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Oracle – Liane Merciel

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Covens of Blood’

A Black Library Publication

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Oracle

By Liane Merciel

Etanios found Anvilgard unsettling.

Though the city stood in Aqshy, its ornately clawed architecture and gloom-choked streets seemed better suited to the shadowy lands of Ulgu or Shyish. Its skyline was all hooks and spires, a woven crown of thorns; its people wore grim grey and black, for other colours stained too easily in Anvilgard’s envenomed air.

Grey fog filled the city’s streets, belched out continuously by enormous, dragon-headed alchemical towers. The dense vapour was a powerful defoliant, pumped throughout Anvilgard to keep the streets from being choked by the unnaturally vigorous flora in this part of Aqshy.

It was said to be harmless to the city’s inhabitants, but Etanios wondered how true that was. How could something so deadly to plant life not hurt the people who lived in its grasp? It turned unwashed windows into blind black cataracts and purged the city of gardens. Surely it must do something to living bodies and souls? Mortals were not so resilient.

But if so, no one in Anvilgard spoke of it. And so it seemed to the Stormcast Eternal that Anvilgard’s fogs were but the physical manifestation of the secrets and lies that drifted through the clawed city, equally pernicious and ever-present, and equally unmentioned by its citizens.

It would be a relief, Etanios thought, to leave this murk-haunted place and return to the parched red wastes he knew. There, at least, Aqshy’s hostilities were honest.

For now, however, he was needed here.

Most of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the primary Stormhost defending Anvilgard, had been called away to serve in another realm’s great struggle. Etanios wasn’t privy to the details; all he knew was that the towering fortress of the Black Nexus stood near empty of its guardians, and that his small strike force of the Hammers of Sigmar had been called back from the hinterlands to reinforce their depleted strength.

He’d thought that this might entail standing watch over the Black Nexus’ precious Realmgates, or patrolling the smoke-swept walls of the city. He had not expected it to involve assisting with a murder investigation. Stormcast Eternals were not, in general, noted for their skills of inquest, and Etanios was no exception to that rule.

But Anvilgard had been plagued by a rash of murders among its influential citizens, and the city authorities were so short-handed that they’d asked the Stormcast Eternals to step in – particularly where heretics were suspected.

Two weeks ago, Magistrate Ilius Caroscale had choked to death at dinner. Post-mortem dissection of the eminent jurist’s throat had turned up neither fishbone nor bread chunk. Instead, the mortuaros had found an embryonic head. A ball of teeth, eyeless and monstrous, had erupted from the inner flesh of Magistrate Caroscale’s throat. That writhing white thing, not any morsel of food, had choked him.

Poison, the mortuaros had declared. Varanite. The deadly distilled essence of Chaos.

None but an agent of the Ruinous Powers would dare to touch such a poison, knowing the penalties for its possession and the dangers of its use. None but a truly dangerous agent could obtain it, given that it came only from the Eightpoints.

And where the cults of Chaos were at work, the Stormcast Eternals stood against them. It was the purpose for which they’d been forged. It was why they drew breath.

It was Etanios’ duty.

‘There,’ said Witchfinder Ithyrac, nodding towards a gaunt spire of black stone sunk in the shadows between two higher, more majestic towers. ‘They’ve holed up in there.’

‘How many?’ rumbled Lord-Relictor Sereghast, eyeing the spire’s narrow windows as if he could see through their lightless slits. Perhaps he could, Etanios thought. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were an ancient and secretive Stormhost, practitioners of grim rites and keepers of strange powers carried from the ruins of a forgotten world. Who knew what one of their Lord-Relictors could do?

‘Six to eight, including Remera herself. Maybe traps, maybe magic and poison. Biggest obstacle’s likely to be the spire itself, though,’ Ithyrac said. ‘Low ceilings, flimsy floors. The place wasn’t built for visitors as big as yourselves. Getting through without collapsing the entire building’ll be the real trick. That, and taking Remera alive.’

The Lord-Relictor’s stern black helm turned towards Etanios. ‘You will go with the witchfinder. Capture the poisoner for questioning. We will ensure none escapes the spire.’

Etanios nodded, readying his shield and hammer. Though he was of another Stormhost and Lord-Relictor Sereghast had no formal authority to command him, he was eager to offer aid in whatever way he could. Sigmar had honoured him greatly by choosing him to be reforged, and Etanios was still anxious to show himself worthy of that honour.

He fell in behind Ithyrac and the witchfinder’s two assistants, identically clad in close-fitting leather cowls and masks of volcanic glass. All three carried duardin-crafted shock-sticks and small crossbows loaded with paralytic quarrels, intended to subdue their targets rather than kill.

At a signal from Witchfinder Ithyrac, Etanios kicked in the door. Wood shattered under his sigmarite-plated boot, scattering across a cramped entryway and a parlour littered with the desiccated carcasses of moths and mice. Rotting velvet curtains, more dust and cobwebs than cloth, covered the grime-smeared windows.

Etanios went in first. The witchfinder and his assistants fanned out behind him, and he motioned for them to take the upper floors while he cleared the ground level.

Low-hanging draperies caught on Etanios’ helm and tore loose from the ceiling. Deformed beetles and blind, iridescent moths flittered from the cloth, swirling around him in a disorientating cloud. They shimmered brilliantly in the dark, and phantasmagoric sigils flashed on their wings before burning into curls of pungent, multicoloured smoke.

Etanios blinked away the magic’s sting. Had he been human, perhaps the smoke would have choked him, or his eyes might have burst and run down his cheeks, but it took more than that to affect one of Sigmar’s chosen. Still, it confirmed the presence of Chaos in this place, and the power of the cult that Witchfinder Ithyrac had uncovered.

Past the parlour was a musty library, its walls crowded with uneven bookshelves obscured behind more loops of damp, rotting drapery. Etanios pulled one aside, dislodging another cloud of maddening insects.

Behind them stood a row of books bound in soft, fleshy leather. Their covers were flayed faces, human and aelven and duardin, trapped in a macabre semblance of life. They winked and yawned and chuckled at Etanios as he looked upon them, their withered lips moving in words they had no lungs to voice. It was a horror, but not one that affected his mission. This place would be purged later. His duty was merely to clear its defenders.

The cultists were waiting for him in the next room. It might have been a kitchen originally, or a vivisectionist’s laboratory. In their hands it had become both – a place where bodies lay pinned open on bloodstained tables, roasting forks thrust through their wrists and ankles to hold them against the wood.

The corpses had been partly eaten, and as Etanios moved into view, their devourers rose up, hissing. Gaunt and greyed by lifelong immersion in Anvilgard’s fumes, they were barely recognisable as human. They’d replaced their teeth with shards of brightly coloured glass, which twinkled like fractured jewels in mouthfuls of dark blood.

Perhaps they hoped that the ghastly sight would unnerve him, or that the swarms of insects in the earlier rooms had weakened him enough to give them a crucial edge.

If so, they were in for a deadly disappointment.

Etanios kicked the nearest table, sending it flying backwards with such force that the two cultists behind it were crushed into bloody pulp as it slammed into the spire’s stone wall. A third leapt at him, swinging a dented cleaver. Etanios didn’t bother dodging or blocking; he simply swept his hammer out in a wide, lightning-chased arc. A blinding flash filled the room, bright enough to incinerate shadows, and when it faded the cultist was a twitching, smoking corpse.

More fighting had broken out upstairs. An ambush. Etanios lifted his head, tracking the noise with inhuman precision. Six heartbeats… no, one was suddenly failing. Five. One of Ithyrac’s assistants cried out in terror as the other heartbeat faltered. The witchfinder snarled defiance, but Etanios could hear the shiver of apprehension under his bravado.

Whatever Ithyrac faced was beyond his abilities. They needed help, and Etanios didn’t have time to hunt through stairs and hallways to find them.

He strode back to the library of flayed faces. Gauging the pace and placement of the noises upstairs, Etanios hurled his hammer against the ceiling and called upon Sigmar’s power.

Lightning erupted from the weapon, accompanied by a deafening crack of thunder. Shattered plaster, dirt and blasted wooden beams rained down, along with three flailing figures and two corpses.

He’d aimed well. The two dead were cultists, their skin threaded with glass that had exploded in the face of Sigmar’s wrath, leaving the bodies speckled with starbursts of torn flesh.

Witchfinder Ithyrac and his surviving assistant picked themselves up unsteadily, dazed but alive. With them rose a massive, lumpen figure, her cloaking rags scorched and torn by the blast and fall. The cult’s leader, he presumed. Remera.

Every inch of her skin was riddled with glass shards, glittering in the dancing aftershocks of the Stormcast’s lightning like a mosaic of crushed rainbows. As Remera rose from the debris and the fleshy rolls of her body fell back into place, the shards clattered together in a maddening cacophony. The spiked tapestry had been worked into obscene sigils and icons of depravity powerful enough that they drew tears even from Etanios.

‘What fools you are,’ Remera spat. Pulling a small, spiked ball of hollow glass from her shapeless rags, she hurled it at Ithyrac and his assistant. A sticky red liquid sloshed at its core. The ball exploded into needle-fine shards, piercing the witchfinders’ black leather like paper.

In the same instant, Remera whirled and fled. Etanios hurled his hammer at her, crushing both her legs in a single blow. She fell heavily, grabbing at a bookcase. It toppled over her, burying the woman beneath a crashing wall of gibbering flesh-tomes.

Etanios didn’t pause to see how badly Remera had been hurt. Instead, he went to the poisoned witchfinder, hoping that there might somehow be something he could do.

Ithyrac’s eyes were wild and unseeing. A high, strangled wheeze escaped his lips. His neck was collapsing in on itself, withering like a sun-baked mushroom stalk. A second later, the witchfinder’s head tumbled free of his body, crumbling to dust even as it rolled across the floor.

Something lurched in the corpse’s chest. Ithyrac’s leather armour tore itself open from within, and a spewing mass of red-veined viscera erupted from the witchfinder’s torso. Somehow his intestines had transformed into a nest of fanged, skinless snakes, their wet bodies knobbed with lumps of half-dissolved bone. They spat venom at Etanios, struggling to tear free of the corpse that had birthed them.

Ithyrac’s assistant had fared no better. The volcanic glass mask sat askew upon a bubbling mass of gelatinous flesh, within which the assistant’s face was imprisoned like meat in aspic. Viscous fluid gushed from his nose and mouth, congealing rapidly into more suffocating jelly. The terror in the trapped man’s eyes was awful, as were his soundless screams.

There was only one thing Etanios could do for him, and he did it swiftly. Then he dispatched the vipers wriggling in Ithyrac’s ruined gut and, disgusted with his own inability to better protect his allies, went to see what had become of the woman who’d poisoned them.

He hauled Remera out of the bookshelf’s wreckage and searched the injured poisoner, not especially gently. She had two more of those monstrous glass balls hidden away, each one swathed in fine grey silk, but no other weapons. Plainly she’d never intended on an honest fight.

‘Who are you working with?’ Etanios demanded. ‘Why did you murder Magistrate Caroscale?’

Remera’s laugh was a hoarse wheeze. ‘What fools you are,’ she whispered, each syllable as unchanging as a clockwork bird’s. ‘What–’

‘Where did you get the poison?’ Etanios shook the poisoner hard enough to crack her glass piercings. Blood spattered over his gauntleted knuckles.

She gurgled out a thick and clotted chortle. ‘Red venom from the fangs of a black-scaled snake. Squeezed from… seized from… black… black scale–’

Suddenly she coughed, choking on the words. The contempt drained from her face, replaced by astonished fear. The veins of her neck bulged and blackened, spiderwebbing across her cheeks and down her chest. Stinking black blood seeped from her nostrils as she collapsed in Etanios’ grip. Her arteries ruptured, pumping inky corruption throughout her body, and within moments the corpse had dissolved into acid-eaten sludge in a shell of rags.

Etanios stood before the Anvils of the Heldenhammer stationed outside the spire. ‘I failed. The poisoner killed Witchfinder Ithyrac and his assistants. I captured her, but she died babbling about “red venom squeezed from the fangs of a black-scaled snake”. It was… most abrupt.’

‘As if her blood had turned to acid?’ Lord-Relictor Sereghast said.

‘Yes. You don’t sound surprised,’ Etanios ventured.

‘No.’ The Lord-Relictor’s hollow voice betrayed no more emotion than his helm did, but Etanios thought he could sense a certain resignation all the same. ‘She is the fourth to die by such magic while speaking of black-scaled monsters. Whoever is guiding these cults and malcontents has been careful to bury their tracks in corpses.’

‘She had these as well.’ Etanios showed the Lord-Relictor the spiked glass balls he’d taken from Remera. As he held them out, cradling the lethal trinkets carefully in their gossamer wrappings, he realised where he’d seen that grey silk before. ‘They are bundled in shadowsilk from Ulgu. Does that seem odd to you?’

‘Perhaps–’ Sereghast broke off as Anvilgard’s alarm bells began to sound in ponderous, booming peals. Smoke was rising over the High Temple of Sigmar and Dauntless Hall, although it was hard to make out amid the ever-present haze of defoliant.

‘Those are the fortress bells. We should return to the Black Nexus,’ the Lord-Relictor said. His black helm turned back to Etanios. ‘Do you wish to accompany us, Hammer of Sigmar?’

Etanios hesitated. ‘I should finish searching the spire. No doubt the city guard is capable of securing the scene, but… there’s so much Chaos taint here. It may not be advisable to permit mortals inside until it’s been purged.’

‘Very well. We shall send someone to aid you when we can.’ With that, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer departed, their funereal armour clanking dolorously.

Etanios went back inside. The city bells kept ringing, an odd discordant tremor to their chorus as some abruptly went silent and then, just as suddenly, began tolling again. He wondered why their call sounded so confused, but tried to put the question out of his mind. The bells were not his concern. He had his own work to do.

Gathering evidence from the parlour and library was simple enough. The second floor was trickier, but the hole he’d smashed in the ceiling was large enough for Etanios to pull himself through, and to his surprise he found that the beams bore his weight. Climbing up, he saw Ithyrac’s other assistant lying dead nearby.

As the Stormcast’s armoured fingers closed around the corpse’s shoulder, the dead woman’s eyes opened. Shadows filled her gaze, washing out iris and pupil behind a veil of black, and more darkness filled her mouth. Slowly, stiffly, she rose to sit upright.

Etanios backed away, gripping his hammer. If this was some new Chaos abomination…

But the corpse didn’t attack. She took off her cracked glass mask and sat cross-legged, her head lolling grotesquely over the gaping wound in her neck.

‘Etanios Storm-Forged,’ the dead woman murmured in a low, distressingly familiar voice. ‘You must leave Anvilgard at once. You must bear an urgent warning to your god in Azyrheim. Time is short. Will you go?’

‘Thaelire?’ Etanios blinked. He remembered the Witch Aelf well. She had been a disturbing, alluring presence in his life, and though their acquaintance had been brief, she’d left a vivid impression. But the sorceress was dead, murdered by her fellow Khainites, and he couldn’t understand how her voice spoke to him now. ‘You’re–’

‘Ah, you do remember me.’ The lifeless face didn’t move, but he could hear clear amusement in the aelf’s voice. ‘I am not dead, Stormcast. Morathi’s handmaiden ordered my death, yes, but nothing could have been more predictable, and I would have been a true fool not to have planned for it. Now listen. Morathi is here in Anvilgard. She has not come to aid this city in its time of need. She has come to take it, and to betray your master in seizing her prize. You must go back to Azyrheim to warn Sigmar of her duplicity, and you must go now. The noose is closing rapidly.’

‘The Lord-Relictor ordered–’

‘He ordered you to chase phantoms. There is no Chaos cult murdering Anvilgard’s worthies. The High Oracle’s agents have been doing that, weakening the city’s defences through their pawns. They, not the wretches in this spire, are your true enemies here.’

‘What proof do you have?’ Etanios barked. ‘This place is steeped in Chaos.’

‘Oh, it was a real cult. Yes. That’s precisely what made them useful. But they didn’t choose their targets. Cultists can be controlled like anyone else, Stormcast.’ Again, he heard the laughter in Thaelire’s voice, unsettling against the corpse’s slack features. ‘Well, anyone but you. We don’t have time to argue. I expect Morathi will try to seal off the Realmgates first. You must act quickly to use them.’

‘I need more than your word to abandon my orders.’

Thaelire sighed. ‘I had hoped you’d be the one Stormcast who might simply trust me. But… go and see for yourself, if you must. I will try to find you before it is too late.’ The shadows drained from the dead assistant’s eyes and melted from her mouth, and the body slumped to the floor.

Etanios tried to put the aelf’s words out of his mind as he continued his work, dutifully gathering what he could from the spire. Yet he couldn’t shake the suspicions she’d planted. The shadowsilk wrappings around that glass ball, Remera’s talk of a black-scaled snake… and if one were planning to seize Anvilgard from within, how better to weaken the city than by assassinating the authorities who held its functions and structures together?

When a scream sounded from the street outside, he almost expected it. Dropping the last of his grisly findings with the bodies he’d piled up earlier, Etanios left the spire to answer the cry.

Outside, a chill mist blanketed Anvilgard, colder and more ominous than the usual grey fog. Sounds echoed strangely in its depths, and its blank whiteness was impenetrable even to Etanios’ eyes. The odour of salt brine hung heavy in the air, laced with the scents of frigid oceanic mud and seaweed. The alarm bells had never stopped ringing, though their chorus had faltered and weakened as individual bells went silent and did not return.

Flashes of lightning drew his attention to the half-hidden skyline. Winged Stormcast Prosecutors flew overhead, all but invisible in the mist and identifiable only by the brilliance of their celestial weapons searing through the murk. Etanios was briefly heartened by the sight, until he heard the distorted echoes of metal weights striking their bladed wings and the heavy crashes of Prosecutors tumbling from the air into slate-tiled roofs and iron gargoyles.

Who’s attacking them? He could see nothing in the fog.

A burst of motion in the mist resolved into a small crowd of running people. Etanios reached reflexively for his hammer, then let go as he saw that they were women, children and unarmed men. With them were two greying Charrwind Rangers, pushing the frightened civilians forward while keeping their eyes on some unseen foe behind. When they saw Etanios one of the Rangers called, ‘Stormcast! Help us! Hold off this monster so we can get these people to safety!’

Etanios was already moving towards them. ‘What monster?’

The Rangers didn’t answer him. They didn’t have to. As the panicked civilians fled towards Etanios, regarding him with as much frantic relief as if he were a solid wall of protection and not a single Liberator, he saw what hunted them.

It was a massive, spike-scaled drakespawn, its hooked claws wet with blood. A black-cloaked aelven knight, armed with sword and spiked lance, rode the snarling reptile.

An elderly man in a clerk’s robe stumbled and fell behind the rest of the fleeing crowd. The drakespawn ripped him open with a lazy kick as it passed, leaving the old man to writhe in agony as it ran down the rest of its prey.

Etanios strode into the drakespawn’s path. ‘Go,’ he told the Rangers. ‘Get these people somewhere safe.’

‘Sigmar be with you,’ one of the Rangers called, hurrying his charges away. The other hesitated a little longer, regarding Etanios with an open concern that he was unaccustomed to seeing in mortal eyes. Then she, too, ran.

The crested knight had seen Etanios. His drakespawn swerved under him as smoothly as if rider and reptile shared one mind.

The knight charged, lance levelled. Etanios braced himself for impact. He caught the spiked lance and heaved the blow aside, but the shock of it left his arm numb, and the rider wasn’t the only threat. The drakespawn was pure muscle and viciously nimble. Even as the lance screeched off his shield, the reptile raked a claw across the Stormcast’s exposed side, threatening to rip his sigmarite plate apart at the joins.

From above came a chorus of shrill, taunting cries. Etanios dared a glance up and saw bat-winged Witch Aelves wheeling overhead, their horned helms cleaving swirling trails through the mist.

Their barbed javelins came down in a deadly hail as the knight charged again. Two glanced off Etanios’ plate. A third found a weak spot in his side and bit into it, releasing a stinging flood of poison. Another slammed into his helm, briefly dazing the Stormcast. Etanios staggered, and the knight rushed in to exploit his moment of weakness.

The feigned weakness was a trap. Sidestepping the lance with inhuman speed, Etanios brought his hammer around to crush the drakespawn’s head, smashing through plated barding and spiked scales.

As the reptile skidded into collapse, its skull now caved in, Etanios reversed his swing and brought the hammer crashing into its rider. The knight’s armour crumpled under the force of his blow. Lightning danced across the ruined metal and singed the pale flesh beneath, but the aelf was dying too fast to notice.

Shrieking in fury, the winged Witch Aelves hurled down a second volley. Javelins hammered into Etanios’ armour and cracked off the surrounding cobblestones. Only one drew blood, but again its piercing bite was followed by a numbing flush of venom. He flung his hammer back at them, but the poison frustrated his aim and the winged warriors jeered as they flew wide of the clumsy throw.

Dizzied and sweating, Etanios wondered how much longer he could stand. He couldn’t counter the Witch Aelves’ volleys in this weakened state, and he didn’t dare flee for cover – not as long as he was trying to buy time for the Charrwind Rangers’ charges.

Salvation came in a snare of shadows. A net of woven darkness, threaded with blood, lashed up to seize one of the aelves and dragged her to the ground. The gut-ripped old man grinned, dead beside her, every drop of his blood drained away to serve the spell.

Two more snares entangled another pair of winged aelves, pulling them down. The others retreated into the mist, hissing imprecations as they flew off.

Even through his delirium, Etanios recognised the spell as he recognised the cold cruelty in the voice that told him, ‘Kill them.’

He did so, grimly, finishing off each of the three netted aelves in turn. When it was done, he looked to the darkened mouth of the alley the voice had come from.

Thaelire stood there, flanked by two pale and dark-eyed warlocks who had woven the shadow snares. When last Etanios had seen them, the warlocks had been corpses on the battlefield outside Redhollow Ruin. Yet here they stood, alive and well, the inky runes once scarred on their faces now gone.

‘I must congratulate your warlocks on a miraculous recovery,’ Etanios said, steadying himself against a nearby lamp post. His vision swam and he could hardly breathe.

‘Fealorn and Ystrael are loyal, and very dear to me,’ Thaelire murmured, lowering the hood of her shadowsilk cloak as she moved towards Etanios. She, too, looked different – her hair had lost its ruby tinge and fell past her shoulders in darkling waves. But it was without a doubt the sorceress he’d known, as slight and sharp as he remembered. ‘I would never have abandoned them. Anyway, I couldn’t have escaped without their aid, nor could they have escaped without mine. We wove our spells and won our freedom together.

‘Now be still,’ she said, studying his armour. She tried Etanios’ gauntlet first, but couldn’t work the fastenings. Instead, she pulled off his helm, then pressed three fingertips to his cheek while pulling the poisoned javelin from his side with her other hand. Curdled blood fell from the wound and the fever was flushed from the Stormcast’s body. He straightened, relieved, as his strength returned.

‘Good.’ The sorceress stepped back, eyeing him critically. ‘Do you believe me now? Your comrades are falling across Anvilgard. Not slain. They are being crippled, as you so nearly were, so that they cannot warn your God-King of this treachery.’

‘I believe you.’ Etanios glanced at the dead winged aelves. Even crushed and torn, there was a twisted beauty to their forms. ‘What are those things?’

‘Khinerai Heartrenders, Morathi’s handmaidens.’ Thaelire breathed out a sigh, looking suddenly and terribly tired. ‘It may be too late for you, Stormcast. I do not think you will get to any Realmgate now, and we cannot take you to walk the shadows as we do.’ She looked up at him, searching. ‘That leaves only one option.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Will you trust me with your heart?’

Etanios stared at her. ‘What?’

‘If you had listened to me earlier, it would not be necessary. But now… I cannot fight both you and your God-King,’ Thaelire said. ‘If you give me your blood – your heart – I will be able to guide you and commune with you as I do with Fealorn and Ystrael. And I will be able to kill you from afar, if need be, so that you can return to Azyrheim that way and evade Morathi’s capture. But you must be willing. Sigmar’s influence is too strong, otherwise, for me to command you as I would an ordinary human.’

‘But if I agree and give you this blood, you’ll be able to control me in that fashion?’

‘Yes.’ Thaelire didn’t blink at the admission. She touched Etanios’ cheek again, lightly, with an odd tenderness. ‘That is why it is a great gift of trust. I will have that power as long as I hold your blood. I can tell you that I will not lie to you, or compel you against your will – although as I said, I may have to kill you here. But those are only words, and they are the words of an apostate who betrayed her High Oracle and fled her faith, so you would be wise to doubt them. Even so, it is the only surety I can offer you. If you cannot fight your way free of the city before it falls, I can at least ensure Morathi does not take you.’

‘Why?’ Etanios asked, holding the aelf’s gaze steadily. ‘Why offer this to me? You don’t care about Anvilgard, and you surely don’t care about Sigmar. What do you gain by it?’

Thaelire smiled. He had the sense that she approved of his scepticism, and that his doubts raised her estimation of him. ‘You’re right. I don’t care about your God-King or his city. But I do want Morathi endangered, and Sigmar’s anger is the greatest weapon I can muster against her.’

‘Why?’

‘Partly because she murdered my friend, and I have too few of those to forgive that. But mostly so she doesn’t have time to come after me.’ Bleak mirth crinkled the corners of the sorceress’ eyes. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing in Anvilgard, Stormcast? Nothing the High Oracle would approve of, I can assure you. Now that she has come to this city, it’s time for me to go – so I must give the High Oracle something better to do than chase after one tiny, insignificant apostate.’

‘Ah. You want me as a pawn to distract her.’

‘No. Your God-King will be the distraction. You, I think of rather differently.’ Thaelire glanced around them. Shouts were breaking through the mist again, and the fog over the roofs glowed with reflected lightning and fire. ‘But whatever you choose, choose quickly.’

‘Take the blood,’ Etanios said.

He wasn’t sure it was the right decision. The Witch Aelf was a perplexing and mercurial creature, one capable of vast cruelty. He’d seen that at Redhollow Ruin. But he had also seen the strength of her devotion to those she valued.

And he needed to be able to fulfil his duty. If Thaelire was right, and Anvilgard’s Realmgates had been captured, then the only way to bear a message back to Azyrheim might well be through death and reforging. Etanios wasn’t certain she was right, but he couldn’t afford to throw away the chance. Not when the stakes were so high.

‘Give me your hand,’ Thaelire said.

Etanios took off his blue-and-gold gauntlet, offering her his bare hand. She turned his palm upward, tracing the veins along the inside of his wrist, then drew the knife at her side and pierced one. After filling a tiny, opaque bottle with the Stormcast’s blood, Thaelire pressed her lips to the wound, sealing it back to unbroken skin.

She lifted her head to him, all dark eyes and scarlet-stained lips. ‘Kiss me.’

He did, conscious of the warlocks’ hostile stares, the screams drifting through the white-choked streets, the incense and rose scent of her perfume – and then of none of those things as a shock of infernal heat passed between them. Magic burned across his mouth and flamed in his veins. He could suddenly feel her, a magnetic presence in his mind. Had she been halfway across Aqshy, Etanios would have been able to close his eyes and point her out unerringly.

That was not all he could sense. She did feel a peculiar affection for him – he hadn’t imagined that after all – and beyond that, a desire that astonished him in its ferocity.

Thaelire smiled faintly at his reaction, but gave him little time to recover from her spell. The cries and clamour of fighting were drawing steadily nearer, unmistakable even through the sound-deforming mist. Already the warlocks were out of sight, and the sorceress herself was fading into faceless shadow. ‘We must go.’

‘The duardin tunnels,’ Etanios said. He clasped his gauntlet back on and replaced his golden helm, trying to regain his composure. ‘Morathi’s forces may not yet have taken them. They might still offer a way through.’

‘Lead.’ Her answer floated from empty air. ‘I will follow.’

Now Anvilgard was burning. Shattered windows littered the cobblestones, and corpses sprawled in rubbish-strewn alleyways and behind decorative courtyard walls – anywhere a desperate defender might have sought cover, or a frightened family might have tried to hide. Etanios saw cellars filled with fire where boltholes had been splashed with incendiaries and set aflame, and all about him lay the remains of citizens torn apart by drakespawn claws and Khinerai spears. Morathi’s forces had slaughtered any human or duardin who crossed their path, no matter how helpless or innocent.

This is but the beginning of what Morathi will do. Thaelire’s voice whispered directly into his thoughts, so close that he could almost feel her breath brush against his ear. She will remake the city in her image, and all who are deemed unworthy to live under her rule will be bled for Khaine’s glory. Witness it well, so you can tell your God-King.

You knew, he thought back at her, accusingly. You knew this was coming and did nothing.

I did not know this was coming. And I did try to warn you. You were the one who chose not to believe.

He had no rejoinder for that.

In truth, he wasn’t really angry with her. Etanios was angry with himself, and with all the seers and signifiers and investigators who had failed to grasp what was happening. Black scales, shadowsilk wrappings, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer sent off to other realms – the clues were there. How could they all have been so blind?

Ahead, the stern walls of the Black Nexus loomed through a pall of greasy alchemical smoke. Anvilgard’s remaining defenders had gathered around the Stormcast fortress, and battle had raged furiously there. The nearby buildings were scorched with the black scars of duardin incinerators and splintered by stray cannon shots. Scraps of twisted metal clinked under Etanios’ armoured boots as he approached.

But there was no fighting now. Only the dead and dying remained, and a few Witch Aelves who picked winding paths through the rubble, slaughtering any survivors they found. What Etanios had initially taken for a half-collapsed building was actually a duardin cogfort toppled over a line of smashed statues. Its thick, steel walls had been ripped apart like wet paper; its turrets and gun ports dripped with spilled fuel and the lifeblood of its crew. He couldn’t imagine what could have destroyed such a behemoth with such savage ease, but it seemed that Thaelire could.

Stop. Please. Etanios, stop. Icy fear laced the sorceress’ mind-voice. Gone was her usual teasing lightness. Only terror, rising by the second, filled Thaelire. We’ll find another way.

We’re almost to the tunnels, Etanios objected. The entrance is right there. Whatever happened here, it’s over.

Please. Pull back. I beg you. She is here. I can feel–

A cold shadow fell across Etanios’ soul. He looked up and saw a serpentine form outlined by the glow of burning towers in the distance. Enormous, leathery wings arched from the creature’s back, black against the fire-specked twilight. The figure turned slightly, and Etanios glimpsed the wrath-twisted features of an aelven face crowned by razored spikes and split-tongued snakes.

But the great figure did not see him. It seemed, rather, to be making a conqueror’s parade through Anvilgard, stamping out whatever embers of resistance still flickered in the streets. It turned away and Etanios shuddered, overawed even by the brief and faraway sight of such a being.

She has become a goddess. The High Oracle has seen her way to that future at last. Despair tinged Thaelire’s thoughts, but fear remained her overriding emotion. If you will not turn back, at least let me veil you. The fortress has fallen and you will find no allies here. Only danger can come from being seen.

Very well. Etanios withdrew to the doorway of a bombed-out home and took off his gold-masked helm. He stood impassively as Thaelire emerged from the shadows to daub his brow with blood and soot, rising onto her toes to reach him. The colours blanched from his armour, blue-and-gold enamel fading to a cool grey as she whispered her incantations. When it was done he could scarcely distinguish himself from the twilit gloom, and guessed that no one outside the spell could see him at all.

‘I had no part in this,’ she said after she’d finished. It almost sounded like a plea.

‘I know.’ Thaelire had risked her life – had maybe even died, although he still wasn’t certain how she’d contrived her escape – to renounce her coven’s faith. Once again Etanios was disgusted with himself, not her. So many valiant defenders had fallen at the Black Nexus, so many innocents had died in terror, and he hadn’t been there to stand among them.

‘You cannot blame yourself, either.’ Thaelire turned his face towards hers, forcing Etanios to meet her gaze. Urgency had, for the moment, eclipsed her fear. ‘You would have achieved nothing by falling and being captured here. It would have been brave, yes, but stupid. Purposeless. It is far more important for you to bear witness to what happened here, and then carry that tale to your God-King.’

‘As you say.’ He was far from convinced, but there was no point arguing.

Donning his helm, Etanios approached the entrance to the duardin tunnels. The metal doors had fused together under a sustained blast of intense heat, as if the duardin had turned their own cogfort’s incinerator guns upon it. Perhaps they’d meant to seal the doors against Morathi’s forces. If so, they’d overshot the mark. Nothing remained but bubbled slag that broke apart easily at a pull.

The stairs beyond the fused doors had also melted. Etanios descended carefully, then turned to lift Thaelire down after him. The aelf weighed nothing in his hands, and he was struck by how fragile, how very mortal, she was. Most Daughters of Khaine were fierce warriors, tough and resilient, but the sorceress felt as breakable as a songbird.

No wonder she preferred to hide in the shadows. If they were cornered in a fight down here…

My warlocks will not come, she told him, as if sensing his thoughts. I won’t have them trapped in close quarters. They will meet us at the waterfront. Until then, it’s only the two of us.

He nodded, moving deeper into the unlit dark. The smokeless lanterns that ordinarily cast the corridors in a warm orange glow had been smashed, leaving the tunnels black. Thaelire conjured a tiny shadowlight, and they went on.

Smoke and fear-sweat hung in the air. Etanios could make out twenty or so heartbeats ahead. The heavy pulses of duardin, the quicker ones of humans, almost too exhausted to remain afraid. Refugees. They must have broken the lights to deter pursuers.

We should be able to slip past them easily, Thaelire responded. They won’t see anything through the masking spells.

They might need help.

Disapproval pulsed in her thoughts. No. You’ll break the illusion. You would throw away your life for theirs? You would throw away–

It is my duty.

Duty. Ah. Of course. Her laugh was sharp and soundless, and bitterer than he’d expected. Yes, one must always be loyal to one’s god. Crucial, that. But your duty is not to them, Stormcast. You must get our message to Sigmar. That’s far more important than a handful of lives.

Etanios didn’t answer. There was no discussion to be had. If the refugees needed help, he’d help them. If that meant he died, he died. Such was a Stormcast’s fate.

If that meant she died…

Etanios hesitated, and then kept walking. The sorceress was resourceful. She’d find a way through. Whatever the cost, surely Thaelire would find a way through.

A few minutes later he came upon the survivors. They’d gathered around a shaky fire to make a meal of their meagre provisions and were arguing about what to do next.

‘–the Brightwing Dancer,’ a chestnut-haired woman in a torn, blue dress was saying. She had two young children with her and was spooning mush into one’s mouth while keeping a watchful eye on the other. ‘I know the captain. She’s an aelf, but she’s a good heart. She won’t turn us away.’

‘It’s too risky,’ a white-bearded duardin grumbled. ‘We should head inland. Towards the jungle. They’ll not follow us there.’

‘That’s your idea of a safer choice?’ scoffed another duardin, tattooed in tribal signs of green and gold. She bore a dozen minor, crudely bandaged wounds. ‘The jungle? Have you any idea what manner of beasts hunt in that deathtrap? Not to mention the man-eater vines, or the steam-swamps that’ll boil the skin right off your–’

‘Still better than trying to get out through Bleakscale Harbour,’ the first duardin said stubbornly. ‘The Scourge Corsairs have locked that up tight.’

Why have you stopped? Thaelire asked, exasperated. They are in no danger here, and their bickering is not our concern.

She was right. Carefully, so as not to disturb the refugees, Etanios and Thaelire circled the tiny, flickering fire and moved on.

Several times they had to detour around sections that had collapsed during the fighting, or slip down side tunnels to evade hunting parties roaming through the catacombs that interwove with the duardin tunnels beneath Anvilgard. Etanios had seldom tried to avoid enemies in his time as a Stormcast, and was both amused and galled by how easily it was done.

Mostly, however, he was glad for Thaelire’s company. It was… different… from marching with his comrades. Her presence, and even her prickliness, marked something new and pleasant and rare. Etanios had not served in Sigmar’s eternal war for long, but it had been long enough for him to understand how lonely that service could be. With her at his side it was… easier.

After the better part of an hour, they came to Bleakscale Harbour. The white-bearded duardin was right – the waterfront was firmly in the hands of Scourge Corsairs and Witch Aelves, including several masked Sisters of Slaughter. There were fewer than Etanios had expected to see, however, and no signs of active fighting. A few ships, crippled and burning, had drifted out into the lagoon. Their flaming sails cast red ripples over the dark water, but even so the night was oddly tranquil.

Anvilgard had fallen. It was over. The victors had gone to celebrate their triumph, leaving only these scattered sentries to watch over their conquest.

Etanios scanned the night sea, looking for the shadow-veiled shape of Thaelire’s boat. It was a slim, black craft, little more than a fishing boat, tucked almost invisibly between two larger vessels. One of them was the Brightwing Dancer.

Let us go. Shadows swirled behind him, and he felt the sorceress brush past as she strode to the pier.

Just as Etanios began to follow, he heard a sewer grate creak open behind him. From it came the subdued voices of the survivors they’d encountered earlier. One of the duardin must have led them along a secret, swifter route to the harbour.

A dozen Corsairs and Witch Aelves stood between the sewer grate and whatever safety the Brightwing Dancer might offer – far too many for the ragtag survivors to evade or overcome, even if they’d been prepared for the danger.

They weren’t. The first refugees emerged, blinking and coughing in the smoke-laced sea breeze, and froze when they saw the Witch Aelves.

‘Were you trying to sneak away? Surely you don’t want to leave Har Kuron,’ an iron-masked Sister of Slaughter called to the little group, laughing. She snapped her bladed whip as she stalked towards them, two more Witch Aelves following close behind.

‘Hurry,’ the mother in the blue dress said, urging her frightened children towards the pier. They balked, the younger one crying, and Etanios knew they’d never reach the ship in time. Nor was the captain likely to take them if it meant the Sisters of Slaughter might follow them aboard. The Brightwing Dancer was no warship, and if her crew had been inclined to the least bit of resistance they’d have been burning on the water with the rest.

‘Go,’ Etanios barked at them, shattering Thaelire’s illusion as he spoke. The refugees gaped at the Stormcast Eternal’s sudden appearance. The crying child’s wails rose to hysteria.

But the Sisters of Slaughter paused as well, reassessing the situation as a new danger presented itself. Then, as Etanios had known they would, they charged him as a feral, fluid pack. He raised his hammer to meet them… and stopped, astonished, as the Witch Aelves suddenly froze. The Corsairs, too, had gone unnaturally still, a shadowy blankness sleeted over their eyes. A wintry gust swept across the waterfront, riming sails and ropes with silver frost despite the sweltering Aqshyian heat.

Tell your stupid humans to run, and kill the aelves. Thaelire’s mind-voice was brusque with strain. Kill them quickly. You wanted this, and it must look like your work.

‘Go!’ he shouted at the refugees again, and this time they fled towards the Brightwing Dancer in a jerky rush. A moment later, the ship began slipping from the harbour, moving with what seemed an excruciating slowness that probably required untold panic and haste aboard.

As the survivors retreated, Etanios slew Morathi’s troops.

It was murder. No other word would have been honest. Thaelire’s magic prisoned their minds, and though the sorceress forced each of them to mime attacks at Etanios in turn, they were helpless puppets in her grip. They died in sham poses, staged for deceit, and Etanios recoiled inwardly each time he struck one down.

But he did it. Again and again, he did it.

The last of the Witch Aelves, a scarred veteran, stirred as he raised his hammer to kill her. Just for a heartbeat, the frost around her cracked and her eyes focused on his gold-masked face. Etanios felt a pulse of intense energy in the air, as if a lightning strike had narrowly missed him. The hammer came down and the aelf fell, silently, but panic flooded Thaelire’s thoughts.

Oh, you fool. Absolute, utter fool of a Stormcast. For a handful of lives, you’ve doomed us.

A woman emerged from the desolation of Anvilgard’s core, approaching the harbour unhurriedly. She was tall, aelven, possessed of a striking grace. Flowing crimson silk, cut high and low to flaunt the sleek perfection of her figure, glistened and clung to her like fresh-spilled blood. She wore a spiked crown of black and gold, but hardly needed the ornament to proclaim that she was a queen. In rags and ashes she would have been more regal than any empress on a throne.

She was the most beautiful creature Etanios had ever seen, and the instant his eyes fell upon her, he understood Thaelire’s despair.

Morathi-Khaine. This was no mere Witch Aelf to be defeated with hammer and spell. This was a goddess risen. The ancient queen of snakes and shadows had ascended to true divinity.

Behind her came a procession of snake-bodied and winged handmaidens, and Daughters of Khaine clad in leather and scale and bloody masks. They stayed a respectful distance from their goddess, never encroaching on her splendour. Witnesses, not foot-soldiers. Morathi needed no lackeys to dispose of a single, stray Stormcast by the sea.

I will have to kill you soon. Thaelire’s thoughts were heavy with regret. He felt the ache in her, the longing for what she was about to lose. Will you be able to say what must be said when you are reforged? Will you remember?

I will take the message to Azyrheim, Etanios sent back, although he could only hope that was true. He had never died in this form before, had never been remade upon the Anvil.

Good. Thaelire’s mind-voice withdrew, her attention shifting to her magic. He could sense that she wanted to say more, and that his answer hadn’t spoken to the question she’d really meant to ask, but she’d already pulled back.

Save the ship, he sent to her – a request, not an instruction. He didn’t want to die for nothing. He’d sacrificed his own escape to protect the people on the Brightwing Dancer; he wanted to see them safe.

You must be joking, Thaelire sighed, but there was no heat to it. Then fight, Stormcast. Fight a goddess for as long as you can.

Etanios raised his hammer in a salute. To her, not to Morathi, but it was Morathi who answered.

The goddess laughed and raised her barbed spear in mocking reply. Bladed wings unfurled from her back, reflecting the light of the burning ships in shards of gleaming shadow and gold. ‘The last Stormcast in Har Kuron. Shall we see whether he fares any better than his comrades?’

Her followers echoed her derision, hurling taunts at Etanios. He ignored them. The Witch Aelves’ mockery meant nothing to him.

Morathi’s baiting, however, sent a sliver of ice through his soul. Her desire to make a show of him suggested that some of the other Stormcasts had managed to defy her, perhaps even hurt her, and that she meant to exact vengeance upon him for this slight. Etanios could only hope that Thaelire killed him quickly. He doubted he could long endure whatever Morathi might devise.

But first, for the sake of the Brightwing Dancer, he had to spin this show out as long as he could. ‘Does it take a goddess to defeat one Stormcast? Can none of Khaine’s daughters prevail? I see them cowering behind you, children behind their mother’s skirts.’

The jeers rose to a new pitch of rage. A bloody-gauntleted Witch Aelf leapt forward, clashing a long knife against her buckler. ‘Great one, I beg of you, allow me to show this storm-dazed fool his place.’

‘You may test yourself,’ Morathi agreed graciously. ‘But he is not to be killed. Death is too easy for those who defy me.’

‘He will not escape through death,’ the Witch Aelf vowed, and sprang to attack.

It was no contest. Etanios had known as soon as Morathi had allowed the challenge that it wouldn’t be. She had only meant for him to spill her overeager servant’s blood to punish the Witch Aelf for having the temerity to interrupt her game.

Still, he played it out as long as he could, letting the Witch Aelf scratch at his armour and evading any more lethal blows while cautiously gauging the Brightwing Dancer’s progress. The ship had nearly cleared Bleakscale’s lagoon, but it remained in shallow water and would be easy prey for the watchtowers overlooking the harbour.

‘This bores me,’ Morathi announced after a few minutes, cold and imperious. ‘Sedlei, you have failed. A true daughter would have brought this storm-clod down already, but you have not even drawn blood.’ The barbed spear lashed out, and suddenly the Witch Aelf was pinned to the ground, skewered through both lungs. She tried to scream, but only hideous red bubbles came to her lips.

Slowly, delighting in her failed servant’s writhing, Morathi withdrew the spear. She gave it a final twist as she wrenched the head free, shredding the Witch Aelf’s heart upon the barbs. As her retinue showered adulation upon their queen and scorn upon the corpse, Morathi flung the dripping ruins of the heart against Etanios’ breastplate. ‘You, of course, can expect no such merciful end.’

Now it was Etanios’ turn to play the toy. He fought with all the ferocity Sigmar had granted him, striking at the crimson queen with greater speed and fierceness than he had ever mustered. Lightning flashed about his hammer, sparks of divine energy coruscated from his armour, and he swung with force enough to crack the walls of a duardin cogfort.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Morathi slid around his swings like smoke, bright-eyed and laughing. He never touched her, never came close. Her spear flicked out with the delicate cruelty of a cat playing with a crippled mouse. She broke his armour off piece by piece, deliberately striking down Sigmar’s holy protections but never drawing more than the thinnest lines of blood.

That tease of blood, more than anything else, incited her followers to madness. They howled like Khornate quill-cats, and Etanios was grimly certain that had their queen relaxed their leashes in the slightest, they would have torn him apart with nails and teeth.

Finally, satisfied with her humiliations, Morathi wrenched Etanios’ weapon from his hands with a whirlwind jerk of her spear, leaving him holding nothing but pain and blood. The Stormcast’s palms were deeply lacerated, the fingers nearly severed. He would have been helpless to grasp hammer or shield even if she hadn’t stripped both from him already.

The goddess lowered her spear. Casually, contemptuously, she took hold of Etanios’ helm and wrenched it off, casting it aside for her servants to defile. She leaned in close, her beauty crushing, her eyes afire with the desire to watch him suffer. Her nails dug into the Stormcast’s throat, breaking his skin and imparting a deadly, poisoned numbness. ‘So end all who stand against me. How foolishly, how easily, you fall.’

Thaelire. He cast his thoughts to her desperately. It was all he could do to close his eyes against Morathi’s darkly luminous glory. Already the queen’s venom had nearly paralysed him. Please. Now.

Goodbye, Stormcast. Her answer came softly, a ghost in his thoughts. Perhaps I will find you again. If you return from this. If I survive. If your so-precious duty allows. But if not–

A terrible ecstasy seized Etanios. Fire flared in his veins; his vision went red. Death did not come for him peacefully, but in a torrent of heat that burned past pleasure into an obliterating white inferno.

His heart exploded. Lightning consumed the Stormcast’s body, arcing up towards the heavens.

Morathi snarled, clenching her singed hands into fists, and seized his soul in lashing coils of shadow. Blue light and serpentine darkness tangled in the sky over the harbour, casting wild flashes over the waves. ‘What treachery is this? What heretic daughter serves the storm?’

No answer came. Etanios, a spirit caught in the maelstrom, could only watch as if from afar, his disembodied senses battered by endless shocks of crackling white and blue. Shadows boiled around him, thick and clinging, binding him like sea-sodden ropes. Their chill slithering repulsed him, but he was helpless to free himself from their grasp. And they were strong, so strong. Inexorably, they pulled him down towards Morathi’s clawed hands.

Then she was with him somehow, unravelling the shadows with a quick and focused deftness. The smallest gap in the net opened, sealed, was forced open again and closed just as quickly. Etanios felt a pulse of frustration and a stronger beat of fear. But she did not abandon him.

On the ground, frost sleeted across the pier’s creaking wooden boards. The aelves of Morathi’s honour guard stiffened abruptly, their eyes going black and vacant. A few Witch Aelves drew their knives in stiff, jerky movements. The Khinerai and serpent-bodied warriors, twitching like restless sleepers fighting to free themselves from nightmare, held out a little longer. Blood trickled from their noses and the corners of their eyes as they fought against their sorcerous compulsions.

Then, almost as one, their resistance collapsed. With spears and javelins and wicked knives, the empty-eyed Daughters of Khaine attacked their goddess.

Morathi screamed in outrage as they turned on her. Levelling her spear at her treacherous handmaidens, she tore them apart in a red whirl of fury. None so much as scratched her skin, but the effort distracted her for the briefest of instants.

Once more, the shadow-net split. Etanios slipped free, a bright bolt in the sky.

Below him, the blood-drenched goddess screamed again. A massive explosion shook the harbour, engulfing entire ships and their crews in a fireball of silvery, white-edged shadowflame. Thaelire’s black boat floated away in splinters, none larger than an arm’s span. There was no sign of survivors.

Morathi stood unscathed at the devastation’s edge, her glory undimmed, her bladed wings shining like a halo of broken stars. The bodies of her servants lay scattered about her feet like rose petals thrown to mark her coronation.

Thaelire was nowhere. Etanios couldn’t sense her. The link was gone.

He rose higher. Anvilgard – Har Kuron – spread beneath his view, still smoking in places and freshly scarred by battle, but already beginning to bend into its new shape. He saw cauldrons of blood boiling in the market squares. Crimson-splashed aelves danced on the once gleaming white steps of Sigmar’s High Temple, the priests eviscerated at their feet. A few captured Charrwind Rangers and other soldiers of the Freeguild stood on the red sands of Hag’s Sacrament, fighting desperately for a few more minutes of life before Witch Aelf gladiators cut them down for the amusement of their crowds.

He didn’t see a single Stormcast anywhere. Their fortresses stood silent. Their temples burned over the spilled blood of the faithful. There was only one god in Har Kuron now.

As he soared above the stricken city, Etanios saw how complete Morathi’s victory was and how little he’d done to dent it. For this, you would throw away your life. You would throw away–

Yes, he thought. For duty.

Because, for him it was not a choice. It was a fate.

The last thing he saw was the Brightwing Dancer, sailing free over a midnight sea. A child stood on its deck, no longer crying, gazing in wonder at a shooting star that flew up, not down, into the dark.

About the Author

Liane Merciel is the author of novels including The River Kings’ Road, Pathfinder Tales: Nightglass and Hellknight, and Dragon Age: Last Flight. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two big unruly mutts, and her preschooler, the unruliest of them all. ‘Red Claw and Ruin’ is her first story for Black Library.

An extract from Covens of Blood.

Morathi’s emissary came at sunset.

She emerged from the shadows with the red light behind her, painting the black-lipped scales of her body with blood and casting her eyes into terrible darkness. The Kharumathi sisters, who were no strangers to such tricks themselves, were nevertheless awed by the deftness and totality with which the melusai welded the sun’s death to her own grandeur. Their coven had never been deemed worthy of a direct visit from one of the High Oracle’s snake-bodied handmaidens before, and this one was all they’d imagined.

Smoothly the emissary climbed onto the great black rock that thrust up over the Kharumathi’s enormous blood cauldron, her serpentine body undulating across the stone. Hundreds of sacrificial victims had died on that rock, their blood poured into the cauldron’s gaping maw as an offering to Khaine’s glory. The emissary’s scales scraped up the rust-coloured flakes of their lives, and the dried blood floated before her like rose petals thrown to carpet her arrival. Little flecks clung to the pale skin of her aelven upper body, stippling her abdomen and elbows with pinpricks of brown and red.

The Daughters of Khaine fell to their knees in a ring, eyes downcast and knives outstretched in ritual supplication. Rhaelanthe, their hag queen, prostrated herself at the head of their circle, though it was excitement rather than terror that tensed the aelf’s body. No greater honour had been bestowed upon the Kharumathi during her reign.

‘Sisters of the Kharumathi!’ the emissary called from the sacrificial stone. As one, the witch-aelves of the coven lifted their eyes, though they remained kneeling with their hands flattened on the ground over the hilts of their knives. ‘I am Myrcalene, Blood Herald of Khaine, Fatescribe to High Oracle Morathi, Finder of the Volathi Shard. I bring you greetings from the High Oracle, and instruction.’

‘Loyally we serve!’ Rhaelanthe cried, though the melusai had not indicated that she should speak.

In the ranks behind the hag queen, one of the kneeling witch-aelves snorted, very quietly, in disdain.

Nepenora, kneeling next to the disrespectful aelf – Thaelire, her oldest and only friend – stiffened in instinctive alarm. Very deliberately, she forced herself to relax. If Rhaelanthe or any of her pet kittens noticed Nepenora’s reaction, they’d assume she, too, was disloyal, because she’d heard the seditious noise and hadn’t reported it.

Which would end very badly, and messily, for her.

Fortunately, it seemed that none of them had. All the other Kharumathi were riveted by the melusai on the blood-streaked stone. Nepenora exhaled a silent sigh of relief and fixed her attention on Myrcalene too.

‘In the fiery Realm of Aqshy,’ Myrcalene told them, ‘there is a fortress said to have been raised by Khorne. Whether this is true – whether the Lord of Battle has the patience, or the skill, to build anything – is unknown, but doubtful. Most likely that is a lie that his slaves tell to cover him with unearned glory. Regardless, the fortress stands. Its original name is long forgotten. We know it today as Redhollow Ruin. Khorne held it for a long and terrible age, and then it was taken from his servants, and sat empty for another.’

The melusai’s voice hardened, and her beautiful face took on a predatory aspect.

‘Now one of his Bloodbound has come forth to claim it again. Graelakh the Gore-Gorger, he is called, and on his right hand he wears a gauntlet of iron and blood with a pulsing ruby in its palm. This is the Goregorge Claw, and the power it grants Khorne’s brutes is stolen from us, for the ruby it holds is none other than a Shard of Khaine.’

A gasp swept through the circle of aelves. Nepenora echoed it too, for she could hardly miss the implication. There was only one reason that an emissary of High Oracle Morathi would come to them with news of a Shard of Khaine.

‘You, sisters of the Kharumathi, must reclaim this shard of our wounded god from the brutes who hold it now. You must fall upon Redhollow Ruin and tear the blasphemer Graelakh apart. Seize the Goregorge Claw, shatter the Blood Lord’s prison, and free our wounded god’s soul-shard from his grip.’

‘For Khaine’s glory, it will be done,’ Rhaelanthe swore, leaping to her feet and clashing her knife’s hilt against the crosspiece of her plated harness. The other witch-aelves were swift to their feet beside her, and Nepenora got up as well, shouting with the rest, for anything less would be viewed as treason.

One of the witch-aelves called for the leathanam. The cry was soon taken up by others, and the leathanam hastened to answer. Heads bowed in mute subservience, the gaunt and wretched half-souls scurried from their dirty slave-tents, bearing loads of cut wood that seemed far too heavy for their frail frames. They heaped the wood about the cauldron’s base, covering its nest of bloodied ashes with a ring of fresh fuel.

Their task done, the leathanam retreated. Not all of them, however, were quick enough to reach safety. A laughing witch-aelf seized the nearest half-soul by his wrist, pulling him to her in a wild, whirling dance around the cold cauldron and its firewood.

He didn’t resist. There was no use in a leathanam trying to resist anything a female wanted to do to him. The gold-crowned witch-aelf tossed the male about like a toy, yanking him close and hurling him away, until she’d danced a complete circle around the cauldron. At the end, she threw him to the next Daughter of Khaine. She, too, spun the hapless leathanam through a furious revel and cast him to the next Kharumathi.

They spun him around and around, their dance growing steadily faster and angrier, their treatment of the unlucky half-soul rougher. The leathanam’s wrists and arms bled from a hundred shallow cuts that the female aelves’ bladed gauntlets and bracelets had slashed in him, but he never made a sound. He never even lifted his eyes from the pounded earth beneath his feet. Nepenora took her turn, and Thaelire too. Then the last of them took her dance, and hurled the leathanam to Rhaelanthe when she was done.

The hag queen brought the exhausted, injured male stumbling up the stone to where Myrcalene waited. Blood from his dance-inflicted lacerations pattered onto the rock between the hag queen’s feet and the melusai. It was the only sound in the hushed, reverent silence that weighted the air.

Some of the Daughters of Khaine, after their dances, had gone to get their ritual drums. Softly, then with greater insistence, they took up the rhythm of the leathanam’s dripping blood on their instruments, first echoing and then drowning out the thudding of his heart.

‘We pray, now, for the glory of Khaine and the favour of his High Oracle, Morathi,’ Rhaelanthe pronounced. The hag queen gripped the leathanam’s hair and slashed her ritual knife across his throat, splashing his lifeblood into the cauldron in a messy, erratic fountain. After a few thrashing moments, the male went limp in her grip, dying with no sound save a choked, involuntary gasp. Blood continued to pour from him even as his heart stuttered to a stop and his flesh went white. Drawn by the cauldron’s magic, it spilled out until all that remained of the leathanam was a dried husk, light and empty as a cicada’s shell.

The drums, which had fallen silent for a beat so that all could hear the first sacrifice die, took up their hammering rhythm again.

‘We pray,’ Rhaelanthe said, letting the male’s body fall from the rock onto the heaped firewood, ‘and we dance. We dance, my sisters. We dance!’

As she shouted, the leathanam’s withered corpse burst into red flame, igniting the fire around the cauldron and washing the Daughters of Khaine in its bloody light. The Kharumathi cried out in furious joy. Those who were not drumming went out into the camp, seizing war-slaves and prisoners and unfortunate leathanam, then pulling them back to the cauldron to dance.

They whirled madly, the witch-aelves wild and terrible and beautiful in the scarlet light, the orruks and humans and leathanam held helplessly in their thrall. Around and around they spun, and the aelves’ ritual knives flashed in their dance, and the air smelled of copper and sweat. The cauldron filled with blood, first slowly and only from a few scattered streams, then in dozens of bright overlapping arches at once, like a grisly fountain running in reverse.

Above them all, Myrcalene watched, impassive as an idol. Wisps of red steam twined about her scales and stirred the loose strands of her white hair. As the last of the sacrifices emptied his life into the cauldron, the bloody steam grew thicker, enveloping the Kharumathi in a warm red fog.

The dancers vanished in its embrace, only shapely limbs or an occasional toss of red-streaked hair emerging from the fog. The drummers remained visible at its outer edges a while longer. Then the mist swallowed them as well, so that their thudding song resonated through the blood-cloud like the disembodied beating of all its harvested hearts.

In that hot red haze, hardly able to breathe, buffeted by the thunder of the Kharumathi drums, Nepenora felt herself seized by a transcendent, incandescent ecstasy. Exhilaration flooded her veins, sang in her heart, filled her sight with a swirl of tingling stars. She was cradled with her battle-sisters in their god’s embrace, suffused with the greatest satisfaction that any male could give them, sated and supreme.

Graelakh and his Bloodbound were doomed.

The blood-cloud began to dissipate, releasing them back to the cool shadow of the world. Witch-aelves emerged from the fog, slowly, unwilling to relinquish the red pleasure of the night. Many, including the hag queen, went off to their own tents in twos and threes. A few eccentrics who preferred males, like Thaelire, took what they could from the leathanam or their surviving captives. Thaelire herself kept a pair of rune-scarred warlocks as pets, and Nepenora was unsurprised to see her summon them to her side.

A comely witch-aelf beckoned to Nepenora, breaking her chain of thought. Blood smeared the woman’s upper arms and chest. Her cheek was daubed with crimson, stark against her bone-pale skin. She beckoned again, her smile alight with promise, and Nepenora laughed and followed her into the shadows.

The last she saw of the revelry was Myrcalene, still standing sentinel on the sacrificial rock, watching the Kharumathi disperse with hot, red eyes.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Catherine O’Connor.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-728-2

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