Contents

Cover

Beasts – John French

About the Author

An Extract from ‘A Dynasty of Monsters’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

BEASTS

By John French

Cado came to in darkness. Sensation tingled in his fingers and up his limbs. Red hunger screamed from the back of his thoughts and blended with rage. He forced thought and instinct to silence, and lay still. He did not know where he was, or what was close. Moving before understanding was a mistake. Wait, and remember; that was what he needed to do. His instincts snarled against the leash of his will. He let them. He had outlived demigods and empires by learning the lessons of being both hunter and prey. And at this moment he was prey. He could feel it. How this had come about – that was the question.

He had gone to one of the sacred streams up in the mountains above Glimmerheart. It had been an uneventful journey. The priests had frowned over burnt ruins, and pulled broken statues from the streams. They had found the body of one of the guardians of the high water pinned to the rocks, its feet dangling in the ice-crusted flow. It must have been there for decades. The snow and cold had turned the flesh and skin to leather. There had been debate about how to treat the boy. It had lasted several hours. Cado and the other guards had watched the nearby crags. Nothing had come. In the end, the worthies had decided to take the bones back to Glimmerheart. Cado had waited in silence. He had come on the expedition because the shape-shifters he had killed in Glimmerheart three weeks past had been priests of the sacred waters. He had hoped there would be signs in the snow melt that would lead him to the rest of their nest. The spawn of the Burning Hand were still there, he was sure, lurking under the skin of the city. But he had found nothing amongst the water channels and ice. Time was running out.

The trail of the Burning Hand had led to Glimmerheart but had ended with three of the sorcerer’s disciples dead in the snow and no threads to follow. He had concealed his kills, milked their corpses of blood, and let the persona of a vagabond sellsword settle over him. He had taken work, in part to allay suspicions, in part to cover his hunt for the servants of the Dark Gods in Glimmerheart. That shroud was becoming thin. Word and rumours spread. They always did. Things that were nothing to do with him were beginning to accrete into stories. He had heard them told with grim laughter in the inns: there were things taking people on the roads. The night was eating people who walked alone and leaving chewed bones. Half a dozen souls vanished trying to open the mines lower down the mountain. He had noticed a few people casting looks his way, and paymasters eyeing him carefully. He had to find the trail of his prey and move on before those looks became swords. Joining the expedition up the headwaters had been one of his last options.

The council of Glimmerheart had decided to try and clear the marks left by the servants of the Dark Gods from the sites that were important to those souls who had not arrived with the crusades of conquest.

They did not think of it as conquest, of course. Not in Glimmerheart, not in any of the other settlements created or taken by the Sigmarites, but that is exactly what it was: another conquest and occupation to take the place of those that had come before. The priests and fanatics and their Stormcast killers saw what they were doing as salvation. They were, they proclaimed, bringing Order, hope and life to realms that had become places of madness and pain. They were right to an extent, too; places like Glimmerheart were fragile candles burning in an infinity of night. Monsters and horrors filled the lands around them. Armies of other, crueller empires marched just beyond the horizon, and Chaos bubbled at the edge of sight. Sigmar’s conquests had reason. They were better than what had come before, but they were still just another dominion created from carrion. And, like all the rest that had come before, it would fall to ashes.

Lying in the dark, the clear truth was that something had gone wrong. He had misjudged, and survival now replaced any other concerns.

Cado felt something touch his hand in the dark. He stayed motionless. Another touch, light, like a finger brushing a child’s cheek. Another, dancing and tapping his skin, and another. Something climbed up his hand. He could feel its weight, and its legs. Feelers danced across his chest. Still he did not move. His eyes were open, but the darkness had not faded. Night was his realm and the dark his home, but this was blackness beyond blackness.

The legs and feelers skittered up his chest. He felt them touch his cheek. They hesitated, as though trying to understand what they were sensing. A hiss broke the silence. The legs skittered. Cado’s hand flashed up to his face as the tips of fangs touched his cheek. His hand closed on an abdomen. Another hiss split the air. His fingers clamped shut. The hiss vanished. Liquid sprayed out. A scent like dank water and mould filled Cado’s nose.

Pale light glowed from his hand and spotted the ground. Luminous fluid dripped from the crushed body of the spider in his grasp. Its body was the size of a child’s head, and its legs were as long as a human arm. He watched a glowing bead of its blood form on one of its fangs. Carefully he felt along his belt. His knives and pouches were still there. He pulled an empty vial out, held it under the spider corpse and squeezed. He stoppered the vial when it was full.

He stood. His sword lay on the ground nearby, still in its sheath. The wan light from the vial showed that he was in a cave. Pale stalactites jabbed down. Mould and damp covered the walls. Fungus sprouted at the edges of the floor. Cado noticed that the mushroom caps seemed to stretch towards the light as he moved. They began to glow in turn. Gills and stems flexed. A fine cloud of spores puffed into the gloom. He tasted them as they touched his tongue. Lights exploded in his eyes and faded. Blurred images burrowed into his thoughts – bloody grins and wide eyes.

He stopped breathing. The images faded. A thin strand of air touched his cheek. He looked up.

A shaft opened in the roof above. It was narrow and burrowed up to darkness but was wide enough that he could have climbed down it. Or fallen. He braced and leapt. The jump carried him to the ceiling. His hands clamped onto the rock, and he hung on the edge of the shaft, bat-like, looking up. There was no way out that way. Blocks of heavy stone jammed the shaft further up. Someone had overcome him, dropped him into this pit and then sealed the entrance. Maybe they thought him dead, but that was unlikely; someone who, or something that could overcome him and steal his memory was something that would know he was not alive enough to die.

He dropped down. The fungus was glowing more brightly now. It looked as though it had grown in the intervening seconds too. Cado looked down at the iron rings on his fingers. He touched one and silently spoke the summons. The spirit-light unfolded behind his shoulder. As soon as it did, he knew something was wrong. It was dim, fizzing and pulsing.

‘Solia?’ he said aloud. His voice echoed, then faded as if the gloom had inhaled the sound.

~My prince,~ came the reply, faint and thin as though coming from far away. ~There is something…~ Her voiced trailed away, then returned. ~Something here it… is pushing against… my… being…~

‘What is it?’ he asked.

~I… don’t… know…~ The light of her presence pulsed suddenly low. ~I can… feel it… breathing…~

Then her light shrank and went out. The fungus caps flexed, glowing brighter. Spores danced in the air. Cado drew his sword. He could see an opening in the cave wall. He moved towards it, slow and silent. There were marks on the floor, he realised: footprints from something large. He reached the opening and paused. Soft discs of fungus framed the opening, and beyond he could see more passages branching off. He went forwards, following the footprints.

The passages went on, coiling through the rock as though they were the burrows of a great worm coiling back on itself. Then the pit was there, in front of him, looming under his next step. He froze. He had not seen it. His senses had passed right over it. It was a blot of complete darkness, ragged-edged. It went down. A long way down. Even without being able to see into it, he knew that.

He lowered the step that he had been about to take. At the edge of his sight, the glow of the fungus pulsed brighter then dimmer, brighter and then dimmer, sucking light in and out of the air. Cado took a step back.

A rumble ground up from behind him, a rising rhythm like the grind of falling mountains. He raised his sword and opened his mouth to breathe a spell into the air. Spores poured into his mouth. The glow of the fungus exploded into rainbow smears. His sight split into shards. Scents of broken stone and dank water filled his nose. He felt something prickle his skin, an instinct pushing through his suddenly spore-clouded senses.

Behind him a shape rose.

Colonies of petrified fungus clung to shoulders the width of a cart. Shards of rock tumbled from cracked skin as a cavern of a mouth cracked wide. In Cado’s colour-smeared vision, the teeth were the shattered pinnacles of mountains. Lids peeled back from fist-sized eyes.

Cado lunged, but the blow was too late before it began. Boulder knuckles crashed into his chest. Armour buckled. Bones cracked. He struck the wall and was falling to the floor as the nausea colours stole the present.

‘I’ve got a job needs doing.’ The man had stepped out as Cado turned up the darkening alley towards where smoke wound from the chimney of an inn. Heavy grey sleet was falling from the sky, and the wind was whipping down Glimmerheart’s streets. The winter light was draining from the sky and the shadows thickening. Down the mountain slopes, you could see wild ghost light flickering in the mist. Cado had seen no one on the streets since he had crossed the bridge back into the city. It was a time to be inside, close to fire.

The man who had stepped into Cado’s path was heavy, fat layered over muscle. A thick, fur-edged cloak hung from his shoulders. He carried knives rather than a sword, Cado could tell, but he knew how to use anything with an edge. This was a hard man, one of the types that thrived in this new age – strong, ruthless, clever enough to keep himself alive, and able to fight and win when he needed to. There were lots of them in every desperate settlement and free city. Sometimes they called themselves merchants, or caravan bosses or guard captains. No matter the title they were all the same. The followers of the God-King might think that they were making a new age of faith and Order, but all they were doing was handing the rule of the living to people like this.

‘I am not interested,’ Cado said and kept on walking.

‘There’s a lot of ways to be paid for decent work,’ said the man. ‘Wealth, safety… blood and secrets.’ Cado stopped. ‘Might be that I know something about where you can get what you need. That is, if I get what I need.’

Cado turned. The man was smiling, picking his teeth with a long fingernail.

‘There’s lots of ways I can be helpful to you. All you need to do is be helpful to me in return.’

The man looked at his fingernail. He was five paces away. Cado could cross that distance in a single bound. Draw and strike with a dagger, down inside the collar bone to the left of the neck. Into the heart. His jaws closing on the throat to swallow any scream. Then a leap into the wind and sleet, and just the barest few drops of blood left to fall to the ground.

A flake of ice touched his cheek.

Only the blood of the damned, said the ghost of a past promise.

He blinked once, slowly. Shook his head. He turned again.

‘You won’t get far,’ said the man. ‘There are whispers already, word of beasts and killing, and it won’t take much to put swords in the hands of the fearful. Then what will you do… Hollow King? Will you hold your hand if it means being torn apart?’

Hollow King… An old name, one left behind on a long road. A name that only someone who knew him in the past would know. Not this mortal, though.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

The man shook his head. ‘I am Byrazan, that’s all that matters. It is not much I am asking, just a small exchange – your skills for something you want and the absence of a lot of things you don’t want.’

Cado drew a breath. This was always the way, deals made, blood bought, vengeance furthered. He needed information. He needed prey, and he wanted, yes wanted to know who was behind this man. He opened his mouth.

The man ran his tongue along his smile. Cado stopped, closed his mouth, smiled back.

‘No,’ he said.

Byrazan’s mouth kinked up at the edge. ‘Unfortunate.’

Blackness boiled from the sky, and darkness struck Cado down like a hammer falling on cold iron.

The beast rose in front of him. He could feel the hunger fuming from it. No, he could not just feel it. He could see it: rust red boiling through black. The spores he had inhaled were spreading hallucinations in his senses. Tiny faces with sickle-moon teeth were cackling as they spun across the inside of his eyeballs.

The beast roared again, and the walls shivered as it lunged. Cado managed to jerk aside. He rolled, came up and spat an invocation into the air. Red fire carved a line into the beast… and vanished. He felt the magic drain into nothing. The beast shivered, as though it were a wolf that Cado had just thrown a piece of meat. It blinked, then lunged. Cado dived for an opening in the wall.

He ran. He was a killer of monsters and champions, but here and now he knew that to stand was to end. The tunnel slid past him. Sound spiralled. Colours giggled at the edge of his eyes. The bellows of the beast followed. Fungus rippled into glowing colours as the sound touched it. He stumbled. A spider leapt at him from the dark, legs spread wide. His knife punched through its abdomen. Luminous blood spattered him. He kept moving.

The tunnel branched. He paused for an instant. Air breathed over his face. Cold air, touched by the frost and stars of the light outside, a thread from this world beneath to the land above. He blinked for a second and then followed it.

The sound of the beast faded to nothing behind him. He kept moving until the thread of air led to a wide shaft. Its sides were smooth, worked. The remains of a spiral of steps jutted from the walls like splintered ribs in a hollow chest. Far above, a flake of starlight winked back. He braced to leap to the lowest handhold.

The beast came out of a tunnel mouth at a run. Cado smelled the fungal reek of its breath as its mouth opened. It had not followed him, he realised. It had come here and waited. It knew that he would find a way out. It had reached here first and squatted in its own darkness, waiting. Ferocious. Hungry. But not stupid.

Cado spun aside. The beast’s fist struck the wall. Chunks of masonry exploded out. He landed and looked up to the point of light above. The beast lunged, and this time the knuckles barely missed as he dived away. He drew his sword and cut as the next blow reached for him. The silver-etched steel bit into stone-hard skin. The beast roared. Cado’s cut had not damaged or slowed it; it had enraged it.

Cado felt space at his back and saw another tunnel opening. An arch framed it. He had the brief impression of a horned skull grinning down at him from under a layer of salt and lichen. The beast stamped forwards. Cado ran, putting strength into speed. The glow from the vial of spider blood sent ripples of light across the walls and ceiling. Carved faces looked back at him from under veils of calcification, grim and proud. He could see orbs, and stars and branches in their hands, the shapes blurred by blooms of crystal and salt. The stone beneath his feet was a paved road under the earth. He thought of the broken steps climbing the shaft to the world above.

He touched the iron ring on his forefinger.

‘Solia,’ he called as he ran. ‘Solia!’

Her presence glowed into being, faint and struggling.

~My… prince…~

‘The walls, look! What is this place?’

~I…~ she began, voice crackling.

‘It’s not a cave system.’

~These are… It’s a shrine or sanctuary. These… they…~ Solia’s presence dimmed. ~I cannot stay with you, my prince. There is something here. Not the beast, a… a hole in the realm…~

He thought of the hole in the floor that he had nearly fallen into.

Night and blackness going down and down. Darker than dark. Deeper than the soul of the earth…

~It is a threshold… this place… Old magic…~

Then her presence was gone.

Purple and green spots pinwheeled across Cado’s sight. Behind him he heard the beast roar. It knew these tunnels. It knew the way out, and like all things that were hungry it would not stop once it had prey in its grasp. It had to die. There was no other way, and he would not be able to kill it before it ground his flesh and bones to paste and powder.

He turned and faced the tunnel mouth he had come from. Another rolling bellow echoed through the stone. Spores spiralled in thick clouds. Cado braced. The sound of feet shook the air and floor. The beast burst from the dark. Luminous streaks of mashed fungus spattered its jaws and chest. Its eyes were rolling in their sockets. Its fists slammed down.

Cado slashed his sword across the back of its hands. It reared, howling in anger. He ran, following the statues and paving. The beast followed, shaking the ground. Cado kept just out of its reach. He was trusting that the builders of these tunnels would only mark a tunnel with such care if it led to something important. To its heart.

An arch loomed ahead, and even with his eyes swimming with fungus visions, he recognised it. He had seen the other side of it when he had first met the beast. He went through. He saw the space, clearer now. The glow of fungus pushed up against a domed roof, dotted with the spikes of stalactites. What he had taken as pillars of stone were statues, their features lost under layers of crystal deposits. A lip of worked stone surrounded the black hole in the floor. The ghosts of runes ran around its edge. Darkness radiated from the space within, pushing into the gloom like black ink poured into grey water. He took a step towards it, began to turn.

The beast burst through the door. Cado tried to duck its swing, but the edge of its fist caught him and sent him sprawling back towards the hole. The beast lashed out. Fingers as thick as a human leg closed on one of the statues and ripped it free. Cado began to stand. The beast was not close enough. He lunged with his sword and felt the tip stab into its belly and stop as though it had hit stone. The beast rammed forwards onto the blade. Force snapped through Cado’s arm and sent him falling back towards the hole in the floor.

His hands gripped the rock lip. He could feel… emptiness… a drop… falling without end.

The beast roared towards him. But he did not hear the sound or feel the ground shake, because he had opened his eyes and was looking down into the mouth of the hole.

Floating…

Floating on the surface of a sea at night, never touched by sun or moon or star, transparent, like perfect glass that let the absence of light pass. He could see things all the way down. Shapes that might have been the towers of a great city. Shadows slid slow over the night-drowned land like the tentacles of leviathans. He looked, and the image became clearer, the shapes of spires larger. He could almost see…

He felt like he was falling but not moving. It was like looking through a glass that pulled things in the distance closer. The night city beneath him was rising to meet him, and the shadows were spiralling, coiling, reaching up to pull him down as he looked.

He closed his fists, felt rock under his fingers, shoved backwards.

He came up gasping in time to see the beast loom out of the gloom. It swung the fungus-crusted statue like a club. Cado sprang towards it, dived beneath the swing and sliced out with his sword as he rolled. The blade cut into the back of its leg. The beast roared, staggered, and Cado rammed into it with all his strength. A mortal man would not have moved it, but even hungry and spore-drugged, he was not mortal, and neither was his strength.

The beast teetered, then fell. It bellowed as it tumbled into the blackness. The sound rolled off the walls. Cracks spread across the stalactites. The fungus glow bloomed to blinding brightness all around as a fog of spores filled the air.

The beast’s cry faded. The light of the fungus dimmed and then went out. Cado looked down at the pale glow of the spider blood, still shining in its vial. He got up. The spore visions were still dancing in his sight as he scrambled his way back through the coil of tunnels to the broken stairs. A faint but growing light was just visible high above. He began to climb.

‘Very well done,’ said a voice from above him.

Cado’s head jerked up, as he emerged from the lip of the well. Byrazan sat on the stump of a statue broken off at the legs. The remains of broken walls, statues and shattered slabs covered the area around the well mouth. It had the look of something that had meant something once, a long time ago. The clouds were clearing from the sky above, and the pale light of dawn was brightening its bowl. The mountains rose behind, capped by snow. He could see Glimmerheart thrusting up on its crags and tors, only a league or so up the mountainside.

Byrazan looked around, squinting. ‘You know, I had my doubts, but she never did, and she was right. One beast removed from its nest. All made well. A good and profitable end for all.’

Cado came up the slope at the man. He was tired but still fast enough that the man would not be able to run. Byrazan raised a hand. A tiny vial of blood jingled on the end of a golden chain. Cado felt his limbs slow. The false beat of his heart stuttered. He stopped.

Blood sorcery – somehow this mortal had blood from his grave line. With it he could steal Cado’s strength, cause him pain or send him into un-sleep. The implications of that bloomed in Cado’s mind behind a red curtain of anger.

‘I will kill you,’ hissed Cado.

‘Perhaps,’ Byrazan smiled. ‘But not today.’ He tucked the vial away under his coat and pulled out a cinderfruit. He looked at it as though mildly surprised, then shrugged and took a bite.

‘It wasn’t the beast you wanted killed,’ said Cado. ‘It was the pit it had come from.’

‘Oh, we wanted the beast dead, but yes – if it had not decided to make its nest right next to an arcane abyss, then it might have been able to sleep as long as it liked.’

‘That abyss… I looked into it. It leads somewhere else, beyond this underworld, beyond this realm.’

Byrazan shrugged. ‘So I am given to believe.’

‘Where does it go?’

‘I don’t know. Honestly, it is not part of my concern at this moment. Making sure it is accessible, that is enough.’

‘Why?’

‘You honestly care, Hollow King? All hope dies, and all that remains is vengeance and justice – isn’t that what you believe? And no, I will not tell you how I know. I am sure you have the beginning of an idea.’ He rubbed pulped fruit from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘What does it matter what we mortals do or why? We are just people for you to move past, our lives way stations on your journey.’

Cado held the man’s gaze and waited.

‘Look at this,’ said Byrazan, gesturing around. ‘Bits of stone and statue, broken, burned, cast down. Why? Because people like you – no, not like you, exactly you – allowed that to happen. You had your age. You had your delusions and power and peace, and what you left was suffering and pain and torment. You let the enemy in. You let your strength become pride. Now we must live with what you left us. This is our inheritance, and we will not lose it because we slept in golden dreams or wallowed in self-pity. Everything is either a weakness or a weapon. You, that abyss, me – everything either serves or is destroyed. This is an age of war, and it’s not about vengeance. It’s about survival.’

Byrazan waited, took a bite of fruit, chewed.

Cado let the words fade to echoes in his thoughts, then gave a single nod and began to turn. It would take him until the sun was up to reach the city. He would need to clean and then begin to consider what his next step was.

‘You have done the work. Don’t you want the payment?’

Cado looked at him. The man was not smiling.

‘You have dealt with the beast, and for that you will be paid.’

‘I want no payment and made no agreement.’

‘But I have, and it must be kept.’ He turned and pointed up at Glimmerheart. ‘The easternmost tower that sits on the highest crag without snow. You will find what you want and need there.’

Cado’s eyes moved across the broken teeth of the city’s walls and towers, out to its edge and on to where smaller crags and pinnacles rose between the waterfalls.

‘There is no tower,’ said Cado.

Byrazan stood, took a bite of his fruit, and nodded. ‘There is. Seeing it is the first problem.’

‘And reaching it?

‘That’s the next problem.’

The man took the last bite from the cinderfruit and threw away the stone. It clattered amongst the rocks. He began to move up the slope.

Cado put a hand on his arm. The man flinched back, and Cado felt a jolt like the touch of lightning pass up his arm. Byrazan’s hand rose. The vial of blood hung between his fingers.

Cado let go. Byrazan lowered his hand.

‘What is inside the tower?’ asked Cado.

Byrazan laughed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I can guess.’

‘What?’

Byrazan’s smile settled, cooling beneath his eyes. ‘To get what we most dearly want, so often is the greatest pain we can bear. I think you can understand that as well as me, Hollow King.’

He straightened his cloak, turned his back, and began to climb between the broken statues towards where the dawn light was just touching the city’s walls.

‘You are hunting for wizards and sorcerers of the God of Change, so that should tell you something. Magic, and revelation, that is what I think is in that tower. Magic and revelation.’

Cado stood for a long while after the man had gone. Then he closed his eyes and began to find his own way back to the city and the dawning day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Mortis, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe Award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

An extract from A Dynasty of Monsters.

The earth moved in the morning, when it should not have until the afternoon.

Jaras Anvarheim rose to greet the dawn of what was supposed to be the last day of the caravan’s journey to the Colonnade. The merchants and their armed escorts were camped on a high, wooded ridge, and though the Colonnade was not yet visible, Jaras knew it was just over the horizon to the east, hidden by another line of hills on the far side of a rock-strewn plain. A river cut a serpent’s line north-south, a barrier to cross a few miles away; a barrier that he expected to have changed by the time the caravan reached it.

Jaras watched Hysh rise, thinking about its rays shining on the Diamond Spire of home, and then the ridge began to rumble. Merchants scrambled out of tents to grab the tethers of startled horses. Jaras seized the trunk of the nearest tree, the instinct to hold on to something solid too hard to overcome, even when solidity was a lie.

The ridge dropped, and the land on either side rose. Stones flowed and reknit themselves. The trees swayed as if caught in a gale. Some of them disappeared, swallowed up where the earth turned soft as water. Jaras’ feet began to sink into the ground. He let go of the tree and danced away just as that patch of land folded in on itself. He jumped onto a boulder that emerged from the underbrush and rode it down. The rocks of the plain turned into scree as the new cliffs thrust their backs up. They tumbled down slopes that angled up from the horizontal to the near vertical, the roar of their fall filling the new valley. They piled up against the edges of the forest, toppling more trees.

The shaking stopped. The reshaping was complete. The ridge was now a deep gorge. The slopes of the forest had reversed, with the trees clinging to the lower slopes of the cliffs. About a mile to the north, a waterfall shouted down the cliff. The river on the plains had changed course and rushed into the gorge. Water foamed by fifty yards to Jaras’ right, where the centre of the gorge had formed a deep bed. The level of the river would rise quickly, but the caravan was high enough up the new banks to keep from being swept away.

Jaras looked up at the jagged cliffs and sighed. There would be no going east this morning. The merchants would have to travel south, where the level of the gorge and the riverbanks began a slow rise. He guessed the land shift had cost them half a day.

Someone was shouting at the caravan leader. ‘You said we had time! You said the change wouldn’t come until hours from now!’

‘That’s what the charts indicated,’ Vela Peltoan said, sounding both patient and exhausted.

Jaras made his way over to the confrontation. Three of the escorting guards from the Colonnade Freeguild stood nearby, unconcerned. They were used to merchants venting at each other, and Vela had proven adept at defusing tensions during the weeks-long trek from Fangshield. The upset merchant was named Bayar, and he had been in the vanguard of the malcontents from the first day out.

Jaras waited to see if he could help. As the caravan’s bard, he was being paid to keep morale up and make the journey seem shorter than it was. Now that it was going to be longer than it should have been, his duties would become more important. If the trip took an extra day, that put a few more riches in his pocket, though he was even more anxious than Bayar for the trek to be over. Bayar was from Fangshield. For Jaras, the Colonnade was home, and he had been away for months.

‘The charts!’ Bayar exclaimed. ‘Are they even real, or are you just incapable of reading them?’

‘They’re old,’ said Vela.

‘Can you afford the new ones?’ Jaras asked Bayar. He smiled to show he was sympathetic, that anyone would wish to have the latest tidal charts to come out of the Colonnade, but who in this caravan had the means for that? Quality was expensive. The charts from before the Necroquake were still accurate to within half a day, and that had been enough to make the journey manageable to this point. It was true that the early change in the land today was a hard blow. At the moment the end of the voyage should have been in sight, the horizon had been taken away.

Bayar turned to Jaras, ready for a fight. Jaras put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Listen,’ he said, as if to a fellow conspirator. ‘I’m grieving with you. Do you know how long it’s been since I saw home?’

‘You aren’t depending on the sale of rugs to put food on your table.’

‘That’s true. But you’re not hungry today, are you? We’ll still be at the Colonnade tomorrow. The next market isn’t until two days from now. But you know what? People will notice our delay. People will be anxious that they might not be able to buy the latest rugs from the looms of Fangshield. That won’t be a bad thing, will it?’

Bayar mumbled something incomprehensible, but his face was no longer turning purple. Jaras gave his shoulders a squeeze and let him go.

The caravan was ready to start the day’s march a few minutes later. The wagons were solid, built for the rapid upheavals of this region of Ghur, their cargoes held by four raised sides four feet high and securely fastened with nets. Jaras jumped up onto the lead wagon and stood up on its load of chests, making himself visible to the whole train. His clothing helped him stand out. It was a variant of the Freeguild livery of the Colonnade. A narrow wedge of silver, representing the castle’s great spire, bisected the green of the fields, above the brown of the land. This was the pattern for armour and uniforms alike. Jaras’ clothes turned the livery to a bright motley. The colours were there, but playfully brighter, and the complex repetitions of the pattern made it a celebration. The bard’s mission was joy, remembrance and exaltation.

‘My fellow travellers!’ Jaras called. ‘I woke up early just to look east. And you know what I saw of the Colonnade before the ridge fell? Nothing. It was still too far.’ He turned to address the cliffs. ‘Do you hear that, you rocks of the perverse? You are not taking anything away from us!’ Addressing the caravan again, he said, ‘The pleasure of our arrival is merely deferred! Let us use our extra time well! Shall we revel in our anticipation?’ He paused, long enough for a couple of faint cheers to make themselves heard, not long enough to make the absence of voices more awkward. He answered his own question with an enthusiastic, ‘Yes! We shall!’

He started to sing, and the walls of the gorge picked up his voice. Before he reached the second verse, most of the merchants had joined in.

‘Sing high for the hills, as they climb at dawn,

Sing low for the gorge, born the night just gone.

Sing high for the town that is unafraid!

Sing high for the Colonnade!

Oh, the land will rise and the land will fall,

And the waves of change shatter every wall.

But the Diamond Spire will never fade!

Sing high for the Colonnade!

Sing high for the Colonnade!’

There were twenty more verses. He had begun teaching the song to the members of the caravan on the morning of their departure from Fangshield. They all knew it by now, and they knew it well. By the time the song was done, the mood of the travellers was closer to eager than disappointed, and Jaras was satisfied.

He hopped down from the wagon and worked his way along the line of the caravan, joking with the travellers. He talked longer with those who seemed most troubled. One of those was a jeweller named Gallaf. Mid-morning, with the riverbanks rising more steeply, they could see the exit from the gorge only a couple of miles straight ahead. Gallaf looked as if he would be sorry to leave the cliff walls, as if their confines represented some kind of safety to him.

‘Why so grim?’ Jaras asked. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re starting to feel your jewels are shown off to better effect away from cities. Is the untamed land so much better a contrast?’

‘No, it isn’t that,’ said Gallaf.

‘You’re missing Fangshield,’ said Jaras.

‘I miss its civilisation.’

‘Is this your first trip to the Colonnade?’

‘It is.’

Jaras laughed. ‘Then you should be overjoyed. I mean no insult to Fangshield when I say that at the Colonnade, you will find true civilisation. It does not have its equal anywhere in Ghur.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘You don’t believe it,’ Jaras said, chiding.

‘Oh no, I do! I do! It’s just… I’ve heard some things about this region.’

‘What things?’

‘About monsters near the Colonnade.’

‘You mean the Avengorii,’ said Jaras.

Gallaf winced. He looked up anxiously, as if expecting the blue sky to darken and the horrors to fall on the caravan, summoned by the utterance of their name.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jaras said. ‘You wouldn’t find me in this caravan if I thought we were going anywhere near their lairs.’ He grimaced in disgust and anger. ‘The land they’ve stolen is some distance east of the Colonnade.’ He took a breath. ‘They won’t hold it forever,’ he promised.

‘You have a song ready for their defeat?’ Gallaf asked, doing his best to mount a front of bravado now that he knew he was safe from what he feared.

‘Many,’ said Jaras, and he strummed a few light chords on his lute before moving on.

To his right, the eastern riverbank widened as it rose. The cliff on Jaras’ left was less than fifty feet high now, its barren top poking up above the trees. The woods here were thick, though the trees stopped a good hundred yards from the edge of the water. The way forward angled westward ahead, but soon the slope would be level with the plain, and the caravan could finally strike eastward again.

Jaras was making his way back up to the head of the caravan, and was three wagons away from Vela’s, when the captain of the escort, walking point, stopped suddenly and held up a hand, warning for silence. The caravan creaked to a halt. Jaras padded forward to join Vela. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

She shook her head.

The guard looked back at them. ‘Thought I heard growling,’ she said.

Jaras turned around slowly, scanning the clifftops, staring into the shadows of the forest.

‘This doesn’t feel like a very defensible position,’ said Vela.

‘It isn’t,’ said the captain. ‘We also have no choice.’ She raised her horn to her lips to sound the call to form a circle.

Before she could, another horn blew. It sounded from just around the bend. The call was savage, brutal, more animal than instrument. It stopped Jaras’ breath with fear.

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