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Cauldron of Blood – Chris Thursten

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An Extract from ‘Covens of Blood’

A Black Library Publication

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CAULDRON OF BLOOD

by Chris Thursten

Onto the tourney-ground at ’Aqsha came forth the Burning Rose, war-daughter of Hammerhal, there to match steel with Khaine’s Handmaiden, whom none in our alliance could best. The witch aelf Virathe had held the field for three days against man, aelf and duardin, each duel a dedication to the oracle of the Bloody-Handed God. But the Burning Rose, she stood her ground and let the knife-dance break against her; she took the field, and we loved her for it.

The next reaver came at her with predatory confidence, loping over bodies and ashen rock, bloody and ragged under darkening skies. Captain Ketta Morrow lowered her greatsword and waited. Let his legs do the work, she thought. Even lunatics tire.

She readied herself, taking a moment to relax her grip and loosen the muscles in her arms. This was not Morrow’s first encounter with the Goretide. She had lived to veterancy, and counted Khorne’s marauders among her most familiar foes. Such had been the cost of life in Aqshy since Sigmar’s tempest had lifted Morrow’s ancestors from the cruelties of the firelands. She understood that the followers of the Blood God would not stop, break or buckle until their stock of prey was exhausted. To beat them was to outlast them, and in order to do that, one must protect the kindle-flame of energy that each clash of blades threatened to exhaust.

The reaver raised his axe and began to scream, beard matted with blood and spittle. He leapt the final few paces, throwing all of his weight up into his weapon, bringing it down with frenzied determination. Morrow simply raised her sword and held fast, letting the reaver’s red-eyed fervour clash against the redoubt of her physical strength. The greatsword’s tip caught the reaver through the stomach and Morrow pulled hard, hauling him away and to the side. She hurried only in the vulnerable instant where her weapon was lodged through the reaver’s abdomen, stepping quickly to pull it free, crushing his throat with her armoured boot as she did so.

No wasted effort, she thought. We can’t spare it.

Around her, the defence of the crusade had fallen to pieces. The Goretide had come upon them suddenly, emerging from a pall of unnatural darkness that blanketed the mountain pass. The Dawnbringer companies at the vanguard had understood its nature too late, having become accustomed to marching in the shadow of the great metalith that hung in the sky above them.

This sorcerous gloom was something new, imposing an eerie silence that deadened all but the nearest voices. One moment the crusaders had marched in quiet order, and the next they found themselves joined in battle to the fore and rear. Morrow had directed the rest of her greatsword regiment forward to safeguard the pilgrims that fled further along the pass, and remained behind to see to any stragglers. The sight of this last blood-slick marauder suggested that no more survivors would be forthcoming. Stepping away from the reaver’s body, she began her own retreat.

Morrow reached an escarpment and spied a group of handgunners in her company’s colours. Their regimental form had begun to fragment as the reavers pressed them back against the rocks. They would not hold for long. Expending what reserves of energy she still possessed, she broke into a sprint and attempted to reach them – but as soon as she picked up speed, she felt the weight of exhaustion against her chest and knew, bone-deep, that she would not be fast enough. In this instance, inertia would save her life.

An unnatural voice pierced the gloom with god-granted force, a dark-tongue curse that resonated from the mountainside. Morrow could not comprehend the words, but their malevolence trembled through her body as if seeking purchase, shuddering up and away through the thick air towards the body of the metalith.

Counter-sorcery, Morrow thought, her stomach sinking. Geomancers.

A tectonic groan emanated from the metalith as it listed first to one side and then the other, colliding with the mountainside and beginning to skid downwards. Morrow arrested her sprint and threw herself to the ground as the great mass of stone passed over her, its enchantments broken. The bulk of it impacted where the fighting was thickest, burying reaver, pilgrim and Freeguilder alike.

Morrow stood uneasily. She pinched ash from her eyes and began to move in the direction of the fallen metalith. Lord Somarthun’s Stormcast Eternals had engaged the enemy further along the pass, seeking to break the Goretide and establish a forward path for the Dawnbringers. There was no doubt that they would return upon the sight of the metalith’s destruction. If there was hope for any of the survivors, it lay in that direction.

She pressed on through dust and darkness, her hands stinging as she collided with a tilting spur of fallen rock. She clambered upwards, seeking vantage, and when she reached clear air she saw that the sky had grown even darker. What little light broke through was stained crimson by a malign presence that had settled itself across the firmament. She attempted to see past the cloud of ash kicked up by the metalith’s descent to the battle raging beyond. Then, in the distance, she spied a flash of blue-white energy; moments later, she felt the rumble of natural thunder.

A Stormcast just fell.

There came another flash, another thunder-tremor – and then another, another, another. Streaks of light leapt skywards as Lord Somarthun’s forces were overcome. The flame in Morrow’s chest guttered at the sight of it. She watched them rise, their souls seeking the heavens – and then, with horror, she watched them die for a second time. The malevolence that had claimed the sky seized each bolt in turn, smothering azure flames in darkness.

The sound! The sound was the worst of it – an aethereal discordance with the quality of a scream, followed by a chthonic rumble with the quality of laughter. An evil concordant with the shadow-sorcery that carried it to every mortal ear.

Alone atop her outcrop, Ketta Morrow knew the dread certainty of her own demise. It was almost an anticlimax. Death was often thus: the stray bolt that strikes the eye, the knife that finds sudden purchase. Yet these deaths began with the body; Morrow now knew to count herself among those for whom it starts with the spirit. At her back, the Goretide regrouped. She felt their heavy, accelerating tread in the rocks, then heard their ragged war cries as they burst free of the gloom. Their numbers spanned the width of the pass.

Morrow leapt the final few feet to the ground and rose to meet them, adopted a defensive posture and prepared to sell what remained of her mortal life.

A bow wave of aethereal force struck Morrow from behind. First came pain – stinging heat, up her spine and into her temples – followed by a manic sort of clarity. A keening wail washed over her. It had the quality of song.

Something stirred within the cloud of dust at her back. Darting shadows sped forth, flowing down from the surface of the fallen metalith and emerging from dark hollows in its shattered flanks. Morrow caught the flash of knives, felt the air buffeted by agile figures whose passage left no other trace. First one banner whipped by her, then another: a heart, a serpent, two blades beneath a lidless eye.

The Draichi Ganeth.

The mystery of who resided within the metalith had given the tale-tellers in her company much to work with; Morrow wondered if any survived to know the answer. Unbidden, she smiled. The dread inside her lifted. As the first witch aelves reached the enemy line, Ketta Morrow lowered her shoulders and raced to join them, greatsword high, breath held in anticipation of her own battle cry.

The animating power at her back grew in intensity as she ran. She sensed that it was drawing closer, and then she saw its source: a great bladed shrine mounted on silent wheels, propelled by the fervour of those that rode atop it. It rolled free of the dust cloud, descending smoothly from a cavernous rift in the metalith’s side. Morrow caught the silhouette of a robed priestess, directing the counter-attack with the tip of a long glaive. She saw the wide-mouthed cauldron at the shrine’s heart, and the towering statue at its rear. It collided with the onrushing reavers with scything force, continuing at speed until the sheer weight of bodies forced it to slow. Its priestess leapt high and descended into the melee with acrobatic grace.

Morrow ploughed into the fray not long after. She ended one reaver with the point of her greatsword before twisting to pull it free, letting its edge catch another at the neck. The next she headbutted with such force that it broke his nose. She swung down to finish him before he could rise, half-blind from the impact. Knives danced around her, slicing close but never cutting.

She collected herself and sought her next opponent, orienting herself using the Khainite shrine. Freed of the strictures of the fighting pit, the witch aelves ended lives with merciless grace. Morrow saw a leaping aelf drive bladed knee-plates into the ribs of a charging reaver before vaulting deeper into the melee, trailing crimson as she went. The Draichi Ganeth bled the Goretide in a thousand places, arresting their momentum with savage efficiency.

As the aelves pressed forwards a gap opened, and through it Morrow caught a glimpse of the priestess. Her glaive was blooded to the hilt and riven bodies lay in a semicircle about her; no servant of the Blood God had survived her coming. As she remounted the steps of the shrine, her eyes scanned the field and caught sight of Morrow in the midst of the melee. Her head tilted at the incongruity of the Freeguild captain, her bloody greatsword and battered plate. Their eyes met, and between them passed a jolt of recognition.

Morrow caught her breath.

Virathe.

The light of the cook fire cast looming shadows against the inner walls of the mess tent, a wide oval of flame-treated canvas rigged to vent smoke in the Aqshian fashion. As Morrow approached she recognised the hunched shapes within as companions, people with whom she shared the tested bonds of a lifetime spent in one war-camp or another. She also recognised them as survivors, and knew that these wavering outlines gave a false sense of their real numbers and true strength.

The Goretide had stolen a great deal of both. The remaining Dawnbringers had fled west for three days after the ambush, abandoning the fallen metalith and its geomantic works and seeking shelter in the western lee of the Sorrow Peaks. The unnatural gloom had followed them but the reavers had not. They shed their pursuers as they reached the mountainside and now their camp nestled in a steep-sided escarpment.

Morrow skidded on ash and gravel as she made the short descent towards the tent, unclasping her half-cape as she went. She had two reasons to make this journey and the symbol of her office would help with neither. First, she needed the warriors under her command to understand that she was with them – experience had taught her that the most durable authority was built on trust as much as rank. Second, she was hungry. Soup stains were a threat to her authority too, in their way.

She folded the half-cape under her arm and ducked into the tent, skin prickling at the warmth inside. The air was thick with sweat and boot leather, and Morrow felt relief enter every muscle in her back at once. She approached the edge of the fire and claimed a space, exchanging curt greetings with the soldiers to either side. Someone passed her a bowl of broth and she tested it with a finger, pleased to find the solid evidence of something like meat.

‘As I was sayin’, they’s all gods of death, when you think on it.’

Dour Ossel sat at the far side of the fire and cast his eyes about the huddled company as he spoke. An empty bowl lay at his feet and he rested his forearms upon the unstrung bulk of his great oaken crossbow. It was considered a miracle that he could still load and fire the thing at his age; more so that he was still alive to do so. Morrow smiled to herself as she raised the steaming broth to her lips. The old mercenary was holding court: something was normal.

‘You mean like Elder Bones? He’s a villain, you ask me.’

Morrow didn’t catch the speaker but saw the gleam in Ossel’s eyes, the delight of a trapper whose bait had been taken.

‘Oh no, not just him,’ said Ossel. ‘None of us like a gheist, that I’ll grant you, but the best man I ever marched with, he lived an’ died for the Great Necromancer. Now, I mean that quite literally.’

This got a laugh.

‘I dunno what his name was, but I called him Ben. He was completely dead. Not a scrap of meat on him, but better with a hand-and-a-half than most I’ve known. Didn’t eat. Didn’t snore. Didn’t speak. Perfect man, you ask me.’

Open laughter, now. A few fond curses.

‘I am quite past my original point!’ Ossel exclaimed. ‘They are, all of ’em, gods of death. The Slayer god? He killed, killed, killed, and then he died. The Everqueen? She plants her seeds in the corpse-earth and what comes out ain’t exactly life as you and me know it, is it?’

Morrow watched as Ossel played with the tension in the air. His touch was abrasive one moment, delicate the next. A bristle of disquiet from a few of Kyrggi’s Irondrakes was enough to steer the focus elsewhere, but whoever was next on the receiving end of one of the marksman’s barbs was treated no more warmly. Morrow glanced at the heavy crossbow in his lap and wondered if he’d ever been a string-player: he had the ear for it. She understood that moments like this had the effect of diverting weary minds from the weight of the destiny that had befallen them. Let old, dour Ossel speak a little dissent to the gods, if that was the role he wished to play. There were harder truths to contend with in time.

‘How about the Maker? Him that gives us weapons and walls?’

This interjection came from a young man at the fire’s edge. From the matted emerald feather in his cap, Morrow recognised him as one of the new recruits from Hammerhal Ghyra, a lad of barely twenty. His cohort had crossed into Aqshy shortly before the crusade’s departure and Morrow had not had time to know them well, but knew this one as Neszbern. He had loped into camp trailing his pack behind him on a rope, his arms full with a battered old Aqshian hand-culverin. That was how Morrow had come to know the boy, and he had not yet gone a day without putting his foot wrong in one manner or another.

‘And what do you suppose those weapons do, my boy?’ Ossel said, dryly. ‘And those walls? Let me tell you. Walls kill as many as bolts, blades or blackpowder. Not a war is fought where someone don’t find themselves on the wrong side of one.’

Morrow caught a glint of stubbornness in the recruit’s eyes as the young man took another helping of Ossel’s bait.

‘You can’t mean holy Sigmar, though?’

Careful, Morrow thought. The boy turned a token in his hands: a chip of heartwood engraved with a runic hammer.

‘He that spares and protects us, and sends the best of us back to spare and protect others…’

Ossel smiled, lowered his head. ‘That he does, my boy, that he does. And who else would you have your soul be pledged to, eh? Perhaps one day I’ll be sent back to you with one of those great golden longstrikes in my hands. That’d be something.’

Somebody elbowed the old man from behind. ‘Don’t reckon the Thunderer will consider it heroic when one of yer blasphemies finally gets you knifed.’

Another ripple of laughter passed around the group. Ossel made a comic show of offence and when the crowd’s attention settled on him once more, he leaned forwards and grew serious.

‘Sigmar stands in defiance of death, it’s true.’ His eyes cast about the room. ‘Or perhaps it’s more true to say that he’d be its master on our behalf. I’m not sayin’ I mind. Yet we each have seen that even one of his Stormcast Eternals can end. Gives an old soldier cause for reflection.’

Morrow tensed. What had occurred in the pass weighed on all of them. At a stroke, Ossel had ceased to be a distraction and now directed her company’s minds towards fresh wounds. Neszbern spoke up again, completely without guile.

‘That was death for them, then?’ he asked. ‘When the sky swallowed them up?’

‘Or worse,’ the crossbowman replied, smoothing an imperfection from the corner of his tunic with his thumb. ‘As I’ve been sayin’, lad – they’re all gods of death, in the end.’

His voice grew weak, affecting age. Morrow had seen this part of the act before – knew that Ossel would allow the group’s attention to begin to drift before snatching it back. As caustic as the old man could be, she trusted him to give voice to fears and distractions that would otherwise go unsaid – and she knew that it was better for the warriors in her charge to confront fear and distraction in a warm mess tent than on the field. Yet she had heard, and eaten, her fill. She caught Ossel’s eyes as she stood, offering a glint of acknowledgement, but was surprised by the steel in the look he returned.

‘Of course, better death than murder.’

Morrow froze. Ossel held her gaze for a moment too long before turning, with a soft smile, to the recruit.

‘I’ve got one piece of real wisdom for you, boy, so listen close.’

Neszbern cocked his head, uncomfortable, attentive.

‘Steer yourself clear of witch aelves, warlocks, any shadow-touched killers that the Queen of Hagg Nar sends to skulk among us. When battle is joined, stay clear, I say. They’re all gods of death, but she would be a god of killing. Of murder! Do you know the difference, lad? Do you?’

The younger man said nothing.

‘Death is a truth, lad. Killin’ is an act. As for murder – murder is a choice, boy, and a dire one at that.’

Morrow’s heart sank. Why this, Ossel? she thought. Why now? Every soldier present would be dead were it not for the intervention of the Draichi Ganeth, herself included, and the continued survival of the crusade depended on the resolve of every warrior who still marched under its banner. Ossel had dredged in a distrust that had a very real chance of fracturing their coalition. More than a few of her men still held bitterly to the memory of old Anvilgard.

‘That’s enough, marksman,’ she said, stepping into the light of the cook fire. ‘I’ll stomach your little blasphemies and I’ll tolerate your poor aim, but I’ll not have you frightening the greenlings.’

Ossel tilted his head. ‘I don’t mean to scare the boy, captain. After all, why should he fear what his captain does not? However, I doubt he’s got the eye to fight down among the she-aelves. Not like you do.’

He leaned conspiratorially towards Neszbern and lowered his voice to a stage whisper, glancing back to Morrow as he spoke. ‘Did you see your captain, boy? When one horde of blood-mad killers met the other? There she was among them, an island of steel in a sea of savagery. Don’t try to follow that act, lad. The witch’s daughters would have your blood just as readily as the marauders at our back–’

‘Enough, Ossel,’ Morrow snapped, raising her hand. ‘You’re pushing it. Get some sleep.’

Ossel held her gaze for a moment, then shrugged and began to stand. He made a show of fatigue as he did so, feigning the weight of his crossbow as he hoisted it over one shoulder.

‘Right you are, captain,’ he said. ‘I mean no offence. I know you’ve got good reason not to fear them.’

He looked again to Neszbern as he stood. ‘Your captain beat one, you know, on the tourney-grounds at Hammerhal, when she was no older than you are now. Did you know that?’

‘Er, no? No.’

‘We called her the Burning Rose. That’s how I first came to know her. So heed her words, not mine, on the subject of killers and killin’. As I say, she’s got the eye for it.’

Ossel closed one eye and made a play of scoping out a distant target with his hand.

‘An’ as she says, I’m sure I no longer do!’

There was lightness in his voice, but the tension did not ease. Old Ossel had shown something of his true weariness. Morrow watched him make for the entrance of the tent, feeling both sympathy and anger – that the atrocities they faced had finally left a lasting mark upon him, and that he was careless enough to let the younger soldiers see it. Perhaps rest would–

Ossel had almost reached the entrance when he staggered backwards and fell, landing heavily and letting his crossbow clatter to the ground. A tall figure stood in his way, framed by darkness. She had entered unseen and the shadows cast by the cook fire seemed to grow unnaturally deep where they fell upon her. It should have been impossible to overlook her height, or the gleam of the barbed glaive she carried with one hand, and yet her appearance resisted the eye.

A moment passed in deep disquiet.

‘Captain Morrow,’ said Virathe of the Draichi Ganeth. ‘I would have us speak.’

They strode away from the barrack tents and across a patch of barren scrubland that the surviving drovers had claimed for themselves and their animals. Hulking cindertusks lowed softly at their passing, ochre hides turned gold by the light of the little fires lit to soothe them. For a period of several minutes they did not speak. Morrow adjusted her stride to keep pace with Virathe, relearning a habit adopted half a lifetime prior. The aelf had the knack of moving so swiftly and with such surety that she almost appeared to glide. The effect was incongruous here, in the rugged lee of the mountains. Yet it had also been incongruous on the duelling field, at the festival that followed, in the firegardens, and on the great causeway at the heart of Hammerhal where the realms – and their lives – had diverged.

Morrow counted twenty years since that day. Twenty-something. Half a lifetime on campaign made it difficult to track. It was a number felt, not known, expressed in calluses, scars, in the eyes of recruits who saw the hair greying at their captain’s temples and thought, Here is one who has lived long enough to teach us something. The aelf had not changed at all. It was as if the witch-warrior had stridden off the tourney-grounds and donned the garb of a priestess on a whim.

Her hair had always been white.

Their course took them further down the slope towards the centre of the encampment, where clusters of pilgrims gave their nightly devotions. It was a place of low voices where dim candlelight plucked desperate illuminations from the dark: blackened fingernails and rheumy eyes, a paring knife, a copper charm, a piece of warm coal gripped tight for luck.

‘The Goretide no longer pursue us,’ said Virathe, at last.

‘I know,’ Morrow replied. ‘We would still be marching if they did.’

‘They followed us for longer than your scouts are aware. Those that survived. The outriders you are waiting for will not return, but their bones and the flesh of their horses have each sated cruel appetites tonight.’

Morrow caught herself at the edge of a pointless interjection. She remembered this: the forthrightness with which Virathe expressed knowledge that she simply should not have. ‘Your scouts see a lot,’ she replied.

‘They do. From the shadows and the skies.’

‘Yet they didn’t see the marauders coming, and I doubt they anticipated the loss of the metalith. Seems to me like you wished to remain hidden up there all the way to the Wretch Sea.’

Virathe did not meet Morrow’s gaze.

‘Secrecy was deemed prudent. Somarthun knew of us, as did the Collegiate mages and the shrine-smiths. It was thought best to avoid discord among the coin-takers.’

Morrow exhaled sharply. Her own Coin Malleus hung around her neck on a thin leather strap, tucked beneath her tunic. It was one of the few talismans she carried. She understood it first and foremost as a contract, a token of the duty to which she had agreed to be bound. Not a bribe, not a pardon, not a sign of divine purpose – a contract.

‘You are correct, however,’ Virathe said, before Morrow could respond. ‘We did not perceive the threat posed by the Goretide before they struck. We should have done.’

It was a disarming admission. ‘Then what happened?’ Morrow asked.

‘An intervention by malign shadow.’

For the first time, the aelf turned to look at her. ‘The horde is commanded by a tyrant of the Golden Realm known only as the Chainsmith. His path has carried him to these lands, and into the favour of his ruinous patron. Yet this is not his final destination, and your pilgrims are not his true prey. He senses that the gaze of the Three-Eyed King is upon him, and drives his host towards the gateway at Kilnsdoor, there to conduct the atrocities that he believes will see him transported before the Varanspire.’

Virathe spoke as if outlining a plan of battle – as if this were information of any practical use to Morrow and her people.

‘It is a ruse,’ she continued. ‘The First Prince looks with jealousy on all that would be tithed to his ancient rival, and works sorcery to alter the Chainsmith’s fate. Kilnsdoor will deliver the Goretide not to the Allpoints, but to Ulgu. There, the Chainsmith will find himself prosecuting war on behalf of a darker master. Whether he knows it or not.’

Morrow walked alongside Virathe and allowed these words to flow over her. They were the stuff of stories, beyond the scale of her life. She paused a moment before responding.

‘There’s no scout pledged to either of us that could tell you all that,’ Morrow said, seeking the priestess’ eyes. ‘You have spoken to your oracle.’

Virathe was curt. ‘I have spoken to my god.’

They had described a curving path through the camp. Morrow sensed that she was being steered, though she did not know where. She considered an apology, but thought better of it.

‘And what did you tell her of our situation?’ Morrow asked.

‘Nothing that is not already known to her. Your survivors lack the strength to return across the mountains. Beasts rise from the Spore Hollows and close on Tempest’s Eye – you will not survive a journey south. You have no boats with which to travel north, and to continue west in your current manner will see you collide with the Goretide unprepared. Your parts have been played, and your people are going to die.’

There was no emotion in it – that was what had always been so frustrating. Grace without tact. Morrow bristled.

‘No, I don’t think we are.’

‘Your assessment is not relevant. The Bloody-Handed God has seen it.’

‘If that were the case, you wouldn’t need anything from me. We wouldn’t be speaking.’

Virathe stopped walking. Morrow believed for a moment that she had given offence, and then she saw where they were. They had reached the edge of the encampment, a narrow strip of clear land that no Dawnbringer chose to claim. On the far side lay the ordered tents of the Draichi Ganeth, radiating out from the shrine at their centre. Narrow banners snapped in the night air.

For the first time, the captain and the priestess regarded one another fully.

‘The Bloody-Handed God would see Chaos denied,’ Virathe said. ‘Together, we are going to kill the Chainsmith.’

In the morning the Draichi Ganeth were gone, having departed west under the cover of darkness. Morrow addressed the Dawnbringers in full regalia, half-cape fixed, Coin Malleus gleaming against her chestplate. Brooking no further dissent, she gave the order to break camp and follow.

They marched for several days before encountering the first sign of the Khainites’ passage: Goretide scouts, lower-order cultists found bloodless and butchered at the edge of a grove of ash-black muriabark trees.

‘We are faster,’ Virathe had told her. ‘We will encircle the horde before they reach Kilnsdoor. We will blind them to your coming.’

A succession of harrying assaults by the Daughters of Khaine had pared away the outer layers of the Chainsmith’s host – the waste-wandering reavers and faithless killers who accumulated in the presence of any warlord of sufficient power. These hangers-on had comprised the bulk of the forces that had cornered them in the Sorrow Peaks, Morrow realised. The Chainsmith had held back his true strength, save the dire invocations employed to bring down the metalith. Strategy was a dangerous quality in a champion of the Blood God.

Despite their insignificance to their master, it was gratifying to see the reavers brought to ruin. On the fifth day they came across a scattered line of brutish chariots, stationary in the dust as if awaiting orders. Their drivers, along with the beasts that pulled them, were dead, each bearing a single puncture wound above the heart. Two days later, Morrow’s scouts escorted her to the burned-out shell of an abandoned farmstead. Widespread destruction spoke to the battle that had been fought there, but the only body that remained was that of a reaver chieftain. She was upright, frozen in agony at the moment of death, her flesh, garb and trophies transmuted to deep-red crystal that pulsed softly in the wan daylight.

These encounters disturbed and energised Morrow’s warriors in equal measure. Some were buoyed to see the enemy laid low; others held tight to their blades and blackpowder and awaited an opportunity to make war in the proper way. A few saw the Khainites’ knife-work and thought only of the doom that had come to Anvilgard. At each dawn a few more soldiers would be found to have abandoned their posts in the night, but Morrow did not waste scouts tracking them down. Let them find their own way, she thought. In a sense she wished them well; certainly, she wished them luck.

She was privately glad that dour old Ossel did not join the deserters, although he no longer held court in his customary fashion – at least not in the captain’s presence. The marksman spent most of his time with his platoon, readying them for the battle to come, gently deriding the poor form that had seen them barely survive their last encounter with the Goretide.

‘You will catch the heart of the enemy and force the Chainsmith to take the field,’ Virathe had said, pausing to drink slowly from a worn silver chalice. Morrow sipped fragrant tea and nodded.

‘We can hold them for a while. We’ll need you if we’re going to break them.’

‘As it was before,’ Virathe replied, as if it were a thing already done.

They sat together for a few long minutes. ‘After it’s done–’ Morrow began.

‘Ulgu,’ the priestess interjected. ‘The Shadowlands, and sanctuary.’

The gateway at Kilnsdoor lay on the far side of a wide basin, the remains of an ancient Aqshian volcano that had fallen dormant many thousands of years ago. Jutting spurs of basalt littered the field, striating the ever-present gloom with bands of shadow. The companies under Morrow’s command mustered at the basin’s edge and prepared to descend. She and her greatswords marched at the fore, flanked by handgunners, halberds and pikes. They encircled a core of armed pilgrims, sellswords and other volunteers.

Coin-takers. Morrow had not been able to shed the phrase.

The warden Kyrggi and his Irondrakes held the rear, supported by bow-armed scouts and Ossel’s crossbows. They would guard against attempts to encircle the formation until the enemy was fully engaged, and then they were instructed to find vantage points and keep the Goretide contained.

The floor of the basin was coated in a thin layer of hot sand that whispered sulphur when disturbed. The atmosphere grew thicker as they pressed on, compounded by the unnatural gloom, gaining a metallic quality that sat on the palate like the aftertaste of blood. It was difficult to know what to attribute to Aqshy’s essential nature and what to interpret as a sign of the Goretide’s passage. I have taken a lot on trust, Morrow caught herself thinking.

Yet she realised that she did trust Virathe. She trusted her fervour, her lethality, her sense of purpose, even if each expressed itself in weaving, ornate, untraceable ways. Her actions were never direct: they described orbits, circles within circles, a dance whose significance was known only to the aelf and her oracle. Morrow corrected herself. Her god, now.

Once, a long time ago, Morrow had bested Virathe by ignoring all of this. She had held her ground and forced Virathe to come to her – made herself the inevitable conclusion of whatever weaving pattern the aelf chose to describe, and from that advantageous position she had written her own ending. Here, at the footsteps of Kilnsdoor, their disparate souls would write an ending for another.

At the first sight of the enemy, Captain Ketta Morrow raised her hand and the clarion went up. The drummers called the formation to stop, and the crusaders gave their bellowed devotions. She brought her hand down, and the guns of Hammerhal thundered into the Goretide from behind. Let them hear this, she thought.

The servants of Khorne met them eagerly. The enemy’s rearguard comprised armoured brutes, warriors whose platemail was tempered to deep crimson and ornamented with leering tributes to the Blood God. It seemed that Virathe’s plan had worked: the Daughters of Khaine’s winnowing campaign had exposed the core of the Chainsmith’s host.

The Blood Warriors endured a hail of shot as they charged, colliding with the Freeguild line at multiple points. ‘Blades forward!’ Morrow bellowed. ‘Hold!’

She ducked the first incoming blow and severed her assailant’s arm at the elbow. The dark-armoured figure attempted to drag her down as it fell, forcing a swift sidestep and a cut below the knee. The next Blood Warrior wore no helmet and rushed at her white-eyed, baring a row of sharpened iron teeth in its lipless maw. This one she decapitated. Her greatswords strode forwards to cover their casualties and broke the first wave, gaining space to intervene elsewhere. Morrow joined them in a counter-charge that relieved the beleaguered handgunners at the company’s flank as the pilgrims pressed into the gap left behind and held the enemy’s own reinforcements at bay.

Morrow cast her eyes about the melee. Kyrggi’s Irondrakes brought down a Khornate warbeast before it could threaten the company’s far flank, while salvos of crossbow bolts whipped from the gloom to thin the horde that pressed in on their front line. As yet, however, the Goretide had revealed no leader. Piled bodies forced a gap in the fighting and Morrow gave the order to reinforce it before it became a breach. They did so just in time. Warriors riding monstrous armour-clad beasts emerged from the darkness and positioned themselves for a crushing riposte. Morrow had seen what such creatures could do to an unprotected line. With a gesture she ordered her warriors to loosen their formation.

‘Disperse, and strike them as they pass!’ she cried.

A shout of alarm from the pilgrims drew her attention, before their voices were drowned by a curse that resonated with ruinous purpose. It held an echo of the dire incantation that had downed the metalith. Then she caught its source: a loping priest of the Blood God, half-naked and bedecked in fresh trophies. At his coming, the first rank of Dawnbringers burst apart in a shower of gore. Their appalling deaths sent a wave of elation through the Blood Warriors. Ahead, the Juggernauts took several steps forwards and broke into a run.

Something hitherto unseen whipped close above her head and she started at it. The soldier at her back screamed as long claws grasped him and hauled him bodily into the air. Morrow looked about in time to see the soldier dismembered by a dark-winged creature that rained gore as it dived back down behind their lines. There it seized the boy Neszbern, his green-feathered cap tumbling away as he was hauled up into the gloom from which the creature had emerged. He struggled with the strap of his battered old hand-culverin as the beast dragged him skywards; there was a loud detonation, somewhere in the darkness, and he was gone.

Morrow felt the rumble of the Juggernauts and turned to see that they had almost closed half the distance. More winged shapes whipped among them as they charged. Furies, she realised. She had encountered the lithe shadow-daemons before, but never among the Blood God’s armies, and never directed with such purpose. They raced ahead of the cavalry, taking advantage of the spaces in the Freeguild line, driving individual soldiers apart and offering them up for slaughter.

Where are you, Virathe? Morrow thought, as her world was reduced to frenzy and shadow.

The Juggernauts battered aside the greatswords set to halt them before swerving to encircle the packed crusaders, turning the company’s tight formation into a charnel pit. Morrow threw herself aside, hauling two of her men out of danger and staggering to the ground. She rose in time to fend off the daemons that descended to finish them, each wild swing punctuated by the final salvos of Kyrggi’s Irondrakes as blood-mad killers closed in on them from both sides.

The slaughter, and the exhortations of their priest, had whipped the Blood God’s devotees to a deep fury – and yet no warlord came among them. The Chainsmith had not taken the field. All the Dawnbringers’ attack had done was give the Goretide cause to turn and slaughter them.

They will not stop until they have exhausted their stock of prey, Morrow thought, her bile rising.

We were bait.

Furious, she began to run forwards. She did not know where her anger should take her until she once again caught sight of the Khornate priest; adjusting her footing, she turned her sprint into a charge. He pivoted to meet her, burnished head to toe in blood. Furies closed in above as the battle behind became a massacre.

The first daemon to come at her was caught by a projectile before it could strike, and the next was snatched by something in the air and dragged away. Morrow was too blind with rage to care. She kept her gaze fixed on the priest. He bellowed an incantation and she could feel the words reach inside her, attempting to light a fire in her blood. She powered onwards. She was a war-daughter of Hammerhal. The fire inside her had never blazed more violently, and it could be stoked to no greater height.

The priest raised his headsman’s axe in anticipation of her blow, but the strength of Morrow’s first strike overcame him. His grip buckled and the blade of her greatsword sliced deep, carving through his shoulder blade to lodge in his sternum. He should have died instantly, but his eyes did not leave her. The acrid air wavered where words began to form on his bloodstained lips. She grabbed his head with both hands and twisted with every ounce of strength in her body, shearing his spine.

Only with the priest’s death did she begin to hear the witch-song in the air. She looked up to see that war had been joined in the sky by a coterie of bat-winged aelves that sent swift javelins hurtling downwards. A silent storm of black arrows whipped past her, leaving coiling patterns in the mist as they struck down the foe with accuracy beyond that of her own marksmen. Morrow’s heart was heavy. She wrenched her greatsword free of the Slaughterpriest’s corpse and staggered back the way she had come.

Around her, the knife-dance had begun. Witch aelves sped from the shadows, but Morrow noted that their numbers had grown thinner. They set about the warriors of the Goretide, scaling armoured hides to plant daggers deep, vaulting high to catch darting furies before skewering them and pulling them to the ground. The aelves died, also: cut down by blows whose wrathful impetus denied all attempts at evasion, mobbed by the descending blades of frenzied shadow-kin.

‘You are alive.’

The voice came from behind. Morrow froze for a moment, then turned. Virathe stood before her, apparently untouched by the grime and strife of battle. Her eyes were fixed ahead, assessing the melee.

‘Are you surprised?’ Morrow spat, her greatsword low.

‘I am pleased,’ Virathe said. ‘We have slain their god-speakers and cast down their icons. They will perform no desecrations and bring forth no greater evils with the atrocities that have been committed here. You have given us the time we needed.’

She paused to consider the ruined body at her feet. ‘And apparently you have slain the last of their priests.’

‘How dare you?’ Morrow spat. ‘How dare you pretend that this is what we agreed? What you promised?’

She cast her arm over the unfolding carnage. ‘You used me, and I won’t have you deny it.’

Something shifted in Virathe’s aspect – a narrowing of the eyes that Morrow first perceived as anger before deeper familiarity called it sorrow. The priestess walked towards her, silent at first. Then she spoke.

‘You were dead, Ketta. We have been dead since the shadow of the First Prince fell upon us. The dark master is a cancer upon the umbral web. Do you understand? Our fates are stained. You were dead, your death ordained to be but a small part of another’s design.’

Morrow was too angry to speak, but what pained her most was that she trusted – as she ever did – that Virathe meant what she said.

‘I wished to see Chaos denied. I wished for your end to be worthy of you.’

There was a disturbance on the battlefield. A shout went up and Morrow saw crimson. There was a madness at her temples and for a crazed second she tensed and moved to raise her blade against the priestess. The feeling abated – but not for the warriors still embroiled in the melee. An invisible threshold had been crossed that no killer could deny and that no holy token could guard against. Violence gained form as the eye of the Blood God fell upon the field, striking his devotees most keenly. Blood Warriors with no proximate prey set about slaughtering each other as the remaining Dawnbringers were whipped into a self-destructive fervour.

The Daughters of Khaine did not break, but their resolve drew the ire – and the steel – of every warrior, beast and daemon on the field. Morrow did not know whether to rush to aid them or to give herself to madness and take up arms against the woman at her side.

Then a stumbling figure pressed free of the slaughter and her decision was made. Old Ossel collapsed as she reached him, and she dropped her sword in order to keep him on his feet. He was white with shock and for the first time in Morrow’s memory, he looked his years. Blood gouted from a deep wound in his side, his tunic rent, his crossbow lost. He is dead, she thought, Virathe’s words refusing to leave her.

‘It’s madness, captain,’ he said, his breathing ragged. ‘It’s madness.’

‘That’s enough,’ she replied. ‘We’re not done, not yet.’

‘He’s here,’ Ossel said, trembling. ‘Most dreadful I ever…’

He tapped feebly at her as he spoke, and Morrow realised what he was trying to say.

‘Where?’ she snapped. ‘Where, marksman?’

She pulled him away from the fray and his head lolled about his shoulders, lifting just enough to nod. At the edge of the field a towering figure killed indiscriminately, swinging a barbed black flail that made a grisly ruin of those it struck. There was an exultant wildness to his movements, but they were not without purpose. The Chainsmith closed on them with every sweeping blow, crushing all before him, Blood Warrior and Dawnbringer alike, as he followed the path that Ossel had taken. Seeking something, Morrow thought. Someone.

She hauled herself and Ossel away, dragging her greatsword one-handed. On came the Chainsmith, burgeoning with his patron’s favour, hard-set on this particular prey. Morrow moved backwards, unwilling to let him leave her sight.

Then Virathe stepped between them, and Morrow’s eyes saw shadows lift. Virathe’s form began to blur; there was a disturbance in the aether, like a veil falling – and Morrow heard her voice.

‘Ketta. Go.’

She blinked and the priestess had grown perhaps a head and a half taller; her robes and ceremonial armour still hung about her torso, but where her legs had been now coiled the body of a serpent. The glamour had withdrawn from her glaive, also, revealing an ornate blade of twining crystal.

The Chainsmith came at Virathe and she swung around him in a dancing orbit, landing a blow across his back. He barked at it, a dry, hacking exhortation at the boundary between outrage and laughter.

‘Scale-spawn. I will eat your heart.’

She caught and redirected his flail with the tip of her glaive and rushed at him, aiming viper-strikes at the Chainsmith’s face. He barked at this, also.

‘I will crush your spine!’

Ossel patted at Morrow’s arm, attempting to wrest himself free. Not to flee, she realised – to unencumber her. She let go and he staggered away a few paces but did not fall. She looked up to see Virathe land another flurry of testing blows before ducking low under the Chainsmith’s broad, heavy strikes.

The din of battle began to quiet as warriors succumbed to their wounds. The fighting had broken down into isolated melees, and every fighter that Morrow could see bore lethal injuries. She watched a witch aelf take two confident strides towards a surviving Blood Warrior before dying from blood loss upon the third; saw that same Blood Warrior stoop to seize the skull of one of his fallen kin only to receive a spear through the neck, thrust up by a dying pilgrim.

Something was changing in the Chainsmith. It was as if he inherited the fervour that abated in each of his warriors as they finally gave themselves to death. There was a limit to how much bloodlust any one being could express, no matter how formidable, and his movements grew wilder – even drunken – as he spun to keep track of Virathe. Yet the blows he directed at her grew only more severe, slicing great rents in the gloom as he sought to land the strike that would end her.

‘You have given me a gift, witch!’ the Chainsmith bellowed. ‘The feast you have laid for me marks a new age.’

He spasmed and something writhed beneath his armour. He adjusted his footing, bracing himself against the forces that roiled in him. ‘The Eightfold Path has no end!’

Virathe adjusted her hands upon the grip of her glaive and rushed at him once again. ‘It ends by the will of the Bloody-Handed God,’ she said, drawing him out with a feint before striking towards his neck. ‘It ends with your murder.’

Morrow came at the Chainsmith from behind and swung hard for his legs. The blade of her greatsword caught the gap above his greaves and bit deep, drawing a gout of black blood. The warlord roared and brought the weighted hilt of his flail down upon her one-handed. It struck her left shoulder-plate and she felt the bones beneath shatter, saw stars and reeled at the agony that danced up and down her arm. She fell to the ground; Virathe brought her weapon about in a scything arc that severed the Chainsmith’s free hand at the wrist. She spun away upon her coiling tail and then returned with lethal swiftness, driving the tip of her glaive up and into a gap near the Chainsmith’s stomach.

She moved as she always had, Morrow observed, half-blind with pain. And yet I am seeing her as she truly is for the first time.

Virathe held fast and a blossom of red crystal began to grow where the glaive had entered the Chainsmith’s body. She stared him down, willing him to die, driving his murder deeper. He attempted to bring the flail down upon her but she was beneath his range of movement. Morrow saw her tense, pushing harder.

Then the Chainsmith struck at Virathe with the stump of his free arm. The flesh of his severed wrist seethed and bubbled, birthing an abomination of knotted muscle and black bone as it punched into Virathe’s chest. Morrow watched four dark talons uncurl from the priestess’ back as her body tensed, twitched and went limp.

Something stopped the scream that rose in Morrow’s chest. She did not breathe at all. She could no longer distinguish grief from rage, nor survival from duty. Virathe had violated the boundaries between these things, as she had so many others, in the name of her cause. But now that cause was lost: the priestess’ designs had reached their lethal terminus. Morrow felt fate’s razor suspended above her, and wanted nothing more than to throw herself into one last clash of blades.

‘Ketta. Go.’

Virathe’s parting words had survived the agony of her death, and – despite everything – Morrow felt the presence of one who still lived and still needed her aid. Taking heavy steps towards Ossel she gathered him up with her good arm, and together they staggered away into the darkness.

Their flight had no direction. Morrow could feel the Chainsmith at their back, but the enclosing shadow gave no sense of how much ground they had gained. At times his barking exultations seemed to roll towards them over a great distance; at others, it was as if she could feel his breath upon her neck. Ossel twitched and muttered to himself. Morrow was deaf to his meaning for several minutes before she realised that he was praying.

She was in pain and found herself almost exasperated at the indefatigable stubbornness of the kindle-flame in her chest. Perhaps it had always been her fate to be the foe’s final prey. Perhaps that is what Virathe had seen in her on the tourney-grounds, at the festival, in the firegardens. She was the descendant of those who had outrun an aeon of darkness – just barely – and she felt the weight of it. Had Virathe lived through those times? Longer? She was dead now, and Ketta Morrow was not.

If the tales were true, then now she fled a different sort of eternity: the sort that the Chainsmith would visit upon their souls when he proffered up their skulls to his master. That is how it goes, isn’t it? she thought. She had heard the chants and incantations across half a dozen battlefields before this one. Blood and skulls. Blood and skulls.

Dark laughter again; the scrape of iron on iron. Morrow wanted to turn and face it, to meet her end head-on, but something – perhaps simply her duty to the dying marksman – kept her moving. They crossed the aftermath of a different battle, the one that Virathe must have fought before coming to the aid of the Dawnbringers. Dead witch aelves flanked the corpses of hulking warbeasts. A grim idol had been half transmuted to crystal before shattering, and they crunched over the glassy debris that remained. Half-serpent warriors – like Virathe – lay about it with arms outstretched, as if still striving to cleanse the profanities of the Blood God.

It was then that the shadows parted and a destination revealed itself. Virathe’s shrine sat dormant amidst a pile of bodies, Goretide and Khainite both. One of its wheels had sheared off and it listed to the side, great cauldron tipped and empty, shrinekeepers dead upon its curving steps. Yet the looming statue at its rear appeared to anchor it, marked it out as something holy. It was a traditional depiction of the Bloody-Handed God, lithe musculature and glowering features rendered in gold-banded iron. Its arms were outstretched and it held aloft a jagged blade that was longer than Morrow was tall.

She picked up her pace, but Ossel began to struggle and quail. She looked down and saw fear in his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him. ‘We’re not going any further.’

He gave feeble resistance as she lifted him up the steps of the shrine. From the vantage it provided she could see the darkness that had trailed them. Obscured by the gloom, it took the form of a shifting, protean malevolence. Morrow reached down with her good arm to grasp a long sacrificial blade from where it had fallen near the body of a shrinekeeper.

Ossel looked up at her, desperation in his eyes. ‘Captain…’

‘It’s all right, old friend,’ she said. ‘The Blood God will not take you.’

She thought then that she saw something of the trapper’s gleam in his eyes. He coughed and struggled. ‘Is there a diff–’ he began to say, before pain took his words.

Ossel shivered and his eyes rolled back, sweat beading on his brow. He no longer had the strength to deny the slow death that came for him, nor the agonising toll it extracted. Morrow lowered him gently over the lip of the cauldron, their combined weight causing the shrine to rock and somewhat right itself. She yanked her Coin Malleus from its cord and placed it on Ossel’s trembling chest.

The Chainsmith emerged a short distance from the foot of the shrine. His armour bulged where abominable transformations forced new muscle over old. He wielded his great flail with one-handed ease, the other arm overtaken by daemonic gifts. A rack of bone had burst from his shoulders, foretelling further blessings. He roared his blasphemies and Morrow’s senses burned.

She leaned over Ossel, reaching beneath her chestplate and grasping one of the few other tokens she carried. It was a talisman of ancient gold that bore a stylised scorpion on one face and the outline of a bloody heart on the other. The designs were rendered in ornate, bladed lines, like knife-strokes. It had been a gift, once, passed from one hand to another on the eve of departure. Virathe had never told her how old it was.

She placed it next to the Coin Malleus and tilted Ossel’s head back, exposing his throat. The Chainsmith took a series of heavy steps forwards, and she felt his wrathful exhortations wash over her once again. Morrow listened now only to the voice in her heart, which spoke with surety and lethal purpose. She drew the sacrificial blade across Ossel’s jugular and let his blood flow down to pool at the base of the cauldron. She tended the kindle-flame in her chest, and as she ended the marksman’s life she spoke the words.

‘Khaela. Mensha. Khaine.’

There was pain and then there was clarity, and beyond clarity there was an ancient, divine anger. She stood, bloody dagger in hand, as the cauldron pulsed with defiant force. It sang in her eardrums – a clarion that called for the death of petty tyrants. As Morrow took her first step forwards the shrine shifted, and a great wave of heat washed over her from behind. Fire engulfed the statue of Khaine, spreading from the extremities of its crown and outstretched arms to burn brightest at its heart. Then it moved.

The statue strode ahead as if mirroring Morrow’s own movements, threatening to overtake her. Propelled forwards and no longer conscious of pain, she descended the shrine several steps at a time and rushed at the Chainsmith, dagger raised, releasing her battle cry.

The Chainsmith lunged at her with outstretched talons, but she shifted her weight and turned it into a raking blow that scoured her chestplate and ripped away her matted half-cape. In return she thrust her knife towards the towering warlord’s abdomen. The blade lodged where unnatural flesh merged with a deep scar of red crystal. The Chainsmith swung his flail to repel her, but redirected his weapon at the last instant as the animated statue brought its burning blade down upon him.

The Avatar of Khaine pressed its attack against the Chainsmith, and Morrow was forced to duck away as the weight of their confrontation threatened to crush her. White sparks rained as each of the statue’s heavy blows was repelled by the hilt of the Chainsmith’s flail. She could see that the tyrant was gradually getting the measure of this new opponent, and that the power of his patron continued to burgeon within him. The fury with which their weapons met appeared to grant him power; he seized his moment and struck a blow across the statue’s chest that sent shards of burning stone scattering to the blood-soaked ground.

Morrow steeled herself and rushed in once more, circling the Chainsmith and forcing him to reposition to fend her off. She was unaccustomed to fighting in this fashion, but it felt almost instinctive – she understood the flow of it, felt herself to be the master of the narrative it described. Strike and fade. Strike and fade. She wove the rhythm of their duel into the Chainsmith’s grotesque hide, leading the dance in time with the Avatar’s forceful interjections.

Then she brought about an ending. Once again she came at the Chainsmith from the side; he anticipated her strike and pivoted to meet her, all of his strength channelled into a great sweeping blow. This time she did not duck, sidestep or fade: she held her ground. The head of the flail collided with Morrow’s chestplate with pulverising force and she felt breath, blood and life escape her as her ribs shattered. But for a moment, she held firm. And for a moment, the rhythm of the duel was altered. It took an infinitesimal span of time for the Chainsmith to wrest his flail free of Morrow’s broken body: and within that infinitesimal span of time, a flaming sword descended.

The blade of the Avatar of Khaine caught the Chainsmith at the neck and pressed deep through the gap above his gorget, bursting through bone and sinew to emerge still burning from his lower back. Red eyes cast about madly from his half-severed head as the Avatar forced all of its weight down through the blade, doubling the tyrant over backwards as it skewered him into the ground.

The Chainsmith twitched as he died, and the Avatar’s movements grew heavier. Morrow saw the fire within it fade – watched as it became a statue once again. A monument, a consecration. The shadows upon the killing field withdrew, and she raised her eyes to the skies of her homeland. There was a touch of crimson to the horizon, as there ever was at the onset of dusk.

Lights danced before her eyes and Morrow imagined that she could see through the firmament to the bodies that moved beyond: waning Hysh, Ulgu rising, far Azyr presiding over a cosmos of lights that whirled and clashed and forged new orbits with each collision. There is no end to any of it, Morrow thought. Then the fire left her too, and her soul raced to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Thursten is a writer and video game developer from Bath, UK. ‘Cauldron of Blood’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Covens of Blood.

Morathi, High Oracle of the aelven war-god Khaine and Grand Matriarch of the Daughters of Khaine, rose from Mathcoir’s crimson depths, blood and magic dripping from her. She stepped from the great iron cauldron with a shiver of delight, the rejuvenation of her body and spirit complete. Strong, lithe and long-limbed, Morathi’s beauty was as cold and magnificent as ice and as deadly, too – not just to the unwary but to all those on whom she turned her formidable charms.

Three handmaidens, powerful warriors and sorcerers in their own right, hurried to dry and dress her, while a fourth was tasked with brushing out her luxurious hair until it shone like moonlight. Her magic swirled around her, as potent as an aphrodisiac. It, too, had been replenished in the cauldron’s sacred blood-waters. Dressed and filled with the boundless energy of Mathcoir, Morathi took her spear, Heartrender, from its bracket on the wall and paced through the corridors of the grand temple in the citadel of Hagg Nar. All who encountered her progress prostrated themselves and she passed without a glance or a murmur. She barely noticed them unless they failed to offer her the correct respect.

Encircling Hagg Nar like a translucent wall writhed the shadow-magics that made the Realm of Ulgu impenetrable to those who had not the knowledge to navigate its ways. Shadows that confused and waylaid wanderers also gave succour to the Daughters of Khaine, whose own magic was attuned to it, but those same coils of mist hid the stealthy incursions from the unholy minions of Slaanesh and Nagash, who had learnt many of the secrets of Ulgu and exploited them for their own evil purposes. The realm’s earth these days ran with blood and her mountains echoed with screams as the Daughters of Khaine defended their sacred home from the Forces of Chaos.

No, Ulgu was not a peaceful realm, but then Morathi had rarely craved peace in her long, extraordinary life. It certainly did not serve her purposes now. The Shadow Realm’s magic, and the blood spilt within it, was both blessing and curse: power that gave and also took away. Morathi was intimately familiar with such a seeming contradiction. Her life and purpose had alike been forged in such extremes, in horrors such as none living could ever begin to comprehend. Horrors Morathi herself refused to dwell on or allow to be spoken. And yet now, thanks to Khaine and the she-aelves who so zealously worshipped him and worked for his return, her strength grew and her power with it.

Morathi ascended the spiralling walkways from deep within the temple until she came to a wide balcony overlooking an arena of black sand. Slabs of jagged stone stood here and there within the oval pit, and surrounding it was row upon row of tiered seating, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of her Daughters, eager for the contest to begin.

Above them, the sky was black, its surface pitted and cracked by lightning that flickered through and behind obsidian clouds. Beyond Hagg Nar’s limits, Ulgu was a realm of deception and bemusement, where a well-trodden path could as easily lead over a chasm as it could to a Daughter’s intended destination. For a Khainite to live within the peculiar magics of the Shadow Realm, she was required to dedicate herself wholly and without restraint to the war-god and his High Oracle. She risked death with every breath she took, and in so doing, she triumphed over it – and dedicated that triumph to Khaine himself.

But not all of Ulgu was completely hostile to those who called it home. Though coils of shadow, of magic and misinformation, still writhed at the gates, their questing tendrils could not penetrate the dome of protection built over the citadel by Morathi’s power and reinforced daily by the Scathborn who lived within Hagg Nar. The barrier protected Morathi and Mathcoir itself from attack, but also the thousands of she-aelves who lived and worshipped here.

Magic sparked across the dome as Morathi stepped back from the balcony, a coruscation of crimson sparkles and flitters that danced and shattered high above them. Weird shapes and patterns flickered over the black sands and the murmur from the seats faded away. Morathi sat in the huge carved-stone throne at the balcony’s centre, ignoring Melusai Filstag who waited in inscrutable silence beside it. Filstag had much news; Filstag could wait.

The arena fell into held-breath silence, the weight of thousands of awe-struck gazes caressing Morathi’s skin, the reverence no less than her due and her demand. She held them in suspense a little longer, winding the tension, savouring their hunger, their love. And then she slammed the butt of her spear onto the stone, the flat crack echoing out across the vast space: the signal for the first bout to begin.

All around the circumference of the arena, she-aelves began to call out in praise of Khaine and in anticipation of the bloodshed to come. Only under cover of that sound did Morathi give Filstag leave to speak. Still she did not look at her, but kept hungry eyes fixed on the warriors running onto the sands below. More blood for Khaine’s glory, for the war-god’s exaltation.

‘The Forces of Chaos grow bolder, First Daughter, both here on Ulgu and elsewhere. Our war-covens march with the humans and duardin, or come to their aid when the benefit falls to us, and turn the tides of every battle they fight. Still, the lesser races shrink from our forces, understanding nothing of us and our dedication. Some have ventured the opinion that they do not need us to achieve victory. That… our ways mark us not as servants of Order, but of Chaos.’

Morathi noted the tiny hesitation in the melusai’s response. Her lip curled. The old fear rising in the weak, frightened denizens of the Mortal Realms as it ever did when the Daughters of Khaine threw themselves into battle to honour their god. Combat was sacred; slaughter was an act of reverence and dedication that had made the Daughters of Khaine the mightiest allies of Order since Sigmar himself. To kill for Khaine, to destroy life in honour of the sacrifice he had made, was their highest, and only, purpose. Of course humans couldn’t understand such dedication. Not even their Stormcast Eternals spent their lives so willingly, for they knew that resurrection awaited them. Morathi suspected they’d take fewer risks in battle if their deaths were final, as the aelves’ were. That was true dedication; true glory.

The temptation to abandon the other realms to face the horrors of Chaos alone was great, but Morathi resisted. Every enemy death was a triumph, after all, and every being, god or mortal, who had ever harmed her was an enemy, whether they allied with Chaos or Order. And every drop of blood spilt was holy – and filled with glorious purpose.

‘Khaine himself is pledged to destroying Chaos. We must do no less, despite the mewling of the lesser races. Are your sisters so feeble that the disgust of mere humans can dampen their battle-fever? Is their faith in almighty Khaine, in me, so small that they would cower from words and hard looks the way a tzaangor cowers from our khinerai lifetakers?’

Filstag cowered herself, just a little. She was a fierce warrior in her own right, had led war-covens in a dozen brutal, bloody campaigns before becoming Morathi’s bodyguard, but none withstood the High Oracle’s rage unscathed.

‘They fight hard and with honour, regardless of what their allies speak or think,’ she said quickly. ‘They fight for Order and for you. For the god of battle above all. There will be no cease until Khaine is returned to us, First Daughter. Until he is restored by your power and the sacred magic of Mathcoir itself.’

Morathi’s fingers tapped Heartrender’s smooth haft in idle, unconscious threat. ‘In Khaine’s image and for his glory,’ she said, and Filstag hurried to echo her.

Mathcoir. The great iron cauldron from which Morathi’s magic sprang. Mathcoir had held her portion of the souls reclaimed from the belly of Slaanesh, the God of Excess and Morathi’s greatest nemesis. She too had spent aeons in that belly and, before that, in torments and tortures that had forever twisted her. From those freed souls she had crafted the first Daughters: melusai like Filstag; and the khinerai. From those small, humble beginnings, the Daughters of Khaine had grown in stature, in number, in influence. In power.

Tens of thousands of she-aelves now dedicated their lives, their skills and their deaths to the war god – through Morathi. Morathi who would not stop until Chaos was defeated. Morathi who would not stop until she, herself, gained immortality. Morathi who sat now in the heart of her power, in the very centre of Hagg Nar beneath its sheltering, concealing mists, and watched blood spilt in her name and Khaine’s.

And yet she was not content. Morathi was never content, for always she was slighted – her Daughters were slighted – by the more puritan of the Forces of Order.

‘It pleases me to report, though, that I found no base for your fears among the sects you sent me to investigate,’ Filstag said, breaking into Morathi’s reverie.

The High Oracle raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ she asked, turning briefly to the melusai. ‘That surprises me. Perhaps you are ill-equipped to ferret out treachery. Perhaps it was going on beneath your very nose and you could not see it. Still, tell me what you can of your travels and interactions of the last months. I shall judge for myself their loyalty or otherwise.’

The Grand Matriarch listened to Filstag’s steady, calm breathing. Whatever she was or wasn’t, she did not anger easily. Still, Morathi suspected that Filstag harboured oceans of rage beneath that cold, inscrutable visage. Here in the very heart of Hagg Nar, the melusai had dropped the illusion that made her appear as other aelves. Her slender waist thickened where her hips should be into a muscular tail of emerald shading into midnight black and she swayed tall upon her coils. Monstrous in Morathi’s own image, but beautiful, too.

She was a Blood Sister, and she had been Morathi’s bodyguard for decades, following her into battle and assisting her in many rituals. And yet despite their history, in the past few years the High Oracle of Khaine had begun to doubt Filstag’s loyalty. It should be impossible, she knew, for one of the Scathborn to betray her, for she had moulded that aelf’s soul herself when it had been freed from the curse of Slaanesh. Moulded it and given it life as a melusai, armed with loyalty and bloodlust and the exquisite pain of the Scath touch, and yet the more time that passed, the more convinced she became.

Filstag was disloyal. Filstag was a traitor. She stank of it.

As head of the Cult of Khaine, Morathi did not need proof to act upon her suspicions, but she was determined to discover how far the rot spread. None of these thoughts showed in the High Oracle’s perfect face as she looked back down at the black sands and the combat reaching a frenzy below. She slammed her spear into the stone again, and more gates in the arena walls opened. Captured beastkin lumbered forth, braying challenges, and the fighters who seconds before had been duelling to first blood – and occasionally to the death – united into a single cohesive force against this new, true enemy.

The cheers from the crowd rose in pitch, shrill prayers to Khaine for blood and victory piercing the cacophony.

‘The Realm of Life is particularly beset by enemies, First Daughter,’ Filstag said without a hint of animosity about Morathi’s opinion of her ability or otherwise to sniff out treachery. ‘The Dark Gods have their claws deep in Ghyran’s verdant hide, though both the Draichi Ganeth and the Khailebron sects oppose them at every turn. The Draichi Ganeth, in particular, have integrated themselves into most of the major cities in order to learn whatever they can to aid us in our great quest. Both sects are ever alert for a disparaging word said against them or against you, First Daughter, and retribution is ever swift and savage. They are loyal,’ she said again, perhaps unwisely, perhaps a little too forcefully.

Filstag paused, but Morathi gave her nothing, instead perceiving her via her magic as she kept her face turned to the slaughter in the arena below. One of the beastkin, a giant wolf five times its normal size and with a slavering muzzle over-full with yellowed, wickedly sharp teeth, had a witch-aelf by the leg and was shaking her, blood and gobbets of flesh flying. Her screams shamed her, and one of her sisters waited until others had hacked into the wolf’s hindquarters and distracted it, and then decapitated her as she began to crawl away. The crowd yelled its disgust for her cowardice and stones and rocks rained down on her corpse from those sitting close enough.

‘I spent time with each sect, as commanded, observing their structure and worship, their daily ritual combat and the interactions and commands of their priestesses. The Ghyran Khailebron take on such quieter tasks as their hag queen, Belleth, commands,’ Filstag continued, and her tone now was one of stilted disdain. Most of the Daughters of Khaine shared her contempt for the Khailebron aelves, though Morathi kept herself above such pettiness; her favouritism extended to particular aelves, those who showed real promise, not entire sects. The Khailebron spies and assassins had many uses that those loyal to other splinters of the Cult of Khaine could not fathom. Yet it pleased Morathi to foster inter-sect competition. The more her children fought each other, the less likely they were to unite to fight her.

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