More stories of the servants of Nagash from Black Library

A TITHE OF BONE
A short story by Michael R Fletcher

STRONG BONES
A short story by Michael R Fletcher

TITHEMARKED
A Warhammer Horror short story by Steven Sheil

RULERS OF THE DEAD
An omnibus of the novels Nagash: The Undying King and Neferata: Mortarch of Blood by Josh Reynolds
and David Annandale

SOUL WARS
A novel by Josh Reynolds

More stories of the duardin from Black Library

GHOULSLAYER
A Gotrek Gurnisson novel by Darius Hinks

REALMSLAYER
A Gotrek Gurnisson audio drama boxed set

REALMSLAYER: BLOOD OF THE OLD WORLD
A Gotrek Gurnisson audio drama boxed set

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Ghoulslayer’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

From the maelstrom of a sundered world, the Eight Realms were born. The formless and the divine exploded into life.

Strange, new worlds appeared in the firmament, each one gilded with spirits, gods and men. Noblest of the gods was Sigmar. For years beyond reckoning he illuminated the realms, wreathed in light and majesty as he carved out his reign. His strength was the power of thunder. His wisdom was infinite. Mortal and immortal alike kneeled before his lofty throne. Great empires rose and, for a while, treachery was banished. Sigmar claimed the land and sky as his own and ruled over a glorious age of myth.

But cruelty is tenacious. As had been foreseen, the great alliance of gods and men tore itself apart. Myth and legend crumbled into Chaos. Darkness flooded the realms. Torture, slavery and fear replaced the glory that came before. Sigmar turned his back on the mortal kingdoms, disgusted by their fate. He fixed his gaze instead on the remains of the world he had lost long ago, brooding over its charred core, searching endlessly for a sign of hope. And then, in the dark heat of his rage, he caught a glimpse of something magnificent. He pictured a weapon born of the heavens. A beacon powerful enough to pierce the endless night. An army hewn from everything he had lost.

Sigmar set his artisans to work and for long ages they toiled, striving to harness the power of the stars. As Sigmar’s great work neared completion, he turned back to the realms and saw that the dominion of Chaos was almost complete. The hour for vengeance had come. Finally, with lightning blazing across his brow, he stepped forth to unleash his creations.

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

Prologue

‘I’m scared, Ness.’

Nestira put her arm around her brother, Seben, and drew him close. The wagon had been still for about a minute. The wind snuffled around its canvas roof like a mordant exploring a gift, wan fingers of amethyst light reaching in between the seams. Thirty children of tithing age sat still, pale faces stroked with purple, too frightened to breathe.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said, the same confiding whisper with which she had once explained how grots would take the teeth he left under his pillow, or that the Arbiters would scare away monsters. ‘We’ll be allowed to go home soon. Mother will tuck you and Darsil into your own beds. She and Father will sit with you until you fall asleep.’ She stroked his hair as his head sank into her chest. ‘And in the morning there will be a breakfast feast.’ She smiled. ‘And gifts. There will be no chores. The margrave will tell Father that Sigmar has no duty for him today. The Exalted of Sigmar will come down from the temple in Arbiters’ Keep to bless us, and he will thank us for keeping Arbitrium safe for another nine years.’ She scratched his temple to make him open his eyes and look at her. ‘And if we are good then there will be more gifts.’

‘Will it hurt?’ he asked, voice buried in the weave of her sleeveless tithing smock.

‘No,’ she lied.

Seben was younger than her.

Nestira herself was almost eighteen.

‘We’ll be all right if we stay together,’ she said, speaking loudly enough to address them all, without speaking over the wind. ‘Think of Sigmar, as the priests say. And say nothing. Try not to be afraid.’ Comforting Seben in one arm, she turned to Darsil and squeezed his knee. He did not seem to notice. He stared up at the roof in silence, starting at every whinny from the horses and every piercing scream.

Something ripped the canvas flap aside.

The children seated towards the rear spilled into the central aisle in their haste to get away, and to her shame even Nestira screamed.

‘It’s me,’ said Mother, holding back the open flap with the stump of her right shoulder. ‘It’s only me. I’m sorry.’ She held up her one hand to show that she meant no harm. The night made it ethereal, darkened the knotwork of scars even as it turned the flesh of her hand pale, a ghost bound in threads of cruel fate. ‘Come on,’ she whispered, beckoning. ‘We mustn’t keep them waiting.’ In spite of the terror that Nestira could see written into Mother’s face, the emerald-green gambeson, padded greaves, mail coif and steel boots of a Freeguild soldier made her seem reassuringly solid. Her presence consoled the children as Nestira only wished she could.

Nestira left the wagon first.

Doing her best to ignore the screams, she stood with one foot on the tailboard to help her younger siblings, and then the rest of the children, down. Mother gave her a smile that Nestira could not read: pity and pride and exhaustion, all mixed up.

More wagons continued to grind up the path behind them. Others, already empty or in the process of being emptied, were drawn up further ahead. A stream of children, all of them garbed in tithing smocks, passed, weeping as they were herded towards the abandoned farmhouse. Not so abandoned. Tired stacks of grey stone stuck out of the ground in the vague shape of a ruin, furry with grave moss, witch-lights twinkling on weathered crystal like earth thrown over a casket. It was too dark to count. A thousand children, she guessed. Maybe more. And of course, more still coming. She turned on the gravel to look back the way they had come, glimpsed something colossal and creamy white that had to be a statue. She looked away quickly, heart beating in her mouth.

‘Don’t look at them,’ said Mother. ‘Everyone take someone’s hand.’ She squeezed Darsil’s until the young man cried. Nestira took Seben’s, and in her other hand that of a girl from their street who, in her panic, she could not recognise. It’s happening, she thought. It’s actually happening. ‘Now, follow me. And remember, say nothing. Please them with silence.’

It was a request that Nestira did not think many of them met. Muffled sobs and cries rang from the forsaken stones of the old farmhouse. Nestira was unsure if she, too, was one of those who failed to be brave.

‘Ness?’ whispered Seben.

‘Shh.’

No one else spoke, though they struggled to stay silent. Even the soldiers in livery.

They reminded Nestira of the cattle that the drovers brought through Justice Gate for market on the last Sunsday of the Celestial month. The same inexplicable obedience in the face of what they had to know was coming. Why does no one fight? Arbitrium was a great city, whatever old soldiers like Mother muttered to one another when they drank too much and thought their children asleep, talking only half in jest of escaping for Astronica or Glymmsforge or far Lethis. Why does no one fight?

She looked up. She was not sure why. A distant memory of hope. No stars pierced the boundaries of the Penultima underworld. No light escaped the pull of the Nadir.

Where are you?

What do you do with all of our prayers?

Periodically, the herd slowed, lingering long enough for the screams from the farmhouse to reach them before the soldiers got them moving again. Nestira thought they looked more frightened than the children. As they moved, the screams got nearer. Or rather, they got nearer to the screams. Purple witch-light flickered over the drystone stumps of what, decades past, had been outbuildings, the shadows wavering, stretching, fleeing on hands and knees from a nightmare that Nestira could hear but not see. And through the screams, constant, was another sound. It was a chewing, but faster – mechanical, like the steam looms that had used to work in the docks before the last Ironweld company abandoned Arbitrium for good. Nestira found that she was shivering. She tried to make herself stop, but couldn’t. Not even for Seben’s sake. Her gaze flicked to the tumbledown columns and moss curtains that flanked them.

Why does no one run?

‘Ness…’ said Seben.

She squeezed his hand and blinked hard, made herself face forwards. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at them. Don’t listen.’

The screams grew louder, and more frequent.

Creatures began to appear at the edges of her sight. As much as she tried to avoid looking at them, averting her gaze from one only seemed to set her eyes on another. Imps of glossy bone and shrouding cloth. No two were similar. Some had grossly distended hands, multiple arms, or long claws with which they carried ornate bundles of scrolls. Others possessed vestigial wings for the conveyance of written messages, and this task they accomplished in a manner that was surely calculated to evoke horror, fluttering through the ruined farm like bats pieced together from the bones of higher creatures. Hunchbacked scribes perched at long tables, birdlike skulls bent over endless rolls of skin-pink vellum, scratching with bone-tipped styluses. Nestira wondered what it was they wrote down and arrived at the answer herself.

Everything.

Her skin crawled as, unable to look away as she knew she ought, she watched one of the creatures look up from its eternal monograph to regard her with overlarge sockets. Female, she imagined the string of hieroglyphs saying as the imp bent down and continued to write. Seventeen. Five and a half feet tall. One hundred and twenty pounds. Black hair. Amethyst eyes. One bone broken in the left foot, adequately healed. Otherwise of good health. Without mark or mutation.

The human cattle moved on, and like that Nestira Suthura was immortalised forever in the great biblios of the Kingdom of Ossia. She felt as though she had lost something indefinable that she could never reclaim.

Innocence before the gods.

‘Ness,’ Seben whimpered.

‘It will be over soon,’ she murmured back. ‘Mother and Father did this when they were our age. And remember,’ she gave his hand another squeeze, ‘I will be there with you.’

‘Hold.’

The voice was the sound of a lonely death, bone dust rasping on dead air.

Like whipped mules, they held.

Nestira stared up, all pretence at not seeing broken by the gigantic figure who stood across their path. It was a skeleton, but the resemblance it bore to the corpses she had seen shambling out of the river, or in mordant-disturbed graves, was less than superficial. To describe this warrior as skeletal was like describing herself as angelic. It was ten feet tall and encased in black iron, its bones as perfect and as hard as marble. The priests said that the skeleton was a sacred form to the Undying King, and this was why he made his champions thus. They reminded Nestira more of the bits and pieces of fresco that were still legible on the ceiling of the High Temple, the Stormcast Eternals depicted in starlight and brightstone, than they did of the common dead.

Seben moaned in horror.

Why does no one fight?

Again, Nestira answered her own question.

This was why.

The Mortek Guard turned its skull-face towards Mother. The purple lightning of Shyish flashed in deep sockets and Mother averted her gaze. It was not an action that she considered. It was something that was just done. ‘Your debt to the empire is paid,’ it said in the archaic diction of the Elder Counts, the dead lords who had ruled Arbitrium before the storm of Sigmar, tilting its immense spear slightly to indicate the stump of her right arm. ‘You are not needed. Go. Return later to collect your offspring.’ Its terms were measured, its instructions precise. Its superiority was so pronounced that it did not even invest the effort needed to be cruel.

‘I assure you, praetorian, that–’

‘Your assurances are as grains of sand in an hourglass without bottom,’ said the Guard in the same, crushingly dispassionate tone. ‘Promises shall tilt the Soulmason’s scales not at all.’

Mother stepped back from the Guard, not even pausing to bid her children farewell as she slipped her hand from Darsil’s and fled.

A tearful murmur passed through their group.

The Guard raised its spear the fraction of an inch back towards vertical. ‘Be silent.’ It stepped from the path. ‘Proceed.’

Nestira tugged on Seben’s arm, but this time he refused to move.

‘Come on,’ she hissed.

Mutely, he shook his head.

She pulled harder. He pulled back. He was the same little brother that she had looked out for and quietly commanded for all the years of his life, but he had, entirely without her noticing before this moment, been turning into a man. He had allowed his sister to push him through life until then because, deep down, he had wanted to be pushed. Now, he refused, and to Nestira’s horror she found she did not have the physical strength to compel him.

‘Come on,’ she said, tears beginning to spring from the corners of her eyes. ‘You heard the Guard. Mother will be waiting for us here when it’s all over.’

‘No.’

Seben pulled back and this time he dragged his sister with him. The small contrary act sent shivers of unease through those still trying to walk forwards. Nestira felt the Guard’s eyes, unseen behind her, flicker across them. Like falling under the shadow of an endless cloud, seeing the horizon blacken.

‘Please. For me.’

His voice was plaintive. ‘I can’t.’

Children screamed as the Guard’s head ground on a dry and fleshless neck towards Nestira. Some cast themselves to the ground, prayed for the mercy of Nagash. Others hurried to rush past. Nestira had eyes only for the Guard, so much so that she allowed Seben to slip through her fingers. Her brother stumbled to the ground, scrambling immediately onto hands and knees, and with a whimper turned to flee.

‘All must pay the tithe,’ said the Guard.

Nestira would tell herself in later years that the spear moved with such vicious speed that she had not even seen it before it was too late, speed of such degree that it was barely distinguishable from the stillness that had preceded and followed it. It was a lie. One she would never fully sell to herself. There had been a moment, the briefest moment in which she might have acted. But she froze, and Seben choked on disbelief as the huge spear’s nadirite tip punctured his back, burst from his chest and skewered him to the ground.

The screams redoubled.

‘All are one in Nagash,’ the construct intoned.

‘All are one in Nagash,’ Nestira sobbed.

‘The Free City of Arbitrium is bound in vassalage.’ It laid a contemptuous accent and the full weight of eternity on Sigmar’s granted title, Free. ‘Resistance is not permitted. The sanction for disobedience is harsh. See that this example is not repeated.’

A pair of hooded serviles pattered from the ruins, converging on her brother’s remains. Nestira crunched her eyelids shut, but before she could turn her head away, Mother was there.

‘Don’t,’ she said, throwing her one arm around her daughter. ‘Don’t grieve for Seben. He pays his tithe in death.’ Nestira wept and fought to look away, but Mother held her tight. ‘Don’t,’ she said firmly. ‘Look. Look at what happens when we fight.’

She opened her stinging eyes, just as the imps drew Seben’s body into the shadows, one on each arm, a trail of warm heart-blood smearing the ground behind them. The Guard lifted its spear. The herd began to shuffle past her.

‘Look,’ said Mother.

And so Nestira looked. She looked. And she remembered.

Chapter One

It had been thirty-six years. Nestira had never stopped looking.

She lowered the binoculars from her face. The deep lines that her mother had warned her since childhood were the consequence of being so stern became a frown. Her vantage from atop the circular crown of curtain wall that projected above Justice Gate was stupendous. She stood upon a colossus of verdant sigmarite and grey stone. Emerald-green pennons bearing the starstruck emblems of the Azyrite Arbiters fluttered proudly from the cone roofs of its towers, the sea breeze that moved them a cold breath on the nape of Nestira’s neck. From there, the arable lands beyond the West Wall were a patchwork breadbasket of dust browns, bone greys and withered yellows, divided by skeletal hedgerows that looked as delicate as the stitching that closed her right sleeve. She did not need the binoculars to recognise the solitary rider that was cantering unhurriedly along the Ossian Road, or the colours it flew.

Nine years exactly. And her stump had been keeping her up the last few nights, aching as it always did when the tithe was coming due.

Along the length of the West Wall bugles sounded, startling scavenger birds from their roosts beneath the watchtowers’ eaves. The melancholic vultures flocked over lower Arbitrium’s jumbled rooftops, spreading their raucous dirge ahead of the alarums. From the gloomy crags of the old city beyond the river, silver trumpets answered their mournful cries. And from there to the estuary between the Free City’s two wards, where Arbiters’ Keep, mobbed by wooden ships like beggars imploring an absent lord, sounded its horns.

Arbiters’ Keep had never been assailed, but the air of inviolability it gave was false and unearned. Justice Gate had fallen a dozen times in the dozen generations since Lord-Castellant Vigil Stormstroke and the Azyrite Arbiters had taken their crusade south, into the Gloomtribe Haunts and the Hook of Shyish. Even the North Wall’s Retribution Gate had been breached during Nestira’s fighting career. Ironjawz of the Bonesmasha Brawl had stormed the fortified villas and dusk manses of the Old Quarter before being broken at Vigil Gate, the Final Wall, the very toe of Arbiters’ Keep.

After each onslaught Arbitrium rebuilt, recovered, but never quite to the glory it had held before. Nestira had seen the decline in her own lifetime. Did she romanticise the might of the Free City as it had appeared to a child? Or had it truly diminished as far as it appeared? Were her fears simply those of the old everywhere: that hers would be the generation that failed to hold Arbitrium for its children?

She shared none of these thoughts for they were unbecoming of a margrave, the highest fighting rank of the Arbitrium Freeguild. Unspeaking, she slid the binoculars back into Captain Hath’s holster, drawing the younger man towards her while she fastened the buckles. There was little squeamishness about it. In Arbitrium, generations of adults had learned to fasten one another’s buttons and drawstrings without shame. Providing a second hand where one was needed was second nature to most. Vagren Hath’s one hand was otherwise occupied, nervously drawing, twirling and reholstering his pistol before repeating the routine afresh. Nestira wasn’t sure he realised he was doing it. All the years he had been lieutenant to her in the Penultiman Outriders, she had never brought it up.

‘Just a few days earlier,’ he muttered. ‘I’m sorry, margrave. When was it she turned fourteen? Last week?’

‘Dispatch message riders to Arbiters’ Keep and assemble an escort,’ she said, pointedly ignoring the question.

He nodded. ‘Yes, margrave.’

She turned to another from the body of silver-plated lifeguards, flag officers and aides-de-camp in emerald braid. Undish was lance-sergeant of the Bone Desert Bow and Foot, the fourth of Arbitrium’s twelve regiments, another of Nestira’s young protégés risen high. He was a cadaverously thin man, prematurely greyed and lined, as Shyish tended to make them, but with a sort of wiry musculature. Ugly scars, the work of a pig-iron axe blade, ran the length of his one arm and right the way up his face to where he had once had hair.

‘See that every regiment is fully mobilised,’ she said. ‘I want every reservist armed too, up on a wall or in a garrison.’

‘Yes, margrave.’ He bowed.

‘The landgrave will disapprove,’ said an aide.

The landgrave was the hereditary ruler of Arbitrium, a descendant of Etred, first of the Ridark line, and chief amongst the city’s citizen conclave. He was brave enough, as men of such lineages found it easy to be. But he had a noble’s sense of tradition. Etred Ridark had been the hero who had rallied the blood thralls and slaves against the Elder Counts and helped the Azyrite Arbiters in their overthrow of the vampires’ rule over Penultima. But it was also his signature on Arbitrium’s treaty with Ossia. A hero, certainly, but a complicated one. He had lived his entire life as a thrall to the Elder Counts. Perhaps, with the Azyrite Arbiters departed and the subsequent arrival of the Ossiarchs, he had not known how to stand alone. Or maybe he had honestly believed that a century of managed decline was preferable to annihilation. That was certainly what his great-grandson, Oten, believed. Although the younger Ridark was little more than a boy.

‘I expect there will be some unrest,’ she said, without answering. She looked down at the coarse stone parapet before her and had to stop herself from laughing.

‘Margave?’ said Vagren.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? When we don’t surrender our children to be butchered by the Mortisans of Ossia, then our people take up arms.’ She gripped the parapet until dust from the rocks that the champions of Sigmaron had set trickled through her fingernails. She breathed out a sigh. ‘Am I really the only one laughing?’

A few of the officers gave a cautious chuckle.

Those who knew her better did not.

‘Mereget,’ she said, summoning a woman in her middle thirties with a milky eye. The translucent ribbons of the Nighthaunt Guard and the Azyrite numeral ‘Ten’ adorned her breastplate, and a captain’s braid decorated her shoulders. ‘Rouse the master of tithes if he is not up already. He will want to muster the tithe wagons and have all children of age brought to the temples. Assist him, but ensure that no child leaves the temples until I order it. Ensure he knows you are there because I told you to be. Understood?’

‘Yes, margrave.’

She stared unblinking across dead fields of bonewheat and corpsemaize until the Ossian rider blurred from her sight. If only it were that simple. It was said that for a mortal to glimpse one of the Deathrider Kavaloi was to see the signed contract of their own death. They were Nagash’s chosen instrument of shock and awe, in war and in peace. They were indefatigable, and this one had presumably maintained its steady canter all the way from Gothizzar.

How much longer could this go on?

How much did Arbitrium have to give before there was nothing left for the Ossiarchs to take? And what then? Was it already too late to do anything to prevent it?

‘Why does no one fight?’ she muttered under her breath.

‘A question, margrave,’ said Vagren lightly, loath to intrude on her thoughts. ‘Which regiment has the honour of providing the city conclave with escorts?’

‘Have the orders written up and sent to the Zephyr Spears.’

The Zephyr Spears were Arbitrium’s First regiment, originally formed and commanded by Etred Ridark, who would go on to become the city’s first landgrave, and named for the short spears wielded by the thrall hosts of the Elder Counts whom he had once served. They were still an honoured regiment, even if the cost of the tithe had been that its soldiers were no longer capable of wielding their traditional spear and shield.

The captain regarded her quizzically. ‘They’re garrisoned across the river on the North Wall. It’ll take an hour or two for the orders to reach them, and at least that again for the march from there to Vigil Gate.’

‘I know.’

‘They’re captained by–’

‘Mornvel, my son-in-law, I know. I’m hardly the first margrave of Arbitrium to bestow honour on my favoured officers and relatives.’ She gave her former lieutenant a pointed look.

Vagren made a minute adjustment to the way his helmet sat, covering for his disappearing hairline. A number of the older officers smiled to see the familiar affectation, but typically said nothing. Sensing a dismissal, Vagren threw an elaborate salute and turned to go.

‘One last thing.’

Vagren turned back.

‘I need someone to ride to the old Ironweld Quarter by the docks. Someone I can trust. I’d go myself but I need to be here when the conclave arrives to meet with the Ossiarch’s Emissarian.’

‘And you want him to be there too,’ said Vagren.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Yes, margrave,’ he said with a sigh that Nestira did not know how to read. ‘I’ll do it myself.’

As the outrider captain disappeared along the wall, his riding spurs ringing off the stone, Undish leant in towards her. ‘I’m assuming these deployments are for show.’

Nestira smiled. She doubted it was pretty.

‘I’ve always hoped for peace.’

Chapter Two

Uzkar fought his way to wakefulness, huge, chiselled hands wrapped around his blanket’s throat. His breath rose in bullish snorts, his face a snarl as broad and rune-smitten as his family axe.

Breath by breath, his last moments faded back into the dream: a battlefield his waking mind could never quite reclaim, the foe he had never yet been allowed to see.

He’d known from the first it was prophetic, showing what it did, and of course, what it didn’t, coming to him when it had during the Time of Omens.

That it had returned since, more often than was innocent, was confirmation he didn’t need.

Uzkar Karrudin was fated to die.

He shivered as the heat of battle left his muscles, relaxing the death grip on his blanket. He sucked in the grave mould and damp of Arbitrium, snorted out the ember-hot steam of ancestral fire. Sometimes, he wondered if Arbitrium was miserable by design.

He’d be sure to ask it of the Azyrite Arbiters, should the Stormhost and the Ulrung ever cross paths before he found his chosen doom.

‘Almost had you that time, you bastard.’

He looked up as, with an excruciatingly pronounced shriek, the wrought-iron door of the former moulding room was heaved in and a pair of ferocious-looking doomseekers forced their way inside. One had a red beard and crest, the other tending more towards gold, both greyed by the bone ash of the Ulfort, the fallen home of their lodge. One had a missing eye, replaced by a rough carnelian stone. One had lost half an ear; golden rings pierced the entire length of his arm like the keys of a clavichord. Both were scarred like chopping blocks and built like gatehouses, their fraternal resemblance making it as challenging as ever to tell them apart in poor light. Both had axes ready, golden scales and ringmail skirts clanking as they entered. The first looked keenly over the chamber with his one eye. The other took another handful of steps inside, sniffed at the brazier-smoked damp, then turned to his brother and grunted in disappointment. Without a word, or even a nod for their runeson, the two warriors withdrew.

Uzkar could hear them grumbling from the corridor.

‘Sometimes, I think an assassin in my sleeping hall would please them,’ he muttered.

‘It would.’

The ancient battlesmith, Lungryr, stood within the doorway. His hair was the colour of brushed steel beneath its dusting of bone ash and soot, his stony visage bearing the pallor of Shyish, livened only by thick studs of gold. The foundry they had occupied was Ironweld-made, designed and built by those distant cousins of the First Forged ancestors, and although the door’s iron frame was just wide enough for the battlesmith’s famously broad physique, his helmet crest brushed the lintel bar and left it streaked with ash.

‘We’d all be pleased by that, runeson,’ he said.

Uzkar bared his teeth in a grin. ‘You’re a good friend.’

‘I was your father’s friend.’

‘That’s what I meant.’

Stiff with aches and phantom wounds, Uzkar tossed aside the ruined blanket and swung his legs from the bed slab. Unconcerned by his nakedness, he stomped over to the cracked sand mould that held what few of his own belongings he’d cherished enough to rescue from the Ulfort – the runeaxe Uzkrander, a helmet, a broad belt and golden kilt, nothing more. Lungryr, nevertheless, made a throat-clearing sound and turned to examine the ceiling.

‘The same dream again?’ he grunted, as the runeson pulled on the kilt and drew the heavy, gold-plated clasp around his middle.

‘Aye. Should I tell you what I remember of it?’

‘If it’s the same dream then I’ve heard it a thousand times.’ He sounded almost bitter.

‘I almost saw him this time, Lungryr.’ Uzkar’s hands retook their stranglehold, this time of the smoke that wreathed the foundry air before him. ‘The one that the dream portends will be my killer. Close enough to taste his breath and feel his skin under my hands.’

The battlesmith stooped under the threshold, leaving a grey streak of crematorium ash on the lintel bar.

His forearms, chin and much of his beard were streaked with soot from his latest battles with the furnaces, trying to get the unfamiliar Ironweld technologies to breathe fire again. As Uzkar had brazenly promised the city fathers he would. The deep metallic chuntering of chimneys being cleaned and crucibles scoured clanged and boomed through the place as though the walls had awoken angry and were elbowing each other’s neighbours. Letting his belly breathe into the metallic girth of his belt, Uzkar looked around at the frigid rust-trap he’d taken for his hall. The Ironweld had left a filthy lodge. The mannish influence on them, he supposed. It looked as though they hadn’t even bothered to clear out their personal effects before abandoning the place. The Ulrung had found most of their cousins’ tools lying about. Several dozen curiously springed, pronged and ignitable examples were now stuffed through Lungryr’s belt.

‘What did he look like?’ said Lungryr.

Uzkar blinked briefly as he turned back. ‘I… don’t remember.’

‘You told me you were close enough to taste his breath and feel his skin.’ Lungryr moved closer. ‘How tall was he? What did his bones feel like as you crushed them?’

‘I don’t know,’ Uzkar snarled.

‘You say his breath. Are you sure of that much at least?’

Uzkar made fists of his hands, runes of strength and fire winking in the brazier’s light. ‘I’ve just woken up. Stop pestering me.’

‘I should have gone with your younger brother, Mothrigar, when your father died,’ the battlesmith complained.

‘Aye, you should have. I sometimes wish you had too.’

‘But in the Time of Tribulations, Grimnir turned in his bed of ashes. He stirred and whispered to you of your doom. I thought you touched by destiny.’

‘Afraid you’ll die of old age before seeing it?’

‘Aye.’ Lungryr sighed, his immense shoulders seeming to withdraw an inch as he acknowledged that private fear. ‘Aye, boy, I am.’

Uzkar punched the old duardin’s shoulder, not lightly. ‘I’ll know it when I see it, old friend.’

Lungryr merely grunted. He was in a black mood now, and there would be no lifting him out of it. Not without a proper fight or more hot ale than this miserable city could afford them.

Both Fyreslayers looked up, Lungryr sullenly disinterested, as the maudlin blast of a horn drifted through the sleepwalk grumbles of the stirring foundry.

‘What’s that for?’ said Uzkar.

‘When did Lungryr of the Gold-Plated Way become the Ulrung’s foremost sage on the ways of the mannish?’

Uzkar rolled his eyes. ‘Fine then, I’ll find out for myself.’ He pushed past the elderly battlesmith and into the corridor. The doomseeker brothers, Zunkrul and Stukkur, were waiting on him a dozen beard lengths further on. Still grumbling on like Dispossessed as far as he could tell.

‘A rider did come for you,’ said Lungryr.

Uzkar turned.

‘He’s waiting in the colliery yard.’

‘For how long?’

The battlesmith shrugged. ‘You were sleeping.’

‘Grimnir’s sent the dream to me every other night for the last century. He’ll send another!’ With an impatient growl, Uzkar swung back. Zunkrul and Stukkur fell patiently into step as he strode past them.

‘If you ask me,’ Lungryr went on, following close behind. Age had burned down his patience, but it had some way to go before diminishing his vigour. ‘Everyone in this city has gone mad. I wouldn’t have thought these grey-hearted sods capable, but there you have it. I was high up in the stacks when the first horn sounded, and before you could turn to the duardin beside you and say gruznor there were dock folk in the streets, knocking on their neighbours’ doors and screaming for their children.’

‘Odd folk indeed,’ Uzkar agreed. ‘What of the apprentices we took on for the margrave?’

‘That we took on?’ Lungryr asked.

‘All right, that you took on.’

‘Still scrubbing out moulds on the foundry floor where I left them. Small hands come in handy from time to time, I suppose.’

‘That sounds almost like an admission that I was right to take them.’

‘It’s not as though we’ve any flamelings of our own.’

‘This city is odd, but I like their war leader,’ said Uzkar, and then grinned. ‘She’s got fire.’

Lungryr fussed with his beard and grumbled. ‘I doubt any dock folk are going to come banging on our door.’

‘Well, if they do, tell them to get lost. Then set Zunkrul and Stukkur on them.’

‘Aye,’ said Lungryr. He looked about as pleased as Uzkar had ever seen him.

‘He’s still out there then, this rider?’

‘Probably. It sounded important.’

‘How important?’

‘As though the world was going to end.’

‘Then I hope you at least left him a beer to sup while he was waiting!’

‘I was elder battlesmith to Morkai-Grimnir for two hundred and fifty-five years,’ Lungryr sniffed. ‘I know how to be hospitable when a man comes promising me doom.’

Chapter Three

Vagren completed his ninth circuit of the yard. He greeted his mare, a grullo Penultiman Baise named Silensa, with a pat on the shoulder. The Penultiman was a racing breed, swift as the wind and as light in the turn as the bodiless dead. While not strictly a warhorse, she had been bred to the existential nightmare and silent terror of the underworld. The Fyreslayers, however, unnerved her.

They were loud and boisterous, and smelled like cremation. About three-score of them were camped out in the colliery yard around open barbecues. Superstition and a general lack of marksmanship meant that the people of Arbitrium generally left the carrion that the tithe horns disturbed alone. The Fyreslayers, however, had apparently considered knocking the birds out of the sky with throwing axes and javelins to be great sport. The scent of scorched bird meat carried on coal-fire smoke, the unseasonal heat wobbling gap-toothed grins and slabbed faces.

In truth, they frightened Vagren too, inasmuch as their compound was probably the safest place in Arbitrium right now.

With his one hand he drew his pistol and idly spun it.

Vagren hadn’t been born high. As a boy, before his tithe, he’d worked the stables in one of the old city manors. He’d had no love for horses then. They terrified him, but it had been good work for an ambitious lad and he’d feared his father’s belt more. Their physical size and strength had been palpable, as powerful as the smell of manure and horse when he’d entered the stalls. They could have broken his arm or leg simply out of carelessness. And Sigmar help him should one of them, for whatever reason, take it into their head to actively wish him harm. Trained and broken to a rider as they had been, there had been just enough wildness still about them for Vagren to fear that, one day, for some reason, one of them just might. He had got over it, of course, learned to appreciate and even admire them, but the Fyreslayers renewed that same old fear and brought it back to him tenfold.

The tallest amongst them stood only as high as his throat, but they carried an ogor’s worth of muscle, while their tall crests bought them at least another foot of height. He had seen a Fyreslayer playfully bend iron bars and another, while drunk, goad a man into hitting his face with a hammer before laughing it off and tossing the dumbstruck soldier a coin. Vagren looked around with horror, and some fascination, as Fyreslayers poked at their cooking coals with their fingers, tore into overcooked carrion meat with gold-capped teeth, or hauled bulging ore sacks that even Silensa would have struggled to carry from the iron gate to the foundry building.

The foundry, too, was uncommonly forbidding, even by the architectural mores of Penultima. Its colonnaded style was Azyrite, but its bleakness marked it as distinct from the grandiose statements of Arbiters’ Keep and Justice Gate. Its columns were thicker. More geometric. The signature flourish was the straight line and the right angle. The walls were brick, so impregnated with soot that at a passing glance they almost resembled the wood, mud and bone that went into most of Arbitrium’s common housing stock, but alien all the same. The windows were huge and framed with high metals, crusted with soot. Chimneys rose from the slanted roof at right angles, as though the Ironweld architect had taken a ruler and drawn it. A high metal fence topped with spikes surrounded it and its outer yards. No particular magic imbued that fence, but the dock folk of lower Arbitrium avoided it as though it did.

Silensa whinnied as something within the foundry exploded, rattling a layer of grime from the windows. Vagren reversed the twirl of his pistol, holstered it without thinking about it, and leant in to murmur in the horse’s ear. As the voices of the dead had once soothed and commanded the Baises’ wild ancestors.

He knew why the margrave and, at her insistence, the conclave, had welcomed the homeless Fyreslayers into their city. But unlike his old lord’s horses, the Ulrung were neither trained nor broken. They would turn as soon as they tired of this old foundry or Arbitrium’s supply of gold ceased flowing into their pockets.

How then, he wondered, were they any better than the Ossiarchs?

‘Cheer up, manling!’

Shushing his skittish horse, Vagren turned towards the foundry just as a group of Fyreslayers emerged from a wicket gate in its great, ironclad doors.

This lot were more grandly outfitted in gold and jewels than those who had been forced, or preferred, to camp in the yard, walking with a swagger that gold could buy but that only bloodline could fully imbue. It was what allowed a warrior wearing nothing but gold skirts and a helmet to walk the underworld as though he were the Undying King himself. The warrior at the head of the entourage was as broad across as the back of a war wagon, and about as mistreated, an unkempt mass of muscle and beard in which the gold beads of forgotten plaits shone like plaques in a grey land of unruly hills. Thick plates of duardin runes studded his naked muscles and shimmered occasionally, as though responding to some passing menace in the air. A pair of near-identical warriors, even more muscular and belligerent in appearance than their prince, followed just behind. They walked like bears with axes. They wore their scars and piercings the way the Knights of the Undying Crusade, the order of mortal champions descended from those blood thralls of the Elder Counts who had cast off luxurious serfdom to fight alongside Vigil Stormstroke, wore robes.

The war priest, Lungryr, who had greeted Vagren at the gate – if you could call his surly grunt a greeting – nodded towards the duardin who had spoken. ‘Runeson Uzkar Karrudin of the Ulfort,’ he said. ‘This is…’ His expression creased further. ‘What’s your name again, boy?’

‘Vagren Hath,’ he said, then dropped Silensa’s harness and saluted. ‘Sir. Captain of the Penultiman Outriders. Second-in-command of the Arbitrium Freeguild to Margrave Nestira Suthura.’

‘I hope my beer eased the chore of waiting,’ said Uzkar, his voice as rough and as unkind as a chisel defiling a tombstone.

Vagren glanced to the steel mug with the scorched-black inside that he’d left, having surreptitiously tossed its contents through the railings, on the low wall beside his horse. ‘Very fair, runeson,’ he lied.

The two bodyguards grumbled to one another, but Uzkar extended a hand the size of a small ploughshare. ‘Well, it’s my honour to meet you.’ Vagren hesitated, torn between the fears of causing the duardin offence and of submitting his one hand to that grip. He caved to the former and offered his hand. Uzkar squeezed it. Enough to hurt, but with strength enough spare to crush every bone in his hand and wrench the arm from its shoulder should he wish to. The barbarian grinned, enough gold in his mouth to provision the entire Arbitrium Freeguild with ale, and probably entirely aware of what Vagren was thinking.

He released him.

‘The margrave woman did mention you, now I think about it.’

‘She did?’

‘Don’t look so nervous, lad.’ The runeson winked. ‘It was only bad things.’

Vagren retreated towards his horse. Underneath the brutishness of their appearance and their morbid attire, the Fyreslayers gave every outward appearance of being happy. It was unsettling.

One of the runeson’s guards elbowed his equally massive twin, and pointed at Vagren. ‘Um hestrur okgal?’ he growled.

‘What did he just say?’ Vagren asked Uzkar.

‘He asked you how much for the horse.’

‘Tell him she was a gift from the margrave on my promotion to captain and is not for sale.’

‘Bungit, litur eins og dawrguz.’

The warrior’s companion nodded slowly, obvious disappointment souring the preternatural fury of his expression.

Vagren turned to Uzkar.

‘He said pity. She looks like good eating.’

Vagren’s hand dropped to his holster, halfway towards drawing. He eyed the two doomseekers, forced his fingers to relax. He was aware enough of his own habits to know when it was not a good time to indulge them. ‘Tell him there is more than enough carrion out here to go around. I come with an urgent message from the margrave.’

‘Aye, I heard.’ Uzkar turned to glare at the war priest and then, to Vagren’s startlement, punched the other Fyreslayer hard in the arm. ‘From this wakki here.’ The pair growled at one another in their own fiery language, too low and fast for Vagren even to make out separate word-sounds. All the while the two bodyguards muttered to one another, all hard consonants and urgency and the occasional angry gesture towards Vagren’s horse. Just as the captain’s hand was wandering itself back towards his holster, the runeson turned back to him. ‘I came here to fight, captain, not to sleep. And that’s why your margrave brought us here, isn’t it? Not to play at Ironweld.’ He flung a hand towards the warriors in the yard. ‘Axes and shields, you lot. Dumfyrd-ha!’

Crunching down the last of the bird meat, the Fyreslayers kicked over their cook fires and picked up axes and shields.

A Fyreslayer went from idle to battle-ready in a frighteningly short span of time.

‘You misunderstand,’ said Vagren. ‘The margrave isn’t going to fight. She’s going to talk.’

Uzkar tapped the gold rune embedded in his shoulder with the eye of his runeaxe. ‘I’m not much of a talker.’

‘There isn’t much to be said. But our treaty with Ossia demands a few formalities.’

The runeson glanced in confusion to his entourage, and then shrugged. He lowered his axe. ‘Never let it be said of the Ulrung that they don’t honour their treaties.’

‘Then I will ride back to the margrave at once.’ Vagren slid his foot into the stirrup and swung himself gladly into the saddle. He could not wait to be away from this place. He had already paid his tithe, after all, and he could not think of anywhere in this city more dangerous than being between the Ossiarchs and the Ulrung. ‘Meet her at Justice Gate. And come mounted. It will be a long ride to the Tithing Nexus. Will you need to borrow a steed?’

Uzkar laughed, as did the others of his entourage. All except for Lungryr, whose expression was that of long-suffering rock.

‘I’ll get by, I’m sure,’ he said.

Chapter Four

Nestira had ridden this road twice more since the first time. Eighteen years ago with her firstborn son and daughter. Nine with her younger two. But never before in daylight. It looked different. Wrong.

The light of Hysh washed through the thin barriers of the Penultima underworld, drawing muted elements of true colour from the ordered furrows of cereals and grains. Emaciated birds chirped in the hedgerows. Wild spirits chased one from hedge to hedge, spindly tree to spindly tree. Tenant farmers yipped as they drove ancient oxen ahead of their ploughs, swatting their short crops not to goad the undying beasts but to whip the flies from their slowly rotting backs. Others leant against the wooden handles of their ploughs to watch the great and noble lords of Arbitrium ride on by, any excuse to pause, or else called for their wives to bring out children of tithing age and show their adherence to the Treaty of Ossia.

The company, too, made the experience unreal.

The magmadroth, which Uzkar had called Trotha – whilst proudly reaching into a mouth the size of a small boat to show off the golden colour of her teeth – dominated the noble company like a steam tank under escort by children riding ponies. The road cracked beneath its weight. Its every breath was a growl that rippled the air with heat. Its scales were the black of the Nadir, but each haloed by a wicked glow, as though the spirit of its true birthplace in the Realm of Fire burned beneath its natural armour. Each time a curious spirit darted too close it would roar, its throat limned by fire, scattering every dead thing for a hundred feet until their short memories and instinct towards soulless repetition forced them to investigate the angry ur-salamander again.

The lords and ladies of the conclave, and the Knights of the Undying Crusade who rode as escort, had learned that it was better to not ride too close.

With the exception of Nestira.

To her surprise and delight, she found that she was excited. Shyish was not a place to go in search of new experiences, but this was different. She could not wait to see what the Emissarians of the Ossiarchs would make of Trotha.

And what Trotha would make of them.

On they rode.

Hysh tracked its given path across the grey barrier of the sky, the plots growing progressively more overgrown, the tenants thinner and more disinterested, until, after a time, no living thing bothered to watch from the procession’s wayside at all. Necrotic scrambleweeds and spirit pests overran untended lands. The road itself was as true as an aelven arrow. This, she had learned, was how the Ossiarchs consumed a so-called ‘barbarian’ state and folded it into their ever-growing empire. They bound it to its neighbouring vassals in a web of aqueducts, irrigation and, of course, paved ossefact roads. No outrider of Arbitrium had ridden this road to its end. Were they ever to do so then, according to legend, it would bear them all the way to the Prime Necropolis of Gothizzar, where all roads in Shyish ultimately led.

‘This looks as though it was decent pasture once,’ said Uzkar.

‘Do you know much about farming?’ Nestira asked.

‘Nothing at all,’ Uzkar answered cheerfully.

‘Well, once it was,’ said Nestira. ‘A hundred years ago. Before the Necroquake. Before the release of Katakros the Undefeated and the rise of Ossia.’

Uzkar pulled on his beard. Nestira did not understand the significance of the gesture, but his face looked anguished. ‘An ugly time. Many a mighty hold was sundered in those dark years. My own amongst them.’

‘Arbitrium was mighty,’ Nestira agreed. ‘But she wasn’t sundered. She surrendered.’

Clapping his lips, which seemed to be what he did with his mouth when he had something to say but thought better of saying it, the Fyreslayer turned to look forwards. Towering over the rest of the conclave in his war throne, he enjoyed an enviable vantage. And Nestira had learned that the duardin’s eyes were almost as keen as those of a Swifthawk prince.

‘Something up ahead,’ he grunted. ‘An old farm, maybe.’

Nestira nodded. ‘We’re here.’

A pavilion had been stretched across the familiar forecourt of the old farm. Its roof was flayed skin, its uprights bone. A towering sentinel of necromantically strengthened bone and black nadirite stood unmoving by each. The four guardians each held a tower shield as large as the mortuary slab of a royal tomb, emblazoned with the skull cartouche of the Mortis Praetorians and hieroglyphic scrollwork. Their nadirite-tipped spears were huge, so much more lethal than those of her memory.

She closed her eyes, banishing the vision to the past.

Inasmuch as there was such a place in Shyish.

Her heart rode progressively higher in her neck as the conclave spread out and drew in. As a feeling, it was similar to the random attacks of terror she had come to know as a soldier. Even veterans were not immune to fear. At the same time it was different, a slow ratcheting of tension, as though something inside her were being wound tighter and tighter, like the spring of an arbalest, until it could either be loosed at an enemy or would snap.

Suddenly, the thickness of Trotha’s scales and the fyresteel of Uzkar’s axe did not seem like enough.

Breathe…

The runeson marked his first encounter with the Bonereapers with a grunt. It was entirely non-committal. Whether it was a disguise for doubt or for fear, Nestira did not know. She was unsure if his kind even felt such emotions in the way that humans did. Or if they simply masked them better.

A campaign desk of the sort that Nestira knew intimately dominated the pavilion’s shaded area. It was made of bone. The surface was polished and glossy. Cross-sectioned osteons and trabeculae produced black spots not unlike the knots in good wood or the subtleties of marble. The legs were double twisted, each grand foot carved to resemble an ungulate hoof.

Behind the table stood two sculpted thrones.

In the infinitesimally smaller of the two was a skeleton, draped in robes the deep purple of night on a day of dark magic. A shadeglass pectoral bore a skull cartouche, surrounded by yet more elaborate hieroglyphic scrollwork that aged mortal eyes ten years at a passing glance. The vitrified plate grinned like a death’s head in the witch-glow of captive spirits, haunts bound to the canoptic jars and phylacteries swirling around the being’s tall hat and filling its fleshless ears with whispers. The Mortisan sat with its long legs crossed, and its throne, Nestira saw, mimicked the pose to the extent that it might conceivably stand on its own and walk if bidden. The Mortisan’s eyes glowed with a fierce and immortal intellect, a personality far more complete and complex than that bound to the martial constructs tasked with its protection, or the scrivener imps known as bibliopomps that attended on it.

At a quarter past the eleventh hour, in this unchanging year of the eternal reign of Nagash, the emissaries of Arbitrium did arrive to comport the Tithe of Bone, they seemed to scribble as Nestira turned to the greater throne.

The warrior there was a nine-foot titan in scalloped plate, and a cloak of deepest nightshade blue. A high-combed helmet sat on the desk in front of it, its large hands flat to either side. Its repose was one of limitless patience. And of eternal threat.

See that this example is not repeated, spoke the voice of her memory, and Nestira had to bite her tongue to keep herself from pulling free the war hammer cinched across her saddle bow.

The rest of the conclave, meanwhile, had already dismounted. There was Excelsior Haltem of the High Temple; the high artisan; the arbitrave; the master of tithes; the magister of the last Collegiate school in Arbitrium, the Amethyst; the lord-commander of the Knights of the Undying Crusade, whose name, by tradition, only the undying and the departed were permitted to know; Prince Ethalien of the Swifthawk eyrie; and of course the landgrave, Oten Ridark. Hooded Mornials, a lesser caste of Ossiarchs that served as retainers and servants, emerged from the deeper parts of the pavilion bearing chairs, which they distributed amongst the mortal dignitaries. The Knights of the Undying Crusade dismounted, but remained standing. They held their lances upraised, bannerettes snapping. But the weapons were for display. Unlike their proud forebears, the one-armed knights could no longer fight with the lance.

Their lords and ladies sat.

‘Be seated, margrave,’ said the Mortisan, amethyst eye-glow gazing directly into her. ‘There is a chair here just for you.’ It gestured towards the Mornial and its offering. The chair, of course, was a thing of artfully plaited bones, comprising enough to assemble one complete human being and framing a single staring skull set in the middle of its high back. Forcing back her disgust, she gave a stiff nod and dismounted. Whose bones was she being expected to sit upon? she wondered. The realms were vast, the borders of Ossia ever widening, but casual cruelty surely meant they could not have originated anywhere but Arbitrium.

Her mother?

Her own son?

Seben?

Keeping her gaze fixed on the Mortisan she asked, ‘Do you know me?’

‘Of course.’ Its visage was locked. And yet it appeared to grin. ‘Sit, margrave.’

She set her jaw and sat, straightening her back against the chair’s.

‘Not all are destined to be praetorians of the Thorac caste,’ the Mortisan went on, once she had. ‘There is provision for the meek, the servile and the unworthy. The Principia Necrotopia of almighty Nagash encompasses all, for all are one in Nagash.’

‘All are one in Nagash,’ the giant warrior beside it rumbled.

‘All are one in Nagash,’ at least half the conclave dutifully mumbled.

The Mortisan turned to Uzkar, still seated on his war throne outside of the pavilion. The presence of a Fyreslayer prince for the first time in a hundred years did not appear to surprise it. It did, however, perform some curious ritual that Nestira had never seen before, drawing a crystal phylactery from its robes and whispering over the vessel’s long neck. It had no physical stopper, and its contents spilled into the air as soon as the Mortisan was done speaking over it. The spectral form of something squat and powerful formed briefly in front of the bone priest before being pulled apart by the haze of spirits that circled it.

‘Motokkur, sonur akulrung,’ the Mortisan said. ‘Anstollen.’

Uzkar blinked, sitting upright. ‘You speak the old tongue of the Ulfort.’

‘You are unexpected, Fyreslayer, but welcome. I am sure another chair can be found.’

‘No,’ Uzkar said, something in his conviction shaken by the Mortisan’s words. ‘No, I’ll stand.’ He dismounted the war throne and slid roughly down Trotha’s flank.

The Mortisan returned the vial to its robes. ‘Then we can commence.’ It clapped its fleshless hands and Mornials emerged from the concealed area behind the pavilion. They bore silver trays, each one holding a gruesomely carved bone ewer and a single goblet. One of the wretched creatures poured out its goblet and presented it to Nestira.

‘A beverage, margrave?’ the Mortisan asked.

Nestira could not help herself.

She was wound so tightly that, in the face of this final absurdity, she laughed. She covered her mouth, shoulders heaving, dimly aware of Excelsior Haltem masking a smile. The excelsior was a dark-skinned native of Azyr, and of those few born to the Celestial Realm still in Arbitrium, Nestira doubted many of them were there by choice. He too was missing his right arm, although it was rumoured he had severed it himself and burned it rather than surrender it to the Ossiarchs. He was one of the few members of the conclave that Nestira liked. The only one she respected. Landgrave Oten stared at her open-mouthed, as though she had just spilled wine on Sigmar’s golden armour.

The Mortisan leant forwards. ‘It is wine,’ it said, as though the explanation made its offering less ridiculous rather than more. ‘From the Ossiarchs’ dominions on the Blacksun Cape of Necros. A toast has been the traditional form of commencement in Arbitrium for over a hundred years. Has the custom changed in the last nine?’

Still laughing, anxiety and doubt falling off her with every faltering shudder of self-restraint, Nestira lifted her glass.

Oten and the rest of the conclave followed suit. Haltem swirled his goblet but pointedly refused to lift it.

‘To peace?’ said Ethalien, his fair mail glittering as he raised his goblet, earning him Nestira’s scowl.

The aelf was older even than she had judged Uzkar’s priest, Lungryr, to be. It had been he who had ridden ahead of the Azyrite Arbiters’ Vanguards and conveyed the secret messages between Etred Ridark’s rebel thralls and Vigil Stormstroke. His signature was on the Treaty of Ossia too. The fullness of Nestira’s dislike, however, stemmed from the fact that despite attending twenty-eight subsequent tithings since the first landgrave’s death, he still had all of his limbs.

The treaty he had helped to negotiate conveniently recognised the Swifthawk’s independence from the other institutions of Arbitrium.

‘To freedom?’ Nestira suggested.

The Mortisan glanced her way, but said nothing as the conclave mumbled their toasts.

‘Exquisite as always, Soulmason Morchrian,’ said Ethalien, with a stiff bow.

Uzkar scowled at the goblet that had somehow appeared in his massive fist, and then slowly upended it. ‘I don’t drink with the dead.’

‘The Fyreslayer doesn’t speak for Arbitrium,’ said Oten.

The landgrave of Arbitrium sat stiff in his chair of bone, clad in an archaic suit of steel and brass splints and an emerald tabard emblazoned with the high motifs of Azyr. The Ridark family harness came with a high gorget, but no helmet, and it was the deathly earnest face of a boy that peered over the high half-ring of perforated steel.

Morchrian’s voice dropped an octave. ‘And yet here he is.’

‘Your tithe has left us weak,’ said Nestira. ‘We needed help to defend ourselves. The Ulrung were willing.’

‘You speak of freedom as though it is a thing that Ossia denies you,’ said Morchrian. ‘Does Katakros demand a single Emissarian on your conclave? Is the imposition of Gothizzar so great?’ He waved a skeletal hand. ‘You may turn wheresoever you please, and do as you will so long as the tithe is met. Is that not freedom?’ The Mortisan turned to Uzkar. ‘The Ulrung Fyreslayers are not of Arbitrium. By the agreed terms of our treaty they are exempt from the tithe, provided they refrain from interference.’

Nestira turned to Uzkar.

The runeson considered a long while before shaking his head. ‘My lodge fell to the dead long ago. I’ve no home now but Arbitrium.’

‘For as long as Arbitrium pays you in gold,’ Oten snapped.

Uzkar demurred with a shrug.

‘And the Freeguild will pay him for as long as I deem it necessary,’ Nestira countered.

‘Then you will present yourself here at midnight tonight to be tithed like everyone else,’ said Morchrian.

Uzkar stuck out his jaw. ‘Say I refuse?’

Nestira hid her smile.

‘Then the responsibility of claiming the tithe will be mine.’

The words came from the seated champion, its voice so alike to the rasp of rusted steel that Nestira spent a moment searching for the one who had drawn a blade.

Everyone waited on the warrior’s next words. It uttered none.

‘This is Liege-Kavalos Heraklis,’ said Morchrian. ‘If necessary, he will take what Ossia is owed.’

‘The Fyreslayer does not speak for us,’ Oten said again.

‘Indeed,’ said Haltem. ‘When Sigmar deems his city worth saving then he will send his own champions to save it.’

‘Take your tithe from the runeson now and spare my city,’ Oten continued.

The Mortisan’s skull snapped back to the landgrave. ‘You would advocate violence under the emblems of truce?’ He gestured idly, but quite precisely, to the hieroglyphs carved into the pavilion poles. ‘Do the living hold nothing sacred?’

‘Would you, sire?’ said Nestira.

Oten ground his jaw. ‘No.’ He rose, and lowered himself stiffly to one knee before the two thrones. ‘Forgive my impropriety, Mortisan.’

Excelsior Haltem looked on his grovelling lord in contempt.

With some visible effort, Uzkar relaxed his tense muscles. He seemed unable to tear his eyes off the warrior Heraklis. He looked very much like a young man fallen in love. Or a duardin presented with a very large cache of gold. ‘For as long as the Ulrung are under Arbitrium’s roof, we’ll abide by her treaties. We’re a people of our word.’

‘Then you will present yourself here at midnight tonight to be tithed like everyone else,’ said Morchrian.

‘No,’ said Uzkar.

Morchrian regarded the Fyreslayer, silent, unhurried. ‘I will retire to study the terms of our treaty and the sanctions available to me should Arbitrium refuse to comply.’

‘Arbitrium will comply!’ Oten hissed, still down on his knee.

‘We all know what Ossia’s sanction is to be,’ said Nestira, and bared her teeth as the Mortisan’s attention turned back to her. ‘I welcome it, and Arbitrium is ready for it. Go, Soulmason. Arbitrium rejects your tithe as it should have long ago.’

‘We shall see,’ said Morchrian. ‘I will await your tithe tonight.’

‘And I’ll be awaiting him on the morrow,’ Uzkar growled, glaring eagerly at Heraklis.

‘I will sign a new treaty,’ said Oten. ‘I will sign anything you ask. The Fyreslayer does not speak for Arbitrium!’

‘Be quiet, Oten,’ said Nestira, and out of years of ingrained deference through having Nestira as his martial tutor, the young landgrave did just that. ‘We should have done this decades ago.’

‘Until Ulgu waxes and night falls,’ said Morchrian.

The two lords of Ossia rose together. The Mortisan’s throne unfolded its long legs to raise him to near parity with the giant Liege-Kavalos while the four Immortis Guards closed ranks with a regimented stamp of nadirite plate.

‘What have you done, Nestira?’ Oten mumbled.

‘Given Arbitrium the chance to fight for its freedom.’

The landgrave shook his head. He was still on his knees. His voice became a bitter hiss. ‘What have you done?’

Chapter Five

From the cloud-top citadel of the Swifthawk eyrie, the murmur of the coming battle was a distant insult. Large, oval-arched windows overlooked a black ocean of night sky. The blustering of disembodied voices were easily ignored from there, but it was also a clamour to which one might tarry and listen, if one had the patience and the luxury of time.

Ethalien’s footsteps rang ahead of him, the assured stamp of silver mail worn by a prince. He carried a roll of parchment in one gauntleted hand. The short message it contained had been transcribed from military semaphore into Azyrite code by his personal notary. He had no particular fondness for the margrave. Nor was he so aloof as to be unaware that she did not like him either. He owed this city no loyalty. Indeed, given the blood he had shed and all that he had risked for their grandsires, the reverse should have been true. But he had a duty to bear. And as it seemed he was to be the last warden of Arbitrium to bear it, then bear it he would.

He strode into the stables.

A vast window looked out onto a void of cloud and deathless skies. A wind stitched together from the eerie voices of dead men scattered the carpet of sawdust.

Valethwéir shuffled along his stone perch and beat his wings in greeting.

His two equerries, aelves of lesser dynasties, although still kings amongst high-born or they would have found no place at all within the ranks of the Swifthawk, had already saddled the great hawk, affixed his diadem and silver wing guards, and so bowed low to the ground as Ethalien approached. Ethalien slotted the parchment roll into the message tube attached to the saddle. Then he laid his hand on the bird’s royal plumage and whispered words of kinship in the lost language of the Shy-gwythiar. All the languages of horse, eagle and hawk were known to him. Ignoring his still-prostrate equerries, he leapt into the saddle. Valethwéir sank as the hawk took his weight, then rose again, eager, extending wings sheathed in metal and flexing his flight muscles. Sliding his boots into the stirrups, Ethalien peered through the window. A handful of specks flitted through the air. Scouts and spies of the Ossiarchs. Their empire was vast and their reach was long. But no matter. Nothing that rode or flew could outpace the Swifthawk of Azyr when the speed was upon them.

Valethwéir craned his neck towards him and crowed.

Ethalien patted the hawk’s feathers. ‘The God-King gave them the freedom to be fools. Ours is not to question why.’

Shrieking his understanding, for the hawk had vows of his own to honour, Valethwéir threw out his wings and cast them both into the Penultiman sky.

Twenty units of Penultiman Outriders, two hundred battle-hardened horsemen and their steeds, give or take, clattered slowly through the North Wall postern in rough, skirmish formation. The postern was an old secret and had been since Stormstroke’s day, known only to the landgrave and a handful of senior Freeguild officers, Vagren included. It ventured out from a particularly labyrinthine district of the Old Quarter and exited from there into a deep ravine. The mountainous terrain on that side of the river obscured it from easy view. From what little the margrave had been able, or willing, to tell him it had been installed first by the Elder Counts, the vampires using it to come and go unseen, and untroubled by the light of Hysh. Etred Ridark and the Vanguards of the Azyrite Arbiters had exploited the secret way to sack the city, and bring about the downfall of the Elder Counts.

Leaning forwards, Vagren drew the tube of parchment that was poking from his saddlebag. He unrolled it. Black wax from the margrave’s broken seal sprinkled his lap. He rolled his eyes. Even now, the margrave was a stickler. He shook out bits of wax, struggling to handle his horse and the unfurled piece of parchment with one hand, and studied it.

It was a map, but it had been coded.

Only by interpreting the symbols and letters in the proper way could he make out the outline of old Arbitrium, the mountains to the north, and all within those confines that fell between the river to the west and the Sea of Fading Hopes to the east.

Vagren hoped he was interpreting it correctly.

The margrave had revealed the cipher to him only last night, and then in some haste.

It looked as though the ravine ran north for about another ten miles before opening out. From there, a skilled horseman, or at least a skilled horseman with good knowledge of their terrain, would be able to double back to reach a fordable stretch of river that did not appear on any other map of Arbitrium that Vagren had ever seen.

He tore up the map and let the pieces fall.

‘Yah,’ he muttered, and gave Silensa his spurs.

The mare lengthened her gait from a walk to a trot. The rest of the regiment smoothly followed suit. Their strung-out formation, a consequence of being led blindfolded by their officers, streamed into something more orderly. There were no trumpeters to relay orders, no drummer to sound pace. The margrave had even specifically instructed him not to raise his voice once he was outside of the city limits, lest he be overheard and forfeit the element of surprise. It seemed like typical over-worrying to Vagren. Something in the ravine’s geology funnelled and withheld sound. The clop of their hooves bounced sullenly around clifflike walls. From beyond it, the tramp of perfectly synchronised marchers and the clamour of siegeworks, while distant, reverberated from its high sides. It was as though the rocks beat their drums in anticipation. Or harboured spirits that did.

Vagren leant into the pommel of his saddle. The dry taste of death rushed past the metal flaps of his helmet’s ear guards. Silensa’s muscles flowed beneath his thighs. The Baise was so graceful, he barely felt her impact with the ground. Turning his head just slightly, he brushed his chinstraps across the lady’s favour, the white petals of an orchid that had been threaded between the splints of his jack.

He thought about the places he could have been now, rather than here.

Vassalage was not so bad. Not when your master called once or twice in a generation, and left a man the rest of his adult life unmolested.

Vagren had no children of tithing age.

Perhaps if he did he would feel differently, but he did not.

‘Do you think we can win this, sir?’ Laster, his lance-corporal, galloped alongside on a dappled grey palfrey.

‘The margrave thinks we can and I wouldn’t bet against her.’ He turned and adjusted the sit of his helmet to be slightly forward of his brow. Laster watched him do it with a trace of a smile. ‘Just think,’ Vagren went on, ‘we could be up on the West Wall. At least the Ossiarchs don’t know we’re coming.’

Many miles behind the front lines of his legion, Heraklis, Liege-Kavalos of Ossia, sat in the hard saddle of his eternally patient steed and contemplated the nature of peace.

His was an existence of intractable contradictions.

He craved the quietude promised by the Principia Necrotopia, and yet he was a composite of a hundred champions and heroes, an amalgam of their boisterous and warlike souls, the blunt instrument of his body moulded into its precise form with their bones. He was a young being, and yet he was also old. Into him had gone the essences of war-beasts that knew nothing of time, of the aelf-like beings from the Perimeter Inimical who did not age as mortal creatures did, who had witnessed the first breaths of the gods and followed the fall and rise of civilisations as men did the growing of grass until the great inversion had heralded their fall. He had never led his legion in battle, and yet he could recall a thousand campaigns. He had marshalled armies of Order and Darkness. He had toasted victory and commiserated defeat. He had been fêted by a dozen divine and semi-divine patrons, and been banished from the graces of a dozen more.

Now, through him, all of those experiences were one in Nagash.

Around him, all was quiet.

At peace.

His great mount was as cold and still as a statue of neglected brass, eye sockets flickering with an intelligence that was at once greater than was strictly needed and lesser than it could have been. Enough to recognise its diminished status and rage against it, although not nearly enough to understand it, or to seek its betterment in any way.

Nagash was just.

The Kavaloi arrayed in their ranks around him were likewise still.

Only Soulmason Morchrian, in his distraction, still muttered.

In the wake of their meeting with the Conclave of Arbitrium at the Tithing Nexus, the Mortisan had convened with the spirits of the aether and the dead sages of Penultiman lore and had summoned to this far corner of the empire an entire library of tomes from his great biblios in the necropolis of Kios. The hulking scarab creature so dispatched now squatted in the field of black maize, its whorled carapace unfurled to expose rib upon rib of neatly ordered shelves. Morchrian stood at a reading lectern within the biblioscarab’s hollow thorax, scrutinising one by one the manuscripts, scrolls and treatises on precedent that bibliopomps continued to bring forth from the stacks.

Heraklis was not sure why he troubled himself. There was only one sanction for defiance of the tithe. Death. And yet Morchrian insisted on cross-referencing and double-checking, ensuring every legality to be neat and ordered before delivering his judgement on Arbitrium’s fate. Heraklis wondered if, in the very duality that he lamented within himself, he might explain Morchrian’s inability to come to swift judgement. Heraklis was capable of rashness, of instinct, of acting on impulse when decision could allow him to pre-empt an unready foe or unpredictability could be a virtue.

Morchrian could do none of these things. He was a creature of exaction, his rectitude predicated on dealing only in certainty.

Heraklis and his Kavaloi had been waiting patiently in the grass for many hours past the allotted hour of the tithing. The exact span was irrelevant to warriors who did not suffer impatience or tire, but to Heraklis it felt close to an age when Morchrian at last stirred from his deliberations.

The Mortisan lowered the scroll he had been studying and dismissed the bibliopomps from his lectern with a wave of his hand.

‘It is decided,’ he announced.

Heraklis felt something in him sink at the Soulmason’s words.

However he was made, whatever his purpose, war was always the last step of a road paved with failure.

It was disorderly.

‘The sanction as decreed by Mortarch Katakros is abundantly clear,’ Morchrian continued.

‘Death,’ said Heraklis.

Visible to the sentries on Justice Gate and the West Wall by the amethyst witch-gleam of their eyes, the Ossiarchs rolled across the black quilt of the city’s fields. The bastion towers and battlements of the West Wall blasted their defiance of them with alarm bells and horns. Line sergeants screamed for men’s courage and warrior priests for their faith in Sigmar. The precision stamp-stamp stamp-stamp of marching feet rang out over the breathless chill, growing louder until it seemed the sky must fall, before the first rank of Bonereapers became more than a pair of eyes in the night, marching out of the Penultiman dark and into the arrayed lights of a Free City of Sigmar.

Caged stars situated atop of long poles bathed the city perimeter in radiance that many ardently believed the dead would not dare cross. Meanwhile, from the castellated ring of bastion towers that made up Justice Gate, teams of engineers cranked mirrored panes into position. From them, beams of reflected starlight stabbed into the night. The light rinsed white across the gleaming bone and gold of Ossiarch praetorians, glancing across the black nadirite of armour as though unable to touch it.

The phalanxes were perfect squares. The gaps between them were identical and unchanging, perfectly sized for columns of heavy Kavaloi to walk between, their pace set by the drum-step of the infantry. Hulking four-armed warrior constructs stalked the flanks, while giant-sized versions of the Mortek line-praetorian marched in protective blocks around more horrifying war machines yet.

Nestira had never fought against the Ossiarchs. Not personally. But she had studied extensively from every scrap of lore and learned traveller that she had come across. She had scoured the city’s libraries, traded favours with the city Collegiate and Prince Ethalien, and had extorted traders from as far afield as Sendport and Carstinia for all that there was to be learned of their methods of war and their weaknesses. From what she had learned, and what her own eyes now seemed to confirm, the Ossiarchs built their legions around a core of highly durable elite infantry, complemented by the hitting power of their Kavaloi. Their principal weakness was immobility and a lack of range. Even the mounted Kavaloi looked slow in comparison to Arbitrium’s skirmish riders or the Knights of the Undying Crusade.

If she could hold them at bay with missile fire, keep them from ever closing with the walls, then victory would be hers.

‘Raise signal, fire!’ she barked, voice worn to a thin edge by a hard night spent yelling at soldiers.

‘Raise signal, fire!’ a fuller-voiced sergeant beside her bellowed.

The shout was taken up further down the line. ‘Raise signal, fire!’ A signalman hoisted a coloured flag. A few moments later, identically shaped and coloured flags were shooting up poles along the length of the walls. Shouts of ‘Fire! Fire!’ rang out, pairs of soldiers converging on siege arbalests that had been bolted to the ramparts. The weapons were pintle mounted, one man responsible for traversing and elevating the giant crossbow while their partner handled triggering and reloading. Without a right arm between them, neither would have been able to manage the weapon alone. The city’s older traditions of target archery had not survived the tithe. It was a child’s sport. Even that was discouraged as bad luck by some, and in poor taste by most. Infantry fought with lighter weapons, and without shields. There were no halberdiers. No greatswords. No spears. There had been no crossbow regiments in the Arbitrium Freeguild for a hundred years. Even the once-famous Penultiman Outriders, her own former regiment, had abandoned the traditional repeating handgun and blunderbuss in favour of pistols, which could be fired and loaded, albeit with some difficulty, with one hand.

But they would fight.

She had given them the chance that their great-grandparents had been denied, and she would make sure they didn’t waste it. They would win. They would show to all the realms that the march of Ossia could be halted.

An arbalest mounted a few merlons along from her loosed with an almighty twang. She felt the vibrations run down her throat as the foot-long bolt arced up and then down.

Nestira clenched her fist in triumph as it smashed through a Mortek Guard’s breastplate in an explosion of bone.

The Bonereaper misstepped, one stamp-stamp beat among two thousand sounding out of time, but then recovered to continue its march.

Nestira swore.

‘Haha!’ Uzkar roared, and slapped the flat of his palm on the parapet stone. ‘Look at that one! It’s not dead, but you could stick a bloody flag in it now, eh?’ He turned to the taller, but considerably gaunter, Freeguild swordsman beside him. ‘Eh?’ The soldier looked down at him grimly, and so the Fyreslayer turned to the man at his other shoulder. ‘Eh?’ The swordsman ignored him, watching the advance unsmiling. Deflated, the Fyreslayer shook his head, grumbling in his native tongue.

‘They’re hard to kill,’ said Nestira.

‘That they are,’ said Uzkar.

‘I’ve heard they’re impossible to fully destroy.’

‘I’ve waged war on the dead since I was swaddled in embers. Whether it’s mordants, death rattle or soulblight bloodsuckers, I find a runeaxe to the ribcage tends to do the job.’

‘You’ve never faced the Ossiarchs.’

‘Neither have you, so let’s not get haughty.’

Nestira frowned, but did not argue before turning back to the Ossiarchs. ‘I’m told that the only way to end them permanently is to shatter the soultrap stones that harbour their spirits.’

‘That’ll make it harder,’ Uzkar agreed.

‘You sound distracted. Isn’t this the battle you’ve been craving since before you came here?’

‘Aye, it is.’ The runeson looked up from his block of wall, ugly face scarred by a thoughtful frown. His helmet was half as tall as he was and, despite its open front and woven design, as heavy as a human man. Knotted bands of fyresteel created the illusion of bones and the snarling likeness of an undying ur-reptile. Gold picked out the finer details, black gems the eyes and the teeth. His own red hair emerged from the golden reptile’s mouth like flame. ‘You know then, why I came to this city of yours?’

‘Of course I know. Everyone knows. You scour the underworld in search of death and you decided that you would find it here. Why do you think everyone dislikes you so much?’

The Fyreslayer shrugged. ‘Your city teeters on the brink of death. What better place for a duardin to go in search of his?’

‘Do you hope to find the doom from your dreams today?’

To her surprise, the runeson laughed mightily. ‘No, lass. Any fool can meet a prophecy, but I’ll be bound by no dream. I left my wealth and my kinbands behind me all those years ago to make my own doom, to kill myself before whatever fate has set for me can. That’s how Uzkar Karrudin spits in the Weaver’s face.’

‘I’m told you’ve been having the dream for the better part of a hundred years.’

‘Aye. Who’d have thought death would be such a hard thing to find in Shyish?’

‘Then perhaps today.’

‘Perhaps.’ Uzkar nodded slowly. ‘If I’m lucky and you’re not.’ He glanced up, regarding her with eyes less stupid than they appeared. ‘The two girls you apprenticed to Lungryr are safe in my lodge. For now at least. I left a couple of warriors to watch over the place.’

Nestira’s frown hardened. She didn’t answer.

Uzkar gave a grumbling sigh. ‘You’re not going to win this fight, you know.’

‘What makes you say that? Of course we will.’

‘Knowing what you know of me and of my kind, knowing what I’ve just now told you about my being here, you’ll not think it cowardice of me to say so – your certain doom is obviously no care of mine. But I just wanted to be sure you knew that.’ He shrugged. ‘One war leader to another.’

‘We have the numbers, and the range. We have the walls.’

‘Walls.’ Uzkar spat. ‘Look around you, lass. Look at these heroes you’ve surrounded yourself with. Look at the stones of your damned walls. No one’s looked after them properly in a hundred years. No one here cares. There’s no joy left here. No hope. They’re all beaten already.’

‘You’re wrong. They’re fighting for their freedom.’

Uzkar shook his head. ‘They’re fighting for a quicker end.’ He gave a toothy grin. ‘And because they’ve forgotten how to stand up to the likes of you and I and say no.’

From the towers above them, guided by starlight and the shouted instructions of spotters with spyglasses, greatcannons and mortars spoke out in rumbling voice. The artillery blasted craters into ordered phalanxes and turned towering constructs to avalanches of bone. But still the praetorians marched, more and more of their number crossing into the field of illumination that encircled Arbitrium’s walls. The Ossiarchs had brought artillery pieces of their own. Nestira could see them, war engines that the Ossiarchs called Mortek Crawlers, enormous centipedes with bone trebuchets fused to their backs. But for now, limited by range perhaps, the Free City’s opening fusillade went unanswered.

‘Do you think that this Heraklis might be the warrior from your visions?’ she asked.

‘Hah! I hope not.’

‘How will you know?’

‘When the time comes, I’ll know.’ Turning aside from the wall as if the relentless march of Ossia no longer concerned him, he leant in towards Nestira. ‘How did you know I’d make them fight for my bones?’

‘Credit me with knowing a little about your people before I invited you to my city. My younger brother, Darsil, was killed fighting Fyreslayer mercenaries in Stygxx, about thirty years ago.’

‘Really?’ said Uzkar, suddenly interested. ‘My eldest brother, Mjorg, took a fyrd to contract in Lethis at about that time.’ He grinned savagely. ‘Maybe my brother killed your brother!’

Nestira returned her attention to the battle.

Uzkar growled under his breath. ‘You see?’ said Uzkar, more softly. ‘There’s not enough fire left in your hearts for this fight.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘I’m speaking always of my family and the deeds of my brothers, but this is the first time in our talks that I’ve heard you mention yours.’

‘My parents are dead. My brothers are dead. I had four children, three of whom are also dead. My husband is dead. Would you hear more?’

‘No, that’s enough.’

‘I hold the Ossiarchs responsible for them all. I have one daughter still alive, though we seldom speak any longer over our disagreements on this. That, and she wedded a fool.’

Uzkar chuckled.

‘Did I say something funny?’

‘No. But there’s a crackling ember or two in you yet.’

‘Go back to your fyrd,’ said Nestira. ‘I’ve been fighting this battle in my thoughts since I was seventeen years old, and I’m telling you that we’re going to win. I will show you my city’s fire.’

While the Ossiarch legions commenced their assault, requiring little in the way of guidance, for each praetorian knew the will of Nagash as it pertained to them, their leaders stood in meditation. Soulmason Morchrian drew a vial from his robes. It was dark, deflecting what little of the city’s light gleamed from its surface. Heraklis knew the aetheric vibration of shadeglass, as a human might know the scamper of a fish in fast water, or the furtive twitch of a mouse in darkness. He and it had come to different ends, but they arose from the same power. They were fundamentally of the same matter. The Soulmason bent over the vial and whispered into it, the words imparted to him in fragment from the deep lore of Nagash himself sending splinters of livid frost crawling down its neck. The stopper dissolved into an amethyst cloud, and with his next utterance the Soulmason teased the spirit held within from its container.

Like many spirits of uncommonly potent will, it had retained some sense of self-image in its new life beyond the grave, and now shaped its vaporous outline to suit. Where most with that degree of fortitude appeared as warriors or kings in armour, this spirit manifested in the garb of a slave. It was cloaked as if for a ball, a thin circlet pinching its brow and a pair of finely wrought bracers locked over its sleeves. The apparel might once have been deep black, the jewellery golden and fine, but now a greenish gloam lit it all through with the light of undeath.

Some part of Heraklis recognised this spirit.

Not from a personal encounter, he thought, but from a statue, or a coin, or a piece of art.

‘Arbitrium’s warmest greetings to you, Morchrian of Kios,’ it said, its voice echoing as though the words were spoken not by the spirit but instead from far away. It lowered itself, its knee floating an inch above the ground. ‘Are there yet formalities to our contract to be agreed?’ The ghost breathed a sigh. Its form faded, becoming briefly transparent, although the bindings of the Soulmason’s phylactery would never allow the spirit to fully disperse. ‘It feels, sometimes, as though we have been at this for an age.’

‘It has been no time at all,’ said Morchrian.

‘It feels like… forever.’

‘Soon it will be finished and you may rest.’

‘I would like that, I think. Who would have thought that surrender would prove less terminable than death?’

‘You have always seen clearly, Etred Ridark. Even when you lived, you saw the folly of defying the will of Katakros.’

‘It was not a war Arbitrium could win. I hoped to buy time for our prayers to be heeded and Vigil Stormstroke returned.’

‘They have not been heeded. Stormstroke is unreturned and victory in war remains beyond the city’s grasp. And yet, there are those among your descendants who lack your clarity of vision.’

‘They have not known servitude as I have known it.’

‘Then you must advise me one last time.’

Morchrian turned his skull towards Heraklis, the soulfire in his eye sockets gleaming. They was a slyness in the Soulmason that Heraklis did not know in himself. He possessed a cunning and a need for aggrandisement that the Great Necromancer, in his omniscience, had permitted to be there. Much as there existed treachery in the Mortarch of Night, or subterfuge in his counterpart of Blood.

Nagash was wise.

‘Landgrave Ridark,’ said Morchrian, bowing his head to the hovering shade. ‘May I present to you my ally and equal in Katakros’ Legions Immortal, Liege-Kavalos Heraklis of Ossia.’ The spirit bowed to Heraklis in a highly formal, archaic style. ‘The landgrave has been of great assistance to me in keeping the peace with Arbitrium these past hundred years,’ Morchrian went on, but addressing Heraklis now. The spirit, dismissed, either did not hear the words or was servile enough to wait until he was spoken to. ‘But I am not a warrior, and not properly minded to consider warlike acts. Ask him what you will of the city’s defences, Liege-Kavalos, and as Nagash is eternal master to us all, he will answer.’

‘For Sigmar, and for Arbitrium,’ said Etred Ridark, and his ghost straightened, somehow betraying both servility and pride as the wind gently tattered his astral form.

The spirit waited, not with the patience of the Ossiarchs but with the obedience of a thrall, while Heraklis considered his many thoughts. The animated dead seldom perceived a changed world as it had truly become. Their memories were lengthy, but far from accurate.

His questions would need to be general.

‘What would be Arbitrium’s first action in the event of a siege?’

‘That is easy,’ said Etred, with a translucent smile. ‘They would send to Azyr for aid.’

Chapter Six

The warhawk Valethwéir shrieked a warning, but Ethalien’s eyes were no less keen and he was already lending his weight to pre-empt the bird’s turn.

The Morghast that they had both spotted dropped out of the sky, its black armour turned ghostly in the underworld’s starless night, lit only by a trail of spectral light shed through tattered wings. Valethwéir banked to avoid the thrust of its spear, twisting mid-flight to rake talons across the back of its helmet.

The Morghast fell beneath them with a hollow roar.

Ethalien looked over his shoulder.

Swarms of lighter creatures, winged constructs of hollow bone and broad pinions that the Bonereapers called aviarchs, clouded the twilight. They were small, messengers and spies rather than killers, but they were numerous and swift. Nowhere close to swift enough to keep pace with Valethwéir when the wind was in his wings, but so long as the warhawk was forced to tarry with the more dangerous constructs then the swarm would continue to gain.

Ethalien drew his spear.

The tapering silver blade gleamed in the pinprick light of stars that mortal eyes could not see from beyond the Penultiman veil.

A second Morghast swooped with a dry-bone hiss. Fleshless wings beat fiercely for speed as it thrust the hook-blade of its halberd towards Valethwéir’s breast. Ethalien blocked the Morghast’s blade with his spear, trading enough of the bone construct’s momentum to punt Valethwéir upwards and the infuriated Morghast down beneath. Starsilver sang. Nadirite hummed. Ethalien drew back the vibrating spear, and spun it overhead. The shaft appeared to split into two, three, doubling in length as, with an air of princely disdain, he spitted aviarch after aviarch from the flock that surrounded him. ‘This message is bound for the Shimmergate of Glymmsforge,’ he said, in the shrill voice of the Shy-gwythiar. ‘That Azyrheim might learn of her daughter’s plight and send aid. We swore an oath, my friend.’ He drew back on his spear, the enchantments innate to aelven metalwork preventing the corpse from sticking. Another scrawny body tumbled from the sky.

Valethwéir shrieked.

‘They are too numerous! They cannot be outrun or outfought, so let us see if they have the deftness of wing or the guile to snare a Swifthawk in flight.’

With an ebullient shriek, Valethwéir tucked in his wings.

He dropped like a starmetal comet, trailing bone-grey bodies like the funnel of a hurricane upended by the pull of the Nadir. Ethalien held on with knees alone, his spear aloft like the bowsprit of a dragonship. With the other hand, he shielded the message tube and its priceless cargo. With a suddenness that would have unseated, and most probably also rendered senseless, a human rider, Valethwéir flung out his wings, catching Penultima’s meagre thermals and driving himself back into a rocketing climb.

Ethalien hooted like a wild Kurnothi as the mob of aviarchs tumbled in their wake.

Though the constructs recovered themselves swiftly, flapping tirelessly, they were not nearly fast enough.

Ethalien’s lip curled into a smile. ‘Well done, Valethwéir.’

A tingle of aelven intuition made him look up.

With superhuman swiftness he raised his spear. But reaction, however swift, was no substitute for premonition.

The Ossiarchs were not simply pursuing.

They were waiting.

The Morghast hit like a trebuchet stone, one immense arm grabbling Valethwéir’s neck while simultaneously stabbing for Ethalien with its halberd. The Swifthawk drew one foot out of the stirrup and lifted his knee. The Morghast’s nadirite blade punched through the saddle leather where his leg had been and into the warhawk’s back.

Valethwéir bucked in the Morghast’s grip and shrieked.

‘Valethwéir!’

The Morghast wrenched its weapon free. Hatred bled from its black armour as it sprayed aelf flesh and ensorcelled bone with Valethwéir’s blood. The noble warhawk gave an erratic flap, like a chick stumbling for the first time from his mother’s nest. Perched lightly on his back, Ethalien felt himself tip towards the earth. The Morghast’s terrible weight on the hawk’s neck pulled them down.

‘For Azyr!’ Ethalien yelled, and thrust his spear into the Morghast’s shoulder. While the construct raged, he ripped the message tube from its stitching and clutched it to his breast.

Together, all three of them began to fall.

Leaving his spear embedded, Ethalien drew his sword.

If he could not bear his charge to Glymmsforge, then he would take it to his grave.

‘Fire!’ Vagren yelled. ‘Fire!’ But the staccato bang of pistol fire was already louder than he was capable of shouting. Horses stamped in shallow water, whinnied in panic. Vagren wheeled Silensa side-on, river water rushing across her hocks, and levelled his pistol at the oncoming Kavalos.

One moment his outriders had been walking across the ford, the next there had been knights thundering out of the fields.

They had been waiting.

But for how long? And how? How could they have known that Vagren and his riders were coming?

Even Vagren hadn’t known he was coming before he had unsealed the margrave’s map.

The next blast added to the cacophony was from Vagren’s own weapon, and louder to his ears than everything that had come before it. When the smoke cleared from his vision the Kavalos bone knight he had been targeting was still there. Eight foot of him, shins and torso scalloped in dark armour, a broad shield dinged and scuffed by bone and pistol shot, but shockingly inviolate in spite of it. Even his mount was huge, stamped from the same hard, unnatural bone as its rider. It made the landgrave’s thoroughbred warhorse or Ethalien’s nimble charger look like a tottering foal. Its hooves were so heavy they demolished everything in its path. Every obstacle, whether animal or geological, that fell across its charge became dust.

The ford began to vibrate.

Vagren fumbled to reload, cocked the hammer with his chin.

Point-blank, he squeezed off a second shot.

The bullet punched through the Kavalos’ skull-face where the helm was open and cracked the back plate of the helmet on the other side. The Kavalos steed and its now-headless rider ploughed into the river regardless, drenching Vagren in freezing spray and missing Silensa by a whisker, slamming instead into Laster’s palfrey. The lance-corporal didn’t even register a scream. He was simply gone, as if the Undying King had reached forth from his great stronghold in Nagashizzar and flicked him from the water.

Vagren mouthed a curse as more and more of the heavy Kavaloi crashed into the ford. His outriders were unprepared and thoroughly outclassed. They broke in seconds. The sounds of gunfire became sporadic, replaced by the sounds of foaming water around dying horses and the cries of panicked men.

He kneed Silensa hard in the ribs. His intent was to break out of the ambush and make for the east bank, but Silensa’s courage was so terribly shot that she reared, almost throwing him, and Vagren was forced to drop his pistol and grab hold of her mane as she took off. Climbing the shallow embankment, she clattered onto solid ground, nostrils flaring, eyes filled with terror, and tore off for the mountains with Vagren clinging to her back before he could think to scream at her to stop.

By the time he did think of it, he decided he did not want her to.

It occurred to him that he should ride back, warn the North Wall garrison that the Ossiarchs clearly knew about the ford and so likely knew about the hidden postern as well.

Silensa’s gait lengthened to a ground-consuming gallop, and Vagren let it, the sounds of frothing water and death fading beneath the thunder of hooves.

Heraklis’ mammoth steed sloshed through the shallow waters of the ford with the second wave of Kavaloi. The horse was so huge that the bottoms of his feet did not get wet. Not that he would have felt it or cared if they had. Leaving the construct to navigate the corpse-strewn crossing on its own adequate initiative, Heraklis surveyed the light horsemen streaming in all directions into the surrounding hills.

His bones yearned to give chase, to cut them down as they fled in punishment for defying the writ and judgement of Katakros the Great, but his will was greater. Thus had he been fashioned, and so he ignored the broken riders.

For now.

Their spirits would be marked in the days that followed, and hounded wherever they fled to the end of days. Their bones would be taken, and an accounting made of all who wilfully abetted them in their flight.

Morchrian would later establish this more properly in law, of course, but Heraklis knew that it would be so.

Thinking of the Soulmason recalled Morchrian’s final warning before he had retired to oversee the main assault on Justice Gate: ‘You are a Panopt of Ossia and not all are destined to be so. But rest uneasy, Liege-Kavalos. Until the last realisation of the Necrotopia there is no permanence, nor a fixed end to time in which destiny becomes set. One can always move downwards in the hierarchies of the Legions Immortal.’ He touched on the reins of his Kavalos steed. The bone mount issued a rumbling facsimile of a mortal equine snort and came about at his bidding. Heraklis was not sure what the late Liege-Kavalos had done to earn this diminished status as his successor’s steed, but it was a fate that Heraklis was adamant he would not share. He would serve Katakros and Nagash to his utmost, and in so doing he could surely do no wrong.

With a word and a thought, he gathered his Kavaloi from their pursuit of the broken outriders. Together, they wheeled unerringly towards the hidden path that Etred Ridark had first discovered a century ago, and which had been revealed to Heraklis that night.

Arbitrium would fall.

And all would be one in Nagash.

A steel-hooked scaling ladder latched on to the parapet.

The ladder was made of some kind of toughened bone, orruk or duardin or an alloy of both, that fractured under the determined blows of Nestira’s hammer, but wouldn’t break. ‘Hold!’ she roared as, all around her, the aviarch pests continued to harry the walls. To professional soldiers the imps were a buzzing nuisance, but distraction enough in the cauldron of battle to draw valuable shot from the main assault.

A hand, sheathed in black armour, appeared at the top of the ladder. It was followed soon after by a broad, grinning skull in a grand helmet.

Up close, Nestira could see the subtle joins in the bone. Discontinuities in colour where the bone of one creature had been moulded into that of another, shaped into this form that Nagash deemed sacred. The gauntleted hand gripped the merlon’s stone edge and drew the warrior up. Soldiers recoiled from it before they could even recognise and address their horror, the oppressor of their fathers and their grandfathers writ close and large in immortal bone.

‘Hold this wall, I said!’

With a snarl, she swung her hammer backhanded into the warrior’s jaw. The blow cracked its mandible and struck it from the parapet. Sixty feet and a few seconds later it crunched to the ground, but did not break. It rose stiffly and from there looked up at the wall, a fell gleam in its fractured socket as though, through it, the God of Death passed judgement on Nestira’s actions and found them beneath contempt.

She suppressed a shiver, refusing to be cowed, as yet more Mortek Guard flung shields onto their backs and started up the scaling ladder. The construct she had just felled was already slotting back into the patient queue of warriors, taking a grip on the runner and setting its foot back on the bottom rung.

‘They can be beaten!’ she bellowed.

Further ladders crunched into the parapet.

The huge swords and colossal shields of the Mortek Guard effortlessly cleared mortal troops from the walls.

‘They can be killed!’

With a triumphant shout, she succeeded at the fifth attempt to smash her hammer through one bone arm of the siege ladder. The Freeguild soldiers to either side ran up to the battlement and heaved against it. Bone and metal shrieked over stone as they forced it from the wall. It tipped backwards, a dozen Ossiarch praetorians clinging stolidly to it. A cheer took up as it crashed to the ground, but Nestira struggled to feel much triumph. The Ossiarch phalanxes were so precisely ordered that there had not been a single warrior under the ladder’s fall. Those who had gone down with it were already picking themselves, and the ladder, up and turning back to the wall.

It had to be possible to kill them.

‘We will live free!’ she screamed. ‘Our children and our grandchildren will live free! They will live whole!’

‘Look out!’

A woman she never saw bundled her to the ground as a huge, skull-faced missile slammed into the parapet.

The rampart’s jagged edge scythed the missile to pieces, bone shrapnel ricocheting off nadirite warplate and dense Ossiarch bone, but withering through the crowds of lightly protected human warriors crowded onto the rampart. Her unseen protector gurgled, throat gashed open by a spinning disc of bone, missed a step, and pitched off the edge of the walkway. Nestira lifted her face from the stone and looked back. The woman was already gone. The wall under her groaned.

A cannon, buried somewhere in the projecting ramparts of its corner casemate, gave a retaliatory blast. War-horns and bugles blared out rallies and re-forms. Line sergeants fought to get their voices heard.

Someone offered Nestira a hand and helped her up. She hadn’t the time or the breath to thank them. She coughed, the air salted with bone dust and mortality. Her ears rang.

‘We stand! Arbitrium stands!’ With her hammer still in her grip, she beckoned for the nearest flag officer. ‘Reserve companies to the walls. We need to hold them here until Vagren and his outriders can draw them off.’

The man nodded, and with the aid of a junior began running the coloured flags. Even from the distance of a banner pole away, Nestira could barely make out their shapes or colours. She cursed, coughing again on the heavy dust. ‘You.’ She singled out the nearest of her aides she could still see with the claw of her hammer. ‘Run to Martial Square. Find Mereget. Tell her to take command of half the reserves and bring them to Justice Gate.’

The junior officer saluted, looking altogether too relieved.

‘And hurry!’ she screamed after him, his footsteps ringing off into the haze. ‘The rest of you.’ She turned. ‘With me. We fight for Arbitrium. We fight for Azyr.’

‘For Azyr!’

With her soldiers’ cries ringing in her ears, she broke into a run.

The Arbitrium Freeguild where Nestira marshalled them had checked the Bonereaper assault, but there were several other places where the Ossiarchs had forced the walls. Towering Mortek Guards held the captured sections, fending off increasingly futile counter-attacks with their enormous shields while more of the battle-line constructs clambered to the summit behind them. The best that a mortal warrior half their size, with a padded gambeson and mail coif to guard against seven-foot-long spears and a notched short sword to pit against nadirite plate, could do was throw themselves into the fray and hope that someone could drag the attackers down. A futile hope and Nestira knew it. Confined to the width of the rampart, against foes so relentlessly strong as the Ossiarchs, superior numbers were meaningless. More of her soldiers fell screaming over the edge of the walkway than to Mortek spears. The Ossiarchs were simply too well protected and too strong.

She had been counting on holding them from the walls, at least until Ethalien could return with aid or she had depleted the Bonereapers’ numbers.

What in the underworld had happened to Vagren?

If he didn’t arrive and relieve some of the pressure on the West Wall then they wouldn’t hold another hour.

She charged to the front rank of her green-jacketed defenders just as the swordsman ahead of her was run through with a nadirite spear. The soldier screamed and fell. Nestira charged under the spear without needing to duck, and rammed her shoulder into the Ossiarch’s midriff.

Even considering the disparity between its goliath mass and her own wiry frame, she had expected her momentum to unbalance it a little.

But it was like shoulder-barging the side of a house.

She bounced back from it and sprawled to the floor with a throbbing pain in her shoulder. The Mortek wrenched its spear from the swordsman’s corpse, but before it could turn the weapon on her, the fresh troops that Nestira had brought with her arrived.

Venting four generations of fury, the soldiers rammed their short swords into the giant Bonereaper like enraged ants: scratching armour, chipping bone.

It punched a man to the ground with its shield and then swept its spear, knocking three more from the walkway. Nestira rose, swinging her hammer as she did so, and crushed one half of the Guard’s kneecap. The warrior toppled forward, lurched onto its broken knee. Nestira swayed to avoid it. A soldier with less experience looked up too late and screamed as the massive construct crushed his leg. Soldiers swarmed over the half-fallen giant, hacking, cutting, stamping on ridged vertebrae with steel-shod boots. But still it would not die. A dozen men on its back, and it was trying to rise.

‘Break the soultrap gem!’ Nestira yelled. ‘That’s the only way to destroy them.’

It was an easier thing to order than to carry out, she knew, but such was a general’s prerogative. The gems were of crystalised gravesand, themselves nigh indestructible, and first needed to be located from within a struggling monster’s body. Even while the tussle on the ground continued, however, Freeguild soldiers took advantage.

A second Mortek Guard was dragged down. A short sword wielded by another unsung hero sliced up between its ribs, under the nadirite pectoral, and cracked the soultrap gem. The lights in the construct’s sockets flared with spirit rage and then went finally dark.

Nestira raised her hammer and led her soldiers in a weary cheer.

There was hard fighting still to be done, more beachheads to be ground back over the battlements, but if she dared hope for some luck then Mereget’s reinforcements would arrive in time to push this brief advantage they had bought for themselves while it lasted.

But how many soldiers had it cost her to hold on to the West Wall?

Hundreds?

And how many of the Bonereapers had they destroyed, truly and finally destroyed, in repelling them?

Somehow, she doubted it was a blow that the Ossiarchs would reel from before renewing their assault.

Where in the Eight Realms was Vagren?

‘Margrave!’

She turned from the increasingly desperate melee that was growing along the wall around her as a messenger came hurtling down the narrow staircase from Justice Gate’s gargantuan towers. The girl was draped in an emerald tabard, young enough to have both her arms showing through the sleeves.

Clearly of tithing age.

‘Speak,’ Nestira demanded.

‘Justice Gate!’ the girl cried, already spinning around and haring off along the wall. ‘The Bonereapers attack the gate!’

Reluctantly, Nestira backed off from the fight, more of her troopers hurling themselves onto the remaining Ossiarchs in her place. ‘Press the attack!’ she yelled to them as she left. ‘Hold the Ossiarchs until Mereget arrives to drive them back.’ Scowling, she turned, against all her instincts to stand and fight with her soldiers, and chased the message runner into the heavily castellated half-circle of battlement that projected from Justice Gate.

The ramparts over that stretch of the West Wall were thick and spectacularly high, having been built to be defended by Stormcast Eternals. A tall man could stand fully upright against their merlons with arms spread wide and never be in any danger of being struck by an assailant’s arrows. Arbalest points filled every wide crenel. Crossbow teams screamed at one another to shoot faster as the weapons thumped bolt after bolt after bolt into whatever nightmare it was advancing on the gate below them.

The girl pointed.

Nestira went to the wall and looked down.

Mutely, she drew the twelve points of Sigendil across her chest.

With the lolloping gait of a flightless bird, a hunchbacked, multi-limbed abomination of sculpted bone strode towards the gatehouse. Bolts feathered the enormous, shieldlike plates of its shoulders. A rigid square of Immortis Guards, the larger, even heavier versions of the Mortek line constructs, ran alongside it. Their movements were swift for the dead, more reminiscent of true life than its parody, sheltering the horrific war machine behind their shields. It was called a Gothizzar Harvester and she knew what it was for.

Breaking open stone fortifications was only the start of it.

‘Bring it down with cannons,’ said Nestira. ‘Before it reaches the gates.’

‘The gunnery master says it’s already too near the walls,’ the girl replied.

Nestira turned and physically pushed the girl in the direction of the gun towers. ‘Tell him he’ll do it. And if he tries to argue again that his walls can’t withstand a stray cannonball then remind him that I’m on the walls.’

The gatehouse and its great walls had been raised by the Azyrite Arbiters. Sigmarite and stormsilver had gone into their construction. They were close to inviolate.

The gates were another matter.

They had been replaced a dozen times over the lifespan of the castle, repaired or wholly rebuilt using Shyishan palewoods and limited mortal craftsmanship.

The girl was only halfway to the steps when the Immortis phalanx hinged open. The giant warriors at the front peeled back, producing a double wall of shields around the Harvester as the battering ram construct was permitted to gain a stride on its protectors.

It struck the gate with a sound like that of wood being fed into an Ironweld steam-chipper. An explosion of pulverised wood pulp and shavings blasted up over the battlements. Nestira fell back with a cry. The arbalest teams let go of their weapons and dropped to the parapet, many with blood pouring from their eyes. The gate stood up to the abuse for another half-minute, time enough for the girl to scramble up the gunnery tower steps and disappear through a door, before the entire frame disintegrated with a shriek of metal. Nestira pulled herself up on the rampart, eyes red with splinters and gaping with horror as the Harvester sawed its way through the gate. The Immortis Guard smoothly reformed around it, the hard stamp of their feet rumbling from the confines of the barbican tunnel beneath her, like something big falling down a narrow well. Pistols cracked. Oil hissed. Nestira did not expect fire grates and murder holes to slow the Bonereaper any longer than Justice Gate itself had.

Vagren was already too late.

Even if he and his riders were to show up now it would be of little help. The walls were beset. Justice Gate was breached.

Oten Ridark’s words returned to haunt her.

What have you done?

She pushed the doubting voice aside.

It wasn’t hers.

What she had done had needed doing, and should have been done a century ago. Arbitrium would have failed eventually, with the intervention of Ossia or without it. Maybe not in her generation. Or the next. But for the one after? And the one after that? Wasn’t it better to take the risk now, to chance their futures on a gamble while they still had some hope of winning?

She had failed before, failed to fight when it had counted, and had regretted it forever.

She had not stood up for Seben when she could have.

She would not be guilty of that again.

Turning from the battlement she waved her arm overhead, praying that someone in the fug of bone, wood and gunpowder dust now blanketing the courtyard beneath her could see.

‘The gate is breached!’ she rasped. ‘Stand by to fight–’

Golden light blazed from the mouth of the barbican before she could finish, rune-fire silhouetting the monstrous shadow of the Gothizzar Harvester on the killing ground before the ruined gate. The gunfire from the murder holes inside petered away, the stones under Nestira reverberating instead to the rapid-fire slap of a barefoot charge.

A hundred or more voices roared out a cry she had been longing to hear turned upon the Ossiarchs since she had first encountered Uzkar Karrudin and his fyrd over the Buried Sea.

‘Khazuk!’

Chapter Seven

The Fyreslayers barrelled through the tunnel. They ran in no particular formation beyond that which got each warrior soonest into the face of the enemy. The brothers Zunkrul and Stukkur, and Battlesmith Lungryr, kept pace with Uzkar. His doom was foretold and for reasons of grandeur and posterity they meant to be nearby when it came, but dozens of vulkite warriors streamed ahead into the darkness. There was not a warrior in the Uzkar dumfyrd who did not share their runeson’s haste. Joyous screams and flashes of rune-fire defined the curvature of the tunnel walls and the shape of the battle ahead. Uzkar bared his teeth, unthreatened by the approach of death even as a Fyreslayer went flying back over his helmet crest and thumped into the curve of the ceiling. He wished Trotha could have been there, but though the tunnel was wide enough to get an elder magmadroth down, he didn’t want to have to turn one around afterwards.

And a part of him wanted to face this foe alone.

‘Khazukan!’ he bellowed. ‘Dum-ha!’

The gritty golden halo of his own body’s rune-glow drew an Immortis Guard from the tunnel’s gloom.

The breadth of its tower shield filled the passage. The height of its winged helmet almost scraped the ceiling. It was a giant of bone, encased in black metals that reflected none of Grimnir’s fire. Uzkar’s grip on Uzkrander tightened at the prospect of measuring it more closely, hand to hand.

Shimmying his feet, he pulled his charge short, stuck a foot out to the tunnel wall and pushed, lofting himself up enough to drive his axe deep into the Bonereaper’s skull.

His bare feet slapped to the ground as the gigantic praetorian collapsed into the wall like a broken doll, and then slid down the curve to the ground at his feet. Its skull made a wrenching, sucking noise, no different to the head of any other beast or monstrous creature that Uzkar had ever killed, as he tore his axe back out of it. He stamped through its hip bone for good measure. Dire warnings of Bonereaper invincibility had not fallen on entirely deaf ears. Even if close contact to the white heat of the Ulrung’s wrath had proven them exaggerated.

Most things looked decidedly less all-powerful when they were dust under a Fyreslayer’s heel.

He pounded his fist on his chest and roared.

Battle zeal and the war-chants of the Ulrung runesmiters made the ur-gold in his body glow hot.

‘Khazuk!’

‘Khazuk-ha!’ came the furious reply.

Uzkar watched with a fierce, paternal pride as his Fyreslayers tore into the Ossiarchs. Their movements were blurs of gold, their axes streaks of fire. Here and there though, it was almost as if the Ossiarchs’ Immortis were weathering them. Matching them even. The margrave woman had been right, though he wasn’t about to admit it. The Ossiarchs had little in common with the dead things he’d spent a lifetime killing.

They were big, yes, they were tough, yes, but they were also surprisingly good.

And they were fast.

‘And thus did Morkai-Grimnir of the Ulfort stand before the dread Mortarch of the Sacrament, hot of blood and rune, and tell him no!’ Lungryr raised his icon staff high, high up towards the tunnel’s ceiling, as if to do so lifted the effigy closer to the source of the Ancestor Gods’ unbroken power and forced it to ignite. Around the battlesmith, the Bonereapers recoiled from its molten brilliance. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The Ulfort will never be your master’s. Its fyrds will never be your master’s.’ The battlesmith struck the icon pole on the ground, splitting it. Steam hissed up into the tunnel between the sundered slabs and the vulkite fyrds roared with their battlesmith as he spoke. ‘No!’

Berzerkers screamed past him, inspired by his fiery rhetoric to tear into the Immortis anew as Lungryr himself, too weary to burn as bright, leant on his staff, turning to Uzkar with the question he always had.

‘Is this it, runeson? Is this the battlefield of your dream?’

And Uzkar replied as he always did. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I should have followed your younger brother, Mothrigar, after your father died,’ Lungryr muttered. ‘I hear he still fights for gold.’

Clapping his father’s old tutor across the shoulder, Uzkar left him to rejoin the charge of the vulkites and hurl himself back into the fray.

His fury made a mockery of Bonereaper strength. His axe clove through nadirite as though it were tin.

The berzerker to his right was lifted off the ground with a sword in his shoulder. He ignored it and ploughed on with a roar. A shield slammed the warrior to his left into the wall. Uzkar barely noticed. He chopped the praetorian’s spear in half and bulled his way through alone.

From some way ahead, Stukkur was screaming.

The sound, high-pitched and shrieking, almost shook Uzkar from his battle-fury. It sounded as though some cruel duardin had beaten a rune of immolation into a small animal and now watched it burn.

The doomseeker was hung upside down, the crest of his helmet a foot off the ground. The claw-grip of the Gothizzar Harvester that Uzkar had just dimly glimpsed sawing through the mannish gate held him by the foot. Now it was sawing through Stukkur. Hooks, saws, skewers, pincers, shears and knives, all of them deadly sharp and attached to articulated appendages of bone, neatly stripped the flesh from the duardin’s leg the way a butcher would remove the bone from a joint. Longer knives followed: curved blades for cutting hard up to the bone, thickly serrated knives for sawing. With the skin already gone and Stukkur still thrashing and howling they deftly, delicately pared away the meat and pulled apart the skeleton. Through it all, Stukkur hacked in a frenzy of pain at the monster’s ribs, even as discarded meat slopped across the Harvester’s thighs and priceless, unwanted ur-gold tinked to the paved ground.

A mewling lump of torso, all that remained of the mighty doomseeker, was bundled into the upturned ribcage that formed a basket on the construct’s back.

Blood soaked through to the bottom and leaked between the Harvester’s ribs.

Zunkrul gibbered in berzerker rage, bellowing his brother’s name, as he hacked at the monster’s side.

Uzkar charged after him, Uzkrander flashing with rune-fire as it struck one of the Harvester’s larger claw-arms and cracked the metal sheath of its blade.

The Harvester defended itself with quick thrusts and myriad blades, and all the while tiny knife-claws articulated along the construct’s spine continued to stab down into the basket and pull what was left of Stukkur into ever-smaller pieces. Zunkrul stepped on a piece of meat and slipped. He fell to one side with a cry of outrage as, with an unexpected turn of speed, the giant construct suddenly scuttled towards Uzkar. The runeson wrenched his axe from the Harvester’s claw-arm, even as one of its main arms was grabbing him up by the hair. He raged against the indignity, kicking out at the smaller blades that snipped in to dice and peel him, holding his helmet down with one hand while swinging blindly up at the arm that had him with his axe.

‘Sons of the Ulfort, defend your runeson!’ Lungryr thundered, behind him. ‘Drive the black legions of Nagash to their graves! Let his cold hand wither before Grimnir’s fire!’

Uzkar kicked aside a set of meat shears, grunted in pain as they snipped away two of his toes, then hacked off another with his axe. Bits of bone and broken blades spun away from him as he raged.

He’d seen what the thing had done to Stukkur.

He would sooner meet his fated end than go that same way.

Another arm grabbed him from behind, and pulled.

He roared in surprise as his swing went wide and another bone-knife carved a square of skin from his shoulder. Several small and mannish-looking hands, for grasping rather than for cutting, dragged him up over the Harvester’s birdlike skull. He kneed and punched at its head as he went, but could not get a good enough swing with Uzkrander to do it harm. At its high-bladed shoulders the hands released him. He rolled down its spine, bumping painfully over scapula and vertebrae until he landed in the meat basket with a crash of bone.

He bellowed in swiftly muffled outrage and slow-kindling panic as several large, paddle-like hands descended to crunch him deeper into the basket’s bloody contents.

‘Runeson!’ came Lungryr’s muted roar.

Uzkar struggled to turn his head. He bellowed like a beast caught in a quagmire and managed to raise himself an inch. A head tumbled towards him, a scrap of face still attached, a wide, bloodshot eye staring out from behind a grimace of bone.

‘Blood of Grimnir,’ Uzkar mouthed.

It was Stukkur.

Uzkar recognised nothing of the mighty warrior who had followed him from the ruins of the Ulfort in the hope of sharing in his runeson’s doom. And what a doom. How quickly a bold warrior could be reduced to gristle and bone. He roared, pushed again, even more frantic, but his efforts only brought the Harvester’s paddle hands down again to drive him deeper. He had been buried alive under the bones of his fyrd. Never in a hundred years of questing for it had he come so near to death.

The joke of it almost killed him.

It was no good end for a Fyreslayer.

‘No!’ Uzkar yelled. ‘Not I!’

Muscles bulging, he dragged on his axe. Bone shifted around it. It came an inch. Heartened by that small movement he gave vent to a mighty roar. The runes studding his body winked fire-bright under the rubble of death that buried him. He roared, again, and swung. The blow was short, with little power, and Uzkrander cracked against a hard rib. The bone splintered. With Grimnir’s rage firing his blood and hazing his eyes with gold, he struck again. The next blow his axe clove deeper, and then deeper again, like assailing a great tree with a sword, until at Uzkrander’s third blow the rib finally broke. Uzkar, in his frenzy, was drawing his axe back for another blow even as the basket’s bottom gave out under him and he, along with the rest of the Ossiarch’s grisly harvest, spilled onto the tunnel floor.

The butt of Lungryr’s icon staff clanged to the ground by his ear.

Uzkar looked up into the battlesmith’s weathered frown.

‘Is today the day, runeson?’

Baring his teeth in an exhausted grin, Uzkar firmed his grip on Uzkrander and rose.

His shoulder glistened red and fleshless where the Harvester had been at its work, striated sheets of naked muscle studded with gold where its blades had cut neatly around the outline of the runes. The pain was immense. With duardin stubbornness and Fyreslayer fury he fought it back, stumbling a moment as he put his weight to his maimed foot even as a livid Zunkrul finished his work of hacking the Harvester to pieces. Meanwhile, the rabid onslaught of the rest of the dumfyrd forced the remaining Ossiarchs to withdraw. They retreated in the same neat order in which they had advanced, tower shields up and locked, fending off the frenzied efforts of the vulkite berzerkers to run them down.

Uzkar bared his teeth at them, breathing through his grimace as he bent to pick up a nub of bone that had spilled with him from the Harvester’s back. He made a fist and crushed it, then turned his axe so that he was looking down at its flat. The heirloom blade was an incandescent crescent of silvered fyresteel. Golden knotwork decorated a toothed edge. Emblems of his ancestors and the First Fires emblazoned the broad flat, positioned in accordance with runic geometries around a symbol reminiscent of the scythe of Shyish. ‘Unkuz. Anadzharr. Grimnyn,’ he muttered to himself as he roughed the ground dust into the blade.

He bent stiffly to pick up another, crushed it likewise and then, grunting in pain, repeated the ritual on his flayed shoulder.

They were Ulrung.

They walked so close to death that it was hard, at times, to know them apart.

From the tunnel behind he could hear clear mannish voices. They shouted things like ‘Secure the gatehouse!’ and ‘Reinforce the inner gate!’ but they’d left Uzkar and his fyrd to the hard fighting just gone, and they could damn well handle this without him.

‘Well, runeson,’ Lungryr prodded. ‘Is this the day?’

‘It’s a day, battlesmith,’ said Uzkar, lowering a trembling hand from his gore-soaked, but newly bone-grey shoulder. ‘It’s certainly a day.’

Chapter Eight

Nestira slumped onto the last bench in Martial Square that had not been cannibalised for stone or dragged across the courtyard by pony teams to make cavalry traps and stockades. It was situated in front of what had once been the Trade Pioneer’s Guildhall and which was now another temple to the God-King. From its high steps she could see right across the square to the work being done to buttress Justice Gate. Sweating teams of soldiers and press-ganged civilian labourers from the docks hammered bracing planks across the inner gates. Twice as many again screamed at them to hurry and be done, rolling up rock-filled barrels into a rough barricade.

Much as she ever had, eldest child of three, now margrave of a Free City, she felt driven to get involved somehow, to take charge.

Maybe in a moment.

Just then, she felt every one of her fifty-three years as a niggle somewhere in her body. Her knuckles and the muscles of her hand were particularly painful. Her shoulder ached just from thinking about it. But more compelling than any of her body’s other aches and needs was the desire, just then, to be sitting.

Just one moment. One moment more, and then she’d take care of everything.

Arbitrium stands.

From somewhere amidst the infantry forming up into blocks in front of the temple, someone shouted an order, the labourers sprinting gladly back to the Freeguild lines. The same ponies that had pulled the old benches into place now strained to do the same with a pair of Helblaster volleyguns. Men in the all-black liveries of the Arbitrium gunnery regiments fussed over the field pieces, while yet more borrowed labour wheeled them into position. The engineers were, in the parlance of Arbitrium’s Freeguild, ‘book-taught’, while the guns themselves were what the Ironweld had left behind when they had fled the city a century ago. They would punish the Ossiarchs, but Nestira wasn’t nearly as confident as she had been that the artillery would hold them. Pistoliers mustered in the side streets, doing their best to calm nervous horses, ready to harry the Ossiarch legions if, when, the main battle line broke again.

The sounds of close-quarters fighting wittered on from the walls. Indistinct. Almost sweet-sounding. She could close her eyes and fool herself into thinking it was birdsong.

Aviarchs swooped low over the slums, but around Martial Square the massed regiments kept them at bay with just the occasional crackle of gunfire. Even the whoosh and crump of warring siege batteries seemed to be taking place on some other level to hers.

The way gods waged war.

With Mereget’s reinforcements and the redeployment of a few of Uzkar’s more temperate warriors, the walls seemed to be holding. For the time being at least.

The runeson himself was mounted again on his magmadroth. The high war throne gave him an imposing view of the entire square. An erudite outsider might have looked on him, decked in gold and surveying his troops from bestride his mighty reptile, and, if not for the complete disinterest he had for their work, assumed him to have been in command. For their part, the soldiers gave Uzkar and his remaining fyrd a wide berth. The berzerkers looked like ghosts come to stand amongst them, dusted from their bare toes to the tops of their crests in ground Ossiarch bone. It was an unnerving reminder of what awaited them, and that as fearsome as these allies were their preference was not to win this day.

Nestira looked up as a rider clattered into the square at a gallop. Paying scant heed to the infantrymen forced to scramble from his path, he made a line towards the seated margrave, his black horse rattling up the steps towards the gold guildhall’s once grand front portico. He threw a salute, turning his horse to slow it, rather than simply reining in, and swinging out of the saddle before it had come to a complete stop. He saluted again.

‘What is it?’ she said. She had no intention of standing.

‘Margrave,’ he panted. ‘I bring word from the North Wall. Captain Hath and his outriders did indeed leave by the postern road as ordered.’

‘Then where did they go?’

‘That I don’t know.’ He slung his arm over his horse’s lathered neck and gave the animal a pat.

Nestira shuffled an inch sideways along the bench. She patted the stone beside her. ‘You’re exhausted. Sit.’

‘No, ma’am. I shouldn’t.’

‘Sit,’ she said again, and smiled to herself as a particularly unfunny joke occurred to her. ‘You can stand when you’re dead.’

He nodded, probably too tired to have actually heard anything that she’d said, and sat down. He perched on the corner of the seat, clearly less than comfortable at sharing a bench with his commander’s commander.

‘Has he deserted?’ she asked. ‘Taken two hundred riders with him and fled north?’

Nestira had considered a similar course many times over the decades. Had she been cleverer, braver, then she might have done so, and before she had raised a family of her own to contribute to the tithe. It was the obvious thing to do, but for reasons of superstition, loyalty to Azyr and simple apathy, few ever took it. This was their home, after all. But there were always some who did. Like Darsil. For some reason, though, she would never have expected it from Vagren.

She would not have credited him with the imagination.

The messenger shook his head. Now he was seated his head was slowly tilting back. His eyes were already half closed. ‘I… I don’t know, ma’am.’

‘He must have. There is no way he could have been intercepted before making the crossing. No way. Unless you count Vigil Stormstroke then the landgrave and I are the only two still alive who know of the gate. Even Vagren had never taken that path before today.’

‘Perhaps they lost their way in the foothills?’

‘Penultiman Outriders?’

The messenger again shook his head, but didn’t argue.

Nestira had been almost hoping he would. Perhaps it was a symptom of tiredness on her part, but she was prepared to be convinced that two hundred of her most experienced soldiers were still out there somewhere.

She leant her protesting body forwards, chiding herself for having sat down and allowed her muscles to stiffen. She wasn’t a teenager any more. She craned her neck to look north.

The broad stone frontage and celestial, gold-leaf façade of the temple filled her view. Even in the covered space under the portico, the air was hazed with bone-white dust and gunpowder smoke.

‘Yours is the first word I’ve had from across the river in over an hour,’ she said. ‘Are there still no signs of the Ossiarchs moving against the North Wall?’

The man’s eyes flickered open. His eyes focused on the battered gates across the square. ‘No, ma’am. It was very quiet when I left.’

‘Perhaps they lack the numbers.’

‘I wouldn’t know, ma’am.’

‘This is good. We should consider forming a second line of defence there. The terrain is more defensible, and the old vampire manors are strongly built. The river will be as good a line to hold as the West Wall, and from there we will still be able to draw back to Vigil Gate and Arbiters’ Keep should we need to.’ Feeling invigorated by the mere act of planning, she snapped her fingers for paper and pencil. She carried both, but she was frankly too tired to remember where about her person she had put them. The messenger handed them to her and, with the metal plates woven into the padded cuisse on her thigh as a rest, she started to scribble out orders for the bridge garrisons. ‘Tell Captain Mornvel to send across more soldiers from the North Wall. However many he thinks he needs to hold both bridges. And have him send riders to evacuate any civilians still in the lower city.’

She passed him the note. He took it. No sooner had he pocketed it than warning horns sounded from Justice Gate.

Despite the withdrawal of forces to Martial Square, the towers were still manned. Their greatcannons were too big to be removed, and as the horns blared they added urgency to the alarm with ragged barks of fire.

Ignoring the stiffness and the pain in her arm, Nestira drew her hammer and made a fist around its grip. ‘The Ossiarchs are coming!’ she yelled. ‘Stand now! Here is where we hold them. Here we repay them for our dead. Stand for Arbitrium, because Arbitrium stands for you!’

The soldiers gave frightened cheers.

Trotha bellowed, belching a smoke ring that climbed slowly into the dusty sky.

Excelsior Haltem raised a hammer.

The war priest was in the front rank of the infantry, a foot taller than any other man and clad in golden armour. To people who had never seen one, he could have been a Stormcast Eternal. His hammer was sigmarite, gold trim tapering at the back to resemble a comet’s tail.

‘For too long has Arbitrium walked the hinterlands of salvation,’ he cried, ‘gazing longingly at the Heavenly realm from across its borders, lacking the courage to cross it lest we stumble. But now? Now we throw off our shackles, and we cast them into the faces of our oppressors. We stand. Alone. And in so doing may we draw the eye of Sigendil to this underworld again. Fight with faith! Fight with heart! And I promise you that even in fair Azyrheim, Sigmar will see how brightly your souls burn. Fight well, show the God-King that this city is worthy of saving a second time, and the Azyrite Arbiters will surely return in our hour of need.’

Nestira had lost that childish hope long ago, but the soldiers treated the war priest’s promises to a wilder cheer than her own short speech had garnered.

She did not resent them their hope.

It was no different, really, to her still holding out for Vagren’s return.

She saw Uzkar turn in her direction. There was nothing even remotely hopeful in his expression. There was nothing even human in it that Nestira could discern, but she thought she understood him better now.

The Fyreslayer was afraid.

He was afraid that the death he sought would be terrible.

She looked away, just as the gates exploded inwards.

The forward ranks recoiled instinctively from the hail of splinters.

Nestira shouted ‘Fire!’ before she had made out any more than the hellish silhouette of the Gothizzar Harvester coming through.

The two volleyguns gave it all eighteen barrels, ripping what was left of the hanging gates to shreds and pulverising the Harvester framed like a target within the tunnel mouth. Bone burst into fragments under the fusillade, meat turning into an awful, sweet-smelling smoke and billowing out across the square as the ruined construct collapsed.

Engineers screamed at one another as they began the torturous process of stripping the field guns’ barrels and reloading.

The Mortek Guard charged.

They did not march as they had before. They did not close with the fixed common purpose of the dead.

They charged.

The first rank bulldozed the roadblocks that had been laid in their way with their shields. Those behind flowed after them, moving more like wrathful spirits than the animated dead they better resembled. The nighthaunt had cruel and hateful personalities of a sort, but there was a robustness to the Ossiarchs that made them all the more dreadful, and their physicality was almost as terrifying to witness as a foe that lead or steel could not harm. In the legions of Ossia, Nagash had crafted for himself the perfect warriors. A triumphant union of spirit and bone. They were so imposing, so powerful, blessed with enough of a hero’s persona to be most useful to him in war, but not enough to be anything except absolutely loyal to the God of Death.

To see them in action made a mockery of all mortal conviction and strength of arms.

Trotha gave an almighty bellow, as though affronted by a rival divinity’s show of strength, and reared up onto pillar-like hind legs. Her return to earth shook slates from the temple roof above Nestira’s head and dust from the colonnades, the soft scales of her throat ribbing as she vomited a river of molten lava over the wall of Ossiarch shields.

Desperate soldiers cheered as the unstoppable charge of Death dissolved before their eyes. Invincible warrior constructs floundered as blackened limbs shattered from under them. Soultrap gems exploded inside bodies that had become kilns. Even Haltem forewent his usual disdain long enough to praise the Fyreslayers as Heaven-sent agents of Sigmar’s will.

Trotha trumpeted her satisfaction. Uzkar brandished his axe at all who cared to see it. Even as the Bonereapers reformed their front rank and smashed into that of the human swordsmen.

There was no stopping them.

Not with any force that belonged to mortal men.

The Ulrung barked their oaths and counter-charged.

Trotha clamped her jaws over a Mortek Guard’s head, the towering warrior presenting the monster an inviting target, and wrenched it from the construct’s neck. Uzkar gave the war-beast a fatherly pat as the Mortek’s body went flying over his shoulder, and then lay about him with his axe.

They were going to win this.

They were going to win.

‘Ranks,’ Nestira yelled to the soldiers around her, her own junior officers and personal guard. ‘We’ll charge their flank and try to break them. Failing that, we’ll buy the volleyguns a minute to reload. Be ready to pull back on my order when they’re set to fire.’

‘A-and what should I do, margrave?’

The messenger was still standing with her, clutching his horse’s reins to the animal’s discomfort but too struck by the horror he was witnessing to notice.

‘What are you still doing here?’ she said. ‘Go. I need every soldier of the river garrisons ready for our withdrawal.’ She gave him a shove. ‘Go.’

The man stared at her as though he were no longer capable of comprehending human speech. Before she could push him again, she felt a thunder running through the ground. ‘What the…?’ She threw her arm out to one of the temple portico’s stone columns. It was trembling. It felt like the moments before a cavalry charge. Her first, foolishly hopeful thought was that Vagren and his outriders had returned. Or even that Landgrave Oten had brought a sally of Knights of the Undying Crusade from Arbiters’ Keep.

But the sound was wrong.

Heavier. Too solid.

Nothing at all like human cavalry.

The soldiers at the back of the square saw them first. In the rear ranks of already-embattled units, where less courageous and faithful men tended to stand, they turned from the nightmare in front and screamed, as a wall of heavily armoured bone knights mounted on monstrous destriers fell on their rear. The best warriors in the Mortal Realms would have crumbled under such circumstances, and these were mere mortal soldiers.

They scattered rather than stand.

They did not run far.

The Kavaloi rode them down, punching through broken ranks and into the convulsing mass of Freeguild troops like a flurry of arrows going through a chainlink vest and into a human’s back.

Only where sturdy buildings, such as the old guildhall behind Nestira, presented a bulwark between the Freeguild forces and the onslaught from the northbound roads did their formations hold.

‘Gods above us…’ Nestira breathed.

The north.

They were attacking from the north.

Vagren hadn’t deserted, or lost himself in unfamiliar hills. He had been discovered. How did not seem relevant just then.

The Ossiarchs had found the city’s hidden North Gate and used it against them.

Just as the free people of Arbitrium had once used it against the Elder Counts.

‘Fight!’ she heard Haltem bellow. The lightning-bolt motif emblazoned across his pectoral took on a piercing brightness, searing itself momentarily into Nestira’s vision as it leapt from the priest’s chest and blasted a four-armed Necropolis Stalker to charred bone. He pounded a Mortek Guard’s shield in a mouth-frothing frenzy with his hammer. ‘Fight!’ Nearby, Trotha, as strong a barrier as any coaching inn or house of Sigmar, swung her snout like a gargant’s club, demolishing a mounted Kavalos and bowling the remains of the rider to a neighbouring roof. The magmadroth stamped another, buried a third under a lake of magma. Uzkar waved his axe overhead to rally Freeguild and Fyreslayer alike to Trotha’s side. The pistoliers were spilling out of the side alleys to engage the Kavaloi, as Nestira had prepared them to do in the event of a fighting withdrawal or a rout. But no one in their right mind had thought to prepare them for this.

Nestira looked one way, then the other.

More Mortek Guard were coming through the sundered gate. They came at a more ordered pace this time, taking the extra seconds it took to form up into phalanxes and brace shields as they advanced on the melee that now occupied three-quarters of Martial Square.

It was over.

Any fool could see that now.

The Deathriders had come from the direction of the old city. They had crossed the bridges. Fall back now and there would be nowhere left to go. They would never get an army across the estuary to Arbiters’ Keep, not with the Bonereapers hard at their heels and in command of the bridges. That left defeating them here, hand to hand, and that, she saw, was beyond the soldiers she had.

She had failed.

Arbitrium had fallen.

Tightening her grip on her hammer, she turned to the messenger, who was still there, dumbstruck, by the bench beside her.

‘I need your horse,’ she said.

‘What?’ he said, but made no move to stop her as she took the reins from him and climbed onto his horse. A few of the soldiers around her called out in shock as she turned the horse east, towards the docks, but she ignored them.

It had been years since she had ridden in earnest, but like Vagren, she too had climbed the ranks as an outrider. It had been almost as long since she had seriously considered abandoning Arbitrium to its fate.

Suddenly, it all came racing back.

Chapter Nine

Nestira galloped her stolen horse as recklessly as she dared.

The roads of lower Arbitrium were cobbled, but poorly mended since the departure of the Ironweld. Many of the cobbles were loose, or absent altogether, and many an inexperienced rider under her command had broken a horse’s leg or their own neck going too carelessly through its dockland streets. Tightly packed hovels streaked by to either side, screaming at her, it seemed, as people bundled up their families and poured onto the streets. A Morghast dropped out of the sky like a rock shorn from the heavens and crashed through a sagging roof. The dwelling collapsed about its shoulders, more screams sounding as the war construct set about its task of slaughter. Nestira ignored it, and them. She twisted in the saddle to look over her shoulder, long ponytail of greying hair streaming out behind her.

The Kavalos Deathrider was about twenty lengths off her pace, but even from afar it was massive.

Its chest was broader than two armoured warhorses stood side by side. Its height at the shoulder was greater than Nestira’s mount at the poll, and the eight-foot-tall knight in its saddle rode level with the eaves.

On open ground, Nestira would have counted on a flesh-and-blood horse to outrun such an undead behemoth with ease, but her mount had been blowing from hard riding even before Nestira had climbed into the saddle. It was panting, its gait starting to lag despite Nestira’s best efforts with heels and crop to keep it moving. And worse, the undead knight did not share her wariness of the terrain, its weight sufficient to pulverise any obstacle from existence before it could present a threat to its steed.

As she watched, a young man pulled away from his family and ran into the road, waving his right arm in the air as if to show his surrender to the tithe. The Kavalos took off the boy’s head with a single swipe of its sword and rode on.

There would be no terms offered now.

No surrender accepted.

The Ossiarchs were going to purge the city to its last living creature before returning to the business of empire. After today, Arbitrium would exist only as an example.

And it was Nestira alone who was to blame.

She had wanted this fight and she had lost it.

She hauled the reins left, dragging the horse onto a smaller street that ran parallel to the main road that she wanted to be following. The horse snorted, clattering downhill, past the boarded-up fronts of long-emptied warehouses. The stale smell of the Sea of Fading Hopes was stronger, even if she could not see it yet. If not for the drumming wail of the Ossiarchs’ trebuchets and the screams, she would have heard the maudlin hum of seabirds by now.

The horse made up a dozen strides before the Ossiarch Kavalos veered off the main road and thundered after her.

Nestira cursed, spurring the horse harder. He gave a short burst of acceleration, before slowing to his earlier gait.

She didn’t know if the Deathrider necessarily knew who she was and pursued her on account of her rank, or if it had simply caught her exiting the battlefield and given chase. Either way it was chasing her. It had passed over plenty of easier and more tempting targets on the main street in order to follow her. Urging the horse on with only her knees, she took the grip of her hammer, glanced back.

She didn’t want to have to fight her way clear.

She knew she would lose.

An explosion of dust-brown brick spared her the decision.

A towering, bone-winged Morghast with a bleak helmet and slab-fronted visor shouldered through the front wall of a storehouse and burst out into the street in front of her. Bits of brick spilled across the road like foam from a breaking wave. Brown dust coated the furious killing machine.

Definitely chasing her.

The horse shied in terror, rearing onto its hind legs and flailing, throwing Nestira, who had no grip on the animal above her knees, from its back.

It saved her life.

The Morghast’s jagged sword decapitated the horse in a single, brutal sweep. Arterial spray fountained over the bone colossus’ breastplate and helmet. Nestira rolled to the edge of the road as the headless courser tottered back on its hind legs and then fell. She scrambled back to her feet as the Kavalos thundered in behind her, vaulted over a low wall and threw herself bodily through a boarded window.

The greyed and decades-old boards split like roasted bones, spilling her into what looked like a disused granary. Desiccated husks carpeted the ground. Old dust hung in the air, as if between death and life. The tired old walls and the boarded windows deadened the mayhem outside.

Aching all over, she pulled herself from the wreckage. Around a rusted chute filled with dust. Through a door. Then another.

She had no expectation that a mere wall would hold a Morghast or a Kavalos Deathrider for long.

She fell into a yard where the old storehouse would have taken deliveries of dried grain and kept its horses. The uprights of a stable still stood to one side. She looked to the skyline, getting her bearings from the decrepit chimneys and listing cargo cranes, then turned and ran again, breaking through an old gate and throwing herself into a service alley.

She bounced off the wall and ran.

Behind her, she could hear the sound of brick walls being torn apart and she almost found it in her to smile as the Morghast trumpeted its fury at her escape.

Leaving the maze of alleys behind, she ran onto the wide seafront promenade.

The docks sprawled out in all directions. Boats sat alongside bone and timber wharfs. Only the faintest nudge of breeze made them creak, masts tilting towards the jagged outcrop of Arbiters’ Keep across the still water and then back. The fortress was shrouded in amethyst fog, aloof as high Azyr, its battlements and its flags layered beneath necromantic wards and enchantment. It would hold a little longer than the rest of the city, but Nestira was in no doubt that it would fall.

It was too late for her to care.

Just across from her, facing onto the docks, was the high, spiked fence of the Ironweld foundry. A few rogue lights still glowed inside.

She started towards it, just as the Ossiarch Kavalos emerged off the main street in a shriek of nadirite-shod hooves on cobbled stone.

‘Die!’ she screamed, refusing to be denied here at the very last, and swung up her hammer.

The blow caught the underside of the giant horse’s cheek, but did no damage. The beast clattered backwards, understanding what its master required of it without needing to be bidden, as the Bonereaper struck down with its sword.

Nestira ducked under the horse’s neck, using the skeletal beast’s bulk as cover, and struck at it again, an overarm swing this time that chipped the construct’s thigh bone. She screamed in frustration as the horse turned on the spot, its massivity alone forcing her to give ground or be crushed by it.

The Kavalos brandished its heavy sword, blocking her escape to the foundry.

Taunting.

Suddenly, the undead horse reared, but rather than charge at her as Nestira had expected, it folded back onto its haunches. She caught a glint of steel and gold as a Fyreslayer, an axe in each hand, launched himself at the now-unhorsed Kavalos. Nestira could not fathom the strength needed to block those blows, but that was what the Bonereaper did. It handled its huge tower shield like a gladiator with a buckler, intercepting the Fyreslayer and then throwing the muscular warrior back. A second Fyreslayer wrenched his axe from the stricken horse’s hindquarters and swung low to swipe out the Kavalos’ legs. The Bonereaper brought its shield down on his hand. Nestira heard the duardin’s fingers crack. A human would have been disarmed by such an injury, but the Fyreslayer merely bellowed like a fighting bull and threw his shoulder into the construct’s shield. The Kavalos’ heels scraped tracks into the road as brute Fyreslayer strength drove it backwards. Nestira had not even noticed the opening coming to her before she took it. Flipping the hammer in her grip to give her the claw end, she drove it with all the height and power she could muster into the back of the Bonereaper’s skull.

It did not die, but rather dropped heavily to its knees. The height was perfect for her to lever the hammer free and hit it again.

It still did not die.

The first Fyreslayer scissored his twin axes across the Kavalos’ neck, and this time it slumped to the promenade and was still.

The duardin on the ground nodded to her, huge muscles doused in sweat and trembling with the effort of felling a Bonereaper and its mount.

The other stowed one of his axes in order to pull his companion up, uttering something unkind about the toughness of his hand in the hard tongue of the Ulrung, and then bent to retrieve the duardin his dropped weapon.

Nestira looked past them to the foundry gates.

Her breath caught.

Two young women stood there watching.

One had long black hair, the other a lighter shade of Shyishan grey. The first was eighteen years old and already as tall as Nestira though lacking the older woman’s strength. The other was fourteen, just turned as Vagren had remembered, and so beautiful. Her name was Malyssa. Her older sister was Lentiri. They were both wearing the sleeveless white smock expected of those of tithing age. Standing protectively over them was a woman who looked so alike to Nestira’s own mother at that age that sometimes she would utter a small prayer to be certain that it was no ghost she saw. She was too weary to take that precaution now. The woman was wearing a long black dress with a sewn sleeve over her tithed arm, and carried a short sword in her remaining hand. The point of it wobbled towards the heap of bones in the street.

‘Thank you both for protecting my family,’ Nestira said to the Fyreslayers, never taking her eyes from the three women at the gate. ‘But I will take responsibility for them now. The battle is lost. Return to your runeson, and find your deaths as you are able.’

The one with the broken hand nodded to her, and she watched them both for a moment as they charged off in the direction of the main road, before turning back to the foundry gate.

‘Grandma!’ Malyssa shouted, and rushed onto the street towards her.

Chapter Ten

Nestira sank to one knee and let her hammer drop with a thunk to the ground, freeing her one hand to embrace her granddaughter as Malyssa threw both arms around her neck. With the always surprising ferocity of an affectionate child, she hugged her. Nestira winced as the girl squeezed her bruised shoulders, smiling properly for the first time in days as Malyssa pulled away, looking at her with a concerned frown. Her face was ashen pale, prematurely lined and criss-crossed with blue veins as most were in that part of Shyish. But her eyes were bright with life. Eyes that would look up, even from the deepest underworld, and see stars. Nestira’s smile became brittle as she thought of the choices she had made so that Malyssa could one day be free. She thought of the children of other mothers who had had to die. She drew her granddaughter’s head back to her shoulder and cradled her there a moment so she wouldn’t see her guilt.

‘What is it, Grandma?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. Children, she knew, had the uncommon knack of knowing whatever adults would rather they did not. She pushed her guilt aside. She would have saved every child in Arbitrium if she had been able to. But she hadn’t fought for them. ‘I’m just tired, that’s all.’

Lentiri came to join them, closely shepherded by her mother, Nia, Nestira’s last living daughter. They moved quickly and low, a necessary reminder that they were all far from safe yet. Aviarchs flocked the lower city in search of prey on which to call down the Morghasts, while the city itself seemed to groan under the near-constant bombardment from Ossiarch artillery. The shrieks of battle were getting nearer, as well as quieter, all the time.

She greeted Lentiri with a brisk hug.

To Nia, she ventured a faltering smile.

She had never been as certain of her own children as she had been of her soldiers. Sometimes, she wished she had known how to be.

‘You’re covered in blood,’ said Nia, only then caring to lower her sword.

Nestira touched the breast of her gambeson. Her fingers left sticky prints and came away red. She hadn’t even noticed. ‘My horse,’ she said, after a moment’s thought, and rubbed the blood into her thigh. ‘Have the Ulrung kept you well?’

‘Well enough.’

‘Uncle Uzkar let me light the furnace,’ Malyssa declared proudly.

‘Uncle?’ said Nestira.

‘He insisted,’ Lentiri sighed.

‘I’m sure he did,’ said Nestira, and then frowned.

She did not want to be thinking about the runeson just then. Instead, she ran her fingers through Malyssa’s hair and kissed the top of her head.

‘What is happening, Mother?’ said Nia.

‘I…’ Nestira hesitated. ‘You and your children are going to live free lives. That is what is happening now. Just as I promised.’

‘Mother–’

‘It’s too late for that argument now. We talked about this before I had Uzkar take you in. If Arbitrium could not defeat Ossia then it was always going to come to this.’

She glanced over her shoulder, back towards the city, as a trebuchet skull struck the high tiered roof of the one-time guildhall turned Temple of Sigmar and demolished it. Roofing slats and stone entablature cascaded into rubble and dust rose high into the air on a plume of screams.

She wondered what Arbitrium would look like in the new age of the necropolis.

Perhaps she would return to see it one day.

Perhaps she should return.

‘Come on,’ she said, holding on to Malyssa’s hand as she had once held Seben’s, and drew her family to the docks.

‘Where is Father?’ Lentiri asked, as they approached the wharf.

Nestira hesitated before answering.

She had posted her son-in-law’s First regiment to Retribution Gate. She had expected the fight to be slower in reaching that part of the city, but he had probably been amongst the first to perish when the Ossiarchs had taken the North Wall.

Even in that small effort it seemed she had come up short.

‘He would want for you to be free,’ she said, stepping onto the creaking pier.

Several of the berths were empty, but not nearly as many as one might have supposed. Resignation ran deep in Shyishan marrow. The water was as still as a carpet of dust, black and opaque, returning no reflection of the four women, but murmuring with the echo of distant afterlives. Nestira picked what appeared to be a fast-looking boat at random. She was literate enough to know that the seas of other lands differed from hers, and that ships there were built in different ways to ride them. Those from the Sea of Fading Hopes’ Penultiman coast were flat-bottomed and low-hulled, designed to breeze silently through still waters and carry lightweight cargos swiftly to trade ports in Morthaven, Hallost and Skelt. Satisfied with her selection, she kissed Malyssa on the forehead and helped her over the gunwale onto the low deck.

She winced as she released her and rolled out her shoulder.

Either she was growing feebler with age or the girl was getting heavier.

‘I don’t think I’ll be able to lift you,’ she said to Lentiri.

‘I’ll manage.’

The elder girl leapt and scrambled over, and Nestira again felt the tug of a smile.

She turned to Nia, who threw her sword into the boat and then, after a fleeting moment of indecision, allowed her mother to help her over. The younger woman turned back and held out her arm.

‘Now you, mother.’

Nestira looked back once more to Arbitrium’s screams.

She closed her eyes, remembering the last time she had been surrounded by such pain and terror, wishing that she had acted, but having not. Out of fear. Out of indecision. Out of not knowing what was right. She made herself watch, and listen, to what her determination to account for that misdeed had inflicted on her city.

She had known it would come to this, but to experience it finally was different.

She could have died then, in Seben’s place.

She knew she could have. If she had stood a little taller, found her courage just a little sooner.

What difference did it make, then, if she died now?

It would be just as pointless, but just as right. She had already done what she had set out to do. She had spared her granddaughters.

Now she should pay for it.

Someone had to pay for it.

She made a fist around the grip of her hammer.

‘Mother!’ said Nia.

Her voice broke the past’s lingering spell, and Nestira turned her back on the failed city’s final throes.

Her daughter held out her hand.

Her grandchildren looked across at her.

They tore at her heart.

Arbitrium could have her death, but it didn’t need it. They needed her. Ossia had a navy, or so she had read, and there were dangers beside the Bonereapers on the Sea of Fading Hopes. She wanted so badly for them to live, but more than that, she wanted them to live free.

She wanted her granddaughters to see stars.

She wanted to be a great-grandmother.

She nodded stiffly, relaxing her grip on her hammer and tossing it into the boat alongside her daughter’s sword. Then, she allowed Nia and Lentiri to help her aboard.

Life, suddenly, felt very tiring indeed.

As Malyssa worked to free the scythe-shaped mainsail, chattering all the while of where and from whom she had picked up the skill, Nestira picked up an oar.

Allowing herself one last look at the city she had let die, she made herself a promise – someone would pay for it, even if it was not going to be her.

Chapter Eleven

Heraklis hacked down with his sword. It did not have a name. It did not need a name. The glyph-etched nadirite chopped through the horsehair stuffing of padded armour and deep into the warrior’s torso. The man might have screamed. It was irrelevant. Heraklis’ Kavalos steed rammed him aside with a grating neigh, recalling battles past in its own limited way, and punched through what was left of the Freeguild line. Heraklis twisted in the saddle, reversed his grip with a sound like bone popping back into joint, and chopped down on the other side, splitting a soldier’s skull open as he broke through the mortals’ ranks.

They were familiar to him, these warriors.

Their emerald liveries.

Their comet devices.

Even some of their faces.

Some of the battles he could remember had been waged from here, he thought. Not more than a generation past.

He reined in, his steed snorting bullishly, purple ectoplasm boiling from its fleshless nostrils as his Kavaloi pressed their charge. He had been hoping for the chance to face the margrave again, to punish her personally for her defiance at the Tithing Nexus. A part of her had gone into his creation. He had felt it then and he felt it now. She lived, and the discomfort of their concurrent existences was an itch he could not relieve, as if her continuance in some way diminished his perfection.

But he did not see her.

She must have broken, like so many of her soldiers.

Heraklis was disappointed that any warrior who had gone into him could be so craven, or so tactically unsound as to stand against the legions of Ossia.

Someone should have to pay for this.

He drew his mount further from the fray and observed as the charge of the Kavaloi put the Freeguild to rout. He was a general first and foremost, and a warrior second.

Everywhere that there were mortal warriors lying dead or in the state of dying, they were breaking for the imagined safety of temples and stockades. It was a pattern of mortal behaviour that had repeated itself in Heraklis’ past experiences many times over.

Except in one last place.

One final bastion where the Ossiarchs’ dominion had yet to be fully imposed.

The Fyreslayer runeson and his magmadroth were a fortress of smouldering living flesh around which the mortals’ chaotic centre held. Shallow blocks of Freeguild swordsmen, banded together from several broken regiments, stood fast in the lee of its stony flanks. Its breath had already carved a bubbling moat across the courtyard to give even the Mortek Guard pause, but which the Fyreslayers struck across with gleeful abandon, before withdrawing to hurl their insults and sing their songs. Mounted human pistoliers moved about the raucous duardin at the gallop, and from within the living bastion a single Helblaster volley gun issued a fan of shot that dented nadirite shields and snapped Ossiarch bone.

The runeson paused in his own efforts to lead his fellow mortals in a throaty cheer.

Heraklis felt his frown as a flicker in his gaping sockets as the Fyreslayer duelled with a Necropolis Stalker. The four-armed construct was a whir of blades, constantly shifting in pattern as it shuffled its warrior personas to best negate the Fyreslayer’s muscular fighting style.

The magmadroth bellowed, apparently losing patience with the stalemate, and butted the peerless warrior construct to the ground. Pinning it under one foot, the ur-reptile’s flaming snout came down like a hammer to break the Bonereaper open.

With an ululating yell, the Fyreslayer flung himself from the monster’s war throne and onto the broad shoulders of a second warrior tetrad, which he proceeded to summarily butcher with a series of brutal swings to the back of its head.

It offended Heraklis’ sense of the natural hierarchy.

Were they not the praetorians of Nagash, perfect warriors, raised by his design and his hand to his own blessed likeness?

His steed snorted balefully, but in this they were of one mind. Here was one challenge to their martial pride that the legion champions within them both would not allow to stand.

‘Runeson Uzkar Karrudin,’ he cried, raising his sword in the manner of ancient kings, and spurred his horse to charge. ‘Ossia comes for your death!’

Uzkar stumbled back from the murdered Stalker and shook the ringing from his ears. His muscles burned in silent protest as he hefted his axe again. He blew out through his teeth. The two Necropolis Stalkers had been particularly tough kills. If he didn’t say so himself.

‘Runeson Uzkar Karrudin! Ossia comes for your death!’

He looked up with a weary scowl as the Liege-Kavalos, Heraklis, pounded across the courtyard towards him. His undead steed crushed a human Freeguilder under its hooves as the swordsman tried to get away. Zunkrul did the opposite, leaping into its path with a wild yell and an axe alight with rune-fire, only to be bowled aside like a rock struck by a much larger rock.

Uzkar breathed through his exhaustion and into a smile.

Somewhere nearby he could hear Lungryr bellowing the war-songs of their ancestors. Trotha tore at fire-roasted marrow. All was a mayhem of heat and noise in which dwelled the Fyreslayer heart, and to which his soul would wait out the long aeons of the Stone Sleep to return to after death.

But this was not the place.

Today was not the day.

With a savage cry, he cast himself at Heraklis, swiping up with Uzkrander to catch and deflect the Liege-Kavalos’ enormous sword. The sword went wide, but the Kavalos mount struck him at the gallop. Something in his chest cracked. Golden light rinsed out his vision for a split second as runes of endurance and strength ignited. When he came to he was skidding roughly back across the flagstones. Heraklis and his steed were already thundering in pursuit. The Bonereaper ignored the sporadic crackle of crossfire and the bodies in their path. He did not wait a single moment to marshal lost strength or to catch breath, and he permitted the Fyreslayer none. Uzkar rolled immediately to his feet, winced through a shudderingly painful breath, grinned for the great joy of it all, and raised Uzkrander up high with a shout.

There was a crunch of bone and a wash of dry heat as the runeaxe sank into the horse’s skull.

Uzkar, Heraklis and the slain steed fell together in a clash of gold, armour and bone.

The Liege-Kavalos was fastest to his feet, but so huge that by the time he was up Uzkar was already launching himself into the attack. He bellowed and he laughed, both with equal vigour, as his axe flurried sparks from Heraklis’ shield. The Bonereaper recovered quickly and countered hard, the swipe of his sword drawing spasming arcs of golden energies from the Fyreslayer’s protective runes.

‘Hah!’ Uzkar roared. ‘You think the fire of the Ulfort so easily put out!’

His fist slammed a dent into Heraklis’ pectoral.

Heraklis gashed his bicep.

Uzkar drove him back with a frenzy of blows.

He could not ever remember feeling such fierce joy, but even a Fyreslayer’s constitution was not bottomless. The night just gone had been the hardest he had known since the fall of the Ulfort. His shoulder was torn and aching. His ribs were broken. Breathing was starting to become painful. His missing toes, small hurt though it was in comparison, threatened more and more to upset his balance as he tired. He swung Uzkrander for a violent parry as Heraklis came at him again, tireless, as fast and as strong now as he had been when the first mighty blow had been thrown.

The Bonereaper’s sword leapt down from its great height and struck against his axe. Sparks spat across the border between nadirite and fyresteel, hissing where they landed on Uzkar’s skin.

He gritted his teeth, muscles bulging, as he held his foe at bay.

It wouldn’t last.

Not even a duardin could wear down the dead.

He gave ground, axe glimmering in fury, gold teeth snarling in the naked light of so many blazing runes.

‘You should have forsaken this city when the chance was offered to you,’ said Heraklis, his voice a hard, flat whisper suited better to a graveyard than the battlefield. ‘It would have been neat. Now look at the ruin that needless battle has made.’

‘I am Uzkar Karrudin, runeson of the Ulfort, and I have never yet backed down on my word once given!’

‘Neither have I.’

Heraklis bashed the runeson with his shield, staggering him, and advanced with a flurry of blows that would have broken a runemaster’s anvil. ‘Brief are the lives of mortals,’ he said as he forced the Fyreslayer back. ‘But soon they will know peace. That at least I can grant them when your defiance is broken. They will know peace such as only an eternity of grateful servitude and toil can provide.’

‘Never!’ Uzkar rasped, backing hurriedly out of the reach of the Bonereaper’s massive sword. Every breath was becoming a torment, every word he wished to utter a challenge to be overcome and defeated. He bared his teeth through the pain. ‘Uzkar Karrudin has never worked an honest day’s toil in his life. He’ll do no more in death.’

‘Enough.’

Heraklis drew his sword out wide for a greater swing.

Uzkar grinned.

So the Ossiarchs were not immune to rage.

With his arm wide, Heraklis’ body was open and Uzkar wasted no time. He threw himself at the Bonereaper, dropping his runeaxe to the ground, for there was no room to strike a killing blow and only one chance left to finish this. Using the Bonereaper’s own thigh as a springboard, he launched himself up, fists clamping around Heraklis’ fleshless throat. His biceps swelled to the size of boulders.

He could not choke the life from the Bonereaper.

But he could crush every bone in his foe’s neck.

‘Got you this time, you–’

Suddenly, he hesitated.

The same dream again, he almost heard Lungryr say.

He gasped loudly as he felt Heraklis’ sword run through him.

A chill greater than any he had ever known or imagined possible spread through his body. It was the bitter loathing of the cold for all that was virile and bright. From somewhere, he could hear the distant drums of celebration. The Uzkar dumfyrd had waited a century for this day. He smiled in spite of his own long-prophesied downfall. Lungryr would be leading them in a song to speed their journeys on the long road to the Doomgron.

They would all be joining him soon.

‘You may yet claim these bones,’ he managed to snarl. ‘But my soul goes to Grimnir, for the long Sleep of Stone before joining the final fyrd.’

‘No,’ Heraklis replied with scathing certainty. ‘It will not.’

‘My death is mine!’

‘Your death is Ossia’s.’

‘My soul belongs to the fire.’

Heraklis pulled out his blade.

Uzkar grunted, although in truth he barely felt it. He was too busy falling.

It seemed to take forever.

From that distant place he looked up. Heraklis stood over him. His solidity faded into Shyishan grey, a sad ghost in orbit of two hellishly bright eyes. ‘Your soul is strong,’ said the ghost. ‘We will meet again, I am sure. In some form.’

Epilogue

Arbitrium was at peace.

Heraklis allowed the amethyst flicker in his sockets to dim, the way a mortal might close his eyes and savour. Justice Gate was a slump of Azyrite stone behind him. Martial Square was rubble. The great crescent sweep of lower Arbitrium was in fog, dust sinking down from shattered buildings, mist rising up from the placid waters, the occasional spasm of wraith-light as a spirit found familiar paths no more. There was still some fighting in evidence from the old city beyond the river, but it was the nervous twitch of something already dead. The keep on the water was holed, half of it fallen into the estuary.

Here, all was quiet.

Had he the lungs to breathe in such air then he would have. But he did not.

Perhaps that was why he felt so unfulfilled.

‘Your first battle ends in Ossia’s triumph,’ said Morchrian.

The Soulmason moved towards the Liege-Kavalos in his walking throne, surveying all around him like a lord come down from his high castle. The throne picked its way daintily over the corpses. Not because the Mortisan possessed any squeamishness or respect for the dead, but so as to minimise any damage done to the bone. Mornial constructs scurried out from underfoot, only to snuffle back in once the priest had passed. They picked at the corpses, cutting neatly with a blade for every type of joint and bone, pulling the bodies apart with utmost care to distribute most fairly amongst the Ossifacts and Emissarians of the legion. The Gothizzar Harvesters were crude engines of war. Heraklis much preferred the quiet diligence of the Mornials.

‘Aviarchs have been dispatched to the Endgate where our lord campaigns to expand his empire, in order to inform him of your success.’

‘Is this success?’ Heraklis looked again at the stillness around them. ‘Had we held Arbitrium in vassalage, this city would have provisioned us with bone for centuries to come. We enjoy the glut now, but there will be no more. Not from Arbitrium.’

‘All things fail,’ Morchrian shrugged. ‘It is their nature. Only in death do they endure. But the empire grows. It must grow. This is the will of Nagash and the commandment of Katakros.’

‘This feels like failure nonetheless.’

Morchrian gestured idly for his throne to lower, which it duly did, sinking slowly to the ground. With a salvo of arthritic clicks, the Soulmason rose from his seat. He was a shade taller than the Liege-Kavalos, but even under his religious finery he was noticeably slighter, hollow of bone and frail where his warrior counterpart was hard.

‘There is a difference between one’s own failures, and those engineered for us by others, events to which we can hope only to mitigate and adapt. The Mortarchs understand the distinction. But do not mistake their grace for mercy.’

Heraklis nodded. ‘What was the sin of my predecessor that led to my creation?’

Morchrian thought for a long while. There was nothing left in Arbitrium by which to measure it. That portion of the Penultima underworld had become timeless. ‘He ceased to be one with Nagash.’

‘I understand.’ Heraklis lifted his gaze and turned north. The ridges of Retribution Gate were just visible through the pall, against the stillness of the hills. ‘Many escaped.’ He was thinking of the horsemen at the ford; the margrave, whom he could feel was still alive. Even a number from the decisive battle there at Martial Square were unaccounted for in the final tally, and the aviarchs had reported several empty berths in the harbour. Furthermore, the shade of Etred Ridark had informed him of numerous clandestine exits from Arbiters’ Keep, which the legion had been unable to seize before it had been too late.

‘Some always will,’ said Morchrian. ‘Their souls have been marked and they will be found, and will, through their flight, lead us to new lands that will submit to the tithe or be remade. As Arbitrium and her people now have been.’

‘What then do we do next?’

‘The Kavaloi will be divided, and with the aid of the Morghasts and aviarchs they will follow the broken outriders north. They will be run down if it takes a hundred years. If they are able to gather aid or find sanctuary in another great city then word of it will return through us to Katakros. If he deems it needful then a new legion will be raised from the bone taken here to bring them to heel. Either way, the tithe will be exacted. The empire will grow. As for us…’ He raised a calcified limb to point across the distant water. ‘The divinations of my fellow Emissarian reveal that the margrave and the majority of Arbitrium’s survivors have fled that way, across the Sea of Fading Hopes towards the underworld of Hallost.’

‘Hallost…’ said Heraklis. ‘What is there?’

‘I do not know,’ said Morchrian. ‘But we will bring them peace.’

About the Author

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.

An extract from Ghoulslayer.

One by one, the lights began to fade. They burned brighter for a moment, like votives kindled by a breath, then blinked into oblivion. All across the Eventide they slipped from view, and a shroud spread over the sea, mobile and impenetrable, consuming everything.

‘What is it?’ whispered Veliger. He was at the uppermost rib of the Twelfth Prominent, resting his elbow on the head of his scythe, leaning out from the battlements. He had manned the walls for decades, but he had never seen anything like this. ‘There’s Lord Samorin,’ he whispered as, several leagues away, the Sixth Prominent pulsed brighter, its shell-like whirl illuminating the waves before the fortress sank from view, adding another pool of darkness to the growing void. Before the light faded something shimmered over the Eventide. It looked like gossamer caught in the breeze. ‘Rain?’ said Veliger, but there was something odd about how it flashed and banked.

Veliger wore the uniform of the Gravesward – a thick cloak of glossy white feathers clasped at the neck with an iron skull brooch and draped over lacquered black armour. He pulled the cloak closer as a breeze whipped through the shadows, even colder than usual, tightening around his chest and snatching his breath.

‘And there goes Lord Ophion,’ replied the figure next to him as another temple grew suddenly brighter. Meraspis wore the same uniform as Veliger. He was also carrying a scythe and a tall white shield designed to resemble a wing. Like Veliger, his head was gaunt, pale and hairless, but he was older, his forehead networked by lines and locked in a permanent frown.

They watched in silence as the fortress blazed then sank into the sea.

Veliger turned to look at the walls behind them, half expecting the light of their own temple to be fading. The Twelfth Prominent was unchanged. It was a mountainous edifice – a crumbling, spiral curve of bone, perched at the crest of an ancient, dusty wave. Souls burned at its heart like purple fire, bleeding through its walls, spilling amethyst over the peaks and troughs of the Eventide, and the fortress’ outline was clouded by white moths, circling in their millions like sea spray crashing over a hull. Light shimmered across the moths, radiated through the walls and flashed in Veliger’s eyes as he looked at Meraspis.

‘What’s happening?’

Meraspis did not seem to hear. He kept his gaze on the horizon. ‘What if they all vanish?’

Veliger looked up at the heavens, imagining a world without light. The stars would not help – they were ghosts, echoes of the living realms, with no interest in illuminating the underworlds of Shyish. Without the light of the prominents, the Eventide would be in darkness.

As he stared into the growing darkness, Veliger heard an unfamiliar sound. It was like pebbles clattering across a table. At first it was distant and gentle, but as the minutes passed it grew louder, becoming a roar.

The two men looked at each other in confusion as millions of white shards rattled across the Eventide. The sea that had never moved suddenly looked storm-tossed, and as the downpour moved closer it crashed violently against the fortress walls, filling the night with a deafening roar.

Meraspis stepped forwards and reached out from the embrasure. ‘Is that hail?’

Then he cursed and whirled away from Veliger, hissing in pain and clutching his hand.

‘What?’ cried Veliger, rushing over to him.

Meraspis shook his head, hunched over and gripping his hand. ‘By the Shroud,’ he muttered.

Veliger helped him stand, then gasped. Meraspis’ flesh had been torn apart. The rain had punched through his skin and bone, tearing the ligaments so badly that his hand looked like a scrap of bloody meat.

Meraspis cradled his butchered hand in his good one, groaning, cursing and staring at the rain.

Most of the shards had punched straight through his palm, but one of them was still wedged between his knuckles, gleaming white against the dark, exposed flesh.

Veliger gently plucked it from the wound and peered at it. ‘Bone?’

They both looked out at the storm, baffled.

Veliger dropped the shard and quickly bandaged Meraspis’ hand. The cuts were deep. He doubted the hand could be saved. But he could at least stem the bleeding.

Meraspis grimaced as Veliger worked, but did not cry out, despite the terrible pain he must be in.

‘We should go to Lord Aurun,’ he said hoarsely.

Veliger looked south to their nearest neighbour, the Barren Points. It was still smouldering with a steady, unruffled light.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Lord Aurun will know what to do. He’ll know what this is.’

Meraspis straightened up and clutched his broken hand to his chest. ‘Look,’ he said, nodding out across the battlements. ‘It’s stopping.’

The storm was already fading, the bone shards hitting the walls with less violence as the clouds rushed off to the south.

They watched the storm move away across the Eventide, still shocked by what had happened, then Veliger fastened his helmet and checked that the rest of his armour was fully attached, turning on his heel and heading for the stairs. ‘Aurun will know what this means. It will only take a couple of hours to get there.’

Meraspis shook his head. ‘We can’t leave the Unburied unattended. You go. I would slow you down anyway. I will wait here and tend to my wounds.’

Veliger hesitated, looking at Meraspis’ hand, then nodded. ‘Very well. I’ll find a Cerement priest. I’ll bring him back with me.’

Meraspis waved to the stairs. ‘Just go. And go quickly.’ He looked up at the clouds. ‘Even your armour might not protect you for long if that storm comes back.’

Each fortress was linked to its neighbour by a bridge, miles-long walkways slung from the gates like iron tendrils. The bridges were called wynds, and they stretched over the Eventide in graceful arcs. Some were only wide enough for five men to pass down them side by side, others were vast highways, and all of them were illuminated by the light of the temples at each end. As Veliger sprinted down the south wynd, his boots clanged against the ancient metal, scattering dust and moths. It was a long time since anyone had passed this way. Each fortress was almost self-sufficient, able to feed its garrison for months before requiring new supplies from the capital. The guards at the Barren Points would be shocked to see him rushing towards them. No, he realised, correcting himself, they would not. They must have seen the lights fading too. They would know exactly why he was coming.

As he ran, Veliger could not stop thinking about Meraspis’ ruined hand. How could weather do such a thing? Where had that storm come from?

Veliger had not gone far down the wynd when he heard the sound he had been dreading – the same ominous hiss he had heard earlier. Bones were falling across the Eventide again, filling the darkness with noise. He staggered to a halt, shaking his head and cursing. There was no way he could reach the Barren Points without the storm overtaking him. And what if his armour did not hold?

As he looked back at the fortress, he let out a horrified cry. A shadow had engulfed his home. The vast, curved surface of the Twelfth Prominent looked stained – as though someone had poured ink over its battlements.

Veliger stared harder and saw that the darkness was a heaving mass of smaller shapes – men, robed in shadow, flooding over the Eventide and climbing up the walls of the fortress like vermin. It was an attack. The idea was even more shocking than the bone rain. The prominents had not been attacked within living memory. The invaders were crossing the surface of the Eventide as though it were harmless. How could that be? The dead waves were lethal. No one could touch them and keep their sanity intact. Who were these people?

Veliger stumbled back the way he had come, dazed and muttering as the bone storm rushed towards him through the darkness.

He broke into a run, but it seemed agonisingly slow. With every step, the rain rushed towards him, crashing over the Eventide and rattling across the wynd.

He reached the end of the bridge and raced up the steps and through the fortress gates, dashing under the first roof he came to.

As he stood there, trying to catch his breath, the light blazed brighter, dazzling him. His eyes adjusted to the glare after a few seconds, and he saw a familiar figure sprinting towards him across the square.

‘Meraspis!’ he cried out, lowering his scythe.

The man crashed into him, sending them both toppling back down the steps.

Veliger rolled clear and leapt back onto his feet, moving with an agility borne of years of training.

‘What are you doing, Meraspis, have you–?’ His words died in his mouth as the man turned to face him. It was not Meraspis. It was a hunched, slavering wretch, a stooped horror with wild, staring eyes, whipcord limbs and flesh sagging from its bones. It looked like an animated cadaver. It was trembling and palsied, and its flesh was a dark, mottled grey, but it lunged at Veliger with shocking speed.

Veliger stepped back, moving without thought, led by the precepts of his training. His scythe flashed twice, slicing through the creature’s torso, and it slapped to the floor in two halves.

Veliger staggered away, shaking his head, staring at the butchered corpse. ‘What was that?’

With a shuddering groan, the corpse’s upper half jerked into motion and began crawling towards Veliger, dragging itself with its hands, trailing innards, its eyes still rolling.

‘Shroud!’ cried Veliger, hacking furiously at the thing until it collapsed and finally lay still.

Veliger’s relief was quickly replaced by a rush of horror. When he had looked back from the wynd, he had seen dozens of figures. What if they were all like this?

He gripped his scythe tighter and ran on, muttering in confusion.

Before he was halfway up the steps, the shadows began to shift and roll, rising up and gathering to block his way. Dozens of figures lurched towards him, their heads twitching and their breath coming in ragged gasps. They all resembled age-blackened corpses, shivering and frantic as they locked their blank, yellow gazes on him. Some clutched splinters of bone or fragments of broken weapons.

‘Mordants,’ whispered Veliger, feeling as though he were in a dream. He had heard tales of corpse-eaters but had never seen them first-hand. One or two occasionally sniffed their way into the prominents, but he had never heard of them attacking in these kinds of numbers. As Veliger looked at the tide of darkness gathering around him, he guessed that there must be hundreds of them clambering over the walls.

The mordants rushed towards him without a sound, twitching and juddering. They were like dumb animals that had taken human form.

Veliger staggered backwards, unbalanced by the ferocity of the assault, trying to stay calm, scything through the throng, filling the air with dark, treacly blood.

He charged up the steps, hacking and lunging and trying to break through the crush, but it was useless. The flesh-eaters forced him back until he lost his footing, nearly beheading himself in the process.

He leapt to his feet, hacked down more of the mordants and backed away, crying out in shock and anger.

The walls of the fortress burned brighter, scattering shadows across the square.

Several mordants broke from the main group and loped towards the wynd, their mindless gaze locked on the distant lights of Lord Aurun’s fortress.

‘No!’ shouted Veliger, backing towards the bridge. ‘You will not taint the Barren Points!’

The crowd rushed towards him. The prominent was now shining so brightly he could barely see.

He turned on his heel and raced back towards the bridge, barring the entrance to the wynd. He would not let the mordants go any further into the princedom.

Then the light of the fortress failed, plunging him into darkness.

Veliger could see nothing but an after-image of the walls, burned across his vision.

He heard breathing all around him in the dark – ragged, hoarse gasps, approaching from every direction.

There was a drum of rushing feet as the mordants attacked.

Veliger hefted his scythe back and forth, cutting down shapes he could not see, thudding the blade into thrashing limbs.

Hands clawed at his back and face, tearing at his armour, pulling him down.

Pain erupted across his body, and he heard the storm wash across the square, punching bones through his armour and skin.

Blood rushed into his eyes and he fell, crushed by the weight of bodies, howling in agony.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Mark Holmes.

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o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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