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Ghosts of Khapthar - Miles A Drake

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Court of the Blind King’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Ghosts of Khapthar

Miles A Drake

Her feet squelched in the putrid mud, pressed down by an unfamiliar weight. The hem of her dusky robe and much of her dark, glassy purple armour was caked in the necrogenous ooze. The noxious haze emanating from the landscape of rotting benthic matter grated at her lungs and burned her eyes.

The foggy currents of the aethersea that might once have brought comfort were stagnant, though she could still feel the ripples of movement cast by the exhausted strides of the namarti at her flanks, and the lethargic circling of her rakerdart. The latter emerged from behind the immense, bleached ribs of a rotting murkwhale, whose skeleton she strode through.

‘Heel, Ionian,’ Akhlys whispered.

The rakerdart did as it was bid. Its scales had turned a hypoxic purple.

‘It won’t be long now,’ she said, mournfully stroking the rakerdart’s dorsal fin with a gauntleted hand.

Death was everywhere, splayed out across the seabed. The decay made a final banquet for millions of chitinous scavengers, who glutted themselves on the rotting world they once flourished in, even as they slowly asphyxiated beneath the wilting, purple radiance that pierced the eerie haze.

She closed her eyes as another beast thrashed behind her. The last fangmora.

Hardening her resolve, she turned, seeing the ragged band file into the colossal ribcage of the murkwhale.

The namarti, several dozen in number, paused, listening to the dying eel. Their once lithe and imposing figures had given way to slumped exhaustion, and the runes on their foreheads, once glimmering with the light of stolen souls, were dull and muted. Several of them carried stretchers bearing comatose compatriots wrapped in damp, saline gauze.

Her gaze panned over to the convulsing fangmora, whose scales showed a more severe discolouration than Ionian’s. A trio of akhelians knelt beside it. Two held it down, easily overpowering its weak spasms. The third, the beast’s bonded master, removed his helm and drew his helsabre.

With a single word of deliverance, he opened the beast’s throat with the inward curve of his blade. A flood of purple sprayed, misting in the air for a moment, caught in the aethersea’s stagnant current, before condensing to sink into the mud.

The akhelian stood, head bowed, helm clutched in the crook of his arm. His regal poise had faded, and his expression showed a blank, hopeless void. He turned as Tethyssian, the tidecaster, approached. The isharann’s loose robes were weighed down by caked mud as he drew back his cowl. He regarded the dead fangmora, before looking up to its former master. ‘May I speak the Rite of Severance?’ he asked, his voice solemn and tired.

‘For what?’ The akhelian stared blankly at the tidecaster, his voice barely a whisper. ‘There are no ebbing tides to dispatch the beast’s spirit upon. The sea is dead. And so is that which was bound to me.’

As an isharann, Akhlys knew the rite bore no true sorrow. The akhelians shared no emotional bond with their enslaved beasts. But it still held significance.

Tethyssian’s lips tightened. ‘Ceremony and tradition, Saturiandi. What we once took solace in are the only truths that can keep us whole through this nightmare. We must preserve the nobility of our forebears, lest we slip further into the abyss of soulless pragmatism.’ His reprimand was as loud as he dared, given the danger that might still lurk in the fog, but it was enough for the others to hear. It was addressed to everyone.

Saturiandi turned away from Tethyssian, leaving the carcass of his eel behind. ‘We can afford no sentiment that does not help our immediate survival,’ he spat.

‘That is the current to oblivion,’ Tethyssian scolded. ‘If we abandon what is ours, what purpose is there to our salv–’

The akhelian wheeled around, his pale visage flushing a furious grey. ‘Salvation is an end unto itself!’ he hissed. ‘What was the purpose of the death of our ocean? What was the purpose of the destruction of our encla–’

‘Enough!’ Akhlys stepped forward, thudding the butt of her talúnhook onto the shell of a rotting ammonite. ‘You will draw more of the thrice-cursed vermin down upon us if you continue bickering. And our enclave is not dead. The Laebreans came to our people’s aid. They will have saved many.’

Saturiandi spared her a half-glance. ‘Yes, but that doesn’t exactly help us now, does it?’ he hissed, before moving on.

Akhlys turned to follow the akhelian. She could understand his pain. The dying defenders of the Amoch-túr pickets they’d returned to had told them that the death toll had been catastrophic, regardless of the Laebrean intervention.

Glancing back at the namarti, Akhlys could see the same pain written in their stances, even if it was more muted. Most of the namarti had left their kin behind in Amalthussanar when they’d been selected to join Akhlys’ raiding party. Ironically, that selection might have saved them, though many would never know what happened to the kin they’d left behind. The receding sea had cut off the route to the Laebrea Basin, as well as any attempt to search for their lost kin.

But there was nothing Akhlys could say to balm their woes. She could heal their flesh and reinvigorate their souls, but she was no tru’heas. She could not heal their wounded psyches. All she could do was remind them of their purpose, and lead them to deliverance.

As the exhausted caravan ascended the slow incline of the Silence of Songs, the death and decay rampant on the vast mesobenthic plain only sapped the ebbing vigour from the tattered band further.

And worse, the place held a certain, solemn significance to the idoneth. It was where the murkwhales came to die. Their great migrations had once carried them through the dark seas of Shyish, and when their ancients passed through the Khaphtar Sea to come to their final resting grounds, they provided the idoneth sustenance in the form of the chitinous parasites that clung to them.

Akhlys had always marvelled at their songs, lonely and sombre. Her enclave lived in near total silence, fearing to utter any noise, lest it draw the teeming shoals of drowned dead down upon Amalthussanar. Thus was the dirge of the murkwhales the only music her people could readily experience.

But now that was gone… forever.

Their remains were scattered about amidst the noxious fog, the ominous shapes of their colossal skeletons overgrown by thickets of huskworms. Once, the worms had bloomed like violet flowers, nourished by the leviathans’ corpses, but now, their macabre beauty had decayed, having long degenerated into masses of crimson, viscera-like ribbons.

Amidst the husks, the pale, spindly carcasses of the carcinarians that had once pruned the worm colonies with tender grace lay scattered about, twisted in the agony of their last, asphyxiating moments, and making banquets for flocks of squawking, razor-beaked bloodgulls.

Things shambled about in the putrid haze. Vile, barnacled cadavers loped alongside the bones of ancient mariners and the bloated husks of the verminous filth that had died during their attempt to infest the draining sea. Flocks of spectres drifted in eerie gyres, their anguished howls carrying across the dead wind, and many times, the idoneth were forced to change course, to avoid the attention of the dead.

‘The putrid sun allows no rest…’ Tethyssian muttered as they marched, glaring up at the purple gleam above. ‘It is the Soul Collector’s abhorrent will made manifest that such dark animation is breathed into the husks of the dead. If he can sift through the memories of those we have claimed, I wonder what secrets he might glean of our people… now that the drowned are exposed.’

It was an unsettling thought. The Khaphtar’s raiders, and all of the enclaves of Shyish, took extra care to carry those whose souls had been taken down into the murky depths with them. They left nothing for the Soul Collector’s agents to interrogate. But no longer… Now he would know. The draining sea had ended their secrecy.

‘The bones of our chorrileum are open and bared to his gaze,’ Akhlys replied bitterly. ‘The memories of those we have taken will tell him no more than what he already knows. I can only hope the other seas have not met a similar fate…’

‘Surely not,’ the tidecaster said. ‘The Amiritanni Ridge will prevent the Laebrea Basin from draining, and the Bleached Isthmus ahead separates us from the Great Quagmire. I merely wonder if your hope is justified. Do you truly believe the Mor’phann will take us in?’

‘They must,’ Akhlys said grimly.

Tethyssian shrugged. ‘I do not know. We broke currents with them because they refused to contact the other enclaves. Do you truly believe they will break their isolation now?’

‘I have to,’ Akhlys said. ‘What other hope is there?’

Tethyssian sighed. ‘None, I’m afraid.’

‘The Bleached Isthmus is not a wide landmass. We can cross it in but a single tide.’

Tethyssian inclined his head. ‘Of course, but such a journey won’t be without its own peril. The Revenant Kingdoms hold the isthmus. We will need to tread carefully.’

‘I’m well aware,’ Akhlys muttered. ‘The shores ahead were my reaping grounds, remember? I will lead us through.’

Tethyssian nodded again. ‘I have faith in you in that regard. I merely…’ He paused, thinking how best to phrase something controversial. ‘I merely wonder if you underestimate what lies beyond that. If we reach the Great Quagmire and find the Mor’phann… if we can convince them not to kill us outright… they will demand a tribute in exchange for their protection.’

‘I’m well aware,’ Akhlys said again, coldly.

‘Perhaps, if we encounter more of the thrice-cursed vermin along our route, or are forced into conflict with the humans of the isthmus, I might suggest saving the souls you harvest.’ He gestured at the doused lantern she carried.

Akhlys had removed it from her helm, and fastened it to her belt. Without the aethersea’s buoyancy, her crested anglerhelm had become too cumbersome to wear. She’d left it behind leagues ago.

Turning her gaze to Tethyssian, Akhlys’ lips curled into a snarl of distaste. ‘That would mean the death of many of the namarti who were weakened by the vermin’s sorcery.’

Tethyssian’s features tightened, and he lowered his voice. ‘I know. But without souls to barter with, I fear we will be turned aside by the Mor’phann… at best. You must consider thi–’

‘No,’ she said flatly, before increasing her pace and leaving the tidecaster behind.

She would sacrifice much to ensure the survival of her people, but to endure whatever trials lay ahead, they would need every namarti ready to fight.

It was hours later, when the caravan began its climb up the continental rise, that they encountered more remnants of the thrice-cursed vermin that had doomed their enclave. Akhlys saw the shape of one of their vile engines ahead, its hull gouged open on the rocks, and was overcome by the tide of bitter memories, fresh and painful in her mind like a festering wound.

Her raiding party had been ascending the rise, several hundred leagues from Amalthussanar, when Tethyssian had detected the shifting tide. When he’d worked out that the sea was draining, the decision to return to the enclave to learn of what was happening was unanimous, and so her band abandoned its task of gathering souls, and began the journey home.

They did not make it, however. Perhaps if the increasingly powerful currents hadn’t made the journey across the abyssal plain so difficult, they might have arrived in time to join the evacuation. But they hadn’t.

They’d barely managed to reach the floating Amoch-túr pickets before the verminous ones attacked in their rattling submersibles. The toxic wakes of their infernal contraptions, and the devastation wrought by their techno-arcane weaponry, halved the strength of Akhlys’ warband.

She’d learned of what was occurring in Amalthussanar then, from one of the dying akhelians that had been part of the Amoch-túr phalanx. The Laebreans had come to evacuate, and, according to the warrior, had somehow managed to distract the dredge-fleets the Soul Collector had sent to investigate. She’d also learned that the currents had grown too powerful in the hadal channels surrounding the massive seamount the enclave was built atop, and that attempting to reach the city, or the Laebrea Basin itself, would be suicide.

With no other option, Akhlys had given the order to make for the second nearest idoneth settlement, the great Mor’phann city of Mor’drechi. All that stood in their way was the relentless pull of the draining currents, and the tide of drowned dead that were caught in them.

It had almost been a relief to exit the waters, for at least that granted the idoneth a reprieve from the harrying vermin submersibles that had trailed them since the pickets. That was about the only mercy they’d been granted since it all began.

The wreck of one such submersible hung impaled on two jagged, rocky spires that protruded from the muddy substrate below. It had clearly run aground as the ocean bled out beneath it.

The machine was dotted with crude stabilisation fins and strange dome-like lenses across its hull. Protrusions of coiling metal, ending in greenish crystals, jutted from its prow, and a secondary cupola clung to its spine like a metallic tumour. Debris and bloated, waterlogged corpses were haloed around it, and Akhlys scrunched up her nose at the stench of decay and acrid fur.

‘Disperse! Seeker shoal!’ she commanded.

The namarti fanned out, adopting a wide formation that would allow their acute, but range-restricted senses to cover the most ground. The akhelians searched the bodies in a more conventional manner.

‘Find me any wretches that still live,’ she called again, surveying the area. The souls of vermin were sour, sickly things. They provided only a paltry spark of nourishment to the namarti. But now, they’d need every morsel, no matter how revolting.

If any of the vile creatures still lived within the submersible, they would be unreachable. She was not about to send anybody inside it, as the vehicle’s gaping wound leaked a glowing green slime that sizzled into the mud below.

Eventually, the leader of her reavers, the Icon Bearer Akmaeon, returned. His face and upper torso were badly scarred with old lamprey bite marks, and he was something of a grizzled veteran – a fierce, old namarti at the end of his current.

‘Nothing…’ he said dourly.

Saturiandi snarled in agreement, emerging from behind the vehicle. ‘Not a twitch of whatever passes for life in any of these cancerous wretches…’

‘Then we move,’ Akhlys commanded. ‘Before something else animates them…’

She saw the namarti slump just a little further. Several of their wounded might not survive the journey without reinvigoration.

But there was nothing to be done. She gave the call to advance, sparing another glance at Ionian, who drifted lethargically in her wake, its scales even more discoloured. With a swish of her hand, she sent a ripple through the dead aetheric currents, calling her rakerdart from the asphyxiated trance it had fallen into, and pressed on.

Hours passed, and the incline and lack of buoyancy taxed the idoneth further. For all of Tethyssian’s exhausted efforts, the aethersea had receded to an almost imperceptible shroud. The air was dry and grating.

The first of the namarti to die from soul-enervation passed but a scant few leagues beyond the wrecked submersible. Tethyssian administered what rites he could, and cast the unsouled husk of the thrall face down into a hastily dug trench in the mud. The other namarti listened, before paying their respects, touching two of their fingers to the emblazoned rune on their foreheads.

With grim resolve, Akhlys bid the band onward, for the route to salvation shimmered in the distant mirage, periodically coming into view as a stinking squall blew away the haze. She could see the skeletal structures of the bleached coral forest ahead, high on jagged cliffs of broken basalt.

She gestured with her talúnhook so the namarti might feel the ripple of the movement. ‘Salvation lies beyond the isthmus ahead. It is still leagues away… but that is but a paltry stretch in our journey.’

Tethyssian lent his words to hers. ‘The humans of the Revenant Kingdoms dwell there. And that…’ He panned his tired gaze towards Akhlys. ‘That means there are souls for the taking.’ That the barbs in his gaze did not translate into his words, for the sake of the namarti, was enough to make Akhlys give him a barely perceptible nod of thanks.

It was all that needed to be said. It was all that could be said.

With a wave of her hand, the respite was over, and the exodus continued.

But the suffering and loss of life did not abate.

Ionian faltered further up the continental rise, slumping into the mud with the ridge and towering coral-forest in sight. The rakerdart thrashed in the silt, frothing at the mouth.

Akhlys knelt beside it, drawing her ritual dagger. The hooked blade was fashioned from the fang of a kharybdean horror from the hadal trenches. She covered Ionian’s form in a shroud of rotting seaweed, and the beast ceased its thrashing, the cool wetness of the decaying vegetation bringing its last comfort.

With a pang of sorrow, Akhlys drew her dagger across Ionian’s throat. Its blood bubbled into the mud, and after a moment, its last shudders of life ebbed away.

As she had done so many times in the past, Akhlys quashed her emotions, forcing them into that deep black void in the back of her mind where all unwanted thoughts went to die. There was no place for grief. Ionian was just another loss. Just another scar to bear.

She stood, straightening her robe.

The namarti regarded her with cocked heads. She didn’t know if they could sense her pain.

Saturiandi did, to some degree. He gave her a solemn nod.

‘Come… we move. We’re close to the isthmus now,’ she said, hoping the strain wouldn’t be evident in her voice.

But she didn’t hear it. The numbness had already set in.

As they approached the cobbled strand ahead, under the cover of barnacled boulders and swirling mists, the twilight haze of Shyish’s sun bathed the jagged formations ahead in a shimmering violet sunset.

Great gouges split the cliff face beyond, and Akhlys knew a warren of trenches, runnels and basins would provide some cover during their crossing of the Bleached Isthmus. A forest of pale coral splayed out above the dark stone bluffs, branching up like skeletal limbs, though most of it remained hidden behind the basalt cliffs.

Hissing a quick command to stop the party, she moved ahead with a small force to take cover behind a muddy escarpment several hundred paces from the strand.

Akmaeon, a trio of other reavers and Saturiandi joined her.

‘That wasn’t there the last time we came this way,’ the akhelian hissed, gesturing at the rickety, whalebone bell tower that stood above one of the rocky outcroppings on the strand.

‘No,’ Akhlys agreed.

‘The humans have caught on to our raids, then,’ Saturiandi muttered.

Akhlys panned her gaze further down the rocky strand. More towers rose up at regular intervals, every several hundred paces along the coast to each side. All were manned.

She looked at Saturiandi. ‘Bring up your ishlaens. We do this with blade and hook.’

Saturiandi gave a thin smile, retreating back into the caravan.

‘We can fight,’ Akmaeon said, his voice muted and emotionless.

‘You are weakened, and robbed of your senses,’ Akhlys rebuked. ‘The humans cannot sound that bell. I need faultless precision, and for now, that is not something you can offer.’

The receding aethersea might have brought discomfort to the higher castes, but the namarti relied on it for their very perception.

Akmaeon bowed his head in deference. ‘We will protect the others.’

Akhlys nodded as she calculated how best to approach the watchtower unseen. The setting sun cast long shadows that would be easily noticeable, but the mist was still dense enough that, with just a little luck, they could make a stealthy approach.

Moving forward, Akhlys and the akhelians hugged the strewn boulders and empty tidal channels, before crossing the final stretch of the cobbled strand to wait in the shadow of the rising bedrock. She’d caught glimpses of the sentries. They were stooped, and leaned on hook-bladed voulges. Their stance indicated fatigue.

She left her talúnhook leaning against the rock. It would be too cumbersome to climb with, or to fight with in confined spaces. Drawing her kharybdean fang-dagger and clenching it between her teeth, she began to climb.

The akhelians followed. But they were mostly a precaution, if anything. She could handle the trio of men atop the tower on her own.

Scrambling up, she hoped the moaning of the distant wind, and the shrill call of the bloodgulls overhead, would mask her ascent. Shifting to the tower’s whalebone scaffolding, she easily hauled herself and her armour upward, her muscles taut with a strength derived from decades of harsh training and battle.

Once she reached the top, she all but vaulted the last rungs. The expressions of surprise on the sentries’ faces gave her a cold satisfaction.

They were wretched-looking men, emaciated and clad in dark, oily rags decorated with frills of pale gull feathers. Two wore masks of driftwood, while the third’s face was obscured by the skull of a doom vulture.

She lashed out with her dagger, opening the throat of the man closest to her. He fell, gurgling as he splattered crimson across the pale driftwood decking.

The one nearest to the bell reached for its cord, but Akhlys shoulder-slammed him, sending him crashing through the flimsy driftwood rail and plummeting to his doom on the rocks below. The third managed a shout of alarm, and raised his voulge to slash at her. But she lashed back with blinding speed, the hooked tip of her blade embedding into his chest before he could even bring his weapon down.

He slumped, gasping.

Saturiandi poked up from the scaffolding, and took one quick glance. ‘It’s done,’ he said, amused, to the other akhelians below. ‘Go back down.’ He ascended the platform anyway. ‘Good to see you’re still quick,’ he said to her, panning his gaze out across the landscape. ‘The fools didn’t build their towers in sight of one another. They thought bells would save them…’

But Akhlys wasn’t listening. She had something to do.

Unfastening the lurelight lantern from her belt, she held it down over the dying humans.

Wispy, aethereal light began coiling from their writhing bodies like a phantasmal mist, seething up to whirl around Akhlys.

Saturiandi shuddered as the coalesced souls drifted around him. He couldn’t see them, but he could certainly feel them. She imagined anyone could.

As the bodies ceased their agonised death throes, ghostly limbs raked at Akhlys with accusation, and she heard the distant cries of the men she’d slain. They screamed, helpless in anguish and confusion as the lurelight drew them towards it.

She didn’t shudder.

Not any more.

With the spirits of the slain trapped in her lantern, Akhlys descended from the tower, pausing to collect the soul of the broken but still breathing man that had fallen, before having one of the ishlaens bring up the rest of her ragged band.

She watched them move up the strand, and guided them through one of the runnels in the rocky terrace that merged into a gouged trench in the cliff wall. Leading, Akhlys kept a hundred paces ahead of the others, backed by Saturiandi, Akmaeon and a pair of other namarti reavers.

The trench’s basalt walls loomed above them, shrouding them in a near aphotic gloom.

Reaching a wider point in the narrow passage, Akhlys gave the signal to halt. The others quickly caught up to her, and she gave the word to allow them a few moments of respite.

Tethyssian emerged from the ranks just as Akhlys drew the lurelight once more. The lantern glowed faintly with the light of stolen souls.

The tidecaster’s exhausted features scowled. ‘You intend to–’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is not a discussion.’

The tidecaster sighed, but bowed his head in deference.

Brushing past him, Akhlys knelt beside one of the stretcher-borne namarti, wrapped in saline gauze. She began to peel the wrappings from around the namarti’s face, revealing the visage of a young female; the raw burns of the vermin’s accursed lightning weaponry marred her features as much as the dim, half-soul rune emblazoning her forehead.

Akhlys uttered an ancient cythai word, causing the souls within the lurelight to stir. Lowering the lantern over the dim rune, Akhlys uttered another word to coax one of the souls from the lantern, directly into the namarti’s collar, where it rushed in to fill the gaping void waiting inside the namarti’s psyche.

With a gasp, the namarti awakened. Immediately, the emblazoned rune began to glimmer.

Akmaeon knelt beside the female, holding her still as her senses surged for a brief instant. His hand over her mouth, he stifled her scream as the unfamiliar sensation of searing emotion and life blazed like a bonfire.

It quickly doused the energies leeched by the collar, lest they burn her out. As the fleeting sensation faded, the muted numbness that was the namarti’s existence returned, and the female ceased her shuddering.

Akhlys watched in disconnected fascination. During that brief moment, she sensed the same will, the same impulse and identity that existed within the akhelians and isharann, if but for an instant.

The moment gone, Akhlys moved on to the next. She had three souls, and there were almost a dozen enervated namarti that needed them.

Repeating the process with a male and another, younger female, Akhlys finished, moving back to the head of the caravan as the revitalised namarti borrowed spare weapons from their kin.

Akmaeon stood perfectly still as she passed, inclining his head ever so slightly.

The other namarti mimicked his motion.

She paused. The gesture was odd. The namarti knew their place. And they knew her place. They did not offer thanks simply because Akhlys had carried out a soulrender’s ordained task. Such was as much for her benefit as it was to theirs.

But then she realised.

They knew.

They’d realised the souls she’d spent to revive three of their number might have been better used to bargain with the Mor’phann. And they’d realised that any bargain made would favour the isharanns and akhelians of the party, not the namarti.

They knew she’d sacrificed something for their sake. And that was a rarity for her caste.

She shook her head, and brushed past the namarti.

‘There will be a small village in the basin ahead,’ she said. ‘If we cannot slip past them, we will need to silence them.’

Sure enough, the trench widened into a basin, several hundred paces across. At the far end, a cluster of immense coral structures rose – from giant reticulated brain corals, their shadowy recesses glimmering with flickering torchlight, to stacks of massive table corals, the spaces between the bone discs fitted with whalebone, driftwood and canvas. Behind it all, a knobby-branched fan coral spread its eroding limbs high over the settlement. Corpses were strung up from the limbs alongside shuddering, winged things, and the light emanating from within the structure had an unsettlingly pallid hue to it.

A network of tidepools and channels pockmarked the muddy flats of the basin. Several villagers, clad much like the sentries, walked on stilts, their long strides unhindered by the mud as they moved about, tending to the crustaceans and sponges within the pools. While they presented gaunt silhouettes in the dying light, the other figures scattered about the basin, armed with hooked voulges, were even more unsettling.

They were too gaunt. Too motionless.

Akhlys narrowed her eyes. ‘Deathrattles,’ she hissed to her scouts.

‘Easy enough to sneak past,’ Saturiandi whispered. ‘It’s the living that’ll present the greater danger.’

‘My reavers can end them,’ Akmaeon said, his voice muted. ‘Scent gives them away.’

Akhlys shook her head. ‘No.’ She gestured towards the fan coral. The things hanging among the corpses were gigantic bats. She had learned not to disregard them as mere creatures. They served as eyes to beings best left undisturbed…

‘We must slip past, silently,’ Akhlys said. ‘If we awaken what sleeps here, we will lose many.’

‘Wait for darkness…’ Akmaeon began, before quieting. The namarti cocked his head.

Akhlys heard it moments later. Tapping.

The sound of stilts on stone, drawing near.

Gesturing for the scouts to take cover, she ducked into a gouge in the trench wall, seeing the namarti disappear into similar gaps in the rock while Saturiandi submerged himself into a pooled-up runnel in the trench’s floor.

The intruders appeared from what must have been an unseen passage in the rock. There were three, dark garbed and bedecked with driftwood masks and gull-feather frills, just like the farmers. Their stilts gave them a close countenance to the strange straw men that the agrarian villages of the Morvirian Duchies left to guard their plantations.

Each carried a long-hafted billhook that they used as a third limb to stabilise their strides.

They stopped for a moment, whispering to themselves in their hushed tongue, before moving down the trench. While they might pass Akhlys’ scouts without realising it, the others would not be so fortunate.

Taking a deep breath, she waited until they came into range.

As the third passed her, she emerged, her talúnhook flashing downward, its curved point biting deep into the collar of the man, sinking all the way to his sternum. Her lantern flared as the man quickly died. Wrenching her blade free, she faced the other two as they turned, shifting their grips on their billhooks.

One went down with a pair of arrows in his back as Akmaeon and another reaver emerged from a crack in the wall.

Saturiandi rose from the shallow water, bashing out the stilt of the remaining man with his shield, and delivering a spine-severing slash with his helsabre.

The clatter of wood and the thump of bodies echoed through the trench.

It was the only sound.

Akhlys glanced furtively into the basin. The farmers continued their toil. The dead kept their vigil.

With no further word, she began her grim work.

Moving back to the others, she transferred the stolen souls to three more comatose namarti before bidding them to wait. A short while later, the setting sun sank behind one of the bulbous corals, swathing the entire basin in shadow.

They crossed then, and Tethyssian drew upon the paltry wisps of the aethersea to further cloak their movements in a sparse, gloomy fog. He slumped further at the effort, but refused the assistance of a namarti to help him move.

Less hindered by the dead weight of their enervated kin, the survivors were able to slip around the edge of the basin easily enough, and entered another partially flooded trench.

Eventually, the passage opened up into a sinkhole, some forty paces wide. Stagnant brine flooded the area, and the fan corals jutting from the cliffs above cast strange shadows on the wall. A lone table coral shelf sported a driftwood shack, where a hooked net, stretching across the sinkhole, was anchored above. Several bloodgulls hung motionless, ensnared in the barbed mesh.

Akhlys was about to bid her scouts to tread carefully when a stilt walker emerged from a recess in the rock wall. In an instant, Akmaeon and his reavers drew back their already nocked arrows. But the human’s weapon, a long metal tube chased in driftwood, decorated with gull feathers, was already drawn.

A bang, and the acrid stench of brimstone filled the air. One of the namarti fell, his chest mangled by a dozen wounds, just as Akmaeon’s arrow found the stilt walker’s throat.

The man splashed hard, with a gurgling cry. In response, two more humans emerged from the shack above. Both carried crossbows.

The third reaver’s arrow took one in the shoulder before he could act. But the other crossbowman knelt and loosed a quarrel. The reaver fell, the projectile piercing her side.

The wounded human loosed, but his shot went wide.

At that instant, the brine pool shifted, and a trio of stinking, salt-encrusted carcinarians emerged. Their carapaces and spindly, gaunt limbs were bleached and hollow, and an unnatural violet glow gleamed from within them.

Akhlys advanced to intercept the reanimated crab-creatures as they scuttled forward.

With a hiss, she swung her talúnhook down in a deadly arc, severing one snapping pincer limb. The other clamped around her thigh, crushing with horrifying force. Her armour dented, but held. With a gasp of pain, she thrust out with the butt of her polearm, pulping its long, opaque eyes and cracking its exoskeleton.

It reared up, lashing out with its barbed secondary limbs, forcing Akhlys back. With her leg still caught, she almost tripped. Bashing again, the impacts of her polearm caved in the front of the carcinarian’s carapace, and it collapsed. The crushing grip broke, and Akhlys pulled her leg free, sloshing through the brine towards the second carcinarian, which was busy dragging one of the fallen namarti into the pool.

The third had latched onto Saturiandi’s shield with one pincer, but the akhelian was busy hacking off its other limbs with his helsabre.

A heavy splash resounded as the wounded crossbowman on the table coral fell into the pool.

Akhlys swung wide, her hook puncturing through the side of the carcinarian attacking the namarti, severing one leg. She pulled, wrenching it off its victim. Gritting her teeth, she kicked, her sabaton crushing its mandibles as it snapped at her with both pincers.

Thrusting with her polearm, she kept it at bay, as Saturiandi, finished with his beast, rushed in to hack into its shell. It collapsed after a trio of fierce swings.

Catching her breath, Akhlys looked up. The other crossbowman sat, slumped, transfixed by the pair of arrows embedded in his chest.

There was no further sound.

When she was certain the danger had passed, Akhlys pulled aside the hem of her long robe to undo the fastening on one cuisse. Prying off the ruined armour plate, she grimaced as pressure released from her pulverised thigh muscles.

She took a moment to lean on her talúnhook.

‘Akhlys…’ Saturiandi began, concerned.

‘I’ll live,’ she hissed through gritted teeth. ‘Even in death, their size ill belies their power.’

Saturiandi gave a knowing nod, holding up his shield. The metal rim of it had been twisted by the wrenching force of the beast’s pincers. ‘Clever,’ he said, regarding the now motionless carcinarian corpses. ‘Hiding the dead beasts in the flooded ways. I wonder how many more we’ve managed to avoid thus far?’

‘Indeed,’ Akhlys returned, wincing as she put weight on her leg. Such creatures had not been present during her last raids in this region. ‘We’ll have to be wary of other pools from now on. More of these sentry beasts might be scattered about.’

Satisfied that her wound was little more than an annoyance, Akhlys unfastened her lantern, holding it up as the wispy soul of the dying stilt walker coiled towards it, even if the dead man on the coral ledge would be out of reach, and the soul of the crossbowman that had fallen had already been pulled away by the ephemeral, deathly gale that perpetually swept across Shyish.

There was no saving the first namarti. The wound inflicted by the human weapon had been grievous, and his chest was a ravaged mess of metal shards. But that wound paled in comparison to what the carcinarian’s pincer had done to him. His leg was shattered, and blood and marrow leaked from the hideous wound, diffusing into the burbling brine pool.

She could revive him, but it would be for naught, for such a wound would not heal without far more extensive care. He would be crippled at best.

Akmaeon knelt beside the mangled reaver, his fingers feeling over the wounds.

‘He’s gone,’ Akhlys said solemnly.

Akmaeon nodded. He understood what Akhlys was and was not capable of, perhaps better than any of the other namarti in the band.

‘Sleep, kin of the silent soul…’ he whispered mournfully, as he touched the rune on the fallen namarti’s forehead, before doing the same to himself.

He immediately moved to the other wounded reaver, who knelt in the brine pool, struggling for breath. The quarrel had pierced one of her lungs: a minor wound, by comparison, even if it would be fatal if left untended.

‘One soul…’ Akmaeon said as he inspected the wound with touch alone.

His voice was muted, but Akhlys could tell it was a plea. A plea for her to expend another precious soul to heal his wounded kinswoman.

She didn’t respond, but limped over to the gasping reaver with sloshing strides. She knelt to remove the projectile from the namarti’s ribs, twisting the head so that it slipped out more easily.

To her credit, the namarti did not cry out, though her features bleached in shock.

Akhlys spoke the word to coax a soul from the lantern, and guided it into the namarti’s collar. But instead of letting it pass into the soul-void within the namarti, she uttered a second ancient word, redirecting the energy into the namarti’s physical flesh.

Forced into material form, the latent potential of the soul’s lifespan condensed into a single moment, burning out its energy to accelerate the healing process to impossible speed. Organ, muscle, sinew and skin knitted shut as though months of natural healing had occurred in a matter of moments. Through the namarti’s torn vest, Akhlys saw the wound vanish, replaced by nothing more than a raw, livid scar.

With a gasp, the wounded reaver convulsed for a moment, before slumping. Akmaeon knelt to help her rise, turning his head towards Akhlys. While his expression was a placid mask, as was typical for his kind, he inclined his head ever so slightly.

That was when Tethyssian and the others arrived. ‘Were you ambushed?’ he exclaimed, out of breath, as the rest of the party fanned out to search for other threats.

Akhlys shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she hissed. Her leg still hurt furiously. ‘But such an accidental engagement was bound to happen.’

‘They’ll have heard that… noise,’ Tethyssian said.

Akhlys nodded, and began to usher the others along with greater urgency.

‘The body…’ Tethyssian gestured at the dead namarti. ‘They might learn–’

‘They already know,’ Akhlys reminded him. ‘Leave the dead. One more corpse left to the Soul Collector’s agents won’t grant him any more secrets.’

With no further sentiment, they moved on. The namarti touched their fingers to their rune-marked foreheads as they passed the body of their kin.

Thankfully, the idoneth didn’t encounter any immediate reprisal, or any further patrols, and eventually, they emerged into a basin far larger than the first they’d snuck through.

Fields of pale, calcified reeds were arranged along muddy irrigation channels, and strange, slimy growths protruded from several pools, encaged by hanging gull-nets. The gulls hopped about, squawking and bickering over what little pickings they’d found in the mud.

In the distant gloom, torches illuminated a massive complex of reticulated brain coral, and a huge cluster of hollowed pillar corals that loomed like a castle above, its towers connected by rickety rope bridges. Tattered pennants flapped above as swarms of bats, some of unnatural size, circled.

The largest of the towers, soaring high over the settlement, was decorated with an effigy of whalebone and driftwood that resembled a leering skull, topped with a high mitre cap of segmented bone. Baleful blue flame flickered within the icon’s empty eye sockets.

‘The twisted countenance of the Soul Collector…’ Tethyssian muttered with distaste. ‘He watches with burning eyes. He hungers and he hates.’

Akhlys ignored him, and focused on the more tangible threat. ‘We need to move quickly,’ she said, noting a formation of stilt walkers gathering before a cavernous portico carved into the pillar-castle like a yawning gate. A host of disturbingly gaunt figures emerged from that darkness, their strides eerily synchronised.

‘A response force,’ Saturiandi hissed. ‘They’ll see us if we try to pass.’

‘And they’ll find us if we stay,’ Akhlys said dourly.

‘Then we must fight,’ Tethyssian whispered. The calm in his voice was clearly forced.

Akhlys shook her head. ‘What do you feel, Tethyssian?’

The tidecaster regarded her, confused.

‘The tides,’ Akhlys said. She’d started to feel a cloying dampness settling on her skin not long ago. She wondered why the tidecaster hadn’t. Perhaps it was the numb exhaustion.

‘I…’ Tethyssian closed his eyes, and then opened them again. ‘I hear waves. I feel currents. Weak and fleeting. Distant, but…’

‘Then we’re near to the Quagmire,’ Akhlys said.

‘Yes,’ Tethyssian agreed. ‘The Khaphtar’s current is dead, but I can feel another.’

‘How far is it?’ Saturiandi asked, his voice eager.

‘I cannot say,’ the tidecaster returned. ‘I am unfamiliar with the Quagmire’s currents. They feel… oily and alien.’

‘Akhlys?’ The akhelian looked to her.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve raided this landmass thricefold, but this township is as far as I’ve come. What lies beyond is unknown to me.’

‘So what?’ he asked, warily regarding the mustering formation.

More figures marched out from the dark gate, cloaked and armoured, but still moving in disturbing unison.

A humanoid shape, tall and lithe, descended from amidst the bats. For all the familiarity of its form, it possessed a set of membranous, chiropteran wings, which vanished disturbingly into its billowing cloak as it landed.

‘We move,’ Akhlys said. She knew what that creature was, and in no way, shape or form did she wish to encounter it. Regardless of the cold dread prickling at her skin, she kept her voice calm and collected. ‘If we can reach the Quagmire in time, we’ll be able to avoid them. If they spot us, then so be it. We can outpace them.’

‘But they’ll know these warrens…’ Tethyssian protested.

Akhlys’ face hardened. ‘We have no choice. They’ll find us here, or they’ll find us somewhere down the current. The closer we get to the Quagmire, the better our chances.’

‘I am in agreement,’ Saturiandi said, drawing his helsabre.

Tethyssian took a deep breath, and nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose this is the only course left to us. May the currents favour our passage, and befuddle our foes,’ he whispered. ‘May the ghost of Mathlann bless us.’

Akhlys nodded, though she shared none of Tethyssian’s sentiment for ceremony. Mathlann was dead. The only god they needed to worry about now was the one that wanted to exterminate her people.

With no further word, she led the way into the basin.

Keeping their heads low, and moving through the bone-reeds, the idoneth advanced as quickly as they could. Akhlys led, with Akmaeon and a pair of other reavers, to scout the easiest path. The namarti were forced to shoot the bloodgulls that nested on the nearby rocks several times, lest they take flight and squawk in alarm.

Halfway across the basin, while the band stalked through the pale reeds along the edge of a muddy, crab-infested irrigation trench, a flight of shrieking bats whipped overhead. The idoneth ducked low, hoping to avoid their attention, but a shrill call from some manner of horn echoed up from the village, and immediately, as one, vast plumes of bats suddenly took flight, erupting from caves in the basalt cliffs to join the swarm swirling around the pillared castle.

Akhlys poked her head above the reeds. She saw the stilt walkers advancing, their loping gait unhindered by the muddy terrain.

Flocks of pale bloodgulls squawked in alarm, taking flight in every direction.

‘Protective shoal!’ Akhlys shouted, waiting for the rest of her people to form up before leading the close-formation retreat down into the nearby trench.

With several namarti still comatose and borne on stretchers, the idoneth were slowed, and their progress was further hampered by the difficult terrain of shattered coral bone and boulders. But quickly enough, Akhlys realised that the trench would work to their advantage. The bony fan structures above prevented the swarm from descending in full force, forcing the bats to trickle in through the narrow gaps in the coral.

The vicious, fanged creatures shrieked, latching themselves to the namarti with their hook-fingered wings, before sinking their dagger-fangs into bare flesh. Several of the creatures landed on Akhlys, and she slowed, ripping one free and crushing its wing with her gauntlet.

Another attempted to bite at her throat, crawling up onto her pauldron, but she tore it off and stomped it under her boot.

With a snarl, she reached to pluck one from Akmaeon’s back even as he pulled two more free of his torso. She spun, deftly arcing her talúnhook through the air to bisect a pair of the shrieking vermin.

One of the namarti fell, covered in half a dozen of the creatures, his throat gushing crimson.

She didn’t have time to help. The stilt walkers were not far behind.

Scything sweeps from the lanmari blades of the namarti thralls, and deft slashes from the akhelians’ helsabres, cut down dozens of bats each moment, littering the ground around them with twitching, black-furred corpses. A deafening bang echoed, and another namarti fell as the lead stilt walker shot his firearm into the tightly packed idoneth. Several reavers were capable of loosing arrows in the midst of the chaos, but most were intercepted by the seething swarm. One of the stilt walkers fell, a lucky shot in the ribs piercing the fingerbone cuirass he wore.

And then, suddenly, Tethyssian’s voice rang out above the carnage. He sang the Rite of Effluvial Torpor, the syllables of the ancient cythai tongue echoing through the trench. In an instant, the moisture-laden air seemed to freeze, and an unearthly, frozen mist billowed out to coat everything, living or otherwise, in a thin film of hoarfrost.

To the idoneth, the sensation was unpleasant, as their parched skin became beset by a blanket of icy cold. But for the bats, it was worse. They fell like a thick black rain, collapsing to the frozen stones. Most writhed about, wings and ribs broken by the impact. Others were able to crawl away, their movements sluggish and weak.

The stilt walkers backed off, and Akhlys saw Tethyssian, his robe covered in thin icy crystals as he held out both arms.

The mist blew away moments later, as a gust of air, disturbed by the sudden heat vacuum, swept through the trench. But unaffected as they were, the idoneth made short work of the bats that still lived, stomping and skewering those that attempted to flap away and rejoin the swarm above.

‘The sea… is returned!’ Tethyssian called, his voice strained from the effort of pulling such a powerful current so far. ‘The Quagmire is near!’

‘Salvation is close!’ Akhlys took up his triumphant cry, taking a moment of satisfaction in seeing another volley of whisperbow arrows scythe into the retreating stilt walkers. Several tumbled and fell.

But she quickly realised they wouldn’t have long before the bats returned. Even now, the creatures billowed up, like some abominable smoke plume overhead.

And worse, through a gap in the fan coral above, she saw a figure, standing atop a narrow spire-coral that loomed over the trench. The bat swarm whipped about it, disturbing its long, tangled hair and tattered black cloak. Its skin was ghostly pale and its eyes seared a malevolent crimson. It pointed with a single, gnarled talon, directly at Akhlys.

Staring up at the figure for an instant, Akhlys gestured back at it with her talúnhook, her lips curled into a snarl.

And then, without a further word, she turned, following the rest of her kin down the trench.

Several hundred paces further, the idoneth emerged from the gloomy canyon into a wide, rocky valley. Hollowed, knobby coral structures, converted into crude dwellings, dotted the entire area, and the surrounding slopes had been carved into terraced pools, lined with gull-nets. Stilt-walking farmers milled about, carrying flickering lanterns as they drew the nets over the terraces for the night. They quickly fled upon seeing the idoneth emerge from the trench.

Ahead, down the gradual slope of the valley, close, labyrinthine formations of brain and column coral obscured what lay ahead, but a cool, oily smell wafted up on the wind.

Akhlys couldn’t see what lay behind that, but she knew immediately. A comforting dampness set on her skin, and a sparse fog misted up around them, coalescing at hip level into a dark, sheeny layer that rippled with their movements.

‘The aethersea floods!’ Tethyssian called, the vigour of hope returning to his voice. ‘The Great Quagmire is close!’

‘One final eddy,’ Akhlys called, glancing up at the bats that crested the cliffs behind them.

Ahead, the flickering torchlights within the labyrinthine structures belied hidden threats, waiting for them, and the tapping sound echoing from the trench behind signified the pursuing host.

‘Move, now! Through the coral warrens ahead,’ Akhlys called, hopping from boulder to boulder, the comforting buoyancy alleviating her fatigue.

But the swarm still circled overhead, following them from above. While Tethyssian’s evocations of freezing mist seemed to keep the smaller bats at bay, larger shapes emerged from the shrieking mass.

With a beat of monstrous leathery wings, a host of abominably large chiropteran horrors swooped low, emitting a chorus of debilitating shrieks as they slammed into the idoneth with savage force. Akmaeon fell, knocked flat as one of the beasts raked at him with its claws. He rolled away, disembowelling the creature with his keening dagger.

Another swooped down at Akhlys, but she scythed its wing off, sending it crashing into the rocks with pulping force. Snarling, she lunged forward to cleave through another’s skull that had knocked down one of the ishlaens.

The idoneth instinctively circled up: a protective shoal to ward off predators. But Akhlys saw what was approaching. The stilt walkers and the armoured undead were not far behind. And the winged, humanoid figure soared above them, the bats haloing it as though it were the eye of their maelstrom. Its whispers echoed across the basin, eerily merging with the cacophonous shrieks of the chiropterans. It descended to perch atop the highest of the pillar corals ahead.

Suddenly, gaunt, tattered figures armed with billhooks and sickles emerged from the structures around them.

The enemy was closing in on all sides, urged forward by the enthralling force of the creature above.

‘Disperse!’ Akhlys shouted, breaking back into a run down the slope. A dense shoal was easily slowed and overwhelmed by sustained attack.

Risking a glance behind her, she winced as a stretcher-bearing namarti fell, her throat opened by a giant bat’s fangs. The gauze-wrapped, comatose reaver rolled onto the rocks as a second bat descended upon it to feast. The other stretcher bearer attempted to intervene, but was quickly scythed down by another shrieking creature.

Akhlys could do nothing. They had lagged behind.

‘Keep moving!’ she roared, seeing several namarti slow to assist their kin.

There was no time to aid the wounded.

Akhlys cleaved a landing bat down in front of her, spinning in mid-run to shear off the wing of another that swooped towards Akmaeon. The namarti’s whisperbow sang its hushed song as he ran, its arrows leaving distorted trails in the aetheric fog, and spitting plumes of misting black blood from the bats they struck.

A series of cracks rang out behind them, as several stilt walkers fired their powder weapons on the move. But none found their mark in the refracting haze of the aetheric mist.

The swarm of smaller bats extended tendrils of itself down towards the idoneth, but most simply fell to the ground, ice crystals blanketing their forms as their movement was reduced to a lethargic crawl.

Akhlys noted how each of the swarm’s attacks was directed specifically at Tethyssian’s position. ‘Protect the tidecaster!’ she called to Saturiandi.

He complied, flanking Tethyssian with another akhelian, savagely carving the swooping bats from the sky with their helsabres.

The aetheric fog became more dense, and the onslaught faltered, the distorting mist playing havoc on the creatures’ echolocation, allowing the idoneth to approach the dense, coral-bone labyrinth further down the slope.

They almost made it.

But then, a whole host of hostile movement erupted from the warrens ahead, cutting them off. Black-clad humans emerged alongside deathrattle warriors, the latter covered in strange kelp-fibre funerary shrouds and driftwood fetishes.

The flanking forces of stilt walkers and animated skeletons approaching from the terraces reached them at precisely the same moment. It was too well timed to be a coincidence.

‘Forward!’ Akhlys snarled, lashing out with her talúnhook to decapitate an oar-armed skeleton, before sidestepping the thrust of a rusted guisarme from a bone-masked mortal. Her riposte impaled the human through the jaw, and her lurelight flared brightly as the escaping souls began to swirl around her. She led the push, deep into the coral warrens. The passages became narrow, carved alleys between the brain and stack corals, and every hole in the walls or rope bridge overhead seemed to unleash more enemies, living and dead.

Akmaeon and his reavers, their quivers empty, cut into the assailants with their keening daggers, severing the sinuous joints of the undead and opening the arteries of the living. The thralls required less finesse, shearing off limbs and spilling entrails with their brutal lanmari blades, while the akhelians reaped a savage toll of their own, their helsabres spraying crimson and shattering bones.

At their centre, Tethyssian unleashed surges of black, aetheric water, coalesced directly from the dark mist that billowed from him. The waves slipped harmlessly around the idoneth, but tore at their foes from below, sucking them down into the oily gloom. While most of the undead rose again, only hindered by the arcane riptide, many of the humans did not resurface, succumbing to the overwhelming terror of drowning.

Akhlys moved like a spectre of death, her talúnhook seeking out the mortal foes, and ending them with scything sweeps. She let the others deal with the undead, and her lurelight flared bright as ghostly apparitions swirled around her, pulled from the dying humans.

She stooped beside a fallen namarti, the cordon of thralls around her warding off the attackers with wide, sweeping strikes, allowing Akhlys to coax one of the stolen souls into the fallen warrior.

The hideous wound raking his chest fused shut in an instant, and Akhlys stood, holding out a hand to pull the namarti to his feet.

Continuing the advance, she saw a human wearing a mask of stitched-together gull-skulls emerge from a gap between the stack corals, impaling another namarti through the chest with the point of his guisarme.

With a snarl, Akhlys rushed in to behead the human, just as another pair of namarti positioned themselves to shield her from the other attackers charging from the adjacent passages. She knelt to heal the next fallen thrall.

In the confined space of the coral labyrinth, the onslaught was hindered, as fighting was constricted by the narrow passages, and the bats struggled to find the space to make their swooping attacks. But the restricted movement hampered the idoneth as well.

Several namarti fell, too far back or too grievously mangled for Akhlys to heal. And she saw one of the akhelians dragged from his feet by a guisarme hooked into his armour. Several more humans seemed to rise up from the corpse-strewn ground, covered in blood as they descended upon the thrashing akhelian with nothing more than their fingers and teeth.

Akhlys saw the baleful violet glow in their eyes… and the fatal wounds that had felled them previously.

Emerging into a wider, staired thoroughfare, Akhlys looked up to see the tattered, black-cloaked figure standing atop one of the higher stack corals that loomed above the labyrinth. Strands of ghostly violet light descended from the figure to pull many of the fallen humans back onto their feet, regardless of the mortal wounds they’d suffered from the idoneth’s blades. Other strands descended into the piles of shattered bones that had once been deathrattle warriors, forcing the broken skeletons to crawl back together and rise again.

Slowed by the endless tide of foes, the idoneth’s progress had been hampered enough to allow the forces that had pursued them all the way from the previous hamlet to finally catch up. The armoured deathrattle warriors led the charge into the rear of the idoneth band, menacingly descending the thoroughfare’s steps, while the stilt walkers lagged behind to fire their missile weapons over the heads of their unliving allies.

Akhlys saw immediately that these undead were different. They were not the rickety, animated bones that swarmed them from the warrens; instead they were armoured in ancient laminar lined with fingerbones, and bedecked with tattered cloaks and frills of gull-feathers. Each wore pauldrons and a vulture-skull mask decorated with twisted driftwood branches, giving them the illusion of wearing crowns of bleached horns. They all but resembled the animated husks of what Akhlys assumed might be these townships’ long-dead chieftains.

They carved into the namarti rearguard with hook-bladed swords that trailed pale flame.

As Akhlys pulled back from the front to assist, the dead rose in their midst, animating with frightening speed to strike the idoneth from within their formation. With a frustrated roar, Akhlys tore into them with hook and fist, dismay surging as the undead butchered the last of the stretcher bearers, and cut off the retreat of the rearguard.

‘Akhlys!’ Saturiandi called, just behind her. ‘They’re gone!’

He was right. There was nothing to be done.

She turned, leaving those namarti to their fate, hoping their sacrifice would buy the rest of them time. Glancing around in frustration, Akhlys saw that only half her people remained.

As the staired street descended between rising basalt formations beneath a massive, building-sized arch of spindle coral, Tethyssian unleashed another billowing surge of freezing mist into the rabble blocking their path.

It stiffened the enemy’s movements, slowing them enough to allow the idoneth to hack a clear path through.

But the undead behind them continued to advance, cleaving through the last of the rearguard as Akhlys moved with the akhelians to intercept them.

‘For the Khaphtar and the lost!’ she cried, sweeping her talúnhook forward. It was parried, and deftly riposted by the undead chieftain. Though she leaped back, the hook-bladed sword smashed into her armour, sending her sprawling down the steps.

Saturiandi took her place, and dropped the ancient chieftain with a trio of lightning-fast helsabre slashes.

It was immediately replaced by two more.

Stumbling into the rocky wall of the alley, Akhlys heaved, feeling broken ribs under her dented cuirass. Leaning on her polearm, she barely ducked under the beheading sweep of another warrior.

She saw Saturiandi fall, the ghostly edge of a chieftain’s sword beheading him even as he pummelled another down with his shield.

The remaining akhelian cried out, avenging his kinsman by cleaving down his slayer. Several namarti moved to assist, one lashing out with a crescent-headed axe to bring down the chieftain assaulting Akhlys. Another namarti pulled her back, away from the battle.

‘You must… live,’ he said to her, desperation marring his muted voice.

A crossbow quarrel, loosed from the stilt walkers further back, took the namarti straight through the eye.

Akhlys gritted her teeth in rage as the reaver fell, pulling back as another pair of namarti intercepted the advancing chieftains, giving their lives to cover her retreat. Exhaustion and pain weighed her down, but as she turned, she saw the first glimmer of hope…

Out beyond the stair only a few coral structures remained as the labyrinth thinned, rising up from a wide, rocky strand. Runnels and jagged boulders dotted the empty strand beyond, sharing space with numerous fishing boats, roped to barnacle-encrusted pillars.

Beyond that, an endless expanse of oily black water beckoned, shrouded in a dense, dark fog.

‘The… the ocean! The Quagmire!’ Tethyssian called, raising his krakigon-headed staff in triumph. ‘We are sa–’

A black shape landed on him, flattening him against the rock. Membranous wings vanished into a tattered, voluminous cloak, and dark hair whipped about like the tendrils of a thrashing oktar.

The tidecaster’s tortured scream was cut short as crimson sprayed around him, misting into the lapping fog-waves for an instant, before condensing into droplets and splattering to the muddy stone.

In an instant, Akhlys felt a staggering weight threaten to topple her. The namarti stumbled, debilitated, as the frigid mists began to quickly dissipate in the dead wind.

The slender creature rose, deflecting a namarti’s sword with a cruel-bladed sickle before raking open his abdomen with a taloned claw. Akhlys saw the creature was vaguely feminine in form, but its jaw was elongated, revealing rows of blackened fangs. Crimson was spattered all over its face, and it shrieked, its sickle flashing with unnatural speed to dismember another attacking reaver.

It darted straight towards Akhlys, who only barely managed to bring up her talúnhook to deflect a decapitating slash.

‘Soulless abomination!’ Akhlys roared, a strength born from cold, vengeful fury drowning her fatigue and pain.

She riposted, twirling her staff in the attempt to skewer the creature with its hooked blade, but it darted around her, its sickle raking into Akhlys’ shoulder, puncturing up beneath her pauldron. The blade’s serrations caught agonisingly in her flesh and the kelp-fibre cloth she wore beneath her armour, causing it to slip from the creature’s grip as Akhlys turned. She thrust the butt of her polearm into its throat, sending it gasping back, slamming into the wall of the staired street.

A namarti rushed it, distracting it by thrusting his keening dagger up into its ribs. Akhlys saw it was Akmaeon only a moment before the she-creature backhanded him down the stairs.

The battle continued to surge around them as the voulge-bearing stilt walkers and the undead chieftains closed in, having cut through the second rearguard.

Only a dozen of her people remained.

‘So close…’ Akhlys gasped at the pain. The sickle blade was still embedded in her back. She shook her head. She would not fail now. She could not…

Lunging forward, she attempted to hook the creature’s skull, even if the movement tore muscle and sent spasms of fire across her back. The creature sidestepped, recovering from Akmaeon’s attack, though the namarti’s dagger was still firmly buried in its chest.

Akhlys whirled, bashing it away with the haft of her talúnhook, and it backpedalled up the stairs, disappearing into the advancing undead ranks.

Akhlys turned and ran, stumbling as she reached the rocky strand below. Akmaeon had risen and waited for her. He’d seized an akhelian helsabre somewhere along the way. For a namarti to carry such a weapon was unheard of, but for now, Akhlys was thankful for his pragmatism.

‘Close,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Akhlys gasped, agonised.

The namarti reached to remove the sickle blade from her shoulder, but she twisted to brush him off.

‘Later,’ she hissed.

The other survivors, all namarti now, were already further ahead. The swarms of smaller bats descended like black coils from the sky to harass them, but with salvation so close, they ignored the verminous creatures. Even so, she saw one namarti fall.

In a staggering, pain-wracked run, she paused long enough to bring her lurelight over the fallen namarti. A quick surge of converted energy brought him to his feet, as Akmaeon slashed the bats away.

The undead weren’t far behind them.

The freakish, slender creature burst from the pursuing host, swooping forward on its chiropteran wings, eviscerating the namarti Akhlys had just saved.

Lashing out again, it raked Akmaeon across the chest, sending red sprays spattering across the mud. Akhlys thrust out, bashing it back before twirling her polearm around in a decapitating arc. But it leaped overhead, landing behind her to tear its sickle blade free from her shoulder.

The force tore Akhlys’ pauldron clean off, and ripped open her flesh. With a scream, she fell, her talúnhook tumbling from her grip. She rolled, seeing the creature rear up to deliver the killing stroke.

Akmaeon tackled it, bowling into the abomination, shoving it back and slashing open its chest with his helsabre.

Three other namarti joined him, descending upon the thrashing, shrieking horror.

They’d come from the group ahead. They’d turned to save her.

Crawling away, Akhlys found her talúnhook, and rose, stumbling with the dizzying sensation of shock and blood loss, as well as the unfamiliar absence of the aethersea. ‘Move!’ she gasped.

The namarti backed away from the thrashing creature. Its clothing had been shredded, and black, vile blood oozed from its ghostly pale flesh. It had clearly been a woman once… Now, Akhlys didn’t know what it was.

And she didn’t much care either. A downward slash, bearing all of the strength she had left, impaled the point of her talúnhook directly into its skull.

It stopped shrieking, and stopped thrashing.

It slumped, and in an instant, its skin, flesh and bone crumbled, disintegrating into ash that quickly began flaking away in the dead wind.

Akhlys collapsed, sliding down the blood-slick haft of her weapon to sink to her knees.

The bats, many of which were still attached to her and the namarti, flitted away in a panic, and the undead, so close to catching them, stopped, suddenly becoming motionless, as though confused. The stilt-walking humans slowed, staring in disbelief.

Akhlys’ vision greyed. Her blood was everywhere, drenching her left arm and side.

She felt the namarti pull her… lift her.

She gazed up into the sky. The sun’s light had faded. The darkness above was cloaked in the noxious haze that the Khaphtar Sea’s death had created.

After a few, almost serene moments, as she felt her life ebb away, the lapping touch of oily waves began to caress her skin. The pain faded as the light dimmed. The muted voices of the namarti became distant, and she couldn’t even muster the strength to see just how severe her wounds were.

As silent numbness claimed her, a violet shimmer washed over her vision. As the mirage of dancing, dying light rose above, she realised it was the oily sheen of the surface. After all that had happened, she could scarcely remember what that looked like…

Akhlys allowed herself a thin smile as she felt the black depths of the Great Quagmire pull her into its unfamiliar, but comforting embrace.

About the Author

Miles A Drake is a professional bartender and aspiring author based in Amsterdam, Holland. His work for Black Library includes the short stories ‘The Flesh Tithe’ and ‘Ghosts of Khaphtar’.

An extract from The Court of the Blind King.

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.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Oaths & Conquests Anthology in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Dave Gallagher.

Ghosts of Khapthar © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Ghosts of Khapthar, 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: 978-1-80026-395-6

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