More great stories from the Age of Sigmar

SACROSANCT AND OTHER STORIES
Various authors

SOUL WARS
Josh Reynolds

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 1
Various authors
Contains the novels The Gates of Azyr, War Storm, Ghal Maraz, Hammers of Sigmar, Wardens of the Everqueen and Black Rift

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 2
Various authors
Contains the novels Call of Archaon, Warbeast, Fury of Gork, Bladestorm, Mortarch of Night and Lord of Undeath

GODS AND MORTALS
Various authors

SCOURGE OF FATE
Robbie MacNiven

• HALLOWED KNIGHTS •
Josh Reynolds
Book 1: PLAGUE GARDEN
Book 2: BLACK PYRAMID

HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS
David Guymer

BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK
Andy Clark

THE RED FEAST
Gav Thorpe

SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY
Josh Reynolds

CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD
Nick Horth

THE TAINTED HEART
C L Werner

NEFERATA: MORTARCH OF BLOOD
David Annandale

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON
C L Werner

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS
An Age of Sigmar novel

NAGASH: THE UNDYING KING
Josh Reynolds

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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Four

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Five

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Six

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Myths & Revenants’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

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

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

PART ONE

BRIOMDAR

CHAPTER ONE

Prince Lurien slumped boredly into the Jade Throne of Briomdar. An artefact of whale ivory and aquamarine, it had thin strands of jade woven through an armature of living coral by the shamanic tide magicks of the isharann chorralus. The physical discomfort of that seat was offset somewhat by the novelty, and by the still-fuzzy glow of his mother’s death. Lurien smiled and shifted position. It was the ‘living’ part, he decided. The coral. In essence, he was sitting on a cunningly crafted rock, one that would regrow itself for each new generation of royalty and never be worn to fit an aelf’s shape. There was a lesson from the gods there, his mother would have said, about hubris and impermanence.

And Queen Lágethé, Tidemistress of the City of Seers, a proven authority on hubris, was now well placed to muse on impermanence.

Her soul, on the other hand…

With a weary sigh, Lurien wound a gauntleted finger through the algal strands of his periwig. The lengths were tied into knots and braids, luminescent turquoise wound with coarse-textured gold. The royal colours of Briomdar. With the bone of his jaw resting against his knuckles, he watched the performance.

The néthic dancer swirled, fishlike, between scattered groups of hooded isharann and ceremonially armoured akhelian, swimming through the deep green ethersea of the hall with the glowing chorrileum shard held above her head. Her body had been painted in mourning purple, marked further in subdued golden pigments with the runes of Erek, Thial and Néthu, with long streamers of black algal hair arranged in fishtails that swarmed over the emblems of the old gods of the dead like cleaner fish about a sacred allopex. Slave dancers of both sexes rippled through the hall in her wake, ribbons trailing from poles. With graceful tumbles, they swam together to conjure scenes from the age of eolas: red dragons breathing golden fire, white isles falling under black seas, golden goddesses devouring the world.

Surrounded by whorls of flesh and colour, the nobility of Briomdar engaged in abstinence, performing the solitary dances of the court. The avarai. The sarail. Or even, for those more daring, the iltaer, in which an aelf partnered with another on the opposite side of the hall. Every great house was accounted for but one, and yet the sense Lurien took from it was emptiness.

Nothing upset the sensibilities of the deepkin like the company of another of their kin.

Lurien watched the dancers with a curled lip. The Dance of the First Age, from the epoch before the Awakening, was a little morbid, even for his idea of entertainment.

With his left hand he wiggled the stem of his wine flute.

A girl bearing a conch shell was beside him almost immediately.

She looked about thirteen or fourteen, although her actual age was impossible to determine: namarti souls aged more quickly than the ivory-skinned perfection of their bodies could show. It was her scars, though, that fascinated Lurien. The namastir ‘half-soul’ rune branded into her forehead. The imperfect flesh that had grown over her hollow eye sockets. The hadrilkar slave collar with the swarming reef emblem of the house of Lágethé. Her bald white scalp had been polished with scented fish oils. Lurien held out his flute, already looking away. The girl flinched from the sudden movement, but didn’t allow any of the dark caulep wine to splash the turquoise-and-gold mosaic of the prince’s armour as she poured.

‘Will that be all, my prince?’ she murmured.

‘For now.’ Lurien darkened his ghoulishly white lips with wine. ‘But do not venture far.’ He watched the dancers distractedly as the conch girl eeled away.

He took a sip of the wine, amusing himself with the thought of how much more enthralling it would be to have the slaves calling him ‘my king’ after the assembral.

‘I hear that the Mirai Wardens are going to inter her above King Lorthael.’

Lurien turned to the three knights lounging variously about the foot of the throne. Each had come clad in piecemeal armour of turquoise scalloping and fine lace, the heraldries of their akhelian houses drifting with their long cloaks in the currents. The hall was a lattice woven of coral strands and gossamer algal netting that draped the original wooden scaffold of the Crannstock, and the icy currents in the ethersea that drove through its many openings never ceased. Lurien frowned down at the three. He was not sure which of them had spoken.

‘The namarti wench?’

The three akhelian laughed, a sound like the last air gurgling from the lungs of a drowning man.

‘Only you would have his mind on his slaves at a time like this,’ said Éodrain, his own gaze nevertheless lingering overlong on the departing girl. His colourless eyes were hooded, as though what he saw both bored and disappointed. His chin was pointed. The pale flush of too much caulep blued his cheeks. He drained the flute.

‘He pities you your royal duties,’ said Calohaire. A scar from a fyresteel axe cleft his left eye up the middle, which, coupled with the angular, ashen jawline of the Briomdar idoneth, lent him a permanently critical look. He glanced to Éodrain and smirked. ‘Or should that be envies?’

Éodrain’s shapeless leer took on an appearance of disgust.

Calohaire laughed coldly. ‘A king must set aside his spiritual discomfort and think of the enclave. Would you not agree, Vágös?’

The third aelf gave a disinterested grunt, his eyes fixed on the eolas dances.

‘Your problem, my prince, is that you treat the namarti almost as though they are real people with feelings,’ Calohaire went on. ‘It confuses them. They do not understand it.’

‘Do you not whip a fangmora that defies you?’ said Éodrain, speaking with a faint slur.

‘And when did you last mount a bound-beast, Éodrain?’ Calohaire laughed.

Lurien laughed as well.

Éodrain said nothing, instead summoning the conch girl for more wine.

‘Do you mean to leer through the entire rite of passage, Prince Lurien?’

An aelf in an austere harness of translucent white plate and a high-buckled cloak swam up to the throne. She was as bald and grey as a manatee, and cadaverous as a skeleton crab, all sharp bone and thin cords of muscle. Her cloak bore the spiked-gauntlet emblem of Túrach – the City of Spines. A group of asglir’akhelian in coats of silvered scales, conical helms and cloaks of identical bearing milled amongst the dancers, disarmed as the custom of assembrals required. Lurien put away his smirk. His retainers studiously occupied their gazes elsewhere.

‘Queen Anaer.’ Lurien bowed his head. ‘Do you come to request the next dance?’

Éodrain sniggered softly.

Anaer glared at him, unblinking.

‘I come because this is an assembral, and you are my host.’ She dipped her head to the precise angle of Lurien’s bow. ‘Were it not for our traditions, the descendants of the cythai would have scattered into the oceans when they first found their way from the Bright Haven and lived solitary lives until one by one they perished.’ Her mouth firmed slightly, noticeable only because of the wastage of flesh from her jawline. ‘Traditions such as rising when you address a queen.’

Lurien startled himself by rising, swiftly covering his embarrassment with a florid bow and then offering the Queen of Spines his hand once more.

Éodrain covered his mouth with his hand.

‘I am considered the finest dancer in the Jade Court,’ said Lurien.

‘Lágethé must have been very proud.’

Lurien felt the spite trickle out of him.

He sat back down.

‘I disliked your mother very much,’ said Anaer.

‘You were not alone.’

‘I found her ambition to rule vulgar. Hers and her sister’s. And I thought her energy… distasteful. You.’ She pursed her lips as she appraised him, slumped in his chair, caulep flute hanging limp between the fingers of one hand. ‘You I have not seen since the tyrant of the azydrazor invited me to witness your mhair trials.’

‘I passed, if I remember.’

‘Everyone passes mhair, Prince Lurien. It is how you pass that defines an akhelian warrior.’

Lurien spread his hands. ‘And?’

‘It can take a century to properly appreciate an ishratisar-made sword.’ Her gaze flicked up from her shallow appraisal and back to Lurien’s eyes. Her stare was lazy and unfocused. ‘A glance alone will show the faults in a bad one.’

The queen of Túrach bowed once more, then turned to rejoin the mailed knights of her entourage. Éodrain emitted a snort that Lurien choked, stillborn, with a glare.

‘I am told she does not even eat,’ Calohaire whispered. ‘They say she sustains herself on malice and the beast souls that she consumes.’

Vágös nodded as though this were truth, incontrovertible as the Light of Teclis.

‘My prince?’ Éodrain waved his fingertips across the twisted barbs that decorated Lurien’s pauldrons as a delegation of warriors armoured in lapis blue came next to pay the customary respects to the throne.

Lurien straightened, determined to make more of an impression on the king of Guethen than he had with Anaer.

‘Galrohir,’ he said, bowing his head lower.

The giant aelf’s face was marbled with scars, new and old, from a hairline nick across his pointed chin to an ugly knot of pallid lines around his eyes that were so tightly drawn that Lurien initially thought they had to be tattoos. His eyes were yellowed, his flesh sickly in hue if not obviously deficient in health. His armour was twisted and barbed to evoke angry waves, coloured every blue-green shade of a slaughter at sea. A dark haze of imprisoned magic gave him a shimmering outline, though it was not of the armour. Magic both ancient and potent abounded in the deep places of the oceans, but the Guethen infamously never employed such materials in their armour. It came from the poleaxe sheathed diagonally across his back. A hilt of merkraken bone and black jewels projected over his left shoulder.

‘King Galrohir,’ said the aelf. His voice was like shingle being slowly worked into sand. He did not bow.

Lurien bit his lip. Even Anaer had bowed.

‘I thought there were no titles amongst equals.’

‘There aren’t. You may claim equality when Vanglyr and the akhelian council emerge from conclave to give their verdict to the assembral.’ He looked around. ‘Where is the House of Vanglyr anyway? Is it not time?’

‘I am sure he will be here soon.’ Lurien held on to his smile. The verdict of the akhelian council was, of course, only a formality.

As well as he could remember from the lessons that he had cared to attend in the first instance, only a handful of heirs in the thousand-year history of Briomdar had ever been rejected by the akhelian council. The incompetent generally removed themselves from contention through death and misadventure long before the incumbent’s demise, and Lurien was nothing if not cautious in his misadventures. If that were not reassurance enough for him, and if he were of the kind that sought after reassurance, then Raidlord Vanglyr’s infamous devotion to Queen Lágethé would suffice. Lurien smiled to himself. For a race that clove to material abstinence and seclusion as its ideals, the idoneth took a rare delight in intrigue. The tyrant of the azydrazor was known to have been a frequent night guest of his queen. He would do nothing to harm her legacy now.

Lurien bowed as though accepting Galrohir’s critique. ‘I am just relieved that you could attend, King Galrohir. None of my invitations were returned.’

Galrohir crossed his arms over his chest. ‘I was out raiding. You might be familiar with the idea of it.’

‘I am passingly familiar with the notion,’ Lurien replied, more caustically than he had intended. ‘And in fact it is my opinion that the enclaves have been raiding rather too frequently of late. It is more than just fishing villages and lost sylvaneth for the picking on the shores of the Green Gulch these days. The stormclaimed have raised a mighty keep of Azyrite stone on the mouth of the River Dwell, and claim a thousand leagues of coast for their own. Those fishing villages are great towns now, with walls and armies to defend them.’

He sat forwards, feeling his cold flesh warm to the passion of the old argument.

‘And yet even as the stormed god encroaches, some worm whispers in the mind of the Gulch Empress of Coryza, telling her to cede those territories she still possesses that she might cast yet more bilgeships into the sea. She hunts us, Galrohir. They all hunt us now. Skaven submersibles prowl the shallows of Dwy-Hor. Slaaneshi seekers and soulblight agents of the Undying King pick through the ruins of your raids for whatever clues to our existence you leave behind.’

He slumped back in his throne, sneering.

‘Your akhelian have done more than any to see our namarti…’ He waved his hand vaguely ‘…problem deferred, but enough is enough. A strong king of Briomdar might be wise to rein in the warriors of Guethen.’

Lurien’s retainers were holding their breath. For a moment, he feared he might have gone too far. Assembral was one of the few occasions when a king of the idoneth was permitted to challenge another. By his reputation, the king of Guethen was probably brutish enough to put that little-used law to the test. Slowly, Galrohir began to smile. It was the cruellest, most murderous expression that Lurien had ever seen outside of his own mirror.

‘That is a fine cut to your eye I see, Lord Calohaire.’ Galrohir looked past Lurien to address his retainer. ‘Taken in Vanglyr’s latest raid, correct? I heard you rode your fangmora against the Okthallin lodges with great skill.’ Lurien bristled at the offhand dismissal. His retainer looked genuinely pleased that the king of Guethen knew his name.

‘It was taken,’ said Lurien, clearly enunciating each word lest Galrohir be in danger of misunderstanding, ‘because you and the raidlord have left nothing more on the coast to be won. The soulscryers instead guided Vanglyr’s phalanx onto the mountain lodges of the fyreslayers. Hardly easy pickings.’

‘The only things that come easily are those which no one values,’ said Galrohir, and smiled. ‘Teclis, his fourth lesson to the Awakened. Teclis it was who drew the cythai from the belly of the Gorged God, but it was his brother, Tyrion, who stayed the god’s hand when he saw the cursed things he had made. Blindness, we are, as much as hubris.’

‘I never took you for a student of the gods,’ said Lurien.

Galrohir tilted his head back, as if to look down his hooked half-moon nose at the enthroned prince. ‘When you take a warrior’s soul, he will insist you fight for it. Remember that.’ He turned from Lurien, then nodded. ‘Lord Calohaire.’

Lurien trembled with barely suppressed venom as Galrohir made his departure. ‘Who does that ugly gathal think he is?’

‘The king of Guethen,’ said Calohaire. ‘Perhaps we should not put ourselves on his bad side.’

‘When did you become so friendly with Galrohir?’ said Éodrain, peering over the rim of his flute.

‘I have never met any knight of Guethen before now.’

‘So he just…’ Éodrain waved airily. ‘…heard of your deeds, did he?’

‘Fuéthain,’ Lurien swore.

‘My prince?’ said Calohaire.

‘There are barely a hundred true-souled idoneth in that sulphurous pit to the underworld they call an enclave, you know. And he thinks he can intimidate me.’

‘But over twenty hardened namarti battalions,’ said Calohaire. ‘Their raids bring in a great number of sou–’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Lurien wormed into the back of his throne. ‘His legions of conch girls and eolas dancers terrify me. Guethen is an angry little power that Lágethé tolerated because the growth of the enclaves was in her interests at the time. No. It is only Túrach that comes close to being Briomdar’s rival for influence in the Green Gulch.’

‘And you and Anaer seem to get along so well.’ Éodrain smirked and sipped at his wine.

‘No matter.’ Lurien waved his hand dismissively. ‘Disputes are heated and untidy. Anaer hates that more than she hates me. Mahbòr is… well, he’s Mahbòr.’ They all nodded sagely at that wisdom. ‘And Aunt Laramé loves me.’ He smiled at the rare feeling of genuine affection. Deciphering the family trees of the idoneth nobility was like trying to pick salt out of water. With so few healthy-souled children born and, purely by the arithmetic involved, most of those being born to namarti, the entire edifice of house and heritage was a fascinating charade of adoption and strategic marriage designed to generate the appearance of noble lineages dating back to the cythai. Laramé and Lágethé had been something rarer even than a true-souled child.

They had been blood twins. Isharann queens.

‘The queen of Elgaen would never go against her sister’s heir.’

‘Where is she?’ Calohaire muttered, still glaring ice daggers at Éodrain.

‘She would not want the others to see her grieve,’ said Lurien, his eyes distant. ‘Anaer in particular. They would not understand her loss.’

‘I don’t recall you being so interested in politics at the azydrazor,’ said Calohaire.

‘I simply never set my mind to it before. It’s really not complicated.’

‘The azydrazor was a long time ago for us all,’ Vágös mused.

‘It speaks!’ declared Éodrain, the caulep raising his voice too loud.

Vágös bared translucent teeth, and then, saying nothing further, turned back to the gathering. His mouth parted slightly in surprise.

‘As Mathlann protects…’

‘What?’ said Lurien, sitting up.

‘Oh my,’ said Éodrain.

Calohaire pointed. ‘King Mahbòr has arrived.’

Surrounded by a globe of silent knights in beryl-green warplate and circlets of thorns, the Laughing King of Dwy-Hor danced a traíga quickstep that was completely out of tempo with his fellow guests and the dour mood of the assembral. His partner was a female akhelian in a wooden masque and a long cloak of woven sea-green leaves. Her bare arms were tattooed with a spiralling spread of thorns, one hand upon her king’s shoulder, the other around his waist.

Lurien watched in scandalised fascination.

‘They are… touching.’

‘Is that the queen of Dwy-Hor?’ said Calohaire.

‘No,’ said Lurien. ‘Mahbòr is unwed.’

‘That is not what I heard,’ said Éodrain.

‘No one cares what you heard, Éodrain,’ said Calohaire. ‘Still less where you heard it.’

‘I heard that he wed that tree spirit of his,’ said Éodrain, his voice low.

‘Do not be absurd,’ said Calohaire.

‘It is true.’

‘It is not.’

‘They call her Queen of the Deepgrove.’

‘Enough,’ said Lurien. ‘All of you.’ He stared into the Deep Nothing, frowning through one of Lágethé’s half-remembered contemplation exercises. ‘If there’s one thing I do not want to be thinking about right now, it’s that.’ The three akhelian chuckled, equal parts disgust and lurid fascination. ‘In any case, I heard he adopted her as his daughter.’

Éodrain lowered his caulep flute. ‘He wouldn’t. Even he wouldn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t he?’ said Lurien. ‘Why then does he keep her?’

Vágös shook his head. ‘She is a pet. A trophy. A reminder of his last raid on the Cueth’ene.’

‘Why would he want to remember?’ said Éodrain.

The other akhelian shrugged.

‘They do things differently in Dwy-Hor,’ Lurien mused.

An explosion of brightly coloured heralklir fish burst from the hall’s pearl-inlaid doorway before Lurien could continue. The fish had been bred by the enclave’s embailors over hundreds of generations for their short memories, the tendency to scatter from any significant grouping of aelves and the royal turquoise and gold of their scales. The school ribboned and ballooned towards the heralklirs’ favoured hiding places in the ceiling’s arches, stilling sombre dances and leaving hushed conversation in their wake. Lurien closed his mouth and turned to the doorway, to the armoured aelves whose procession had disturbed the tiny heralds.

Vanglyr.

And the akhelian council.

The prince’s retinue pulled themselves upright and surreptitiously concealed their wine flutes. Despite every conscious effort to remain seated and prideful, Lurien found himself straightening, pushing himself up to hover in the ethersea above the Jade Throne. It did not matter how long it had been since an akhelian passed his mhair. Vanglyr Fellglaive, raidlord of Briomdar and tyrant of the azydrazor, still had the power to command absolute obedience from his former charges.

Where the Fellglaive passed, the water bubbled, agitated even under the tremendous pressures of the ocean floor to boiling by the power he wore. The unformed magic that filled the deepest oceans of the Mortal Realms manifested in numerous ways. In planktonic form it fed the mouths of the great behemoths that prowled below the depths of mortal prey. It sustained empires of daemons unaligned to any god, whose powers waxed and waned with the tides. And it would, in rare conjunctions of the spheres, break in apocalyptic storms that could scour an ocean and leave not a ripple upon its surface. In some rare places it deposited as a metal that some jewel of intuition in the idoneth psyche had bade them to name ithilmhair. Armour forged from its seasilver scales would withstand a blow from Sigmar’s hammer. A blade of it would cleave any ward.

Noble guests and namarti performers alike drifted into a wide circle as the akhelian came to face the Jade Throne. The tyrant said nothing until the hall was quiet and everybody was still. Though Vanglyr was a tall aelf, he did not loom like Galrohir. Rather, he was a cold force of charisma around which brine might freeze and mortal souls hasten to obey. Only the néthic dancer bearing Lágethé’s chorrileum shard continued to twist and gyrate around the circle of souls.

‘For eighty-three years has Queen Lágethé ruled Briomdar,’ said Vanglyr, his voice so resonant and deep that Lurien felt it almost as a vibration on his skin rather than in his ears. ‘She oversaw the growth of the isharann túrscoll to one without rival in the oceans of the seven realms. And she bade Briomdar rise from the old wood citadel of the Crannstock to an enclave of a hundred thousand souls.’ The namarti dancers bowed their heads in homage. A handful of Briomdain nobles mimed silent handclaps. ‘And it was under her rule that Briomdar eclipsed her sister enclave, Túrach, as the pre-eminent civilisation in the Green Gulch.’

Lurien sought out Anaer and her retinue, eager to see what the Queen of Spines made of that remark, only to find her quietly conferring with Galrohir. Both their expressions were inscrutable. Lurien frowned, wondering what those two could possibly have to talk about.

‘But now her body is empty.’ Vanglyr’s voice lowered still further. He growled as he surveyed the gathered nobility. ‘Her soul.’ He raised a hook-taloned gauntlet and gestured to the maroon-painted macabre, the néthic dancer, who swirled uncaringly about the hall, higher, higher in the ethersea where the full stillness of the nobles’ attention could follow, holding the glowing chorrileum stone aloft. ‘Her soul goes to blessed isolation. Lágethé need feel no more.’ If the tyrant suffered any pain at the loss of his lover and queen, there was no way to know it. ‘Briomdar must find its way without her guidance.’

Lurien put his hand to the turquoise-and-gold dominoes that adorned his breastplate. His heart was pounding underneath, so hard it seemed almost perverse that he could not feel it through the metal.

‘I am ready to guide it,’ he said.

Silence overtook the hall.

Anticipation was a vernal tide, swelling around him, bearing him up, lifting him high. He was drunk on caulep, a little, tipsy with expectancy. If there was one thing in the Mortal Realms that could sweeten becoming king of Briomdar, it was being crowned so by Vanglyr Fellglaive.

Lurien closed his eyes.

There was a hiss as an ithilmhair blade left its scabbard.

‘By the custom of assembral,’ said Vanglyr, ‘I challenge your claim to your mother’s crown.’

The flute slipped from Lurien’s fingers. The innate magic of the idoneth deserted it as it did so, dark red caulep squirting from the rim like blood from a living heart, crushed by the titanic pressures of the sea floor. It all made sense to him now – the attempts to break him at the azydrazor, the whispers of his reluctance to raid at court, the courting of Queen Lágethé’s black heart. It had all been for this, to rob him of this. Well, he was not a frightened child now, alone in a house of warriors and bereft of his mother. He was regent of Briomdar. And if Vanglyr wished to face his prince in the Court of the Blind King, the challenge of swords, then he was welcome.

His right hand closed over the aquamarine pommel of his akhelian sword.

Metal hissed throughout the hall as namarti warriors that Lurien had not even noticed until that moment drew blades. No palace guards these, the Emerald Phalanx, armed with falx and netcasters – these were battalion thralls, seasoned raiders bearing coldly beautiful lanmari greatswords, exquisite alloys of lead and silver that seawater would never rust. Behind him, Lurien’s retainers hastily drew their swords.

‘Do not draw in anger, Lurien,’ said Vanglyr. The growling cadence of his voice was bitterly familiar, as indeed were the words and every variation thereof. Think before you strike, Lurien. Keep your mind on your foe, Lurien. The only battle that must be won is in your own heart, Lurien. It was as though the tyrant were explaining another lesson whose nuance had once more passed Lurien by, only this time with an entire assembral to witness his humiliation. ‘De’comhrac has been offered.’ He lifted his glaive, the black weapon that had earned him his name. ‘The rite of Lacelothrai. Trial by sword. My blade has spoken the challenge. Unsheathe yours now and the gods will demand that it end in blood.’

Lurien tightened his grip on the pommel.

Calohaire caught his hand by the wrist. He squeezed. Lurien stared at the akhelian’s hand in horror.

‘Do not answer the challenge,’ Calohaire hissed.

‘Do not touch me.’

‘My prince,’ said Éodrain. ‘Are you sure?’

‘He has had this coming for years.’

Pulling his hand away from Calohaire’s, Lurien bared pallid teeth in a snarl. The sound it made echoed that of the blued steel as it slid from his scabbard. His sword was thinner than the blade at the head of Vanglyr’s glaive, but longer, more elegant. The tyrant’s blade was a hacking implement, notched and black, more befitting an ironjaw chieftain than a king of Briomdar. Lurien’s was patterned with waving lines of gold. Where it caught the rays of the light globes and glowstones, and even the luminescent pigments in his periwig, the metal shimmered like liquid.

Vanglyr’s expression turned dark. His voice became smoke. ‘It will be as the gods will it, then.’

‘You think you frighten me, Fellglaive? I am not a child any more.’

‘A child is exactly what you are.’

With a hiss of fury, Lurien chopped his sword towards Vanglyr’s neck.

The tyrant parried it effortlessly with the huge blunt width of his blade. Sparks curled off between the scraping blades to be quenched in freezing ethersea. Using the impact force to propel himself upwards, Lurien spun, switched grips and stabbed at Vanglyr’s head from above. Vanglyr blocked with his long glaive like a shield.

Lurien spun his elegant blade through a dazzling sequence of manoeuvres. ‘You fight like a duardin.’ He was already breathing hard, an unpleasant warmth blueing his cheeks. His cloak swam wild about him.

‘Duardin are easy to mock,’ said Vanglyr, returning his sword to its guard. ‘More challenging by far to kill.’

‘My sword is unmatched.’

Vanglyr snorted. ‘Your sword is untested. Not in any way that matters.’

With a strangled yell, Lurien launched himself at the tyrant, a measured sequence of warm-up routines devolving into a maddened flurry of chopping actions that the older warrior coolly weathered. Stabbing low and forcing a parry, he punched Vanglyr as hard as he could in the jaw. The tyrant did not seem to feel it. But he did react. Wrath lit up his eyes, just for a moment, and Lurien kicked back, blinding Vanglyr with riptides and tiny bubbles.

‘Yield,’ Calohaire called out to him. ‘Blood has been spilled. The gods will be satisfied.’

Lurien frowned, then felt the thin sting of indigo blue across his cheek. It did not bleed. The pressure exerted by the ethersea at the sea floor was far in excess of that inside his body. One had to inflict an extraordinary amount of damage to really destroy a deepkin aelf. Even so, he felt the injury far in excess of the wound’s severity.

For the first time in his short life, it occurred to Lurien that he might actually be in danger.

Fear and spite warred in him as he considered his retainer’s words, the heat of their struggle bringing a tingle to his cold, clammy flesh.

‘The crown is mine,’ he hissed at last.

‘Why do you want it?’ said Vanglyr. ‘You have never shown the slightest interest in ruling wisely.’

‘Because it is mine. Why do you wish it?’

‘For Briomdar.’

‘Then you yield!’

Lurien threw a looping slash towards Vanglyr’s neck, aiming for the white skin above the curved lip of his gorget.

Vanglyr simply opened his hand and caught the strike in the super-hard ithilmhair of his gauntlet. Lurien pulled at the sword, but it would not move, stuck in the tyrant’s grip like a mollusc enveloped by an expanding reef. Then, with a speed and a brutality that belied his mass, the armoured warrior hammered his forehead into Lurien’s nose. Spots burst across the prince’s eyes. Water rushed through his ears. The next thing he knew, he was falling backwards over a coral spur.

‘You may sit on the throne,’ came Vanglyr’s voice with the deliberate, distant tones of an executioner, one who wielded the blade but drew no personal satisfaction from its tally. ‘But you are not a king.’

Pain ripped through Lurien’s body.

He had never felt anything like it. So intense. So limitless. He was not entirely sure where he had been struck, only that it was grievous. Upper body. Yes. Shoulder. Gods, yes. His mind groped for Lágethé’s meditation litanies. His body could have its suffering and be damned, but the very pain he sought retreat from scrambled his thoughts, and his mind stumbled over the first exercise.

‘Asyr… Asir… Asur…’

He looked down, and whimpered.

Vanglyr’s glaive was embedded in his shoulder. It had struck down, through meat, through bone, through whale ivory, aquamarine and living coral, and cut diagonally through Lurien’s chest. His breathing hitched, as though inhaling might rip a lung. His eyes roved wildly. The water was thick with atomised coral. Vanglyr’s glaive pinned him to the throne like a chopped fillet to a block. Water pressure kept his blood from spraying, but he could feel it pulsing against the wedge of ithilmhair that had been driven into his body.

It occurred to Lurien, somewhat belatedly, that he was not quite as good with a sword as he had believed.

‘As the Blind King stands witness,’ said Vanglyr. Lurien almost blacked out with pain as the tyrant set a boot to the throne’s arm, the other anchored on the dais, and began to wrench the heavy glaive from his torso. ‘I claim the Jade Throne of Briomdar.’

CHAPTER TWO

The floor tasted of metal. A question – Why? – bobbed loosely about in his head, swiftly superseded in prominence by a jumble of vaguely connected queries. What was his mouth doing pressed against a floor? Where was he? Whose fault was this? And then, as recollections of the assembral emerged from their hiding places in the crannied reefs of his brain…

Why was he not dead?

Lurien made to touch his fingers to his lips and banged the back of his head on something hard. The muted rattle of lead bars rang off through the ethersea. A cage. He opened his eyes for a better impression of his surroundings, drifting in perplexity for a moment before realising that his eyes were, in fact, already open. He just couldn’t see.

With panic rising, he threw his hand to the rocky shelf he could feel beneath his chest. Tensing the muscles of his abdomen, he pivoted on his axis, pushing with both hands against the bars he had just banged his head on. They were blisteringly cold, and creaked with pressure. The cage was barely deeper than Lurien’s chest. Laying his back to the rock and pushing against the bars required him to bend his arms down by his waist. He let go. Half swimming, half walking up the bars, he scrambled about two feet before hitting another barrier. He tucked his knees into his belly and rolled, then pushed off, swimming the two feet he had just travelled and then two more before hitting the opposite wall of the cage.

He thumped it with the base of his fist.

It rattled dully.

The sheer affront of the situation served to subdue his panic. He closed his eyes again, for what that was worth, and lowered his head to the bars. He waited for his heart to slow.

Briomdar, he knew, boasted a labyrinthine though little-used suite of dungeons. He had known it with the same airy certainty with which he had known of the existence of the realm Celestial or the changing seasons of Ghyran. Or my great skill with a sword, he thought bitterly. They were things that were and which would happily go on being with or without any conscious appreciation from him. As a consequence, he was not certain where in the enclave he was, or if he was still within the complex of palace reefs. He was not even certain which way was up. He was assuming that the rocky floor on which he had awoken was ‘down’, but the spellsinging of the isharann chorralus could shape a wall or a ceiling of rock as easily as a floor from metal.

It had never occurred to him to ask the question why – why did a race so splendid in its isolation, too pathologically self-centred even to make war on itself, need a dungeon?

For him, he supposed.

He touched at the now bloodless hew that bisected his shoulder. He was clad only in cerecloth under-armour. The fine silk and seafrond weave was horrifically torn where Vanglyr’s blade had passed through. He ran a finger along the magically sealed gouge in the flesh. It was still an inch deep, but there was no more blood. No pain. At some point after his fight with Vanglyr he must have been tended by the isharann healers of the tru’heas fane. Better than the soulrenders. Lurien was not about to complain, but he could think of no palatable reason for the Fellglaive to keep a rival for the throne alive. Whatever the reason, Lurien resolved to live long enough to make him rue it.

Somehow.

He caught a drifting lock of his periwig and swept it back. It had become oily, and stiff as seagrass. With a frown, he drew a handful to his mouth and licked it. Metal. The taste he had woken to. The fish oils that the namarti used to soften the alga must have run, dense and immiscible, pooling in the ethersea by his mouth as he lay unconscious. He spat the snaggled braids from his mouth, as though recalling the even strokes of his slave attendants as the oils had been applied, pulling on his periwig until, finally, he felt the sting of adhesive on his scalp. Vanglyr had taken even the right to wear these colours from him. Well, he would take it back. It was his. He wanted it. He would have it.

With renewed venom he pounded on the bars, fists and knees and feet, the cage rattling as he screamed out a wordless curse that none but Lurien and his gods would hear.

He yelled for Vanglyr. For Calohaire and Vágös, and even for Éodrain. He cried out for his mother. Her spirit resided in the chorrileum now, but in truth Lágethé was as likely to bend her will to his aid from there as Éodrain was from the caulep gardens and enervas parlours of the Crannstock. He beat on the leaden barrier until he was breathless from screaming, knees skinned and knuckles bleeding. His wounded shoulder throbbed. His final blow propelled him miserably back from the unbroken bars.

‘Are you finished?’

He startled from the unexpected voice, twisting in the water.

‘Who is there?’

‘You don’t remember me, my prince?’ The voice was darkly sweet, like deepblossom honey, but six words were too many for it to disguise their bitterness. ‘We have met before.’

Lurien felt movement in the water. Had he the faintest clue as to the direction it approached from, he would have recoiled. Trapped, he simply tensed, senses straining. Blackness soaked through his eyes. He heard a soft rustle, as of a long dress made of something tough like shagreen or sargassum felt. The scent of naiad flowers drifted through the water.

‘I am not offended,’ the voice purred. ‘There are so many pretty girls.’

Lurien peered into the darkness before him, willing that coarse rustling and faint scent to somehow come together for his eyes. Over the millennia since the cythai fled Léiriú and founded the enclave of Gealrachi in Hysh, the idoneth, as they would later come to be, had developed many extraordinary senses by which they could ‘see’ in darkness. But Lurien had lived amongst the light globes and glowstones that adorned Tor Mathlann and its Jade Palace. He wondered with horror, and an unlikely sense of relish, if this was how it must have been for the cythai when they had first forsaken Teclis’ Bright Haven and descended into the Gaelus’ depths. Had Volturnos himself, high king of the deepkin aelves and last of the Awakened cythai, once groped in the dark as Prince Lurien did now?

‘Such fear in your eyes,’ said the voice. ‘The others would be jealous of me. Engendering such true feeling in an akhelian prince.’

‘I’m not afraid of you.’

‘I thought you did not know who I am?’

‘Someone I would advise to mind their tongue if they wished to keep it.’

The darkness laughed at him, husky-voiced, dripping with spite. With a snarl, Lurien opened his mouth to say more. Then he hesitated. Something she had just said came back to him.

‘You can see me?’

‘I have been blind since birth.’ The water was silent for a moment, but Lurien felt the cool appraisal of sightless eyes. ‘Let us just say that I look in better shape than you.’

Embarrassment spread over the various bruises and dull aches in Lurien’s body, and he folded his arms over the lean muscles of his chest.

The dark water made a pitying sound.

‘Is akhelian flesh too fair for the kiss of cold water and callous eyes? If it is any solace to you, then know that it is not my eyes I see you with.’

Which left… what, exactly?

Touch? Taste?

Lurien was not certain that any alternative sense was preferable.

‘You are one of the palace slaves,’ he muttered.

‘I cannot understand how the Fellglaive managed to outwit you so completely. Your mind is as swift and razor-keen as your sword.’

‘Vanglyr was besotted with my mother. No one could have predicted he would challenge me.’

‘He has been plotting with Galrohir and Anaer for years.’

‘Impossible.’

‘The rumours were there.’

‘And Lágethé did not hear them?’

‘Did I say that?’

Lurien clawed at his ears. ‘I am the prince of Briomdar. I will not be ridiculed by a… a… thrall.’

The dark space in front of him chuckled. ‘Your power was built of dark sand and pretty shells.’ Fingers snapped. ‘Gone with the tide. Easier for a king to deny Mathlann his due than cow a slave from behind bars.’

Lurien wracked his tired brain for a clue as to who this woman might be. What could he possibly have done to aggrieve her? He could think of nothing. Nothing that a hundred akhelian had not done to a hundred thousand namarti just like her. ‘You are the conch girl,’ he said. ‘The thrall who served me wine?’

A spiteful laugh rang out.

Lurien clenched his fists. What did he care for the derision of a slave, anyway? Not at all, he told himself. Not one whit.

‘I think young Jaire would have enjoyed seeing you so reduced, my prince. Almost as much as I do. If I thought she had the courage to leave the palace’s walls, I might have asked her to join me.’

So, they were no longer within the bounds of the palace. Lurien grasped that morsel of information, as though it had been hard won from the namarti’s clutches by superior wit and true-soul guile.

‘Who are you, then?’ he said.

‘The better question is why am I here.’

Lurien swallowed another insult. ‘Then please, why are you here?’

‘To release you, my prince. Why else?’

For a moment, Lurien could not speak. ‘For Vanglyr?’

Laughter burst from the darkness again. This time it was without mockery, but with a mirth that twisted Lurien’s very concept of pleasure. ‘For a namarti can surely have no ambition for herself?’

‘I don’t understand you.’

A sigh. ‘Come closer.’

In spite of his desire to be out of his cage, he hesitated. ‘Why?’

‘Because I would like to talk to you without shouting it across this room. There are few guards in this place, for you are the tyrant’s only captive. What that means is that those few wardens there are do not have to swim far from your cell. I could move nearer to you, I suppose, but no, I would much rather tell you to come to me.’

‘Insolent half-souled–’

‘Closer.’

Lurien practically gritted his teeth against the urge to meekly do as he was bidden, but found his body floating obediently towards her even so.

Lágethé would have been so proud of how effortlessly he seemed to have mastered the separation of the flesh from the higher power of the aelven mind.

A hand shot between the bars, invisible, and grabbed his. He startled, jerked back, but it held him fast.

‘It is me, you fool.’

‘You would start too in my place.’

He allowed his hand to ease into her grip, exploring it with the long-disused senses of his own. Her skin was clammy and cold. It was also supple, and very smooth. The nails had been trimmed, and recently. No gardener then, nor a cleaner, nor a personal thrall, which discounted almost all the functions that Lurien associated with the namarti class in his immediate orbit. Nor was she a cook or a table server, nor even a young conch girl, for he could remember the short time he had spent dismaying over the way the shell crockery had worn an aelven beauty’s hands to dustcloth. He marvelled, though, with a little nervousness, at the strength in her grip. He felt no pain, of course, but the tingling sensation as she cut off the blood to his fingers was mildly unpleasant.

An entertainer of some kind, then, he surmised – a juggler, or a tumbler.

One of the assembral dancers.

Yes.

‘My name is Namaríel,’ she whispered, close enough now that Lurien could feel the displacement of her words on the watery character of the ethersea between them. ‘I would see you be king. If that is still your wish.’

‘What does a namarti care which lord holds her collar?’

Namaríel laughed with a warped gaiety that was to mirth what a stabbing was to an embrace. ‘The darkness has been good to you, my prince. It is as my isharann master would always preach as he reminded me how fortunate I was to have been born without eyes. I do not care the least who sits on the Jade Throne. Less even than I care whether it is the Everqueen or the Grandfather or Sigmar God-King who rules over the Realm of Life.’ She tightened her grip on his hand, a possessive hold, one that dragged his body towards her chest. The sudden closeness of a body had an immediate effect on his concentration. His heart fluttered. His breath dropped. The naiad scent on her choked his senses. ‘I am interested in she who will stand beside it.’

Beguilement, and the utter ludicrousness of what was reaching his ears, meant that he struggled for several moments before alighting on an appropriate response.

He laughed.

‘Enough!’ she snapped

In Lurien’s experience, namarti were servile and submissive. It had never occurred to him, until that moment, to wonder if they might think and feel the same as other aelves. He remembered how, in rare escapes from the rigours of the azydrazor, he and Éodrain, and later Vágös and Calohaire, would venture into the enclave, to browse the markets and marvel at the new beasts the embailors had brought into the city. They would amuse themselves by picking namarti at random from the flowing rivers of busy aelves, always easy on account of their iron hadrilkar, their eyelessness and the mystic slave rune on their foreheads, and challenging the others to guess which lesser creature had given up its soul to allow that twisted aelf parody to live past infancy. A human? Too obvious a guess. Most were human. An orruk? An ogor? A beastman, even? The mind boggled at the possibilities. The soul sickened. And who would be on hand to repay the sin of darkening the mood of four bright young akhelian? Only the very namarti who had provoked it. No one had ever stopped them, nor reproved them afterwards. They had been akhelian. And he had been the heir of Lágethé.

Now, though, held tight by a namarti’s grip, he did wonder.

‘A namarti queen?’ he muttered. ‘Impossible.’

‘You would bed one readily enough.’

Lurien looked quickly away.

‘You would bed a dozen, and your own mother would not bat an eye.’

Lurien frowned, again tried to pull his hand away, and again Namaríel held it firm. ‘We all have that duty to the race,’ he said. ‘But the Briomdar houses would never accept a namarti for their sovereign. It is abhorrent.’

‘Some say that Mahbòr wed a dryad.’

‘Untrue,’ said Lurien. ‘Little stirs the cold blood of a Briomdain akhelian like scandal.’

‘They call her the Queen of the Deepgrove.’

‘Do you know what they call him?’ Lurien laughed. ‘And he was once as feared a raider as Galrohir and Vanglyr combined. Or so mother once told me. You listen too much to rumour. But if the houses will not accept you, and they won’t, they are not going to accept me either if I take you as a wife.’

‘I know that. We will exchange promises only, and bind ourselves before the gods. None need know our intentions until you sit upon the throne. The ceremony can come later.’

Lurien stilled the smile that was trying hard to be born. He had lost count of the promises he had frittered about the noble houses and slave corridors of Briomdar.

He was good at giving promises.

‘A promise then. That is fair. My troth in exchange for my freedom.’

‘Freedom is just the beginning, my prince.’

Lurien grinned. ‘Did you bring a daethar for the hand-fastening?’

‘I brought something better.’

He sensed movement. Displaced water spirited across his cheek, fluted his cloak. Sharp warmth in his hand. A sudden cold. Then a spectacular pain. Lurien screamed with the realisation that the namarti woman had just driven a dagger through their clasped hands.

‘If I managed to hear of Vanglyr’s plot, imagine what rumours I heard of you,’ she hissed, her breath against his face. ‘I will have a true oath. I will drag it screaming from your soul.’

As their blood commingled she began to chant, a string of twisted vowel sounds as darkly intimate as smoke in his mouth. The blood of the idoneth ran naturally cold, but Lurien felt his turn as sluggish as a river of ice slush at the namarti’s words. The isharann of Briomdar were legendary across the Seven Oceans, rivalled only, and perhaps, by the soulrenders of Mor’phann. Queen Lágethé had been pre-eminent amongst them, and her adopted son had grown to adulthood with little fear of magic. Or so he had thought. He was being confronted by so many untested convictions of late, he was beginning to lose his grip on that which had been true and certain and that which never had. This was not a tidal wave to be hurled at some belligerent – distant – continent, a clifftop dragged into a hungry sea at his arch protector and patron’s word. This was a cry to the gods, performed over a libation of his own spilled blood and hers. It was elemental, and it was personal.

‘Release me!’ he screamed

Namaríel clasped the knife tighter. His scream ratcheted higher, louder. She smothered his mouth with her unimpaled hand.

‘Aesha, bind this man’s soul to mine. Athaerti, bind this man’s body to mine. Ladriella, blind this man to all other charms but mine. Drakira, be watchful, ensure in soul and in body that this man does not stray…’

‘The old gods are gone!’ Lurien snarled through Namaríel’s fingers as she went on, apparently intent on entreating the entire pantheon of asur gods.

‘Mathlann, hide this man from all other eyes but mine…’

‘What are you?’

‘One of the néthir. I have been trained by the isharann chorralus to bear the souls of the dead to the dreamless sleep of the chorrileum, and from there into the embrace of the gods. They know me well.’

‘An oath on fallen powers is meaningless.’

‘Is this meaningless?’

Namaríel twisted the knife.

Both aelves cried out with the consummation of their agony. Pain swallowed Lurien like a curse. The great ocean above him shuddered beneath the full weight of the divine. The pressure on Lurien’s soul was titanic, his nerves freezing, the darkness hardening. Saltwater ice grew up his arm from the knife wound in his hand, accompanied by a beetling sound as though it were being knitted for him by a host of tiny krill with needles.

‘The gods have heard,’ said Namaríel. ‘Cadai and Cytharai, they wait on you now. What will you tell them?’

‘I… I…’

‘Will you give them their promise?’

‘I…’

‘Or will you float in this cage for Vanglyr?’

Lurien grit his teeth. ‘I give it!’

His promise became a scream as Namaríel wrenched the knife from their joined hands. He tumbled backwards, mouth open, mutilated hand clutched to his breast, his head casting about for a last, parting glimpse of Mathlann – if that was what the terrifying pressure he had just experienced had been. But the namarti could not command magic. Even one trained in the lore of the chorralus could not summon their protector’s gaze. Could they? But what else could it have been? He looked around, still blind, feeling no sensation now but the cold and the slow, gelid regularity of his beating heart.

He barely even heard the sound of a key turning in a lock as his cage was opened. The scent of naiad flowers mingled with that of freshly offered blood in the water as the namarti leant in to brush a kiss across his forehead. He was too numb in spirit to even flinch.

‘How do you enjoy your freedom, my love?’

CHAPTER THREE

His eyes were starting to adapt.

The dungeon’s walls appeared as a rinsed-out grey, a tapestry that had been colonised and partially devoured by burrowing fishes. The tiny souls inhabiting the reef from which the walls had been grown were but dim flickers, but in their abundance generated a limpid glow that Lurien could perceive with something beyond sight. It was a gift resident in all idoneth to some degree. Lurien had simply never needed to rely on it before now.

Nor was it his only source of ‘light’.

Magic lay over those structures, as commonplace as sand or lime, deposited over tens of thousands of years, consumed by coral polyps, built into their exoskeletons, and laid down layer by layer to imbue every crest and terrace with a crystalline shimmer. To swim through them produced a visual effect akin to turning an ishratisar-made wine flute under a light globe. If the layered magic did not align perfectly with the soul-light of the living coral, then it did conjure a profound sense of dimension. Of depth. When he turned it was as though he were the centre of a universe that turned with him. Lines of sight had little meaning to a sense rooted in intuition and magic. Lurien found that he could see through the reefs as easily as he could see the reefs themselves. He saw the tiny fish that inhabited the reef, that kept it, cleaned it, far beneath the notice of the isharann chorralus who sculpted it. He saw the planktonic things they preyed upon, the larger fish that preyed on them, the squids and jellies that used the hard structures of the coral to lay their eggs. It was a constellation of connected lives, a maelstrom of movement and light, and Lurien was at its heart.

His eyes were starting to adapt.

That was not to say that he saw, too gripped by his own numb sense of horror and wonder to do aught but take the knocks as they came. The winding passages and occasional chambers were replete with obstacles. Barnacle-tiled tables. Curtains of stiffened kelp. Manacles, bolted to the coral by leaden chains. Anything not made of still-living material, or old enough to have been layered in ocean magic, remained invisible. He swam into cupboards and stools, bumped his head more than once on light globes that had long ago drained their soul-charge and been abandoned by the isharann that had set them.

‘Must you swim into absolutely everything?’ said Namaríel, a spectral presence by his shoulder. ‘I could track the noise you are making from Elgaen.’ She took his wounded hand in hers.

He pulled it back with a yelp.

‘Pull yourself together, akhelian.’

‘I…’

The namarti was a faint shimmer of soul-vigour and magic, but was better perceived as an eclipsing body over the dim glow of the reef, her half-soul less virile even than the corals around her.

‘You touch so freely,’ he murmured.

‘Because my soul withers too quickly to be noticed by the Dark Prince of Excess. Now focus, my prince. So far I have taken us by the more vigorous passages, where the coral is thick enough to cloak us from prying eyes. But we are almost clear now, and it is mostly dead reef from here. You will have to move quietly and still your thoughts. Can you do that?’

‘What?’

‘The guards will be behind us now, but they are namarti, as I am. If you appear any different from the fish we swim amongst, they will see it as well as I can.’

‘I…’

‘Can you do that?’

Lurien pushed the heel of his palm into his forehead and closed his eyes.

The techniques of separating mind from body, and self from mind, were many and varied. Lurien had learned most of them, for Lágethé had been supremely gifted, and singularly insistent, but seldom had he had the inclination to practise. He willed his thoughts to slow. The distances between them seemed to expand, the cold of the greater ocean entering into those spaces, to chill their motions further still. One thought in isolation was nothing. Taken in isolation, even the most burning of worries could be picked up, turned over, examined to exhaustion without emotional risk. That was the key. It was only when thoughts combined in the crucible of an uncontrolled mind that they gained the power to insist and bedevil.

‘Good,’ said Namaríel. ‘Very good.’ He felt her point into the spiralling arms of soul-light and darkness. ‘That way.’

‘Do you have a plan?’

‘Get out of the dungeons, then get out of the enclave.’

‘And go where?’

‘One stroke at a time, my love. Come now. There are people waiting.’

‘People?’

‘One stroke at a time.’

She led.

He followed.

Time stretched when one bid oneself to experience nothing.

Lurien remained conscious of the kicking of his feet, but it was a metronomic act, one he witnessed rather than took any part in performing, a thing of singular boredom from which he would drift back and forth, no idea how long it had been or how long there was still to go. This was the state which purists like Anaer sought to occupy, the state that awaited them all in the chorrileum. Both promised an escape from the depredations of Slaanesh. Lurien had always found the promised sanctuary of the afterlife a dull prospect. Worse, it was hypocritical. What was total deprivation but an excess of its own, an overreaction to a species of fear that could be as easily negated with smaller measures and lesser sacrifices?

All things in moderation.

That was what Lágethé would have said.

But that had been before he had given a promise before the gods. Maybe. Now, he watched himself watch himself, captivated by the meandering thought processes of a stranger engaged with the thinking of nothing. Twice removed, he sensed the passage his body was swimming through widen into a spherical chamber. He sensed open water. Fresher salts. Stronger currents. With unexpected reluctance, he began reeling back the more explorative parts of his consciousness.

‘Hold there!’

A male voice. Lurien felt movement towards him, but his thoughts were still too widespread to register either fear or surprise. A hand grabbed for him. It moved with staggering languidness, the slow-down of his thoughts dragging the world to near standstill. He felt the coarseness of skin, tasted the salts under the aelf’s fingernails, water rushing over knuckles like waves on rocks. The composite mind-image tingled between his expanded senses like a picture in the sky. He plucked at his body’s strings, his forearm batting the incoming grab aside, and then pushed back with his own hand, aiming for where his mind told him his assailant’s mouth would be. His attacker caught the open palm and twisted. A bright spot burst across his mind. Not pain, exactly. Pain as it appeared to someone on the outside, something that a soul capable of empathy would share a portion of and wince in sympathy.

The assailant shoved him back into the wall of the chamber, elbow in his neck, knee in his groin, his back forced into the curve of the chamber’s sphere.

A low growl trembled from an aelven throat.

‘Release him, Morogai,’ said Namaríel. ‘Lest you break my betrothed.’

At the namarti’s order, the various points of pressure on Lurien’s body were grudgingly withdrawn. The dark water occupied by this Morogai offered no welcome or apology of its own beyond a surly grunt, but Lurien sensed the figure sculling backwards.

‘These would be your friends, then.’ Lurien rubbed his throat, and ruefully cupped a hand over his bruised groin. As he might have expected, and as Lágethé had always taught, the world was a darker place when senses and mind coexisted under the same skin. ‘I can tell.’

‘You went deep,’ said Namaríel. She sounded genuinely impressed, and Lurien drew a moment’s pride from that. ‘I did not think you capable.’

‘My mother was the tidemistress of Briomdar, an isharann queen and the mightiest of her fane in the Green Gulch. I just don’t like doing it. It makes me feel like a… like a thornjelly. Or something like it. Drifting on the ocean’s currents.’

‘It was impressive. I could barely see you myself, and I was swimming right behind you.’

Lurien squinted ahead into the gloaming soul-light to where he thought Morogai must be. The sphere of the chamber was illuminated by capillaries of dimly living things, against which he could almost convince himself Namaríel was faintly defined. Even that impression was guided mostly by the sound of her voice and his growing, unwelcome familiarity with her grotesque half-soul. He saw no one else.

‘Light a stone, Urael,’ said Namaríel. ‘Let our prince take a moment before we move on.’

There was a knapping of stone followed by a spark of light. Lurien winced as a muscular silhouette set a blazing glowstone on a shell-encrusted table. He grunted, blinking, as the brilliance slowly leached back into the dark. Aside from the table on which the glowstone burned, sputtering off its soul-light, the chamber was sparsely furnished. A scattering of empty shelves and alcoves that had been grown directly from the walls, a garderobe of some kind, overgrown by leafy algae, for the akhelian commander of a garrison that the dungeons had apparently never needed.

Three blind and collared namarti watched him.

One was already beside him, possessively close.

He had seen her once before, only then she had been in mourning garb and painted in maroon, dancing for the gods from within a crowd. Namaríel. She was as beautiful as he recalled, and somehow even more so now for having her figure properly clothed. She was garbed in a long seaweed kirtle suited to travelling, ribbed at intervals with fishbone, buttoned and weighted at the hem with rough zircons so as not to interfere with her swimming. An ivory-white whisperwood bow was strapped across her back, with a cloak draped over the opposite shoulder, its colours sufficiently bland as to have plausibly originated from any enclave in the Gulch, assuming it were to attract notice at all. A colour sense, Lurien knew, was something all namarti lacked. A shagreen bodice enclosed her upper body, criss-crossed with tight straps and bulging pouches, leaving her well-muscled arms bare.

Of Namaríel’s companions, the male was the most immediately striking.

He bulged with muscle like an orruk wearing an aelf’s skin, which, given the infinitely variable manifestations of the soul transference ritual, he might well have been. His forearms were encased in heavy leather gauntlets. A crown of nails describing a Druhirri death rune had been hammered into his skull. Scars covered his body, but a second glance revealed them to be the result of burns rather than blades. Given his physique, Lurien assumed him to have been a smith of some kind, enthralled to one of the artificers of the ishratisar. Useful to have around. Given the namarti’s obvious physical power and the still-throbbing hurt in Lurien’s throat and hip, this, clearly, was Morogai.

The second of the two was the most delicate-looking girl-child that Lurien had ever laid eyes on. He could not even begin to imagine what duty so frail a thing could have been given to perform. She resembled a doll made of porcelain and black pearls, the sort that would sit above an akhelian’s bed to remind him of the misery of the half-souled. A bald head winnowed away what little stature she had. Her hadrilkar was an immense mass of lead around her slender neck, and it was only by the natural buoyancy of the water that she was able to lift it at all. Her pale skin prickled with an intensity that reminded him of the one time he had witnessed a fully charged fangmora preparing to bite. She regarded him in turn with an eyeless yet unsettlingly perceptive gaze, as though mentally peeling away his skin to look inside and finding nothing there.

She said nothing.

‘Your hadrilkar bears the sigil of Lágethé’s house,’ Lurien said. ‘As does yours.’ He turned to the burly smith. ‘Is that why you have chosen to help me?’

‘We can tell each other our stories later,’ said Namaríel. ‘For now we need to swim. Vanglyr will notice your absence eventually, and I want to be a long way from Briomdar when he does.’

‘And go where?’ said Lurien. ‘Perhaps as namarti you do not know, but there are no soulscryers in the Mortal Realms more gifted than those of the Briomdar túrscoll. They could follow the soul of a fly through the Garden of Nurgle, and their tidecasters could send the phalanx there to retrieve it. I cannot hide from Vanglyr Fellglaive.’

‘Not forever, perhaps, but long enough.’

‘Especially if he can quiet his soul like that again,’ said the big aelf, his voice like a mailed fist in the jaw.

‘We should go to Elgaen,’ said Lurien. ‘Aunt Laramé will protect me.’

‘Too close,’ said Namaríel, shaking her head. ‘Too obvious. And as your betrothed, may I say too unambitious.’

‘Where then?’

‘Soon.’ Namaríel beckoned to the smaller of the two namarti. ‘Come, Morogai. It is time to make our prince look the part.’ The porcelain girl-child gave a contentious jerk of her head, lips peeling back, as if the taking of instruction were somehow akin to a limpet tick alighting on the back of her skull.

‘Wait.’ Lurien pointed at the dishevelled waif. ‘That is Morogai?’

‘What do you think, Morogai?’ said Namaríel. ‘Can you work with this?’

The aelf girl drew a hooked, twin-bladed knife the length of Lurien’s middle finger and grinned.

The magical currents of the Gulch stream converged at their strongest over the deep ridges of Briomdar. Twenty-two spires rose from the barren crust like a broken crystal, glimmering with ancient power. Each represented a fundamental truth, the wisdom and knowledge that Teclis had imparted on the cythai only to see his Light fade from the minds of their descendants. The ghost glow of ishratisar-made entablature, gods and heroes of the cythai, legends of the asur, a hundred feet high, stood firm against the primordial flows, as unfixed in the eye as the lessons of Teclis were in the mind. The spires were a mandala of three rings, each dedicated to a circle of gods whose significance no chorralus could explain, but which every aelf could intuit and see unconsciously manifesting in their craft. An outer ring of fourteen surrounded an inner ring of seven. These were the keeps and palaces of the isharann and akhelian, the homes of the túrscoll and the azydrazor. And at the centre, a watery spear of turquoise and gold rising from the omphalos of the mandala atop Tor Mathlann, greatest of gods, and the original wooden citadel of the Crannstock, was the Jade Palace.

Lurien had never seen it from this distance before.

It was beautiful.

They had emerged from the dungeons under the mournful coronach of the ring of fourteen. The song in the air was that of the Life currents of Ghyran, blasting through the mile-high reefs that formed the enclave. After that they had quickly hidden themselves in the sprawling marketplaces and craft shops of the lower city, and Lurien had become immediately and stupendously lost.

For an isolationist species, the idoneth still harboured a deep-seated instinct for trade, and this racial yearning they humoured largely amongst themselves. The ocean provided all. Live beasts from the Gulch. Fish meat. Products of bone. Ink and pearl and ivory. And then there were the luxuries exclusive to the noblest classes – bespoke coral artefacts and soul-imbued objects like glowstones, objects that only the time and skill of an isharann could create.

Namaríel had already purchased a number of smaller items, which the hulking Urael bore without complaint in a pair of panniers slung across his broad shoulders.

At a butcher’s stall, she posed as the agent of an embailor caravan, sent to barter for a bushel of fishmeal. Discussing medicaments with a namarti child in a herbalist’s stall, her story and demeanour changed again to make her the set-upon thrall of an ishratisar perfumer, seeking only the finest sense-deadening potions to release her master’s creative thoughts. Her skill at dissimulation was astounding, and given what he had seen of her, Lurien could not help but wonder if some manner of sorcery were involved. She cast off personalities and donned new ones as easily and as often as Éodrain would try new cloaks. A different fit for every occasion. Hold up a mirror, tilt the head askance. An accent for every class of company.

Approaching a seller of fine cloths, she flowed again into a new role, lady’s maid to an isharann noblewoman, blithely prattling with the merchant of how her mistress wished to impress the visiting nobles of Túrach in order to acquire one of Embailor Irimé’s famous gulchmares.

‘She’d best be quick,’ said the merchant as he wrapped the three bolts of good fabric in white, pale blue and silver that she had purchased in seaweed fronds. ‘Queen Anaer means to leave soon.’

‘Before the joining?’ said Namaríel, in a voice so far removed from the caustic hag of Lurien’s recent acquaintance that he wondered if he had become lost in the crowds and attached himself to another group of namarti.

‘Preparing her train at the Tor Anath tidegate, I heard,’ said the merchant, passing the wrapped goods to Urael and pointing in the direction of the Huntress’ Spire.

Lurien squinted in that direction.

An enclave of the idoneth was a living and breathing creature, a semi-divine being of tremendous space and arch beauty. Or so Lurien had always entertained, admiring the glow of its spires from the balconies of the Jade Palace, caulep flute in hand. From beyond the ring of seven, those dark expanses betwixt the spires streamed with a confusion of energy and colour, life in all its Ghyranite profusion. Namarti fishherds moved their livestock. Blubbery laurai. Fine-scaled caleth. Elephantine jagaire whales whose eggs were a delicacy at the tables of akhelian kings beyond the riptides of the Láthway and the Caillegaeta. Green-shelled terrorpin, lesser children of the mighty leviadon, drew broad-finned wains laden with goods and aelves. Cougwai and fangmoras hunted the scavengers that prowled its sprawl. Wherever larger predators lurked, drawn to the scents and sounds of the enclave like vultair to carrion, the semi-domesticated bond-beasts went in packs, and only rarely did they find prey in scarce enough supply to turn on the tented shanties of the namarti classes.

By the standards of human cities, Briomdar was spacious and sterile. Not once since their emergence from the dungeons had another aelf come near enough to jostle Lurien, but the sensory proximity of so many of his aelven kin was more than enough for him.

‘What’s he gawping at?’ said the merchant.

‘He’s simple,’ said Namaríel.

Lurien opened his mouth to protest. He felt Morogai at his shoulder, and he shut it again.

‘It happens,’ said the merchant. ‘Sometimes the soul doesn’t take. No one knows why.’

‘My mother once told me that theirs were souls already claimed by the gods.’

The merchant shrugged. ‘Everyone has their theory.’

Lurien sneered at the half-souled aelf as Namaríel gave her thanks and then pulled him back into the crowd.

‘Try to act more like a namarti,’ she hissed.

‘I could say the same of you,’ Lurien snapped back.

‘Don’t talk. Don’t stare. Be small in your movements. Don’t draw attention.’

Lurien scratched at the disguise Morogai had hastily fashioned for him, ripping his royal cerecloth and butchering good hessian into something bearing the vague shape of an aelf. It itched like a coat fashioned from deepmare tongue. Nor did it do a tremendous job of mitigating his nakedness, being little more than an upturned sack with slits cut for his arms and neck. It barely extended as far as his thighs. His feet were bare. It might have stretched a little further had Morogai not delightedly taken her knives to the hem to fashion a thin strip of cloth for him to wear over his eyes. The material was sufficiently coarse that it did not impair his vision too severely, but it did conceal his eyes from anyone who did not look too closely. And it was idoneth they swam amongst – no one was going to look too closely.

He pulled on the thick metal hadrilkar bolted about his neck.

‘Uncomfortable?’ Urael grunted.

‘You probably get used to it,’ Lurien said.

‘You don’t.’

Lurien frowned, not wanting to press the matter with the enormous namarti. ‘The clothes are draughty.’

‘Morogai was once master dressmaker to the house of Lágethé,’ said Namaríel. ‘Her skills were highly sought by the lords and ladies of her court.’

‘Not her finest work.’

‘I told her to make you look like the lowest order of thrall. Not a prince.’

‘You all get to wear clothes.’

‘Think of it as working your way up from the bottom, my love.’

Lurien scratched the eye mask and rubbed at his bald head. It stung where Namaríel had, with little enough warning but plentiful satisfaction, ripped the periwig from his scalp. He brought his hand down, brushing it across his forehead.

‘The namastir she drew on my face. It is not permanent, is it?’

Urael chuckled sourly as Namaríel led them slowly, almost casually, towards Tor Anath. Morogai, he had come to realise, never spoke, or did so with such rarity as to make no difference. She trailed after them like a silent urchin, a semi-feral porcelain beast-child that nobody had ever loved enough to teach words.

‘Why are you taking me through the Huntress’ Spire?’ he whispered, after Namaríel had dropped a handful of shells bearing the soul-imprint of Queen Lágethé into the hand of a cobbler in exchange for a pair of boots in Lurien’s size.

‘Because that is where Anaer is. Or have you not been heeding the merchants’ gossip?’

‘Túrach? That is your plan? Anaer despises me. The best I could hope for from the City of Spines is that the asglir’akhelian will kill me before returning me to Vanglyr.’

‘Think of it another way. If you can convince Queen Anaer, then you can convince anyone, and you will want the second-greatest army in the Gulch on your side. War is not my expertise, but I imagine that will come in useful if you mean to dethrone the Fellglaive.’

Lurien snorted.

‘There is the simple matter of opportunity as well,’ said Namaríel. ‘Mahbòr and Galrohir intend to remain in Briomdar for several tides yet, as the Fellglaive’s guests. There will be no chance of escaping with them before Vanglyr notices your absence. Escape is our most pressing need. We can refine what comes next when we are safely in Túrach.’

‘I am the rightful king of Briomdar,’ Lurien muttered. Lágethé, the great tidemistress of Briomdar, had chosen him to adopt into her house, and it was him she had raised as her son and heir. What right did Vanglyr or anyone else have to gainsay her? ‘I will show Anaer that she backed the wrong akhelian.’

‘You will, with my help.’

‘You seem to know a great deal of the comings and goings of royalty.’

‘It is remarkable what you can hear when you listen.’

‘I thought you were a néthic dancer?’

‘The dead of the chorrileum speak most freely of all. They have nothing else to do.’ She leant in close, and Lurien cringed from the water that her breath pushed against his earlobe. He wanted nothing other than to scrub at the offended skin with a tru’heas healing stone until he could no longer feel it. ‘My ears are at your disposal now. Did you know, for instance, that Vanglyr means to give his promise to Lágethé tonight?’

‘Lágethé is dead.’

‘No idoneth truly dies once they are interred. Take it from one who knows.’

‘He means to join our houses. Legitimise his rule. Fuéthain. But why? The akhelian council have already given him the right. He has the backing of Galrohir and Anaer. Can he really fear the disapproval of the other enclaves?’

‘Let us hope so.’

‘Why did Vanglyr spare my life? Why not just let me die?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Every noble in the Green Gulch was there at the assembral – he could not have wished for a more public spectacle of his rule.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does if I say it does.’

Namaríel patted his bicep, then lowered her head to rest against his shoulder. She said nothing more, and Lurien was forced to endure several excruciating minutes with her arm in arm before they came to a stallholder whose floating displays marked him as a seller of arms. Namaríel approached directly, raising her voice to indicate her intention to buy. Racial inclination or no, the idoneth were too deeply introverted to make effective hawkers.

‘Must we dally with every merchant between here and Tor Anath?’

‘But, my love,’ she said, loud enough for the merchant to hear, ‘we are to be wed, and you simply must have a weapon as fine as one of these if you are to protect our home. Our children.’ Her face took on a horrified expression. ‘My father is too old to look out for us now. The unbinding withers him a little more with each tide.’

The weaponsmith pressed his fingers to the namastir on his forehead, then turned his hands over, opening them like a bivalve shell, and bowed. ‘May Mathlann intercede on your behalf, and bless you with a child of full soul.’

Namaríel interlocked her fingers across her heart. ‘You are kind.’

‘I have had fourteen children,’ the merchant said. ‘We haven’t given up hoping. Or praying.’

‘Fourteen souls bought with akhelian steel,’ Lurien muttered.

‘What was that?’ said the merchant.

‘My beloved speaks to himself sometimes,’ said Namaríel. ‘An eccentricity of the soul, but I do love him for it.’

‘A lucky man then,’ said the merchant. Lurien made a face that he was relatively confident the blind namarti could not see. ‘May his luck carry through to your children. But you are right, lady. There are many beasts, particularly here in the low city. The akhelian seldom patrol beyond the ring of seven, which most here would think for the best, but there are plenty of namarti prepared to prey on their own.’

Lurien snorted. ‘What do they own worth stealing?’ He glanced at Namaríel, and then looked at his feet. ‘I mean, we.’

‘The robes on your back? The woman on your arm.’ The merchant reached across and pushed a finger into Lurien’s false namastir. He recoiled from the touch. ‘The soul in your flesh would be worth more to the right aelf than anything in my stock.’

Namaríel drew Lurien close, as though unsettled by such dark talk. Her fingernails dug into his arm until even cold-deadened aelf flesh felt it and demanded a wince. ‘I hear that even the akhelian will sooner trouble an unarmed namarti than one with a blade.’

The smith looked over his shoulder before nodding. ‘True. True. Though as I say, it is the soulrenders you need be wary of.’

Lurien’s genuine look of horror was perfectly matched for Namaríel’s act.

‘What is your favoured weapon?’ The merchant spread his hands over the display.

For a slave whose business was to arm other slaves, it was a decent enough selection. The centrepiece of the display, on a felt rug draped over the shell of a bond-clam, was a collection of swords of various grades. They had been neatly arranged in order of size, from keening knives on the left all the way up to the lanmari on the right. In buckets attached to the back of the bond-clam by ropes and suspended by floating air sacs were bi-spears, axes and whisperbows. They were useful enough weapons, but more suited to the skills of the namarti classes. But Lurien’s training at the azydrazor had achieved nothing if not lent him an eye for a weapon. A rhomphaia, an elegant akhelian polearm, stood amongst the bi-spears. The graceful curve of a hellsabre framed the display of swords, half drawn from its sheath so that Lurien might admire both the waving pattern of the golden blade and the craftsmanship of the scabbard. There was even a razorshell harpoon, hanging by a strap from one of the clamshell’s ridges.

Namaríel slapped his hand from the harpoon and set it upon the blue-zircon pommel of the hellsabre, laying her smaller hand atop his. Her body pressed into his back, and she gasped lightly as his fingers touched the grip. Lurien wanted nothing more than to shrink into his own bones and leave his dead skin to her touch.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It must be this.’

‘The lady has a keen feel for quality.’ The merchant picked the hellsabre from the rug and drew it fully from the sheath so that Namaríel could admire its cutting edge. Lurien, he had apparently surmised, and correctly, was no longer relevant to this sale.

He felt himself phase out as the pair settled over the minutiae of price.

This part of the market was thick with the stench of burden beasts, the water alive with the lowing of fangmoras and giant teglai sea snails. The teglai were one of the few mortal species with the stamina to cross the vast tracts of ocean that separated the enclaves of the Gulch. Their enormous shells were wrapped in cargo netting, embailor-trained namarti drovers sitting patiently on the apex, whispering softly to one another, reins loose in their fingers. In amongst those giant animals were shell-armoured carriages, drawn by paired allopexes in breaching and traces and caparisoned in silver. The predatory beasts sniffed and snarled at each other, irritated as much by the proximity of the placid teglai as the bow-armed namarti that clambered over them. Other namarti with the look of serviles and thralls checked over tack and blinds and the security of the stowage nets, while half a dozen akhelian knights watched their toings and froings disdainfully from the backs of their fangmoras. The knights wore long coats of silver mail, ice-blue-and-white surcoats and conical helms decorated with silver fins. They were the asglir, the elite warrior class of Túrach. Anaer’s silvered helms.

They had arrived, Lurien realised.

The great spire rising vast and softly blue above them must have been Tor Anath, and he was looking at Anaer’s mission as it prepared to make its departure. Everything looked prepared. They could leave at any moment. The only reason they had not already done so was that there was no creature in the realms of mortals or Chaos more disdainful of the concerns of others than the isharann master of an enclave’s tidegate. The tidecasters knew full well that without their magic travel was so difficult as to be essentially impossible, and so even queens were forced to abide by their whims. Somehow, however, Lurien doubted the Queen of Spines would be made to wait overlong. Essential they might have been, but someone like Anaer could always find another tidecaster. The isharann were generally adept at knowing how far they could push their value.

Looking around, Lurien realised he could no longer see Morogai and Urael. They were probably already busy embedding themselves amongst the caravan’s slaves in preparation. He would say this much for Namaríel – she had planned this well.

‘Namarti!’

Lurien ignored the outraged shout, assuming it was intended for one of the hundreds of other namarti in sight, and continued to search the caravan for his absent thralls.

‘Are you deaf, namarti?’

Lurien looked up to see a tall akhelian in a frock coat that had been cut artfully into strips to frolic with his passage through the water and a wide-brimmed, frilled hat. The akhelian tugged it down at the front as he swam towards Lurien. The breath froze in Lurien’s mouth.

Éodrain.

Lurien’s unexpected ousting from court must have left his retainer suddenly without a patron. Calohaire had at least some kind of military reputation to fall back on, while Vágös had never much cared for the indulgences of court. Now he thought about it, Lurien was not sure why they had even been friends. Éodrain, he realised, must have ventured across the ring of fourteen for perhaps the first time in his life in the hopes of currying favour with Queen Anaer or, failing that, one of her knights. In another place and time, Lurien would have laughed. If there was one idoneth less suited to a place in Túrach’s spartan court than Lurien himself, it was the aelf in the frock coat and frilled hat.

Instead, he tried to think what a namarti would do with an angry akhelian swimming towards him. Imagination failed him. Éodrain grabbed a handful of his smock coat before he could say or do anything. Lurien gasped in pain. He expected cries of outrage from the namarti stallholders, but none were forthcoming.

A lord swam amongst them, and he could do as he pleased.

‘Your head, slave,’ said Éodrain. ‘It has been dyed recently – turquoise and gold.’ Lurien shook his head dumbly, but that only seemed to convince Éodrain to grip his rags tighter. ‘It is faded, but I see it there still, even if these eyeless soul-runts cannot. Those are royal colours. I would be within my rights to kill you now for having worn them.’

Namaríel turned away from the weaponsmith. ‘Please, lord. He–’

‘Quiet, woman. There can be no explanation.’

Namaríel eased herself across Lurien. ‘Some form of recompense then, my–’

‘No.’ Éodrain pushed Namaríel aside. He had already been drinking, Lurien could tell. The akhelian had probably hit upon this scheme of inveigling himself into Anaer’s circle while overnighting in the caulep gardens. He was here to impress an asglir knight. He drew his sword.

‘Éodrain!’ Lurien hissed. ‘Stop!’

The akhelian gasped, sword half raised. ‘Is that…?’ With his other hand he pulled the eyeblind from Lurien’s face. ‘Eidolon of Mathlann. Lurien?’

‘Éodrain, I can explain.’

‘What is going on over there?’

One of the Túrach asglir had turned his mount towards the disturbance.

Lurien silently cursed. There went their plan to sneak out of Briomdar unseen, like the breath from a drowning man’s lungs. Not that he had thought too highly of Namaríel’s ‘plan’ to begin with. He watched the tiny, darting movements of Éodrain’s glassy eyes as the aelf’s mind dealt with the unexpected presence of his oldest friend.

Very slowly, the akhelian began to smile.

‘No,’ said Lurien.

‘It is Prince Lurien!’ Éodrain yelled. ‘He has escaped. I have him!’

He lashed his sword across Lurien’s belly.

It was a careless move, with little lead-in, and Lurien had ample time to throw himself clear of it. With a sound like a sack being ripped, the akhelian blade cut through his hessian surcoats. He did not feel the shallow cut across his middle. His back bumped into the merchant’s bond-clam. It was hard and ribbed. Blades clattered as he groped back. The merchant yelled angrily, but Lurien was not in the mood to care – even if he had been in the habit of bothering himself with what the namarti thought.

Éodrain stabbed for the throat, one-handed, the other hand curled behind him as though to grasp a kerchief. Lurien seized the first weapon he got his fingers around and swung it up, smashing Éodrain’s blade aside. Both akhelian looked at the unfamiliar weapon between them with expressions of disdain and dismay. It was a namarti estoc, longer than an akhelian sword but shorter and lighter than a lanmari. The straight blade was blunt, only the triangular point having an edge of note. Lurien imagined that the namarti must have used it for bludgeoning armoured monsters. Or mounted akhelian knights.

Lurien gave a nervous laugh as he brought the estoc to guard, and Éodrain again lunged high for his throat. Lurien parried and replied, wielding the sword two-handed, and hacked diagonally across Éodrain’s guard. For several rounds of block and return, the two akhelian flailed, as if aiming to embarrass the other with their lack of skill and succeeding brilliantly. They were warriors, raised by the azydrazor, but neither had ever slain another, nor shed blood in anger. The closest Lurien had come was his duel with Vanglyr.

A slim advantage, but one he meant to take.

He parried one of Éodrain’s swift lunges. The akhelian sword made a rasping sound as it slid down the estoc and sheared through one of the ropes that tethered the namarti weaponsmith’s stall to the float sacs. The bucket holding the merchant’s bi-spears began to sink, the float sac remaining afloat exactly where it had been, the severed end of the rope drawing lazy loops in the water. The namarti gave another aggrieved shout, which Lurien would have happily continued to ignore had a startle in Éodrain’s eyes not convinced him to risk a backward look.

The weaponsmith had unhooked the razorshell harpoon from the bond-clam and was aiming it at Lurien’s back. The shoulder strap rippled loosely in the water.

‘Why did you have to bring your trouble to my stall?’

He fired before Lurien could reply.

The harpoon hissed towards the prince’s shoulder blade. In the split second he had to spare, Lurien bent away from it, turning, but that was not what saved him. What saved him was that the harpoon was already missing anyway. Éodrain’s mouth widened in silent realisation, the akhelian experiencing something akin to a moment of awakening as his free hand closed around the metal shaft sticking out of his stomach. He was feeling pain for the first time in his life, and he was clearly quite certain that he did not like it. Lurien sympathised.

The warrior screamed, eyes huge, as though impaled on the claw of the Dark Prince.

An arrow sprouted from the weaponsmith’s neck before he could rue his error.

Namaríel nocked another arrow to her bow. ‘I should have known that this much guile was beyond you.’

‘It was your plan,’ Lurien replied. ‘Not mine.’

‘All you had to do was be quiet and look unimportant. But no.’ She pulled the bowstring taut as she turned towards Éodrain. Lurien kicked the base of the stave as she loosed, and the arrow hissed into the chest of a namarti woman in a short leather dress sewn with pink and white shells. She might as well have been selected randomly for death, plucked from the crowds around Tor Anath by the spectre of Khaine. The woman’s arms flailed, the force of the arrow driving her into the net stall of a namarti selling drinking shells.

Namaríel’s expression blackened into anger.

‘He is my retainer,’ Lurien said. ‘His life is mine.’

A venomous hiss dragged his attention around. A heavily armoured Túrach asglir powered towards him on a silver-caparisoned fangmora. Their bodies crackled with a golden nimbus of voltaic charge. Seconds away. The asglir lowered his voltspear.

‘Namaríel!’

The namarti drew her bow around, arrow nocked. She was not going to be quick enough.

With a dervish shriek, Morogai dived from the panicked crowds to slam into the asglir’s shoulder.

The heavy knight barely seemed to register the girl’s arrival until she drove a pocket knife up into his armpit. The warrior folded into her, but retained enough wit to reach for the arming sword in the saddle scabbard by his thigh. Silver shone. Then Morogai ripped the knife from aelf flesh, hazing the water blue, and shanked what appeared to be a pair of dressmaking scissors under his helmet and through the bottom of his mouth. The knight issued a gurgling noise that, for all its restraint, made Éodrain’s earlier screech seem positively rapturous. Morogai’s lips parted as she stabbed him again, again, again with the pocket knife, holding the scissors firmly throughout.

Lurien gawped as the namarti girl mauled a knight of the most fearsome warrior order in the Green Gulch.

‘Come on,’ shouted Namaríel, loosing her arrow into the back of a Túrach thrall. The allopex whose back he had been standing on lunged for the nearest body, ripping through the armour of another asglir and coming away with a leg. ‘Before any more of them notice us.’

Lurien looked around.

The remaining asglir were forming a ring around one of the shell-armoured carriages, presumably Anaer’s, the water hazed and shimmering with overlapping bubbles of biovoltaic shields. They did not seem to have noticed that one of their number was unaccounted for. Yet. Lurien did not expect that fortunate state of affairs to last for much longer, but he had a window, a small and ever-closing opportunity in which to get out with his skin intact.

But how?

One of the other tidegates, perhaps?

Morogai issued a death-rattle moan of elation as the asglir in her grip finally fell slack over the horn of his saddle. The fangmora twisted its serpentine neck around to bite her, throwing the girl clear into the water. Lurien made a grab for its pearl-and-silver-inlaid harness and pulled hard. The fangmora had more muscle crammed into that thick neck than Lurien had in his entire body. It pulled back. Harder. He sailed towards its shovel mouth, and thumped it on the snout with an open palm just as the azydrazor embailors had taught him. The blow dazed the sense organs in the eyeless creature’s nose and mouth, turning it briefly placid in his grip. With a bitter laugh, he wound his wrist through the reins, tipped the still-installed asglir knight from the saddle and swung himself up into his place. He had himself seated just as the fangmora recovered enough venom to twist its neck back and snap at him. Lurien slapped it across the jaw with the flat of his estoc and dug his bare heels into its flanks. A massive undulation of its twenty-foot-long body almost pitched him from the saddle, but when that failed it seemed to settle.

Lurien brandished his clumsy blade, one hand on the reins. ‘See how even the beasts know the true king of Briomdar!’

‘Celebrate when we are safely out of the enclave,’ said Namaríel, sliding the dead merchant’s hellsabre into the makeshift sheath beneath her bodice straps and helping herself to one of his quivers. ‘We will have to take our chances on another tidegate.’

‘Urael!’ Lurien yelled over the commotion.

‘Here,’ said the big namarti.

‘Put Éodrain over my fangmora’s neck.’

The namarti glanced first at Namaríel.

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘But swiftly. If we are quick, perhaps we can lose ourselves with the embailors travelling through Tor Estreuth before word of this gets back to Vanglyr and the tidegates are barred.’

‘There’s no way out, and you know it,’ said Lurien.

‘I am not ready to go back to a life of chains just yet.’

Hauling one-handed on the reins, Lurien dragged the truculent fangmora towards the ocean that lay huge and emerald green beyond the tidegates.

‘We will lose them in open water.’

‘Without burden beasts or a tidecaster? There is no ethersea beyond the tidegates, Lurien. You would need to be insane.’

‘I know.’ Lurien kicked the beast forwards. ‘Vanglyr will have sent agents everywhere from Mor’drechi to Rúndhar before he ever thinks to look for us out there.’

CHAPTER FOUR

No one travelled through open water. Not unless they had to. Isharann embailors in search of new beasts, shell pickers and soul hunters, the endless caravans bearing sullen namarti labourers to new lives in the pits and quarries that supplied the idoneth’s relentless expansion with stone and metals. No one, going nowhere, journeys of days at most, and not without a bubble of the enclave’s ethersea, which only the most powerful of knights could procure the means to generate. When Lurien had been a child, Lágethé had gifted him a necklace of gem-encrusted shells that she had personally woven with enchantment to blend water and air. He had lost it. Vanglyr must have taken it from him. But Éodrain, he knew, still carried his. It was an emblem of status amongst a people that placed no value on wealth, and Éodrain had prized his status even if he had never had the slightest inclination to venture beyond the tidegates. The hunting grounds and mines that encircled Briomdar were the halo that surrounded a glowstone, insignificant against the unimaginable expanse of darkness that enveloped it.

Lurien had thought he knew the meaning of the word vastness.

There had been clay maps of the Gulch in his mother’s chambers. The delicately reproduced spires of the five enclaves had been needles in a vast bowl of emerald green, bordered on one side by the amorphous grey slabs of continental Ghyran and on the other by the great unknown. The deeper ocean. Lurien had been bored enough, often enough, to memorise every detail of that map, following the glitter trails that had marked the swiftest currents between the enclaves, the tributaries that fed into the Láthway and Caillegaeta, the great vortices onto the whirlway.

Lurien had thought he understood its scale.

He had heard of the urkraken that had laid siege to Guethen ten years before he was born, larger than the father of all leviadon and as ancient as the ocean’s floor. According to the isharann, it had been coming out of that Deep Nothing since the creation of the realms and had only then finally made it as far as the Gulch. He had seen the lights that winked sometimes in the dark, luring hunters and adventurers from the enclaves never to return. He had heard the same tales as everyone of dead gods and wandering daemons, impish species of ocean dweller such as the valay, said to possess the lower body of a squid and the bearded upper frame of a duardin, hoarders of ithilmhair with a love of deadly word games. Vágös, of all people, had even once told him of the reef forests to the far west of Túrach. The great allopexes that hunted the squigrays and green lanterns there were singularly vicious creatures, maddened by fungal parasites, inherently unbreakable but highly valued for their sport. The spores, he had said, were from the fabled orruk prophet Mawgog, who had supposedly fallen into the Láthway after being driven from his sacred lands in Ghur by the taint of Nurgle. Had the tale come from anyone else, Lurien would have dismissed it as he had Calohaire’s outlandish tales of the surface races, but Vágös did not open his mouth often enough to waste breath on lies.

The closest enclave to Briomdar was Elgaen. Four weeks of hard travel through monster-infested waters and the cyclonic tides of magic storms. Lurien did not know how long it would take to reach Túrach that way, as Namaríel had originally intended. He did not think it had ever been attempted. Even with a tidecaster to bless the journey and cast a traveller down the truest currents, a voyage to the Gulch’s outermost enclave was one of several weeks.

It would take years.

Tens of years.

Perhaps only the urkraken of Guethen truly understood the ocean’s immensity. Lurien was beginning to.

The fangmora, which Lurien had named Venom, though a larger breed of beast than those the akhelian of Briomdar regularly rode in battle, was little deterrent out here. Here roved monsters of brass, armoured like keeps; beasts with glacial minds, without sense of pain or awareness of self, things which had prowled these seas since before the realmspheres had formed out of the aetheric cloud. Namaríel’s bow was useless against such behemoths, as was Urael’s strength, and no one had even cared to enquire after Lurien’s sword.

Their only advantage was their lack of numbers. They stuck to the ocean floor, the zigzagging topography adding days to their journey but providing an abundance of nooks for a small group to move unseen.

Every few days, the ever-threatened storms would break, magical vortices tearing great chunks out of the ocean floor, the water rippling with emerald lightning. There was to be no travelling on such days, and so the group instead sought shelter in the many burrow holes and caves of the bottom. Many were ancient, but none were completely unoccupied, and Lurien was forced to dirty his hellsabre on troggoth crabs, polypsest and, in one terrifying encounter, a lurkinarth adolescent already as massive as the infamous Blacknarkh breed of allopex. Urael proved worth his weight in aelf souls in those encounters. It was more than just brawn. The big namarti seemed to have an innate understanding. He knew exactly where to cut.

In such dubious comfort and relative safety, with meat, at least, in plentiful supply, there could be some respite.

‘Again,’ said Namaríel.

The namarti sat against the back wall of the cave with her knees up by her chin, wrapped in her frayed cloak. Blasts of aetheric lightning strobed her eyeless face with random flashes of false colour. In the darker spaces behind her, Urael butchered the carcass of the hugarth that had not given willingly of its lair. Lurien let out a slow breath and brought his hellsabre back into a guard. Morogai hung a sword’s length from him, a cruel-looking shortsword and a serrated knife with which he had become intimately acquainted over the preceding weeks in her small hands.

He struggled to keep himself from swaying.

‘This is hardly a fair fight.’

‘She knows that,’ said Namaríel.

Morogai grinned. Her gums were green.

‘I’d like to see how well she fights after a cupful of enervas.’

Enervas was a flowering algae that was common everywhere in the Green Gulch and one of the few that the idoneth actively cultivated. In its wild-growing form it was a potent soporific, but in the hands of a skilled isharann herbsinger it was prized more highly even than caulep for its nerve-deadening effects. A single leaf was more powerful than a full cellar of duardin ale, and for those few surface dwellers erudite enough to have gleaned hints of the idoneth’s existence, there was no artefact or jewel more actively sought.

‘Does Morogai complain that she is half your size? Or that she is blind? This is the handicap that the gods have chosen to throw at you, my prince. I think you would agree it is preferable to leaving your senses open for Fellglaive’s soulscryers to find.’

‘I suppose.’

‘It is just dead leaves and stems now, in any case. We should have been halfway to Túrach by now, and I was not expecting to need to split the supply two ways.’

Namaríel glared at Éodrain.

The akhelian was clad in the same exotic finery as he had been at Tor Anath, although it was noticeably greened and frayed around the cuffs. Morogai’s seamstressing was as potent as her swordsmanship, and even if Lurien were to run his hands over his friend’s tunic he doubted he would have been able to say where the razorshell harpoon had passed through it. The damage to the aelf underneath had been rather more serious, but, as Lágethé had often told him when he had scraped a knee or taken a knock from a practice sword and sought the attentions of the tru’heas, saltwater is the best medicine. After giving the wound a tide to flush itself clean, Morogai had just sewn him up too. He looked hale enough to escape now, if he wanted to, but Éodrain had never needed a thousand leagues of hostile ocean to excuse his indolence. He had not even sought to deny Namaríel’s daily tisanes, which would have been a singularly effortless way of getting the soulscryers’ attention.

‘Why do you always do as she tells you?’ he said.

‘Enough, Éodrain.’

‘Namarti witch that she is.’

‘Enough.’

Éodrain yawned, chewing on the enervas stems he had picked out of his tea. Lurien had been wise enough to return his dregs for Namaríel to eke another pot out of them come the next tide.

‘That is my promised you are talking about,’ he said.

‘About that…’

‘Are you going to hang there like a limp caulep berry from the vine?’ said Namaríel. ‘Or are you actually going to fight?’

‘Oh, I’m going to fight,’ Lurien snarled, and lunged for Morogai’s belly.

Like an octopus striking from ambush, the tiny namarti burst into motion, all blurring limbs as she caught his hellsabre between the quillons and blade of her shortsword and pressed the serrations of her knife’s curved edge to his throat. Lurien swallowed and held up his free hand in surrender.

Éodrain chuckled.

‘You are welcome to take a turn,’ said Lurien.

‘I am not the one challenging Vanglyr Fellglaive for his crown.’

‘You could help though.’

‘What is it worth to me?’

Not for the first time, Lurien wondered why he had not let Namaríel shoot him. Éodrain was a feckless dilettante, which, coming from Lurien, was quite the accusation. His ethersea-generating amulet was useful, but nothing he could not have cut from the akhelian’s neck the second they had been free of Tor Anath. Petulance, he decided. Namaríel had wanted to do it, and he had wanted to take the decision away from her.

‘Again,’ said Namaríel.

With grinding reluctance, Morogai withdrew her knife from Lurien’s throat. Lurien studied the doll-like namarti as he reset his stance, bobbing up and down in the water. She had to have some weakness.

He feinted left with his sword, then went right, rising diagonally to flurry the namarti with high blows. She rode them as effortlessly as a shaft of light, playing over the furiously moving blade, before arriving with a knife against his loin and a shortsword across his belly.

Éodrain laughed hard enough to allay any concerns anyone may have had as to the stitching in his gut.

‘Again,’ Namaríel sighed.

And again, like some porcelain golem created by the soul mages of Briomdar’s ishratisar houses, Morogai withdrew her blades.

‘How is this any different to training under Vanglyr?’

Lurien turned to Éodrain for support, who nodded, remembering. ‘He never did much to actually teach us either,’ he said.

‘No. He just beat us in the hope we would eventually improve.’

‘Again,’ said Namaríel.

‘I refuse to make sport of myself for this namarti spite creature.’

Namaríel frowned past him, towards Morogai, and nodded.

The namarti exploded forwards.

Lurien kicked back in panic, digging up every trick and ounce of grace he possessed to keep her blurring blades at bay. Four times over the course of a second, his sword hit metal, only to finish with a slash across empty water and Morogai’s knife working into the small of his back.

‘Spear of Mathlann!’ Lurien swore, throwing his hellsabre down in anger.

Éodrain gave a sardonic clap. The enervas was starting to kick in.

‘Again,’ said Namaríel.

‘Maybe she can fight Vanglyr,’ Lurien suggested.

‘And what would the noble houses you are so fond of make of that, do you think?’

‘What I told them, if they didn’t want to be the next in line to face her.’

‘I wouldn’t want to,’ said Éodrain.

Lurien and Namaríel both sneered.

‘Let him put something in his belly first, at least,’ Urael suggested, looking up from his butchery. He had been carving the dead hugarth into strips, laying them over firestones to sizzle, surrounding himself in oily micelles and bubbles of warm air. ‘It might take the edge off the enervas. Give him a chance at least.’

Lurien held his hand out towards the big namarti. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘A small chance,’ Urael conceded.

‘This is still a game to you, my prince,’ said Namaríel. ‘Even after everything you have been through, I don’t think you understand what is at stake. You want to be king because you think you deserve it. Wearing the crown means you win and Vanglyr loses. You do not yet seem to have grasped that you might lose, or what losing really means. A return to slavery for us. Execution, and banishment from the chorrileum for you. I doubt there will be torture. Your soul will be devoured by the Prince of Pain, and he will make eternal mockery of any form of pain that the students of the druchir could devise. Anaer and the others will understand this even if you do not. They will give you nothing because you think you are entitled. You are going to have to convince them. They will probably want something from you in exchange, and it will not be easy or cheap. They need to believe that you at least have a chance of defeating Vanglyr Fellglaive in honourable combat.’

‘The tyrant almost killed me once.’

Namaríel nodded towards Morogai. The seamstress grinned.

‘You don’t eat until I see her bleed.’

‘But I’ve never even–’

‘Again.’

Lurien bent to pick up the hellsabre and surged forwards with a yell, rancour stippling his sword arm with chilblains. He hacked at Morogai. The girl bent under his blade, countered with her shortsword. His sword met it, knocked it aside. He twirled, blocking a trio of short thrusts to the midriff. Pushing up off his toes, he launched himself over the smaller aelf’s head. She dropped into a split and slid under him as he somersaulted over, their blades clashing in the middle. What he would have done had he actually managed to break through her guard, he did not know. But he was determined to find out. A kick of the feet righted him, propelled him round. He would have given anything for some proper finned fighting boots, but a deft splay of his bare toes served almost as well. His blade licked out, scraping between Morogai’s two. The girl skipped out of reach. Instinct screamed at him to go after her, but he reeled it back, using his weapon’s greater reach instead to stab back and drive her onto her heels. He drew his sword back and settled into a new guard.

Gasping for breath, he grinned.

Morogai looked at him in puzzlement, then threw her knife at him. It spun, end over end, before smacking him between the eyes pommel-first.

He came to a moment later, lying flat. Urael and Namaríel peered worriedly down at him.

‘She could have put a knife between his eyes,’ said Namaríel.

‘She didn’t,’ said Urael.

‘She could have.’

‘But she didn’t.’

Namaríel turned to glare at the porcelain child-creature. ‘She can contemplate how upset having to take Éodrain’s promise instead would have made me while the rest of us eat.’

After that, Namaríel seemed to take pity on Lurien, and said nothing as Urael eased him up against the cave wall and set a shell plate in his lap, layering it with strips of hugarth.

The four aelves chewed in silence, retreating into the bitter company of their own thoughts.

The clack-snip of Morogai’s needles served as an appropriate accompaniment. The namarti’s fingers worked deftly over the fabric in her hands, empty eye sockets staring at the ground as they did. The work seemed to settle her. Just for the moment, Lurien could almost see a seamstress, rather than the girl that had savaged a Túrach asglir and fought like a daemon squid with blades. The bolts of white, silver and blue that Namaríel had purchased prior to their flight from Briomdar were almost coming to resemble the tunic and hose of a Túrach noble. It would not have quite the same effect in Laramé’s court as it might have had in Anaer’s, but it was better than presenting himself in sackcloth.

Lurien smiled ruefully at the thought. It would be good to be amongst kin, and in a noble’s clothes again. Perhaps, with the resources of Laramé’s court, he could even be rid of Namaríel and her promise too. The gods had, after all, been known to change their minds before.

‘Where did a dressmaker learn to fight better than an akhelian knight?’ he said.

‘Urael has known her longest,’ said Namaríel.

The big namarti shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Namarti often develop strange talents as they age,’ said Namaríel.

‘Such as?’

‘All kinds,’ said Urael. ‘And tastes as well. For surface foods, or music we cannot make.’ He nodded towards Morogai, in her corner. ‘The rumour in the palace was that her soul belonged to a great hero of men.’

‘Why does she not speak?’ said Éodrain.

‘She speaks,’ said Urael. ‘When she wants to.’

‘And would she kill Vanglyr for me?’

‘Do you think she could?’ Namaríel asked.

Lurien glared at the small namarti through narrowed eyes. He tried to imagine it, watching Morogai and the Fellglaive at crossed swords in the Court of the Blind King. The namarti girl was swift as lightning, bestially vicious, but the tyrant of Briomdar was rightfully the most feared warrior in the Gulch. He had never been bested, either in battle or in de’comhrac. Even Galrohir looked up to him. Lurien frowned, wondering where this insight had been when he had thought to challenge the tyrant at the assembral.

Usurpation, it seemed, was nothing if not a tonic for one’s perspective.

‘From behind, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Or while he sleeps.’

‘For all her skill, there are things she will never be able to do,’ said Namaríel. ‘Command a bound-beast. Master a soul-bond blade. If Vanglyr has to be fought, and you can always hope that he does not, it will have to be you that fights him.’

Lurien thought on that as Morogai’s needles snipped and clacked from the other side of the cave. He pushed his empty plate away for Urael to dispose of, suddenly lacking in appetite, and sat back with his arms crossed behind his head. The big namarti, again, glanced first at Namaríel. She gave a nod, and Urael grudgingly collected the prince’s plates.

‘We will be in Elgaen soon,’ said Namaríel. ‘If not the next tide then the one after. Have you given any thought to what you will say when we arrive?’

Lurien smiled.

‘Yes. I believe I have.’

PART TWO

ELGAEN

CHAPTER FIVE

Elgaen was an enclave renowned for its beauty, cupped like a promise ring in the open shell of a titanic oyster. Dwellings of every shape bulged from its nacreous centre like blown glass, a single enormous pearl drawn into bulbs and ribbons and spirals, crowned with glowstones and petals. Even the fish that swarmed its palaces had been bred over successive centuries to complement the colour palette of the White City. Scales gleamed as they shoaled across the myriad points of light, bronzes, reds and yellow-golds, even the ways in which they chose to billow and swarm guided by the civic embailors with an eye for their beauty.

Most aelves thought of Elgaen as a fief of Briomdar, a retreat for the enclave’s isharann to bathe in splendour for a year, perhaps ten, before returning to the solemn business of the idoneth curse. That unfair view was, in large part, due to Queen Laramé. She had been close to her elder and mightier twin and had rarely, if ever, adopted a contrary opinion. But Elgaen was a proud city in its own right – too proud, if one were to ask an aelf of Guethen or Dwy-Hor. Its akhelian were few in number, but renowned as the haughtiest and most arrogant aelf warriors in the Mortal Realms. Its isharann túrscoll was rivalled only by Briomdar itself for the depth of its lore and the skill of its practitioners. That, too, was due to Queen Laramé.

Lurien sat straighter in his saddle, the tired leather creaking. Venom gave a low growl. The fangmora’s wide mouth tasted the water, sampling the unfamiliar odours emerging from the striated towers of the Mantle Tidegate. Even this far out from the city the water was redolent with the scent of the seaweed that grew over the palaces, a culinary herb plant that scrambled attractively up the walls. It immediately cast Lurien’s mind to the seasons of his youth spent at Aunt Laramé’s court. The idoneth abhorred emotional excess. To speak of things such as ‘happiness’ was, for Lurien, like a discussion of death was for a human, or of love for a duardin.

But Lurien had been happy here.

‘Pretty,’ said Namaríel.

The namarti commanded senses he had only a dim perception of, but at the same time Lurien knew she did not see the half of it. How could she? Denied true sight and the miracle of Elgaenite colour.

‘They say that the poorest namarti in Elgaen lives like a lord in Briomdar,’ said Éodrain, looking up at the spires and lagging some way behind the others.

‘I am sure the lords of Briomdar say that,’ said Urael.

Éodrain acted as though the namarti had not spoken, for slaves were to be seen and not heard.

‘I see no defences,’ said Namaríel.

Lurien did not need to look for himself. He could remember.

Location and isolation meant there had never been a genuine military threat to the enclaves since the abandonment of Léiriú, not until the likes of Archaon and Nagash had come to realise that something of power lurked beneath the oceans of the Mortal Realms. Even so, Briomdar bristled with mage towers and razorshell turrets, and Guethen was as heavily fortified as any holdfast of the duardin. It was impossible to wall off an enclave and the bubble of ethersea that contained it the way a city of the surface races could be. But each of the outer, lesser spires of Briomdar’s ring of fourteen was garrisoned by hundreds of namarti reavers, and held the palaces of isharann and akhelian lords, giving the nobles a vested interest in providing for their defence. Beasts did prowl the darker spaces of the ocean, and while full-blown assaults from daemonic armies, skaven expeditions or even other enclaves were rare, they did happen, and had happened in Laramé’s lifetime if not in Lurien’s.

‘Elgaen is small,’ he said. ‘And close enough to Briomdar for any predators to pass it over. And there are plenty of defences that you can’t see. Laramé’s magic was always second in power only to my mother’s. I suppose that now makes her the pre-eminent isharann in the Gulch.’

Namaríel reached over her shoulders to run her hand down the whisperwood shaft of her bow, like a blind woman seeking reassurance in a familiar object. ‘I would rather have nets and walls and a few more razorshell harpoons.’

Éodrain added his own unasked-for agreement.

‘I would have thought a néthir would be more appreciative of the intangible,’ said Lurien. ‘Arcane wards and spells of binding.’ Perhaps it was Elgaen, the peaceful splendour, the memories of contentment and safety he associated with it, the taste of Laramé’s power in the water, but his promise-giving in the dungeons of Briomdar felt far away from him now. A smile pulled at the corner of his lips. Yes. It was more than mere beauty and fond memories that had called him back to Elgaen. If, somehow, Namaríel had tricked him into a genuine promise before genuine gods, then Laramé Farseer was possibly the only individual in the Green Gulch with the power to lift it.

At least, he hoped she had the power.

Namaríel frowned at some distant thing. ‘The magic of the isharann is a different thing. It is inner spite, fashioned into tools of exploitation, the same self-loathing that brought about the cythai’s fall given an alternative expression. The gods do not give protection or power to the aelves. They trade it.’ She smiled at him, and Lurien felt the ocean around him lose its meagre warmth.

With a shudder, Lurien turned to Morogai. Since discovering he was unable to best her with a sword, he had taken to baiting her with words instead. That way, at least, she could not fight back. ‘And what is your opinion on Elgaen, dear Morogai?’

As he had expected, the girl stared into the water a thousand leagues beyond the back of Lurien’s skull, twitching occasionally, and did not answer. Lurien chuckled.

‘Do you really think Laramé is going to help?’ Éodrain murmured as the fluted tors of the Mantle Tidegate grew steadily larger.

‘Of course she will,’ said Lurien.

‘Because she likes you.’

‘Because she loves me,’ Lurien corrected. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I seem to remember that Anaer was going to back you out of a disinclination towards turmoil, and that Vanglyr Fellglaive was loyal and unambitious.’

‘Lágethé and Laramé were sisters. Real sisters. Blood and soul and not just name. They rose to power together. Isharann queens, and two of them. It is almost unheard of.’ Several akhelian had questioned their right, as isharann, to rule, but the sisters had been simply too powerful. They had commanded the loyalty of the Fellglaive, and they had had something no other akhelian or isharann had – each other.

Lurien frowned, wondering suddenly if Vanglyr had always been one of those who sought to supplant his isharann queen.

‘And yet she was not at the assembral.’

‘Because she knew how the Anaers of this world would have judged her grief.’

‘Or maybe she knew what Vanglyr plotted,’ Namaríel interrupted. ‘As the Anaers of this world did.’

Lurien frowned. He had not considered that. ‘And stayed away so as not to be party to it?’

‘And gave you no warning,’ said Éodrain.

‘When did that school of black fish begin to follow you around?’ said Lurien.

Éodrain grunted and turned his sour gaze away. ‘Sometime between taking a harpoon for you and your namarti witch running out of enervas.’

A spiralling horn atop the Mantle Tidegate sounded a shivering note as Venom eeled into whisperbow range of the towers. Urael dropped a big hand to his buckled adze. Namaríel reached back to grip her bow stave. Lurien sat confidently in his saddle, hands raised in a gesture of peace, urging Venom to continue on forwards as a loose band of namarti swam from the twin towers of the tidegate. Their muscular torsos were strapped in studded leather, covered in beautiful tattoos and jewellery of whale ivory and gems, armed with a mix of whisperbows and lanmari.

The akhelian that led them wore armour that had been cut rather than forged, carved from the great pearl of Elgaen and stylised with intricate swirling patterns. The green seas of Ghyran were a tint under his skin, the pelagic equivalent of sunburn or windswept features. His ears were large with prominent tips, his eyes narrowed as if pressed together by a heavy brow. His chin was pointed, his bald head polished smooth and inked with a similar golden pattern to that on his armour. The fangmora he rode was of a smaller breed than Lurien’s stolen beast, barely two-thirds its length, but it dazzled with a caparison of golden ringlets and a collar and tail-sleeve of nacreous spikes.

Lurien disliked him immediately.

He held up a hand to bid his followers remain where they were, then dug his boot heels into Venom’s ribs, snapped the reins and goaded the fangmora to intercept his Elgaenite counterpart. If Namaríel or Éodrain took issue with his presumption, they kept it to themselves. In his new finery, his finned boots and silver cloak, a golden hellsabre sheathed at his hip, mounted upon a fangmora barded in the majestic style of the silvered helms of Túrach, Lurien was a prince to whom lowly akhelian lords and slave namarti bowed their heads and suffered their opinions in silence. He eyed the Elgaenite with the appropriate contempt.

The white knight reined in his fangmora, turning the beast to block Venom with its length. ‘I am Nael, of the Pearl City.’ Even his choice of title was presumptuous. As if Elgaen were his possession. The Elgaenite akhelian’s reputation for arrogance was well founded. The namarti reavers spread out behind him, adopting a half-moon formation that, although none had weapons drawn, kept everyone’s lines of sight clear. An elderly aelf in foamy white robes the colour of ocean spray, his wild clothes home to numerous small creatures, swam up between them. His staff was bottle green, curved like the back of a wave. ‘And this is Tidecaster Filenduil,’ Nael went on. ‘Warden of the Mantle Tidegate.’

The old aelf nodded a greeting.

Lurien ignored him completely.

‘And I am King Lurien of Briomdar, nephew and favourite of Queen Laramé. Stand aside and grant me passage, for I demand an immediate audience with my aunt.’

Nael nodded and drew his sword.

‘I know who you are.’ The aelf’s long countenance formed an unpleasant smile. ‘Cousin.’

CHAPTER SIX

Lurien’s initial dislike for Prince Nael had been a starting offer. On further consideration, he was quite prepared to be haggled up towards loathing. The Elgaenite set a challenging pace, entirely disregarding the fetters around his guest’s ankles and the namarti spears at his back. He swam through the luminous colonnades of the low city, the slave quarters of Elgaen living up fully to Éodrain’s boast of being the Jade Palace’s rival in beauty. He swam up towers that gleamed with light and life, sometimes within them, sometimes around, but always, Lurien suspected, for the simple joy of being an arrogant fuéthain. His armed entourage passed from spire to spire via the exquisite bridges that linked them, all a part of the same pearlescent body. They had to be follies, statements of Elgaen’s wealth and her chorralus’ skill. The idoneth had no need of bridges, except perhaps as a signpost for where each doorway lay.

‘I am so glad that you gave such consideration to how you would announce yourself,’ Namaríel hissed, swimming with ankles similarly fettered, her legs held together like the tail of a fish.

Lurien did not answer her. He had hoped to be able to leave her with the Mantle garrison along with Éodrain and the others, and clear up this small misunderstanding with Laramé alone. But Namaríel had insisted. Suspicious of what Lurien might ask of his mighty isharann aunt were she not in the room, no doubt. And Nael, Mathlann forsake him to shallow waters, had acceded.

The Elgaenite threw open a set of lustrous doors, and a pair of spear namarti ushered Lurien and Namaríel in after him. Four more with whisperbows followed. Another pair of spears closed the doors behind them. A pair of extravagantly tattooed lanmari thralls stood guard over the far door with arms crossed over the sculpted musculature of their chests. Nael swam across to confer with them. Lurien watched the exchange with a curled lip. The white knight betrayed his weakness. Either that or his insecurity in his station. Why else would he care to be so courteous with his slave warriors?

The prince turned back. ‘This is Alova Hall.’ Nael looked up to the conch-shaped ceiling. Glowstones had been set into the nacre, giving a lustre that seeped through the structure of the walls, whites glowing whiter against the darker, oil-slick bands of yellow, grey and brown appearing against it. Shelves grew organically from the walls. Flowering algae overspilled rustic shell vases, bijou fishes picking at the buds until the aelves’ approach startled them into the foliage. ‘Named for my great-grandmother. She was a chorralus from Briomdar, and raised the first tower in Elgaen. It wasn’t actually this one.’ He pointed. ‘It was over there.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Lurien.

‘Your great-grandmother?’ said Namaríel.

‘The first queen of Elgaen, of course,’ said Nael. ‘Before Laramé and Lusan.’

‘Of course.’ Lurien nodded, feigning familiarity with that branch of his adopted lineage. ‘So… I have a cousin now, do I?’

‘Oh yes.’

The lanmari thralls drew open the inner doors, and Nael kicked himself into a climb. His warriors’ spears ensured that Lurien and Namaríel followed. There were, of course, no stairs, no windows. Colours blurred through the spire’s walls in accordance with the lights outside.

‘Laramé took me into her family after my father and sister died in battle, leaving me the last of my house.’ Nael peeled off from the spiralling ascent and swam into a passageway. ‘I had some reputation here in Elgaen, and with your mother fading, Laramé felt it prudent to secure her line.’ With no sign yet of being out of breath, he took the pearl handle of an unguarded door and pushed it open.

‘They do call her Laramé the Wise,’ said Lurien.

‘With just reason,’ said Nael.

‘I always thought so.’

Nael turned back to the open doors. ‘Through here is–’

‘Tides of Gealrachi,’ Lurien sighed, and pushed past the embarrassed warrior. ‘It is the White Haven, modelled after the Great Palaces of Teclis in Léiriú. I know where we are. I have been here before, remember?’ The thrall warriors behind him bristled, but Lurien ignored them. He reasoned that if they were going to kill him, they would probably have done it somewhere other than on the pristine white tiles of Laramé’s antechambers. He swam inside.

The brightness was devastating.

Looking back on his old life in the Jade Palace, viewed from the perspective of an aelf who might now think little of a spell in the dungeons or a trek across open ocean, he was almost embarrassed by the luminous halo in which he had existed. It was nothing compared to this. This was the antithesis of what isharann ascetics sought in the deep ocean, and what purists like Anaer sought to recreate in their palaces. It was the obliteration of the senses through excess rather than denial. The enormous caryatid figures spaced along the walls could have been representations of the asur pantheon – there were enough of them – but they could have been almost anything at all for all that Lurien could make them out. The scripture on the panelled walls above them blazed brilliantly golden, beyond the capacity of aelven eyes to read. A thousand captive souls burned in that chamber, emitting a radiance that neither beauty nor malice could endure.

Nor did he notice the two heavily muscled namarti insensates before they grabbed him by the wrists and shoulders.

That, he decided, was a deliberate effect.

‘You were always talking yourself into trouble, Lurien,’ said the light. Lurien squinted into it, just succeeding in convincing himself of the existence of a throne at the far end of it, with blazing glass above. ‘Your mother despaired, but I told her she worried over nothing. The kind of trouble that can be talked into, I said, is the kind that can be talked out of, and the skill of one is much the same as the other.’ The chamber sighed. ‘And still they call me Laramé Farseer. Not for much longer, I think. Words are the knife that one learns to use with impunity. But Vanglyr took one cut of the tongue too many, did he not? Galrohir and Anaer too, I suspect.’

Lurien shook his head. ‘I never–’

The throne issued an impatient snort. ‘There is some edge yet to these wits, but my ears have not been those of a young aelf for a century and a half. Bring him closer.’

The namarti dragged Lurien forwards.

‘Oh, don’t coddle me. My whim orders sea and tide. Do you think the lash of an unwise nephew’s tongue threatens me at my age? Unhand him. Go on, back with you.’

The command was less a spoken one than a magical imperative, a coalescing of the ethersea into a shove that propelled the two thralls towards the back wall of the chamber. The strength of the edict diminished where it brushed across Lurien, between them, but only because the greatest tidecaster still living in the Green Gulch had willed it so. Laramé could just as easily have bidden the water in the chamber to repel from him, leaving him breathless and gasping in a bubble of air, or to crush him like a caulep grape between her fingers.

Nael lowered himself to one knee. Namaríel hesitated, then quickly did the same. Lurien was not sure any more if it was out of genuine respect or fear. Or both. But unlike Lurien, she was blind enough to the light to actually see what was sitting in front of them.

Lurien started to lower his knee.

‘Not you. Come closer.’

He did.

The brightness reduced as he drew nearer to its source, as though he swam through a tunnel of reflective glass. Queen Laramé was at its end, enthroned in light. She wore a crown of white fire and a silver breastplate that exaggerated her feminine physique. She was older than Lurien remembered her. Her skin glowed like a paper lantern and her eyes were glassy and white. But if age had diminished her physically, it had failed utterly to dim her power. Lurien bowed his head as she pushed herself from her throne and drifted towards him. Her fingertips brushed his shoulders.

‘Nephew,’ she said, then embraced him in the tentative manner of the idoneth, as though she were made of paper and he was covered in spines. Lurien returned it, hesitantly at first, but with a tideswell of relief that soon had him crushing his aunt to his chest.

‘Enough of that.’ Laramé brushed him off.

A grin flickered over Lurien’s face. He glanced down towards his manacled feet. ‘I was starting to fear I was unwelcome.’

Laramé tilted her head towards the thralls still hovering behind Lurien’s back, and the warriors duly melted towards the far corners. ‘Briomdar’s soulscryers have been watching for you. Like allopexes tasting the water for blood. I thought you might come here, as Vanglyr did, and told Nael to greet you in the manner he did.’

‘My apologies for the deception, cousin,’ said Nael, with a bow.

‘Are they still watching?’

‘If you think there is an isharann alive, in Briomdar or anywhere else, who can breach the wards of my sanctuary, you would have been better served in Dwy-Hor. I hear they tolerate mallachi there.’ She sniffed, apparently pondering the strange derangement to which all deepkin were prone, but those of Dwy-Hor more than most. The taint of their incarceration marked every soul liberated from the belly of Slaanesh, lending that soul to a debauchery and madness that only withdrawal and self-denial could hope to delay. It was something the subjects of the Laughing King seemed to have neglected in recent years. ‘Lágethé might have possessed the strength to do it, but even she did not have the nerve to try.’ With her fingertips, Laramé gave him a shove. ‘Insolent boy.’

‘Then you know what happened at the assembral?’

‘Of course I know. Vanglyr is not the only aelf with soulscryers, and word travels faster than a troupe of fools over the ocean floor. Tidecasters from Briomdar have been and gone, and then been again. Soulscryers have sent word to their fanes as far as Túrach and Dwy-Hor.’ She shook her head at him, the same Aunt Laramé who would encourage his childish misdemeanours and then chide him when he was careless or stupid enough to be caught. ‘Imagine telling Galrohir, to his face, and on the eve of your own coronation no less, that his enclave raids too often. Why not just try to pull the tonsils from the allopex’s mouth while your arm is down there? And did you think you could defy your mother so brazenly and so often that the akhelian council would not notice, or were you simply too young and stupid to care?’ She glanced at Nael and sniffed. ‘And they tell me the knights of Elgaen are arrogant.’

Lurien lowered his head. A scolding from Laramé Farseer had always cut deeper than Lágethé’s more corporal attempts at discipline. ‘I see that now.’

‘It is easy to see the lurkinarth from inside its belly, and some good it does you.’ She sighed. ‘As much as having your failings pointed out to you after the fact, I suppose.’ She snapped her fingers at Nael. ‘My son. Rouse yourself. You may meditate on the meaning of nothing in your own chambers. Summon a platter from the kitchens, anything will suffice, and a ewer of caulep with flutes for my nephew and me.’

‘Yes, mother.’ Nael straightened, bowed, then departed.

Lurien drew no small pleasure in seeing the prince dismissed like some common thrall. Laramé sat back in her crystal throne. She lifted her gaze to Namaríel. Her eyes narrowed. Lurien was uncertain what troubled her, only that Laramé Farseer perceived much that even the greatest of isharann could not. The lines of her face drew into a frown.

‘Elgaen will not be a haven for you for long, nephew, but I can keep you in safety for a few tides at least. Tell me, what would you have me do to help you?’

‘I would have your support against Vanglyr Fellglaive.’

The White Queen sighed.

‘I feared as much.’

Lurien frowned at his reflection. The mirror was a flattened teardrop of highly polished nacre, its dark frame inscribed with delicate runes. It was one of a dozen in the shop, but the only one currently showing a face. He had lost weight. His jawline was sharper, the taper of his ears and chin more pronounced. There were blue rings around his eyes, and a hollowness that he did not recall ever seeing in his reflection before.

‘Are you sure these are the colours you desire, lord?’

The namarti tattooist presented the two hollowed-out shells of ink with his own hollow face downturned.

‘It’s what I asked for,’ Lurien said. ‘Get on with it. I have a raid to lead.’ The namarti draped a seagrass shawl over his shoulders and began to scrub the salt and grit of the open ocean from Lurien’s scalp with a placid urchin brush. Lurien watched his long face grimace in the mirror. ‘Lead a raid, she says. Lead a raid, and then she’ll support me.’

‘Put yourself in her position,’ said Namaríel.

The namarti floated by one of the window ovals overlooking the sybaline gardens below. Idoneth travelled from across the Green Gulch to admire the gardens’ austere splendour, and the idoneth were not a people to travel idly. Their baffling statuary reflected the deep cold of an alien mind, the physical abstraction of its slow thoughts. Meditating on their shapes was said to be one of the more potent soporifics in the Mortal Realms. Lurien meant to try it before he left. Éodrain was already down there. What a sightless namarti drew from the experience he could not imagine.

‘Her point of view?’ he said.

‘You have never led a raid,’ she said, turning from the oval. ‘You have never even been on a raid. Neither has Éodrain. She, meanwhile, is effectively on the doorstep of the most feared raidlord in the Gulch. I told you Elgaen was too close, my prince, and that no one, not even beloved Aunt Laramé, was going to help you without asking for something in return.’

‘But she isn’t even asking me for something. She is giving me a hoop.’

‘A test.’

Lurien sneered towards her reflection. ‘One blind eye sees just the same as another. It is a hoop.’

‘Please hold still, lord,’ murmured the tattooist. Lurien felt a prick against the back of his head. He winced.

‘How does one even go about organising a raid, anyway? In Briomdar, Vanglyr or one of the other great akhelian would announce their intention to raid. Then they would take their plans to an assembral of the azydrazor and make offerings to the Sanctuary of Mathlann. After that, warriors would come forward to pledge their swords and thralls and… well, it just seemed to happen.’

‘My prince. My love.’ Namaríel smiled sweetly, a faint deflection in the imperfect mirror. ‘You are not going to be organising any raids.’

‘And who will? You?’

‘No, what I mean is that there will be no raid.’

‘But Laramé–’

‘Aunt Laramé has promised her support in exchange for a task she knows you cannot perform.’

‘I can and I will.’

The reflection of Namaríel shook its head. ‘You are a warrior without reputation, my love. You can declare your intention and target, but no one will join you. The White Queen knows this full well.’ Her voice sounded almost admiring of the isharann’s political cunning.

‘So she was… getting rid of me?’

As graceful as a sea spider repositioning its legs, Namaríel kicked off from her place by the window and swam towards him. Lurien kept his gaze on his own reflection. The tattooist changed needles.

‘Do you think even Vanglyr commanded on his first raid?’ Namaríel said. ‘If you want your aunt’s allegiance, you are first going to have to make a reputation.’

‘You mean…’ Lurien hesitated. ‘Avail myself of another lord’s raid? Like any other akhelian?’

Namaríel patted his shoulder. ‘I hate to be the bringer of this news, my prince, but any other akhelian is what you now are. Éodrain would be fortunate to be thought of even as highly as that.’ She lowered her lips to the back of Lurien’s head and drew in a breath through her nose. ‘You know I have no sense of colour, but I can smell the pigment.’

‘Turquoise and gold. It was how my head was dressed the day Vanglyr took my throne from me. I left the headdress in the dungeons of Briomdar, but when I saw the tattoos that Nael and the other Elgaenites wear, well… the idea came to me.’ Lurien glared into the sallow pits of his reflection’s eyes. ‘I’d thought to wear royal colours into battle until the throne was mine again. I thought that… never mind. It doesn’t matter now, does it? How does an akhelian go about finding himself a–’ he bit his lip to stifle a grimace ‘–lord? Perhaps I need to talk about this with Éodrain.’

‘No need, my prince,’ said Namaríel, patting his stinging crown. ‘I have already approached an acclaimed warrior of Elgaen, one who happens to have an interest in seeing you succeed and an inexplicable regard for you personally. He is already in preparation for a raid and would welcome you and Venom into his ishlaen guard. Éodrain as well, Mathlann protect us all.’

‘Who is this knight? He sounds like a gift from the gods.’

Namaríel smiled.

‘No,’ said Lurien. ‘No, not him.’

‘He leads thirty akhelian on the Esurien Cape, far to the south.’ She fussed over the sit of Lurien’s cerecloth, adjusting the barber’s shawl as he stared, unseeing, at his reflection in the nacre. ‘I hear it is cold there, so wear Morogai’s cloak. And try not to die.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

The White Prince of Elgaen gleamed like a fallen jewel on the snow and ice of the Esurien Cape. A fluted helm with cheek guards in the shape of mollusc shells enclosed his face, leaving only a narrow slit for his sea-green eyes. A white cloak snapped behind him in the gale coming in off the cape to batter at the frozen cliffs. The brightly coloured bond-fish of Elgaen made living torques about his arms and waist, their coexistence with the snow blustering through his long green headpiece made possible by the magic of the ethersea that Tidecaster Filenduil had cast ahead of the phalanx. The black-and-white-stripe pattern of the prince’s fangmora dizzied the eye as it eeled up the beach through the ethersea. Nael’s sword seemed to carve silver from the air as he pointed it forwards to signal the charge.

The akhelian of the morrsarr guard lowered their voltspears and, without so much as a cry, crashed over the fleeing orruks.

The greenskins were hoary-looking brutes, tusked and tattooed, clad in hide and bone and bristling with coarse white fur. They were hunter-gatherers, armed with bone clubs and primitive spears. The phalanx had burst from the sea to find them straggled along the length of the beach, harvesting crabs, scraping lichen out of cracks in the ice and splashing in the shallows after the frostwyrms and gorseals that basked there on the rocks.

The morrsarr guard swept over them like an in-tide through rocks, voltspear discharges crackling and frothing at the head of the wave.

Lurien dug his silver spurs into Venom’s flanks and urged the fangmora to claim his share of the slaughter.

The ishlaen to which he had been attached was the second wave, that which would hit the beach just as the first was dragging its spoils back to the sea. Hacking left and right with their hellsabres, the knights chopped down those brutes too tough or too stubborn to stay down after the passage of the morrsarr. They were not killing strokes. A soul cast into the clutches of the Undying King, or whoever it was who took the life essences of these brutes after death, was a wasted one. And so they crippled, dismembered. Cuts to the arms. Chops to the legs. Strokes across the belly that left orruks floundering in the ethersea, entrails in one hand and stone axes in the other. For Soulrender Keylarr and the namarti who followed with her.

They were difficult to put down, these orruks.

That Elgaen would even consider raiding the territories claimed by the endless hunts of the alfrostuns proved the point that Lurien had been trying to make for years. The very point he had, in hindsight inelegantly, sought to put to Galrohir at the assembral. The beastclaw ogor tribes and their orruk followers were big and hard and almost impossible to stop without killing. Worse, they were not exactly numerous. So even after accepting the cost in lives that such fearsome quarry exacted, the rewards were only ever going to be measly.

Hardly the bounty Lurien had been hoping to present to Laramé.

If this was the best target that Elgaen’s soulscryers could divine, far to the southernmost extremity of the Green Gulch, then victims had become scarce indeed.

Lurien squinted up.

The sun was a submerged treasure, buried in sky. He touched fingers to his numb face. The cold of Briomdar was immeasurably harsher than anything the Esurien Cape would ever suffer, but wind and snow had nevertheless brought his cheeks out in a painful flush, colouring them indigo, and streamed his eyes with tears. The pearly substance of his warhelm was icy to the touch. It was invigorating and strangely wondrous.

Arrows whistled from the frozen dunes, cutting Lurien’s musings short.

Venom reared, the bone-tipped shafts disintegrating in puffs of blue fire and a wash of ozone as they struck her voltaic field, and Lurien flourished his bloodied hellsabre as though he were Tyrion himself. He was clad in breastplate and vambrace of Elgaenite pearl, yellow-brown, decorated with golden banding and engravings of the lost gods. It had been a gift from Aunt Laramé. It was, he had been the first to notice, considerably less fine than Nael’s all-enclosing plate. His helmet was open-faced. The whorled tattoos of Briomdar colours were visible there, while his cloak and trews were the ice blue of Túrach. Venom herself was caparisoned in the silver ringmail of the asglir, thicker of neck and longer of tail than the lesser beasts of the Elgaenite ishlaen.

‘Éodrain,’ he called out, spurring Venom towards the archers. ‘With me!’

He counted about two dozen orruk archers, crazed along the crest of the dune, but more were charging out of their round ice-block beach huts all the time. With monstrous strength, they hauled back on bowstrings made of animal sinew, launching their crude missiles with the power of ballistae. Their aim was atrocious. Lurien might have believed they were actively targeting the sea. But enough of the thick shafts sporadically blistered Venom’s voltaic field to make his heart flounce in his chest.

The ishlaen wheeled and, to the sound of swords being slapped against the leathery heads of fangmoras and dire threats being issued, raced after Prince Lurien.

He bared his teeth as wind and ice whipped his face. The beach disappeared beneath his mount. Arrows burned up before he saw them. His heart hammered with the speed and the danger and the simple immediacy of being alive. He was beginning to understand how raiding could become so embedded in the soul, why the likes of Galrohir and Vanglyr spent almost as much time striking at land as they did in their palaces. There was something energising about courting death. His actions had consequences. His existence had meaning.

He narrowed his eyes at the rapidly nearing orruks and picked out the first to die.

‘Ha!’

He swept down with his hellsabre, the stroke perfectly timed to coincide with the archer’s neck at the moment Venom brought them together. The fangmora’s momentum multiplied Lurien’s strength, and he clove the orruk’s trunklike neck in a single blow. Its body crumpled as its head sailed clear. Venom tore a chunk out of another, arm separating from torso and disappearing down the fangmora’s throat, then tossed the ruined orruk aside. Lurien could see the savage’s heart where it still beat inside the pulped mess of shoulder flesh. His eyes widened as it stood back up and roared a challenge. Lurien was spared the need to kill it a second time when an ishlaen akhelian in a bronze-coloured cloak and backswept helm ran it through, then it was bludgeoned to one side on the neck of her fangmora.

A large orruk with a helmet and vambraces of yellowed bone bellowed and hurled itself at Lurien.

Frothing at the mouth, the greenskin beat at the idoneth with its bow stave. Like a bored dilettante picking sweetmeats from a tray, Lurien parried the orruk’s attacks. He grinned, enjoying himself. Since his thwarted coronation he had come to realise that he was not quite the swordmaster that his retainers had allowed him to believe he was. There were probably few amongst Nael’s phalanx that he could best in an honest trial of swords, but amongst the savage orruk archers he was speed and grace personified, the exemplar of Eldrázor’s art. Keeping the orruk unbalanced with a series of chopping strokes, he allowed Venom to bowl the brute over with a bone-shattering blow from her armoured tail.

Still grinning, he brushed the patina of sea-ice crystals from his brow and looked for Éodrain.

His retainer had been tight to his flank during the ishlaen’s initial charge from the sea, but neither he nor Lurien had been skilled enough riders to keep to formation once the killing had begun. It took Lurien a moment to find him. Éodrain was beset by two gigantic orruks. Their fur-clad bodies were swollen with muscle and a febrile dynamism, their attacks lent fury by the power of their destroyer god. The akhelian kicked at one. The barbed spurs of his ishlaen riding boots tore the flesh from the orruk’s chin, but it did not seem to feel the blow at all. It buried its axe in his fangmora’s neck. The wound was not a deep one, but the bound-beast screamed as the stored charge of its entire body coursed down the bone handle of the orruk’s axe and into the savage’s hand. The greenskin jerked and gibbered. Smoke rose from its shoulders, its skeleton strobing against the charring outline of flesh. The orruk was briefly haloed in the sapphire glare of a voltaic field, then there was a snap and the orruk finally let go of its axe.

It crashed to the ground. As dead as an orruk could be.

The fangmora issued a keening whine, its voltaic field exhausted. Without the steady hum of its protection, Éodrain looked suddenly vulnerable as the second orruk whacked its bow stave across his backplate. The blow unseated the akhelian and threw him to the ground. The terrible novelty of falling and of landing looked almost as shocking to the akhelian as the blow itself, and it was only as his face ploughed into the ice that Éodrain cried out in pain.

‘Éodrain!’

Spurring Venom hard, Lurien rode to his retainer’s side.

The orruk was wrestling with the now riderless fangmora, fingers clamped over its snapping jaws. Lurien plunged his hellsabre down through the orruk’s temple and deep into its simple brain. An inch of gold exploded wetly from its open mouth. Lurien grunted as he tried to pull the blade free. Behind him, a savage greenskin bellowed a challenge. He turned to look over his shoulder. An orruk with a missing arm, a hellsabre wound in its chest where one ventricle of a dark green heart visibly throbbed, ran up the sloped beach with an axe. Venom hissed, as annoyed by the orruk’s persistence as Lurien was. He twisted, tugging furiously at his blade, lodged in the orruk’s skull. It was stuck. He looked around for his warriors, but the rest of the ishlaen had flooded over the archers and continued to surge on in the wake of the morrsarr.

Éodrain groaned and started to push himself up off the ice.

With a curse, Lurien pitched himself from Venom’s saddle. He hit the hard ground and rolled, snatched up Éodrain’s sword and continued the roll onto his back just in time to catch the orruk’s blow. The orruk’s axe smashed into the hellsabre hard enough to splinter the crudely knapped bone and drive the dulled back edge of the akhelian sword to Lurien’s cheek. The greenskin kicked him in the chest, skidding him a short way up the ice, and dragged its ruined weapon back for a killing blow. Its muscular torso swelled like a killing sea. Blood roared in Lurien’s head and he yelled, overcome by the emotion of living. A whistling filled his ears, a noise he presumed to be associated with the life fleeing an idoneth’s body until he saw the arrow sprouting from the back of the orruk’s head. It toppled like a felled tree, Lurien hurriedly parting his legs to avoid his feet being crushed in its fall.

Namaríel lowered her whisperbow. Elgaen’s reavers swept past her, loosing shafts at targets further up the beach as they ran. ‘I thought it was the duty of a retainer to protect his lord,’ she said. ‘Not the other way around.’

‘Éodrain has his uses,’ said Lurien.

‘Making you look good with a sword, for one.’

Lurien winced as he bent to offer Éodrain his hand. His breastplate had taken the brunt of the orruk’s kick, but he was feeling the unpleasant oddity of a bruise spreading across his chest. Éodrain regarded his hand for a moment, but then appeared to realise that they were not in Elgaen any more and took it, returning the prince’s grip with a squeeze and allowing himself to be pulled up. The akhelian nodded his gratitude, then climbed back into his fangmora’s saddle. The injured bound-beast sagged under his weight.

Lurien turned back to the namarti.

‘You are supposed to be further back,’ he said.

‘We are further back,’ said Namaríel. ‘You have fallen behind.’

Lurien’s joy at having fought and lived warred with annoyance at his bride-to-be. As soon as he was returned to Elgaen he would insist on a private meeting with Laramé. And he would remain there until the isharann found a way to rid him of his promise.

‘I am new at this,’ he said.

‘Even Vanglyr would not have done it perfectly first time,’ said Éodrain.

‘You need to be better,’ said Namaríel. ‘Or at least to look better.’ She turned to Éodrain and curtseyed. ‘So thank you, Lord Éodrain.’

The akhelian glowered.

A cohort of lanmari-armed thralls hurried towards them before Lurien could intervene, pinning still-struggling orruks to the ice with swift thrusts of their blades. Soulrender Keylarr, clad in starfish-encrusted armour with shagreen boots and gauntlets, drove her talúnhook into the hard ground and surveyed the slaughter through her faceless helm. The soulrender’s talúnhook was runewood, a dark and twisted oak from the deepest crevasses of Briomdar, very rare, crowned by an Elgaen pearl that glowed with an inner light. The natural patterning of the orb warped and writhed with its soul-pulse, settling over the dying like the boiling gaze of the Prince of Excess. She lowered the talún pearl to an orruk’s brow. Its struggles ceased as the spirit was drawn from it. Its body breathed on, regardless. The pearl shone a little brighter.

When Keylarr reached Namaríel and the other reavers, she cursorily checked them for injuries and satisfied herself that they were few and minor. With a jerk of her head, she dismissed them. Lurien was glad to see that Keylarr was frugal. Through the medium of the namastir rune that the namarti all bore, the soulrender’s power could be used to restore an injured warrior, even to return one from the cusp of death. But, of course, doing so required expenditure of the very resource they came ashore to claim.

‘How many souls is that claimed for Elgaen?’ Lurien asked, catching Venom’s reins again and drawing her to him.

‘A score,’ Keylarr rasped, her voice feminine and cold, echoing from the confines of her sealed helm. ‘Thrice that again if you tally their livestock and herdbeasts. Useful for the crafting of soul objects if not the giving of namarti life.’

‘Hardly worth the effort,’ said Lurien.

Keylarr’s own opinion remained inscrutable.

‘What if we were to take the fort itself?’ Shielding his eyes against the flurrying snow, Lurien looked up.

The beach was sloped and rugged, carved by ice and wave, and presumably rocky beneath the encrusting ice. Jutting cliffs broke the headland, squalled by squig colonies and vicious seabirds. The ground at the foot of the cliffs was blistered with ice-block huts, pens made of bone in which semi-domesticated warboars and mournfangs rutted and stamped and snorted steam. A great swathe of the backshore was strewn with what litter an orruk could neither eat nor find warlike use for.

Hacked out of the cliff ice, blasted by spray where carved channels forced the wave uprush far from the break zone, stood the fort of the alfrostun ogors. Its design was crude, temporary by nature, a shape that a child would draw if told to produce a picture of a castle, but scale alone made it a threatening prospect. An aura of blistering cold shrouded the battlements, watering Lurien’s eyes even from afar. Filenduil’s ethersea did not extend that far. It lapped instead at the slippery islets of frozen rock that surrounded it, separated from one another by brine pools and water channels, spanned by crude bridges and colonised by the largest of the orruk ice huts.

It was those huts that Nael and his morrsarr guard were now ransacking.

As Lurien watched, they began to break off, sliding back to the sea like the downwash of a broken wave. The ishlaen were still pushing on without him, flanked and supported by reavers and thralls, but would break themselves as soon as they met the withdrawing morrsarr. A single allopex swam belligerently to the phalanx’s far right, away from the alfrostun fort, herding orruks towards Keylarr and her talúnhook with shots from its akhelian rider’s harpoon. Lurien might have wished for a leviadon, but then he might have wished for many things and been disappointed. Elgaen was a small enclave, largely bypassed by the great beasts of the ocean. Nor was it exactly renowned for the skill of its embailors, as was Túrach.

‘Tidecaster Filenduil would need to extend the ethersea for your mounts to make it that far,’ said Keylarr, mirroring his thoughts. ‘I doubt the old aelf has the power, and it is power that we would need from him later if we were to attempt to wrest the souls from the ogors.’

Lurien nodded, disgruntled but accepting the soulrender’s argument.

‘Another day, perhaps,’ said Éodrain.

‘I have a tyrant to slay and a crown to reclaim,’ said Lurien. And, if possible, a promise to escape from. ‘I do not have the luxury of time. Where is Filenduil?’ he asked the soulrender.

‘Where the tides take him,’ she said. ‘And vice versa.’

‘My lady,’ one of Keylarr’s lanmari thralls called, urgently but softly, leaving his greatsword to rest tip down in the ice to point towards the cliffs. ‘Prince Nael.’

Prior to their departure with Nael’s phalanx, Lurien had asked Namaríel why she had not furnished him with a voltspear back in Briomdar and ensured him a place in the morrsarr guard. The morrsarr of Elgaen were hardly as glamorous a cohort as Túrach’s elite asglir, or even the Slitherguard of Briomdar, but Lurien was not so innocent to war that he did not know where a battle’s glory would be taken. It was the morrsarr who were first onto the beach, who led the charge, voltspears lowered, and broke the foe for the soulrenders and reavers who followed. Namaríel had quietly explained that glory was there for the taking, provided Lurien lived to pick it up from such warriors when they fell.

Following the thrall’s pointed finger, he began to understand her meaning.

Mobs of boar-mounted savage orruks were pounding from the headland corrals, flowing like ice-melt streams to converge upon the morrsarr guard. Feral packs of frost sabres, leonine beasts with white pelts and swordlike fangs, loped alongside them, eager for their share of the kill.

With an explosion of bone, a land behemoth of a kind that Lurien had never seen and could not have imagined strode through one of the orruks’ primitive stockades. A huge ogor wrapped in a shawl of white fur sat in a palanquin-like saddle on its humped shoulders, manning what looked like a sling catapult loaded with blocks of ice. The size of the beast almost stilled Lurien’s heart, and the ethersea itself seemed to freeze solid at the approach of its wintry aura. Lurien whispered fervent prayers of thanks to whichever gods still strained their ears for the desperate pleadings of the idoneth. The huge beast smashed at the frozen ethersea with tusks like whalebones, but the solidifying air was actually slowing the monster down – enough that it was still a hundred yards up the beach when the orruks’ countercharge hit.

It was carnage.

Warboars gored giant eels on their tusks, squealing in porcine delight as they trampled the invader beasts under their trotters. Savage orruks wielding an axe in each fist and maniacal grins on their faces hacked voltspears to pieces and set about continuing their butchery on armour and flesh. Leaping frost sabres tore akhelian knights from saddles, pinning the aelves to the ice under their forepaws and ripping them open with vicious teeth. Savage orruks and knights of the morrsarr swirled and mingled, the lethal whirlpool that forms at the convergence where two great oceans meet. Nael’s sword flashed, pearl white.

Lurien was suddenly quite content with a place amongst the ishlaen.

What had been an orderly backrush was dashed on jagged, greenskinned rocks, runnelling towards separate pools that would never reach the sea. The ishlaen’s uprush broke in its wake, while namarti reavers loosed arrows to cover the disorderly retreat.

‘We should fall back,’ said Namaríel.

‘So soon?’ said Lurien.

‘It is our way. In and out, like the tide.’

‘What of Nael?’

‘Laramé will grieve. And then she will see that she needs a new heir.’

Lurien froze for a moment as his mind worked through the implications of Namaríel’s apparent suggestion. Not all of them were bad. He shook his head. ‘I will not be the aelf that goes back to tell Queen Laramé her son has fallen. If I am to make a big enough reputation in the small amount of time that I have, I need to do something that these warriors will return home and talk about.’ Sliding his foot into the stirrup, he swung himself onto Venom’s back, then turned her towards the embattled morrsarr. He raised his sword with a flourish. ‘As Teclis is harsh and Tyrion wrathful, for Lágethé and Laramé and for the Jade Throne of Briomdar – deepkin, to me!’ The sword came down to point up the beach as he kicked his spurs into Venom’s flanks. ‘Charge!’

He could hear Namaríel yelling after him, but he was already too far away, moving too swiftly to heed her even if he had wanted to. For that he was grateful. The wind whistled past his ears. Snow battered his face. He leant over the saddle horn to hug Venom’s neck, making himself a smaller target for orruk arrows, his cloak whipping out behind him. He could not tell if the namarti were following. If they were, they were well behind, but he dared not look back. Fangmoras were one of the fleetest and most agile beasts in the ocean, and there was no ground obstacle they need fear, swimming through ethersea six feet above any terrestrial hazard. But at the insane speed that Venom was moving, a collision with a floating body part or piece of debris could prove deadly.

He caught a glimpse of an ishlaen’s shocked face as he flashed past the milling warriors. There was a moment of sound. Agitated fangmoras. Harness jingling. Lurien was aware of the doctrines of war that Namaríel had referred to. How she had become so familiar with them he did not know, but they had been drummed into him at the azydrazor. A wave broke and then it withdrew – it never broke on the same land twice.

As far as he was concerned, Vanglyr could shout his lessons from Tor Mathlann until he choked on them.

‘Turn and charge,’ Lurien yelled into the teeth of the wind.

He was not sure if any of the ishlaen heard him. He barely heard himself. But they could not have failed to misconstrue his intention.

He struggled to raise his sword against the howling gale.

The cold was sharpening, cutting into bone. He had never before realised that cold could be a sensation in its own right, more than just the power to numb a body to all other sensations.

A wall of freezing brine erupted from the outermost water channel with the mountain-breaking power of a crashing wave. Venom shot through it. He was in amongst the ice huts now. Lurien’s chest felt tight. It was becoming difficult to breathe. He could sense Venom wheezing. Her gills trembled, sucking on gelid water. The threat of suffocation would have panicked a lesser beast, but Venom had been taken as a mount for the asglir and the Túrach embailors had been thorough in destroying the animal’s free will. Lurien unfroze that portion of ethersea that filled his mouth with a long, bitter cry, and struck with his sword.

A boar orruk died.

Like a butcher driven fully to madness by mallachi, the temptations of bloody excess, Lurien hacked left and right, ignoring the bright sprays of blood as Venom’s momentum ploughed her through the squealing boars. The fangmora trembled for air as she bit down on the hindquarters of a frost sabre. A twist of the neck dragged the hunting cat onto its side. Lurien bent low in the saddle, leant almost parallel to the ground, and stabbed the struggling beast through the neck as Venom raced over it. His chest burned with cold. And before any mortal could have adjusted to the speed of change, he was there in the heart of the melee, the eye of a vortex that funnelled down to death and darkness and worse – damnation.

Lurien shot glances over both shoulders as he brought Venom under control. With the shock fading, many greenskins now littering the ground, food for riderless warboars, the akhelian rallied.

The beautifully armoured knights of Elgaen stabbed at the orruk berserkers with voltspears, or traded tooth and claw with pearl-edged daggers when the savages came too close. Frost rimed their wargear and glazed the sea-green blush of their cheeks. Of the fifteen warriors that had ridden through the Mantle Tidegate in Nael’s morrsarr guard, only seven remained. A handful of those were trying to wheel their mounts around and break for the sea, but the beasts were sluggish, mouths working for breath, and refused to respond to the akhelian’s lash.

A ferocious growl drew Lurien’s attention as a frost sabre sank back onto its haunches and launched itself at Venom, forepaws upraised to drag the fangmora’s neck to the ice. Lurien turned his sword, already too late, screaming as a morrsarr’s voltspear caught the frost sabre in the belly. A voltaic blast propelled it sideways, the beast rolling and skidding on the ice where it fell.

The White Prince of Elgaen cast down the spent voltspear and drew his akhelian longsword from the whaleskin scabbard strapped to his fangmora’s neck.

‘Do I owe you or do you owe me?’ he panted.

‘Even, I think,’ Lurien breathed in return.

He turned to hack down a boar orruk, only for the ferocity of its charge to drive Venom back until she was flank to flank with Nael’s lighter mount. Their harnesses jangled together, barbs interlocking. Nael rammed his sword through a charging orruk’s face, the pearly blade erupting from the back of its skull. Lurien gasped for breath.

‘Did you wonder why I agreed to let you join my phalanx?’ said Nael.

Lurien shook his head. ‘Beggars cannot be choosers.’

‘I was hoping you would die, solve Laramé’s problem for her.’

‘I think Namaríel was hoping for the same from you.’

Nael grinned fiercely. It may have been the unearthly cold that forced Lurien’s heart to pump warm blood into his veins, but something about his cousin’s expression thrilled him to the marrow.

‘Well,’ said the Elgaenite, ‘we are family.’

Lurien’s lips pricked. He had always found the charade of ‘house’ and ‘family’ to be ridiculous, a surprisingly long-lived jest that idoneth of good sense could enjoy at the expense of those who took it so seriously. When Nael said it, he could almost believe in it.

The arrival of the ishlaen guard spared Lurien the embarrassment of words.

The knights’ charge smashed through the already wavering orruks and broke them. The triumphant ishlaen drove the greenskins and their beasts back, the way a wave would pick up a log and push it higher up the shore. Lurien saluted Éodrain with his sword as his fellow akhelian exhorted the ishlaen to ride the orruks down and harvest their souls, only to see their charge falter.

Ice splintered under trunklike feet, a single swipe of monstrous tusks dismounting four ishlaen and hurling them from their fangmoras.

The land leviathan had waded at last into the fray.

To Lurien’s horror the ishlaen it had discarded neither floated in ethersea nor fell to the ground. Rather, they froze in place, screams silenced, as the arcane waters around them hardened. The warbeast’s ogor rider laughed until his belly shook. Namarti reavers riddled the beast with arrows, but its thick hair was proof against such irritants. Namaríel put two arrows in quick succession through the ogor’s cheek and jowl, but her missiles were as perilous to the huge warrior as a pin was to a cushion.

At Keylarr’s command, the reavers fell back and the soulrender stepped forwards. Singling out orruks with her talúnhook pearl, she ripped the souls from their bodies even as they attempted to rally against the stunned ishlaen and return to the fray. But even Lurien could see that it would take more powerful magic than hers to stop the ogor and his winter beast from crushing the knights underfoot.

‘Back to the water,’ Nael choked, turning his steed. ‘Back to the Sanctuary of Mathlann.’

‘No,’ said Lurien. ‘We can take it. All of them. Take their souls for Elgaen.’

As he spoke a resurgent tide buffeted him. His cloak riffled beneath his arms and rushed forwards. Drawing it from his face, Lurien turned to see a great wave in the ethersea, sparkling and emerald green, bearing Tidecaster Filenduil on its crest. With one hand out, palm forward, and his eyes closed, the old isharann swung his staff. That tiny ripple became a tidal wave, a hammer of water that smashed the frozen ethersea around the warbeast’s body. Suddenly, Lurien could breathe again.

Namaríel put another arrow in the ogor’s chest.

It chuckled, flicking it out with a giant finger.

‘Back!’ Nael roared.

‘We can take them all,’ said Lurien.

‘We don’t have the strength.’

Lurien reached out to grasp Nael’s vambrace just as he began to pull away, a brazen act of familiarity that took the Elgaenite prince aback.

‘Then let us hit another target. A richer target. We can return to Laramé as heroes.’

‘There is no such place. The days when the idoneth could pillage the coasts at whim passed with Sigmar’s warstorm and the Necroquake.’

‘I know of one place still left,’ said Lurien, suddenly glad to have been condemned to so many idle tides in his mother’s chambers, little better to do than memorise every detail of her great map of the Gulch. He released his cousin’s arm and bid Venom into the downrush. ‘If you trust me, cousin.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was one place. A fortress. Impregnable. A byword for futility.

Coryza.

The land was a melange of fecund marsh and rotting wood, an endless landscape of lumpen hills where blind and toothless folk reared leeches and maggots and gave praise for their good fortune to the God of all Flies. The vast expanse of territories extended from the River Drell and the lands contested by the stormclaimed to the north, to the groves of the Gulchwood sylvaneth in the south. Even in Briomdar’s halcyon era, the glory days of the Ionrach heroes, no akhelian had dared set foot on its shores. Karivinya the Great, the Gulch Empress of Coryza, had once claimed dominion over the entire coast. Only such scions of revilement as Torglug, Morbidex, Cankerwall or the Brothers Glot could claim higher favour, and the land itself had blessed her rule with degradation. Even after two centuries of decline, the capital of her former demesne was a thing of magnificent virulence.

The emerald-green oceans of Ghyran were brown and sludgy by the time they met Coryza’s shores, no longer verdant water but an excremental filth that tarred the object of their affections black. Decrepit-looking seabirds pecked at the rocks and cawed, flightless and blind, their feathers diseased, bills and feet blighted with mutation and abscesses. Flies boiled across the sky, horizon to horizon, the way the leaden seas of Chamon might look from above. They flexed, bulged, rippled with peristaltic motions, as though this part of Ghyran had been swallowed by the Grandfather himself and this was the gorge that awaited the entirety of the realmsphere in time.

Lurien felt a tingle of excitement as he emerged from the water, closing his eyes to listen to the oily crunch of virgin gravel under his boot. Vanglyr had never dared strike against the Gulch Empress. He would be the first.

Clambering up onto the bluffs for a better view, he wrinkled his nose against the foetid breeze.

The Empress’ squalid burgh festered at the sheltered end of the bay. The very buildings wriggled with maggots and worms, squatting behind thick walls. Bell towers spaced unevenly throughout the city spilled out a dissonance of despair, while the chittering of vermin, the coughs and moans of the diseased, the wails of the mad and the squelch of filth all combined as a faithless mockery of how a living city should sound. A scabrous tangle of pontoons, crafted from the bloated corpses of plague victims, filled the harbour. Bilgeships groaned in their berths and playfully slapped each other with filth. The obese warships were icons of faith and madness, temples to Nurgle erected by shipwright-prophets whose sanity had been eviscerated by disease. Diminished she may have been, but the whisper amongst the raiding akhelian was that Karivinya’s star was again in the ascendant, answering now to the summons of Archaon himself. It was at his order, it was rumoured, that the Gulch Empress cast those ships in search of the idoneth, for their souls had been claimed in ages past by the Dark Prince. Another reason for the idoneth to dread the name Coryza.

‘You are unusually quiet, Namaríel.’

The néthir scrambled easily up the tarred rocks of the bluff to stand beside him. The wind pawed at her clothing, and her face had already become sheened by a greasy substance that Lurien did not want to be identified. Finding a spot to sit, she quickly strung her bow stave as she gazed sightlessly over the bay.

‘Coryza,’ she said simply.

‘I wonder why they call Karivinya “the Great”,’ said Éodrain. The Briomdain akhelian had remained at the foot of the bluffs, where the waves slapped against the shore and oozed into the gaps between the rocks. He was scrubbing the back of his gauntlets, trying to cleanse them in the pure water of Filenduil’s ethersea. ‘Since Sigmar returned and the Everqueen was roused, her holdings have shrunk a hundredfold in as many years.’

It sounded as though Éodrain were trying to reassure himself.

It did not seem to be working.

‘It gladdens me to see you taking our quest seriously, my love,’ said Namaríel. ‘I can only admire the scale of your ambition. But I will not be queen to a corpse in the Gulch Empress’ jetty.’

The survivors of Nael’s phalanx mustered on the beach behind him as they climbed out of the water. A handful of ishlaen guard, even fewer of the morrsarr. Tidecaster Filenduil, Soulrender Keylarr. The allopex knight, sneering over his diminished kin with the glittering arrogance of an Elgaenite akhelian. In addition to the true-souled warriors, the namarti battalion numbered about a hundred, including the familiar faces of Urael and Morogai. Lurien nodded to them, but it appeared as though the pair had been instructed to ignore him. He had wondered why they had not been properly assigned to the battalion for the raid on the Esurien Cape. Morogai in particular was the most frighteningly efficient killer he had ever come across. Namaríel had answered that fighting in a battle demanded a very different set of skills to murdering akhelian in the streets.

The warriors milled together uncertainly in the small bubble of ethersea. This was not the overwhelming hit-and-run onslaught that the idoneth codes of war vouchsafed and that the Elgaenite knights were accustomed to. Gathering themselves up on a beach several miles from their target clearly sat uncomfortably with them. If the notion of striking at the most powerful single force in the Gulch with half of an already small phalanx appealed to them any more, no one was saying so.

‘Second thoughts, cousin?’ said Nael.

The White Prince had been amongst the last group to emerge from the sea, as befit his rank, leaving his fangmora in the care of his namarti to climb the bluffs further along the bay. He stood there framed by the cesspool city of Nurgle, arms crossed, his fine armour of pearl and gold smeared with filth, his bronze cloak fluttering in the foetid breeze.

‘Just savouring the moment,’ said Lurien.

Nael nodded. ‘Forever more I will be remembered as the first of our kind to lead a raid into Coryza.’ Lurien frowned. He had been under the impression that he was the first into Coryza. The plan had been his, after all. He had naturally assumed that the acclaim would be as well.

Nael let out his held breath and grinned, his face flushed a pallid green.

‘Let us do this mad thing.’

Lurien smothered the woman’s voice with his hand as his boot knife went into her back. Her chest hitched, but a lifetime of sickness had left her frail and the small sigh she let out sounded almost like gratitude. Lurien eased her to the ground as Keylarr approached. The ethersea that her enchanted accoutrements generated about her sheathed the soulrender in a shimmering green bubble, warring constantly with the vile taint of Coryza. It was enough to provide clean water for her to breathe, but not for her to swim. Now she was forced to walk, her every movement spoke of exhaustion as she pressed the lurelight of her talúnhook to the dying woman’s brow and drained her. Shrouding the glowing orb with a dark cloth provided from Morogai’s growing collection of seamstressing materials, Keylarr nodded to him that it was done. Lurien threw a gesture into the noxious haze clogging the alley behind him, and Nael, Éodrain and Filenduil hurried up to join him. Namaríel was last, leaving another breathing corpse on the ground behind her.

Lurien noted the unspoken deference to his leadership. Nael fell in to take second place behind him. Even Namaríel forfeited the opportunity to comment on how competently he had handled the killing of an unarmed leper. It had been the charge against the alfrostun, he decided. They had all started to treat him differently after the retreat from the Esurien Cape.

He could get used to it.

Taking extraordinary care to avoid touching the walls, Lurien moved to the end of the lane. The ethersea protected them, but even the ocean’s primordial magic was not total proof against the corruptions of Nurgle. It was said of the Chaos gods that they preceded even the precursor stuff of the realms themselves, and true, the six idoneth were caked in as pestilential a set of disguises as any that could have been prepared ahead of time.

‘I can feel the dirt moving under my feet,’ said Éodrain.

‘It’s not dirt,’ said Filenduil.

Éodrain looked down and swore quietly.

‘You could have stayed on the beach with Morogai and Urael,’ said Namaríel.

‘I would not have it,’ said Éodrain, dragging his gaze from the scuttling carpet of dung beetles and roaches.

‘Spoken like a true akhelian,’ said Nael.

Éodrain mimed the Elgaenite’s words to his back.

Lurien suppressed a grin. At the end of the row of dung-heap hovels, he peered out.

More downtrodden townsfolk shuffled about an enclosure that resembled something between a low market and a public latrine, busying themselves with degrading and, as far as Lurien could discern, pointless tasks – carting filth, huddling into small misbegotten groups to moan and sway, smearing the walls of the buildings with fresh ordure. Flies crawled over them, up noses, out of mouths. The corners of their eyes glistened with egg clutches. Their bodies were covered in sores, visible where the rags they wore rotted off their backs.

‘Why do they continue?’ Éodrain whispered. ‘Why not just die?’

‘They have lost the hope of something better,’ said Namaríel. ‘Even in death.’ The namarti regarded the abjects strangely. Not in sympathy. But perhaps with empathy.

‘Then they deserve their lot,’ said Éodrain.

‘Perhaps a year or two of slavery would alleviate your contempt.’

Éodrain sneered, but wisely said nothing.

Lurien frowned over the motley of wretches in the square.

He had never given much thought to the morality of what the idoneth did in order to survive as a species. It was possible to lament the measures demanded of them by their curse and still conduct the pillage of mortal souls with no more remorse than a human would feel over eating meat or an orruk about making war. Many did. His dispute with Galrohir had been over how much and how often rather than whether the extension of their own children’s lives at the expense of others’ was just. The thought had simply never occurred. It did not exactly occur now. But for the first time, faced with the broken existence of these hollow creatures, Lurien wondered if the grim necessity of the idoneth’s actions could ever be considered merciful, an endeavour to which even Teclis might wish his forsaken children well.

High notions of mercy, however, fled far from reach as the aelves moved into the square.

Lurien pushed his knife in between another woman’s shoulder blades, a victim and a mode of execution that he was finding infinitely preferable to the dispatch of orruk warriors from the front. With a fleetness that even an experienced human warrior in the prime of health would have struggled to match, he dropped his victim and took another. With equally swift lethality, Nael and Éodrain fanned out to either side, silently killing as they went. Those men and women out of immediate reach felt the effects of Filenduil’s glamours. Mouths drooped. Eyes widened. But whatever melancholy or despair the tidecaster was able to project from his own soul the wretched vassals of Nurgle had already suffered a hundredfold. More than a few shrugged off the aelf’s magic to stumble away. Their shuffling was slow, even by human standards, and certainly not enough for them to be counted amongst the handful of the Mortal Realms’ creatures who could outrun Namaríel’s whisperbow.

Keylarr did not even wait for the first body to fall before entering the square.

The soulrender selected her victims as a tru’heas would triage her patients. Those nearest to death were the first to receive the mercy of her talúnhook, and only one perished before she reached the man’s side to claim his soul. It was a measure of the number that her lurelight had already claimed that losing one to the Garden of Nurgle did not even warrant a frown. She was still tearing the light from the eyes of those few that Filenduil’s glamours had managed to incapacitate when another dozen mortals entered the square. They looked at the aelves in shock, for they came not with weapons but with pushcarts, presumably to drag away the dead to some spiritual site of decomposition.

The deepkin claimed them as well.

Éodrain looked almost giddy with their glut.

Lurien wafted his knife through the air until the steady renewal of the ethersea that sheathed him cleansed the blade.

‘What is our tally, soulrender?’

‘Three hundred,’ she said. ‘Including those souls taken from the Cape.’

‘Such riches!’ said Nael.

‘You will be feted over all,’ said Keylarr.

Nael grinned and bowed his head to her.

Lurien regarded the pair sourly.

‘There is no need to be glum, cousin,’ said Nael. ‘Whatever conditions Laramé has given for her support, know that I care not. You will have my support against the Fellglaive. We are family. We will fight for your throne together, as Lágethé and Laramé once did.’

Lurien’s eyebrow climbed. He was not sure if Nael truly understood what he was offering. And yet, when the prince offered his sword, victory somehow seemed possible.

‘Someone is coming,’ Namaríel hissed.

‘Good,’ said Éodrain, sounding almost drunk on success. ‘More souls to claim!’

‘Quiet,’ said Filenduil. Some resonance in his voice made even Éodrain shut his mouth and pay heed. The pupils of the tidecaster’s eyes were like oceans, his mind swimming through the adjoining streets. ‘It is no dung worshipper or leper the namarti senses this time. We should hide.’

Lurien nodded, though everyone was already obeying the tidecaster, drawing themselves under sagging eaves or back into the mouth of the alley they had come from. Filenduil muttered something under his breath, and Lurien felt the deadening chill of an obfuscation hex trickle through his body. The idoneth had been hiding from gods and mortals alike since their creation. They were good at it. Lurien could no longer see another aelf in the square himself by the time he heard what Namaríel already had. Footsteps. Not the squelch of bared feet in excrement, but the armoured trudge of warriors. Though he knew that Filenduil’s magic made caution unnecessary, he slunk further back towards the edges of the square all the same.

A company of putrid knights crossed into the space.

Various ancestral colours still clung to their armour, but the ochre-and-dun heraldries of lichen and mould mottled their wargear now. The metal was buckled where bloat and corrosion had distended the plates, writhing maggots and loops of entrail extruding through the gaps. Their spines were twisted, hips out-turned, breath gurgling from ruined, half-warped visors, and yet even the largest race of humans would have called them giants. Lurien had fought orruks and revelled in the grace and power that his aelven heritage held over them. And yet whatever fell power invested these unholy champions, it whispered to its lurking counterpart in Lurien that for all their plodding mien, he would enjoy no such advantage here.

Something touched his shoulder and he almost screamed. But it was only Namaríel, half seen behind obscuring magic.

He wanted to ask her what she was thinking, moving about, but glamour or no glamour, he dared not speak.

The knights ignored the dead. Corpses, presumably, were commonplace in Coryza, and the warriors traipsed past Lurien’s hiding place, heading in the direction of the harbour. Somewhere beyond the miasma in that direction, warning bells were tolling.

Lurien pressed a palm to his breastplate, marvelling at the insane racing of his heart – panic, excitement and dread, all working it at once. A grin stretched his face to loathsome dimensions as he watched the knights of Nurgle depart. The reaping of mortal souls had been the aspect of the plan he had sold to Prince Nael, but it was not the only one. Nor even the most important. With any luck, the maggotkin would not suspect that their bilgefleet was sinking due to an allopex chewing their hulls from below. Not until it was too late.

Lurien could not wait to hear of Vanglyr’s reaction when the great raidlord learned that the true king of Briomdar had not only had the boldness to strike at Coryza but had drowned the Gulch Empress’ dreaded fleet in the process.

Keylarr emerged from their obfuscation first, seawater breaking over her armour as she stepped from the far side of the square. Lurien looked up as his party reappeared one by one. He frowned.

‘Where is Prince Nael?’

The five idoneth looked around them, but the square was empty now save for bodies, still but for the scuttling of beetles and flies and the ragged breathing of the dung walls themselves. There was no sign anywhere of the White Prince.

‘Could he have gone somewhere?’ said Éodrain.

‘Alone?’ said Lurien.

‘Knowing we could not follow?’ Filenduil’s lips pursed as he fixed his bushy-eyed gaze on Éodrain. ‘The last I saw, he was standing by you.’

‘I did not see him,’ said Éodrain. ‘I could not see any of you.’ He pointed a trembling finger at the tidecaster. ‘Do not throw accusations at me, tidecaster. More likely it was your spell that swallowed him.’

Filenduil sighed. ‘That is not how the power of Mathlann works.’

‘Did you see where he went?’ said Lurien.

‘Teclis himself could not have followed him,’ said Filenduil.

‘Well then,’ said Éodrain, crossing his arms over his breastplate.

‘You are shaking,’ said Lurien.

‘It is this place. The sky is too bright and the air is too warm, everything makes a noise and I can’t touch anything without feeling something.’

‘Calm down,’ said Lurien.

‘Then stop accusing me!’

‘We cannot tarry here,’ said Namaríel.

Lurien’s eyes narrowed as he turned to the namarti. ‘You found me,’ he said. ‘Even through Filenduil’s obfuscation. I felt you walk up behind me.’

‘I suppose it is possible,’ said Filenduil. ‘Namarti have many senses that we do not.’

‘Teclis himself…’ Éodrain sneered.

‘I was there beside you, my love,’ said Namaríel. ‘There is no way I could have followed Nael as well.’

‘We are not leaving without Prince Nael,’ said Keylarr. She brandished her talúnhook. ‘Or his soul. Should the worst have befallen him.’

‘We cannot wait,’ Namaríel murmured. ‘The sinking ships will distract the blightkings for a time, but when the harbour yields no obvious culprit they will come back to search the town.’

‘She is right,’ said Éodrain.

‘As is Keylarr,’ said Lurien. ‘I need him. If I am to win over Laramé and take the fight to Vanglyr, then I need him.’

No sooner had he spoken than a horn blared from the sodden heap of plague furnaces and castles that scabbed the cliffs overlooking the harbour. It moaned across the sagging roofs of the old town, its dolorous monotone agueing limbs, blocking noses and clouding eyes. Lurien took a wobbling pace back, as though his trouser legs were stuffed with eels. He squelched a hand into the wall of a filth-hovel to keep himself from falling. The purity of his gauntlets seemed the least of his woes now.

Éodrain put his hands over his ears and groaned.

‘The Gulch Empress…’ Lurien breathed.

‘Lurien…’ said Keylarr.

‘Lurien?’ said Namaríel.

Cotton-wool ears meant he barely heard them. ‘We go,’ he hissed.

‘What of Prince Nael?’ said Keylarr.

‘He knows where the ocean is.’

Keylarr turned the cold metal of her covered face towards him. ‘And if he is gone?’

Lurien hesitated over his answer. He could just about face informing Laramé Farseer that her heir had fallen in a scheme of his instigation, but telling her that Nael’s soul was now a plaything of Nurgle with which to torment his eternal rival in the dark pantheon was a conversation he did not want to have. He almost turned back, only for another vitiating blast of the horn to settle the issue. Wiping a stream of mucus from his top lip, he backed towards the alley.

‘Mathlann protects,’ he muttered, and then ran.

Down rot-sodden streets they sprinted, Lurien leading, retracing their steps, Filenduil struggling at the rear until Éodrain dropped back to help the old isharann move. The akhelian grimaced in distaste as he took the old aelf’s arm across his shoulder, but even he knew better than to try to flee this place without their tidecaster. The foetid labyrinth of alleyways was largely deserted, for Lurien and his party had passed this way once before, but even so, the call of the Empress’ horn summoned a steady dribble of pitiable souls from their homes and into Coryza’s streets. They died quickly, quietly, Namaríel’s arrows through their eyes, ethersea filling up their mouths so that they clawed the earth in silence as they drowned, or even, on occasion, with Lurien’s knife slashing across their throats. It was neither quickly nor quietly enough, and the next time the horn sounded, Lurien was certain that it was closer. The maggotkin must have found the breadcrumb trail of dead they had left behind them. Namaríel’s arrows, perhaps. A corpse had suddenly become a cause for suspicion.

Their eyes were red and their joints swollen, their lungs crackling with the onset of disease, by the time the aelves reached the battlemented heap of steaming feculence over which they had entered.

‘There is no time to climb over,’ Lurien wheezed.

‘Can we dig through?’ said Keylarr.

The colour drained from Lurien’s face at the thought.

Dragging Filenduil along beside him, Éodrain joined them. ‘What are we all… still… doing here?’

‘Unhand me now, akhelian,’ said Filenduil.

Éodrain gladly let go, and the tidecaster leant his weight fully into his staff. Robes billowed in phantom swells as he drew the tides of magic towards him. His eyes rippled like rock pools in an earthquake. Waves ran the length of his staff. Lurien and Keylarr dropped back from the wall just as the tidecaster unleashed a wave that demolished a twenty-foot-wide section of it. Sodden lumps splatted as they rained out, mutated worms with tiny horns and boil-encrusted segments wriggling and drowning in the mud smear that the tidecaster’s magic had left of the wall.

Éodrain caught him again as he let go of his staff and slumped.

‘Filenduil!’ said Lurien.

‘I… think he is dead,’ said Éodrain.

‘He is not dead,’ said Keylarr. Disdain for the akhelian seeped through the solid metal of her helm. ‘But he has extended himself overfar.’

‘Then how do we get out of here?’ said Lurien.

A heavily armoured boot squelched into the torrid filth behind them, and every aelf bar one spun to see. Namaríel put two swift arrows through the scabrous helmet of a pox knight, one through a jellylike grille and another through an eyeslit. White fluid dribbled from the protruding shafts, but the warrior strode purposefully on, failing to react even to the impact force of a near point-blank shot to the head.

‘We could try running again,’ said Éodrain.

‘Go,’ said Lurien, and before he knew what he was doing, rammed his hellsabre into the horror’s breast. Armour crumbled from the golden blade, the revealed skin giving a hideous flutter, like a coral polyp vomiting up befouled water. The stench almost knocked Lurien down. He stared a moment at the oozing sore, stricken, as the diseased warrior headbutted him to the floor. He skidded almost ten feet through a slippery concoction of seawater and filth.

Namaríel vaulted over him and into a crouch, and another arrow sprouted from the blightking’s groin.

‘Defend the prince,’ she cried.

In furious silence, Keylarr charged the blightking, staving in squamous flesh and mouldy armour with crushing blows from her talúnhook. The giant’s warped soul flexed and rippled under the onslaught, but it had already been forfeited to another and was beyond all but the mightiest of soulrenders to tear free now. Shaking off the fever spreading through his skull, Lurien staggered back to his feet. He tightened his grip on his sword, then looked down at his empty hand as he realised that his hellsabre was still sticking out of the blightking’s heart.

How is he even still moving?

The warrior parried Keylarr’s talúnhook with the haft of its axe, then kneed her in the chest. The force of the blow flipped the soulrender over and sent her sprawling to the ground on her back.

Slipping and stumbling towards Éodrain, who had been dragging the unconscious Filenduil back into the breach, Lurien reached across and drew his retainer’s sword. Raising the weapon in weary salute, he took a haggard breath, then turned back and charged.

The blightking gurgled up yellow pus as it blocked Lurien’s blow with its axe. The chain links of the knight’s vambrace rattled, loose flesh rippling like liquid. The might of the warrior’s arm was irresistible, and Lurien let his sword go where it was pushed. Pivoting on the balls of his feet, he ducked the knight’s arm and saw the blue-zircon pommel of his hellsabre where it protruded from the blightking’s heart. He grabbed it. The blightking chuckled, noxious air blowing over Lurien’s arms from the rips in his chest, and hacked back with his axe. The knight’s body turned with the blow, and, keeping a tight grip on his hellsabre, Lurien turned with it, his legs flailing out behind him. The axe shaved his pauldron, and the pox knight gargled in apparent amusement as the torque finally ripped Lurien and the hellsabre from his chest and sent them both sprawling across the filth-strewn ground.

Lurien slithered back, staggered, twinned swords raised defensively as fat-clogged and plague-blackened arteries spilled from the blightking’s split chest. They twitched along the ground like maggots, wriggling unerringly towards Lurien’s feet. He stamped on a clutch of entrails, a tendrilous residue sticking to the bottom of his boot as he lifted his foot. He made a face.

‘My prince!’

Namaríel grabbed him by the shoulders and began pulling him back.

‘Help Keylarr,’ he said. ‘The souls she has taken have to make it back to Elgaen, or all of this is for nothing.’

‘Without you there is nothing.’

‘I said, help Keylarr!’

With a hiss of annoyance, the namarti let go and ran to the soulrender’s side. Keylarr was already back on her feet, but similarly beset by worming tendrils of the blightking’s animated viscera.

‘Go,’ Lurien told her. ‘Join the morrsarr and ishlaen in the bay. Swim back to Elgaen.’

‘That will take weeks.’

‘Better that than risk the souls we have taken. We will lure them to the far end of the bay and take our chances there.’

‘Laramé will learn of what you did here.’

‘Go!’

The blightking issued a wet chuckle as Keylarr spun away and fled into the city for the harbour. He fixed his ruined gaze on Lurien and Namaríel. ‘My Empress knew there was something in the oceans of the Gulch, and we – we few but forever faithful – never doubted. The progression of Nurgle’s Rot to her brain grants her wisdom beyond the grasp of common folk.’ Humming the first foul note of a dirge, the blightking hewed at Lurien with his axe. Lurien countered with a sword in each hand, skilful, beautiful to behold he did not doubt, but absolutely no match for the pox knight’s tireless power.

‘Time to go,’ said Namaríel, pointing to where an entire cohort of blightkings was advancing through the city, less the crashing wave of an akhelian charge than a river of slurry, promising a death that would be slow in the coming but no less inevitable for that. Her arrows raked the block of pox knights as she sought, and failed, to slow them down.

Lurien began to back away, only for a loop of connective tissue to worm around his wrist and drag him back into the blightking’s clutches. The metal of his gauntlet began to blacken.

‘Ho-ho, no no,’ said the blightking. ‘Lie down and die.’

Lurien swept his sword through the string of cartilage, only for another to wrap around his thigh. Another around his waist. His other wrist. He grunted, trapped.

‘I envy you,’ said the blightking. ‘Truly. You are going to learn the great truth of acceptance, a truth I learned a hundred years ago.’

The sticky tendrils began to reel Lurien in, as if the Nurglite meant to absorb the idoneth prince into his chest.

Lurien fought.

The blightking chuckled.

Something leaped onto its back.

With a strangled cry, as though its own battle rage was something perverse, the attacker stabbed at the back of the pox knight’s head. Sludgy blood and black pus sprayed everywhere. The blightking swung back with his axe, and missed. He wobbled for a moment, stubbornly upright, axe flailing in a loop, as his attacker cracked through his skull and began butchering his brain. Finally the knight keeled over, backwards, his tendrils dragging Lurien down with him. He hit the warrior’s soft, armoured corpse with a squelch, quickly fighting his way free with a look of horror on his face.

A familiar face looked down at him.

‘Morogai?’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

The namarti cleaned her knife on the trembling bubble of ethersea enveloping her fingers.

She did not answer.

‘No time for that now,’ Namaríel screamed. ‘Run!’

One look at the coming wedge of blightkings convinced Lurien she was right. She grabbed his wrist and he let her drag him.

They ran.

The breached wall opened out onto a scrub of oily grasses, on the clifftop overlooking the beach. The wind grabbed at Lurien’s cloak, a blind infant searching for something it knew it desired but would not recognise if it found. The stench of decomposing seaweed rose off the water, Nurgle’s gifts of wastage and decay overcoming even the power of the ocean to purify. Éodrain and Filenduil were ahead of them, but not far, the former encumbered by the barely conscious weight of the latter. They were heading towards the beachhead, hidden amidst the bluffs a few miles further up the cove where the namarti battalion waited with Urael and, Lurien had thought, Morogai. He glanced at the seamstress-cum-assassin beside him. She scrambled over the bare rocks as though a native to them, moving almost on all fours. There was no time to dwell on her unexpected presence just then, however. They had a long way to run yet, but provided Éodrain’s strength held out and Filenduil did not fade any further, they were still moving faster than the blightkings.

They could make it.

The plague horn sounded again, and this time it could not have been more than two hundred feet behind them. Lurien felt his entire body weaken. Muscles faltered with the wastage of a long illness. Arteries hardened. Will failed. Namaríel cried out, and even Morogai found her voice to scream a name Lurien did not know as she clawed at her ears. Éodrain crashed to the ground ahead of them. Filenduil rolled to the cliff edge before managing to arrest his fall, shaking his head as if confused to find that he had just awoken to his own nightmare. Another blast of the horn tore wails from them all. Lurien flopped to his knees as the bones of his legs became jelly. The ground shuddered under a titanic footstep, and Filenduil cried out as the cliff edge beneath him crumbled. Lurien turned to look back. His innards turned to water.

The Gulch Empress of Coryza pressed her horn into the gloopy flesh of her gut and hefted a sledgehammer. Its haft was as long as three aelves arranged head to foot in a line were tall. The head was a boulder engraved with seeping runes, black tentacles wriggling from its mass.

Lurien looked up as she stepped over her blightkings.

Karivinya the Great was a gargant.

Her skin was the black of putrefying meat, her belly a mountain of bloat where liquefying fat drooled from the summit. Bare and withered breasts hung to either side of her paunch, pierced with hellish icons and encrusted with fungal diseases. Infected tattoos spiralled around her massive arms. She was armoured only to her thighs – that was as high as most warriors could reach – a patchwork of leather and metal, wood and shell. One thigh plate was a still-living human man nailed to the frame of a door, a faecal smear running over the knee joint. The tortured harness creaked, rattled, groaned as the Gulch Empress took another thudding step towards the stricken aelves.

Lurien screamed. Namaríel struggled for the strength to draw back her bowstring, only to fumble the arrow between her fingers and watch it clatter away over the cliff edge. Morogai crawled determinedly towards Éodrain and Filenduil.

‘Mightily will Archaon praise me for this,’ Karivinya bellowed, her voice the bursting of gas-filled corpses and the snapping of bones. ‘And when he is finished, the Grandfather will reward me with the degradation of aelf flesh.’ The saggy folds of her face slipped and slid into a lopsided grin as she sank her free hand into a loin pouch and drew a pearl-inlaid object that size for size looked like a stylus in the hand of a scribe. She hurled it towards Lurien, and as the object grew in size he realised it was the plague-ravaged body of an aelf.

Prince Nael.

Lurien tried to move himself out of the way, but his arms and legs had become lodestones and refused to respond as the Elgaenite’s corpse smashed to the ground at his feet. The body burst like a water balloon filled with mud, flesh already thinned, tissue softened by Coryza’s mark of decay. Muddy brown fluids sprayed from the joins in his nacreous warplate as his corpse tumbled towards the cliff edge, bones rattling about inside, Lurien and Namaríel screaming as they were doused in the rancid foetor of their prince.

Lurien struggled to lift his sword, only for its weight to bear him to the ground instead.

Karivinya’s presence was a thing of power, the smallest piece of a godly footprint on the Mortal Realms. And this was a mere servant of Archaon. Never had Lurien felt so naked in the face of his true place in the cosmic hierarchy of powers. Never had he understood what the term fell power truly meant, or the might to which the true paragons of Order and Chaos could lay claim. His ambitions were as nothing in the grand pageantry of the gods, or of the titans that served their designs as champions. He had been a fool to think that the backing of a warrior as mortal and limited as Nael would have been enough to win him even as far as his limited imagination had conceived. This was the horror that awaited the kings and queens of the Green Gulch. They could hide from it, as they had for millennia, but their enemies had not been looking. They looked now. It was only a matter of time before the likes of Karivinya and her patrons found them.

He understood, in some enfeebled place that remembered reasoned thought, that his retreat into the arms of inevitability was the work of the Empress, but even so, he could not find the strength to resist it.

Easier to just lie down. Accept it.

There was an angry hiss, and a string of arrows puckered the gargant’s naked chest. The individual shafts were barely discernible against the Empress’ own coarse hairs, but it was enough of a distraction that Lurien felt the malaise in his body lessen. ‘Joyful day!’ Karivinya bellowed as Nael’s reavers drew back bowstrings to loose again. Urael hurled a javelin with a roar. It smacked into the gargant’s cuisse and stood there, quivering. ‘More virgin fields for the Grandfather to plant his seed.’

The ground trembled as the gargant waded into the reavers.

Lurien heard screams.

Ignored for the moment, he crawled towards Nael’s body. At full stretch, he caught hold of an ankle, and then half dragged the corpse towards him, half pulled himself on towards it. ‘Namaríel,’ he called out. ‘Help me move this.’

‘Leave it,’ the namarti shouted back. ‘It is a dead shell already.’

‘It is a dead shell wearing a king’s ransom in Elgaenite pearl!’

He tugged furiously on the corpse’s leg, and when it became clear that he was not leaving without it, Namaríel came to take the other leg while Éodrain lifted the head. Morogai remained to assist Filenduil. Lurien turned his sore and aching neck to where the tidecaster clung to the ground. He had recently vomited and was staring at the watery results in amazement and horror.

‘Get us out of here, tidecaster,’ he said.

‘Impossible,’ Filenduil said.

The Gulch Empress shook with mirth as she stamped on a reaver.

‘I will drive the Stormcast back,’ she cried, her hammer emitting a squalid drone as it obliterated another aelf from the waist up. ‘My rot will spread through the bowers of the Everqueen. I will tear out the roots of her wargroves and plant the seeds of decay in their foulsome glades.’

‘Tidecaster!’ Lurien cried.

Filenduil stared at his hands. ‘I have lost my staff. And my strength is… Elgaen is too far.’

‘Then cast us somewhere nearer. Anywhere.’

Karivinya’s cries grew fevered with laughter. Lurien closed his eyes, hugging Nael’s corpse tight to his chest as he felt the ethersea that sheathed him quavering before the champion’s corruption.

‘Anywhere!’

PART THREE

DWY-HOR

CHAPTER NINE

‘So…’

Éodrain leant forwards, over the waxy orange leaf that had been folded in half to serve as a table, hand cupped around a mollusc shell stained blue inside with dark caulep wine. The half a dozen emptied shells to precede it had worked to progressively loosen the muscles of his face. His eyes were as big and watery as fish eggs. His words were clumsy. ‘How many deepkin have you killed?’ Morogai turned porcelain-white features towards him. Then away again. Needles flashed over the torn set of fishscale leggings in her lap. They had belonged to one of Nael’s thralls, ripped by an orruk arrow on the Esurien Cape.

‘She won’t answer you, Éodrain,’ Lurien said.

‘She has a voice. I heard it on the cliffs.’

Lurien looked down into his own caulep shell and shuddered. The deepkin shunned material things and abhorred sensation, but that which dulled the nerves, slowed the mind – that was a gift to be cherished. Dwy-Hor’s nightshade caulep was a case in point, a superior variety of the common sea grape, nurtured by the occasional splashes of sunlight that reached the vineyards of its shallower seas and the unstoppable fecundity that came with its shared border with the lands of the Radiant Queen. But Lurien had not drunk nearly enough of it to numb the memory of Coryza. He did not need the reminder.

‘Let it go,’ he said.

Éodrain took a gulp of caulep. ‘She could show me on her fingers.’

He demonstrated, holding up ten.

Morogai carried on sewing.

‘More than ten?’ Éodrain drawled in horror.

‘I said stop it,’ said Lurien.

With a frown, Éodrain flounced back into the creamy-green pith cushion of his living chair. ‘When did you become so joyless, my prince? If one cannot taunt the namarti, then what is the point of being alive at all?’

Morogai’s needles paused. They quivered in her tiny hands. Like arrows in skin.

Lurien tensed, but it lasted only a moment before the namarti was back at her work. He let his breath slide out.

The three of them occupied a table in the gloomy dining lounge of the Lenlui, a taberna whose name, depending on context and intonation, could mean either The Living or The Dead. The huge roots of living trees vaulted the ceiling, casting broad shadows from the smattering of green-stained glowstones that illuminated the space. Lurien was still acclimating himself to the idea of a structure tailored solely to the comfort of visitors. The oceans were too vast to be travelled freely, the magic of the tidecasters guarded too jealously by the isharann fanes, but visitors had still come to Dwy-Hor. Its location on the coast had made it a trading hub of sorts. By deepkin standards. There had even been a skink ambassador here, once, much feted by Mahbòr, according to the Lenlui’s aged proprietor. But that was well in the past now.

Every so often the roots of the taberna would creak, shift a little as the growing trees stretched, tremors running through the small enclosure of water to make Lurien and, before inebriation had steadied his nerves, Éodrain grip the edges of their leaf table and look nervously about them. As if the ceiling were about to fall in.

Dwy-Hor was an enclave under siege these tides, he knew. The closest of the Green Gulch’s enclaves to the lands of Ghyran, it was the first to hear the growing stridency of the Everqueen’s war-song, and the first to feel the expansion of her borders. Schools of wild fish, predatory and unbound, swirled through its arbours, darting in and out of the contorted boles from which Dwy-Hor’s chorralus fane shaped their dwellings. Deepwood spites, whether out of mischief or sheer malevolence, would often caper ahead of such shoals, luring them around armed patrols and into the homes of the idoneth before dissolving back into the magic of the deepwood. The few idoneth who still lived there were a tenacious breed and uncommonly grim, though they had a peculiar way of expressing it. Their skin carried the russet hue of red algae, or new wood, and they had taken to the wearing of bright and disjointed colours, further ornamented with berries and silver and noise-making shells. They also took the unthinkable precaution of moving about their enclave in large groups.

Some combination of close-quarters living, bitter defeat, constant encroachment by the Everqueen of Ghyran and their sovereign’s slow descent towards mallachi had left the Dwy-Hor a cursed, distracted folk.

Keeping an eye on the door, Lurien took a cautious sip of caulep.

A namarti woman garbed in a stiff leather jerkin, particoloured and decorated with bark, swam to Lurien’s table with a wooden tray in one hand. Her baldness made her ears seem longer and more pointed. The namastir on her forehead was traced with silver. The hadrilkar about her neck was of thick, aged wood rather than metal, the spreading bower of Dwy-Hor encompassing a host of lesser runes displaying the idoneth to whom she belonged, the incubati that had nursed her, the soul warden that had furnished her soul and the raid leader who had claimed it. She was beautiful, in spite of her advanced years. Not in any spectacular way. But all aelves were creatures of innate beauty.

He did not look at her twice.

Éodrain leant back as the woman swam over the table to gather up his empty shells. He frowned at her as she left, casting the same critical eye over the Lenlui’s aged proprietor, hovering behind the bar. Blearily, he gazed over the handful of grim, haunted patrons that occupied the other nooks and hides of the lounge.

‘Everyone here is so… old,’ he said.

‘Mahbòr doesn’t raid any more,’ said Lurien. ‘There have been no new souls in decades, and no new souls means no new namarti.’ He looked around. ‘And namarti only live thirty or forty years, so… you can understand why.’

‘Then why doesn’t he raid?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. I heard that he used to be prolific, that he would lead his phalanx deeper into land than even Galrohir or Vanglyr are forced to go today. I don’t know why he stopped. But I remember mother telling me something about a particularly bad defeat he suffered at the hands of the sylvaneth. Maybe twenty years ago. Just before the raids stopped.’

Éodrain shrugged. ‘Sometimes a raid goes bad.’

‘As if you would know,’ Lurien sneered. ‘In any case, it was a disaster, as I recall. Hundreds of akhelian were slain, their souls lost. And Mahbòr himself lost some kind of Ionrach heirloom after being bested in combat by the sylvaneth treelord.’

‘And now he’s mad.’

‘Now they’re all mad.’ Lurien again cast an eye to the door.

With a sigh, Éodrain drained his caulep shell. He pushed himself up from the table.

‘Where do you think you are going?’ said Lurien.

‘I have drunk enough caulep.’

Lurien snorted. ‘Someone find the soulscryer potentate. The end of days is upon us.’

‘You can wait here as long as you want for your namarti witch, but this is my first time in Dwy-Hor and I intend to explore it fully.’ His fumbling eye caught the old serving wench on her meandering return to the bar, and he grinned lazily. ‘I wonder if there is a sample of surface-dweller spirit left over from this place’s halcyon days.’ And then he stumbled off in the general direction of the bar.

‘Stay inside,’ Lurien shouted after him.

With a sigh, he turned to Morogai, who had remained quiet, intent only on her seamstressing throughout the entire exchange.

‘So…’ he said. ‘How many deepkin have you killed?’

She shook her head.

Checking over his shoulder to ensure that Éodrain was well out of hearing and that none of the Dwy-Hor had ventured any nearer, Lurien leant forwards. ‘Did you kill Nael in Coryza?’

No answer. The click-clack of needles.

‘Because Filenduil suggested that a namarti could have seen through his glamours. But Namaríel was right there beside me the whole time. But then there you were.’

‘I did not kill him.’ Her voice was as quiet as a whisper in a fane, and just as unexpected. ‘I hear the voice of my thoughts. And then I find them dead.’

‘What does that mean?’

She stared blankly into his skull.

‘And if I were to wish for you to find a dead man for me? Or a dead woman?’

But the girl was mute again. She turned away.

Click-clack.

Urael pushed in the heavy doors. There was a howl of discordant music and screaming aelves that was swiftly muted again as the big namarti leant back onto the doors to shut them. He breathed out, relieved. The namarti had made every effort to blend in, his huge muscles hennaed in the Dwy-Hor style, albeit, at Lurien’s suggestion, with the turquoise and gold of Briomdar. The colours were a better match for his skin than the lighter shades favoured by the dark-skinned Dwy-Hor, and to any casual observer it would clearly mark the aelf as Lurien’s.

‘Is it still bad out there?’ Lurien asked.

Urael peeled himself from the door and swam towards them. He pulled up a chair.

‘Worse.’

‘You were able to make all of the arrangements, at least?’

‘I found a tidecaster who was lucid enough to talk. He’s prepared to send the armour back to Elgaen.’

Lurien sat back and held up his hands, admiring again the nacreous lustre of the vambraces, how well the harness had fit to his body once its former occupant’s disease-hollowed bones had been removed. It was so very much finer than the inferior half-plate that Laramé had gifted to him. Filenduil had protested and some of the reavers had muttered, but, as he had explained to them, there was surely no other aelf in the Seven Oceans that the White Queen of Elgaen would prefer to wear it now that Nael was no more. He was the heir to Elgaen now, after all. And the true king of Briomdar. She would probably thank him for being courteous enough to return her earlier gift to him.

‘The price is not going to spoil the taste of this fine caulep in my mouth, I hope,’ he said.

‘Those fangmoras that came back riderless from the Cape. And the promise of a good word with Queen Laramé. Some of the thralls will go back as well, to advise the queen of what happened.’

‘That Keylarr and three hundred souls will be returning to Elgaen in a month or so?’

Urael nodded.

‘And how I led the raid after my cousin fell?’

‘Namaríel insisted on it. She wanted Laramé to hear her telling of events before she heard Keylarr’s.’

‘What do they intend to tell her about the manner of Nael’s fall?’

‘I… left that with Namaríel.’

Lurien brushed Nael’s sword hilt with his fingertips, where it rested against his hip under the half-leaf table. Elgaenite armour. Elgaenite blade. Túrach steed. The colours of Briomdar still fresh in his skin. He was becoming a walking token of fealty from the enclaves of the Green Gulch. And, having twice now been reliant on a borrowed blade from Éodrain, he had come around to the virtues of having two.

‘What about the rest of the namarti?’ he said.

‘Coming with us, I suppose.’

‘Better than going on with just the five of us.’

Urael smirked. ‘You are a prince, after all.’

Lurien’s slightly drunken smile grew a little wider about the middle. ‘The reavers did prove useful in Coryza. And it will be novel to have someone else to carry my belongings when we move on.’ He thought about it a moment longer. ‘It will be novel to have belongings.’

The two aelves looked up as another namarti approached their table.

It was the proprietor that Lurien had noticed glaring at Éodrain earlier. He looked ancient, skin folded like some kind of sponge and pickled in brine, clad in split-sided robes that bared his cringingly thin legs as he swam. His neck was noticeably lengthened, rubbed raw by the weight of his hadrilkar. Lurien put his hand over his still half-full caulep shell and shook his head. Morogai, of course, had no shell in front of her, and none was offered to Urael. It was accepted that a namarti might sit alongside their akhelian masters in public, since most were dependent on their thralls, but to dine alongside them would have been unthinkable. Even in Dwy-Hor.

‘May I take an order of food to the kitchens, my lord?’

Lurien opened his mouth to say that yes, he was hungry enough to eat a charged fangmora.

‘You may not,’ said Urael.

The older namarti glanced at Lurien, who nodded, reluctantly, and then swam back to the bar.

Lurien turned to Urael.

‘I’ve seen the kitchens,’ the namarti explained. ‘The food here isn’t good.’

‘What do you know of good food?’

‘I was head cook in Tor Mathlann for five years.’

‘You were a cook?’

‘Is that so hard to believe?’

‘I took you for a metal-crafter, or a mine-worker maybe.’

‘Why?’

‘Well…’ Lurien gestured to the great limestone-white slab of him.

‘Have you ever carved ironsquid tentacle? Or been asked to serve murwhaal while it’s still fresh?’

Lurien shook his head. Urael sat back, the elegant bowering of his chair creaking with his weight. He folded his hands behind his head, as if to display the full glory of his pectoral muscles and biceps.

‘You’d think we would have eaten better,’ said Lurien.

Urael snorted, and Lurien began to laugh.

Bitterly.

There was a flap of curtain from one of the corner hides, and Lurien turned, expecting to see a briefly satiated Éodrain sauntering back to the table. But it was only Filenduil, being led by the hand by Namaríel.

‘Give him your caulep.’ Namaríel sat the old tidecaster down, her hands firmly over his shoulders. ‘His need is greater.’

‘What did you do to him?’

The isharann’s eyes were huge and staring. His bottle-green skin had turned almost white.

‘I’m flattered,’ said Namaríel, ‘but this is Karivinya’s doing, not mine.’ She patted Filenduil’s shoulders. He moaned, sniffling softly. ‘I think his soul has been sickened by the taint of Coryza.’ She smiled, cruelly. ‘Or at least, he fears it enough to believe it – I am not convinced. It would be rare for so brief an exposure to overcome the constitution of an aelf, particularly a deepkin sheathed in protective ethersea.’ She shrugged. ‘But I may have promised him a bushel of the famed restorative berries of the deepwoods if he were to help us earn the favour of Mahbòr. Just be grateful I was able to persuade him of the merits of your cause. There are worse things for a renegade prince to hold in his pocket than a pet tidecaster.’

Lurien nodded.

Every fane of the isharann túrscoll played its role in the survival of the enclaves, but if an idoneth wanted to cross oceans, strike at land or conduct diplomacy or trade between distant enclaves, it was a tidecaster they needed.

Lurien handed his caulep shell to Urael, who, in turn, patiently squeezed open the uncooperative aelf’s mouth and poured the nightshade-blue liquid inside. Then he pushed Filenduil’s jaws closed again. The tidecaster coughed, caulep juice puffing out from the corners of his mouth and squirming away into the water.

‘Stay with him, Urael,’ said Namaríel. ‘You too, Morogai. If anyone asks, you are his.’

The two namarti nodded.

‘What about Éodrain?’ said Lurien.

‘Éodrain knows how to amuse himself, I think,’ said Namaríel.

‘So what are we doing?’

Namaríel nodded towards the door. ‘What we came to Dwy-Hor to do, my prince. Enlist the aid of the Laughing King.’

Sunlight dappled the submerged groves of Dwy-Hor, and where it touched on the sea floor there rode a wild hunt. Aelves in motleys of sea leaves and wood armour capered over every greyed-out blemish that appeared, waving weapons and war banners, scattering in a profusion of colour with wails of madness as it passed. Aelves in fish-head masks and rippling cloaks. Aelves cavorting in rigid suits of deepwood bark, like wilder spirits from some alien realm. It was as though some intoxicant had been spiked into the water here, gold-coloured and fleeting, aelves whirling about one another in furious abandon, arm in arm, the dark water fizzling and pulsing with the malfeasance of the arbour’s deepspites, the occasional scream. It was what insanity tasted of. A voltaic charge, running through the water, energising something deeper than skin. The war-song of Alarielle, bouncing off every tree, ringing through the unfathomably deep water, down to the ocean’s bones. In the ocean-dimmed light of the day, they stood revealed to Her, the twisted misfits of Teclis’ creation that they were. And so they danced, masked and masqueraded.

They danced to war.

Lurien held on to the huge gnarled doorjamb of the Lenlui, all he could do to keep himself from swimming out to join the Dwy-Hor in the carnival of despair.

‘Dwy-Hor,’ Lurien hissed. ‘Tell me again why I even want their aid.’

‘They are diminished, but there is a kind of strength in their misfortune.’ Namaríel lifted her arms above her head, her lithe, dancer’s body already beginning to move to the undercurrent. Her training with the chorralus dancers of the néthir must have made her more receptive to Mahbòr’s strain of madness, or her namarti senses were somehow more attuned to it.

Lurien wondered if she even realised what she was doing.

‘Perhaps you should wait inside with Morogai and Urael.’

‘And let you talk with Mahbòr alone?’

Namaríel twirled, her long cloak whipping gracefully around her body.

Lurien could not help but stare.

‘Do you think I did not see how you tried to meet with Laramé without me back in Elgaen?’ she said. ‘I know you hoped that she would help rid you of me.’

‘Is it strange for an aelf to sit alone with his favourite aunt?’

Namaríel laughed, her voice taking on a duskier quality as she danced. ‘Mahbòr lost almost all his akhelian, but his court is filled with isharann of dark and terrible powers.’

‘So I hear.’

‘I am sure one of them could break our bondage if you were to beg it of them.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘But Mahbòr never sets foot in his palaces. He is a dark circus that roams his enclave and its outposts. Always riding down the sunlight.’

Lurien looked over the unsettling carnival around them. ‘Then he’ll be somewhere nearby. That’s something.’

‘Come, my love,’ she declared, and for the first time since they had been joined together in the dungeons of Briomdar, she said those last words as though they might mean something. Lurien felt a frisson of madness’ energy enter him, running through his skin as she whirled away. ‘Let us seek him out.’

‘Wait.’ Lurien grabbed after her trailing wrist. ‘I still think it would be better if you waited for me in the Lenlui.’

‘And I think it would be better if we danced.’

Stronger than him, she drew him from the porch step and into a pirouette, her laughter colder than an algal eclipse of the sun. Lurien was versed in all the courtly dances of the Briomdain. The avarai. The sarail. Even the traíga. His skills had been spoken of with admiration, and he was certainly nearer his element in the ballroom of a royal assembral than at crossed swords in the Court of the Blind King. But he had never known a dance so tactile, so visceral, as that which Namaríel described for him now. She spun him as though he were a colour ribbon wielded by an eolas dancer, drawing with every movement of her body the silent tale of downfall and disgrace.

A victory lament went up from the surrounding aelves as the work of distant waves caused the scattering of sunlight to move elsewhere. Hunting horns were sounded, banners furled, and like a great school of fish startled by the shadow of a predator, the carnival broke apart to charge after it. With an athleticism that Lurien could only envy, Namaríel spun away from him.

He was too dazzled by her to notice her getting away.

‘Namaríel!’

Snapping out of the daze, he kicked off after her.

Desperate swimmers bumped and jostled as he joined them in their wild hunt. Whirling limbs. Kicking feet. Dwy-Hor covered too vast an expanse of forest to be considered crowded, even by the standards of most idoneth, but the frenetic convergence of a thousand aelves and the deepspites that followed the hunt in order to mock and molest its efforts made for a dizzying swirl of jewels, shells, jolts of Ghyranic energies and gamine aelven bodies.

‘Namaríel!’

Someone caught his arm around the bicep and pulled him around. He turned, expecting to see Namaríel, only to be confronted instead by an old male aelf with red-brown skin. His attire was a net stuffed with sea berries and leaves. Lurien could not even tell if he was true-souled or namarti, his face masked by a plank of wood whorled with a multitude of painted eyes and splayed with horns. He danced a turn with Lurien before handing him off into the embrace of another, and another, and then another. Around and around.

‘Namaríel!’

He pushed back against the hands of a would-be partner and looked around. A solitary dancer caught his eye. Alone amongst the profusion of colours and wild garb, he was clad in beryl-coloured splint mail with gloves, boots and a hooded cloak that concealed his face. Despite the fact that he danced alone, he did so with a ferocity the equal of any aelf around him.

‘Mahbòr,’ Lurien hissed, and swam towards him.

He had barely kicked his feet once before a crone of a dancer dragged him back. He kicked her in the face with a snarl and almost laughed as she recoiled in shock. He turned back to where the Laughing King had been, but the aelf had vanished into the carnival.

‘Curse of Teclis on them all.’

He turned again, somehow still spinning even without hands over him. Mail glittered. Frills shivered. Faster. Faster. Namaríel’s white skin. Mahbòr’s cloak. He swam towards it. The water immediately in front of him burst into emerald fire as a deepspite manifested in his path. The spirit was a living contusion of magical energies and basic sentience, a squirming life-thing of no definite shape. It cackled and gibbered as it repositioned itself to thwart Lurien’s efforts to swim around it, before, apparently deeming him poor sport, delivering a slap of aetheric power that sent him cartwheeling to the sea floor and the unyielding arms of an aelven king.

‘I know you,’ said Mahbòr.

Lurien stared in amazement, certain that the mallachi that had afflicted Namaríel had finally overcome him as well. The Laughing King whirled around him with surprising agility, entering into the first movements of the yulrhair. Tall, achingly slender, clad in dark green mail and wooden plates, draped in cloak and hood, the Laughing King of Dwy-Hor bowed.

‘I… know you as well,’ said Lurien.

‘The currents have carried you a long way from the Crannstock, Prince Lurien.’

Before Lurien could think of a response, a great shoal of dervish thrall-dancers armed with hook-bladed crultân spears descended to englobe him and the mad king. Lurien looked up as the eyeless thralls whirled about one another, each dancer moving to a solitary routine but at the same time part of a collective that was breathtaking in its choreography. They were wild and tattooed, long-limbed, beautiful, their narrow faces harbouring a cruelty and a focus on the moment that set them apart from the mere brilliance of their fellow aelves. Their grace was devastating, in spite of their blindness, their hypnotic routines said to be capable of reducing the most brutish of killers to awed disarmament before hooked blades darted from the lissom shoal to end them.

Túrach had its asglir. Briomdar and Elgaen their all-powerful isharann.

Dwy-Hor had its deepwood hookweavers.

Lurien understood he was a madman’s word from death.

Automatically, he mirrored Mahbòr’s movements. The yulrhair was a courtly dance of the Ionrach in which aelves of high status swam in wide arcs around the narrower, swifter circles of the lesser nobles. Since Mahbòr had taken for himself the role of lord, Lurien assumed the supplicant part. It was an unfamiliar position, but he still knew the movements.

‘I have come to seek your aid.’

‘This I know.’

‘I already have the backing of Laramé of Elgaen. Or soon will.’

‘This too, I know.’

With a rustle of leaves and a gasp of tiny bubbles, Mahbòr broke off and spun away. Lurien correctly mirrored the pirouette, peeling off in the opposite direction before returning to the cowled face of the Laughing King after half a dozen perfectly executed turns.

Mahbòr nodded, impressed. ‘You can dance.’

‘I am a prince. I have practised.’

‘Perhaps we can be of some help to one another after all.’

‘Of course,’ said Lurien. ‘What can I–’

Mahbòr closed the distance between them before Lurien could finish.

The water rushed in after him, flurrying his cloak around Lurien’s legs as he took the startled prince by the collar of his armour and drew him towards him. The sudden forward motion caused his hood to fall away. Mahbòr’s scarred, painfully emaciated head was covered in leaf-pattern tattoos similar to his hookweavers’, but what took Lurien aback, what robbed him of any will to resist Mahbòr’s manhandling, was the fervid emerald of the king’s eyes.

He was not laughing.

He was not even smiling.

It looked as though all the energy in the aelf’s face, in his body, belonged to those two eyes.

‘You can help me win back my enclave,’ he said, too intimate, too close.

‘Retake it?’

‘From the forest.’ Mahbòr’s fierce eyes darted up, then back. ‘Since I lost Aeslecai in battle with Kua’thor, the forest has sought advantage from my weakness. It knows I can’t raid without it. It knows. It knows.’ He pushed Lurien off him with a sneer, as though remembering too late to be offended by their touch, then pointed up to the surface. He turned his face to follow it. ‘See how she sends the sun to watch me. There. There. Did you see it?’ He was raving now, his eyes drilling into Lurien’s with too much intensity to be comfortably met. ‘Why do you think I took her soulpod from the Cueth’ene’s nursery groves? The sylvaneth, Deepgrove.’

‘Your mistress?’

Mahbòr laughed. Too loud. Too long.

‘What is Aeslecai?’ said Lurien.

Mahbòr grabbed him again. ‘The Child of Light. The Soultaker. The Soulkeeper. How can you, a prince, heir to Lágethé, not know? The first Ionrach princess to voyage into the Green Gulch and declare herself queen of Túrach bore it with her, and it has been passed down through her family and into mine for over a thousand years. Nor was she the first to wield it. No. All the way back to the cythai of Gealrachi it goes, hoarding the souls of its wielders lest they fall, unable to find the peace of the chorrileum. And now it is lost to the Cueth’ene of the Ironbark glade. Twenty generations of my ancestors. Their wisdom. Their power.’ He covered his face with his hands as if his skull were about to explode. ‘Return my spear to the sanctuary of the deep, Prince Lurien, and you will have my backing against any enemy. I will throttle Vanglyr with my bare hands. I will dance through the Hidden Gloaming for you.’

Brushing the mad king off, Lurien made the protective ward of Mathlann over his chest. ‘How am I supposed to reclaim a relic that cost you an entire army to lose?’

‘I have something they want.’

Lurien thought about it. ‘Deepgro–’

Mahbòr sealed Lurien’s lips with a finger. ‘I have a plan. But later.’

‘I am ready now,’ said Lurien, spitting Mahbòr’s finger from his lips.

‘Now the light of the Radiant Queen falls upon Dwy-Hor, brave prince. Now we ride to oppose it. Now we dance.’

CHAPTER TEN

Emerald-green waves crashed against the pebbled shore, hissing back to reveal glistening islets of slime-covered stones surrounded by slowly draining moats of limpid water. Thick mats of algae rose and fell with the restless motions of the sea, the air thick with the scent of their blooms. Beyond the marginal strandline, vegetation spilled from a dense wood, driven by an urge to conquer and colonise that was, in its way, as powerful as that which infused any stormclaimed of Azyr. Trunks leant out over the waves, branches outstretched, roots tearing free of the brink to froth up the backwash. It was as if the trees further inland pushed at those in the vanguard, driving them ever closer to the frontier. To Dwy-Hor. And beyond. Their hypernatural vigour filled the air with wooden creaks, branches swaying, leaves rustling, the slow talk of unimaginably ancient things. Lurien tried to follow just a measure of their song. The motifs were hauntingly strange, a long sequence of decrescendos designed to arouse feelings he did not possess and suggest metaphors he could not frame.

‘What an abyss,’ said Éodrain, tugging at the collar of his surcoat to let some of the cool of the ethersea into his clothing as he drew his fangmora up alongside Venom.

The two akhelian sat stiffly in their saddles, watching as staggered groups of forest folk emerged from the ocean, tramping up the beach with water streaming from their hard bodies. Tucking in behind the sylvaneth’s lolloping advance, the namarti reavers followed in on the ethersea’s swell. Their bows were already drawn, trained on the wall of trees ahead of them and, surreptitiously, on the dryads that had been waiting for them in the shallows.

Namaríel eased her draw, and by some silent communion, the other reavers did the same. Urael lowered his adze to rest it against his shoulder. Filenduil lay slumped in a fin-tailed wain drawn by a teglai snail. The creature twisted its neck towards the treeline, mutilated eyestalks twitching. Then it turned away to lick the slime from the rocks. Morogai was nowhere to be seen. Proof enough for Lurien that she was out there somewhere.

Lurien realised that at some point along the way he had come into possession of an army. It was a small one, totalling two akhelian knights, an isharann who had not quite been himself since Coryza and two-score namarti archers, but it was an army just the same. And it was his. Watching Namaríel order it onto the beach, Lurien felt himself ease a little into his saddle, a wistful smile creeping over the numb muscles of his face.

‘Quite the night, was it not?’ said Éodrain.

‘They do things differently in Dwy-Hor,’ Lurien agreed.

Lurien waved for his retainer to be quiet as a sylvaneth creaked towards them on backward-jointed limbs, robed in green spray where the waves crashed across her ankles. Her hide was tough and grey, the heartwood mottled with base metals. The sword in her hand was of genuine metal, of duardin or possibly native Ironbark work, sharper than any wood or razorshell.

‘My name is Swordfern,’ she said. ‘Your arrival in the Jade Kingdoms was expected.’

‘I see that,’ said Lurien, eyeing the dryad’s sword warily.

‘The song of our deepwood sisters carries even here. They heard the compact you made with the sea-king, Mahbòr, and rejoiced in it. They sing of nothing but the return of Lady Deepgrove to the earth of her own glades.’

Éodrain leant towards Lurien with a creak of harness. ‘The Laughing King knows the sylvaneth, my prince. Do you think he let us walk into this on purpose?’

‘I’m sure he did,’ Lurien said, then shrugged. ‘At least we have an escort.’ He turned back to the dryad. A venture into the verdant groves that encroached on the northern hinterlands of Coryza may not have been Lurien’s favoured choice of destination after Dwy-Hor, but there was something captivating about this wood and its spirit folk. It spoke to him, to his soul, sang to him with a melody that was utterly alien and yet heartbreakingly familiar. Standing on the shores of the Jade Kingdoms, he could almost feel his soul press against his chest like a prisoner against the bars of a cage, straining for the radiant glow of that song. The deepkin were a fallen people, but they could still crave that which was pure. A part of Lurien’s impoverished spirit longed for the unifying song that every sylvaneth in the Realm of Life could hear. The unfading warmth and affection of their goddess in their breasts.

It made him at once envious and bitter.

‘Then your people will agree to the trade? Deepgrove for Mahbòr’s ancestral spear?’

‘That will be for the council of ancients to decide,’ she said.

There was something in the dryad’s voice that suggested she hoped otherwise. The very idea of a division between her and her leaders was intriguing, and Lurien made a note to think on it more when the time arose. Though possessed of free will of a sort, the sylvaneth were creatures for whom loyalty to the greater will of the collective ran deep.

‘These are the groves of Clan Cueth’ene, of the Ironbark Glades.’ Swordfern pointed inland. The Ironbark, Lurien knew from long, dull days in the azydrazor, were metalworkers and traders. Being sylvaneth and having little material need of their own, they traded predominantly in good will and favour, carrying Ironbark metal, sylvaneth wood art and exotic foodstuffs to mortal lands across their great forest, and returning to the noble spirits of their hearthglades with strengthened alliances and enhanced prestige in exchange. ‘Our hearthgrove is not far,’ she went on. ‘The ancient treelords of the glade prefer the taste of salt in their roots and the sea wind in their branches.’

Éodrain gave her choice of route a dubious frown, tilting his sourness to regard the entangled mass of threateningly verdant woodland that blocked it. ‘Through that?’

‘Enough of your complaining, Éodrain,’ Lurien hissed.

He had travelled to Dwy-Hor to broker an alliance, had agreed to venture into the groves of the Cueth’ene to secure it, but it occurred to him that in so doing Mahbòr might have given him the opportunity to forge a better one. By most akhelian’s reckoning, the sylvaneth wargroves of the Green Gulch were powerfully in the ascendant. As living vessels for the voice of the Radiant Queen, they were also greatly respected, and when an elder spirit spoke, even the proudest king of the deepkin aelves paid proper heed.

If he could convince the ancient spirits of the Ironbark Glade to speak for him…

‘We could go over it,’ Lurien suggested.

One look at Filenduil, however, bereft of his staff and laid out in the back of his wain, pasty with the muggy heat and whatever sickness his tormented soul imagined him to have contracted in the despoils of Coryza, was enough to tell him that the tidecaster did not have that kind of strength left in him.

‘Or not,’ said Éodrain.

‘I am sure the Lady Swordfern has a path in mind,’ said Lurien.

The branchwraith’s head creaked, some of its rigid lines turning upwards, forcing her fixed expression to reshape. Lurien thought she was smiling. ‘It is only Swordfern. But you are correct, Prince Lurien. As your tide-mage compels the sea to bear you from the deepwood, so too will the forest hark to my song.’

The heat intensified as they moved deeper into the forest, away from the cooling breeze of the sea. The air became syrupy, a combination of tree sap and leaf mulch and recycled moisture. It infested clothing and made armour heavy. Even at the bottom of the deepest ocean, Lurien had never felt so sodden through. He slumped in his saddle, barely maintaining a grip on the reins. Venom moved as though drugged with naiad poppy, swimming low to the ground, her gills rippling like the tail of an animal left to die in a desert. He understood that he should count himself fortunate, however, and found the reserves of energy to smile at the thought of Namaríel and her reavers slogging ahead with the forest folk on foot.

‘I do not understand,’ Éodrain panted. The humidity had sapped the akhelian of his strength, but not yet his will to complain. His long, painstakingly braided peruke clung to his jaw and neck in spidery trails, and his cheeks were indigo flushed. The collar of his surcoat was hopelessly misshapen from an hour of pulling and tugging. ‘If Mahbòr wishes to parlay with the Ironbark glade, then why does he not come himself?’

‘He did not say as much to me, but I think he fears to. The Cueth’ene broke him and took the very symbol of his power before driving him back into the sea. I don’t think his mind ever recovered from it. Deepgrove is the only thing he still holds over them.’

‘That explains why he paraded her around the Crannstock the way he did when his court first arrived in Briomdar.’

‘It does?’

Éodrain shrugged. ‘He couldn’t stay away, not with every king and queen in attendance of your assembral. But he couldn’t leave her behind either. Not with deepspites running amok and that damned forest singing. He would have been terrified she’d escape somehow.’

‘And take away the only symbol of strength he has left,’ Lurien agreed. ‘That’s actually quite insightful.’

Éodrain laughed for a moment, then remembered how hot and miserable he was and stopped, tugging ruefully at his collar.

‘I wonder why the sylvaneth do not march on Dwy-Hor and retake her.’

Lurien sighed. ‘I don’t know that either. Maybe the sylvaneth are so abundant a race that they do not prize these… soulpods, as we do our children. Or maybe the forest folk are bound by loyalties that we cannot understand.’

Éodrain turned towards him, straightening slightly. ‘I am loyal.’

‘Like a caulep grub to the grape it suckles on. In any case, you think too highly of yourself. I was speaking of Vanglyr. Betraying my mother’s legacy, seizing my throne, and then having the nerve to take over my house as well.’ In spite of the clammy heat, Lurien shivered in self-righteous indignation. ‘It’s been months now since we left Briomdar. Vanglyr has been wed to Lágethé’s spirit all that time, fortifying his position, winning the support of the houses.’

‘He was the tyrant of the azydrazor and the raidlord. He already had their support, my prince.’

‘No, he feared me. And the strength of Lágethé’s house. That’s why he didn’t just kill me.’

Éodrain shook his head and turned away, watching the forest slide slowly by.

‘Besides,’ Lurien went on, ‘I’m not sure that the Cueth’ene actually value Deepgrove’s life as much as Mahbòr seems to think they do. She seemed rather… broken to me. Nothing to compare to a relic of Gealrachi, anyway.’

‘If you think the sylvaneth aren’t interested in what we have to trade, then what are we doing here?’

‘I’m still thinking about it.’

Éodrain let out a long sigh.

‘It is not far now, Lord Éodrain,’ said Swordfern, her voice creaking back down the marching line of dryads and aelves.

‘You said that an hour ago,’ Éodrain muttered.

Lurien barely heard the akhelian’s words himself, and would have thought them too softly spoken for the branchwraith at the head of the column to hear, but her hearing was keen even by aelven standards.

‘How much of your ocean could you traverse in that time?’ she said.

‘I would not,’ said Éodrain. ‘I would know better.’

Lurien put a hand on Éodrain’s shoulder to quiet him, but his retainer’s sleeve was wet and clammy, the mail hot, and both aelves recoiled from the contact.

‘Perhaps a brief rest would be welcome,’ said Lurien.

‘Not here,’ said Swordfern, pointing a long, multijointed finger into the forest to Lurien’s right. ‘The jungles of Coryza are scant days from here.’

Lurien’s hand twitched towards the hilt of his Elgaenite sword. ‘Are we in danger?’

‘Always,’ said Swordfern, nodding stiffly towards Lurien’s half-drawn sword. ‘But not as you think. The forest is wary. It is constantly ready for war.’

Éodrain looked around nervously.

As soon as Swordfern’s back was turned, Lurien finished drawing the blade. The pearl finish glittered wetly under the green filtering of the forest canopy. He focused his attention on the way ahead.

There was no clear path through the wood that he could see, but nor had he seen the trees overtly moving aside to make way for Swordfern and her kin. The path simply existed where they walked, and did not further ahead of them or behind. What that implied for Lurien’s later return to Dwy-Hor should he, for whatever reason, need to do so without the good will of the sylvaneth, he did not know. He had not come all this way to antagonise the Cueth’ene, but he did not like the idea of depending on their friendship should the need to escape arise. They were fickle and strange, and though Mahbòr had insisted that the sylvaneth treasured the lives of their own above all earthly considerations, it did not negate the fact that the sylvaneth simply did not think as aelves thought. Who could say what tiny slight, some unconsidered affectation of lukewarm blood and soft flesh, might offend them?

Mopping his brow, Lurien turned fully in his saddle to where the teglai snail dragged itself mulishly after the archers and fangmoras, its enormous conical shell scraping through the hanging branches, the cargo stowed in its heavy netting tinkling dully. Even the slime trail it left behind seemed to vanish into the wood. Tidecaster Filenduil lay silent in his wain, barring the occasional cough and sniffle. The old aelf seemed to be holding himself awake by willpower alone. Lurien would not be relying on the tidecaster for an expeditious exit should one be required.

A rustle in the tangle of branches made him frown upwards.

He assured himself it was the teglai.

It was the heat that bothered Éodrain, because his retainer was a simple aelf and preferred equally simple explanations for his spite. Lurien, however, had noticed something else to trouble him more.

The silence.

With the exception of the great trees and the lesser plant life of the undergrowth, the forest was almost deserted. There were no foraging animals on the ground, no birds hopping branch to branch or disturbing the canopy, no creatures squirrelling up and down the trees. It was a green space, jealous and draped in the heraldry to match, a dominion of plants, great trees and the sylvaneth that tended to them, a verdant hierarchy in devotion to the Radiant Queen. Creatures such as the idoneth deepkin had no place here, and the very air served to remind them of that fact.

They called it the Realm of Life.

It was simply not their kind of life.

As Lurien pondered that, he noticed Urael swimming back from the front of the column, a javelin resting against one shoulder and one hand on the belt thong that held his butcher’s adze. His muscular upper torso glistened with sweat, his chest rising and falling like the heart throb of a jellyfish.

‘What is it?’ Lurien asked, eyeing the sylvaneth over the namarti’s shoulder, but the dryads seemed to be trooping onwards with the same unspoken singularity of purpose that they had exhibited since their arrival in Ghyran proper. ‘Is something the matter?’

The big namarti shrugged, raising the javelin an impressive distance in so doing.

‘Namaríel told me to be here. So I’m here.’

‘Did she ask you to tell me anything?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

Lurien felt himself deflate. He was not sure exactly what he had been hoping for, but something. After Dwy-Hor he had definitely been expecting something. After all, was this not what she had wanted all along, a faithful and besotted akhelian king who would bring her the Jade Throne?

‘You want me to go back?’ said Urael.

‘No. What would be the point?’

‘Thank you, my prince,’ said Urael, readjusting the sit of his javelin on his shoulder and turning to match his stride to Venom’s sluggish gait. ‘It’s too hot to be swimming backwards and forwards. You’d think the ethersea would be cooling, but it’s not.’

‘When did you start calling me “my prince”?’

‘I don’t know. After the Esurien Cape, I think.’

‘Well, stop. Éodrain doesn’t, and I think you’ve earned the privilege if he has.’

Somewhere in the forest a twig snapped. The forest folk stopped so abruptly that Venom almost slithered into the back of one. Lurien hauled back on the reins, but it was as much Urael’s hand on the bridle that woke the fangmora to her master’s command. As one, the dryads’ gnarled and scratched faces turned in the direction of Coryza. Lurien felt his body go cold, and he angled his sword to the same facing.

‘What is it?’ he hissed.

‘I don’t know,’ said Urael, and from a namarti that was a chilling admission. ‘It’s the trees, I think. They talk to one another, and move in strange ways. I can’t sense anything beyond the trail.’

With his sword still positioned to ward against an imagined threat from Coryza, Lurien turned towards the front of the column. ‘Swordfern!’ he yelled, but before the branchwraith could even turn around, a bovine cry split the air, followed by a mouldy javelin that tore through the screening vegetation and thunked into the heartwood of a dryad.

The impaled forest spirit staggered a few steps as though drunk, and then crashed into the leaf mould. Her sisters issued a collective shriek of grief and rage that forced Lurien to decide between holding on to his sword or covering his ears, and he chose the latter. He let Nael’s sword impale the ground, just as a score of heavily muscled beastmen pushed through the treeline and onto the path.

They were huge creatures with the height of an aelf and twice the mass in brawn. They were armed with a mix of rusty hatchets and mouldering spears, and clad in bone-studded leather cuirasses and greaves. Their fur was mangy where it showed under their armour. Eyes the colour of sour milk stared madly from toothless skulls. Their horns were rotten through and crumbling. How they even stood up Lurien could not say, but after his ecounter with the blightkings of Coryza, he was not about to doubt their ability to fight.

The grief-wail of the forest folk built into a harrowing war-shriek, and Swordfern sprang onto a spear-armed beastman, a single swipe of her clawed hands ripping the creature from groin to throat and spraying the forest floor with its guts. Without any abatement to their war-song, her sisters launched themselves after her into the beastherd. The willowy bodies of the forest folk had not been built for violence, but their souls were hard, their territorial hatred singular, and it was difficult in that moment to conceive another use for those whiplike talons than to rip open leather armour and beastman flesh. The beastmen, however, had very much been built for violence. Their bodies were strong and their bones were thick, and after a few moments of bloody savagery a third of the forest folk were down, the beastmen standing over them torn to ribbons but honking in rabid defiance.

‘Back!’ yelled Namaríel, pulling the namarti reavers away as the beastmen’s weight of muscle drove their melee further into the forest trail. With silent discipline, the reavers drew into a cordon around the teglai and the two fangmoras and nocked arrows to their bowstrings. Namaríel exchanged her whisperbow for a shortsword. ‘Defend your king. Do not loose unless they attack.’

Lurien drew his secondary sword, the old Briomdain hellsabre, with a flourish. ‘Loose a volley on my order. Then, Éodrain, you ride with me.’

‘What?’ said Namaríel.

‘What?’ Éodrain echoed.

‘We’re lost in this wood without the sylvaneth, so we’re going to aid them any way we can before they’re overrun.’

Namaríel stared at him, open-mouthed, as if stunned by this open countermanding of her authority, and then laughed, a high-pitched cackle that ran through Lurien like the back end of a knife. ‘You hope to win over the Cueth’ene with your heroism? As you did Elgaen? I should have suspected as much. But the sylvaneth do not care what passes beyond their forests, any more than we care what happens beyond our oceans. Why not petition the stormclaimed or the nighthaunt of the Gawlic sultanes to lend us their soldiers while you are at it?’

‘If they were here right now and in need of my sword, believe me, I would.’

‘Save your strength for our own battles. We are close to the Cueth’ene hearthglade. Their own warriors will not be far.’

‘I’ll not be betting my neck on being almost there,’ growled Éodrain, drawing his own akhelian blade. ‘I am with you, Lurien. Let us spit these Chaos dogs.’

With a grin at his retainer’s bloodlust, Lurien raised his blade, waiting for some optimal moment that he trusted his subconscious to recognise before slashing it down and yelling.

‘Loose!’

Thirty-nine whisperbows spoke in silence, black shafts tearing through the brawling beastmen and felling several.

‘Again!’

Arrows were nocked. Strings pulled taut.

‘Loose!’

A second volley punched through the beastherd. Arrows thudded into leathery flesh. Fluid sores burst. Armoured beastmen suddenly resembled spinefish, so studded were they with shafts. This time, however, not a single beastman went down. They had been unprepared for the first volley, and though it had been a matter of moments before it and the second, it had been time enough for the beastmen to divert their attention from the sylvaneth and shield vulnerable eyes and mouths with the armoured parts of their bodies.

‘Namarti, hold,’ Lurien yelled, brandishing his sword anew. ‘Éodrain, with me.’ He kicked Venom with his heel spurs to goad the torpid fangmora into a charge. Her long neck twisted towards him, her jaw flopping stupidly to taste the air. ‘And they tell me Túrach trains the most obedient warbeasts in the Gulch.’

‘My prince!’ Éodrain yelled, and Lurien looked up from his mount to see a dozen beastmen barrelling towards his position. There was a hiss as thirty-nine namarti reavers simultaneously drew long knives from their belt sheaths.

‘Tyrion turns his blind eyes to me, and always at the blackest hour!’ Lurien dismounted. ‘Charge!’ He sprang forwards even as he screamed the order, stealing a foot on his warriors and swinging his sword back to strike. With the senses of his skin and his ears, he felt the approach of another blade through the ethersea. He bent back, forward momentum pushing him on through the ethersea and under the blow, his own sword reversing to cut back across the beastman’s belly. He straightened, parrying another heavy blow without needing to see it. His sword whipped up into a high guard, an overhead blow crushing into the blade and knocking him back before sliding off the angle of his guard.

A beastman of particularly obscene strength and diseased ugliness heaved the blade end of a maul out of the ground where Lurien’s block had sent it. The weapon’s lumpen head had been inscribed with vile runes and gleamed with a sheen of luminescent slime. Black earth fell away from the ensorcelled blade as it came free, mosses and leaf mould even in this enchanted forest shrivelling from the metal’s touch. The beastlord snorted, a caustic mist blowing from its pierced nostrils. The leather of its armour had split where it had been forced to contend with the beast’s physical deformities and swollen musculature, and its goatlike beard was strung with bells.

Lurien took a horrified kick back before bringing his sword up to guard again.

‘Perhaps I really am the finest sword in Briomdar.’

The beastlord howled its challenge, but Urael tackled it through the chest before it could attack. The two brawlers crashed to the floor together, one in water, one in air, kicking and biting at one another as they rolled. Lurien moved further into the melee. A blade flashed across the corner of his eye. Countless hours of humiliation in the sparring chambers of the azydrazor flashed through his mind, moving his sword almost as he was aware of it. The blades came together with a stinging clang, his sword and a beastman’s axe shredding down Venom’s mail. The oversized fangmora had apparently followed him into the battle, but the blow to her chest finally roused her. The asglir creature hissed annoyance, mouth opened wide, and lunged for the beastman’s head, swallowing it as far down as the chest and its axe arm to the elbow. Lifting the still-kicking beastman from the floor, Venom shook her prey violently from side to side, unintentionally sending Lurien sprawling in the process.

‘Fishbrained beast,’ Lurien swore as the fangmora swallowed the beastman warrior whole.

Collecting his sword from the ground, he looked up.

Everywhere he turned was bedlam. Beastmen stood over the remains of forest folk and hacked them to flindered bark and strings of pulpy white flesh. Groups of namarti duelled with massive bestigors, aelven grace and skill finding itself pitted in a horrendous mismatch against the beastmen’s brute strength and savagery. He saw Urael stagger from his duel, bluish blood smearing the side of his head, before throwing himself onto another beastman’s back. As the two fighters fell to the floor together, Lurien spotted Swordfern. Blood dripped from the woody ridges of her spine as she fended off three beastmen at once with raking talons and iron blade.

With a winded cry, he swam towards her, catching his foot on a root that had been concealed under a corpse’s cloak and driving his hellsabre through a beastman’s calf instead of its back. The blade erupted from the warrior’s shin and sank six inches into the soil. The beastman lowed in pain and tried to turn but found itself hobbled. Unbalanced, it fell sideways with a howl of agony, the fall tearing the wound in its leg even wider. Meanwhile, Swordfern took full advantage of Lurien’s intervention to rip out a second beastman’s throat with her claws before running through the stomach of the third with her sword, slopping the diseased remnants of its last meal onto the earth as she twisted the blade and pulled it free.

‘You came to my aid,’ she said, surprised, after helping Lurien to finish off the beastman he had pinned.

‘I’m new to this part of the Green Gulch,’ Lurien panted, pulling himself up. ‘But I would like for us to be friends.’

‘If only my own took their responsibilities as seriously.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

But the branchwraith’s attention had already turned back to her embattled sisters.

‘More come from the forest,’ yelled a voice, and it took Lurien a moment to realise it belonged to Éodrain. He sought the akhelian out and found him dismounted by the side of his slumbering steed, like a dragon knight from an eolas imprint in his polished mail, elaborate surcoat and three-winged helm. Even as he found his retainer, however, Lurien saw the foliage being ripped – or simply rotted – aside, more beastmen in a medley of armaments bulling through, heralded by pox flies and braying prayers, banged drums and discordant chimes.

‘I could wish never to see another worshipper of Nurgle in my life,’ said Lurien.

‘You have that luxury,’ said Swordfern. ‘The Gulch Empress will fight over her lost domains to the last maggot.’ The ground beneath them shuddered as she spoke, and the branchwraith looked up in apparent confusion before something like understanding reworked her features. ‘Stay back,’ she said. The beastlord of this second wave, mantled in pox-scarred human hide and a helm derived from the skull of some horned beast, emerged from the haze of decaying plant matter. In one fist it raised a fly-covered icon. Its lips were pierced by iron ringlets and a dribbling censer swung from its pointed chin, shrouding its torso in malefic fumes. The earth trembled a second time.

‘Get down!’ Swordfern sang.

Six feet of spear exploded from the beastlord’s ribcage even as Swordfern dragged Lurien back and to the ground.

The Chaos champion looked down at the wedge of white metal, lowing pathetically as it was hoisted from the ground, a twelve-foot titan of thick, iron-studded bark and dark knothole eyes striding from the tree cover with the huge spear in one hand. A hand like a gargant’s broom swatted a beastman from his path. Lifted it. Broke it. Smashed it against a tree. Then, with deep patience and horrifying daintiness, ignoring utterly the beastmen scrabbling about its age-gnarled roots, the treelord formed forefinger and thumb from its branchlike talons to pluck the still-squirming beastlord from the tip of his spear. Then he made a fist.

Blood sprayed from between the giant’s fingers in a welter of gore.

Lurien looked up, frozen in horror.

He had never seen blood shed so copiously, or with so little effort.

The treelord tossed the gory remains aside, then crushed a beastman brandishing a totem effigy of the Gulch Empress underfoot as it tried to flee. The treelord’s spear filled the still air with the burnt odour of power. Its long blade was a ripple of liquid starsilver, inconstant in shape and in length but for the flowing columns of aelf script and the teardrop-shaped hollow that ran through it. The haft was wood of a golden hue, almost as long as the treelord was tall, studded with pristine jewels, moonstone and white sapphire, and engraved with the old Eltharri words for ending and safekeeping. Even in the treelord’s hand, the weapon was huge, but Lurien suspected that that hollow would have made it light enough for an aelf to wield two-handed if he was particularly strong and able and aided by the buoyancy of water around him. Like a pike. Or something more exotic and lethal, like a hookweaver’s crultân. One look was enough for Lurien to know he was looking at a cythai blade. A relic of Gealrachi. Perhaps even a weapon of the old asur, a replica from the forges of Léiriú, created under Teclis’ ever-watchful eye.

It was Aeslecai. The Soultaker. Of that he was certain.

The longer he spent considering the weapon, the more his soul desired it, even as a sweep of that ancient spear carved the beastherd into two screaming halves.

Those that could flee and those that could now die.

Lurien swallowed and looked up as Swordfern threw back her head and screamed. To Lurien it sounded as if all of Ghyran united in a howl of vengeance as the branchwraith started towards the treeline, her few surviving sisters dropping onto all fours like simian predators to tear off after the broken beastherd.

The approaching treelord stayed them with a wave of his hand and a groan of sylvan-speak.

‘You would let them live?’ Swordfern hissed, and Lurien noted how she had reverted to the language of the Ionrach, that they might all note her displeasure.

‘For now, Swordfern. For now,’ the ancient creaked. ‘Gather your kin. Return with me to the hearthgrove. When sap again runs cold and the song of the Radiant Queen is clear in your thoughts once more, then you may hunt the beasts of Coryza to the borders of their own woods as you desire.’

‘Their own–?’ Swordfern began to protest, before another rumbling groan from the treelord silenced her.

‘We have guests, daughter of jade.’ The treelord’s knotholes tightened as he turned to regard Lurien. ‘Where is the Child of the Deepgrove?’

‘The sea-king sends this aelf ahead to negotiate the price of her return.’ Without tearing her gaze from the earth, Swordfern gestured to Lurien.

The treelord took another earth-shuddering step, and then, turning the liquid blade tip of Aeslecai point down, doused his spear’s brilliance in the loam between his huge splayed feet. ‘I am Kua’thor,’ he said. ‘Shield Warden of the Queen’s Wood.’

Lurien stared at the spear jutting out of the ground.

He had never desired anything more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘We are here,’ said Swordfern, raising a hand to gesture dismissively to the surrounding trees.

At first Lurien wondered if the branchwraith was again being loose with her concept of distance, for there was nothing to differentiate where they were from the path that had come before it. The trees loomed as close and high as ever, the air beneath their tangled canopies trapped and thick with cloying odours. With a weary sigh, he looked up, hoping to surprise himself.

The fortress-arbour of Dwy-Hor had been a brooding hulk of silver-grey bark, as massive and ancient as any living being in the deeper oceans of the Green Gulch. Its gargantuan trunk had been blistered with tumescent growths, which served the idoneth as dwellings, and gleamed with the amber panes of windows. Its branches, meanwhile, had been ingrown to form terraces and gardens, where the malevolent flicker of deepspites wove about the claws of its leafless crown. He had been expecting something similar here. A stately elder sister, perhaps. The Lágethé to its Laramé. But there was nothing.

Just… more forest.

The one indication Lurien was given that they had, in fact, arrived somewhere came a few moments later. A small kin-group of dryads stepped out of a root thicket ahead of them. The undergrowth rustled with their passage, not because the forest folk were incapable of moving silently should they wish it, but rather because they explicitly did not wish it. The forest itself was as much a part of this welcome as the sylvaneth.

Swordfern and her kin-band moved ahead of the idoneth, and the two groups of sylvaneth came together. Dryads ran their talons over their sisters’ bark, murmuring in the creaking timbre of the sylvan tongue, a language far less alien to Lurien than the physical syntax that seemed to complement it. A dryad’s touch lingered on the torn bark on Swordfern’s chest. The branchwraith emitted a grieving song like that of wind-wearied branches, and the dryad seemed to diminish in her embrace. A mournful note entered the Life song of the glade. Until that point, Lurien had almost stopped listening to it, in much the same way that one who lived all his life by the ocean did not need to marvel each day at its splendour, but the sudden dissonance in the rhythm made him hark to it anew. It was a new verse to a cyclically unchanging song, a melody of mourning and grief, for enemies unslain and lives cut down before their prime.

Lurien felt an unwelcome sting in his eyes, and unconsciously wiped away a tear. He stared at his glistening fingertip in dismay, then looked up to find Éodrain similarly afflicted.

‘My eyes,’ said the akhelian. ‘I think they are bleeding.

Lurien rubbed the moisture between forefinger and thumb, then tasted it on the tip of his tongue. ‘Saltwater.’

‘They call the ocean from our eyes.’ Éodrain pulled his collar even further out of shape to wipe the streaming liquid from his cheeks. ‘What tree witchery is this?’

Lurien looked up to see that the rest of his small army suffered as he and his retainer did. Filenduil sobbed quietly in his sickly half-sleep. Only the eyeless namarti seemed to be spared the strange tears. Nevertheless, a few of those shuddered as they struggled to contain the alien emotions, and Namaríel, he noted, was amongst them. The woman had shown herself to be unusually sensitive to mood-altering magicks, and she stood now with arms crossed over her breast, chest practically heaving with a forest’s grief.

He longed to go to her, to comfort her in some way he knew not how, but even Venom had been afflicted by the air of melancholy and refused to move despite Lurien’s direst threats.

‘Weep not, daughters of Alarielle,’ rumbled Kua’thor, his unhurried stride bearing him easily beyond the grieving dryads. The Shield Warden of the Queen’s Wood walked with his weapon drawn, not because there was some threat he feared here in the Cueth’ene hearthglades but because he wore no accoutrement on his gnarled trunk in which to sheathe it. The long spear blade rippled like quicksilver, the aelf runes fixed within its fluid form sparking fitfully in the forested twilight. The occasional forest spite braved its killing halo to play amidst the sparks, the spirits gaily shifting in form and colour as they orbited the ancient treelord and his mighty blade. ‘I remember when this realm was naught but endless marsh,’ he groaned. ‘Nothing grew here then. Nothing but the flies and grubs of Nurgle, gifts to capture the heart of the Radiant Queen. Now it is green. The seeds of your sisters will not know such a world again.’

Swordfern straightened, pushing her sister from her embrace. ‘Small comfort, warden.’

‘Only because you know no better.’

‘It would ease their spirits better to know that we have driven the worms of Coryza into the ground.’

Lurien glanced at the branchwraith, then turned back to Kua’thor. ‘Why have you not?’

‘We will,’ said Kua’thor. ‘When the season comes.’

‘Coryza’s strength waxes again,’ said Lurien. ‘Even in the courts of the deepkin we speak of it, and it is dire tidings indeed that interest my people enough to discuss. I have raided the Gulch Empress’ city myself.’ Swordfern looked at him in surprise. He pretended not to see. ‘I have seen for myself how her power has grown.’

Kua’thor emitted a long groan, the sound of deep strength and infinite patience. ‘Short are the lives of aelves. Shorter yet those of the deepkin. You speak of things you cannot know. You cannot know how mighty Karivinya once was, how every tree in Ghyran once trembled to her footstep.’

‘All the more reason to strike at her now,’ Swordfern hissed. ‘While she is still weak. We should make common cause with the deepkin enclaves on our borders and wipe her from our lady’s realm.’

Lurien had been waiting for such a request, implicit or otherwise. He affixed his least bloodless smile and bowed his head to the branchwraith. ‘Once I am crowned king of Briomdar, you could, of course, count on my fullest support.’

The branchwraith nodded her gratitude, too frustrated to answer in kind.

‘We will strike,’ said Kua’thor, his tone measured and unchanged, ‘when the season comes.’

‘And when will it come?’ Lurien asked.

‘When it comes.’

Without a further word, the treelord strode on, the tremors of his footsteps bringing yellow leaves and ripened fruits falling from the branches overhead. Urael bent to pick one from the ground. He turned it over in his big hand before taking a bite from its dark red flesh. He turned to Lurien, juice running down the sides of his face, and nodded.

‘We are not here for the food,’ said Lurien.

‘It’s delicious, my prince.’

‘I should think so,’ said Éodrain. ‘I have known akhelian lords who would trade a thousand souls for a single bushel of Cueth’ene fruit.’

‘In that case, stop eating them and gather as many as you can.’ Lurien pointed to the fruit lying untended on the ground. ‘We will sell them in the markets of Guethen. If anyone has a thousand souls to spare, it’s Galrohir.’ He kicked his spurs into Venom’s flanks. The fangmora startled, but at least now consented to move, eeling forwards with Éodrain and his mount close on his tail.

Swordfern appeared to be waiting for him. The branchwraith and her sisters milled in the middle of the trail, as if some potent summons drew on them, only to find the dryads loathe to hasten their sister’s grief-song. Even for a spirit as venerable as Kua’thor clearly was.

‘I appreciate your words, Prince Lurien,’ said Swordfern as he rode near. ‘It reassures me to know that I am not alone in thinking them. It makes me think I am not mad.’ The dryad straightened to her full, swaying height, branchlike antlers and long claws willowing in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘But it is not for me to speak of such things. It is neither the place nor the season.’

‘Follow,’ Kua’thor intoned.

The ancient’s huge stride had already carried him some distance into the trees, and at the rumbling timbre of his voice, the dryads stiffened as though they were powerless to disobey. From what Lurien knew of the sylvaneth, that was probably the case. Namaríel swam up behind Lurien as the idoneth’s column slowed to accommodate the forest folk. The long-healed skin that covered her eyes was a purple-blue, lines spidering through the cold beauty that surrounded them.

‘I saw what you tried to do,’ she said.

Lurien smiled. ‘It was almost too easy.’

‘The Everqueen herself weeps over these glades,’ she said. ‘And you would take advantage.’

‘To make myself king, and you a queen, I’d gladly tell an enemy what she most wanted to hear. What’s wrong with you?’

‘Even before the grief of the gods, you know no shame.’

‘Ignorance is bliss.’

‘A lesson I somehow doubt Teclis passed down to the cythai.’

Lurien grinned. ‘I suspect there was quite a lot he kept to himself, my love.’

‘Would a prince make his betrothed walk while he rode?’

She presented her hand.

Lurien squirmed in the saddle before finally laying his fingertips across hers.

Their chaste and fleeting contact sent a flame of passion along his fingers. At the same time he tensed, half expecting the namarti to pull him from the saddle for the amusement of the reavers and sylvaneth alike. But as she and Lurien hooked fingertips and she climbed gracefully into the saddle in front of him, he realised that he knew her better than that.

A revenge as petty and fleeting as that was beneath her.

‘My prince is gracious,’ she said. And then, ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

Lurien kicked his heel into Venom’s ribs and with one hand, the other hovering chastely over Namaríel’s shoulder, jigged the reins after the tail of Éodrain’s beast. The fangmora hissed, but the hard regime of the Túrach embailors had left her with no outlet for her annoyance but obedience. After a moment’s resistance, she moved.

Tree after tree dragged by, almost hypnotic in their regularity and sameness. They called to mind the meditation exercises in which Lágethé had attempted to instruct him, and with which Namaríel had, if only briefly, been genuinely impressed. He muttered a few half-hearted mantras, but what came easily in the crushing depths of Briomdar took more effort than he was accustomed to giving here. Sensation was everywhere, emotion never far beneath the surface. The air was too stiflingly hot. Namaríel a discomforting and distracting presence in his lap. The patient whalesong of the trees an unnerving pressure against his ears, a nagging constant in his soul. Even those trees, for all their interchangeability, had unique qualities that became apparent when one’s mind was starved of stimulation elsewhere. The girth of the trunks, the colour and age of the mosses and ivy that grew on them, the spread of their branches.

As his focus deepened, he realised that while there remained no evidence of cultivation or habitation as an idoneth would recognise it, he could hear a difference in the Life song. A chorus of contralto singers had joined the bass ensemble. The collective sound brought Lurien out in goosebumps, though his accursed soul had no way of understanding its meaning. On sensing that change, he began to see it, as though scales of his own mental creation had been drawn from his eyes.

Individual dryads emerged from curtains of undergrowth or crouched on the ends of branches to sing their part of the greeting before being absorbed back into the forest, their numbers impossible to gauge. Lurien redoubled his attempts to spy any sign of sylvaneth dwellings, but again found nothing. He wondered if he had underestimated the differences between his people and his hosts. They were, in essence, sentient trees, or spirits thereof, sap and heartwood encased in silvery bark. Did they need shelter, or rest? Perhaps they lived free in the forest, like the spites, answering only to the seasons as the idoneth answered to the tides.

Realising that his efforts at meditation had been more effective than he had expected, Lurien blinked himself back to a more immediate point of focus.

He looked up to the towering form of Kua’thor, the treelord ancient continuing to lead them deeper into the Cueth’ene hearthglades, his spear blazing like a beacon lamp for every mothlike spite and timeless sentience within a hundred leagues.

‘I wonder how old he is,’ Lurien mused.

‘Who?’ said Namaríel after a time, pointedly observing their silence a moment longer.

‘The treelord, Kua’thor.’

Namaríel looked ahead to where the ancient strode, disturbing the lower branches over the trail with his height. ‘I know you well enough to know that you have no interest in Kua’thor, or his age.’

‘Well, you are mistaken. He interests me a great deal.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve failed to notice the spear he carries?’

‘Aeslecai. Yes. I have noticed.’

‘Kua’thor rather seems to have made it his own. What are the chances, do you think, that he would surrender a weapon like that for one outcast dryad?’

Namaríel turned in the saddle until she was facing him. ‘Whatever you are thinking, forget it. Whatever madness Mahbòr suffers with, he seems to like you. You are this close to receiving the blessing of Dwy-Hor. Don’t ruin that now because things look difficult.’

‘I didn’t say I was thinking of giving up, did I?’

‘Follow Mahbòr’s instruction and see where it leads us. The last time you decided to be impulsive, you led us to Coryza.’

‘An expedition whose benefits outweighed its costs.’

‘Elgaen and a pet tidecaster in exchange for one dead prince.’

Lurien shifted uncomfortably. ‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that.’

‘Well, hopefully we will not need to resort to such measures to earn Dwy-Hor’s allegiance, because in case it has escaped your notice–’ she gave Lurien’s shoulder a push to emphasise her meaning, ‘–we are down to our last prince.’

‘I’m not being impulsive. I am thinking.’

Namaríel snorted and turned back around.

Ahead of them, Kua’thor came to a lurching stop.

The forest folk slowed, bidding the aelves in their charge to tread ethersea as the treelord spread his arms to the forest and issued a juddering groan. It was the sound of a horn eighteen feet in height and carved from living timbers, the sound a mighty oak might make if hands existed that were powerful enough to wring the air from its bark.

The cry was still echoing from the forest when the trees flanking them began to thrash and sway, appearing for all the world to bow their canopies as first one, then two, then three great treelords of the Cueth’ene strode to Kua’thor’s side. It was as though all had converged on this inauspicious place, at this specific time, by chance. Simply by their own presence, the noble spirits transformed the innocuous glade into an arena for an assembral – or a moot, as the sylvaneth referred to a meeting of their elders. Lurien looked up as, despite the whispered assurances of Swordfern and her sisters, the namarti reavers drew nervously back from the gathering giants.

Like the trees themselves, Lurien could see that the treelords, while similar at a glance, were each different. One was tall and willowy, its knotholes narrow and set stupendously high, so that it was forced to squint down at aelves and sylvaneth alike. Another was thicker of trunk, branch arms stiff, its bark encrusted with the hard shell-like growths of lichens. The third stood somewhere between the two, its heartwood mottled with the scar tissue of old diseases, one knothole scratched, the bark down one side of its girth blackened as though by fire. Lurien felt that the last lord must hail from the lands bordering the plague kingdoms of Coryza. All were mighty, and yet none quite rivalled the imperiousness of Kua’thor. It was clear that these spirits of the forest possessed a hierarchy, and the Shield Warden of the Queen’s Wood was at its top. Kua’thor strode between those lesser treelords, who bent at the approximate position of knees as the ancient raised his spear, turned it point down and plunged it into the stump of a long-felled tree.

Light blazed from the stricken stump, rinsing every scrap of shadow from the forest glade and bringing despairing cries from the idoneth, who had long since forsaken the light of their maker. Éodrain fell from the saddle as though punched by a lance, rolling on the ground and covering his eyes. Even Filenduil was roused from his torpor to scream. Lurien buried his face in the material of Namaríel’s cloak, colour bursts of visual pain crashing against his eyelids like a tidal wave from the white oceans of Léiriú.

‘The power of the kings and queens, that spear holds,’ Lurien cried. ‘It is incredible.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Namaríel. ‘I see nothing.’

Lurien did not reply, but the pain in his eyes brought a quiet satisfaction that the dead spoke to him for a change and not to her. The cythai reserved their greatest revelations for their true-souled children, and, as though faced with a puzzle whose solution had become clear, all again seemed right with the realms.

The radiance sank back into the forest, drawn in through roots and stoma, a dewy portion remaining to glimmer from leaves and grey bark, and from the heartwood of the sylvaneth, who now encircled the glade.

Kua’thor stomped slowly back the way he had come, Aeslecai a single point of brilliance half-buried in the dead wood of the stump. Blinking the spots from his eyes, Lurien forced his gaze away from it as the treelord ancient came to stand before him.

‘Come, guests from the green ocean,’ said Kua’thor, gesturing hither with crooked talons the length of Lurien’s hellsabre. ‘Come, foes who may in time yet become friends. Come forwards.’

Lurien shared a look with Éodrain and the now startlingly lucid Filenduil, then took a deep breath and reluctantly swam ahead. He was unfamiliar with the Cueth’ene clan’s customs, but he lowered himself to one knee.

The treelords grumbled amongst themselves, apparently approving.

‘You have come for the weapon for Mahbòr,’ said Kua’thor.

‘In exchange for your lost daughter,’ said Lurien, head bowed.

‘She is no daughter of ours,’ said the disease-scarred spirit in a voice like cracking nuts.

‘She is the Child of the Deepgrove,’ said another.

‘Taken from our nursery groves as a soulpod,’ said the third.

‘But her heartwood is Cueth’ene,’ said Kua’thor, and then to Lurien, ‘and yet, Mahbòr’s crime is one not lightly forgiven. It is not to be rewarded, nor undone with the return of his great weapon.’

‘The sea has only been peaceful since it was taken,’ one argued.

‘The Everqueen demands the conquest of Dwy-Hor,’ growled the Coryzan spirit.

Lurien thought back to the beach where he and Swordfern’s folk had come ashore, the great mass of greenery threatening to overspill the coastline and claim the sea. If the Radiant Queen gained a foothold in Dwy-Hor, would she ever be removed? Would she be content with her forest enclave in the shallows, or would she spread until the hidden floor of her realm was green with the same life that enveloped its continents? Alarielle. Archaon. Nagash. Could the idoneth ever be truly hidden again? With a shrug, Lurien decided that these were wars for distant heirs and aelves with crowns already on their heads, and lifted his gaze to meet Kua’thor’s knotholes.

‘I am not Mahbòr,’ he said. ‘Can we not begin on that basis?’

A gruff shudder of sylvan-speak passed between the gathered treelords. It went on for several minutes before a wave of Kua’thor’s huge hand sent a shiver through the watching folk.

‘Good,’ said Kua’thor. ‘Good. Good.’

Silver-barked dryads carrying bronze trays laden with fruits and nuts and tall ewers of wine walked into the glade. They spread out amongst the idoneth, offering repast. Urael took one of the abundant red-skinned fruits in each hand. A spindle-limbed dryad with a smattering of coppery leaves passed Lurien a cup and filled it with sweet-smelling wine. Despite the creature’s hag-like features and stiff-bodied movements, he was unpleasantly reminded of the namarti conch girl that had waited on him at his coronation assembral. He looked down, strangely embarrassed by his own past self. The cup in his hands had been shaped from the seed coat of a large nut. An amber liquid half-filled it, scattered with red and yellow seeds.

‘The duardin clans of the Dourfold taught us the brewing of naluewka,’ said Kua’thor, ‘in exchange for knowledge of the spirit paths to the sea. Many, many hundreds of years ago now. Before the coming of Chaos and the rise of Coryza. When the Dourfold still lived. And when there were friends across the sea with whom to trade.’ The treelord issued a deep, grieving sigh. ‘How long has it been since a cask of Dourfold was uncorked for a guest?’

‘Almost ninety years,’ said the willow-tall treelord. And then, after a long pause, added, ‘Mahbòr.’

The other three treelords, Kua’thor included, grumbled in discontent.

Lurien smiled stickily, keen to intercept this change of mood. He swirled the sweet naluewka in his cup. ‘What, then, is this for, noble lords? A toast? A libation to each other’s gods?’

‘It is for drinking, Prince Lurien,’ said Kua’thor.

‘I am… honoured.’

‘Long has it been the custom of the Cueth’ene when welcoming a new friend. It is the first offering, a token of trust, the soil in which green shoots may prosper.’

Lurien glanced down at the syrupy liquid in his cup. ‘Perhaps my dear friend Éodrain would care to join me in a cup?’ He waved again for the dryad who had served him.

‘I would not want to rob you of the honour, my prince,’ the akhelian called back, keeping his arms firmly crossed over his chest.

‘But–’

‘Drink the damned drink,’ Namaríel hissed, behind him.

Lurien deflated. ‘Vomiting over the elder grove of the Cueth’ene doesn’t seem very diplomatic,’ he whispered back.

‘Just do it.’

With a grimace, Lurien lifted the cup in toast to Kua’thor and his fellow treelords, then brought it to his lips. Forcing his throat to unclench, he threw the cup’s contents into his mouth. He gagged. It was sticky, and mind-blastingly sweet, infused with a dozen floral odours that assailed his senses at once. It was as though he were attempting to swallow a distillate of springtime. He made himself swallow, coughing wretchedly as he looked up, only to choke in astonishment as Kua’thor split in two. He blinked. The two treelords blurred as they drifted apart.

‘Wha…?’

He turned towards Namaríel, but fell sideways the moment his balance shifted. The cries of Urael and Éodrain sounded like the roar of a distant sea as they crashed over his head and swept him to oblivion.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lurien awoke with a groan, a stabbing pain in his ribs. His eyelids fluttered open, a ceiling of interwoven leaves and a syrupy odour welcoming him back to consciousness. Dappling sunlight illuminated a basket-like structure of wreathed branches that, judging by the occasional, sickening sensation of motion, was suspended some distance from the ground. Mossy curtains and brightly coloured toadstools decorated the curved walls. He was lying on a bed of some kind. It was prickly, but not uncomfortable. His head felt as though it had absorbed its own weight in mud, which had since hardened in the heat, and he turned it slowly against the pillow. The pale, haggard features of Filenduil frowned miserably down at him. The tidecaster’s eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with indigo rings. He withdrew something from Lurien’s side. The jab to the ribs had been Filenduil’s fingernails.

‘I hope Teclis finds you to curse you all over again, you old leech,’ Lurien said, his voice a dry whisper that he almost did not recognise as his own.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Mathlann, no!’

The tidecaster pursed his blued lips. ‘You look better.’

‘How long have I been unconscious?’

‘Almost an hour.’

‘An hour?’ Lurien attempted to struggle upright, only to think better of it as the weight of the realmsphere fell across his brow. His head spun as it sank back to the pillow. ‘You couldn’t have left me a little longer?’

‘We cannot afford to wait for you.’ Namaríel’s voice came from somewhere beyond the foot of the sylvaneth bed. ‘You are not the only one who suffers in this place.’

Filenduil clenched his jaw through a sneeze, settling back into something that Lurien could not see but which creaked like a chair. While Lurien, Éodrain and a few others carried small enchantments to continually replenish their ethersea, the tidecaster was the only one amongst them with the power to blanket the area fully, allowing their beasts to breathe and Lurien’s army to move freely. When his strength failed…

‘You have to negotiate the trade without me,’ Lurien said.

‘They want you,’ said Namaríel.

‘They should have considered that before poisoning me with their naluewka drink, shouldn’t they?’

Filenduil sniffed. ‘And we have nothing to give them.’

‘Can he swim?’ Namaríel asked the tidecaster.

‘I see nothing wrong with him.’ Filenduil placed his palms over his eyes and sighed. ‘I have done all I can, but I am no tru’heas.’

‘Perhaps we can pick up one of those in Dwy-Hor.’ Lurien dragged the hundredweight of his head from the bundle of soft roots that seemed to have been drawn from the floor as a pillow to regard Namaríel. She was clad in her shagreens, but had loosened the bodice and shed the cloak. ‘That is what we do, it seems. We accumulate the old and the stray from every enclave we pass.’

Spreading her hands along the foot of the root bed, Namaríel leant forwards. ‘If you prefer being stranded here to facing a little headache, then by all means, stay in bed.’

‘Let Éodrain do it. He can offer them whatever they want.’

‘Tell me you are joking.’

‘He’s akhelian. He’s my retainer. Tell Kua’thor that he may deal with him as though he deals with me.’

‘I would sooner–’

‘I understood that we had precious little time to argue,’ Lurien snapped. ‘Take Filenduil, fetch Éodrain, and get Mahbòr’s accursed spear.’

‘You seem to forget who is in charge here.’

‘No, I think I’m just remembering.’ Lurien did not know if it was the sensation of his skull being cracked open or the souls of Gealrachi that had just recently seared his eyes, but he was having something of an epiphany. ‘We are promised, and as the gods were our witness I will honour it, but from the moment you set me from my cage, your need for me became greater than mine for you.’

Namaríel’s grip on the bedrest tightened.

‘Now do as I command,’ Lurien snarled.

‘Yes, my prince.’

‘Have Éodrain insist they conduct the negotiation on the beach we arrived by. Have him say it’s symbolic or something.’

‘Why?’

‘Just make sure he does it. And Urael – is he nearby?’

Namaríel nodded, lips pursed.

‘Then send him in with food and saltwater.’ Lurien lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. ‘If it comes to it, he can carry me.’

Urael entered a short while after Namaríel and Filenduil had left. Lurien was not sure how. There were no breaks in the lattice of branches for doors or windows, leading Lurien to the conclusion that either he was still under the influence of the sylvan nectar or there was Life magic at work. The possibility that both could be true did not escape him either. The big namarti swam to his bedside bearing a tightly stoppered jug of pink nacre and shell and a large slice of fruit.

Lurien waved off the offered fruit, mildly annoyed at how enamoured the namarti seemed to be with it, and beckoned for the water. Urael passed him the jug. The long, winding neck was wound with flowing runes of Eltharri, the arcane language of the isharann. The script glowed in reflection of his true-soul as he held it, and he sensed the contents begin to shake. The water within had been bottled under the incredible pressures of the sea bottom, and only the isharann enchantments had kept the vessel from exploding before they had come within a mile of the surface. With the weakening of the bindings, saltwater squirted from the neck.

Lurien pulled the stopper and took a long swallow. It was effervescent and slightly stale, but the jug had been sealed in one of the mineral vents of Elgaen, and the salty, nacreous taste, not to mention the sudden head-freeze, was cleansing. He took another swallow, but the invigorating effects were less intense, the staleness more noticeable. Re-stoppering the jug, he handed it back to Urael. The runes on its neck dimmed again as it left his hand, the vessel ceasing to shake as the conditions of the deep ocean again prevailed over its contents.

‘Tell me, Urael,’ he said weakly, forcing the namarti to come low to hear. ‘Is she gone?’

‘Who?’

‘Namaríel, of course. Who else?’

‘Yes. After sending a reaver for Éodrain, she went straight to the elder grove to rouse Kua’thor.’

Lurien let out a long sigh. ‘Thank you, Urael. I feel much better now.’ A gentle shove through his wrists and ankles pushed him up from the bed. He rose to float about six feet above it before sinking back down again. The ethersea was thinner than it had been, sustained predominantly by his own personal enchantments now, rather than by Filenduil’s tide magic. It was not his imagination. Fighting off the wave of dizziness that came on a rush of blood to the head, he rolled himself upright.

Urael regarded him with his head cocked, as if to turn the maximum area of blind face towards his movements. ‘Namaríel told me you were too weak to get out of bed.’

‘It’s a miracle.’ Lurien looked around the gently swaying room, his vision eventually catching up to the movements of his head. ‘I am healed. Now, where are my weapons?’

Urael gestured to the pair of scabbards that leant against the wall, bejewelled hilts protruding from plain sheaths. The weapons did not feel the tidecaster’s magicks as a living idoneth did, and had to rest as earthbound objects did against a wall. He swam over and buckled them on. Having been unconscious for less than an hour, he was fortunately still in his armour.

‘Where are we going?’ Urael asked.

Lurien winced. ‘Not so loud.’

‘Where are we going?’

Ignoring the question, Lurien rested his hands on the pommel jewels of his swords and glared at the lattice wall. ‘You are namarti, Urael.’

‘Last I checked,’ he said with a faint smile.

‘Are your senses as keen as Namaríel’s?’

‘I don’t know. I’d say they’re keen enough.’

‘Are there any forest folk outside?’

‘What are we doing, my prince?’

‘Just answer the question.’

‘They’ve all travelled to the shore with the elder moot for the negotiation.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Kua’thor take his spear with him?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Good. Now… how do we get out of here?’

Urael folded his huge arms over his chest. ‘And go where?’

Lurien grinned wickedly. ‘We’re going to steal Aeslecai.’

‘Kua’thor’s spear?’

‘A Gealrachi spear,’ Lurien corrected. ‘The spear of my cythai ancestors.’

‘You think they won’t notice you taking it?’

‘The treelord left it sheathed in the elder glade. And their attention is elsewhere.’

‘For now. It’ll return quickly enough when the time comes for Kua’thor to escort us back to Dwy-Hor.’

‘Leave that to me.’

In truth, Lurien had not planned that far ahead, but he was confident that he could figure something out as they went. Lágethé had always despaired of his belief in his ability to talk or think his way out of any difficulty he might fall into, but it had not failed him yet. Laramé had been the wiser of the two sisters, for intelligence was invariably a trait cultivated by those of lesser power, and had instead encouraged him in his conviction – for there was no power that the gods could bestow greater than unshakeable confidence in oneself.

‘Does Namaríel know you are doing this?’ said Urael. ‘Because it will be her and Éodrain faced with four treelords if they discover us.’

A fact that had not slipped Lurien’s mind.

‘She said herself that I will have to face Vanglyr in battle sooner or later. If I’m going to beat him, I’ll need a weapon that can pierce ithilmhair plate. A weapon like that one.’

‘Mahbòr’s weapon.’

‘Leave that to me.’

Urael unlocked his arms from about his chest. ‘I think I understand how you ended up where you are.’

‘So, how do we leave this… thing?’

‘Just step through,’ said Urael.

‘No particular side?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Lurien eyed the wicker wall, noting the idle sway, the sound of leaves scratching outside, the creak of branches.

‘After you.’

Urael turned and stepped into the wall. An emerald bleed seeped through the woven sprigs until the namarti was liquid light, draining through the lattice, and then gone. Lurien shook his head and swam after him…

…emerging above a branch about twice the width of his shoulders and strengthened with iron bars. He pulled up short and looked behind him. Almost thirty feet away, a large spherical bird’s nest swayed. But there were no birds. Lurien grunted in surprise and relief. The emerald halo faded from his eyes.

‘That was…’

He did not try to finish. He had no words.

‘This way,’ said Urael.

The namarti swam along the branch, and Lurien followed, looking around in wonder as he went.

They were high above the forest floor here, though how high exactly Lurien could not say. He could see only a few score feet in any direction before his view was broken by branches or leaves. Many of the branches he could see were ironclad, like the one they followed now, almost akin to paved roads, branchways through the high treetops, though there was still no sign of the sylvaneth’s abodes. Even the bird’s nest that had accommodated him seemed to be the only one of its kind, conjured by the Life magic of the sylvaneth to fill an immediate need, and would probably soon be reclaimed by the forest once he was gone.

He looked more closely at the metal he swam across. It was strange. He could see no evidence of the sorcerous heat or the sculpting magicks that went into isharann metalworking, nor the marks of fire or tooling as humans and duardin understood the craft. It seemed truer to the properties of ironjaw workmanship, a blandishment with which he, on this occasion at least, meant no offence. It was beautiful, organic, wrapping the bark of the branch like a vine. There was a handmade quality that it shared with the products of the greenskins’ craft, as if the ore had been dug up and worked over root and branch over hundreds of years until the pure, gleaming element was ready to be moulded and set.

‘Don’t look down,’ Urael warned.

Lurien laughed. ‘I am swimming through ethersea. If I fall, I will swim back up again.’

The branch widened until it joined the trunk of a gargantuan tree. Even at their current altitude, it was wider than the great spire of Tor Mathlann at its base, and all the more impressive for being a living being beneath its cladding of bark and iron. A true colossus of Ghyran. Its great bulk was decorated with handholds, scores of ironwork branchways radiating from it into the neighbouring bowers. It had a voice in the Life song of the forest that belonged to it and it alone, sonorous and slow and heedless of the affairs of aelves. It spoke to Lurien as he might speak to the kelpgrass or krill of the ocean, which was to say that its words were not meant for him at all. The ability even to hear them was a gift reserved for those of aelven heritage, even those from as accursed a line as the deepkin.

From a long, vertical crack in the trunk, a sylvaneth stepped out from the tree and onto the branchway. It was another of Swordfern’s forest folk, stick-limbed and clad in silver-grey bark and bronze leaves, and of a height and width that was surely too great for her to have emerged from that aperture. Lurien regarded the great tree with renewed suspicion.

‘Prince Lurien,’ she said. ‘You are recovered.’

Lurien’s lips twitched, but he did not attempt to deny the obvious. ‘I thought all had gone to the water’s edge to witness the trade.’ He glanced at Urael as he spoke.

‘Many of my sisters did go. That our lost sister might yet return to us with songs of the deepwoods for us to hear.’ The dryad’s autumnal foliage breathed a sigh. ‘But I had not the strength in my heartwood to hope.’

‘I understand,’ said Lurien.

‘No one sacrifices for their children like the deepkin,’ Urael grunted.

The dryad twitched her head at something. She took another step towards Lurien. ‘What concerns you? You seem unsettled.’

‘You don’t know idoneth very well, my lady,’ said Lurien. ‘We do not easily unsettle.’

‘I intended no offence.’

Lurien dipped his head. ‘Neither do I.’

‘None was ta–’

In the time it took her to speak those words, Lurien had put his hands to her woody shoulder, inwardly cringing from her coarseness even as he pushed, shoving her off the edge. Her intended platitude became a song-scream as she crashed through intervening branches, those same branches that then muffled the sound of a hard wooden body breaking on a distant ground.

Urael joined Lurien at the edge.

They both looked down.

‘We’re committed, then,’ said the namarti.

‘Looks like it.’

‘I heard the sylvaneth can sing to one another through their thoughts. Even over great distances.’

‘I heard that too.’

With the toe of his boot, Lurien pried loose a chip of gleaming iron from the branchway. He worked it between his hands, immersing it roughly in ethersea, and then threw it as hard and far as he could. It sailed over the open space, not dropping but rather slowing down to an eventual stop. The two aelves watched it for a moment.

‘It’s not falling,’ said Urael.

‘My ethersea doesn’t extend that far from my own enchantments. It means Kua’thor has not killed Filenduil yet. Either the dryad did not scream in time, or Éodrain has already failed to offer the Cueth’ene enough to surrender the spear and is back in the sea, waiting for us.’ Lurien suspected the latter and had, in fact, been counting on it. Éodrain had always been reliably lazy, and had made no secret of his desire to return to the desperate pleasures of Dwy-Hor as swiftly as possible. Lurien expected his retainer already had half an eye on a position in Mahbòr’s diminished court for when this was done, for in the entirety of the Green Gulch it was surely the one place whose endless carnival of self-loathing could hope to exorcise his own.

Lurien only hoped that what he planned to do did not rob the akhelian of that chance. To his surprise, he found he would not begrudge his retainer that reward for his loyalty.

‘They’re high stakes you’re gambling with,’ said Urael.

Lurien laughed, semi-aetheric bubbles spilling from his mouth. ‘Exhilarating, isn’t it?’

Urael just looked at him.

‘Which way to the elder glade? I was unconscious when I left it.’

The namarti pointed into the forest, down.

With a grin, Lurien kicked off from the branchway and dived.

Where the dryad had plummeted like a weighted corpse into an ocean trench, Lurien descended like a seabird in pursuit of prey. Brushing off the attentions of branches and leaves, he kicked his feet until he saw the forest floor. The remains of the dryad were strewn across an area of ground beneath him. Her hard body, no question an advantage against thorns and blades, had resisted the blunt force of impact poorly. Lurien could make out a piece of head here, a bit of foot there, all of it smeared in a sticky white pulp. He felt little remorse, a touch of guilt at a wasted soul perhaps, as he entered into a somersault, pushed his toes against something woody and dead, then nudged himself back into a free float.

He looked up as Urael descended feet first, slowly, in a semi-aethereal froth of paddling limbs that had Lurien shielding his face behind his hand.

‘You are as graceful as a one-armed orruk.’

‘We should move quickly,’ said Urael, ignoring the insult.

‘You lead,’ said Lurien. ‘I’ll follow.’

‘Very well.’

They both turned in the direction the namarti had indicated to see a dryad there already, perched across several thin branches about six feet off the ground.

Lurien mouthed a silent curse at the sylvaneth’s ability to appear and disappear unnoticed. His solitary reprieve was that the dryad was staring at her broken sister, misshapen eyes and mouth wide with shock, but it was a brief one. Her cold blood purged itself of surprise more swiftly than the deepkin’s, and her black gaze lifted from the firewood to the two aelves. Her mouth stretched before Lurien could react, her lungs filled, and a scream that was both sound and magic blasted through the nearest leaves. Lurien drew his hellsabre, but Urael already had a razorshell javelin drawn from his shoulder quiver.

His cast was perfect, straight through the dryad’s open mouth from thirty feet away, splitting the spirit’s head in half and pinning what was left of it to the tree.

The scream stopped.

But it was already too late.

The scream continued.

With the shiver and creak of living things, the first took it up, the constant of the Life song growing darker and more resentful with every moment that Lurien wasted to horror. He could feel a pressure building, as if a sea rolled towards him. Without a single branch appearing to move, the trees drew tighter together. Leaves scraped across leaves. What light filtered through was snuffed out.

‘Go,’ Lurien hissed. ‘Go. Go now!’

They swam hard, Urael leading, but the forest conspired against them at every turn.

Ways that had seemed clear became snarled with exposed roots and low branches only once the aelves were upon them. Other potential paths closed almost as soon as Lurien spotted them, blocked off by huge and brooding trees that had surely never moved in a thousand years. They were being herded, and all the while the song grew darker and more strident. The beat of a savage drum. It became the counterpoint to every frantic stroke of his arms, the rhythm of his breath, the beating against his chest.

Through thickets that would have ensnared any other mortal, they swam, twisting, rolling, wriggling like eels through gaps no wider than the narrow shoulders of an aelf and out the other side. Lurien thought of Venom, and despite the impracticality of the monster’s bulk he could still wish for the reassurance of voltaic shields and fangs.

In a relatively clear space that was almost wide enough for Lurien to swim freely, he rolled upside down and twisted to look back. Urael had fallen behind. Significantly broader about the shoulders and like a barrel around the chest, the namarti had been tattooed in blood across his half-naked upper torso. The ethersea brought many of the advantages of the deep sea to the surface environment, but the phenomenal pressure that kept a wound from bleeding was not one of them.

‘Filenduil said I was only unconscious for an hour,’ Lurien gasped between breaths. ‘We should have been at the glade by now.’

‘The forest is changing,’ said Urael. ‘I don’t know where we are.’

Angry shrieks tore through the forest behind them, all around, closing fast. Lurien was startled by how clear the trails had suddenly become, hardly a club root or bramble in sight. He drew Nael’s long sword with his left hand. Urael already had his butcher’s adze in his fist.

‘Here they come,’ said the namarti.

‘I will not die on land,’ said Lurien. ‘I swear it on the Psi-Trident of Mathlann.’

The forest folk emerged from the dark beneath the trees in a swarm. He had thought them almost beautiful before, possessed of an eerie, inhuman grace. If a trace of that allure remained to these spirits, it had been buried under spiny armour and knotted bark where aelven eyes would never find it. They had become crooked, haggish things, scrabbling out of the undergrowth on all fours like crabs.

Lurien picked out the face of one snarling crone, a dryad, her face a jagged mess of bark and hate. He swung his hellsabre up and diagonally across as she pounced, severing her hand, then turned across her to free his left hand and plunge his Elgaenite longsword into the chest of another. A short distance away, though far enough in that tangled place to be another battlefield altogether, Urael held a third dryad by the throat while he hewed into her skull with his adze.

Lurien twisted his sword in the dryad’s chest and tore it free in a shower of pith and splinters. His heart pounded, fizzing his muscles with euphoric energy. He had killed, and by Mathlann he would kill again. But this had been the first rush, the most wrathful and least cunning.

With the next wave, the spites of the forest came with it.

Their forms varied, colours switching, two merging into one or splitting into four, seemingly without limitation and apparently at random. They shifted about the glade at such furious speeds that Lurien could not hope to track them all.

An emerald wisp in the form of a tiny leviadon, encrusted with miniature harpoon platform and finger-sized aelf crew, popped out of the aetherfold an inch from his nose to deliver a telekinetic slap that sent him reeling. He brought the back of his hand to his cheek to find it lanced by the spite’s miniature harpoon. The replica aelves upon the thing’s back shrieked at one another in high-pitched voices as they strained to reel him in, as though he were not a thousand times their size. He swiped his sword through the spite, jade sparks trailing from the blade but causing the apparition no obvious harm. The spite instead adopted a pint-sized likeness of his face, screaming as though in agony before dissolving into motes and cackles. The rest of the swarming creatures took up the sound as they flitted recklessly over the battlefield.

Lurien’s attention was still directed upwards when a dryad raked the pearl lacquer of his backplate with her claws. He spun to face her, but the branches of the tree behind him interfered, grappling with his sword arm and leg. By the time he shook himself free, the dryad had moved on, drawn to the woodsman’s cry of Urael’s adze, and two more were closing, hunched and feral.

One was almost barren, her elder bark crawling with infant bittergrubs that nibbled even then on what foliage she had left. The other was recently absent a hand. They circled more warily while spites looped and tormented. They were content to wait, to let the spites bait him into dropping his guard. He was not about to let them. He had seen what Swordfern’s talons had done to the beastmen that had attacked them on the spirit paths, and he had twice felt a spite’s sting.

He knew which he preferred.

‘I would have rather left as friends, but I was right – Kua’thor was never going to give up that spear.’ The dryads hissed, no evidence in their obsidian-black eyes that the building war-song left any room for comprehension. ‘Die!’ Lurien kicked off the tree that had tried to snare him and straight at the two dryads.

His swords became a blur as the dryads separated to come at him from opposing sides, aelven instinct and agility measuring itself against sylvaneth savagery and finding itself its equal. Woody talons splintered against isharann metalcraft with every parried blow. On some level Lurien understood that the dryads were the least of the sylvaneth’s warriors and he was barely holding his own, but Laramé Farseer had always taught him to count the blessings he had rather than those he did not need.

The grub-infested dryad jerked suddenly back, struggling in someone’s grip. Lurien spun around as another set of claws raked for the back of his neck. He parried the attempt with his hellsabre, leaving the one-handed dryad without a defence as the straighter edge of the akhelian sword plunged into her belly and up, erupting from between her shoulders. The tree spirit faded, its wooden corpse sliding from Lurien’s blade as he turned around.

The older dryad was still struggling. A small white hand was clamped over her forehead, pulling her head back and exposing her throat to the sawing action of a serrated shortsword.

Her struggles ceased.

Revealed behind her fallen corpse, clutching the severed head by the branches in her tiny hand, was Morogai. The namarti twitched as though she had something parasitic on her back, dropping the grisly trophy in her spasms. Lurien had never been so pleased to see anyone.

‘I knew you would be around here somewhere.’

Morogai swung her head towards him, her gaze unfocused, appearing to struggle with recognition for a moment before pointing into the forest.

‘Aeslecai or Namaríel?’

She pointed.

‘I suppose either will do at this point. Lead on.’

She pointed again.

‘The mute act doesn’t work after I’ve heard you speak, you know.’

She trembled as though trapped in a bottle, then pointed.

‘Fine. Urael!’

He turned to see what had become of the big namarti, and then gave a horrified yell. While Lurien had been contending with dryads in twos and threes and thinking himself the very grandson of Tyrion in so doing, the forest had recognised the greater threat and dragged it down accordingly. A dryad hung off each arm. Another clung to his back and was ripping muscle and flesh from his shoulders. The giant namarti screamed as he went down beneath the weight of horrors, pain and disbelief overcoming even namarti endurance.

‘Urael! Morogai, do something!’

The slender namarti shook her head, almost fearful, as though going up against a conscious foe terrified her, and pointed into the forest.

With a snarl, Lurien took a stride towards the fallen warrior before changing his mind. The namarti was a half-souled slave, as worthy of a prince’s grief as a pretty bottle with nothing inside. He was fortunate to have lived as long as he had, and even in death, perhaps, his isharann-forged hybrid soul could disintegrate into the aether without fearing the predation of the Dark Prince. Truly, he was the fortunate one. Perhaps. He was in no position now to be asked.

He was…

‘Cursed gods,’ Lurien wept. ‘Urael!’

Morogai touched his shoulder.

Lurien spun around in a fury of grief, but the girl had already vanished. He gave a strangled yell.

She was almost as bad as the sylvaneth.

He dived into the forest in a direction that was as close to the one she had pointed him in as he could remember. Making his peace with that decision, he swam for his life, the sound of shrieking tree-devils fading into the tangle of branches behind him. The forest sought to impede him, but compared to what it had done before it was an act of unconscious malice, like kicking out at a fish that brushed an aelf’s toes in his sleep. As if something else now had its full attention. Morogai, perhaps. Or Éodrain. Namaríel? He tried to convince himself that he cared as little for them as he did for Urael and was not wholly successful, partly because thinking of the big namarti brought a cruel sting to his eyes. He was alone now, lost down a hole of isolation such as he had not known since the dungeons of Briomdar, and it was not the cleansing spiritual experience preached by the isharann. His senses had become almost painfully sharp, a knife with a bladed grip, every crack or rustle that did not come directly from his passage bleeding a fresh trickle of terror into his mind.

His flight bore him into a vague clearing. It was darker, closer than he remembered, and it was only by the inert weapon lodged in the tree stump that he recognised it. The elder grove. With a cry of relief, he swam towards it. He felt a measure of his normal confidence return as he did so, the frantic escape of moments before reduced to a cool simmer under his chest, like freezing water boiling under lower pressure. He should have known that Morogai favoured him over Namaríel. He should have known it. How could she not?

He looked up as a spite the colour of a black eye zipped over the clearing. It disappeared into the forest without appearing to notice him. Lurien waited to see if any more were about to appear, then snarled at his own hesitancy and made a direct line for the rough-sheathed spear.

Its beauty was even more staggering up-close. The white jewels moulded to its haft were cut and shaped like starfish and teardrops, and threaded with gold. The ferrule was a piece of diamond, curved like a crescent moon and almost half the length of the blade. The grip was unusually long, designed for two hands stacked one over the other, explaining how Kua’thor had been able to wield it in his one giant hand. Its leanness, however, suggested that the treelord had never been its intended owner. It was an aelf blade. A tingle passed through Lurien’s fingers as the wooden grip reshaped itself to his hand, oozing like a stiff putty with a will of its own to fit the contours of his grip.

He pulled on the spear.

It did not move.

He wrapped the other hand around the malleable grip, below the first, and pulled again.

Nothing.

‘Damned treelords,’ he muttered.

Using the spear itself as an anchor, Lurien drew up both knees to set his feet against the rim of the stump and pushed against it with all his might, sheer spite eking a few additional pounds of strength from his muscles before they surrendered. He slumped against the hilt, exhausted. It had not moved an inch.

‘Damn you, Urael. Why did you have to… die… when I could still use you?’

‘Allow me.’

Lurien turned as a dryad stalked from the treeline that bordered the glade. The twinkling light of enraged spites glittered down the length of a plain and pitted blade and the lumps of iron in her bark.

It was Swordfern.

‘I trusted you. I sang for you. I thought you an ally against the deeproots like Kua’thor, and against Coryza, but you betrayed us. You murder my sisters and blight their song.’

The dryad raised her sword. Moments away.

Lurien threw his full attention back to the Soultaker Spear and pulled.

Desperation lent his arms a strength that even malice could not find. He pulled until tears sprang from his eyes. He pulled until his entire body was immersed in shakes and pain. He pulled until he could almost wish for the dryad’s blow to fall. And he felt the weapon budge. The seasilver blade sang to him from its prison of wood.

Lurien gave a laugh, the pain crying out from every muscle an unlikely source of pride, and with jelly-armed strength he gave the loosening spear his all.

Come the end it offered surprisingly little resistance.

The weapon flared as it finally came free, the runes on the blade glowing star-bright as its enchantments acknowledged the grip of a worthy wielder, Eltharri forms that Lurien could not read nor even recognise as language, but which reached into him through the eyes and spoke words of power there. Ilissith ana estroi ast daroir, the layered voices of the spear whispered in his mind. The magic bound into those ancient phrases caused the blade to turn molten as it was drawn, somehow retaining the shape that its cythai maker had intended.

With a rapturous cry, Lurien lashed the semi-molten spear around, his exultation turning to a scream as the blade struck Swordfern’s descending sword and exploded into amethyst-hued light.

He stumbled back, away from the attack, blinking quickly to hasten his vision’s return, holding Aeslecai with both hands across him lest the dryad attack while he was incapacitated. But as the bleaching amethyst faded from his eyes, he saw that Swordfern was similarly indisposed. She stood hunched over her backward-jointed legs, one hand raised to shield her eyes. With a self-destructive fascination that was almost aelf-like, she stared through clawed talons into the rippling, still-shimmering spear blade as though seeking revelation, its radiance deepening the contrast between the ridges and canyons of her tough body.

‘You were never going to escape the forest,’ she said, as though chastising the spear rather than Lurien.

‘You’re probably right, but it was worth the risk.’

‘Why?’

‘Does it matter now?’

He levelled the spear point to her chest.

She did not react.

‘You murdered my sisters,’ she said.

‘Let me pass or I will send you to join them.’

‘I was born to the Season of War,’ Swordfern replied. Still enraptured by the soul-glow of Aeslecai, the dryad lowered her sword. Her expression was that of a scarred tree, made hideous by the unforgiving light of a dozen or more idoneth souls. ‘Kua’thor tells me the war-song is all I hear.’ She turned her sword, and for a heartbeat Lurien thought she intended to spring at him, but then she lowered it. ‘I would grieve for my sisters, but instead I hear only the war-song.’ Her head creaked, side to side. ‘You have drawn Kua’thor’s spear. If I let you flee this glade with it and return it to the sea-king, Mahbòr, do I have your promise that you will use it against the Gulch Empress of Coryza?’

‘What about your sisters? What of the fabled loyalty of the sylvaneth?’

Swordfern appeared to consider that. ‘I am loyal to the Everqueen. Too loyal to let Kua’thor fail her in this.’ Lowering her sword fully, she extended her taloned hand to Lurien. ‘I will guide you back to the deepgroves of your kin.’

Lurien regarded the sylvaneth’s hand. It was an offer, but one he first had to reach out and take. All he had to do was promise to make war on the one being in the Green Gulch that terrified him more completely than Vanglyr Fellglaive.

Forcing his cold lips into the shape of a smile, he reached out and accepted the branchwraith’s bargain.

He was good at making promises.

PART FOUR

GUETHEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lurien raised Aeslecai.

The two akhelian that floated above the colossal spinal ramparts of the tidegate lowered their glaives, though whether it was in deference to the spear or the infernal brilliance that it brought to their sea-floor domain, Lurien neither knew nor cared.

The knights of Guethen were heavily armoured in sculpted warplate the red of asur blood, but the light of Aeslecai revealed every harsh truth of their aspect – the algal growths that lurked in the grooves, the salt-gnawing of the barb tips. Truth was painful, and that, Lurien supposed, was why the cythai had rejected it in the first place and fled to the bottom of the Gaelus. The two hundred or so thrall warriors who made up the rest of the garrison force, both above the walls and before them, stared through Lurien without comprehension, unable even to perceive the soul-light. The namarti were clad in shagreen straps, so tight to their muscled physiques that the hands that gripped their bows and blades were a bloodless white. Trophies of the surface world adorned their wargear, from the quixotic to the banal, marking each a veteran of Guethen’s near constant raids on the realms above. Their cold flesh was scored with tattoos, caldai dragon knights and other monstrous beasts of eolas. And yet they followed the example of their akhelian and loosened their grips on their weapons.

‘It is true,’ one of the akhelian whispered to his companion, the words carrying easily through the water. ‘He has recovered the Gealrachi spear.’

Lurien shifted in the saddle, keeping the spear upraised lest its charm expire, and turned to face Namaríel, who swam under her own strength by Venom’s side. ‘I told you this spear was worth having. More even than the friendship of the Cueth’ene Branch Clan.’

Namaríel said nothing. Her expression did not even register his words.

Their relationship had turned colder following their reunion on the littoral fringes of the Jade Kingdoms. Whether it was due to his assertion of authority over her, the death of Urael or even festering self-doubt over how far beyond any need for her he had come since Briomdar, he did not know.

Mahbòr, however, had been spectacularly unmoved by the anarchy Lurien had left behind him in the glades of the Cueth’ene. The Laughing King, already steadier of manner and gaze, had delighted only in the return of the spear to the deeps. Even Lurien’s insistence on holding on to the spear – just for the time being, of course – had not upset his settled spirits. Indeed, the king had ordered a night of feasting and revelry, before calling on an ishratisar to inscribe his soul-pledge to Lurien’s cause upon his pallid skin then and there. Deepgrove, on the other hand, had welcomed Lurien’s return with a bitter song, one that the deepwoods themselves had taken up and amplified.

The aelves of Dwy-Hor had taken their home’s lament as further evidence of their triumph over the Cueth’ene, and had apparently cemented Lurien’s right to possess the spear.

He wondered, idly, if his ownership of it now made him the heir to Dwy-Hor as well.

Deepgrove muttered a few fractured bars of song before Lurien could silence her with a swift jab of Aeslecai. He was not sure why he had asked Mahbòr to give her over to him, except perhaps with half an eye on some future gesture of good will towards the Cueth’ene. His progress towards the Jade Throne seemed to make the odd plan or two against that future seem prudent. To his surprise, Mahbòr had given her freely. Venom dragged the twisted outcast behind her by a chain that had been bolted directly into her heartwood, her song growing ever more disjointed the deeper they had travelled from Dwy-Hor and its forests. Lurien found he liked her. And he liked her singing. He thought he understood the value that Mahbòr had found in keeping her around. She had testified to his conquest of the Cueth’ene, and now she testified to Lurien’s, and all idoneth, though they did not know why, felt the draw of the sylvaneth and their queen. He had taken to daubing her bark turquoise and gold.

Another statement.

Leaving Namaríel to wallow where she was, Lurien spurred Venom towards the tidegate. Only Deepgrove, chained to the giant fangmora like a buoy, remained with him.

Guethen was the only truly walled enclave in the Gulch.

The region’s volcanic geography made it possible, forcing the city almost entirely below ground, mushroom-cap structures of sulphurous yellow coral clinging to the inside walls of a subsurface vent. The roof of the trench was blocked with monstrous coral growths, snarled together with poisonous blisters and acidic spines, leaving only a thousand smoking vents and the fortress tidegate itself as points of ingress. The water was unpleasantly mild and tasted rotten. The horizon was a forest of frothing mineral spumes. No beasts dwelt within a thousand leagues of Guethen, the water too hostile for anything but the magical and infinitely adaptable constitution of the aelves.

That, Lurien suspected, was why the early Ionrach explorers had settled on that site. Safety from predation had been as priceless then as it was now. It was also, Lurien again suspected, one of the reasons the Guethen akhelian fought almost exclusively on foot.

Another reason, more widely discussed and even more commonly derided, was the unusual prominence of the namarti battalions to the Guethen articles of warfare. There were many reasons that namarti went unmounted, from the cultural to the practical, but primarily it was because a bound-beast had to be broken to the point of senility before it would suffer a half-soul master. The Guethen akhelian had come to the highly unusual conclusion that their limited numbers were better deployed commanding their hordes of thrall warriors from within their ranks.

The namarti that swarmed the open water before the tidegate drew aside from Lurien and his hissing fangmora, regarding him and the dryads with wary distrust. Those that swam the battlement spines and harpoon cysts above him kept their array of weapons trained on Lurien’s small force, themselves holding steady under Éodrain’s insouciant command.

Lurien had earlier marvelled at his coincidental acquisition of what amounted to a small army, and while it was still small, it was closer now to being considered a genuine army.

Éodrain looked every inch the akhelian lord in cloak, mail and tri-winged helm at the force’s head. Tidecaster Filenduil, too, looked far nearer to the prestige of his isharann fane than at any time since they had cast forth from the tidegate of the Pearl City. He had been another beneficiary of the bottomless largess of the Laughing King, his new staff a living knot of black vines that was ever fecund with black berries which, as Namaríel had promised, were said to be restorative to an isharann’s strength and focus. In addition to that gift, Mahbòr had bestowed them with twenty russet-skinned thrall warriors armed with lanmari greatswords, an isharann soulscryer by the name of Kimladril in case either Lurien or Mahbòr should need swift contact with the other, and a tru’heas called Danai, whose addition, given Lurien’s sarcastic remark to Namaríel in the Jade Kingdoms, had made Lurien smile. Added to the thirty-three Elgaenite reavers that had survived the Cueth’ene hearthglades, it made a handy force, if lacking in akhelian might. That would come. Four towering teglai pack snails carried the army’s gear, including rune-sealed missives and offerings addressed to every noble between coastal Dwy-Hor and deep Túrach.

Soon.

Soon it would be fit to challenge Vanglyr.

Judging by the guards’ reaction to Aeslecai, however, it seemed that knowledge of Lurien’s exploits in Ghyran had already made it from the shallows. That had to be Mahbòr’s work, or that of the isharann in his counsel. The Laughing King may have affirmed his reputation for insanity a hundred times over, but Lurien could find no fault in his knowledge of statecraft or war – as personally satisfied as he was by his token phalanx, a misunderstanding between it and the fortress tidegate of Guethen would neither last long nor end well.

And there were few warrior orders in the Mortal Realms more prone to misunderstandings of the deadly variety than the Cobalt Knights of Guethen.

Their namarti too were said to be soul-cannibals, happy to prey even on a fellow idoneth unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches, and the enclave’s isharann were perfectly willing to rend such souls. Such were their numbers that Galrohir was rumoured to employ namarti counsellors, and that a namarti in Guethen could, through acts of self-sacrifice and valour in battle, hold almost equal status to his or her akhelian masters.

Lurien yanked on the reins, bidding Venom and his dryad anchor to halt just inside whisperbow range of the battlements.

He did not need to approach any nearer. The water would have carried his voice to the two akhelian knights from beyond even harpoon range, provided that everyone else between them remained silent, but the personal approach seemed politic, given the circumstances. He looked up at the battlements. The namarti bowmen held their aim on him.

This was what came of giving namarti ideas above their status.

‘I wish for an audience with King Galrohir,’ he said.

‘Of course.’ The two guards lowered their heads, and then the second warrior added, ‘He is expecting you, King Lurien.’

Lurien had never been to Guethen. He had met Galrohir only once. Even so, he felt he could have described the akhelian king’s throne room to Éodrain from the antechamber outside and barely missed a detail.

The walls were an irresolute mix of noxious yellows and toxic pinks, bricks of scoria and pumice stained with hotspots and smears, spirals of emergent pattern that sank back into nonsense when directly challenged by the eye. The architecture was narrow and severe, like the aelves who inhabited it, for the dimensions of their vent restricted expansion to the vertical. One porous wall had been thinned to grant a blurred view of roiling smoke, sulphurous and black, a djinn rising endlessly from its abode beneath the crust of the realmsphere.

He would also have expected to see weapons, lots of weapons.

And he saw weapons.

Lots of weapons.

Most were held in the hands of namarti guards, a multitude of favoured warriors whose hadrilkar runes identified them as the recipients of precious aelven souls. Unusually for namarti, they were armoured, elaborate piecemeals of plate and shagreen that covered only half the body, leaving none in doubt as to the fused nature of the wearer’s soul. None wore helmets, for to do so would be to conceal the namastir, hadrilkar and eyeless faces that marked them as namarti. Even the aelves of Guethen did not defy that ancient convention.

There were more, though, weapons of every class and size mounted in brackets on the volcanic walls, painted with the lingering soul essences of those who had wielded them and those who had last died on them. More often than Lurien would have imagined, the two were the same. It persuaded him to hold all the more tightly to Aeslecai. Éodrain, Filenduil and Namaríel had all surrendered their weapons in exchange for admission, but Lurien refused to relinquish his even for sleep, and to his surprise, much like Mahbòr before them, the Guethen had let him keep it.

The second thing to surprise him – the one thing, perhaps above all others, he had not expected to find in the seat of Galrohir’s court – was a library.

Every surface all the way up to the far, far distant ceiling not already claimed by a weapon was riddled with hollows, each holding one of the braid-scrolls that served the idoneth as books. Called quithai, or talking knots, they were beauteous objects in their own right, mandalic spirals of coarse silk whose arrangement of knots conveyed the recalled wisdom of the deepkin. Demanding both sight and touch in their decryption, they excluded both namarti and those idoneth who failed to fully master their tactile senses. Lurien was one such idoneth. He was surprised to find that Galrohir was not.

He had not taken the king of Guethen for a reader.

He had not taken him for a thinker.

Galrohir sat in a throne that had been sung from the rock floor and into its current shape, its back curled and knobbled to resemble wings, or possibly horns, harkening implicitly to the dragon kings that every child knew had once ruled the isles of the asur. His eyes were a golden yellow, his face angular and pale, jaundiced with prominent veins. His armour was an accretion of ridges and spines fit for a high king, forged specifically for his huge frame by the greatest isharann craftsmen of Briomdar. His akhelian queen sat enthroned beside him, her stare hard beneath a diadem of blood stones, her frown severe, her armour every bit as harsh in its contours as her husband’s. Her name was Syltháer. Courtiers and warriors – and in Guethen one could be both or one could be neither – swirled about their twin thrones like fish around a sinking morsel, not stilling even as Galrohir raised a fist to Lurien in greeting.

‘Lurien,’ he growled, a dark grin tugging at the corner of his lips as if he were recalling something that the pair of them, alone amidst this throng, would find amusing.

‘Just “Lurien”?’ Bidding his retinue to remain where they were, Lurien swam ahead to the supplicant’s dais before the foot of the Guethen throne. He lowered himself towards the floor, but pointedly did not bow. ‘Your warriors at the tidegate called me “king”.’

Galrohir and Syltháer shared a glance, a glimmer of amusement reflected between their eyes. ‘They get ahead of themselves,’ Galrohir said, then turned back to Lurien. ‘But did you not once remind me there were no titles between equals?’

‘And you told me that we were not equals.’

‘I did.’

‘That my claim to it was contingent on the ruling of the akhelian council.’

‘Guethen does not answer to Briomdar, but it does listen.’ The king shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Has their opinion of me changed, then?’

‘I suspect it has. For your good or ill I don’t know, but they can hardly dismiss you as the indolent aelf-child they did before Lágethé’s demise. You have been making waves, Lurien.’ Galrohir leant forwards, eyes locked on the diamond-encrusted shaft that protruded from behind Lurien’s right shoulder. He licked his lips. ‘Liberating Aeslecai. Taking that.’ He gestured towards Deepgrove, chained and held on a short leash by Éodrain. ‘Raiding Coryza.’

A swirl of awed mutterings enveloped the king’s throne. So the courtiers of Guethen were not the pathological gossips of their Briomdain counterparts – many of them had not heard.

Lurien turned, seeking out Namaríel, but the namarti’s face was turned in feigned respect towards King Galrohir. He did not doubt that she was perfectly aware of his questing after her approval. Éodrain caught his gaze and returned a conspiratorial smirk, as if they had played equal roles in the plotting and execution of the Coryzan raid and now reaped equal glory before the court of Guethen. Deciding it did him no harm to let his retainer hold to that belief, Lurien nodded in reply and turned back to Galrohir.

‘All of it true,’ he said.

The king leant to confer with Syltháer once more. She answered in curt, whispered sentences. He nodded in apparent accord. ‘Attacking the Gulch Empress was foolhardy,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Lurien said. ‘I faced her.’

‘In person?’ Even congenital idoneth disdain could not fully mask Galrohir’s surprise. The court’s mutterings became almost reverent, several circumspect pairs of eyes running appraisingly over Lurien. Garbed as he was in the richest suit of pearl plate ever to emerge from the isharann of Elgaen, and haloed by the foul glow of Aeslecai, Lurien doubted he disappointed anyone’s inspection.

‘It is true,’ Filenduil muttered.

The tidecaster crossed his arms over his chest and glowered into some point within the middle distance of nowhere before perceiving that Galrohir wished for more detail. He went on to explain how Lurien had convinced Prince Nael to launch the raid on Coryza, and how he had taken charge when the prince had fallen. In the only episode that aroused something akin to emotion in his telling, the isharann concluded with how Lurien had drawn Karivinya the Great from her city so that Soulrender Keylarr and three hundred captured souls could be returned to Elgaen.

The impressive tally brought raised eyebrows and murmurs from the court, doubly so from the namarti who, in contravention of all decorum and sense, swam amongst them.

‘Her attempts at finding us will redouble,’ said Galrohir.

‘She was trying to find us already, and had sacrificed half her domains to the sylvaneth and the stormclaimed to do so,’ Lurien countered. ‘It is a big ocean, and in any case, I sank her ships.’

Syltháer whispered in her husband’s ear.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So we have heard already from Laramé Farseer.’

‘Then she confirms what I tell you.’

‘I could not fit a keening blade between Laramé and Lágethé on any matter before this. Why should I expect that to change for Lágethé’s heir?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Lurien. ‘If you’re going to toss me to the Fellglaive, why are we here talking?’

The giant aelf chuckled. ‘I was still in Briomdar when Vanglyr first had word of your escape. He was furious, barely able to speak another word that day, though he tried to hide it. I told him to spare you no thought. I thought you would slip through the Láthway to live in embittered exile in the court of Priom or Atleus, or perish in some miserable and ignoble hole in the bottom of the Gulch, unmourned by any but your crone of an aunt. But he was right, Lurien. He was right, and I wrong. The Pearl City has sworn for you, and even were I to take that as no great surprise, the backing of Dwy-Hor is undeniable. Mad Mahbòr may be – mad he is – but there is no lord of the idoneth I would prefer on my side in battle.’ The king drew back his lips to reveal yellowed, translucent teeth. ‘I have never seen him fight, of course, but I have an imagination.’ The courtiers echoed their king with icy laughter. It was no sycophantic murmuring. They were all fighters. They had imaginations too.

‘Mahbòr is mad no longer,’ said Lurien.

‘Truthfully?’ Galrohir and Syltháer turned to face one another. ‘Then you may have found the one ally in the Green Gulch who would give the Fellglaive pause.’

‘And you would face the raidlord of Briomdar as well?’ said Éodrain, lifting his face. Lurien restricted his expression to a twinge of annoyance in the muscle that ran between collar and jaw. ‘He has a reputation that does not require any imagination to see,’ the akhelian finished.

Galrohir shrugged. ‘The lesson of the Awakened is that what is easy to see is not always easy to accept, Lord…’ The pause was a question.

‘Éodrain,’ said Éodrain, then bowed.

‘He’s my retainer,’ Lurien explained. ‘He has proven himself…’ His tongue explored the unfamiliar outline of the word. ‘Loyal.’

Galrohir studied the akhelian, the way a knight would a shield that was broken beyond repair, certain that it must be useful for something. ‘I suppose he would have to be.’

‘We have met once before, King Galrohir,’ said Éodrain.

‘You may ingratiate yourself into the Guethen court after I am finished,’ Lurien hissed.

‘Well, Éodrain,’ said Galrohir with growing impatience and a menace that bordered on the preternatural. ‘The raidlord has a towering reputation when it comes to sacking human villages, as the title he has given to himself proclaims. But he has not fought a war. He has never attended to the defence of his own enclave, as I did during the assault of the urkraken fifty years ago. As Mahbòr has. For as well as the sylvaneth, skaven explorers and crabspider grots assail Dwy-Hor with every other tide.’ He bent forwards in a snarl of armour, frowning as though offended at needing to belabour a point already made. ‘One does not dwell so near to land without some mettle in one’s soul. Without a crown or an army, Éodrain, your lord has performed two great feats, shown his contempt of the Cueth’ene Ironbark and won the backing of two enclaves that could not be more disparate. If those two can find favour in him, then perhaps so too can I.’

‘I think I see,’ said Lurien. He spoke slowly, thinking even as the words came out of him. ‘You don’t want to see Vanglyr on the Jade Throne either.’

‘You have achieved some impressive things, Lurien, but only because the gods have always delighted in the exploits of the young and the stupid. There is no such grace given to the stupid and old. They simply die. In a hundred years, Vanglyr has never lost a battle. You, Lurien, will never be that cautious or good. You will not live long enough to have the dream of uniting the phalanxes of the Gulch under a single raidlord, or of making yourself a high king in all but the declaration before the gods.’

‘Yet you supported him. You and Anaer.’

‘Because he was going to be king, regardless.’ Galrohir gestured offhand to the wall repositories housing his library of quithai scrolls. ‘Even the gods of the old pantheon were at each other’s throats more often than not. Better to be the bastard’s friend than his foe.’

‘And you change your mind now, because I turn out to be stronger than you had first thought. But not too strong.’

‘Does that offend you?’

‘Yes,’ Lurien muttered. ‘A little.’

Galrohir laughed, an empty, booming sound. ‘A little? Good. A little danger keeps the mind sharp. Too much kills. A little privation hones the soul. Too much cripples the body. Just look at Anaer.’ Arching himself against the horned, winged, vertebral spine of his seat, Galrohir pushed himself free and floated towards Lurien. Even with their feet coming to about level, the king of Guethen had a head in height over his Briomdain counterpart-in-exile. He was larger in every dimension. His armour was more massive. Lurien had not felt a mismatch more keenly since he had knelt before the throne of Queen Laramé Farseer. ‘Elgaen and Dwy-Hor alone will not give you the strength to challenge Briomdar, but with the might of Guethen allied to theirs?’ He closed his gauntlet into a fist. ‘We will crush them.’

‘That makes us the kingmaker,’ said Syltháer.

With Galrohir’s brute size and theatrics, Lurien had neglected the role of his queen. He tried to recall all he knew of her, but it was not much. When Anaer had journeyed unaccompanied to Lágethé’s last assembral it was no great surprise to anyone, but Galrohir’s wife was a warrior of great esteem in her own right and her absence had been noted. Lurien and Éodrain, with that breed of idiocy that became painfully obvious only in hindsight, had amused one another with speculations as to how embarrassingly crone-like she must have been for Galrohir to leave her in Guethen. The truth was, of course, that while her husband had been occupied with the business of peace in Briomdar, Syltháer had attended to that of war. She carried the beauty of all idoneth, but hers was a warrior’s face rather than a cloistered maiden’s, and the scars she carried were the same as her husband’s and courtiers’.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Lurien slowly, carefully. ‘I could go to Túrach. Anaer commands more akhelian than Guethen and Dwy-Hor and Elgaen combined. And her aquarium of beasts is bettered by none.’

‘Anaer hates you,’ Galrohir observed. Syltháer returned to her former poise of silent inquisition, smiling faintly. ‘She hated your mother too, and if Vanglyr taught history as strictly as the azydrazor of Guethen, you’d know that Briomdar and Túrach have fought wars in their lifetimes. They disagreed over the wetness of water. I set my banner beside Vanglyr’s because it was convenient, and withdraw it now because I can. They thought you a fool, Lurien. Only a fool would believe in Anaer to think as clearly as I.’

Syltháer leant forwards and bared her teeth with a smile. ‘The same fool who thinks he can swim freely from our fortress bearing that weapon.’

Lurien’s hand went protectively for his spear’s pole. Behind him, Éodrain and Namaríel both hissed warnings. Namarti guardians throughout the chamber gripped weapons of their own.

‘If you truly wanted it, you would have taken it already,’ said Lurien.

‘I could have,’ said Galrohir, too solid a warrior and too long in the tooth to let the tension in the water show beyond a faint squeal of armour as he shifted position. ‘I may yet. But listen to what I ask of you in exchange first.’

Lurien glanced back at his followers – Éodrain, Namaríel, Filenduil – and nodded for them to stand down.

‘We want so little,’ said Syltháer. ‘Less by far than Laramé or Mahbòr requested of you.’

‘What then?’ said Lurien, looking between Galrohir and Syltháer, uncertain which to address. Their expression of icy superiority was the same. ‘Speak.’

‘Your promise to our daughter,’ said Galrohir.

A smile tore the cold flesh of Lurien’s cheek. ‘Less dangerous than a raid into Coryza, it is true,’ he conceded.

‘We have both had many children,’ said Galrohir, with a nod to his queen. ‘Together, and with others. Most serve in the palace, as servants or as húrskarl.’ Lurien glanced at the half-armoured namarti that swam close to their king, hands hovering over the grips of blades, and understood at last what they had done to earn such distinction. ‘They receive only the very best souls, and in exchange they give me loyalty.’ From the looks in their blank faces, Lurien knew it was true. In return for the soul of an aelf, of a khinerai or melusai, perhaps even a seraphon or sylvaneth, a decade or more of life over their less fortunate kin, they would murder a babe at the mother’s breast for their king. It was as Namaríel had once explained to him – most namarti were grateful for their life, such as it was, and these had learned to love their golden chains.

‘You would ask me to marry a namarti?’

Galrohir laughed, folding his arms over his breastplate barbs. ‘If I had a true-souled daughter, do you think I would wed her to you?’

‘You are talking about a namarti queen.’ Lurien’s eyes flicked towards Namaríel. Her expression was impossible to read. ‘That would be… abhorrent.’

‘You think you would be the first? Namarti can be beautiful too, courageous, gifted in war, and for all our divine pretentions few mortal races come as flawed as ours. Think of it, Lurien. With Nael’s death you are already heir to Elgaen. With that spear and the royal souls it holds, Mahbòr has as good as handed you the throne of Dwy-Hor. With my support, you will see your claim to Briomdar sustained. And when I die? Then you will be king by marriage in Guethen as well.’

‘I thought your reason for defying Vanglyr was because he wanted just that?’

‘Indeed. Because he wanted it. That doesn’t mean I can’t want it for my own daughter.’ He smiled, like something painted onto a skull in blood, then extended a cruel-edged gauntlet to Lurien. ‘Or for my son.’

‘I…’

Lurien hesitated. It was not, he could not deny, an offer without merit. A lesser aelf would have been content with bringing about the death of his cousin and inheriting the throne of Elgaen. A sensible aelf would have been thrilled at the crown of Briomdar, the ghost of which he could almost feel settling on his brow already. But he was being offered more, much more, and all he had to do was say yes, accept whatever bride Galrohir could conjure from his stable of royal cast-offs and suffer whatever future unpleasantnesses such a union entailed. It was not as though Lágethé had ever shown the pretence of fidelity to her husbands, after all – a ruler’s duty was to the species, long before it came to the bloodline.

‘I fear that my prince is already promised to another,’ said Namaríel.

‘Is this true?’ asked Syltháer.

Lurien bowed his head, then nodded. ‘It is.’

‘It will need to be annulled,’ said Galrohir, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘I will consult with my isharann and see that it’s done at once.’

Lurien felt his jaw fall open.

As easy as that.

He had been living with a knife to his throat, the threat of eternal damnation should it slip. And as easily as that, Galrohir offered to take both away.

‘Then I would have to say yes,’ he choked.

‘Do not dare to consider casting me aside,’ Namaríel hissed, unable to raise her voice in the presence of Guethen’s king.

‘I appear to have outgrown you, my love,’ Lurien whispered back, then turned to Galrohir before she could reply. He bowed his head, a dutiful son to his father.

‘Let the preparations begin at once.’ Syltháer rose and clapped her hands for servants to attend. ‘The messages were sent as soon as our soulscryers received word from Mahbòr.’ She smiled. ‘We anticipated your agreement. The guests are already on their way.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Guethen was crowded. Slender bridges criss-crossed the volcanic vent, less than a mile across, acid-scorched like glass needles held above a flame. The castles of akhelian lords clung to the rock face wherever they could fit, more closely resembling chance mineral accretions than anything sculpted by chorralus magic. Lurien passed through halls in which he himself was the only source of light. His Elgaenite harness of golden ithilmhair and pearl had been oiled and pumiced until it gleamed like moonrock, glowstones and blood sapphires casting a rugose iridescence that sank into the immense heroic entablature of the walls. Such was the enclave’s vertiginous scale that the glow diffused from red to black and all the long way to nothing before it could touch either ceiling or floor. In Briomdar or Elgaen, an idoneth could have swum through such a space and not encountered a soul, but this was Guethen, and by some illicit contract of the enclave’s Ionrach originators, every cubic foot of space needed to be occupied by a namarti.

Every passage swarmed with them, however narrow, a slave population greater than an enclave three times its size should have been able to sustain.

It was by the talúnhook of its soulrenders that Guethen’s boom had been fuelled, a bloody legacy of success in battle that would grow and grow to demand yet more, as infants that should have been doomed instead gave birth to hollow children of their own.

The idoneth were a virile species, because rather than in spite of their curse, always seeking to produce more of their own. An infant of pure soul was born but once for every ninety-nine that would otherwise die. And yet each of those ninety-nine was someone’s child, belonging to a mother and a father with an instinct to nurture and protect unblemished by their fall from the divine. Some asserted that the lengths to which the deepkin would go for their children demonstrated that their fall was not absolute.

Others contended the opposite.

Lurien had himself wondered what would happen if the isharann and akhelian were to somehow eliminate the accursed namarti element and begin again, but the child born of two akhelian knights was as likely to be soulless as one born of their namarti slaves. If there was a way for the idoneth to escape their curse, it would probably not be through genocide.

At least, not of their own.

Lurien understood what drove his race to the depths it had gone to. He had not always, but he did now. The time he had spent with the namarti since losing his crown had ensured that. Namaríel. Urael. Even Morogai. And now he was to marry one. Since the tide when Namaríel had released him from captivity and extracted his promise, threatened him with the withdrawal of Mathlann’s protection and the claws of the Prince of Excess, he had known the day was coming. But he had not been ready for it to come quite so soon.

Or quite like this.

Éodrain was waiting for him at the end of a long passage festooned with garnets and yellow-brown stones.

The retainer hung in the ovoid door space, framed by the sulphurous door jambs and haloed by his own fluttering cloak. The diaphanous material had been cut to fashion a hundred swarming strips of fabric, each one worked by an isharann couturier of surpassing skill to resemble an eel of metallic hue. His long white peruke was tied with ribbon into an elaborate fishtail, secured with jewelled clips and a silver circlet bearing a single topaz cabochon. An ornamental breastplate with a diamond pattern of red and gold was buckled over a turquoise shirt threaded with platinum and whale ivory buttons picked out with more precious metals and gems. Éodrain had always possessed great skill in the selection of clothes. His akhelian sword was buckled at his hip in a shagreen scabbard, one beringed hand on the hilt to turn it out from his legs as he lazily treaded water with finned boots.

‘I was just thinking how I miss Vágös,’ said Lurien as he approached. ‘He would know that the duty of the dyngorai on the day of marriage is to draw no attention and stay quiet.’

Éodrain’s lifeless grin stretched deeper into his face.

‘I am just happy for you. For us both.’

‘Since you are here, I assume the temple is ready?’

Éodrain executed the perfect courtly bow. ‘Mathlann himself awaits your pleasure.’

‘And Galrohir?’

‘The very eidolon of proud fatherhood.’

‘The guests?’

‘Expectant.’

‘Who came?’

A thin smile. ‘Wait and see.’

‘And my bride?’

Éodrain chuckled, without warmth, lifting his hand from his sword to waggle a finger. ‘You know Athaerti brings ill fortune to the male who disturbs the bridal train on her wedding day.’ He allowed his upraised finger to droop.

‘Athaerti is the absent goddess of a failed race in whose image we were fraudulently remade. Tell me.’

‘I have not seen her, but…’ Éodrain leant conspiratorially closer. ‘Would you care to know her name?’

Lurien stared dully. ‘Not especially.’

‘Gwyndyr.’

Lurien tried the name on, testing how it felt on his lips. ‘And is Namaríel there with the other guests?’

‘I don’t know. Why should I care?’

Lurien was not sure why he had asked, except that it was her face in his mind when he mouthed his bride’s name.

‘If you are having second thoughts, then just say so,’ said Éodrain. ‘We can wait. If Galrohir had wanted the girl married off elsewhere, he would have done it by now.’

‘No. The sooner we get started, the sooner it will all be over.’

‘That’s the spirit.’

With another elaborate bow that spoke eloquently to the akhelian’s own poorly suppressed anticipation, Éodrain turned and swam ahead.

Gwyndyr.

Lurien tried the name again, moving his lips silently to shape its syllables. It still did not seem to fit properly in his mouth.

Shaking off the feeling of low dread, he swam on after Éodrain.

Knights in lapis-blue livery and fan-tailed cloaks drew aside from them and bowed. Warrior namarti wielding huge rhomphaia swam up and down from their path, frothing both Briomdain nobles with a confetti of bubbles. Lurien had the impression that the display was all for him.

The akhelian.

The namarti.

A processional guard to line the new heir’s approach to the Sanctuary of Mathlann.

The sanctuary was situated deep in the heart of the vent, where the water was so poisonous and black that even the Dark Prince could not spot the glimmer of an aelven soul. Lurien doubted it had seen many royal weddings.

‘I take it that a title in Galrohir’s court no longer interests you?’ asked Lurien.

Éodrain made a face that sank slowly towards its familiar, loose-muscled smile. ‘It is Dwy-Hor for me.’

‘Even now the carnival is over?’

‘There is opportunity there, my prince. Trade and adventure will soon come there again, I can feel it.’

The distances between the various enclaves of the Gulch had never been accurately measured, as far as Lurien was aware, and he would be content to vouch for either of Dwy-Hor or Túrach being about as far from his new court in Briomdar as it was possible to get. He might even have suggested an assignation through the Láthway or the Caillegaeta, an ambassadorial residence in Príom perhaps, where the damage Éodrain might do to his standing with High King Volturnos would be more than compensated for by having a Realmgate or two between himself and his retainer.

An ocean would suffice, he supposed.

Though, to his surprise, Lurien thought that he would miss Éodrain.

‘Dwy-Hor it is, then,’ he said.

Lurien looked across, taken in by the pathological insincerity in his retainer’s smile, and then both aelves laughed. It was as ugly a sound as any bubbling hiss emitted by the vent that had blackened the outside of the walls and was still spilling from them as they swam from the thrall-lined passage and into a large chamber.

In Dwy-Hor or Briomdar, an enclosed area of that scale might have been a garderobe or a kennel for smaller bound-beasts, but Lurien’s preconceptions had been altered by his spell in Guethen. Enough that the grandeur of the space’s architecture, and the breathtaking distance of the right wall from the left, killed his laughter.

Its impression was ovoid, but the darkness was too thick for it to be properly defined. It was as though some behemoth creature had laid its spawn on the vent wall, its egg being crushed and deformed by the constant gaseous expulsion from below as it grew. They were close to the source of the area’s volcanism. A bitter, mineralogical heat filled the chamber. Hissing geysers of yellow-black smoke broke through the gold-veined tiling in a dozen places. The idoneth could endure a near limitless range of environments, but the chamber was at least a hundred degrees too hot for Lurien’s preferences.

A sea of banners hung from float sacs, rippled from cross-spars, the natural flow of heat mimicking the effect of an actual wind. The banners formed a corridor that slowly widened as it led from the passage that Lurien had just exited and into the chamber, disappearing into the murk towards the sanctuary. They heralded the Guethen houses, of which there were few, and the namarti battalions, of which there were a great many. A small number displayed the colours and avataric monsters of other enclaves, but these held positions of, Lurien presumed, privilege before the gates of the sanctuary and were obscured from view by the smoke.

Above and around the undulating banners swam aelves in long-skirted mail and heraldic coats. On sighting Lurien, they sounded horns, pipes, aural stones, chimes, a myriad of deep-sea instrumentation announcing the presence of themselves and their masters to Lurien, and vice versa. The proclamation rose to ring from the far walls as those heralds that had not yet glimpsed their prince, their king, made as if they had. Heralklir fish with the iodine scales of Guethen startled from hiding places in the porous rocks and billowed into a living celebration of specious joy. The explosion of sound disturbed even the butchered and deadened nerves of the bound-beasts corralled within the chamber – fangmora and allopexes and teglai, and even a vicious-looking deepmare adding to the din with subsonic pulses, whistles, whines and bleeds of voltaic energy.

To be both centre and cause of such commotion sent a thrill through Lurien’s skin.

Many of the monsters bore elaborate saddles, caparisons, harnesses that glittered with an ocean’s uncounted wealth in metals and jewels. Others languished in the traces of chariots and carriages, the grand transports of the worthies in attendance. Lurien might have expected to be conveyed to his own wedding in such style and wondered if being made to swim was a deliberate slight on Galrohir’s part. It was possible that the king had said something about it. He could not remember. Galrohir and Syltháer had arranged everything, and the days he had spent cloistered in their isharann fanes enduring the priests’ prayers had passed so quickly.

There was a splintering wrench as an unsettled allopex tore free of its carriage – a snap of trough-like jaws and a thrash of thickly muscled body, and its traces were splinters. A namarti beast handler too slow out of its way disappeared below the waist in a ropey eruption. The others scattered. Lurien and Éodrain drew their swords, as did every aelf in view. Knights and namarti alike converged into a protective sphere around the two akhelian, blades gleaming blood red in the glow of the soul-gems affixed to Lurien’s armour.

A pack of namarti armed with clubs and hook-spears swam after the escaped allopex, screening the pair of embailors that followed after them. Both had the severe, high-browed features of Túrach, the silver-blue pins of the City of Spines marking their journeyman’s shagreens. The apparent leader of the two was female, older, as elegant in the water as a hunting arachnid and with a dark-eyed cruelty that would not have been out of place on such a creature. The other was male, considerably younger, but a living testament to the inherent dangers of the embailor’s arts. His face was a misery of scar tissue. One leg was missing, replaced with a wooden paddle. The corresponding arm was gone too, replaced by a trident-pronged metal hook that enclosed a stave of bone carved with Druhirri pain runes.

‘After it, Malaneir,’ said the female. ‘Ensuring the beasts are sedated and restrained is your task.’

‘Yes, Master Irimé,’ said the younger embailor, kicking his paddle foot to catch up.

One of the namarti had already hooked the allopex through the chest with her spear. Water pressure worked to keep the wound contained, but the allopex’s struggles and the cruel design of the embailor spear ensured the opposite. Blood squirted into the water. Malaneir caught up to the monster just as the rest of the namarti laid into it with clubs. The beast fought back in furious silence until a single blow of the embailor’s rune-stave brought a bellow of pain from its mouth. Its huge body stiffened as though every nerve screamed its pain to every other. One of the namarti took advantage of the monster’s paralysis to throw a net over its back, Irimé continuing to berate her young apprentice as the beast was dragged back to its corral.

‘That’s Anaer’s carriage,’ Lurien breathed.

‘I told you,’ said Éodrain. ‘Wait and see.’

Lurien let out a breath, then resheathed his sword. ‘This is going to be quite the occasion.’

He had not been inside a Sanctuary of Mathlann in years.

The Lord of the Deeps had sheltered the ancestors of the idoneth in his fathomless demesne even as the World-That-Was succumbed to its destruction. But as the gates of Mirai were broken open and the underworlds plundered, aelfkind devoured wholesale by the Dark Prince, the seas of the dying world were themselves drained and the children of Mathlann exposed to their destroyer. Mathlann himself had been consumed, and then Slaanesh had devoured them all. It had been Teclis then who, under a bargain struck with his twin brother, Tyrion, and their dark counterpart, Malerion, had drawn the soul essence of those antiquarian beings from the belly of Slaanesh. The last to be devoured and thus first to be freed, Teclis had used their souls to birth the cythai. The name meant Awakened in the old Eltharri of the gods. And it had been Tyrion, the Blind King, who had stayed his brother’s hand when confronted by the freak-show horrors he had created.

Or so the creation myths of the idoneth reminded them.

Lurien’s heart felt like a rock in his chest as he entered the home of his defeated saviour, false and unbeating. The cold eyes of a hundred turned towards the ripples of his entrance, a sea of unfamiliar faces, all blank and uncaring.

In the front row of the assembral, he spotted Laramé, and something akin to life sputtered from the lump in his breast at the sight of her. She wore a crown of deep-frozen starfire and a white cloak bearing the oyster shell and gleaming pearl emblem of Elgaen. A breastplate of ensorcelled silver punished direct regard with pain, but did little otherwise to hide the gradual physical diminishment of the woman inside. Power nevertheless shone from her eyes, as if to burn through the paper-thin substance of her face.

She greeted his hesitancy with a brittle smile. Lurien returned it, but his attention had already been drawn elsewhere.

There, on the other side of the aisle, was Mahbòr. The Laughing King was clad not in armour but in a kelp-green livery covered in decorative webbing with feathery fins running up the trouser legs and shirt sleeves and a frilled ruff around the neck. His half-moon face had been delicately hennaed to resemble the coarse tangles of a forest. From within its whorls, two emerald eyes shone, bright still and preternaturally keen, but cooled by the departure of madness.

Towards the back, nearer to where Lurien and Éodrain had entered, an aelf female with a face so gaunt as to be all teeth and brow turned to regard him. She wore an ice-blue coronet to match her eyes. A heavy coat of mail had been draped over her narrow shoulders, hardened with plated vambraces, spiked pauldrons and a high gorget that covered the left side of her face up to the pointed end of her chin. A cloak with a slit up the middle bore the spiked gauntlet of the City of Spines across its torn halves.

Queen Anaer put a hand to her breast and bowed her head. It was the kind of regal gesture that said nothing at all, the greeting one might give to an aelf at their wedding day or the farewell one might betoken the same aelf as they were led to their execution.

They were all here.

By all the gods, they had come for him.

Lurien swallowed, looking towards the inverted apse at the centre of the sanctuary.

An effigy of Mathlann towered over the sunken dome, pieced together from oral fictions and spirit memory, a dead god rebuilt by his lost children in malachite, serpentine and jade. His likeness was that of a heroic he-aelf in dripping mail, each scale immaculately represented by an individual square of jade. In his hands he wielded a fuathtar trident, his lower body and long cloak blending into the shape of a great wave, as though at once concealing and protecting the altar that lay in the form of the realmsphere of Ghyran beneath it. Unlike the green stone used in the creation of the rest of the statue, the fuathtar was a genuine implement of lead and silver, the prongs still sharp, as though waiting for the time when it would be wielded again. It was a likeness that inspired worship, Lurien could not deny, a figure that it was difficult to believe even the raptures of the Dark Prince could fully consume. And perhaps he had not. Perhaps he shielded his charges still, and it had been he, through Tyrion, who had spared the idoneth a second time.

The idoneth thought themselves cursed. Their very name in Eltharri bespoke their self-knowledge of the fact. From a certain perspective, however, their existence had been a charmed one indeed. What other race still in existence could claim to have survived the destruction of the World-That-Was and the wrath of their creator god?

And before Mathlann’s crashing waves, three figures floated.

To the left was Galrohir, massive in lapis plate and sealed helm, a barbed frill spiking up from the centreline and fringe. Even the monolithic presence of a god behind him could not make the king of Guethen loom any less. His arms were folded over his breastplate, not so much with impatience as with indecision, uncertain what the gauntleted hands at the end of them were for without the accustomed comfort of a weapon at his hip.

To the right was an aelf whose age and gender were impossible to determine beneath a rippling black alb and a golden mask. Over the alb was a long surplice, dark red, frayed and fluttering in the currents, decorated with remembered recreations of dragons, phoenixes and eagles. The soulscryer potentate, the mightiest and most gifted of their fane. The high priest, or priestess, of Guethen. Lurien did not know their name. At least, he did not think so. He could not think. Could not breathe.

He tapped on the pearlescent plating above his chest as if to kick-start his heart.

And between them was…

Between them…

She was veiled and cloaked, gowned in black chiffon and satin that glittered with powdered ruby, permitting Lurien only the dimmest impression of a face. The thrall who had dressed him for the ceremony had assured him she was beautiful, and from the outline of her figure alone he was certain of it. She was statuesque, clearly her father’s daughter in height at least, and with a femininity of form that no feathering of layers could fully mask. A trillion gallons of emerald water pressed down on Lurien’s head, and yet his mouth was dry. His tongue had become chalk. His heart had stopped beating. He listened for it for what felt like several minutes, but nothing came.

He looked down at the breastplate.

His face crooked a smile.

The gods were cunning. What if his promise to Namaríel had not been lifted at all? The Prince of Pleasure had simply been lying low, awaiting the moment of greatest theatricality to devour him from beneath Mathlann’s helpless gaze. He looked over the assembral one more time. The aelves were trapped in time. His gaze flowed over them until it passed across Namaríel. He had not spoken with her since his audience with Galrohir and Syltháer. He had not expected her to attend. Instead, she floated at the front row of the assembral with Laramé. She was whispering in the White Queen’s ear, his aunt watching him with pursed lips as she listened.

He blinked as time resumed its normal flow, realising he had slipped into a meditative trance, rather than into the hungering gaze of the vile goddess.

Éodrain nudged him in the calves, and Lurien forced himself to draw a breath and start forwards. Galrohir removed his helmet and slotted it under his arm. His eyes were keen and fiery, bracketed by age lines and scars, his brutal face split in two by a smile.

As Lurien’s slow procession brought him nearer the apsis, the soulscryer potentate removed their mask to reveal a woman’s face beneath. Her expression was arched with high, swept-back ears, and with old eyes despite the absence of any obvious symptom of age on her face. She had probably never smiled or frowned in her long life. Galrohir spoke words that Lurien did not hear. He lowered his knee towards the floor, head bowed. His heart was still not beating. He chanced to look up just as Galrohir and the high priestess reached forth to draw back his daughter’s veil. It fell away from her face. Lurien’s jaw fell away from his. A collective sigh passed through the sanctuary.

Namaríel was beautiful. Éodrain was beautiful. Lágethé had been beautiful.

All aelves were beautiful.

Gwyndyr was divine.

Her cheeks were high, her ears long, her chin descending to a graceful taper. The skin that covered her empty eyes was silken, the namastir on her forehead rendered with the dedication of divine art. Her hadrilkar was modest, lightweight and finished in silver. Even the jaundice to her complexion and the conspicuous veins only added to her lustre. As though she were made of gold.

‘Better-looking than Karivinya,’ Éodrain murmured.

Lurien had no words, was too dumbfounded even to nod. Athaerti herself, the lost asur goddess of sensuality and desire, had manifested before him.

The goddess’ hollow eyes met his.

The priestess began to speak.

Lurien never heard a word.

The journey back to his chambers was a blur.

Their wrists had been bound, husband and wife lifted by namarti bearers into the twinned valves of the carriage that awaited them outside the sanctuary’s gates. There had been some last words from Galrohir that had swept by his ears in the moment, some earnest words of nuptial wisdom from Mahbòr that he wished had done the same, and then a namarti cracked a whip and they were away. Of the journey itself he recalled even less. Just the warm ache where his bound wrist rubbed against that of his new wife, the public torture of her touch. Their arrival brought relief in the all too familiar smirk of Éodrain standing guard over the conjugal chambers. The tradition of the dyngorai, or first man, standing watch over the newly joined couple dated back to the idoneth’s earliest days, when the first aelves under the sea had lived in constant fear of predation and attack. It was a duty that Lurien would have expected his retainer to gladly shirk. Their association was already too old for Lurien to wonder if he had misjudged him. But even so, he was surprised. And a little pleased.

Éodrain opened the door. A nod. And then Gwyndyr was sculling towards the bed, their bed, with light kicks of her feet, going backwards, unbuckling the complicated gold wiring of her crown as she did so.

Lurien closed his eyes and looked to the ceiling, muttering a prayer to the blind god.

He turned to face the door.

‘I can still see you,’ said Gwyndyr, her voice as intoxicating in its bittersweet charm as the Life song of Dwy-Hor had been.

‘See me?’

‘You can turn your back, close your eyes, but you cannot hide your face from me.’ He sensed that she was smirking. ‘You are afraid of me, hero of Coryza.’

He turned, ready to protest, but no words of anger were forthcoming. Gwyndyr reclined a foot above the bed. Bubbles from the bound creature’s slow respiration gave buoyancy and an eerie life to her gown.

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he lied.

‘Then will you at least put down the spear?’

Lurien turned to look over his shoulder. Aeslecai’s diamond-encrusted pole glittered there in the lambency of the chamber’s soul-globes. The namarti frowned before Lurien had a chance to answer, as something bumped the outside of the chamber door. Lurien scowled back at it.

‘Don’t bother me, Éodrain.’

There was no response.

‘Éodrain?’

The door exploded. His retainer flew into the bedchamber with it. Lurien’s first realisation that he did not do so willingly was when the tidal force that had driven him through the door then smashed out most of the frame. Lurien was the next object directly in the wave’s path. It picked him up like a feather on a storm swell and hurled him back. He crunched into the wall, his expensive armour buckling. Then Éodrain crunched into him. Lurien gnashed his teeth in pain as shards of yellowed rock and door knifed his face and rattled off Éodrain’s backplate. He looked down into his retainer’s face and had his second realisation.

Éodrain was already dead.

The wave smashed through the foot of the bed, tearing away the wooden framing and ripping into the soft tissue of the bound-beast inside. Gwyndyr rolled clear just as the bed heaved on the byssus stalk attaching it to the floor. Blood and bubbles geysered from its gills as the princess scrambled for something in the corner.

Lurien choked on an emotion he did not think he had felt before as he pushed Éodrain’s corpse from his chest. Then he shoved himself from the wall, far enough to wield a weapon, and dragged Aeslecai from its long sheath. A fell, indigo-hued light speared from the naked blade as though it had just struck the death blow on a star, and the three akhelian knights exposed in the doorway screamed. Their confident, murderers’ strokes turned into flails and a disorderly tumble into the chamber. Lurien might have exalted in answering this attempt at assassination with such a critical blow, but the light was double-edged. His own eyes felt like molten ingots in his face.

He fell backwards, bumped the wall, blinking painfully as a knight flailed towards him. She was clad in a breastplate of solid pearl, acid-etched with spiral patterns and worn over a ringmail coat of silvered lead and white surcoats. Her helmet was nacreous and smooth, with a narrow slit for eyes that were haughty and cold.

Elgaen.

The warrior trying to kill him was a knight of Elgaen.

She struck with a long glaive, a bleachwood shaft with a curved blade at either end, one of which hammered into the rock an inch to the left of Lurien’s pointed ear. She cursed and ripped her blade free of the wall, blinking her helmeted eyes just as Lurien did his. With awesome grace she spun her weapon around and overhead. If the knight had not been blinded at the outset, Lurien suspected he would be dead already.

Pushing himself from the wall, he hissed a battle cry and ran Aeslecai at the woman’s breast. Seeing it late, the knight parried at the last moment possible. Her spinning glaive knocked it aside, and she retaliated on instinct, thrusting back along the length of Lurien’s spear. As huge as Aeslecai was, the knight’s glaive was longer. He might have expected to avoid the instinctual jab even so, had he seen it before it banged into the matching nacre of his pauldron plate.

The blade scraped clear, but the reverberating impact drew the blind knight’s focus just as the lurelight of a talúnhook drew a mortal soul. Lurien gave way before the churning bladework until his back again hit the wall, unable to match the Elgaenite for speed or for power.

The Soultaker Spear became little more than a barrier behind which to shelter until the knight recovered enough of her sight to kill him. He almost regretted the cost and effort of taking it now. It was too big, too unwieldy. Even underwater. A two-handed weapon required an entirely different set of skills to that of a sword wielded in one hand. It was a different mode of fighting, power and timing rather than raw speed, demanding a mentality centred on killing rather than what an akhelian knight might consider fighting. If a contest lasted beyond the opening exchanges, it was already as good as over. Never mind that it was a weapon of the ancients – mastering it still took practice, and more devotion to its heft and wield than Lurien had troubled himself to give. One could only be embarrassed by Morogai’s knifework so many times before their attention wandered.

In hindsight, he might have been better served in that moment by Urael than the Soultaker Spear.

‘Die, murderer,’ the knight hissed as she aimed an uppercut between his legs.

Kicking off the ground, Lurien rose up against the wall. The glaive crunched into rock between his ankles as he touched against the ceiling.

Sensing the glimpse of an opening, he stabbed down for the join between the knight’s helmet and her pauldron. Even accounting for his dubious skill with the spear, weight and power alone would have cloven the woman into diagonal halves had she not angled her glaive’s shaft to block it. The hardened bleachwood splintered under his blow, bowing, but did not break. Then the knight ripped her blade from the wall and reversed the weapon’s spin, almost tearing Lurien’s spear from his hands, instead whipping him from the ceiling as though his spear had become caught in a whirlpool. He snarled in panic as he went tumbling through the water.

He would have imagined that Aeslecai, the weapon and the final resting place of generations of akhelian rulers, would have boasted a few more useable properties than an uncontrollable and mutually debilitating blast of soul-light. He had seen it dim and brighten on occasion, even alter its length by a few inches at a time for no apparent reason, but nothing that he could command or employ to his advantage when his life depended on it.

A scream sounded from somewhere off to his side, near enough that Lurien felt he needed to risk looking.

Of the other two akhelian knights, one was slowly separating, his legs sinking independently of one another to the floor while his severed arms went the other way to the ceiling. Gwyndyr floated over him, wrapped in her bridal gowns like a true-souled warrior queen, bloody bubbles clinging to her skin and clothing. Wielding the Elgaenite longsword that Lurien had buried in the corner of the bedchamber with the rest of his meagre possessions, she then struck the warrior’s head from what was left of his body. The quartered knight floated apart, connected by a residual memory and stringy tendrils of fiercely pressurised tissue. Gwyndyr herself remained poised and perfect at the centre of the disintegrating knight, the blade held horizontal across her body, as though awaiting the judgement of her swordmasters on a perfectly executed form.

The second knight swam at her with his glaive held high, and stillness immediately became motion.

Gwyndyr’s body folded to the ground, corkscrewed. A pearl-edged blade glinted and removed the knight’s leg below the knee. The akhelian fell towards the crippled bed-beast, its bloody bubble stream pushing him up towards the ceiling and pinning him there.

Gwyndyr turned to the last remaining knight, still facing Lurien.

Lurien did not know why he was surprised to find that Gwyndyr could fight. She was Galrohir’s daughter, and she was from Guethen. They could all fight. Most importantly right now, she was namarti. Namarti were blind to the light.

She could still see.

‘This has nothing to do with you,’ the knight said to her, turning her head from side to side as if to echosound the location of her adversaries. ‘Allow me to slay this killer and you will not be harmed.’ Only a knight of Elgaen could have been so arrogant.

‘No one will be killing my husband on my wedding day,’ said Gwyndyr.

Lurien was a little embarrassed by how much difficulty the Elgaenite had caused him. Against Gwyndyr’s clear-sighted and elegant bladework, she did not last long. He turned to the knight still pinned to the ceiling, feeling almost inadequate, and speared him through the back of the head.

‘You did not have to kill him,’ said Gwyndyr.

‘You took the other two. I don’t want you to think that I bring nothing to this union.’

‘He was beaten. You cannot just murder a true-souled idoneth. You–’ She looked up, her mouth falling open. ‘What is that?’

A hideous blueish haze was seeping out of the impaled akhelian, like blood but with a curious energy that persisted beyond death, escaping through the pores of his skin, bathing the two aelves below in sickly, brackish light. Lurien tugged Aeslecai from the leaking corpse with a grimace, but the unbound rivulets of light streamed towards it, like a charged ink drawn in towards a lodestone. More horrifying still was how the amethyst ribbon dimmed on contact with the blade, how the asur runes glowed as they drew in the akhelian’s spirit essence and drank it.

Gwyndyr looked at him in horror. ‘What did you do?’

‘I… don’t know.’

But he could guess. Mahbòr had called it the Soultaker Spear for good reason.

‘We have to take your spear to the chorralus, before it is too late.’

‘Too late for what?’

‘For the knight’s soul to be saved.’

Lurien thought about the other name that Mahbòr had given the spear, the alternative inflection of Eltharri words and sounds. The Soulkeeper Spear. ‘I think that his soul is safe enough where it is.’

‘But–’

Lurien stopped her. ‘Wait.’ He turned to the ruined doorspace. ‘There is one more warrior out there.’

The namarti caught his wrist before he could pull away to investigate. ‘We should wait for my father’s warriors to come for us. The door was the work of a tidecaster.’

‘Stay behind me.’

‘You think I need protection?’

‘I think you need more armour.’

She looked down at her gowns. ‘Fine then.’

Drawing the malefic glow of Aeslecai in close, Lurien swam for the doorspace. He moved quickly, as though swimming into death were like tearing off a tru’heas shroud and approaching it with conviction would lessen the inevitable pain. The ruined door opened onto a parlour. A low table sat to one side, decorated with starfish that were still alive but mentally shredded to remain still. A clutter of floor crannies held quithai scrolls that Lurien had not sought to examine. It was not his room. They were not his scrolls. Small fish fed off hanging baskets filled with grasses and berries.

Then he lowered the blade.

The tidecaster had not come anywhere near the chamber. She had summoned the wave that had broken the door and crushed Éodrain, then tidalcast her assassins to finish the task. Lurien knew of only one isharann, besides his late mother, who could command that level of obedience from the seas.

That was why he was already mentally referring to her as she.

‘How did you get in here?’

The question he addressed to the namarti floating against the parlour’s far wall.

‘I heard a commotion,’ said Namaríel. ‘I happened to be passing.’

‘Is this your doing?’ Lurien gestured back to the broken doorway behind him. ‘Because I reneged on our promise?’

‘My doing? No. You flatter me, my prince. This is the judgement of the gods.’

‘How dare you?’

Namaríel raised a hand before he could swim at her. ‘How dare you? I can only assume that someone, directed by powers higher than yours and mine, must have whispered in Queen Laramé’s ear, told her of the deception by which you claimed her allegiance.’

‘What deception?’

‘The murder of Prince Nael. Obviously. For you slew him in Coryza and claimed his raid for your own.’

‘Lies! Morogai–’

‘Confesses all,’ Namaríel snapped. ‘Laramé has already taken her. Back to Elgaen. The White Queen commanded all of this from her own chambers, you know. Your aunt is an isharann of terrifying power, when properly roused. You were right to seek her allegiance first.’

Lurien’s mouth worked as though trying to chew on water.

‘Morogai…’

‘No doubt the Fellglaive will wish to torture her before granting the mercy of an execution. But she is an instrument of the gods, and she has served them well.’

‘You are insane. Éodrain. Morogai.’

‘Urael?’ Namaríel smiled.

Lurien fell quiet.

‘Who is this namarti?’ Gwyndyr emerged from the doorspace behind him, akhelian longsword held in an upright guard.

Namaríel dipped her head. ‘An ally of your husband’s, my lady.’ She fingered the knife sheathed at her waist. ‘I am sure that you and I will become closely acquainted as well.’

‘Enough, Namaríel,’ Lurien hissed.

‘What are you doing in our chambers?’ said Gwyndyr.

Namaríel turned to Lurien, dismissing the princess as casually as that. ‘Laramé has mustered the phalanxes of Elgaen and sworn allegiance to Vanglyr. They are coming here, my prince. Now. The Fellglaive marches on Guethen.’

Lurien felt the disintegration of his hard work and scheming as the physical unravelling of his desire to stand. He sank to the floor. Gwyndyr’s fingers hovered above his shoulders in concern.

‘The crown was in my grasp,’ he said. ‘Why? Why would you snatch it from my fingers at the last? You spite yourself as much as me.’

‘You spat in the eye of the gods who had lifted you high,’ said Namaríel. ‘This is their warning to you.’ She bent forwards until they were eye to skin-covered eye. ‘To never again underestimate how far your need for me goes.’

PART FIVE

TÚRACH

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Queen Anaer took her ease in a throne of spines. Her expression was tranquil, eyelids heavy, skeletal features slack. Her chambers were sparse, cleared even of the petty oddments that had elevated Lurien’s quarters from the status of mere cave, and infused with the seed-scent of the enervas. The sword- and spear-armed asglir that flanked her throne wore the limp white poppies on their armour as tokens of favour. Anaer herself had one threaded through her crown by the stem. The seed-scent was said to induce a transcendental state of serenity that cared not for the trappings or woes of the mortal world. That accounted for her expression, but not the throne. Lurien had been surprised to see that she had transported it all the way to Guethen for the wedding, but then even puritanical tyrants were entitled to their hubris. Lurien was hardly immune. He was idoneth. It was the great failing of the species.

His equivalent sin was to accuse her of ambivalence when he was not at all sure that he cared about their imminent defeat himself.

Whether it was the potency of the enervas in the water or recent reversals, he was wearing a barrier layer between himself and the world. A blubber of numbness. Namaríel had been right, and the admission of that was like a filleting spear through his belly – he had thought of this as a game, he had believed that with the barest minimum of effort the Jade crown would just float onto his brow. Now aelves were dead. Éodrain at least had the consolation of the limbic eternity of the Guethen chorrileum alongside Galrohir’s ancestors, which was more than Urael or Morogai could look forward to. And as for Nael…

He sucked in his cheeks and stared up at the throne.

He was trying not to think about Nael.

‘Are you even listening?’ he muttered.

‘I am listening.’ Anaer stirred herself to direct her poppy-hollow frown towards Galrohir and Mahbòr. Gwyndyr and Namaríel, though both had insisted, had been denied at the door by Anaer’s guard. It had been the one blessing that Lurien could cling to. ‘To all of you.’

Mahbòr, still garbed in his wedding finery and indigo flushed from too much caulep and dancing, bowed in acknowledgement. Galrohir merely grunted, a mute observance of the niceties.

‘And yet you have nothing to say?’ said Lurien. ‘Because were I in your position, I would, at the very least, be amused by my plight. I might even gloat, say that I had seen this coming all along and had warned my witch of a mother of it the day she adopted me as her heir.’

Anaer’s placid gaze settled over Lurien.

‘Did you murder Prince Nael?’

‘No.’ Lurien spat the answer, as though absolvement from Namaríel’s actions were the best he could pray for now.

‘Or solicit the namarti assassin that Laramé has taken to perform the deed on your behalf?’

‘No.’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘If I knew the answer to that question, you would not need to ask it!’

Anaer eased back into her hard throne. ‘Believe it or not, I do believe you. I think that if you had done this thing and been found out, then you would not be so chastened by it now. You are thoughtless and arrogant, but what I see grovelling before me now is not a murderer. He is an aelf of poor self-restraint, one whose soul has been tormented and is relieved at having its sins exposed.’

Lurien’s lips twitched. He dipped his head to the throne.

‘Thank you, Queen Anaer.’

‘Do not thank me. What Laramé Farseer does or does not believe about the death of her heir is inconsequential to me.’

‘But it says something about me, don’t you think?’

‘It says you are not a fratricidal opportunist, which is frankly the very least one could look for in a king. That you were able to talk Nael into raiding Coryza also says something about you, and I am not sure that it is good. I am the queen of Túrach, and it is Túrach I look to. I do not care who reigns in Briomdar.’

‘And yet you conspired with Vanglyr.’

Anaer’s eyes glittered behind their enervas glaze. ‘Conspired? Hardly. I simply refused to take a stand on principle then. As I refuse to take one now.’

Lurien sighed, unable to muster the conviction to argue further. Mahbòr supped thoughtfully on the caulep flute he had brought with him when summoned from the after-ceremony for Lurien and Gwyndyr at the sanctuary, but said nothing.

Galrohir scowled at all three of them.

‘Vanglyr Fellglaive and Laramé Farseer are coming now,’ he said, dropping his voice to a rough-edged growl that could saw through ice. ‘They are coming here.’

‘The currents will be against them,’ said Mahbòr.

‘Unless they take a more circuitous route,’ Lurien mumbled. ‘As I did.’

‘They strike directly from the Pearl City,’ said Galrohir. ‘My own tidecasters push back, but they are no match for Laramé. Even the untrained acolytes of the soulscryer fane have begun to feel her wake.’

‘How many?’ asked Lurien.

‘Briomdar has the largest army in the Green Gulch,’ said Galrohir. ‘Vanglyr can field twenty thousand warriors, and Laramé, perhaps, another thousand. Were I in the Fellglaive’s boots, I would be looking to demonstrate my strength.’ He glanced at Anaer. ‘I would also not be sure where the might of Túrach lay. I would be bringing every sword I could muster.’ He tore his gaze away and growled. ‘My isharann concur.’

‘But Guethen is famed for its martial prowess,’ said Lurien. ‘Your enclave is a fortress, and you said yourself that Vanglyr was inexperienced in true war. Could Guethen and Dwy-Hor alone defeat him here?’

‘He’d still outnumber us three to one, and the true might of Briomdar and Elgaen isn’t the number of their swords but their isharann. I haven’t the numbers, or practitioners of sufficient skill, to overcome them. I told you that my tidecasters are already feeling the strain of resisting their approach. Why, Laramé alone could break open the roof of this enclave and bury us all inside.’ Lurien nodded in agreement. He could attest to his aunt’s might. Galrohir glared at him. ‘She’s angry enough.’

Both aelves turned to Mahbòr.

He smiled back at them. Like an evil moon rising.

‘The isharann of Dwy-Hor are supposed to be powerful,’ said Galrohir. ‘Tested in battle. Enough to rival Laramé?’

The Laughing King played with the tapered end of his chin. ‘Time will tell.’

Galrohir flung his hand above his head. ‘We need Túrach.’

‘I see that,’ said Anaer. ‘The heralklir we left scattered at the young prince’s wedding can see that. But it is aid I have no obligation or interest in providing. This counsel of panic does not endear me to your cause.’

‘Do you think I’ll just allow you to leave this chamber without your support?’ said Galrohir.

The two asglir knights either side of Anaer’s throne subtly tilted their heels, so that a single kick would be enough to interpose them between the three kings and their queen should the need arise. Anaer, however, gave no reaction.

‘And you will prevent me how? Will you kill me, Galrohir?’

The huge akhelian shrank before her vacant stare. His head slumped. ‘No.’

‘No,’ Anaer repeated. ‘We are idoneth. Our lives are too precious to end on a whim.’ She looked at Lurien as she said it, though whether she was referring to the death of Prince Nael or the killing of the akhelian in his bedchamber he was not sure. Then again, it occurred to him that she might equally have been referring to Vanglyr’s decision to spare his life in the first place.

‘I can hold you hostage,’ said Galrohir.

‘Until Vanglyr and Laramé arrive,’ she agreed. ‘But holding me under guard in these chambers will hardly improve your chances in the coming battle.’

‘Well, Dwy-Hor stands with you to the bitterest of ends, Lurien,’ said Mahbòr. Discarding his caulep flute, the Laughing King rolled back the sleeve of his kelp-green livery to bare the lean, russet-coloured muscle of his forearm and the oath rune that his ishratisar had tattooed there. ‘It has been declared before Mathlann, and all the gods beneath him, toasted with caulep, and can be broken only in blood. You returned the souls of my forebears to the keeping of an akhelian king, and so my life is yours.’ He drew his sleeve back down, covering his arm. ‘If it is the judgement of those here that Guethen cannot stand, then you must return with me to Dwy-Hor. Yes. We will make our stand with the dirge of the forest in our blades and the sun’s light on our backs, and see how well our enemy fares before the wild beasts and spites of the deepwood.’

‘He’s going nowhere.’ Galrohir made an angry gesture. ‘And neither are you. He’s wedded to my daughter, part of my house. I thought we had Laramé on our side.’ He shook his head, like a monster in a cage. ‘I’ve gone too far to make this right with Vanglyr now.’

‘Then come with us.’ Mahbòr extended a hand to his red-gauntleted counterpart. Galrohir looked at it as though the fingers were poisonous. ‘You, Syltháer, your daughter, your warriors.’ He bared dark green teeth in a grin, but there was madness in it, madness and pain. ‘There is room for them aplenty in Dwy-Hor.’

‘You would like to see me so diminished,’ said Galrohir. ‘Truly, your mind is restored, you conniving fuéthain.’

The Laughing King gave him a painted-on grin.

‘If this is it,’ said Galrohir, glancing between Lurien and Mahbòr, ‘if this is all we can come up with together, then I have no choice.’ He turned his back on the Laughing King, straightening to his full height as his expression hardened. ‘I will hold you and Gwyndyr until the Fellglaive arrives, and then I’ll surrender you both and pray he’s in the mood for forgiveness.’

‘You would give up your own daughter?’ said Mahbòr.

‘I have more of them.’

Lurien found he was too numb to care any more. Éodrain. Urael. Nael. All dead now because of him. When did it end? Namaríel too had then thrown Morogai, an ally and a confidante, to a far worse fate for far lesser cause. She had wanted to make a point. All Galrohir was doing was protecting his enclave. And was it not even a little true, when it came down to it, when the gods settled on their judgements, that on some implicit level he had been a party to his cousin’s eternal suffering as a plaything of the Chaos Gods? He had certainly benefited from Namaríel’s treachery, and had continued to act the part she had made for him even after he had come to suspect the truth. One aelf’s callousness was another’s cold calculation. Raging against where that finest of lines should lie was like fighting the tide with a blade of seagrass.

He sighed, shrugged.

Anaer leant forwards in her throne.

‘You seem remarkably… sanguine, about your fate, Lurien. I did not think you had such tranquillity in your soul.’

Lurien shook his head.

‘It must be the enervas.’

The queen glanced to the warrior on her left, a white poppy threaded through the rings of his mail, and idly brushed the limp flower in her crown as though only then reminded there was something there. ‘No. I do not think so. I think your time in exile has finally taught you something of value. Perhaps the gods have not wholly abandoned you yet.’

‘They have their usual, curious way of showing it.’

‘They don’t show it at all,’ Galrohir muttered. ‘They are our gods, after all.’

Anaer rested the point of her chin on the backs of her hands, studying Lurien with glassy-eyed intensity as though wavering on the edge of a thought. ‘It is not for me to care who rules in Briomdar, but I know that what Galrohir says is true – the Fellglaive will not content himself with Briomdar.’

‘Then you’ll fight with us?’ said Galrohir.

Anaer sat back into her throne of spines, her hands tracing the wicked curve of the rests. Her smile was a drowned and trebly damned thing. ‘If Prince Lurien is able to do something for me in exchange.’

The glove was chainmail to the elbow and shagreen up to the bicep, weighted over the knuckles with lead plates and spiked along the back of the fist like one half of a mace. Lurien shook the mail down over his fingers, then made a fist and smacked it across Venom’s snout. The backhand tore grey flesh from the slumbering beast’s jaw, but failed to rouse her.

‘Wake up, you overgrown tadpole.’ He struck her again. ‘If we don’t leave Guethen now, we may as well stay here and wait for Vanglyr.’

Bound-beasts slept deeply, and often. With so little of their minds left after the embailors were finished, there was precious little going on behind those scarred eyes to occupy them if left too long unattended. The best-trained creatures would lie unmoving until they starved unless specifically commanded to feed. Venom was a Túrach beast. She was amongst the best-trained creatures.

‘Up!’

He thumped her in the ear.

This time she stirred, raising her sledge-like head and tasting the water with a flick of her tongue. Lurien felt his ears pop, his extremities tingling as the fangmora’s volt sacs began to emit charge. He took her jaw with the gauntlet, his hand roughly the size of one of her teeth, and turned her head towards him, allowing her flickering tongue to catch the taste of her master.

‘That’s right. It’s Lurien. Prince of the Deep Nothing and laughing stock of the gods. We’ve met before.’

A snarl emanated through the netting of the neighbouring stall, where Filenduil was having a similar struggle rousing Éodrain’s fangmora. The Elgaenite beast was less completely broken and had awoken easily enough, but the isharann was not its master. It was only because there was some familiarity to the tidecaster’s taste that the fangmora had not already bitten off his arm. The old aelf was wheezing already, the gauntlet heavy in the water from a dozen unrewarded blows to the jaw.

‘Hit it again,’ Lurien suggested, hanging his own gauntlet from the hook on the roof of his net.

‘I could hit it until Teclis recants his hubris and welcomes his lost children back to Léiriú. It will make no difference.’

Lurien threw the heavy silver-blue caparison over Venom’s back, then the saddle, manually tightening the cinches that would bolt it to the fangmora’s oily hide.

‘My gauntlet will yield before this beast does,’ Filenduil complained.

‘Perhaps the tidecaster should stick with the teglai,’ Namaríel suggested.

She floated just outside the beasts’ globular enclosures. The namarti was again dressed for the rigours of open water, in a ribbed linen kirtle, buttoned and weighted, a sturdy cloak over one shoulder. Her tough shagreen bodice was criss-crossed with netting and pouches, and a bulging knapsack hung over the opposite shoulder to her cloak. Her feet were booted and finned. Her whisperwood shortbow was unstrung and held in her hands like a journeyman’s stave.

This was it.

The rest of Lurien’s phalanx were presently ‘guests’ of Guethen. Or ‘hostages’ of Galrohir, if one preferred the actual language passed down to the idoneth by the Awakened over that of courtly politics.

‘Move back from the nets,’ Lurien told Namaríel. ‘Your namarti soul is upsetting the fangmoras.’

Namaríel offered an exaggerated bow, then kicked herself backwards, playing out the chain, leaving the outcast to stare blankly through the diamond pattern of the net alone.

‘We don’t have the time to bring the snail anyway,’ Lurien went on. ‘Teglai are perfect for carrying heavy burdens over great distances, but we are in haste.’

Filenduil grunted into another solid blow. His gauntlet this time crunched into the fangmora’s eyes socket. It growled, but refused to shift. ‘I am told that Vanglyr forces a march against the currents, and against all the efforts of Guethen’s tidecaster fane.’ He kicked the truculent beast in spite, only serving to propel himself slowly back. The net bulged around his body as he pulled off his gauntlet and wheezed. ‘Even with the full might of Briomdar and Elgaen’s isharann behind them, it will take weeks for the Fellglaive to reach Guethen.’

Lurien wondered at how easily the old aelf could speak of the tidecasters of Elgaen as though he were not one of them. What horror Namaríel had threatened him with to remain at their side when it was surely within his power to flee as Queen Laramé had, Lurien could only imagine. Mahbòr’s restorative berries helped to endear him, no doubt, but Lurien suspected it was their shared experience of Coryza that explained it best. There was a time, not so very long ago, when Lurien would have assumed it was devotion to his leadership that made the tidecaster remain. How he could scoff at such arrogance now – truly had he been Lágethé’s son and heir. Loyalty was a fluid concept amongst the idoneth. To themselves and to the species they were steadfast, but every layer of hierarchy in between was there to shift with the tides. With the loss of Urael and Morogai and the turning of Queen Laramé, Lurien had half expected his slim force to disintegrate around him. That the tidecaster and the Elgaenite namarti who had been at the heart of his efforts since the raid on the alfrostuns had instead opted to stand by him was the one glimmer of hope he had in this abyssal time.

He did not question it any more. He was just grateful.

‘Weeks in which we are to venture into uncharted ocean far to the west of Túrach,’ Lurien reminded the tidecaster. ‘Beyond the current streams of the Láthway and the Caillegaeta. Beyond the boundaries of the Green Gulch itself. We go into the Deep Nothing, to find a beast the likes of which the embailors of Túrach have never seen and return with it as an offering to Queen Anaer. So forgive me, tidecaster.’ He turned the screws on Venom’s harness finger-tight. She spasmed in a pain that her body felt but which the broken wiring of her brain could not understand. She opened her mouth as though expecting food. He slapped it with his bare hand, then turned to Filenduil. ‘We are indeed in some haste.’

Leaving Venom to sort through her broken nervous system’s conflicted signals, he swam around to the entrance flap to Filenduil’s enclosure. Once inside, he snatched the tidecaster’s gauntlet from him and slid his arm inside it.

‘Let me show you how it’s done, and maybe I won’t need to do it for you every tide from here until we lose ourselves to the Deep Nothing, or find ourselves devoured by some ancient terror.’

‘Not all bound-beasts respond to pain.’

Lurien turned. The embailor woman he had seen outside the Sanctuary of Mathlann before his wedding was swimming to join Namaríel at the nets.

From afar the aelf had appeared elegant, if patrician, much in the manner of the denizens of Túrach. Their home was the City of Spines, and it was so called not only for the ancient leviathan in whose bones the Ionrach had built their first enclave in the Green Gulch. Up-close she was a horror of hard, dead eyes and Druhirri punishment brands, clad in tatty shagreens, sargassum overalls and the pungent musk of beast. Her face would have been nightmarish enough as a mask – as something attached to living bone, it was a death scream in the eye of the beholder. That she somehow contrived to make that potpourri of ruined skin look arrogant made it all the worse. She wore a necklace of what looked like eyeballs. A thick length of rope was wound around one shoulder. An ugly bone cudgel, almost of a length to be considered a quarterstaff, floated from her hip in a thong.

‘Not all bound-beasts respond to pain,’ she said again.

Irimé, Lurien remembered. Her name was Irimé.

‘Pain is how they are broken,’ said Irimé. ‘But afterwards… their minds are broken down and rebuilt, a cycle of provocation and punishment designed to strip away every residual trace of defiance. A broken beast will associate pain with obedience, hunger with obedience, a threat with obedience. It is a harsh process, dependent entirely on the willpower of the embailor for it to be seen properly through.’ She smiled as though remembering some old lesson, and something in the look in her eye made Lurien shudder. The embailor peered through the gaps in the net. ‘Cleft jaw. Bleached colouration. About thirteen feet long. And see the dual row of spines, slightly off-centre and asymmetrical, longer on the left side – characteristic of the maraglir.’ She turned her flat black gaze back to Lurien. ‘A fangmora breed native to the oyster reefs of Elgaen. And broken by that enclave’s own embailors, most likely.’ She shook her head, and Lurien flinched, almost expecting a blow from Irimé’s club in punishment for her disappointment. ‘Their lack of skill is explicable, if not excusable. Their waters are almost as barren of life as those of Guethen. Have you tried a more positive inducement?’

‘It has always answered the rod perfectly well before now,’ said Lurien.

‘Then perhaps it needs a firmer hand.’

Irimé swam into the enclosure.

The Elgaenite fangmora was of a smaller breed than the limited number of warbeasts kept by the red knights of Guethen, but the addition of a third aelf in the enclosure nevertheless made the thirteen-foot-long predator feel uncomfortably close.

The fangmora opened its jaws in a universally understood gesture of menace as Irimé drew her bone cudgel. At first glance it looked flawed and lumpen. On second glance it became clear that it had been assembled from the vertebrae of giant beasts, each one inscribed with black runes that looked like bodies broken on a wheel. A brief glance was enough to make Lurien’s skin wish to shed its own nerves. It was Druhirri, black cousin to Eltharri, a forbidden language of the elder days known only to embailors and those dread few whose sole purpose was the affliction of pain upon others.

The embailor tilted the fangmora’s head with the staff, shutting its jaws, something in her manner or some innate beast-magic in her being drawing instant obedience from the monster. She uttered a splintered consonant and then drove the rod into the fangmora’s neck.

Red light flared from the monster’s mouth, a volcanic glare fissuring through the scarified tissue covering its eyes. Its body stiffened in an instant of agony, before its tail lashed into the net behind it. Lurien and Filenduil both ducked, covering their heads with their arms, but it made no attempt to strike them again. It had been a reflex act of the body, an unconscious mechanism unrelated to any free act of will, for the beast possessed none. The blow rippled through the net walls as the fangmora’s pain spasms grew increasingly listless.

‘Your mount is awake now, tidecaster,’ said Irimé.

Lurien dipped his head. ‘You have my gratitude, embailor.’

‘Yours is a particularly fine breed,’ Irimé went on, gesturing through the nets while Éodrain’s former mount nuzzled the back of her hand and licked the scarred, bitten flesh of her arm.

‘She is,’ said Lurien.

‘One day you will have to tell me how you came by an asglir beast.’

‘One day?’

‘I am told you are bound for the Deep Nothing, west even of Túrach.’

‘And I thought the Guethen knew nothing of gossip. It seems they need no lessons in that from the Briomdain.’

‘If you mean to take a beast, then you will have need of an embailor. You will need me.’

‘I don’t need to break the beast, merely capture and return it.’

Irimé’s face twisted into a sneer. ‘Three pairs of hands, counting your own. To bring in a beast supposedly greater than a leviadon.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘With my own eyes? No. No one has. But it is a soul-shadow that embailors who venture out that way have sensed. Some have gone to seek it, but none have returned, and Anaer has since forbidden any true-souled aelf of Túrach from attempting to claim it again.’ Lurien understood now why the queen had thought to send him. She would either win the beast her enclave had desired for many years, or she would be rid of Prince Lurien. He could not fault her reasoning. ‘Two old students of mine, Flowain and Valhanir, were amongst the last to go in search of the monster’s lair.’

‘So this is about revenge?’

Irimé’s thin mouth tightened until it almost resembled a smile, bubbles issuing from the narrowest of cracks in the corners. Lurien had the horrible impression that she was laughing. ‘Hardly. Flowain was gifted but soft-hearted. Valhanir was the same. My interest in them expired when they chose to leave my charge.’

‘So why would you want to help me?’ said Lurien.

‘Why do you care?’

‘Care is a strong word. But I have a suspicious mind these days.’

‘My reasons are my own. But the satisfaction of breaking such a behemoth of the unknown would be reason enough for most to dare the wrath of their queen. The glory of the deed should we succeed. The desire for fame was what always drove Ubraich, my master, and Giléan, who was his master. Of course, my deeds have already eclipsed them both. They were weak too, in their own ways. Did you know that I was the embailor who broke the deepmare that Anaer herself rides in battle? But there is always more to achieve, higher to reach, before my name is remembered alongside Mor’u and the first of the embailors.’ Her smile, if that was what it had been, faded. ‘Regardless, you need me. The breaking of a beast is only the final application of an embailor’s talents. Tracking. Trapping. Binding. These are all skills of which the embailor is master.’ She turned to Filenduil. ‘The Fellglaive is mere weeks away. Or did I hear that incorrectly, tidecaster?’

The old Elgaenite glanced at Lurien, as if for permission, then gave the embailor a tired nod.

‘You need me,’ Irimé said again.

Lurien frowned. He was unaccustomed to altruistic offers of assistance. ‘And you want nothing in return?’

‘Only the chance to be there.’

Lurien shared a glance with Filenduil and Namaríel, then shrugged. ‘Fine. You carry your own gear, bring your own mount if you have one, and we leave in an hour. Don’t expect anyone here to wait for you.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Strange things happened to the water the deeper one went in the Green Gulch. At the most basic level, it still resembled water. It was a liquid. With a little effort Filenduil could still blend it to create ethersea. Lurien could swim in it. He could breathe it, though it tasted sour and burned the back of his throat as it went down to his lungs. Water, though, should not sparkle as though every droplet had trapped an emerald. Nor should it sing. Its voice was that of a million sirens, timid but hungry, invisible to the eye, manifesting only in spectral harmony and the unnatural caress of currents on aelven skin. Water did none of these things. Laughter, or something eerily akin to it, bubbled up from nowhere, bouncing from insane formations of coral and rock that should have been impossible at any depth. And already they were far, far deeper than Lurien had ever gone, deeper than all but the most solitary of deepkin would ever dare to venture.

It was not just the geography that was impossible. Miles beneath the range of any fish or creature that glowed, miles more below the deepest reaches of Ghyran’s absent sun, darkness should have reigned absolute.

Water did not glow.

But then light and water had more in common with each other than with the substance that Lurien and his followers actually swam through now.

Magic.

It was magic, not water, that filled the darkest reaches of the Deep Nothing, beyond the imagined borders of the Green Gulch. The primordial creation energies left over from the founding of the realmsphere resided there, stagnant and heavy. It was said that raw magic could still be found at the boundaries of the realmsphere, a gushing torrent of Life magic that the realm would one day subdue and domesticate into the natural cycles of Ghyran. The magic of the oceans was neither one nor the other. Elemental, yes. Destructive, yes. But it was also torpid, like a dragon of old, curled up in a hollow beneath the notice of mortals and gods and sleeping this age of the world away, forced into this sluggish, liquid-like state by the titanic pressures of the true ocean above.

Even that was to endow the conditions of the Deep Nothing with a physical parallel they simply did not, and could never, possess.

Deeper still they went, deeper, until even Lurien could feel his nose filling with a bleed that the phenomenal inward pressures would not allow to escape from his nostril. The blockage made his eye quiver. His head hurt. This was not the idoneth’s environment.

It was not even close.

And still, Irimé led them deeper.

‘Further,’ Irimé said one tide as they rested, waiting for Filenduil to recover sufficiently for another cast. ‘If the Fellglaive seeks you then he may yet divert his wrath from Guethen to come after you.’

Lurien simply shook his head, too exhausted to speak. Even the great soulscryers of Briomdar would have struggled to pluck a single lost soul from the vastness of the Deep Nothing.

It would be like finding a particular grain of sand on a beach.

So they waited.

It was later that tide that Lurien encountered his first daemon.

Namaríel saw it first.

Her bow was up before Lurien had even felt the warping effect of its existence on the not-water. She loosed. The whisperwood shaft disintegrated before it had leaped off the bow string, imploding under the pressure.

The daemon lurched for her.

There was something catastrophically unstable in its nature. Arms became tentacles, then flippers, then gelatinous millipede-like pseudopods, then arms, the fluidity of the change stumbling the entity when it could easily have swum. Shrieking like a kettle shaking atop a heatstone, Deepgrove dived on the blob-like thing with raking talons. Fecund energies overflowed from the daemon’s wounds, driving the maddened outcast back as something toad-like and cyclopean wriggled through the rents in its form. Lurien spurred Venom to the dryad’s aid just as a long arm of alabaster-pale skin crowned with a pincer claw erupted from the oozing meat of the daemon’s shoulder. Its spine cracked as it turned its head towards him. A long tongue unfurled from a mouth that was half beautiful and half revolting, and Lurien cried out in soul-fright. Venom reared in confusion. Stung out of his horror, Lurien drew Aeslecai from its sheath, but even its light was subdued there. It caused neither him nor the daemon the slightest pain.

Irimé swam in behind the entity’s broken neck, driving her pain-stave into the daemon’s putrid lower body. Its patchwork frame fluctuated, like ripples breaking a reflection, but it had less to do with the Druhirri magic bound to the pain-stave than with the tightly disciplined soul of the aelf that wielded it.

The newly shapeless daemon slapped her aside, bands of elaborate golden armour bursting from the writhing aether of its form to wrap themselves around an emerging figure of androgyne beauty as it rounded on Lurien. The daemonette licked barb-like teeth, then blew him a kiss.

Lurien dropped Aeslecai to the not-water and screamed.

‘Go back to the deep,’ Filenduil muttered. Lowering his vinestaff to the daemon, he made a ripping motion with his off-hand. A vortex whipped about the daemon’s adopted form. The tidecaster was accustomed to turning the innate magic of the realm’s oceans to his bidding, but this time it was the bottomless reservoir of that raw creation energy itself that he commanded. The vortex he summoned shredded the daemonette down to its constituent aether and cast it back to the ocean of its making with an explosion that threw all of them onto their backs.

‘What was that?’ Lurien breathed as they all pushed themselves back up.

‘A daemon,’ said Irimé. ‘The magic here is pure creation. It is aligned to no power. It is enough to sustain a daemon’s existence, but they depend on the souls of mortals to give them form and focus.’

Lurien frowned, saying nothing, as he dragged Deepgrove back to her feet and ensured that she was secured to Venom’s harness.

He did not want to dwell any longer than he needed to on the daemonic form his soul had chosen to take.

‘She is leading us nowhere,’ Namaríel hissed, sighting down the shaft of her arrow as only a namarti could, face turned out, feeling what lay beyond the arrowhead.

Lurien could not imagine what that might be in this dread place.

With his own, more limited senses and imagination, he could make out Irimé, sheathed in several tides’ worth of magical emerald glow, crouched low with her palm flat to the rocky floor. Occasionally, she lifted her gaze to confer with Filenduil. The tidecaster had dismounted, his fangmora slumbering fitfully a short distance away. Their discussions had become increasingly lengthy and embittered as the tides had come and gone.

‘The tidecaster seems to agree with you,’ said Lurien.

‘Because we are both right,’ she said.

Lurien pinched his temples, snorting another bloody bolus back down into his lungs before coughing it up. The ethersea could only mitigate so much of the pressure, and it was only getting harder to bear the deeper they went. He wiped the back of his hand on his armour. ‘Need I remind you that it’s because of you that we’re here in the first place?’

‘Is it, my prince? Is it? Because I do not recall being the one to renege on our promise.’ Namaríel pivoted her eyeless gaze towards him, the fulcrum of her arrow shaft remaining perfectly stable in its aim. ‘You always want the brightest thing. When you were a child it was Lágethé. In Elgaen it was Nael. For a time it was me, until you became infatuated with that.’ A tilt of the brow towards Aeslecai, sheathed across Lurien’s back. ‘Now it is Gwyndyr. So have her, assemble yourself an entire cohort of servile namarti if that is what you wish. Perhaps the gods will never see us fulfil our oaths. But I will be a queen to you in all but name.’

‘I never asked you why you killed Nael,’ Lurien murmured.

‘You did not ask because you knew why. He was in your way. And so he was in mine.’

‘And Gwyndyr? Is she in your way?’

‘You will grow bored of her on your own.’ She smirked, sensing Lurien’s protest. ‘I am sure she seems very fine to you now, but you do not have it in you to be satisfied. So enjoy her while you are able to.’

Ahead of them, Irimé rose. Filenduil kicked his fangmora awake, then remounted, his staff raised.

‘Again,’ Lurien muttered.

Time lost definition. There was no day-night cycle, no tidal variation. Even the sense of time took on a curious elasticity. Sometimes it felt as though they had departed Guethen only hours before, at others it felt closer to a hundred years. Were Galrohir and Mahbòr still waiting? Was he too late? Had Laramé crushed the entire enclave in her rage? Had Guethen surrendered? Had they all died centuries ago? Did the children of the Radiant Queen now rule the Green Gulch from the arbour-keeps of Dwy-Hor, fighting off the noxious tides of Coryza while a nameless, forgotten pretender sank deeper and deeper into the nothing? One time, certain he had seen a particularly mountainous formation of coppery rock once before, he caught a glimpse of himself moving off in the opposite direction. It felt like being visited by his own ghost. He mentioned it to Namaríel, who suggested that the magic was confusing his senses, and that he was a fool to think it was light and eyes he was seeing with in that place.

He had not believed her for a second.

Even counting his sleeps became an unreliable means of marking time. Everything had become like a dream. The only method left was to keep a tally of Filenduil’s castings, and this Lurien did religiously.

After each great throw of the old tidecaster’s strength they would stumble from the tideways, some interminable distance from where they had last been, and there stop long enough only for Filenduil to recover. Irimé would project her embailor sight into the ocean, sounding for the soul-spoor of their prey, Namaríel and her namarti senses keeping watch for daemonic attack while the two isharann were engaged. With nothing nearly so useful to contribute, Lurien became obsessed with keeping his count, worrying endlessly over the number in his mind. He took instead to carving it into Venom’s flank. She did not object. She did not notice.

Then, when Filenduil felt his strength restored, he and Irimé would argue.

And Lurien carved a nineteenth notch into the fangmora’s skin.

By the twenty-fourth casting, Lurien had filled Venom’s shoulder and started scratching on her fin. After the thirty-second, she started to notice and snapped at the hand with the knife. He disciplined her, a firm smack to the nose, and then diligently carved a thirty-third.

After the fifty-second casting, Irimé announced that they were close.

‘Something is alive in there,’ she said. She spoke with so little enthusiasm that, after fifty-three fruitless castings, Lurien could not convince himself that the embailor was entirely sincere.

‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘You are sure that there is a current pulling at your ears. You are sure that a heart beats in your chest. Your senses tell you so.’ She turned away. ‘So, yes. I am sure.’

The vista before them was jagged with flumes and spines, as though the ocean floor had drawn molten rock from beneath itself to encase itself in armour. The majestic structures stabbed out of the bedrock at every possible angle, as well as several more that should not have been possible at all, glittering and malign. Cruder formations of rock and accreted magic dotted the otherwise pristine arrangement of spires – coronets and crescents, rotundas and stacks. They seemed to have been drawn from the earth by the same arcane processes as the spines, only to have become broken or somehow found flawed, their growth turned inwards to some other, geometrically imperfect shape.

The formation that lay directly in Irimé’s eyeline was a right-handed spiral of calcified magic and of truly monstrous dimensions. It was a hundred feet wide at the base and a thousand high, leaning into the side of a spire that was itself almost three times that height. Its resemblance to the shell of some gargantuan snail was so acute that Lurien expected at any moment to see a soft body oozing from the opening at the base, antennae the size of leviadon waving in search of aelven prey.

He dared not breathe.

‘That can’t be the beast that Anaer sent us here to claim,’ he whispered. ‘Can it?’

Irimé chuckled. It was like listening to the legs being pulled from the underbelly of a shrimp. ‘Do creatures of that scale dwell somewhere in the Deep Nothing? I am sure they do. But be calm, Prince Lurien. You are looking at a creation of nature and time. The monster we hunt simply dwells within.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘This question again? I simply am.’

‘Is there anything else you can sense from it?’

The embailor closed her eyes. She remained that way for a long spell, then shook her head. ‘It is large, though not as large as you fear. Old. Very powerful.’ Her eyes reopened. ‘That is all it will let me see.’

‘Let you?’

‘It is not aware of us yet, if that is what concerns you, but it is a creature of magic, and subconsciously… subconsciously it senses me as I sense it.’

‘Do we go into its lair and take it?’ Namaríel left the exhausted Filenduil and the two ever-patient fangmoras to swim ahead and join them. ‘Or do we lure it out, fight it in open water?’ She and Lurien both turned to Irimé, who shrugged.

‘What bait do we have to lure a beast that has not stirred since the realmsphere itself was made?’ she said.

Lurien kicked himself higher for a better look, swimming a few dozen feet nearer to the mouth of the cave. Anticipation and fear together wound a noose about his chest, a burning tightness. He could turn around still, go home, wherever that might be once Vanglyr was finished with Guethen. But Namaríel had been right about him, and something about this timeless expanse bared his soul to the gods, and to himself – he wanted this beast, he wanted it for no other reason than it was there to be taken and he had said that he would have it. He was a descendant of the cythai, who were themselves descended from the asur. What kind of king was he without his dragon to ride? Muscle by muscle, desire pushed fear aside until there was nothing of it left but a numb tingle in his fingers and toes. He refused to return empty-handed to humiliation and defeat. And perhaps even death, though he was confident that he would be able to flee before it came to that. If it should come to that. But flee where? To what? Dwy-Hor? The whirlway? He set his jaw, discovering that the decision had already been made.

‘We go in,’ said Lurien. ‘Irimé?’

‘Hook-spears and nets,’ said the embailor. Her voice rose from snarl to growl to address them all. ‘You will find them in the saddlebags I loaded onto your fangmoras.’ She grinned, an expression that might have been a new addition to the Druhirri tattoos covering the old aelf’s face for all the emotion it conveyed. ‘Today you are all to be embailor namarti. You will herd the monster for me, distract it from doing me harm while I strike at its mind.’

‘It sounds as though you’ve given yourself the easier task,’ said Lurien.

The embailor turned her shoulder. ‘Tell that to my master. And to his master. Ubraich’s arm is inside Queen Anaer’s deepmare now. And his leg too. I told you that this beast is a creature of magic. Be assured that it will have defences beyond those that you can see.’

Lurien hoisted the caparison from Venom’s flanks. It revealed a secondary travel harness of looped belts around its barrel, studded with buckles and clasps and attachment sites for their gear. Most of the bags had contained pressurised water and foodstuffs and were now empty. He tried not to think about it. Eating would become a concern for him if he was alive tomorrow. A long spear, more a pike, designed to keep some hapless namarti as far from the teeth of their quarry as was possible, was slotted across a pair of dangling hooks. It was half as long as Venom, running from her shoulder to the base of her tail. The haft was thicker than that of an ordinary war-spear, bite marks and scratches telling of prior good use. It had two blades. One was long and straight with reversed barbs. The other curled back towards the haft and was serrated on the inside edge for hooking flesh. The weapon had been painstakingly designed to ensure that its blades stayed inside whatever they stabbed and would do plenty of damage should whatever that was manage to pull free.

Further back, Filenduil was similarly engaged, though it was clear that playing the role of namarti did not sit as lightly with the old isharann as it did with his prince. He pulled brusquely at his fangmora’s coverlets, complaining all the while under his breath of bitter joints and indignity. In a perfect realm, Lurien was sure there was some use to have been made of the tidecaster’s powers in the coming battle, but if the perfect realm was out there somewhere, Lurien had yet to find it. The isharann was spent. Even his vinestaff had been plucked bare, yielding the last of its bounteous fruit to see them this far into the Deep Nothing. When Namaríel swam back to claim her own spear, she took charge of the drowsing fangmora, and the tidecaster offered no protest.

Lurien freed his hook-spear at about the same moment that Namaríel did hers, brandishing it at arm’s length to admire in full its perfectly crafted lethality.

The bedrock trembled. Tremors pulsed through the not-water, and through the aelves that swam in it. The spiral shell structure ahead of them ground against the spine on which it leant, an inky issue burbling from the mouth of the formation. It was as much magical as physical, the oily manifestation of an ancient creature’s malice and power. Lurien lowered his hook-spear as the reverberations ran through him. Namaríel did the same, reaching instinctively for her bow stave, which brought another grumble of unrest from the shell.

‘Release your weapons,’ said Irimé.

The namarti released her fingers from the whisperwood, then slowly unpeeled her hand. The tremors faded, then ceased altogether.

‘Incredible,’ Irimé whispered. ‘The beast must be in part daemonic. Or so infused with the essence of the Deep Nothing as to share something of their properties. It is feeding off your malicious intent.’ The embailor turned around. Cruel fascination mauled her already unattractive face. ‘I was wrong, Prince Lurien. Very wrong. It knows we are here. It knew even before we did.’

Namaríel’s fingers twitched for her bow, itching to take it up however useless it might prove. ‘Then I do not think we should venture in there, not if it is lying in wait.’

Lurien turned back to the cave mouth, as hooked as any prey beast on an embailor spear, and unable to break free now without ripping something that would not soon heal.

‘I agree,’ he said, and then smiled. He had an idea. ‘Only one of us needs to go.’

Time was already meaningless. Lurien made it stop. His thoughts froze like splinters between vast sheets of ice, floating, separated by a gulf of silence and cold. His soul gusted somewhere across that void, rootless and adrift, watchful for him as he watched for it. Beyond the boundaries of the mind’s expanse, a body smiled. Fingers closed around the shaft of a spear and pulled. The draw lasted the duration of an ice age. He felt nothing. No echo of malice answered the unsheathed blade.

‘Rem…’

Irimé’s mouth yawned open, her voice ludicrously slowed down.

‘Mark…’

The meditative exercises that Lurien’s mother had taught him as a child quietened his soul. It separated from his thoughts, neutered both from his body. Daemons were creatures of fear and emotion, the familiar forms they wore but rags cut from the finery of mortal subconsciousness. A daemon, or even a magical beast of the Deep Nothing, could not draw on that which even Lurien could not feel. He was an empty well, an eclipsed star, a black hole. He was the light, drowned at the bottom of the sea. The whole purpose of the technique was to hide. He hated it, despised how it made him feel and the thoughts it opened his quiet mind to receive, but the monster would never see him coming. He only had to injure it, trap it, and then Irimé and the others could follow him in.

‘Ab…’

The embailor was still speaking as the Lurien-body took a net from her, slid it up his arm to the shoulder and then swam towards the cave mouth.

Reaching it took an eternity, but he was not counting.

The Lurien-body swam inside. While his mind occupied itself with navigating the distances between thoughts and with vague conceptualisations of a future involving beast and blade, the body looked around. It was darker within than it had been without, sheltered by fluted walls against the endless flows of creation magic. The Lurien-body extended Aeslecai. Its amethyst soul-glow crept with algal haste towards the cavern’s walls. Its appearance brought no great revelation. A tubular cavern, curling upwards and inwards towards the distant centre point of the spiral. A baleful smear of soul essence scarred the walls in places, scratches left in the fabric of the aether by the passage of a beast. The marks were invisible to mortal senses, but to his altered perceptions they smouldered like runes stamped onto the metal of a freshly wrought blade. An understanding of how Irimé had tracked the beast across such an expanse of ocean became clear to him. The creature had not slept the cold aeons post-creation dormant in its lair. It had left. It had hunted. It had fed. And it had returned.

It was here.

And it knew he was here.

The Lurien-body responded to its understanding with something called fear. A glacial creep moved through its bones, freezing its liquid insides. But it was separate from him now, and from the monster. It did not know he was here. Holding the glowing spear aloft, torch and talisman both, the Lurien-body swam deeper.

The way narrowed, vast still but always curving until up and down ceased to exist. Only forwards and backwards remained. The spear’s light caught less and less surface as the walls became closer. The Lurien-body’s mouth became chafed. Its muscles ached with tension. He had no way of knowing how long that had been so, for time meant nothing to an untethered mind. Cold rationality held that every additional foot he was made to swim meant a monster that was several feet smaller than it could otherwise have been, but the severance of body from mind and soul was not one way. It held on to its fear in ignorance while he watched on from afar. It would have been scant consolation in any case. There was volume enough where the Lurien-body swam to allow the passage of a leviadon. And there were miles of tunnel ahead yet. He forgot rationality. He would rather face the monster now.

The Lurien-body swam on.

His mind, by then, had adjusted to the expanses between moments. The interval between what passed before and what came after felt less epochal than it had before.

Aeslecai’s light brushed the dust of darkness from another essence smear on the wall. The Lurien-body paused. It was the first mark it had glimpsed since the one on the entrance wall. Chance? Or was it getting closer? A mark of territory, perhaps. Or a threat.

A low growl struck up from the tunnel ahead, a deep, throbbing bass.

Flesh converted the sound into a mental image. With that image came a dread that no degree of spiritual separation short of permanent unlife could insulate him against. It was aware of him. But how? He had been perfectly controlled. Lágethé would have been awed. She might even have found it in her soul to praise him for once in her long, cruel life. He perceived a spark of soul essence from somewhere in the maelstrom of raw aether beyond the walls of the cave. Behind him. Aelven, Filenduil, and swiftly hidden. Not swiftly enough. Another growl rumbled from the abyss ahead. With answers slow in forming, he pulled his thoughts back and into the cold shell of his body. He may as well have been lighting himself on fire, but that did not seem important now. The beast was alert to him. He had to move.

He turned his spear towards the inward passage.

And then it came. He saw it only for a moment.

The indigo-blue soul-glow of his spear glanced off gelid skin, mottled green and grey. Blood-infused tissue. Throbbing beneath translucent flesh. A great eye, bulging and black. It devoured what light came near as though impervious, seeing by other means, failing to return even a glint. A slab of nose. A flash of tooth.

A moment was more than enough.

The mass of it forced a compression wave into the tunnel space ahead of it, picking Lurien up like a shipwreck in a storm before the behemoth even came near. Soul-light raked over glittering walls, scrabbling for purchase. Holding the spear one-handed, he flailed behind him with an arm. His fingers brushed something. Clammy, but rigid. A fin. Armour. He made a grab for it, but was spinning ahead of the wave before he could get a purchase. With a shout of frustration he cast out again, and again, almost giving thought to abandoning Aeslecai to free both hands before finally managing to curl his fingertips over some nail-width protrusion in the monster’s side.

His previously tumbling direction of movement became aggressively forwards.

Water hammered his head into his shoulders, driving him flat to the monster’s carapace, and screamed past his ear – Let go! His fingers slipped. He bent his wrist into the torrent, transferring the burn from his fingers to the bones of his hand, turning the face of his agony from the rush of water and screaming as the monster burst like a razorshell harpoon from the mouth of the cave. Then he let go. The monster’s bow wave propelled him well wide of the creature as it surged on ahead without him.

Outside the cocooning darkness of the cave structure, Lurien saw it clearly.

It was a nightmare of the primordial ooze, blown out of the proportions of mortal fear to rule an ocean. An allopex, at least in origin, but five times the bulk of even a Blacknarkh and encased in glittering emerald plates of prehistoric magic. Where the grey, jellylike tissue of flesh squirmed beneath the armour, it showed the organs within. A heart, throbbing madly in a cage of ghost-white bone. Gills, rippling like canvas sails under way. He could see every vein that cut through its leviadon-ending mouth, a feast of translucent gums and row after row after row of huge, cartilaginous teeth. It was a monster like no other in the Mortal Realms, a unique abomination, swollen and mutated into a new and terrible form by the forgotten magicks of the Deep Nothing. No name known to the bestiaries of the embailor fanes could do it justice, but Lurien found the title that fit it there already in his subconscious.

Dharathai.

In the Eltharri of the Awakened, it meant black dragon.

That was what it was to Lurien. That was what it would be.

He wanted it.

A lilting war-cry rang out, and Lurien paddled and kicked to stabilise himself in the water. He turned in the direction it had come from to see Namaríel nocking an arrow to her bow. Surging ahead of her was Filenduil’s fangmora, terror penetrating deep enough into its mangled brain to override its survival instinct and even embailor discipline. It powered into the attack. If there was any conscious thought or sense to its actions, however, Lurien could not see it. It was pressure madness. Lurien had no personal experience of the affliction, but it had been luridly described to him by warriors like Calohaire who had attempted to bring live prisoners back with them to the enclaves. It was said too that the oceanclan orruks that roved the seabeds of the shallows suffered from it constantly, accounting for their destructive mania and savagery. The Elgaenite fangmora was weaker and less thoroughly broken than Venom, and even Irimé’s harsh imprecations could not slow it now.

The dharathai snapped the fangmora in two. Blueish blood splattered its fangs. The bottom half of a giant eel spun out from the monster’s jaws, leaking tendrils of gore.

‘Mathlann!’ Lurien yelled. ‘Preserve us.’

Namaríel loosed an arrow.

After their first encounter with a daemon of the Deep Nothing, Filenduil had enchanted a quiver to better survive the pressure, but the tidecaster would have been better served preserving his energies – the arrow snapped against the dharathai’s armour.

Filenduil cried out, terror coming at the tidecaster in a rare and giddying extreme, and thrust his embailor hook-spear into the unprotected flesh of the monster’s face.

A snap of its jaws demolished the hardened wooden shaft down to the grip. It swallowed the blades. Lurien saw them go down. The force of the spear’s obliteration hurled the tidecaster away from the monster’s mouth, giving Namaríel the time to catch his ankle and drag him clear. It took the dharathai the remainder of a heartbeat to finish destroying the embailor spear and then twist around to pursue the two aelves. Namaríel launched another arrow. This time she targeted an eye, which burst like a caulep grape under an akhelian’s boot heel. The growl the dharathai’s jaws were emitting grew in intensity. Perhaps in pain. But Lurien had seen no evidence that it was capable of feeling such a thing. Perhaps just with speed. Vast muscles swept its dorsal tail-blade from side to side as it accelerated.

The two aelves scattered, and it swept between them before turning with a frustrated snap of its jaws to chase after Namaríel.

Lurien realised that the monster was ignoring him. It was possible that some residual effect of the separation trance was obscuring his soul from its senses, but it could just as easily have been that the piscine simplicity of its mind could not hold two thoughts in its head at once. Either way, he was content to take advantage.

The dharathai quickly devoured the distance to Namaríel, the namarti quite aware of it without needing to look back. She turned. Stabbed with her hook-spear. The blade scraped off the underside of its head, chipping magical armour, and punted her just beneath the reach of its jaws. Its neck, as thick as a regular allopex was long, twisted after her, and its mouth snapped shut mere inches from the namarti’s foot.

Lurien frowned, almost disappointed, as the storm of bubbles swallowed Namaríel and pushed her away from danger. There was a part of him that was tempted to wait it out, to watch for the heartbeat and a half it would take to see the namarti eviscerated like the poor fangmora had been before her. But greed overruled such petty interests as revenge.

The dharathai was his. He knew he had promised it to Anaer, but he would deal with that problem later. As he had with Mahbòr and his precious spear. He wanted it.

This was his dragon.

Something unkempt and wild in his psyche gave a whoop, propelling him onto the dharathai like a spirit of Kurnoth. He drove Aeslecai into the monster’s abdomen. Coarse-grained plates of magical sediment cracked under the blow of the ensorcelled spear, a jellylike grey mush spluttering out from the wounded section as he tore the spear tip free. The monster bucked, throwing Lurien off and into a backward somersault. It slowed, turned, and by the time Lurien had himself righted, it was coming straight for him, liquid magic rushing across the titan’s pectoral fins, jaws gnashing.

‘Prince Lurien!’

Namaríel loosed an arrow that thunked into a join between the thick plates covering the dharathai’s head section. Drawing and firing so swiftly that she became a blur in the water, she riddled the monster’s head with the pale shafts. A dozen shattered against its magically toughened flesh. It tilted its dorsal line as though deliberately using its own armoured bulk to shield the more vulnerable parts of its head. Nevertheless, one pinpoint shot nailed the monster’s second eye and splattered its hide with black jelly. Champing at everything around it in a water-frothing frenzy, the dharathai snapped towards Lurien’s hip. A vortex swirled up from under its belly before its bite could close and pushed the monster up over his head. Its jaws crashed shut over empty water and Lurien turned to strike his spear tip along its underbelly. Unlike with a leviadon, however, he found no weak point in its armour there, and the dharathai cruised overhead, angry, blind, but otherwise uninjured.

Lurien put a hand to his waist, as if to assure himself his legs were attached by more than mere water pressure, and looked down at the shattered tidecaster.

‘Indebted,’ he gasped.

Filenduil did not answer. He was already dragging himself back to where Venom floated placidly, curled around the idoneth’s gear, flickering her tongue in the direction of the behemoth with mind-broken disinterest.

Namaríel nocked another arrow.

Lurien raised his spear.

‘Do not kill it,’ Irimé yelled.

The master embailor had held herself separate from the fray until then, obscuring her soul with discipline as Lurien had with ritual, but she entered it now, delivering a scream that was part Druhirri death curse and part embailor mage-pulse. The spell shock hit straight at the dharathai’s brain and crunched the unnatural carapace that encased its head. Grey matter leaked from the cracks. The water around the monstrous allopex seethed and foamed, clouding up with blood and brain matter as the beast thrashed in its pain throes. Lurien could no longer see it. He backpedalled to put himself further beyond its reach.

With a roar, the wounded dharathai burst from the clouded water, jaws yawning wide. Straight at Lurien. Crying out, Lurien hoisted Aeslecai by instinct. The spear blade stabbed into the soft palate at the back of the giant’s mouth. It bit down hard. Teeth cracked. The charnel reek of stale magic and butchered metal wafted outward across Lurien’s face. He gagged, pushed back against his spear, its spectral light filtered now through veins, chew muscles and teeth. The dharathai opened its mouth again and roared.

‘Kill it!’ he screamed. ‘Kill it now!’

‘I have it.’ Irimé’s hollow ecstasy rang through the false dark. ‘I have it.’

The monster drove him forwards, jaws crunching shut again. Irimé levelled another pain-curse. The dharathai shuddered. Lurien felt it weaken. He shook against his spear pole, blood squirming from the giant allopex’s mouth where the tip was lodged, but only seeming to excite the ravenous monster further. Filenduil returned, dragging a heavy net. He cast it over the dharathai’s head. Lurien cursed him as the weight of the net pushed him closer towards the monster’s mouth. The growl emanating from its cavernous throat became the sound of death, the flocking of the black-finned néthir that ferried the souls of the damned from the gates of Mirai to the old underworld of the aelves. It was all he could do to hold on to his spear pole and push himself back against the net. Namaríel swam to attack the dharathai’s mouth with a hook-spear from above, blizzarding Lurien with wood and metal splinters.

‘Cease!’ Irimé yelled, driving her pain-stave from on high and into the roof of the monster’s skull with a splintering of bone. Spasms of agony tore through the great beast, throwing Lurien from its jaws, the weight of the net capturing him and pushing him back towards the side of its mouth. He cursed, clinging to the netting as the dharathai reared. ‘No!’ Irimé snarled, tiny beneath its gaping jaws. ‘You will obey.’

A gasp of stale breath wafted through the embailor’s robes as the dharathai’s strength seemed to abandon it. The growling ceased, its gills stilling. All sense of hostility retreated into its magic-encrusted skin.

Lurien grinned, even as the dead weight of it and Filenduil’s net pushed him ever back towards its dumbly hanging mouth.

It was over.

‘Lurien?’ said Namaríel, tugging at the net. ‘My prince?’

He began to laugh, a mirthless celebration of madness.

‘Bind the creature’s mouth shut,’ he heard Irimé say. ‘Then cover its fins and make ready to return it to Túrach.’

And from there to Guethen, Lurien thought, with a real army at my back.

This was, by Lurien’s reckoning, only the third hopeless task he had accomplished since setting out from Briomdar.

What was one more?

All that remained now was to kill Vanglyr Fellglaive.

PART SIX

THE BLIND KING’S COURT

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The battle had been raging for hours, ebbing, swelling, draining into persistent pools of melee of perhaps a hundred fighters apiece before fresh waves of combatants crashed together to bring foam and noise to the battlefield again. That noise was the hew of blades and the scrape of shell and steel. An aelf could close their eyes and imagine that they listened to waves breaking on a rocky beach. There were few screams, no cries. Even the whisperbow shafts of the reavers threatening to englobe the conflict were loosed in silence. It would have been contested in darkness, too, if not for the shoals of luminescent fish released by both sides to reveal their opposite’s numbers and thwart any thoughts of trickery. Their glowing scales painted the dying in the colours of warring kings.

This was not another raid on one of the lesser races of the surface world. This was deepkin war. That meant wave after wave of namarti until one side’s thrall contingent was spent and they were forced to commit precious souls to an akhelian charge. Sheer numbers and Galrohir’s curious willingness to armour his favoured thralls gave the defenders of Guethen the upper hand. They would win this phase.

It was so obvious that Lurien had begun to wonder why Vanglyr allowed it to play out as it did. Had it been Lurien in his stepfather’s place, he would have charged the Guethen namarti with the full might of his morrsarr guard and prayed he could even the odds before the shock troops on the Túrach and Dwy-Hor flanks could respond in kind. But perhaps there was something to what Galrohir had said after all – Vanglyr, the greatest raider of his age though he was, did not know how to fight a war. He raided the same lands that the tyrants of the azydrazor before him had raided. He fought his battles as they would have taught, while Lurien had cheated and lied and stabbed a Coryzan leper in the back, and in so doing had unified to himself the greatest host the Green Gulch had ever known.

He scanned the serried ranks of the Briomdar akhelian for his enemy. Vanglyr was not so easy to spot as Lurien knew he himself would be from the Briomdain side, clad in plates of the finest armour ever made by the pearlwrights of Elgaen, mounted in a finned chariot traced to a titan of myth, flocked with sallowtails bearing the colours and emblems of half the enclaves of the Gulch. Wait. There. The raidlord was almost hidden in the energy haze of five hundred knights of the Briomdar ishlaen, but there – mounted on a deepmare, monstrous cousin to his knights’ fangmoras, clad in heavy turquoise plate embellished with scallops and starfish motifs.

The Fellglaive had ridden into harpoon range of Guethen’s tidegate the day before, three tides after Lurien’s return from the Deep Nothing and just one after the arrival of the promised forces of Mahbòr and Anaer.

They had exchanged the usual demands for surrender, which was how most deepkin conflicts were ended – a display of strength followed by the capitulation of the weaker side. The idoneth were so few, their lives short enough as it was, and they had developed a multitude of unique customs to keep them from killing one another as freely as they might otherwise wish. By every tradition Vanglyr professed to cleave to, he should have surrendered to the alliance arrayed against him with no blood shed. But no. That, too, was as Galrohir had once warned him – they were as much Tyrion as they were Teclis, blindness as well as pride. This would be settled by Lacelothrai, the Sword of Tyrion, and so however unexpectedly, however reluctantly, the defenders of Guethen had sallied forth so that Lurien could face his foe in the Court of the Blind King.

The knights of Guethen held the centre, a diamond of heavy infantry fourteen deep and fourteen high set immediately before their city’s tidegate. The space between the individual warriors was great, for such were the practicalities of a defensive formation in the deep ocean, their huge barbed shields and long trident spears just enough to cover the warrior above, below or to either side should the Briomdain break through. On the right flank was the phalanx of Dwy-Hor, the eclectic warrior bands of Mahbòr. Akhelian knights in beryl-green half-plate, decorated with leaf fronds and warpaint. Allopexes in floral lorica, mounted by body-painted riders wielding razorshell harpoons and retiarius net launchers. Ahead of those sombre battle lines, a grim carnival of namarti hookweavers brought the bleak tidings of Mathlann’s deepwood to the crags of Guethen, dark and half-naked, clad in tattoos and the darting shoals of their ever-moving blades. On the left flank, a huge mass of fangmora cavalry waited in disciplined ranks, arranged in a mandala of provenance around a glittering wedge of asglir’akhelian led by Anaer herself. The penitent queen was encased in silver plate and hard edges, every joint encrusted with spines. A conical silver helm enclosed her head. Her sword was sheathed, a lance in a quiver on her deepmare’s shoulder, ice-blue cloak flapping in the currents of battle, the very eidolon of martial detachment. Lurien wished he could be so tranquil.

Facing them from across their namarti screens, five thousand knights in the regal turquoises and golds of Briomdar awaited the order to charge. About a twentieth of that number again wore the pearl white of Elgaen, but Lurien had seen their prowess first-hand and knew they were more than a token force to be discounted.

A pair of gargantuan leviadon anchored the foe’s lines in the water. The enormous shelled monsters were living fortresses, the vulnerable parts of their heads and necks sheathed in damascened metal, their fins scythed. Elegant turrets of moulded turtle shell and enamelled metals bristled with harpoon launchers and fierce cadres of akhelian ma’harr, reinmasters. Upon each leviadon, a single namarti stood within the decorative ramparts of the rearcastle, red with the runes of thraldom cut into their flesh and beating a sonorous dirge upon a gold-framed drum. Each thump sent a wave of distortion and reflection through the water, a shimmering field that bent arrows and deflected light. Where the echo fields of the two leviadon met, duplications scattered through the surrounding water, Vanglyr’s phalanx doubling or even tripling in apparent size before the vibrations faded.

A leviadon was practically unkillable, used either as line breakers or as mobile bastions around which a fluid force could rally before striking out again at the crest of the next wave. Túrach, however, was well known for its deep waters and terrible monsters. They had brought three, and of a breed larger than any other beast on the field. Dwy-Hor had brought another, its shell painted in esoteric emblems and snarled with verdant tangles.

And yet, the longer those early exchanges ebbed and crashed, Guethen namarti butchering their counterparts in turquoise and gold, the more Lurien began to doubt his earlier confidence. Old fears reasserted themselves. The Fellglaive had to know what he was doing. An akhelian undefeated in almost eighty years of battle deserved more respect than that. Lurien fiddled with the haft of Aeslecai, easing and tightening his grip on the reins of the dharathai as he did so.

Gwyndyr was down there, fighting alongside the Guethen slave castes. Every so often he caught a flicker of gold or pearl and fancied it was one of the two blades he had gifted her on the eve of his departure to the Deep Nothing. Their union would never be one of love, and he could not argue that her death in battle would solve more problems than it would create now that Galrohir had committed his troops to his cause, but she had proven far too useful, and surprisingly so, for him to actively wish her harm. Lurien scowled. With nothing to actively do, he was obsessing. Straining after every glimmer of white or gold was starting to hurt his eyes. He was glad that Namaríel was not there to notice. He had intervened personally with the Laughing King to ensure she was seconded to Mahbòr’s reavers, where she could make the greatest contribution, furthest from him.

Pulling his gaze from the fray, he turned to Kimladril, the Dwy-Hor soulscryer ensconced in the armoured carriage of the war chariot beside him. She was enshrouded in robes of olive green and deep black, head cowled. Her shoulders were clad in fretted guards that were more decorative than defensive, a hollowed shell from which scryfish shoals darted and swam, disturbing her heavy robes.

‘Anything from Mahbòr?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Anaer?’

She looked at him pityingly.

‘Galro–’

‘I assure you, Prince Lurien,’ she said. ‘I would not keep it to myself.’

The last member of the triptych aboard the dharathai-drawn chariot was Embailor Irimé. While competent enough fighters, the beastmasters did not generally accompany their charges into battle. If their work was done properly, their presence was unnecessary, but there had been no time to break the dharathai for battle, assuming such training would ever be possible for such a titan of the deep, and any orders that Lurien wished to give would require the embailor’s pain-stave and mind powers to make so.

Lurien watched anxiously as lapis-garbed namarti began to trickle back from the sprawl of melees, a fresh wave led by a chosen handful of akhelian foot-knights already gathering speed to replace them.

Everything he had endured. Everything he had already achieved. He was just one more victory away from finishing it all with a crown on his head.

He could not tell any more if it was unease in his belly or impatience.

‘We could end this now,’ he murmured.

‘We could.’ Irimé frowned. ‘Either way, we will end it soon.’

‘When next the battle breaks, we could hold back our next wave, meet theirs instead with a countercharge of akhelian and beasts. Four leviadon and the dharathai.’ He wound the great beast’s reins in his grip until small bubbles of water squeezed out from cracks in the leather. ‘We will break their backs in a single charge.’

‘You are so eager to cross swords with the Fellglaive?’ asked Kimladril.

‘A part of me,’ said Lurien. ‘Yes.’

So many crossed lines and bent promises had been moving towards that seemingly inevitable confrontation. His lessons with Morogai. His theft of Aeslecai from the Cueth’ene. His refusal to surrender it to Mahbòr. Even withholding the dharathai from Anaer until after the battle was won had been with the Fellglaive in mind. There was a proper way that such things should be done, taught by Teclis to his children in the time of eolas and felt by Lurien in the roots of his soul. A king rode into battle at the head of a host of his proud knights, silver-clad and glorious, to defy his challenger with burning sword and golden lance. His jawline twitched, the imagery of the glorious cavalry charge so deeply bedded into his psyche that it was difficult to parse from his own thoughts. Those were the thoughts he focused on. They had experienced the Fellglaive’s skill in de’comhrac for themselves, not second-hand through the illuminating Light of a creator being. Those were the thoughts that would be more than happy to see Galrohir or Anaer face Vanglyr in the Blind King’s Court, assuming a stray whispershaft or a well-aimed razorshell harpoon could not accomplish the deed from afar.

‘And a part of me… no.’

‘As contradictory as those desires would appear to be, one of you is about to get his wish.’ Irimé pointed towards the meandering battle lines.

Lurien had already seen. He leant forwards, as if what he was witnessing had created a hollow space in the water that needed to be filled. Vanglyr’s thrall warriors were breaking from the centre. They were fleeing, swimming hard for their akhelian’s lines in numbers enough to break the incoming wave. A rout. Their victorious counterparts from Guethen milled in the water, murdering those too suicidal or slow to flee, their own momentum already broken by the fierce close-quarters fighting. Their own follow-up wave was already surging towards them, lanmari-armed thralls kicking up a froth in pursuit of the fleeing Briomdain. They were going to catch them. The akhelian were too far away. Lurien bared his teeth.

‘Kimladril,’ he said. ‘Signal Anaer. Tell her to–’

The soulscryer doubled over with a shriek before Lurien could finish. She dropped to the palanquin and sprayed vomit over the side. Lurien grimaced and pushed himself aside. Palms flat to the living wood of the palanquin, the soulscryer looked up, eyes indigo-shot, and spat an anaemic lump of something from between her teeth.

‘Laramé!’

Lurien felt pressure growing between his ears, the sea floor and the surface two hands that were pushing slowly together. His mouth opened as though to relieve the pressure on his skull. He floated to his knees, only his hand around the reins keeping him from drifting away from the floor of the chariot. He mouthed the words Hold on to something but could not hear them. His ears popped. Something broke.

The soundlessness of idoneth doing battle shrank to a point of true silence and then blew out. Waves of compressive power. Screaming violence. Flattening the namarti who had, until that point, been giving chase. Those closest to the explosion were turned to anthropoid puffs of indigo cloud, obliterated a heartbeat later by secondary waves so that a witness might think them ghosts he had imagined in his terror. Those fortunate enough to have been further back were tossed aside, armoured and unarmoured alike broken by the whim of a master tidecaster at work, limbs torn from limbs, and strewn to the mercy of the waves below.

The dharathai had been, at Anaer’s insistence, separated from the front line by half a league and a deep block of Guethen heavy infantry, but even there the blast wave flung Lurien back. The reins snapped taut, tightening around his wrist until he feared his hand would be severed. Irimé clung grimly to the side board, Kimladril flapping past her as though snatched up in a gale.

It was the reins again that drew Lurien back as the blast wave passed over them.

‘Heart of Mathlann,’ he swore.

The explosion had cast ruptured pieces of namarti into a half-circle, a wave, its expanding centre breaking weakly against Guethen’s main battle line. They suffered the slap-slap of their kindred’s body parts against their shields with the sneering distaste of akhelian knights. Lurien scanned the gruesome indigo froth, praying to see no sign of Gwyndyr, but incredible beauty was not a trait that the living passed on to the dead, and one clump of ruined flesh looked much like another. A pearl-inlaid longsword was indistinguishable from a crude blade of silvered lead when both were bent and broken and smeared dark with idoneth blood. From somewhere behind that surf-break of upraised shields, Lurien could hear Galrohir’s voice. ‘Brace. Brace. Brace,’ he was saying. He had seen something that Lurien was about to.

A violent seethe of magically heated water hissed towards the Guethen lines like a meteorite. The manifest fist of a deep and bellicose ocean. The deepkin’s variant on the fireball.

‘Brace!’

The spellwave hit the akhelian in sound-compressed silence, crumpling shields, tearing plates from armour, the temperatures required to boil water at those depths more than sufficient to cook even preternaturally resilient idoneth alive. The blast blew a hole in the Guethen formation. Those caught in it were dead already. Those at the periphery of its effects were screaming as they tried to tear boiling armour from their flesh. Galrohir bellowed at them to reform and raise shields. Lurien could see another hissing trail streaking towards them. Two more. Three more. Serial detonations crumped through the Guethen centre. Dozens boiled to death in seconds, hundreds more spinning wildly out of formation.

Raising his voice over the carnage, Galrohir was screaming for his isharann.

Lurien felt the change in the taste and pressure of the water as they belatedly began to work, but they were too few, and no match for the power of the Elgaenite and Briomdain sorcerers. Far away to the right, angered deepspites spiralled upwards like the birthing funnel of a whirlpool as Mahbòr’s isharann called on their own powers. It was not enough. The very water in which the Guethen swam bucked like an allopex with a namarti rider, ruining any chance Galrohir might have had of rallying them.

Lurien followed those trails, parallel tracks of foaming water, to where the White Queen of Elgaen swam, shrouded in power. She burned white, an element so violently combustible that it would burn even when doused, hissing and seething until it consumed itself in its fury. A cabal of white-robed tidecasters englobed the safe limits of that sputtering halo, and it was from their staffs that the magic obliterating Galrohir’s forces originated. Laramé herself, however, was glaring across the bubbling slaughter that their efforts had invoked. A single isharann dared her queen’s immolative aura to whisper in her ear, directing her pearl-hard gaze with a claw-sheathed finger.

Her eyes locked with Lurien’s.

There was no hiding place in the Mortal Realms from a Briomdain soulscryer or their Elgaenite cousins. Laramé could crush him at will. And she would.

Once she had inflicted as much injury as a living aelf could bear.

Lurien drew no satisfaction in acknowledging that his paranoia had judged the situation perfectly. He had indeed won this phase. The real battle, however, was only now beginning.

Rank upon rank of Briomdain cavalry, hundreds of knights, started forwards.

‘Briomdar charges,’ Irimé hissed.

Lurien drew Aeslecai. The great spear tip rippled and lengthened as it was drawn, proud scenes of eolas reflecting in his dulled eyes as he took it two-handed. The reins floated aside. They served little purpose beyond anchoring his feet to the floor of the chariot in any case. It was the embailor that controlled the beast.

‘And so do we,’ he answered.

The azydrazor taught any number of ways for an infantry cohort to stand up to a charge of heavy cavalry. Tighten formation, stand firm, present a wall of points with long spears for which the tri-spear favoured by the Guethen akhelian was amply suited. But they did none of these. The tidecasters of Elgaen were merciless in ensuring that every vestige of order and morale had been shredded from the Cobalt Knights by the time five hundred heavily armoured warriors of the Briomdain morrsarr struck like an electrified wave.

It was a massacre. Voltspears cracked helms, sundered breastplates, electrical spasms hurling warriors back into the water, their armour crawling with energy, and killing as many by ricochet as with thrust spears. Fangmoras barged through, driving their knights deeper into the wound and biting at those that still tried to fight back. The very water vibrated, tortured by the concerted voltaic discharge of so many.

Galrohir bellowed, trying to stamp order on his pocket of the line, and hacked the curved blade edge of his poleaxe into a charging morrsarr’s neck. Blood oozed and blebbed from the rent in the knight’s armour as the king of Guethen wrenched the aelf from her saddle. He enjoyed about a second to snarl of his victory before a second fangmora ploughed through him. His pocket of order dissolved. Lurien saw no more. What had passed for a formation was disintegrating under the fury of the Briomdain charge. Like a brick struck with a hammer.

Only Lurien and the dharathai continued to move forwards. Brain-dead and huge, it was the rock that the stream could gush around but not break. Fangmoras shied from its bulk. Voltspears emptied charge into unfeeling hide. Knights fell away in pieces to every snap of its jaws.

A morrsarr knight spurred his beast at Lurien on a rising diagonal, over the dharathai’s magically toughened back, and then stabbed down at him with his lance.

Lurien tucked in his shoulder. The lance tip glanced off his pauldron. Tendrils of charge crabbed over the pearly plate as he thrust back at the racing warrior. The fangmora’s speed had already carried it beyond his reach, but Aeslecai itself extended into the swing, hungering after the aelf’s soul, lengthening enough to snick his mount’s gut. The squeezing action of the fangmora’s own belly muscles forced its entrails out through the slit and into the freezing water. Its rider kicked hard to get clear of what quickly descended into death throes. He made it as far as the dharathai’s hanging jaws. There was a bloody explosion as the knight crossed that threshold. Compacted metal. A sound like glass shards and rubble being tossed down a well as it swallowed.

‘Make it go forwards, Irimé,’ said Lurien. ‘Faster. Before they overwhelm us.’

The embailor struck at the dharathai’s tail with her pain-stave. The dharathai issued a shriek, expelling glittering shards of Briomdain morrsarr plate.

‘Maleth ilyar,’ the embailor spat in bastardised Druhirri. ‘Go!’

The titan lurched forwards, crushing another half a dozen knights and destroying two more with monstrous bites. A riderless fangmora wriggled its way out of the carnage. The dharathai caught it in a bite-hold. It writhed and snapped, its thick, muscular body resisting for several anguished heartbeats before bursting into two unequal halves in a crunch of cartilage and splattering gore.

Lurien hacked left and right, up and down, the blade of Aeslecai glowing brighter and truer with every accursed soul it cleft from its body. It began to shudder in his grip, as if eager to break free and start killing of its own accord. The spear started to spin. Loops. Figures of eight. Murdering with a grace that Lurien himself had not yet had the time to master. If he had held any doubts at all that the blade harboured the warlike souls of ten generations of Ionrach aelves and more before them, they were erased now. It wielded him. Whispered to him. Its brilliance extended to enshroud him, growing to such an intensity that he was fighting essentially blind, an island alone in a sea of bitter light.

Never in his life had he felt so isolated as he did then. Never had he felt so keenly the lives that had been torn away from his, felt them as if they had been a part of his own.

Urael, Morogai, Nael.

Éodrain.

He had not grieved for his retainer and had not expected to, but his absence hit Lurien so hard then that he gasped.

He remembered how his heart had pounded as he had raced to save his retainer from a savage orruk’s axe on the Esurien Cape, how their spirits had thrilled to charge together into the beast herds of the Gulch Empress. He remembered how it had felt to bask in Nael’s effortless charisma, to trust that Urael was at his side or that Morogai watched over him from the darkness. Into that twisting funnel of bitterness and self-pity there even went some remorse for Venom, abandoned to Guethen’s embailors in favour of this mightier, nobler monstrosity that he rode now. But Éodrain. Éodrain. His oldest friend, and friend was the proper word for what he was and had been, even if Lurien could not explain to himself why nor express as much in words. The light of his ancestors revealed all. Would his other friends from the azydrazor be out there now too? he wondered.He did not have many. Vágös? Perhaps. Calohaire, already proven in battle with the fyreslayer lodges? Almost certainly. Vanglyr had brought every warrior to crush Lurien’s threat to his rule. Perhaps Lurien had killed them both already. Did their souls burn within the ripplesteel of Aeslecai? Or did they swim now with Galrohir and Gwyndyr, awaiting the soulrenders in the battle’s aftermath to reunite them with Éodrain in the chorrileum of Guethen?

A warrior in Elgaen’s white, her mount barded in dazzling nacre, had the gross misfortune to enter Lurien’s sight at that moment.

He struck her down with a yell.

The appearance of Elgaen’s akhelian meant that the dharathai had driven far against the Briomdain tide, for the Fellglaive did not think as highly of their qualities as they famously did themselves. He did not make that deduction immediately, however, for the soul-light that bathed him had little interest in highlighting such external truths. By the time he did, he was aware of the water around him vibrating. It closed in. A sound like thunder rolled.

‘Isharann power,’ Irimé shouted over the gathering squall.

The embailor was crouched low to the carriage, sheltering from morrsarr voltspears and reaver arrows, both hands wrapped around her pain-stave like a human boatman with his hand to the tiller.

‘Are we close to Laramé and her sorcerers?’ Lurien asked.

‘No, this is not tide magic. Its taste is different.’

The sea floor about a mile to Lurien’s right shook itself apart before he could ask what the embailor meant. A ring of rock and acid-bleached corals vented off plumes of yellow gases before giving way to the shell of an enormous and still-growing coral creature. Knights were swept up in its fronds, ripped apart or trapped, hacking at ever-thickening curtains of pseudo-foliage as they were dragged further from open water. Spreading tentacles unsaddled riders and fouled charges. The displacement effect of its swelling skeleton alone was enough to throw spear thrusts wide and send confused fangmoras careering out of the fight. By the time great limestone roots began tearing up from the steaming seabed, a coral polyp larger than the tidegate of Guethen was spreading its acid-yellow fronds over the wreckage of the Briomdain morrsarr charge. Lost and furious spirit creatures spiralled from the tentacles that swayed hungrily from the behemoth’s summit, illuminating the tableau in forest splendour, descending to the sea floor to fall on the surviving Briomdain without mercy.

Mahbòr.

All isharann power came from an inner place, an outward manifestation of an inward spite, and the demonstration of inner loathing from the Laughing King’s court was breathtaking to behold. Lurien could hear the akhelian king’s harshly spoken commands from across the maelstrom of battle. His bitter self-hatred and that of his court spoke out in the screams of the akhelian entangled by his wrath’s avatar, a recrimination of every deep-held desire that his fallen nature denied.

With equally unearthly wails, the king’s deepwood hookweavers fell on the broken knights. Where they met confusion they brought stillness of a sort; where they found warriors already in open rout they brought an end to their dance. The fierce warrior namarti spun from foe to foe with an aquabatic grace that only the body of an aelf could match, and then only with a lifetime’s dedication to master. Their crultân moved too swiftly for all but the most skilful of the Briomdain to match, their tattooed bodies always twisting away from every blow before it came. Murdering with fey abandon to the strobing light-pulses of the deepspites, it was as though they shared closer kinship with those capricious spirits than with the aelves they slaughtered, deadly aetherials bearing nothing but malice towards creatures of flesh and bone.

Whooping allopex and fangmora knights clad in hennaed warplate and spiral-thorn tattoos rampaged in after the hookweavers to deliver the death blow, but the Briomdain were already in full flight.

It was not the idoneth way to contest an even fight, or to stand and wait for a charge. Their instinct and training was to withdraw when confronted, to break like a wave on rocks and come again, and the majority of the surviving morrsarr guard had already been swimming back for their line-anchoring leviadon when the hookweavers had hit. It made idoneth armies almost impossible to finish off in a single decisive move, and battles between two such hosts became frustrating, free-flowing affairs of assault, feint and retreat.

Only on the left flank, where the limited numbers behind Mahbòr’s onslaught had not extended, did the Briomdain charge continue into the Guethen unimpeded. The Dwy-Hor on the right flank were themselves spilling back from a gathering counter-attack when the charge of the asglir’akhelian hit home.

The deepwood hookweavers were possessed of a murderous vitality, but to witness a charge of the Túrach asglir was to be uplifted in body and soul. Tall helms. Flowing coats of silver mail. Caparisoned steeds. Lance heads that gleamed as they were lowered. It was like witnessing a scene from eolas as it was replayed, the charge of the silvered helms at Finúval or Yvrasse.

The elite tip of Túrach’s spear crashed through the flank of the more lightly armoured cavalry from their sister enclave, the multitudes of lesser cavalry coming in behind providing the weight on the haft that drove the blow in deep. Lurien caught a glimpse of Anaer herself at the very tip of the spear, armoured in white and silver, like a gleam on the point of a blade.

There was barely a warrior in turquoise and gold left on that flank to retreat by the time a withering hail of fire from both leviadon and the remaining Briomdain reavers forced the knights of Túrach to scatter and break.

A razorshell harpoon zipped towards Lurien. He checked its flight in the corner of his eye, a glint of reflection from the luminescent fish shoals in the water above, and ducked by instinct. The carriage lurched beneath him as the dharathai rolled, and Lurien flailed to hold on to the sideboard. There was a crunch. The giant allopex righted itself, and Lurien peered over the side. An eight-foot-long harpoon jutted from a crack in the monster’s exoskeleton.

‘Well timed, embailor,’ Lurien breathed.

‘It was not me,’ said Irimé, voice low. ‘It must be an instinct. We saw it defend itself from Namaríel’s arrows in the same way.’

Lurien’s longing for Venom felt like a suddenly distant memory, a mirage from the gods. A biovoltaic field’s attempts at thwarting a razorshell harpoon would be visually spectacular, but otherwise ineffectual.

‘Try not to destroy that instinct when you break it properly,’ he said.

‘I can promise nothing.’

While Lurien contemplated his good fortune, the Briomdain left had launched their expected counter-attack, chasing Dwy-Hor’s cavalry and deepwood hookweavers around their great coral and back to their lines. Guethen’s foot-knights and thralls had rallied under the missile coverage of the tidegate’s mantlets. And on his left, Anaer’s knights had reformed around the grinding advance of their three leviadon. Two of the castellated monsters had drawn close enough to their Briomdain counterpart to engage in impotent exchanges of long-range fire. The battle lines as Lurien could perceive them had become less a line than a wave, an undulating coastline, a high water mark in the sand. Again, Lurien found himself the farthest-flung element of his assault, the spit that would have to face its battering alone until such time as the tide went out once more.

‘Anaer wishes this beast returned to her intact,’ said Irimé, ducking low and sheltering behind the boards as reaver arrows thudded into the dharathai’s dorsal armour.

‘I’ve no intention of doing otherwise.’

‘Then fall back. Let Anaer and Mahbòr carry this from here.’

‘No.’

‘I can command this monster without your approval.’

‘No. We anchor this salient until Galrohir’s phalanx can rally to us.’

‘If they can rally to us. Is this what your azydrazor teaches you?’

An arrow smacked into the side of the chariot, inches from Lurien’s hand. Enough of this. Acting on instinct, he swung his spear towards the distant throng of archers. It was ended as a gesture, born of frustration, but amethyst light blazed from the spear tip as it reached its apogee and fell like an executioner’s draich towards the distant archers, the souls it had devoured in the battle screaming forth from the blade like smoke from a thermal vent. The last to boil free was the Elgaenite akhelian he had slain in Gwyndyr’s bedchamber, streaming after the other tattered souls towards the namarti reavers. The blind aelves did not see a thing.

The hail of incoming arrows simply stopped.

Lurien looked at his spear in horror as the souls of slain aelves unhooked their talons from namarti flesh, dissolving with harridan screams into the water.

He swallowed hard.

‘Go forwards.’

‘I did not agree to do battle with the Fellglaive.’ Irimé pointed to where another warrior, mounted on the back of a monstrous creature of his own, beckoned more archers forward, spurring his deepmare ahead of the lesser beasts that were chivvied to attend it. The warrior was encased in armour of turquoise and gold, ithilmhair, the water seething where it touched metal, leaving a bubble trail where he and his beast passed. As though the warrior had clad himself in the still-warm heart of a dead star. He lowered his own huge weapon like a lance.

It was Vanglyr.

The Fellglaive.

Here he came, the moment of destiny, falling equally between the grasp of the two matched heroes. Just as the lessons of eolas taught that it would have to be.

‘Forward,’ Lurien hissed.

‘No,’ said Irimé.

‘I said forward. If we leave Vanglyr with a free run at us then we are both going to die. That, too, is what they teach us at the azydrazor.’

Irimé snarled, quivering as psychic intent made her pain-stave glow. The dharathai lurched forwards with a trembling roar, snapping at Vanglyr’s mount, but the deepmare was more agile, and exquisitely trained. The embailors of Briomdar had left it no mind of its own, and so what thoughts it had were perfectly attuned to those of its bonded master. It turned and strafed across the dharathai’s right side, its triplet tails rippling in its wake as it flowed over the allopex’s clumsy lunge, raking armour, and Vanglyr stabbed down with his glaive.

The blow cut across Lurien, missing Irimé’s leg by the distance of one flick of a deepmare’s tail. The shock of the near miss was enough to throw the master embailor from the platform. The glaive crunched instead into the carriage, obliterating the chariot in a blast of light, the deepmare undulating past as Lurien was spilled into the water.

He turned himself with his feet, his hands filled by his grip on his spear, no choice available but to abandon the dharathai to its mind-broken advance on Briomdar. If it maintained its current speed it would probably breach the enclave’s outer ring of spires in about two hundred years. In the meantime, Vanglyr came around for another pass.

Lurien swung Aeslecai out to meet him, and this time met the glaive mid-thrust. There was a flash of polluted light, a moment of dark illumination. The glaive sailed over his head, pushed out by Lurien’s upswing. And then came the downfall that inevitably followed enlightenment, half a ton of armoured deepmare crashing through him.

Lurien bounced off the deepmare’s scaly chest. He tucked his arms into his ribs and gave a sob of pain. It was only Nael’s armour and water pressure holding him in one piece after that. He righted himself with a reflex kick of his left boot, wincing at the pain it sent up through his chest. Vanglyr circled him, high, well out of reach even of Aeslecai, spinning his glaive in lazy loops.

Lurien scowled, wishing he had more souls to cast into his path.

‘Prince Lurien,’ said Vanglyr, his voice deeper even than Lurien remembered. ‘From the stories I had heard I had my doubts. I was expecting to be faced by the avatar of Addáiòs, the god of swords himself, not the same Prince Lurien who wept for his dead mother when I skewered him to the back of his own throne. Tell me.’ He drew his deepmare in hard behind Lurien’s back, forcing Lurien to swallow his pain and turn. ‘Mahbòr, I can understand. But how did you convince sane deepkin like Galrohir and Anaer that you did all that you claimed to have done?’

‘I did it all.’ Lurien bared his teeth, pretending it was not through pain. ‘I attacked Coryza with sixty warriors, sank her ships and returned with three hundred of her souls. I journeyed into the Deep Nothing and returned with a great beast. I retrieved Aeslecai from the children of Alarielle.’

Vanglyr’s long face twisted into a sneer. ‘And how many idoneth perished so that you could claim these things?’

‘That is Teclis calling Tyrion blind. Why did you insist on fighting? Why did you not surrender when Galrohir demanded it?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Because my host was greater. That is the way. It is the way that you taught me.’ He clenched his teeth to bring his voice back under control and gestured vaguely towards the battle flowing around them. ‘All these who have fallen. Their souls are your burden.’

‘I do not see Galrohir now,’ Vanglyr said, looking around. Then back to Lurien. ‘And who are you to tell me whose force is superior?’

‘You can’t hide behind Laramé forever.’

Vanglyr spread his arms wide with a creak of his ithilmhair plate. The deepmare tugged willingly on its bridle. He gave an icy laugh as he pulled back. ‘This is me in hiding, Prince Lurien. Would you have the courage to face me if I were to emerge from it? Shall we continue this argument between us as warriors, and let the gods guide the sword of who is right?’

Lurien’s heart gave a traitorous flutter. It had assessed his chances more swiftly and honestly than he was prepared to do.

‘My mount seems to have left me for dead,’ he said, steeling his voice with false confidence. ‘Swim down from your deepmare and face me as an equal, unless you are afraid to really put this before the court of the gods.’

He did not expect Vanglyr to agree to that. Had it been Lurien in his position, he would have claimed, quite properly, that possession of his monstrous beast was as much a sign of the gods’ favour as a perfect thrust to the neck.

But Vanglyr gave a grunt, and then dismounted. Lurien had been hoping that if Vanglyr was going to offer up that advantage, he would swing a leg over the deepmare’s back and climb down, or in some other small way show his back, but he was too veteran a campaigner for that. The tyrant simply slid his feet from the stirrups until only the toes were left inside and pushed himself off. He floated up from the saddle. Lurien snarled. That was as good an opening as he was going to be given.

‘For Lágethé!’ he yelled, and swam into the attack.

Vanglyr began with the advantage of the higher position, and the patience to use it, waiting for the perfect moment to swat Lurien’s blow aside. His glaive struck Aeslecai from above, forcing it down, threads of oppositional energies driving the two blades apart before either combatant could adjust. To an observer it might have appeared as though the weapons themselves were as much a part of this battle as the warriors that wielded them. Another of more sympathetic worldview might imagine instead that they conspired to keep warring children apart. Either way, both were plainly idoneth blades – nothing repelled them like the touch of their own.

Vanglyr’s glaive looped back. Lurien knocked it aside on the pole. Pain exploded in his chest, the damage confined by his breastplate. Willing it to the hinterlands of his mind, he turned with the momentum stolen from Vanglyr’s strike and returned a rising backhand. The tyrant bent away from it. The bubbles wriggling from the joins in his armour provided the push he needed to drop beneath the spear. Then he slid the long haft of his weapon along the back of Lurien’s pole. The blades spat and fizzed as the half-moon curve of the tyrant’s glaive hooked the liquid metal and scraped down its length. He yanked back on the trapped spear. A few weeks ago, the move would have disarmed Lurien. This time, he allowed the tyrant to pull him into a roll, the bone of his heel smashing across the bridge of Vanglyr’s nose as he came down and the weapons scraped apart. Lurien paddled backwards, the right way up. The tyrant’s nose was a florid indigo, but the pressure kept the blood from escaping. He was breathing through his mouth. Both of their weapons flared and hissed.

‘It is true then,’ Vanglyr snarled. ‘It was that spear that made Mahbòr the warrior he was. No wonder he fell so hard when the sylvaneth took it from him.’

‘First blood,’ Lurien spat back, ignoring him. ‘I was told that was enough to satisfy the gods.’

‘In de’comhrac. This is war.’ Vanglyr appeared almost to be feeling an emotion as his expression shifted around his broken nose, exploring the damage. ‘And you see, it does not matter whose army is greatest. It comes down to this. To the aelf who is greatest.’

‘Always another lesson. Well, I have one for you too, Vanglyr. You should have let me die after the assembral.’

‘That is not our way. You would know that if you had ever paid the slightest attention to what I had to teach you.’

‘And yet you’d kill me now?’

Lurien launched himself at the tyrant with a yell, hoping youthful energy and spite alone would be enough where skill had fallen short. Aeslecai was not a weapon designed to be elegant at speed, but for a few seconds in his hands it became a blur of fuzzy after-images and interwoven threads of light. Every stratagem and trick he had learned from Morogai, Urael or Nael he threw at Vanglyr in those few moments, but the tyrant of Briomdar was just too good. Every combination that Lurien could think of or, on the spur of desperation, invent, he rebuffed without effort.

When the two blades’ energies again forced them to separate, Lurien kicked himself back. He dragged Aeslecai behind him one-handed, clutching at his chest, indigo-faced with exertion. His lungs were on fire. He could not feel his fingers.

‘It had been my hope that you would learn from the experience of having the tide turn against you,’ said Vanglyr, not bothering to press his advantage and end this fight.

‘Always the teacher.’

‘Always. It had been my hope as well that a few years in a cage might temper you. That you might have succeeded me when I followed Lágethé into the chorrileum. That was why I married the ghost of your mother, Lurien. Did you not wonder? It was so you could be my son and heir.’

Lurien began to laugh.

‘Why do you laugh?’ said Vanglyr.

‘I don’t know. Maybe because you do not.’

With a grim look, the tyrant craned his neck to take in the battle that had grown to envelop them. One of the Túrach leviadon had crashed into another from Briomdar, the heavier Túrach monster turning its rival slowly, slowly into the ground. Fangmoras of a dozen colours knifed through the gloom. Aelves danced and chased, caught between acts of bloodshed by the angry flicker of luminous fish and spirit creatures in the shadow of Mahbòr’s colossal coral.

He readied his blade again.

Lurien’s expression became serious once more.

‘But it is too late for that now,’ Vanglyr growled. ‘You have already grown too powerful. Too much idoneth blood has been spilled in the course of your quest.’

‘I–’

A fleck of light darted across Lurien’s face before he could finish his retort. It was silvery, too small and too focused in its simple form to be one of Dwy-Hor’s lost deepspites. His cloak rippled with its passage and began to lift as Lurien turned his head to follow it. He could feel a current rising, as though a mighty ocean vortex were about to touch its funnel to the sea floor. The mote looped away and swept upwards, as if caught in the birthing currents of the growing whirlpool. Lurien turned his head to look up, and gasped. A thousand similar silver dots swirled on aetheric currents, scattering the light of the glowfish and banishing deepspites in miniscule combustions of magic where they passed. The disparate strands of energy swirled together like tiny fish into a bait ball, some ghastly moon that flooded the newly darkened battlefield with its own bitter light. Lurien was not the only one to be convinced to suspend the fight to watch. The entire battlefield had fallen eerily quiet.

The sphere billowed and distended, pulled out of shape as if by some force from within, some trapped creature, stretching into the contoured near-likeness of the aelven form. Bolts of energy crackled from its extending limbs. The rush of the aetheric tides towards it accelerated, and Lurien cried out in pure and heartfelt terror as the towering simulacrum grew solid.

The ocean tore itself asunder.

‘Mathlann protect us!’ Lurien cried.

‘Laramé!’ Vanglyr yelled back. ‘I underestimated her power.’

‘I underestimated her madness!’

As Lurien watched, the summoning took shape. Silver wisp-light barded with golden armour and pale flesh, a dark cloak rippling out behind its coalescent form like a storm sea. An aelf, armed with crulhook and fuathtar spear, deep sea-green hair bounded by an open helm. The face thus enclosed was infinite in its bitterness, supernatural in its disdain for life and possession. It was female. For a moment Lurien thought it a giant projection of Laramé herself, her rancour and grief, for the depthless malice it bore the mortal aelves swimming to flee its presence belonged to a face Lurien knew well.

But it was not Laramé.

It was a face Lurien knew and hated even more.

‘Lágethé,’ Vanglyr breathed.

‘Mother,’ said Lurien.

The former tidemistress of Briomdar was only recently departed. Her power had been such that perhaps something of her spirit yet clove to life through the magic of her blood twin. Lurien did not know. He could only imagine. He could not think. The Lágethé creature delivered a birthing cry that tore through the water like a duardin depth charge. The sea floor cracked, vortices spiralling up from the bottom like green shoots from the footsteps of the Everqueen, ripping up idoneth from both sides without discrimination.

The sea careth not.

Her voice was the wave that tore the cliff from the land, and the idoneth in the vicinity of her manifestation went mad, hacking at one another with whatever they held in their hands, regardless of whose enclave’s colours they wore. Glaring at Mahbòr’s swaying coral, its crown of tentacles rustling, its trunk rooted defiantly into the rock, the titan extended a watery hand.

He is not king here. He will never be king here. The sea taketh all.

A great funnel descended from the ocean’s surface to alight on the very point she indicated, smashing the enormous oak to pieces and spraying the surrounding water with leaf pulp and splinters.

‘Laramé has gone mad!’ Vanglyr shouted. ‘Her sister. Nael. This is why the idoneth were always meant to hide from themselves.’ He turned to Lurien. ‘This goes beyond you and me now. In her grief Laramé will destroy us all. Help me. Help me stop her.’

‘You always were so loyal,’ Lurien mumbled. ‘I said as much to Éodrain. He didn’t believe me.’

‘Lurien.’ The tyrant did not extend a hand. It was not their way. Had he done so, Lurien might have turned and fled and not looked back. But there was something in his dull eyes that reached out. ‘We can declare this feud settled, and both Lágethé and the gods will be well satisfied. We can marshal what strength we have between us and finish this together – I as the king of Briomdar, and you as the heir to four thrones.’

Regaining his regency and landing a father like Vanglyr was far short of what Lurien felt his achievement to date deserved, but under the present circumstances it felt like getting something when nothing was becoming the stronger option. He grimaced, then nodded.

‘Which way to Laramé?’

Vanglyr hoisted his glaive.

‘Follow me.’

And then, finally, the tyrant of Briomdar showed Lurien his back.

He gave a quiet gasp as amethyst brilliance illuminated the underside of his face, and then looked down. A foot of Aeslecai’s liquid edge projected from his chest. It had split ithilmhair plate as easily as Lurien had hoped it would, and had cut the cool black meat of the tyrant’s heart just as cleanly.

‘Un… grateful.’

‘As even dead gods must know by now – I always hated my mother. Thank you for reminding me why.’

Lurien twisted the spear to loosen the suction of Vanglyr’s chest, his bared teeth reflecting the spirit glow of his enemy’s terrified soul as Aeslecai drank it in. Then he pulled it out, the soulless corpse sinking away, and turned to face the titanic avatar of Queen Lágethé.

He would rather have nothing than settle for something. The spear’s wisdom had brought him that self-knowledge, if nothing else.

He wanted it all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The ocean was the last great unconquered space in the Mortal Realms outside of mighty Azyr. It was greater than any army, vaster than the ambition of any god. It was older than all of them and would be there when they perished. When the time came for Nagash himself, the great ender of endings, to expire, there would be the sea, lapping at his bones. It was the breaker of continents, that which all people, whatever their race and to whomever their souls were pledged, prayed to and feared, and it was that which Laramé had summoned a shard of now. The spirit her power had called forth was the maelstrom around which the broken corpses of aelves and monsters and fractured polyp-titans swirled. Lurien fought against it. His cloak pulled at him like a sail, he a ship facing into the wind, whipping about him in coloured tatters. Whisperwood arrows flew at him, only to bend off course and snap, torn up by the swelling violence that screamed about the body of the Lágethé spirit.

Even now, she was trying to protect him.

‘You think I needed your help to be king?’ Lurien yelled into the storm. He was being drenched in hatred as completely as the idoneth whose blades had already slaughtered one another and whose bodies now circled their former queen. He knew this, but the closer he drew to the avatar, the more powerful the rage became, and the less he even wanted to resist. ‘Perhaps you should have thought of it when you were alive!’ He brandished Aeslecai, screaming in senseless fury as the tow pushed him several feet back. She was so huge, but so far away. He could not even get close. ‘Here is something I regret never sharing with you while you lived.’

I am the end.

The voice of calamity rumbled from the deep water as the Lágethé spirit dropped to one knee and impaled a Túrach leviadon. Her fuathtar split the monster’s iron-hard shell and pinned the beast to the sea floor. Shock waves rippled outwards, shredding the shell castles on the monster’s back and the aelves that still cowered within them, still powerful enough by the time they reached Lurien to hurl him back, erasing minutes of painstaking progress in one brutal expulsion of power.

A hand caught his wrist and dragged him from the current.

He made to strike it off, but at the last moment did not. Residual common sense, or the additional distance pushed between him and the eidolon, had restored his powers of reason somewhat. The face that the hand belonged to was familiar, if not friendly, contorted by a spectacular infusion of hatred, forehead namastir and spiked collar gleaming with the silvery emanations of the soul-titan. Every muscle of her face was locked hard against its influence, but nevertheless, when she shook his arm it was with more violence than she needed for attention she already had.

Namaríel.

So many had died. Some he had killed himself. Most, however, could be laid at this namarti’s feet, and his relief that she was not now one of them surprised him. In the face of Laramé’s horror, he supposed even her face could appear friendly.

‘It would take an army to destroy that thing,’ she yelled. ‘Ours is gone. And even if you could command every aelf still here, you would never get close enough to succeed.’

‘Then what do you propose? Run? Become king of Briomdar simply because there’s no one left alive with a better claim? If I don’t stop Laramé now, then I’m only delaying a battle I might not be able to win later. I don’t want to leave an enemy as powerful as Laramé bent on my destruction.’

‘I propose exactly that, my prince. It is Laramé you have to stop.’

Lurien did not ask how the namarti was so well informed on the darkest secret of the isharann chorralus. She was néthir. Her life had been devoted to the souls of the chorrileum and the gods for whom the idoneth waited. Before she had decided to throw off her chains and play kingmaker. She knew of what she spoke.

‘Then where is she?’ said Lurien. ‘I can’t see her in this.’

Namaríel indicated one of her blind eyes. ‘You do not need to. Follow me.’ With that she turned, legs locked together like the tail of a fish, and plunged into the riptides.

With a last hateful glare at the spirit-titan of his mother, Lurien followed her in. It was like stepping into a river. Going into it head first.

They were a long way from the whirlpool that surrounded the Lágethé spirit, but it was already starting to pull the surrounding currents into the direction it had chosen. Lurien imagined that every beach and estuary in the Green Gulch would soon be feeling the tug on its flows, and in time, the entire ocean would fall into a screaming vortex with its eye over Guethen. If Lágethé was allowed to do so. She had the power. Time was all she needed. Time and permission.

Lurien paddled like a drowning dog. The currents were too fast. An explosion of cloak pulled out behind him, billowing and collapsing as he tumbled. His stomach turned flips depending on the direction he fought against from moment to moment. Flashes of pink and silver appeared through the churn of debris and dying monsters as he was dragged around and around the soul-titan.

The avatar’s wrathful aura had driven Lurien at it directly, goading him into attacking the currents head on, but the path of wisdom had been to surrender – the currents themselves took him in, closer with every loop, with a speed and power that the mightiest of Túrach’s fangmora breeds could not rival.

The amount of debris in the water thickened as they drew closer to the epicentre of destruction. Arrows. Bits of metal scale. It began to patter on Lurien’s armour.

‘Lurien!’ Namaríel’s voice was thin from where she spun ahead of him. ‘Stay with me.’ Struggling to contain his cloak with one hand, Lurien battled towards her. Blood puffed from the namarti’s thigh as a piece of metal trapped in the same inward spiral that she was punched through her leg. She screamed and fought to keep swimming, her kicks becoming one-sided. Lurien snatched a fistful of her cloak. The pair of them spun together, screaming, combined weight and odd shape pushing them out to the faster-flowing straits at the vortex’s edge. The cloak began to tear.

‘Take my hand,’ Namaríel yelled.

‘No,’ said Lurien. Even holding on to her clothing made his skin creep.

‘Lurien!’

She flailed a hand at him.

He ignored it, instead pulling himself hand over hand up her cloak.

‘Where are we?’ he yelled into her face, still barely heard.

‘Close. I can sense her.’

Namaríel turned her head sharply as they tumbled, blank eyes roving. Lurien did not know what she was looking for. He would never know half of what she perceived, but when a watery light briefly pushed away the silvery craze of light and long shadows thrown by the soul-titan, he noticed. Namaríel did not seem to. Lurien turned his head in that direction.

‘What?’ said Namaríel, sensing his reaction. ‘What do you see?’

He saw Laramé. She was a point of light, bright and hard, far away still and, relative to him at least, moving fast. His sense of her was intuitive, the way his skin could tell the difference between the cold emanations of a glowstone and genuine sunlight. She was family. As much of it as he had left. He knew her soul.

‘It’s Laramé!’

‘Alone?’

‘I can’t tell!’

‘Show me.’

Overcoming his revulsion, Lurien took her hand in his, fingernails biting into her wrists.

She turned her blind face down to their joined hands in shock.

‘You don’t think I’m going to face her alone, do you?’ he said.

Lurien kicked himself back, towards the edge of the vortex, dragging Namaríel by the hand. The namarti wriggled in his grip, aiding his clumsy strokes with paddling efforts of her own, as coordinated as a squid with two heads, and as elegant. But Lurien saw the fury at the eye of the vortex grow fainter, further. He turned his head to look over his shoulder. Almost out.

‘How do you intend to keep Laramé from killing you outright?’ Namaríel yelled.

Lurien grinned, the battering elements infusing it with blushed cheeks and a glow of mania. ‘She loves me. She’ll want to hurt me first.’

One last kick and they were out.

They floated free for what felt like a long time, spread-eagled, corpse-like almost except for ragged breathing and the limpet-like hold they kept on each other’s hands. Eventually, their drift out of the vortex began to slow, albeit through no action of their own making. The calmer waters beyond the vortex’s immediate influence resisted their drift until they came to a stop. Exhausted, Lurien raised his head to look back, the debris of his worldly ambitions whipping around the whirlpool’s funnel. Aelves struggled and perished in near silence, dragged in, torn apart, their cries obliterated by the complete totality of its roar. It wasn’t even sound any more. It was an infinitely compacted fusion of sensation. Light. Noise. Death. But to watch it happen was like watching stars fall. The awareness of watching a cosmic tragedy, and yet being unable to see it as anything other than beautiful.

Starting with the flick of a toe, a squeeze on Namaríel’s wrist that the namarti returned, he nursed life back into his limbs and forced himself to turn away.

Laramé floated alone in the still water. Her coterie had either fled or been destroyed by the power they had helped her summon. Her eyes were hollow, her cheeks as insubstantial as the shadow cast by a thousand boiling souls over bone. Deep lines gnawed at her face. In the gauntlet of one hand she held a glowing shard of pink rock. She stared into the heart of its porous structure, chanting, until the rock slowly became dust in her palm, only the glow remaining.

‘By Néthu, keeper of the dead, she is mad,’ said Namaríel.

‘And whose doing was that?’ Lurien returned.

‘This is a crime that cannot be justified. That is soul-coral in her hand. She has plundered Elgaen’s chorrileum for its power. That is how she is sustaining the avatar.’

‘Aunt Laramé!’ Lurien yelled.

‘Don’t “Aunt Laramé” me, nephew.’

Nephew… boomed the distant titan.

Laramé turned towards him then, as though between facing him and bearing witness to the destruction of Guethen, this was the task she found more onerous.

‘This is one mess you’ll not be talking your way back out of. Or your namarti concubine. I think I might sooner command the ocean to destroy us all before listening to the excuses you might have for murdering my son.’

My son…

‘I’m still your nephew!’

‘Look at yourself, broken and pathetic. You are no child of Lágethé’s.’

Child of Lágethé’s…

‘Thank Mathlann,’ said Lurien. ‘She was a mean-spirited hag.’

Laramé cackled, the mirthless sound rumbling from the heart of the vortex like thunder as she drew another lump of pristine coral from the folds of her cloak. Its aura of power was brighter even than her own, streaming out from between her fingers, one star in the beginning stages of consuming another.

‘You murdered my son–’

My son…

‘–then set the enclaves to warring amongst themselves to please you. Claimed Guethen, Dwy-Hor and even Elgaen in the process, too. Believe me, nephew, there is more of her in you than you like to think.’

Think…

‘Kill her,’ Namaríel hissed. ‘While she is too angry to kill you.’

‘Then stop this, Laramé,’ Lurien yelled.

The White Queen laughed. She spat a word of ancient Eltharri and the coral exploded in her hand, glittering her armour with magic. Namaríel cried out in dismay. Far away, the Lágethé creature roared.

‘No.’

No…

‘I admired Nael,’ Lurien shouted. ‘I didn’t want him to die.’

‘Here it comes,’ said Laramé. ‘The excuses.’

Excuses…

‘I didn’t kill Nael.’

‘Then who did? The God of Death?’

Death…

Lurien pushed Namaríel forwards. ‘She did.’

Laramé looked from one to another, nonplussed, and then screeched with laughter. ‘You think you can blame the closest namarti? You and your braggart friends may have gulled Vanglyr with such tricks at the azydrazor, but you will need to be more convincing with me.’

With me…

‘Tell her,’ said Lurien.

‘I will do no such thing,’ Namaríel hissed.

Laramé sighed. ‘I think I’m going to kill you both now.’

Kill you now…

‘Tell her!’ said Lurien.

‘Wither in Teclis’ Light, you selfish, true-souled beast.’

‘Tell her!’

Namaríel pedalled back from him in shock. Even Laramé widened her eyes, her white halo guttering, taken aback by the deeper, resonant timbre that had entered Lurien’s voice. It took Lurien a moment to realise that neither woman was, in fact, looking at him. He turned his head to follow their gazes over his right shoulder and almost dropped his spear.

‘Tell her,’ Vanglyr’s voice echoed, the raidlord’s spirit shrinking back into the Eltharri runes of Aeslecai like scum caught on an oar.

Lurien still did not understand the full properties of the spear, nor how to use them. There was, he suspected, a great deal that Mahbòr had neglected to tell him about its powers. But he had the feeling that the proud souls of Aeslecai had judged the spirit of Vanglyr Fellglaive and found it worthy of a place amongst them. Spending an eternity guiding the destiny of those that would follow sounded a better prospect than the chorrileum to Lurien.

Better by far than the other alternative.

‘My nephew slew the Fellglaive?’ Laramé breathed.

The silence that swallowed her words was resounding.

Namaríel fell back, her mouth a gaping O of horror. ‘You would not only betray me, but you would betray the dead?’ With blind sockets she stared at the semi-molten spear. ‘Their souls belong to their oblivion. They go to the gods.’

‘Tell her,’ Lurien said again.

‘Lurien, you are as mad as she is.’

‘You told me once that your soul will wither before the Dark Prince will ever claim it.’ Lurien lowered his spear and, pushing against the fierce currents of the oceans beyond, the weapon of the Fellglaive did the same. ‘I don’t know if there is enough inside you for Aeslecai to hold on to, but I promise you, if you don’t confess your full part in all of this right now, we will both be in no doubt by the time Laramé summons the power to kill me.’

‘We could have killed her together,’ Namaríel hissed. ‘We could have ruled all of this together. There would have been no one left to challenge us.’ She turned to glare hatefully, sightlessly, in Laramé’s direction. ‘I told Morogai to murder Prince Nael, but only because Lurien was too enamoured by him to see that it needed to be done. Any other akhelian would have done the deed himself, and my hands would be clean now. He would have done it cleanly, quietly, and Nael’s spirit essence would now be interred in the chorrileum that you would plunder so recklessly for power. Which of our souls is blacker, Laramé? All I did was kill an aelf. You have burned away a hundred immortal souls.’ When she was done her voice was hoarse and Laramé was stone, the eerie pulse of Aeslecai hanging between them like a magistrate sent forth from the underworlds of Mirai to sit in judgement over their crimes.

Laramé turned to Lurien. ‘Is this true?’

‘It is.’

‘And yet you let her.’ A tear the colour of a glistening pearl rolled down the White Queen’s cheek. ‘You took the spoils of Nael’s raiding. You claimed the allegiance of Elgaen. And you said nothing.’

Lurien found that he was grinning, his lips moving of their own accord. ‘I did.’

Laramé snorted. ‘Lágethé’s son, indeed.’

‘You still have need of an heir.’

‘I still need vengeance.’

She turned to Namaríel.

‘No,’ said Namaríel. ‘No, I will not allow you to blame this all on me. I will not allow you to slither out of all culpability, as you always do.’ With a hiss of metal, the namarti drew a keening blade from its thigh sheath and lunged. The ghost-light haloing Aeslecai shimmered and parted, and Lurien swung up the diamond ferrule to meet the unexpected attack. The impact threw his arm high, spun him half to the side, movement Namaríel exploited to draw a dagger from her bodice sleeve and plunge it towards Lurien’s stomach. She was quick as a fangmora’s flickering tongue. His spear was nowhere near. He grit his teeth, ready for the pain.

It never came.

The namarti’s knife was stuck a hand’s breadth from Lurien’s belly, as though in a block of ice. She pulled at it. It did not move. She screamed. If it made a sound, Lurien did not hear it. The water had withdrawn from her, leaving a bubble of dead space empty even of air about six feet across and six high that the namarti hacked at with her shortsword to no avail. Ripples ran around the walls of the bubble. Pretty colours. Her blows became weak. She dropped her sword. Started clawing at her throat instead. Soundlessly, she folded like a wilting flower to the floor of the bubble.

She mouthed words that Lurien could not make out.

As fiercely as he wished to, he could not make himself look away.

Laramé, too, was staring hard, as though it were the power of her unbroken focus alone that sustained the void in which Namaríel drowned.

‘I understand that Nael suffered,’ she said, then extended her hand to the surface of the bubble.

Splinters of ice trailed between her fingers as she drained the water of even the vigour it needed to remain liquid, its rarer, solid form rising off her like air. At her touch, ice began to creep around the bubble’s surface.

Namaríel struggled to keep her face above the spreading frost.

Laramé made a fist.

‘Before he died,’ she finished.

Namaríel breathed a last word against the ice.

This one Lurien could make out, even if he still could not hear.

‘No.’

Laramé struck the frozen sphere with her balled fist, the entire bauble and all that it had contained shattering into a million twinkling shards that, one by one, were already beginning to melt back into the ocean.

Lurien dragged his gaze away from the pointless search for a corpse. Laramé, he suspected, seldom left one.

He turned to the White Queen and offered up his arm.

‘Shall we return to our own kingdoms, then, Aunt Laramé?’

Hesitantly, she hooked her arm through his and patted his wrist.

‘Yes, nephew. Let’s.’

EPILOGUE

Prince Lurien slumped into the Jade Throne of Briomdar. An artefact of whale ivory and aquamarine, it had thin strands of jade woven through an armature of living coral by the shamanic tide magicks of the isharann chorralus. The physical discomfort of that seat was offset somewhat by the novelty, and by the still-fuzzy glow of his mother’s death. Lurien smiled and shifted position. It was also not the real thing. Lágethé had installed a smaller and slightly more comfortable replica of the original in her bedchambers about a century before Lurien’s birth. It was Lurien’s now. As were the bedchambers. The real Jade Throne was in the great hall, on the other side of a thick door and down a corridor, centrepiece to a vigil for the union of Lurien and Gwyndyr. Lurien smiled to himself at the thought. His relief at his wife’s survival had been quite genuine. He was, he was loath to acknowledge, quite taken with her, and could only offer thanks to Mathlann that she had survived. Galrohir, regrettably, had not been so tenacious, leaving yet another enclave in need of kingship.

It was important, in times as dark as these, to remember to smile.

He listened to the distant revels with one half of an idle ear.

Nothing. Silence.

The war for the succession had left Briomdar with too few deepkin to assume even spurious joy. Word had been sent into the whirlway that there was title and opportunity to be won in Lurien Soultaker’s new court, and many ambitious souls had already arrived. He needed a new raidlord, a tyrant for the azydrazor, a prefect for Guethen, not to mention knights courageous enough to fend off an increasingly belligerent Túrach and to keep a promise he had made to the Cueth’ene regarding the Gulch Empress of Coryza. But it would take time for the properly ambitious to heed his call.

In the meantime, he would have to reacquaint himself with silence.

He smiled vaguely.

Soultaker had been Gwyndyr’s suggestion. As had the summons into the whirlway.

He liked it.

A tap on the door roused him from his contemplations.

He looked up idly as it opened.

Morogai swam inside.

If the namarti had been doll-like when Lurien first met her, then her childlike beauty was much the same now, albeit like something misused by a household beast and then left too near to the hearthstones. Her sullen features had become a chequerboard of cuts and welts. A jagged scar and some stitching marked where an ear had been torn away. Her mouth was absent several teeth, the injury recent enough that her gums were still blue-green and swollen. It was as though the lacquer had been scraped away from the porcelain, exposing something sharp-toothed and verminous where it had always lurked underneath.

On finding her still alive and awaiting execution on his glorious return to Briomdar, Lurien had interceded with Laramé and seen her sentence commuted from torture and death to one of servitude. There were, it turned out, many levels of thraldom. Her hadrilkar already bore the emblems of House Lágethé anyway, and Lurien was glad to have the namarti back in his employ, beholden fully to him rather than to Namaríel. One example was the duty she performed now. It was traditionally the duty of a ruler’s closest akhelian companions to stand watch over the marital bedchambers, but after the experience of his wedding night in Guethen, there was no one he would rather have on the other side of that door than Morogai.

And Lurien did not have so many friends left.

The damaged namarti clasped small hands in front of her waist and floated before the open door. Characteristically, she said nothing.

Lurien sighed. ‘If you can’t talk to me now, who can you talk to?’

She gestured back with her head.

Lurien pushed himself up in his throne to look beyond her.

‘Is someone out there?’

A nod.

‘Go on then, Morogai. Let them in.’

The namarti gestured to someone behind her, then swam into the chamber and drew aside. Gwyndyr entered after her. She wore her wedding finery, a dark mauve calico dress with a plunging neckline, brocaded and jewelled with frilled sleeves and a layered hem that rippled like a litter of patterned eels as she moved. It was raiment befitting an isharann princess. Or a highly favoured slave.

Gwyndyr halted before the replica throne. There she bowed.

‘It is time for me to return to Guethen,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I can’t allow that.’

‘Duty has been done, my love. Guethen needs to be brought to order, and soon, if we are to rule in peace.’

‘I need my beloved queen by my side.’

The namarti lifted her face and frowned sightlessly at this perceived insincerity. ‘It will be only until an akhelian with a strong enough claim on the title can be found.’

‘I want you here.’

‘You promised me…’

‘Are you about to scold me over another loosely given promise?’

‘Anaer still waits on her dharathai. Guethen simmers. Mahbòr again tests his strength. The Cueth’ene are outraged and spoil for war. Coryza enjoys full knowledge of our presence. And do not forget the high king. I am sure the last of the Awakened will want to take his own measure of the ambitious young king who restored Aeslecai to the deepkin.’

Lurien gazed into the rippling surface of the blade leaning against the arm of his throne. ‘They have taught me much, you know. The souls of my ancestors.’

‘Mahbòr’s ancestors.’

Lurien laughed coldly. ‘They are as much my ancestors now as Mahbòr’s.’ He turned the pole in his grip, watching the metal ripple around the columns of Eltharri runes, the flowing script staying always to face his gaze. ‘They have been telling me what it is to rule. And I am starting to understand them. It is more than Lágethé or Vanglyr, or even Namaríel, were ever able to manage.’

‘What does that mean?’

Lurien regarded his young queen, eyes filled with cold-blooded ambition like a predator of the deep sea. ‘There are vast oceans out there, beyond the Láthway and the Caillegaeta, other kingdoms, greater crowns even than this one.’ He inclined his hairless eyebrows towards the circlet of turquoise and tourmaline and gold-coloured seaweed that rested on his brow. ‘What do you think of the title high queen, my love?’

He turned back to the cold metal of Aeslecai and grinned.

Because when had one of the idoneth deepkin ever settled for what fate had given them?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Guymer’s work for Warhammer Age of Sigmar includes the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio dramas Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from
‘The Learning’ by David Guymer
featured in the anthology Myths & Revenants.

I

The isharann fane was a long way from their home in Túrach. His mother held his hand. Monsters swam free around the túrscoll, she had warned him, and it would not do to get lost. The thought of monsters did not frighten him, but he decided not to tell her that. If she thought that he was unafraid then she might let go of his hand. He sensed that when she let go, it would be for the last time. He did not understand. Through darkness and cold, they swam. Through silence. Through shoals of translucent fish that were all teeth and spines and which burst into individual fleeing shapes at their approach, his grip tiny but firm in hers.

After a time that did not feel long enough, they arrived at the temple. He sensed the size of it, smelled the coral from which the structure had been grown. He could hear the scrabbling of the little things that lived inside, the restless murmuring of the kelp gardens in the currents that came in off the open ocean. He tried to look back. His mother would not let him.

They set down before a bivalve doorway. It was ribbed and grey, and appeared to be breathing slowly. Blind aelves with huge swords and straps around their arms and chests stood in front of it. Five of them. Namarti. They looked unfriendly. He drew back into his mother.

‘All will be well, Ubraich.’

She lifted him in the water until their faces were level. Her face was eyeless, smooth skin growing over the hollows, just like the warriors. She stroked his face around his eyes, just as she had done since he had been small. It had always seemed to make her happy, and sad.

Like now.

‘You go to a better life,’ she said.

‘When will I be allowed to come home?’

She hugged him tightly.

‘I love you, my brave isharann.’

II

He never saw his mother again.

He tried not to look as though her removal from his life had taken from inside him everything that was warm and strewn it over the walls of his little cell. The isharann masters punished such emotion, and in pretending not to feel it, it did become easier to ignore. The cold helped too. The isolation. The dark. Even if he did still stroke his eyes until he fell asleep each night. Isharann, he had learned by that time, were aelves of pure soul who had been judged by the soulscryers as being gifted in magic. Those better suited to the warlike arts had been sent instead to the azydrazor to become akhelian. Pure soul. He was starting to understand what that meant too. How it had made him different.

There was tutelage of a sort, but it passed in a blur of homesickness and misery. He was taught the healing stones of the tru’heas, the foundation songs of the chorralus, how to track a single soul across a thousand leagues of ocean, to tear a soul from a mortal’s body or to bend one to his will. With no explanation given, the faces around him began to fall away. Gone were the lessons in soulrending and tidecasting. Instead he learned the names fangmora, allopex and leviadon. He learned what they were, how to mistreat them, how to train them.

He learned how to hunt them.

III

He became an embailor the night his master came into his cell with a knife.

The tide was late and he had been sound asleep when they burst in. Three eyeless thralls, their bodies sculpted and lean, covered in cruel-linking ink calligraphy and scars. The musk of the embailor quarter entered with them. Ubraich started from his shelf, but he was confused, still half asleep, and they knew what they were about. Two namarti took his arms. He struggled, but he was a boy. He was outnumbered and the namarti were both strong. A third hung in the water with arms folded across his chest. Since he had been old enough to understand the difference between isharann and akhelian and the soulless namarti, Ubraich had puzzled over why it was that the latter needed to lose their eyes.

He wondered if it was so they could not look into another’s soul and feel pity.

An old aelf entered behind them.

Everything about his appearance conferred a greyed-out hollowness. He wore an armoured robe of steelglass and black nacre that seemed too large for his frame. His cheeks were drawn and scarred. The faded semicircle of an allopex bite cut his face in half. His neck was so withdrawn it had become paper over dry bones. His hair was colourless. It floated out behind him in a tail. The skin beneath one of his eyes was a scarred mess.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. Even his voice was empty.

Ubraich nodded.

Giléan Six-Eyes.

Ubraich recognised him from his lessons in beastmastery. It would not do to say that he had enjoyed those lessons. Such feelings were discouraged. But he had excelled in them and been satisfied in himself. He had sought no praise from his masters, and none had been forthcoming.

Until, perhaps, now.

The old embailor held out the staff that he was carrying. It appeared to have been fashioned from the fused vertebrae of something very large, possibly a fangmora. The pumiced bones had been painted black and carved with druhíri dread-runes, an ancient aelf form that existed solely as an expression of pain.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

Ubraich shook his head dumbly.

‘It is an embailor pain-stave. And it is yours.’

‘It is too large for me.’

The embailor looked him up and down. ‘You will grow.’

Swimming between the looming namarti, Giléan let the staff drift towards the wall of the cell and drew in alongside Ubraich’s shelf. With one aged talon of a finger, he traced a line down Ubraich’s cheek. Ubraich shivered. The two namarti held him down.

‘Your scars will heal, but you, like the beasts you will tame, will never forget the pain of this night,’ said Giléan, as he drew a hooked and rune-heavy knife. ‘This is the first lesson my master taught to me. It will be the first that I teach to you.’

IV

The túrscoll was a creation of living coral, coaxed into its current form by the spells of the isharann chorralus, those with the talent for shaping the native materials of the idoneth’s ocean home. It glowed, and as his embailor powers grew, so too did his ability to discern every tiny being that dwelled there. He could see their souls. The idoneth economy, he knew, turned on souls. The miniscule lives of the coral-dwellers might have been too small to interest the incubati who tended to the infant namarti, but there were those who earned their living from harvesting them, trading them to craftsmen who would use the soul material to make healing gems, soul-lights and restorative potions. The embailors were central to the industry. Most could be wealthy if they chose to be.

Even the unearthly splendour of the coral, however, paled before the creations of the ishratisar. Artists and artisans of the isharann, their magic left an immortal imprint of their own souls on the works they left behind, and made them glow in the senses of the sightless. Even to an aelf numbed to sensation by his own environment, the statues were wondrous: giants in silver, depicting heroes of the cythai, the sea-aelves of the first oceans. The beasts they had ridden were creatures that no embailor had ever described to him, with huge wings or legs instead of fins, and clad in metal in the style of the surface races. They bore names like asglir and caldai – Silver Helms and Dragon Knights.

Over the tides that followed, Giléan Six-Eyes proved a reluctant mentor, stirring himself from seclusion only rarely. It was to the aelves shown to him by the ishratisar that Ubraich found himself drawn for solace or guidance. They looked so proud, so wise, as if the solution to all problems had once been theirs. They rode their wondrous beasts without saddle or harness.

To aspire towards such nobility was as natural as breathing.

V

‘Why did Teclis not make the cythai perfect?’

Giléan, on those rare occasions when he roused himself from isolation, betrayed a fondness for thought puzzles and riddles. He believed them to be the most elegant expression of eolas. The word was of the cythai, and it had several meanings. Knowledge. Teaching. Another name for the god Teclis himself.

Most often, however, it was understood as ‘The Learning.’

He turned his brutalised face to look back at Ubraich.

The two embailors were swimming through the pens. The globed nets rippled and bulged like jellyfish, glowing internally with the souls of the monsters they held. The billion tiny gems of the túrscoll and, some way beyond it, Túrach itself, were brilliant and austere. Like a moonrise. Giléan preferred to pen his most monstrous beasts here. There were two reasons: it kept those beasts well away from the túrscoll, and it served as a deterrent to all but the largest of ocean predators that might otherwise be drawn to the enclave.

Ubraich paused, his arm in a bushel of fish. A hungry allopex beat its snout against the inside of the net. The globe bulged. It gnashed its teeth furiously, trying for purchase. Its eyes were glassy and yellow, glaring through the diamond pattern in the net.

‘Perhaps Teclis is not perfect?’ he guessed.

Giléan cocked his head, as though considering, but Ubraich knew him well enough to know that that was not the answer he was seeking.

Ubraich proceeded to feed the allopex.

‘Or maybe the cythai were never meant to be perfect,’ Giléan said.

‘Why would a creator god do such a thing?’

Giléan grinned, pleased to have been asked. ‘So that we must strive for the Light that blinded the cythai. That we might learn again, however painful.’ The old embailor swam to the next net. His pain-stave was larger than Ubraich’s and far more elaborate. Its structure incorporated the vertebrae of more than one beast, greatly enhancing the range and scope of its powers. It was topped by an enormous splayed fin that the embailor seemed to be relying on more heavily than usual.

‘Are you injured, teacher?’ Ubraich asked.

Giléan glanced at his arm and presented a rueful expression. ‘A beast that I have not yet broken in thirty years of trying. It had the better of our encounter again.’ He looked back at Ubraich, his gaze appraising. ‘You will be able to assist me, I think. When your magic is strong enough.’

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alexander Mokhov.

The Court of the Blind King © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. The Court of the Blind King, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78999-634-0

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