banner of a Beholden Empire.’

‘Empire…?’ Saroglek turned to his king.

Vlagorescu smiled, his eyes taking in the lands that would soon become his. ‘A glorious notion, no?’

Saroglek felt a shiver of anticipation, and grinned. ‘Indeed… The other tribes will gladly kneel when we show them the boons of true civilisation.’

The king nodded approvingly. ‘Good. Then we must plan, for there is much work to be done.’ He turned back to Saroglek. ‘There are many realms to take… and I aim to make the Beholden Empire a nation of legend. But to do so, I will need a second in command. I will need a grand duke to lead my armies. And I believe there is no finer candidate than the one standing before me.’

Saroglek bowed. ‘My lord, I am unworthy.’

Vlagorescu laughed. ‘Did I not just say there was no finer candidate? Rise Lord Saroglek, for tonight you shall dine at my table, and sup from the finest wine in all of the Beholden Demesne.’

Saroglek did as he was bid, rising, and followed the king towards the interior keep. With that promise of reward, and of greater purpose to come, Saroglek’s woes all but vanished, the Atrogai spell forgotten in the face of future glory. He would not fail his king… and he would be the lord his people needed to bring them to their destiny.

MOURNING IN RAINHOLLOW

Dave Gross

After tearing down all the wanted posters she could find to delay the competition, Janneke Ritter traced the deserter’s path from Glymmsforge to Satyr’s End. There she trusted a hunch and bought passage on a duardin longboat across the Nihilus Reach.

During the voyage beneath the weird, amethyst skies of Shyish, she fought elbow to shoulder beside the crew when they disturbed waterlogged ghouls aboard a wreck boarded for salvage. Along with her fellow survivors, she reached Sendport alive but no richer than when she set out.

Her hunch rewarded her with three independent sightings of her quarry: he’d struck north days earlier. Disguising herself in a grey shroud, black cowl and red sash, Ritter joined a procession of Morrsend pilgrims returning to their ancestral city.

After passing beneath the tattered banners hanging from the city’s gate, Ritter abandoned the petitioners before they began their seventy-seven-day purification. She had no wish to join the next leg of their sojourn, at the end of which they would offer their blood to the ancient vampires who once defended their home.

Two Morrsend residents recognised the deserter’s face from the bounty poster. One had sold the man a donkey and claimed he had ridden it into Modrhavn, despite warnings of the deadly creatures infesting those lands. Biting her lip at the cost, Ritter traded for an ageing grey palfrey and a worn saddle and bridle. A pair of used saddlebags and a week’s provisions further depleted her funds. At this rate, she grumbled, she’d be destitute by the time she could collect her reward.

Three days out of Morrsend, Ritter rued her decision to buy the horse. While the beast had an agreeable amble, it baulked at every sharp turn in the stony trail. When Ritter kicked its flanks, the horse bent its neck to look back at her with a comical expression of exasperation.

‘Horseface,’ Ritter snapped. It was a nonsensical name dredged up from memories of childhood tormentors, but saying it to an actual horse gave her a bitter satisfaction. Anyway, it was slightly better than calling the animal ‘horse’, and she had no desire to invent a better name for a beast she’d soon trade again.

She walked Horseface over the difficult terrain, consoling herself with the notion that travelling on foot would increase her chances of noticing signs of spoor. When she spotted the first, it was just as well she was already on foot so she could feel the dung to get a sense of how long it had lain on the ground. Cold and starting to form a crust, the turd suggested Ritter was a day or so behind her target.

She returned to the saddle and goaded Horseface until the animal showed it hadn’t forgotten how to trot.

They continued for a few more days, resting when they found untainted water or a shelter from the cold winds. As the saddlebags grew slack, Ritter regretted not filling a backpack with horse feed. She preferred to leave easy access to the modified weapons she carried on braces down her back: two guns and a sword.

Like most of the names Ritter chose for things, they were self-explanatory. The Cutter was her heavy broadsword, wider and shorter than military standard. The Catcher was a modified duardin bolt-thrower that propelled nets and lines. The Blaster was the multifunctional firearm cobbled together from salvaged Ironweld and Kharadron weapons. It could discharge several kinds of hell at varying levels of reliability. The scatter shot was both the most reliable and the one she least liked to employ. Bringing back her bounties alive was not only more profitable, it had become a point of pride.

Once Ritter began rationing feed, Horseface wandered off the trail whenever it smelled the rank flora of this desolate realm. Ritter hoped they weren’t poisonous. Fortunately, Horseface seemed to know which ones to avoid by scent.

‘Smarter than you look,’ muttered Ritter. She decided that sounded too friendly and added, ‘Horseface.’

While the horse gnawed on a sedge, Ritter took the opportunity to relieve herself. It was while she was squatting that she noticed the plume of smoke in the distance. She squinted at it, still unused to the purple light of the realm. Something about it made it hard to judge distances, much less colours. As she finished her business, she realised what she was seeing wasn’t smoke. It was a plume of dust.

Horseface resisted as Ritter pulled her away from the grass, but a few sharp, loud commands reminded the beast who was in charge. Soon they were trotting, then cantering towards the disturbance.

The source was a wagon drawn by two animals, ponies or donkeys judging by their relative size. There was something wrong with their hitch, and one kept pulling the vehicle to one side, forcing the driver to correct course with a jerk of the reins.

Behind the driver, a patched canvas bonnet had torn away to reveal the wagon bows, exposed like the ribs of a skeleton. Below them cowered three figures. One adult-sized, like the driver. The other two were much smaller.

The dust cloud obscured whatever they were fleeing.

Ritter couldn’t imagine her target would chase a family across the plains. If he had designs on them, he had only to clap his hands and destroy their vehicle or slay their beasts with a slash of lightning.

There’d be no reward for helping these strangers. Perhaps they weren’t running from anything. Maybe the driver had simply lost control of his team after one of the beasts spotted a pale adder.

A distant shriek carried across the wind. Horseface curled her neck again, the irises of her wild eyes straining in what felt like an accusation to Ritter. She cursed as she remembered the other factor in her calculation.

The children.

‘Damn it.’ She kicked Horseface into action.

Horseface surged into a full gallop before Ritter realised the animal had been holding back.

They drew close enough to make out the individuals on the wagon. A woman had the reins in one hand and a lash in the other. She fixed her full attention on the terrified donkey whose panic kept pulling them off course. It didn’t help that the beast was bridled with a makeshift length of rope. Its teammate, a pony, distinguished itself both with obedience and a proper harness.

A box bounced out of the rear of the wagon, falling on the trailing remnant of the wagon’s canvas cover and tearing the rest away. The man in the back reached hopelessly after it; Ritter saw he had a stump beneath his left elbow. The man crouched again, arms curling around the children as all three stared into the dusty wake. Ritter peered with them as Horseface slowed, apparently sensing a presence she no longer wished to meet.

Ritter saw it deep within the cloud. A shape darker than the dust leaped over the fallen crate and ran closer to the wagon. Ritter discerned a lupine hunch in its shoulders, but its gait was pure feline. An abhorrent tickling filled Ritter’s throat, and a tooth-shivering drone rose above the racket of the wagon wheels.

Just as they were about to pass the wagon, Horseface reared. A second pursuer leaped out of the dust cloud. The size of a grown wolf, it pounced like a mountain cat, yet its shape remained obscured in a dark, murmuring nimbus.

Ritter reached for the Blaster. Her fingers closed around the stock as the impact knocked her off the screaming horse. She hit the ground perilously close to the rear wagon wheels. Rolling, she regained her feet, the Blaster in her hands. The blinding dust washed over her.

She closed her eyes against the grit, listening for a growl or a footfall.

Her hand released the safety on the Blaster’s shot cylinder, already in firing position. She heard the click of the mechanism, the clamour of the wagon, and Horseface’s frightened squeals – fortunately not the sounds of being devoured, but those of knowing a predator is close.

Ritter opened her eyes.

In the dissipating dust, she saw the monster. It glared at her with empty eye sockets, half its skin rotted away to reveal a cracked skull. Where ears had been, only scabrous stumps of cartilage remained, crawling with fat white maggots. The creature’s mottled pelt suggested a leopard, but the spots were nothing compared with the jagged rents in its flesh. The wounds exposed desiccated muscle and fat between wind-scoured ribs. Worse were the black hollows where all flesh had collapsed inward. The buzzing sound originated in those dark cavities.

A crepuscular sheath flowed out of the rotting stalker. It thickened into a furious cloud. At first, Ritter couldn’t comprehend what had emerged from the beast, but then she realised it was a cloud of corpse flies.

The swarm moved with a collective purpose, more like a single parasite than ten thousand individuals. When the monster uttered a dry cough, more insects emerged from the concavity of its skull. As the cloud of corpse flies thickened, the beast tensed to leap.

Ritter raised the Blaster, but a heavy weight knocked her to the ground. Foetid breath gushed over her face as fangs snapped at her throat. She felt hundreds of stings through the gaps in her armour. Rolling, she raised her shoulder to shield her neck. Reeking jaws clamped down on her pauldron.

Ritter thrust the Blaster into the animal’s chest and fired. She felt two separate halves of the beast fall away as flecks of bone and gore rained down on her.

She rolled again, knowing that predators using pack tactics seldom pause before a kill.

Sure enough, the first beast landed beside her. She rolled farther before rising to a low crouch. She shifted the gun’s selector from shot to flame canister and pumped the primer twice. There wasn’t time for more.

She kept the stream trained on the monster as she let herself fall backward to avoid its pounce. The stream was weak, and flecks of hot oil touched her face. For a moment she feared she would immolate herself, but as the igniter snapped, the insects’ shivering wings fanned the flames across themselves.

A torrent of incinerated flies fell over Ritter as the animal struck the earth, legs twitching. The stench of its burning pelt wet Ritter’s eyes.

She rose to one knee and raised the Blaster, turning to scan the area. She saw no sign of a third predator. The buzz of flies dwindled to a whisper.

Ritter sighed with relief when she saw Horseface stamping around, tail lashing her flanks. Ritter jogged over to help, peeling off her cape to slap at the horse’s neck and shoulders until the last of the flies dispersed. With the destruction of their hosts, they no longer acted as one.

The wagon returned, the driver still struggling to keep the donkey pulling in a straight line. Her children stood up behind her, peering over her shoulders. Ritter couldn’t tell whether they were boys or girls or one of each. Their faces were little replicas of their mother’s but for the bright eyes and curly hair of their one-handed father, who hopped off the wagon to examine the fallen crate.

‘You have our thanks,’ said the driver. Ritter guessed she was in her mid-thirties, but it was hard to judge the age of those who lived in Shyish. Many died young, and those who survived often appeared decades older than they were.

‘It’s intact!’ called the woman’s husband. He pulled an unbroken sack out of the fallen crate and shrugged it over his good shoulder.

‘Let’s leave her one,’ said his wife.

The man nodded. Lugging the sack over to Ritter, he let it fall to the ground. ‘Feed for your horse. We have enough to reach Morrsend.’

‘Thanks,’ said Ritter. She patted her stomach. ‘And maybe a little–’

‘Yes, of course.’ He gestured to the children with his stump. ‘Breen, fetch us some of that bread.’

‘One other thing,’ said Ritter.

‘We have little,’ said the driver. Ritter could almost hear the woman’s hackles rise.

‘Just information.’ Ritter unfurled one of the wanted posters. ‘Have you seen this man?’

The look that passed between the man and woman told her they had. Neither adult spoke as one of the children – a girl, Ritter decided now that she could see her close – brought over a grease-stained parcel.

‘Thank you, starling.’ The man passed the food to Ritter. He watched his daughter skip back to the wagon. He turned to Ritter. ‘You should let him go.’

‘Can’t,’ said Ritter. ‘It’s my job.’

‘It doesn’t have to be,’ he said. ‘You’re no different from him.’

Ritter bristled. Many looked down on bounty hunters, but she was no deserter. ‘What do you mean by that?’

The man’s wife put a hand on his shoulder and inclined her head towards the wagon. Before he left, the man fixed his gaze on Ritter. ‘Our pony could barely pull the wagon,’ he said. ‘He gave us his donkey, even though he was in a hurry to reach Rainhollow.’

The man’s wife shot him a stern look. ‘Go on,’ she said. As the man returned to the spilled supplies, the woman looked Ritter in the eyes. ‘Just follow our trail if you must find him. But the Nighthaunt are already there.’ She walked away.

Ritter unfurled the wanted poster and studied the deserter’s face.

Usually the artists exaggerated the features to make a bounty target look more villainous, but this one had a pleasant face, even a wry half-smile that made it look as though he’d just said something amusing or charming. The one sinister mark about him was a half-star-shaped scar over one eye, and even that looked more rakish than criminal. The way his hair flopped over his brow seemed incongruous for a portrait of a deserter. Ritter had a hunch the artist fancied him.

After a careful double-fold, Ritter tore off WANTED: ELDREDGE DUUL, surrounded by stylised lightning bolts, from the top and the warnings from the bottom. It might be better not to advertise that she was looking to arrest a man who made a good impression on strangers.

Horseface nipped at the discarded paper. Ritter gave the beast a few handfuls of grain instead before filling the saddlebags and following the refugees’ path.

Ritter found Rainhollow at the base of the Modrhavn Mountains.

She passed a few plots of farmland before spying green streaks of moss and ivy that marked the crooked streams running down the eastern cliffs. The run-off pooled in reservoirs too small to be called lakes before following irrigation channels or tapering off to brooks vanishing into pale and lonely woods.

Two of the little pools flanked a great cleft in the cliff wall. Ritter realised the village lay not at the foot of the mountain but within it. The entrance created an illusion: the cleft formed a gentle spiral from the outer edge of the cliff into a gap sheltered by walls shaped like a pair of hands cupping a candle flame. Inside, the village of Rainhollow hid from the plains of Modrhavn.

Fortified ledges formed ‘fingers’ on the curtain walls. Motionless guardians stood between crenellations built of irregular stones. Ritter could just make out the wooden frames that supported the withered corpses, the wire that lashed their wind-mummified limbs to their spears, and the awkward tilt of their rusty helmets over naked skulls. Here and there, a living watcher patrolled among the sentinel dead.

Ritter followed the sound of a ringing hammer to a double gate spanning the ‘fingertips’ of the outer walls. One half stood closed, prominently displaying the grim visage of Nagash. The wreckage of the other half had been dragged to the side while workers hurried to construct a makeshift replacement out of scavenged wood and the salvaged iron frame. Whatever had demolished the gate had shredded wood and shorn metal alike.

Ritter reined Horseface to a halt and showed the deserter’s face to a man hauling a keg of nails. ‘Seen him?’

The man indicated the third of four lanes leading into the village. ‘Straight on to the second reservoir.’

She nodded.

‘You’d better hurry,’ said the worker. ‘He could use the help.’

For the second time, Ritter felt a pang of resentment. He’s a deserter, she reminded herself.

Meagre light eked its way down into the deserted lanes of Rainhollow. Woodfires flickered in every third stone brazier, but they cast long shadows above the awnings. The doors and windows were all shut tight. Ritter noticed two doors were chalked with skull-shaped symbols.

She heard the dogs barking before she saw them skid around the corner. Three mutts of different sizes, all dirty and wide-eyed, barely glanced at Horseface while peeling off to either side to continue their retreat. With them came a strong scent of bitter smoke and the sound of splashing water. A flash of blue-white light suggested lightning.

Ritter’s target was near.

She dismounted and led Horseface to a water trough fed by one of the dozens of ducts catching run-off from the cliff walls. She thought of the frightened dogs and looped the horse’s leads loosely, unslung the Blaster, and approached the corner.

Around the bend, the street opened into a plaza bordered by two other streets and a cliff dotted with grey-and-yellow lichen. Light flickered from three fires on the surrounding houses, apparently the result of lightning strikes. No one fought to quench the flames.

In the centre of the plaza was a circular pool fed from the cliff run-off, redirected by a series of flat stones suspended on an iron brace. Around the lip of the pool lay abandoned buckets and pots, and two corpses surrounded by expanding pools of blood.

The cause of their deaths came whirling across the pool. Waterspouts rose beneath the shadow of a dark blur and fell back again in its wake. The thing spun so fast that Ritter could make out little more than a black shroud and chains. Staring, she perceived a grim iron mask beneath the hooded shroud and a greatblade in the grasp of a fleshless hand.

Ritter had never seen a gheist before, but she’d heard them described by Stormcast Eternals who counted themselves blessed to have survived. She faced a Bladegheist Revenant.

The Nighthaunt flew towards a man who was only just rising to his feet. The broken shutters behind him suggested he’d been thrown hard against the wall. Judging from the damage, it was a wonder he could stand at all.

Despite his bloody face and wet hair, there was no mistaking Eldredge Duul. A week’s beard darkened the mage’s cheeks. Dusty grey robes covered more colourful garments exposed only at collar, cuff and hem. His fingers glittered with jewels. As he stood, he glanced ruefully at the remaining half of his staff before tossing away the useless stump. His fingers sketched esoteric signs in preparation for the gheist’s charge, but then he noticed Ritter’s arrival.

‘Stay back!’ he shouted.

The warning had the opposite effect. The Nighthaunt turned its eyeless mask towards Ritter. The blur of chains and blade rushed at her.

Ritter fired. Most of the shot passed harmlessly through the Nighthaunt, despite the dull sound of impacts on metal. The black shroud shuddered, but Ritter saw only a few holes to prove it had been struck. The gheist appeared unperturbed.

Eldredge Duul’s voice rose in an arcane language Ritter had heard but never understood. With the first three long syllables, the water from the reservoir rose higher than the rooftops. Duul paused, letting the gheist close with Ritter. The final syllable was thunder. An immense weight of water crashed over the gheist the moment its ethereal form took substance, smashing it against the cliff wall.

The breaking wave forced Ritter back. She tripped over a raised herb garden and cracked her skull against a windowsill. She heard the Blaster skitter across the pavestones, but she could see only bright yellow starbursts. Trying to stand, she fought a wave of nausea. She decided to sit a moment, but that felt only slightly better.

‘Here, chew on this.’ A warm hand pressed something rootlike into hers. Ritter blinked, but Eldredge Duul’s face remained a blur. ‘Try not to move.’

A whispery voice rose across the plaza. ‘…never… drown… again.’ Chains rasped against cobblestones. ‘I’ll smother your soul!’

‘Get down!’ hissed Duul. He spoke a single word of power. The rising screech of the gheist was muffled as an unseen barrier appeared between its descending tomb blade and the mortals beneath the mage’s shield.

Terror sharpened Ritter’s vision. She watched as the Nighthaunt raised its blade to slash again and again. Each time, the blade stopped inches from Duul’s outstretched hand.

‘Can you reach your gun?’ Duul winced as another blow tested the strength of his spell. Judging by his pallor, Ritter didn’t know whether he could withstand another.

She nodded, waiting for the moment the Bladegheist raised its weapon. Rolling towards the Blaster, she sensed Duul moving with her. He kept the shield between her and the Nighthaunt, exposing his own body in defence of hers.

‘Wait for it,’ he said. ‘The moment it strikes, it must be tan–’

‘Do it!’ Ritter aimed, Duul stepped away, and she fired. The shot blew the blade out of the gheist’s grip and shattered the bony hand wielding it. Half the iron mask flew away, the shot pellets leaving a ragged border resembling tooth marks.

The amethyst energies of Shyish continued to sustain the maimed horror. It groaned an inarticulate threat and reached for the mage.

Duul spat out another spell as the gheist’s claws closed around his throat. A bolt of energy exploded between them, throwing each combatant backward. Duul hit the ground flat on his back. He rolled to one side, rising on one elbow to brace for another attack, but none came. The last tangible fragments of the depraved soul twitched on the pavement until, at last, they lay still.

Ritter felt the subsiding terror like liquid silver through her veins. Standing beside Duul, both panting with hands on knees, she noticed she was a good six inches taller than he. She was taller than most men, but not usually by so much.

A clatter of hooves caught her attention. Rather than fleeing, Horseface had come to investigate. The palfrey walked up and nosed Duul in the shoulder.

‘Aren’t you the valiant one?’ said Duul. He stroked the horse’s nose. He looked at Ritter. ‘Your protector, I assume?’

Ritter felt an unexpected indignation that the horse had gone to Duul. What did she care who a dumb animal favoured?

‘I’m grateful to you both,’ said Duul. ‘I was starting to worry that gheist was too much for me. Good thing you showed up when you did. Thankfully, that was the last of them.’

‘Umm…’ Ritter looked away. He had saved her as much as she’d helped him.

‘Oh,’ said Duul, noticing something on the flooded street. He reached towards a soggy scrap of paper. At his gesture, it flew from the wet pavement to his hand. He blew on it, and a minor spell dried the bounty poster. He grimaced. ‘Bounty hunter, eh? You must be good to have found me so soon.’

Ritter wondered whether she could reach the Catcher and fire a net before he could hit her with a spell. She tensed as he raised a hand to his lips, but he only blew her a kiss. Before she could object, a warm magic breeze dried her clothes and hair. Duul waved his hand as if fanning himself, and the same magic blew back his hair and tidied his soiled robes.

He smiled again. She could barely stand to look at it. She knew he was manipulating her, but he seemed so genuine. Was there magic in that smile?

She shouldered the Blaster, trading it for the Catcher, finger on the trigger. ‘Eldredge Duul, I’m taking you back to Glymmsforge to face charges of desertion.’

He grinned. Ritter couldn’t tell whether that was a sign of madness or another misplaced attempt to charm her. Suspicious of a trick, she watched his hands for any arcane gesture.

Instead, he showed her his palms. ‘Just give me a little time to do what I came here for, and I won’t resist. Say, what’s the reward for my capture this time?’

‘This time?’ said Ritter.

Duul pinched his fingers along each torn edge of the poster. An orange-white glow appeared where he touched the paper. Like a cigar burning in reverse, the missing strips reappeared. Duul whistled appreciatively. ‘Desertion, is it? The old man isn’t fooling around this time.’

‘It’s a no-kill bounty,’ said Ritter. Duul beckoned her to follow as he strolled towards the centre of Rainhollow. Ritter grabbed Horseface’s reins and marched after him.

‘Lucky for me.’ Duul appraised her. His eyes lingered on the butts of the weapons protruding from behind her back. It made her feel uncomfortable. She slung the Catcher over her shoulder. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be Janneke Ritter, would you?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘You caught an old friend of mine a few years back.’

She set her jaw. ‘Well, I’m not sorry about it.’

‘Nor should you be,’ Duul laughed. ‘Dorren Tael is as testy as an orruk, and twice as easy to goad. After killing those soldiers in that brawl, he deserved his punishment. I’m just surprised you brought him back alive.’

‘It wasn’t easy.’ Ritter tried not to look as pleased as she felt at the compliment.

‘They say you brought in a Stormcast Eternal once.’

Ritter said nothing as they walked for a while. More people emerged from their homes. They looked hopefully towards the plaza, where the residents had finished quenching the fires. No one cheered or thanked them. They merely returned to the task of waiting to die.

‘Did you bring in an Eternal?’ Duul raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

‘I never take bounties on the Stormcasts.’

Duul mulled it over. His annoying smile returned. ‘Yeah, what kind of maniac would try something like that?’

‘Where are you taking me?’ said Ritter. ‘I haven’t agreed to anything. I’m still taking you in.’

‘Just up ahead, on the street of yellow doors. That is, if they haven’t moved. I need to bring them back to Glymmsforge now that it’s clear of Nighthaunt.’ His voice darkened, and again the smile faded. ‘As you can see, bands of Nighthaunt have scattered from the main armies. What we drove out of Glymmsforge is now finding its way into villages like this one.’

‘And you were just going to turn yourself in when you got back to Glymmsforge?’ Ritter had had just about enough of Duul’s easy charm.

‘I hadn’t given it much thought,’ he said. ‘When I heard the scattered Nighthaunt forces had begun preying on villages, I knew I had to get back here. And I knew the commander wouldn’t give me leave, so I just took it.’

‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Ritter. ‘You can’t just leave your garrison to check in on someone.’

‘Not just someone.’ Duul’s smile returned. ‘She’s going to like you. Anyway, she always said I’d wind up in prison.’

Of course, thought Ritter. A woman. Wizards might be cleverer in some ways, but when it came to women they were still as foolish as other men.

They stepped aside to let a trio of mourners and a corpse-bearing cart pass on the way to the front gates. Ritter wondered what rituals the people of Rainhollow used to propitiate Nagash. She glimpsed Duul sketching a sigil over his heart. Whether it had mystic or religious significance, she had no idea.

Ritter shook her head to clear out the cobwebs. She ought to knock Eldredge Duul over the head, tie his hands, gag him, throw him over Horseface’s back and get back to Glymmsforge and her bounty payment.

Horseface nickered as they turned onto the street of yellow doors.

‘There it is,’ Duul said. His pace accelerated as they approached a corner house, but he paused when he saw the skull chalked on the door. His grin perished.

Ritter felt an unwelcome pang of sympathy. ‘Perhaps she moved to another house.’

Duul’s expression darkened as he scanned the flowers in the window boxes. ‘No, they’re still here. Zora would never leave her lilies behind.’

They went to the door, which opened before they could knock. There stood a man thin with grief. His eyes welled as he took in the sight of Eldredge, his fists closing and opening. Ritter braced herself to break up a fight, but the man lunged before she could act. He hugged Duul tight.

‘I’m sorry, Gerren,’ said Duul. ‘I came as soon as I heard the Nighthaunt remnants were starting to maraud.’

‘No one is swifter than death,’ said Gerren.

Ritter waited with uncomfortable patience.

‘This is my friend Janneke,’ said Duul. ‘She helped me finish off the last of the gheists.’

We’re not friends, Ritter reminded herself, but she managed not to utter the thought.

Gerren led them inside the simple home. He gave them thistle tea and slightly stale oat cakes. Duul set aside some of his cakes, and Ritter realised he was saving them for Horseface. She set aside all of hers, thinking, we’ll see who that horse comes to next time.

‘I taught her this recipe shortly after we were married,’ Duul said, nibbling on a cake.

‘What?’ said Ritter.

‘Zora had a taste for scoundrels back then,’ said Gerren.

‘She came to her senses eventually,’ said Duul. ‘She threw me out long before marrying Gerren.’

‘She’d had her eye on me since we were kids,’ said Gerren. ‘She knew she’d made the wrong choice the first time you went off to war. You never should have learned magic, Eldredge.’

‘Lucky for you I did,’ said Duul. ‘Bad luck for me.’

Despite the situation they were describing, the men didn’t seem anything less than friendly to each other. Ritter shrugged, deciding it was none of her business, even if it would have made good gossip in most places she’d visited. Here, it just seemed like a fact of life.

Gerren had made a shrine of Zora’s favourite belongings. Together, he and Duul picked them up one by one, sharing their memories of the woman they’d each loved in their time.

Gerren unsheathed a long, double-bladed dagger. ‘She once pulled this on a greedy merchant in the market. He learned to barter fairly after that, let me tell you.’

‘She once broke this plate over my head,’ Duul said, holding up the dish. ‘If you look close, you can see where the glaze is lighter where the spell rejoined the shards.’

‘She never broke things around me,’ said Gerren. ‘She knew I couldn’t snap my fingers and repair the damage. You’re right. I’m glad I never learned magic.’

‘And you never provoked the damage.’

They laughed a little.

‘How did it start?’ said Duul, his lower tone indicating a change in subject. No one needed him to say what he was talking about.

‘There was only one at first,’ said Gerren. ‘An outsider came to the gate. No one realised what it was. It asked to be let in long after dark. Of course, no one opened the gates, but it kept asking. We thought the spells would keep it out. Maybe it had to ask permission a hundred times to wear down the magic. Maybe if we had a mage here… Sorry. I didn’t mean you.’

‘I know,’ said Eldredge, but his voice cracked.

‘Eventually it tore down the gate. We tried to fight, of course. You’ve seen how little use that was. There was something different about this Nighthaunt. Those it slew rose as all sorts of gheists the next night.’

‘And Zora fought it?’

‘Zora always fought,’ said Gerren as he looked away to the window. ‘It’s almost nightfall. The others that have risen came for their families first. That’s why we’ve been marking the doors.’

‘Where is this outsider now?’ said Duul.

‘It moved on. Maybe it was bored with us. Or maybe it thought it had done enough to ensure we’d all die. Thanks to you, the gheists are all destroyed. All except one.’

‘Maybe she won’t be like the others.’

‘No,’ said Gerren. ‘She’ll come for me. Now that you’re here, she’ll come for both of us.’

Ritter stood up. ‘Then let’s get out of here. There’s no time to lose.’

The men shook their heads.

‘We can’t leave her like one of them,’ said Gerren.

‘Think of the other souls she’ll claim if she’s a Nighthaunt,’ said Duul.

‘Think of the reward I won’t earn if you die here!’ said Ritter.

Gerren looked at Duul.

‘We can take you with us,’ said the mage.

‘We don’t even know whether she’ll come back,’ said Ritter. ‘You said it yourself, no one has seen the stranger since yesterday. Maybe it has to be present to transform Zora into a gheist.’

‘I don’t think that’s how it works,’ said Gerren. ‘The priests say–’

‘The priests don’t know anything,’ snapped Duul. He caught himself from continuing in that testy tone. ‘They only tell us what we hope is true.’

‘Eldredge, you know magic,’ said Gerren. ‘What do you think will happen?’

‘I think we owe it to Zora to be sure before we leave.’

For a few moments, each of them started to say something before thinking better of it. There was no point in arguing. Ritter tended her weapons, priming the flame reservoir and refreshing the spent cartridges in the Blaster. Duul applied salve and fresh bandages to Ritter’s wounds and his own. He knew what he was doing. Gerren cooked a meagre meal and spared some fresh oats for Horseface.

Duul inclined his head towards the door. Ritter followed him outside.

‘Look after Gerren, would you?’

Ritter scowled at him. ‘Don’t think you can slip away that easily.’

‘Never crossed my mind.’ For the first time, his smile seemed forced. Ritter suspected it wasn’t because he was lying but because of what he was planning to do. ‘If I can draw her attention, you can get a shot before she knows you’re there. You don’t even have to take your eyes off me. I’ll be right out here with your bodyguard.’

‘Horseface.’

Duul looked perplexed. ‘You call the horse Horseface?’

‘Never mind that,’ said Ritter. ‘I’ll be watching you.’

‘Good. If she appears much like the living Zora, I might hesitate. I trust you won’t.’

‘You know better than I that the Nighthaunt don’t look the same in death. You won’t be seeing her pretty face.’

‘You’re right,’ said Duul. ‘Beauty isn’t in the face, though. It’s in the action. The way she came to check on us earlier, I think Horseface here is beautiful. She deserves a better name.’

Ritter scoffed. ‘What do you plan to do out here all alone, anyway?’

‘I will cast a mighty spell,’ he said in a pompous voice that made Ritter think he was imitating someone he knew personally.

‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ Ritter regretted the remark at once. It sounded too much like flirting, a talent she had never mastered.

‘I do say that to all the girls.’ Duul winked. ‘Right before I cast a mighty spell.’

Now that was flirting, and Ritter wanted none of it. She retreated before things became any more uncomfortable.

They stood vigil, two inside without candlelight, Eldredge on the street lit only by the glow of the stone lanterns. Veins of frost began to form on the windowpanes but almost instantly melted into rivulets of blood. Somewhere on the rooftops a cat wailed a long, sustained note that set Ritter’s teeth on edge. When a horrid screech of pain marked its unseen death, Ritter found the silence that followed far more dreadful. Soon she could hear the distant splash of water from the reservoir plaza. Eventually, even that formless noise coalesced into a rising moan – the voice of a woman in mourning.

But not a living woman. A gheist. A banshee.

‘Gerrrreeeeeen!’

‘Zora!’ Her widower clamped a hand over his mouth, too late to stifle the unbidden name.

‘I came back for you, Zora!’ Duul shouted on the street.

‘Ellldredge,’ the bodiless voice keened. ‘I can smell the magic on you, the magic you always took with you when you left me alone.’

Ritter scanned the street for any signs of an ethereal presence. Only shadows trembled as Eldredge paced back and forth. He called out again, trying to fix the banshee’s attention on himself.

‘No!’ gasped Gerren inside the house. He stared at the shrine of Zora’s belongings. Her dagger floated above the tabletop, its blade shining frost white.

‘Get back!’ Ritter said. She aimed at the dagger but held her fire, reasoning that harming the weapon wouldn’t stop the gheist. She had to wait for it to materialise.

Gerren took a step away from the shrine, inadvertently blocking Ritter’s line of fire.

‘Out of the way!’

A spot of blood appeared on the back of Gerren’s tunic, then another and another as a rapid succession of thrusts cut through his slim torso. As the dagger withdrew for the final time, his body slumped to the floor. The spectre of Zora hovered before him.

Draped in a shroud that faded from incarnadine at the crown to lily white at the hems, the banshee held the dripping dagger at arm’s length as if it were a rat pulled from the porridge. Where a face should have appeared under the cowl, only a jutting metal jaw stood in place of bone. The Nighthaunt’s only ornament was an hourglass hanging from a leather jerkin. The sand inside had stopped spilling.

Ritter fired. Her blast destroyed Zora’s shrine, but the ethereal foe escaped. The banshee flew through the closed door. Her passage left a rime of frost on the yellow paint.

Ritter started to follow but thought better of it. The Nighthaunt were cunning. Ritter dived through the open window instead, rolling on her shoulder to come up ready to fire, but she did not see the banshee waiting at the door. What she saw frightened her more.

Eldredge Duul stood two doors down the street, feet spread wide as his arms swayed in arcane patterns. Above him, an enormous purple sun materialised, its dark light casting weird shadows along the lane of yellow doors. Upon the face of the sun shrieked an enormous skull, its wail far louder than that of the banshee cowering before it.

With a graceful gesture, Duul asserted control of the great sun and propelled it towards Zora.

The banshee dropped her dagger and reached up with both arms as if to embrace her doom. Instead, her wail caused ripples to flow through the amethyst spell. The sun shivered and contracted, pouring itself between Zora’s open arms and in through her widening mouth. Where it went, Ritter could not tell.

‘You feed me, Eldredge,’ she laughed. Bulging veins appeared in her shroud, as if it were flesh. She had paid a price for consuming Duul’s mighty spell. ‘Show me more of this magic that you loved more than your own wife! Let me feast upon it as I will soon feast upon–’

The gheist turned suddenly and flew wailing towards Ritter.

‘Zora!’ Duul flicked his hands towards the gheist. Witch-light flew from his fingers like beads of water from wet hands. Zora’s cowl turned towards him just as one of his arcane bolts struck her full on.

She hissed and spat, angry enough to forget her previous target. The banshee flew towards Duul as his second bolt passed through her intangible body.

‘Duul, protect yourself!’ cried Ritter.

Zora’s dagger thrust deep into his chest. Duul twisted, enough, Ritter hoped, to make the blade miss his heart, but a stab to the lungs could also be fatal.

Ritter felt a heavy weight on her shoulder. Horseface nudged her, whether for the animal’s comfort or to suggest running away, she could not tell. Slinging the Blaster, Ritter pulled herself up by Horseface’s mane.

Without so much as a kick to prompt her, the horse ran towards Duul. One hand pressed against his wound, the mage staggered back from the banshee. Gripping the mane in her fist, Ritter reached down to scoop him up. Thankfully, he was as light as he looked.

‘To the reservoir,’ he gasped. A red bubble burst, colouring his lips.

‘Run wherever you wish!’ screeched Zora. ‘I shall catch you. When I do, I shall take my time. Oh, how I shall linger. How I shall savour…’

The banshee flew after them, soon shortening the gap between them as Horseface slowed for turns.

‘Other side of… water,’ wheezed Duul. By lantern light, Ritter saw the basin had been replenished in the hours since Duul had drained it. She started to suspect what he had in mind.

She set him down gently and joined him on the street, debating which weapon to use. She’d had limited success with the Blaster, but she hesitated to let the banshee get close enough to use the Cutter – assuming she could time her strikes to hit the gheist in a moment of solidity.

Horseface shied, torn between fight and flight. For unknowable reasons, she decided to stand fast.

With a few halting gestures, Duul conjured orbs of light against the corner houses just in time to illuminate Zora’s arrival.

‘There you are, my wayward husband,’ she crooned. She glided forward but hesitated at the water’s edge. ‘Ah, ah, ah!’ The banshee glided around the perimeter of the reservoir rather than over the open water.

‘It was worth a try,’ said Duul. ‘She remembers my favourite spell.’

‘Lightning,’ said Ritter. ‘You wanted her over water.’

‘We’ll just have to do this without the extra oomph.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Ritter. She pulled the Catcher from its holster and ensured it was set to the proper cylinder. Then she plunged the apparatus into the water, giving it a good dousing.

‘What are you doing?’

‘This is going to be tricky,’ said Ritter. She took the reins and led Horseface away from Duul. ‘You’ll need to let her hit you first.’

‘I don’t think I can take another–’

‘On your magic shield, idiot!’

Duul opened his mouth and shut it again.

‘Then quick with the thunderbolt. You’ll know when.’

‘Got it.’

The banshee crept closer, baulked, and moved towards Ritter instead of Duul.

That complicates matters, thought Ritter. Beside her, Horseface snorted and stamped. By all rights the beast should have fled screaming, but something defiant had got into her.

Maybe she too had noticed how often the banshee feinted.

Zora snarled at Ritter, her cowl pinched as if in a wicked smile, and instead flew towards Duul. The mage conjured his magical shield and crouched behind it. Ritter knelt for a better angle to allow for the heavier load in the Catcher. When she squeezed the trigger, the sodden net shot forward with a plopping sound. It rose in a short arc and fell heavily across Zora in the instant her chill dagger struck Duul’s shield.

The mage rolled back as the net covered the gheist, and his arcane barrier dissipated. Immediately, he shouted the eldritch syllables of storm. Lightning flared in his eyes and leaped from his fingertips. The coruscating energy suffused the drenched net. Steam exploded in all directions, its hiss drowning out the doleful sound of the banshee’s last wail. At last, all the semi-tangible remains had vanished, leaving only Zora’s favourite dagger.

Duul crawled over to the blade but stopped short of touching it. He knelt there on the cobblestones, palms over the hot blade as if gathering the last of its warmth into himself.

Ritter walked up behind him. She stopped herself from putting a hand on his shoulder but remained beside him a long while, listening to his muttered farewells to the woman he’d loved and the friend who’d loved her after.

Four days later, Duul was well enough to walk with a limp.

Since burying Gerren, they had taken shelter in the home he’d shared with Zora. Duul tried to conceal his misery, but Ritter observed the way he moved about the house, sitting near a particular window for a time or studying a simple painting over the hearth as if reminding himself of happier times and trying to fix them in memory.

He removed a stone from the hearth and revealed three leather purses. He opened one to reveal a small quantity of realmstone. ‘A little more than I remembered,’ he said. ‘You should be able to exchange it for enough supplies for a comfortable return to Glymmsforge.’

‘About that,’ said Ritter. ‘I was thinking first we should find this outsider who caused all this trouble. Think of how much horror the thing visited on Rainhollow in a single night. If it gets far ahead of us, we might find an entire procession of Nighthaunt.’

‘I thought you were in a hurry to collect the bounty on my capture?’

‘Who knows how many souls this outsider will claim before you get out of prison?’

‘Oh, I never stay long in prison.’ He winked, crinkling the half-star scar above his eye.

‘Even so, I’d feel better if we went after him first. Horseface agrees.’

‘And then back for the bounty?’ Duul’s smile softened, and Ritter knew she wasn’t fooling him. Something was changing between them, and each was content to leave it unspoken. ‘The city elders have found someone to bless their gate, and I think they’ll be glad to see the back of us. There’s word a stranger was seen on the road to Bitterstone.’

Ritter remembered what she could of the local maps. ‘If we take turns riding, we could be there in two days.’

Duul nodded, gesturing for Ritter to mount up. She stopped herself from insisting he ride first. Whoever walked the first stretch would enjoy the relief of a ride later. She hooked a foot into the stirrup and swung herself into the saddle. Duul led the way, pausing only to trade a pinch of realmstone for a sack of fresh fruit and salted meat at the town’s tiny market. Horseface followed him out of the repaired gates of Rainhollow, occasionally nudging his shoulder. ‘You know,’ said Duul, ‘I’ve an old friend in Bitterstone who might like to relocate to Glymmsforge.’ He tossed Ritter an apple with deep purple skin and mimed taking a bite out of another. When Horseface whinnied in protest, he grinned and surrendered the treat to the animal.

Ritter suspected the wizard was teasing her as well as the horse, and a suspicion arose in her imagination. ‘Don’t tell me you have another former wife.’

‘All right,’ said Duul. He plucked a third apple from the bag and polished it on his sleeve.

‘All right what?’

His only answer was the crunch of his apple.

BLOOD DROUGHT

Eric Fomley

Tents clustered in the ancient outpost. Toppled statues of Sigmar jutted from dunes of ash and sand, lining the entrance to the remote desert haven. The wind howled, echoing like the forlorn moan of a damned soul through the gorge.

Mylox the Skinner looked down on the camp from a vantage in the rocks above. A smile split his face, exposing filed teeth behind cracked lips. Too long had it been since he’d offered skulls to Khorne. He needed to kill, now more than ever, if he was to stay in the Blood God’s favour.

Mylox’s axes would drench the parched sands of Callidium with crimson nectar.

He heard the clank of skulls on brass and spun to find Gheke striding towards him. She was tall and well muscled, and carried a shield and black sword, gifts from Khorne for the many enemies she’d slain. She looked down at the outpost with a wolfish gaze.

‘The others are restless. How many are there?’

‘Four score of flagellants and a handful of mounted spearmen led by a Sigmarite warrior priest. They are on a holy mission to cleanse these lands.’ He snickered.

One of Gheke’s eyebrows lifted. ‘A warrior priest is a worthy prize. Khorne will be pleased when I offer his skull.’ Her face lit up as if she were already imagining the rewards of Khorne’s heightened favour.

Mylox bristled.

‘He would be pleased by any skulls,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘but the priest is mine.’

Her eyes narrowed and he locked his gaze with hers, not caring to hide the hatred in his stare. He tightened his grip on his axes and his corded muscles bulged, ready for any sudden movement.

Weeks of scouring the deserts of Aqshy for skulls to offer Khorne had proved a fruitless endeavour. The warband had found little quarry in the wastelands. When they had stumbled upon caravans they’d discovered only death. The bodies were desiccated, scorched by the heat, their skulls piled ceremoniously. It was clear Mylox’s warband were not alone in the desert. But the lack of skulls was making the warband restless, and Mylox knew they were held together by only the slightest thread.

Gheke was the strongest of Mylox’s warriors. She had the greatest chance of defeating him in single combat. Mylox had defeated her to command her loyalty and it had nearly cost him his life. He feared the drought of blood meant he was out of Khorne’s favour. If it continued much longer, Gheke would seek to reconsider her position, the others of his warband would, or else the warband would themselves be among the piled skulls of a neighbouring warband. They needed this fight, the skulls to offer to Khorne. Mylox more than any of them.

Gheke gave an affirmative nod, and Mylox relaxed.

He hid the smile of this small victory from his face. ‘When the warrior priest’s head adorns the pile of skulls that will be my offering this day, the Blood God will see my worth.’ And I’ll show you your place, he thought to himself.

Mylox brushed past Gheke and started back up the narrow stone path. A thick sheen of sweat covered his face, and his back was drenched and sticky under his brass armour. The griffon hide draped over his shoulder fluttered in the hot wind, and the skulls tied to its fringes rattled with each step. Gheke fell into step behind him and they ascended the steep rocky incline in silence. The notion of her attacking him from behind was unthinkable, for that was not the way of a Blade of Khorne. She would wait until he was in a position of strength, to maximise the glory of her victory.

Three other Bloodbound waited at the hilltop. Byror and Tezyb were brutish in size, and taller than Mylox, their large, muscled frames complemented by their thick armour and the huge war axes they wielded with ease. Their size was contrasted by Hush, a slender woman who preferred mobility to armour, and the broad-bladed impaling spear she leaned on to the axe or sword.

‘I grow weary of your dawdling, Mylox. The time to kill is now,’ Tezyb said. ‘We have the opportunity, let us not waste it with idleness. Too long has it been since my axe was wet with the blood of foes. I scarcely remember the scent.’

Mylox cast him a look that could have wilted the greens of Ghyran. ‘The time is upon us. Our waiting has paid off to see the worthiness of the skulls we will be offering to the Blood God this day.’

‘How many are there?’ Byror asked.

‘Nearly ninety, mostly unarmoured zealots. I doubt many will be skilled in combat.’

‘And is there any sign of our friends?’ Byror asked.

‘There’s been no sign.’

‘For now,’ Tezyb growled, ‘but there’s no guarantee it will remain that way.’ He paced back and forth like a beast locked in a cage.

They all feared that their glory would be stolen. Mylox’s group had been cheated of offerings one too many times. Now was their chance to end the drought.

‘I’ll show the warrior priest the edge of my axe,’ Byror said before licking his axe head, splitting the tip of his tongue and allowing the blood to streak across the blade. He looked up at Mylox with a wolfish grin as blood dripped from his chin.

‘No. The priest is mine.’ Mylox took a step forward. ‘My axe thirsts for his holy blood.’ I would see you dead before you superseded me in the eyes of Khorne, he thought. He knew that if given the chance, they would all try to steal the glory from him.

‘It matters not,’ Tezyb sneered. ‘Khorne cares not which skulls are given to him, so long as they are given to him.’

‘Perhaps it will be our skulls this day,’ Mylox said.

‘You can have your priest. One skull cannot compare to the fifty I will pile at the feet of the Blood God.’ Gheke puffed out her chest, slamming her sword hilt on her shield with a loud clang.

Mylox ignored her and turned back towards the path, gripping his axes tight in his hands. He was sick of words and eager to restore his lost favour.

‘There will be blood and skulls aplenty this day. May we all honour the Lord of Skulls with offerings!’ He charged down the path, the clink of armour and the rattle of skulls behind him as his warband followed.

They ran as fast as they could manage, careful of their footfalls. The steep incline ensured a single misstep would end in a deadly tumble.

The alarm raised in the camp below.

Flagellants scrambled for their weapons. They screamed and called out to Sigmar; dozens of bells rang in the hands of the crazed warriors. Many were half-naked, their feet bare in the searing sand. The zealots ran headlong at Mylox’s warband, maddened with hatred in the face of Sigmar’s enemies.

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ Mylox screamed.

His warband took up the call, the words echoing in the rocks above.

The two sides met in open ground outside the encampment. Tezyb and Byror used their brutish size to bowl over several opponents, cutting swathes through the enemy’s naked torsos with their massive war axes. Their battle cries could be heard even over the clamour of the wild-eyed flagellants.

Gheke and Hush went right. Gheke blocked blows with her shield and counterstruck with deadly efficiency. Hush fought with a more calculated approach, waiting for her impatient enemies to impale themselves on her spear as they tried to get close.

Mylox attacked where the enemy was most numerous. His twin axes slashed with a power and speed unmatched by his opponents. Limbs were severed and bodies crumpled under his deadly barrage.

An old man swung a flail at Mylox’s head.

Mylox caught the blow with one axe and chopped the man from the collarbone inward.

The old man’s bones shattered, ripping through his flesh and spraying hot blood onto Mylox’s face.

Mylox laughed as the man twitched spasmodically. He let the body collapse to the sand as he wrenched his axe free, then stepped over the corpse and launched into the air, bringing his left axe down to cleave through the skull of another opponent. Gore splashed his face as he sliced with his right axe through the torso of another, spilling the man’s intestines onto the sand. Both men collapsed, and Mylox left one to fumble with his guts as he tried to shove them back into the gaping hole in his stomach.

More flagellants came, forcing Mylox’s warband closer together as the enemy pressed in on all sides. There was a commanding voice on the wind. Mylox saw the warrior priest and a handful of spearmen join the fray. The hatred in the flagellants’ eyes burned brighter. They formed together and pushed in around the warband with renewed vigour and heightened screams.

Mylox welcomed their onslaught, and set about harvesting more skulls.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mylox saw Byror fall. A blow to the brute’s back knocked him to the ground and the wild flagellants leapt onto him, bludgeoning him to death with their clubs and flails. Tezyb stood nearby, but did not intervene. Any who were not strong enough to defend themselves were unworthy of salvation. Tezyb continued to claim his own prizes for Khorne over the dying screams of Byror.

A kick from behind sent Mylox reeling forward. The opponent to his front seized the opportunity to strike. The knife slashed Mylox from forehead to jaw, piercing his eye into a bloody pulp that poured down his face. He bellowed and cleaved the man’s head from his shoulders, the stump of his neck erupting in a volcano of blood.

Mylox spun, twirling his twin axes in a flurry as he hacked hands, arms and heads off the advancing zealots. His feet shifted in the sand, made muddy from the blood that gushed from the waist-high mound of corpses around him.

But his enemies continued, uncaring of their losses. Some shouted of the end times coming upon them, and Mylox smiled when he considered his warband as the bringer of that end.

Mylox cut off the heads of two more foes as they clambered over their dead, and risked a glance around with his good eye. The warrior priest had engaged Hush, his battle hammer swinging wildly as she backed away. Mylox had never seen her struggle in a fight, but she was hard-pressed to keep up with the flurry of powerful blows. She tripped on a corpse, only a misstep, but the priest smashed her skull in a splatter of blood.

The flagellants cheered the warrior priest and pressed inward, and Mylox found himself in a tight circle with Gheke and Tezyb. Mylox wanted to push through the bodies, to take the head of the warrior priest, but when he glanced at him, the molten flame in the priest’s eyes told Mylox what he already knew. They were going to die.

‘More skulls for Khorne!’ Mylox roared over the clamour.

‘If they will have mine, it will come at a price,’ Tezyb answered.

The flagellants came on with heightened fervour at the three warriors that remained, but their lack of armour and wild tactics cost them heavily as they rushed the powerful Bloodbound. The heaps of corpses grew larger still, the ground awash with the blood of Sigmar’s servants, yet still the enemy kept coming.

Tezyb went down. All Mylox heard was a grunt before he saw the Bloodbound on his knees, the hole in his chest pumping blood down his stomach. The brute dropped his bulky war axe, drew his knife and stabbed his attacker in the stomach. He ripped the knife upwards and the man’s guts poured onto him as he pushed the body off to the side. He whirled from his injured position and lashed out at the legs and bellies of the enemies around him. He managed to sink the blade into one of the zealots’ knees. With the last of his strength, Tezyb crawled to his fallen foe and stabbed his knife through the man’s temple to skewer the brain, trying to win one final act of favour from Khorne.

A spearman saw the struggling Bloodbound and punched his spear-point through Tezyb’s neck. Blood spurted from his arteries and the Bloodbound was stilled.

‘This is it for us,’ Gheke said. ‘We have given many skulls to the Lord of Slaughter this day.’

‘We will give still more,’ Mylox said as he bashed his head into an opponent’s nose.

The circle grew tighter still around the final two warriors, as the warrior priest shouted words of faith and triumph.

Then there was a scream. A wild battle call heard above the clamour. Several of the flagellants looked away from the Bloodbound, giving Mylox and Gheke a brief respite.

‘Sykrut’s warband,’ Mylox hissed. ‘They’ve come to try to take that which we would gift to Khorne. Let us further spoil their fun.’

Mylox looked up the ravine with his remaining eye. Eight Bloodbound warriors rushed down the steep rocks, led by a man he recognised from his time in the Goretide. Sykrut, a powerful slaughterpriest of Khorne. Mylox snarled. It was these fools that had stolen so many kills from his warband over the past weeks.

Sykrut’s band charged into the flagellants. The warrior priest hoisted his hammer, shouting orders and devotions as they faced the coming tide.

Mylox surged forward, slaying with a belated quickness and ferocity that put his previous efforts to shame. Only some of the warrior priest’s men remained to finish off Gheke and Mylox, and it was an error the two Bloodbound made them pay for.

Gheke held two at bay with her shield, thrusting her sword into the eye of the first and slashing the second across the neck. She laughed when the man’s eyes went wide and he reached for the arterial blood that spurted from his throat.

Mylox hacked off a flagellant’s leg at the knee. The zealot fell to the dirt and clutched the bloody stump, his agonised screams echoing through the ravine. Mylox looked down at the man, grinning, and stomped on his head until brain matter splattered the sand.

With the remaining opponents distracted, Mylox broke into a sprint and caught several by surprise as he smashed into the back of the warrior priest’s ranks.

The forces of Sigmar dwindled fast and Mylox saw the warrior priest engage Sykrut.

‘No,’ he growled.

Sykrut’s sword sliced into the warrior priest’s leg. The priest shouted, and his followers screamed, throwing themselves in front of him as Sykrut cleaved through them with his sword. The warrior priest pulled back towards his encampment, his handful of spearmen at his heels.

The flagellants were in a frenzy.

Mylox lowered his shoulder, barrelled through two of the zealots and pursued the priest, but not alone. Out of the corner of his unruined eye he saw Sykrut leave the fray as well. Mylox put his head down and ran with what might he could muster. His muscles burned with the effort, threatening collapse with the strains of the day. But he would not yield to his body. The weak were not servants of Khorne and he would sooner die than allow himself to fail in his efforts.

He heard the panting of Sykrut behind him. Either the hulking slaughterpriest was quick on his feet, or it was Mylox’s weary body that had allowed the other Bloodbound to gain on him. As they neared the encampment, the spearmen that followed the warrior priest formed a defensive line. Mylox leapt high into the air, crashing down onto their helms with his axes, but did not wait to engage. Instead, he allowed them to entangle Sykrut while he pursued the priest. He heard Sykrut shout in disgust in his wake.

Mylox wouldn’t give up the glory of this kill so easily.

The warrior priest was lost in the sea of white tents. Mylox slowed, carefully surveying each tent he passed in turn like a predator stalking its prey.

A horse whinnied as it reared, and the now mounted warrior priest charged at Mylox, who barely ducked under the hammer blow aimed for his head. The priest fled from the camp, away from the skirmish and deeper into the ravine.

Mylox glanced around wildly, gaze levelling on a white warhorse tethered to a tent post a hundred feet away. The beast snorted and pulled against its lead as Mylox approached. He was no friend to beasts and he knew the horse could smell the stench of the butchered upon him. Mylox was relieved to find the horse was outfitted with a saddle and bridle. He mounted the creature and kicked it into a gallop in pursuit of his quarry.

The ravine path narrowed. It wound sharply around the tall rocks of Callidium, jagged and weathered by the harsh Aqshy winds. The rock formations harboured caves and gullies, and the singular path became a maze as Mylox rode on.

Mylox cursed and chose the largest, central path. But after a minute of riding with no sign of the priest, he worried the man had doubled back to hide or taken an alternate route.

He’d decided to turn around when the warrior priest stepped out in front of his horse. Mylox tried to slow the gallop, but it was too late. The warrior priest’s warhammer came down on his horse’s head.

The beast collapsed forward, flinging Mylox from the saddle and crashing to the jagged rocky ground.

He groaned and, despite his body’s protests, rose to his feet.

‘You dare face me alone?’ the warrior priest asked. ‘You are a fool.’

Mylox spat a glob of bloody mucus at the priest’s feet. ‘Fear not, slave of Sigmar, your skull will find a place of honour on the mound of heads I will build for Khorne this night.’ He banged his axes against his breastplate, challenging the priest to move first.

The warrior priest circled around him, his warhammer poised to strike. ‘Your kind are a scourge to these lands – unfit, impure – and you will be destroyed. None can withstand the might of Sigmar.’

‘Show me,’ Mylox said darkly.

The priest charged in, his powerful blow deflected easily by Mylox, who slashed for the man’s head. The priest dodged away, suffering a scrape across his cheek from Mylox’s blade.

The warrior priest grunted, raising a hand to feel the gash on his face as blood poured down his jaw and onto his armour. His eyes narrowed on Mylox and he began to whisper a prayer. The smell of burning flesh filled the air as the bloody gash seared shut, sealing itself into a long, black scar.

Mylox went on the offensive, launching a series of savage blows that the priest now deflected easily. He knew he’d missed his single opportunity to take his opponent. The priest would not be caught with such a simple manoeuvre again.

Mylox kept his footwork active, constantly changing the pattern of his assault in an attempt to catch his foe off guard, but the priest was a skilled fighter.

The warrior priest whispered another prayer to Sigmar that caused his warhammer to shimmer like blue flame.

Mylox grinned. Sigmar must have favoured this servant indeed to bless his weapon. It would make tearing the Sigmarite’s head from his shoulders far more impressive to the Blood God.

The priest launched a series of counter-attacks. The powerful blows from the blessed hammer took a great deal of strength on Mylox’s part to deflect, the bone-jarring force causing him to tire quickly. Mylox’s own attacks were less quick and more calculating, as the loss of his eye left him at a disadvantage on one side. He would not defeat this foe by strength alone.

He threw his axe at the warrior priest’s face and rushed in with his other axe held high. The priest knocked the thrown axe out of the air, but Mylox buried his other in the priest’s arm. Mylox back-pedalled, stooping to retrieve his fallen weapon. The priest grimaced, his breath ragged through flared nostrils as he roared and surged forward.

The warrior priest feigned a downward strike, which Mylox was prepared for, but turned it at the last moment.

The warhammer smashed into Mylox’s chest, stealing the air from his lungs in a burst of white-hot agony, denting his brass armour and sending him sprawling to the dirt. Each breath was wracked with pain. He knew he must have broken several ribs. He struggled to move, even to roll over, as the warrior priest slowly walked towards his prone form, eclipsing the bright sun as he looked down at Mylox.

‘You were foolish to contest the powers of Sigmar. Now I will purge this land of your profane existence. In these final moments, know the might and will of the God-King.’ The priest raised his hammer for the killing blow.

Mylox rolled, coming to his feet with a savage roar.

Flesh ripped. The warrior priest’s head flew from his shoulders, landing in the sand a dozen feet away, spraying Mylox in slick blood.

‘No!’ Mylox screamed.

The torso twitched spasmodically and collapsed forward with a kick from Sykrut, sending Mylox to the ground with it. The stump of the neck drenched his brass armour and the sand around him in blood.

Sykrut looked down at him with a grin.

Mylox had been cheated once again. The warrior priest was his gift to Khorne, the worthy skull a promise he had made to the Blood God, now made empty. It was supposed to be his chance to find Khorne’s favour. Stolen by Sykrut.

Sykrut walked casually to the place where the head had landed and lifted it from the sand. He raised it high above him, letting the blood drip onto his leathery face and into his open mouth. When he’d finished, he tossed the head at Mylox and it rolled to a stop against his prone body. Sykrut grinned, then rolled his head from side to side, cracking the vertebrae in his neck with loud pops.

‘You were too weak to defeat him. You allowed this man to spit in the face of our lord and live. He overcame you – he would have killed you if I had but let him. I would have done that very thing, but I wanted to deal with your failure personally. You are a disappointment and you are weak. Khorne favours the strong. I will deliver your skull to his throne in recompense for your frailty. Do not fear. In some small way your skull will still please Khorne, despite the failure of your body.’

Sykrut began to whisper, a communion with Khorne. His mumbling grew in intensity and he turned from Mylox to look skyward, outstretching his hands.

Mylox grunted and shifted the warrior priest’s corpse to the ground beside him. He started to rise. His feet wobbled under the weight of his tired body. His breath came in gasps, and he found no refreshment from the burning air that poured into his lungs.

Mylox clutched at his chest, at the dent in his armour and the broken bones beneath. He allowed the anger to well up inside him. His limbs screamed in agony, but he gritted his teeth and pushed through. He wouldn’t allow Sykrut to see his pain or exertion. He had lived in fear of losing Khorne’s favour before, but now it had been stolen from him. He would make Sykrut pay, or die in the process. Either way, Mylox would gift Khorne a worthy skull.

Sykrut turned to face him, bringing his sword to bear.

Mylox spat a glob of blood in the sand and dragged the edges of his axes together in a noisy scrape. ‘You will not have so easy a time claiming my skull, slaughterpriest.’

Sykrut roared with laughter. ‘We shall see.’

There was a crackling sound like kindling set to flame. A fire tore through the air, swirling like a whirlwind in front of Mylox. The flames shrank and contorted, coalescing into the form of a massive axe.

It sliced the air where Mylox’s head had been a moment earlier. Then fast, too fast, it chopped downward, and Mylox barely got away as the sand sprayed the air.

Mylox gritted his teeth as he rolled to his feet. This was a wrath-axe, a judgement of Khorne. Sykrut had asked the Blood God himself to test Mylox’s worth.

The axe slashed and Mylox darted backward, the dreaded blade shearing through his armour like paper and slicing his flesh.

Mylox winced, but the damage was light. He clinked his axes together and barked a battle cry. One misstep and the axe would cleave him in two.

The axe attacked again. It cut high and low with inhuman swiftness and power. Mylox strained to parry the blows, using the flats of his axes to turn the sharp blade from his body. He back-pedalled, his breath straining to keep up as he focused on each move the axe made. It was maddeningly fast, and he could not hope to evade the weapon for much longer. It was like fighting Khorne himself.

Each blow was powerful, the vibrations that travelled through his axes rattling his bones. Mylox knew this was his end.

Then he misstepped. The heel of his boot hit a rock, and he tumbled backward.

The wrath-axe sliced down.

Mylox slashed wildly as he fell, and his right axe struck the flat of the judgement blade.

He hit the sand, waiting for the sure death blow.

But the wrath-axe hovered in the air. And in the same way it had arrived, it dissolved in a whirlwind of fire.

Mylox gasped in the scorching air. He didn’t understand why or how, but the Blood God must have found him worthy enough to live a little longer. Khorne’s favour was shifting.

‘No,’ Sykrut hissed. He raised his sword and sprinted forward, leaping at Mylox and striking a powerful downward blow. Mylox was forced to cross his axes to block. He caught the blade, but the shock of the impact jolted his bones. Sykrut was strong and the mighty sword was heavy and sharp. His muscles screamed in protest, and it was all Mylox could do to keep the blade from splitting his skull in two.

Mylox leaped back and dodged a quick sideways slash. Then he jumped in and assaulted the slaughterpriest with all the speed he could muster, striking blow after blow, changing direction at the last possible moments in an attempt to confuse or disorient his opponent.

Sykrut kept pace, parrying the blows with ease as Mylox began to tire, his attacks becoming slower and clumsier. He overcommitted, and in his brief moment of defencelessness the slaughterpriest bashed Mylox’s face with the hilt of the sword.

He staggered backward, dazed for just a moment. His wounds screamed; lifeblood poured out of his shredded armour, adding more crimson to the already soaked metal.

Mylox gritted his teeth through the pain, refusing to give the slaughterpriest the satisfaction. He spun and slashed with both his axes simultaneously.

Sykrut brushed the blows aside with ease.

Mylox had planned on this, and slashed at Sykrut’s face with his left axe, waiting for Sykrut to move to block it before striking at the brute’s torso with his right. The slaughterpriest knew his games and dodged just in time, hacking at Mylox’s armoured side.

Sykrut roared and Mylox spun away from another blow, the sword slicing through the griffon hide on his back and tearing it from his armour.

The slaughterpriest brought his sword overhead, slashing downward in a blow meant to cleave Mylox’s head in two.

Mylox caught the blade with both of his axes. His muscles ached and bulged as he strained, but Sykrut pushed harder. The priest was far stronger than he. His ruined body wouldn’t last much longer.

He dropped his left axe and grabbed the slaughterpriest’s sword with his hand, the sharp edge of the powerful blade carving through flesh to grate against his bones. He freed his second axe.

Sykrut’s eyes went wide as Mylox took the head from the slaughterpriest’s shoulders.

The headless corpse fell to the windswept sand.

‘It is you who is the disappointment,’ Mylox gasped.

His lungs burned from the heat, the exertion and the pain. Blood poured from his many wounds and he felt weak. But I am not weak, he thought. He raised his axes, his arms burning with the effort, and tilted his head skyward.

‘Khorne, Lord of Slaughter, I offer the skull of this enemy to you, and the many lesser skulls I’ve taken this day. May your glory be furthered by my blades.’

He jolted spasmodically and screamed as his skull split. His axes fell to the sand and he collapsed to his knees, clawing at his face. Mylox knew this was Khorne’s doing. Had he not pleased the Blood God after all?

Bone protruded from his skull and pierced the flesh, pouring hot, sticky blood down his face and onto his hands and armour. His mind felt as though it would collapse with the pain; it was as if his skull had been skewered with a spear. He wanted to bash his skull, to gouge his eyes, to tear the very head from his neck. Twin shards of bone grew outward from his temples, twisting into long, bloody horns that sheared upward.

When the pain finally subsided, Mylox stroked his latest mutation, cutting his fingers on the jagged edges of his horns. He wiped the blood from his face, licking that which fell upon his lips. He was in the Blood God’s favour, there could be no doubt. A grin split his face.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ he whispered.

Mylox rose to his feet and took unsteady strides to the body of the warrior priest. He tore the priest’s robes into strips to fashion a sack, then used it to hold the severed heads of the warrior priest and Sykrut. With the sack in one hand and a piece of the priest’s flesh in the other, he approached the priest’s horse, which had been tethered to a rocky outcrop nearby. The beast roared and reared on its hind legs. Mylox tugged on the bridle and pulled the horse’s head close.

‘Your service to me and to the Blood God continues,’ he said as he fed the horse the flesh of its former master. The beast quickly became calm. He mounted and rode back towards the ravine and the ruined outpost.

The scent of death and corpses was heavy on the wind. Blood stained the sands around the camp. The ground was littered with the bodies and severed limbs of Bloodbound and flagellants alike.

The ravine echoed with the screams of the dying. Sykrut’s warband scoured the dead, severing skulls and piling them for Khorne.

Mylox smirked maliciously as he took in these sights. The victory of his planned attack would further secure his favour with the Blood God. As he rode into the encampment, covered in the blood and gore of his enemies, the warriors ceased picking through the survivors on the ground and crowded around him.

‘Your leader sought to challenge me, claiming I was out of Khorne’s favour.’ He tossed the makeshift sack, and the skulls of Sykrut and the warrior priest rolled at their feet, covered now in sand. ‘But Khorne favours the strong. Follow me in his stead, and this drought will be at an end. Blood for the Blood God. Skulls for the Skull Throne.’

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ the warriors echoed as they raised their weapons.

Gheke came forward from the crowd. Her sword, shield and armour were bathed in blood. She looked up at Mylox with burning hatred, but as she studied the horns that adorned his skull, she bowed her head.

Mylox knew he was still the greater.

‘You’ve had your victory and Khorne has shown his favour with you. Where would you lead me next?’ she asked.

Mylox showed his jagged teeth. The clear signs of his victory and Khorne’s favour demanded her respect. But his increase in status with the Blood God would only fuel her desire to kill him. ‘I lead you to greater glory in the name of Khorne.’ He bellowed for all the gathered to hear. ‘I will unite the warriors of the Blood God and quench the thirst of these lands in a tide of blood. None I come across will live to see the dawn.’ Without another word or glance, he spun his mount westward and rode deeper into the desert whirlwinds of Aqshy.

The blood drought was over and the warband followed.

THE NEFARIOUS ANTIPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

David Guymer

THE FLESHSTINK PROCESSION

The monks did not go four or five tail-lengths before disappearing into oil-smear fog and teeming, ratty hordes. The air was fur and musk, smoke and fat, claw-scrabble and strident squeals. Weep Dripclaw kept his hood drawn and to himself, inasmuch as the numberless inhabitants of Fleshstink would allow, and listened, likewise, as the monks brought them the foulsome news of the Withered Word.

‘These are base-low and degenerate vermin,’ said Fekreek Bruhrk, Bilecardinal Superior of the Obstreperous Retch, his squeak conspiratorial. His head was tonsured, his lips cracked, the skin of his muzzle peeling and raw as ordination to the episcopal degree demanded. His expression was one of permanent addlement, and not improved by the charred-meat smell and warpstone edge to the fog. ‘Fertile fur for the Church’s message.’

‘Do not mis-smell the deviancy of the Moulder clans for the blessings of the Corruptor,’ said Weep. ‘They are as different as yellow dengue and scarlet palsy.’

Fekreek tilted his head, a gesture deliberately spoiled with a curl of his lip and a display of brown fangs. When he spoke, his ulcerated tongue rolled sloppily over his superior’s titleless name: ‘I would not dream-think of telling Weep Dripclaw his business.’

In the Churches of Contagion, orthodoxy changed daily. When the personalities of the Great Horned Rat became especially febrile and fragmented, it could morph hourly. Whatever it happened to be, Weep believed it. It was a test. To sift the morally adroit and theologically nimble from the masses. And so he believed, and strove with every moment to know the current truth of the Corruptor and to believe it harder than any anointed rat-priest of Clan Morbidus. Such was the state of competition within and between the Churches that an ‘irregularly’ consecrated theologian with a knack for interpreting, and for reinterpreting, the Word would always be in demand.

Weep and Fekreek both looked up as the sawing, hammering and gnawing that had been a part of their background abruptly ceased.

A scaffold of rotten timber beams and mouldy rope rose just high enough for the rickety platform at its top to be lost in fog. The resident vermin ignored it, as they ignored Weep and the lay menials who had spent the last Bell and a half erecting it. New structures went up in Fleshstink almost as frequently as old ones came down.

‘Why do you sit-wait, great cardinal of the Obstreperous Retch?’ Weep turned to Fekreek. The priest was still looking up at the tower, snot dribbling down his hairless snout. ‘Your congregation awaits. The Moulder clans yearn to listen-learn of their abhorrent ways.’ He gestured his snout to the platform. ‘Up-up.’

Poxmaster Gagrik could barely think for the clatter of machinery. Cable carts carrying muculent slop lurched, step by iron-grinding step, from slime plantations in the dank uplands to the feed mills and renderiser plants there in the delves. As befitted his lofty status as right paw to Archpustulent Makulitt Pus, Gagrik and his coterie of monks had set up their stall on the low ground close to the factories, the better to negate the false Word of his superior’s rivals. A poor decision, in hindsight. The fog was thickest there: equal parts vapour, warpstone dust and aerosolised animal fats, it drove him almost past madness with hunger, and turned the warp-powered ark lamps of the flesh-warren into spitting migraines on poles. Mill wheels the size of church fronts turned with cacophonous clanks, a deafening onslaught that was at the same time not quite deafening enough to blot out the sounds of pulping, tenderising, masticating and mincing emanating from the factories.

His stomach gurgled.

‘What do the craven apostates do now?’

Friar Rikkulous Snarp held the corroded brass of the farsquinter to his eyes and dialled the focus rings. He adjusted the filter sets to compensate for the all oppressive green, his fur crinkling in consternation. ‘They are very far-distant, most august one. Perhaps they do not think-plan to contest the Word of Clan Morbidus in the Fleshstink after all.’

Gagrik looked down at his subordinate and cuffed him across the ear. The jewelled rings and bangles concealed under worm-eaten robes gave a muffled jangle. ‘Other end. Fool-fool.’

Snarp turned the farsquinter over, the smaller holes towards his eyes and the larger away. ‘Infinite apologies, oh favoured of the bilious one.’

‘Careless paws betray faithless thoughts,’ Gagrik warned.

One of the Archpustulent’s favourite psalms.

Swallowing hard, Snarp brought the farsquinter to his eyes. He leant forward, tail rising from the ground to counterbalance.

‘They build, oh forgiving one.’

‘Building what?’

‘A platform, eminence.’ The friar sniffed, in spite of the thousand tail-lengths between the end of his farsquinter and the vile, villainous nonconformists of the Scratching Ruin.

Gagrik rolled his eyes.

Corruptor spare me the plague of cretinism.

‘Six tail-lengths,’ Snarp announced. ‘Maybe seven tail-lengths high.’

Gagrik frowned into the distance. To the naked skaven eye, the construction was a teetering smudge of blackness in the green. He could have listed a thousand places that he would have rather been than there. His grip on the Coryzan noxwood sceptre under his robes was strong. His claws were blunted from hard work, permanently stained by many an exotic potion. Given the choice he would rather have been with the lay menials building his own pulpit than be the rat who had to climb it and proselytise a faith he barely understood himself.

‘I think it finished,’ said Snarp, still peering through the farsquinter.

‘Do you see him?’ said Gagrik. ‘The villainous uncanon? The arch pretender? The nefarious Antipustulent?’

‘No-no, eminence. Only one of his gullible fool-priests.’

Schisms such as that which had riven Clan Morbidus were not uncommon and occurred always in fours. Thus, when a wayward Church split to follow its own radical interpretation of the Word, three more would invariably follow, either of their own volition or for some contrived reason of the superstitious priests left behind. Gagrik did not know why. He knew better than to wonder. Nor would he risk his neck to suppose that the Archpustulent may have been in any way imprudent in wielding his powers of excommunication so profligately, appearing to neither understand nor care that unholy lore would force others from the bonds of orthodoxy.

‘The foul apostate climbs!’ Snarp jiggled footpaw to footpaw in his fervour, only the farsquinter against his face holding steady.

Gagrik looked up the ladder of their own ramshackle pulpit. Although sturdier than its rival effort, for the wealth of Makulitt Pus was inexhaustible, it leant like a monk on a palsied knee, creaking with every lurch-step fly-past of Fleshstink’s sopping cable carts.

‘Then we must shepherd these wretches from the false-faith of the Antipustulent.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Snarp. He peered at Gagrik pointedly. ‘We must.’

‘Hear me, faithless!’ Fekreek shrieked from the tower-top, arms aloft, voice as ripe as a week-old corpse. ‘Hear the condemnation of the Great Horned One on your sinful and most-deviant works, and despair…’

Decrepit, unwholesome-looking specimens of Skavendom glanced up briefly as they scurried past. The skaven were a pious race. Few had a keener awareness of their slavering deity, nor so brief an allocation of years and, thus, so near an engagement with his jaws, as the skaven did. It was a rare rat, then, who would not spare a moment and half an ear to the slim possibility of salvation. Plague monks brandished clubs and snarled whenever a clanrat, sniffing a way to circumvent the crowd, pushed close enough to Weep to make the pulpit’s rickety scaffold creak.

Fekreek was too gripped by the passion of the Word to notice.

‘Remember how less ignoble vermin… errr… how less ignoble vermin reject such false prophets…’ A preternaturally high skaven voice boomed tinnily from a loudsqueaker somewhere on the other side of the warren. Weep lifted his snout towards the source. He could not see it. Sound lingered unnaturally in the fog, like a plague rat after a heavy meal. It moved strangely, or not at all. ‘They heed not their promises, for they know-smell the true scent of the Corruptor.’

Weep shook his head, sourly. Such wanton misinterpretation of the Word.

The passage was supposed to read how less ignoble vermin ingest such false prophets…

‘Louder, Bilecardinal Superior,’ he hissed.

‘And it is foetid!’ Fekreek cried, his voice climbing until it was as shrill as the joints on rusted armour. ‘It is Ruin, robing itself not in silver tarnish and verdigris…’

‘Nor cowering amongst you as a beggar, nor as a… er… a common leper or agent of infection. No-no! No! He is an emperor of ailment…’

‘A leveller of the potent…!’

‘A blight for the many…’

‘Give yourself to decay as they did…!’

‘Gird yourself in decay as they did…’

Weep hissed at a nearby plague monk as a clanrat with bug-eyes and sharp, needle-like fur barged into him from behind. The monk brandished his club at the miscreant, who, confident in the mass of furry bodies now separating them, squeaked insults in reply. Weep watched the clanrat push his way on until he was halfway lost in the fog, to the point where a monk in matted robes the colour of scarlet pus came up behind and coshed him on the back of the head with a rusty mace. The rat went down without a squeak. The monk lifted his snout to squeal something, but the fog was so thick it was as though they all scurried with fat-soaked rags in their mouths. Whatever it was, it changed the mood of the horde. A clanrat with mangy yellow fur and breath like a butcher’s midden was suddenly hissing in Weep’s snout. He hissed back, drawing a dagger from his robes. Before he had a chance to use it a plague monk clubbed the clanrat down. Froth sprayed from the unholy warrior’s muzzle.

Weep raised a paw to calm the monk’s zeal, searching with his nose for the ratman who had struck the first blow. The Antipustulent had embraced so many of Clan Morbidus’ wayward Churches into his diocese that it was impossible to know them all by livery or scent.

The culprit had already disappeared into the fog.

‘Calm yourself, litter-brother,’ said Weep. ‘We come to convert. Not to fight-kill.’

With a rabid shriek, the monk pushed past regardless, club swinging into the belly of an apparently ignorant clanrat. Foetid breath whooshed from the clanrat’s lungs as he was lifted off his footpaws and slammed bodily into the foot of Fekreek’s tower. The stricken beam gave without any resistance whatsoever, and Weep turned to look up, his jaw falling open as the entire rotten frame exploded like a bird bone hit by a hammer. The tower pitched onto its broken toe. The handful of monks who had been doing their utmost to hold the wobbly structure upright scattered with shrieks of terror.

Fekreek screamed at them to come back.

Not one of them did.

Weep whirled with a scream, pushed his knife into the back of the plague monk – who was more interested in clubbing down Moulderclan than fleeing – and ran. He ran, until sound, weight and pain came down in awful amalgamation and fell across his shoulders.

Gagrik did not see his rival’s pulpit go down, nor was he able to hear it for the clank and shriek of industrial butchery taking place beneath his footpaws. But a displacement wave rolled through the fog as though the Great Horned Rat had reached down from his tortured heavens and flicked it with a blackened claw. And that Gagrik felt. He could hear as well Friar Snarp’s giggles as the priest peered through the warp-filters of his farsquinter, describing the catastrophe with great mirth. Gagrik set his own footpaws across the sturdy, even boards of his pulpit. His chest puffed a little fuller. The hunch of his spine became slightly lesser. Gagrik was not much of a preacher, but building, making – that he knew.

‘A new-sharp thing of befoulment arises within the Clans Pestilens,’ he squeaked, the loudsqueaker turning his natural skittish whine into a strident soprano, so loud that it made his fur stand trembling on end. ‘You are right-right to deny the false messiah-thing, Moulderclan. And wise. Yes-yes. Most-very wise. All of you. Yes. A new voice thinks to squeak for the faithful of Clan Morbidus. Favoured will be those who ignore him. Debased and degraded will be those who heed his pretenders. Woe!’ He shook his paws, taken by the energy of his sermon now. ‘A fate lots-much blacker awaits those who succour him openly. Not for them the gullet of the Great Horned Rat. No! Not even the fleas that infest the black fur of his infernal back will have them. No-no! For them will be the mites and grubs that plague those loathsome insects. Forever will be their torment! Death to the Antipustulent of Clan Morbidus! Death to–’

The platform lurched.

Gagrik swayed, spreading his footpaws, his arms and tail springing up for balance. He peered short-sightedly to the ground.

The Archpustulent had spent enough warptokens to ensure that there were as many lay members of the Morbidus clan in Fleshstink just then as there were clanrats of the Clans Moulder, but his congregation did seem to have swollen somewhat beyond even what he had paid to expect. Several monks in a mishmash of pestilential drab that might have belonged to one of Makulitt’s Churches led the rabble in noisome chants, a number pushing right up against the foot of the tower. The platform beneath him ticked like a Skryreclan time bomb as it tilted slowly, slowly, away from level.

He aimed the loudsqueaker straight down and yelled.

‘Stop! Stop now!’

Weep emerged, coughing up bits of lung and small pieces of wood, dragging his body like a blind and blood-soaked newborn from the wreckage of Fekreek’s platform. His arms shivered as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. A confusion of shrieks and squeals and dull metallic clangs filled the fog. He shook his muzzle, clearing the fuzz of tinnitus from his ears somewhat, and blinked the spots from his eyes.

Plague monks in every hue of contagion fought each other to the death. They grappled, arms locked, claws gouging, eyes crazed, weapons abandoned or simply forgotten about under the debris left by the fallen tower. Some were swaddled in the noisome robes of the travelling mendicant, pilgrims of plague and unholy rats of no Church. Others were sacerdotally anointed pox warriors – many of them, apparently, formerly in the guise of clanrats of Clan Dregg, raggy hoods since shrugged off in their determination to bite the face off their brother rat. There were a few genuine Moulderclan rats in amongst the fighting too, but their zeal for the fray was markedly lesser, and most of those that weren’t already corpses were in the business of running away.

Fekreek appeared to be dead.

Weep looked up as a great whumf rolled across the sky.

A sludgy missile arced lazily overhead from some kind of catapult hidden within the warrens, dripping like a wet comet as it flew.

This was getting rapidly out of paw. Who had brought a plagueclaw catapult? One of his or one of theirs? Unless, of course, it had been Moldrent’s doing. The Antipustulent was certainly mad enough to attempt to smuggle an artillery piece into one of the Greater Clan’s Blight City heartlands and expect nobody to notice. Weep silently girded himself to the mental task of aligning himself wholly to the military, theological and political genius that was Antipustulent Moldrent Sour.

The plagueclaw missile struck its target with a chloroformed crash.

Greenish flames and muffled squeals rose on a mushroom cloud of vile gases and debris. Metalwork shrieked as it tore. A zigzagging section of the Moulder clans’ weird assembly line collapsed in on itself. Gagrik moaned and looked away as bits of it fell on him, scratching dimly at the blood-scabbed paw that was trying for his wrist. Undaunted, the paw wrapped its fingers around his wrist and he mumbled in alarm as it hauled him up. Broken beams and splints of wood tumbled off his head and shoulders as he was levered upright. Slime from an upended cable cart dripped from his snout. He licked his lips and wrinkled his face in disgust.

Plague Abbot Krusk of the Gnawing Ruin slapped him.

Gagrik looked up, baring his fangs absently.

‘Move-move.’ The plague abbot was a proud foot soldier of the Corruptor with a seeping bandage wound across both eyes, a jaw filled with broken teeth and infected bronze piercings, and a rusty clawhammer in one paw. Gagrik knew him mostly by his smell, which was of the sour urine he sprayed daily on his leather armour and the blood that he coughed up onto his forearm fur. ‘If not then I will eat you, take your jewels, and squeak-say you were already dead.’

Gagrik peered dimly around, barely listening. The battle was a vague murmur, of something terrible happening very far away.

‘Who brought a plagueclaw? Was it the Archpustulent?’

Krusk jabbed the three cardinals of the Splintered Temple across his breast and gave a sticky sigh. ‘The Archpustulent is as treacherous as he is unholy.’

Killing everything and rationalising it later did sound suspiciously like the sort of thing the Archpustulent would do. As they often did when under extreme and unfair duress, Gagrik’s thoughts drifted back to his workshop in the basement sub-tiers of the Splintered Temple. He wondered if it was still there, safely boarded up and booby-trapped the way he had left it, or if someone had been desperate enough for the space to move in and claim it.

‘No one ever tried to kill-kill me when I was assistant to Verminable Cruor. For some reason, no one ever want-take that job.’

‘Up-up.’ Taking him by the collar, Krusk dragged Gagrik onto his footpaws. Nose to nose, Gagrik recoiled from the plague abbot’s breath. As potent as ammonia salts on an unconscious rat.

Gagrik shook his muzzle and snarled.

Krusk let him go.

Gagrik made to straighten his over-robes, then shrugged and shed them. The layers beneath were a yellowed cream. Cracked jewels and adornments twinkled in the greenish haze: golden spurs; horned crosses; the ordinaries of various orders of Pox and Ruin into which he had been duly invested as grandmaster, or simply invented himself to make his robes of state even more impressive. He pulled his sceptre from its sleeve and rolled his shoulders to loosen tense muscles. He bared his fangs.

‘Where is Friar Snarp?’

Krusk shrugged.

Fled, probably.

Everywhere else, skaven fought.

He had never been in an actual battle, but even from that position of ignorance he hesitated to call this one. There were no lines, no formations. No one was giving orders except for the most local and extremely rudimentary of kinds – plague abbots and pox templars squealing ‘Kill-kill!’ in the moments before they hurled themselves onto their fellow faithful. Or each other. It was hard to tell. It was a riot, with all the tools and appurtenances of the battlefield. Although everyone else appeared to be fighting, Gagrik was not sure if he was supposed to be too. He struggled to shake the feeling that every other rat in Fleshstink was privy to something that he ought to know, and in their apparently gleeful acts of fratricide were mocking him that he did not.

He turned to Krusk.

‘We have squeaked-done as Makulitt Pus has commanded. We have saved the vermin of Fleshstink from the false Word of the Antipustulent. We may run-scurry now.’

Krusk shook his muzzle.

He pointed into the fog.

Robes whiter even than Gagrik’s winked like a lighthouse in the melee.

‘Oh no,’ he breathed. ‘What is he doing here?’

One did not see a lot of white in Blight City. It was difficult to fashion, and ruinous to keep clean. Most clans only went to the effort and expense for their flags of surrender.

‘Pus!’

The false monks of Clan Morbidus chanted and banged their gongs.

‘Pus!’

The white shape bludgeoned its way closer, a wobble in the murk, just on the wrong side of definition.

‘Pus!’

A warrior of the Corruptor hurled himself at the white-robed divine with a shriek. The priest’s long-handled crozier connected with the monk’s jaw. Teeth and spittle flew. The monk skidded away over the ground.

‘Pus!’

A second monk attempted to run at the white priest, only to collapse into a fit of coughing while he was still three tail-lengths away, heaving in sticky lungfuls of the incense issuing from the skaven’s staff. He tottered forward on his knees, foaming at the mouth, the priest smashing him down the way a novitiate monk might line up a bottle or a brick to practise his swing.

Makulitt Pus.

The Archpustulent himself.

Weep had never smelled the high priest with his own snout before, and he found himself both awed and unnerved by his zeal. Another might have thought it a travesty that Moldrent and Makulitt must be at loggerheads. What heights of ambition, such a rat would rightly dream, might the Morbidus clan and its Churches reach with such fervid maniacs working in concert? But Weep knew, as a skaven and a scholar, that it was ever the Horned One’s whim to pit rat against rat, strong against strong, weak against weak, that only the most innovative and cunning would prevail, and the mediocre serve as meat for his eternal hunger.

‘Pus!’

With frenzied screeches and the furious pummelling of clubs and staves on unarmoured bodies, the monks of Clan Morbidus slammed together. A warrior swung a flail at Makulitt. The Archpustulent leapt the leaking censer, and hammered his crozier down between the monk’s ears. His brains exploded from his nostrils.

‘Pus!’

Weep almost wished Moldrent could be here now. The Antipustulent was a terror on the battlefield, which was exactly why Weep devoted so much of his time to ensuring he never found himself near one.

Muttering curses under his breath, Weep drew up his sleeves.

Sometimes a rat just had to do a thing himself.

He took a deep breath. The air was thick and syrupy. He held it. It burned in his lungs. It tickled the back of his throat with long, poison-steeped claws. Still, he held it. In his mind, he squeaked a prayer to the Corruptor. He felt his chest bloat, something inside boiling and scratching, rising up, pressing against his cheek walls, his lips, his mouth filling up. His eyes began to stream.

Still, he held it.

Makulitt turned his way and screamed a challenge.

Weep opened his mouth with a gasp and exhaled.

The pestilential brume drove a teardrop of corruption into the battling monks. The skaven caught directly under the torrent turned instantly to sludge. Those caught further out, with a limb or a tail in the stream, squealed as the appendages began sloughing from their bodies. Blind faith or blind luck preserved the Archpustulent. A wall of withered corpses, driven ahead of the pestilential breath, bowled the priest down and piled over him.

Weep cursed as the Archpustulent planted his crozier in the teardrop-shaped puddle and hauled himself back up. The high priest looked around, thuribles jangling, then seemed to notice Weep and remember where he was, and charged again.

The Archpustulent shrieked as his footpaw sank into the corrosive puddle.

Weep tittered.

Oh, how Moldrent would rock on his haunches and grunt in something approaching consciousness when Weep spoke of how he had personally slain his rival. How he would clench his fangs and drool before the next seizure administered to him by the Corruptor broke his sanity again. For did Weep not practically set the mitre atop his master’s head?

Cracking his fingers, limbering them for another casting should the threat arise, he scampered forwards. Unlike the fool of an Archpustulent, he took care to skirt the steaming broth his pestilential breath had made on the ground, leaping it at its narrowest and scuttling around. In his other paw, he brandished his knife. He would take the crozier, take the mitre, and perhaps then even Moldrent Sour would have to be sane long enough to be pleased.

With a toxic huff of air, another loose projectile from the plagueclaw catapult soared overhead. Weep glanced up, watched it go, saw it slap into the fog-shrouded hump of one of the Moulder clans’ giant slaughterhouses. The payload slid down the wall of the meat-plant.

He breathed out.

That could have been a lot w–

A sigh rippled out through the fog, the distances involved and the near solidity of the murk making it sound almost apologetic, entirely out of proportion to the slow-motion catastrophe playing out for the eyes. The wall collapsed. Weep stumbled to a stop, willing his shoulders narrower, as bricks pulled away from bricks, tumbling into an ever-expanding hole in the meat-plant wall. After the wall went the roof. One of the great steeple chimneys swayed as the building disintegrated under it. The gargantuan mill wheel that ground against one of the sturdier outer walls issued a series of increasingly loud and urgent pops as it, too, began to lean.

‘Fool-fools, all of them,’ Weep muttered.

With a steady tramp of armoured footpaws, great blocks of stormvermin in the drab of Clan Dregg emerged from the fog. The black-furred warrior caste were thick-necked, broad-shouldered and clad in bent plates of iron and bronze. Plague monks ran at them pell-mell, the stormvermin waiting phlegmatically for them to beat the frenzy from themselves on their shields before butchering them with swords. Weep sniffed about for where he had last spotted the Archpustulent. He bared his teeth. The priest was gone! He turned at the sound of screaming and cursing, watching as a muscular priest in cream-coloured cloak and cassock and a blind abbot dragged him from the field. The Archpustulent fought them every step, shrieking treachery and murder. Not dead yet, then.

Flexing his knuckles, Weep called on his prepared spell. To hell with the mitre. He would get Moldrent a new one. If there was one rat in all the Clans Pestilens who would not appreciate the genuine article then it was the Antipustulent, Moldrent Sour. Joints popped as his fingers drew the thirteenth eschatological sigil of the Withering. His claws thrust after the escaping priests. The final syllable of the incantation burnt a black mark on the backs of his teeth.

A rat ogor punched through the melee like a gargant’s fist through a wall. Plague monks and stormvermin alike flew from its leading shoulder like bits of pulverised brick. The monster threw back its hideously oversized head, and roared.

Weep swallowed his incantation whole.

The Moulder beast crouched onto its knuckles, tail lashing, then snatched up a terrified plague monk in a fist the size of the great Liber Abominus. It brought the squirming rodent to its jaws and bit the monk in half. A twist, a wrench, a crunch of sinew and bone, and it drew its locked jaws away, stringy bits of tissue stretching out between its bloodstained muzzle and the lower portion of the monk still wrapped in its fist. Weep gawped. The rat ogor stuffed the last of the monk into its jaws, veins polluted with warpstone standing rigid atop twitching, bulging muscles, and with a full mouth it roared once more.

As if that almighty bellow were the straw, the great factory wheel completed its stately collapse, dragging down what was left of the slaughterhouse wall and triggering a tsunami wave in the fog that saw the warren’s ark lamps exploding one by one.

But Weep was not watching any more.

He was running, already halfway to the Antipustulent’s palace in Brasstain.

Grey Seer Ratskitten limped from the stairwell and into the Hall of Twisted Bone with a mutter and a curse. A mutter, because there were two thousand and ninety-seven steps from the masterburrow to the top of the sub-tower of He Who Is Tenth. A sigh, because for all its sorely appreciated flatness, the great hall promised to be at least as lengthy a walk. His staff clacked on the parquetry as he struck determinedly out.

The mosaics his grey robes scuffed over were very fine. Much of it, he noticed, was markedly less fine than it had once been. Something had been dragged across it recently. Something large. It did not appear to have gone willingly.

He lifted his snout to follow the trail of gouged tiles and blood-smear with one lazy eye, an arc leading towards a portcullis and, behind it, a set of double doors. They were well made, snugly fitting and – that greatest of rarities in Skavendom – bespoke work. That was not where Ratskitten was bound, but he was, as his peers and underlings alike had always agreed, a curious rat. He wondered who the craftsrat had been to have won so lofty a commission. Mikalis, perhaps, the self-styled Architect of Ruin. Or it could have been Gethit Greystripe, the engineer who had succeeded in undermining the Stormkeep of Astralian and raised a tower of industry in its place. Of course, Gethit had come to fame only five years ago and been murdered by one of his apprentices less than a year later, but still, it was possible.

With a sigh, he limped on past the doors, the clack of his staff echoing through the vast emptiness of the hall.

Heavy was the burden of being Grey Seer Ratskitten.

In a megawarren like Blight City, solitude was its own luxury, and the Hall of Twisted Bone was deliberately uncluttered by oddments or slaves. Massive windows stood where the portraits of great lords might have hung in a man-thing keep. They were unglazed. The humid stink of a billion billion skaven living out short, fast, frantic little lives brushed across his fur as he passed by them, and excited his whiskers. The Tower of Kavzar was the greatest structural feat achieved by any race, anywhere. It pierced the sky of the Realm beneath the Realms like a spike into the roof of a mouth, the endless warp storms that forked and split across the roof of the world its unintended consequence. The view from near its summit was tremendous. Normal perspective was turned upside down. The sky was near enough to smell the corruption that flaked off the skin of the Great Horned Rat as he burrowed through it, an evil shadow filled with threatening shapes and fork-tailed lightning. It was the ground instead that was distant, swaddled by the clouds of skaven artifice, and which glittered with a firmament of greenish stars.

Movement, close enough to register with dim skaven eyes, caught his attention. He turned away from the view.

The doors at the end of the hall opened.

A pair of albino stormvermin stepped out.

They were white-furred instead of black, pink-eyed and clad in shape-fitting plates of black warpstone-steel with a patterned, golden trim. Custom-made to their muscular builds, not scavenged. In uncanny unison the two warriors planted their halberds onto the parquetry, a doubled clack that rang out far louder than the report of Ratskitten’s staff. Making a point. They said nothing as he shuffled with hunched shoulders between them.

But then, of course, they could not.

He stepped inside.

This was not Ratskitten’s first time in the whisper holes and private burrow-halls of the worthy. Far from it. But the Tower of Kavzar was the centre of power of all Skavendom, the diverse cultures of a diaspora, its unbridled innovation, its unlimited wealth. Every wing and sub-tower was a new surprise, every great lord his own unique beast.

The lair of He Who Is Tenth was no different.

Everything was slightly too large and solidly made, as though for a skaven of uncommon clumsiness or strength. Creatures that even the Realms of Chaos would not tolerate to exist outside the arts of taxidermy lurked sullenly behind big chairs and pillars. An adult ripperdactyl with human hands and the head of He Who Was No Longer Tenth perched on a beam: the predatory gleam in its eyes, achieved with glass and warpstone, gave Ratskitten a particular start as he scurried inside.

More unnerving by far were the sculptures. Made of clay, they dotted the room on small tables and pedestals, or balanced precariously atop small towers of well-chewed books. They looked vaguely humanoid, albeit twisted into odd shapes, as if in anger at some failing that the sculptor had identified before proceeding to fire and display them anyway. It was difficult to be certain what they were supposed to be.

And Ratskitten had a nose for such things.

A number of too-large chairs were scattered, apparently at random, around the space. The armrests and backs were all heavily gnawed. The skins of more races than one could easily find in Blight City’s epicurean quarters draped the seats. Stuffed skaven lords occupied a few of them. Ratskitten suppressed a yelp when he first noticed. They were draped in mouldering finery of silks and sequins, their faces pulled into expressions of idiocy or wonder as they admired the even-rarer skins that adorned the back wall.

The silken, lilac-coloured skin of the greater daemon Syll’eik’queilein fluttered languidly in pride of place above the hearth. Palace rumour had it that the skin faded each day and that each day a new one was taken to replace it, that Syll’eik’queilein still lived somewhere within the Tower of Kavzar and each day thanked the immortal Lord of Decay for his exquisite skill with a skinning knife when it was done.

Despite his own august station in the teetering pyramid of the Masterclan and his own not-inconsiderable personal power, Ratskitten felt himself shrink with every step that took him closer to that beguiling hanging.

And the vile lord enthroned beneath it.

Zhurn Aelf-Eater, Master Moulder of Clan Dregg, holder of the Tenth seat on the Council of Thirteen, sat uncomfortably in a great wooden seat. His two tails constricted about each other like serpents that loathed one another absolutely, tumbling over the armrest and onto the floor. He gnawed furiously on a finger the length of most clanrats’ entire paw, even as his eyes lifted and narrowed. Ratskitten gulped and raised his snout to bare his throat. One eye was red as the heart of Khorne and twice as mad. The other was a shapeless lump of raw warpstone beaten into an empty socket, but Ratskitten was in no doubt that it probed him in its own foul way. The Lord of Decay shifted slightly, a giant predator marking the approach of a rodent creature too small to warrant its interest as prey, letting it know that it had been noticed, that its continued existence was on sufferance.

The doors closed with a thud of great finality. The paired albino stormvermin resumed their posts to either side. Ratskitten was almost entirely successful in not flinching.

Zhurn drew his claw from between his teeth and watched it regenerate with obvious disgust. His gaze lifted to focus again on Ratskitten, his expression very much unchanged.

‘My summons takes-pulls you from nothing of importance.’ He licked his lips. ‘I hope.’

Ratskitten bobbed his snout. ‘I merely sniff-study a most fascinating set of tablets. Taken by Eshinclan agents in Sigmaro–’

‘Good,’ said Zhurn. He sat back. Ratskitten winced in pain as the lord’s spines screeched down the wood back of the chair. ‘You know why you come here?’

‘Actually, I–’

‘Yes,’ said Zhurn, and Ratskitten clammed his mouth shut. ‘What do you know of the civil war in Clan Morbidus?’

Ratskitten opened his mouth, eyeing the Master Moulder carefully to ensure he was not about to interrupt again before answering.

‘Little,’ he said quickly. ‘No more than any rat can hear or smell for himself. Eight months ago Makulitt Pus was scratch-voted to succeed Heerak Gungespittle to the Archpustulency. I understand he has been most… hasty in purging his clan of rival Churches. But that which weakens the great Pestilens clans can only be to the better good of–’

‘Their scuffles destroyed half of Fleshstink,’ Zhurn growled. ‘They may squeal their homilies in my demesnes and kill one another as they please, but when they irritate a Lord of Decay then a claw mark in the sand is crossed. Order is the responsibility of the Masterclan.’ He leant forwards. His fur seemed to growl as it brushed wood. ‘Deal with it.’

‘But–’

‘You know why they seek converts in Fleshstink?’

Ratskitten offered an ingratiating bob. ‘A most interesting question, lord. The warrens are of spiritual significance to both sects of the Morbidus split. As the cauldron of the fleshslough blight, which is, of course, absurd as contemporaneous accounts in the libraries of Clan Retchid clearly show–’

‘I will tell you why,’ Zhurn snarled, and Ratskitten obediently shut up. The Lord of Decay fidgeted again, and for one horrifying moment in which his heart refused outright to beat, Ratskitten feared he might actually rise. ‘You know where the Antipustulent has laired since his exile from the Splintered Temple?’

‘No, I–’

‘Brasstain of Clan Ezzik. The competition between the Clans Pestilens and Skryre is legendary. High Arch Warlock Lord Skrach backs their Pustulency only to weaken a rival.’

Ratskitten’s brow wrinkled. ‘So–’

‘They were there to annoy me,’ Zhurn growled. ‘To make me as sick of this scuffle-war as Skrach has become. To make me deal with it so that He Who Is Second, and so nearer to the left paw of the Fleshgifter than I am to his right, will not have to.’ The Master Moulder resumed his gnawing, this time on another claw. As if awaiting that signal, the albino guard moved. The doors opened up like a trapdoor. ‘As I now pass this problem on to you, grey seer, infinitesimal in the broodsire’s smelling as you are next to me. End the fighting before the day of the Bloodfeast.’ The Master Moulder snarled around his slobbered paw. His miscoloured eyes glittered madly. Behind him, the skin of Syll’eik’queilein fluttered against the wall, as if equal party to its master’s pleasure. ‘Or I will find another use for you.’

THE EDICT OF THE TOWER

Moldrent was hearing voices. This was not an unusual state of affairs. The difficulty was in knowing whether they came from within his head or without.

‘The true children of the Corruptor win a great and moral victory this day, most loathsomely eminent one…’

Moldrent shifted. Somewhere amidst the broken pieces of schizophrenia and darkness that together comprised his world view, a chain clanked. His mind was a piece of black glass that had been broken and broken and broken until there was no piece larger than dust to be ground under the Horned God’s heels, and that sound, the sound of slithering chain, cast a thousand reflections through his thoughts. The chains of a captive. Those of a slave. The thick chain of a plague censer in a fanatic’s blistered paws. The caustic bliss of incense. He shivered, chain tinkling. Slaughter. Blood. Death. He thrashed, snarled, aware, as a rat both half in and half out of sleep might be aware, of the orruk-skin mask strapped across his muzzle as its inside became flecked with spittle.

The coughs and snarls of plainsong echoed through his jumbled thoughts. He felt his anger settle. His breathing calmed.

‘From the ashes of your triumph comes unlikely opportunity. A stranger comes with an offer, oh unclean one. A chance to stop-end fighting and be Archpustulent…’

The voice was too insistent to be one of those that commonly peopled his head. And unusually dull. It did not scream. Did not jabber. Did not wither and froth and flail as it faded into–

He forced himself to focus.

Eyelids like dried scabs opened.

He was in a hard cell. The walls were covered in claw-scratch marks, the script becoming ever tighter as the number of unscratched stones became fewer and the prophet’s urgency became greater. He had no recollection of being that rat, but assumed that it must be so. There were no windows, one door, the air within so spoiled by Moldrent’s breathing of it that it was yellow, and thick enough almost to hold in one’s paws. Moldrent was so singularly profane that he could barely smell it.

A single skaven in the plain green-and-brown cassock of a lay priest was prostrate before him. His fur, where it was visible, was a sketchy green-brown not dissimilar to his robes. Like swamp water. The flesh of his snout and paws was red with sores. Moldrent sifted the broken glass of his memory for the name of a slavemaster or a victim or a priest to go with the face and found none. Satisfied in what passed for his own mind that the visitation must be genuine, he jerked fully awake.

The action brought a hard rattle of chain and a constriction of the collar about his neck. The stitching of his reinforced clothing rasped as he thrashed and squirmed, his mask drawing tight around his jaws.

‘He is supposed to be tranquilised,’ the visitation squeaked. To some delusion of its own, perhaps. ‘Give him more-more.’

There was a hiss as a thick brume of mustard-coloured gas spilled into the cell. The visitor covered its muzzle with a rag sleeve and coughed before being swallowed up by the smog. But not Moldrent. Moldrent was blessed. So very blessed. The congested notes of plainsong curdled in the re-dirtied air, as painful, almost, as the seizures that flashed across his brain every second or so. His lids drooped, the welcoming chorus of old rampages rising to fill his skull, his strange visitor already lost amidst a million pieces of memory.

Be Archpustulent, it had said.

He wondered why it thought he would want that.

‘When he comes, say nothing, oh afflicted one. I will take care of everything.’

Makulitt Pus sat in his throne, spine pressed almost straight against the back, footpaws up on the seat, nose poking out between his knees. The chair was as high as a cathedral spire, and as intricate, little golden finials and turrets protruding from the dark panels of mouldy wood. A pungent miasma clung to it, the ancient woods treated with every tolling of the Great Bell to prayer with bilious unctures and oedemic fluids to keep it forever a-teeter between fatal decay and final, lasting collapse. It stung the whiskers, every in-breath an epileptic fire-crack in the minds of the faithful.

Makulitt hated it. Not the throne itself. No rat who had suffered under the malfeasance of the Corruptor, as he had, could turn their nose at such glorious filth. It was an appurtenance befitting a high priest or a messiah, and certainly all that any skaven who craved such accolades might wish for as reward for their ambition and toil. Makulitt simply liked it much better when he was not in it, exactly where every rat and his string-puller could expect him to be.

He was Archpustulent, after all.

He glanced suspiciously over the chittering sea of hooded backs and buried snouts. The monks were bent diligently over their writing desks, feverishly scratching the Word, as it manifested to them today, with rat-bone quills and bile-ink. The more highly skilled and grossly distinguished amongst their fraternity added illustrations and illuminations, decorating the already browning pages with faeces, vomit, mucous, phlegm, tarnish and stains derived from the guts of maggots and flies. It would all be deemed heretical by the thirteenth nocturn of matins tomorrow, and burned, which was, presumably, why they worked with such consuming mania.

Makulitt sniffed over the busy susurrus. An assassin could be disguised or hidden anywhere in such a crowd. His decision to join the Virulent Procession to Fleshstink and lead it in person had no doubt wrong-footed them all. He stroked the tawny grey wisp of his goatee so vigorously that it hurt. Could he not almost see Moldrent’s assassin now, peeking behind the mildew curtain and under the scriveners’ tables, stabbing speculatively at the wriggling thing in the cushion. Oh yes, he had showed them the futility of attempting to second-guess Makulitt Pus.

‘Most execrable one?’

Makulitt snapped from his fevered imaginings.

A small retinue of priests-militant from the Fleshstink procession had gathered under their liturgical banners and dripping icons, huddled together on the thin strip of threadbare carpet that ran from the foot of the Pustulent Throne to the gilt doors in the distance. Small bells woven into the cassocks of a few jangled nervously. The friar of the Church of the Thrice-Swollen Boil, Snarp, considered himself something of a leader-in-waiting. He wore his oozing bandages and the festering splinters in his snout like badges of devotion and shuffled his way to the fore of the congregation, gazing up at Makulitt with an adoration bordering on the suspicious. Beside him was an abbot whose name was beneath Makulitt’s need to know, standing with the preternatural wariness of the blatantly treacherous. Makulitt scratched a mental reminder to find the abbot’s name and have him executed, just in case. He sought out Gagrik, loyal Gagrik, who had settled for a place of middling honour and safety towards the congregation’s rear. He stood with his arms crossed under his cassock’s folds, his tail tapping an irritable rhythm that made for an erratic score with the quill-scratching and the bells.

Makulitt licked his lips carefully while he tried to decide which one of them had addressed him.

‘Yes?’ he hazarded.

‘August cardinal of contagion,’ Snarp grovelled. ‘I did arrange for the swift-quick execution of the three hundred and twenty-nine priests of the forty-two Churches with which you tasked me after the Fleshstink procession.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes-yes!’

Snarp whipped a scrip of parchment from his robes with a flourish. Makulitt clutched the arms of his throne and cringed back.

‘Guards!’

The congregation turned to fog as several heavily armed sextons, lay monks charged with the body of the Archpustulent and the upkeep of the Splintered Temple, converged on the witless friar like flies on dead meat. The friar squealed as he was thoroughly frisked, the parchment snatched from his paw and presented to Makulitt.

Gagrik rolled his eyes. ‘No sudden moves around the Archpustulent. Fool-fool.’

Makulitt sniffed the document warily. ‘What is this?’ he demanded of Snarp.

‘Heretical scribblings, most base and perverted one. Taken from the possessions of one of the three hundred and twenty-nine you ordered dead-dead. And more! His underlings did thereafter confess freely to his traitorous thoughts.’ An awed murmur rippled through the re-congealing congregation. Snarp’s expression was slack with sycophantic wonder. ‘However did you know, lord?’

Makulitt shrugged.

Of greater concern to him was how a spiritual mission to Fleshstink had turned into a pitched battle, who had brought the blasted catapult and, more importantly, how he had managed to win it. Again! Was he so greatly debased in the thoughts of the Corruptor that he could not even fail on purpose? His claw danced a nervous, secret jig on the swaddled pebble hidden in one of his vestments’ many inner pockets. It had cost a small fortune. The bound spell engraved into it had cost another. But then Makulitt had fortunes to fritter and he certainly had not earned them. Was it not as the theologians said: that it was easier for a million verminlords to go through the gullet of the Great Horned Rat than it was for a rich rat to flee? He let out a sharp breath, not yet a sigh, too brief to be a sigh. The magic in the skitterstone was enough for a one-shot jump to somewhere very far from the Splintered Temple of Clan Morbidus. He had hoped to have been able to use it in Fleshstink, but he was surrounded by eyes and whiskers, always. As Archpustulent, it seemed, he never had fewer than a dozen under his nose. He couldn’t even run away without someone noticing.

And worse, bringing him back.

‘The nefarious Antipustulent was given a bloody snout this day,’ said Snarp. ‘The lyceum of priests are much pleased and our monks converted lots-many of Clan Dregg’s faithless to wield plague censers in your cause. Lots-much scorn was laid on the doctrine of the hated fool, Sour.’

The congregation hissed and chittered at the naming of the apostate.

‘There was unwanted damage,’ Gagrik muttered.

The babbling ceased as all eyes turned to the former Poxmixer of the Extirpated Way, not one of them friendly. As Makulitt’s favoured lieutenant and loudly proclaimed successor, Gagrik was a valued buffer between his own hide and those same unfriendly eyes. He trusted him. Not because the poxmaster was trustworthy, but because they had been the last two rodents together on the ballot to succeed Heerak Gungespittle and Makulitt knew without a whisker of a doubt that Gagrik was the only rat who desired the position less than he did. Only now was Makulitt beginning to appreciate the conundrum in that state of affairs. If he were to attempt to spirit himself away, then he could expect Gagrik to move hell and earth to bring him back. After all, if something were to happen to Makulitt then it would be Gagrik who would be expected to fill in as Acting Pustulent. It would take months to gather the lyceum electors from their lairs across the Mortal Realms, and after so long in post, he might even find himself with a chance of being chosen. Makulitt had started to give more and more serious thought to being rid of him and replacing him with someone more conventionally ambitious, like Snarp. Someone who would not ask too many questions if the Archpustulent were to suddenly disappear between terce and sext.

‘The Council of Thirteen demands an end,’ said Gagrik.

‘They will have-have an end when the Antipustulent confesses his heresy!’ said Snarp.

‘They send an emissary from the Masterclan to enforce an… amicable split of the Churches.’

Makulitt stopped fidgeting and sat for a moment, perfectly erect and still.

Amicable?

No, that would not do at all. He would never get away. And without a confirmed apostate like Sour to rage against he would probably be dead by vespers.

‘We should listen-hear to what he squeaks,’ said Gagrik.

‘Who is this ambassador?’

‘A grey seer,’ grunted the abbot, his voice slick with drool. ‘I do not know-smell.’

‘I do,’ said Gagrik. ‘A little. He is very old. It is he, supposedly, who translated and unpicked the magicks that warded the Hexengate Vault, and drew most of the gnawholes maps that were not immediately useless. I hear it was he who ended the civil war between Clans Spikkel and Grung, more than twenty years ago.’

‘An old-thing,’ Makulitt mused.

Snarp bowed low. ‘His eminence is most–’

Makulitt shushed his obsequiousness with a snarl. ‘Admit him.’

Ratskitten’s nose wrinkled from the horrific stench. The floor was slick with filth and ordure, and appeared to have been recently swaddled with something that the grey seer suspected was no more palatable. Insects lay curled up in puddles, the conditions there too poisonous even for Blight City’s vermin.

The walls, somehow, were worse. They were daubed from floor to ceiling in scratch-mark runes and letters, line after line of jagged script written in skaven faeces and an exacting hand. It was written in no language he knew – and he was fluent in five with a passable understanding in eight more – but familiar enough to be unsettling. It was like looking at a suicide note in one’s own handwriting, or studying a grimoire of power with the certain knowledge that something within its pages was studying its reader in turn. The ungodly plainsong, a sinfonietta of piped and bagged instruments peculiar to the Clans Pestilens, pumped in from an adjoining cell did little to set his fangs back from edge.

Hitching up his robes, he stepped decorously over the larger lumps, his staff making a dampened squelch. He had never been more glad that age and patronage had afforded him the wealth to own footwear.

Two other ratmen waited for him inside, and he bobbed his snout towards the likeliest-looking candidate.

‘Antipustulent Moldrent Sour.’

The skaven demurred. ‘My name is Weep Dripclaw.’ Ratskitten found that he distrusted this rat immediately, and more than could be accounted for by simple common sense. ‘A humble theologian and scholar. An advisor to the great and terrible Moldrent Sour on matters theic and mundane.’ He gestured with his snout towards the second skaven.

The ratman snarled, sensing the attention as he might the touch of an unkind master or a three-eyed fly upon his snout. His attempts at rising translated as an idiot twist of the shoulders and a jerk of the head, a rattle of chain running out of the solid corbel bolted to the rear wall. The scrawny figure was straitjacketed and muzzled, half sprawled like a slug trying to break out of a spider’s cocoon. Yellow eyes fulminated from behind the slits of its mask. Ratskitten resisted the instinctual skaven urge to recoil from something so self-evidently dangerous.

‘This is the First Broken Claw of the Church of the Scratching Ruin?’

‘And over twenty allied Churches,’ said Weep. ‘More join the flock every day.’

‘He does this from here?’

Weep gave a practised sigh. Woe, it seemed to squeak. ‘The paw of the Corruptor rests heavily on Moldrent Sour.’

‘I see-smell.’

‘When the ravings of the Horned One bid it, he is released to inflict terror on the unfaithful. The congregations of Clan Morbidus have never known-tasted defeat when led in battle by Antipustulent Sour.’

Ratskitten believed it.

A feeling similar to that of eyes on the back of the neck made him turn and glance over his shoulder. It was surely the contagion in the air, but the scribblings on the wall looked ever so slightly more fevered and urgent than they had before.

‘He is bound here always?’ he said.

‘When he is like this,’ said Weep.

‘Then who wrote the scratch-verses?’

Weep seemed momentarily bereft of an answer. In his hesitation, Ratskitten saw the sort of genuine adulation and terror that most skaven lords would fritter and scheme their entire lives to know.

‘I… No one knows.’

Behind the pale, leathery mask, Moldrent bared stub teeth.

Ratskitten grimaced, unable to tear his gaze away. ‘Is he capable of negotiating?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Weep, looking studiously at the ground. ‘Moldrent Sour always gets what he wants.’

Ratskitten carefully masked his irritation as the Archpustulent, Makulitt Pus, theatrically pondered his proposition. He stroked a withered-looking straggle of goatee, muttered thoughtfully, and reached more than once for some charm or token that he appeared to think cunningly concealed within the deep folds of his vestments. All the while Ratskitten watched him, his eyes were never still. They sniffed into every corner, burrowed around every shadow, started at every unexpected movement or sound and circled it with healthy suspicion and obvious fear.

Paranoia was the prime denominator in all skaven of high office – more things wanted them dead than not – but Pus’ ever-twitching hyper-wariness looked as dangerous to himself and those around him as any poisoned dart or exploding rat. It looked as though he had not slept in days or eaten in weeks. Ratskitten charitably gave him a month. Even if nobody tried to kill him sooner. The priests that debased themselves around the Pustulent Throne, however, looked at him as though he were the Third Coming. The notable exception was his lieutenant, whose glazed and frankly bored expression was focused on an imagined point about five tail-lengths beyond the back of the Archpustulent’s chair. Ratskitten empathised. He cleared his throat.

‘Hm-m-m,’ Pus muttered, looking suspiciously at a patch of creeping mould on the ceiling fresco.

Ratskitten rapped his staff politely on the ground.

Pus looked up, startled.

‘What?’

Ratskitten cocked his head.

‘Oh yes.’ The Archpustulent settled back into consideration, but of a markedly more deliberate variety for the interruption. He sat back, crossed his arms, his tail, uncrossed them, wriggled to the edge of his seat and leant forwards, rested his snout on the backs of his steepled claws, sat back again. ‘Hm-m-m,’ he pronounced again. ‘A conclave, you squeak-say. A Conclave of Zhurn. Me and Moldrent?’

‘Moldrent and I,’ the bored priest mumbled.

‘Moldrent and you?’ said Pus.

‘What?’ said the priest.

‘Preposterous!’ squeaked another, smaller and more elaborately gowned. Amongst the Clans Pestilens, Ratskitten had learned, ostentation of dress and title was a reliable cypher for individual ambition. ‘Poxmaster Gagrik has–’

Ratskitten raised a weary paw lest Clan Morbidus tear itself apart over semantics and double the task given him by the Tower. ‘A conclave between the rival Pustulents. Yes-yes. Mediated by myself, a mouthpiece of the Great Horned Rat and chosen by the Council of Thirteen. That you might resolve whatever ecumenical differences have divided you, split your holdings fairly, and cease the pointless warring that tests the good will of neighbour-warrens.’ He did not add or suffer the consequences but he very much hoped that it was implied. Poxmaster Gagrik was not the only rat present who had things they would rather be doing.

‘The Archpustulent will never–’ the ambitious priest began.

‘How can I know this is no trap?’ said Pus.

‘I scurry at the bidding of He Who Is Tenth. I bear his token.’

He presented the coin-sized disc of refined warpstone, engraved with the lateral slash marks of Zhurn Aelf-Eater’s personal seal and the Queekish numeral ten. Pus leant forward to sniff it before crawling swiftly back between the rests of his throne.

‘How can I know Moldrent will honour the laws of conclave? He is mad-thing.’

‘My patron offers his sub-tower of the Masterburrow for the conclave.’ Ratskitten watched the change in demeanour that went through the priests at that. They were all ambitious, in their own ways. They were creatures who had grown on a steady drip-fed diet of power, and would offer up their own teeth for a chance at a state invitation to the Tower of Kavzar. ‘His albino guard will ensure safety,’ he went on. ‘None of Moldrent’s congregation will be admitted beyond the outer halls. As will none of yours.’

Pus stroked his chin. His other paw went back into his pocket.

‘None, you say? I will be alone.’

The weaselly one looked as though he was about to protest, before a vision of the Black Pillar, the Table of Thirteen and the Deepengnaw appeared to pass across his eyes and zip his teeth back together.

He said nothing.

‘Except for Moldrent, me and a claw-pack of the Aelf-Eater’s albino guard,’ said Ratskitten.

The Archpustulent fidgeted to the very edge of his seat. Ratskitten had become involuntarily versed in the symptoms, and he could see that that the priest was currently in deep thought. Almost certainly he was formulating a plot by which to strike at the Antipustulent and reclaim the entirety of Clan Morbidus for himself. It was what Ratskitten would have been doing in his place. No doubt Pus considered himself very clever. Most rats did until they realised they were not.

But Ratskitten had seen it all before.

‘Yes-yes,’ said Pus, finally, baring his teeth. ‘I think this will be acceptable.’

THE CONCLAVE OF ZHURN

The albinos marched ahead of Gagrik in perfect order, the clank-clank-clank of steel-encased footpaws like the ticking of a precision clock. Plates of black armour and strings of mail went a sickly green as the albino guard passed under the great, gaping windows of the Hall of Twisted Bone. They carried themselves with the straight backs of proud creatures, warriors bred, who would never know the great levellers of fear or hunger. They served one of the almighty Thirteen and it was a rare and special fool who would knowingly lay a claw on that which was his. For all that they were still skaven, and the flaunting of their untouchable status was evident in all that they did. Their fangs were white, their armour polished and their pelts brushed and clean, and they suffered the soiled rags, matted fur and malingering pace of the Pestilens monks with special disdain.

Shuffling at the head of a dolorous celebration of gongs, thuribles and chanting monks, Gagrik was scarcely aware of his hosts’ disregard.

He had dressed for the occasion in the full pomp of a high priest of plague. His ceremonial chasuble was the bright, smeary green of phlegm freshly hawked by a sufferer of the bubonic pox. To it he had added a motley of bells, lace, braid and the arms of the Unholy See, a yellowed maniple crossed over his chest to evoke the horned head of the Corruptor, and a cincture of oily human hair threaded with gold. A long mantum oozed a trail of black bile that squelched under the footpaws of his subordinate priests and their retinues. He carried his rod of office in one hand and a censer in the other. He had even donned a mitre, despite the fact it inflamed his rashes and made his head itch.

He had never felt so proud, so near to the body of the Great Horned Rat and so far from his avaricious attentions, and thus with licence to walk so tall. His spine trembled from the effort.

The albino guard came to a sharp stop as a clawguard in heavy plate more gold than black and more elaborate by far, approached. He wore a helmet with a plume of short knives and a long spike jutting from the chinstrap. The shield of Clan Dregg marked the rondel pieces of his armour, and the similar scratch-slash mark of Zhurn Aelf-Eater had been branded into the side of his muzzle.

The Virulent Procession wheezed to a slower standstill. Gagrik resisted the urge to scratch at the back of his head.

Ignoring Gagrik and the other principal unholies, the clawguard gestured to the procession’s rear, where a gaggle of hooded and hunchbacked slaves dragged three mouldy chests on litters of poxrush. He made a mute’s gurgling snarl and gestured again.

Eager to be perceived as important, but not so important as to be unhelpful, Gagrik bowed. ‘A gift from my lord to yours. Spices from the Church’s holdings in bountiful Chamon. Much desired by breeder-masters. Very rare.’

The clawguard pointed to one of the chests. His right paw went to the stained gold and black opal hilt of the longsword at his hip. He bared a row of fangs.

‘Of course,’ said Gagrik. Waving a path for himself through the steaming ranks of the procession, he led the clawguard to the train. A hard metal paw descended onto his shoulder and the clawguard pushed him to one side.

With a grunt, the warrior opened the chest. The acidic tang that wafted out prickled a path up Gagrik’s nose. The albino stuck a paw inside and withdrew it. Silvery grounds ran through his fingers. Satisfied, he closed the lid, wiping the metallic stain on his mail cuffs.

Gagrik breathed a sigh of relief as the clawguard turned his back, but the acidic odour lingered in his snout like a bad memory. As poxmixer to the Verminable Cruor, he had handled blightpepper grounds before. Their odour was less sharp, more bitter than acid. Surreptitiously, he cracked the lid and sniffed again.

By the gnawing fangs of the Corruptor, he thought, as recognition came.

Moldrent.

Weep Dripclaw sat in the box seat of his plague cart while a pair of white-furred albino guard rooted through the cargo of Clan Ezzik crockery that Moldrent, in his perverse but infallible wisdom, had decided to bring as tribute. Ignoring the clattering and the occasional breakage, and the heterodox hymnals of the counter-procession from the other side of the hall, he divided his attentions between his myriad small aches, pains and skin irritations, and the frankly stupendous view.

According to well-established and relatively unchanging myth, the Tower of Kavzar had been raised in a single night, the work of a mysterious skaven whom many Churches held to have been an incarnation of the Great Horned Rat in one of his rare, direct interventions into the affairs of his get. Others accepted variations of the myth. That it had been Screech Verminking or another from the Shadow Council acting at his behest. Or even, with delicious paranoia, that it was the first play in a long trick played by one of the Horned Rat’s rival deities: Tzeentch or Slaanesh or even, some squeaked, given the storm-wracked skies prevalent in every variant of the tale, the thirteenth-accursed God-King. As many again argued that the legend was apocryphal, and not to be taken seriously except by literal-minded idiots. Weep, after great study and painful prayer, had come to his opinion that it did not matter either way. The Great Horned Rat would probably not remember, even if it had been done with his own mighty paws, such was his nature.

Weep turned from the window as the albinos grunted that they were satisfied. With a nod to his escort, he drew in his reins. The plague cart was drawn by two horned dozen – one horned dozen and twelve now, he noted – slave-lepers in sleeveless robes, their arms spread out to either side and the paws nailed to a pair of wooden traces. He was about to whip them on when something pricked his ears.

He turned to his companion in the box seat. Grulsh, Chancellor of the Last Bell, was asleep and snoring wetly, as was his affliction.

The sound came again. A cough. His ears pivoted towards it. A Procession of the Clans Pestilens was never silent. It was a carnival of wheezes and sniffles and popping joints. It was not the cough itself that disturbed him but the apparent efforts of the rat it had come from to smother it.

It was not just strange. It was sacrilegious.

He looked down at the toe board. There was a small gap in the planking where a rat might be able to peek in. Or peek out. Weep bent over until his head was between his knees and he was looking back through the narrow opening beneath his seat.

A pair of twinkly red eyes looked back.

By the scratching ruin of the Corruptor, he thought, as the implications became clear.

Pus.

Makulitt Pus crossed his arms over his chest, hiding himself behind several layers of pustulent vestments, as the doors to Zhurn’s burrow-hall swung open. A pair of white-furred, black-armoured guards stood silently to either side. He glanced at Moldrent. The Antipustulent was draped in ratty sackcloth with a hood so deep it bundled up in folds at the scabbed end of his snout. When he moved it was with a metallic shuffle and a whiff of malodour, his arms buried under his robes at the waist as though clasped fervently in prayer. Makulitt regarded his rival with mixed feelings.

‘You first,’ he said.

The hooded snout drifted towards him. Words did not emerge. Makulitt wondered if he had taken a vow of monastic silence.

That would make the grey seer’s conclave… interesting.

Ratskitten turned impatiently from the door sill. ‘There is threshold enough that you may cross it together.’ He rapped his staff demonstratively on the sill. ‘Do not think yourselves the first warring clans I have bent to peace.’

Realising that he had spent longer than was comfortable with his attention on the Antipustulent, Makulitt shot a quick glance over his shoulder.

The two Virulent Processions were indistinguishable from one another. Both were garbed in the green shades considered most unholy by the greater Churches of Clan Morbidus, sang the same hymns, brandished the same liturgical banners and reliquaries over clouds of incense smoke, and spluttered with the same contagions. Scores of masterburrow albino guard muscularly separated them, herding them towards different antechambers of the sub-tower.

‘Very well,’ Makulitt hissed, and with wary eyes on his spiritual counterpart, the albino guard and the grey seer, he shuffled inside at a cautious leper’s pace.

Inside, he shrieked in terror.

A seraphon star-creature with the snarling head of a skaven was perched directly above, leathery wings spread for imminent flight and tipped with man-thing hands for grasping. Only once a second had passed and it had not launched itself from its perch did Makulitt realise the creature was stuffed.

Moldrent snickered.

Makulitt glared at him. One paw over his beating heart, the other already clutching the skitterstone in his pocket, he waited three breaths for panic to subside.

A bestiary of stuffed and patchwork horrors populated the warren. A disturbingly sentient flap of skin floated, mocking, in the heat rising from the hearthplace. Removing his paw from his pocket, he pointed at one of the chairs that faced them. In it was a bulky skaven with black fur, distinguished with silver and criss-crossed with scars. Its head listed stupidly, its tongue hanging from the side of its muzzle. Visible wires had been employed to widen the eyes and flatten the ears, making the creation appear doubly imbecilic.

‘I will not sit-wait next to that.’

‘They are dead things,’ Moldrent muttered in a glottal wheeze. ‘We are all dead things.’

Makulitt turned towards him, shuffling unconsciously away.

So it spoke.

Ratskitten raised his paws. ‘Formalities. Details. That you both are here under truce-flag of my master squeaks highly. There is burrow-space and spoil enough for both Churches of Contagion in the Mortal Realms. Yes? Yes? The Horned One makes us fight, to winnow the stupid and weak, but when we fight too fiercely, when the great struggle unsettles skaven supremacy or hinders his great agenda, does he not always intervene to stop-cease?’

The Antipustulent turned his hooded snout back towards the hall, apparently seeking out the scent of some counsellor or other from the processions.

‘The answer is yes. He does.’ Makulitt looked away and sniffed. ‘Imbecile.’

Moldrent responded with a wet growl as albino guard ushered them fully inside and closed the doors behind them. Only one remained.

‘As you see-smell.’ Ratskitten spread his paws, exposing his chest and vital organs to any one of a hundred potentially fatal blows. ‘It is perfectly safe-safe.’ He gestured towards the solitary albino guard. ‘You may surrender your weapons now.’

Reluctantly, Makulitt handed over his crozier. Under the grey seer’s impatient stare he proceeded to furnish the stormvermin with several dozen knives and a warplock pistol with a damp wooden stock and a corroded barrel. Ratskitten turned to Moldrent. The Antipustulent raised his paws, spilling layers of diseased sackcloth to reveal that, rather than being clasped tightly in prayer, his paws were in fact manacled by his waist. A heavy chain linked to his ankles yanked taut before he could raise them beyond chest height.

Satisfied, Makulitt turned to the grey seer. ‘Your staff.’

The stormvermin took the staff along with the other weapons and withdrew to the door. Ratskitten turned, still grumbling, and hobbled towards a vacant chair. It was half again too large for him. He climbed in. It took some time.

Delving into one of his many pockets, Makulitt drew out an ornate bronze timepiece and checked the time.

‘What is that?’ Ratskitten wheezed, sitting back into his high chair.

‘A simple timepiece, grey seer.’

‘Give it to the guard.’

‘I need it.’

‘For what?’

Makulitt’s claws folded over the device as the albino guard approached. ‘Prayer?’

‘Take it,’ Ratskitten instructed, and the albino prised open Makulitt’s fingers to remove it from his paw. The Archpustulent bared his fangs but did not struggle beyond that. ‘And whatever it is hidden in his robes.’

‘What?’

‘The thing you reach for when you feel your skin threatened.’

Makulitt hissed. ‘Lies!’ He made to pull away; the albino set its paw on his shoulder like a bundle of chain and the brute muscularity of a dragon.

‘Take it too,’ said Ratskitten.

‘No-no!’

Tightening its grip on his shoulder, the albino pulled open his vestments at the collar and reached inside.

Gagrik slammed the lid down on the chest, loudly enough to be heard even over the spluttered praises and cacophonous chimes of a Virulent Procession at rest. He winced at himself as the clawguard turned back around. The warrior could not speak, but he glared demandingly. Gagrik looked away, down at the chest.

How to explain the presence of three chests full of blasting powder mixed in with the blightpepper grounds? It was enough to bring down a Stormkeep, and Skryre-made, which meant dangerously volatile and, in these quantities, liable to explode at any moment. Somehow, Antipustulent Sour must have spiked Makulitt’s offering to the Aelf-Eater, to kill the Archpustulent or to shame him or both.

While his mind whirled through possible, if implausible, excuses, the clawguard had started to pad back. Gone was the straight-backed pride of an albino elite and in its place a common murderer’s hunch. The posture spilled his gold-lined cloak over his off-paw shoulder, his paw tightening again around his sword’s grip. Gagrik stood rigid with his paws flat on the lid. As though his flesh had melted and merged with the rotten wood. As though the slightest move to tear them away would blast him into the gullet of the Corruptor.

The massive clawguard towered over him.

Gagrik cringed, caught between two terrors, and something in him gave up the pretence at resistance and snapped.

He screamed.

‘Run-flee!’

Weep’s eyes narrowed. Assassins. Hidden in the very plague cart that conveyed Moldrent’s offerings to the Aelf-Eater. Clearly, this was the infamous trickery of Makulitt Pus at work. Only the Archpustulent had anything to lose from an enforced cessation of warfare and the recognition of Moldrent as the head of a new clan. But how to explain this? The albino guard of the masterburrow were known for their efficiency, their brutality and their loyalty: they came by no part of that reputation by seeking complicated explanations to simple conundrums. This was Moldrent’s cart, Moldrent’s treachery, and, now that Weep’s eyes adapted to the darkness inside of the cart, he could see that the concealed warriors – deviousness heaped upon cunning! – were even garbed in the drab of Moldrent’s own faithful.

Weep had to protect him. Lest the pretender to the true Word exploit his disgrace.

With his head still upside down and between his thighs, he coughed up a prayer. Pestilence boiled from within his throat, a bitter green fog spuming from his lips and blasting through the peephole above the toe board. The plague cart rocked on its axles as Pus’ assassins thrashed and squealed, the pestilent cloud blasting out from the back of the cart in an explosion of broken earthenware and hurling the two albino guard back onto the parquetry.

The rest of the albinos turned, steel scraping as the entire clawpack drew weapons.

Chancellor Grulsh awoke with a spluttered prayer.

‘Treachery!’ Weep hissed. ‘Kill-kill!’

Moldrent was hearing screams. This was not an unusual state of affairs. The difficulty was in knowing whether they came from within his head or without. He did not think as other rats thought, scheme as other rats schemed. It would have been impossible for him to do so, his mind a puzzle of a million pieces to which the experience of his senses was indistinguishable from the memories of his past and neither particularly reliable even in and of themselves. But he did think, and he did scheme, and most of that jumble of consciousness had, for the longest time, been bent towards the ultimate goal of not becoming Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus. The Corruptor had made him a madrat and a killer. This, too, was the limit of his ambition for himself.

He was passingly aware as the albino guard pushed Pus out of the way, leaving whatever it was he had been rooting for hidden under his robes, and moved to the doors. The big warrior pressed his ear to the wood. Moldrent could hear the clangour of weapons and shields, the hiss of gas and, of course, screams. The grey seer in the throne squealed something that Moldrent decided was probably ignorable.

He raised his paws. There was no resistance at all as the manacles around his wrists turned brown and flaked to nothing. With one paw he gripped the length of chain before it could fall. With the other he drew back his hood. The sight of his uncovered face drew gratifying shrieks of irreligious dread from both Archpustulent and grey seer. The sorcerer hissed, jabbing a claw at him. Moldrent followed the direction of his eyes and turned around.

The albino rushed towards him with a strangled growl. Moldrent gave a toothless grin, whiskers wilting under a rotten exhalation, and grasped the chain that had been formerly attached to the manacles. Then he pulled, his sackcloth robes parting as the massive spiked ball of a plague censer emerged from between his ankles. He swung it up, the huge head belching a toxic cloud that frazzled his senses and re-shattered his thoughts. But it had not killed him. As it was supposed to have done when a smaller censer filled with a feebler incense had been chained into a younger rat’s paws all those years ago. No gift of the Corruptor could lay him low now.

Because he was blessed.

So very blessed.

Swinging the censer up over his head, he looped it, building speed, gathering power, his gangrel frame hoarding more strength than its withered muscles should have allowed, and with the albino a tail-length away he let it out. The spiked censer crunched into the albino’s breastplate, cracking it like an eggshell and hurling the warrior back towards the doors. The albino crashed into them at the join, splintering them, buckling them inwards and almost tearing them off their hinges with his weight.

He grinned, dropped his shoulder and charged.

Ratskitten rose painfully from his too-high seat. There could be only one Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus, and so help him it was not going to be either of these two. He would stamp his footpaw on this before the next internecine squabble of a Verminous clan or a falling out between a pair of Moulder-masters over breeding rights irritated a High Lord enough to burden him with its resolution. He had a warm burrow, a pile of plundered Azyrite scrolls there waiting to be translated and studied.

Ignoring, for now, the quivering Makulitt, who had scurried behind a chair, he turned to Moldrent. The Antipustulent had surprised him. He would admit that much. Going into his pocket, he withdrew a thumb-sized nugget of refined warpstone and popped it into his mouth. It fizzed on the tongue. Spikes of euphoric power rammed outwards from his mouth cavity into his throat, his chest, his brain. His thoughts became a giddy swirl. He was going to end these spoiled cretins and it would be glorious. Chittering the opening bars of an incantation, he extended a claw towards Moldrent.

The Antipustulent issued a strident squeal, shoulder-charging the stricken albino into the door. But rather than simply finishing him and returning to attend to Makulitt and the grey seer, as Ratskitten would certainly have done in his place, he gave the door the full force of his charge. The already weakened frame gave, the doors splintering outwards, parting enough up the join for the Antipustulent to shoulder through. This he did with a triumphant squeal, trampling the albino in his armour underpaw and leaping into the back of the fray in the hall beyond.

Ratskitten blinked. His spell drained back into the aether.

‘Mad-thing,’ he muttered.

He turned to the chair behind which Makulitt Pus still cowered, his tall mitre just visible behind the stuffed lord who sat upon it. A halo of ruinous energy flickered around the grey seer’s paw, his mind too overloaded with the raw stuff of Chaos and his own invincibility to fret overmuch on consequences: he considered blasting the lot of it into the next realm.

He bared his teeth, struggling to force his magic-charged mind to understand a thing that did not, at an intuitive skaven level, make any sense.

With an effort of willpower he lowered his paw.

‘Do you want to be Archpustulent at least?’ he said.

Gagrik struck the albino guard with his sceptre. The mace-like head crunched into the albino’s gardbrace. The heavier warrior took the hit with a grunt, then replied with a brute sweep of his sword. Gagrik ducked. The blade knocked off his mitre, and chopped into the side of a plague monk. The slain rat squealed. The sword made a sucking, squelching noise, like a footpaw trapped in mud, as the albino tried to pull it free. Gagrik jabbed with a snarl. The sceptre’s end-teeth gnawed at the warrior’s breastplate, the cocktail of unguents working at the scratches to mottle the plate. Smelling the odious gases put out by the metal blights that were eating his armour, the warrior snarled in something like genuine panic, scratching at the infected plate with his claws. It was just enough of a distraction for Gagrik to finish the warrior off.

Instead, he ducked around the flapping albino and ran.

Plague monks were spread out over the hall in a wall-to-wall congregation of warring filth. Intermingled, the two processions became indistinguishable. Bells jangled. High, cracked voices squealed a mélange of battle hymns. Monks wearing robes of near-identical colour and symbology fought with albino guard twice their size, and with each other.

A skaven dressed in lay priest’s robes stood on the top of a plague cart, shrilling at the monks that surrounded him even as the violence they perpetrated caused his platform to rock. For a split second his eyes and Gagrik’s met. The priest opened his jaws wide and squealed. Gagrik saw the first tendrils of fumes rising up from the priest’s throat and swiftly changed direction. He heard then, rather than saw, the pestilential flood that erupted from the priest’s jaws and sprayed across the hall like a torrent from a warpfire-thrower. He smelled the rot where it gushed over warring ratmen and felt the withering of the hairs at the tip of his tail where it blasted too close for comfort before its power was diluted.

He looked over his shoulder, just as the doors at the far end of the hall were forced open and Antipustulent Moldrent Sour disgorged. The apostate priest shrieked like a daemon as he set upon the albino guard from the rear.

Gagrik swallowed. He had heard that Sour had never been beaten in battle.

An albino clawguard gave a mangled roar as he lifted a squirming priest from the floor and hurled him bodily across the hall. The priest fell hard against one of Makulitt’s tribute chests.

Gagrik cringed.

Nothing blew up.

Yet.

He spun away, eyes darting for the nearest and least heavily guarded way out. As he did so he bent to rip the hem of his chasuble and then, with the other paw, pulled frantically at the neck ties of his ridiculously long mantum cape. More warriors were piling up the stairs before he was finished. He watched, clawing desperately at his throat, as hundreds of heavily armoured albino guard tramped into the hall under the war-banners of Clan Dregg. A snarling drum sounded what must have been an order to reform. The warriors drew into narrow-fronted blocks, leaving several tunnels by which two-rat weapons teams bearing glowing, multi-barrelled machine guns scurried up to the front. The gunners were armoured in leather and goggled. To a rat, they grinned madly as they began cranking their weapons.

Gagrik let go of his collar, the mantum still tight about his throat, and with a terrified curse, dropped like a plague victim down a well.

With a sound like a hailstorm on a tin roof, the ratling teams opened fire.

Bullets whickered through the air, carving a brief flurry pattern of straight lines into the incense smoke. They punched wetly through the soft bodies of plague monks, priests and slaves. Albino guard died with flatter tones, bullets hitting armour like mallets against bells without clappers. They tore through banners, broke open reliquaries, ricocheted off gongs, shredded poles. Gagrik watched in horror as bullets mowed through the bodies of monks and slaves alike and hammered against the sides of the chests they were still protecting. The warpstone-tipped munitions perforated the soft wood of all three chests in a dozen places.

Moldrent Sour charged into the bullet hail, squealing a challenge, and smashed his censer through a gun barrel.

From somewhere behind the smog and the carnage and the broken gilt doors, Gagrik heard a voice cry, ‘Skitterleap!’

There was a flash of darkness.

Gagrik buried his head in his paws and screamed.

It was the last thing he heard before the explosion.

THE ARCHPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

The magma plains of Aridian were a wasteland of bronzed sands and slow-moving rivers of molten rock. The air smelled of nothing so much as heat. The nose meekly surrendered to it, passed the impossible duty onto other senses. The sound of bubbling earth, the hiss of geysers. The constant tremble of menace from underpaw. The haze above the endless, flat horizon. The Mortal Realms were a dangerous place for a lone skaven to be, but it was safer by far than being Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus for one lacking the ambition, guile and authority to have craved that position in the first place. The blanket annihilation of Zhurn Aelf-Eater’s sub-tower and all of his best warriors was a small price to pay for this self-imposed exile.

Makulitt had found a hole in the ground and, after some increasingly delirious scrabbling, had expanded it enough to fit himself inside. His paws and footpaws, snout and tail, were wrapped in the surfeit of clothing that the skitterstone had transported with him from the masterburrow. There was no need for such heavy frocks and grand regalia here in Aqshy. He found moisture by sucking on the split ends of grasses and burrowing for roots. He spent his time in contemplation of the Great Horned Rat, giddy as a plague hermit with heatstroke and dehydration. There was not enough moisture in the air to carry a single contagion, and his head ached for lack of water.

He began to see things. Scratch marks of prophecy in the yellow sky, gnashing teeth at the mingling of two sulphurous plumes, hunched bodies slinking through the haze. He did not worry himself overly, then, when he first marked the wobble on the horizon.

Over the hours that followed it got bigger. He thought of scurrying on, finding himself a new hole to hide in, perhaps even, dare he dream it, a bigger hole, but in his mean and dried-out little heart he knew that he did not have the willpower or the strength. As it drew closer he realised that it was a cart. Its wheels rattled over the broken earth, sides blurry in the heat. Only when it was almost close enough to stand up and touch did he notice the mutant draught rat that pulled it and the single skaven perched on its seat.

With the deep interest of one who has seen nothing else in weeks, Makulitt watched as the cart pulled in alongside his meagre burrow. The draught rat panted thirstily. The skaven leant out to peer at him more closely. He too had lost all sense of smell in the heat. The skaven was wrapped in tinder-crisp robes of bleached green bound at the middle with rope. Spoiled silver devotionals twinkled on braided strings from his belt, almost white in the heat. The Splintered Temple of Clan Morbidus stabbed into Makulitt’s sore eyes every time the slowly turning devotionals caught the Aqshyan sun.

‘You found me,’ he croaked.

The monk bobbed his head. ‘I am sent all the way from Charcoal Scorch to seek-find. The lectors squeak of how you kill-slay the Antipustulent, and aim now for the Tenth seat on the Council of Thirteen. The lost Churches flock back to you, Archpustulent. And more come over from other clans, awed by your ambition and your embodiment of the Word. Clan Morbidus has never been mightier.’ He offered his paw. Not knowing what else to do, Makulitt took it. The monk pulled him up onto the seat beside him. He shuffled along to make room. ‘Just as well too. Zhurn Aelf-Eater has sworn to kill and stuff you to baptise his new burrow-chambers.’

The monk snapped his reins, and the draught rat launched eagerly forward. He turned to his passenger as their cart clattered over the baking desert, bared his teeth in a humbled smile and squeaked a quiet prayer.

The glisten in Makulitt Pus’ eyes clearly denoted the fervour of one hand-chosen by the Great Horned Rat.

ROADWARDEN

Liane Merciel

‘I hear you’re a guide.’

Fereyne opened her eyes slowly. She shook ash from the battered, salt-stained brim of her hat with one hand as she pretended to wipe the sleep from her eyes with the other.

She hadn’t really been sleeping, of course. Like everyone else in Reaver’s Mourning, she’d been watching these strangers since they’d arrived at the dusty little outpost. And, like everyone else in Reaver’s Mourning, she’d been subtle about it, because even by the measure of this hard, cracked land at the edge of the Reaver Wastes, everything about them screamed of danger. It was not wise to gawk at daemons.

This woman, looming over her, was more daemonic than most. Her skin was brass, her rough black hair knotted with blood-red rags. Old scars seamed her flesh. One, revealed by the droop of her loose linen cowl as she bent over Fereyne, was a skull-shaped welt between her collarbones.

Fereyne knew that mark. A chill traced down her spine as she met the woman’s stare. ‘Who says?’

‘Does it matter?’ The woman nodded towards the worn stone pendant that had slipped out of Fereyne’s pocket while she pretended to sleep. ‘You’re a roadwarden. Roadwarden Fereyne. The best guide in this miserable little dust camp, they say, despite being the youngest. The youngest still living, at least.’

‘I’m alive because I don’t take stupid risks,’ Fereyne said sourly. She rubbed the worn etchings of her roadwarden’s pendant. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Somewhere in the Wastes.’ The woman straightened, glancing over her shoulder to the little inn where her companions were staying. The white glaze was flaking off its bricks, stripped by Aqshy’s merciless sun and wind. ‘Veskil can tell you. He’s hunting something in there.’

‘In the Reaver Wastes?’ Fereyne baulked. This job sounded worse by the word.

‘Veskil pays.’ The woman flashed a smile. Her eyeteeth were filed to points and dyed red along the edges. ‘He pays well. Gold and gems, not coin. It’s worth a water-gem for you to take us into the Wastes. Two if he finds what he’s seeking.’

Fereyne’s eyebrows rose. Paying in gems wasn’t unusual around the Reaver Wastes. They were far from any of Aqshy’s great cities, and the blood lords who claimed to rule over this desolation cared nothing for civilisation or its currencies. Money, in these lands, was meaningless. People traded by the weight of their coins, not the stamps on their faces.

But a water-gem was a price that could change a life. Two…

She hesitated. This woman bore Khorne’s brand, but she behaved like no bloodreaver Fereyne had met. The Lord of Slaughter’s lackeys relied on force and fear, not flattery and bribes. Subtlety was as anathema to them as peace.

‘Who are you?’ Fereyne asked. She gestured to the woman’s heart-scar, now hidden again by the linen cowl. ‘You carry the Blood Lord’s mark, but not his manner. That scar is of the Skullborn, but…’

‘The Skullborn are dead. That tribe’s name is no more.’ The woman said it flatly, without fear or grief, though tribe was life in the Wastes. A person with no tribe was without water or shade. Walking dead.

‘But who…? How…?’ Fereyne faltered. The Skullborn were among the most feared tribes she knew. Led by the cannibal warlord Gringur Bloodfist, they hunted from the Piroc Plains to the Vultur Sands, leaving pyramids of bloody skulls in their wake. It was impossible that anyone could have broken that brutal horde, unless… ‘Has one of the Bloodbound warbands come?’

‘No.’ The woman fell silent for a moment, then shook it off with another disconcertingly red-toothed smile. But a trace of awe lingered as she said: ‘None of the Blood God’s champions brought them down. Sigmar’s… giants did that. They came clad in gold and lightning, with thunder in their voices and devastation in their fists. They swept Gringur and his hounds in a blue blaze, brighter than the noontide sun, and when the sky grew dim enough to see again, all those who’d sworn Khorne’s oaths of blood were dead. The rest…’ She shrugged. ‘The rest scattered from Sigmar’s storm. Including us.’

‘Then you are not Skullborn?’ Fereyne pressed, unable to believe what she’d heard.

‘No. This brand… it does not mean what you imagine. It marks that I was born to them, and claimed by them. Not that I claimed them myself. Now the Skullborn are dead, and their name is no more. Now I am only Khensev. Khensev of no tribe, and glad to be free.’ The woman held out a hand. ‘Come. You should talk to Veskil.’

And Fereyne, to her own surprise, took the scarred woman’s hand.

The inn at Reaver’s Mourning had no name. It needed none, for it was the only inn in a flyspeck settlement that only existed because sometimes traders from Callidium ventured down the crumbling old roads into the perilous Wastes, and sometimes tribespeople came out of the desolation to meet them. While the nomads seldom wanted a solid roof over their heads, the city merchants did, and so an enterprising villager had built one for them.

It was a low building of dun brick covered with flaking white glaze, its windows filled with carved panels of pale-bleached wood. Near-bald chickens pecked at the dirt in its shadow, while the fat yellow lizards that the innkeepers bred for meat lay dozing in the sun.

No traders were there now, and no tribespeople. The only occupants, apart from the two old sisters who kept the place, were Khensev’s companions.

It wasn’t hard to see why everyone else had left. Khensev’s band consisted of five former Skullborn, each more savage-looking than the last; a grim, pale aelf whose skin was the same shade as his cloud-grey leather, and whose eyes were cold as the lore-spinners’ tales of ice; and a bald duardin whose muscled arms were striped with scars where runes or tattoos had been carved from her flesh.

And then there was Veskil, perhaps the strangest of them all.

He was human, maybe, although much of his face was hidden behind a great bronze contraption of whirring gears clamped around his hairless skull. One of his eyes was gone, replaced by a rune-scribed golden marble that shimmered in its socket, and the other peered out from behind the coloured lenses that clicked through the wizard’s bizarre headpiece. Gold-threaded red robes hid most of his body, but Fereyne could see enough of his bulk to know, without a doubt, that Veskil was a creature of the cities. No one outside their watered walls grew so large and soft.

‘Ah, so Khensev persuaded you to join us,’ the wizard said. His voice was as soft as his hands, but there was a sharpness to his gaze that made Fereyne wary.

‘She persuaded me to listen,’ Fereyne said.

‘To listen, then.’ Veskil nodded in concession and smiled. ‘You must wonder what is so important that it draws us into the Wastes.’

‘So important that you’ll offer me two water-gems to help you find it? Yes, I wonder.’

‘Are you native to these lands?’ Veskil’s headpiece clicked and whirred. The green lens that had been before his right eye ticked away, replaced by a grey octagon. Behind it, his eye changed too. No longer human, it now appeared ringed by ashen scales, its pupil a vertical slash of flame. A dragon’s eye, fiery and merciless. ‘Not the cities, but the wild places. The wastes, the plains, the ruins of fallen Ahramentia?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you know the hardships of life in Aqshy’s desolation. The heat, the hunger, the horrors that Khorne’s savages have dealt for so many generations.’

‘Yes.’ Fereyne kept her gaze steady on the wizard’s half-mechanical face. She clamped down hard on the memories that tried to rise up at her answer. Her mother, writhing in dry fever. What was left of her younger brother after Khorne’s bloodreavers came upon their camp. The baby, the one they’d never named, putting his tongue out for milk or water or anything, anything, except hot dust on his lips.

So many memories. So many deaths. She wasn’t yet twenty, and she was alone in the world, the others all blazed away by a realm that took lives like kindling.

‘What if it didn’t have to be that way? What would you say if I told you that we could bring life to Aqshy – oases, glass gardens, places where people could prosper in peace and plenty?’ Veskil leaned forward, his chair creaking under his weight. The grey lens spun away, and the green one returned. Behind it, his eye was human again, and wide with earnest belief.

The sisters’ brooms had stilled. Even the innkeepers were listening now.

‘I’d say you were mad,’ Fereyne snorted. ‘You could just as easily try to–’

‘To what? Tame Khorne’s scarred savages? By Sigmar’s blessing, we have. You’ve seen the proof yourself.’ Veskil gestured to Khensev and her fellows. The Skullborn woman crossed her arms and cast him an annoyed look, but said nothing.

‘The world does not have to be forever what it is today,’ the wizard continued. ‘We have the power to change it. To make these wastelands less punishing. To give its people the hope of something better than a swift and early death.’

Fereyne glanced out of the panelled windows. Past the dusty crossroads of Reaver’s Mourning and its handful of hovels, she could see nothing but sun-blasted rock and sparse dots of gnarled, thorny brush under a low red sky.

There was nothing soft in Aqshy. There never had been, even before Khorne had forced most of the realm under his bloody boot. That was exactly why the tribes had so easily fallen under the Lord of Slaughter’s sway: each had known from birth that the world was pitiless, that only the harshest survived, and that cruel hardship had been their lot since their first breath.

But that is why this man must change it. Understanding hit Fereyne like a thunderclap. Peace required plenty. If this wizard wanted the tribes to build better lives than Khorne had promised them, then he needed to change the world in which they lived. Otherwise, the tribes would fall back to squabbling over scraps, and would soon return to rage.

‘What are you looking for?’ Fereyne asked, curious.

Veskil steepled his fingers, pleased by the question. ‘We seek an artefact known as Eshael’s Font. It may be a fountain, or a watering vessel of some kind. Whatever its form, its magic is known – Eshael’s Font holds the power of life. With its power, we might have orchards on the Piroc Plains, grain fields in the Reaver Wastes. People wouldn’t have to kill each other for a sip of water.’

To Fereyne, it sounded impossible. But the wizard’s dream was compelling, and anyway, what did it matter if he was wrong? Even if they failed to find this font, Veskil was offering enough money for her to shake off the road dust forever and buy a rich life in Callidium. Whether or not they brought water and green life to the Wastes, Fereyne would have it for herself.

‘It’s a pretty picture. For that, and your water-gems, you’ve got yourself a guide.’

They left the next evening, just as the red sun was sinking and the desert began to exhale its heat out to the night. Burnflies spun through the gathering shadows, while fireburst beetles spewed yellow-tipped flame from their hidden lairs among the stones. In Aqshy, nightfall meant only that the realm’s fires moved from its heavens to the earth.

For the first few nights, Fereyne kept them on the Piroc Plains, which offered better water, and better grazing for the remurants who carried their supplies. The lumbering, insectoid creatures ate a mixture of combustible grasses and mineral-rich rocks, and though they required no additional water to survive, a poorly proportioned diet could cause them indigestion. Indigestion, for a remurant, meant belching gouts of explosive gas and flame. Even if the humans managed to avoid incineration, their baggage seldom did, so Fereyne took great care to keep the remurants properly fed.

On the fourth night, however, she turned them towards the Reaver Wastes.

‘We’re nearing Smokescar territory,’ Fereyne told the others as they made camp that morning. ‘I’ll try to skirt around their boundaries. They’ve always fought the taint of Chaos, but they’re a hard people in their own right, and it’s likely they’ll take your markings to mean you’re true Skullborn.’ She nodded meaningfully at Khensev’s brand. ‘I doubt they’ll pause to ask questions, so it’s best we don’t risk that misunderstanding.’

Veskil nodded, and the others voiced no objection.

But the land was harder than Fereyne remembered. Where she thought there would be water, they found dried-up oases and exhausted, abandoned wells. Ravines that had once held good grazing stood withered and grey, their grass gone to dust. Two days and two nights passed with no water, no food, and no sign of the Smokescar. By the end of the second night, Khensev and her warriors were getting restive, and the remurants had exhausted their graze.

‘We cannot stay in the Wastes,’ the aelf, Whyrlin, told Fereyne while sharpening his blades. He had an inordinate number of them, from the glassy scimitar worn across his back to the matched knives at his hips and the smaller, secret daggers hidden about his person. ‘Our water runs low. If you can find none here, we will have to go into your smoke-tribe’s land.’

‘I know.’ Fereyne rubbed her roadwarden’s pendant uneasily. She hadn’t warmed to the pale, grim aelf, and she didn’t like the idea of trespassing into Smokescar territory. Khensev and her warriors might not have been true Skullborn in their own eyes or in Khorne’s, but they bore the skull-brand scar, and that would surely be enough to damn them to the Smokescar.

But Whyrlin was right. They had no choice.

‘Where are they?’ Fereyne muttered to herself. For three nights they’d been moving deeper into Smokescar lands, and still they’d seen no tribespeople. Here, too, the land was poorer than Fereyne remembered, but not so harsh that the Smokescar should have abandoned it.

At the Oasis of the Drowned Skulls, the water was low and brackish, but drinkable. The soft earth around the pool, however, was untrodden by camel or remurant. Bluecrown and fireleaf flowered in Redclaw Ravine, thin but untouched, though the nomads should have rushed to gather the succulent plants during their brief, precious bloom.

Even at the Arch of the Ancestors’ Spears, a wind-carved bend of stone ringed by the crumbling weapons of Smokescar warriors from centuries past, no one came. The arch was one of the tribe’s holiest sites, its burial grounds fiercely protected from outsiders, and yet Fereyne and her companions walked in unopposed. All around them, the burial mounds of revered ancestors stood unguarded. The wind shrilled through the blackbone spears of the long-dead Smokescar, but there was no whisper of any living nomad.

Fereyne couldn’t explain it. They’d seen no signs of battle. The oases held water, and the seasonal plants were ripe for forage. There was no reason the Smokescar should have abandoned their territory, leaving its rare bounties behind, and yet they plainly had.

‘Why should this be of concern?’ Khensev asked when Fereyne mentioned her puzzlement to the others. ‘They have not attacked us. Good. What does the reason matter?’

‘It just feels wrong.’ Fereyne’s unease had only grown since they’d left the Piroc Plains. Once they’d moved into Smokescar territory, she’d been able to find enough water and forage to sustain them, but at every step of their journey, there was less than she’d expected, and it was sparser and bitterer. It was as if the land itself were somehow ailing.

‘How much longer must we remain in their territory?’ Veskil asked. The journey had been hard on him. Large as he was, the wizard was obviously unaccustomed to the heat and exertion that the others endured as a matter of course. He never complained, but Fereyne could see the toll it took.

‘Not long. The last good water in this direction is at the Copperscales,’ Fereyne said. ‘It’s their year-round camp. The Smokescar elders live there, caring for the sick and wounded who cannot travel. Once we’re past that, it’s a short night’s journey to leave Smokescar lands.’

Veskil mopped his brow with a red kerchief, fastidiously patting away the sweat channelled along the headpiece’s brass arms. Despite his exhaustion, the wizard nodded, straightening determinedly even as he tucked the cloth back into his sleeve. ‘Perhaps we’ll find answers there. Failing that, at least we’ll have water.’

Fereyne led them on.

In secret places, hidden amid the Wastes’ desolation, she found uncropped grass and unpicked fruit. She found piles of dried remurant dung that the nomads had failed to gather for their campfires, and forgotten snares that held lizards’ dry bones in their cracked coils. But, through all those blistering days and throat-parched nights, she did not find a single soul from the Smokescar tribe.

And then, at last, they came to the Copperscales.

The Smokescar settlement was a cluster of yellow mud huts built in a semicircle around an oasis. Behind the houses grew a dense forest of rough-barked trees with metallic copper leaves, which chimed like bells when stirred by the wind. The scale-shaped leaves were key to the Smokescar tribe’s survival, for they could be strung together into lightweight but formidably tough armour that, unlike true metal, did not roast its wearer in Aqshy’s heat. That armour gave the Smokescar warriors a crucial edge in battle, and trading loose copperscales kept the tribe from starving during lean times.

An eerie stillness blanketed the huts. Beneath the trees’ familiar music, Fereyne could hear another sound – a wet, phlegmy chuckling that seemed to gurgle from all the dark windows and doorways at once. It was a foul sound, so foul that merely listening to it seemed to leave an unclean film on her skin.

‘Spears, to me.’ Khensev dropped into a fluid crouch and moved forward, flanked by her warriors. Whyrlin melted into the shadows, loping towards the huts with a predatory smoothness that even the Skullborn couldn’t rival. The duardin, Brokkar, slapped her hammer into her hands and strode forward to guard Veskil.

Fereyne watched with her heart in her throat. She was a fair shot and a good hunter, but she’d never been in a real fight. She notched an arrow to her bowstring anyway, hoping and dreading that a target might appear.

The chuckling intensified. It grew thicker, uglier, broke into sticky coughing, and kept laughing, now multiplied by a chorus of hundreds. Then, abruptly, it went silent.

Khensev peered into an open doorway. Then she recoiled, her face twisted in disgust. She gestured swiftly for her warriors to back away.

‘The Plaguefather has taken these souls,’ the scarred woman spat. ‘There is nothing to fight here.’

‘I see.’ Veskil’s face hardened. He returned to the remurants and drew a tall staff from his baggage. It was not one Fereyne had seen before. Its shaft was braided steel and gold, and a teardrop-shaped orange crystal, big enough to fill her palm, shimmered at its head. Fiery light poured from the stone, surrounding Veskil as he lumbered to the huts. ‘Stay within the light, if you wish to bear witness here.’

Khensev’s warriors were clearly unwilling to go, and Fereyne was curious. She shouldered her bow, tossed the remurants’ reins to the nearest Skullborn, and hurried after Veskil. The staff’s light was warm on her skin, oddly comforting. She had almost forgotten the feel of her mother’s embrace – but in that fiery glow, strangely, she felt an echo of the safety she’d believed in as a child.

Veskil looked at her quizzically. The gears around his head churned, and a blue lens flicked over his eye. Behind it, his eye appeared to be a hovering ball of white flame. ‘Are you a mage, roadwarden?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so,’ Fereyne said, her eyes on the huts ahead.

‘Curious. Do you sense the winds of magic?’

‘The wind’s always blowing in the Wastes, wizard.’

‘True. Yes, that is true,’ Veskil said quietly, the corners of his mouth crinkling as if something in her answer amused him. Whatever it might have been, it was swiftly forgotten as they came to the dead of the Copperscales.

Perhaps a dozen Smokescar lay sprawled around their huts. No two had died the same way. All had been felled by disease, but there was no commonality to their symptoms.

One lay in a sun-dried rime of pooled sweat and urine, every drop of water wrung out by sickness. The salt of his body had crystallised into hypnotic patterns, almost words, that made Fereyne’s eyes ache.

She looked away. Ten paces off, a greybeard slumped against the village well, his chest deformed by massive buboes that had erupted into mushrooms of blood-streaked yellow fat. Real mushrooms sprouted from his flesh beneath the grisly false ones, their gills heavy with sickly, moist-looking spores. White grubs squirmed under the mushrooms, their wet squelches sounding uncannily like chuckles.

Other vermin fed on other bodies. Black flies climbed through a woman’s eye sockets, their slimy wings leaving tracks like tears on her cheeks. Broken-legged ants with huge, drooping eyes had gnawed her clothes into lacy ruin and built nests of fractal madness in her limbs. The noises of their gnawing, too, sounded like hideous laughter.

Death and gluttonous fecundity, again and again, intertwined like awful lovers. The same nightmare with a thousand different faces, all of them laughing at their glorious, horrible joke.

The sun should have blasted those mushrooms and mildews. The wind should have scoured away the flies and maggots. But there was a god’s touch in that horror, and it shielded his creatures from Aqshy’s wrath.

Chaos. Fereyne turned away, covering her nose and mouth against the smell.

The scent of smoke, and a quiet popping noise, turned her back. Where the light of Veskil’s staff spilled across the vermin, they blackened like leaves thrown into a campfire. The fungus curled to char, not a single spore escaping. She looked at the wizard in puzzlement, and found him staring back at her. It was impossible for her to read his face under the mechanical headpiece.

‘Can you tell what brought this to them?’ he asked. ‘And whether anyone survived?’

Fereyne nodded, fighting through the nausea. I won’t be weak in front of these people. She closed her eyes, drew a breath, then another. I am a roadwarden, Fereyne told herself. I will see the signs.

She opened her eyes. This time she didn’t look at the dead Smokescar, but at the meals they hadn’t finished and the jars of water that they’d spilled when their doom came upon them. There were more bowls laid out than corpses beside them, and there were footsteps in the drying sand at the jars’ mouths.

The footprints led away. There were survivors. Fereyne retraced their steps, concentrating on the task to push away the horrors around her. The grubs’ nightmare chuckling receded so that she could almost ignore it. Almost.

The survivors had gone into the Copperscales. They had walked in a messy single file, like soldiers too badly wounded to stay in line. Blood and ichor, congealed but not dry, dimmed the crinkled lustre of the fallen leaves at the forest’s edge. Fereyne followed just far enough to confirm their direction, and then withdrew to relay her findings to the others.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

Khensev exchanged a glance with her warriors. The scarred woman spat, expressing their shared view. ‘If the Plaguefather has taken them, they are gone. We have no duty to avenge this tribe.’

‘Don’t you wonder why he wanted them?’ Veskil asked.

‘No.’ Khensev’s voice trembled with hatred, and ill-concealed fear beneath it. ‘You could as well ask why dust fever chose to strike down some and spare others. There is no reason. There is only chance, and madness, and the hunger of parasites.’

‘I think there was a reason here.’ Veskil lifted his staff. Its fiery glow changed subtly, taking on a greenish tint where its nimbus neared the Copperscales. The wizard held it aloft for a moment, long enough to let them all see the light shift, then lowered it and looked to Fereyne. ‘Do you feel it? The change in the winds?’

Fereyne held a hand up to the forest, spreading her fingers as she tried to detect some shift in the breeze. Under the Copperscales, the air was cooler, less parched. Though she could only see coppery leaves and black-ridged trunks, the forest’s exhalations carried a whisper of crushed leaves and pond water that smelled softer, greener, than the spiked and scorched vegetation of the Wastes.

But she couldn’t feel any wind, not really. She lowered her hand. ‘No.’

‘Try the staff.’ Veskil held it out, ignoring the irritated look Khensev cast him and the mutters from her warriors. Brokkar stamped impatiently in the background, shouldering her heavy warhammer with a grunt, but Veskil ignored the duardin as well.

Fereyne took the staff. The metal was vibrant in her palm, thrumming with life. The crystal dimmed as Veskil released it, then flared again as Fereyne took hold. Green and gold and fiery orange flashed across its facets, scattering sparks across the fallen copper leaves, and she felt a swift wind rise up from those fallen motes.

It whirled through her, buffeting her breath away, filling her blood with a sudden tingling shock of possibility. Wildly, madly, Fereyne felt that she could bend the wind to her will, heat it to billowing flame at whim, wrap it in burning coils around foes or harden it to a blazing shield before her friends. It was all the eldritch force of Aqshy, all the magic of the Realm of Fire, and it was hers, it was–

Shuddering, she thrust the staff away. Veskil took it, regarding her with mixed sympathy and satisfaction from behind a shimmering blue lens. Ghostly sigils danced across that lens, dissolving into golden sparks and re-forming into new runes. ‘You do have the gift,’ he said. ‘If we had more time, I might try to train you – a few simple spells, at least – but we cannot afford that now. When this is over, we can discuss it. For now, we must go on.’

‘Why?’ Khensev demanded, putting a hand to her bone-bladed scimitar. ‘The Plaguefather’s doom took that camp. Why should we go after them?’

‘Because Eshael’s Font is here,’ Veskil replied, thrusting his staff towards the coppery forest. ‘That’s what keeps these trees alive in a wasteland, and that’s what brought the Plaguefather to these poor people. Aqshy is no realm for his work. Even now, his vermin die, having exhausted their hosts and finding nothing else to feed upon but fire and dust. But his other servants – the stronger ones – went into the wood. They’re hunting Eshael’s Font, just as we are.’

Khensev’s snarl showed red-edged teeth. ‘Can we overtake them?’

‘They aren’t that far ahead,’ Fereyne said. ‘Not more than a few hours.’

‘Then we have not yet lost.’ Slapping her scimitar’s hilt, Khensev started into the wood.

Fereyne kept close beside her. She still felt uneasy around the savage-looking Skullborn, and she would have preferred to give Khensev a wide berth. But they were leashed together by Veskil’s light, and Fereyne had to stay at the front to track their quarry.

It wasn’t difficult. The tribespeople, lost to their afflictions, hadn’t covered their tracks. The forest’s gleaming leaves closed around Fereyne and her companions, enveloping them in cool, tinkling shade.

Behind her, the remurants clacked their mandibles in distress. The plants of the Waste were short-lived grasses and gnarled creepers that survived Aqshy’s frequent firestorms by keeping low to the ground. Trees were alien to the remurants, and a forest incomprehensible. Every time a leaf fluttered, the chitinous beasts startled.

When the Smokescar tribespeople lunged out of the wood, their eyes glazed with delirium and faces locked in rictus snarls, the remurants went mad.

Everything turned to chaos. Khensev and the Skullborn leaped to meet the shrieking plague victims. Fereyne shot twice into the fray, hitting two maddened Smokescar, then lowered her bow in frustration. She couldn’t find any more clear shots. The remurants tried to bolt, jerking wildly in their harnesses, and Fereyne grabbed them to keep the beasts from escaping. Veskil’s staff blew out a gust of red-gold sparks, half blinding the combatants in their stinging swirl.

Where Veskil’s sparks struck the afflicted Smokescar, the tribespeople went up like torches. Still they fought forward, biting at anything they could reach, even as their eyes boiled white and the skin burst and sloughed from their bones.

One of them had torn his own chest open with his fingernails. Wormy white tentacles wriggled out from the wounds. Tentacles and tribesman alike burned swiftly in Veskil’s firestorm, but the corrupted Smokescar still managed to grab one of Khensev’s warriors and drag the struggling woman out of the staff’s reach.

As soon as she stumbled from the wizard’s protection, discolouration flooded her veins and tumours bubbled under her skin. The stricken warrior tried to scream, but no sound rose from her throat – only an enormous veiny swelling, which shoved her tongue aside, stretched up through her teeth, and then erupted into a plume of diseased spores.

Yet even as horror choked her, the Skullborn warrior fought. She hacked at the festering Smokescar, burying her scimitar in the man’s chest and then ripping it out to behead him. Dead and dying, they fell together.

Around them, the others were locked in their own mortal struggles, but Fereyne had no time to watch. She grabbed the remurants’ flying reins, dragging the panicked creatures away from the melee. If they lost the remurants, they lost their water and supplies. Brokkar shoved past her, smashing a corrupted Smokescar woman’s head from her plague-rotted neck and tossing it away in a pinwheel of burning hair.

And then it was over. The leaves rattled with the last throes of violence, and the remurants clacked in continued distress, but the fighting had stopped. Veskil’s sparkstorm spun back into the staff’s crystal, leaving scorch marks like black raindrops on the companions’ faces.

Khensev wiped ichor from her scimitar. ‘Losses?’

‘Veekah is dead,’ one of the Skullborn called. ‘Mekhar as well.’

‘One of the bastards stuck me pretty good,’ Brokkar grunted. The duardin made a fist and pumped her injured arm, watching with interest as the oozing corruption that had begun to claim the wound shrank and died under Veskil’s light.

Grimacing, Brokkar knotted a bandage around the wound. ‘I can still fight,’ the duardin told them, flexing her arm. ‘Been through worse than this.’

‘This was not a serious challenge,’ Whyrlin murmured, studying the fallen. Fereyne hadn’t noticed the aelf a moment earlier, and hadn’t seen where Whyrlin had gone during the fighting. His white-grey hair was barely mussed; only a few strands had escaped their leather tie. ‘Only plagueborn, and only a few.’

‘Have you any insight why?’ Veskil asked.

‘The Plaguefather does not tell me his secrets.’ Whyrlin smiled, bleakly amused. ‘But I imagine he will show them to all of us soon.’

‘Helpful bastard,’ Brokkar muttered. No one else responded. Khensev, bristling, stalked ahead.

Fereyne hurried to join her. Then, impelled by some curiosity, she asked the scarred Skullborn: ‘Don’t you grieve for your dead?’

Khensev cast her a caustic glance from beneath her swinging dreadlocks. ‘Do you know what it is to be Skullborn?’

‘I’ve heard stories,’ Fereyne replied, but Khensev continued as if she’d said nothing.

‘When we are born, the God Speaker brands us over the heart with the Lord of Slaughter’s mark, and then puts a drop of a slave’s dying blood to our lips, so that we will know the touch of iron and the taste of death before we know our mother’s milk. Every day of every year, from that first one until our last, is another trial. Rage is the only sanctuary from fear. Many of the Blood God’s champions swallowed the madness of Chaos because they were fleeing their own weakness, though the result is the same as if they ascended through bloodlust. Either way, they give up their humanity forever.

‘Those who survived Sigmar’s storm – the warriors who joined Veskil’s quest with me – were the bravest of the brave. Do you understand?’ Khensev turned on Fereyne, her dark eyes afire. ‘They never accepted the Blood God’s temptation. They clung to their souls in the face of his terrors.’

Fereyne nodded mutely. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

Khensev didn’t seem to notice. ‘They survived the Lord of Slaughter,’ she muttered, ‘and I brought them to the Plaguefather. To die, if they are lucky. To be terrified into corruption, if they are not.’

‘But they resisted the Blood God,’ Fereyne protested.

‘That was a danger we understood from birth. This is different. Poison and plague give a warrior no enemy to fight. There is only weakness, dishonour and death.’ Khensev fell into scowling silence, and Fereyne gave her as much space as Veskil’s light allowed.

As they ventured deeper, the forest changed. Green leaves and starlike flowers carpeted the earth beneath the black-barked copper trees. Moisture suffused the air, touching Fereyne’s cheeks with a cool comfort that she’d never felt under Aqshy’s blazing sun. Her boots sank into rich loam, not the coarse and blistering sand she knew so well.

It was beautiful. It was so beautiful that her heart clenched with the awe of it. Fereyne had never imagined a place so rich in shade and water, or flowers that bloomed for longer than an hour before Aqshy’s fire burned them to paper wisps. This was life, unpunished, and even as she tried to focus on the trail, the green luxury of their surroundings stung her eyes with tears.

But corruption had walked through this beauty. Blight marred the forest with pox-blotched shrubs and flowers that drooped into brown slime. Rings of corruption dotted the wood and expanded outward, consuming the forest like sparks dropped onto dry leaves. At the centre of each rotting circle lay a pulsating ball of slime and thorns.

‘What are those?’ Fereyne whispered, as if acknowledging the grotesquery too openly might somehow make it more real than it was.

‘We should see.’ Veskil lumbered towards the nearest circle, his staff’s light bobbing with each step. Creepers tugged at his red robes, tearing threads away. They weren’t the first creatures those vines had snagged, Fereyne noticed: a rime of stinking flesh clung to the creepers’ thorns, and many of the brambles lay limp on the ground, filmed with fungus.

‘Be careful,’ she cautioned, pointing out the residue. Then she fell silent as they came to the creature at the centre of the decayed circle.

She had never seen anything like it. The creature seemed to be a… person, almost, fashioned of wood burnished to a rich, deep sheen. Sticky fungal strands bound it into a foetal shape prisoned to the forest floor. Curled horns crowned the creature’s head, once grand, but now flaking with rot.

Worst were its eyes: enormous, almond-shaped, and filled with a vast, depthless green that was now clouded with poisoned rheum. The creature’s mouth was small and toothless, and a ululating moan whispered from it like the cry of some infernal flute.

‘Eshael’s Font isn’t an artefact,’ Veskil marvelled, staring at the dying thing. The fungal web pinning the creature to the ground charred under his staff’s light, but the creature itself didn’t seem harmed. ‘It’s a Realmgate. It must be.’

‘What? I don’t understand.’ Fereyne backed away as the fungal web burned. The creature stirred weakly. Its twig-like fingers twitched unevenly, as if grasping at something that existed only in a fever dream.

‘This is no creature of Aqshy. This is a sylvaneth.’ Veskil’s voice shook with excitement. ‘A creature of Ghyran, the Realm of Life. And look at the forest. There must be a Realmgate here. Unknown to the Collegium, evidently unknown to the Sigmarites–’

‘Not unknown to Nurgle,’ Khensev spat, as the corrupted sylvaneth heaved up from its fire-weakened bonds. The discoloured sap that dripped from its fingertips had hardened into lumpen claws, and though these smoked under Veskil’s light, they didn’t burn as easily as the tainted Smokescar had.

The sylvaneth lunged up. It swatted Brokkar’s shield aside and hurled the duardin into a second corrupted circle, where another imprisoned sylvaneth slashed at her with the one clawed hand it could work free. Fereyne notched an arrow to her bow and let fly, scoring a solid hit, but the sylvaneth didn’t seem to notice.

Veskil hurled fireball after fireball at the sylvaneth. Its broken horns blazed into a crown of fire, but it hardly slowed. Khensev’s scimitar only chipped off splinters as the sylvaneth smashed through her warriors. It stamped on a fallen Skullborn, and sharp, iron-hard roots sprouted from its foot, punching a gory fountain from the warrior’s chest. The sylvaneth never paused. Swiftly it turned, pivoting on the Skullborn’s crushed remains to slam her partner against a nearby tree trunk. Dagger-sized thorns burst from the sylvaneth’s palm and nailed the unfortunate warrior to the tree.

Mouldy bark sloughed off the sylvaneth’s body as Fereyne shot it again and Veskil scorched it with another fiery blast, exposing a weak spot. Whyrlin’s grey crystal knives landed unerringly in the spongy material beneath – was it flesh? Fereyne wondered; it looked like cork and bled tainted sap – and the sylvaneth let out a tortured bellow. The sound should have been mighty, she felt, but it came only as an agonised wheeze.

Then suddenly Brokkar was back among them, roaring wildly. Blood made a red mask of her face and soaked half her body, but the duardin ignored it. She hammered on Whyrlin’s crystalline knives as though they were nails, shattering the delicate hilts in glassy bursts and driving the blades deeper. Finally the creature fell.

‘Help me,’ Brokkar hissed. The duardin’s face was grey with terror. Fanglike splinters were embedded deep in her wrist where the imprisoned sylvaneth had grabbed her. Only the splinters’ ends showed, studded among Brokkar’s bones, and though these burned readily in Veskil’s purifying light, the lengths buried in that grisly bracelet were not exposed, and so they did not burn.

‘Help me,’ the duardin cried again. Fever sweat streaked through the blood and soot on her brow. Her wrist had bloated hideously. Pustules strained her skin into yellow-capped bulges around the splinters.

‘Only one way to help that.’ Khensev swung her scimitar.

Fereyne looked away just as the blade came down.

Brokkar’s scream tore through the forest. The smell of the ruptured pustules was nauseating, and the stench only worsened when Veskil brought his staff down to cauterise the wound where her hand had been. Brokkar screamed again.

‘You’ll live.’ Khensev wiped the blood from her scimitar and slammed it back into its sheath. The Skullborn didn’t glance at the remains of her last two warriors, both already reduced to bones and massed vermin that squirmed obscenely beneath their tattered skin. Fury and fear knotted Khensev’s shoulders as she turned away.

Swallowing, Fereyne took up the lead again. She wasn’t sure what she was tracking any more. Earlier, she’d been following the last of the Smokescar, but those tracks were gone now. Only one walker remained. These strides were too long to be any Smokescar, and the boots had sunk too deeply into the soft, rich earth. The boots themselves were hobnailed and hard-soled, nothing like the light sandals favoured by the sand-running tribes of the Wastes, and their prints were crumbly with fine-threaded fungus and powdery mould that seemed to poison the earth under each step.

This walker was too tall, as well. The Smokescar were a compact people, whittled short and lean by a hard land. This creature, however, stood well over seven feet in height. It had left a trail of scabbed and blighted leaves as it brushed through the Copperscales’ trees.

Fereyne pushed a lock of red hair from her eyes as she squinted upward. ‘Whatever that is, it’s not human.’

Khensev snorted. ‘Did you think it was the Smokescar who bound all these… these sylvaneth into their circles? No. One of the Plaguefather’s favoured children did this.’

‘How can we fight that?’ Fereyne swallowed. ‘There are only five of us left, and Brokkar’s lost a hand.’

‘We will die,’ Khensev agreed. ‘But, with fortune’s favour, we will die quickly, and ringed by our enemies’ bodies. There is no choice, anyway. Haven’t you looked behind us?’

‘Of course,’ Fereyne said, but she hadn’t, really. She’d been so preoccupied with ensuring that the remurants – and the precious supplies they carried – were safe that she hadn’t paid much mind to the forest behind them.

Now, for the first time, she looked at the wood itself, and saw that it had been consumed by rot. The circles of corruption had grown large enough to overlap, and where one ran into another, the forest twisted into a ghastly, dripping nightmare. The trees grabbed at one another, their branches knotted into a pulsating net that held Fereyne and her companions trapped. Rat-sized creatures slithered among the branches, ringing them with high-pitched cackles and the gibbous flash of wide, excited eyes.

‘We go on,’ Khensev said grimly, seeing the despair of understanding on Fereyne’s face. ‘Perhaps we’ll at least get to see this font we’ve died for.’

Ahead, the forest was still green – green, and ragged with recent violence. Iron-hard roots, far larger than those the corrupted sylvaneth had driven into the Skullborn, thrust up from the earth. The bodies of boil-ridden Smokescar warriors and other things, stranger things, things for which Fereyne knew no names, hung broken and dripping from those roots. Sylvaneth, too, lay lifeless on the soil, but these were clean-limbed and eerily graceful, even in death, and the roots cradled them gently in repose.

Past the corpses, and largely hidden by a screen of splintered trees, an ongoing battle roared. Guttural shouts reverberated through the trees, accompanied by metallic thuds and the wet crush of flesh. The battle cries were oddly one-sided; Fereyne could make out only one loud voice and a few sibilant echoes, all of which sounded like the same voice through different mouths. That voice’s foe, whoever it was, fought in silence.

Or… not silence, but a song so low and foreign to Fereyne’s ears that she didn’t register it as music at all, but as a rumbling tide that enveloped her with the same force as the windstorms that rose from the Parch’s greatfires. Like those storms, it couldn’t be seen in itself, only in its world-shaking effect.

She eased ahead, the remurants clacking softly in terror behind her.

A titanic battle had flattened the forest around two massive combatants. The first was a hulking, helmeted warrior whose body bulged in pulsating rolls from the ill-fitting plates of his armour. Three decapitated heads swung from the warrior’s flail instead of metal balls. One was human, one aelven, the third so battered and disfigured by the gnawing maggots that squelched from its skin that Fereyne couldn’t tell what it had originally been.

The other combatant was a copper-streaked sylvaneth whose limbs of living wood were bearded with rich green moss. The sylvaneth met the rotten monstrosity’s flail with tearing claws and antlers that curved out into spearlike points. It thrust its head low, punching into the armoured warrior’s side, and tore its antlers away in a spray of festering gore. Filth gummed its prongs and dripped across its brow, but before the Plaguefather’s feculence could blind the sylvaneth, its antlers greyed and dropped to the ground. New ones sprouted from green buds, renewing the sylvaneth’s weapons within moments.

The warrior’s mace was harder to avoid. Each of the three heads on his flail screamed in its own agonies. Spores fountained from the first one’s mouth, reeking clouds from the grey teeth and spotted tonsils of the second, buzzing flies and spittle-flecked maggots from the third. When their skulls crashed into the sylvaneth, they bit down mercilessly and their fat tongues licked the wounds. The sylvaneth’s brown skin peeled away under their obscene caresses.

They fought, and around them, smaller battles raged. Thorny-headed sprites stabbed at eyeless, leprous toad-things in the branches overhead. Ants tore maggots apart in the loam. Their struggles seemed tied to those of their masters. When the rotten warrior had the advantage, so did his creatures; when the sylvaneth was ascendant, the creatures of the Copperscales fought back their corruptors.

And then the tide of battle changed.

From the forest, a host of lesser sylvaneth emerged. At first Fereyne felt a swell of hope that they’d come to save their leader, but as they moved into the clearing, she saw that the Plaguefather had claimed these creatures. Their movements were jerky, their elbows and shoulders seamed with spongy rot. Their vacant eyes bloomed with the ghastly asymmetries of leaf-rust and blight and purple ergot.

They shoved through the forest and converged on the last great sylvaneth, blotched claws upraised to tear their former kin apart. Before she knew what she was doing, Fereyne had thrown the remurants’ reins aside and hurled herself in front of them. She wasn’t nearly the fighter that Khensev or any of the others were, but what did it matter? No human warrior could stand against creatures such as these. The Skullborn had shown her that. If skill and training weren’t enough, what difference did it make if she had neither?

At least she’d die trying. That was worth something. She’d die striving for the dream of green in Aqshy.

Fereyne slashed at the nearest corrupted sylvaneth. Her knife skittered across its oak-hard skin. The broad green leaves crowning the sylvaneth’s head lifted in response, revealing themselves to be the folded wings of chittering parasites. They flew at Fereyne in a stinging swarm, and as she tried to shield her eyes from the vermin, the sylvaneth smashed a claw into her shoulder and knocked her to the ground. She scrabbled away, waiting for the sylvaneth’s sharp-rooted foot to crush her as the other had crushed Khensev’s Skullborn.

It didn’t come. Fire came instead. Flames blasted from Veskil’s staff as the wizard held its crystal high. The sylvaneth stumbled back, burning, and the vermin plaguing Fereyne fell from the air on blackened wings.

Then it was all madness: crystal knives and rotting sylvaneth and Brokkar roaring and Khensev cursing and the stench of burning pestilence, and blood and terror and fire, fire, fire. Fereyne stabbed at another tainted sylvaneth, felt the knife shatter in her hand, felt its claws slash across her cheek in retaliation.

The wounds burned. Fever, delirium, worse. Red thunder cracked behind her eyes. Vomit filled her mouth – and it wasn’t her vomit, but half-digested gristle and chewed carrion and disease. Something wriggled in it, pushing at her teeth.

Again Veskil’s light saved her. Golden radiance bathed her, purging the poison. Fereyne retched furiously – translucent lice squirmed in the white-flecked bile, until they fried in the wizard’s fires – and, wiping at her bloody mouth, stood shakily.

She looked around, hoping to find victory and seeing only despair. Whyrlin sprawled in the dirt, his grey-white hair soaked with blood. She couldn’t see Brokkar, though the duardin’s phlegm-choked curses carried through the trees, sounding weaker by the moment. Khensev still fought, but she was badly overmatched by two corrupted sylvaneth. And the great sylvaneth had fallen, leaving its monstrous, stinking foe the victor.

Swinging his three-headed flail, the warrior abandoned the sylvaneth and came for Veskil. Only a single eye, twice as large as a human’s, gleamed red and watery from the centre of his crude leaden helm. He didn’t seem to have a nose. ‘Fire, fire. You shouldn’t play with that. Didn’t anyone ever tell you? I don’t like fire. Burns all the pretty playthings. Turns them into ash. And we can’t eat ash, can we, my pretties?’

‘Rotbringer.’ Veskil drew his staff up across his chest. Its crystal flared anew, surrounding them both with fire. The heads on the Rotbringer’s flail wept and wailed, squeezing tears and vermin onto the ground. ‘You shall not have the gate.’

‘You know my name! Well, the name I have now. There was another before, but it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t remember it either.’ The Rotbringer’s giggle was shrill. He didn’t seem to notice his greenish skin blistering in Veskil’s aura. Stomping forward, he clapped his fleshy hands, and the heads moaned as they bounced. ‘And you know there’s a gate. What a clever fellow. What fine friends we’ll be.’

‘I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint.’ The lens over Veskil’s eye was nothing but reflected fire. His staff flared, and a blue-edged fireball engulfed the Rotbringer from helm to knee.

The warrior waded through it. Tumours popped between the seams of his armour. Something roiled in his abdomen, making the metal groan. ‘I’ll change your mind. It’s easy to change little ones’ minds. My pets eat the old one, and then… we’re friends.’ He grinned, showing a few stumpy teeth rattling loose in his gums.

Veskil’s answer came in flame. Again and again he hammered the Rotbringer with gouts of fire. Fereyne couldn’t see the new blasts through the after-images of the last ones; she could only hear the hollow thud of their impacts. Waves of heat sucked the breath from her lungs. And yet the warrior kept coming, a hulking vessel of darkness cleaving through the firelight.

Lead dripped from the Rotbringer’s helmet and pattered onto his shoulders. His lips blistered and his laughter smoked. He did not slow.

He took Veskil by the throat. The wizard was not a small man, yet the Rotbringer lofted him into the air as easily as Fereyne would have snatched up a rock lizard. ‘Little man,’ he crooned, as his armour groaned, strained and snapped. A fat tentacle, tipped with rings of grinding teeth, slithered out of the Rotbringer’s abdomen. It swayed as if scenting the wind, then plunged into Veskil’s side.

The wizard made an awful noise. Half choke, half grunt, no words. The Rotbringer’s tentacle squelched merrily as it rearranged Veskil’s body from the inside. The staff fell from the wizard’s spasming fingers, and its light died in the ashes.

Fereyne dashed soot from her eyes and looked about wildly. Her knife was gone. Her allies were gone. Veskil was dying, and there wasn’t even anyone left to bear witness. Only her.

And the remurants.

Firelight flickered on the giant insects’ carapaces and glinted off their mandibles. Fereyne couldn’t hear their chittering over the crackling inferno that surrounded the beasts, but the caustic scent of their fear carried to her. It was still clean – acrid, nose-burning, but clean. Veskil had been right. The Rotbringer wasn’t native to Aqshy, and didn’t know yet how to corrupt its creatures.

Nor, probably, did he know what they could do.

Praying to no god she could name, Fereyne grabbed the remurants’ reins. With blood and sooty sweat slipping her hands, she dragged the creatures towards the Rotbringer. They baulked, but the harnesses were well made and the remurants well trained, and they didn’t fight hard enough to break away.

The Rotbringer noticed. He dropped Veskil with a meaty thud and, chortling, waddled towards Fereyne. The warrior was hurt worse than she’d realised: his leaden helm had melted around his partially crushed head, and beneath it his body was a blackened wreck.

But he didn’t seem to care. The Rotbringer’s blistered cheeks cracked in a grin as he waddled towards Fereyne. ‘Pretties! Such pretties you’ve brought me.’

Fereyne gritted her teeth against the aura of sickness that radiated from the Rotbringer. Acid rose in her throat; agony knotted her stomach. From the remurants’ sudden stillness, she knew the carapaced creatures felt it too. The telltale gurgling of their indigestion sounded behind her. ‘Do you know what remurants are?’

‘No.’ The Rotbringer clapped his hands happily. ‘But I will.’

‘Yes.’ Fereyne let go of the remurants’ reins and dropped to the ground, flattening herself against the charred earth. ‘You will.’

Freed of their restraints, the remurants’ mouths opened. All their terror and nausea and pain spurted out as hissing gas that, upon touching open air, sparked furiously to flame.

That fiery torrent, aggravated by the Plaguefather’s sickening influence, burned longer and hotter than any Fereyne had ever seen. When finally the remurants closed their mandibles, heaving in exhaustion, nothing was left of the Rotbringer but a few blackened bones and the puddled lead of his helm.

Fereyne ran to Veskil. The wizard was still breathing, but his face was pale and sweaty. The runes on his golden eye had gone dark, and all the lenses were cracked on the other.

‘I’m here,’ she said, taking Veskil’s hand.

He turned his head towards her, but it was clear that he saw nothing. ‘Fereyne?’

‘Yes. We’re alive. We won.’

‘Good. Good. But I fear our fight is… not yet done. Give me… my staff.’ Veskil coughed, and Fereyne saw with dread that there was something dark and furtive moving deep in his throat. A sour stench emanated from his robes.

What had the Rotbringer done?

She handed him the staff. Fine ash traced its braided shaft. Soot blotched its golden crystal, flaking away as Veskil woke its magic once more. ‘Back away,’ he told her, wheezing, as the light intensified into flame.

‘What are you doing?’ Even as she asked, Fereyne knew.

‘As the Rotbringer said. His pretties can’t eat… ash. I won’t give this one… a meal.’ Veskil tipped his face up blindly towards the crystal’s light, basking in it, even as his robes and eyebrows began to smoke. ‘When this is done… take the staff, roadwarden. It will… help you. Your gift. To become what you should–’

He never finished the sentence. The fire seized him, and all his words turned to screams. The worm in his chest tried to tear its way out, but Veskil dug his bloody fingers into its thrashing body, and the inferno took them both.

Fereyne covered her mouth, but she couldn’t cry. There weren’t any tears left in her. All around her was ash, and all inside felt like ash as well.

She took the staff from the charred scraps of Veskil’s red robes. It was cool enough to handle, although its fires had burned with such fury that only ashes were left under the cloth. Not even the wizard’s brass headpiece had survived.

Leaning heavily on the staff, Fereyne poked through the smouldering wreckage of the Coppergrove. She found Whyrlin and Khensev breathing, but badly wounded and insensible with shock. Brokkar lay slumped against a tree trunk, limp and blood-soaked. The great sylvaneth lay motionless as well, but one of its green eyes, filmed with cinder dust, blinked open as Fereyne approached.

‘Your friend chose to die in fire,’ it said. Its voice rose from the earth all around her, rather than emanating from the sylvaneth itself. ‘A hard death.’

‘It stopped the Rotbringer.’

‘It did.’ The sylvaneth sat up slowly. Fibrous roots snapped from its limbs as it pushed itself up. It examined these, breathing a long, mournful sigh. ‘He would have suffered badly otherwise. As I soon shall. The Plaguefather’s stain is in my sap.’

‘What does that mean?’ Fereyne drew the staff across her chest defensively, though she knew she hadn’t a chance against the great sylvaneth.

The creature held out a wide brown hand. The roots that ran down its forearm were slimy and swollen, and the living wood of its flesh was soft with rot. ‘I prefer the fire.’ The sylvaneth’s chest didn’t move, but Fereyne felt the trees stir around her as if the forest itself were drawing a breath. ‘But I will give you… three gifts… before I go.’

‘What? Why?’

‘You… saved the grove. Your gladekin chose… fire over rot. Honourable. And… hard. So. Three gifts. Like the… fairies of myth… that your people made from ours.’ Cloudy spots were spreading over the great sylvaneth’s eyes. It closed them and lifted its other hand, which the mould had yet to reach. Olive-sized seeds filled its palm. Under their fuzzy silver skins, the seeds were a deep, rich blue, and each was lit from within by a heart of golden fire.

‘What are they?’ Fereyne marvelled as she took the seeds. They vibrated in her hand, thrumming with a song that hovered just beyond hearing.

‘Our kind… do not die. Not as you do. We go to the earth and… remember. Are remembered. Lamentiri.’ The great sylvaneth shuddered. Dry cracks spread across its skin and fissured its broken antlers as the creature’s vital sap withdrew to its depths, turning its exterior to tinder. ‘These are not… that. Not… souls, as you would call them. But… a weak echo of that magic. Memories. Hopes. Remembrances… of the past. To be carried into the future.’

‘You trust me to carry them?’

‘You… must. Blight has taken… this soil. The seeds must be planted… elsewhere, and no… gladekin survives to bear them.’

Fereyne stared again at the seeds in her hands. They seemed so small to carry such importance. ‘Where do I plant them?’

‘They will grow… wherever the earth is… clean. In ways… shaped to the land.’ The great sylvaneth’s voice was failing. ‘Scatter them. So no blight can… take them all. Scatter them freely, as you would spread… hope.’

‘And the other gifts?’ Fereyne could barely manage the words. Watching the great sylvaneth die hurt her in ways she’d never imagined. That such a great and ancient being could exist for aeons, hidden in its secret grove, and then die just as she glimpsed it – that hurt, in a way she didn’t know how to name.

‘This wood was… a place of… life. I have given the last of it… to your gladekin. They will not… die, despite their wounds. And the last gift…’ The great sylvaneth’s voice was as weak as the crumbling of old leaves. ‘Taelrhunil. What the other quick-glade, the smoke-children, called Eshael’s Font.’

‘Veskil was right, then. Eshael’s Font is a Realmgate,’ Fereyne whispered.

‘Yes. Hidden… and guarded… for the life of this grove. Countless cycles… of yours. While… Ghyran suffered, and the Everqueen hid.’ As the grove’s magic faltered around the dying sylvaneth, the trees shed their coppery leaves like tears. Through the balding branches, Fereyne glimpsed an arch of mossy stone, bent low to the earth and braided with roots and living saplings.

‘How do I–’

‘Walk through. Warn… the Everqueen. The guardians of Taelrhunil have… fallen… and the Plaguefather knows where it stands.’ The great sylvaneth’s eyes had sunken into knotholes in its ruined face. ‘Now… I have given you three gifts, and you must… give me one. Fire.’

Fereyne nodded. She could feel the winds of magic stirring all around her, catching around the crystal of Veskil’s staff. With that staff, she could weave those eldritch wisps into flame – perhaps only a small one, poorly controlled, but she could do it.

But she didn’t want her first work of magic to be the destruction of this ancient wonder. That stain would never come clean. Fereyne picked up a smouldering branch, instead, and blew its embers bright as she offered it to the sylvaneth.

It opened its mouth, and she tipped the glowing seeds of fire into its mouth as if she were pouring water down a parched throat. The sylvaneth heaved a mournful breath, gusting it over the embers, and then sank back, groaning, as fire blossomed between its lips.

Fereyne couldn’t watch. She smelled the mildewed wood burning, and she turned her stinging eyes away. To the gate. Eshael’s Font. Taelrhunil.

The promise of water and greenery for the Wastes. Of life, in a realm where Fereyne had learned as a child never to let her tears fall, lest the water be wasted on sand.

She’d found it. Veskil’s dream, and her own, could still come true.

Behind her, she heard Khensev stand. To the side, she saw Whyrlin helping Brokkar back to her feet. The duardin was maimed and shaky, but already reaching for her hammer.

Khensev came to stand beside Fereyne. Her scarred face was hellish in the red light of the burning sylvaneth, but grim awe filled her voice. ‘A Realmgate.’

‘A Realmgate.’

‘What do we do with it?’ Khensev gave her a searching look. A Skullborn – a warrior, fearless enough to defy Khorne the Blood Lord – turning to her, Fereyne, for guidance. She marvelled at it.

‘We go through. And warn Alarielle.’ A goddess. A goddess. The name sounded absurd passing through Fereyne’s lips, but none of the others seemed to hear it so. Whyrlin checked his knives. Brokkar flexed her remaining fist. Khensev merely nodded. All three looked to Fereyne respectfully, as if her suggestion were a chieftain’s command.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange, though. She had guided them here, and then… I killed a Rotbringer. I heard the last words of a great sylvaneth. I was trusted with a Realmgate, and given a message for the Everqueen. Heroes – real heroes – died for less.

Fereyne lifted her chin. Started for the gate. And, with her companions close behind, she stepped through.

TRAIL OF ASH

Graeme Lyon

The village was gone.

Jaqlyn Kouslo stood in what had once been the main square and looked around at the devastation that had been wrought upon it. Buildings of stone and stout timber and more esoteric materials unique to this region of Ghur had been reduced to ruins and ash by the bestial fury of the thing she hunted. And the people…

Many had fled, scattered groups of crying children and confused elders shepherded by those men and women clear-headed enough to see that they couldn’t stand against the threat that had been unleashed upon them. Warriors who had fought to defend their homes for decades took one look at the enemy that now came for them and abandoned all they had known with barely a second look, making for the far plains and distant mountains, preferring to brave the monstrous predators of Ghur than to stand against this horror. Jaqlyn knew that few would make it. The beasts of this land were swift to fall upon the unwary and the defenceless, and most of those who had fled would end up as meals for the denizens of the region.

They were the lucky ones.

Those that had remained – the brave, the hopeful, the foolhardy – had died in agony as fire consumed them, body and soul. Jaqlyn had arrived too late to save them, but in time to hear many of them screaming. The sound, she knew, would haunt her to her dying days. It wouldn’t be the first thing to do so. It was unlikely to be the last.

The worst thing about this, though, was the randomness of it. Farhold hadn’t been targeted. No mad wizard or vengeful necromancer had unleashed this magical monster on the innocents. It was sheer, random chance that it had come this way. Some unfathomable instinct had driven it, and the citizens of Farhold had just been in its path. It had killed without mercy, but also without desire to inflict pain. It was as a force of nature, and just as impossible to understand. And it was her fault it existed.

‘Shall we make camp, magister?’

Jaqlyn looked up from her reverie to see Sergeant Archus standing a respectful distance from her. His men – her men, she reminded herself, though she would likely never get used to being nominally in command of them – were still searching the village for survivors; it was a vain task, but she knew they wouldn’t be satisfied until they had completed it.

She considered resting for the night amid the smouldering ruins, but the smell of burning meat, hair and bone remained too strong to bear, and too strong a reminder. Besides, she didn’t want to sleep yet. The sooner she slept, the sooner she would dream.

‘No, sergeant. We have a few hours of daylight left. Let’s use them. We’re closer than we’ve been since we started this. With luck, we might actually finish it.’

Archus nodded sharply and turned away, calling to the rest of his Freeguild unit. He was exhausted, Jaqlyn knew. They all were. Their pursuit of this enemy had taken long months. They were far from home – not that there was a home to go back to now – and alone, save for each other.

All they could do was continue onwards. And so they did.

Half a day’s walk brought the group to the edge of a forest. It was like nothing Jaqlyn had seen before. The magic that formed the core of each of the Mortal Realms shaped its character. Here in Ghur, it seemed like the flora, as much as the fauna, was monstrous. Towering… trees, she supposed they had to be called, of a substance that shone like amber, stood taller than the highest tower Jaqlyn had ever seen in settlements of man or aelf. They branched into shapes that were reminiscent of beasts of ancient legend.

As she took her first steps into the gloomy depths, the constructions around her made it feel as though she were surrounded by immense monsters – hippogryphs and drakes with wings outstretched, talons ready to strike, or stout gargants leering down, clubs the size of houses gripped in meaty fists. Even the patches of light that fought their way through the canopy to strike the ground resembled capering creatures.

Had these been immense beasts once? she wondered. Had they roamed these lands in the Age of Myth, fighting amongst themselves until some magical catastrophe had frozen them into amber like this?

The thought of a magical disaster brought with it a wave of memories and grief, which Jaqlyn pushed down. This was not the time. As she gazed at the forest canopy above, she noticed that the light was fading. Night would come soon.

‘Let’s make camp,’ she called, and a chorus of relieved utterances followed. As Archus and his Freeguild soldiers busied themselves setting a fire and pulling bedrolls from packs, Jaqlyn made her way over to one of the trees and reached out a hand, hesitating for a moment before touching it. She opened herself up to the flows of magic that ran through the realms. An ancient power, raw and brutish, filled the crystalline structure of the tree, passing down through roots that spread deep beneath the earth and intertwined with others, creating an immense system that felt almost like a living thing.

She probed deeper, exploring the mystical energy and primal instinct that infused the root network, and realised that it was a living thing. It spread as far as she could sense, and insofar as it had emotions that could be compared to those of mortal races, it seemed angry… and in pain. She followed the sense of pain, tracing her way through a labyrinth of roots. The ecosystem of the forest fought against the intrusion. Already hurt, it lashed out in its unthinking way, and shocked her back into her physical body.

She removed her hand from the smooth surface of the tree. She was breathing deeply, heart beating quickly, blood pumping around her body. She was terrified, but also elated. This was it. She could use the forest’s life force to track her prey. But not tonight. Not without rest.

The fire crackled and spat into the night. Jaqlyn lay facing away from it, watching the shadows cast by its light playing across the amber trees, oddly illuminating their depths. Behind her, the soldiers huddled around the fire, talking in low voices. She opened her magical senses and listened, though she felt a pang of guilt for it.

‘Aye, we’re close,’ said one. She thought it was Amaro, who had been new to Archus’ unit when Tantalum fell and their quest began. He blamed her, she knew. He was right to, though she would never tell him that. ‘But what happens when we face it? Can we really trust her to stop it?’

‘She’s a magister, Amaro.’ That was Cragen, the oldest of the unit. Solid and dependable, always calm. He had lost his family when Tantalum burned, but he had turned his grief into a steely determination to stop the thing they hunted.

‘When did you last see her use magic?’ Amaro pushed. ‘I think she lost her nerve after the city fell.’

‘No surprise,’ said another – Baris, she thought. ‘It was her fault as much as anyone’s. She can’t control it.’

‘There was nothing she could have done,’ said Cragen. ‘And I’ve served beside her longer than either of you. When she needs to, she’ll come through. She’ll stop the thing.’

‘I wish I had your confidence,’ said Amaro.

‘Enough,’ barked Archus. ‘She’s a magister of Tantalum, maybe the last one left. We follow her, and we serve her. And we agreed long ago that we would see this thing undone.’

Jaqlyn silently thanked the sergeant for his support, but in her heart, she knew she couldn’t argue with Amaro. She had failed Tantalum. And he was right about her use of magic. Since that night, she hadn’t harnessed the threads of power that pulsated through the realms for anything other than the most mundane tasks. She couldn’t risk it.

She put the thought from her mind and let sleep take her.

Around Jaqlyn, Tantalum burned. Everywhere she looked, corpses walked, shambled and crawled. Some were aflame, pulling themselves forward with arms that were blackening, the skin falling away as the fire consumed them. Others marched in serried ranks, ancient armour hanging from skeletal bodies, notched and pitted blades held in literal death grips.

That was bad enough, but they weren’t the only enemy in Tantalum.

For years, the city had fought hard to keep the beasts of the local forests at bay. The brayherds lived in the deepest parts of the Ironwoods, and the various tribes fought one another more than anyone else. When they united though, Tantalum was too tempting a target to ignore. Jaqlyn was used to fighting their kind, but normally from the walls, with ranks of archers raining arrows down on the beasts, duardin war engines peppering them with hot metal and her fellow magisters devastating them with spells.

Tonight, on this worst of nights, everything was different.

She didn’t know what it was that had swept across the realm, but in its wake, the dead had risen, ancient skeletons in corroded armour climbing from churned earth to stand alongside the recently dead, flesh still rotting from their bones. Worse, whatever it was had changed the magic as well, infusing it with the dark stuff of Death in quantities Jaqlyn had never imagined possible. With that, Tantalum lost its best defence. The change in the thread around them made it harder for the magisters to cast spells. It was taking them all longer, requiring more focus, and with the walking dead all around, it was time they didn’t have.

Then the beasts had arrived, driven towards the city by even larger hosts of the dead that had risen in the depths of the forest. Skeletons with horned skulls, the dead of decades of internecine conflict between the herds, pushed their living brethren towards Tantalum. With no one free to defend the walls, everyone too busy fighting the risen within the city, the beasts broke inside, and all was anarchy as the two enemies fell upon each other as much as the rapidly falling numbers of defenders.

‘Jaqlyn, the city is lost.’

She turned at the voice, her reverie broken, to see Nicol striding towards her. His robes were caked in mud, blood and worse, and he had gashes on his face. He carried his long staff of office, a closed eye at its apex, and a short sword with glowing runes on the blade.

‘No,’ she said, determination in her voice. ‘We can save it. We can save these people.’

‘The students are getting as many as possible to safety,’ he replied. ‘Taking them through the tunnels beneath the west tower. You should follow them.’

‘And you?’

His bloodied face was grim. He didn’t need to answer. Jaqlyn knew that he would stay, sacrifice himself to hold off the armies of the dead and the children of Chaos, giving his people time to get away. He’d always had an idiotic heroic streak. It was him she’d learned it from.

‘I’m staying too,’ she said. ‘I’ll fight with you until the end.’ Not waiting for a response, she drew her own sword, a long and slender stabbing blade, and held it in a two-handed grip, turning to face the nearest skeletal warrior. ‘Come, spawn of Nagash!’ she screamed at it. ‘You won’t take Tantalum without a fight!’ It stared at her blankly even as she lashed out, lifting its shield at the last moment and blocking the blow. It struck back, an ancient and pitted blade slicing through Jaqlyn’s robes as she stepped back. It pressed on, blade swinging in tight arcs which she parried with her own. It paused, and seeing an opening, Jaqlyn went for its neck, separating its skull from the body in one swift blow. It fell into a pile of bones in the dirt.

‘Jaqlyn,’ Nicol said again. She turned back to look at him. ‘Fight if you must, though it pains me that you embrace death so readily. But fight for a cause, not for vengeance. There are still people here. Find them, send them to the west tower. Do some good. That’s what we were always for.’

She nodded, as much a goodbye as an acknowledgement, and closed her eyes for a moment. She could sense the dead, the Death magic animating them. She wished she could pull the threads of magic and end their abominable existence, but the dark power was everywhere. The magic of Shyish suffused everything. It came from all around, and unbinding it would be the work of more time than she had. Instead she sought its antithesis, the motes of Life magic, the very essence of Ghyran that clung to all living things. Some of them were muddied by the corruption that afflicted all who worshipped the Dark Gods. Those would be the beasts. But there were others. She grieved to see how few, for Tantalum had been a populous city just a few hours before.

She found a cluster two streets away and moved towards it… but hadn’t she done this before? She remembered… no. No. Not again. She couldn’t do this again. There was something else. Somewhere else she needed to be. A clearing in a forest of amber.

She woke.

The mood of the soldiers was dark. Jaqlyn suspected they’d been afflicted by dark dreams as well. She knew many of them had recurring nightmares, as did she. Drawing closer to the end of their journey and the thing that had been unleashed that night could only be making it worse.

They broke their fast in near silence, and repacked their bedrolls and gear. As they did, Jaqlyn turned her attention back to the trees, remembering her attempt the previous evening to tap into the life of the forest. She had to try again.

She wandered away from the group, and after a moment she heard footsteps behind her. She reached out her senses and recognised the life-pattern of Sergeant Archus.

‘What is it, Archus?’ she asked, and turned to face him.

He frowned. ‘How do you always know it’s me?’

‘Magic,’ she said, raising her eyebrows theatrically. Archus laughed.

‘Of course,’ he said. Then he fell silent, his gaze dropping to the mossy ground.

‘What do you want to say, sergeant?’ she asked softly. ‘I know some of the men have doubts…’

He looked back up at her, surprise etched in the lines of his face. ‘You heard that?’

‘My hearing is more acute than you might think,’ Jaqlyn replied sardonically. She felt that pang of guilt again. Archus didn’t deserve to be lied to.

‘It was nothing, magister. Just tired men venting frustration. They respect you and would follow you into the Realm of Chaos itself.’

‘They weren’t wrong though,’ she said. ‘Amaro said nothing I haven’t thought about myself.’

‘Still. You are our magister and we serve you. We trust you. We will finish this. It’s just…’

Silence fell between them again.

‘Go on,’ Jaqlyn urged. ‘What do you want to ask?’

‘What do we do when this is over?’ he sighed. ‘Where do we go?’

They were good questions. Tantalum was no more. She didn’t know what to tell him.

‘I… I don’t know, Archus. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I just want to stop this thing. Make it right. And let tomorrow take care of itself.’

He nodded curtly and turned away.

It didn’t take Jaqlyn long to find the path to her prey. Her second communion with the life force of the forest was as difficult as the first, but through the anger and pain that suffused it, she found a trail of devastation that her quarry had left behind it. Her spectral form glided between twisted and bestial trees that looked mostly unharmed, their surfaces perhaps a little smoother, a touch discoloured, but the crimson grass that grew to waist height in the spaces between them had been burned to ash, and the way was scattered with the shrivelled corpses of unidentifiable creatures that called the forest home. In all likelihood they were a vital part of its ecosystem, evolved over millennia into one larger entity. And now parts of that were dead and dying. No wonder it was in pain. Had she the time, she would have grieved for it.

As she continued, the magic around her shifted. She could feel a familiar malign energy nearby, and she was sure the wind carried the echoes of crackling flames. She glided on, coming soon to the edge of an immense clearing. At its centre was her quarry. It was larger than she remembered and utterly terrifying – a creature of shadow and fire, in the shape of a massive, monstrous bull, pawing at the ground as it faced its latest prey, a lone duardin. Jaqlyn tried to cry out, but her spectral form was as ephemeral as mist, and unable to make any impact on reality. With a thought, she unravelled it and awoke in her physical body, one hand pressed against the cold amber of a huge tree. She turned to the semicircle of soldiers standing around her.

‘I know where it is. And we have to hurry.’

It wasn’t far to the clearing.

The crackling of flames and stench of sulphur assailed the group as they approached.

‘Definitely the right place then,’ muttered Archus. He raised his voice. ‘Soldiers of Tantalum, shields up, weapons at the ready. Do your duty for your magister, and for the memory of our great city!’

The soldiers unhooked their shields from their packs and pulled shining swords from scabbards at their waists. Jaqlyn looked at them, their grey and dark purple uniforms torn and muddy, worn from the months of travel that had brought them to this point.

‘I am proud of you all,’ she said to them. ‘You have never let me down. And today, I promise, I will return that favour. We will defeat this rogue spell. For our fallen friends. For Tantalum.’

‘For Tantalum,’ they echoed as one, striking the flats of their swords against the Sigmarite icons adorning their shields.

‘We’ll buy you time, magister,’ said Archus. ‘You can do this.’ He nodded, and Jaqlyn returned it, then he ordered his small unit forward.

Against any normal foe, they would be effective soldiers. But this was no ordinary enemy. The great shadowy bull turned to face them as they approached. Jaqlyn saw the duardin it had been threatening grab a pack from the ground and stumble back towards the treeline. If he was fleeing, that was for the best. This monster had claimed enough innocent souls. It stood ten times the height of a man, and its body seemed to have as much substance as smoke. Fire burned from its eyes, and consumed its rear half, the flames splashing around the shadow of its form. It opened its mouth and bellowed, a tongue of flame licking out. It lowered its head and pawed at the ground with one man-sized hoof, then charged.

As the monstrous spell approached them, the paint on the soldiers’ shields blistered and melted, running like it was coming straight from the brush and pooling on the ground as they pivoted around the magical construct, avoiding its headlong charge. The metal of the shields heated quickly, and the men were forced to drop them as they burned through uniforms and charred the flesh beneath.

They should have been running, but they held firm, the bravest of them slashing ineffectually at the thing. Even blades blessed by a priest of the God-King could do little to the ephemeral form of the endless spell. The swords passed through its shadowy hide as though parting mist.

One of the soldiers had the misfortune to swing in such a way that his blade hit the flames that billowed from the dark form. His blade caught fire, and he screamed in agony, dropping it as the metal melted and the grip burned. He fell to his knees, his hand blackened and charred. The bull turned more quickly than something of its size seemed capable of and gored him, its great horns solid enough to run the soldier through. It pulled its head back and the corpse dropped to the ground.

The other troopers closed ranks and presented their half-ruined shields. They knew this was a hopeless fight, but they would do their duty.

The bull turned again, facing the small group, and prepared once more to charge. Archus pulled a pistol from a holster at his waist, cocked it and fired into the great bull’s horned head. The bullet parted the shadowy substance, which closed again behind it. He started reloading the pistol, and looked to the side. Jaqlyn could see him shouting something, though there was no way of hearing it over the unearthly braying of the spell.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and focused on it. Opening up her aetheric senses, she reached out. It was a complex, multi-layered spell, as any that could achieve a form of life and exist of its own accord would have to be. She took it in, part of her marvelling at the artistry of its very existence. To her magical senses, it was a web of energy, thousands of filaments in the eight colours of the magical spectrum, woven together to form something that should have been impossible, and would have been were it not for the flood of power that had saturated the realms – and the dark corruption of Chaos that infused many of the threads.

She sought an opening, a chink in its defences through which she could find a way in and unbind its essence. The densely woven magical threads resisted her, defying her attempts to penetrate them. She pulled back and looked again.

To another wizard, the spell would have appeared different. Each person attuned to the mystical filtered what they visualised through their own experiences and perceptions of the world around them. To one, it might have been a vast pattern of complex geometric shapes forming a puzzle, or cogwheels turning and shifting and linking with one another in a never-ending clockwork mechanism. Another might have seen countless serpents devouring one another, growing and shrinking. For Jaqlyn, it had always been trailing threads, intertwining and weaving together. When she cast a spell, she did so by visualising its elements and weaving them into the pattern of the casting.

When she undid another wizard’s spell, it was the reverse. But she needed a loose thread to pull on. There was always at least one. Here, that was at its heart, beneath the outer layers that had accreted as it travelled, pulling in the raw magic that suffused the land and creatures around it. It had always been powerful – more so than it should have been – but it had grown ever more potent in recent months.

‘There’s no way in,’ she muttered. ‘Maybe if I–’

Her attention was captured by a shift in the magical energy around her. Something flashed from the direction of the soldiers. She turned, and saw them, the faint traces of magic clinging like lightly woven rags to each of the few that had survived the spell’s malign intentions. She was struck by grief that several of the men who had followed her these long months were gone.

Behind them was something else. A beam of energy, bright and strong, was radiating from another figure, around whom the threads of magic were densely packed. It hit the great bull, which reeled back. To Jaqlyn’s astonishment, what she saw as the outer layers on the weave of the spell began to fray and flake away. In moments, the surface layer was gone, and the beam continued, shredding another layer of threads to magical ash that drifted away on the aetheric winds.

Jaqlyn tried to take advantage of the situation, sending her magical form towards the endless spell and trying to find a thread on which to pull. The bull bellowed and surged forward. The spell broke the beam, overpowering it by sheer force of magical will, and, it seemed, absorbing its energies in an immense implosion. Jaqlyn’s aether-self reeled in pain, and she drew back to her own body, which had been tossed against a tree. She looked at the bull. It grew before her eyes, the licking flames of its rear half becoming a mighty torrent of fire that crashed outwards against amber trees and incinerated unfortunate soldiers.

‘Stand firm, men. Stand firm!’ shouted Archus, but it was to no avail. Overcome by terror of the unimaginable monstrosity they faced, and undone by the death of their fellows, men threw down their useless weapons and fled. One by one, they were caught by the spell, tossed into the air by great shadow-horns, devoured in flame-wreathed jaws or trampled under monstrous hooves.

Jaqlyn pulled herself up, but her body was reacting slowly, the after-effects of the magical implosion disrupting the bonds between her aether-self and her physical body. She would recover soon, but not soon enough. Only Archus remained now, standing firm and shouting prayers to Sigmar as the spell’s great jaws closed on him.

There was a thunderclap, and a bolt of lightning fell from the heavens and struck where Archus stood. For a moment, Jaqlyn thought she heard a booming voice and saw a stern, bearded visage in the flash of lightning. Then Archus was gone, and the spell bellowed again, angry at being deprived of its prize, as the God-King claimed a worthy soul for his own. What would happen to Archus now was beyond Jaqlyn’s knowledge, but she hoped that his next life, whatever form it took, would be kinder to him than this one had been.

‘This is not good,’ she heard a thickly accented voice shout. ‘This is not good at all. That shouldn’t have happened, Steelfist. That big, burning beastie shouldn’t have been able to take that energy. Why did it go wrong?’

Slowly, trying not draw the spell’s attention, Jaqlyn edged around the outside of the clearing until she saw the source of the voice. It was a duardin, his beard a shade of red not far from that of the bull-spell’s flames. He wore a combination of leathers and scraps of plate armour inscribed with duardin runes. Somehow, they seemed to be holding back the spell, though judging by the way the runes glowed and spat, that wasn’t going to last much longer.

The duardin was frantically rummaging in pouches on a wide bandolier that crossed over his barrel chest. ‘No, not that one, you oaf, that’s no good. Maybe the aetheric destabiliser?’ He pulled a cylindrical device from one of the pouches, pressed a rune on the side and gripped it tightly, staring at the bull.

‘Let’s see how you like this!’ he shouted and threw the device at it. When it made contact, it exploded and the spell reacted as if in pain, drawing its tendrils back into itself. Jaqlyn saw her chance and reached out once again. To her amazement, where the device had hit the spell, there was a great hole in its magical shell. She took her chance.

It was like diving head first into boiling water. The magic tore at her aether-self, but she ignored the pain, though it hurt her soul.

Frantically, she sought a thread on which she could pull. As she did, she could feel the spell’s focus land on her. She only had seconds before it recognised her for what she was and incinerated her vulnerable body. She delved deeper, searching.

There. A thread.

She grabbed it, and pulled. In reality, what she was doing was infinitely more complicated. She was taking immense quantities of magical power and dissipating them, taking the complex creation that was the Burning Head and reducing it once more to its constituent elements of magic. But in the metaphor that her aetheric senses created to help her understand the impossible metaphysics of it, she simply pulled…

…and nothing happened.

The malevolent entity roared and turned towards Jaqlyn as she tried to pull her aetheric form back into her exhausted body. It lowered its head and gazed at her. As she looked into the fiery eyes, she realised her mistake. Human will warred against a magical desire to survive. This spell, the product of her folly, her error, could not be unbound. Not by her. Instead, it would be her undoing.

It was going to kill her, and that would be her penance.

She couldn’t look away from its burning gaze. Instead, she felt as though she were falling as she remembered the last time she had stared into that monstrous visage, the night the spell had come to be.

Jaqlyn made her way down the street, screams echoing strangely around her. Death was everywhere. Corpses, broken and brutalised, littered the ground around her, both human and beast. She watched them as she passed, constantly aware that at any moment, one of them might be returned to a semblance of life by the deluge of amethyst magic that swirled around her. A grasping hand at her ankle, or a body suddenly rising, broken teeth snatching for her throat, could spell her end.

She followed the screams to a group of townsfolk clustered together, defended by a makeshift barricade constructed from doors, barrels, broken statuary and whatever else they had managed to drag over. At the front, a pair of old men and a burly duardin leant crossbows on the top of the barricade, firing shots at deadwalkers and beasts alike as they approached. Around them, grim-faced men and women held long makeshift weapons – brooms with kitchen knives or cleavers tied to them – with which they stabbed at any beastman or skeleton that came too close. Behind them, more old men comforted crying children.

Jaqlyn hurried towards the group, swinging her sword at foes who drew near, severing limbs and breaking bones. She fought towards the barrier, every step earned with another fallen enemy. But there were too many, and their numbers were growing. Swearing under her breath, Jaqlyn stepped back. With a deep breath, she focused and opened her magical senses.

The familiar swirl of threads surrounded her, but it was different than it had been just a few hours before. There had been balance in the weave of magic before, with just the warm golden threads of Metal magic outnumbering the others. Now, threads of amethyst were everywhere, their total greater, she thought, than that of the other seven colours of magic put together. Death truly was everywhere. And there was something else, a further corruption in the magic around her. It reached out from a locus of power, fraying threads and turning them from their natural colours to pulsing, sickly darkness. It was the raw stuff of Chaos, and it was being shaped into something hideous.

She quickly found the source – a monstrous bray-shaman standing in the midst of a group of hulking bestigors. Its tall staff, topped with the horned skull of another of its kind, was planted in the ground. It was chanting in its dark tongue, and to her magical senses, the syllables themselves took life and formed into threads, meshing with one another and pulling in other nearby threads. Whatever the bray-shaman was casting, it was powerful, and it was nearly done.

Jaqlyn had a choice. There was no way to reach the bestial wizard and stop it with a blade. She could wait until the spell was complete and hope to unbind it, or she could try and disrupt the magic that was forming it. She scanned the threads it was drawing in. Besides the stuff of Chaos that spewed from the beast’s throat, the bulk of the magic it was using came from the winds of Fire and Shadow, the magic of Aqshy and dread Ulgu. Jaqlyn sought threads that would stand in opposition. Chamon would be no good – the fire could overpower it as flame melted metal. The soothing light of Hysh was a good bet, the antithesis to the shadows of Ulgu. To combat the fire, she drew on the pure magic of Azyr, the Celestial Realm. Known more as the magic of stars, it also encompassed all that came from the heavens – including the furious storms that could quench any flame.

Jaqlyn reached deep inside herself, plucking glowing white and blue threads, weaving them together into an inchoate form and pulling them out into the aether before her. What she was creating didn’t follow the structure of any spell she knew. Instead she was just trying to create something, anything, that could disrupt the weave that was taking form before the bray-shaman.

The magic was resisting her. She persisted, pulling more threads towards her, knitting in some gold in an attempt to balance the magic. But even as she did, sinuous filaments of Shyishan purple drifted into her spell, turning its bright glow darker. The spell started to struggle in her grasp as more of the Death magic was attracted to it. The pale blue became purple, and the purple started to turn black. Jaqlyn was losing control. Panic rising, she tried to pull some calmly drifting Ghyranian green into the mix. The opposing force to Shyish, that magic of Life might bring the spell back into balance.

It was to no avail. For every piece of Life magic she added, more Death magic infiltrated the weave, until it was too late. The spell was no longer hers. With a prayer to Sigmar on her lips, she let the spell go in the direction of the bray-shaman’s magical construct.

The results were catastrophic. What emerged into reality was no ball of blazing light. It was a dark mirror of what she had intended, alive with pure Death. It surged forward, bringing an end to all that it touched, undead and living alike. Skeletons and deadwalkers were silently incinerated, wood and even stone scorched with purple flame, and the screaming from behind the barricade intensified as the defenders and their charges were burned alive. The screaming continued even after they were no more, as the magic of Death consumed their souls, sending them to one of the underworlds of Shyish to be playthings for the King of Bones. Again, Jaqlyn heard that otherworldly laughter as the spell slammed into the pack of beastmen and met its target.

The world turned dark as spell met spell. She saw the bray-shaman’s magic pull out of its control, and had the fleeting impression that the beastman was consumed and absorbed by it. There was a flash, impossibly both light and dark at the same time, and she shielded her eyes. When she dropped her arm, what she saw before her filled her with such terror as she had never felt before.

A monstrous flaming bull towered over her, and it stared down with eyes of roaring fire. It was looking at her, and she felt its magical gaze pierce her soul. It recognised her as someone who had tried to stop it from being birthed. And it hated her. Around it, the remaining beastmen who had not been consumed in its birth jabbed spears and clubs in the air, chanting in worship of this godly creature that had been unleashed.

‘What did you do?’ Nicol grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. ‘What did you create?’

She had no answer for him.

‘Go, Jaqlyn. Get out. The west tower. Sergeant Archus and his men will take you.’

Nicol turned away and raised his staff towards the great spell, chanting words of power. That was the last Jaqlyn saw of her mentor as Archus ordered his men to lift her and carry her with them, her struggles to no avail.

The journey to the west tower was quick. Archus’ unit battered their way through the enemies in their path, losing many of their number as they did. Those that reached the tower and escaped into the catacombs below, and thence out of Tantalum, were few, but they were determined. There was no question of what they would do next, after they emerged into the daylight once more and saw the ruins of their once great city, and far on the horizon, a vast creature of shadow and flame bellowing into the sunlit sky. Jaqlyn watched it until it passed out of view, unable to forget the depths of hatred in those blazing eyes.

Jaqlyn came back to herself, standing before the unstoppable spell that was the result of her failure. It would be her end. But… if she died here, what could stop it? What could possibly stand against it as it rampaged across Ghur, drawn by some unfathomable instinct to settlement after settlement, extinguishing them of life. How many more deaths would Jaqlyn allow?

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I will not be defeated. Not by you.’

She took a deep breath and reached deep inside herself to the core of her being where the physical and magical were one. It was here that her spells began. It was here that she hadn’t dared touch since that night. It was here, at her very heart, that she needed to reach to end this.

Back in Tantalum, she had sought to disrupt the equilibrium of the spell, and had succeeded only in making it stronger. In the months since, she had discovered more about what happened that night. About the great power that had swept across the realms – the Necroquake, it was being called. It had originated in the underworlds of Shyish, which explained the way it infused the weave with the power of Death.

It was that power she called on now, in a way. The spell before her was too great to defeat by any normal magical means. So instead she would create something that could meet it on its own terms, something that used the greatest concentration of energies around her – the natural threads of Ghurian magic, what scholars called the power of Beasts, and the abundant Shyishan magic of Death.

She let instinct take over, not consciously guiding her casting. Instead, she let the magic take the shape it desired. It wanted to be cast, to become… something, and she would be the conduit by which it took form and was given life.

She had mere moments before the great bull charged her and she suffered the same fate as the Freeguild soldiers. Grief and pain welled up at the thought of their painful deaths, and she embraced it, pushing it into the spell that took form before her. She reached deeper, and unleashed all the emotion that she had pushed down since Tantalum’s fall. As she did so, she knew the spell was ready.

Jaqlyn let go, and the magic flowed through her. She felt like she was being torn apart, every fibre of her being slipping away onto the aetheric winds. She held on to the core of who she was, gripping tightly to thought, feeling and memory as the magic passed through her.

Then it was over. She collapsed to her knees and looked up. Above her was a great sphere of living crystal, gnarled and trailing streamers of liquid amber. It was as if one of the monstrous trees around her had returned to life and birthed some grotesque child. It radiated power, and even the bull felt it, taking a step back.

‘Here, lass.’ She looked in the direction of the voice, seeing the strange duardin by her side. ‘Come on, I think we should go,’ he hissed, pulling at her. She didn’t resist, and he dragged her away as she watched her conjuration fall on the prey she had sought for so long.

The two spells met. The gnashing maw of the amber creature was lined with immense teeth, each larger than a man and looking like it had been plucked from the jaws of a dragon. They closed around a horn of shadow and snapped shut. The amber beast pulled back and tore the horn from the magical bull, which bellowed in pain and rage… and perhaps terror. It charged, head lowered, its remaining horn piercing the side of the maw. The wound bled liquid amber that streamed onto the bull and, rather than passing through its immaterial hide, sizzled and burned it, pocking what passed for its flesh.

An idea came to Jaqlyn.

‘Do you have a weapon?’ she hissed to the dwarf as the two endless spells circled one another above them. ‘Any kind of bow or pistol?

‘I’ve got my arm,’ the duardin said, rapping his knuckles against what Jaqlyn had taken to be a metal gauntlet, but she now saw was some kind of mechanical limb. ‘I’ve a wee one-shot gun built in there in case of emergencies.’

‘I think this counts,’ Jaqlyn said, gesturing to him to do what he needed to get it ready. The duardin nodded and twisted the metal arm at the wrist, pulling the hand to one side to reveal the snub barrel of a pistol.

‘I’ve only got one shot, lass,’ he said. ‘What do you need me to hit?’

‘You see where the blood has burned the bull’s hide?’ She pointed to the wounds. ‘One of those.’

‘Small targets,’ the duardin said, shaking his head. ‘I’ll need to get closer.’ He started forward and Jaqlyn followed. Together, they circled around the duelling spells, which were continuing to strike at one another. The gnashing maw had torn away half the bull’s face with its massive teeth, revealing what looked like a skeletal structure made of flame beneath the shadow-hide. In return, the bull’s fiery jaws and remaining horn had wrenched chunks from the amber creature, and the liquid that trickled from the wounds stained the ground of the clearing.

Jaqlyn prepared a conjuration, a mystic shield, should they need it. It felt good to use magic again. Months of fear and doubt had been exorcised by casting the gnashing maw. She felt, for the first time since Tantalum, like herself again.

The amber maw lunged at the bull once more, and it batted the thing away, roaring.

‘Now,’ Jaqlyn shouted, and the duardin opened fire. His accuracy was unerring, and the bullet pierced the shadowed hide in the very centre of one of the amber stains, creating an entryway for Jaqlyn. To her aetheric sight, it was a mess of threads. She grabbed them – not seeking any one, just following her instincts once more, and pulled with all her might.

There was an explosion, and a wave of powerful magical energy rushed towards her. When it hit her, Jaqlyn fell into blissful oblivion.

When Jaqlyn woke, she knew it was over. Even without dipping into her aetheric senses, she could tell that the magic around her was cleaner than it had been. She pulled herself to her feet and checked for injuries. She’d been lucky – her body had been far enough from the duelling spells that she’d escaped more or less unscathed. She had the duardin to thank for that.

She looked for him, steeling herself for the sight of a hideously burned corpse. But there was no sign of that. Further away, she saw him lying on the ground, smoke rising from many of the runes carved into his armour. She moved towards him, reaching out with her magical senses. He was alive.

‘Are you well, master duardin?’ she called cautiously.

The duardin’s eyes opened. He rolled onto his side, looked over at her, and slowly pulled himself to his feet. He made a show of dusting himself down, and trudged towards her. When he reached her, he peered curiously at her for a moment, then rummaged in one of his pouches and pulled out a small oilcloth, from which he extracted what looked for all the realms like a monocle on a metal arm. He adjusted something on its side and fitted the arm into a slot on the side of his helmet, flicking the lens over his eye. He closed the other eye and squinted at her before stepping back.

‘Well,’ he said at length. ‘I don’t know if I’d say well. That was a mighty explosion back there. But I’m alive, and that’s a start. The real question is, what are you?’

‘What am I?’ she repeated, dumbfounded.

‘Aye, lass. What are you? You don’t look like a wizard. No staff, no robes, no haughty superiority. But this,’ he tapped the eyeglass, ‘this suggests that you are. And so does what you did back there. That was… well, I’m not easily impressed by manlings, but that was quite something.’

‘I… thank you,’ she said. ‘You can see magic with that lens?’

‘Aye,’ the duardin said. ‘But that’s not important. What did you do to stop that thing? What did you cast? Why did my aetheric destabiliser not work? And just what are you doing here at all?’

Jaqlyn laughed bitterly. ‘There is a long story that will probably answer all of that.’ She trailed off. ‘Most of it anyway. I don’t know about your… whatever you called it.’

‘Didn’t work how it should,’ the duardin grumbled.

‘Nothing works quite the way it should any more,’ Jaqlyn replied.

The duardin nodded. ‘Aye. I’ve noticed. And the rise in that purple magic lingering around these past months. I have a feeling you know more about that than I. Maybe you can help me out actually. I’m Thorri Steelfist,’ he held out his non-mechanical arm, ‘magical investigator for hire.’

She took his hand and shook it. ‘Jaqlyn Kouslo. I’m not sure what I am any more.’

‘You’re here, and I thank you for that,’ said Thorri.

‘Why were you here?’ she asked. ‘How? I was following that spell for months. If you were too, we would have crossed paths before now.’

‘Aye, well, I wasn’t following it so much as waiting for it. My gadgets picked up something powerful and magical coming this way. I wanted to try and capture it. Study it. Or stop it if I had to.’

‘I didn’t think duardin had wizards,’ said Jaqlyn.

‘We don’t, really. I’m not naturally attuned to magic like you seem to be. I use a mix of duardin engineering and runic secrets instead. It’s… new. It doesn’t always work. And I could use a real wizard to help me perfect it.’ Thorri looked up at Jaqlyn, his broad brow furrowed.

‘What do you say, Jaqlyn Kouslo? How about we partner up for a while? I reckon we could work quite well together. And who knows where the tides of magic will take us?’

Jaqlyn considered the offer. She had nothing to return to, and with the tragic deaths of Archus and his men, she had no one to be responsible for. She could seek out one of the other magical colleges that dotted the realms and continue her studies, as she had done at Tantalum. But that had been all she had known before the disaster. And with the wild magic unleashed by the Necroquake, there were all sorts of new things out there to discover… and perhaps more threats to be stopped. She considered Thorri.

‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked.

‘Well, I heard tell of something strange in a town a few weeks’ travel from here. A giant sinkhole and rumours of ratmen being sighted. It has the stink of Chaos magic to it, if ye ask me. Want to come with me and see what we can do about it?’

Jaqlyn smiled. ‘Lead the way,’ she said.

NO MATTER THE COST

Michael R Fletcher

Fell threw off the blanket and pushed into a sitting position with a wheezing groan. Thin legs stretched out before him. His left ankle hurt, its foot bent out at an odd angle, the instep crushed flat where a horse had once trodden on him. He eyed the offending limb. Such frail bones, so easy to snap.

He didn’t have to suffer such wounds. It was a choice.

Fumbling at the side of the bed, he found his cane. For a score of weak and sluggish heartbeats he glared hate at his hand, the skin wrinkled and sunken. The last two fingers, fixed in their bent position, taunted him: how much is your oath worth, old man? Heal thyself!

Swinging his legs off the bed, he stood, groaning at the stabbing twinge in his lower back. Leaning heavily on the cane, he shuffled into the kitchen. The sad, timid steps of a man terrified of falling. His right knee clicked as he walked. He banged it years ago while digging in the garden and it had never been the same.

A tin cup of water sat on the table. Clutching it in the other hand, he drank. Stale. Brackish. The hard taste of rusting metal. He spat out a fly that had drowned in the cup as he’d slept. His eyes weren’t great, especially in the early-morning gloom.

The front door slammed open with a bang, and little Rita stomped into the kitchen, a basket of bread and what looked to be a baked potato clutched in her arms. Red hair like an evening sunset, fringe cut short, two dishevelled plaits hanging down her back, she was all gangly limbs and bright green eyes.

‘The hells!’ Fell barked. ‘Get out, you little rat! I’m not dressed yet!’

The ten-year-old frowned, head tilted to one side as she studied him. ‘You need to wash your nightshirt. It’s filthy.’

‘Out, before I give you a bloody good thrashing!’ He threatened murder with the cane, careful to lean on the table as he did so.

Rita ignored him as she slid past and set the basket on the seat of his rickety chair.

‘I was going to sit there,’ he muttered.

‘Ashton gave me this bread for you,’ she said, laying the loaf on the table. ‘He says it’s only a few days old and still good.’

‘Great. Wormy bread. Now get out!’

‘Terese sent the potato.’

‘I hate potatoes.’

Rita placed the potato beside the bread.

‘Galley said you can have his old horse blanket as soon as Ryder finishes the new one.’

‘Fantastic. I love smelling like a gods-be-damned incontinent donkey.’

‘It’ll keep you warm in the winter,’ she prattled on, clearing his dinner plate and fork from the table and taking them to the bucket where he kept his dirty dishes.

‘I don’t need their stinking pity.’

Glancing over her shoulder, she said, ‘Wouldn’t pity suggest that they like you, at least a little?’

‘That’s unlikely.’

‘At the very least it means they care.’

‘They like having someone to look down on.’

Grabbing the foetid cloth he used for cleaning, she dipped it in his water cup and set to scrubbing his dishes.

‘Oi, you little wretch,’ he barked. ‘I was drinking that!’

She ignored him as she worked. ‘Gallowglas said he’ll give you a mug of ale if you come by the Dripping Bucket tonight.’

Fell had been once, back when he first came to Hollow’s Dell. Many times he considered returning, just to hear Terese sing again.

‘I hate the tavern. Too many people.’

‘Terese is going to sing,’ Rita said, as if she’d read his mind.

That stopped him. Terese sang like the very gods spoke through her. ‘I do love the sound of someone skinning a rutting tomcat.’

‘See?’ she said. ‘A reason to go!’

Rita babbled on as she cleaned, telling him about how Maz killed a deer on her first time out with Lawrence, the huntmaster. She talked of how beautiful Sarah looked in her new dress, how old lady Kalindy died the night before in her sleep, and was to be buried this afternoon in the town plot. She told him about how distant wars were going to affect the price of grain, and how the vile forces of Chaos were being driven from the Realm of Shyish. A thousand conversations between ignorant farmers overheard and filtered through the understanding of a ten-year-old girl. Half the time he hadn’t a clue what she was on about.

‘How old are you?’ she asked over a shoulder.

‘Why?’ he demanded, suspicious.

‘Terese asked me how old I thought you were.’

He swallowed a sigh of relief. ‘And?’ he asked, curious in spite of himself.

‘I said sixty.’

Not too bad, considering the truth.

‘Terese said she thought you were closer to fifty-five.’

Fell smothered a grin of pleasure. Not only had Terese asked after him, but she was also wondering if he was of a suitable age; whether they might spend time together without it being unseemly. Even though his back and knees were hell, he looked nothing like his true age.

Finishing, Rita wiped her hands on her trousers. ‘Will I see you at the Bucket?’

‘No.’

‘All right. I’ll swing by tomorrow.’

‘You set foot in my house uninvited one more time,’ he hefted the cane, threatening, ‘and I’ll crack your skull!’

‘I’ll probably be late,’ she explained. ‘I agreed to help Hellen collect eggs. I’ll bring you a few.’

‘I hate eggs.’

‘I can make scrambled eggs, you know. Momma showed me. Maybe I’ll try and find some cheese.’

‘Get out.’

‘I’ll make you scrambled eggs and cheese,’ she decided, collecting her basket and wandering out the front door, red braids swinging behind her.

‘You’re not right in the head!’ he called after her.

By all the gods dark and bright she reminded him of Leona, his daughter.

Collapsing into the now vacated chair, he sat in silence. His knees hurt. His back ached. One of the fingers on his left hand felt like it was going to lock up.

An eternity of slow decay.

Time devours us all.

Someday, he’d be a broken ruin, utterly helpless. His joints would seize, and his ancient bones crack. It might be a decade, or maybe another century, if he was careful, but that was his inevitable fate.

Rot and decay. Eternal life trapped in an undying body.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Break the oath he swore over the dust of his daughter, and he could repair himself.

Never.

He’d lie where he fell, mind as sharp as ever, awaiting an end that would never come. Carrion creatures would feed on what little meat he had. Insects would worm into his eyes, feast on his brain. Even that could not end him. Tied to these bones, his soul would remain forever trapped. He couldn’t die, not ever. No escape.

‘Grief,’ said the woman who did this to Fell. ‘I curse you with an eternity of grief.’

Fell and Ruhinn knelt over their daughter’s bed. They’d cried themselves hoarse and now had nothing left.

Wrung out.

Emptied of all emotion except soul-staining misery. The one bright spark in the world, snuffed.

Leona lay still and pale, red hair brushed out and tied in plaits neater than she’d ever achieved when alive.

My girl. My beautiful girl.

Why go on? What was the point? How could anything ever matter again?

Ruhinn placed a hand on Leona’s forehead. ‘She’s cold,’ his wife said. ‘So cold.’

He watched her glance about, as if in search of a blanket to warm their daughter.

She’s not cold. She’s gone.

But he couldn’t say it, couldn’t speak the word.

Gone.

Teeth clenched tight, his skull ached from the pressure.

‘Daddy, am I going to die?’ Leona asked on her last day.

And he lied. ‘No, my love. Daddy will protect you. Daddy would never let anything hurt you.’

He was, he discovered, wrong. He could still feel. Something deep inside cracked then, never to heal. The kind of soul-deep wound that either breaks a man or twists him into something different.

This can’t be real. This can’t be.

Having a child changes you. You don’t know who you are until you’re a father. For the first time in his life, Fell had liked who he was. The selfishness of youth fell away, and he became a man. Tasks once daunting were nothing. Work hard to support your family, to give your beloved little girl everything she could need? Yes! Happily! Having a reason made all the difference in the world. His thankless job as a scribe for the Collegiate Arcane became bearable. That they couldn’t have another, that Rue had barely survived giving birth to Leona, made their daughter all the more precious.

The Collegiate. Gods, he’d spent countless thousands of hours copying tome after tome for the masters. Much of the time he understood little of what he wrote. His eidetic memory and knack for penmanship and precise copying, even when he didn’t know the language, earned him a place among the most prized scribes. Funny, as the work bored him to tears.

What a waste! Every hour there he could have been with Leona!

The Collegiate.

Something poked at his memory, demanded attention.

Copying books. Forbidden books, sometimes.

‘Rue,’ he said.

She looked lost, red-rimmed eyes unseeing.

‘I copied a book once.’

Ruhinn stared at him with dull emptiness.

‘It was a language book. A dictionary… for translating from the ancient tongue.’

She blinked. ‘So?’

‘I also copied another book. A book written in that old tongue.’

She waited. Not with patience, but with dejected disinterest. Nothing meant anything any more.

Fell pictured the worn leather cover, soft in spite of its age. Each sheet, warm to the touch. He remembered leaning close to inspect a page and seeing the whorls of flesh, the ink a strange, rusty brown with the scent of old salt. Blood. A thick tome; many hundreds must have died to make that one book.

One of nine.

Maybe.

‘A forbidden book,’ he said. ‘A private commission, though I do not know for whom.’ The idea built as he spoke. ‘I didn’t understand it at the time.’ He’d always had a perfect memory, could clearly see the pages of every book he’d ever copied. ‘I can apply one to the other. With some work, I can read that other book.’

Rue shook her head, lost. ‘So?’

‘I think I know what the book was.’

Closing his eyes, he remembered the text on the cover, flipping through the pages of his mind to find the translation. His breath caught.

‘If I’m right,’ he said, ‘it was a book of spells. Necromancy spells.’

‘Death,’ said Ruhinn, perhaps beginning to understand.

Eyes still closed, Fell skimmed through several more pages of the ancient tome. ‘A spell book.’ He turned to Rue. ‘Necromancy, my love. Powerful necromancy.’

‘Necromancy,’ she repeated, looking to where Leona lay.

‘Maybe…’ He hesitated, afraid to give voice to his thoughts.

Rue turned on him, curled her fingers in the collar of his shirt. She glared into his eyes, alive again, bright with desperate hunger. ‘Bring her back to me. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost. Bring her back.’

Fell swallowed. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost.

He knew little of necromancy, but something of history. These were fiercely guarded secrets, and necromancy devoured its practitioners, twisted them, body and soul.

‘Whatever it takes,’ he said. ‘No matter the cost.’ He held his wife. ‘I swear it.’

Purpose. Without it, we are nothing.

He had purpose now.

The next day Fell left his job at the Collegiate Arcane. He and Ruhinn sold their family estate in Glymmsforge and used the funds to pay a Scáthborn aelf to cease their daughter’s rot. Fell would learn necromancy, but could not do so overnight. It would take years. They rented a single room over a cockroach-infested tavern, and Rue took a job cleaning dishes and scrubbing floors to support them while he studied.

Day by day the horror grew in him as he came to understand the task he had undertaken. But there could be no turning back. He would not fail Ruhinn. He would not fail Leona.

No matter the cost.

It became his mantra, repeated when he woke screaming from the nightmares, tangled in the sheets, face flushed and soaked in sweat.

He felt himself crumble beneath the onslaught of this terrible knowledge. The man he was died, hour by hour, day by day.

Year by year.

No matter the cost.

Fell crushed the potato with a fork, making sure there was nothing hard hidden within. In the past, he’d broken teeth on unexpected foods. Once, an incisor cracked in half when he tried to eat an apple Rita brought him, a treat from Terese. Pulling out the remains was unpleasant. When confident the potato was safe, he spooned it into the stale bread, making a hefty, if somewhat bland, sandwich. He ate slowly, chewing with care. It was, he was loath to admit, the most delicious thing he’d eaten in months. Maybe longer. After, he released a long belch and sat happy and sated.

He spent the day rooting about in his vegetable patch, pulling weeds, ever cautious not to injure himself, before returning inside to collapse onto his one chair with a groan. His back hurt. His knees hurt. His arms–

It all bloody well hurts!

He eyed the dirty plate still sitting where he’d left it on the table. Reaching out, he collected a few crumbs with a dirty finger and ate them.

He considered the Dripping Bucket. There’d be people. Few if any would talk to him, but they’d note his attendance. The town was small, everyone knew everyone and everyone knew everyone’s business. Except for Fell. Though he’d lived here for years, no one knew him. To the people of Hollow’s Dell, he was a grumpy old man probably named for his tendency to trip on things. Little Rita aside, people rarely talked to him. And that was fine. What could he possibly say to those with such brief mayfly lives? They’d age and die, and he’d still be here, rotting, falling apart one bone – one joint – at a time. In another decade he’d move on, find another town. It didn’t do to stay anywhere too long. Better not to catch the attention of the townsfolk.

Still, it had been a long time since he’d immersed himself in the hubbub of humanity. It would be nice to see people, even if he didn’t talk to them. There might even be news from beyond the Dell. Rumours of war had been trickling in for years. The forces of Order and Chaos would never rest until they’d subjugated or freed – the difference seemed non-existent to Fell – all the known world.

Gallowglas’ offer of a mug sweetened the deal even further. It had been years since Fell had allowed himself alcohol. A man who doesn’t heal can’t afford the careless clumsiness of drink. But just one? It’d be nice to feel a little distance.

Admit it, you’d go just to hear Terese sing.

In a town like Hollow’s Dell, there wasn’t much for entertainment. Not like in Glymmsforge. He recalled how, years before Leona was born, he and Ruhinn used to attend concerts, visit galleries and see plays. They once saw a lavish production of The End of Despair, Fall of a Mortarch. The magisters shut the play down the next week, hanging the actors in the city square, displaying their tortured corpses in iron cages. But out here, out on the ragged edge of civilisation, a voice like Terese’s was a wonder.

She’s not hard on the eyes, either.

Fell laughed, a flat, humourless chuckle.

Nearing fifty, Terese was less than a tenth his age.

Funny how, as a youth, he’d never noticed older women. These days, anyone under forty looked like a child. There was something about women in the later half of life, a confidence, an understanding of what actually mattered, that was attractive beyond pert body parts.

Also, twenty-year-old girls don’t know you exist.

Terese, on the other hand… Sometimes she watched him when she thought he wouldn’t notice. And she often sent food along with Rita. He licked his lips at the memory of the potato.

It didn’t matter. There could be nothing between them. She’d age and die, and he’d have to watch.

We all fall apart, just at different rates.

Having already lost one family, he was unwilling to lose anyone else.

Excuses, excuses, old man.

It wasn’t like Terese was going to bear him children. Why could they not spend a little time together, make the passing years a little less brutally lonely?

No!

Rue might be centuries gone, but he would never betray the memory of her. And Terese deserved better.

How old do you have to be before you stop thinking about women?

He didn’t know. Certainly, he had yet to reach that age. Would he ever? Would he miss it if he did?

‘One drink,’ he said. ‘One quick drink, and then I’ll return home.’

Home, a stinking hovel. Two rooms, one where he slept, another where he ate. A bucket to crap and piss in. Gods he missed the estate back in Glymmsforge. They hadn’t been wealthy, not compared to some, but sometimes he dreamed of sitting rooms, soft divans, leather reading chairs and a small library of much-loved books.

Late that evening, cane in hand, Fell made the short walk to the Bucket. He moved at a careful limp he once jokingly told Rita was ‘stately’. She’d pretended to understand, bouncing off the walls with the careless and enviable energy of youth.

Each time a foot slipped in the mud, darts of hot pain shot through his knees. The slight decline made the trip into town easier, but treacherous after a rainfall. The journey home would hurt, though he wouldn’t truly appreciate how much until he woke the next morning.

He laughed, a mirthless cough. Nothing ever gets better. The axiom of the elderly.

Movement caught his attention, and he shuffled to a stop. There, to the west, up on what the locals called Hollow’s Hill, stood a massive black beast of a destrier. Cloaked in white, the rider sat watching Fell. The wind gusted, whipped at pale wisps of cloth, teasing Fell with hints of a shapely body hidden beneath. The horse stood motionless, its eyes two shards of obsidian.

She found me.

A terrible sadness – a soul-crushing grief – overcame Fell, and he stumbled to his knees. Tears came, and he sobbed into his hands for a lifetime of loss. The pain of the fall was nothing. Flesh and bone and muscle mattered not when everything worth living for had been torn from your life, turned to dust before your very eyes, crushed in a skeletal fist.

When the misery had passed and his eyes were once again dry, Fell found his cane in the dirt and pushed himself back to his feet with a groan. He stood, staring at the blood on his hands where he’d scraped them on a rock catching his fall.

‘I have to leave.’

He’d stayed in Hollow’s Dell too long.

He felt it deep in his bones.

Turning, he saw the rider was gone.

She wanted to be seen.

It was a message: I found you.

Fell turned, looked back up the hill towards the wretched hovel of his home.

You can’t leave tonight, not in the dark.

The only easily travelled path out of town was the single road cutting through Hollow’s Dell, and that was the one place someone would definitely think to intercept his escape. On the other hand, creeping through the forest in the dead of night was a sure recipe for broken bones.

Doubt and fear.

They won’t come tonight. She would want him to suffer. I’ll sneak out in the morning.

He tried to shake off the lingering grief, but it clung like spiderwebs.

One last night. One more taste of Gallowglas’ ale.

One last chance to see Terese, to listen to her sing.

Would Rita be at the Bucket? Sometimes her mother let her stay up late to hear a few of Terese’s songs before bed.

I’ll miss the brat.

The thought hurt more than expected. The precocious child was a constant annoyance, always letting herself into his home and prattling on with that incessant babble. A thousand small gifts littered his hovel, crude drawings sketched in charcoal on thin slabs of wood. She often brought sweets, treats saved from her own meals. Her constant thoughtless kindness was a pain.

So like Leona.

Fell sighed, and turned back towards the Dripping Bucket. One last night. He’d say goodbye to these people who had, if not welcomed him, still been kind. He’d say goodbye to Rita too, if she was there. And he’d thank her. She’d more than earned that.

Decision made, Fell set off down the hill.

On the outskirts he passed the town graveyard, and recalled Rita mentioning that old lady Kalindy had died and was to be buried there. Did she already rest in the earth?

As if death is a respite.

Though a small town, Hollow’s Dell was old. Hundreds of stones marked graves. The eldest, further back, were stained black with moss, and smooth, wind-worn. Many had toppled over and lay half-sunken in the soil.

Perhaps, for people like Kalindy, death was an escape. Undying, Fell would never know.

Constructed of field-stones, the Dripping Bucket used to be a homestead. The wood shutters on the windows, warped and painted and repainted a thousand times, had been nailed shut. Probably to keep them from falling off. Judging by the colour of the stones and the crumbling mortar, the Bucket was one of the oldest buildings in the Dell.

A sodden and swollen wooden bucket, banded in rusted iron, hung over the door. It looked more like someone had hung it there, never bothering to retrieve it, than a tavern sign. Sometimes, after a heavy rain, it dripped for days.

From outside, he heard the raised voices of good cheer and shared drink. Taking a deep breath, he pushed through the front door.

Grief followed with him.

For years Fell studied the dread tome. Time lost meaning. He and Rue aged, him bent from his endless hours hunched over the book, her from her time washing dishes and scrubbing floors.

Studying books was one thing, but he had to know. He had to practise what he learned to be sure it worked. He might get only one chance to save Leona.

At first, he practised on small animals, bringing the stiffened corpses of birds and rodents back to some twitching semblance of life. It was easy. Too easy. It was, however, difficult to judge success. Did they thrash and scream because their bodies were still broken, or had he got the spell subtly wrong? He had to know before he chanced anything with Leona.

He needed human subjects, and knew where to get them. There are always fresh dead in Shyish.

Each night he sneaked from the house as Rue slept, and visited a nearby graveyard. Sometimes he lay on fresh graves, talking to the dead, hearing of their sorrows. They all said the same thing: their greatest regrets were the things they hadn’t done.

Leona never changed. She didn’t age or rot. Every night they stood over their perfect little girl, read her stories, told her they loved her and would see her again soon.

Fell cracked the dark mysteries contained in the foul book, and they cracked him.

The nightmares stopped, an oddly terrifying occurrence. Such horrors should never become commonplace. The need to learn, to grow in power, consumed him. For it was not possible to learn a single spell and save his daughter. One mastery led to the next. Each terrible secret opened the gates to another. The man he’d been sank inwards like rotting fruit, became a dried husk of a being. Most nights he barely noticed Ruhinn, the love of his life, when she brought him meals, or tidied around him as he studied.

He made progress, fast at first, and then more slowly as the spells became more difficult. Finally, after years, he had but one last spell to learn – the only one that mattered.

And it defeated him.

Something held him back, hesitated like it knew that to learn the last spell was to surrender what remained of his humanity.

One last spell, and he couldn’t do it. Week after week he smashed himself against the book, hammering his mind with repetition, struggling to learn what eluded him. Week after week he failed. He went days without sleep, weeks without bathing. He often forgot to eat, neglected every aspect of self-care, becoming a hollowed shell of the already thin man he was.

‘Maybe you should stop,’ Ruhinn said one day, standing over him as he sat at his desk. ‘Maybe we should let her go.’

‘No.’ I can do it. I will master that spell.

‘It’s killing you. It’s killing us.’ She groaned, rubbed at the small of her back with gnarled fingers. ‘It’s not going to work. It’s been years.’

‘No matter the cost,’ he said.

Some part of him struggled to the surface, a memory of who he’d been.

‘Anyway,’ said Fell, ‘I’m almost there.’ A lie. That spell defeated him.

Her breath caught. ‘Truly?’

‘This year or the next.’

She made a dry noise that might have been a laugh.

Fell turned to face his wife. ‘We’ll have her back, I promise you. I’m almost there. And then everything will be like it was.’

‘Like it was,’ she said.

He saw in her eyes that she wanted to believe. Desperate hope. Doubt.

‘I promise,’ he repeated.

How could things ever be like they were? Even if he returned Leona to life, and she was exactly as she had been, what of him? Was it possible to set aside a decade of necromantic study and become a loving father? Could he turn his back on all he learned? Gods, the secrets he knew, the powers he could access should he so choose.

Why settle for something so pedestrian as fatherhood? He could carve out a name for himself, raise armies of the dead! Someone, somewhere, must have use for such power! He and Rue could be wealthy, live in comfort! He glanced around their sad home, taking in the sparse and threadbare furniture, the stained curtains. Why live in such squalor?

As if sensing his thoughts, Rue took his hand, led him to the room where Leona lay.

He stood motionless, studying his daughter.

That’s why.

No matter the cost. He understood now. To keep his promise, he must set aside all he learned once his task was complete.

If I can complete it at all.

Fell turned to his wife, took her in his arms. ‘Give me one more year.’

She nodded, then lay her head against his chest. He held her, breathing the scent of her hair.

The next day, while Ruhinn was out shopping, a woman came to visit. Young and voluptuous, she had pale skin that glowed in the dim light of the apartment. She wore the rich clothing of the nobility, and walked with an assured grace beyond her years.

Unsure what to do, Fell invited her in. If the filth and poverty bothered her, she hid it masterfully.

She studied him without doubt or fear. ‘You’ve done it. You’ve mastered the book.’

He twitched. ‘What book? I think you’ve mistaken me–’

‘I see it in your eyes. It should have broken you.’ She reached up a fine-fingered hand to caress his cheek. ‘But it didn’t.’

He was less than sure. Something at the very core of him was dead, murdered by what he’d learned. He shook his head in silent denial and she ignored him.

‘Rare is the mind that can hold such knowledge,’ she said. ‘Rare indeed.’

Surrendering the pretence, he said, ‘One last spell to learn.’

The only one that mattered. The one he failed, over and over, to master.

‘For your daughter,’ she said.

He didn’t ask how she knew.

‘For Leona,’ he agreed.

‘Raising the dead is easy,’ she said, studying him with dark eyes.

There was something deeply wrong with this beautiful woman; he found himself too aware of the skull beneath her skin.

That’s the necromancy. It infected his every thought.

‘If you want mindless minions,’ he said.

‘Ah. Yes. You seek to truly cheat death.’

‘I can’t do it. The spell is beyond me,’ he admitted.

She flashed the slightest smile, unstained by humour or warmth. ‘Nonsense. You are your problem.’

‘How so?’

‘You care too much.’

Was that true?

‘But if I don’t care, why bother?’

‘Power for power’s sake,’ she said. ‘Power because you can. Power because you want it. Power for what it is, for what it does.’

‘I don’t care about power.’

That twitch of a smile again, like she heard the lie. ‘I can teach you the spell.’

His heart skipped, but caution held him. ‘At what price?’

‘I will give you another book.’

‘What book?’

‘The next book.’

The next.

‘The second,’ he said.

‘Of nine,’ she agreed. ‘You will learn it as you have this one. I will guide you.’

‘Why?’ he demanded.

‘You are skilled, but you could be great.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

An eyebrow quirked. Gorgeous as this woman was, skin flawless, body curved in all the most desirable ways, she sparked no lust in Fell. She terrified him. Her utter confidence spoke of a mastery he was decades – maybe centuries – from achieving.

‘Lady Oh wills it.’

‘Don’t play with me. Who is she? What does she want?’

‘She does not deign to share with me the reasons for her commands.’

‘And the price?’

In Shyish, there was always a price.

‘Once your daughter is returned to life, you will serve me as I serve her.’

‘For how long?’

Unmoving, still like a statue, she stared at him for a score of heartbeats. ‘Does it matter?’

No matter the cost.

‘No,’ lied Fell, ‘it does not matter. And you are?’

‘Nothing and no one, but you may call me Misère.’ She glanced about his drab and ill-lit home before returning her attention to him. ‘I will make you powerful beyond your dreams.’

Deny it as he might, a hunger burned in him. He’d lost Leona because he was powerless. He’d failed his wife. He’d failed his daughter. And now here he was, about to fail them again because he could not learn the one spell that mattered.

No matter the cost.

‘Teach me the spell.’

The Dripping Bucket was warm and smelled of the boiled mutton Gallowglas had cooked up for the evening’s meal. A fire crackled and snapped in the fireplace, occasionally shooting sparks out onto the stone floor before it. The scent of dry birch added a subtle spice beneath the mutton. A dozen men and women sat with their chairs turned towards the corner where Terese stood. She hadn’t started singing yet, and was chatting with Rita, who sat on the table with her feet up on a chair.

Spotting Fell, Rita waved and beamed a huge, toothy grin. Terese flashed a more shy but no less welcoming smile that stuttered his heart.

He felt his face flush hot as he found an unoccupied table.

Scampering through the room, dodging around knots of people, Rita collapsed into the chair across from him.

‘Go away, you wretched little monster,’ he growled, but his heart wasn’t in it.

She ignored him anyway, saying, ‘I’m glad you came!’

Gallowglas brought Fell a brimming mug of strong ale, placed it on the table without a word, and disappeared back behind the bar.

Fell sipped the beverage and sighed.

‘Are you all right?’ Rita asked, examining him with bright eyes.

‘No. My back and knees hurt.’

‘Did you fall again?’ she asked.

He remembered kneeling in the mud, sobbing into his hands. The woman on the horse.

They’ve come for me.

‘Yes,’ he admitted.

Tomorrow he would leave Hollow’s Dell forever.

‘Rita?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you. Thank you for bringing me food. Thank you for the blankets. Thank you for the potato and bread.’

She shrugged, embarrassed. ‘You really should thank Terese for that.’

‘I will. After.’

Somehow, knowing he was leaving, knowing he’d never see these people again, freed him. He didn’t have to be grumpy. It was, at least in part, an act meant to keep people away. He needed that distance, didn’t dare get close. Everyone he ever cared about, everyone he ever loved, was dead because of him.

Never again.

‘Why do you always pretend to be grumpy?’ asked Rita, with the prescient understanding of youth.

‘All old people are grumpy.’

‘That’s not true. Ashton the baker is older than you and he’s much happier.’

I was alive two hundred years before Ashton’s great grandparents were born.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘All old people are grumpier than young people.’

She thought about that, head tilted to one side, as she played with the tangled mess of one of her plaits. ‘I suppose,’ she admitted grudgingly.

‘If you can avoid ageing, do so.’

She gave him a perplexed look as she considered his words. ‘Isn’t dying the only way to avoid ageing?’

It wasn’t, of course.

Not waiting for an answer, she stood, said something about helping Gallowglas in the kitchen, and jogged away.

The girl never walks anywhere.

So like Leona. Boundless energy. Such a pure heart, untroubled by the horrors of the world.

Someday that would change. Someday she’d be old and wrinkled, bent by the years, innocence scoured to nothing. Fell would be long gone. Not dead, but not here to witness it. Sadness crept up on him, a thief, stealing the warmth from the fire and the joy from the room. An ancient grief, centuries gone, but still sharp enough to wound.

The door to the Bucket swung open, and a large man wrapped in heavy muscle entered. He wore a hauberk of double chain, the coif thrown back and hanging loose to show the shaved dome, pocked by countless scars, of his skull. Matt-black, his armour absorbed light. He wore an unadorned livery of black. A sword hung at his side, one hand resting on the pommel. The room stilled, everyone freezing in fear. The warrior surveyed those gathered with icy eyes, dead gaze lingering on each table, before finding Fell.

Grinning white teeth, he strode through the room to join Fell. ‘Misère sends a message,’ he said, waving at Gallowglas for a pint.

‘The answer is still no,’ said Fell.

The man shrugged broad shoulders. ‘She said as much.’

Slowly, the conversations in the room stuttered back to life, the inn’s patrons careful not to stare. They might not know who or what this man was, but everyone understood that, in Shyish, such men were dangerous and served even more dangerous masters.

‘I’ll leave in the morning,’ said Fell. ‘There’s nothing for me here.’

‘Really?’ The man cocked an eyebrow, rubbing at dark stubble with a huge and scarred hand. ‘Almost twenty years you’ve been here and you haven’t made a single friend?’

‘No.’

‘Hmm.’ The man turned in his chair, made a show of studying Terese. ‘A bit old for my taste, but a good-looking woman.’

Fell stifled his reaction, shrugged.

Returning his attention to Fell, the big man grinned. ‘You care nothing for what happens to these fine people?’

‘Nothing,’ agreed Fell.

‘So you won’t care when we ride in tomorrow and butcher the lot?’

Fell studied the warrior. ‘No. Anyway, I’ll be long gone.’

Carrying a pint of ale, Rita exited from behind the bar. Fell’s heart dropped when she headed straight to his table.

‘Who’s this?’ she demanded, when she arrived, delivering the ale. Turning on the warrior, she asked, ‘Do you know Fell? From before?’ She showed no hint of fear.

‘Only by reputation,’ said the big man, grinning at Fell.

‘Begone, child!’ snapped Fell.

As always, she ignored him. ‘Is he your father?’

‘Ha! No, child. My mistress has some… interest in him.’

‘Interest? Why?’

‘Your friend Fell possesses a rather singular mind.’

‘Your mistress wants him because he’s grumpy?’

Again the big warrior laughed. ‘Quite. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I have some things to discuss with your friend.’

With a careless shrug, Rita disappeared back into the kitchen.

‘We’re going to kill them all,’ said the warrior.

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’m going to nail that girl to the wall of this shite-hole tavern and skin her alive.’

Fell leaned forward on his elbows and grinned death. ‘I don’t care.’

‘I almost believe you.’ The warrior stood, ignoring his pint. ‘But we’ve been watching you. The singer,’ he nodded in Terese’s direction, ‘sends you food almost every day. I’ll gut her, let her die slow. It’ll take days.’ He adjusted the sword at his side. ‘We’ll be back in two hours.’ He left without waiting for a reply.

Fell watched him depart, his chest tight.

If I leave now…

It didn’t matter. Misère would make sure the people of Hollow’s Dell suffered terribly. ‘Grief,’ she had told him as she stood over the ruin of his life, ‘is a weapon.’

She thinks she can change me, make me like herself.

A servant to this mysterious Lady Oh.

He remembered the swirling dust, ash dancing in the wind, whipping about his legs, staining his hands. Everything gone. Life and purpose. Ash and corpses.

Rita exited the kitchen, bringing a tall mug of water to Terese. The woman accepted it with thanks, and tousled the girl’s hair. Glancing at Fell, she flashed that shy smile. He had to look away for the shame.

‘You all right?’ asked Rita.

She stood at his side, face crumpled with concern. He hadn’t heard her approach.

Walk away.

Maybe she wouldn’t follow through with the threat if he left.

She would. He knew it.

There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Except there was.

Fell’s fingers curled into a tight fist. A smouldering ember of rage sparked to life.

Misère, you push me too far.

Fell studied at Misère’s side every day and long into each night. She guided him through the workings of the spell that had defeated him, but also insisted on teaching him spells from the second book. No longer did he sneak away to skulk in public graveyards. Her servants delivered fresh dead for him to practise his necromancy upon. Sometimes it was old men and women, or those who’d died in accidents, their bodies bent and broken. Sometimes it was children, seemingly unharmed, but quite dead.

He never asked where they came from; he dared not.

Leona. She was all that mattered.

No matter the cost.

‘If you don’t learn these spells in time,’ she said one evening, ‘you’ll die of old age long before you’re useful.’

Useful. She might have plans for him, but Fell had plans of his own. Being useful to this woman was not one of them. Dying of old age, he decided, wasn’t part of his plan either. He and Rue had lost years trying to get their daughter back. He’d learn these spells, let Misère think he would honour his end of the bargain, and give him and his wife that lost time back. From the moment Fell agreed to study with the necromancer, he began scrimping and saving what funds he could. When the day came and his daughter was returned to them, he wanted to be ready.

Very quickly it became clear that Misère’s understanding of necromancy – the raw power at her disposal – far outstripped his own meagre abilities.

‘I could never have your skills,’ he admitted after one particularly difficult evening.

Misère sat across the table from him, dressed in silks of pristine white that flowed loose and yet managed to cling seductively to the curves hidden beneath. Porcelain-perfect skin. Flashing dark eyes. If he were forty years younger, his wife might actually have some reason for the jealousy she harboured.

Misère studied him. ‘When I was your age, I had a fraction of your abilities.’

She looked like she couldn’t be out of her twenties, though Fell knew appearances could be deceiving.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

That humourless smile graced full lips and died a fast death. ‘This is not my age.’

For a moment he thought she meant that her body did not accurately display her age, but that was more than obvious. Then he saw it. Did she date from the Age of Chaos? Could she be even older, and hail from the Age of Myth?

No! Impossible!

Whatever the truth, it didn’t matter.

Once Fell had his daughter, he would abandon this dangerous woman. He’d flee with Rue and Leona. Maybe to another realm. Anywhere but here. Shyish was madness, in love with death, infected with soul-deep rot.

‘You shall serve me as I serve Lady Oh,’ Misère said. ‘In time, you shall fight at our side, help turn the tide of war. Your potential…’ She sighed with longing.

War? He dared not think about who this woman served.

Six months later, Fell had learned half of the second book – for learning with a skilled teacher was much easier than trying to translate and teach oneself – and knew he could cast the spell to save Leona.

That evening, after Misère left for wherever she retired to each night, Fell bolted the door and turned himself to the effort of raising his beloved daughter from the dead.

The spell worked, as he knew it would. He and Rue held Leona, this time crying tears of joy, as she looked around the room, trying to understand where she was, and how her parents had suddenly become so old.

Hurrying his wife and daughter, they rushed to pack what little they owned and fled into the night. Hailing a carriage, they rode to the docks. Fell purchased passage on the first ship heading south, not caring where it went, as long as it left Shyish.

Freedom. Time to finally start living again.

The next morning he stood alone at the rail, watching the sea flash past. Fish jumped and dived as they followed the vessel. A flock of seabirds, their twisting chaos staining the sky, followed too. They squawked a constant cacophony, fighting over scraps and defecating on everything. The sea air felt good on his skin. A strong breeze ruffled what hair he still possessed, and hurried the ship on its way.

He’d done it.

He’d mastered the spells and rescued his daughter from death. She was alive and beautiful, full of energy, and already exhausting Rue with her constant questions. Last night the three of them had shared a bed, all cuddled and clinging to each other, Rue and Fell unwilling to let go of their little girl.

And if she gets sick again?

No! He had power now, he could protect her, protect them all.

But is it enough?

He could learn more. There was always more. What if his talents extended beyond necromancy? Could he find a teacher? Maybe he should continue his studies. Having planned to escape Misère from the very beginning, Fell read through the second book in its entirety. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t understood much of it, for it was locked in his mind. He saw every page with perfect clarity.

I can teach myself.

Why stop? Better safe than sorry, surely!

I’ll talk it over with Rue.

They were a family again. This would be a family decision. Whatever she decided, he would abide by it. And if circumstances changed, that book was forever in reach.

‘She’s a beautiful girl,’ said Misère, standing at Fell’s side.

His heart dropped into his stomach, a deep, writhing nausea. Worms in his gut.

‘We had a deal,’ she said.

A monster of a man, clad in angular plate armour stained a deep and arterial crimson, stood with her. A hand rested casually on the pommel of the great sword hanging at his hip. Eyes, blood-red diamonds, glowed from deep within the helm.

‘I just want time with my family.’ Fell hated the desperate pleading in his voice.

She laughed, a harsh bark of scorn. ‘This was always your plan, and so it was always mine. You brought this on yourself.’

‘I’ll serve, I swear. Just let my family–’

‘They were dead from the moment you agreed to learn from me.’

It’s my fault. Guilt crushed him.

He turned on her, anger building. ‘You don’t touch them!’

Misère raised an eyebrow as if shocked by his outburst. ‘Just as your fear of failure stopped you from learning the spell you needed, your family – your love for them – will stop you from learning everything she requires of you.’

‘You don’t need to–’

‘Life is nothing. Love is nothing. To become one of us, you must shed such weakness. Someday you’ll understand.’

One of us? Fell stared at her in horror. ‘You’re insane!’

‘You thought that first book broke you. You still cling to hope.’ Misère studied him, beautiful eyes in juxtaposition with the horror of what she was. ‘We need you shattered.’

‘You can never break me,’ Fell swore. ‘No matter what you do, I shall never serve.’

‘Grief,’ she said, ‘grief will break you.’

Turning her back to him, she raised her arms as if to accept the adulation of a crowd. Several sailors stopped to admire the interesting things this did to her already interesting physique. White silk whipped about her as the wind picked up.

‘There is only one escape from grief,’ she said. ‘Death.’

And the sailors collapsed. Those working the rigging plummeted, landing boneless and broken, leaking blood into the wood. Fell felt the impacts of them through his feet.

A heartbeat later, scores of seabirds crashed to the deck or splashed down in the sea.

Thousands of fish bobbed to the surface, floated belly-up, pale and dead.

No one screamed. Silence of the grave.

‘There is but one universal constant,’ she said. ‘Decay.’ And the stench of putrefaction filled the air as scores of bodies began to rot. Flesh sank. Faces became leering skulls, maggots feasted on festering eyes. Bellies swelled and burst.

The door to the cabins below-decks where Fell and his family stayed swung open, and Ruhinn and Leona exited, blinking in surprise at the littered corpses.

‘No,’ said Fell. ‘Please.’

Misère beckoned Rue and Leona forward. ‘Use your power,’ she told Fell. ‘Stop me from taking them, and they shall live.’

What could he possibly do? She was a powerful necromancer, maybe even a deathlord, though he couldn’t bring himself to believe he’d captured the attention of one so terrible. For a mad instant he considered trying to leap past her guard to tackle her. But the thing in armour watched with glowing eyes. Fell had no doubt it would cut him down.

Dead. Everywhere. They littered the deck, fouling the air with the stench of their rot.

Raise them! Turn them against her!

There were enough that her guard couldn’t possibly bring them all down. At the least, they’d keep him busy, leaving Fell free to put a knife in her back.

Misère grinned at Fell and her disguise fell away. While her body remained curved and beautiful, flawless in every way, her face shed its flesh. Empty sockets, deep holes of endless black, studied him. Her perfect, full lips shrivelled like strips of meat left in the sun, exposing the mad rictus of cracked teeth. Turning to face Ruhinn and Leona, she lifted her arms as she had when killing the sailors.

He had to act now!

With none of her finesse and mastery, Fell screamed out the spell. Eyes clenched shut, he pictured the book, flashed through the pages.

Don’t fail! Don’t fail!

Everything had to be perfect.

Fell poured himself into the spell, sacrificed the tenuous threads of his psyche to save his wife and daughter.

And failed.

Eyes open, he stared, stunned, as Misère undid the spell maintaining Leona’s life. The necromancer was a master, a seamstress of unparalleled skill.

Fell watched, helpless, frozen by terror and grief, as his daughter unravelled. She came apart like ash in the wind, crumbling and falling in on herself, mouth open in an oh of terror. In an instant she was a dispersing cloud of dust, dancing on the sea breeze.

Kneeling, Fell screamed. He screamed threats. He screamed pleas for mercy. He begged forgiveness and swore vengeance.

Misère turned on Rue, her fingers hooked into claws. The necromancer shed the last of her false humanity, allowed the illusion of life to fall away. She was death. Clean white bone. That reaching hand squeezed into a crushing fist, and Ruhinn screamed as she suddenly aged at an increasing rate.

Rue’s hair, already shot with grey, turned white and then fell out in fist-sized clumps. Her skin wrinkled and sank, her eyes dulling like turning milk. Flesh and muscle withered. Knees shaking, she collapsed. Her hip, brittle with age, snapped when she hit the deck, and she pitched to one side. Sprawled and helpless, she mumbled incoherent nonsense, her mind gone.

A score of heartbeats later, she was shreds of rotting flesh on bone.

Numb with horror, Fell sat back, staring up at Misère, broken by grief.

She turned to face him, once again whole and beautiful, and all the more terrible for the lie. ‘Do you understand why you failed?’ she asked.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Words were gone from him, life and meaning stolen, his purpose murdered. Dead inside.

‘Love,’ she said. ‘You loved them so much the fear of losing them made you panic.’ Stepping closer, she patted his head like he was a favoured pet. ‘I’ve saved you from that.’

Tears fell as he struggled to understand what had happened.

Rue’s bones are still here.

It was enough. He might be able to raise her.

But nothing remained of Leona, the dust of her scattered to the wind.

If he raised his wife, he’d have to explain his failure, how he cost them their daughter. He couldn’t face that, couldn’t put Rue through that pain.

‘I know this hurts,’ said Misère, ‘but in time you’ll come to understand. You’ll thank me for freeing you.’

He stared up at her in mute incomprehension, blinking tears as she continued.

‘When you are immortal, godlike in power, this will seem a small price to pay. In time you will forget them.’

Forget them? Part of him desperately wanted that.

‘You will serve, and in return I shall teach you,’ she said. ‘Someday, many centuries from now, when you are ready, you shall meet my mistress.’ That hint of a mad grin.

Looking down at his hands, Fell saw them stained with dark dust. Leona. His little girl. His beautiful little girl.

‘I will never serve,’ swore Fell. ‘Kill me if you want.’

‘Kill you? No! Lady Oh has decided, and you shall be hers. You might be stubborn, but she is forever.’ Misère stared down at him with what might have been pity, had she been capable of such emotion. ‘All too human. Let me help you with that.’

Hooked fingers moved and twisted as she tore away some core part of his humanity.

‘There,’ she said, sounding pleased with herself. ‘Now you will live forever. Know, however, that this is a curse, not a gift. You shall never heal. Every wound will haunt you for all eternity.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Give it a few hundred years. You cannot die. No wound can end you. Someday you will lie broken and unable to move.’

‘I will never use necromancy again. I deserve this.’

‘Deserve.’ She snorted in derision. ‘You already know the spell that will reverse my curse.’ Misère knelt before him so she might look him in the eye. The dust of his daughter stained one knee. ‘You will break your silly oath.’

He grinned madness at her. ‘You’ve taken everything. You have no power over me.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, standing and brushing the dust from her white silks. ‘Grief is a weapon. Grief is her weapon. You think yourself beyond that now, but you are wrong. Some day you’ll feel again. You’ll love again. When that times comes, so shall I.’

Fell gazed about the Dripping Bucket – at Terese singing, Rita behind the bar wiping mugs because she had too much energy to sit still and couldn’t stand the thought of not helping – and knew that time had come.

I tried to remain apart. I tried to be distant.

Their kindness undid him.

Their kindness was going to be their death.

Only if I do nothing.

But what could he do?

A limping cripple, he had no chance of escape.

His gut soured. Misère would force him to watch these people die.

Old lady Kalindy only beat them by a day. Unlike her, the rest of the townsfolk would never be buried.

Fell’s breath caught.

Hundreds of graves, centuries of Hollow’s Dell dead.

He wasn’t helpless. All he had to do to save these people was break the promise he made to the dust of his daughter.

No! Never!

He watched Rita, red hair spilling from her braids, deliver a full mug to Ashton and return to the bar. Gods, she was so like Leona.

Will you let her die just so you can say you kept your word? Will you let them all die?

He knew the spell. He could raise the dead of Hollow’s Dell. They wouldn’t be like his daughter, not truly alive, but they could fight.

Fell stood so abruptly his chair toppled over backwards.

Startled, Terese stopped singing. All attention was on Fell, the spell of her voice broken.

Rita paused in wiping a mug. ‘Fell?’ she asked.

‘All of you stay here,’ he said. ‘Bar the door behind me. That man who was here, he came to kill me. To kill you all.’

They blinked at him in disbelief.

‘Don’t come out until it’s over,’ he commanded.

He left then, not waiting to see if they’d listened. He didn’t have time, less than two hours if the warrior in black was to be believed.

Could he do it?

Fell’s heart pounded in his chest and he remembered his failure on the ship. Misère’s cutting critique: you loved them so much the fear of losing them made you panic.

She was right, he’d panicked.

But she was also wrong. Love wasn’t why he’d failed.

Slamming the door to the Bucket behind him, Fell tossed aside his cane and sprinted as best he could for the graveyard. Gone was the careful shuffle of an old man afraid to hurt himself. Clouds blotted the night sky, choking the stars. Only tenuous hints of the moon punched through to light his path. He leapt puddles and potholes, taking risks he would have called insane an hour ago. Nothing else mattered. He would not fail this time.

An unseen crack in the path tripped him, sent him spilling to the ground. He felt the bone in his left forearm snap as he landed. Screaming from the pain and frustration, he rolled back to his feet and ran on.

The arm swung loose, grinding bone on bone, sending sparks of hot agony through him.

Nearing the graveyard, he tripped again, this time on a root hidden in the dark. When he tried to stand, he discovered he’d re-broken his left ankle and it no longer supported his weight.

Fell crawled the rest of the way, tearing his hands and knees.

You’re ruining yourself.

These wounds would never heal. He’d be crippled, helpless.

He didn’t care.

Reaching the graveyard, he found a branch to use as a crutch, and regained his feet.

Calm, he reminded himself. You will not let your love for these people kill them.

Closing his eyes, he imagined the book, flipped through the pages until he found the spell he needed.

Breathe. Calm.

Misère was wrong. Love wasn’t a weakness, it was strength. Caring about the people of Hollow’s Dell gave him reason and purpose. He would sacrifice himself to save these people. He would wipe out whatever she threw at him, and if she dared to show herself, he’d throw his strength against her too. She was always impressed by his potential. With nothing to lose and a willingness to sacrifice everything, he prayed he might at least wound her. More was too much to hope for.

Focus.

Fell lost himself to the spell. The sounds of the night and the damp smell of impending rain faded to nothing.

Misère had taken everything from him. All he had left was his word, his oath to the dust of his dead daughter, and she was taking that too.

She’d pay.

Oh, she’d pay.

I’ll have my bloody vengeance.

Fell heard a whooping war cry from the hills surrounding Hollow’s Dell. They were here, and he wasn’t ready.

He’d failed again.

‘No!’

Surrendering himself to the spell, Fell poured all he was into the dark necromancy.

The war cry grew closer, the rumbling thunder of hooves.

There were many ways to raise the dead. With skill and finesse, one could summon the spirit of whoever originally possessed the body. When time was of the essence, it was possible to call whatever souls happened to be nearest. In moments of desperation, there were infinite hells of suffering spirits one might contact.

Fell tore the fabric of worlds and threw it wide, a gaping wound. Wrenching open the gate he called upon the lost souls and savaged spirits trapped there.

‘Come to me!’

They came.

They all came.

The soft earth of the graveyard heaved and buckled as generations of dead clawed free. Skeletons, held together by gristle and ill will. The more recent dead, still clothed in their decaying finery, meat rotten and frayed. Old lady Kalindy, dressed in her best dress, her normally peaceful face twisted in a feral snarl, milky eyes seething with madness.

It wasn’t enough.

Fell screamed the spell, opened his soul to the darkest forces, unleashed countless hells. His voice echoed through the town and surrounding forest, and all the dead within hearing rose. Thousands of insects and animals. Wolves. Mountain lions. Deer and horses. Cats and dogs. Snakes. Slaughtered cows and pigs writhed and fought free of the hooks on which they hung and staggered from the butchery.

The dead heard, and they answered his call.

‘Destroy them!’ Fell commanded, and his army of decay hurled itself against the attackers.

He stood, transfixed, horrified at what he’d done. A score of armoured riders thundered into town, only to be met by a crashing wave of death. They fought, stabbing and hacking, but the dead care not for wounds.

Fell watched as old lady Kalindy, ignoring the sword stabbed into her belly, dragged a woman off her horse. The two struggled for a moment, Kalindy worrying at the warrior’s armour. Finally, pulling the coif aside, she tore the woman’s throat open with her teeth.

Everywhere such scenes of horror played out. A horse, mobbed by the corpses of vipers, their poison made worse for rot. Half a dozen dead wolves, still working as a pack, pulled another horse down and savaged its rider. The dead were unstoppable.

The woman Kalindy had killed rose, her throat a raw and gaping wound. Fetching her sword, she turned on her companion, attacking and killing him.

Fell laughed, a cracked cackling edged with madness. He succeeded. He raised the dead, and they obeyed his commands. But he also got the spell subtly wrong. Everything that died rose to continue fighting under his control. One of the raiders’ horses, belly hanging in shreds, entrails dragging behind it, reared up to trample a man, crushing him to the earth.

It went on and on, death making more death, until the dead surrounded the last warrior, the big man in black plate armour who had threatened Fell in the Bucket.

‘Don’t kill him,’ Fell commanded.

The warrior cut down scores of dead before they wrestled his weapons away and stripped him of his armour. They held him helpless, arms pinned behind his back.

Leaning heavily on his makeshift crutch, Fell approached. His left leg dragged, the ankle twisted to an impossible angle. His left arm hung limp and useless.

‘This didn’t quite turn out as you’d planned, I suspect,’ he said.

‘My plans matter not,’ grunted the big man. He showed no fear. ‘End me and be done.’

‘Not yet.’

In truth, Fell wasn’t sure why he spared the man. Perhaps he could, through torture, learn something of his opponent, Misère. He doubted it. This man would die before betraying his mistress.

Turning, Fell saw an army of the dead silently awaiting their next command.

Dull pain pulsed through his body. Everything ached. He’d done decades of damage in the last hour.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

He could undo Misère’s curse.

My promise to Leona.

What was that worth now? He’d broken his oath when he’d raised the dead. Why go on suffering?

Because I deserve this.

But someone else deserved it more.

Misère.

He knew now what she saw in him. She might have more skill, more talent. She might know more spells, but he was hardly helpless.

I’ve hidden for too long.

Flipping through the pages in his mind, he found the curse she’d worked against him, a slow path to undeath. He’d never given it much thought, but now realised there was a good reason he ate less every year, slowly becoming increasingly brittle. In another century his heart would stop and he’d be a walking corpse. There were other spells in that second book, too. Spells locked in his perfect memory but never studied. Spells for repairing the dead. Spells for reversing the damage of time by stealing life force.

Misère’s curse, he decided, was handy. No need to age. But this slow decay was unacceptable.

Skimming through the pages of his mind, Fell found a spell that tore life from the living to repair the dead.

He glanced at the helpless raider.

This spell is evil.

There was no way it couldn’t be.

But this man serves an evil master. Fell laughed. Two wrongs making a right?

Taking his time to get it right, Fell worked the foul magic. The raider’s screams, sharp and piercing agony at first, faded to dull moans and then silence.

In moments Fell stood whole, a man in his early twenties. After centuries of falling apart, he gloried in the feeling. A sunken husk, the raider stood staring at Fell with dead eyes, awaiting his new master’s command.

‘Come,’ said Fell, and his army of corpses followed after him.

There were, he suspected, one or more of the nine books hidden somewhere in Glymmsforge. He’d find them. He’d learn the spells even if they shattered what sanity he had left. Nothing would stop him.

It was time to take the war to Misère.

He would bring her down. Her mistress too, if she got in the way.

No matter the cost.

Misère watched from the trees, Pharizair, her undead guard, at her side. Red eyes glowing from within his helm, he stood motionless and emotionless, untouched by the horror.

‘I told you he had potential,’ she said.

Pharizair remained unmoved.

‘Grief is a subtle weapon,’ she mused. ‘Mere fear of it will move men to terrible action. Anything to avoid the guilt and loss.’ She smiled fondly down at where Fell stood with his little undead horde. ‘He just needed a push.’

‘He’ll come for you,’ grunted Pharizair.

‘They all do,’ she agreed. ‘But that was always the plan.’

MOURNCLAW

Ben Galley

The mire was ravenous, swallowing Durbrord Grimbelly’s boots with every hurried stride. With great heaves, he dragged them free, only to battle the next hungry puddle of muck. Clouds of hot breath escaped his mouth, wreathing his fixed scowl. If Durbrord had learned but one thing since visiting this accursed barony, it was that duardin were not naturally built for marshes.

There it was again: the snickering. An errant splash of feet in wet mud. Durbrord snatched a glance over his shoulder, seeing nothing but the curling wisps of fog and the shadow of the dark pine forest. The duardin growled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and fixed his gaze on the blurry lamps of the town ahead. As he ran, he grasped the angular shape hanging at his neck, hiding beneath his leather plate and filthy tunic.

Foliage crackled behind him. Durbrord whirled, sweeping his notched axe from his belt. He stood, tensed and ready, listening to the creaking of the insects and the drip of marsh water.

‘Come out!’ he challenged the murk. No answer came. The duardin’s weary mind conjured up monstrous foes out of the swirling mist.

Durbrord was on the cusp of turning when a dagger came spinning out of the night. He might have been close to exhaustion, but old instincts never sleep. He ducked, hearing a squelch as the blade buried itself in a mound of mud behind him. Quick on the dagger’s heels, a shape loomed from the mist. Its clawed feet thrashed through the marsh water. Durbrord recognised it immediately, even before its rank stench had reached his nostrils.

‘Skaven scum!’ he roared, raising his axe over his head.

Yellow eyes bulging, the ratman screeched as it brandished a black and twisted sword. Durbrord’s axe spun through the air, meeting the brute’s chest with a loud crack of bone splitting. Blood sprayed, and the ratman’s legs flew out from under it, the creature crashing into the mud with a squeak.

With a hiss of steel, Durbrord snatched a knife from his belt and charged to his foe’s side, ready to cut its foul throat. But the ratman had no fight left in it, only spasms of its claws and tail, and desperate gasps for air. Dark blood bubbled around the axe blade protruding from its breastplate of tanned hide. With every shuddering exhalation, it tried to speak. Wary, poised to stab, Durbrord leaned in, mindful to hold his breath against the stink of rotten meat and forge smoke.

‘Why are you pursuing me? What do the Clans Skryre want with me?’ Durbrord demanded.

‘M… Mour…’ The skaven’s verminous gaze was fixated on the duardin’s chest.

Durbrord twisted the axe. ‘Speak, you beast!’

The ratman writhed in the mud, and with the last breath that passed its fangs, it whispered one word: ‘Mournclaw.’

Durbrord flinched at the caw of a raven. He stared at the fingers of pines reaching above the fog, blacker than the night behind them, but unmoving. He look around him, scowling at every shadow. With a growl, Durbrord wrenched his axe from the ratman’s ribcage and scrambled through a puddle. Righting himself, he turned towards the speckled lights of the town, and continued to run.

Patience is a virtue sought by many yet achieved by few. It takes a sharper mind than most to realise the worth of waiting and watching. A thief’s mind, for example.

Through the narrow gap between the rim of his tankard and the lip of his hood, Mallon Tein’s inquisitive eyes shifted over the tables and their inhabitants. Locals of Kurchak, mostly. Several travellers, or roaming hunters. Mallon’s gaze tracked hands as they subtly checked pockets, or darted suddenly as precious metals caught the flaxen glow of torchlight. Mallon let the cackling and bragging and arguing wash over him like a tide. He was the silent, lonely boulder amidst its flow.

Mental notes had been made. Connections drawn. A group deeply embedded in the west corner looked promising. A bearded man with a gryph-hound lounging at his feet was huddled conspiratorially with a handful of other figures, trading whispers. Though his armour was a patchwork of various metals welded together, he had the look of a knight.

A distant niece of the local baron was entertaining a gaggle of silk-clad men by the fireplace, waxing on about the few occasions she and Baron Kurch had crossed paths.

Or a lone aelf, a merchant by the silver trim about his collar and the way he kept fondling his notebook. Mallon was interested in the thick rings of silver and gold on his fingers, and the fat coin purse at his side that his constant twitching intermittently revealed. The thief narrowed his eyes as he chose his mark.

Mallon was momentarily distracted as a duardin bustled into the tavern. He was spattered with mud and his face was ruddy behind a thicket of russet beard. He charged through the crowds, caring not whom he barged out of the way, and headed over to the group in the corner. Mallon assumed a bad debt or grudge was about to be settled, but the others welcomed him, swiftly enveloping him into their huddle without a word.

Mallon sighed and went back to his waiting. He nursed his single tankard of mead while the merchant scrawled away for almost an hour. It was only when another fellow approached the merchant’s table and instigated a hushed discussion that Mallon saw his chance. It was a fine distraction, and he pounced like an owl spotting a mouse between the rushes. He levered himself out of the chair and made for his mark. The aelf was too busy bantering to notice the thief coming. Slipping his trusty razor into his palm, Mallon stumbled, playing the drunkard as he made his way through the throngs of revellers. As he came close, he barged into the aelf’s table, spilling the remnants of his mead across the notebook. Mallon garbled an apology as he fell against the merchant. The aelf arose with a yelp, but not before Mallon had deftly slit his coin purse from his belt and pocketed it.

‘My notes are ruined, you cursed oaf!’ the merchant snapped.

‘A hundred pardons, sire. Deepest ’pologies!’ Mallon hiccupped for good measure. ‘Allow me to buy you another mead,’ he slurred, already slipping backwards, as if to the barkeep. Mallon was more concerned with the door.

‘Mead? I should have you flayed, man! You’ve cost me weeks of arithmetic!’

‘Allow me to make it up to you,’ Mallon said, and flicked him a silver coin for his troubles, one from the aelf’s own purse, no less.

It was a mistake, Mallon realised before the silver had even landed in the merchant’s palm. All his patience had been for nought. He knew it the moment he turned, and heard the two words all larcenous souls fear the most:

‘Stop, thief!’ came the shriek.

All eyes turned. Conversations died. Even the baron’s niece finally shut her trap. Mallon was already counting the worrying number of people standing between him and the door.

The aelf waved his accusatory finger about as if he were fencing. ‘That man has stolen from me! This coin he tried to distract me with is mine. See my mark on the coin’s face? Thief, I say!’ He held up the coin for all to see, and the distinct rune chiselled into its silver.

Hands immediately fell upon Mallon’s shoulders, holding him tightly despite his struggles. He felt their grip tighten as fingers rooted through his pockets, and quickly revealed the stolen purse. Mallon flashed a winning smile as the aelf retrieved it.

‘Let me explain–’

‘To the chopping block with him!’ some drunkard crowed, drawing cheers from all around.

Mallon’s charm withered in an instant. ‘The block? Wait, no! There’s been a mistake!’ He received a fist in his gut for his excuses and was dragged towards the door. There was nothing quite like the prospect of swift and bloody justice to liven up an evening.

‘Fetch Baron Kurch’s men!’ came the cries.

Mallon watched in horror as the door yawned wide ahead. Before he was carried over the threshold, a booming voice cut through the eager chatter of the mob and brought them all to a halt.

‘STOP!’

Craning his neck, Mallon saw the bearded knight from the corner come wading through the crowd. A wiry woman followed in his wake, a head taller than him, and so battle-scarred and weathered she looked like old pieces of hide all stitched together.

‘There you are!’ announced the knight in a deep baritone, looking down at Mallon. ‘He is our companion.’

Mallon nodded eagerly for anyone watching, trying to cover his sigh of relief. He had never seen the knight nor the scrawny woman in his life, but he was immensely pleased they were the charitable type.

‘We will pay the damages,’ the man continued, ‘if there are any damages now that the property has been returned.’ He threw a sharp look at the merchant, whose fist was still raised in the air.

‘It is the indignity of it all,’ said the aelf. ‘He is a thief, after all. A criminal must be punished!’

Amongst the jeers of agreement, the knight tutted admonishingly. ‘He was cursed by a hedge-witch. Made strange in the head and damned with greed. He is not a criminal, he is sick! Does he deserve to be taken to the block for that?’

‘He ruined my notebook. All my work…’ stammered the aelf.

With a grunt, the knight produced a fingernail-sized piece of what looked like torope gold from a pocket and tossed it to the merchant. It drew a muted gasp from the onlookers. The Black Marsh Barony was famed for its torope, farmed from the colossal turtles that roamed the vast marshes. Mallon would have been impressed if it hadn’t meant he was now deeply in the man’s debt. At least there would be no beheading tonight, and for that he was grateful.

‘All has been forgiven?’ the knight asked.

The aelf picked at the gold nugget with a sharp fingernail for a moment before nodding and retreating to his seat. Mallon shrugged his way out of the tight grip of the mob. They left him be, though they seemed far from happy about it. They had been cheated of their entertainment. Mallon couldn’t help but smile.

‘Come… Lothar.’ The knight beckoned to him. Mallon thought of the door behind him, still open. He had run from debts before, but this man looked the type that would hunt him to the edges of Ghur. Instead, Mallon followed cautiously behind his saviours, trying to ignore the narrowed looks and hushed accusations from the dispersing mob.

While the man and woman retook their seats amidst the tight group, Mallon stayed standing, meeting each of their gazes. The woman had a young lad by her side, a dead-eyed boy with a shaven head. The beak-like noses they shared told Mallon they were mother and son. Two men sat opposite: one hooded and smiling awkwardly, the other, balding and heavy-set, looking bored and half-asleep. Between them sat the duardin with his beetroot face, and the brute of a knight who had saved him.

Mallon flashed a grin. ‘Well, thank you kindly for interjecting there. Very kind of you. It’s not often you find such charity in this realm. I shan’t bother you any further, I really must be going, so thank you ag–’

‘Malefitz,’ the knight said.

Before Mallon could make sense of the word, a pair of sharp, iridescent purple ears appeared above the table, followed by two glittering eyes and a hooked yellow beak that snapped menacingly. A low growl made the feathers at the gryph-hound’s neck shake. Mallon’s legs did the same.

The knight ruffled the beast’s ears. He still played the friend for now, but Mallon saw the hardness in his gaze. ‘Malefitz here doesn’t take kindly to rudeness. We did you a favour, didn’t we? Least you could do is sit down with us.’

Mallon realised there was nothing charitable about this man. As with ur-gold or realmstones, there was a currency in favours, and like anything with value, they could make or break a man.

With a sigh, Mallon sat, much to the duardin’s apparent dislike.

‘Should’ve just left him to have his head chopped off, Ulriker,’ he said gruffly, his stern mouth only barely visible between his thick, rust-coloured beard. ‘We don’t need anybody else for this job, especially not some grubby tavern brigand from the backside of nowhere.’

‘You sure about that, Durbrord?’ Ulriker snapped. ‘Didn’t we all start out nowhere?’

The duardin fell silent.

Mallon spoke up, playing tough to hide his nerves. ‘I’m no common brigand. And the grubbiness is intentional. You’re one to talk, duardin. You’ve brought half the marsh in with you, I see.’

A tense moment passed, ended only by the bored-looking man snorting with laughter. Durbrord crossed his arms, and Ulriker’s glaring expression broke into an ivory smile.

‘Sharp tongue on this one.’

‘Speaking of brigands, who are you lot?’

‘Sharp wit, too, I see. We’re mercenaries by trade, lad, and you might be just what we need.’

‘Need for what?’

Ulriker leaned over the table. His fellows did the same, heads bowed. Mallon half-expected them to begin praying. ‘I’m sure a thief like you is aware that the realms are strewn with old trinkets lost throughout the Ages,’ said the knight. ‘Some are treasures that only dreams are made of.’

‘Or nightmares. Others treasures are dangerous. Objects of Chaos,’ Durbrord added.

‘Valuable in either case, especially when delivered into the right hands.’ Ulriker narrowed his eyes. ‘The Stormcast Eternals, for example.’

Durbrord and the others nodded emphatically.

‘And you’ve found one of these treasures, I take it?’ Mallon asked.

‘Not quite,’ said the hooded man with the ever-present yet nervous smile.

‘But I might know somebody who has,’ growled the duardin. ‘Something who has.’

‘If Durbrord’s information is correct–’ Ulriker began, but Durbrord’s spluttering cut him off.

‘Why would I lie, old friend? I’ve still got rat-blood on me!’

Ulriker waved his gauntleted hand dismissively. ‘If Durbrord’s right, then we intend to kidnap him and make him tell us where it is. Then we can go and retrieve it,’ said the knight.

Mallon shrugged. ‘And then what?’

Ulriker snorted. ‘We deliver it to the nearest Stormkeep and claim the reward.’

‘You sound more like rogues and burglars than mercenaries,’ said Mallon, wary.

Ulriker smirked. ‘Not our usual kind of work, true, but if we pull it off, work will be a distant memory. I, for one, am tired of scratching a living on the fringes of the Realm of Beasts. Aren’t you?’

The woman spat on the floorboards, as if the notion disgusted her. ‘I still say we should just kill the bastard,’ she said.

Ulriker clenched a fist. ‘Perhaps we will, Elfrun, but after he has given us what we need. How many times have we been over this?’ His gaze moved around his circle. ‘Each of us has grudges to make peace with.’ His grey eyes found Mallon. ‘Or debts to settle. Unfortunately, none of us are thieves, and that’s why we need one.’

‘He’s clearly not a very good thief, is he? Just got caught red-handed,’ grumbled Durbrord.

Ulriker’s stare was intense, still locked on Mallon.

Mallon raised his chin. ‘First time I ever got caught, I swear.’

‘Then come south with us. If you live through the next few days, your debt will be paid and many times over. You won’t have to worry about robbing aelves in backwater baronies any longer.’

Ulriker had stumbled upon Mallon’s desires. Whether unknowingly or incisively, Mallon didn’t know. Escape. That was all he had ever dreamed of: of making it to the cities. Here was his chance, though not in the form he had expected.

The thief drummed his nimble fingers on the mead-soaked table. He couldn’t abide their stares for long. ‘I don’t really have a choice, do I?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said the knight, wearing his broad smile. ‘You don’t. Not unless you can pay your debt in coin or gold or torope tonight? Then we can call our business concluded. Or you can take your chances with the charming citizens of Kurchak.’

Mallon thought of his hoard, stashed in the wall of his hovel, deeper within town. It barely paid for a quarter of what Ulriker had donated to save his life.

‘I cannot,’ he admitted.

With that, Ulriker clapped his gauntlets on the wood and arose. The rest of the table moved with him. Even Malefitz got to his feet, tongue lolling from his sharp beak. Mallon was left sitting, quite confused as to how the whirlwind of the evening had brought him here. He looked up, feeling miniature.

‘What’s your name, lad?’ the knight asked him.

‘Mallon. Mallon Tein.’

‘Well, Mallon Tein, what’s your answer? Will you come with us or will you visit the block after all?’ Noticing Ulriker was patting the sword at his belt, Mallon hoisted up his hood and got to his feet. There was precious little alternative, after all. This way he could watch, and wait. Patience was Mallon’s virtue. Perhaps he could make it his saviour, too.

‘The word treasure does have a certain appeal,’ he said.

Ulriker chuckled, and as the others moved off, he clapped Mallon so hard on the back he almost pitched the thief onto his face.

‘Then welcome to the Rusted Blades, Mallon Tein. Welcome indeed.’

It took half the night to traverse the bogs of Black Marsh, and Mallon spent it swatting vicious insects from his face and staring at the vast yet faint shadows of the immense turtles in the distance, and the trails of lights that clung to them.

By the time dawn rose upon the barony, the small band had reached solid ground amongst the dark clutches of the pine forests of Askan. Though the trees swayed above them, whispering unknown secrets, they felt no breeze, just the thick, cloying air between the endless tree trunks and knee-high shrubs. Their path wandered, but Durbrord led them true, following some map drawn only in his head. Ulriker seemed content to trust him, and so did the others.

By the time the sunlight rose above the trees, they had broken free of the pines and stood upon the edge of the Vilefang Wastes. There Ulriker called for a halt, and the Rusted Blades broke their fast and slaked their thirst.

Mallon sat upon a rock, digging through the meagre supplies he had snatched from his hovel before they had left town.

The bald man who had been half-asleep at the tavern noticed how empty Mallon’s haversack was, and sighed. ‘Not much of a traveller, hmm?’

Mallon shook his head. ‘I’d always planned on leaving Black Marsh one day, when I had enough of a hoard. Always wanted to seek or steal my fortune in Excelsis. Not so abruptly as this, mind.’

‘Not a fighter either, eh?’

‘What do you mean? I can look after myself.’

‘You ain’t got no weapon.’

Mallon held up a hand, revealing the thin blade of a razor cradled in his palm.

‘Ha! That little slicer?’ The man laughed with abandon, drawing the others’ attention momentarily.

‘It does the job. I’m a thief, not a knight.’

Still chuckling to himself, the man rummaged in his pack until he found a spare knife, and handed it to Mallon.

‘Here. Name’s Lundrich Twice-Killed, by the way.’

Mallon took the knife and poked it through his belt between his pouches. ‘And why do they call you that?’

‘Because I’ve come back from the grave more than once,’ Lundrich said with a wink. Before they could say any more, Ulriker called for them to move on.

In single file, the Rusted Blades left the carpet of pine needles and dead leaves, and put their boots to grit and sand instead. The rolling hills of the Vilefang Wastes were featureless save for the scattered, bleached monoliths that poked from the scarlet sands like the fangs of some gigantic, buried creature. The sun beat down, scorching any bare flesh, and Mallon was glad he had brought a cloak, even though he was sweating tankards beneath it.

‘Where are we headed?’ he asked of Lundrich, who was marching ahead of him.

‘South.’

‘I know that. How far south?’

‘A day’s journey, maybe less. To the Fiend Crags.’

Mallon had heard of that place. Evenings upon evenings spent watching marks in the taverns of Kurchak tended to lead to a lot of eavesdropping. Nothing he had heard of the Fiend Crags was good.

‘But that’s skaven territory…’

Lundrich yawned. ‘Aye, so it is.’

‘Clans Skryre territory,’ growled Elfrun, walking behind them. ‘And they have no idea we’re coming.’

Mallon’s mind might have been young, but it had been honed by tough experience. He put the pieces together. ‘We’re kidnapping a skaven? I expected this to be a simple job, not a suicide mission. You don’t just steal idly from the ratmen.’ Any thieves Mallon knew that had tried had disappeared without a trace.

‘We’re meaner than we look, thie–’

‘Shut it, back there!’ Ulriker barked, interrupting Lundrich’s gloating. ‘By Sigmar! You should be keeping an eye out for grots or great worms, not yammering on!’

‘Aye!’ Lundrich shouted half-heartedly, before yawning. By the vacant look in his eyes, Mallon couldn’t help but wonder if some of the man had been left in the grave.

Afternoon saw the Fiend Crags appear on the horizon: dark and ominous. At first, Mallon thought them distant monoliths, given how jagged they were. As the leagues passed by underfoot, they proved themselves to be dominating towers of rock, surrounded by volcanic black foothills. Before the Crags lay the humongous skeletons of creatures Mallon had never seen or heard the like of. Their sun-bleached ribs would have dwarfed any tower in the Black Marsh Barony, perhaps even rivalled the spires of Izalend, if the rumours Mallon had heard were true. Their skulls still held teeth the length of pine trees, each eye socket the size of a courtyard. He shivered to think of a time when such monsters roamed the Realm of Ghur.

Ulriker called the Blades to a stop on a ridge pockmarked with great craters and pulverised boulders. There they slumped in the sand, staring across the plains of bones. Closer to the Crags, fat streaks of black smoke rose from unseen pits amongst the foothills.

‘The ratmen come to hunt the beasts that roam the plains. For meat, fur and hides, for warbeasts, or just to test their foul weaponry on living creatures,’ Durbrord told the Blades in his gruff tone, looking thankful for a chance to rest his legs.

‘Filthy bastards,’ Elfrun spat. She had a habit of doing that.

Mallon could smell the soot and char of forges on the breeze. With the evening starting to fall, an unholy green glow could be seen amongst the darker crags, sparking amidst the amber light of fires.

‘You lot wait here,’ Ulriker ordered, tightening the straps on his mismatched armour. ‘Durbrord and I will go to the next ridge and scout ahead.’

‘We will?’ asked the duardin.

‘Aye, friend,’ Ulriker replied, standing over him. ‘We’ll see if your suspicions of the Clans Skryre are correct. Come, Malefitz.’ The gryph-hound yowled before it bounded over the ridge.

‘Hmph.’ Durbrord unsheathed a battered axe and held it firmly with two hands. Its blade glowed copper in the light of sunset.

Without another word, they departed, leaving Mallon alone with the others. They worked silently, producing victuals and kindling for a quick fire. A cold was creeping across the wastes, chasing the shadow of night.

‘Adalbero,’ said Elfrun, already cross-legged by the small pile of wood she had built.

The hooded man, who had remained silent since the tavern, knelt by her side. Clenching a fist over the fire, he muttered to himself, sounding curiously irate. With a babbling burst of foreign words, fire sparked in his palm. He pressed it to the kindling and let it burn.

‘You’re a wizard,’ Mallon stated, stepping into the firelight.

Adalbero took a seat on the sand. ‘I am,’ he said, looking proud now his smile had returned. ‘I was in training, once. I hope to be again.’

‘What happened?’ asked Mallon, ever inquisitive. More than that, he knew information to be both a tool and a weapon, depending on the situation. It was always wise to have one to hand.

The wizard cleared his throat. ‘Clerical error. A mistake.’

‘He was kicked out. Ejected in disgrace,’ Lundrich chuckled. The Twice-Killed chose to lounge on the sand, eyes already half-closed, catlike. Only Elfrun’s son chose the cold, keeping watch on the skaven fires.

‘Shut it, Lundrich,’ Adalbero snapped.

Elfrun spoke around a mouthful of cracker. ‘He’s right though. The Collegiate Arcane booted him out for peeking at a forbidden grimoire. We found him in a tavern last year, all covered in ash and blood, half his clothes burnt off. The place was gutted by fire. Ulriker thought the Rusted Blades could use some magic, and here he is.’

Adalbero huffed and occupied himself with the fire. His fingers moving in intricate, twitching patterns, he pulled and pushed on the flames, bending them absently to his whim.

‘And how did the rest of you come to be in the Blades?’ asked Mallon, chewing an apple. ‘Do you all owe debts to Ulriker?’

Lundrich snorted. Elfrun spat in the sand again. ‘Life debt for me,’ she said. ‘Two years ago, he and Durbrord saved me and Oddone from a gang of ratmen.’ The young boy turned at the sound of his name, but said nothing. ‘Now I get paid to exact my revenge upon them.’

Twice-Killed spoke up as he stretched. ‘I clashed with Ulriker and Durbrord over a job a while back. The old bastard almost killed me a third time, so I decided to join him. I’m just here for the coins and gold, lad. And for the excitement. Once you’ve seen the face of death twice, you get bored quite easily.’

The wizard paused playing with the fire. ‘Ulriker saved me like he did you. Bought off the guards and murderous barkeep with torope. I’ll be paid up after we find and sell the Mournclaw.’

‘Mournclaw?’

‘The Mournclaw Mace. What we’re stealing, lad. Some grand old weapon that Durbrord knows of,’ said Lundrich.

‘That’s the treasure? A weapon?’

‘By Sigmar, you ask a lot of questions.’

Mallon threw up his hands. ‘Probably because nobody has told me anything since leaving Kurchak. Only that we’re on some mad mission to kidnap a skaven.’

Elfrun shrugged. ‘That’s because we ain’t been told much ourselves. Ulriker only tells us what we need to know. The rats know of a treasure, and we’re going to beat them to it.’

‘What’s Ulriker’s story, then?’

Lundrich yawned. ‘None of us know much. Only that he’s a beast with a blade and a damn stubborn mercenary. He was a knight once, but found himself disgraced somehow. There’s a darkness in his past drives him, but I’ll be damned if I know what. Durbrord’s known him the longest besides Elfrun and Oddone, and though they’ve never seen eye to eye – pardon the pun – they seem to trust each other. At least enough for mutual gain.’

Mallon’s naturally curious mind was already bursting with questions. He had trouble holding his tongue.

Elfrun nodded. ‘All I know is that Durbrord hates the skaven almost as much as I do. And that this Mournclaw job was his idea even though Ulriker acts like it was his. Ulriker’s intent on delivering this Mournclaw to the Eternals. He thinks they’ll restore his honour.’

‘I tell you, this is personal for Durbrord, too. I can see the fire in him…’ Adalbero muttered.

‘How fortunate the ratmen are content in their burrows this evening, Blades,’ a gruff voice admonished them. Those around the fire flinched, grabbing weapons. It was Ulriker, emerging from behind a shattered boulder with his gryph-hound.

Durbrord was behind him, a duardin spyglass in his crossed arms. ‘They would have heard your gossiping from a league away,’ he said.

None of the Blades spoke. Mallon wondered how much Ulriker had heard.

The knight stood over the fire. ‘Our warlock’s banner stands above a small rift, set apart from the Crags and only an hour’s journey, as luck would have it.’

The unease settled like a rock in Mallon’s gut. ‘Did you say a warlock?’

‘A warlock engineer, lad,’ Ulriker responded. ‘Problem?’

‘That’s madness, surely!’

The knight grunted. ‘You might be afraid of a little danger, thief, but the Rusted Blades have no such fear. We have the scars to prove it.’

Mallon shut his mouth, realising his arguments would have counted for nothing. He thanked the gods he was fast on his feet. There was nothing cowardly about escaping with one’s life, and he vowed to do it as soon as this situation went awry. Hopefully Mallon’s debt might die with Ulriker, and he would be free to pursue his fortune once more.

It seemed he wasn’t the only one with a worry to be voiced. ‘In fairness, Ulriker, you didn’t say we were kidnapping a warlock engineer,’ Adalbero grumbled. ‘That is no ordinary ratman.’

The knight sighed wearily. ‘Better tell ’em it all, Durbrord, before we have a mutiny on our hands.’

Durbrord stepped forward. ‘Warlock Engineer Volz Flayfang of the Clans Skryre. He’s the one who’s been hunting the Mournclaw. He’s the one who’s been sending his ratmen after me. Twice in the Amber Steppes and again last night, in the marshes, like I told you. All because they want this.’

Taking great care, Durbrord parted his bush of a beard and dug an intricate key from around his neck. It filled his palm from fingertip to wrist, and was made of interlocking cylinders and thick duardin runes. Mallon had never seen a key like it.

‘What is it?’ Lundrich asked.

‘The only key to a duardin tomb. My ancestors’ tomb, here in the Realm of Ghur, where the Mournclaw is hidden behind stone, lock and spell. If Volz is hunting for the key, he knows where the tomb is.’

Ulriker drew his sword. Like Durbrord’s axe, it was notched and rusted in places. Mallon was curious why a knight so rich in torope gold couldn’t afford a better blade, or armour that wasn’t cobbled together from shards of a dozen different suits.

‘Once we kidnap Volz, we’ll have both the tomb and its key,’ Ulriker said.

Or Volz will, thought Mallon. ‘Why can’t we just lure him out with Durbrord, then pounce when he’s out in the open?’

‘You want to use me as bait, lad?’ Durbrord looked furious. ‘How bloody dare you.’

Ulriker drove his sword into the black dust. ‘We go into the rift tonight. Who’s with me?’ he barked. The Blades said nothing. Elfrun and Oddone did not hesitate, moving to stand at Ulriker’s side. Lundrich shrugged, cursed, but did the same. Adalbero and Mallon were left standing by the extinguished fire.

‘Fine.’ Mallon moved first, leaving Adalbero to scramble after him. Let Ulriker doubt the wizard, he decided, while the thief slipped away.

The mouth of the rift in the black rock glowed like a dragon’s throat. Though stretching high up the jagged cliff, the doorway to the burrow was narrow. Ribcages, those of men and other creatures, littered the sand around it, between bloody, sharpened sticks and banners with the three crossed bars of the abhorrent Horned Rat. Symbols had been blasted into the sand by some ungodly fire, declaring Skryre land, and the burrow of Volz, or so Durbrord told the Blades.

A deep rumbling from within the rift caused a tremble in the earth around it. Screams and screeches intermittently escaped into the night. The stench of death, rotten meat and forge soot was already overpowering, and Mallon had yet to even see a ratman.

Gripping the knife handle hard enough to hurt his hand, he watched the rest of the Rusted Blades move slowly down the scree towards the rift. Adalbero and Oddone crept beside Mallon, one bare-handed and the other wielding two curved shortswords. The boy seemed barely old enough to pick up one sword, never mind two. In front of them, Elfrun had an arrow nocked on a bow.

As Ulriker closed the visor of his helm, the others wrapped kerchiefs around their mouths to keep from choking on the thick air. One by one, they entered the starless dark of the rift, following the glow and noise, and feeling the heat begin to grow. Mallon tried to hang back, but to his infuriation, he found Twice-Killed bringing up the rear.

‘Steady, lad,’ he said.

Fine advice that was, thought Mallon.

The chilling screech of a tortured beast filled the rift. Ulriker held up his sword and the Blades froze, hugging the obsidian walls. No sooner had they halted than a hulking ratman emerged from a side tunnel. Ulriker’s blade fell in a blur, hacking into the thick fur at the back of the skaven’s neck. Despite the rust, the sword cut true, and the ratman managed a pitiful squeak before Durbrord’s axe sliced him to the floor.

After dragging the body aside, the Blades moved on, swifter now. The rift soon split into three channels. The sound of clanging and smoke poured from one, along with the stink of charcoal. Smears of blood – some fresh, some dried – criss-crossed the roughly hewn walls.

‘Where are the bastards?’ hissed Elfrun.

‘I only care about one of them! Volz!’ Ulriker snapped. He looked around before snapping his fingers at Mallon. ‘Which way would you go, thief?’

Mallon wracked his brains. Skaven minds did not work with the same logic as a man’s. The tunnels seem to have been built with no reasoning. He chose the one on the far right; one that led deeper into the rock, smaller and unlit. It was an instinctual guess. ‘That way,’ he said.

‘This way!’ Sword held ready, Ulriker led them into the tunnel.

‘Adalbero!’ came the order.

The wizard held his hand high, fingers clawed, straining to keep a candle-flame alight.

A damning squeak rang out. Mallon caught the glint of eyes in the darkness ahead. Far too many for his liking. A dagger clattered against the wall by his head and he took cover behind Adalbero. As the skaven drew closer, Elfrun tossed her bow aside and drew a longsword. Mallon snatched up the bow from the dirt. He’d spent a youth hunting deer with a bow half this size. With a thief’s swiftness, he plucked an arrow from Elfrun’s quiver and sent an arrow flying into the shadow. His rusty skills were rewarded with a screech.

Four clanrats, flea-bitten and twisted runts, charged them with vicious spears. Elfrun and Oddone met their advance, batting the spears aside and swinging their swords at the ratmen’s limbs. Dark blood sprayed in arcs behind her strikes. The dying squeals were matched only by Elfrun’s roars of fury.

‘Onwards!’ yelled Ulriker, eyes burning furiously through his visor. The battle had commenced. There was no stopping it now, no matter how many times Mallon snatched looks over his shoulder.

Ratmen came at them in ones and twos and threes, and the Rusted Blades left a trail of furry corpses in their wake as they burst through tunnel after rock tunnel in search of the warlock.

‘More of them are coming!’ Lundrich yelled from the rear. Mallon turned and saw a green light filling the tunnel behind them. A ratman bearing a smoking metal contraption on his back sprinted into view. He brandished a butcher’s knife in one claw and a glowing globe in the other. Behind him ran a score of clanrats, baying for blood.

‘Man-things! Sneak-find!’ they squeaked.

‘Stop that ratman! Kill him!’ Ulriker bellowed.

Mallon scrabbled to grab another arrow, but was plunged into shadow as Adalbero extinguished his flame. Green warp light seemed to envelope them eagerly, but it was momentary. An orb of red fire sputtered into life between Adalbero’s hands, roaring and spitting fiercely. With a cry of fury, the wizard released the fireball upon the skaven. It struck the acolyte in the chest, throwing him into the clanrats. As the glowing globe broke in the spell’s blast, it exploded into a billowing cloud of green gas that immediately ignited into a firestorm.

‘Run!’ yelled Adalbero, already sprinting for the mouth of an adjoining tunnel. The Rusted Blades followed suit without complaint.

‘The gate’s locked!’ Ulriker yelled, driving his shoulder against it to no avail and drawing a roar from his nearby gryph-hound.

‘Let me!’ Mallon pressed himself against the rough iron gates the skaven had thrown together, and alongside a lock pick, he dug his razor blade into the crude lock at its centre. Within moments, Mallon had broken it, and the Blades flung themselves to safety before the fire could consume them.

Ulriker didn’t hesitate. ‘That’ll keep them busy. We keep moving!’ he ordered, pressing on. With the warpfire lighting their way, they careened over scree and rock until they saw an opening into a larger tunnel. A gang of black-furred ratmen stood there, clad in hide and mail and sporting ragged banners on their shoulders. They were listening to the explosion that had rocked the burrow. At their midst, a smaller skaven squeaked order after order.

‘That must be Volz,’ hissed Durbrord. ‘And he hasn’t seen us!’

Ulriker was seasoned enough to slice an opportunity’s throat when it reared its head. ‘Blades, claim your destinies!’ he yelled, causing the skaven guards to turn.

Lundrich sped past Mallon. The Twice-Killed made his mark on their hide armour, stabbing like a lunatic until three ratmen were slumped at his feet. Elfrun and Oddone hacked away beside him, parrying fangs and claws with their blades. Mallon tried his best to avoid the mayhem, attacking from the flanks and stabbing frantically wherever he could. He ducked as Adalbero was tossed aside, a spiked tail lashing him across the stomach.

With Ulriker and Durbrord cleaving away like woodcutters attacking a copse, the fight was over in moments. Mallon’s head spun.

As the remaining ratmen cowered before the blood-soaked Blades, Volz Flayfang was revealed. He was a crooked, piebald creature covered in scars and patches of metal bolted into his skin. One eye glowed red; the other was encased behind an oval of ruby glass, copper and wires.

Lundrich made a grab for him, but not before the warlock engineer raised a monstrous-looking pistol and squeezed its trigger. The warpstone bullet had no chance to miss. Lundrich’s head jerked backwards, a bloody hole of bone and flesh where a face used to be. Tendrils of green smoke curled from the back of his skull. Lundrich Twice-Killed was dead before he toppled to the ground, and this time, it looked highly likely he would stay that way.

Ulriker used the flat of his sword to knock the warplock pistol from Volz’s hand, and with his fist, struck the ratman square in its furry jaw. Malefitz seized the ratman’s arm in his teeth, and after a swift kick in the goggles from Elfrun, the engineer fell unconscious. The element of surprise had somehow won the night. The Blades almost seemed surprised as they stared at each other, breathing heavily.

All except Durbrord, who hefted his axe. ‘The battle isn’t over yet. We still have the tomb to find.’

The rush from the rift had been a savage, blood-soaked affair, with Mallon claiming two more ratmen and receiving a gash across the cheek for his troubles. Adalbero had proved his worth once more. It appeared his anger made his pyromancy flow, and despite being injured, he conjured a wall of flame high enough that the ratmen were blocked from pursuing.

A hurried, breathless rush ensued, back across the scarlet sands, now robbed of their colour by the night and faint starlight. Ulriker slung the unconscious Volz across his back, letting the skaven’s limbs and tail dangle as they scurried across the wasteland. Adalbero had kept his spell burning long after they escaped the foothills of the Fiend Crags, and only once they had stopped for breath behind a monolith did they hear the faint screeches of the Clans Skryre, pouring out into the night.

The Rusted Blades continued to move, gasping yet determined. Soon they felt alone between the monoliths and gigantic, towering skeletons. As Ulriker led them a straight and hurried path through the graveyard, Mallon’s neck grew sore from constantly looking over his shoulder.

The Blades ran, jogged and finally trudged until the sun shone upon them once more. They had reached an edge of the Vilefang Wastes, and looked out over fields where scarlet flowers bloomed between the cracks in the dead earth. Rusty grasses drew patterns in the crust. Still, the skeletons remained with them, otherworldly silhouettes stark against the dawn sky.

‘Where are we?’ Mallon asked of Oddone as they walked, but he received no answer. His mother spoke instead.

‘The Bloodbloom Fields.’

‘And here we will speak to our ratman,’ called Ulriker. He pointed to a shard of an immense jawbone, still cratered with empty tooth-sockets. It protruded from the earth at an angle, and they took shelter beneath it.

The knight dumped Volz on the ground, eliciting a faint groan from the creature.

‘Should just knife him now, given what he did to Lundrich,’ murmured Elfrun, looking particularly twitchy. Oddone hovered close to the warlock.

Ulriker pushed her away. ‘Back, I say! What would be the point in Twice-Killed’s death then, you fool?’

Mallon slumped to the earth a short distance away, content to watch while the burning in his legs and lungs subsided.

‘Up, rat!’ Durbrord shook Volz liberally, making the ratman’s tongue loll. ‘By Grimnir, he reeks!’

Volz pounced. His eyes snapped open as he hooked his claws around Durbrord’s neck. The skaven was quick, but the duardin was quicker, jabbing the warlock with his knife. Volz squeaked, giving Ulriker the chance to pin him to the ancient bone wall, and squeeze. Malefitz strained at his heel, eager to put his sharp beak to work.

‘Behave, Volz Flayfang. We don’t want to kill you, but we will if you leave us no choice.’

Mallon saw the sharpness in the ratman’s red, forge-scorched eyes. There was intelligence in this beast.

‘Still-quiet, I be, man-thing,’ Volz rasped, baring his sharp fangs.

Ulriker released him, and the warlock slumped to the ground. Durbrord bound him with rope as Adalbero stood guard. One of the wizard’s hands was clamped to his bleeding stomach, the other outstretched with fingers caged, spells ready to burst from him.

Volz stared at the wizard with amusement. ‘Spell-caster. Break-burn much in sneak-fight,’ he said.

‘And he’ll break-burn much more if you don’t cooperate,’ Durbrord warned him.

Volz’s forked tail flicking impatiently. Oddone watched it avidly, sword ready.

‘Speak-piece, fool-meat,’ said the warlock.

Durbrord crouched before him, resting his axe handle in the dust. ‘You know what we want, Volz. The same thing you want. The reason you sent your clanrats to steal this from me.’

The duardin revealed a sliver of the key to the warlock, and Volz stiffened.

‘You tell us where the tomb lies and we’ll spare your life,’ he pressed him.

‘Lie-speak. False-tell.’

Ulriker struck him hard and Volz spat out a tooth.

‘Tell us where the Mournclaw is, Volz,’ he growled.

‘Knight-meat, you look clever-smart. Lead-order these others?’

‘I do.’

Volz grinned, dribbling blood into his piebald fur. ‘Then you die-break last. You watch-see them cry-shriek first.’

‘Do you want to die, ratman?’

‘You seek-find me. Need me. No-kill.’

Mallon couldn’t help but point it out. ‘He’s got you there, Ulriker.’

The knight glowered daggers at the thief. Malefitz growled.

‘Think-idea,’ proposed the warlock. ‘Tomb deep-hidden, hard-tough to tell-speak you where it is. Take-carry Volz with you instead. He need-must show you. Seek-find tomb together. You spare-loose me after-then.’

‘Ridiculous. He’s playing for time until his clanrats can find him. He’ll slow us down every chance he gets,’ said Elfrun.

The others nodded. Even Adalbero, straining with his magic.

While Durbrord knuckled his brow, Ulriker strode back and forth.

‘Fine!’ he yelled.

‘Ulriker…’ said the duardin.

‘Adalbero, keep an eye on that rat,’ Ulriker ordered. He beckoned the rest of the Blades aside, out of earshot of the warlock. ‘What use is claiming the Mournclaw if we die before claiming our reward, Durbrord? If we beat them to your family’s tomb, we can destroy them with the Mournclaw Mace. Him and all his clan,’ he argued in a low growl. ‘Think how much honour that would bring us all, when we arrive at the Stormkeep.’

Elfrun growled appreciatively. Mallon’s ears pricked up, along with Adalbero’s. The tomb belonged to the duardin’s line, it seemed. The thief could see now why Durbrord was so invested in this mace.

‘It’s a weapon of Chaos, Ulriker. I’ve told you before, you can’t wield it, no matter how strong you think you are! My ancestors couldn’t, and that’s why they buried it.’

‘Enough! We will not discuss this now!’ Ulriker barked.

The Rusted Blades watched on, eyes wide. It was Mallon who spoke up. He was tired of not having a say over his skin.

‘We have to take the ratman with us,’ he said.

Ulriker moved closer to Mallon, reaching out a hand and grasping his shoulder. ‘The thief is right. We must keep moving no matter what. We lost Twice-Killed already,’ he said, taking a moment to pause. ‘I refuse to lose any more of you.’

The others murmured their assent, though they sounded far from eager about it. Mallon certainly wasn’t comfortable carting the rat with them, but it seemed the only way to keep them moving. And alive.

Mallon approached the rat. Durbrord was right: the creature did reek. ‘Which way, Volz? How far?’

Volz regarded the thief with a curious look in his eye, and for a moment, he did not speak. ‘South-ways, edge-boundary of Blood-fields. Day’s scurry-scurry.’

Ulriker dragged the ratman up by the scruff of his neck and shoved him. ‘South it is, Blades. Onwards!’

‘Keep still,’ Ulriker ordered the ratman as he trussed him up with another length of rope. There was so much already wrapped around Volz’s body he looked somewhat like a maggot.

‘If anything, it might keep the smell in,’ Mallon said. At least it stopped him weaving spells.

‘You better hope it does. And count yourself lucky we made up the miles today, or you wouldn’t get to rest at all. We’d still be running. Not so good in the hot Ghurish sun, these skaven, but they move like a gryph-hound once it goes down. That’s why you’re on first watch tonight. Keep your blade close, and don’t listen to a word Volz says. Skaven breathe lies,’ said the knight, laying a heavy hand on the thief’s shoulder. ‘You’re alive, and that means you did well. Keep it up and you just might live to be a rich man.’

Ulriker left Mallon there, somewhat alone with Volz. Malefitz was nearby, one eye open and fixed on the rat. The others were gathered around Adalbero’s fire, where the wizard was busy tending his wound with the help of Elfrun. Mallon inched out his razor, just in case the skaven wanted to play dirty.

An hour must have passed before the others were fast asleep, exhausted from the brisk day’s journey across the Bloodbloom Fields. Mallon stretched, eyes shifting from the fields to Volz. To his surprise, he found the skaven staring at him, the creature’s red eye narrowed.

‘New-blood,’ Volz whispered, making Mallon flinch.

‘Don’t speak. You’ll wake the others.’

‘Care-none. You not friend-clan?’

‘I’m not their friend.’

‘Come-stay for coin, then. Knight-meat promise-swear you riches?’

Mallon struggled to understand the rat’s speech, but he got the gist. ‘In a way, yes.’

‘Mournclaw,’ chuckled Volz, ‘its poison-curse tastes sick-strange to each who seek-want it. Why knight-meat want it?’

‘Gold, I suppose. Honour. Glory.’

‘Sure-think? Duardin-meat speak-true about man want-think he wield-use Mournclaw. Don’t trust-believe him.’ Volz paused, watching Mallon’s reaction. ‘And duardin-meat?’ he asked.

Mallon shrugged. ‘To destroy it. For his family…’ Realising he was somehow entertaining the warlock’s questions, he added, ‘Shut it, skaven. No more questions.’

‘Know-know what Mournclaw is?’

Mallon tried his hardest to keep quiet, but his curiosity beat his resolve. ‘No.’

‘Duardin-meat build it. Many-time year back. Bash-club for rat-skulls. Clever-smart skaven steal-take it. Change-build it. Make it ours for Horned Rat. Duardin-meat steal-claim it back. Dig-bury it for long-year, until Volz find-see.’

If Volz spoke the truth, that meant this mace rightfully belonged to Durbrord, Ulriker’s ideas of glory be damned. Was it stealing if a soul claimed what was owed to him? Mallon swallowed, watching the sleeping forms around the smouldering fire.

‘Knight-meat worry-trouble you?’ asked Volz. ‘Trust him?’

‘That’s enough from you,’ Mallon warned the skaven.

‘Volz know magic. Fool-meat warriors do not. Not even spell-caster.’

‘Shut it, rat!’ snarled Mallon, brandishing his razor blade close to Volz’s throat. ‘Or you won’t ever speak again.’

Volz winked a red eye at the thief as he turned around to lie on his shoulder. ‘Find-catch will clanrats. Faster-foot than man-things. No-need sleep. Will gut-kill all. Think-right when time comes, thief.’

As if hearing Volz’s words, Adalbero arose from his bedroll and lumbered over to Mallon. He seemed in pain.

‘Has he given you any trouble?’ asked the wizard hoarsely.

‘Just won’t shut up, is all,’ said Mallon, seeking to escape the stench of the ratman. His heart was pounding.

‘What did he say?’

Mallon winced. The fact the man shared the same debt to Ulriker almost loosened his tongue but he held back, knowing better. ‘Just the same old threats of disembowelment,’ he lied.

Adalbero wiped sweat from his forehead. ‘Ulriker will keep us safe.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

The wizard looked to the fire and chewed his lip. A wave of pain seemed to take him then, and he doubled up.

‘Are you sure you’re fit to watch him?’ asked Mallon.

‘Me? I’m fine. Just a scratch,’ Adalbero replied, with a feeble cough. His pale forehead was slick with sweat. Earlier, it had only seemed like a minor wound, yet now the skin around the cut was turning ochre. Dark veins were creeping across his stomach, like dirt roads spreading from a foul town. Mallon didn’t dare to mention the word ‘poison’ to the wizard, but it crossed his mind all the same.

Mallon found a space on the cold earth and stretched his hands out to the warmth of the embers. Ulriker slept in his armour nearby, chest rising and falling beneath his breastplate. Mallon idly counted the different pieces he had forged and welded together, and wondered what a knight had to do to be disgraced, and yet somehow remain rich.

He gazed at the pouch at Ulriker’s side and wondered how much gold hid within. He reached out, fingers hesitant, but a quick glance told him all were fast asleep. Mallon’s practised hands undid the clasp and dug inside, feeling a pouch filled with something that felt like rocks. He plucked one free just as Ulriker snuffled in his sleep, and rolled to face Mallon, one eye stuck open. The thief swiftly turned away. His nose pressed to the dust, he placed the torope nugget on the cracked earth and stared at it. He picked at it as the aelf had done before taking his knife-butt to it, and bashing it as loudly as he dared. Once, twice, thrice. The nugget dented then cracked open, revealing a thin patina of gold hiding grit and iron beneath.

Mallon clenched the knife until his hand ached.

Morning saw a cold dew hugging the Rusted Blades. The bitter and irritable crew of seven stomped out across the undulating moors of crimson grasses and defiant flowers. When a frigid wind gusted and blew clouds of loose petals across the fields, it momentarily appeared to rain blood.

Dawn had broken with cries and shouts as the Blades awoke to find Elfrun throttling Volz. It had taken both Oddone and Ulriker to drag her off him. Volz had grinned through it all. Even when the ratman was forced to march, his smile would not fade.

Elfrun and Ulriker prodded the beast ahead of them with sword-points. He had been gagged to prevent him from weaving more lies.

Mallon hung back with the hollow-eyed duardin, who seemed quieter than usual.

‘How much do you trust Ulriker?’ Mallon asked of him, unwilling to mince his words any longer.

‘Gossiping again, thief?’ replied the gruff Durbrord.

Mallon grumbled. ‘Merely trying to understand this mess I seem to find myself in.’

‘Humph. You and me both, lad,’ Durbrord admitted. Perhaps it was the tiredness, or the way Mallon caught him eyeing Ulriker, but the duardin’s tongue was loose that morning. He sighed deeply. ‘I wonder if I should have ever told him of the Mournclaw.’

‘Why did you?’

‘Because the Mournclaw deserves to be destroyed by the Eternals, and my family deserves to be left in peace, not desecrated by some filthy rat-horde!’ Durbrord growled, then sighed. ‘And besides. I owe him. He found me half-drowned in a bucket of mead. Dragged me up by the beard and put an axe in my hand. Since then he’s always kept me in coin, and trusted me as I trusted him. He and I are the same. Disgraced, dispossessed, and damned stubborn. See his armour? Made up of the armour of enemies he’s killed, usually the most savage ones. He’s a fierce man with a lot to make up for.’

‘Care to tell me what?’

‘It’s not like me to tell a man’s past for him. Let us say he was a callous man in his youth. A proud knight, skilled, but death followed him like a shadow. It cost him his honour and he’s been fighting to get it back since. Most of the time, it keeps him on a virtuous path. Though, when he found out about my family tomb, and what lies inside…’ Durbrord lowered his head, seemingly ashamed to have been duped. ‘He’s changed.’

‘Take it from a thief, greed is a poison,’ Mallon whispered.

As if the knight had the ears of his gryph-hound, Ulriker turned to check on his Blades and locked eyes with Mallon.

‘Up front, Durbrord! According to this filthy rat, we’re getting closer,’ he called.

‘Same-like clanrats. They come quick-quick,’ Volz tittered, receiving a clap around the ears before being gagged again.

Mallon matched the knight’s gaze. His had been a short life, but he had yet to let anyone take advantage of it. No thief-boss, no marauder, no baron. His life was his. Ulriker was fool enough to think he owned him.

‘He lied to me, you know,’ muttered Mallon, before Durbrord was out of earshot. ‘That torope gold in his pocket is fake. Worth less than sand. He lied to both me and Adalbero. Ulriker sounds very adept at finding people when they’re at their lowest. Most desperate…’

‘Durbrord!’

The duardin swatted at a crimson flower and left Mallon alone. He stared back at the wizard, who now trailed behind, looking greyer than the sky and bent like a man thrice his age. Mallon looked past him. North, to the immense crown of ribs perched on the horizon. He would have run, if he hadn’t wanted to expose Ulriker for the fraud he was.

Mallon kept to trudging, loathing the burn in his calves. Like the others, he watched every ripple of wind-chased grass, every shadow between the great skeletons. They marched in this fearful way until once again the sun followed its inexorable path into the distant black spires of the Hornteeth Mountains.

Ghur was famed throughout the Mortal Realms for its beasts, both savage and terrifying, but no thought crossed the Blades’ minds except the Clans Skryre hot on their heels. As night fell, they saw the light of fires and torches shining against the skeletons, reanimating their sun-scorched bones.

‘Magic not help-save you now. Clanrats scurry-hurry,’ Volz chuckled, as Adalbero failed to light a fire. The wizard was as white as milk, and now shaking. It looked as though a fever ran through him.

‘Ulriker… I don’t feel–’ Adalbero whispered.

‘Get some rest, man,’ said Ulriker, preoccupied with the warlock. ‘Volz, you scum. How far?’

The ratman sniggered. ‘Eager-keen, knight?’

Ulriker punched him without the restraint he’d displayed previously, yelling, ‘Where do we go now?’

Volz reeled from the blow, and yet somehow between spitting blood, he still managed to laugh. It was deeply unsettling.

‘What truly want-for Mournclaw, fool-meat? You think-believe you can carry-wield like ratmen? Ha!’ Volz squeaked with glee. ‘Want-see yourself a mighty hero-warrior?’

Ulriker looked around the Blades, face earnest. Durbrord was scowling. ‘Lies as always! I want nothing but the reward we’ll get when we deliver the Mournclaw. That is all! He’s sowing doubt in your minds!’ Ulriker cried.

‘He’s not the only one doing that,’ muttered Mallon.

Before the knight could respond, a warpstone bullet struck a spur of bone mere feet from them, exploding with a trail of green light.

‘Take cover! How close are we, Volz?’

Volz nodded towards a black spear-thrust of stone that matched some of the skeletons for size. ‘There-place.’

As the first war squeaks reached their ears, Ulriker hoisted the warlock up, grabbed Durbrord by the shoulder and sprinted away. ‘Keep moving!’ he hollered over his shoulder.

The rest of the Blades followed, chasing Ulriker as he scrabbled through the night.

Behind him, Mallon saw dark shapes rushing through the blood-red fields all around them. The starlight caught the glint of steel and glowing skaven eyes. Mallon’s chance to escape had crumbled like stale bread.

Adalbero had dropped to a knee. A brown-furred ratman burst from a clump of crimson grass, jaws wide and screeching. The wizard scorched him with a hurried spell, sending him squealing.

‘Come on, Adalbero!’ Mallon cried, but the wizard shook his head.

‘It’s skaven poison! No saving me now, thief. You were right,’ he wheezed. ‘This is all madness.’

Another clanrat fell upon Adalbero then, stabbing him through the shoulder with a wicked dagger. The wizard roared, and Mallon heard the urgency in his voice.

‘Run, thief!’

As Mallon threw himself after the others, rolling and biting sand, Adalbero burst into flame. As the thief snatched a last look, Mallon saw him as a man-shaped pyre, his skin pure white flame, his face a snarling mask of ash. Mallon made it to the cover of an enormous tooth as the fire spread outwards in a whirlwind. Adalbero’s scream seemed entwined in it, elongated, burning alongside the spell. Mallon felt his hair curling in the heat.

With ratmen behind him and the Blades before him, Mallon decided to run. Using the distraction of Adalbero’s spell, he managed to catch the rest of the mercenaries as they hastened through the fields. By the sound of the snarls and screeches coming from the darkness, Malefitz was wreaking havoc amongst the ratmen. Ulriker had the warlock over his shoulder. Durbrord ran alongside. Elfrun and Oddone seemed singular in their desire: follow. Mallon did the same.

‘Where’s Adalbero?’ Ulriker yelled.

‘He fell behind!’ replied Mallon. ‘Poisoned by a blade in the Skryre tunnels!’

‘Should have mind-watched your spell-caster. Not Volz,’ the rat chastised them.

They traced the edges of the Bloodbloom, running through knee-high thickets of red flowers and leaving broken vegetation in their haste.

‘How far, Volz?’ panted the knight.

‘I told-tell. South-ways. To a rock.’

‘And when we find the tomb? What then, Ulriker?’ asked Durbrord, making Mallon run closer.

Ulriker sighed. ‘We’ll set the bastard free, and take what we came for, old friend,’ he said, making Elfrun growl.

‘And you expect Skryre to simply leave us be?’ asked the duardin.

‘They will once we get our hands on the Mournclaw,’ Ulriker replied. Volz squeaked to himself appreciatively.

‘Nobody will touch it but me. I told you that from the beginning. It is my Mournclaw,’ hissed Durbrord sternly. ‘My ancestors’ tomb. Remember that, old friend.’

‘I will,’ Ulriker snapped, vaulting a hedge of scarlet flowers. ‘But I don’t plan on dying alongside them because you’re unwilling to do what’s needed. Remember that, old friend. I’ve never led you wrong before, have I?’

Mallon fought not to speak up, and let Durbrord grumble instead. The thief glanced behind him, and in the dying light of Adalbero’s fire, he saw the dark shapes regrouping. He could taste the gathering stench in the air. Ratman after ratman must have filled the fields around them. All he could do now was keep running. He refused to end up like the wizard.

As the Blades weaved around boulders and bones, Mallon found himself running beside Volz. The warlock stared at Mallon with his bulging, scorched eye, whiskers twitching as the cold wind blew.

‘Close-near to end now. Clanrats almost caught-snatch you.’

‘Shut it.’ Mallon’s feet involuntarily twitched, eager to sprint away through the grass. His knew his escape from Ulriker and his Blades would be swift. He narrowed his eyes, watching the wind send waves across the dark-red fields. There, between clumps of shifting grass, he swore he caught the faint glint of eyes staring back at him. They were being toyed with.

‘They want you back alive, don’t they?’ he whispered.

Volz nodded. ‘Important-smart Volz is to clan. Smart-thinks. Tells clanrats what to do-kill. Make big-boom weapons. Many fall-die at Volz’s claws.’

‘If you’re so important, then you can get me out of this mess alive.’

‘Clans Skryre too fierce-strong?’ The warlock snickered.

‘Ulriker’s too stubborn to know when he’s beat. Durbrord and the others don’t see what it’ll cost them. I’m no fool. I don’t want to die at the hands of your clanrats out there.’

Volz bared his fangs in a broad smile. ‘You want-make a deal?’

Mallon swallowed, finding his throat dry. Skaven were famously untrustworthy, but the thief was enormously desperate. ‘I keep you alive, you keep me alive. Free to walk away.’

‘And the others?’

The thief clenched his jaw. ‘There’s no turning back for them,’ he muttered.

‘Think-talk like skaven, thief-meat,’ Volz hissed, his gaze even more avid than before. ‘Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Mallon!’ called a gruff voice from behind. ‘Stop talking to that filthy liar!’

Mallon kept a plain look on his face as Ulriker caught up to them. ‘He was just telling me how much he couldn’t wait to eat us all.’

‘I’m sure he was,’ Ulriker growled. ‘I’m sorry it’s ended up like this, lad,’ he said. ‘This quest wasn’t ever meant to be easy, but it’s becoming desperate.’

Mallon watched the cracks around Ulriker’s face tense and soften as he spoke.

‘You’ve done me well. You all have. Even Adalbero and Lundrich, Sigmar save them. I won’t let any more of you down, I promise that. Trust in me, and I’ll see us through to the end. Alive, and richer than you ever dreamed. Agreed?’

Ulriker stuck out a callused hand, and offered an easy smile amid the thicket of beard.

Doubt flared once more, and then Mallon remembered how the torope gold had crumbled in his fingers. He shook the hand firmly mid-stride.

‘Agreed,’ Mallon lied.

A distant screech made them both flinch.

‘Faster, Blades!’ Ulriker roared, breaking into a sprint.

‘Keep that warlock close,’ Durbrord ordered. Elfrun grabbed Volz eagerly as she tore past. ‘We don’t stop until we reach the tomb!’

Mallon chased them, hoping to Sigmar he had chosen the right devil to put his trust in.

In the shard-like foothills of the Hornteeth Mountains, the Rusted Blades huddled up against a wall of black rock, breathless, and blades trembling. Their lungs burned as bullets zipped over their heads. Clans Skryre had parried and feinted with them the whole day, chasing them deeper into the canyons.

‘Where now, Volz?’ Ulriker barked, over the screeching filling the evening air.

‘There-place.’ The warlock stayed calm and aloof despite the madness of the chase. He nodded down a channel of rock, where the skaven’s ungodly machines had chewed at the mountain. Part of the rock face lay curiously untouched.

‘Hold them off! Durbrord, see to the door!’ The panic in Ulriker’s voice was audible. Mallon drew his knife to stand between Elfrun and Oddone while the duardin pressed his hands to the black granite.

‘Duardin doors,’ Mallon heard him muttering.

A yellow-furred ratman broke into view, wielding a vicious pike. Oddone ducked its blade and sliced the thigh of the skaven, pitching it into the earth. Malefitz ripped into its throat, finishing it off.

‘Now-time, duardin-meat. Waste-tarry or die!’ snarled Volz, slumped at the foot of the rock.

‘Quiet, rat!’ Durbrord was hesitating, stuck between decisions. ‘Give me time!’

‘We have no choice!’ Mallon cried, knowing the doubt he was experiencing. Scores would have to be settled within the mountain.

Durbrord dragged the cylinder key from about his neck and pressed it against the doors in different places. It took far too long for Mallon’s liking, but with a grunt, Durbrord slid the key deep into a hidden space in the rock, and turned. With a mechanical rhythm, the rock face split at its centre, revealing a doorway and a dark passage beyond.

Ulriker was already inside, dragging Volz with him. Malefitz was close at heel. No sooner had the doorway yawned than it started to shut, and Mallon sprinted towards it. Elfrun and Oddone were too busy carving red ribbons from several hide-clad clanrats.

‘Come on!’ Mallon yelled after them.

Elfrun turned and ran, trying to pull the bloodthirsty Oddone with her. It was at that moment that a hulking skaven scooped up the boy from the earth and dragged him away between the rocks. Elfrun howled as Durbrord dragged her inwards, roaring with the animalistic note of a mother losing a child.

The rocks were now alive with ratmen. Pikes poised to skewer him, Mallon hurled himself inside the shrinking doorway before it ground to a close.

Sprawled on the rock, the thief looked up to see a dozen skaven spears wedged in the thin gap of light. They twitched as their owners struggled.

Durbrord found his tinderbox and filled the darkness with a sulphurous glow. Volz’s eyes glowed in the light. ‘What happened to setting the warlock loose?’ the duardin asked.

Ulriker’s chest was heaving. There was a sour look in his eyes as he regarded his remaining Blades. ‘Changed my mind. We might still need him. Or we can bargain with him, if it comes to it,’ he replied, meeting Durbrord’s glare.

The duardin snorted. ‘Glad to hear you’ve come to your senses,’ he said. ‘Come! They’ll break through soon!’ He strode forward as if he knew the way, ignoring Elfrun’s visceral grunts of frustration. She still clawed at the rock face and spearheads.

‘Elfrun, we have to keep moving!’ Mallon warned her.

‘Not while there is rat-blood left to spill,’ she growled.

‘Ulriker!’ Mallon shouted after the knight, but he did not seem to care.

‘Leave her! Or stay and die!’ came the echo of his shout, his form already lost behind a corner.

Mallon winced, watching Elfrun’s heaving chest, listening to her savage, guttural grunts. The knight knew her heart. She had chosen her fate, and Mallon still had to reclaim his. With a bellow of frustration, he left her behind, chasing the orange light of the others.

What remained of the Blades ran silently, listening to the echoing crash of rock and the roars of Elfrun behind them. The reverberations hung in the musty air long after the four survivors delved deep into the tomb.

Between his frantic footfalls, Mallon glimpsed angular duardin architecture and runes between the shadows. The air became frigid, and as the stairs flew past beneath them, Mallon began to feel the weight of the earth above him. Why duardin had such a penchant for living below ground escaped him.

As hewn tunnels turned to smooth-stone corridors lined with tiles and mortar, Mallon began to glimpse treasures between gateways and offshoots. Golden cups and silver shields, dotted between untouched suits of fine mail and plate. The thief in Mallon longed to dart left or right, but he stuck true, clinging to retribution and survival.

‘Where now, Durbrord?’ Ulriker snapped as they came to a fork in the corridor, both blocked by doors of thick stone.

‘You ask me as if I’ve been here before!’ Durbrord snapped. ‘Not a single member of my family has entered this place for many centuries.’

‘Then think like your ancestors, old friend, and fast!’

‘The time for giving me orders has passed, Ulriker. You walk on my ground now. Remember that,’ snapped Durbrord, his patience clearly worn away, and his suspicions worn to a sharp point.

Ulriker said no more, though he gripped his blade tighter. As did Mallon.

‘Be clever-smart, thief. Time-time comes for choice-make,’ whispered Volz.

‘I should silence you right here, warlock,’ Ulriker hissed.

‘Then kill-end, as you promise-say. Won’t save-free you. Clans Skryre come.’

‘Durbrord!’

Brandishing his key alongside his axe, the duardin moved forward and chose the left door: deeper into the mountain. Though the oppressive rock made Mallon’s heart pound, with ratmen swarming behind him, the only way was forward. He stuck close to Volz, listening to the growing shrieking behind them.

With every bend in the route, with every chamber of sarcophagi and glinting treasures they passed, the more frustrated Durbrord seemed to become. He was seething by the time they reached a door of obsidian, marked with skulls in silver, as if it belonged to a Chaos cult. It looked promising, but only a bare corridor was revealed.

‘This is hopeless, Ulriker!’ he yelled.

But the knight pressed on, undeterred. ‘We’re close. I can feel it.’

‘Your stubbornness will get us killed.’

‘No, it won’t,’ said Ulriker. ‘I can save us.’ A fiendish grin had appeared on his bearded face. It disturbed Mallon greatly.

‘You can’t wield it, Ulriker!’ Durbrord accused him, abruptly snapping. ‘That stinking ratman was right. You are a fool!’

Ulriker didn’t reply. His smile was fixed and his feet determined. All that could be heard was Volz chuckling.

They climbed a steep upward ramp to a domed hall and found a silver door blocking their path. Across its polished surface, geometric patterns were interwoven with stout bars and rivets. There was no handle or keyhole to be seen, merely a small hollow emblazoned with a duardin rune.

Ulriker dragged his blade across the door, making sparks but not so much as a scratch. He slammed his fist against it, then the pommel of his sword, but it seemed firmer than a mountain.

‘What is this?’ Ulriker hissed, fists clenching and unclenching. ‘Unlock it, Durbrord.’

Durbrord brandished his axe but said nothing. He seemed to be staring at the rune as if he recognised it.

‘Door is blood-bound,’ chatted Volz casually, as Ulriker threw him aside. ‘Answers to family-kin only.’

Ulriker cursed. Mallon could see the sweat beginning to run down his cheeks.

‘He’s right, Ulriker.’ Durbrord stepped closer to the door. His hand hovered over the hollow. ‘You go no further, old friend.’

Ulriker look incredulous. ‘You seek to betray me?’

‘As you seek to betray us? I told you time and time again, this isn’t your family’s tomb. It is mine, not some trunk for the plundering. The warlock is right, curse it! You want the Mournclaw for yourself, do you not?’ Durbrord yelled.

Ulriker might have puffed and snorted, turning red in the face, but he made no argument.

‘You think it can restore your honour? Your disgrace? I told you – it would change you, Ulriker, more than your greed already has. The Mournclaw would kill you. You are not strong enough. None of us are.’

Mallon recognised the thirst in Ulriker’s eyes. He had seen it many times in other thieves; in men that didn’t know when enough was enough.

‘I say let him take it,’ Mallon spat. ‘Death is what a liar and a cheat like you deserves, after all.’ Seeing the narrowing of Ulriker’s eyes, the thief grinned without humour. ‘I know about your fake torope gold, Ulriker. Your lucky knack for finding lost souls is nothing but a sham. Go ahead. Take the Mournclaw. Reap its rewards.’

‘Curse you!’ roared the knight.

Before Mallon could raise his knife, Ulriker struck. The knight’s sword came swinging fast and hard. Mallon barely had a chance to dive wildly out of the way before he was sent reeling, arms windmilling as he teetered on the edge of the steep ramp.

Even as Mallon tumbled, he heard the clang of sword blade against axe head. He spread his arms wide, trying to stop his fall. His knife clattered away from him. He clawed at the stone once, twice, three times before he managed to arrest his momentum. He’d barely halted before he heard the scuffle of rat-claws in the tunnels behind him, and between the fighting above, Volz’s incessant tittering and Malefitz’s yowling.

Mallon heard Durbrord cry out. He began to scramble up the slope, not due to any notions of allegiance in his head, but to be anywhere that wasn’t about to be littered with skaven.

As he saw the shapes of ratmen streaming through the mouth of the tunnel below him, Mallon reared above the edge of the slope with a cry. He sprawled on the stone, just long enough to see Ulriker slicing the axe from the duardin’s hand. Blood flowed with Durbrord’s outraged cry, spraying the stone beneath him. Before the axe could clatter to the floor, Ulriker had already seized Durbrord by the beard and was muscling him to the doorway. He slammed the duardin’s remaining hand against the rune, and to the clanking of buried machinery, the door cracked open down its centre. A shaft of unearthly emerald light divided the hall. Ulriker bathed in it, grinning, before throwing Durbrord into the chamber ahead of him.

Treading as quickly as he dared, Mallon crept to the doorway, thanking Sigmar it stayed open now that Durbrord’s bloody hand had touched it.

Inside the Mournclaw’s chamber, the air was stifled and old. Ulriker, too obsessed with his prize to spare a glance for Mallon or Durbrord, strode towards the Mournclaw, cradled on its pedestal in the lone shaft of light.

It was an ugly thing, and yet the Mournclaw Mace somehow commanded awe. It was a formidable-looking weapon: a stout metal handle the length of Mallon’s arm, with a crown of intricate blades and spikes atop it. The sable metal refused to shine with any light but the sickly green glow of the crystals at its core. Wide-mouthed skulls decorated the handle, frozen in the anguish of dying.

Durbrord was curled around his severed hand, feverishly mumbling the word ‘betrayal’ over and over as blood pooled beneath him. Mallon could have bound his hand. He could have stayed at his side, but there, deep beneath the earth, in the dark, loyalty had crumbled. Self-preservation was now the only truth to hold onto, and with a horde of skaven swarming at his heels, Mallon knew what he needed to do.

Braving the foetid warp-glow of the mace, Ulriker stood at the pedestal and reached into the light to claim his treasure. So entranced was he by the Mournclaw that he failed to see or hear Mallon running up behind him. Only when the thief’s knife plunged into his neck did he break from his reverie.

Ulriker roared, swinging a fist wide. Mallon was already crouched, and poised to plunge the blade into Ulriker’s chest. He did so, his blade finding a weak spot between the mismatched metals of the knight’s breastplate. Malefitz pounced at that moment, sinking his sickle claws into Mallon’s arms, but Mallon’s razor dug into the gryph-hound’s temple. Malefitz’s golden eyes rolled up before he slumped to the cold flagstones.

‘You…? Out of all of them…’ Ulriker gasped, mouth flapping, dark blood painting his teeth.

‘Now we’re even,’ Mallon said as he reached into Ulriker’s belt pouch, and brought forth a nugget of so-called torope. Mallon crushed it beneath his heel as the knight’s life left him.

Mallon wasted not a second; the sound of myriad claws on stone was becoming deafening. Leaving the blade in Ulriker’s chest, he surged forward to the pedestal and ripped Mournclaw from its rest. Clutching its handle, Mallon felt an icy power rush though his veins, felt darkness seep into the corners of his vision. For a moment, he was filled with notions of wielding it himself, but he could only tolerate its touch just long enough to turn, kneel, and drop it at the feet of the warlock.

Mallon prostrated himself before Volz, eyes fixed on the mace lying on the floor, and mouth busy mumbling through prayers to any god that was watching.

An eerie silence fell. Mallon couldn’t help but glimpse over his bloody arm. He saw the edges of the domed hall crowded with skaven. They panted heavily and bared their teeth, but they took not a step towards him.

Mallon heard the scratching of claws in front of him and looked to see Volz Flayfang emerge from his bonds. The rope fell from him as if it had been cut hours ago. The ratman arose from the floor to his full height, now towering over Mallon. His forked tail swished gleefully at the edge of the thief’s vision.

Every muscle in Mallon’s body was clenched. He fought not to gag against the stench of so many skaven around him. Mallon felt his hands trembling as he gestured towards the Mournclaw.

‘Take it,’ whispered the thief. He felt Volz bend down, closer to him, and sniff. The ratman’s whiskers fell across his ear and cheek, making him flinch.

‘Thief-scoundrel last to live. Impressive.’

Mallon dared to look up, meeting Volz’s red eye inches from his face. ‘You have the Mournclaw. That’s what you wanted, correct?’

Volz snickered. ‘For such-long, I have hunt-looked for the Mournclaw. Dig-find, we did, until we see-spy magic spell impenetrable. Know we need duardin-meat and duardin-blood to break it. Rusted Blades work-kill for Volz. Exactly as he plan-see it.’

Mallon saw it now. It had been a trap from the moment Durbrord had come bustling into the tavern. Who knew how long Volz had been planning this?

Mallon had never been a groveller, but he knew its worth in certain situations: the kind that ended in either death or survival. ‘Very clever, Volz. You outsmarted all of us. Now, I do believe we had a bargain. Seeing as I kept my end of it, I simply wish to leave and go home,’ Mallon said. Silently, he swore never to leave the Black Marsh Barony again. His dreams of far-flung Excelsis had died with the rest of the Blades.

The thief watched, rapt, as the warlock picked up the Mournclaw Mace. Green light emanated from the crystals at its centre, stuck between the blades. Something about the weapon seemed to leak vapour, as if it boiled in the cold of the hall. Though it looked heavy, Volz appeared to brandish it with no effort. The weapon seemed to fuel him in some way, and he stretched even taller. The skaven around the hall’s edge began to screech and holler in praise of their warlock. Several snapped their thick tails like whips.

‘Our deal, remember?’ Mallon shouted above the noise. He begun to shuffle backwards on his knees, when Volz’s claws alighted on his shoulder. Mallon flinched away in fear. The ratman sighed in his ear and Mallon froze. What felt like a day of waiting passed before he felt able to sit straight, and slowly look up at the warlock standing over him. Volz was grinning as usual, and though that smile was full of sharp and bloody fangs, Mallon saw a kind of respect there, if one could see such a thing in the eyes of a beast.

‘The thief. Last fool-meat alive. Better than all-lots of these,’ Volz hissed, as he ran his claws over Ulriker and Durbrord.

Mallon smiled back. He rested back on his heels, glancing at the shaking body of Durbrord. The duardin was staring at him, judging even in death.

Volz balanced the Mournclaw on his furry shoulder and took a deep breath, sounding disappointed. ‘Shame-shame the thief-meat was not born-lived a skaven. Would have done-proved Clans Skryre proud.’

Mallon took breath to speak. ‘I–’

He never finished his thought.

The charcoal-black blades of the Mournclaw sliced through the thick air without a sound, colliding with Mallon’s head before he could blink. His skull was pulverised in a flash of green lightning, leaving nothing but black blood, charred bone and the broken corpse of a thief behind.

As his clanrats squeaked in approval around him, Volz raised the bloody mace, feeling the Chaos magic burn his veins.

‘Shame-shame.’

RIVER OF DEATH

Anna Stephens

‘Won’t his lordship get blisters on those soft hands of his?’ Sati asked with a sneer.

Brida groaned. ‘Don’t be like that, Sats, please,’ she begged. ‘Eron Rush is a good man.’

Sati curled her lip but relented when Cahn, her brother, kicked her ankle. A faint blush stained the young woman’s cheeks and, despite herself, Brida was glad. The twins were her oldest friends, but they both thought her marrying into one of Demesnus’ ruling families was a mistake, a betrayal of the poor weavers and fishers she’d grown up with.

The burden of their resentment bit at her. Brida rubbed her palm over her lips, feeling those calluses that Eron didn’t have snag against her skin. Calluses from wielding the rush-knife, from tying knots, from punting, from weaving. From scratching a living in a city once a centre of learning and power. The birthplace, if legend was true, of Saint Garradan – Gardus Steel Soul – himself!

But despite the care and wise governance of the Rush family, Demesnus was a shadow of its former glory. The city was famous for its weaving and basketry, yet the rushes that supplied their industry were failing, great swathes of them dying year after year, irrespective of their hardiness and ability to spread far and wide along the edges of the river. Some thought they had been harvested too heavily for too long, others that some new parasite or blight had found its way downriver.

Whatever was causing it, times had been especially lean this last year, and a small, selfish part of Brida acknowledged that marrying Eron Rush would put such concerns behind her. The thought shamed her; what about her friends? How would Sati and Cahn fare when they took over their parents’ business? How would Brida’s own family cope without her to cut rushes for them?

Cahn was laughing silently at her distraction, no doubt believing her daydreams had taken a different turn, and she felt a blush, hotter than Sati’s had been, warm her cheeks, both at the implication and her own cowardice at not correcting his opinion.

She checked the binding that attached her rush-knife – a sickle as long as her forearm – to its pole, which was longer than she was tall, and listened to the twins’ good-natured bickering as they waited for Eron to arrive. He’d do so in a flap, Brida knew with a secret smile: he hated being late, but he hated getting up early even more, and to get all the way to the eastern docks on the River Quamus for dawn was more than he could manage.

And then there he was, the mist cutting the brightness of the sun so it didn’t flare in the burnished red of his hair the way she liked. Instead it was dull with moisture, but his eyes were alive – apologetic and laughing both. He faltered a little at the sight of Sati and Cahn, then came resolutely forward with an engaging grin. Sati was at the pole and Brida shot her a warning glare. She wouldn’t put it past her friend to rock the punt as Eron clambered in.

She needn’t have worried. Eron sprang off the quay into the middle of the boat with ease, balancing against its movement with unconscious grace. It impressed the twins. It did something far more interesting to Brida’s stomach, but she swallowed against it and the resurgent blush.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ he babbled, snaking an arm around her waist and kissing her cheek, the corner of her mouth. He let go before she could push him away and advanced on the twins, hand out. ‘I’m Eron. Brida’s told me so much about you.’ He patted the satchel slung over his shoulder. ‘I brought supplies so we can stay out all day. Pies, cheese, apples, salted pike. Even some beer.’

Cahn’s mouth dropped open. ‘Well,’ he managed, standing to shake Eron’s hand, ‘that’s a good start.’

Sati was more reluctant, her expression promising Eron all sorts of pain if he hurt her friend. Eron pressed his lips together and gave her a solemn nod, a silent oath. Sati’s eyes narrowed a little, but then she huffed and shook his hand too. Brida released her breath.

‘All right, daylight’s burning,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s get moving. Sats, you’ve got the pole. Cahn and I will row until we reach the reed beds.’

‘I’d like to do my share,’ Eron said, and sat down at the oar before she could protest. Cahn shrugged and took the other, leaving Brida with nothing to do but navigate and hope they’d all get along. It was disconcerting. It was wonderful. Mostly, it was terrifying.

The morning brightened as they moved upriver from Demesnus, Cahn making Eron work hard to match his rhythm. Her fiancé was soon sweating and his smile had become a rictus, but he didn’t complain and he didn’t slow. He was the outsider here, and it seemed he was determined not to embarrass himself.

They all fell silent as they passed a huge reed bed. The tall brown stems were soft, bending over under the weight of their own heads. Brida knew from frustrating experience they would fall apart if she tried to weave with them, and anything she did make would hold a strange, bitter scent unlike anything she’d ever smelt before. Many of the oldest weavers were worried by the unknown blight, muttering prayers to the Lady of Leaves for intervention. Demesnus had enjoyed peace and prosperity for many years, and Brida worried that that time was coming to an end.

‘Hey, Eron. Heard of the River-Watcher?’ Sati broke the silence and they all jumped.

Eron nodded, grave. ‘I have,’ he said solemnly. ‘The spirit of the Quamus. Some say he’s a sort of god. That in return for an offering he will ensure a fruitful harvest from the river.’

Sati’s eyes narrowed. ‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘He’s a spirit all right, and he demands offerings, but they’re to stop him upending your boat and dragging you to the bottom of the river. He eats the unwary, they say. The unlucky. Those whose offering isn’t proportionate to their status.’

Eron stopped rowing and they drifted slowly. Brida stood up, ready to intervene. ‘Then I suppose I should make an offering that’s appropriate, shouldn’t I?’ Eron asked. ‘What would you suggest?’

Sati pursed her lips and Brida groaned inwardly. Her friend’s impulsiveness had got them all into trouble more times than she cared to remember, and she had no idea what Sati might suggest to see how far she could push Eron, the rich man who’d stolen Brida away.

‘Your dignity,’ Sati said.

‘Sats,’ Brida warned, but Eron interrupted.

‘A mighty offering indeed for one so stiff-necked and unfamiliar with the real work done by the good people of Demesnus,’ he said, and before anyone could comment, he stood up and stripped off his coat. ‘River-Watcher, accept my dignity as your offering,’ he called, and belly-flopped into the water.

The boat rocked and Sati flailed to regain her balance, her mouth an ‘O’ of astonishment as she clung to the punt’s pole.

Cahn began to roar with laughter as Eron surfaced and paddled for the side, his mouth tight with pain from the impact and a string of weed clinging to one ear. He hauled him on board and gave the other man an approving slap on the back. ‘I’d say your dignity was well and truly offered, Eron,’ he said approvingly. ‘I’m glad too. If you’d offered the beer instead, well, we could never have been friends.’

Sati grunted, but couldn’t help smiling as Eron shuddered in feigned horror at the weed festooning him. ‘You’re all right, rich man,’ she said after a pause. ‘But best get back on that oar if we’re to get any work done today.’

‘As you command, Lady Sati,’ Eron said.

The twins laughed and Brida felt a knot of tension loosen in her chest. ‘You’re an idiot and I love you,’ she murmured, planting a kiss on his wet cheek.

‘And you’re beautiful,’ he murmured back through chattering teeth. ‘Now get out of my way, woman, and let me row like the man I am.’

They were half a mile from the healthy reed beds when the flat-bottomed punt rocked so hard that Cahn’s oar came up out of the water. Eron yelled in surprise, letting go of his oar to grab the bench and the punt’s side. Sati clung to the pole, pushed deep into the riverbed. Brida, in the square prow, disappeared into the water with a splash.

It was shockingly cold this far out on the wide, swift river, and her disbelief at being knocked overboard – Brida prided herself on her skill as a sailor – meant she just hung in the water for a second. She opened her eyes; they must have hit a submerged branch or something, because there weren’t any sandbanks on this part of the Quamus.

Nothing. Brida kicked for the surface, her troggoth-hide boots threatening to drag her down. Her head broke the surface and she gasped in a breath, looked for the punt. Three worried faces peered down at her.

‘Brida!’ Eron called.

She flailed a hand in acknowledgment. ‘I’m fine. Steady the boat.’ She had both hands on the side when something brushed past her legs – something big, muscular. A long, sinuous shape moved beneath her and the boat, grey and green. ‘Get me out,’ she said and the urgency in her voice had Cahn leaping to her side. He dragged her into the punt. ‘There’s something down there. It’s big,’ she stuttered, shuddering.

‘Get on the oars,’ Sati ordered and Eron slunk back to the bench. They weren’t fishers, weren’t equipped to deal with some of the river monsters inhabiting the Quamus. Rush-knives were one thing, but it was more prudent to just leave the creature to its own devices. They rowed hard, angling for the reeds and the illusion of safety. They didn’t make it.

Sati shrieked as the pole was ripped from her hands and then snapped like a twig. The brown water churned and a grey-green flank turned in the morning sun and was gone – beneath them. The four of them clung to the sides on instinct, riding the next impact, which sent the punt lurching cross-current. Eron and Cahn fought the oars to drag them back on course.

Another impact spun them the other way and they all saw it this time, the muscular body whipping through the water, longer than the punt – a freshwater eel mutated, grown to monstrous size and malevolent intent.

‘Everyone quiet,’ Brida whispered and they waited, oars in the water but not pulling.

‘I think we’re all right,’ Cahn started, but the boat rocked again, the wood echoing to the dull boom of the eel’s strike. A tail flicked up and around, scything towards the men in the waist. Eron grabbed Cahn and jerked him sideways, almost into his lap, and the tail flapped down, smashing the bench where he’d been sitting. It wriggled and was gone.

‘Circling,’ Sati called, her voice throbbing with fear. ‘It’s coming back. Row!’

‘Ship those oars,’ Brida countermanded. ‘We’re going to need them.’ She stood, legs spread for balance, and hefted her rush-knife. The long handle gave her a six-foot reach and the blade had a wicked edge. She watched the river intently, blinking away the freezing water leaking from her hair. The twins both took up their knives and Eron hefted an oar with awkward resolution. They all stared down at the river as the punt slowly spun and began drifting downriver with the current, back towards Demesnus.

‘Port!’ Sati cried.

‘Starboard!’ Eron yelled at the same time.

‘Which is it?’ Cahn demanded, but then the boat shuddered, the planks splintering as the eel drove into the side. ‘We’ve got a leak!’

Brida glanced back. It was more than a leak; water was pumping from between two planks faster than they’d be able to bail. If the eel was prepared to let them bail. She saw its blunt head and square mouth arrowing through the water away from them, and the long, powerful body sliding after. Her heart was in her throat, beating so hard it was difficult to breathe.

‘Twins, take position fore and aft the bench,’ she croaked as it headed for them again. ‘Eron, both oars, row for your life. There’s an island ahead, I’ll guide you in. Sats, port side – Cahn, take starboard. Slash don’t hook. We don’t want to drag it on board or we’re all dead.’

The warm brown of Sati’s face had curdled to sickly grey, but she balanced easily against the rocking, rush-knife poised.

‘Careful, careful,’ Cahn was muttering as Eron grunted at the oars, pulling fast and smooth while Brida threw handfuls of water out of the bottom of the boat. It was covering the tops of their feet already. If the eel managed to hit the same spot again, the punt would come apart.

Even at the height of summer, the sun wouldn’t have been strong enough to cut through the chill she felt as the thing’s back breached the river and she saw, clearly for the first time, that the green speckling wasn’t a pattern on its scales, but rot. Gangrene. Plague.

‘Alarielle save us,’ she breathed and then Sati was swinging, blade winking golden as it disappeared below the surface and beneath the creature’s body to slice upwards, rolling it and opening grey flesh and green putrescence. Blood gouted from its flank and, maddened by its wound or Nurgle’s Rot – for it could be nothing else – it bashed its deformed, monstrous head against the punt over and over, coiling its massive body to flail at the underside.

Brida saw it foul the oar and began to shout a warning, but then the oar snapped in half with horrific force, the handle slamming up into Eron’s face and knocking him off the bench. Cahn grabbed the remaining oar and hit the eel as it passed beneath them again. Brida splashed to Eron and dragged his head up so he didn’t drown. He was unconscious and bleeding.

The Chaos-addled fish rammed them again, staving in three planks so the river poured through the gap. They were going down.

‘Take him,’ Brida shouted at the twins. ‘I’ll keep it busy on the starboard side. Slip out on the other and make for the island.’

‘That island? They say it’s haunted–’ Cahn began, horrified.

‘Go!’ Brida screamed, because their own ghosts would haunt the river if they didn’t. She had the rush-knife in one hand and the broken oar in the other. The eel lifted its head from the water, gills flapping obscenely. It watched her and she watched it, both poised, both waiting. It was just a fish, but there was intelligence there. Malevolence.

The deck rocked as the twins lowered Eron and themselves into the river with the punt between them and the monster and the island only a hundred yards away. They could make it. They would make it. They’d be safe. Brida didn’t let herself think any further than that. The eel’s head lowered so its gills lipped at the water, and she feinted with the oar, swept the rush-knife around instead. She caught the thing with the outside, false edge, knocking it away instead of slicing it open.

It dropped below the surface and Brida felt it pass beneath the boat, felt its intent. There was easier prey to be had. Prey that swam fast – for a human – but was encumbered with an unconscious man.

‘No,’ Brida breathed. She dropped the oar, ripped the knife free from the long handle and dived into the river, wrapping her arms and legs around the eel’s tail as it flashed by beneath. She had time for one breath before it twisted and was on her, head slamming into her leg and teeth just missing flesh.

Brida hooked the sickle underneath the churning body and jerked upwards, felt the bitter edge bite in, and sawed it frantically back and forth. Green blood bloomed in the murky water and the eel thrashed, more concerned now with throwing her off. Brida tightened her legs and arm around it and kept cutting. It was longer than the punt, thicker around its middle than her thigh, and it was all lean, packed muscle. It gave a single, mighty contortion and threw her clear.

Brida struggled to the surface, dragged in air and looked around. The island was only a few strokes away – the eel had brought her right to it. She kicked desperately as Cahn splashed back into the shallows armed with a heavy stick. Then Sati darted past him, grabbed Brida’s hand and hauled. Her knees caught on the riverbed and she kicked, pushed, knife-hand squelching down into the mud. Cahn bellowed and she heard the stick swing down and crack into something with a meaty thud. Water roiled and thrashed and then the big twin raced back, grabbed Brida under her other arm and, together, they got her to shore.

They didn’t stop once they were past the tideline, though Brida had swallowed half the Quamus and could barely breathe. Instead, Cahn threw Eron over his shoulder like a bushel of reeds and they ran. Trees, dripping with moisture and bearded with moss, closed in around them and the rushing of the river, along with its cold breath, faded into silence broken only by their pounding footfalls and rasping breath.

They stopped in a small clearing and Cahn lay Eron on his side. His nose was mashed flat and the lower half of his face was coated in fresh blood, but his chest rose and fell. He lived. Brida let out a cry and dropped down next to him, her hands feverish on his face and chest even as she coughed and struggled for air. ‘Eron? Eron, wake up. Please, Eron!’

Sati and Cahn were pacing the clearing, Brida’s knife in Sati’s hand. She could hear them muttering as they examined their surroundings, poking hesitantly into the undergrowth.

‘Who are you?’

The three who were conscious screamed and spun to the source of the voice: a hunched figure in sweeping brown robes and a deep hood, gnarled hands clutching a driftwood staff. Nothing of its face could be seen.

‘Who disturbs the River-Watcher’s domain?’

‘Alarielle save us,’ Sati breathed, backing away until she almost fell over Brida and Eron. ‘The stories are true.’ Cahn retreated too and Brida stood up so they formed a barrier between the figure and her unconscious lover.

‘Y-you’re the River-Watcher?’ Cahn stuttered. The hood nodded. ‘Forgive us for trespassing, holy spirit. Er, god. We were…’ He trailed off.

‘Were what? Speak! Are you frightened?’ the figure calling itself the River-Watcher asked. Brida’s throat clicked as she swallowed, but none of them said anything. Then the figure laughed and swept back its hood to reveal a face thin and somewhat stern, yet not hostile. ‘I am the guardian of the river and of the people who harvest its bounty,’ he said. ‘You will not come to harm from me, children. I am a friend.’

‘We made an offering,’ Sati began but Cahn elbowed her ribs. Their prank was no offering and they all knew it.

Brida took a threatening step forward as anger replaced the cold of the river upon her skin. ‘Guardian? Then why have you allowed Nurgle’s Rot to infect the Quamus once more? We were nearly killed!’

The River-Watcher’s eyes narrowed and he swept his staff up and across his body. Brida flinched. ‘Then it has returned again,’ he growled. ‘Go to my home, where it’s safe. Along that path there, not far. I will be back once this atrocity has been dealt with.’ He hurried off through the trees before they could respond.

‘What in the realms is going on?’ Cahn demanded when he’d vanished from view. ‘That can’t be the River-Watcher, can it? I mean, not really? It’s just a story,’ he added, almost pleading.

Eron groaned before anyone could answer him. ‘You’re awake,’ Brida breathed, kneeling and using her sleeve to wipe some of the blood from his face. ‘How do you feel?’

His eyes were already blackening from the blow to the face, swelling up until she could barely see the blue of his irises. He groaned again and flopped onto his back, then struggled to sit up. ‘What happened?’

‘The eel… the punt sank and we’re stuck on this island and… and there’s someone claiming to be the River-Watcher.’

Eron stared at her in confused dismay. ‘River-Watcher? That was just a joke. It was just to make your friends like me.’

Brida shrugged, not knowing what to tell him. It was an old story, one every child learnt and believed for a few short years before growing up. Or at least, that’s what she’d always thought. What all of them thought.

‘Look, we’re soaked, we’ve lost our boat and our supplies, and we’re trapped on an island with a madman claiming to be a local spirit,’ Sati hissed, crouching opposite them. ‘Whoever, whatever he is, he’ll have a boat. We can use it to go home.’

Brida hesitated, then yawned, the terror and the cold catching up to her. ‘Should we go where he said? His house?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea,’ Sati said. ‘I say we find his boat and get off this island before he comes back.’ She didn’t make a move towards the shoreline though; none of them did.

‘We can’t steal the River-Watcher’s boat,’ Cahn said slowly and slumped on Eron’s other side, shivering.

‘We should get warm,’ Brida said dully. Eron was already asleep again. She stretched out next to him, huddling close. The twins crowded in on his other side. ‘We’ll have to move soon,’ she mumbled. They slept.

It was almost dawn when Brida woke, passing from sleep to alert wakefulness in an instant. Her heart was pounding. She lay still, listening. The island was full of the rustles of small animals, insects, the first birdcalls. Eron was still warm beside her but there was… an absence. Slowly, carefully, she opened her eyes. The twins were gone.

Instinct told her to shout for them and shake Eron awake; with an effort she managed not to do either. They’d slept all night. They should have been too scared, too wary, to sleep at all. Brida rolled onto her back and examined the other side of the clearing through slitted eyes. There was a faint glow of firelight through the trees, the barest murmur of voices.

‘Eron?’ she whispered, scanning the trees. ‘Wake up.’ The voices abruptly fell silent, though they couldn’t have heard her from so far away. She reached out without looking, shook Eron’s arm. ‘Wake up now.’

He tensed as he went through the same process upon waking. ‘What’s going on?’ he breathed.

‘I don’t know. I think the twins are over–’

‘Here,’ Sati said loudly and they both jumped, rolled over. She laughed at their expressions. ‘Finally awake,’ she added as Cahn joined her. He held a flaming torch and the smiles they both wore made Brida uneasy. A touch too wide, a fraction too excited.

‘Look at your face!’ Cahn exclaimed, shoving the torch close to Eron and whistling. In its light, Brida could see the swelling and bruising around his nose and eyes was even worse. ‘Not so pretty now, is he?’

‘Sun’s coming up,’ Eron said as they both stood. ‘We should look for a way to get home.’

‘Not yet. The River-Watcher’s making you breakfast – you’ve got to try some, it’s delicious. Come on.’ Sati was beckoning, already turning away towards the crackle of the campfire through the trees.

‘We don’t have time for breakfast,’ Eron protested. ‘Our families will be frantic.’

Cahn’s easy-going smile evaporated. ‘We’re not all so fortunate in our families as you, councilman’s son. If we want to stay here for a few days, that’s what we’ll do. You can swim back for all I care. Swim or drown.’

‘Cahn!’ Brida said, shocked.

The big man shook his head, puzzlement creasing his features. He forced a laugh and gave a half-shrug. ‘Only joking, Eron, no offence intended. Come on, let’s eat. We’re starving.’

He turned away with the torch before either of them could respond, leaving them in the dawn’s gloom beneath the trees. Eron put his hand on Brida’s arm, stilling her. ‘If they’ve eaten already, why are they hungry? And why did we fall asleep so easily? I don’t like this, Bri.’

Brida licked her lips. ‘Me neither. Let’s get the twins away from this so-called River-Watcher and find a way home. I don’t like it, but we can steal his boat if we have to.’

Eron nodded and they followed their friends to the small clearing near the one where they’d slept. The River-Watcher’s hut stood in a gap between two monstrous, twisted willows whose branches hung down to conceal most of the structure. In the centre of the clearing a small fire burnt in a ring of stones, and around the edge bigger stones were placed as seats. The River-Watcher and the twins were already resting, legs stretched towards the warmth of the fire. All three were eating from stone bowls perched in their laps.

The River-Watcher’s hood was back in place, only the tip of his nose and point of his chin limned in orange firelight. They ate intently, paying no attention to the new arrivals. Two stones had been left free: one between the River-Watcher and Sati, the other between Sati and her brother. On each stone stood a bowl, steam curling gently from its contents.

Splitting us up. The thought came to rest in Brida’s mind like a bird roosting, and once there, it wouldn’t go away. They’re making us sit apart from each other.

‘What’s for breakfast, then?’ Eron asked cheerfully and she shot him a worried glance.

‘Stew,’ Cahn said, his mouth full. ‘Fish stew. It’s incredible.’

‘Eat as much as you want,’ the River-Watcher said, indicating the cauldron on the fire. ‘There’s plenty. Eat until you burst!’ The twins laughed as if they’d never heard anything so funny.

Brida didn’t know what to do. She approached the circle and picked up a bowl, sat gingerly on the edge of the stone, feet gathered beneath her and ready to leap up and away. The bowl was cold despite the steam rising from inside, chilling her fingers.

Eron picked up his own bowl and sniffed the contents, then grinned at the twins and strolled around the circle to Brida’s stone. ‘Shove up,’ he said, nudging her, and she scooted over until they could both – just about – sit down, pressed together at shoulder and hip and thigh. He leant in to kiss her cheek. ‘Don’t eat it.’

The words were more breath than sound, but they sent another tremor through her. She lifted the spoon to her mouth and pretended to eat in a pantomime that would fool no one. The twins were oblivious, scraping the last of the stew from their bowls and then licking their spoons.

‘So good,’ Sati said again. She patted her stomach. ‘Could I…’ She indicated the cauldron and the River-Watcher waved her on. She refilled her bowl and Cahn’s and again they began to eat.

‘You’re not hungry?’ the River-Watcher asked when the sun had risen into the river-mist, diffuse as candlelight through silk.

Eron and Brida jumped. ‘Not really,’ Eron said and touched his face. ‘It seems that breaking one’s nose robs one of appetite. It is no comment on your hospitality, which is excellent and appreciated,’ he added as everyone turned to stare at him. He was using the voice he spoke in when trading – relaxed and friendly, hiding a steel mind behind a façade of benign interest. It told Brida how worried he was. And Eron didn’t get worried; it’s why she loved him, his quiet competence, his calm in the face of challenges. She could see the tremor in this Eron’s hands, the glisten of sweat on his unshaven upper lip.

Not just worried. Scared.

‘And you?’ the River-Watcher asked, and though she couldn’t see his eyes beneath his hood, his gaze upon her was as heavy as lead.

She swallowed. ‘I… no, thank you.’ It wasn’t an excuse – she didn’t have an excuse, had no idea what she could say, but movement from the twins broke the moment. They were at the cauldron again and this time they hauled it off the fire, fingers and palms blistering against the hot metal. Brida clearly heard the sizzle of flesh burning. She gasped.

Sati and Cahn dipped their hands into the scalding stew and pulled up gobbets of fish and vegetables, cramming them into their mouths, bickering and snarling at each other as they fought over the choicest meats. Meat…

Brida tipped her bowl into the light and squinted. Grey flesh, tinged here and there with green she’d originally taken for cress or dandelion tips. The eel…

Without thinking, she stood and hurled the bowl as far from her as she could, desperate only to be rid of the tainted stuff. Eron was up a second later, but his bowl sailed through the air and struck the River-Watcher hard in the face so he fell backwards off his stone. Eron lunged around the fire and snatched up the rush-knife from its place near Sati and then grabbed Brida and hustled her backwards.

The twins had stopped eating, poisoned flesh dripping from their mouths and fingers. Very slowly, their gazes switched from the River-Watcher’s prone form to Brida and Eron. As his head came around, she saw Cahn’s eyes were leaking pale green tears. They rose to their feet with an inhuman fluidity, as if their bodies contained thousands of tiny bones like a snake’s.

Eron brandished the knife at them and pushed protectively in front of Brida. There was the sound of cloth tearing. Over it a different sort of tearing – wetter, meatier. To their right, the River-Watcher rose to his – its – feet, the robe splitting and falling from its bloating flesh.

If it had ever been human, it had been aeons ago. If it had ever been beautiful, it was but a maddening, distant memory subsumed in filth. Wide mouths ripped open in its sickly flesh as it grew ever larger, gaping grey lips rimed with rotten blood out of which putrid entrails bulged. The hair on its head was stringy and a shocking blond, the final vestige of its former humanity. Fingers as thick as bulrushes clicked and flexed, ragged black talons punching through the ends and reaching for them.

Its head swelled, cheeks and nose spreading until the eyes were almost hidden. Its throat distended like a bullfrog’s, but no words emerged – instead a tide of pus, acrid enough to sting their eyes, gushed from its mouth onto the grass, blackening it instantly. It beckoned to them.

Brida tore her gaze from Nurgle’s disciple as Eron stiffened. Sati was smiling, a hungry feral rictus. Her fingers stretched and then hooked, the flesh opening at the knuckles and weeping black blood. ‘Hungry,’ she growled. ‘So hungry.’

She took a shambling step towards them, her belly suddenly distended and flopping over her waistband, an empty sac begging to be filled. Next to her, Cahn grunted as one of his eyes exploded, spraying thick, viscous liquid into the fire to hiss and squeal as though it were alive. They advanced; so did the Rotbringer.

Eron flailed his hand back and found Brida’s, gave it a desperate squeeze. ‘Go,’ he yelled as Sati lunged, hooked fingers clawing for his face and screaming her hunger on blasts of foul breath.

He swung the knife, the outside edge smacking her hands away, and then Brida was running, and he was on her heels, and they were racing headlong through the trees blanketing the island, no destination in mind, nothing but to get away, get far away and never look back.

The Rotbringer’s unearthly laughter rose behind them, laughter that bubbled and gasped through a pus-filled throat, great dolloping splats of putrid mirth. Beneath his retching, the drumming of pursuing feet.

‘Head for the river,’ Eron panted as they raced through the trees ahead of the twins.

‘The eel,’ Brida gasped back, but of course it was dead – the Rotbringer had fed it to her friends. She screamed as a branch whipped into her face beneath her eye. Tears blinded her but she stumbled on, Eron’s fist in her sleeve as he dragged her faster and faster through the trees and around the undergrowth. Ghyran’s voracious plant life seemed as healthy as ever, but Brida didn’t trust anything now. Already Nurgle’s Rot could be seeping into her skin from the cut beneath her eye, could be changing her from the inside out, changing her into a monster dedicated to Chaos. One of Nurgle’s putrescent little pets.

She sobbed and concentrated on running. Thoughts like that would ensure one thing only – that she never left the island alive. The trees grew thicker as they ran, the occasional wink of the rush-knife in a patch of light the only leavening of the gloom. The sound of pursuit had broken up and Brida knew the twins were flanking them – or herding them.

The air felt lighter over to their left, but Cahn was there, his tall, muscled frame appearing in flashes through the trees. That was the direction they needed to move, she was sure of it. She pushed hard until she was level with Eron, then dodged ahead of him and then left. ‘This way,’ she gasped and was gone, Eron’s protest lost in the air behind her. He had no choice but to follow and she prayed to the Lady of Leaves she wasn’t leading him to his death.

Cahn let out a hungry, joyful bellow as they veered towards him. Filthy claws tipped the ends of his fingers and he swiped at them, too far away to cause any damage – yet. He too had a hanging flap of belly just waiting to be filled with their meat and bones, and it slapped against his legs with every stride, hampering his progress, slowing him just enough that they had a chance. She was sure they had a chance.

Sati screeched from their right, far closer than Brida had expected.

‘Eron!’ Brida yelled.

‘Go,’ he shouted, ‘go, go!’

Brida put on a final burst of speed, leaping tree roots and bursting through and over shrubs, hurdling vines that would tangle her feet and hold her fast for the untender mercies of her friends. She could see a splash of grey ahead – the River Quamus. She ducked under a hanging branch, sped over a patch of bindweed, and emerged onto the shore, the long, mud-and-sand spit between the forest and the water. It was empty – no boat, no driftwood large enough to float on.

‘Keep going,’ Eron panted behind her and together they pounded along the mud. ‘Rushes.’ He pointed with the knife for a second and Brida saw them, tall and brown and upright. A huge, thick stand of them right at the edge of the water.

She angled for them, head down and knees pumping, putting all her terror and confusion into the single, simple act of running. The twins’ shouts were fading with distance, but she knew – somehow just knew – that they wouldn’t give up. They might have to walk, or crawl, or even drag themselves along by their claws, but they were coming. They wouldn’t stop; they couldn’t. Hunger, madness, Chaos, drove them.

Eron stopped her at the edge of the rushes and stuffed a flint and steel into her hands. ‘Use the rush heads and stems and build a fire,’ he said. ‘Signal fire, something to drive them back. I’m going to make a raft.’

She hesitated. ‘Rushes won’t support our weight, Eron. We’ll sink in seconds.’

‘Just make a fire,’ he snarled at her, his eyes wild and the knife raised. Brida lurched away, panic drawing an icy finger down her spine. ‘I’ll cut wood,’ he added.

‘You shouldn’t – the Everqueen,’ she began.

‘Then I’ll pray for forgiveness, but without it we die. Now help me,’ Eron insisted. He didn’t wait for her answer, instead running back to the treeline and hacking wildly at the lowest branches.

Brida used up precious seconds watching him and offering a prayer to the Lady for forgiveness and aid, then began ripping the thick fluffy heads from the bulrushes and stuffing them inside her shirt for safekeeping.

She hadn’t gathered many before she spotted a thick shape bobbing in the water – the reed bed was the perfect collection point for driftwood. Brida splashed towards it and began hauling it back towards land. It could form the spine of the raft. Eron dragged over what he’d managed to hack from the trees and they piled it all together. Even with the driftwood it wasn’t much, a pitiful collection of branches that didn’t look as if it would support the weight of a child, let alone two adults.

Still, it was all they had and they were running out of time. ‘I saw strangler vine just up there,’ Brida said, gesturing back the way they’d come. ‘Not far. Give me the knife – I’ll cut as much as I–’

‘I’ll get it,’ Eron interrupted and ran off before she could stop him.

Brida pulled the branches together into a narrow platform ready for tying and then set about making the fire, pausing every few seconds to scan the trees for Eron or their pursuers. One of Demesnus’ swift trading ships might see it, or even a slow, flat-bottomed rush punt – someone, anyone to rescue them, to tell them it was all right, that they were safe.

The fire was tiny but bright in the early sun when Eron came staggering back, swathes of vines trailing from his arms. ‘Hurry,’ he gasped. ‘I could hear them.’

Brida snatched the vines from him. Movements automatic after so many years weaving, and with a speed born of renewed terror, she lashed the branches together with the vines and pulled them tight. Narrow, so narrow. If they so much as breathed wrong, they’d capsize. And what if there was more mutated river life? Still, the choice was between angry fish and an actual Rotbringer and his… disciples. My friends.

Tears pricked Brida’s eyes but she blinked them back savagely, then blinked again at the shapes scudding through the trees close by. ‘They’re here,’ she hissed and shoved Eron in the back. ‘Lift.’

They dragged the raft into the shallows and it dipped alarmingly beneath the surface before bobbing back up. ‘I should stay,’ Eron said. ‘Make sure they don’t catch up to us.’

‘Shut up and get on,’ she snapped, clambering aboard. He followed as shouts of triumph and then fury erupted behind them. Sitting cross-legged on the almost submerged raft, they used their hands to paddle out of the reeds. ‘Angle across the current. Doesn’t matter how far downriver it takes us as long as we reach shore.’

Behind them, that hacking laughter broke out again. ‘Chase them down, my pretties. One bite and Grandfather’s joy will have them and hold them tight. Let them carry it home within them, nestled deep in their meat and bones to grow and consume them until they too must feed or die. Feed and spread his rot. Faster, pretties, faster! Don’t let them get away.’

Sati and Cahn – or what was left of them – splashed into the shallows and began wading out. As soon as their tainted limbs touched the water, it began to boil with frenzied life – fish and frogs sped away from the approaching pair, some leaping onto the raft in their desperation to escape.

‘Alarielle, Lady of Leaves, please, please help us,’ Brida prayed as they paddled, but the words stuck in her throat when Eron slipped off the raft. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Swap places,’ he ordered, treading water and clinging to the side.

There wasn’t time to argue, not with him in the river and vulnerable to whatever might be down there. Brida slid forward, wincing as splinters ripped into her palms and through her trousers. Eron hauled himself back on, facing the way they’d come, the rush-knife clenched in his fist. A second later Cahn was clinging to the raft, nearly upsetting it.

Eron roared and swung, the blunt edge of the knife chopping into the bloated fingers, mashing them flat. Cahn squealed and vomited blood and half-digested meat across the raft, but Eron hit him again, in the face this time, and he lost his grip.

Sati reared up in front of the raft and Brida lashed out with one foot, kicking her squarely in her keening mouth; her friend hung on and chewed through the thick troggoth-hide heel of her boot as if it were rice paper. She could hear Eron grunting as he lashed out with the knife at Cahn. Sati fell back with a splash as the heel sheared away and then bobbed back up, a rotten apple in a barrel. Brida kicked her again and this time her lower jaw ripped free, flesh tearing. Maggots oozed from the hole and plopped into the water to feed fish and infect them. Brida screamed; Sati sank and didn’t come back up.

‘Ahoy, the raft. Trouble?’

A low-sided fishing boat was tacking towards them. ‘Help!’ Brida screamed with everything she had. ‘Help us!’ Oars slid out to aid the sail and she could see nets and long, wickedly barbed harpoons being passed among the rest of the crew. The distress flag was raised and, in the far distance, Brida saw the yellow sails of Demesnus’ fishing fleet begin to drift in their direction.

The water boiled apart ahead of her and Sati rose again, jaw rehung and slavering with famine and the need to infect. The water around them was alive with diseased fish. Eron slammed into Brida’s shoulder almost hard enough to pitch her into the water, but the knife point came down into Sati’s head and through her skull. She thrashed and flopped, blood gouting into the air and spraying from her screeching mouth before, still writhing, she sank again.

Brida stared after her for a long, disbelieving second before Eron yelled. She turned to see Cahn holding onto the rear of the raft, his massive hands crushing the branches and tearing at the vines, snapping them like cotton. The raft shuddered and the branches began to move apart. Eron threw himself flat on the raft, both arms outstretched to cling to the narrow platform and push it back together, using brute strength to prevent them from sinking.

Brida lunged over him and punched Cahn in the face, bursting his other eye. He disappeared in a swirl of bubbles. She hesitated for a second, then scrambled to the front and began to paddle again, faster and harder than ever before. The fishing boat was near now, but it was slowing – harpoons were jabbing down into the water on all sides as eels and pike – and Cahn – hurled themselves upwards to attack the fishers. One woman was dragged screaming into the Quamus and the water around the boat quickly turned pink.

‘Alarielle Everqueen, I’ll serve you all my days if you lend us your aid,’ Brida gasped. It was a poor prayer, but it was all she had time and breath for as she paddled madly. Shouts and screams erupted from the boat – not just that boat, but all the boats that had come to help – ringing in her ears and drowning out her prayer. ‘Lady of Leaves, hear me. Save us, I beg you.’

Eron was grunting and cursing, the water lapping at his nose and mouth as he lay on the raft and held it together. Sobbing, shoulders burning, Brida paddled on, leaving the battle between the fishers and their prey turned predators behind. The sounds of fighting slowly faded, though whether with distance or because everyone was dead, she didn’t know. Didn’t want to know.

They were trapped in the fastest part of the current, too fast for a broken raft and an exhausted woman to combat when Demesnus slid past, far away across the river. With the last of her strength, Brida tried to reach it, but as the sun slid across the sky and Eron fell silent, it disappeared in their wake, oblivious to their fate.

The sun was low in the sky when the great river began to curve and Brida spotted the telltale sign of a sandbank stretching far out into the river and angled for it. Eventually they ran aground. It didn’t matter that they were on the wrong shore. What did matter was that they were on land and they’d left the monsters behind them. They were safe.

Brida sat and let her head hang to her chest for a while, just breathing as the agony in her arms began to fade. Then she licked the sweat from her lip and crawled off the raft onto the sand. ‘Eron? Come on, we’re safe.’

He whimpered and rolled over onto his back, cradling his arms against his chest. Brida’s heart stopped. Great chunks of flesh were missing from his forearms, a finger gone from his left hand. His flesh was decorated with human bite marks. He’d held on – he’d saved her – while Cahn ate him.

Brida dragged him off the raft onto the sandy bank. ‘Rest, love. Just rest.’ Working quickly, she used the rush-knife to cut off her sleeves and wrapped them around the worst of his wounds. Crude bandages, but all she had.

She made a fire and pulled Eron close to the flames, holding him tight. ‘Sleep now, my love,’ she murmured in a cracked voice as he lay in her arms, shaking and muttering. For what felt like the hundredth time since their ordeal had begun, tears pricked at her eyes. This time she let them come, watching through their veil as the sun set and the world shrank down to orange flames and black night.

By dawn he was raving, and by its first light she saw how the wounds were pus-filled and rotting, how his skin had taken on the pallor of a drowned corpse. Eron’s eyes were milky-green and his lips pulled back from snapping teeth.

Brida was empty. She stood and stepped away, evading the hand that reached to snag her ankle. Hollow, she walked around the dead fire and picked up the rush-knife, returned and knelt before him like a supplicant. ‘Eron? Can you hear me?’

Claws burst from the ends of his fingers and swiped at her; she swatted them away. ‘Eron?’ she tried again. ‘Come back to me.’

He laughed, mad and malevolent. There was no sign of the man she knew and loved, the man she was to marry. Eron was gone.

She was raw, no more emotions left inside her, and she was glad of it. If she could feel, she wouldn’t be able to act. Brida rose up onto her knees and placed the inner curve of the rush-knife against Eron’s neck. She didn’t look into the face she’d once thought to wake beside every morning for the rest of her life. Instead she drew the blade across his throat hard and swift, leaning back from the spray of blood so it didn’t touch her skin.

She counted the beats left to his heart, shuffled back from the final grasping of his hand, not sure whether it was offered in love or hunger. Not willing to risk finding out. What did that make her? As much a monster as the Rotbringer, to deny a dying man final comfort.

But a monster with a purpose.

When Eron was dead, Brida stood and stared back through the mist in the direction of the island. She wasn’t sure she’d ever feel anything again, but she knew what she wanted. Vengeance. If any of the fishers had made it back to Demesnus, the city was already dead, and she wasn’t strong enough yet to fight the shambling, diseased remnants of the rest of her kin.

Brida needed to be stronger. Strong enough to fight the evil that had taken everything she loved. And she knew who could make her so. Who would raise her up and make her vengeance holy. She had sworn to serve the Lady of Leaves if she was saved, and she had been, though Eron had not. And while his loss was a knife in her heart, Brida lived free of disease and free to take her vengeance in his memory.

She lifted her hands in supplication. ‘Alarielle, Everqueen, I am yours to command. My life for you, my service in the destruction of your enemies. Forever.’ She felt something, a brush across her senses, as of sunlight dappling through leaves. Acceptance. A binding.

Brida looked one last time at the corpse of her lover, all that remained of her life before, and then she began to walk. There was a Freeguild company camped a few days’ west. She’d make a new future with them. One written in blood.

WATCHERS OF BATTLE

Ben Counter

‘We’re a long way from Carngrad,’ said Kyryll as he trudged up the sludge and shale of the mountain slope.

Voleska looked up towards the sky and the peaks of the Fangs that surrounded them. ‘Not so far,’ she said.

‘Camp’s up ahead.’ Kyryll peered towards the scattering of bonfires and torches on the shoulder of the mountain above them. ‘Looks like the Blackblades and the Mercy Slayers made it.’

‘More to watch us,’ said Voleska. ‘More to weep.’

It had rained blood that night. Bonebreak Pass was clotted with coagulating gore. It formed a slow, black river along the pass, draining into the foothills of the Fangs, a sluggish bloodletting that formed a portent for what was to come. The pass was one of the few relatively stable ways past the Fangs and into the regions of the Bloodwind Spoil closer to the citadel of the Varanspire. Control of it had passed from one bloody hand to the next hundreds of times over the generations. Bones and shattered skulls mixed with the loose shale and formed natural cairns, pulled apart by the coagulating flow.

A lot of people had died there. A lot more were about to.

Voleska and Kyryll made their way through the encampment towards the hide tents and bivouacs of the Red Sand Raiders. Warbands from across the Bloodwind Spoil had gathered for the coming battle over Bonebreak Pass, and the banners of several Spire Tyrants bands hung from the spindly trees clinging to the upper slopes. On another day, they would be butchering one another for the right to be called the best among the Children of the Arenas. Tonight, they were allies against a common enemy.

Voleska pulled back the flap of the largest tent. Inside, Ferenk Sunder-Spine was scratching battle plans into the loose dirt. The Head-Taker of the Red Sand Raiders was a huge man with hundreds of finger bones piercing the skin of his arms and shoulders, each taken from a kill in the arena. He looked up at Voleska’s intrusion.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

‘Scouted, like you said,’ replied Voleska.

Ferenk grunted and poked at the battle lines he had scratched. ‘What have you got?’

‘The Crows have the high ground at the northern end,’ replied Voleska. ‘They reckon they’ll swoop down on us and peck out our eyes.’

‘How many?’

Voleska shrugged. ‘Six, seven warbands. Couple of thousand ears hanging from the trees. Flocks of birds everywhere.’

‘Were you seen?’

Voleska smirked. ‘Look at me. Course I was seen.’

Ferenk looked at Voleska as if seeing her for the first time. She was huge. Most of the time the really big competitors failed to make their mark in the fighting pits of Carngrad – they were too slow and cumbersome, and a leg tendon got cut or a gut was punctured before they could bring their bulk around to face a faster enemy. The crowds whooped when they emerged onto the sands, and they cheered when they fell. But Voleska had climbed the ladder of victories to challenge the very best, all while carrying more heft than anyone in the Red Sand Raiders. She carried a stone-headed hammer over her shoulder – a less than ideal weapon for a pit fighter, but one she wielded as if she had been born with it in her hand. What skin showed beneath her heavy garb of layered animal hides and splint mail was tanned and battered, and her lank black hair was tied severely back to show off the scar taking up the right side of her scalp.

‘Not like they don’t know we’re here,’ mused Ferenk. ‘What about the Unmade? The Scions?’

‘The faceless mob are on the west side of the pass,’ replied Voleska. ‘Opposite the Splintered Fang. Doesn’t look like the Scions made it.’

‘Too busy annoying the gods,’ said Ferenk. ‘Here. Come.’

Voleska walked up to the battle plans Ferenk had scratched out. The torchlight in the tent cast flickering shadows across a crude diagram of Bonebreak Pass and the positions of the warbands. ‘What’s the plan?’ she asked.

‘Spire Tyrants don’t do subtle,’ said Ferenk. ‘No feints. No secret paths. No false retreats. We’re going straight down the middle. Storm the heights, hit the Cabal, kill them.’

Voleska nodded. ‘They think they own the mountains. They’re arrogant. They’ll try something. But we won’t fall for it. Straight down the middle.’

‘I saw you,’ said Ferenk. It was unexpected. He rarely said anything that wasn’t strictly necessary. ‘At the Gutripper Pits. Slavemaster Barakhor’s games. You killed four men.’

Voleska shrugged. ‘They were only small.’

‘The last one, you knocked his head clean off.’

‘Yes, that I did. Went right into the crowd. They called me the Gift-Giver after that.’

‘You fought well for us, Voleska. It was obvious enough, never had to say it. But a lot of us are going to die this dawn. Maybe someone important. Maybe me. The Red Sand Raiders will accept you if you want to step in. Do you want that, Gift-Giver?’

Ferenk looked at her now, piercing and intense, in a way he never had before. Voleska felt herself tense up, as if aware of an assailant trying to flank her. ‘I want… I want more,’ she said.

‘More than what?’

Voleska was rarely lost for words – like Ferenk, she didn’t use them when she didn’t have to. Now she had to fight to turn her thoughts into speech. ‘More than being… one among many. That’s what I fought for in the arenas, to be on my own at the top. That’s what it means to be a Spire Tyrant – we got to the top in the arenas and now we’re doing it in the Spoil. I’m not going to live and die as just another Red Sand Raider. That’s what I want. Something more.’

Ferenk nodded. ‘Maybe they’ll follow you, if it comes to that,’ he said. ‘But whether they will or not depends on tomorrow. Take some heads, give some gifts, I can make you my right hand. You want that?’

‘I’ll take what the Spoil gives me,’ replied Voleska.

‘Good,’ said Ferenk with finality. ‘Of course, first of all, you’ll have to survive.’

‘Not planning to do anything else,’ said Voleska.

‘With the dawn,’ concluded Ferenk, and turned back to his map of Bonebreak Pass.

‘With the dawn,’ agreed Voleska.

Outside, the night was turning chill. The moons were sinking as the night kept a jealous grip on the Fangs against the daybreak. The Spire Tyrants of their various warbands were resting, but few were asleep. They sparred and gambled, because the habits of the fighting pits never really left them.

‘What did you mean earlier?’ said Kyryll as Voleska emerged from the tent.

‘When?’

‘You said we weren’t so far from Carngrad.’

‘Because we aren’t,’ replied Voleska. ‘Back in Carngrad, we fought for the eyes of the audience. For the lords who might hire us. The crowds. Even each other, so we knew who to respect. You think it’s any different now?’

‘Not many arenas round these mountains,’ said Kyryll.

Voleska clipped him around the back of the head with her meaty palm. Kyryll wasn’t small, but he was smaller than her, and he cringed at the impact. ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said.

‘So who are you fighting for?’ retorted Kyryll. ‘For Ferenk?’

‘Him, among others,’ she said. ‘These other warbands will know not to stand in the Raiders’ way when they see us tear apart the Cabal. The Cabal will remember us, too, if we let any live. They’ll talk about the Ones Who Make The Sand Red, and the Gift-Giver. The Bloodwind Spoil will know we’re coming. They’ll beg to be the first to kneel to us. And then…’

Voleska gripped Kyryll’s shoulder and turned him to face one of the nearby peaks. Bloody snow clung to the highest point, well above the line where the spindly thorn trees thinned out to nothing. On one of the peaks, against the deep dark of the night, a sharp black outline was just visible.

It was a human of immense size, bulked out by plates of spiked armour and a massive tower shield. One hand held a halberd with a bundle of skulls strung around its point.

‘One of Archaon’s Chosen,’ said Voleska. ‘Saw them while we scouted. You were too dim to notice. They’re watching. Not just us, the Cabal, the Unmade, the Splintered Fang. Why do you think we’re here, Kyryll? To be the biggest dogs in the Bloodwind Spoil? Maybe that’s enough for you, but not me. They’re watching for warriors to take to the Varanspire. For Archaon’s army.’

The lone warrior didn’t move. The face was hidden behind a solid steel visor broken only by a black eyeslit.

‘You think they’re watching us now?’ asked Kyryll.

‘Me, maybe. You? Not so sure.’

Down the pass, in the direction of the distant Varanspire, the Corvus Cabal’s warbands held the upper slopes. They hadn’t set up bonfires and torches as the Spire Tyrants had. Their presence was betrayed by the trophies they strung up among the trees. Their Great Gatherer demanded trophies be taken from their dead. The Corvus Cabal cut a memento off every corpse they left in their wake, and hung up those orphaned ears and fingers everywhere they settled. The Cabal thought Bonebreak Pass and the Fangs were theirs, and they had been labouring under that misapprehension for far too long. With the dawn they would learn the truth.

And the watchers of battle would see them fail.

They swept down from the heights in a storm of bloody feathers, shrieking as they ran. Beneath the clouds of an impending storm, at the breaking of the lightning-touched dawn, the warbands of the Corvus Cabal made their charge.

Across the pass, the Splintered Fang and the Unmade had their own battle to fight, and perhaps the victor of that slaughter would survive in sufficient numbers to challenge for command of the pass. The winners’ blood could be shed another time. For now, the Spire Tyrants had the enemy ahead of them to fight.

Ferenk held his spear high. He had used it to kill his way to fame and glory in Carngrad, and then killed his owner with it when he led the breakout of pit fighters who had become the core of the Red Sand Raiders. ‘Life kept the prize from us,’ he yelled. ‘Now we take it!’

The Red Sand Raiders gathered in front of him cheered. They were men and women of every kind, small and fast, strong and brutal, cold-blooded killers and frenzied murderers. They were united by the old marks of combat on them, and the ugly functionality of their wargear. They carried the weapons with which they had learned to fight in the blood pits and amphitheatres. Hooked blades, nets and tridents, scythes, twinned daggers. They were united by the same fury that had seen them earn or steal their freedom from the pits.

‘I heard a rumour that we’re here to take the pass,’ continued Ferenk, which was met by a muttering of dark laughter. ‘I say we’re here to take some heads! Let the rest squabble about who owns what. We are Spire Tyrants! We turned the sands of the arenas red, and we do the same to the Bloodwind Spoil! We kill and break and tear, and when there’s no one else left, we take what we want!’

The other Spire Tyrants warbands had their own leaders, and they were stoking the fires in their warriors just as Ferenk was. Some of them had started their careers doing the same thing in the arenas, in Carngrad and elsewhere in the Bloodwind Spoil, whipping the crowd and their fellow fighters into a fury that could only be sated by blood.

Their words mingled with the howl of the coming storm’s winds and the shrieking of the Corvus Cabal. The crow-warriors were a dark tide descending from their high ground onto the treacherous slopes above the blood-clotted pass. They had been expected to hold the heights and wait for the Spire Tyrants to come to them. They had instead chosen to force the battle and, by advancing, join it on their terms.

It did not matter. The battle plan still held. Straight down the middle, and kill them all.

The leaders of the Spire Tyrants couldn’t have held them back any longer if they had wanted to.

Voleska felt the ripple of fury running up and down the Spire Tyrants’ lines. The ex-gladiators broke into a charge down the slope towards the advancing Corvus Cabal. She was a part of it, carried along on their tide, and she felt her heart hammering with anticipation. It was the same sensation she had once had when the doors of the arenas were hauled open and she saw the enemy for the first time. A hot, tingling spark of anticipation that ran from her core down her arms and legs, a cousin of fear but something rooted far more deeply in her mind.

‘They’re fast,’ gasped Kyryll as he ran beside her, his twin jagged swords in his hands. ‘They’ll go for the tendons.’

‘Not my first tumble, little Kyryll,’ replied Voleska.

The distance closed. Voleska could hear the birdlike shrieks and caws of the Cabal, a battle-tongue other warbands could not understand. They wore black feathers and avian skulls. Their faces were smeared with black warpaint. She hauled her hammer up onto her shoulder and felt its familiar, comforting weight on her.

The two forces slammed into one another. The Cabal were fast and cunning. The Spire Tyrants fought with a straightforward brutality. Blood sprayed across the shale and a dozen people died in the first seconds. A gladiator’s head was sheared clean off by a razor-sharp blade. A feather-clad Cabalist was rammed through the gut by a jagged two-handed sword. A Spire Tyrant a few strides from Voleska fell back, screaming, his face torn wide open by the finger talons of the Cabalist who had dived under his guard.

With a howl, one of the Cabal leapt off an outcropping of rock. He dived down at Voleska feet first, and the murky sun glinted off the talons built into his boots.

Voleska was faster than he thought.

She swung the hammer to meet him in mid-air. The weapon’s head slammed into the Cabalist’s midriff. It was a blow the crowd had always adored. They loved the crunch of the spine and pelvis, the elongated grunt as the air was forced out of her opponent’s lungs. They loved to see the body, lifeless as a rag doll, thrown down to the bloody sands. She flung the Cabalist’s body off the head of her hammer, and she could almost hear the cheering.

Kyryll was alive, wrestling with a Cabalist who had rushed him. The two rolled on the gory slope, in danger of tumbling down into the pass. Their weapons were pinned at their sides as neither was willing to let go of the other. Voleska grabbed the Cabalist’s feathered cloak and hauled him up into the air. The Cabalist dropped Kyryll and slashed at Voleska, but her reach was such that the dagger’s points skimmed past her throat.

Voleska slammed the enemy back into the ground. He rolled to a kneeling position from which he could stab and slash at her abdomen. But Voleska was wise to it. She was already in mid-swing by the time the Cabalist’s head was up, and there was no time for him to even throw out a hand in defence.

The hammer smashed into his face. Voleska angled the blow upwards, into the chin, a trick she had learned in the arenas when the gladiators had been given the maimed or condemned to fight for the crudest entertainments of the crowd. The Cabalist’s head snapped back, the neck gave way, and his head was smacked clean off his shoulders.

If there had been an audience, thought Voleska, they would have screamed with joy and bloodlust at the decapitating blow. They would have chanted the name of the Gift-Giver.

She corrected herself. There was an audience. They were watching from the peaks overlooking Bonebreak Pass.

‘Get up, little Kyryll,’ she scolded. She turned to the rest of the battling Spire Tyrants. ‘Onwards! Straight down the middle! Don’t give these vermin the time to draw breath!’

The Spire Tyrants surged. Bodies tumbled down the slope into the coagulating gore flowing down the pass. The Corvus Cabal fell back and counter-charged, some finding soft flesh for their blades, others finding only a swinging sword or a shield boss to the face. Voleska swung her hammer in a huge arc and the Cabalists scurried away from her. The Red Sand Raiders ran into the gap she opened up, and they set about the fleeing Cabal with an efficiency born of a lifetime of killing.

Ferenk was among them. The jagged steel head of his spear found a Cabalist in the back and he pinned her to the ground, rushing up to her and slamming his foot down on the back of her head.

Voleska had a split second to gather her thoughts. She risked a glance away from the carnage, up the slope towards the peaks surrounding Bonebreak Pass like the spires of a crown.

The watchers of battle were there, unmoving. In the flashes of lightning she could see how their black armour was banded with steel. Their shields were inscribed with glowing runes and hung with strings of skulls and severed hands. Every peak in the Fangs seemed to have one of Archaon’s warriors atop it, watching the various fronts of the battle unfolding in Bonebreak Pass. Some were observing the bloodshed on the other side of the pass, where Voleska knew that the Unmade and the Splintered Fang were butchering one another. Others were watching the Corvus Cabal and the Spire Tyrants.

They were watching Voleska. They had seen her pair of kills.

‘Killing is not enough,’ said Voleska to Kyryll, who was scrambling to his feet to join Ferenk’s advance.

‘What?’ Kyryll struggled to understand her above the din of clashing steel and screams.

‘They’re watching. Killing isn’t enough. We have to show them. Like in the arenas! We are the spectacle!’

She shot her friend a grin. His face showed only confusion, which passed as he refocused on the battle unfolding around them.

She knew now what she had to do. She understood why she had fought in the arenas, and why she had broken out in a night of anarchy and bloodshed on the streets of Carngrad. Why she had joined Ferenk and the Red Sand Raiders, welding a coherent force out of so many disparate killers. It was because one day, in the chill and storm-lashed Bonebreak Pass, the eyes of Archaon would be on her at last.

‘They’re falling back!’ gasped Kyryll. The Corvus Cabal were scurrying back towards the heights, leaving dozens of dead and maimed in their wake. The slain tumbled down the slope into the thick gore, which was swelling and foaming with the rain.

‘It’s a feint!’ shouted back Ferenk as he finished off a Cabalist on the ground with spear thrust to the throat. ‘They want to draw us in.’

‘Then let them!’ answered Voleska. ‘Tyrants! They are watching! Finish these vermin! Fill up this valley with the dead!’

She held her enormous hammer high over her head. The whole Spire Tyrants force could see her – she was a head taller than most of them and her gore-clotted weapon was like a standard of war brandished as a rallying point.

Some recognised the Gift-Giver from their days in the Carngrad fighting pits. Others just roared in appreciation of the bloody hammer and the toll it had reaped. They surged forward again in Voleska’s wake as she ran after the retreating Cabal.

Some of the Cabalists were too slow. They were trampled underfoot or killed with blades when they stumbled. Voleska slammed her hammer down on the crown of one Cabalist’s head and drove his shattered skull into his chest. Kyryll kept up with her and slashed at the hamstrings of another runner, sending him face first into the bloody scree to be despatched by the Spire Tyrants behind him.

The Corvus Cabal scrambled up the slope to the heights. They had banked on the Spire Tyrants waiting to exult in their victory, licking their wounds and regrouping, not pursuing them heedless of the trap the Cabalists were trying to spring. They never made it to the eyries strung with battlefield trophies, where thousands of crows roosted among the thorny trees of the Fangs. The front ranks of the Corvus Cabal were forced to turn and face the Spire Tyrants before they were overrun, well short of the ridge where they had hoped to mass for their counter-charge

The warriors on the peaks were still watching. They had not moved, save to turn their heads and keep the thickest of the fighting in view. They showed no reaction to the bloodshed.

Voleska had to get their notice. She had to go further.

A leader of the Cabal stood proud of the enemy lines. He stood on long steel legs, like stilts strapped to his shins. They ended in talons that he wielded as skilfully as a bird of prey, clotted with torn flesh and hair. He carried a pair of hooked blades and he shrieked in anger beneath his bird-skull helm. his arms were pierced with hundreds of feathers so that he seemed to have a pair of bloodstained wings.

Voleska had seen other Spire Tyrants killing with a flourish – a skilful decapitation, a flamboyant disembowelment – and she knew her spectacular hammer kills had competition. There was only one target for her in the unfolding bloodshed.

Voleska ran right at the Cabalist leader. He loped towards her, towering over even her prodigious height. He leaped with improbable agility, stabbing his talons down at her. She pivoted to one side and felt the claws raking down her shoulder. She roared in pain and let it fuel her, as she had learned in her first few hours as a killer in the arenas. She would always be hurt. She would always be wounded. It was her choice to use it, and not let it defeat her.

Voleska had the strength and the enemy had the speed. As fast as he was, he could not fly up out of the reach of her hammer. She held the weapon near the butt-end and swung it in a wide, circular arc, ignoring the Spire Tyrants who scattered out of the way. With a clatter the hammer knocked one of the Cabalist’s stilts out from under him.

He hopped onto his remaining stilt and let out a series of staccato, shrieking syllables, a war cry in the battle-tongue of the Cabal. Voleska shifted her grip on her hammer and lunged at her enemy, driving the head of the weapon towards his midriff.

The Cabalist easily jerked sideways out of the way of the blow. His twin blades ripped into Voleska’s unwounded shoulder and down her upper arm. He spun on his stilt and lashed out again, slicing a deep gash into her cheek and another into her other arm.

She had known she would be hurt. There was no way, with her relative slowness, to get into position. She had made a career in the arenas taking blows and refusing to let them debilitate her. She would feel the agony later. For now, she was right next to the Cabalist leader, his bloody wings unfolded over her, his wicked beak grimacing down.

Voleska swung the hammer down and up again, feeling her torn muscles fighting to power it out of its lowest point.

The hammer arced up and slammed into the Cabalist’s groin.

Bones crunched. The Cabalist’s pelvis shattered. The roar of an imaginary crowd filled Voleska’s mind. Severed heads and heart thrusts got boring eventually, but every crowd loved to see a kill-shot to the groin.

Voleska couldn’t leave it to chance. She had to confirm the kill before she could play to the stands and exult in her victory. The Cabalist toppled off his stilt and landed on his knees. Voleska hefted the weight of the hammer over her head and swung it down like a labourer driving a post into the ground. The hammer came down on the back of her foe’s neck.

The blow compressed the enemy’s body, folding it in half. The ribcage collapsed into the abdomen. The spine was turned to pulp. Blood and gore spurted out through the Cabalist’s torn torso, spraying to either side in crimson wings to complement the false pinions of black feathers.

Every kill needed a final flourish, an exclamation mark. Voleska swung an underhand blow into the shattered mess that remained of the Cabalist leader. She caught him under his ruptured chest and flung him high over the battlefield. He trailed blood like the tail of a comet and thumped into the middle of the Corvus Cabal.

Voleska could feel the tide of despair that rippled out from the corpse’s impact. The dismay of the opposition was as sweet as the appreciation of the crowd. Whether they loved or hated her, it was the reaction, the emotion she sparked in the hearts of the onlookers, that drove her on.

The Spire Tyrants roared at the death. They rushed in around her and dived into the Corvus Cabal. The enemy were shattered, their feathered bodies beaten down to the scree or held aloft impaled on spears and blades. They fought back till the end, and there were Spire Tyrants whose throats were cut or whose hearts were pierced even in the moments of victory, but for every fallen gladiator, five or six of the Crows were left butchered in bleeding heaps.

Drops of blood pattered down onto Voleska’s shoulders as she paused. The thunderclouds overhead swelled deep crimson, and the storm broke. With a hiss and a roar, the blood rain fell again.

It trickled down the scree in hundreds of tiny streams, mingling with the river that now flowed through the pass, foaming pink around rapids formed by piles of bodies. It streamed down the faces of the Spire Tyrants and spattered against the armour of the warriors on the mountain peaks. It sluiced down the mountainsides. The sky was rent and bleeding, as if the fury of the battle below had dealt a mortal wound to the sky itself.

Voleska panted with exertion and leaned on her hammer. The pain of her wounds was starting to hit her now. Both arms were streaming with blood, and not only from the crimson downpour. She looked up through the red rain at the watchers on the peaks.

Would that be enough? Did they care? Had they even seen her butchery of the enemy amid the swirling bloodshed? Plenty of Spire Tyrants had made spectacular kills in the last few moments alone. What made her stand out compared to them?

And then she knew.

A Spire Tyrant fought alone. They might form alliances in the arenas, and then join greater alliances outside it, banding together under leaders like Ferenk for mutual protection. But they were not born to such allegiances. Even her friendly rivalry with Kyryll had its roots in a genuine desire to outdo, to defeat, to step over on the way to something greater.

There was nothing for her on that bloodstained slope, nor in the camp where the Spire Tyrants would drink and boast past nightfall. A true gladiator did not make herself a part of that. She stood alone.

She knew what she had to do. She had never been more certain of anything in her life.

She turned to Kyryll. He looked similarly exhausted. His flesh was covered in nicks and cuts, and his arms were slathered in gore to the elbow. He grinned up at her, smearing the blood rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Not so different from Carngrad after all. Never gave them a show quite like this, though.’

Voleska felt the weight of her hammer as if she was lifting it for the first time. No one else in the arenas had the strength to wield it. No one had thought she could either. She had proven them wrong.

Kyryll never had the time to let the smile fall off his features. Voleska’s hammer blow caught him square in the face.

It was good that she started with him. He was the hardest to kill. Once he was down, his face staved in and ruined, the rest were easy.

It took the other Spire Tyrants several fatal moments to realise what she was doing. They were drunk on victory and their bodies were sluggish with the fatigue suddenly catching up with them. Voleska crushed the skull of one who had his back to her, then knocked the legs out from under another and finished him off with a stamp to the back of the neck.

The first Spire Tyrant to react turned to her and wrestled his blade back out of its scabbard. ‘What are you…?’ he gasped before Voleska rammed the head of the hammer into his chest, driving the air out of him. She swung the hammer up under his chin, shattering his jaw and snapping his head fatally back with the crack of snapping spine.

They tried to swarm her. When they came into her guard, they were mown down by the swinging arc of her hammer. They leapt at her and she swatted them out of the air where they could be killed down in the scree.

Surviving Cabalists took advantage of the sudden confusion among the Spire Tyrants to leap into the fray. More died in one-on-one struggles with the Spire Tyrants. Others were caught within the whirlwind of blood that surrounded Voleska. Crowded around by enemies, stronger than any of them and with a greater reach, she could not help but catch an enemy or three with every swing of her hammer.

The pain was gone. Her strength flowed back. The hollow inside her, that had been temporarily filled with the adulation of the crowd and the rush of victory, was brimming over with a certainty of purpose.

Ferenk faced her through the carnage. He loped over the broken bones and pulped torsos towards her. His face was a furious mass of scars twisted with anger. He led with his spear, blinded by his anger at Voleska’s betrayal.

‘Witch!’ he snarled. ‘You betray! You break us!’

‘Give them a show, Sunder-Spine,’ said Voleska with a blood-flecked grin.

Ferenk led with a spear thrust. Voleska shifted out of the way but he knew her too well to be wrong-footed. He snapped an elbow up into her face and caught her square on the jaw. Sparks flared in front of her eyes as her head snapped back, and she felt herself drop. She threw out a hand to break her fall, dropping her hammer, and felt Ferenk’s spear grazing her cheek as he just missed a fatal stab to her face.

Voleska grabbed the haft of the spear and pulled. Ferenk came down on top of her. She wrapped a meaty hand around the back of his head to keep him from getting back up and the two rolled, wrestling, slick with blood and fighting for a grip.

Ferenk rolled on top. He tore an arm free and punched it down at her. She twisted her head and the blow slammed into her collarbone. The flash of pain told her it was probably broken. Ferenk’s teeth were gritted and every ropelike muscle stood out on his lean, battle-carved body. He drew his fist back again and slammed it into the side of her head.

Ferenk’s eagerness to punish her had let Voleska free one of her arms. She grabbed a handful of his lank black hair and pulled his head back. He was forced backwards and Voleska had the room to force herself up into a seated position. She wrapped both her arms around Ferenk and held him in a bear hug.

She could feel his ribs creaking against her biceps. He hissed through his teeth as he fought to draw a proper lungful of breath. He pounded against her back but she cinched him in tighter, locking her fingers and grinding his torso. He thrashed and struggled, and his fingers found the haft of the stone dagger in his belt.

Voleska had killed men with this death grip before, but not often. Any competent fighter had a backup blade to slide between her ribs in such a clinch. Even as Ferenk pulled out his knife, Voleska powered up to her feet and threw the leader of the Red Sand Raiders away from her.

Ferenk landed heavily on one shoulder. He rolled to standing, panting down a breath, knife in hand.

‘Who paid you to betray us?’ snarled Ferenk. ‘What did they offer you?’

‘No one offers anything,’ said Voleska. ‘Not on the Spoil. You have to take it.’

‘When I leave this pass, I will be wearing your skin.’

Voleska spat out a gobbet of bloody phlegm. ‘You’ll never leave.’

Ferenk ran at her, but his fury made him sloppy.

Voleska took the dagger thrust on her forearm. It sliced down to the bone, but it was just one more wound among many. Ferenk rushed into her, and she rammed a knee up into his stomach.

He folded and wheezed, almost pitching face first into the scree. Voleska drove her elbow down into the back of his head and felt the skull crack.

Ferenk was on his hands and knees now. Voleska picked up her hammer and shifted her grip to hold it just below the head, with the gore-encrusted lump of stone facing groundwards. She looked up at the closest watcher of battle, whose armoured visor was facing down at her.

‘The Gift-Giver has a gift for Lord Archaon!’ she yelled, and slammed the hammer down.

The blow crushed Ferenk’s skull flat against the scree slope. The Sunder-Spine’s brains sprayed out of his sundered cranium. His legs twitched with some primeval instinct of death, and then he was still.

No Spire Tyrants rushed in to avenge their fallen. No spat curses came her way. Voleska turned to look behind her, but through the falling rain she could see only bodies littering the slope.

They were all dead, or fled. She had done it.

She was the last one standing.

They descended the slopes as the last embers of the battle died down. Most of them turned away from the carnage and walked off into the labyrinthine peaks of the Fangs, uninterested in what the warbands had to offer them. But two of Archaon’s warriors descended to the place where the Corvus Cabal and the Spire Tyrants had fought, and where only the dead and wounded remained. Save one warrior who waited for them, leaning on her giant hammer. They looked her up and down, sizing up her wounds. Up close they were huge, taller and broader even than Voleska. If they had found her wanting or too badly hurt to be used, they would have despatched her then and there. But they did not.

They turned away and headed for the northern end of the pass, in the direction of the Varanspire. Voleska gave silent thanks to the Dark Gods, and followed them.

Outside the Varanspire was a complex of dozens of forges, each one a structure of black stone and iron belching smoke. The region was bathed in infernal heat and the air was almost unbreathable with smoke and ash. Pale, skinny slave-things scurried about carrying ingots or hauling sleds loaded with swords and armour. The warriors led Voleska through the forges to one where the black iron doors hung open, revealing the glowing throats of the fires inside.

Segments of armour hung on the walls. Hundreds of swords were lined up in racks, with others in the process of being forged by a malformed smith whose enormous, lopsided musculature drove the hammer he used to beat the blades into shape. His face was hidden behind a caul of chain and it looked like he had never left his place at the anvil. He took a blade he had finished beating and plunged it into the water trough running the length of the room. A blast of steam filled the air as the superheated metal was suddenly cooled and hardened.

Voleska let her heart fill with anticipation. She had not dared believe she would join the ranks of Archaon’s armies, not truly, until she saw it happen. Now she was to be fitted with the all-enclosing armour of a Chaos Warrior, ready to join the legions marching out through the Realmgates to conquer and despoil.

One of the weapons racked up for inspection was a hammer. It was the length and heft of her own, but of infinitely grander construction. Its iron head was faced with spikes and its haft was bound with the warted skin of some leathery beast. Voleska reached out to touch the weapon, imagining its killing power in her hands.

An iron-shod foot kicked her in the back of the leg. She fell to one knee, grunting in surprise. She reached out to arrest her fall and her hand found the edge of the trough containing the water used to quench the forge’s blades.

But it was not full of water.

Voleska was looking into a trough full of blood. A gauntleted hand fell on her shoulder and kept her down on her knee. She struggled, but the grip on her shoulder and the weight pinning her down did not shift. It was like being held in an iron clamp. Voleska had never encountered anyone as strong as she was, but the warrior holding her was stronger by far.

They were not like her. They were not men and women. They were something inhuman. It was no gladiator of Carngrad or brave of the Corvus Cabal beneath that armour. It was no Unmade or Splintered Fang. Perhaps it had once been, a lifetime ago, but now it was something very different.

Voleska had thought the watchers of battle were searching for a warrior who was their equal, but she was not an equal.

She was not strong enough.

Panic rose in her. She had never truly felt it before. This fear was an alien thing, like a ghost that stole into her heart and turned it to ice. She tried to reach up and grab the arm pinning her down, but another hand seized her wrist and she was held fast.

Not strong enough to be one of Archaon’s warriors.

She felt the sword point touch the back of her neck. The trough of blood was used for quenching the blades of Archaon’s soldiers, but no mundane blood would do. It gave its strength to their arms and armour, imbuing them with the ferocity and anguish of the warbands of the Bloodwind Spoil. These facts rushed through Voleska’s mind as she desperately sought a reason why she might live.

Not strong enough to serve Archaon. But strong enough to be a sacrifice.

The Gift-Giver, the Butcher of Bonebreak Pass, was chosen not to march with the armies of Archaon, but so their newly forged swords could be quenched in her blood.

The tip of the warrior’s sword pierced the skin of her neck. The first trickle of it ran down her throat and dripped into the trough. The malformed blacksmith grunted in acknowledgement as his hammer rose and fell in a deafening, unceasing rhythm.

The sword punched through Voleska’s neck. Ice ran through her as it cut her spine. Blood sluiced into the trough in front of her. Blackness flickered around the edges of her vision.

The last thing she saw was her lifeblood flowing into the trough, the only thing of value the servants of Archaon had seen in the Gift-Giver. Her last thoughts, before they were cut off by the passage of the blade through her brain stem, were of emptiness.

THE MANSE OF MIRRORS

Nick Horth

I don’t do break-in jobs, as a rule. The crucial thing about my line of work is that it involves searching for items of incalculable value and historical significance. Relics of a lost age, the sole remaining cultural evidence of civilisations ground down by time and damned by the gods. It is one of the immutable laws of existence that such precious things tend to fall into the hands of the realms’ very worst people.

So I remain unsure as to the exact reason I agreed to break into the manse of Phylebius Crade, noted master of amethyst magic, former high thaumaturge of the free city of Lethis, and by all accounts one of the most dangerous men you could ever wish to meet. Fortunately, he’d been dead for something approaching fifty years, so running into him seemed an unlikely prospect.

As usual, Rhodus gave me the hard sell. Over a glass of overpriced Cyphian amber in an overpriced private room of the Silvermoon tavern, he massaged my ego and played upon my desires as only a merchant of the Ivory Circle could. Our meeting place was a fine, if rather gloomy establishment, its walls and chairs fashioned from polished black wood and decorated with all manner of gewgaws: dreamcatchers, rope-charms and brass tintinnabula that tinkled unsettlingly in the breeze. A lamp filled with whale tallow burned softly above our private table, releasing a strange, blue-white glow. The Lethisian aesthetic was not one I particularly admired. It felt as though I were drinking in a gigantic coffin.

Rhodus signalled a cadaverous member of the serving staff to refill my glass, and I made no objection. I never pass up an opportunity for free food or drink. The life of a roaming treasure seeker is one of dramatic highs and frequent, penurious lows, and currently my resources were worryingly meagre. It had not been easy to gain passage to Shyish; at great cost I had booked a berth upon a trade fleet out of Excelsis that had passed through the Lixian Realmgate, carrying vast quantities of augur-stones for the Raven City’s markets. That journey had taken a season and more, and had drained the last of my coin. I was weary and broke. The perfect mark for a rogue like Rhodus.

‘No one’s heard a whisper from the place since the old wretch passed,’ Rhodus was saying. ‘And you must have heard the rumours. By the time Crade died he had gathered himself a hoard of Stygxxian relics, the sort of treasures that would bring in a cog-fort’s worth of Azyrite coin on the shadow market. Now don’t tell me that doesn’t strike your fancy, because I know you better than that, Shevanya Arclis.’

He leaned back on his chair, his legs swinging ridiculously like those of an overeager child.

I took a long, slow drink, trying to mask my interest. It never pays to let someone like Rhodus know he’s got his hooks in you. I had an inexplicable fondness for the odd little man with his gaudy robes and silly little pince-nez, but he was a business associate first and friend a distant second. You don’t get to be a member of the Ivory Circle unless you have the predatory instincts of a wraith-spider. I liked Rhodus Blithe, but I sure as sigmarite didn’t trust him.

‘If that’s true,’ I said at last, ‘I’m sure someone’s already broken in and looted everything of value. It’s been decades, Rhodus.’

‘No!’ the merchant squeaked, shaking his head excitedly. ‘That’s the genius of it! You know what these Lethisians are like, Shevanya, they can’t empty their bowels without reciting half a dozen canticles of obeisance to Morrda. Besides, as far as the common folk are concerned, Crade may as well be Nagash himself. The entire city trembles at the mention of his name. No one goes near his manse, and those who’ve tried…’

I flashed him a look. ‘Go on.’

He twitched a little, and flashed me a slightly sickly smile. ‘Well, there’s no profit without a little risk, is there, my dear? I have it all in hand. I have obtained the services of three most accomplished… ah, retrieval experts. But I require your discerning eye, Shevanya. In return I can promise an equal share of any items that we extricate, as well as fitting compensation for your efforts.’

The offer of coin was welcome, of course – show me a freelancer who doesn’t appreciate a decent payday – but it was the chance to root through Crade’s belongings that really piqued my interest. Of course I’d heard the tales. No one had explored as many of the dangerous wilds of the Land of Forgotten Gods as the former high thaumaturge. Stygxx is a land of mystery, home to the remnants of a thousand lost cultures. A graveyard of history. To someone like yours truly, an archaeologist who specialises in unearthing the bygone secrets of the Age of Myth, it’s unendingly fascinating.

‘I’ll need to meet your crew before we continue,’ I said, before draining my glass. The amber burned pleasantly as it slipped down. ‘We need the best for a job like this. You know how protective wizards get about the things they’ve stolen. And by all accounts Master Crade was something of a prodigy amongst his kind.’

Rhodus couldn’t keep the smirk off his face. He knew he had me, despite my attempts to feign professional disinterest.

‘Of course,’ he said, fairly rubbing his hands together in glee. ‘Believe me, Shevanya, this is the best decision you’ve ever made. We’ll be in, out and away with a fortune in priceless treasures before the week is out!’

As it turned out, Rhodus was wrong about all of that.

Phylebius Crade’s mansion was not exactly what I expected. I’d pictured your typical wizard’s abode, a monument to its owner’s towering ego, some form of ludicrously extravagant tower looming over the city in a display of gaudy excess. In fact, the manse was an attractive yet rather nondescript building constructed in the Azyrite fashion, with a columned portico and a great domed roof. It stood amidst a tangled forest of hedgerows, which had been left to grow unchecked for many years. Spidery vines wrapped the mansion in a tight embrace, and patches of luminescent moss gave it a strange, silvery sheen, like meat gone bad.

I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of unease as I gazed upon the house, not solely due to the typically Lethisian weather. An early morning mist had settled over the free city. Above, a baleful moon peered out of the clouds, bathing everything in a sickly green light. A gathering of black birds sat atop the dome, silently observing the grounds. These were the creatures that had earned Lethis its epithet – the Raven City. The locals worshipped them as living agents of their silent god, Morrda, an ancient deity of death whom they believed had escaped the clutches of the Great Necromancer. I found the cold and calculating stares of the carrion birds profoundly unsettling.

My companions joined me by the iron gate at the front of the property.

‘Not much to look at, is it, aelf?’ said Dhowmer, leaning against his ivory staff, smirking at me through bloodless lips. I had taken against the mage at first glance. He was a young, sallow human with an air of practised insouciance, dressed in richly embroidered robes with a high, sweeping collar, and sporting a painstakingly fashioned moustache. A prodigy of the Collegiate Arcane, according to Rhodus. That didn’t explain why he had joined our little expedition. I had an inkling that if any of Dhowmer’s masters caught wind of his business tonight, the punishment would be severe. Probably fatal. Not an unpleasant thought, as far as I was concerned.

‘Certainly his groundsman’s work leaves a lot to be desired,’ I said.

‘Crade weren’t ever a flashy one,’ said Goolan, scratching at a week-old tangle of grey stubble. This one was a master amongst thieves, allegedly, though at first glance he looked like any random drunk one might stumble upon in a seedy drinking pit in the early hours of morning: overweight, foul-smelling and with teeth like broken nails. Only his eyes gave his true nature away; they sparkled with the vigour of a man half his age, flicking to and fro restlessly without missing a trick.

‘The old vulture Crade didn’t need no flashy tower or a set of gaudy robes like yourself, boy. All he needed was his name. People whispered it in fear. Still do, and he’s been dead a long while.’

El-malia sighed theatrically. ‘If we’re going to do this, shall we press on? Lord Zainton hosts the Evenmoon Ball tomorrow eve, and I should like to attend if it’s all the same to you three.’

Tall, statuesque and with enough knives strapped about her person to equip a butcher’s shop, Lady Nazira El-malia was of Azyrite stock, or so she said. She certainly had the coin and self-assurance to back that up. I marked her as a noble-born thrill-seeker, and was not overly impressed. I’d seen plenty of her kind in my time.

‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘The longer we linger here, the sooner the Blackshore Guard or the Raven priests show up. I’d rather not see the inside of a Lethisian gaol. Your taverns are bad enough.’

Goolan worked his skills upon the gate and had it open in short order. It creaked ominously as it swung open to allow us passage. We advanced along the overgrown path towards the front door, the only sound the distant howling of the wind. All else was eerily still and silent, and the ravens perched atop the domed roof watched our progress with judgemental stares.

The mansion’s main door was a great wedge of black iron, inlaid with a spiralling pattern of symbols that I could not decipher. In its centre was a huge brass ring, and beneath that a circular panel etched with more odd, angular runes. The disc glowed with a faint silvery light.

‘Hmm,’ said Goolan. ‘Clever little enchantment. You got to press the right combination of the symbols, else it knows you’re an intruder and boom… you’re coiler-meat.’

‘How do you know that?’ I asked, impressed.

‘I’ve been doing this a long time, girl,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen every type of lock, trap and enchantment you can imagine. These wizardly types, they always figure an ignorant thief’s got no chance against their unmatched genius. I like to prove ’em wrong.’

‘Can you break it?’ asked El-malia.

‘Course. You just keep your eyes open and your mouths shut, and let me work.’

The thiefmaster set down his backpack, and began to rummage through it. After a moment, he withdrew a conical brass instrument inlaid with purple gems, and a leather belt containing a selection of odd-looking implements whose function escaped me.

‘Magic leaves a trace, same as anything else,’ Goolan said. ‘Just got to learn… to read it.’

He held the cone-shaped object near to the panel, and moved it slowly over the surface. The gems inlaid upon the device began to pulse gently. Goolan passed the cone over the area several times, and after each circuit he scribbled down something in a little leatherbound notebook.

Meanwhile, the rest of us shivered and shuffled about nervously, expecting a patrol of black-clad Freeguild to appear at any moment. A sudden gale picked up, scattering dead leaves as it whipped across the gardens. I frowned. For a moment the rush of wind seemed to take on an almost human sound, like a susurrus of hushed whispers. It passed in a moment, and I told myself it was just my ears playing tricks on me.

‘Right then,’ said Goolan at last. ‘Think I’ve got it.’

‘And if you don’t?’ I said, knowing the answer.

‘Then I’ll likely be splattered about these flagstones, along with the rest of you. Here goes nothing.’

El-malia, Dhowmer and I all took a discreet step backwards.

The thiefmaster’s slender fingers danced across the panel, and the silvery glow intensified. There was a deep, low clunk.

With a groan, the door yawned open. Beyond, I could see a narrow corridor, shrouded in darkness.

Goolan got to his feet with a nod of satisfaction, and regathered his tools.

‘After you,’ gestured Dhowmer with a bow and a smile, clearly expecting me to defer.

I managed to refrain from rolling my eyes. My golden rule of exploration has ever been this: always take the lead, and trust your own eyes over anyone else’s. Not being the one to trigger a trap yourself won’t make you any less dead if one goes off in close proximity. No matter where in the realms they hail from, trap designers tend to operate on the same basic principles as Ironweld cannoneers – the more destruction and death you can leverage at a single location, the less likely there are to be any survivors.

I fetched a raystone from my belt, thumbing the central depression in the oval rock. Then I tucked the object into a pocket on the lapel of my coat, where it began to glow softly, illuminating the path ahead. These imports from Hysh aren’t cheap or easy to get hold of, but unlike a flaming torch they don’t go out, and they have the advantage of leaving one’s hands free. I proceeded slowly along the hallway, scanning the walls and floor for any telltale signs of imperfection, any sudden gusts of air or strange smells that might signify something untoward. The stonework was flawlessly smooth obsidian, the floor richly carpeted with a length of crimson fabric upon which were embroidered skeletal pipers, cavorting madly across a corpse-strewn battlefield. Cheerful, I thought.

Eventually the passage opened into a large central chamber, dominated by a great spiral stair that ascended into the darkness of a domed ceiling. Lining the chamber on all sides were great oil paintings and embossed murals, arranged so tightly upon the walls that I could barely see the masonry beneath. I don’t profess to be an expert on Lethisian art, but judging by the quality of the pieces, Crade was something of an aesthete.

‘Oh my,’ said Lady El-malia. ‘Is that an original Ruthean? Throne of Azyr, that can’t have come cheap.’

‘A master of the Collegiate Arcane does not want for resources,’ said Dhowmer. ‘And Crade was one of the most powerful men to ever hold office in Lethis.’

There was a scattering of imposing landscapes. An immense mural depicted the towering presence of Deific Mons, the Mountain of the Silent Gods, rays of heavenly light bathing its highest peaks in a golden glow. I believe I recognised the darksome forests of Tzlid, and a tremendously unsettling image of a sea vessel caught in the crushing embrace of a great skullcoiler eel. Yet the majority of the gallery was comprised of portraits. Pale, austere men and women glared down at us disapprovingly. The majority wore fine robes and collars of fur, and were bedecked with golden jewellery and Azyrite sigils. Several possessed a more military bearing, clad in ornate armour and accompanied by similarly proud-looking animals: star-eagles, astral lions and hook-beaked gryphons. The gloom rendered these strangers ghostly and foreboding, and gave their hawkish stares an uncomfortably lifelike appearance.

Upon a landing at the top of the first flight of stairs was the largest painting of all. It depicted a stern-looking man in a white skullcap, standing beneath a full moon. In one hand he held aloft a cracked timepiece that trickled black sand. In the other, a staff of bone and gold, topped with the symbol of the comet. I recognised the staff of office. It resembled those carried by the masters of the Collegiate Arcane.

‘So that’s our host,’ I said.

‘High Thaumaturge Phylebius Crade himself,’ nodded Dhowmer. ‘Before my time of course, but the masters of the Centrellum can’t talk for more than a minute without invoking his name. Most tiresome.’

I shivered, despite my warm rhinox-hide coat. Somehow it was colder in the empty hall than it had been outside. Each breath unleashed a curling wisp of fog, and the tips of my fingers ached painfully. There was an unnatural stillness to the house, as though we were frozen in time. Looking around I saw no dust upon the carpet, and no signs of life. The curtains and drapes framing each of the great murals were not moth-eaten and ragged, but richly coloured, as if they had only just been installed.

‘This hardly resembles a house that’s been abandoned for fifty years,’ said Dhowmer, echoing my thoughts. ‘Someone’s here, or has been until recently.’

‘That arcane ward on the front door’s not been breached in at least a decade,’ said Goolan. ‘I’d bet my teeth upon it.’

‘Perhaps our host is not, in fact, deceased,’ said Lady El-malia, nervously clutching a thin-bladed throwing knife.

‘Come on,’ I said, starting for the great stairway. The cold eyes of Crade’s painting followed me across the chamber. I could tell the others were as unnerved as I. The look of self-satisfaction had temporarily disappeared from Dhowmer’s face, and Goolan’s eyes darted to and fro like those of a cornered alley rat.

The stairs curved around and led us to a circular landing. Directly ahead lay a pair of doors, their surface panelled with amethyst glass. Cautiously I approached, the sensation of being watched growing ever more potent. My scarred visage stared back at me from the frosted surface – the ragged marks were the legacy of an old injury, an ever-present reminder of a time I’d rather forget. I stopped, my heart hammering. Reflected in the glass I saw a ghostly, withered hand reaching over my shoulder, taloned fingers stretching out to caress my neck. At the same time I felt something brush lightly across my skin.

I whirled about, panic seizing control of my limbs, and struck at the figure looming behind me, which recoiled with a shriek of its own. It was Goolan. He cursed as he clutched his face.

‘What in Sigmar’s name is wrong with you?’ he growled.

‘I saw…’ I began, turning back to the glass door. No longer was there any sign of the gruesome apparition, only a deeply irritated thief nursing a bruised jaw.

Embarrassment battled fear for control of my emotions, and emerged triumphant. I muttered an apology, but I could not shake the image of that cadaverous hand coiling around my neck. I had the same feeling an arachnophobe experiences when they know that a spider is crawling and scuttling somewhere close by, but they can’t lay their eyes upon it. It’s somehow worse than being confronted with the creature itself. My gut was telling me that we should abandon this fool’s errand right there and then, but foolish pride and a desire to lay my hands upon Crade’s collection refused to allow good sense to prevail.

‘Can we get a move on?’ asked Dhowmer looking even paler than usual, trickles of sweat running down his face despite the cold air.

Cursing my overactive mind, I pushed open the double doors. A long corridor of dark, panelled wood stretched off into the distance. Lining the walls on each side were handsome dress mirrors set into oval frames of silver and gold. The raystone tucked into my coat illuminated the passage, causing the looking glasses to flicker unnervingly and sending a cascade of rippling light across the ceiling.

Cautiously, I proceeded down the corridor. Reaching the first mirror to my left, I glanced into its depths, half expecting to see that same withered hand wrapped around my neck. My reflection stared back, but to my disquiet it stood not in the halls of Crade’s mansion, but upon the crystal steps of a teetering spire, a city of glass and shadow stretched out far beneath me, nothing but utter blackness above my head. As I watched, my mirror image raised a trembling hand, my mouth open in astonishment.

‘Throne of Azyr,’ whispered Goolan. He too was staring into the depths of the mirror as if hypnotised. To my disquiet I could not see his reflection in the glass, even though he stood no more than a few inches from my side.

‘Beautiful,’ said Dhowmer. ‘It reminds me of a tale my mother used to tell. Of the City of Mirrors, where the damned are trapped for all eternity to suffer and rot, never granted the peace of death.’

‘You Lethisians really are a cheerful lot, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘All of these show the same location,’ said El-malia, studying each mirror in turn.

She was right. The landscapes displayed were bizarre and incongruous, their physical dimensions impossible, but there was a uniformity in the architecture: grand, gothic spires and soaring arches; cramped, switchbacked streets; and above all, the ornamental use of dark, green glass. Entire walls and towers were shaped from the substance. In the midst of this dark grandeur there at first appeared to be no life at all. Yet as I looked closer, I saw hunched, crook-backed shapes lurking in doorways, slumped and hopeless. In the shadows of oubliettes and catacombs half-seen figures shuffled, avoiding the light like vermin.

More than anything I felt a sense of sorrow and anguish radiating from the city beyond the glass. The sensation was palpable, yet it was tremendously difficult to tear one’s eyes from the strange sights. I dragged myself away, and continued on down the hall.

I shivered and clutched my coat around my chest. Across the walls and ceiling I could see a patina of hoar frost glittering in the half-light. As I watched, it began to spread, trickling down the walls in spidery patterns.

‘This place is wrong,’ El-malia said, and I could not disagree. Yet I set my jaw and tried to banish my unease. I’ve faced down slavering monsters and deranged sorcerers alike, visited cursed temple-cities and conversed with ancient beings whose sheer, alien otherness made me question my own sanity. I was not about to abandon our prize just yet.

‘We press on,’ I said. ‘We’re close, I’m sure. Just keep your eyes peeled.’

The next mirror showed a tower of emerald glass, its spires twisted into the image of a gargantuan, skeletal face. Hooded figures knelt before the tower. They bent and rose in supplication. As I looked in fearful fascination, the figure at the centre of the gathering rose and turned to face me. A gaunt, thin-limbed creature, its flesh pale as a corpseworm. It began to stride towards me, reaching up with spider-like fingers to pull back the hood of its robe. Beneath was a face from my darkest nightmares, a sunken horror with blackened teeth and a snakish slit of a nose. Yet far worse were the cadaver’s eyes. Shards of green glass had been thrust through its eyeballs, and dried blood caked its cheeks. The robed corpse opened its arms, as if to welcome me home. A withered hand reached out, and with a crackle of splintering glass, black fingernails pierced the mirror and thrust into reality, reaching for my face.

Lady El-malia’s gasp of horror stirred me from my trance. I tumbled backwards as the disembodied hand brushed past my face, its grasping claws missing me by mere inches. I fell on my backside and scrambled away across the floor. El-malia thrust out with her dagger, and the thing in the mirror withdrew its hand with a hiss of pain, falling to its knees. It began to sob and wail, pressing bleeding palms against the glass surface. As it turned its eyeless face towards me once more I registered not fury, but boundless sorrow. To my surprise I felt a stab of pity along with my revulsion.

Inhuman shrieks filled the air. All around us the glass portals stirred, as the skies above the strange city flared with emerald light. Soaring above the spires and glass-towers came shrouded horrors wreathed in ragged cloaks of black, their skull-like faces gleaming in the twilight. They wheeled and turned in the air, unleashing piercing cries filled with bitter hatred. In the presence of these apparitions the distant, praying figures fell to the floor and prostrated themselves in terror. Then, as one, the wraiths turned and fixed their soulless gaze upon my companions and me. I felt my heart stutter as dozens of pairs of baleful eyes bored into my own. I could keenly feel their predatory hunger. With another awful cry the spectral nightmares swept down towards us.

Behind us, glass shattered, and a ghostly form swept into reality. Then another mirror burst into pieces, and another, and suddenly the hall was filled with swirling, aethereal forms and flying shards of glass. Gaunt faces leered down at us, and clawed hands clutched rusted blades and verdigrised chains.

‘God-King preserve us!’ cried Goolan.

‘Run,’ I hissed, tearing my eyes from the awful sight. ‘Run!’

Scrambling to my feet, I raced for the door at the far end of the chamber, icy rime spreading across the wooden floor ahead of me with a terrible crackling sound. Goolan was faster. His boots clattered across the floor, and I could hear Dhowmer and El-malia rushing close behind us, their breathing ragged. As we ran, I could see shapes stirring within the mirrors on either side, stretching out their hands to pierce the veil between worlds. The far door was barely a dozen feet away when a spider-limbed horror wrapped in pale rags burst from the mirror to the left of Goolan in an explosion of shattering glass, wrapping its spectral arms around the thiefmaster. Goolan was torn from his feet, and with a scream the gheist dragged the poor man through the glass portal.

As I raced past, I saw from the corner of my eye the thiefmaster struggling helplessly, borne away into the shadows of the mirrored city.

Again came the sound of shattering glass, and a high-pitched, terrified scream that I was almost certain was not my own. Ghostly hands swiped at me, but I threw myself into a headlong dive, tucking my shoulder and coming to my feet just a few feet from the door and, I hoped, sanctuary.

My shaking hands grasped the handle, and I tore it open. I would like to say that I stopped then for the sake of my companions, but in fact it was only the shattered remains of a broken table that halted my escape. I stumbled and nearly fell, one hand slamming down upon a carpeted floor to steady myself. Turning, I saw Dhowmer in full flight, his robes billowing behind him. He rushed into the room.

Lady El-malia was on his heels. She had made the threshold of the chamber when she froze in place, her body stiffening. A spectral claw tore through her chest, its long, curved fingernails protruding from her heart. The noblewoman collapsed to her knees, eyes glazing over, her face locked in an expression of purest horror. Then she too was dragged away.

I kicked the door shut, even though some distant corner of my mind registered that against the spectral dead such physical barriers were all but pointless. For a few, terrible moments I expected our hideous pursuers to come flooding through the thick oak of the door and into our chamber.

But silence fell once more.

Dhowmer began to chant urgently, weaving his staff in a figure-of-eight pattern. There was a burst of white light, and the mage fetched a leatherbound bag from his belt and began to sprinkle a fine, white powder across the floor beneath the door.

‘Saint’s Wort,’ he explained. ‘Mixed with Azyrite starwater and ground with the bones of a Devoted battle-priest. A ward against the dead.’

‘Will it hold?’

He shook his head helplessly. ‘If it doesn’t, we’ll be joining our late companions in whatever cursed place lies beyond.’

The thought stirred me into motion. I clambered to my feet and took in the chamber for the first time. It was a high, square room, almost every inch of it piled with workbenches and stacks of yellowed tomes. Around the edge of the chamber were a number of towering glass cabinets, filled to the brim with one of the most eclectic collections of magical and historical ephemera I have ever seen. Rhodus had been right about one thing: Crade’s collection could have rivalled that of any Azyrite antiquarian. I saw Thraxian gunshields crafted from blue invictunite, sun carvings from the Hyshan sky-plains, a suit of ensorcelled plate bearing the sun and eagle of Lantea. My fear ebbed away somewhat, replaced by astonishment and wonder.

For all the splendour of the wizard’s hoard, Crade had clearly had greater things on his mind than mere appreciation of his treasures. Several of the great cabinets had been shunted aside, stacked together about the edge of the chamber. The doors of some were hanging open, their contents lying scattered about the floor or piled up absent-mindedly upon stacks of unwashed plates and notebooks scrawled upon in an untidy hand.

Crade had been clearing space for a bizarre tangle of arcane machinery that occupied the centre of the room. Three pillars of gold were arranged around yet another looking glass. This one was far larger and more ornate than the others, almost reaching to the ceiling. It was wrought of gleaming obsidian and fashioned with the skill of a master craftsman, filigreed patterns of silver worked into every inch of the metalwork. The stone pillars were marked with runes and scrawled notes and arcane formulae written in what looked like glowing chalk. Each was capped by a disc of blue metal, upon which rested a geometric fist of violet crystal. I am no student of the arcane, but I could feel the power surging from these objects, sending an aetheric charge fizzing across my flesh. Looping trails of metal spilled from the base of the pillars like iron intestines, coiling across the floor.

Feeling a trickle of dread creep along my spine, I edged around the front of the mirror, peering into its calm surface. There was the faint outline of my reflection, but beneath it I once again saw an image of the strange city. This time I saw no eyeless ghouls or malevolent spirits. Instead I looked upon the interior of an emerald cathedral, a great, vaulted hall that possessed a cold and terrible beauty. The floor was polished obsidian, the walls lined with statues of tall and foreboding figures. Rising from the floor in the centre of the cathedral was a frozen river of glass that disappeared into the domed roof above. Swirling patterns of light rippled along the length of this strangely organic structure, and though the distance was too great to be sure, I thought that I could make out vaguely human shapes drifting within its crystalline depths, floating as if carried along by a swift current.

‘This one feels different,’ said Dhowmer, shaking his head. ‘These pillars. The magic is beyond me, but I can sense their power.’

He frowned, then closed his eyes and fell silent.

‘I don’t want to distract you from your meditation,’ I said with no small amount of frustration, ‘but any minute now a horde of vengeful spirits is going to come flooding through that door.’

The mage’s eyes snapped open.

‘It’s not my magic holding them at bay,’ he said. ‘There’s an arcane barrier surrounding this chamber, radiating from the pillars. But it’s more than that. There’s an echo of something else, the lingering residue of a very powerful enchantment.’

Deciding that I was not going to be much help deciphering the mysteries of Crade’s magic, I began rummaging through piles of scrollwork and scattered trinkets, searching for something we could use to escape. Crade had apparently kept nothing so organised as a journal. Instead, his writings and observations were scrawled across scattered scraps of parchment in an untidy hand. I found several mentions of ancient ruins and subterranean chambers that the wizard had excavated across Stygxx – several of these I pocketed for my own use. Crade did not appear to be particularly interested in uncovering the anthropological history of the region, rather he appeared to be searching for something he referred to in rather unembellished terms as the ‘catalyst’.

‘I see you find my studies intriguing,’ came a thin, frail voice from behind me, almost causing me to jump out of my skin. Dhowmer started violently too, spinning around and knocking over a teetering pile of scrolls that collapsed in a cloud of choking dust.

In the surface of the mirror a small man had appeared. He was old and stooped, dressed in flowing white robes and wearing a grey skullcap, yet despite his frailty there was still immense power in his piercing grey eyes. I recognised him at once from the picture hanging in the manse’s great hall.

‘Phylebius Crade,’ Dhowmer whispered.

‘My wards still hold,’ said the wizard. ‘Good. You are the first in many decades to make it into this chamber. I have been waiting for you for a very long time.’

‘What curse has taken hold of this place?’ I said.

‘A malediction brought about by my own arrogance,’ Crade sighed. ‘This prison in which you find me trapped, it is a vector for an ancient and terrible curse. In my folly I thought to break this dark enchantment, or even harness its power for my own ends. But as you can see, I failed.’

‘The Mirrored City,’ whispered Dhowmer. ‘Shadespire.’

‘Aye,’ said Crade. ‘Not a myth. Not just a story told by mothers to frighten unruly children. No, Shadespire exists. An entire city cursed by the Tyrant of Bones to an eternity of deathless torment. And just as Nagash’s power swells with every passing year, so has the curse of the Mirrored City grown more powerful and deadly.’

‘It’s spreading,’ I said, and Crade nodded gravely. It made a horrible kind of sense.

‘So it is. This mirror you see here belonged to the Katophrane Demius Mavos, one of the masters of Shadespire-That-Was. It has a potent connection to the Mirrored City, and it left in its wake a trail of death and misery as it passed from noble house to merchant’s hoard, from one collection to another, eventually finding its way to the Raven City. I believed that I could use my own magic to study this relic, and gain insight into the nature of the curse of Shadespire. Perhaps even curtail it.’

He laughed. It was an empty, mirthless sound.

‘For my troubles, I was claimed by the very curse I sought to understand. Yet the power of my magic still lingers. I formed a chain between two places in time – my own manse, and the Mirrored City. That is all that anchors me to reality.’

‘How can we stop this?’ Dhowmer asked. ‘Can we destroy this mirror somehow?’

‘The device you see before you is a soul-circuit,’ Crade said, gesturing at the three pillars and the crystals mounted atop them. ‘Powered by Chamonic echostones and charged with the wind of Shyish. For decades I have held the curse at bay, but my power wanes. With every passing day a portion of my spirit is claimed by the Mirrored City. I am weak, and when I can no longer hold open this connection, the curse will spread like wildfire throughout Lethis. But you…’

He lowered his staff at Dhowmer.

‘I sense power enough in you. Nothing to match my own, but perhaps enough to overload these echostones. Doing so may cause a cascade of arcane magic strong enough to shatter the Mirror of Mavos.’

Dhowmer flashed me a nervous glance, and I gave him a shrug in return.

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘You’re the master magician, or so you keep telling me.

‘And what happens to you if the mirror shatters?’ I asked Crade. The archmage shot me a strange, narrow-eyed look. Either suspicion or frustration, I could not tell which.

‘I will be lost of course,’ he said. ‘Trapped in this cursed place forever. It is not a prospect I relish, but it serves a greater good.’

‘It’s not like we have a choice,’ said Dhowmer. ‘We can’t let the curse spread beyond this place.’

‘I will join my power to yours from this side,’ Crade continued. ‘Begin now.’

Dhowmer nodded, and closed his eyes. The air sizzled with actinic energy as he began to mutter words in a tongue I did not understand.

‘You, aelf,’ said Crade. ‘As soon as the process begins, it will disrupt the wards I have placed around this chamber. The dead will be granted entry.’

‘And what exactly am I meant to do about that?’ I said, helplessly. ‘Throw books at them?’

Crade stiffened, and shot me a sour look. Clearly he was not a man used to dissension.

‘The cabinet to your left,’ he said, in curt voice.

Within was contained an array of polished weapons and unpleasant-looking instruments: hooked chains, iron masks with vicious spikes that would put out the wearer’s eyes, and ritualistic daggers. I swung open the doors and made a quick inventory of the contents. Hanging from a chain above this collection was a broadsword with a golden, fluted blade. The ridges pulsed with blue light, and engraved upon the hilt in duardin runes was the epithet Grum Damaz. Grudgesettler. The weapon thrummed with barely contained power.

‘Crafted by the forge-kings of the Dhammask Mountains, as a gift for their Lantean allies,’ said Crade. ‘A blade made for a king’s hand, imbued–’

‘What about this one?’ I said, pointing to a blade that looked entirely incongruous amidst Crade’s otherwise impressive collection. It was a dull-looking dagger of rough, black crystal. Runes were crudely etched across the flat of the blade.

‘An unremarkable object,’ said Crade, clearly irritated at being interrupted in mid-flow. ‘One of many items found within the tomb of an Amethyst princeling. Loosely translated from ancient Fleizchan, those runes upon the blade denote the phrase “From the end.”’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They don’t.’

Crade’s voice grew even icier, if that were possible. ‘I have spent a great deal of time exploring the ruins of the Amethyst Princedoms. My grasp of Fleizchan runeography is unrivalled, I assure–’

‘It can be a difficult language to grasp,’ I said. ‘The subtleties can fool even the most learned scholars. My father had something of a professional interest in the history of the region, and it took him many years to master the language. The placement of the rune “ucht” changes the entire meaning of the words. Really, it’s closer to “Death’s ending.”’

‘Fascinating,’ said Dhowmer, with potent sarcasm. ‘But is this really the time for a linguistics lesson?’

I took up the dagger and flipped it in my hand, then balanced it across one finger. Despite its crude craftsmanship, it was beautifully weighted. As I clutched the weapon, the chill air of the chamber seemed to bite into my flesh with less intensity. Though the etched runes were in Fleizchan, the dagger itself was clearly not crafted in the elaborate manner of the Princedoms’ weaponsmiths. It barely looked shaped by mortal hands at all, more like a shard from a broken rock. I didn’t quite understand why, but merely holding it steadied my heartbeat and filled me with a strange calm.

‘King Rhanuld Fireheart slew the Drake of the Void with Grudgesettler after a duel that lasted three days,’ said Crade. ‘I used that worthless relic you’re clutching to break open wax seals.’

‘I’m not much of a duellist,’ I said. ‘Think I’ll keep this, if it’s all the same to you.’

‘I have no time to argue,’ said Crade, waving his hand in disgust. ‘Are you ready, boy?’

Dhowmer gave a determined nod. ‘If those things try to take me, you use that dagger,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be dragged away to some lightless prison for all eternity.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘When the opportunity arises I will be all too happy to stab you.’

He snorted with laughter.

‘Enough!’ barked Crade. ‘Begin!’

Dhowmer took a deep breath and stepped to the nearest golden pillar. He levelled his staff, and purple lightning spat from its bone headpiece, dancing across the echostone. At the same time, Crade began to chant arcane phrases, weaving his own staff in an intricate pattern.

The room was bathed in purple light, and the floor began to shake beneath my feet. The pillars surrounding Crade’s mirror began to slowly rotate, creaking and groaning as they moved. A piercing whine filled the chamber, sending a wave of agony pulsing through my skull. There was a sudden and violent pulse of white light.

And then the howling began.

With screeches of blood-chilling hatred the dead swept into the chamber. Five spectral, shrouded figures, clutching cruel weapons stained with verdigris and glittering with hoar frost. They swooped down over our heads, empty eye sockets blazing with deathly light.

I threw myself to the floor, seized by panic, all thoughts of defending myself or my companions instantly obliterated by a desperate desire to flee. As my palms struck the wooden floor, I turned into a half-roll, scrabbling across the surface on my elbows as the gheists soared above me, circling the ceiling. One of the dread things rushed towards me, one clawed hand outstretched to pierce my heart. I twisted aside, but ice-cold talons tore across my arm. Immediately I felt a terrible numbness creeping across my flesh, accompanied by a surge of revulsion and horror. The spirit whirled about and came on again, raising a rotting club to strike me down.

Unthinking, delirious with fear and pain, I slashed out with my crude dagger.

There was a keening note, and a quivering tremor ran up my arm. The dagger swept through the spirit’s arm, parting aethereal matter like smoke. The gheist-thing howled, not in triumph this time but in an agony I had not imagined it was capable of feeling. It careened away from the blade, its translucent form coming apart in a cloud of spectral motes.

The remaining gheists recoiled. I brandished the dagger like a drunk with a broken glass, swiping it back and forth madly. They feared this weapon, I realised, and the thought granted me a measure of hope.

‘Yes!’ came Crade’s voice, sounding fuller and more insistent than ever. I looked to the mirror and saw the wizard pressing his hand against the glass, a look of wild-eyed triumph upon his skull-like face. ‘I am so close!’

Dhowmer did not look so jubilant.

The mage’s normally pale face was puce with strain. Trails of amethyst light coalesced around his body, and his staff spat purple sparks of fire that scorched his flesh and the sleeves of his robes. He trembled as he tried vainly to control the potent magic coursing through his body. The coils of twisted metal spilled across the floor were pulsing with blinding light, and the air shimmered like a heat haze.

More spectres drifted through the walls, and glowing skulls rose through the very floor, spectral chains rattling as they turned their baleful gaze in my direction. Another gheist swept down upon me, and I stabbed out again. The rough stone blade sank into its eye and the thing came apart in another eruption of spectral matter.

Dhowmer began to scream. Beneath his skin I could see something straining, yearning to break free. Crade’s eyes were fixed upon the young mage, filled with a terrible intensity. The old archmage’s face was strained with concentration. His fingers pushed through the glass of the mirror, unleashing a spider’s web of cracks.

Crade was laughing, the effort turning his face into a rictus grin.

‘At last,’ he was muttering to himself. ‘At last!’

‘Dhowmer!’ I shouted. Something began to seep from beneath the mage’s skin, a translucent shadow of purple light. He was convulsing madly now, yet the purple flames still poured from the end of his staff.

Glass shattered. I turned to see Phylebius Crade almost free of the mirror, his face as twisted and filled with bitter madness as the gheists that circled above. His hand was outstretched like a claw, and he was reaching for Dhowmer’s face like some ravenous ghoul, his eyes full of hunger.

I was certain at that moment that Crade had lied to us. This was no noble act of self-sacrifice. The mage was siphoning Dhowmer’s very soul solely to enable his escape from the City of Mirrors.

I made the decision in a split second. Trusting to my instincts – a strategy that has proved varyingly successful in the past – I raced to the nearest pillar and leapt atop it. The device continued to spin madly, and I felt a surge of nausea as it whipped me about. My hands burned where they touched the golden metal, but I held on tight. Flipping my dagger into a backward grip, I thrust it into the centre of the glowing echostone at the top of the pillar. I felt the crystal splinter under my strike.

There was an explosion of white light that lifted me into the air and sent me crashing into a glass-panelled armoire, in the process earning me several new scars to supplement the ones upon my face.

Crade screamed, a wordless cry of outrage.

The room was filled with snaking chains of purple lightning that licked the roof and swept across the floor, leaving smouldering, black flames in their path. Dhowmer was slumped on the ground, unmoving, his staff lying broken and smouldering at his side. Yet I could see that the man’s chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.

‘Curse you!’ Crade was screaming. He was poised halfway through the mirror, struggling vainly to push into reality. ‘You have damned us all, fool!’

Shards of the sundered crystal were embedded in the ceiling and floor. I felt a burning scorch mark across my neck where one had narrowly missed decapitating me. The pillar it had rested on was toppled and melted, gold bubbling across the floor and setting fire to scraps of scattered parchment. The remaining two pillars shuddered, and the echostones mounted atop them began to glow fiercely. I saw cracks of light ripple across their surface. A lash of purple fire spat from the nearest stone and whipped straight past me, slamming into the wall of the chamber and blasting apart masonry and woodwork. Lurid moonlight spilled into the breach, and with a rush of relief I saw the open air and the looming spires of the Lethis skyline. Freedom, if I could just summon some strength to my aching limbs.

Dhowmer groaned. The gheists, driven back by the sudden explosion of magic, swept back towards the prone figure, hands outstretched.

I could have run. I didn’t particularly like the man, and charging a pack of ravening gheists is not the sort of thing I would normally consider my area of expertise. Yet for some ridiculous reason, I clambered to my feet and charged towards Dhowmer, swinging my new-found dagger madly.

What can I say? It was one of my nobler moments.

My first strike slashed another spirit to pieces, my second drove its fellows back with shrieks of hatred. I bent and grasped Dhowmer by the collar and began dragging him away from the rapidly disintegrating machinery. Crade was screaming threats and curses, promising a cruel and bloody vengeance upon me and everyone that I cared for. Dhowmer stirred at last, muttering insensibly.

‘Get up!’ I bellowed directly into his confused face. ‘Get up or I swear to Sigmar I’ll leave your useless backside in this cursed place.’

He stumbled to his feet, leaning on me for support.

‘I will find you!’ Crade was screaming, his formerly serene face twisted in rage. ‘If it takes me a thousand years I will free myself from this place and find you! I swear it.’

The hooded gheists descended upon Crade, locking spectral hands around his throat and his arms. His eyes were wide with terror and rage, and he struggled helplessly against their freezing grasp. They dragged him screaming into the depths of Mavos’ mirror, which no sooner than he had disappeared exploded in a shower of glass and torn metal.

Ignoring the stabbing pain of a twisted ankle, I hobbled towards the blasted opening in the wall, Dhowmer groaning as I dragged him along. Behind us the echostones were glowing with the fury of a purple sun. Cracks began to open in the walls and floor. With a deafening roar the crystals shattered, unleashing a shock wave of magical power that swept across the room, shattering glass and stone and sending priceless relics flying across the chamber. The force of the blast caught me and my injured companion and lifted us into the air, hurling us bodily through the breached wall and into the cool Lethis air. The world was a blur of sickening motion. I waved my arms helplessly as I tumbled towards the earth.

Thank the God-King for Crade’s poorly maintained grounds. I struck an overgrown tangle of hedges, feeling stabbing pains across my body as thorns sank into my flesh. Yet mercifully the vegetation prevented me from dashing myself to pieces upon the flagstones of the entranceway to the manse. I rolled, tumbled and fell free, smacking my jaw painfully upon rough gravel. Just as I was staggering to my feet, Dhowmer landed atop me and drove me to the ground once more. Cursing and groaning, we clambered to our feet. Above us the sky was limned with fire. Stones and masonry rained from the ruin of the domed roof, and cracks spread across the front of the building like splintering glass. Spectral forms burst from the breaches, rising into the night sky with terrible cries. The ravens of Morrda screeched in warning, flocks of the black-feathered birds swarming about the swirling spirits.

Hobbling like the newly risen dead, Dhowmer and I made our escape along the tangled pathway, the screams of restless spirits echoing in our ears.

Just as we reached the front gate, still hanging open, there was a tremendous explosion that momentarily turned night to day. The entire front of the domed manse was hurled into the air on a sheet of purple flame, smouldering debris thrown a hundred feet into the sky to shower across the grounds. I threw myself down and tucked my arms over my head as the cacophonous explosion went on. Heavy chunks of stone and metal struck the stone around me. The thunder rolled on for several terrifying moments, and then there was abrupt and blissful silence. Warily, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the night sky. Where the manse once stood was little more than a smoking pile of stone and rubble.

‘Well,’ said Dhowmer, nursing a bloodied scalp and observing the devastation. ‘Hell of an evening.’

I grunted in acknowledgment, temporarily unable to form a coherent sentence.

‘How did you know?’ he said. ‘That Crade meant to seal me in his place?’

‘There was just something about him that I misliked. It may have been the way he cackled in triumph as he crawled through a haunted mirror.’

‘Mmm. In retrospect I was perhaps a little too eager to heed his word. In any case, you have my thanks. I thought for certain that was the end of us.’

‘Fortune smiled upon us this night. And I did not leave entirely empty-handed.’

I raised the strange dagger, which gleamed in the moonlight. There was a mystery to unlock there all right. And safely tucked into my coat pocket were the notes I had purloined from Crade’s chambers. Not exactly what I had been hoping for, but perhaps the old wretch had stumbled upon some worthwhile secrets during his exploration of the Stygxxian wilds.

‘All in all, it could have gone a lot worse,’ I said.

Something cold and metallic pressed against the back of my head. Slowly, I raised my arms and turned around. There stood four burly men, clad in black and white jackets with gleaming breastplates of silver. Each clutched a blackwood musket, hung with trophies of polished bone and pouches of sacred herbs.

‘You,’ said the leader, his expression grim, ‘are under arrest.’

And so, in the end, I found myself visiting the dungeons of Lethis after all.

THE FOURFOLD WOUND

Eric Gregory

I

Across the realms, heads drew together in forgotten places.

The God-King, they said, gave out the gift of immortality as he saw fit – sometimes to the brave, or in the wake of great works, but sometimes to the ill or to spinsters or to layabouts.

You couldn’t work or worship your way into the graces of Sigmar. Not reliably. There were those – everyone had a daughter, a cousin, a father – who gave themselves to service in the armies of the free cities, then died a hard death and were gone.

Across the realms, resentments boiled over into talk, and talk bound comrades into enclaves of spite.

The God-King, they said, wasn’t fair.

They met in the cellars of public houses, in stables, in bathhouses. They met in every realm – in Shyish and Chamon and Ghur, even in Azyr. Human and duardin and aelf, they shared grievances and whispered and watched. They tracked the landfalls of Stormcast Eternals, read patterns in their deployments, studied the characters of the Stormhosts.

You learned quickly when you travelled the realms: there were forgotten people everywhere, and they were watching.

Shinua had travelled a long time and a long way to learn what they saw.

This far north, the guild-chartered maps of Ghyran still weren’t as reliable as they might have been. Ice caps jutted from waters that were drawn on cartographs as tundra; old settlements dotted coasts that the last surveys had marked as empty.

Shinua wondered whether it was the maps that were unreliable, or the geography. Out here on the edge of the Realm of Life, where even the Jade Kingdom’s verdancy retreated from the cold, even the air felt tentative – a frozen fog liable at any moment to give way to something impossible.

But she found what she was looking for. The northernmost island, Ark’non – called in some tongues ‘the Land of the Valorous’ – announced itself to ships with the red glow of a lighthouse lantern. She tied her sloop to a dock that moored only two other ships, started into the village without encountering another soul.

Night was falling quickly over the village’s precise grid of squat hovels and yurts. The roads were silent and empty except for a sledge pulled by three woolly, ivory-tusked beasts of burden. The rider was bundled so tightly into his sledge that Shinua didn’t see him at first, took the beasts for pilots without direction. Her breath clouded before her like a spirit familiar guiding the way, and she blinked against the frigid air, half-scared of her eyes freezing shut.

If she understood the cipher, she was searching for a smithy beneath an icon of eight crossed tusks. A longhouse under a sign of tusks stood before her, precisely where it was supposed to be.

Shinua raised a frost-stiff fist and rapped on the door.

No answer.

She pounded on the door again, more urgent this time, more careful to strike the heavy wood in the pattern described by her despatches. Two raps, a pause; two raps, a pause. And then the cadence repeated.

So I’ll freeze to death here, she thought. Knocking on the door of an empty house. She hacked out a painful laugh. Behind her, the neighbouring longhouses were quiet. The sledge was gone, and now the street was empty, lit only by the red glow above.

It would be a fine joke, surely: to track the despatches this far, to wrestle her sloop across cold seas, only to die frostbitten in an abandoned village at the edge of another land. The type of joke only a god would tell.

She started to knock again, but the door creaked open before her knuckles reached the wood. The face that stared back at her was sunburnt and serious and younger than her own. The girl – no older than ten – was bundled in grey pelts and rested a palm on the knife-sheath at her waist, holding the door open only a narrow gap.

‘Yes?’ said the child.

Now that she was here, facing someone much shorter than she’d expected, Shinua wasn’t quite sure what to say.

‘Are your parents here?’ she asked.

The girl shook her head. ‘They were beheaded and thrown into the sea.’

Her northern Ghyranese dialect lent the words a peculiar musicality, but Shinua felt sure she’d heard correctly.

‘I’m… very sorry,’ she managed.

The words turned to fog between them. The girl nodded once.

‘May I… may I come inside?’ Shinua tried.

‘You are welcome here by Guest Right,’ the girl said gravely. Shinua doubted the words had ever sounded less welcoming.

The girl stepped aside to admit Shinua, but kept her hand conspicuously at her sheath. The warmth inside the smithy was a wash of fire against Shinua’s face. She brushed frozen hair from her eyes, breathed as she felt blood traverse her limbs, and tried not to seem too desperately relieved.

If she’d worked out the chronology correctly, she had only hours left. The guild maps’ errors had eaten her time, and now this was becoming too near a thing.

The interior of the smithy was a sort of mandala, with every fur and tool and furnishing arranged around the centrepiece of the hearth and anvil. The forge shone with the same hue of crimson as the lighthouse – a red richer than flame. The glow seemed to cast no smoke, though there was an acrid smell to the air.

Seated by the hearth was a woman of at least seventy, who smiled uncertainly from beneath layers of ornately patterned blankets.

Shinua made a hasty bow. ‘I am Shinua Gan,’ she said. ‘I am here to–’

‘She’s quite a strong-looking girl,’ the old woman said.

Shinua hesitated.

‘A hard worker, I’d wager.’

‘Grandmother is called Hesh-yeh to one housed under Guest Right,’ said the girl, hand still on her knife with all the discipline of a palace guard. ‘I am called Nor.’

Shinua spread her hands in a display of harmlessness. ‘Thank you, Nor,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Hesh-yeh. I am here to–’

‘Would she like some soup?’ asked Hesh-yeh. ‘She looks hungry. We have a mighty lot of soup. Leek and salted eel.’

Shinua forced a smile. The old woman by the hearth didn’t look like a purveyor of anti-Azyrite intelligence. Shinua’s own grandmother would have been a more likely suspect: ninety when she died but still lean and shrewd and entirely capable of slitting a bull’s throat. But Shinua had met many unlikely dissidents in her travels; she pressed on, speaking more quickly now.

‘I am here to speak in the circle of the eye,’ she said, drawing up her sleeve to reveal the tattoos on the inside of her forearm: her old Freeguilder garrison tattoo, cancelled with a jagged line of red ink. And above it, closer to her heart, an eye encircled by radiating arrows. ‘I have questions.’

‘She has tattoos!’ said Hesh-yeh.

‘Yes,’ Nor agreed.

‘So lovely.’ The old woman leaned forwards to admire the ink-work.

Nor sidled behind her grandmother and discreetly, without moving her palm from her sheath, lifted the sleeve of her knife-hand. The tattoo on her arm wasn’t quite the same as Shinua’s – it was more finely drawn, and the circle around the eye was a sort of sunburst halo. The ink was red. But the meaning was the same.

‘I will show the guest to her bedroll and dry clothes,’ said Nor, and hurried Shinua up a ladder to a cramped loft. The bunk was lit by a brazier that shone with the same crimson as the hearth below. The girl sat on the bedroll with crossed legs, her head bowed slightly so as not to hit the crossbeams of the roof, and Shinua attempted to echo the position.

‘The question,’ Nor whispered.

‘You’re… the Watcher of Ark’non?’ Shinua asked, careful to keep her voice low. ‘You wrote these?’ She drew the Watcher’s reports from her satchel.

Nor inclined her head. ‘And so?’

She was a child. How was this possible? Shinua steadied her thoughts. ‘I compile Watchers’ almanacs in Shyish. I received your reports a fortnight ago. The original dating is some time earlier.’

Every sighting of the God-King’s Stormcast Eternals, every known station and deployment, the name and biography of every claimed hero known to the recorders across the realms. The Watchers shared what they knew in a web of vellum and ciphers and post – information that wasn’t even secret, most of the time, but that told stories or posed questions when stitched together into an almanac.

What lands had the celestial armies claimed?

Who was hallowed and chosen?

Why?

This account that had started with Nor had come to Shinua from a Watcher in Ghur, who had it from a Watcher in Hysh. It had passed through many hands before hers, which made the document all the more puzzling.

‘The question,’ Nor repeated.

‘If you have the cipher right, if I do, you date a deployment of the Hammers of Sigmar to this night. This village. Is that what you intended to write?’

The child nodded in the red light. ‘Yes.’

‘How can you know that they will deploy here before it happens?’

‘Why do you wish to know this?’

Shinua weighed the prudence of honesty. At last, the tattooed eye shared between them swayed her to tell the truth. Or most of it.

‘One of Sigmar’s warriors wronged me. I will find him and make him answer for the crime.’

Nor brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and gazed appraisingly at Shinua.

‘What crime?’

Four oilskins arrayed in the blackened earth of the farmstead. They should have been too small to hold bodies, never mind three generations.

‘He betrayed my family to killers,’ said Shinua. ‘He betrayed my family while he lived, but the God-King claimed him as a hero.’

That seemed to satisfy the girl. She nodded.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you must meet my brother, the Lordbreaker. He is the one to tell you about futures.’

The spikes of Shinua’s boots crunched ice as she and Nor hurried down the empty street, their breath rising like chimney-smoke into the red-black sky.

Smoke, Shinua thought. The hearth in Nor’s home had burned, but there was no smoke, and the air was clear. The forge had burned with the same crimson light as the brazier and the village’s vast lighthouse.

The girl wore a small mountain of grey-white furs that hunched over her head and amounted to an armour, trimmed with figures in black and gold. The pelt, Shinua realised, must have come from the little sledge-bearing mammoth-beasts.

If the bulk of the coat slowed Nor down, it didn’t show; she seemed more urgent in her stride than Shinua, darting gracefully across the ice. Or perhaps she was simply more accustomed to the cold. Shinua struggled to keep up, and was relieved when the girl stopped at the base of the lighthouse. Beyond, the tides spoke their cold, hushed language. The signal-light above flickered, like a guttering candle in the night.

Nor pounded on the lighthouse door: twice, a pause; twice, a pause. And then the pattern repeated. But no answer came. The girl fumbled in her furs for a skeleton key, unlocked and heaved open the door. It opened into an unadorned stairwell not much warmer than the street.

‘He lives here?’ Shinua asked. ‘Your brother?’

‘Yes,’ answered Nor, only a little breathless, taking two steps at a time.

‘You called him the Lordbreaker. Who did he break?’

‘Our village…’ she took a breath, ‘…is built on pelt and bone and blood. The tusks of marmut, mostly. Some whaling – in the season. Before, the Old Lords kept my people in thrall. They commanded the hunts and the smithing and they took the coin. They ate the fat and we ate the meat that rots. Anyone who opposed them was beheaded and thrown into the sea.’

‘So your brother broke the Old Lords,’ she said.

‘The horns of our whales and the tusks of our marmut and the blood of our veins – they are of great value. The Old Lords sold our labour to the Kharadron of Barak-Laskar, and to the Azyrite free cities.’ Nor turned her back to Shinua and started up the stairs again. ‘The free world was happy to have their custom. But we ached and ate rot and died. My brother raised a revolt. Ark’non loves him for it.’

Shinua’s muscles burned as they climbed. As they approached the top of the lighthouse, Nor began to call what must have been her brother’s name: ‘Sgon, Sgon.’ Her tone was between a warning and a question, but no answer came.

They reached the tower’s apex. A wave of heat struck Shinua as they entered the room – welcome, but wrong, smokeless and subtler than it should have been. In the centre of the space was a hearth much larger than the forge in the smithy – this was a sanguinary pyre, piled high with obsidian bones. There was a pattern in the architecture of the pyre, a shape that Shinua couldn’t quite name. Small, unburnt bones were scattered on the floor, knuckles or digits or ribs.

Before the pyre lay a young man’s form, pale and bled from the wrist.

Nor took a hesitant step towards the dead boy, glanced back at Shinua. Her older-than-her-age composure was gone, replaced by incomprehension. Her wide eyes darted fearfully around the room. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

Sgon the Lordbreaker’s right hand held a knife, the blade brown with blood that had nearly dried. He was dressed in a robe of black and gold. A trail of his blood ran from the rim of the pyre to a pool around his arm.

For a moment, the light turned black. Not a darkness, but a shadow-light. Then it was red again. A guttering candle.

‘You should be with your grandmother,’ Shinua said quietly. As far as she’d come, as hard as she had fought to be here, she wasn’t prepared to see a child through loss. Nor knelt by her brother, but didn’t touch him.

‘He did this… to himself?’ she asked.

Shinua looked out the aperture of the lighthouse at the emptiness of the night sea. Snow had begun to fall.

‘He saw visions in the fire,’ said Nor, nodding to the lighthouse pyre. ‘That was your question. He knew the Hammers of the God-King would come to raze Ark’non because he saw it in the fire.’

This boy wrote the future, and then removed himself from it. The thought made her shiver.

‘Why would the God-King want to raze this place?’ Shinua asked.

‘Sgon taught us rage as a catechism,’ she said softly. ‘He taught us to hone our wrath and blood into pure and liberating fire. The God-King does not sanction rage other than his own.’

The room’s curved walls bore vellum maps of nearby islands. Stone-scrawled ideograms that Shinua couldn’t read, racks upon racks of obsidian tusks carved into fine bladed weapons. In one corner, a small cot by a desk messy with papers. The home of a revolutionary.

The pyre flashed black again.

‘Do you know how he saw his visions in the fire?’ Shinua asked softly. Her conscience twisted uncomfortably at this pressing of the grieving girl. She thought of her own brother Hsien, burned. The charred remnants of a life, gathered and wrapped in oilskin. As a boy, Hsien had looked up to the man Shinua hunted now; he would have loved that the bastard became a Stormcast Eternal.

Nor looked up at her, wet eyes reflecting a warbling light.

‘The oracle bones. And fire and blood. That is how everything is done here. The bone of the beasts of the ground and sea. Horns and tusks and limbs. Lacquered with the blood of…’ She looked down. ‘One of us. One born of the old families of Ark’non. The Valorous. Lacquered until the bone is black…’

Her voice failed her. She stared at her brother’s sprawled form. Shinua was silent, and after a moment, the girl recovered her words.

‘When it burns,’ Nor said, ‘the fire is holy. The kiss of the flame twists metal, but its glow is a small warmth. It spoke to Sgon. Tongues of fire. It told him what was to pass.’

The tusks on the racks around her. The skeletal construction in the lighthouse pyre. The bones of Hesh’yeh’s forge. All black with the blood of the Valorous.

Who had bled? How much wrath and blood had Ark’non given itself over to? Shinua kept the question to herself, stared into the fire that seemed liable, now, to speak. Then her gaze travelled past the fire to the night sky beyond, and the breath caught in her throat, and all the warmth of the pyre receded.

The stars were falling.

She rushed to the aperture. Above, dark thunderheads parted like mouths and an army of light spilled from the sky.

The descent was silent at first. Then, a shock of sound buckled the atmosphere.

‘Gods,’ said Shinua, startling herself with the words. ‘They’re here.’

Nor climbed to her feet. The fear and grief and exhaustion written across her face made her painful to behold.

‘Grandmother,’ she said. ‘They will kill her.’

‘Her?’ Shinua asked, then felt foolish.

She knew the stories of the God-King’s annihilations. She had compiled the accounts in the almanac.

Nor heaved a carved black tusk from the racks, struggling to lift it by its one leather grip halfway down the blade. ‘She is the armourer,’ Nor said, sounding panicked. ‘She lacquered every wartusk. They will kill her.’

The weapon was clearly meant to be wielded one-handed, slung under the forearm of an adult warrior. It was a sad burden in Nor’s hands. The girl strained to raise the tip of the blade into the pyre.

Outside, the points of light in the sky brightened and grew larger, like sudden morning was dawning.

It’s real now, Shinua thought. The anger of Sigmar was falling towards her.

‘I’ll carry it for you,’ she said. ‘Stay with me. I’ll protect you.’

Nor appraised her for a moment, then held out the wartusk. Shinua hefted the weapon and dipped it in the signal pyre. Crimson flame danced up the length of the blade with a whisper of ignition.

She grabbed a clutch of oracle bones from the floor and stuffed them in her coats.

‘Down,’ she said. ‘Run.’

Nor spared a last glance for her brother and then ran down the spiral stairway, taking three steps at a time. Shinua was behind her, desperate to descend and desperate not to topple Nor, straining to hold the tusk aloft. The blade scored the stone of the wall.

Breathlessly, they tumbled out of the lighthouse and into the cold. She could make out shapes in the radiance now: humanoid forms, some winged; hammers and standards and great bows in silhouette, a luminous judgement.

Around them, the Valorous left their yurts, eyes turned to the lights above. Women and men dressed in black-trimmed furs like Nor’s. Many carried tusks that glowed crimson. Every blade black with blood, lacquered by Hesh’yeh. The people of Ark’non gathered in clusters outside their homes, and they stared at the sky not in awe or bewilderment but in defiance.

They knew. They knew this was coming.

The first blaze of golden light struck the lighthouse. A concussion, a shattering more primordial than thunder. The ground quaked. Shinua risked a glance over her shoulder. Stonework toppled in a flare of auric wash, and the signal pyre was extinguished. Tundra and white stone-dust rose where the tower collapsed, and a gold glow issued from within the cloud of destruction.

Another impact, another rippling of earth beneath them. Nor nearly fell; Shinua steadied her with her free hand. The snowfall thickened, and all at once it felt like the entire realm was falling in on them. Homes cracked and burned, the ground shook as the storm of warriors descended around them.

A shout. Through the sleet, Shinua caught a glimpse of a figure in golden armour, grand and wrong in stature, a head taller than any human she had known. The Stormcast Eternal loomed over one of the island’s tusk-wielding defenders; it raised a warhammer the length of her torso and swung it into the ribs of the Valorous, whose upper body snapped backwards at an awful angle.

The corpse landed bloody in the snow, and the Stormcast turned its impassive mask towards Shinua. An expressionless face was carved into the metal of its armour – or perhaps that was its face, a study in uncaring, holy grandeur.

‘Run!’ Shinua shouted, to the girl or to herself. Her lungs burned as she sucked frozen air. Where were they running? The smithy and Nor’s grandmother? The old woman was doomed already; everything was doomed. Shinua had what she came for, or near enough – the bone and blood to kindle an oracular fire, to know where the Stormcasts would fall.

Take the girl and make for the dock, said a voice in her head, clear and urgent in the chaos.

Right now, they were running towards both the docks and the forge. But another block and she would have to choose.

A golden blaze like a comet careened over their heads towards the smithy. With horrible, majestic inevitability, it fell into the forge and exploded in a riot of sound. Snow and wood and earth erupted in a spume where the longhouse had been. Nor screamed. After the shock, Shinua felt a sick-making relief. She grasped Nor’s shoulder with her free hand.

‘We have to run for the dock!’ Shinua shouted.

Nor turned to her, eyes full of empty horror, tears turning to ice on her cheeks. Then she was looking past Shinua.

She twisted around to find the Stormcast warrior stalking towards her. Liberator, she thought with wry despair. These foot-soldiers of Sigmar were called Liberators. The thing’s stride was massive, and blood stained its armour. Thin scrolls flapped from the edges of deep blue pauldrons, the colour of night falling. It was calling her name.

‘Shinua,’ said the Liberator.

Oh gods, she thought. Oh gods, oh gods.

It was one thing to hate the God-King’s power from afar. But here was divine wrath in front of her, speaking her name.

‘Shinua,’ it said. ‘Shin?’

A question.

The Liberator latched its warhammer to its belt and raised its enormous hands to its helm. Removed the stoic mask that might have been a face.

Underneath: wet, messy hair. A jagged nose and receding hairline. Tired eyes. Immortal now, and still tired.

‘Shinua?’ said Halas.

‘Halas,’ she breathed.

He would have some new name now – some heroic, eternal name. She didn’t care. His armour seemed too large for him. He’d always stood tall, but not this tall. The sigmarite gold seemed to consume him. Shinua stepped towards Halas, her feet moving on their own. The snow fell around them.

‘How are you here?’ Halas asked. ‘Are you real?’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I see you when I close my eyes.’

The snowflakes turned to steam when they fell on his face. But he was flesh, right there in front of her. His skin flush and wet with sweat, the old scar still on his brow.

‘I’m real,’ she said. ‘I was looking for you.’

And it was true. But she wasn’t prepared for the moment to be now. She’d expected months – maybe years – of scrying and searching.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know that’s worthless to you, but it’s all I have. I am so sorry.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ Shinua said. Her voice was level; a peculiar calm had settled on her.

Halas inhaled. ‘I disgraced myself.’

‘You were drunk.’

‘I was drunk on my post. You’ve known me a long time. You never saw me drink on watch, did you?’

For twelve years of his mortal life, he had been posted as a solitary watchman in the Freeguild outpost on the Gan farmstead. An eye and sword against the bandits and predators of Ghyran. She had seen him every day of her childhood, and he had been kind to her and her brother Hsien, taught them swordplay and taken their enthusiasms seriously. He was too eager to be liked, perhaps, or to share unlikely tales of his old wars. But he was neither a drunkard nor a shirker of duties.

‘Why, then?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I was stuck in melancholy and felt my years. Your parents kept a cask of Azyrite wine and the sky seemed heavy. I…’ He hesitated. ‘I had felt a weight over me in dark hours for some long time.’

The Halas she had known – the Halas who had been her teacher and friend – told his tales eagerly. He had spun out a myth of himself facing down orruk cavalries, felling undead gargants.

She had believed in Halas. She had idolised him.

‘And what happened when you were drunk?’

‘The outlanders,’ he said quietly.

‘The bandits from the outlands. They came for the cattle. The grain. They burned everything that remained.’

He was silent.

‘When one of your mates in the garrison leaves his post,’ she said, ‘or breaks his oath, or turns tail, he loses his sash and his life. Soldier’s justice.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

She saw Halas as he was when he came to them, a decade younger and stubbled, a scar across his brow but his face somehow childish, soft with a capacity for awe. The Gans had welcomed him and fed him their bread; her father had helped build furniture for the soldier’s quarters in the watch-station.

‘They trusted you,’ she said.

‘I know.’

He was barely audible. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’

He looked up. Shinua showed him the scratched-out garrison tattoo on the inside of her forearm: a skull with skeletal hands over its eyes. He had the same tattoo.

‘I left home to be like you. Someone who could keep watch. I trusted you to keep them safe while I was gone.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

He was right. His sorriness was worthless to her.

‘Four lives you owe me,’ she said. ‘This one is for Hsien.’

She reared back and swung the wartusk up and into his throat.

The burning blade tore through his jaw and into his skull. Immortal blood stained his armour and sizzled against her blade.

His heavy form slackened and fell.

Nor gaped at her. Shinua stared at the body of the Stormcast, watched Halas’ lifeblood spill from his throat into the snow.

One life. One of Halas’ endless lives, taken.

Her hand shook.

All at once, the body hurled away from her and into the sky, as if plucked from the earth by invisible lines. Lightning crashed. Shinua could almost trace the passage of the corpse into the sky, an afterimage against the snow.

One debt paid.

‘I have a ship at the dock,’ said Shinua. She was shaken, but steadying. She smiled down at Nor, and tried to look like she knew what she was doing. The child’s world was in flames. The air was steam and ash. Everyone Nor had ever known was dead already or would die by the hammer.

‘Come with me,’ said Shinua.

II

In the years since she left home, Shinua had lived alone and as she pleased, or near enough. She travelled the unmapped or faintly sketched places of the realm, and she sent her reports by courier to the free cities’ surveyors’ guilds. The pay was meagre, and the existence was humble; she slept in ruins or dunes or goatskin tents, rarely lingering on any frontier long enough to do more than render its topography. She mapped cavern systems and desolate mountain ranges, but all the while her life had been simple. She was alone, and her only real purpose was vengeance.

Now Nor was in her care.

The girl was hardier than Shinua had been at her age; she knew how to skin game, how to tie the net of a hammock in high branches. Talents Shinua had learned either from Halas or in training with the Freeguild. But she was another will, another knot of needs and whims. In the night, she sometimes cried out for her brother or grandmother. Sometimes she wept over dreams that she didn’t understand: ‘A horned god. A raven. A mountain upside down, burning to death.’ She refused to eat any meat she had not hunted herself.

At first, Shinua had considered leaving her with an orphanage or holy order. But Nor spoke regularly and matter-of-factly about her plots of violence against the God-King, and about the rituals of blood and bone that her brother had employed, that she would employ herself one day. ‘I will burn down the heavens,’ she said once, unprompted, over breakfast. The girl would have a difficult time, Shinua suspected, in the orphanages and academies of the free cities.

After cutting Halas’ throat and securing a skin of oracle bones from the Valorous, Shinua had indulged herself briefly in some giddiness of triumph. But that thrill faded quickly. She owed her old mentor three more deaths. Worse, the holy fires weren’t speaking futures as they had done for Nor’s brother, the Lordbreaker. After the first two little bones burned down voicelessly, without a word of prophecy, she had grown wary of wasting the entire supply.

So she watched, and she recorded – for a year, and then another. As they travelled, Shinua shared her maps and accounts with others who bore the tattoo of the eye. In the cellars of public houses, in stables, in bathhouses, she exchanged journals and ledgers. She compiled a more current almanac. From a bitter-mouthed swineherd outside Hammerhal Ghyra, Shinua learned the true names of an entire company of Hallowed Knights – and realised with mixed intrigue and discomfort that she might track down those immortal warriors’ surviving families, if she wished. She learned the heraldry of the Stormhosts; she learned to chart their organisation into chambers and companies, to read the symbology on their pauldrons and banners. She studied the sketches she had made of Halas’ armour – the scrollwork and icons; the awful, empty face of a mask – and she knew where he stood in the armies of the sacred.

Finally, with his company named and numbered, she found him. In the dim-lit backroom of a muggy tavern, Shinua learned that Halas’ company of the Hammers of Sigmar were reported in the fields of the Sog, embroiled in a campaign against the armies of the Grandfather of Plagues. The report was two months old, but the campaign was said to be a slow, brutal weathering of bodies and spirits, a grind with no evident end.

Shinua smiled.

On the north-west frontier of Ghyran lay a metropolis that no citizen of the free cities named as home, that was discussed – even in taverns with no love for the God-King – only in grim whispers. A city built in swamps, its pillars raised over centuries by slaves and then toppled in a day of epidemic.

In some tongues, the place was called the City Bereaved. In others, darkly, Abundance. To most, the agglomeration of mossy stone and ruined towers was known as Plaguespire. Even glimpsed on the horizon, any mortal eye could see that it was a place where reality thinned and sickened, where some other cosmos loomed. Vast winged sacs – what might have been gargantuan flies – circled the crooked towers, and the sky above was always tinged a feverish pink-purple.

The city belonged to the Plague God.

Far to the south-east, across leagues of marsh and rotwood forest, the Stormcast Eternals and their sylvaneth allies laid siege to the outer bastions of the Plague God’s influence. They were an endless march from Plaguespire, but perhaps they didn’t mean to take the city itself – only to contain it. Reality strained out there on the front: the holy lightning of Sigmar scorched air made squalid by the breath of daemons. Creatures not of these realms marched in sickly legions – nearly humanoid, but not quite, they might have been mistaken for walking corpses, moaning inscrutable numbers in voices from outside time. Above the legions towered great flesh mounds like rotten, living mountains. And there were mortal worshippers of the Plague God, too – bulked by the gifts of their deity, sweating in sick-green armour.

Shinua wasn’t foolhardy enough to make for the front, especially with Nor in tow. The daemonic city seemed a similarly deadly destination. Instead, she studied the latest consensus maps of the surveyors’ guilds and found an operational centre that the pair of them might hope to survive.

Her maps called it the Abbey of the Twined Root. Half-forgotten and cradled in creepers and moss, the ruins of the aelven monastery were closer to the front than the city. The construction was vaster than it first appeared: underground, a network of catacombs and tunnels ranged far beyond the obvious walls, emerging now and then into swamp brush or quiet hillsides.

Shinua could fit in the catacombs, but only just, which meant she couldn’t have stopped Nor from exploring the place if she had tried. Watching over the girl required her to cultivate a careful disinterest – not to worry whether a tunnel had collapsed on her, whether she had hunted some game that got the better of her.

While Nor explored, Shinua waited on the old, neglected road that ran between Plaguespire and the front. She sat cross-legged by the side of the road and unfolded her bookbinding tools, committed her more current almanac to leather. For three days, she waited. And on the third, they arrived: the mortal troops of the Plague God, walking the supply line.

They sang a merry marching song that collapsed often into phlegmy guffaws at their excretory rhymes. Their music travelled most swiftly, followed by the stench of shit and rot, and the sight of them. Swollen and unsteady, they were giants of men in armour of vomitous metal. Some of their limbs were inhuman, unruly suckers and feelers; every man looked simultaneously vigorous and on the edge of death. The Rotbringers.

‘Hail,’ said Shinua.

The Rotbringers’ emissary was a man named Baslaergh. He was good-humoured but not quite so loud as his comrades, and Shinua thought it was a mercy that he came to the monastery alone. The gaiety of massed Rotbringers was trying, but the odour was deadly. He arrived at the monastery gate at precisely the appointed hour. Nor spotted him first, through the tiny window of the cramped cell where they slept.

‘He’s hideous,’ the girl said.

‘He is very ugly,’ Shinua agreed.

The Rotbringer wouldn’t fit comfortably in the narrow corridors of the abbey, so they met him in the vine-strangled courtyard. In one hand, he carried a stave crowned by a tremendous bell. He was even larger than a Stormcast Eternal, but he wore little armour beyond greaves and a helm; his bulk was a function of impossible, divine bloat. He seemed at ease in his flesh, even as his flesh seemed not entirely under his control. Cysts squirmed just beneath his pallid skin, and small bluish cilia grasped from his gut. He bowed his oversized, cyclopean helm in greeting to Nor.

‘My lady,’ he said. ‘I am Baslaergh, Blightking of the Rotbringers. Pleased to make yer acquaintance.’ And to Shinua, ‘A pleasure to see yer again.’

‘And you,’ Shinua lied, smiling too broadly and trying not to breathe through her nose.

‘You’re a king?’ asked Nor.

‘We are many of us kings, lass, if we live in the god’s favour.’

‘Are there Blightqueens, too?’ Nor asked.

‘The god welcomes all in the Garden.’

The air was heavy with humidity. Shinua slapped a mosquito from her arm and tried to position herself upwind of the stinking mass of the soldier. Nor perched on a half-tumbled statue of an aelven monk.

‘You look ill,’ said the girl.

Perhaps, Shinua thought, Nor wasn’t the best partner in diplomacy.

Baslaergh smiled down at the girl. His teeth were rotten and sparse, his eyes hidden behind his helm. ‘I expect I am! I’ve all manner of beasties livin’ in me. Livin’ with me. I choose to make myself a home for ’em. What yer call illness, I call hospitality.’

‘Is that why your god makes you so big? So you can be a home?’

‘That’s enough, love,’ said Shinua.

The Rotbringer was untroubled. ‘Could be, at that! Or else to smash the false God-King.’

Nor grinned, satisfied with that answer. Baslaergh turned to Shinua.

‘My masters,’ he said, ‘reviewed yer proposal with interest.’

Rusted and worn as it was, Shinua could make out a muddy reflection of herself in his helm. ‘I’m pleased to hear it. What did they think?’

‘They think yer would make a fine servant of the god.’

She craned her neck to stare up at the Blightking. The representative of daemons, of a fell god. Was he threatening her, or evangelising? With beings like this, what was the difference? Her stomach knotted, but she breathed and willed her face into a mask of confidence.

‘I don’t scare easily.’

‘Aye! Fightin’ spirit, very good. My masters were intrigued by yer scribblings on the God-King’s armies. They’ve already diverted forces as yer suggested, and they’ll continue the manoeuvres so long as ye provide the rest of the book. But… are yer sure it’s what ye want?’

Shinua exhaled. In her mind’s eye, on the front of the war in Ghyran, a line of the plague legions began to – ever so slightly – give ground.

After months of attrition, a line of Stormcast Liberators started to push forwards. Funnelled along a path.

‘I’m sure,’ said Shinua.

‘And it’s revenge ye want?’

She nodded.

‘I want to burn down the heavens,’ said Nor gravely.

Baslaergh looked back and forth between the pair of them. ‘I’ll warrant yer fearsome. But I don’t ken how ye propose to kill one of the golden bastards.’ He reached into the pouches of his belt and produced what looked like a snail shell, a bone-coloured spiral with a stopper of cork and ivory.

‘I do not give ye this lightly. It is a flask of the Grandfather of Plagues’ own breath, stoppered in the Garden itself.’

Her stomach curled at the sight of the spiral.

‘I can’t accept that,’ Shinua said.

‘It is not yers to refuse.’ With absurd tenderness, the Blightking kneeled and placed the gift at her feet.

‘If ye find yer want his favour… break the flask. Breathe his holy breath, accept his salvation.’

Shinua said nothing.

‘And if ye will not… be ready. They are coming.’

‘Look,’ said Shinua. ‘This is how you thread the needle.’

They had exhausted their preparations. They had mapped the whole of the Abbey of the Twined Root, the countless boltholes and the veins of secret passages that ran through the walls, through the rafters, beneath the floor. Now they each sat cross-legged on the cool stone of the vestry. Nor watched Shinua bind up the spine of a book of secrets for the daemon generals of the Plague God. The bone needle had belonged to Shinua’s mother before her – it had sewn cloaks and shawls before it bound almanacs. She held out her needle and awl to Nor.

‘Here. Try. The needle was my mum’s.’

Nor took the needle. ‘Sgon was the one who made furs. My parents were always on hunts. Before they were dead.’ She tested the sharpness of the needle against her thumb. Drew a bead of blood. ‘It breaks skin,’ she said approvingly. Then allowed a small smile, which Shinua returned.

‘It breaks leather, love. It breaks space and time, with enough work.’

She watched the work of Nor’s mind behind her eyes – the unanswerable hurt of loss after loss. For Shinua, grief had meant one great annihilation of the people who loved her, all at once. For Nor, it had been twin concussions. After growing up on the promise that you were an instrument of others’ yields.

Most days, there was a distance in the girl’s gaze, as if she weren’t quite present in herself. Here and now, her eyes focused. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

‘You weave,’ Shinua gestured at a sheaf of Watchers’ accounts, ‘words into a form that will endure, that carries visions from one mind to another, one age to another. You can work the needles, too. You understand?’

Nor nodded once, mulling the words.

‘You’ll need a trade to make your way in the realms,’ Shinua said. ‘I can teach you.’

‘I wish to fight. I will fight for pay.’

‘Then you’ll spend your whole life fighting other people’s wars. You need a trade if you want to be really free.’

The distance returned to Nor’s gaze. ‘I see,’ she said.

Outside, a bell tolled. Baslaergh stood in the courtyard, ringing his bell-stave.

‘It’s time,’ he called.

There were two armies at the Blightking’s heels.

First, a procession of the plague legions in retreat. They marched in an organised riot down the supply road: cavalry on vast, squamous toads or gargantuan flies. The one-eyed infantry like dreams of corpses, sag-skinned and bloat-bellied, swords dragging in the dirt. Rotten throats droned enumerations. Then there were the walking mountains of flesh, horned and grinning…

Shinua tried to focus on Baslaergh’s empty helm, to ignore the chants and gongs of the daemonic legion beyond the monastery gates.

‘They’re an hour behind,’ said the Rotbringer. ‘An hour at most.’

‘Thank you,’ Shinua said. Her stomach threatened upset, but she swallowed spit until it settled, and proffered the half-bound book of Watchers’ secrets. ‘I didn’t finish the binding on the second folio, but I think you care more about the contents.’

The skin behind his helm creased to suggest a smile. Delicately, a hand the size of her head reached down to grasp the book. His nails were yellow and dirty with dried blood. Baslaergh briefly evaluated the volume and slipped it into a pouch on his belt. Her stomach twinged as she thought of the Hallowed Knights’ true names, the surnames of surviving families all lined up in rows like gravestones.

‘Yer sure ye won’t embrace the god?’ he asked, his tone allowing that he knew the answer already. ‘There’s such joy in it, lass. The sight of the Garden, the death and birth and death and birth, the bigness. The Grandfather might ease yer mind.’

Shivers ran along the skin of her arm, even in the humidity of Ghyran’s midday. She shook her head.

‘Ah, well.’ He turned away and made for the monastery gate. ‘But a word to the wise. Not just as a servant of the god, but… survivor to survivor. En’t no point in livin’ if it’s only for yerself. Yer got to believe there’s something beyond ye to make any meaning out of it all.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.

He shrugged vast, sweat-slick shoulders. The cilia of his gut grasped at nothing. ‘Revenge is an indulgence, lass. If ye make yerself a means of yer own satisfaction, what’ll ye be when yer done?’

The second army marched in radiance.

Through the fug of Ghyranese noon: a golden company, thunderbolt banners borne high. In precise rows the Liberators walked, rows of shields and hammers and impassive face masks. Above, spear bearers and archers circled on wings of light, describing arcane patterns in the skies.

This was a company of immortal warriors who took the name of their Stormhost from the God-King himself.

First among the Stormcasts: the Hammers of Sigmar.

The company encircled the gate of the Abbey of the Twined Root. Liberators massed along the supply road and took up position by the gate. An advance guard fanned out through the halls of the monastery.

From her bolthole in the north-western wall of the courtyard, Shinua watched. Her window was only a crack in mislaid brick, but it was enough: she watched the Stormcasts assemble in parade discipline on the same ground where she’d splayed her weapons and plotted the previous afternoon. After a time, a figure somewhat grander than the others – its armour filigreed, a cloak around its shoulders – emerged to inspect the ranks of Liberators.

Here was a Lord-Celestant, commander of immortals. In the warlord’s retinue was a bodyguard of Stormcasts in bulkier armour, wielding massive, light-puissant greathammers. The Lord-Celestant paused before a rank-and-file Liberator, bowed its head in some confidence. The leader’s voice carried through the courtyard as it ordered the Liberator: ‘Hearthguard. With me. Now.’

Shinua scrabbled from the bolthole up into the rampart passages, taking care to stifle her breathing, wincing at the scrape of her boots on the gravelly stone in the hollows of the walls. The tunnels were narrow; she had to arch backwards to work her way up and through the arteries of the abbey.

She wiped dust and stray spider-thread from her face, drew herself forwards handhold by handhold. The dark was total now; she had to rely on touch and count. Her packed shoulder bag scraped the walls. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen – she should be over the sacristy now. Right, square shoulders to squeeze around the corner, then twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three–

She emerged into a cranny that overlooked the nave. The worship space was circular, a kind of enclosed amphitheatre with a lectern and stone altar at its centre. The altar was raised an arm’s length from the floor. Shinua looked out across the nave through the open jaw of a statue embedded in the wall, some placid aelven icon.

Shinua unlatched her crossbow, crawled forwards and settled into a firing position.

On the altar, Nor sat with her legs dangling off the edge, her feet not quite touching the ground. She kicked absently, as if she were bored.

The Stormcast vanguard took up posts at intervals around the nave, levelling strange Azyrite pistols. Behind them came the slow, heavy march of the warriors in bulkier armour, the Retributors. Finally, a trio of Stormcasts:

The Lord-Celestant, revealed as a woman around fifty with grey hair braided to her scalp.

A man with heavy robes draped over his armour, thick-bearded and bearing a stave that shone with blue flame.

And a Stormcast in Liberator plate, walking a hesitant step behind the Lord-Celestant, as if he were unsure of his place.

The Lord-Celestant looked down on Nor.

‘Child,’ she said. ‘How did you come to be here?’

Nor shook her head. ‘Only Halas. I will only speak to Halas.’

‘The one you have asked for by his true name is here.’ She gestured with an armour-plated hand to the nervous warrior beside her. ‘Liberator Hearthguard. Halas.’ She turned to him. ‘Do you know her?’

‘No,’ Halas said quietly. He removed his helm and crouched to speak to Nor. ‘What is your name?’

‘I am called Nor.’

‘Why do you ask for me? How do you know my old name?’

Shinua fixed the sight of her crossbow on Halas’ right eye. Tried to summon her mother’s face into the fore of her mind. In memory, her mother’s features were hazy, indistinct. Mixed with the image of bone needles. An oilskin of ashes, a hole in the world.

He took the clarity from my mother’s face.

Her fingertip grazed the metal of the trigger. The sight described a black halo around Halas’ head.

‘I am bait,’ said Nor. ‘She is here to take a life from you. Price for your debt-of-mother.’

Halas and the Lord-Celestant exchanged a glance.

Behind her back, Nor gave the hand signal that she was ready.

‘Now!’ Shinua called, and fired.

Nor hurled herself from the altar and under its belly, into the monk-tunnels.

And Halas frowned.

The bolt from the crossbow hung suspended in the air, halfway between hunter and prey, captive in cobalt flame. The robed and bearded Stormcast held his stave aloft, eyes and hands and weapon blazing with the same aethereal fire.

Shinua’s limbs went cold.

Slowly, the bolt spun around in the air. One hundred and eighty degrees, like a compass needle, to point at her.

The pistols of the guards followed the guidance of the bolt, all directed at the open mouth of the limestone saint where she crouched with her crossbow.

She didn’t have time to fire another bolt. The Stormcast sorcerer gestured with a blue-burning hand, and the statue of the aelven saint collapsed. Shinua toppled to the floor yards from the altar, her knees and elbows cracking against the stone. She lost her grip on the crossbow and it clattered out of reach.

She coughed, climbed to her hands and knees. Her eyes teared against limestone dust. As the cloud parted and settled, Halas stood before her.

He looked more tired now than in Ark’non. More tired than he’d ever looked in life. The sight of her seemed to exhaust him, to dull his eyes.

‘Oh, Shin,’ he said. He kneeled and extended his hand. ‘I am so sorry. I am so unutterably sorry for what I’ve done to you.’

She glared up at him. Made no move to take his hand.

‘Some part of me was… relieved before,’ he said. ‘When you killed me. In the snow. I thought… perhaps you had done what you needed to do. But I see that isn’t true. I’ve warped your life. I’ve taken years from you.’

‘Will you protect us?’ asks Shinua, a child who lies awake each night in terror of ghouls and daemons and necromantic bandits that raid from the outer darks.

Halas drops to one knee, right there in the kitchen. Her parents smile.

She is a child, and he is a hero, and he smiles beneficently in the morning light of her kitchen, his knee bent, his smile the bearer of all his legends. ‘I always will watch over you,’ he says. Even sixteen years later, the contours of that smile will remain with her; even as her mother’s face fades, she will see him with perfect clarity–

Shinua spat on his golden boots. There was a bit of blood in the spittle, and it stained the gold. Behind him, the pistols of the Stormcasts stared her down with their dozen empty eyes.

‘The worst day,’ Shinua rasped. ‘Do you know what the worst day was?’

Regretfully, Halas withdrew his hand.

‘Not when I saw their corpses. Not when I learned they were gone. The worst day was when I learned you had died. The garrison captain called me to her tent and told me you had been assigned to a penal detail on the front. She said you died in single combat with a Chaos warrior. She said Sigmar claimed you. And all I could think was, That death was supposed to be mine.’

He was quiet for a time. ’I don’t know if you can truly hear me now,’ he said. ‘But your anger – it’s eating your life. It’s eating the life of this girl in your care.’

‘She wants to see you dead, too,’ Shinua said, low and ragged. ‘All of you. I couldn’t turn her away if I wanted to.’

He frowned.

‘I’m going to make a last promise to you,’ he said. ‘We will never speak again. You’ve let this… rage and rot into your soul on my account, and it’s going to eat your years if you allow it. So I will be gone for you. From here on, I may as well be dead. You will have to spend time in gaol, but even when you are free, you won’t find me. Let that be the end. Will you?’

For a moment, there was silence. The sorcerer and the Lord-Celestant loomed over his shoulders.

The sound that rolled from her throat started as a growl, an unsteady moan of defiance in confinement. Then it rose to become a scream – a hatred and a fury and an answer to an unanswerable question. Perhaps she howled No! into the echoing stonework of the nave. For an instant, her mind was unknowable even to herself.

Halas flinched. Shinua held her breath, grasped the flask in her shoulder bag and flung it with all her strength into the breastplate of Halas’ armour. The bone spiral shattered against sigmarite.

The pistols of the Stormcasts barked; she hurled herself away and rolled behind the altar. A shot grazed her bicep, a streak of agony.

Behind her, a smog unfurled around Halas, the Lord-Celestant, the sorcerer. The breath of the Plague God filled the nave – a mustard-hued cloud that seemed to want to grow and grasp and consume everything it touched.

Shinua spared only a moment’s glance. Through the yellow cloud, the skin of Halas’ face erupted in boils and growths. Cilia lashed from his mouth like a dance of tongues, then from his eyes, his throat. His jaw opened until it cracked, his skull distended. Halas screamed even as he choked on growth, an awful, strangled sound. The Lord-Celestant choked. The sorcerer choked.

The Stormcasts’ bodies burst, and their armour clattered to the stone. The lightning of Azyr pierced the stone of the monastery, lit the nave in holy blue. Shinua swallowed vomit and hurled herself into the opening of the monk-tunnel under the altar, shut the trapdoor behind her. Nor’s anxious face waited for her in the darkness.

‘Go!’ Shinua hissed. ‘Go, go!’

They had a long way to crawl before they reached the ends of the tunnels, where they opened into the swamps.

Her old mentor’s words reverberated in her ears:

I will be gone for you.

III

In his last promise, Halas was true to his word.

For a year, and then another, Shinua and Nor walked the trade roads and pilgrimage paths and half-blazed frontier trails, sleeping in inns and high, tree-borne hammocks.

He was nowhere to be found.

Halas’ company of the Hammers of Sigmar was easy enough to track. Mere months after the killing at the Abbey of the Twined Root, Shinua found a Watcher’s report describing the company’s assignment to a refugee camp on the Numinous Shore of Hysh. She read stolen troop manifests; she scoured the compound with her spyglass. She searched for Halas’ face, for the markings of his pauldrons, for that cruel joke of a name, Hearthguard.

Nothing.

I will be gone for you.

In an inn, Shinua tried burning oracle bones in the hearthpit. Asked her question and waited. But once more, the fires didn’t speak.

‘I will try,’ said Nor. ‘A blood prayer.’

The girl unsheathed a skinning knife. Cut her palm with a grunt of pain, her mouth set in a serious frown. Gingerly, she dripped the blood of her palm into the firepit.

A tongue of flame rose to lick her palm, and the fires darkened into a surreal crimson. Nor did not withdraw her hand. Her face was cast in a chiaroscuro of ruby and shadow. The girl murmured softly to the fire, so softly that Shinua couldn’t make out the words, and the fire lapped at her hand.

‘Louder,’ Shinua hissed.

Nor ignored her. The pupils of her eyes glinted with the light of the flame.

‘The Raven,’ said Nor. Her voice was her own, but tripled – three of her seemed to speak at once. ‘You will find the Raven.’

Nor blinked. When she spoke again, it was with one voice. Slowly, a little reluctantly, she drew her hand from the fire, pressed her wound closed and winced.

‘I saw you,’ she said.

‘Saw what?’

‘You and the Raven. It was great and small at the same time. It had too many eyes. It opened its gullet and ate you whole.’

Between them, the crimson bled from the blaze and left an ordinary hearthfire, crackling softly. Shinua exhaled.

‘That was it?’ she asked.

‘That was it.’

They had used eight of the oracle bones. Eight remained. Shinua turned one of the unburnt bones between her fingers, studied the shape.

‘What do we want with a raven?’

Nor frowned into her bleeding hand. ‘Perhaps…’

She hesitated to finish.

‘Yes?’

‘A raven may stand for death.’

Shinua was silent.

‘It may be a sign,’ Nor said, gathering confidence, ‘that death lies along this path.’ She saw that Shinua was about to interrupt and pressed forward, undeterred. ‘It may be a sign that we should turn our eyes towards others. Towards a greater justice.’

All at once she sounded older to Shinua. She was older – not a girl any more, really. She was choosing her words with fear and care, like a woman weighed by responsibility.

‘What justice?’ asked Shinua.

‘We might stand for all the serfs and field-hands that mortar the God-King’s cities with blood and sweat and shit. We might cast down all the parasites like the Old Lords of Ark’non.’ She turned her arm to display the tattoo of the eye on her skin. ‘We can write books of revolt,’ said Nor. ‘We can do more than watch.’

There was a force of conviction in Nor that Shinua found she didn’t share. Perhaps couldn’t share. The thought made her sad.

‘I thought you understood the use of vengeance,’ said Shinua.

Nor shook her head. ‘Wrath is a means to justice. I do not mean to burn the heavens for my own satisfaction.’

‘You bind the library one book at a time,’ said Shinua. ‘This justice begets others.’

Nor looked uncertain, but nodded.

‘We must find the Raven. Whoever it is, whatever it is. And you’re right – we need to turn our eyes towards others.’

In the cellars of public houses, in stables, in bathhouses, they raised their sleeves and spoke the shibboleths. I am here to speak in the circle of the eye.

In each village or city or hamlet, the mark of the Watcher was in some small way unique. The shape of the pupil, the nature of the circle – halo or spiked crown or radiating lines. The artistry of the ink was different in every place. The people were different in every place: an elderly duardin woman, poor and self-possessed; an angry young man, wealthy and insecure.

The grievances were different: a child enslaved. Immortality denied. A crop blighted. A lover lost.

The grievances were all alike. Suffering.

Why does the God-King allow us to suffer?

In the public houses and stables and baths, Shinua and Nor asked the same questions: Do you know where to find a Stormcast called Hearthguard? Do you know where to find someone or something called the Raven?

Many Watchers knew nothing. But the eyes of some grew guarded at the mention of the Raven. Still others muttered names they might seek to learn more. A collector of secrets, they said, a Watcher of Watchers. Ask in Aqshy.

Finally, an innkeeper in a Great Parch township said he knew the Raven personally: it was the codename of a magister in the Callidium Academy. The professor compiled the Watchers’ almanacs out here in the desert of the Parch.

Shinua bought brown scholar-aspirant robes from a pilgrim. Aspirants would have free entry to the academy, but not with weapons on their backs; she risked only a fire-striker blade under her robes, an oracle bone – too precious to leave to a secret cache – around her neck. Nor took her skinning knives.

The academy was a new construction, a project of renewal in a middling city that seemed eager to equal Hammerhal Aqsha or Bataar. The colonnade in the courtyard projected antiquity and Azyrite majesty, but the school was younger than Nor. An observer only had to search briefly to find labour-teams laying new brick paths, or erecting public art – a vast mobile of concentric rings – that Shinua supposed was designed in Azyr.

The magister’s office was at the end of a long, sunlit marble hall, empty of students or sound. Shinua and Nor’s approach was announced in loud, echoing footfalls.

The door to the office was open – inside, a darkness in stark contrast to the bright marble hall. They paused at the threshold, glanced at one another.

‘Please do come in,’ called a genial baritone. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be in this wing unless you’re looking for me, or lost.’

‘You’re Magister Set?’ asked Shinua, stepping into the office. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the outlines of a cramped, shadowed library. Bookshelves heaved with tomes in the dark.

‘Indeed!’ said Set. ‘I apologise for the dim light. My eyes are sensitive. Here, on your left.’

Nor nearly tripped on a stack of thick, leather-bound volumes; books were piled haphazardly on the floor, along the walls.

Set was hunched in his magister’s robes behind an ornate desk that barely fit in the office. His beard was a blend of red and grey, his long hair tied back. It took her a moment to notice his eyes – dominated by too-large pupils, almost entirely black.

On his right shoulder, eerily still: a raven. The bird regarded her through eyes as black as the magister’s.

‘My name is Shinua Gan,’ said Shinua. ‘My friend is Nor of Ark’non. We’re here to speak in the circle of the eye.’

‘Ah, wonderful! Then today is the day. I lose track of time. You can imagine.’ Magister Set rested his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. ‘The girl will have to leave, I’m afraid. She is… claimed by another Power. She’ll spoil the work.’

Nor’s expression was outwardly impassive, but it said everything to Shinua. This is wrong. We should leave.

‘Go back to the inn,’ Shinua said softly. ‘Wait for me there.’

Nor answered in a murmur. ‘We should both go.’

‘Wait for me, love.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Nor whispered.

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I’m afraid for you.’

‘If you want your justice against Heaven,’ Magister Set said, ‘she must go.’

At the word justice, they both froze.

‘Go,’ said Shinua.

Reluctantly, Nor turned her back to Shinua and left the office. The raven watched her go. Her footfalls echoed down the marble hall; Set didn’t speak until the echoes silenced.

‘Her sort,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘will always obey in the end. They are creatures of prayer, and prayer is a submission, like any pleading. She is a fine instrument for you, but she mustn’t spoil the work.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Shinua.

‘No matter. I forget what you know.’ He took a quill from the inkwell on his desk and began to scratch some note.

‘I think it was her prayer that told me to find you,’ Shinua said.

‘Did it?’ That seemed to amuse him.

She tried to read what he was writing, but the longer she stood in this office, the less clearly she saw. The darkness seemed to shift around her, like an invisible tide lapping over the dim features of things.

For a moment, she imagined that the raven on his shoulder stared at her with nine eyes; that it was not on Set’s shoulder but a part of him. She blinked and the vision receded.

‘What do you know about what I want?’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

He paused his writing. Looked up at her with those vast pupils. For a moment, she imagined that he was nine-eyed, too.

‘What I know is that you seek your justice against the immortal called Hearthguard or Halas. He is hidden. You would have me make him plain. How do I know? I am a Watcher of Watchers. It is my lord’s work to know what is unknown.’

The words chilled her. She felt known and seen when she had believed she kept her own counsel.

‘Your lord?’ she asked.

Set ignored her. ‘Your sort,’ he said, ‘are not given to prayer, or to submission. You will always question, even down to the foundations of answerlessness. That is why my lord favours you, I think. That is why my lord will aid you.’

A wash of invisible tides. The darkness roiled around her, seized her with a vertigo. Set’s face receded into shadow. His words made her nauseous.

‘You want to render the hidden into the plain, the immortal into the dead, the impossible into the real. My lord is a lord of rendering. But it requires a sacrifice, a substrate for your alchemy.’

Shinua felt dizzy. ‘I don’t… have anything to give.’

‘You will.’

Now she saw the raven again; once more it was nine-eyed. But the bird had grown vast as a cathedral, vaster than the academy around them. The great beak opened. The gullet opened. Inside was infinitude.

‘When the time comes,’ Set said, ‘you will light a great hecatomb of souls, and then my lord will return you.’

The Raven consumed her.

Another darkness.

Cold sweat soaked her skin. Her head throbbed; her stomach felt as if it were straining to fold in on itself. Shinua doubled over and vomited, and that relieved some of the agony.

Wet drops. At first she thought it was her own sweat, but no, this was warm and falling from above.

Below, uneven stone. Not the flat marble of the academy, or anything hand-carved, but the floor of a cavern.

Some primal sense told her that she had moved far from where she had been. Worlds away. The air had changed: it was cool and carried an acidic tang.

Carefully, she climbed to her feet. She had mapped enough caverns for the surveyors’ guilds to know the dangers of darkness like this.

Ahead, points of blue light like fireflies bobbed in the dark. Indistinct voices accompanied the glow.

Low murmurs and the steady drip of water into water, echoing in a tight, narrow space. The blue lights grew closer and began to illuminate the cavern. Fang-like stalactites loomed overhead; the walls were moist, the ground a path of shallow pools in the rock.

The two forms that approached out of the darkness were broad-shouldered and bulky with full body armour, standing as tall as Shinua’s chest. Small glass chambers were affixed to their helmets, and inside the chambers fluttered bioluminescent moths. Their armour was crafted to resemble exaggerated duardin forms – one with a stylised moustache engraved into the faceplate, the other with a winged helm. In her right hand, the second duardin carried a staff tipped with many glass vials. They looked like Kharadron, but their armour was subtly different, adapted to some work that Shinua couldn’t quite discern.

The pair paused, and the one in the winged helm raised the staff to collect a drop that fell from a stalactite. Then they noticed Shinua.

‘Who are you?’ came a muffled, bewildered voice. The Moustache.

‘Please,’ said Shinua. ‘I’m lost. I need help.’

‘Lost,’ said the other duardin, the Wings. She sounded incredulous. ‘You’re… you can’t be here, can you?’

‘I don’t know where I am,’ said Shinua. She didn’t have to work hard to sound scared. The best deception was the truth. ‘Please, is there someone who can help me? Any soldiers? Stormcasts?’

The duardin exchanged a glance.

‘I expect we had better get you out of here,’ said the Wings.

‘I can barely see,’ said Shinua. ‘Do you have a torch? I can light it if–’

‘No,’ barked the Moustache. ‘No fire. Ever. First rule. Only rule. No fire. Understood?’

Shinua let herself sound shaken by his vehemence. ‘Y-yes.’

‘It’s all right, dear,’ said the Wings. ‘Safety is paramount. Fire and the Living Mountain don’t mix, and all of us miners will be the sorrier if they do. Come, stay close to me. And… maybe cover your mouth with the sleeve of your robe. Try to breathe through the cloth. I’m Ylgra.’ She glanced back at the Moustache. ‘It’s not the only rule, Olreg,’ she chided. ‘You were complaining about the partner rule just yesterday.’

‘That was more about you than the rule,’ said Olreg. ‘So “no fire” is the golden rule, then. Is that better?’

‘The golden rule is don’t tease the people with the very large hammers.’

The pair led Shinua through the tunnel, which gradually widened into a subterranean chamber. All around her, a vast labour was underway. Hundreds of tiny blue moth-lights – perhaps a thousand, perhaps more – marked workers on the walls of the caverns, applying delicate instruments to stone. In the centre of the chamber, a great, dark lake, the limits of which extended beyond Shinua’s sight. Moth-lights marked miners on the lake, too, working some arcane machines that softly churned the water. The low whir of obscure devices echoed through the chamber.

Shinua felt light-headed. She wasn’t sure if that was down to the nausea of her travel, or some quality of the underground air.

‘This way, then,’ said Ylgra, leading her onto a catwalk that wound around the edge of the lake.

‘What is this place?’ ventured Shinua. ‘Where am I?’

‘Not to worry, not to worry. This way!’

As they walked, a wind stirred in the chamber, like a storm-warning breeze. A great sigh passed through the cavern, and a fine mist rose from the lake.

‘That sounded like a breath,’ said Shinua. ‘What was it?’

‘No matter,’ said Ylgra.

They crossed the catwalk, crossed the chamber, and passed into another tunnel. At the end of this tunnel was a brighter light, daylight. Shinua quickened her pace, hurrying through puddles that soaked her feet.

Outside: fresh air. She dropped the hem of her sleeve, breathed. Then she looked up, and vertigo gripped her.

The sky was earth – a great cascade of craggy, snow-peaked mountains. There were rivers, above, that fed into a sea on the horizon’s edge. There were canyons etched in what should have been sky; her surveyor’s eye wondered at the topography above, at the world writ in the distance.

Beneath her feet was a vast, rocky mountain that stretched into an expanse of cloud and sky. The mountain hung from the heavens. Sky-ships anchored here and there, and some colossal machines were built into the farthest reaches of rock, where the base of the mountain gave way to cloud. Tiny, distant figures were tethered to the engines, whirring in a mechanical flight that looked, from Shinua’s vantage point, like the play of fruit flies.

On the cliff’s edge beyond the mouth of the cavern was a sparse watch-station; it reminded her of the fire-towers that overlooked forests in Ghyran. Spyglasses peered from the windows of the cabin, some fixed on the landscape above and some on the clouds below.

In the watch-station, eye to the lens of a spyglass that faced the world above, was Halas. He glanced sidelong at her, returned to his observation. Then looked again. He started, stood up.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

He seemed annoyed by the disruption. He pursed his lips and appraised her.

‘No,’ said Halas. ‘No, I know you.’

‘Hunter-Prime,’ said Ylgra, ‘I don’t rightly know what to make of this, but we–’

‘Weapons!’ Halas shouted abruptly, as if coming to some sudden realisation. ‘Unsheathe your weapons!’

Ylgra and Olreg looked one to the other and then, more swiftly than Shinua had expected, produced wicked hooks from their belts.

‘Don’t take your eyes from her,’ commanded Halas. ‘She’s more dangerous than you know. More dangerous,’ he breathed, ‘than she knows, I think.’

The duardin shifted into fighting stances, curved hooks gripped tight in their armoured fists. They were not, Shinua thought, to be underestimated.

Faster than she could follow, Halas was in front of her.

His armour was lighter in frame now, scuffed and muddy. The grey pelt of some beast draped over his shoulder. He carried a handaxe rather than a hammer, and the symbology on his left pauldron named him – if she read it right – as a soldier of the Vanguard Chamber. One of the God-King’s lone wolves, posted on long assignments outside the bounds of heavens or battlefronts.

The light in his eyes was guttered.

‘Here,’ Halas said. ‘What kind of wretched compact did you make to get here?’

‘There is no coward’s escape,’ she said quietly. ‘It is justice. Justice follows.’

A bitter laugh, like a cough.

‘No escape,’ he said. ‘That’s certain. I see you in dreams. Out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I forget your face, and sometimes I remember, and sometimes the dreams are true. You come here in, what, a scholar-aspirant’s robes? With death and Dark Gods in your eyes.’

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘Justice.’

‘For my crime, you punish the world.’

‘Only you.’

‘No.’ He took a book from the satchel at his waist. The spine was only half-bound.

‘Recovered in Ghyran,’ he said. ‘At great expense. Written in your hand. I carry it to remember you.’

A bile rose in Shinua’s throat.

‘And so?’

‘You gave the names of innocents – the children and spouses and descendants of Stormcasts – to a Ruinous Power. What do you think happened to those people?’

She was silent.

‘Do you want to know what happens when you die, Shinua?’

Again, she didn’t answer.

‘When you die, you will be eaten. Your soul will be subsumed by the gods you’ve given yourself up to. That’s what they are, Shinua. Eaters of eternities, and they start the feeding while you’re still alive. Make you part of them. They’re a part of you now. A wound in your soul. You’re not just complicit. You are ruin.’

Shinua realised she was shaking. Halas took a step closer, careful now.

‘You’re the plague you spread. You’re wrath. You’re this impossible thing flitting at the edge of vision. You used to want to protect people. Who are you protecting now?’

‘Bastard,’ she growled.

‘Repair your soul. Please. Let me help you. Let anyone help you. You’re going to break yourself and leave suffering where you used to be.’

What she wanted to say was, You’re the hand of an arbitrary god. You are the receiver of unjust gifts. But she didn’t have those words. Instead she had the one moment in time that wouldn’t fog or dull, the one moment that she was still somehow living: four oilskins arrayed in the blackened earth. Three generations.

And you call me ruin.

‘You are a debtor,’ she said. ‘You owe me a father.’

What she felt then wasn’t the tempered purpose that had borne her through years, but hatred as grace. She relaxed into the grasp of the grace, into a freedom from choice and decision, and another power bore her limbs.

Shinua turned her back on Halas and moved, more quickly than she had known she could move. It felt like ease; it felt like drifting. As though she were carried by the beating of countless impossible wings. The duardin shifted to stop her, to catch her, and they were fast but she was faster. As Olreg swung his hook, she met the swing, took hold of the weapon, seized the momentum and swung the duardin bodily; he flew one hundred and eighty degrees and into Halas. The duardin’s faceplate cracked against the golden sigmarite of Halas’ armour, and Shinua was still moving, hardly wondering at her strength, hardly wondering at the grace.

A vision: her father carried her through the air in a field of Shyishian grain, a moment that never happened. The man had never in her memory held her, hardly kissed her head. Old Tsien Gan wasn’t given to physical affection – wasn’t given to his family, really. He was always going to market, going to the pastures – going out of care for them, yes, but out of fear of them, too, not really knowing how to speak to this family he had made.

Shinua pressed a foot on the winged helm of Ylgra and leapt over her, soared into the cavern mouth of the Living Mountain. Into darkness, but there was no doubt in her mind now, no fear. In its place, certainties:

Halas was behind her, moving with aether-striding swiftness himself–

The mountain’s living breath exhaled through the cavern, an exhalation of mist and crisp air, and it should have pressed her back but it didn’t–

The chamber loomed ahead, and the lake; the darkness was almost total but she knew they were there, and she knew she shouldn’t reach it before Halas but she was going to nevertheless, because the Raven said, the Raven said–

She passed into the chamber, lit in dim blue by moth-light, and she plunged into the black waters of the lake.

The Raven said–

The lake was cold, and it wasn’t water. It smelled like storms. Now Halas reached her; hard metal gloves gripped her shoulder. Another certainty: he wouldn’t strike her with his handaxe, even now. He thrashed and tried to constrain her, tried to seize her limbs, but something stronger gripped her arms and moved them. She reached inside her scholar-aspirant’s robes, ripped the fire-striker knife from its sheath on her leg and scraped it across the collar of Halas’ armour.

A spark.

The particle of heat and light caught on the dew or oil or blood of the Lake of the Living Mountain.

The Raven said: You will light a great hecatomb of souls, and my lord will return you.

Halas’ golden armour erupted. She caught a glimpse of thrashing realisation in his eyes, and his face crumpled like paper in a pyre. There was a thunderclap, and he was yanked into the upper dark as if strung to an invisible line.

And Shinua was drawn away, too, as though she dangled from her own strings. Out and away, plucked through the aether at impossible speed.

She fell from the mouth of the Raven, tumbled onto the marble of the magister’s study in Aqshy. But the gullet of the vast bird-that-was-not-a-bird gaped wide, and she could see the place that she had left.

In the Living Mountain, a ripple of white fire spread across the lake. It engulfed the workers on the lake’s strange machines, ignited the air, danced along the cavern walls and ceiling. In an instant, the conflagration consumed hundreds of miners, turned light-bearing moths to ash. Hundreds of souls, more than hundreds.

A mountain hung in the sky and burned with white light and died.

Shinua stared into the mouth of the Raven and watched.

IV

Out past the farthest reaches of Aspiria, on the western frontiers of Aqshy. Beyond Passion’s Gate, on the tidelines of the Disintegrating Shore. Waters from the wild edge of the realm itself crashed on beaches of black sand, the tides carrying – now and then – the husks and shells of creatures born to impossible geometries. Past the beachhead, under the grey skies and under the churning seas, ordinary logics strained and sometimes snapped.

Near the realm’s edge, the laws changed. Reality thinned, and its more improbable children lurked just under the surface.

On the Disintegrating Shore, black dunes towered, and the beach was empty of settlements or beachcombers. Almost empty: now and then, you might catch – out of the corner of your eye – roving fauna not quite of this realm, or any of the Mortal Realms. Lithe and equine, these sinuous spawn of a lost god tasted the air with long tongues and strolled in the breakers.

They wandered here as if masterless, as if bereft of guidance. If you were wild enough, if you wanted them enough, you could master those steeds, or have them master you. The allure had drawn – and ended – enough would-be tamers that some functionary of Azyr had requested a small outpost of Stormcasts to discourage thrill-seekers, daemonologists and believers in absent gods.

It was a remote, quiet outpost – a good assignment for warriors of Sigmar who had suffered some trauma in the course of their Reforgings, who needed to rest. If you found the right perch in the dunes, you might watch the routines of the Stormcasts posted there on the Disintegrating Shore; you might keep time by them.

In the morning, a Liberator would leave his bastion and walk down the beach, leaving heavy footprints in the sand. His gait was slow, as though he were weighed down with more than his armour. He would walk at water’s edge and stare out into the grey distance of the realm’s edge, uncharted and unchartable. He would stand there, utterly still, for longer than you could bear to watch, and only then would you see the deathlessness of him.

He wouldn’t fidget, or shift his weight, or sit in the sand. He would stand like a statue and stare out into the emptiness for a morning and then an afternoon, fixed and motionless in a way that no living soldier could have matched. A quiet sentinel at the edge of the world.

You could almost pity him, he looked so remote from life.

Halas wasn’t hiding any more. He wore his old Liberator plate again, and the scrollwork on his pauldron named him Hearthguard, and every morning he walked along the beach where he stood in plain sight for hours.

The finding was simpler than it had ever been; placating Nor was harder. She insisted on accompanying Shinua, constantly wore an expression that alternated between the mournful and the anxious. She had been increasingly uneasy since she peered into the oracle fire and saw the Raven; Shinua began to wonder what else the girl had seen.

Every day, Nor urged her to return to life as a Watcher. To speak to those who suffered in the realms. To organise them against the dictates of Azyr. The girl put her in mind of Baslaergh. The Rotbringer’s exhortations to belief.

Even as they crouched in the scrub of the dunes – Shinua watching Halas through her spyglass as Halas watched the waves – Nor tried to turn her back from her path.

‘You’re pressing fate,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve made him answer for so much. You’ve been lucky to survive this far. You might do so much more to help those who suffer in the God-King’s realms.’

Shinua kept her eye on the spyglass. ‘Sorry, love. The balance is the balance.’

In truth, she’d had the same thoughts. For once – for the first time, really – she had hesitated. The pair of them had not taken the shortest path through Aspiria to the Disintegrating Shore, but instead – and to Nor’s initial satisfaction – made for Shinua’s family farmstead on the outskirts of Hammerhal Ghyra.

Another family lived on the Gan farm now. They had tamed the pastures, built another home over the ashes of the last one. The granary and the barn still stood, same as they always had. Shinua paid an old garrison mate to manage the property, though she hadn’t seen him in years, had only met her tenants once. The poor family didn’t recognise her at first, seemed nervous of these hard-looking women on their doorstep. Shinua wanted the sight of the farmstead to enrage her, to stoke the fire. It hadn’t.

She stood over the patch of dirt where the four oilskins had lain and felt a distance. The world had left her behind. Children she didn’t know screamed their play out in the pastures, and strange hands tilled the soil of the garden. The realms had moved on.

Now she crouched in the dunes, and her debtor stood there unmoving on the beach, and she was almost finished. All these years, and soon there would be justice, and then she would be done. She stood up.

‘It’s time,’ she said. ‘Nor, love, you’re to stay here. You’re not to follow me. You understand?’

Nor stood, too. She looked like she wanted to move closer, but she did not.

‘Please,’ she said.

Shinua turned away from her and walked over the dune. She took her old Freeguilder’s spear from her back and used the pole as a walking stick, dragging haphazard lines in the black sand. The sea breeze batted at her hair. After a moment, Halas turned, perhaps hearing the sound of her footsteps. That impassive golden mask fixed its eyes on her.

‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ he said, not unpleasantly. ‘This beach is restricted.’

The voice was unmistakably his, but it was also wrong. Too matter-of-fact.

‘Hello, Halas,’ she said.

He took a step closer. Raised his left hand and unlatched his helmet.

The face was his. The receding hairline, the jagged nose. But it was all… off, somehow. His eyes had hollowed. He reminded her, somehow, of her family’s faces in memory, all blurred and blank.

His brow furrowed; he peered at her in confusion.

‘I haven’t heard that name in some time,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’

‘You know who I am,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid you must have me mistaken for someone else.’

A wave crashed and the voice of the tides was like her pulse in her ears. The dullness in his gaze, the placidity – it wasn’t feigned.

He’d lost too many lives. Something in his head was corroded. And there was no satisfaction in that, no pleasure, because it was a mercy for him.

You don’t get to forget what you’ve done.

Shinua took a step towards him. ‘I know your name, Halas. You know mine.’

‘My lady, I’m afraid I don’t–’

‘You have to remember,’ she hissed. ‘It’s not right if you don’t remember.’ She tried to shove him, but he was too heavy. Her left hand gripped the spear so tightly that her knuckles were white. ‘You don’t get to forget me. You see me when you close your eyes. At the corner of your sight.’

‘I’m afraid–’

‘I flit around at the edge of your vision. I am wrath and rot and impossible things, always your shadow, always with you.’

His voice was a whisper. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘I am Shinua Gan,’ she said, and raised her spear. ‘I am ruin.’

What Halas saw then, she didn’t know. But a change wrote itself on his face. His eyes widened, and he remembered something. A nightmare with the contours of her face, perhaps. A Shinua-shaped horror that lurked in the recesses of his memory, that had dogged him across reincarnations. He grasped his warhammer and howled an abject, immortal terror that could only be cultivated through a succession of lives. The head of the hammer crackled with static and charged the air as it swung.

The hair on her forearm raised. She staggered backwards to avoid the swing and thrust her spear between the joins of his armour, caught him in the armpit and shoved.

Halas screamed. His hammer hand slackened.

But he didn’t slow.

He had never really fought her before. She saw that now. His eyes were terrified and empty at once; light and steam spilled from his mouth as he cried out his immortal agony. Halas’ entire form seemed to vibrate. He drew back his good hand and struck her above her heart.

Her ribs shattered. She was hurled backwards and skidded through black sand to the base of a dune. Shinua was broken before she touched the ground.

She lay face up, eyes on the grey sky. Oh, she thought, and struggled to shape a clearer one. Her mind was a fog. Someone screamed. Oh. She wanted to turn her head. She wanted to curl her fingers in the dirt. But her body wouldn’t obey her.

There was pain, but it was distant. Almost pleasurable in its distance. Everything felt far. The world was leaving her behind, and quickly.

Nor eclipsed the sky. Tears fell from her face to Shinua’s.

‘I asked you not to leave,’ Nor was saying. She kneeled in the sand and cradled Shinua’s head. ‘I asked you not to leave me and you left.’

I am dead, she thought. I am dead.

But that was wrong. The life was still leaving her.

When you die, Halas had said, you will be eaten. Your soul will be subsumed by the gods you’ve given yourself up to.

He loomed above Nor, aghast at the work of his own hand. He’d said there was a wound in her soul, and she could feel it now, a cavity of the heart. Out past Nor, out past the grey sky and somehow inside of her, too, intelligences vast and predatory and unfathomable circled to regard her, to welcome her.

‘It’s all right,’ said Nor, her mouth at Shinua’s ear. Labouring to master her own fear, to make a benediction. ‘It’s all right that you are leaving. I will carry on.’

Shinua wanted to say, no. She wanted to say that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Her own life was supposed to be different to this, better than this, and she wanted to make the loss worth something, to tell Nor that it wasn’t too late–

‘Bastard!’ Nor shouted at the Stormcast. Even as she cradled Shinua’s face and murmured reassurances, her voice was fierce. ‘He won’t have any rest. I’ll carry on killing him. I swear to you. I will find him and kill him and find him and kill him. I will take all of his lives. All of them. He’ll have no rest in the heavens. No rest anywhere.’

The girl stood and drew her skinning knives and advanced on Halas – the big, dumb automaton staring down at her wild-eyed and bewildered.

Shinua wanted to call, no. She wanted to tell Nor that there was no use in the killing, that there were only insatiable mouths in the sky.

She wanted–

She wanted–

She wanted not to have wasted her life on granting Halas the mercy of forgetting.

Beyond her sight, a cry of fury and the screech of metal on metal.

She wanted to have given Nor a good life, to have protected her, to have said she was sorry.

A pained grunt. A tremor of armoured weight in collapse.

The distance was too great. It was all too far, and too late.

A thunderclap.

So she wanted, at last, to be past suffering, to finally be done. But she understood now: she would not have respite after all. Like Halas, she would never be finished.

Shinua thought she felt her soul wrench itself from her mouth and towards the maws of the gods, and she thought she saw the truth of herself. The truth that would be bound in eternity. This last moment, this person she had become.

She was rage and rot. She was her ambition and her obsession, and she would always be what she had been.

She was ruin.

THE SERPENT’S BARGAIN

Jamie Crisalli

Laila wriggled into the hole dug deep under the hut she called home. The hole was little wider than her hips and she yanked the stone cover over the opening, sealing her in a womblike darkness. Small holes the size of an old Pelos coin let in air. Thin roots tickled her freckled skin and the smell of Ghyran loam smothered her nose. A cache of water and bread in a sealed clay pot sat between her bare feet. In her shaking hand, she clutched a small leather bottle on a string around her neck.

Raw screams and exultant roaring filtered down to her in that tiny hollow. And other, more obscene sounds as the fiends went about their horrid joys. Of all the places in Ghyran, the followers of the Needful One had come to her village of Varna. The new palisade had not kept them out, nor had any fighter that they possessed.

Up above, the hut door banged open and she started, her heart racing.

A man moaned and licked his lips.

‘Not much sport here,’ he said, his voice melodious.

‘This is the first settlement in weeks not tainted by those reeking pus-bags,’ said another. ‘So, I’d enjoy yourself while you can. These little people are entertaining enough.’

Something crashed over, shards of pottery scattering across the floor. And they talked about what they had done and would do if they found someone. Shuddering, Laila clamped a callused hand over her mouth and pressed herself deeper into the dirt. Her mind shrinking away from the memories of her husband’s tortured last moments years ago, Laila worked the stopper out of the bottle and a dusty smell like dead flowers filled the air. She would not die as he had.

Inside was a poison called Blood of the Wight; it was not painless but it was lightning quick. Her mother had given it to her when she was a child and told her to keep it with her even when she slept. There were numberless things worse than dying.

With a hiss, the raiders went quiet. A shadow crept over the breathing holes, sniffing. Laila put the bottle to her lips. Then a shrill hollow tone wended over the town, reverberating in her head.

‘Is that a retreat?’ one asked in disbelief.

‘I would watch your forked tongue unless you want to be the cure for Lord Zertalian’s ennui,’ said the other. ‘Clearly he wishes to save this place for future amusement. So let’s go.’

Ceramic crunched under foot and the door banged shut. Yet, Laila could not move. She stayed, holding the poison to her lips, staring at the dirt wall, trying to breathe quietly. Only a buzzing tension remained, as if her head were full of bees. What if it was a trick and they had not left, instead waiting to pounce? No, it was better to stay in here with poison than risk that fate. Even as her sturdy legs cramped and her lips went numb, she held still. Then a familiar voice called her name.

‘Stefen!’ she called, her voice ragged.

Laila crammed the stopper back into the bottle and clambered out of her sanctuary. Then she paused.

Her home was wrecked, her meagre belongings tossed about and broken, her food stores spilled and trampled. Still, she was lucky – only her things had been touched by the seekers. She would burn it all as was tradition with tainted things. Hopefully the elders would spare the hut itself or she would have to move in with a neighbour during winter.

Stefen rushed in, his dark eyes wide.

She embraced him, trembling and choking back tears. He was an old childhood friend; they had gone on to their separate lives when he had become a hunter and she had married Jonas.

‘It’s all right, they’re gone,’ he said, pulling her close. Stefen was tall and well built, though the Rotskin pox had left him with scarred, pallid skin, ruining his good looks. A clutch of scrawny birds swung over his shoulder, along with his snares and bow.

A wash of cold fear rolled through her as the gossip of the raiders rattled in her brain.

‘Are the elders still with us?’ she asked.

‘Yes, they were spared,’ he said.

‘They need to know,’ she said.

Without waiting to see if he followed, she rushed out into the bright light of the Lamp. The palisade gate dangled as men worked desperately to wrench the doors back into place. Homes burned, releasing sweet smoke and pale flames as ashen-faced neighbours watched, making no move to put them out. Others wandered aimlessly, their clothing torn and eyes utterly vacant, while some desperately called out for missing loved ones. Horror seeped through the very air as if some malign spirit had made a home in every hut and heart, a final curse bestowed by the fiends. No doubt it would linger for years.

Laila walked, eyes seeing but unable to understand it, same as it had been then. The horrid memories edged into her mind and she forced them away. Jonas was long dead, praise Alarielle.

By some miracle, the stone elders’ hall had not been touched. Some speculated that it was once a temple devoted to a forgotten storm god. Perhaps that was why the fiends avoided it.

Inside, the place was stifling hot, the fires burning high to warm old bones. Yet, the crowd was more meagre than Laila had expected. The hall guards were gone to help with the gate. At the far end, sat in a loose half-circle, were the elders, some hunched and withered, some grey and still robust. The old altar loomed behind them.

‘We will rebuild and mourn as we have always done,’ Uma said, her voice like a creaking door. ‘The dark ones never stay. The seekers will move on and leave us be.’

The other elders nodded. As always, they acquiesced to the ancient crone. Laila suddenly hated the old woman and the sycophants that surrounded her. Of course they felt that way; they sat in the heart of the village surrounded by stone and armed guards. Did they even know what happened out there? No more than they had after the last raid by the seekers.

‘No, they won’t,’ Laila said, her tone cold. ‘They’re coming back.’

The silence sharpened and Laila blushed as all eyes focused on her. Uma’s face crumpled, her eyes narrowing.

‘What do you mean?’ Uma said.

‘They’re coming back?’ another man said.

The crowd bubbled with alarm, looking around as if the dark ones were going to lunge out of the walls.

‘Two of them came into my house while I was hiding,’ Laila said, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘They were summoned by their leader early. They said that they would return.’

Another rumble of discontent. If Uma could have killed Laila with her gaze, she likely would have.

‘I agree with Laila, we can’t wait and do nothing,’ Stefen said behind her.

‘What would the youngsters suggest?’ Uma said. ‘That we fight them?’

Laila stammered, her thoughts churning. She had no solution to the problem that she had presented. Then an idea popped into her mind. A dangerous endeavour but better than the alternative.

‘The Fair Ones in the Valley of the Oracle’s Eye,’ Laila said. ‘They help people if the foe is right. Is that not correct?’

The crowd murmured. The Fair Ones. Some said they had earned this name because they were beautiful. Others claimed they were hideous, with snakes for hair, and cursed those who did not flatter them. What the legends did agree on was that the Fair Ones hated Chaos more than anything else, especially the followers of the Needful One.

Uma snorted. ‘You are not serious,’ she said. ‘The valley where they dwell is a place of madness and they are themselves not remotely human. The Fair Ones fight on their own terms and no one else’s. You are a fool.’

‘Says the old woman who counsels that we wait for those beasts to return and finish what they started,’ Laila snapped.

Uma blanched, her thin skin turning whiter than the wisps on her head.

‘Out! I will not tolerate your stupidity a moment longer,’ Uma said, snapping a finger at the door.

Laila spun on her heel and pushed through the crowd, out into the smoky air. Inside the hall, the arguing escalated. Although there was a harvest to bring in, no one wanted to go outside the walls if there was the slightest chance that the fiends were waiting for them. Cries echoed, questioning why they did nothing. Others called for the villagers to resettle elsewhere. Uma shouted back with all the ferocity in her old bones.

‘And she calls me stupid,’ Laila muttered to herself.

‘She’s afraid, nothing more malicious than that,’ Stefen said. ‘This isn’t like the pox walkers. It’s worse. I should have been here.’

‘You would have just got yourself killed, or worse,’ Laila said. ‘We need to get help from people that can fight. Uma is right, we can’t defend ourselves against that.’

‘I can lead us to the valley,’ Stefen said. ‘I’ve been to the borders anyway.’

‘Really, you’ve seen it?’ she said. ‘That’s forbidden.’

Stefen blushed sheepishly and nodded. ‘Once.’

‘You will not get there alone, especially if the fiends are still out there,’ a stranger said in a hard, growling accent.

They both spun about. A man stood before them in leather and bronze plate. His skin was tanned and aged and he was built heavily with a round gut that spoke of a steady diet of beer and meat. That he was creeping into middle age indicated either luck or skill, likely both.

‘Who are you?’ Laila asked.

‘Ano,’ he replied, as if that explained everything. When they continued to look at him in silence, he added, ‘I worked for the merchant, Antton. I hope that if I help you, your village will let me stay over the winter.’

‘What we’re talking about doing is dangerous,’ Laila said, suspicious.

‘I heard, but what that old woman is suggesting is worse,’ he said. ‘What you described sounds like something that the fiends do. They wait for your guard to fall. And they can wait a long time. Then they strike.’

While Laila did not trust the stranger, when standing against the Chaos hordes all pure humans had to stick together. What few untainted humans remained.

‘The real question is will Hadlen let us out?’ Stefen said.

Laila winced; the reeve was stubborn at the best of times. ‘We have to try,’ Laila said. ‘He might be persuaded.’

Stefen smiled tightly. ‘Yes, and lightning men will fall from the sky and kill our enemies.’

They snickered at the old child’s tale and made their plans. They delayed as much as they dared, speaking to the few close friends that they knew would keep their peace. With the watch so tense, sneaking out would be a challenge. Carefully, they gathered their supplies – a few loaves of hard bread, dried beans and smoked meat. Then at the light of dawn the next day, they walked to the back edge of the village where the midden heap lay next to the wall. It smelled of rotten grain and human waste; however, there was a gap in the palisade where the beams had rotted and they slipped out into the greater world with no one the wiser.

‘So this is how you kept escaping,’ Laila said.

Stefen grinned as he brushed off his hands. ‘No one ever looked.’

As they walked around the village and onto the road, they saw not a single corpse. Just dried bloodstains and spatters of clear fluid like the trails of slugs. Strange perfumes lingered in the air, faded but potent enough to tickle the nose. Crows fluttered out in the fields, squawking at each other.

Stefen took them off the road towards the east, into the thinning forest. A deep layer of leaves rustled underfoot. Overhead, the skeletal trees rattled in the wind. The glow of the Lamp dimmed with the evening, while the Cinder Disc glimmered, already small and red with the autumn.

It felt almost unnatural to be moving away from Varna. The trees seemed to hide sinister threats, and Laila waited for some pale horror to come pelting out at them. Out here, the urge to leave struck her as impulsive while in the town it had felt brave. Had she misheard the raiders? Was Uma right? With a start, Laila realised that she had never been this far from the walls.

‘Second thoughts?’ Stefen said.

‘How do you do it?’ she said. ‘Leave Varna I mean.’

‘One step at a time,’ Stefen said, smiling.

They walked on, the shadows growing long. Stars flickered into being and the night birds started to warble to each other.

‘What about you?’ Laila said to Ano. ‘How did you come to travel?’

‘It’s tough to do,’ Ano said. ‘But there are advantages.’

‘Like what?’ she said.

‘Being paid in coin is good,’ Ano said.

It was practical, yet there was a mercenary attitude to his response that she did not like.

‘We can’t pay you in coin,’ she said, hoping to gain a clearer sense of his motivation.

‘No, but a bed for the winter is priceless,’ he said. ‘Besides, I could not help my employer.’

She let the subject drop when he looked away from her with a cough.

They travelled for several days, the forest twittering and breathing around them. It had not always been so. Once upon a time, this entire woodland had been a mire of maggots, rot and corpses. Then something had changed. Some said it was just the way of nature to reassert itself after a time. Others said it was a blessing from Alarielle, waking from her long slumber. Still others whispered that it was the Fair Ones that had freed the region of its decay.

Laila found herself dreading the night. Her sleep was long in coming and when she finally drifted off, nightmares haunted her with horrifying blends of past and present. The fiends, all wearing the manic sweaty face of Jonas, chased her through the fields. They always caught her and then cut her apart, ecstatic breathing echoing in her mind. The shadowy pain remained after she bolted awake, lingering in cramping muscles and unmarked skin.

Just as Laila began to think they were going the wrong way, Stefen spotted a coiling vine growing under the dense boughs of a great tree. It was black, like the night void when no other heavenly bodies lit the sky. Laila had never seen such a colour in nature before and marvelled at the glossy black leaves.

‘Don’t touch it,’ Stefen said. ‘Most things in the Valley of the Oracle’s Eye are venomous.’

‘Are you sure you can get us there?’ Ano said, shifting his weight.

‘Normally this is where I turn around,’ Stefen said. ‘If we just keep walking, the landscape will guide us. Though it will be dangerous in ways that are unfamiliar to us.’

‘We should be more cautious now,’ Ano said, gripping his spear. ‘Pay attention. Watch your backs. I will take the rear.’

‘Why?’ Laila asked.

‘Because I have the feeling that the beasts out here do not attack from the front,’ Ano said with a sardonic smile.

Laila shivered. The shadows seemed even deeper and more threatening than before. As they moved eastwards, the land grew bleak. The trees shrank, their limbs struggling upwards. Blood-red leaves coated the earth, filled with worms that slithered alarmingly under Laila’s bare feet. Above them, the Lamp grew fat and orange as if seen through a veil of ashes. Animals became quiet and unnatural, with deep black coats, bloated white eyes and long spidery limbs. The world of Ghyran changed, tainted by whatever miasma leaked from the Oracle’s Eye.

They trudged onwards until the Lamp suddenly winked out and darkness fell, a blackness so complete that it hurt the eyes. Laila stifled a scream. The night had never come on so fast back at Varna, not even in the depths of winter. A clammy chill rushed in, cutting through their clothes. The sort of cold that would slowly kill if allowed to.

‘Light,’ Ano hissed. ‘Now.’

Leaves rustled under foot as Ano shifted around.

The shadows watched them. This she knew. She felt their gaze lingering on the skin. Something whispered past her and she flinched. Shadows touched her hands, coiled around her legs and brushed her cheeks, light as cobwebs. She stayed still, even as a scream threatened to escape her throat.

Instead, she focused, her ears straining. The whisper of cloth, a soft grunt, a light rattle of stone. Something fell into the leaves. Stone clacked against stone. Sparks flared, stinging her eyes. Then the crackle of fire. The hiss of retreating things.

‘Hold this,’ Stefen said, handing her the torch before putting an arrow to the string of his bow.

‘Where is Ano?’ she said, looking around.

Their hearts hammering, standing in the little circle of light surrounded by blackness, they realised that their best fighter was gone without a struggle. How could he have not made a sound? Neither dared to call for the man. Laila crept to the edge of the light, as if she were looking over the side of a boat into a dark sea.

‘Ano, say something,’ she hissed, then her toes brushed something heavy and wooden.

Ano’s spear lay where he had dropped it. There was nothing else. Not a drop of blood, nor a shred of cloth. Not even the leaves were disturbed. With a start, she looked up, expecting some beast but there was nothing but blackness.

‘Don’t make a sound,’ Stefen said, then turned his back to the light and walked out a few paces. Unblinking alien eyes peered from the gloom, disappearing and then reappearing somewhere else. He raised his bow, drew and waited. Then he loosed and something hissed in pain out in the darkness. That he could see anything amazed her.

‘We should move, that’s not the only thing out here,’ Stefen whispered. ‘We may be in some creature’s territory and it will leave us alone once we’re gone. At least that’s what I hope.’

Some might have called her and Stefen cowards for not looking for Ano. However, death came quickly or sometimes not fast enough. He was already lost and she would not risk her own life for a corpse.

Laila nodded jerkily, shaking from the fear and cold. She picked up the heavy spear though there was no way she could wield the thing. The idea of fighting was not comforting: more than likely she would die. Still, better that than simply giving up. They moved on, searching for shelter of some sort.

Laila wrapped her cloak about herself. She had thought the greatest danger was the fiends waiting outside Varna; once past them, she imagined that the venture would go smoothly. Guilt crept over her. This journey was her idea. Ano would not have been out here if they had not gone. But what choice did they have, given what they knew?

They needed an army, and if Ano had died to give them that, then his death was not in vain. Yet if the darkness could take Ano, what hope did they have of reaching the valley?

Eventually, the pair found a small ditch within which they took shelter, building a roof of branches over the top and then a fire to stave off the chill. Laila did not sleep, every noise emphasised by the unnatural darkness. The rustling of her clothes, every small cough, even her breathing seemed loud enough that all the world heard.

Dawn came on weak and cold, the air thick with grey vapours. They helped themselves to some beans and bread, then moved on. The earth became hard and stony, the trees shrivelled and the undergrowth thickened with pale white plants that shrank back when touched.

‘We’re definitely moving down,’ Stefen said.

Grey hills rose on either side, shrouded in mist. Laila felt she was walking into a prison that she could not escape. Yet, her nightmares whipped her on. What dangers compared to what the fiends promised?

They walked on and then the rocky earth gave way to a smooth stone street, like the ancients had made before the Plague Times. Tall statues of women loomed on either side. But their proportions were strange, too tall and thin as if they had been stretched out. They wore scandalously little clothing and brandished swords as they silently charged towards an unseen enemy. Laila shuddered at their screaming faces and wild hair. The place seemed abandoned, yet every eye followed them as they passed.

Ahead of them, impossibly tall towers hove out of the mists, clawing up towards the heavens like a clutch of brambles. Laila had never seen anything so vast made by the hands of mortals. Set in the side of the nearest was a huge set of doors that stood open, guarded by another pair of stone warrior women. From over the doors, an idol with a screaming face watched them, grasping a downturned sword in one hand and something small and dripping in the other.

‘Maybe this was not the best idea,’ Stefen said. ‘We should not be here. This place is not for us.’

She found herself nodding in agreement.

‘We can’t,’ she said, more to herself than him.

‘That statue is holding a heart in its fist,’ he said, drawing an arrow from his quiver.

Laila paced around on the threshold, her fists balled up, trying to summon up her courage. One part of her wanted to yell at him for strengthening her fears, while another part wanted to leave and never return.

‘I know what they will do,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I can’t let that happen to me or anyone else. This place is terrifying, but not as bad as being in that hole, knowing what they do.’

She looked at the black opening and steeled herself. With a deep breath, Stefen stepped forwards.

‘No, not you. Just her,’ a hoarse man’s voice floated to them out of the darkness.

They both froze like rabbits caught out by a fox.

‘And no weapons in this holy place,’ the voice said.

Laila swallowed. Reluctantly, she handed the spear to Stefen and then stepped over the threshold. A stifling silence enveloped her and when she looked back, the outside world was hazy and dark. Stefen was little more than an ink blot on a sheet of paper. Pale blue torches guttered, merely enhancing the deep darkness that settled in every corner. The ceiling loomed far above her, arched and covered in sharp, jagged runes. It made the old temple at Varna seem like a hovel.

‘Go on,’ the voice said.

She caught sight of a gaunt face in the dark, the eyes two black pits. Then it vanished into the gloom.

What kind of place was this? How could a darkness this deep exist? And was this one man all there was? No place this grand stood empty and unprotected. Yet the silence was so deep, and the place so empty. What if this was merely another grandiose ruin?

As she walked deeper, her eyes started to pull phantasms out of the black air, leering faces, flying serpents and skeletal men riding gangling horses.

A glutinous bubbling sound caught her attention and she moved towards it. As she walked closer, the air grew thick with incense and a sweet, coppery stench like cooking blood sausage. A strange altar revealed itself – at least, she thought that it was an altar. Two flights of stairs wound their way up to a vast cauldron held by a statue of a straining man. Steam rose from within the huge vessel. Looming over it was the same idol she had seen above the door. Yet this one was covered in thick red enamel, burnished gold and glittering gems. Its eyes burned crimson and seemed to follow her with predatory focus.

Something stirred in the cauldron, fluid sloshing over the side. A great coil rose, like a leviathan breaking the surface of the sea. Then a small green snake crept over the side, black tongue flicking. She cocked her head, puzzled. Another serpent and then another slipped over, peering at her with unnerving, single-minded interest.

Laila took a step backwards. Why would anyone put a snake colony in a cauldron? And what else was in it? Instinct rattled through her, the overwhelming need to run. There was a predator in here, one large enough to kill her.

Then a bright light leapt to life from her left, stinging her eyes. A woman’s voice, deep and rough with wisdom, spoke softly. Whatever was in the cauldron settled back like a dragon lulled to sleep.

‘I would come towards the light, young one,’ the voice said. ‘My sister is not friendly to the curious.’

Laila blocked the light with her hand and stepped towards it, feeling her way with her toes. She stumbled when her feet touched earth and a soft fragrant wind sighed through her curls. With watery eyes, she looked around at an outdoor garden, the surrounding walls gleaming like black glass.

All the plantings, neatly laid out in vivid clusters, were venomous: Strikeweed, Neolinem and Grave-eye. And those were just the ones she recognised. Other plants and trees whispered in the wind, dark and spiky or pallid and ghostly. Even the grass under her feet had a purple cast to it. Above her, the Lamp was shrouded, though still brighter than the blackness within the temple.

In the centre of the garden stood the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Now Laila understood why they were called the Fair Ones.

The woman resembled a human being only loosely. Long and thin as a blade, she moved with an airy grace, like a great cat. Her pointed ears peeked through her black hair and her skin was dark as a doe’s eyes, without blemish or scar. A jewelled leather cloak hung off her slim shoulders and underneath she was nearly nude, though Laila doubted she felt any shame in it. Two strange blades hung from her hips, more like torture instruments than weapons of war. Yet it was her face that was the most unnerving. While her expression was gentle, it was at odds with her sharp black eyes and thin cruel lips.

Next to the aelf was an elaborately carved table, upon which rested a stone bowl etched with sharp runes and the familiar idol in miniature.

‘We have not seen one of your kind in many years,’ she said, her accent hissing through the human words.

‘Generations, ma’am,’ Laila said, her voice scratchy with nerves. ‘I am Laila. I represent the village of Varna.’

The woman’s eyes narrowed and her smile deepened. No human expression, that. It was like seeing a sicklecat smile.

‘I always forget how short-lived you humans are,’ she said. ‘So, Laila of Varna, do you know who we are or have even your legends forgotten us?’

Laila opened her mouth but then realised that she could not in fact answer the question. Certainly, not to this woman’s satisfaction.

‘Only in the vaguest terms,’ she said. ‘We know that when the great enemy comes, you will fight for us.’

‘For a price,’ the woman said, with a tremor in her voice as if she were trying to repress some strong emotion. ‘Let us move beyond simple legends, shall we? My name is Cesse, and this is a temple of the Khelt Nar, a sisterhood devoted to the defeat of Chaos under Khaine’s holy guidance.’

‘So you are a holy order?’ Laila said warily.

‘Precisely,’ Cesse said, her voice bright with fervour. ‘We are dedicated to our faith and that is enough.’

‘And if you operate on faith, what is this price then?’ Laila said, sensing something was off.

‘The price is that of blood. Blood buys blood,’ Cesse said, drawing a dagger from her belt.

Laila took a step back.

‘Please, I will not kill you,’ Cesse said, flicking her hand dismissively. ‘You have a need of our skills. You need us to kill your enemy. What is this enemy?’

‘They worship… um… they worship…’ Laila started, then she took a breath and looked up at the sky. ‘The Needful One. The Beckoning Prince.’ Cesse looked at her, one thin brow arched in confusion. ‘Slaanesh,’ she mumbled finally, looking at her feet.

Heat crept into her face at her blasphemy, at speaking that abominable name. She looked up and recoiled. Cesse stared at her, every muscle standing like a cord under her skin. Seemingly unaware, the woman slowly drove her blade deep into the table, the wood creaking. The pleasant mask was gone, leaving a hate that shivered through the aelf’s limbs and etched her face into a scowl of furious cruelty.

‘Hear my words, human. We will not rest until your dread enemy is slain,’ she snarled, her voice a terrible rasp. ‘We will kill them without mercy. None of them can be allowed to live.’

Laila fought the urge to run, holding herself still as Cesse wrenched the dagger from the table. Seeing Laila’s expression, Cesse’s eyes narrowed in suspicion as if sensing some weakness.

‘Do you not want them all dead?’ Cesse said, her black eyes feverish.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ Laila stammered.

Cesse smiled. ‘Oh, I see. To be as ignorant as you are now. You do not know what they do. You do not know the thing that lurks in the darkness and eats at their souls.’

Cesse’s focus turned towards some inner turmoil, her eyes dark and dull. A profound hate flickered there, a self-loathing that was all-consuming and burned eternally. A shame that ever boiled, a pain that never eased, a hurt that never healed. What caused it, Laila could not guess. However, she did not want to be around when that storm of emotion turned outwards.

‘You will kill them for blood?’ Laila prompted. Now that she said it out loud, it seemed insane. What would a holy order want with blood? What was the significance?

Cesse tossed her head, her black hair shimmering, coming back to the present.

‘Of course, that has always been the agreement,’ Cesse said. ‘And what is blood compared to the tortures that await you if you do nothing?’ Cesse leaned across the table. ‘Trust me when I say, the agonies and slow death that you envision are only the beginning. It is not just the body that they devour.’

‘Whose blood is it?’ Laila asked.

‘Yours, I assume,’ Cesse said. ‘Who else’s?’

Laila blushed. It seemed easy enough.

‘Why?’

‘All of creation moves at the beating of a heart. All things from the strongest godbeast to the stars themselves. Nothing can be outside it. The heart and the blood it moves are the most sacred of things.’

Laila nodded. ‘I agree on behalf of Varna. You will kill the raiders in return for blood.’

‘Excellent, now we can begin,’ Cesse said, gesturing that Laila should stand opposite her at the table. Then she began to chant, her words like the rattling of swords and spears. The aelven woman sliced the dagger across her palm without even flinching, as if she had done this many times before. Blood leaked into the bowl. Then she crooked a long finger at Laila.

Yet Laila hesitated. Then she shook herself. What was a little cut compared to what those creatures did to their victims? She thrust out a hand. Cesse took it, her skin feverish, and then quickly slashed open Laila’s palm. It burned like hot iron and Laila tried to jerk away, but Cesse held her fast until her blood fell into the bowl. At last Cesse released her, still chanting.

Now the blood began to seethe, filling the air with coppery smoke. Shadows crept among the shrubs and flowers. Cesse’s voice rose to a shout, darkness seeping around her body like a serpent. Then she clapped her hands together, the sound like thunder. Laila stepped back towards the door. The air became dark, vile and oozing, catching in her throat and lungs, crawling over her skin like spiders. Cesse’s eyes were pits of the blackest spite, her hands dripping blood and gloom.

‘It is done,’ Cesse said. ‘You will have our blades, our magic and above all our hate. All is yours for blood yet spilled. Now go, this place is no longer for you!’

Laila did not need to be told. She fled, the shadows hurtling after her. As she burst through the hall, something hissed and roiled up on that dread altar. Laila ran on, things catching and plucking at her clothes and hair. She bolted under that fearsome archway out into the sickly light.

‘Stefen,’ she yelled, slowing her breakneck pace only slightly. ‘We’re done. We need to go!’

He was not there. Only the spear, a broken arrow and an ominous spatter of blood remained.

‘Stefen!’ she screamed, looking around frantically.

The shadows boiled out of the temple, hissing like vipers.

Laila ran as fast as she could. Like any nightmare, it could not catch her if she did not look back at whatever it was that snarled and snapped at her heels. She reached the edge of the forest and hurled herself through the trees without pausing. The seething shadows grew distant and then retreated as if the brilliance of Ghyran was not to their liking.

Once she was certain that she had left the creatures far behind, she dropped to her knees and wept. Never had she imagined that Stefen would perish. She had always thought that it would be her, that Stefen would be the one to carry back the news of their success. After all, she was just another farmer and he was a hunter that went out in the wider world.

Why had she lived while he had not? As if in answer, the cut in her palm leaped to life, stinging like an envenomed lesion. The wound seeped a clear fluid, and the skin surrounding it was a sickly grey. She tore a strip of cloth from her frayed tunic and tied it around the torn flesh.

This done, Laila set off towards home, tormented at night by nightmares and pain, and driven on by terrors of fiends and predators during the day. Sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed thin pale men on dark horses slipping through the shadows. She wondered if she was going mad.

It was twilight on the third day when she came within sight of Varna, long shadows reaching across the fields. A familiar sickly-sweet smell tickled her senses. Had she been too late? Was that grim bargain all for nothing?

Exhausted fear leaped through her and she pelted out across the fields of red-tinged grain. She half expected some terrible shriek or that shrill tone to echo from the trees, but there was nothing.

The gate was already closed when she reached it. She banged on the wood and called out for someone to have mercy and open it, though she knew that they should not. They would leave her out here to survive the night as best she could before opening that door.

Then the gate creaked, opening just enough to let her in. She rushed through the gap and crashed into something solid.

‘Laila,’ Hadlen said, slowing her down. ‘Where have you been? Where is Stefen?’

One of the other warriors took off, running towards the great hall, shouting that she had returned.

She shook her head and told Hadlen what had occurred in a soft voice. Yet, she found herself obscuring details, even as the story spilled out. She lingered instead on Stefen, on his skills, on his calm. As she finished, she noticed a commotion coming towards her.

Uma. Of all the people in Varna, the last person she wanted to see was Uma. Laila had no stomach for the crone’s displeasure after everything that she had seen.

‘You were forbidden from doing this, Laila,’ Uma snapped as she shuffled up to them.

‘What would you rather have happen?’ Laila said. ‘That we just sit waiting to be slaughtered by the worst that this world has to offer? By those beasts. You know what they were going to do to us.’

Laila glanced around. To her surprise, some of the others crowded around rumbled in agreement. Still, many clearly sided with Uma, their faces set hard as stone.

‘You know not what you have done,’ Uma said. ‘Time will tell. The legends say to be cautious of the Fair Ones. Who knows what they will do in the end.’

‘They are going to kill all those fiends for us,’ Laila snapped, jabbing a finger in the old woman’s direction. ‘We might learn that we don’t have to be so afraid any more.’

It was an empty thing, grasping at surety in the face of Uma’s doubts. It was as if the old woman were plucking Laila’s own secret worries from her head, when Laila desperately wanted the bargain to work out. Uma had not seen Jonas’ body or heard his last wheezing breath. Sometimes the lesser evil was all that remained.

‘I doubt that,’ Uma said, turning away from her. ‘There is always something to fear.’

Uma shuffled away, her back bent more than Laila remembered. Her supporters went with her, scowling.

Exhausted, Laila excused herself when the others pressed in with urgent questions. She stumbled into her house and hurled herself into bed. Yet her nightmares continued, dreams of shadows chasing her through endless halls while the aelves’ bloody-handed god loomed over her with burning eyes. Sometimes, Ano and Stefen were with her and they were always devoured by whatever beast ran in the shadows.

As Laila returned to the familiar rhythm of her old life, she remembered the bargain with ever greater unease. She was missing something. But what? Cesse was sinister certainly, but had given her word in front of her god. While that god was no Alarielle, he was still a deity that had rules that were binding. So why did it feel like something had gone horribly wrong?

The days turned into a week and then two, autumn cooled and the rains started in earnest. Fear of famine set in; their stores were lean as much of the harvest had rotted in the fields. Stefen and Ano’s funeral came and went, bleak and routine like all the others before it. Normalcy never returned. The cut in her hand would not heal; instead it constantly broke open and bled, the skin ashen and dry. Likewise, the vivid nightmares also continued, an unending torment.

Her neighbours treated her differently, either greeting her with cool politeness or pointedly avoiding her, making holy signs as they did so. Rumours that she was cursed began to circulate. Never had she felt as alone as she did now, surrounded by familiar faces, none of whom trusted her as they had.

Then late one night, a high musical tone sounded through Laila’s dreams, reverberating through her bones. Dazed, she opened her eyes as another call went out, louder than the last. Laila clamped her hands over her ears as the sound pierced her skull like a butcher’s pick. The horn-blower was real; worse, it was out in the fields. The fiends were outside the walls.

The cut began to itch, then to throb. She clutched her hand tight and felt warm blood. She stripped off the soaked bandage and searched for another. As she looked, another horn call went out, different than the first. Brassy and eerie, it shivered up the spine and set the heart racing. Then there was a high, keening howl.

The Fair Ones had come.

She wrapped her hand and glanced at her bolthole. Disgust at her fears and nightmares rose. She had to see the creatures die. Maybe then she would be free from the monsters that stalked her dreams and the memories of her husband’s death. The Fair Ones had promised to kill them all, why not see them fulfil that promise?

She paused. The sounds from the battle filtered through to her, high ululating screams, roars of elation and the metallic bang of weapons meeting. It was almost musical in its own way, rising and falling by some rhythm that she could not discern.

Even as the pain crept up her arm like venom, she stepped outside and looked up at the cloudy sky. No, not clouds. Shadows. They weaved through the sky as though they were living things, tinting the Cinder Disc into a colour like heart’s blood.

She climbed the wall to where Hadlen and a couple of warriors stood and looked out with them.

The scene was grim.

Out amongst the rotten grain, a great jewelled chariot lay crumpled like a dead beetle. Clustered about the wreck was a group of heavily armoured men, if one could call them such, bunched up with weapons turned outwards. At the centre was a tall, lithe creature with an elaborate helm, shouting in a silvery voice. All about them, shadowy women probed at the raiders’ defence, thin spears piercing through hardened armour, others tearing at shields with hooked blades. A final, bloody last stand.

Something flew out of the trees on the wings of a drake and circled above the battle. Then it dived down into the heart of the raiders like a hawk. The defensive knot broke apart, revealing a flickering dance between the Chaos leader and a monstrous winged aelf. Blows lashed between them and for a moment, it looked as though they were equal. Then the aelf skewered the leader through his jewelled breastplate, ending the beast’s life.

The winged woman was not the only monster. Other aelves with the bodies of serpents weaved among strange crystalline statues that glittered in the half-light, frozen in mid-flight. Still other warrior women flickered after their fleeing enemies, snaring them with barbed whips or lopping off limbs with long daggers. The crack of breaking bones, the chanting of women and the screams of dying things drifted out from beyond the trees. A strange fire burned out there, throwing up dense, ruddy mist. The stench of blood was so thick on the wind that it gummed in the eyes and throat.

Never had Laila imagined that their defence would be so ugly. Yet did those creatures not deserve it? Did evil deserve evil? Yes, they did. Maybe now, Jonas would no longer haunt her dreams with his screams and pleading.

As they looked on, a shadow walked down the road. It was Cesse. Below them, she stood, strong and cold. A bloody sickle gleamed in one of the aelf’s hands, while in the other was that magnificent crested helm. No, not a helm, a head in a helm. She lifted up the gruesome trophy, blood dripping from the severed neck.

‘We thank you for this glorious slaughter, which we have carried out in your name,’ Cesse said, her voice quivering with a cruel elation. ‘This creature will trouble you no more. Now, whose blood shall it be?’

‘What? I gave you what you wanted,’ Laila said. ‘I gave you my blood.’

Cesse blinked and dropped the head into the dirt. All the other aelves stopped and looked towards the village as one. The shadows paused in the sky as if frozen and then seeped downwards like black snow. Out in the forest, something rumbled and that dread altar rolled forwards of its own volition out of the trees, the cauldron the source of that terrible smoke. Around it slithered some terrible thing, a vast serpent.

‘It pains me that your kind are so forgetful,’ Cesse said, a hint of amusement in her voice as if she were revealing the punchline of a joke. ‘You spoke for all, therefore you are all. Your blood stands for your village’s obligation to us. Do not worry. We will not take the strong from among you, only the weakest from each household. The ones that you will not miss. Given the state of your harvest, you would not be able to feed them anyway. In time, you will be grateful for the lack of useless mouths. Just as it was before.’

‘She cannot be serious,’ Hadlen said. ‘Laila, you could not have agreed to this.’

‘I didn’t,’ Laila stammered. ‘That was not what we agreed to.’ She leaned over the wall. ‘I gave you blood.’

‘No, you sealed the agreement with your blood,’ Cesse said. ‘A few drops is not enough. Did you really think it was?’

Laila frantically searched her memory for some misstep, some loophole, something. Then a single moment leaped out at her.

For blood yet spilled.

It had been right there in front of her face. She had thought that the phrase referred to the enemy. But no, it had been her own people. That could not be right. She looked at the others, who glared at her with the frightened anger of those dragged into a situation not of their making. She had to fix this.

‘The whole point of this was so that the defenceless would live,’ Laila said. ‘If we could have done it ourselves, we would not have needed you.’

Cesse cocked her head, her sharp brows furrowing. ‘I do not understand your motive. We have laws. We do not move our forces on behalf of the weak without payment in blood. The weak must be culled from the strong so that the strong may continue unburdened. If you do not give, we will take what we are owed, no more, no less.’

Cesse did not – no, she could not – understand. She wasn’t human. It was inevitable now. Dozens were going to die because of Laila’s naïveté, her idiocy. There was now nothing that she could do. There never had been. Someone was always going to kill them; she had merely chosen a different foe.

‘You are like the fiends, like a reflection of the Lamp in a lake,’ Laila said.

Cesse’s face twisted into a depthless fury that no human could know. All the self-loathing and hurt turned outwards. She leaped into the air with a shriek, her cloak falling away, wings like those of a great dragon snapping free. The monstrous aelf crashed into Laila, slamming her off the wall. Laila experienced a long moment of weightlessness before she hit the ground, the breath blasting from her body. Breathless and throbbing with pain, she lay there.

Shadows flitted past her, the gate groaned open and the aelves shrieked in. They bolted right for the hall and the villagers scattered like startled birds from a nest, fleeing in terror. It mattered not, they died all the same: the infirm, the aged, the injured and the unlucky.

Cesse crouched nearby, a fleshy tail flicking, her wings loose over her back, watching the slaughter.

‘Please understand, this is not purposeless or merciless,’ Cesse said, calm as if the screams mattered to her not at all. ‘We build a better world. One that is strong enough to stand against not only the destruction of the flesh but also the entropy of the soul. Illusions like justice and fairness allow weakness to fester. Killing the weak is merciful to the strong.’

Laila pressed herself onto an elbow, still trying to suck in a breath. Pain flared in her palm and then was gone as if it had never been. She looked down. A thin scar was all that remained of the wound.

‘The bargain is complete,’ Cesse said, straightening up. ‘Now you are strong and will survive.’

Cesse leaped into the sky, her wings hitting the air. In the space of a breath, she was gone. They were all gone as if they had never been. Light washed over Varna as the shadows lifted, revealing a village of sorrow and corpses, of wailing and death, of curses and recrimination.

And Laila wept.

THE UNLAMENTED ARCHPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

David Guymer

‘Graunch Festerbule is with us.’

Rattagan Borkris listened with an idle ear as a pair of skavenslaves fussed over his cassock. His assistant, Underdeacon Makulitt Pus of the Presbyopic Wilt, was an unctuous rodent with teeth the colour of gold pried from Shyishan soil, black gums and a muzzle with one side drooping lower than the other, bestowing a permanent frown as though he were assessing the value of another skaven’s organs. He was, as Borkris’ keen sense of smell could confirm, much beloved of the Horned Rat. He stood with only a slight hunch, garbed in a long-sleeved black cassock with varicose piping. The rat servants busied themselves about their master.

Rattagan Borkris.

Malfeasant Superior of the Church of Gnawing Ruin.

Spiritual overseer to a million unworthy souls, twoscore lairs spread like a necrotic rash across the Realms of Metal and Death.

His robes were vestal white, as befit the lord of a great diocese of ruin, the emblems of the Great Corruptor and the one hundred and sixty-nine Verminlords that served that aspect of the skaven’s schizophrenic deity covering the garment with gold stitching. Even the gnawholes around the trailing hem had been re-stitched with thread of so close a colour match that only the keenest of eyes amidst his dim-sighted race could have spotted the difference. It was raiment to bankrupt a warlord clan and make the eyes of a lesser priest water. It announced him as the unholiest of unholies, a high priest and lector of Clan Morbidus, and a skaven who commanded the ear and whiskers of the Horned Rat himself.

He stared through the warpstained windows of his high tower as a slave threw a tatty white cloak over his shoulders. Rain scratched at the glass. Green lightning and machine fire lit the horned belfries and gnawing spires of Blight City.

‘Sequeous Rank is bought and bribed for,’ said Makulitt. ‘Milketan, Sithilis, Verukik – all have taken-snatched your offer. Ureik is under Festerbule’s claw and will scratch as he does. Perish and Wastrett are loyal to you.’

Borkris squeaked, unimpressed, as the ratservant moved in front of him to affix the collar buckle.

Loyalty, even amongst the pestilential ranks of the faithful, was not the same thing to the skaven that it was to other races. It meant that Rank, Perish, Wastrett and the rest had been bribed, threatened and cajoled for so long that they could no longer smell the distinction between their own self-interest and that of Borkris’ coin purse. Their churches espoused a variation of the Withered Word that was no more at odds with his own than that extolled by the more excitable zealots in the farthest flung parishes of the Gnawing Ruin. But if he had a warp-token for every skaven that had snatched with both paws, tail crossed behind their back, then he would be rich enough to buy the high throne of Azyr, never mind the archpustulency of Clan Morbidus.

A second slave forced a jewelled mitre over his ears. He wriggled his brow until it sat properly.

‘Go on.’ Borkris’ voice was a cultured squeak, blessed with a bubbling hoarseness that spoke of his high favour. He waited.

Makulitt remained painfully silent.

‘Is that all?’

‘Eight scratch-votes, your unholiness,’ said Makulitt. ‘Nine if you add-count your own.’

Borkris resisted the urge to turn and cuff him. To do so would have unsettled the teetering armature of arm rings and signets so painstakingly arrayed and forced the slaves to begin again. He was not one to fret over his property’s inconvenience, but tardiness he would not tolerate. ‘The Lyceum of Lectors numbers twenty-one. Fool-fool! A majority of twenty-one is eleven. With all my wealth you cannot bribe-buy two more scratch-votes?’

‘Two times the backing of Hascrible, or of Dengue Cruor, your unholiness. Persuade one of them and the archpustulency is yours.’

The slave working on Borkris’ collar nicked a dark red bubo on the underside of his muzzle with a claw. The slave gagged, swiping at the emitted flatus with his paw before going stiff and dropping dead at Borkris’ footpaws.

Borkris sighed and fastened his own collar. He chose to take it as a positive omen. The Horned Rat scurried in nefarious ways.

As archpustulent he would be a claw’s length from the primacy of Clan Morbidus. In time, perhaps, even a seat on the Council of Thirteen. A touch on the Black Pillar. A sup of the life-elixir. He preened as staccato lightning brought the warpstained glass to life, a chiaroscuro of light green and dark, scenes from the First Withering as retold through the Withered Word. And after that? He would see out the Final Withering with his own half-blind eyes.

The thought of Dengue Cruor or, better yet, that bell-waving fanatic, Hascrible, elevating him to so lofty a standing at the Corruptor’s right paw was a pleasing one.

‘Is it yet known how Archpustulent Heerak Gungespittle died?’

‘Not yet. Not yet,’ said Makulitt. ‘The sextons still try to determine which of the archpustulent’s wounds was fatal. I do wonder why so many would want-crave so lofty and… exposed a position.’

Borkris gnawed thoughtfully on his tail before answering. ‘Slave-thing.’

The second skavenslave scuttled around. His muzzle was inclined so far that, if not for the curvature of his spine and pronounced skaven hunch, he would almost have been looking backwards. He was naked apart from a grubby loincloth and a leather collar, his pelt lice-ridden and mangy, and pockmarked with scabs. Borkris closed his paw around the slave’s bare throat. The creature’s breath hiked, but he made no effort to resist. The abject’s fear-musk brought saliva trickling through Borkris’ fangs.

‘This is why,’ he said, and then he pushed.

The warpstained glass behind the slave shattered, the sound of raining shards immediately gobbled whole by the tumult and the hunger of Blight City’s insane machinery. The capital of skavendom in the realms was a teeming metropolis of a billion souls, the true Eternal City, gnawing on the roots of Order from a cosmic plane neither truly within the Realms of Chaos nor a part of the great hierarchy of the Mortal Realms. The ungodly engines that had dragged the city to that limbic nether-realm continued to rumble on, belching waste magic into the air, triggering city-wide quakes and only very rarely causing the first and last of the realms’ great cities to sink deeper into the dark strata of the universe. Over all that, Borkris still thought he could hear a faint squeal of terror falling further and further away before ending in a pathetic, hopelessly distant smack. Then again, it might just have been one of the Skrye clan assembly lines stalling.

‘As archpustulent I get to push-shove whoever I want through whatever I like.’

‘Who here can squeak-say of the Withered Word?’ Hascrible, the First Claw Broken of the Scratching Ruin, sprayed the table that was his pulpit with spittle. ‘There are those in this unwholesome covenant who do not know-smell the Word. I see the opulence and idolatry that abounds me!’

He was speaking rhetorically, of course, as the Corruptor spake unto Grey Seer Salasqueek.

Id est – he was lying.

Hascrible was blind.

He had not been born to the Clan Pestilens, littered instead to a warlord clan of no significance, but the fever that had burned through his body and taken his sight had cracked his brain open for the Word of the Corruptor. That plague had been the prelude to an attack by Clan Morbidus and he, half dead though he was, had been taken by the plague monks and enslaved. In the spore mines of Sour Pit he had preached. To himself. To the breath ghost he left hanging in the cold air. To the clang his pick made on the rock. And then – because what else was there for a slave to do but listen? – to his fellow chattels. Hascrible had killed the slavemaster that had sought to silence the Word and had eaten him. After that his following in the mines had grown large enough to be considered a Congregation of Filth within the internecine hierarchies of the great clan.

It was not, though, recognition that he sought. No. Nor the validation of his former slavemasters. No! The crackling in his chest and the fiery maledictions of his joints were all the acclaim he required, for they were the gift of the Corruptor. He had no ambition of his own, but if his god wished for him the archpustulency – which he surely did, for why else would he bid this avatar of his will to pursue it? – then it would surely be done.

‘You!’ He pointed into the congregation at random. ‘Squeak to me of the Withered Word!’ The rat so chosen hesitated, and Hascrible stabbed his claw elsewhere before he could find his voice. ‘What of you? You! You!’

He could not see them, but he could smell them. He could taste their zeal. Their hunger for the Final Withering. It was a tingle as of dark magic on his whiskers. He felt as they did, smelled as they did – a simple monk in a pestiferous habit and tattered cowl, crusted slavemarks and spreading cankers there on the sloughing flesh of his muzzle for all to see and judge his piety.

‘The Word is fever! The Word is madness! The Word is poison and lies, for the lesser pieces of the Horned Rat are jealous of the Corruptor, and so he plant-seeds lots-many falsehoods in the minds of his faithful. But not to me. Not Hascrible!’

He raised his staff, the horned bell housed at the top with a bronze emblem of the Splintered Temple clanging. The creaking protestations of his spine were, most assuredly, the manifested impatience of the Corruptor.

‘Your leaders have lost scent of the foetid path. Their noses are filled instead with gold and realmstone and earthly treasures. They have become numb to the blessed reek of his foulness.’

A sea of angry chittering surrounded Hascrible.

‘Anoint one of these false prophets in the unctures of the archpustulency and Clan Morbidus will be surpassed by Clans Septik and Feesik within the year!’ The outrage of the congregation grew more shrill. Hascrible’s screech rose to match it. The acid taste in the back of his mouth was, without doubt, the fetor of the Corruptor, eager to be sprayed across the Mortal Realms. ‘We will be ejected from the Council of Thirteen, become a shadow of those messiahs of ruin that brought the germ-spore of Clan Morbidus from the world-that-was, left to scavenge over the scraps of our lessers. Such will be the Corruptor’s punishment of your masters’ failure!’

Hascrible’s sermons had never been for the mighty. Partly this was practical. The mighty seldom wanted for anything he could give them. But there was strength in numbers too, power and a certain thrill in exerting the true will of the Horned Rat through the furry masses of the laiety.

‘Whisper in the ears of your fellow monks. Squeak to the clanservants. And your slaves. Squeak the truth to your priests and your abbots. Let them know-smell in your gathering the mind of the Horned Rat, for you are many-many and they are few. Hascrible of the Scratching Ruin! Archpustulent Hascrible!’

Delirious squeals and the discordant choir of bells and chimes broke out across the eating hole, but Hascrible’s sensitive ears alerted him to the sounds of a fracas at the back of the crowd. While fighting was technically forbidden within the walls of the Morbidus clan stronghold during conclave, there were any number of loopholes relating to blasphemous squeaking and apostasy that the inventive skaven mind could contrive. Most therefore resorted to scratching and hissing, only accidentally misplacing a knife in someone’s chest when they thought they could get away with it.

He cocked his head towards the sound.

‘Ruin gnaws!’ one rat snarled.

‘Ruin scratches!’ another chittered.

Hascrible sniffed at a wafting scent, the inside of his nostrils shrinking from it like blasphemous parchment from a naked flame. He sniffed again. Wightrot. He knew it well, though it was only a smell. An incense so potent it was said to be capable of inflicting ague and shivers on the dead. Cut from the ethereal bark of dead forests, it was fabulously rare and fabulously expensive. The ignorant and the vain saw a censer of wightrot as a mark of prestige, and the Horned Rat knew that there was no dearth of ignorance or vanity in the upper echelons of Clan Morbidus.

‘Rattagan Borkris!’ he guessed. Or perhaps not, for it was not coincidence that had caused the rotgrubs in his brain to wriggle and bite until he had taken this particular eating hole between Borkris’ lairs and the Lyceum chambers for his church. ‘Come-stay. You and your priests. Listen-hear the true Word of the Corruptor and side with me!’

Borkris’ disdain squeaked from across the eating hole. ‘You will be exiled, Hascrible, not elevated. If you are not made archpustulent here then you and your church are soon to be purged. You know this. If you were not as mad-cracked as you are then you would know that you will never be made archpustulent.’

Biting and pushing, the malfeasant superior’s guard made a path for him through the congregation.

‘Never say never,’ Hascrible hissed. He held out crooked arms for a pair of burly monks to lift him from the table and onto their shoulders. He pointed after his departed rival. ‘To the Lyceum.’

The eating hall erupted with the sounds of squeals and furniture breaking the moment that Hascrible was out of sight.

‘Pustiss Ventik. Lord-Brewer of the Shrivelling Pox.’

The Lyceum burrows were a temple to the Great Corruptor, gouged from the sub-basement dinge of the Splintered Temple, the Blight City acropolis of the Morbidus clan. Bits of broken claws stuck out of the walls, and there were smears of diseased blood on the panels and triptychs where the slaves had continued digging with their fingers.

‘Gastrule Skabes. Provost-Warden of the Excremental Feast.’

The cornices and clerestory were celebrations of tarnish, mould, and verdegris, lesser decorations lurking amidst the gilt like rats, unaware of the awful majesty that loomed colossal overhead.

The ceiling fresco was the last masterpiece of the visionary, Glotto. Visions of the Final Withering, as it was known, had been the work of his disciples, painted after the skaven artist’s death using the fluids of his own diseased organs. Sigmar dissolved in lightning. Nagash succumbed to decay. Alarielle withered within a dead forest. Grungni drowned in the molten metals of his own forge. In a band of painted marble around the lower tier of the dome, the nine gods of Order succumbed in hideous and inventive ways to the divine malfeasance of the great four in the band above, while above them all, filling the dome’s apex, the Horned Rat gnawed at the stuff of the Mortal Realms in glee.

A dark-veined slab of marble, shaped by the devotion of skaven teeth and claws and installed with the strength of the faithful, sat beneath a mottled ciborium. A mildewed altar cerecloth lay across it, the grey material speckled black with dead insects and eggs. Behind it, an elaborate triptych of gold and mica, burnt sienna and skaven faeces showed the Great Corruptor ascendant over the lesser personalities of the Horned Rat.

To either side of the altarpiece, a plague furnace was tended by a hooded mutant. Standing somewhere in stature between a monk and a rat-ogre, the mutants were the results of the Morbidus priesthood’s spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to use disease and arcane alchemy to siphon some of the wealth generated by the Moulder clans’ breeding program. The hulking creatures tended their fires with a rare single-mindedness, and resilience to disease. When the Lyceum of Lectors came to its decision and the doors of the Splintered Temple were again unbarred, then the sexton-general would squeak for the furnaces to be fed with greenvile and with cankerwood, and with the new archpustulent’s own befouled robes, so that the pilgrims in the burrow-plazas beyond the stronghold’s walls might be flooded with toxic smog. Any skaven lacking in their tolerance to disease would, of course, die in horrific agony, but the faithful would know that a new archpustulent had risen to lord over them.

‘Graunch Festerbule. Most High Supreme Patriarch of the Carrion Blights.’

A heavily built skaven in a steel cuirass and a helmet with a crown read from an enormous ledger, spread across the hunched backs of two kneeling slaves. Sexton-General Crassus was a brute of a rodent, a lay-member of Clan Morbidus and so beneath the labyrinthine hierarchies of priests, but charged with the maintenance and defence of the Splintered Temple and thus of supreme eminence within its walls. At the sexton-general’s call a priest in a dust-grey cassock with venous piping and an elaborate bone-effect mitre and crosier raised his paw. Crassus gnawed on the tip of his quill and dutifully scratched Graunch’s name into the ledger.

The roll call went on.

Borkris watched, arms crossed over his wiry chest, paws burrowed into the voluminous sleeves of his cassock, as rivals, flunkeys and nobodies alike declared themselves. Underdeacon Makulitt had assured him of the votes of eight of them, and it would be his underling’s spleen if they failed to deliver.

‘Priestmonk Hascrible of the Scratching Ruin.’

Hascrible raised one crooked paw. Crassus squinted down his long snout as he scratched down the lector’s name. Borkris’ lips pulled back into a sneer. Hascrible looked as though he had snuck inside to scrub a fresh layer of filth onto flagstones before anyone important recognised his presence. As pathetic as the monk’s devout zeal was, it did seem to endear him to the masses. It was commonly remembered by beggars and slaves like Hascrible that the gullet of the Horned Rat awaited all, but the Word also spoke of the amusement he drew from those whose strength and cunning saw them climb over the backs of their litter-brothers. A frothing lunatic the monk most clearly was, but ignorant of the lies and hypocrisies of the Withered Word he could not be.

No one clambered over the bodies of so many rivals by being stupid.

For that reason Borkris had always assumed the bell waving and the frothing at the mouth to be elaborate theatre to enthuse his congregation, but his probity had, in recent days, proven frustratingly genuine.

‘Dengue Cruor. Bilious Sage of the Extirpated Way.’

Crassus looked up from his ledger.

The priests shuffled amongst themselves as if to shake the elderly plague priest like dandruff from their ranks.

The sexton-general drew back enough lip to expose a yellowed fang. ‘Dengue Cruor?’

‘He is not here,’ someone squeaked.

‘I have not seen-smelled him since first bell prayers.’ Another.

Wastrett Spleenrot, Pox-Abbot of the Ghurish Spreading, tittered, hacking up something corrosive and spitting it onto the flagstones. ‘The old-thing probably died in the night.’ He smeared the gobbet under his footpaw. ‘At long last.’

‘And where is Bilemaster Drassik?’ said Hascrible.

Everyone looked to the priest beside him.

Drassik, Bilemaster of the Church of the Scales of Pungeance, belonged to the small group of priests mad enough and poor enough to scratch their vote for a maniac that would be the doom of them all. And with Borkris’ only other genuine rival for the archpustulency, Dengue Cruor, similarly absent, the supporters of the Bilious Sage might not be so unwavering in their support.

Borkris preened. The Corruptor bared his throat to him this day. ‘They are late, and we all have other duties to attend to in our own realms,’ he said. ‘We should vote-scratch without them.’

Dengue Cruor, also known as the Verminable Cruor, or the Bilious Sage of the Extirpated Way, was in his burrow-hole in the meridional wing of the lower dinges. Drassik was there also, although, unlike the aged verminable, he was strapped to a table.

‘The Church of the Scales of Pungeance will make sourblight from your flesh and pudding meal from your bones, old-thing!’ The table legs rattled against the floor as the priest again decided to waste effort on breaking the leather belts holding him down. The priest’s diatribe had veered between fulminating threats and promises of hellish vengeance, but he reached for an inarticulate squeal as Cruor picked up an enormous pair of metal cutters. ‘Verminable! Maker of plagues! Whatever you want-wish is yours! Warptokens? Slave-meat? My scratch-vote? It is yours. All of it. Take it. Take-take!’

Cruor struggled to open the cutters. Despite the care he devoted to all of his tools, it had rusted. It was the price one paid for lairing in Blight City, for entropy was to the Realm of Ruin as heat was to Aqshy or darkness to Ulgu. It had not always caused him such difficulty, however. He was getting old. That was the real problem. Invigorating diseases and elixirs of his own concoction had strengthened and sustained him for many centuries, but age was finally starting to wear him down. Finally, he managed to wrench the cutters apart, wobbling the heavy tool towards Drassik’s snout.

‘No! No! No-no!’

The priest thrashed like a cocooned slug.

Snick.

‘Arrrrrgh!’

A single whisker dropped from between the scissoring blades.

Cruor plucked the hair from Drassik’s chest with the claws of his forefinger and thumb. Drassik panted something nonsensical. He stared at the severed whisker with an idiotic blend of incredulity and relief. Ignoring the priest, Cruor twisted around on his stool, his tail slithering around its legs.

A brass alembic had been spread across a pair of tables, several stools and one precarious stack of books. The pot bubbled over a blue alchemical flame, filling the burrow-hole with fumes. Cruor removed the glass lid and dropped the whisker into the pot. It dissolved instantly into the liquid within. His assistant, a bronze-furred whelp called Gagrik, stirred the contents with a huge glass paddle. Despite his self-conferred title of poxmixer augustus, Gagrik was dressed not in the priestly cassock that was his due, but in an apron, mask and a pair of thick leather gloves. He hunched over the bubbling pot atop a platform of nailed-together stools and lengths of shelving.

‘One whisker of plague priest,’ Cruor muttered under his breath. ‘Taken…’ Cruor turned his attention back to the priest, foraging with one paw amongst the assorted implements strewn across his workbenches.

He found a paper knife.

‘That is it. Yes? You will let me go now. Yes? Most verminable sage. Most blessed of the Horned R–’

Cruor ran the knife across the priest’s throat. A bloody froth gurgled up from the neat wound, the priest jerking once more in his restraints. As if freedom would come as any kind of relief to him now. His jaw hovered open and shut before falling open for the final time. Blood continued to squirt from the priest’s neck, but it was slowing. His red eyes began to turn pink. Cruor frowned over him. He poked the priest with the knife. Drassik did not respond. Cruor pounded on the priest’s chest, bringing a splutter of blood and a damp gargle from the priest’s lips.

The verminable nodded to himself, satisfied.

‘Taken exactly thirteen breaths before death.’

He turned away from the corpse to study the bubbling alembic, adjusting the formulations in his head as he watched the evaporated fumes rising into the condenser.

Unlike his fellow lectors, Cruor had no church. He commanded no armies and had conquered no lands. Despite all of this he knew that he had personally delivered more apostates, both skaven and not, to the belly of the Corruptor than the other twenty members of the Lyceum combined. This he knew. He knew that they knew it too. And it was not because, at over five hundred years of age, he was older than the other twenty members of the Lyceum combined. His mastery of alchemy and pox-magic was unrivalled in Clan Morbidus, and over the centuries the increasingly deadly potions of his genius had been the death of millions.

He was one of very few skaven still alive who had experienced the Age of Blood, when the triumphant legions of Chaos had turned on their erstwhile skaven allies. He had seen plague lords and lectors who had sought to ingratiate themselves with champions of Tzeentch and Nurgle, only to be thrown onto the proverbial sword. But Cruor had survived. He had hidden, he had brewed his poisons and he had prospered.

Sigmar’s warstorm had been the best thing to have befallen the skaven race since the days of the First Withering. Suddenly the other gods – traitorous, savage Khorne in particular – were weak and the Horned Rat again had shadows in which to lurk and scheme. Such was the Corruptor’s way. To take advantage of other’s vicissitudes, to exploit unwitting catspaws like mighty Sigmar in securing the future dominion of the skaven race.

Such was also Dengue Cruor’s way.

He just needed to live long enough to see it.

‘Grated horn of a Great Unclean One,’ he muttered, sprinkling a claw-pinch of the exotic powder into the alembic.

The mixture in the crucible turned a sour yellow. Bubbles broke the surface with increasing vehemence, and the brass vessel began to rattle against the table. Cruor turned one side of his long face to the glass to study the reaction more closely.

‘Forgive this unworthy interruption, master.’ Gagrik swayed on his footpaws, dutifully stirring the mixture in spite of the bubbling pot banging against the frame of his platform. ‘But should you not quick-soon be joining the Lyceum?’

‘Do not speak-squeak. Fool-fool!’ Cruor glanced up, another claw-pinch of ground plague daemon horn at the ready. ‘The Lyceum does not meet for three bells yet.’ He sprinkled the second titrant into the mix. The brass plating around the alembic began to bloat, a sickly foam frothing through the imperfect rubber seals. He touched his soft nose to the froth and blinked at the giddy spike of acridity it drove up his snout and into the back of his brain. He shook his muzzle. ‘Pleasantly caustic.’ He reached again for the powder jar.

‘Forgive me, oh verminable one. But it is now.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, master.’

Cruor pondered. Could he really have allowed so much time to scamper away, unnoticed? Age slowed even the nimblest of minds in the end, oh yes, it did. He would need to remember to wind the pocket bell-chime that he kept in one of these drawers. Perhaps he should take on a second assistant to tidy up and keep time for him…

‘I am too busy to spare myself now anyway. You know I hate-loathe the fuss of liturgical matters.’

‘Yes, master.’ The hint of a sigh in his underling’s voice. Cruor decided to be gracious and overlook it. Taking on one new assistant would be onerous enough.

‘These things are never done-settled at the first assembly. By the time they have argued the first vote and Hascrible has demanded a recount we will be done-finished. I will be robed-ready to rejoin them when they return from recess.’ He snickered. ‘Yes-yes, I will be ready.’

‘But what if–’

‘Even I cannot be in two places at once.’ As he spoke, he rummaged through the clutter of his workbenches, finally spotting what he was looking for and reaching over Drassik’s body to snatch it up. It was a glass potion bottle with a metal screw-cap lid. In it was a roundworm the size of Cruor’s middle claw. It was curled up, apparently sleeping. Cruor shook the jar and it uncoiled like a spring trap. Cruor tittered as a suckered mouth squealed down the side of the bottle where Cruor’s eye was, its segmented body bristling with spines. ‘Or can I not?’ He unscrewed the bottle, picked the roundworm up in his claws and dropped it into his mouth. The worm splattered under his blunted teeth, the texture meaty and the taste pleasantly vile.

As he chewed, he picked up a bronze-bottomed pan that he used for the cooking of poisons and spat into it.

He squeaked a word from the one hundred and sixty-nine phrases of power, then carved a rune into the brown splatter in the base of the pan. Then he spat out what was still in his mouth, along with an unhealthy gobbet of saliva, and smeared the lot over the bronze surface, obliterating the rune. What remained in its place was a mucoid smear-pattern that slowly ran into an image. Priests in jumbled gilt and jaded finery stand beneath the great clerestory of the Lyceum burrows. The gungy fluid continued to run. The image moved. A pair of rat-men in sexton robes move amongst them. One carries scratch-quills. The other parchment scraps. A third stands by the altar with a bucket. The priests stick together, like clanrats on a battlefield, as the sextons pass their consignments around. All except one.

Borkris.

The whelp.

The malfeasant superior of the Gnawing Ruin looked more than usually smug. Cruor snorted. As if all the wealth in the Realms of Chaos could make a golden bolus thick enough to save his soul from the belly acids of the Horned Rat come his time.

He would have liked to hear what the priests were saying or, better yet, to smell the tell-tale emanations of their musk-glands, but he saw through the eye of Gastrule Skabes. The identical twin of the worm he had just consumed had burrowed into the provost-warden’s eye and curled up there to feed off his optic juices and lay its eggs, a procedure so excruciatingly painful that the plague priest probably did not even recall it being inflicted upon him.

With half an eye on the silently moving image, Cruor watched the first drop of virulent yellow-green liquid swell from the dripper of the alembic. He snapped his claws for a vial and, when it was handed to him, bent to hold it patiently under the growing drop.

Oh yes. Soon, the life-elixir of the Council would be within his grasp. Soon, he would be ready.

What was the old verminable’s scheme?

Hascrible scratched at a particularly ripe gift from the Corruptor, nestled on the lobe of his right ear, as the Prater of the Foulsome Crucible made his claw-scratch. The priest glanced over both shoulders before scrunching up the parchment roll and tossing it into the bucket. And then, under the sextons’ unwavering gaze, he ate the scratch-quill. Hascrible heard the bones crunch as they went down.

Cruor was testing the loyalty of those who had pledged him their votes. Yes. That had to be it. His absence would tease out those who would remain loyal, even without the old rat’s breath on their necks, from those tempted to chase after their own ambitions. But how? How! How could he know? Each priest scratched the name he favoured on a strip of parchment, which would then by bundled into a ball and mixed with the others by the sextons. Even the quill would then be destroyed.

Hascrible was young for one so riddled with ailments and plague, but he had seen two elections in his time as a high priest of contagion.

He had seen a priest attempt to cheat by scratching a rune onto his own parchment that had changed every other scratch-mark on parchment that touched his own. Unfortunately for the unanimously elected priest, the one mark that had not been altered was the rune itself. The priest had, of course, protested his innocence, and the sexton-general had acknowledged that such a ploy would indeed be an ingenious way for another priest to rid himself of a rival. Crassus had therefore executed a third of the Lyceum at random and ordered a recount.

A rather surprised Heerak Gungespittle had been elected archpustulent from a thinned field of candidates immediately thereafter.

Hascrible gave his ear one last devotional scratching. He did not need to resort to such risky deceptions. His faith and energies went instead to the dark claws of the Horned Rat. He would guide the minds and the paws of his children, and he would ensure that Hascrible’s mark was made on their parchment, even if they were misguided enough to wish another there in its place. Yes, he would.

All praise the Great Corruptor!

Graunch Festerbule prodded him in the back with the butt-end of his crosier. Bone chaplets and pale torques jangled against the morbid obesity of the priest’s cassock.

‘You were squeaking to yourself,’ he said.

‘I was not.’

‘It sounded like you were chanting.’

‘I was not.’

‘He was chanting!’

Hascrible sensed the spreading of an anxious quiet as the sextons glanced his way. ‘I was praying, you gas-bloated oaf-thing. Because the Horned Rat does not listen-heed to your chitterings does not stop a true child from begging his ear.’

Festerbule bristled. ‘Infecund whelp. When you nurture your pet blights in the nighthaunt kingdoms of the glass veldts or the unfeeling lands, you come-scurry to me and squeak-tell of your favour. Until then, you may lick the pus from my claws.’ The priest’s arm swung back.

Someone grabbed his wrist before he could rake his claws across Hascrible’s snout.

Hascrible sniffed, but he could not make out who it was. The sexton-general, if he was lucky. If the Horned Rat favoured him, he corrected himself, preening in the warm glow of his piety.

‘The Most High Supreme Patriarch of the Carrion Blights apologises for his outburst,’ said Borkris. ‘These auspicious surrounds, the excitement of the occasion – it is all too much-much for one accustomed to the Realm of Death. Perhaps you and he can chitter-pray together when this session is concluded.’

Hascrible bobbed his head.

The sextons seemed to relax, withdrawing themselves to the clerestory walls. The fear-scent in the chamber thinned.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘The Horned Rat is a permissive and uncaring god. So should we be.’

Crassus took the bucket of scratch strips from his underling. He started to pick out names, his muzzle moving up and down as he read the marks to himself, then again as he scratched them into his ledger. Hascrible could hear the scarred rat’s teeth clacking together. He shuffled from footpaw to footpaw, muttering homilies of corruption under his breath. What would he not have given for the chance to read the sexton-general’s lips? Why, oh why, had the Horned Rat needed to take his sight? Could he not have claimed his bitter taste instead, his sense of cold, the prickling in the nape of the neck when another skaven lurks in the dark? Not that he would ever question who or what the Horned Rat took to devour. No. Of course not. Never! He turned his nose to sniff the priests to either side of him. Their musk was as tense and as fearful as his own must have seemed to their noses. Not that he was at all anxious, of course. The Corruptor favoured only one rat, and his name was Priestmonk Hascrible, of the Scratching Ruin!

‘The first scratch-votes are counted,’ said Crassus, managing to make his voice snarl as though the consummation of that sacred duty had caused him to crack a tooth. ‘Rattagan Borkris has nine marks.’

A chittering of consternation and surprise broke out amongst the gathered priests. Borkris himself gnashed his fangs in frustration at falling short by a whisker’s margin. With Cruor and Drakksik absent that left nineteen voting lectors, and ten a winning count. Hascrible wriggled on the spot, closed his blind eyes, another prayer scuttling its way towards the pricked ears of the Horned Rat.

‘Dengue Cruor has four marks.’

‘What?’

Hascrible stamped his footpaw on the ground and lashed his tail. The crunching of bones and the arthritic flare in his ankle was, most definitely, the choler of the Corruptor himself. How could a high temple full of so-called priests be so deaf to the squealings of their god?

Crassus ignored him. He squinted down his snout at his ledger. ‘Hascrible has three marks.’

‘This is a travesty!’ Hascrible squeaked. ‘An outrage!’

‘Silence-close your muzzle, Hascrible.’

‘Who said that?’ Hascrible sniffed the air and turned his ears, but whoever it was, was staying wisely quiet now.

‘Salvik Rakititch has two marks,’ said Crassus.

The rust-furred priest from Aqshy seemed as startled as everyone else.

‘No one else has any marks. You have not elected an archpustulent.’ The sexton-general made it sound like an accusation as he closed his ledger.

Hascrible’s fury – incubated in his breast on behalf of the Great Horned Rat, naturally – bubbled over. ‘I demand a recount!’

The priests groaned – the only collective action the Lyceum would ever knowingly undertake.

‘Every time,’ said one.

‘Never sniff-smelled a sorer loser.’ Another.

‘Bad enough an archpustulent has to fail-die every few years to make us do this again.’

‘Agreed.’ Borkris. ‘We all have our diocese to attend. The Corruptor’s designs for the Mortal Realms suffers for want of our guidance.’

A dozen priests nodded in agreement.

‘This is as much a part of the Corruptor’s scheme as the wars for the realms,’ Hascrible protested. ‘I say count-tally the marks again. Crassus made a mistake. Either he cannot read or he cannot count!’

From being closely jostled by half a dozen priests, Hascrible suddenly found himself alone in an empty space in the middle of the burrow-hall. He gulped. The watery feeling in his bowels was, quite understandably, the ire of the Horned Rat at his doubting the indestructibility of the true of faith.

The sexton-general was silent a long time.

Then he reopened the ledger with a snarl.

‘Very well. One recount.’

Elaborately frocked plague priests spilled from the Lyceum’s burrow-doors like birds released into a mine. Some flew straight into the waiting cages of their guards, others fluttering off together to darkened burrows to plot and scheme and to decide how best to extract personal advantage from the coming rounds of voting. Borkris hoped that his demonstration of support would be enough to persuade a few more waverers. Assuming Cruor and Drassik remained absent, then all that stood between him and the archpustulency was one scratch-mark more.

He watched Salvik Rakititch disappear into a pocket of burly plaguevermin before departing through an upward sloping tunnel. The lay warriors were clad in rusted half-plates patched over with scraps of cloth. Their heads were tonsured and they carried heavy maces in baldrics, shields bearing the device of the Flame that Withers.

One more scratch-mark.

One.

Borkris summoned Makulitt with a curt snap of the tail. The underdeacon had been waiting outside the Lyceum with Borkris’ own gaggle of priests, guards and paid cronies, and scuttled in behind his master as he swept after Rakititch.

At first, Borkris assumed that the priest was returning to his own burrows. Each of the twenty-one lectors had their own grace and favour burrows within the Splintered Temple. Those who lacked the ambition to assume the mantle of archpustulent for themselves, and preferred to avoid the skulduggery that occurred between votes, would often bolt themselves inside until the decision was made. It would have surprised Borkris to discover that the Aqshyan was such a rodent. His reputation for violent conversion said otherwise, and anyone who would dare vote for themselves, never mind command the support of another, was surely not one to cringe and squirt the musk of fear when destiny reared its horns. That had seemed to be the priest’s destination, however, until his entourage had scurried him onto a branch to the left and started ascending again.

The tunnel opened up, after a few minutes, to what looked like a wine store. Huge metal vats stood off the ground on spindly wooden legs, like pregnant beetles armoured in brass. The air was rancid with the taste. Corrosion leaked from the ancient drums. Every so often, one of them issued a tortured groan. Another tunnel led off from the chamber but, unlike the way in, this one had a door across it. That door was locked, and guarded by a pair of sextons. They were heavily armed with helmets and metal shields, their mail covered by frayed surplices. One carried a halberd, the other a wicked-looking morningstar. The door must have led to one of the outer warrens, for the import of wine. The warrens of the Splintered Temple were as interconnected with those of Blight City below ground as they were above.

Rakititch turned as Borkris and his company entered behind him, a hulking plaguevermin to either side. Borkris frowned at that. He was certain that Rakititch’s entourage had numbered almost a dozen when he had walked into the storeroom.

With a threatening squeak, the other ten plaguevermin stepped out from behind the wine drums. The warriors stood with their shields raised, paws near to where their maces lay in their baldrics – although, a beady eye apiece on the phlegmatic sextons at the chamber’s far end, none of them had yet drawn. Makulitt squeaked in alarm. The underdeacon and his subordinates huddled into a tighter knot of bodies, glancing nervously between the well-armed plaguevermin and their master.

Borkris reluctantly tilted his muzzle, giving Rakititch a flash of throat.

‘Are you so afraid-scared of what I have to say that you run-scurry to the sextons?’

The Aqshyan priest shrugged. His fur was the colour of rust, or dark sand, swaddled in umber robes and yellow piping. An incense burner nestled against his chest on a neckchain. It made him resemble a miniature plague furnace, his head wreathed in smoke.

‘He who fights and runs away…’ began the priest.

‘Lives to flee another day.’ Every littered runt knew that old rhyme. It descended from those who first fled the world-that-was, or so the litter-mothers said. ‘I am not here to fight-kill.’

‘Good-good.’ Rakititch lifted his muzzle towards Borkris’ underlings. ‘Then they have nothing to squirt the musk over.’ Borkris waited for the Aqshyan to order his plaguevermin to back off, but he did not. He just stood there, waiting, back hunched, arms folded in his cassock sleeves, slowly disappearing in a thickening red cloud of incense smog. ‘If you have come to persuade me you are the Horned Rat’s favourite rat then do not waste your time-breath.’

‘You think the Corruptor favours another?’

‘I think he does not take favourites.’

Borkris tittered. ‘Of course he does. A slavemaster has favourites. Or a breeder of rat-meat will become fond of the rat cunning enough to avoid the block. But his mind is vast, his attention span short. He leaves us to pick our own favourites and expects to be pleased with our choices when his gaze again returns.’

‘Your reputation for usury and perfidiousness precedes you even into Aqshy, Borkris.’ Rakititch cocked his head. ‘I see-smell it is all true. If it were not then the gossips would have surely squeak-talked instead of your… agility with the Withered Word.’

‘To use a thing properly you need to understand the thing. Creatures like Hascrible do not see. Even the Eshin clan killer learns first how a body works.’

Rakititch snorted, conceding. ‘What do you want, Borkris?’

‘Your scratch-mark, of course. And I want to know-smell the other who voted for you. With you I have ten. With both I have eleven, and a majority of the Lyceum even if Cruor and Drassik return.’

‘I know not. It was a surprise, even to me.’

Borkris gnashed his teeth. Annoying, but not unexpected. ‘Then squeak your support of me before the next vote, and whoever it was may follow.’

‘Why would I?’

‘You know you cannot win for yourself. Not with two scratch-marks. Better to back the winner. Is it minerals or jewels from Chamon you want?’

The priest pulled a face.

‘Rare spores from the deserts of Shyish?’

‘You insult me, Borkris.’

‘A virulent crusade in the Realm of Fire, then! Yes-yes! With you, Salvik Rakititch at its head. As archpustulent I could command it. All the land it covers would be yours to despoil. All the glory would be yours to bargain with the Horned Rat for the fate of your soul come the Final Withering.’

Rakititch paused in thought.

He was still thinking when the head of one of his plaguevermin exploded.

Everyone turned as the armoured warrior sank to his knees, a fuming metal ball lodged in the ruin of his neck. A monk in vomit-brown robes dragged the flail back on a heavy chain. His nose was dripping, smearing his habit and his paws with copious quantities of virulent snot. Foam flecked the tattered edges of his hood, red madness gleaming from its depths. The nearby warriors were already starting to choke and die.

‘Plague censer!’ Borkris shrieked.

The censer bearer opened his toothless mouth and squealed, monks and warriors boiling up from the plague cloud that filled the tunnel behind him.

Hascrible screeched a challenge as he scrambled after his warriors. It was not cowardice that made him last into the storeroom, oh no, for he was a favourite of the Horned Rat and feared neither decrepitude nor death. His wizened muscles and arthritic joints were, quite obviously, the Horned One’s way of ensuring he entered the fray at exactly the time that he was supposed to. He felt a glow lurking in the mucous-filled caverns of his chest, a choke-response that, he was almost certain, had nothing to do with the nurglitch vapours currently circling through his respiratory system and devouring the plaques blocking off the inside of his lungs. It was destiny! The focused intensity of the Corruptor’s interest in him and him alone, nurturing and curating the many ailments of his life, much as the jovial grandfather was said to do with his own favoured creatures. Providence had brought him here. Yes, that was it. Providence!

He scuttled into the melee, crouched low, hidden by the incense pall, his normally keen senses of smell and sound confused by the anarchy of combat, questing the path ahead with his bell-staff.

He found a body.

His tail padded it down while he sniffed at the air. Robed. Hooded. A staff. A priest. One of Borkris’, judging by the finery. He was spread-eagled, face down, blood still oozing from the eyes and nose. That and the occasional rattle of breath told Hascrible that the priest was still alive. Hascrible’s tail coiled around the dagger in his cincture, then stabbed it into the priest’s brain through the soft meat of his throat. Hascrible felt only joy, for the priest’s final jerk was, as plain as the scent of blood, the last futile effort of his soul to evade the damnation of the Horned Rat’s jaws. This was, after all, the Corruptor’s work he did here. Rattagan Borkris had schemed to pervert the Horned One’s great will. It was a wrong that the faithful would see righted. Crassus would understand, he was sure, once Borkris was dead and unable to answer Hascrible’s charges of blasphemy.

An armoured warrior ran at him.

In the chaos of sounds and smells, vibrations and tastes, the first he knew of it was the scrabble of claws on stone. Then the hiss of breath as a weapon was drawn back. A lesser rat would have frozen, panicked by his blindness in such a sensory din, but not he. Not Hascrible. His blindness was the great paw of the Horned Rat upon his brow.

Hascrible raised a claw and pointed it towards the sound. He chittered a word that brought a cluster of rancid blisters to the tip of his tongue, and a beam of withering energy stabbed from his claw. The charging rat-warrior was vaporised. A mace-head and some rust flakes clattered to the ground, the sound of their falling muffled by the robes he had been wearing. Hascrible sniffed. He wished that he could have seen that. But such were the sacrifices demanded of the faithful.

With a sigh he lowered his still-tingling claw, squeaked another challenge and scurried off in search of Borkris.

A plague-shrivelled wretch from the stronghold’s slave stocks stabbed at Borkris with a spear. The thrust was weak, the paws that guided it malnourished and barely strong enough to keep a grip on the shaft, much less drive the point through skaven flesh. Borkris twitched aside, catching the spear as it slid across his shoulder, and then yanked it from the slave’s paw as he rammed a fist into the prominent lump of bone between stomach and chest. The slave doubled over, spraying Borkris’ cassock with spittle, and Borkris broke the spear over his head.

Raising his paws in line with his snout, Borkris snarled.

The altercation had knocked his armlets askew.

Sliding his right arm into his cassock’s left sleeve, he drew out a long, curve-bladed shamshir. This was why lectors so often lingered with their arms folded into their sleeves. For the comfort of a concealed blade. He was tempted to reach into his right sleeve as well, but decided that, in such an enclosed space, that would be unwise.

His hired thugs and Rakititch’s plaguevermin were fighting back hard against Hascrible’s followers, but the waves of foaming zealots had forced them back into the storeroom.

The priestmonk’s entourage, as with everyone else’s, had been restricted to a dozen. Twelve plus one amounted to the unholy numeral of the Horned Rat, but the true objective was to create a field even enough to discourage overt treachery. But Borkris had seen for himself how Hascrible had been spreading his message amongst the clanservants and slaves of the Splintered Temple, and there were even a pawful of monks in the habits of other lectors amongst his fighters. They outnumbered his and Rakititch’s guards several-fold, and they were the kind of odds that would lend spine to even the most enfeebled of slave warriors.

The plague censer bearer, however, was down, coughing up an orange froth in the midst of a ring of rapidly bloating skaven corpses.

Borkris would take the fanatic’s death over the alternative, but he suspected that Hascrible’s task for him had already been accomplished. Half of Rakititch’s warriors were in that pile, and most of the rest were coughing up their insides even as they fought off three, four, five times their number of foes.

And they were odds to make even the proudest of the Corruptor’s crusader-knights waver in his certainties.

Borkris spied a priest of the Gnawing Ruin scrambling up the wooden legs of one of the wine drums. The priest launched himself upward, grabbing hold of a rivet, claws digging into the metal, while a pair of spear-armed slaves stabbed at his whipping tail. A monk wearing Hascrible’s filthy brown threw away his sword to climb after him. Muttering a loathsome incantation, Borkris claw-scratched a rune of decay into the air and blew it towards the drum. The rivet the lackey had been clinging to burst, firing the screaming plague priest across the burrow-hall on a sour jet and slamming him against the vat on the opposite side of the chamber. Corrosion spread from the broken rivet and into the surrounding metal. It thinned, flaked.

It turned black.

Acrid wine gushed through the sickened metal, sweeping away the monk that had been clambering up the vat’s wooden legs, and crashing over Hascrible’s slaves. The flood flattened the followers of the Scratching Ruin, slicking the flagstones with communion foulness and imposing enough of a lull for his cronies, under Makulitt’s urgent squeakings, to pull back and regroup.

Watching Hascrible’s minions slip over the wet stones brought Borkris a brief gnawing of amusement before the sounds of an entirely separate battle drew his attention.

The sextons had entered the fray.

The temple warriors butchered whatever happened to fall in their path, entirely without consideration for allegiance. As Hascrible’s monks and slaves greatly outnumbered everyone else, for the time being that predominantly meant them. They swamped the two sextons in fur and froth, but the warriors fought as a genuine pair. Another skaven might – on the very horns of the Corruptor – swear to do such a thing, only to shrink from it or conveniently forget in the heat of battle. Not these two. They watched each other’s backs, without even the momentary hesitation of whether to stick a knife in there. They defended each other, killed together, while every other rat in the burrow-hall was busily fighting for its own hide. They were, in effect, unstoppable. And they were coming directly at Borkris. He doubted it was for his own protection.

He still remembered the election of Gungespittle.

He turned towards the entrance.

The emptying wine drum had pushed back the censer-bearers’ lingering fumes to reveal Priestmonk Hascrible’s dripping host in all its foulness. The zealot himself was towards the rear, hunched over and sodden through, his off-brown robes stained purple. He was shaking his muzzle, banging his ear as if to force wine through to the opposite side, pausing every so often to sniff at the air. The wine fumes seemed to have confused his nose.

Borkris bared his teeth.

He had not started this fight. Assuming he could evade the sextons, then he could prostrate himself before Crassus and claim self-defence. Kill Hascrible and victory was as good as his.

Rakititch breathed in his ear.

‘Who says I cannot win the archpustulency on my own?’ he hissed, and then punched a previously concealed sword of his own through Borkris’ back.

Hascrible pulled his claw out from his ear. He was certain he recognised that scream. A grin peeled his lips back as it came again. Borkris. His ears pivoted and he cackled at the brief snatch of conversation he managed to pick up over the melee. Borkris and Rakititch were fighting each other. The Horned Rat bless skaven perfidy! He was about to order his warriors to withdraw – those of them sane enough to heed a simple command at any rate – and let the two plague priests kill one another, when a crazed screech split the air. He sniffed, but all he got was wine vapour. He could hear squealing, dying, fighting getting closer. He snarled, scratching at a wart between his blind eyes.

‘What is happening?’

‘Underdeacon Makulitt!’

And suddenly Hascrible saw. He didn’t see, of course, Corruptor be praised, but he saw. Caught between Hascrible’s rotten host and the sextons, Borkris’ minions were fighting the way only trapped rats could.

Hascrible turned in the direction of the voice that had answered. He could neither see the monk, nor smell him over the pungent wine, but was confident enough when he reached out that he would find a pawful of habit with which to drag the underling into the path of the frenzied underdeacon’s charge.

The monk shrieked as Borkris’ frantic underlings ripped him to shreds.

The Horned Rat’s will had been done.

All praise to the Great Horned Rat!

Snorting wine from his nose and banging on his clogged ear, he turned tail and fled.

Borkris fell to the ground as Rakititch pulled his sword out of his back. The flagstones took a tooth. He snarled. If there had been a single nerve in his body not sick with plague or encrusted with scabs then both the impalement and subsequent blow to the muzzle would undoubtedly have been extraordinarily painful. But the Corruptor’s priesthood were a tough breed. Even those of Borkris’ ilk, who preferred to hold their paws above the day-to-day business of the death of all creation. He crawled along the ground from the Aqshyan priest, his breathing sucking in through one lung. He could hear it hissing out from the other, gurgling through the blood that was ineffectually plugging the hole in his back.

Rakititch pounced with a snigger and rammed the sword through his shoulder, hard enough to crack the metal but not before enough of it had penetrated the stone to pin Borkris to the floor. Borkris shrieked. That broke enough of him to hurt. He turned to look over his ruined shoulder, some morbid need inbred into the Clans Pestilens to sniff every blessing and pick at every scab.

It was not a sword at all, but a leather gauntlet with a quarter-tail-length fist spike. Rakititch wriggled his fingers out of the glove, causing the wound to stretch and tear. Borkris chittered in annoyance, but the diseases that had been calcified into the bone were already in his bloodstream, busily killing anything that might have caused him further agony. Smoke from the Aqshyan’s incense burner wreathed his muzzle, eddy patterns snaking about his snout and muzzle so that he no longer resembled a plague furnace so much as a bale taurus of the azghor duardin. Or perhaps that was just the necrotising infections that Borkris’ injuries had flushed into his brain, making him see the hated foe that he had crossed so often on the battlefields of Chamon and in the consular burrows of Blight City.

‘You squeak-say I cannot be archpustulent alone,’ Rakititch hissed. ‘But when word spreads that I killed you, your followers will quick-soon become mine.’

Borkris snarled. The pain was already dulling, and the degradation of his brain from within was proving a rhapsodic experience. ‘You think Hascrible is not already telling everyone that he killed us both?’

‘But I am not dead-dead.’

‘Not yet.’

With one eye, Borkris glanced towards the sextons. Just a pawful of panicking slaves left between them now. Rakititch turned rigid. His mouth opened to squeak a protest, even as his eyes roved the burrow-hall for a way out.

‘Deliver this morsel to the Corruptor,’ said Borkris. His neck swelled, his jaw broke, and a torrent of corrosive gases rushed from his distended mouth. Rakititch had been crouched over him. The bilious flood dissolved his sword arm and the rest of his body from the chest down.

Everything above that took a little longer to die.

‘May he be… sated… when I arrive.’ Borkris spat out a gobbet of acerbic phlegm, cackling, gasping for breath even as the butt of a sexton’s halberd cracked his temple and knocked the consciousness out of him.

The atmosphere in the Lyceum was quietly resentful, the echoes of the occasional muffled squeak gobbled up by the rotunda’s nightmarish frescoes. Wastrett Spleenrot was missing part of an ear, Verukik a paw-shaped patch of fur along his snout. Almost all had rips to their robes, cuts and plague blisters they had not possessed before. Borkris glared at them, one-eyed. The other was swollen shut. His head and body was a bundle of pointed sticks glued together with pain and a liberal slathering of skalm. His whole body rattled when he breathed. None of his former supporters risked standing too close. It might have been wariness of the heavy eucalyptus reek of the skalm, but he did not think so. None of them would even catch his eye. They gathered around Hascrible like flies late to the midden.

Having claimed responsibility for the killing of Rakititch, the maiming of Borkris and the disappearance of Drassik for good measure, the priestmonk looked outrageously pleased with himself.

Borkris did not care anymore.

A maniac like Hascrible would last five years at most. Borkris did not think he would survive even as long as that. He would generously give him three months before a senior cleric of good sense pushed him off a building. They would all be back here again in no time. He could wait.

He glanced to the old priest at his right.

Verminable Cruor was the only rat in the chamber, the sexton-general and his warriors excluded, who did not look the worse for wear. And perhaps that had been the full extent of the old rat’s ploy after all, for compared to his bedraggled and exhausted kith-rats he looked resplendent in a blood-red cassock, gold fascia, chaplets and a horned mitre. He carried as well an ornate stave, and small censers breathed out puffs of yellow-green fumes as he scurried. Where the other lectors were too mired in smugness or self-pity to do much beyond twitch and chitter, he seemed too anxious, or perhaps excited, to keep still, skittering hither and thither and wafting a trail of caustic vapours all around him.

He had every right to be agitated.

With Hascrible about to be elected archpustulent he was set to find himself in the same unpleasant hole as Borkris. Perhaps the old poxmaker would be nervous enough to consider an alliance. Borkris preened stiffly. Yes. Perhaps this need not be considered a defeat after all. A delay in his ambitions at best.

Before he could consider the matter further, Crassus cleared his throat.

The sexton-general stood before the altar, framed by the blotched pergola of the ciborium. A heavy sword hung at his hip. His claws drummed on the cracked device of the pommel. ‘You will now vote-scratch again.’ An over-the-shoulder snarl sent sextons scurrying towards the lectors, parchment, buckets and quills in paw. ‘Will anyone squeak-talk to the Lyceum before the scratch-count is made?’

A few eyes flicked towards Borkris. Guilty, some. Fearful, almost all.

He was weak now, they knew, but he would not always be so.

He shook his head.

Hascrible bared his teeth. ‘Nor I. Let us vote-scratch.’

‘I would squeak before we vote.’

There was a rustling of cassocks and a popping of joints as everyone turned from the altar towards Dengue Cruor.

Crassus thrashed his tail. ‘Speak-squeak.’

‘You all should vote for me,’ said Cruor.

Hascrible snickered. ‘You, old-thing? Why?’

Cruor sighed. ‘How I despise the intrigue of this burrow-place.’ At least one lector rolled his eyes. ‘So I will be simple-quick. You should vote-scratch for me because all in this chamber have been infected with splintergut. With a little help from Drassik, of course.’ He flicked one of his belt censers with a claw and tittered as the closest priest scuttled back from him in alarm. ‘A most virulent plague.’

Borkris felt a ringing in his ears.

Everybody else was quiet.

‘Onset is fast-quick and death quite painful,’ said Cruor. ‘So painful it will follow your soul to its afterlife.’ He withdrew what appeared to be a pocket bell-chime from beneath his fascia and studied it, counting under his breath. ‘I suggest you vote quick-quick.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Borkris hissed.

He looked to Crassus, but the sexton-general appeared to be at a loss for how to respond.

‘I submit gladly to the Corruptor’s plagues!’ Hascrible squeaked, straightening to his full, hunch-backed height. ‘I survived the blistering scalepox before even hearing of the Withered Word. Do your worst, verminable, I say.’ The priests started to shuffle away as though the priestmonk was personally contagious. ‘Vote-scratch for me. All who scurry in the Corruptor’s shadow will be spared!’

Borkris’ eyes narrowed.

Hascrible had to know something that the others in the Lyceum did not.

No one was really that zealous.

Yes. He saw it now. Hascrible and Cruor were in league. He could not believe he had not sniffed it before. Cruor’s absence from the first vote had allowed Hascrible to scare off Borkris’ supporters, allowing Cruor to re-enter, unsullied, and steal the archpustulency with this farcical deceit. He wondered what the priestmonk had been promised. The life-sustaining secrets of his alchemical concoctions? The recipe for plagues that had ravaged the first nations of the Mortal Realms before the awakening of the gods, known now only to a scholarly few? Yes. That had to be it. How else would he have bribed a fanatic that cared not for Borkris’ wealth? Borkris cursed his fixation on his own prize and that he had not deduced all of this for himself already. This was a trick. There was no plague. Splintergut indeed. Whiskers of a plague priest? Horn of a Great Unclean One? Extract of nighthaunt and an unshed raindrop from the high clouds of Azyr? Preposterous!

‘Only a rat cunning enough to smell through such a blatant deception is fit to lead Clan Morbidus.’

He drew the shamshir from his left sleeve, and with the same left-right arc, struck Cruor’s head from his shoulders. Blood sprayed towards the ceiling, as though its final act was to strain towards the Horned Rat at the apex of the dome, as the verminable’s body collapsed.

The lectors squealed in terror as Borkris lowered the blade.

He regarded them smugly.

‘What did you do?’ squeaked Festerbule.

‘You have killed us all!’ said Rank.

‘There is no plague,’ said Borkris, as though explaining the Withered Word to a fool. He pointed a claw at Hascrible, but the accusation he had been about to level disappeared in a tirade of increasingly painful coughs.

A muscle in his stomach that he did not know he had clenched. Something semi-liquid and foul-smelling trickled down the inside of his thigh as he doubled over with a squeal.

Onset is fast-quick and death quite painful.

‘Great Corruptor,’ he moaned, as groaning lectors began to crumple to the ground. ‘No-no…’

‘What is happening in there?’ Gagrik hissed.

‘I do not know.’ Makulitt pressed his ear to the door. ‘I cannot hear anything.’

‘They have been in there a long time.’

‘Maybe they are praying,’ Makulitt said hopefully.

‘I heard something hit the floor.’

‘I am sure they are fine.’

‘We should check.’

‘And interrupt the unholy ruminations of the Lyceum of Lectors?’

Gagrik hesitated. The poxmixer augustus was clad in robes that were almost laughably plain. Half his whiskers had been singed off and one eye drifted lazily, constantly weeping from too much time staring into his master’s concoctions. ‘A sniff then. Just to be certain.’

‘The door is bolted from the inside by the sextons.’

‘Just try it.’

‘You try it.’

Makulitt looked over his shoulder. The lackeys and lieutenants of Perish and Skabes and Festerbule and all of the other high priests milled behind them. It was quite clear that they were happy for Makulitt and Gagrik to settle this amongst themselves. Makulitt cursed his misfortune. If not for his injuries in the battle against Hascrible’s zealots then he would never have allowed himself to be manoeuvred into so exposed a position.

‘Fine then,’ he hissed. ‘We do it together. On three. One… Two…’

Gagrik and Makulitt pushed together. To their surprise, the door opened. Something on the other side resisted, but nothing so unyielding as a bar across it.

Makulitt pushed harder.

The door opened fully.

The body of the sexton that had been slumped against it slid onto the floor.

He was still holding the locking bar in both paws, but had apparently died before he had been able to open the door. And he was dead. The pale glaze over his eyes and the coolness of his fur was confirmation enough for Makulitt, his lack of breath another, but there was a very living pain in those eyes still. It was subtle, slow, but, moreover, Makulitt realised that the corpse was actually still writhing in pain. He raised his snout to take in the rest of the burrow-hall. Heavily robed bodies lay slumped over the ornature. The sexton-general was draped across the altar, covered by his mangy scrap of cloak. Even the mutants that had tended the plague furnaces were dead, the fires nibbling away at their skin, burning darkly on the voided contents of their vast, corrupted bowels.

The underdeacon squeaked in alarm, covering his snout with his cassock sleeve as the diarrheal stench reached him.

He was a priest of plague, an acolyte of the Corruptor and proselyte of the Final Withering, but the malady at work was something horrifying that he knew instinctively he wanted nowhere near him. Here was a plague straight from the codicils of the Libers Pestilent, certain martyrdom to any but the most malefic priest or champion of Nurgle.

‘So… who does that make archpustulent of Clan Morbidus?’

The gaggle of underlings in the corridor behind him quickly shuffled back.

‘I vote-squeak for Underdeacon Makulitt!’ Gagrik squealed.

IN THE MISTS OF CHAOS

Rik Hoskin

The sounds of new swords being forged echoed across the settlement of the Ironvale with the familiar clanging of hammers on metal as they were beaten into shape. Uffo Weisz winced as he crossed his arms across his broad chest and surveyed the settlement. His arms, like the Ironvale, were scored with scars, evidence of how both man and village had barely survived its recent encounter with the forces of Chaos. The mining settlement was in the process of being rebuilt, locals toiling to bolster the damaged walls that had been ruined by projectiles and flames. Walls could be repaired, but his scars would be permanent, their thick white lines like medals scored into his flesh, proud evidence of the valour he had showed here two months prior. Weisz’s scars stung when the temperature dropped, but his brother’s wounds had been far worse.

Weisz and his younger brother Moryn had been central in protecting this settlement from the deranged hordes of Chaos, then saved it with the thrust of swords and blasts of shots, until they had forced back the adherents of madness who wanted to seize control of the Realmgate that waited beyond the pass. Moryn had almost lost his leg during that cruel, final push, the swipe of an enemy’s axe cleaving a great hunk of flesh from his thigh, and dropping the lad to the ground with a blood-curdling scream.

‘We won, brother,’ Weisz murmured. They had saved the village, with its mine that scooped the metal from under the ground to forge the swords and shields that Weisz and other brave Freeguilders like him relied upon – but the cost had been colossal. Soldiers had been lost, and there had been the loss of his brother’s wellbeing. That the boy lived, crippled and in constant pain, was no consolation. Death would have been a relief.

Weisz was a large man, made larger by the story that had grown up around him since that frantic battle. In the eyes of his Freeguild colleagues, he was a legend. Their stories nurtured that legend with each retelling, clung to it the way they would a shield, as if it could protect them from the horrors that lurked here in the burning realm of Aqshy. Sometimes they would add details from their own imaginations as to why Weisz had been promoted from guardsman to general on that day. In the stories they told, he had fought a thousand beasts of Chaos, had arm-wrestled an Arcanite of the Dark Gods with such determination that the sorcerer’s arm had been pulled clean from its socket and had beaten back the last of the ravening hordes with that bloody limb until all that was left was fleshless bone. Weisz enjoyed hearing the tales, and would even correct them sometimes, adding his own parts to the legend, layer upon layer of hyperbole, each new addition giving the people around him hope.

The truth was less sensational. It was, however, enough to cause Weisz to awaken at three in the morning, struggling to catch his breath as the panic set in – seeing his sword cleave through the tattooed forearm of a sorcerer calling himself Ty’Gzar, to stop his weaving of the spell that would have razed the village. Weisz had made an impossible choice to stop the sorcerer instead of saving his brother from the swing of an axe, a choice he would have to live with forever, a choice that had made him a hero.

The mining village called the Ironvale was located between two towering walls of rock that hid it from the sun for most of the day. Inhospitable as the location seemed, one hundred and thirty-seven people still called it home. The rock walls towered fifty feet above the fortress village, gleaming with thick seams of iron and copper and tin, spikes and cicatrices of metal lurking in those walls like fossils. Those exposed metal seams were baked hot by the relentless sun until they became scalding to the touch by midday.

The buildings were humble, the families young, and like all places where hardship ruled, the community was close-knit. Everyone here was involved in the local mining, either as miners or metalworkers or weapon smiths. And they all knew Weisz – knew his legend, at least, repeating it over homebrewed ale as the harsh red sun set, painting the walls as red as the blood Weisz had spilled to protect them all.

Weisz watched from the Ironvale’s lone watchtower as his colleague, Mannetje, came hurrying along the path to the village walls. Mannetje was a small man, stumpy but all muscle, with shoulders as wide as a doorway and a moustache whose ends trailed down past his chin. He looked at Weisz with a combination of awe and reverence, believing the legend more than the man.

‘Sightings of movement out in the west,’ Mannetje said, his face grim as he looked up at Weisz.

‘How close?’ Weisz asked. He automatically shifted his gaze to the path that led between the towering bluffs, from where Mannetje had run. A tiny sliver of sky could be seen above those rock walls, silver clouds lit orange from the glow of the distant volcano.

‘About three miles out,’ Mannetje said, turning the spyglass in his hands around nervously, as if he was wrestling with a snake. ‘Three miles and closing.’

Weisz closed his eyes, secretly thrilled by the prospect of getting revenge on the foul sorcerer who had stolen his brother’s independence. ‘They don’t want us,’ he said slowly. ‘They want the gate. They just think we’re close enough to be in their way.’

‘That’s what Bren figures, too,’ Mannetje agreed. ‘That damned Realmgate. I don’t care for it, puts everything off balance.’

Weisz nodded.

The Realmgate was called Brimfire, a hidden path fabled to open onto another of the Eight Realms, the control of which could end a war or start one. Hidden centuries ago, its only access had neither been marked or mapped, and its mystical properties had been masked by runes of duardin warding. That the Ironvale was located near to one of the suspected entryways was happenstance and nothing else. Weisz and his men were here to protect the mine and its valuable resources, not a Realmgate. That was something better left to soldiers whose nature was closer to almighty Sigmar’s. But even the Stormcasts could not be everywhere, and sometimes a man became a legend by standing his ground when his other option was to die like a dog. Legends never gave up for even so much as a breath.

Humanity followed the lead of Sigmar himself, who had strived against all obstacles to push back the dark forces of Chaos. Weisz knew in his heart that it was his duty to do the same, to strive against all obstacles and stand firm against the darkness. Just like Sigmar’s personally chosen warriors in their fearsome armour that gleamed like the sun.

‘Amass the men,’ Weisz said, donning his battle helm as he spoke to Mannetje. ‘Today we show this black-hearted spawn what it means to face good men and women on the battlefield.’

Uffo Weisz took a few minutes to visit his brother Moryn in their shared dwelling close to the south wall. Moryn had the sweats, the same as he had for the last two months, and his leg was wrapped like something from a butcher’s stand.

‘We must push back this sorcerer and his army once and for all, or they shall keep coming over and over,’ Weisz said as he checked on Moryn’s leg. The wound was scabbed over and it was slick with weeping pus, but it looked better than before.

‘I’ll come with you–’ Moryn began.

But Weisz was shaking his head as he dampened a cloth. ‘You’re in no state for that, Mor,’ he said.

Moryn nodded solemnly. ‘You did it once, brother,’ he said, wincing while Weisz efficiently cleaned the wound.

‘So the ballad singers tell me,’ Weisz said with a smile. ‘My duty was clear – to drive Ty’Gzar’s unholy army back.’

‘When you took the sorcerer’s hand,’ Moryn reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’

‘I won’t,’ Weisz said, replacing his brother’s dressings. ‘But I doubt that Ty’Gzar has either.’

Two miles out from the Ironvale, the fog was rising. Weisz led his troop of three dozen Freeguild soldiers into the west, following the pathway between the towering bluffs until it narrowed to a point where barely five grown men could walk abreast. The shadows were thick here – the sun’s rays never reached between the towering crags of rock. Illumination came instead from the sunlight’s flickering reflections on the seams of raw metal, playing across the walls and ground like ripples on a pond.

‘You smell that?’ Mannetje whispered, his nostrils widening as he took a deep breath of air, turned bitter with the tang of sulphur. ‘Reeks of something… twisted.’

Beside him, Weisz and several others took a breath, and cursed as they scented the awful reek of Chaos that carried on the warm air along with the rising mist. Down the line, Hobbs, a young recruit who lacked experience, began to vomit, a slick smear of saliva and bile drooling down his chin as he doubled over.

‘Someone hold him,’ Weisz said, indicating Hobbs. ‘Make sure he doesn’t choke.’

A woman called Berta grabbed Hobbs and held his head. ‘Take a breath, soldier,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t lose it now.’

Berta was tough. She wore her hair short and had a burn scar running the length of her face from the platoon’s last skirmish. Before the scar she had worn her hair longer, until a Chaos cultist had set light to it. She was here as much for revenge as Weisz himself.

‘Stand firm,’ Weisz told the others, feeling the air pressure change. It was pressure that seemed to be almost internal somehow, like the never-abating fear for his brother’s health. His allies steadied themselves, hands on sheathed swords, a few pistoliers reaching for their guns.

Weisz wished his brother was here. Moryn fought like he was born to it, he moved like poetry. Weisz was a brute compared to him, a lumbering thing where Moryn had been a specialist. Or maybe it was just the companionship he missed. Maybe the trust that only brothers shared when they put their lives on the line together. This time he would fight for his brother, rather than with him.

At that moment, figures began to emerge from the grey fog, moving together but still ramshackle in their way, as if they had tried and failed to coordinate their movements. Some looked human, or nearly so, their faces hidden behind grotesque masks in iridescent yellows and the blue of corpses that elongated or squashed their profiles. Others seemed closer to animals, walking on all fours like hounds, some held tightly on leashes. Weisz counted thirty-eight in total, presumably all that was left of the sorcerer’s cult after their previous clash with his Freeguilders. It was a small group to strive for the Realmgate, but enough for the enclosed terrain.

‘Form up,’ Weisz commanded his troops, never taking his eyes from the forms proceeding from the mist. ‘No one moves until my command.’

Behind him, Weisz heard his faithful soldiers step forward, readying themselves. They were edgy, he sensed. Many had seen their comrades cut down by these worthless cultists before, and some of them understandably wanted blood. But they needed to remain together, Weisz knew. The numbers were too close, the combatants too well matched to do it any other way. Large weapons and massed armies could do nothing within a tight passage like this – it was a place where only close combat could prevail, for there was not the space for anything grander.

‘There!’ a Freeguild soldier called Bren said, pointing to the figures of Chaos emerging from the tendrils of thick, grey mist.

Weisz saw, and a jolt of anticipation ran through him. Standing a little way back from the head of the troops stood Ty’Gzar, dressed in robes of midnight blue, a staff in his one remaining hand almost as tall as he was, with a warpfire gemstone embedded within its apex. The man’s right arm was missing from just below the elbow, where Weisz had hacked clean through the bone two months prior, when he had held this same pass against the onrush of enemies. Ty’Gzar’s forces had been almost wiped out then, and now he was running out of troops. He was a fool to attack the same spot again, but Chaos did strange things to a man’s mind, addling him to believe in his own invulnerability. He would learn, Weisz thought grimly.

Using the uneven walls and the shadows for protection, the Freeguild soldiers looked to Weisz for their next move. Fearless as his legend, Weisz strode purposefully to a point midway between his own men and those devoted to the trickery of Chaos.

‘You’ve taken a wrong turn, Stumpy,’ Weisz taunted, his voice echoing back along the tight passage between the cliffs.

The things of Chaos halted, looking to their own leader for instruction on what to do next.

Weisz spoke again. ‘Surrender,’ he boomed. ‘Lest you prefer to see how far and how fast you can run from me and my men. For, if you force us, we will cut you down, you can be assured of that.’

A dozen steps back from the head of his small army, Ty’Gzar sneered, his yellow teeth seeming yellower still where reflected light was cast through the gem in his staff and onto his face. ‘You’re outnumbered,’ he said, his voice shrill as a crow’s caw.

‘In numbers, perhaps, but numbers alone do not make an army superior,’ Weisz replied with a confident laugh. ‘Any blood shed this day will be that of your men and yourself, just as it was before.’

Ty’Gzar turned back for a moment, tapping the blunt end of his staff against the ground thrice in a steady beat as he looked into the low-hanging mist at his back. ‘You have miscalculated our numbers,’ he said, as the echo of the staff’s beat rang through the pass. ‘Gravely so.’

As the sorcerer spoke, Weisz saw more figures moving in the mist, an army of humanlike things come to wage war on the small company of warriors whose only task was to protect the mining village.

Weisz gestured, one hand moving rapidly behind his back. An instant later, his troops moved in unison to join him, their synchronised footfalls loud against the baking metal of the ground, step by ominous step.

‘Together,’ Weisz advised, assessing the men and women under his command with a firm nod. ‘Hold the line. No one crosses this point. Sigmar is with us, at every step. He watches over this battle, he sees the bravery within us and he feeds it with his own. We are unstoppable.’ Like my brother was, until this evil struck him down, Weisz thought.

Weisz’s troops girded themselves, moving to defend the pass at this, its narrowest point, readying themselves for his next command.

‘Charge!’ Weisz hollered as the figures in the mist hurried forward, lolloping and leaping, teeth gnashing and limbs swaying. At Weisz’s back, twelve loyal troops stormed towards the approaching army, weapons drawn, loudly affirming their fidelity to Sigmar. They were all he would need. Behind them, a second wave of Freeguilders launched the fort’s lone catapult, dragged behind them as the lead troops proceeded ahead. The catapult was filled with a wad of burning shot. And behind them, more troops moved into position, shoring up the defensive line so that none should pass.

The noble Freeguild men and the loathsome Kairic acolytes met with a clash of metal on metal, as blade struck against shield and armour and flaming projectiles rained down. Weisz watched derisively as an acolyte met his sword blade with his hideous mask, splitting the mask in twain so that it dropped away to reveal an even more hideous mockery of a face beneath. Weisz raised his sword again and swung it down, splitting the acolyte’s skull as the man tried and failed to stab him with his blade.

All around him, Weisz was aware of his comrades doing similarly, meeting this wretched army with fearlessness. They were fighting not only for their lives but for their very way of life, and all to the honour of Sigmar. And they were winning. Acolytes fell to their blows, men whose senses had been twisted to Chaos. Then the grey mist rose around them, and dark horrors shuffled in its depths, bounding forward to join the battle like hunting dogs catching a scent.

Weisz saw the face of the first emerge from the fog and he recoiled in disgust. Its features were human but malformed, the eye sockets too large, the mouth too wide and with teeth like a shark’s. The thing screamed as it bounded across the ground towards Weisz, and he drew back his sword in a two-handed grip. Then, Weisz swung the heavy blade and its arc met the vaulting monstrosity at the precise moment that it came into reach, striking with a bone-crunching clatter.

The creature went down with a ghastly shriek, the cry like stone grinding against glass.

The mists seemed to rise as the monstrosity fell, immersing Weisz and his colleagues deeper within their foul-smelling depths, visibility reduced to almost nothing in an instant. Weisz’s colleagues became shadows, moving shapes in the gloom. The Freeguildman was aware of things all around him, the cackling of Ty’Gzar in contrast to the battle cries of Weisz’s fellow defenders.

Where did this cursed sorcerer find such allies? Weisz wondered. When they had met before, Ty’Gzar had employed only human acolytes to wage his campaign, but now he had these things that defied logic, each more nightmarish than the one before.

Another monstrosity appeared from the gloom, a sickening thing that Weisz could hardly bear to look at. It was taller than Weisz, with a second face leering above its armoured head, the expression twisted in agony. It was not one being then, but two – a host and a rider. It smelled awful, like it hadn’t washed in… well, a lifetime, perhaps. Weisz thought he would be sick, his stomach spasming as the thing approached.

Weisz evaded the thing’s broadsword as it swept the ground towards him. ‘In the name of Sigmar!’ he cursed, as sparks were kicked up from the ferrous content of the rock beneath their feet.

Above the main body, the second creature was weaving a spell, its hands aglow with eldritch magic as they gestured towards him. On some instinctive level, Weisz realised what it was in that moment – a combination creature, with the combat prowess of a warrior and the dark knowledge of a sorcerer. Weisz sidestepped, sweeping his blade around with the movement and hacking at the horror’s legs with the same gusto he would attack the trunk of a tree. The conjoined beast wailed as the blade hacked into its host body, and its spell went awry. A bolt of Chaos energy shot out into the sky, momentarily painting the mist in a multitude of blues and greens before it hurtled away.

Weisz hacked at the right leg again, smiling grimly as the twinned creature began to sag, its leg giving way.

Another sweep, another strike, and the creature finally dropped, sagging sideward where the kneecap burst and the shinbone gave way. The homunculus on its back continued to weave its spells, eyes dark pits in the withered remains of a once-human face.

The monster’s head split from its neck in a single, brutal strike, spraying gore across Weisz, ruined flesh hitting the ground with wet thumps. For a moment its emaciated body continued to waver, hands still knitting the air as it tried to conjure whatever spell of abomination the dread thing had planned. And then, abruptly, it fell still, the life draining from the rider’s body instantaneously, like the last embers of a dying fire.

Below, the mount body, the one that had lost its mind in this cruel bargain, swayed where it kneeled on one ruined leg.

‘Die,’ Weisz snarled, panting for breath as he drew back his sword and struck the final killing blow. ‘And stay dead.’

Around Weisz, the cries of his colleagues echoed through the pass, distant voices in the gloom of the risen mist. Every man and woman had joined the fight now, while the Freeguilders’ catapult had fallen silent, out of ammunition, lost somewhere in the haze. They sounded fearful, desperate, but they remained strong – like all men of righteousness, they had more to fight for than any acolyte of Chaos.

‘Roll call!’ Weisz hollered as he spun around in the billowing fog.

The voices of his troops wended back from the depthless mists:

‘Bren!’

‘Falke!’

‘Mannetje!’

Eighteen men and women yet lived, all told – eighteen against the amassing forces of Chaos. Each man was most likely fighting alone now, Weisz realised, against enemies unseen, who materialised just feet from their faces as they revealed themselves from the blanket of thickening fog.

Weisz turned in place, eyes narrowed as he scoured the murk, trying to discern his enemies. A figure came spinning out of the gloom, arms flailing about it like a spinning top, face a tightening of muscles and flesh as it displayed a rictus grin. It was a creature from the sadistic depths of Chaos, with blue skin the colour of a bruise and eyes that glowed like weeping sores, accompanied by the foul aroma of sulphur. With its impossibly wide mouth and abruptly shortened body, it was no more human than the sword that Weisz wielded.

The beast leapt at him with a hiss, and Weisz was repelled by the stench of the thing’s breath. Wincing, he swung blindly, the noxious scent raising bile at the back of his throat, and felt the hard thud as his sword blade struck the beast. The ghastly thing cried out, a very human sound, and dropped back with a loud, fleshy slap against the ground.

Weisz stepped over the fallen beast, his nose wrinkling as he smelled the sour tang of spilled stomach acid where the thing had been gutted.

But there was no time to stop. Already another enemy was moving in from behind, another of the human cultists who made up the majority of Ty’Gzar’s forces. This one wore blue armour and a mask with a hideously hooked nose, red eyes burning from within the mask’s sockets. The eyes reminded Weisz of the tattoo that had been grafted to Ty’Gzar’s forearm – the one he had hewn free in their prior encounter. That pulsing eye was what came back to Weisz in the middle of the night, staring at him from the depths of his dreams, stabbing through his thoughts like a hot dagger. The eye had twisted in such a way that it had seemed infinite somehow, one edge looping back to the other. The eye had been coloured a vivid blood red with blue at its corners, and even after the flesh had cooled, still the eye seemed to move and pulse, as if the tattoo was somehow alive.

A strained cry snapped Weisz’s thoughts back to the present. His brother had almost lost his leg through a momentary slip of concentration; Weisz needed to stay alert to stay alive. The acolyte was shouting something shrill and incomprehensible at Weisz, the words ‘Chaos’ and ‘beware’ bubbling muddled from beneath the mask as he hefted a sword that glinted silver in the gloom.

‘Beware yourself!’ Weisz snarled, meeting the blade with the length of his own in a shower of brilliant sparks, shoving it aside even as his own legs threatened to buckle with the impact. With a grunt, Weisz stood his ground, waiting as the cultist tried to get his bearings to renew his attack.

Emboldened, the acolyte came at him in an obvious attack, almost as though he thought Weisz posed no threat to him, and Weisz brought his sword up in a brutal swing that met with the man’s side.

Then another came at Weisz – had the first been sent as a distraction? – even as his sword struck the first acolyte in his flank, embedding itself there. For a moment it seemed that Weisz was defenceless against the second man. This one too wore a mask, a hideous inhuman thing that looked like a mockery of a woman’s face.

Weisz let go of the sword and stepped back, allowing the second acolyte’s sword blade to jab past him by a matter of inches. Drawing back his bunched fist, Weisz stepped forward until he was within the outer arc of that swinging sword, and punched the cultist hard in the face, breaking his mask and his human nose beneath.

The acolyte staggered back with a shriek of pain, and for just a moment his words came out as a plea: ‘Look at what you’re–’

Weisz punched again, driving his mailed fist hard into his enemy’s jaw, feeling the satisfying crunch of breaking bone. He followed through with a knee to the man’s groin, delivered with such force that the masked acolyte left the ground momentarily before crashing back into the sheer wall of the bluff.

But there was no time for Weisz to catch his breath. Already the first man he had felled was rising once more, the sword no longer in his side, the blue glyphs painted on his body seeming alive in the swirling mist. Weisz dropped down as the Chaos disciple lunged at him, and plucked his sword from where it had fallen.

A feint, ducking another attack, and then Weisz was upright, using his superior strength to bring the sword down on the acolyte’s head. The sword landed with a sickening, wet thud. The acolyte sank to his knees, dropping his weapon as his hands reached up for his ruined face, and Weisz swung the sword once more.

As his blade cut through the acolyte’s belly, Weisz heard the pained shout of Mannetje close by, in the unmistakable gasp of a man’s final breath. It made Weisz’s momentary victory bittersweet, hearing his friend’s final gasp even as the Chaos man’s limp body slipped to the ground from his blade.

Weisz looked around in the swirling mist, but he could not see Mannetje. Still, he knew – knew the sound of a man dying, knew the noises a man made when he had reached the end of his life.

‘Mannetje?’ Weisz shouted into the fog, still searching around. But there came no response.

The realisation made Weisz more determined. Weisz knew Mannetje to be a good man, a good soldier. And, by the Stormhosts, he would not have given his life in vain. No soldier under his command would – Weisz swore it. These spawn of Chaos would be routed.

‘Drive them back!’ Weisz yelled into the mists, trusting his unseen allies to hear him. ‘In Sigmar’s righteous name, drive them back!’

The battle cries of brave men and women echoed back, muffled by the mists that swirled and danced across the scarred ground, allies reduced to shadows projected upon its moving surface.

Weisz raised his blood-slicked sword once more and charged with a booming holler: ‘Let the routing begin!’

They came at Weisz from all sides then, things that slithered and things that hopped, things that smelled like the grave and things that smelled of a sweetness so strong that it addled the senses. They wore expressions that defied comprehension, sometimes in places where faces should not be. And each of them wielded swords and knives and axes, with shields and armour to protect their deformed, reformed, malformed bodies. Torsos were hewn in two by Weisz, heads parted from shoulders and limbs mangled under the onslaught of his defence. If any had doubted his legend before, by Sigmar’s blade, he was proving it now, with every cut and thrust, every hacked limb and broken bone.

But the Chaos things seemed endless.

First they came in ones and twos, acolytes wearing fright masks to unsettle a foe as they stepped from the swirling mist, but human all the same.

Then came things that seemed to be made from the elements themselves – headless beasts covered in a fire that burned blue with the brilliance of the oxygen that fed it, long arms that ended in cruelly toothed claws. Shimmering like flames on a candle’s wick, the creatures turned the ground red-hot beneath their tread, steam hissing from the surface, and lunged for Weisz with those clawed appendages amid the confusing blur of their self-generated heat haze. Azure flames leapt at Weisz’s body and face, turning him around as he avoided their burning lunges, fingers of flame playing across the ground before him as he strived to force them back. He cut furrows with his blade, blow after blow as he backed away from the creatures, until they could come no further down the narrow pathway of the pass, no closer to the Ironvale.

The flames sparkled in the fog like stars in the night sky, until Weisz had backed away sufficiently that they dwindled to nothing, absorbed by the grey.

But the surge of Chaos was relentless. There came things that were too big to comprehend, lunging out of the mist on knees that had been reversed, causing them to totter like toddlers as they made their approach. Weisz took these on too, his sword a blur of movement in the clouding fog. The feel of his sword making contact in the murk was enough to let Weisz know that the fight could still be won, and that he still had the strength to win it. Each wound he endured was worn like a fresh medal, each bruise a mark of victory. His brother had almost given his leg to an assault like this, and he still had faith in Sigmar’s righteousness. Moryn had never given up. Weisz took it upon himself to be Moryn’s fury on the battlefield, to stand firm against the creep of Chaos. And creep it did.

A blue-fleshed creature fell to Weisz’s sword, breaking apart only for its dismembered limbs to reach for him where they had fallen, its disembodied mouth snapping at his ankles until he killed it a second time.

He did not notice when his allies dropped out of the fight. He called for them, instructing them to sound off and getting just two responses, but the next time he cried out, minutes – or was it hours? – later, no one shouted back. They were dead then, most likely, taken by Ty’Gzar’s forces, and all that Weisz could hope for was that their demise had been swift and as painless as it could be in the circumstances, and not drawn out and cruel in that manner Chaos preferred. They had trained together, eaten together, lived together. They had been as familiar and trusted as his own sword. But now was not the time for grieving. Weisz would lament them later, honour them as they deserved.

Weisz’s breathing was coming hard when the last of the Chaos things fell. He stood, hunched over, his shoulders sagging as if he carried a heavy weight, the ache in his muscles burning like fire. Around him, the corpses of those cultists loyal to Chaos were piled, blood wetting the ground, turning the flickering seams of iron to scarlet where it washed.

Weisz stood, strength leaving him as his fury passed, and he heard laughter, cruel and mocking. Weisz looked up, saw the fog slowly part, its tendrils like slippery grey fingers pulling gradually away from his eyes, revealing what lay beyond, just feet away. There, arrayed before him were not the bodies of the dead cultists at all – no, they were his colleagues, revealed one by one, and beside them the miners from the village. Every last one of them had been butchered. Weisz stood in the centre of the Ironvale, surrounded by the corpses of his allies, his friends. No one lived. No one but him.

‘I… must have got… turned around,’ Weisz muttered as he realised where he was, the stench of death assaulting his nostrils. The mist had played cruel tricks on his senses, and he had travelled here as he fought – each time he had spun around in the heat of battle must have brought him closer.

But the bodies. How could he explain the bodies? His colleagues lying here where it should have been those wretched beasts of Chaos, those bent-limbed, flame-faced, sick-smelling things who had accompanied Ty’Gzar?

Weisz looked up as he heard that mocking laughter once more, reverberating from the high walls of the canyon and the buildings of his village. Ty’Gzar was striding towards him, yellow teeth on show, chuckling with spite. As Ty’Gzar approached, flanked by his remaining acolytes, the last of the mists departed, swirling away to nothingness.

‘You’ve done a masterful job,’ Ty’Gzar said, sweeping his staff casually through the last of the fog, his voice that familiar, grating crow’s caw. ‘More than I could have done.’

Weisz looked around, absorbing the details of the scene before him. There was Mannetje, guts strewn before him like the tangled roots of a tree that had been upended by lightning. And there, his ally Bren, who had first spotted the attackers and Berta, who had suffered such terrible burns in their previous encounter with Chaos, dead now with her face caked in blood where it had been caved in by a savage blow. And other Freeguilders, even civilians – the blacksmith who worked swords for the armies of man in the hut at the west of the village, the horseshoe worker whose knack with animals was a thing of wonder to observe.

And then Weisz’s heart seemed to stab at him as he spotted the other figure, the one he had really been looking for all along – the body of Moryn, his own brother. The dressing on his mangled leg was dark with blood, his body was twisted where it had been struck with something heavy. Moryn’s eyes stared up into nothingness, as if waiting for the heavenly Stormhosts of Sigmar to come down and claim his spirit, his last breath already departed.

‘I… did this?’ Weisz asked, the words stinging in his throat.

Ty’Gzar watched him, a cruel sneer on his twisted face. ‘You were merciless,’ the Arcanite revealed. ‘It was the stuff of legend, a thing to behold.’ Around him, guttural voices chuckled, from throats that had given up their own humanity in their pursuit of power.

Weisz felt his knees give way then, and he crashed to the ground like a felled oak tree, a legend rendered just a man after all. He had not just killed his brother, he had taken away his right to prove himself worthy of ascension to become a Stormcast Eternal. Everything had been taken away with the blind thrust of a sword.

‘How…?’ Weisz asked, the words little more than a whisper.

Ty’Gzar moved his stump of a right arm, gesturing to the narrow confines of the pass. ‘It can be so easy to become confused in the fog,’ he said vaguely, the yellow smile never leaving his face. ‘Tragically easy.’

Weisz saw it all then, piecing the whole terrible sequence together in his mind’s eye. He and his men had gone into battle against Ty’Gzar’s meagre forces only to be drawn into the unnatural fog that had followed them. The fog was a spell, Weisz realised with a hollow sense of horror. A way to muddle a man’s mind and confuse him until he saw things that were not there. In Uffo Weisz’s case, he had seen the awful multitudes of Chaos, swarming upon him in wave after wave, beast after beast, thing after thing. His colleagues likely had seen the same, their senses tricked, never aware that they were fighting one another, killing their allies until there was no one left but Weisz himself. And in all the confusion, Weisz and his men had been funnelled back to their safely walled village, proving it not to be safe at all.

‘Why didn’t they cry out?’ Weisz asked, staring at the ground before him, the bloody hilt of the sword slick and warm in his hand.

‘Oh, they did,’ Ty’Gzar said, striding closer as his men parted to let him through, handing one of them his gem-topped staff. ‘“No, Uffo!” “What are you doing?” “Keep back, keep back!”’ – the words came from Ty’Gzar’s mouth but the voices were familiar, captured by his magic, the pleas of the dying before Weisz had killed them.

Weisz’s eyes were focused on the haft of the weapon in his hand, where a droplet of blood was slowly wending its way down its length to join a scarlet puddle on the blood-soaked ground. ‘Why… didn’t… why couldn’t I hear them?’ he asked the ground, barely whispering now.

‘Because you took my hand,’ the Chaos sorcerer replied, his words a cruel hiss. ‘My hand! I would have let you live, if you’d just stepped aside those months before, but no – you had to fight, and so you brought all of this upon yourself.’

The words of the masked acolyte with the hook-nosed mask came back to Weisz then, the one he had ultimately gutted with his sword. Only now Weisz recognised the voice despite the way the fog had dulled the sound. It had been Mannetje. ‘Chaos’, Mannetje had said, and ‘beware’, the rest of the words lost…

We’re being deceived by Chaos, Uffo, beware before you kill us all.

The words were suddenly clear, the gaps filled in by memory or conscience, spoken by a man whom Weisz could neither see nor hear at the time when they were said, a man who had died on the sharp edge of his blade, his head cleaved, his belly ripped open.

And the other, the ‘acolyte’ who had accompanied Mannetje. He had begged for Weisz to see, shrieking out his last pleas as he sank to his knees – ‘Look at what you’re–!’ The voice had been familiar. The voice of Falke.

They had seen him, then – his allies – as he had raged and rampaged his way through them, killing every single man who had placed his trust in Weisz and in the legend that had blossomed around him. They had not all been fooled, not entirely. No, they had known full well what he was doing. He had killed them all.

Weisz felt the void opening inside him, the utter emptiness of defeat and of loss, the wide expanse of a grief so absolute that it seemed, in that moment, to have no limits. He had lost his allies, his friends, his family, and they had been killed at the end of his blade, either killed by him or by his colleagues as they fought in that awful, mind-altering mist. Whether Weisz had killed his brother or it had been one of his colleagues, it did not really matter. Moryn was dead. Because of him. Because of his intervention. Because he had stood up to Chaos and taken the hand of a sorcerer whose only desire was power.

As the dying words of his allies came back to him, replaying over and over in his mind, Weisz heard other words too. They were the taunting words of Ty’Gzar from just a few moments earlier: ‘I would have let you live, if you’d just stepped aside…’

‘You’re wrong,’ Weisz muttered, the words so quiet that only he could hear them. ‘You lie. You would never have let me live.’

As Weisz spoke, he saw Ty’Gzar’s shadow cross over the ground before him, its dark shape playing over the blood-soaked hilt of the sword he held there. Above Weisz, his victory complete, the Arcanite was voicing the slithering words of another tongue, words of magic to draw this conflict to a close. The words of Chaos burned into Weisz’s skull, pounding into his brain like hammer blows, each one raising the pressure there until Weisz could barely think at all. Ty’Gzar’s remaining hand twisted in the air, forming the eldritch shapes that would bring his spell to fruition.

‘No!’ Weisz spat, swinging his sword blindly up at the shadow that loomed before him. The sword struck, with the solid thud of chopping wood, driving through the sorcerer’s remaining arm instantaneously.

Ty’Gzar looked bewildered as his hand was replaced by a geyser of spurting blood where Weisz’s sword had opened an artery, the limb itself dropping to the ground with a heavy thud like a hunk of discarded meat.

Weisz rose to his full height once more, his gaze meeting Ty’Gzar’s as the Arcanite struggled to process what had just happened. Weisz could see it in the sorcerer’s expression, a look of disbelief across his Chaos-warped face. It was clear to Weisz, in that bloodied, scarlet moment, that the Arcanite had mistakenly believed him to be utterly broken by what had been done to him, driven to madness, with all hope and all thoughts of resistance gone. But he was wrong.

Ty’Gzar sank to his knees like wet cloth, all colour draining from his face. ‘How…?’ Ty’Gzar asked, the word a squawk from a strained throat.

‘You look like you’re struggling,’ Weisz said, a sneer curling his lip. ‘The way my brother struggled to fend off your depraved fanatics two months ago, the way he has struggled ever since, because of you.’

Behind Ty’Gzar, the remaining masked acolytes of Chaos charged, swarming towards Weisz as he stood before them in the ruined village of the Ironvale.

Let them come, thought Weisz. He had nothing left to lose.

Weisz drew back his sword and entered the fray once more, smiling with grim glee as he batted aside the first of the cultists. For a man with nothing left to lose has nothing left to fear.

THE BOOK OF TRANSFORMATIONS

Matt Keefe

PROLOGUE

THE GAZE OF STONE

The door to the old alchemist’s place was made of heavy oak and surrounded by neat stone blocks set directly into the cliff. A dozen windows looked out haphazardly from the rocky face, with no obvious indication of sense to the rooms and the floors behind them. Between those windows ran veins of metal and seams of minerals. They grew where the alchemist’s work had suffused the rock of the cliff-face and climbed up it like vines, his magicks bringing to the surface the latent energies of Chamon.

The boy had passed this sight perhaps half a dozen times, but he had never been inside. Everyone called it a shop, but it didn’t look like one, and the boy was full of trepidation. Whatever the alchemist’s own esoteric pursuits, most knew him as the city’s most reliable purveyor of all manner of substances, mundane and otherwise.

Though the door was ajar, its size and sturdiness had the boy imagining frightful things, like this great oak door was in place not to keep the world out, but to keep something terrible in. He raised his hand in a fist and knocked, three times, though the first was so timid and faint that the sound was that of only two.

Nothing.

He waited but knew he would have to go in, so he pushed. The great heavy door opened smoothly and easily – but so nervous was he that he pushed it only enough to open it by about a foot or so. He slipped inside, as if somehow imagining that going unseen, even as he entered, would quieten his own fears.

Three stone steps, hemmed in by shelves packed with stone jars, leather flasks and small wooden boxes, led down from the doorway. As far as the boy could tell there was just a single room in front of him, but its space was so packed with shelves and stacks of wooden cases that they created a narrow passageway that turned off to the right ahead of him.

The boy stopped and peered into the jars closest to him. Fat black leeches writhed over a lump of stone – nothing more than a dull rock, and yet their writhing, slug-like bodies left threads of silver across the glass. Beside them sat a jar of liquid – metal, seemingly, like mercury, but vivid blue in colour.

The boy peered around the corner into the room up ahead. Green flames flickered in lamps on the wall, but the room was still dim and for a moment the boy could make out little around him. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he realised with a fright that there was a man standing right in front of him.

Shinguren, the alchemist.

The boy gasped and stepped back. He tripped and sent the lid of a great cauldron tumbling to the ground with a clang. The alchemist didn’t say a thing, even sterner and more terrifying than the boy had imagined. The boy stuttered an apology and clumsily returned the lid to the cauldron, never taking his eyes from the man.

The alchemist was not tall but seemed particularly rigid and imposing. His clothes were drab, his hair and beard grey and his face oddly colourless, an effect compounded by the gloom, and one that had made him hard to pick out amidst the jumble of shelves, cases, bottles and jars.

‘You’re the alchemist, sir?’ said the boy.

But the alchemist did not answer.

The boy stepped a little closer, pulling his cloth cap from his head and swallowing hard.

‘Excuse me, sir. I’m Mehrigus. I’ve been sent by my father to–’

‘I doubt he sent you to speak to that thing, boy.’

The boy jumped as a voice came unexpectedly from behind him. He turned to see a second man standing there, taller, somewhat older, his beard much longer and his robes much heavier and shabbier. And he was moving rather more than the first man. The boy looked from one to the other.

‘A statue?’ he said, his heart racing in a mixture of surprise and fear as he realised the first figure was entirely motionless.

‘Not quite, boy,’ said the real alchemist, taking another step into the room from the shelf-lined passageway behind him. ‘That is a petrulus.’

‘A what, sir?’ said the boy.

‘A petrulus. A living thing turned to stone.’

The boy was already open-mouthed, and hearing this he quite forgot to breathe, gasping and spluttering a moment later as he looked around him – for something to say, or for simple escape, he wasn’t sure which. In the end, he couldn’t help but turn his attention back to the statue – to the petrulus – reaching out to touch it but stopping himself before he did.

‘Did… did you do this?’ he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t, and rushing in with the second-most terrifying of the thoughts running through his head as if to disguise the first. ‘I mean, if I touch it, what will happen? Will I turn to stone, too?’

The alchemist burst into uproarious laughter.

‘No, boy. I didn’t. And you won’t. This is the work of a cockatrice.’ The alchemist took a couple more steps into the room, standing just beside the boy as he looked up at the petrulus. The boy hesitated a moment, but then reached out, running his hand over the face of the ‘man’ he had first seen on making his way into the stuffy little room. He could feel nothing but cold stone.

‘This was… a person? A man?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the apothecary. ‘One with the unhappy distinction of having met the gaze of a cockatrice.’

‘What are you going to do with him?’ said the boy.

‘What do you mean, child?’ said the apothecary.

‘Are you going to… change him back?’

There was more laughter from the gruff old alchemist.

‘Oh, no, boy,’ he said. ‘Nothing will ever change this wretched fellow back again.’

The boy swallowed hard; the thought of what had become of this man had been terrifying enough when he’d imagined it to be some kind of trick or curse that might be undone, in time. He trembled to think that this was a living person turned forever to stone.

‘Then… what are you going to do with him?’ he said, the fear and trepidation in his young voice obvious.

The alchemist smiled unsettlingly.

‘You’re a curious one, aren’t you, boy?’

I

A BAETYLUS OF HEAVENS

Mehrigus looked up from the bench as he became aware of Ngja chittering below – a moment later, the lizard appeared, settling on the wall over the open doorway leading to the stairs beyond. Ngja lurked most of the time on the jambs of the front door. He had turned up of his own accord one day and had stayed more or less ever since. Mehrigus fed him on scraps of all kinds of things. Ngja would eat anything and, whatever kind of creature he was exactly, it seemed his behaviour would change, echoing whatever magical essence he was able to extract from these scraps and morsels. Mehrigus had once fed him the leftovers from a spagyric of magmatic sulfur he had been making, and for the next three nights Ngja’s belly had glowed like a lantern. In return for this nourishment, Ngja would announce the arrival of visitors if Mehrigus wasn’t downstairs to hear them. When Mehrigus was too deep in his work to notice the chittering, as he was today, Ngja would flap lazily up into the chambers above to find him.

As Mehrigus arose from his chair and headed for the winding staircase, Ngja took to his shimmering, dragonfly wings and followed him, hovering close by his master’s head.

Downstairs in the shop a boy stood quivering in front of the counter. He was barely tall enough to see over it, but he was turning his head frantically from side to side, clearly looking for Mehrigus. The place had little changed from when Mehrigus himself had stood there, timid and afraid, in front of that very counter.

‘Are you the apothecary, master?’ said the boy as soon as he saw him.

‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus calmly. ‘I am. What do you need?’

‘They told me to ask you to come, master,’ the boy said. ‘A man’s been injured.’ The boy trembled as he spoke. But it wasn’t from fright, it was from terrible, terrible alarm. ‘My father,’ he said.

Mehrigus turned and took his heavy, dark outer robe from where it hung on the wall and donned it hurriedly, before reaching out for a satchel and two small pouches, throwing them about himself with equal haste.

‘Come, then!’ he said. ‘Show me where.’

Mehrigus was right behind the boy, his hands on his shoulders, as the pair hurried out of the door. Behind them, Ngja settled back down onto the doorframe and shot out his tongue to lock the door.

Up on Mandringatte, the boy led Mehrigus into one of the small houses lining the road where it began to slope up towards the city’s eastern gate. Up a flight of wooden stairs, Mehrigus found the injured man in a crowded room on the first floor. There were three members of the city’s watch, unkempt, bloodied and anxious – the man’s comrades – plus two women and the boy, who Mehrigus presumed to be the man’s family.

The man lay on a straw-stuffed mattress on the floor. He was still in the breeches of his uniform but shirtless, his open jerkin underneath him. A wound on his left-hand side had been hastily bandaged, a dark mass of seeping blood showing through them, but there was clearly more to his condition than this mere wound. The man’s skin was sallow, and his eyes clouded. He moved his head as Mehrigus and the boy entered but seemed almost to be looking through or past the figures in the room.

‘He’s been wounded,’ said one of the watchmen, a slender man of average height, grey-haired and bearded. He crouched down beside the mattress to point at the all too obvious wound. ‘Some outcasts – real dregs – down in the tunnels. It was a wicked, rusted old thing they stabbed him with,’ he said. ‘The blade broke off but we left it for fear of bleeding. We brought him back here to get it out of him but…’

The man hesitated and one of the women took over.

‘It wasn’t right. It had rusted to nothing, that thing,’ she said.

‘Worse than rust, I fear,’ said Mehrigus, kneeling down beside the man. The others in the room glanced from one to another, as if Mehrigus had just said the very thing they had all feared.

‘The remains of it are in there?’ said Mehrigus, peering into a bucket pushed against the wall, where flecks of sickly white scum floated on top of blood and water.

‘Aye,’ said the watchman beside him. ‘We dropped it in there, but I doubt there’s anything left of it. It was falling apart even as we pulled it out of him.’

Mehrigus watched the scum seeming to expand across the surface, creating ripples in the still water. There was an unsettling life to it. He began to peel back the man’s bandages and, much as he feared, saw at once little white spores around the wound.

He reached for one of the pouches he’d brought with him, and from his satchel drew a phial of water. He took the cork from it and then, taking a flat metal rod from his satchel, added a little powder from the pouch.

The other woman knelt by the bed, hands clenched in front of her, elbows on the sheets, offering a prayer to Sigmar. Her words were inaudible, hurried, but she finished the prayer before looking up to see Mehrigus standing beside her. She stood up and stepped aside to allow him to move closer to the wounded man.

‘You’ve a cure for it?’ she said, lingering beside him.

‘Of sorts,’ said Mehrigus, stirring the mixture. He reached out towards the bucket, and carefully tipped the phial until just a few drops of the liquid fell from it. Where they landed, steam rose and water hissed, and the sickly white scum died away.

‘It’s poison,’ he said. ‘But you mustn’t be alarmed. There are times when you have to kill to cure.’ Mehrigus dipped the metal rod into the phial of liquid. He took one last look around the room – at every one of them, silent and still, pale with fear – and began to drip the poison sparingly around the wound.

The wounded man snarled as his flesh began to hiss. He turned his head to Mehrigus, staring at him. Mehrigus could sense the man himself now. His eyes were still alert, fixed on Mehrigus, not staring past him at all, but they were hidden behind the sickly white sheen forming over them. The man’s breathing began to slow. He seemed calmer, as if he understood Mehrigus was trying to help him, and he laid his head back on the mattress.

Mehrigus rummaged through his satchel again. He drew out what looked like a rough, pitted stone, the size of an orange.

‘It’s a baetylus,’ he said. ‘Of the heavens.’

It had the smell of petrichor, even though it was bone dry and had been stored safely indoors for months. It was carved with sigmarite runes connected by lines whose geometries made the rough orb into a careful approximation of the heavens. It appeared as dull stone, but where Mehrigus ran his hands over the runes and incanted, the dullness of the stone gave way to glimmering light, as if revealing precious metals beneath. And unlike the other ‘baetyluses’ in Mehrigus’ collection, this one really was a meteorite – or a fragment of one – hurled down from Azyr in the wake of one of Sigmar’s Stormhosts and possessed of much celestial magic.

Mehrigus took the man’s hands and wrapped them around the baetylus, covering them with his own, and using his fingers to guide the man’s thumbs around the glowing edges of the runes.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Incant as I do.’

‘He’s too weak,’ said one of the women.

‘I know,’ said Mehrigus. ‘I’m talking to the rest of you. What this man has been touched by is a taint… Pray it spreads no further.’

II

A LIKENESS IN MIND

Three weeks later, the man was well enough that Mehrigus was able to tell him and his family that he would not need to visit them again. The man was blind and afflicted with great pain when moving his left arm, the latter caused, it seemed, by the spot on his side where Mehrigus had scarred his flesh with poison. But he was alive, and seemingly free of the wicked taint the weapon had been infected with. There’d been more reports of diseased dregs lurking in the city’s caves and tunnels. Some said these outcasts were victims of a plague rumoured to be raging in a number of nearby towns, driven from their homes by their terrified neighbours, but others pointed out these bands seemed to be armed, and more than willing to attack any who chanced upon them. Many, Mehrigus included, began to wonder if something more sinister was afoot.

As he made his way home after his last visit with the man, Mehrigus fumed inside. He hated that these were the methods he was forced to use – to have to poison a man and scar him to let him live. He knew there was another way. He burned all the more to find it.

Several more days passed, and it continued to play on Mehrigus’ mind, feeding and reinvigorating what had long been his obsession: transformation as cure. The only true cure. To Mehrigus, the apothecary’s fledgling art – let alone the chirurgeon’s dull butchery – was nothing more than the savage preservation of life, however desperate for that savage preservation benighted and afflicted souls might be. It was little of an art at all. But he had glimpsed how close something better must be. His journals were full of these glimpses, meticulous in their reasoning, of life, sickness, age – nigh on all of existence, in fact – as simple processes of change and transformation, whose course needed only to be guided to do away with all the harms they might otherwise bring. The apothecary’s simple physic, with most of its potions no better than poison, was lacking. For Mehrigus, what the apothecary knew of the body would have to be melded with the alchemist’s art and the mage’s lore. And this – this – was his obsession.

Freshly determined, he pored over his journals. The man’s case he added, as he always did, while taking what he had seen there and looking back across pages filled over years with his observations, his reasonings, the results of his experimentations, and looking for what would unite and illuminate them from what was new.

Around noon one day, as he paced to and fro behind the desk on which lay open the most recent of his journals, Mehrigus was filled with a curious sense that someone was waiting for him. He descended the stairs, down into his little apothecary’s shop. Sure enough, an elderly man, perhaps twice Mehrigus’ own age, stood peering into the jars Mehrigus kept on the shelves closest to the door.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mehrigus, emerging behind the counter. He glanced up at the door. Ngja was there as ever but gave no sign of having noticed the man at all. Peculiar. Mehrigus tried to recall what he had fed him last.

The man turned and smiled.

‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Mehrigus? The apothecary?’

Mehrigus smiled, amused as much as he was surprised. He was seldom greeted by name on a first meeting.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Mehrigus, I am. May I be of help?’

‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, shuffling forward. Mehrigus noted the difficulty with which the old man moved and came out from behind the counter, dragging a stool to offer to him. ‘Or perhaps I can be of help to you,’ said the man, accepting the seat without a word about it passing between them. ‘Or perhaps this will prove to be nothing more than a meeting of two men of a like mind.’

‘You’re an apothecary?’ said Mehrigus.

‘I was,’ said the man. ‘You might say I’ve retired, but for one or two little interests.’ He smiled, one hand resting on the counter as he leaned forward on the stool. ‘Call me Trimegast,’ he said.

‘Trimegast. Welcome, sir,’ said Mehrigus, idly wondering if he ought to be deferential, his pondering making him seem quizzical instead as he spoke. ‘And how did you come to hear of me, Trimegast, may I ask?’

‘Well, you see,’ said Trimegast, ‘I had heard that you treated a man known to me, a neighbour–’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. In fact, a few folks hereabouts mentioned it to me. Some were quite amazed, some were quite troubled. It’s always the way, Mehrigus. Don’t worry, that isn’t why it intrigued me,’ he went on. ‘You see, once they described you and one of them mentioned your name, it came to me that I had heard your name before, Mehrigus. I recalled that I think I had perhaps once heard you speak…’

‘Ah,’ said Mehrigus.

‘…on transformation as cure.’

Mehrigus felt an involuntary cringe run through him; he hated that he felt this way about his life’s obsession, but it was a reaction long cultivated by the responses his ideas drew from those who claimed to know well the arts of healing and magic.

‘The Collegiate Arcane,’ he replied. Mehrigus had spoken there, three years prior, when he was certain his ideas were ready to be shared. He was wrong. Not on account of his own ideas, perhaps, as Mehrigus saw it, but in his own simple naivety. He had not before that day quite realised that for knowledge to be shared required also an audience willing to receive it. He had discovered in humiliating fashion that day that his did not yet exist.

‘Yes!’ said the old man, animatedly. ‘And then I wondered, whatever happened to this work of transformation as cure…’

‘It goes on,’ said Mehrigus, slinking back behind the counter, as if he felt the need of physical protection if he were to find the will to go on with the conversation. ‘But it won’t be transforming the minds of the Collegiate Arcane any time soon, I’m sure.’

Trimegast seemed to sense Mehrigus’ reticence and fell silent for a few moments, turning on the stool to gaze around the shop.

‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘are people surprised to find this is an apothecary’s shop?’

‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus, at least a little intrigued by Trimegast’s perceptiveness.

‘I can see why,’ said Trimegast.

‘My master was an alchemist,’ said Mehrigus. ‘I was apprenticed to him as a boy. He dabbled in spagyry, too. I thought myself an alchemist for some time. I suppose he thought he knew something of the apothecary’s physic, too. But in one regard I always knew he was mistaken – limiting his arts of transformation to the inanimate.’ He stepped back out from behind the counter, pacing slowly around the shop, seeming not to fear a trap from the old man any longer.

‘We have mastered the transformation of the inanimate,’ said Mehrigus. ‘No one thinks anything of it. Ice to water, water to mist to water again. Stone to magma, magma to rock. It is the way of things, and we have mastered it for ourselves, we alchemists, centuries since. Why shouldn’t the living substance be the same way?

‘It is, you see,’ he said, confident now. ‘Life, growth, age – just change, transformation, but we have not yet mastered it. Why, it’s as if we believe we can’t. But it’s so obvious. If an infection can rot the flesh, it is but change – deleterious change. And if a tumour can grow, it is the same. Why can we not harness this transformation, grow back the living flesh, the youthful flesh, healthy and new? The flesh is as ready for change as the simple metals and realmstones we can craft into a thousand forms.’

Trimegast smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it, Mehrigus. But, tell me, do you believe you are the first to think it?’

‘Of course not,’ said Mehrigus. ‘It’s obvious. Doesn’t the God-King himself show us the power of transformation in his Stormcast Eternals? And the flesh can be no different from the inanimate,’ said Mehrigus, almost manic now. ‘I know it. I’ve always known it.’ He swept across the floor of the shop, to the far wall, where an object stood under a heavy, deep-blue cloth.

‘How can the animate be any different from the inanimate,’ he said, whipping back the cloth to reveal the petrulus beneath, ‘when the animate can become the inanimate?’

Trimegast grinned. ‘A masterful observation,’ he said, rising from his stool and walking gingerly across the room to the petrulus – the motionless stone that had so terrified, then so intrigued, then so inspired the young Mehrigus, and which he had inherited from his long-deceased master.

‘So if there is a gaze to turn a man to stone, there is something – something – to turn him back to flesh and bone,’ said Mehrigus.

Trimegast smiled. He slipped a shaking, aged hand inside his heavy cloak, creating the sound of rustling paper as he tugged at something inside a deep pocket.

‘You are not the first to think it, Mehrigus, as I have told you. I believe once much was known of this. Much indeed. But it was lost.’ Trimegast pulled a sheaf of papers from his cloak. He offered them to Mehrigus.

Mehrigus took the sheaf of papers, aghast that at last someone had come to him of a like mind, and even more aghast that he seemed already to know of much which Mehrigus did not. The papers were ancient and tattered. The script and the symbols on them were unknown to him, but over perhaps a third of each page, at a glance, there were translations in a modern hand, which Mehrigus took to be Trimegast’s.

‘Do not misunderstand me. By no means is all of this plain to me, Mehrigus,’ said the old man. ‘It has been a life’s work, collecting these pages and deciphering what I have, and there is much missing. There is much that I cannot decode. But it is there. And it is obvious enough that the secrets you seek – the secrets I have been seeking for a lifetime – were once known, Mehrigus. They are written in those pages you hold. That is the Book of Transformations. I will entrust it to you a little while, Mehrigus, if you’ll agree to let me share in whatever discoveries might follow.’

Mehrigus took two stumbling strides and sat himself down on the stool he had earlier set out for the old man, such was his great surprise at what had come to him. Trimegast seemed almost amused by Mehrigus’ overawed delight. He continued to inspect the petrulus.

‘There must be great potency in a stone like this,’ he said, with a grin.

III

A DREAM OF SIGHT

For three days, Mehrigus did not sleep. The door to the shop remained barred and Ngja found himself having to venture several times a day up to the study above to plead with his master to feed him. Mehrigus was absorbed in the Book of Transformations. His own journals – the work of years – lay around him but so dismayed was he now with the blindness of his own earlier reasoning that he tore whole pages from them and fed them to the demanding lizard.

There was much that was indecipherable but Mehrigus could already see from the old man’s diligent work that he had missed a very obvious truth. Mehrigus himself had long lambasted (privately, for the most part) the short-sightedness of those who confined themselves to alchemy or physic or magic alone, but he realised now that his own methods had too long been lacking some vital part of each. Essence, substance, enchantment – transformation required each of these. Mehrigus’ own perfunctory blending of mystical arts had been too haphazard; it was so obvious to him now. He rolled the baetylus between his palms, one to the other, as he pondered it, mulling over the runes and their power and wondering how he might harness the same from the strange symbols on the pages of the Book of Transformations.

At last, in exhaustion, he abandoned his desk and his study for his bedchamber and collapsed into sleep and fevered dreams.

The eyes were flicking frantically from side to side, pupils wide in terror at their imprisonment – seeming, in fact, even more horrified for the unblinking, stone eyelids frozen open around them.

Mehrigus awoke, sitting up sharply in bed. No light fell from the gaps in the rickety old shutters – it was the middle of the night. Perhaps he had slept for a day or more. He sat panting, letting his thoughts gather for a few moments. It was a dream, but it was quickly turning into an irresistible question in his mind.

Mehrigus pushed the thin quilt aside and hurried barefoot across the bedchamber and headed for the cramped, winding stairs to the shop below. He snatched at the lantern that hung always at the head of the stairs and whispered to it, bringing to life its faithful orange glow. Down he went. As he entered from the back of the room, he dropped to his knees beside a large wooden box standing against the wall. He swept aside the clutter of empty jars, bottles and smaller boxes on top of it and pulled off the lid.

Inside was a mess of tools, some inherited, some found, some opportunistically collected, few with any particular reason for being there. Mehrigus rummaged excitedly through the jumble of them, looking for an implement. He knew what he needed it to do, but not yet what it would look like. He pulled out a small pick, used for chipping mineral deposits free from their rocky birthplaces. Too destructive, he thought, but set it down on the floor beside him all the same and continued to rummage. He pushed a small, square-ended hammer aside – too clumsy – then stopped, turning back to it, scrabbling for its handle through the mess of tools pushed on top of it and pulling it out. The hammer was too clumsy, true enough, but at the sight of it Mehrigus realised what he needed. Impatient, he hauled the box towards him, spilling its contents across the floor. Sharp edges cut his bare feet as the mass of tools slid across the stone but he didn’t care. He snatched up what he was looking for. A stonemason’s chisel. He grabbed the pick and the hammer too before hurrying through to the front of the shop.

The petrulus was where it had always been, its eyes as unmoving and as petrified as ever. Mehrigus stopped, panting – in fear, in anticipation, in mad, senseless curiosity – and stared at the floor beside the statue. The excitement he felt was like that of someone knowing they are about to do wrong, and he asked himself why he felt it, if that was what he really believed. He looked at the petrulus, wondering if something within it or beyond it still existed to judge him. But he could gain no such sense and, calming his thoughts, he could see no reason to judge himself either. He raised the chisel and put the blade to the petrulus’ lifeless eyes, carefully positioning just one corner in the little gully between the eye and its lower lid.

He lifted his right hand, his grip tight around the handle of the hammer. But then he relaxed his arm, and instead ran the corner of the chisel’s blade slowly and carefully along that little gully, without striking the chisel once. A trail of dust, like sand, fell from the corner of the petrulus’ eye, like tears. Beneath the stone was whiter and the dream of those eyes – brilliant whites, pupils wide – came back vividly.

Mehrigus lifted the hammer and struck. The trickle of sandy tears became a stream, flecks of white stone falling down the petrulus’ cheek, over his stiff, stone robes and onto the floor. But the chisel was now perhaps a blade’s thickness further in, and the white that shone from the gouge Mehrigus had made was still just stone. Cold, lifeless stone.

So, it was just a dream. Mehrigus could be sure of that, at least. This stony surface was not some eggshell waiting to be shattered to reveal a still-living eye beneath. Mehrigus breathed a great sigh – of relief that he had not made some horrendous mistake or discovered something truly terrible, but equally of disappointment that he had not yet uncovered any of the secrets he was sure the unfortunate thing held.

But the question of whether or not some living thing still dwelt beneath was not really the one that Mehrigus had come to answer. This was not the source of that nervous, guilty excitement that had brought him rushing from his bed. That same excitement returned now as – having answered his dreaming mind’s darkest doubts and being free to ask the question that gripped his waking mind – he set down the chisel and dropped the hammer to the floor beside him.

He lifted the pick.

And slammed its tip straight into the corner of the petrulus’ agog, still-staring eye.

IV

A SPAGYRIC OF LIGHT

‘It’s a tincture,’ said Mehrigus, drawing out the little phial. He was speaking to Dormian, the watchman, but the man’s family clustered around him. ‘Just a powder, dissolved in alcohol and set beneath lenses shaped to capture celestial light.’

He didn’t tell them what the powder was made from.

‘A few drops, into each eye, morning and night. Do you understand?’ he said, turning to the man’s son.

The boy nodded.

‘I will return in a week.’

‘Funny thing, you coming by here unexpected,’ said the watchman from his chair as Mehrigus was turning to leave.

‘A fortuitous thing, I hope we shall soon see,’ said Mehrigus.

‘Yes, perhaps,’ said the man. ‘Though I shouldn’t like to get my hopes up. And, in any case, I was starting to think I was lucky, being wounded already.’

‘What do you mean by that, Dormian?’ said Mehrigus.

Dormian leaned forward in his chair. ‘The rot’s come,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Three days ago, there was an attack, a little way from here. More of the dregs, trying to force their way in through the east gate.’

‘What happened?’ said Mehrigus. He looked from Dormian to the woman sat beside him, to the boy. All were pale with fright.

‘The watch got up a militia and beat them off, but a lot of men were injured, and others are sick. They’ve tried to confine them, like,’ said Dormian, ‘but Brennia told me she heard it’s spreading.’ Dormian nodded his head. Mehrigus turned to the second woman.

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘People are taking sick all over the place. They’re saying it’s the rot. And now people are hiding them for fear of what might happen to them otherwise, so there’s no one with any idea of how to help them…’

Mehrigus pulled his robes tight about his face as he hurried through the streets. He was hopeful, he was curious, but he had no wish to be his own patient.

So the rot had come. A plague was upon the town and people feared it heralded worse to come. By all accounts, so afflicted were those dregs who had assaulted the city that they should have succumbed long ago. No one could really believe this was some mere mortal malady.

As Mehrigus approached the east gate barracks, two men emerged from the sides of the road, barring his way. Watchmen.

‘Turn back,’ said the man on the left. ‘No one’s to go any further.’ He put his hand to the hilt of his sword where it hung by his side to reinforce his point – his mate held a cudgel, though both looked terrified.

Mehrigus calmly raised a hand as he approached.

‘I know the danger,’ he said. ‘If you won’t let me pass, please, go and tell your captain that Mehrigus the apothecary is here.’

The man with the sword kept his eyes fixed on Mehrigus. The man with the cudgel looked from Mehrigus to his fellow watchman and back again. Seeing that his comrade was unsure of what to do, he stepped closer, whispering, though he couldn’t prevent himself being heard.

‘Mehrigus. He’s the apothecary that saved Dormian,’ he said.

The man with the sword looked Mehrigus over again, as if weighing up the man when he was really weighing up the situation – he didn’t actually have any good idea of how to do either.

‘Alright,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll let you through, but understand this – I can’t be letting you back out without the captain’s say so. Go on, if you choose…’

Mehrigus offered a solemn nod, the collar of his inner robes still pulled up over the lower half of his face, and carried on towards the barracks.

Mehrigus watched the leeches writhing in the jars on his desk. Three generations, left to right. The first were grossly afflicted – they were the same leeches he’d placed on the confined victims in the barracks, allowing him to capture samples of the rot. He popped the lid from the jar and reached for his tongs. He lifted one of the rotten leeches from the jar, and dropped it into the next one.

This second generation of leeches were a slick, oily blue-black colour. They swarmed over the afflicted leech, their mouth parts rending chunks from it. The rot spread, appearing in buboes and boils on their skin, but died away almost as quickly. The leeches, at least, Mehrigus could make strong against the rot.

He collected another of the afflicted specimens from the first jar, and dropped it into the third jar, the one on the right. The leeches in this jar shimmered with purples and blues. As they feasted on the infected leech, buboes, boils and welts appeared across their flesh, sickly grey, green and yellow erupting on their shimmering, periwinkle flesh. But these marks of the disease didn’t merely die away. Where they erupted, they soon burst, birthing new leeches, oily and purple-skinned, free of the taint, which even then died away on their parent.

This was another step forward for Mehrigus – taking the disease’s vitality and turning its energies against it, binding them to the leeches’ own essence. But it was not enough. The leeches might feed on diseased flesh, but they could cleanse the rot only by stripping it away. Its victims would be stripped, scarred, mutilated. Saved, perhaps, but half-ruined by the leeches, killed by them if the rot went deep enough. It was more poison. Mehrigus would need more potency than this if he was to truly heal.

He returned the lid to the jar of infected leeches and turned back to the pages of the Book of Transformations.

V

A BALM OF ICHOR

Ngja appeared above the door. Mehrigus looked up but didn’t move, as if waiting for a more definite sign from his pet. This had become the norm, as if he had become loathe to imagine there should be any tedious mere apothecary’s business to distract him now. The lizard threw back his head, unimpressed, and chittered again, but there was no need.

‘Mehrigus!’ came a booming voice from below. ‘I’ve gots your guts and I’m here for mi’ gold!’

Mehrigus set the baetylus and the engraving tool down on his desk, atop the pages of the book, and hurried down the stairs.

‘’Ere it is,’ said the surly duardin, Grimendahl, not seeming to care much whether Mehrigus had arrived to hear him or not.

He slapped a heavy, and rather bloody, cloth sack down on the counter as Mehrigus entered.

‘What’s that?’ the Apothecary asked, peering down at the grizzled adventurer and his comrades.

‘You know what it is!’ said Grimendahl. ‘You asked for it!’

Mehrigus picked up an iron rod from beneath the counter and opened the mouth of the sack. ‘It’s the head. That’s not what I asked for, Grimendahl.’

‘It is,’ said the duardin, turning red. ‘Hydra’s blood, you said. That thing’s full of it!’

Mehrigus sighed. ‘I thought I’d been quite clear. Blood from the body, not the head. It doesn’t grow back from the head, does it? It grows back from the body. The head is the part that dies.’

‘Guts, ’eads, legs, can’t tell ’em apart with them hydras. Can’t tell its ’eads from its tails or any of ’em from its–’

‘Ignore our friend here,’ said Ostion, Grimendahl’s human companion, and a man who spoke curiously well for someone who’d fallen in with a disgraced duardin, an alcoholic priestess and a seasick pirate. ‘He’s obsessed with the heads. And he’s playing with you. We have what you need, Mehrigus. And it will be worth every single gold coin… but I’m sure we would all like to see them first.’

Mehrigus disappeared from sight and returned dragging a heavy wooden chest. He hauled it in front of the counter and nodded at it. Ostion did the same to Grimendahl who kicked it, then, cursing that it hadn’t magically opened when he did so, stooped and lifted the lid. The odd band, all four of them, seemed pleased enough with what they saw. Ostion nodded to another of the duardin, Kaliqar, who then stooped to reach into the sack at his feet. He brought out a large, earthen jar and set it on the counter. Mehrigus reached out to remove its lid.

‘Take care with that…’ said Ostion. He and the rest of his party were already shuffling away, dragging the chest behind them.

‘Thank you, all,’ said Mehrigus, unconcerned with their presence now he had what he wanted. ‘I will be quite careful with it.’

He removed the lid. Inside, just large enough to be visible above the surface of the pool of blackened blood that surrounded it in the jar, was the heart of a hydra.

Mehrigus followed Dormian across the courtyard and into the small basement where the wounded man lay feverish on the hay.

‘Paluris, I’ve brought an apothecary to see you,’ Dormian said, but the man was feverish and insensible. ‘I told you, he’s the one who fixed my eyes.’ Another moment went by without reply, and Dormian simply gestured towards the prone man. Mehrigus nodded and stepped closer. A woman, the wife of one of the other watchmen, Mehrigus was told, sat on a small stool beside the man, periodically checking his fever and mopping his brow.

‘They cut off his leg?’ said Mehrigus, crouching down beside him.

‘As soon as that chirurgeon saw a sign of the rot,’ said Dormian. ‘See what I mean about starting to think I was lucky?’ Dormian offered a grim chuckle. ‘But they saved him doing that, didn’t they?’ He seemed earnest.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mehrigus. He doubted it. This was simple butchery to him now. And the rot, well, Mehrigus couldn’t for a moment say it aloud, but the rot was growth, life, change, in its own way. Its fecundity might even have been turned to healing the man’s other wounds if Mehrigus had been brought here sooner. Still, Mehrigus had no need of such extra potence. Not anymore.

Mehrigus pulled a brass pot from his satchel. It had no lid, for the ichor inside was set solid, like black wax. Mehrigus took a knife from his robes and carved out some of the ichor from the centre of the pot, making a small well.

‘Leave me, please,’ he said to the others in the room. Dormian and the woman looked from one another to Mehrigus and the wounded man, Dormian shrugging to show that he saw no reason not to do as the apothecary asked. His clear, seeing eyes were evidence of his ability. They left.

Mehrigus set the pot down in the hay between the man’s legs. He took a tourniquet from his robes and bound it around the thigh of the man’s surviving whole leg. He breathed deeply as he prepared to test what would be this near-ultimate transformation as cure, then he put the point of the blade to the man’s leg, below the tourniquet. Quickly, he snatched up the pot to catch the blood that came streaming forth.

Mehrigus let the pot fill and flow over, then set it down again in the hay. He stitched and bandaged the cut he had made, then took the same knife and began to stir the blood and ichor, incanting the words he had gleaned from the Book of Transformations.

Essence, substance, enchantment.

The balm writhed and lashed, momentary shapes, waiting to be flesh…

VI

A COURSE OF LEECHES

Mehrigus sensed another presence in the room. He looked up, calmly, from his desk. He had been without fear for days. He had been transformed by certainty.

Trimegast stood in the doorway, at the head of the stairs. Ngja was nowhere to be seen. Mehrigus smiled.

‘You heard,’ he said.

‘I wondered,’ Trimegast replied. ‘It goes well, I think.’

Mehrigus smiled. ‘Perfectly, I think. I’ve deciphered more of the book and–’

Trimegast stepped into the room. Mehrigus paused, struck for a moment by the man’s seemingly greater stature. The infirmity he had seen before was gone.

‘Hmm?’ said Trimegast.

‘Oh, yes, I’ve deciphered more of the book and I have the proof I need. Of transformation as a cure.’ Mehrigus couldn’t help himself. He grinned.

‘You seem pleased,’ said Trimegast.

‘I am ready to show them all how mistaken they have been.’

Trimegast frowned. ‘You think the mistaken are willing to see it?’

‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus. ‘When I–’ Something about Trimegast’s stern gaze silenced him. The old man stepped closer. He peered at something on Mehrigus’ desk. The baetylus. Mehrigus watched him as he took it carefully in his hand, long fingernails tracing its geometries as he examined it. He smiled, pleased, and set it back down.

‘Perhaps… perhaps I will attempt one more proof before I show them,’ said Mehrigus, coy now.

‘Perhaps,’ said Trimegast, turning and descending the stairs. Mehrigus did not follow.

Mehrigus woke with a start. This had been happening more and more lately. He sat there, dazed. He couldn’t remember going to sleep, or what he had been doing before that. He didn’t know why he’d awoken as he had.

Then the banging started again.

He rolled out of bed, running a hand over his face as if to lure himself into consciousness. Ngja was on the wall beside the door, chittering furiously. Mehrigus seized up his robe from the floor and shot down the stairs.

‘Help! Help!’ came the voice, half drowning itself out with the frantic banging on the door. At least, Mehrigus assumed the banging and the voice were one and the same.

He opened the door.

A man fell into the shop, stumbling down the shallow steps behind the door. He collapsed on the floor at their feet, legs splayed, just about propping himself up on his hands as he coughed and wheezed. Mehrigus stepped slowly around him, willing only to nudge a little wooden stool towards the man with his foot. He was dressed in rags that were worse than tattered, matted hair poking through holes in a torn hood, sores and pustules covering his arms and legs.

‘I need… an… apothecary,’ he hacked. ‘I need… Mehrigus.’ The voice was a spiteful hiss.

‘Well, which one is it?’ said Mehrigus. ‘Mehrigus or an apothecary?’ It was a strange sort of vanity that seized him – he’d been ridiculed for so long while hoping for acceptance that it filled him with an odd sense of satisfaction now to think of himself as something more than a mere apothecary.

The man raised his head, glaring at Mehrigus with one good eye. It was clear he was desperate and had no time for this game. He hauled himself up onto the stool, panting and heaving.

‘I need the apothecary… Mehrigus… The rot… The rot…’ A drip-drip-dripping sound joined the noise of the man’s sputtering breath, and droplets of something began to patter onto the floor around the little stool. The man was horrifically afflicted. Mehrigus couldn’t quite believe he had made it here. In desperation, he supposed.

‘I don’t know if I can help you,’ said Mehrigus.

The man laughed. A wicked, snickering laugh. The hissing of his breathing could have been coming from anywhere – his mouth, his neck, his open wounds – as he did so. His hand shot out from his stinking robes and grabbed Mehrigus by the wrist. Mehrigus’ skin burned where the man touched it.

‘You can!’ hissed the rotten man, what seemed a terrible roar giving way to the most perverse laughter.

Mehrigus ground his teeth. His hand shot to the baetylus hanging around his neck. He clenched it in his left hand, even as his right hand burned, still clutching his staff. His fingers searched out its geometries, running over them to draw out the shapes of those most powerful symbols – the symbols of transformation – and the rotten man shrieked as the baetylus’ power lashed out at him. The burning receded and the afflicted hand recoiled.

The man screamed in pain.

‘Listen,’ said Mehrigus, angry now, but determined to take the opportunity fate had presented him. ‘You are terribly afflicted. That rot does more to you than you know. Your soul is in a worse state already than this miserable body of yours. But I will try.’

Mehrigus stood and paced across the room. He bolted the door and led the man into the secluded back room of the shop.

The man lay on the layer of thin sack cloth Mehrigus had rolled out on the floor. Fumescences filled the room, their smoke drifting from braziers around the walls. Mehrigus set the heavy glass jar down on the little table beside the man. He removed its broad lid slowly with both hands, setting it down carefully on the table beside the jar before reaching for his tongs, and picking out a huge, two-headed leech, grown fat on hydra’s blood and worse.

Mehrigus lowered it towards the man’s face, towards the gaping, horrific wound on his cheek. He set the leech to the diseased canker and carefully loosed his tongs. The huge leech quivered, slapping its tail against the man as it rolled its body over to bring its mouthparts to the diseased flesh of the open wound, latching on at once. The leech fed with one mouth, tearing at the rotten flesh, and the rot spread down its own body as it did. The leech’s flesh boiled with pustules and boils, but as it changed it came to match the man’s own diseased flesh and then, as the rot died away on the leech’s writhing skin, it came to take on the appearance of something else – healthier, human flesh. The leech’s second head bit on now, spewing out a black ichor from around its mouthparts, but it did not rend. Instead, the transformation that he’d begun in the leech’s flesh spread to the man, the rot dying away around the parasite’s bite, ichor spilling and changing, turning into fresh, pink, healthy human flesh. The leech itself was consumed by this transformation, its fat body thrashing away to nothingness as it gave up its substance to restore to the afflicted man what the rot had taken.

But the man howled in agony. Mehrigus knew well that the cause of this rot was dark and terrible, and it would not be easily undone by the physics and magics of a mere man. Great buboes grew on the man’s body, bursting as they swelled and casting blobs of pus and angry, red, bloodstained spores into the air. Mehrigus reached with his tongs for another leech. He pulled back the man’s tattered robes and dropped the fat, quivering thing into the worst of the wounds he could see on the man’s side, but the rot still attacked him and the man kicked and thrashed.

Mehrigus could not wait. He picked up the glass jar and shook it, hurling a rain of bloated, two-headed leeches over the man.

It was a feast. The leeches attacked the rot, here and there even fighting their brothers and sisters for the taste. Their potency was great, perhaps even greater than Mehrigus had hoped, and in their frenzy, many split, one gnashing head pulling free from the other, a second bursting from each as the leeches multiplied, tearing at flesh and vomiting forth black ichor.

The man screamed and wailed, thrashing his legs, ragged fingers tearing at his own flesh where the leeches worked. Their bulbous bodies quivered, the transformation rife, but it was too much. No longer did the writhing leeches take on the shade of healthy, living flesh, but as they thrashed instead their tails grew into a mass of lashing tentacles of vivid pink and blue, melting into the man’s flesh and spreading their lurid colour across his body. Where the leeches stripped away the rot on the man’s face, they exposed for a moment the bone and cartilage of his jaw, his nose and his cheeks, and feasted on it the same way. Their flesh grew hard, and as the transformation spread grew into a great bony protrusion, like a beak, where they had eaten away the man’s face. The man’s screams were transformed, too, turning from gurgling howls into manic screeching.

Bile rose suddenly in Mehrigus’ throat. He grabbed an ancient sword from the wall and hoisted it above his head. He stared at the transformed figure writhing in frenzied agony on the floor, and brought the blade crashing down, severing the man’s – the beast’s – head clean from his shoulders.

VII

A GIFT OF CHANGE

Mehrigus’ skin ran with cold sweat. He sat on the floor of the shop, in the corner, his back to two cold stone walls.

There was a silver bowl full of water beside him. He cupped a handful of it and threw it on his face. His carefully prepared crop of leeches, sat in dozens of glass jars in crates in front of him, just waiting to be carried to the street and put onto carts to take Mehrigus’ ‘cure’ to the city. But now Mehrigus had seen the effects of his cure and had fallen into a stupor, a fog of clouded thoughts. He felt stretched by exhaustion, anticipation and now cold fear.

He hauled himself to his feet and staggered across the room. He clambered up the shallow steps and yanked the door open, stepping out into the street outside. He would find Dormian and Paluris. Mehrigus would need more proof – though he dreaded finding it – if he were to really admit he had failed. He wanted to see, again, his transformation as a cure. He wanted desperately to believe that the rotten man’s fate was down to his own sorry condition.

He headed across Mandringatte and west through the small streets, to the courtyard where Dormian had taken him weeks before.

The little basement was empty. The matted pile of straw still lay at one end but it didn’t look like anyone had been here for days. Mehrigus turned back the way he had come, up the stairs to the passageway between houses. As he emerged into the courtyard, a window opened above him. A man leaned out, yelling, bawling, sobbing. ‘What have you done?!’ It was Paluris. ‘What have you done?!’

Mehrigus stood dumbfounded. Paluris disappeared from the window and up ahead, where stone steps ran from the end of the passageway up to the floor above, the crashing of bolts could be heard. Paluris appeared again, in the open doorway, howling in rage. He stood there, whole again, in a way – one bird-footed leg gripping the stone of the threshold.

Mehrigus turned and fled through the courtyard and down the narrow streets.

Sweat was pouring from Mehrigus’ brow by the time he crashed through the front door of Dormian’s house and charged up the stairs. He burst into the little room Dormian and his family used as a sitting room. He couldn’t wait – he couldn’t risk being refused entry. He needed to see for himself.

Dormian was slumped in the corner, hands to his face, scratching at his eyes. The boy and the two women stood over him.

‘Horrors! Horrors!’ he yelled. ‘I’m surrounded by daemons!’ Dormian turned his head. Swirls of purple and blue clouded his eyes, the pupils barely visible beneath them – not blind, but all too seeing. Mehrigus could feel him fix his corrupted sight on him as he entered the room. Dormian howled all the louder. Mehrigus turned and fled once more.

Mehrigus left Mandringatte, hurriedly descending the steps down to the little lane outside his shop. He turned the corner onto that narrow street to be confronted by a mob, Paluris at their head, hobbling on his mismatched legs, waving a sword and screaming. Around him a crowd was yelling, carrying cudgels, swords, small axes, blacksmith tools – seemingly anything they could lay their hands on. They battered at the door to Mehrigus’ shop.

‘I didn’t mean any of this…’ Mehrigus murmured, weeping as he took an almost automatic set of steps forward. Something inside him was driving him to give himself up to the crowd.

But they hadn’t seen him. Not yet. Up ahead, the mob smashed the door from its charges and in they swept.

Mehrigus hesitated. He reached for the baetylus around his neck. He searched for the words to a prayer to Sigmar – they did not come. The baetylus felt heavier. He turned it over in his fingers, frozen in indecision. Over the weeks and months since Trimegast had gifted him the Book of Transformations, Mehrigus had carved it with new geometries. The runes were meaningless now – lost, all but erased by the lattice of lines that allowed Mehrigus to trace out any of the symbols of transformation and transfiguration he so chose. But it was changed beyond even that now – perhaps it had been for some time. As Mehrigus turned the baetylus in his hands, he followed the oldest of the lines he could find, but no matter how he turned it, he could not follow it back to where it began. The lines ran ever onwards but never returned – it was impossible. It was changed.

Mehrigus felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, gasping.

It was Trimegast.

‘Those who are mistaken will never be willing to see it,’ Trimegast said, beaming almost beatifically. ‘Come with me.’

Trimegast pushed back his robes, sheathing the sword he held in his hand. He was a foot taller than Mehrigus. He was younger, sturdier, more imposing than Mehrigus had even seen him before. He was changed.

‘They will not see,’ he said. ‘You see, Mehrigus. You see. Now it is time to leave.’

‘No,’ said Mehrigus. ‘They don’t understand… but it’s a mistake. The hydra… the leeches… the cure… It didn’t work… It will… I’ll… I will make it work. I will make it change.’

‘It is enough, my young apprentice,’ said Trimegast, pulling at Mehrigus’ shoulder. ‘You have shown them the power of change. A war is raging, but it is not between mortals and this trifling rot. It is a great game, a war between the gods. And you have shown you command the power to play your part in it, Mehrigus. Nurgle has sent his minions and you have mastered the gifts of change well enough to defeat them. For now. Our master is pleased. But these others, Mehrigus, they do not see…’

Ahead, down the way, the haphazard windows of the old shop erupted outwards into the street one by one, staves, axes and spears bursting through them. A few moments later, smoke followed, billowing.

‘One day it might be revealed to them, perhaps,’ said Trimegast. ‘One day. But for now, you must not be seen, my apprentice. Not like this.’

Up ahead, the mob began to emerge from the shop. They were led by the watch captain. He recognised Mehrigus at once.

‘They’ll hunt me. They’ll find me,’ he said, turning to Trimegast, pale with fear.

‘No,’ said Trimegast. ‘You have been given the gift of change.’

Mehrigus reached a hand into his robes, even as the mob dashed towards him. He fingered the edges of the sheaf of papers. The Book of Transformations. He looked up, panting.

Trimegast stepped across, swinging his huge, twisting staff in a great arc in front of him. Bolts of light shot forth from the gleaming arc, launching into the mob like arrows. Men howled when they struck them and Trimegast turned, grabbing Mehrigus by the collar and hauling him back down the street. Unthinking now, Mehrigus ran with him.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

Trimegast turned a corner – into a little alley between shops leading back to Mandringatte. But up ahead came a watchman. Trimegast leapt forward, striking the watchman down with his staff. He seemed untroubled by the effort.

‘I am Trimegastraxi’attar-i-qash, magister now to you, my apprentice,’ he said. ‘And you are right. They will hunt you. It is time to take the gift of change, Mehrigus…’

Trimegast reached out a hand, running pointed claws over the baetylus hanging around Mehrigus’ neck.

‘Take it, my apprentice. Take the gift of change…’

Mehrigus reached for the book inside his robes. He drew it out slowly, even as he heard the noise of the mob approaching. He ran his hands over it. He was drawn to a part he had never fathomed before. He knew what he needed to do. He could never allow himself to be seen again. Not like this. With the tip of a finger, he instinctively drew a strange sigil he had never seen before.

Trimegast beamed. ‘The Mark of Tzeentch.’

Mehrigus cast off his robes. He stooped and pulled the breeches and jerkin from the slain watchman at his feet, even as the mob approached. There was a puddle in the road beside him, and in the reflection Mehrigus saw, though he already knew, that his appearance was changed. He was taller, younger, his skin darker, his eyes changed from brown to green, his hair from straight and neat to shaggy and thick.

He placed the book on top of his discarded robes and conjured a blue flame around them – he needed those pages no longer. He turned and ran back to the head of the alleyway. The mob was approaching.

‘Where is he?’ yelled the watch captain. Paluris stumbled along behind him, and thirty or forty men after them.

‘He’s not here,’ said Mehrigus. ‘He must’ve gone that way,’ he added, gesturing on down the street towards the north gate. The mob hurried past and Mehrigus made to follow them before letting himself fall behind. He turned, his heart pounding, and slinked back into the shadows where Trimegast waited for him.

This, it seemed, was his fate. He could change it no longer.

FROM THE DEEP

Jaine Fenn

Something was wrong. Kelara kicked back from the kelp strand, her wave-wings trailing. A host of tiny, glowing nektons puffed out from between the shadowed stalks, mirroring her unease. An unwelcome presence touched the shallows of the Sea of Serpents: a malevolence on the tide.

She sent a query to the Naereids tending the nearby kelp fronds.

I sense nothing, said one.

The nektons are restless, said another.

Invaders come from the shore! said a third, panic evident in her tone.

Kelara, more sensitive and powerful than her fellow custodians of the underwater forest, was sure now. We knew this day might come, my sisters, she called, silently but widely. Prepare yourselves!

Before the first acknowledgements came back, the wall of tawny green in front of her quivered, then burst asunder.

For a moment, Kelara thought she faced one of those who made their home in the green-above. But they had all fled or been killed long ago. Besides, this creature was huge – nearly as big as Kelara – and warped, its ragged furs bursting under the weight of its pallid, bloated body, limbs red with rashes and lesions. Its head was a great silvery sphere, encased in an open basketwork of woven rushes.

The apparition struck. A long, rust-pitted spear thrust straight for her heart.

She dodged, leaving a trail of bubbles.

Her opponent turned, stubby legs kicking. Like Kelara, its overall form was that of a shore-dweller. But the newcomer lacked the fronds, membranes and wave-wings that allowed Kelara and her Naereids to speed through the water. Its movements were clumsy and slow.

The invader brought its weapon round again. Kelara darted forward, under the probing spear. As the blow roiled the water over her head, she turned to swim face-up, towards the bright surface far above. When she passed beneath the interloper’s blubbery arm, she reached up and grasped the haft of its spear with both hands.

The creature was strong, but she had surprised it. Its grip on the weapon slackened, and Kelara pulled the spear free of its pudgy hands. Her palms stung at the spear’s touch. Ignoring the pain, she sped round in a wide arc, rolling through the water. The silvery head turned, tracking her movements. She whirled the spear round, turning it point-first towards the creature. Then she charged.

If her opponent saw the danger, it did not react. Instead of fleeing into the kelp or trying to defend itself, it turned its grotesque body, corpulent chest thrust forward.

The spear met flesh. The force of the blow jarred Kelara’s arms, but the resistance was momentary. The rusty tip pierced the creature’s taut skin, slid deep into the blubber–

–and all at once, her monstrous opponent came apart, skin splitting and peeling back, slack muscle and rotted organs erupting from its disintegrating carcass.

Kelara released the spear, kicking frantically up and away. She knew what this was now. This was a Rotbringer, a minion of Chaos. The corruption that was slowly but inescapably consuming the Realm of Life had finally reached her domain. She must evade the creature’s foul touch or risk succumbing to the taint it carried.

She swam clear, up into the light. When she turned to look back, little remained of the invader save an expanding cloud of brown and pink. A vile soul-stench permeated the disintegrating guts and blubber.

Where the filthy remnants touched the kelp, the fronds curled and writhed, then dissolved. In moments, the nearest strands collapsed, dissipating into stringy slime.

Most of her nektons had darted out of the creature’s way, but a few had been too slow. Caught in the noxious cloud, they burst. Each tiny death stung Kelara’s consciousness. A new scent entered the water – that of rot and decay.

No! Kelara’s cry was involuntary, but she had to watch. The corruption spread outwards, infecting the next strands along. Still the taint continued. Kelara let out a low, horrified moan. The neighbouring strands twitched and shrivelled at the edges, but they did not dissolve. The ball of blight was slowing, thank the Everqueen.

Knowing – fearing – such an attack might happen, Kelara had instructed her Naereids to hone their fighting skills. They tended the kelp forests in the shallows that edged the Sea of Serpents, quietly keeping to themselves while so many of Alarielle’s other children fell. They sometimes needed to see off slow creatures of the deep who, disturbed by the chthonian motions of the serpents far below, swam up to the shallows. Grouchy, confused and often hungry, the sea beasts saw the kelp forests as a source of food, and had to be discouraged. But the threat of Chaos was something else. They must be ready to meet it.

Kelara tuned into the voices of her sisters.

I cannot hold it off!

Help me!

There are too many!

Overlaying the fear and panic, Kelara sensed a furious determination to defend their forests to the death.

But what with?

Kelara had stashed an arsenal of sharpened serpents’ teeth in a cave to await such a day as this, but the attackers had used the cover of the kelp forests to sneak up on her people, and they had had no chance to arm themselves. She drew the only weapon she had to hand: the jagged-edged clamshell kept in a pouch at her waist, used to prune kelp stalks and scrape off parasites and encrustations.

Turning her attention back to her sisters, she focused on the nearest, Anela, and swam towards her, crying, I am coming!

Hurry!

Kelara slid between the green strands. Ahead, the kelp twisted and jerked. Kelara tensed in case Anela had dispatched her opponent and this was the sick by-product of its demise.

But Anela was still in combat with the tainted shore-dweller. The Naereid had one arm round its middle. This servant of Chaos showed a different form of corruption, being emaciated rather than bloated, and the skin on its scrawny limbs looked as if it had been scourged then left to fester. Its great silver head bobbed absurdly on its gaunt body.

The two were in a tight, macabre embrace, each trying to evade yet wound the other. The Rotbringer swung its double-headed axe down while Anela dodged, at the same time slashing upwards with her scraper. Intent only on their opponent, neither had seen Kelara.

She swam closer. Her fingertips brushed a strand of kelp, cut free during the fight. She grasped it; in such desperate times, anything might serve as a weapon.

The combatants turned side-on. Kelara ducked as the notched axe sliced through the water in front of her face. If she got behind Anela’s foe, perhaps she could strike with her scraper. But what if the blow triggered the Rotbringer’s grotesque self-destruction?

She swam back half a stroke and took hold of the other end of the kelp strand, doubling it up for extra strength. At a momentary pause in the frantic combat, she looped the kelp over the creature’s head, keeping a firm hold on both ends. The impromptu garrotte caught on the reeds around its silver forehead. The shiny surface rippled, and a gout of silver broke free and flew upwards.

The loop slipped down around its neck. Kelara pressed her knees into the scabby back, and pulled with all her might. The loathsome brute’s frantic movements slowed, becoming sluggish.

There was movement ahead, past the creature’s shoulder. Another Rotbringer pushed aside the kelp. Its spear was already out. Kelara shouted a silent warning to her sister.

Too late. The new invader wriggled forward through the water, kicking hard.

It stabbed sure and low. The Chaos spear found its mark.

The blow went in hard – straight through Anela and into her opponent’s gut.

Kelara felt her sister die. The loss tore at her soul.

She threw herself backwards as the vile creature dissolved into flesh and filth. Anela’s body arced away into the depths, impaled on the spear. Kelara looked away.

Anela’s murderer had lost its weapon. But how could she kill it without releasing its corruption?

Then she had an idea.

Rather than closing, she stayed above her opponent, turning an effortless somersault over its head. It followed her movement, tilting its disconcertingly blank face up.

As she passed over it, Kelara reached down. Her fingers curled around the reed cage encasing the giant silver head. She tugged hard, continuing her downwards sweep. The reed cage flexed and warped, ejecting bubbles, but didn’t move.

Cursing to herself, Kelara released her hold, coming down behind the Rotbringer.

Leather straps crossed the invader’s back, holding the cage in place. She slashed at the leather with her scraper, even as her opponent struggled to turn and face her. The central knot parted. For a moment she feared she had cut too deep and broached the corrupted flesh. But the foul creature did not explode.

The Rotbringer flailed in the water, hands going to its head. Kelara kicked up again, grabbed the edge of the reed cage, and pulled as hard as she could. The invader briefly managed to hold on to the cage, then–

Plop! The cage ripped free of the scrawny neck. Gouts of bubbles burst forth. Kelara darted out of range of the rising storm of silver.

As she had hoped, there was a normal head under there. Normal by some values, anyway: this corrupted shore-dweller had patches of long, lank hair congealed with yellow pus from the weeping sores in the bald areas between. The hair moved like some vile parody of weed as the thing thrashed and gasped, hands raised to its throat. Deprived of the air in its bubble, it was drowning. Good: these were the first servants of Chaos she had met, and it appeared they were as helpless as any shore-dweller under water. Perhaps this explained why her realm had so far avoided the ravening despoliation she had distantly sensed in the green-above.

Kelara looked on, half watching the kelp around her for new threats. It took long, excruciating moments for the tainted shore-dweller to die but she had to be sure. Finally, its threshing spasms ceased. Kelara tensed, ready to scoot backwards out of range of any post-mortal ‘gift’ of corruption. But the body just flopped back and sank slowly into the depths.

Grinning in triumph, Kelara kicked upwards. From above she could see bare patches in the kelp all around. She called out to the dozens of other Naereids fighting their own battles nearby. Do not pierce them. Remove the contraptions on their heads to drown them!

She headed for the nearest Naereid. Timid and unarmed, Finala was dodging and feinting, trying to tire a foe she had little hope of overcoming. Kelara swept in from overhead, pulling at the Rotbringer’s bubble-helmet. This one was not properly attached. It levered off at once to expose a bald head alive with maggoty growths. She did not stay to see the thing die, though she revelled in Finala’s triumphant mind-shout.

In a nearby clearing – the result of an earlier death – two of her sisters struggled with a single opponent. As Kelara approached, one of them cut the ties while the other wrested its helmet off. Both Naereids swept back to watch the abomination drown.

Kelara lent assistance to more of her sisters. Where a Naereid was already locked in combat, she darted in and wrestled the cage from her opponent’s head. In other cases, she acted as a distraction, allowing the Naereid to take the offensive and remove the helmet herself.

Some of the foul creatures showed a vile cunning. Seeing the battle went against them, they plunged their own weapons into their breasts, triggering violent self-destruction. Kelara wondered what punishment awaited them on their return to the green-above, to make such a fate attractive. Or perhaps they were simply insane, mindless creatures of Chaos.

Finally, as the last drowned invader’s body sank to the depths, Kelara surveyed the damage. One in ten of her Naereids had perished. A quarter of the forest had been destroyed or harmed. But the blight showed no sign of spreading beyond its initial, explosive infection. It could have been far worse.

She led the uninjured Naereids down to where the kelp anchored itself to the rocky sea floor, to locate both their fallen sisters and the weapons and equipment of the Chaos invaders. Their own folk would remain untouched, though when time permitted Kelara would speak words of blessing over them, before leaving the silt-worms and spine-urchins to return the dead to the cycle of life. But every tainted item from the green-above had to be ejected from the sea.

Once, before Chaos had wracked the land, this part of the coast had been the shore-dwellers’ greatest settlement. Here, they had honoured the sea-dwellers they lived in harmony with. But those days were long gone. Every last shore-dweller had either been slain or corrupted, their homes abandoned, their fields left barren.

The corrupted shore-dwellers who attacked her realm must have been a lost enclave, or perhaps a tribe from distant lands; her knowledge of the wider realm beyond the immediate shoreline was limited. It had been years beyond counting since she had ventured into the green-above. As the shore-dwellers had died or left, she had less and less reason to do so. Even the seasons had drifted out of kilter, as the mountains that shepherded the winter became erratic, turning summer to barren cold, then withdrawing to bring sharp and disastrous thaws. Terrible things had happened in the green-above, and it was best avoided.

Once the weapons and fragmentary armour were gathered, Kelara and her Naereids took up their burdens, bundling them in green weed to protect themselves from the dark burn of corruption. Although the forces of Chaos should have moved on by now, Kelara would not let her Naereids go ashore without knowing what they faced. She took the initial steps out onto dry land alone.

Her first feeling was of relief: although the air was ripe with decay, no Chaos horde lurked on the shore, poised to attack any who dared leave the sanctuary of the sea. There was no one here at all.

Then she saw what the green-above had become.

If she had been capable of shedding tears, she would have wept.

Sorcery, you say?

Aye, my lord cousin. Kelara had floated free of the palace floor; she pushed herself back down with a languid wave. Having to stand was one of several inconveniences she endured when she visited Lord Usniel’s reefcastle. Some enchantment trapped the air they needed in a reed cage around their heads.

But it was easily overcome, yes? Just a matter of removing these breathing helmets. The Lord of the Deeps squatted on his dais. Usniel was only man-shaped from the waist up – as befitted the guardian of the great serpents, whose own tails reached into the very roots of the world, in place of legs he had a pair of coiled serpent-tails.

At great cost, as I said! And if the forces of Chaos make such an effort once, then will they not try again?

If they do, they will fail. Nothing from above can overcome us. This is not their realm, and never will be. He gestured heavily, leaving a tracery of lights in the water. His massive body, like the palace walls themselves, was encrusted with glowing nektons.

I hope you are right. She hesitated, knowing the argument was most likely lost before she made it. Yet she had to try. But you did not see what has become of the green-above. There is no green there anymore, save rancid slime and rot. Every part of the land is taken by pestilence. Beyond the tide-line, all that remains is a carpet of vile and stinking skull-like blooms protected by infected thorns.

Hmm. I will have to take your word for that.

Another reason she disliked coming here was the pressure – pressure the Lord of the Deeps needed to survive. Kelara lived among the kelp forests of the shallows, and could briefly visit Usniel’s deep, dark realm. Usniel – older still than her – was both arbiter of and voice for the serpentine beings whose slow, cyclopean motions moved the very waters of the world. While some of the great creatures he commanded could come to the surface, Usniel himself could not leave the deeps.

She deployed her final argument. My lord, the winter mountains themselves have succumbed to Chaos!

The Jotenbergs? That cannot be! For the first time, Usniel’s craggy face showed concern. Like his world-serpents, the mountains that moved were creatures beyond the reach of war or death. They were the bedrock at the heart of the realm of Ghyran: massive, solid… incorruptible.

I only saw one. But rot had infected it. And if one of the living winters has been corrupted, then surely others may have been. She pressed home her argument. Every year the blight intrudes deeper into the kelp forests. My Naereids can barely contain it. And now the forces of Chaos strike directly at our realm. Cousin, we have stood by for too long. We must fight back!

For some moments Lord Usniel was silent. Finally, he said, Resist, yes, but not fight.

Resistance is not enough! While Queen Alarielle rests in her sanctuary, the ruination grows unchecked. We must join with the sylvaneth, and all those in Ghyran who remain faithful to the Everqueen, and combat this threat. How can you just stand by?

You speak out of turn, my lady. You are a creature of the shallows. It pains me that your guardianship of the kelp forests brings you so close to this corruption, but I am the Lord of the Deeps and I do not feel–

A soundless scream tore through the depths.

The Everqueen!

Kelara had never met her queen, but Alarielle was the Mother of All, font of all life in the Jade Kingdoms. Even while she remained hidden in her distant green sanctum, her presence had permeated the realm. But now her refuge had fallen. Her response was a world-shaking shriek of horror and dismay.

Kelara looked to Usniel. His face reflected her shock.

He lifted a heavy arm. Go to your folk, little cousin!

Kelara nodded. Leaving Usniel in his gloomy throne room, she swam past constellations of nektons and up into the light.

Her Naereids had been replanting kelp lost to the Chaos attack. She found them floating unmoving, stunned by the reverberations of the Everqueen’s anguish, or else huddled together, comforting each other.

To me. We must arm ourselves!

The Naereids responded as best they could, and Kelara marshalled them. They took their places on the borders of the forest, serpent-tooth spears out and gazes fixed on routes from above. But no attack came.

When night fell and peace still reigned below, Kelara led a small party of her best fighters to the green-above. The darkness hid the worst ravages of Chaos and no further horrors greeted them. The land remained empty and barren under its crust of corruption, just as she had last seen it.

Finally, with the raw wound of Alarielle’s cry fading, Kelara conceded there was no immediate threat.

But her spirit would not rest.

In the days following the Everqueen’s scream, Kelara patrolled her territory and trained her Naereids without cease. But the next move in the great conflict took a form she could not have imagined.

She was swimming through the kelp forest in fitful daylight when the sky darkened overhead. A storm was brewing. Kelara’s sense of foreboding grew. Suddenly she felt a hint of hope and power, a distant song. She tried to focus on the entrancing soul-melody but it was faint, and not directed her way…

All at once, an unearthly chill spiked down from above. The water overhead solidified, turning instantly to ice.

Kelara did not think – she swam. Freezing water dragged at her limbs. She swam faster, angling downwards.

The frigid, deadly front fell behind. Still she did not slow. Only when she reached the sea bottom did she turn and look back. A full third of the water above was solid ice. Around her, on the shadowed ocean floor, Naereids looked around in alarm; mercifully, those not on patrol had already been down here, tending the newly planted kelp holdfasts. But some had been too close to the surface to evade the ice. She called her sisters to her.

Grab whatever will cut the ice, and split into search parties.

Each group of Naereids took a section of now-frozen forest. Listen for your sisters’ cries! she urged the rescuers as they swam away.

She herself led half a dozen Naereids to the nearest dark spot in the ice. Her mind touched that of Tiva, always one of the most measured and calculating at weapons practice, but now scared and on the verge of panic. Kelara drew her scraper and began to hack at the ice. Others joined her. Two had spears, which they jabbed and poked to loosen frozen lumps and work them free. Together, the rescuers broke through. Tiva tumbled from her icy prison, shocked but unhurt save for bruised limbs and torn wave-wings – she had instinctively curled up tight when the ice engulfed her, protecting her body and head.

The next Naereid they came across had been crushed to death before she could curl into a protective ball.

Another faint echo of life from nearer the surface had Kelara and the Naereids frantically digging up through the ice. One of the spears broke and the Naereid using it drew her scraper. Kelara’s own scraper was half-blunted. They were still a full body-length away when the weak presence faded into death.

As Kelara scanned the ice for more survivors, a sound too deep to hear yet too powerful to ignore boomed through the water. She stopped, her Naereids thrown into disarray by the thunderous reverberation. As the last echoes faded, the ice above began to crack.

Kelara turned, looking for sanctuary, but though the frozen sea overhead graunched and grumbled, only a few lumps of ice broke free. Even so, cracks showed all through the solid barrier above her head now – which might make the rescue easier. She bade her sisters hurry to reach the last few trapped Naereids.

Next they found Assani. Fleet of mind and body, Assani was one of Kerala’s most competent fighters. She had managed to break free by herself once the ice had cracked, leaving her full of confused fury. The second Naereid they freed was near death and was taken off to be nursed by her sisters. Nearby, another of their sisters was already dead: the movement of the ice had crushed the life out of her.

No further calls for help came. Everyone who could be rescued had been.

Do we go to your noble cousin now?

Kelara considered Assani’s question. Both the sudden freeze and the strange concussion that had partially thawed it had come from above, so they would be safer in deeper water. They could run away. Hide. Regroup. Wait out the storm. Usniel would no doubt applaud such a move.

She looked up. Patches of open water showed overhead, areas the ice had not touched, or where it had been shattered. Whatever this latest menace was, it came from up there. They had hidden away for too long; they had done nothing and now the fight had come to them. Kelara had acquired a serpent-tooth spear during the latest rescue and now raised it high, thrusting its point towards the green-above.

No. We go to war!

Yes! Assani’s fierce joy was echoed by her sisters.

Kelara sent her speediest swimmers for the last of the weapons. While spears and javelins were handed out, she scanned the sea with all her senses, wondering where they could best lend help.

Further out to sea, the water remained unfrozen. Here, great lumps of oily darkness were dropping into the water. They bobbed, then floated. A chill colder than the ice went through her. Even at a distance, the stench of foul magic was unmistakable. As another dark mass plunged into the water, then rose and froze in place, Kelara sensed its corruption as a nauseous reek, a bitter taste at the back of her throat that put her very soul on edge. She had no idea what the vile substance was, but it radiated Chaos.

She pointed with her spear. This way, my sisters. Drive the taint from our waters!

She longed to take on the freezing darkness, to eject its defiling influence from her sea. But as she swam towards it, she sensed both the size of, and the magical power emanating from, this putrescent parody of ice. Some foul master of magic was creating a great and abominable construct, reaching out across the open water. Such sorcery was beyond her ability to combat.

Hold! We must be cautious.

She led her Naereids to the edge of the ice, away to one side of the Chaos structure. Then she stuck her head out of the water.

The green-above was white. Kerala had seen snow before, but this was a blizzard fit to scourge the world. No scent of corruption tainted it, but the wintery gale swamped all vision and drowned every sound beneath its howl.

Then, through a gap in the whirling snow, she saw figures. At first she thought them shore-dwellers – men. But these were some peculiar combination of man and beast. Though they stood on two legs, their heads bore great curling horns. They wore ragged furs and skins, and even the snow could not hide their stench – a stench that was more than physical. These were creatures of Chaos. There were perhaps three score of them, meaning her Naereids outnumbered them four to one. At last, a threat they could combat.

She selected those who had some skill in fighting out of the water, the best part of a hundred Naereids in total. Follow me, she instructed. We can take them before they know we are here.

Kelara hauled herself up onto the ice shelf.

The beastmen, with no inkling danger lay in that direction, had their backs to the water.

The Naereids crept forward in a line, keeping low, weapons in hand. The Chaos creatures remained oblivious, intent on events near the bridge-like structure. Whatever was happening over there, it was hidden by the whirling snow.

A little nearer… she told her sisters. Too far away and they would not have the range. Too close, and their foes might sense their approach. When Kelara judged the distance right, she held up a hand. The Naereids stopped at once.

Now!

They hurled their javelins.

A third of the beastmen fell, skewered on thin bony blades. Would these foul creatures explode like the ensorcelled underwater invaders? she wondered. But they just dropped to the ice, gargling and screeching, much to her savage delight.

The surviving beastmen turned to face the unexpected threat.

Attack!

The Naereids rushed forward, Kelara at their head. The ice slid away from her damp, webbed feet, and she fought to stay upright. From the corner of her eye she saw two of her companions fall, while others stumbled, then caught themselves. Up here they were the clumsy ones.

Their opponents had their weapons drawn now. One scowling individual threw a rusty hand-axe, and a Naereid fell with a whistling shriek. The beastmen stood firm, braced to meet the charge, but the Naereids did not falter.

Kelara targeted a big brute with a broken horn and a necklace of red-stained fingerbones. Her first thrust was clumsy, the spear too light in her hand. The beastman knocked her blow aside. Kelara ducked under his pitted sword.

Having to fight on land robbed her of a whole dimension, but she was already adjusting to the lack of water resistance. Hand to hand, such free movement was a boon – she was faster than her opponent. While it was still completing its sword-swing, she brought her spear up from below, piercing the creature’s side.

The beastman grunted and staggered back, but did not fall. She had missed its vital organs.

She tugged the spear free, dodging to the side as her enemy’s rusty blade sliced the air. She extended the movement to pirouette on the spot, using the slippery ice to her advantage.

Her opponent was fazed; his next strike fell short. That was the chance she needed. Releasing her momentum, she stabbed side-on, spear braced in both hands. Her blow punched straight through the beastman’s chest, cracking ribs. It howled in agony, dropping even as she pulled her weapon free with a spurt of dark blood.

Another foe loomed out of the snow. This one was squat, with a single eye, the other just an oozing, infected scar. Kelara, elated at her success, thrust her spear into its remaining eye before it could raise its weapon. It screeched, warped hands clutching at the ruin of its face, and fell backwards.

She pulled her weapon from the beastman’s head and looked around. The nearest Naereid, Chella, was holding off two beastmen. Kelara sprang forward, plunging her spear into the back of the larger foe. It whirled. The spear, half embedded in its back, was jerked out of her hands.

Her opponent nearly matched her in height. It snorted through its pock-marked snout and raised a barb-ended chain flail. With its free hand, it reached back, knocking the spear free. The weapon slid away across the ice.

Kelara went for her scraper – even half-blunt, it should cut through this creature’s hairy flesh, if she could just land a blow.

The beastman began to whirl his flail overhead. Kelara took a step back, searching for an opening.

When the flail swung away, she darted forward, slashing at the exposed neck. Her scraper met only air.

The flail flicked down. Kelara dodged back, though not before a barbed hook nipped at her head-fronds.

She needed her weapon. Sparing a glance beyond her opponent, she saw whirling snow and grappling figures, but no spear.

The beastman grinned, viscous slather dropping from its jowls. It brought the flail around again, this time sweeping low, aiming for Kelara’s legs. She jumped straight up. When she landed, she stepped back. Retreat was her only option. This was not a battle she could win.

Even as she thought this, her opponent gasped, and looked down. There was her missing spear! Its point protruded from the creature’s chest.

With a strangled grunt, the beastman pitched forward.

Hah!

Kelara recognised the shout of triumph as Finala was revealed, standing behind the now-fallen beastman. The Naereid drew Kelara’s spear from the twitching body and offered it back to her.

Thank you, sister, said Kelara as she took the weapon. She sensed Finala’s pride at saving her, returning the favour from the first battle.

Finala must have come from a way off, as the two nearest Naereids were engaged in their own duels. As Kelara watched, Chella stabbed her remaining opponent in the guts, twisting the spear as it went in. The creature folded and fell.

With no threat nearby, Kelara surveyed the battle. It was all but won, with the last few heavily outnumbered beastmen being brought down. Bodies lay strewn across the snowy landscape, and ichorous blood steamed on the ice. Kelara reached out in a silent roll call. All but three of her Naereids answered. More losses to mourn, but they had won.

Her triumphant joy fled when a sudden gust of wind blew the snows clear for a moment. On the far horizon, beyond the sea of ice, loomed a mountain where no mountain should be. Nearer, on the ice itself, a terrible army was revealed. Unspeakable creatures beyond count marched, scurried, shambled or crawled towards the dark curve of the Chaos bridge: giant pot-bellied man-things with lesion-covered skin; a chittering horde of hunched and robed figures; hulking tribesmen in rust-red armour. Further off, their true size impossible to gauge due to distance, hunched figures rode monumental beasts covered in mangy fur, or bloated with rolls of pale, pestilent flesh. And everywhere, on ragged robes, on battle-worn shields, on flapping banners of tanned skin, she saw a three-lobed sigil. This had to be the mark of one of the great powers of Chaos, perhaps even the unspeakable entity the shore-dwellers had referred to as the Father of Plagues.

What could they do against such a fearsome multitude? She and her sisters had despatched a few unwary outliers, but that was nothing. This army could roll right over them without noticing.

Should she send word to Usniel, to let him know the war had come to them at last? Surely this would convince him to join the fight. If he could rouse the young serpents from the dreaming depths, they could turn the tide of this battle.

Even as she pondered, a brief flash of wonderment lit her spirit. She thought it came from the direction the monstrous army was heading. But it was faint, gone as soon as she focused on it.

Did you feel that? she asked her companions.

Yes!

The Everqueen!

Just an echo.

So weak…

Back to the water! instructed Kelara.

She divided her forces into a dozen shoals. Find out what is happening, my sisters. Go out under the ice in every direction. Look above wherever the ice is clear, though make sure you are not seen. Discover all you can of these momentous events, both above and below. Go with all haste, then return here.

While her Naereids scouted further afield, Kelara surveyed the extent of the ice around her kelp forests. Though she itched to join the fight, the odds were overwhelming; and while she waited to find out what could be done, she must look to the part of the sea she was responsible for. The ice was thickest along the shoreline, a solid rim. Farther out it fragmented, forming fissured promontories. Her forests would take harm from being frozen, but would survive – provided the forces of darkness did not win here today.

Once she knew the kelp forests were safe, she headed back to the rendezvous point.

One of the first scouting parties to return reported that the unfrozen sea ahead was dotted with broken ice and small bergs.

A second shoal, sent to find the extent of the open water, confirmed that the Chaos structure whose wrongness still polluted the sea was indeed a bridge; on its far side the ice remained pure.

A solid sheet of ice must have covered this part of the sea in the initial, magical freeze. Later, it had been partially shattered in the centre of the sea – perhaps when that great concussion sounded. But then, some unspeakable sorcery had been employed to bridge the gap between the two ice shelves.

Most likely the ice extended all the way to the far shore of the Sea of Serpents. Any remaining doubt she had was banished: this was the site of a great confrontation between the forces of the Everqueen and the minions of Chaos.

All her scouting parties were back now, save one. She had sent swift Assani the furthest. Had she been discovered?

Then a familiar mind touched hers. A moment later a score of lithe forms came arrowing through the water.

Assani! What did you find?

We scouted the shoreline on the far side of the gap, as you instructed. Even through the ice, we heard the commotion. We went above to see two armies facing each other on the ice. A host of woodland folk are ranged against the Chaos army, but they are sorely outnumbered.

Kelara could not let the sylvaneth face this threat alone. Yet to intervene was to invite the rapacious gaze of the enemy, and despite her earlier bravado, her Naereids were no combat-ready army. But this was not about the survival of one of Ghyran’s minor peoples; the future of the whole Realm of Life was at stake.

We must help them!

With Assani leading the way, Kelara and the Naereids swam as fast as limb and frond would propel them. To her relief, their path did not bring them close to the dark bridge.

The ice remained unstable at the edges, but when they reached the far side, the fissure Assani had used was no longer obvious. The ice was growing mushy, giving no easy access to the world above. We must find a way through! Kelara exclaimed.

The Naereids split up, searching for a route. A short while later a shout came: a patch of clear water and stable ice had been found. Kelara beckoned Assani to follow her while she bade the rest of her sisters wait for them.

When she climbed out of the icy water, Kelara saw that the snow ahead had abated. Some way off, she saw the backs of hulking treelords and fleet dryads. She had come up behind friendly lines. Beyond their swinging branches and plunging scythes, she glimpsed the snarling faces of warped tribesmen, packs of slavering hounds and the occasional larger figure: half-naked, long-limbed creatures with craggy, malevolent faces and scabby skin, swinging massive clubs or hurling boulders.

Assani, climbing out the water after her, asked, Should we try and get behind the enemy, to surprise them again?

It had worked against foes not expecting trouble, but the battle was in full swing now. By the time the Naereids got behind the enemy army and made their way back up onto the ice, it might be too late for them to make a difference. We may be of more use lending aid to the forest folk, perhaps fighting alongside them. Maybe we should–

Kelara’s words died as the blizzard cleared further, affording a glimpse of the full scale of the battle. The forces arrayed against each other stretched along the ice as far as she could see. Holding the line for the forces of Order were beings such as she had never imagined. They had the form of men, but were encased in shining armour of silver and blue. A double line, shields locked, faced the Chaos horde. Behind the wall of shields, more shining men raised ornate bows and fired arrows that burst into bright flame, raining down a storm of celestial fire on the seething mass of the Chaos army.

Assani echoed her amazement. What manner of man are they?

I do not know. Kelara called to her sisters below: All those able to fight on land come with me! The rest of you, wait here.

As soon as her companions had assembled on the ice, Kelara began to lope towards the strange warriors as fast as was safe on the treacherous surface. Suddenly a great roar rang out over the clamour of shouts and clashing weapons. A huge, bull-headed figure crashed through the armoured ranks, tossing the fighters around like driftwood in a stormy sea.

The beast turned, slipping on the ice, its tree-sized axe swinging. It had not seen Kelara’s small force but appeared intent on attacking the lines it had just broken through – a rear attack, just as Kelara and Assani had considered. The shining men, moving in perfect synchrony, had already plugged the gap. Focused only on the enemies before them, they appeared oblivious of the danger from behind. Kelara sped up, hoping to engage the bull-creature before it ran amok. But they were too far off, too slow.

A tight formation of armoured men appeared out of the snow and set upon the creature. Their leader cracked its leg with one swing of his weapon. The beast toppled onto the ice and his comrades fell on it, despatching their enemy with brutal efficiency.

As the bull-creature gave a final tortured bellow the warriors’ leader saw Kelara and ran over to her. He carried a great hammer, and the insignia on his massive shield was also a hammer, set between twin thunderbolts. His face was hidden behind a silver mask. Recalling the bubble-headed invaders, Kelara half raised her spear. The newcomer halted. Beneath the gore that spattered it, his armour was the blue of sunlight through pure water.

‘What are you?’ he called, perhaps taking in her frost-rimmed fronds and pale blue-green limbs, so different in form to the sylvaneth fighting on the ice. His voice was deep and hoarse, but that of a man, not a monster.

Kelara shaped her words into a form the shore-dweller could understand. ‘Not what. Who. I am Kelara, Guardian of the Kelp Forests. These are my Naereids. And what, I mean who, are you?’

‘I meant no offence, Lady Kelara. This land holds so many strange creatures. I am Retributor-Prime Markius of the Hallowed Knights.’

‘And why are you here?’

‘To escort Queen Alarielle to safety.’

‘The Everqueen! Where is she?’

He gestured with his hammer. ‘Ahead, but… your queen’s handmaiden wove an arcane song that drew on the last of Alarielle’s power. She commanded a living mountain to freeze the sea, that we may cross it.’

‘I saw that!’ The Jotenberg, glimpsed through snow. What else had the power to turn the sea from water to ice in an instant? Then the full import of the warrior’s words hit her. ‘But you say it was “the last of her power”?’

‘Queen Alarielle is… diminished. Her essence is now contained in some kind of magical seedpod. Her handmaiden carries it – her. Half of our troops remained behind to delay the forces of Chaos who seek this queen-seed. It is–’

‘–over there!’ Kelara pointed ahead. Now she knew what she was dealing with, she could sense the divine beacon of the Radiant Queen’s soulpod just over the horizon.

‘Yes.’

‘How can we help?’

‘The queen-seed must reach the far shore. Go to the aid of your queen.’

‘We will.’

As Kelara turned to go, the Hallowed Knight returned to the fray.

Once back under the ice, Kelara gathered her Naereids and, focusing for a moment on the distant, divine presence, led them away from the battle overhead and towards the Everqueen.

But they were under the ice shelf now. It formed an impenetrable ceiling.

Assani voiced her fears. How can we lend aid, trapped here below the ice?

Before she could answer, the queen’s presence flared, and a strange, silent song impinged on Kelara’s consciousness.

A moment later, the ice quaked.

Sudden creaks and groans filled the ocean, then the ice overhead buckled and cracked. Kelara stared upwards, eager to reach the action. But the quake did not abate. Anyone trying to surface risked being crushed, ground between ever-moving, interlocking sheets of ice.

We must reach the queen-seed.

Kelara sensed a pattern in the ice movement: it came from behind her. They were heading into a more stable region.

Then she saw light ahead. Not just the dull snow-filled light of day, but a divine glow as bright as pure sunlight. It had to be the Radiant Queen’s soulpod.

She started forward, drawn to the presence of her deity. But the way was blocked. Though the ice was not thick here, it remained unbroken. The frozen surface was thin and clear enough to see through; she made out spindly, distant forms that must be the sylvaneth. But so few, and moving so slowly! At the centre of their small group shone the transcendent light of the queen-seed, carried by Alarielle’s handmaiden – that must be the brave and faithful Lady of Vines, who was said to have sprung from the very body of the Everqueen.

Kelara cast her awareness wide, searching for some means to get to the Lady of Vines and her precious cargo.

Her senses recoiled at the touch of Chaos. The enemy was close, converging on the small party of sylvaneth. For a moment she thought she caught a dark echo of corruption and power in the water itself, but then her roving senses lit on a mundane and welcome clear spot – a gap in the ice.

This way. She shot through the water, her Naereids trailing behind her. The hole was some way from the Lady of Vines but it was their only route up. Hurry!

The gap was tiny, a body-sized fissure in thin ice. As she approached, Kelara scrutinised the immediate surroundings, checking for cracks or faults that could, should more shudders come, turn this from an exit into a death-trap. All appeared stable.

When she put her head above the freezing water, the air was full of chill salt mist, and the distant grinding of the ice competed with the sounds of combat: battle-cries from the throats of men, and the howls and grunts of their vile opponents. Above it all a song such as Kelara had never heard wove through the air, soft yet powerful, evoking days of light and life while compelling all who heard it to fight, to stand up against the forces of darkness. Summoned by the song, Kelara pulled herself up onto the ice shelf.

Ahead, through the mist, a heavenly radiance shone. Even at this distance the queen-seed filled Kelara with wonder. The Lady of Vines, who cradled it in her arms, had the form of a shore-dweller; though she was a branchwraith, her woody torso was encased in shivering creepers. The exquisite song came from her. She was surrounded by a dozen dryads.

As Kelara looked for the best route across to them, a shadow fell over the Lady of Vines’ party. A moment later, a spear of darkness stabbed down from the misty sky, skewering one of the dryads. The remaining dryads turned to face the threat, but their movements were sluggish and uncoordinated. The cold, which Kelara barely felt, was slowing these woodland dwellers.

Something comes!

The distant shout came from below, but before she could respond, darkness boiled overhead, and a miasma of Chaos assaulted Kelara’s every sense. She jerked her head up and met the blank, many-eyed stare of a giant fly swooping down on her. The green-skinned figure on its back held its twisted ichor-black sword high, ready to cut her down in passing as it flew towards the Lady of Vines.

Without thinking, Kelara hurled her spear. The bone tip buried itself deep in the rider’s flaccid gut, which was already marred by a pustulent wound. The Chaos-rider shrieked in surprised agony, and toppled backwards off its mount. The fly-thing flitted away, showing a swollen, diseased abdomen. Kelara refocused her attention on the deeps, from where a panicked chorus of mind-shouts was rising.

But the aerial abomination was coming back round. As it darted towards Kelara, a venom-tipped proboscis unfurled from the point of the creature’s great scabrous head.

She had no weapon, and the only escape route was cut off by the Naereid still hauling herself up through the ice-fissure. She could not even save herself and her folk, let alone help the Lady of Vines.

The ice beneath her erupted.

Kelara was flung upwards as the surface burst out and up with a thunderous crash. As she flew through the air, she caught a brief glimpse of grey flesh pushing up through shattered ice. She came down hard on ice that tipped the moment she hit it. Stunned, but saved from a severe concussion by the slippery surface, she slid helplessly back into the water, a rain of smaller fragments pelting down around her. She kicked down and away, tracing an erratic yet urgent path out of range of the turmoil. When sense had returned enough to know she was out of immediate danger, she turned and looked back up.

A great serpent, young enough to swim free but still as long as a kelp-tree was tall, thrashed and twisted above her, churning the icy surface to splinters as it coiled in on itself.

For a moment Kelara’s heart sang: Usniel had sent aid!

But something was wrong. Why would the serpent break up the very ice the Lady of Vines was fleeing across? Then she saw how its once silver-grey flanks were dull and scarred, pocked with open wounds and patches of raw, diseased skin.

The serpent had been corrupted. No wonder the Lord of the Deeps had refused her call to fight Chaos: the taint she sought to keep out of the sea had already taken hold in its depths. This epic creature had come from the deep, but not to help. It must have been summoned by the fell power she had scented earlier. The forces of darkness had subverted this serpent, using it to disrupt the Lady of Vines’ flight.

And it was not alone.

She tuned into the calls from her sisters. More serpents were heading up into the light, heeding the call of Chaos.

Closer, she sensed a small bright point, fading: the Naereid who had followed her through the fissure had been trapped, then battered and crushed by the shattering ice. Even as Kelara started towards the distant figure, the final spark of life fled.

A brief tide of despair washed over Kelara. What hope was there for Ghyran when its mightiest denizens, the Jotenbergs and sea serpents, had been infected by Chaos?

No, they must fight, no matter how hopeless their cause. While the Radiant Queen lived, the Realm of Life might yet recover.

Naereids, to me, she cried. We must stop the serpents! She kept her tone buoyant, though they all knew the odds.

While her sisters converged on her, Kelara swam over to the dead Naereid, and eased her poor sister’s spear from her unfeeling hands.

Beware below!

Alerted by Assani’s shout, Kelara extended her senses.

Not one, but two serpents were rising up from the darkness towards them. She dimly sensed her more distant sisters scattering and reforming in their wake, then the lead serpent loomed up from the depths. Its great head was thrust forward, the heavy frill that edged its cheeks and jaws flattened by its passage through the water. The huge, luminous orb of its eye was clouded, no longer the rich, deep blue of the open sea but a milky green, the colour of shoreline scum. Its anguish washed over Kelara. Insofar as the serpents felt such emotions, it hated what it was becoming – and what it was being forced to do.

The monstrous sea-beast ignored Kelara. Propelled by the sorcerous call, it arrowed past, homing in on the beacon of the queen-seed. Amidst everything else, Kelara could still sense the divine presence, whole, undamaged and on the move. But not for long. This was a threat the Lady of Vines was helpless against, perhaps oblivious of.

Even as she thought this, the serpent twitched and recoiled, as though struck by an invisible blow. The sweep of its tail swatted aside several Naereids. At the same time, the serpent thrashing overhead froze, going limp.

Both serpents started back into movement a few moments later. Yet they appeared oddly unfocused. The serpent at the surface turned on its tail once, then began to swim back down and away, only to pause, shudder, and circle again. The nearby serpent tossed its head, as though trying to dislodge something, then swam off, but at a diagonal to the Lady of Vines’ position.

Kelara, attuned to the sorcerous currents weaving through the water, saw the truth. Usniel was fighting back. From the depths of his reefcastle, he was extending his will, trying to regain control of his beasts, or at least divert them from the deadly mission the Chaos sorcerer had set them to.

Even as hope flared, a new apparition appeared. A third serpent swam upwards into sight. Bigger than either of the two she had encountered so far, this beast showed no hesitation, no sign that it harkened to the Lord of the Deeps. It was heading straight for the queen-seed, mindless insanity burning in its blank, monumental gaze. Kelara’s meagre magics could do nothing to affect the silent, sorcerous battle for control of the serpents playing out around her. But here, so close to the queen-seed, she could make a difference. This serpent was a creature of Chaos now. It must not be allowed to reach the Lady of Vines.

Stop the serpent!

Most of her Naereids had reached her safely. Every one still able to obeyed without hesitation. They exploded into action, swimming hard to keep pace with the beast as it slid through the water with sinuous swiftness. When they closed on it, they were going flat out. They would only get one chance.

Strike hard!

As one, her Naereids thrust their spears into the serpent’s diseased flanks. With several score hitting it at once, these pin-pricks got its attention. The beast convulsed, its progress arrested. It coiled in on itself, swatting the attacking Naereids as it sought the source of the irritation. Cries of agony exploded in Kelara’s head. The light of half a dozen lives went out around her.

Again!

Fewer spears hit home this time. The serpent writhed and twisted. Kelara ducked its swishing back-frill; once three times her height, the fronds along the creature’s spine had been eaten away to scabby lace by leprous growths. But even a passing blow, by any part of this giant of the sea, could end her life.

Though the serpent had slowed, the jabbing spears were little more than an irritation. They delayed the beast, but did no serious harm.

Kelara kicked forward and swam ahead, fighting to keep a straight course through the turbulent water. Keep harrying it, my sisters!

She reached the serpent’s head. Just off to the side, Finala hung limp in the water; half her upper body had been crushed to a pulp, wave-wings and one arm reduced to stringy masses of flesh and membranes teased into streamers by the swirling current. Kelara tore her eyes away from the heart-breaking sight and turned to assess her target.

One obvious point of weakness stood out: the serpent’s huge and baleful eyes, attuned to the darkness of the deeps. The half-blind eye on this side was overhung by a cankerous nodule that burst forth from the brow-ridge.

Kelara swam nearer.

The serpent still twitched and flailed under the Naereids’ spear-thrusts, but too many of Kelara’s sisters had been disabled or killed. As the remainder tired their attacks became less effective. The serpent started moving forward again.

Kelara braced her spear under one arm, holding it close to her body. Then she rushed forward, sleek as an eel. She held the spear ahead of her like a lance, aiming for the centre of the eye. An up-close vision of the slimy orb filled her sight. After momentary resistance, the spear went in, puncturing the tough surface of the eyeball then breaking through into the gelatinous centre.

The serpent convulsed. Kelara, remembering her encounter with the beastman earlier on the ice, kept a tight grasp on her spear. She held onto it – but the weapon itself was being eased out by the serpent’s frantic movements. It gave a last shake of its head and the spear tore free of its eye with a gout of thick green ichor. Kelara and the spear flew backwards. She braked her motion with a frantic kick and a silent curse.

The creature’s eye was too big. Her spear had not penetrated deep enough to do serious harm. Did it not have any vulnerable spots?

Yes, it did.

The infected creature had opened its mouth in a silent wail of pain when Kelara stabbed it in the eye. Before she could think better of it, Kelara swam between its gaping jaws and into the cavernous maw.

As soft darkness engulfed her, she noted the irony. She was surrounded by weapons such as the one in her hand. Some of this serpent’s teeth were missing from its rotten gums. For all she knew her spear could be a tooth shed by this very beast.

Thinking this, she grasped the weapon firmly in both hands.

For Finala! And Anela, and every other Naereid who had lost their lives to the march of Chaos. And for Ghyran!

Bracing her spear, she swam with all her might towards the far end of the living cave. Her weapon rammed into the soft skin at the back of the serpent’s throat. It met little resistance, and plunged deep. Her leading hand came up hard against soft, pulsing flesh.

The shudder that went through the serpent almost dislodged her. But she held on. She had found her mark. She pushed harder, pressing herself into the disgusting wall of spongy tissue in an effort to penetrate as deep as possible. A paroxysm of agony went through the serpent. The spear, slick with its lifeblood, slipped from Kelara’s hands. With nothing to hold on to, she was knocked backwards.

She twisted in desperation. If she could only turn, she might swim free of its mouth. Then the serpent’s tongue rose, catching her in yielding clamminess. Her last thought was of the queen-seed: a final, urgent hope that it would find safety. Then she was slammed into the bony roof of the serpent’s mouth. Darkness closed in.

Kelara blinked. There was something in her eye. She raised a heavy arm to clear her vision. It ached. All of her ached. Her leg was a throbbing focus of pain.

She opened her eyes.

She floated in the deep, surrounded by her Naereids. What happened? she asked.

We freed you. Assani gestured at a grisly object off to one side. After a moment, Kelara recognised the floating mass as the serpent’s jaw. Strands of flesh trailed from it. Her Naereids had torn it from the beast’s head. Of the serpent itself there was no sign. No doubt its body had returned to the depths.

Thank you. But what of the battle?

I am not sure. We saw some serpents turn back, though not all…

And the queen-seed?

We do not know.

Her Naereids lacked her strength; perhaps they were unable to sense the Everqueen. Unless… No. She must find out for herself. But the pain was distracting. Kelara looked down: one of her legs had been crushed. It would take all the ministrations of her cousin’s healers to mend.

Ah, Usniel. No wonder he had been so brusque. Brusque, but uncorrupted. He had known of the Chaos taint deep in his realm, and been battling it secretly. Yet he had not shared this with her, not showed his hand until the final moment. Between them they had tipped the balance, but she would still have harsh words for him when they next spoke… and then she would lend him aid. She had seen off the incursions of Chaos in the shallows. Once she had recovered, and mourned the dead, she would help her noble cousin drive the taint from the deep.

But that was for the future. And without Queen Alarielle, there was no future.

Kelara concentrated, focusing on the green-above, seeking some trace of the divine light they had fought so hard to save. Nothing. She did sense, distantly, that the two armies fought on. But the celestial presence was gone.

No, not gone! The light was distant; while Kelara’s Naereids fought to save her from the serpent, the Lady of Vines had reached her goal. Kelara homed in on the glorious brightness and saw, for a moment, a vision of the Lady of Vines stepping onto dry land, the queen-seed cradled in her arms.

Alarielle’s most faithful servant had crossed the sea and evaded capture – thanks in part to Kelara and her folk. Even now she carried the queen-seed farther from her enemies. Kelara sensed the strength beginning to return to the dormant goddess now she was safely ashore. She was gathering her forces, ready for the fight back.

The Everqueen was safe. Hope endured.

FAITH IN THUNDER

Robert Charles

Snow billowed through the mismatched timbers of the fighting pit’s walls. The wind shrieked like a chorus of the damned dead. A rumble of boisterous, drunken laughter echoed about the crude amphitheatre above. Niara Sydona gripped the rusty sword in white-knuckled hands, and ignored it all.

The frost sabre pounced. Niara urged sluggish senses to life and threw herself aside. A blur of iron-grey fur and a snarling feline maw shot overhead. Bones jarred as her shoulder struck the fighting pit floor.

Raucous cheers washed over her.

Breath burning her lungs, Niara stumbled to her feet. The great cat loped past, muscles rippling beneath fur. She spun, dimmed vision blurring as she strove to keep the beast in sight. Teeth snapped at her trailing heel. She twisted away and lashed out – more from frustration than conscious thought. Blood spattered the snow.

The frost sabre roared and shied away. Cheers redoubled. Heart pounding fit to crack her ribs, Niara sought new footing.

The frost sabre circled back around. One mighty tusk was broken off inches from the jaw. Not her doing. An old wound. Ribs showed through a scarred, emaciated hide. The hunting beast was starving, worn thin by winter. Niara knew it’d have killed her long ago, else. Still might.

Probably would.

Thunder rumbled in the unseen distance. Seemed there was always a storm breaking on the mountainside. Niara never glimpsed lightning, not through the undying snows. Couldn’t even see the valley below.

But she didn’t need to. Where there was thunder, there was lightning. And where there was lightning, there was Sigmar. Niara knew few truths, but that was the greatest. It gave strength to the body and snap to the limbs. And hope… hope most of all. She’d survive. She owed it to those of her patrol who had died on that desolate mountain.

A yowling roar chased weary reveries away. The beast sprang.

Niara breathed deep. The sword, once leaden in her hand, became an extension of her arm. She twisted from the snarling maw. Her rusted blade bit deep through fur and flesh. It shivered against spine.

The frost sabre gave a pained howl and crashed into the snow. With a final, shuddering breath it lay still. Niara edged closer. Death had a look all its own, but the hunting cats were cunning. A jab to the beast’s underbelly confirmed its spirit had fled.

The fighting pit exploded in fury. Niara let her head fall back against her shoulders, and took in sights made familiar by repetition. Ogors lurched to their feet, fists raised in acclamation or anger. Outrage contested the deeper gusto of laughter. Flesh-picked bones and wooden flagons the size of a man’s head rained down and shattered on churned ground. Gold glinted and changed hands.

Overcome, Niara let the sword fall. It joined scores of discarded weapons on the fighting pit floor. The first tremors set in.

A booming shout shook the air. It held no words. At least, it had none Niara understood. The crude ogor tongue sounded like rocks grinding together. But she knew the tone of command. Some things transcended race.

Little by little, the fighting pit went quiet. Above the open portcullis to the prisoner pens, a hillock of flesh and crudely stitched furs rose from a throne fashioned from a thundertusk’s ribcage. Dark eyes gleamed above an unkempt beard and chipped teeth.

The tyrant’s command came again. His ironstone maul thumped against the balcony’s ill-fitting timbers. He plucked a half-eaten joint of meat from a stone slab and tossed it into the fighting pit.

Niara caught it. A mere morsel for an ogor, it was a feast to her. The rich, smoky tang of the meat set her stomach seething.

Uncaring of the tyrant’s teeth marks in the bare bone, she tore hungrily at the gobbets of flesh. Warm juices trickled over her chin. She didn’t know the manner of beast it had come from. It wasn’t human. That was enough. She had certainly eaten worse in her days before the guardian’s oath. Concordia was like that: plenty above, scraps below.

Niara’s gaoler lumbered out of the portcullis’ shadow. Chafed lips cracked into a snarl of warning. Niara almost laughed at the farce of it all. She was exhausted, wounded and frozen to the bone, and the ogor reckoned she’d start a fight with a brute eight or nine times her size?

Fingers still tight around her prize, Niara mutely made her way back to the cage that had been her home ever since the ambush.

She’d done it. She’d survived another day.

The cage door slammed. The gaoler set the latch and lumbered away. A drunken roar sounded from the fighting pit, muffled by the cavern’s rock walls.

Niara sank against the wooden bars. Bound tight by strips of hide, they were perhaps not as rigid as Concordia’s duardin-smithed gaols, but they didn’t need to be to contain unarmed and weary guests such as herself. With a heartfelt sigh, she gazed up and down the uneven row of cages. Two dozen cells in all, packed tight against the walls. Some sat empty, others housed occupants as filthy and worn as herself – plunder from the ogors’ raids.

Every cell had a clear view through the broad portcullis arch and into the fighting pit beyond. A tantalising glimpse of freedom, if only the freedom of death. If there was another exit from the cave, Niara had never seen it.

She had never determined if the ogors intended for their pit fighters to share the spectacle, or whether it was intended as a cruel reminder of the fate that claimed them all, one by one. She didn’t know, and nor did she much care, for it would have changed nothing.

‘You still alive?’

Lothran Horst shuffled closer through the gloom of his adjoining cage. Filthy, unshaven and clad in the torn, baggy remnants of a Concordia Freeguild uniform, he looked like the worst kind of bandit, and not a stalwart defender of the fabled City of Spires that stood as bastion against the tumultuous beastlands. Not that Niara could hold that against him. She looked no better, and felt far worse.

‘Seems so.’ She thrust the remnants of the joint through the bars. ‘Saved you some.’

He snatched it away. ‘Thank you. I take back everything bad I ever said about you.’

‘Too late. You already did that three days back, remember?’

‘No. I’m not a glutton for misery. Every day’s the first day. I keep track of the days – much less remember what fills ’em – I’ll go mad.’ Horst turned the bone over and over. Emaciated fingers picked it clean of morsels. ‘Thanks. Could’ve kept it all for yourself. Should’ve.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

A lie. The meat she had wolfed had only sharpened her hunger. But Horst was one of hers. The last of hers. Duty went deeper than discomfort.

Horst fell silent, save for the smacking of lips.

Niara dragged the filthy, lice-ridden scraps of pelt about her shoulders. She hugged herself tight. The warmth from the fire never quite reached the cages. It certainly did little to upset the icicles clinging to the cavern roof. But the wind got everywhere. That was how Loth had died. Curled up to sleep, never to wake.

That had been what, twelve days back? Fifteen? Despite her earlier words, Niara had lost track of time. She measured passage by the dead. Kurt, Wennel, Markin, Dag, Sleever, Loth… a dozen more. Those who’d survived the ambush in the Pass of Jaws, slain for the ogors’ entertainment. Just her and Horst left. It was fitting, in its way. She and Horst had entered the Concordia guard together, escaping a scrabbled life in the gutters. Three years on the wall, Horst ever teetering on the brink of dismissal while she had earned a sergeant’s bars. Together to the end. The vagabond and the rising star.

Most other cages were empty. The last of the aelves, Methrin, had died that morning. Besides Niara herself, that left three: Horst, Bragga and Valruss.

The ogors’ sport was running thin.

‘For shame. You’ve saved none for me.’

Niara allowed herself a weary smile at the gruff mutter. Bragga stood unmoving in her cage. Her bare, stocky arms were folded, her gaze fixed firmly on the door. At least, Niara assumed that to be the case. The ogors had stripped the duardin’s armour away when they had dragged her from her crashed sky-ship. She’d gnawed a crude mask from a scrap of pelt to cover her features from chin to brow. A point of honour, or so she said.

‘Thought you Kharadrons didn’t believe in charity. Thought you had a code.’

‘The code? ’Tis stricture and guidance for well-fed mercenaries, not prisoners with echoing bellies.’ Bragga shrugged. Fire-cast shadows rippled across her leather tunic, setting etched runes dancing. The long, bloody scab on her left forearm – a memento of her most recent turn in the fighting pit – glinted wetly. ‘It might yet be that Valruss honours a duarkvinn by sparing her a morsel.’

It took Niara a moment to wrap her ears around the mix of guttural duardin and accented Freeguilder. ‘He’s in the fighting pit already?’

Of course he was. The cage to her right was empty. She had walked straight past him and never known, lost in a fog of victory and numbing cold. She clambered to her feet and peered out.

True enough, the broad-shouldered warrior stood with his back to the fighting pit’s portcullis arch, more statue than man. The battered mace that was his favoured weapon sat planted between his feet. Greying black hair twitched with every gust of wind. He stood otherwise immobile, without a flicker of the apprehension he had to be feeling.

‘You’re dreaming, skyborn.’ Horst licked his fingers. He stared regretfully at the now-clean length of bone in his hands. ‘Grimbody’s only out for himself. Reminds me of a priest I knew.’

Niara ignored the veiled insult. Horst had despised Valruss from the start, though the hatred seemed irrational to her. Perhaps it arose from the larger man’s imperturbable attitude. Sigmar knew Horst lacked for one of those.

She kept her eyes on the fighting pit. On the gate opposite the prisoners’ cave. The beast-gate, where the ogors kept their pets. ‘I thought you didn’t have a past?’

Horst tossed the bone aside. ‘Oh, I’ve a past before this place. Remember it like yesterday, I do. Because it was. Don’t let anyone tell you different.’

Niara shook her head. Horst’s peculiar sense of humour had seen him brought up on plenty of charges over the years. More than one officer had accused him of living in a world that bore only tangential connection to whatever counted as ‘real’. But now? Since their capture, it had been one dry, cynical jibe after another – sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes not – played for an audience that wasn’t laughing. She’d given up calling him out on it.

A drunken bellow issued from the fighting pit. The beast-gate creaked open. A gangling, wart-encrusted creature shambled into view. It was human-shaped, if not of human proportions: ferociously ugly, with tattered flaps for ears and ridged, sinewy limbs.

Niara caught her breath. A troggoth. Seemed the ogors had tired of watching Valruss slaughter wolves, frost sabres and the like. They didn’t want a fight. They wanted Valruss to die.

The troggoth rushed forward. A raucous cheer sounded as the chain about its neck went taut. The brute roared and strained. The chain creaked, but held.

‘Don’t look much like Valruss’ll be sharing much with anyone,’ muttered Horst. ‘Going to miss his sparkling conversation.’

‘Quiet!’ snapped Niara. She wondered why she bothered. Horst was right. In all the time they’d been fellow captives, Valruss had barely spoken a dozen words to her beyond his name. To any of them, far as she knew. He was as quiet as Horst was not.

The chain tore free of its mooring, or was set loose – Niara couldn’t see. With a ragged roar that challenged the tumult of the crowd, the troggoth barrelled towards Valruss.

He didn’t move.

‘Move yerself, grimbody!’ Horst gripped the bars, ambivalence forgotten.

Bragga grunted. ‘Thought you didn’t care?’

‘I don’t.’ His grip tightened, all the same.

The troggoth’s knuckles dragged against the frozen ground as it picked up speed. Drool splashed from slavering lips and steamed in the snow.

Valruss snatched up the mace and swung an arcing, double-handed blow.

The troggoth skidded, claws scraping on ice. The mace struck. The troggoth lurched, its expression more confused than pained. Shards of splintered teeth spattered the snow. Valruss, moving swifter than a man his size ought, stepped aside. The troggoth struck the ground with a muffled thud. The fighting pit fell silent.

A spill of sonorous – but gleeful – duardin burst from beneath Bragga’s mask. Niara found herself cheering. No words, just unfettered emotion. She’d seen him fight before, but she never tired of it. The man had been born to the battlefield.

‘Ain’t done yet,’ said Horst sourly. ‘My old ma said that troggoths regrow missing limbs. It’ll laugh that off. You’ll see.’

Valruss swung the mace down in a whistling, overhead blow. Once. Twice. On the third strike, Niara heard a dull crack. On the fifth, the troggoth’s head mulched like a palefruit.

Bragga laughed. ‘A strike worthy of Grungni’s hammer. That wazzok won’t rise.’

Satisfied, Valruss tossed the mace aside.

Before long, he was back in the cage between Niara and Bragga, the tails of his tattered blue cloak wrapped around ragged tunic and trews, and a hunk of meat from the tyrant’s table in his hand.

Niara nodded in greeting. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘Impressed! Impressed?’ Horst flung an agitated hand towards the fighting pit. ‘Too cursed quick is what it was. What if they send another of us out there? I ain’t fighting a blasted troggoth!’

Suddenly, Niara was tired of his voice. ‘Enough, Horst.’

Valruss gave no sign of having heard either of them.

In the event, no one else fought that day. The fighting pit fell empty and silent. Niara’s fellow captives found what ease they could – no easy business in cramped cages – while their gaoler laboured over a simmering cauldron.

Horst passed the time in fitful sleep. Bragga, as was her wont, stood facing the door to her cage. Sometimes it seemed to Niara that the duardin slept standing up. Maybe she did, but not at that moment – not unless she sang softly in her sleep. The melody smoothed the harsh edges of her words and set them sparkling like gemstones.

Valruss knelt in the centre of his cage, eyes closed and palms on his knees, motionless save for the gentle swell of his chest and the twitching bristles of his beard. Last night Methrin had still been with them, muttering away, begging for salvation from his distant gods. Niara wondered which of them would be gone tomorrow.

For herself, Niara couldn’t sleep. She’d been cursed that way as long as she could recall. Too long standing night watch at Concordia gate, she supposed. A body got used to it after a while.

Instead, she tried to recall her life before the cage. Names and faces swam in her memory, familiar and yet indistinct. Names perched forever on the tip of recollection. The more she strove to focus on features, the faster they dissolved. Even her parents’ faces seemed distant. Lovers, too. Maybe Horst was right to treat each day as the first. It was kinder that way. She’d been too long in the cage. Weeks. Maybe even months. Waiting to fight, waiting to die. It had become her life.

She longed for thunder. For the proof that Sigmar was near. None came.

Hours after snow-chased dusk faded into night, the gaoler at last turned from the cauldron and dropped a wooden bowl outside each cage. The day’s rations, such as they were.

‘Food,’ he rumbled, tongue clotting on the unfamiliar word.

Duty done, he clutched a fifth, larger bowl and ambled out of the cave. The portcullis rattled down behind him.

Niara dragged her bowl through the bars. The greyish-brown gloop commended little to sight, but to smell…? If she’d learned one thing, it was that ogor cooking tasted even better than it smelled. The brutes weren’t entirely without art.

She fished a lump of meat out of the stew. Her stomach rumbled.

‘Don’t eat it,’ hissed Horst. ‘For all you know, that’s Methrin floating in there.’

Bragga belched. She ran a finger around the rim of her empty bowl and licked it clean.

‘’Tis not gamey enough to be aelf,’ she pronounced. ‘By the plentiful Ice Wind, but these ogri know how to cook troggoth.’

Horst stared at his bowl with a fraction more disgust. ‘You eat troggoth back in Barak Skarren?’

Bragga shrugged. ‘Only a fool finds profit in an empty stomach.’

In truth, Niara’s own appetite had abated with the mystery’s resolution. But practicality won out. Rations were thin enough. That it tasted every bit as good as she’d expected only made it worse. When she was halfway done, Horst made inroads into his own meal. Valruss’ bowl was already empty, his meditations renewed.

‘No, no.’ Bragga tilted her head to one side in thought. ‘I’m in grave error. That is elgi.’

Horst spat a mouthful of stew across his cage. Niara’s stomach lurched. Bragga chuckled.

‘Harden your heart, manling. I’ve not eaten elgi.’ She folded her arms and lowered her voice. ‘But by Grungni’s Beard, I’d do so if it’d see me out of this place.’

Horst wiped his mouth. ‘Ain’t no way out.’

‘Sure there is. Portcullis is open during a fight.’

He scowled. ‘Open onto a fighting pit full of ogors.’

‘A fighting pit full of drunken ogors,’ Niara corrected. ‘Even sober they are slow-witted. One alone doesn’t stand a chance, but if we stick together, we might just fight our way out.’

‘Say that’s true,’ said Horst. ‘We have to get out of these cages. How do you answer that?’

Bragga crouched and fished beneath the scraps of matted fur at the base of her cage. Steel gleamed in the dying firelight. The broken tip of a sword, no more than four inches long.

‘Found this in the fighting pit yesterday. Scrap, it may be, but I’ll warrant it holds enough of an edge to slit the bindings on the bars.’

‘How did you get that in here?’ Niara’s pulse quickened. Maybe this was possible.

The duardin’s fingers danced across her forearm, against the wound that Niara now realised wasn’t a just a wound, but a sheath of bloody flesh in which the blade had lain concealed.

‘The search was lacking,’ said Bragga, ‘and my need severe.’

Horst let out a low whistle. ‘That’s… revolting.’

‘It will be no small labour, but I can loosen enough bars to get out. A steady hand and careful eye are necessary, lest the cage entire clatters apart. Fortunately, a duarkvinn has both.’ She tapped at the base of a bar, and nodded thoughtfully. ‘A night of toil, and I shall be free. Maybe one other at my side. But if we’re all to be out of this place, someone has to keep our gaoler’s eye tomorrow. That task falls to whoever goes into the fighting pit first.’

Niara nodded. There was no way to know who’d go in first. Best case was it’d be someone whose cage hadn’t yet been broken. ‘I can do that, if they come for me. Horst?’

‘What if we’re caught? More than that, what if we’re not? Where do we go?’

‘Anywhere,’ Niara replied flatly. ‘There is nothing for us here but death. At least we’ll have a fighting chance on the mountainside. Who knows, we might even make it back to Concordia.’

‘’Tis a breach of accord to say as much, but a Barak Skarren trade route runs a few leagues westward,’ said Bragga. ‘If we’re bold enough to make it that far, you can barter passage home.’

Horst scowled. ‘If the ogors don’t run us down first. They’ve cages full of hunting beasts, you know that. They’ll be on our heels.’

‘And how will you outrun them in the arena?’ said Niara. ‘If this is merely a choice between the ways of death, I’ll choose one where I’m free. Do you have a better idea? Chances are you’re dying in the fighting pit anyway. How much longer do you think you will last?’

He flinched. ‘I don’t like it.’

Niara bit away a flash of anger. Their numbers were slim as it was. ‘I’m not asking you if you like it. I’m ordering you to come.’

He stiffened. ‘Glad to follow you into death.’

She smiled. ‘As you should be. Valruss, are you in?’

‘No.’ He spoke without opening his eyes.

‘No?’ she hissed. ‘What do you mean, “no”?’

‘I have no intention of leaving. You may do as you wish.’

And just like that, they were down to three. Bragga raised the lower lip of her mask and spat on the floor. Horst sank back against the bars of his cage.

‘Called it,’ he muttered. ‘Grimbody’s only out for himself.’

Niara glared at Valruss, and dredged deep in her soul for words to change his mind. But a man who calmly faced down a raging troggoth was not a man to be swayed by bluster, and she didn’t know what it would take. Where had he come from? His accent did not hail from Concordia, nor from any place she knew… Though something about it was familiar, all the same. All she knew was that he had been here before her – before Bragga had been dragged from the wreckage of her sky-ship some weeks before. Maybe that was how he had lasted so long, by fighting when called to, and not getting involved in any damn-fool escapes.

She shook her head. The Dark Gods take him, anyway.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said instead. ‘But we’re still going.’

Niara jerked awake at the thunder-crack. She had dozed off. Pulse quickening, she scrabbled amongst the blankets for the precious scrap of steel. Bragga would kill her if she lost it.

Fingers closed on metal. Relief flooded in. She glanced at Bragga’s cage. The duardin stood in her customary position. Awake or asleep, she’d said nothing since she’d pressed the broken blade into Niara’s hand and clambered by into her gimmicked cage. The soft ripple of Horst’s snores washing over her, Niara wrapped one end of the steel in the blanket, and went back to sawing.

Thunder rumbled. The storm was getting closer. She peered up at the cave roof, and wished she could see the lightning.

‘You are afeared of the thunder?’

Valruss’ eyes flickered open as he spoke. He otherwise remained unmoving, knelt in his meditative position.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘It gives me hope. Sigmar is in the storm.’

He shook his head, crow’s feet in his skin reshaping into a maybe-smile. ‘So that is how you have kept your fire. You believe the God-King will sweep down from the heavens on a lightning bolt. That he will smite your salvation on the mountainside?’

Niara bristled. ‘No. Why would he bother with a handful of souls? But he might send his Stormcasts.’

A soft chuckle. ‘And what do you know of the Stormcasts?’

That was harder. She’d seen a chamber of Stormcast Eternals once, when they had fetched victory out of massacre at Rockfallow Gorge. Only from a distance, though. But what she knew went far beyond what she’d seen. Faith did that.

‘They’re heroes,’ she said. ‘They are salvation.’

Valruss scowled. ‘Heroes fall. And salvation is better claimed than sought.’

Niara stopped sawing at the hide and fixed him with a withering stare. ‘Then claim it. Fight with us tomorrow. We need you.’

‘No. I am already where I belong.’

She spat her disgust. The other’s fatalism struck a poor chord with his calm demeanour. ‘A rat in a cage? Why’s it so important you stay?’

‘Why is it so important you leave?’

‘Because I’ve a duty, that’s why. I swore to Sigmar that I’d fight for those who couldn’t.’ That detail shone true in uncertain memory. ‘I will choose death with a sword in my hand over any other.’

‘Duty begs you to go. It commands that I atone for surviving where my brothers and sisters did not. Only then will I be worthy of the storm.’

Worthy of the storm? His earlier words echoed back with fresh resonance. Heroes fall. ‘You’re a… Stormcast? No! They’re heroes who ride the lightning, not apostates in grubby garb and tattered cloaks.’

If Valruss took any offence, none showed in his face. ‘Never confuse the armour with the warrior within. The armour is divine. The warrior is flesh. And flesh is… fallible.’

Disgusted, Niara returned to her sawing. ‘Keep your lies to yourself. The Stormcasts are perfection. The chosen of Sigmar.’

‘Proclamation is not truth. To be a hero is to strive. Nothing more. It is certainly not perfection.’ One eye narrowed. ‘You named me Stormcast. Why?’

Niara shook her head, angry at herself as much as Valruss. Why had she? The man had the physique to be one of Sigmar’s chosen – and the battle-skill, sure enough. More than that, the title fitted him in a way she couldn’t explain. As if she’d glimpsed beneath the torn raiment. Or maybe she was weary… too weary to argue.

‘Say I believe you. You should be out in the world, fighting for a glorious age of light…’

She broke off. If Valruss was what he claimed to be – what she believed him to be – she should be respectful… even afraid. Could that cage even hold him, if he wished otherwise?

For the first time, emotion marred Valruss’ expression. Not the anger Niara had feared, but an abiding hollowness. ‘My host – the Knights Tempestor – fought at the forefront of the Realmgate Wars until the Dark Gods sent their greatest sorcerer against us.’

He paused. A scowl of recollection flitted across his lips. ‘I slew him too late. His conjuration slaughtered my brothers and sisters. Of the host, only I survived. I awoke on this mountainside, armour blackened and melting away. Alone. Even now, my memory lies in tatters. Wisps and fragments of might-have-beens. But I know that my fellows are gone. I fear their spirits are lost, that they never regained the solace of Azyrheim and were drawn into the Dark Gods’ embrace. It is my fault that it is so.’

Niara glanced around the cave. At the emptiness that was an accusation of her failure. So many dead. The patrol she’d led into the ambush was gone, all save her and Horst. For the first time she felt a kinship with Valruss, bleak though it was.

‘I’ve lost comrades too…’

He growled. ‘You dare compare your loss to mine? My kith should have been reborn, forged anew at Sigmar’s hand. Now they are dust, my punishment is to suffer. Why else would Sigmar have sent me to this place?’ With visible effort, he regathered his composure. ‘I am to shed my blood until I am forgiven.’

Niara decided ogors were an odd path to enlightenment, but elected against saying so. Be he madman or Stormcast, she would gain little by offending Valruss.

‘And how will you know when you are forgiven?’ she asked instead.

‘Sigmar will send me a sign.’

‘And what if we’re that sign? Maybe Sigmar wants you to join us.’

He laughed softly. ‘No. Sigmar is many things, but he is not subtle in his wishes. The sign I seek will not be mistaken.’

Valruss closed his eyes. The first murky rays of dawn glimmered at the cave mouth. Niara swore under her breath, and redoubled her efforts with the blade.

The gaoler did not come at dawn, nor for many long hours after. For Niara, this was all to the good, for the bindings on her cage were tougher than she’d believed possible. But with perseverance – and no small cost to herself in sliced fingers – the last strip tore free as the portcullis rumbled open. She hurriedly thrust the precious scrap of steel through the bars into Horst’s hand and awaited the gaoler’s selection. Whose suffering would buy time for the escape?

The ogor peered myopically from one cage to the next. Then, decision made, he rumbled forward and yanked aside the door to Niara’s cage. She shared a brief nod with Horst, and followed the gaoler’s beckoning hand.

A raucous cheer greeted her arrival in the fighting pit. It fell swiftly away beneath the tyrant’s rambling, stentorian address. The first bout was always the tardiest for that very reason. Niara normally hated the delay. Fear festered, and the cold sapped what little vigour remained. But today, every moment the tyrant rumbled on was a moment she would not have to buy. If only they’d taken Horst for the fighting pit, and not her. There would be no bonds to cut, and no need for delay.

She stooped, reclaiming the short sword she’d used the previous day. She glanced behind. The gaoler stood beneath the open portcullis, his attention on the fight to come. Good. That much was going to plan, at least.

After a cold, shivering age, the tyrant fell silent. The far gate creaked open, revealing a gangling, white-furred beast with black, ice-frosted claws. Twisted teeth parted in a hooting roar.

Niara’s heart sank. A yhetee. Large as a troggoth, but faster and quicker-witted to boot. Valruss could have killed it, but she? Bloody fur and scabbed limbs betrayed wounds already taken. Maybe it could be done. And besides, all she need do was survive until Horst was free.

Thunder rumbled across the sky. Niara raised her sword.

Eyes closed, Valruss sought peace in meditation. He blotted out the snarls of the yhetee. The guttural cheers of the crowd. The thunder. Niara’s screams of pain and challenge. She was not his sign. Not the sign of forgiveness.

Sigmar had shown him the path of penance, and that path lay in the carnage of the fighting pit. Not in escape. And certainly not in offering his fellows false hope of salvation. After all, who was to say they had not failed as he had? That Sigmar was not testing them all? Such tests were not to be passed, but endured until the dawn of divine mercy, or strength failed.

So why did he feel otherwise? Why did he feel a kinship? Why had he spoken so freely of his burdens? He had not in all his years as a captive. Sooner or later, everyone died. Attachment to fellow captives gained nothing.

A harsh, wooden clatter dragged Valruss from his musings.

‘Oh, crask.’

Horst stood frozen in place, his grasping hand extended almost comically as the heartfelt curse spilled from his lips. A wooden bar from his cage tottered back and forth on the rock floor.

In the cave mouth, the gaoler lurched about. Bellowing in outrage, he lumbered towards Horst’s cage, cudgel readied.

‘Kazak bryngadum!’

Bars clattered as Bragga barrelled out of her cage. Snaring a burning brand from the fire, she hurled herself at the gaoler and thrust the glowing timber up at his face. The ogor’s roar of pain drowned out the sound of sizzling flesh.

Horst slashed. Broken steel glinted. Blood welled on the ogor’s forearm.

The brute flailed, striking Bragga from her feet. The cudgel smashed down. The arcing sweep ended in a meaty thud and a crack of breaking bone.

‘I’ll have you for that!’

Horst slashed again, this time at the ogor’s belly. The blade snagged on the filthy apron. As he drew back for a second stroke, the gaoler backhanded him across the face. Stunned, Horst fell across the bars of his cage. The ogor’s hand closed around his throat.

The gaoler spared no glance for the lifeless duardin. A struggling Horst still dangling from his grip, he lumbered towards the cave mouth.

Valruss watched until they had crossed the threshold. Would Horst find the strength to endure? To continue penance for sins Valruss could only guess at? Perhaps. Either way, Sigmar would wish no intervention. Valruss closed his eyes once more, and sought elusive peace.

Niara screamed as she rammed the sword home. The yhetee, every bit as bloodied and weary as she, screeched. Rusty steel punched through matted fur, glanced off a rib and plunged deep into the creature’s heart.

With a mournful, keening wail, the yhetee fell. Niara barely made it out from beneath its stinking, smothering bulk in time. The crowd roared approval.

Heart pounding, she fell to one knee. Her left arm – her broken left arm – throbbed with an insistence that promised worse to come once the glamour of battle faded. The side of her face was slick with her own blood, and her right ankle ground whenever she set weight upon it. And that was before she took account of the dozen or so gashes from the yhetee’s claws.

She had survived, but she had failed. She’d had to end the fight before Horst and Bragga had freed themselves.

The gaoler emerged from the cave with an indignant bellow. The ogor’s face was blistered and raw. A struggling Horst dangled from his grip.

The crowd fell silent. On the balcony above, the tyrant rose to his feet and rumbled a question. The gaoler jabbed his cudgel back at the cave mouth. A booming back-and-forth began between the two ogors. Freed from the gaoler’s grip, Horst scrambled on hands and knees to Niara’s side and helped her stand.

‘Are you all right?’ she gasped.

He rubbed his neck and grabbed a short-handled mace from the ground. ‘Damn near popped my head off. Otherwise, yeah.’

‘Bragga?’

Horst shook his head. Niara felt a pang of loss. Maybe you couldn’t trust a Kharadron unless your coin was good. Didn’t mean you couldn’t like one.

‘Valruss?’

Horst snorted. ‘Grimbody watched, and did nothing. As usual.’

‘You know he told me he was a Stormcast?’

‘No such thing as Stormcast. Told you before.’

‘You have not.’

The ogors’ conversation fell silent. The gaoler withdrew. Timber creaked as the tyrant made his way down the shallow stairs to the fighting pit floor. It was only now that Niara realised how truly massive the brute was – an avalanche of armoured fat and slabbed muscle come to bury her alive. Thunder rumbled fitfully, like the growl of a watchdog that hadn’t yet roused itself to the challenge, but was giving the matter serious thought.

‘Don’t suppose he’s setting us free.’

Niara sighed. Spikes of pain shot through her chest. ‘What do you think?’

The tyrant halted a dozen paces in front of them. He hoisted the ironstone maul aloft. The haft looked like a toothpick in his hands. The crowd roared approval.

‘I think we’ve upset him,’ muttered Horst. ‘You hang back. You can barely stand.’

Niara straightened. ‘Damned if I will.’

The tyrant lumbered forward, maul back-swung and ready to strike. Niara and Horst shared one last nod, and charged.

Unburdened by a lumpen ankle, Horst reached the ogor first. The air screamed as the ironstone maul came about. Horst skidded in the snow, half turning as he fell. The killing blow swept over his head. Horst rolled to his feet. His mace cracked against the tyrant’s armoured knee.

Might as well have struck the mountain itself, all the good it did.

Niara joined the fray, striking from the tyrant’s left as he lumbered to crush the upstart Horst to his right. Thick furs cheated her first strike. The second slipped beneath his corroded gut-plate and drew blood.

Enraged, the tyrant spun about. The maul whirled, the sound of it lost beneath the rising storm.

‘Move it!’

Suddenly Horst was at her side. His shoulder rammed Niara clear. She sprawled to the ground. Agony flared bright as broken bones ground together.

The tyrant’s blow took Horst full in the chest. A sound of snapping ribs like branches broken underfoot, and he spiralled away. His pulped body struck the timber bounds of the fighting pit and lay unmoving in the bloody snow. If he had screamed, it was swallowed by the thunderclap.

Niara crawled onto one knee. Her sword arm shook with cold and exhaustion. The tyrant’s rough laughter washed over her. The crowd cheered. Thunder rumbled, closer than ever before. So close she felt it in her bones. So close she could almost embrace it.

The tyrant raised his maul.

Thunder roared. Niara dropped her sword, and let it swallow her whole.

Light blazed in the darkness of Valruss’ meditation. The sizzling, roiling crack sounded a heartbeat later. A rush of sharp, sweet air flooded his lungs. Achingly familiar and longed for, all at once. Like coming home after a long journey, or setting out anew with strong stride.

He opened his eyes. Fire raged beyond the cave, the fighting pit’s mistreated timbers set alight by the lightning strike. Wind howled beyond, whipping the flames to a flurry of smoke and fury. An unnatural tempest as familiar as the lightning itself. And something else. Not words. Not even a voice. But a presence as familiar to Valruss as his grief-born burdens. One so long desired he wept as it touched his thoughts.

He remembered that feeling from long ago, from before the armour and duties of a Stormcast had claimed him. But the presence had not come for him. It barely acknowledged his existence. He was unworthy. It had come for another. One worth saving.

One worth saving. Niara’s penance was done, if it had ever existed. She did not belong here. She did not deserve his fate.

Seized of a purpose he had not felt in long years, Valruss gripped the bars of his cage.

Niara staggered to her feet as the fighting pit collapsed around her. Soot stung her eyes and clogged her lungs with the sour tang of roasting flesh. Snow hissed into the rising flames. The wind plucked at her tattered clothes, but otherwise let her be, as if she stood in the eye of her own personal storm. Of the tyrant, she saw no sign. The lightning strike had hurled him away. The fire hid all else.

Piece by wretched piece, the storm tore the fighting pit apart. High above Niara’s head, timber wrenched free and vanished into the tempest. A fluttering length of fur followed, then a section of planking.

An ogor plunged from the upper tiers and thudded into the fighting pit, his lifeless flesh already shrivelled and black where the fire took hold. Another succumbed at the balcony’s edge, his body blazing like a torch. Panicked roars and the thump of running feet echoed as the survivors sought safety. Niara saw only flame and the starburst of black ash at her feet.

Thunder shook the sky. Taking heart from the sound, Niara limped towards where she had last seen the stairway. She had to risk the fire. To stay in the fighting pit was to die.

The flames surged. A dark shape lumbered out of the conflagration, roaring in anger and pain. The tyrant’s furs and beard were ablaze. His seared face glistened like molten wax. But the maul was still in his hand.

He swung. Niara twisted. The ironstone head whistled inches past her face.

Oblivious to the pain, the tyrant came on.

Thud. The tyrant staggered and lashed out behind. Valruss strode out of the smoke, long-hafted mace gripped tight. With a wordless grunt, he swung at the ogor’s head, driving him back.

The maul came about once more. Valruss darted back. When the blow passed, he struck knee and gut, and then at the head once more.

Blood crackling into his blazing furs, the tyrant cast his maul aside. When Valruss next swung, the mace was wrenched from his grasp. The tyrant snarled in triumph.

As Niara watched in horror, the ogor gathered Valruss into a bear hug. Strong though Valruss was, he was no more than a child beside the tyrant’s bulk. Horror crystallised into determination, and determination into action.

Niara snatched up her sword. Tucking it in close, she levelled the blade like a lance and threw herself at the ogor as fast as her buckled ankle could bear.

Steel thunked into flesh, slicing cleanly between the ogor’s ribs. The tyrant roared anew. A flailing arm struck her away, the sword still in his back. Already off balance, Niara landed awkwardly. She cried out as her wounded ankle gave way with the sound of a snapping bough.

Valruss prised himself free of the single arm that now held him. Rolling clear of the tyrant’s attempt to snare him, he ripped the sword free and thrust.

The tyrant’s roar died with him, the sword buried in his throat.

Her vision dimmed by pain, Niara barely saw the ogor fall. Even the wind seemed distant, its fury spent alongside her own. But the fire raged stronger than ever.

‘Leave me,’ she told the approaching Valruss. ‘I can’t walk.’

‘You have no need to,’ he replied, and gathered her up across his shoulders.

Valruss stared out across the mountainside. The distant ogor camp was but a dull orange glow against the deepening dusk, half hidden by the blizzard and the trees. He saw no sign of pursuit. That would come later, if any had survived the fire. By then, the snow would have covered their tracks. Or so he hoped.

Turning his back on the mountainside, he retreated deeper into the narrow cave. Niara sat before a small fire, her broken bones splinted and bound.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘We are safe. For now.’

She nodded, wincing as the motion tugged on wounded flesh. ‘Thanks to you.’

‘I am a poor steward of salvation. You must look elsewhere.’

She nodded. ‘I know it wasn’t just your doing. Sigmar sent the lightning, and the storm.’

Valruss nodded, though that was not what he had meant.

Should he tell her? That the lightning was portent as much as liberator, a sign that Niara was marked for greatness – perhaps even ascension to the ranks of the Stormcast Eternals themselves? A noble life – even a necessary one – but it was not his to reveal. He who had broken from his penance in a moment of weakness. The thought of that failure yawned wide in his soul.

Or… had Sigmar meant for him to act? To shepherd a worthy soul from an unworthy fate? Had penance become redemption? Was he at last worthy of Azyrheim’s golden spires once more? The fellowship of his brothers and sisters?

He grimaced and discarded the thought as the fantasy of a weak heart. It was in the nature of portents to reveal what the witness most desired, and the nature of the desperate to cling to what they saw. His penance was broken. He could not go back to how he was. There was only the path forward. The old war renewed in shame. That would suffice. It would have to.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sigmar saved you.’

Niara’s eyes narrowed. Her cheek twitched. ‘And he has forgiven you?’

He turned away. ‘The war against the Dark Gods goes on. I will be part of it again. But I will see you safe to Concordia first, so you may also play your part…’ He hesitated. ‘Whatever Sigmar wills that to be.’

So saying, he returned to the cave mouth, where he stood a long, lonely vigil until night fell.

TIES OF BLOOD

Jamie Crisalli

The clouds shrouded the moon, and a thin knife of a ship slid over blood-tinged waters through a canyon of sandstone. Her oars sliced the water silently, her black sails lashed down. Out on the deck, Savrian, mortal descendant of Sarn the Everliving, pressed a scented silk cloth to his face to blot out the growing reek of blood.

Then the source of the dread stench hove into view. The Bastion of Red Dust, a mountain of basalt that loomed in the shattered canyon as if it had been hurled there from on high. Over time, the Sea of the Unwanted had filled the surrounding chasms and pooled at its feet, thick with the red dust that flowed off the fortress’ flanks. Axe-wielding idols crusted its towers and watched over the blood-soaked arenas. Only those who bore Khorne’s symbols could enter its singular gaping maw high above, to fight and die in the Blood God’s name.

Savrian leaned against the rail, black plate creaking. Behind him, his slaves carried a tray of elixirs and powders, breathlessly waiting in case he had a need. They attached his sabre, Malisette, to his belt and wiped his black armour down with scented oils. Malisette had been impregnated with the narcotic tears of Blessed Ones at its forging, and caused a dreamy exhaustion in its victims, draining away their fighting spirit so they could be taken alive.

His second in command, Issaya, waited nearby, her dark-skinned face impassive, cutting her forearm with a small razor.

‘Beloved, what is on your mind?’

Savrian started. He had not heard his wife, Cirine, approach. Suddenly he was aware of it all, the numbed skin, the near colourless vision, the aching joints, the muddled hearing. Beyond the damage from a lifetime of ecstatic devotion to Slaanesh, a near lethal poisoning by a rival seeking his crown had rendered him both decrepit and sterile. Fortunately his god-gifted beauty was untouched, his pale form still lean and graceful, his chiselled face still porcelain smooth, his hair still ink-black and lustrous. Yet, it was nothing more than a youthful shell over a worn and decaying carcass.

‘Just regrets,’ he said, though loath to admit it. ‘I know I shouldn’t. Regret implies fault.’ He sighed. ‘I should have realised Verigon was alive, that Chagorath took him. That Khornate wretch, he’s had my son for years. I should have taken Verigon with me that day. He is the only other true-born alive.’

He looked at Cirine, his dark purple eyes gleaming. The eyes of Sarn, the eyes of the immortal. It was no trinket or title that marked his line, but rather Sarn’s physical blessing that separated them from the masses.

‘We will retrieve Verigon before dawn,’ Cirine said, leaning against his shoulder. ‘Your plan is perfect. A scalpel instead of a hammer. Your son is as good as saved.’

She touched his arm, her thin black claws teasing his skin. Beautiful and obscene, Cirine was everything he wanted in a mate. Clad in filmy silk that hid nothing from the eye, she oozed with a sensuality that she frequently denied him. She was cruel but never boring.

‘You say that,’ he said. ‘But I do not have your confidence.’

He should. The plan was simple: infiltrate the fortress, retrieve Verigon, return the same way and then escape over the sea back to Sarn’s Rest, their ancestral home. They knew their route and their enemy. It was no more complicated than sneaking into a forbidden harem.

A small bottle was pressed into his hand and he swallowed the bitter mouthful that lay inside. A warmth diffused through him. His breathing quickened. Colours enriched, sound sharpened. The aches and pains faded. Yet, this was no youth in a bottle. Before the poisoning, such a dosage would have left him in a fugue state lasting for days. Now it barely returned him to normality.

Cirine leaned forward and licked his lips, tasting the bitter concoction.

‘What do you think of it, my love?’ she whispered.

‘I need something stronger,’ he said. ‘But it will do.’

The ship struck the craggy beach at the base of the fortress. Savrian leapt off the ship and offered Cirine his hand, which she grudgingly took as she stepped onto the beach. Issaya followed them, wary of threats.

Yeneya, his chief spy, joined them, a small slim woman still brushing at the red dust that marked her clothing. Of all the spies he had sent, only she had returned alive. ‘Sire, there is the way in,’ she said, pointing up.

High above them, small against the fortress’ vast black bulk, was a crack, a wound that glowed orange in the darkness. It was like a gateway into a different world.

Once they had disembarked, the ship slipped away into the shadows of the canyon, all but invisible in the dark.

Then the four of them bounded up the cliff face, the challenge no match for their superior agility.

When Savrian reached the crack, the torchlight from within half blinded him. He listened for a long moment but no one seemed nearby. With a deep breath, he slithered through and dropped down a few feet. Landing lightly, his boots sank into fine red sand. He stood in an empty hallway, torches burning greasily. Skulls grinned at him from every surface. A scream echoed, plucking at his nerves.

‘Yeneya, where are we?’ Savrian said.

‘Just underneath where Chagorath’s reavers live,’ Yeneya said as she slipped through.

‘Live?’ Savrian said. ‘That’s an exaggeration of prodigious proportions. For such savage souls, they repress themselves too much to call it living.’

Boots tramping through dust interrupted them. Savrian readied himself, his blood singing. It had been too long since he had been in battle.

A group of reavers rounded the corner down the hall. Clearly of common stock, the men wore blood-soaked rags, their bare torsos scarred, their faces bruised and noses crushed. Confusion flickered over their brute expressions for a moment, and then they barged forward.

Savrian charged in, whipping Malisette free from its sheath. Lightning quick, he cut open the closest reaver’s throat, brilliant arterial splatter arcing through the air. With a graceful spin, Savrian turned and skewered another through the eye.

Savrian’s companions fell on the rest with abandon, pulling their foes apart with sadistic glee. A shriek of pain burst out as Issaya slammed a blade through a man’s chest. As the body fell into the dust, the echo rippled away from them, like a spirit seeking its master.

They froze, listening. Someone must have heard that scream. Long seconds passed, their senses straining. Water dripped, torches crackled, a rat skittered. Seconds turned into minutes and no one came.

They breathed out a sigh of relief.

Issaya’s face flickered with disappointment. Her idea of perfection was very different from Savrian’s. Martial prowess was the only worthy pursuit and she obsessed with frightening tenacity.

Savrian nudged a corpse with his foot, trying to imagine living with such ugly creatures. His son had been among such brutes for years. A stale, futile anger surfaced but he quashed it. In this place, his anger was dangerous, even blasphemous.

‘We should move,’ Issaya said, her voice toneless. ‘Where to?’

‘That way,’ Yeneya said, nodding towards where the reavers had come from.

Yeneya led them through a maze of hallways and basalt stairs. Occasionally doors boomed open, men screamed and chains rattled. Each floor was seemingly a clone of its predecessors, just endless halls filled with red dust and ominous noises. At first, they were on edge, cautious and watchful. Then the itch of boredom grew, the sheer monotony of the place unsettling them.

The only relief was the occasional patrol of reavers, which they ambushed and dispatched with urgent speed. The need to take more time with their victims ate at them. Savrian’s mind sank into the abyss of wanton desire, an urge that screamed for bodies to use and souls to bless, for ecstatic screams and quivering flesh. Not this dull, inartistic murdering.

He had not seen any treasures or shrines, not a spot of gold in the entire place. Just this peculiar fiction of vigilance, with its warriors watching over nothing with ferocious jealousy.

Abruptly, Yeneya stopped, holding up a hand.

Ahead of them, a glowing firepit illuminated an unremarkable chamber. A man stood, turning a hunk of meat over the fire, while another lay snoring on the dirt floor. Barred oak doors lined the walls, jagged gashes etched into their planks. There was another entrance opposite where Savrian waited, a solid stone gate decorated with aged brass and leering skulls. Iron bars as thick as Savrian’s wrist served as a ceiling, revealing the level above.

‘The reavers are each kept in separate cells, I think so they don’t kill each other,’ Yeneya whispered.

‘Did you hear something?’ the reaver at the firepit said, clutching a large brass bell. The other curled up tighter, grumbling.

Savrian swore. This guard was annoyingly watchful.

The guard drew a crude short sword and looked cautiously around, sniffing the air.

Cirine stepped by Savrian and winked, her scent suddenly sweet and intoxicating. Issaya followed, her dark eyes flat as she tapped a long knife against her thigh. Pleasure coiled in his gut and Savrian retreated into the dark with Yeneya. This would be amusing.

The reaver gasped as Cirine stepped into the light, his eyes widening at her near nude form. The bell’s clapper tapped the metal. Putting a finger to her lips, she closed on him, an intoxicating haze drifting in the air. The bell went still as she pulled it from his limp grasp. He took in more of her scent with every breath.

Utterly absorbed, the reaver touched her slim shoulder. Savrian repressed the urge to lop the filthy limb off.

Cirine ran a hand up his chest and her fingertips stopped at the hollow of his throat. Then she curled a finger, hooking a black talon into his flesh.

A thin rasp escaped the reaver as his muscles clenched tight. He choked, his veins puckering and blackening under his skin. Sweat beading, eyes bulging, he toppled into the dust. In a few quivering moments, the agonising bliss killed him.

Issaya crept up to the sleeper as he turned over, slapped a hand over his mouth and slashed open his throat. Gurgling, he sprawled in the dust, fumbling for his axe. Eyes widening in fascination, Issaya watched his life drain out.

Savrian smiled as he stepped by the reaver’s contorted corpse. Cirine’s venomous claws brought such ecstasy, a clash of pain and pleasure that Savrian knew well. It was a pity the poor thing died so quickly; he had enjoyed what Slaanesh offered for such a short time.

Cirine licked her fingertips.

‘You let him touch you,’ he said, with more spite than he intended.

She snickered. ‘You’re so beautiful when you’re jealous.’

He reached for her but she swayed out of his reach. Savrian fumed. She might as well have slapped his hand away.

‘Your son is in one of these cells,’ Yeneya said. ‘I don’t know which one. And those aren’t the only guards – stronger ones make the rounds up above.’

Cirine’s games forgotten, Savrian looked around the identical doors. He scanned each, looking for some sign. Then he saw a crude symbol carved into the heavy bar across one of the doors. His son’s name, barely legible.

‘There you are,’ he said.

‘Hide!’ Yeneya hissed.

They bolted into the shadows as two red-armoured warriors appeared on the level above them. Massive brutes with leathery skin and broken teeth, they gazed down with feral eyes.

‘Sloppy like the others,’ one growled.

‘We must find them now,’ the other said without enthusiasm. ‘We can’t have the rabble thinking ambushes outside the pits will be tolerated.’

They strode out of sight, hefting their bloody cleavers.

Now the Khornates were searching. How long did they have before those animals found them?

Savrian lifted the heavy bar free and jerked open the door to reveal Verigon’s austere cell. Then he recoiled. It reeked of excrement, sweat and blood. Straw covered the dirt floor and the stone walls glistened with condensation. A man was sitting in a crude cot that was too small for him, groggily blinking away his sleep.

This was not the little boy Savrian remembered. He had gone from a scrawny, timid child to a powerful, scarred youth. His golden skin was tanned and his black hair stringy with old sweat. Yet, he had the deep purple eyes that marked Sarn’s purest bloodline.

Savrian leapt back as Verigon lunged to his feet, snatching a broad-headed axe from a hanger on the wall. An expression of absolute rage twisted Verigon’s face as he stalked forward, brandishing the weapon. Savrian stepped back, raising his empty hands. Verigon had to know who he was, didn’t he? Would Savrian have to fight his own son?

‘Verigon, stop,’ Savrian said.

Verigon halted, his purple eyes narrowing.

‘I am your father,’ Savrian said, not a little relieved.

Verigon cocked his head and a peculiar expression flickered over his face.

‘I have not heard that accent in a long time,’ he replied. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m rescuing you,’ Savrian said. ‘Come, we need to go.’

‘No.’ Verigon tightened his grip on the axe.

Savrian froze. ‘What?’

‘I am a warrior of Khorne,’ Verigon said. ‘I will not leave.’

Savrian’s heart stuttered. Of all the things he could have heard, that was the worst. Verigon had completely forgotten where he had come from.

‘You are my son, the son of a king, a scion of Slaanesh,’ Savrian said. ‘This is no place for you. I keep my pack drevars in better accommodations.’

‘Physical comfort is for the weak,’ Verigon said. ‘And to struggle is glorious.’

What kind of puritanical drivel was this? Savrian took a deep breath.

‘Only Slaanesh knows true glory,’ Savrian said.

‘He does not see you,’ Verigon said, though without malice. ‘Who witnesses your deeds? Who is there to impress? My god can see me, yours cannot.’

Savrian clamped his jaw shut. What a bitter stroke it was. And it was true, that was the cruellest part about it. Every one of Slaanesh’s followers knew the ache, the deep-down need that was worse than a widow’s loneliness or a child’s desire. Mortal tribes, daemon kindreds and sorcerous cabals scoured the realms in search of a glittering bauble, one shimmering hair or even just the echo of her divine voice. Deep in his soul, Savrian felt it too.

‘It is true,’ Savrian said, relaxing with false ease. ‘She hides her face from us. I won’t lie. It is a misery. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. However, we are family under her and nothing is going to change that. Her being gone doesn’t change that.’ Somewhere beyond the cell a door opened. Savrian looked around, his ears perking up. ‘You come from a dynasty that has stood for thousands of years. Daemons will bow to you on your name alone. Thousands of mortals owe you their allegiance. Whereas this path will reduce you to a common murderer, whether you kill dozens or thousands. You are worth more than that, especially to blessed Slaanesh. And to me. Please, my son, come with me.’

Some of it was truth, some of it was lies. However, once Verigon came back to Slaanesh, his family and his people, he would forgive Savrian for vastly exaggerating. He would understand that it was for his own good.

Verigon looked at him, then he lowered the axe, wracked with indecision.

‘Highness, they’re coming,’ Issaya hissed, hovering around the exit with the others.

Savrian winced as the tramp of boots reached his ears. Now was the time for expediency. Cirine’s venom would have to do the persuading. As Savrian gestured towards her, the central doors slammed open and the two brutes stepped into the chamber, with more behind. The first pair charged forward, their grotesquely muscular bodies rippling, hefting massive cleavers.

‘Slaaneshi scum!’ one roared, ferocity boiling off him in a red haze.

With a screaming roar, the first swung his cleaver at Savrian’s head. Savrian ducked and slashed open his belly, guts falling free in a rush. Crouching under the blow aimed at his neck by the other, Savrian drove his sabre into the second’s exposed armpit. The blade sheared through muscle and lung, and the brute dropped with a gurgle. Savrian planted his foot on the beast’s shoulder and ripped out the blade.

He looked up, quivering with adrenaline.

A wall of red and brass hedged them in, blades gleaming. Yeneya, Issaya and Cirine were herded together as the warriors edged forward, preparing to charge.

‘Wait,’ a voice said, ugly and hard as slate.

A man the size of an ogor walked through the bristling wall, a bulwark of muscle and armour that dwarfed the room and everyone in it. An axe made from gore-soaked stone hung in his twitching hand. His head was bare, his face a featureless mask of scar tissue, teeth sharpened to points clacking together rhythmically, yellow eyes squinting with rage.

Chagorath: only he could command the wrath of such creatures.

Savrian’s stale anger roared with new life. He never thought he would meet the man. Every sense heightened. Hate sharpened to a razor edge.

Aside from the creak of armour, no one made a sound.

‘I remember the scent of you,’ Chagorath said, pointing his axe at Yeneya.

He lunged forward and cleaved Yeneya’s head with one swing of that brutal axe. A sound like a bird skull being crushed popped through the air. She was dead before she hit the ground.

‘Spies,’ Chagorath rasped. ‘Tools of the weak.’

Then his gaze fell onto Verigon and dread coiled in Savrian’s stomach.

‘Verigon, why did you not kill this man?’ Chagorath said. ‘He is from your meaningless past.’

Wary, Verigon dropped to a defensive crouch, gripping his axe with two hands.

Chagorath’s teeth clicked, the jaw working.

‘Do not touch him,’ Savrian snarled, pointing his bloody sabre at the hulking lord. He would not allow this animal to deny his desires and brutalise his betters. Chagorath gestured at him and dozens of grasping hands took Savrian down like a tentacled leviathan, pressing him to his knees.

Chagorath ignored him. With a sniff, he stalked forward, struck the axe out of Verigon’s hands, snatched him by the throat and slammed him into a pillar. It was casually done, as if Chagorath were chastising a chattel slave. Verigon’s feet kicked as he choked.

‘Never let Slaaneshi talk,’ Chagorath said.

Verigon punched Chagorath in the head but the massive man barely seemed to notice; he might as well have been punching a stone.

Chagorath looked back at Savrian and he grunted in comprehension.

‘I see,’ Chagorath said. ‘Such sentimentality has no place under Khorne’s gaze.’ He dropped him and Verigon crumpled at his feet, gasping. ‘Release the tribes into the highest arena. Let them see how strong Verigon is.’

His captors pinned Savrian and gagged him with a rag. A hundred doors boomed open and a great roar went up. Then they hauled him to his feet and dragged him out of the chamber through a sea of red warriors. Somewhere Cirine screamed, but he could not see her.

They entered a dark, close tunnel that reeked of urine and fear. The air was humid, the roar of a berserk crowd deafening. A maw-like portcullis clanked open in front of them, the teeth of it resembling Chagorath’s snarl. Someone pressed Malisette into Savrian’s hand and kicked him forward through the opening.

The ground squelched under his boots as he stumbled forward. He ripped the gag from his mouth, shuddering with disgust. Then he looked down and retched.

There was no earth under his feet, just a congealing soup of blood, bones and meat. A bloody fog hung in the air, moist like the inside of a heart. The eight-sided arena was cramped, built to force combatants into close proximity with each other. Above him, a barbarous audience roared in derision under furious stars. At the end of the arena, a crude idol loomed over them, more beast than man, an axe in each hand. Of all the places Savrian had imagined dying, this was not one.

Issaya and Cirine joined him, the latter revolted, the former impassive.

Savrian forced himself to breathe the disgusting air and gathered his dignity. As a civilised man, he would show them how to comport themselves. He swaggered into the centre, a smirk on his face, his arrogance armouring him as much as the steel that encased his body.

Chagorath appeared under the stone idol on a terrace and the crowd stilled.

Opposite them, a portcullis opened and Verigon stepped out, alone.

‘Verigon, you have something to prove,’ Chagorath growled, his voice carrying. ‘Kill that man before the others do in equal combat. He is a degenerate, the feeble aesthete of a cowardly god. Prove that he is meaningless to you.’

The threat of death did not need to be spoken aloud.

Verigon looked up at Chagorath, then at the ground, hefting his axe. There was none of the feral instinct or the ferocity from before. Instead, he milled, his face working, his mind racing.

Then a flood of half-naked reavers leapt into the arena. Savrian lifted his sabre, disappointed in the calibre of his opposition. With a sigh, he leapt forward into the fray. They were no match for him, these squalling little murderers. He hewed off limbs and heads without effort. They rushed him in threes and fours, but it mattered not. His blade was a flickering wall. Elusive as smoke, he danced through them, and where he went, they died.

Those who tried their hand at Cirine and Issaya suffered similar fates. Cirine flitted about, her silks flowing, transfixing her enemies. When they reached for her, she sank her claws into their flesh, bringing them a spasmodic, depthless ecstasy they cursed and hated. Issaya killed painfully, cutting hamstrings, peeling away sheets of skin, crippling limbs with broken nerves. She left screaming bloody victims in her wake that died slowly.

Soon, only his son remained and Savrian approached him warily.

‘Tell me, Verigon,’ Savrian said, gesturing at the corpses, ‘do you even remember their names?’

Verigon looked around him, his face revolted as if a sudden revelation had opened his eyes.

‘It’s nothing more than a cage, Verigon,’ Savrian said. ‘There are whole worlds beyond these walls. Do you really want to stay here?’

Verigon looked at him, his eyes steady. Then he seemed to make a decision.

‘You cannot get us out,’ Verigon said. ‘Not from him.’

That was really why he stayed. Not anger but fear. Savrian looked at Chagorath. He was the key to the whole bloody wreck.

‘I will not let him touch you ever again,’ Savrian said. ‘I swear it on Slaanesh’s sacred eye. You are my son, the most precious thing to me in this dull world.’

Verigon took a deep breath. The axe drooped and his posture relaxed. His face softened, and Savrian recognised his child in that face. The sweet, curious child he had always known. These monsters had not managed to kill him.

Chagorath quivered and gasped with rage, his fist clenched on his axe. His feral eyes flicked back and forth between Verigon and Savrian. Savrian knew it was not intelligence or restraint that stayed the berserker. Rather he simply could not decide who to kill first.

Did Khorne watch his flailing vassal? Oh, if that blinkered god did and Savrian cast him down… Savrian’s mind skittered to a halt. It was too perfect. If Chagorath died, his followers would fight for his position. Thousands of the wretched beasts would die in the mad fight for control while they escaped. And then Savrian and his kingdom would come in, mop up the weakened remains and turn the fortress towards a better, loftier purpose. He would succeed where his ancestors had failed so often in breaking this place.

Savrian pressed his fingers to his lips, a shuddering thrill rolling through his body. He threw back his head and laughed, the manic cackle spiralling through the still air. He knew he looked mad but this perfection of opportunity was too beautiful.

The only trick would be persuading Chagorath to cooperate in his own savage way.

‘You know, I figured out what you are doing,’ Savrian said. ‘Collecting and offering all these skulls. Tell me, Chagorath, does Khorne know you’re trying to buy his favour like a courtesan?’

Chagorath screamed, a wordless slavering howl. The brute leapt down into the arena, sweeping his axe from his belt and hefting it overhead. Savrian leapt away as the Khornate lord crashed in like a meteor, his mighty overhead blow splintering the stone beneath him, blood and gore flying.

Chagorath whirled around and charged, closing on him with shocking speed. Dropping into a crouch as Chagorath’s axe whooshed overhead, Savrian grinned. Finally, someone worthy of his blade.

Springing aside as the brute’s axe cleaved the air where he had just been standing, Savrian lashed out, whip-fast. Sparks flew from the warrior’s red armour as Malisette bit deep. Chagorath bellowed, whirled around and swung his axe at Savrian’s legs. Savrian vaulted over the whistling blade, spinning gracefully in the air.

Around them, more reavers and blood warriors rushed into the arena to try to kill the others. But Savrian could not protect them. He had his hands full.

Chagorath rushed after him, his strikes precise, while Savrian danced around him, every movement flowing like liquid, turning the duel into art. Chagorath’s aggression curdled into frustration with every unrewarding swipe.

Gasping for the blood of his opponent, any at all, Chagorath reached a little farther, a little harder. Then Chagorath’s form broke, his arm outstretched, and the gap between his breastplate and pauldron spread open to reveal pale, almost translucent, flesh.

Savrian sidestepped and whipped his blade into the gap. Blood flew. Chagorath’s body hitched as soothing narcotics ran through his veins. Roaring, Chagorath spun around, his axe leading the movement. The blow whistled passed Savrian’s face as he retreated.

The Khornate lord pursued him across the arena, slashing and howling, and Savrian was pushed back. With a boneless agility, he dodged around Chagorath’s relentless attacks. He struck back where he could, his sabre lashing Chagorath’s exposed flesh, but it was like trying to take down a rabid rhinox with a shaving razor. The brute bled from a dozen cuts but he never slowed, each wound another goad for his endless rage.

Savrian dropped into a low crouch, prowling around his bigger opponent like a frost sabre, Malisette held tight at his shoulder, the point following Chagorath. Indignation and ego boiled in him; Savrian hated being on the defensive. Yet, Chagorath was the bigger and taller man with reach and weight to match.

Maybe Savrian could use that. Yes. He could use that.

Savrian waited, watching for the shift in the brute’s shoulder, in his hips, a twist in the torso. The muscles in his left thigh clenched as Chagorath shifted his weight. Another charge.

Chagorath barged in and Savrian spun away, allowing the axe to come close but not quite bite repeatedly. Allowing the stupid beast to feel like he was in control. Savrian watched his opponent’s grunting, impatient face, waiting for just the right moment.

Then pain shot through Savrian’s knee and he stumbled. Horrifyingly, the elixir was wearing off. The axe swooped in, the serrated edge ripping through Savrian’s breastplate and slicing across his ribs. Pain seared through him, enlivening his dulling senses. He shuddered in ecstasy, staggering on weak legs.

‘Cut me again,’ Savrian breathed, steadying himself.

Stepping back, his scarred face etched with revulsion, Chagorath tightened his guard.

‘Why not?’ Savrian shouted, grinning manically.

He flicked his blade at Chagorath’s face, a quick feint. Reflexively, not wanting to be touched, the beast snapped his axe up. Savrian sliced his blade down through Chagorath’s weapon hand, sending fingers and axe spinning away. Roaring, Chagorath backhanded him with a meaty fist, catching Savrian full across the head.

Savrian crashed to the ground, Malisette disappearing into the ooze. The world wobbled and spun in a ruddy blur, his breathing too loud in his ears.

Chagorath crashed onto him and grabbed him by the throat with both hands, bloody nubs digging in.

‘Die, you disgusting wretch,’ Chagorath hissed.

Savrian flailed, scrabbling at the red bulk on top of him. The cartilage of his throat cracked. His lungs burned, his veins throbbed. Spots flickered over his vision, his skull straining as if it was going to burst. He tore at Chagorath’s iron grip but it was like rock.

With a last gasp, Savrian rammed his thumb into Chagorath’s glaring right eye. Jelly burst and the man howled, rearing back. His deadly grip loosened and Savrian sucked in the coppery air, made sweet by suffocation.

He slammed the heel of his hand into Chagorath’s jaw, snapping his head back. Blood spurted as the beast bit through his tongue. A flicker caught Savrian’s eye: Malisette. The Khornate lord toppled sideways like a felled tree and Savrian lunged towards his weapon. Chagorath grabbed his ankle, jerking him back bodily. Snarling, Savrian kicked him in the face, crushing his nose.

Chagorath released him. Weaving on his knees like a drunk, he struggled to rise.

Coughing painfully through a battered throat, Savrian staggered to his feet, his sabre in hand.

Loathing boiled in Savrian as he turned towards his weakened foe. This was the man who had ruined his life. A man who had slaughtered his first wife and all her court. The man who had stolen his son, brutalised him, told him his heritage was nothing. The man who had saddled Savrian with a mountain of regrets.

‘You fought well,’ Chagorath slurred.

‘You did not,’ Savrian said, his lip curling. ‘Go to Slaanesh and feed her appetites as best you can.’

With a two-handed swing, Savrian cut up through Chagorath’s skull, the ancient blade shearing through teeth and then bone. No skull for the skull throne. The god of commoners would receive nothing. The corpse crashed into the muck.

Savrian looked up at the silent crowd. Now was the moment of truth. Who did they hate more?

The Khornates did not look at him; instead they glowered sidelong at their neighbours. Fingers caressed hammers and axes. Lips curled into snarls. Soft growls rumbled in cracked throats. Armour clanked as barbarians shifted.

Someone screamed, a ragged, desperate cry. A man turned and slammed his axe into the guts of his neighbour. Blood flew. A towering brute with a flaming hammer smashed a man out of his way only to be beheaded in turn. The cry of ‘Blood for the Blood God!’ boomed.

With a great roar, the cultists ripped into each other with stunning ferocity, Savrian and his cohort forgotten. Savrian grinned in triumph: he had bet true.

Yet, out of the corner of his eye, Savrian thought he saw the great idol of Khorne smile.

‘Verigon!’ Savrian said, looking across the arena for his son.

The battle surged across the arena, a sea of blood-soaked bodies thrashing through the gore. Savrian glimpsed Verigon before his son hurled himself into the melee with a roar. Cursing, Savrian slashed his way through the crowd, but it was like swimming against a tide. A painful hitch lodged itself in his right shoulder. He was losing his edge, but he could not leave.

A mass of armoured brutes coalesced around him and a throwing axe came whistling in.

Then Issaya bolted out of the crowd and slapped the throwing axe to the ground. She charged, her knives flickering. Agonised screams followed her as she crippled her foes. However, her thirst for pain led her deeper into the crowd and when Savrian ordered her to fall back, she ignored him. Savrian could only watch as axes hacked her down. Grinding his teeth in frustration, Savrian fought on. While they took his best followers, it seemed their numbers were endless.

‘Husband, we should go,’ Cirine said, flitting to him. Covered in gore, her gown in tatters, Cirine’s eyes were wide with fear.

‘I cannot find Verigon,’ he said, barely glancing at her.

‘But–’ she said.

‘My love, this will all be for nothing if we don’t find him,’ he said.

She pressed her lips together, as if possessed by some sudden doubt.

‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice hard with suspicion.

She opened her mouth to speak but at that moment, Savrian caught sight of Verigon.

‘Verigon!’ Savrian shouted, his sabre singing as he cut through the crowd.

The young man whirled about, his face snarling. He caught himself in mid-swing, pulling back the blow aimed at Savrian’s head. Shuddering with adrenaline, his eyes hard as gems, Verigon glared at him.

‘I was fine,’ he growled.

‘Of course you were,’ Savrian said. ‘It is time to leave.’

Verigon’s eyes narrowed, as if making some calculation. Then he nodded.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We should go.’

They fled from the arena, down into the guts of the complex. The battle thinned into isolated murderous brawlers and flocks of tattered slaves who scattered at the sight of them. All around, the cells were empty, the roar of battle echoing down to them through stone halls. Retracing the path back was easy and the three of them reached the open crack, where fresh air bled through and twilight broke out.

‘Go on,’ Savrian said. ‘See that small beach?’ Verigon nodded. ‘That is where we are headed.’

Verigon slipped through and began the laborious climb down, his movements confident if lacking a certain grace. As Savrian prepared to go through himself, Cirine caught his arm.

‘My love, I do not trust him,’ she said.

Savrian paused, looking at her hand on his arm.

‘He is my son,’ Savrian said. ‘He listens to me, he remembers me. I know he is not that promising now. But give me time. I can teach him.’

‘He listens but does not hear,’ she replied. ‘He remembers but does not care. He does not want to be saved, my love. He is manipulating you and has been from the beginning.’

Cirine was a clever woman and deeply perceptive. Yet, what she suggested was preposterous, even paranoid. Then he recognised her true motive. It was jealousy, a scenario that had played out many times. While he had tolerated her possessiveness in the past because it amused him, this had to be ended now.

‘Your desires do not trump mine,’ Savrian growled, grabbing a fistful of her hair. ‘My whims are absolute. I recommend that you get used to his presence. I desire that he returns to us, so he shall.’

‘All I am saying is to be careful,’ Cirine whispered.

‘My sweet, I recommend you take your own advice,’ Savrian hissed.

She looked away from him and Savrian knew he had won. He released her and then slipped out of the Bastion into the clean air. The climb down was much worse than the climb up. Savrian’s joints ground together. His skin felt like that of a corpse, stretched dry over his bones. Colour faded, sound muddled. Once he reached the beach, bone-deep exhaustion dragged him down onto his knees. All the dreadful years fell back upon his shoulders.

‘Father?’ Verigon said, sounding concerned. He walked towards Savrian and then suddenly stopped, wary.

‘It’s nothing,’ Savrian said, breathing hard. ‘It will pass. We will go home, and I will teach you the joys of Slaanesh. Things I should have taught you years ago.’

Savrian took out a small silver flute on a chain around his neck. When he blew on it, there was no sound. However, the captain of his ship would hear it and come for them.

Savrian turned inward, drowning in his misery. Cirine crept over to him and hovered, her gaze fixed on Verigon.

Suddenly, sand churned and Cirine screamed. Savrian staggered, struggling to rise. An axe was stuck deep in Cirine’s flesh. Some Khornate had found them, some brute lingered out here. Savrian froze.

Cirine fell, Verigon’s axe buried deep in her chest. Verigon tore it free, a feral gleam in his purple eyes. With an adrenal shiver, he stepped over her corpse.

No. His son could not be doing this. He could not.

Savrian pushed the truth away even as his mind lurched for it. Verigon charged, teeth clenched, bloody axe swinging low. Sluggish, Savrian lunged back, his legs wobbling. The axe cleaved through the gash in his armour into vital organs.

The pain crushed him, obliterating every other sensation. The withdrawal blasted the sensation to unendurable highs. He rolled into the sand, unable to breathe, unable to think. A chill, cold as glacier-melt, filled his flesh. As he inhaled, the pain twisted his guts like a fist. Warmth bathed Savrian’s side, and his hand came away red with blood.

Verigon looked down at him, muscles twitching in his face.

‘I serve Khorne. Not Slaanesh. Never Slaanesh,’ Verigon snarled.

‘No one can reject her allure… She will not allow it,’ Savrian gasped, struggling to his knees. ‘You cannot be my son. Not the boy I raised. You are some fake. Some soul-dead counterfeit.’

‘I am your son,’ Verigon said, his voice quivering. ‘I remember the towers and bathing pools, and the endless feasting and the vulgar rituals. I remember my mother. Her charms and venom did not save me. And you didn’t either. You were off searching for a vanished god while we died. I’ve hated you ever since then.’

‘I should have seen you for what you were – a wretched animal,’ Savrian hissed, then he coughed and the pain flared.

‘You did, and you ignored it,’ Verigon said, circling around him. ‘Because you are soft, like your useless, effete master.’

‘Do not blame her for my decisions,’ Savrian said. ‘It’s my fault you were taken. Slaanesh is perfect and cannot be blamed.’

‘Perfect?’ Verigon said, his voice full of venom. ‘It was Khorne who kept me alive in the pits, who taught me to fight and set me free. You were right, the Bastion is a cage and Chagorath was a brainless fool for staying there. There are so many other ways I can please Khorne. Like turning the Kingdom of Sarn to a god that is actually worthy and not just a hole in the heart.’

Spite and hate and fury rose up in Savrian, desperate and clawing. It pushed him to his feet and helped him drag his sabre free of its sheath. Yet, he didn’t have the strength to strike; the blood loss was too much.

‘They will know your allegiance,’ Savrian snarled. ‘They will reject you.’

Verigon continued to stalk him, prowling just out of reach of Malisette.

‘No, they won’t,’ Verigon said, smirking. ‘They will see the purple eyes of Sarn’s bloodline and love me as they were conditioned to. And they will follow me to Khorne’s side like children.’

The horror of it crashed in. Savrian’s dynasty was ending, the empire toppling, the work of a thousand ancestors burning away. His people’s devotion to his bloodline would be the undoing of his house. And it was his fault.

‘Slaanesh give me the strength to kill you,’ Savrian whispered. ‘I swear I’ll have you dead. My ancestors will break your soul after they break your body. They’ll–’

‘You will see them before I do,’ Verigon said. ‘And if they’re going to break anyone, it is you. If you desire vengeance, you should pray to Khorne.’

Verigon hefted the axe, encroaching on him.

Savrian recoiled, clutching his side. Malisette gleamed, outstretched in his other hand, but then his legs crumpled and he collapsed once more.

‘No, I will not run from my goddess,’ Savrian choked out. ‘My devotion is true. Do not insult me, you heartless beast.’

Verigon stopped and stepped back then, his face dark with pity.

‘You are pathetic,’ Verigon said. ‘You are so blinded by your sentimentality that you don’t realise Slaanesh never cared about you. At least Khorne does not pretend to. I’ll leave you to him, though I wonder if you even deserve that. Goodbye, father.’

Savrian tensed but the axe did not come. Verigon walked away, nothing more than an outline against the rising sun. Then he disappeared down the beach and Savrian was alone.

Darkness ate at Savrian’s vision, his flesh clammy and cold. He could not feel anything. This was suffering, this long degeneration into the oubliette of one’s own dying body. His thoughts slurred together, his memory turning to soup.

‘Slaanesh, no, please,’ Savrian said. ‘Come to me, please. Beloved. Please. You cannot let him. Please, let me fix it. Let me…’ Savrian’s breath ran out as his life blood leaked from the mortal wound. His heart fluttered in his chest like a trapped bird. Savrian forced himself to inhale against the agony, but each breath became shallower and shallower as the abyss inside him grew.

He felt for some comfort, some presence as his soul loosened in its moorings. Just a hint of her. He would endure any soul-breaking torture just to see her. She could punish him in ways that would make a daemon wilt. All of that would be nothing if he could just see her. Just a glance. Just once.

‘Beloved, where have you gone?’ Savrian whispered.

He sank into a cold and endless abyss, his countless regrets whispering in the dark.

NO HONOUR AMONG VERMIN

C L Werner

The pungent smell of incense was predominant, but there were underlying scents as well. Human scents. Odours of subjugation, anxiety and adoration. The stink of fear.

Fylch Tattertail’s whiskers twitched as his nose instinctively tried to draw more information from the air. He knew it was a futile effort. The walls of the tunnel were much too thick and the alcove much too high to discern much by scent. It was by visual inspection that the truth would be revealed.

The brown-furred skaven pawed about in the pouches woven into the inside of his thread-bare tunic. Fylch pulled out a motley assortment of oddments. The skull of a weasel, the shiny carapace of a dried beetle, a rusty bolt of dubious importance, a gold coin badly scratched where it had been bitten, five buttons, a salted grot ear that looked a bit mouldy. Fylch let the litter of junk spill onto the tunnel floor. He didn’t need any of it. What he wanted was… He stopped fumbling about his tunic when he removed the blackened bit of warpblend. Steel infused with trace amounts of warpstone, the three-inch rod was etched with Queekish symbols invoking the Horned One’s protection. Fylch wasn’t so sure he accepted the merchant’s pitch about such divine defence, but he did know that the taste of warpblend on his tongue was a powerful stimulant, giving him a clarity and focus that was otherwise elusive.

Fylch scrambled up the last few steps to the top of the alcove. Slaves had spent several painstaking weeks excavating the secret stair and the little spy-perch at its top, working in absolute silence until their task was done. Fylch regretted it had been necessary to work them so hard – by the time the slaves were finished there hadn’t been much meat left on their bones. And Skowl Scorchpaw had been counting on the slaves to supplement the meagre rations the expedition had brought along.

Fylch shook his head and bit down harder on the warpblend. He was letting himself get distracted. He had to focus on the job ahead.

At the top of the alcove, Fylch found the brass-rimmed eyepiece jutting from the wall. Just a twinge of fear coursed through him as he pressed his face to the lens. He knew what he should expect to see; his biggest concern was that he’d be too late. If things had gone too far and the skaven had to wait for the next moon… Well, there weren’t any more slaves left to eat.

Peering through the lens, Fylch was afforded a bat’s-eye view of the chamber on the other side of the wall. He didn’t pretend to understand the complex arrangement of mirrors and mechanics that allowed the spy-scope to bring everything into view with such clarity. It was enough that the device worked the way it was supposed to work, something not always a certainty with Clan Skryre’s inventions.

From high above the chamber, the scope brought the room into view, gathering up the fitful light from braziers and torches to throw a reddish cast across everything. To Fylch it was like looking at a reflection in a puddle of blood.

The chamber was vast, easily a hundred feet wide and thrice again as long. Parts of the walls and especially the ceiling looked raw and natural, but the floor had been smoothed and levelled. The wall sections that had been worked were likewise smoothed down and covered in a sort of plaster or limestone glaze. There were pictures and symbols painted on them, but some of those symbols made Fylch’s glands clench and the less thought he gave to the murals the better.

Dominating the room, at its far end, was a broad altar of volcanic obsidian, its edges shining like mirrors. There were iron shackles set into the four corners of the altar, and Fylch could pick out the smell of dried blood rising from the shallow grooves cut into the top of the platform and the hound-faced basins resting on the floor beneath each one. Behind the altar, towering dozens of feet above it, was a monstrous statue. It had a roughly humanoid build, with broad shoulders and two powerful arms, but instead of legs it had a mass of serpentine bodies, their coils interlaced in grotesque patterns that defied the eye to follow them. There was no head; instead a bestial face jutted outwards from between the shoulders, its lips pulled back in a toothy snarl. One stony arm was held against the statue’s side, a viciously crooked sword clutched in its hand. The other was outstretched, pointing one of its claws forwards.

Fylch held his breath when he saw that claw. There was a chain wrapped around it and at the end of the chain there was a hook. Normally that hook was unburdened, but now there was a huge bronze bell hanging from it. It looked as big around as an overfed duardin and was about as tall as a grot in boots. Fylch could make out the grisly runes cut into the sides of the bell. They almost seemed to glow with malice and precipitated a spurt of fear-musk from his glands as he looked upon them.

It wasn’t just fear that Fylch felt. There was a brew of relief and eagerness that rushed through him as well. The bell was what they were after! It was the reason Skowl had brought them here. And despite his anxiety, Fylch knew that it wasn’t too late. They still had time to steal the relic away from the humans.

He glanced across the robed figures that were seated on the floor facing the altar. They swayed in time to the angry cadence of a huge drum, their hooded heads sweeping across the ground. At an estimate, Fylch would have guessed there to be two hundred of them, but he found it hard to make an accurate assessment with their individual scents masked by the incense – he might be counting the same ones over and over. He was more certain about the dozen armoured guards who flanked the congregation, tall and imposing men locked inside heavy suits of bronze armour. Then of course, there was the masked priest standing underneath the statue, his visage locked behind the fanged skull of a monstrous hound. That was the man-thing to pay particular attention to, and Fylch gave him a scrutinising glower. The cultists were mindlessly obsessed with ritual and each ceremony was performed exactly like the ones before it. The priest would set the tempo, and from what Fylch could see there was still quite a bit of time before he’d be ready to start his mumbo jumbo and make an offering to the Blood God.

Fylch drew back from the eyepiece. If not for the warpblend bit in his mouth, he might have uttered a titter of triumph; instead he simply lashed his forked tail from side to side in amusement. There was still time! Everything was ready and there was still time!

Fylch took the bit from his mouth and scurried back down the steps. He paused over the pile of junk he had dumped earlier. He picked through the rubbish, stuffing objects back into his pockets. It was a very pretty beetle husk, after all, and one never knew when even a mouldy salted grot ear might become appetising.

Fylch hurried down the narrow tunnel. He was reassured by its comforting confines, his whiskers brushing against solid walls to either side. All skaven preferred it when they knew nothing could go creeping around them and come at them from behind. When the tunnel opened into a wider corridor, Fylch’s paw closed about the hilt of the sword tucked under his belt. It was an unthinking, instinctive motion, a reaction to the abrupt loss of the security offered by the tunnel.

It was also a mistake. Before Fylch could react, he was struck a powerful blow from the side. He crashed against the hard stone floor, the sword flying from his fingers as he slid across the ground. The tang of his own blood was on the air, and he could feel a sticky dampness under his tunic where he had been scratched by claws. His eyes darted to the creature who had struck him. No need to guess which of the five skaven in the corridor was to blame. Only the hulking Krick was licking blood from his claws.

Fylch bared his fangs and lashed his forked tail in fury. Krick glared back at him, showing his sharp teeth in a wicked grin. The big skaven was powerfully built, almost twice as massive as Fylch. His body was covered in woolly black fur, and the fur in turn was covered by metal armour and a hide cuirass. Krick absently wiped the rest of the blood on the hanging skirt of his cuirass and glanced at the sword Fylch was reaching for.

‘Go. Take. Krick kill-bash Fylch fool-meat,’ the big skaven snarled, fingers tightening about the spiked mace the brute carried.

A guttural snarl from one of the other skaven in the corridor caused Krick to drop down in a submissive posture, head turned and throat exposed in a gesture of contrition. ‘Tattertail bring-carry sword-blade…’ he stammered, trying to explain himself.

The skaven who had snarled at Krick gave the brute a menacing glower. He was a tall piebald ratman, lean and rangy in contrast to Krick’s muscled bulk. He wore a voluminous leather robe-smock, its outer surface slick and shiny. A bewildering array of tool belts criss-crossed his waist and chest. Lashed across his side was a metal cylinder with a deranged assortment of hoses and wires streaming away from it. Many of these connected to the bulky metal glove that was strapped to his right hand. A sinister green glow pulsated from the cylindrical device… and from a reservoir on the back of the glove. Taken in whole, the device was a ghastly weapon and one that had given its inventor his name: Skowl Scorchpaw.

‘Fylch too clever-smart to plot against me,’ Skowl snapped, eyes straying from Krick to Fylch. They were ugly, bulging eyes, burned red by the chemical fumes of Clan Skryre’s workshops, and it was a hard thing for any skaven to hold the warlock engineer’s gaze for long.

‘Yes-yes, mighty-great Skowl,’ Fylch whined, his forked tail flicking across the ground. ‘Fylch is loyal-true!’

Skowl held his crimson eyes on Fylch. ‘And what has loyal Fylch spy-seen?’

‘Man-things start rite,’ Fylch said. ‘Bell hang-swing from statue-beast.’ Fylch looked across the other skaven in the corridor. ‘Soon bring sacrifice-meat to altar-plate,’ he declared.

One of the other skaven, a hunchbacked ratman with a scrapyard of weird tools and devices hooked to the basilisk-hide coat he wore, quickly fished a spherical instrument from one of his bags. He squinted at the crystal sphere and manipulated a dial on its underside. He bobbed his head in delight as the device blinked and whirred. ‘Not-need fear-worry,’ he squeaked. ‘Cultists never start-slay without moon-time. Still time-chance for plan.’ He jabbed a clawed finger at the sphere as though to prove his point.

Fylch ducked his head to hide his bared fangs. The tinker-rat was Teekritt Badscratch, as adept at creating new inventions as he was at stealing them from other skaven. Fylch wondered which category the strange lunar tracker belonged under. He almost hoped the thing wasn’t working right just so he could watch Scorchpaw vent his displeasure on the arrogant Teekritt.

Skowl bruxed his fangs as he digested Teekritt’s assurance. He turned to the other three skaven in the corridor. ‘Know-remember what to do,’ he said. ‘Hide-find places. Wait-lurk.’ His gaze roved across the three. The red eyes locked with that of a small, one-eyed ratman. ‘Ragbrat send-show signal.’

Ragbrat’s gloved paw caressed the barrel of the gun he carried. It was a massive warplock jezzail, its barrel etched with Queekish scratches and its stock carved from a gargant’s tooth. There was a murderous twinkle in his eye. Fylch had heard it said the marksrat couldn’t go to sleep unless he had shot something beforehand.

The two skaven who would be waiting for Ragbrat’s signal were as different from each other as hot and cold. Brakkik Gnash wore a smelly confusion of rathides and a big satchel slung across one shoulder. A long, hollow rod cobbled together from finger-bones was strapped to a loop that crossed his chest. On his shoulders and scampering about his feet were a pack of rats, each branded with a different Queekish glyph.

The other was Haak Blackear. From head to toe he was covered in a costume of heavy leather robes, gloves and boots. On his back he wore a heavy metal cylinder, hoses running from it connected to the long mask that, for the moment, was hanging against his neck. Slung at his side was a big ratskin basket containing a deadly profusion of poison gas bombs.

Skowl turned back to Teekritt. ‘Prepare-ready box-casket,’ he snarled, pointing a claw into the darkness. ‘Wait-watch for Skowl return.’ The inventor lost his arrogant confidence and dipped his head in a show of obedience. Licking his fangs, Teekritt scurried off into the shadows. Skowl watched him go, then turned to Ragbrat and gestured towards the concealed door that linked the skaven tunnels with the halls of the humans. ‘Sneak-slink behind man-things. After priest-thing strike bell, Ragbrat give-send signal. Then Brakkik scare-scatter. Haak kill all-every brave-stupid man-things.’ The marksrat and his companions hurried away to carry out their orders.

‘Fylch, Krick, follow-stay,’ Skowl announced. The warlock engineer mounted the steps leading up to the alcove.

Fylch started to follow, but a cuff from Krick sent him sprawling. The black-furred brute gave him a toothy grin as he stalked past. It was more than just a reminder of where Fylch stood in the pecking order. It was a promise that there would be an accounting between them when it was all finished.

Fylch had to repress a titter of amusement as he followed Krick. The verminous thug had no idea who it was he was dealing with if he thought he’d have a chance to settle scores.

Fylch was back in the hidden alcove above the cult temple. The tiny space was even more cramped now that Skowl and Krick were with him. He was thankful that the others were down below, creeping about the back of the temple. Trying to stuff six ratmen into the place wouldn’t have left enough room to swing a dead mouse.

‘Fylch! Watch-spy! Speak-squeak all that happens.’ Skowl Scorchpaw gestured to the bat’s-eye scope. Krick lashed his tail in annoyance when the other skaven walked to the top of the alcove.

Fylch wondered if Krick would feel so jealous if he understood why Skowl had bestowed this ‘honour’ on him. The warlock engineer had a trepidation about using any device he hadn’t inspected beforehand. He had seen too many high-ranking skaven perish in unfortunate accidents – indeed had arranged several of them himself. With no time to extract the scope and examine it, he’d arrived at the pragmatic solution of letting Fylch take on the duty.

‘Man-things still sit-pray,’ Fylch reported as he gazed down at the cultists. The skull-masked priest was standing behind the altar, only now there was a bronze axe in his hands. Fylch knew it was just his imagination, but he fancied he could smell the blood caked onto the axe even through the heavy incense. The man-priest started to chant in a weird language that was unfamiliar to Fylch. It had a strange quality that he didn’t think was purely human, more like the snarl of wolves or hungry dogs.

Suddenly the priest swung around and gestured with the gore-caked axe, pointing it into the crowd. A cry of horror rose from one of the cultists. The worshippers to either side of him seized their companion and dragged him up with them as they stood. Fylch licked his fangs in grim anticipation as he watched the victim being led to the altar. ‘Sacrifice-meat is chained to altar-plate,’ he reported as the man was forced down onto the stone and bound by the shackles.

Now the man-priest reached down and tore open the front of the sacrifice’s robe, laying bare his chest. The gore-crusted axe came into play, but instead of hewing the man asunder, the priest merely brought the weapon’s edge to his victim’s body, scraping bloody furrows in his skin. Fylch repeated what he saw to Skowl.

‘Good,’ the warlock engineer hissed. ‘Soon they ring-strike bell.’

Fylch tried to control his glands when he heard Skowl speak. He knew what striking the bell would herald. Even so, he was compelled to keep watching the macabre tableau unfolding below.

The priest now turned from his victim and looked towards the dangling bell. With the man’s blood still dripping off the axe, the cult leader brought the weapon smacking against the metal. A dolorous note rumbled through the cavernous chamber. From where he watched, Fylch could feel the sound throbbing through his bones. There was a power within it that went far beyond simple noise. It was an intonation to shiver the very soul.

A gruesome change overtook the hall below. The illumination grew notably darker even though the flames rising from the torches and braziers had risen to twice their previous height. Fylch could feel a clammy chill emanating from the room, coursing up through the scope. His gaze was fixated on the altar. There was another figure there now, something that had not been there an instant before. It was taller than the priest and far more powerfully built than even the armoured warriors who guarded the hall.

The dark shape surged towards the altar, moving with a grotesque undulating motion. Fylch gnashed his fangs to stifle the squeak of fright he wanted to utter. Moving out from under the shadow of the statue’s arm, the daemon – for it could be nothing else – was revealed as a small simulacrum of the monstrous idol. Its flesh was slimy with fresh blood, its skin rippling as it moved. The eyes that glared from its hideous face were alight with a hellish fury, glowing with the kind of feverish intensity Fylch had seen only in warpsnuff addicts.

In stammering words, Fylch described what was happening to Skowl. Then the daemon swept to the man lashed to the altar and started to feed…

‘Fool-meat!’ Skowl growled as Fylch jerked away from the eyepiece. ‘Watch-tell! Hurry-scurry!’

Krick pounced on Fylch and forced him back to his post. The brute’s powerful arms were locked around his head, pressing his face against the eyepiece.

Down below, Fylch could see that the daemon had finished its meal. All that remained on the altar was a shambles of bone and shredded skin. Blood spilled from the gutters carved into the stone, filling the jars set beneath. The victim’s head was missing and as the daemon slithered back under the idol’s arm, Fylch could see the skull gripped in the beast’s jaws.

The bell was still ringing from the blow the priest had struck, but now the reverberations stopped. Awed silence held the chamber, the cultists watching in fearful adoration as the murderous daemon they had called up vanished with the last echo of the bell’s summons.

‘Daemon-thing leave-gone,’ Fylch told Skowl.

Skowl tittered with delight. ‘Plan-plot start now!’

Fylch could see the man-priest standing behind the altar again. He brandished the axe above his head with both hands and began leading the cultists in another bestial chant. Then, above the roar of the crowd, a sharp boom cracked across the chamber. The wolf-skull mask of the priest was shattered, crumbling to the floor in ragged fragments. The priest fell back onto the coiled limbs of the statue, his face obliterated by the warpstone bullet that had struck him.

The cultists fell silent, stunned by the grisly death Ragbrat’s shot had delivered from the back of the temple. Before they could gather their wits, cries of alarm sounded from the left flank of the congregation. Fire crackled against the wall, blazing away with ferocious violence. A second fire erupted from the right, soon to be followed by another and yet another.

Brakkik’s work, or rather that of his trained rats. Keeping out of sight, the ratmaster was blowing specially scented pellets into the chamber. The smell of each pellet was prepared to entice the rat trained to seek it out. Only unlike the treats used to teach them, those Brakkik now used would start a pyrotechnic reaction when consumed by the rats, turning the rodents into living firebombs. Fylch had to concede that the scruffy skaven was creating a splendid distraction with his pets.

Thrown into panic by the fires, confused by the murder of their leader, the cultists lost all cohesion. They scattered in frantic flight. Only a few were devoted enough to remember the bell. Led by an under-priest and accompanied by a few armoured guards, a small group removed the bell from its hook and hurried through the swelling smoke and fire to a little door at the back of the chamber.

‘Man-things take-fetch bell. Run-race through door.’ Fylch dropped away from the eyepiece the instant he felt Krick release him. One paw darted for the sword he wore, but Fylch resisted the urge to stab his oppressor. It would be too easy to gut the vermin where he stood. Besides, Skowl wouldn’t like it. Krick’s part in the plan was just starting. The vault where the cultists secured the bell was only a few hundred yards down the tunnel from the alcove and the black-furred brute would be needed to help carry it away.

Skowl bruxed his fangs in delight. ‘Yes-yes! Stupid-fool man-things! They do just what I want-need!’ He gestured to Fylch and Krick, then pointed at the steps. ‘Hurry-scurry! We find-fetch bell now!’

The three skaven scrambled back down the steps and into the tunnel. Fylch had lost count of how many times Skowl had forced them to practise this mad dash from the alcove, down the hidden tunnel to the secret door that opened into the cult’s vault. This time, of course, they made the run in earnest and that urgency lent him more speed than he thought he could muster. He reached the door easily ahead of the others. In the thrill of the moment, he pushed against the stone portal, but it resisted his efforts. He had to wait for Krick to add his brute strength to the effort before the stone swung aside and exposed the cult strongroom.

The vault was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling and a rough floor of unworked stone. The walls were cut into little niches wherein the mouldering remains of coffins and human bones gave off a musty smell. There were other smells, too, that assailed Fylch’s senses as Krick pushed him through the secret door. Blood was one. Evil was another, a brooding malice so potent that it conveyed itself to the skaven’s sharp nose as a rank, desolate odour. It took Fylch only a heartbeat to detect where the smell was strongest – a huge obsidian sarcophagus that loomed at the far end of the vault.

The sarcophagus, Fylch knew, was where the cult kept the daemon-bell when it wasn’t needed for their rituals. Arcane spells guarded the obsidian vessel and for more mundane purposes there were a series of complex locks that might have befuddled a duardin craftsman. Fylch was relieved to see the sarcophagus standing open. That meant they had beaten the humans to the vault and the bell hadn’t been sealed away. It also meant Fylch would be able to skip the most dangerous role he would have played in Skowl’s plan.

‘Thieves! Ratkin desecraters!’ The cry rang out through the vault. Fylch spun around to see the under-priest and his entourage entering through the vault’s door. Four cultists bore the daemon-bell between them, and he could see the fanatical outrage that twisted their faces when their leader shouted. The armoured guards, however, were of far more immediate concern. They didn’t simply glare at the skaven. They came charging towards Fylch with axes and swords. He glanced around for Skowl and Krick, but the other ratmen had ducked back inside the hidden passage.

Fylch cringed away from the guards as they rushed him. As the first swung at him with a bronze axe, the ratman whipped around, lashing out with his curved sword. Thinking the skaven cowed, the axeman was taken completely by surprise when Fylch’s blade slashed across his arm and tore into his shoulder. The guard cried out as his useless limb lost its hold on the axe and the weight of the weapon dragged down his good arm. For an instant the man was exposed and vulnerable. It was all the opportunity the swift ratman needed. In a blur of fur and steel, Fylch stabbed the point of his sword into the warrior’s throat. The man fell and thrashed on the floor while he choked on his own blood.

Fylch darted around as one of the other guards came at him with a sword. There was no question of parrying the man’s blows. In a contest between human and skaven, the advantage of strength usually belonged to the man-thing. Even a comparative brute like Krick was merely able to hold his own against a human warrior. But the skaven had their own advantages over their enemies. If Fylch could not match the guard’s strength, then the guard could not match his speed. While ducking around the warrior’s blade, the ratman lashed out with his forked tail. Like a scaly whip it cracked against the man’s leg, stinging the exposed skin of his thigh. The sudden and unexpected pain provided a moment of distraction, one that Fylch was quick to exploit. He dived in towards the guard, rolling across the floor and raking his sword across the man’s side as he passed. The guard screamed in agony, a great gout of blood spilling from where the serrated edge of the skaven blade had ripped just above his hip, between the sections of his bronze armour.

Fylch darted a glance at the other cultists. Krick had finally rushed out from the tunnel. One guard was down with his head caved in while the other was trying to fend off the attentions of the spiked maul with his axe. The under-priest was shouting for help while at the same time forcing the cultists carrying the bell towards the obsidian sarcophagus. Fylch hissed a curse on the damnable humans. If they should make it…

One hand clutching his bleeding wound, the guard Fylch had injured chopped at him with his blade. Again, the wily skaven ducked the sweep of the sword and struck out with his own weapon. He had the satisfaction of feeling flesh rip under the steel, and saw a pair of fingers go bouncing across the floor. His hand maimed, the warrior staggered back, trying to recover his momentum. Fylch didn’t give him the chance. Thrusting forwards, he stabbed his blade into the gap in his armour where pauldron joined cuirass. He felt bones crack under the blow and savoured the sharp tang of blood that sprayed from the man’s torn flesh. Darting back from a desperate but unfocused sweep of the guard’s sword, Fylch watched his foe crumple to the ground.

‘The cult-men!’ Skowl roared as he deigned to emerge from the tunnel. ‘Stop-slay!’

Skowl acted on his own words; holding forth his metal glove he pointed the fingers at the cultists. Green energy crackled about the glove, sparks flying from the generator and the reservoir. Then streamers of jade lightning went shivering across the vault. Fylch threw himself to the ground as one of the green bolts hissed past his ears. Others smashed into the roof and walls, blasting little showers of pebbles from the stone.

Some of Skowl’s erratic warp lightning seared into his intended targets. Anguished screams rose from the cultists as the green energy burned through them. Robes and hair burst into flames, flesh blackened and cracked as the humans were flash-boiled.

The immolated cultists fell, and as they fell the daemon-bell crashed to the floor. Again, the dolorous, shivering tone pulsed through the air and trembled through Fylch’s bones.

The under-priest, half-cooked by Skowl’s attack, lurched to his feet, his face ashen where it had not been burned, his eyes wide with terror. In a Herculean effort, he wrapped his arms around the bell and flung it into the sarcophagus. The lid slammed shut as the man collapsed beside it.

If the human had thought to save himself by locking away the bell, he was to be disappointed. Fylch could see the dark, monstrous shape that had suddenly manifested in the vault. He felt its ravenous, malevolent eyes sweep across him and the other skaven. The under-priest was closer to it, however, and it was the cultist it chose for its victim. In a rapid, undulating motion, the daemon surged over the prostrate priest. Fylch had thought the earlier ritual was ghastly, but now he was afforded a close-up view of the proceedings.

It was enough to gag a rat.

As before, once it had claimed its meal, the daemon evaporated with the same swiftness with which it had manifested. The only evidence of its advent was the gory litter it left behind.

Skowl was the first of the skaven to recover his wits once the daemon was gone. He glanced at his still glowing glove, then at the dead cultists, and finally at the sealed sarcophagus. His lips peeled back from his fangs and he lashed his tail angrily from side to side. Turning towards Fylch, he seized him and pulled him within inches of the exposed fangs.

‘Fool-meat! Traitor-meat! Why Fylch not stop-slay man-things?’ Skowl dumped Fylch to the floor and continued to glare at him. ‘Now Fylch will open bell-box! Quick-quick!’ He turned his head towards Krick, who was standing over the body of the last guard. ‘Fail-falter and I will feed your spleen to Krick!’ The proposition brought a grisly leer from the black-furred skaven.

‘Yes-yes, bold-wise Skowl.’ Fylch bobbed his head in an unctuous display. He didn’t dare tell the warlock engineer that it was his fault the cultists had dropped the bell and called the daemon back. A skaven quickly learned it wasn’t smart to point out the mistakes of superiors.

Muttering curses under his breath, Fylch approached the sarcophagus. He was careful to keep away from the mangled mess that had been the under-priest. Closer to the obsidian vessel, he could feel the crackle of the protective wards cast upon it. The lid of the sarcophagus had been cut into the semblance of a human skeleton – a grim touch that he didn’t appreciate under the circumstances. He wasn’t certain what the wards would do to a thief and he wanted to keep things that way.

Fylch rummaged about the pouches sewn inside his tunic. He discarded a ball of twine, some rock-hard cheese, an empty moth cocoon, three azurite beads, a lizard fang… Finally his paws closed around the object he wanted. It was a long, smelly item: a severed skaven hand that had been pickled and then coated in paraffin. Each finger was upright with a little wick pinned to the claw. The mummer he had bought it from called it a ‘paw of gory’ and claimed the magics invested into it would counteract any spell that tried to foil a thief. Fylch had used it before, as two singed fingers attested, but never to steal anything that he was absolutely certain had some kind of arcane protection.

‘Hurry-scurry! Quick-quick!’ Skowl snapped. The warlock engineer didn’t have much patience and what he did possess was wearing thin.

Gnashing his fangs and clenching his glands, Fylch set the paw of gory down on the floor. From another pocket he brought a duardin tinderbox and used it to light one of the wicks. He started to put it away, then reflected on the eerie sensation of the arcane wards. There was power here that might need more to oppose it. He hastily lit the other fingers so that all five were flickering with an ugly blue glow. Almost at once, he felt the uncanny crackle of the wards dissipate. As long as the wax-coated fingers burned, the arcane wards would be rendered impotent.

Fylch glanced back at Skowl and Krick, then swiftly set to work. There was no need to rummage around to find the intricate lock picks he carried. He kept them secure on his belt where they would always be in easy reach if he needed to get out of a tight spot quickly. Staring at the morbid sarcophagus, Fylch felt this was about as dangerous a place as he had ever been in.

With the paw of gory sputtering away, Fylch approached the mechanism the cult used to secure their relic. Previous inspection of it had convinced him it was going to be a tough bone to crack. Coupled with the wards, it was the reason he had persuaded Skowl that they should intercept the bell rather than try to steal it from the vault. Besides, the warlock engineer wanted to make sure the bell really summoned daemons before going through with the scheme.

Fylch now attacked the problem of the devilish locks. A pick gripped in each paw, two more clutched in the coils of his bifurcated tail, and a fifth clamped between his fangs, he set to work. Carefully, with the exacting caution only someone raised in the paranoid society of skaven could master, he manipulated the tumblers and teeth. There was a system to the mechanisms, forcing each to be opened in sequence before the whole would be overcome. Fylch experienced moments of panic as picks threatened to snap under the pressure of the teeth, and tumblers refused to budge. So intent was he on his task that he even ignored the demands and threats Skowl shouted at him. The locks would be finished when they were finished. Not before.

There was only one thing that could urge Fylch to reckless haste, and a chance glance back at the paw of gory provided it. Two of the fingers were already burned down to mere nubs while the others had less than half their length to go! Once they were all extinguished, whatever dread spell guarded the sarcophagus would be unleashed.

Fylch pried and prodded the locks with all five picks, juggling and jostling with abandon. Unable to think about what he was doing, he fell back to instinct and the innate sense of long experience. First one, then another of the locks sprang open. Soon it was Fylch’s turn to demand haste.

‘Fetch-take bell! Fast-quick!’ He swung open the lid of the vessel, exposing the sinister bell.

Skowl now turned his impatient ire on Krick. ‘Get-fetch! Help loyal-clever Fylch!’ he snarled at the brute. Pointing the glowing warp-glove towards the skaven motivated him to be quick.

Fylch helped Krick lift the bell away from the sarcophagus, trying to ensure that the clapper didn’t strike the sides. ‘Quick-quick,’ he hissed to the black-furred killer. He was watching the paw of gory burning down to its last knuckle. When it went out, the arcane wards would return.

‘Lift-carry, tick-sniffer,’ Krick cursed as he hefted the bell. Together the two ratmen managed to carry it away from the sarcophagus. Fylch felt the magical crackle of the restored wards as they scurried away. He was still happy not knowing what the spell would do to a thief.

‘Rest later,’ Skowl told them as they lugged the bell towards the tunnel. ‘We find-seek Teekritt. Use his bell-box to take-leave cult-nest.’

Fylch and Krick both bobbed their heads in agreement. Right now, anything that let them set down the heavy bell sounded like a good idea. It seemed to grow heavier with each step they took, but knowing what would happen if they dropped it made them persist.

It wasn’t particularly reassuring to Fylch to see Skowl keeping his distance as they trudged down the tunnels. If anything did happen, the warlock engineer was making sure it didn’t happen to him.

Fylch’s arms felt as though they were on fire by the time he and Krick finally reached the spot where Teekritt was waiting for them. Krick gave a happy squeak when he saw the cart and the big metal casket Teekritt had prepared to receive the bell. Fylch winced when he saw the ramshackle conveyance. It looked as if it would collapse under the bell’s weight when they loaded it. Skowl had been so meticulous in all his plotting and scheming, but this minor detail appeared to have escaped his devious cunning.

‘No-not drop-trip now!’ Fylch warned the black skaven.

Krick bared his fangs. If his hands weren’t around the bottom of the bell, he might have put them around Fylch’s neck. ‘If weasel-licking Fylch would hold-carry his end!’ he growled.

Teekritt squeaked in horror when the two skaven took a final stumble towards the cart. The clapper swayed perilously close to the side of the bell. All three of the ratmen froze and didn’t twitch so much as a whisker. Scrambling under the bell, Teekritt reached up and held the clapper still. Gesturing with his free paw he motioned the others forwards, keeping the bell silent while they pushed it onto the cart.

Fylch let out a deep breath once the bell was in place. ‘Good-glad to put down bell.’

Krick grimaced at the rickety cart Teekritt had brought. A spurt of fear musk wafted into the air. ‘Need better-good way to carry-take bell,’ he complained. He turned and looked at Skowl as the warlock engineer approached, finally deigning to join the others now that danger was no longer imminent. ‘Cart make bell shake-ring.’

Skowl bruxed his fangs and gave Krick a sharp look. ‘I already plan-plot. I need-want Krick carry bell. Now I need-want Krick keep bell quiet.’

Krick’s ears were folded back in puzzlement as he heard Skowl speak. He still had that confused look when Fylch drove his sword into the ratman’s back. Krick spun around, fangs bared, but Fylch’s blow had been delivered with the murderous skill of an assassin. Death silenced Krick’s fury before he could even raise a claw to his killer.

Skowl looked away from the corpse to Teekritt. ‘Get to work,’ he told the tinker-rat.

Teekritt scurried underneath the cart and dragged out a wooden skinning rack. In short order he had Krick’s body stretched out and was peeling away the ratman’s woolly hide with a flensing knife.

‘Krick will muffle-quiet the bell,’ Skowl declared. ‘Let sleeping daemons sleep.’ He turned to Fylch. ‘Grey Seer Nezslik pay much-much for magic bell, but not enough for Krick-share.’

Fylch bobbed his head in agreement, while trying to keep any sign of agitation from his posture. ‘Big-share better than little-share,’ he said.

Skowl displayed his fangs in a gruesome grin. ‘True-squeak,’ he agreed. Before he could continue, the sound of something running down the tunnel brought all three skaven spinning around. Their agitation relaxed slightly when they saw that it was only Brakkik returning to join them. The ratmaster looked even more ragged than before, breathing heavily and without his entourage of trained rodents scurrying about his feet.

‘Where are Haak and Ragbrat?’ Skowl wanted to know.

Brakkik dipped his head in apology to the warlock engineer. ‘Dead-die, ‘ he reported, though there wasn’t any regret in his tone. ‘Ragbrat shoot-kill man-priest, then Brakkik’s rats confuse-scare cult-things. Some cult-things see-find skaven. Chase-hunt! Ragbrat try to shoot-kill but jezzail-gun explode!’ Brakkik made a violent gesture with his hand. ‘Haak use Poison Wind globes to gas-kill, but poison get into mask!’

‘Then they are all dead,’ Skowl stated. He gave Fylch a knowing look.

Fylch fumbled among his pockets until he found the squirming bundle he wanted. He pulled out the rat, its back branded with the number four. A flick of his claws broke the tethers that bound its legs and jaws. He held the animal towards Brakkik. ‘Lose-drop,’ he said. ‘Fylch find-save.’

As Fylch released the rat it went scampering straight for Brakkik. The ratmaster squeaked in horror, all too aware of what kind of treachery was afoot. He frantically patted his clothes, trying to find the scented treat that was drawing the number four rat to him. It was a futile effort, Fylch had hidden it with the same dexterity that had allowed him to steal it in the first place. Brakkik realised this and turned to flee down the tunnel, but even as he did, the rat reached him. It scurried up his back and down the neck of his coat. An instant later there was a hideous scream and a bright plume of fire as the vermin found its deadly treat and the resulting conflagration consumed its master.

‘Then there were three,’ Skowl stated. ‘Clever-quick Fylch. Now we split all their shares.’

Fylch bobbed his head in agreement. Skowl watched as he rummaged in one of his pockets and brought out the screw he had removed from Ragbrat’s gun and the valve that had previously been attached to Haak’s respirator. ‘Skowl not need-want more?’ Fylch asked, backing away from the warlock engineer.

‘I did not need-want Brakkik and others,’ Skowl said. ‘They not-no useful. Clever-loyal Fylch is useful.’ He looked aside to Teekritt as the tinker-rat was stuffing Krick’s hide inside the bell to muffle its clapper. ‘Teekritt clever-loyal too,’ he added. ‘Both clever-loyal skaven put bell inside bell-box now.’

Fylch scrambled up onto the cart beside Teekritt and helped the tinker-rat push the bell into the metal casket. Once it was inside, the lid was shut and Teekritt locked the casket with a small brass key.

Skowl held out his hand, waiting for Teekritt to give him the key. Fylch grabbed the tinker-rat and kept him from dropping down to join the warlock engineer. ‘Wait-listen,’ he hissed at Teekritt. ‘Maybe share-three is too much for Skowl. Maybe share-twice is too much!’

‘Doubt-question Skowl?’ Teekritt tried to keep his voice level, his posture authoritative but not unduly threatening. His red eyes fixed on Fylch. ‘Honest-clever Fylch learn-know Skowl is good-true. Pay much-much when Clan Skryre come to take-carry bell.’

Teekritt glanced at his weird timepiece. ‘Yes-yes, Clan Skryre come soon-now.’

Skowl stroked his whiskers and bruxed his fangs. ‘Pay Fylch much-much.’

‘Same-like way Ragbrat and Haak and Brakkik and Krick pay much-much?’ Fylch asked.

Skowl bared his fangs. He was tired of this slinking thief’s impertinence. It didn’t matter that Fylch was right and he’d be disposed of just like the others. That was simply what happened to underlings who were no longer useful.

‘Traitor-Fylch!’ Skowl roared. He raised his warp-glove, but then his eyes narrowed with vicious cunning. The bell was too close to risk using warp lightning. He glanced at Teekritt and saw the confusion in the half-crazed tinker-rat’s eyes. There, at least, was an underling who was still useful. ‘Teekritt! Kill-slay traitor-meat!’

The tinker-rat rounded on Fylch, but he was ready for him. Fylch’s claws raked across Teekritt’s face, then he dived against his foe and sent them both crashing down from the cart. The two skaven wrestled on the ground for a moment, then Fylch broke away and fled to the far side of the cart.

Skowl lifted his gloved hand, but again stayed himself because of the bell. His gaze drifted down to Teekritt. The tinker-rat didn’t have the same shield to protect him. In a blast of green energy, Skowl immolated the hunchbacked ratman. He leaned over the carcass and plucked the key from the charred claws.

‘Only Fylch and Skowl now!’ the warlock engineer snarled. He glared at the cart with his red eyes. ‘Come out and die quick!’

For answer, an object came whistling out from the darkness. Skowl leapt back as it struck him. He expected to feel a stabbing pain; instead he felt an unpleasant warmth at his side. He stared down at the warp generator for his glove. A throwing star, similar to those employed by Clan Eshin, was buried in the device, causing it to spit sparks and green flame.

Frantically Skowl ripped away the straps that fastened the generator to his side. He pulled away the warp-glove and threw the whole apparatus far into the tunnel. He spun around and threw himself to the floor as the malfunctioning device exploded and sent metal shrapnel and bits of refined warpstone flying.

The explosion was still ringing in his ears when Skowl regained his feet. He glared at the darkness, trying to spot or scent Fylch. When he couldn’t find the coward, a sneer of contempt curled his tail. Let the little thief run; once Skowl collected from the grey seer there wasn’t anywhere in Skavendom Fylch could hide from him.

Skowl picked up Krick’s maul and stood guard over the cart and the bell-box. He would not need to wait long. The conveyance he had arranged would be here soon to retrieve both himself and his prize.

Fylch watched from the shadows as the huge Clan Skryre digging machine burrowed its way into the tunnel. The crew helped Skowl aboard, then loaded the bell-box as well. Fylch held his breath while they carried the casket inside, but nothing happened. Then the digging machine was moving again, its huge drill gnawing away at the opposite wall while its wheels ground against the floor. In only a few moments, the huge machine was gone from sight.

Fylch dropped the woolly hide he had removed from the daemon-bell. He didn’t need it any more. He also didn’t need the key he had stolen from Teekritt. It was as useless to him now as the one he had replaced it with and which Skowl had taken with him. While the warlock engineer was getting rid of his warp generator, Fylch had used the real key to open the box and remove the muffling hide.

He crept down the tunnel to where the digging machine had gone. Fylch strained his ears in hope he would hear the faint tolling of a bell. He lashed his tail in amusement when he imagined the daemon appearing inside the machine to eat the crew. Even more amusing was the idea of Skowl trying to open the bell-box with the wrong key.

Grey Seer Nezslik would have to forget about adding this relic to his grisly collection. Skowl Scorchpaw had made a few too many enemies among his fellow warlock engineers. Enemies who had paid Fylch quite well to dispose of him in a manner that couldn’t be traced back to them.

The problem Fylch had now was to make sure his employers paid him with money in his paw instead of a knife in his back. But that was an almost daily ordeal for any enterprising skaven. The fine balance between caution and ambition.

THE PATH TO GLORY

Evan Dicken

SULLA

‘Hold the line!’ Captain Sulla shouted over the roar of combat. The Lantic forces drowned in a sea of blades, their ragged shield-wall battered by the unreasoning tides of battle. Sulla swung her heavy greatsword, sprays of blood rising like startled birds as she hacked at the press.

Azakul the Winnower’s host seemed without end. Chaos marauders pushed forward, their faces bent around armatures of rage, spitting blood and teeth as they beat at the Lantic line. Sulla screamed back at them – insults, curses, oaths, but no prayers.

She would never make that mistake again.

A shrieking face emerged from the press. Standing a head taller than his fellows, the marauder champion was cloud pale, his beard woven with Lantic medals similar to the ones glittering on Sulla’s breastplate. He howled a corrupted legionary battle hymn as he brought his maul whistling down. Rather than block the blow, Sulla retreated a step, grinning as the champion overextended himself and stumbled forward. She raised her greatsword like a spear so the momentum of the man’s charge impaled him on the long blade, bringing them face to face. She could see he was young, the blasphemous sigils etched into his flesh still red and raw – a recent convert, then, one of the poor souls Empress Xerastia had meant to rescue.

His breath was hot on her cheek.

‘Die, traitor.’

With a scowl, Sulla twisted her sword, dragging it through the marauder’s chest before kicking him back into his comrades. The battle eddied around her as the Chaos forces drew back, uncertain.

Leaning on her sword, Sulla scanned the battle. The Lantic lines looked to be holding, a thin ribbon of gold arrayed against the fury of Azakul’s horde. The hot breeze carried hints of powder and oiled metal from the left flank, where the legion’s few cannons were ranged on the dune behind the scarred bulk of Old Tiberius, their last surviving steam tank. Like the heart of an ageing yet trusty warhorse, Tiberius’ boiler had burst as it slogged through the rusty orange sand of Chamon’s iron desert, but rather than abandon the steam tank, the legion had dragged it up onto the dune to serve as a bulwark against the Chaos forces.

Pride blossomed in Sulla’s chest – even alone, surrounded, and betrayed by their god, the Lantic Empire didn’t abandon its own. Her people may be dying, but they were dying like heroes.

‘Captain!’ It was Ardahir, the standard bearer for the empress’ personal legion. A red-spotted bandage covered the ruin of his left eye, his gilded armour chipped and battered. He carried a blade in one hand, the other bound to the ragged Lantic banner. Limping up, he thrust his chin at the centre of the horde. ‘They made it! Empress Xerastia faces the Winnower.’

Sulla squinted through the clouds of rust kicked up by the battle. The trackless iron desert had obscured the legion’s movements from the many Chaos warbands that roamed Chamon, but it was hell to fight in. They’d been just three days’ march from Uliashtai when the Winnower found them. Empress Xerastia had chosen to fight rather than lead another horde to the City of Gears.

Sulla caught a flash of gold amidst the tarnished murk, the empress’ armour glimmering like a coin tossed into a murky fountain.

Empress Xerastia’s plan had worked, in a way. The last remnants of the Lantic Legions had been too enticing a prize for the Winnower. The Chaos lord had committed his horde to the charge while Xerastia sneaked a cadre of hand-picked knights around to cut the head from the blasphemous host. But Azakul’s horde had been far larger than expected, its ranks swollen with traitors and fools.

‘She’s surrounded.’ Sulla gave Ardahir an anxious frown. ‘Does General Kelephon know?’

‘The general’s dead.’ The standard bearer winced. ‘Damn chimera broke through on the right, would’ve rolled up our entire flank if Kelephon hadn’t led the command battalion into the breach.’

Anger rose like bile in Sulla’s throat. Kelephon had been a pompous ass, but no coward – far better than most of the Lantic nobles who’d purchased their commissions. Another death to lay at Sigmar’s feet. The god’s treachery burned in her memory, Sulla’s anger so hot and bright she felt as if it would burst from her in a spray of flame.

‘Who’s in charge, then?’ she asked.

The standard bearer cocked his head.

‘No.’ Sulla’s mouth was dry, her scalp hot and prickly. ‘All of them?’

‘Afraid so.’ Ardahir glanced nervously towards the beleaguered Lantic lines. ‘Don’t mean to rush you, captain.’

Sulla cursed. Empress Xerastia’s expedition to lift the siege of Uliashtai had been doomed from the start. The legion had fought its way to a dozen former Lantic cities only to find them destroyed or gone over to Chaos. Khemal, Nehaj, Thun – the names of the traitorous cities burned in Sulla’s memory. She’d even heard rumours that some of the Eshunnaic Legion had defected after the fall of the Gilded Steamgird, but that had to be impossible…

When word had come that the mages in Uliashtai still resisted the tides of Chaos, Sulla had dared let herself be swept up by Xerastia’s blind hope. In the end, it had been a choice between dying by slow cuts or risking everything.

It was the same choice Sulla faced now.

Bright flashes marked the distant ridge where Empress Xerastia fought Azakul the Winnower. A few knights remained at her side, but they were cut off, buried by rank upon rank of dark-armoured warriors. The Chaos horde turned back on itself like a snake devouring its tail in an attempt to reach the Lantic empress. If Sulla called a retreat, the legion would survive, battered but intact.

She discarded the thought with a fierce scowl. She was no traitor, no coward.

‘Captain, your orders?’ Ardahir asked.

‘Sigmar might have abandoned the empire, but I won’t.’ She nodded at Ardahir. ‘Give the call to dress ranks. We advance.’

There were no more horses, so Sulla and the surviving greatswords formed the point of the charge; blade, axe and bow arrayed in staggered ranks behind. Spearmen screened the advance, holding back the screaming flood while the artillery launched a ragged fusillade to clear the way, Old Tiberius’ cannon booming like a funeral drum.

Fury lent strength to Sulla’s swings, her blade in constant motion. Many thought the greatsword a weapon of pure strength. They hacked and chopped at their foes, wielding the blade with all the finesse of an orruk, never understanding greatswords required more care, more finesse than the lightest duelling sabre.

Sulla cut into the seething press of bodies. Chaos came as a roiling throng, fierce but unordered, each warrior seeking to catch the attention of their dark gods, but their ferocity was no match for Lantic discipline.

Sulla’s limbs burned, her greatsword as heavy as a steam tank. The air was thick with scents of blood, viscera and oiled steel. Her boots slipped on spilled entrails, her blade shrieked across pitted steel to nest in flesh. She was close enough to smell the foul exhalations of her foes, to see the flicker of fear in their eyes as her weapon came slashing down.

And Sulla exalted in it.

She might not be able to set her blade at Sigmar’s throat or strike down the traitorous Lofnir Fyreslayers who had destroyed the Gilded Steamgird, but she could kill the enemies of her people, here and now, stroke by bloody stroke. She and her comrades painted the corroded desert sand a bright crimson, draping the high iron dunes in a shroud of twisted bodies.

The marauders drew back, fleeing before the men and women in tattered gold. Sulla stumbled, her legs weak as wet clay, but a hand steadied her. She glanced back to see Ardahir, his standard torn but unbowed.

The surviving Lantic soldiers were like statues covered in blood and flecks of rust. They closed ranks behind her, faces grim. Sulla turned to see a phalanx of heavily armoured warriors, shields marked with the ruinous powers’ twisted sigils, their helmets worked into the visages of fearsome beasts. She shouted the order to advance, already breaking into a run. She didn’t need to look back to know the others followed – they were Lantic, they wouldn’t abandon her.

A Chaos warrior with a helmet like a snarling steelcat raised his shield to catch her blow, but Sulla reversed her swing, dropping low to hammer her blade into the back of the warrior’s knee. She leapt over the toppling man to bury her greatsword in the helmet of the traitor behind him.

Sulla didn’t even see the axe coming. A heavy weight crashed into her side. Sulla’s breastplate took the worst of the blow, but it still knocked her from her feet. Sulla rolled on the ground, her mouth filling with bloody iron sand as she struggled to draw breath. The Chaos warrior raised his axe for the killing blow.

A shadow fell over her, a curtain of heavy brocade draping over her face. She swatted the fabric before realising it was the Lantic banner. Ardahir had lunged from behind, driving the spike at the end of the banner pole into the traitor’s throat. With a snarl, the Chaos warrior hacked down, cutting the banner pole in half.

Sulla rose with a strangled shout, her greatsword sweeping up to take off the enemy’s head. Lantic soldiers surged past, matching the fierceness of Azakul’s guard. For a moment, Sulla thought they could turn the tide, but there were too many foes, there were always too many.

Beyond the mass of Chaos warriors, atop a ridge, Empress Xerastia battled alone, her armour bright against the rusty backdrop. She fought with spear and shield in the ancient fashion, the duardin runes inscribed in their gleaming surfaces burning like miniature suns as she parried blows from the Winnower’s flail. Tall as she was, the empress seemed a slight thing when ranged against the Chaos warlord’s dark bulk. The Winnower’s armour was a labyrinth of interlocking plates. Strips of steel and bronze slithered like serpents, blurring Azakul’s outline. The Winnower moved with a puppet’s jerky grace, seeming to hang from invisible strings as he pivoted to bring his flail arcing around once more.

Xerastia rolled aside, driving her spear into the Winnower’s side. Azakul’s backswing knocked the empress’ winged helm from her head. The blow left Xerastia’s hair matted with gore, her one eye blackened and bloody, the empress’ expression showing no fear, no pain. With a defiant shout, Xerastia released her shield to put both hands on her spear, forcing the blade deeper into Azakul’s chest.

The Chaos warlord’s scream was surprisingly human. He caught Xerastia by the throat, the clawed talons of his gauntlet gouging bloody rivulets in the empress’ flesh as he bent Xerastia slowly back.

It seemed impossible, but even over the din Sulla could hear the crack of Xerastia’s spine breaking.

Bitter rage bubbled up through the cracks in Sulla’s reason. She threw herself at the dark-armoured ranks, cursing her traitorous limbs for lacking strength to reach her empress.

With a roar of triumph, Azakul flung Xerastia away. A cry went up from the Lantic troops, but there was no way to reach her. The Winnower swayed on his feet, black ichor dripping from the wound at his side as he shambled towards the dying Lantic empress.

With a sound like a snapping banner, a flash of azure lightning streaked down from the roiling copper clouds above to strike Xerastia’s body. Sulla blinked away flickering after-images, and saw the ridge where her empress had lain was scorched and empty.

‘It’s over, captain.’ Ardahir pulled her back.

Sulla struggled free of his grip, but strong hands took hold of her – soldiers in Lantic gold, their expressions hard and bitter. Sulla saw bloodied arms and bandaged knees, faces caked in sand-gritted gore, her comrades almost indistinguishable from the marauders they fought.

‘We need to go,’ Ardahir shouted. ‘Before the Winnower’s host regroups.’

Sulla drew in a shuddering breath. It was if a giant hand pressed down upon her, the mad strength bleeding away to leave nothing but hollow exhaustion.

‘The empire doesn’t abandon its own,’ she shouted as they dragged her from the battlefield.

‘Take a look, captain.’ Ardahir almost spat the words. ‘There’s none of our own left to abandon.’

KASLON

Monsters came and monsters died. Transfixed by precise lines of golden light, bisected by sheets of sorcerous energy, their bones transmuted to lead, the teeming mass of Chaos fell before the power of the Gilded Order. Kaslon stood in the great pattern, his chant lending strength to the master mages at its centre. As a sorcerer of rank, Kaslon was entitled to one of the vertices; apprentices were relegated to lines and connecting points, reduced to mere conduits.

The mages stood between the horde and the shanty town that had sprung up outside the rune-covered walls of Uliashtai – the City of Gears, stronghold of the Gilded Order. More than a hundred mages of rank, all who remained of the Order, were arrayed upon the sacred geometry.

Birdlike daemons slipped through the air, gouts of green balefire licking around the edges of the mages’ wards. Kaslon swallowed against the sudden upswell of fear, willing his power along the lines and vertices of the pattern’s radiant formulae.

With a wave of her withered hand, Grandmaster Lek sent bladed parabolas arcing into the bird daemons, who fell like dying embers. In concert with the other masters Lek struck the ground with her staff, and white gold lines radiated from the points of the pattern, carving through the horde outside the city walls.

Kaslon tried not to look at the Lantic refugees crowded outside Uliashtai’s high walls. The refugees had come in their tens of thousands, but the autarch had ordered the gates closed before retreating to his palace, and a great shanty town had sprouted up outside. Although the Gilded Order’s sorcery was mighty, it was not kind.

At last, as it had a hundred times before, the gibbering mass retreated before the sacred geometries of metal. It had become something of a formula – the mages of the Gilded Order would decimate the horde, then Skayne Bloodtongue and his warlocks would spend weeks drawing more creatures from the twisted realms of Chaos. Over and over the pattern played out.

Except this time, something was different.

It came first as a tremor, a fractal splintering along the outer edges of Kaslon’s wards. One of the apprentices fell to her knees, a hand pressed to her forehead.

‘Keep the pattern!’ Grandmaster Lek called.

Kaslon glanced to the pattern and found its lines bowed, razor straightness skewed as if viewed through a concave mirror. He felt his concentration slip and desperately tried to sing the lines back to congruence.

The horizon seemed to shiver, and there, streaking from the ruins of the Gilded Steamgird on bladed disks, were not a score of Chaos sorcerers, but a hundred, Skayne Bloodtongue at their head.

The Chaos lord was armoured in a patchwork of scintillating scales that caught the sunlight, twisting and reflecting it like a spray of broken glass. Constellations of light spun around Bloodtongue, his slightest movement accompanied by bursts of prismatic colour. The sorcerer’s hair was wild and unkempt, his craggy brow, deep-set eyes and crooked grin giving his features a kindly, almost grandfatherly cast.

Kaslon knew better than to be fooled.

The ground shifted at the sorcerers’ passing, the air above rippling like a heat mirage. Lek brought her staff crashing down once more, but the lines that emerged were skewed and weak, the perfect symmetry of the pattern twisted beyond repair.

It was too much. Kaslon stumbled away, hands raised to shield his eyes from the maddening distortion. He watched horrified as the apprentices along the lines intersecting his vertices erupted in columns of bilious flames.

Lek sang a shield of intersecting wards only to have the lines twist back, pinioning her to the ground. Arcs of golden light sprang from the disorganised pattern, cutting many of Bloodtongue’s warlocks from the air, but the survivors came on undaunted, the skein of reality warping before them.

There was no time for consideration, no time for shame, only the need to escape. Kaslon sang the Golden Mean, rising into the air on a spiral of gilded steel. He glanced back to see the mages of the Gilded Order dying where they stood. Like candles raised against a storm, their sorceries were feeble, flickering things, easily snuffed. Kaslon looked away, cheeks burning. The pattern was broken, there was nothing to be done.

He crested the wall near the city’s eastern gate, barely able to halt his descent. Uliashtai spread before him like the innards of a massive timepiece, streets, blocks, even entire districts rearranged by the methodical rotation of ancestor gears.

It was just after noon, the great golden expanse of Clock Street a perfect line leading between the only two fixed points in Uliashtai: the Gilded Tower at the eastern end of the city and the Autarch’s Palace in the west. Visitors often became lost in the shifting paths, baffled by directions that changed depending on the time of day. They thought the city disordered, anarchic, but there was a rhythm to Uliashtai, a complex and beautiful pattern that allowed those who understood it to traverse the city with surprising speed.

Kaslon had come over the wall near the eastern gate, so the Gilded Tower was nearby. He made for it. The tower would be safe; the survivors could regroup, strike back. Unfortunately, Clock Street thronged with terrified citizens.

‘What’s happening?’ A woman in cogtender leathers caught Kaslon’s sleeve.

‘Bloodtongue, he’s…’ Kaslon chewed his lip. What had Bloodtongue done? It seemed impossible that the Chaos lord had conjured so great a working. The ritual alone must have taken months, how had the masters not sensed it?

‘Will the walls fall?’ An old man with a spring-winding crook hobbled from the crowd. ‘Should we make for the Underway?’

‘Have to go through the palace to get to the Underway,’ the woman said with a scowl. ‘And the autarch has that place locked up tighter than a duardin vault.’

‘We must stay calm.’ Kaslon used a harmonic cadence to lend his voice strength and resonance. It was as much for his benefit as the crowd’s. The people were too frightened for Kaslon to transmute their nervous energy to true calm, so he settled for directing it towards a purpose, threading his speech with rhythms of command. ‘Go back to your homes, arm yourselves and await word. I must return to the tower.’

For a moment, Kaslon worried he might have to resort to more invasive sorcery, but thankfully the crowd dispersed with only a few anxious glances at the walls. When they had cleared a path, Kaslon hurried off.

The tower rose like the fist of Sigmar, a monument to perfection, its every curve, every angle in perfect symmetry. There were no doors or windows, only the subtle interplay of dimensions, the walls composed of interlocking tesseracts. Kaslon picked the closest one and followed one of its shifting faces into the tower.

The interior was honeycombed with libraries and workshops, repositories nested within classrooms within great halls, all separate, all together. Kaslon sent a globe of glowing silver spiralling up through the overlapping planes of the tower, a call to any who might yet remain.

When he received no answer, he conjured another, and another, quick as the stutter of a dying glowbug. Bloodtongue couldn’t have annihilated the whole Order. Lips numb, Kaslon mounted the steps to the Auracularium at the tower’s apex. Formerly, it had been barred to all save masters, but there was no one to stop him.

Scores of cochlear spines studded the long, vaulted chamber, rising through the mirrored ceiling and into the open air beyond. There was one for each gilded tower in the Lantic Empire. Once they had hummed with life, bearing messages from the cities across the Mortal Realms – Chamon, Hysh, Aqshy, and beyond. Kaslon walked the length of the chamber, pausing to rest his hand upon each as he passed, feeling, pleading for the vibrations that would tell him he wasn’t alone. But the spines lay still and dead.

All save one.

The quiver was slight, barely an echo, but Kaslon recognised the tell-tale rhythms of an Order cipher. He pressed trembling fingers to the vibrating metal, lips pursed as he translated the message.

All is lost.

The empire has fallen.

Flee to Azyr. In Sigmar’s name, flee.

Before it is too late.

The message repeated, over and over. Kaslon stepped back, the air seeming too thin to fill his lungs. The masters must have received the warning, they must have known Uliashtai stood alone, and yet they’d said nothing.

Comprehension settled on Kaslon like a shroud.

To leave Uliashtai would be to admit the sacred geometries were flawed. The masters had put their faith in reason, blinded by familiar patterns, but Chaos knew no order, no pattern. Bloodtongue couldn’t defeat their logic, so he had changed the rules of reality.

Kaslon staggered from the Auracularium. Everything seemed strange to him. The great orreries, tracking the motion of the Mortal Realms; tall pillars of steel and silver; walls inscribed with immutable constants in delicate gold filigree; vast libraries, their broad shelves creaking with millennia of collected knowledge, all useless. Bloodtongue would shatter Kaslon’s geometries as easily as he had Grandmaster Lek’s.

He needed something more powerful, and he needed it quickly. The layered wards on Uliashtai’s walls kept the horde at bay for the moment, but without mages to defend and repair the apotropaic formulae, it was only a matter of time before Bloodtongue bludgeoned his way inside.

Kaslon ventured into the depths of the Gilded Tower, to where the Order locked away the most powerful and dangerous artefacts. There was no time for caution, so he made for the greatest concentration of sorcerous energy.

Stumbling down a flight of uneven stairs, Kaslon found himself in a room unlike any other. It seemed to have no walls, no ceiling, the floor soft and yielding. Strange fractals blossomed in the gloom, tugging at Kaslon’s eyes, their razor-edged intricacy surrounding him like an embrace. Something rested at their centre – a shadow, long and thin as a serpent’s slitted eye.

Kaslon stretched out a hand, flinching back at the flash of golden light. The masters had warded whatever was in this room. They couldn’t countenance any flaw in their design, any truth they couldn’t bind and quantify, so, like the message, they had hidden it away.

Kaslon tore into the wards, singing errors into their design, tiny faults that slipped into the cracks and uncoupled the chains of logic. Such blasphemy would have brought every mage in the tower down on him, but Kaslon was alone.

As the last of the protections fell away, he plunged his hand into the heart of the fractals, drawing forth a long, jagged staff. Fashioned of hard crystal, it seemed to shift in his hands, a riot of interdependent patterns sparkling within. He could feel the power radiating from it – more, he could see the promise. The staff contained multitudes, infinity writ small, bounded, yet somehow also without end.

Kaslon strode from the tower, heading for the eastern gate, staff in hand. It was all so clear now, how rigidity had destroyed the Order, how it had doomed their city, their empire.

‘Master Kaslon, praise Sigmar you survived.’ Relief was plain on the guard captain’s face as Kaslon climbed the stairs to the eastern gatehouse. ‘Bloodtongue’s creatures are swarming like locusts, but they can’t breach the walls.’

Kaslon surveyed the battlefield from atop the crenellated gatehouse. Uliashtai’s walls still held, millennia of overlapping wards proof against Bloodtongue’s sorcery for the moment. Twisted forms capered through the streets of the shanty town outside, tearing into the fleeing refugees. A mob had gathered outside the eastern gate, hammering at the great golden expanse while, inside, the guards watched with numb resignation. They had their orders, their foolish, inflexible orders. The guards were Lantic, there was no question – they would die rather than abandon their posts.

Not unless Kaslon made them.

The wards along the wall were ancient and powerful, but Kaslon knew their weakness. Like the people they shielded, they were hard, but brittle. It was delicate work, threading inconsistencies into the logical framework, but Kaslon drew upon the staff, spiralling down into its arcane fractals, each new revelation like a jolt of lightning down his spine.

Cracks began to form, wards flickering as the constants that bound them frayed. Kaslon could see it all, the fallacies, the inconsistencies. The masters had been wrong, they had all been wrong.

‘What are you doing?’ The guard captain stepped forward, hand straying to his sword hilt.

‘Saving us all.’ Kaslon let out a long breath as the gate burst open.

The guards came at him with swords and spears, their blades skittering from his wards in showers of sparks. With a sad grin, he turned to them. ‘The walls are breaking. There is nothing left. Spread the word – only the Underway remains open. Flee.’

And at last, they did.

Kaslon rode a twisting spiral down to the gate, spreading his arms wide to welcome the refugees. They came in a mad rush, filling the plaza inside the gate in a throng, their expressions wild and panicked.

‘You must remain calm.’ This time, Kaslon dispensed with subtlety, imbuing his words with enough magical force to cut through the babble. Normally, he would have been hard pressed to affect a dozen people with so blunt an enchantment, but the staff magnified Kaslon’s power. The refugees turned almost as one, eyes wide, mouths hanging open as Kaslon’s sorcerous command pressed down on them.

Kaslon tried not to wince at their glazed expressions. To lay such a compulsion on Lantic citizens went against everything the Order stood for, but if the decision was between dominating his people or watching them die, Kaslon knew what he would choose.

The mob parted as he strode towards the gate. Many of the refugees were inside, but the creatures of Chaos would be quick to follow.

He was surprised to see the flash of steel beyond the gate. A small force of men and women in Lantic gold had formed a cordon across the broken portal, holding the gate so the refugees could flee inside.

They were a ragtag bunch, their armour battered, their tabards almost unrecognisable beneath layers of blood and grime. At their fore stood a tall woman with tarnished silver captain’s stripes picked out on her breastplate. Helmetless, her dark hair was cut short in the legionary fashion, her expression sharp as the notched greatsword she swung in bloody arcs. The lines of her long face were picked out in dusty filigree, her scowl seeming bone deep.

For all her fury, Kaslon saw the legionaries would soon be overwhelmed. He drew on the staff, using the power within to lend strength to his sorceries.

He struck the ground with his staff, lines of force radiating out, shifting, transmuting. Chaos spawn floundered in earth gone suddenly soft, drowning in quicksilver. Spikes of liquid steel arced up from the ground to carve into the horde, as a golden lattice formed between the legionaries and their attackers.

The Lantic soldiers fell back, surprised, the captain calling out orders.

‘Quick, to the gate. My spells won’t hold them long!’ Kaslon shouted. The staff was like a living thing, writhing in his grasp, struggling to wrest free of Kaslon’s sorcerous bonds.

The legionaries rushed past, the captain stopping beside Kaslon while her soldiers filed inside.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her expression guarded. ‘You’re of the Gilded Order?’

Kaslon nodded, still struggling to cut the flow of energy from the staff. It was like trying to dam a river midstream.

‘My name’s Sulla. I command what’s left of the empress’ legion,’ she said.

‘Kaslon,’ he gritted out, sighing as the staff finally quieted.

‘We saw your battle with the Chaos sorcerers. How many Order mages remain?’

‘I may be the last.’ Kaslon turned back towards the gate. ‘Uliashtai has fallen. I can lead you from the city, but we must hurry.’

She snorted. ‘You’ll get no argument from me.’

Together, they hurried through the gate, Sulla already calling to her soldiers. ‘Ardahir, have the legionaries keep the people together, we need to move quickly.’

A small man clutching a broken staff nodded, and began shouting orders. With Kaslon’s enchantments tamping down their fear, the crowd fell in with no argument.

Sulla watched them, frowning. ‘Those people were screaming their heads off just five minutes ago. What did you do to them?’

Kaslon kept his expression neutral. ‘I did what was necessary.’

Sulla opened her mouth as if to speak, but her words were drowned out by the shriek of tearing metal.

‘They come!’ Kaslon shouted, already making for the far end of the plaza.

Sulla followed, her long legs easily keeping pace. ‘We’ll hold them off. You lead the others to safety.’

‘No need.’ Kaslon regarded the toothy border where the gate plaza’s ancestor gear met that of Clock Street. Already the street was almost blocked, the wall of a huge storehouse obstructing more than half of the entrance as the gears ticked their inexorable progress. ‘Get your people through that opening. In another minute or two Bloodtongue’s creatures will have to tear through half a district to catch us.’

Sulla raised an eyebrow.

‘This is Uliashtai.’ Kaslon spread his arms. ‘The city defends itself.’

With Kaslon’s enchantments and Sulla’s legionaries driving the crowd the refugees made good time, the stragglers slipping through the thin opening just as the first of Bloodtongue’s creatures burst into the plaza.

‘We must make for the Autarch’s Palace,’ Kaslon said. ‘The Underway opens beneath.’

Sulla’s scowl relaxed a fraction. ‘Lead the way, mage.’

They hurried through the shifting city, the distant roars of Chaos monstrosities urging them on. More people joined them from the surrounding houses and storefronts.

‘We’re making good time.’ Sulla joined Kaslon at the front of the column. ‘I set a dozen legionaries at the back to round up stragglers.’

‘I’m grateful for you and your soldiers, captain.’ He glanced at her uniform. ‘I thought the Lantic Legions were lost.’

‘We were,’ Sulla replied.

‘What are you doing in Uliashtai?’

She gave a mirthless laugh. ‘We came to save you.’

LIVIUS

Livius awoke among the dead. Corpses sprawled across silken divans, lay draped across marble balustrades, and were wedged amidst the larger gears of the palace’s clockwork. Some bodies were prepared as if for a funeral, although whoever had begun the ritual appeared to have either died or fled before the transmutation from flesh to metal could begin.

Livius called for his mother, his father, anyone, but his throat was dry, his voice a weak croak. His last memory was of stumbling to his knees, Countess Ikara shrieking as blood came pouring from her mouth. With a groan, he rolled over. It took him some time to rise, and even longer to find an unopened bottle of wine.

Not that Livius wanted to get drunk, he just knew better than to trust the water.

The Autarch’s Palace was unnaturally quiet. Gone was the music and laughter, the whispers, the raised voices and drunken slurs, the clash of duelling sabres. Blood and vomit stained the nobles’ fine robes a muddy brown, their exposed flesh covered with weeping sores. Livius’ memories came on like a nightmare.

The siege had done nothing to lessen the autarch’s already acute paranoia, and he had ordered the palace sealed at the first signs of plague, ancestor gears churning, every egress barred by heavy steel shutters. No one questioned his decision. Rumour had it that the sickness was worse in the streets, but few had any interest in venturing out to see. To leave court was to give rivals the chance to plot in your absence. Great families had been undone by less, and Livius’ family was far from great.

It had been too late. Death stalked the vaulted halls, the gear-lined chambers, snatching up people without regard for wealth or station. Livius had been one of the first to succumb, to no one’s surprise.

He stumbled past the bloated corpse of Baron Haakon, surrounded by the bodies of a dozen of his moon-faced progeny. A fat man even before the plague, the Baron’s skin had split to reveal rotting abscesses, red-tinged bile staining the thick carpet beneath.

Livius took a long pull from his bottle. Then again, perhaps he did want to get drunk.

A sudden bout of dizziness left Livius leaning against the wall, panting. He took a long drink to steady himself then stumbled down the hall towards the duelling floor. Alive or dead, his mother would be there.

Livius felt a flush of familiar embarrassment as he stepped into the enormous duelling hall. The chamber was circular, stepped seats surrounding a floor studded with raised gears. Livius winced as he recalled the one and only time he’d stepped onto a duelling gear. It’d been over a stumble on the dance floor that jostled Countess Atia’s skirts. Livius had been so nervous, his legs trembling, his skin seeming too tight. Atia had barely needed to take a step before he’d lost his footing, stumbling from the gear without her even needing to draw blood. Worse than the laughter were the beatings his mother had given him under the guise of ‘training’, as if bruises and broken fingers could wipe away the stain of embarrassment.

The memory stung Livius’ eyes like smoke. He drained the last few drops of wine then tossed the bottle aside. It made a very satisfying crash.

He found his mother sprawled across a sparring gear, Widowbane, the family sabre, clutched in her rotting fist as if she planned to cut the plague’s throat. Livius knew the sight should make him sad, or glad, or relieved, but he couldn’t seem to summon even the barest flicker of emotion.

Livius stepped up onto the gear and squatted next to the corpse, eyeing the rune-inscribed sabre. It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn his mother’s pale, glassy eyes followed him as he moved.

‘Our family has boasted heroes, kings, emperors. You’re not even worthy to speak their names.’ His mother’s voice echoed in Livius’ thoughts. ‘I’ll die before I pass Widowbane to you.’

‘You never could be wrong, mother.’ Livius pried the rune-inscribed blade from her grip, wondering if she’d died just to spite him.

He half expected sparks, or light, or flames, something to mark Widowbane as special. Family legend said the blade was a gift from Sigmar himself, transmuted from the bones of a hundredfold great-granduncle who had died nobly on some hoary battlefield of old.

Nothing happened, so Livius ran through some forms, drunkenness blurring his movements, and causing him to stumble.

Sloppy. Disgusting. An orruk could do better.

He winced, shoulders high.

You’re an embarrassment to the empire, to our family.

‘You’re an embarrassment!’ He whirled on his mother, stabbing down. Widowbane slid into her chest, necrotic flesh parting like clouds before the enchanted blade. He slashed at her again and again. ‘Commoners die in plagues, mother. Not nobles, not heroes. What does that make you?’

The exertion left Livius lightheaded. He overbalanced, ankle twisting to send him toppling from the gear. It was only a foot or so to the floor, but Livius landed awkwardly, skinning one knee on the tiles, Widowbane clattering from his grip.

Face burning, he snatched up the sword and stumbled from the chamber, his mother’s laughter chasing him from the hall.

Livius ran until his legs gave out, then slumped against the wall, gasping. Thankfully, the palace was silent save for the slow rasp of ancestor gears. He could feel their cold regard, blood calling to blood, however distant, however diluted. Transmuted from the flesh and bone of those who had come before, the Autarch’s Palace was the work of generations. Like his mother, the palace despised weakness, and Livius was nothing if not weak.

He sat for a long time, legs drawn up, face pressed against his knees as he had when he was very small, before his mother had found him and given his backside a dozen welts with the flat of Widowbane. But mother was gone, now, wasn’t she?

Dully, Livius wondered if they were all gone. It seemed impossible Livius was the only survivor. He pushed himself to his feet, wiping a sleeve across his face. ‘Time to find out.’

The corpses were fresher in the throne room. They were piled thick around the high articulated columns, splayed across the carpet, slumped in the shadowed alcoves where oaths and betrayals had been wrought in whispered tones. It made sense they would have gathered here at the last. Livius would have come himself if the sickness hadn’t overcome him so quickly. With morbid amusement, he wondered whether his father had been disappointed or relieved Livius had been the first to succumb.

He found the old man stretched out below the autarch’s dais, one beringed hand outflung as if to claw his way up the stairs. The plague had yellowed his father’s ruddy skin and made dark the hollows of his eyes, but the old man’s expression maintained an air of impatient irritation, like he’d taken death’s measure and found it wanting.

‘It seems fitting.’ Livius stepped over his father’s corpse, glancing up at the throne. ‘All your schemes and intrigues, and here you are, still sprawled at the autarch’s feet.’

At least I tried, boy.

‘Fair, fair,’ Livius nodded. The reply was typical of his father – when the old man deigned to notice Livius at all it was usually to berate him.

Sharp as a spoon, this one. You never had the mind for intrigue.

‘And yet, here I am.’ Livius clucked his tongue. ‘And there you are.’

And why do you think that is, boy?

Livius swallowed, unsure. How had he been the only one to survive?

Think you fought off the plague all on your own? That you were spared because you’re special? His father’s chuckle was thick and wet. You weren’t worth killing.

‘I’ll show you what I’m worth.’ Livius turned away from his father to climb the dais steps.

The Autarch of Uliashtai sat slumped on the edge of his throne, awash in gold embroidered robes now far too large for his plague-ravaged frame. His breastplate was embossed with silver cogs, arranged in a way that they seemed to be turning as Livius approached. Next to the meticulous finery of Uliashtai’s ruler, Livius seemed a beggar in tattered linen, his doublet stained with blood and bile.

The autarch had been a hero in his youth, fighting alongside his niece, Empress Xerastia, even as Chaos devoured the Mortal Realms. He had slain warlords and beasts, set scores of daemons and monsters screeching into oblivion. Beloved of the gods, the autarch had risen high, wielding powers beyond mortal comprehension, but the fall of the Steamgird had broken him, left the man bitter and paranoid. Instead of marching forth, the autarch had retreated from the world, locking his court inside the palace’s ancient walls.

‘And none of it saved you,’ Livius said, his voice little more than a whisper. His barest touch was enough to send the autarch’s body toppling down the stairs. Livius froze, mortified, but the blank faces of the dead held no admonition. He let out a long slow breath, then sat in the autarch’s throne.

He grinned down at his father. ‘Do you see me now?’

But the old man would never see, none of them would.

Livius had dreamed of this day. Now, he saw how foolish, how worthless it all was. He drew up his legs, pressed his face to his knees, and wept.

He had no idea how long he sat that way, but he must have fallen asleep, for a great hammering snatched him from fevered dreams. He stumbled to his feet, almost pitching headlong from the dais.

It had to be Skayne Bloodtongue, Chaos come at last. But no, the palace was still sealed, he would have felt if the gates were breached. Widowbane in hand, Livius stumbled down the stairs, stepping gingerly over his father. Thankfully, the old man remained quiet.

At the far balcony, Livius saw dark fingers of smoke curling up from inside the city walls. Bloodtongue’s creatures rampaged through the churning gears of the outer city, their progress marked by flashes of green-and-yellow balefire as they battled both the defenders and each other.

Livius glanced down, surprised to see not daemons, but a great mass of people below. Men and women in legionary gold assaulted the palace gate with a makeshift ram, to little effect. After a few moments, a robed man stepped from the crowd. Rolling back his sleeves to display dark skin inlaid with the delicate filigree of the Gilded Order, he brandished a crystal staff at the gate, unleashing a torrent of jagged lines.

But the gate was more than just iron and bronze, it was blood, and bone, and flesh – the souls of a thousand thousand Lantic heroes. They would not yield.

Livius called out, but his voice was too weak, so he staggered back to the throne, gripping the armrests with nervous strength. There were people below, his people, and the Lantic didn’t abandon their own.

He concentrated, willing the gears to turn, the gate to open. For a moment, he feared his blood was too weak, that the ancestor gears would fail to recognise him. Then, slowly, grudgingly, they began to move.

It was torture. Livius could feel their gaze upon him – queens, kings, autarchs, emperors, empresses in a long line stretching back to the beginning. Who was he to sit upon their throne? To command their obedience? Livius felt naked, exposed, worse than worthless.

Then came the pain. Their disdain raged through him like cold fire. Livius must have blacked out, because the next thing he knew there were people in the throne room.

Strong hands lifted him from the throne. ‘This one’s alive.’

Livius opened his eyes to see a tall, sharp-faced woman in the uniform of a Lantic captain. She wore a greatsword strapped to her back, and although her armour was battered to almost shapelessness, Livius could just make out the markings of the empress’ personal legion on her breastplate.

She set him down with surprising gentleness, tipping a canteen of warm water to his lips.

Livius drank greedily. The Gilded mage stepped into his vision, kneeling to offer a hunk of stale bread.

‘Careful, careful,’ the sorcerer’s voice seemed to resonate within Livius’ thoughts. ‘You’ll make yourself sick.’

‘You opened the gates?’ the captain asked.

Livius’ mouth was too full to respond, so he just nodded.

‘What happened here?’ the sorcerer asked.

Livius swallowed a large mouthful. ‘Plague.’

‘Strange.’ The sorcerer pursed his lips. ‘There was no sickness in the city.’

‘What does it matter?’ the captain said angrily. ‘They’re dead. And we’ll join them if we don’t keep moving.’

The sorcerer ignored her. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Livius. I am – was part of the autarch’s court.’ He took a bite, then looked around. ‘Now, I don’t know.’

‘We don’t have time for this,’ the captain said.

The sorcerer pressed a hand to his chest. ‘I’m Kaslon, and my impatient friend here is Captain Sulla.’

Livius stood unsteadily, nodding his thanks to them both.

‘Where is the Underway?’ Sulla asked.

‘Careful, that’s no way to address your emperor,’ Kaslon said.

Sulla took a step back, her mouth working. ‘You can’t mean…?’

‘He is of the blood.’ Kaslon leant on his odd crystal staff to offer Livius a deep bow. ‘Do you know of any other surviving nobility, captain?’

Livius swallowed, feeling his stomach clench. How many times had he dreamed of this? In the quiet, desperate moments when his parents’ expectations pressed in around him, when embarrassment burned like fire in his cheeks, when his failures and disappointments piled so high they seemed to blot out the sun? He’d fantasised about becoming emperor, but not like this, never like this.

Thankfully, he was able to lurch away before the vomit came boiling up. When he turned back, red-faced and ashamed, they were all kneeling.

‘Emperor Livius,’ Sulla said, her tone forced. ‘Your people need you.’

KASLON

Kaslon stared into the latticed depths of the staff, drinking in the jagged interplay of its facets. He could feel the hint of a pattern lurking just beyond his ability to grasp. He would not repeat the Order’s mistakes. The masters had been unable to accept anything outside the narrow bounds of their logic. But knowledge had no bounds, no limits. Kaslon understood that now, just as he understood that to truly defeat Chaos he would first need to understand it.

‘They’re almost here.’ The hard rasp of Sulla’s voice broke Kaslon from his contemplation. She was leaning over the throne room balcony, scowling out at the city beyond.

He glanced up, frowning. ‘And the refugees?’

‘Still coming,’ she said with only the barest of flinches. The city guard had spread word of the Underway, and with the Autarch’s Palace lying open the people of Uliashtai had come in their hundreds and thousands, desperate to escape Bloodtongue’s creatures.

‘We must close the gates,’ Kaslon said almost without thinking.

Sulla’s scowl was sharp enough to etch glass. ‘And abandon our people?’

‘Better than losing everyone.’ Kaslon glanced at Livius.

The new emperor frowned, looking as if he was about to faint. Although eating had restored some of the young noble’s colour, it had done nothing to dispel the nervous flightiness that seemed to cling to him like a miasma.

‘I don’t think I can,’ Livius stammered. ‘Close the gate, I mean.’

‘What?’ Sulla asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ Livius said. ‘Opening the Palace nearly killed me.’

‘Then it’s settled.’ Sulla gave Kaslon a hard look. ‘The gates stay open.’

‘And what will we do when Bloodtongue’s monsters come shrieking down the Underway after us? We can’t outdistance them, not with all these people.’ Kaslon laid a hand on Livius’ shoulder, threading his words with lines of compulsion. He could feel them loop around the young noble’s scattered thoughts, then draw tight, leaving no room for fear or doubt. ‘You must try, emperor.’

‘I will try,’ Livius repeated.

Sulla made a disgusted rattle in the back of her throat. ‘I can’t believe a Lantic Emperor would–’

‘There’s more than honour at stake, here.’ Kaslon spoke over her. ‘The empire is dead, captain. Now isn’t the time to cling to tired doctrines, we’re facing extinction.’ He flicked his hand at the burning city visible beyond the balcony. ‘More than extinction, they will erase us from history.’

Sulla’s hands made white-knuckled fists at her side. ‘And what will we tell those inside the palace who have friends and family outside?’

‘Tell them it’s a necessary sacrifice,’ Kaslon said. ‘They’re Lantic, they’ll understand.’

Sulla looked to Livius, who trembled under the captain’s gaze.

‘I’m the emperor.’ The young noble’s voice was as thin as gold foil. ‘I’m responsible.’

‘Fine.’ Sulla flicked an angry hand towards the crowd gathered in the autarch’s court. ‘Then you tell them you’re leaving the city to die.’

With a terrified nod, Livius took a few steps up the dais.

Kaslon summoned the power for a spell, already tugging at the threads that would give Livius courage, but a strong hand fell on his shoulder, the grip painfully tight.

‘I looked the other way in the plaza.’ Sulla’s breath was hot on Kaslon’s ear. ‘I won’t again. We’re Lantic, mage, we stand free – to the end.’

Kaslon felt a momentary flash of irritation. It seemed the captain and her soldiers were too strong-willed to succumb to arcane compulsion. He gave a sour nod, and let the power bleed away.

‘I’m glad we have an understanding.’ The pressure on Kaslon’s shoulder relaxed.

‘My people,’ Livius looked like a caged animal, shoulders high, gaze darting around the chamber. ‘You don’t know me, but I am your emperor.’

That got the crowd’s attention.

‘Bloodtongue’s horde is inside the walls. They’ll be here soon.’ Livius swallowed, glancing at Kaslon for support. ‘We… we must flee. If I don’t close the palace gates now, Bloodtongue will–’

‘We can’t abandon the city!’ Shouts trickled from the back of the chamber. ‘My brother is still outside!’

Livius blanched. ‘I know we’re Lantic, but maybe just this once we could–’

‘Coward!’ The crowd took up the cry. ‘Traitor!’

‘I order you to flee!’ Livius was red-faced now, his voice high and desperate. ‘I’m your emperor. I’m your emperor!’

‘Are you satisfied?’ Kaslon pulled free of Sulla’s grasp. ‘The emperor has made his choice, or don’t you follow orders any more, captain?’

Sulla’s glare was deadly, but she gave a tight nod. ‘I’ll have my people restore order, explain why we need to close the palace gates. If there’s one thing the Lantic people understand, it’s sacrifice.’

Livius collapsed into the autarch’s throne, looking ready to vomit again.

‘Fine speech, boy.’ Sulla stalked off, abandoning all pretence of deference.

‘You made the right choice.’ Kaslon stepped up to lay a hand on Livius’ arm.

‘What does it matter?’ Livius put his face in his hands. ‘What does any of it matter?’

‘You showed bravery,’ Kaslon said, acutely aware the court was full of the corpses of Livius’ friends and family. He glanced at the autarch’s throne. ‘But there are trials, yet.’

‘The gates.’ Livius’ face crumpled.

‘You are emperor,’ Kaslon said.

Like a man facing his own execution, Livius straightened, fingers curling around the toothed cogs set into the arms of the throne. Shudders wracked the young noble’s body. Sweat broke out on his face as he convulsed upon the autuarch’s throne, a thin line of blood trickling from his nose.

Kaslon wanted to reach out, to use his powers to aid the young man, but the ancestor gears would not turn for sorcery. Only blood would tell.

So he waited, hands tight upon the staff, his throat dry as the iron desert.

Livius cried out, his back arching so sharply Kaslon feared it might snap, but, at last, the great gears began to move.

The first cries rose from outside the palace. At first surprised, they quickly turned furious as the gates slammed down.

Jaw clenched so tightly he feared his teeth might crack, Kaslon helped Livius down from the throne. The young noble was barely conscious, his feet slipping on the smooth marble stairs.

‘See, father, see,’ Livius muttered as Kaslon half carried him from the throne room and down through the spiralling galleries that led to the Underway.

Sulla’s soldiers had begun herding the refugees towards their escape. They marched down the stairs, shoulders hunched, muttering and surly. Grim men and women in tarnished legionary gold moved among the crowd. Their gazes raked over Kaslon, sharp as blades, but he paid them no mind. The Lantic soldiers would do their duty.

With a tight frown Kaslon followed, knowing that if he looked back, even for a moment, all was lost.

Runes lit the vaulted shadows of the Underway. Constructed long ago as a show of friendship between man and duardin, it burrowed beneath Chamon’s metal skin in a perfect line, connecting Uliashtai to the hold of their old allies in the Lofnir lodge.

Kaslon could feel it in his bones: the meticulous care in every line, every column perfectly arranged, nothing out of place. It was like standing between mirrors, flawless reflections retreating to infinity. The Gilded Order had worked hand in hand with the Auric Runemasters of the duardin, just as they had on the Gilded Steamgird, the great wall that had protected the empire since time immemorial. That was before the Lofnir lodge had betrayed them, brought the Steamgird crashing down and the Lantic Empire along with it.

The tunnel was quiet save for the echoing footfalls of the refugee column, silent now that the wails of those left behind had faded into the distance. The survivors clumped together in ragged bunches, eyes downcast as they hurried along, blind to the marvels around them. Massive metal statues lined the tunnel – heroes of the Empire, their armour picked out in golden foil, their shoulders broad and unbowed. Their eyes seemed to follow Kaslon as he passed, the heat of their steely gaze like a fire at his back.

He grunted. Let them judge him; the empire they knew was gone.

Kaslon gripped his staff tighter, leaning on it for support. The answer lay within its prismatic depths, he was sure of it. The power to save his people, to master Chaos. Kaslon knew he could find the truth.

He just needed more time.

LIVIUS

‘We must stop,’ Livius said. It felt like days since he’d last rested, perhaps longer – they had been unable to mark time in the unchanging twilight of the Underway.

‘The Azyr Realmgate is but a few hours’ march,’ Kaslon said, shielding his eyes from the bright coppery sun overhead, as the refugees emerged from the Lofnir lodge’s massive gate in a staggering mass, blinking against the glare.

‘What use is reaching it if half our number are dead from exhaustion?’ Livius glanced back along the ragged column. He could see the exhaustion dragging in their every step, the quiet desperation that hung about them like a fog.

‘I agree with Livius,’ Sulla said. ‘We lost too many in the lodge. To press on would be suicide.’

Livius shivered at the memory of the Lofnir lodge’s vast empty halls and vacant chambers, its duardin inhabitants having abandoned the great bronze citadel in their mad lust for ur-gold. The channels and sluices had overflowed, molten iron spilling onto the broad thoroughfares, drowning the duardin halls and forges in a mass of cooling slag. Many of the refugees had been overcome by the fumes, tumbling from the high bridges to disappear into the deep red of Chamon’s lifeblood. Livius would have been one of them if Sulla hadn’t ordered her legionaries to carry him. Thankfully, the lodge was stifling, and Livius’ humiliated flush was mistaken for heat stroke.

‘If Bloodtongue catches us, we’ll lose everyone,’ Kaslon said.

‘It would take him days to cross the Ringing Hills overland.’ Sulla stepped up to glare down at the mage. ‘And the palace gates are barred, remember?’

They looked to Livius. Responsibility hung like a noose around his neck, slowly strangling him. He chewed his lower lip, glancing at the jagged horizon. ‘Is that the Steamgird?’

Sulla grunted. ‘What’s left of it.’

‘We’ll rest there,’ Livius said.

Perhaps an hour later they collapsed in the derelict shadow of the Gilded Steamgird, its broken walls still bristling with the shattered remnants of cannons, arc casters, galvanic trip hammers, organ guns, and other war dynamos.

‘The empire will never see its like again.’ Sulla sat next to Livius, passing him a canteen.

The water was warm and tasted of rust, but Livius drank greedily before passing it back. ‘The Lofnir, why do you think they did it?’

‘Why do duardin do anything?’ Sulla shrugged. ‘Their reason doesn’t concern me, only their actions. And they will pay for those.’

The barely leashed anger in Captain Sulla’s voice made Livius uncomfortable. It reminded him too much of his mother. So he changed the subject. ‘You fought with Empress Xerastia?’

Sulla straightened a bit. ‘I did.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Xerastia?’ She sat quietly for a long while. ‘She was a hero.’

‘I’m sorry about back at the palace, I just couldn’t see any other way.’ He glanced away. ‘I’m no hero.’

‘I think the time for heroes is long past.’ She gave a tight smile, then clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Now get some rest, emperor. It might be your last chance.’

It seemed like Livius had just closed his eyes when he was shaken awake, but the sun was already slipping below the horizon.

Kaslon loomed over him. ‘He comes – Skayne Bloodtongue.’

Livius jolted up, rubbing his eyes. ‘Through the tunnel? So quickly?’

Kaslon frowned. ‘No. He comes overland.’

‘Impossible.’ A nearby shadow resolved into Captain Sulla. ‘The Ringing Hills would take days to cross.’

‘With Chaos, nothing is impossible,’ Kaslon said with a thin smile. ‘Bloodtongue flies. He hunts us with a small force.’

‘How small a force?’ Sulla asked, one hand drifting to the hilt of her greatsword.

‘I don’t know,’ Kaslon replied, gaze flicking to his staff. ‘I can only sense the echoes of his coming.’

Sulla made a fist, her grin as fierce as it was sudden. ‘This is our chance.’

Livius blinked.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘Bloodtongue overreaches. My soldiers and I can set an ambush, cut the head from the serpent!’

‘You may be all that remains of your legion,’ Kaslon said, his words taking on a deep, resonant quality. They seemed to slip inside Livius’ skull to echo through his thoughts. ‘We can’t afford to risk–’

‘I don’t follow your orders, mage. And if you try to enchant me again, I’ll break your legs and leave you for Bloodtongue.’ Sulla’s voice was low and threatening. She looked at Livius, her expression furious as she thrust her chin at Kaslon. ‘I saw it back at the city, this one’s been using sorcery to get his way.’

‘It was necessary.’ Kaslon crossed his arms. ‘Just like it’s necessary that we stay together.’

Livius glanced between them, wanting to run even though he knew there was no escape. Back at the palace, when Kaslon had spoken, Livius had felt, if not heroic, then brave, at least. He’d felt like the mage believed in him, like they all believed in him.

Just another lie.

A strange calmness settled on Livius. What did it matter? There was no escape. What did any of it matter? The only real choice that remained was how they would die.

Livius looked to Sulla, and nodded. ‘Go.’

She turned away, already shouting orders.

‘She’s going to get them all killed,’ Kaslon said.

‘They want to die like heroes,’ Livius said quietly. ‘I’d be a poor emperor if I didn’t let them.’

‘We should make sure their sacrifice isn’t in vain.’ Disdain whetted Kaslon’s words to razor sharpness, but the resonance was gone from his voice.

Livius took a long, slow breath, wondering if he should have gone with Sulla and put an end to his sad charade of a reign, but knowing he was still too much of a coward. ‘Wake the others. We make for the realmgate.’

SULLA

The fury shrieked as Sulla pinioned it with her greatsword, its filthy claws slashing bare inches from her face. Bloodtongue had brought with him a flock of the batlike humanoids, their membranous wings propelling them through the air. Sulla had fought monsters and daemons before – red-skinned devils with blades of pitted steel, great bronze-clad monstrosities that scattered men like pebbles – but none of it had prepared her for the speed and viciousness of the furies’ attack.

They clawed through the air like vultures, their high, teeth-gritting shrieks seeming to bore into Sulla’s skull as they darted through the dusky shadows. The first volley of crossbow bolts had downed a score of the monsters, but not nearly enough. Men and women fell, gutted by jagged talons, blood gurgling from slashed throats and ruined mouths.

With a snarl, Sulla twisted her blade, ripping it free from the monster in a spray of stinking ichor. It fell away to flop on the ground like a landed fish. Her soldiers reacted quickly, forming a rough phalanx to fend off the furies’ attack with spear and pike while the crossbows reloaded. Ardahir stood among them, shouting encouragement as he waved the broken banner pole above his head. The sight conjured a wild joy in Sulla’s breast. She was no leader, no politician, spending lives like coin; she was a soldier, she belonged in the press.

Here, at least, everything made sense.

Something flashed through her peripheral vision and she pivoted, bringing her blade around in a tight arc. Another monster came diving down, clawed hands and feet flexing to snatch Sulla up. Her slash left the fury with bleeding stumps and her backswing hammered it to the ground.

She twisted as another fury shrieked by, letting the sword’s momentum carry the blade around in a looping cut. It struck one of the creature’s wings, cleaving through muscle and bone. The thing’s shrieking ceased as she swept the sword down to divide its body neatly in half.

Panting, she scanned the ruins of the Steamgird, stalking through the scaffolded shadows, her blade at the ready. Kaslon had said the furies were Bloodtongue’s hunting hounds, but where was the huntsman?

It was the Chaos sorcerer’s armour that caught Sulla’s eye. It glittered like cut glass in the light of the setting sun, oil-slick colours sliding across the laminated scales. Skayne Bloodtongue floated over the battle on a disc of barbed flesh, watching with an air of detached interest.

Sulla crept closer, sheathing her sword to work her fingers into the carved runes of one of the cracked pillars of the Steamgird. Bloodtongue hovered perhaps ten yards above her, apparently blind to all but the desperate combat below. It seemed strange he hadn’t yet intervened, but Sulla was beyond questioning the motives of a madman.

The shouts of Sulla’s comrades lent urgency to her climb. Every pained cry was a knife dragged across her flesh. There would be a reckoning. Bloodtongue, the Winnower, the Lofnir lodge, even Sigmar. Somehow, she would find a way to make them pay.

The jagged metal cut Sulla’s fingers, hot runnels of blood trickling down her forearms. At last, she reached a ledge above Bloodtongue, who continued to hover above the battle. There was no time to judge the distance, so she drew her blade and jumped.

The Chaos sorcerer turned at the last moment, his eyebrows raised in an expression that seemed more amused than surprised. Sulla’s strike skittered from Bloodtongue’s armour in a spray of chromatic sparks. It was as if she’d struck an iron wall. Sulla rebounded from the sorcerer, her arms flailing as she tipped backwards through empty air.

Bloodtongue caught her by the shoulder. The sorcerer’s grip was light, but Sulla felt as if she’d been dropped into a forge, multicoloured flames licking across her skin, her every muscle contorted in agony.

Bloodtongue pursed his lips, inspecting Sulla as if she were a piece of fine metalwork. She wanted to hack his wizened face to pieces, but her limbs hung loose and liquid at her sides. It took all her strength just to maintain a hold on her greatsword.

Bloodtongue grinned at her, gesturing towards the packed ranks of Lantic veterans.

Sulla followed the line of his pointing finger, unable to do more than snarl as the realisation hit home. Bloodtongue’s monstrous hounds hadn’t been hunting Sulla’s soldiers, they’d been herding them.

Slowly, the Chaos sorcerer opened his outstretched hand, a ball of roiling balefire glowing between his spread fingers. Then, like a doting grandfather about to share a secret, he winked at Sulla.

LIVIUS

‘We have to help them.’ Livius glowered at Kaslon. The surviving refugees crowded in a ragged circle around them, a few thousand, perhaps less – all that remained of the Lantic Empire. They muttered, casting glances at the battle taking place a few miles distant.

‘She’s dead. They’re all dead,’ Kaslon said.

‘Because we abandoned them.’ Livius glanced at the mage’s staff. It was unsettling how the thing seemed to shift and change, the outline blurring as if seen through warped glass.

Kaslon’s expression turned strange. ‘I thought you understood.’

Livius felt a nervous flutter in his chest as he regarded the mage. The Gilded Order were supposed to serve the empire, but Kaslon seemed different – wilder, less restrained. He glanced towards the distant shadow of the Azyr Realmgate. How easy it would be to just turn his back on Sulla. Still, Livius only had to look at the tired column of refugees to remember the screams of those they’d abandoned back at the palace.

Somehow worse was his memory of the cold scrutiny of the ancestor gears as he’d slunk into the Underway, the first emperor in Lantic history to flee without a fight. Not for the first time, Livius wished the plague hadn’t spared him. He was no emperor, no hero. From the moment he’d sat upon the autarch’s throne, every decision had been a mistake. There was no place for him among the ancestor gears, no glorious page in the Lantic histories. If he survived it would be as an embarrassment, the emperor who let everything fall to ruin.

Better to die, to be forgotten.

‘My people, hear me!’ He faced the gathered refugees, pointing Widowbane at the Azyr Realmgate. ‘There lies safety.’

It took all Livius’ willpower to keep his arm from trembling as he turned to the battle. ‘And there our comrades fight alone. I won’t think less of any who wish to press on to the realmgate, but I am going to stand with my people, my empire.’

The refugees were all watching him now. Kaslon gave an irritated grunt, but Livius pressed on. ‘We are of gold and steel, of fire and light. We are Lantic. Although our foes may rob us of our homes, our lives, they cannot take who we are, what we stand for. Not unless we let them.’

It was a poor speech, cobbled together from some third-dynasty romances Livius had read as a child. For a long moment, the refugees stood in silence, then, from the back came a ragged cheer. It spread like wildfire. People shook their makeshift weapons and roared, already streaming towards the battle.

Livius took a step back, surprised. ‘It worked.’

‘Of course it worked.’ Kaslon snapped back. ‘They’re Lantic.’

Livius turned towards the mage. ‘And you?’

‘I can hardly go through the realmgate alone.’ The sorcerer’s sour expression was spoiled by a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth. ‘What would I tell Sigmar?’

Livius clapped him on the shoulder, grinning despite the terror twisting in his gut. He was going to die. They were all going to die.

Kaslon winced as a flash of distant balefire lit the darkening sky an unhealthy green. ‘They’re not going to make it in time.’

‘Can you?’ Livius asked.

The mage gave a tight nod.

‘Will you be able to hold Bloodtongue until we arrive?’

‘On my own?’ Kaslon’s gaze flicked to the staff. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Do it.’ Livius’ mouth was dry, his fingers buzzing. What did it matter? The empire was gone, better to disappear with it.

Kaslon gripped the staff. Muttering incantations under his breath, the mage conjured a thread of glowing silver. It streaked from Kaslon’s outstretched hand towards the distant battle, straight as a surveyor’s line. Kaslon glanced back at Livius, then, with a pained expression, tugged on the line and was whisked away.

With a deep breath, Livius jogged after. He knew he should be terrified – death was almost certain, now – but the only feeling he could summon was relief.

It would all be over soon.

KASLON

Kaslon could feel the heat of Bloodtongue’s power. The Chaos sorcerer burned like a tiny star, his aura flickering with bursts of mad energy as he showered the Lantic soldiers with gouts of balefire.

Kaslon hit the ground at a run, feet already tracing lines and vertices. He sketched a triangle ward to shield the soldiers from Bloodtongue’s coarse sorcery. There was still strength in the sacred geometry, more now that Kaslon understood its limitations.

A golden pyramid sprung up around the surviving Lantic legionaries, Bloodtongue’s balefire flickering across its sharp edges. The Chaos sorcerer redoubled his effort, brilliant blue-green flames so bright Kaslon had to look away.

The crystal staff was like a living thing, squirming in Kaslon’s grasp. He could sense the power within, galaxies of untapped energy, but there was too much risk. There was a way to circumscribe the maelstrom, to use Chaos without being used in turn. Kaslon knew he could discover it.

He just needed more time.

Kaslon moved along lines and axes, shoring up his wards with more complicated shapes. Intricate polyhedrals sprang into being, their edges curling like the legs of dying insects before the fury of Bloodtongue’s arcane attack.

The Chaos sorcerer slid through the sky, bludgeoning Kaslon’s wards from every angle, the barrage of spells like stones flung without skill or finesse. As the sorcerer flitted by, Kaslon saw that he held the limp form of Captain Sulla. He could sense the weak pulse of life within her, snared by Bloodtongue’s enervating grasp.

Balefire licked around Kaslon’s feet, the heat growing painful. Blisters formed on his hands, the skin of his face hot and tight from the heat.

No matter Kaslon’s skill, the Chaos sorcerer was simply too powerful. Strangely, the realisation came tinged not with fear or sorrow, but a vague sense of disappointment. Kaslon had just begun to plumb the depths of this new understanding, just begun to grasp the infinite complexity of true sorcery.

He could not die like this.

With a snarl, Kaslon reached for the power in the staff. It came in a torrent, unbridled and uncontrollable. Kaslon did not shape the spell so much as unleash it.

Bloodtongue’s sorceries were devoured by skewed geometries of light, balefire dissipating along jagged lines and uneven vertices, warp bolts lost along twisting paths, arcing back up on themselves.

The tide of madness spread, enveloping the furies and the Lantic troops.

Kaslon could hear them screaming, mutating, but their voices were distant, little more than a fading echo against the power that roared through him. Everything was so clear. The staff was not a conduit, it was a lens, a way to better understand the truth. There could be order without balance, law without symmetry. The lack of a pattern did not preclude understanding, it only complicated it.

Kaslon tried to strike at the Chaos sorcerer, but the flying disc was too quick. Bloodtongue dodged Kaslon’s jagged warp blasts with contemptuous ease. It was like trying to crush a fly with a trebuchet. The energies in the staff were powerful, but difficult to control. Alone, Kaslon still had no chance against the Chaos sorcerer.

Except Kaslon wasn’t alone.

Shielding his eyes from the glare of balefire, Kaslon saw that Bloodtongue still held Sulla. Desperately, he set a tendril of power looping around the captain and, pressing the staff to his forehead, abandoned his wards to tear at the spell that bound Sulla.

Kaslon felt the sorcerous bindings snap a moment before a wave of arcane force knocked him tumbling backwards. There was a moment of sickening disorientation, then the ground hammered the breath from him, setting bright comets streaking across his vision.

He looked up to see Bloodtongue hovering above him. Lambent energy gathered around the sorcerer’s free hand, but Sulla was already moving. Freed of Bloodtongue’s enchantment she brought her greatsword around one-handed, hacking down not at the Chaos sorcerer, but at the disc that bore him.

Sulla’s blade bit deep. The disc wove drunkenly for a moment, then plummeted to the ground.

The roar in Kaslon’s head was replaced by ragged shouts. Dully, he turned to see a mob of refugees surge across the rubble, Livius at their head. They were met by the shambling forms of the Lantic soldiers, their bodies warped by Kaslon’s sorcery, merged with furies in an unholy amalgamation of man and beast. The burst of Chaos energy had spared only a few of the legionaries. Led by the sergeant with the broken standard, they hacked through former comrades, weeping as they did.

Screaming the names of their murdered kin, the refugees beat at the abominations with hammers, stones, axes, even bare fists, not caring that the twisted legionaries reaped a bloody harvest.

Kaslon staggered to his feet in time to see a spray of prismatic sparks. Captain Sulla howled a Lantic battle hymn as she slashed at Bloodtongue, her blade skittering from his armour. Bloodtongue flung a bolt of energy at her and it took all of Kaslon’s strength to send the blast streaking away. For all Sulla’s fury, her swings seemed to barely stagger the Chaos sorcerer. Bitterness nested in Kaslon’s breast – even now, he was too weak to defeat Bloodtongue, and without an enchanted blade, Sulla wouldn’t be able to cut through the wards that surrounded the Chaos sorcerer.

That was when Livius leapt from atop a pile of rubble. The young noble made no pretence towards self-preservation, screaming like a madman as he brought his sabre down, two-handed. With a flash of runic light, the blade sheared through the scaled plate on Bloodtongue’s shoulder.

The sorcerer reeled back, hands already bright with balefire. He raised them to strike Livius.

Head ringing, Kaslon drew on the staff, letting the mad power fill him. His skin burned, the gold filigree inlaid in his flesh glowing white hot. Screaming, Kaslon fought to leash the nested infinities, to channel them into a single word.

‘Stop!’ The word hit Bloodtongue like a spear, pinioning him for the span of a heartbeat.

Sulla threw her greatsword aside to seize the Chaos sorcerer, locking him in a great bear hug. Hair burning, she lifted Bloodtongue from the ground as Livius drove his sabre up and under the sorcerer’s ribs. The rune-inscribed steel hissed like a quenched blade as the curved tip of the sabre burst from Bloodtongue’s neck in an oily spray of blood. Livius gave the blade one last twist before drawing it forth.

Skayne Bloodtongue slid to the ground, unmoving.

Kaslon staggered to their side, catching Sulla as she bent to pick up her sword and almost collapsed. Livius slipped under her other arm.

Kaslon was relieved to see that none of the corrupted legionaries had survived, although the rubble was strewn with many Lantic corpses.

They limped towards the survivors – about a dozen soldiers and a few score refugees.

‘You came for us,’ Sulla whispered through blackened lips. ‘I’m sorry for doubting you – both of you.’

‘We don’t abandon our own,’ Livius said.

Kaslon let out a long breath. ‘No, I suppose we don’t.’

SULLA

The Azyr Realmgate was huge beyond reckoning. It rose from the mist-shrouded valley like the cenotaph of a long forgotten god, the few ragged bits of the Gilded Steamgird that surrounded it seeming little more than a child’s toys strewn about the coppery hills. It glowed with a soft, azure light, an intricate arch of steel standing without apparent regard for logic or gravity. The gate itself was inlaid with veins of metal filigree, gold and silver twining between polished gems to form bright points and constellations, a mirror of the night sky above.

It was almost dawn when they reached the gate, a small, shambling mass of exhausted folk, threadbare as their clothes. Sulla leaned against one of the massive steel columns that formed the base of the arch, using her greatsword as a prop. Livius murmured encouraging words to the few survivors while Kaslon limped forward to press a hand to the gate itself.

Sulla regarded her companions, chewing her already ragged lip. As much as she hated to admit it, she’d misjudged them. She’d thought Kaslon heartless, and Livius a coward and a fool, but it had been Sulla who’d led her people into a trap, and Sulla who’d failed to save them. Bitterness burned like a coal in her breast as she scowled up at the realmgate. No, it had been Sigmar’s failure, Sigmar’s betrayal that had done this to them.

Sulla was just a soldier, he was a god.

‘Captain,’ Ardahir came limping up, still leaning on the blackened haft of his banner pole. ‘Can I talk to you about something?’

Sulla glanced up, nodding.

‘It’s about the mage.’ He glanced at Kaslon. ‘I’m not sure exactly what I saw, but during the battle, I swear he–’

The realmgate crackled with cobalt lighting. With a stricken cry, Kaslon stumbled back, a smoking hand clutched to his chest.

Sulla pushed off the wall, at his side in a moment, Livius on her heels. ‘What is it?’

‘The realmgate.’ Kaslon’s words were almost a sob. ‘He’s barred it.’

‘I don’t understand. Who?’ Livius asked.

‘Who do you think?’ Sulla didn’t even bother to hide her anger.

Kaslon’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Livius crumpled to the ground, knees drawn up to his chest and face pressed into his hands as he rocked back and forth.

The scream rose from deep within Sulla’s chest, rattling up her throat to burst forth in an inarticulate roar – part rage, part despair. To come so far, to overcome so much only to fall to this final betrayal. She swung her greatsword at the realmgate, eyes burning, her fury lending strength to the blow.

Sulla’s blade snapped in half.

With a snarl she tossed it aside, beating at the massive steel gate with her fists, but either Sigmar didn’t hear, or he didn’t care.

‘Captain. Captain!’ Ardahir shouted.

Sulla turned on him, fists raised, but stopped as she saw what the sergeant was pointing at.

Dawn set the copper hills aglow. Arrayed upon the sloping ridgeline was a vast host. Weapons glittered in the sunlight, horses stomped and snorted as armoured knights jostled for position. Banners snapped in the morning breeze, tall and proud. It seemed impossible – there was the golden lion of the Thunnic Legion, the sparrow and sun of the Khemal Legion, even the snarling silver dragon of Eshunna, the city where Sulla had grown up.

She blinked back tears, her throat thick. They’d finally come for her. The empire didn’t abandon its own.

Then she noticed the eight-pointed stars, the streaks of blood and ichor across the banners, the leering faces, the dark forms of daemons and beasts among the gathered host. At the head was Empress Xerastia’s banner, affixed to a cross of black iron with General Kelephon’s severed head spiked at the top.

At last, Sulla understood. ‘It’s him. He’s come.’

Livius stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘Who?’

‘Azakul the Winnower.’

She knelt to retrieve her broken greatsword. The few surviving refugees huddled in a tight mass, Ardahir and his soldiers at the fore. Unable to even muster the strength to weep, they watched the horde advance, marching down the coppery slope in a maelstrom of waving blades and howling faces.

The forerunners of the host stopped well out of bowshot, not that Sulla or the others had any arrows left. As if by some silent signal, the uproar ceased, the horde parting as Azakul the Winnower emerged.

He came slowly, striding across the broken ground with the uneven, marionette gait Sulla remembered, his flail flung almost casually over one shoulder. He halted a few dozen paces away, then extended one hand and beckoned Sulla closer.

‘I think he wants to talk,’ Livius said.

‘We don’t want to hear anything that bastard has to say,’ Sergeant Ardahir barked back.

‘What choice do we have?’ Kaslon asked.

Sulla realised they were all looking at her. She gave a savage grin. ‘Maybe he wants to surrender.’

No one laughed, but she hadn’t expected them to. ‘Sergeant, keep order until we come back.’

Ardahir’s frown cut deep lines across his scarred face, but he gave a quick nod.

The Winnower spread his arms as she, Kaslon and Livius approached. They stopped half a dozen paces away.

‘Come to finish what you started?’ Sulla asked.

‘Yes.’ The Winnower’s voice was surprisingly soft. With a sigh, he removed his helmet, revealing an unexpectedly mild face – small and round-cheeked with a weak chin and a widow’s peak of thinning brown hair – more like what Sulla would’ve expected from a clerk than a bloody-handed warlord. She found herself staring at the Chaos lord’s unremarkable features. The stories said he never removed his armour, and now Sulla knew why. Only Azakul’s eyes hinted at his true nature. Deep set, they were as dark as coal, but caught the light like an animal’s, flashing yellow as the warlord regarded Sulla and her companions. ‘Well, come on, then,’ Livius shouted. ‘Kill us!’

‘Kill you?’ The Winnower laughed, rocking back on his heels. ‘And waste such talent?’

Sulla spat at his feet. ‘Fine, we’ll kill you.’

‘Ah, but you can’t.’ The Winnower nodded back at his warhost. ‘Look, there – not a single one of them doesn’t want me dead. But they don’t have the strength. So they must bide their time, just as you must.’

‘You murdered my empress,’ Sulla said.

‘Xerastia was a worthy foe, I drank many toasts to her.’ The Winnower pressed a gauntleted hand to his side. ‘You were there. You saw. I fought her face to face, no trickery, no guile.’

‘What of our people?’ Kaslon spoke for the first time, his voice tentative, unsure.

The Winnower laughed again. ‘Look upon my host, mage. I count many more of your people among them than that paltry band cowering behind you.’

‘Traitors,’ Sulla snapped back.

‘Are they?’ the Winnower asked. ‘Traitors to what? To the empire that failed them? The gods that abandoned them? No, captain, it is they who were betrayed. I offer them a chance for justice, for vengeance, just as I offer it to you.’ He turned, arms spread as if to embrace his host. ‘All are here because they wish to be.’

Sulla could summon no reply. She wanted to charge the Winnower, to work her broken blade into the cracks in his armour and carve out his twisted heart, but she knew she was too tired, too weak.

‘Why us?’ Livius asked.

‘Bloodtongue was a senile old fool, clinging to scraps of power. With him gone, nothing stands in my way.’ The Winnower brushed back a loose lock of hair, an unnervingly human gesture. ‘You have fought, you have triumphed, the chaff has fallen away.’

‘You offer nothing but madness,’ Kaslon said.

The Winnower straightened. ‘I offer the truth. Not the gods’ truth, but your truth. I think you have already seen the promise, mage. I can help you understand, give you time to explore realms of which you’ve never even dreamed.’

Kaslon’s hands tightened on his staff, his expression troubled.

‘And me?’ Livius strode over to stare up at the Chaos lord, seemingly unafraid. ‘What do you offer me, mighty Azakul?’

The Winnower knelt, coming face to face with the young noble. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

He held up a hand, fingers spread. ‘You will live or die as you choose, absent of judgement or expectation. I offer you the chance to leave your past behind, to tear free of the smothering weave of history.’

Livius took a surprised step back. ‘What of the others?’

‘I would be a fool to turn away such fine prospects.’ The Winnower stood. ‘The choice is theirs. The choice is always theirs. Unlike the coward who cowers behind this realmgate, my gods do not abandon their true servants.’

Sulla glanced at Kaslon, then Livius. They had stood by her, fought by her side. She owed them far more loyalty than she did Sigmar.

‘We could rebuild the empire.’ Kaslon broke the silence.

‘Or not,’ Livius said.

Sulla knuckled her brow, unsure.

Azakul crossed his arms. ‘Follow me, captain, and you’ll have the chance to kill more followers of Chaos than you ever did fighting for your empire.’

Sulla met her companions’ gazes, knowing they were thinking the same as she. Would it be better to die alone, unavenged and unremembered, or risk everything? The choice never really changed.

‘After all we’ve done, all we can yet do for the empire,’ Kaslon seemed to draw strength from the pronouncement, standing taller, ‘to throw our lives away would be the true betrayal.’

‘What does it matter?’ Livius massaged the back of his neck, wincing. ‘Xerastia, the autarch, the Masters of the Gilded Order, they all died, and for what? No one will remember them, no one will care. Whatever is left of the Lantic Empire is there.’ He gestured at the Winnower’s horde.

‘So that’s it, then?’ Sulla asked, looking at Livius and Kaslon in turn. ‘We join him?’

Slowly, they both nodded.

She glanced at the Winnower. ‘This doesn’t mean I won’t kill you.’

‘I would expect nothing less,’ Azakul replied.

The ritual was surprisingly painless. There was nothing to renounce, nothing to swear to, the Winnower simply looked into each of their eyes, one by one. His gaze seemed to bore into Sulla’s soul, but she stared back, daring him to doubt her conviction.

After a long moment he nodded. ‘You are finally ready.’

He extended a hand to touch her forehead, leaving behind a tiny brand with a hiss of sizzling flesh. Strength flowed into Sulla, the pain of her wounds receding. She hadn’t realised how tired she was. Exhaustion had become a silent companion, only recognised by its absence. What few doubts remained were swept away in the rush of renewed confidence. She would see justice done, visit bloody accounting on those who had betrayed her people.

She looked at Livius and Kaslon and knew they felt the same.

They had limped out to meet Azakul the Winnower. They walked back, heads high.

Sulla spread her arms, grinning. She couldn’t wait to tell Ardahir and the others – they could march with comrades again, rejoin the Lantic Legions. The empire wasn’t gone; it had simply changed.

A hurled stone hit just above her eye, glancing off her forehead in a spray of blood. Sulla stumbled back, confused. More missiles followed, legionaries and refugees throwing masonry and hunks of slag.

‘Ungrateful.’ With a quick gesture, Kaslon raised a shield of prismatic force.

The survivors charged, their faces bent around armatures of rage, spitting blood and curses as they beat at Sulla and her companions.

She pivoted out of the way of a woman with a notched axe, coming face to face with Sergeant Ardahir.

His banner pole cracked across her shoulder in a blow that would have broken bone had Sulla not been imbued with new, unnatural vigour.

‘Die, traitor.’ There was no friendship in Ardahir’s voice, no comprehension. He had seen all that Sulla had seen, suffered all she had suffered, and yet, he still couldn’t understand. Worse, she knew he never would.

Tears stinging her eyes, Sulla slid the broken blade of her greatsword into the joint between Ardahir’s breastplate and pauldron, driving it through muscle and bone to make a red ruin of the sergeant’s chest. He fell back, blood spreading like wings across the coppery ground.

There was an azure flash, the smell of ozone. Sulla threw up an arm to shield her eyes as a bolt of lightning streaked down. When her vision cleared, Ardahir was gone, a streak of molten copper all that remained. Sulla shrieked her fury at the sky, brandishing her broken blade. But, as ever, Sigmar paid her no heed.

The few surviving refugees fled towards the realmgate, even knowing it was closed, even knowing their god cared nothing for them.

It made Sulla sick to watch.

‘After all we’ve done, all we’ve sacrificed.’ Kaslon sported a new bruise on his cheek, a shadow against his dark skin. He touched it, then winced, glaring at the refugees. ‘They wouldn’t even hear us out.’

‘What do we do?’ Livius was panting, his doublet stained with slashes of red, although judging from the two men lying at his feet, Sulla doubted any was his. ‘Azakul will massacre them.’

‘They made their choice,’ Sulla said, her voice thick. Livius was right, Azakul’s followers would revel in the slaughter. Sulla had seen it before, when Xerastia had ‘liberated’ Eshunna, Sulla’s home. The Lantic Legions had driven Chaos from the city only to find flayed skins draped across the walls like festival banners, familiar streets lined with ruined bodies. The survivors had shuffled from the ruins – eyeless, tongueless, their mangled hands outstretched, pleading for release.

And Sulla had given it to them.

‘It would be a mercy.’ Sulla’s knuckles whitened on the hilt of her broken sword. ‘We owe them that much, at least.’

‘I don’t know if I can,’ Livius said, his shoulders hunched as if to ward away a chill.

Sulla nodded at the corpses at his feet. ‘You already have.’

For once, Kaslon was silent, his expression like someone had buried a dagger in his ribs.

‘We don’t abandon our own,’ Sulla said, already striding towards the remaining refugees. She didn’t need to look back to know Livius and Kaslon followed.

Some of the refugees fought back, snarling like steelcats as they came. Sulla gave them quick deaths. Merciful, honourable deaths.

The others burned.

Kaslon’s eyes glimmered in the reflected balefire, tear tracks cutting silver lines down his cheeks. A few of the refugees ran, and Livius cut them down, crying out with each slash, one arm thrown across his face as if to blind himself to the slaughter.

They watched until the last of Kaslon’s balefire had faded, leaving nothing but blackened smears upon the realmgate. Sulla looked to Kaslon and Livius, seeing her pain mirrored in their red-rimmed gazes.

‘We did the right thing,’ Kaslon spoke slowly, as if trying to convince himself.

‘There was no place for them.’ Livius rubbed a hand across his patchy stubble. ‘Not any more.’

Sulla realised her hands were clenched at her sides, her whole body tensed as if to flee. Then, with a feeling of shaky relief, she realised they were done running, now and forever.

‘What now?’ Livius asked.

‘What I said back at the Steamgird – I was wrong,’ Sulla said. ‘The time for heroes is far from over.’

Livius blew out a shaky breath. ‘I’m no more a hero than I am an emperor.’

‘We’ll see.’ Sulla scowled at the blackened carnage. ‘I’m going to need help killing Azakul, and you’re the only two I trust.’

‘Lead on, captain.’ Kaslon gestured at the Chaos horde, leaning on his staff as if it were the only thing keeping him upright.

Together, they walked away from the Azyr Realmgate. A cheer rose from the Winnower’s horde, welcoming them home.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Miles A Drake is a professional bartender and aspiring author based in Amsterdam, Holland. His work for Black Library includes the short stories ‘The Flesh Tithe’ and ‘Ghosts of Khaphtar’.

Erstwhile editor of various publications including Star Wars Insider, Dave Gross also dabbles in tabletop and video game design. He is the author of various fantasy novels and is perhaps best known for his Radovan & the Count series. He lives in Edmonton, Canada.

Eric Fomley lives in Indiana with his wife and children. His three loves beyond his family are reading, writing and gaming, and his stories have featured in various publications including Daily Science Fiction and Galaxy’s Edge. ‘Blood Drought’ is his first foray into the worlds of Warhammer.

David Guymer’s work for Warhammer Age of Sigmar includes the novels Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and The Court of the Blind King, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio dramas Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, and the Primarchs novels Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa and Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

Liane Merciel lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two big unruly mutts and her preschooler, the unruliest of them all. She is the author of the novels The River King’s Road and Dragon Age: Last Flight. Her work for Age of Sigmar includes the novella Red Claw and Ruin that featured in the portmanteau novel Covens of Blood.

Graeme Lyon is the author of the Age of Sigmar novella Code of the Skies and the Space Marine Battles novella Armour of Faith. He has also written a host of Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer short stories including ‘The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter’, ‘Kor’sarro Khan: Huntmaster’, ‘Black Iron’, ‘The Eighth Victory’, ‘The Sacrifice’ and ‘Bride of Khaine’. He hails from East Kilbride in Scotland.

Michael R Fletcher is an author and grilled cheese aficionado with several dark and grim science fiction and fantasy novels to his name, including his first story for Black Library, ‘A Tithe of Bone’. He lives in the endless suburban sprawl somewhere north of Toronto.

Ben Galley is an award-winning author of dark and epic fantasy books who currently hails from Victoria, Canada. ‘Mournclaw’ is the first story he has penned for Black Library and he couldn’t be prouder to be writing in the Age of Sigmar.

Anna Stephens is a UK-based writer of epic, gritty, grimdark fantasy. She is the author of the Godblind trilogy and the Age of Sigmar short story ‘The Siege of Greenspire’.

Ben Counter has two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles, he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris as well as a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit that has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

Nick Horth is the author of the novels City of Secrets and Callis and Toll: The Silver Shard, the novellas Heart of Winter and Thieves’ Paradise, and several short stories for Age of Sigmar. Nick works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

Eric Gregory’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Lightspeed, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Nowa Fantastyka, and others. ‘The Fourfold Wound’ is his first story for Black Library. He lives and works in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Jamie Crisalli writes gritty melodrama and bloody combat. Fascinated with skulls, rivets and general gloominess, when she was introduced to the Warhammer universes, it was a natural fit. Her work for Black Library includes the short stories ‘Ties of Blood’ and ‘The Serpent’s Bargain’, and the forthcoming Age of Sigmar novella The Measure of Iron. She has accumulated a frightful amount of monsters, ordnance and tiny soldiery over the years, not to mention books and role-playing games. Currently, she lives with her husband in a land of endless grey drizzle.

Rik Hoskin is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning comic book writer and novelist. As a novelist, he has written almost 30 books, many of them under the pen-name ‘James Axler’. He has also written animation scripts for BBC Television, and audio scripts for Graphic Audio. ‘In the Mists of Chaos’ is his first work for Black Library.

Matt Keefe’s Black Library credits include the novel Outlander, set in the dark underhives of Necromunda, and the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘Fate’s Masters, Destiny’s Servants’, which features the Ultramarines and first appeared in the anthology Tales from the Dark Millennium. He lives in Sheffield, England.

Jaine Fenn is the award-winning author of the Hidden Empire series of space opera novels as well as numerous science fiction and fantasy short stories. After studying Linguistics and Astronomy at university she spent some years working in IT by day while writing, running and playing tabletop RPGs by night. She is now a full-time writer. Recently she has written for video-games such as Halo Wars and various games in the Total War franchise, including Warhammer II. She lives in Hampshire, with her husband and too many books. ‘From the Deep’ is her first story for Black Library.

Robert Charles’ career as an author truly began when a senior colleague told him that he should under no circumstances seek a career as an author. Despite what people say, it’s not true that Robert never leaves the house. While his body seldom strays far from a keyboard, his mind walks distant futures and forgotten pasts. That the better bits have a habit of finding their way onto the printed page is all to the good.

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

‘The Path to Glory’ is Evan Dicken ’s first story for Black Library. He has been an avid reader of Black Library novels since he found dog-eared copies of Trollslayer, Xenos and First and Only nestled in the “Used Fantasy/Sci-fi” rack of his local gaming store. He still considers himself an avid hobbyist, although the unpainted Chaos Warband languishing in his basement would beg to differ. By day, he studies old Japanese maps and crunches data at The Ohio State University.

An extract from Dominion.

The city grumbled and lurched, almost hurling Niksar from the wall. He was perched on a broken lintel, looking down over one of Excelsis’ most unwelcoming streets – a rain-lashed warren of lean-tos and hovels that looked discarded rather than built. The Veins had always been one of the poorest parts of the city and, during the tremors of recent months, several streets had caved in, opening craters and revealing the coiled horrors that wormed through the city’s foundations.

Excelsis was besieged. Not just by tribes of greenskins but by the land itself. Walls groaned as grubs devoured the mortar. Sewers flooded as lizards spilled from drains. Slates tumbled from roofs, hurled by screeching, feathered rodents. Nothing was stable. The ground stirred, constantly, and every shattered flagstone revealed something repulsive. It was like being on the deck of a sinking ship. And this close to the city walls, the tremors were even more violent.

Niksar looked over at Ocella, hoping she was nearly finished. Ocella was only standing a dozen feet away but he could barely make her out through the mounds of rubbish and debris. He was sure it must be dawn by now, but the light clearly had better places to be. Niksar could sympathise.

As far as he could tell, the exchange was going as planned. The street was deserted and Ocella was talking eagerly to her contact, showing no signs of alarm. She had promised Niksar this would be an easy job. She was meeting a dockhand to buy information, tipped off by one of her pets, and as usual she wanted Niksar on hand in case there was a disagreement. Niksar almost wished there would be so he could shift into a different position, but it all seemed to be going swimmingly. The dockhand was a weaselly old salt Ocella had met on several previous occasions. He was hunched and wizened but Niksar guessed he was probably no older than thirty. Life beyond the city walls was brutal. It took its toll on everyone who sailed the Coast of Tusks.

The dockhand kept glancing up and down the rubble-strewn alley, peering through the rain, clearly nervous. Niksar could see why Ocella had asked him to hide himself up on the wall.

Ocella twitched and threw back her head. Then she laughed. Her laugh was peculiar, a kind of ‘haw haw’ that reminded Niksar of a coughing dog. The more he worked with her, the stranger he found her. He knew she was wealthy, but she wore filthy animal skins and a tattered cloak of greasy feathers. She looked like she had never slept under a roof. She wore a crooked feather headdress and had dozens of tiny bird skulls plaited into her hair that clattered as she moved. And she moved constantly. It was hard to be sure of her age, covered as she was in muck and feathers, but Niksar guessed she was around twenty years old. Despite that, she held herself like a palsied crone, always flinching, spitting and scratching. She leant constantly on a staff carved from a wing bone. The bone was taller than she was and as she talked it juddered in her hands, shaking rain from the beak at its head.

The meeting continued to be uneventful and Niksar’s attention wandered. He had never mentioned it to Ocella, but the role of lookout did not really play to his strengths. He thought about the deal they were hoping to make tomorrow with an armourer over on Quadi Street, then his thoughts ranged into the distant future as he returned to his favourite fantasy. He pictured himself rising from the squalor he had endured for the first twenty years of his life. The city was on the verge of collapse, but his own fortunes had never been better. He was close, this time. Close to really becoming someone of importance – someone who did not have to scrape by to survive. So many of his schemes had come to nothing, but working with Ocella had gained him an incredible collection of artefacts. Strange as she was, he had to agree they were a good team. And, because Ocella thought everyone else in the city was trying to kill her, Niksar could not see their lucrative relationship ending soon. Visions of opulence and power filled his head.

His daydreams were interrupted by movement near his hand. A beetle wriggled from beneath a stone and pounced on a plump, slow-moving grub. The beetle locked its mandibles around its prey and swallowed it whole. Once it had finished eating, the beetle took a few steps, then paused, as though remembering something. Niksar leant closer, fascinated, knowing what would come next. Sure enough, the insect juddered and fell onto its side, twitching and trying to stand, then its carapace burst, revealing a mass of teeming larvae. Mature burrow grubs sacrificed themselves so that their young could start life with a hearty banquet. Niksar grimaced as the larvae devoured their host. There were so many it only took a few seconds.

The land is always hungry, thought Niksar, remembering the words of an old Thondian song.

A loud bang echoed down the alleyway, followed by the acrid smell of gunpowder. Niksar cursed in surprise and leapt from the wall, drawing his sabre and pointing the blade into the rain.

Ocella stumbled away, and for a moment Niksar thought that his golden goose had been shot. Animals shifted under her furs and glossy eyes stared out at the drizzle, panicked by the noise. Then he noticed that the docker had a hole in his forehead. The man wheezed quietly and crumpled to the ground.

‘Sigmar’s teeth,’ muttered Niksar. In all the times he had worked with Ocella, his presence had been a formality. She was crippled by paranoia but there had never actually been any need for a bodyguard.

The alleyway was empty, but the sound of the gunshot would have carried to all the nearby streets. Passers-by might come to investigate. Or even the city watch.

‘Niksar!’ cried Ocella, staggering away from the corpse, hysterical, waving her staff at the shadows.

‘Damn!’ he spat, rushing to her side and staring at the dead body.

Ocella looked everywhere but at him, her eyes rolling loosely in sunken sockets. ‘Why weren’t you looking?’ She laughed, making the haw haw sound again. ‘The lookout who doesn’t look!’ Her straining eyes made it clear that she did not really find the situation amusing. She reached under her furs, trying to calm her rodents and birds.

Footsteps echoed towards them and Niksar hauled Ocella behind a lean-to.

‘It came from that direction,’ he muttered, peering through the shadows. He tried to shove her further back but she gripped him like a terrified child.

‘I told you,’ she whispered. ‘They’re after me.’

‘Who?’ demanded Niksar, but before she could answer a figure strode into view, splashing through puddles, silhouetted by the dawn. ‘It’s a guardsman,’ muttered Niksar as he saw a Freeguild uniform replete with a polished breastplate and a broad, feather-plumed hat.

‘A soldier?’ Ocella wiped drool-sodden hair away from her mouth and tucked it behind her ears. She tried to look less panicked but her mouth refused to stop twitching. ‘Here? No one comes here. That’s specifically why I chose here. Here is where people aren’t. If you ask anyone about here, they will–’

‘Niksar!’ cried a familiar voice.

Ocella gasped and stared at Niksar. ‘Did you sell me out?’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘You? I thought I could trust you.’

Anger pounded in his temples. ‘Of course I didn’t sell you out. Just because I fight for glimmerings doesn’t mean I’m a–’

‘Niksar!’ cried the soldier again, pointing a pistol his way and stepping close enough for Niksar to make out a face. It was a young woman in her mid-twenties with an angular, proud face and large, dark eyes. She was tall, broad-shouldered and powerful looking.

Niksar lowered his sword in shock. ‘Zagora?’

‘Who is it?’ hissed Ocella, swaying and stumbling as she tried to look.

‘My sister. She won’t hurt…’ Niksar’s words trailed off as he looked at the docker’s corpse. ‘Zagora,’ he demanded, striding out of his hiding place. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Saving your life.’ She was reloading her pistol as she strode past him towards the docker.

Niksar’s rage was starting to be replaced by concern. His sister had forged an impressive career in one of the city’s Freeguild regiments. She was risking a lot by coming here and associating with the likes of him and Ocella – never mind shooting dockworkers.

‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, following her over to the body.

Zagora dropped to one knee beside the corpse, avoiding the quickly spreading pool of blood, and ripped the man’s doublet open. Then she stepped back, bumping into Niksar.

‘What?’ He pointed his sword at the corpse, expecting something to leap at him. His pulse quickened as he saw the tattoos that covered the dead man’s chest.

‘The Dark Gods.’ Zagora made the sign of the hammer across her chest as she stared at the crudely inked symbols. She turned to Niksar, her expression neutral. ‘What have you got yourself mixed up in, little brother?’

Niksar shook his head. ‘That can’t be right. I was just here as a–’

‘There are purges happening today. Did you know? This morning. Right across the city.’ She pointed at the dead man. ‘Because of this. Because of him.’

There was a clattering sound behind them followed by the splash of running feet. Niksar whirled around to see Ocella weaving off through the darkness with surprising speed, her head held low. Niksar considered chasing her but his sister shook her head.

‘You really don’t want to be seen with that woman.’ She nodded in the opposite direction, to the other end of the alley. ‘This way.’

Niksar hesitated, looking at the crumpled corpse. ‘My fee.’

‘Do you realise how bad this is? Even for you?’ Zagora waved at the crumbling buildings. ‘The city is falling apart. This really is not the time to be seen with cultists. Can’t you see what’s on his chest? The man’s a heretic. If you so much as touch him you’ll be strung up outside the White Angels’ tower, feeding gulls with your innards.’

Niksar stared at the corpse again. The tattoo was so repulsive it was hard to look at. The shape was simple enough – a fish-like swirl with a circle in its lower half, but it was the details that made his head hurt. The design was covered in intricately inked flames and scales that were morphing into screaming faces. The faces were partly human, but partly something else, something that Niksar could not quite explain but that filled him with inexplicable terror.

He nodded weakly and let his sister lead him away. As soon as they emerged onto one of the wider streets, Zagora stopped running and adopted a confident, nonchalant stride, ignoring the glances that came her way. She was dressed in the gold and red of the Phoenix Company, one of the regiments formed in the wake of the city’s recent hardships. She cut an impressive figure and people scattered at her approach, ducking back through the doors of their crooked, tiny shacks.

‘I had no idea.’ Niksar’s pulse was still hammering at the memory of the tattoos. People had been put in the gallows just for looking at symbols like that. ‘How did you know? Ocella has always seemed like a reputable–’

Zagora glanced at him. ‘Reputable?’

Niksar licked his lips. ‘Reputable might not be the right word. But I’d never have dreamt she was involved in anything to do with… I can’t believe she would knowingly involve herself with cultists. I didn’t think–’

‘You didn’t think at all. You rarely do. Did you ask her where she met that docker?’

‘There’s not much point asking her anything, to be honest. She generally just–’

‘You could end up swinging from a rope.’ Zagora glanced around and lowered her voice. ‘Me too, if anyone saw what happened back there. Or if that witch decides to talk.’

‘She won’t.’ Niksar spoke with more confidence than he felt. ‘And she’s a fool, not a witch. And I’m the only person in the city she trusts. She won’t want anything to happen to me.’

Zagora shook her head and continued down the street. ‘I heard about this from someone in my regiment, Niksar. I dread to think who else has heard about it. That docker’s linked to a cult called the Mirrored Blade. And then, when I heard he was selling things to someone called Ocella I remembered that you worked with someone called Ocella. Aren’t you two partners?’

Niksar took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. ‘Not partners, exactly. That’s not the word I would use. I’m just her muscle, really.’ Niksar was slender and wiry, but he was good with a sword and he had grown up on the streets, so what he lacked in bulk, he more than made up for in speed and nerve. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s no real harm done. Thanks to you. You’ve got me out of a mess, Zagora. I won’t forget it.’

They turned onto one of the city’s main thoroughfares leading towards a large market square. The city was as unsteady as Ocella, but life continued. Lots of the traders were already setting up whalebone awnings and unloading their wares, attracting a crowd of peevish-sounding gulls that battled against the rain.

‘You might not be out of the mess yet,’ said Zagora. ‘This morning’s purges are being organised by witch hunters.’

‘The Order?’ Niksar stumbled to a halt.

Zagora waved him on. ‘We need to put some distance between us and that body.’

Niksar shook his head as he stumbled across the square. The Order of Azyr were hard-line zealots, killers who hunted down anyone considered a threat to the Sigmarite faith. Their methods of extracting information were famously inventive and as the assaults on the city grew worse, the fanatics gained even more power, striking without censure at anyone they deemed suspect.

‘And you need to stay away from that woman,’ said Zagora.

They left the square and hurried through the growing light to the edge of the Veins. Finally, after walking in silence for half an hour, they left the slum stacks behind and headed out into the wider, cleaner streets of the Temple Quarter with its grand stormstone facades. The buildings here were sturdy and well-made, and they were still mostly intact. Even here, though, there were cracks in the road that revealed ominous, sinuous shapes beneath. As they wound higher, up through the levels of the city, they began to catch glimpses of the bay and the city’s hulking bastion walls, lined with garrisons and siege cannons. Beyond the rain-whipped harbour and the bobbing masts of the ships, Niksar saw the Consecralium: the forbidding keep of the White Angels. It was probably the city’s last hope of survival. But it might also be his final resting place if this ever got out.

Zagora saw his troubled glance and paused. They both leant against a wall to catch their breath.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s so much going on at the moment that your idiocy will probably go overlooked. You’ve promised me you’ll have nothing more to do with her. And I killed the dockhand. So he’s not likely to talk. And I’m sure you weren’t so stupid as to be seen in Ocella’s company. As long as there’s nothing linking you to either of them the Order won’t come looking for you.’

Niksar frowned.

She studied him. ‘Is there something linking you to them?’

He looked at the Consecralium again, imagining the White Angels spilling from its depths, nailing the faithless to walls. ‘There… Well… Possibly.’

She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the wall.

‘Ocella didn’t usually pay me with glimmerings,’ he said, referring to the prophetic stones used as currency in Excelsis. ‘We had an arrangement. I kept her safe and then we shared the objects she… procured.’

Zagora looked amused. ‘You kept her safe?’

‘She’s still alive.’

She laughed. ‘How you’ve made a career as a hired sword is beyond me. I saw you up on that wall. You were looking off into nowhere when I shot the docker. Lost in a daydream. Like always.’

‘I’m not the dreamer.’

She ignored the jibe. ‘Did you keep all the “objects” Ocella gave you?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I knew she was odd but I had no idea she was a cultist.’

‘I don’t know if she’s a cultist. But she certainly doesn’t worry about whose company she keeps. I’ll be amazed if she survives the day. This is not the time to be involved with dubious societies. Did you keep everything she gave you?’

‘Yes. My plan was to sell them as a collection. I need to raise a lot of glimmerings, you see. I have a problem with–’

Zagora held up a hand. ‘One problem’s enough for now. I can imagine how many other disasters you’re working on.’ She looked out at the harbour and the churning clouds. ‘Everything might still be fine. If you’d sold any of those things people would be talking about them. But if you’ve still got them stashed away, no one knows you have them. You have to get back to your rooms. Destroy everything that connects you to Ocella. What are we talking about? A couple of weapons? Some jewellery?’

Niksar massaged his temples, avoiding her gaze. ‘It might be easier if I show you.’

‘I don’t want to see them. Just get rid of them. And quickly. If the witch hunters find you in possession of that stuff, Sigmar help both of us.’

‘I can’t just throw it all away. I need to sell those things, Zagora. You don’t understand how much trouble I’ll be in if I don’t.’

She waved at the distant fortress overlooking the bay, and the bodies hung in cages at its walls. ‘More trouble than being taken to the Knights Excelsior?’

Niksar slumped against the wall. ‘I’m dead.’

She stood and hauled him to his feet. ‘If you were, my life would be so much easier.’

‘What is all this stuff?’ gasped Zagora.

They were standing in Niksar’s crowded lodgings on Sortilege Street, right on the outskirts of the Trade Quarter. It was a single room, ten foot by ten, and Niksar’s furniture consisted of three items: a bunk, a wardrobe and a crooked table littered with half-empty wine bottles and dirty crockery. Next to his bunk was a pile of armour, sacks, bones, weapons, cases and books that he had just emptied from the wardrobe.

Zagora shook her head. ‘This didn’t all come from that witch, surely?’

Niksar nodded. Then he headed over to the table, poured two cups of wine and offered one to Zagora.

She shook her head. ‘The day’s barely started.’

‘That’s what I’m worried about.’ He emptied one of the cups into the other and downed the contents. ‘No,’ he said, wiping his beard on his sleeve. ‘Not all of this came from her.’ He winced. ‘Damned if I can remember which things didn’t, though.’

Zagora tapped the pile of objects with her boot, as though expecting it to move. ‘What were you thinking? Even I can see how dangerous these things are. Look at those markings. None of them are Sigmarite. These things were made by people who worship other gods, Niksar. The wrong gods. And you kept them all here, in your wardrobe? What were you going to do with it all?’

He shrugged. ‘Different things.’ As he studied his collection, he forgot about his desperate situation and remembered the various plans he had been working on. He nodded to one of the bottles. ‘That oil can turn anything into amber bone.’

‘Then why are you living in this hovel?’

‘I don’t know the correct method yet. But Ocella has a contact on Harbinger Street. He promised her he knows what to do. She has these creatures in her furs that tell her things. We just need to get our hands on a few–’

‘And that?’ interrupted Zagora, pointing to a mouldering, severed hoof.

Niksar grinned. ‘Saltim’s Talisman. A devotee of Saltim would give me anything for it.’

‘Have you ever met a devotee of Saltim?’

‘No, not exactly, but I once spoke to a man who–’

‘You’re deluded. You always have been. Don’t you see? You’re obsessed with getting rich and you’re the poorest person I know. These things are mostly junk, brother.’

‘You don’t understand, Zagora. It doesn’t really matter what these things are. They were just a means to an end. We were going to use them to acquire something really special. Something that would have changed everything. Ocella was talking to that dockhand about an artefact called an aetheric alkahest. A kind of alchemical talisman that would enable us to–’

‘I don’t want to hear it. Listen to yourself. You sound like a lunatic. Don’t you see? All these talismans and alkahests will just land you in trouble. Like all your other ventures. They’re the reason you’re in this mess.’

Niksar wanted to argue but the thought of the witch hunters stilled his tongue.

‘We have to shift all of it,’ said Zagora. ‘And quickly.’

Niksar sat heavily on the bunk. ‘It’s not that easy. I have debts, Zagora. Debts you can’t imagine. To people you don’t want to imagine. Some of this stuff was very expensive. If I don’t sell it I’m ruined. Worse than ruined. Getting my hands on the alkahest was going to be my salvation.’

She waved at his grimy amberglass window and the streets outside. ‘It’s happening today, Niksar. The Order are making their move this morning. Half my regiment have been talking about it. The Grand Conclave say these tremors are because of Chaos cults – heretics working somewhere in the city. They’ve given the witch hunters orders to arrest anyone who even looks suspicious. What if they come here and see all this? Even I feel like putting you on a pyre.’

‘What if they don’t come here?’

‘Ocella knew your name. I’m guessing she also knew where you lived. And there’s a dead cultist lying in an alley waiting to be discovered.’

Niksar was always careful but there was no way he could guarantee his name would never come up. He looked at the pile of ephemera Ocella had given him. It was valuable stuff. Ocella seemed uninterested in most of the objects she procured and she had passed things on to him that far exceeded his normal fee. There were furs from the Thunderscorn Peaks, ivory from the coast of Kald, a feathered headdress from the Myassa Basin similar to the one Ocella wore. And there were weapons of such exotic design he could not even place their origin. This was the haul that would have made him. He had so many plans. This was going to be his chance to clear all his debts and start again.

His sister sat next to him. ‘Look, I was being unfair earlier. I know how good you are with that sword.’ She tapped her polished breastplate. ‘Why don’t you join the Phoenix Company? Captain Tyndaris is always on the lookout for good men.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘We could try to convince him you are one.’

Niksar shook his head. ‘Everything has always gone so well for you. You always come out clean and smiling. How? How do you do it?’

She nodded at the objects next to his bed. ‘By not chasing wealth, Niksar, that’s how. It’s a race you can’t win. I serve the city. I serve the God-King. And I let the rest go.’

Niksar wanted to mock her but he could not bring himself to. He knew her better than he knew anyone and, unlike most people, she actually meant what she said. She just wanted to do good. To lead a worthy life. Her worldview really was that simple. It was impressive and maddening at the same time.

‘I’m in hock to every moneylender in the city,’ he muttered. ‘If I don’t sell this stuff they’ll kill me just as surely as the Order.’ He reached for the wine bottle but Zagora moved it out of reach.

Niksar was about to argue when a scream echoed across the rooftops. Even the rain could not dampen the shrill, awful nature of the sound.

Niksar wandered over to the window and wiped some of the muck from the amberglass. There was another scream and the sound of gunfire, followed by rattling swords and the crash of breaking wood.

Zagora joined him at the window as flames blossomed across the Veins, battling against the rain, no more than half a mile from Niksar’s lodgings. Birds erupted from rooftops and dogs started howling. Some of the flames bobbed away from the building and Niksar realised they were torches; torches in the shape of twin-tailed comets. As the light banked and flashed he caught glimpses of screeds nailed to boards and wooden, hammer-wielding effigies.

‘Zealots,’ he whispered.

Zagora nodded. ‘They’re already out looking. Maybe your docker friend was being watched.’

‘He wasn’t my friend.’

Screams rang out from another direction and flames billowed from another cluster of slums. The sounds of fighting echoed through the early morning stillness.

‘We have to move fast.’ Zagora turned back to the pile of objects. ‘You can’t be found with these things.’

Niksar felt like he was being crushed. His breath came in gasps. But he nodded, grabbed a sack and began shoving things into it. Then he paused and looked around. ‘Perhaps we could just set the place on fire? People would blame it on the zealots.’

Zagora glared at him. ‘Think how many rooms are crammed into this building. And how close it is to the other side of the street. The fire wouldn’t stay within these four walls. It would spread. People would die. It would be our fault. And we’re not zealots.’

‘I sometimes wish I was,’ muttered Niksar, stuffing things into the sack. Zagora grabbed another bag, and within a few minutes they had almost cleared the floor.

A chorus of shouts came up through the floorboards, followed by the sound of splintering wood.

Niksar and Zagora froze, staring at each other. They ran back to the window and saw filthy, rag-wearing figures filing through the streets, carrying clubs and brands. Some were already outside the building and were hammering on doors. There was a witch hunter waving them on, carrying a pistol and wearing a tall, peaked hat.

‘They have your name,’ whispered Zagora. ‘They must. Why else would they have come straight here? It can’t be a coincidence.’

‘Damn it,’ muttered Niksar. ‘I really am going to have to destroy everything.’ Part of him had been hoping that his sister might still be wrong.

Zagora gripped his arm. ‘We can’t just march down the stairs with all this. Is there another way out?’

Niksar shook his head, then looked at the window. ‘Maybe. There are bits of old storm-engine stuck on the walls. Old Collegiate machines. They’re not in use any more but they’re pretty sturdy. We might be able to climb up them.’

Zagora looked at the two large sacks they had filled. ‘With those?’

He frowned. Then the sounds of fighting and yelling grew louder as people rushed into the lower levels of the building. ‘It’s that or the noose. Or worse…’

They quickly threw the remaining objects in the sacks and looked around the room.

‘Are you sure this is everything?’ Zagora nodded at some rubbish heaped under the table. ‘What about in there?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Niksar. Then he cursed. ‘Wait. There is something.’ He lifted the bed onto two legs and nodded at the floor underneath. ‘There. There’s a loose board. There’s a glimmering under it. She rarely paid me with augur stones but she said this one was special.’

Zagora crept past him and lifted the board but when she looked at the polished stone she hesitated, staring at it.

‘Quick!’ snapped Niksar.

Zagora muttered something, reaching out for the stone, but the moment she touched it her body jolted as though she had been kicked. She cried out in surprise.

‘What is it?’ demanded Niksar, trying to bend down and hold up the bed at the same time. ‘What are you doing?’

His sister seemed unable to reply, muttering and gasping as though she were in pain. Then, with another incoherent cry, she dropped to the floor and curled up into a tight ball, hugging the stone to her chest.

‘Zagora?’ Niksar tried to see her face but it was turned away from him. ‘What in the name of Sigmar are you doing?’

She mumbled something. Her voice sounded odd, more growl than speech. Then she started to shiver.

‘What are you playing at?’ Niksar held the bed with one arm as he dropped to his knee and reached for her. His hand was inches from her shoulder when he snatched it back in alarm. There was light coming from under her cuirass, splitting the gloom of his chamber with thin, white lines, gilding the dust motes. He shoved her over onto her back. Her eyes were wide and rolled back. Her mouth opened and closed silently.

There was a bang from the hallway outside and voices approached, shouting and cursing. A woman screamed. Swords clattered.

‘They’re here!’ whispered Niksar, dragging his sister from under the bed and trying to hold her still. She stared past him into the dancing lights, convulsing and groaning. Niksar had never seen such a violent reaction to a glimmering. Augur stones induced witch-sight, showing miraculous glimpses of the future, but that usually amounted to little more than a vague premonition of rain, or a warning about a card game. He had never known one to light someone up. Zagora’s skin was glowing. She looked like one of the aetheric lanterns made by the Collegiate Arcanum. It was cool in the room but her face was beaded with sweat.

Footsteps hammered down the corridor outside and the sounds of fighting increased. Niksar heard breathy chanting and a deep voice bellowed through the door.

‘Open up! Now! For the most holy Order of Azyr!’ Embers billowed through the wood as someone kicked the other side.

Niksar filled a cup of wine and hurled it in Zagora’s face. She coughed and finally focused on him.

‘I saw it,’ she whispered, gripping his arm.

‘Saw what?’

‘Gnorl’s Feast.’ She squeezed his arm, her eyes bright. ‘I was there. On the Faithful Tor.’

Niksar felt as though there was a stranger in the room with him. His sister seemed transformed. Or possessed.

‘Tor?’ he said. ‘What are you…?’ But before he could finish, more embers billowed around the door as another kick jarred its frame. ‘We have to go.’ He hauled Zagora to her feet. ‘Can you walk?’

Her eyes clouded and she looked confused. She seemed to have forgotten who he was.

‘Zagora!’ he snapped, nodding to the door. ‘The Order of Azyr. Remember?’

She nodded. Then shook her head, staring at him, clearly confused. ‘What just happened?’

‘You’re asking me?’ He handed her a sack and then led her over to the window. He wrenched the latch back and the hinges screeched as he pushed the window open. ‘Let’s talk about it later,’ he said, helping her out. He glanced back at the buckling door. ‘If we can.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Red Knight’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Mourning in Rainhollow’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Blood Drought’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘The Nefarious Antipustulent of Clan Morbidus’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Roadwarden’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Trail of Ash’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘No Matter the Cost’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘Mournclaw’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘River of Death’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘Watchers of Battle’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘The Manse of Mirrors’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Fourfold Wound’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Serpent’s Bargain’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Unlamented Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘In The Mists of Chaos’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘The Book of Transformations’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘From the Deep’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘Faith in Thunder’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘Ties of Blood’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘No Honour Among Vermin’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘The Path to Glory’ first published in Inferno! Volume 1 in 2018
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Inferno! An Age of Sigmar Collection © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Inferno! An Age of Sigmar Collection, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, 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: 978-1-80407-136-6

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.