Contents

Cover

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

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

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

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

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

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

My purpose is domination.

Domination of enemies. Domination of realms. Domination of events, of time, of fate, of chance, of self. Domination prevails. All else falls away. There are no limits to the sacrifices I will make in its name.

The past, the present and the future roll into one another endlessly, locked and grinding like vast mill stones, turning and turning and turning. The powers of the realms rise and fall, rise and fall, yet the passions of the living and the dead are constant in their nature. Hatred, revenge, ambition, desire, fear… they do not change, and their constancy makes them useful to me. They are my arsenal. So is disaster. When the sweep of events overwhelms all other calculations, the only choice is disaster. I embrace it, because through it, as through everything else, runs the tide of blood. Ebbing and flowing, rushing and stilled, it is constant yet changing. And it has always been mine.

– A Call to Purpose

Chapter 1

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

Snow the colour of ash fell over Nulahmia. It was the grey of abandoned hopes and forgotten graves. It gathered upon rooftops like torn shrouds, their tatters sweeping onto windowsills. In the streets, mounds formed. Gazing down at them from his chambers in a corner turret of his family’s palace, Mathas Hellezan thought the mounds looked like huddled bodies. Cold death descended from the sky to blanket the city of tombs. Mathas felt trapped between the dooms of sky and land. He couldn’t breathe. He yanked at the casement and opened the windows. The wind of sepulchres keened into the room, stinging his face with the grey flakes. The cold braced him, and he filled his lungs. He choked, swallowing fragments of pain. Bent double over the sill, gasping, he heard the hammering at the palace doors. The sound shocked him back to calm. The knock was heavy, a mailed fist slamming against bronze three times.

Three reverberating booms, the tolling of a bell reaching up through the night for him. At first he was surprised he could hear the knocking from the far side of the palace. Then he realised what the summons portended, and of course he heard it. Every Hellezan heard it. The walls of the palace trembled with the impact of fate coming to call.

Mathas stood back from the window. He crossed his chamber, passed through the narrow recess into his armoury, and began to make ready. He was just donning his helm when his father appeared at the doorway.

‘It is tonight, then,’ Mathas said.

Verrick Hellezan nodded. He was pale, and his eyes were stricken.

The Culling of the Firstborn was upon them.

‘You aren’t grieving, are you, father?’ Mathas asked. ‘We knew this moment would arrive. We have been preparing for it.’ The Mortarch of Blood had cursed mortal houses of Nulahmia with the tradition centuries before.

‘Yes, I know.’ Verrick’s voice trembled with fear and the anticipation of sorrow. ‘I did not think it would be this night.’

‘Would another night make a difference?’

‘No,’ Verrick admitted.

‘She knows I am about to ascend to command of the house, father,’ said Mathas. ‘There is no hiding that from her.’ Like all other firstborns in his position, he must go to the Palace of Seven Vultures. ‘It is my time to be tested.’

‘I had hoped we might have been able to discover the nature of the test before this moment.’

Mathas smiled. ‘It is deadly. We know that much.’ The Culling was real. Most firstborn never returned, except in coffins. Their mutilated remains were presented to their families, and the biers were carried in mocking silence by a cortege of skeletons.

‘If you fall…’ Verrick began.

‘I won’t. But if I do, you will go on.’

‘Will we?’

Mathas could already see, in his father, the same despairing face he had encountered so often in the kin of the lost firstborns. ‘The Hellezans can survive,’ he said. ‘The others have.’ More or less. Weakened by the losses, some houses failed, decapitated by the death of the firstborn. But others continued to exist, diminished and humbled, taught the futility of resisting the blood queen, often even before the idea had been whispered in the halls. The grieving leaders of these houses bent their knees and bowed their heads before Neferata, entreating her that this son, or this daughter, should be a full and sufficient sacrifice.

‘But you won’t have to just survive,’ Mathas said. ‘I will return. I will return as myself,’ he emphasised, as he saw the shadow of a greater horror pass across Verrick’s eyes.

Some firstborn did not return in coffins. Shrouded by darkness, their flesh cold and pale, their eyes red with ancient, unquenchable thirst, the new vampire thralls of Neferata crossed their thresholds as destroyers.

‘You weren’t at the home of the Salveins,’ Verrick said. ‘You didn’t see what Harvath did to them. He painted the walls with their blood. And the bodies…’ When Verrick shook his head, it seemed to Mathas that he sent a tremor down his entire frame. ‘They filled the corridors, and we couldn’t count them. Such butchery. So many pieces.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, squeezing them tight against the vision of the charnel halls. ‘Harvath just stood there, the blood of his family dripping from his mouth. I don’t know if he even saw us.’

‘That won’t be me, father. You know it won’t.’

Verrick smiled sadly. No matter what Mathas said, it seemed, the old man refused to be comforted. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You might be more restrained.’

‘Like Wrentis Nalvaux?’ He had been merciless in his bloodletting, killing his family members who needed killing, turning those who would be of use, and subjugating everyone else. And so another house had become Neferata’s, controlled by her will as surely as if her terrible presence resided in its chambers. ‘No,’ Mathas said. ‘I will return, and we will all rejoice. This is not the moment of doom. This is our chance to strike.’ He paused. ‘We want this,’ he said softly.

‘I know,’ Verrick said, without conviction.

Mathas clasped his father’s shoulder. Verrick had devoted himself to the struggle, and the effort of the decades had told on him. His frame had withered. His bones seemed frail under Mathas’ touch. His eyes were sunken in his sallow face.

‘You’ve done well, father. You’ve brought us this far. It is time I took up the torch. This night, I will.’ He had been in training for his entire life, waiting for this very night. He, his parents and their allies had not known when the summons would come, but they had known it was inevitable. Mathas was a firstborn, and as mercurial as the queen of Nulahmia could be, she had never spared anyone marked to take part in this ritual.

Why would she? Mathas thought. It is so useful for her.

He left his quarters and made his way through the palace. Verrick walked at his side, seeming to age with every step. The wall sconces burned brightly in the halls, casting a defiant light over the great portraits of the Hellezan line. Gold inlay on the columns and gold leaf on the ceiling gleamed, rich with the pride of a family that had carved out a wealthy life in the kingdom of death. Withstand and Prevail: that was the Hellezan motto, and Mathas believed in it. He would prove its worth and his own tonight.

His armoured boot steps echoed down the halls, the only sound in the palace, though everyone was awake. Servants clustered in doorways to watch his passage. The household seemed to be holding its collective breath. His mother, his brother and his sisters were waiting for him at the main entrance. Teyosa of House Avaranthe, his wife, stood beside them holding their infant son, Kasten.

The doors were closed, but Mathas could sense the dark beings waiting on the other side. Two men-at-arms stood at attention, ready to pull the doors open when he gave the signal.

Mathas embraced his mother. Glanath’s lips were pressed together tightly, her face taught with strain. The years had been hard on her too. It was his responsibility now to make sure his parents’ sacrifice had not been in vain.

Nor would they be the only ones depending on him. There were other families whose fortunes would rise or fall because of this night. In truth, he believed that the fate of all Nulahmia rested on his shoulders. There was solemn pride, but no vanity, in that belief. If he succeeded this night, everything would change. If he failed, someone else would have to take his place, and someone surely would, because the struggle was too important. There was no alternative, other than the despair of complete surrender.

‘I won’t fail,’ he said to Glanath.

‘I know you won’t,’ she said. ‘You march from our palace to a greater one, and to your destiny.’ Her voice trembled only once. She spoke quietly, but with incantatory fervour.

Mathas turned to Teyosa. ‘I will return to you,’ he said. His hand hovered over the sleeping head of Kasten. ‘I swear it.’

‘You should not have to fight alone,’ said Teyosa.

‘Yet I must.’

‘I could…’ she began, but trailed off as he shook his head.

‘If you tried to follow, they would kill you before you had taken ten paces from our gates. You are second-born. Your family has already paid its tithe of blood. And we need you here.’

Teyosa looked down at Kasten and nodded. ‘You will pass by my family’s house,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Mathas. ‘I will learn what I can as we do.’

In the last week, rumours had reached the Hellezan palace that a plague had come to House Avaranthe. Silence had fallen over the family, but there had been no way to learn the truth, no way to know if Neferata had discovered that they were part of the plot against her. If the worst had happened, there could be no open contact between the two houses, especially now that the attention of the dark queen had fallen on the Hellezans.

The days and nights of the Hellezan palace had been consumed with the dread anticipation of Mathas’ summons. The Culling of the Firstborn came to every house. Since there were no exceptions, the summons was predictable. It was possible to prepare for it. Mathas had. The threat stiffened the resolve of the Hellezans and the families with whom they forged quiet, whispered alliances. They vowed to break the chains Neferata had thrown over Nulahmia. The city may have been her creation, but it was time it was freed from the grip of its creator. As plans were laid and the kernel of an organised resistance slowly, almost imperceptibly, came into being, the links between the families had become, on the surface, more distant. If the Avaranthes had been found out, and punished, the appearance of that distance was all the more vital.

Teyosa understood. Yet Mathas knew she feared for her family and grieved in the expectation of tragedy. Knowing one way or another might help. Mathas needed to know, too. Everyone in House Hellezan did.

‘I’ll find out,’ he promised, determination growing. ‘Good news or ill, I will come back, and I will hold you as I tell you.’

‘I can ask no more,’ said Teyosa.

Mathas nodded to the guards, and they opened the doors.

The wind shrieked into the entrance hall, blowing grey before it. The snow whirled about the Hellezans. Verrick winced and brushed the flakes from his shoulders as if trying to shed himself of a dark omen. Three Black Knights stood on the portico. Their heavy armour gleamed dully in the reflected lights of the hall’s torches. The cold breath of the night whistled through their empty eye sockets, and the chill of the grave worked through the seams of Mathas’ armour and clutched his face with a numbing grasp. The blast of the snow storm surrounded the Black Knights, but another, more frigid wind blew from the undead warriors themselves.

Mathas took in the eroded crests on the trio’s armour and bowed. The skeletons were nobles from houses that had been powerful when their families were alive, and were even greater now they were dead.

The middle Black Knight cocked his head as if amused by Mathas’ display of courtesy. You aren’t fooled, Mathas thought. You sense my loathing. Good. But I will walk into the dark with honour. Do not think you can take that from me. He stared back into the knight’s empty sockets. After a few moments, the skeleton turned and strode away, armour creaking, bones grinding together. The other two waited for Mathas to come between them. When he did, they fell into step on either side, an escort of doom.

At street level, the mounds of snow looked even more like bodies, huddled in agony against the building walls. Though the night was freezing, the shapes were melting, heated by the unnatural alchemy that governed their existence. Where the grey was piled high enough to take on the curves of agony, it began to bleed. The masses sank down, rotting, turning to blackened slush, then running in crimson streams down the cobblestones, washing against Mathas’ boots.

The Black Knights took him down a wide boulevard that ran between towering mausoleums. The black walls were hundreds of feet high. Rank upon rank of huge, snarling gargoyle maws covered the facades. Behind every gaping mouth was a stone throat, leading into the structures and the tombs within. The mausoleums held tens of thousands of coffins. Few of their occupants slept soundly.

The grey snow fell past the gargoyles. It gathered on Mathas’ shoulders. It settled onto the street, and was swept away by the streams of blood.

Everything in the night shouted to Mathas that only death could triumph in Nulahmia. He was going to prove the night wrong. They did not know it, but the Black Knights were giving him the opportunity to make that attempt. He would spill blood, and he would kill. But it was one death in particular he sought. One death, to bring the hope of life to the mortals of Nulahmia. Or, no – not a death, for he did not pretend he could kill what was already dead. Destruction, then. He lived to destroy one being.

He was going to destroy Neferata.

Mathas recognised the folly of the quest. He knew he was not the first mortal to make the attempt. What did his two decades of training mean compared to her countless millennia of existence? The hubris of his attempt was without measure. But one of us will bring you down, he thought. One of these times, the blade would strike home. He refused to believe that she was eternal. She, too, was guilty of pride. What was happening to him this night was proof of that. She was inviting destruction over her threshold. One day, the invitation would be accepted.

Your hour is coming, he thought.

They reached an intersection of many avenues. The land here was on a steep slope, and Mathas beheld a vista of the sweep of this quarter of Nulahmia. To his right, the city sloped downwards. To his left, it rose towards the great mass of Neferata’s palace. The enormity of what he intended struck home. Ending the being who had commanded Nulahmia into existence was madness.

It is an honourable madness, he argued. One worth dying for.

The Black Knights and Mathas crossed the wide expanse of the intersection. There were no other mortals on the streets at this hour. They had fled the grey snow as they would a fall of death from the skies. The city was not silent, though. In the shadows below and in the greater darkness above, Nulahmia groaned and rang with endless creation. The hunger of Neferata’s will was never satiated, and it urged the city into transformation. No structure or configuration of streets was eternal. There were monuments a thousand feet high and vaults as big as mountains, and they too would vanish, as if melting into air, at the command of the queen. Death and Neferata were the only constants. Death came for everything.

Mathas looked up at one of the soaring monuments before him. Engravings marked the deaths of a million souls in a distant battlefield. The towers rose from the corners of the intersection where, he recalled from his childhood, there had once been homes. Every change is death, he thought. In Nulahmia, creation’s only purpose was, in the end, to be washed away by blood.

Movement at the top of one of the towers caught his eye. A ragged glow, the colour of sorrow, rushed down the face of it with a howl that seemed to drag claws across his soul. A banshee floated a short distance above Mathas, its wizened face gaping at him in mockery and grief.

‘Proud Hellezan,’ the banshee hissed with a voice of crumbling earth, ‘joined to the proud Avaranthes. So much pride. Such nobility. How do they serve you now?’

Mathas did not answer. He stared straight ahead and kept walking.

‘Tell me of your defiance!’ the banshee taunted. ‘Sing to me of hope!’ The banshee kept pace with him. ‘Hooooooooooope!’ it shrieked, and then it rushed ahead, up the hill, wailing. It stopped by high iron gates, flowing in and out of the bars. ‘Hope,’ it repeated. ‘Hope. Come and tell me of hope, proud Hellezan.’

Mathas knew those gates. He tried to brace himself for what he would see when he drew near. But when he beheld the grand mansion beyond the gates, his eyes widened. He stumbled, shaken by sudden distress.

The rumours were true. Death had taken House Avaranthe. The light that came from the broken windows did not come from torches or lanterns. The glow was sickly green, the phosphorescence of wraiths that flowed, wailing, through gutted corridors. Skeletons swarmed over the façade, unmaking and changing. The roof was gone. A fell nimbus rose from the interior to meet the falling snow. It coiled around the walls, and seemed to work in conjunction with the skeletons. The corpses toiled to unmake the mansion and turn it into a new thing. Mathas could not make out the nature of the transformation, beyond the death of what had been. The new building was taller. Its gables reached out into the air, turning into clawed wings of stone, as if the structure would soon take flight.

The skeletons still wore shreds of clothing. It was falling in rotten tatters as the labours of construction continued. In the spectral light, Mathas could just make out enough of the designs that remained. The dead were the Avaranthes. The undead creatures they had become now slaved to destroy the home. Before long, no trace of the family would exist.

The banshee laughed with grief.

Mathas’ legs were numb. He could not feel the ground under his feet. He and Teyosa had feared for her family, and though he was not surprised by what he saw, the shock was immense.

The Black Knight in the lead had paused and was looking back at Mathas, skull cocked. Mathas did not know if it was amused or curious. He suppressed a shudder as he felt the cold evaluation of the eyeless gaze. He wanted to pull his sword and charge. For Hellezan! For Avaranthe! For life! The words were huge in the back of his throat, demanding to be shouted. He choked them back. Such defiance would betray the families and all they were struggling to bring about.

Does she know? he wondered. Did Neferata have the Avaranthes killed? She might have, but then again, it might really have been the plague that felled them. Even if Neferata was behind the destruction, she could have commanded it for any of a hundred reasons, or for no reason at all. No, Mathas decided, the conspiracy had not been discovered. If it had been, doom would have come for all of the Hellezans, and not just for him.

And if he was wrong, that changed nothing. His path was set. If Neferata knew, and still permitted him to enter her palace armed, then her hubris was even greater than he had thought.

Mathas tore his eyes away from the mansion and started forwards again. The Black Knight watched him for a moment more before continuing onward.

Another hour passed before they reached the palace. They did not approach it along the main avenue. The door that waited for Mathas was on the opposite side from the grand entrance. The Black Knights took him through a maze of ever-narrower streets, weaving through an endless graveyard. Colossal, nitre-encrusted obelisks clustered like sentries, looming over the road. The passage was so tight, the Black Knights now walked single file. Mathas’ shoulders brushed against the obelisks. Melting snow streaked his armour with gore. The road, slick with blood and slime, glowed faintly, giving just enough light for Mathas to see where he was going. He glanced behind once, and the way back was lost in impenetrable darkness.

The path narrowed still, winding and twisting. Mathas felt he had become a carrion worm, burrowing through a gigantic corpse. He lost all sense of direction; he had been unable to see the mass of the palace since entering the cemetery. A huge, squat monument reared up ahead, crouching over the path like an immense toad. The road entered a tunnel in its base.

The wind still blew inside the tunnel, whining in captivity. The crimson melt of the snow ran down the slope, and the low walls echoed with the footsteps of Mathas and the Black Knights. The tunnel ended in a wide antechamber, where the Black Knights brought Mathas to face a massive door. It was metal, but as dark and gleaming as obsidian. Its surface appeared featureless at first glance, but once he was closer, Mathas saw runes. They swam in the surface like oil on water. They shifted, flowed into one another and flickered on the edges of meaning. Mathas could not read them, but protean menace reached out from the door and wrapped tendrils around his soul.

The wind rose and fell. It hissed and rasped, and became the voice of the door.

‘Who would be pyre-bound?’ said the door.

For the first time, the lead Black Knight spoke. The cold that blew from his soul shaped itself into words, the syllables cut into sharp pieces by the rattling of teeth. ‘Mathas Hellezan,’ he said, turning Mathas’ name into a foul incantation.

‘Mathas Hellezan,’ the door repeated.

‘Firstborn of the house,’ said the Black Knight.

‘Firstborn!’ the door exulted. ‘Let him pass, and grasp his fate-thorn.’

The door opened, swinging inwards into gloom with the sound of a mountain grinding apart. A faint glow wavered deep inside the stone tunnel. Mathas’ eyes adjusted, and he realised a single torch hung on the wall, waiting for him.

Without looking back or glancing at his undead escort, he drew his sword and marched into the tunnel. The door closed behind him with the boom of hollow thunder.

Mathas raced down the tunnel, anxious that the caprice of the test might snatch the illumination away. The floor crunched under his boots. As he entered the circle of light thrown by the torch and snatched it from the wall, he saw that the floor was a pavement of bones. Skulls, femurs, pelvises and more, densely packed together into an uneven surface. There was no distinguishing between individual bodies. The floor was a compressed hecatomb, its brickwork stained the colour of old blood. Viscous fluid, too thick to be water, flowed down its length. The stench of corruption was foul. Mathas breathed through his mouth, and the smell scratched at the back of his throat.

The tunnel was about ten feet wide, and fifteen feet high at the centre of the rounded vault of the ceiling. It descended deeper into the foundations of the palace. Its slope was steep and its curve was sharp. Mathas could only see twenty feet ahead as he advanced down the spiral.

Echoes scrabbled upwards to meet him. Garbled and overlapping snarls. They grew louder, the voices becoming more distinct, and eager. They were unintelligible, as if the speakers had mouths full of bones. The noise of claws scraping against walls twisted Mathas’ spine into a knot. The stench was almost overpowering.

He moved as fast as he dared, careful not to slip on the curves of skulls poking up like slick cobblestones from the floor. The gabbing, snarling voices were close now. He sensed the enemy around the next curve. Monstrous voices laughed. They could hear him, too.

There was no point in attempting stealth. Gathering himself, he raised his sword and charged. ‘Withstand and prevail!’ he shouted.

There was an answering roar, and from around the bend came a trio of hulking monsters. Their flesh was pale as the underbelly of a dead fish, and was pierced by long, jagged bones, the trophies of former victims that stuck out of their limbs and torsos like spines. What had been mortal had become gargoyle, and they bared their blackened teeth in pleasure and drooling hunger.

The lead monster swung a misshapen bone-axe at Mathas before he was in range, missed and lunged clumsily, grasping for him with its filth-encrusted claws. Mathas dropped the torch, crouched, and drove his sword upwards with both hands, impaling the horror through the throat. ‘I have not come here for you,’ Mathas snarled as the monster staggered against him, its great weight almost bringing him down. ‘I am here for the Queen, and you try my patience.’ The monster choked on the blade. Dark, stinking blood gouted from its jaws, soaking his armour. One of its eyes burst from its skull. It dropped its axe and tried to grab him, but it was dying, and its claws slapped against his pauldrons, then fell to the side.

The other horrors gabbled at Mathas. Their words were nonsense, yet there was something in the rhythm of the yells that sounded like mottos, as if they were hurling the pride of their own noble houses back at Mathas.

‘Your foul blood sullies a noble blade!’ Mathas shouted back. ‘But come. I will kill you just the same!’

The horrors clawed and beat at the body of the first. They were crowding forwards, and in the confined space of the tunnel, they could not reach past the body to sink their claws and blades into Mathas. Between their blows and the mass of the corpse, his knees almost buckled. He managed to step to the rear, sliding his blade out of the body. With a jerk, he leapt backwards. The dead horror fell. The monster on the right had jammed its claws into the corpse’s flesh to pull it away, and the sudden shift pulled it forwards, off balance. Mathas slammed the point of his sword into the beast’s eyes and punctured its brain. He threw himself to the side as the last of the horrors reached for him. It caught his helm with the flat of its axe blade. His head rang with the blow and his eyes blurred. He swung to his right, slicing open the ghoul’s flank. It howled, dropped its axe and clutched at him with both hands.

The grip was powerful. His armour began to buckle under the pressure. The diseased claws sank into the seams. The beast gnawed at the front of his helm, breaking teeth on metal and suffocating him with the stench of its breath. It held Mathas’ shoulders, its strength like a vice of iron. He managed to move his forearms up, stab the monster in the belly and saw upwards, slicing through muscle and viscera. The horror’s snarls mixed pain and rage. It tore his visor off with its teeth, and the blood from its shredded gums and lips poured over his face and neck. Mathas gagged at the poisonous, rotting fluid. With desperate strength, he brought his sword up higher, and at last cut through too much for the monster to live. It stiffened, its snarl fading to a gurgle, and then fell, taking Mathas down with it.

Choking and coughing, Mathas broke free from the dead grip of the horror and squirmed out from under the hulk. He wiped his eyes clean of the thing’s blood, and tried not to think about how he might have been tainted. He picked up the torch and moved forward again.

The spiral passageway ended after another few hundred yards, levelling out into a wider cavern littered with bones, scraps of flesh and piles of detritus. The stench made his eyes water. On the other side of the chamber was an iron door. It screeched as Mathas hauled it open, and the echoes of its scream were swallowed up by a choir of shrieks in the huge space beyond.

Mathas crossed the threshold and walked out onto a finger of fused bone which arched gently upwards, extending over an abyss. The light of the torch could not reach the walls or the ceiling. The bottom of the cavern was an unguessable distance below. Its deep night was broken by fitful streaks of light and the glow of apparitions. Phantoms glided over the pathway to circle Mathas, rising from the depths and dropping back into them. They keened in distress and hunger, in anger and eagerness, in grief and madness. Spectral hands, gnarled as talons, formed out of ghostly energy, reached for him as they flew past, but they did not come near enough to touch him. The bridge seemed to be forbidden to the wraiths, and they screamed in an intensity of pain and frustration as they passed.

From somewhere in the dark came the heavy beat of leathery wings. Mathas held the torch high and swung it from side to side, but the thing that made the sound remained out of sight.

Mathas kept to the centre of the bridge where the footing felt even more precarious than in the tunnel. There was nothing to keep him from falling off the sides if he stumbled too far – or if something hit him. The flapping of the wings passed overhead, closer now, as if the predator were closing in, making ready to attack.

Ahead, the bridge reached a platform. But Mathas’ hopes that he had reached the far side were dashed when he saw it was a circular surface at the apex of the bridge’s arc. The span continued on the other side. Shaped into a shallow bowl, the platform was ringed by stones twisted into gnarled forms, as if it were in the grip of a giant skeletal hand. The stones thrummed with sorcerous power. Wraiths clustered around, casting the bowl in the sickly green of their soul-light, but though the power of the stones seemed to draw them, it also held them at bay. The phantoms were spectators, Mathas thought, forced to bear witness to the struggle to come, but unable to affect its outcome.

The screams of hunger chilled Mathas. He was surrounded by the ghastly persistence of existence after death. To become such as these things was worse than oblivion. The nature of their captivity in this cavern was even worse. It was a display; a statement that his struggle for survival was nothing more than another’s entertainment.

Your hopes are meaningless, it signalled. You are but a plaything.

Above him, the flapping of wings circled, waiting for him to reach the platform.

‘Are you amused?’ Mathas shouted at the unseen queen of Nulahmia. ‘I come to bring an end to your delights! You are right to hide from me!’ He ran forward. Let there be an end to games, he thought. Victory or death, let either come now.

Mathas crossed the ring of stones at a run. There was a sudden sharp flap from above, as of wings being tucked in for a dive. He changed direction abruptly, pounding around the curve of the bowl as the snarl from above became a roar. Unable to alter its trajectory quickly enough, the hunter smashed down into the centre of the platform, splintering the surface of bones.

The brute turned slowly, tracking him, its breath making like snarling bellows. It had the form of an immense bat. The talons on its wings were as long as his forearm; its massive torso furred and muscular – a body suited to battering through doors.

Varghulf, Mathas thought. The family chronicles made reference to such monsters in descriptions of past battles. Viscous saliva dripped from its fangs.

Mathas charged, aiming his sword at the varghulf’s throat. It swept a wing at him, and in the moment before it struck, Mathas hurled the torch into the monster’s face. His aim was true. The varghulf shrieked, its fur smouldering and its face blackened with the burn. Mathas threw himself to the right in the direction of the monster’s retaliating blow, and though weakened, the impact knocked him off his feet and sent him sliding up the platform, smashing against one of the stones. His chest plate cracked. He felt broken movement in his ribs as he struggled to his feet.

The varghulf swiped at its eyes with one of its wings, and lashed out with the other with wide, sweeping blows as it stormed up the slope towards Mathas.

He ran to his left, away from the scything wing, then down along the monster’s flank. Half-blind, the varghulf missed him. It paused at the ring of stones and sniffed for its prey, stopping just long enough for Mathas to plunge his sword into its spine.

The varghulf screamed and leapt. Blood streaming down its back, it flapped its wings and flew straight up from the stones. Mathas held tight to the hilt of the blade. He rose with the monster, his weight dragging open a longer wound. The varghulf climbed vertically, then looped, and Mathas fell.

He landed on his back. The impact knocked the air from him, and pain exploded down his spine. He could not move. Above, the varghulf climbed higher yet, then dived for him, its jaws gaping in fury. For a terrible moment, the sight of those jaws and the blaze of the monster’s uninjured eye held Mathas, extending his paralysis. Then, he thought of his family, and of his duty, and of the dream of freeing Nulahmia from the tyrant who arranged these battles for her amusement. Teyosa’s face rose before his mind’s eye. You do not die here, she said, her voice as strong in his heart as if she had really spoken.

With a surge of desperate determination, he rolled to the side and rose to his knees. The burning vision of the varghulf’s face was still before his mind’s eye. Its monstrousness was mesmerising, and though he had broken from its grip, it remained the vivid centre of his reality. It was the core of everything, and so when he rose, he stabbed at that centre with his sword. His instincts and reflexes knew where the face was even more than did his rational mind. He thrust, and the blade struck the eye of the varghulf. The speed and weight of the monster drove the blade deep into its skull. The varghulf’s scream cut off. Its immense body shuddered, and then, with a crash, collapsed.

Mathas crawled out from underneath a wing. He staggered up the side of the bowl to the descending arc of the bridge. Wraiths shrieked at him, skeletal fingers of ectoplasmic energy reaching out in frustration. Mathas’ stride steadied as he marched along the span, the adrenaline of victory coursing through his frame. It gave him the focus to work through his pain, and he moved faster. He raised his sword in challenge.

‘I know you are watching!’ he shouted. ‘I know you can hear me. Your nemesis has come, Neferata. Your end is here!’

His words were lost in the wailing choir of phantoms. But to speak the words aloud was a form of power. He did not have to hide any longer. Here, in this monstrous place, his rage was natural. Who would not wish destruction upon Neferata after this? So he roared his truth, and raced for the far end of the bridge.

At the foot of the bridge was another wide platform. Five doorways led off it. Each of the doors was forged from the same obsidian-black metal as the one that had barred the entrance to this netherworld of slaughter. In them, too, runes appeared, disappeared, and shifted, threatening him with meaning, but withholding the blow. Understanding was an executioner’s axe poised over his neck.

Mathas stepped onto the platform, and the door in front of him began to move. It stopped after a few inches, opening no more than a hand’s breadth. Mathas regarded it with suspicion. The other doors were silent. This was the path of the labyrinth he was directed to choose, then. He did not like having his hand forced. Then again, he thought, how much choice have we had at all?

None.

Even so, he delayed the inevitable, rebelling to the extent that he approached the doors to the left and right of the open one. The wraiths shrieked with mocking laughter at the futility of his gesture. The other doors were sealed to the walls. They would not move for him. Surely, they waited for some other victim, concealing some other doom.

Mathas returned to the first door. He grabbed the edge and, with a harsh scrape of metal against stone, dragged it open. The space beyond was completely black. He held the torch forward, and the flame became a feeble red glow, illuminating nothing. Mathas hesitated, picturing himself stepping forward and plummeting to his death. But where would be the sport in that?

He crossed the threshold, and the darkness drew back like a receding tide, settling into the recesses and corners of the chamber.

He was in a circular, domed hall. Sconces of skeletal human arms held torches on the curved wall. In the centre of the floor was a huge mound of bodies, the corpses of hundreds of warriors cast in iron, their death agonies and their shame of failure preserved for eternity. Limbs, armour, weapons and severed heads tangled together in a mass grave of humiliation. Would-be champions were now the tortured foundation for the throne that sat atop the mound. It was constructed of bone. It gleamed ivory-white in the torchlight, yet it was not as white, or as pure a thing of death, as the skin of the tyrant who now rose from it.

Neferata walked slowly down the mound of bodies, and Mathas felt his strength, his courage, his very ability to move, drain away. His sword arm hung limp at his side. The torch dropped from his fingers. He was paralysed. It was not mere beauty that transfixed him, but something far more terrible. It was majesty, a sublimity of command. Her presence struck him with awe, the true awe that was the supreme form of horror. Her being was too great for the hall, as if she were somehow larger than the space through which she moved.

She wore her tall, spreading crown of overlapping plates and gold-plated bones. It sat low on her brow, and beneath it her eyes glittered, eyes of devouring darkness that pulled Mathas’ soul with the strength of a monstrous whirlpool. Her lips, dark as arterial blood, curled upwards slightly in cold amusement. Her armour, of the same black and gold plating as the crown, left her arms bare, as if they disdained such mundanities as protection. Her only weapon was a dagger, and it was sheathed.

‘Well met, Mathas Hellezan,’ she said. Her voice was low and compelling, like a torrent dragging him to the heart of a glacier. ‘But where is my promised nemesis?’

The taunt broke Mathas’ paralysis. With a cry of hatred, he ran forward, sword raised. He reached the foot of the mound at the same moment Neferata did. She still had not drawn her dagger. He swung his blade at her neck.

Neferata’s strike was a blur, too fast for Mathas to see, but in that fraction of a second, there was time for understanding. Her arms were unclad not from pride, but so that their speed was without fetters. The blow knocked the sword from his hand and sent it skittering across the floor. Neferata yanked his helm from his head and grabbed him by the throat. Black claws sank into his flesh. Mathas could not believe those were fingers that held him. Surely he was in the grip of an unholy device of ice and iron.

Neferata tilted his head to one side. She looked at him with impassive contempt. ‘I’ll ask you again. Where is my nemesis?’

Mathas tried to find defiance. He tried to curse. All he could do was choke.

‘Not here?’ said Neferata. ‘That’s what I thought.’ Her lips parted, revealing fangs sharp as a serpent’s. She pulled Mathas close and bent her head to his exposed neck.

Mathas’ limbs twitched as the fangs slid into his flesh. His soul cried out though his voice was mute. He reached one last time for duty, family and honour. He saw Teyosa again, and his promise echoed back at him, cruel and mocking.

I will return to you.

Darkness closed over him.

Stability is a lie. It is the limning of a battlefield; the chance to prepare for war. Its risk is that it conceals the struggles already taking place. I am engaged in those struggles whether I am aware of them or not, and if I do not know it, then I will deserve my defeat. I must not be blinded by stability and its illusions of peace. I must never forget that peace has no reality, though its mirage can blind the gods.

– Exhortations

Chapter 2

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

The revels had returned to the Palace of Seven Vultures. In the centre of the great hall, Neferata presided over the festival from a vast, raised dais. She walked slowly around its periphery, circling her drakstone divan, watching her court unleash its desires. Her gaze let no detail pass ignored. In any corner, any shadow, or under any light, she might find that which her subjects tried to conceal.

High above her, wraith-light circled the great chandelier with urgent hunger, eager for her to find the guilty. The candles of human tallow blazed as if the souls of the executed themselves had caught fire, foreshadowing penalties to come. The volcanic glass and fossilised bone of the chandelier gleamed with a liquid brightness, a pure essence of corruption conjured from ancient, petrified death. Below, along the walls, flames rose high from the gilded bone braziers. Their burning light mixed with the colder, refracted light of red and green and blue from the jewels embedded in the crystal skull lanterns. The eye sockets were dark, yet they seemed watchful, joining their scrutiny to the queen’s.

The darkness of the hall cavorted with the light. Beauty and horror were one. The shadows danced, their movements both angular and sensuous, a pantomime of the pleasure, the grace, the cruelty and the bloodshed that filled the hall. The vampire nobility of Nulahmia gorged itself. The feast of blood was a harvest of mortals, highborn and low, chosen for their youth, their beauty, their strength, their artistry, their wisdom. Some vampires delighted in the destruction of something precious. Others preferred the vintage of blood taken at its prime, when its possessor bloomed in the fullness of vigour. Gore and torn flesh spread across the marble floor of the hall, but thralls gathered up the remains and swept the blood into draining channels with such dexterity that the revellers were never conscious of their presence.

For all the mortals doomed this night, there were as many who would not be bled, and they knew it. Neferata read the dark joy in their faces. They had purchased their safety with the sacrifice of their kin, and had been rewarded with gold, jewels and heightened prestige in the court. They danced too, and if they regretted the price in flesh they had paid, if they grieved the loss of children, siblings, parents and spouses, they showed no sign. And so the grand ball of slaughter moved around the pillars, crossing and re-crossing the expanse of the hall with a flow that was frenzied, precise and elegant. The swirling movement of predators and prey had so much energy, it appeared to govern the melodies that came from the orchestra in the gallery above.

The musicians were mortal. On some occasions, Neferata commanded the presence of vampire players, whose centuries of experience had honed their skill to a perfection no mortal could reach. But that was a cold perfection. On nights such as this, the terror of the mortal players lent their music a delicious and delirious passion. They played as if their lives depended on their performance, as if this was their final hour. For some of them, it would be.

Neferata studied her subjects and analysed them, searching for treachery. At her side, Lady Raia walked attentively. Neferata’s chief spy murmured quietly to the queen when her opinion was sought, and was otherwise silent, a useful shadow.

Neferata did not partake in the feast. She had satisfied her hunger earlier, when she had drained Mathas Hellezan. She still wore her armour, choosing to be a figure of dark command, the forbidding point at the centre of the maelstrom of riot. Her gaze returned again to Mathas, watching the newest vampire in the court fall upon prey for the first time, and weighed possibilities.

As the currents of the dance brought undead and mortals past the dais, they bowed to Neferata. When the music swelled, the multitude offered a choir of thanks and praise to her. The vampires were joyous in their savagery. The gift of blood she had given them was bountiful. And the spared mortals were giddy with survival and newfound riches. They had every reason to celebrate her reign.

Neferata did not trust their worship. Nulahmia had been safe from outside threats for some time. That safety bred complacency, which created fertile ground for rebellion.

A handmaiden approached the dais, lowering her head and clasping her hands together in respect first to Neferata, then to Raia. Neferata gave her a slight nod, and the vampire climbed the stairs gracefully.

‘You have news, Mereneth,’ said Neferata.

‘I do, my queen. Should Lady Raia and I retire so as not to disturb you?’

‘No. Tell me what you have learned.’

‘It is not as much as either of us would like.’ Mereneth spoke softly, too quietly to be overheard. Her words were almost an admission of failure. Neferata had executed underlings for less. But Mereneth had repeatedly proven her skill as a spy. She performed her visible role as handmaiden as expertly as she extracted secrets from Neferata’s enemies. She was too useful to be discarded lightly. If she did not have all the information Neferata expected, then that lack would itself be significant.

‘Go on,’ the Mortarch said.

‘What we suspected appears to be true. The Avaranthes were not alone in plotting against you. But the conspirators have concealed themselves well. The Avaranthes must have been far from the centre of the plot. They did not even know who their allies were.’

‘You are certain?’

‘Your necromancers have made sure. We continue to pursue the rumours, my queen, but for now we are chasing shadows.’

‘Yet the rumours are plentiful.’

‘They are, and they are proving to be of some use,’ said Raia. ‘They are giving us some sense of the extent of the discontent.’

‘Which is?’

‘Considerable.’ It was brave of Mereneth to be so blunt. It was also what Neferata demanded of her. ‘The stirrings of rebellion seem to be most widespread among mortals.’

Neferata had expected that. With no outside threat, the mortals would feel the predatory demands of the vampires more keenly, and with greater resentment. ‘Vampires are also more adept at concealment,’ she pointed out. Again, the absence of a threat was the problem. That was one less goad to find unity under her reign. She had rivals out there, even if she did not know who the dangerous ones were, yet. Their ambitions would be freer. Some would be toying with the idea of replacing her on the throne of Nulahmia. A select few would be moving towards making the idea a reality.

Nulahmia is mine. I created it. None shall rule it but me. Ever.

Raia said, ‘I am troubled, my queen, by how successful the mortals have been at concealing their actions. The rumours are legion, but vague. We are finding very little that we can act upon.’

‘That success implies considerable organisation,’ said Neferata.

‘So I believe, too,’ said Mereneth. ‘They are determined.’ The spy turned her head to look at Mathas. ‘The link of marriage between House Avaranthe and House Hellezan is suggestive.’

‘We will pay greater attention to the Hellezans.’

Raia said, ‘I am relieved that their firstborn is now your thrall.’

‘He will be useful,’ said Neferata.

Mathas took another offering, plunging his claws into the neck of a daughter of House Bantayre. Neferata noted how far he had progressed during the course of the revel. His initial kills had been frenzied, the work of a mad butcher. He had ripped the prey to pieces, shredding throats, ripping arms from bodies, bathing his face in huge jets of gore. So much flesh destroyed, so much blood wasted. Now he had calmed. He was no longer a wild animal. He attacked with precision, more like the warrior he had been. He had moved past mindless destroyer to discerning hunter. There was much promise in him. He would indeed be useful.

Especially once she sent the monster back to his family.

Neferata left the great hall before the end of the revels. The orgy of excess would continue until dawn, and she had accomplished her goals. She had been seen, reminding all present of who had brought the festival into being. More importantly, she had seen, noting well everything there was to observe. Now she retired to the most private of all her chambers.

The circular hall occupied the entire height of a narrow turret that rose from the centre of the Palace of Seven Vultures. It adjoined the great library, but its access was hidden, veiled by Neferata’s spells and wards designed by necromancers she had killed as soon as their work was completed, so that she alone would know the passes needed to arm and disarm them. Even the tower, the Claw of Memory, for all that it was clearly visible from the exterior, escaped notice. The observer’s gaze slid over it, all attention diverted to adjoining features of the palace.

Against the interior wall, a staircase of iron-clad bones spiralled up all the way to the roof. It climbed past shelves holding thousands of tomes bound in mortal flesh. The vertiginous chamber looked like another wing of the library. In a sense, it was a library, but one that held the works of a single author, who wrote for the eyes of a single reader. Here, Neferata wrote for the benefit of her future self, and consulted the wisdom of her past. The Claw held aeons of memories, and their analysis. In these books, she recorded all the means to power, to its preservation, and also the records of its losses, of the errors she had made, and of the inevitable blows of chance and destiny.

In the centre of the ground floor was a lectern. Its pedestal was a mummified body, strengthened by sorcery. Its jaws stretched wide by dried tendons into an expression of endless pain. The pain was no illusion, for the damned thing’s soul was trapped in the withered, leathered flesh, cursed to support the drakstone slab of the lectern’s top, and to feel the weight of every moment of eternal service.

The lectern held one of the bound volumes, open to a blank page, waiting. Neferata took up a quill, dipped it into a pot that was perpetually replenished in a fluid that mixed ink, blood and ectoplasmic ichor. She began to write, addressing a warning to herself for now and in the days and millennia to come.

A storm is coming. A storm is always coming, even for the gods. Where there is stability, there is ground awaiting disaster. Embrace the storm. If necessary, summon it.

– On the Crucible of Disaster

Chapter 3

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

The thin vampire sat on the throne atop the mound of iron-cast corpses. Torchlight danced over his armour of midnight-blue. He cast his eye around the circular chamber. It had been abandoned by its former mistress who no longer used it to receive and devour the firstborn.

It is mine, now, Venzor thought. I decide its purpose. He smiled, and his flesh pulled tightly over his narrow skull. Bit by bit, he was establishing his claim on the Palace of Seven Vultures.

The door to the chamber opened. The vampire who entered was injured, but she walked without hesitation. Her armour bore the marks of huge claws, and her drawn sword was slick with blood. She stopped before the great mound and looked up.

Venzor rose from the throne, his membranous wings folded beneath his arms. He walked halfway down the hill, stopped and bowed.

‘I am Venzor,’ he said, ‘sworn to Arkhan the Black. I am his regent in Nulahmia, and I salute you, Dessina Avaranthe.’

The warrior’s eyes widened.

‘Yes,’ Venzor said, enjoying himself, ‘I know your hidden name. I am aware your splinter of that house has survived in the cracks and shadows until now. I have paid attention to the folklore of Nulahmia. I have heard the stories of the Avaranthes still fighting against Neferata, century after century.’

Dessina did not sheathe her blade, but she did not attack. She nodded, waiting for Venzor to speak again.

‘I am not the one you expected to find,’ he said.

‘Nothing in these halls is what I expected.’ She glanced back towards the open door. ‘I did not expect to do battle with Blood Knights.’

‘But perhaps you are not as surprised as you might be?’ Venzor asked.

‘Perhaps not,’ she admitted. ‘Who were they?’

‘Warriors loyal to Neferata, seeking to undermine what we are doing here. We do not prevent their infiltration of this region of the palace. We find them useful.’

‘And what is it that you are doing here?’

‘Recruiting,’ Venzor said with a thin smile. ‘Our lord Nagash has punished Neferata for her overreach during the recent siege. It was not her place to choose to forge an alliance with Sigmar’s immortals. For her presumption, she is punished.’

‘She still reigns over Nulahmia,’ Dessina spat, her voice filled with undisguised bitterness.

‘She does, but only after a fashion,’ Venzor reminded her. ‘Her authority is diminished. After all, here I stand, deep in her beloved palace. By right of my master, granted to him by Nagash, I have unlimited access to the palace. Our forces do more than govern the walls and the northern sector of Nulahmia. We watch her actions in the heart of her domain. We watch, we see and we act.’

‘Yet still she reigns,’ Dessina insisted.

Venzor conceded her point with a shrug. ‘For the moment. And so we recruit. We gather our strength. We prepare.’

‘You think to destroy her?’

‘Isn’t that what you thought when you found your way into these caverns? Did you really think to challenge her single-handedly?’

Dessina didn’t answer at first. At length she said, ‘I had to try something. I am a firstborn, and I knew that would open this entry point to the palace for me.’

Venzor’s fanged, misshapen smile became broad. ‘And you have done something. You are here. Join your strength to ours, firstborn of the broken House of Avaranthe and last of that line. You fought well for Nulahmia against the forces of Lord Lascilion, and you fought for a ruler who did not deserve your prowess. Fight with all your passion now. Be the leader you are destined to be. Avenge your house at last.’

‘You swear that Neferata will fall?’

‘Her final defeat is my great purpose,’ said Venzor. ‘And you. Are you true to your fallen house?’

‘I am.’ She pulled a chain out from her gorget. A large medal hung from it. Venzor noted the Avaranthe coat of arms: twin dragons coiling their tails around a spear of gold. Dessina let the medal hang on her chestplate.

Venzor nodded with approval. Carrying that medal, even concealed, was a supremely dangerous act of loyalty to her slaughtered ancestors. ‘Wear the honour of your house with pride,’ Venzor said, and walked the rest of the way down the mound of the dead.

Dessina took a step forwards, bent a knee and presented Venzor with the hilt of her blade. ‘My sword is for you, and for Arkhan.’ She bared her fangs. ‘Command me, so that I might drink the blood of Neferata.’

She had not lost the city. It had been stolen from her.

I will reclaim it.

The Queen of Shadows moved along the northern ramparts of the palace. Hate and determination swelled in her heart as she looked down the slope of Throne Mount upon the blemished vistas of Nulahmia. The blasting heat of the season of Crematory gnawed the bones of the towers. The wind was the breath of a forge, gritty with ash and blown dust. It was as nothing before the fire of Neferata’s purpose.

This will be mine again, she thought. All of it. All of you will be mine again.

The city still bore the scars of the invasion by the Slaaneshi lord Lascilion. Mausoleums, towers, bridges and grand boulevards had been destroyed in the fighting. One wound, at least, was healing to a certain extent. Nagash’s return had killed almost every living soul in the city, but mortals had since made their way back to Nulahmia. Even so, the metropolis of the living and the dead that had risen in answer to her will and her desire was marred. The aesthetic perfection of death that she had sought was cracked. The worst distortion was not the physical damage and a population that was still far from what it had been. The worst was the occupation.

Knowing how best to wound her, Nagash had decreed her punishment should be the loss of power, and he had commanded that the northern sector of Nulahmia be under Arkhan’s rule. Forces loyal to him, under the command of Venzor, were cantoned in barracks below the wall. Neferata was nominally sovereign over the rest of the city, but realities of shared rule meant that Venzor’s influence spread across Nulahmia. Mortal and undead powers were thinking through their allegiances. Neferata knew full well that there were those, even far outside the region controlled by Venzor, who saw advantages in allying themselves with Arkhan. As long as the other Mortarch had even a semblance of control in Nulahmia, Neferata could not be sure of her authority at any level. Nagash had undermined her from the foundations up. The city would not be hers until all of it bowed the knee to her again.

So she became a shadow, and made the Palace of Seven Vultures a tomb. There were no revels, no grand displays of power, artistry and blood. In time, when the Palace was truly hers again, she would remake it, too. For now, silence filled the halls. Venzor and his acolytes walked through the palace freely, but they encountered only the grey death of luxury. Her servants performed their duties, and members of her court came and went, but she refused to give Venzor the victory of seeing her daily humiliation. She passed from chamber to chamber like a breath of cold wind, seen only when she wished to be seen. She came upon courtiers when they did not expect her, emerging from darkness like a promise of vengeance. If Venzor wished to speak with her, then he must seek her, and if an encounter was absolutely necessary, it took place on her terms, where and when she chose. She was an absence, but a felt one. She was the movement in the corner of the eye, the footstep at the back. She was a whisper heard over all of Nulahmia. Every soul in the city, living or undead, tensed in the anticipation of her resurgence.

She had lost power, but she would reclaim it.

She walked the ramparts in silence, blending with the night, unseen by any of her sentries. She knew the rhythms of their patrols better than they themselves did. When she had had her fill of looking at what had been stolen from her, she withdrew into the interior of the palace.

Venzor went wherever he chose, but there was one door he had never seen, one chamber he had never entered. The Claw of Memory remained inviolate. When Nagash had returned from his apparent death, and she had been humbled on the point of turning the battle of Nulahmia into a great victory, Neferata had understood that punishment was coming to her, and that much would be stripped away. She had thrown all of her efforts into preserving her sanctum. It held the keys to her restoration. She would sooner burn it than have Venzor paw through its tomes, even though it was unlikely he would be able to interpret the ancient language of her writings. But the enchantments guarding its doorway had remained strong, and she had reinforced the wards since. Venzor’s pleasure in entering every other chamber of the palace was such that he remained oblivious to his blind spot around the single tower.

She left the outer wall of the palace, and made her way to the Claw, and to the parapet at the top of the spire. Only the elect of her servants could reach this peak, and even they could not do so from inside. There she could speak with her spies with no possibility of being seen or overheard. On this night, Lady Mereneth waited on her, standing against the battlements, facing outwards, away from the centre of the roof. The vampire noble bowed low when Neferata came up behind her.

‘Is there confirmation?’ Neferata asked.

‘Yes, my queen. Our scouts have observed the enemy force directly. It approaches from the north-west.’

‘It is a large one?’

‘Massive. Our initial judgement is that it is comparable to the army led by Lascilion, and its allegiance is to the Blood God.’

‘It is heading this way?’

‘We believe so, though it is still at such a distance that some doubt remains. There are also many obstacles between it and our walls.’

Neferata waved the matter away. ‘They are no longer obstacles that will stop such an army. Not now.’ Lascilion had pierced the veil concealing Nulahmia from the hordes of Chaos. Once found, the city could not be hidden again. Nor did Neferata wish it to be. ‘Does Venzor know of its existence?’

‘I don’t think so. Not yet.’

‘Very well.’ Neferata was pleased. Mereneth had justified her elevation yet again. ‘Tell me its location.’

Mereneth did, and then, dismissed, she dropped over the side of the battlements and scuttled, a shadowy spider, down the outer wall of the tower. Neferata looked up in the night sky and whispered, ‘Come to me.’

Her words reverberated through the night itself. They were soft, a hiss of command intended for one being only, and they made distance meaningless. Moments later, a concentrated glow of aethereal energy descended on the tower. Answering the call of his rider, Nagadron the Adevore landed on the parapet, claws sinking deep into stone.

The dread abyssal whipped the length of his skeletal tail back and forth, eager to obey. Neferata had exiled her mount from the palace at the beginning of the occupation. Since then, Nagadron had flown over Nulahmia in wide circles, hidden in the ash-clouds that shrouded the land, waiting to be called upon. He was a thing of bone and claws. His huge rib cage was a prison for countless phantom skulls, souls all screaming for release, their agony finding expression in the sick, pulsating green of their ghost light. Nagadron was their eternal sentence, and the beast drew strength and pleasure from their pain.

Nagadron lowered his huge skull, and Neferata mounted his back. She touched his neck bones, and he leapt into the sky. The wind blew hard and cold against Neferata’s face as they flew north-west, but it was not as hard nor as cold as she. Neferata stared towards the horizon, waiting for her first glimpse of the Khornate army, waiting for the first hint of the disaster she sought.

She did spare one glance for Nulahmia before it dropped behind. She looked at the expanse of the city that had been stolen from her. This will be mine, she thought again. No sacrifice would be too great in the name of power. Disaster is the crucible of opportunity, and you will be mine once more, if I have to burn you to the ground.

If I believe myself to be all-seeing, then I am lost. My sight has shadows. In them, enemies find shelter. To forget this truth is to offer my back to their blades.

– Treatise on Blindness

Chapter 4

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

Mathas left the Palace of Seven Vultures at twilight. Gorged senseless on blood, he had slept after the revels. He had no coherent memories of what had happened since. He could not remember retiring to a chamber, yet he had awakened in a golden sarcophagus lined with silk. The chamber was illuminated by a chandelier of human arms. Their hands held candles, and their severed ends dripped a soft rain of blood into a bronze basin set into the centre of the floor. When Mathas rose, the arms moved with him, stretching to shine their light where he went. A wardrobe of the same golden design as the sarcophagus held fine clothes for him, their material rich beyond the means of any mortal in Nulahmia. He found boots and gloves made of the finest leather. His senses were heightened, and the touch of the leather was a sensual delight. He inhaled its scent, and learned that it was worked from the flesh of infants. Next to the wardrobe were his armour and his sword. They had been repaired, cleaned and polished. They gleamed in the light of the chandelier. They were hungry, Mathas thought. Their hunger reflected his.

He dressed, donned his armour and exited the chamber. Servants bowed their heads as they passed him in the corridor. There were no guards outside the door. Mathas turned left, and surprised himself by finding his way to the grand entrance of the palace. As a mortal, he had attended court functions, performing the expected, worshipful homage to the queen, but he had never ventured beyond the great hall. Now he walked through the palace with the same assurance he had in his family’s home.

Home. The thought rose, insistent, burning with the force of a command, when he passed beyond the palace gates. He did not just wish to go there. He must go there. There was no choice.

Mathas descended the Throne Mount along the Pathway of Punishment. He walked down the centre of the wide, switch-backing road. The mortals climbing up to worship at the gates of the palace gave him a wide, anxious berth. The bloody, iron architecture of torture lined the avenue. Victims cried out in pillories, atop elevated breaking wheels, and shuddered their last on impalement poles. Lines of pikes were topped with heads, freshly decapitated or rotten with flies. Before this day, Mathas had stared at the torture with horror and fear. Now the scent of blood made him heady. It didn’t matter how much he had fed the night before. The thirst was always there, always ready. If the duty to return to the Hellezan palace was not so ferocious, he saw how easily he might pause to drink from one of the suffering mortals.

Or perhaps he would have chosen a richer, stronger vintage. He could sense the blood pulsing through the veins of every mortal he passed. He was a predator moving through a river of prey, his for the taking. The kills would take no effort. He had learned that last night. His strength was prodigious. His hands could puncture bodies, opening them wide and spilling their treasures for his delectation. He was walking murder. He knew it, and the mortals did. They glanced at him in terror, and he could see their desperate hope that they would pass beneath his notice, that they would escape his desire, because there was nothing they could do to defend themselves.

But first, home. Nothing else was as important as home. It called to him, thundering in his head like a heartbeat, home, home, home, and he marched to the rhythm of the summons.

Below the Throne Mount, he moved quickly through the streets. His stride was effortless, and he passed over the cobblestones as if he were flying. The temptation of blood was everywhere, but he found the mastery of his instincts becoming easier. And the closer he came to the Hellezan palace, the more urgent the drive to reach home became.

Within those walls was the blood that was truly his.

He raised a gauntleted fist when he reached the palace doors, and he hammered on them with the same force that had called him out what must have been an aeon ago. The bronze trembled, as if it too feared the return of its house’s master.

Three streets away, overlooking the grand sweep of the Queensroad, a clock tower tolled the fall of night. It was a tall shadow, and twisted, a giant of tortured architecture, lit from within by a spectral glow. To look upon one of its faces was to see time as the inexorable approach of death. Now the hollow call of its bell sounded at the same moment as the doors of the Hellezan palace opened. Mathas could not but perceive an omen in that coincidence.

His parents and Teyosa were there, flanked by guards. The faces that met Mathas were almost as pale as his. He was white with death, and they with fear.

‘We prayed for your return,’ Verrick whispered.

‘Your wish has been granted,’ said Mathas.

Verrick blinked at his words, and turned even more pale.

In his father’s stricken face, Mathas saw the truth of what he had become. He was the shape of the family’s doom. Teyosa, Verrick and Glanath stood straight and proud despite their terror, and the guards did not flinch, though he could cut them down in an eye blink.

The people I love most are waiting for me to kill them, Mathas thought.

The thirst curled in his chest. He heard the hammering of pulses, smelled the blood that surely was eager to leap from veins into his mouth.

Mathas stepped across the threshold, into his moment of truth.

He looked at Teyosa, and reached out for her. ‘Do not fear me,’ he said.

She rushed into his arms, and they embraced.

‘She did not take you from me,’ Teyosa murmured.

Mathas groaned a sob of gratitude.

‘And she has not made me kill all that I love,’ he said. ‘I did not destroy her, but it is she who has failed.’

‘How is this possible?’ Verrick asked when Mathas and Teyosa at last broke their embrace. The guards had withdrawn to give them privacy. ‘You are…’ Verrick did not finish. He winced, overcome by grief and relief at the same time.

‘I am undead, father. We must say the truth, face it and use it. I am a vampire. But I am not her thrall.’

‘But how?’ Verrick insisted.

If he had been asked while he was still making his way through the streets, Mathas would not have been able to answer. He had not even known, then, if he was free. The thirst and the need to return were so strong, they had seemed to be the same impulse. He was thankful they were not. He was able to think more clearly now, and he understood at least in part how he had triumphed. ‘Family,’ he said. ‘It is our ties that have made me strong.’

He remembered the darkness taking him as Neferata drank his blood. ‘I could not fight her,’ he said. ‘She took me, and I fell into night. She stole everything that defines me…’ He paused, the memory of dissolution sending a shudder through his frame. Then another memory came, the memory of salvation, and his strength returned. He looked at Teyosa. ‘But she could not take you from me. At the last, I saw your face. I felt your presence, and your love – our love. It was the last thing that was mine, and I held it. You were the jewel whose light defeated the abyss.’ He smiled. ‘You are my truth. You are my duty and my defiance.’

The truth of love had sustained him in the hours that had followed, even if he had not been aware of its presence. He felt it now, in the centre of his heart. It was imperishable in its strength, eternal in its fire. His death had been as nothing to this truth. His body had died, but his self had survived.

The greater implication of that survival was not lost on him.

Teyosa saw it too. ‘She failed,’ she said, echoing him. ‘She can be resisted. She can be fought.’ What had only been a dream before was now a reality. Where there had been only determination, now they could add hope.

‘And she will have to be fought now,’ Mathas said. ‘Our time is limited. If I was permitted to return, it is because she believes me to be her thrall, and that I have come to prey on this family and control it in her name.’

‘Does she suspect us?’ Glanath asked.

‘If she does, she must be uncertain, and not see us as a threat,’ said Teyosa. ‘Or she would have destroyed us.’

Mathas thought of the destroyed House of Avaranthe, its inhabitants reduced to skeleton slaves reshaping their home into a monstrous image conjured by Neferata’s will. Teyosa gave him a quick look. She knows, he thought. If I had good news to give her, I would have done so. He would tell her what he had seen, but when they were alone, and she had the space to grieve. He held her eyes with his, and her lips thinned as she braced herself to go on.

‘We have her doubts in our favour,’ Mathas said. ‘But it will not be long before she realises that I have not done what she expects me to do, and that I am free of her control. We must strike before she takes further action.’

‘Can we possibly be strong enough?’ Verrick wondered aloud.

‘No matter how long we prepare, the only way we will know is in the struggle itself,’ Mathas told him. ‘But she is weaker than we thought. Her failure to destroy my will is proof of that. She is weaker, and we are stronger.’

‘He is right,’ Teyosa said to Verrick. ‘The time has come. The signs are all there. Tell him.’

‘Tell me what?’ Mathas asked.

Verrick smiled. ‘In the short time of your absence, we have received help from outside the walls of the city.’

‘What help?’

‘Come. I will show you.’

The four of them descended into the vaults of the Hellezan palace. Past the wine cellars were the deeper foundations, older than the palace itself, riddled with tunnels linked to the honeycomb of underground passages that swarmed beneath Nulahmia. Mathas did not know how far down they extended, though there were whispers that their roots were so deep that unwary explorers would enter the true underworlds, never to return.

‘She can still see us,’ Verrick murmured, ‘even down here.’

The tunnels, like every other aspect of Nulahmia, were part of Neferata’s design. The city was so utterly her creation that every bend and branch and dead end, in every specific location, had come into being because she had willed it. The sense of security created by the maze and the depths was an illusion. If Neferata turned her gaze this way, there would be no hiding from her.

‘She can see us,’ said Mathas, ‘but only if she knows to look.’ Her eyes cannot be everywhere at once. There must be some limits to her knowledge. There must be.

At length they reached a low, wide chamber, lit by a handful of guttering torches. The stone coffins that lined its walls were empty. The people gathered in the space would have been careful to make sure of that. The tombs had been disused so long that their interiors were thick with cobwebs and dust.

Present were the heads of more than a dozen of the great mortal families of Nulahmia. This was the first time Mathas had seen them together, outside of court functions. Each of them represented a cluster of families. The cells of the rebellion were breaking the security of isolation. They sensed that the time to strike was fast approaching. There were vampires present too. They represented houses that were under Neferata’s political control, but none were her direct thralls.

But among the vampires was one Mathas had seen only a few hours before. He was Jedefor, and he was a captain of the guard at the palace.

Mathas eyed him carefully. Jedefor gave him a brief nod. Mathas had not known he was part of the conspiracy. His jaw tightened with suspicion. ‘I am surprised Neferata would choose as captain a vampire who is not her thrall,’ he said.

‘I am surprised one of her thralls can claim to be a rebel.’

Teyosa touched Mathas’ arm, and he bit back his retort. ‘Indeed,’ he said, and forced a smile of acceptance. If Jedefor was here, then he had already proved himself loyal to the cause.

There was another vampire that Mathas did not know. His brow was heavy, his chin pointed, giving his face a pronounced triangular appearance. He was a noble, clad in fine armour of wightbone and leather. The insignia of his house, borne on his chest, was strange to Mathas. Jedefor introduced him as Lestor.

‘We come from a friend outside Nulahmia,’ said Lestor. ‘He has taken an interest in your cause, and pledges his support.’

‘Of what kind?’ Mathas asked.

‘Arms. Other reinforcements too, for when you march.’

‘And what is his price?’

‘Nothing you cannot afford.’

Mathas had his doubts about that. But the conspirators were not in a position to turn their back on aid.

‘Please convey our thanks to your lord,’ said Hasynne of House Nastannar. Broad of shoulder and thick of arm, the vampire seemed to have come into being to take to the battlefield in heavy armour. Hers was the most bellicose of the noble families. She brought great strength to the cause.

Lestor bowed. Jedefor looked pleased, and Mathas guessed what he hoped to gain from Neferata’s overthrow.

But this is more than an exchange of masters, Mathas reminded himself. Whoever replaces Neferata may be as cruel, but none will be as powerful.

‘This is very well, and we are grateful,’ said Sethek, one of the vampire nobles. Her gratitude sounded perfunctory. ‘But we are running out of time. Meeting like this makes certain the moment of our discovery is imminent. When do we attack?’

‘Very soon,’ said Mathas. ‘I agree with you. We must make ready.’

‘Very soon,’ Sethek repeated bitterly. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means what I said,’ said Mathas. ‘I doubt that anyone here is ready to march on Throne Mount tonight.’

‘We are ready,’ said the vampire lord Borzhas, standing next to Sethek.

‘Ready to attack on your own?’ Mathas asked.

Borzhas frowned at him.

‘That is why we are here now,’ said Teyosa. ‘To coordinate, to know what must yet be done, and to set about doing it.’

‘Let us be clear about my role,’ Jedefor said. ‘I will provide information about the Palace’s defences on the chosen night, and I will do what I can to assist behind the walls. But I cannot be seen to do so until the last moment. I will not lead the uprising.’

There was disappointment in the faces around the chamber.

Coward, thought Mathas. Though he understood Jedefor’s reasoning, and he wondered how certain the captain was of his troops. Mathas looked at the hesitation in the others. Sethek and Borzhas were still seething over the delay. They were reckless, he thought. Before either of them could step forward, he said, ‘I will lead. I will carry the banner for mortal and vampire alike.’

The veins of Borzhas’ face stood out in anger, giving him the appearance of cracked porcelain. Jedefor, though, was nodding. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Good. Her newest thrall. The proof of her weakness.’

‘The proof of our strength,’ said Teyosa.

Mathas believed Jedefor was right. He hoped Teyosa was too.

She looked at him, her eyes shining and strong, and suddenly he felt he could throw the Palace of Seven Vultures down with his bare hands.

If strength is to serve power, its true form must be recognised. Strength is to understand limits. It is to see the power of the adversary. It is also to see the enemy’s illusions of strength, and to turn them to advantage.

– The Use of Enemies

Chapter 5

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

Ruhok turned at the sound of the rumbling grind and the screams. A stretch of land a score of yards across was eating more of his troops. The Mighty Lord of Khorne cursed the weakness of his men to let themselves be taken, and he cursed the ground on which they all walked.

His army was fighting its way through the Cremation Plain. The landscape looked like bare, jagged rock. In reality, it was composed of the remains of millions upon millions of beings. Their teeth were fused together in vicious clusters, jabbing upwards through densely packed ash. The surface might be solid for a long stretch, and then suddenly the ash would give way, insubstantial as a dust cloud, and the long, razored constructions of teeth would grind and slash. The Plain would take its victims one at a time, or it could devour a hundred at once. There was never any warning, and no way to tell where the unstable ground lay.

The teeth ripped flesh to shreds. Blood erupted in fountains from the dying men. And when blood touched the Plain, a new cremation occurred. Flames roared out and up from the collapse, incinerating the corpses, and washing over more troops as they fled the explosion. Ruhok stood without flinching as the fire engulfed him. His ornate bronze armour blazed crimson, shining brighter than the flames in the night. His flesh had become a blackened, scarred hide, so thickened and scaled with scabs that there was nothing left for the fire to consume. He waited out the fire. When the flames dissipated, it appeared to his troops as if he had defeated them. Shouts of anger and praise came to him, and the horde struggled on.

‘We move ever forward, Lord Ruhok,’ said Ghour, pausing with him.

‘Too slowly,’ Ruhok told the bloodsecrator.

Ghour did not contradict him. He bowed his head and, carrying Ruhok’s huge icon high, marched forward.

Ruhok paused a moment longer, watching the huge siege towers sway back and forth. The casualties among the brayherds hauling them forwards were tremendous. Every few moments, new flames marked where the ground consumed tuskgors as they pulled the great chains, or the towers jerked as their wheels dropped into another collapse. The towers were immense constructions of brass. Their peaks were carved into grotesque faces with gaping jaws. The interior of the maws glowed red. The towers had their own fires. They were forges of destruction. Nations had fallen to their advance, cities reduced to ashes on the wind. Ruhok had sworn to Khorne that he would bring the same fate to Nulahmia.

At the base of the towers, Torsek the Skullgrinder raged at the tuskgors. His anvil swung on its chain, striking any slave who did not pull hard enough. The towers were Torsek’s creation, and he rarely left them, as if his will alone was what pulled them to the walls they would destroy.

As Ruhok turned and marched forwards again, his slaughterpriest caught up with him. Vul’s chest was marked by the last explosions. His flesh glistened with burns, and his horned helm was charred. ‘Doubts are spreading,’ he warned. ‘Doubts that you know where you are taking us.’ He lowered the point of his spear with a rattle from the skulls tethered to the shaft, and pointed into the distance. There was nothing to see except the next few hundred yards of the Cremation Plain, lit by the torches of the warhorde and the infernal blazes of the siege towers. ‘By day and by night we march across this ground, and by day and by night there is only more of it.’

‘Are my followers afraid?’ Ruhok demanded. ‘If they are, they are weak. Let the ground consume them.’

‘It does, Lord Ruhok. It well and truly does.’

Ghour had stopped again, watching the exchange, his eyes narrowing with anger when he looked at Vul. Ruhok wasn’t sure if Vul was merely reporting on the discontent, or indirectly issuing his own challenge. It did not matter. His message for everyone was the same. ‘Let those who doubt me try themselves against the edge of my axe.’ He swung the blade of the terrible weapon up and down. The rune of Khorne glowed white with heat, and the axe hissed in hunger. ‘Spread the word!’ Ruhok shouted. ‘Tell them! Tell them all! Step forward if you defy me! Prove your leadership by usurping mine!’ He lowered his voice. ‘But tell them this, too. Tell them that their loyalty and their effort will be rewarded. Nulahmia will perish forever in a storm of fire and blood that will shake the entire realm.’

Vul bowed. ‘I will do as you command.’ His voice trembled with reignited fervour. The slaughterpriest believed in Ruhok’s promises.

‘Take my gospel to the warhorde,’ Ruhok said. ‘Fill the hearts of the Bloodbound with new fire.’

Ruhok marched on, thinking of the destruction to come. The visions of utter ruin had filled his thoughts since the Everchosen had given him the dispensation to correct the errors of that dilettante Lascilion and in some measure avenge the death of Bloodking Thagmok. Ruhok grudgingly admitted that the lord of Slaanesh had one genuine accomplishment of which he could boast, and that was finding the way past the magical defences that had hidden Nulahmia for so long. But once in the city, he had squandered his advantage, indulging too much in the pursuit of sensation rather than devoting all his energies to the complete annihilation of his foe.

Nulahmia was no longer inaccessible, but when Ruhok was done with it the city would have vanished again, this time forever. He would drown Nulahmia in blood, and leave nothing behind, not even the stones to mark where the city had once stood.

But first he had to reach it, and the land was seeking to grind his warhorde down before he could even be absolutely certain he was leading them in the right direction.

He felt the ground subside under his right foot. He sidestepped with a growl, while a spike of teeth ground futilely in his wake.

Movement in the sky caught his attention. A glow of wraithlight was approaching. He stopped walking and raised his hand to warn of an approaching enemy. There was just one, though. The appearance of a single foe made him far more suspicious than the thunder of an opposing army. An individual meant some sort of subtlety was being woven, and he despised such schemes. They were the delight of the followers of Tzeentch; all Ruhok asked of war was the endless spilling of blood.

The glow drew closer, and Ruhok’s jaw dropped in surprise. Mounted on a dread abyssal, the Mortarch of Blood flew towards him. Ruhok had never seen Neferata before, but he knew this was she. No other being could have such presence. Ghour hissed, and Ruhok growled low in his throat, discomfited by the sensations Neferata provoked, even at a distance.

The dread abyssal stopped less than a hundred yards away from the Lord of Khorne, and some twenty feet up. It made lazy passes through the air, its bony tail whipping sinuously. Ruhok looked on all sides for signs of an ambush, but Neferata appeared to be completely alone.

Kathag, the Exalted Deathbringer of Ruhok’s Gorechosen, came up behind him. The scars on his bare torso were so numerous, they had turned his hide into leathered armour. His face was barely human. He had cut his cheeks open, stretching his lips into a perpetual grimace of hate. The horns he wore completed his transformation into a beast of war, a thing of such coiled muscle and burning rage that he looked as if he needed no battering ram to shatter fortress gates. ‘This is a trap,’ he said. ‘Do not let her spring it.’ His voice was surprisingly soft. The anger of his words seemed to come from a source of instinct rather than wisdom. He adjusted his grip on his huge, ruinous axe. ‘I will destroy her.’

‘We shall present a fine skull to Khorne,’ Ghour said.

‘But can you?’ Neferata asked. Below her, bloodreavers had rushed forwards. They strained upwards with their blades, shouting in rage and hunger. She ignored them. ‘And will you?’ she asked, her attention on Ruhok. ‘When I offer you the keys to my city?’

‘This is a trap,’ Kathag said again.

‘Is it?’ said Neferata. ‘If it is, wouldn’t I have sprung it by now?’ She cast her eyes over the army of the Bloodbound. ‘It is done,’ she mocked. ‘The war is over. You are all dead.’

The warhorde screamed back at her.

Neferata shrugged. ‘It seems you are not.’ She turned back to Ruhok. ‘I will speak with you alone,’ she said.

Attack now, he thought. Destroy her, and the siege is won before it has started. The thought was not enticing. That was a victory unworthy of Khorne. Unlike Kathag, Ruhok was not foolish enough to think Neferata could be taken down so easily. If she was here, she was ready to fend off an immediate challenge. And her offer was interesting. After the endless march through the Cremation Plain, it was very interesting.

Ruhok nodded. ‘I will speak with you,’ he said.

‘You are a fool,’ Kathag snarled.

‘Then I will not return, and you will be Lord,’ said Ruhok. ‘And so you will be spared a duel you could not win. You should be grateful to the vampire. Perhaps offer her a few skulls.’ He pushed Kathag away contemptuously.

The Exalted Deathbringer’s eyes narrowed, but he stepped aside, calm despite the insult. The spikes of the skullgouger on his left hand were motionless. He had not even clenched his fist in response.

‘You accept insults too easily,’ Ruhok said, trying to provoke a reaction. He did not like the depths of Kathag’s self-discipline. He had yet to challenge Ruhok’s reign and had fought loyally. But this ability to channel his anger into still waters was a profound threat.

‘I ignore what is pointless,’ said Kathag.

Ruhok growled and stalked forward, following Neferata as her mount flew slowly away, remaining low and visible.

Ruhok followed the flight of the Mortarch for over an hour. There were only slight rises in the Plain, and they would have had to travel for miles to be beyond the sight of the warhorde. Neferata had to content herself with pulling him far beyond the possibility of immediate action from his army.

Ruhok laughed. ‘Do not think you are safe!’ he called.

Neferata didn’t answer. Her skeletal beast landed. Its head, covered with an eyeless mask, faced Ruhok, the jaws gaping slightly, perception deeper and more sinister than any provided by eyes focused on the lord of Khorne. Neferata descended and stood before Ruhok. In her hands were a black dagger and wide-bladed staff darker than the night. She held them casually, without threat. The danger they represented was clear. She looked steadily at Ruhok, and though her skull would be a supreme prize to offer to Khorne, he felt himself strangely reluctant to attack her. The low growl began once more in the back of his throat.

‘So,’ said Neferata, ‘what lord of Khorne is it who seeks to capture Nulahmia?’

‘I am Ruhok, and I will not capture it. I will burn it. I will grind it into dust.’

‘Good,’ said Neferata.

Ruhok snorted. ‘Do you expect me to believe you seek to betray your city to me? Without reason?’

‘I have every reason,’ said Neferata. Her voice wrapped itself around his head, its music insinuating and intoxicating. ‘It is not my city any longer. It has been taken from me, and what I cannot have, I will destroy.’ As she spoke, her voice became colder, shot through with an anger of ice and steel.

That was rage he saw in her, and Ruhok had a deep understanding of rage. ‘I will destroy your city with or without your help,’ he said, but he was curious now. ‘What could you offer me?’

‘You are approaching the city from the north-west,’ said Neferata. ‘Yes, Lord Ruhok, you are indeed heading in the right direction. You will continue as you have been.’

Ruhok stiffened in anger that she dared to give him an order. But he would hear her out. And, though he could barely admit it to himself, he wanted to continue listening to that voice.

‘You will, as you begin your attack, make a convincing feint towards the north-west section of our wall and the Hyena Gate. But your main strength must be ready to strike instead at the north-east. Send a small force ahead, and they will find the Raven Gate open to them. Let them hold it, and the city is yours.’

‘Why is this subterfuge necessary? Open Hyena Gate for us.’ He was already displeased to be discussing a form of warfare that was anything less direct than a battering ram.

‘I cannot,’ said Neferata. ‘That gate is too well guarded.’

‘And the other is not?’ Her tale was sounding more improbable by the second.

‘The second is not guarded because the defenders of the northern quarters of Nulahmia do not know about it. It is small, and my arts have kept it hidden from all eyes but mine. It is a route for my personal escape. If Nulahmia is no more, I shall have no further need of it.’

You will regret giving that secret away, Ruhok thought. You will die with the city you are betraying.

‘Once enough of your troops have…’ Neferata paused as if searching for the right word. ‘Once enough have entered the city, you may open whatever gates you like.’ She smiled, perfect predator teeth showing through the blood-red of her lips.

‘And what of your troops? You are sacrificing them on the altar of your displeasure?’

‘You will not be fighting my forces. Your foes will be legions in the service of Arkhan the Black.’ The smile vanished, and the terrible winter of fury consumed her features once more. ‘Did you not understand that the city is no longer mine?’

‘I do,’ said Ruhok. ‘And now so must you. I said that after I am done, nothing will remain of Nulahmia.’

‘So I should hope.’

‘My vow encompasses all that belongs to the city. Your betrayal is no protection. I will destroy you too.’

Neferata sheathed her dagger and stepped forward. She reached out slowly. Stunned by disbelief, Ruhok did not react. She dragged a nail down the scarred flesh of his cheek. The wrath of flame could not move him, but that delicate touch sent a shudder through his frame. ‘Please try, Lord Ruhok,’ Neferata whispered. ‘Please try. Be my disaster.’

Properly honed, the blade of truth and the blade of lies are indistinguishable.

– Philosophy of Deception

Chapter 6

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

Neferata headed back towards Nulahmia in a shroud of darkness. She was the unseen watcher in the night, and she was hunting. She flew in a search pattern, covering a wide area on the path between the warhorde and the city. She scoured the ground with her sorcerous sight, seeking those who would remain unseen, watching for the other watchers.

She needed Ruhok to advance as far as possible without Venzor knowing. The warhorde was an impressive one, but she would give Ruhok every advantage she could going into the conflict. She needed the full power of the disaster.

Twice she caught sight of her own spies moving swiftly through the night. Then, midway on her journey, she saw two figures who did not serve her. They were moving north, and on the western edge of a path that would bring them to a point where they would catch sight of the warhorde. If they deviated slightly from their current direction, they might miss Ruhok’s advance entirely. But if they kept going, they would see what Neferata did not want them to see.

Nagadron plunged downwards, claws extended. Neferata’s veil of darkness shredded, and she descended on the scouts with the full fury of the hunt.

The Adevore opened his jaws wide, and the souls trapped within his frame screamed. The cry shattered the night, and the two vampires on the ground froze, prey paralysed by the shriek of a raptor. They looked up, saw destruction coming for them, and ran, sprinting in opposite directions. Nagadron streaked for the one on the right. Just before he reached the ground, Neferata leapt from his back, arcing through the air for the other scout. She landed in a crouch a few yards ahead of the vampire. Ash puffed up between her feet. Though his eyes were wide with fear, the scout kept running towards her, choosing to fight rather than veer off. There was no escape. His sword was drawn, and he lunged at Neferata with the ferocity of desperation.

Neferata rose from her crouch and blocked the scout’s blade with Aken-seth, the Staff of Pain. When the sword made contact with the staff, a crackle of eldritch magic arced from Aken-seth to the blade and down the arm of the vampire. He screamed, immobilised by pain that coursed through his tainted blood into the depth of his bones. Neferata stabbed him through the chest with Akmet-har. The Dagger of Jet pierced his heart. The scout’s vitality, which he had taken from the blood of mortals, was stolen again, devoured by the ancient weapon. The vampire’s face withered. His sword dropped to the ground, and then he fell too.

A short distance away, Nagadron was dragging his claws over the body of the other scout, spreading it over the Cremation Plain. A circle of fire erupted around the dread abyssal as the vampire’s blood soaked the hungry ground.

‘Take the body,’ Neferata commanded. ‘This one too.’

Nagadron obeyed, grasping his victim in curled claws, and seizing Neferata’s in his jaws. The monster’s teeth ground bones and organs to jelly. There had still been a spark of existence in the scout, and now he twitched his last.

Neferata mounted Nagadron again, and she directed him west as they flew off once more. They travelled for some time, and a murky dawn had come before Neferata brought Nagadron to land. They were in a region where the Cremation Plain transitioned to the Tombhills. The terrain became rolling here. The hills varied in size, but not in shape. They were all burial mounds. They held as little as a single grave, or many hundreds. There were so many that they overlapped, the upward slopes of some mounds emerging from the rounded peaks of others. Carrion grasses covered them: brown, razor-edged weeds that hummed and sang in the winds blowing over the hills. The grasses fed on the countless bodies buried beneath the surface of the Tombhills. They also added new bodies to the land, slicing the veins of any living thing that dared to enter the region.

Where they had landed, the grasses presented in thin clumps, dusted by the ashes blown in from the Cremation Plain. The ground here was hard-packed dirt, and stable. The reeds recoiled from the presence of Neferata and Nagadron, then leaned in hungrily at the mangled bodies the abyssal steed dropped. Tiny mouths opened along their lengths, puckering in hunger. A few stalks sank the sharp contours of their lips into chunks of flesh, but not enough of the grass could reach to entirely consume the corpses. There would be traces of the scouts for some time to come.

Neferata had Nagadron paw through the remains again. The violence done to the bodies must be massive in order to conceal the signs of her handiwork. Just as importantly, the extent of the injuries would suggest attackers of enormous ferocity. That would make it easy for Venzor to believe that Khornate forces had passed this way, moving in a direction that would make them miss Nulahmia. This one scene of murder would not be enough to convince him, but there would be others to come.

The following night, she spoke with Mereneth again on the roof of the Claw of Memory.

‘I will have Venzor blind to the north-west,’ Neferata told her spy, ‘but believing himself to be clear-sighted. Draw his attention westwards. Hunt for his scouts. Lure them from the path that would lead to them to Ruhok, or kill them. Leave no trace of violence that would cause him to look in the direction of the enemy.’

‘Sooner or later, he will know what is coming,’ said Mereneth.

‘I do not expect the forces of Chaos to take the city by surprise.’ At least, Neferata thought, not initially. ‘But I will have Venzor less than prepared. We will do what is possible. What is most important is that he does not suspect my hand in the death of his agents. Should he become anxious enough about the north-west to send a reconnaissance force that way, ignore those troops.’ She would alter her tactics when that eventuality arose.

Five nights later, Neferata stood in a narrow fissure sunken into the outer wall of the Palace of Seven Vultures. Far below, the glints from torches and lanterns in the windows of Nulahmia’s palaces were indistinguishable from the wraithlight of tombs. The city flickered with currents of light and darkness, and the night pressed down, heavy with the great heat. The anticipation of fire dwelled in the city, a fever-dream of catastrophe.

Mereneth approached down the tunnel behind Neferata. They were in the gossamer web of passages that gave her secret movement through the Palace’s walls.

‘Venzor appears to be satisfied, my queen,’ Mereneth said. ‘He believes the news he receives about the passage of the enemy.’

‘I am less concerned with whether his belief is sincere or not,’ said Neferata, ‘than how he chooses to act.’ She did not turn around.

‘His energies remain concentrated on his position in the city.’

Neferata smiled thinly. ‘He seeks to rule entirely. When he believes he is ready, he will move against me.’

‘His ambition will be his doom,’ said Mereneth.

‘Do not be dismissive,’ Neferata warned. Now she faced her spy. ‘His challenge is real. The longer my rule is diminished, the stronger he becomes.’ She could feel more and more of the currents of the city flowing away from her. Greed and fear were the engines of loyalty in Nulahmia, and she was no longer the sole controller of those passions. She was engaged in a race to reclaim her rule before it was taken from her once and for all. ‘Loyalties are shifting, are they not? My subjects grow restive. They perceive a new master.’

‘Some do,’ Mereneth admitted. ‘We have not acted against them, as you commanded. Do you wish us to punish them now?’

‘Not yet. My judgement will fall on them, and it grows heavier with delay. For now, we wait. But we do not wait much longer, Mereneth. Ruhok approaches.’

‘We cannot keep Venzor’s awareness away from the warhorde much longer.’

‘I do not intend to. Indeed, I will warn him myself. Where is the proud lord?’

‘Holding court, my queen.’

‘Excellent. Then I shall see him.’

She left the tower, and Mereneth followed, the loyal shadow following the great one.

Venzor had quarters in a palace near the north wall, one whose mortal inhabitants had been killed by the return of Nagash. Though it was close to the larger concentration of the troops under his command, Venzor had been spending more and more time of late in the Palace of Seven Vultures. He was growing accustomed to its surroundings. He was coming to see himself as the new master of Throne Mount. Like a monarch in waiting, he had taken, for his use, a magnificent suite of chambers adjacent to the grand hall. Neferata had not protested. She had remained the phantom in the halls of the palace, and it had suited her purpose that the only show of luxury and renewed energy in the palace should come from Venzor. Let him be the counterfeit ruler. His poor mimicry of the glory that had been hers would only be the more apparent.

Neferata threw open the doors of Venzor’s receiving hall. The vampire lord was seated at the far end in a chair of gold and wraithbone, its arms constructed from fused, bejewelled skulls. It was very close to being a throne. Neferata had amused herself in the past by offering the seat to ambitious nobles and wealthy ambassadors from outside Nulahmia. Her amusement came precisely from the fact that the seat was so very near to being a throne, yet it was not. It rarely took more than a few seconds for her visitors to understand this truth, and to feel torn between the honour that was shown them, and the humiliation of the lesson. Venzor, it seemed, was immune to the lesson of the chair. Neferata looked forward to ending his delusion.

Neferata strode down the centre of the hall. On either side of the central aisle, a procession of tall candelabra lit the room. They were bodies of mortals frozen in the moment of death agonies. Molten iron, and then gold, had been poured over them. The courtiers surrounding Venzor drew aside at her advance. Alarm crossed the faces of the vampire nobles. She gave each of them a quick, contemptuous look. Flanking Venzor were his lieutenants. One of them was Dessina Avaranthe. There, Neferata thought, stood the symbol of a family with a history deeply entwined with the currents of treachery that flowed through Nulahmia. Such turns of fate and chance it had taken for Dessina to exist at all. An age had passed since Neferata had ordered the extermination of the Avaranthes, yet here still was a representative of that house, clad in armour, and silent in power.

Venzor seemed entertained by Neferata’s interruption. ‘You honour us with your presence, Queen Neferata,’ he said. He hesitated minutely before and after her title, underscoring its precariousness.

‘It is not an honour I wish to bestow,’ said Neferata. ‘But your foolishness compels me to do so. I am here to demand that you explain yourself. With so much at stake, why have you concentrated solely on defence? I do not understand.’

Venzor’s thin lids lowered and raised in a slow, reptilian blink of confusion. ‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ he said, his rasp steady and unconcerned. ‘I do not know what you are talking about. Defence against what?’

Neferata stared at him, arranging her features into a mask of astonishment and anger. ‘Why do you dissemble? What purpose is there in pretence? Defence against the Khornate warhorde, of course.’

Venzor shrugged dismissively. ‘We have noted the evidence of its passing. The enemy has not located Nulahmia. There is no threat.’

Neferata maintained an icy silence for a long moment. Though she had engineered the deception, she still wondered if Venzor truly was as much the fool as he appeared to be in this moment. She didn’t think he was. Some of his unconcern had to be for show. Even so, her pretended outrage took very little effort to be convincing. ‘No threat,’ she said at last, repeating his words with a precise mixture of contempt and disbelief. ‘Evidence of its passing? Lord Venzor, what have your scouts been telling you? Where have you been sending them? My spies have seen the warhorde. The Bloodbound of Khorne will be at our gates in a matter of days.’

Now it was Venzor’s turn to be silent. His left eye fluttered with a nervous twitch. ‘You are certain of this?’

‘Would I be here if I was not?’ Neferata began to pace. ‘We have been fools, both of us,’ she said. ‘You, for remaining ignorant of what is closing in on Nulahmia. I, for assuming that you were taking measures to protect the northern walls. I should have spoken sooner.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

She stopped pacing and rounded on him with a snarl. ‘Because I did not wish to,’ she hissed. ‘Because your presence in my city is a perpetual humiliation. And because I thought you knew what you were doing!’ Venzor fumbled for a response, and she kept going. ‘At least my foolishness had limits. I have taken some measures to prepare for the coming war.’

‘What measures?’ Venzor asked.

Was that hope she heard in his voice? The irony was of a rich vintage. It was the first unalloyed pleasure she had experienced within the walls of Nulahmia in a long time. ‘My agents have opened negotiations with Lord Ruhok,’ she said, and the look on Venzor’s face was the equal in delight to the irony of his hope a moment before.

‘They have what?’ he sputtered.

‘They have promised, in my name, to ensure that the Hyena Gate will open to the warhorde.’

Venzor gaped. One hand clutched the arm of the chair, while the other clawed at the air, as if trying to catch the words that had failed him.

Until now, the rest of the vampires present had been silent, perhaps hoping to drop beneath the notice of the leaders in conflict and so be forgotten. Now they stirred. Whispers of fear circled the hall. Neferata felt their stares. None could understand what she was doing. All were reminded that in this room, there was only one being who had the right to inspire terror in their hearts, and that was their queen, not this ambitious lieutenant of the Mortarch of Sacrament.

‘What have you done?’ Venzor finally managed. Behind him, Dessina took a step forward, her gaze furious, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Venzor raised a finger, signalling patience and restraining her.

‘What, it seems, was necessary.’ She cocked her head and looked curious. When Venzor did not respond, she sighed in exasperation. ‘Do you not see? I have set the terms of the battle in our favour. We know where Ruhok will direct his strength, and we have time to prepare our defences and our counter-attack.’

Venzor leaned forward, some animation returning to him. His eyes narrowed. ‘And why would Ruhok trust you? Why would he believe you would betray your city?’

‘Because rage is what he knows. My spies brought him word of strife in Nulahmia. Will you pretend there is none?’ Venzor said nothing, and she continued. ‘They told him a tale of usurpation. And of a queen willing to destroy what was taken from her.’ There was no pretence of anger in her words. Her voice was the cold of vengeance, and the flames of the candelabra dimmed. The courtiers instinctively took a step back. No one in the hall doubted her sincerity.

‘That is a tale to convince a lord of Khorne,’ Venzor admitted.

‘I’m glad you agree,’ said Neferata. She strode forward until she towered over Venzor in his seat. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘what do you intend? Are my efforts to be in vain?’

‘They will not be,’ said Venzor. ‘If this is the situation we face, then we will make ready, we will break the siege before it even begins, and we will crush the forces of Chaos.’

Neferata read his eagerness and his determination. She was close to putting Venzor on the war footing she desired. If, he had said. If this is the situation we face. He was cautious. He knew better than to take her simple word as truth. He would seek certainty for himself. And look where she wanted him to look.

Once Neferata had left, Venzor turned to Dessina. ‘How much of what she said would you believe?’ he asked.

‘I was never close to the queen,’ said Dessina.

‘I am well aware of that. But your life and your undeath have been spent in Nulahmia. You have been in and out of her court. Your insights have already proven valuable. I would have more of them now.’

Dessina bowed her head in respect. ‘I believe most of what we have heard. A lie about the advance of a Khornate army would be too easy to disprove.’

‘Then you feel we should act on the assumption that her information is accurate.’

Dessina grimaced. ‘I would do so with reluctance.’

Venzor nodded, pleased. ‘As would I. The question, then, is where we are to find the lie in her words. This is where we must find the trap and its nature.’

‘She may not be lying at all,’ said Dessina.

‘Explain yourself.’

‘It is a strategy I have witnessed the Mortarch deploy more than once, but one I have not been able to detect until it is too late. She may have told you the truth, but perhaps not all of it. Or she may have told you all the truth, but told it slant. For Neferata, the truth is the most powerful of all lies.’

‘I see.’ Venzor sank back in his throne. One fang bit his lower lip as he began to go over Neferata’s words, looking for the gap in the story or the weakness in the reasoning that would show him what he must do to hold on to the city.

I know what lies on the other side of stagnation, of decay, of all forms of defeat. I have seen it. When I close my eyes, I can see it now.

– The Understanding of Annihilation

Chapter 7

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

Neferata was uneasy. Her impulse said, Look in the north.

Her discomfort came from more than the rumours of rebellion. It was acute to the point of pain. It was an instinct she did not dare ignore. Something was happening in the northern reaches of Nulahmia. From the highest tower of the Palace of Seven Vultures, she looked down the Throne Mount into the city, her witchsight revealing every street and courtyard to her. She saw nothing to warrant what she felt. The city pulsed with its nocturnal rhythms of cruelty and blood. Predators hunted prey, and the weak cowered behind locked doors and barred windows. The dance of the living and the dead continued as it had for millennia. She saw nothing to warrant her unease.

I see no rebellion, either, she thought. Yet I know the conspirators are out there.

And then again, Look in the north.

She would not ignore the instinct. So she seized the Staff of Pain and the Dagger of Jet, and summoned Nagadron. With Aken-seth strapped to her back, and Akmet-har in hand, she flew off from the Palace. What she could not see from a distance, she would hunt out. She left behind her bodyguard of morghasts. For now, she would be the unseen presence in the night. She would find the source of her unease, and then decide on a course of action.

On Nagadron’s back, she soared over the rooftops of Nulahmia. To the citizens, mortal and undead, who happened to look up, she would have appeared as no more than an eddy in the banks of fog that moved across the city. The Adevore flew low, grazing the peaked gables, flashing between the spires of mausoleums. Neferata was close enough to feel the pulse of the city, the throb of its lifeblood. No matter what discontent arose in her subjects, she was the creator of Nulahmia. Its being and its soul belonged to her, and whatever force now disturbed it, like an insect struggling in a web, she would find it, and preserve what was hers.

Deep into the northern region of Nulahmia, in the midst of the Silent Quarter, the disturbance grew stronger and clearer. The nature of the instinct that had driven her into the night became clear. She sensed the deployment of powerful magic. Its precise nature and location were still veiled from her sight, but its mere presence sent occult ripples through the aether. There was no question in her mind that this was connected to the stirrings of rebellion in the city, and it disturbed her that those who plotted against her had abilities on this scale. There was something familiar about the nature of the magic. Though she could not yet find it, and though she did not know what it was meant to do, it had a character. The closer she came, the more precise that character became.

The Silent Quarter was a vast cemetery. No mortals lived here, and no vampires held palatial homes. There were only the dead, entombed in mass graves, in humble tombs, and in sepulchres so vast they rivalled the Palace of Seven Vultures in size. Cobbled passages wound between the vaults and mausoleums in a twisting, tangled maze. The mortals who erred and wandered into the Silent Quarter soon became lost, and never emerged. The living who entered this region were doomed to fall into silence. At the centre of the Quarter was the Tomb of the Unnumbered. It was a colossal mausoleum, one of the oldest constructions in Nulahmia, and it contained legions upon legions of the dead. It rose from the surrounding tombs like a great, slope-backed beast, its spine covered with grim, black towers of basalt slabs and fossilised bone. The tallest were on its peak, twin spikes that reached hundreds of feet into the sky, clawing the fog into streamers.

Nagadron flew between the twin spires. Too late, Neferata realised this was the centre of the disturbance. Black, sorcerous energy lashed out from both of the windowless peaks. It enveloped both the vampire and her mount. Neferata’s limbs convulsed, and her hand clenched with such violence around the hilt of Akmet-har it seemed that she should have snapped the dagger in half. Pain coursed through her limbs and her spine, and that agony was as nothing compared to the searing eruption in her skull. She could not move, or think. Her head was thrown back, her jaws locked open in an unvoiced scream. Nagadron shrieked, his tail thrashing in fury and distress. He clawed and flailed at the air, as trapped by the coruscating darkness as his mistress. The souls inside his huge body screamed too, and then he began to lose cohesion, to return to the otherworld from which he had been summoned.

Neferata sensed the imminent dissolution of her mount, and through the torment of her paralysis came the salvation of anger, of outrage that she should be attacked here, here, in her realm. She could not yet move, but she could think again, and she could see, though her vision was cracked by black lightning. The greatest drive of all, the drive to adapt, to do whatever was necessary to survive, took over, and in the incandescence of agony, she began to move.

Nagadron was still in mid-dissolution. The attack had begun half a heartbeat ago.

As Neferata took back control of her limbs, two figures leapt from the top of the spires. They were winged vampire nobles, Borzhas and Sethek. They each carried a sword in one hand, and a large, gnarled, talismanic cylinder in the other. It was from these objects that the energy coursed, lashing across the gap between them with unending fury. The two vampires dived at Neferata, blades out to impale her.

Take them, she commanded herself, and because that was the greatest necessity of the moment, she did. Nagadron’s spine was the last portion of the abyssal steed to remain solid, and she launched herself from it in the moment before her mount vanished completely. Her leap was clumsy, her movements jagged with pain, but it was enough. She flew to meet Borzhas. Startled that she had broken her paralysis, he tried to veer out of her way, spoiling his blow. Neferata’s armour turned his blade aside, and she collided with him. The impact knocked him down, and they fell, a tangle of struggling limbs. As they dropped, the link between his talisman and Sethek’s snapped. The web of energy tore. Chaotic, weakened but still ferocious, the violent magic surrounded the combatants. Neferata’s pain lessened, and Borzhas screamed in the shock of new pain. He tried to fly, but she stabbed Akmet-har through the membrane of his wing, tearing it into flaps.

Down they fell, and the uncontrolled storm of the spell blasted through the roof of the Tomb of the Unnumbered. Neferata forced the pain of the energy further back into her consciousness and fought for control of her actions, but she was still awkward, still jerking wildly. As she and Borzhas tumbled over each other, she caught a glimpse of Sethek streaking down after them, her wings tucked in for the dive. She must have dropped her talisman when the magic recoiled. Her left arm was blackened and trailing smoke.

Neferata saw Borzhas’ talisman clearly now. It bore a great seal, one she recognised. ‘Mannfred,’ she hissed through her pain. The Mortarch of Night had lent his signature to the trap then. His hand was reaching into Nulahmia to attack her, mocking her from afar. ‘You strike with borrowed power,’ she sneered at Borzhas. ‘It will always betray you.’

They dropped through the domed vault beneath the roof of the Tomb. The stone coffins below were laid out in circular rings, forming a funereal amphitheatre. Spectral light shifted like tattered lace over the graves. The shouts of the struggle and the crackling blaze of the sorcery broke the silence of millennia. Then they hit the centre of the vault, the floor disintegrating before them.

They fell, end over end, snarling in anger and pain, a dark comet plunging through the heart of the Tomb of the Unnumbered. Borzhas tried to break free, but Neferata jammed the Dagger of Jet between his ribs, and held it there. Her grip was iron, and she trapped the other vampire in her fall. There was no escape for him. She would take him with her into the abyss of their own creation.

The magic seemed to be growing weaker, or perhaps Neferata was inuring herself to the pain. Yet she was still caught in the midst of a black explosion, whirling and falling, seeing only fragments of the monument around her and of the pursuing Sethek. Falling through level after level, ever downwards, through the foundations of the Tomb and its subterranean vaults, down through the tunnels and the caves beneath Nulahmia, and still down, Mannfred’s monstrous spell burrowing endlessly into the earth.

Borzhas smashed his other wing repeatedly against her head, dazing her, and he started to pull away. She snatched at the membrane with her free hand and sank her claws into it, shredding the leathery flesh. Borzhas screamed anew as his blood sprayed, and she dragged him closer, forcing him to see the journey of the fall to the end.

And down, deeper and deeper through rock, Sethek still following, until the rock became of uncertain substance. They fell through caverns so huge they seemed to have no walls or floor. They fell through howling fogs of ectoplasm, and past legions of wailing spirits. They were plunging through regions that were the threshold of spirit worlds.

Neferata’s head became clearer. The magic was weaker now, but it was still enough to tear through the substance of the realm. The thought came to her that perhaps this fall might never end. Then, as they fell through a maelstrom of whirling, howling, tormented souls, an instinct of terrible danger awakened in her, an instinct infinitely more powerful than the one that had led her to the trap, and one entirely hers. The deepest core of her being shrieked at her, that fundamental urge to survive howled that she must stop the fall, and she must stop it now.

With the Dagger of Jet still lodged in Borzhas’ body, still trapping him to her, she released his tattered wing and reached behind to snatch the Staff of Pain from her back.

Below, the chamber floor rushed to meet them. It glowed with green wraithlight tinged with a strange, thrumming grey. The stone of the floor was twisted into the form of a frozen whirlpool, as if wrenched and contorted into this shape by an immeasurable force below.

Neferata jammed the blade of Aken-seth against Borzhas’ chest and sent a withering blast of magic into his body. A searing flash of violet, sorcerous light hurled her and Borzhas away from each other. His left hand had closed around the talisman as if fused, unable to let go of the source of both their torments, and the shock of Neferata’s attack jolted his fingers open, dropping the talisman, and at last they were free of the corrosive magic.

Borzhas spread his wings. He tried to fly, but they were too shredded, and the festering wound where Akmet-har had pierced him slowed his movements. He could do no more than slow his fall. Sethek flew to his aid. She grabbed his arm, but his weight dragged them both down, towards the floor.

Her frame still jangling knots of pain, her mind filled with broken glass, Neferata straightened out of her tumble and focused her energies through Aken-seth and directed them at the floor of the cavern, hundreds of feet below. The stone surface rippled as if it were nothing more than a membrane ready to tear at the slightest touch. Feet-first, Neferata rode a pillar of magical fire, but she was too weak to reverse her fall. She slowed, dropping more like a feather than a stone, but still she dropped.

Borzhas’ lost talisman hit the floor of the cavern ahead of the vampires. The rock crumbled away beneath the talisman. Cracks raced outwards, covering more than a league in every direction. The cracks became crevasses, and the stone tore. It became something thin and fragile, mere parchment. It flaked away to nothing, shreds of rock and the talisman falling into the horror that waited below. There was a moan as if all existence mourned its death.

Neferata gasped. She knew, with terrible, final certainty, what she saw. It had always been a legend, even to the Mortarchs. Nagash had only mentioned it in her hearing once, millennia ago, and even then speaking as if there were some things that, for the gods too, were better left as myths.

A huge whirlpool of grey nothing churned beneath her, swallowing the falling wreckage of the floor, and eating at the distant walls. The grey had texture, the arms of its vortex wrinkled like the surface of a brain. The movement of the currents was heavy, but not sluggish, massiveness whirling with inexorable strength. But the sense of spinning matter was an illusion. The texture and the movement were visible only because they were the dying gasps of consumed reality. The truth of the whirlpool was that it truly was nothing. It was the greatest and most terrible of devourers, because everything, at the last, became nothing. This was the Maw of Uncreation.

Shyish was the realm of death, yet it, like all the mortal realms, was still a thing of being. It existed. But down in that whirlpool was the final end, absolute entropy. It was there that even death would come to an end.

Above her, Sethek and Borzhas screamed. Sethek flapped her wings with the power of pure terror, and carried them both towards the cavern wall.

Neferata’s slow fall was still a fall towards extinction. With the energy born of desperation, she called to herself a tangible wind of darkness. Its tendrils surrounded her and, at her command, threw her towards the cavern wall. As she flew, the dark disintegrated and fell into tatters, and she arced ever downwards.

The maelstrom was silent, its spiral movement of grey dissolution majestic in its indifference. She came closer and closer to it, the immense coils of the churn ready to consume her. In the seconds of her flight, she sheathed her weapons, freeing her hands. She reached out, a final act of denial. She would exist. And her hands gripped the rock of the wall.

Neferata’s fingers drilled through stone, and she clung to the curving rock face. She was less than fifty feet from the relentless turning current of non-existence. She looked down into the terrible grey. It mesmerised and repelled. There were no true features, only the endless movement of matter dying. She looked away, conscious of the danger of meeting the gaze of pure blankness. But though she was dangling over her terminal fate, and though she had so little strength left with which to save herself, her curiosity was not dead. This was a wonder below here, and it was also a power. One that could not be reasoned with, and that could not be grasped. Yet power was what she understood. It had been the study, practice and purpose of her existence.

She would not turn from the study of the Maw.

She would learn from it. For where there was power, there was opportunity.

Neferata looked up, and saw that Sethek had managed to bring herself and Borzhas to a narrow ledge midway up the cavern wall from Neferata’s position and some distance to her right. Borzhas was moaning in pain and fear, and Sethek was staring down into the whirlpool with fascinated horror. For the moment, they appeared to have forgotten Neferata in the extremity of their terror.

The Mortarch of Blood jammed her hands deeper into the rock. She kicked the wall, creating footholds. Certain, for the time being, that she would not slip, Neferata rested. Cautiously, wary of the pull to dissolution, she studied the Maw of Uncreation.

The point at which the cavern wall met the whirlpool drew her attention. It seemed that matter did not so much disintegrate as flow into the current. The stone was not molten. It was as cold and grey as the rest of the walls, yet it was as if the rock had become a slow-moving liquid, a gradual cataract feeding the hunger of the Maw.

The extent of that hunger was another puzzle. Once in contact with the maelstrom, nothing could resist it. Still, the Maw of Uncreation had not reclaimed all being, devouring Shyish and the other mortal realms. It was both the end and the precondition of existence. It was ravenous, yet it was contained within the boundaries of the cavern. Neferata wondered what supreme enchantment governed this cavern, giving the necessary strength to hold back the ravenings of absolute destruction.

She looked back up at the assassins. Borzhas had quieted, and they were both staring at her, torn between the need to finish her off and the fear of moving even an inch closer to the whirlpool. Neferata smiled at them, taunting them with their cowardice. Sethek snarled. She let go of Borzhas and rose to a crouch. Borzhas scrambled back on the ledge, clutching at the wall. Neferata had stolen the power of flight from him. If he fell, he would have no chance, and he knew it. He clawed gouges into the rock as if he would burrow his way back up to the surface.

Sethek hesitated, alarmed by Neferata’s smile. She looked back and forth between the Mortarch and the maelstrom, gauging distances and chances. Poised for flight, her balance on the ledge was precarious.

Thank you, Neferata thought. You have made all the errors I wished you to. Her strength renewed, she took up the Staff of Pain again and sent a sorcerous bolt blasting up to the ledge. It struck Borzhas and hurled him from the ledge, into the void. Borzhas screamed and grabbed at Sethek. He seized her ankle and she toppled over with him.

They fell, but Sethek reacted quickly. Her blade slashed down and severed Borzhas’ wrists. Howling, he dropped away from her and plunged into the Maw of Uncreation. He vanished beneath the grey, his scream silenced on contact. The speed of the current increased suddenly, and the level of the whirlpool rose.

Sethek wheeled away from Borzhas’ grave and flew straight at Neferata, eyes burning in fury. She came in with blinding speed, heedless of the cliff face, her blade extended, aimed at Neferata’s heart. The half-moon blade of Aken-seth glowed with dark power, and Neferata thrust upwards, impaling Sethek through the upper chest. Sethek choked, gasping, broken by her own speed. She dropped her sword and clawed at the Staff of Pain. Blood foamed from her mouth. Her blade clattered against the cliff, and dropped into the vortex.

Effortlessly, Neferata held Sethek out at the full extension of her arm. She dangled the other vampire over the Maw of Uncreation. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘You may take pride in that. You also have my thanks. You have shown me just how dangerous my enemies have become. You came very close to achieving your ends,’ she said, and paused, then smiled again. Even in her final agony, Sethek writhed in fear from the promise of that smile. ‘Forgive me,’ said Neferata. ‘I misspoke. You did achieve your end after all.’

‘No,’ Sethek choked out. Now she clutched the shaft of Aken-seth as if it were her salvation.

Neferata lowered her arm and aimed the spear downwards. Sethek slid off the blade. Neferata watched her fall into the whirlpool, eager to see the reaction. Sethek sank, leaving the surface of the grey untroubled, but again the speed of the current increased, and again the level rose. The maelstrom was now less than thirty feet away from Neferata, and the pull of its lethal fascination was stronger than ever.

‘You feed, and you hunger for more,’ Neferata whispered.

The wall of rock vibrated under Neferata’s touch, and the entire cavern shifted minutely. The flow of stone into the Maw of Uncreation accelerated by the same infinitesimal degree, and the whirlpool receded, dropping back to its original level.

The sense of adjustment was profound. Touching the wall as the change happened, Neferata felt how far the change went. It was no spell, no magic as she understood it, that allowed the cavern to act as prison for the Maw of Uncreation. It was something greater. It seemed to her that Shyish itself acted to suppress the thing that was the destroyer of being. Neferata wondered how much of Shyish’s nature was shaped and governed, however invisibly, by the need to keep the Maw buried.

She scanned the cliff above her, and spotted a ledge a short distance away. She climbed up to it, and then sat, exhausted, waiting for enough of her strength to return so that she might summon Nagadron to the realm again, and have him take her from this place.

She turned her face away from the whirlpool, resisting the dark fascination. She looked up instead, at the distance she had fallen, and was troubled. In their plunge, she and Borzhas had broken the seals that had kept the Maw hidden away. Now it was exposed. They had opened a wound in creation. The whirlpool was contained, but if it was fed again, it might grow and rise. Disaster waited in the wings. Her city was up there, exposed to the hunger of the final predator.

I am the nomad of power, holding not to the illusion of structures and stability, instead moving from node to shifting node. I do not fight the currents and tides. I am one with them. I make their strength my own. I embrace then, too, the fluidity of labour, the mutability of art, and the eternity of the task. If the project before me appears long, even after more than a century of progress, I must remember that this is the nature of all work. There is no end except in the Maw of Uncreation. Creation keeps the Maw at bay, and death is the purest form of creation. All this I write, I believe, and I remember. I will not expect the project to end, but I will see it to fruition. I do not concern myself with utility. Let potential be my beacon.

– The Understanding of Annihilation

Chapter 8

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

At Neferata’s orders, an army descended on the Silent Quarter and into the deep foundations of the Tomb of the Unnumbered. The scale of the construction that began matched its urgency. The Silent Quarter was silent no longer, and no more did the Unnumbered dead sleep. The first contingent of the army to arrive was the necromancers who summoned the dead from their tombs to their duty. Their queen had commanded, and the living and the dead must obey. Thousands upon thousands of skeletons dragged huge slabs of granite through the streets of Nulahmia and into the depths of the Tomb of the Unnumbered. Tireless, they swarmed over the construction site to create a new seal over the Maw of Uncreation. It was higher than the final barrier that had existed before but it would be more solid, and closer to Neferata’s watchful eye.

She had named it the Annihilation Gate.

Most of the slaves creating the Gate were skeletons. When chains snapped and slabs dropped through the shaft that had been created in the Tomb, crushing scores of workers in their descent, there was barely a pause in the work. Skeletons did not mourn their comrades who had been smashed to powder. They did not wonder what it was they were labouring to seal away. They were not slowed by curiosity or fear.

But not all the workers were undead. Neferata demanded the presence of hundreds of mortals. Her Black Knights rounded them up from all levels of Nulahmian society. Slaves, prisoners, tradespeople, artisans, merchants and aristocrats, Neferata’s deathly guard took them all to the Silent Quarter.

The entrance to the Tomb of the Unnumbered was so wide, a dragon with its wings spread could have passed through. Neferata stood next to it, Raia at her side, as the stream of mortals entered the Tomb. The people bowed their heads as they approached her.

‘They are struck with wonder to be walking these forbidden paths,’ Raia said.

‘Some of them have realised that the paths are still forbidden,’ said Neferata. She looked at an elderly man whose face was pale with foreboding. ‘They know they will never leave the Silent Quarter.’

Raia was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘Rumours are raging across the city, my queen.’

‘So I would expect. The tales vary, do they not? There is no consistency except that the city is in danger of destruction from below?’

‘Precisely so.’

‘Good. Do nothing to counter them. I want my subjects to know that doom came near, but is being held back.’

‘I still do not understand the nature of that doom, my queen.’

‘Nor can you,’ Neferata said. ‘Not without seeing it, and its sight would destroy you. Content yourself with the rumours, Raia. Imagine that they are all true, and you come close to the heart of it.’

The weeks passed. Neferata supervised the construction in person, and as she strode past the lines of trembling slaves, she saw their growing terror, and the dawning of bleak understanding. On the day the Annihilation Gate reached completion, she addressed the mortals from atop a high plinth next to the Gate.

As she mounted the platform, the assembled mortals looked up at her with terror. They had laboured hard for her, and now that their task was complete, she saw that they dreaded the reward she was about to bestow.

‘You were right,’ she said, ‘to fear for your lives. But take this lesson into your hearts. You never had a choice. There was nothing you could have done to alter your fates. I command, and you obey. This is the plain truth of existence. The purpose of your lives has been revealed, and it is to serve the end you will, this coming night.’

The slaves trembled, their worst fears realised. A few, however, stood taller at her words, taking pride in the sacrifice they would soon make for their queen and their city. She noted who they were, each one. Their honour would see them through their deaths, and she would see that their families were rewarded. She regretted that she would not be able to reward their loyalty still further, and resurrect them as skeletons, that they might continue to serve. But even more than the strength of the great stones that made up its physical being, the Annihilation Gate needed the most powerful magic possible. The sacrifices would have to be absolute. Nothing could be held back, not bone, not flesh, not blood.

The dead who had worked alongside the mortals now surrounded them, herding them into a great circle before the Gate, to await the assigned moment of their doom.

The rite that would consecrate the Annihilation Gate was announced across Nulahmia. Vampires of the Palace Guard and the Company of the Walls marched down the Queensroad and the other great boulevards, banners unfurled, fanfares trumpeting the event. Once again, the queen had seen to the salvation of Nulahmia. Neferata declared three days of feasting, and even the lowest-born mortals, many of whom would be those feasted upon, rejoiced, for she decreed too that great hordes of gold and jewels were to be showered upon the human populace.

For every citizen who died, and for every citizen who grieved, she knew there would be another who would rejoice in their good fortune and shout their thanks to the Mortarch of Blood.

For the hours that preceded the ritual, Neferata returned first to her court, and then flew with Nagadron over the parades. She heard the cheers and the roars of gratitude. And during these hours, she felt the danger of an insurrection recede. The conspirators would not have the support they needed for the moment. The city was celebrating. They required its seething discontent.

That would come again. She had no illusions about that. This was a false peace, an even more brittle and misleading form of stability. It would not last.

The hour of the ritual approached, and the vampire nobility of Nulahmia descended into the Tomb of the Unnumbered. A wide chamber in the shape of a shallow amphitheatre surrounded the Gate. There were so many sacrifices gathered on the floor and the lower slopes that there was limited room for spectators, and so Neferata decreed that only one representative from any of the aristocratic clans would be permitted to attend. Even so, many had to be turned away. Hundreds of vampires in their finery gathered in the chamber, eager to bear witness to the shedding of so much blood. Channels had been carved in the slope of the amphitheatre to bring the flow of offering to the granite Gate.

On the plinth, Neferata watched the crowd. She observed the nobles’ eagerness and hunger. Most of them seemed to regard the event as no different from any of a thousand revels she had hosted in the Palace of Seven Vultures. Even if they were awed by the sight of what had been built, they did not appear to grasp the full import of why it was necessary. How could they? Neferata reminded herself. They have not seen what lies beneath. If they have not seen it, then its existence must be suppressed from their consciousness. As with the realm of Shyish, so with its inhabitants. She had not tried to tell the people the true nature of the danger. They would not understand, and she had no wish to see what sort of disintegration might ensue if they did grasp what the Maw of Uncreation meant. It was enough for them to know that a danger existed, and she had arranged for it to be locked away forever.

The Annihilation Gate was more than a hundred feet high, but was at such a low angle to the ground that it was several times that length. Its granite doors were inscribed with runes of imprisonment. Each of the runes was at least ten feet wide, and they overlapped, amplifying their individual power into a collective wall as powerful as Neferata and her necromancers could construct. At the centre of the doors was the seal, a multifoliate iron blossom of a lock, the edges of its petals honed such that the merest touch would cut deeply into flesh, flooding the trespasser’s body with a poison lethal to mortal and vampire alike. Its convolutions were so complex that no key could ever be constructed to fit them. At the cardinal points around its circumference, baleful eyes of pure silver gazed forbiddingly outwards, eternal, unblinking sentinels.

Neferata wore black, hooded robes woven with runes in threads of crimson and gold. When she moved, the voluminous folds concealed and revealed the runes, throwing them into different conjunctions with each other. Her every gesture was an incantation. Her eyes were shadowed. Her lower face was visible, that all who looked upon her would see her lips move. The words of power she would utter this night must be seen as well as heard.

She spoke, and her voice echoed against the wall and ceiling of the chamber, but was absorbed by the inert massiveness of the Annihilation Gate. ‘This is a night of celebration,’ she said, ‘but our celebrations are solemn. We do not mark a triumph. Instead, this is the moment of triumph. We have been engaged in a battle, and tonight we strike the final blow.’ She swept her eyes over the vampire nobles. ‘You who stand here before this great gate have not come to bear witness. You are here to act.’

She paused. The audience stirred uneasily. The vampires whispered to each other. Some of them appeared now to notice that the contingent of skeleton guards who surrounded the mortal captives was fairly small. It was enough to keep the prisoners contained, but it would take a long time for such a number to work through so many sacrifices.

At the front of the throng, Lord Tristallar stepped forward. He was a tall vampire, and ancient, though it had been many centuries since he had taken to any battlefield more dangerous than the ballroom floor. ‘Do you mean for us to perform the sacrifices ourselves?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Neferata said. ‘Not at all.’ She raised her eyes towards the back of the chamber.

The aristocrats turned to follow Neferata’s gaze. At the rear of the chamber was a much larger force, with more skeletons arriving though the entrance. They were the most mindless of reanimated servants, summoned from their vaults in the Tomb of the Unnumbered. They were draped in torn funeral shrouds and mouldering armour. Their blades were pitted and dull, though they would serve their purpose.

A number of the mortals began to laugh. Neferata looked at them and smiled, sharing their mirth. They were pleased that those who had come to witness their deaths would instead become part of their sacrifice.

‘You cannot mean this!’ Tristallar shouted, his voice shrill with outrage.

Neferata glared at him, and the force of command in her stare made him take a step back. ‘I cannot mean this, Lord Tristallar? Who are you to pronounce upon the nature of my intentions? How do you presume to know your queen’s mind? No one but I can ever declare what I mean. But I will tell you this. I mean exactly what I do.’ And she raised a hand.

The skeleton army descended the slopes of the amphitheatre. The warriors formed a solid wall. They marched slowly, steadily, without hesitation and began the slaughter. The vampires did not accept their destruction peacefully. They fought back. The air of the chamber burned with sorcerous energy, and scores of skeletons exploded into fragments of bone in the first few seconds. Against a single noble, even a dozen skeletons would not prevail, but they came in the thousands. No matter how many were destroyed, there were always more. There was no breach in the wall of bone and blade. A few vampires, motivated perhaps by rage, perhaps by panic, tried to fight their way back up the slope, throwing themselves deeper into the army. They managed to make some headway, but were always borne down and cut to pieces before they could reach the exit.

On her plinth, Neferata turned the Staff of Pain against the nobles. She selected for her targets the vampires who were holding their own most successfully against the skeletons. She hit them with withering black lightning. They doubled over in agony, their spells dissipating without effect. The skeletons closed around them and cut them down, bony arms rising and falling with unwavering, implacable rhythm, blades chopping through finery and flesh to unleash the stolen blood from undead veins.

The skeletons filled the chamber, and there were always more. There was no room for the vampires to fight. Many of the spells they cast crippled other nobles as well as incinerating skeletons, and the army of slaughter never diminished.

On a platform midway up the plinth, the necromancers chosen by Neferata to oversee the construction of the Annihilation Gate added their sorcery to hers, and it was not long before the throng of vampires began to thin. The thunder and crackle of magic diminished, giving way to the screams of the dying as vampires and mortals were united in becoming part of the great sacrifice. The blood ran in rivulets, then streams, then torrents. It overflowed the channels, and it rushed like a cataract across the entire slope of the floor. It lapped in waves against the stone of the Annihilation Gate, and the doors drank it in. The huge runes glowed fiery red, and the granite darkened. The blood spread through the grain of the stone as though it were sponge, changing its nature, transmuting the rock into a substance far stronger. The Annihilation Gate became the black of absence, an echo of the horror it concealed. The seal turned, its razor petals spiralling, and the silver eyes, now streaked with crimson veins, blazed with light. The Annihilation Gate sang as it came into its strength. Its voice was deep and grinding, and it was a choir of thousands of souls fused into unity, all individuality gone, its final trace in the multiplicity of the Gate’s triumphant cry.

As the storm subsided, the blood lapped higher against the edges of the Gate. The vampires fell, overwhelmed, and the skeletons moved deeper into the mortal prisoners. Some still refused the honour of their sacrifice, and they tried to fight. Without weapons, without hope, their struggle was brief. But several mortals, and even a few vampires, came forward to stand next to the plinth, before the gate. They looked up at Neferata and bowed to her. She nodded, acknowledging the grace of their acceptance, and its importance. They could not know what they died for, yet they knew their deaths were necessary. Because their queen commanded it, they gave their lives willingly.

They faced the Gate, looking in awe at that thing they would die to complete. Then the skeletons came, and hacked them to bloody meat.

Such loyalty, Neferata thought, watching the sacrifices fall. Would that I could see where it lay at all times.

Then she thought, I would be bored.

The certainty flashed through her mind and then was set aside. She needed to focus her concentration on the ritual, and leave nothing undone. The contemplation of that truth would have to wait for another time.

Now the butchering was done. No mortals or vampires remained on the floor of the chamber. Mutilated bodies and shattered skeletons lay everywhere, but there was no blood. The Annihilation Gate had devoured every drop.

The Gate’s song had dropped from its initial frenzy. Now it keened and whistled, through its stone throat. The seal turned and flowed, the petals of iron shaping the song like lips.

Neferata looked down at the necromancers. They looked back at her. ‘The ritual is complete,’ one of them said.

‘You have done well,’ Neferata replied. ‘Who is left now, who worked on the Annihilation Gate, or who knows even partial secrets of its construction?’

The satisfaction on the faces of the necromancers faded.

‘You are good and loyal servants,’ Neferata told them. She pulled the Dagger of Jet from her robes. ‘I receive your sacrifice with gratitude.’ She dropped down onto the necromancers’ platform, and slit their throats.

The Annihilation Gate sang as it accepted their blood.

When it was done, Neferata returned to the top of the plinth and contemplated her work. The angle of the doors was so low that from her position, she was almost at eye level with the seal. She watched its gradual, graceful revolutions and mutations, and listened to the grinding, rising and falling whistle of the Gate. The immediate risk to Nulahmia was past, but her efforts here were not truly completed. The Gate would require perpetual vigilance, and its strength would need to be renewed. The skeleton army would remain to protect the Gate, guardians as unflagging as the eyes that surrounded the seal.

At length, Neferata turned away, knowing she would return. There was also much to study here, even if she did not see the Maw of Uncreation directly. Much to learn. Much to think about. She had faced the hidden, obscene core of being, and had retained her sanity. There were lessons here. And where lessons could be learned, there was power.

On the following night, Neferata held court at the Palace of Seven Vultures, and the illusion of unity in Nulahmia was over. There was a mob of courtiers clamouring for her attention and for redress. There were mortals who had come to the great hall, though they were far outnumbered by vampires. Of that nobility, a few attended out of duty. Perhaps, Neferata thought, even out of loyalty, though she would not trust that possibility. What she trusted was the anger. She appeared before them on her dais, and waves of suspicion and resentment crashed against her. She was pleased by the honesty of the reaction. It told her where she stood. She was able to read the state of Nulahmia more easily when the anger was not hidden.

At first, she had intended to face her subjects clad in her armour. She changed her mind, deciding instead on robes of translucent emerald and red, their many layers so delicate that a breath made them billow like sails. Their voluminous sleeves and train exaggerated every movement she made. That exaggeration would be useful to her. So would their appearance of fragility.

She said nothing for a long time, letting the clamour grow. The demands were stated a hundred different ways, but they were all essentially the same. Why were so many of her most loyal – and here she understood the word to mean important – subjects massacred? The act was senseless, the nobles cried, though none of them truly knew the nature of what had happened. That their kin had never returned from the ritual was enough to stoke their rage.

Neferata waited until the shouting was at its peak. Then she stabbed again at the false stability of Nulahmia. Let the blood flow, she thought. Let treason come to light.

‘I will not be questioned!’ she shouted. She introduced a querulous note into her voice. Give them frustration instead of command. Give them weakness. The uproar in the great hall quieted enough that she could be heard. ‘I am your queen!’ She swept across the dais as she spoke, throwing her arms out in melodramatic anger, and the robes became a storm of movement. ‘How dare you stand before me in this way? Will you defy me?’ She paused, as if out of breath or at a loss for words, giving her question time to sink in. Let them ponder the idea. Make them decide. Push them to come out into the open. ‘You will not,’ she said, and she deliberately undermined her authority with a petulant gesture. Be weak, she thought. ‘And I will not answer to you,’ she finished.

She threw herself down on the divan, and her handmaidens rushed to tend to her. The walls of the great hall vibrated with even more shouting than before.

Raia knelt beside her. ‘You have fanned their unhappiness,’ she said, looking at the nobles.

‘Good. Let it spread. We will force the unrest in the city to the crisis point.’ Sethek and Borzhas had taken her by surprise. She would not let that happen again. If the slaughter of the nobility beneath the Tomb of the Unnumbered did not push the rebels into the open, then her show of vulnerability would.

‘Watch and listen,’ she told Raia. ‘When my subjects leave, you and your sisters will follow them, and see where the paths of anger take them. Most of all, observe those who shout the least. Beware the thoughtful. They are the ones we must guard against.’

She studied her restless subjects. The deeper truth behind the theatre she had mounted was that she was vulnerable. That was the lesson she had learned in the Silent Quarter. She hoped she was not acting too late.

Subjects belong to the ruler. Their happiness, their wealth, their lives, indeed every facet of their existence are the prerogative of the ruler. To believe otherwise is to march down the path that leads to the ruler being subject to the ruled. That end is ruin. It may be useful to allow the subjects to believe their well-being is the responsibility of the ruler. But in the end, they are but chattel.

– Dominion

Chapter 9

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

Once more, Neferata was a shadow in the Palace of Seven Vultures. She had chosen the role, adapting to her circumstances. Yet as she moved through halls, observing but unseen, she felt those circumstances more painfully than ever. She was running out of time. The longer it took for the disaster to arrive, the more devastating it would have to be if she wanted even the faintest chance of taking back her city.

She flowed through the Palace with Mereneth in attendance. ‘Lord Venzor is spending more time at the wall, shoring up the defences,’ the spy reported.

‘So he has taken the bait. That is promising, but politically, he seems to be more active than ever.’

Mereneth nodded. ‘He has been making overtures to the nobles outside the northern quarter.’

‘Are they responding?’

‘They are.’

Neferata paused outside the archway to Venzor’s receiving hall. Shrouded by darkness, she and Mereneth observed the aristocrats who were speaking with him. There were a few who had been there before, and several new faces. Neferata’s appearance in this chamber, then, the reminder that she was present and that she saw all, had done little to shift the political realities. ‘They think they know which way the winds of power are blowing,’ she whispered to Mereneth. ‘And so they lay their plans. Mark them. Add their names to the register of judgement.’ They would know a full measure of terror when she was no longer a shadow.

Her determination was unchanged. But she saw how badly Venzor had undermined her. ‘He is no fool,’ she said. ‘He acts on two fronts. He assumes that I was telling the truth about the Bloodbound advance. And he assumes that I was lying. He seeks to counter both threats.’

Neferata withdrew from the doorway. ‘Come,’ she said to Mereneth. ‘Lord Venzor is too divided in his attentions. He needs focus, and I will give it to him.’

Morbhend lay to the north-west of Nulahmia, in a region of arable land past the termination of the Cremation Plain. Before the forces of Chaos had burned their way across Shyish, it had once been a city of considerable importance in its own right. It had begun to recover in the wake of Lascilion’s defeat, though it was a mere splinter of its former self. New walls had risen around the former keep, and its population, primarily mortal, lived within them. Beyond the walls lay miles upon miles of blackened ruins. There were just enough people in the reviving embers of Morbhend to have resumed trading with Nulahmia. Given time, if left in peace, Morbhend might truly rise from its ashes.

It was probable that Ruhok’s horde would come across it, but not certain. It was some leagues to the west of the Khornate line of advance.

Neferata had taken up a position in the peak of a ruined tower. The north face of the tower’s battlements had been destroyed, and the structure resembled a dagger plunged into the body of Morbhend. Nagadron was crouched on the edge of the remaining battlements, his tail coiled around the curve of the tower. In the night, he was an angular shadow, one more jagged piece of rubble among many. Even the glow of his imprisoned souls blended in. Wraith energies flitted over the smashed, burned streets of the city.

Neferata looked to the north-west, waiting. At last, she was rewarded. She saw her three scouts running across the fields towards the city. Some distance behind them came the torches and shouts of a Bloodbound raiding party.

Let yourselves be seen, Neferata had instructed the scouts. Draw the Chaos followers to Morbhend. They had done as they were told. Their mission was almost complete.

The scouts were running quickly, but so were their pursuers. The Bloodbound were gaining ground. The scouts sprinted past the rubble that had been Morbhend’s outer wall. They reached the open space of a large square and paused. They turned around, peering at the falling houses and low heaps of stonework. One of them made an uncertain movement. The other two looked back at the Bloodbound, who were closing in. They were, Neferata knew, wondering if they had erred, if they had stopped in the wrong location. They had not. They were doing exactly as she had commanded. They had done everything she had asked of them. What she needed from them next was not something they could give. It had to be taken.

Too late, they realised they had been abandoned. They ran for the shelter of the ruins. Given a few more seconds, they might have been able to find hiding places. But Ruhok’s warriors saw where they went. They ran into the shell of a temple, and the howling pack of bloodreavers followed. The Blood Warrior in command led a direct charge through the doorway. There would be no prolonged siege.

The three vampires fought hard. Neferata saw bloodreavers stagger back out of the temple, their throats sliced wide open, their jugulars spraying wide. The interior of the ruin flashed briefly with sorcerous energy. But her scouts had cornered themselves, and the Khornate savages were too numerous. Their frenzy only increased as their own blood was spilled. After a few minutes, the screams and roars faded. The Blood Warrior marched back out of the temple, the blade of his goreaxe slathered in vampire blood.

The Bloodbound explored the ruins for more prey. They passed by the side of Neferata’s tower, ignorant of the fact that a much greater predator observed their progress. Then the Blood Warrior shouted and pointed to the south. He had spotted the torchlight on the inner wall of Morbhend.

The warband rushed towards the gate, lured by the promise of greater bloodshed. Neferata climbed onto Nagadron’s back and they rose into the dark, invisible as she followed the progress of the attack. The first part of the martyrdom of Morbhend was complete. The next stage would require that she play an active role.

The defenders of the reborn city greeted the Bloodbound with arrows and boiling oil. Khorne’s followers shouted threats and ran at the gates as if they could break them down with hand-held weapons. The Blood Warrior was almost strong enough. The entire portcullis shook when he seized it. It held, though, and the defenders began to take their toll on the bloodreavers. Without siege engines, the Chaos warriors were not going to breach the wall.

Neferata smiled. ‘Such puppets,’ she murmured to Nagadron. The Adevore made a low, whistling sound, a hiss made from the cries of the damned, expressing pleasure at her words. ‘They have no choice in their roles. There is no question about their fates. They believe in their own wills, but only mine is real.’

The Blood Warrior marched away in disgust from the gate. He shouted at his followers.

‘Now they will choose to retreat,’ Neferata said to Nagadron. ‘They think they will return to the main army and return with a larger force. They do not understand that this choice is closed to them. I do not have time for Ruhok to be distracted by a siege here. Morbhend should be no more than further incentive for him. So take us down. Finish them all.’

Nagadron plunged to the earth, his skeletal jaws parted to issue a roar that was fashioned from the cries of imprisoned souls. The Bloodbound froze, then looked up, in time to see Neferata unleash an arcane bolt from the tip of the Staff of Pain. The blast struck a bloodreaver in the chest. It blew him apart, his body vanishing into ash, and the flash of energy knocked the Blood Warrior off his feet.

Nagadron landed, his claws crushing two other bloodreavers, and he lunged forward to seize another in his maw. The Blood Warrior rose and, with a roar, charged at Neferata. She looked down at him with contempt, and raised her hand. At her signal, her hidden forces joined the fray.

Despite the weakness of her position in Nulahmia, she still had a large army to call upon. For this night, she had chosen the troops carefully. She needed obedience and silence in equal measure. The foot soldiers were skeletons, and the commanders were her most trusted spies. The vampires and skeletons emerged from their concealment in the ruins of Morbhend and swarmed towards the Chaos warband. The Blood Warrior stopped before he reached Nagadron. He snarled when he saw the wave of skeletons descending upon him on both sides. He charged into them with a roar, his goreaxe smashing the undead troops into pieces. Neferata smiled at the frustration she heard in his shouts. His enemy did not bleed, and were a poor offering to his god.

Neferata killed a few other bloodreavers with fiery spells. They were no more of an irritant than carrion flies. The end of the struggle was decided before it began. Neferata’s forces overwhelmed the warband. The skeletons kept coming, relentless and seemingly infinite in number. The vampires circled around the Blood Warrior, moving like wind, attacking like serpents, and they wore him down. He cursed them, blood from a dozen wounds pouring down his limbs. At last, he cried, ‘My blood for you, Khorne!’ and fell to the ground with a crash.

Cheers resounded on the ramparts of the inner wall when the last of the Bloodbound died. Neferata’s spies gathered beyond Nagadron, the skeletons forming up behind them. Neferata mounted the dread abyssal again and flew to the height of the ramparts. ‘Open the gates,’ she commanded.

Her subjects were loyal, and they obeyed their queen without hesitation. The portcullis rose.

The skeletons streamed in.

The shouts of celebration from the people of Morbhend became cries of confusion. The new Lady of Morbhend had run forward to greet the saviours of her city. She stopped, frozen. ‘Wait!’ she shouted, a command of nothing to no one. She held up her hands, as if there had been a misunderstanding, and her plea could stop what was about to happen.

Now her citizens cried in disbelief, then in terror, and then in despair. The skeletal army marched through the reborn city. Their slaughter was cold and implacable. Under the command of the vampires, they put the inhabitants to the sword and set fire to the rebuilt structures. Neferata brought Nagadron in low over the massacre, weaving between the flames, judging the quality of murder.

‘More savage,’ she commanded her spies. ‘Tear the bodies apart. Flood the streets with blood. And cut the heads off.’ She let Nagadron join in the feast, his talons and jaws rendering the bodies unrecognisable.

On the steps of the keep, a hundred people were on their knees, their arms raised in supplication to Neferata. ‘What have we done?’ they cried. ‘Have pity on us, our queen! Let us redeem ourselves in your eyes!’

Neferata looked down at them, and shook her head at the weakness of their plea. ‘It is fascinating to me that dreams of mercy live on in Shyish,’ she told the cowering sheep. ‘You have committed no crime. But I am your queen, your lives are mine, and I have need of them.’ Then she turned Nagadron on them.

What the Bloodbound had failed to do, Neferata’s forces did for them. Two of her spies dipped the hair of severed heads into currents of blood and splashed the symbol of Khorne onto the walls of gutted buildings. When the last of the screams faded, and the fires died down to smoking embers, Morbhend had died a second time. Neferata walked the streets with an artist’s eye, evaluating the authenticity of the illusion she was creating here. The slaughter was well-wrought. Everywhere she looked, she saw the remains left by frenzy and butchery. And in the outer ruins, any searchers would find the bodies of some Khornate warriors, clearly the ones who had fallen in the early stages of the siege. Present too were Neferata’s scouts. She, too, was experiencing losses as Ruhok drew closer.

By the end of her inspection, she found no flaws in the evidence she was leaving in Morbhend. The story that would be deduced, that would reach Venzor’s ears, was clear.

Her spies gathered at the gate, which the skeletons had now demolished. The vampires waited for Neferata’s verdict on their work. ‘This was well done,’ she told them. ‘This will concentrate Lord Venzor’s mind.’

A force that passed through Morbhend was on a direct path for the Hyena Gate. As Neferata flew back to Nulahmia, she was pleased with the narrative she had constructed. She thought it would hold. She hoped it would gain her some time.

The race between disasters was narrowing.

Do not be bound by the chains of intentions. The intention of an act is unimportant when compared to its consequences.

– Exhortations

Chapter 10

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

Neferata stood before the Borzhas palace and watched it burn.

‘Why have we waited until now?’ Raia had asked.

‘I wanted the families to wonder about the fates of their commanders. I wanted all the rebels in Nulahmia to wonder what had happened. I have made uncertainty their poison. Let them worry about what I know. Let them look over their shoulders. Let them squirm and make mistakes.’

Only the mistakes had not happened.

‘The rebels are still hidden to us,’ Raia said, frustrated.

‘That is instructive too,’ Neferata said. ‘They are well-disciplined. And perhaps Sethek and Borzhas acted on their own. They may have attacked when the rest of the traitors counselled caution and patience.’

The north tower of the palace became a torch, flames roaring up its entire height and reaching up into the dark and falling snow.

‘We must change strategy,’ Neferata said. ‘If the battlefield is not what it appeared to be, I will not cling to an illusion.’ In the end, her goal was to shape the field to suit her, but she would adapt to each reality as it presented itself. She would always adapt. ‘We shall end the patience of the rebels. We will push them again and again, harder and harder, until they can no longer hide.’ The anger in the wake of the sacrifice at the Annihilation Gate had not even begun to fade when she finally sent justice upon the Houses of Sethek and Borzhas.

Neferata turned from the blaze. ‘Come,’ she said to Raia. ‘I would see all the fires at once.’

The palaces of the traitors were magnificent constructions, and they were huge – among the largest at the base of Throne Mount. It took a full night for Neferata’s guard to put their entire households to the sword. It took three nights before the flames that consumed the palaces finally dropped to embers. Neferata watched the conflagrations from her parapets, reaching out with her senses to smell the burning flesh, to taste the blood and the ash on the air, and to hear the screams of thousands. The extermination was total, down to the servants. If there were beggars on the doorsteps, they died too.

On the third night she went down to the ruins of the House of Sethek. She marched through the smoking stones and blackened timbers. Withered, scorched arms reached out from the rubble in entreaty. Every so often, Neferata passed arms that were still moving. She spotted a hand that bore the high rings of Sethek, and she crouched beside it. She cocked her head, listening, and heard a faint, despairing moan. With a few quick gestures, she tossed away the cracked slabs that covered the victim. Harkhaf, Sethek’s consort, dragged himself forwards. His legs were a jellied mass, and the blaze had charred away his silk robes, turning his skin shining red and black. His hair had burned away, and his scalp was split and suppurating. His hands were contorted talons, and he reached for the soles of Neferata’s boots, begging for mercy with a phlegmy moan.

Neferata ground a heel into his wrist, and the moan became a scream. ‘Your arrogance amazes me,’ she said. ‘You conspire against me, and now you turn to me for succour.’

‘Nnnnn… nnnnnuhhhh…’ Harkhaf gasped.

‘You would contradict me too? Sethek would burn in shame. She, at least, fought to the last.’ She took a step away from Harkhaf. The ruined vampire coughed, and tried to speak, but he no longer had lips. ‘What do you have to say to me? Promises? Truths? Lies?’ She shook her head. ‘I will not waste my time trying to decipher your final gasps. There are others who will do that.’ She gestured to two of the palace guards. ‘Take him to the Pathway of Punishment. Have someone listen to what he says while he is on the wheel.’

Harkhaf thrashed weakly as they came for him. His agony would soon be supplemented by torture. He made a palsied gesture at his heart, begging to be put to death.

Neferata only smiled at him, and kept walking.

At the centre of the ruin, where the fires had burned down into the cellars beneath the palace, she found Raia. ‘I would think it a kindness,’ the Mortarch said, ‘if you have found information of value to make up for your failure in not anticipating the perfidy of these houses.’

Raia hung her head, stung by Neferata’s words and her failure. She had been anxious since the assassination attempt, and Neferata was concerned that she was spending too much effort on the possibility of redemption rather than simply doing her duty.

‘Do not forget that I have other kinds of spies,’ Neferata said. ‘Some of them are so deep in the shadows that to use them is to sacrifice them. They are a precious resource, and there is no certainty that, even in their positions, they know more than you do. But I will consume this resource if you cannot serve me as I want.’

‘I will not fail you, my queen.’

‘Show me that you will not. Begin with what you know.’

‘We have found little,’ Raia said. ‘Even under torture, it seems most of the family was ignorant of the wider conspiracy. That knowledge must have perished with Sethek.’ She pointed at the tunnels below. Smoke billowed out of their entrances. ‘The conspirators meet beneath the surface of Nulahmia.’

‘Of course they do. That hardly narrows the location down.’

‘It does not,’ Raia admitted. ‘But it must be a point easily reachable by both houses. That will suggest some regions in which to look. I will take charge of the search myself.’

‘Do so.’ Neferata paused. ‘Explain your failures,’ she said. This was a test.

‘The rebellion is widespread,’ said Raia. ‘There are too many rumours to follow, and too many lead down unimportant avenues, to people who know little or nothing. We know our assassinations have had some effect. So did the sacrifice you performed, my queen. But the beast has many heads.’

‘How many of the families do you think are now involved?’

‘Of the vampire nobility, it is hard to say. I believe a majority of the families are still loyal to you.’

For the time being, Neferata thought. If they see the wind blowing against me, their allegiances will shift. There were very few she would trust, though there were more that she knew she could control.

‘As for the mortal families,’ Raia said, ‘it is possible that they are all involved.’

‘If they are, they will learn that they do not yet know what it is to truly fear me.’

‘They will have earned that lesson, my queen.’

Neferata thought for a moment. ‘What have you heard about the Hellezans?’ she asked.

‘Very little. Nothing since the thrall returned to his family. Is he not providing the information you require? Shall I dispatch a spy to that house?’

‘No,’ said Neferata. ‘Leave that house to me. Tell me where you think we stand overall.’

‘With regards to the wider conspiracy, decapitation will not be possible,’ Raia said. ‘Only extermination. For that, we need the rebellion to be in the open.’

‘Granted,’ Neferata said, still testing. ‘And are we nearly there?’

Raia waved a hand to take in the smoking ruins. ‘This kind of pressure will push them out of the shadows, or in the end, that is where they will die. It sends a warning, but it also breeds converts to the cause. Our task is to push them into the open before they are ready.’

‘Then what must we do to ensure that result?’

‘We must strike them where they feel safe. Even if we know we cannot find all their leaders, they must believe we can. So we must find their meeting places. We must make them desperate.’

Neferata nodded. Raia was thinking clearly. She had not tried to minimise the situation, and she saw what needed to be done. She had proved her usefulness, and so avoided execution. If Raia knew how close she had come to her doom, she did not show it. She demonstrated only her determination to serve her queen, which was as it should be.

‘Go, then,’ Neferata said, looking into the tunnels. ‘Find them and make them panic.’

‘You said we were about to act,’ Hasynne Nastannar said to Mathas, ‘and we have not. How many more will Neferata slaughter before we do?’

The meeting in the underground chamber was far more tense than the last one. Mathas could smell the desperation in the air.

‘Sethek and Borzhas were too impatient,’ Mathas said. ‘Now they and their families have paid for their hurry and set us back.’

Hasynne growled, then she turned on Jedefor. ‘And they were killed by you!’

The captain of the guard shrugged. ‘Of course they were,’ he said. ‘I said I would not lead this rebellion. I most certainly am not going to openly defy Neferata while she still reigns.’

‘Do not mistake his alliance for belief in our cause,’ Mathas said to Hasynne.

Jedefor’s smile was cold. ‘That would indeed be foolish,’ he said. ‘But I see your strength, and it will get me what I want.’

‘I am satisfied,’ Mathas said before Hasynne could retort. To the others, he said, ‘We are not defeated. By her actions, Neferata has driven more families to our banner.’ There were missing faces in the chamber this evening, but there were new ones as well. He turned to Lestor. ‘You promised us support from your master. When is it coming?’

‘Very soon,’ Lestor said, unconcerned by the anxiety in the chamber.

‘It had better be,’ said Hasynne.

Mathas agreed. Anything less than immediately is risking disaster, he thought. The sacrifice at the Annihilation Gate and the destruction of the Houses of Sethek and Borzhas felt like the beginnings of a purge. It was important that he remain calm and lead by example, but Hasynne was not far wrong. If they did not act soon, they might not be able to act at all. But Neferata was still strong. With the reinforcements that Lestor promised, they would be very close to being able to confront her.

‘What are we to do then?’ Hasynne asked. ‘Have we gathered merely to talk again?’

‘No,’ said Mathas. She was right. One way or another, the moment of truth was close, and it was time to prepare.

There was a map of Nulahmia on the table in the centre of the chamber. He opened the large scroll. He studied it for the hundredth time, looking for the error in his plans. But the strategy remained firm in his mind. For all the doubts he was wrestling with, the plan of attack was one of his few certainties. He saw what must be done with such clarity, it felt like prophecy. ‘Get your forces ready. When we strike, we will have to take the Queensroad.’

‘Which is what will be expected,’ said Jedefor.

‘Of course, but there is no other way for an armed force to reach the palace, is there?’

‘No,’ Jedefor admitted.

‘Can you slow down the response of the guard?’

‘To an extent, yes.’

‘That will be sufficient,’ Mathas said. ‘Even a small delay should buy us the time we need.’

‘You’re very confident,’ said Hasynne.

‘I am.’ He had to be. That was part of the role he had accepted. He had as many doubts as any of them about their success. But Neferata had been weakened. She was lashing out, and though she had inflicted losses on the rebellion, they were not targeted ones. They were luck. So there was a chance of success. More than that, the need to fight back was imperative. The tyrant must be toppled, and now was the moment of possibility.

He had his doubts, but he had his certainties too. Victory was possible.

‘The cave is ready, is it not?’ he said. The massive natural formation lay several levels below the meeting chamber. Hasynne’s guards had kept it under constant watch for months, and no one had gone through it.

‘It is ready,’ Hasynne confirmed. ‘The tunnels between it and the houses are complete. Our forces may gather there at any time.’

‘Good,’ said Mathas. ‘Now look at the map. Imagine our houses as ramparts. See how we come close to forming a line that can choke off the Queensroad at the near approach to Throne Mount. Once we march at full strength, we could be on the slopes very quickly. But I think we do not need to take that route.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Jedefor.

‘Neferata will expect us to try to storm the palace.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No. We take the city instead. We hold the Queensroad. We lay siege to Throne Mount. We force her to come to us. While your guard wastes time mounting defences that we will not challenge, we consolidate our positions below and spread the uprising.’

Jedefor grinned. ‘And thus my loyalty is both unquestioned and useless. Our delay in descending will be considerable.’

Mathas looked around the chamber. The atmosphere had changed. There was eagerness now, and hope. They were on the edge of transforming Nulahmia.

‘What about the keep?’ Teyosa asked. The guard stronghold sat in the centre of the Palace Quarter. ‘Do we have the strength to take it?’

‘We will if that help arrives,’ said Mathas. He gave Lestor a significant look.

‘Be assured,’ Lestor said. ‘They will.’

‘I will feel assured when they arrive on time,’ Mathas said. ‘We do not have the luxury to wait much longer.’

‘Your patience will be rewarded,’ said Lestor, his unconcern palpable and enraging.

‘We no longer have patience,’ Mathas told him. ‘There is no space for it any longer. We…’ He stopped. The back of his neck was suddenly tense. His skin prickled with unease. He had heard nothing, but he was ready to lash out. There was an enemy present, and he knew this with the same clarity with which he had visualised the plan of attack. He forced himself to speak again. ‘We need to know when the support will arrive,’ he said, and signalled to Lestor to keep talking.

The other vampire nodded. ‘My master has not given me those details,’ he said. ‘It is not my place to ask. And the gifts of goodwill he has already given you were squandered by that premature ambush.’

Lestor went on, equivocating arrogantly and saying nothing at great length. Mathas held up a finger, warning the others not to question him as he turned away from the table and padded towards the doorway behind him. Teyosa looked at him in alarm. He gestured to her and to the other mortals to move to the back of the chamber.

He eyed the tunnel beyond the doorway. If they were being observed, then he was already at a disadvantage. If the intruder was only listening, he might have surprise on his side. He could see no one. His new sight pierced the shadows, down to the point where the tunnel curved. The passage was empty. If I cannot see you, he thought, you cannot see into the chamber. I hope.

He drew his sword silently from its scabbard.

The doorway was arched, which meant there was one place where an intruder could be close enough to hear every word and still be hidden. Mathas grasped the hilt with both hands and raised the blade. Then he lunged through the doorway and struck up at the low ceiling.

The spy was clinging like a spider to the roof of the tunnel. Mathas had seen her before at the Palace of Seven Vultures, always standing close to Neferata and whispering to her. It was Raia, and in the moment of Mathas’ attack, he realised that if he did not strike true, then it would not matter when the help from Lestor’s master arrived. The rebellion would end now.

Fate smiled. He stabbed Raia through the chest before she could react.

Raia shrieked. She dropped from the ceiling and rode the blade down. It protruded from her back as she grabbed Mathas’ neck with her claws. She sank them into his flesh, and his blood poured down his chest to mix with hers. They were trapped with each other now. Her claws plunged deeper. Tendons tore, and Mathas started to choke before he forced himself to remember he did not need to breathe. The tip of a claw scraped against bone, and in another few moments, she would be able to snap his head off. He twisted his blade and sawed to the right, fighting to reach her heart.

‘Traitor,’ Raia hissed, spraying dark gore in his face. ‘You will all burn.’

‘The tyrant failed with me,’ Mathas grunted, the words liquid as his mouth filled with his blood. ‘Now she will fall.’

Raia’s lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Her hands began to curl deep inside and tear at Mathas’ flesh. His physical being teetered on the brink of dissolution. He wrenched the sword desperately, and Raia stiffened. The blaze in her eyes dimmed, went dark. Her arms went slack, and her legs gave way. Mathas lowered her to the ground and released his sword. Carefully, he pulled her talons free from his throat. His blood was still pouring from his wounds and his mouth, and he felt a terrible looseness in his neck. He crouched and fed from her river of blood flowing from her severed heart. The vintage was rich with age and experience, and as he drank, his wounds began to close. This was blood stronger than any he had tasted before. His senses exulted. Savage, intoxicating pleasure roared through his veins.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he whirled, snarling, teeth bared to tear the throat from the rival who would dare drink from his kill.

Teyosa staggered back, eyes wide.

Her terror broke the feral spell. It stabbed into him, soul-deep pain much stronger than any murderous pleasure.

He rose from Raia’s corpse, swaying and reached out to Teyosa. ‘Do not fear me,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t ever fear me.’ He stayed where he was, his hand open and waiting.

Teyosa met his eyes, and she came forward again. She clasped his hand. He pulled her gently to him, embracing her with one arm, protecting her and at the same time leaning on her for the strength of her love.

He turned to the others as they crowded in the doorway. Still dizzy from the power of Raia’s blood, he pulled his sword free. He had killed a much older, more powerful vampire. It had taken luck to give him this victory. Yet the victory was real.

‘You see?’ he rasped. He could barely croak out the words. ‘We can win. And we will.’

‘Do you know who that is?’ Jedefor asked, eyes wide.

‘I do.’ With Teyosa’s help, Mathas took a step towards Lestor. ‘There is no more time,’ he said. ‘We need your master’s aid. Now.’

‘You aren’t returning to the court tonight,’ Teyosa said. ‘You can’t. Not after this. She will know.’

‘I must,’ Mathas told her. ‘She may not find out. But if I don’t return, she will.’ He paused, already anxious at the thought of being absent from his family. ‘Be ready to take Kasten into the tunnels,’ he said. ‘The passages can be reached by a door hidden in the wine cellar.’

‘We won’t be safe here either.’

‘But you will have hope.’

That night, Mathas took his place among the other vampire nobles. He composed his face into a mask of attentive humility whenever Neferata spoke, a thrall awaiting the pleasure of his mistress. He hoped Neferata would not look too closely at him. He hoped she would not perceive his thoughts of Raia’s dust scattered through the tunnels.

There were few revels in the Palace of Seven Vultures any longer. Neferata’s anger pervaded the halls, and Mathas took that fury as a good omen, another sign of her growing weakness. The light from the torches seemed dimmer, as if the fire itself were clotted with resentment and corrupted blood. Dark smoke coiled around the pillars of the hall and gathered, sullen, under the ceiling like a lowering cloud. There were no musicians, and no dances. In their place were terse whispers and the whine of complaints. The Mortarch of Blood still provided the court with fine mortal victims on which to feed, but the events seemed more like executions than celebrations. Over the course of the last several nights, Mathas had found himself looking carefully into the faces of his prey before he fed, increasingly worried that he might see someone familiar.

He watched the other nobles, too, careful not to hold the eye of fellow conspirators too long. The faces that interested him were the ones who were not part of the rebellion, but looked so unhappy they might well take part when the uprising began.

‘Why are you displeased?’ he overheard Lord Vasyth ask Lady Casein. ‘You ascended to control of your house thanks to that slaughter.’

‘We are as decimated as you are,’ Casein hissed back. ‘Control means nothing if there is nothing left to control.’

Neferata presided over harsh sessions where the encounters with her courtiers threatened to draw blood through words alone. The nobility was becoming less obsequious and more demanding. The queen was becoming less willing to grant favours, and more savage in her denials. In the great hall, beneath the smell of incense and spilled blood, the air reeked of conflict and hate. With a spark, the atmosphere would combust into war.

The stars were aligning. An uprising was inevitable. All Mathas asked was that he be able to choose the moment when the spark was applied.

He hung back, keeping to the rear of the hall, saying nothing and requesting nothing from Neferata, doing everything he could to avoid her attention.

Casein reached the front of the line of supplicants. ‘You have weakened us,’ she said, paused, and then added, with bitter pretence of respect, ‘my queen.’ Her hands were clenched in anger. ‘Yet your tithes are unchanged. We cannot sustain them. We seek compensation… my queen. We seek justice.’

Neferata rose from her divan. She strode to the edge of the dais and glared at Casein, then at the entire court. Weakened she might be, Mathas thought, but she was still terrible in her anger. Majesty wrapped around her like a cape and thundercloud. Her eyes burned with deep, volcanic fire. ‘You tire me with your needs,’ Neferata declared, her words a hissing serpent. ‘You would feed from my very veins if I let you. Your greed and your vanity would devour Nulahmia. I will not let them. Begone from my sight. I will see true fealty, or I will see no one.’

The courtiers pulled back from the dais as if burned and filed out of the great hall. Mathas moved with them. The ragged ceremony was done.

Then Neferata called out to him.

‘Mathas of House Hellezan, you will remain.’

He froze where he stood. With an effort, he forced himself to turn around. He stared across the empty space of the hall’s floor to the dark figure of Neferata.

‘Stand before me,’ she ordered.

He obeyed. As he walked towards her slowly, feeling the pressure of her glare, the doubts returned. He wondered how he could think to challenge this being in whom beauty and command and death were fused.

Mathas reached the edge of the dais and stopped. He looked up into a cold, merciless mask.

‘I hear little of your family,’ said Neferata.

Mathas forced the tremor from his voice before speaking. ‘There is little to hear, my queen,’ he said.

‘Isn’t there? That is, I must say, a pleasant change from the chattering vermin that assail me in my palace. And how well do you feed?’

‘Very well.’

‘Your wife and child, were they succulent?’

His face turned numb with fear. He grunted, unable to answer. He could not lie. She would know. She must realise they were still alive. The question was a trap, and there was no way out. ‘I…’ he said, and trailed off.

Neferata smiled, showing her perfect fangs and perfect cruelty. ‘You don’t know? No matter. I’m sure someone else knows the answer now.’

Mathas stared, trying to pierce through the pounding clouds of horror in his head to make sense of her words, and then trying to deny their meaning.

Neferata waited, her smile sinking its venom into his veins.

Then he turned and ran.

Guards closed in from the sides, but Neferata stopped them. ‘Let him go,’ she said. ‘Run, Mathas! Run to your house of traitors! Did you think you could hide your perfidy from me? Did you think I did not see your pretence? Did you think I would let Raia’s death go unpunished? You are a fool. Go now, and learn. Go, and burn.’

Mathas burst from the main doors of the Palace of Seven Vultures. He pounded down the Path of Punishment, and the martyrs to Neferata’s will were a blur in the corner of his eyes. The wind of his flight blew his hair back. He barely saw where he was going. A howl rose from his chest. It caught in his throat, then squeezed out of his jaws, so huge it emerged as a long, constricted whine.

As he ran, he sought hope, and found none. The fact that she had not succeeded in making him her thrall now seemed nothing more than an extra layer of cruelty. Part of him wondered how much Neferata knew, but that part was drowned in the incoherent grief and terror of the rest. He could not think. He could not plan. He could only run, and run, and run, and try to free the scream that grew larger and larger as he drew closer to the Hellezan Palace.

He smelled the smoke before he saw it. It billowed up over the roofs of Nulahmia, rising to greet the dark of the night, spreading its annunciation of doom, the crimson glow of flame pulsing from beneath. Mathas drew his sword as he flew down the final streets before his home. He was ready to fight and kill and die for his family. Jedefor, he thought. I curse your name, you coward. He had no doubt the captain had led the attack on the Hellezans without hesitation, unwilling to take any risk until the battle was already met and decided.

Mathas rounded the last corner. House Hellezan was before him, a black shell of walls containing a maelstrom of fire. If it had been Jedefor’s guards who had turned the palace into a torch, they were gone now. The streets were empty even of onlookers. No one wished to draw the Mortarch’s attention their way. Mathas stumbled forward, his sword raised in desperate anger, but he was alone.

Fire billowed out of the shattered doors. It spun in furious cyclones from the windows. The dull, suffocating roar of the conflagration filled Mathas’ ears. It was the cracking, rumbling thunder of the death of his family. Centuries of honour burned. Nulahmia might belong to Neferata. It was her creation. But the Hellezans had been part of it too. They had built a history and a tradition. They had placed their mark upon the city. They had helped shape it and its story, and surely what they had done was theirs to own and take pride in. Neferata was not a god. Some aspects of what made Nulahmia must be the work of its citizens.

Something must belong to them. Something must belong to a family that had stood proud and unbowed in this land of death, holding the line for an ideal of decency when decadence and cruelty flowed through the very air and ran in blood through the drains.

All gone now. History annihilated, symbols and flesh turned to fire and black smoke.

The walls trembled with the force of the firestorm. Mortar crumbled, and a portion of the upper wall collapsed inwards. No mortal could still be alive in the palace. Mathas knew that. Any who would not have been put to the sword would have burned alive. Yet he ran through the doorway, into the holocaust. He had no choice. It was the only action left to him.

‘Teyosa!’ he cried out in the great hall. He could not hear himself over the fury of the blaze, but he kept calling for his wife. The tapestries were curtains of flame, waving in the wind of destruction. Fire writhed and coiled along the ceiling, twisting into spectral shapes that mimicked the pain of dying souls.

Mathas staggered towards the stairs. ‘Teyosa!’ His cape caught fire and he tore it from his shoulders. His skin curled and cracked in the heat. He would already be dead if he were still mortal, and the violence of the firestorm could still destroy him.

A wall of smoking rubble crashed onto the stairway before he could reach it. The barrier stopped Mathas and jolted him back to rational thought. He had been racing on the wings of instinct, about to run upstairs to his and Teyosa’s chamber. She would not be there. If there was any chance she and their son had survived, it would be down below, in the deep tunnels, far from the palace.

He turned to the cellar doors. They too were smashed. Fire and smoke roared out to meet him. He hurled himself into the choking, flickering darkness. ‘Teyosa!’ He took the steps three at a time. He did not fall. He cut through the howl of the fire with preternatural grace. He dropped through the cellars and vaults of the Hellezan Palace. Flaming timbers fell before him, and he battered them from his path. On all sides, the wreckage of his family’s history blazed. Corpses lay under smashed shelves and overturned chests, and sprawled in his path. Their throats were cut. Their limbs were dismembered. They were eviscerated, decapitated. Every outrage of mutilation had been visited on their bodies by the command of the Mortarch of Blood. They were burned black, and beyond recognition to mortal sight.

But Mathas knew who they were. He smelled the nature of their blood through the smoke. His witchsight caught the residual agonies of their spirits still convulsing over them. Every corpse he passed, no matter how quickly, was a new stab of grief.

But none of the dead were Teyosa. None of them were Kasten.

There was too much horror for hope, and too much urgency for despair. Mathas ran faster yet. The fire was consuming even the deepest foundations of the palace, and it was here that he found Verrick and Glanath. His parents had died together, their mutilations fusing their corpses, and there was no telling one severed finger or fleshless skull from another.

And still he knew who they were. Their rings had not melted. His father’s blackened seal of office hung from his charred neck.

Mathas stood over the bodies, his lungs raw from smoke, his throat tight with grief, his limbs trembling with rage. He tried to give voice to his horror. If he screamed loud enough, perhaps he would banish the reality before him. ‘Nnnnnnn,’ he groaned. His teeth clenched tight, and his denial became an animal keening. ‘Nnnnnnnnnnnn…’

His parents had fallen in the centre of a corridor in the foundations. The hall led to the tunnels running under the palace, but not the important ones. Mathas entered the wine cellar, and gave a sob of relief when he found the entrance to the rebels’ network untouched. The cellar burned, but the mechanism that opened the stone door was not damaged. Perhaps, in a final act of defiance, his parents had misled their killers. Perhaps they had saved Teyosa and Kasten.

Don’t hope. Don’t you dare hope. Look for them. Find them. But don’t succumb to hope. It seeks to destroy us on this day.

Mathas closed the door, and he shut the fire away behind him. There was smoke in the tunnels, but much less. He ran through the maze, into a darkness that was ever cleaner, shouting his wife’s name. He made for the meeting chamber, the floor outside its threshold dark with Raia’s blood. Just before he reached it, he foolishly let himself think that perhaps, perhaps, Teyosa had found refuge there.

There was no one in the chamber.

Now there were no further destinations. Mathas had nowhere to reach, no sanctuary he could think of. There was nothing left to do except run, and run, fleeing the despair that at last closed in, its black pinions sweeping to embrace him.

‘Teyosa!’ he screamed. ‘Teyosa!’

Saaah-saaah-saaah! the echoes mocked.

He ran and shrieked until he no longer knew where he was, and his voice was hoarse. He sank to his knees. ‘Teyosa,’ he whispered, and the only answer was the susurrus of his pain rasping against stone walls.

Mathas hung his head, limp with despair. It was over. Some of the other families might still be committed to the uprising, but the battle would happen without him. Neferata had destroyed the Hellezans before they had begun to fight. He was spent. He thought that maybe, just maybe, he could will himself into nothingness right here.

Distantly, he heard the sound of marching feet. The palace guard, he thought. The coward Jedefor leading a sweep to finish his bloody work. Very well, then. He would accept his execution and be thankful for it.

As the boot steps drew closer, he realised he was mistaken. The marchers were approaching from the west, away from the palace. And there were many of them. Many more, he thought, than would have been necessary for the raid on his house.

He blinked, and rose slowly. He stood in the centre of the wide tunnel, waiting to face the arrivals.

Closer yet, he could hear the clanking of heavy armour and the grinding drag of heavy masses being pulled along the floor. Barely aware that he was doing so, Mathas tightened his grip on his sword. Deep in his soul, an ember glowed, and he was ready to fight one last time.

Lestor emerged from the gloom ahead. Behind him marched a seemingly endless column of vampires and skeletons. Their armour was dark, and shorn of all insignia. They were an anonymous army. There was no way to tell what master they served.

Lestor had drawn his sword, but put it away when he recognised Mathas. His smile of greeting faded when he met Mathas’ eyes. ‘Is all well?’ he asked.

‘It is not,’ said Mathas. ‘Neferata has destroyed us.’

Lestor bowed, acknowledging Mathas’ grief. ‘Am I too late, then? Have the other houses fallen as well?’

‘No,’ Mathas said. ‘The others are not burning.’

‘Then they have something to lose. Their leader must not.’

Mathas stared at Lestor. ‘If you mean to say the murder of my family is a boon…’ he snarled, and took a threatening step forward.

‘I do not,’ Lestor said. ‘But fate has chosen you, Mathas Hellezan, and fate is rarely kind. You were preeminent in the rebellion. Now your command will be unchallenged. And you will lead with such fury the enemy will burn before your gaze.’

Mathas felt the brutal truth of Lestor’s words. He thought about his wife and son. There were not even any bodies over which he could mourn. He had only his last memories of them to fan the embers of his soul, and ignite the ruins of his heart. Energy surged through his veins. Grief transmuted to anger, anger to strength. He was not done. He was not finished.

He looked at the army stretching into the gloom behind Lestor, and he was ready. He was ready to bring down a queen.

The anger of my enemy is to my advantage. I must be wary of mine serving my foe in turn.

– War and the Passions

Chapter 11

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

Dessina at his side, Venzor strode through the Palace of Seven Vultures, seeking its shadow queen. He had sent word to her household that he wished to speak to her, but she had not appeared in his chamber. In frustration, he had left his throne to find her himself.

Though he marched past many of his underlings, the halls felt empty. At the same time, the air seemed thick, as if he were having to push his way through curtains of cobwebs. He caught himself several times about to raise his hands to part the invisible threads.

‘Where is she?’ he snarled.

‘Spinning her web,’ Dessina answered, as if she had read his thoughts.

‘You feel its presence too,’ he said.

‘It is her nature to weave it. It is always there, Lord Venzor. It would be a mistake to think any of us are ever free of it.’

‘I am not blind,’ Venzor snapped. Arkhan had warned him about Neferata’s skills, and he was not going to be lectured by a subordinate. ‘I know that I have been at war with the Mortarch since I arrived in Nulahmia.’ What he would not admit was that this was a war where he had difficulty perceiving even his own moves. The critical point was closing in. He had ceased any political activity not directly connected with the defence of the city against the Bloodbound. ‘Somehow, she plans to use the coming siege to her advantage. I will prevent her.’

Pride demanded that he confront her, and show her he was not going to be her fool.

Yet when he found her, he flushed with humiliation. After more than an hour of searching, on the verge of giving up, he looked once more in the throne room.

Neferata was there, seated on the great chair of bones coated in black iron. Clad in black, she was perched on the edge of the seat, a predator on the verge of pouncing, but also a statue of infinite and dark patience. She smiled at Venzor. No doubt she had been expecting him, he thought.

‘Leave me,’ he snapped at Dessina, wounded pride festering. He composed his features and advanced to the throne.

‘You were looking for me?’ Neferata asked.

‘I was.’

‘You have come to discuss our plans for the defence of the city?’

Venzor shook his head. ‘No. I am taking measures, and I will not seek your counsel.’

Neferata cocked her head. ‘Then why are you here?’

‘To tell you that I know your hand is at work behind the Chaos threat.’

Neferata laughed. ‘How will Ruhok’s conquest serve me? Do you think I plan to rule at his side? Do you think he plans to leave a single stone of Nulahmia standing?’

Venzor held on to his temper. ‘It is enough for me to know the attack will benefit you, even if I do not know how,’ he lied. ‘I will defend the city. I will defeat Ruhok. And I will defeat you.’

‘If I said that you were fighting on a front where there are no enemies, would you believe me?’

‘I would not,’ said Venzor. The response felt weak in the face of that knowing smile, but it was the best he could muster. He turned on his heel and left the throne room with what dignity he had left.

He returned to the private chamber he had claimed for himself. Maps of Nulahmia lay on the huge oak table in the centre. He had been studying them obsessively ever since Neferata had come to warn him of Lord Ruhok’s approach. He came back to them now, running a finger over the contours of the walls, searching for weaknesses in the defences, and trying to pry out the secret that could do him harm.

Neferata’s smile slipped as soon as Venzor was out of sight. Torturing his pride had given her pleasure, and filling him with doubts was useful. It was good that he seemed uncertain. But the fact remained that he was strong enough to counter her. Venzor was more of a threat to her than he knew.

From a shadow in the Palace, she became a shadow in the skies. Mounted on Nagadron, wreathed by mists of darkness, she flew over Nulahmia. She combed the city with her witchsight. She listened to the blood running through its veins. She pierced its secrets. And she flew north. North over a city that was no longer hers.

Along the southern border of Venzor’s area of control, she saw lines of torchlight. Neferata’s hands clenched in anger. Venzor was erecting barriers, sealing off the north from the rest of Nulahmia. Even the Throne Mount would be cut off once he was done. Barricades of wood and stone twenty feet high filled the streets. The houses along the line of the new wall had been emptied. Some of them were smouldering shells, their interiors burned and collapsed so they were an inert, impassable mass. Lanterns shone in the windows of others, where Venzor had stationed troops. Two of the broad avenues were still open. Through them poured the fearful of the south. Neferata flew low over them, glaring at the wretches with hate. They were all from the nobility of Nulahmia. She saw no one from the lower classes of the city, except the servants of fleeing households. Either the less fortunate had been turned away, or they still feared Neferata enough to know better than to make the attempt.

The faithless travelled from the south to the north in ragged caravans of wealth. Servants and horses pulled wagons overladen with gold, jewels, art, furniture, clothing and tapestries. The nobles sensed the coming of war, and they were trying to save their existence and their positions at the same time.

Neferata circled over them, her anger growing. She raised her head, looking away from the worms, seeking counsel with the darkness above.

Think about what you know you are about to do, she told herself. She worked to detach herself from the scene below, from the humming and whining of Nulahmia’s blood and fears. She sought to read the currents of power. This was, in the end, why she had taken to the skies. Remember what must be accomplished, she thought.

I remember. And I will do this thing, too. There is no contradiction. There is no error. This will change nothing. The disposition of the forces is set.

The river of power was growing turbulent. She still believed she could ride the turbulence to her victory.

Is this reason or rationalising?

It does not matter. I accept the consequences.

She dispelled the concealing mist, and brought Nagadron down to land on the vast heap of rubble that would soon be moved to block the width of the Bloodway. Already the avenue was half its normal span. Venzor’s troops were shepherding the refugees through the passage between the rubble.

Nagadron landed with a splintering crunch as his claws shattered stone. Soldiers and aristocrats turned in alarm. Neferata descended from the Adevore and walked slowly down the slope of the rubble. The citizens on the avenue winced at every step that brought her closer to them.

‘You are cowards,’ she said. She spoke softly, and she spoke so every soul in her sight heard her voice, and felt its hiss sink into their bones. ‘You are ungrateful.’

One of the vampires dropped to his knees in a practised show of obedience. His robes spread out around him in a flourish. ‘My queen,’ he said. ‘We wish for nothing but your eternal reign.’

‘Do you? How kind.’ She reached the bottom of the wreckage and walked over to the noble. People rushed to clear the way for her, stumbling into each other and against their wagons. Horses whinnied and bucked, their eyes rolling in terror at her presence. ‘Tell me, Lord Bessein,’ she said, standing over the kneeling vampire, ‘why are you so quick to mention my throne?’

Bessein coughed, his smooth obsequiousness slipping away from him. ‘I meant… That is… I did not presume to suggest…’

‘Fear drives you,’ Neferata said. ‘It has brought you here. It speaks through you now. It defines you, and its stench is repugnant.’ She turned around, catching hundreds in the scythe of her gaze. Venzor’s warriors stood by uneasily, knowing better than to move against her. ‘Fear drives all of you,’ she said. ‘Our city has suffered greatly.’ She tempered the anger for a moment, yet made her pretence of understanding so transparent that many of the wretches, Bessein among them, began to whimper. ‘Nulahmia will soon suffer again. Awareness of this truth will bring fear to the craven. This is the nature of things. Not all subjects are warriors. Nor do I expect them to be.’

She turned back to Bessein. He fell silent.

I will punish later, she thought. And I will punish now.

‘Your fears are misplaced, Lord Bessein. You have forgotten how much you must fear me. This I cannot forgive, and must correct.’

Bessein’s eyes widened. ‘Please,’ he said, and began to rise from his kneel.

Neferata whipped the Dagger of Jet from its sheath and plunged it through Bessein’s neck. She lifted the choking vampire until his feet left the ground. He tried to pull Akmet-har from his neck, but his strength was fleeing, his energy pouring down the blade and into Neferata. His flesh contracted on his skull, withering and turning grey, pulling back from his fangs, thinning into tearing parchment. His struggles grew weaker, but the pain in his eyes did not diminish. He dangled from the blade, a whimper of agony bubbling up from his throat.

Neferata looked around. ‘Lord Bessein has remembered to fear me. What of the rest of you?’

‘Mercy, great queen!’ nobles wailed, on their knees. ‘We are loyal! We have been misled!’ Others turned to run. Venzor’s warriors, seeing what must surely come next, were pulling back, putting space between themselves and the passage to the north. There was nothing they could do here, and they saw no reason to let themselves be destroyed pointlessly. Neferata pulled back on the reins of her anger, marking a limit to her actions. She would not force Venzor into open war.

She waited, drinking in the screams around her. At the edges of the crowd, to the north and south, people were fleeing, carrying their renewed fear like a virus. Bessein trembled weakly, his pain still rich as his body contracted in on itself.

‘Do you fear me?’ Neferata asked. With a sharp flick of her wrist, she cut through the right half of Bessein’s neck. His head flopped to one side, and he dropped to the ground. Already, his body was beginning to crumble to dust.

‘We fear you!’ the nobles cried. ‘We fear you!’

‘Not enough,’ Neferata said, and at her signal, Nagadron the Adevore craned his neck down and opened his jaws wide. He breathed a fog of terrible dissolution on the crowd. Spectral green, it screamed with the voices of shattered souls. Vampires and mortals alike screamed back as their bones shed their flesh, and a pain beyond the corporeal tore through their beings. The street filled with the roiling light of rot and pain. Neferata strode through it, slicing throats and tearing heads from their bodies, consuming blood with savage contempt. ‘To the living and to the undead I bring death,’ she pronounced, her voice an echoing toll of doom. ‘Death is no mercy, because I am a stranger to mercy. Death is merely the beginning of your unending suffering.’

Nagadron inhaled. The Adevore had no lungs, and he did not breathe, but he inhaled. A devouring wind howled up from the street, and with it new souls flowed, shrieking, into the dread abyssal’s maw. He gathered new prisoners into torment, new screams into the cage of his body. He snarled, the glow of death blazing from his core.

Neferata stood in the centre of the Bloodway, surrounded by twisted, broken corpses. Blood washed against the heels of her boots. Screams of terror came from the north and south. The nobles who had managed to move beyond the scope of her massacre were fleeing further into what they hoped would be Venzor’s protection. The ones to the south were cowering back, though she knew they would rush forward as soon as she left. She had given them new cause to fear, but it would not be enough to stop them. They still believed the south of Nulahmia would fall.

‘It is accomplished,’ she whispered, the flush of rage leaving her.

The satisfaction of punishment was a reward, and she would savour its taste for some hours to come. Her anger at the disloyal nobles was real, but the slaughter had served a larger purpose.

Venzor, do you see how weak I am? Do you see how I lash out to no purpose? Give me the gift of your contempt.

She returned to Nagadron and soared upwards. The site of the butchery dropped away, and with it the wails of the frightened. Neferata took Nagadron higher and higher, until all of Nulahmia was spread out below her. She reached out, the span of her fingers encompassing her city. Mine, she thought. Now and forever. Mine.

She looked to the north-west, and the night was burning. Flame and brass and blood was a day’s march away.

Catastrophe was coming to storm the gates.

Knowing that the storm must come, I may choose to summon it. But because a crisis can be called into being, that does not mean it can be controlled.

– On the Crucible of Disaster

Chapter 12

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

‘She has doomed herself,’ said Hasynne.

‘Yes,’ said Mathas. ‘Yes, she has.’ Hasynne was speaking the simple truth. In the cavern that had awaited them, the rebels had gathered at last; Mathas was surrounded by strength, and the fire of vengeance burned in his blood. The Mortarch of Blood must fall. Fate could not judge otherwise.

The hour had come, and the army of liberation had come together with such speed that a surge of satisfaction and anticipation cut through the walls of Mathas’ grief. ‘She has galvanised us,’ he said. ‘She believes she has killed my family. In truth, she has killed herself.’

‘The rest of us are not prepared to wait for her to decide when it is our turn on the executioner’s block,’ Hasynne said. ‘I do not think she intended it, but she struck the first blow of the war when she attacked your house.’ She paused for a moment, then said, ‘Jedefor has sent word that he is ready too.’

‘Jedefor,’ Mathas repeated, his voice flat.

‘If he led the attack, he had no choice,’ Hasynne reminded him. ‘I believe he is still loyal to us.’

‘To us?’

She shrugged. ‘Then to the promise of power. It has a powerful hold on him.’

Mathas grimaced, then nodded. With or without Jedefor, they were ready. ‘The time of hiding is over,’ he said. The warriors of a score of noble houses were assembled in the cavern. Their armour shone in the torchlight. Standard bearers held banners aloft. The colours hung motionless in the still air, barely visible in the gloom, but their presence was a brilliant shout of pride. Mathas smiled. ‘This is our fist of defiance,’ he said. ‘Our sword to slay a tyrant. Once it reaches the surface, it will be a clarion call to all who would be freed from the yoke of their fealty to Neferata.’

‘You are faring well, I see,’ Hasynne said.

Mathas thought before answering. ‘Yes,’ he said. He nodded. ‘I am well.’ He pulled his lips back over his fangs. ‘And I am ready.’ His family was gone. There were no Hellezans for him to lead into the fray. Instead, he was at the head of an entire army. His heart was in agony, but his soul blazed with power. He could, he thought, break the foundations of Nulahmia with his bare hands. He was fire. He was wrath.

He was vengeance.

‘We are ready,’ Hasynne said. ‘All of us are.’

‘Then let us begin.’ Mathas raised his sword, and the echoing din of voices and armour faded. ‘You are the great families of Nulahmia,’ he shouted. ‘And you have never been as great as you are this night. Because this is the hour when we declare that this city is not the work of a single being. And we are not her property. We are this city!’ A strange conviction took him, and he spoke the next sentence in full passion, before he could have second thoughts. ‘We are its life!’

‘Life!’ Lestor exclaimed in surprise. ‘A strange boast in Shyish!’ Yet he sounded curious in spite of himself.

Mathas wondered what had pushed him to speak those words. He felt as if he was tempting the anger of Nagash himself. He saw the irony in making that claim now, when life was no longer his. But the god of death did not strike him down. And he knew he was speaking the truth. Life. The word was strange, misplaced, yet it also felt right.

‘Yes!’ Mathas answered. ‘Life! There is life in this cavern, and this army will bring life to Nulahmia!’ He pointed his sword at the phalanxes of skeletons and zombies that had come with Lestor. ‘There is no life in them, but not because of what they are. It is because they are here at the command of your distant master. He has no interest in the well-being of Nulahmia and its citizens. He cares only for the downfall of Neferata. Is that also true of you, Lestor? You, who spoke to me of fate?’

The other vampire didn’t answer. A hesitant excitement spread over his sharp features.

‘Life!’ Mathas shouted again. ‘Life! It is in our passion for our cause! It is in our belief in what our city can be!’

And Hasynne cheered his words, as did all the other vampires in the cavern.

Mathas had had to die before this revelation came to him. He saw it now, and as the moment of the beginning of the march had come, he was alive in a deeper way than he ever had been before.

‘The three great tunnels are our route,’ he announced. ‘They run in rough parallels to each other, and through them, we shall storm to the surface. We must use speed against the tyrant. Our first strike must be too fast and hard to stop.’ He turned and aimed his sword at the exits from the cavern. ‘To war!’ he cried, and his army of followers obeyed.

At the head of his phalanx, Mathas marched, and then ran, racing back up through the underworld of Nulahmia, rising from the darkness, a blade reforged and made stronger by grief. He led his troops back through the tunnels that had marked his descent into despair, and then he was storming through the broken foundations of the Hellezan palace. Hasynne and Lestor followed closely behind him.

‘You were right,’ Mathas told Lestor. ‘I was mindful of risk before. Now I have nothing left to lose.’

‘You would be a martyr for the freedom of your city?’ Lestor asked.

‘For that prize? Willingly. And what of you? Do you march and die only for your master’s pleasure?’

Lestor hesitated before answering. ‘I am no longer sure,’ he admitted. And he grinned.

The ruins were still smoking. The blackened timbers and stones were a further goad to action. With the companies of House Tennsein, House Gallatal, House Vernax and House Bretherel, Mathas climbed through the ashes of his home, and burst like a phoenix of rage onto the street. Now, truly, the time of secrets was over. Mathas roared, and his troops roared with him. They thundered their challenge to the reign of the Mortarch of Blood, and with a still greater thunder they made for the Queensroad. The tramp of boots and crash of armour filled the streets. The standard bearers raised trumpets to their lips, and the music of rebellion blared in Nulahmia for the first time in the city’s existence.

The three corps merged together in the Queensroad. They hit the great avenue in a wave. The road was always crowded, as day and night the pulse of Nulahmia moved through it. Now Mathas severed the flow of merchants and serfs, pedestrians and riders, caravans and corteges. People fled in confusion and fear to the side streets. Dark towers of residences lined the road in this quarter, and faces crowded at their windows, looking down on an event that, until this very moment, had been unimaginable in the city of Neferata.

The army had advanced less than a mile up the Queensroad when it encountered the first guard patrol. The warriors stared, rooted to the spot for crucial seconds by the sight of the impossible. Mathas charged them, and the torrent of the army followed him. As the trumpets sounded again, Mathas yelled, ‘I am the vengeance of the Hellezans! For Nulahmia! For freedom!’

For life! he thought. He did not put the great heresy into words.

Not yet. Not quite yet.

He fell on the captain of the guard as the other vampire broke through his paralysis and lunged forward. Mathas smashed his sword to the side and barrelled into him, a battering ram of fury. The captain stumbled back and Mathas decapitated him with a single stroke. The rest of the guards planted their pikes and tried to stand fast against the wave that came for them. They were swept away in moments, trampled and cut to pieces by the unwavering tide of freedom.

‘First blood!’ Mathas shouted. ‘First victory!’ He paused to look up at the people in the windows. ‘You know us!’ he called. ‘We are you! We are Nulahmia! Join us! Together, we will seize the night from the tyrant!’

He ran forward again, taking the charge up the Queensroad. People were leaving their windows and emerging from doorways and side streets. ‘Join us!’ Mathas called. ‘Become the birth of hope in Nulahmia!’

At first the citizens hesitated. Before long, though, a stream of new recruits joined the rebellion.

The further Mathas went up the Queensroad, the larger his army became. Already it covered the width of the avenue, and it was so long he could barely see the end. It advanced relentlessly. Vampires and mortals marched side by side, supported by unflinching ranks of skeletons and zombies. Before long, a pale green cloud drew Mathas’ gaze upwards. A spirit host flew overhead. He readied himself for an attack, but it did not come. Faces emerged from the roiling mass of ectoplasmic energy. Their eyes were empty gaps, their mouths contorted howls of pain, but their anger was directed towards the Throne Mount. When they looked down at Mathas and his army, there was no anger.

It was tempting to believe he saw hope in the forms of the tortured dead. He knew better. Yet it was very tempting.

The crowd ahead of the rebels thinned quickly, and more and more of it became part of the march. The wave overwhelmed the individual squads of guards it encountered. There was still no coordinated response, no larger cohorts of troops loyal to Neferata.

Hasynne joined Mathas. Behind her, her troops of House Nastannar followed in a solid wall of armour. ‘Captain Jedefor is true to his word,’ she said.

‘So it seems,’ Mathas said bitterly. They were almost at the foot of the Throne Mount, where their stand would begin. Already, it was too late for Neferata to prevent the siege.

‘You sound disappointed,’ Hasynne said.

‘I would have welcomed the chance to kill him for his treachery.’

‘He will be careful, no doubt, to remain safely above the fray.’ Hasynne looked up towards the Palace of Seven Vultures. ‘We cannot surround the Mount,’ she said. ‘We can’t trap Neferata up there.’

‘We don’t have to,’ said Mathas. ‘Even if we did surround it, what does that mean to someone who can fly? We block her strength, though. We do not need her. It will be enough to take her power.’ It was a lie and he knew it. This might have been true a few nights before. He would not be truly satisfied now unless he could destroy Neferata. The souls of Teyosa and Kasten demanded it.

Be content with what you can achieve, he told himself. Look around you. You have made the impossible real.

Then why not a bit more? Why not one more impossibility?

He glanced up at the spirit horde, half-expecting to see the traces of his wife and child. There was no sign of them. They had vanished absolutely, and for that, he was grateful. His last memory of them was not of their burned corpses. He would have no new memories of their tormented, raging souls, or so he hoped.

The front ranks of the army reached the base of the Throne Mount.

‘Houses Tennsein and Vernax,’ Mathas ordered, ‘barricade the bottom of the Path of Punishment. The rest of us will move west.’ As the barriers went up, he eyed the slope. There was a formation of several squads of guards at the first sharp bend of the Path. Even from this distance, Mathas could sense the uncertainty in the troops. Whatever orders Jedefor had given them must have been contradictory or vague, at the very least unsuited to the circumstances. The guards held their position.

Sink into your doubts, Mathas thought. The longer you wait to act, the stronger our barrier will be.

Then, with Hasynne and her house at the fore, supported by Lestor’s undead hordes, Mathas turned the march to the west. Two thirds of the rebel force went with him. They left the Queensroad and plunged back into the Palace Quarter of Nulahmia, making for the guard keep at its centre.

‘Now comes a true test,’ Hasynne said. ‘There will be more than a matter of a few isolated patrols at the keep.’

‘We are strong enough for that,’ said Mathas. ‘But I agree. There is a test. It will be how the rest of the population of this Quarter responds to us.’

‘You think we will be defeated if they turn their backs on us?’ Lestor asked.

We? Mathas thought. Interesting. ‘I refuse defeat,’ he insisted. ‘But the fight will be hard without them, yes.’

He had his answer before long. The trumpets called, and the people answered. They shouted from windows and rooftops, and then they came running. From doorways and side streets, from alleys and markets, from courtyards and from the grand houses, the rich families of Nulahmia came running.

‘The moment has come!’ Mathas shouted to them. ‘We shall overthrow Neferata and make the city our own!’ He picked up the pace. ‘Move fast,’ he said to Hasynne and Lestor. The street was narrower than the Queensroad. ‘We must not become trapped by the crush of our own numbers.’

The larger the crowd, the faster it grew.

Despite the risks of the massive crowd, Mathas laughed. ‘Do you see?’ he asked Lestor. ‘Do you see the people taking courage from each other? Our movement will not be stopped. Did your master foresee something this vast?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lestor admitted. He did not seem to care what Mannfred had anticipated or not.

‘How many of our new recruits are believers, do you think?’ Hasynne asked.

‘I am not asking myself the question, because it doesn’t matter,’ Mathas said. ‘Even if most of them have joined us to be part of the victorious side of the conflict, I can accept that. The victory is important, and they will help get us there.’

Though Mathas kept his force together, concentrated on a single street, the march spread wide. Soon, it seemed to him that the entire Quarter was on the move. The immensity of the wave stoked his internal fire even higher. A new thing had come to the city. He would not call it life yet. With pride, he would name it hope. After untold centuries of decadence and excess and exuberant murder, hope was here. It was a strange, disturbing, disorienting emotion in Shyish, yet it was here, and Mathas exulted in its arrival. He did not know where it would take him or how the thing he had become could encompass it, yet he also knew that he would, just as surely as his thirst for blood would never be truly slaked. He hungered for the hot spray of salty gore in his mouth, and he was consumed with the determination to protect the citizens of Nulahmia. Perhaps the paradox could not be resolved. If so, he would be content. He would embrace it as the new truth of his being, and see defining unity in division.

The road ended, opening into a wide square that surrounded a squat, glowering keep. Mathas had expected to see defenders on its roof, for arrows to streak from the crenels and finally test the mettle of the rebels. Yet he saw no one. There were no shouts, no alarms; there was no attack of any kind. There were no torches on the roof, and the windows were dark.

‘Surround the keep,’ Mathas ordered. ‘Seal the exits. We’ll turn their fortress into their prison.’ Hasynne and Lestor repeated the commands. The rebels filled the square and flowed around the walls of the keep, a sea of arms enveloping an island of stone.

The keep remained silent.

‘Front ranks, torches,’ Mathas commanded. ‘Throw them through the windows.’

Flaming brands arced through the air and into the apertures. The interior began to burn, and still, there was no reaction.

Mathas, Hasynne and Lestor regarded the keep with growing concern.

‘Why haven’t they shuttered the windows?’ Lestor wondered.

‘Where are they?’ Hasynne said. ‘They can’t be hiding.’

‘That would be an odd strategy,’ Mathas agreed.

‘They have had time to prepare,’ said Lestor.

‘We always knew they would,’ Mathas told him. ‘We had no surface access points nearby. Better to seize the Queensroad and have that strong point than to be bogged down in the Palace Quarter while Neferata sent her reinforcements unchallenged down from the Throne Mount.’ He shrugged. ‘We expected this would be a hard fight.’

‘We did not expect nothing,’ said Hasynne.

‘We must assume they made ready,’ Mathas said, thinking aloud. ‘Why would they abandon their keep? This is their strongest defensive position.’

‘They can’t have simply retreated,’ said Hasynne.

Look to the west! The mental warning hit Mathas with the force of a physical blow. His body jerked as if struck by lightning, so intensely did his instincts shriek with the premonition of imminent danger. He spun around.

The exit from the north of the square was the Doomwood Way. The wide road reached the square at a hard diagonal, angling so sharply north-west that he could see nothing more than fifty yards of the Way.

‘They haven’t retreated,’ his said. ‘They aren’t defending. They’re going to ambush us.’

The vulnerability of the rebels’ position chilled him, and he saw the magnitude of the trap they had entered. His army was spread around the empty keep. A powerful strike from the Doomwood Way could hit without warning and smash the coherence of the rebel force before any defence could be mounted.

In the distance, they could hear the sound of marching boots.

‘We are fools,’ Hasynne groaned.

‘We are not destroyed yet,’ Mathas said. ‘They have already missed their chance. As long as we’re moving, then we have the offensive. He raised his sword. ‘With me!’ he shouted. ‘To the Ten Sepulchres!’

Warriors cleared a path for him and then followed. The distance across the square seemed infinite, an attack before he could reach the Way inevitable. And yet the wings of war supported him and he ran like the wind. Behind him, the forces of the rebel houses turned to the new direction of attack with the fluidity of a river.

We are not destroyed yet, he thought again. Hope refused to be extinguished, and he would not let it die. It was too precious a flame in Nulahmia.

At Mathas’ side, Hasynne bore a fierce, determined grin. You feel the flame too, he thought. Lestor kept pace with them, the commanders of the three largest forces hitting the Way together. Lestor was grinning too, and the smile was much fiercer, much more impassioned than earlier, when the first hint of excitement had crossed his features. Lestor, who had nothing truly at stake in this war. Lestor, who acted as his master’s tool, a master who saw the rebellion merely as a useful weapon against Neferata. But Lestor was grinning, his eyes shining with a fire that had nothing to do with cold calculation.

The rebellion of hope rushed into the Doomwood Way. The torrent thundered up the cobbled pavement between the façades of palaces and high walls bordering the grounds of great mansions. The army was well engaged in the street when the enemy came into view, less than a mile away. If Mathas had wasted another few minutes, staring at an empty keep, the trap would have closed. Instead, two juggernauts raced towards each other. Wide as the avenue was, it still constrained the armies.

‘How many, would you judge?’ Mathas asked Hasynne.

‘More than what would have been in the keep. Beyond that, I cannot tell. I cannot see as far as their rear flanks.’

Mathas glanced back quickly. ‘They will say the same of us,’ he said.

‘The queen is with them,’ Lestor said. He pointed up. The sinister glow of Nagadron flew above the front ranks of the guards. He moved back and forth across the width of the Way, his tail slicing sinuous wounds in the night. From her wraithbone throne on his back, Neferata looked down at the rebels. The golden crown of Lahmia caught the infernal light of the Adevore and shone with the majesty of cruelty. Mathas could not see her eyes, but he could feel her reptilian gaze strike him.

‘It is good that she is here,’ Mathas said, forcing himself free from the terror of those eyes. ‘It is good,’ he said again, exhaling the word in a long hiss of anticipation.

‘She means to end this war at a stroke,’ Hasynne said.

‘She will fail,’ said Mathas. ‘The victory will be ours. Nulahmia will have its freedom.’ I will have my vengeance. My family will have justice.

A bronze statue of Neferata stood at the intersection with a narrow cross street. The figure was posed in stern triumph, its head inclined downwards to judge all who passed beneath. Mathas leapt high and landed on its shoulders. Visible now to all his followers, he stood atop the image of the hated queen whilst he pointed at the real one, and shouted over the rumble of the two armies. ‘Behold the tyrant! Behold her fall! She has her power, but we have hope!’ And then the moment finally came for the greatest heresy, the challenge to all of Shyish, the roar of the most impossible, and most powerful truth. ‘We have life! Charge the enemy! Seize your victory now!’

The words were lightning. From them followed thunder: the thunder of voices raised in triumph and fury, and of boots slamming against the ground as the rebels hurled themselves forwards. Mathas jumped back to the ground and sprinted forwards, leading the way, leading the hope.

Like clashing oceans, the armies came together.

The study of enemies means more than learning their tactics. It means learning what they call themselves. To learn the names and the ranks by which they exult themselves is to learn their cultures and this, in turn, is to learn their souls. The souls of Chaos are the most crucial. Whether forces are to be used against each other or must be fought directly, their names must be known, and with them the strengths and desires and madnesses of the armies of the Dark Gods. Then the truth can be perceived. Truth must be mine. From it, I will craft the strongest illusions.

– The Orders of Chaos

Chapter 13

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

‘She did not lie,’ said Venzor. On the north ramparts of Nulahmia, he and Dessina observed the approach of the monstrous horde of the Bloodbound. The air shattered with the blasts of brass horns. Towering siege engines made their slow, implacable way towards the Hyena Gate. Lit by torches, energised with hate, a surge of the crimson warriors of Khorne moved towards the gate with the destructive force of a lava flow. The first exchanges of arrow volleys between defenders and besiegers had begun, though the targets were still just out of range. ‘They are coming for the gate, just as she said.’

‘Truth is the most powerful of lies,’ Dessina reminded him. The words sounded like an incantation, as if she had survived as long as she had only by branding the sentence onto her soul. ‘You would do well to take that fact to heart, too.’

‘Yes,’ said Venzor. This moment, when events were definitively proving Neferata to be honest were when he should be most suspicious.

If he was going to alter the disposition of his forces, he had to act quickly. There would soon be no more time to manoeuvre. There was no doubt that Ruhok was attacking the Hyena Gate, and Venzor had prepared for that battle. And yet…

The Bloodbound horde was so vast, it stretched to the east and west as far as Venzor could see, the horizon turned to brass and blood, coming to embrace all of Nulahmia. The army was too huge for all of Ruhok’s warriors to assault a single portion of the walls.

Venzor cursed. The inspiration he had been pursuing for days finally came to him, when it might be too late. ‘Come with me,’ he told Dessina. He strode quickly to the command tent he had ordered erected on the battlements. Inside, a table held the same maps that had obsessed him in the Palace of Seven Vultures. He snatched the one he needed and unrolled the scroll. He stabbed a finger at the north-east section of the defences. ‘What do you see?’ he said.

Dessina studied the map. ‘Nothing. The wall is unbroken there.’

‘Exactly.’ He opened another scroll that showed the quarter of the Hyena Gate. ‘There is nothing when there should be something. The wall is unbroken, yes. For so very long a stretch. Why? Where is the gate?’

‘Should there be one?’

Venzor nodded. ‘The lack of one creates a delay for travel to the north-east that does not exist in other sectors. It makes little strategic sense, unless there is a greater reason for there seeming to be nothing here.’

‘An escape,’ Dessina said. She spat the word.

‘Would that not be in character?’ Venzor asked. ‘A secret egress for the queen rather than a passage for her troops?’

‘It would be,’ said Dessina. ‘That duplicity defines her.’

‘And I have been a fool not see this earlier,’ Venzor said. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Take your warriors to the wall. Find the gate if you can, but at all costs defend that region of the wall.’ He looked outside the tent at the monstrous siege towers still closing on the Hyena Gate. ‘You were right,’ he said. He pointed at the towers. ‘They are the truth that concealed the greater lie from me.’

Dessina bowed. ‘I will do what I must. I will not fail. This I swear.’

She hurried from the tent. Venzor watched her go, then advanced to the front of the battlements again to command the defence of the Hyena Gate. This attack was still a truth he must contend with. It constricted his actions and shut down his choices. He cursed Neferata and her corrosive truths, and he cursed himself for coming to understanding so slowly. His hope lay in the hate he saw in Dessina’s eyes. She would fly to the north-east in a fury that would match the rage of the Bloodbound.

A huge figure rode at the head of the legions below. His helm was a crimson skull of bronze, and from his shoulders rose a massive rune of Khorne. His dark cape swung heavily in the night wind. On the armoured flanks of the monster he rode, rows of spikes impaled skulls, and every death’s head wore a crown. A destroyer of nations advanced to the gates of Nulahmia. He came within the range of archers, and rose higher in the saddle as arrows struck against his armour and broke. He raised his axe and roared with a voice so loud and full of rage, it seemed to Venzor that a volcano had found a tongue and the power of speech.

‘Nulahmia falls this night!’ Ruhok shouted. ‘Do not seek mercy or flight – stand and die! I am war, and I have come to throw your towers down! Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

The horde behind him echoed his shout, and the Bloodbound charged.

The parapet vibrated under Venzor’s feet. An arrow of doubt pierced him. We aren’t ready, he thought. It was as if Ruhok’s voice alone was shaking the walls. They felt thin as parchment, and weak as hope. Venzor pictured them cracking apart. He pictured himself falling through shattered stone to savage axes below.

Storm clouds had gathered over Nulahmia. They hung low, grazing the highest spires of the city. They glowed a dull red, reflecting the fires of Ruhok’s army. The architecture of Nulahmia cast angular, wavering shadows in their light.

Neferata moved through darkness in the far north-east of the city. Wreathed in a mist of shadows, she passed between two high, broad monuments. They were engraved with colossal representations of her image, seated in judgement, dispensing death. Their black, polished granite was cold to the touch, and they held all habitations at bay. They shouldered close to the city’s ramparts, allowing only a narrow passage between them and the wall. The darkness of the passage was eternal. The cobbles were slick with moss and slime. The alley was nameless. It was never used, and led nowhere. Except to the Raven Gate.

Neferata approached a featureless expanse of the wall and placed her palm against it. The stonework vibrated beneath her touch. A split ten feet high appeared, and two sections of the wall rumbled apart. She entered the tunnel, advancing a dozen yards before she reached an iron door. When she touched it, it ground upwards into the rounded ceiling.

She kept going. One barrier after another opened at her touch. No other key would open the Raven Gate. She moved through Nulahmia’s outer wall, a faint aura of sorcery surrounding her. It reached into the walls of the tunnel, holding at bay the wards that would destroy any presence that sought to pass the gate without her permission.

She had conceived of the Raven Gate as a means of escape. She had never intended to use it to permit entry into Nulahmia. She found the alteration of its purpose interesting, not distressing. The currents of power flowed in this direction, and so she had adapted. So she always would, or she would fall.

The outer stonework of the wall parted, and the gate was open. The land beyond was steep slope, broken by curved boulders, the fossilised claws of an ancient leviathan that had become its own monument. Neferata stood in the archway. She let the shadows flow away from her. ‘The city awaits you,’ she said. ‘Do not keep it waiting.’

The warbands emerged from behind the stone claws. Ruhok had clearly commanded them to do as she had instructed, and conceal themselves until the gate was open. Even that minimal gesture towards stealth ran against their natures and the warriors who came towards her were consumed with new rage. She smiled at them, fuelling their anger and confusing them at the same time. They did not understand what she was. Their instinct to attack her was, for the moment, troubled.

She wondered idly what orders Ruhok had given them concerning her.

‘Come,’ she said, and walked back through the open gate. The Bloodbound followed, running now, the promise of unleashed violence and mountains of skulls urging them on.

Ruhok’s warriors were savages, Neferata thought. That savagery would be useful to her. So would their strength. They entered the tunnel, and the walls seemed too small to contain their muscle-contorting wrath. Neferata knew the kinds and ranks of the followers of Khorne.

Most of the troops entering Nulahmia were bloodreavers. Many of them disdained armour, taking violent pride in the fresh wounds and old scars that covered their bodies and faces. The Blood Warriors who led them dwarfed their underlings. They were huge, mountains of crimson armour clanking with every step. At their head was the largest of them all. His helm, surmounted with massive horns forming the rune of Khorne, concealed his face. There was nothing human visible beneath the mask of rage. The spikes on his shoulders were coated in blood, and some of it was very fresh. He had, Neferata thought, anointed himself with the gore of a subordinate who had displeased him. She approved of the excess. She had less patience for the crude application of force.

‘And what do you call yourself?’ Neferata asked the Blood Warrior.

‘I am Wrahn,’ he said. The massive double blades of his goreglaive moved back and forth as he walked. ‘My name is the name of your destroyer if you betray us.’

Neferata laughed, making him jerk with surprise and anger. She tapped a finger against the edge of the glaive. ‘That would be singularly pointless on my part, don’t you think? Betraying you inside these walls would not serve my purpose at all.’

‘We are not here to serve you,’ Wrahn growled.

‘Aren’t you?’ She looked back at the long line of Bloodbound following her through the wall. There were over a hundred of Wrahn’s warriors already inside, and more were following. A very good start, she thought, for the work ahead. She was pleased with the size of Ruhok’s detachment. ‘I rather think you are,’ she said. ‘Lord Ruhok is too, though no doubt it will please him to believe otherwise.’

Wrahn growled. ‘Jest while you can.’

‘I do not jest.’

As she spoke, they reached the other side of the Raven Gate, and the Bloodbound spilled into Nulahmia.

Neferata took a step to the right, and crooked her hand in summoning. The mist of shadows rushed around her again at the same moment that Wrahn turned with her and swung his goreglaive at her neck.

The attack was as predictable as the fall of night.

‘Blood!’ Wrahn yelled. ‘Blood for the–’ His swing went wide, cutting trailing darkness. Then Neferata seized him from the whirl of shadow, tearing his helm from his head and clutching his throat, cutting him off in mid-shout. His features were a mass of scar tissue, huge parallel claw gouges running from forehead to chin. He gasped for air, but her grip had closed his air passages. He lashed out with the glaive again, and she grabbed its shaft, immobilising the weapon.

In answer to her will, sorcerous energies rose from the ground at her feet, lifting her and Wrahn into the air. Her attack was so fast that the other Khornate warriors were only just starting to react, and already Wrahn was out of their reach. The Blood Warrior had doomed himself the moment he had thought of turning on her.

Wrahn could not speak. He kicked at the air. His lips mouthed the words Blood God.

‘No,’ Neferata hissed, her voice tearing the air like lightning, blasting down to the army below. ‘Here, there is no blood for the Blood God. Here, the blood is mine.’ She snapped her head forward, a striking serpent, and sank her fangs into Wrahn’s neck. His blood flooded her mouth. She drank deeply, draining his strength in moments. She pulled back while the gore still pumped, letting it rain down, and tore Wrahn’s head from his shoulders. She crushed the skull to powder, brain matter and eyes squeezing from between her fingers. ‘This is my city,’ she thundered at the Bloodbound. ‘All that exists inside these walls belongs to me. Every life, every death, every drop of blood. You are mine. Now go, and wreak your havoc. Go, and do your worst. I command it.’

She dropped Wrahn’s corpse and rose higher, vanishing from the sight of the warriors as the shadows embraced her completely. She listened to the Bloodbound scream their outrage and hate and then, the target of their wrath gone, turn to punish the city in her stead. Neferata’s spell carried her to the roof of the tallest monument. She perched there, watching the Bloodbound bring their rampage. The first fires began to spread, and the stream of warriors was still passing through the gate. The Bloodbound raced through the streets, their path of murderous conquest fuelled by the even greater hate that was her gift to them.

Two fronts had opened in Nulahmia, and Venzor was caught between them. Catastrophe had come to the city, and the flames were the start of its great blossoming. Her fate – and Nulahmia’s – hung in a balance of destruction.

The currents of power had become a torrent, hurling everyone in the city at the rocks that could and would tear them apart. Exhilarated, Neferata laughed, her voice the crack of doom sounding over the city at war.

The blood is mine.

Never accept defeat. Never doubt its possibility.

– Exhortations

Chapter 14

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

Below Neferata, the Doomwood Way was awash with blood. Rebels and guards cut each other down in a war of passion against discipline. The skills of the guard slowed the advance, but no more. The rebels outnumbered them, and though their formations were more ragged, there were enough veteran warriors among the houses to make the difference. The ranks of the skeletons had a greater effect as the battle wore on and they moved up, bringing their unflinching relentlessness to bear. The defeat of the guard was more than predictable. Neferata could anticipate the moment of their collapse down to the second.

She took Nagadron high above the rooftops and looked down upon the panorama of the uprising. Most of the Palace Quarter was in turmoil, the streets filled with marching, chanting traitors. In the regions furthest from the combat, the rebellion had taken on the aspect of a carnival, the people celebrating a victory that had yet to occur.

I see you all, Neferata thought. You have revealed yourself to me, and my judgement will spare no one. Her anger would scorch the streets with the fury of the sun. The celebrants would curse their existence. Their deaths would be eternities of torment.

But the punishment could not come yet. She would need her victory first.

She took Nagadron back down, swooping in on the march a short distance behind the front lines. As the Adevore closed in, talons extended, she noted each banner and coat of arms. She had wanted to know who plotted against her, and here was that triumph at least. She had pushed them into the open, and there they were, defiant in their treachery, howling for her blood.

You see them all. Now crush them.

Nagadron struck the centre of the Way, crushing rebels under his talons, then raking more apart before leaping skywards again. Neferata turned Aken-seth on her enemies, blasting a storm of dark magic through their ranks. Rebels fell, twisting in death agonies, withered to emaciated mummies as the Staff of Pain drained their life forces in an instant.

She took Nagadron up again, leaving a score of rebels destroyed. But the gap in their formation closed almost at once. Nagadron dived again, and again, this time dragging long gouges through the army, shredding mortal, vampire and skeleton to pieces. The march did not slow. If anything it moved faster, as new warriors raced through the spaces Neferata and the dread abyssal opened. The rebels’ commitment to the struggle was absolute. They must know the only outcomes for them are victory or annihilation, she thought. And so they attacked with a fusion of belief and desperation.

There were so many. The line of rebels stretched all the way back to the Queensroad, and it seemed to be growing all the time. The guards were able to slow the march down only because the confines of the Doomwood Way limited the width of the front lines. And the reinforcements were massive. She had no doubt who had sent them. I survived the trap of your spell, Mannfred, so you try this instead. He had played his hand well. The skeletons and warriors he had sent were a small fraction of his strength, and represented no risk for him. Had they been besieging Nulahmia, Neferata would have exterminated them effortlessly. In the streets of the city, they were a much greater threat.

But that isn’t enough, she thought. Mere physical force was too crude an approach for Mannfred. There must be something more.

She soared up and down with Nagadron, attacking without cease, to little effect. The brief stalemate began to break down as the remainder of the guard made a last stand. When they fell, the rebels would be able to spread far and wide. There would be no front. The other guard formations would be isolated islands in the raging sea of the uprising. The rebels’ advance had to be broken in the Doomwood Way, while it was still concentrated. She needed a death blow.

And she still could not find Mannfred’s trap. ‘I know it’s there,’ she said to Nagadron. ‘You can feel it too, can’t you?’ Unease tensed her shoulders, and the Adevore hissed in distress. Something was concealed from her, forcing her gaze to slide over what she sought.

Neferata climbed again, and Nagadron banked towards the front lines as they began to move faster. As the Adevore turned, a sudden, violent movement of shadows caught Neferata’s eye. It came from partway back on the Way, far enough to the rear of the rebels that those marchers had not come under her attack yet. At first all she could see was a vague swirl of movement in the dark. The motion slowed, coalesced into a thick, pulsating dome of fog. The spell faded, and the fog dispersed, revealing a mortis engine. The ornate, necromantic throne was held aloft by a swarm of bound spirits. It had been travelling low to the ground, camouflaged by magic and the crowd of marchers. It rose now, Mannfred’s banners unfurling from its spikes to the howls of banshees. Standing on the throne, a robed corpsemaster pointed at her, thrusting his arms forward as if he were hurling a great weight. The mortis engine shook with a build-up of dark energy.

The mortis engine had been concealed until it was ready to attack. Now it did, and there was no time to react. Yet Neferata had all the time she needed to think, you wanted this.

The corpsemaster made his gesture of attack, and the power in the engine lashed out. The violent release shattered the throne apart. The corpsemaster disappeared in the black lightning, howling in the triumph of his sacrifice.

You wanted this.

The lightning struck Neferata, and pain eclipsed the world.

Then she was falling.

Mathas stared, dazzled by the jagged flare of black, and the war took a breath. The combatants on both sides looked up, their gaze seized irresistibly by the sight of a burning star plummeting to earth. Nagadron burned with green and black flame. The dread abyssal screamed and hurled himself back and forth across the avenue, smashing into the building façades, smashing spires down into the street. Neferata streaked to the ground, a comet of fire and darkness. She struck the Way a few hundred yards up from Mathas’ position. The pavement shook, and stone bubbled. A fountain of molten rock splashed outwards from the crater left by the Mortarch’s fall.

‘The tyrant falls!’ Mathas roared, and he attacked the ragged line of the remaining guards with the fury of imminent victory. He brought his sword down in a diagonal swipe at the throat of the guard before him. The other vampire’s block was too weak, Mathas’ strike too fast and too strong. The blow shattered the chainmail gorget as if it were glass. Mathas’ blade sliced through the guard’s neck and shoulder and down into his chest, severing his heart. Mathas gulped down the jetting blood, and strength built upon strength.

The guards went down beneath the surging wave of rebels. The sight of Neferata falling shattered their morale and energised the rebellion. Mathas fought and killed, but his spirit was already past the guards, and in moments his body was past them too, racing down the Doomwood Way to finish Neferata while the chance was there.

The Mortarch of Blood emerged from the crater. She was limping and bent over in pain. She moved quickly to flee, but Mathas and his comrades were faster. The distance between them narrowed.

‘She cannot escape,’ Hasynne said.

Beside her, Lestor grinned ferociously. He burned with the fire of the cause now, as fully as if it were his own. He had caught the scent of an epochal triumph, and of glory that went beyond being his master’s servant in this war.

Above, Nagadron flew uncontrollably. The sorcerous fire still consumed him, and the monster howled. Rubble fell to the street as he smashed back and forth across the avenue. Mathas threw himself to the side as a slab smashed into the street before him. A hail of shards exploded in his face, and bounced off his armour. He wiped away the blood that ran down his face and kept running. More wreckage crushed rebels running on the sides of the Way, but the losses were trivial now. The guards were destroyed, the way was clear, and Neferata was in desperate retreat.

The rebel army pursued. From the grand apartments bracketing the Way came shouts of jubilation, adding to the liberation chorus that resounded across the Palace District.

Mathas climbed a mound of rubble with Hasynne and Lestor, pausing at the vantage point for a moment to see the sweep of their triumphant force.

‘The citizens of Nulahmia are unanimous,’ said Lestor.

‘Can we truly be this unified?’ Hasynne wondered.

‘Let the perception be the truth,’ said Mathas. ‘If it is not true now, it will be after our victory.’ No one would dare admit to standing with Neferata after she was destroyed.

They ran forwards again, leading the hunt for the tyrant.

The huge statue of the queen stood in the centre of the Way. Mathas saw Neferata stumble as she passed it, steadying herself against a plinth twenty feet high. The obsidian statue was imperious, its chin raised, its eyes staring with merciless impassivity into the distance. Its heroic posture mocked the hunched, diminished figure beneath it.

Neferata pulled away from the plinth, and with a burst of speed, passed into the storied heart of the Doomwood Way. The rebels followed, and Mathas suddenly thought: it ends here. She can go no further.

In the middle of its length, the Doomwood Way widened into a circular plaza a mile wide. Surrounding it were the sepulchres that gave the road its name. They were colossal, hundreds of feet tall, constructs of black marble streaked with crimson, and each holding thousands of graves. They were built in the shape of immense trees. Their branches, thick as the temple spires, reached out to one another around the periphery and across the centre of the plaza, forming a grim, latticed dome. Iron sculptures of dead, drooping, ten-foot leaves hung in the tens of thousands from the branches, turning and grinding in the wind. They filled the plaza with the sound of unnatural, heavy foliage trapped in an eternal autumn, always about to drop, but never falling. To look up from the plaza was to see the twisting reminder of the imminence and immanence of death. To stand in it was to feel oppressed by gargantuan presences. The sepulchres were vast shadows of stone, their shapes mockeries of life that crushed the soul with the weight and majesty of death.

It was here, in the centre of the plaza, that Neferata stopped running. She turned to face the rebels, straightening now, in her hands the Dagger of Jet and the Staff of Pain. As small as her figure appeared in that space and at that distance, Mathas felt the force of her presence strike at him. Wounded, at bay, doomed, she yet seemed greater than the towering sepulchres.

Mathas’ mouth dried, and the fiery song of victory that flowed through his blood stuttered for an instant. Beside him, Hasynne’s smile faltered. The chant of the rebels dropped.

But only for an instant.

‘We have her,’ Lestor said.

Mathas heard his total commitment to the rebellion, and he took up the shout. ‘We have her!’

Furious that even now the queen could make him hesitate, Mathas ran even faster, his cry of vengeance tearing his throat.

His army ran with him.

The rebels howled the refrain of victory. ‘We have her! We have her! We have her!’

This spell. It would be wrong to say I hope never to cast it. I know the currents of fate and misfortune too well to preserve such an illusion. I have thought of the spell, and so the day will come when I shall cast it. Disaster will call upon a greater disaster. I do not know if this spell will work. I do not know if I can survive its casting. I do not know if I will be able to control it, once I have unleashed its force. I do know that I will not hesitate when the time comes. Certainties are tedious lies. Only mortals, caught in the narrow span of their existence, can believe otherwise. Power requires risk, and the casting of this spell will be the greatest risk. I will embrace the risk. I will revel in it.

– The Understanding of Annihilation

Chapter 15

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

Blood before and fire behind, Venzor thought. He ran back and forth on the battlements, shouting orders no one could hear over the monstrous clash of arms and the roars of the Bloodbound. He could not fathom the true nature of Neferata’s trap. ‘She can’t have chosen to destroy her city!’ he exclaimed, turning to speak to Dessina, forgetting for a moment she was no longer there.

‘Trapped, trapped, trapped,’ he snarled to himself and cursed Neferata. ‘Where is Dessina!’ he shouted. ‘Where are her forces?’ Had she not reached the wall in time? Had she been overwhelmed?

No one answered, and the Bloodbound rampaged through Nulahmia. To Venzor’s rear, fires raged as the enemy cut through the streets towards the Hyena Gate. To the front, the horde was pushing through the volleys of his archers and the flesh-destroying spells of his necromancers. The ground at the base of the wall was awash with the blood of the fallen, but every death only drove the followers of Khorne to greater ecstasies of rage. They raised ladders as fast as the defenders could hurl them down, and the monstrous siege towers had reached the wall, and loomed over the battlements.

The towers’ maws gaped wide, unleashing cataracts of molten brass onto the parapets. The burning river spread wide, incinerating Venzor’s troops and driving them back from the defences. Skeletons stood their ground and vanished under the flow. The necromancers fled, but not all were fast enough. Their robes burst into flames and they screamed, drowning and burning at the same time as they were engulfed.

On the upper flanks of the towers were thick arms of bronze, fists raised to the sky. Now they slammed down onto the parapets. Stone shattered under the blows of the fists, and the arms became bridges onto the wall for the forces waiting inside the towers. Gates opened at the towers’ shoulders. They unleashed the hordes of Khorne. Brayherds and bloodreavers charged down the arms. At their head, swinging a blazing anvil on a chain, was a skullgrinder. Just before he leapt from the fist onto the parapet, he paused for a moment, bellowing with delighted hate at the sight of the destruction his engines had wrought.

Venzor jumped over the river of brass and landed on the crest of the battlements. He leapt from merlon to merlon, making for the skullgrinder. He gestured as he leapt, issuing silent commands. They were obeyed at once. Flights of vargheists and fell-bats swarmed out of the battlement towers. They swooped low over the parapets, talons and fangs tearing into the horde of Bloodbound. The parapet became a storm of wings and blades, of blood and molten flame. The spread of the enemy’s army slowed. The rush down the arms of the siege towers stopped as the Khornate warriors struggled against the ripping death that descended upon them, screaming, from the sky.

‘We are holding them!’ Venzor shouted to his troops.

We are holding them, Venzor thought. His satisfaction evaporated in the next moment. ‘Holding them for what?’ he said to himself. ‘Hold, hold, hold, and then? And then?’ Unless Dessina performed a wonder, all he had gained was a brief stalemate. The fires were raging higher in the city, and already much closer to the gate. Ruhok’s two forces were tightening the noose, and Neferata’s troops were all in the south of the city. ‘She won’t send them,’ he said, and startled himself with his high, bitter laughter. ‘She told me the truth, and I didn’t see it. She does want her city to die. She does. But I won’t let it. I won’t. I will make it mine. I will. I will.’

The skullgrinder marched across the bronzed corpses, using the dead as a causeway to keep him just above the killing flow. He wielded his anvil with the dexterity of a whip. Skeletons exploded into smouldering fragments on impact. As Venzor closed with the skullgrinder, the huge warrior hurled the anvil into the face of Akthal, one of Venzor’s captains. The vampire’s head burst apart, vanishing in a gritty spray of red. The skullgrinder saw Venzor and swung the anvil at him. Venzor feigned hesitation, then launched himself up at the last moment. As the anvil destroyed the merlon that had been his perch, he spread his wings and soared over the skullgrinder’s head. He came down behind the Gorechosen warrior’s back. The skullgrinder whirled, too slow to block Venzor’s daemon-possessed blade. With a vibrating hiss and a flash of violet, the sword sank deep into his shoulder and cut off his left arm. Howling, the skullgrinder threw himself against Venzor, swinging the anvil with his right hand. The chain wrapped itself around both combatants, pulling them into a bloody embrace, two corpses in a single coffin. The heat of the anvil whipped past Venzor’s face, and its momentum toppled him and the skullgrinder into the molten brass.

The jaws of fire and pain seized Venzor. They shook him, taking away his control over his limbs. He managed to jerk his head forwards and sink his fangs into the skullgrinder’s throat. The flow of rejuvenating blood healed him as fast as the stream burned. The skullgrinder thrashed, but was tangled in his own weapon and weakened quickly, his flesh sloughing off his bones. It took all of Venzor’s will not to scream, to keep drinking, and then the chain of the anvil snapped. He shoved the dying skullgrinder away and shot up out of the river of brass, howling in agony and anger.

His armour was scored and melted. His flesh hung in tatters. But he was healing, and he was in command of his powers. He flew up, shedding the burning metal and flying towards the peak of the nearest siege tower. He channelled his pain into a withering blast of magic that he aimed into the maw. The upper portion of the tower exploded, and an eruption of liquid brass drenched the battlements, falling on attacker and defenders alike. The huge engine became a torch. It collapsed with the roar of a dying monster.

Soaring over the battlements, Venzor looked into the city and his moment of triumph vanished. The Bloodbound infiltrators had reached the Hyena Gate, and were slaughtering its defenders.

To Ruhok’s left, the siege engine fell and unleashed an ocean of molten brass across the Bloodbound, hundreds at a stroke. The edges of the killing sea lapped at the feet of Enteth, Ruhok’s juggernaut. The armoured monster growled, but held its ground. The air roiled with the heat. Ruhok gave Torsek the skullgrinder’s fallen achievement only a passing glance.

‘The queen has betrayed us,’ said Kathag. The Exalted Deathbringer stood beside Enteth’s right flank, the eternal grin-snarl of his face more threatening than ever. He was as ready to attack his lord as he was the walls of Nulahmia. Nearby, Vul the slaughterpriest and Ghour the bloodsecrator said nothing, waiting to see how the confrontation would evolve. ‘She made us come here only to hurl ourselves against the strongest defences,’ Kathag insisted.

‘This is what she said would happen,’ said Ruhok. ‘This is not defeat. This is victory. Look. Look beyond the wall.’

Kathag hesitated, then obeyed.

‘See those flames,’ said Ruhok. ‘The city burns. Neferata should have lied, because she has sealed her doom. But she did not lie. Nulahmia is ours, and we will destroy it so utterly, it will vanish from memory.’

Ruhok had barely finished speaking when he heard booming sounds from the other side of the Hyena Gate. It was the knocking of fate. The time had come for him to raise a mountain of skulls in Khorne’s name.

As if in answer to his thought, the sound came from the other side of the walls of the Bloodbound chanting their praise of Khorne. Through the screams and clash of arms on the battlements, the words were still clear.

‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

‘Now!’ Ruhok shouted to his legions. ‘Take the gate now! Take the city! Drown it in its blood!’ Enteth thundered across the last of the ground that separated Ruhok from the Hyena Gate. Kathag and the other Gorechosen warriors kept pace. There was doubt in the Exalted Deathbringer’s eyes, but he obeyed.

Ruhok bellowed, exulting in the charge. There was nothing to hold back the legions of Khorne, and they launched at the Hyena Gate like a terrible, crimson fist. The defenders on the ramparts were either dead or locked in struggle. Forces still descended from the other siege tower. Torsek’s chained anvil no longer swung above the crenellations, but his creations carried his bloody work forward.

The great charge grew stronger with every step. ‘Give praise to Khorne!’ Ruhok commanded, and Vul picked up the chant, shouting prayers and imprecations that fired the blood of the attackers with a force greater than frenzy. He called upon the Blood God’s blessings, and his prayers were answered. Ruhok felt new power spread through his limbs and gather in the air itself. Ghour reacted the most violently. He raised his standard high, and the huge rune blazed with energy. Mouth agape in religious ecstasy, the bloodsecrator gathered the building fury into the icon. As the Gorechosen reached the arch of the Hyena Gate, the reality of Shyish grew brittle. Chaos itself was on the verge of breaking through.

The Hyena Gate glowed angrily as its wards sought to kill the attackers before they could strike the huge portcullis. ‘Weak!’ Ruhok shouted. ‘Show them, bloodsecrator! Show them the strength of Khorne!’ He urged Enteth forward as, with a howl of praise, Ghour unleashed the stored power of his icon.

In this small region of Shyish, the reality of the realm tore and crumbled. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ the Bloodbound raved, a thousand voices united in rage, and Chaos roared through a rent in the air. The anger of the Blood God lashed out, Khorne’s hatred of magic made manifest. The Hyena Gate’s glow turned into a death blaze, and then darkness. Enteth slammed into the portcullis, a living battering ram. Weakened from the other side by the attacks of the infiltrators, the gate flew apart before the incandescent rampage of the Bloodbound. Iron and stone shattered and melted.

Howling in the unstoppable glory of rage, the legions of Lord Ruhok stormed into Nulahmia.

Let me be on time, Dessina thought. Let me be on time.

She felt the weight of the city on her shoulders, and she took the burden gladly. The mission was the greatest honour of her existence. The prospect of its failure was her greatest horror. And failure was a possibility as likely as it was dreadful. Let her be on time? There was no time.

The tunnels through which she led her forces of vampires, skeletons and zombies were damp, and their echoes were old, dull with abandonment. They had not been used in an age. Every step she took down them was fateful. That she was here, that anyone was here, marked the day as a turning point.

‘I question again why we are here,’ said Felsein. Venzor had made her Dessina’s lieutenant, and she had served without hesitation until now. ‘Why are we here?’

‘We will take the enemy by surprise, from below.’

‘So you said. But, it will be impossible for us to reach the surface quickly. We are very far below ground, and we keep going down.’

‘Yes,’ said Dessina. ‘It is necessary.’

The other vampire tried a different tack. ‘We are urgently needed.’

‘I know that even better than you do.’

‘Were we not supposed to be making for the north-east portion of the wall? I think we have been going south at least some of the time.’

‘We are going where we must. I have never made so crucial a journey, and neither have you.’

The passion in Dessina’s voice quieted Felsein for a moment, but did not put an end to her doubts. ‘Did Lord Venzor order us to take this route?’

‘It was commanded,’ Dessina said, and her voice almost broke as she thought of the trust that Neferata had placed in her. I will not fail you, my queen. This would be her greatest act of loyalty, and the fires she would unleash would at last burn away the final traces of dishonour to cling to her name.

The destruction of the House of Avaranthe, in another age, had been deserved. It was the punishment due for treachery, and the Avaranthes had dared to rebel against the Mortarch of Blood. The destruction, though, had not been total, because not every Avaranthe had joined the Hellezans and the other conspirator houses. When Dessina’s direct ancestors had discovered the treachery, they had gone to Neferata, and condemned their kin to the flames. One of the few comforts Dessina could take from the history of her family was the knowledge of its punishment. Even now, centuries upon centuries later, she sometimes saw enslaved wraiths and skeletons that she recognised as the ancient rebels, still suffering their punishment.

Dessina had inhabited the shadows of Neferata’s reign for hundreds of years, unknown even to her sister spies, her every action having the sole purpose of projecting her queen’s will. She was Neferata’s hand, striking in the dark and at a distance. She proved her worth a thousand times over.

And it was never enough. Not for her. The shame of her family followed her, always in her consciousness. It found her no matter how deeply into the shadows she ventured.

On this night, though, with this task, she hoped at last to purge the shame.

One more descent, one more tunnel, one more passage through the emptiness and dust and silence of age, and then they crossed under an arched doorway. It was the last threshold.

Though she could not know if she was in time, and the doubt tormented her, Dessina smiled when she saw what stood before her. ‘We are here,’ she breathed. She could have wept in gratitude to Neferata.

‘What is this place?’ Felsein asked, shaken. The other vampire troops were murmuring, distressed. ‘We are not at the wall.’

‘No, we are not.’

‘And who are they?’

‘Reinforcements.’ Of a kind, Dessina thought.

Tens of thousands of skeletons awaited them. The tens of thousands of skeletons who guarded the Annihilation Gate.

The night was heavy with the heat of the season of Crematory. The sky was low, ash and dust falling in curtains over the rooftops, swirling in the desiccating wind. And a silence spread across the city from the Tomb of the Unnumbered. It smothered voices. It muffled the din of siege in the north. It was the silence of final anticipation. It was the silence that came before the roar of ending.

Nagadron circled above the Tomb of the Unnumbered. The Adevore moaned eerily, in sympathy with his mistress. Neferata’s eyes were half-closed. Her fingers combed and braided the air through which she flew. Her consciousness was divided between the work of her hands and her senses that reached down into the bowels of the city. She was waiting, waiting for the slightest touch on her web. The thrumming of a single strand.

In the north, the city burned. The flames had spread over entire districts, and the night crashed and boomed with the sounds of war. Two armies struggled for ownership of the city, one to control it, the other to destroy it. She would break them both.

Neferata’s gestures carved runes and summoned powers, shaping the most terrible of spells. The powers that she called to her were not hers alone. She drew upon the energy of the entire city. Her rule had been weakened, yet Nulahmia was still hers, by right of creation. It was as she had told the Bloodbound. All blood within the city’s walls was hers. All within was hers.

The power built. The spell trembled on the verge of completion. Neferata ground her fangs in the effort to keep it contained. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. If she unleashed it too soon, it would miss its mark, and all would be lost.

Then it came. The thrumming of a single strand. The presence of the loyal servant.

The arrival of the willing sacrifice.

Now, then, now was the time of the spell. And it was ready, howling to be unleashed.

‘Nulahmia is mine!’ Neferata shouted. ‘Mine to rule and mine to destroy. I reclaim it!’

She hurled the monstrous force of the spell down through the peak of the Tomb of the Unnumbered. A coruscating beam of starlight silver and void black roared towards the Annihilation Gate.

As if sensing the catastrophe to come, the city began to shake.

Against defeat, no sacrifice is too great. Beside defeat, all pain is trivial.

– A Call to Purpose

Chapter 16

AGE OF MYTH
THE SEASON OF LOSS

On the Doomwood Way, in the plaza of the Ten Sepulchres, Neferata stood alone and faced the army she had come here to destroy. The deathly snow of quietus was falling, draping the monuments in grey and trickles of blood.

‘The city is mine,’ said Neferata. Did they think they could take it from her? Did they think they could destroy her? Did they not understand the arrogance of hope was theirs only because she willed it?

Pain still wracked her from the blast of the mortis engine. But the pain was inconsequential. It was the price she had paid, the price she had sought, to bring this moment into being. She had prepared for a blow that might be strong enough to fell her. The risk was necessary. The injury had to be real, so her flight to the plaza would be real.

The truth was the most powerful of lies.

Mathas and his army of traitors raced to finish her off. They filled the grand plaza of Doomwood Way. Their roar of triumph was deafening. Fifty yards away, Mathas slowed in his charge. He raised a hand, and the army slowed with him. He was looking at her wounds. She saw him take in the tremor in her limbs. He could read the extent of her injury. He could see the truth. He could see the importance of this moment, and how it would determine the fate of Nulahmia.

Neferata saw that he had learned well, and had determined, as his forces surrounded her, to savour his triumph. She could see the fire that burned in Mathas’ eyes. The fire she had ignited and carefully nurtured.

‘We have come for justice, tyrant,’ he said.

‘You shall have it,’ she said, her voice rough with pain.

Mathas walked forward slowly. Hasynne and Lestor followed a few steps behind. The last Hellezan advanced with determination, and a stern purpose worthy of a king. ‘Justice,’ he said. ‘For all your victims. For my family. For my son. For Teyosa.’

Neferata smiled, and Mathas hesitated. A cold wind rushed through the sepulchres. It blew harder and harder, a freezing annunciation that turned the snowfall into a stinging punishment. Neferata’s cloak billowed in the blast. Her hair streamed out from beneath the crown of Lahmia. The blood running down the sepulchres shot across the plaza to surround her, obeying the will of its absolute ruler. The burns on Neferata’s flesh faded away. Her wounds vanished.

She ceased to smile. She opened her eyes wide, and showed to Mathas and all before her a fury that was colder than any tomb, and colossal beyond measure.

‘The city is mine,’ she said again. ‘The city is mine!’

Her voice, the great tolling of judgement, boomed across all Nulahmia.

And she raised her arms, and she took the city back.

Thunder drowned out the roar of the rebels. The thunder of Neferata’s true army. The strength that she had held back until now, the strength that she had concealed, poured out from the huge sepulchres. Cavalries of Black Knights and blood knights led thousands of skeletons and vampires upon the rebels. From the upper branches of the monuments came another cavalry. Mounted hexwraiths galloped down through the air, leading hosts of spirits, an unending storm of glowing ectoplasm descending upon the plaza. Flights of fell-bats swooped through the deathly green, hunting for the blood of the queen’s enemies.

Flying on skeletal wings, Neferata’s morghast guards landed beside her. The monsters of shadow, monsters of bone, they raised their massive blades to slaughter in her defence.

She barely needed them now. Her will had called absolute destruction upon her enemies, and that rejuvenated her as much as the richest blood. She strode forward, Aken-seth held high. Mathas and the other leaders of the rebels were still making for her, but there was only desperation in their run now. Their uprising had no chance, and they knew it. Their shouts of triumph had turned into screams of despair, and the massacre had only just begun.

‘Life?’ Neferata taunted Mathas. He staggered as she turned his deepest thoughts into words. ‘Hope? You thought to bring them into my city?’ She laughed, and invited them to battle.

The morghasts fell on Lestor, chopping his limbs from his body before he could even begin to fight. Mathas and Hasynne brought their blades in at opposite angles, and at the same moment. Neferata blocked Mathas’ strike with the Staff of Pain. Hasynne’s sword cut through her wraithbone armour and into her side. Neferata snarled. With the speed of a mortis scorpion, she stabbed the hooked blade of Akmet-har into Hasynne’s right eye, cracking her skull open with the force of the blow. The powerful warrior slumped to her knees as the Dagger of Jet pulled her undead vitality out of her.

‘Life?’ Neferata repeated. She blocked a flurry of blows from Mathas. ‘What is life except the prelude to the power of death. Do you see its power now? Do you?’

‘I do,’ Mathas growled, granting a truth without admitting defeat. He came at her again and again, his fire undimmed.

‘Do you not know what you are?’ she asked.

He backed away and circled her, looking for an opening, trying to exploit her injuries. ‘I am not what you would have made me,’ he said. ‘I am free, and you are fallible. If you destroy me tonight, another will come, and your end will come.’

‘Free?’ Neferata said, speaking softly now, and smiling.

Mathas hesitated. The blaze in his eyes faltered. Perhaps he suspected what was coming.

‘I did not fail,’ she said. ‘You were never free. I have given you the illusion of freedom. I planted the venom of hope in your blood. I needed to know my enemies, and you led them to me. You have been, truly, a loyal servant.’

‘No,’ Mathas whispered. His eyes were wide, the fire gone, in its place a shine of horror. ‘I will not believe your lies.’

‘Then believe the truth.’ She smiled more broadly, showing him the pleasure his hope had given her. ‘Stop,’ she said, as if he had been overfilling a chalice, and he froze in mid-lunge.

‘Drop your sword.’

The blade clattered to the cobblestones.

‘Give me your neck.’

Mathas’ scream as he obeyed was the exquisite sound of perfect despair and absolute loss. It was a sound that took time to craft, and Neferata was pleased by her work. The scream went on and on, a perfect accompaniment as she drank his blood one more time. She turned her thrall into a husk as she washed her pain away with pleasure.

‘All blood is mine,’ she whispered to him.

The truth was the most powerful of blades.

The power of balance can be immense. I witnessed its strength in the chamber of the Maw of Uncreation. The matter of Shyish flows into the Maw at a rate that keeps it quiescent. If the balance is disturbed, whether through a sudden influx or through a withholding, then the vortex rises. Once the matter at the circumference of the vortex asserts the flow enough, the Maw will recede to its original point. So I believe. One day, I know, I will have to put that belief to the test. If I am wrong, then I will doom everything.

– The Understanding of Annihilation

Chapter 17

AGE OF SIGMAR
THE SEASON OF CREMATORY

‘Reinforcements.’ Felsein sounded doubtful.

‘Yes,’ said Dessina, and strode forwards. She no longer needed Felsein and the others to trust her. The few moments that their doubts would grant her would be enough.

She marched into the ranks of the skeletons. As they raised their swords to strike her down, she said, ‘I must see Karvent.’

The skeletons paused, then stepped back, clearing a path for her to the base of the Annihilation Gate’s plinth. A Black Knight awaited her there. As she walked, Dessina grasped the medal that hung from a heavy chain around her neck. It was the coat of arms of the Avaranthes. The symbol was a hated one, an embodiment of disloyalty. Now she broke it in half. Inside it was another, smaller, obsidian medal, carved to match the seal of the gate. She had been carrying Venzor’s doom in plain sight.

Dessina reached Karvent, and showed the Black Knight what she carried.

‘Has the time come, then?’ the skeleton asked with a voice like wind over sand.

‘By the command of our queen, it has.’

Dessina carried Neferata’s authority with her, but not the Mortarch’s power. The key would not, by itself, be enough to complete her task. But Dessina had her loyalty and her love, and for her, they were enough.

She had faith Neferata would provide the rest.

Dessina gestured at Venzor’s forces. She raised her voice so that all could hear. ‘They are the enemies of Neferata. Kill them all.’

‘Traitor!’ Felsein shouted.

‘No,’ Dessina said as Karvent led the skeletons forward. ‘My loyalty is greater than yours could ever be.’

She watched as Felsein and Venzor’s forces charged the skeletons. Their attack was futile bravado. Venzor had given Dessina strong warriors to command, but there were only hundreds of them. They could not hold out long against Karvent’s many thousands of guardians. Neferata had designed the Annihilation Gate’s defences to be impregnable to all but her or her chosen servant.

The chamber shook with the clash of steel and crack of bone. The vampires’ screams of rage became cries of distress as the skeletons overwhelmed them. Dessina turned her back on the slaughter and climbed the plinth.

She stood before the seal, and savoured the moment Neferata had given her. So great a boon, Dessina thought. I am not worthy, but I am grateful. ‘I am the hand of your will, my queen,’ she said, and touched the key to the seal. The seal began to move. She felt a thrum rise from within the Annihilation Gate, passing through her body, and up through the underworlds of Nulahmia. For a brief moment, Dessina was closer than she had ever been to her queen.

And the power came down.

Storm of night and storm of light, destruction had arrived to release annihilation. Dessina came apart in a blaze beyond the reach of fire. In the last fraction of a moment of her existence, she felt not pain, but ecstasy. There was joy in martyrdom, and finally there was honour in her name.

Neferata stood beside Nagadron on the peak of the Ossa Spire. Constructed entirely of fused bone, the tower was a thin, jagged spike stabbing hundreds of feet in the air at the northern edge of the Silent Quarter. Here she could witness the totality of her action. Her work of centuries was coming to fruition.

Not completion. Nothing ever ends.

Except that tonight, that was not true. Tonight, there would be endings. Tonight, the end itself would rise.

The time had come. She unleashed catastrophe, and the great engine of sorcery and stone roared to terrible life.

The tremors, centred at the Tomb of the Unnumbered, radiated across Nulahmia. Towers swayed and crumbled. As far away as the southern wall, spires collapsed in a thunder of rubble as the surface of the streets rose and fell like ocean swells. Spirits beyond counting rose from the splits in the ground and the shattered mausoleums, hurled from the underworlds as the shattering spread through the material and immaterial domains of Shyish. The engine opened a great wound in the Realm. This was the beginning of its work.

The shaking of the Tomb of the Unnumbered reached a new intensity. A cleft appeared, running vertically down from its peak, between the twin spires, through the centre of the structure. With an immense grind of tortured stone, the gargantuan mausoleum began to rise from the Silent Quarter. Sorcerous light of crimson and violet burned at its base, and the two halves of the Tomb began to part. The monument gradually took on the appearance of an opened claw. The mausoleum floated hundreds of feet above the streets.

Then the streets fell. The Silent Quarter dropped into an abyss. The pit widened quickly. Its edges moved towards the flames of battle. The hot wind blew straight down, air and dust called to their destruction too. Tombs and monuments disappeared, and then the Maw reached the border of the Silent Quarter. The Ossa Spire swayed. Neferata waited a moment longer, drinking in the immensity of what she had done, her gaze called by the darkness below, because she knew what waited in the depths. The Spire began to lean, and she experienced the vertigo of delicious, absolute destruction.

The gods themselves fear what I have freed, she thought, and then leapt onto Nagadron’s back. They flew to the skies, fleeing the jaws of the most perfect of disasters. The Spire toppled, snapping in half, and in half again. The great lengths of bone tumbled end over end into the pit, small as needles before they vanished.

Neferata gazed down, her witchsight unveiling every detail of the cataclysm. The abyss consumed the Crepuscular Road. Its citizens filled the street, tramping each other in panic as they tried to flee. The distant sounds of their screams reached Neferata’s ears. Individual voices merged into a single, collective shriek. At first, the scream was barely audible beneath the rumble of collapsing architecture, but soon it grew loud as more and more of the city joined in. Habitations, grand manors and palaces vanished. Thousands of the living and the undead perished in moments, and as great as the scream became, a greater silence followed, rippling outwards with the pit, putting an end to hope and despair alike.

And the war waged on, the armies ignorant for a short time yet of the doom that was coming for them.

The darkness in the abyss began to swirl and turn grey. The Maw of Uncreation was gorging itself into a frenzy. Its level rose and rose, the secret that could not be confronted becoming visible. Now madness outgrew and outpaced terror, as the inhabitants of Nulahmia beheld the absolute. The great scream took on a new tone. Madness and awe and terror became one.

‘So great a symphony,’ Neferata said to Nagadron. ‘And it is my creation.’

Neferata watched and looked away, watched and looked away. She did not gaze on the Maw of Uncreation long enough for it to seize her with its devouring blankness, yet she needed to see.

The work unfolded in all the glory of horror. The pit was miles wide now, and its circumference was spinning, pulling more and more of the city into the vortex of the Maw. When it reached the streets of the north, torn apart by battle, the firestorms plunged inside, the flames sucked away by a force of destruction that rendered theirs meaningless. The Maw of Uncreation rose higher yet, and it devoured the war.

Neferata took Nagadron north, the better to see the end of folly, the shared folly of Venzor and Ruhok that they had any right to the city.

The usurper was fighting with the Lord of Khorne. They had come to grips, and Ruhok was trying to snap the vampire in half while Venzor lashed at him with a frenzy of sorcerous bolts. To their rear, Bloodbound fled from the onrushing collapse. They cut each other down in their panic. Those who were close enough to the edge to see the Maw were frozen. They understood, to their cost, what they saw. No being could behold the destroyer and not know it for what it was, for it nestled in the deepest recesses of every thought, every belief, every consciousness. Every reality.

Neferata heard the glorious sound of the Bloodbound screaming in fear, and she laughed. Her laughter rang across the city in agony, clear and strong and merciless.

Venzor and Ruhok stopped in mid-strike. They stared at their doom. Not far from them, Kathag, alone among Ruhok’s Gorechosen, had understood the nature of the maelstrom in time to turn away. ‘Do not look!’ he cried. ‘Do not look!’

His warning was a whisper in a gale. Only Neferata heard it, and she smiled.

The bloodsecrator and the slaughterpriest did not run. Neferata witnessed the crumbling of their faith. Their muscles went slack. Their faces went dark with monstrous comprehension. At the last moment, just before the ground beneath their feet dropped away, the bloodsecrator hurled his huge icon into the pit. Then they vanished, unable even to curse.

Ruhok, too, was paralysed. He stared directly into the face of doom, but when it came for him, he raised his voice in a thunderous roar. His pain and his rage would have hurled fortress walls to the ground, but the Maw of Uncreation took his anger, and so this too, only Neferata heard. Then he fell, a meteor of crimson armour plunging into the terminal grey.

Venzor tried to flee, gabbling in terror. But he turned his head away too late. He was too slow, and when the Maw came for him, he looked at it again, all choice stolen. His last scream was high and long, rich in all the shades of terror.

Only Kathag moved fast enough. He tore through the struggling hordes of Bloodbound, trampling them into the ground, sprinting for the outer walls. He looked back only once, from the top of a hill of rubble. Instead of staring at the Maw of Uncreation, he looked up, and Neferata met his gaze.

‘Run!’ she called to him, and laughed. ‘Tell them!’ she shouted, as the Exalted Deathbringer turned and ran again, fleeing the collapsing city, the all-destroying hunger at his back. ‘Tell them all! Tell your god what you have seen this night!’

Whirling, growing, whirling and growing, the Maw of Uncreation swallowed the armies, casting the legions into final silence. It pulled the outer walls of the city down, and the northern edge of the abyss stretched into the land beyond. There were no fires now, no defenders and no attackers. The Maw had claimed them all.

The glow from the base of the Tomb of the Unnumbered sent tendrils to the circumference of the pit. They were the arms of disruption, and they prevented the material of Shyish from restoring the balance that restrained the Maw of Uncreation. The strain on Neferata’s sorcerous engine was enormous. The Tomb of the Unnumbered began to crack. Slabs of dark rock fell from its sides. Splits webbed across its façade, turning it into a broken eggshell. Foul light gleamed from inside. The engine was on the verge of flying apart.

Neferata did not know what would happen if it destroyed itself. And its work was done. Balance must be restored. So she turned the Staff of Pain towards the hovering monument and jagged sorcery crackled across the night to the Tomb. The force was powerful, but it did not drain her as before. She was not unleashing magic now. She was releasing the strain.

The spell struck the Tomb of the Unnumbered. The tendrils of light flared, then vanished. Now there was a rush of new material into the Maw faster than its hunger could grow. The vortex began to withdraw. The grey sank down into the darkness, receding to its chamber.

The Tomb of the Unnumbered began to descend. The open claw closed, the two halves returning to one another and, as far below the Annihilation Gate shut once more, so did the Tomb come to ground with a boom that shook the city. Destruction slumbered again, covered by the sleep of death.

The tremors ceased. Silence fell over Nulahmia. The silence of dread, the silence of rubble, the silence of Neferata’s rule. The northern quarter was a slumped pit. Phantasmal energies floated over it, a nimbus of green and loss. Mile after mile after mile of the city was utter ruin. The destruction was more complete than anything that had happened during Lascilion’s siege. What Neferata had created, she had destroyed. What she destroyed, she could create anew.

She brought Nagadron down into the wasteland. She dismounted and began to walk, first through what had been the Silent Quarter, then onwards, into the ruins of the north. The sound of her boots on broken stone rang sharply in the quiet. The wind gradually picked up again, keening with grief. And then, though the end of the furnace season of Crematory was still far in the future, it began to rain.

The rain fell up. It rose from the rubble, droplets darkened with ash. Neferata stretched out her hands, and the mourning of stone pattered up against her palms. She smiled, followed the flight of rain to the sky, where clouds turned sluggishly in aftershocks of pain.

At her back, she felt the sudden gathering of night. She wheeled around to see the coming of a god. She had expected his arrival. That did not make it any easier. Now she would see the ultimate consequences of her risk.

The ropes of night became limbs and armour. The cold fire of the gaze appeared, and then the terrible skull. In glory and might, he who was dread incarnate, he who was death incarnate, materialised before her. His armour was ribbed in golden wraithbone. Long spurs rose from his shoulders, symbols of his grasp reaching out beyond his form. In his hand he held Alakanash, the great Staff of Power, his authority captured in blade and bone.

Nagash was here to render judgement.

‘You risked my Realm,’ said the god of death.

‘I was not reckless with Shyish, master,’ Neferata answered, her tone humble and respectful, but not cowering. She must stand by her actions. ‘I knew, once I permitted it, that the balance would be restored.’

‘You knew, or you believed?’

‘The line between the two was insignificant.’

‘Yet it exists.’

Neferata bowed her head. ‘I do not believe that you did not know the Maw of Uncreation lay below Nulahmia, master. I do not believe you did not know I would, in time, make use of it.’

The eyes of the death’s head glowed with what she hoped was amusement.

Nagash swept his hand, taking in the devastation of Nulahmia. ‘The city was a different risk. You sacrificed much.’

‘It is mine to sacrifice. Is it not?’

‘Yours? Yours by my dispensation.’

Neferata said nothing, waiting.

The cold fire in Nagash’s gaze grew brighter, and she was sure, now, that she saw dark pleasure there. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yours. Through your skill at deceit, you have destroyed a legion of Khorne and reclaimed the right to your city entire. I revoke Arkhan’s claim.’

Neferata held her face still. She kept her triumph in her heart, though she had no doubt Nagash could see it. She lowered her head again. ‘My thanks to you, my lord. My service, eternally, is yours.’

‘So it must be,’ Nagash warned, and he faded from view, death returning to the night. The sense of his gaze lingered, a call to obedience.

Neferata turned back to Nulahmia. The city was wounded, bleeding. Her city. To wound and to heal as she saw fit.

Her city. Bleeding at her command.

For all blood is mine.

About the Author

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade and Castellan, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

For Margaux, and for our dance.

A Black Library Publication

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

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Kevin Chin.

Neferata: Mortarch of Blood © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Neferata: Mortarch of Blood, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-977-4

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.