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The Learning – David Guymer

One

Two

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Hammerhal & Other Stories’

A Black Library Publication

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The Learning

David Guymer

One

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 akhelion. 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 akhelion 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 semi-circle 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.’

VI

The corral was the heart of the túrscoll’s embailor quarter. Circular and roofed with a thick accumulation of nets, it was large enough to confine a whole battalion of leviadon. The walls were high and silvered by ishratisar panelling, a living diorama of laagering knights so vivid that the thunderous silence of their hooves was disorienting.

‘Have you ever broken a deepmare before?’

Lady Sithilien frowned at him through the narrow slits in her helmet. The akhelion knight was fully clad in blue scales, a shield of organically shaped coral worn across her back. A bundle of delicate white hair emerged from beneath a coif of turquoise mail, dancing in the weak currents of the corral floor. She held a voltspear disinterestedly.

Giléan sneered.

Ubraich did not answer.

There were those races in the Mortal Realms that knew an innate and equal bond with the beasts they rode. He had been told tales about them at the fane. The Stormcast Eternals and their Celestial dracoths. Fyreslayers and their magmadroths. Even the brutish beastclaw ogors and their mournfangs. For reasons that no isharann had been able to explain to him, an animal had never yielded willingly to the idoneth. They had to be broken. Deepmares were the most dangerous and difficult. Too fiercely intelligent to be courted by promises of friendship. Too mean-spirited and guileful to be dominated easily by the embailor’s arts. They were also the mount most desired by akhelion nobles raised on the soul-memory of the old asur; images of asglir and caldai and Teclis’ eolas. Giléan had broken deepmares for two Túrach queens and a king. He wore the six eyes he had taken from them on a string around his neck.

‘He will not be breaking this one,’ said Giléan, his face turned upwards. ‘He will be assisting me, and perhaps learning something.’

The akhelion swept the fringe from Ubraich’s face with the back of her hand and studied him. It was little more than a brush of knuckles on skin, but to the sensation-deprived it was like being bitten by an electric fangmora. Ubraich did his best to suppress a shudder.

‘Leave my apprentice be, akhelion,’ said Giléan.

‘He is very young,’ said Sithilien, staring hard into his eyes.

‘They all begin that way, I am told.’

The akhelion chuckled blackly and released Ubraich’s face.

‘You are nervous,’ said Giléan. ‘You are making the boy nervous.’

‘Nervous? Either your beast will kill me, and probably both of you, or we will break it and I will be begged to join the highest rank of Túrach’s warrior nobility, a place within the asglir’akhelion itself. Why ever should I be nervous?’

Even through her blank helm and cold eyes, Ubraich could sense the ferocity of her smile. His pale skin blushed a diffuse shade of indigo, and he averted his eyes.

To see an older woman betray her feelings so…

The Lady Sithilien laughed without pity. ‘Have you never been to the surface, child? Have you swum in the aethersea?’

‘No, lady. What would a taker of beasts do on the surface?’

Giléan nodded, possibly approving.

‘Those who have raided have a different perspective on things,’ she said. ‘I have stepped outside our ocean and seen it from beyond. I have felt the sun warm my skin and seen light in all its colours. It is an experience that changes you. Not all emotion is to be feared or sensation to be avoided.’ She subjected Ubraich to a new, more deeply discomforting appraisal. ‘I have eight children, you know. All of them namarti.’

Ubraich’s mouth worked soundlessly.

‘He is a hundred years too young for you,’ said Giléan.

‘And you are a hundred years too old.’ She produced a smile such as Ubraich had only seen on hungry allopexes.

‘I will give you a deepmare,’ said Giléan. ‘Any ambitions beyond that must wait for another tide.’

The old embailor nodded upwards.

Ubraich, and then finally Sithilien, turned to follow his gaze.

A shoal of muscular namarti converged over the great nets above the corral as they watched. They swam like fish with arms at their sides and legs together, long hair slicked back in tails. Their souls were a constellation of muddy colours. Stunted hybrids of aelf and human, aelf and duardin, aelf and orruk, fused together so that those unfortunates born without souls might persist beyond infancy. Those namarti fortunate enough to have received the souls of aelves taken in the surface raids were favoured as personal servants and guards, but even they were noticeably diminished to Ubraich’s senses. There had been a time when he had perceived the namarti differently.

It was difficult for him to imagine such a time now. The differences between them were too stark.

With ropes knotted around their waists, the namarti drew one of the rippling globe nets down from the beast pens in the water above. They docked it to the corral roof. Other namarti swam in quickly to secure the two sets of nets together with metal rings. Ubraich felt the tension in the namarti rising. He fidgeted with his pain-stave and saw Sithilien doing something similar with her voltspear. This was where so many namarti of the embailor túrscoll earned their scars. He watched them dart through the holes in the nets, threading them with the ropes tied around their waists. They unwound them, transferring the knots over to the netting. They fastened them tight, then drew knives to begin cutting away the ropes that held the two bodies of netting separate. Coral-encrusted ropes fell away. The two netted enclosures effectively merged to become one, and the namarti scattered like startled prey as the beast swam into its enlarged pen.

Ubraich clutched his pain-stave to his breast. Trepidation and fear tingled uncertainly under his skin.

It was a gulchmare, one of the rarest and most dangerous breeds of deepmare to be found in the oceans of Ghyran. It was half again as large as the monster that Giléan had broken to Queen Anaer’s saddle. Its clawed fins and tail spines were the restless green of seaweed, but it had no single colour. Its flanks were rainbow swatches of armoured reef. The rippling, wriggling, puckering creatures that had colonised those encrustations conferred a sense of fevered energy and menace to the beast’s every movement. Ubraich lost a moment to awe. It was majestic. The gulchmare looped and rolled, swimming foalishly around the larger enclosure.

It had not yet noticed the three idoneth in its midst.

‘Bounties of Mathlann!’ Sithilien crowed.

Her voice rose in pitch to a keen of whalesong as she kicked off the corral floor and shot towards the gulchmare. The beast turned towards her, then tossed its head as though something had just crawled inside. With one hand on his pain-stave, Giléan held the other outstretched. His face was a rictus of concentration. Sithilien deftly evaded the distracted beast’s fin-claws, then gave a whoop as she swung herself onto its back. The gulchmare arched its spine and roared, but Sithilien had wedged herself firmly between the beast’s spikes and held on. The akhelion then set about with the butt of her spear.

Giléan turned to Ubraich.

‘It is a defiant beast. Only through pain and the fear of pain can its walls be broken and its soul dominated. I cannot both cloud its wits and break its defiance. I need you to confound its mind, Ubraich, while I get in close and aid the Lady Sithilien.’

‘I-I will try.’

The old embailor appeared to consider Ubraich a moment, then thrust his pain-stave into his ribs. A firm blow from such a weapon could cripple a leviadon. The idoneth, trained by abnegation and privation, had an altogether more delicate nervous system. Even a touch could be lethal. It was like being burned alive. Being shocked repeatedly by fangmora. Being eaten alive by sawfish while he screamed. It was all of those things and yet, at the same time, none. It was purely internal. It was pain of a sort that would chew through a body to inflict every suffering imaginable short of actual death.

It was pain that an aelf would say or do anything to avoid experiencing twice.

‘What are you going to do?’ Giléan asked calmly.

‘Confound its mind,’ Ubraich gasped.

Ignoring his apprentice, Giléan kicked off after Sithilien and the gulchmare.

Ubraich carefully unfolded his body from the foetal position it had unconsciously curled itself into. He tentatively quested out with his beast magic. The gulchmare’s soul was a writhing knot of angry defiance, an apex monster that an aelf, in his arrogance, had put in a cage. Ubraich touched its mind at the same moment that Giléan’s pain-stave cracked into its shoulder. Its soul halo turned ugly. The beast emitted a shriek of agony. Its mind folded in on itself, instinctively seeking an escape from the pain. It felt the link to Ubraich’s soul, and like a school of fish bursting from the closing jaws of an allopex it attacked.

Ubraich grunted. The muscles of his face tightened as he struggled to hold the gulchmare’s tortured soul at bay. With the fin-claws and teeth of its mind it savaged him, real wounds opening up his chest and his forearms, while leaving his journeymen leathers undamaged. He screamed as a lash of the beast’s tail tore the meat of his thigh. Blood ripped outwards from his leg in a narrow jet.

‘Hold it,’ Giléan snarled, and struck it another blow.

The gulchmare’s torment was staggering. For a moment it was as if Ubraich’s mind and the beast’s fell into each other’s embrace, too beaten and wearied to fight any further. It was so far removed from the principles of eolas that Ubraich almost fainted from the dissonance of it. This was not how it was supposed to be.

What would the cythai have made of the embailor’s art, he wondered?

Or the asur?

He shrieked as a soul maddened by agonies beyond all comprehension savaged at his. Had the gulchmare been lucid enough to actively desire him harm, then it might have slain him on the spot. A mauling proved adequate to appease its rage, and he was flung physically back through a compressed fog of dark blood and tiny bubbles. His body cracked against the ishratisar panelling of the corral wall.

The gulchmare’s mind landed firmly back into its own body. It was furious, and free to act on it. It snapped Giléan up in its jaws and shook the master embailor violently back and forth. He lost his pain-stave. ‘You belong to me!’ Sithilien yelled. She attacked the gulchmare’s head this time with the bladed end of her voltspear, but its armour encrustations spoiled each of her blows.

Truly, it was a mount deserving of Túrach’s asglir’akhelion.

Ubraich pushed himself from the corral wall with a whimper. His body trembled with unpleasant sensations. It was the most intensely he had felt since his mother had left him at the gates of the túrscoll. He made the connection unthinkingly. There was no longer any pain attached to that memory. It had been crushed by time and desolation. Just the idea of feeling made his body respond as though threatened by unseen predators.

He looked at Giléan, flailing in a murky red compress of his own blood.

He looked at the beast.

Something arrogant and prideful awoke in his soul-memory. He would break the beast where Giléan had failed. It would be his name that future generations of isharann would learn alongside Lotann and Mor’u when they studied the masters of ages past. He extended his beast magic towards the gulchmare once more. The master embailor was already the centre of its attentions, the taste of his lifeblood filling its mouth. Through the connection that Ubraich had already formed between their minds it was simplicity itself to bid the predator to sink its every thought into the devouring of his former master.

‘Do not let go, Lady Sithilien.’

Kicking off from the wall of the corral, he swam at the distracted gulchmare. Sithilien had her thighs clamped around the beast’s flanks, holding on to the mineral encrustations of its neck with one hand while continuing to stab at its neck with the other. Ubraich came up beneath it and drew back his pain-stave.

The blow crunched into the rock armour of its hip. The beast’s back arched, pain shredding outwards and coursing up the monster’s spine to its brain. Sithilien whooped as the creature’s convulsions exposed bare skin at the base of its throat, and she drove her voltspear into it. Blood squirted from the wound. Its soul flared with confusion and pain. Ubraich reversed his grip on his pain-stave, striking the gulchmare two-handed across its hindquarters. It released Giléan’s carcass from its jaws, a thin scream of tiny bubbles issuing from its mouth.

Ubraich planted his foot against the monster’s flank and pushed himself back.

‘Command it,’ he hissed. ‘Assert your soul’s dominance over its.’

‘Yield!’ Sithilien crowed, hooking her arm under the beast’s throat as if to throttle it into submission.

The gulchmare snapped its jaws in a futile bid to dislodge the akhelion straddling the back of its neck. Its gouged eyes found Ubraich. Its nostrils flared, the muscles in its neck tensing. Ubraich had been inside the monster’s mind. He knew what instincts drove it.

‘She said yield.’

He held his hand to the gulchmare’s gaping jaws, and the beast recoiled as though from a master’s pain-stave. Baring his teeth in effort, he bent his will against the last shred of the monster’s defiance, his magic a tool to leverage its pain. Where he found rebelliousness, Ubraich expunged it mercilessly, excruciating entire swathes of the creature’s mind to leave dead soul wherever free will might bloom.

Slowly, reluctantly, the gulchmare closed its jaws.

Sithilien sank as the tension left its spine.

She began to laugh.

‘Yes, Ubraich. Yes!’

Ubraich glowed with the first words of praise he had ever received.

He found he liked it.

Two

I

Ubraich sat back into the rippling flesh of the giant calroir clam, gently kneading the muscle of his thigh. His expression was rueful. It had been twenty years since his encounter with the gulchmare, yet the wounds he had taken that day had never closed. It was a soul injury, according to the tru’heas, and such wounds seldom healed well; they had been known to pass from parent to child, and even to recur in distant generations. The constant and quite obvious pain it caused had made him something of a pariah, for the idoneth found extremes of any kind disturbing. This had not troubled Ubraich unduly. Something in the idoneth’s nature bade them to seek out seclusion, and none more so than those drawn to the embailor’s arts. He settled into his bound-beast’s gently quivering gill-sac, allowing its simplistic soul to form a protective mesh about his own as he toyed idly with the necklace of eight deepmare eyes resting against his chest.

In the corral below, three young isharann took turns to bait an allopex, notionally working in tandem to bring the beast down, but idoneth did not work naturally in groups. As he listened, Irimé, the eldest, broke from the others to lay a blow. Her pain-stave crunched into the allopex’s shoulder, convulsing it.

‘A well-struck blow, Irimé,’ Ubraich called down.

He had been experimenting with praise and found it to be effective. As with anything, it was best indulged in moderation.

Irimé was a vigorous girl, when passion was allowed her, and so she relished these opportunities in the corral. The study of beast magic and of the ishratisar’s illuminated bestiaries bored her. Ubraich had been forced to face down the angry young isharann more than once. There were those in the túrscoll who would tut, as much at her intensity as his unspoken indulgence of it. ‘Send her to the azydrazor to learn the ways of the soulrender,’ they often said. For their ways were not dissimilar and the soulscryers who assigned young children to their respective fanes were not immune to mistakes. Where the embailor strove to bend a soul to his will, the akhelion-schooled soulrender tore it wholesale from a being’s flesh. But Ubraich did not wish for that. He knew that, once unleashed, the difficulty lay in restraining her.

‘Back now, Irimé. I would see what the others can do.’

With a scowl, she withdrew.

Flowain and Valhanir were of a similar age and as close as twins. Both were more naturally cautious, and though they lacked Irimé’s talent, they also lacked her scars. Flowain, in particular, would still let fear show when paired with a particularly difficult beast, and had probably felt Ubraich’s wrath as often as Irimé. In that, at least, the two were evenly matched. She had a gift, however, and Ubraich was loath to be rid of her entirely. He had once watched her floating on her back in the tru’heas herb gardens, arms extended to the wild ocean, singing down a flock of spinelbuds. They had come to her through the arbour nets of the túrscoll, mindless of the predators they held, to enamel her waiting hands in ruby-coloured florets. Her laugh had been as carefree as a cythai queen.

Ubraich had taken no pleasure in punishing her for her sense of wonder.

All three would make fine embailors, for he demanded no less.

The allopex reared suddenly to snap at Valhanir. The monster’s jaw was bound in rubbery kelp, preventing it from opening its mouth much more than an arm’s width, but the boy startled all the same. He cried out as he stumbled back. The allopex surged, butting its flat nose into the young isharann’s stomach. Valhanir dropped his pain-stave. Ubraich frowned in displeasure. Before he could offer a chastisement, Irimé pounced. She leapt at the allopex from behind, beating its back and tail with such a flurry of blows that the monster almost broke its own spine with its convulsions.

‘Enough, Irimé!’ The young isharann was snarling as she drew back her pain-stave for another blow. ‘Enough.’

From across the corral, Flowain cocked her head, then made a gesture with her foot that Ubraich would not have noticed had he not seen it many times before. Mirroring it almost exactly, the allopex swatted Irimé with its tail, crashing her into the walls of the corral.

Ubraich winced to see the ishratisar soul-pigment of the asglir that had been rendered there crack.

Only then did his concern shift to his pupil.

‘Should I dispatch a namarti for the tru’heas?’

Paddling furiously, Irimé rolled herself upright. She thrust her pain-stave accusingly at Flowain. The younger embailor noticeably shrank from it. Valhanir looked between them. He was a swift learner. One lesson had been enough to teach him to stay well clear of Irimé’s temper.

‘I know that was you, Flowain!’

Gripping the edges of his calroir shell, Ubraich rose, trying and failing to suppress the quiver of pain that ran through his leg. He settled instead for ignoring it, letting it suffer in isolation from his spirit. The calroir emitted a wheeze to compensate its buoyancy for the shift in weight.

‘You earned that blow, Irimé,’ he said.

‘But she–’

‘Imagine, if you prefer, that the blow was mine. I would have tasked her with delivering it had she not done so freely.’ Irimé snorted at that. ‘I tire of your distemper. You may retire to the seclusion cells until I deem it to have passed.’

‘But–’

Ubraich lifted his pain-stave, and the young isharann quietly set about gathering her things. ‘And you two.’ Ubraich added snap to his voice. ‘Remove this thing.’ he pointed to the quivering allopex with his staff. ‘See that it is fed your rations this eve and its wounds are treated. Tomorrow, I think, it will be ready to break.’

‘It is all quite different from Giléan’s regime, is it not?’ Lady Sithilien observed drily as her gulchmare drew in alongside his calroir.

Princess Sithilien, Ubraich reminded himself.

Her claiming of the gulchmare had impressed not only the Túrach’s akhelion order, but the royal house of Anaer as well, and they had quickly seen her wed to one of the royal bloodline’s innumerable namarti bastards. She wore a coat of scalloped armour emblazoned with the spiked fist of Anaer arms. Her helm was tall and silver, in the old asglir style, leaving her proud, lined face uncovered. The gulchmare too was cloaked in heraldry and mail. A hundred and forty years old, and she had never looked more powerful. Ubraich seldom kept himself up to date with the whisperings of court, but he knew that Sithilien had recently given birth to her fourteenth child. Another namarti. Nobody was entirely certain as to the identity of the father. Nobody was entirely interested. Least of all her prince. The idoneth were dogged if not enthusiastic breeders: they prized fecundity far more than fidelity.

His royal patron and occasional lover settled into a companionable silence that Ubraich rebuffed with a frown. He fondled the eight-eyed necklace thoughtfully as the princess spoke again.

‘Giléan would have made an example of Irimé for her aggression. He would have punished Flowain for her cowardice, and Valhanir for his ineptitude.’

‘I decided long ago that I would surpass Giléan,’ Ubraich said.

She laughed, and Ubraich noted how it had been hoarsened by her years. ‘Giléan was good enough. His skills earned him the favour of the akhelion.’

‘I do not desire their favour.’

Her smile thinned. ‘There are those who wonder by what right you wear the Eight-Eyes’ necklace.’

‘Six-Eyes,’ Ubraich corrected her. ‘His name was Six-Eyes.’

‘Not if you heed the aelves at court.’

‘There is a reason I do not.’ Fastening his jaw, he settled into his mount’s flesh as if resolving to ignore the akhelion princess. ‘I broke the gulchmare you ride now.’ He glared askance at her and the beast whinnied as if remembering the cut of his mind, forcing Sithilien into an inelegant touch on the reins. His abilities had only grown since that day. ‘Not Giléan.’

‘I remember. It is why I am here now. You are proud, Ubraich, and I am old. I would see you continue to enjoy favour when my soul rests in the chorrileum.’

Ubraich said nothing, choosing instead to watch as Valhanir set nets around the allopex to prepare it for moving.

‘Are you not even going to ask?’

Ubraich frowned up at her.

Sithilien mirrored the expression. ‘I am recently returned from a raid on the Blight of Gullyrion. On my return, I lost several namarti scouts to a deepmare of a kind whose description confounded the isharann in my phalanx.’

‘Tidecasters and soul wardens,’ Ubraich muttered. ‘What would they know of a beast?’

‘It was shelled after the fashion of a leviadon, they claimed, though narrower in shape and not quite as large. It moved swiftly too, they said. Whatever it was, it dispatched forty namarti reavers.’

‘Where was this?’ Ubraich tore his gaze from his apprentices to regard the princess fully. ‘And when?’

‘In the shallow seas, near to Dwy-Hor.’

‘The shallows,’ Ubraich mused. ‘It would be rare to find a truly great beast there. Does anybody else know of it?’

Sithilien unsheathed her grin. ‘For a reclusive people, we are little able to keep a secret amongst ourselves. The túrscoll is abuzz with talk of this beast, as you would know if you spent any time there. Several embailors and their apprentices are already making plans to claim the monster.’

‘They will need the support of the akhelion.’ Ubraich’s mind was already moving, plotting, visualising the long overdue eclipse of his former master’s legend by his own. ‘Without the strength of the battalions they will never make it as far as Dwy-Hor.’

Sithilien’s harness creaked as she leaned towards him. The smile on her face was much the same as Giléan would wear, in his unguarded moments, when he had succeeded in imparting some wisdom.

‘Know you of an embailor in Túrach who could command such backing?’

Ubraich scowled. His right hand found its way to his face. With forefinger extended, he started to make rings around his eyes. It was an old habit. He could not recall when he had started doing it, or why, but whenever he felt emotion threatening to get the better of him, it reminded him of a time, a place, where he had felt safe.

He let his hand float to his side, and sighed.

‘How long will you need to get ready?’

II

The idoneth were a puritan people, little given to carnival or splendour. If there was an unearthly beauty to their enclaves, then it was because the reef and shell from which they had been created were possessed of it. And if their armed hosts appeared to be things of sublimity, then it was because their composites too had a beauty all of their own. This was as true for the namarti thralls as it was for their akhelion lords, for sickly and withered of soul though they were, they were perfect of body as only aelves could be.

The namarti battalion of Princess Sithilien assembled before the shell-encrusted tidegate of Túrach, not in the dressed ranks and files of a landed host, but as a school of beautifully scaled fish in a bowl. They swam freely, armed with lanmari greatswords or short whisperbows, confined only by the cohesion of the school itself and by the softly glowing coral spires that jutted above them like the spines of a God-Beast.

Neither Ubraich nor Sithilien had made any prior announcement, and yet a small crowd had grown organically to witness the hunt’s departure. Namarti carters and pickers and labourers paused in their efforts. Lords and their favoured servants watched from coral shelves and verandas that grew from the great spires. A rawness of energy suffused them. Cold and withdrawn the idoneth may have been, but there was something buried deep in their spirit that longed to cut loose on a wild hunt.

Sithilien swept up her spear to rally her schooling battalion.

She did not need to say anything. When the phalanxes raided the shores that bordered their oceans for mortal souls, all knew why. When the akhelion mustered their battalions to bring home a great beast, all knew why.

Ubraich turned to his apprentices and his own small band of stern-looking thralls. Irimé was eager, her face made crooked by a fierce smile. Flowain and Valhanir looked trepidatious, but excited. All three were dressed for the open ocean. Finned leather boots for distance swimming. Lightweight kelp jackets stuffed with pockets and with shells sewn in for added protection. Valhanir had his arm draped over a pack beast. The sea snail was the first in a train of six, their spiralling shells festooned with netting that held provisions: rune-stones for heating, healing and meditation; ropes; chains; herbs; more nets and spare weapons for the namarti. The three isharann all carried their pain-staves.

They required no words either.

Ubraich turned back from them, letting his soul-sight drift out of focus over the mountain of cultivated reefs.

It was his first return to Túrach that he could recall. He was not sure what he was hoping to see there. Or who. Only namarti dwelled in Túrach. The one in one hundred of pure soul would be in the palaces and castles of the great coral-spires, or in the blessed seclusion of the túrscoll. He clutched his pain-stave and drew a steadying breath. Already his leg was beginning to ache, just from treading water. He wondered if he had chosen unwisely in leaving his calroir behind. It was pride that had made him insist that he could swim, for it was a long journey ahead of them and he would not force an entire battalion to the clam’s pace.

An isharann tidecaster that Ubraich did not recognise swam through the flitting namarti. She was tall and glitteringly austere, cloaked in white, garlanded in lapis shell and aquamarine. As she descended to join Sithilien, clad almost entirely in asglir silver and mounted on her gulchmare, she raised her pelagic staff to test the prevailing currents through the tidegate and declared them favourable. Eager cheers ran through the watching workers and then, like the tide, the isharann withdrew.

Sithilien gave the command.

The hunt rode out from Túrach.

III

The open ocean was no place for the idoneth.

Though they claimed everything bound within or touched by it, they ruled little beyond the meagre confines of their enclaves. When the phalanxes raided land they voyaged through the aethersea, cast far by the isharann magic of the tidecasters and soulscryers. On those rare instances when the wish or need was there to journey to another enclave or answer the call of assembral, then they travelled through the whirlways, the network of realmgates that confluenced in the Gaelus Ocean in Hyish, the mythical birthplace of the cythai.

There were five idoneth enclaves in the Green Gulch of Ghyran, all descended from the original Ionrach colonisation. Elgaen, the White City, whose nacreous towers had earned it a reputation for austere beauty and unearthly splendour. Dwy-Hor, with its verdant underwater forests, where sylvaneth might occasionally be spied beneath wave-dappled sunlight. Guethen, renowned for the barrenness of its stone and the hardiness of its warriors. And Túrach of course, the City of Spines, once pre-eminent, before the rise of Briomdar and its isharann queen. They were motes of civilising influence, scattered across a black and crushing void. In the ocean, there was no light. No ishratisar art defined its walls and edifices. No chorralus builders existed to order its beauty. The pulse of life choked the ocean’s surface with algal mats the size of continents, but the deep places remained forever hostile. It was another symptom of the unformed magic that resided there. Physically, the oceans belonged to Ghyran still, but in reality…

Guided only by the meandering soul-lines of the namarti marching columns, Ubraich made it a point of ritual to pause, breathe deeply and imbibe of the crushing emptiness that abounded him. The desolation was absolute, primal; it was almost spiritual.

They lost six namarti to the first tide. Eight the next. Then eighteen, one of Ubraich’s own hunters included. Sithilien grew increasingly embittered and wary as the toll steepened, but Ubraich had known that the distance between the Túrach tidegate and the emptiness to which they were destined would come at a cost. He tried to explain, but the akhelion had been borne only to land, on the aetherwaves of the tidecasters, and could not comprehend. A thousand miles of forsaken water separated Túrach from Dwy-Hor, naught but ancient beasts and dreamless magic to fill it.

The mood amongst the namarti was more than usually bleak as they made camp on the turning of the fourth tide. Huge fishscale awnings were unfurled, providing shelter from the icy currents and some degree of camouflage for the namarti to huddle beneath from the occasional prowling predator. Ubraich bade his namarti to release bushels of sentinel fish into the ocean. They swirled around the forsaken camp, each of them broken and bound to Ubraich’s soul and hesitant to be parted from it. They would be easy enough to recapture when the tide turned again and would emit an intense emerald light when threatened; a natural defence mechanism, and useful forewarning in the event of an attack.

At Ubraich’s insistence, the entire business was conducted in silence.

Tracking a beast through open ocean was no simple task. There were no broken twigs or footprints to follow, no abandoned kills or droppings to signpost a trail. They had only their ears, their noses and, if they were possessed of the power and knew what to search for, their soul-sense.

Once Ubraich was satisfied, and Sithilien had murmured her assent, the embailors made off from the newly struck camp to divine for the trail of the beast.

Valhanir struck two stones together. Light burst from them. Ubraich grunted. Only the namarti hunters that accompanied them, physically lacking eyes, gave no reaction at all. Ubraich blinked as the light burst faded to tolerable levels. Rocky hills and mesas bulged from the ocean floor, barren even of the simplest vegetation.

‘There is nothing here,’ said Irimé.

‘Do you not sense that?’ said Ubraich.

‘I do, teacher,’ said Flowain.

Irimé screwed up her face as she sought to force her senses further.

‘There is another soul in the water,’ Valhanir murmured. ‘Is it our prey?’

Ubraich shook his head. ‘It is not just one. Look again. Namarti!’

The namarti hunters swam forwards, raising their whisperbows, arrows already nocked.

‘I see them!’ Irimé cried.

Silver-bodied havaklir streamed from a cleft in the rock ahead of them like an eruption from a gaseous vent. The fish were scavengers, but only out of deference to the behemoths that ruled the ocean’s brutal food chains. Each was twenty feet long and three high, but so preposterously thin that to face one head on was like looking down the length of blade, all cruel serrations and silvered lines. Grimacing in concentration, Ubraich drove a wave of power into the shoal, scattering the flotsam of their tiny thoughts and breaking the school into a confusion of individual minds. Fish snapped at empty water, swimming furiously after the implanted suggestion of prey.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he said.

There was a twang of vibration as the namarti hunters loosed arrows into the convulsing shoal, and Irimé needed no further encouragement.

Her pain-stave crushed into a flat body. The creature locked stiff, its tail muscles and fins frozen in agony. It cartwheeled stiffly, head over tail, as Irimé spun gracefully in the water and hammered the length of her staff into its side. The pain-stave was not designed to be a lethal implement, but swung with enough force it was as effective as any mace or cudgel. Blood puffed from cracked scales and clotted gills as it spun back from her.

Ubraich hefted his pain-stave. Irimé had focused the predators’ minds. The scattered elements of the school were shaking off Ubraich’s spell of suggestion, looping back around and swimming ferociously towards the taste of blood in the water and the wriggling of live prey. One went at Irimé like a thrusting sword. Ubraich reached out for it and made a tugging gesture. It was a simple creature with only the dimmest awareness of self. Its soul was but weakly tethered, and Ubraich’s spell wrenched it from its body to dissolve into the ocean. The havaklir’s mouth and eyes opened wide, a dead thing now in a living body.

The rest of the school swirled about him. A namarti’s bow stave was bitten in half. Another lost her head to a single bite, her body disintegrating as more havaklir converged over her corpse. Ubraich lashed at them with his pain-stave. The school bruised with purples and blues as pain wracked their souls. Agony of his own flared up in his mutilated leg. He welcomed it. It fed him with more, and worse, to inflict upon his prey. A scream pealed through the seething maelstrom and Ubraich risked a look back to see Flowain breaking from the melee, swimming for the open ocean in panic. He summoned one of his surviving hunters.

‘Bring her back here.’

‘Master.’ The namarti bowed.

‘Defend me, Valhanir.’

Freed of the need to concentrate on defence, Ubraich drove another harrowing pulse through the havaklir’s minds. This time, the school had suffered enough that it broke up completely under his power, individual shards of silver scattering into the ocean.

Ubraich slumped, slapping away Valhanir’s helping hand.

‘Gather the corpses,’ he panted. ‘Sithilien and her battalion will eat well this tide if nothing else.’

‘I have never seen havaklir in such numbers,’ Valhanir murmured.

‘Teacher,’ Irimé called, before Ubraich could reply.

The isharann was, as she always conspired to be, some distance ahead. She lay on her stomach above the cleft from which the havaklir school had emerged, her upper body swarmed by obsidian-dark hair. Wearily, Ubraich swam to join her. The others followed.

A monstrous striped fish, big enough to glut even a havaklir swarm to satiation, lay in the lee of the rocks, partially buried under grit and sand. It was a sunken head and a scrap of tail, held together by about eighty feet of crushed bone.

‘That is why,’ said Irimé. ‘They were defending their kill.’

‘The havaklir did not kill this.’

Ubraich hovered his hands over the fish’s remains and channelled his beast magic. The various bite marks upon its body suddenly inflamed. Valhanir gasped as the oval-shaped indents flared up silvery white.

‘Namarti. A knife.’

The hunter behind him wordlessly presented his blade by the handle. With an equal absence of ceremony, Ubraich took it and carved a fillet from the tail.

‘What is it?’ Irimé breasted lower to see for herself.

‘A bite.’

Holding up the fillet to her, Ubraich traced the strange, undulating crescent shape with his blade.

‘From what?’ said Irimé.

Ubraich smiled, but before he could answer her, the namarti he had dispatched from the battle returned with Flowain struggling in his strong grip. Ubraich sighed. He noted Valhanir, and even Irimé, were no longer looking.

‘Bring her to me.’

‘Please, teacher,’ said Flowain, as the thrall obeyed. ‘Forgive me.’

‘Shush.’ Ubraich pressed the flat edge of the namarti knife to the girl’s cheek. She whimpered, tried to turn her head away, but the namarti that held her knew his master well and caught her head in an arm lock. One eye stared upwards, the other buried in pectoral muscle. ‘I will not have a student of mine show such fear in her eyes. Not with Princess Sithilien here.’

‘It will not happen again, teacher.’

‘No, it will not.’

Ubraich withdrew the knife and then, serpent swift, plunged it into Flowain’s eye. She screamed, convulsing in the namarti’s rigid lock, as Ubraich wrenched the knife out, her face spewing blood and tears and compressed ropes of jelly-like fluids.

‘Pain is what Teclis gave to us that we might learn, and find our way back to his light.’

He returned the knife. ‘Go and rouse Sithilien,’ he told the namarti, ignoring his apprentice’s increasingly inchoate screams. She would thank him one day. ‘Tell her that we take the beast tonight.’

IV

The bite mark was better than a footprint in the ground. It was a compass that pointed neither north nor south, nor to the wild energies that coursed around the realm’s edge. It pointed to the soul of a single beast. When they strayed from true, a tremor in the chewed fillet in Ubraich’s hand guided them back. Valhanir broke another light stone. The barren cliffs of mountains rose and rose beyond the edge of the light. Irimé ranged ahead with the remaining namarti, forcing them all to swim a little harder to match her impatience. But even with Teclis’ own will behind him, Ubraich would never be as swift in the water as he had been before the gulchmare, and Sithilien caught up to them just as the tide was beginning to turn.

The akhelion princess came mounted on her gulchmare, pennons streaming from her voltspear and mingling with the silver-white cloud of her hair. Ubraich’s hunter returned with her, along with an entourage of greatsword-wielding thralls and bow-armed reavers twenty-strong. Between them and Ubraich’s túrscoll hunters, they numbered twenty-five.

He hoped that there would be enough bodies to distract the beast’s attention while he broke its mind.

This, he reminded himself, was merely the hunt. Most embailors would agree that it was the easy part. Giléan had captured Sithilien’s gulchmare easily enough, but it had taken him thirty years to finally break its will. That long and dangerous process would come later. It would need to be stabled, acclimatised. It would need to surrender its eyes. And as soon as an akhelion with the courage to make the attempt was found, then it could begin.

Ubraich looked forward to it with relish. He regarded the ruined soul that moved underneath Sithilien’s saddle with pride. The gulchmare had been a wild and tempestuous beast. Now there was not enough independent spirit left to twitch without Sithilien’s implicit command. It was a mutilated once-animal spirit in a mighty body, all but its basest instincts muzzled by fear and the memory of pain.

‘I see something ahead,’ said Sithilien.

Immediately on her arrival, she had taken charge, and despite her age she had an aelf’s eyes, her vision honed by decades spent hounding smaller prey. Her gulchmare pulled her to the front of the group as she spoke. It had a scent. An animal’s sense for the presence of a mightier beast than itself in its waters. It was agitated. To Ubraich’s wonder it was even demonstrating enough free will to resist Sithilien’s reins. She pulled angrily, opening up the old wounds where Giléan had hooked the original harness into the gulchmare’s flesh. The beast emitted a near-constant whinnying vibration that ground through Ubraich’s teeth and set all of the younger isharann on edge. Irimé gave the monster a sideways look, fondling her pain-stave thoughtfully, before Sithilien caught her eye and withered her temper with a glare.

Ubraich was impressed.

‘What do you see?’ Ubraich asked her.

‘The mountain we passed earlier is part of a range that cuts across the Green Gulch,’ said Sithilien. ‘I have heard of it, though I do not think any aelf has ever seen it with their own eyes. We come now to its foothills. I see a cave ahead.’

‘I see it too,’ said Flowain quickly, eager to please.

Ubraich patted her shoulder and she flinched.

‘Do we wait it out?’ asked Valhanir. ‘Or do we lure it to us?’

‘Allow me to go inside, teacher,’ said Irimé.

‘No, I will go!’ said Flowain.

‘Neither of you will go,’ said Ubraich.

‘No indeed,’ said Sithilien, rising contemptuously in her ornate saddle. ‘Foolish girl. You are isharann. Do you think I bed myself to half of Túrach to sire endless namarti brats so that a pure soul can bait herself for a beast? You do? Then let me help you, girl. I can gut you here and cast your entrails into the pit that the beast might follow them to us.’ The gulchmare dropped its lower jaw, displaying a hideous grin of emerald-coloured teeth.

Irimé swam hastily back. Ubraich covered his smirk with his hand.

‘No, girl.’ Sithilien lowered her spear, then regally raised a hand. With a wave of the fore and middle fingers, she summoned a lanmari-armed thrall. ‘See what is in there,’ she ordered.

Ubraich muttered a few phrases over his beastmark, then passed it to the namarti before he swam off towards the cave.

They fell to silence as the warrior vanished into the opening.

‘What did you say over that skin you gave him?’ Sithilien asked softly.

‘It has a power entirely separate from mine. The words I spoke merely awakened that power. It will draw the beast to its mark, as it drew us to the beast.’

Sithilien smiled to herself.

‘I knew you were as good as Giléan, Ubraich. Nothing pleases me like being right.’

Waves of ink-black water erupted from the cave mouth before Ubraich could answer. The namarti thrall flailed helplessly against the sudden torrent, tossed around like a gloomtide wreck caught up in waves of denser, darker water. Ubraich felt something rising. He made a pained sound and bent suddenly, pressing his hand to his forehead. It was titanic. Ancient. The idoneth could be pitiless and uncaring, often mistaken as cruel, but the depth of malevolence he felt from this creature was enough to make him bare his teeth and grip his pain-stave until his knuckles whitened. Flowain howled like a frustrated predator, shortly followed by Irimé and Valhanir, as the monster surged from its lair.

Some way distant, it still managed to be huge, rippled and distorted by squalling water, but not to Ubraich’s soul-sight. The basic body plan of a deepmare was there; the long horn that jutted from the middle of its forehead, the clawed forelimbs, the triplet of tails, but altered by the centuries and the ancient magic of its environment into something scarcely recognisable.

Colossal forelimbs encased in chitinous exoarmour and terminating in pincer claws snipped the struggling namarti neatly in half. Legs disappeared into a segmented, chute-like mouth. A still living, still screaming upper body, innards held inside his torso by the crushing in-pressure of the ocean floor, spun away in the whirlpool that the titan’s emergence had left in its wake. The gulchmare issued a terrified whinny. Ubraich was dimly aware of Sithilien screaming at it, rallying namarti reavers to loose and her thralls to close.

How would it be to sit bestride such a beast? To stand upon that armoured back, heavy chains in hand? He would be as the caldai of the mythic asur, mounted on the reptilian god-beasts of the skies-that-were.

As Teclis the Wise had always wished his children to aspire.

He reeled his mind back from his grand visions of eolas with a tremble of effort. While he had indulged it, battle had been joined.

Sithilien’s reavers peppered the monster with arrows that scattered harmlessly off its carapace. The lanmari-wielding thralls availed of themselves better, chipping away at the monster’s armour, though at a cost in blood. Every flex of its limbs crushed bones, knocked blades from hands, and sent muscular namarti aelves tumbling through the water. It pincered its claws menacingly, but the namarti were too agile and too wily to be drawn.

‘For Túrach. For Mathlann. For the pride of Anaer!’

Sithilien aimed her voltspear, the gulchmare already hurtling forwards. The two monsters crashed together. Akhelion voltspear split crustacean-like armour and drove deep. The ancient deepmare was easily three times the gulchmare’s size but the moment of the charge sent them both spinning through the cordon of namarti. They grappled savagely as namarti were flung aside. The gulchmare raked carapace with fin-claws. The ancient fought back with chitin-bladed forelimbs. The gulchmare whipped the monster’s underbelly with its tails. It was how the embailors trained deepmares to battle leviadon, but unlike that warbeast, there was no weakness to its armour there. The ancient emitted a screaming pulse of sound that rippled out from it in a wave. Sithilien screamed as though she could not hear her own voice. Then the monster pincered through two of the gulchmare’s tails. Her mount scrabbled at the behemoth in a furious panic, breaking a fin-claw on its armour, before Sithilien, hands clapped to her ears, kicked her heels into her mount’s ribs.

It swam away, leaving the akhelion’s voltspear sticking from the side of the titan’s head. Arrows continued to loop in as thralls swept back in to harry the monster with lanmari blades, buying their princess time to escape and regroup.

‘It is a defiant beast!’ Ubraich turned towards the embattled giant, kicking his legs harder for more speed. It did not occur to him that he spoke now in his own teacher’s voice. ‘Only through pain and the fear of pain can its walls be broken and its soul dominated. I cannot both cloud its wits and break its defiance. Confound its mind, my students, while I get close and aid the Lady Sithilien.’

He heard no reply. His attention was too firmly fixed on his quarry. This would be the realisation of his dreams, the affirmation of the status he had always craved, even before he had known he craved it. The túrscolls of the entire Green Gulch and beyond would come to revere his name.

A namarti fell diagonally into two pieces as Ubraich swam towards her, through the cloud of blood that stretched thinner and thinner between the departing halves.

He drew back his pain-stave, and then stove it into the side of the monster’s head. Its eye splattered under his blow. Then… nothing. He stared in disbelief. The deepmare’s ancient nervous system was buried deep under an armoured shell. It was immune to the pain-stave. A panicked stream of bubbles escaped from between his lips as the monster turned towards him.

He bashed at its snout with his stave, paddled back with both feet. At his command, debilitating waves of enervation and despair thundered from his psyche and through the alien mind of the monster. A tail looped around his ankle. He gasped in shock. It dragged him back towards the deepmare’s mouth. He sensed the disturbance in the water of the approaching pincer, struck at it as if with an asglir lance, and wedged his pain-stave into the closing claw. It withstood the monstrous pressure for a split-second before exploding. Bone fragments formed a grainy white cloud. His arm scissored off from his shoulder, sweeping through the cloud and away. He looked down.

He screamed.

Then he screamed again.

A thrall hacked through the tail that held Ubraich’s ankle with his lanmari greatsword before the stump whipped into her gut. The thrall coughed up pulped organs as she drifted away.

Irimé swam in.

‘Take its other eye, Irimé! Take it, and we will claim this beast together.’

The young isharann extended a hand towards the deepmare as she swam. Power shivered through the intervening water. The master embailor was already the centre of the deepmare’s attentions, the taste of his lifeblood filling its mouth.

It was simplicity itself to bid the predator to sink its every thought into the devouring of her former master.

Ubraich screamed as the deepmare tore off his leg and sent him spinning into higher water. In the dimmest sense, he was aware of Irimé crashing blows against the monster’s head, Sithilien exhorting her as the akhelion princess came around for another pass at the beast.

Embraced by the cold and the dark of oblivion, the screams of battle becoming muted, Ubraich smiled as the life poured from his wounded flesh. Like the cythai before him, like Teclis himself, he had been shown a great truth, and like those exalted antecedents, he had been blinded by it. He smiled because he understood it now, and if there was a lesson to be taken from eolas, then it was that one was never too old to learn.

He smiled because one day Irimé would find herself usurped by her own creation too.

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote 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 drama Realmslayer. 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 Hammerhal & Other Stories.

The rat chittered, exposing yellow incisors in warning. Belloc growled and tossed his knife. The rat fled as the narrow blade thudded into the side of a mould-encrusted crate. The dock-warden cursed and ambled to retrieve his weapon. As he did so, he saw the flash of eyes in the nearby shadows. The rat wasn’t alone. They never were. Where there was one, there were a dozen – these days, at least. The sacks of grain that were stacked along the causeway of the aether-dock were irresistible to hungry vermin.

The docks rose high over Hammerhal’s warehouse district, one ring of berths and warehouses stacked atop the next, almost all the way up its length. From each ring, an ever-spreading canopy of high-altitude berths and quays extended out over the tangled streets below, like branches stretching from a tree of immense size.

Belloc had heard that it was, in fact, just that – that much of the city had been grown rather than built. He didn’t know whether he believed that or not, though there were stranger things in this realm, to be sure.

Hammerhal itself, for instance. The Twin-tailed City stretched across two of the eight Mortal Realms, separated by untold infinities thanks to the Stormrift Realmgate. Like all realmgates, it was a portal through which one could pass into another realm entirely. Countless numbers of these apertures in reality were scattered about the Mortal Realms, and all of the great cities were built about one or more realmgates.

Hammerhal spread outwards from the twinned thresholds of the Stormrift Realmgate into both Ghyran, the Realm of Life, and Aqshy, the Realm of Fire. Belloc had only been to Hammerhal Aqsha once, and the experience hadn’t been a pleasant one. The air had tasted of cinders and smoke, and he’d been covered in sweat from sunup to sundown. Ghyran was better, but not by much – it was too wet here, too humid. He missed Azyr. The Celestial Realm had its problems, but at least the weather was pleasant.

He plucked his knife free of the crate and spun it lightly between his fingers, careful not to cut himself.

‘Well,’ he said, glaring at the rats, ‘anything to say for yourselves?’

When no reply was forthcoming, he kicked the mouldering crate towards them. It came apart as his boot touched it, and he yelped in disgust. Bits and pieces clattered across the ground, and the rats took the hint, scattering into the shadows.

Belloc hopped back, scraping at the sludge on his boot with the edge of his knife. If it got into the leather, he would have to get new boots, and he’d only just managed to break these ones in. He looked around as he dislodged the last of it. There was mould everywhere, growing on every warehouse and berth that occupied the vast wooden platform of the docks. And vines. And weeds, even. It seemed inconceivable that anything should be growing this high above the city proper, but life found a way. Especially in Hammerhal Ghyra.

This side of the bifurcated city was awash in unwelcome growth. The heat from the Fire-Bastions could only do so much; no matter how much lava was channelled into the immense stone runnels from Hammerhal Aqsha, the city’s spires and golden domes were under eternal siege from Ghyran’s excessively exuberant plant life.

And the rats. Always the rats.

‘Vermin,’ Belloc muttered, thrusting his knife back into its sheath.

That was all this job was, at times. The dock-warden scratched at his unshaven chin. He was burly, but not especially brave, even with a sword on his hip. He wasn’t ashamed. Bravery cost extra, and the owners of the docks were notoriously cheap. You got what you paid for, and they had paid for Belloc. Luckily, no one was stupid enough to climb all the way up here, just to filch grain – or worse, try and steal an airship. So it was just him and the rats.

He wondered if Delph and the others were as bored as he was. Probably. Things were either boring or terrifying this high up, but they had drawn the short straws and been forced to patrol the uppermost ring.

He didn’t like it up here. The Kharadron vessels smelled of strange chemicals and the vibrations of their buoyancy endrins shook the entire dock. The sky-duardin were a stand-offish folk who kept to themselves, unless they had business to attend to. He’d heard from Delph that they lived in flying cities, but didn’t know how much credence there was in that.

Then again, Delph was a duardin herself, so perhaps she’d know, if anyone did. She said the Kharadron were duardin who had retreated to the skies when the armies of the Dark Gods had swept over the Mortal Realms. She didn’t seem to like them very much. Granted, she didn’t like anyone.

Belloc stared at one of the Kharadron vessels. It was oddly shaped. Too many curves. The bulbous aether-endrins that held the ship aloft glowed dimly, even when at anchor. If you stared at them for too long, you got dizzy. Belloc blinked and looked away.

There were sounds up here too, sometimes. Not the usual creaking and groaning you’d expect, but something else. Smells, too – acrid and unpleasant. Once, he thought he’d seen something watching him from the roof of a warehouse.

Suddenly uneasy, he glanced at the unfamiliar stars above. The sky was green here, even now at night, with the faintest tinge of azure. Sometimes it was so pale it was almost white, and sometimes it was so dark as to be black, but it was always a shade of green. The stars were the worst. They were the same as in Azyr, he was certain, but somehow different, as if he were looking at them from the wrong angle.

He blinked and tore his eyes away from the unforgiving sky. Beyond the obscuring wall of anchored airships and skycutters, Hammerhal Ghyra stretched across the horizon. It was almost beautiful from up here. Parts of the city were given over to vast groves of trees, and amongst the green he could see golden domes and white towers rising over a sea of smaller buildings.

A constant flow of molten rock poured down through immense stone and crystal runnels that emerged from the city’s heart, where the Stormrift Realmgate was located. The glowing lines stretched like veins through the tangled streets towards the distant defensive canals which marked the outer districts. He could just make out the faint reddish glow of the Fire-Bastions on the horizon.

Each time the city extended its borders, the Fire-Bastions were duly redirected by teams of human and duardin artisans. The engineers of the Ironweld Arsenal were capable of great feats of artifice. They bent the wisdom of two races towards devising weapons and mechanisms for the reconquest of the Mortal Realms.

The Fire-Bastions were one such mechanism. Fed by the runnels of molten rock, they served to burn back the ravenous flora of the realm, keeping the outer districts of the city from being overwhelmed by fast-growing plant life.

The hollow, ashen network of tunnels that were left behind when the Fire-Bastions were redirected were then gradually built over and hidden from sight. Belloc sometimes wondered how many of those tunnels were repurposed rather than filled in, and how many still ran beneath the winding streets of Hammerhal Ghyra.

‘And probably rats in all of them,’ he muttered.

The city was full of rats. And worse things. No one talked about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so. He’d left Azyrheim one step ahead of the thief-takers, but a stretch in the sky-cages didn’t seem so bad now compared to some of the things he’d seen.

Delph and the others swore blind that the mystic wards around the city prevented anything too horrible from getting in. They said the magic kept the monsters out, but Belloc wasn’t concerned about the ones outside. He was more worried about the ones that might already be in the city somewhere. Hiding. Waiting.

There were stories. There were always stories, even in Azyrheim. About rats that walked on two legs, and men with the heads of goats and wolf’s teeth. Belloc was no child. He knew that monsters were real, and their gods too. And he knew that nothing could keep them out for long, if they were truly of a mind to get in.

As he gazed at the horizon, he found his eyes drawn towards the Nevergreen Mountains. He’d never seen them up close, but he’d heard about the great forest that covered their broken slopes and the things that lurked within it. Lightning flashed, arcing between the distant peaks and the night sky. He shivered. The lightning reminded him that the Stormcast Eternals had marched west, towards the mountains, two days before.

He shivered again, thinking of those massive, silver-clad warriors as they passed through the steaming gates of the Fire-Bastions. Delph said they’d been human once, before Sigmar had blessed them with divine strength and holy armour, but what would a duardin know about such things? She didn’t even worship Sigmar. Like most duardin – at least those he knew – she worshipped Grungni, the god of her folk.

Something clattered. Belloc froze. Then, slowly, he turned.

It was probably a rat. It was almost certainly a rat. But sometimes it wasn’t. He’d heard stories that sometimes things crawled down out of the green sky, looking for food. It was the same in Azyrheim, but it was somehow worse here. He reached for the hilt of his sword as he took a step towards where the sound had originated from – an alleyway between two warehouses.

Belloc didn’t call for help. Delph had gotten angry the last time he’d called for help and there hadn’t been any need. He needed this job. Besides, if it was something other than a rat, calling for help would only attract its attention all the quicker.

He took a step towards the alleyway. For a moment, he heard only the creak of rigging and the whistle of the wind blowing between the buildings. Warehouses of all sizes clustered thick here, near the edge of the ring, and they collected shadows.

Another clatter, and a rat ran out of the alleyway, squealing.

Belloc sighed in relief. He nearly choked on that sigh as something pounced on the rat. The rodent died instantly as four dun paws crushed it flat. A tawny, feathered skull dipped, and a hooked beak tore at its kill. Belloc took a step back. The thing turned, golden eyes fixed on him.

‘Gryph-hound,’ he muttered as a chill raced along his spine. The creature resembled a small lion, only with the head of a bird of prey. It was no larger than a wolf, but it was far more lethal. Its tail lashed as it crouched over its kill. He held out his hands and began to back away slowly. ‘Easy there. No harm done. Enjoy your meal.’

It might have come off one of the airships, but there was no way to tell. Just as he was about to call out for help, he bumped into someone. An instant later, something very sharp was resting against his neck.

‘Hello, friend,’ said a voice. ‘No, don’t move. Especially don’t try to draw that sword you’re wearing. Things might take an unfortunate turn.’

Belloc kept his hands from his blade. Thieves, he thought. Or worse. He made to speak, but the pressure of the blade against his throat increased slightly.

‘Quietly, friend. Quietly. No need to speak.’

Belloc quickly closed his mouth.

‘Good,’ continued the voice. ‘Good. Now, I need you to point out the berth belonging to the sky-merchant Rollo Tarn. Remember, don’t reach for the sword.’

Tarn? Why did they want Tarn? He didn’t ship anything valuable. Just wood. Belloc’s mind spun in confusion. No one could expect him to die for wood, could they? He gestured slowly, hesitantly. The pressure of the knife was removed, and he sucked in a breath.

‘There now. Excellent. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

Belloc swallowed, but didn’t reply. He was too busy praying.

‘You can turn around, now.’

Belloc did. The man before him was tall, and dressed like someone with more sense than to be creeping around the aether-docks at night. He wore a heavy, triple-caped overcoat over something that might have once been the uniform of a Freeguild warrior. A basket-hilted rapier was sheathed on one hip, and he had a brace of pistols on the other. On the lapel of his coat was pinned a symbol that Belloc recognised all too well from his time in Azyrheim: the hammer and comet of the Order of Azyr.

Belloc drew back in fear.

‘Witch hunter!’

Click here to buy Hammerhal & Other Stories.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lewis Jones.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-948-4

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