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Tower of Secrets - Graeme Lyon

About the Author

An Extract from ‘A Dynasty of Monsters’

A Black Library Publication

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TOWER OF SECRETS

By Graeme Lyon

'The master will see you now.'

Jaqlyn Kouslo stood and stretched. She had been sitting in an uncomfortable chair for too long. She took one last look around the small parlour in which they had waited, taking in the overstuffed chairs, the ornately decorated tables covered with arcane contraptions, and the esoteric runes that were carved into the walls in subtle, snaking patterns. It reminded her of home, in a way.

She looked to her companion, and he nodded for her to take the lead. Thorri was always uncomfortable in such surroundings, drawn more towards functional stone and metal. He had barely stayed still for the hour or more they had been kept waiting, instead pacing the room, examining the instruments and taking notes in one of the many small journals he carried with him.

'He doesn't like to be kept waiting,' said the tall woman in the doorway. Thorri spluttered, and Jaqlyn replied before the duardin could say something impolite about the irony.

'Our apologies. Please lead the way.'

The woman, clad in ornately decorated armour of blue and purple, inclined her head and strode away. Jaqlyn followed, casting a reproachful look at Thorri, who shrugged.

The woman led them from the parlour back into an expansive entrance hall and up a marble staircase, the banisters decorated with stylised renditions of the zodiacal godbeasts from the legends of Ghur and the other realms. At the top, they passed through a door and down a series of wide corridors decorated in rich colours with tapestries on the walls showing scenes of ancient heroes performing great deeds.

'Your master enjoys the myths of the realms?' Jaqlyn asked.

'It is one of his areas of interest,' the woman replied, stopping and pushing on a section of wall, which slid aside silently to reveal a hidden door. 'He believes that in the tales of the past we can find the truths of the future.'

'Good duardin thinking, that,' muttered Thorri. 'Learn from your ancestors.'

'Precisely, Thorri Steelfist,' said a thin, reedy voice from beyond the doorway. 'Your people preserve their past in a way that many other civilisations have failed to. I have never had the pleasure of visiting one of the fabled Dispossessed holds in Azyr. I imagine I could learn much from them.'

Thorri said nothing. Jaqlyn knew little about his past and where he came from, but she'd learned enough in the months of their partnership that she didn't think he hailed from the Celestial Realm. In fact, she'd come to suspect that, like her he originally came from Chamon, and that his people were the famed Kharadron Overlords, though she'd never dared ask him.

'Come in, my friends. My, my, Jaqlyn Kouslo and Thorri Steelfist in the flesh. What an honour. Your reputation precedes you.'

'And what reputation is that?' Jaqlyn asked, stepping into a chamber that set her magical senses tingling. A long table stood before her, littered with half-burned candles that dripped wax onto piles of books and scrolls. Beyond the light from the candles, the room was dark, but she could just make out a figure. 'Your… associate here was vague on what you want of us.'

'Ah, yes, I asked Karemma to be discreet. The nature of the task I wish you to undertake must remain secret, for reasons that shall be obvious soon.'

Thorri followed Jaqlyn through the doorway, and a device tied to his belt with a frayed rope began to clang. He slammed it against his leg until it stopped.

'Sorry,' he said. 'It goes off in the presence of concentrated magic.'

'A useful warning tool,' said Karemma's master. Jaqlyn squinted to try and make him out, but he remained swathed in shadow. 'But you have nothing to fear from me. I doubt I could hurt you if I tried. To answer your question, Magister Kouslo, your reputation is that of those experienced with the mystical and able to deal with threats of a, shall we say, less-than-living nature.'

'You've got an undead problem?' asked Thorri bluntly.

'To get to the point, yes,' the figure replied.

'Point us at them,' Thorri said, grinning.

'They are not here, friend duardin. Which is why I am. As I'm sure you are aware, some time ago there was a significant magical disturbance across the realms, centred on Shyish.'

'The Necroquake,' Jaqlyn said. Memories flashed through her mind of that night, of Tantalum ablaze, the dead all around…

'That is not a name I'd heard, but yes, appropriate,' the figure said, drawing Jaqlyn back from the dark memories. 'On the night it happened, I was in my tower, out on the Plains of Thirio. The wave of magic shattered the wards, and before I knew it, an army of the dead were inside. Were it not for Karemma, I would be dead. As it is, I was badly injured, and left behind something very important to me.'

The shrouded figure stepped forward. He was slight in stature and hunched with age. A stout cane was clutched in one gnarled hand. Jaqlyn suppressed a gasp as his face came into the flickering candlelight.

'By Grungni's beard,' Thorri breathed. 'What happened to you?'

Jaqlyn cursed the duardin's lack of tact, but the figure answered matter-of-factly.

'In the escape from the tower, I was touched by one of the spectral beings that invaded my sanctum,' he said. 'As you can see, it has left a mark upon me.'

The left side of the man's face was marked with a livid handprint, the flesh even more withered and shrunken than the rest of him.

'The bitter irony is that had I taken the artefact I need you to retrieve, the phantom could never have touched my flesh. It is a crown, you see, one imbued with certain properties that bring me greater power and vigour. Without it my strength is slowly ebbing away, and my magical abilities are weakened. Without it, I am diminished, and more than that, I miss it. I need your help.'

'One question,' Thorri said, and their would-be employer nodded. 'How much are ye paying?'

The proffered fee was more than satisfactory, and so Jaqlyn and Thorri agreed to the job. The wizard - whose name they discovered, was Malgorius - sent Karemma, his warrior servant, with them. Her task was to lead them to his tower in the expansive Thirion plains, and to provide support of a more physical nature. She was an expert swordswoman, experienced in fighting the dead, he said, and could deal with creatures such as skeletons and deadwalkers while Jaqlyn and Thorri used their talents to defeat spectral enemies and overrule any of the towers remaining magical traps.

The journey took slightly more than a week, the small party crossing the empty plains by day when the beasts of Ghur rested in their lairs. By night, Jaqlyn cast subtle enchantments to protect them, and Karemma was ever watchful, twin blades at the ready. And so, as night fell on the ninth day of their travels, they approached what Karemma called the Tùr Dìomhaireachd, which apparently translated as the 'Tower of Secrets'.

'Bit of a pretentious name,' Thorri grumbled to Jaqlyn as they gazed at the tower, silhouetted against the dying amber light of Ghur's sun.

'Well, that's us wizards for you,' Jaqlyn said distractedly. 'Back in Tantalum, the magisters named their towers all sorts of things you'd no doubt laugh at.' She was studying the structure, trying to match it up with the description of the interior Karemma had given them during the journey. The swordswoman had gone ahead to check the perimeter for enemies. At length, she returned, gesturing to Jaqlyn and Thorri to join her.

As they moved forward, Jaqlyn felt a change in the magical energies surrounding her, as though she had crossed an invisible barrier.

'Do ye hear that?' muttered Thorri.

She did. Where just moments before there had been nothing but the ambient sounds of the plains at night, now there was… nothing. Just an eerie silence. No birds sang their last serenades of the day. No beasts gave warning that as darkness fell their hunts would begin. No wind howled. All was still. As quiet as the grave.

The trio approached the simple wooden doorway that served as the tower's entrance. Jaqlyn held her hand to the stone around it, probing the structure for magical traps. 'This is curious,' she said.

'What's that?' Thorri asked.

She opened herself up more to the magic of the tower, visualising it as a great weave of threads. This was her unique perception of the magical energies that infused the Mortal Realms. She had never encountered another wizard who saw it the same way.

'I'm finding more of a barrier than I'd expect given the way the wards broke,' she replied. 'It's not quite intact, but the threads are not as tattered as they should be.'

'What does that mean?'

Thorri's understanding of magic was very different from Jaqlyn's. He had no natural perception of it, instead relying on duardin runic ingenuity and mechanical devices to gain a view of the aetheric world.

'Imagine a wall,' Jaqlyn said.

'Not hard,' Thorri said sourly, rapping the knuckles of his artificial metal arm against the tower.

'Imagine that the magic is the mortar holding the stones together and that the power of the Necroquake loosened that mortar.'

'Stones would fall and the whole thing would become unstable.'

'Exactly. And that has happened. But not as much as I'd expected. Not enough to make it topple.'

'What does that mean for what we shall find in there?'

Jaqlyn turned to see Karemma staring at her curiously, hand on the pommel of one of the long, curved swords she wore at her waist.

'I don't know,' Jaqlyn said. 'If the wards had broken as badly as I thought, I'd expect to find the tower heavily occupied, with the dead leeching off the magic to sustain them. Like this… they should be enough that the worst of it was kept out.'

'Then let's get in there and get the master's crown,' Karemma said, striding past Jaqlyn and pulling open the door, which squealed on unoiled hinges, breaking the silence. Thorri cursed at the sound, and Jaqlyn gave him a sympathetic look. He was clearly on edge, as was she. She didn't share the swordswoman's nonchalance. They were about to walk into darkness and danger, and the thought of the horrors they might find inside chilled her blood. With a heavy heart, Jaqlyn eased her sword from its scabbard and followed the warrior into the darkness. Behind her, Thorri pulled two pistols from their holsters and did likewise.

Inside the tower was as still and quiet as outside. A foul stench filled Jaqlyn's nose and throat as Karemma led them through the ground floor and onto the first level above. It smelled like death, old and rank. It was the smell Jaqlyn associated with tombs. Their surroundings were unsettling. Torn tapestries and bloodstained paintings on the walls depicted grotesque scenes of slaughter.

'What d'you think was on those pedestals?' Jaqlyn asked, pointing to a series of empty plinths along the wall of a dust-shrouded corridor.

'This is a dark place, Jaqlyn,' Thorri said after a moment. 'Whatever Malgorius was doing here, I don't think it was pleasant. And I think those are meant to display something unpleasant. I don't like it here at all. I can't sense magic like you, but I can feel the evil of this tower.'

Jaqlyn couldn't help but agree.

They moved up the tower with slow precision, cautious not to trigger any of the magical traps Malgorius had described to them. Along the way, the scenes in the artwork became even more disturbing, depicting acts that turned Jaqlyn's stomach. She took the lead to move past them as quickly as possible; opening herself up to the weave of magic, searching for any loose threads that might signal danger.

She climbed the stairway onto the third level and pushed the thick oak door at the top, which creaked slowly open. She stepped through, the effort of dividing her attention between her physical surroundings and the magical atmosphere giving her the beginnings of a headache. She stopped for a moment to focus herself, and in that instant, a figure reached for her. It was a deadwalker, its flesh desiccated by the dry atmosphere in the tower. Behind it were more of its kind. The creature emitted a low moan, and lunged, black teeth gnashing in dried gums and coming close to damping on to her neck. One of its eyes rolled in its socket, the other hanging against a hollow cheek by a thread of sinew. She smelled the sickly-sweet rot of its flesh, and the sour, dry stench from its jaws. Instinctively, she jerked back and quickly channelled power into an inchoate blast of energy which shoved the deadwalker back into the mass of undead approaching behind it.

Karemma barged past Jaqlyn, shoving her against the wall as the swordswoman lashed out with her blade. The blow was almost too fast to see, and cleaved through dry flesh and dusty bone, sending the deadwalker to the ground. The warrior followed up with a kick that took the undead creature's head from its neck and sent it to shatter against the opposite wall. Its body spasmed and was still.

The other undead monsters pushed forward. There were more than a dozen of them, with more emerging from shadowed corners and open doorways in the small chamber beyond the door.

Two loud gunshots sounded, and two of the deadwalkers fell, bullets emerging from the backs of their heads in sprays of bone fragments and brain matter that coated the dusty paintings on the walls. Two others went down in a heartbeat as Karemma leapt forward and separated their heads from their bodies with a pair of graceful cuts. But there were plenty more.

Jaqlyn opened her aetheric senses once more and started to gather energy. The prevailing magic here was the amber of Ghur, threaded through with the amethyst power of Shyish - she quickly drew some of these threads together and knitted them into an attack that she unleashed at a knot of deadwalkers emerging from a door across the chamber. What manifested had the form of an amber lion with a leering death's head where a proud snout and jaw should have been. Jaqlyn shivered to see it. Ever since the Necroquake, it had become more and more difficult to cast spells untainted by the magic of Death.

The apparition roared like a wild beast and loped into the deadwalkers, its skeletal jaws tearing through flesh and bone, and great clawed paws collapsing ribcages. Its might swiftly overpowered that of the creatures of Shyish.

When the undead had been dealt with, Jaqlyn gestured and the spell disintegrated back into spiralling threads of magic in amber and purple that slowly rejoined the great weave around them. She looked around to see Karemma driving her blade through the skull of one last deadwalker. The rest were still. Jaqlyn waited a moment, listening for the shuffle of dead feet or low moans issuing impossibly from rotted throats, but there was no sound save the breathing of the living.

She lowered her guard, and her companions followed suit, Thorri reloading his pistols and Karemma sheathing her sword before turning angrily to Jaqlyn.

'This is why I should go first,' she said. 'If I'd been just a little slower, that abomination could have killed you.'

'I appreciate the concern,' Jaqlyn said, 'but you need us here to deal with the magic. If you walk into a trap that you can't see, it'll go much worse for you than an attack by a zombie.'

Karemma inclined her head. 'I can accept that.' She grinned. 'But take care.'

Jaqlyn smiled in return. 'Keep watching my back.'

Besides the undead, the third level was deserted. As they passed up the stairway to the fourth, Jaqlyn felt a magical pressure on her, further increasing the pain in her head.

'Are ye okay?' Thorri asked.

She shook her head. 'There's something here, some power. It's… pressing on me.'

The duardin frowned and checked some of his instruments. 'Aye,' he said, 'there's strong magic here. A ward to stop the undead climbing higher, I'd wager.'

'It'll pass,' Jaqlyn said, her head pounding.

They climbed to the fourth level, which was devoid of foes, and of the hideous artwork from the lower levels. Instead, it seemed to be a large dissection chamber. Stone slabs, stained with blood, dotted the floor, and a collection of grisly blades and other instruments lined the walls. Karemma lingered over these, gazing at them with an expression Jaqlyn couldn't read.

As she gazed around, Jaqlyn heard a sound, a distant howl.

From the plains below, she supposed.

Thorri, as disgusted with the chamber as Jaqlyn, urged them on to the fifth floor. They advanced, and he joined Jaqlyn as she moved slowly along a dark corridor. Sconces along the walls held half-burned candles, which Jaqlyn lit with a light touch of magic, channelling threads of Aqshian energy to kindle the flames. The flickering lights revealed streaks of dried blood along the walls and floor, as if something had been dragged along the corridor towards the door at the end.

'Are you sure she shouldn't go first?' he asked in a whisper. 'That deadwalker could have killed you, and I don't want to see you die.'

'I'd much prefer that none of us die, Thorri,' Jaqlyn said. 'Besides, the magic here isn't right. The wards are still active… Weaker than they once were, I'd reckon, but definitely not as broken as Malgorius told us. They're dangerous, and need to be disarmed as we go along. She can't do that.'

Thorri grumbled something inaudible and pulled a device from his belt. Jaqlyn recognised it as what he called his 'aetheric scanner'. He used it in much the same way as she used her second sight, to see and analyse the magic around them. He flicked a switch on it and watched the dials.

'There's something here,' he said. 'A spike of magic. Can you see it?'

Jaqlyn closed her eyes and reached out with her aether-senses. The weave of magic in the atmosphere around her was being drawn towards a point about thirty feet in front of them. The glimmering multicoloured threads were pulled tight filled with tension. She focused on where they led, a tangle of thread like a badly tied knot, pulsating with power in all the hues of the magical rainbow. It was tempting to try to unpick it, but she sensed danger. She opened her eyes again.

'Yes, the magic is converging at one point. I don't know what it is, but it's messy. Like something that's been cast quickly and left. I could try and untangle it, but it would take time, and I feel there's more to it. It's focused on that door.'

'I should have something here…' Thorri said, patting the pouches on the twin bandoliers he had across his stout torso. As he did, Karemma stepped forward, a sword drawn, and advanced on the door. Before Jaqlyn could warn her, she reached out the blade and touched the door. She gave a shout of pain, and for a moment her outline blurred. Jaqlyn blinked and it was gone. Karemma reared backwards, the tip of her sword sparking, a curse on her lips. She fell, and Jaqlyn ran to her.

'Karemma, are you all right?'

The woman glared at her. 'You're supposed to be disabling those wards,' she snapped.

'That's what I was saying. There's greater power in them still than there should be. But it's not quite right. As if it's been hurriedly rebuilt.'

Karemma looked at her. 'Not good enough. That could have killed me.'

'Then you shouldn't have barged ahead,' Jaqlyn said.

Karemma's expression was venomous, and for a brief moment fear surged through Jaqlyn. Then it passed, and the swordswoman nodded and slumped back. Jaqlyn turned to Thorri, who had pulled several items from his pouches and was assembling them into something that looked like a compact pistol.

'Are you going to shoot it?' Jaqlyn asked, allowing doubt to creep into her tone.

'Something like that,' Thorri said. 'You said it's tangled, aye?'

'That's how I perceive it, yes. Like a badly tied knot.'

'Then we do what you do with rope when you need through it in a hurry.'

'Cut it?'

'Exactly. Karemma there had the right idea, just not the right tools. Basically, she didn't have this.' Thorri brandished his completed device. 'I don't have a name for it yet, because I just came up with it. Let's see if it works…'

Jaqlyn had seen Thorri's ingenuity at work many times. Often it was genius, and exactly what was needed in any given situation. Sometimes, though, it caused as many problems as it solved. Usually with explosions.

'Karemma,' she called, 'we should get behind something while Thorri tries his… key.'

'It's perfectly safe,' the duardin said, sounding slightly upset. 'Probably.'

Jaqlyn and Karemma retreated several paces behind Thorri, who looked as though he were having second thoughts about firing his device at the door.

'Well, here goes,' he muttered, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened - at least to mortal eyes. Jaqlyn's aether-senses were immediately overwhelmed by a flare of energy. She felt the flow of magical power channelled through Thorri's device strike the snarled magic at the door, and cut through it like a sword through flesh. The energies tied into the tangle were unleashed, the tension she had noted in the magical threads releasing. The effect was like a whipcrack. Jaqlyn staggered back, overwhelmed by pain. She closed her inner eye, cutting herself off from the magic, and the pain receded. She opened her eyes to see Thorri looking down at her, thoughtful concern on his face.

'Are ye all right, Jaqlyn?' he said. 'You fell back like you'd been hit.'

'I'm fine, I think,' she said, pulling herself up. After a moment's hesitation, she opened her magical senses again, reaching out to the door. Where the tangle had been, there was now just the background magic that infused the entire tower. 'That worked, I think,' she said. 'We can move on, I don't sense anything else ahead on this level.'

'I'll go first then,' said Karemma harshly, 'if you've actually done what you're here for and there isn't going to be anything else likely to kill me.' The warrior barged forward, kicking open the door. She passed through it and Jaqlyn went to follow, but Thorri stopped her.

'What happened to you there?' he asked in a low voice

'The magic exploded, in a way. It hit me, and I couldn't block out the sensation in time.'

'I didn't feel anything,' he mused. 'But a couple of my instruments overheated. So it only affected the magically attuned?'

'Probably,' Jaqlyn said.

'Then why,' Thorri asked slowly, 'did Karemma react like she'd been hit as well?'

Jaqlyn's senses proved correct. The fifth floor held no more dangers for the trio, and no sign of whatever had been dragged bleeding through the corridor. That was a mystery Jaqlyn hoped never to solve. This level seemed to be filled with cells, each with a sturdy lockable door. Many had dried blood on the floor and up the walls, and Jaqlyn wondered once more just what Malgorius had been studying here. The sixth beckoned, and as she climbed the spiral staircase, Jaqlyn heard the eerie howl once more, louder this time. Had the creature come closer to the tower, sensing life inside? Was this something they'd have to face when they emerged back into Ghur's night? Thorri had insisted on leading, with a device in his hand checking the magic ahead. Briefly freed from focusing on the weave, and with her headache receding, Jaqlyn's thoughts turned to the woman who was behind her. Was she magically attuned? It would be a useful trait a in a wizard's bodyguard, to be sure, though generally those with the ability to perceive the elemental energy of the Mortal Realms were also able to shape it, and use it. And if that were the case, why did Malgorius need Jaqlyn? There was something here they hadn't been told.

The stairs ended, and a corridor spiralled ahead of them, archway set into the left wall led into a gallery. More paintings lined the walls, below high windows that lit the chamber with bright moonlight. Each painting showed a landscape from across the Mortal Realms. Jaqlyn was relieved that they weren't grisly scenes like the ones on the lower levels, until she thought she saw something move in one of them. She drew closer and saw that inside the painting, a duardin warrior stood on a fire-wreathed plane, an axe in each hand. As she watched, a horde of brutish orruks entered the frame from each side, barrelling towards the duardin, who met them with steel and fury. She looked away.

The unearthly howl sounded again, even closer than before.

'Did ye hear that?' Thorri whispered.

'It must be from outside,' Jaqlyn said.

Thorri's answer was drowned out by the howl, this time much closer. Too close. Jaqlyn turned to see something emerge from one of the paintings. It was the spectral figure of a woman draped in a long dress and swathed with robes that covered her head, but left the impression of a screaming skull.

'Thorri!' Jaqlyn shouted, as the monster advanced on the duardin, and slashed a ghostly claw at him. He screamed and fell, and the spectre howled.

She felt the sound pierce her soul, and suddenly she remembered the worst day of her life, Tantalum burning around her, the magic she had unleashed out of control and adding to the devastation. She was back there again, smelling the burning corpses, feeling the horror as she watched a giant creature of shadow shaped like a bull charge through the streets…

…and then she was back in the tower, lying next to Thorri. He seemed to be saying something, but she couldn't hear. She reached for her ear, and felt blood dribbling from it. She looked at the duardin, and saw that the banshee's claws had carved through the light armour he wore and drawn blood.

'Where is it?' she said, sure she was shouting, but unable to hear herself and not caring. She looked around and saw the phantom. It was advancing on Karemma, who was standing with swords drawn, facing it with a hideous sneer on her face. She turned back to Thorri, who was scrabbling at his belt, his expression a mix of determination and agony. He pulled something small and round from a pouch and rolled it towards Jaqlyn before collapsing back, blood flowing freely from his wounds.

She pulled herself up and grabbed the sphere Thorri had sent her way. It was one of the bombs she had helped him construct, weaving magic into the explosive core to make it effective against enemies of an aethereal nature. She fumbled with the fuse, trying to remember Thorri's instructions on how to prime it and make it work. She needed a flame. She tried to grasp a thread of Aqshy from the magical weave, but her head throbbed and she couldn't focus. She looked up again, to see Karemma backing away from the banshee, swords swinging. They seemed to be making contact with it rather than passing through - magical blades, she guessed - but it was unhurt.

She saw the ghostly creature pull back and howl again. She didn't hear it this time, but felt its effects once more, like a distant echo of her past crashing back to the present - a forest clearing, the monstrous flaming bull killing the men who'd followed her from Tantalum's ruins. She shook it off and crawled over to Thorri, searching the pouches on his belt for one of the thick, long-stemmed matches she knew he carried. She found one, and with shaking hands used it to light the fuse on the bomb. She rolled it towards where the banshee and Karemma clashed, hoping the swordswoman would notice and get out of the way.

She grabbed Thorri and began to drag him towards the chamber's other exit, using strength she didn't know she had. Unable to hear, she had no idea what was going on behind her, the experience surreal and terrifying. After an eternity, she reached the door, wrenched it open and hauled the heavy duardin through, before slamming it shut.

She couldn't hear the explosion of the bomb, but she felt its force vibrate physically through the stone, and aethereally through the weave of magic around her.

For a long time, she lay there in the dark, chest heaving.

Gradually, she realised that she could hear herself breathing again, and Thorri too. She sat up.

'Thorri,' she said, her voice sounding strange to her slowly returning hearing. 'Thorri, wake up.'

'S'not morning,' the duardin slurred. 'Still dark.'

'Come on,' she insisted. 'Sit up.'

'Jaqlyn,' he mumbled, pulling himself up against a wall. 'What happened?'

'A banshee. It attacked you… Oh, we need to do something about that wound.' The gashes on Thorri's shoulder were still bleeding. He felt them gingerly, and grunted.

'Don't worry, lass. I've given myself worse. The bomb, did you…?'

She nodded. 'I don't know if I got it. Or what happened to Karemma.'

Thorri pulled himself to his feet, swaying unsteadily 'It doesn't matter. We're nearly at the top. Let's see what's up there and find out what's really going on in this benighted tower.'

Jaqlyn stood too, grasping the wall for support. 'Can you feel the power above us? No, sorry, of course you can't. It's… massive. And focused. It's designed to keep something out. And I want to know what.'

The ascent to the seventh and highest level of the tower was steep. Spiralling stairs led upwards, and as she ascended, the oppressive power of the ward Jaqlyn had sensed grew. Each step became more difficult. Thorri, curiously, seemed unaffected. Finally, she had to stop.

'It's stopping anything magical,' she told the duardin. 'It's crude, but it would work against the dead, since they're animated by magic. A good way to keep them out. It's also affecting me. I need to break it. It'll take a few minutes.'

Thorri slumped on the step beside her, back to the wall, and Jaqlyn focused on the magical barrier. The magical threads pulsed strongly with power, but with magic so crudely woven, breaking it apart without care could be catastrophic. Slowly, she picked at the tapestry of energy, finding errant threads and teasing them loose, pulling on them and slowly unpicking the structure of the spell. She pulled at one last thread and the remaining magic broke. At once, she felt a rush of release as the oppressive power around her collapsed. She gasped aloud.

'Are you all right?' Thorri looked concerned.

'Yes. It's done. We can go up.'

The duardin stood, and smiled grimly. 'All right then. Let's finish this.'

The spiralling staircase ended in the centre of a chamber that spanned the entire floor. It was lit by hundreds of candles on floating platforms. They illuminated packed bookshelves, and a plethora of delicate silver and brass instruments that made Thorri's eyes light up. Workbenches dotted the room, many of them scattered with books and scrawled notes, others bearing beakers, test tubes and more complicated contraptions of glass that contained fluids in dozens of different colours.

Along one curved stretch of wall were a series of tables on which lay figures - an orruk, a skaven, a hulking ogor and more. Each had been partially dissected, flesh flayed back from muscle, bones exposed, organs removed. Jaqlyn suppressed the urge to vomit as her eyes passed along the row and she saw a young human, his chest spread open and heart missing.

'What was he doing here?' Thorri said, his voice half full of wonder, half outrage.

'Exactly the question I should be asking you,' said a voice from behind them. A thin, reedy voice that Jaqlyn recognised instantly. She turned to see Malgorius standing before them. He seemed less frail than when they had seen him last, standing erect, draped in robes of sea green. He wore a spiked crown of dark metal, inset with runes that blazed with the amethyst magic of Shyish to Jaqlyn's aethereal senses.

'Who are you?' the wizard demanded.

'What do ye mean, "who are we"?' Thorri shouted. 'You hired us to come here and get that gaudy hat you're wearing. How did you get here first?'

'I assure you, duardin, that I did no such thing. Now tell me who you are, and why you're here, before I am forced to destroy you.'

Jaqlyn felt a build-up of power from the wizard, and lifted her hands to show she was no threat. 'We have no wish to hurt you,' she said. 'We've been tricked here, somehow. We were told a story about the night the Death magic hit, and what happened here. Tell us what really took place.'

'Power, great power, shook my tower, and broke the wards I had built to keep out my enemy,' Malgorius said after a moment. 'After it came undead horrors. Skeletons, ghosts and worse. I managed to hold them off, confine them to the floors below. And I rebuilt the wards, though it cost me dearly to do so. I had to use magic of a most terrible sort.'

The wizard stepped past them and moved over to the young man whose corpse lay on one of the dissection tables. He looked down at the figure, and his expression was one of regret and self-loathing.

'Blood magic,' Jaqlyn said. 'You sacrificed him to power the spell and keep the wards intact. That's why they're… wrong. The power came from something dark.'

'Yes,' Malgorius said. 'Since then, I've been studying what happened and trying to find a way to restore the wards fully and drive out the creatures that lurk below. So I assure you, I have had no opportunity to meet you, let alone hire you to retrieve something I have in my possession! So please drop your flimsy pretence and tell me who you are and why you arc really here.'

'Who they are doesn't matter, Malgorius,' said a voice from behind them. The wizard turned, horror etched on his face.

'You brought that creature here? Into my tower? She's what the wards were designed to keep out!'

'Don't think too badly of them,' said Karemma smoothly. 'They were deceived as thoroughly as you once were. They thought they met you in an opulent mansion. In fact, they were stumbling through a ruin talking to shadows. Mortals are so easy to fool with simple glamours.'

As she said this, it was as though a veil lifted from Jaqlyn's eyes, and she saw Karemma clearly for the first time. Her form was humanoid, but every detail was wrong. Her limbs were jointed in the wrong direction; her legs ended in hooves, and her arms in long, slender claws. Worst of all was the face. It was utterly inhuman, with large black eyes surmounting a slit where a nose should be and a wide, fanged maw.

'What are you?' Jaqlyn stammered.

'I am the future,' Karemma said, stepping forward and raising a claw.

'Not another step, daemon!' yelled Thorri, moving in front of Jaqlyn and firing one of his pistols at Karemma. Lightning-fast, she stepped aside and, impossibly, grabbed the bullet from the air with one claw. She examined it carefully before throwing it aside.

'Careful, duardin. These runic bullets of yours could actually hurt me. And if they did, you would regret it for a long, long time. You have been useful to me, you and dear Jaqlyn, and will be again. I've seen it in the shadows of the future. You will be crucial to my apotheosis. Alas, Malgorius, the same cannot be said for you.'

She swept forward, and before Jaqlyn could react, she had slid one claw into Malgorius' gut, lifting him from the ground. With the other, she reached up and gently pulled the crown from the wizard's head, before throwing his lifeless body to the ground with a casual flick of her arm. Thorri rushed to his side.

'Why did you go to all this trouble?' Jaqlyn asked, shaking with rage. 'Why the deceit? Why not just come in here yourself and do this?'

The daemon laughed, a sound that hurt Jaqlyn's ears.

'Malgorius and I have a history. He once sought power from any source that would provide it. It amused me to aid him, for my own purposes. But he was treacherous, and cunning for a mortal. He betrayed me, took the power I offered and moved on to the next source. The wards on this tower were very clever, and designed to prevent me from entering or progressing. I thought the Necroquake would have broken them, but he was able to keep them strong enough to hold me out. I needed skilled souls to help. And you were so accommodating, and easy to manipulate. "This is why I should go first!"' She laughed again. 'Mortals. So simple.'

Jaqlyn's eye was drawn to Thorri, still bent over the wizard's corpse. He had moved round the body to face Jaqlyn and had something in his hand. Jaqlyn recognised it as one of his magical bombs. Designed to unknit magic itself, it had proven its worth against the undead below, and should be effective against daemons as well. She looked back to Karemma, who was gazing lovingly at the dark crown in her claw.

'What is that?' Jaqlyn asked. 'Why do you want it so badly?'

'You couldn't come close to understanding,' Karemma said absently. 'This crown of sorcery is one of many crafted for the generals of Nagash's armies. It symbolises the God of Death, and it is the first of many that I will use to become a god myself.'

'A god? That's insane!'

'There is an absence in the pantheon of true gods. A gap that must be filled. I will—' She stopped abruptly, turned and shook her head. 'Foolish duardin. You think your toy will stop me?'

Snake-fast, she was on Thorri, blade-limb slicing out. He took it on his artificial arm, and grunted - in annoyance rather than pain, Jaqlyn was sure - as the claw cut through the metal. One of the arcane gadgets Thorri had hidden in the arm activated, and the claw began to vibrate; then its end shattered. Karemma pulled back, screaming in pain, and Thorri took advantage of the momentary respite to throw the bomb at her. Jaqlyn jumped behind an overturned table.

The explosion was as vivid to her magical senses as her physical ones. She screwed her eyes shut against the light, and experienced the blast through her second sight. The sound of the detonation was deafening, and echoed oddly through her head. She felt another flare of magic, and opened her eyes to look over the edge of the table. Thorri was picking himself up, his armour and leathers scorched and blackened. His artificial arm was scored and broken, and he looked at it ruefully.

'That's going to take a while to fix back up.'

'What happened to the daemon?' Jaqlyn asked.

'Gone. Dodged the bomb, opened up some sort of rift or portal and vanished into It. Took that crown too.' He paused, looking thoughtful. 'What d'you reckon she meant about becoming a god?'

'I don't know,' jaqlyn said. 'But whatever she really plans, I intend to stop her.'

'How?'

'She said there were more artefacts. We find them first. Stop her getting them. And if we cross paths again, we kill her.'

'Easy job, then,' Thorri grumbled. 'Where do we start?'

Jaqlyn looked at the remaining bookshelves in the tower, and around at the dissected corpses. This place could be useful, with some changes to the decor.

'A magical library seems as good a place as any, Thorri. Let's get reading.'

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Graeme Lyon is the author of the Age of Sigmar novella Code of the Skies and the Space Marine Battles novella Armour of Faith. He has also written a host of Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer short stories including ‘The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter’, ‘Kor’sarro Khan: Huntmaster’, ‘Black Iron’, ‘The Eighth Victory’, ‘The Sacrifice’ and ‘Bride of Khaine’. He hails from East Kilbride in Scotland.

An extract from Thunderstrike & Other Stories.

If there was one thing Captain Holger Beck hated about the swamps – even more than the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, the overbearing heat and the stink of filthy, brackish water – it was the light. Filtered through the feathered branches of the paperbark trees, it fell from the sky like a foul miasma, gloomy and sick. It gave everything a queasy, submerged look, and constantly peering through it was beginning to give him a headache.

Holger looked out from the raft over the choked wetlands and felt his heart sink. They were poling along a narrow channel that cut between the glades, the surface of the water carpeted in a thick green scum. On either side of the channel the swollen boles of the swamp mahogany trailed beards of moss into the water. They looked like faces staring at him, he thought, like creatures uneasily mashed together from all the muck and filth of this awful place. He turned away. Every now and then he could hear the rippling flop of a leopard eel slipping below the surface, the slow and menacing drip of the recent rain pattering through the leaves.

Something screeched in the distance, hidden in the mists. Holger sighed. A mosquito landed on his neck with a flicker and he slapped it into a bloody paste.

‘It’s a man’s life in the Freeguild,’ Sergeant Huber said. She raised an eyebrow, an ironic smile on her face. ‘Isn’t this the kind of adventure you signed up for, sir?’

Huber’s collar was unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up, her breastplate stacked with all the others at the centre of the raft. The rest of the platoon was sprawled out exhausted in the heat, mopping their brows with sodden kerchiefs or staring dejectedly into the shadows across the water. On either side, two guardsmen dipped poles into the stagnant water and propelled them slowly onwards. The water slopped over the lip of the raft, oily and dark. Holger looked back at the rafts that were following behind, another dozen or so carrying his whole company deeper into the Mirkmere Swamps. He could see the glint of metal, the faded green of uniforms, but he couldn’t even see the rearguard, the light was so dim.

‘I didn’t take a commission in the Iron Bulls so I could have adventures,’ he said. He uncorked his flask and took a careful sip, feeling it burning in his chest. Only enough firewater left for another day or two, damn it. ‘I took it for a nice uniform, a quiet bit of guard duty, and plenty of opportunities for playing cards and drinking in the officers’ mess.’

‘And then the siege happened,’ Huber prompted him.

‘And then the siege happened…’

He shut his eyes, tipped the flask to his mouth again. No matter how long ago it was, the memories still lashed him with their original force. Lieutenant Holger Beck of the Iron Bulls had spent the best part of the Siege of Excelsis hiding in a tavern cellar off the Pilgrim’s Way, head buried in his hands as he tried not to cry. The smart new uniform, the polished steel breastplate, the officer’s sword at his hip – none of it was worth a cuss when the enemy were at the gates. He had slipped away as the first arrows fell, as the Ironweld cannons had started firing with a sound like holy thunder. He didn’t think of himself as a coward, Holger Beck. He was more of a realist, and the idea of matching himself against the awful things that had fought their way into Excelsis had been just too fantastical a concept for him to entertain.

Armoured orruks slavering for war, ogors and daemons… He shivered. Thank Sigmar he hadn’t had to witness the worst of it.

‘Still, it all worked out in the end,’ Huber said cheerfully. ‘The lone survivor of your platoon, all those medals, the promotion. Your own company.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed again. ‘It all worked out beautifully.’

‘I must confess,’ a voice said at his side, ‘that it pains me to hear you talk in such cynical tones, Captain Beck.’

Holger turned to see the priest standing there with a strained look on his face. Caspar Hallan was young, ascetically thin, his hair shorn down to the scalp. He had the sort of flinty, uncompromising look in his eye that had always made Holger nervous. He bobbed slightly as the raft buckled over the water. As far as he could tell, Caspar was as close to being a fanatic as you could get without actually grabbing a copy of Intimations of the Comet and ranting your way into the wilderness to convert the heathens. Holger had always been highly suspicious of men who were that certain in their beliefs – they tended to be the ones who got you killed.

‘Mere soldiers’ banter,’ Holger said. ‘The life of a guardsman is a hard one, I’m sure you’ll agree, and our humour occasionally tends towards the dark.’

‘We must not make light of our mission, however,’ Caspar said. Unlike the sprawling troops, he hadn’t even loosened a single button against the heat. ‘The brave settlers missing from Palmer’s Creek, from Dezraedsville and Junivatown, deserve better. They deserve our zeal, our courage, our faith!’

‘They’ll get all three,’ Holger said. ‘We’ll find out what happened to them, I promise.’ He glanced at Sergeant Huber and shrugged. ‘As much as I can promise anything in this benighted place.’

Caspar drew himself up and stared with unyielding fervour into the dripping murk.

‘There is nowhere in the Mortal Realms that can be considered benighted while the light of Sigmar is there to illuminate it.’

‘And what brings you with us?’ Huber interrupted. ‘This is a military expedition, not anything to do with Sigmar’s Temple.’

‘The ministry of Sigmar’s priesthood is wherever his justice needs to be meted out,’ Caspar intoned. Holger couldn’t tell if he was quoting scripture or not; everything the young man said felt like it came from a parchment or a scroll. ‘Nearly a thousand of the faithful have vanished from these settlements, brave crusaders spreading the light of Excelsis deeper into the Mirkmere, and I would be on hand to offer spiritual succour wherever it is needed. Succour,’ he added, patting the hammer at his belt, ‘and righteousness.’

The reports had been coming in for weeks now, of homesteads and settlements utterly deserted, their inhabitants vanished, as if swallowed up by the swamps. Contact had been lost with Fort Harrow, and concerns had even reached the office of the High Arbiter in Excelsis. Holger shook his head and traipsed to the back of the raft, stepping over his soldiers’ feet. He had no doubt that all those settlers were dead. Leopard eels were the half of it; there were flense-fish in these waters, he was sure, razorspines too. Even bloaters. Any number of disgusting diseases, any quantity of poisonous fruit. Bogs, quagmires, quicksand. No matter what Caspar thought, it wasn’t just the faithful who joined these crusades out into the wilderness; it was those too poor or too stupid to see any other way of surviving. You take folk who’ve spent their lives grubbing about the slums of Excelsis and drop them in the middle of the Mirkmere Swamps, what do you expect to happen? You could barely see five feet in front of you in here. They’d only built the rafts because the trails were so choked and overgrown it would have taken them weeks to cut their way through.

Holger sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that day. Sigmar knew what had happened to those people, but where was the sense in sending a full company of Freeguild into the swamps to look for them? And a full company that was led by none other than the Iron Bulls’ least enthusiastic officer, for all that?

‘Just my luck,’ he muttered bitterly.

He squinted through the rising mist at the rafts coming up behind, raising his hand to signal them.

‘We’ll have to stop soon,’ he said to Huber. ‘Evening’s nearly on us, and this damned mist is getting worse. It stinks like corpses. We’ll press on to Fort Harrow in the morning.’

‘Take us in to the bankside,’ Huber told Corporal Fischer.

The corporal angled his pole to push the raft to the left, and soon they came under the lowering canopy of the woe trees. The shadows were deeper here, danker, the mud oozing into the water. A whooping, almost mournful cry came from deeper in the swamps. It rose and then broke apart, fading into a careful silence.

Holger could see the other rafts following up behind and bumping into the bank. He stepped out into the mud and slogged his way up towards the treeline, where lank ropes of ivy dropped from the canopy overhead. The undergrowth was thick with bindweed and scrub. The swamps were full of these patches of raised ground, hummocks of mud that were like islands in the shallow waters. He could see Lieutenant Weigand further down the bank chivvying his platoon from their raft, and the other platoons beyond them – all of them struggling with their weapons and equipment, the helmets and breastplates, firearms, swords and shields, ration packs.

What a waste of time… he thought.

He turned to call on Corporal Fischer to start setting up camp. Fischer was standing there under the low sweep of a woe tree, one hand resting on its trunk, the other trying to pluck something from his mouth. For a minute it looked like he had something caught in his moustache, and then his knees buckled and he sank into the mud.

‘Fischer, what do you think you’re doing?’ Holger said. ‘Get on your feet.’

He stepped forward. A snick in the air, the whip of something passing his face. He turned and saw Lieutenant Weigand with an arrow sprouting from his eye, his mouth open and a look on his face of vexed amazement. He toppled from the bank, and with a splash disappeared into the slimy water. Holger looked back at Fischer, slumped against the tree. His eyes were like glass. An arrow had passed through the back of his neck and was jutting from his jaw.

Holger turned to Sergeant Huber, who stood there with her mouth open, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Half the other guardsmen from the company were still on their rafts, the other half milling about uncertainly on the bank. There was absolute silence, broken only by that same strange whooping call far out across the wetlands and the glades, which rose once and then melted off into the mist.

Holger swallowed. ‘Huber?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, captain?’

‘…What do we do?’

There was a sharp hiss, like falling rain. A dozen guardsmen hit the mud, riddled with arrows.

Someone screamed. There was the scrape of drawn swords, the damp thud of arrows striking shields. Hoarse shouts of command, steel clashing against steel. A guardsman stumbled past and collapsed in the undergrowth with a knife buried in his neck.

Holger threw himself into a hollow between the bloated roots of a tree. Groaning, screams, the splash of water. He risked a glance over the edge of the root and saw a dark shape slip past, lank and wiry, a long blade in its hand. He saw one of the guardsmen from Third Platoon stagger past with his guts hanging out, blood pouring from his mouth. He choked, dropped, fell face forward into a brackish puddle. The mists swam like a rolling tide, the gloom broken only by a few columns of watery light falling down from the canopy.

‘God-King save me, save me, please!’ Holger hissed.

He scrambled over the roots and slipped into the slime, rolling, hauling himself up, running. An arrow smacked into a trunk beside his head.

‘Huber! Where are you?’

He ducked, tripped again, smacked his head against a stone. He scrambled into a spume of razor-tipped fern, the stink of rot and blood in his nose. He was heading deeper into the swamps, but there were screams still ringing from the bank, and if Holger Beck knew one thing it was to run away from where the fighting was fiercest.

‘Oh Sigmar, please,’ he whispered. ‘I swear, see me through this and you’ll have the most faithful servant at your command!’

He ran on, scurrying from cover to cover. When he glanced back, the channel of water had been swallowed in the mists and the screams and cries were dying away. He’d lost his sword somewhere, but no force in the Mortal Realms would have made him go back for it.

Slowly, for the next agonising hour, Holger crawled forward inch by inch through the putrid water, weaving his way through the swamp weed and the fern, trying miserably not to make a sound. Insects clicked and whirred in the air around him; creatures slithered away through the muck. Water dripped down his collar. The darkness drew in and he started to shiver.

He started and stifled a scream when he saw a pale face peering at him from the undergrowth, but it was only the priest, Caspar Hallan, huddled in the mud.

‘Damn it, you scared the life out of me!’ Holger spat.

Caspar’s thin face was drawn with fear. There was a long, shallow cut down one cheek, blood dripping onto the torn collar of his robes.

‘Captain Beck…’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘What… those things, they… Did you see them, Beck? Did you see what they were?’

Holger swallowed and shook his head. He risked a glance over his shoulder. Was that laughter he could hear? A liquid cackle, burbling off into the fens.

‘We have to go back,’ Caspar hissed, staring into the darkness. ‘For Sigmar’s sake, we have to go back…’

‘I don’t think Sigmar’s listening out here, priest.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We make for Excelsis – it’s our only hope now. Get back to the city, warn them if we can…’

Or, he thought, just hide away in the lowliest backstreet tavern we can find and never breathe a word of what happened here…

A shadow dripped across Caspar’s face. The priest’s eyes went wide with horror, and his mouth opened to scream. A dank smell enveloped him.

Holger spun around, but then all he saw were stars.

Click here to buy Thunderstrike & Other Stories.

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