More great stories from the Age of Sigmar

SACROSANCT AND OTHER STORIES
Various authors

SOUL WARS
Josh Reynolds

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

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

GODS AND MORTALS
Various authors

SCOURGE OF FATE
Robbie MacNiven

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

HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS
David Guymer

BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK
Andy Clark

THE RED FEAST
Gav Thorpe

SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY
Josh Reynolds

CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD
Nick Horth

THE TAINTED HEART
C L Werner

NEFERATA: MORTARCH OF BLOOD
David Annandale

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON
C L Werner

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS
An Age of Sigmar novel

NAGASH: THE UNDYING KING
Josh Reynolds

THE RED HOURS
Evan Dicken

HEART OF WINTER
Nick Horth

WARQUEEN
Darius Hinks

THE BONE DESERT
Robbie MacNiven

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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

WARBEAST

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

Chapter thirty-four

Chapter thirty-five

Chapter thirty-six

Chapter thirty-seven

Chapter thirty-eight

Chapter thirty-nine

Chapter forty

Chapter forty-one

Chapter forty-two

Chapter forty-three

Chapter forty-four

Chapter forty-five

Chapter forty-six

Chapter forty-seven

Chapter forty-eight

Chapter forty-nine

Chapter fifty

Chapter fifty-one

Chapter fifty-two

Epilogue

BENEATH THE BLACK THUMB

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

EYE OF THE STORM

THE SOLACE OF RAGE

KNIGHT OF CORRUPTION

THE TRIAL OF THE CHOSEN

IN THE LANDS OF THE BLIND

BLOOD AND PLAGUE

SEE NO EVIL

FURY OF GORK

Prologue

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Epilogue

BLADESTORM

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

THE PRISONER OF THE BLACK SUN

SANDS OF BLOOD

THE LORDS OF HELSTONE

THE BRIDGE OF SEVEN SORROWS

THE BEASTS OF CARTHA

FIST OF MORK, FIST OF GORK

GREAT RED

ONLY THE FAITHFUL

LORD OF UNDEATH

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Epilogue

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Neferata: Mortarch of Blood’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

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

The Age of Sigmar had begun.

WARBEAST

Gav Thorpe

CHAPTER ONE

A fresh flurry of snow swept across the mountainside, layering onto thick drifts that already half concealed remnants of ancient walls and towers toppled in a distant age. The rusted and fused remains of great gears jutted from the ice, staining the snow the colour of dried blood. The immense barbican that had once housed them was little more than wind-worn boulders scattered across the area. Of the ramparts, buttresses and ravelins that had supported the gatehouse little remained – humps and ridges beneath the snow delineated by heaps and lines of unnaturally regular rocks.

The wind caused tent sides to crack and guy ropes to sing as it keened over an encampment within the comparative shelter of the centuries-old ruins. In the lee of broken stairwells and part-tumbled walls, the nomads huddled close to their fires, wrapped tight in pelts of many different colours and patterns – black bear, the white and grey stripes of snow tigers, exotic carmine and mauve spots against white from slain lyregryphs. On small spits over glowing charcoal they cooked their meat, slowly turning the skewered flesh while dripping fat caused the embers to sputter and hiss. Cauldrons bubbled over flames, the water within bobbing with pieces of gristle and bone through a greasy slick.

Tonight’s was a special feast, despite the weather, for the hunting had been good. Thick haunches and splayed ribs would grace the trenchers of the chief and her favourites, with fresh marrow and small cakes thick with congealed blood, while those less in regard licked their lips in anticipation of liver, shins, feet and fingers.

The cannibals bickered over the other spoils, fighting over metal buckles, tin cups, teeth pulled from the skulls – used as necklaces and for beads in braided hair and beards – while clothes, weapons, boots, jewellery and armour were stacked neatly in piles beneath awnings, awaiting the chieftain, who would award them to those that had fought the best or pleased her in other ways.

A few captives were still alive, roped together to an immense stake outside the large tent of the clan’s leader. Naked, they huddled together for what warmth they could find, terrified and numb with shock. There were eight of them, three women and five men, and each bore cuts and bruises from the battle, and rope burns from their chafing bonds at ankle and wrist.

The wind picked up, starting to pull at the tent ropes, flattening the flames of the more exposed fires, throwing sparks and ash into the air. The sky darkened and the arguing and laughter petered out. The Bonekeepers glanced at the heavens and to the tent of their leader, wary of the sudden change. There was good reason why no tribe remained in one place for long, for the mountains of Ursungorod were of ill-temper, always prone to the sudden spasms and constant peregrinations that had laid low the fortress currently sheltering the kin-eaters.

The prisoners started wailing, lifting shrill voices in lament while blue lightning crackled across the unnatural storm gathering above. The children who had been tormenting them fled for the shelter of the tents and the protection of the adults, who in turn rose from the firesides, whispering prayers to Kronra, God of the Bloody Feast.

Trailing half-naked suitors, the Gore Maiden emerged from her grand marquee, still clad in red-lacquered leather armour. Hair the colour of raven feathers spilled to her waist from beneath a helm adorned with a crown of bone splinters taken from the body of a goroxen she had slain single-handedly two winters before. She snapped commands, calling for her guards to form around her while others scrambled for spears and shields left close at hand.

The Bonekeeper war party gathered, the strongest at the front, the unblooded behind. Battle and internal politics, as well as long winters of famine, meant none amongst the Bonekeepers lived long enough to become old and infirm.

In a rough half-circle with their chief at its centre, the clan waited. Eight dozen pairs of eyes scoured the gloom, casting their gaze over snow-blanketed stones lit by the flashes of azure above.

A single bolt lanced down, striking the ground no more than a hundred paces in front of the Gore Maiden. All flinched from the brightness and blinked furiously to rid themselves of the after-shadow. When their eyes cleared they saw a single figure, a cerulean statue, standing where the lightning had struck.

It stood half again as tall as the largest warrior of the Bonekeepers, and was clad entirely in gleaming plates in representation of a muscled warrior. A huge guard curved across its left shoulder, the roundel where it met the sculpted breastplate moulded with a sapphire in the design of an upraised hammer that blazed two bolts of lightning from its head. A helm with a snarling visage hid the face beneath a spiked halo-like arc of gold. In the right hand a sword gleamed with moonlight brightness, angular runic shapes lit by their own power along its length. The left held a hammer, its head blazoned with the mark of a twin-tailed comet. From the figure’s shoulders hung a slatted cloak, each ribbon tipped by a weight in the shape of a warhammer.

For ten heartbeats nothing stirred save for the snow devils whipped up by the wind. A few of the tribespeople edged forwards, looking to each other for reassurance, grunting in their guttural tongue.

The eyes of the helm blazed into life, filling with a scarlet glow. Magical energy coruscated across the figure’s body, crawling up the arms and into the weapons, causing them to shine even brighter with white light. The statue broke into a run, blade and hammer head leaving a trail of silver sparks in its wake.

In a voice edged with a boom of thunder in the skies, the lord of metal let forth a mighty shout. The volume alone was enough to shake all but the hardiest of constitutions, but what stunned the Bonekeepers was that the words were in their own tongue, albeit an ancient dialect.

‘The Bear-clad hath returned. The Hard Winter shall end and justice be restored!’

‘The storm comes.’

So spoke the sagesayer Radomira. The skies above the great mountains of Ursungorod filled with sinister clouds that flickered with green lightning. Withered hands with nails painted blood-red clutched the twisted wood of her staff, knuckles white with tension. Beneath a hood of coarse black wool, she turned her face up to stare at her krul, the warrior-king of the Ursungoran clans. There were tears in her eyes. ‘The omens have not changed. You shall not see the end of it.’

‘Ratkin scum,’ replied Arka, known as the Bear-clad for the thick black pelt he wore across his immense shoulders. A word came to him, passed down through the many generations that had fought against the plague-rats of the deep. A cursed word that came from the Times Before. ‘Pestilentzi.’

He stood nearly a head taller than the men and women of his stratzari, the best warriors from more than two dozen clans. Many had once been clan leaders themselves, of the kort, zakar, hussta, zagir, uztek, kimmeri, ussra, and many others. For this he was also called the Uniter, and the Bear of Hard Winters for other feats, and several other titles across the peaks and valleys of Ursungorod.

The elite of Arka’s army waited on the gatehouse, six hundred in number, their armour a mixture of hardened leather and bronze rings, supplemented with bands or roundels of steel for those fortunate enough to have inherited such protection from their forefathers. There were styles from across the mountains – the high-peaked helms and gilded aventails of the valley clans, rounded basinets and dog-faced visors common amongst the scythic clans that had once dominated the caverns of inner Ursungorod, and skullcaps flamboyantly decorated with tassels, crests and beast-visaged emblems from the summit clans of the upper snows. Flags of red and gold, banners of white and blue, and gonfalons of black fluttered and snapped above them in the strengthening wind.

All were set with grim faces turned towards the darkness approaching from the mountain depths – the zienesta abisal, the Shadowgulf. While the coming ratkin horde spread out from scores of tunnels and caves, the air above them seethed with corrupted power, churning and frothing like a maelstrom.

The high walls to either side thronged with three thousand of Arka’s spear- and axe-wielding warriors, for the most part guarded against harm by nothing more than layers of leather and wool, and wooden oval shields painted with the rune of their new overlord.

The outer wall of Kurzengor, the settlement itself but a small fragment of the immense city built above and dug below Ursungorod, stood five times the height of a man, and thick enough for chambers within. But it was broken in places, shattered by the constant upheavals that wracked the mountain range, the breaches filled as best as possible with dull brown bricks, mortared stones and thick planks.

It was not ideal, but it was the best place to meet the squealing, shrieking mass of half-man rat-things that boiled up from the tunnels below. The wall itself was nothing, it was the men and women who held it that would decide the course of the battle.

Arka held up his axe, its long haft in one hand, the crescent moon blade glittering in the light of the accursed storm. He lifted his voice above the growing rumble.

‘This was the weapon of my mother. She took it from the fist of my father when he fell at Nijholli, already bathed many times in the blood of their enemies. Scores of foes – human, gods-tainted and ratkin – fell beneath it from my mother’s hand. She lived for the battle, but the cowardly vile-rats did not give her the peace of a war-death. Their corruption, their filth, spewed forth on noxious clouds, and plague heralded their attacks. In her bed, choking on lung-rot, every gasping breath an agony, that is how she died.’

He paused, eyes closed as the memory of that sight sank its claws into his throat, stifling his words. Taking a deep breath, Arka continued.

‘Before her final moments, I, a child of eight winters and seven summers, took this axe from her. I bid her farewell, and swore that I would see every one of the rat-filth slain. Every day since, I have cleaved to that oath. Long I have waged that war, and now they are goaded into showing themselves in the full light of day. Today shall live long in the legends of our people.’

Arka spoke the words with passion, but as he looked down at Radomira, who had nurtured him after his mother’s death, he shared her sadness – though he could not show it.

‘The omens do not give us hopes.’ Her words appeared in his thoughts, not passing her lips. ‘On the day you were born, the Ursungorod shook and the earth cracked beneath the Skagoldt Ridge to throw up the fires of the deeps. I saw a storm that day, and in its depths comes your ending.’

‘You knew as much when you took me as your son,’ Arka replied without speech, as he had been able to do with Radomira since that day she appeared at the house of his dead mother and bid him to leave with her. ‘You also spoke of great things that will happen this day. Our people will be saved, you said. If that needs my death, so be it.’

‘I did not say our people would be saved,’ she chided. ‘You must pay attention to detail, I have told you before. I said from the events of this day our lands will be freed.’

‘It is the same thing,’ grumbled Arka.

Accelerating, Arkas gloried in the touch of the frozen ground beneath his feet. The air was crisp and clean in his nostrils, at once so familiar and yet an almost forgotten memory. It instantly brought to mind childhood hunts and stalking the other youths of the Greypelt clan.

Darker recollections encroached, fuelling his long stride. Much had changed, in the lands as well as in his form and knowledge, but still his heart burned with the same furious thirst for vengeance. Sigmar the mighty God-King had furnished him with the means to finally fulfil that oath to his dying mother, gifting him with an immortal reforged body and weapons of celestial power. He was Greypelt no more. His clan loyalties were insignificant compared to the brotherhood ties of a Strike Chamber. All of the old titles were nothing compared to the epithet he had earned from Sigmar himself – Arkas Warbeast.

The kin-eaters were foolishly brave, not knowing the full nature of the warrior that attacked. They saw a solitary figure and perhaps thought to overwhelm him with the first rush of their counter-attack. He pounded up the slope, vaulting toppled stones and bounding across crevasses that had once been tower chambers. Arrows from short bows and stones from slings clattered and cracked harmlessly from his plated body.

‘The Lord Sigmar sends this message to all that nestle in the bosom of the Dark Gods,’ Arkas roared, his voice carrying like the wind of a storm.

He swept out the trails of his cloak and a flurry of hammer-shaped bolts flew across the gap, slashing golden wounds through the cannibalistic Chaos worshippers. A dozen strides later, he met the first of the kin-eaters’ warriors. Arkas’ sword flicked out, trailing lightning bolts, its tip parting the depraved barbarian from gut to chin. His hammer smashed the heads from two others. Pig iron blades and studded cudgels clattered ineffectually from his silvered armour.

It was more than the earth underfoot and the air in his lungs – the subtle nature of the Realm of Ghur stirred within him, calling him back to his roots, unleashing the war-beast that had always been part of him. When he had been known as the Bear-clad it had been something of a madness, coming upon him in the heat of combat. As the bloodfever rose he understood now that something more primal was aroused – something in the fabric of the mountains of Ursungorod that ignited inside him.

The leading edge of the storm was no more than a bowshot from the walls. Putridity, foul and yet sweet, carried on the strengthening wind. The rankness of the vile-rats came before them, accompanied by the chittering and squealing of warriors with matted fur and ragged robes.

‘There are fewer of them than I expected,’ Arka joked. The pestilentzi numbered at least five times that of his host. But in truth he did not think it too many; his warriors were a match for that number, and the walls, though broken, gave them even more advantage. He started to think that perhaps Radomira’s dire prophecy was wrong. It was not unknown for her to misinterpret the signs.

A shout from the left brought his attention to the upper end of the valley. There were shapes moving through the rocks of the gorge, the sickly light of the storm glinting from rusted armour and weapons. Men with unkempt locks and filth-crusted beards skulked through broken boulders and stunted trees. Their womenfolk came with them, their hair teased out into untidy braids slicked with human fat.

‘The ghoul tribes,’ sneered one of Arka’s companions, a wiry uzteki called Timur. The one-eyed warrior spat on the stones. ‘They are already cursed by the foul powers, and now they have made an alliance with the ratkin.’

‘No matter,’ Arka replied, though the confidence he had felt moments earlier was starting to ebb. ‘They are hardly better fighters than the scab-rats from below.’

He eyed the storm, which washed over the grand fortifications, bringing with it choking fumes. Men and women on the battered ramparts coughed and retched as foul-tasting smog obscured everything.

‘Archers!’ Arka bellowed, knowing that the pestilentzi would use the cover of the cloud to advance quickly. He had marked their approach carefully and had expected such a ruse – this was not the first time the ratkin had unleashed the foetid breath of the Horned One. ‘Loose to one hundred paces!’

Fifteen hundred bows were lifted and fifteen hundred dark shafts disappeared into the gloom. Eyes stinging, Arka could not mark their flight beyond fifty paces, but the fog could not wholly muffle the shrieks and squeaks of pain a few moments later. The archers reloaded and sent another volley, more ragged than the first, and another.

‘Fifty paces!’ Arka cried, seeing shadows emerging from the greenish mist. Overhead, the thunder cracked, shaking the ancient city wall to its foundations. Jade lightning crackled down, striking at several points along the rampart, each blast cutting down half a dozen warriors. Another bolt struck just ten paces away, blackening Aslanbek in his cracked armour, molten droplets of bronze spattering those nearby.

‘Clear the storm,’ Arka snarled at Radomira.

The sagesayer withdrew, her cabal of magicweavers gathering about her, brandishing a variety of rods, staves and wands, the jingle of their amulets and clatter of bone talismans a distraction for a moment.

The ratkin did not come for the gate, but threw the weight of their numbers towards a repaired breach about seventy-five paces to the left of it, where they clearly intended to scale the wall and meet up with the ghoul tribes coming from further along the slope. They brought no ladders or grapples, but simply climbed the wall with thin, clawed fingers, finding easy purchase in the pitted surface of stones laid countless decades before.

The first crash of metal on metal rang out along the rampart. Another immense roll of thunder caused Arka to glance up. It seemed that the tempest was changing, crackles of blue splitting the green, cerulean clouds bubbling through from the midst of the green sky. He did not know what Radomira was doing, but it seemed to be working. The fog that swathed the wall was swirling away in many places, revealing the skittering horde of ratkin approaching below.

Without any need for a command, a storm of javelins and throwing axes descended into the onrushing mass, sending the front-runners tumbling to the bloodied ground to be trodden down by the ratkin that followed.

The din of battle increased, the shouts of both sides and the clash of weapons echoing back from the inner wall some four hundred paces behind Arka. Checking to the left and right, he was reassured to see that his warriors were holding. Axes, swords and spears were relentless in their deadly welcome. Every ratman that made the rampart was met by two or three speartips or blades.

‘They use their numbers poorly,’ remarked Marta. She pointed with her tulwar, moving the tip along the wall to the right. ‘They should draw us out along the entire length, not throw themselves at one place where their mass counts for nothing.’

‘Do not expect sound strategy from verminous filth,’ replied Ljubo. ‘They do not count losses like warriors.’

This last comment stuck in Arka’s thoughts. The pestilentzi truly did not care how many died. He had seen twenty perish just to drag down one of his warriors. He stepped up to the wall and looked out, turning his gaze to the left.

The ratmen thrown at the walls were spindly, ragged creatures with bubo-pocked fur, armed with shards of stone, wooden clubs and crude daggers of rusted metal. A terrible choice for a first assault. What was needed was a spearhead of armoured, experienced warriors to create an opening for the masses to later exploit.

There were certainly such fighters in the pestilentzi ranks. He could see them advancing behind the slavish horde, decked in blackened armour, banners and tri-barred icons carried above their more orderly regiments. And then there were the sergahulla – plague-frenzied verminkind that wore thick robes and shrieked disturbing chants. They hurled themselves fearlessly at their foes. Either would make better siege breakers than the scum being tossed up against the walls.

Tossed up against the walls…

He leaned out further to look down at the ground at the base of the great bastion. Already hundreds of dead ratmen were piling up.

‘They are using the bodies of the dead for ramps!’ he cried out. ‘Fetch oil and brands, we must turn them into pyres!’

While this order was passed along the wall, a new wave of pestilentzi reached the defences, thrusting through the milling crowds of slaves. They were bigger, darker furred, with swords, halberds and shields. Arrows and sling bullets met the next assault but made little injury to the numbers of the foe.

Arka was about to order part of his guard to move down to the wall to form a mobile reserve when he felt a shift in the wind. He spluttered and others around him coughed and retched as a noisome reek blew along the wall.

‘What sorcerous…’ The words drifted away when Arka spied the answer to his question.

The ranks of the elite vermin were parting, the filthy ratkin throwing themselves to their knees and stomachs in obeisance. Through the gap advanced a monstrous figure, more terrifying even than the bekevic that haunted the mountain meres and could swallow a warrior whole.

A frightened muttering broke out through the stratzari. Warriors who had faced battle dozens of times whispered curses and flexed sweating palms on their weapons. Arka felt his mouth dry as he watched the approach of the creature.

CHAPTER TWO

Incensed, driven along the teetering line of insanity between abject terror and suicidal desperation, the kin-eaters tried to drag down the Stormcast Eternal. Crudely forged blades shattered on his armour, and broken fingernails caked in blood scrabbled at his plate. He bulled his way through, crushing bodies underfoot and slamming his foes aside with sweeps of his arms.

Arkas had once been a man of flesh and blood. Now he was something far greater, fashioned by the spirit of Sigmar and armed by the great duardin god Grungni. Reborn, reforged, remade in an ideal – hope and nobility, courage unsurpassed, strength tempered by humility.

But here, now, on the slopes of Mount Vazdir, where he had seen his people fall to the filth of the Pestilens skaven, he was simply death incarnate. His runeblade and hammer had been created in the great foundries of the smith-god, made from purest sigmarite, but in his mind he bore an old crescent-headed axe given to him by his mother. In spirit if not in any physical sense, the weapon lived on.

‘Know this, servants of darkness! Your end has come! The Light of Sigmar falls upon Ursungorod and by his beacon shall the warriors of the storm be guided to his foes.’

Enemy blades shattered at the touch of his sword, leather armour and crude mail no guard against the weight of his lightning-wreathed hammer. In the Gladitorium of Sigmaron, Arka Bear-clad had finished his transition to Arkas Warbeast, Stormcast Eternal, herald of Sigmar’s wrath. It was not until now that he fully appreciated the changes wrought upon him by his Reforging. The kin-eaters fell to his sword and hammer like wheat before the reaper, leaving a dismembered trail in his wake as he cut and smashed his way towards their leader.

Not only in prowess had he been altered. The magical energy of the Mortal Realms, the essence of Ghur that sustained the Realm of Beasts, flowed around him, suffusing the landscape. He saw it escape the bodies of his foes as they fell, returning to the great flow of the wild and untamed world. He felt it in his body too, as he had once felt the enlightening power of Azyr open his mind to the full truth of the universe.

Arkas had desired revenge, but the sensation of justice fulfilled as he cleaved apart another handful of foes was unlike any feeling he had encountered. It was a redemptive force, payment for the agony of his Reforging, the reward for enduring endless trials and hardships to become a Stormcast Eternal.

He realised less than a score of heartbeats had passed since he had been hurled down to Ursungorod by the power of Sigmar, yet three dozen enemies already lay dead behind him. The kin-eaters’ mistress looked on with an expression of joy, not fear, and he stared into her dark eyes and saw only the madness of Chaos. In her the spirit of Khorne the Blood God was strong. Arkas could smell the taint on her as strongly as the metallic scent of blood leaking from his slain foes.

Drawing a wickedly serrated tulwar, the Gore Maiden leapt to counter-attack, hurdling the headless corpse of one of her followers as he fell away from Arkas’ swinging blade. She was as fast as his Stormcast companions, the tip of her sword cutting across the curve of a moulded pectoral. The blade appeared to steam with the power of Khorne, leaving a molten welt on the breast of Arkas’ armour.

Stunned for a moment, he stepped back, raising his hammer to ward away the next slashing attack. The sigmarite rang cleanly at the impact of the Gore Maiden’s tulwar, sparks of power erupting from its head. Another blow sped towards his arm and Arkas turned quickly, allowing it to fall just past his shoulder.

He kicked, his armoured boot connecting with the midriff of the Khornate champion, breaking ribs and throwing her a dozen strides across the snow. She rolled through a flurry of white, coming to her feet with a grimace just in time to block Arkas’ descending blade with her own.

‘Your bloody master cannot aid you against the righteousness of Sigmar,’ Arkas spat, knocking aside the Gore Maiden’s weapon with the haft of his hammer.

The Stormcast Eternal felt blows clanging against his back and helm, but all of his attention was directed on the Gore Maiden. He pressed his advantage, swinging his hammer towards her head. As she jumped aside, the tip of his blade met her neck, parting flesh and spine without pause.

Seeing their chief decapitated robbed the kin-eaters of their remaining courage. The cannibals fled as he turned, some abandoning their weapons to speed their flight down the mountainside. They dashed left and right, splitting up, too many for Arkas to chase them all down.

The Stormcast Eternal lifted his hammer above his head, pointing to the skies where the Tempest of Sigmar still churned in cerulean glory.

‘To me, warriors of Sigmaron! Celestial Vindicators, our moment is upon us! Heed the call of your Lord-Celestant, my Warbeasts!’

There was a little likeness of a rat in the monster’s features, but it walked five times the height of the Chaos vermin, its head surrounded by a mane of curling, twisted horns. Its tail, longer than the beast was tall, was like a barbed whip tipped with metallic blades. Overlapping plates of serrated oil-black armour covered a ragged tunic of dun and pink-grey flesh, and a faceted helm of the same unnatural metal protected its skull and cheeks. A thick belt of cracked hide girded its waist and a huge book was bound there by a corroded chain, a smog-like cloud slipping from the fluttering pages.

In taloned hands it gripped a spear, the head splitting into four curved tines that sparked with magical energy. The air thrashed around the monster and the ground blistered under its tread, as if its simple presence offended the earth and sky.

‘Verminlord! Daemon of the Horned One!’

Arka heard the gasp and glanced over his shoulder in time to see Radomira collapsing. Blood ran from her eyes and ears, and her attendants looked on helplessly, ashen-faced, quivering with fear.

The verminlord thrust its spear towards the ramparts and a bolt of green energy struck the stones, sending up jagged chunks and charred corpses. The ratkin flowed forwards, their screeches deafening. Another bolt of magic slashed through the defenders to Arka’s left, turning armour to rusted flakes and the flesh within to rotten meat.

Arka saw again the face of his mother, withered before its time, claw-like hands grasping at the sweat-soaked bedding. Coughing wracked her body. In the horror of that moment, Arka knew that the creature stalking towards the gates was the same that had unleashed the pestilence on Ursungorod and ripped his mother’s life away.

He levelled his axe at the creature in silent challenge. It looked up at him with glowing green eyes and bared sharp fangs in what might have been a smile.

A rolling blast of thunder drew Arka’s gaze up for a moment. Blue lightning crawled across the bottom of the storm clouds, like nothing he had seen before. The stones beneath his booted feet shivered as the verminlord unleashed a blast of power at the gates, turning wood to mouldering splinters.

The lightning lanced down, hitting Arka’s upraised axe, earthing through his arm and down his spine.

He thought himself dead in that instant, but the feeling of energy that ran through him grew rather than weakening. He felt himself lifted, ascending towards the heavens. His body dissolved into energy, a bolt of power erupting upwards.

With a last conscious thought, he saw the ratkin swarming over the walls of Kurzengor and knew he had failed his people.

From the head of Arkas’ hammer, a beam of blue light leapt up to the skies, its signal carrying beyond the Mortal Realms to Sigmaron. An instant later, a crackle of storm energy lanced down. The two crashed together and a tempest of lightning bolts flared, raining down around the Stormcast. Where each blast touched the ground, the snow melted and the earth beneath charred. Each blinding flash left behind another giant warrior clad in turquoise armour, until a company of the greatest warriors stood before him.

Two lightning strikes flanked Arkas to the left and right, each just a few paces from him. On his left appeared a warrior bearing aloft a golden standard in the shape of crossed hammers, wreathed in parchments adorned with the blessings of Sigmar in Azyrite script.

‘Dolmetis, my Knight-Vexillor, raise the standard and proclaim these lands the domains of Sigmar, God-King!’

On the right his Knight-Heraldor materialised, bearing a long clarion from which hung a pennant in the colours of Arkas’ Exemplar Chamber.

‘Doridun, sound forth the challenge so that all will know that Sigmar’s rule has returned to Ursungorod!’

The Knight-Heraldor lifted the instrument and let forth a single peal, its note matched by a thunderous crash from the heavens that echoed across the mountain valley. As the last reverberations died away, Dolmetis approached his Lord-Celestant, casting glances at the mutilated remains of the kin-eaters that lay scattered across the blood-stained snow.

‘I thought we were to attack as a chamber, Lord Arkas?’

The Lord-Celestant laughed and pointed to the fleeing Chaos war party.

‘I left some for you! Doridun, signal the pursuit. Leave none alive!’

CHAPTER THREE

‘Such a sight to stir the blood,’ said Theuderis Silverhand, speaking as much to himself as to his steed. He patted the scaled neck of his dracoth, Tyrathrax.

The sight to which he referred was a display of unparalleled martial glory. Retinue after retinue of the Silverhands Warrior Chamber marched forth from the realmgate. The portal had been opened on the Plateau of Omens in the Celestial Realm, and led to the Capricious Wilds, an untamed region within the Realm of Beasts. In a few strides, Sigmar’s army had crossed the cosmic gulf. The portal itself was formed of two jutting pilasters of gleaming rock, their surfaces etched with runic devices each as tall as a man. They rose from opposite sides of a canyon, which was scored like an axe wound across the mountains. Arcs of energy blazed between them and flared into the dark sky, lighting the white armour of Theuderis’ host.

They issued forth in ordered ranks, every precise step crashing against the grey mountain stone. Brotherhood after brotherhood they came, bearing blades and bows and axes charged with Azyric energy that filled the air with a cerulean light.

Flights of Knights-Azyros raced into the glowering sky, each warrior carried on lightning wings and bearing with them lanterns that shone with the light of Sigmar’s ire. Behind them rose Knights-Venator and soaring Prosecutors, their celestial arrows and javelins like sparks against the stormhead, a flock of star-eagles swirling around them in the mystical vortices and thermals of the pulsing realmgate.

Drilled beyond mortal discipline, the Stormcast Eternals of the Silverhands Chamber moved like the pieces of an intricate, perfect machine. Ranks and files slid effortlessly together, expanded and reformed to negotiate the broken terrain, rapidly forming a line in echelon across the mouth of the broad defile. The conclaves formed, their arrangement an abstraction of a fortress. Swift, sky-borne Angelos Conclaves acted as the outer defences, the insurmountable warriors of the Paladin Conclaves forming a living barbican behind them. This ‘gatehouse’ was flanked by the walls of the Redeemer Conclaves, a solid bulwark of gleaming hammers and azure shields. Theuderis Silverhand and his sub-commanders kept company with the Justicar Conclaves as a central keep from which reserves could pour forth to exploit any weakness or counter any enemy advantage.

The Lord-Celestant did not need to utter a single command. The entire manoeuvre had been set in motion before he had led the vanguard though the gate. Each Stormcast Eternal knew his exact place, the Strike Chamber a single entity far more than it was a collection of individual warriors.

When the several hundred warriors were assembled, Theuderis raised a hand and the army advanced as one, sweeping onto the barren ground of the Capricious Wilds in an unbroken line, while Sigmar’s heralds swooped above.

From just below the iron-grey clouds, Theuderic had a magnificent view of his knights’ final charge. His hippadon, Sasyran, dipped a wing at his spoken command, plunging them back towards the battle garlanded by streamers of the reptilian beast’s steaming breath. On silvery styllions the knights of the Glittering Breaches thundered into the serpent-bannered ranks of the alter-folk. Detonations marked the impacts of a thousand thunderlances, each flaming spark tearing apart a follower of the Fallen Gods. The styllions, flesh and bone magically bonded with the finest engines of the auromancers, crashed through the alter-folk, crushing them beneath flailing hooves and tearing at them with iron-sheathed fangs.

A battery of falconet heavy gonnes let fly another barrage, incendiary ammunition destroying a motley band of vulpus riders trying to outflank the jezzailers holding the right. Theuderic’s personal grenadiers supported the charge of the knights, their magically wrought explosives detonating with purple-and-white fire amongst the barbarian foe.

The hippadon exhaled orange flame as king and mount fell upon the fleeing remnants of the enemy chieftain’s entourage. Skin blistered and fur garb blazed while Theuderic struck left and right with his slender blade.

The enemy were broken, the last of their strength desperately assembled, and now purged on the fields of the Iron Dunes. Theuderic lifted a fist and from his armoured gauntlet a blaze of white pierced the spring air, signalling the general pursuit.

No more than half a mile from the realmgate stood a citadel raised from the dark rock itself, not a single seam or join on its forbidding surface. The blazon of Sigmar flew from a dozen poles along the walls. It was not large – barely the size of a tower of Castle Lyonaster of old – but it was far more potent than size alone would suggest. At the approach of the Knights Excelsior Strike Chamber, a horn sounded three notes from the castle and bronze gates opened to release a column of figures in white plate.

Theuderis urged Tyrathrax on and the dracoth broke into a run, claws striking sparks from the exposed rock, heading towards Lord-Castellant Neros Stormfather, who led the garrison force. Coming closer, the Lord-Celestant saw damage on the armour of the other Stormcast Eternals. He brandished his blade in salute to the efforts of Sigmar’s warriors.

‘Well met, Lord Stormfather,’ he called out when Tyrathrax came to a halt beside the Lord-Castellant. ‘I see that you have been kept in useful engagement.’

‘We have that, Lord Silverhand,’ said Neros, clasping his halberd to his chest in a gesture of respect. ‘But not for seven days have the degenerates attempted to regain the gate. I do believe they might have learnt the lesson taught by our weapons.’

‘Or they bide their time awaiting a moment of laxity,’ warned Theuderis.

‘They shall wait in vain. The Silverhands are always vigilant.’ Neros looked past Theuderis, to where the host was wheeling en masse, heading towards the hills above which the crimson glow of sunrise was creeping. ‘I judge from the direction of the march that the Capricious Wilds are not the final objective.’

‘No.’ Theuderis followed his gaze. ‘Securing this realmgate was only the first stage, Neros. I march for the lands of Ursungorod.’

‘The Mountains of the Bears – I have heard of them. Home to vile Chaos filth and skaven, and where the lands themselves rebel against the touch of the Dark Powers. No easy task.’

‘Sigmar did not elevate us to undertake easy tasks, Neros.’

‘He did not, but enough grains of sand can bury even the greatest monument. Another realmgate? It always is.’

‘Of course,’ Theuderis answered with a nod. ‘An important one. Buried beneath a mountain, no less, and surrounded by skaven. When we take the Ursungorod realmgate it will bring us to the Vaults of the Spring Moon, within striking distance of the Lifegate. Others are moving into position for the other great realmgates that lead to the Allpoints. We are the fist of Sigmar God-King, tightening around cursed Archaon. So our immortal lord demands.’

‘Blood-hungry hordes above, vile ratmen below. I hope your sword-arm is fresh, my lord. That is a long wound to cleave.’

‘We are not alone in the endeavour.’ Theuderis leaned forwards and dropped his voice. ‘The first piercing blow has already been made. The Warbeasts have been cast directly into central Ursungorod as a breaching force. They will draw the enemy to them for a time and allow us to cross into the mountains without hindrance.’

‘The Warbeasts? Lord Arkas? I have heard of them.’ Neros looked away, letting his halberds swing down to his side. ‘You best hurry.’

‘You think they will be overrun before we reach them?’ Theuderis was surprised that the Lord-Castellant showed such little faith in his fellow Stormcasts.

‘I think they will have torn a bloody path to the realmgate before you can catch up!’

Theuderis sheathed his sword and shook his head. He lifted a hand in farewell to Neros and turned Tyrathrax back towards his army. He signalled for his Knight-Vexillor, Voltaran, who broke from the other members of the command echelon, carrying the lightning strike icon of the chamber. While he waited, Theuderis eyed the mountains that lined the far horizon, stretching like a jagged barrier. Lit by the new dawn, a wall of cloud obscured the mountain peaks, roiling with a life of their own.

‘We must be prepared,’ he said to Tyrathrax. ‘And focused. Nothing shall stop us seizing the realmgate. Nothing.’

Voltaran fell in beside his Lord-Celestant.

‘A change of orders, Voltaran.’ Theuderis looked again at the distant mountains. ‘Double-pace. I want to reach Ursungorod by dawn.’

‘As you command, Lord Silverhand.’

By the time the sky was bronzed by the approaching dusk, not a single alter-warrior was left alive in the Glittering Breaches.

Ten times a thousand glowing torches lined the road back to Castle Lyonaster. A thousand banners from a hundred lands and more were lit by their pale light, each borne by a champion of the realm. Behind the colour bearers, the regiments of the Reforged Kingdoms stood in solid ranks, weapons lifted in salute to their lord.

Demigonnes and other great machines of war stood sentinel between the companies of cavalry and infantry, the weaponcasters and forge wizards who created them standing proudly with the crews. Overhead, flights of pteragryphs and hippadons seeded the skies with explosions and ribbons of colour from censers and maces empowered by the light of Chamon.

Theuderic dismounted before the gate of Castle Lyonaster, having ridden the length of the triumph to acknowledge his followers. Once it had been a simple keep and curtain wall, erected by Theuderic’s ancestors to hold against the hordes of the alter-folk. Like other castles across the Glittering Breaches, it had become a focal point of the resistance against the demented armies from the Iron Wastes. Generation after generation, supplied by springs and mines, walled orchards and fields, Lyonaster weathered every assault and siege laid upon it by the likes of Turkhar Nex’s draconic hosts, the Silvered Horde and the half-dead shambling legions of Ghorgorondoth the Tumourfiend.

To call it a gate was not wholly accurate. It was nothing less than an outer citadel, made of five towers in pentagon formation, each capable of housing a company of five hundred soldiers. Passing into the central courtyard, Theuderic crossed the gilded sigil carved into the flagstones, so large it took him five paces to cross it. He felt the shimmer of Chamonic energy flicker through his armour as he passed into the Auric Shield, the true strength of Castle Lyonaster.

Seven forefathers, seven Dukes of the Breaches, had held court here, but for Theuderic it had not been enough. He had seen the toll it had taken on friends and family, a lifetime lived close to walls, ever fearfully watching the horizon. Children grew up with a haunted look and parents quelled any adventurous spirit and curiosity with grim tales of the savages and nightmare armies that lay just a few days’ march away.

On ascending to the Marble Throne, Theuderic had declared it not enough to hold their lands against invasion. Lyonaster had to expand if it was going to thrive. The first marcher forts had been built the following year. Neighbouring dukes sent emissaries, complaining of encroachment into their lands – lands that were for the most part overrun with rogues, monsters and wild thaumic automatons from the Great Unleashing, but their lands all the same. Rather than argue with these messengers, Theuderic sent them back to their masters and mistresses with gifts of metal from the mines, of plans and engineering secrets that had been kept in the vaults of Lyonaster since its first founding. Artificers and auromancers were escorted at great expense to the other keeps, to advise on how to improve their defences, taking with them designs for demigonnes and enchantments for flameswords and other wonders.

The others started to call Theuderic ‘Forge-lord’, delighting in the double-meaning of the title. When the terrible wrath-drake Ankalaonos descended upon the realm of Princess Swanachild, Theuderic himself rode out with his knights and jezzailers to bring down the bronze-scaled beast. By example he led the other rulers, always ready to defend their lands, never requiring any oath in return but receiving promises of fealty nevertheless.

Lyonaster grew along with the dominions of its lord, and its population swelled along with its defences, to the point that it now rivalled the old cities of Tyren and Colbertine, before they had been swallowed by the expansion of the Iron Wastes.

Theuderic reached a flight of steps and ascended them two at a time. Gaining the rampart, his arch-warden Carloman awaited him. Decked in robes of red threaded with gold, platinum and steel, the auromancer shimmered as he bowed, his steel skullcap reflecting the ruddy twilight. Straightening, Carloman smiled, his expression twisting the burns and scars of many an alchemical mishap.

‘Magnificent, my king, simply magnificent,’ said Carloman. His voice was a staccato whisper, which some took for constant agitation but was actually the result of damage to his vocal cords from inhaling the wrong sort of fumes during an experiment. ‘A wondrous day to live for.’

‘And credit all to you and your brethren, Carloman. If not for your skills, the strength of Lyonaster would have been outmatched by the fury and number of our enemies.’

A walkway of shining steel marked with many runes linked the towers, cunningly wrought so that its outer fence created an overhang from which jezzailers could pour bullets down onto a foe through murder holes. The metal rang to the tread of the king, almost drowning out Carloman’s next words.

‘A weapon needs be wielded, my king,’ he said humbly, bowing once more and allowing his liege to move on alone to greet the next group.

Standing back from the battlement, his wife Ermenberga and their two daughters waited with broad smiles. Theuderic kissed Ermenberga on the cheek and knelt to carefully embrace his children, wary of the unyielding nature of the plate that covered almost every part of him. He stood, laying a hand on the head of each child.

‘It is done!’ declared his wife, her smile bright in the gleam of his magic armour. ‘The war is over!’

‘Is it true, papa?’ asked the youngest, Peneranda.

‘The alter-folk have been slain,’ he told them, the words bringing home the scale of the victory he had won. He stroked the child’s cheek. ‘I started this campaign before you were born, little one, but now the lands are free of their taint.’

‘Does that mean we’ll have more time to play?’ said Clothild, older by three years.

‘We will,’ he assured her, standing up. ‘Though ruling the Glittering Breaches will not be without its tasks. Now that the foe has been driven out, I must work to keep the unity of the Reforged Kingdoms. But if the serpents of the Iron Wastes cannot keep me from my daughters, the arguments of princes shall not either.’

He heard chanting – his name – and Ermenberga waved him towards the parapet.

‘Your subjects await you,’ she said, eyes moist with joy. She patted her stomach meaningfully, ‘and soon you will have other news to brighten their spirits further. I think it is a boy…’

Theuderic was struck dumb, his thoughts whirling. He pulled himself up onto the rampart edge. His army, led by princes and dukes and war leaders of many other castles and citadels, erupted into even greater noise, such that Theuderic almost didn’t hear the rumbling of thunder above.

He looked up and saw that the darkening sky was filling with ominous clouds. Fearing some last treachery of the alter-folk, Theuderic glanced back at his family.

With his name still ringing in his ears, and the loving expressions of his wife and children etched into his mind, Theuderic juddered as a bolt scythed through his body without warning.

In a moment, all that he knew, the wide plains and jagged hills of the Glittering Breaches, dropped beneath him. The great keeps and fortresses of his lands became specks of gold and silver before they too were lost, and in a moment the blur of the Auric Shield of Lyonaster disappeared from view.

He thought for a moment that he had been swallowed by a star, suffused with light and heat.

And then he was no more.

Watching his adjutant turn away, Theuderis considered his command. Every warrior had been selected by Sigmar himself, chosen from across the Mortal Realms to be the best fighters in history. His own feats had marked him out for leadership, but each and every Stormcast Eternal had a similar story of heroism and defiance to tell. There was not one amongst them that would take a step back in the face of the enemy, or flinch from the battle ahead. These were concerns for leaders of mortal soldiers.

Yet for all that, the Strike Chamber of the Silverhands was untested in war. The training fields of Sigmaron and the orchestrated battles of the Gladitorium were tests, nothing more. Theuderis did not fear death, for he would be remade if he fell, just as would all who followed him. There was a price for immortality, he had heard, but the greater loss would be the pang of failure. Though Neros Stormfather’s comment had been light-hearted, it had cast a doubt in Theuderis’ thoughts – the Silverhands were ready to be tempered in battle, but what of the Warbeast and his warriors? More than skill, bravery and fury were required to overcome the foes ahead.

In his former life, Theuderis had never known defeat. The Silverhand was not about to commence his eternal service to Sigmar with anything less than total victory.

CHAPTER FOUR

Much had changed, though much had stayed the same. Arkas found the spot where he had been standing when Sigmar had ascended him to the Celestial Realm. Not only was he able to pick the place from the general layout of the collapsed fortifications, he could feel an imprint on the world from where he had been plucked for a new existence. The bolt of Sigmar that had taken him, the same cosmic energy that had deposited him earlier that day, left an indelible mark in the fabric of Ursungorod.

‘How long?’ he whispered as he looked at the tumbled ruin of what had once been Kurzengor.

‘Did you say something, Lord Arkas?’ asked Dolmetis, a few paces behind his lord.

‘When I last stood upon these stones they were mounted on each other as a great gatehouse,’ he told his companion. ‘I suppose they were knocked down by the sorceries of the foes that came that day, but it is the passage of time that has buried them. How long would you say, Dolmetis, would it take for the land to claim back its own?’

‘Centuries, Lord Arkas, as judged in the Realm of Heavens. Perhaps half a dozen or more.’ He stepped closer. ‘It is only a mortal measure, my lord. The past is of no consequence, only the future holds the hope of change. Many of the God-King’s host were taken from their realms in even more distant times.’

‘A good point, Dolmetis.’ He stamped a booted foot on the hard block beneath him. Blue sparks flew. ‘These walls were old even when I held them, set down in a time long past, along with the rest of the city below Ursungorod.’

‘The Shadowgulf?’

‘The lowest parts are called that. We thought they were the tomb of those that hollowed Ursungorod. I know better now. Gnaw-burrows of the skaven, bleeding the realms together, spreading canker into the depths of this place and the neighbouring regions.’

‘That is where we are heading?’

‘In time. We do not simply thrust our hands into the vermin nest. The clans of the Ursungorod I knew are no more – the hand of Chaos stretched far across these lands and despoiled the souls of its people. We will purge this taint and secure our route to the realmgate. Theuderis the Silverhand marches from the dusk to rendezvous for our attack and we shall crush the followers of Chaos between us like a fist closing. The battle will wet our blades and whet our wrath for the true war below.’

Doridun had been close at hand too and now stepped forward. His clarion was slung across his back and he held a blade slicked with blood.

‘And where will we find these enemies, lord?’ He sounded eager.

‘Everywhere,’ Arkas replied with a chuckle. He turned and pointed up the mountainside, to where the slopes disappeared into dark clouds. ‘But there is somewhere else we must go first.’

The Lord-Celestant raised his hammer thrice and from the gloomy skies a spark of light dropped in response, quickly resolving into the shape of Hastor, his Knight-Venator. On blazing sapphire wings he descended, the long curve of his realmhunter’s bow in hand. He landed as softly as a feather and held out his free arm. A blur of colour streaked across the pale mountainside and a few moments later Hastor’s star-eagle settled on his wrist, resplendent with yellow and red plumage.

‘Hastor, take the Prosecutors and scout me a route to the summit. You will find an old outpost there, I hope, of duardin style. Do not enter, simply return to me with the news if it still stands.’

‘There are duardin in Ursungorod, my lord?’ Dolmetis looked up the slope as if he might see one of Grungni’s stocky descendants. ‘I did not know.’

‘No cause for excitement, they were driven out by the skaven before I was born. Another… person makes her lair in their old workings though, and she will have invaluable intelligence about the Pestilens and the corrupted tribes.’ He looked at Hastor. ‘On no account are you to enter the tower. The Queen of the Peak may be a useful ally, but she will certainly be a foe if you come upon her unannounced.’

‘How are we to announce our presence, my lord?’ asked Hastor.

‘Leave that to me. Though I am reforged, I still have a few tricks from the old times.’

Hastor nodded and tossed his star-eagle into the air, leaping effortlessly after it a moment later. His shrill cry cut across the wind and the Knight-Venator’s twenty Prosecutors rose up to meet him, the pale spines of their Azyr-crafted wings shimmering.

‘Dolmetis, you will remain here with a small rearguard. Take Martox and his Decimators, and half the Retributors. Doridun, call the rest of the chamber to column. We have a long climb ahead of us.’

CHAPTER FIVE

The march across the foothills passed without incident. The peaks rose abruptly ahead of Theuderis’ army, delineating the boundary between the Capricious Wilds and Ursungorod. As the Lord-Celestant had commanded, the host had started ascending the lower slopes before the light of the rising sun fell upon their backs. They advanced without pause, covering the ground with giant strides, as relentless as the pistons of a duardin engine.

The formation changed organically to match the variations in terrain, the different elements repositioning as they passed along defiles or spread out across valley floors. By mid-morning the sun was hidden behind the clouds again, its wan light barely penetrating the deep gorges and ravines.

At times they were hemmed in by vertiginous cliff faces of solid ice, chasms barely wide enough for the Stormcasts to walk three abreast. Inside the frozen walls could be seen the dim shapes of carcasses from gigantic beasts and the bones of monsters consumed in aeons past. More disturbing were the shark-like apparitions that lived within the solid ice scavenging on these remains, half-seen creatures with long fangs and dagger-spined fins.

Amongst the blue-needled trees, they would hear the tinkling of metal and come across great oak-like arboreal giants with bark of iron and leaves of bronze. The column found itself negotiating winding trails that seemed to shift as they passed, the trees moving imperceptibly, subtly closing off routes and opening others, directing their progress towards dark ravines and coursing rivers that fumed like boiling blood.

They passed much evidence of the ancient human and duardin strongholds that had once dominated these lands. All was worn and broken by countless years, but from the back of Tyrathrax here and there Theuderis spied a rune-etched column or some carved face of a deity long consumed by the ravaging Chaos Gods. In places, the tribes had tried to rebuild parts of the mountains-spanning dead city, leaving ramshackle walls and circular encampments of piled stone. Symbols of the Dark Powers were daubed on these hovels and there was other evidence of depraved practices.

‘I thought the Realms of Beasts would be teeming with life,’ remarked Voltaran. ‘Yet all I hear is the wind and tread of boots. Not a bird cry or snuffle or growl.’

Theuderis had noticed the silence too and developed a theory.

‘It is our presence that stills them. We carry with us the light of Sigmar, the power celestial. Long they have nestled in the crux of the Dark Gods’ embrace – they are suffused with its corruption.’ He gazed about at the tumbled rocks and spiny trees that littered the slope around them. ‘Trust nothing here, no matter how fair-seeming. All has been touched by Chaos.’

‘You think nothing has survived of what once was?’

‘There is no purity to be found in this forsaken realm, Voltaran. When it has been purified, when we have seized the realmgates and wrested the Allpoints from accursed Archaon, the beauty of the untrammelled wilderness will blossom again and those untouched by the darkness will live here in peace.’

‘That is a very long time yet, Lord-Celestant. The work has only just begun.’

‘Yet longer has the Lord Sigmar planned this return. In an age the Mortal Realms fell. Not overnight will they be restored to goodness. Be comforted that each region we purge, each realmgate we seize, brings that blessed state closer.’

‘In the God-King’s name.’

‘For eternity may he reign.’

They continued on for some time, the landscape growing ever more barren and contorted as they progressed. The slopes were gouged with great welts that wept ruddy blood-like tar and the Prosecutors scouted far and wide to find the best route through the maze of pits, ruins and chasms that blocked the army’s route. At times Theuderis was forced to dismount to allow his dracoth to negotiate a steep climb, and just after noon he and many others were virtually on their hands and knees, pulling themselves up the near-vertical wall of a canyon. Tyrathrax scrambled up behind, panting hard, her claws scratching against the unforgiving rock.

Theuderis dragged himself over the lip of the cliff, joining the several dozen Stormcast Eternals of the vanguard who were already there. A sudden wild cawing and a mad flapping of wings announced the rise of a panicked flock of huge crows, each with a wingspan that rivalled a star-eagle’s. Other birds were wildly trilling and shrieking, taking to the skies in haste, predators and prey fleeing together.

The ground trembled.

Theuderis launched himself back towards the cliff edge, skidding along the brown grass with outstretched arms. The clifftop bucked even as he reached the edge. He looked down and saw Tyrathrax looking back at him, her pale blue eyes staring out of the slits in her gilded chamfron. To either side the ascending Stormcast Eternals doubled their efforts, heaving themselves between footholds, cracks and small ledges.

‘Jump!’ the Lord Celestant roared, digging the fingers of his left hand deep into the dirt and throwing out his right.

The dracoth bunched its muscles and leapt even as the face of the cliff sheared away.

Theuderis snatched a horn as it passed close to his hand, pulling with all of his strength to wrap his arm around the neck of his faithful mount. Tyrathrax’s claws gouged furrows in the disintegrating stone. The Lord-Celestant powered to his feet, dragging the dracoth with him in a welter of rock shards and clumps of mud.

‘Stay back from the edge!’ he bellowed over the cracking and groaning of tortured earth, as warriors of the vanguard moved to aid their companions on the cliff. There was nothing they could do and more would be lost.

Theuderis staggered away, pulling Tyrathrax after him, the ground rising and falling violently under his feet. Twice he fell to his knees and he let go of the dracoth to look back. The cliff was still tumbling away, breaking apart in boulders and sheets as the strata split, the edge moving closer and closer. It settled just a few strides away.

A few of the Stormcasts made it to safety. Armour cracked and buckled as they clambered through the deluge of rock. Beyond them the landslide was lit by detonations of power, glimmers of lightning as Theuderis’ warriors were crushed and pummelled, their physical remains summoned back to Azyr by Sigmar’s magic, there to be forged anew. The gleams from many who perished were swallowed by the burgeoning cloud of dust and grit that billowed up from the gorge. A last convulsion threw the surviving Stormcast Eternals to the ground. Theuderis’ legs buckled beneath him as the clifftop briefly dropped away and then sharply rose up to meet him like a bucking steed.

The shaking subsided. Commanding Tyrathrax to stay, Theuderis pushed himself to his feet and made his way carefully to the slew of broken rock that now descended into the valley. The shattered bodies of wounded Stormcasts were strewn amongst the grey and brown. The quake had lasted no more than a dozen heartbeats but had done as much damage as any enemy attack.

After the deafening tumult, the quiet was profound. It was quickly broken as the Stormcasts still alive called out, some shouting for aid, other voices coming from the Primes as they tallied who remained and who had been taken. The raucous cries of the circling birds echoed along the ravine to join the hiss of streaming dirt, the creak of settling stone and the last resounding thuds of rocks bouncing further down the defile.

Theuderis clambered down into the anarchy of piled boulders and broken tree trunks, scanning the debris. Movement above drew his attention to the descending flights of Prosecutors, the Knights-Venator gesticulating to the carnage below.

‘Back!’ roared Theuderis, waving his hand to attract their attention. ‘Back to your posts! If the enemy come upon us in this parlous state we are ruined. Keep vigilant!’

The flying warriors acknowledged his command and ascended, wings thrumming with celestial power, spreading out to form a watchful cordon. Theuderis joined his warriors, lifting the rocks and hurling them away with superhuman strength to unearth the Stormcasts trapped beneath. He pulled away a boulder to reveal a Retributor, his starsoul mace still tightly gripped in his hands. Blood seeped from a gouge across his chest, but he turned his head to look at the Lord-Celestant.

‘It will take more than a mountain falling on me to keep me from the fight, my lord.’

‘Elegias?’

The Retributor nodded.

‘I saw Vortemon Azyr-drawn. You are Retributor-Prime now. Lead well.’

‘I am honoured,’ replied Elegias, grasping Theuderis’ proffered arm to haul himself out of the rubble. Others were also emerging from the crush, the hardened sigmarite of their armour bearing scuffs, dents and cracks inflicted by the earthquake’s fury.

Some were not so fortunate. Theuderis levered aside a boulder almost as large as the warrior beneath, freeing a Judicator named Sementor. His arm had been ripped off by the churning rocks and his boltstorm crossbow lay off to the side, mangled amongst the stones. The side of his helm had been caved in, too, jagged edges cutting deep to the bone of the exposed skull, a single blue eye revealed.

‘I cannot fight on, my lord,’ said Sementor. ‘I shall be no burden to the Silverhands. Sigmar calls me.’

‘And he will remember your sacrifice,’ Theuderis said quietly, drawing his runeblade to place the point between Sementor’s cuirass and his helm. ‘We shall meet again on the far side of the forge.’

He leaned his weight onto the weapon, pushing it deep. The Judicator’s body crackled and vanished, leaving the faintest aftertrail of blue heading skywards from the point where he had lain.

They worked their way down to the rock-littered canyon floor. As they descended, the survivors grew fewer and fewer – those at the bottom had faced the full weight of the cliff coming down upon them. Theuderis lifted clear another of his companions, the Knight-Heraldor Attaxes Darkbane. The plates of his armour seemed mostly undamaged; only the weight of the rocks pinning him down had necessitated assistance. Nodding his thanks, Attaxes retrieved his slender clarion.

‘I thought…’ The Knight-Heraldor’s voice trailed off as he turned his head to look past Theuderis.

Casting his gaze about, the Lord-Celestant saw that many of the others had stopped their labours and were also staring back up the slope. He turned to see what had caught their attention.

The stones of the rockfall had parted into two main flows, leaving an uneven expanse of the grey cliff between them. At first Theuderis could see nothing, just jags of rock and striations. And then, tilting his head slightly, the image came to him, the shadows and light resolving into a picture. It was unmistakable – the cliff had formed the face of a gigantic roaring bear, with sharp promontories of rock for fangs, and exposed clay beds casting a red hue within the open mouth.

‘What do you suppose that is?’ said Attaxes.

‘Proof of this land’s corruption,’ replied Theuderis. He said nothing more, but it seemed more than coincidence that the earthquake had struck at the most damaging moment.

He called out to the others to free their remaining companions and did the same himself. When the last of the buried Stormcasts had been dragged from the toppled boulders, the army ascended once again, though Theuderis remained behind for some time, staring at the cliff face. The sun had moved and the image was no longer there, and had not his companions also seen the apparition he would have dismissed it as a hallucination brought on by the sudden stress of the earthquake.

A rasping bark from Tyrathrax drew his attention away, to where his sub-commanders awaited him at the top of the rock pile. Suppressing his unease, Theuderis pulled himself over the rocks and joined them, glad to put the depressing episode behind him. His Knight-Vexillor, Knight-Heraldor and the most senior of the Knights-Azyros, Samat, attended to him.

‘Our strength is much diminished, my lord,’ reported Voltaran. ‘Nearly half of the Paladin Conclaves were lost, and a third of our remaining warriors.’

‘We press on regardless,’ commanded Theuderis. ‘Sigmar shall see fit to return them to us when needed. Let us not turn an unfortunate incident into a disaster. The Warbeasts are depending upon us to make rendezvous in three days, and we will make the meeting point in two. Samat, spread the search groups further ahead. Find me the swiftest route to the inland region.’

‘As you will it, Lord Silverhand,’ replied the Knight-Azyros.

‘If I might make a suggestion, my lord,’ Voltaran said quietly. Theuderis nodded. ‘Overground is proving troublesome. Perhaps there is an alternative. The ruins of the subterranean city of the duardin are said to stretch far into Ursungorod.’

‘We would lose my warriors’ mobility,’ said Samat.

‘And there is no reason to believe the underground passages have survived in any fit state,’ said Theuderis. ‘Also, I would have the skaven remain unaware of our presence for as long as possible. Delving into their underground domain would be sure to announce our arrival, but overground we might yet continue a day or two unnoticed by them.’

‘If Arkas and his Warbeasts draw their eye, we might even be upon them before they know it,’ said Attaxes.

‘I am certain Arkas is making quite a disturbance,’ replied Theuderis.

CHAPTER SIX

During the ascent of Mount Vazdir, the air grew thinner and colder, until the breath of the Warbeasts followed them like a mountain fog. But the snows held and, except for the ever-present dark clouds, the skies were clear for the Prosecutors to lead the way. At first they had reported a steep climb marked by treacherous ridges and thick forest, but the way proved less than formidable. The dense thickets of trees appeared to open up before the Stormcasts and the winding trails seen by the scouts resolved into broader paths, as though the mountain itself wished to speed them on their way.

Arkas led from the front. There were some Lord-Celestants who preferred the distance of command, placing themselves in the main body so that they might act and observe more dispassionately. He had heard as much regarding Theuderis Silverhand. Arkas considered himself a more intuitive leader in battle. Just as one had to look into the eye of a foe to judge their character and intent, so he had to be in the forefront of the clash of arms to know, to feel, the best course of action to take.

‘I am sure we saw those trees before,’ remarked Dolmetis, indicating a stand of immense pines ahead of them. ‘Are we sure Hastor is not entertaining himself at our expense?’

‘I forgive your ignorance, so perhaps Hastor will forgive your distrust,’ replied Arkas. ‘Those are spectral pines – the leaves are bluer than the mountain firs we saw earlier. And the ways of Ursungorod are not always straight. It might seem but a javelin’s throw to your destination, but a defile separates you that cannot be crossed but at the expense of half a day’s march.’

‘Or the opposite,’ Dolmetis said quietly. ‘I feel that we are not being welcomed so much as lured...’

Arkas stopped, sensing a ripple of energy flowing through the roots of Ursungorod. He held up a hand to halt the army. A heartbeat later he felt the ground shiver. Some snow fell from the tree branches and slid across drifts, but nothing more serious. In moments the tremor had passed.

His mortal experiences meant that, despite the intervening age, he could feel Ursungorod as closely now as when he had been the Bear-clad. The perturbations in the Ghurite energy told him that the quake had been to the west – from where Theuderis approached. He hoped his fellow Lord-Celestant had weathered the incident well.

More days than not witnessed a quake in Ursungorod. It had made it impossible to launch an attack on the skaven lairs, as entrances opened and closed with every earth movement. This time would be different – he had an army capable of breaching the underdeeps and even the Shadowgulf itself. He would strike like a dagger into their heart.

A flit of shadows heralded the arrival of a quintet of Prosecutors. Their Prime, Venian, landed in front of Arkas while the others kept station on humming wings.

‘My lord,’ he began, dropping to a knee to deliver the report. ‘Knight Hastor dispatched us. A foe lies between us and the ruin we seek. Five hundred strong, at least, garbed for war. We did not reveal ourselves and Hastor awaits your command.’

‘Where?’

‘A still lake, frozen in a bowl-shaped valley. Even the rivers and falls are ice. We saw a town of tents and more solid structures arrayed the slopes.’

‘I know this place,’ Arkas said. ‘Icemere. You saw the enemy?’

‘Briefly, my lord,’ replied Venian. ‘Many were well armoured, not like the scum we chased down earlier. The encampment looked more settled also. There were several burnt-out pyres and totemic poles raised in the centre, and a charnel stench – sacrifices no doubt. We approached stealthily and heard the growl of hounds and caught glimpses of larger beasts.’

‘What were they doing? Where exactly is the camp?’

‘The route to the tower passes onto a sharp ridge, but we could see no further than that. It was the opinion of Knight Hastor that they were deliberately blocking the approach. It is far too high and inhospitable for them to have remained there for any other reason.’

‘They have good reason,’ said Arkas. ‘The Queen of the Peak is a powerful oracle and many seek her wisdom. They might hope to keep her visions to themselves or just ambush and murder those who would consult with the Queen.’

‘Do you have orders for Knight Hastor, my lord?’

‘They will find their next guests harder to handle, be sure of that.’ Arkas loosened his runeblade in its sheath. ‘Heed my command for Knight Hastor. We must secure the safety of the Queen of the Peak. I will lead an attack on the main camp. The Angelos Conclave has two missions once the attack is underway. Part of your force must hold the ridge to ensure none of the enemy can reach the Queen’s tower. You must personally locate the tower and ensure there are no foes in the surrounding area. Kill any that are, but do not enter under any circumstances. Allow nobody to pass into the tower until I arrive.’

‘What if the Queen of the Peak should emerge?’ asked Venian.

‘She cannot leave the tower,’ Arkas said. He knelt and used a finger to mark a symbol in the snow. ‘Mark this sigil and pass it on to Hastor. There is a gate-arch carved with duardin reliefs. He will know the presence of the Queen beyond it. He is to leave this, my rune, at the threshold, but is not to pass in.’ He closed his fist. ‘We will advance at haste. Make your move when Doridun signals the attack.’

‘Understood, Lord-Celestant.’ The Prosecutor-Prime stood up and lifted a crackling javelin as a salute. Turning gracefully, he sprang into the air, taking his warriors with him.

‘Dolmetis!’

The Knight-Vexillor hurried to attend his commander.

‘Form the army for attack. Trident formation, Judicator vanguards.’

‘It shall be done, my lord.’

Arkas set off again along the faint trail through the snow, trusting his Knight-Vexillor and the Primes to implement his command without delay. He knew the Icemere well and was surprised that it had changed so little over the many centuries. It had to be the influence of the Queen of the Peak. In a land wracked by constant upheaval, she was stasis personified.

With their Lord-Celestant setting a relentless pace, the Stormcast army soon came upon a band of thick forest, beyond which lay the Icemere. As Arkas had ordered, the host broke into three detachments, the general leading the central tine while Dolmetis and Doridun commanded the others. Forming the points of the trident, Arkas’ thirty Judicators advanced just ahead of the main columns, their various bows and crossbows well suited to taking down any patrols or sentries set by the foes.

Arkas’ force was small but formidable, its warriors elite even amongst the Strike Chambers of the Celestial Vindicators. He could sense the anticipation for battle in his host, infusing the ever-present aura of Ghur with a predatory hunger. The skirmish with the Bonekeepers had been a simple execution. True battle awaited.

They had not long passed under the shadowy eaves of the woods when one of the Judicator-Primes returned to report to Arkas. He led the Lord-Celestant to where his retinue were waiting amongst the trees, a broad clearing visible ahead of them. The ruined stones of a road passed directly into the pale sunlight.

‘There are watchers in the trees, my lord,’ said the Judicator-Prime, indicating half-seen shapes in the branches of the pines to either side of the track. From what Arkas could see, the sentries did not appear human – he caught glimpses of grey flesh and leathery wings.

‘Harpies?’

‘I don’t believe so, my lord. Something else, but we cannot see them well enough to say.’

Arkas looked more closely, crouching next to the trunk of a huge mountain pine. As he laid his hand upon its bark to steady himself he felt a tremor through his fingers. Glancing at the tree, he saw knotholes blinking, and within, green eyes looking back at him. He recoiled to his feet, seeing other eyes opening on the trees around him. Turning his attention to the trail ahead he saw that the ‘beasts’ in the trees were in fact twists of branch and leaf, forming humanoid shapes.

The dark bark of the tree he had leaned against started to split, the splinters of wood forming a maw. A low moan issued from this hole.

‘The trees are tainted,’ he snarled to his companions. ‘The trees are the sentries!’

The warning groans were getting louder and the branches were swaying, their rustling alarm rippling outwards.

‘If we cannot be stealthy, speed and shock will do. The Icemere is only three hundred paces more from the break of the trees,’ said Arkas.

He looked back to see the warriors of his command picking their way through the woods, their turquoise armour catching rays of weak light and then plunged into shade as the wind moved through the canopy above. He could hear the snap of twigs and thud of heavy boots even through the muffle of old leaves and mulch. ‘I do not think Sigmar was concerned with us sneaking around when he bid Grungni to forge our armour as he did…’

Looking through the trees, he spied the other Judicators, their Primes looking to him for some sign of what to do. He raised his hand as a sign for all to halt and then looked for his Knight-Heraldor. Doridun was at the head of his column a hundred or so paces away to the left. With two simple gestures, he passed on the command to sound the charge and then turned back to the Judicator-Prime.

‘Move now and kill all that you can. We shall pass through you. Guard our backs.’

‘Kill what, my lord?’

‘The trees! Burn them!’

‘As you will it, my lord.’ The Judicator-Prime moved his hand as though pulling a string on his bow, a lightning bolt appearing in place of where an arrow would be on a mortal weapon. The sparkle of others doing the same lit the trees. A heartbeat later the bolts flashed across the clearing, searing into the treetops.

Like candles, the trees lit with flame, sap crackling, needle-swathed branches thrashing as blue fire leapt from one to the next. The moaning became a higher pitched keening as another volley of enchanted missiles streaked into the arboreal watchers.

The peal of Doridun’s clarion reached Arkas’ ears and he launched into a sprint, hammer in one hand, runeblade in the other. From all along the treeline the Stormcast Eternals burst forth, thundering into the cloud-shrouded sunlight, the flicker of the Judicators’ lightning bolts catching on their armour as they ploughed through drifts of snow on the uneven ground.

Arkas surged ahead with his Retributors close at hand, their lightning hammers at the ready. Glaive-wielding Protectors followed Doridun and Dolmetis to either side. Made of unalloyed sigmarite, their thick armour was no encumbrance as they raced across the clearing.

Shouts from ahead warned that the enemy knew that something was amiss, but there was no chance they could know the nature of the foe about to fall upon them. Soon brash horns and drums called them to arms.

The clearing widened out as they neared the banks of the Icemere. Its surface was mirror-smooth, reflecting the tall trees around its edge and the grey sky above, stretching to the horizon to the left, where Arkas knew it became a frozen waterfall. To the right it was bordered by the stumps of the duardin walls that had dammed it in ages past. The enormous piles of a bridge still rose from the ice.

The Chaos tribe had spread across the banks and part of the lake opposite where the road had once run down the perimeter of the water. The scene was just as it had been described by Venian, with tents of all sizes arranged haphazardly on the snow-covered shore and frozen tarn, interspersed with bivouacs and more permanent structures of wood, hide and bone. Drifts of smoke rose from the fires of the previous night and five mighty pillars had been erected in a circle at the centre, held in place by thick rope cables.

Arkas could see the bold shapes carved into the wooden totems and recognised four of them immediately as interpretations of the Chaos Gods – Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch and Slaanesh. The fifth caused him some surprise, a rendition of a horned figure crouched upon a spiralling tower of skulls and bones covered with swarming vermin. The Great Horned Rat.

Why was the fifth member of the despotic pantheon, the skaven god, being worshipped by an Ursungoran tribe?

Chaos worshippers boiled out of their tents and rough hovels, leaving Arkas no time to ponder this question. Though they could not have expected to face a Strike Chamber of Stormcasts, the Chaos followers were well prepared to attack at short notice, and judging by the trophies and human remains that adorned their altar-pyres and totems, they had gained considerable success doing so.

Horsemen erupted from the woods, bringing with them baying packs of hounds. Riders, steeds and mastiffs all showed signs of Chaos mutations – horns, scales, sting-tipped tails, fiery eyes and burning manes, along with myriad other deformities. Rather than attack directly, the riders and their hunting packs circled to the right, along the lake shore, using their speed to outflank the oncoming Stormcast Eternals.

Marauders in mail and leather armour formed quickly into war-groups ahead of Arkas’ charge, at least two hundred of them clustered beneath tattered banners and standards made of bone and sinew. Here again there was skaven influence, triskele symbols similar to those of the Pestilens among the runes of the Blood God, Lord of Decay, Changer of Ways and Pleasure Prince. Brandishing spears and axes, the Chaos thugs jeered and hollered abuse. They crashed their weapons on wooden shields daubed with thick blood, taunting the Stormcasts and defying their own fear.

Warriors in a mix of heavier plate, gilded fishscale and banded laminar jogged into position to the left, facing the onrushing column led by Doridun. Many sported crab-like claws, tentacles, tusks and immense fangs, some of them bursting from their armour in places with unnatural muscles and tumorous growths, several easily as big as the Stormcast warriors pounding towards the lake.

Holding out his hammer, Arkas redirected the charge, acting as a pivot for the entire formation. The Warbeasts responded immediately, wheeling left towards the most dangerous foes. Arkas and Doridun speared into the heavy infantry while Dolmetis and his retinue of Protectors and Decimators redirected their assault towards the marauders in the centre. They would trust to the Judicators behind to waylay the cavalry encircling the oncoming host. Overhead, the glitter of artificial wings showed the progress of the Prosecutors as they headed over the lake towards the ridge beyond, their arcane missiles scything down the shrieking harpies that had escaped the initial attack.

Running down the sloping shore, Arkas caught a glimpse of the larger beasts reported by the Prosecutors. They might have been men once, or perhaps bears, it was hard to say. They lumbered forwards on their hind legs, a handful of moaning, snarling creatures covered in dark fur, chained together at the neck by thick iron links. Like the warriors, they bore signs of gross mutation, their flesh in places thick with pale chitin plates and pustules, while metal rivets had been driven into their bodies to make a kind of studded armour. Whipping pseudo-limbs thrashed back and forth, each lined with vicious barbs.

For all that the Chaos tribe was organised and experienced, it had never faced attackers like the Warbeasts. Armoured in sigmarite, the Stormcast Eternals cared little for the damage the enemy weapons might deal. Arkas applied the same principle to his strategies, training and drilling his warriors to drive into the thick of the enemy army, to seek out as one the toughest foe, just as he had singled out the Gore Maiden when he had first arrived. They had but one concern – to bloodily rip the heart from the opposition, destroying their best warriors and most fearsome beasts first. The Judicators and Prosecutors were well equipped to finish off those that remained.

So it was that Arkas was the first to fall upon the enemy, hammer and sword at the ready. Halberd blades and jagged maces rose to meet him as he leapt.

‘Death to the unclean!’ he roared, smashing into the Chaos warriors’ ranks, his weapons trailing twin tails of gore like Sigmar’s comet, celestial energy exploding through the ranks of the foe at his impact.

He crushed one beneath his weight as he landed, rings of mail scattering when the Chaos follower’s ribcage exploded. Crouching, Arkas smashed his hammer through the legs of three more, greaves and armour no defence against the sweeping blow. As he straightened, his blade carved a diagonal furrow across a pair of full-plated foes who were still drawing back their enormous maces.

Two heartbeats more, three more foes sliced and crushed.

The Retributors crashed into the foes pressing around Arkas, their hammers unleashing a blazing storm of lightning that split open armoured plates and charred the warriors within. Starsoul maces cracked like thunder, their touch bursting apart the bodies of the Chaos-tainted. At the centre of this celestial tempest the Warbeast struck the head from a foe with his runeblade, his hammer slamming into the chest of another.

‘Spare none!’ he roared, though his followers needed no such instruction. Driven by a hate aeons in the making, finally given true release in battle, the Stormcasts of the Celestial Vindicators let free their vengeance in a bloody outpouring of rage.

A fighter as tall as Arkas loomed out of the blood-spray, a jagged sickle-like blade in each hand, slabs of thick steel painted black covering his flesh. He wore no helm, and a reptilian third eye protruding from his forehead fixed the Lord-Celestant with an inhuman gaze, the regular orbs a glossy, sightless white beneath. Lips wrinkled back, revealing teeth like glass shards in bloodless gums, and a bulging black tongue.

‘Spawn of corruption!’

Arkas’ runeblade crashed against the Chaos champion’s upraised arm, red sparks flying as Chaos sigils burned in the hexed metal. The shock of the impact sent a tremor up Arkas’ arm and he stepped back, flexing his numbed fingers around the hilt of his sword. The Chaos champion let out a gurgling laugh and hacked at the Lord-Celestant, both weapons aimed for his throat.

Arkas raised his hammer in time to catch one blade on its haft, the sickle’s edge skittering over his gauntleted hand and leaving a furrow through the sigmarite. The other passed over his rising runeblade and struck him just above the left eye, whipping his head back.

Snarling, Arkas swung his hammer at his opponent’s midriff, but the blow fell short and was turned aside by a timely parry. The Chaos champion’s defence left him open, however, and the Lord-Celestant’s boot crashed into the man-beast’s chest, driving him from his feet.

The Retributors needed no urging and fell upon the toppled champion with hammers and maces, pounding incessantly upon his armour until the heads of their weapons glowed white with power and the runes of his plate burned yellow. The champion rolled to all fours, trying to escape the deluge of blows, but a starsoul mace cracked against his skull with an electric detonation. Bone and blood flew and the champion slumped, his collapse only drawing an even more incensed assault from the raging Stormcasts.

Arkas slashed and hammered his way into the press around his companions, slaughtering the Chaos warriors who sought to fall upon his Retributors as they finished off the champion. He cared not who dealt the final blow – it was only pride that led champions to seek to best each other in single combat.

Bursting free from the tangled mass of corpses and wounded, Arkas had just enough time to see Dolmetis’ warriors carving apart the last of the marauders before the gigantic mutant beasts were upon him, snarling, ropes of stinking saliva flowing from their enormous maws.

A tentacle-limb wrapped itself about his wrist as he drew back his hammer to strike the first blow. He hacked at the pseudopod with his sword, parting it on the second attempt. By then, the brutish monster was upon him, bowling him over with its immense mass. Sword-arm pinned beneath the creature’s foreleg and his hammer equally trapped, Arkas head-butted the beast, splintering dagger-like fangs.

Claws raked and gouged at his pauldrons and cuirass, slivers of sigmarite falling like curled thread as another brute joined the attack. He felt blood trickling down his shoulder, the first wound his flesh had known since passing through the pain of Sigmar’s forge. The shock sent a surge of energy through him, firing him with a strength unknown before.

Bellowing, Arkas threw off the hellish beast atop him, rising to his feet. His hammer slammed into the face of the second, snapping horns, tusks and skull, pulping the brain within. Heaving aside its dying bulk, he threw himself at the monster that had trapped him. It howled and launched itself in a counter-attack. Ignoring the tentacles flailing at his face, Arkas speared his sword into the brute’s mouth, following the blade in with his whole arm. Blade and fist punched out through the back of the creature’s bony head. Bracing a foot against the slumping corpse’s shoulder, he dragged his arm free, tearing the head away like a macabre bracelet before he threw it aside.

Doridun’s combined assault with Arkas had torn through the Chaos warriors’ flank as they had been forced to turn towards the Lord-Celestant. The Knight-Heraldor and his warriors battered and cleaved at the last remaining foes while Arkas turned his attention to Dolmetis’ progress.

The Protectors slashed a bloody path through the barbaric tribesmen. They swept their glaives in arcs that left their foes dismembered and bisected, the marauders’ numbers counting for little against the far superior weapons, physique and armour of the Stormcast Eternals. Beyond the Protectors, a spearhead of Decimators encircled the survivors, led by Dolmetis. Their thunderaxes streaked bolts of energy from the corpses of their slain foes, the ice underfoot lit by the fury of the war-storm.

The carnage lasted for a little while longer as Hastor and his winged Stormcasts ran down the hounds and horsemen that had attempted to circle, and others fell upon the Chaos followers breaking for safety towards the far end of the lake, heading for the ridge leading to the Queen of the Peak’s lair. Not one survived to reach the shore, incinerated by heavenly shafts and javelins, pierced on the tines of the Prosecutors’ tridents.

The ice was cracked in places, amongst the red wash of freezing blood and the scattered remnants of limbs and bodies. Arkas noticed a few of the Stormcasts gazing down at the sheer surface, concerned.

‘No need to fear for your footing,’ he declared to them, stamping a heavy boot. ‘The Icemere is sustained by the magic of the Queen of the Peak. All year round it could take our weight.’

‘Who is this queen?’ asked Diocletus, one of the Protectors-Prime. ‘Such sorcery is surely Chaos-born.’

‘Not so,’ snapped Arkas. ‘Do you think I would seek her aid if that were the case? No, her power comes from the strength of Ghur, the pure wildness of Ursungorod rendered into magic. The legends claimed she was a goddess in the World Before, but I cannot say that is true. She is powerful, certainly, but a goddess? All that matters is she will know me.’

‘I did not mean any insubordination, my lord,’ Diocletus said, offering a bow in apology, the long blade of his glaive dipped in submission. ‘I sought knowledge. I do not understand why we need the assistance of… a witch.’

‘When I last fought for these lands I had nearly all of the clans at my side and it was not enough. The grip of Chaos is tight and the pollution of the skaven runs far. I would talk to the Queen of the Peak and find out the extent of the power of both.’

‘She can be trusted, Lord-Celestant?’

‘She will not break a bargain struck,’ replied Arkas. ‘I will pay the price she names and she will tell all.’

While Arkas had been speaking, the other Primes had started their post-battle practices, arranging for the bodies of the tainted to be dragged into piles ready to be consumed by cleansing fire. Here and there were mottled patches of ice, the surface crazily scarred by the detonations of those Stormcasts who had been physically overwhelmed and called back to the Celestial Realm. Half a dozen, no more – though Arkas would have preferred it to have been fewer still.

Searches were conducted throughout the camp, all possessions and artefacts added to the pyres. As a Decimator walked past with an armful of rags and trinkets, Arkas called out to him.

‘Wait, Philodus!’ The Lord-Celestant pulled out a necklace fashioned from small, sharp teeth and sinew. The pendant was a large fang inscribed with a symbol similar to the triskele icons the barbarians had carried. ‘This is a Pestilens amulet. Where did you find it?’

The Stormcast indicated a hut of crude planks and untreated hide.

‘There are all kinds of gewgaws and baubles,’ he said. ‘Everywhere.’

‘Forget the pyres!’ bellowed Arkas, tossing the amulet away. ‘Burn it all where it stands! If these cretins were in league with the skaven, who can say what foulness of the Great Horned Rat lurks in their camp. Purge it all, now!’

The Primes rushed to obey his command and moments later arcs of holy lightning flashed across the camp, setting pale flames in the tents and hovels. More celestial blasts incinerated the scattered bodies, the cleansing fires burning a scintillating blue. Arkas stalked through the flames, pointing out bodies and heaps of belongings that had been missed. The surface of the melting ice shimmered while azure smoke poured into the sky.

Only when all was ablaze did Arkas order his warriors onwards to seize the approaches to the ridge taken by the Prosecutors. It seemed as though the clouds descended at their approach, swathing the ridgeline in a thick mist. Ice crystals crackled across their armour. Where the mountains had ushered Arkas on, it felt as though the Queen of the Peak sought to dissuade him.

‘We saw more warriors out on the ridge,’ Venian reported, when Arkas reached the slope. ‘It was your command not to proceed any further.’

‘They are of no consequence,’ Arkas assured them. ‘Hastor holds the far end, does he not? Decimators, to me!’

The Paladins answered to his call, forming up behind Arkas in a dense block, their thunderaxes held ready. Dolmetis and Doridun approached.

‘What orders, my lord?’ asked the Knight-Heraldor.

‘You shall remain in command of the rearguard here, Doridun. None are to advance further without explicit command, and nothing is to pass.’

‘As you command.’

‘Decimators, you will follow at fifteen paces. You will approach no closer without specific order, no matter what occurs.’

The Decimators signalled their understanding with silently raised axes.

‘What am I to do?’ asked Dolmetis.

‘If needed, you will turn and run,’ Arkas said. ‘As fast as you can, back to Doridun. From there you will lead the army to the rendezvous with Theuderis.’

‘That is… comforting?’ said Dolmetis, staring into the swirling mists. ‘What exactly is waiting for us?’

Arkas said nothing, but set off up the ridge into the whiteness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The first night fell upon the mountains of Ursungorod, the sky alive with unsettling lights and ribbons of magic that lit the heavy clouds from within. The snow came again, silently filling in the footprints of the host, erasing the evidence of their passage. Theuderis and the Silverhands pressed on through the building storm, limbs as tireless as when they had first breached the realmgate into the Capricious Wilds. The Knights-Azyros and other airborne warriors of the Angelos Conclave had been forced to land by the growing snows and wind, and so Samat marched at the side of his Lord-Celestant. He held a great lantern, a celestial beacon that gleamed with Azyrite fire, penetrating the darkness with its white glare. Along the column, the other four Knights-Azyros lit the way for their Stormcast comrades, sparks of brightness against the dark backdrop of the mountainside.

‘There is a certain beauty to it,’ said the Knight-Azyros, casting his gaze to the illuminations of the heavens.

‘Glamours of Chaos,’ said the Lord-Celestant. He snorted and shook his head. ‘The air itself is thick with the corruption of the Dark Powers. See how it rebels against the presence of Sigmar’s truthbringers and forces you to the ground.’

‘You think there is more to this storm than mountain climate, Lord Silverhand?’

‘I am certain of it. Since we crossed into Ursungorod I have felt its enmity. We are strangers in this land, bearers of Sigmar’s grace. We are not wanted here.’ Theuderis noticed Samat glance at him. ‘Do you not sense it also? There is a presence here, hiding in the shadows, spying on us, stalking us.’

‘The skaven, perhaps?’

‘No, though their stain is close at hand. One of their lairs is nearby, but it is not the skaven presence that I feel. It is Ursungorod itself, I am sure of it.’

‘A daemon, maybe?’

‘That may be it, Samat,’ said Theuderis. Tyrathrax shook her head, dislodging the snow gathering on her chamfron. ‘Yes, something nascent, like a daemon trying to break into the realm through Ursungorod.’

‘A curse on this storm that blinds us to the way ahead and shields our foes.’

Theuderis said nothing and they continued on in silence for some time. It was well past midnight when the snows faltered and the clouds started to break apart, revealing a purple-tinged sky. Shooting stars streaked yellow trails while two red crescent moons stared down from past the mountain peaks.

‘Shall we ascend?’ asked Samat, loosening his starblade with his free hand.

‘Not yet.’

Theuderis could see blocky shapes jutting from the slopes ahead. More duardin ruins. As the vanguard approached the broken remnants, they slowed their march, stopping to examine the collapsed towers and fallen walls. The Lord-Celestant urged his dracoth into a run, swiftly covering the ground along the trail forged through the snows by the conclaves ahead.

‘Keep moving!’ he bellowed as he came upon the first warriors of the vanguard. ‘We can afford no delays.’

‘My lord, look at this,’ called out one of the Liberator-Primes, pointing to a leaning column not far from the path. There were faces in the stone.

‘Just old duardin carvings,’ Theuderis snapped, but on riding closer the cause of his warriors’ curiosity became obvious. Though once the designs had been of stout bearded faces beneath crested helms, they had been subtly changed, looking now more like bears, cats and dogs.

In the flickering lighting of the celestial beacons it looked as though the faces were alive. Then a monstrously fanged wolfshead on an arch keystone not far away opened its mouth and Theuderis heard a howl. He started in shock as Tyrathrax lurched away, hissing and spitting.

‘Sigmar’s wrath!’ exclaimed the Lord-Celestant, clearly seeing the wolf curl back its lips with a snarl that echoed through the ruins. He could feel magic seeping up from the ground, the weathered masonry contorted under its influence. Theuderis drew his sword, its blade silver in the flow of magic. ‘Hold ground! Angelos aloft! Paladins secure!’

The Strike Chamber moved as a single entity, blue and white shining in the light of the Knights-Azyros’ lamps as they led the Prosecutors skywards. The Liberators and Judicators of the Redeemer Conclave fell in towards the ruins where Theuderis waited, while the Paladins – retinues of Decimators, Retributors and Protectors – formed a solid outer wall of hammers, glaives and axes.

The snarls, barks and growls of animals intensified as more and more of the ruins sprang into unnatural life. To Theuderis it seemed as though massive claws scraped on stone and he spun in the saddle, whipping his sword around. There was nothing but for the glaring faces in the tumbled stones. His dracoth paced left and right, unnerved, snow falling from her scales.

‘Hold steady!’ Theuderis called, the words helping to calm his mood as much as that of his fighters. ‘Scour the dark!’

With the celestial beacons shining their light from above, the Stormcast Eternals stood ready, eyeing every shadow, hole and broken doorway around them. Voltaran moved up beside his lord, bringing with him a regiment of Judicators armed with shockbolt bows. The fire of their projectiles made the darkness and light dance all the more crazily. Theuderis did his best to pierce the night with his inhuman gaze, but could see nothing except his own warriors.

He forced his breathing to slow and relaxed his grip on the hilt of his sword. Slowly the Ghurite energy seeped back down into the earth and the stones returned to their inert state, the grimacing faces of duardin ancestor heroes and lesser godlings returning where feral visages had leered before.

Even when all seemed to have returned to normal – whatever passed for normal in these Sigmar-cursed mountains – Theuderis did not stand down his force. He waited, reassuring Tyrathrax with pats on the shoulder, until Samat descended, his beacon lamp bathing the ruins with its comforting light.

‘No foes in the sky or on the land,’ reported the Knight-Azyros, hovering a few paces from his lord. ‘As for what passes below… Our eyes cannot see there.’

‘Very well,’ said Theuderis. He suppressed a sigh of relief, unwilling to betray to his companion how tense he had become. The Lord-Celestant stared at the ruins for a few moments more, daring them to change again. Nothing happened and he raised his voice. ‘Form column! Divine Fury formation. Advance with all haste.’

The ruins shuddered to the thunder of marching boots and the scrape of armour. Conclaves of Stormcast Eternals seamlessly filed and split, arranging themselves without delay or hesitation, the lines and ranks almost mesmerising in their efficiency. Watching the conjoining retinues settled Theuderis. His army in motion was a thing of pleasure to witness, a single beast of sigmarite and reforged flesh that answered to his command as quickly as his dracoth.

He waved them onwards, urging Tyrathrax forwards with a single word, glad to quit the ruins. When they were well clear, and heading back down into a cleft between two vertiginous peaks, he turned to look back. The first smudge of the coming dawn lit the sky and for an instant it seemed that two broken gateways formed eyes glaring at him.

‘Onwards,’ he told the dracoth and she moved into a smooth run, taking him towards the head of the column. ‘In the name of the God-King, we will strip the Chaos from these lands. We shall wash it clean with the blood of the corrupted.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

The vast chamber reverberated with the scurrying of thousands of clawed feet on bare rock, an incessant scratching that gnawed away at the soul even as the skaven gnawed at the underbelly of the mountains. The skittering of the slaves drowned out the click of picks and hammers, obliterated the crack of overseers’ whips and masked the tormented shrieks and squeaks.

A living tide of mangy furred bodies seethed across the cavern floor, ebbing and flowing down side tunnels, across rickety bridges that spanned bottomless chasms, along ladders and scaffolds built from the bodies and bones of their predecessors. Lash marks competed with buboes and sores on their suppurating hides, cankered limbs forced into agonising service while cataract-pale eyes gazed blindly in the green light of the warp-lamps. Boulders and baskets of smaller rocks passed across the slave carpet, hewn down from the walls by rusted tools and bare hands, to be passed out into the great spoil heaps that littered the surface of the Whiteworld Above.

The air was thick with turgid swirls of emerald smoke from hundreds of incense braziers, the fumes causing the slaves to constantly hack and cough while its warpstone essence fuelled near-dead limbs with unnatural stamina. The musk of the downtrodden mass was equally cloying and foul, as was the rank aroma of the splashing filth underfoot.

A gong sounded, a single strike that echoed long through the undercity. Almost as one the slave mass looked up, their chittering quieting to a hushed dread, the sighted and the sightless turning towards the source of the noise. The black-furred overseers stayed their barbed whips for the moment, sniffing the air, agitated, pink tails twitching.

Squeals of pain and panic swiftly silenced announced the arrival of the priests’ black-furred bodyguards. Even burlier than the slave-masters, clad in robes and coifs of corroded mail, mercenary spitevermin battered and chopped a path through the packed slaves. A ripple spread through the downtrodden horde as the spitevermin trampled the mangled corpses of those that had no room to evade the bloody advance. Terror spread like a bow wave before the armoured skaven. Slaves squealed and bit and clawed, tearing at each other to escape the unforgiving cudgels and blades.

As the press started to thicken more and more, the overseers were forced to wield their whips again, lashing out with snarled fury. Some fled before it was too late, others were buried under the weight of the slaves pushing away from the incoming procession. The musk of fear and scent of blood was overpowering, driving the slaves into an increasingly panicked orgy of ear-splitting shrieks and feral violence.

Behind the spitevermin came the first of the plague monks, clutching long staves from which hung warpcloud-spilling censers. The censers glowed with sorcerous power, the mutating effect of the warpstone plain to see in the cadaverous faces and blistered skin of the wielders. Their eyes glowed in the darkness, spittle flecking lips and fur and falling in drooling ribbons to the ground.

After the censer bearers came the procession proper, rank after rank of skaven robed in tattered green and black and red, their cowls and hoods half-hiding faces marked with pox scars and weeping sores. Their garments were stained, held together by fraying rope belts, and covered in a thin layer of shed fur and flakes of skin. They clutched foetid blades and woe-staves in fingers tipped with cracked nails.

With them came chanting. A sonorous, repetitive dirge filled the tunnels, stirring the warp-fog like the breath of an almighty beast. It was accompanied by the slow beat of heavy drums and the clatter of bone rattles. The gong boomed again at the moment the procession entered the vast chamber, its ominous note silencing the tumult for a moment.

The plague monks issued forth into their cathedral like pus filling a boil, dominating the space created by the spitevermin. They parted to create a path towards the object of the slaves’ labours, now revealed.

It was an arch. At least, it had been an arch at some time in the distant past. Of duardin construction, it stood five times the height of the spitevermin, broad enough to enter ten abreast. It leaned off-kilter, filled with blocks of rubble etched with duardin runes, brought down when the hall beyond had collapsed. The supporting columns were carved with angular, bearded faces that glowered down on the interlopers, the shadows caused by the flickering lamps making the eyes appear to stare around the room with distaste. The lintel stone, a single immense slab of carnelian-speckled granite, was covered in gilded script that glowed with a light not of the warp-lanterns.

A single figure swathed in voluminous black shrouds appeared at the tunnel mouth, his scabrous muzzle protruding from the patched hood. The plague monks turned and bowed their heads. Baring their fangs, the spitevermin glowered and snarled until the slaves threw themselves to their knees and bellies, grovelling and whining the name of their master.

‘Poxmaster Felk…’

With him came his plague priests, six robed attendants bedecked in amulets and fetishes of the Great Horned Rat. Battered copper and tin censers hung from their belts, dribbling more warpfume. Each bore a staff taller than them, tipped with a triangular device of bones surrounding a hunk of raw black warpstone. The air churned around these staves, their corrupting magic like a faint green fire. Felk’s rod was even larger and more impressive, a bifurcated branch with the skulls of five humans bound to it with rotted twine and rusted chain. Their eyes were nuggets of warpstone and their jawbones wired in such a way that they chattered madly with each stride that took him across the cavern. His priests followed a few steps behind, their gazes constantly shifting with nervous energy.

Felk stopped before the huge gate, under which a small gap had been dug. It was just large enough for him to step into had he desired, like a postern gate formed where two blocks of stone butted against each other at a sharp angle.

Instead of darkness, the hole glowed with an inner light, the same as that which lit the golden runes of the lintel. Felk’s lips curled back in pleasure, revealing shards of broken teeth and black gums.

‘Yes-yes!’ he crowed, turning to his companions. ‘See-see? Divinations were right-right. Duardin gate! Not just city, realm-burrowing tunnelway. No more begging, no more playing nice to Clan Nekrit for Poxmaster Felk and esteemed acolytes of Withering Canker.’

‘We spray musk on the tolls of Warlord Shrilk!’ exclaimed Priest Festik.

‘Our own gate-gate!’ laughed Priest Chittir.

‘Where does it lead-lead?’ Priest Kirrik asked as he took a step closer to the portal.

Felk gestured to one of the nearby spitevermin and then to the slave cowering at the warrior’s feet.

‘Send it through,’ the Poxmaster commanded.

The spitevermin heaved up the squalling slave in one hand and dragged it up the ramp of stone and bodies leading to the gate. The slave twisted and made one last lunge for freedom, but was too weak from its exertions. Its eyes fixed on Felk with a last panicked glare. The spitevermin heaved the protesting skaven into the flickering light of the gap.

Felk saw the slave for a moment, silhouetted against the golden glow. A heartbeat later the shadow dissolved, accompanied by a drawn out screeching that suddenly stopped.

‘Nowhere yet,’ said Felk, turning away. Somewhere in the Realm of Life, that much the Poxmaster knew. It mattered not. A realmgate would give him access, the power to move far more swiftly than the gnaw-ways allowed. ‘More dig-dig, whole gate must be open.’

He signalled to his troupe to turn around and follow him back to the upper chambers. As they left, the spitevermin withdrew, leaving the surviving overseers to lash the slaves back into action.

The route back to the main skaven city took them through a mixture of gnawed burrows and duardin-delved corridors and halls. There was filth everywhere, including half-eaten carcasses of animals and slaves, though anything of use had been stripped from the bodies. In the larger halls, where once duardin lords had held court over their followers, nests crowded around the walls, ramshackle conglomerations of stones, mud, sticks, furs, bones and other materials.

Felk knew his city well and could navigate its byways and tunnels by smell alone in the places there were no luminous fungi or warp-lamps to light the way. Fresher draughts of air from the Whiteworld Above signalled their arrival at the uppermost level, dug from the ruins of a human city. The ground had swallowed the buildings whole in times past, though most had collapsed, scattered into a litter of broken pieces of once brightly coloured temple domes and age-worn bricks.

The Great Shrine, centre of Felk’s domain, had been raised out of the combined duardin and human detritus. Built onto the remains of a palatial complex of buildings and towers, it resembled a gigantic termite mound more than anything. Packed earth, broken duardin mortar, human-crafted bricks, all had been thrown together for floor after floor. Haphazard bridges, walkways and stairs circled its girth, held together by frayed rope and rotting sinew. In many places it was shored up with ramshackle buttresses, cracks and slides in its surface caused by the frequent tremors. It looked as though it might collapse with the smallest shudder of the earth, but in reality was solidly built within and had withstood some of the fiercest quakes since Felk’s predecessors had erected it.

From chimneys and smokeholes issued a dozen columns of fumes, ranging from thick black smoke to misty green vapours. The effluence of the plague furnaces within spilled down pipes and rusted gutters, a spew of noxious liquids that pooled and spattered across the splintered remains of royal chambers and courtly cloisters.

At the summit stood a towering framework of rotted timbers and chain, from which hung the great gong of the Withering Canker. Lit from above by weak sunlight coming through a great crack in the roof of the cavern, at first it looked to be made of simple copper stained by verdigris, but the surface shimmered with something like oil. On a rope-bound arm next to it was a warpstone-headed hammer. A network of wheels, belts and tackle descended into the Great Shrine to a capstan where three hundred slaves waited for the command to work the hammer.

The approach to the Great Shrine was joined by smaller temples that housed the plague monks, and a warren-like mess of barracks that held the spitevermin regiments. A causeway zigzagged up from the huddled abodes, joining with a stained arch that might have once been the vault of an immense cathedral, but was now the last bridge to the gate of Felk’s inner domain.

The gate was made of overlapping planks and boards nailed and bolted together, reinforced by bars of untreated tree trunks and rusting rivets. It hung on two tusks that formed the entry arch, each higher than the duardin gate in the depths.

Felk started his ascent, dismissing his plague monks with a waved claw, though his priests and bodyguard remained close at hand. As he passed under the shadow of a broken human tower he felt a presence beside him that had not been there a moment earlier.

He suppressed a squeal, turning his fear to anger.

‘You approach unannounced, Eshin lackey,’ he snarled at the black-clad scout who had materialised at his left hand. The gutter runner cocked an emerald eye towards him, showing no fear or apology. The spitevermin belatedly dashed forwards but Felk stayed their attack with a sneer and a dismissive gesture.

‘Come, quick-quick!’ whispered the assassin-scout. ‘Very important news. Come see!’

‘Tell me,’ said Felk. ‘What news?’

Thriss, the agent Felk had hired from Clan Darkclaw, glanced warily at the nearby plague priests and shook his head.

‘Come see. Alone.’

‘Not mad,’ snapped Felk, fearing duplicity. ‘Tell me!’

The assassin’s tail twitched twice, the blade attached to its end glinting. He shook his head again.

‘Must see for self. Not let others see yet. Big problem.’ These last words were delivered sotto voce, so vehemently that Felk stopped in his tracks, every nerve taut. He had never heard the gutter runner speak in such a way.

‘Prepare for dismal feast,’ Felk commanded his underlings, affecting an imperious stature to glare at them. ‘I return soon.’

Before any of them could offer complaint or question, Felk directed Thriss to lead the way with a quick glance. The spitevermin split at their approach, uncertain what to do. Their fangleader, a hulking one-eyed blackfur called Skarth, moved to block his master’s route, the tip of his halberd moving towards Thriss.

‘What orders, Poxmaster?’ His one good eye fixed on the assassin, the words issued as though he were chewing a gristly remnant of a victim. Foaming saliva wetted balding fur. ‘We spill blood-blood?’

‘Not now, fangleader.’ Felk considered Thriss’ short but worrying report. ‘Soon-soon. Very soon. Guard Great Shrine ready for dismal feast. None but priests to enter.’

With a last surly glare at Thriss, Skarth moved aside, bringing up his wickedly bladed halberd. Felk hurried past, his thoughts a sudden whirl. It was enough to balance the contesting loyalties and usefulness of his own priests and monks, without worrying about developing rivalries between Thriss and his hired elites from the Savage Fang. The success at the realmgate and the dismal feast he had ordered in celebration were fast becoming overshadowed in his mind.

He made no complaint when Thriss set a brisk pace, leading the Poxmaster down through the barracks and into the widespread skaven dwellings beyond.

Along tunnels and alleys they sped, Felk feeling more and more out of his element with every step. Much of the city was deserted, its inhabitants hunting and scavenging in the Whiteworld Above during the last sunlight – the skaven disliked the sun, but knew better than to venture at night when all manner of monstrous beasts and birds searched for prey on the mountain slopes. The twilight of dawn and dusk was their domain.

They travelled for some time, leaving behind the dropping-strewn streets and passageways, coming into a poorly explored part of the duardin ruins that had only recently been uncovered by a quake.

‘Must climb,’ said Thriss, stopping beside a crack opened in the side of a broad, smooth-hewn tunnel. Without another word he disappeared into the fissure, claws scraping on rock.

It had been some time since Felk had needed to perform such physical activity. He tightened his rope belt and tucked in the hem of his robe to free his legs. Wedging his staff into a safe crevice, he started the ascent, finding easy purchase in the jagged break.

To his relief the climb did not last long, the split rock chimney taking them to a columned gallery somewhere in the mountainside. Clambering over the edge, Felk found himself on a neatly tiled floor, the colour faded but a duardin design just about visible in the dusk glow. The long balcony stretched for dozens of paces to the left and right, archways in both directions blocked by debris or overgrown by roots from trees in the soil above.

Thriss was at the edge, looking down over the low stone balustrade.

‘There!’ He pointed to the right, jabbing a claw repeatedly at something below. ‘There-there! Quick-quick!’

Felk approached cautiously, not wishing to give Thriss the opportunity to throw him over the edge if that was his intent. Staying far out of reach, he risked a glance into the valley below.

At first he was not sure what he could see. Something shone in the light of the setting sun, a ribbon of white winding along the valley floor. He thought it was a river at first, but as his eyes adjusted he saw that there was a column of figures picking their way between the rocks and broken remnants of duardin architecture.

From this height it was hard to make out details, but Felk could see that the armoured warriors were gigantic, almost as large as the rat ogres of the Moulder clans. They bore unsheathed weapons and many had broad shields decorated with a design: a stylised golden star with a long tail.

‘What-what is it?’ snapped Thriss. ‘Not tribes. Not human.’

‘Not human,’ Felk murmured, caught between intrigue and dread. They might have been warriors of Chaos, but he saw no mark or icon that indicated which power they served.

‘Back-back!’

Thriss threw himself at Felk, snatching hold of the Poxmaster’s robe to drag him away from the edge of the gallery. Felk thrashed from the assassin’s grip in time to see more of the giants swooping past on shining wings. He slithered back across the tiles, worming his way into the dark shadows where Thriss had already taken shelter.

Eyes wide, teeth bared, they watched in trembling silence while five of the winged soldiers peeled away, wheeling through the sky towards the gallery. It seemed as though their leader looked directly at him, the red eyes of the masked helm blank and pitiless. A moment later the strange warriors changed trajectory, descending out of sight.

‘Bad-bad,’ he said. They were so close to unearthing the realmgate. The imminence of that victory, a few timely decapitations by Skarth and a couple of accidents engineered by Thriss had stayed off the worst of his underlings’ latest efforts to grab power, but an outside threat could provoke a coup more dangerous than the daily infighting of skaven politics. ‘Bad-bad. Bad-bad.’

Thriss had earned his warpstone payment twice over. Felk turned to say as much to the agent, only to find the assassin had already fled back down the crack.

Alone and exposed on the balcony, the Poxmaster quickly followed.

CHAPTER NINE

The crunch of the snow sounded impossibly loud. The creak of armour was an assault on Arkas’ senses. The blustering wind skirled and hooted in fantastical melodies, every gust carving swirls in the snow. He could hear breathing, fast and heaving, distorted by a helm. He had thought it was Dolmetis, but realised it was his own. He fixed his eyes ahead, seeing vague silhouettes through the blizzard that had descended moments after they had started up the ridgeline. Even vision made perfect by the artifice of Sigmar could not penetrate the white veil ahead.

With every stride he expected the ground to give way and he knew he should proceed with more caution, but his blood was still fired from the fight with the Chaos warriors. The spirit of Ursungorod, the magic-infused air, drove him on as much as memories of the oath he had sworn.

The wind surged for a moment, clearing away the fog, and then stillness enveloped the ridge. He heard Dolmetis take in a sharp breath as the darker shadows materialised into the shapes of men, women and beasts. Like Arkas, the Knight-Vexillor already had his sword in hand, but the Lord-Celestant caught a glimpse of the blade as Dolmetis drew it up in readiness.

‘Calm yourself,’ Arkas said quietly. ‘These foes are beyond our wrath.’

As they neared the figures Arkas could see what he had already suspected – each was clad in a faceted sheath of translucent ice. Like blue-tinted glass it covered them, a layer of frozen water no thicker than his finger. There were fighters in the garb of the Ursungoran tribes, most with expressions forever locked in fear or pain, eyes wide and glittering with crystals, the spittle on their tongues like air bubbles. Amongst them were men and women showing various signs of Chaos mutation – extra limbs, lizard-scaled skin, cat-like eyes, a profusion of horns, tusks and fangs.

There were snow tigers and cave bears too, and larger beasts also warped by Chaos – manticores, hippogryphs, hydras and others, towering twice as tall as the Stormcast Eternals, some even larger still. A squid-like bekevic had been drawn from its watery home, or forced out by some mortal hand. A few of the monsters still carried riders clad in armour of Chaotic origin, made of bone or whorled with strange devices, or etched with runes that continued to shift and writhe even within the ice bonds.

‘What bizarre display have we discovered?’ whispered Dolmetis. The muttering of the Decimators sounded dully from further back.

‘Touch nothing,’ Arkas reminded them, stepping around a frozen hound skulking close to the ground, its legs buried in the snow, ears back as it whimpered at something unseen ahead. ‘These are the trophies of the Queen of the Peak. Disturb them and we risk joining their ranks.’

He stopped when he realised Dolmetis was no longer at his shoulder. Arkas turned in time to see the Knight-Vexillor approaching a statue-like woman, her hands upraised as if to protect her face, locks flowing from beneath a tall helm like a frozen waterfall.

‘What enchantment slew them?’ asked Dolmetis, slowly circling the female warrior. ‘Why did she kill them?’

Arkas stepped up next to the standard bearer as he completed his circuit and stopped in front of the woman, bent slightly to peer into her face.

‘Why do you assume they are dead?’ asked Arkas. He could imagine Dolmetis’ look of surprise inside his helm as he twisted sharply to look at his lord.

‘They live? Inside this frost-born casing?’

‘So legend speaks,’ replied Arkas. ‘For a time, at least, until the Queen of the Peak grows weary of their company, or forgives them, or otherwise releases them from torment.’

‘There have been survivors?’

Arkas shook his head.

‘You misunderstand me, Dolmetis.’ He pointed to the woman’s chest. The ice was darker, denser in the slight hollow her breasts formed in the mail shirt. ‘She spares them further suffering by lancing an icicle through their hearts. The bodies remain.’

‘I do not think it is wise to risk this venture.’ Dolmetis straightened and looked back along the ridge towards the Icemere, though it was far from view. ‘Let us lead the army to the rendezvous and begin the attack on the skaven. We have no need of this hag’s aid.’

‘I think we do,’ said Arkas, stepping away a few paces. He indicated something further ahead, gesturing for Dolmetis to look.

The Knight-Vexillor adjusted his position to see what Arkas intended. Two dozen paces ahead, just within the retreating bank of fog, stood the unmistakable shape of a skaven. Three, in fact, huddled close together, hunched over, their rags stiff in a breeze that no longer blew, their serrated daggers held in frozen hands and prehensile tails.

Arkas set forth with long strides, Dolmetis following after the briefest hesitation. On closer inspection they found that the skaven were clad in brown and black, the garb of thieves and silent killers, their ratty faces wrapped with dark bandages. Something greenish-black shimmered on the edges of their weapons.

‘Weeping blades,’ said Dolmetis. ‘Assassins. They meant harm to the Queen of the Peak.’

‘There is another skaven, over there,’ said Arkas. He pointed at a frozen vermin figure cowled in thick robes, a staff in its hands. ‘They tried to send an emissary and when that failed they dispatched would-be killers. When that also failed, they had the approaches barred by their tame tribesmen. I think that none have approached in many years, decades or perhaps centuries even.’

‘The Queen of the Peak is probably mad with loneliness too? Any other good news, Lord-Celestant?’

Arkas grinned inside his helm and pointed with his hammer. A much larger shadow rose from the ridge, curving away to the left. It looked like a bridge composed of a single arc, though its far end was lost in the mists. Something moved above, coming closer.

‘We draw close to our goal,’ said Arkas. ‘And here comes Hastor to accompany us on the last stretch.’

The Lord-Celestant spoke truthfully and the flying shape quickly resolved into the Knight-Venator, gliding down towards the ridge with vortices of snow trailing from his shimmering wings. He landed a short distance away and met Arkas halfway.

‘You seem unsettled, Hastor,’ said Arkas, feeling a wash of agitation from the commander of his Angelos Conclave. ‘I hope you did not pass the gate as I commanded.’

‘In truth, my lord, only a direct command to step over the threshold would have forced me beneath that arch,’ confessed the Knight-Venator. He turned his attention to Dolmetis. ‘I trust all went well on the lake.’

‘Righteous bloodshed is its own reward,’ replied the Knight-Vexillor. ‘I find myself on more uncertain ground at the moment.’

‘The way ahead is free of foes?’ said Arkas, cutting across Hastor’s next words. ‘None approached the tower?’

‘None dared try.’ Hastor indicated the sharp slopes to either side of the ridge. ‘A few attempted to negotiate the snows below, but the storm took them.’

‘We shall push on.’

The going was quicker from then on. The mists parted before them, revealing more and more of the frozen statues as the ridge widened to a plateau from which rose the bridge Arkas had seen. Like before, the Queen of the Peak’s victims were a mix of human, Chaos-tainted, skaven and beast. The ice covering betrayed the greater age of many of them, frosted, chipped and cracked in places, though the screaming, terrified faces within showed no sign of decay.

The bridge itself was of duardin construction, perfectly fitted and mortared stones creating a span ten paces wide with a low parapet at each edge. Though the skills of the old duardin mason and engineers had been magnificent, it was the enchantment of the Queen of the Peak that had protected the bridge from the decline that had ruined the rest of Ursungorod’s ancient cityscape – the snow did not settle here, but a thin veneer of ice covered every intricately carved block and thread of mortar.

Arkas did not ascend immediately, but led his Stormcast companions beneath the bridge, to the crumbling edge of the plateau. The mountain dropped down into a sheer chasm, the forests below just a dark smear against white, the glittering ribbon of a frozen river even further away. The fog continued to roll back, revealing the gorge. It was over five hundred paces wide, the far side a jagged face of black rock and pale ice.

‘It was not like this when last I came here,’ said Arkas, turning his gaze to the left, towards the bridge. ‘This chasm was but a javelin’s cast across, the duardin bridge crossing over the ruins of the outer castle.’

‘What use is a fortress that has a bridge over its wall?’ asked Dolmetis. ‘An enemy could march in and besiege the keep with ease.’

‘The bridge was not built in time of war,’ replied Arkas. ‘It linked the duardin lands to those of my forefathers, when Sigmar first drove the taint from Ursungorod and peace prevailed for a time. The bridge was marked by powerful duardin runework. I think that it would collapse at their command if needed, taking any attackers to their deaths and sealing the castle.’

‘The remains of the outer wall and gates, such as they are, are down there,’ said Hastor, pointing into the abyss. ‘I descended earlier. The far side of the cliff is marked by old passages and halls, revealed in cross-section as if a blade had cut through them.’

‘What of the tower?’ Arkas’ question was answered not by the Knight-Venator but by a swirl of wind that revealed the furthest extent of the sky-bridge. The stocky design of the ruins unveiled by the retreating cloud was obviously of duardin making, but the central tower was taller and more elegant, topped by an onion-shaped dome that still sparkled with red and gold.

‘Remarkable...’ breathed Dolmetis.

‘Indeed it is,’ replied Hastor.

Arkas looked on in stunned wonder.

The bridge descended as it had always done, to a sturdy four-towered barbican in front of the Queen of the Peak’s abode. The tumbled remnants of the duardin fort lay about on broken cobbles and flagged courtyards. In turn, the tower and ruins stood upon a great hunk of frozen rock, held only by the bridge itself, the vastness of the chasm dropping away below the inverted cone of the foundations so that it seemed to hang in the air. Openings that were the remnants of duardin vaults and storerooms broke the outside of the edifice, squared caves and smooth-hewn ledges.

‘The duardin runes you spoke of, my lord,’ said Dolmetis. ‘You think they might still work?’

‘I think they were activated long ago but nullified by the power of the queen,’ replied Arkas. He looked at the Knight-Vexillor and shrugged. ‘Should she wish to deposit us into the gorge, she has only to release her icy grip. Bridge and castle would drop as surely as a stone from your fist.’

‘But she would plummet also,’ said Hastor, ‘without the bridge to hold her tower. There is little danger.’

‘Says the knight with the wings,’ Dolmetis said sourly.

‘Time is passing,’ Arkas said, turning back to the bridge. ‘I will return to the army before night falls if possible. I will proceed alone.’

The Knight-Vexillor and Knight-Venator accepted this order without comment and moved to join the Decimators that had formed a defensive ring around the approach to the bridge. Arkas started his ascent.

The climb was not steep but the slippery surface of the bridge forced him to proceed with a little more caution than normal – the duardin-height wall to each side did not even reach to his waist and would have been little barrier against a fall.

At the apex of the arc he stopped to survey the mountains that had once been his home. The peaks seemed so familiar – he could remember the names of them all – but it was more than geography that made Ursungorod, and the indefinable spirit that suffused the land had been changed. Near the roof of the world, far from the rivers and forests that were the foundation of the peaks, the traces of magic that rose this high were thinned, like the air. Away from the near-overwhelming rush of power he had felt on his first return, he could taste the change, the telltale foulness of Chaos pervading everything.

Could it have even entered into the mind of the Queen of the Peak? She had been an ally at best for Arka Bear-clad, never a friend – giving support only in return for something. The Chaos Gods had become all-powerful in the centuries of Sigmar’s enforced exile to the Celestial Realm and over the turn of the years the queen might have succumbed to their threats and temptations.

With more uncertain thoughts in mind, he started down the far side of the bridge, heading towards the half-ruined fortress that hung impossibly over the valley. The stones soon gave way to timeworn paving, which led a short distance to the shadow of the gatehouse looming over the road. The wall to either side had long since been toppled, by time and assault, even as it had been in Arkas’ life as a mortal.

Of the gate itself nothing remained either. Even so, there was a barrier, a shimmer of energy between the massive bastions that flanked the road, a haze that obscured the tower beyond. Moving off the path towards the ruins of the wall, Arkas could see a line of thick frost that encircled the keep as surely as any curtain wall. His keen eyes picked out the shine of bones and skulls trapped within the ice beyond the boundary circumscribed by the ancient stones.

‘Though you might not know me by sight, know me by heart,’ he announced, using the dead tongue of his homeland rather than the language of Azyr. The words seemed heavy and crude after so long conversing in the speech of the immortals. ‘I am Stormcast, a warrior of Sigmar, God-King from the world-that-was. Arkas I am called, though I am known to my lord and companions as the Warbeast. The Bear-clad I was before Sigmar took me, Arka the Uniter, the Bear of Hard Winters. By another name you knew me, and you alone, written with this rune by your hand.’

Laying down his weapons, Arkas knelt before the portal.

‘“Saviour”, you told me it meant when last I was here. The Fang of Freedom you called me. I am here to deliver on my promise, though it has been long in the reckoning.’

Silence followed, even the wind stilled while the Queen of the Peak considered his pledge. Arkas gripped his hammer and sword, stood up and waited. Nothing happened.

A test, he thought, looking at the shimmering curtain just a pace away. Beyond that he could see the wide, low steps leading up to the arched doors of the tower itself. One step, one stride would take him into the domain of the Queen.

An act of courage? No. His courage had never been doubted, by any that knew him.

An act of trust.

He stepped into the veil.

CHAPTER TEN

The sky was blue above, the air sharp, cold and invigorating. The sun was low in the sky, a winter sun devoid of warmth but reassuring all the same. Frost crackled under Arkas’ tread, his boots leaving clear imprints in the thin layer that covered the flagstones leading to the tower.

Exactly as it had been hundreds of years earlier when the Bear-clad had made his last journey along this road.

It’s a gate, he realised.

The barbican was a realmgate of sorts, the Queen of the Peak’s domain a pocket enclave, a self-contained magical plateau shifted slightly aside from Ursungorod and the Realm of Beasts. The Bear-clad would not have understood such a thing, the concept of the Mortal Realms layered and entwined about each other as alien to his mind as the idea that he might one day become an immortal war leader clad in armour forged from metal mined in the heart of a dead world.

The grand doors at the top of the steps were open, the flickering light of brands glowing from within. He ascended the stairs four at a stride, covering the ground quickly. He paused for a heartbeat at the entrance. Like everything else, a veneer of snow and ice lay like a patina on the stone and wood. The sigils and images carved into the doors glittered in the light of the brands – faces of bears, suns with beneficent smiles, and stylised lightning bolts that reminded him of the magnificent city of Sigmaron.

It was exactly as he remembered. Exactly. Like a dream being re-enacted. It was impossible, of course, a trick of this mind. Even so, as he stepped into the light of the braziers and torches within, he could not shake the feeling that he was doing more than following in his footsteps.

The entrance hall was lavishly decorated, a thick red carpet running the length of the chamber. Archways curtained with velvet of the same colour broke the walls to either side. Both fabrics were threaded with gold in a repeating design of flame-like waves interspersed with triangular mountains and simple star-like suns.

But all was frozen still, every bend in the cloth, every flame in the sconces caught in a moment of time. The silence was all-consuming, muffling his step, swallowing the scrape and creak of his armour.

The only movement was Arkas. Leaving a trail of vapour from shallow breaths he advanced along the hall, as he had done before. He knew nothing of what lay beyond the curtains and dared not speculate.

Something caught his attention and he looked down, surprised to see a single trail of footprints leading towards the stair. His stride was much longer now, his body magnified by the Reforging upon the Anvil of the Apotheosis. Yet when he glanced back, he saw only that single set of tracks. He could even see the pattern of the hobnails in his old boots.

The stair inside, ascending from left to right, was more like that of a rampart, narrow enough for two men to hold back an army. Arkas covered the distance to the next floor in moments and then from there, ignoring the wooden doors to the left and right, walked along a short landing to a spiral staircase that he knew took him to the domed chamber at the top of the tower.

He had to duck to fit his massive frame through the door at the top, and stepped into a circular hall roughly thirty paces across. The door closed behind him with the faint click of a lock.

The ice coated the inside of the dome, with facets and edges forming crystal faces at odd angles to each other. Arkas saw his reflection three dozen times over, turquoise and gold refracted and contorted all around. He stepped into the centre of the chamber, the images splintering and reforming.

Hammer held to one side, runeblade sheathed at his hip, Arkas waited in silence. He looked up and saw his helm mask glaring back at him from between the dark wooden vaults of the ceiling, eyeholes suffused with a glow of celestial energy. It was reassuring to know that, even here in the heart of the icy palace, the link to Azyr was strong. Should anything happen, should his body perish, he would be called back to Sigmaron, there to be recast and remoulded.

Immortality, though not without a price.

A breeze drifted across the circular hall, the slightest gust that barely stirred his cloak. It brought with it the queen’s voice, soft but hostile.

‘Who claims the name of Arka Bear-clad?’ she demanded. To the right a reflection of Arkas was replaced by a vague outline of a middle-aged woman clad in white robes edged with fur, her silvery hair hanging long and straight about her shoulders. Her eyes were a piercing blue, shards of ice given sapphire life. ‘Reveal yourself!’

‘I am Arka,’ he replied. He lifted away the mask that hid his face. He almost started at his reflection, having forgotten the changes that had been wrought by the artifice of Sigmar. His beard and hair were short, never requiring to be shorn again, his eyes sunken and dark. Three scars ran across his face, one from each eye to the ears and another down the centre of his forehead.

‘What have they done to you, my champion?’ A sigh wafted through the chamber, perhaps of pity, or sadness. Another reflection shifted, revealing a matronly figure in the depths of the ice, bundled in a black shawl with a hood over her head.

‘They made me strong,’ Arkas replied.

He turned his head to face this new image. Other mirrored figures fractured and reformed on the edge of his sight. He caught glimpses of different people, though when he looked directly at them he saw only his own ravaged face. His mother, his father, Radomira, the sculpted masks of his warriors, even the bearded, noble visage of the God-King himself.

A third manifestation of the Queen of the Peak appeared, almost directly in front of Arkas. She was young, clad in white-enamelled armour chased with silver and sapphires. It was no ceremonial suit, and neither was the blade in her hand a weapon for parades. A warrior-queen, her face enclosed within the cheek guards of a helm with a white horsehair crest, eyes boring into Arkas.

‘Oathbreaker! Deserter! Traitor! You abandoned your people.’ Her voice dropped to a plaintive whisper. ‘You abandoned me.’

‘Never, my Queen of the Peak,’ Arkas replied. As he addressed the latest apparition he could see himself as he had been in an ice mirror to his right – a full beard and head of hair, a nose broken more times than he could remember, glowering eyes beneath bushy brows. For an instant he forgot that he was Stormcast as the memory of his past life was given form in this place. ‘I was taken. I would not have willed it, but I have returned to fulfil my oath.’

‘Your oath?’ This was from the first Queen, imperious and distant. ‘Your oath to your mother or your promise to me?’

‘Both.’

‘Yet it was not in your power to do either.’

Her words bit as deeply as an axe blow. The memory of his ascension to the Celestial Realm welled up inside him, bursting free from deep behind the walls raised by Grungni’s craft.

‘I tried,’ said Arka. The frustration and sadness that had overpowered him in that moment surged through him. He fought through the bleakness, a snarl escaping gritted teeth. ‘The Bear-clad is dead, but the Warbeast will deliver where he failed.’

Quiet followed, his words ringing around the chamber and in his ears. The images of the queen moved of their own accord, coming together into one reflection, an amalgam of all three – stately, armoured and motherly all at the same time.

‘You know that which I desire more than anything,’ said the queen. ‘Do you renew your pledge to deliver it?’

‘It shall be done,’ said Arkas. He replaced his mask and the likenesses all became that of the Lord-Celestant again, his mind of a single purpose. ‘There is something you must do for me first.’

‘No,’ said the Queen of the Peak. ‘The pact was sealed long ago, and I have fulfilled my part.’

‘You did not,’ insisted Arkas.

‘I gave you the winds and the snows to command, as you demanded.’

‘A power I never had the chance to unleash.’

‘Of no consequence. The fault of your god-king, not mine.’

Arkas turned on his heel and took a step towards the door. He stopped as he felt a chill seep up through his foot. Glancing down, he saw tendrils of ice crystals snaking up over his boot and onto his leg.

‘I am here to grant us both a fresh chance,’ he said. ‘Answer my questions and I will deliver on what I promised.’

‘I will not let you betray me again!’

The cold branches crept further up his leg and fresh veins of frost started to encase the other. His breath formed a thick fog. The plates of his armour paled with a thin coating of ice.

‘I am your last and only chance for freedom,’ Arkas said. ‘Aid me and you serve the God-King, who shall be handsome in his favours. Or strike me down with frost-spite and remain here in your prison forever.’

Arkas felt his heart thudding, every pulse a drumbeat in his chest, the rush of blood a surge of noise in his ears. Had he judged her wrong?

A rime crept over his face, fogging his vision, crawling along the channels of his scars. He could feel a current stirring inside, the Anvil of the Apotheosis beckoning to his spirit while death stole along his nerves.

He could no longer feel his legs, his hands were leaden weights, a coil of ice binding his fingers to the haft of his hammer. In a dozen reflections he saw himself as he should be, a withered, frost-bound corpse.

The fate Sigmar had spared him, he realised with a shock.

‘You will... be free...’ he gasped, his breath forming crystals on the inside of his mask.

He heard the faintest whisper, barely audible over the thunder of his own heartbeat.

‘Sleep.’

‘I cannot,’ Arkas managed, each word a triumph of will against the freezing of his muscles.

‘Beloved descendant.’

Arkas swallowed, the motion painful, as though swallowing a stone. He closed his eyes, frost thickening on the lashes.

With a shudder, he took in a great final lungful of chilling air and the magic of the queen’s breath flowed into him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Descending into the valley, Theuderis’ host had left the worst of the snows and storms behind. The wind was strong, bending tall firs and pines, whipping the great branches back and forth to dust the marching Stormcasts with falling snow. Roots slithered like serpents underfoot, opportunistically snaring feet and ankles. Even the stones and boulders rebelled at the presence of the Stormcasts, forming frowning faces and leering eyes as they passed, rolling to trip and hinder the step of Sigmar’s chosen, the larger rocks toppling down banks and hills in lumbering attempts to crush the invaders.

Tyrathrax padded quietly across the whiteness, her harness and armour jingling. The creak and tromp of the Stormcast Eternals advancing between the trees were the only other sounds. The lack of birdsong and small animals still disturbed Theuderis, but he allowed himself a moment of reverie as he contemplated his surrounds.

‘It has a certain grandeur, I give it that,’ Theuderis said to his dracoth. ‘A fallen glory, you might say. When the taint has been cleansed it will be beautiful again.’

The trees formed an almost unbroken canopy and except for the odd beam breaking through a gap caused by the wind, Theuderis had not seen the sun since they had entered, not long after dawn. The white-and-blue of his warriors was muted in the gloom, swallowed by the green and brown shadows.

A shaft of light sprang into being a short way ahead – not the soft gold of the mountain sun but a paler glow Theuderis recognised immediately as the gleam of a celestial beacon. Samat descended slowly through a break in the leaves, coming to rest a few paces ahead of the Lord-Celestant. The Knight-Azyros’ wings furled with a last glint of colour as the two met.

‘There is no sign of the road we saw yesterday, Lord Silverhand.’ Samat turned to look along the line of advance. ‘It has been... swallowed. The forest is vast. We shall not see the sky before midday tomorrow if we continue in this direction. A wide river bounds the forest half a day to the south. We saw no ford or bridge and the current is strong.’

‘North?’

‘The slopes rise steeply but we would break the treeline before dusk. The ground is broken by shoulders of rock and more ruined settlements. The snow is heaped on the higher slopes, and I fear avalanches would be a constant threat, needing only the slightest tremor to bring a storm of ice and rock upon us. The land has not taken kindly to our presence – who can say what other threats it harbours.’

The memory of the collapsing cliff flashed through Theuderis’ mind – warriors engulfed by a tide of earth and stone, bright flashes of lightning as so many Stormcasts were called back to Sigmaron.

‘We continue through the forest. Though it is hostile, it does not appear to pose too great a danger,’ said the Lord-Celestant.

Samat hesitated before bowing his head in acknowledgement.

‘Speak your mind.’

‘There is still the option of the city beneath,’ said the Knight-Azyros. ‘The duardin ruins we have seen stand atop vast delvings. I expressed my doubts before, but I must say that I am of a mind that the route below might prove the swifter.’

‘The swiftest road is by no means the surest,’ replied Theuderis. ‘We have been fortunate to have eluded the attention of the skaven thus far. Doubtless Arkas and his Warbeasts have stirred their nest. It serves no purpose for the moment to draw their eye to us.’

‘We cannot know how the Celestial Vindicators fare, my lord,’ argued Samat. ‘They could be sorely beset and every delay threatens the success of our mission.’

‘It is the task to which Sigmar appointed them,’ said Theuderis, crossing his arms. ‘We cannot judge from afar whose need is greater, ours or Arkas’. If we hasten and run into peril, what succour can we provide?

‘It is for your wisdom that you are Lord-Celestant,’ admitted Samat, bowing further, ‘and through your words is spoken Sigmar’s will. As you command, we obey.’

‘Do not chastise yourself, Samat.’ Theuderis reached out a hand and beckoned for the Knight-Azyros to approach closer. ‘I would not have my officers close their lips and minds. The advice was given in good temper, and I accept it. Yet my own mind is set upon its path for the moment and I would see it run the course for a while longer.’

Before Samat could reply, a noise silenced him. It was a distant horn blast, far shriller than the clarions of the Knights-Heraldor. Tyrathrax snarled and the Stormcasts threading through the trees stopped where they were, instinctively raising their weapons.

Answering notes came from ahead and behind. Theuderis twisted in his saddle to peer through the trees but could see nothing. He turned back to issue an order to Samat but the Knight-Azyros had already taken flight. Nothing could be seen through the branches and leaves above.

Tyrathrax sensed her master’s agitation and snarled, tail lashing back and forth like an angry snake.

Theuderis heard a cry, the metallic shout of one of his warriors. He could not make out the words or direction in the press of trees. Some of the nearest Stormcast Eternals started out into the woods, calling to each other to find the source of the disturbance.

‘Stand fast!’ he roared, dragging free his tempestos hammer. ‘Form a perimeter, castellation line!’

The horns sounded again, louder and closer, coming from all around it seemed, yet still Theuderis could see nothing and no report came from his men. The Stormcasts did their best to reform the marching column into a defensive line, but the closeness and thickness of the trees meant that they could stand no more than four or five abreast in many places. The Primes strode back and forth, tightening the shield walls of the Liberators, moving the Judicators into gaps in the line from where Azyr-forged bows and crossbows would be able to mark an incoming foe.

Theuderis headed back to the rearguard as a third chorus of strident horns sounded out of the gloom beneath the trees. Tyrathrax’s claws gouged great divots of mud and leaves as she ran, spraying wet mulch and ice behind. Low branches whipped at Theuderis’ helm and pauldrons as he crashed through them, needles and splintered wood falling in his wake. Armour clattered as a troop of Protectors sprinted alongside, their Prime urging them into position with short, sharp commands.

‘Trajos, what can you see?’ Theuderis called out to the Judicator-Prime in charge of the Justicar Conclave that formed the foundation of the rearguard force. Hefting his thunderbolt crossbow, the Judicator-Prime glanced back at his commander.

‘Nothing, Lord Silverhand. Just trees and snow.’

‘They must be almost upon us,’ warned Theuderis as he stared up and down the slope trying to discern any movement in the shadows. ‘Those horns were close at hand.’

Snapping wood above drew their attention to the canopy. A white-armoured figured crashed through the branches, his wings scattering iridescent metal feathers, bloody droplets streaming from a great rent across his breastplate. A heartbeat later another Prosecutor plunged down from above, his left arm missing. Both hit the ground like meteors, throwing up explosions of dead plant matter and dirt.

‘Hold ground!’ Theuderis bellowed as several Justicars broke the line to move towards the wounded flyers. ‘Trajos, control your men.’

The Judicator-Prime snapped reprimands while Tyrathrax moved out of the column at Theuderis’ urging. He saw the one-armed Prosecutor push to his feet, using his hammer as a prop. The other crackled with celestial power and disappeared, succumbing to the wound he had suffered.

‘A manticore, my lord!’ gasped the Prosecutor. ‘And a griffon also!’

A shout drew Theuderis’ attention back along the host, towards the main body of troops. Flares of power seared between the trees as a regiment of Judicators unleashed the missiles of their skybolt and shockbolt bows. From his position, Theuderis could see nothing of their targets, but amongst the crackle of celestial energy he heard feral snarls and howls.

Even as his mind raced to accept this development, a darkness passed over him, accompanied by thrashing in the treetops. A short distance away a tree snapped and into view tumbled an immense beast. It had the body of a giant black-and-white striped cat and an eagle’s head, its red-and-black feathered wings tattered and bloody. Its beak was locked around the right arm of a Prosecutor-Prime, his hammer still in his grip.

The Prime repeatedly smashed his fist into the creature’s eye as the two flailed into the mulch, while its front claws raked back and forth across his ivory cuirass. With a supreme effort, the Stormcast hauled himself onto the back of the beast as it struggled to straighten, still raining blows against its feathered skull.

A nearby retinue of Decimators leapt into the attack, hewing at the downed monster with thunderaxes as though it were a fallen tree, every blow throwing up a fountain of thick blood.

Shouts and monstrous howling betrayed the airborne battle continuing out of sight above, but Theuderis had no time to consider this – their attackers had revealed themselves, charging along and down the slope from out of the shade.

Beastmen, hundreds of them. Most had goat-like features with curling horns, as tall as a normal man, crude axes, swords and clubs in hand. They carried wooden shields fixed with hardened hide, onto which triangular symbols and circular devices had been painted. Some were almost as big as a Stormcast, using both hands to wield their axes and mauls, their horns twisting like helms about their faces.

Before them rushed a swarm of smaller creatures, some no bigger than waist-high to Theuderis, the largest no taller than his midriff. They wielded stone-tipped spears and hide bucklers, brutish faces snarling, leather-skinned with stubby horns and chins sporting tufts of ungainly thick hair.

‘Target the gors,’ the Lord-Celestant commanded Trajos. ‘Leave the ungors to me.’

The Judicator-Prime gestured for the wounded Prosecutor to retreat into the sanctuary behind the retinue, his Stormcasts parting neatly to let him pass and then reforming. Tyrathrax bounded towards the enemy as a fusillade of celestial energy flared through the trees, over the heads of the smaller onrushing ungors and into the foes beyond. Explosions of cosmic power lit the forest, every detonation accompanied by the shrieks and bellows of dying beastmen.

Theuderis rode on, trusting to the impeccable aim of his warriors as another salvo of fire and lightning scythed past to wreak more bloody ruin through the mobs of charging Chaos-tainted. Scant moments from crashing head-on into the oncoming tide of ungors, the Lord-Celestant glanced around and truly saw the extent of the enemy they faced. The forest teemed with beastmen of all sizes and varieties, their banners and shields bearing the marks and icons of dozens of different tribes and champions, their sigils and ornaments showing worship to all of the Chaos pantheon, with many skavenesque symbols amongst them.

Even as Tyrathrax leapt into the throng of smaller beastmen, fangs and claws mauling and slashing, Theuderis realised that a greater power had forged the unholy alliance of beastmen warbands and clans that now assailed his host. Only a creature with immense influence could command such a force; only the most lucrative promises and dire threats were capable of overwhelming the natural antipathy and infighting of so many warp-tainted creatures. A daemon perhaps, or a Champion of Chaos not yet revealed.

He laid about with his tempestos hammer, every strike obliterating an ungor with a blast of celestial force. He and Tyrathrax continued to plough through the small beastmen, their spears shattering and splintering on sigmarite plates, shields hewn asunder by dagger-like claws and teeth, or crushed and smashed aside with every swing of Theuderis’ hammer.

Like a swimmer surfacing, dracoth and rider burst through the throng of the ungors, taking a moment to pause and evaluate the progress of the battle. Immense bull-headed creatures, equine mutants and other types of beastmen joined the fray, lowing and snarling and screaming in the dark tongue of Chaos. They fell upon the vanguard first, but solid lines of Liberators with shields locked weathered the initial storm and now they counter-attacked with warblades and hammers, their Primes surging forwards with devastating sweeps of two-handed weapons.

The manticore had been forced down through the canopy, its ruddy fur marked with many wounds, leathery wings broken and ragged. Its bizarre human-leonine face was a picture of rage, its deafening howls and roars audible over the crash of weapons and war-shouts of the Silverhands. A ring of Retributors formed around the beast, ensorcelled hammers and maces pounding like Grungni himself at the Forge of Ages, protected from attack by rapid volleys of missiles from nearby Judicators that cut down any beast that came within fifty paces.

The centre had been spared any meaningful assault so far, but the Stormcasts arranged in retinues of alternating melee and missile troops knew better than to break formation yet. If the van or rear was overwhelmed it would be to the core of the army their Stormcast companions would retreat. Like the keep of a castle, the Redeemer Conclaves were the underlying strength of the army, the fulcrum of strategy and refuge in need.

Movement rippling through the branches above drew Theuderis’ eye before he could check how the rearguard fared. More ungors scampered monkey-like through the boughs, thinking themselves safe from the ire of the Lord-Celestant.

Tyrathrax reared at his simple command, roaring forth a tempest of magical bolts from her maw. The storm ignited the cones, wood and leaves, setting fire in fur and flesh. Shrieking and gibbering, the ungors dropped to the forest floor, to be met by the dracoth and rider pouncing forwards with tireless fury.

Two dozen more foes had been slain when Theuderis redirected his attention back to the line. Voltaran had moved back with some of the Judicators to pour more lightning-fuelled bolts into the horde, carpeting the ground with the bodies of the dead. Yet it seemed for all the ire of the Stormcasts, the numbers of the beastmen were greater, and they were driven on by some power more potent than their horrendous losses.

Tyrathrax snarled, her claws sticking in the mire of bodies underfoot, the corpses sliding and splitting beneath her tread as she laboured towards fresh foes. She spat lightning again, frustrated that she could not rend with her claws, turning another handful of ungors to ashen clouds. Bunching her muscles, the dracoth leapt free of the bloody morass and found firmer ground, sensing Theuderis’ desire to return to the line.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When he opened his eyes, Arkas could see all of Ursungorod. It took him a moment to accept it, so vast and unnatural was the view. Every sheet of ice was an eye, every snowflake an ear, every icicle a fingertip.

See, hear and feel as I see, hear and feel. Seek what you must.

His presence stretched the length and breadth of the mountains, the power dizzying. He focused, drawing the vision within him, seeing the tower from the outside, as though standing on the broken curtain wall. He turned his mind’s eye and flowed effortlessly back across the bridge, sparing barely a glance for Hastor, Dolmetis and the Decimators at the far end.

He allowed his consciousness to fracture like a splitting ice flow, part of him zooming to watch over the Stormcasts still holding position on the Icemere, the rest of him skating to and fro through the wilds, leaping from snow-laden branches to drifts to frozen puddles in the blink of an eye. He scrambled across rockfalls of skull-shaped stones and slid along stone arches with icicle fangs. In the waters of Ursungorod’s hundreds of rivers he splashed through rapids between dagger-pinnacles and across impossible waterfalls that flowed up the slopes. He felt the eternal presence of the trees, slumbering in places, alive and predatory in others.

Arkas felt the tread of many feet as though on his skin. Concentrating, he saw different tribes, some in camp, others following the herds or enemies, raiding and fighting, sacrificing their own and their foes to the Chaos Gods. Pyres burned bright, blades gleamed with blood, voices were raised in guttural chants in praise of unholy powers.

Down he delved, following the cracks and chasms, into the lairs of the skaven, though he could not penetrate deeply. Even so, he recoiled at their teeming thousands, overwhelmed by the slithering, skittering touch of them, their greasy, furred bodies rubbing against him, pulsing and pushing like corrupted blood through veins, claws eternally scratching, teeth biting.

Repulsed, he almost withdrew, but as he did so Arkas saw something that pulled his thoughts away from the creeping touch of the rat-filth. He witnessed hooded figures buying slaves and mutated beasts from human warlords, paying in warpstone tokens and laying on blessings of the Great Horned Rat.

It seemed impossible that humans would worship the rat-god.

There are those who follow other powers, but when you fell and the last resistance ended, it was the Lord of Thirteen Dooms that stretched out the furthest to seize what was lost. To escape the disease they swore their souls to the rat-masters, allowed to keep the lands above in return for their obedience and service to those below.

There was a daemon, he recalled, a monstrosity that had filled him with dread. Arka Bear-clad had heard of such a thing only in the darkest legends, but Arkas Warbeast knew well the verminlords of the Great Horned Rat. Brought forth from the gnaw-wounds between realms, the rat daemons were incarnations of death and pestilence. It was this vile monster, a Corruptor, that had unleashed the plague winds that had slain his mother and later destroyed his army after his ascension.

Skixakoth.

It has a name?

An ancient evil from the world-that-was, given form once more.

Arkas tried to delve deeper, pushing as far as he could into the unforgiving bedrock, but he met a wall of resistance. No matter how hard he tried he could not penetrate the depths he knew to be there – the Shadowgulf.

Even my power does not extend so far. Another rules there.

Arkas felt the darkness pulse, a wave of hostility forcing him to retreat, suddenly wary of discovery. As he withdrew, he sensed another knot of power, a whorl of Ghurite energy that drew him in as a whirlpool might snare a boat. Rather than resist, Arkas allowed himself to drift upon the flow until he found the source.

It was a realmgate, half excavated by the skaven from the duardin undercity. At the moment of discovery he realised that this was his goal, the objective Sigmar had set for the Warbeasts and Silverhands. He had assumed the realmgate was active, but now he understood why the God-King had dispatched his Strike Chamber with such swiftness. The skaven were on the verge of opening the portal between realms, and once they did so they would have another route into the Realm of Life where Alarielle and her sylvaneth armies were sorely beset. A portal into Therdonia would bring the skaven perilously close to the Lifegate. Taking the gate of Ursungorod would not only hasten the Stormcast assault on Archaon at the Allpoints, it would stave off a potentially devastating skaven invasion into Ghryan.

I have shown you that which you desired to see.

Arkas’ thoughts moved quickly to his ally, Theuderis of the Knights Excelsior. Even as his mind turned to his fellow Lord-Celestant, his awareness shifted, racing away from the skaven caverns and into the peaks once more. In a few moments he felt the heavy footfalls of white-and-blue warriors, at their head a lordly figure on the back of a red-scaled dracoth. Above them burned the celestial light, shining down from the lanterns of Sigmar’s Knights-Azyros. Its touch filled him with a sense of belonging and ease.

Even as he luxuriated in Sigmar’s reflected glory, Arkas felt something marring the light, a darkness close at hand. In the ground beneath Theuderis’ warriors, a coming together of evils. Diving down, seeking the source, Arkas chanced upon a chamber lit only by luminescent fungi. A skaven clad in black conversed with a goat-headed creature with twisting horns that wore thick layers of tanned human skin as a robe and cloak. Their intent was clear – they plotted against the army of Theuderis.

An ambush. Arkas had to warn the Silverhand somehow.

What you have seen is but a shadow, a mirror of the past. Events are already in motion.

Dark woods spread out across the advance of the Knights Excelsior and in the shadows beneath the boughs gathered a throng of beastmen and Chaos-warped monsters. The immense trees shielded them from the eyes of the Prosecutors flying overhead. Theuderis was already marching straight into the trap.

There had to be some way to reach Theuderis. If through the magic he could see the Lord-Celestant, perhaps he could communicate with him? Arkas felt resistance from the queen.

That was not our bargain, Bear-clad.

The freezing became an agony, lancing through Arkas’ thoughts, blood snapping, marrow cracking.

Remember your oaths!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A sudden darkness warned Theuderis an instant before a monstrous beast hurtled through the trees close at hand, descending in a welter of snarling and broken branches. He barely had time to register it as another griffon attacked, black like a dreadful blend of raven and panther, eyes aflame with Chaos magic. On its back clung a knight armoured in bronzed plate and links, a sigil of the Dark Gods burning with yellow fire upon the blade of his axe.

Griffon and dracoth collided, the winged monster bowling over the mount of the Lord-Celestant. Theuderis released his hold and rolled with the motion of Tyrathrax, throwing himself clear of her as she turned onto her back, claws raking at the underside of the griffon even as its beak skittered and screeched across the armour protecting the dracoth’s throat.

The Chaos champion’s axe blade bit into the back of Theuderis’ shoulder as the Stormcast came to his feet. Powered by vile sorcery, the edge of the blade parted sigmarite and flesh down to the bone. Theuderis threw out an arm in reflex, the head of his tempestos hammer crashing against the flank of the griffon, snapping bones and pulverising flesh.

Spitting and snarling, Tyrathrax struggled free of the griffon’s clawed grip, lightning crackling along her fangs. Theuderis sprang forwards, using the back of the dracoth as a launch point to hurl himself at the Chaos champion. Taken unawares by this tactic, the griffon’s rider could do nothing as Theuderis’ hammer connected with the side of his helm. Arcs of power erupted from the Stormcast’s weapon and the champion’s head caved in, skull splintered and neck snapped by the force of the blow.

Wound gushing from its flank, the griffon was not yet ready to die. Battering Theuderis aside with a wing, the monster charged Tyrathrax once more, beak closing around the dracoth’s foreleg with a sickening snap of bones. Tyrathrax snarled in pain. Lightning flared from her mouth and crackled across the sable hide of the griffon, leaving burning welts in the flesh.

Theuderis swung his hammer in both hands, bringing the head around in a long arc to connect with the shoulder of the griffon where leg and wing met the body. Bone shattered beneath pulsing flesh, forcing an unearthly scream from the beast. The blow lifted and toppled the griffon to its side, a wing buckling and snapping beneath as its heavy body rolled onto the blood-pooled dirt. Tyrathrax was on the wounded monster in a heartbeat, chewing into the exposed flesh until her head disappeared, tearing out entrails with swipes of her claws.

Gore-slicked scales shining in the cerulean light of Theuderis’ hammer, the dracoth ripped herself free of the twitching corpse, ribbons of tissue hanging from her jaws. She limped to her master, feeling now the wound caused by the griffon’s assault. It was obvious she would not be able to bear Theuderis’ weight.

The larger gors and bestigors that had been following their smaller cousins stalked closer, perhaps thinking the wounded creature would be easier prey. Theuderis turned a glance back to his army and saw half of the centre had now broken away to reinforce the rearguard, where hulking beast-brutes, thrashing, formless spawn and nameless foul creatures were throwing themselves at the Liberators and Judicators.

Tyrathrax was not Stormcast, she would not be reforged but returned to the stars to be reborn as a child of the cosmic serpent, Dracothion. He did not know whether they would be reunited. Yet for all the tenderness Theuderis felt for his mount, who had bonded with him on the arduous Trail of Starwalking and deigned to carry him since, his duty lay with his warriors.

He laid a hand on her neck and she understood his intent without words. The dracoth turned towards the approaching beastmen and hissed a challenge, standing over the body of the griffon as though she defended a prize or nest.

Theuderis turned his back on her and broke into a run, carving into the ungors that ebbed and flowed around the Stormcasts like a sea breaking on rocks. The righteous fire was tinged with a bitter feeling as he set upon his deformed foes. Grief powered his arm more than vengeance. The Lord-Celestant battered his way back to the line, crushing smaller beastmen beneath his boots as he opened a path with devastating sweeps of his hammer.

Two Decimators stepped forwards to meet him, parting to allow him past while their gleaming axes smashed aside a flurry of ungors hurling themselves at their commander’s back. As fluidly as they had counter-attacked they fell back into place, their comrades’ blades rising and falling in unison to carve apart the next wave of foes.

Theuderis sought out Voltaran and found his Knight-Vexillor commanding the opposite side of the line, facing down the slope of the mountain. Swift centigors rode back and forth just a dozen paces away, hurling axes and javelins while they laughed and cursed in their barbarous tongue. The missiles were of little threat, but the Liberators were pinned in place by the attacks, unable to move to support their brothers beset by fiercer foes while the centigors threatened a charge.

‘Their leader is dead, their spirit will break soon,’ Theuderis assured his officer. ‘Stand fast for the moment.’

‘I fear otherwise, my lord,’ replied Voltaran. He gestured down the mountain. ‘We have not yet seen the worst of it.’

Further down the slope Theuderis could see a group of figures, horned heads visible beneath the cowls of their robes, staffs hung with grisly baubles and runes made of sinew and bone.

‘Shamans,’ snarled the Lord-Celestant.

‘They summon fresh forces,’ Voltaran added.

The lower slope was filling with all manner of mutated creatures – hounds and wolves with mutated spines and misshapen heads, slug-like, tentacled abominations and gangling monstrosities with snapping jaws and blade-like limbs. Baying and howling broke out, accompanied by whining and mewling from the Chaos spawn.

The forest started to shudder, shedding leaves and snow. A trunk snapped as a gigantic figure pushed through the press of trees, its heavy tread setting the other boughs shaking. Several times the height of a Stormcast Eternal, the gargant heaved and shouldered its way forwards, tree limbs snapping, gigantic feet sinking into the soft mulch and earth. It was clad in a crude jerkin and trousers of patchwork furs and hide, its engorged belly testing the rope-like stitching. A roughly shaped and poorly welded helm wobbled on its head, while pieces of ancient plate and broken shields tied with belts and scavenged horse harnesses made for vambraces and gorget. In its hand it trailed several long staves spliced together, cart or chariot axles perhaps, three axeheads wedged into the length to make a fearsome polearm.

There were more beastmen coming, following the packs of dogs – ungors with short bows that scampered up into the trees and bestigors clad in thick mail hauberks and coifs. In the sunlight from the gap in the trees made by the giant, Theuderis estimated another two or three hundred goat-headed fiends. Other creatures prowled the shadows, eyes glinting, their growls and snarls audible even at this distance.

A glance over his shoulder confirmed to the Lord-Celestant that his Knights Excelsior were still holding against the attack from above. The outer line had been pushed back, forcing the Judicators behind their companions in the retinues of Decimators, Protectors and Liberators battling with the beastmen. Trajos was doing his best to stem the flow of attackers trying to encircle the line but time and numbers were against him.

‘Enough!’ snapped Theuderis. ‘Attaxes, report to me!’

The call for the Knight-Heraldor went along the line but it was a while before Attaxes appeared, running down the mountainside from the fighting at the head of the column. His armour was dented and scratched in several places but he had no obvious wounds.

‘We cannot hold like this,’ Theuderis said. Looking from Attaxes to Voltaran. ‘We must attack.’

‘As you command,’ the Stormcast Eternals chorused.

‘What battle formation, my lord?’ asked Attaxes, readying his clarion.

‘Divine Vengeance, Jaws of the Dracoth drill,’ Theuderis replied. ‘Signal the storm of wrath to Samat.’

The bray-shamans were ordering their latest wave of attackers up the slope as Attaxes lifted his instrument and let out a series of peals and blasts, ascending and descending sharply. He repeated them twice, but the army was already in motion before he had started the third.

The Silverhands collapsed together, the vanguard and rearguard falling back towards the main body, each retinue withdrawing a few paces while its neighbours held off the beasts, and then in turn they fell back and others continued the defence. Even as the Stormcasts settled their line, retinues of Liberators, shields locked, advanced into the brunt of the fighting, weathering the storm of missiles, blades and mauls to push forwards again on the flanks, while the centre continued to withdraw to form a ‘v’ of retinues into which the beastmen were guided.

The Prosecutors descended through the canopy, a hail of mystical javelins scything down dozens of gors and bestigors. Samat and several other Knights-Azyros led a charge against the bull-beasts and other large foes still assailing the left flank, the light of the celestial beacons burning bright beneath the leaves. The energy of Azyr rippled along the hammers, grandaxes and grandblades of the winged Stormcasts as they fell upon their foes, circling to attack with a whirlwind of crushing and slashing blows.

To counter the threat from the lower force, Theuderis moved his Judicators to cover the approaches, their celestial missiles bursting forth once more against these fresh targets.

‘Clear the ground,’ Theuderis told Trajos. ‘Hinder their advance and leave them no sanctuary.’

Trajos passed the order to the other Primes and the next salvoes sliced not through flesh but wood, felling trees across the line of advance. Another fusillade from skybolt bows and thunderbolt crossbows set branches ablaze, forcing the creeping ungors to the ground. Here they were targeted by the Judicators carrying shockbolt bows, every crackling arrow that hit causing a chain of lightning to leap from one beastman to the next, slaying several score of foes in a few volleys.

Fresh torrents of fire continued to shred and rip through the forests, leaving a blackened, smoking swathe of destruction littered with burning and charred corpses.

The ‘Jaw of the Dracoth’ was starting to close on the beastmen, the two flanks of Liberators pushing hard towards each other, not using their hammers or blades, but simply presenting two walls of white-and-blue sigmarite that the beastmen could not pierce or break.

Theuderis joined the attack as dozens of Decimators and Retributors became the fangs of the dracoth, sallying forth between the ranks of the Liberators, who parted briefly to let them through. Axes cleaved flesh, hammers pulverised bone, the dead and dying beastmen wreathed with crackling remnants of celestial force.

The beastmen, even the more disciplined bestigors, were ferocious but unskilled. Theuderis abandoned any finesse and waded into his foes with his hammer swinging in wide arcs, scornful of any attack that might be directed at him. Leaving trails of blood and blue fire, his tempestos hammer swept aside every enemy before him. To his left and right the other Stormcasts were advancing over a carpet of beastmen dead, their weapons spitting and hissing with vengeful energies.

Behind them the Judicators were falling back once more as the gargant and other large monsters crashed towards their line. The beastmen were clearly content to allow these enormous creatures to lead the charge, loitering close behind to dash in and pounce on the Stormcasts once they were engaged.

‘Samat!’ Theuderis smashed his hammer through another three beastmen and pointed it towards the approaching monster. ‘The gargant!’

The Knight-Azyros saluted with his starblade and leapt into the air, disappearing through the branches in a heartbeat. A bullgor charged at Theuderis, horns lowered, distracting the Lord-Celestant for a moment. He crushed the monster’s bull head with a single blow and rolled over the body as it ploughed into the dirt. Theuderis came to his feet and looked back in time to see Samat’s descent.

It seemed at first as though a thunderbolt had struck the giant creature, but the flash of light resolved into Samat, blade in two hands, his lantern on his belt, wings stretched to the full as he swooped head first towards the ground. At the last moment the Knight-Azyros spun feet-down, landing smoothly a few paces from the gargant.

Samat took a step backwards and looked up, the gigantic figure framed by two trees blazing with pale blue fire. It twitched and then parted, two halves neatly slewing away from each other down a cut from the top of its head to its groin. Samat leapt to avoid the wave of blood and offal that spilled out. Pieces of bisected vertebrae and ribcage washed across the ground beneath him.

A great cry of woe went up from the beastmen as their enormous ally degenerated into a fleshy, shapeless mass. Caught in the vice of the advancing Stormcast retinues, many of them turned and fled, but the Prosecutors fell upon them in moments. They flitted between the trees, summoning celestial power to cast javelins into the routing gors and ungors while their companions hunted them down with their hammers, sweeping and wheeling through the boles to shatter spines and pulp heads.

Even so, it was no easy task to overcome the remaining foes. The bray-shamans grunted and barked at their underlings, forcing them into a fresh assault while the Stormcasts were still occupied driving through the remains of the first wave. Chaotic energies churning around their horned heads, raised fists and staff tips glowing with infernal magic, the shamans themselves joined the fray, escorted by scores of heavily armoured bestigors that advanced like a solid wall of fur, metal and horns.

And there were still several hulking mutants shambling closer, their skins pocked with sores, vestigial limbs waggling like cilia, plates of bone and chitin sliding and scraping. The centigors had abandoned their taunting attacks when the Stormcasts had withdrawn but now they returned, their broad-headed spears tilted ready for the charge. The yammering of the hounds intensified, carried through the crackle of flames up to the Stormcasts with the grunts and snorts of boar-like creatures and the coughing barks and low bellows of the beastmen.

‘For Sigmar!’ Theuderis raised his hammer above his head as he issued the shout. The echoing cry from his warriors rolled along the mountainside like thunder, shaking the ground. While the Decimators and Retributors of his Paladin Conclave continued to wreak bloody mayhem upon the last of the gors and ungors, the Lord-Celestant rallied the Redeemer Conclave’s Liberators and Protectors. ‘We are the God-King’s knights of vengeance. Our weapons are his wrath, his faith our armour. We are the righteous death, born for battle, created to kill. Hold back no ire and harbour no mercy. Death to the unclean!’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Arkas opened his eyes and found himself standing on the far side of the barbican, outside the demesne of the Queen of the Peak. He harboured the idea of returning but stopped himself from passing back through, aware that he had pushed his previous relationship as far as possible.

He broke into a run, remembering the attack about to unfold. As he powered up the bridge he thrust his hammer thrice into the air.

‘Hastor!’ he bellowed as he reached the top of the bridge. ‘Attend to your lord!’

In a flash of colour the Knight-Venator rose, trailing particles of ice. Arkas called out his orders as he skidded to a stop in a spray of snow. Hastor signalled his understanding.

‘Speed towards the dawn and seek them in the forests of the southern valleys,’ said Arkas. ‘Fly as swift as Sigmar’s scorn!’

The Knight-Venator made no comment and raised no question, but simply dipped a wing to wheel away, a flash of rainbow colours and gold that soon disappeared into the clouds that were closing in on the mountain once more.

Dolmetis started to climb from the base of the bridge, his hasty steps betraying his concern. Arkas turned to look back at the queen’s tower. Her presence was everywhere, and in every icy sparkle and frosty glimmer he felt her gaze upon him. Had she played him false, out of spite showing him the peril of Theuderis when it was too late to act? Had she known what would happen on the walls of Kurzengor when Skixakoth had issued forth from the deeps to sweep away mankind’s last reign over Ursungorod?

Despite his doubts, Arkas could not ignore a simple principle – an oath was an oath. It was not his place to judge the Queen of the Peak but to measure himself by the standards of his spirit.

He lowered to a knee, head bowed, hammer in both hands with the brow of his mask against the haft.

‘God-King, my Lord Sigmar, Protector of the Faithful, Shield of Mankind, I beg leave of you for a boon.’ Arkas could hear Dolmetis’ rapid steps approaching and spoke quickly. ‘Grant peace to the Queen of the Peak, and forgive any wrong she has done in worlds past and ages forgotten. Through her I have received wisdom and guidance, in this life and in the other, and she has earned freedom from the curse laid upon her. Reward her loyal service and free her.’

‘Free whom, my lord?’ asked Dolmetis, catching his commander’s last words. ‘And whence does Hastor speed?’

‘The Queen of the Peak has provided and I must pay her price or be dishonoured. It is in the hands of Sigmar Almighty.’

‘You think he would set her free?’

‘I do,’ said Arkas, looking skywards. The clouds were turning dark, edged with a cerulean gleam. ‘It was he that imprisoned her, after all.’

Dolmetis said nothing and looked up as well. Streaks of power lashed across the bulging mass of the thunderhead forming over the gorge. As when he felt the touch of the celestial beacons of the Knights-Azyros, so now Arkas bathed in the presence of his master and creator.

With a thunderclap that shook the bridge and caused flocks of birds to launch from the forests far below, a single bolt of light flashed down and struck the top of the tower’s dome. Ice exploded like glass splinters, showering down into the chasm beneath. A blast of wind howled, swirling up from the gorge around the two Stormcast Eternals. Arkas thought he heard a whispered farewell.

The last reverberations of the thunderstrike echoed away.

The cocoon of ice that had encased the fortress and the queen’s tower started to shear away, crumbling into sparkling fog.

‘That is freedom?’ asked Dolmetis.

‘Oblivion,’ said Arkas. ‘All that she has craved for countless lifetimes of men. I swore once to end her existence, and now Lord Sigmar has delivered on my promise.’

‘Perhaps you might have invoked the power of our God-King whilst on solid ground,’ suggested Dolmetis, pointing his warhammer at the rents and cracks spreading up the far end of the bridge. As the enchantment failed the whole of the duardin stronghold plummeted into the valley, foundations and vaults and barbican as one, a deluge of stones and mortar following it.

The two warriors broke into a run as the bridge collapsed, pounding down the span just a few paces ahead of the falling masonry. Making a last leap for safety, they threw themselves over the edge of the parapet, falling towards the ledge beneath.

Both landed heavily in a fountain of snow while chunks of stone rained down, glancing from their armour. Arkas pulled himself back to his feet and looked down into the gorge where the fallen castle had ploughed a massive furrow into the trees far below.

‘Perhaps I should have thought that through,’ he admitted.

‘I forgive you, my lord,’ said Dolmetis. ‘I am sure the warriors we left stationed on the Icemere will be equally understanding. When they dry out.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Theuderis seized a beastman by the throat as it swung a hatchet at his head. The axeblade glanced ineffectually from the side of his helm. He snapped its neck and used the corpse to swat away an ungor that was trying to ram a dagger into the back of his knee.

‘Attaxes, let us up the tempo of this dance. Signal stormfall. Voltaran! It is time to bring the hammerstrike.’

As the rising notes passed along the line, the Stormcast Eternals battling the horde of gors broke from the fight, retreating from the enemy with swifts steps. Stunned, the beastmen scrambled away or milled about, unsure whether to retreat or attack. Behind the melee ranks, the Judicators did likewise, falling back before the oncoming rush of monsters and bestigors. Their Primes shouting out swift commands, the two lines passed through each other and turned, smoothly swapping positions.

Now the bray-shamans attacked, and a horde of beastmen and spawn found itself hurtling towards a bristling line of hammers, axes and glaives, shimmering with celestial heat. The Judicators unleashed their projectiles into the gors and ungors fleeing up the mountain, scything them down in a hail of crackling bolts and eruptions.

In the midst of this, Voltaran held aloft his icon.

‘Lord of the Celestial Realm, heed our call,’ the Knight-Vexillor shouted. ‘God-King, saviour, avenger, let free your wrath upon these cursed beasts!’

The gilded lightning strikes that tipped his standard started to glow, turning from shining gold to a bright, pale blue. A fierce wind swirled upwards, ripping trees bodily from the ground and hurling them into the sky. Above, stormclouds boiled into existence, dark and low, seething with celestial energy. The beastmen and their leaders cowered beneath this display of divine might.

Attaxes let forth a refrain from his clarion. The noise rose in volume, swiftly becoming a deafening call to arms. It reached a crescendo and crashed like thunder, a shockwave of power exploding from the Stormcast. The wall of sound sped out, churning mud, cadavers, splintered trees and ice. When it hit the beastmen it lifted them from their feet and skewered them with broken branches. The wind hurled the survivors into each other, tossed them into tree trunks and sent the ragdoll carcasses spinning and skidding across the rough earth.

Just as the peal of thunder dissipated, the storm cloud burst into violent life, raining down strike after strike, every bolt centred on a mutated Chaos creature. Dozens of blasts fell in a matter of a few heartbeats, blinding in their intensity. Celestial power crawled across the ground like a tide of serpents, writhing up the shattered trunks of the trees and coiling tentacle-fashion around the legs of Chaos spawn as if to drag them down.

Theuderis strode into the fire and bolts with his Paladins at his back and flung out his hammer, casting it into the air in a looping arc. It thudded into the ground not far from the bray-shamans, who were berating their bestigors, trying to restore some semblance of control after the fury of the storm.

‘Let the hammer of kings strike!’ the Lord-Celestant bellowed, drawing his runesword, the pommel and blade etched with symbols that were the bane of Chaos. His thrown hammer shook with a life of its own, sending out sparks and fronds of blue lightning that fizzed across the ground.

The Stormcast Eternals advanced. Another blaze of power erupted above. The strikes did not lance towards the foe, but this time were met by streaks of energy leaping out from Theuderis’ hammer.

Where they touched, a Stormcast Eternal appeared, fresh and ready for battle, Liberators bearing great axes and swords, or short warblades and shields.

Flash after flash, the tempest grew in magnitude with every heartbeat until the smoke-shrouded clearing reaped by the Stormcasts was bathed in blue light and filled with giant soldiers. An entire Redeemer Conclave burst into existence in the midst of the foe, reserves from the Celestial Realm that Theuderis had been waiting for the right moment to summon.

At their heart the cloud descended for a moment, a funnel of darkness and lightning touching down with a crack of thunder. Another Stormcast Eternal materialised in its heart. His armour was black, and wrought into the plates were bones that glowed with celestial energy. His helm-mask was fashioned in the shape of a skull, its eyes gleaming with a cold red light.

In one hand the Stormcast Eternal bore a massive hammer, a silver thunderbolt trailing from its head. In the other hand he bore a huge staff, not unlike the standards of the Knights-Vexillor. Its head was no icon of the Silverhands, but an open sarcophagus. The bones within were bound with shroud and corpse-tatters, its dead eye sockets filled with the same scarlet energy as the bearer.

Lord-Relictor Glavius, lodestone of the power celestial, guardian and champion of the Silverhands.

Still wreathed in the last vapours of his summoning, Glavius lifted his hammer high. The head started to glow, channelling cosmic energy from the raging storm above until it shone like a star. The Lord-Relictor thrust the hammer towards the beastmen and lightning leapt across the gap, slicing through their depleted ranks.

‘Glory to the God-King!’ Theuderis roared.

The Silverhands charged.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Stormcast Eternals thrust as a white spear into the dark innards of the beastmen army. Wherever they struck, the creatures of Chaos fell. The freshly arrived Redeemer Conclave formed the point of the spear, already in the midst of the enemy. They drove onwards through gors and bestigors, those armed with grandhammers and grandblades at the forefront, hewing into the enemy with their double-handed weapons. After them came the Liberators with warblades and sigmarite shields, guarding the flanks and backs of their brethren in the vanguard, cutting down any that survived their assault. Lord-Relictor Glavius walked in their midst, urging them on to the greatest effort, blanketing them in the energies of the Celestial Realm.

On their heels advanced Stormcast Eternals with paired warhammers or dual-warblades, spreading out from the incision made by the assault formation, widening the breach for Theuderis and his warriors to exploit.

Hound packs, mutated wolves and centigors tried to evade the oncoming attack, peeling away from the blasted clearing into the thicker woods to the left. Samat and the other Knights-Azyros followed them, darting between the trees with inhuman speed and skill, the rest of the Angelos Conclave following swiftly behind.

Theuderis did not look back, trusting to the Judicators to finish off any threat from the rear. As he ran he pointed his sword towards the cabal of bray-shamans.

‘Pierce the heart and the body will die,’ he commanded.

Out of desperation more than bravery the beastmen were rallying against the attack. Several score of bestigors had survived the tempestuous assault of celestial energy. Snarling and bleating, they held their ground between the oncoming Stormcasts and their masters, presenting a thicket of spears, axes and shields. Several bullgors that had fled from the earlier counter-attack returned from the darkness, bloody with wounds but still formidable. A few mindless spawn and writhing mutants flopped and scampered along the periphery, hauling bloated carcasses towards the gleaming ranks of the Stormcasts, smaller creatures chittering and shrieking, leaping and gambolling through the burning trunks and felled trees.

Theuderis felt the air around him changing, the ground underfoot shifting. At first he feared another earthquake, but he soon realised that the sensation was something far more supernatural.

The bray-shamans were summoning the power of Ghur, dredging it from the deepest earth and draining it from the trees. The magical energy coiled like a trapped serpent, the corruption of Chaos bubbling through its loops, polluting and blackening where it spread. The trees surrounding the fire-ravaged clearing started to sway with violent life, their bark blistering with sores that spat hissing gobbets of acidic sap while grasping root appendages thrust from the mulch-covered earth to snare and trip.

The ground became boggier, sucking at Theuderis’ feet as he reached the bullgors. Almost losing his footing, he brought up his runeblade just in time to meet the downward arc of an axehead the size of his breastplate. The metal of the bullgor’s weapon shattered against the sigmarite of the Lord-Celestant’s. Shards of iron slashed into the enormous beastman’s flesh and pinged from the Stormcast’s armour. Grunting in surprise, the bullgor stepped back, but not far enough to elude the tip of Theuderis’ blade, which found the creature’s throat a moment later.

Dragging his boot free from the mud, drenched in the congealing blood of the brutish monster, Theuderis pressed on. His Paladins to either side laid into the bestigors, bullheads and Chaos spawn heedless of the poor ground underfoot, overcoming the worsening conditions with raw strength.

Across the furious din of battle, the Lord-Celestant heard a disturbing, ululating cry. It emanated from the bray-shamans, and echoed back in strange ways from the surrounding trees. Increasing in pitch and intensity, the call stirred up the polluted Ghurite energy frothing around the beast army, sending it soaring into the sky like a fountain. Here it met Sigmar’s Tempest, and began pushing back the celestial clouds to disperse across the forest.

Theuderis had no idea what this spell boded, but he was determined to win victory before the consequences made themselves apparent. His force had joined with the Liberators of Glavius, dividing the beast army into two almost equal parts. To the eyes of the beastmen, it must have seemed as though the Stormcasts had allowed themselves to be surrounded. Grunting and roaring orders, the gors and bray-shamans sent all of their forces into the attack.

Above the throng of hairy, deformed bodies flew tattered and patched banners, and grim standards of bone and wood. Held aloft by the fiercest warriors of the assembled warherds, these standards became the focal points of the attack, leading the beasts directly to Theuderis’ host. Every ungor, gor and bestigor threw itself at the Stormcasts, trying to break the line of ivory and blue. Though there was little guile to the attack, the feral intensity of the Chaos-born beasts threatened breakthroughs at several points. Though not classic strategists, the leaders of the beastherds could sense areas of weakness and threw themselves into the fighting with ferocious bellows. The battlefield shook with the crash of weapons and shouts from both sides, bestial howls competing with the sonorous war-chants of the Silverhands.

‘Blade of the Triumphant, Purifier formation,’ Theuderis told Attaxes, judging that the moment had arrived to deliver the killing blow.

The Knight-Heraldor’s trumpet signalled clean and clear through the cacophony of war. Hearing its command, the Silverhands acted as one. Paladins and Redeemer Conclaves moved through each other, while the Judicators guarding the rear fell back to join the rest of the army. All the while fending off the savage assault of the beastmen, the Knights Excelsior formed into a kind of wheel, with the Judicator Conclaves as the hub and the other Stormcasts spearing out like axle-blades, each two rows of warriors back to back.

The wheel started to rotate, the Stormcast Eternals keeping in perfect step whether moving forwards or backwards. Missiles and lightning bolts flared from the centre while the Stormcasts cut down everything before them. With warriors in front and behind, the beastmen were thrown into anarchy once more, unsure where to direct their attacks. Unable to simply hold position against the relentlessly advancing ‘spokes’, the beastmen were either pushed to the centre where they fell to the missile fire, caught by the swords, glaives and hammers of the Silverhands, or forced to try to break free.

The Stormcasts’ formation slowly moved across the clearing, pace by pace. The warriors stepped over and past burning logs and piles of dead beastmen, weapons still swinging, the whole army functioning as a single perfect machine.

A raucous screech from above drew Theuderis’ gaze away from the righteous carnage. His eye was drawn immediately to the large shape swooping down through the break in the celestial storm. Tendrils of Ghurite energy trailed from its leathery wings and sword-long claws. Evidently the magical call of the bray-shamans had attracted it from its hunting ground further up the slopes. More winged shapes in the distance betrayed the approach of other creatures that had also heard the summoning cry.

‘Manticores!’ he shouted, heart sinking. His warriors were in no position to defend themselves from an aerial attack, but to change formation now, in the heart of the enemy’s force, would be equally disastrous. He glanced at Attaxes. ‘Signal for the Angelos, now!’

Attaxes had raised his clarion but before a single note had been sounded a light streaked across the sky. Theuderis’ eyes adjusted to see a winged figure in armour of turquoise, a rainbow-coloured bird at its shoulder, a golden bow in hand.

Even as Attaxes sounded the alarm, the newcomer’s wings flared with a thunderous crack that could be heard on the ground, bringing him to an instant halt. He loosed a single bolt from his weapon. The missile blazed across the sky, a comet trailing white and blue fire.

The star-fated arrow struck the descending manticore full in the chest, becoming an inferno of colours that engulfed the monster with licking flames. The diving beast was quickly consumed by the fireball, thrashing and howling in pain as it disappeared from view and crashed into the forest some distance away.

Samat and the rest of the Angelos Conclave raced from the trees, abandoning their pursuit at Attaxes’ signal. The newly arrived Knight-Venator met with the Knight-Azyros and a moment later was directed groundwards while the Knights-Azyros and Prosecutors turned to face the following monsters.

Theuderis’ made his way back along the line of Paladins, allowing himself to be absorbed by the Judicators at the centre. There was a space two dozen paces across in the heart of their formation and into this gap dropped the Knight-Venator.

The Stormcast’s appearance confirmed Theuderis’ guess – a warrior of the Celestial Vindicators, doubtless a Warbeast despatched by Arkas. The Lord-Celestant feared the worst, unsure what the warrior’s appearance foreshadowed, and spoke before any introduction was made.

‘How fares your master? Do the Warbeasts still fight on?’

‘To the best of my knowledge, Lord Silverhand,’ the Knight-Venator replied, taken aback by the demanding tone of the Lord-Celestant. ‘He fares better than you, I would wager.’

‘What purpose brings you here, Warbeast?’ Theuderis had little time for jest, and this was certainly no occasion for levity. ‘You distract me from the course of battle.’

‘I am Hastor, Knight-Venator of the Lord Warbeast,’ the other Stormcast said formerly, giving a slight bow as he furled his wings. His star-eagle settled on a nearby bestigor corpse and started plucking at its exposed innards. ‘I bear a warning from my lord.’

‘A warning?’ Theuderis wondered what further strife could befall his host. Since arriving in Ursungorod they had been beset by misfortunate and enemies at every step.

‘Yes, Lord Silverhand. Lord Arkas wishes you to know that the skaven have stirred a great alliance of beasts against us and they are setting ready for ambush in the forests.’ He looked around and shrugged. ‘I apologise for the untimely nature of this news...’

Theuderis was about to deliver a rebuke but stayed his tongue. This was his first encounter with his new allies and it would bode poorly for the relationship if he started it with chastisement. He had to accept that the warning had been sent in earnest, and that Hastor was simply attending to his duty as he had been commanded. Hastor was forthright in his manner, but the Celestial Vindicators, and the Warbeasts in particular, had a reputation for less-than-perfect discipline. He chose his reply carefully, mindful that his words and deeds might soon be reported back to Arkas and his warriors.

‘Thank you, Hastor. Though your skills as herald are lacking, your warrior-craft is not. You dealt with that manticore in admirable fashion.’ He purposefully turned to survey the ongoing battle. As they spoke, the two warriors moved along with the Judicators, unconsciously keeping station with the whole formation. ‘I regret that I cannot offer you a reply to Lord Arkas at the moment. My attention is keenly needed elsewhere.’

‘As is my bow,’ said Hastor, glancing to the flights of warriors closing on the griffons, manticores and other monstrous creatures aloft. ‘My lord’s other message will wait a while, I’m certain. With your permission, Lord Silverhand?’

‘Knight-Azyros Samat is Angelos-Prime,’ said Theuderis. ‘I am grateful for your bow, Hastor.’

The Knight-Venator said nothing else and sprang into the air. A whistle summoned his star-eagle to follow and in a matter of moments they were another colourful blur amongst the many soaring across the cloudy vault of the sky.

Theuderis lifted his sword, the runes flashing with renewed celestial energy. The Judicators parted at his approach, allowing him to rejoin the fight.

‘No beast lives past nightfall!’ he declared, hacking his way towards the bray-shamans with renewed intent. ‘Sigmar God-King expects nothing less.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Black River had always been named for its dark waters, not just murky but as black as pitch. Even after many lifetimes, its inky depths were unchanged. It bubbled and frothed between dozens of jutting pillars that had once held aloft the roofs of a great palace, the walls and floor also long since consumed by the torrent. The blackness of the water was deceiving, obscuring the speed with which it moved – too fast even for a Stormcast to forge across. The Celestial Vindicators were thus forced to follow the old road that ran beside it – though it was not so much a road as the remains of an old mosaic-covered floor that had been thrown up by the convulsions of Ursungorod, laid out before Arkas like a carpet set before an arriving dignitary. The broken tiles were slick with river mud and water plants, but made for surer footing than the sheer ice that stretched for miles to either side as they approached the central uplands.

From ahead a shape descended quickly. Arkas recognised Venian, his Prosecutor-Prime.

‘A stranger approaches, my lord.’ There was something odd in Venian’s tone, as if this event was more worrying to the Prosecutor-Prime than the coming of a flight of dragons.

‘A stranger? A very particular choice of word,’ replied Arkas.

‘I can think of no other.’ The flying warrior landed next to his Lord-Celestant and fell into step with him as they continued along the path. ‘A woman of the tribes. Armed with bow and spear, and armoured in scale, wearing a cloak of white fur.’

‘And how does she “approach”, Venian? What do you mean?’

‘She crosses the snow drifts ahead, directly towards us.’

‘And she saw you?’

‘She raised a fist in salute, my lord.’

Arkas pondered this for a few strides.

‘Alone, you say? Are you sure?’

‘The ice field ahead is expansive, my lord, and devoid of much cover,’ Venian said, his tone slightly clipped with indignation.

‘She bore no marks of the Dark Gods? No mutation or symbols?’

‘I would have reported such, my lord,’ said the Prosecutor-Prime, growing increasingly vexed by his commander’s questions. ‘Unless she possesses unprecedented and hidden mystical abilities, I do not think she is a threat.’

‘That’s what confuses me,’ admitted Arkas. He shook his head. ‘I resigned myself to the fact that my people were no more, slain or fallen to Chaos worship. Now you tell me that a woman approaches, unmarked by the Dark Gods, which suggests that there are yet some that still resist the skaven and their allies. Your report stirs hope where I had none. Its loss would be a fresh wound.’

‘It seems your hope is not misplaced, my lord. Her trail across the snow was simple to follow for a while, though it petered out eventually. She has been heading directly towards us for the better part of a day. She is seeking us out, I wager my reputation on it. How she can know of us or where we travel I cannot say.’

Arkas looked up and gestured with his hammer. Across the river there were dark specks moving over the clouds – crows and other carrion eaters. They had been growing in number since the Celestial Vindicators had descended to the lower slopes, having quickly learnt that the Stormcasts would provide ample pickings.

‘In my days as a mortal there were those that could speak with the birds and the beasts.’ He thought of Radomira, a reader of bird sign, and remembered the times she would have a raven or hawk or finch upon her wrist, woman and bird cawing and chirping intently to each other. ‘If there were survivors of the alliance, if their descendants still strive for freedom, such secrets might still be known.’

‘Not only by potential allies,’ said Venian. ‘Such spies could serve our enemies also, my lord.’

‘I have been counting on it,’ said Arkas. ‘Do not forget our part in this campaign. We are the rod that attracts the lightning. We will stir the Chaos followers and skaven from their camps and holes and bring them to us, so that Theuderis and his Knights Excelsior can lay the vengeance of Sigmar down upon them with their arrival. We shall be the bait that draws the serpent’s strike, the Silverhands the blade that severs its head.’

The path veered away from the bank, moving around a block of stone mounted on the bank of the river. On its worn surface could still be seen faint markings – duardin runes worn nearly smooth by the elements. Even so, Arkas could read them, running his fingers over the faint indentations.

‘A mile marker,’ he said aloud. ‘A day’s marching to another duardin city, though long ago it was swallowed by the glacier we called meshka kozia. The Bear’s Pelt. The city lies beneath the ice field you have just come back from.’

‘It has been swallowed deep then, my lord,’ said Venian. ‘We saw no sign of tower, gate or wall.’

A thought occurred to Arkas and he turned, his gaze seeking out his Knight-Vexillor. Dolmetis followed a hundred paces behind with a guard of Decimators and Retributors. Seeing that his lord required him, the standard bearer hurried forwards, his icon gripped in both hands.

‘A new command to the chamber, Dolmetis,’ said Arkas, as soon as the Knight-Vexillor was within earshot. ‘We leave the river and head across the ice field.’

‘Towards the stranger?’ asked Venian.

‘Of course. I’m sure she has something important to tell us. We shan’t make her labour longer than necessary.’ Arkas leaned closer, placing a hand on the shoulder of the Prosecutor-Prime. ‘You assured me she was no threat, yes? You staked your reputation on it. Let us see what that is worth.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The dark cavern stank of human sweat and fear. Felk breathed in deeply, whiskers trembling with delight. The captives huddled naked in their rope bonds, most kneeling or sitting, some lying down from weakness. There were four hundred in total, eyes wide with fear, shaking with cold and hunger. The Poxmaster rubbed spindly hands together as he paced back and forth, examining his prizes.

‘Good-good meat,’ said Felk, addressing nobody in particular. ‘Good tribute, yes-yes. Great Horned Rat touched you, yes-yes. Honoured, to become the flesh of the Great Witherer. Dismal feast will be grand, grander than all before. Gaze of the Great Horned Rat be upon the Withering Canker. Felk will rise, yes-yes, rise past all, even Skixakoth. Not to fat rotting god will life-woods fall. To the children of the Horned Rat, to the Clans Pestilens, to the Withering Canker. Plague and pox and pustule, yes-yes, the flesh of the life-queen will crawl with gifts of Pestilens.’

The cluster of pale faces stared up at him in horror as the prisoners recoiled from his presence, shifting like a single organism to avoid being in the Poxmaster’s vicinity as he stalked back and forth, staff clacking on the stone floor. In the light of the warp-lamps, their skin seemed so white, so smooth and pale, and their eyes, glistening with tears, were almost good enough to pluck out and swallow right there.

Felk fought back against the urge.

‘Not for now. For dismal feast, yes-yes.’ He stopped and leaned on his staff, peering down at the captives, broken claws tapping an arrhythmic tattoo on the twisted wood. He inspected the closest specimens, finding on each one some mark of the Great Horned Rat – a wart or cluster of boils, a suppurating lesion or weeping sore, cataract or rash.

‘Chosen, yes-yes. You will be punished. Great Horned One has taken blessing from you, bad-bad man-things. Roast and boil and spitted, for the dismal feast your bones broken, such crispy skin, flesh purged of evil and devoured for Blessed Plague of Plagues.’

Drool flowed as Felk imagined the eating pits filled with the meat of his sacrifices. One of the captives started to moan and others broke into sobs, their despair a virus that spread quickly through the craven mass until all were crying and groaning. Some wailed with lament, clawing at their hair and skin.

‘Stop-stop!’ snapped Felk, claws and tail shaking violently.

The temptation was too much, he had to turn away. Skarth, whose spitevermin ringed the cave, approached a few steps. He said nothing but jerked his head towards the entrance to the chamber. Thriss lurked in the shadows, hands wringing close to his chest.

The gutter runner’s demeanour punctured Felk’s good mood, concern sweeping away his anticipation of the dismal feast. With an irritated wave Felk commanded Thriss to enter.

The gutter runner sidled up to his employer, head held low, tail limp. The Poxmaster had never seen Thriss so subordinate and he instantly suspected trickery.

‘Stay-stay there,’ Felk snapped, prodding the gutter runner with his staff to force him back several paces. Thriss complied without resistance, heightening Felk’s suspicion.

‘Bad-bad news, legendary Poxmaster,’ began Thriss, head bobbing in deference. ‘Makargas. The Beast-caller... ‘

‘Yes-yes? Demanding higher price? Treachery?’

‘Is dead-dead.’

Felk shrugged. ‘Not problem for us.’

‘All beasts dead. Metal giants kill-kill Makargas and all beasts.’

The Poxmaster thought he had misheard for a moment.

‘Beast army dead? All dead?’

Thriss nodded and bared yellowing fangs. He shifted from one foot to the other and back, unable to hold still any longer.

‘Metal giants bring magic and fire. Much-much magic.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Star magic, power of storm and sun!’

This news sent a fresh shudder of fear through Felk. He had heard tales – many of them from Thriss, it was true – regarding a new foe that had been seen throughout the many realms. They were carried on a dire storm, relentless and merciless. Several clans had been wiped out and terrified survivors of others had fled back to the Blight City with stories of indestructible armies and warriors that rode lightning.

‘Is true-true?’ Felk’s gaze flicked around the room, from Thriss to the slaves to Skarth and back again, suddenly wary of everything. ‘Very bad-bad for us.’

‘For you...’ Thriss corrected him. The Eshin agent took another step back as though physical distance would spare him any consequences of their association.

‘Us-us!’ hissed Felk. He crooked a finger towards Skarth, beckoning him closer. Thriss sidestepped at the larger skaven’s approach, the gutter runner’s hands hovering close to the dagger hilts jutting from his belt. ‘Fangleader, what is our contract, my will-will?’

‘Power to the Withered Canker. Foes slain.’ The fangleader looked pointedly at Thriss. ‘Revenge in death.’

‘What about gate?’ said the gutter runner, eyes narrowing.

‘Metal giants come for gate, must be true-true,’ said Felk. ‘Not chance we find gate and star-born army comes to Whiteworld Above. Dig-dig faster. More slaves. Pay warpstone to man-things, beast-things, all-things. Kill-kill metal giants first.’

‘What if star army comes here?’ said Thriss.

‘We fight,’ replied Skarth.

It took all of Felk’s self-control not to release a squirt of musk at the thought. The moment passed and he looked at the slave-sacrifices. His resolved hardened and his grip on his staff tightened.

‘Too close-close to fail. Gate is ours! Glory to the Withered Canker! Must be ready for fight. For war.’ He waved a staff towards the slaves. ‘Dismal feast not wait! Tonight we honour Great Horned Rat with offerings. Prepare the meat.’

As Felk departed, Thriss following a few steps behind, Skarth signalled to his spitevermin. The ring of warriors readied their rust-spotted weapons and closed on the humans.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Though the shadows were long, the Knights Excelsior were equal to Theuderis’ demand. After the crash and shrill clamour of battle, the forested slopes fell to deathly silence, only the crackle of flames to break the stillness.

Theuderis walked amongst the dead – the corpses of foes, of course. A number of his Stormcasts had been undone, overpowered by hulking Chaos brutes or outnumbered and dragged down. They had been taken back to the Celestial Realm to be reforged again. It was a strange experience, to survey the carnage of the fighting and yet not know the true cost he had paid until his Primes reported.

‘I am not altogether sure that I like it,’ he told Attaxes, who had been at his shoulder since the arrival of Glavius’ conclave.

‘Like what, my lord?’

‘The emptiness.’

‘There is plenty to see,’ said Attaxes, stepping over the remains of a centigor, its head cleaved to the chin. He pointedly turned over the body of another, its hind legs flopping where they had been mangled by a hammer blow. ‘Much to be happy about.’

‘Do you not find it unsettling, Attaxes? When you were mortal, before you ascended, you were a general, yes?’

‘A Sinistran Legation Commandant, in the Westering Marshes, in the Realm of Shadows. Is that important?’

‘And you walked many battlefields as we do now.’

‘Thirty-eight battles I fought, thirty-seven I won before the poisoned wind of the skaven nearly took me and Sigmar ascended my spirit.’

‘Were you never moved by the bodies of those that had fallen under your command? Did their loss mean nothing?’

‘It meant everything. On their shades I swore each time to bring vengeance for their sacrifice.’

‘Exactly! How do we remember the lost if they are not truly gone? I have lost many warriors today, but they are not dead. What does that mean?’

‘It is not for us to count the cost any longer.’ This came from Theuderis’ left, where Lord-Relictor Glavius approached, his war-plate as bloodied as his lord’s. The icon he held was dormant now, as was the hammer in his fist. The bones of his reliquary seemed just that – dead bones strapped into a metal coffin.

‘But there is a cost,’ Theuderis replied.

‘Only to them,’ said Glavius, pointing with his hammer at the hundreds of dead beastmen. ‘That is the only tally of merit. When the enemy are all dead, the battle is won, not before. That is why the Lord Sigmar takes the fallen from us. Their loss should not trouble your thoughts, until your thoughts cannot be troubled any longer.’

‘You wield the power celestial,’ said Attaxes. ‘What do you know of the Reforging? Truly?’

‘No more than you,’ Glavius admitted with a reluctant shake of the head. ‘When a Stormcast passes beyond the veil of the mortal and back to the Celestial Realm, he passes from my sight also. If the God-King chooses to pass a little of his blessing through me on occasion, that is all I can hope for. To kill or heal, two equally potent powers, yet neither the greater over the other.’

A shout from one of the Liberators drew their attention. The Stormcast Eternal stood near a pile of ungor bodies, which were heaped like a curving wall. Theuderis realised it was the spot where he had left Tyrathrax and hurried over.

‘What is it?’

The Liberator gestured in reply, indicating the dracoth half buried under the bodies, the remains of a small beastman still clamped in her jaws, scales slick with their vile blood. The sight was difficult, a reminder that perhaps it was better not to see the remains of one’s companions. He knelt down and held out a hand to stroke the beast’s gore-covered neck, aware of the shadows of Attaxes and Glavius falling over him.

Tyrathrax twitched, an eye opening to stare at Theuderis.

‘She lives...’ He stood up, as stunned as though dealt a blow. ‘She slew many and their corpses hid her from vengeful foes.’

‘Only just,’ said Glavius, pushing aside the mound of corpses with a booted foot. This exposed the cuts and gashes along the flanks of the dracoth, her hide rent in many places, armour broken and buckled. ‘I feel the celestial power leeching from her. The darkness of death beckons her spirit back to the stars.’

Theuderis stood up, eyes still on Tyrathrax. ‘Can you save her?’

Glavius looked between lord and dracoth several times, though whether doubtful of his ability or duty was unclear.

Glavius planted the haft of his icon in the pile of dead, spearing it through the corpses into the ground. He reached out and a star of celestial energy appeared in his fist, the energy leaking through his fingers in golden rays.

‘Stand back,’ he warned them before kneeling beside the quivering form of Tyrathrax. He looked back at Theuderis. ‘She has but moments left. I make no promises.’

‘There are no guarantees in matters of life and death,’ the Lord-Celestant replied.

Nodding, Glavius returned his attention to the dracoth. He laid a hand on the side of her head, whispering calming words, and placed the sphere of shining energy upon her exposed chest, nestling it into a wound just above the heart.

‘Almighty God-King, father of war, guider of the lost. Send forth your power to this loyal servant that I might bring your light to others. All that fall in your name are worthy of your mercy and your blessing. Unto the anvil as metal, unto the battle remade.’

Glavius stood and grabbed his hammer in both hands. Theuderis could not stop a reflexive step forwards as the Lord-Relictor swung with all of his might. The hammer crashed into the spark of celestial power. A thrust of lightning crashed down from above. The impact sent Glavius staggering back and the resultant explosion engulfed the nearby Stormcasts, blinding them for several heartbeats.

When Theuderis’ vision cleared he could see tendrils of energy crawling across the body of the dracoth, sparking in her eyes, flaring from exposed fangs. It moved like a living thing, like a flame along paper, but where it touched it did not destroy but remade. Bones healed, flesh knitted, scales regrew. Plates of armour straightened, rents in the sigmarite flattened and joined together.

With a growl, the dracoth rolled to her feet. The globe of celestial power fell to the ground, much dimmed. Glavius picked it up, turning it this way and that as though examining the mote of power for damage.

‘Welcome back,’ said Theuderis, as Tyrathrax pushed herself up, shaking free dried blood and dead scales with a toss of her head. ‘There is still much fighting to be done.’

The dracoth gave an appreciative growl and lowered to the ground, inviting Theuderis to climb into the saddle upon her back. Her tail whipped in excitement.

‘My lord?’

Theuderis turned before he mounted to see the Knight-Venator Hastor descending. The Lord-Celestant raised an arm to beckon him.

‘You had another message from your lord,’ said Theuderis.

‘I did, and he bade me repeat it exactly.’ The knight paused for a breath before receiving a nod to continue. ‘I have entreated the aid of... a local power. The skaven are unearthing the realmgate in the depths of Ursungorod. They are close to activating it. Hastor bears warning of an ambush, but I fear he will be too late. I trust you will survive, and no matter what manner of force you lead afterwards you must make all haste to the rendezvous. We have no time to spare.’

‘What power does your lord speak of?’

‘Power?’ Hastor understood Theuderis’ meaning after some thought. ‘Ah, I see. She is a sorceress, the Queen of the Peak. Or was.’

‘Was a sorceress? What do you mean?’

‘I do not know the whole tale, Lord Silverhand. She has dwelt in Ursungorod since Arkas’ mortal life. She was an ally of my commander when he was known as Arka Bear-clad.’

‘What manner of aid did she give? What sorcery?’

‘I do not know, Lord Silverhand.’ The Knight-Venator shrugged. ‘Lord Arkas sent me soon after and none but he passed into her tower. I believe he received a warning of the attack, amongst other information.’

‘What do you know of a realmgate beneath Ursungorod?’

‘Nothing, Lord Silverhand. I left my commander at the tower of the Queen of the Peak as his army made camp on a frozen lake called Icemere. What has happened since, what my lord saw, is beyond my sight.’

‘Of course,’ said Theuderis. ‘What were your orders once this message had been delivered?’

‘Unfortunately, Lord Silverhand, in his haste I believe Lord Arkas overlooked that necessity. I am, for the moment, at your service. Do you wish me to return to the Warbeasts?’

Theuderis thought about this as he pulled himself up onto Tyrathrax’s back. The dracoth growled contentedly under the familiar weight.

‘Remain with Knight Samat and his Angelos Conclave for the time being. I will compose a reply to the Warbeast for you to take.’

Hastor accepted this judgement with a slight bow. He waited in silence for a few heartbeats longer.

‘You may go.’

‘I am obliged, Lord Silverhand,’ the Celestial Vindicator replied with a further bow. His star-eagle had been sitting in the branch of a burnt-out tree above. It let out a long screech and swooped down, reaching its master just as his wings snapped into streamers of light and lifted him skywards.

‘These Warbeasts are strange warriors,’ said Attaxes. ‘They stand on ceremony yet I hear they are also ill-disciplined and swift-tempered.’

‘I do not like this talk of native sorceresses,’ Theuderis told the Knight-Heraldor and Glavius. ‘Ursungorod has been under the yoke of Chaos for centuries, the taint runs deep. There is no power here that is good, save the power of Sigmar that we bring with us.’

‘I am sure that Lord Arkas is beyond any corruption,’ Glavius said quickly, misunderstanding Theuderis’ meaning.

‘Of course, he is Stormcast,’ the Lord-Celestant replied. ‘His heart and spirit I do not doubt. His wit and wisdom, on the other hand, might be all too easily swayed by the wrong notions. The God-King knows best his own strategy, but I would not have sent a commander as unpredictable as the Warbeast back to his home realm. We have only a single purpose here, the liberation of the realmgate.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Attaxes. ‘All other considerations are secondary.’

‘There are no other considerations.’ Theuderis leaned closer to Glavius. ‘Speak with Samat, have him discuss with Hastor the surest route to the rendezvous. And get him to find out all he can about the Warbeast and this sorceress from the Knight-Venator. I do not like mysteries. I expect a full account by nightfall.’

‘Yes, my lord, as you will it.’ The Lord-Relictor bowed and withdrew to the other Knights Excelsior.

‘I overheard the Warbeast’s message, my lord,’ said Attaxes. ‘He seemed insistent that we proceed with haste.’

‘Indeed. Form column, Javelin formation, ready to depart at my command.’

The Knight-Heraldor had his clarion lifted even as he turned away. Soon the notes of the command call pealed across the devastated forest. Theuderis watched as his retinues fell into line, five files wide, with the Justicars at the tip, the other Stormcast taking the inner places behind their missile weapons. It was a fragile formation, able to move at speed and negotiate rough terrain with ease, but it left his army strung out over some distance.

Looking at the ground scattered with hundreds of beastmen corpses and the carcasses of manticores, griffons, gargants and Chaos spawn, he knew the risk of another attack was minimal.

‘Judgement awaits!’ he cried. At a tap from his heels, Tyrathrax broke into a run, taking him to the head of the column. He galloped on. ‘Swift justice!’

The Stormcast Eternals broke into a run as Theuderis continued into the forest, their long strides covering the ground with speed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Even surrounded by Prosecutors circling like hungry eagles, their hammers and javelins burning with celestial light, the woman looked remarkably calm. She was older than Arkas had expected, nearly sixty he would have guessed, though she held herself straight and showed no infirmity. The tribal elder, for such she had to be in the estimation of the Lord-Celestant, was short even for a mortal, no taller than his hammer was long. The bow in her hand was of bone and wood, recurved in the style of the ussra valley riders of the north, though the sword in her other hand was straight and double-edged in the manner of the kimmeri warriors from the ice caves above the Bear’s Pelt. Her cloak was from a black-and-grey ice bear, trimmed and tied with leather thongs. The fangs of her necklace were delicately carved with lettering, distorted over many years from the forms that Arka had used, but still readable.

‘Whose names do you wear?’ he asked in the old language, pointing to the inscribed teeth. ‘Your mothers’?’

She started, eyes showing surprise for the first time since the huge warriors had marched into view across the flat stretch of ice that became the Bear’s Pelt glacier. The stranger had stopped and waited for them, weapons bared but held at her sides. Arkas had recognised it not as an act of defence or aggression but one of trust – a tribal custom that declared ‘Here I am, I hide nothing’.

‘You speak as we?’ she said as she recovered from the shock. Her speech was oddly inflected but not so different from the tongue the Bear-clad had shared with the other tribes. She glanced down at her necklace. ‘Yes, mothers and mothers’ sisters.’

The woman had been staring at Arkas since he had approached, her brown eyes soft in colour but unflinching. Now she looked away to glance at the other Stormcasts before returning her stare to the Lord-Celestant.

‘You are the warriors of the tempest.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘Soldiers of the heavens.’

‘We are...’ Arkas struggled to find the terms that would explain how they had been mortals once but had now been made into something deadlier. ‘We are tempest-born, servants of Sigmar the God-King. We were men once.’

He lifted away his mask to show the flesh beneath. The woman smiled and nodded.

‘Yes, I see that the birds spoke the truth,’ she said with an assured nod. ‘I am Katiya Gospor and I have been waiting for you since I was a child.’

‘How can that be?’ He replaced his mask, the chill breeze on bare, ravaged flesh making him feel exposed without it.

‘Of tempest-warriors I know nothing. But I have had dreams for many years. Of a bearded king who once ruled. Others did not listen – they said I was touched to believe the legends were anything but stories. But I knew. I knew. Arka the Uniter would return.’

Stunned, Arkas said nothing. Katiya lowered herself to the flat ice and offered her weapons up to the Lord-Celestant.

‘I knew,’ she said again, eyes brimming with emotion. ‘Your army awaits, Bear-clad. I have summoned them for you.’

‘Army?’ Arkas stepped forwards and motioned for Katiya to stand. ‘What army?’

Katiya winked then and raised her fingers to her lips. She let out a piercing whistle that drifted into silence across the emptiness of the ice field. For several heartbeats nothing happened. Then, two hundred paces to the left the ice shifted. It looked as though a boulder rolled aside and suddenly half a dozen men emerged from nowhere, clad in leathers and plate, wielding swords and oval shields. Five more rose up from a mound a little behind them.

The retinues of Stormcasts rearranged themselves instantly, the thud of boots on hard ice and scrape of armour plates the only noise as they executed drill and manoeuvres practised a thousand times in the arena of the Gladitorium. The giant warriors seamlessly moved to form a cordon of weapons between the newcomers and Katiya. An aurora of celestial power from bared blades and cracking hammers shimmered over the host and cast hard shadows across the ice.

Everywhere Arkas looked more men and women seemed to materialise from the ice field. Most were dressed in grey, pale blue and white, with furs and patterned hides that made them seem as much animal as human.

Turning about he guessed that two hundred had revealed themselves already and more were still appearing, rising up from crevasses and cracks, climbing out of openings cut into the ice itself. Twenty heartbeats passed and Katiya’s army numbered at least a thousand, springing into existence like snow devils.

‘Venian?’ Arkas called out. ‘I would have words!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘They ran,’ explained Katiya as she led Arkas between two shoulders of rock. Doridun flanked the Lord-Celestant on the other side, the Protector-Prime, Diocletus, following close with his retinue. ‘They thought you dead, struck down by the sorcery of the daemon-lord. Faced with such power and the unending numbers of the ratkin, the defenders of Kurzengor fled.’

An undercut formed the start of a tunnel that ran steeply into the ice, the pale walls indistinguishable from the rest of the glacier. Led by other guides, the rest of the Warbeasts descended into the hidden settlement – Katiya had been swift and insistent with her demands that the giant warriors did not remain on the surface to attract hostile attention.

‘They would have died, had they remained,’ said Arkas.

‘The stories tell of how they flung down their shields and threw off mail coats to speed away,’ the Ursungoran elder replied. ‘Some, the cursed ones, turned on their own and cut them down.’

‘They hoped to find alliance with the skaven by slaying their allies?’

‘They were already agents of the rat-filth,’ spat Katiya. She looked up at Arkas. ‘Traitors that would strike from within the walls. The legends speak for some time on how they are accursed for eternity and the Uniter would return to revenge himself upon them in many unpleasant ways.’

‘I thought every one of them my brother or sister,’ murmured Arkas. ‘We had spilt and given blood together, shared ale and meat at the fires. It was for nothing?’

Katiya did not reply. She stopped as the tunnel widened, pulled back the hood of her fur coat and had a brief conversation with a young, broad-shouldered warrior waiting for her. He nodded and dashed off into the cavern.

Stepping across the threshold, Arkas suddenly understood how it was that Katiya’s ‘army’ had survived and been able to appear so swiftly. The glacier was riddled with passages and tunnels, dug from bare ice but shored up with duardin-hewn stone. The ceiling of the hall into which he stepped was so low he could almost touch it, but the hollow was easily three hundred paces across, the floor of the open space paved with cracked flagstones. He counted eight more archways leading off, as well as several sets of steps winding further beneath the ice field. Lines of Ursungorans and Stormcasts were emerging from these other tunnels.

‘Amazing,’ said Doridun. ‘A lifetime’s work.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Katiya. Arkas explained.

‘Nineteen,’ she said. ‘Nineteen generations have carved the City of Ice until today.’

‘Nearly four centuries,’ Arkas told his Knight-Heraldor. ‘It is not so long as I thought since Sigmar took me. Ursungorod has not aged lightly in my absence.’

‘Time is a cruel companion,’ replied Doridun. ‘For mortals.’

‘What language do you speak?’ asked Katiya, watching the exchange with wide eyes.

‘It is the language of the celestial sphere, of the God-King and his immortals.’

‘It is like thunder and music at the same time!’ Her brow furrowed. ‘And loud!’

‘It is a tongue for battle, to be heard over the crash of metal and the dying cries of our foes,’ said Arkas, making an effort to speak softly. ‘Our chambers in Sigmaron are vast, so I suppose we do quite a lot of shouting. Just how far does this city stretch?’

‘For nearly the length and breadth of the Bear’s Pelt,’ Katiya said, her back straightening and chest swelling with pride. ‘As grand as the duardin city that came before.’

They crossed the chamber while Arkas’ warriors gathered in their brotherhoods, looking in astonishment at their surroundings. The native warriors drew back from the armoured giants, their expressions displaying disbelief, fear and hope in equal measure.

‘How have you not been discovered? The Pestilentzi must know you are here.’

‘The city is known but we are few enough that we hide when the cursed tribes come. We know the City of Ice and its ways, and we kill those that trespass. A few we allow back to the surface to spread tales of the snow-killers of the ice. The rat-filth do not come and we do not disturb them.’ She smiled with grim determination. ‘Until now, of course. Now we disturb them much.’

‘Are there more of you?’ he asked, looking at the hundreds of men and women crowding into the chamber, faces expectant yet wary. Quite a few had seen as many years as Katiya, and there were few young faces amongst the throng.

‘Some patrols and sentries that keep guard, maybe another hundred,’ Katiya told him. His heart sank a little and she must have noticed.

‘Each is worth ten cursed ones and twenty rat-filth!’ she said.

‘I am sure of it,’ said Arkas. He had been equally sure of it on the walls of Kurzengor. He directed his next words to Doridun, keeping his tone even so as not to betray further disappointment to Katiya. ‘Twelve hundred fighters at most. I had hoped to liberate many more to add numbers to our cause but that is not going to be the case. Send word to Venian, he has a chance to redeem himself. Tell him to seek out Hastor and Theuderis. He will guide them to this place, not the agreed rendezvous. Our foes will surely have marked our progress here. It would be wrong to abandon these people now.’

‘If we depart they will come, my lord,’ said Doridun, looking along the lines of Ursungorans. ‘They have the manner of people that have run and hidden for long enough. They may not be many but they seem capable. They will certainly engage the foe for some time.’

‘Here, on their own territory, defending their homes they may be powerful.’ Arkas took a deep breath. ‘We must venture into the depths of the skaven tunnels and there will be only victory or death, no retreats and ambushes. These are the last of the true people of Ursungorod. The uncorrupted. We came to liberate them, not spend their lives to shield ourselves.’

‘You misunderstand–’ Doridun began but Arkas cut him off with a sharp gesture.

‘No, Knight-Heraldor,’ he said sternly, ‘you misunderstand your commander. Ursungorod will be freed and its true people will repopulate these mountains. Look at them – their strength is diminishing with each generation. If I asked, each would lay down their life – but I cannot ask. Katiya thinks I will lead them to some new age of glory. I cannot lead them into battle and do that at the same time.’

Doridun stepped back and glanced away, towards the other Stormcasts.

‘I will send Venian on his mission, my lord,’ the Knight-Heraldor said stiffly. It was clear he had more to say but was holding his tongue. ‘Do you have orders for the rest of the chamber?’

‘We hold here for the moment,’ Arkas replied. When he said nothing further, Doridun nodded and left. Switching back to the Ursungoran language, Arkas addressed Katiya. ‘When Ursungorod is free, from here its people will rise. Show me your city.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

What the free Ursungorans had built was remarkable, when so many other civilizations had risen and fallen during the turning of the ages. Even if they had not been his people, to Arkas the Ursungorans would still have been as precious as diamonds found in the filthy mire of Chaos. Katiya guided Arkas through barrack-chambers, along tunnels lined with deadfall traps and pits that could waylay pursuers. Cunningly balanced tip-doors and hatches allowed the defenders to redirect the path of an attacking force, built using ancient duardin door mechanisms engineered beyond anything Katiya’s people were capable of.

‘What about food? Forging metal? Clothes?’ the Lord-Celestant asked when she brought him into a living chamber. It was squared with duardin stone slabs but the floor and ceiling were naked ice, with columns formed from thick icicles. Fur mattresses and pillows were scattered in small groups where families slept, and rough planks were used as shelves for a small assortment of jugs, pots and trinkets. The chamber was uninhabited for the moment, sparse and cold, but Arkas could remember far less comfortable and homely abodes from when his people had roamed the mountains, following the herds and avoiding the skaven and Chaos attacks.

‘We do not live all of the time in the city,’ explained Katiya. ‘Much of the time we hunt and trap in the forests above the Bear’s Pelt. We take what metal we can from our enemies, likewise other tools and weapons. There are high pastures where we farm goats, though they are often raided by wolves and worse.’

She crossed the chamber and crouched beside a bedroll. Unfurling it, she revealed two long knives, wickedly sharp.

‘We carry weapons at all times, and even asleep it is our law that we are armed.’

‘A law I created,’ said Arkas, smiling inside his helm.

‘Indeed, and many more laws that have kept us safe.’ She turned her eyes away, embarrassed by her own awe, and rolled up the bedding again. ‘In the wild no group more than twenty gathers. We run when we can, and if we are attacked we fight only until we can run. Each third-moon we return to the City of Ice to exchange news, trade what we have scavenged and hunted, tend to the wounded and deposit the dead.’

‘Deposit?’ The low ceiling of the chamber made it hard for Arkas to follow her, and he was forced to walk in a stoop. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Many of the cursed tribes are corpse-eaters, and they will take the dead as happily as the living. And the skaven use corpses to fuel their plague winds and poxes. We try to leave no bodies. There are several shafts, run holes that go to the bottom of the glacier. Bodies go into those, into the purity of the ice, returned to Ursungorod.’

‘Very sensible,’ Arkas told her. She blushed and moved into a side tunnel. He squeezed his bulk through the opening after her, helm scraping shards from the icy roof. ‘No danger of manticores down here.’

‘That is another advantage,’ Katiya said, her wrinkles deepening as she smiled.

‘Are you their leader? Their queen?’

Katiya did not answer, but led him along a curving corridor that sloped gently upwards, slats of stones providing surer footing. The tunnel stopped and became a near-vertical shaft going up and down, metal rungs driven into the bare ice. When she shimmied up, Arkas inspected the ladder closely, dubious about its potential to hold his considerable weight. He saw that each rung had once been a blade, the edges blunted, ends turned to right angles.

Arkas tugged at one and it started to come away in his grip. Thrusting the rung back, he looked up into the shaft. It was about ten times his height, wide enough for him to fit comfortably. Turning his back to the ladder he rammed his gauntleted fingers into the ice, driving them deep enough to get a handhold. Pulling himself up, he bent his leg and repeatedly drove a boot through the wall until it could take his weight. Gathering confidence, he hauled himself up with increasing speed, leaving a trail of indentations.

‘I hope this is worth the effort,’ he said, clambering over the lip of the top.

There was no need for Katiya to speak – what he discovered at the top was answer enough.

They stood in a triangular tower made of reclaimed duardin masonry, tall enough for Arkas to stand. Three broad, shallow windows showed a view out over the ice fields in every direction. They were at a considerable elevation, much higher than where Katiya had been waiting for the Stormcasts. Two Ursungorans sat on ledges by each window, another couple sat in one corner, their bone dice clattering on the hard floor.

Moving to a window, Arkas saw banked snow packed around the tower to obscure its shape. From a distance it would be impossible to spot against the whiteness of the ice field. Yet from such a vantage point they could see far across the Bear’s Pelt. Arkas’ keen eyes picked out other humps and mounds, and the telltale slits of dark windows that would have gone unnoticed had he not been looking for them.

‘Watch towers,’ he said.

‘Also escape routes,’ Katiya added, pointing to a wooden trapdoor in the ceiling, linked to a counterweight by a thick chain. ‘We can also ambush from here, in many places across the ice field. As you know.’

‘Impressive,’ Arkas said. He was about to turn away when something caught his eye. It was a smudge of darkness, barely visible, beyond one of the other watch-mounds. He had noticed a pile of logs and small red-coloured blocks in one corner. ‘Do you light beacon fires?’

‘Yes, that is how we send a message of an attack.’ Katiya moved up beside him just as flames licked into view from the summit of the intervening tower. ‘Cursed ones! They are coming along the Black River.’

‘They followed us,’ Arkas said. ‘We should investigate, find out how many.’

‘No need,’ Katiya told him. She pointed out of the windows and he saw a trio of ravens heading out from another tower, one of the birds coming towards them.

When it was close, Katiya gave a shrill whistle, much like the one that had summoned her army. The raven dropped down to the window and settled upon the ledge. Chirping and bobbing her head, Katiya held out a hand. Arkas could feel the power of Ghur wreathing around her, the magic responding to her call. The raven croaked and pecked at the sill, bobbing in agitation.

Katiya drew back sharply and Arkas read shock on her face. She turned to look at him, horrified.

‘What is it,’ Arkas demanded. ‘How many?’

‘Many,’ Katiya mumbled. She said nothing for a few moments, before some semblance of comprehension surfaced. The elder flicked a look at the bird and then back to Arkas. ‘She said she could not count so many. More cursed ones than there are trees in the forest.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It took some time for Arkas to traverse the city for a look at the incoming army. Whole areas were inaccessible to him and his warriors due simply to their size. Many of the watch-mounds were equally impassable, and when he eventually found his route towards the river curtailed again he was forced to speak with Katiya.

‘I must take my warriors above ground,’ he told her. ‘I have to see the nature of what we face.’

‘It is not our way,’ Katiya insisted, a saying she had used several times in the fraught journey across the City of Ice. ‘We do not allow them to see our numbers or place.’

‘They will not see you at all. My Stormcasts will face this threat and you will remain in the tunnels.’

‘You do not understand, you cannot face an army like this. You are too few.’

‘We are Stormcast Eternals, forged by Sigmar in the celestial fires of the heavenly sphere. Into us is poured the wisdom and skill of the Six Smiths. We are armoured with sigmarite, the undying strength of the God-King made real. Our weapons are the breaking storm of vengeance. There is no foe we cannot face.’

‘An army greater than the trees of the forest!’ Katiya was on the verge of tears. To her it seemed her hopes had been raised and cruelly dashed in the passing of an afternoon. ‘How can you prevail against so many cursed ones?’

‘I do not place much trust in the counting of ravens,’ Arkas replied, his temper fraying. ‘I will lead my warriors back to the surface even if I have to call a storm and blast a hole through the ice!’

Shocked at the thought, Katiya was torn between two minds. He could see the uncertainty written on her face where there had been such conviction. Arkas crouched, resting his hammer across his thighs. He spoke softly, as a father might to a distraught daughter.

‘We will prevail. Across Ghur, across all of the Mortal Realms, the armies of the Stormhosts have struck back against the darkness of destruction and Chaos. Where we bring the light of Sigmar, evil cannot stand. We have come to Ursungorod to liberate you. The nightmare is coming to an end.’ He laid a hand gently on her quivering arm. ‘Trust me. Trust yourself. You saw the return of Arka Bear-clad, and I have come. Together we will deliver our people from the horror and tyranny of the Chaos Gods.’

Katiya sighed, looking tired and old. She wrapped an arm around his massive limb and laid her cheek upon the armour.

‘It is warm,’ she murmured. ‘I thought it would be cold.’

‘The power of our forging still burns within us,’ Arkas explained.

He waited for some time, allowing her to hold his arm, drawing strength from his presence.

‘I need you, Katiya,’ he told her. She looked up, confused.

‘But you are the Bear-clad, Arka the Uniter. All of our people are yours to command.’

‘To command, yes, but not to lead. You are their leader. When we have delivered Ursungorod I cannot remain. I am Stormcast, beholden to the will of Sigmar. It is not our fate to make homes and have family. It is to you we must look for the building of a new future, and others like you that cling to resistance and freedom across the Mortal Realms. I need you to lead your people and I will command mine.’

Nodding, she released her grip and stepped back. Her eyes were moist but her jaw was set with determination.

‘I have to prepare,’ she told him.

She gestured to one of the Ursungorans close at hand. The denizens of the City of Ice had been gathering in their war-packs, ready for the defence of their homes. The man she signalled was rangy, his face stubbled with blond hair. He wore a full hauberk of mail and a breastplate; he carried a tall helm under his arm, and a long-hafted axe was strapped to his back. He might have been one of Arka’s stratzari in a different age.

‘This is Ajfor, one of my grandsons,’ Katiya said. ‘Ajfor, show the Uniter to the north sally tunnels by the Chasm of Sighs. He wishes to see the army coming from the Black River.’

‘It is my honour,’ said Ajfor, eyes fixed widely on Arkas. Eventually he dragged his gaze away. He picked up a pack and a silver-headed spear, and indicated for Arkas to follow him through one of the archways.

‘I must assemble my warriors first,’ Arkas told Katiya.

‘It would be better if you went alone,’ she replied. ‘Secrecy is still our best defence. Our only defence, truthfully. If the cursed ones cannot find the entrances to the City of Ice, they cannot attack.’

Arkas considered this and could not fault the logic, or the proof that the Ursungorans had survived when countless others had not, though part of him was reluctant. His unease formed into something more solid.

‘I cannot defend the City of Ice if I do not know the field of battle. I need a map, so that I can see where to place my warriors, where we can manoeuvre and counter-attack.’

‘There are no maps,’ Katiya said, brow knotting. She tapped the side of her head. ‘All that we need to know is kept here. It cannot be stolen, cannot be lost or looted from here. We do not allow ourselves to be taken alive. Only those that grew up in the City of Ice know its ways.’

‘Then I cannot fight underground,’ Arkas said.

‘I will give you guides,’ said Katiya. ‘They know the routes, the ambushes and escapes.’

‘That will not work,’ Arkas said with a shake of his head. ‘There are passages where my warriors cannot fight but your tactics do not allow for that. We are too large for this tunnel-fight. Your people are put at risk if they must stay with us, and the enemy will use the narrow ways against us. If I cannot see a map, I cannot make a plan.’

A resolution started to form in Arkas’ thoughts, coalescing from various threads of doubt and questions about the City of Ice.

‘You have it wrong, Katiya,’ he declared. ‘You cannot have me thinking like an Ursungoran, I am a commander of the Stormcasts. The Chaos corrupted do not come here for you, they seek my army. I shall give it to them, on the surface where we can fight in the open. We are not a guerrilla force, to hit and run from shadows. It is for this purpose we came to Ursungorod, to be the flame that lights the beacon of fresh hope. We will not skulk in tunnels and caves and expect you to fight the battle for us.’

‘There are far too many for us to fight,’ said Katiya, fearful at the thought. ‘Skulking and hiding has seen us survive for long years, Uniter.’

‘My words were not meant as an insult,’ Arkas replied quickly. He lowered to one knee and leaned close so that she could see his intent in his eyes. ‘What you have achieved is incredible, Katiya. Almost miraculous. That is why we must do this my way. Our coming is to liberate you, not doom you. It would dishonour the sacrifice of all those that came before if I allowed the darkness to consume what you have protected for so long. We will fight on the surface and we will kill many, many of the cursed ones. If it is our fate to fall in that fight, so be it. We are Stormcasts, we will be reforged.’

He did not think of the price of Reforging. The memory of becoming a Stormcast, of passing under the hammers of the Six Smiths, was vague but full of pain. Every time a Stormcast was remade, they lost a piece of themselves, and Sigmar too gave up a fragment of his power. The God-King had diminished himself to create his armies, and this crusade would be the one that brought victory or defeat, conquest or oblivion. There would be no retreat to Azyr next time, no quiet centuries to build and prepare. The Stormcasts were heralds of the final war that would decide the fate of all, mortals and gods alike.

‘You must continue to survive,’ he told Katiya. ‘If we fail to turn the tide you will still have the City of Ice to protect you. You must hold on. My companions from the Knights Excelsior are being led here. Theuderis Silverhand commands them, a host ten times the size of mine. It was for this reason we are here, to bring forth the poison of Chaos and destroy it.’

Katiya said nothing, conflicted. It was Ajfor who replied.

‘We will show you the way,’ he said. ‘A place where a few can stand against the many.’

‘The Teeth of the Bear,’ said Katiya, looking to her grandson and receiving a nod. She smiled. ‘If there is anywhere this flood of foes can be dammed, it is there.’

‘I know it,’ said Arkas. ‘A defile along which the Black River flows, steep-sided and narrow.’

‘It is not as it was in your day,’ said Katiya, as Arkas stood and replaced his mask. ‘The land does not stand still. But you will see for yourself.’

Ajfor moved away to several more men and women and spoke to them, pointing at Arkas and then continuing for a short while longer. He turned back to the Lord-Celestant.

‘With your permission, Uniter, we would bring you to the Teeth of the Bear by several routes. My cousins will take your warriors by the secret paths.’

‘Tell them the Warbeast commands it,’ said Arkas. He repeated the phrase in the celestial tongue and had the guides practise the words. ‘Speak thus and they will know it comes from me.’

The Ursungorans said their farewells and disappeared into the white-and-grey tunnels. Ajfor directed a look to Arkas, a silent inquiry.

‘One moment,’ said the Lord-Celestant. He led Katiya to one side and spoke softly. ‘I see where you draw your strength. It is a long bloodline, but the power of Radomira flows in your veins still. Am I right?’

‘I am one of her daughters over many generations,’ said Katiya.

‘Then know this, Katiya Gospor, daughter of Radomira, child of Ursungorod. Your ancestor raised me as her own when my mother died. She said she saw omens that I would save my people. The storm claimed me, as she knew it would, and she stood beside me even though she knew that day would end in death and misery. Today know that the circle has turned, the night becomes day and light returns to Ursungorod. Your dreams of salvation are her memory returned, her hope reborn. Whatever happens, never abandon hope, never submit to the darkness.’

‘Death first,’ Katiya said hoarsely, throat tight with emotion. She stroked his armoured arm, child-like next to the giant but as motherly as Radomira ever was. ‘Go. Fight. Free our people.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Black River was narrow and fierce here, still fresh from the highlands, strengthened by the meltwater of the Bear’s Pelt. It frothed and rushed over jagged rocks, between the walls of a valley that were almost vertical. The defile did not run straight, but jagged back and forth around sharp bends, in places becoming waterfalls, in others slowing slightly into broader pools.

The way was impassable but for the remains of a duardin road that led down to the ruins Arkas had seen before meeting Katiya. Made of seemingly imperishable stone, the dark grey ribbon ran alongside the Black River, sometimes crossing over it on steep arches, in other places heaping up on thick piles to run across the surface of the cliffs and the clifftops themselves. The river itself was not in full flood, for when it was even the road was barred. Had it been the short spring, the host of the cursed ones would have been forced across the snow fields and exposed to the bitter winds and blizzards, not to mention the hidden chasms and ambushes of the Ursungorans. They had learnt to tread warily across the Bear’s Pelt, and so they approached through the Bear’s Teeth, sure of the ground beneath their feet and confident in their numbers.

The Bear’s Teeth had been, in Arkas’ mortal time, a pair of high rock pillars that flanked the river at its narrowest point – black columns each nearly a quarter of a mile high. Making his way towards them, Arkas saw that the landscape had changed, as Katiya had warned. The river now spread into a deep pool half a mile across, and more rock pinnacles speared from the black depths at its edge, curving towards each other to form a boundary of immense rock fangs, leaving the original Bear’s Teeth as monstrous canines.

The lake was not impassable though, for a maze of boulders and walkways stood proud of the water, slick but broad enough for the Stormcasts to use them as stepping stones and bridges if needed.

‘They were not here before,’ gasped Ajfor, pointing to the wetted boulders. He looked in amazement at Arkas. ‘The lands form to your command, Uniter!’

Even as he watched, Arkas saw another rock push forth in a welter of bubbles, capping the end of a bridge-like spur. Rocky steps led down from the cliff-like banks to the waters.

‘So it seems,’ he grunted, unsure of this revelation. Ursungorod had always been erratic, but this behaviour reminded him of the touch of Chaos. Could he trust the land enough to cross the lake?

From the clifftops, Arkas could see further down the river. As he had suspected, the arithmetic of crows and hawks left something to be desired – the Chaos army numbered several thousands, but no more than ten thousand. Even so, it was a formidable sight, a snake of black and red and leather-brown, of silver and bronze mail that snaked for some distance along the canyon below.

Pennants stitched with vile symbols fluttered above the host, alongside wooden placards burnt with runes or daubed in blood with symbols of Chaos and the Pestilens. The tramp of their feet was louder even than the roaring of the Black River, echoed and amplified by the defile walls. Harsh laughter, the baying of mutant hounds and monstrous bellows of lumbering, blood-coloured khorgoraths added to the din.

‘So many,’ whispered Ajfor, his hand shielding his eyes against the low sun. He crouched behind a pillar of rock jutting from the cliff edge, a little way ahead of Arkas who stood in the column’s heavy shadow. ‘They usually fight each other, raid and steal from their camps. They blood and burn each other in sacrifice! Why have they become allies?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Arkas. ‘I don’t know what the skaven have offered them, or what threats demanded this loyalty.’

It was a lie. The Warbeast knew exactly what had finally brought the tribes together, for it was the same thing he had exploited to become the Uniter. Fear. The skaven perhaps had instigated the union, and fuelled it with promises and payments, but it was fear that welded it together. The Stormcasts and news of their victories had moved swiftly through the mountains, doubtless made all the speedier by verminous messengers. One by one, the tribes of Chaos could be crushed, but together...

As Arka Bear-clad, he had sent the same message to free men and women, warning of the danger of the skaven in the deeps. The rewards for alliance coupled with the dangers of isolation meant that when a few clans had joined, the rest saw more benefit in friendship than enmity.

The tribes of Chaos were afraid of the Stormcasts, and had been promised the City of Ice. Their rivalries and hostility put to one side for a time, now was an opportunity to take that which they had desired for an age – to rid themselves of the thorn that had worried them for so many generations. Slay the Stormcasts and sweep into the City of Ice to kill the free people. And the skaven could happily trust that once their foes had been destroyed, the tribes would quickly fall back to old ways, fighting each other over the spoils.

‘See how they still march as tribes and warbands?’ he said to Ajfor. He could see where the different factions kept to themselves, each a distinct section of the whole, fault lines that could be exploited. ‘They are uncoordinated, and will fight piecemeal. They have no commander, just competing warlords. Some will try to let the others take the brunt of the fighting, some will be eager to earn themselves glory in the eyes of the Dark Gods.’

‘That does not lessen their number, Uniter,’ said Ajfor. ‘There are still many to kill.’

Arkas took a deep breath, still eyeing the approaching army. He let free some of the celestial energy inside his immortal body, his warhammer and runeblade flaring in his fists. He looked at Ajfor and smiled, though the Ursungoran could not see it.

‘Not too many.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The crackle of thirteen vast firepits and the smoke from their flames filled the immense cavern of the undercity. The fires fizzed and popped with multicoloured light as wood, hide and warp-saturated flesh burned.

By the dim light of the fires, the huge structure of the Great Shrine loomed over the proceedings. The hammer of the great gong was pulled back, ready to strike and pronounce the beginning of the festivities. From every rickety balcony and pole hung banners of human skin and slave hide, decorated with the symbol of the Withered Canker, the thrice-slashed claw mark of Felk himself.

A hundred slaves laboured at the enormous turnspits erected over the pits, roasting the flesh of the diseased captives. Limbs and ribcages were pierced on the raw wooden stakes, while in mighty cauldrons tended by a further army of ragged slaves, organs and fat bubbled away, stirred by Felk’s watchful plague priests.

A barricade had been erected around the new enclosure, piled from brick and stone taken from the excavation of the realmgate, and supplemented with mouldy planks and boxes, tattered sacks stuffed with sand and gravel, and sheets of crudely flattened brass and bronze. Skarth and his spitevermin patrolled the perimeter, hissing and snapping at any that approached, hurling stones and darts at those that did not heed those warnings.

The floor of the cavern was layered with deep filth from many years of occupation. Through the accreted effluent of the undercity, trenches had been dug, waist-high to the slaves that had carved them from hardened excreta and filth. The trenches were arranged in an angled circle, with branches and offshoots running off at strange angles – the rune of the Great Horned Rat, the name of the Great Witherer, given shape.

The bottom of the trenches had been lined with the bodies of those that had dug them, the corpses so fresh that the blood was still drying in the wounds from the spitevermins’ halberds. From the banks of the trenches, plague monks poured out libations from cracked pottery urns and amphorae. The line of skaven passed dented golden goblets, stained porcelain vases, tin cups, glazed pots, silvered jugs and crystal pitchers all the way back from the skewed gates of the Great Shrine. Filled from the festering pits beneath the shrine, every receptacle brimmed with noxious fluid gathered over many years, faintly glowing with power from the warp deposits at the Great Shrine’s heart.

The plague monks breathed deep of the fumes that emanated from the frothing brew of corruption. Their tails twitched with excitement, eyes saucer-like with narcotic delirium, chattering and squeaking without words as they laboured to fill the trenches.

Felk prowled at the centre of it all, alternating between triumphant hand-rubbing and nervous twitches as his thoughts and moods shifted from his excitement about the feast to his concerns over the metal giants.

A shape ghosted out of the fire-shadows and resolved into Thriss, a splintered human thighbone in his claws. There were scratches on the bone, written in a code unknown to the gutter runner. Felk could smell rotting leaves and sensed the dissipating aura of Ghryan, the Realm of Life. He took the bone and quickly read the inscription. It was a simple statement explaining that it was not known where in the Realm of Life Felk’s portal would open, but assuring him that his agents would be prepared when it happened.

‘And other thing? The skull-skull?’ Felk demanded, beckoning with impatient claws. ‘Have it, yes-yes?’

From beneath the folds of his cloak, Thriss produced a skull, yellowed and much cracked. A prominent break pierced one temple. Felk could smell the dried blood ingrained in the bone. The holes had been stoppered with fatty-smelling wax. The skull was slender in the jaw, high in the cheeks, with a pronounced forehead and shallow brow. The head of an aelf. Not just any head. It had been taken from its owner by none other than Felk’s master, the verminlord Skixakoth.

Felk shook the artefact and was satisfied by the dull rattle of something within.

‘It is still inside, yes-yes? The Tooth of Skixakoth?’

‘Yes-yes,’ snapped the gutter runner. ‘As promised. Clan Darkclaw never fails.’

Felk cocked an eye at this ludicrous claim, but chose not to list the numerous times both Thriss and his Eshin companions had been total failures. The Poxmaster was too excited by his new acquisition.

‘Life-life and death-death,’ he crowed, stroking a claw across the top of the skull. He sniffed, taking in the heady scent of depraved magic, the raw Chaos of the verminlord fang still trapped in the skull. ‘Much magic! Power of Great Witherer itself! Yes-yes, glorious feast tonight.’

‘What is it for?’ asked Thriss, eyeing the skull with a dubious look. ‘What does it do-do?’

‘Is talisman,’ said Felk, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. He clutched the skull to his ear as if listening. ‘Is key to the gnaw-ways. Is symbol of Skixakoth. Is many things. Is greatest channel, opening, window to highest and lowest places.’

‘Channel where?’ Thriss’ eyes darted in all directions as though he expected some portal to open immediately. Felk hissed with irritation.

‘To burrows of the gods, to Great Horned Rat!’ he spat. ‘When dismal feast is done, we speak to Great Witherer and with blessing take all Whiteworld Above.’

‘What of metal giants? Humans not stop them.’

‘No-no, but metal giants come too late. Trap set.’ Felk lifted the skull in triumph and then, realising all of the plague monks could see it, snatched it back and hid it in a ragged fold of his robe. ‘Great Horned Rat will destroy metal giants. Felk will rule all Whiteworld Above. Open the gate, we will, and Withered Canker will destroy sylvaneth. All bow to Felk’s power!’

Thriss muttered something.

‘What say?’ demanded Felk. ‘Say-say again!’

‘Praise mighty Poxmaster Felk,’ Thriss intoned flatly. ‘Great leader of Withered Canker.’

Felk eyed the Eshin agent for a time, until thoughts of the dismal feast distracted him back to a more pleasing topic. The plague monks had filled the ditches, tossing the broken pots and jugs into the noisome soup. At a gesture from Felk, the plague priests started a low chant, uttering praises to the Great Horned Rat, invocations of pestilence and decay. The lower ranks took up the hymnal, swaying forwards and back, left and right, caught in drug-fuelled throes of elation.

Stalking between the undulating lines of robed skaven, Felk raised his staff, signalling to the slave-masters at the firepits. Whips cracked and voices were raised in command, ordering the slaves into action. Teams of bent-backed skaven lifted up the great skewers and pots and brought them across to the site of the feast, eyes rolling in fear, pink tails lashing.

Trenchers of rough-beaten brass and iron had been set up in long rows, forming a triangle around Felk. While the chanting of the plague monks grew louder and louder, the slaves bore their loads to the trenchers. Using broken, filthy claws, they tore away hunks of meat, corroded bonesaws severing thighs, shinbones and ribs, immense ladles filling the trenchers with thick, greasy stew.

Their tasks complete, the slaves cowered together, fearful of their masters’ goads. Felk walked amongst them, staff and empty hand upraised.

‘No fear-fear!’ he told the quivering mass of poxy fur and scabbed skin. ‘Tonight is dismal feast. Slaves no more! Eat-eat! Strong you will be, blessed by the Great Witherer.’

The slaves eyed him with suspicion, glancing nervously at the trenchers and then back to the Poxmaster.

‘Eat!’ Felk snarled, grabbing the closest slave by a ragged ear, pulling it towards the food. ‘Fill bellies!’

Starvation won over distrust and the skavenslaves broke en masse to the trenchers, gorging themselves on the roasted and boiled meat. They squabbled and snapped, raked their claws across each other’s muzzles and bit the tails of their neighbours in their desperation.

While the slaves feasted, the plague monks turned, chanting still, lining the sigil of the Great Horned Rat. Felk’s priests disappeared into the gloom and emerged with thirteen bound humans. They were stripped to the skin, revealing lesions and boils, open sores and ruddy clusters of buboes. They were the most diseased, the greatest tribute to the power of the Great Witherer. Gibbering and sobbing they stared in horror at their hellish surrounds, recoiling from the frenzy of gluttony and depravity as they witnessed the fate of their former companions.

Unresisting, the humans were pushed to the ground, forced to kneel facing each other, Felk at the centre of the circle. The Poxmaster licked the air to taste their abhorrence. It was sweet nectar.

The activity at the trenchers was slowing, the slaves sated, staggering and groaning with bloated bellies. The plague monks continued their dirge, the rhythm starting to quicken, staves rising and falling to thud softly on the packed detritus that covered the ground. Faster, harder came the beat, and through it Felk could sense the magic of Ghur shifting, responding to the ritual.

The monks panted, gasping for air but unable to stop the liturgy. Possessed by the rising spirit of the Great Horned One, they continued to pound with their staves, the rhythm becoming more ragged, the chant discordant.

Felk was mesmerised by the chorus of mewling captives, moaning slaves, shrieking monks and thundering staff beats. He slowly turned on the spot, marvelling at the way the sound changed as he spun, the acoustics of the massive cavern twisting, rebounding and changing the music of the Horned Rat.

Arms still held high, he closed his eyes, his natural paranoia dropping away for an instant to allow him a moment of pure intoxication. He felt his heart juddering in his chest, could smell the musk and sweat and the taint of warpstone.

The sensation passed and he opened his eyes, wobbling to a dizzy stop. His vision swam for a while longer, the faces of his priests blurring in and out of focus, sometimes leering jealously, other times concerned and fearful.

‘Great Witherer!’ Felk declared, regaining his equilibrium. ‘Horned One of Decay! Felk offers you Whiteworld Above. Grant me this boon, grant me bounty, and Felk gifts all lands to your praise. Bless Poxmaster Felk, bless Withered Canker in your name. Felk beseeches Great Horned One, hear our prayers, hear laments of your victims! Plague we are. Pox and infection we spread. In your name, for your praise. We are Pestilens. Harbingers of the Doom of Worlds. Gnawers of vitality. Swift bringers of your filthy blessings.’

Felk pointed his staff at the human captives, who recoiled as if struck.

Their depressed moaning turned into wailing and crying.

‘See these offerings! Most foul, most touched by your divine hand. Back to the Great Horned One we send them.’ Felk skittered over to the prisoners and grabbed the hair of the nearest, dragging her head back. His thin tongue licked along her neck, leaving a trail of thick saliva in the crusted dirt, blood and pus. ‘Feast as we have feasted! Eat-eat, mighty lord of the thirteen plagues.’

Felk stepped back as his plague monks set about messily sacrificing the captives to their horned deity.

Now was the time. Now was the moment of his glorious triumph.

Felk snatched out the skull taken from the lair of Skixakoth. The daemonic fang within was rattling and bouncing of its own accord. The green glow of warp energy seeped through the wax and cracks, bathing Felk in its light.

The Poxmaster dashed the skull against the ground, releasing the power of the verminlord’s tooth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Green lightning arced with violent snaps, leaping from the broken skull to the corpses of the sacrifices. The bodies jumped and jittered as though given fresh life. Limbs spasmed, chests heaved, eyes darted to and fro while twitching, bloodied fingers grasped at open wounds and shattered bones. Engulfed by the torrent of power, the cadavers rose to their feet, listless puppets sustained only by malicious magic.

Warp energy surrounded the sacrifices with an aura of sickly roiling magical fumes, like the vapours that rose from the sigil of the Horned Rat carved around the feast. The air grew thick with power, clinging to Felk’s claws and teeth, matting his fur. The noxious liquid in the mark of the Great Witherer started to bubble and boil of its own accord.

Still the magic grew in strength. It pooled into the engorged slaves, who were now lying in torpid piles beside the trenches. It filled them with unnatural vitality. They staggered to their feet with jerky movements and started to writhe and dance, distended bellies swinging, emaciated limbs shuddering and twisting.

His thoughts becoming a feverish blur, Felk heard a snap behind him and spun around in time to see the first slave collapsing, his weak bones unable to sustain him. A wet slapping noise heralded the gut of another splitting, its distended organs spilling out in a welter of undigested food and blood. The magic of the Horned One animated them still, set them flapping and cavorting across the uneven floor while more slaves burst, collapsed and broke under the magical assault.

Beside Felk the human corpses withered. The magical lightning sapped them of blood, fat and flesh. It turned their bones to dust, their blood to vapour, leaving only empty skin hanging in the air.

The fang of Skixakoth, as big as Felk’s outstretched claw from thumb to little finger, rose into the air, slowly rotating, held aloft by a miasma of jade warp energy. The fang stopped at about head height and righted itself, hanging down as though in an upper jaw. The fog started to coalesce into something more solid. Around the tooth a huge rat-like face crowned by thirteen horns shifted in and out of the mist.

Felk threw himself to the ground, averting his gaze. From the corner of his eye he saw his priests doing likewise. Some of the plague monks were not so swift. Their agonised shrieks cut across the thunderous pulsing that now filled the chamber, as they looked upon the visage of the Great Horned One and were sent mad. Wet mewling followed as they clawed out their eyes and gouged their flesh, trying to rid themselves of the sight, trying to free themselves from the gnawing that worried at their souls.

SPEAK.

The voice of the skaven god was not heard, it was felt. It was a rumbling in the rocks, a reverberation in the gut, a noise in the back of the head, a hissing in the ears. The scratching of ten thousand claws on the bones. The rasp of innumerable teeth, gnawing, gnawing, gnawing. The Poxmaster felt blood dribble from his ears and nose, but kept his face pressed into the dirt.

‘Poxmaster Felk, most devoted of the Horned Rat’s servants.’

FELK? WHY DO YOU SUMMON ME?

‘Offer Whiteworld Above to you, mightiest of mighty, potent deliverer of plague and distress. Grant me boon, hear Felk’s plea. A realmgate we have. Victory over sylvaneth. Death of life, pox unbound.’

THIS I SEE. FOR A LIFETIME YOU HAVE PROMISED WHITEWORLD ABOVE.

‘Yes-yes, but patient Felk has been. Good priest, loyal-loyal servant. Let humans kill and fight, look for realmgate. Now-now it is ours. Yours! Realmgate yours, great herald of oblivion, master of the thirteen deadly ways. Metal giants come-come. Much slaughter. Celebration not certain. Victory unclear. Beseech you, conjurer of abyssal torment, thirteen-times blessed lord of the realms. Grant power. Grant magic. Much-much power.’

IT SHALL BE.

Felk was snatched up by an invisible claw, lifted bodily into the air above his minions. He clutched his staff tightly to his chest, clenching every muscle to stop his musk glands betraying his terror. Tendrils of power flickered around him, caressing his fur to make it stand on end and sparking from his exposed teeth.

He looked down and saw the blazing rune of the Great Horned One, the lines of plague monks duplicating it within, the corpses of the slaves spattered in replica of that awful, awesome sigil.

KNOW MY POWER. FAIL ME NOT.

The gong of the Great Shrine tolled, louder than ever before, the shockwave of noise rolling out across the feast, tossing bodies into the air, passing on to flatten the walls of the spitevermin, toppling the hovels and ramshackle streets beyond. On and on it seemed to echo until Felk’s world was nothing but his claws digging into the wood of his staff and the dreadful ring of the Horned Rat’s declaration shuddering through his whole body.

In the silence that followed he thought he was falling. Falling so far he had to have passed into a great chasm, dropping into the gap between realms, disappearing along the gnawholes of the skaven and into the lair of the Great Witherer.

Felk saw the fang of the verminlord hanging in the air before him, glinting cruelly in the light. His hand reached out, not of his volition, clawed fingers opening to grasp the cursed tooth. He did not resist, knowing that it was the will of his god. His arm shaking, he held the tooth before him like a dagger.

Everything was darkness, but for the light from that jagged tooth. Felk moved his arm to expose his chest, his robes parting with their own life to bare his furred flesh.

With a hiss, he dragged the tooth closer, plunging it into his heart.

Pain engulfed Felk. Pain of every pox, every plague, every disease unleashed by the pestilent lords combined. He felt their power spreading from the wound, infecting him with their potency, the virulent energy rippling along arteries and veins, infusing organs with eternal power, the energy of Chaos itself.

In a blast of ecstatic fusion he was joined with the Great Horned One. His minds were filled with blistering images, of the gnaw-tunnels between worlds, stretching into the past and future, coiling through infinities, an impossible maze that burrowed through and under every mortal thing. And further still, into the Realm of Chaos, undermining the dominions of the four great powers.

The scurrying, gnawing, endlessly teeming mass of skaven thrived in the under-empire, enslaving, scavenging, growing in numbers beyond counting, ready to burst forth across all of the realms.

And there – a glimpse of realm-burrows working towards the bastions of Azyr, locked for so long by the will of the human god-king. An army of golden warriors bringing fire and death to the followers of Chaos. The metal giants, the soldiers of Sigmar.

For some it was the end. The last war that would see the worlds of mortals destroyed. Not for the Children of the Horned Rat. Death brought opportunity. Famine and plague, the companions of war, were ever ripe ground for the disciples of the Great Witherer.

Felk opened his eyes. A shadow loomed over him and he held a hand up, reflexively squealing in panic.

‘Poxmaster?’

The blur resolved into Skarth’s face. He bared his teeth, halberd held at the ready. A slight movement allowed Felk to see the ring of plague priests around him, concerned more by the blade of his fangleader than the state of their master’s health. Some looked openly disappointed at his recovery.

Felk sat up, fingers unconsciously questing for the reassuring feel of his staff, seeking the familiar cracked wood.

He remembered a last image, of the collapsing under-empire, of the dominions of the Great Horned One imploding back into him. Felk recalled the surge of power, and his staff exploding into threads and splinters.

It was his badge of office, his weapon and the channel for his power. He felt naked without it.

He stood up, staying close to Skarth. The priests and the spitevermin forming a cordon against the plague monks beyond let out a communal hiss of surprise. Skarth took a step back, lips curling back over dark gums.

Where Felk’s robe had fallen open, his chest was in plain view. The roots of Skixakoth’s fang could be seen just over his heart, protruding slightly from suppurating flesh. Threads of corruption pulsed like a web from the wound, spreading from the tooth across Felk’s chest and abdomen. He lifted a claw, allowing the voluminous sleeve to roll back, revealing corded tendrils of warp power gently gleaming beneath the skin. His nails were long and sharp as he flexed his fingers.

He pulled his robe closed and rose to his full height – a little taller than before, he thought, though perhaps he had always stooped without realising. The power of the Horned Rat’s blessing was evident not just in the visible signs. Felk could feel the energy flowing through him, spiralling and weaving through his body, suffusing his organs with putrid vitality.

‘Come-come, brothers.’ He gestured for his priests to gather closer. ‘Disciples of Felk, chosen of the Great Horned Rat. Bear witness to our master’s divine will.’

Cautiously, the plague priests approached, clutching their staves and knives, casting glances at each other.

‘Time has come,’ declared Felk. ‘Wrong we are, poor worshippers, selfish rat-rats! War we make. War good.’ He clenched his fists. Warp power dribbled from between his fingers like smoke. ‘Not fight with fist. Not fight with sword or halberd. We the masters of disease! Not conquer Whiteworld Above. Destroy it! All life, all humans, all giant men of Sigmar! My ruin-bringers, my plague-heralds, my warp-fiends, bear witness! Corpse-mountain we build. Plague furnaces we make. Wind of annihilation blows. Death-death, all things dead! When realmgate opens, tide of death unleashed. Much work to be done. Felk decrees, you obey.’

Cowed by this grand oratory and the halo of power wreathing their leader, the plague priests bowed and fell to their knees, faces hidden inside their hoods.

‘Praise Felk,’ cried the Poxmaster. ‘Lord of the Withered Canker, Slayer of the Whiteworld Above.’

‘Praise Felk,’ they intoned.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Not only had the Black River dammed itself to aid Arkas, it had steepened its banks downriver, swallowing the makeshift road beneath jagged rocks and mudslides. Some of the Chaos clans were not content to funnel up the gorge and attempted to scale the shallower sides of the defile to reach the wide expanse of the Bear’s Pelt. Arkas took this as the sign to announce the presence of his warriors.

Having crossed the stone bridges on the lake to set their ambush along both sides, Judicators lined the precipice edges to welcome the climbing warriors with volleys of shockbolts and skybolts. Burning from the touch of the celestial missiles, an avalanche of corpses fell back into the defile, causing panic amongst the packed tribal warriors below. Those not caught under their falling companions responded with angry shouts and a surge that sent many splashing into the river, scrapping with each other to forge their way to the easier ascent further along.

At a word from Arkas, his Prosecutors swept into the gorge, speeding along the twisting ravine and unleashing more heavenly arrows into the throng. Scattered projectiles leapt up to meet them but were poorly aimed and of little threat to the armoured fliers. Trolls and larger beasts hurled rocks and fistfuls of smaller stone, bellowing impotently at the tormentors soaring out of reach.

‘Arrows alone will not slay them all,’ said Ajfor, who had remained with Arkas to act as a messenger if needed. He pointed to the narrowest part of the ravine, where sharp, ice-covered rocks thrust like gigantic fangs. They glittered in the weak sun, the striations of red stone inside like trails of dried blood. ‘That is the best place to defend.’

‘The Jaws,’ said Arkas. ‘A good choice if I was going to pick somewhere to make a last stand.’

‘What do you intend, Uniter? We cannot hold them on the open ice.’

‘I don’t intend to hold them anywhere.’ Arkas beckoned to Doridun. ‘Prepare to signal the attack. We’ll push down the river and cut down anyone stupid enough not to run.’

The Knight-Heraldor nodded and relayed the order to Dolmetis, who carried the command to the nearest Primes. The Warbeasts moved closer to the edge of the ravine, ready to start their descent.

‘Attack?’ Ajfor’s eyes were so wide they seemed to bulge out of his head.

‘We are the storm of Sigmar’s wrath, the Celestial Vindicators, the Warbeasts,’ Arkas said with a grin. ‘We do not wait for battle to come to us, we seek it out.’

At his word, the Strike Chamber started the climb. Reaching the pebble-strewn bottom, where ice covered the small stones, the Warbeasts quickly assembled into their retinues, rallying on their Primes. The canyon turned to the left, masking them from view for the moment, though the Chaos warriors leading the attack could not have failed to see them disappearing from the clifftop.

‘Full charge, no mercy,’ Arkas barked to his Stormcasts. ‘Kill the foe in front, leave the foe to the left and right to your companions. We fight together, we win together.’

A guttural roar signalled the assent and readiness of the Warbeasts.

‘Come on then,’ laughed Arkas.

They reached full speed before the enemy came into view, pounding across the blue ice and splashing through the frothing water. Rounding the bend, Arkas saw that the foremost Chaos tribe were also moving swiftly.

Well-armed and armoured warriors led them, advancing at a trot, gathered beneath a banner of bone and stretched skin inked in gore with the symbol of the Blood God, Khorne. Some had bare heads, their faces heavily scarred and pierced, while others wore helms with curving bull’s horns fitted like tusks and tipped with jagged iron shards. Each bore two heavy hammers or maces, their gauntlets were spiked at the knuckles, and they wore metal bracers on their forearms.

Issuing bloody challenges, the Chaos warriors broke into a sprint, heedless of the threat posed by the Stormcasts, relishing the opportunity to slay the most powerful foes. The Warbeasts continued on at the same relentless pace, a wall of sigmarite that left a trail of shimmering celestial power on the rocks and dancing across the rapids.

The crash of the two forces rang down the canyon. The bodily impact of the Stormcasts sent many of the Chaos warriors hurtling and tumbling, while sweeps of starsoul maces and stormstrike glaives sent hewn corpses spinning into the reddening spume of the river.

Pushed on by the weight of their comrades behind, the leading edge of the Warbeasts rumbled down the gorge. Arkas, running along the left bank, cleaved a path with warhammer and runeblade, as Dolmetis and Doridun formed the point of the attack on the opposite side of the river.

The Prosecutors returned from their raking attacks further downstream and poured their missiles into the tribesmen just a dozen yards ahead of the Stormcast assault. One in three Chaos followers fell beneath the aerial onslaught, the survivors disorientated and split, easy prey for the rampaging Warbeasts.

The steep sides of the ravine left little room for manoeuvre – or escape. The more cowardly tribesmen found themselves trapped against the unforgiving rocks, cut down as they fled, crushed against the boulders by hammers and maces forged in the heavenly foundries of Sigmaron.

Preceded by the volleys from above, the Celestial Vindicators swept all before them, only the occasional flash of blue light showing where an unfortunate Stormcast had fallen to a lucky blow or an aggregation of many wounds. A corona of azure light moved before them like a bow wave, flickers of lightning from skybolts and shockbolts detonating in the depths. Ruined flesh and armour carpeted the defile in their wake, and the Black River ran crimson.

‘Easy now,’ bellowed Arkas as the gorge widened. They had pushed on perhaps a thousand paces, and here the river was slower, the sides of the defile not as steep. Warhounds and cavalry skirted the flanks, holding back for the moment, but waiting for the Stormcasts to over-extend and give them room around the flanks.

‘Hold fast!’ Arkas ordered.

The notes of the command rang out from Doridun’s clarion and the Strike Chamber stopped in a heartbeat, extending outwards as far as possible, the end of the line bowing slightly to present no space through which the enemy might slip.

‘Enough glory for each of us, my lord,’ said Martox. The Decimator-Prime stood a little way to Arkas’ left, his thunderaxe over one shoulder as he surveyed the mountain hordes.

Though his tone was light, Martox’s observation was correct. Two thousand at least had fallen already, but Arkas watched a sea of warriors still coming up the river. Freed from the strikes of the Prosecutors, several tribes, each a few hundred warriors strong, had started the ascent to the ice field again.

The nearest tribal groups pulled back, taking advantage of the sudden halt in the attack. Over their heads, Arkas could see larger monsters being brought to the fore – skull-faced khorgoraths with bulging bodies and flailing bone-tentacles, Chaos-twisted spawn that defied category and description, and other mutant monstrosities covered in scale and fur and sharp spines. More heavily armoured warriors shouldered their way through the barbarian marauders, line-breakers determined to make a breach in the Stormcast wall. Behind them came plate-armoured warriors on the backs of huge destriers covered by caparisons of bronze mail, fire burning in the eyes of their daemonically blessed steeds.

War altars dedicated to the Dark Powers were carried forwards on the backs of scaled beasts or held aloft by chained slaves blinded and whip-scarred. Arcane magic spilled from these unholy totems, polluting the draughts of Ghurite energy that flowed with the Black River. Cockatrices and chimerae from the deep forests were goaded forwards by hooded beast-handlers. All the myriad forces of the Chaos Gods were arrayed against the Warbeasts, the river valley thick with their numbers.

‘At least it’s stopped snowing,’ Martox continued.

Laughing, Arkas looked up. The clouds were there, grey and pregnant with a fresh blizzard, but for the moment Martox was right.

The Lord-Celestant saw something against the gloom, small at first but swiftly approaching. As it came closer he could make out that it was a bird, quite large, with multicoloured wings.

Smiling, Arkas raised his sword and flexed his grip on his warhammer.

‘Charge!’ he roared.

The sky glittered, a coruscating backdrop of magic that made stark the descending silhouettes of angels. The Angelos Conclave of the Silverhands fell with swift fury on the dark legions, first clearing the ravine walls of foes before raking missiles into the Chaos tribesmen. A few dozen tainted warriors managed to clamber to safety on the glacier, only to be met by Hastor and Venian, who were quickly joined by the rest of Arkas’ Prosecutors.

The army of Theuderis arrayed on the heights above the river, a line of ivory and blue that stretched far, the air above crackling with latent celestial energy. The Silverhand himself sat astride his dracoth, which reared in salute to the Warbeasts, lightning forking from its mouth. Knights-Vexillor and Knights-Heraldor held the line for a moment, awaiting the command of their lord.

Theuderis swung down his blade and the clarions blared. Icons aloft, the Knights-Vexillor led the attack. Lightning churned along the defile, leaping in chains through the warriors in the river, charring fleshing and melting armour.

Wrath incarnate, the Knights Excelsior fell upon the Chaos host with a single refrain echoing down the gorge.

‘For the glory of Sigmar!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The first charge of the Knights Excelsior broke the will of the Chaos tribes. Pressed into the confines of the Black River those at the front could do little but fight desperately, but even their greatest warriors were no match for the spear of Theuderis and his Paladin Conclave leading the charge. Those further downriver saw the thousands of ivory-and-blue giants and fled at the sight, all bargains with the skaven, all alliances and dreams of possessing the City of Ice, overwhelmed by the spectacle of Sigmar’s wrath given form.

Arkas and his Warbeasts met the monstrous khorgoraths, gargants and mutants head-on, relishing the challenge of fighting such warped beasts. The waters of the Black River frothed with unnatural blood and ichor, and the ravine sparked with flares of celestial energy as Stormcasts were torn apart or crushed, but the Celestial Vindicators were irrepressible.

Scoured and blinded by the purging light of the celestial beacons held aloft by the Knights-Azyros, the barbarians called prayers to their twisted gods, beseeching the Dark Powers to save them, even as the warriors of Sigmar slew with abandon. None were answered.

While Arkas and his warriors were a rampaging beast, slaughtering at will as they forged down the river, the Silverhands were a devastating, unstoppable storm that swallowed everything with a machine-like relentlessness and left nothing but corpses in its wake. The black waters reflected the fire of the heavenly realm and seemed to burn with it as the followers of Chaos were consumed.

The killing went on until mid-afternoon, spilling from the river onto an expanse of the Bear’s Pelt, where thousands more tainted natives were cut down where they fled – slashed, crushed and pierced by the celestial weapons of Sigmar’s host.

Arkas did not weary of it, but ran out of foes. Hastor came to him bearing greeting from Theuderis and he bade his Knight-Venator to return the compliment and lead the Lord-Celestant to Ajfor so that he might be brought into the City of Ice.

In the depths of the city, in a chamber of reclaimed duardin stone and carved ice lit only by a small, guttering oil lamp, Theuderis evaluated his companions. Arkas Warbeast looked like any other Stormcast Lord-Celestant, though his armour showed far less wear and damage than Theuderis’ own. He crouched, arms on thighs, speaking with the woman, Katiya. She was not what the Lord-Celestant had been expecting when the Warbeast had offered to broker a meeting with the leader of the free Ursungorans.

She was small, though not frail, skin weathered by constant exposure to the harsh elements. She wore only rudimentary armour, but bore a sword, bow and quiver with the ease of a lifetime’s experience. She spoke softly to Arkas in their shared language. For all that elders were objects of respect and receptacles of wisdom, it was hard for Theuderis to believe this woman was a war-leader. Her voice would never rise above the din of battle. She could not be at the heart of the fighting, leading by example.

Katiya looked at him, and he almost flinched from her grey stare, ashamed of his thoughts. He suddenly understood, recognising in that glance the hardness of a castle wall, the strength of forged sigmarite. She returned her attention to the Warbeast, her words coming swifter and more forcefully.

‘What are you discussing?’ Theuderis asked.

Katiya stopped and frowned at the interruption in annoyance, or perhaps simply in incomprehension.

‘If we are to debate strategy I would be involved, Lord Arkas.’

‘I’m sorry, Lord Silverhand,’ the Warbeast replied. ‘The City of Ice was not dug with warriors of our stature in mind.’

‘It is of no consequence, we will not be remaining here,’ said Theuderis. ‘Your message said that the skaven are on the brink of activating the realmgate. We must stop them before that happens.’

‘We will,’ said Arkas, ‘but first we must ensure my people are safe.’

‘The Chaos army has been scattered,’ said Theuderis, troubled by Arkas’ use of the phrase, ‘my people’. It betrayed his split loyalties, but there was no purpose in raising the matter there and then. Doing so would only foster division and suspicion. Better to offer support to his ally. ‘Dead skaven are no threat. The sooner we destroy them, the safer for all of Ursungorod.’

‘The cursed ones will return,’ argued the Warbeast. He cast a glance at Katiya and stood up. ‘As for the skaven, we have seen nothing of them since we arrived. They could be preparing an attack, hoping to exploit the damage done by their human puppets.’

‘If that is the case, I suggest our original strategy remains the best course. Divert the skaven, lure them from their lair, and I will strike into the heart of their domain and seize the realmgate. Faced with two armies of Stormcasts, the skaven will pay little mind to the few survivors hiding here.’

Arkas considered this until Katiya spoke. The two exchanged heated words, accompanied by small but insistent gestures, Katiya jabbing a finger at Arkas and pointing away, the Lord-Celestant making halting motions with upraised hands.

‘She wants to fight,’ said Theuderis, guessing Katiya’s intent, picking up on some of the words already familiar to him. ‘You should let them.’

Arkas approached and spoke quietly, concerned that Katiya might take something from their tone even though she could not know the meaning of his words.

‘We go into a battle that even our Stormcasts cannot imagine. For centuries the skaven have dominated here, multiplying unchallenged, strengthening their defences. I do not expect many of us to see victory. We cannot take the Ursungorans into that.’

Theuderis took a breath and a pace back, uncomfortable with Arkas’ closeness. He looked around the chamber, nothing more than a space created in the glacier. There were no furnishings, no belongings save the pack and bedroll that leaned against the wall behind Katiya.

‘They have been wanting to fight for generations,’ said the Knight Excelsior. ‘But they have clung to a different ideal. To survive. That so many of them are still here is testament to the success of that strategy, but it cannot last. We have heard the tales from other chambers, other Stormhosts that have been into the Mortal Realms. Many lands are completely lost, others have but a handful of people not swayed or enslaved by the Dark Powers.’

‘Every reason why we cannot risk them,’ Arkas said sharply. He clenched his fists. ‘This is our war, we must fight it for them.’

‘They are an army, of sorts. They have proven themselves capable. For what reason have they clung to existence if not for the day when they can strike back at their oppressors, to fight for the freedom they crave? It is clear they venerate you – I saw their looks when we entered their city. As you say, we need every warrior we can muster.’

Arkas shook his head and did not reply. Katiya barked something at him and he turned away. She grabbed at his arm as Arkas strode towards the arch of ice leading from the chamber, but he pulled from her grasp, the hammer weights that adorned his cloak clattering against each other.

‘Wait!’ Theuderis dashed after Arkas and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘We are n–’

Arkas rounded on the Knight Excelsior, seizing him by the breastplate and thrusting him against the wall. Ice chipped under the impact, Theuderis’ head jarring back in his helm.

‘We are done talking!’ growled the Warbeast. ‘We stay until daybreak to ensure the Chaos tribes do not return and then we set out for the undercity. That is the plan.’

Theuderis said nothing. Arkas released his grip and stalked away, leaving the Knight Excelsior to exchange a look with Katiya. She sighed, took up her pack and moved to follow Arkas. Theuderis stepped in front of her, holding up a hand.

‘Do you understand me?’ he said, approximating the Ursungoran tongue. He turned to Katiya.

She looked in surprise at his words. ‘You understand me?’

‘Mostly,’ Theuderis said. ‘Enough for the moment. All human language can be found in the tongue of the immortals. Your accent, your dialect is strange but brief study has revealed its workings to me. Another gift of the God-King.’

‘This is powerful sorcery, lord,’ she said, still looking at him with shock. Her manner settled and she glanced away. ‘It is good that we can speak without the Uniter.’

‘His heart is sore at the moment,’ Theuderis replied. He did not wish to speak ill of his companion, despite his misgivings, and it was important that Katiya trusted him as much as she did Ursungorod’s ‘saviour’. ‘What has he told you of us, the Stormcasts, and our mission here?’

‘He is the Uniter, he has come to lead us to victory over the cursed ones and the rat-filth.’

‘We are warriors of Sigmar, the God-King. We come from Azyr, the Realm of Heavens, where he rules. The Stormcasts are waging a war to free all of the Mortal Realms from the corruption of Chaos.’

‘I do not understand. Sigmar is a myth. What are these Mortal Realms? Lands beyond Ursungorod?’

‘In a sense. It would take me a long time to explain and you might still not understand. Sigmar is a myth, that is true, but that does not make him any less real.’ Theuderis felt pride as he spoke. ‘He is the master of the Uniter. As Arka Bear-clad brought together the tribes of Ursungorod, Sigmar will unite the Mortal Realms and the scattered gods. There are many worlds and places, all of them overrun by the darkness of Chaos and the forces of destruction, save for the sanctuary of Sigmaron and Azyr. Many people are looking for new lands to live in, lands where they can be free from Chaos and death. A land like Ursungorod, once we have rid it of the Chaos tribes and the skaven, could be such a sanctuary.’

‘You are powerful warriors, but you are so few,’ said Katiya. ‘How can you hope to destroy all of the ratkin and the cursed ones?’

‘We come on the storm of Sigmar, sent by his divine will, but there is also another way to travel between the planes of existence. Realmgates, we call them. The skaven have one. We will seize it from them and our allies will use it to reinforce us. This is a war, not a battle, Katiya. We will not win in the next day or the next ten days. I do not know what Arkas has promised you, but you must fight on for a while longer.’

Katiya looked downhearted but rallied quickly, entwining and releasing her fingers as she considered her next words.

‘There are others coming? People like us, not warriors like you?’

‘Yes, in time. Not just humans. Duardin, aelf and others. The free peoples, allied under the eyes of their gods. We will forge a new civilisation here.’

‘We are not part of the plan, are we? Arkas thinks we can stay, but he is wrong.’

‘I make no promises. I do not know how long this war will last. We have been reforged, made immortal. We cannot die, but we are no longer alive like you.’ He paused, not sure whether he should say what he had to, but Katiya deserved the truth. ‘It is unlikely you will live to see peace, Katiya. Your children, perhaps. Perhaps not. For all that Arkas protests, he will not make this decision for you. He is a servant of Sigmar, not Ursungorod, and I will remind him of that.’

‘My sons and daughter are already dead,’ Katiya replied, looking away. ‘My grandchildren have known nothing but hardship and fear. But we do not want to be safe, we want to be free. We will stay, we will fight.’

Theuderis nodded.

Ursungorod had constantly defied expectation and eluded definition since he had arrived, and continued to do so. Of all the battles and dangers he had prepared for, a confrontation with the Warbeast was not one.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The ice tunnels swallowed Arkas, deadening the distant sounds, surrounding him with their isolating whiteness. He found a small side chamber, perhaps occasionally used as a guardroom or storehouse, perhaps of no purpose at all. There was no stone, just the ice carved by pick and chisel. He ran a hand over the wall, trying to calm himself. His fingers picked out every indentation, every gouge and striation.

Hard, unforgiving labour had dug the City of Ice. Generations of Ursungorans had chosen to cling to an ideal of freedom and defiance rather than accept the dominion of Chaos. It was tempting to claim some credit for that. The Bear-clad, the Uniter, had shown their ancestors that it was possible to fight. But that was false praise. He had learnt to defy the Chaos Gods and the rat-filth from his parents, and they from theirs. His had been the most successful resistance, but not the first. Now he had the chance to make Katiya’s people the last to know what it was like to be afraid for their lives every day, to never settle for fear of discovery, to hide and make themselves small. They had exchanged one form of slavery for another, had become captives to their dread.

Was it worth it? His finger followed a channel at about chest height, ice crystals falling from the tip as he dragged it along the crack. Someone had stood where he stood, an Ursungoran, and had hewn at this wall. What had they been thinking? What did they think they were digging for? Was it just instinct, burrowing like an animal, or had the digger thought of loftier goals, of a future where they would not have to dig any longer?

All the time he had spent in Sigmaron, he had been honing his skills, becoming accustomed to his new body, a new way of war; coming to terms with the pain of Reforging, turning it into something meaningful, a sacrifice in exchange for the strength to fight back.

Hardest of all had been remembering those he had left – those he had been snatched from. Sigmar had reached out and plucked him from the battlefield. His saviour? Very likely. Arka Bear-clad would not have run that day. He would have fought and died, and with him the other free tribes would have perished too.

But he didn’t feel saved, or blessed, or righteous.

He felt the spirit of Ursungorod, the background ebb of Ghurite energy that flowed around him, and welcomed its touch. After that first moment of awareness on Mount Vazdir he had tried to fight it, to keep back the lure of the savage, bestial heart that still beat in his chest.

It called to him, begged him to be free.

It was impossible to resist. Returning to Ursungorod was not an opportunity, it was a punishment – a reminder of what he had failed to do in life. He had only to think of his ally, the Silverhand. He was just as well known among the Stormcasts. A king, a conqueror, and a unifier just like Arka Bear-clad. But he had saved his people. Sigmar had ascended the Silverhand in triumph, not defeat.

Arkas smashed a fist into the wall. Splinters scattered and a crack ran across the pale ice. He drove his other hand into the ice, again and again, feeling the power of Ghurite energy lapping at his armour, its feral howl in his ears urging him on.

He gritted his teeth, fists hammering like pistons, sigmarite gauntlets buckling under the impacts. Arkas started to feel something, the first pangs of pain in his hands. It was not enough. Blow after blow he rained onto the wall, each strike sending a cascade of ice shards falling. When he felt the bite of breaking metal on his knuckles it only drove him on into a greater fury, desperate for some release.

Snarling and growling, panting between blows, Arkas’ started to slow his assault. He snorted, throwing one last strike, driving all of his might down his arm and through his fist, punching elbow-deep into the ice.

He leaned his head forwards, the chill of the ice wall seeping through his helm, cooling his anger. Arkas laid his other hand against the wall, fingers splayed, their tips seeking the undulations and cuts.

Generations of labour. Clinging to an ideal he had embodied.

Not survival. The Bear-clad had not fought for survival, he had fought for victory. Arkas knew that he could not have won. Every rational part of him recognised that his alliance had been doomed, that he could not have been victorious. The logic of the God-King’s intervention was clear. Arkas was here, now, to deliver on his oath, given the means to do so by Sigmar. A longer view. A godly perspective.

Straightening, Arkas inhaled, enjoying the coldness in his lungs. His first breath had been of this chill air. It was as much a part of him as anything else.

The rage was a memory now, no longer a living part of him, exorcised through his bloodied hands, returned to the well of Ghurite power from which it had come.

He knew what he had to do. It would not be easy. He had to find Katiya and tell her to prepare to leave. For good or ill, the Ursungorans would hide no more.

As he came to this conclusion something pricked his attention. A sound, much muffled by the distance and tunnels. Shouts.

Screams.

Arkas exploded with celestial energy, his fists remaking themselves as he drew forth his weapons.

He ran.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Theuderis was not sure what was happening. The Ursungorans were calling out in their tongue. Amongst the panicked bellows and shrieks there was one word again and again, but he could not fathom its meaning.

He raced after Katiya, who had set off like a coursed hare, gathering a trail of Ursungorans as she went. More followed behind the Lord-Celestant. Despite the tumult, everyone seemed to know what was happening, enacting a well-rehearsed drill in which youths snatched up infants and the able-bodied readied their weapons.

They passed into one of the larger chambers, not far from the surface. Several hundred Ursungorans were coming and going. Katiya grabbed some of them, speaking quickly.

‘Is it an attack?’ Theuderis demanded.

Katiya paid him no attention. She snapped off orders, pointing, directing, speaking with quiet assurance to some. Theuderis did not wish to interfere, but set forth to look for more Stormcasts.

A Celestial Vindicator burst into view ahead, blazing with celestial energy. He had a warhammer and runeblade, and his hammer-tipped cloak was blazing with light.

‘Arkas!’

The Warbeast turned, surprised.

‘What is it?’ demanded Theuderis. ‘Have the Chaos tribes returned already?’

‘No.’ The Warbeast shook his head.

‘What are they saying? What does that word mean?’

Arkas hefted his weapons and looked at Theuderis.

‘Vermintide.’

Across the dead of the battle they swarmed. Up from the Black River, down from the forested slopes, emerging from every crack and crevasse in the ice field. A living carpet of fur and fangs and glinting eyes. Many were simple rats, bodies slicked with grease and blood from the corpses, each no bigger than a fist. But there were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Others were far larger – warp-mutants as big as dogs, collared with rusted iron, naked tails as long as broadswords. Some were scaled, some naked but for protrusions of bone, some even skinless with visible muscle and flesh and strands of rope-like sinew.

From across Ursungorod they had come, white as snow, grey as ash, black as pitch. The air was filled with the nerve-jangling scratch of claws on ice and armour, the slither of dark bodies over flesh and the rustling of cloth, the chittering and squealing – a nightmare orchestration.

The wave moved as one, possessed by the singular will of the Great Horned Rat, directed by the malevolence of Poxmaster Felk. As an undulating mass, the swarm welled up from the ravine of the Bear’s Fangs and slithered across the glacier from the valley walls. The rats burst out onto the snowfield, surging like a storm front.

With them came a sorcerous mist. It streamed from hex-laden bodies like green smoke, a trail of pestilent vapour flowing from fanged mouths, heavy with foul enchantment.

A band of Ursungorans had been burning the dead of the battle. They were taken in a few heartbeats, vanishing into the ravenous swarm with barely a shriek. The lookouts had just enough time to shout warnings before the dark wave was scampering up tower-mounds and into window slits, pouring down open sally ports like filthy water. Beacon fires stayed unlit, bells and horns unsounded. The guards screamed, the only alarm calls they could muster before they were overwhelmed by biting, clawing horror.

Into the tunnels washed the deluge of rats, pooling and bursting in waves, overrunning everything. Some of the Ursungorans tried to run, others fought. Neither were successful; whether dragged down from behind or with weapons in their hands, it made no difference. Armour was no defence against a foe that was dozens of slashing claws, scores of gnawing fangs. Flailing and shouting, flesh turned to bloody ribbons, they fell.

Such was the scene that confronted Arkas as he and Theuderis burst into one of the great chambers, dozens of Stormcasts converging from different directions. The massive warriors waded into the vermin, laying about with maces, swords and hammers. Dozens of the foul creatures died with every sweep of the enchanted weapons but there were dozens more to take their place. Against the armour of Sigmar’s chosen, claws and fangs were small threats, but in turn the Stormcasts could not slay enough. Their greatest weapons, tempest-wreathed javelin, crossbow and bow, were useless against such a heaving mass, the warriors unable to unleash their full power for fear of harming the few Ursungorans that continued to battle vainly in the midst of the vermintide.

‘Knights-Azyros! Samat!’ Theuderis forged waist-deep through the leaping, snarling rats, carving a furrow through them with metronomic swings of his celestial hammer. ‘Glavius!’

No specific order was needed. The Silverhands’ warriors knew exactly what was required. The Lord-Relictor plunged into the morass of vermin, spearing a gigantic rat with the haft of his morbid icon. Planting the mortuary standard, Glavius thrust out his hammer towards the swarm. His divine icon shimmered with the power celestial. Forks of lightning crawled down his arm and across his body to spear from his out-thrust weapon. Where they struck, bursts of blue fire erupted, incinerating the vermin a score at a time.

Samat and his fellow Knights-Azyros could not take flight, but that was not their intent. Flanking Theuderis, they strode through the snapping, hissing rats, oblivious to their scratching and biting. Holding aloft their celestial beacons, they called in unison for the power of the God-King to smite their foes.

The blast of Azyrite light that filled the chamber blinded even Arkas, who had left mounds of dead rats as tall as himself in his wake. Blinking clear his vision, he saw hundreds of smouldering rodent corpses littering the chamber floor. Closer to the ring of Knights-Azyros, the corpses were ash mounds, and at their feet nothing was left but dark grease stains on the stone flags.

The respite was momentary. More and more rats were streaming down the tunnels and passageways. Arkas turned, seeking Katiya. She stood at one of the corridor entrances shepherding the last children away while her followers hacked and slashed at the few rats that had survived the tempest of celestial energy.

‘Go!’ he shouted at her. ‘Run!’

She looked as if she would argue. Her eyes moved past him and widened in horror. The fresh wave of vermin was more monstrous than the first, a clawing, squealing pile of hound-sized rodents with curling ram’s horns, barbed tails and dagger-claws, spreading like oil across water. Thick clouds of filthy breath followed them, stinging eyes and burning throats. The handful of Ursungorans that had been saved by the celestial beacons were overwhelmed by the noxious vapours, hacking up blood, eyes and noses weeping thick pus while buboes blistered like burns on their exposed skin.

Katiya turned and ran, taking her people with her, leaving Arkas and the other two dozen Stormcasts alone with the plague rats.

‘Seal the chamber!’ bellowed Theuderis, moving to block the exit by which Katiya’s group had fled.

Arkas broke left, crushing bodies underfoot, using his fists as much as his weapons to smash his way through the swarm while feral rodents hurled themselves at him with hisses and snarls. He swept his cloak round in a long arc, unleashing a wave of Azyr-born hammers that crackled and spat with lightning as they smashed a furrow through the vermin throng.

The others, an eclectic mix of Judicators, Knights-Azyros, Decimators and Liberators, pushed towards the tunnels like men wading through heavy surf, battering and slashing against the living tide. Decimators brought down their starsoul maces in mighty two-handed swings, unleashing thunderous explosions that scattered the giant rats by the score. Judicators loosed missile after missile into the heaving mass, their quivers never emptied, firing as swiftly as they could summon the celestial energy for each projectile.

A gigantic rodent leapt for Arkas’ neck. He caught it in mid-air with the flat of his blade, snapping its spine, its lifeless body splashing against the wall to leave a red smear across the ice. So thick were the bodies underfoot that he almost tripped, bogged down as though crossing a mountain fen.

The miasma of sickness cloyed in his throat and nostrils, acidic and dry. His reforged body was strengthened against even the harshest warp-taint, but his eyes streamed and his lungs burned all the same.

The Lord-Relictor, Glavius, raised his storm-wreathed icon, incanting a benediction of Sigmar. The bones within his sarcophagus-icon gleamed with power. Where the light touched the vapours they burned with white fire. The wave of cleansing power coruscated through the air in a ragged ring around Glavius.

Eventually the incoming tide stopped, the seemingly inexhaustible swarm ending as suddenly as it had arrived. It was little comfort, for Arkas knew that they had faced only a fraction of the vermintide. His sword slashed through another handful of beasts and a final volley from the Judicators scoured the chamber of the remaining rodents.

‘We must hunt down the rest,’ said Theuderis.

‘We have to evacuate the Ursungorans,’ Arkas replied, waving a hand through the last wisps of plague-fog that lingered. ‘Nowhere is safe below ground while this pestilent smog remains.’

Theuderis nodded and snapped out orders to his warriors. The few Celestial Vindicators looked to Arkas for command.

‘With me,’ he said, stepping towards the passage where Katiya had left. ‘Move speedily, kill swiftly. Time is the greater enemy now.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Clouds obscured the stars and moons, blanketing the Bear’s Pelt in utter darkness. A pale blue light flickered in the forests on the western slopes of the valley, casting long shadows from the trees. The beacons of the Knights-Azyros lit the way for the dozens of scattered groups of Stormcasts and Ursungorans as they picked their way across the treacherous ice, heading towards the sanctuary promised by that holy light.

Three times Arkas made the journey from the City of Ice to the growing encampment on the slope, each time heading back into the chill catacombs to search for Katiya, each time finding pockets of terrified, shocked Ursungorans to lead to safety but no news of their leader.

Flights of Prosecutors circled and criss-crossed overhead, their wings a faint trail of iridescence against the gloom. Cordons of Liberators and Protectors guarded the approaches through the trees, wary of rats, skaven and the Chaos-tainted.

Knowing that he could wander the City of Ice all night and never find Katiya, Arkas resigned himself to a patient wait until morning. He sought out Theuderis, and found the Silverhand at the heart of the camp marshalling what resources were to hand. Trees had been felled to create wind breaks and the few belongings that had been snatched from the icy depths were passed to those in most need. Pale-faced children huddled in blankets and cloaks close to the fires banked up by their guardians, watching, mesmerised, as the stars of the celestial beacons passed back and forth overhead. In numb shock, they found comfort in the divine light of Sigmar shining down from between the boughs.

There was little enough food, but some stores had been saved and the Ursungorans’ best hunters had quickly checked their closest pits and snares and brought back several hares, deer and foxes. Hastor had insisted on leading Arkas’ Judicators on a hunt and had returned with three enormous mountain boars, their flesh seared by the blasts of celestial missiles. The Ursungorans were still butchering the huge carcasses ready for cooking.

Seeing Arkas approach, Theuderis dismissed his companions. His dracoth prowled the shadows at the perimeter of the camp, eyed warily by the Ursungorans as it sniffed and snorted in the darkness.

‘I can think of no surer guardian,’ said Theuderis, following Arkas’ gaze and line of thought. ‘Tyrathrax’s senses are far superior to even the patrols of our winged companions.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ said Arkas. He fell silent, tongue tied by awkwardness. He felt a fool for putting his hands on another Stormcast, but could not find the right words.

‘We are fortunate that the skaven did not seek to exploit their attack further,’ said Theuderis after a long silence. ‘Had they been waiting on the surface we would have been easy targets to bring down.’

‘Luck had no part in it,’ Arkas said, bitter memories stirring. ‘They kill from afar rather than risk their scrawny necks.’

‘Perhaps. It signals a change in the skaven’s plans, whatever their motivation.’

‘I have spoken to some of the Ursungorans. Neither in memory nor in their oldest stories has anything like this happened before. Our arrival has stirred the ratkin. They are trying to keep us from their lair so that they can concentrate on unearthing the realmgate. They will not be drawn forth, you can be sure of that.’

‘Even so, why have the skaven not tried anything like this before? What are they hoping to achieve now that we are here?’

Arkas thought about this but had no quick answers.

‘They are afraid. Desperate. Cowards to the last, but lashing out any way they can. Do not look for more ambition than cruel spite in these creatures. What they cannot dominate they kill.’

‘You are right.’ Theuderis tilted his head, deep in thought. ‘And perhaps in that you have found the solution. We stand at a confluence of events and must trust that the Lord Sigmar did not send us to Ursungorod at this time by whim. The preparation for the assault on the Allpoints gains momentum, the battle for the Realm of Life is pitched to full fury, and the skaven discover a realmgate that leads close to the Lifegate, hidden for... centuries, maybe millennia?’

‘Kill or be killed,’ said Arkas. He started to pace. Movement assisted the flow of thought. Light from the growing fires gleamed on his armour, countless scratches marring the surface. With a thought he let a surge of celestial energy sparkle across the surface, turning the plates back to unblemished turquoise while blood and crusted gore fell away in a shower of dried flakes. ‘When I fought the skaven they were led by a verminlord, a Corruptor named Skixakoth. By description I think this creature is among the daemonkin that assault the sylvaneth in the Vaults of the Spring Moon.’

‘How did you come by this knowledge?’ The question was asked in a neutral tone – too flat for Arkas’ liking, clearly masking more than curiosity.

‘Does it matter?’ He regretted his snapped reply immediately. It looked like evasion, which hinted at guilt. Arkas sighed. ‘I learnt this from the Queen of the Peak. It was her power that granted me the visions of the undercity of the skaven, and the realmgate.’

‘You have seen its location? Could you take us there?’

Arkas nodded. ‘That is my intent.’ He hesitated again, clawing for words that were uncomfortable to say. ‘I would welcome your opinion, Silverhand. In matters of strategy. I am the Warbeast, I’m sure you know my reputation as well as any other. I can seize the realmgate, I am sure of it. But I need your help to hold it.’

‘We are allies, are we not?’

‘We are.’ Arkas swallowed hard. ‘And in the spirit of alliance I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I laid hands upon you.’

‘Worse has been done in the Gladitorium.’

‘No, it should never have happened. I... This place, Ursungorod, affects me. I am a child of these lands, more than in flesh, in spirit. Sigmar took me, made me a being of the Celestial Sphere, but he cannot remove that shard of Ghur that is in my heart.’

‘I cannot say that I understand,’ said Theuderis. ‘It is obviously something more than simply returning to the place of your birth, but it is not an experience I have shared.’

Arkas looked at the Knight Excelsior for some time. Theuderis was unsure what the purpose was for such scrutiny.

‘Ask me what you want,’ he said. ‘I will answer truthfully to the best of my ability. There will be no secrets between us.’

‘Why do you care?’ said the Warbeast.

‘Care about what?’

‘All of this,’ said Arkas, waving a hand towards the Ursungorans, the camp, the forest, the mountains beyond. He turned slowly, looking up to where the light of celestial beacons flickered. ‘Why do you fight for Sigmar?’

The question surprised Theuderis. It took him a few moments to articulate his reply.

‘For the same reason as you. To save my people. To ensure that mankind has a future free from the tyranny and wrath of uncaring darkness.’

‘But you had saved your people, when Sigmar took you. The Glittering Breaches, your castles and armies, were safe.’

‘At that time. If I have learnt anything in Sigmaron it is that the threat of the Chaos Gods waxes and wanes. For a time they were held back by the God-King and his allies, but that did not last. We are where we are. Sigmar took me because I protected my lands, fostered cooperation rather than war, built as well as conquered. I would repay that honour.’

‘Honour?’ Theuderis could hear the grin in Arkas’ voice. ‘You think honour will help us in this place?’

‘I think that I believe in two principles. My honour and my duty, and they are entwined. I cannot say that Ursungorod holds any particular relevance for me. I would feel the same wherever Sigmar despatched me.’

‘Even to the Glittering Breaches?’

Theuderis had no answer for that. He did not like theoretical situations and questions.

‘I have a special regard for that place, but it is not my home.’

The Knight Excelsior started towards the perimeter, put on edge by Arkas’ attitude. The older Ursungoran children were digging in the mulch and dirt, creating a ditch and rampart between the trees. It was hard work on the frozen ground, and only a few paces had been erected. Theuderis did not see the point in any defensive sense, but it kept them engaged and made the Ursungorans feel they were doing something useful.

‘How can you say it is not your home?’ Arkas kept at his shoulder, speaking quietly but insistently.

‘The worlds turn, places change. Castle Lyonaster might be a great city or it might be nothing more than the duardin and human ruins that make up the bones of Ursungorod. My family are dead. The people I served and who served me are dead. The Glittering Breaches I knew no longer exist.’

Movement in the darkness further into the trees drew his eye, but it was only a trio of Ursungoran hunters prowling the shadows on patrol. Like the entrenchment, it was of little purpose when Stormcast Prosecutors, Knights-Venator and Knights-Azyros kept an immortal watch above. Theuderis’ warriors would know of any threat long before the natives.

‘You do not know?’ said Arkas, shocked. ‘How the war fares in the Glittering Breaches?’

‘No Stormcasts have yet been sent.’

‘It is possible to find out what is happening in the realms beyond Azyr. Lord Sigmar could tell you...’

‘I do not wish to know!’ snapped Theuderis. He kept his next rebuke in check, snatching in a breath instead. When his temper had cooled a little, he continued with quiet words. ‘I know you, Warbeast. Hungry for revenge, needing to punish those that wronged you. I cannot blame you, but I do not sympathise. You harbour a doubt, the thought that if you had stayed that perhaps your people would have prevailed?’

‘It is unlikely, I know, but...’

‘But nothing! I had won, Warbeast!’ Theuderis turned on his companion, taut with aggravation. He kept his voice low, conscious of the Stormcasts and Ursungorans close at hand. ‘I had ensured peace for a generation, for my family and my people, after a life of war and death. My wife was bearing my third child.’ Theuderis leaned close, his helm almost touching Arkas’. ‘Do not think that I gave up nothing! But the sacrifice was worth it. They lived long and happy lives and my children sired many descendants who continue to protect Castle Lyonaster to this day.’

He did not say out loud the alternatives that crowded his thoughts in the dark moments. Ursungorod was proof enough of what had beset the Mortal Realms during the long age of Chaos. The bare truth was that the Glittering Breaches would be no different to the rest of Chamon, overrun or at least besieged by the followers of the Chaos Gods. His great victory had been a blink, a momentary respite in the great turn of history.

The real lesson he had learnt as a Lord-Celestant was that all victories were fleeting, until the last one.

The Knight Excelsior turned and marched away, shoulders stiff. He thought for a moment that Arkas would follow, but was grateful when he heard the other Lord-Celestant calling for his Knight-Heraldor and Knight-Vexillor.

He strode out past the perimeter and into the fluctuating shadows away from the campfires, fists tight, teeth gritted. He already regretted his outburst. It was a display of weakness he should have avoided. Whether Arkas was deliberately baiting him, it was impossible to say, but the effect was the same. Maybe the wildness of Ursungorod was affecting him too.

The pad of large feet on frosted leaves caused him to turn. Tyrathrax emerged into the fronds of pale blue light, drawn by her master’s unease. She came up alongside Theuderis, close enough for him to lay a hand on her armoured shoulder. Her presence was reassuring, anchoring him back to his purpose.

Being paired with the Warbeast taxed the Knight Excelsior’s patience. Raised to admire the perfection of interlocking functions, the beauty of military drill and expertise, the wild nature of Arkas and his Strike Chamber concerned Theuderis.

‘It is not our part to guess the ways of the God-King,’ said Theuderis. ‘Which is fortunate, for I am baffled that he would set me beside the Warbeast. I cannot help but feel it is some kind of test. Perhaps the Lord Sigmar wishes to know if I am strong enough to return to the Glittering Breaches and whatever waits for me there.’

Tyrathrax said nothing, which was why Theuderis considered her the best of all possible companions.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The fires had guttered down to embers and the Ursungorans were nothing more than shapeless lumps of shadow in bedrolls and blankets, huddled close to each other and the remnants of the fires. Dawn had arrived on the far side of Ursungorod, but had not yet reached the valley of the Bear’s Pelt. The air was freezing, and mist curled from the breath of the Stormcasts as they stood watch. The Warbeast sat atop a broad log, his back to the fires, gazing out into the shadowed forest.

The Ursungorans might have been driven from their city, but they were at home in the wilds too. Just as when Arkas had been a warrior of the Greypelt, the people of the mountains were nomads by necessity and long tradition, and had brought with them everything they needed. They lived lightly, able to hunt and trap on the move, sharing kinship with the wilderness that went beyond familiarity. They were part of Ursungorod, steeped in the magic of Ghur, their collective instincts honed by a lifetime of wariness and bitter experience.

It had been a long night and the morning bode little better. A few more refugees from the City of Ice had arrived, but there was still no sign of Katiya. Accounts conflicted. Some had her safe and well in the southern tunnels, others thought they saw her turn to fight the tide of rats, protecting the young ones she had taken with her. A few thought they had seen her on the ice field, tirelessly rallying survivors in the darkness. None could say they had seen her fall, but Arkas held little hope to see her.

Theuderis had been absent also, gone into the woods since his sharp words with Arkas. The Silverhands made no remark about their missing leader, but minded themselves and their duties with quiet diligence. For their part, the Warbeasts prowled the camp and surrounding woods like guard hounds confined within a wall.

To ease communication, Arkas had spent some time instructing the Knights Excelsior in the language of Ursungorod, refining what they had already learnt so that they could talk with the Ursungorans and also understand the battle-tongue of the Warbeasts. Being able to address the natives, and understand them in return, eased the mood somewhat.

A glint of celestial light betrayed the descent of Hastor. He had spent the night scouring the Bear’s Pelt for survivors and foes. He landed effortlessly, as though newly forged, with no sign of fatigue in his gait or voice.

‘A rough time,’ said Hastor, gauging his commander’s mood. He looked around at the sleeping Ursungorans. ‘Four hundred, I would say. There will be others still below the ice.’

‘Four hundred and thirty-six,’ replied Arkas. ‘Three hundred and eight of fighting age and ability. Half those that woke yesterday dawn.’

‘When they have rested, we will search the city for others,’ said the Knight-Venator. ‘I have crossed the opposite slopes but if they are choosing to hide, which would be wise, even I would not find them.’ Hastor glanced up, about to say something further, but remained silent.

‘You would prefer someone to light your way?’ said Arkas, following Hastor’s gaze to the slowly circling Knights-Azyros. ‘They are not my warriors to command.’

‘The Silverhand has chosen an inconvenient time to go exploring. When dawn arrives we must be ready with a plan.’

‘We do not need Theuderis for that.’ Arkas straightened his back and stretched out his long legs. ‘You are right, we search the City of Ice for other survivors. One day, that is all.’

Hastor’s lightning wings crackled into nothing to allow him to sit next to his lord. He clasped his hands together, resting his arms on his knees. He did not look at Arkas, but at the Knights Excelsior standing like statues at the edge of the encampment.

‘I do not think Theuderis will agree.’ The Knight-Venator paused for just a heartbeat, and then continued. ‘He might be right not to.’

‘The realmgate,’ Arkas said with a nod and a sigh. ‘I know.’

‘What will we do?’

Activity off to the left drew the Warbeast’s attention before he could reply. Theuderis had returned and his officers were moving across the camp to attend to him. Dismounting, the Silverhand approached with his retinue.

Arkas felt others behind him and glanced round to see that Doridun and Dolmetis were at his back as though summoned. How much of his conversation with Hastor they had overheard he did not know but he was grateful for their timely arrival.

‘A nice ride, Lord Silverhand?’ Hastor asked as Theuderis stopped in front of Arkas.

‘Hush your tongue, knight,’ the Warbeast growled. Hastor stood and stepped away, head bowed in apology. Arkas rose and folded his arms. ‘I hope you spent your time in the wood productively.’

‘I did,’ replied Theuderis. ‘And with Samat’s aid I have located the entrances by which we will attack the skaven city.’

‘You have?’ Arkas looked at the Knight-Azyros. ‘I did not realise you knew the mountains so well already.’

‘The vermintide trail was not difficult to follow even at night, and the skaven here have grown arrogant. Their spoil and spoor is evident everywhere.’ Samat glanced at Theuderis and received a nod of assent. ‘There is a large cavern on the other side of this mountain, across a ridge to the south-east.’

‘I know it,’ said Arkas. ‘Flanked by the remains of two human towers?’

‘That is the one.’

‘We cannot attack there,’ Arkas said with a shake of his head. ‘The skaven use it easily enough but there is a chasm not more than three hundred paces into the warren. They will cut the bridges and topple the crossings the moment we enter.’

‘I see,’ said Theuderis. ‘And the gorge west of there, an outflow of an underground river.’

‘The Ratway it was called. Obvious, but possible.’ Arkas flexed his fingers around an imaginary sword hilt, remembering when he had last been there. ‘I tried that before, but was baulked on the surface. However, I did not have Stormcast Eternals to lead back then. But it would not be enough, there are too many other ways for the skaven to get out and come in behind.’

‘Do you have a better plan?’ said Attaxes, stepping forwards. ‘If you know these mountains so well, find us a way to attack the skaven.’

‘I already have,’ said Arkas, keeping his gaze locked on Theuderis. ‘But you knew that, yes?’

‘Our success cannot rely wholly on your survival, Warbeast.’ The Silverhand shrugged. ‘Or your mood.’

Arkas laughed, slapping a hand to his chest.

‘My mood? Yes, my infamous temperament!’ He turned to his knights, put a foot up on the log, a hand resting on his knee. ‘Headstrong, that’s me. Incautious, they say. Rash, perhaps. What do we say?’

‘Swift and deadly,’ the Warbeast officers replied in unison.

‘Swift and deadly...’ Arkas returned his attention to Theuderis. ‘I understand. As hard as it is for you to share command, it is the same for me. Do you want to know my plan? Do you think I would keep it secret, bargaining with my knowledge for time to search the glacier for Ursungorans?’

‘It had occurred to me,’ Theuderis admitted. ‘It seems we know each other well enough.’

‘We do, Silverhand. We do. Which is why I want you to lead us.’

‘What?’ Hastor stepped forwards, shaking his head.

‘I do not understand,’ admitted Theuderis. ‘Are you placing yourself under my command?’

‘I am,’ said Arkas. He drew his warhammer. The celestial weapon shone in the pre-dawn gloom, bathing them all with pale blue light. He offered it to Theuderis, a gesture of fealty. ‘You are the general, the king. You are the strategist. I am a brute. Cleverer than most, but still a brute in my heart. Guide my hand and it will smite our foes.’

Theuderis had no response at first. He looked at the assembled Celestial Vindicators, his expression hidden behind his mask, eyes cloaked in the shadow of his helm. He nodded.

‘I accept. And I apologise for doubting you. Perhaps, despite prior experience, we might actually possess sufficient wisdom between us.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

While dawn brightened the forest, the Lord-Celestants planned. Arkas told Theuderis everything he knew of the skaven tunnels, though long centuries would have changed much. However, the more he recalled the vision he had received from the Queen of the Peak, the more certain he was that he could find the realmgate.

While plans were discussed, the Ursungorans started to wake. Arkas became aware of their coughs and gentle moans in the background. He paid the noise little heed until he heard his name tersely called. It was a young man, twenty years perhaps, nervously wringing his deer hide hat in his hand. There was fear written across his face and his glance kept moving back to a group of Ursungorans a short distance away. They were crowded around a blanketed figure, concerned. Several Warbeasts interposed themselves, stopping the approaching native.

‘A moment, by your leave,’ Arkas said to Theuderis and received a nod in reply. He approached the Ursungoran, waving his warriors aside. ‘What is your name? What is wrong?’

‘Mika, our Uniter. I am Mika.’ He flopped a hand towards the others. ‘My brother. Elder brother. He is sick.’

‘Sick?’ A cold feeling crept into the pit of Arkas’ stomach as he strode over to the group. One of them was still in his bedroll. He could hear the man’s wheezing breaths, each touched by wetness in his lungs. There were scabs at the corners of his mouth and in his nostrils. ‘How long?’

‘He was well when we ate last night,’ said an old man swathed in a thick shawl. His spindly fingers teased at some loose threads in its weave. ‘Bortis had quite the appetite.’

Bortis was awake, but only just. His eyes were yellowy, pupils little more than pinpricks staring without sight up into the trees. He kept swallowing hard, each time a wince creasing the skin at the corner of his eyes. The Warbeast crouched to examine him more closely. The Ursungoran’s gums were bleeding, his tongue swollen.

‘Show me his arms,’ Arkas commanded, trying to keep the concern from his voice.

They complied, rolling back the tattered sleeve of Bortis’ coat. The veins stood out like wire beneath his pale skin. His fingers twitched spasmodically, the brittle nails split and cracking.

‘Wait here. Light a fire to keep him warm,’ Arkas said, rising to his feet.

They looked up at him, hope and desperation etched into their faces. Arkas was thankful they could see nothing of his expression, nor his doubtlessly ashen skin. They did not ask if Bortis was going to be all right, and for that Arkas was also grateful, because he could not lie to them.

Returning to Theuderis, he gestured for the Silverhand to meet him. Exchanging a last few words with Attaxes, the Lord-Celestant approached.

‘Plague,’ Arkas said before Theuderis could ask what was wrong. ‘Skaven-pox of some kind.’

‘How many?’ Theuderis asked, looking past Arkas’ shoulder and then turning towards the rest of the camp.

The Warbeast felt dead inside as he replied. It was better that way, to feel nothing. The alternative was too hard to contemplate.

‘All of them, perhaps. If it came from the rat-fog in the tunnels...’

‘Quarantine? Purging?’

‘There’ll be no purge! These people have seen every horror of war, plague and famine. That is the fact of life in Ursungorod. They can deal with it.’ He cast a glance behind to confirm what he suspected. ‘As for quarantine... See how the other groups do not approach. They already know what is happening. They are not strangers to this.’

‘Everybody has been exposed.’

Arkas sighed heavily. ‘Yes. Those that weren’t infected during the attack have been nearby ever since. There might be a few families, maybe some that escaped but haven’t made it to the camp yet.’

Neither of them said anything for a while. Arkas was too familiar with the scenario. He had seen how this devastating turn of events unfolded before, whole clans wiped out. As the Uniter he had razed villages to the ground to rid them of the Pestilens-taint.

‘We keep watch, keep the camp safe, that is all we can do,’ said Arkas.

‘We cannot afford distractions. We still have to finalise the plan for the assault on the realmgate.’

‘We do,’ said the Warbeast, dragging his eyes away from Bortis and his family. He focused on Theuderis, but the effort of maintaining an air of control and calm was almost too much. ‘Do not worry about leaving guards here, Silverhand. When we attack, the skaven will have more to deal with than they have ever feared. We cannot protect the Ursungorans against this latest wrong. We can avenge them.’

‘I understand that you want to strike back at the skaven to punish them for this,’ said the Knight Excelsior. ‘In time we will wipe them from the face of the mountains. We will purge the bowels of Ursungorod of every skaven and Chaos-tainted soul to be found.’

‘Aye, as it will be in all of the Mortal Realms when we drive Archaon from the All-gates.’

Theuderis laid his hand on Arkas’ arm, a placating gesture.

‘But not today. Not this battle.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ Arkas tried to pull his arm away but Theuderis’ grip tightened and his tone was insistent.

‘We fight for the realmgate. We will seize the realmgate and guard it for as long as we must. As instructed by Sigmar himself, when the gate is ours Glavius will call for my Lord-Castellants to arrive with the rest of the Strike Chamber. When all is secure, when the realmgate is opened and ready for the attack on the Lifegate, the cleansing will begin.’

‘I swore an oath, many times, to destroy the skaven and free Ursungorod from their clutches,’ Arkas said, prising himself from Theuderis’ grip. ‘You do not need to lecture me on how that will be done, Silverhand.’

‘Very well.’ Theuderis stepped away and looked around the camp. ‘Make whatever provisions you need to deal with this... situation. I want to march at noon.’

‘I’ll find you soon enough,’ Arkas assured him.

He turned away. Hastor and the others officers moved to approach but he waved them back without a word.

His warhammer seemed heavy in his grasp as he walked out into the woods, a sign of his inner burden.

He could leave it, throw it away, dispense with the burden. To do so invited a very dangerous train of thought. The hammer was a badge, the symbol of the God-King. It was Sigmar’s authority. It was also Arkas’ duty, which was why it weighed so heavily at the moment.

The Warbeast looked back through the trees. The sun had not yet penetrated the canopy and only the light of celestial beacons shone through the camp. By the pale blue glow he could see the Stormcasts moving back and forth, the deadly warriors utterly unable to combat the threat growing in heart of the encampment. The Ursungorans were rousing in greater numbers, awakening to the news of infection and plague. Mothers and fathers would have to look at their children and know that these could be their last days together.

Suddenly his armour felt constricting, his helm a prison. Gasping, Arkas tore off the mask and threw it aside. He gulped down the fresh, cold air, the sudden chill stinging his eyes, tingling his scarred skin.

He felt the faintest of shudders beneath his feet. A fine mist of snow fell from the needled branches overhead. He barely noticed it, his mind going back to the camp and the horror that would unfold there.

It was good that they would leave, that the attack would take him far away into the bowels of the skaven lair, out of sight of the spreading sickness.

Guilt welled up at that thought. The feeling of abandoning his people again forced him to take in another stuttering lungful of mountain air.

Another tremor shook the mountain, strong enough to sway the trees this time. Arkas staggered over to a nearby trunk and leaned his free hand against the rough bark, trying to draw reassurance from its solidity, its unyielding nature.

He could feel the rush of Ghurite energy streaming from the roots and into the trunk and branches, spreading into the air like a fog. Not just the roots of the tree, the roots of the mountain, the depths of Ursungorod itself. The endless deeps of the Shadowgulf. It was in him too, connecting him to the land, to the wild places above and below the ground.

Pain scored up through his bones, the like of which he had not felt since being reforged. His fingers dug knuckle-deep into the tree as he fought back against the agony that suddenly coursed through him.

He remembered the meaning of that pain, what it heralded. He stumbled away, tearing a fistful of wood as he went. Arkas flung away his hammer. He fell to his knees, eyes wide, teeth bared like an animal. The ground shook constantly now, dusting him with falling snow and pine needles.

‘No,’ he snarled.

He thought that he had been freed of the bear’s gift-curse when Sigmar had altered his body upon the Anvil of the Apotheosis. He was Stormcast, a lord of the Celestial Vindicators. His spirit belonged to another.

Perhaps he was wrong. His sigmarite-fused fleshed rebelled against the influx of Ghurite energy. Celestial power and savage, aeons-old magic confronted each other, like a pack of wolves howling at the distant moon.

On all fours, Arkas shuddered and the mountain shuddered with him. Through the rushing of blood in his ears he heard the shouts of the Ursungorans and the bellowed commands of Stormcast Eternals. The words were meaningless sounds, drowned out by the thunderous heartbeat that threatened to burst his chest.

He could not resist the pain any longer, could no longer fight the surge of energy trying to break his bones and reshape his flesh.

Staggering to his feet, Arkas seized the closest tree. Celestial magic and beast power came together. Lightning flashed across his armour and the glow of savage power lit his eyes. He ripped up the tree, roots tearing the frozen earth.

He wanted to roar, to howl, to free the savage noise building in his head. In the small part of his mind that was still his, Arkas knew he could not. It was his will, his choice whether he embraced or rejected the beast trying to possess him.

The tree exploded into burning shards, showering him with ash and sharp splinters.

Arkas stood with fists clenched in front of him.

‘I am a Stormcast of Sigmar,’ he hissed between gritted teeth.

Warbeast, a voice whispered, but its power was dissipating, its hold on him broken by his assertion of fealty to the God-King.

He stood with head bowed, eyes closed, fists at his side, and waited for the quaking to subside. When all was still again he sought out his mask and fitted it to his helm. The click of it snapping into place was an affirmation of who he was and why he lived.

And he also knew exactly how to defeat the skaven.

Arkas Warbeast, Lord-Celestant of the Celestial Vindicators, strode over to his hammer and snatched it from a pool of melting snow. He turned back to the camp, filled with renewed purpose.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The morning passed quickly. After the distraction of the earthquake – which was disruptive but caused no serious damage – Theuderis spent most of it in deep conversation with Arkas. The Warbeast was filled with a vigour that enthused Theuderis. His short sojourn into the woods had proven very productive and the strategy they devised on his return gave the Knight Excelsior fresh hope. For the first time since he had crossed into the Realm of Beasts, Theuderis felt that he was moving in the right direction, after the many setbacks that had waylaid him previously.

In the main camp there were many more showing symptoms of the virulent infection. The first, the man called Bortis, was still alive, but only just. It was unlikely he would see nightfall. The sores, the watery breath and facial bleeding varied in severity from victim to victim, showing no favour to age or gender, but it was only a matter of time for those who had been caught by the pernicious attack. Theuderis took some heart that nearly half of the Ursungorans so far seemed unaffected, a few family groups that had not encountered the plague rats free from the taint thus far.

With a plan settled between them, Theuderis and Arkas sent word for their officers to make ready for a war council. Theuderis heard Glavius mention his name in passing and joined the Lord-Relictor where he was crouched in front of three dozen Ursungorans, more than half of them no older than ten years. He had removed his mask, revealing brown eyes that were warm and comforting, in marked contrast to his demeanour as Lord-Relictor.

‘Here he comes, the Lord Silverhand!’ Glavius declared. The children smiled, their joy somewhat incongruous given the morbid ornamentation of their entertainer. ‘King of the Glittering Breaches! Master of Castle Lyonaster! Lord-Celestant of the Knights Excelsior!’

‘What was your castle like, Lord Theuderis?’ asked a young woman, her infant swaddled close to her breast. Theuderis could see the child was pale, and there were flakes of dried blood on its chin. He looked at the mother’s face, suddenly lost for words.

‘Was it as large as the fortress at Raven Gorge?’

‘I do not know this fortress,’ Theuderis admitted. ‘I cannot make a comparison.’

‘It’s as tall as a mountain, and made of black bricks from the world-that-was,’ a little boy cheerfully informed him. ‘It used to have a whole tribe of ogors what lived there, but the ratmen killed them all before I was borned.’

‘There were no ogors at Castle Lyonaster, though we had to fight off armies of orruks several times.’

Theuderis looked at the families, their expectant faces streaked with dirt and blood, huddled in cloaks and blankets. So different from the citizens of the Glittering Breaches in appearance – so pale and thin and scared. But inside they were the same. They wanted the same thing, to live in peace, to raise their children and die of happy old age.

He lowered to one knee, still avoiding looking at the sickening child.

‘Does he have a name?’

‘Ljubo,’ the mother replied. ‘After his father and grandfather. They were fine trackers and huntsmen.’

‘A very good name,’ said Arkas, coming up beside Glavius. ‘I fought beside Krul Ljubo of the hussta, a very clever warrior and excellent marksman. If you are of his blood then I know where your ancestors’ cunning and woodscraft comes from.’

The woman smiled up at Arkas and Theuderis used the moment to rise, desperate to return to more certain ground, such as the discussion of lines of advance and flank protection. He could not get involved with these people. He could not pick favourites, it was not his place. They were all worth saving or none of them, just as those that served the Chaos Gods could not be pitied or saved, simply exterminated.

‘Are we ready, Lord Arkas?’ he asked, his tone stiff with formality, uncomfortable with the feelings stirred by his encounter with the Ursungorans. Why had he not kept his distance? Like battle, such things were best directed from afar.

‘Is everything well, Silverhand?’ Arkas asked quietly.

‘It will be noon in a short while,’ he replied. ‘We need to commence the final council.’

‘We cannot begin until Hastor and your Knights-Azyros have returned,’ said the Warbeast. Along with patrols on foot and Theuderis’ aerial forces, they had been scouring the glacier and the valley for signs of survivors. ‘I took the liberty of dispatching one of your Knights-Venator to summon them.’

‘He has flown swiftly,’ said Theuderis, pointing towards the sky above the Bear’s Pelt. A flight of Arkas’ Prosecutors descended at speed.

‘Wait,’ Arkas said as Theuderis moved towards where the other officers waited. ‘That is not Hastor.’

The Prosecutors dipped out of view briefly, disappearing behind the trees. It was not long before one of them reappeared, speeding towards the camp on azure wings. He landed a few paces from Arkas and bowed to his lord and then to Theuderis.

‘Venian, what tidings?’ asked the Warbeast.

‘Ursungorans, my lord, in the woods.’ The Prosecutor-Prime turned and pointed back the way he had come. ‘My retinue escorts them. Several score more, I would say. We did not see them on the ice.’

‘There are a few routes from the glacier directly into caves in the valley walls,’ said Theuderis. ‘Some of my warriors found concealed entrances on the lower slope.’

‘They will be here shortly, my lord,’ said Venian. ‘I do not know if they carry the skaven taint. Shall we let them approach?’

‘Several score?’ said Arkas. ‘More than a hundred, would you say?’

‘Yes, Lord Arkas. At least that many, from what I observed.’

‘Katiya will be with them,’ Arkas told Theuderis. ‘There is no other reason for so many to be in the same place.’

‘A leap of logic,’ warned the Knight Excelsior. ‘Do not surrender to false hope.’

‘Maybe not logic. Call it instinct, if you must. Katiya is with them, I am sure of it. We cannot hold the council yet. I will go with Venian to meet this group and decide where best to direct them.’

‘I think your Prosecutor-Prime is able to deal with...’ Theuderis fell quiet, understanding Arkas’ intent. ‘Very well, Lord Arkas. See if Katiya is with them, but return swiftly. Our march will be difficult and dangerous, and we need to be across the mountain before dusk.’

‘This won’t take long,’ Arkas assured him. His voice had dropped to a murmur.

When Arkas had departed, Glavius rose from where he had been entertaining the Ursungorans. Theuderis saw his eyes scanning the camp as he approached, though alert for what threat he could not tell.

‘You have a gift with words,’ said Theuderis. ‘And a way with infants I find at odds with your calling in Sigmar’s host.’

‘You are not the only Stormcast who was a father before being called to the Stormhosts, my lord,’ replied Glavius. ‘When I was mortal I was a bard-blade of the Wraithlands. We fought with words as much as weapons. In the Realm of Death a rite can be more dangerous than a sword or axe.’ He glanced at the Ursungorans. ‘They hide it well, but they are all afraid, child and adult alike. This is skaven-plague. Chaos-tainted.’

‘Indeed.’

Glavius fixed his helm back in place, concealing his features behind the grim skull-mask of his rank once more.

‘We have to purge them all,’ said the Lord-Relictor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The walk down through the trees was the hardest Arkas had ever taken. It seemed to last longer than the forced march across Ursungorod. Despite Theuderis’ doubts, the Warbeast was certain of what he would find at the end. The gathering of so many refugees in one place had to be the work of Katiya, and he had seen her close to the fighting, close to the skaven-spawned plague mist.

Leaving deep footprints in the thawing mulch he headed straight downhill, his heart as heavy as his tread. As much as he wanted to avoid confronting the reality that awaited him, it was unavoidable, and delaying simply allowed his doubts to nag at him for longer.

It was obvious that Theuderis thought him blindly optimistic, but the Silverhand did not understand the mind of an Ursungoran, even one that had been reforged. Arkas hoped, in his soul, that he could fix the ills of the world, and he hoped that he could bring peace and prosperity to his lands and people. It was this hope that had sent him on the path to become the Uniter. Without hope he would have given up, crawled under the blankets with his dying mother. Without hope he would not have stood upon the broken walls in defiance of the skaven horde, despite the dire prediction of Radomira.

But it was not a hope that all would simply be made well. It was not a hope that everything would get better without pain and suffering, without sacrifice and effort. It was, he thought, simply a hope that the hardship served a purpose, that there was always a goal worth striving for. His hope for an end to the misery of Ursungorod did not preclude acceptance that the misery existed and had to be endured.

So he did not hope for anything as his long strides took him down the mountainside. He did not dread the coming reality either, because dread was just another form of denial. The survivors in the camp embodied this characteristic, accepting the reality of the plague without fear or favour, hoping that some might slip from its grasp, accepting the likelihood that most would not.

Venian flew down through a gap in the trees ahead and waited for the Lord-Celestant to reach him.

‘Another two hundred paces, my lord,’ said the Prosecutor-Prime, pointing. Between the trees Arkas could see figures in the distance, barely visible in the forest shadows.

‘Very well. Return to your retinue and take them back to the camp. We are mustering for the march. Knight Hastor will have your orders shortly.’

‘We are abandoning the search of the Bear’s Pelt, my lord?’ Venian looked up. ‘It is not long since the sunrise reached the valley.’

‘We have more pressing duties, Venian,’ Arkas told him, with conviction. ‘There is little point in rounding up a few more survivors if doing so grants victory to the skaven. We have a realmgate to take.’

‘Of course, my lord, I did not mean to disagree.’

Arkas said nothing else, dismissing the Prosecutor-Prime with a flick of the head. The Warbeast watched the approaching refugees, able to pick out their pale faces now, a picket of armed men and women leading the way, ever wary. Knots of others followed a few dozen paces behind.

The hunters saw Arkas and gravitated towards him, their expressions a peculiar mix of relief and anxiety. It was obvious they were pleased to see the Uniter, but their glances back towards the other Ursungorans told him without any words exactly what he needed to know.

He spied Ajfor amongst the rearguard. He beckoned and Katiya’s grandson approached quickly. There was a cut across his left eye, the infected wound weeping blood and less wholesome fluid. His eye was a black orb, his skin jaundiced.

‘Where is she?’ Arkas asked softly.

Ajfor looked back, scanning the other survivors. He pointed away to the left, at the largest following group.

‘She is...’ He choked on the words.

‘I know,’ Arkas said, laying a hand as gently as he could on the young man’s shoulder. He nodded uphill. ‘There is a camp not far away. Most are also afflicted. But there are fires and some shelter.’

Nodding, Ajfor broke away and continued upwards without looking back, the other hunters drifting after him with solemn looks at the Lord-Celestant, perhaps having overheard his conversation, perhaps simply guessing what had passed between them.

The Ursungorans parted as Arkas strode through the trees, all but making a path for him to find Katiya. She was being dragged on a bier of lashed wood, hide and rope. Some around her were also showing signs of infection but were strong enough still to walk, while many others were on stretchers, some with their faces covered, their bedrolls already shrouds.

Her hand fluttered from beneath a deer pelt blanket at his approach. Her wrinkled face was almost devoid of colour and her left eye was crusted shut with scabbed pustules.

‘Uniter...’ she said. Her voice was firm, though she was forced to take in a ragged breath after. Arkas winced as he heard the bubbling in her lungs. The bearers set down the bier and stepped away, granting them a little privacy.

‘Katiya.’ He knelt beside her and saw, perhaps properly for the first time, her thinning hair, the curve of cheek and jaw, the line of her nose. ‘You look like Radomira.’

‘Yes,’ she replied. Another rattle of inhalation. ‘A daughter in every generation. Her bloodline is strong.’

Arkas could not shake the sensation of familiarity, beyond simply recognising Katiya. Seeing her lying on the makeshift bed brought back such strong memories.

‘Do not give in to grief,’ wheezed Katiya, sensing what he was thinking even though his face was hidden.

‘No,’ he promised, nodding slowly. ‘Never grief.’

Still he could not fight back the hurt, the sense of injustice swelling inside at the sight of her so forlorn and weak. Perhaps it was simply the context, but Arkas could not ignore the resemblance, not just to Radomira but also to his mother.

‘It is time to tell... you something.’ Katiya coughed as she sat up. Arkas helped her, providing an arm for her to lever herself upright. He could smell the infection on her rank breath. ‘It is about your mother. About... Radomira and your... bloodline.’

‘The past is the past,’ said Arkas, echoing the traditional Ursungoran saying.

‘It is.’ Katiya did not smile but there was softness in her good eye. Sympathy, perhaps. The look was so uncannily like his mother’s last expression. Insight flashed.

‘Radomira... She was a relation?’

Katiya nodded.

‘My grandmother?’

‘No...’ More coughing prevented Katiya from continuing but Arkas already knew what she was going to say. He barely whispered the words.

‘My mother. She was my real mother.’

Katiya nodded through the spasms, her grip weak on his arm.

‘Then who...?’

‘Your sister,’ Katiya managed. She took several deep breaths and recovered a little. ‘Older by fifteen years. The man that was bonded with her acted as your father. You were... unexpected arrival. Radomira was sworn sagesayer, sundered from family, forbidden liaisons with... outsiders. Old, old past childbearing... it was thought.’

‘I see,’ said Arkas, though he was not sure he did. He understood, intellectually, what Katiya was saying. What it meant, on the other hand, eluded him. ‘That is why her thoughts were so close to mine.’

Katiya simply nodded, her strength exhausted by the brief confession.

‘But when my... my mother and father died, I was their only child.’

Katiya nodded again. ‘Radomira had no more children either. But you did.’ Katiya looked away, suddenly ashamed. ‘You bedded women, yes? Your children... they were hidden from you... by your mother. To protect you. To allow you to lead all without favour.’

‘You said the bloodline was strong.’ Arkas turned her face towards him. She frowned. ‘What did you mean? The touch of Ghur? The beast-gift?’

‘In some, yes,’ Katiya told him. ‘The men, a few of them. For the women... The sagesight. The Ghur-tongue.’

‘And what of my real father?’

‘Nobody knows for certain.’

‘Why are you telling me this, why now?’

‘The truth.’ Katiya lay back, folding her hands to her chest. Her eye fluttered closed. ‘What you fight for.’

And there it was again, that startling, heart-stopping resemblance to his mother’s – to his sister’s deathbed. Radomira had lied to him for years, and even when he had been inside her thoughts she had kept this secret from him.

‘Was it part of her vision?’ he demanded, but Katiya did not answer.

Arkas’ heart trembled as he moved his head closer. He could not feel or hear her breath, but he saw the weakest of pulses in her neck. She held on, but only just. The conversation had sapped much of her remaining strength, taking an effort of will just to speak.

‘She needs rest,’ said one of the nearby women. The others came back as he rose to his feet. Arkas could see the family likeness, nieces and nephews, cousins, siblings perhaps. How many were his descendants? How many had really survived that day on Kurzengor? Not just his people by culture. His descendents, his blood.

‘Look after her,’ he told them, though it did not need to be said.

He gave a last look at his daughter by nearly a score of generations and turned away. He started the long climb back to the camp, knowing that he would not look upon her face again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Thick black smoke choked the sky, but though the twilight was obscured by the fumes, the light of many flames provided ample illumination for the marching Stormcasts. Their armour glinted in the gleam from the six fiery peaks of the Skagoldt Ridge, lit by bubbling lava flows and burning rivers that split and conjoined in a ruddy maze.

The ground was as black as the air, the hard volcanic rock strewn with ash. The column of Stormcasts navigated through a mesmerising labyrinth of pore-like tunnels, jagged spires and bulbous columns. In places the floor was ribbed and undulated, broken by clefts that could trap feet and break ankles. Fumaroles belched forth constant sprays of lava and vapour. Seemingly solid plateaus proved treacherously unstable, shaking and splitting to reveal themselves as skins across pools and lakes of semi-liquid rock. Sheets of fire and pillars of flame burned from naked rock, and ash-devils swept through, driven by no natural wind. Lizards the size of dogs with pelts of coals and ember eyes scuttled over the dark rocks.

Everything shimmered in the heat haze – heat so incredible only Stormcasts could withstand its sapping effects. Arkas laboured with heavy breaths, his reforged skin slicked with sweat, but the hardship was nothing – any advance along the ridge known once as the Bear’s Spine would have been impossible for his mortal army.

The ruddy, flickering light played tricks with the bizarre landscape, creating shadow-giants and threatening simulacra. Combined with the oppressive heat, and the knowledge that they were marching into battle against an untold number of skaven, the jarring volcanic wasteland subdued the spirits of the Celestial Vindicators and Knights Excelsior.

In the red-and-black sky, flitting through the wreath of smog, the Prosecutors, Knights-Venator and Knights-Azyros swooped and rose on the hot air from jagged thermal vents and winding lava trails. Theuderis had sent them ahead as scouts but no sooner had the Stormcasts started up the Skagoldt Ridge than Samat returned with news that almost nothing could be seen from the air, the cloud was so thick and low. Even so, they stayed aloft, ready to respond swiftly to any threat.

Theuderis’ Judicators, led by the Prime called Trajos, scoured the land ahead searching for the best route through the meandering streams of lava and gaping chasms. Several times the army was forced to stop and turn back, retracing its steps until a way ahead was found. On occasion they scaled steep cliffs of dark rock and scrambled down tumbled slides of scree and obsidian shards. In places their route took them along crystal-lined gorges, the walls sparkling and faceted, in places sprouting prismatic growths as large as the Stormcast warriors. Pillar-like intrusions rose far above their heads, a mixture of dark, pitted crags and smooth, white columns.

The sun had set, as best could be judged, by the time the army crested the top of the ridge. From this vantage point, rare breaks in the fumes allowed them to briefly look down into the valley on the far side. In places the drop was precipitous, layer after layer of volcanic expulsion and magma extrusion forming a dense network of canyons and bridges.

Their goal was on the far side, the flank of the central peak of Ursungorod, from whose vertiginous slopes long-dead humans and duardin had delved and built the great city of Kurzengor. Beneath lay the bulk of the skaven lair, nestled in the ruins of the massive conurbation.

‘A volatile place,’ remarked Doridun.

‘My... My mother told me that the ridge first split asunder and spewed its fire on the day I was born,’ Arkas replied. He looked at the cratered peaks around them. ‘Its fury has not abated since.’

‘What was that?’ asked Dolmetis, marching on the other side of Arkas.

‘Did you see something?’

‘I thought so.’ The Knight-Vexillor pointed to a sharp spur of rock that overhung the trail ahead. ‘On the top there.’

Arkas looked but there was nothing to be seen.

‘My eyes are tired,’ Dolmetis admitted, ‘and filled with grime and soot. But I would swear I saw a figure on the rock.’

‘Impossible,’ said Doridun. ‘Nothing could live in this place.’

‘Nothing mortal,’ Arkas corrected him, scanning the surrounds with renewed interest. ‘If we can survive here... The Chaos powers have more than mortal followers.’

He weighed up whether to call a halt. In his years as the Bear-clad few had ventured to this part of the mountains and none had returned after anything but a cursory investigation. He had learned, as a Stormcast, of places where the realms sometimes bled together – overlaps between the planes. Often these were near hidden or damaged realmgates, the mystical energy of the cosmos mixing together in unpredictable ways.

Though there was no reason to suspect anything other than volcanic activity shaped the Skagoldt Ridge, Arkas had stopped taking evidence at face value a long time ago. He had never seen Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, with his own eyes, but something rang true in the descriptions of those that had returned from the war there.

‘Move on,’ he said. ‘We need to be in position to attack mid-morning.’

They carried on in silence for some way, negotiating the rough terrain without complaint. Arkas’ thoughts were focused on the battle that waited at the end of the punishing march. As with the entire endeavour in Ursungorod, his was the bolder, more dangerous mission. Guided by the memory of his vision from the Queen of the Peak, he would lead the Celestial Vindicators directly for the realmgate. It was imperative that the skaven were prevented from opening it.

While the Warbeasts lanced into the heart of the undercity, paying no heed to any foes save those directly in their path, the Silverhands would advance in a more systematic fashion. Their strength divided between attacking the Warbeasts and defending against Theuderis’ assault, the skaven would succeed at neither. It was a simple but effective stratagem, and victory was further assured by the unexpected route of the attack.

A long clarion call broke through Arkas’ thoughts. The Silverhands swiftly changed formation, forming defensive clusters where they were, as allowed by the intervening terrain. Attaxes, the Knight-Heraldor, sounded another signal and the white-and-blue Stormcasts adjusted their ranks, skilfully moving together to form even tighter knots of warriors.

Doridun sounded the alarm of the Warbeasts, setting them into motion a few heartbeats later. Diocletus and his Protectors formed the outer rank, their glaives projecting an impassable wall of blades and points. Around the Lord-Celestant, the axe-wielding Decimators led by Martox stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Arkas scanned his surrounds, searching for any threat, but all he could see was forbidding rock and fire.

Theuderis rode his dracoth towards the head of the column, evidently where the first alarm had been raised.

‘Make way!’ snapped Arkas, pushing through the Decimators to head after Theuderis. ‘Dolmetis, Doridun, with me! All others hold fast.’

They broke into a run, hurrying after the lord of the Silverhands. The Knights Excelsior were like statues, every warrior facing front with unwavering attention, the Primes at the centre of each retinue ready to respond. Not a single head turned as the Celestial Vindicators raced past.

Arkas caught up with Theuderis at the edge of a ravine some three hundred paces away. The Silverhand had dismounted and was peering over the edge, a cluster of Judicators around him pointing into the depths.

They turned at the scrape of Arkas’ boot on the rock, bows and crossbows raised. Seeing that it was the Warbeast who approached, the Knights Excelsior parted, moving along the lip of the chasm to give his party room.

‘What is it?’ Arkas stepped up beside Theuderis to look down into the ravine. The Silverhand did not need to reply.

At the bottom of the chasm a winding river of fire cut through the darkness. The smog was thick, carried on the gusty wind along the canyon. But it was not this that had unsettled the scouts. Cut neatly into the vertical wall of the chasm was a set of steps, starting somewhere off to the left and zigzagging down until they were swallowed by the fumes. At each turning was a short landing where the wall was marked by archways, although there were no visible breaks in the rock. In places there were bridges, narrow spans that curved across the chasm, their silhouettes fading into the smog.

‘Duardin ruins,’ said Dolmetis. ‘Why such alarums?’

‘Look again,’ said Theuderis. ‘Not ruins.’

Arkas examined the closest steps more carefully. The Silverhand was right, they showed little sign of wear. In fact, had they existed before the eruption of the volcanoes they surely would have been broken and scattered.

‘They were cut after I was born,’ said the Warbeast. He turned around, surveying the surface for any other sign of habitation. There was nothing, though the conditions cut visibility to a few dozen paces. The design of the solid archways was consistent with the duardin style. ‘Maybe the skaven had duardin slaves?’

‘What skaven could survive this heat?’ said Theuderis.

‘Perhaps they escaped by building this way out of the skaven tunnels,’ suggested Doridun. The others looked at him.

‘With dressed stone and perfectly built arches?’ said Dolmetis. ‘A very circumspect escape attempt.’

The Knight-Heraldor realised the ridiculousness of the statement and withdrew a few paces, embarrassed.

‘There was something else,’ said Trajos. The Judicator-Prime stepped into view. ‘Several reports of figures seen. In the fire, in the smoke.’

‘Watching?’ said Dolmetis. ‘That’s what I thought I saw.’

Trajos nodded.

‘I do not think they are related to the skaven,’ Theuderis concluded. ‘It is not in the ratkin’s nature to make such constructions and they cannot possibly make use of these steps themselves.’

‘Something else is here,’ said Arkas. ‘Something that arrived after the mountain broke.’

Theuderis nodded and stepped back from the precipice. ‘The question is whether they mean us harm, whether they are allies or enemies.’

‘Or neither,’ said Dolmetis. ‘If they have been watching us they have made no effort to make contact or attack.’

‘They are thinking the same about us,’ said Theuderis. ‘Gauging whether we are friend or foe, perhaps?’

‘If they wished us ill, they have had sufficient time to plan and execute and attack,’ said Trajos. ‘In fact, we are not far from the end of the fire-morass. Crags and canyons lie ahead, but no more lava or volcanoes.’

Arkas turned around, standing with his back to the chasm. He thought for an instant he saw a fleeting glimpse of something in the heat haze across a lava stream a few dozen paces away. A face, flat-nosed and broad, surrounded by hair and beard of fire. The figure had been squat and solid, like a duardin… but different.

‘They are watching us pass through their territory,’ he said to the others. Arkas raised his voice. ‘We are the Stormcasts of the God-King Sigmar. We seek only to bring justice to the minions of Chaos, we are foes only to the forces of destruction. We are passing through these lands, to wage war against the skaven. We have no intent to stay and mean no harm to any that struggle against the Dark Powers.’

It seemed as though he were talking to himself, the fiery spectre a hallucination of heat and the effort of the march.

‘Over there,’ whispered Trajos, nodding to the right.

A group of five duardin-like shapes stood silently amidst the fires of a lava flow, oblivious to the deadly temperature. They were all but naked, wreathed in the flames rather than clothes. The shimmer of the heat made it impossible to see where the fires stopped and the figures began. In their hands they held what looked like wands and staves, but on better inspection Arkas saw that they were the handles of axes with blades of fire.

One of the duardin-folk took a step closer, eyes like coals regarding the Stormcasts solemnly, moving along from one end of the line to the other. The figure nodded once, slowly, and raised a fire-axe towards the north-east.

Turning his head, Arkas saw the fires dimming, a path of blackness curving through the lava, flames, geysers and tar pits. He raised his hammer to return the salute, but the figures had already vanished.

‘What do you suppose they are?’ he asked Theuderis.

‘I do not know, but it is not the last we will see of them, I think,’ said the Silverhand. ‘We will be upon our enemies all the sooner with their aid. Attaxes, signal the advance.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The sun had not yet risen when the Stormcasts fell upon the outer strongholds of the skaven. Coming down the mountain from the Skagoldt Ridge, the warriors of Sigmar swept towards the surface ruins of the ancient city. Theuderis’ Angelos Conclave formed the spearhead, their attack concentrated to slash a path to the entrances of the underground lair. The Silverhands’ Paladin Conclave would follow, forcing a breach into the undercity through which Arkas and his Warbeasts would launch their assault.

The light of celestial beacons lit up the ruins as strands of lightning wreathed the heavens. Arkas had never ventured here in his mortal life and marvelled at the extent of Kurzengor. He had seen nothing of the spectacle in his vision. The mighty city he had defended on the day Sigmar had taken him for Reforging was but a bastion of a far mightier conurbation that had once stretched across the highlands of Ursungorod.

The concentric rings of the old city walls divided cramped streets and high towers, broken apart where those soaring edifices had collapsed to scatter immense stones, leaving foundations and lower storeys jutting like broken teeth above the skyline. Plazas opened up wider spaces where temples to forgotten gods and palaces of long-dead nobles looked upon cracked mosaics and stained tiles.

He could see where markets had once bustled, shop fronts and domiciles had been home to countless thousands of humans and duardin. Onion-domed cathedrals sat broken next to a dry riverbed crossed by stout duardin-built bridges. Centuries of subterranean perturbations had torn open large gouges in the city, exposing the duardin dwellings below. The azure celestial light was swallowed by huge shafts and sinkholes that split vast throne halls and treasure vaults.

Despite its state of ruin, the city was not empty. Wooden walkways and rope bridges criss-crossed the old streets from sagging rooftops and cracked chimneys. Ramshackle fences and walls had been erected to delineate the territories of vying warlords. Vast swathes had been levelled and replaced with corrals for monstrous beasts and Chaos-tainted steeds, while pits and scaffold-decked gorges pierced the underbelly of Kurzengor, countless slaves sleeping where they had laboured on the unforgiving planks and cable.

The ground beneath the city showed its tortured past. In several areas it rose up to high plateaus reached by rope ladders and clumsily constructed scaffolds. Neighbourhoods had been swallowed by churning tar pits that continued to bubble and gurgle. Parts of Kurzengor had been reclaimed by the landscape, tentacle vines swallowing whole districts, the remains of houses and workshops caught in the branches of gargantuan trees, granite and marble fingers pulling at stretches of curtain wall and watch towers.

The fires of the Skagoldt Ridge had also made intrusions. The craters of dead volcanoes and fissures bleeding lava marked the outer quarter closest to the Stormcast advance. Sinkholes opened into crystalline shafts that dropped into the depths, lined by seams of sapphires, emeralds and diamonds.

Entire tribes that Arkas had never seen or heard of occupied the vast city. As he looked down on the maze of roads and shattered buildings he wondered if any clan still resisted the skaven and the touch of Chaos. It was a short-lived hope. Immense sacrificial pyres and monstrous effigies to the Dark Powers dotted the cityscape, built from the ruins of churches and shrines dedicated to lesser, fallen gods.

As elsewhere, the dominion of the Horned Rat was evident in many places. On the doorstep of the undercity, penned in by the indomitable peak itself and the fires of the Skagoldt Ridge, the tribes here had no option but to succumb to the power and temptations of the Chaos Pantheon.

Death was always an option, he reminded himself. He and his united clans had been willing to die rather than submit. There could be no pity for those who sought the sanctuary of Chaos worship, no matter how dire their predicament. Their weakness simply strengthened the foes of order, exchanging personal gain at the expense of Sigmar and their fellow humans.

An undulation in the mountainside gave way to reveal even more of Kurzengor’s environs. Long boulevards crept up the slope, radiating out from the more densely packed centre. Villas and manses lined these streets, their gardens long reclaimed by nature, family estates overrun by the wild once more.

Arkas recognised tombs also, some distance outside the city, but closer to the richer quarters than the mercantile inner city. They were like the cairns raised by his own people but far grander. Some were ziggurats of obsidian and marble and other exotic stone. Though distance obscured any detail, he could see plentiful statuary and small dome-roofed family shrines scattered among the larger memorials.

He stopped, taken aback by what he saw next. Angry muttering broke out from the Decimators around him until he silenced them with a barked command.

The rocks of the mountain had been carved in an age past, creating immense visages in the cleared stone. So vast were these faces that Arkas could see windows in their eyes, balconies and stairs formed by wrinkles in the skin, doorways hidden in folds of beard and hair.

The monuments had been both duardin and human, though most likely fashioned by the craft of the former. All seemed to be kings and queens, proud of expression, crowned helms on their heads.

Eight there had been, though one was almost nothing but bare rock, its remnants broken asunder by some shift in the earth in the intervening years. The others were marred by advanced age, but also by deliberate vandalism. Noses were chipped and broken, lips cracked, cheeks hollowed and ears removed.

The masonry that had been stolen had been put to a fresh purpose, built atop the central face. The design was crude, the construction showing much patching and improvisation, but the subject was all too clear. Horned and glowering, green flames burning in the gaps of its eyes, the mask of the Great Horned Rat stared down over the ruined city.

‘The account will be settled soon enough,’ Arkas told his incensed warriors. He raised his runeblade, the sigils etched into the weapon flickering in the light of the celestial storm. ‘We head for the realmgate. No more delays, no distractions. We win or we die.’

‘We win or we die!’ came the return shout.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sentries across the city looked up to the skies, baffled by the storm clouds swiftly gathering. They did not think to look towards the fire-lands, for what threat could possibly come from that direction? The first they knew of their coming doom was when flights of shining warriors descended from the storm on iridescent wings, accompanied by bolts of lightning hurtling down into the tumult of broken buildings and earthquake-twisted streets.

Brash war horns and warning drums sounded across the city, far too late.

The Retributors and Decimators led the advance on the ground, an armoured fist of white and blue aimed towards the heart of the city. Guided by the blazing storm of missiles overhead, they marched at speed through the deserted streets, the uniform tramp of boots ringing from the dead buildings, watched only by empty windows and doorways.

Theuderis rode with them to ensure that the breach into the skaven undercity proceeded exactly as planned. While his attack speared through Kurzengor, his officers would oversee the following sweep and occupation of the city. He glanced back to assure himself that Arkas was close behind – the turquoise plate of the Warbeasts reflecting the celestial energies roaring across the storm above.

The other conclaves were fanning out along the line of advance, moving forwards to engage any foe that threatened the flanks of the breaching force. Theuderis paid them no more mind, confident that they would acquit themselves as only Knights Excelsior could. His mind was bent towards the achievement of his own objective – attaining entry into the undercity.

As they crossed a star-shaped plaza, the wind changed, swirling from the right. A snarl from Tyrathrax warned Theuderis of something untoward.

‘Namazar!’ He bellowed the name of the nearest Protector-Prime. The Lord-Celestant angled his sword towards the tumbled remnants of what might have been an old trade exchange, guildhall or perhaps some kind of mint or treasury. Its colonnaded front had completely collapsed, but several statues of mercantile-looking folk could be seen amongst the debris. There were other stone figures, not on plinths, of Chaos warriors and beasts in various poses of combat or flight. Theuderis recognised the threat immediately. ‘Rearguard!’

The Protectors quickly peeled away after their Prime, a phalanx of glaives directed towards the rubble-strewn steps of the building. From the shadows of the main hall prowled an enormous beast – part cat, part lizard, its mane a nest of writhing vipers that hissed and spat. Its long tongue licked the air, tasting the presence of the intruders. Snarling, it bounded into a run, heading directly for the Protectors, baring teeth as sharp as any sword. In its wake, half-naked savages poured from the ruin, their hooting calls echoed by other warbands emerging from other nearby buildings. They were heavily scarred, pierced and tattooed, barely a patch of exposed skin not ornamented in some way. Screeching, waving bone and flint weapons, the troglodytic clansmen sprinted towards the block of waiting Stormcasts.

‘Keep on,’ Theuderis reminded his warriors. ‘Continue the advance.’

He watched as the monster leapt at the Protectors, its savage nature undaunted by the rows of points confronting it. Sigmarite blades cracked against scaled skin, piercing deep, slashing long gouges through the flesh. In turn its claws and fangs raked welts across the ivory armour of the Knights Excelsior. The beast landed, crushing a Protector beneath its bulk while its serpent-mane spat gobbets of saliva that hissed and bubbled on the plate of the Stormcast Eternal.

The Celestial Vindicators entered the plaza, breaking into a charge to sweep into the unprepared savages. Theuderis saw Arkas leading the attack, carving bloodily into the disorganised mobs with swift blows from his hammer and blade.

Soon the skirmish was out of sight, though the shouts of the Warbeasts and the screams of the Chaos-tainted followed the Lord-Celestant for some time.

The street pushed up towards a hilly outcrop ringed by broken walls, an overgrown orchard within. The road split to encircle the ground, but Theuderis ordered his men straight on. They vaulted the remnants of the wall and plunged through the thicket of undergrowth and twisted trees, snapping branches and trunks with their bulk to shoulder their way through. Surprised by the quiet of their passage, Theuderis examined his surrounds in more detail and saw that the trees grew green and brown feathers instead of leaves.

To one side, the remains of the great house whose gardens they violated leaned precariously on its footings, kept upright only by the tangled limbs and roots of immense trees bursting from one of its dilapidated wings. There were platforms and huts constructed in the upper reaches of both building and tree, but of the inhabitants there was no sign – perhaps they were sensible enough not to confront the armoured giants advancing through their domain.

The wall on the far side of the garden was still intact, until the lightning hammers of the Retributors made short work of its bricks and mortar. Bursting onto a cobbled road that swept down towards the central city, the Stormcast Paladins broke into an easy run, Tyrathrax loping alongside them, Theuderis in the saddle.

On one side, the city descended into a tangle of alleys and steps too tight for the Stormcasts to easily traverse. On the other, a succession of terraces climbed up the mountain, each level home to the decrepit remains of terraces and warehouses, stores, smithies, armouries and jewellers. The road angled away from the pits into the undercity. It was not the most direct route but it was still the swiftest.

Several times more they encountered scattered bands of Chaotic tribal warriors. Some were barely more than animals, like those they had first seen, while others were more organised, better armed and armoured. It made no difference. The Paladin Conclave cut through them all in turn, ruthless and efficient, driven on by Theuderis’ demand that there be no delays.

The few that survived this onslaught were little resistance to the Celestial Vindicators following behind. Those not cut down by the white-and-blue spear of the Knights Excelsior were crushed into oblivion by the hammer blow of Arkas’ force.

It was not only humans that tried to waylay them. In abandoned parks overrun by tides of beetles and spiders, and orchards with trees that grew eyeballs and bloody organs instead of fruits, beastmen and monsters had made their lairs. Theuderis did his best to avoid these, knowing that to become embroiled in an extended engagement would not only needlessly spend time, but might allow the gathering creatures to wholly surround them. The most desolate, broken areas he skirted around, staying to the wider avenues and squares where the enemy had to present themselves more openly.

Despite every effort, Theuderis was painfully aware of the growing light as the sun crept above the mountains. The skaven would have lookouts positioned, if only to guard against treachery from their subject-tribes and those clans still swearing allegiance to gods other than the Great Horned Rat.

How long would they take to muster a force?

Through a combination of evasive manoeuvres and brute strength, Theuderis’ Paladins carved a path for Arkas, on occasion smashing their way through buildings to forge the best route.

When the first rays of dawn shone on the many-coloured domes ahead, they were almost at the closest slave-pit, the opening into the skaven domain just a few streets away.

The way ahead was blocked. Stretching from one side of the road to the other was a wall four times as tall as a man, raised from stone and earth and reinforced with sharpened stakes and thick timbers. The buildings to either side were similarly fortified, crude ramparts built along rooftops, windows and doors barricaded.

A storm of arrows greeted the Knights Excelsior, raining down from the wall and surrounding heights. Theuderis led his warriors to the left, seeking a route around the obstruction. The next street was similarly blocked, and the next. Iron-tipped arrows clattered from armour and stone around him as he pulled Tyrathrax to a stop to assess the situation. For all that he could tell, the wall could stretch for a considerable distance.

He looked up and saw warriors in mail and leather scrambling over the roofs, bows and javelins in hand. On the wall armoured figures waited, waving axes and swords, their jeers echoing along the walled-off road. He had seen no sign of gate or bridge. A glance back towards the main street revealed the Celestial Vindicators approaching fast.

‘Up, my lord?’ suggested Elegias, the Retributor-Prime. He pointed to the closest building with his starsoul mace.

‘You have the right of it, Retributor.’ Theuderis stood in the saddle and pointed his blade towards the roofs. ‘We go over these wretches!’

The Paladins piled into the nearby buildings, crashing through boarded windows and doors, the light of their gleaming weapons shining through shutters and cracked walls. Theuderis rode along the road a little further, ignoring the occasional missile sparking from his armour and the moss-covered flags as he sought ingress for Tyrathrax. A few dozen paces on, a building had collapsed, a slump of rubble spilling down into the street. Assorted tools and containers showed that the tribe had been in the process of rebuilding the breach.

Tyrathrax sensed his intent and broke into a run, heading for the improvised ramp. Three bounding strides and a leap took them onto the roof of the adjoining townhouse, claws sending broken clay tiles skittering to smash on the street three storeys below.

From this point Theuderis could see how close he was to his objective. Barely a hundred paces beyond the wall, steps and wooden ramps led down into the slave pit.

The scale of the obstacle in front of him was also clear. The roofs and wall were thronged with foes, more of them spilling up from trapdoors and rope ladders like ants from an agitated nest. Warriors swelled by Chaos power, clad in thick armour plates, gathered in front of him, axes and shields held up, faceless helms staring at him in challenge.

Lifting his blade, point heavenwards, Theuderis drew down a bolt of celestial power. The lightning earthed along his weapon and crackled across his armour. Above, the storm clouds seemed to roil, swirling with their own energy.

Moments later, the Angelos Conclave burst into view. With Samat and the other Knights-Azyros at their head and Arkas’ Prosecutors alongside, they plummeted groundwards at blistering speed.

The tempest of fire from their weapons lashed along the roofs ahead of Theuderis. Lightning-wreathed javelins and flaming hammer-bolts tore into the Chaos warriors, slicing through armour, scorching the flesh within. Tiles, brick and slate exploded, jagged shards ripping through the marauders scrambling up stairwells and hauling themselves across rope bridges.

On and on the torrent came, slaying everything in the way of Theuderis’ charge. The blaze of celestial beacons shone in the morning gloom, the power of Sigmar’s light blinding and burning the impure. Chaos worshippers staggered, holding their hands to their faces, screeching and screaming as they toppled from the roofs in panic and desperation.

‘Onwards!’ roared Theuderis.

Tyrathrax charged, ripping up more roof tiles with every stride. Theuderis’ blade trailed purifying flame. Ahead, Prosecutors with blazing hammers descended onto the wall, the bodies of their foes smashed from the ramparts as they advanced. Behind, the Paladins of the Silverhands roared their battle cry and followed their Lord-Celestant into the fray.

‘For the glory of Sigmar!’

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The Silverhands cleared the enemy with astounding speed, but Arkas knew better than to waste time admiring their bloody work.

‘Straight on,’ he told his warriors, heading directly along the street to the wall across it. ‘Our turn will come soon enough.’

The Warbeasts surged between the fortified houses, trampling the dead and dying cast from the rooftops. Arkas threw himself the last few paces at the wall, driving the head of his hammer into the patchily mortared masonry. Dust sticking to the caked blood on his armour, he used the hammer to haul himself up, driving in his sword to form the next handhold. Around him his warriors ascended with equal speed, unchallenged now that the wall’s guardians were battling the winged heralds of Theuderis’ host.

In a few more heartbeats, Arkas dragged himself over the jagged crenellations and took a quick stock of the situation. To his left and right, his Prosecutors and the Knights Excelsior had sliced through the wall’s guardians, opening a breach for his group. The number of Chaos followers was quickly swelling though, a wave of twisted humanity building up against the line of Stormcast Eternals like water at a dam.

There was no time to waste.

He leapt down the far side of the wall, boots cracking the flagstones further with the impact. In a heartbeat he was off and running again, heading directly for the maze of walkways, steps, ropes and scaffold ahead. Beyond, the ground dropped away like a cliff.

A stream of wasted, unwashed humanity spilled from the gash in the world, some still struggling with shackles, chains and rope bindings, their bodies covered in sores and welts. They stared in dumb wonder at the Stormcast Eternals, unsure whether they were liberators or simply new masters. All of them had the touch of Chaos about them, Arkas noted, as he watched them scrambling and sprinting past – tiny horns, patches of discoloured or scaled skin, tails, claws, jagged teeth, disjointed limbs. For all that they had endured untold misery they were still tainted.

‘Leave them for our shining companions,’ Arkas barked as some of his warriors moved towards the pitiful wretches with hammers and axes ready. ‘We have a pressing appointment below.’

The pit was a ragged wound in the earth. It burrowed down at a steep angle, shelves of harder rock and ledges built of debris from the demolished city creating staging levels still littered with the corpses of slaves dead from exhaustion and starvation.

The rickety boards and ladders looked incapable of taking the weight of a Stormcast. Arkas chose to descend in swifter fashion, leaping towards the closest outcrop. He crashed through mould-slicked timbers onto the rock. From here he bounded to a ledge on the left, and then let himself drop down to another below.

His warriors followed, some tracing his route, some picking their own way down into the darkness. Though the opening of the pit had seemed large from the surface it soon dwindled into a pale oval above as they descended, and then disappeared to leave the only light the gleam of Azyr-forged weapons.

There were offshoot galleries and tunnels but Arkas ignored them. The scene from the vision was vivid in his memory, as deeply etched as if he had already been into the depths in person. He remembered the sound and sparkle of an underground river nearby. When they found that, they would have their route to the realmgate.

Down they went, down into the bowels of the mountain, leaving behind the scrapings and workings of the tribes above, into a nether-realm between the city of humans and the skaven undercity. Here the duardin ruins were still intact in places, giving the Celestial Vindicators bridges across the cracks in the world, straight-hewn passages and winding stairs to follow.

Unlike the ruins he had seen on the surface, neither light nor wind had scoured these underground streets. Arkas was surprised by the amount of colour and texture. There were bright murals of geometric patterns and stylised scenes of builders, smithies and miners; the pillars and archways were decorated with bands of blue, purple and deep red. It brought home that Kurzengor had once been a thriving metropolis, rivalling Sigmaron in size, home to tens of thousands of humans and duardin.

Before the Age of Chaos. Before the skaven.

He tightened his grip on his weapons, his mood souring again.

Though the city was more engineered in these lower vaults, passage through it was still difficult. Like the City of Ice, it had been constructed by inhabitants smaller than the warriors of Sigmar. Tight passageways and sharp turns hindered them and several times the Stormcasts in the vanguard were forced to turn back, either encountering dead-ends or slender subterranean alleys that simply would not allow them access. Frequently Arkas’ helm or elbow would break the plaster rendering on the walls, turning works of art that had survived centuries of neglect into shards and dust.

As he descended, Arkas could feel the weight of the mountains pressing down upon him. More than that, it was the weight of expectation, of history. He moved towards a fateful confrontation in the unfolding saga of Ursungorod. With equal awareness he could also sense the power of Ghur churning in the foundations, trapped in the bedrock below. The further he went down, the stronger grew its lure, and the greater was its power. It was a primal force – contained, but struggling to break free.

The Shadowgulf.

Just like the Skagoldt Ridge, it was uncharted territory, a yawning emptiness that he had been aware of as far back as he could remember. He thought he knew now what it was – the void beyond the realmgate, a hole in the depths of Ursungorod that led to the place between realms, the vacuum of nothingness and raw Chaos leaking into Ursungorod through the inter-realm gnaw-ways of the skaven.

It was uncharted, but not unknown, and no longer impossible to penetrate. With Stormcast Eternals at his command, there was no barrier he could not cross, no territory he could not enter. The thought of piercing the undercity of the skaven brought a visceral thrill. For so long he had been denied vengeance, and now the victory he had craved on the walls of Kurzengor was within his grasp.

His oath fulfilled, his pain salved.

‘Are you all right, my lord?’

Dolmetis’ question dragged him out of his thoughts.

‘Yes, why?’ Arkas snapped.

‘I... I thought you said something.’ Uncertainty wavered in the Knight-Vexillor’s voice. ‘Growled.’

‘Dust,’ Arkas said quickly. ‘In my throat.’

‘Of course, my lord.’

The further down they went, the warmer it became, and the air carried on it a stench that grew stronger with each level they passed. Sometimes the smell waned as they encountered shafts and airways cleverly fashioned into the old city to bring draughts of chill mountain air from the surface, while the wider duardin chambers and halls dissipated the unpleasantness for a time. Where they had to squeeze through narrower galleries and corridors, the reek added to the suffocating claustrophobia.

They came across a large hall, the ceiling held by metal pillars and vaulting, a firepit at the near end. It was a grand chamber, swallowing the echoes of metal-shod feet. The Stormcasts spread out, heading towards large archways on the opposite side, grit crunching underfoot. The far wall was lost in shadow until Arkas held up his hammer and let forth a burning blue flame of celestial power.

In the flickering shadows, giant faces danced. Angular and flat, they were stylised versions of the duardin rulers carved into the mountainside above. Steps rose to a dais on which a stone chair sat, ornately carved with knotwork and more sculpted duardin faces.

‘A king’s throne room,’ muttered Doridun.

‘Not so,’ announced Martox. The Decimator-Prime stood at one of the arches with his retinue, looking into the lighter shadows of the space. ‘Perhaps a prince’s.’

Arkas joined him and looked into the adjoining hall, the Prime’s meaning becoming clear. The cavernous space was enormous, even vaster than the hall in which they stood. The floor was covered in intricate geometric tiles, each the size of Arkas’ hand, many shattered to reveal smooth rock beneath. The walls had a more natural finish, undulating and bulging in places, but polished, every strata and striation of colour catching the dismal light. Rusted sconces for hundreds of torches marked the walls, and there were similar ruddy spots on the ground where braziers had stood for many decades before being taken by looters.

The throne dais here was not only taller than the one in the antechamber, but at its summit were five thrones, all of similar size, though differing in design. Onyx, amber, marble and granite had gone into the construction, so cunningly wrought that even the skaven had not been able to prise them from their anchoring bolts.

The hall was split by a crack no wider than Arkas’ outstretched arms, running from one corner to the other directly across their line of advance. Moving closer he heard a trickle of water. He looked down into the chasm and could see nothing but a vague movement far below – but the sound of the stream was definite.

‘Not far,’ he said. ‘Listen...’

The Stormcasts stopped, statue-still. Above the faint hissing of water another sound carried through the passages and halls. A faint murmur. The tink of picks and scrape of shovels. Cracks of whips.

‘This way,’ said Diocletus, pointing to archways behind the thrones. ‘It’s coming from...’

His voice died away as the background noise changed subtly. The same sounds were there but there was another – the pattering of feet, the scratch of claws, the rustling of cloth.

A bell tolled, the nerve-jangling noise reverberating into the hall from several directions. It sounded another knell. And then there was the discordant clash of a disfigured gong. And drums. Over a few cacophonic rounds they came together, crashing out a sombre beat.

Growing louder.

A green flicker of warpfire lit the passages beyond the archways, a dull, shifting light at first, becoming a paler, greener flicker over the cut stones and weathered flags.

Arkas looked down at the ground again, lowering his hammer so that its glow illuminated the floor. The tiles were not just broken and cracked, there were dozens of scratch marks, and a faint sheen betrayed grease trails. Casting his gaze about he saw smears of droppings and small pools of urine. Only now did he register the stronger stench of filth, mould and rot.

From other directions the warp-glow strengthened. In front and behind, to the left and the right. The scraping grew louder and louder, the inharmonious drums, gongs and bells resounding closer and closer, a repetitive moaning accompanying the discordant crashes of noise.

Long shadows jumped along the walls as the Warbeasts formed a circle. Their weapons gleamed with celestial fire, lighting impassively masked faces, a knot of turquoise in the blackness. Putrid green warp-light spread into the vast hall from all around.

‘They have found us,’ said Arkas.

CHAPTER FORTY

The power of Skixakoth’s fang was intoxicating. Filled with the blessing of the Great Horned Rat, Felk could feel the armoured giants as though they were a scab on his own flesh. They reeked of celestial magic, a sore upon the well of Ghurite energy that saturated everything from the Whiteworld Above to the undercity.

It hadn’t only been his unnatural senses that had warned him of the intrusion from the scavenger city on the surface. Thriss had shadowed them unseen for some time, and when it had become clear they would head for the old throne room, Felk had set his forces into motion. The gutter runner had slipped away again after delivering this message, on some devious personal mission, most likely.

‘Close-close, so very close,’ Felk told Skarth. ‘Not long, not long at all.’

The light coming from the unearthed realmgate was brightening all of the time, as the last few rocks and boulders were levered out of the way. The runes upon its structure added their own glimmer to the proceedings, a rhythmic oscillation of pale golden energy that sparkled up a pillar, across the keystone and down the other side.

‘All is ready,’ said the fangleader. He indicated the rings of spitevermin and lesser warriors around the realmgate plinth, facing outwards.

‘Yes-yes!’ Felk let the power of the Great Corruptor swell inside him. He could feel it burning through his veins. It empowered him but consumed him also. He knew that his time was short. It did not matter. Once the realmgate was opened he would corrupt the swirling forces that permeated the Realm of Life and stave off the call of death. Until then he would be sustained by the tooth of the verminlord piercing his heart.

With bounding strides he sped after the ranks of plague monks he had set upon the Sigmar-spawned warriors. He wanted to see the foe crushed, and then when he had proven his power once again he would break open the Realm of Life and glut himself on the swirl of released magic. Fresh forces awaited his command on the other side, Thriss had assured him. The armoured giants in the surface city would be swept away and all of the Whiteworld Above scourged or enslaved.

He reached the ancient throne room just as the most fanatical of his followers were hurtling towards the invaders. Frothing and screeching, these plague monks wielded immense censers that billowed with warp vapour, the pierced heads of their weapons spilling sickly fog that wreathed into strange shapes around them as they charged.

Behind these fanatics, the other plague monks continued their measured pacing, gathering through several arches and corridors, their shambling march starting to quicken.

The giants sprang forwards to meet the attack of the frenzied skaven hurtling across the throne hall, heedless of the heavy spiked censers crashing against their armour as they swung their gleaming weapons.

Driven mad by the fumes of their own weapons, possessed by the death-fervour of the Great Witherer, eyes bulging and teeth gnashing, the censer bearers flailed and swung without heed to their own safety. Spitting infected breath, they bit and scratched in their death throes, tearing at the unyielding plate of the giants with cracked claws. They crashed the spiked balls of their weapons against the armour of their foes even as they were spitted on glaives and pulped by glinting hammers. Though rusted and worn, the balls and chains were wreathed in warp power, and broke apart in tiny flecks and splinters that gnawed and worried at the enchanted metal.

The fog of death surrounding these manic disciples of the Great Horned Rat burned the eyes and filled the lungs of the warriors. Though superhuman, they were not wholly immune to the effects of the smog. Several doubled over retching and coughing. Others fell back with hands raised to their masks as the acidic fumes assaulted their eyes and mouths.

Incensed by the fighting, the plague monks quickened their pace, feeling the rage of the Great Horned Rat descending upon them. In Felk’s chest the plague-fang burned, the sudden pain and vitality shocking him into renewed effort.

‘Kill-kill!’ screeched Felk, waving his horde onwards. ‘Kill-kill-kill!’

The mass of plague monks broke into a run, brandishing staves, rusted daggers and jagged swords. Hoods and robes flapping, clawed feet skittering over ancient tiles, they poured towards the interlopers seeking to desecrate the holy undercity of the Withered Canker.

‘Purge-purge!’ shrieked the Poxmaster. ‘Pray and slay and flay!’

Hissing and snarling, the skaven launched themselves towards the warriors, who were still reeling from the attacks of the censer bearers and the cloying fog left in their wake.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

If the Warbeasts stayed they would be swamped by a tide of maddened ratkin. Arkas fought back the urge to simply kill without thought, focusing on the mission he had agreed with Theuderis. The Silverhand would be following, bringing down his entire army, but the Celestial Vindicators had to secure the route to the realmgate.

Amongst the throng of incoming vermin, one stood out. Taller and bulkier than the others, one of the plague priests held itself proudly, hood thrown back to show a head marked with nodules of horns and bubo clusters. This skaven was different in other ways. It tore through the pool of Ghurite energy that Arkas could sense lying dormant in the hall, and it left behind it a ragged trail of warp power greater than anything Arkas had encountered before.

Murderous instinct roared at Arkas to confront this creature, to destroy the architect of the plague and vermintide that had laid low the Ursungorans and doomed Arkas’ descendants to a dwindling death.

‘Enough,’ growled the Lord-Celestant, tossing aside the ragdoll corpse of another censer bearer. ‘Warbeasts, follow me!’

He cleaved a path not towards the rat-leader but to one of the archways from which the sounds of digging had earlier emanated. The hammer-blow charge of the Stormcasts smashed into the leading plague monks, cutting a gouge into their ranks in a burning tempest of starsoul maces, lightning hammers and thunderaxes. With Arkas at the front, the Warbeasts slew a dozen plague monks in the moments of impact, leaping over their tumbling bodies to fall upon the diseased vermin pressing behind. Another dozen fell without striking a blow in return, and as swiftly as they had been surrounded, the Warbeasts were clear.

The sudden breakout took the skaven by surprise, allowing the Stormcasts to quickly fight their way through the dregs of plague monks still arriving, reaching the relative sanctuary of the corridor beyond. Forced to press into the close confines after the Sigmar-chosen, the skaven were easy targets for a group of Decimators left as a slowly retreating rearguard.

Ahead Arkas could see a different hue merged with the ever-present shimmer of warp-light and phosphorescent fungal growths. A golden aura suffused the tunnel, coming from a vast cavern beyond.

The Stormcasts burst into the chamber of the realmgate with meteoric force, crushing and slashing the milling slaves in their path. The corridor had brought them out almost directly opposite the realmgate, the vivid picture from Arkas’ vision now wrought physically before him.

The skavenslaves fled from the approach of the Stormcasts, pulling down the whip-handlers in their stampede. Like regular vermin exposed to the light of day, the pathetic creatures bolted for every nook and hole and exit they could find, swarming away from the turquoise-armoured warriors to leave their larger, more aggressive kin to protect the prize for which they had so painfully laboured.

Arkas slowed, allowing his warriors to form up on either side while he evaluated the situation. As well as pressing in along the corridor behind, the plague monks flowed back through other tunnels and passages to the left and right, seeping into the large cavern like filthy floodwater.

Several score of armoured skaven with wickedly bladed halberds stood directly in the path of the Stormcasts, guarding the realmgate. In turn, to either side of them were hundreds of lesser skaven, most with shields and simple mauls and blades, some with spears or scavenged halberds.

The realmgate itself was set back slightly, the excavation that had uncovered it leaving a short defile before it. A maze of scattered stalagmites, crevasses and pits further broke up the approach to the objective. But in Arkas’ mind’s eye he did not see obstacles, only defensible positions. If his force could break through the skaven’s elite, the Warbeasts could seize the final approach to the realmgate and negate the mass of the rat-filth’s numbers.

With this simple plan in mind, Arkas descended to the cavern floor, picking up the pace to ensure the flanking plague monks could not surround his several dozen warriors. Glancing to each side, he saw the plague monk leader entering the chamber off to the right, while several other plague priests emerged from the shadows at the edges of the great cavern, and scores more skaven followed from the gloom.

Faced with the incoming Stormcasts, the nerve of the armoured elites broke and they moved aside, seeking shelter behind their lesser companions, who were thrust cursing into the path of the vengeful Sigmar-blessed warriors. These proved little better than the slaves, fodder that bogged down the advance of Arkas’ warriors but did not halt it. While the Warbeasts hacked and bludgeoned their way towards the realmgate plinth, more and more plague monks filled the cavern.

The battle-heat was on Arkas and he barely had to think as he struck down foe after foe. His focus was like a fiery spark directed at the next enemy, his purpose single-minded and irresistible. Yet as he cut down yet another skaven, another sense was nagging at him, a more rational part of him trying to warn him of something amiss.

He realised two things in quick succession. Firstly, the plague monks were not throwing themselves after the Stormcasts as he had expected. They came together in several masses, cutting off any route back out of the cavern, content to allow him to clear a path to the plinth. Many of them were bowing hooded heads as though in prayer.

Secondly, as another foe fell beneath his sword, his gaze fell upon the realmgate again. The runes were not flickering as they had been before, but glowing with a steady light. Beneath the arch the air shimmered, the rock face beyond obscured in shadows cast by immense trees on the far side.

Amongst the clamour, he heard a chittering laugh echoing across the hall. He glanced back to see the skaven leader with his hands raised, arcs of power leaping between them, igniting the magic of the chamber and lancing overhead. The bolts struck the duardin-carved pillars and the runes flared like newborn stars.

The realmgate opened.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The cavern trembled, bringing gravel and dust spraying down from the high ceiling. The throbbing in Felk’s chest intensified in time with the tremors, every pulse sending a shock of energy through his diseased frame.

‘Witness the power of Poxmaster Felk!’ he crowed, lifting up a claw that danced with warp power. His words seemed to take form, noxious breath spilling from his mouth as he spoke.

The impetus of the armoured warriors was faltering. Their leader, the giant with hammer and sword that never stopped, halted on the first step to the realmgate dais. Though his weapons continued to arc left and right with blasts of power, his gaze was clearly fixed on the opening portal.

‘All hail Felk!’

The Poxmaster quivered as his name issued from thousands of throats, accompanied by the din of gongs and bells. ‘Power to me!’

The realmgate called to him, trying to drag him towards it. He felt it in his chest, the fang of Skixakoth like a white-hot shard in his heart. Forks of power crawled across the stones of the portal and leapt across the gap. They rapidly grew faster and brighter. The flashes were mesmerising, each flicker drawing in Felk’s consciousness, trying to snatch his mind from his brain.

He howled in triumph and pain, and threw out his hand in a spasm, involuntarily letting loose another arc of warp power that speared across the cavern and struck the keystone of the realmgate. The detonation sent a shockwave rippling out over the occupants of the hall, throwing skaven and Sigmar-warriors to the ground. The blast of energy snuffed out the warp-lamps, leaving the chamber lit only by the crawling fires engulfing the realmgate.

With a thunderous crack, the gap between worlds was breached and the cosmic bridge opened. Shimmering sunlight tinged with arboreal green crept into the cavern, bringing with it a gust of wind carrying the smell of mouldering leaves and rotted flesh.

The view through the gate was not altogether clear, but shuffling shapes quickly resolved into more hooded plague monks, icons of the Greater Witherer held aloft, drums and gongs banging as they marched out of the coruscating aura that filled the portal’s frame.

‘Beloved am I!’ screeched Felk, his triumph overcoming the agonising gnaw of the fang impaled through his breastbone. ‘The ranks of my disciples swell!’

The fighting abated, the warriors of Sigmar halfway up the steps, Felk’s followers gratefully drawing back from their merciless weapons now that reinforcements had arrived.

Another shape loomed in the translucent energy of the gate, almost blotting out the light from beyond. Felk stumbled to one knee as the pain in his chest flared to unbearable levels, a scouring agony that burned through every organ and coursed along his bones and nerves. Death seemed certain. Vile dread welled up where sweet victory had resided moments before. Squinting against the brightness, the Poxmaster watched as something monstrous and holy pushed through the veil between realms.

Its pinkish flesh was protected by rust-edged plates of warp-forged iron and its rat-like face was guarded by an angular helm fashioned to accommodate the profusion of horns that curled about its head. It wore a thick black belt from which hung a massive tome – the Liber Cankorum, in the pages of which were held the secrets of the Miasmic Flux. In its hand it held a four-tined spear that trailed tendrils of power from the realmgate.

Verminlord.

The musk of fear was strong around Felk as he watched the greater daemon of his god stride onto the realmgate dais. The monster’s eyes were drawn immediately to the Poxmaster and he felt the fang in his chest throb powerfully.

‘Felk.’ The verminlord’s voice was a sinister whisper that carried with it the weight of a booming shout. ‘Poxmaster of the Withering Canker.’

‘Mighty Skixakoth, Corruptor of the Pure, Sagacity Incarnate, Bearer of the Sacred Text!’ The list of titles devolved into a rambling mash of syllables as Felk’s nerve failed him.

The verminlord thrust a scimitar-like claw at Felk. The fang hummed with magical power, wreathing the Poxmaster in a greenish vapour. The same issued from the mouth of Skixakoth as it spoke.

‘Did you think I would not miss it?’ hissed the verminlord. ‘Did you think I would let you freely bargain with my power? Steal my victory?’

‘No-no!’ wailed Felk, demeaning himself more by falling to his belly, though he could not drag his eyes from the verminlord. ‘For-for you, greatest of the great, Skixakoth Right-Hand. Open gate, destroy Whiteworld Above, slay tree-queen for glory of Skixakoth.’

The verminlord’s lips rippled with what might have been a snarl or a smile; it was impossible to tell. It turned its gaze on the armoured giants formed in a tight group on the steps before it.

‘Kill them,’ it snapped, casting a bolt of power from its spear.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Arkas raised his hammer just in time to catch the warp blast on its head. Corrupting magic and celestial power sprayed like sparks. At the verminlord’s command the skaven were filled with renewed fervour and poured across the cavern towards the surrounded Stormcasts. Even the pitiful slaves picked up stones and wooden clubs and scampered after their betters.

The Warbeasts stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a solid ring, weapons presented to the foe. Arkas fixed his gaze on the verminlord, a terrible wrath building in his heart.

Skixakoth.

This monster had laid low Ursungorod, destroyed the resistance of Arka Bear-clad and enslaved the people of the mountains. More than that. The Lord-Celestant’s eyes moved to the fell grimoire upon the daemon’s belt, a spell book containing virulent curses and devastating plagues – the same that had slain his adoptive mother in her bed, and even now gnawed the life from Katiya and her kin.

The rage was almost unstoppable. Arkas barely felt the earth trembling, thinking it was his own limbs quaking with power as Ghurite magic surged up into his body from below. With it came pain, the agony of memory a physical sensation.

But it was not Arkas’ pain, Arkas’ memories that consumed him. He felt the torture of Ursungorod itself, the spirit of the land tormented and corrupted by the infiltration of the skaven and the lashing of Chaos power at its heart.

A single desire possessed him – to free the lands of their tyrant, to slay the verminlord.

But that was not his purpose here.

He thought of white snow and a cool breeze, birds aloft in the mountain sky, free from this turmoil, desperately trying to calm the beast that raged inside his chest as though in a cage.

He was not Arka Bear-clad, he was Arkas Warbeast. Stormcast. Lord-Celestant. Commander. Servant of Sigmar.

The Celestial Vindicator ran these thoughts over and over in his head as the noose of skaven tightened around his warriors. Through the ruddy veil that had descended on his vision he searched the surrounds, though he was not sure what he was seeking until he found it.

An island, of sorts. The base of a gigantic stalagmite that had been smashed aside as the skaven had dug for the realmgate, blocked on three sides by cracks freshly widened by the convulsing earth.

‘Reform! Withdraw on me!’

With a clash of weapons, the Stormcast ring turned into a spearpoint with Arkas at the tip. The dozens of Paladins flowed like liquid, parting to allow Arkas to pass through, heading for the stalagmite.

A mob of plague monks stood between them and their objective, their leader a plague priest with two crooked blades scratched with skaven runes that caught the light from the realmgate in strange ways.

The plague priest snapped a command, eyes full of madness and hate as Arkas and the Warbeasts plunged back down the steps in a long triangle of turquoise sigmarite and gleaming celestial energy that rippled down the levels like a flood of raw Azyrite power given form.

Arkas kicked as the skaven priest leapt at him. His boot connected with its chest. Thick, tattered robes absorbed some of the impact but still the blow sent the creature spinning back into its fellows, toppling two more. An instant later, Arkas was into the gap, sweeping his weapons left and right to carve the breach even wider.

He piled on, ignoring the blows that rang from his armour, cutting down all in front of him, trusting to his companions to do the same to any that he passed. Bone crunched underfoot and he pulled his feet free from grasping fingers and entwining rags, smashing his hammer through another handful of foes. Striding on, he angled through the small gap between two precipitous chasms, less than ten paces wide, and turned as he set foot on the stalagmite.

The Warbeasts coursed around him, spinning in turn to take up fresh positions defending the natural island while their fellows moved past.

They were just settling into these new positions when the verminlord attacked.

The greater daemon leapt across the gorge to the left, easily covering the gap, its hooves striking sparks from the stone as it landed. The miasma of decay that followed it billowed across the Stormcasts, almost blotting out the light.

Arkas reacted without thought. He threw himself between the charging verminlord and his warriors, hammer and runeblade ready. With supernatural speed, Skixakoth twisted, bringing the long haft of its spear around to block Arkas’ sword, the hammer crackling through the fog where the verminlord had been a heartbeat earlier.

A massive fist crashed against the back of the Lord-Celestant’s head. He moved with the blow, completing a full forward roll to negate most of the impact. A hoof caught him in the midriff as he turned, knocking him back.

He had his back to the crevasse. Ahead, the plague monks screamed and shrieked their dedications to the Great Horned One as they launched their attack against the Stormcasts, the first dozen ratmen cut down by hammers, maces and glaives, the following skaven throwing themselves forwards undeterred.

That was all Arkas had time to glimpse before he had to step to the right, bringing up his hammer to deflect the spearhead of Skixakoth.

‘I know you...’ The greater daemon’s brow creased into deep furrows. ‘A strangely familiar smell.’

Arkas said nothing. He launched himself at the daemon, aiming his runeblade for its midriff. Its spear deflected the attack, but not the hammer-blow that followed, smashing into the creature’s shoulder. It staggered, snarling and spitting.

A spear thrust forced Arkas to retreat several steps, until he could feel the yawning precipice behind him. The verminlord leered, displaying dagger-like fangs.

‘I have not killed you before, have I, little Sigmar-thing?’ It splayed the talons of its free claw, warp lightning cracking between them. ‘No, that is not it. They were iron-clad and you are not.’

Arkas dodged aside to avoid the blast of warp lightning, but in doing so moved into the range of the verminlord’s spear. It pierced the side of his chest, below the right shoulder, two rusted tines shredding sigmarite and flesh.

Arkas cried out as corrupting magic poured into the wound, splitting bones and shredding sinew. He tore himself away from the spear and stumbled, thick blood gushing from the grievous injury.

‘I will see you soon in Azyr!’ cackled Skixakoth, driving its fist into Arkas’ masked face.

The blow hurled him back. He fell hard and scrabbled for purchase, but after an agonising moment Arkas discovered there was no ground beneath him.

He dropped into the chasm. His last sight before darkness engulfed everything was of the verminlord looking down over the edge of the precipice, a halo of warp-light surrounding its horned face.

Arkas hit an outcrop and bounced heavily, spinning laterally. He threw out a hand to grasp something, anything projecting from the side, but his fingers gripped only empty air.

He could feel waves of Ghurite energy buffeting him like updraughts of air. Arkas let the magic lap around him, soothing his troubled thoughts, comforting him like a friend. A brotherly embrace.

The light from the cavern of the realmgate was just a faint line far, far above when he hit the bottom of the ravine.

The agony was thankfully short-lived, the Stormcast’s bones shattered, organs pulverised, flesh pierced and gashed by buckled sigmarite plates. He felt it for just a few heartbeats, until that heart gave out and the celestial power in the core of his being exploded. It disintegrated what was left of Arkas Warbeast and as a bolt of pure energy shot up into the heavens.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The battle for Kurzengor had eached an impasse. Theuderis and his Paladins had reunited with the Angelos Conclave and the rest of his warriors. They held three routes down to the undercity – the slave pit they had first seized, a tunnel network beneath a crumbling temple and a sinkhole that had collapsed in one of the gardens of a sprawling palace.

Against the warriors and weapons of the Chaos tribes these positions were virtually impregnable. The three forces were arrayed in a triangle so that not one of them could be surrounded without the enemy being caught with their backs to another Stormcast enclave. Justicars and Prosecutors raked celestial missiles into any foe that approached too close, but were content to let them flee beyond range when their spirit broke. Those that dared and survived this barrage of arrows, bolts and javelins were confronted by a shield wall of Liberators, who received the brunt of the initial assaults and then peeled apart by retinue to allow the Paladins within each armoured ring to counter-attack.

Several times this strength had been tested and the streets and plazas of Kurzengor were thronged with corpses, the bloody remnants of corrupted humans waist-deep in places. The rooftops, courtyards and alleys were similarly littered with the dead. It had started to snow again and streams of crimson pooled from gutters and downpipes, staining the fresh fall.

Thousands of the Chaos-tainted had been slain but not without losses to the Knights Excelsior. Theuderis’ Paladins in particular had paid heavily for their presumptuous thrust into the city, and more than a third of their number had already been returned to Sigmar.

For all their solidity, the three forces were mutually dependant. If Theuderis led one into the depths to relieve Arkas then the remaining two would be surrounded. It was this dilemma that Lord-Relictor Glavius raised with Theuderis, as the two stood on a mansion roof above the wall that girded the slave-pit. From here they could see almost the entire circumference of the defences, and across to the other forces in the neighbouring areas.

A swathe of the city was on fire, torched by the Chaos marauders in the hope that the smoke and flames would drive out the interlopers. The swirling winds had thwarted that plan and the few dozen warriors daring enough to sneak through the fume clouds had been easily picked off by Trajos and his Judicators.

‘We should already be on the heels of Arkas, my lord,’ said Glavius. ‘We do not know how far into the depths we must descend.’

‘He knew the plan and was willing to accept the risk of his part in it,’ Theuderis replied. ‘Without a secure base any movement into the undercity will likely splinter and fail.’

‘That is true.’ Glavius looked over his shoulder towards the expanse of the slave pit. ‘Even so, a degree of rapidity would not go amiss. Our route is uncertain.’

‘You do not have to labour the point, Glavius.’ Theuderis gestured in a wide arc, encompassing the other two Stormcast enclaves. ‘I planned for two possible approaches to the next phase of the attack. The first is to launch a three-pronged assault, each battalion collapsing in behind its Redeemer Conclaves to make steady advances into the deeps. Alternatively, we can bring the entire host to a single ingress and make one concerted push for the realmgate.’

‘You speak as though you have already decided which is the better,’ said Glavius. ‘But perhaps are not yet ready to commit.’

‘I have weighed the risks and benefits of each course, and there is little to choose between them as far as chances of success or failure go,’ admitted Theuderis. ‘To come together risks attack and disruption on the surface but guarantees a more cohesive assault below. To make three separate invasions shares the risk, negating the dangers of attack from the tribesmen but leaving us separated against the skaven.’

‘Which would be the quicker?’ asked the Lord-Relictor.

‘A speedy move to defeat is pointless against a more measured advance to victory.’

Theuderis could sense his companion’s frustration but he would not be cajoled into a hasty decision. He had only half the force with which he had entered Ursungorod. Though he would not shirk from sacrificing the other half if it brought victory, a hurried venture into uncertain terrain against an uncounted, unknown enemy was not his idea of a sound strategy.

‘Lord...’

The tone of Glavius’ voice rather than the word drew Theuderis’ attention straight to the slave-pit. Several retinues of his Prosecutors were hurling their missiles into the depths while the Decimators and Protectors stationed at the gantries and scaffolding withdrew, moving into more defensive postures.

Samat was a streak above, flashing down towards the Lord-Celestant, but whatever warning he thought to bring was unnecessary. Moments later Theuderis saw for himself the nature of the threat emerging from below.

Towering above the Stormcasts, a verminlord burst out of the pit, spearing a Decimator on the blades of its polearm. Missiles converged on the greater daemon, sparking and splashing from its unnatural form. In its wake a wave of robed skaven boiled out of the hole like froth overrunning a cup, streaming after their god’s avatar as it slashed the head from another Knight Excelsior.

Samat descended, wings trailing spirals of celestial energy that melted the falling snow.

‘We hold,’ Theuderis barked. ‘Take word to the other battalions to unite and make fast where they can. We will delay the foe as long as possible.’

‘What of you, my lord?’ asked the Knight-Azyros.

‘I will make my stand here.’

Samat nodded and sped away, becoming a blur against the clouds. Theuderis took a step towards the stairs down from the roof but a hand on his arm stopped him.

‘Where are you going?’ said Glavius.

‘To fight,’ Theuderis replied.

‘You cannot, my lord.’ The Lord-Relictor removed his hand. ‘It is more important that you lead the army.’

The Lord-Celestant looked at the skaven horde spilling from the undercity, and at the line of white and blue arranged against the dark mass.

‘I will lead the defence,’ Glavius continued. ‘But you are needed to muster what force you can with the rest of the host.’

‘No,’ said Theuderis, stepping past the Lord-Relictor. ‘My place is here. I am a commander, but a warrior first. The others will know what to do and will await my return.’

He would listen to no further argument and ran for the steps, heading down to ground level as swiftly as possible. Tyrathrax awaited him beside a broken-down gatehouse, padding back and forth as the sounds of battle increased.

‘You cheated death once, but it comes again,’ he told his steed, swinging into the saddle. ‘I will be reborn. Lessened, but alive. Your spirit will return to the great flux of Azyr.’

The dracoth did not seem the least perturbed by this and threw herself into a sprint, heading down the street directly for the Stormcast line. Prosecutors and Judicators did their best with volleys of fire, and had driven the verminlord back into the pit for the time being. Against the numberless horde their celestial bolts and arrows had little impact.

Over the heads of his warriors, Theuderis spied the skaven leaders – a cabal of staff-wielding priests directing the attack from the rim of the slave-pit.

‘If we do nothing but slay their commanders we will have struck a vital blow,’ he bellowed to his warriors as Tyrathrax bounded through a gap between two brotherhoods of Decimators. ‘Attack is the surest defence!’

Skaven bodies were flung aside by the rampage of the dracoth, while bolts of celestial energy forked from her maw to strike down even more. Theuderis’ blade moved constantly, every whip-fast sweep and precise thrust finding a throat, skull or heart amongst the tightly packed skaven monks.

He could see his goal less than fifty paces away. One of the plague priests was larger than the others, swollen with warp-touch, eyes gleaming green, its staff crackling with the same power. Perhaps it was coincidence or perhaps the priest sensed Theuderis’ approach. It turned its eyes towards the Lord-Celestant. He thought to see concern, knowing skaven were a fearful breed in their hearts. He was met with a stare of hatred so intense he almost felt it like a blow.

Screeching, the priest pointed its staff at Theuderis, waving a fresh mob of priests towards the Knight Excelsior. Dozens more furred and robed creatures scampered into the space ahead of Theuderis.

Tyrathrax stumbled. A skaven corpse was tangled around her front leg by a frayed rope belt. It was almost nothing, and she quickly recovered, but the loss of momentum proved consequential. The plague monks pressed in harder still, swamping the dracoth and her rider, battering and hacking from every direction. No matter how quickly Theuderis struck, or how viciously Tyrathrax bit and clawed, their progress was slowed to a halt.

Skinny fingers with broken claws grasped and scraped at Theuderis and plucked at the armour of his steed. Rusted blades found the saddle-cinch and moments later the Lord-Celestant felt himself slipping sideways, dragged down by dozens of scabbed, blistered hands.

Tyrathrax howled as she too was overwhelmed, buried beneath a living, snarling avalanche of frenzied rat-beasts. Theuderis managed to twist to his feet as the dracoth pitched sideways and the saddle fell free. He could barely see anything, tatters of cloth across his face, gore and blood clotting the joints of his armour. He struck out with blade and fist, but could not fight his way free.

His mask was ripped away and he caught a glimpse of vermin faces, drooling and manic. He tasted rusted metal. It was confusing, until he realised the blade had entered his mouth from beneath his chin.

He rolled over, crushing the plague monk beneath his bulk, but half a dozen leapt onto his back, using the edges of his armour plates as handholds, hammering and stabbing with delirious intensity.

Pushing himself to one knee, the Lord-Celestant swept his sword in a broad arc, severing the legs of a handful of foes. Something pierced his cheek from behind and he reached back to pluck the offending attacker from his shoulder. With a grunt he smashed the squealing skaven into another robed foe, breaking the spines of both.

He was almost upright when his knee gave way, tendons severed by the sawing of jagged knives. A serrated sword entered his eye, not quite deep enough to pierce the brain. Roaring from the pain he punched the head from the monk trying to drag the weapon free.

And then Theuderis fell, toppled to his back by the weight of his foes. He saw a last glimpse of grey clouds, the snow falling heavily.

Through swimming vision he saw the priest, the one with the jade eyes. There was something in its chest, revealed through the tatters of its robe, smoking and bubbling in a patch of scorched fur. It raised its staff, the skull at its tip chattering wildly, though the sound was distorted, muffled, masked by the drumming of the Lord-Celestant’s heart and the lessening throb of fleeing blood.

The pain stopped.

Furnace heat. Searing. Melting. Reforming.

Hammers crash. A forge, not battle. Anvils ring. Thunder rumbles.

Sparks, bright. Forks of lightning. The glow of forges. Starlight above.

Sulphur and hot steel. Charcoal. Boiling blood and charred flesh.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

He heard chanting – his name – and Ermenberga waved him towards the parapet.

‘Your subjects await you,’ she said, eyes moist with joy. She patted her stomach meaningfully, ‘and soon you will have other news to brighten their spirits further. I think it is a boy…’

Theuderic was struck dumb, his thoughts whirling. He pulled himself up onto the rampart edge. His army, led by princes and dukes and war leaders of many other castles and citadels, erupted into even greater noise, such that Theuderic almost didn’t hear the rumbling of thunder above.

He looked up and saw that the darkening sky was filling with ominous clouds. Fearing some last treachery of the alter-folk, Theuderic glanced back at his family.

With his name still ringing in his ears, and the loving, upturned faces of his wife and children etched into his mind, Theuderic juddered as a bolt scythed through his body without warning.

In a moment, all that he knew, the wide plains and jagged hills of the Glittering Breaches, dropped down beneath him. The great keeps and fortresses of his lands became specks of gold and silver before they too were lost, and in a moment the blur of the Auric Shield of Lyonaster disappeared from view.

He thought for a moment that he had been swallowed by a star, suffused with light and heat.

Pain returned.

He retreated, letting it consume his body, protecting his mind from its ravages.

In time the agony became a dull ache.

Theuderic was consumed by the storm, reforged into the Silverhand. But he was not yet Stormcast again, merely a mote of power hanging in the firmament of the quenching chamber. An idea bound into a miniature star. Celestial energy awaiting form.

He rebuilt himself without thought. Mind, body, armour.

Re-clad, Theuderis Silverhand waited for the last of the pain to wash away. The walls of the quenching chamber fell away with a last crackle of lightning, leaving the Lord-Celestant standing upon white marble floors, the high crystal-paned vaults of Sigmaron above him.

He was not alone.

Like shades from the past, the dead Knights Excelsior stood in ranks close at hand, waiting patiently for the return of their commander. There were fewer than he had feared.

Were the rest still in Ursungorod, or yet to be remade? Was the battle already lost?

A single note rang across the chamber, resonating inside his mind. A summons he could not ignore.

With swift strides he made his way to the grand hall of the God-King. Through great arches and windows he saw scores of other Strike Chambers from half a dozen Stormhosts gathered about their commanders, awaiting the Tempest of the God-King to send them on their missions. There was motion everywhere, columns and flights of Stormcasts ready to add their strength to the ongoing campaign to seize back the realmgates.

Entering the hall of his lord, the Silverhand found Sigmar sitting statue-like upon his throne, a giant that dwarfed even the Stormcasts of his armies. He was clad in golden armour, and his hair and beard flowed in the celestial gale that surrounded him.

The Warbeast was already present, some distance from his lord, bent to one knee, head bowed.

Theuderis tried to avert his gaze but the moment before he did so, the God-King looked directly at him. He expected anger, perhaps disappointment. He felt nothing but understanding, even admiration.

‘We failed, Lord Sigmar,’ Theuderis whispered, taking position next to Arkas. ‘Ursungorod is lost.’

The God-King rose from his throne and approached. As he neared them he seemed to grow smaller. His presence did not diminish in any way, but his form shifted, so that when he was standing almost within reach he was just a little taller than the Lord-Celestants.

‘Rise,’ the God-King commanded. They obeyed. ‘You have not yet failed. There is still time.’

Theuderis thought he would have been more moved by this revelation, but his mood was level, his spirit placid. Cold, even.

The Warbeast had not looked at him, but out of the corner of his eye Theuderis could see the Celestial Vindicator. His hands were fists, shoulders hunched. There was a palpable aura of anger emanating from him.

‘The division of our enemies has granted us opportunity,’ Sigmar continued. ‘The skaven and the Chaos tribes war with each other. Lord Silverhand, half of your force survived and awaits your return not far from the city.’

Theuderis nodded, accepting this fact without comment. Sigmar turned his attention to Arkas.

‘The Warbeasts were not so fortunate, but they have been reforged.’ The God-King crossed his arms. ‘You have one chance more to seize the realmgate. Lord-Castellant Durathos stands ready still. You will take the realmgate and summon Durathos to bring forth his Knights Excelsior.’

‘I will lead the attack,’ growled Arkas. Now he looked at Theuderis and there was a sullen rage behind his gaze. ‘This time there will be no hesitation.’

Sigmar raised a hand to silence Theuderis’ protest before it was voiced.

‘The assault on the All-gates is fast-approaching. I can spare no other Strike Chambers for the attack on Ursungorod.’ Sigmar looked from Arkas to Theuderis and back again. ‘Arkas, return to your Strike Chamber and prepare for the Tempest. Your hour of vengeance has not yet passed.’

Arkas hurriedly raised a fist in salute and stalked away. Theuderis watched him depart, already calculating a strategy that would take into account the Warbeast’s increased fury.

‘I do not understand why you approve of such ill-discipline, Lord Sigmar,’ he said when Arkas was out of sight. ‘These Warbeasts are barely controllable. Unfit to be Stormcasts.’

Sigmar’s expression soured.

‘It is not your place to question my judgement.’ He relented as Theuderis again sank to one knee in silent apology. ‘But I will indulge you on this occasion. My Celestial Vindicators are rough gems, that is certain. They are unpredictable, often barbaric. Not every great hero of the Mortal Realms is a prince or knight, Lord Theuderis. The Warbeasts are savage, relentless and meteoric. Let them be free and they will take you to the realmgate.’

‘Arkas seems possessed by an even greater wrath than before.’

‘Aye,’ said Sigmar. His gaze moved away, as though looking at the departed Warbeast. ‘His Reforging was costly.’

‘Angry commanders make poor decisions, my lord,’ Theuderis said.

‘But they make decisions,’ Sigmar said, and Theuderis flinched at the words. ‘They take risks which can achieve great reward. Not all problems can be solved before a blade has been raised. Have you ever considered that I might want Arkas to be angry?’

The thought had never occurred to the Silverhand and his silence was admission of the fact.

‘Go,’ said the God-King. ‘The tempest of war calls you. Strike with the speed and fury of my wrath.’

‘Your wrath, my blade,’ Theuderis replied.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

‘A sight that pleases me greatly.’

Felk shuddered as the verminlord’s words scuttled into his ears, sending tiny shockwaves through his system. Whiskers and tail twitching like disturbed serpents, the Poxmaster looked out across the city. He could see everything from the vandalised faces carved from the mountain rock. The snow fell thick in places over the masses of the dead, freezing the dying. Fires raged elsewhere, their glow lighting broken buildings and ruin-cluttered streets.

Here and there bands of skaven and the human tribes still clashed. The noise of their skirmishes carried far in the quiet aftermath of the skaven attack.

‘Late-late,’ mused Felk, swallowing hard. ‘Long time needed.’

‘Yes,’ said Skixakoth. ‘Vermalanx throws war at the sylvaneth queen, but is blind to other routes to victory. His fall shall be my rise.’

Felk said nothing. He had known he tampered with the schemes of beings far greater than him, but it had seemed a distant, abstract danger. Now there were warriors of Sigmar – Stormcasts they were called – bringing battle against him, and verminlord Corruptors taking an interest in his schemes.

Yet not for a heartbeat did he regret any action or decision. If not to be the greatest, if not to be seen by the eyes of the Great Corruptor, what was the point of existence? Though by nature his body was weak and cowardly, his ideals held him to a greater standard. He was driven by ambition, not courage, but would, when tested, prefer death to failure and slavery.

‘We will kill-kill storm warriors and nothing will stop us,’ said Felk. He could see the azure glow from the host of the giant warriors. They had taken up position on the mountainside between the city and the fire peaks.

‘No.’ The single word made Felk flinch. ‘The Whiteworld Above is of no consequence. The realmgate is open, our forces united. Vermalanx will fail and I will rise.’

Skixakoth strode away, tail lashing back and forth. Felk hissed at his back, emboldened again by the verminlord’s departure. He waited until the daemon of the Horned Rat had descended into the passages behind the duardin kings’ memorial.

‘I smell you,’ he said quietly. ‘Strong fear, yes?’

Thriss emerged from the shadows to the left.

‘I am Eshin,’ said the gutter runner. ‘No friend to Corruptors of the Horned One.’

‘But serve me?’

‘For payment.’ Thriss flashed fangs in the gloom. ‘For more payment?’

Felk fought back a threat. He had little bargaining power left since the arrival of the verminlord. He sighed.

‘Yes-yes. Double warpstone. Triple slaves. Yes-yes?’

Head cocked to one side, Thriss considered the offer and then nodded.

‘Good-good.’ Felk scratched at the open wound containing Skixakoth’s fang. His eyes strayed back to the Stormcasts upon the hill. They had not fled, but were waiting for something. He had heard the verminlord taunting one of the giant’s commanders, the one that had tried to seize the realmgate directly. Its words had implied that death was no barrier to Sigmar’s chosen. They could return. The wheels of his mind turned and he looked at Thriss. ‘Fetch Skarth. Have missions for two of you.’

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Even the storm that had heralded the arrival of the Warbeasts paled in comparison to the Tempest of Sigmar’s power that boiled through the sky over Kurzengor. The stars turned blue and then were swallowed by the thunderheads of celestial energy blanketing the heavens from horizon to horizon.

In the city skaven and human alike looked up at the immense magical conflagration and knew that war was not yet finished in Ursungorod. The boom of a single thunderclap was like the bellows of the God-King himself, toppling decrepit buildings, bringing avalanches of snow and rock tumbling down the mountainside onto the outskirts of the ancient city.

The flare of lightning started an instant later. It peaked in just a few heartbeats, hundreds of strikes lashing the mountain around the perimeter of the Stormcast position. So fierce was the return of the Warbeasts and fallen Silverhands that the snow was turned to rivers of meltwater cascading down over rocks and down gullies to flood into the contested city below.

A corona of power still crackling around him, Arkas Warbeast sucked in a deep lungful of air. Almost immediately he could feel the wash of Ghurite energy, the spirit of Ursungorod welcoming him back with a feral snarl in the back of his mind.

The Reforging had awakened the spirit of the Bear-clad again, but this time it had not dissipated. Arkas and Arka existed as one and the same. There was no more doubt, no inner conflict, just a rage, pure and focused, an animal instinct to slay his foes without thought of the consequence. It felt good. He felt stronger. Stronger than he had been before.

Released. Freed.

His gaze found Theuderis, who, sitting astride his dracoth, was surrounded by a growing cadre of Silverhands officers. Knights-Heraldor and Knights-Vexillor dashed from the Stormcast encampment to greet their returned brethren and receive their commands, while the ranks of the Knights Excelsior stood silent guard.

Dolmetis and Doridun approached, several Primes a few steps behind them.

‘My lord,’ the Knight-Vexillor began, but Arkas cut him off with a snarl. It was hard to form words, to bring some coherent thought from the swirl of anger that embroiled his mind.

‘I will speak to Lord Silverhand and then we attack,’ he said, pushing past the knot of Stormcasts.

The Silverhands parted at his approach. Theuderis saw the Warbeast’s mood and bade his officers to depart a short distance. His dracoth snorted and snarled as Arkas approached, nostrils flaring. The Silverhand dismounted and offered a salute.

‘Your mount takes a dislike to me,’ said Arkas, meeting the hostile glare of the dracoth. It backed away several steps.

The Silverhand patted the monster’s shoulder. He turned his gaze back to the Warbeast, his tone clipped and precise. ‘We will attack in a single, coordinated assault.’

‘We will,’ replied Arkas. He reigned in his emotions, leashing the animal that was trying to break free. ‘I will lead, you will follow. We kill everything we meet until there is nothing left to kill.’

‘Yes, but we n–’

‘We strike now.’ Arkas drew in a deep breath through his nose, pushing the bestial growl from his voice. ‘The skaven still fight with the tribes. They cannot both attack and defend.’

He feared what might happen if Theuderis prevaricated further and so turned away. His officers fell in beside him, silent, cowed by his demeanour.

‘Warbeasts!’ He raised his hammer, a signal for mustering. When the Stormcasts had assembled, he lowered the weapon to point to the city below. ‘We fight. We kill. We win.’

‘We fight. We kill. We win.’ The chorus growled from the throats of his immortal warriors, echoed from their masked helms. ‘We fight. We kill. We win. We fight. We kill. We win.’

With this martial chant filling the air, Dolmetis raised the standard of the Warbeasts high and Doridun let forth a blast from his clarion. The call became a thunderous roll from the storm and a single stroke of lightning flashed to crackle down the icon of the Knight-Vexillor.

‘Sigmar commands it,’ laughed Dolmetis. ‘He blesses the deaths of our foes.’

‘We fight!’ Arkas’ voice rose over the continuing tempest-clamour in the skies. ‘We kill! We win!’

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Ignoring the insult of Arkas’ actions, Theuderis watched with detached interest as the Celestial Vindicators commenced their bellowing and chanting. It was quite unseemly, the display of brute emotion, but he remembered the words of Sigmar: Let them be free and they will take you to the realmgate. Considering the words again it seemed that they were not so much an instruction as a foretelling. Did mighty Sigmar have insight beyond the present? Could he know what would happen?

Every part of Theuderis’ calculating mind railed against another impetuous, ad-hoc assault into the undercity. It made no sense that what had failed before would succeed this time, even if the skaven were currently occupied with trying to retake the city from the humans.

Yet his master had commanded, and the part of him that was the loyal knight could not refuse Sigmar’s will. Oaths had been sworn, promises must be upheld.

‘Follow the Warbeasts,’ he told his officers. ‘All brotherhoods.’

‘What of a rearguard, my lord?’ asked Attaxes. ‘The city is filled with foes that might fall upon us as we pass.’

‘My orders were clear, Knight-Heraldor. Sound the general advance.’

Progress through Kurzengor was even swifter than during the Stormcasts’ first assault. Without delaying to secure their flanks or finish off the scattered bands of humans or skaven that crossed their path, the Warbeasts and Silverhands had slashed their way through to the centre of the city by the time dawn was rising, fully a day after their initial attack had begun.

Knowing that speed was more valuable than stealth, Arkas led the force not to the slave-pit where they had descended before, but to an area of the city where many of the buildings and streets had collapsed and subsided, undermined by the skaven tunnelling below. Where the duardin parts of the city had been extended by the gnawholes of the skaven, entire districts had been swallowed. In the twilight before sunrise, the unnatural gleam of fungi and warpstone lit cracks and holes from below, a dull beacon that drew Arkas on.

The army of Sigmar’s chosen plunged down through the ruins by chasms and caves, bursting into the cellars of toppled mansions and the crypts of looted temples. They came upon an immense cavern dominated by the piled ruins of the buildings that had fallen from the surface.

The outer parts of the skaven city were a maze of hovels, ragged tents and reclaimed buildings patched and reinforced by a mad scattering of debris. As well as covering the brick-strewn ground, the city teetered up the bases of massive stalagmites, the towers crisscrossed with bridges and walkways, ratlines running from the roofs to the tips of hollowed stalactites. From the midst of this scavenged urban tangle, a causeway of masonry and mud cut back and forth out of the buildings until it met with the broad stones of what had formerly been the vaulting arches of a human temple.

This dismal edifice speared like a living mountain from the effluence and trash of the undercity, in places shaped by the hands of humans, in others crafted by duardin skill, all smeared and smashed together with reckless abandon by the Chaos ratmen.

The pilaster of decay was wreathed in fumes and vapours that issued from smokeholes and chimneys and rose from streams of filth and sluggish rivers that dribbled from stolen gutters and cracked sewer lines.

Its peak seemed broken, a tangle of splintered wood and split rope, collapsed gear housings and huge wheels piled atop each other. The remnants of something bronze embedded in the structure glinted in the witchlight of countless warpstone-fuelled lanterns.

Though a great many of the skaven contested the city above, their undercity was not undefended. Streams of ratmen poured forth from the filthy warren, setting upon the Stormcasts from all sides. From the depths of the central mass marched forth columns of robed plague monks, swaying in time to the bells and gongs, thirteen tendrils of matted fur and dirty cloth each led by a ranting plague priest.

Arkas and the Warbeasts speared into the heart of the skaven, driving deep through their line and across the causeway leading to their shrine. Possessed by his fury, Arkas paid no heed to defence, but such was the ferocity of his coming none survived to land a blow upon the plates of his armour. His hammer and runeblade slew everything they touched, killing with single blows, their celestial power fuelled by his rage.

Commanded by Theuderis, the Silverhands were more deliberate but no less swift in their encroachment. Like the horns of a bull, brotherhoods of Paladins swept out around the cavern, each tipped by winged Prosecutors. The Lord-Celestant and his Redeemer Conclave formed the centre, pushing steadily through the ramshackle huts and streets, churning through skaven warriors with irrepressible force.

There was little thought to Arkas’ approach. Even the simple mantra, ‘We fight. We kill. We win,’ had devolved into something even less specific – a primal desire to destroy. A need to slay. Pure animal fury, defending the nest, the attack of a predator, the battle for dominance of the herd. Unthinking and savage, it pushed Arkas further and further into the undercity, the spirit of Ghur that writhed in his gut calling him deeper and deeper into the belly of Ursungorod.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The plague monks attacked Theuderis directly, trying to break between the Knights Excelsior and the Celestial Vindicators. The Silverhand could see the crude strategy unfolding like jittering clockwork – a spasmodic mechanism that was easy to disrupt. He called to his Judicators and before the skaven had made much headway they were confronted by volley after volley of flaming missiles and celestial bolts.

Impetus was the key, and he did not allow the attack to sway him from his course – his brotherhoods had to keep pace with the haste of the Warbeasts’ advance. Yet for all his endeavours, he could not prevent a separation occurring. His army was simply more unwieldy than the compact force of Arkas, and more prone to delay by the unforgiving terrain and surging assaults of the plague monks.

Arkas was almost gone from view, forging towards one of the corridors to the lower levels, when another factor further impinged upon Theuderis’ evolving strategy. From upon the walls and buttressed towers of the massive temple, catapults hurled festering payloads of rocks and waste. Encrusted pots and slime-covered boulders crashed into the Knights Excelsior. The impacts were severe but it was the splash of noxious, warp-strengthened filth that proved the greater threat. Like the fume cloud of the plague rats and censer bearers, these missiles carried a toxic mix of infection and acidic vapour that hissed and bubbled across the armour of the Silverhands.

Prosecutors sped up from the city, unleashing salvoes of lightning-wreathed missiles against the crews of the machines and falling upon them with blazing hammers. Freed from the swooping attacks of these warriors, the plague monks below charged down the causeway and thrust up from the catacombs, attacking with renewed fervour.

For all that Arkas and his warriors crashed into the foe with unmatched ferocity, these fresh attacks dragged at the flanks and heels of the Warbeasts, slowing their impetus. Skaven forces arriving from deeper into the mountain swarmed up the tunnels, confronting the Celestial Vindicators head-on, choking the path to the depths with a mob of hissing Chaos vermin.

The horns of the attack had also stalled, not quite encircling the cavern as Theuderis had intended. Glavius fought at the head of one tip, trying to break through to Arkas’ increasingly beleaguered position, but the weight of enemies before him was still increasing. On the other flank, Theuderis could see the icon of his Strike Chamber amongst the broken buildings where Voltaran had similarly been swamped by skaven.

The situation threatened to spiral out of Theuderis’ control. The whirring gears of his mind processed every extant aspect of the battle, analysing and assaying possible strategies, discarding them all in turn. Even as Tyrathrax spat lightning and his blade bisected wailing skaven, he focused his thoughts on a single purpose.

The realmgate. Deliver the Warbeast to the realmgate.

Cursing his own stupidity, he realised that he did not have to be with Arkas to protect him. If the Celestial Vindicators could reach the realmgate their icon would act as a lode-star for Durathos, who was waiting with an entire Strike Chamber in Sigmaron. Theuderis just had to protect the Warbeasts’ backs to allow them to get close enough.

Before he could enact his plan, the atmosphere in the cavern changed. A foetid wind blew across the burning, broken skaven slum, bringing with it the acrid taste of warpstone and an even deeper stench of decay and ruin.

The verminlord.

It was silhouetted against the dawn light at one of the gashes into the city above, towering over a sea of its verminous followers. A spark of warpfire from its spear lit the air.

At the same time, almost directly opposite Skixakoth, the chief plague priest appeared at the gate atop the causeway. Theuderis remembered the wound in its chest, and could see the gleam of warp-power from beneath the creature’s robes.

It mattered not. Theuderis’ disparate trains of thought came together, the pieces of the plan sliding into place like the levers of a carefully machined duardin engine. At its centre, the gear around which it all revolved, was Arkas. One piece of wisdom from the God-King shone bright in Theuderis’ mind, perhaps another semi-prophetic pronouncement, masked as a question: Have you ever considered that I might want Arkas to be angry?’

‘Samat!’ The Silverhand’s call cut through the clamour of weapons and shrieking of rat-warriors. Even as the Knight-Azyros heard his lord’s command, he turned on glittering wings and sped down.

‘What orders, my lord?’

‘Take this to Arkas and make him listen.’ Theuderis followed with his message, clearly enunciating every word. ‘Say it exactly as I told you. Make sure the Warbeast hears it.’

Whether he understood the implications of the message or not, Samat flew away, shafts of dull sunlight from above catching his white form as he cruised over the battle.

Theuderis cleaved his way free of the skaven that had been pressing up around him. His gaze moved from the plague priest to the verminlord, assessing the validity of the two courses of action before him. To attack one left his forces vulnerable to the other.

‘A reckoning,’ he told his dracoth, turning her towards the verminlord. He raised his voice to a thunderous bellow. ‘Silverhands, today the plan is simple. We fight! We kill! We win!’

CHAPTER FIFTY

Fatigue was a greater enemy than the Chaos-tainted rat-creatures that fell beneath Arkas’ blade and hammer. As a fire burns its fuel, so the celestial force that powered the Warbeast – the very same essence of Sigmar from which his entire being was formed – was consumed by the rage of the Lord-Celestant. He could feel his power waning, sapped by every blow that decapitated and eviscerated.

Around him frothed waves of magic, swells of Ghurite energy trying to pierce his will as the skaven weapons tried to pierce his armour. It sought the chinks in his consciousness, flashing memories of standing upon a wall looking down upon a desolate field as the skaven poured forth on their conquest. It was a voice inside his head, saying nothing, but its panting, bestial presence was a constant temptation to free himself.

He had sworn oaths, to serve Sigmar, to be Stormcast. The God-King granted him life, an immortal existence, in exchange for his service. The celestial force that ebbed from his body was the same power that sustained him.

A shout pierced the ruddy cloud of his thoughts. A name. His name.

He stepped back, allowing his Decimators to push on around him, hacking and crushing, their axes and maces glowing with mystical force. The voice called again and he looked up to see an angelic being above, ivory and blue lit by a halo of distorted sunlight.

Something arced down towards him, catching the light. The Knight-Azyros, Samat. He hovered just above Arkas, his wings of lightning flickering with power.

‘A message, Warbeast!’ the Knight Excelsior called down. ‘From my lord, Theuderis Silverhand. “The taint will be purged. Your people are dead”.’

Shaking his head, Arkas did not grasp the importance of the words. His mind laboured over their meaning, but intellectual thought was made impossible by a rising tide of pure instinct, a subconscious understanding that swept through him.

Pain. The pain of memory. Katiya lying on the bier, plague eating her from the inside.

But not Katiya. His mother. No, his sister.

Confusion, torment, the agony of failure.

An oath. Words spoken on the deathbed of his mother-sister. A promise older than his fealty to Sigmar.

A promise unfulfilled.

Snatched away by the God-King. Friends, companions, family left to die and be enslaved.

His land abandoned.

Ursungorod betrayed.

But he would save his people. The omens...

The words came to him, crystal-clear across the vast ages.

‘I did not say our people would be saved,’ Radomira chided. ‘You must pay attention to detail, I have told you before. I said from the events of this day our lands will be freed.’

Failure. Again.

Arkas tore off the mask of his helm and howled, feeling the rush of Ghurite energy pounding into him like water through a broken dam. The spirit of Ursungorod filled him where the power celestial had diminished.

This time he did not fight it. He welcomed it.

He barely noticed his Stormcasts moving away, forming a defensive circle around their stricken commander. Arkas’ thoughts were a vortex of pain.

The Lord-Celestant accepted the pain, took it as his own. It was a burden he had carried as Arka Bear-clad, a role he had abdicated as Arkas Warbeast.

He let the Ursungorod pit pull him down, funnelling his pain into a bright star of frustrated rage, drawing him into the heart of the mountain – into the Shadowgulf where all light and hope died.

Here the power of Ghur found its home.

Arkas touched something vast and cosmic. He felt it stretching out into the impossible gulfs between realms. A fragment, an avatar, a memory from the world-that-was. The spirit of Ursungorod, trapped and in agony for countless lifetimes, ravaged by the fires of Chaos, split and rent and broken, a body of fallen mountains, chasms and cracks. His flesh crawled as he felt the aching emptiness of skaven gnaw-ways burrowing through his immortal frame like worms and maggots, trying to corrupt him from within.

He shuddered at the pain, and the world above shuddered with him.

Arkas ascended again, sent up through the rock like a mote lifted on a geyser, a channel, a conduit for the eternal rage of the spirit buried under the mountains. With a bestial roar that shook the cavern of the undercity, he burst back into his body, immolating himself with the power of Ghur, burning with the vengeful fire of the beast.

The mountain broke.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The power manifested itself as a monstrous bear, a churning maelstrom of erupting force that hurled half of the mountain skywards with its eruption. Thousands of skaven were drawn up by the raging beast as its slavering maw and immaterial claws swept through them, their terrified squeals and shrieks swallowed by the earth-shattering boom of the roar it shared with Arkas.

The undercity was ripped asunder, its jagged innards exposed by the rising of the beast. The incarnation of Ursungorod’s spirit became a thick cloud, a creation of dust and shattered stone that roiled away into the dawn light, leaving sunbeams lancing down into the heart of the broken peak. Skaven bodies fell like hail.

Panting, snarling, infused with the beast-magic, Arkas squinted against a painful light. Something blinding and golden shone in the depths. The realmgate sat fully exposed on its dais, the cities of men, duardin and skaven scoured clear. The archway was alight with magic, flames licking from the stones in fluttering golden waves.

‘Go!’ he commanded his warriors, dragging the word out of the depths of his mind, language almost forgotten. He thrust a finger towards the exposed realmgate. ‘Go!’

The Celestial Vindicators hesitated, unsure of what was happening. It was Doridun who reacted first, lifting his clarion to signal the charge. Dolmetis responded, turning to lead the attack into the crater left where the Ursun-spirit had erupted.

The ivory-clad warriors of Theuderis were spearing towards the verminlord, the Silverhand leading the charge from the back of his dracoth. Arkas set his sights on another target. From the causeway spilled the plague monks, yelling and screaming their praises as they launched themselves into the flank of the Silverhands’ attack. The leader stood at the gate still, surrounded by ranks of his armoured elite.

Letting the Ghurite magic flow through him, allowing the beast-power to push aside the celestial force that had created him, Arkas broke into a run. He took up his weapon two-handed as he charged, but as he leapt into the attack, hewing at the robed skaven with revitalised strength, he swung not a hammer, the symbol of Sigmar almighty, but a great axe.

The axe of his mother.

Rocks fell like meteors onto Stormcast and skaven alike, though it was the latter that suffered the greater casualties from the plummeting remnants of the mountain. Theuderis was not sure he would ever understand what had just happened. He had thought to rejuvenate Arkas’ flagging assault, but the consequences of unleashing the Warbeast’s full anger were far greater than anything he could have expected.

Despite the surprise manifestation of cosmic power, the battle was not yet won. The verminlord descended into the cavern, its presence spurring the skaven into apoplectic fury. Billowing spews of noxious magic engulfed the Stormcasts as they attempted to surround the greater daemon, seeping into their armour, choking and burning them inside the moulded sigmarite.

The counter-attack from the despicable temple was dragging more of Theuderis’ warriors away from the main thrust towards the greater daemon. There was nothing the Lord-Celestant could do to prevent his warriors defending themselves, but the consequence was a faltering assault, his force drawn into two battles.

For good or ill he had to remain committed to the course of action he had chosen. The Celestial Vindicators were heading for the realmgate. Arkas himself fought like fifty Stormcasts as he chopped his way into the ranks of the plague monks. The preservation of his force for its own sake was of no value. He had to destroy the verminlord or any attempt to protect the realmgate would be in jeopardy.

Felk was still stunned by the explosion of Ghurite energy that had rocked the mountain and torn the heart out of his city. His ears rang with the noise of the detonation and his vision was blurred by the unwelcome dawnlight slanting from where the peak of the mountain had once been.

The one that had summoned the beast was death given form, ripping his way into Felk’s followers like a claw tearing at unprotected flesh. Though the plague priest and his closest council stood behind the lines of spitevermin, he felt far from safe. Apparently Felk’s underlings did not feel the same.

‘Not lost-lost,’ squeaked Festik. He jabbed a claw down towards the dust cloud-swathed lower levels. Giants in turquoise armour were clambering into the ruin, obviously intent on the realmgate. ‘Attack-attack, from behind!’

‘Mighty Skixakoth leads us to victory,’ exclaimed Chittir, redirecting the Poxmaster’s attention to where the verminlord was slaying the Sigmar-chosen with wide sweeps and armour-piercing thrusts of its crackling spear.

‘Attack-attack!’ parroted Priest Kirrik. ‘Snap-snap like rat ogre jaws!’

Felk looked at them with contempt. The fang of Skixakoth trembled and burned in his chest, reminding him of the plan.

‘Fools,’ he hissed. ‘Treachery! Make peace with Skixakoth against me? Only one rules the Withering Canker. Praise Felk!’ He glanced at Skarth and nodded.

The fangleader cut the head from Kirrik with a single blow from his halberd. The other two plague priests turned on their betrayer with raised blades. Festik gurgled blood as Thriss struck from behind, emerging unseen from the ranks of spitevermin, weeping blade taking the priest across the throat. Felk deflected the attack of Chittir, his warp-infused body barely registering the pain as the rusted blade cut through his robes and caught in the flesh of his arm. He tore out the priest’s throat with a slash of sparking claws.

Stepping over the bodies, Felk squealed a command to his remaining underlings and then disappeared into the Great Shrine, heading for the tunnels in the lower levels. The spitevermin followed, trampling the bodies of the dead plague priests.

Thriss remained a little longer, watching as the plague monks under the sway of Felk melted away from the fighting. The war-leader that glowed with painful fire was getting closer. Tail trembling, Thriss dashed after his employer.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

The beast-possessed Arkas hewed a bloody path through the remaining plague monks. The inexplicable departure of the plague priest and many of its followers left Theuderis with no distractions. Rallying his warriors with a shout, the Silverhand pressed on towards Skixakoth.

The verminlord wreaked carnage amongst the Stormcasts, its doom-wreathed weapon crackling and steaming as bolts of celestial energy shot skywards from dismembered warriors. The chosen of Sigmar did not fall lightly. Starsoul maces and thunderaxes boomed as they struck the greater daemon’s immaterial flesh. Flickers of celestial lightning trailed from warblades as they cut its unholy skin.

The skaven frothed around the periphery of the combat between Skixakoth and Theuderis’ warriors, sometimes bringing down a Silverhand from behind, more often cut down themselves by a backswing or trampled underfoot by the massive warriors. The verminlord cared nothing for its followers and the wide sweeps of its four-tined spear struck down more skaven than Knights Excelsior.

Into this melee burst Theuderis’ dracoth, snarling, forks of blue lightning springing from her open jaw. Skixakoth turned towards the Lord-Celestant, the shimmer of heavenly power creeping across its arcane armour.

Theuderis felt nothing when the murderous gaze of the greater daemon fell upon him. Neither fear nor triumph nor anger troubled his heart. The verminlord was just another problem to solve, another enigma to unravel. Victory depended upon finding the solution, nothing more.

Tyrathrax responded as though an extension of his body, leaping aside as the enormous spear of the verminlord lanced towards her rider. Theuderis’ sword caught the weapon behind its barbed head, the star-forged blade leaving a notch in the ensorcelled metal. The force of the clash almost knocked him from the dracoth, but he clutched the saddle horn and hung on while Tyrathrax leapt at Skixakoth, claws raking across its thigh.

The skaven drew back from the duel, fearful of the white warrior that dared face their demigod. Not so the Silverhands, who leapt to the attack with jubilant shouts, hammering and slashing with renewed determination.

‘For the glory of Sigmar!’ they chorused.

Its barbed tail lashing limbs and heads from its attackers, the verminlord snatched up a Liberator, encasing his head in its massive claw. Plague-magic churned, turning flesh to a molten slurry that dripped from the armour before a flare of celestial power carried the warrior’s spirit back to Sigmar.

Theuderis lunged with his runeblade, thrusting the tip into a gap in the daemon’s armour below its outstretched arm. Snarling curses, Skixakoth spun away, the haft of its spear crashing against Theuderis’ shoulder, unseating him and throwing him to the ground. The dracoth moved to put herself between her master and his foe.

Recovering, the verminlord loomed over beast and Lord-Celestant, hatred flowing from it like waves of heat. Ichor streamed from rents in its armour and its horns were cracked and broken, but in the depths of the helm, twin eyes of warp-fire pinned Theuderis in place.

On his back, the Lord-Celestant was defenceless.

Except for one manoeuvre. A sacrificial move.

The spear-points descended and Theuderis acted without hesitation, rolling underneath Tyrathrax. The tines of the daemonic weapon followed him, lancing into the head and shoulders of the dracoth, piercing armour, flesh and skull.

Theuderis continued his roll while Skixakoth tried to drag its spear free, emerging from beneath the collapsing dracoth. Using her crumpling body as a step he launched himself at the verminlord, slamming the point of his sword through the eye slit of its helm. Grabbing a stump of horn, he rode the greater daemon as it staggered back, drawing out his blade to ram it into the other eye, pushing with all of his strength until the crosspiece ground against the unearthly material of the verminlord’s helm.

The greater daemon folded into itself, its grip on the Mortal Realm severed. The physical form of the verminlord fell apart, becoming hundreds of rat corpses, mangy and boil-ridden, that melted into a viscous pool beneath Theuderis as he landed on the filth-covered ground.

Still victory was not certain. The Stormcasts were surrounded, their enemies beyond counting. The gleam of celestial energy in the depths reminded Theuderis of the mission.

‘Glavius!’ he bellowed. ‘Summon the Lord-Castellant!’

The Lord-Relictor held aloft his mortuary staff, chanting an invocation to the God-King. A stream of lightning leapt from the tip of his icon and then dissipated into the air. Nothing happened.

‘The warpstone corrupts everything, the Celestial Realm is blind to us,’ said the Lord-Relictor. ‘I cannot summon them.’

‘The realmgate, can you use its power?’ asked Theuderis.

‘It is too far,’ replied Glavius, looking towards the distant crater. ‘Unless...’

The Lord-Relictor again held up his bone-clad staff and called upon Sigmar. This time the bolt of energy did not launch skywards, but seared across the cavern, seeking the tip of the icon wielded by Arkas’ Knight-Vexillor, Dolmetis. The celestial power flashed like a beacon fire lit and then leapt again, forking madly as it earthed into the pillars of the realmgate.

The sickly glowing runes dimmed, their yellow-green light replaced by the azure blaze of heavenly power. Like a hurricane unwinding, the vortex of energy surrounding the gate became a near-blinding star. In the depths, the realmgate shuddered, the stone of its structure cracking, splinters falling away from its surface.

The realmgate burst with another detonation of power. Ignited by the celestial energy of Glavius, the cosmic portal shed the stone prison the duardin had laid upon it, turning the archway to shards and dust. In its place burned a white flame, tongues of fire licking across the stones and caressing the air. A pulse of energy snapped back along the route of the beacon-power, jumping from Dolmetis’ icon to the mortuary-relic of Glavius.

‘Sigmar!’ the Lord-Relictor bellowed, channelling the renewed power through his body, sending it as a surge of lightning that flared into the skies revealed by the collapse of the mountain.

In an instant, scores of lightning blasts flashed down in reply.

Theuderis saw a bright flash of golden light reflected against what was left of the cavern ceiling. He turned as horn blasts reverberated around the chamber of the shrine, announcing the arrival of Lord-Castellant Durathos.

Faced with the death of their god’s avatar and the drum of marching boots from the depths, the skaven faltered and scattered, bolting for whatever runs and holes they could find.

Ever mindful of his duty, Theuderis called his warriors to make for the realmgate to link with the Celestial Vindicators and other Knights Excelsior. Samat led the pursuit of the fleeing ratmen, but the craven creatures soon lost themselves in the mire of the undercity.

Theuderis looked down at the remains of Tyrathrax. There would be no miracle this time. The ease, the speed with which he had been ready to let her die nagged at him, as did his lack of emotion as the blood pooled amongst the decaying remnants of the verminlord. It was known that each Reforging affected a warrior profoundly – stripped away a layer of their humanity. Mortals were not meant to live forever and there was a price to pay for becoming a celestial being. The Reforging of Arkas had left him prone to the beast within.

As he turned away from the dissipating remains of his mount, Theuderis was not sure what he had become.

EPILOGUE

They found Arkas unconscious at the shrine gate after climbing and hauling their way through a veritable mountain of skaven dead. In his hand he still held an Ursungoran-style axe. The Warbeast woke as Theuderis rolled him onto his back. He reached up and removed his mask, sitting up to look around the cavern.

Snow was falling from the broken roof and he glanced up, surprised to see the clouds. Getting his bearings, he could see that the shrine hall was devoid of enemies. The only skaven left were the thousands of dead littering the ghetto of huts and hovels. Already teams of Knights Excelsior were heaping the verminous creatures onto pyres built from their polluted homes, the smoke thick and oily.

Warriors in white and blue were everywhere, though there was a knot of turquoise-armoured figures not far away. Theuderis extended a hand and Arkas allowed the other Lord-Celestant to help him to his feet.

‘Ursungorod belongs to the Knights Excelsior,’ he said. ‘A well-earned victory.’

‘Lord-Castellant Durathos,’ said the Silverhand, indicating the officer behind him. ‘He will be in charge of rebuilding the city here, and the garrison for the defence of the realmgate.’

‘Take good care of these lands,’ said Arkas. ‘Its people bled to keep a part of it free long enough for us to save it.’

‘I...’ Theuderis shook his head and dropped his voice, perhaps concerned to speak in front of Durathos. ‘I do not understand what happened.’

‘Something from the World Before,’ Arkas said quietly. ‘Manifested in the sea of Ghurite energy we called the Shadowgulf. A demigod, perhaps, or a god of a dead people. Trapped, tortured by Chaos. The skaven burrowed through it, enslaved part of it for their diabolical ceremonies, used it to pollute the magic. It tried to break free once before – that is what caused the eruptions on Skagoldt Ridge on the day of my birth. It found me, has been calling to me all of my life, looking to share its pain.’

‘It is gone now?’

‘Mostly.’ Arkas looked at the axe in his hand. ‘I can feel a little part of it remaining.’ He tapped his breastplate. ‘In here, where it’s always been. I can accept it now. The beast within me. The bear’s anger.’

The Silverhand accepted this with a silent nod.

‘What next? We await the command for the assault on the Lifegate?’ As he asked, the thought twisted in Arkas’ gut. Perhaps something of his reluctance showed on his face.

‘You have another plan?’ asked Theuderis.

‘Many skaven escaped,’ Arkas admitted. ‘Their chief priest amongst them. My people are dead. Others will build a new civilisation here in time. I am the last. I would hunt down the creature that destroyed the Ursungorans. But, that is not the will of Sigmar. We have a higher calling, to free not just one people but all.’

‘Sigmar is wiser than that,’ said Theuderis. ‘Some of us are constructors. Some of us... You are a conqueror. You are his Warbeast. He did not save you to raise castles and cities for him. He raised you to fight, to kill, to win. But, you do not need my permission, Arkas. You are Lord-Celestant of your Strike Chamber, commander of the Warbeasts. Your will is Sigmar’s will. The God-King means for you to rid him of these filthy skaven.’

‘Then with your leave, if not your permission,’ said Arkas, ‘I still have vengeance in my heart and the need to spill skaven blood. We each serve Sigmar in our own way.’

Arkas started down the causeway, but a call from Theuderis drew his attention back.

‘Lord Arkas! Kill them where you can, righteous is your vengeance. But heed your oaths to the God-King. We have a staging ground to seize the Lifegate, and the other routes to the Allpoints will be secured by the endeavours of other Stormhosts. When the call of the God-King comes, when we march on the Allpoints to destroy Archaon, be ready to answer.’

‘I’m always ready, Lord Theuderis!’ Arkas fitted his mask. ‘For the glory of Sigmar!’

BENEATH THE BLACK THUMB

David Guymer

I

‘You come to me offering death,’ said Copsys Bule, stabbing his long-handled trident into the soft red soil. Blood or something distantly akin to it oozed lazily up around the sinking tines. ‘A kingly gift, envoy, but death flourishes where I choose to sow it. I am a harvester of death.’

Kletch Scabclaw studied him with eyes that could have gleaned weakness from diamond. They were milk yellow, and glared over the mangy scrap of man-skin that he held pressed to his muzzle in the claws from which he had taken his name. The look on his furry, verminous face might have been one of disgust, though at what, or who, was something the plague priest kept for himself.

‘A new age begins, they squeak-say.’ Spreading his paws, the skaven irritably swatted aside a buzzing bloat fly. Through Bule’s blurred vision it appeared to have three eyes, until the ratman snapped his claws and his vision once again became clear. ‘War comes. Even to you.’

Bule snapped his head up.

The skaven immediately backed up a pace, hunched for fight or flight. Light on his foot-paws, he stood atop the rotten mush that went up to Bule’s greaves. His right paw had gone for the weapon he concealed beneath his robes, and he hissed a warning through his scented rag.

Bule smiled, rotten flesh yielding to produce something too wide for a human mouth.

Slowly, Kletch held up his empty paws, then the gnawed-on nub of his tail. It switched over the ratman’s head with irritation. ‘I did not come-scurry all way from clan-burrow to fight-quarrel. The Black Thumb and Clan Rikkit were friend-allies in the Age of Chaos. Is written. Is remembered. Now we must-need fight tooth to claw again.’

Bule turned his back with a mild shake of the head. Withdrawing his bloodied trident, he stabbed three new aeration holes into the soil, the tines spearing an inch deep before hitting something unyielding. Baring the black stubs of his teeth he gave a grunt of pleasure, planted his foot to the back of the fork-head, and rocked back and forth on the handle.

Levering the trident against his bloated girth, he turned over the unyielding patch in a waft of decomposing flesh.

The human corpse tore off its blanket of topsoil and flopped over. A face that was grey-black and runny and lovely as a crop of sweet tubers fresh out of the ground stared up at the slow circling stars with the clarity of the dead. Disturbed maggots and worms squirmed under the starlight, as if divulging some great secret under torture. Bule watched them re-bury themselves, lulled by the drone of a billion bloat flies and the rank cackle of crows.

Wriggle. Wriggle.

‘Rotbringer,’ the skaven prompted him.

Bule pinched his eyes wetly, mind asquirm with worms and portent. The ratman continued.

‘The lightning men hit clan-burrows in Cripple Fang, Untamed Lands and Putris Bog. Even clan-cousins from far Ghyran come-flee, tunnelling the realm-places to bring word of war.’

Shouldering his trident, Bule turned around suddenly enough to elicit a low squeal of alarm from the plague priest of Clan Rikkit. The ratman leapt to one side, reaching again for his concealed weapon, but Bule merely squelched through the spot he had been occupying as though he were a zombie suddenly impelled to be elsewhere.

‘Bule. Bule!’

Copsys Bule ignored him, his armour emitting a mould-muffled clank with every step. Several of the spiked plates were split apart at the joins, but the damage to his armour had been inflicted not from without but from within. Corpse gasses distended his belly, opening up the plates from the inside like a fat grub eating its way out of an egg sac. Everywhere there remained living skin, swellings, boils and tumours caused further buckling, mottling the once-green metal to black.

Not since before the Age of Chaos had Bule known an equal, and his gardens brought weeping harvest to lands from the Bloodbloom Fields in the south to the Avalundic Ice Kingdoms in the north, from the peat bogs of Murgid Fein to the unconquerable Rabid Heights and their gargant kings.

His demesne was too vast for one name.

It encompassed the Pox Sands, the great Bloat Lake and the Plantation of Flies – fleshwork patches stitched with irrigation ditches that steamed with blight and hummed with spawning daemonflies. As far into the bubonic haze as the eye could see, scrofulous, once-human things tilled the soil with rakes and hoes, or waded into pools with long prods to turn the bloated corpses that floated in them, gestating towards ripeness. Hundreds expired in the time it took Bule to walk past them, and were dragged away to the nurseries to replenish the soil in their turn.

But it was the nature of lesser beings to attach small names to great things.

They called it the Corpse Marshes.

Seemingly at random, feeling where the dead desired his knife, he squatted down into the mire. A sigh of simple pleasure escaped him. The crucified remains of men, women and children staked the ground in serried rows for a stretch greater than a man could ride in a day. Here could be found the bodies of almost every race, including several that no longer existed anywhere but as they did here now. For reasons fathomable to few but Bule himself, he called it his Living Orchard. A foetid breeze moaned through the dead, making them hum and sway, like lush-leaved trees in bloom. Drawing a curved knife from his arming belt, he sawed away a hand that liquefaction was beginning to pull away from the wrist. It was human. A nectarine blackness trickled from the cut. He licked it from his hand, eyes closed in ecstasy.

There was no plan in his mind of how his garden should be, but he knew what needed to be done towards its completion. And it would be soon. Very soon.

The thought thrilled him even as the part of him that had cherished these labours was saddened by their imminent passing.

‘There are a great many of your kind here,’ Bule said, aware that the ratman had followed him and was now crouching on an old wall behind him. Keeping his distance. ‘Your fur. Your guts. You teem with life like no other.’ He cut away another sagging limb with a clinical slash. ‘Nothing rots as quickly as a skaven rots. Nothing embraces Grandfather Nurgle so completely.’

‘Is that what you want-wish me to take back to my masters?’

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

‘Why-why? What changes then?’

Bule licked his knife with a wide smile. Birds cried in fevered tongues, a diseased animal sagacity that he might one day have the fortune to fathom but half of. ‘You come on an auspicious night. For the first time in thousands of years the stars will align my realmgate with another.’

‘And then?’ Kletch hissed, suddenly wary.

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

II

Fistula, First Blightlord of the Black Thumb, delighter in sickness and death, opened the orruk from hip to hip with a sawing reverse of his blade. A surprised snort issued from the greenskin’s tusked helmet, but the fighter remained upright, tough as necrotic flesh and just as dead to pain. Holding its squirming guts in a fist the size of a buckler, it swung its axe at the blightlord with a roar.

Hardwearing, vicious – orruks were infamous. But the fever spreading fire through its veins from the infected belly wound made it sluggish. Fistula sidestepped the clumsy slash with ease then broke its shin with a heel jab. It was sweating. Most men would never know that an orruk could suffer the way this one now did. But still it would not yield.

Fistula appreciated that.

Dashing aside its weakening backslash on the flat of his sword, he stepped in behind its flailing trunk of an arm, close enough to smell the daemon plaguelings rampaging through its veins, then plunged his parrying dagger through its throat.

The orruk’s mammoth jaws snapped spasmodically as Fistula tore his dagger loose and kicked the brute away. Blood from the torn artery sprayed in a rising arc and painted the open face of Fistula’s helm green. He gasped. Partly to drink the wetness from the air. Partly for the raw pleasure of doing so.

Fistula looked down on the beaten orruk. It was still snapping its jaws even as it drowned in its fluids and its eyes turned white. Fistula could have ended it quickly, should have, perhaps, but endemic as the orruks were in the shadow of the Rabid Heights there were never enough to last. He looked up.

The orruks were still fighting in scattered mobs spread out along the length of the narrow gulch into which the Black Thumb had pursued them, but they were broken. Not in the manner of a human or Rotbringer host. They did not run. Rather, they held on with the witless tenacity of sick beasts. Hardy as they were as a race, all bore the stigmata of infection: weeping sores and crusted cuts that would not heal. For every hundred that lay dead with an obvious wound, a hundred more twitched on the ground with blood foam in their mouths and flies on their rotting flesh.

Gors and bestigors plunged headlong into the fray, hacking and goring with frenzied abandon. Rotbringer knights on maggot-riddled steeds galloped up the steeply climbing wall of the gulch to strike at the orruk warleader. The huge beast was surrounded by his biggest and most brutal, but was already heavily beset by the Tzeentchian warhost driving in from the opposite side of the ravine.

The Changeling host was a cacophonous legion of colours and shapes. Gold glittered. Strange voices whispered. Flames of every cast, smell and texture danced along the crossbars of banner poles, and suits of almost-sentient armour whispered secrets to the deepest subconscious of all nearby with a mind to hear. Daemonflies buzzed over everything and everyone. Blight hounds ran along the flanks, pulling down the isolated and the maimed. Giant slugs burrowed up from under the hardpan to swallow Tzeentchian warriors whole while plague drones and sleek daemonic screamers swept at each other in pitched battle for the skies.

The orruks had become almost incidental.

Fistula read the kindred mood in his opposite number, the hunger, coming from somewhere out there in the gulch. They had both come to torment prey, but now, starved of a true challenge, they threw their warriors at the other with greater ferocity than they had ever before.

It was something that Copsys Bule had become too fat and old to realise. Even the most rapacious of plagues could be tamed, lingering only on the scraps left by those they had once devastated in their millions.

A stamp of hellsteel and an ebullient cry called Fistula back from the abstract of the battle. Through a congested melee of putrid blightkings and sickening orruk fighters half again their size, a Chaos warrior encased in full plate armour of azure and gold barged towards him. His helm was solid metal, with only the etching of half-lidded eyes through which some enchantment perhaps permitted him to see. From the sides, golden horns spiralled inwards towards infinity. The Tzeentchian knuckled aside an orruk and roared the final strides with his broadsword swept high overhead.

With a shout, Fistula pivoted on the spot and smacked his saw-toothed blade hard into the larger blade’s descent. It was not a parry. He struck the Tzeentchian’s broadsword as though meaning to do it harm. The impact arced up his arm. He felt it vibrate in his teeth. Reflex action shocked his fingers open and would have lost him his blade if not for the blood and pus that pooled endlessly into his grip from infected calluses and glued palm to hilt.

The Tzeentchian reeled as though it had been struck on the head by a blow that had left its helmet ringing. Its heavy sword trailed, elbows locked in spasm with the aftershock of keeping a hold of his blade.

Fistula struck off the warrior’s head with a single blow to the neck and laughed.

He was the opposite of Copsys Bule in most ways. Where the Lord of Plagues had become a bloated wreck of a man, Fistula’s body was wasted, the favour in which he was held written in lesions on pared bone and in the ropey musculature that seeped and seeped without end. He was a warrior. A fever raged in his mind that no level of war could ever purge and his armour, lighter by preference, was etched with tallies of the blights he had tasted and the civilizations he had brought low.

‘Secure the dead,’ bellowed a cadaverous, jaundiced blightking wearing a cruel harness of scythe-edged plates and hanging mail. He lay into the orruks with a pair of matching knives, bloodily proficient in his preferred mode of killing. Fistula was one of the few to know him as Vitane. To most, he was Leech. The blightking turned and waved a come now gesture. ‘Bring up the wagons. If we are not back by high moon it will go poorly for you.’

Rattling in under a fug of disease came a dozen wagons. Each was drawn by a team of six wheezing horses, their loose wheels the size of a man, their high sides scratched with the knife marks of individual warriors and with a splintered parapet of aged wood. Leprous harvesters in hoods and swaddling leaned over the parapet with hooks to draw up the dead. The drovers called a halt. The horses snuffled in their traces, hacking, puking, biting at each other’s flea-ravaged coats.

Fighting his way to Fistula’s side, Vitane looked down on the orruk still dying at his lord’s feet. The leathery tissue was continuing to shrivel away, the liquidised remainder sinking around the bones.

‘He will be unhappy. This one is worthless.’

Fistula sneered. Vitane was old enough to have fought with Copsys Bule from the beginning, lacking enough in ambition or favour to prevent his star being eclipsed by the man he now followed into battle.

‘I am not here to scavenge and I am not here for Bule,’ Fistula said.

They could not all dine off glories past.

Fistula scanned the confusion for the Tzeentchian champion. Warriors of every stripe filled the gulch from wall to wall with a riot of colour and noise. Even the sky reflected the vivid clash, the bubonic haze that blanketed Bule’s demesnes turned a sickly turquoise by the rolling cumulus of Tzeentchian fire that followed the war horde from the north. Twisted trees covered in naked sores and weeping black foliage clung to the ridgeline. They swayed under the opposing winds.

Fistula shivered though he could not say why. His eyes narrowed.

There was something there, hidden under the drooping canopy. Fistula glimpsed a figure, or the suggestion of one. More a feeling than something he could later describe and claim with certainty had been real. He perceived a sense of robes, of a gaunt, skeletal height, but his overriding impression was one of watchfulness, of many, many sets of eyes trained upon every aspect of this moment in time. In a blink of the mind it was gone. The inkling of its prior being was a subliminal glamour that nevertheless refused to fully fade, as though he had gazed overlong upon a daemon and imprinted its corona of power onto his mind.

He shook his head, and with the blessed release of a peeled scab pulled off his helmet and wiped the orruk’s gore from his hairless scalp.

The sense of watchfulness remained on him, a nagging question at the back of his mind. He felt judgement, though for what, Fistula doubted he had the faculties to comprehend. Nor did he care. He bared his teeth in anticipation and raised his sword to signal the charge. His own glorification was all that mattered.

Let it watch. Let it judge.

III

Kletch Scabclaw spread his arms out to either side while a skavenslave hung the heavy ambassadorial cloak of Clan Rikkit over his shoulders. It was a bit much for the cloying humidity of the Corpse Marshes, and itched in hard-to-reach places that no garment so august should. Its fleas had been passed from priest to priest for two hundred years, and were now the hardy descendents of those that had survived the clan’s full arsenal of pesticidal sorcery.

His dresser ducked under his arm and shuffled around to the front.

The slave was naked but for its own scrappy fur and the brands of clan and owner, but Kletch was only partially reassured by that. To his mind there were any number of innovative places in which a determined assassin might secrete a weapon. His yellow eyes drilled into the side of the slave’s head. The wretch bared its throat with a whimper, stabbing its thumb several times in its panic to fasten the cloak’s rat bone collar. Kletch fidgeted as the slave fussed.

It was too hot. The garish green light of the warpstone braziers around the low-roofed tent was too bright. The spiced scent they gave off to hold back the reek was too sickly sweet.

‘How much-long to high moon?’ he asked of the plague monk seated against the wall of the pavilion behind his back.

‘Soon-soon.’

Scurf’s piebald fur was pox-scarred, so denuded of hair from his own incessant scratching that he resembled a game bird that had been abandoned before it could be fully plucked. The crusted word-bringer set his claw quill onto the stack of man-skin parchment on which he had been cataloguing the many new diseases they had encountered since their arrival in the Corpse Marshes and shrugged. ‘An hour, I think-guess.’

Kletch wriggled his shoulders in discomfort. ‘Something is about to happen-come. I feel-feel in my claws.’

‘I feel-smell also,’ said Scurf, always eager to concur.

The slave scurried over to the brass-ribbed chest sitting open by the hide wall of the tent, and returned with Kletch’s warpstone-tipped staff. Kletch snatched it off the slave with a snarled rebuke. Feeling a little better, he gave the air a fresh sniff, opening his mouth to taste. Between the reek of putrefaction and his own efforts to keep it at bay, there was little left to be smelled, but somehow he knew, knew, that there was more than just the three of them present in that tent.

‘You want-wish to go home?’ asked Scurf.

‘No,’ said Kletch, meaning yes. ‘Clanlords will not reward us for returning with paws empty. The lightning men hit them much-hard in lots-many places. Clanlords grow desperate. They… make bad decisions when they are desperate.’

The slave scurried back bearing a bottle filled with a greenish red liquor that it poured into a goblet. Steam hissed off the cup as the liquid hit the lacquer. The slave bobbed its head low and presented the potation. Kletch eyed the rodent severely. With a gulp, the slave brought the cup to its lips and took the daintiest sip.

Kletch took the goblet from his retching slave, stole his nerve, and then downed its contents. He grimaced, throat tightening, musk glands clenching, and stuck out his tongue. ‘Blegh!’

‘Best-best potions taste worst,’ said Scurf sagely.

Clan Rikkit had once been part of Pestilens, before a tunnel collapse in the ways between worlds had separated them from their brethren. They still retained many of the old immunities, but the cautious rat was the healthy rat.

‘This all a waste of time anyway,’ said Scurf, picking up his quill once more and dunking it in the shelled ink bug still twitching on his table. Scratching away at the parchment, he went on. ‘He has many warriors, but this not the Copsys Bule used to frighten my litter when I was small-young.’

Kletch was unconvinced. Bule could afford to let the world pass him by for a millennium or two if he chose to do so, of that he was certain. And if Bule was any less than the tyrant of clan legend then Kletch was glad that he had not been the envoy sent to treat with that Lord of Plagues.

‘One hour more we can wait. Let us see this over-done, but have all my warriors ready to go.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Scurf, carefully folding his quill and packing it away.

Kletch twitched aside the tent flap and slipped out into the muggy night with wrinkled nose and downcast eyes. Two from the two-dozen plague monks quietly chittering their praises on the broken ground outside of the tent fell into step behind him.

A colossal fortress-temple had once stood here, built by a people who had worshipped the stars and raised towers of incredible scale that they might feel the distant objects of their faith more keenly. For all that their eyes had attended the heavens, they had clearly also been masters of stone. Many of the great structures still stood though they were ruinous now, verterbral columns of stone that had been yellowed by blight, weather and war. Copsys Bule called this place the Hanging Gardens, named so for the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying strung up from its moss-clad defensive walls. Those still alive writhed in fever so that the walls themselves appeared in motion. Their mouths moved but no evidence of their torment could be heard from them, not above the flies.

To count the flies was to court insanity. They were infinite, swarms within swarms, billowing over the corrupted fortress in such numbers that at times they were as the chitinous outer wings of a beetle closing over the world and shutting out the sky. At such times the drone was a gnawing on the boundary between earth and heavens, between real and unreal. At other times it was simply maddening. It set the teeth on edge.

The Clan Rikkit camp pavilion was set up on the rubble where the innermost gate had crumbled to create a rockery populated with razor weeds that were watered each day with the blood of year-dead men. It would foul a charge as surely as any gate ever would, assuming any enemy had the fortitude to survive as far as Bule’s innermost defensive line.

From that vantage Kletch had an unimpeded and deeply unpleasant view.

The Corpse Marshes were monstrous. It reminded him only somewhat of the honeycombed pox caves of Murgid Fein, where diseases were bred, mutated and harvested from slaves of every race. But here the scale was far more epic. The very fabric of the world for as far as his dim eyes could show him felt rotten, perished. The reports of all of his senses scurried about his mind to decry its wrongness and even he, master of the industrialisation of degradation, felt sickened by it.

A geyser of corpse gas rippled upwards and outwards from a sinkhole further down near the gatehouse. Grime spattered back over the rotten gates and the band of warriors marching home over its splinters. A column of plague beasts and meat wagons followed them. Kletch recognised Fistula’s pack: the most useful of Bule’s warriors, but a drop in the septic ocean of his horde.

Leaning against his staff, he settled in to wait.

‘Another day spent in genuflection to our lord’s placidity, envoy?’ said Fistula as he tramped up the slope, evidently bound for the same destination as Kletch. The champion was spattered with loose gore and beaming, contempt for all and sundry and for Kletch in particular vibrant in his bloodshot eyes.

The blightlord walked over, laden carts drawn by withered, pestilential beasts creaking on behind him. Kletch stiffened with immediate suspicion and sniffed at the flies buzzing lazily after the vehicles’ cargo. The experiments of Clan Burrzik in breeding eavesdropping mosquitoes had faltered as a consequence of the clan’s incompetence, but one never knew. One never knew.

‘Maybe,’ he said, then chirred something conciliatory and gestured with his tail to the top of the hill.

There, encircled by a ring of luminous white pillars that in their cleanliness exuded a sense of power and prominence, was a marble archway carved with astrological constellations and runic notations. It stood bare to the stars as if waiting only on their call, and even inert as it was, the sight of it sent a frisson of imagined dread running to the tip of his tail. He could understand why the ancients here had built such a monument to the heavens.

He licked his gums nervously. ‘What does Bule want-think will happen tonight?’

‘I can tell you what I think will happen.’

Kletch caught the blightlord’s look and read the need there. Battle. Survival. Aims not identical to his, but with cunning words and enough will perhaps complementary ones. He glanced upwards again to mark the approach of high moon, his neck, accustomed to tunnels and caves, already sore from continually doing so. That was when he noticed what had been worrying at him since he left his tent.

The stars were moving.

IV

For a count of years numbering seven times seven times seven times seven, Copsys Bule had tended his garden. He did not know how many millions he had pulled out of the ground since that first day. Unlike some, he kept no lists, no ledgers, except that which existed in his mind. He knew only that his god saw it as good.

Turning his knife so that it was point down, he pushed the blade into the mushy chest of the body spread like soft grey cheese over dry bread across the trencher table in front of him. There was no resistance. It was like cutting into marrow jelly.

Flesh separated in a great swelling of maggots as Bule carved from collar to coccyx. A comingling of organs and body juices dribbled from the gash. The smell was pure ambrosia. His belly gurgled. Decay was a master gourmet. It loosened the fat, softened fibres and pulled meat from the bone. It brought out a depth and range of flavours that the impatient flesh-eaters of Khorne or the squeamish that burned their meat with fire could never experience.

He licked the juices from his knife blade, mouth distending to accommodate his entire fist. The panoply of tastes and odours gave him shivers and he closed his eyes.

The added spice of plague magic, the power of new life, tingled on the tip of his tongue and then diffused through him like a warmth. He withdrew his hand, sucked clean, and then hung the knife from one of the curing hooks that protruded from his armour.

‘All. Ready,’ snuffled Gurhg, the bray shaman thumping the ground with a skull-topped stave as he walked around the stirring realmgate. Standing behind the sagging trenchers in an octed around the realmgate, blightlords and champions watched solemnly. The shaman raised his bull snout and snorted, bone fetishes and feathers tinkling from blistered horns. He closed his eyes and emitted a low sigh that made the hanging flesh of his throat quiver. ‘Feel. Him. Stirring.’

Bule spread his arms with a smile. Torchlight flickered from sconces set in the columns. Brass tocsins played by hooded slaves with wire brushes hummed a sonorous chorus.

‘Feast, my children.’

To a great squishing of meat and crumbling of rot-softened bone, the gathered worthies of the Rotbringers tucked in with a hunger. Bule watched them all, hands across his swollen girth. There was Fistula, ever prideful, ambitious, filling his mouth with the same abandon as the others. Beside him the old bloat hound, Vitane, sucked jelly from his fingers and laughed at a joke. Their greatly honoured guest from Clan Rikkit was hunched behind a corner trencher, nibbling diplomatically at a bit of bone and throwing uneasy glances up at the sky. Copsys Bule basked in the paternal glow.

It was nearly time. The magic was rising, and Bule could feel the realmgate responding. For a moment he could feel the connections that ran through the Eightpoints to some other place, some other realm, where one far mightier than he tended a garden of his own. He looked up. The moon was approaching its zenith. The stars were in alignment, brighter and clearer than Bule had ever seen them before. One of them momentarily grew brighter.

Bule examined the moving constellation with wide open eyes.

Yes. Yes.

The star grew brighter, brighter, shining out the others around it and projecting a beam of starlight directly onto the realmgate. Bule grunted at the sharp glare and shielded his eyes with his arm. As the light dissipated, he looked immediately back to the gate.

A slender-bodied lizard wielding what looked like a dartpipe and a spear was now standing on the pedestal before the gate. It stood on its hind legs like a man, shorter even than Kletch Scabclaw and more wiry still. The black colouration of its scales mottled to white as Bule watched, matching itself almost seamlessly to the marble hues of the gate behind it. His eyes continuing to recover from the flash, Bule noticed a hundred or so more of the little creatures, spread out in the shadows around the gathered Rotbringers.

A strained silence fell over them all. Even Gurhg noticed and stopped chanting.

The lizard-man lowered its head, spines engorging to raise a vivid frill. It emitted a warbling chirrup then lifted its dartpipe to its beak.

For one so vast, Bule could move like poison through a panicking man’s veins when quickened to do so. That he had not been so roused in over a hundred years was nothing. He was Copsys Bule, the Black Thumb, and his knife was in his hand and wrist deep in the lizard’s still-shattering ribcage before the creature had drawn its breath.

The lizard’s nictitating eyelids fluttered in shock. Already its scaly skin was beginning to blister with the lesions of Nurgle’s blessed rot, daemonflies pupating inside the wound in its chest, but to Bule’s surprise what emerged from that wound was not blood but pure, cleansing starlight.

Scalded where it touched his arm, Bule tore his hand back, ripping a chunk of the lizard’s chest out with it. It shuddered and fell, vanishing in a cascade of glimmering motes before it hit the ground.

Clenching and unclenching his fist around his knife handle, feeling the burned, cleansed, tissue pulling, Bule grunted at the barely comparable sensation of a metal-tipped blow dart puncturing his neck. He felt the venom enter his blood and would have laughed at its impish ineffectuality had he not been building towards such a fury.

This was his moment, his time. The signs had been guiding him for centuries towards this night.

With a snarl that came from deep in his monstrous belly, he turned and flung his knife. It spun end over end, so fast it appeared as a solid discus, and punched a chameleon lizard from its feet in an explosion of light and bone.

Blow darts and javelins droned around him like hornets, snuffing out the torches with the wind of their flight, and falling on the Rotbringers. They bristled from unfeeling flesh, rattled off heavy armour and even downed a handful of the mighty warriors before they had a chance to react. The beastman, Gurhg, dropped to his haunches and backed into a trencher table with his head down. He found Kletch already under it.

Air rippled inside the arch of the realmgate.

It was subtle but there, the power awakening in direct response to the plague magic that Bule had nurtured in his garden for two thousand four hundred and one years. That power was still rising. Nothing would stop it now.

Copsys Bule looked again at his hand, free of blight for the first time since he knew not when.

‘Kill them all!’ he shrieked. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

V

Fistula was more disoriented than angry. He was drunk on meat and cankerberry wine, and on a power that he could not put name to but which filled him with a fever swirl of thoughts. The discordant moan of tocsins droned through his mind, though they were playing a cadence of battle now rather than of ceremony. The taste of meat was in his mouth, but it was fresh, torn not from the embrace of Copsys Bule’s soil but from the struggling bodies of the living.

He spat out a mouthful of blistering starlight. Or tried to. His throat burned, however hard he wretched and gagged.

Goaded into lucidity on a knife-edge of pain he struck down a lizard-man that was hissing in cold-blooded consternation at the chunk bitten out of its wrist. It disappeared in a drizzle of glimmer dust. Two more took advantage of the light-shock to blindside him. They came with spears held short.

Fistula caught the haft of the first spear thrust, then with his sword hand punched it in half. The lizard stumbled. Turning his body across and through it, he pushed it on its way to the ground, spitting his sword out to arm’s length to impale the second. Light exploded from its back around the tip of his sword. This time he was ready for the glare. Eyes already narrowed, he spun quickly away, stamping on the first lizard and grinding the light that bled from its fractured skull under his boot.

Something small and metallic spanked his pauldron guard. Darts tipped with starmetal zipped by. He saw a burly Rotbringer with a cloak of festering hide go down under a volley of them. Another took a freak hit, a dart straight down the ear, dropping the warrior like his weight in dead meat.

From somewhere, screaming. Melting flesh and starlight.

Every one of these warriors was a master of war, the mightiest of mortal champions uplifted to near daemonhood by the Lord of Decay. But they had forgotten what it felt like to be challenged. After millennia of pointless warfare they had forgotten what it truly was to fight.

Fistula clutched at his gut with his off-hand.

He felt ill, stricken, a great swelling pressing up from inside his chest. Pressure climbed up his throat, as though he were a snake trying to regurgitate a man that had been too large for him to swallow. A bilious taste flooded his mouth and, on unconscious reflex, he doubled over and vomited forth a torrent of foulness and corruption.

The lizard-men caught in the flow died instantly and in agony. The Rotbringers similarly touched were healed as if by the beaming intercession of Grandfather Nurgle himself. Maggots squirmed over open wounds. New and glorious infections puckered flesh that had been rankly cleansed by the lizards’ light.

Swallowing several times to assure himself that he too was whole again, he looked about for more enemies. There were none. All around him were in advanced stages of rot or already returned to whatever heavenly body had spewed them forth.

He panted, heart racing. Was that all?

‘Kill them all!’ he heard Copsys Bule shout, a shrill note of fury screwing his voice tight. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

Fistula shot around to look down the slope. His heart thumped hard for joy.

Light knifed frenziedly from the heavens. Flashes blossomed within the fug of flies, then glowed and spawned warriors. Many of them were bigger than the lizard-men he had just slaughtered. Some of them were a lot bigger. That first wave must have been some kind of advance party. Scouts. Assassins, perhaps. This was an army, coming down in conventional formations.

Accompanied by tocsins and bells and calls to glory, warriors of the Rotbringers mustered over the old corpse-hung curtain walls to oppose them. Bule commanded the souls of a hundred thousand, and although more than half were scattered wide over the Corpse Marshes and beyond, what remained was a mighty host indeed.

He bared sharpened teeth, a feral grin. Now for notice. Now for glory. This was going to be a fight.

‘You want war?’ Bule roared at the stars, and the very ground beneath seemed to tremble at his words.

Someone had passed the Lord of Plagues his helmet, and his voice boomed from inside the steel. In both hands he gripped the haft of the trident with which he tended his garden, veins standing out from bulging biceps as he continued to howl without words. God-gifted power oozed from him, turning the air around him syrupy brown. Sickly, cyclopean figures began to take shape there. They were horned, drenched in mucous and stooped over serrated swords that reeked of soulrot. Nurgle’s tallymen. Plaguebearers. From the strain in Bule’s bearing it was though he passed them from his own body. In a sense he did.

Fistula howled, maddened by battle-lust and plague.

Bule crashed the brass ferrule of his trident into the ground and screamed.

‘I will give you war!’

VI

Kletch Scabclaw ran in the middle of the Rotbringers’ counter-attack, where he felt naturally safest, ducking, weaving, leaping between pockets of solid ground. Not that he felt all that safe. Beastmen thundered downhill like rabid animals while Chaos warriors, each with their own maddened cry on their black lips, battled each other to be the first to meet the enemy and in their blundering almost dragged Kletch under more than once. Of course, the plague monks of Clan Rikkit could be just as zealous in battle, but only with the inspiring words of their priest in their ears and the fumes of his blessed censer in their snouts. As well as being unruly, the horde was not as sufficiently numerous as he would have liked. That wasn’t exactly helped by those who were continually peeling off to strike out at the lizard-man skirmishers firing down on them from their flanks.

The lizards scampered with near-impunity over walls and pox moats that, judging by the clear lack of defenders, the Rotbringers had considered impassable.

The Rotbringers had been fools.

Even by Kletch’s own standards, the lizards were light on their feet. Their bones seemed to be hollow, and with little else to them but light they skipped across floating corpses as cleanly as if they were solid ground. Only the moats themselves gave them pause – fecund nurseries of disease that hummed with deadly daemonflies – but they served only to funnel the rabid Rotbringers through their own defensive works where they were easy pickings for the lizard’s dartpipes.

Skinks.

Kletch shivered, some deep residual instinct to freeze and play dead almost killing him there amongst the running column of Chaos warriors, beastmen and mind-plagued fanatics.

He kept running, not watching, his pre-conscious replaying him impressions of jungles he had never seen, of stepped pyramids he had never visited, the terror of being prey in a land he had never called his. He had not seen or heard of these lizard-men, these seraphon, before now, but deep down he knew them, and it was a knowledge that a thousand generations of new lands and new enemies could not wipe from his racial memory.

He leapt from one patch of solid ground to another, then another, easily outpacing the beasts and once-men that ran around him. His heavy cloak slowed him only a little, flapping out as he made one long leap, landing on a leaning root of a column. Sinking around his staff onto all fours, he sniffed the air for the musk of his own.

Useless. The whole castle was thick with decay. With a snarl, he resorted to using his eyes.

Despite the lizards’ – the skinks’ – success in drawing the Rotbringers into more difficult terrain, the bulk of Bule’s horde were still charging for the good ground where the main outer curtain walls converged on the gatehouse citadel. He could hear the drums and horns, the shouts and the roar of beasts. Skaven eyesight grew dim over any kind of distance and for that, today, he was grateful.

‘Go around!’ he squeaked, gesticulating furiously from his pedestal to the band of Rotbringers that were wading into a stinking brown pond to get at the brightly scaled skinks on the other side. ‘Go get. Kill-kill. Go!’

To no surprise of his, the Rotbringer’s champion plunged on into deeper water. The warrior was an idiot. He’d earned the dart in the throat that dropped him face down into the mire a moment later.

The skinks were making a mockery of the heavily armoured blightkings, making them look sluggish. The daemons were another matter.

Every sore on Kletch’s body wept, every ache seizing and filling his wiry body with pain as ten of Nurgle’s tallymen strode onto the pox moat, walking weightlessly upon the scum that floated on the surface and through the stinging daemonflies. The cold-blooded star-creatures barely reacted. Kletch watched as a skink shaman rustled his feathered cloak, flying over the plaguebearers’ heads to land in a swirl of red and gold on a stump of wall behind them. There, he shook his staff, exhorting a hail of darts from his kin that fell amongst the closing daemons.

Kletch snickered. Everyone knew that daemons could not be killed that way. But the tallymen fell by the handful, if anything even more vulnerable to the seraphon’s envenomed darts than the mortals they marched beside.

With a snarl, Kletch reached inside his cloak for his weapon, eyes locked on the shaman.

‘See-smell how tough you are. Kletch not afraid of scrawny scaly-meat.’

The faintest trace of reptile musk warned him of the danger just before an ear-splitting shriek from above re-triggered every instinct he had to freeze, run, hide. Terradon. The giant reptile swooped overhead, banked gracefully under the effortless direction of its skink rider, then dropped a boulder from its hind-claws. It came down like a meteor. It was a meteor.

With a terrified squeal, Kletch leapt from his column, arms and legs churning as the spot he had been standing on was annihilated, the air at his back electrified by a starlight explosion. His tail peeled. His cloak caught fire. He landed in a roll, steaming from fur and clothes and from the accidental release of fear musk down his leg.

‘Scratch and sniff,’ he swore.

Patting himself down, he brushed a string of darts from the back of his cloak. He swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Dropping to all fours to make himself less of a target to any skinks looking to pick off survivors, he scurried from the path, zig-zagged through a verge of bloodgrass that stuck up from a hummock of dead men and horses like pins, and then dived into a wild patch of bruise-coloured bushes that clung to a ledge growing out from the second curtain wall. A few tail-lengths in he poked his head up through the scratching branches.

Below, clanking streams of Chaos warriors fed into a blurrily defined blob of screams and steel, a blood-and-lizard stink spilling out over half a league of the Hanging Garden’s heartlands. He didn’t need the eyes of a surface-dweller to see the blocks of bulky lizard warriors – saurus – grinding in under their golden icons. He could see well enough the giant reptiles that towered over all with swaying howdahs on their backs, even if he couldn’t quite count the horns on their bony head shields.

The seraphon were being held back for now. Nothing stood up to attrition like a warrior of Nurgle, and Copsys Bule commanded monsters of his own. Kletch sniffed the air and shivered at the sharp, unmistakeably vile scent.

The Lord of Plagues was down there. Good riddance.

‘Scabclaw-master!’

Kletch hissed angrily to mask his surprise, but this time held onto his musk. Scurf was scurrying through the flesh-drinking grasses, surrounded by a clawpack of stormvermin mercenaries in muddy black plate mail and wielding vicious-looking halberds. Several hundred raggedy plague monks followed, individuals breaking every so often to sniff the air, lash their tails in fear, and then hurry on.

‘Lightning men!’ Scurf squealed.

The word-bringer was in the same stained linen cassock he’d been wearing an hour ago, but had, apparently in great haste, donned a mail coif and was clutching a cracked tome that he held onto like a shield. He waved a rusty scimitar at the stars. Flies eddied and swarmed, a billion billion, but the stars behind no longer moved. An unnaturally intense constellation in the shape of a squatting toad glared down with eyes tinged red.

‘Fool-fool,’ Kletch snapped. ‘This is something other.’

‘Something new?’

Kletch shook his muzzle. ‘Something old.’

‘The claw-packs are ready to leave-go,’ added Scurf. He glanced down to the battle and gulped. ‘Very-very much-ready.’

Kletch bared his teeth, yellow eyes shining. This might all just work out after all. If Copsys Bule was defeated, as looked likely, then the clanlords could hardly blame him for failing to secure an alliance that the Lord of Plagues had never appeared to want at all. And if the weakened Lord of Plagues somehow managed to secure a pyrrhic victory? Perhaps then the generous backing of Clan Rikkit would appeal to him more.

‘This way,’ Kletch hissed.

Darting back into the bloodgrass, he wove through it, driving purposefully away from the main seraphon assault. Corpses at varying stages of rankness wobbled underpaw, tipping, sinking, at times disintegrating before he was able to leap clear and plunging him into foetid water. He spluttered a wordless prayer to the Pestilent Horned Rat that the tonic he had drunk would continue to prove effective. Keeping his head down and his nose clear, he scurried on. He was moving inside the circle of the inner walls to the far side of the fortress-temple. From there, with luck, he would be able to clamber down and escape without great difficulty. He upped his pace, becoming a blur of fur and movement.

There was nothing in all the realms quicker than a skaven with a battle to escape, but Kletch was not yet so anxious to flee as to allow himself to pull ahead of his brother monks.

Not for the first time – and he fervently hoped not for the last – sound skaven thinking saved his hide.

Crashing through a canopy of hanging dead, a lumbering reptile as massive as a barded warhorse snapped the lead clanrat up in its jaws, trampling three more before the saurus riding it could rein it back.

Its predatory head was huge and low-slung, supported by a monstrous neck and counter-weighted by a thick tail that tacked menacingly in advance of its movements as it turned. The skaven in its jaws was shrieking. A savage yank of neck and jaw and the beast bit the pitiful creature through, sending legs and torso flying over opposite shoulders. A rake of its vestigial forepaws claimed another.

Scurf issued a rallying squeal, backing into the stormvermin clawpack as the beast completed its turn and snorted in his nose. He whipped up his book of woes with a frightened squeak as the saurus’ mace came down.

The book was mouldering parchment bound in cracked leather.

The mace was meteoric stone.

Hurriedly withdrawing from the smashed word-bringer, the stormvermin lowered their halberds, throwing up a wall of hooked blades between them and the beast. The reptile – a cold one – snapped contemptuously, taking off one of the blades and eating it.

The saurus hefted its bloodied mace and with cold calm scanned the skaven scattered across the grass before it. Every scale armouring its grossly powerful hide was chipped and scarred. Its eyes were old. Beautiful works of golden plate clad vulnerable spots such as its throat and wrists. It shone like the light at the end of all the skaven’s tunnels.

Pumping its mace up into the air, it gave a roar that shook the air. With answering roars, a full cohort of glittering saurus warriors marched into the open.

Kletch squealed for order, for ranks, shoving his way to the back of them as he did so. These saurus were on foot, armed with spears and shields, but it scarcely mattered. Each one was twice the size of an armoured stormvermin and looked the match for any six.

With frenzied squeals, the plague monks charged. The saurus trampled them without appearing to notice and slammed into the line of stormvermin.

‘Hold. Fight! Kill-kill!’ shouted Kletch, growing ever shriller as the lizards’ massive line troops ground their way through his.

A rustle from the tall weeds to the right made his heart sink. There were more.

Hacking wildly at the bodies that came at him on nooses from all sides, Blightlord Fistula ran through, savaging a saurus from behind before the cold-blooded brute had even realised he was there. Coming under a swarm of flies, his putrid blightkings piled in behind him.

This was a more even fight. The blightkings were Bule’s elite and, Kletch knew, Fistula’s were the best. He was not at all surprised that the first blightlord had been amongst the reckless few to be dragged out into the swamp chasing skinks.

‘In! In!’ Kletch squeaked, urging his warriors on.

Scenting blood, the clawpacks and surviving plague monks pushed forward, wedging the saurus between two sets of enemies.

Observing the reverse in fortunes with an impersonal, calculating detachment, the saurus pointed its cold one towards Fistula and roared its challenge. The first blightlord ran at it with a yell, both weapons out at his side, armour dripping with bile.

The saurus struck first. The cadaver-thin blightlord parried the lizard’s mace with a blow that would have broken both of their arms had either been a lesser being, then rolled out of the lunge of the cold one’s jaws. His knife chewed down the side of the beast’s neck and spat out scales. He dodged back, turning a crunching side kick from the old saurus on his vambrace, then charged back in.

The saurus was wheeling his furious mount when Fistula stepped onto a plague monk’s mushed body and, using it a springboard, vaulted over the reach of the cold one’s flailing snap. Sliding down the beast’s spiny neck, he slammed bodily into the saurus and punched a knife towards its neck. It moved just fast enough to take it in the shoulder. If it felt either surprise or pain it didn’t show it. A shattering head butt snapped back Fistula’s head and sent him crashing over the cold one’s flank and down to the sucking ground. The cold one stomped on his breastplate, pushing him deeper under.

Then Kletch withered away the saurus’ head with a bolt of plague magic.

The cold one issued a defiant roar that shook the eardrums long after it vanished into the same cloud of light that reclaimed its master.

Shivering off the giddy tingle of the warpstone fumes from his pestilent censer, Kletch secreted the relic back into its pouch underneath his robes. He had taken the weapon from the clan vaults to deal with Copsys Bule, but it smelled like that was one precaution he didn’t need anymore.

‘He had me.’ Fistula’s laughter bubbled crazily, riding down from some wild adrenaline high.

‘We should be going-gone. Before more like it come.’

‘Going?’ Fistula sat up straight, face flushed red and cut in half by a razored smile. ‘I would fight more of your lightning men.’

‘They are not lightning men,’ Kletch snapped, suddenly lacking all patience for the stupidity of others. ‘The lightning men are... are much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Come with me,’ Kletch hissed, sidling closer, tail switching side to side. ‘Bule is old. Leave him to rot in his garden. Come kill-slay with Clan Rikkit.’

Fistula looked to his warriors. Kletch bared his fangs in a grin. He wouldn’t be returning to the clanlords with empty paws after all.

VII

Copsys Bule was untouchable.

Of the lizard-men that came close, only the very mightiest amongst them could make it within reach of his weapon before Nurgle’s Rot left them crippled and blind. And yet on these star-lizards came, fearing neither death nor disease.

His trident struck like an adder, piercing the throat of a heavily scarred lizard and exploding through the back of its neck. With one huge scaly hand it grappled with the haft, swinging a glowing starmetal axe with the other. Bule yanked back on his trident, pulling the impaled scar-veteran into a forward stumble and sending its axe stroke flailing harmlessly past his shoulder. An open fist to the gut punched the scar-veteran off his weapon’s tines, two feet through the air and onto its back. Bule closed the distance, trident spinning once, twice, overhead, and then smashing through the lizard-man’s chest. With a heave, he drew the trident up, the weapon arcing back overhead to its full extension to polearm the spear warrior that had been charging his supposed blindside.

With the rest of his horde struggling to hold their line, Copsys Bule took another forward step.

A powerful lizard in golden armour blocked him. The blinding might of Azyr screamed between the joins of its scales, and the roar of its challenge was like that of a furnace. Saliva stellar white hissed from its jaws as it brought up a primitive-looking two-handed blade.

Bule turned the hacking stroke with a loop of his trident, then took the haft between both hands and drove the ferrule into the sun-lizard’s groin. The warrior emitted a grunt and staggered back, unhurt, throwing a punch that caught the haft of Bule’s weapon. The struck trident popped out of Bule’s fingers and landed in the mud behind him. It was the deft, impish move of a master of unarmed combat.

With a celestial roar, the sun-lizard swept its weapon overhead.

Spinning and dropping, Bule planted his knee on the ferrule and slid his hand under the trident’s haft. Halfway along, a flex of the fingers bounced it up, reversed against the slope of his shoulder, just as the sun-warrior charged in to deliver the deathblow.

There was a heavy crunch, a sigh, the burn of starlight raining across his back.

Bule turned as he rose, swinging his weapon out like a scythe, letting fly, and sending the dying sun-warrior cannoning into the head of the hulking lizard giant that had just strode into view. Both went down in a mighty crash. The sun-lizard vanished in a flash of sunbeams. The giant, merely unconscious, did not rise again.

‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then span, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth, and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

‘He seeks a champion.’

The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.

‘Seek him, champion.’

Turning, gesturing without anything so prosaic as a pointed finger, the figure directed Bule’s gaze to the realmgate. The skin within it flexed. The stars above it wheeled. Even from afar Bule could see that the view within was no longer of the garden with which it had previously been twinned. Fury returned to him redoubled. Disbelief. It was not mere bad fortune that had brought the seraphon upon him with the aligning stars. They had come for his realmgate.

Somehow they had manipulated the Eightpoints to change its destination. How? The magic involved in enacting such a feat was godlike!

The apparition hissed in sudden distress. Its cloak shimmered with many colours, every eye tightening shut as though simultaneously blinded. And then in a searing moment of universal light, it was gone.

‘Grandfather!’ Bule cried, light like a fire in his eyes. ‘Aid me!’

Shading his eyes with one heavy arm, he peered into the oncoming host.

Floating on a cushion of force above the golden spears of its warriors came the source of the light. It was as if a star had been called down from the heavens and condensed into a brittle caul of bone-brown wrappings and dry flesh. Its presence alone was massive. From its palanquin, the mummified creature regarded the battle with the distant disinclination of an inhuman god. Instinctively, Bule understood that here came a being that had known power long before some daemons had even come to be. He felt himself drawn spiritually towards it, the golden funerary mask that picked out its amphibian features in jewels swelling to fill his mind as the universe subtly reordered around it.

It made no word or gesture, but somewhere in the cosmos something gave.

The heavens opened.

Bule howled impotent fury as the stars glimmered and fell, plucked from the sky, and smashed into his horde.

The first meteorite hit at an angle, obliterating a dozen Chaos warriors utterly and blowing a crater hundreds of feet wide. Then came the rest. The ground shook under the fury. The sky turned white, light and sound reaching an intensity where they sublimated into one, a single shrieking colour in Bule’s inner eye, and even the daemons burned in fire.

Bule struggled gasping onto hands and knees, tripping a warrior lizard running in behind him with a backward kick and riding it face-down into the filth until it stopped thrashing. He stood up, dazed senseless by thunder. Waves of power smashed out from the advancing palanquin. It was almost impossible to stand against it, but in a tremendous feat of will, he stood. He shook his head.

‘Aid me!’

Nothing. Nothing but the awesome presence of this starmaster.

Moving with difficulty, he turned and staggered back the way he had come. Never in his life had Copsys Bule run away, but Grandfather Nurgle did not know defeat.

With every waning, he would wax again.

VIII

First Blightlord Fistula stepped out of the realmgate and onto another world.

The air was syrupy, hot, sweetened by the sweat of fat citrus-scented leaves and by the bell-shaped blue flowers that he and his warriors crushed underfoot. He looked around in amazement, turning ponderously. He felt… weightier, as if the sky itself pushed him down under its palm. And the sun – forgetting for the moment that it should be night – was over large and buttercup yellow. Winged creatures rustled through the leaves above. And from somewhere, screams.

He pulled off his helmet, wiped his running nose, and drew deep.

‘New lands.’

Soon all that was green would be a verdant collage of yellows and browns and leaf-rust reds. It would be the cradle of a new land’s blight, the metastasis from which a new canker would swell. And all of it was his.

‘Over here,’ growled Vitane, crunching through the undergrowth in the vague direction of those screams.

Fistula acceded to the old blightking’s instincts for pain and followed. After a few minutes of unexpectedly heavy going through the dense foliage of this foreign land, the warriors were, to a man, blowing hard, their armour hanging loose on straps. The screams got nearer. More abject. Chesting aside a branch, too weary to bother his arm with the task, Fistula pushed ahead into a sun-drenched clearing.

Varicoloured lichens and mushrooms covered the split bark of the fallen log that dominated the clearing. The cries were coming from the other side of the log.

Shading his eyes from the visceral brightness of the sun, Fistula saw the bray shaman, Gurhg, who was easy enough to pick out with his totemic staff and cloak woven with bones, even within a knot of his followers. There were perhaps two-dozen, stomping about and smashing horns – re-establishing dominance hierarchies and staking claim to new territories. Gurhg stood hunched and swaying in the middle of it, nodding his goat head approvingly as six men and a woman bound to a line of hastily woven racks screamed. The wails of the seventh man were of a different order. A beastman with the face of a horse and a line of horrendously infected iron piercings through its top lip diligently flensed the human with a blunt knife.

Fistula smiled. There were people here. Good. It had been too long.

‘Blightlord.’ Arms spread, snout turned to bare the throat in that odd gesture of his, Kletch Scabclaw padded towards him through the forest. The skaven envoy fussed at the clasp of his cloak, but despite his obvious discomfort he did not seem inclined to take it off. At the treeline, he bobbed low and withdrew with a hiss, averting his eyes from the sun.

‘Where are your warriors?’ asked Fistula.

‘In woods. Less brave rats than I must cower where sky is less bright-strong.’

‘Good.’

Fistula looked across the clearing at the brawling beastmen, and the blightkings now spreading out through the lichens to crash down and rest. It was not much, but it would be a start, and more would flock to him soon enough.

‘I will have them seek-burrow for the way home at once,’ said Kletch, stamping his foot-paw anxiously.

‘Good…’

Fistula put his hands on his hips and turned his face full on to the sun. It was his. It was all his.

Something heavy and wet tramped up through the woods behind him. The wheezing breath on the back of his neck was thick with the stench of stagnant meat.

‘I began my quest with less. I can begin again.’

Fistula spun around.

Bule.

‘I see now,’ said Copsys Bule, unhelmed, smiling blackly. ‘I see what I have been missing.’

‘This is mine,’ Fistula snarled, baring his blades. Some withered instinct for self-preservation kept him from using them, some dim recognition that the gods too had their favourites. He backed into the clearing. Bule moved towards him, Fistula continuing to retreat until the fallen tree prevented him from going any further. He dropped into a fighting crouch. ‘I will not let you turn my conquest into another garden. You have forgotten how to do anything else!’

The Lord of Plagues spread his arms in forgiveness as he passed from the tree line and into the sunlight. His eyes squeezed shut against the sudden glare, but still Fistula did not think to attack. Mosses mottled and died where Bule trod. Insects dropped dead out of the air as he breathed it. Throughout the clearing beastmen, skaven and blightkings alike stopped what they were doing and abased themselves.

He came within sword’s reach, knife’s reach, arm’s reach. Fistula lowered his weapons. He felt lethargic. His skin was hot.

Dropping to one knee in front of him, Copsys Bule leaned in and embraced him.

Fistula made an attempt at fighting it, but he felt so weak. His breath drained up and down like fluid. He shivered with chills even as fever sweat poured down his skin. Jerking in his determination to fight, he struggled as the Lord of Plagues cradled him, lowering him to the ground. Fistula tried to stare hatred at him, but failed even in that. Delirium fogged his eyes and opened his mind to wisdom’s flood.

Sorcerers robed with eyes. An army of champions. Chaos united. A three-eyed king. Round and around.

‘I’ll. Fight you. Forever,’ he swore.

‘Grandfather Nurgle does not want us to submit,’ Bule smiled. ‘He wishes us to rage.’

The last thing Fistula saw before Nurgle’s Rot fully entered his mind was Bule turning towards Kletch Scabclaw, arms open in blessing and friendship.

IX

Copsys Bule broke up the earth with his trident. A tangle of roots knotted up the soil, making it tough, and before long he was breathing hard, a burn spreading through his shoulders. It felt good. The simple labour eased his mind and his muscles. The repetitive activity gave him the chance to think, and to order his thoughts.

He had much to think upon.

‘There,’ he said, giving the ground a vigorous final crumbing, then stabbing his trident to one side. He ran his arm across his lank-haired brow, then turned and nodded.

Vitane slid his toe under Kletch Scabclaw’s body and rolled the corpse into the rill that Bule had prepared for him. Flies crawled over the ratman’s lips. His eyes were the black of rot-pickled eggs and the smell had that same astringent piquancy.

‘So much life.’ However many skaven he buried, the truth of that still filled him with wonder. ‘My garden will thrive here. It is as I said to you, envoy, no other race gives so thoroughly of themselves to Grandfather Nurgle.’

The skaven did not answer and nor did Bule expect him to. He would live again, of course. That was Nurgle’s promise to all. The ratman’s flesh would nurture many millions of short and wondrous lives, his decomposition would bring bounty to the ground in which he lay, but never again would he talk, think, or interfere in the ambitions of a Lord of Plagues.

Pulling up his trident, Bule proceeded to bed the skaven in.

The humans would go here, and here, either side, where their decay would be accelerated by the skaven’s proximity. One of the other rat-men he’d dig a plot for over by the south-facing tree line where its remains could feed the poplars there. They were fast growers, and the rot would spread quickly. Already their leaves were beginning to wilt and brown at the edges. Birds hawked up a thin and sickly chorus of phlegm on the bowers.

He could see it now. He did not know how this was to end, he never had, but he knew how to begin.

‘Archaon.’

Fistula was fetched up against the log, shivering like a man just fished in full armour from an ice pail. He muttered non-sequiturs under his breath, tired, for the moment at least, of raging them at the forest. His eyes rolled, like bones cast by a feverish shaman, and his brush with Nurgle’s Rot had bequeathed him a circlet of rugose blisters that rimmed his bald head like a crown. Bule examined the stigmata. There was a sign there, he knew it, but of what?

‘He grows more lucid,’ observed Vitane.

‘Nurgle favours him greatly.’

‘A lord of flies,’ Fistula murmured, shaking. ‘A king with three eyes.’

A sign. Definitely.

Taking up his trident, Copsys Bule pushed it into the ground and began again.

He had much to think upon.

EYE OF THE STORM

Rob Sanders

The sorcerer opened his eyes. All of them.

The Many-Eyed Servant. Disciple of Tzeentch and subject of Archaon, who was the Everchosen of Chaos and the Ender of Worlds. Envisioner of sights unseen.

The Many-Eyed’s gaze reached far, for he saw as gods do. He was Archaon’s eyes. His gaze reached across the Mortal Realms. Searching. Searching for those who would become giants among men, warriors already pledged to ruin, who themselves searched for greater meaning and dark service. And there was no warlord of Chaos darker and greater than the Everchosen, for Archaon was Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse.

The Many-Eyed missed nothing. He saw through the living and dead, the inhuman and inanimate, and through the eyes of daemons, glinting in shadow. Coins fell from the lids of corpses, laid out on funeral pyres. Statues blinked the dust from their stony orbs. The eyes of cutthroats, kings and all wretched existence in between were spyglasses of the soul, through which the great sorcerer observed. Even the mind’s eye was the sorcerer’s to see. The play of pictures in the blackness behind the face. Memories churned up from the past. Secrets kept and fantasies imagined.

The daemon sorcerer looked for warriors worthy of his master’s blade and plate, seeking out the darkest potential amongst a sea of butchers, corrupters, deviants and witchbreeds. True paragons of Chaos, like Archaon himself. Knights of Ruin, ready for the Everchosen’s invitation in symbol, sign or vision, so that they might pass his test and join his baleful ranks – the living, armoured embodiment of Archaon’s wrath, visited upon the Mortal Realms.

The Many-Eyed blinked his way across the worlds of men. He saw as the beasts did, and as the denizens who would act like beasts. In the forgotten reaches of the realm of Ghur, on a storm-lashed wasteland that savage nomads and wind-worshippers knew only as the Blasted Plain, the sorcerer found who he was looking for.

Orphaeo Zuvius. Blessed of the Great Changer. The one they call the Prince of Embers.

The Many-Eyed looked on Orphaeo through the eyes of the Tzeentchians that he led, the twisted wretches of his warband. In the cerulean plate and skirts of his half-robe, Orphaeo Zuvius pressed his slender body against the storm. The skies were bleeding and the winds streamed with blood, while grit plucked at his unholy vestments.

Zuvius steadied himself with the length of a wicked glaive. He walked with the polearm like a sorcerer’s staff. It was a daemon-forged weapon, a shaft of sculpted metal crowned by a blade fashioned in the shape of Tzeentch’s willowy symbol. It was called A’ cuitas, and it was a gift from Zuvius’ patron. The Many-Eyed came to know this as he opened the ensorcelled weapon’s eyes – for it had three, like his master, the Three-Eyed King – one that opened in the fat counterweight of the glaive’s pommel and two set in either surface of the blade. The Many-Eyed took this as a good omen. From A’ cuitas, the sorcerer commanded a better look of the champion’s gruesome features.

Helmless, his face was a web of melted skin stretched across scorched flesh. The skin strands squirmed continuously across scalded features that might once have been handsome – features now contorted with self-satisfied determination and dark humour. Threadbare tresses of blue hair streamed from his head. Zuvius licked his smeared lips with a silver tongue: another of the Great Changer’s gifts.

The glaive’s blade blinked in the bloodstreaming storm. Now the sorcerer saw through the eyes of the Prince of Embers himself. Zuvius looked up at Mallofax, who sat atop the perch created by the blade’s billhook. The creature was a familiar – a reptilian bird of cerulean plumage. The damned thing spoke to Zuvius in an ear-bleeding squawk that only the champion seemed to understand. The Prince of Embers nodded and looked back at his warband, trailing through the maelstrom of blood and wind-borne grit.

Trudging across the Blasted Plain in his wake were Sir Abriel and the remains of the king’s household guard. Formerly charged with the protection of the royal family – for the Prince of Embers was royal indeed – the knights were now shadows of their former selves. Gone was the lustre of their plate and the mirror-finish of their weaponry. The Great Changer had twisted them as he had done the prince. They were but slaves to darkness, gangling horrors. The knights’ besmirched plate had fused to their bodies and stretched with their unnatural step and reach. Covered in the glowing sigils of ruinous sorcery, they were now the Hexenguard of Orphaeo Zuvius.

Behind the knights, in their shredded cloaks, were the Unseeing – the Tzeentchian sorcerers who completed Zuvius’ warband. Blind wretches, the Great Changer had taken their sight and cursed them with terrible, warped visions of the world about them. Striking out with their powers, the Unseeing turned their enemies into the frightful realisation of their horrific imaginings. With crooked hands on shoulders, the Unseeing formed a line of the blind following the blind – and all following the crunch of their master’s footsteps.

Zuvius closed his eyes against the bloodstorm. Behind them and in the blackness of his lids, the Many-Eyed found light and the roar of flame. The prince’s past was never far from his thoughts – an appalling vision of death and destruction that formed a dark stillness within the madman. It was the eye of a storm, a vision from an age long ago, before Zuvius and his warband were the twisted things they had become. A memory that would not be forgotten, floating to the surface of Zuvius’ mind to sicken and be enjoyed.

Night. The walled city of Stormhaven, ablaze. The tower tops writhed in unnatural blue flame. The people screamed for their lives and then their deaths. The king was dead. Long live the king! The household guard stumbled from the north gate, the only one that was open. The others had been locked shut from the outside. People died like animals behind them, barging and clawing – swallowed by the blue flame. Sir Abriel and his men hacked and coughed, the power of change already finding its way inside them.

With them was Orphaeo – youngest son of the king and the only surviving member of House Zuvius. Surviving – but only just. He too had received the touch of change. Licked by the furious flames, Orphaeo was horribly burned. His face. His head. His hands. He did not cry out in pain. He was calm. The red raw muscles of his face remained uncontorted. He gave the order. Sir Abriel and his soot-smeared knights could not believe what they were hearing.

‘Seal the gate,’ the prince told them, stumbling away from Stormhaven’s mighty walls. There was disbelief, disagreement, dissention even. But Orphaeo Zuvius was now the king and his will was absolute. Burying their doubts, the knights sealed the towering north gate, trapping the screaming innocents inside. They hoped that their liege had a good reason for acting so.

He did.

Ascending the nearby foothills, Zuvius turned to watch his city burn. A city loyal to the God-King, whose walls had stood against storm and ruinous savagery for generations. The prince felt the heat of the fire on his blistering face. He fancied this to be the satisfaction of the Great Changer, bathing him in the warmth of approval. It was a feeling that his face would not allow him to forget.

Mallofax circled the roaring, spitting firestorm of the burning city, the sapphire flames reaching for the heavens. He swooped in to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. Abriel hated the prince’s pet but the dread spectacle of Stormhaven ablaze meant that he barely noticed the scaly, feathered thing. If he had known that it had been Mallofax that was responsible for Stormhaven’s fall, he would have cut the bird out of the air with a swing of his longsword. For it was Mallofax, flying over the walls and arriving one day on the prince’s balcony, that had spoken of such horror to Orphaeo Zuvius, that had taught the prince the secrets of sorcery, the arts of manipulation and the power of change. That, as Tzeentch’s emissary, had empowered Zuvius to turn brother against brother, son against father and the people against their king, all culminating in riot and treachery, atrocity and flame.

Sir Abriel and the household guard gathered about their young king. He was not their king, however. He was no one’s king. He was forever the Prince of Embers – heir to the glowing ashes of a razed kingdom.

Zuvius watched the palace towers fall. He watched his own topple, falling like a mighty felled tree through the flames. Its tower top smashed into the city walls before the prince, knocking brick and stone from the defences. Zuvius stood transfixed. The bright blue fires within the city lit up a symbol rent into the wall.

‘What is that?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. Mallofax twitched his head and turned a glassy eye towards the damaged wall. The bird squawked. Through the soul-curdling sounds Zuvius heard the familiar’s dark words.

‘’Tis the mark of the Everchosen,’ Mallofax told him. ‘An invitation.’

‘To what?’

‘The Exalted Grand Marshal calls,’ the bird squawked. ‘The Architect made you but Archaon will break you. You are to be forged anew, Zuvius, like I taught you. Listen to the screams. Look into the fire. Tell me what you see.’

Zuvius watched as the blue inferno flared up through the damaged wall, reaching for the battlements. In the lick and flicker of azure brilliance, the Prince of Embers saw a far off place take form.

‘I see a storm within a storm,’ he said to Mallofax. He squinted at the blaze.

‘And?’

‘Rising from it is a landform, sculpted by the storm,’ Zuvius said. ‘A mesa, shaped like a great anvil, with a path leading up to it.’

‘The Beaten Path,’ Mallofax told him. ‘Your mettle is to be tested there, for the Everchosen selects only the best warriors of Chaos for his inner circle of death and dread.’

Zuvius nodded to himself. ‘You know this place?’

‘Of course,’ the bird said. ‘The storms you speak of rage across a distant wilderness called the Blasted Plain.’

The Prince of Embers jerked his shoulder, prompting the familiar to once again take flight.

‘Then lead on,’ Zuvius said. ‘It would not be wise to keep the Everchosen of Chaos waiting.’

The Blasted Plain was living up to its name. Orphaeo Zuvius put one foot in front of another, forcing his way on through the streaming haze of crimson. There was nothing there but a maelstrom of everlasting gales and the blood of those claimed by the storm. The prince’s hair and robe skirts twisted and tangled in the wind, while Mallofax’s plumage was a constant ruffle. More miserable still was the twisted thing that had been Sir Abriel, and what remained of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing who followed.

They had reason to feel misery. They had been wandering through the bloodstorm for weeks. Their cloaks and robes were in tatters and their plate scratched and dented. With only the beady eye of the bird Mallofax to guide them and the nods of his beak to indicate their heading, Zuvius and his warband moved from squall to squall. The storms that tormented the Blasted Plain were filled with whirls and eddies. In places, the Tzeentchians were drenched in fat droplets of gore that rained down from a crimson sky, while in others the gales and tempests turned the blood to a diluted smear. Exposure was not the only danger in the perpetual storm. Whirlwinds snatched up shrieking sorcerers of the Unseeing, lifting them into oblivion, while on the rocky expanse, sudden gusts lifted grit and pebble from the ground, blasting them through the Hexenguard like grapeshot from a cannon.

The Prince of Embers left a trail of corpses in his wake. What had been an army of Chaos knights and witchbreeds was now a warband numbering fewer than forty dark souls – still a potent force, but the trials of time, the perversities of the weather and enemy encounters had taken their toll.

He did not regret his decision to brave the Blasted Plain in search of the Beaten Path. He had been chosen. Those knights and sorcerers who had fallen had been unworthy of the Everchosen, and unworthy of him. Zuvius was to be tested. What kind of prospect would he be if he couldn’t even reach the site that had been chosen for his trial? Zuvius pushed on through the bloodstorm. He could not allow it to defeat him.

Still, the depleted ranks of Zuvius’ grand warband did not bode well for the challenges he knew to be ahead. He would have to supplement his numbers with lost wretches looking for direction and dark purpose. Fools were never in shortage. The Prince of Embers would give them purpose and they would give their lives in service of his destiny.

The Chaos champion heard Sir Abriel call something unintelligible through the storm. It was all the twisted knight was capable of now, beyond the devastating reach of his bladework. Peering at him through the bloody curtain of rain, Zuvius saw that Sir Abriel was pointing off to their right with the freakishly long fingers of his warped gauntlet. Following the direction the finger indicated, Zuvius squinted at the outline of tents in the distance – some kind of encampment in the wilderness.

‘Food. Water. Shelter?’ Zuvius said, shaking Mallofax on the glaive.

‘Death?’ the bird returned. Zuvius looked around. After weeks out on the Blasted Plain he honestly thought his warband wouldn’t care.

‘We’re more than a match for a few nomads,’ the Prince of Embers hissed, almost insulted at the insinuation of their vulnerability. Recent encounters and the toll of the storm had depleted his numbers but the Hexenguard and the Unseeing were more than capable of bringing horror and death to a tribe of wind-worshipping savages. Zuvius lurched through the storm in the direction of the camp.

‘Onwards,’ he called. With warped appreciation, the knights and sorcerers of the warband followed their master.

Zuvius pulled back the thick flaps of stitched flesh. Inside, the huge tent was a structure of giant bones. It was like stepping inside a giant ribcage. Torches flickered smokily. Zuvius immediately got the impression of many bodies – no doubt the tribesmen and savages he had been warned about. As Mallofax had predicted, the place stank of old blood and death.

The Prince of Embers stepped forward with confidence, allowing the Hexenguard and his sorcerers in. Regardless of the horrors they could inflict, the Unseeing did not make for an intimidating sight. The twisted knights, however, in their ghastly plate and glowing sigils, would be more than enough to startle the tribesmen. Then they would come to know that warriors of the Ruinous Powers were among them and that the sight of these doom-laden forms would be their last.

As Zuvius blinked blood from his eyes and adjusted to the gloom, he came to realise that he was not standing among scrawny nomads. Instead of wind-worshippers, the tent was filled wall to wall with muscle. Red flesh and scar-markings confirmed Zuvius’ fears. They were not the first warband to take shelter in the tribesmen’s tents. Barbaric servants of the Blood God had beaten them to it. Looking down, the Prince of Embers saw that he was standing in the splattered remains of its previous occupants.

Casting a gaze across the tent, Zuvius made a quiet estimate of his rivals’ strength. It was a veritable warband, all armed to the teeth, with perhaps more in the other tents. Zuvius had nothing approaching their number. A ripple of brute surprise passed through the barbarians, followed instantly by snarls and the wrinkle of lips. Muscles twitched to tautness and weapons scraped as they were snatched from the tent floor. Zuvius saw bloodreavers of the Goresworn, obvious from their decorative scarring. Other savages he recognised from their brazen cuisses and greaves, rattling beneath the broad red musculature of their chests. They were the wrathmongers of Khorne, blessed with the unyielding fury of their Ruinous god.

A stitch-faced chieftain and a wrathmonger closed on the Tzeentchians. The chieftain drew wicked blades from a selection of leather sheathes, holding them like talons in his gore-stained hands. The master of the wrathmongers, wearing the fanged skull of some daemon creature as a helmet, dragged the blood-rusted chain of a flail behind him, ready to yank it forward and hurl the hammer head attached to the length.

‘Fight or flee?’ Mallofax shrieked, flapping his wings and hovering above Zuvius and his warband. When the champion of Tzeentch didn’t answer, the familiar repeated, ‘Fight or flee?’

‘Neither,’ the Prince of Embers said. The Tzeentchian didn’t move. He made the effort not to straighten and his glaive remained upright in his hand like a walking staff. He didn’t want to provoke the savage disciples of Khorne any more than he already had by simply being there. At the same time, he wanted to present the calm front of a champion too powerful to be threatened by warriors of the Blood God, even in such number.

‘Mine,’ the chieftain hissed.

‘The scraps, perhaps,’ the wrathmonger rumbled.

Sorcerous sigils burned bright on the plate of the Hexenguard as the ghastly knights formed up in front of their prince with their notched longswords and battered shields.

‘Stand down,’ Zuvius said, his tone perverse and playful. Sir Abriel was unsure. He issued some kind of question from the hole in his face that he used as a mouth. The chieftain and the wrathmonger advanced, their men drawn up behind them.

Zuvius’ eyes moved beyond the furious warband. Rising from a throne of stained skulls – the nomads’, the prince presumed – was a champion larger still. A deathbringer, an exalted champion of the Blood God. Though he had been a man once, Khorne had blessed his chosen with hulking brawn. The warband leader was a veritable wall of muscle. The teeth of great beasts jangled on sinew necklaces while a pair of bull’s horns erupted from his malformed skull. His hands were encased in bone weapons – pronged gougers that extended like a pair of claws. On his back, he carried a battle-axe, the blade of which was as broad as the champion himself.

‘Hold,’ the monstrous champion said. His voice was deep, like some bottomless trench reaching down into the bowels of the realm. His dogs of war stopped in their tracks, as if they had been yanked back on a running chain. The Goresworn came to a halt at the champion’s command. They parted to let the deathbringer through.

Zuvius could see the champion’s mind at work – which was something to be said of such savages. A hardening of the eyes. A tautness in the lips. Zuvius reasoned that the deathbringer had probably fought just about everything that lived and breathed on these plains. He had faced the sorcerous servants of the Great Changer before. Unlike his lieutenants, he was cautious. Wisely so, Zuvius agreed.

‘What are you doing here on the Blasted Plain?’ the warrior called across the tent. ‘Speak fast and true or the bloodreavers here will smash your bones for the marrow inside. The wrathmongers will simply kill you out of spite. At my order, your blood will join that of the storm, in honour of mighty Khorne.’

Zuvius felt the eyes of all on him. The barbarians were aching for the violence to come.

‘That would be ill advised,’ the prince told him, playing for time. Zuvius’ mind whirled. The Khornate savages within the tent would swamp them. Others, responding instinctively to the sounds of battle, would come up behind the Tzeentchian warband. It would be a slaughter, standing on the blood and bones of a previous one. Zuvius tasted the air with his silver tongue. Swords and sorcery couldn’t take him where he needed to go. He would have to rely on one of his other god-given talents. ‘For then you would not hear what I have to say.’

‘And why would the great Skargan Fell-of-Heart need to hear the lies of filth witchbreed like you?’ the Goresworn chieftain hissed, looking back at his master.

‘Because even if only half of what I tell him comes to pass,’ Zuvius said, ‘then his ascension will be assured.’

‘What ascension?’ Skargan rumbled.

‘The Everchosen calls for you, mighty one,’ the Prince of Embers lied.

‘Almighty Archaon?’

‘Aye, my lord,’ Zuvius said. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse asks only for the greatest warriors of the age, and he has called for you.’

‘I’ll cut that lying tongue out of your mouth, Tzeentchian,’ the chieftain promised.

‘Kraal, son of Zhufgor, let the sorcerer speak,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart said. The bloodreavers seethed about their chieftain while the wrathmongers foamed at their snaggle-toothed mouths. ‘How came you by this knowledge?’

‘A vision, my lord,’ Zuvius said.

‘Visions and enchantments,’ Kraal, son of Zhufgor, spat in disgust.

The deathbringer’s mouth curled into a snarl. He nodded his great horned head. A member of the Goresworn stepped up behind his chieftain, slipping his reaver blade beneath Kraal’s chin. In a moment it was over. Zuvius felt the speckle of warm blood across the sensitive flesh of his face. The chieftain dropped and his killer stepped forward.

‘Voark, son of Kraal,’ the deathbringer said, ‘the Goresworn is yours.’

Voark nodded his murderous appreciation.

‘Sorcerer: speak.’

‘I saw a vision in the flames of a burning city, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘Skargan Fell-of-Heart, wearing the sigil of the Everchosen. The Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse is gathering his troops, deathbringer. Khorne knows you belong among them.’

Skargan narrowed the bloody orbs of his eyes at Zuvius.

‘Your sorceries will not work on me,’ he told the prince, tapping the talon-tip of a gouger against his bronze collar. ‘The Blood God will not allow it.’

Zuvius nodded. He had seen such artefacts on Khornate champions before – the Blood God was eager to protect his butchers from the manipulations of magic. But the Tzeentchian did not need such powers.

‘Come between the Ender of Worlds and his chosen?’ Zuvius said. ‘Not me, deathbringer. Not for all the dark glory in the realms. I know my place – in this, as in all things. I am merely the messenger.’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart looked to Voark, son of Kraal.

‘Tell me more of your vision, sorcerer,’ the deathbringer commanded.

‘You must walk the Beaten Path, exalted one,’ Zuvius said, ‘to a place of testing – so that the Everchosen may judge if he chose wisely.’

‘A battle?’ Skargan said with a gory glint in his eye.

‘I suspect, my lord.’

‘You know this path?’

‘I do,’ the Prince of Embers said. ‘And I have seen you walk it to glory.’

‘What do you get out of this, sorcerous mongrel?’ the deathbringer spat. Zuvius thought on the question.

‘Nothing, mighty champion,’ the prince told him. ‘But I cannot deny destiny or the will of the Everchosen.’

Skargan scowled. Zuvius could see that the monstrous warrior didn’t believe him. The prince watched as a flicker of doubt crossed the warlord’s features. To disbelieve a servant of Tzeentch was one thing – common sense even – but to defy the will of the Everchosen of Chaos was something else entirely.

‘Then you shall guide me along this path,’ Skargan said. He turned to address the warriors in the tent. ‘And if I seem displeased with this sorcerer and his wretches or you see them doing something that you know would displease me, then in Khorne’s name – kill them.’

‘As fair as you are wise, my lord,’ Zuvius told Skargan Fell-of-Heart.

Orphaeo Zuvius forged on through the storm of blood. His warband trudged laboriously through a mire of rising gore, while Mallofax flapped his wings and shivered his feathers, shaking crimson droplets from his plumage. The Prince of Embers was now surrounded by Khornate killers intent on his blood. Looking back along the ranks of the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing, Zuvius could see the horde of Skargan Fell-of-Heart following them through the maelstrom. Two wrathmongers strode either side of him like a brute escort and Voark, son of Kraal, walked at the head of the bloodreavers, who swarmed about their beloved deathbringer, shielding Skargan as best they could from the storm with their number.

When Zuvius had seen the true size of the deathbringer’s horde he knew that he had made the right decision in not attacking the Fell-of-Heart and his butchers. Skargan’s warband numbered hundreds of battle-hardened warriors. To destroy them would have cost the prince dearly, perhaps even his life. Skargan and his horde had come to the Blasted Plain to honour their god, baptised in a bloodstorm they thought to be a manifestation of Khorne. They did not know that the storm existed only to scour the plain and claim the unwary. Mallofax had told his prince that the Blasted Plain was a cursed place. Nomads, wind-worshippers and travellers found eventual death in the perpetual tempest, their blood becoming one with the rains.

And the rain came down harder than ever, strumming fat droplets against Zuvius’ plate. As they moved across the Blasted Plain, the Chaos champions left corpses in their wake. Moving from maelstrom to maelstrom and subject to the perversities of the storm, both Skargan and his sorcerer guide had lost members of their warbands. Twisters suddenly made landfall, stirring up the shallows and snatching bloodreavers up into the sky. One of the hulking wrathmongers was claimed by a sinkhole in the flooding mire. The temperature would change rapidly: in one moment red icicles hung from the plate of the Hexenguard, then an hour later Zuvius would lose a sorcerer to a balmy haze of swirling red steam.

‘What is it?’ Zuvius asked as Mallofax began to squawk and flap his wings furiously.

‘This storm has teeth,’ the bird said cryptically. Zuvius gave the familiar a quizzical look before the patter of bone against his plate told him all he needed to know. As the rising gale whistled through his skirts and the ragged ribbons of the Hexenguard’s cloaks, it carried with it teeth, fangs and splinters of bone. Zuvius felt a shard cut across his cheek. Another tore through his skirts and plucked at the flesh of his leg. As the tempest intensified about them, so did the hail. It shredded through one of the wrathmongers and turned a bloodreaver into a bloody smear.

‘The hollow!’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart bawled through the storm. The horde had just passed a flooded hollow and the deathbringer directed his savages down into it.

‘Do we follow them?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius looked about as the Hexenguard closed in with their shields, giving their sorcerous lord shelter. It was their best chance to escape Skargan’s warriors. Conversely, the storm might still eat them alive and the Khornate warband was not without its uses.

‘Do we have a choice?’ Zuvius said, marching towards the hollow, teeth and bone rattling against the metal of the knights’ shields.

Slipping and sliding down into shallows, Zuvius looked up at the wind streaming blood and bone above. The hollow offered shelter but was flooded with a crimson murk that sloshed around their boots. Zuvius wondered how long the squall of razored teeth and bone shards would last.

‘How much further?’ Skargan demanded, pulling fangs from his red flesh. Zuvius didn’t know.

‘Not far,’ the prince said.

‘What does that even mean?’ Voark, son of Kraal spat. He could not hold back his ire. Looking around for his own son, Skraal, the bloodreaver continued, content that there was not a blade heading for his back. ‘This sorcerer-filth is trying to get us killed out here. Leading us from trap to trap.’ One of the wrathmongers grunted agreement from nearby. Zuvius realised that he had to stop this before Voark ignited the Blood God’s hatred of sorcerers in Skargan and his horde.

‘Apologies, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. The deathbringer’s monstrous features creased with disgust. He despised any man who would beg for his life rather than fight for it. Voark allowed cruel glee to creep across his lips.

‘I can hold my tongue no longer,’ Zuvius spoke quickly. ‘My vision revealed knowledge that I was too fearful to grant you.’

‘What knowledge?’ the Fell-of-Heart snapped. He eyes narrowed in fury. ‘You would deny me all that you know?’

‘Having met your chieftains, I could not believe it,’ Zuvius said. ‘No champion commands warriors as fervent and loyal.’

‘Believe what?’ the deathbringer fumed.

‘That the bloodreavers and the wrathmongers would betray one another,’ the prince told him, with as much grave sincerity as the Tzeentchian could muster through his sly lips. ‘And through each other – you.’

Skargan looked incredulously at Zuvius, at the wrathmongers and at Voark, as if he did not know which of them to kill first. Voark made the decision for him.

‘Turncoat wretch! I knew you were planning something,’ he shrieked, drawing his reaver blade and pointing it at the nearest wrathmonger. At Voark’s accusation, the bloodreavers started to advance, only to be caught in the terrible arc of the wrathmonger’s hammer-flail. Splatting through bloodreavers, the warrior roared in confusion, heaving his devastating weapons about him on their wrist-clasped chains. Others erupted around him, cutting down swathes of warriors with ugly swings of their flails. Agile bloodreavers leapt and ducked out of the weapons’ devastating paths, those too slow becoming a splatter of flesh chunks and detached limbs. Running back at the crimson hulks, the bloodreavers swarmed the wrathmongers, climbing up onto their backs and globed shoulders, knifing and stabbing with their short, cruel blades.

For a brief time there was mayhem. Wrathmongers stamped fountains of crimson rainwater about them as they charged throngs of rabid bloodreavers. The warriors danced out of their path and slashed at them with their razor-sharp blades. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cut through the havoc. Grabbing his colossal battle-axe from his back, the deathbringer strode through the shallows and into the murderous clash. Smashing one of the wrathmongers down with the flat of the monstrous blade, Skargan shattered his skull helm and knocked him unconscious.

Turning savagely, he stamped out with his boot, landing a kick on the chest of Voark, son of Kraal. The warrior flew through the air with a crunch before splashing into the shallows.

‘This is good?’ Mallofax squawked from Zuvius’ glaive.

‘I’m not sure,’ the Prince of Embers said. The ruthless violence and bloodshed about him was distracting. Being butchered by Skargan’s savages was not part of Zuvius’ plan, but having them butcher each other was not desirable either. He had acted to distract them from killing him, but he needed to harness their strength for the trials ahead. He had a feeling that he could not achieve his fell goals without their strength. Standing in the flooded hollow, Zuvius’ sorcerous instincts twitched.

‘Wait a minute,’ he told the feathered familiar.

Zuvius saw a cloud forming through the bloody shallows of the hollow. The waters began to thicken to a muddy paste about the boots of the Chaos warriors, slurping and bubbling. Arms of pink brawn and sinew broke the surface of the unnatural mire, clutching with daemonic claws.

Zuvius watched as infernal horrors spawned from the water about them – a plague of Tzeentchian monstrosities drawn to the deliciousness of treachery and dissention in the ranks of the horde.

The hollow filled with the roars and screams of the Blood God’s servants. Grabbed about the boots and ankles by the frightful appendages, they were dragged down into the sludge. Jaws formed in the fleshy surface of the shallows, brimming with row after row of jagged fangs, and Goresworn killers were swallowed whole. A wrathmonger had his leg chewed off, sending him into a sludge-punching fury, but his fist became entangled in the sinewy stickiness of daemon flesh.

Faced with a common enemy, the butchers forgot their former enmity and visited their rage upon the spawning pool in which they stood. Zuvius smiled to himself. The Great Changer, in all his perversity, had sent a blessing. The Khornate horde was once more unified in the face of a common enemy. They had swiftly forgotten their desire to end the prince. The daemon attack, meanwhile, was thinning out the dissenting forces. The appearance of the horrors not only gave Zuvius a chance to fight at the Khornate savages’ side, but it would make them easier to manipulate than ever.

The sludge seemed like a single monster but from it individual creatures of nightmare rose, stretching themselves free. Wrathmongers splattered the daemons within the monstrous arcs of their hammer-flails, while the bloodreavers struck grasping limbs from the creatures with their blades only to find two more erupt from gushing, pink stumps in their place.

The horrors seemed never-ending, scrambling free of their spawning pool like a plague of jubilant insanity. Their grotesque bodies were all fang-filled maw and beady eyes that frantically set upon new victims to maul. Clawed, muscular legs helped them to bound and latch onto Skargan’s berserkers, while an eruption of supernaturally strong arms tore armour, limbs, helms and heads from the warrior-victims.

‘This cannot be,’ Mallofax shrieked above the carnage. ‘These are the lesser playthings of our master.’

‘The daemon horrors of Tzeentch,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said, spinning the shaft of his glaive about him in willowy gauntlets. The prince’s warband were not immune to the creatures’ attentions. Infernal monstrosities dragged members of the Hexenguard down into the fleshy embrace of the pool to crack their plate in writhing knots of daemonic muscle.

The sorcerers of the Unseeing, meanwhile, clutched to one another in their blindness. Judiciously deployed, they were among the most powerful wretches at the prince’s disposal. Their sorcerous powers could transform even the most deadly opponents into statuesque spawn of ruptured flesh and twisted bone, visiting the form of their dread visions upon the enemies about them. Against these formless monstrosities, their powers were all but useless. The daemonic horrors already took the form of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imaginings.

‘The Great Changer must be displeased,’ Mallofax flapped. ‘The Exalted Grand Marshal’s invitation has angered him.’

‘No,’ Zuvius said, gritting his perfect teeth as he lopped off the clawed fingers of a reaching daemon with a graceful swing of A’ cuitas. ‘It is an honour. The joint damnation of this hollow strengthens our association with the Blood God’s barbarians. Battle is like ale shared across a table to these brutes.’

As a member of the Hexenguard was pulled apart by two multi-limbed horrors, Sir Abriel splashed up through the slime to smash aside another monstrosity with his shield. Holding his glaive by the base of the shaft, Zuvius wheeled around, allowing the heavy blade of the weapon to lop limbs from the attacking creatures.

‘Why do the Great Changer’s daemons try to destroy us, then?’ the bird squawked, unconvinced.

Zuvius turned A’ cuitas around in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the glaive at the horrors emerging from the pool.

‘For perversity’s sake,’ the prince said, with a grin of insanity. ‘Why else?’

His daemon-forged weapon’s searing blue eye opened. Lightning cracked from the glaive, causing the air to burn and the heart to jump. As the jagged bolt struck the nearest daemon, the thing seemed to rupture, exploding in a shower of pink slop. Aiming the sorcerous weapon across a line of advancing creatures, Zuvius had the lightning jump from monster to monster, turning one after another into flinch-inducing splatters of flesh.

Stomping through the curtain of gore, Skargan Fell-of-Heart was a destructive machine. His great axe was everywhere, chopping daemons asunder, lopping off limbs and cleaving the gibbering creatures in half. The clawing, strangling, savaging things climbed across his muscular frame only to be gouged free by the bone blades the deathbringer wore on each meaty fist. Flinging them off and down at the floor, Skargan sent them shrieking back to the fleshpool before stamping down on them with his boots.

‘You!’ the deathbringer roared at Zuvius. ‘This is your doing.’

The Prince of Embers was tiring of the belligerent champion and his savage lieutenants. Thrusting A’ cuitas forward, Zuvius impaled a creature before tearing the weapon back and turning it around in his hands. Blasting lightning into the stricken daemon, Zuvius coated Skargan with filth.

‘Does this look like my doing?’ the prince shot back, before passing the glaive behind his back and thrusting it to the side. The Tzeentchian horror coming at him opened its gaping mouth and attempted to swallow the weapon. The glaive blade was momentarily lost in the darkness before bursting forth out of the daemon’s back. Zuvius turned to the approaching champion of Khorne. ‘Does this look like my god favouring me?’

Skargan Fell-of-Heart considered the prince’s words, with all of the calm thought of which he was capable. Furious at his brute conclusion, the deathbringer carved out a circle of destruction about him. Chopping. Hacking. Obliterating. His battle-axe dribbled ichor. The colour in the hollow was changing, however. The pink that had clouded the shallows and solidified to a spawning fleshpool was now dashed with azure. Every time a pink horror was mulched into formlessness, blue claws would prize the ruined daemonflesh apart. As the dying monstrosity rippled and quivered, a blue horror would climb out of its corpse, followed by another. Apart from its colour, each was identical in form to the foul being from which it proceeded.

Zuvius pursed his smeared lips. He was once more caught between the fury of the deathbringer and perverse circumstance. Looking up, he saw that the wind had dropped. The storm of fang and tooth was passing. The fat droplets of the bloodstorm still hammered down about them, however.

‘It is an affliction of the land, exalted one,’ Zuvius said. ‘A hellish hole through which daemons bleed into the world. A flesh without end, my lord, living, dying and dividing. We must withdraw.’

‘Never!’ Skargan roared, tearing his gouging talons through a creature before batting three blue clawing beasts away with the flat of his axe blade.

‘Get the sorcerers,’ Zuvius commanded, sending Mallofax off in the direction of the Unseeing. The Prince of Embers would not die in some squalid hollow with a mindless berserker. As the sound of the bird’s squawking led the blind wretches back up out of the hollow, Zuvius pointed a finger at Sir Abriel and the slope behind. Batting mad creatures aside with their knightly shields and cutting down horrors with their notched longswords, the Hexenguard covered their master’s retreat.

Stepping back up the incline and towards the howl of the bloodstorm, Zuvius crackled lightning down on the creatures rushing Skargan. Dripping with pink and blue daemonblood that sizzled with sorcerous energy, and with monsters exploding about him, the deathbringer had a moment to take stock. His warband was dying, overrun by the daemon plague, despite the bloodreavers’ savagery and the devastation of the wrathmongers. A single decision separated Skargan Fell-of-Heart from annihilation.

Zuvius watched as the deathbringer exercised judgement beyond his powers. Skargan believed that the Everchosen of Chaos had demanded his dark service. Zuvius had put that belief in the champion’s mind. Pushing several wrathmongers back up the slope and snatching Voark, son of Krall, from a small massacre of bloodreavers, Skargan bellowed his order across the hollow.

‘There is no glory to be had here,’ Khorne’s champion roared, pointing his battle-axe back up at the storm. ‘Onwards! To the glory of the Blood God and the Exalted Marshal!’

With Skargan’s command cutting through the red haze of berserker rage, the horde began its staggered withdrawal from the hollow. Stumbling up the incline and away from the Tzeentchian swarm, the host re-entered the bloodstorm.

They were drowning. Drowning in blood.

The heavens broiled with fury and a crimson rain hammered down, flooding not just the hollows, cuttings and craters of the Blasted Plain but the storm-wracked wilderness itself. Zuvius and his Tzeentchian knights waded through the wounded waters. The Unseeing half-stumbled, half-swam. Mallofax flew, the bird buffeted this way and that in the gales that swept across the rising waters of the shallow sea.

Following the Prince of Embers through the deluge were the warband of Skargan Fell-of-Heart. Wading in disbelief through the waters, the Khornate warriors had never quite got over their rout at the hollow. Their champion’s order to retreat from a fight and the soul-crushing demands of their trek through the storm and flood seemed to be breaking them. The cursed land and the daemons that haunted it notwithstanding, Zuvius had manipulated them with his lies. He had convinced Skargan to take this road to self-destruction and he was not finished with the deathbringer yet.

‘Mallofax?’ Zuvius called up through the storm. In the past hour, the prince had felt the blood slopping and splashing lower and lower against his plate. ‘Are the waters receding?’

‘We are on the Beaten Path,’ the bird shrieked, swooping down onto the blade of A’ cuitas. ‘Look!’

Zuvius peered through the blood-streaming sky. A dark silhouette was rising above them, a feature so large and tall that even the unnatural storm’s best efforts could not hide it. Zuvius recognised the mesa from his fiery vision, eroded by the erratic elements into the rocky shape of a colossal anvil.

Zuvius nodded absently at the bird. They were climbing, ascending the path that would take them up to the strange land. This path would test him, even more than it had already. Like a piece of bronze, Zuvius would be remoulded. The bronze had no comprehension of the blade it could become and the power over life and death it would wield. The Everchosen had selected his raw materials in Zuvius. The Tzeentchian hoped to now be hammered to hold an edge, to become a weapon worthy of Archaon’s choosing. It was on the Beaten Path and the mesa that he would be tested and reforged. Zuvius pledged in the dark recesses of his heart to become that which would please the Everchosen of Chaos: a vision of death and destruction to earn the demigod’s gaze.

‘Deathbringer,’ Zuvius called, prompting Skargan Fell-of-Heart to push roughly past several of his horde and slosh onwards through the shallows. ‘The place I saw in my vision,’ the Tzeentchian told him honestly, pointing to the silhouette of the anvil-shaped land formation. ‘There challenges will be issued and destinies realised.’

The champion of Khorne didn’t seem to hear Zuvius. Instead he barked a barely intelligible order to his warband, urging them on through the strength-sapping flood.

‘Out of my way, sorcerer,’ Skargan said, striding through blood and pushing past Zuvius, ‘for gods help any wretch that stands in it.’

Standing aside, Zuvius issued an order to Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard, bringing them to a halt. The stumbling progress of the Unseeing was also checked by squawks from a hovering Mallofax. Zuvius let the spent savages of the Goresworn through, the wrathmongers stomping miserably up the Beaten Path after their master.

Several hours were spent ascending the weathered mesa. The storm still raged about them, with dark droplets hammering into the rocky surface of the colossal formation.

Skargan stomped off across the mesa with his warband following in a loose, exhausted formation.

‘I am here!’ he roared, announcing his arrival with bombast only the blessed of Khorne could manage. ‘Here to be judged. Judged worthy of your favour.’

The deathbringer’s words were lost to the storm. The skies howled above but no answer came. The champion’s face creased with anger. His horde gathered about him in expectation, driving the Fell-of-Heart’s frustration further. They had travelled so far and given so much. He would not be humiliated in front of them. He would slaughter them all to a man before suffering doubt to cross their faces.

‘Test me, Lord Archaon!’ Skargan roared. ‘End me if you can, Ender of Worlds.’

The blasphemy passed unheeded. Blood rained down. Skargan lowered his battle-axe.

‘The Blood God’s chosen is displeased,’ Mallofax squawked. As Zuvius watched rage take the Fell-of-Heart, he knew what was coming.

‘Ready yourselves,’ Zuvius warned his Hexenguard and sorcerers.

‘The sorcerer betrays the Exalted of Khorne,’ Voark hissed through the ranks of the Goresworn. ‘He lies for his amusement and that of his twisted god.’

Two of the wrathmongers flanked their furious master. Skargan himself steamed, his burning hatred for Zuvius and his sorcerous kind turning the droplets of bloody drizzle on his red skin to a searing haze.

‘Unworthy…’ the Deathbringer roared.

Sir Abriel’s sword cleared its scabbard with a whoosh, followed by the blades of the rest of the Hexenguard. The Unseeing began to moan. Blind though they were, they had some inkling of the butchery to come. They would recraft the enemies of their prince, sculpting, breaking and contorting his foes to uselessness and agonising death.

As Orphaeo Zuvius went to answer the champion of Khorne, it suddenly stopped raining. It had rained forever on the Blasted Plain – yet here on the Beaten Path and the rocky mesa, blood suddenly ceased to fall. The storm died and the clouds that boiled above them began to clear. Such was the unexpected change in the weather that Zuvius, Skargan and their followers forgot one another and looked up into the sky.

‘What is happening?’ the Fell-of-Heart asked.

‘This is vision become reality,’ Zuvius told him. ‘We are about to be judged. Now we shall see who is truly unworthy.’

After the storm, distant thunder. The darkness was bleached clean by a blinding light. A swirling vortex of lightning streams fell from the sky and hammered into the mesa between the deathbringer’s warband and Zuvius’ Tzeentchians. The rock cracked with the force, sending spidery fractures through the surface of the landform. Everyone stumbled back, shielding their eyes.

Zuvius forced himself to look, despite the eye-scalding brightness of the intervention. The air burned. Snapping arcs reached out from where the lightning had earthed. The spreading storm created shapes from the crackle and static of bifurcating bolts, almost as though the power seethed across the surface of invisible figures that were already there. The crackle grew to a blinding intensity until finally, in a crescendo of light, heat and sound, armoured figures were suddenly among the Chaos warriors, having burned into reality.

‘Stormcast Eternals,’ Mallofax squawked in alarm. ‘The God-King’s vengeance made metal and flesh.’

Zuvius turned A’ cuitas about in his gauntlets, causing Mallofax to take flight. The interlopers were no champions of Chaos, sent by the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse to test them. These were not the legendary warriors of Archaon’s inner circles, taken from the very ranks the Prince of Embers wished to join. These were warriors crafted beyond the Mortal Realms – the Stormcast Eternals of the God-King. Zuvius had never seen such champions of light. They had been a fantasy, a myth, a rumour – but now they were a searing reality. As they stood before him, it seemed impossible that they were anything else.

Clad in celestial silver plate, the Stormcasts were armoured perfection. Their helmets were moulded and close-fitting, presenting a cold mask of terrible impassivity framed in the spiked halo of their calling. Zuvius could almost hear the laughter of the Dark Gods. Tzeentch, revelling in his perversity. In Lord Archaon’s trial, the Great Changer had presented Zuvius with both opportunity and certain death. The Everchosen had led him to his doom, into a trap with a sworn enemy.

A warrior – especially a sorcerous one – had to rely on more than a sword and the muscles used to swing it. Zuvius hadn’t known what he would face at the end of the Beaten Path. He had tricked Skargan Fell-of-Heart into standing between him and whatever it might be. Perhaps the deathbringer might end them all and catch Archaon’s eye after all. The Prince of Embers had to take that risk. Sigmar’s living weapons, heralded by the thunder and riding the storm, had given him no choice.

‘Exalted one,’ Zuvius called over the crackle of lightning. Skargan looked through the lightstorm at the Tzeentchian. ‘It’s time. As I promised you: an enemy worthy of your blade. Here, on the great anvil of the world, Archaon means to craft a warrior worthy of his banner. In the fire of battle, you will be forged anew. I have seen it, Skargan. Here, in the eye of the storm, I have seen it.’

The Blood God’s champion levelled his axe at the column of lightning that spawned the champions from its blinding brilliance.

‘Only the faithful,’ one of the Stormcast Eternals called, his words burning on the air with dread purity.

‘Bring me heads,’ Skargan Fell-of-Heart growled to his savages.

The first of the celestial warriors marched forward, undaunted. Skargan and his Khorne-worshipping savages were the kind of mindless barbarians that brought death and destruction to the realms. Zuvius felt a perverse glee in the clash of such warriors.

Advancing with bows of gleaming metal that crackled with a spiritual energy, the Stormcasts drew back arrows almost as long as a man was tall. As they held them there, the metal missiles glowed as though heated by some internal source of energy. With the arrows shafts of crackling brilliance, the Stormcasts let their missiles loose. As they left the bow, the arrows turned into bolts of lightning that shot forth in a streaming barrage too fast for the eye to follow. The loosed lightning blasted straight through members of the Goresworn, turning the impact sites on their chests into a molten vortex of flesh and bone before blazing on through a second and third victim.

The wrathmongers battered aside Voark’s bloodreavers, swinging their hammer-flails about their hulking bodies. Zuvius saw the flails smash into the metal arrows with a resounding clang, but fail to turn the missiles aside. A celestial warrior came forth with an even larger bow clutched in his silver gauntlets, aiming it up at the crystal clear sky. Raising it to the heavens, he blasted a lightning storm up at the stars that then fell towards one of the wheeling wrathmongers. The barbarian had incredible reflexes for a warrior of his size and somehow dodged the descending blast of energy. Erupting into a maelstrom of furious arcs upon impact, the snaps and cracks of energy seized upon another wrathmonger and several nearby bloodreavers like a tentacled beast. At first stricken by the power coursing through their bones, the warriors began to smoulder and blacken, burning from the inside out. Crashing to their knees as the lightning storm died away, the charred remains hit the stone floor and shattered in a cloud of ash and soot.

Zuvius heard the clatter of shields as Sir Abriel and his monstrous Hexenguard formed up before their prince. The Stormcast Eternals would not be deterred, however. Stomping forward in their immaculate plate, they aimed the lightning of their bows straight at the ruinous knights. As all became blazing white before them and the metal crackled and snapped, the Hexenguard instinctively lowered their shields. Running forward, the knights set upon the warriors of Sigmar, smashing at burnished plate with their notched blades. Pushing back Sir Abriel with a stamp of his silver boot, a Stormcast stove in the ghoulish helm of another knight with the reinforced nock of his bow. Loading it once more, the warrior turned to blast a stream of lightning straight into a charging wrathmonger’s head. The decapitated barbarian stumbled on several steps more before thudding to the ground.

The Prince of Embers could stand by no longer. It was in the nature of a Tzeentchian to manipulate, lie and allow others to assume the burden of circumstance in their stead. In presenting his sworn enemies, the Everchosen had assigned him a trial that could destroy them all. The Stormcasts were not some monstrous aberration of Chaos, a horde without number or champion blessed by the ruinous pantheon. They were an implacable foe for whom the destruction of all that Zuvius craved was absolute. The prince knew that he would have to throw everything he had at them.

Helping Sir Abriel back up to his feet, Zuvius felt his gauntlet creak about the A’cuitus. Dark desire drove him into a run and he hurled the glaive at the nearest Stormcast. A’ cuitas closed its eyes as the blade of the daemon-forged weapon cleaved through the warrior’s breastplate. The glaive sat there, embedded between the sculpted pectorals of the plate as something horrible happened within. With a blast of spiritual energy that knocked Zuvius back, the eye slits of the Stormcast’s mask lit up. Something proud and lost died within the suit of armour. Like a bolt of lightning launching up from the realm and into the sky, all that the Stormcast warrior was disappeared in the momentary afterglow of the blinding arc of raw energy.

The death seemed to feed the rage of Skargan’s warband, with the wrathmongers indulging their berserker fury and the bloodreavers throwing themselves at the advancing wall of celestial plate. Taking dark inspiration from Zuvius’ kill, the slayers doubled their efforts, taking the fight to the Stormcasts that marched forth from the storm.

Wrathmongers swung their great hammer-flails about their mountainous frames, smashing Stormcast helms aside with one impact before taking them clean off with a second. Voark and his warriors swarmed Sigmar’s Stormcasts, jumping, clutching and climbing – prizing apart plate from sculpted plate with the tips of their reaver blades. As another champion of Sigmar died nearby, skewered on the tapering blades of several Hexenguard, Zuvius ordered his warriors back. He looked up at the blood-swirling sky. He hoped that the Everchosen was watching, that the prince’s sorceries, manipulations and slaughter had pleased monstrous Archaon.

‘Form up,’ the Prince of Embers called from behind the wall of warped shields. Lightning bolts crashed into the metal as the Stormcast Eternals unleashed the power of their bows at the knights. Sir Abriel and his gangling warriors staggered back. As Sigmar’s celestial heroes pressed their advantage, the Prince of Embers willed them on. His knights had taken the fight to the mighty Stormcasts but it was now time to visit upon the God-King’s warriors the true power at his disposal.

‘Now!’ he called. The Hexenguard parted their shields and pulled to one side, allowing the Unseeing through. The sorcerers thrust their gnarled, outstretched hands forward and the symbols tattooed into the flesh of their palms burned with dark enchantment.

Zuvius hadn’t thought it possible for beings such as the Stormcasts to scream. The mesa was suddenly afflicted with horror as flesh, metal and bone contorted and changed shape. One moment the Stormcasts were sacred knights of purity and doom, the next they were horrific statues of twisted plate and ruptured innards. Blood pooled about the stillness of their forms as they suffered their final agonising moments frozen in place – warped representations of the sorcerers’ nightmarish imagination.

As a bolt blasted over Zuvius’ shoulder, Mallofax beat his wings for the sky, the bird shrieking and leaving behind a cascade of blue feathers. Stalking confidently forward, the Prince of Embers snatched A’ cuitas from where it had fallen on the floor after striking a Stormcast down. He moved through the fray like a madman, untouched. The cold determination of Sigmar’s holy warriors was nothing to him. The blood fever of Khorne’s barbarians was nothing to him. The dark sorcery of the Unseeing and the swing of swords clasped in the Hexenguard’s stretching limbs were nothing to him.

He spun his glaive about him elegantly, passing it about his wrist and across his back. With vicious turns of the shaft, Zuvius brought the blade down through the enemy, slashing ragged paths through celestial plate and flesh. Pillars of spiritual energy vaulted back to the sky at each merciless death like comets unleashed. The Prince of Embers sent the Stormcasts blazing back to their god, the Tzeentchian’s devastating downcuts and heart-stabbing thrusts a whirlwind of death.

The Hexenguard moved up behind their prince in a wedge of dark plate and blade, forcing their ghoulish way through Sigmar’s disciplined ranks. The Unseeing followed in a huddle, moaning and thrusting out their palms in sorcerous fear, turning armoured attackers to warped visions of plate and bone.

Zuvius was a force of serene destruction. He reached out with the length of his glaive to stab and stove in the masks of Stormcast helms. He swung the shaft of the daemon-forged weapon about him, smashing through the metal of bows and cutting gashes in the breastplates of advancing enemy warriors. He carved a path through the Stormcasts. Reckless insanity lifted his spirit as he ended those of pure heart about him.

He knew he had done well in the eyes of Tzeentch and the Everchosen of Chaos. A true warrior of Chaos served the Dark Gods not only to the best of his ability but through the abilities of the best. Skargan Fell-of-Heart and his host were battle-hardened slayers whose talents were best put to work in the service of a greater darkness than Khorne’s simple bloodlust. Zuvius had put them exactly where he needed them to be, turning their strength againstthe warriors of the wretched God-King. Here, on a mesa crafted to celebrate Zuvius’ victory, the Stormcasts and the mindless savages of the Blood God wasted their lives on one another.

Stormcasts marched out from the column of lightning with their glaives thrust out before them. The shimmering weapons were like sword blades mounted on shafts and the armoured warriors used them to cut bloodreavers in half. Slicing down through the savages of the Goresworn from the jaw to the hip, they marched on through the fallen flesh, coming together to skewer individual wrathmongers on their blades.

Zuvius felt the death about him as Voark, son of Kraal, was bludgeoned into the rocky surface of the mesa by a Stormcast with a glorious mace. He was avenged almost immediately by one of the wrathmongers who brought around the hammer head of his chain-flail in a brutal arc. It struck the warrior, smashing through the plate on his back and turning him into a shower of mangled plate, gore and blinding light.

The mesa was brightest about Skargan. As brilliant as the continuous column-stream of lightning was in bringing forth the God-King’s warriors, the maelstrom of blazing death about the Fell-of-Heart was brighter still. Skargan was unstoppable, killing Stormcast after Stormcast for his god and the Everchosen. While his warband died about him – the Goresworn’s savagery was no match for the Stormcasts’ implacable, armoured advance, and the wrathmongers went to their deaths with reckless abandon – Skargan was a rock upon which the Stormcasts smashed themselves in the storm. He was death. He was fury. He was the exalted avatar of Khorne.

As the Prince of Embers approached, leading his warriors and killing with judicious flair, he saw Skargan gouge skulls out of masked helms with his bone claws, impale Stormcasts on his monstrous horns and smash bows from the cowardly grip of Stormcast Judicators. He broke armoured warriors in two with savage kicks and wheeled about him with his axe, the weapon taller than the deathbringer himself. He chopped through plate, he cleaved limbs from torsos and he felled mighty warriors of the God-King’s holy storm. He tore heads and helms from bodies with his bare hands and rammed the shaft of the battle-axe back through throats and chests.

There was no stopping him. With the bodies of his warband about him, Skargan roared his challenge to a cloaked lord in immaculate celestial armour. Flanked by two of his brothers, the lord leading the host closed in, wielding a great halberd in one gauntlet and a warding lantern in the other. Zuvius could feel the soul-scarring magical energy coming off the lantern and flinched as it was unleashed. Skargan Fell-of-Heart cared nothing for its terrible light. His red flesh cooked on the bone at its proximity.

He killed the celestial leader’s guardians, his axe screeching through their armour before sending their soulfire raging for the heavens. The lord came at the deathbringer with all the righteous fortitude of Sigmar himself. He smashed the warding lantern back and forth across Skargan’s horned skull, battering and momentarily blinding the Chaos brute. For a moment, Skargan was caught off guard and stumbled. Wielding the length of the halberd in one gauntlet, the lord chopped at Skargan with elegant sweeps of the axe blade and thrust with the bladed spike that crowned the weapon. He smashed the bone claws of the gouger Skargan held up to defend himself and ripped through the smoking flesh of the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lord landed a kick on the deathbringer’s muscular chest with an armoured boot before cutting one of the monstrous horns from the warrior’s head.

For a moment, Zuvius thought that he might have to face the mighty Stormcast lord himself. As the champion swung around the warding lantern for another disorientating blow, Skargan raised his axe with both hands. Instead of batting the magical weapon aside, the deathbringer’s wrath-fuelled swing smashed the lantern into a blinding nova of magical energy. Surprised by his weapon’s destruction, the lord staggered back. Skargan bellowed as the fierce flash of the lantern’s destruction bathed his Khorne-pledged flesh in the God-King’s scalding brilliance. He would not be stopped, however. Blindly back-swinging with his axe, he cut the halberd in two. Aiming with a slayer’s instinct alone, Skargan brought his axe down and cut straight through the lord.

Plate, flesh and bone sheared away in two halves as the axe blade sparked. Zuvius watched the blinding essence of the warrior rocket into the sky. As it did, the column of lightning burning into the rock of the mesa crackled and spat to nothingness, leaving behind only heat and an afterglow.

‘Hold,’ Zuvius commanded. Sir Abriel and the remaining Hexenguard locked shields and waited, while those sorcerous wretches of the Unseeing who had not been skewered or blasted by the Stormcast Eternals grasped blindly for one another. They were not the only ones to have lost their sight.

The deathbringer was a mess, but an impressive mess. His red flesh was burnt and raw, smouldering about him. The bulging muscles of his arms, chest and back hung like ribbons where the God-King’s warriors had sliced and stabbed, exposing rib and bone. One of his great horns was but a smashed stump while the champion’s eyes were misty with the scorching brilliance of the warding lantern. It was obvious from the clumsiness of his movements that he was blind but he still clutched his battle-axe to him with the murderous talent of ten sighted warriors.

Mallofax flapped down to land on Zuvius’ shoulder. The sound seemed to spook the deathbringer, who looked about and then up into the sky, expecting the judgement and reward of Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos.

‘Filth sorcerer,’ Skargan growled. ‘Is that you?’

The Prince of Embers turned A’ cuitas about in his gauntlets, aiming the pommel of the daemon-forged weapon at the deathbringer. The eye opened in the metal.

‘Aye,’ Zuvius said. ‘It is me. I have bad tidings for you, exalted one. You have been judged unworthy.’

Skargan’s ugly features screwed up in fury. He peered blindly up into the blood storm.

‘By who?’ he roared, challenging the gods. ‘By Khorne? By the Everchosen?’

‘By me,’ Zuvius told him. As the lightning leapt from his glaive and struck the deathbringer in the chest, Skargan Fell-of-Heart exploded. In an air-cracking blast of blood and flesh-scraps, the Blood God’s champion turned into a crimson mist, thick and bitter. Zuvius cocked his head towards Mallofax.

‘I sent him back to his dark god,’ the prince said, a crooked smile on his lips. ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’

Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t have to wait long for his judgement and reward. He had been reforged to the Everchosen’s liking, and the bodies about him erupted in blue flashes. The unnatural lightning reached up into the sky with a whoosh and surrounded him. It sizzled in the blood rain, the licks and flames encircling the Prince of Embers and forming shimmering shapes.

‘What do you see?’ Mallofax asked of the prince. Peering hard into the heat and light of the furious vision, Zuvius looked about. In the surrounding energy, he could make out the outline of a great fortress.

‘Jagged spires,’ he said, ‘towers and keeps, reaching up into horror-choked skies. Walls – spiked, colossal and thick. A fortress of ruin so large that it spans the Mortal Realms.’

‘You see the Varanspire,’ Mallofax told him, ‘the fortress of the Everchosen. Your invitation is extended, my lord. You are worthy and he calls you to his service.’

The raging wall of flame that encircled them suddenly died. Everything became ominously still. The skies cleared to reveal a darkness beyond. Then came the flapping of wings. While Mallofax hopped between the prince’s shoulder and A’ cuitas, a flock of carrion birds descended from the darkness to feast on the flesh of the fallen.

‘And where do we find this Varanspire?’ Zuvius asked.

‘It sits in the Realm of Chaos,’ Mallofax said, ‘linked to the Eightpoints, a nexus of gateways connecting the Mortal Realms.’

‘A place of unrivalled destruction and death,’ Zuvius said.

‘Yes, my prince.’

Zuvius licked his mangled lips. He stabbed at the rock, tapping the pommel of his glaive on the surface of the mesa. The carrion birds took to the air in a swirling flock, startled by the impact. Mallofax flapped his wings also but retained his purchase.

‘Invitation accepted,’ Orphaeo Zuvius said. The knight that had been Sir Abriel followed with the Hexenguard and the sorcerers of the Unseeing.

‘What now, my lord?’ Mallofax asked.

‘We follow the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said, ‘and trust in their appetite for death.’

THE SOLACE OF RAGE

Guy Haley

In a castle fashioned from crystal, a weaver of destiny worked.

He, she, it – who could tell? None knew if the sorcerers had once been mortal or were daemon made. There were nine, or there were one, or there were both one and nine. In all things, including their number, they were mysterious. Or so they had meant to be.

The Many-Eyed Servant was one of the names of the nine, and it applied in this instance to a tall, skeletal figure, impossibly thin, with limbs like reed stalks and a body to match. Atop a strand of a neck balanced a broad head, disturbingly smooth and featureless save for a line of eyes along its ridge. A body of this sort was nought but a garment, and not the most important that it had occasion to wear. In this form, the Many-Eyed Servant’s cloak defined it, name and nature – a long covering made of eyelids that fluttered and blinked, from behind which moist eyeballs of every hue peered out curiously.

The Many-Eyed Servant dabbled long fingers in a pool of steaming quicksilver, flicking through the images it conjured there. Scenes of war. All the realms were in uproar with the coming of Sigmar. From time to time, it stopped to examine this hero or that, emitting a gentle purr of satisfaction when it saw one worthy of note, clucking in annoyance at those who disrupted its carefully placed webs of cause and effect. Once it had toyed with individuals of this type for its own ends. The Many-Eyed Servant had spent long lifetimes of men twisting the threads of fate into pleasing patterns – but no longer.

There was a tightness around its spindly limbs, chains of fate that were not of its making. Once it had been merely the Many-Eyed, but then Archaon had learned its one true name, and forced upon it the role of servant. Now it was bound to the Everchosen’s purpose, along with all its siblings.

The facets of the Many-Eyed Servant’s lair darkened along with its mood. Displayed by sorcerous means in panes of crystal were images of its eight counterparts. A few worked in their own dens, each a sanity-testing place conjured by the architect’s ineffable whims. Others were abroad in the realms, doing the bidding of their master. Wherever they were, they looked up as one at the Many-Eyed Servant’s pique and scolded him, wary lest Archaon’s attention be directed toward them. The Many-Eyed Servant hunched its shoulders and turned its back upon them. The others were overly concerned by Archaon. If Tzeentch learned of their bending to the Everchosen’s will, the displeasure of the Changer of the Ways would make Archaon’s worst wraths seem as nothing. Nevertheless, although the Many-Eyed Servant would not admit it was afraid of their current lord, it returned to its scryings, compelled by dread and duty.

Archaon demanded champions, and so the Many-Eyed Servant looked for them in every realm.

In the Realm of Beasts, there was a prairie of such extent it had no single name, a landscape that a man could not cross in the space of a single life. Stretching for thousands of leagues, the plains encompassed mountains and seas, forests and mighty canyons, but for the most part they comprised grassland of rich and infinite variety. Great beasts walked there, their horns as high as the crowns of trees. Men hunted them, as bewildering in the profusion of race and tribe as the beasts themselves were in variety.

The Bloodbloom Fields were found on these plains. The grasses were red, and its flowers crimson. The partly fossilised ribcages of animals of impossible size studded the scarlet, higher than cathedrals, their breastbones covered in patches of woodland that trailed long creepers earthward. Their eyeless skulls were osseous mesas, the phalanges of their paws greying crags.

At the time of the Bloodbloom’s breeding, when the wind blew just so, the flowers opened and spat their pollen to be carried far and wide. The flowers sang for days during this season. Individually, the voices of the flowers were almost too quiet to be heard, but the sound of millions together created a musical sighing that gave the Bloodbloom Fields its other name, the Singing Steppes.

These were rich lands, well populated with beasts and tribes. Even at the close of the Age of Chaos when Sigmar’s warriors rained down from the heavens with wrath in their hearts and lightning in their hands, there remained free people of the plains who had survived the terrible centuries. They were hunted because of it, for the gods loathe freedom above all else, but they survived.

It was to this place that the Many-Eyed Servant’s attention was drawn. Its restless fingers paused in their fretful dibbling, the ripples on the silver stilled. The image sharpened, and it leaned in closer.

Upon the Bloodbloom Fields was assembled a host of men. These were the Bloodslaves, the horde of Lord Kalaz the Hewer. The name came to the Many-Eyed Servant immediately. In ordinary times they moved restlessly across the plains, cutting a swathe across grass, herd and nation alike. Not today. Rank after rank of blood warriors and bloodreavers were arranged in a hollow circle atop a hill of stacked, gargantuan bones. To the north, the greying faces of the bones made cliffs twenty yards high; to the south, the hill sloped down gently to the plain. Atop this plateau, black and bronze armour gleamed in a sultry morning hazed by pollen.

Around the hill, the scorched marks of the Bloodslaves’ hundred campfires pitted the red with black. A broad road of crushed flowers stretched over the horizon, marking their passage to this place of battle. A trampled field of torn earth and dark bloody stains bore silent witness to the great slaughter that had been done there the prior day. Eight cairns of fresh skulls, still pink from flensing, ringed the site, all that remained of the Heyeran people.

The Heyeran’s horses’ bones charred in fires made with the shattered timbers of the defeated tribe’s chariots. A hundred of the tribesmen lived on, but in body only. Given the choice between the dark feast and death, they had opted to consume the hearts of their comrades. Already their old existence slipped from minds clouded with Khorne’s rage.

All present desired fresh slaughter, and none more than the once-Heyeran, but all was still. The horde waited in silence. Their eyes were upon the open space at the centre of the ring of flesh and brass they made. Save for the moaning of chained khorgoraths and the snap of banners in the wind, silence reigned.

The extermination of the Heyeran had been a costly victory. Lord Kalaz the Hewer was dead, cut down at the height of the battle, the last bold act of the War King of the Heyeran.

Five of the tribe’s Gorechosen remained. The slaughterpriest Orto, the bloodstoker Danavan Vuul, the skullgrinder Kordos and the tribe’s two exalted deathbringers. There to the south of the ring was the one who called himself Mathror, horned and proud. The other was the voiceless Ushkar Mir. The ranks of the Bloodslaves were a quarter reduced, the three other Gorechosen among the slain. It did not matter, for Khorne cared nothing for the deaths of his followers, only that death had been done, and the Heyeran had been worthy foes.

The banner of the tribe’s dead bloodsecrator spiked the earth. The hum of wrathful energy demanded a new bearer, but it and all other things must wait. Before aspirants could attempt acceptance to the circle of eight, the Bloodslaves required a new lord.

Ushkar Mir and Mathror glared at one another. They had fought for many years together, but such things counted for nothing among the worshippers of the Blood God. Barely contained fury radiated from both.

Mathror was a hulking brute, muscles swollen by the dark energies of chaos. A pair of brazen horns sprouted from his temples. He wore the Blood Armour, a spiked set of plates that completely enclosed his body from his cloven feet to his eyes. A bevor encased the lower part of his face, but he had no need of a helmet. His horns were as much a part of that dread panoply as any other piece, offering protection to his head. From above the bevor glared a pair of bloodshot eyes, yellow irised, trapped within a perpetual glower and overhung by brows tense with the need for violence. He bore a huge sword the weight of two men, finned and spined the length of its bloody blade. Old gore caked its runnels, but the edges glinted bright steel and were sharp enough to draw a cry from the wind. On his other arm he carried a tower shield, dark red, embossed with the runes of Khorne and the holy eight-pointed symbol of Chaos.

Ushkar Mir was taller. He too retained a general human shape, but was also grossly swollen with unholy power. An unbeliever would have seen him as a giant, although like all the Bloodslaves he had once been an ordinary man, untouched by divinity. About his face, Khorne’s whims were clearly exhibited. Mir’s lips had withered away, leaving his teeth exposed to the root in a perpetual snarl. Around his eyes was bound a brass ring, riveted to the bone of his skull with iron. The brass was stamped deep with runes. Dark now, they glowed hot in battle. Ushkar Mir’s head was consequently a mass of twisted tissue haloed by thin wisps of brittle hair, for the runes’ heat tormented him, driving him to greater rage, which in turn made them burn hotter.

Mir disdained armour, preferring speed and fury to a coward’s shell of metal. Beneath his simple leather harness his scars were clear to see, raised welts all across his back and chest. Unlike his mutilated head, these made coherent imagery – Khorne’s skull rune, Chaos’ eight-pointed star, and the four-base tally marks of his many slaughtered foes.

Mir’s twin axes Skullthief and Bloodspite lay crossed upon his back, their querulous heads muzzled by their sheaths. One was black, the other red, gifts from Mir’s master. His fists were clenched, the brass bands around his knuckles buckled with the expression of his great and furious strength. His chest heaved in and out, muscles flexing with every bullish breath. Mir’s snorting was a provocation, an invitation to violence. The noise of it dominated the hilltop.

Orto looked between the two once-men facing each other across the circle.

‘So?’ he said. A single word, loud as a bell and as clear as a trumpet call, carried on breath that reeked of blood. The Bloodslaves shifted at its uttering, movement rippling through the crowd’s mass. Fire kindled in their hearts after their rare minutes of inaction. However the day was to end, its beginnings were sown then, in that moment, in that one word.

Orto had drunk of the slaughtergruel the day before, a tincture of boiling heartblood tainted by daemon gore and powdered warpstone. Khorne had deemed him worthy once again, for he lived still, and he had been granted yet more power. His skin was taut with new muscle and his terse words carried the authority of the great Skull Lord himself. Power shone through him from Khorne’s own throne.

‘Mir is not worthy,’ said Mathror. ‘It should be I who leads.’

‘See!’ said Orto. He strode to Mir’s side on legs grown unnaturally long. He pinched at Mir’s muscles, rapped huge knuckles against Mir’s brass blind, caressed the raised scarring on his massive chest. ‘The gifts of Khorne.’

‘Gifts for the unworthy,’ said Mathror.

Orto touched the black and red axes of Mir fleetingly, so as not to rouse the daemons sleeping within.

‘Twin axes he bears, daemon-kin from Khorne’s own legions. These are not the marks of the worthy?’ Orto barked a laugh. ‘You deny Khorne’s judgement. Your skull shall be his.’ Orto gripped his double-handed axe meaningfully. It was a cruel thing, toothed with black spikes.

‘I do not deny the judgment of the Skull Lord,’ said Mathror. He raised his hand, and Orto paused. For all his monstrous appearance and the fire of rage that burned in him, he spoke evenly. His voice was no ragged war-shout, but a silken thing, suggestive and deadly, a weapon in its own right. ‘Instead it is you, Orto, who denies his sense of humour!’ Scattered guffaws came from the horde. ‘Khorne laughs at Mir, and that is well. You mistake amusement for favour. Ushkar Mir will not lead us. He lacks faith.’

‘You think you should lead? Ha!’ said Orto.

‘I will not follow you,’ said Danavan Vuul. Kordos the smith, as ever, said nothing.

A blood warrior stepped forward from the horde. He was smaller than many present, close in size to the city dweller he had once been. Tight black armour clad him, while his tall-crested helmet he carried under one arm, leaving his face free. His skin was pale blue, marbled with bloodmarks. His eyes were the same colour, so that they were hard to distinguish from the rest of his face. He looked a living sculpture carved from exotic marble. Even so, the intelligence in those eyes could not be missed. Skull was cunning, a master of intrigue in a herd of killers, and that made him dangerous on and off the field of war.

‘Skull!’ Orto spat. The priest despised Skull’s temerity, most especially in his taking of a holy name. ‘What do you want here?’

‘I speak for Mir,’ said Skull. His voice was high, insinuating.

‘You have no business here.’

‘Lord Khorne saw fit to deprive the Great Ushkar Mir of his voice, and then Lord Khorne saw fit to provide him with the service of Skull.’ He bowed to the slaughterpriest. ‘Skull speaks for Mir. Skull always speaks for Mir.’

Orto growled and snapped his teeth.

‘You dislike my name, I know,’ said Skull. ‘Must we have this dance every time we meet? If you would slay me, do so!’

‘You have no right to it,’ said Orto. ‘You will die for your blasphemy.’

‘You may challenge Mir to dispute my right,’ said Skull. ‘I am under his protection.’

Mir growled, the first sound other than his bellows-breath he had made since the gathering began.

‘Let the Court of Blades decide the matter. Then you may present your complaint directly to the brass throne,’ said Skull.

Blood rage flushed Orto’s skin, but he restrained himself. He had no desire to fight Mir – it was not a contest he could win.

‘Speak then, insolent wretch!’ he said.

Skull inclined his head in mock deference to the slaughterpriest. ‘I shall, and I say this – Mir is worthy.’

‘And why would you not say Mir is worthy?’ scoffed Mathror. ‘Your word means nothing! You are his thing, his creature. You live because of his patronage. How dare you address your betters – get out of my sight! When this is settled, I will come for you and scrape the flesh from your living bones. Run now, and you may survive a little longer.’

A smile flitted across Skull’s face. He adjusted the grip on his sheathed longsword. Mathror exaggerated. Mir was not his sole guarantor of safety – Skull was a talented warrior himself. He thought often on his own and Mathror’s relative might. Perhaps Skull’s skill was greater, though his strength was undeniably lesser. Khorne’s servants were not known for their consideration, but for those like Skull who could hold back the fury and fight with head and heart, life was full of such assessments.

‘Mir is worthy,’ said Skull again. ‘None fight better or harder for the Blood God than he.’

‘Fight harder? Maybe. I fight better,’ said Mathror, clanging his shield against his breast. ‘And however he fights, he does not fight for the Blood God.’

‘No?’ said Skull. He cocked one silver eyebrow. ‘Then who does he fight for?’

‘Ushkar Mir fights for himself,’ said Mathror, and his contempt revealed itself fully.

‘Your proof, my lord Mathror?’ said Skull.

‘His words are his proof. All heard them. His own prayer condemns him. “By each skull I pave the road to your throne, by each step I come closer to vengeance.”’ He quoted the prayer of Mir, one the champion had uttered quietly in every battle before Lord Khorne took his words forever. ‘Who else but a faithless servant would say that? And a fool to whit – none may fight the Lord of Skulls!’

‘Khorne took away his voice. There is nothing to hear,’ said Skull. ‘Khorne respects bravery. Mir is brave, not a fool. Khorne enjoys defiance, not the cringing obeisance you offer.’

‘Khorne took his voice to protect his toy so that none could hear his blasphemy! I am no toy. I am worthy, he is not!’ bellowed Mathror. ‘I will lead the tribe!’ He held up his shield and sword, and the larger portion of the Bloodslaves chanted his name.

Mathror sneered at his opponent in satisfaction.

‘Silence!’ shouted Orto, and his voice was the crack of Khorne’s own whip. The chanting of Mathror’s name faltered. ‘Mir is worthy,’ said Orto. ‘It is you who blaspheme. Mir reaps skulls and lives. They go to Khorne, as will Mir, his skull for the skull throne. You also fight for yourself. Your ambition to lead is clear. A true servant fights not for his own glory, but for Khorne’s.’

‘I am for Mir,’ said Danavan Vuul. He walked to stand by Skull and Mir, his well-fleshed body wobbling as he walked. ‘Khorne has use for all murder, no matter the cause or the manner of death. This is our creed. Mir is a greater deathbringer than you, Mathror.’

‘You are a coward who hides behind your whip, making others do your killing!’

‘My whip and blade bite deep,’ Vuul hissed through crooked, yellow teeth. ‘By their application I slay more than even you, mighty Mathror. Khorne cares not as long as the blood flows.’

‘Mir is a test!’ roared Mathror. ‘Many of us fell in the fight with the Heyeran. Khorne tests us with this blasphemer, rewarding him to see our reaction when we come close to failure time after time. He is displeased – that is why Kalaz fell. It is plain!’

The agitation of the horde was growing. A split formed across the mass of warriors. Men glanced at one another. Minds clouded again with Khorne’s red vision and the distinction between friend and foe became blurred, irrelevant.

‘Khorne is not a subtle god,’ said Skull. ‘Do we not follow him for his directness? Do we not revel in his rage? He has no time for petty intrigues. Skulls and blood are his demands, and Mir delivers no matter his own intent. That is why he is rewarded.’

‘This one is the proof of my argument,’ said Mathror, gesturing at Skull. ‘A weasel’s tongue in a serpent’s mouth.’

Mir growled again.

‘Venerated Skullgrinder Kordos,’ asked Skull. ‘Where will you throw your lot, with Mir or with Mathror?’

The warrior smith did not reply, nor did he move, his chained, burning anvil scorching the flattened red grasses. His masked face gave nothing away. Skull shrugged. Skullgrinder Kordos served Khorne alone. He had no loyalty to any man, and few words for them. ‘And what does the slaughterpriest say? You speak for Khorne, give us his judgement!’

Orto’s eyes flicked back and forth between the deathbringers, weighing them against each other. His black tongue wormed along scarred lips as he hesitated. ‘Khorne does not speak. Khorne is displeased we do not fight, but talk like weaklings. There is one way to settle this. Skull invoked the Court of Blades, so let the test of arms settle it.’

‘You will not name a favourite? You are unsure who will win,’ said Mathror. ‘You do not wish to take sides. Who can respect such cravenness? You display your weakness this day, Orto.’

The slaughterpriest puffed himself up and snarled. There was truth to Mathror’s words.

‘Does any of this matter?’ said Skull. ‘Mir is the best warrior. None is as mighty as Mir. No one has a higher tally in skulls and blood. Whether Mir reaps skulls for Khorne or Mir reaps skulls for revenge, it does not matter. All death is worship, however given. Khorne does not care from whence the blood flows.’

Mathror smiled evilly. ‘Now you see my point exactly.’ He drew his sword and leapt at Mir.

The horde bisected itself, swift as the surging sea parts on a reef. A faultline of animosity that had existed for many weeks yawned wide, those for Mir on one side, those for Mathror on the other. It was telling that Mathror’s followers outnumbered Mir’s by a third again.

Mir did not speak, but Mir could hear. Mir looked like an insensate monster, but Mir could think.

Here is what he thought as he unsheathed the axes Bloodspite and Skullthief: Mathror is right. I have no faith. I have only hatred for Khorne.

Khorne did not care. Khorne was amused, Mathror was right in that too.

Bloodspite and Skullthief cried out with joy at their release.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ screamed Bloodspite, the red axe.

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’ replied Skullthief, the black axe.

‘I shall spill more blood than you,’ said Bloodspite.

‘And I shall take more skulls!’ rejoined the other.

The axes laughed metallically as Mir swung them. Several blood warriors were ambitious enough to chance their lives against Ushkar Mir, and flooded into the space between he and Mathror. None were his match, and all died quickly. Skullthief and Bloodspite drank the life fluids into their uncanny alloys. Their gleaming surfaces were never marred by the death they wrought.

The two parts of the horde crashed together with a tumult of bloodthirsty roaring. The singing of the Bloodbloom flowers was eclipsed by the clash of arms as the sides met. None were taken by surprise as their fellows fell upon them; these were warriors of Khorne, and they were ever ready for the spilling of blood and the red harvest of skulls. Men who had fought together and shared the flesh of the slain Heyeran around fires yesterday gladly buried their swords in each other’s guts today. Axes lopped heads from shoulders. Blood sprayed from severed arteries as limbs were cleaved from bodies.

‘Khorne! Khorne! Khorne!’ they roared. ‘Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the skull throne! Let the red votive flow!’

Within minutes, a battle that began as two rough sides degenerated into a formless melee. The flowers sang mindlessly and on the hill skulls watched disinterestedly as the warriors of the Blood God butchered each other. Sights like these were common occurrences in those dark times.

Kordos stood motionless amid the turmoil, awaiting some signal known solely to him. Orto roared his praises to Khorne as he fought, but was careful not to seem to help either Mir or Mathror. The melee would be done eventually, and his instinct for self-preservation stayed sharp even as the deep rage came on him. Skull protected his master’s back, his sword quick enough to best any but those of the Gorechosen.

In the centre of the battle, Mathror and Mir fought. They were well matched. Mathror was methodical, in control of every movement and action. Mir was rage and fury, his daemon axes screaming exultantly as he leapt and twisted through the air. Neither gained advantage. Mathror’s shield turned Skullthief and Bloodspite aside, and they caught Mathror’s blows in return. The air around the deathbringers was misty with smoke shocked from their weapons’ blades. Blinding, multi-coloured sparks erupted from them as they met. Bloodspite and Skullthief howled in anger. They were bloodletters of the legions, and they did not recognise defeat. No mortal weapon could stand before them, but Mathror’s was no ordinary blade. A mighty sword, heavy with blood-magic, this also was a gift of Khorne. The Lord of Slaughter was generous with his boons, for he liked to see them pitted against one another.

Mathror shoved Mir backwards with a combined push of blade and shield. ‘You cannot win, Mir. You lack the proper regard for Khorne. Only I am worthy of leading the Bloodslaves. Lay down your arms and acknowledge me as lord and you shall live.’

Mir made a curious growling and came in for another attack. Words he could not speak ran through his mind. I hate you, Mathror. I hate you all. I look upon what I have become, this monster of rage and anger, and I hate myself. But above all things I hate Khorne, and I will not rest until I have trodden the red road to its very end and stand before his brazen throne with my axes in my hands. You will not stand in my way, you will fall before me.

Khorne had rendered Mir dumb, and so his words went unsaid, but Khorne heard. In response to Mir’s treacherous thoughts the runes in the band that blinded his mortal eyes glowed with growing fire.

Searing pain built in Mir’s head. The furnace heat of the ensorcelled brass cooked his skin, transmitted down the iron nails into the bone of his skull where it gnawed and spread and baked his brain. The Bloodslaves saw the ring as a great blessing, but it was not. Khorne allowed Mir to live, but he punished him often and hard for his blasphemy. Pain became agony. Thought became impossible. Mir surrendered himself to his killing rage. The shades of red that coloured his vision grew deeper, until the world around him was clouded by a gory murk. Far away he heard the roaring howl of Khorne, ever hungry, demanding more skulls, more blood, more war.

‘Interesting,’ murmured the Many-Eyed Servant, watching from its crystal donjon. It was party to the secrets of men, being able to peer into their minds. The brass ring about Mir’s head was resistant to sorcery and stymied some of this ability, but the Many-Eyed Servant saw enough of Mir’s thoughts to intrigue him.

‘Here is a man who defies his own god, even while he serves him,’ it whispered. ‘Here is a man who is dedicated to Chaos, but to serve his own ends.’ The Many-Eyed Servant made a hideous sound which served it for laughter. ‘How Archaon will adore this one! How alike they are!’

More had to be done before the Many-Eyed Servant was convinced. The Bloodslaves were a lesser horde – their dead master had been no Khul or Baudrax. Kalaz the Hewer’s name was unknown beyond the rolling steppe. And who had sung the name of Ushkar Mir in either praise or fear? Few, if any.

‘A test, a test, I must set a test!’ hissed the Many-Eyed Servant.

It searched a while through the Realm of Beasts, a thousand scenes of strife and horror passing beneath its hands. In a land far away, it found what it sought. The ogor followers of Skargut burned to avenge the death of their master at the hands of Baudrax. They massed around their cook-priests, who at that very moment offered up the choicest offal to their hungry god, beseeching him to guide them to their foe.

Maw-portals opened, red and glistening as gullets. The ogors screamed out their desire for revenge and poured through.

For one such as the Many-Eyed Servant, it was a small matter to manipulate such simple magic and send the ogors where it willed.

Somewhere far away in the Realm of Chaos, the Many-Eyed Servant heard an angry, brutish bellowing, but it paid the complaints no heed. The Ravenous One was feeble. Tzeentch was not.

It seemed to the Bloodslaves that Khorne grew bored with their squabble. Around the battleground where Mathror and Mir duelled, several shimmers took hold of the air. The stink of magic flooded the plain. A foetid wind blew, ripe with the smell of spoiling meat, rank sweat and old food. As it rippled the grasses, the Bloodbloom’s song wavered. Discharges of energy crackled from the centre of the shimmerings.

‘Look! Look!’ bellowed Orto, severing the head from a screaming bloodreaver. ‘A new foe comes! Khorne blesses us! Khorne hears our war! Skulls! Skulls! Skulls!’

At first the magical storms stabbed lightning out randomly, earthing in the wargear of the dead. But the jags of power concentrated themselves, gathered up by magic into a double row of crackling, interlocking dagger shapes. Only when the skittering light blinked out were these revealed to be teeth – fangs in a mouth like Mir’s, bare of lips and dripping with drool.

With a roar, the first of these mouths opened into a gaping circular maw. The quivering skin of a realmgate was held between, delicate as a meniscus of saliva.

Through this stepped a huge ogor, then another and another. More gates opened, all around the horde and within it. A whole tribe of ogors charged into the brawling horde, knocking men flying with their huge guts and striking down those who raised their weapons against them with great clubs and mauls.

‘Khorne favours us! A true foe!’ shouted Orto ecstatically. ‘To war, to war!’

The battle between the Bloodslaves ceased immediately. Men stepped back from one another and unlocked their blades. Their prior enmity was forgotten.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ they roared, and attacked the ogors gathering on the field.

‘Another time perhaps, Mir,’ said Mathror. He disentangled his sword from Bloodspite, but kept his guard up in case Mir had ideas other than a truce.

Through the fog of pain and rage, Mir recognised the greater threat and the opportunity it presented. Here were many skulls for his road, large cobbles on the route to revenge. He nodded to Mathror, and they stood side by side.

‘For Khorne! Skulls for Khorne!’ shouted Mathror.

Mir roared out his wordless self-hatred, and together they ran at the ogors gathering on the plain.

There were at least two hundred ogors, and they attacked with a cunning that defied their brutish appearance. The first wave threw themselves on their foe as the greater part organised. The ogors in the centre comprised their best fighters, far bigger than the biggest of the Bloodslaves, and heavily armoured. Large iron plates covered their guts and arms, and they carried long falxes which cleaved warriors in two with a single blow. The ogor vanguard, more lightly armoured, halted their advance into the horde. Mir saw that they awaited their fellows still pouring through the realmgates. The heavier ogors were forming themselves into a hollow arrowhead that new arrivals quickly filled in.

Skull jogged at Mir’s side. ‘We must crush them quickly, my lord, before their wedge is completed.’

Mir nodded. He understood this. Once he had been a general of note, and was greatly frustrated that he could not communicate his intentions. Tactics that he could not speak crowded his boiling head.

But Skull seemed to infer them somehow, and was able speak Mir’s own thoughts back to him.

‘My lord, should I call upon your authority? I can order the men by your name, tell them to form squares to oppose the ogor rush, when it comes. Mathror is no use. Look at how he howls after glory, trailing those bloodreavers behind him in no formation. They will break on the wall of the ogors!’

Mir grunted a laugh. It was true. He nodded at his follower. Skull peeled away from his side and bounded up the spongy, weather-worn surface of an ancient bone to the top of a knoll higher than the rest of the hilltop. Shortly afterwards a horn winded, and Skull’s voice cut across the battle, shouting orders to chieftains and champions.

‘Control your fury, warriors of Khorne! Meet the ogors together, do not throw your lives away piecemeal. Do not disappoint Khorne! As a wall of flesh and steel shall we throw them back! I speak for the Lord Mir. It is he commands you now! Form up!’

Men stopped to shake the rage from their minds, looking back to Skull. A small group of warriors already gathered themselves around him. Mir strode to Skull’s side atop the knoll, and the trickle grew to a flood, scores of men ranking up into tight blocks about the bony knoll. Mir roared out and men looked to him. He gestured with his axes, and they understood, deploying themselves to his intent without error. Soon five hundred well-blooded warriors stood in readiness. A score of skullreapers came to Mir’s side, all slick with gore. Their skullseeker leader saluted Mir, and they gathered as a bodyguard around him. Then came Orto and Kordos, and the deathbringer’s battle line was complete.

But many of the Bloodslaves did not heed Mir and instead followed Mathror.

The wedge of ogors was two hundred yards from Mir’s position. Mathror’s men had broken through their skirmish screen and seethed around the ogor arrowhead. Ogor weapons scythed them down, sickle blades hacking them into bloody chunks. Mathror fared well, slaying all who came against him, but there were always more to replace those felled, and the ogors required great effort to kill.

Mir looked to the flanks of the horde. The ogors continued to display their cunning. Large beasts were coming through the gates, arraying themselves into battle lines either side of the wedge. Bellowing at their shaggy mounts, the ogors goaded them so that the lines became oblique, facing in towards the leading edges of the wedge.

‘They mean to trap Mathror’s warriors between their skilled centre and the beasts,’ said Skull. ‘Should we aid them?’

The shake of Mir’s head was decisive. Mathror would live or die on his own. Those men that had chosen Mathror could die beside him. They were caught up in battle lust and remained ignorant of the approaching danger.

Mir’s attention was fixed on a massive ogor at the heart of the wedge. Bigger and even fatter than his followers, he stood a head over the next largest. His thick armour was decorated with gaping mouths inlaid in precious metals, and he carried a massive, two-ended bludgeon whose heads were huge ingots of spiked iron. Mir marked him. This gutlord would fall to his axes, he resolved, a fitting tribute to the god he would eventually slay.

The last of the ogor elite strode through the portal. The wedge was complete. A number of ogors lifted their hands to their mouths and let out a tremendous hallooing, strangely musical after a fashion, and the others drew themselves up.

‘Skargut!’ roared their warlord.

‘Skargut! Skargut! Skargut!’ they replied.

‘We kill for Skargut! Revenge!’

That was a sentiment Mir could understand.

The ogors marched. The rest of Mathror’s supporters were shoved aside as easily as children.

A second vocal trumpet hooted from the left flank, a third from the right, and the ogor war-beasts lurched into motion, braying loudly, their heavy tread making the ground shake. The war animals broke into a ponderous trot. Shouting their warcries, the riders guided the warbeasts to smash into the horde either side of the wedge, decimating the Bloodslaves. Mathror was confronted by a rearing monster sporting a wide sweep of stony horns, and disappeared under its feet.

Mir grunted at this with a hint of satisfaction, and turned his attention to the closing ogor elite. He stared at their leader until their eyes met. Mir saluted with his axes. The ogor inclined its head in recognition. The challenge had been accepted. The ogors picked up speed. They came on, guts swaying, shouting deafeningly. As they neared, they raised their weapons over their heads.

‘Brace, O bloody men of Khorne!’ shouted Skull. ‘Cast them back!’

‘Blood! Blood for Khorne!’ screamed Orto, and brandished his axe over his head.

Kordos silently wrapped one more loop of chain about his hand and gripped it tightly.

The ogors’ charge was slow, almost sedate, but when it hit the Bloodslaves’ line it was devastating. With a roaring cry louder than the falling of city walls, the ogors thundered into Mir’s men. Return shouts of ‘Khorne! Khorne! Khorne!’ were cut short as the first ranks of Mir’s Bloodslaves were crushed or knocked flying to land on those behind them. There was a rolling clatter emanating from the point of impact, followed by a second as the ogors’ long hook blades fell, lopping limbs and heads.

The men of the Bloodslaves were encircled, but they did not fall. Leaning into their adversaries, they pushed back against the great scrum of ogors. Their feet ploughed furrows in the blood-sodden earth as they were forced backward. Men threw themselves at other men’s backs, pushing hard until all the horde strained against the enemy. The ogor wedge penetrated only a little into the massed Bloodslaves. Their line flattened against that of the Chaos warband, and their charge was arrested. Hooked weapons whistled through the air, cutting down three men at a time, and the line buckled, but still the ogors could not force their way through to the bony knoll at the Bloodslaves’ centre. Men leapt up from the rear ranks, lightly armed bloodreavers running along the armoured backs of blood warriors. They screamed dark praise to their bloody god and hurled themselves forward, axes swinging for ogor heads. Dozens fell, split by the ogors’ massive blades, but more came through, planting their axes into piggy faces, or scrambling onto shoulders and stabbing down with serrated knives into the tough muscle of the ogors’ necks. Others leapt for the ogors’ arms, preventing them striking with their weapons. Their fellow warriors saw their chance, and pushed their blades up to the hilt in the ogors’ fleshy bodies.

With terrible screams and crashes, the ogors began to fall. The Bloodslaves’ horns let out a brazen call, and they surged forward.

From their vantage upon the bony knoll, Mir, Orto and the rest watched the battle shift. The ogors surrounded them in a long bow. Their war-beasts had done with Mathror’s men and were coming to the aid of the others, but the ogor elite barred their way, and the beasts milled about uselessly behind the main line. The time was right. Mir raised his axes.

‘Forward for the glory of Khorne!’ screamed Skull.

‘Skulls for the skull throne!’ shouted Skullthief.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ shouted Bloodspite.

Mir leapt from the knoll, sailing with supernatural might over the heads of his warriors to smash into an ogor. The giant warrior was rocked off his feet by the impact, gaping in surprise at the power of one so small.

Its face was still wearing that expression when Skullthief swept off its head.

Mir ploughed on into the ogor elite. Now they were in disarray, not the solid wall Mathror had encountered, and he hacked his way through them. Where they pressed too thickly he leapt at them, pushing off their thick limbs and stout bodies with his legs. Every swing of his twin daemon axes killed another. By his efforts alone he opened a wide gap in the ogor tribe, and his skullreapers came behind him. Massive, mutated men whose Khorne-given strength was a match even for that of the ogors, they widened the gap in the line. Lesser Bloodslaves came in their wake, advancing over a carpet of ogor fat and muscle.

Mir fought forwards, seeking out the ogor lord. All the while, his open challenge to Khorne played in his head: By each skull I pave the road to your throne, by each step I come closer to vengeance.

The runes in his punishment band glowed with hellish fire. His flesh sizzled, but he did not stop his blasphemous prayer.

The last of the ogors between Mir and his target fell, and the ogor lord was before him.

‘You! Little man!’ roared the tyrant, pointing a finger fat as a man’s arm. Gobbets of saliva flew from his red mouth. ‘You I kill now.’

Mir raised his axes to attack. The ogor tyrant swept round his double-ended maul, catching Mir in the chest and slamming him backwards. The ogor’s smile of triumph turned to a snarl as Mir shook off the blow, though his ribs glowed with a swirl of bruises, and blood ran from a deep gouge that showed bone. The tyrant advanced on him.

‘I don’t know who you are, twisted one. The Great Maw sent us to you, and not to he who slew Skargut, but you will do as an appetiser. Your god killed Skargut the Great, Prophet of the Maw, so we kill you!’ grunted the ogor chieftain. ‘We smash you puny men down, then we eat your livers while you watch.’

The tyrant spun his maul around with astonishing speed, turning the iron heads into blurs of grey. Mir dodged one, then the second, but the third crashed into his face. Nails tore at his skull as his punishment band took the brunt of the blow. His head reeled, and he went down onto one knee.

‘Now you die. I ain’t one for pretty speeches, but I’ll tell you, I’ll kill every one of your bloody kind I see. I should have started long ago. Your god will learn to fear the followers of Skargut!’ The tyrant lifted up his maul, and brought it down towards Mir’s head with a force that would have pulverised the skull of a juggernaut.

Inches before the impact, Mir swept Skullthief and Bloodspite together onto the bludgeon, shattering it into a thousand spinning fragments of iron that glowed with magical heat. They hissed as they landed on the combatants’ flesh. The ogor roared, overbalanced by the sudden shift in the weight of his weapon. Mir’s unholy vitality drove back the pain of his wounds, and he stepped aside as the ogor stumbled forward. The chief half recovered before Skullthief took his leg off at the knee, and he collapsed to the ground. A hand he raised to protect himself was similarly removed by Bloodspite, who cackled madly as he drank the blood coursing over his blade. Great hot spurts of life fluid pumped from the tyrant’s wrist to drench Mir.

‘A curse on you and all your murdering kind,’ spat the ogor chief, before Mir ended him. The deathbringer stooped, picking up the sodden mass of the tyrant’s ruined head, and held it aloft. Its face twitched as Mir roared his incoherent defiance at his divine master.

The ogors quailed to see their mightiest warrior cut down. The end had begun for them.

Mir fought his way onwards, butchering ogors wherever he met them. Kordos barged past him, flaming anvil whooshing through the air, each ogor it hit engulfed and flung backwards. They wailed as their copious body fat ignited with the sorcerous fire, turning them into living candles. Danavan Vuul’s barbed whip whirled around his head to strike the Bloodslaves and drive them on, provoking them to greater savagery.

Many ogors were fleeing back to their gates. The Bloodslaves gave chase. A war-beast, its riders hanging dead in their harnesses upon its back, reared up against Ushkar Mir, threatening to pound him flat. A mad cry answered from the left, and the Bloodslaves’ two khorgoraths leapt at the monster. The beast fell. Mir did not stop to watch as one of the khorgoraths bit the beast’s head off, shattering its great horns in its powerful jaws, and swallowed it whole.

He ran on. Bodies large and small carpeted the field once more. He fought down his exultation at the slaughter. That way led to true damnation. He clung to the kernel of his own will that still survived. He cut down a fleeing ogor, then another. The maw gates shone redly not far away. And then there was Mathror, coming toward him, sword held high.

Mir abandoned his pursuit, and readied himself to continue his duel.

Skull grabbed his next trophy’s hair and yanked upward, preparing to cut his skull free so that he might add it to the growing cairns.

The man moaned and opened his eyes, and Skull let his head drop. He rolled the man onto his back. The warrior, a bloodreaver, blinked eyes that were free of rage and newly filled with fear.

‘Where am I? Where is this place?’ he said. He looked down his chest to inspect the deep wounds in his torso and saw the thick muscle, the crude tattoos, the spiked harness he wore as clothing. His eyes widened. ‘What has happened to me? What have I become?’

‘Ah,’ said Skull. ‘The fury has fled you.’

‘Fury? Who are you? Where am I?’

‘I am Skull,’ Skull said. He squatted next to the bloodreaver and drove his long knife into the turf. ‘Tell me, why do men fight?’

The man’s face creased in puzzlement.

‘I am dying, and you pose me riddles? Help me!’

‘I am helping you. Answer the question, and you will have some idea of where you are.’

The man gasped. His breaths were coming in short bursts, pink blood frothing at his lips. ‘A man fights to protect his land and his family. Or for money.’

‘And when those things are gone?’

‘A man fights to survive.’

‘Very good. So did you,’ said Skull.

The man’s face took on a look of horrible realisation.

‘Old gods! I remember… What have I done? What have I done! The redness has gone from my vision. I see, I see!’

‘Shhh,’ said Skull, and knelt by the warrior. He smoothed hair wet with sweat and thick with blood. The man’s skin was slick, his beard caked and filthy. His face was disfigured by tattoos like those on his body, but what looked out from behind the savage mask was pure anguish.

‘The red rage has left you. Khorne has no more use for you. He abandons you.’

The man wept. ‘I killed them all... My friends. I ate their hearts.’

‘And why did you do this?’ asked Skull. ‘You did it to survive.’

He looked over to where Mir and Mathror still battled. In the gathering evening the men fought, neither besting the other. The ogors were dead or gone, and the Bloodslaves had ceased their own struggles. Those handful who were left sank exhausted to their knees, dumbly watching the deathbringers. A few of them made their offerings to Khorne. Wandering the battlefield they hewed the heads from the fallen and piled them onto the cairns from yesterday’s battle. One of these had grown higher than the rest, and had been lit. Open jaws and eye sockets glowed with fire.

‘I shall tell you a story,’ said Skull softly. ‘There was once a land, with a glorious city named Mir at its heart. It had kings both just and kind, whose reigns were held to be exemplary. Mir had many armies, with fine warriors and knights mounted upon fabulous beasts, and a talent for battle. Hundreds of mages were theirs to call to war, and the peoples of its towns were master wrights. They were peaceable, but they turned their talents to the construction of engines of death readily enough once the gods abandoned the realms. By these means they remained free while the nations of their neighbours fell to Chaos, either destroyed or seduced one by one, until only the land of Mir was left, all alone in a sea of darkness.

‘For long years Mir persisted, a beacon in a dark age of blood. Refugees from other lands flooded the streets, but Mir took them in without complaint. Diversity became their strength.’

Skull sighed. ‘There is but one story Chaos tells, and that is of defeat. Fast or slow, it comes to all who defy the Four. Every year saw the borders of Mir shrink. A duchy here, an island there. Sometimes the land of Mir fought back and retook the lands it had lost. Every victory was tainted with sorrow, so many dead in return for territory made barren by the power of Chaos. Seas turned to blood, forests became hellish groves of screaming bone trees, farmland withered to dusty plains where phantom armies fought every night. Very little taken back could be made use of, and Mir died, one bloody bite at a time, until only the city remained.

‘Ushkar Mir...’ gasped the man. ‘He was the king?’

Skull shook his head. ‘No. Mir was not the king, but he was the champion of his age, blessed with an ability at arms to rival Sigmar himself, and a command of strategy not seen since the Age of Myth.’ Skull smiled at the futility of it. ‘But he could not win. Then came the inevitable night when Mir’s walls were assailed a final time. The full might of Khorne’s armies were brought to bear on this one last city, for Mir’s continued defiance had become an affront to the Lord of War. They could not hope to win. But Mir, he was... he is... a singular being. He looked out upon that endless horde of brass and steel, and he did not despair. He could not win, not on that battlefield, so he chose another. That is why Mir wished to survive, to find a ground better suited to victory. He was offered the Dark Feast by Korghos Khul himself, it is said. He accepted without complaint.’

‘So did I, so did I! I am sorry, so sorry.’ The man choked. ‘So sorry.’

‘Do not ask for forgiveness!’ snapped Skull. He pointed to the duelling deathbringers. ‘That is Ushkar Mir! His wish to live is no petty desire to preserve a worthless life. Mir plots revenge! By dedicating himself utterly to Khorne’s red road, he hopes to ascend to the heights of daemonhood, and challenge the gods themselves. Do you not see my friend? In a sane world, a man achieves immortality through his children or through his works. But this is no longer a sane world. Children are slaughtered and works cast down. If the great powers of the universe take family and achievement away, a man is left only one means to gain immortality – to survive, and to exceed his master. Of course, the Lord of Skulls knows of Mir’s desire, but I think the Blood God takes some pleasure in his defiance. Maybe Mir shall succeed, maybe hubris is the gods’ only weakness. Maybe... well, who knows?’

Skull looked down at the bloodreaver. Sightless eyes stared out of his face, the light gone from them. Horror remained on his dead face. ‘This is what I have learned, this is what Mir taught me.’

Skull stood. ‘Skulls for the Skull throne!’ he whispered, and severed the man’s head with a quick downward strike of his sword. He retrieved his knife, took the head up and carried it to a pile where he tossed it high, then went to the next dead man to repeat the grisly ritual.

All around the battlefield, the skull cairns grew.

Finally, as night drew in, Mathror fell. The two deathbringers were exhausted, their bodies sporting dozens of cuts and Mathror’s armour in tatters. Blood stained their skin from head to foot. Mathror’s ankle turned on the horned helmet of a dead blood warrior, and he went down, driving the point of his nameless weapon into the warrior to steady himself. Were he fresh, he might have sprung back to his feet with alacrity.

Were he fresh.

Bloodspite swept across Mathror’s blade. With a chilling scream it cut straight through the metal. The magic left Mathror’s blade with a mighty bang, and the halves turned to granular dust that pattered down onto the ground.

‘Wait!’ said Mathror.

Skullthief was Mir’s answer to that plea. The daemon weapon lived up to its name, its edge so sharp it cut through the flesh and bone of Mathror’s neck without leaving a mark. For a second Mathror gaped and gurgled, his eyes rolling, then blood welled up through his mouth and along the line of the razor cut. Only then did the head topple to the floor. Mathror’s severed head lived just long enough to feel itself lifted from the ground in Mir’s brass-bound fingers.

When Mathror’s skull was laid upon the highest cairn, a silky, diabolical laugh rolled over the Bloodbloom Fields. It grew louder and louder, until it became a clarion ringing in the distance. Mir looked that way, toward the sound’s eminence far out over the Bloodbloom Fields. The stars swam and became eyes looking down upon him on the slaughter ground. A faceless creature, spread thin over the night sky regarded him. Man or daemon or both, Mir could not tell. Its body was tall and thin, its head oddly shaped with many eyes upon it. Its robe too was made all of eyes, millions of them, greater in number than the stars.

‘You hear the call, Ushkar Mir. Heed the horns of Chaos.’

Who are you? thought Mir, and the apparition heard him.

‘No one, and someone. I am the herald of Archaon. Go to him, fight for him. He will reward you. You hate the Lord of War. This is your chance to fight for something greater than a god.’

I desire only revenge, thought Mir. I fight to live, so that I might become great in the eyes of Khorne and come into his presence. There I will offer up true worship, I will smite him down.

‘As you wish, Ushkar Mir. Go to Archaon, in Shyish he awaits! Go toward the rising sun, there you shall find a gate amid the Arman Forests. It will take you to the Realm of Death! Go!’

The figure faded. The eyes closed, becoming stars again.

Mir felt rage unending, but his thirst for revenge outweighed it. He clung to this tiny pebble of himself. The core of who he once was grew smaller with every passing year, but it was not gone, not quite.

The Bloodslaves had a new master. There were but an eighth of the number that had been present that morning, but they were the strongest, the fastest, the most skilled. They gathered behind their new lord and awaited his command.

Ushkar Mir, Warlord of the Bloodslaves, threw back his head and roared at the sky.

KNIGHT OF CORRUPTION

David Annandale

The daemon considered the nature of vision. It was his power, it was his goal and it was his frustration. Through vision, the Many-Eyed served Archaon. In serving, he saw more and more. The more he saw, the more distant the moment of great revelation became. That sight, lost to him except in blurs and fragments, was his eternal torment and goad.

No accumulation of knowledge came close to what had been. It must never stop. His vision must reach further and further, embracing more and more. Piece by piece, he would construct infinity.

The Many-Eyed Servant thought about the eyes of a fly, of the mosaic of a single insect’s vision, limited in distance yet all-encompassing in the immediate. Sight compounded then compounded again by the multiplicity of a swarm. So many pieces coming together, creating clarity.

For those with eyes to see.

How well does he answer the call? The voice came, as deep with power and with the thunder of Chaos as if the speaker were present. It was the voice of the sorcerer’s master, the voice of Archaon, reaching across the realms.

‘He hears,’ the Many-Eyed said. ‘He strives. He lacks clarity.’

He is aware of his shortcoming?

‘He is, Everchosen. He seeks to know what he must do.’

Then the trial continues.

‘As you command.’ Standing in the empty throne room, the Many-Eyed Servant looked beyond its walls. He received the vision of the swarm.

The flies were speaking to Copsys Bule again. They burrowed into his scalp, took his blood and laid their eggs in his lank, dripping strands of hair. Their buzzing was music that had accompanied him for years. It was the sound of Grandfather Nurgle’s growing garden, the melody of blessed corruption. Now, though, it had become something else. It sounded very close to whispers. The drone of insects, growing louder and softer as the nimbus circled him, had a shape just beyond his ability to perceive. He wondered if that shape would match the apparition that had spoken to him. The drone was urgent. It was commanding. It pulled, but he could not discern the direction of the tug. Since the retreat from the seraphon, the call had become both more insistent and more vague. He had a duty to fulfil, one different from any he had known until now.

He seeks a champion, the apparition had said. And then, with meaningful symmetry: Seek him, champion.

And Fistula, deep in fever, speaking unconsciously, had said Archaon.

And there were other duties too. A portion of the garden had been uprooted. Nurgle’s blessings had been rejected. There were reparations to be made.

So Fistula was quick to remind him.

‘We should go back,’ said Fistula. He marched beside Bule. His words were for the commander’s ears alone, but he did not temper their volume as much as he should have.

Bule did not know if any of the other Rotbringers heard. He thought not. But Fistula’s anger was clear. His tone was on the verge of a challenge.

‘You would have us return to annihilation?’ Bule asked.

‘No, for vengeance. For Grandfather.’

‘Your zeal is sound. Your judgement is not. We cannot go back. What makes you think the gate would return us to our point of departure? Do you even know what realm this is?’

‘No,’ Fistula admitted.

‘We are fortunate to have emerged where we have,’ said Bule. ‘Grandfather Nurgle still blesses us.’

The realm was blighted; the Plaguefather’s gifts were everywhere. The warband moved through a diseased forest. The gate was far behind but Bule wanted it further yet. He didn’t think pursuit was likely, but until his diminished warband had recovered some of its strength, it was better not to risk another clash with the seraphon. He had lost his trident in the most recent clash and now carried a pock-marked axe. He looked back at his warriors. They had been bloodied. Their numbers were reduced and the shame of retreat hung over them. This portion of Nurgle’s following had withered, and it needed to blossom once more.

‘There is no glory in luck,’ Fistula said. His bald head reddened with anger. The white spots of emerging blisters appeared. They gave him no joy. ‘And we are still retreating.’

Bule did not argue. Whether an enemy pursued or not, the effect was the same. The march had begun as desperate flight. Nothing had changed that initial impulse. Bule needed to turn the retreat into an advance. There was still strength in his warriors, and there was strength all around them. For the day and the night since their arrival, they had been surrounded by the glorious blight. The garden was flourishing. There was cause to rejoice even as there was work to do.

The terrain was rolling and gaining altitude. A river flowed on Bule’s left. The water was brown and grey and gelid, despite a fast current, and soft, rotting shapes tumbled through it. Black-crusted foam burbled around rocks, leaving a patina of slime. On both sides of the river, the forest quivered. Pendulous fungi hung from trees. There were no leaves. Huge colonies of mould covered the branches, the growths thicker than the trunks. They hauled the branches down toward the ground. The loam was thick, a festering carpet of decomposition. It rippled with feasting insects.

‘Children of the Plaguefather!’ Bule shouted. Phlegm thickened his voice, and he revelled in the wet, crackling pain at the back of his throat. ‘We turn our backs on sorrow, and march towards the ecstasy of blight. Enough of retreat! Now we hunt!’

‘What is our prey?’ Fistula asked.

Bule smiled. ‘It must be found. That is the first stage of a hunt, is it not?’ His chest expanded with an eager hope.

Bule’s optimism found its reward after they had marched less than another league. To the east, deep in the forest, a huge shadow lurked. Its form was suggestive, and Bule turned off the path to investigate. He found himself standing before the crumbled remains of a vast monument. Much of what had once been was gone, but the angle of the exterior sides of the foundation stones suggested an obelisk. If that were so, it would have towered many times the height of the tallest trees. The shattered base extended far into the forest, wide enough to have supported an entire keep. The ruins were overgrown with black, glistening lichen. At the top of the stones, the growth had been scraped away, revealing naked rock.

Bule walked the length of the monument, his boots squelching and sinking deep into the toxic mulch. Disturbed by his footsteps, swarms and stench rose in waves. All around Bule, life erupted in the celebration of abundance and decay.

‘There has been work done here,’ Bule said. ‘Someone has been building something.’ The monument had fallen long ago, but it had been disturbed recently. Though the rot had spread over it again quickly, he could see the marks of tools. Stones had been removed. Beyond the wall, the diseased vegetation had been flattened as the scavenged masonry had been dragged away. The stones that remained were so huge it would have been impossible for anything less than an army of slaves to move them.

The flies buzzed in Bule’s ears. The whine was excited. He grinned, ripping open the pustules on his lips. He had the scent of prey.

And there, the words of the flies became a little clearer. Here was purpose. Here was destiny. If he hunted this prey, he would find what he had been told to seek. And he would serve…

He blinked, surprised and puzzled.

A conviction formed. He would be in service to a being who was neither Nurgle nor one of his champions. Yet he was equally certain this allegiance would not in any way be contrary to the Plaguefather’s wishes. The paradox confused him. His need to answer the call was clear. It was his paramount duty. He was summoned. But the source of the call was lost in the insect miasma. He did not know how he was to answer.

He looked again at the wide swathe of drag marks in the putrefying vegetation. There was his direction. The marks were a clear sign. Whatever answer he must make, he would be propagating the garden, and clarity lay ahead.

Clarity and prey.

Exhilaration drove away the shame of defeat. His laugh was loud, long and braying. It turned into a generous cough, spraying yellow phlegm before him. The sputum hit the ruined wall. At its touch, the sickened, spreading lichen convulsed, bursting into sudden, accelerated, tumorous growth before dying. The lichen decomposed into a corrosive acid, pitting and crumbling the stone beneath. But as the lichen liquefied, it revealed a portion of an engraving. Bule paused. He used the edge of his axe to scrape more away, revealing the head of a hammer. Decayed as the stone was, the skill of the ancient work was clear. The majesty of the weapon shone through the grime. Bule growled and struck the wall, smashing the engraving and erasing the memory.

He turned to Fistula. He wondered if the other Rotbringer could see the triumph in his eyes.

‘I have the scent,’ he said. He raised his voice for the warband to hear. ‘Feasting lies before us!’

He lurched off, cutting through the suppurating woods in the direction of the drag marks. His vigour spread over his followers, a joyful contagion. After a few minutes, they reached another, wider path. It showed signs of recent use, and of the ferrying of heavy loads. Bule charged along the route, his hunger and eagerness growing together. The ground rose. The forest thinned, withering to a bubbling sludge at the peak of a hill. There, Bule saw his goal.

Below the hill was a wide valley. A river, much larger and even more polluted than the one the Rotbringers had left behind, flowed in from the west. It had once irrigated agricultural land. Even now, long after its conquest by Nurgle’s children, the valley’s former character could be seen in the grotesque parody it had become. The fields waved with tall, ergot-covered stalks and undulated with squirming decay. At their edge, heaps of fungi multiplied, each the parasite of the one beneath, their accumulation rising many feet into the air. A ruined city rotted in the centre of the valley. Black water filled the open foundations. The ramparts were gone, lost beneath fungal mounds. The roads were broken, collapsing into the banks of foetid canals. None of the original buildings stood; they had all crumbled into piles of shattered stone and brick.

But not everything had fallen. There were statues here, colossi hundreds of feet high, bestriding the valley. An army could pass between the huge columns of their legs. The statues had been defaced. Some heads were shattered half-moons. Others were missing altogether, and monstrous faces had been carved into the torsos. None had any hands, their arms ending in jagged stumps. Their shapes, once heroic, had been eaten away until their proportions were skeletal. They were corpses now.

And they moved.

Arms rose, coming together for absent hands to clasp in prayer before absent faces, then fell again. The western-most statue, closest to the entrance to the valley, bowed and straightened again and again, filling the air with the slow grinding of rock. Creations of wonder and majesty had been reduced to immense, meaningless, idiot gestures. A great city had been razed to nothing but a mockery.

In its place, something new had risen.

A tower had been built using the ruins of a hundred other structures. Its construction was crude. Even from this distance Bule could see the mismatched stonework, each block marked by the fragments of ancient carvings. It was a rough, scavenged construct. There was no artistry in its design. It was blocky, almost as wide as it was tall. Speed and resilience had governed its making. But it was big – its crenellated peak soared higher than the Rotbringers’ position on the ridge. Where it rose, the glorious ruin and bounty of Nurgle’s generosity ended. Around the base of the tower and spreading eastward to the valley’s mouth, the ground was barren. The temple was order reformed from chaos. Its stones, irregular and damaged, had been forced into something coherent. And clean. The walls had been scoured. There was no growth, no celebration of convulsed life on its surface. Though it was heavily fortified, it was not merely a keep, it was a site of worship. The walls had been carved to suggest armoured visages of a sort Bule had never seen before. He guessed what they represented: a myth he still refused to credit with any validity.

Further to the east, the land dipped towards a barren plain. Bule saw no life there, either. There was only the evidence of a terrible cleansing, the ground scorched by lightning. Worse still, it held the potential for new growth, unblessed by the Plaguefather. Less than a league from the temple, Nurgle’s blight ended. The meaning was clear. The land beyond was the site of another defeat. There was no way to guess what enemy had scraped the land clean of blight, but that a foe had done so was beyond doubt. For a moment, Bule wondered if the inhabitants of the tower were responsible for this tragedy. No, he decided. They had built this high edifice, but only from the wreckage of what had been before. The scoured earth did not begin at the tower. Rather, a finger of purifying fire had reached this far into the valley from the battlefield. What had happened beyond the valley must have been the inspiration for the construction of the temple, and for the noise that came from within and from the roof.

The temple rang with human voices.

‘What’s that sound?’ Fistula asked.

‘You don’t recognise it?’

‘No.’

Of course he didn’t. Such a young warrior. So inexperienced. He had not known the great wars of the past. He had not been formed by those struggles. He had not witnessed the fall of empires. He had not witnessed the extinction of what had suddenly dared to be reborn.

‘That,’ Bule said, ‘is song. It is hope.’

The song travelled to them on the humid air in snatches. It was, Bule thought, uncertain. It was spontaneous, but unled.

‘Hope.’ Fistula’s breath wheezed with the intensity of his anger.

Bule shared his underling’s rage at the blasphemy. But he also celebrated. Here was a prey whose destruction and instruction would be satisfying. The annihilation of hope was a pleasure to be savoured. The Rotbringers would hurl the temple down. All within would experience the gifts of Nurgle and know true apotheosis in the exquisite opulence of disease. An easy victory for the warband, but rich in satisfaction.

His flies buzzed in growing excitement. The pull was much stronger. The longer he stared at the temple, the closer to clarity he drew. The fall of the temple became of crucial importance. The defeat by the seraphon was suddenly trivial, merely one battle among many. Somewhere in the temple, destiny awaited.

‘Sound the horns,’ Bule commanded.

To raise his voice in praise was a strange sensation. All his life, the very idea of song had been inconceivable. He only knew what song was because of the monstrous chants of the dark warhosts. Song was the triumph of Chaos. Song was the announcement of doom. It was the liquid, burbling, discordant, cackling sound that presaged slaughter. There was no song in the lives of the people struggling to survive under the reign of night and plague.

No song until that moment when Brennus witnessed the deeds of the beings that blasted down from the heavens. Beings of light, beings of fury, their coming had illuminated the landscape with fire and routed the armies of disease. He and his fellows had watched the battle from a distance. The waves of the war had lapped at the edge of the valley while they had hidden and sought what refuge they could in the remains of the city whose name had been lost long ago. A purging sliver of fire had reached into the valley, and that holy blaze was surely the promise of more.

The destruction had been pure. The blight was gone. The emptiness to the east was sacred, and so was the sear in the valley. It was the sign of healing to come. Of the return of dawn.

And so they had built the temple and built it as high as the dead-but-restless statues. The inhabitants of the valley had numbered only a few score at the beginning. But the battle had been witnessed by many more, scattered through the hills and the forest. The activity of construction had become a beacon. Before long, hundreds had joined in the act of worship. Then thousands. They were all ragged, hungry, ill. Many were maddened by pain and grief, yet they were able to complete the simple tasks of hauling stone, even as they babbled and shrieked their horror. But even the most feral also had hope, and they were strong with it. A following formed. And those who began the building, those who led by example, and so were expected to continue to lead, were the priests.

Brennus was among their number. He knew what he had become. He accepted the calling. He was proud of it and humbled by it, as were the others who had been called to wear the robes of their new office. To their rags they added pieces of scavenged armour and fragments of robes, vestments that bore marks which resonated with their spirits, even if they did not know the meaning of the signs. And now they sang their strength. They sang their praise.

On the roof of the temple, the celebrants had erected their altar of war. Brennus himself had found its largest piece, half-buried in the ancient foundations upon which the temple would be built. It was a portion of an ornate crimson anvil, larger than a man. The beings of light had great hammers. Surely the anvil had some connection to their divinity. At the entrance to the valley, a black helmet framed by a golden halo had been found. Its visage was as unforgiving as it was blessed. The priests had placed it on the altar and it had given focus to their praise, and to their determination. They would pray here, and when the time came, they would take up the hammer to fight for their lives and their still-inchoate faith.

A large fire pit was next to the altar. A massive cauldron sat over the flames, its contents boiling. Around the cauldron was a large group of the most damaged of the faithful. Most could barely speak, and they mortified their own flesh with their fervour. They were no longer victims. Now they were flagellants, and their wasted bodies were kept alive by the fury. On all sides of the temple, sentinels stood at the crenellations, keeping watch at all hours, vigilant for signs of evil or of deliverance.

And around the altar, around the fire, around the ramparts, Brennus and his comrades sang.

The song was a patchwork, constructed of bits and pieces dredged from the collective memories of the worshippers. The people combined melodies and words passed down from generation to generation, eroded and forgotten as the centuries of darkness passed. They took the fragments, many of them devoid of any meaning save the impulse to praise itself, and put them together in the same manner they had built the temple. The result was irregular, a thing of awkward rhythms and strange halts, but it was powerful. It gave voice to the soul. Brennus sang his thanks, even though he did not know who he thanked. The hymn was raised to unnamed gods. The objects of praise were the warriors who had brought the light. Whoever they were, they had broken the forces of the Dark Gods, so they must be divine.

The worshippers sang for the warriors seen only from a distance, offering thanks for the miracle already performed, and calling upon them to return.

‘Movement,’ Kalfer shouted.

The worshippers kept singing. Brennus and four others detached themselves from the circle and joined Kalfer at the ramparts. Silhouettes gathered on the summit of the hill to the south. Soon they covered the slope. The forms were bloated, twisted. Torsos and limbs were malformed. Some were swollen. Others were too long, tentacles instead of arms. The air, foul and choking as ever, became fouler yet. Brennus’ throat began to feel tight and raw just from looking at the hulking, pestilential shapes.

And then there was music, the terrible music, a jangling discordant sound in celebration of corruption.

All along the lines of the assembled host, horns were raised. They sounded. Their blast reverberated across the valley. The noise was huge. It ratcheted like lungs filling with fluid. It buzzed with the wings of millions of insects. It echoed, it squirmed.

Brennus was sure the light in the valley began to fail more quickly, as if sickened by the sound. The air grew still worse. Brennus swallowed, and he felt the tickle of legs crawling at the back of his mouth and down into his chest.

‘Our trial has come,’ Kalfer said. He sounded determined, but Brennus could hear the fear just beneath the surface.

‘We are prepared,’ said Brennus.

‘I had hoped…’ Kalfer trailed off as the warband began to march down the hill.

‘For what?’ Heccam asked. ‘To be left alone?’ He had already picked up a double-headed flail from the stacks of weapons lining the ramparts. Its handle was long enough to be used as a staff. He held it up like an icon.

‘No,’ said Kalfer, already sounding stronger. He touched his forehead, where he wore a tight band of studded metal.

‘Good.’ Jessina was arming herself too. ‘Our duty is not to hide and hope for deliverance.’

‘It is not,’ Brennus agreed. ‘We will give praise in struggle. And if we die, we must die with pride and with hope. Then victory will be ours, no matter what.’

The horns sounded again. The army of Rotbringers was midway down the slope and moving fast. Laughter and shouts followed the second blast. Voices thickened by the flow of pus and the pressure of tumours mocked the celebrants. At the head of the host was a massive warrior. His helmet was terrifying in the blankness of its features – it had just three holes drilled into the front, which suggested an unnatural configuration of eyes. A single horn curved out and down from the right side. He raised his right arm, pointing a gigantic, pitted battle axe.

‘Grandfather Nurgle summons you to the celebration!’ he roared. His voice was thunder, and beneath it was the hum of a million insects. It came from a throat raw and suppurating and powerful. Its invitation should not be refused.

The celebrants of the tower refused it.

They loosed volleys of arrows at the Rotbringers. Untrained, they did so too soon. Most of the arrows fell short. The few that reached the warband did so only because the corrupted warriors advanced into the hail of shafts. Their shambling gait was surprisingly fast. The diseases cratering their skin and twisting their forms gave them strength, and they charged with the fervour of zealots. They too gave praise, and they came to spread the contagion of their faith.

Brennus looked back toward the centre of the roof. ‘Hurry!’ he called. A group of flagellants dragged the cauldron toward the north rampart. Brennus helped lift a curved length of metal. It was the first and only product of the temple’s forge, ten feet long and widened at one end to better receive the contents of the cauldron. The priests fastened the chute into place with rope and a wooden framework. The larger group hauled the cauldron up. As they did, disease-ridden ungors loosed a volley of arrows against the temple walls. The plague warriors laughed. The attack was simple mockery. Even so, a number of arrows whistled through the crenellations. One struck Kalfer through the throat. He staggered back, eyes wide, his mouth open in silent shock. His hands clutched at the shaft. They came away slimy. The arrow was dark with filth. The fletchings looked as if they were made from feathers, but the vanes were coiled and wiry, and they released a small cloud of spores as Kalfer stumbled and the arrow shook. One step away from him, Loressa began to cough. Kalfer fell, twitching. Retching blood, Loressa pulled his body away to the north end of the roof. She managed to reach a wall before slumping over the corpse.

‘Ready!’ Jessina called. The cauldron was in position. At the same moment, Brennus heard the clash of weapons far below against the metal door that was the sole entrance to the temple.

‘Burn them! Burn them!’ Heccam shouted.

Many hands tilted the cauldron. The boiling water poured into the chute. Brennus ran to the next aperture and looked down.

He wished they had oil, but there was only water, collected from a clean and pure stream that ran through the edge of the scoured region. Hauling the water back over those leagues had been a task almost as painstaking as the construction of the temple. Now, kept in stone reservoirs, was enough good water to last for months. And enough to hurl at the enemy.

Steaming, the boiling embodiment of resurrected faith and hope, the water fell upon the Rotbringers.

Bule had his axe raised to strike the door of the temple when the scalding rain came down. It took a few moments for the water to work its way through his armour. He ignored the pain at first, but then it became ferocious. The warriors on either side of him howled, recoiling from the burn. Bule snarled. Simple water should not hurt like that. It should turn to muck on contact with him, more irrigation for Nurgle’s garden. Instead, it dug deeper into his flesh with flashing agony. One warrior fell to the ground, the skin of his skull and his left arm sloughing off, dissolving into sludge.

This water had been transformed. It burned with noxious purity. When it touched the ground, it scoured again, eating the diseased plant life and leaving bare stone.

Bule had expected sport in killing the inhabitants of the temple. Now he encountered blasphemy. He would permit no portion of Grandfather’s garden to wither. He roared, dismissing the pain. Where his skin deliquesced, pus ran over the surface, overrunning the purity with a wealth of illness. Beside him, Fistula also stood his ground, his scalp an oozing mass of open blisters. They exchanged a look. In this moment, Bule shared the blightlord’s rage. Fistula pulled back, giving Bule the space he needed. Heedless of the searing rain, he raised his axe again, and brought it down against the door. The iron barrier shuddered in its frame. The blade left a gouge two feet long and as deep as his hand. Rust spread from the lips of the wound. The disease of metal cracked the face of the door. A prayer to the Plaguefather on his lips, Bule smashed the door again.

It buckled.

Brennus rushed down the uneven stairs of the temple. His spirit was fired by what he had witnessed. The temple worshippers had struck a true blow against the Rotbringers. He had believed they could be defeated after seeing the beings of light. Now he believed they could be defeated even by forces that were not divine. He did not dare hope that defeat would come at his hands and those of his fellows. But he would fight as if it could.

On the ground floor, there were no windows. There was only the door. In the vast hall, the worshippers in their thousands stood armed with old axes and blades. The people waited as another terrible blow battered the door. They were ragged, but they were an army, and they were ready to fight.

Brennus stopped on a landing at the top of the hall.

‘No!’ he cried as he saw some movement towards the entrance. ‘We’ll keep them out yet! Block the door!’ In a direct confrontation, he knew the Rotbringers’ strength would be overwhelming.

One of the men nearest the door turned around. ‘But we’ll be trapping ourselves.’

‘If they get in, they will win quickly,’ Brennus said. ‘Keep them out, and we continue to hurt them. Do it now!’

The man began to object again, but at both sides of the door other congregants rushed to release a cluster of ropes. Freed, the ropes swept up toward the ground floor’s ceiling, passing through a large iron hook. On the other end, massive blocks, the heaviest the people had been able to find and move, fell from their suspended position just above the doorway. They hit the floor with a booming crack. The door to the temple became meaningless. Now there were only walls.

‘Take to the stairs!’ Brennus called. ‘Strike the enemy from above.’ There were hundreds of arrow slits in the tower. The faithful would fight until the end.

Iron tore and crumbled before Bule. The door fell. Behind it was solid stone. Bule laughed, his good humour returning. He walked away from the blocked entrance. More scalding purity fell on him. The pain meant nothing. The bounteous rot of Nurgle surged into the wounds, infecting and swelling his flesh with new toxic gifts. He gathered his warband a few yards from the base of the temple wall, out of range of the water, but well within reach of the archers. He and his warriors laughed at the poorly aimed volleys. Arrows bounced off armour or sank into putrefying flesh, doing little more than release floods of larvae to the air.

‘Why hide yourselves away?’ he asked the mortals. ‘Why refuse Grandfather Nurgle’s generosity? His garden is a riot of delights. If you will not revel in the garden out here, we will send the garden to you.’ He faced his warriors. ‘They send us purity. We should answer in kind.’

The warband constructed a bonfire from the diseased branches of trees standing twisted and putrefying in the ruins. They filled copper vessels with the thickened water of the river. Within minutes, as the horns sounded again, a thick, damp smoke filled the air. It embraced the temple. The breath of Nurgle wafted into the tower’s apertures.

When he heard the first sounds of distress emerge from the interior, Bule said, ‘Thus the Garden grows.’

There was satisfaction in the lesson being taught, but even as he spoke, he knew it was not enough. His warriors would not content themselves with victory at one remove. It was a poor substitute for the direct mortification of the enemy’s flesh. And there was more. The goal that called to him was not the simple extermination of this false hope. His destiny waited inside those walls. The flies about his head flew in a concentrated swarm at the temple again and again. The call, now so tantalizingly close to clarity, was just beyond his reach.

He must find a way to pass through those walls, or shatter them.

Brennus returned to the roof of the temple. The Rotbringers’ smoke came for the priests and flagellants. He felt his chest hitch and his throat tighten in anticipation in the moment before the coiling tendrils enveloped the tower. He coughed. The stench was foul. It was rotten meat and writhing flesh. It was as dry as hollowed-out bones, yet it was as clammy as a damp fist. Heccam was among those at the ramparts and the first to breathe in the poison. The defenders dropped their bows and collapsed. Heccam clutched his head, weeping and choking.

‘We can’t,’ he moaned.

‘Stand up,’ said Brennus. He breathed through his mouth. The air felt thick enough to chew. It was furry with legs. It sank into his body. It tried to sink into his soul. It weighed him down, whispering the death of hope.

He refused to listen. With weeping lesions on his arms, he hauled Heccam upright. ‘Do not surrender,’ he exhorted. ‘Keep fighting!’

‘For what?’ Heccam muttered. Thick, yellow saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Sores appeared on his face, clustering and bursting.

Brennus let go of him. He picked up his weapon instead. He turned to the wall and loosed an arrow into the spongy air. He was not alone. Others acted with him, and when one priest fell back, another stepped forward. They fought, though Brennus knew their arrows were futile against the warband, and though he heard the bubbling laughter of the Rotbringers. Each time he drew the bow string, Brennus struggled against the despair that sought to erode him from the inside out. And each time he released the bow string, he struck a blow against the despair. His eyes were watering. He felt the lesions spreading over his skin. But he would not surrender. Hope had returned to the world, and he held it fast.

The valley dimmed with the murk of floating plague and the coming of a darker night. Yet there was light. Brennus felt it in his soul. It was his strength. He saw it behind his eyes, and it guided his shots.

And then the light was real. It slashed through the gloom from above. Lightning slammed into the ground at the base of the temple. It struck the edges of the ramparts, and for a moment the temple had a dome of thunder. Priests threw themselves to the side. The light faded. Brennus’ eyes cleared, and he saw the divine warriors.

The largest part of their number had appeared outside. The blast of their arrival forced the Rotbringers back. It banished the evil smoke. On the roof, Brennus gazed upon the leader of the gods. He was a towering figure in cloaked armour. He was flanked by archers. Above, winged warriors alighted for a moment on the edge of the broken roof before taking off once more.

Holy terror assailed Brennus. He joined his fellow priests in falling to his knees. These gods were forbidding in aspect, clad in obsidian, and the cold visages of their helmets were ominous. They were beings of metal forged from the night itself. Yet there was nobility here, reflected in flashes of gold amid the black. It rimmed the shoulders. It shone from the hammer icon of the shields. And it was there in the halo that framed the helms.

The leader spoke. ‘I am Merennus. We come to bring justice to the darkness. You have fought well in the defence of the gate.’

‘Gate?’ Brennus said. But his voice emerged as a croaked whisper, and the warriors had already turned to the needs of the battle. They moved to the wall facing the Rotbringers. They towered over the ramparts. They raised magnificent bows whose strings were of searing blue light. They drew their weapons and awaited the command.

‘Judicators,’ Merennus said, ‘pronounce your judgement.’

As one, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer visited destruction on the bearers of plague.

The light. The thunder. The sudden host of warriors, their armour black yet gleaming with ghastly purity, sterile, an affront to the carnival of decay and life.

No, Bule thought.

He knew what he saw. He knew what these beings called themselves. They were Stormcast Eternals, and they were a rumour. He had heard of the struggles against them. He had dismissed the reports as lies. The gods of Chaos were triumphant. Sigmar was beaten, hiding behind his walls, trembling before the spread of the garden. The Stormcasts were lies propagated by Nurgle’s rivals and by warbands who refused to acknowledge the shame of their own defeats.

The Stormcast Eternals did not exist. This he had believed. This he had declared.

And now the myths attacked.

On the roof of the temple, armoured figures drew bows, but the arrows they loosed turned into lightning. The blasts incinerated tumour-bloated barbarians. Bule took a hit in the shoulder. It knocked him back. He snarled at the flames that shook his body. They burned brightly, attacking him with the purity that he strove to destroy with his every act, with his every breath.

‘Decimators to the fore!’ came a voice of doom from the tower. ‘Tear out the heart of the enemy! Liberators, lock shields! You are the marching wall! Crush all before you! Prosecutors, strike from the east and west! Teach the enemy to fear the skies and the wrath of Sigmar!’

And from ahead and from above, war as he had never known fell on Bule and his legion of plagues.

The lightning arrows continued to rain down. In the midst of the fury, Bule exchanged a look with Fistula. The blightlord’s eyes blazed. He nodded to Bule. They were united. The Rotbringers had fled one defeat, and now, still weakened, they faced an enemy fresh to the battlefield. This new war began with the odds against them. This was not the prey Bule had brought his band to hunt. This was a formidable opponent.

So be it.

There would be no retreat. Bule had seen, beyond the valley, the desert that came when Nurgle’s garden was uprooted. He would die to preserve the Grandfather’s gifts. And he would smash through any barrier, be it stone or metal or flesh, that stood between him and the call of his destiny.

He raised his axe high. He defied the lightning. He roared his joy of service to Nurgle, and of the fight for the glory of the garden. The warband echoed his cry. Barbarian marauders and knights of Chaos, vassals and lords, mortals and things transformed into shambling infections, all of them charged with the Lord of Plagues.

The enemy lines clashed, Bule’s mob of pestilence hurling itself against the perfect, shield-locked line of the warriors of light. Phalanxes of Stormcasts wielding huge thunderaxes cut into the mass of the Rotbringers. Bule hit the Stormcast before him with the full force of his bulk. The impact brought his enemy to a halt. The warrior swung his two-handed axe into Bule’s exposed flank. The blade cut deep through fat and muscle. Polyps burst. Rot surged through Bule’s flesh. It did not weaken him. It purged his body of the light. It gave him the strength of contagion. He laughed at the wound. He leaned into it, trapping the axe blade in the folds of his body. He brought his own axe down, shattering halo and helm. Beneath the metal face was a visage just as noble, but animated, snarling with its own fury. The Stormcast yanked his weapon free. Before he could strike again, Bule, still laughing, swung his axe sideways into his foe’s jaw. He cut the knight’s face in half. The warrior fell.

And then he and Grandfather Nurgle were robbed. He should have seen the body burst open with maggots and worms. It should have blackened with the proliferation of life, become a new mound for the garden. Instead, the corpse vanished, transformed into a blast of light. It shot from the ground. It cut through the clouds, and was gone.

These beings would not even die properly.

The falling night rang with the clash of blades and the shouts of combatants. Bule took down more Stormcasts, but their line remained unbroken. They tightened their ranks with each loss, and held the Rotbringers back from the temple’s foundations. The bowmen sent volleys of lightning into the rear ranks. Winged Stormcasts swooped out of the sky, their hammer bolts smashing into the flanks of the warband.

‘Break them!’ Bule shouted. ‘Loose the maggoth!’

The ground shook as, from the rear, the beast thundered forward, a huge mass of festering muscle and horns. It stamped into the Stormcasts with legs thick as tree trunks. Its arms were longer than its legs and batted the foes aside with broad claws. Its multi-forked tongue lashed out from a circular maw, grasping warriors in an armour-crushing grip. It lumbered into the line of Liberators, and broke the formation.

A Stormcast with a skull-faced helm cried out to the skies, and they answered. Lightning stabbed down at his command in a night-shattering, blinding maelstrom. The maggoth vanished, burned out of existence, and across the wide swatch of scorched earth, the Stormcasts surged forward once more, trampling Bule’s Rotbringers into the dead stone.

‘There is no retreat!’ Bule shouted. ‘There is only victory for Grandfather Nurgle!’ He wielded his axe with one hand. He spread his arms wide and grabbed two Stormcasts by the neck, yanking them from their shield formation. He used his massive bulk to immobilize them. He reached deep into the Plaguefather’s blessings. His strength was more than physical. He was disease made flesh. To see him was to sicken. To approach him was to die. He roared, and his voice was the vortex of contagion. His reach was enormous. He embraced his warband. He embraced the enemy. He grasped the length and breadth of the temple. In the ecstasy of his decay, he turned the air into a roiling mass of death.

His roar became the lead voice of a choir. It was joined by the shouts of his fellow Rotbringers, the ratcheting, coughing, gurgling cry of plague at war. The warband fought with greater ferocity. Each warrior’s own manifestations of disease blossomed, polluting the air even further. From inside the temple came the cries of the prey. The men and women who had been singing in praise now fell to coughing and spluttering. He could not reach their souls as his forces had with their earlier attack, but his grasp eroded their bodies. Skin turned slick. Lungs filled with fluid. Bones softened.

His assault hit the Stormcasts too. They shouted in defiance, but those near him weakened. They coughed. They staggered. The two he clutched sagged. When he released them, they clawed at their helms. Their movements were slowed, clumsy. One of them managed to pull his helm off. He gasped for air. His face was cratered. His tongue, swollen by layers of sores, filled his mouth. He could not breathe. Bule left him to suffocate. The prolonged death gave the Lord of Plagues the satisfaction of seeing a Stormcast rot before returning to the sky in that hateful light. He decapitated the other before wading in against the next, slamming his axe left and right, and at last he broke through the line.

The temple wall was only a few yards away, sealed and featureless. The route to his destiny was still blocked. The momentary triumph brought him no closer to his goal. A swarm of flies whined about him, calling and urging, but clarity eluded him.

In the moment of Bule’s hesitation, the leader of the Stormcasts leapt from the upper floor of the temple. His leap took him over his own men, and he fell to earth like a meteor. He broke the spine of a barbarian as he landed, causing the swollen marauder to burst open in a spray of pus. The Stormcast Eternal wielded a rune-marked blade and a hammer. He tore his way through the Rotbringers, gutting, severing heads, and chopping warriors down with a single blow. Three knights of Chaos charged him at once. The ground shook with their heavy steps. Their swollen, suppurating muscles expanded through the gaps in their spiked, filth-encrusted armour. They came in with halberds, axes and blades gripped in both hands. They swung with strength that had felled trees and infected entire cities.

Their blows never landed.

The Stormcast made a sweeping gesture. His cloak billowed as if caught in a wind of its own creation. Lightning and shadows clashed within. In a storm of gold as bright as the Lord-Celestant’s fury, a hail of spell hammers slammed into the knights. Amour exploded into fragments. The hammers pulverized limbs. They reduced torsos to jellied pulp. They punched through the skull of one knight and his body took two confused steps before the fact of its death sank in, and it collapsed.

Bule saw the tide of the battle turn again. The Stormcasts reformed their lines and moved to join their leader. They brought ruin to the Rotbringers between them. When the warriors met, their wedge would cut the warband in half.

The hammers of lighting came in volleys from above. The winged Stormcasts were besieging the Rotbringers, always beyond reach, beyond revenge.

Bule snarled. As the Stormcasts nearest him pulled back in order to create a more powerful formation, a fist to smash his forces, he started to pursue. But more of the enemy leapt from the upper floor of the temple to engage him. Three were on him. He welcomed them with rage. Let them gaze upon the three-eyed blankness of his helm. Let them see the mark of the fly, the mark of the Plaguefather.

And let them die.

He turned to drive his spiked pauldron up through a Stormcast’s gorget. The spike was as long as Bule’s forearm. The warrior choked, impaled through the throat, then up into the brain. Bule turned his gaze from the glare of the Stormcast’s dying light. He used his anger at the purifying burn to power his axe swing into the next warrior. He cut an enemy’s sword arm off at the shoulder. The third stabbed him in the gaping sore in his belly. The corruption of his organs hissed against the steel. This was no common blade. It burned him with a god’s anger, but his own god’s blessing reacted against the assault, keeping him alive on a foundation of plague. He slammed his axe into the Stormcast’s chest plate, hurling the warrior back. The sword slid out of his body. He pressed his advantage, blinded by pain, furious with determination. This battle was more than a struggle between two hosts. It was a war between gods.

Bule was willing to die for the glory of the garden. No matter the numbers of the Stormcasts, he would fight them, ripping them asunder with his bare hands if need be. If this was his final battle for Nurgle, he would make it a brutal one.

But no, not here. The conviction was too strong. The buzzing call was deafening. His duty was not to make a final stand. He must answer.

The call was not just coming from inside the temple. It was coming from below.

Bule looked beyond the Stormcast with which he wrestled to the left of the temple wall, at the polluted river. It flowed behind the temple, but part of the structure’s base extended into the water.

Flies clustered at that corner. The swarm took on a shape. There was the suggestion of robes. A hint of a hoe-shaped head with many eyes. A long, clawed hand pointed down, to where the river flowed beneath the tower.

Bule ran at the Stormcast. He wished the warrior could see his smile behind his helm. It was the smile of revelation. He collided with the Stormcast. The thunder of their impact shattered the air. The ebon-armoured knight drew his arm back and stabbed Bule again. Bule moved forward on the blade. His axe shattered the Stormcast’s mask. Corruption spread over the warrior’s face. Bule struck again, cleaving the hated visage in two. The Stormcast fell. Bule pulled the sword from his own gut. Steam rose from the blade and he hurled it into the night.

The path was clear to the river. Most of the combat had moved to Bule’s right as the Rotbringers sought to mob the Stormcasts’ wedge.

‘Hold them!’ Bule shouted to his army. ‘Destroy their illusions!’ He pointed to a group of knights and marauders nearest to him. ‘With me,’ he cried. ‘We go below!’

He ran for the river. It was blacker than the coming night. It was the sanctuary of life’s final degradation, unspoiled by the repulsive purity of the Stormcasts. Insects and worms squirmed in their millions over its surface. Its depths promised worse. They welcomed Bule as he plunged into them, closing over his head in a foetid embrace.

The water was thick with chunks of rotting matter. Its textures washed over him as he sank. It flooded his wounds with new parasites and infections. As he fell into the dark, he discovered it was not absolute. The glow of decomposition lit his way. In the wavering strands of green, he could just make out the black mass of the temple’s foundations.

He touched bottom, Fistula and the others following a few moments later. Already his lungs were straining. He took slow, heavy steps toward the wall. His boots disturbed the muck of decay. Bones, rags and heavy putrescence floated upward, wreathing him in a nimbus of greater filth. The sounds of battle filtered down through the water in muffled echoes.

Bule neared the wall, and it was all he could do to hold his breath, to not shout in exultation. There was an archway before him. He tried to run. Destiny was open to him. The call was so intense, he thought he could hear the buzzing of the flies underwater.

And even now, he did not know what called. He did not know what answer he must give.

He entered the archway. Now the darkness was complete. He was blind, yet his steps were sure. There was only one direction now. There were no barriers.

His lungs cried out for air. His head filled with the sounds of his body: the strange beats of his pulse, the bubbling in his blood, the wet rustling of flesh disintegrating and reforming in distorted configurations. The slowness of his movements turned the expectation of triumph into agony.

Then he found steps. He mounted them, rising into a sickly green aura again. At last he broke the surface. He drew the air into his lungs. It was close, stale and thick with spores. Bule found himself on the edge of a wide dais in the middle of a domed chamber. The curved walls and the dais dripped with fungi and lichen, which were the source of the glow. They were green-black, bulbous with disease and formed a carpet thick enough to distort the lines of the masonry. At the centre of the dais stood a high archway.

A gate. Bule approached it. He stared at it while Fistula and the others gathered on the dais. Flies circled it endlessly. The call had brought him here. This was his goal. But the gate was inert. There was no passage here. The buzz of whispers was the most insistent it had ever been, but even now they were not clear. He had no answer. Revelation was withheld.

‘Why have you brought us here?’ Fistula snarled. ‘There is no way up. All we have done is ensure our defeat.’

‘Destiny has brought us here,’ Bule said. ‘This was commanded.’

‘By whom?’

Bule didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Again, he felt that paradox: the command was not Nurgle’s, but if he served the master who called, he would not be betraying the Plaguefather. He might even be pleasing Nurgle.

There was no way through the confusion except forward.

Fistula was correct, though. There were no other exits from the chamber. There was no way of moving upward into the temple and turning the tide of the battle from the interior.

Yet this was where Bule was supposed to be. He examined the growths on the archway. They looked different from the rest. They were a pure, glistening black. No glow came from them. He reached out and his hand sank deep into their moist, fleshy texture. They were not fungi. They were naked tumours. They were the material of disease itself. The pure, unfiltered gifts of Nurgle.

They were inspiration.

New strands of pestilence ate into his flesh. They turned his blood to slime. He became their master. He was a Lord of Plagues, and he commanded his vassals to multiply.

To spread.

To march.

The garden of Nurgle exploded into voracious life. The black growths of the archway infected those on the dais, remaking them. Darkness poured from the gate. It spread over the waters. It rose up the walls. The green glow fell into the devouring corruption.

So did stone.

This concentration of disease was so virulent that its hunger surpassed flesh. Whatever could be eroded fell into its jaws. Bule willed it into the mortar. He sent it gnawing into the fissures in the stone, widening them, destroying structural integrity. His soul was a thing of uncounted hungers, and he would eat the temple.

Sigmar, Brennus thought. That was the name the divine warriors called out as they fought. They were not gods, as much as they appeared to be. They served Sigmar, and how resplendent must be his glory if these beings were his servants.

‘Sigmar!’ the warriors shouted as they cut into the Rotbringers with light and sword.

‘Sigmar!’ Brennus called too, and his fellows joined him. Many could not shout. They were too weak. Brennus could barely stand, but he leaned at the edge of the ramparts and he used his bow. Heccam was further gone, but with the coming of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, he had recovered his will to fight. He slumped against the wall. He could barely draw his bow. But he fought. And he whispered, ‘Sigmar.’

Disease wracked Brennus’ body, but he had hope. He believed in the defeat of the plague. When a portion of the Rotbringers had broken off and disappeared into the river, the struggle shifted decisively in favour of the Anvils. The evil would be vanquished. The land would be purged of the foulness. So would his body.

‘Sigmar!’ he called, and drew his bow.

The roof cracked. The tower trembled.

Brennus stumbled, his arrow flying wild. He clutched at the crenellation to keep from being pitched out to the ground below. Darkness seeped up. Tendrils of multiplying growths spread over the roof like talons. Dust burst from the walls. The sounds of breaking stone became deafening. The tower shook harder. It groaned. The temple was diseased, and it was dying.

The blackness shrouded Brennus in a cloud of jagged flakes. His throat and eyes were on fire. Breathing felt like drowning.

The Anvils of the Heldenhammer remained in their positions. They unleashed their lightning on the Rotbringers. But their bolts dimmed. The darkness spread up their legs, the black of corruption seeking to cover the gleaming black of retribution.

Tendrils became talons. Talons became tentacles. They uncoiled from the tower and reached into the land. Perfect putrescence covered the battlefield. The Rotbringers rejoiced. They fell upon the Anvils with renewed fervour, propelled by the wave of unleashed plague.

‘Sigmar,’ Brennus croaked. He had found his light in the darkness. He would not release it. He would have this victory until the end.

The temple shuddered. It swayed. The blackness closed its fist completely around the tower. All that remained was for the grasp to close, and crush everything.

‘Sigmar.’ A desperate whisper against the night.

But then a great shout…

‘SIGMAR!’ The Anvils of the Heldenhammer roared at the night, and though Brennus could see nothing, he could hear a still more ferocious clash of arms.

And he knew that where the Anvils fought, the monsters could be defeated.

He was fuelled by a power far beyond his own. Bule felt the tower and the land contained in his hands. They were his to turn into the most perfect flowering. He had tended Nurgle’s Garden faithfully, and now he would make it bloom through the heart and bones of the enemy. The strength of a thousand plagues was his. He was the plague.

The dark was complete. The light was gone from the temple. His power reached its apex. And in that moment of completion, something else was accomplished.

The gate sprang to life.

The centre flashed. It twisted and coiled. Paths opened before him. He saw them with the myriad eyes of insects, a compound vision of choices. One choice dominated all others. It came into being with the activation of the gate. The power he held had opened the way, and now he must pass through or bring the temple down.

Behind him, the other Rotbringers were shouting victory as the walls shuddered.

‘Drop the walls!’ Fistula shouted. ‘Crush the lightning men!’

But Bule heard the call again, and it came from the other side of the gate. Archaon awaited.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Fistula demanded.

‘Archaon…’ Bule whispered. Louder, he said, ‘We pass through the gate.’

‘And leave the field again?’ Fistula was outraged.

Yes, Bule thought. They would leave. ‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Archaon calls!’

He stared at the path through the gate. It flickered. It led into a grey void. A cold wind blew in Bule’s face. It felt like emptiness, like the wail of the tomb. There was no garden at the end of this path. There would be nothing to cultivate. The call demanded he step away from any recognisable trace of Grandfather Nurgle’s dominion.

He made his decision. I will go, he thought.

The passage exploded with swarms of hungry flies. A welcome.

Bule looked back at Fistula and the rest of his warriors. His chosen few, he saw now, much as he had been chosen. ‘We do not abandon the field,’ he said. ‘We march to a grander one. A magnificent flowering.’

He entered the gate, abandoning the temple to its illusion of hope. Let the Stormcast Eternals triumph here. How meaningless that victory would be. How bitter it would taste for them when he returned.

When they and all their kind would learn what he had become.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHOSEN

Guy Haley

Under purple skies flickering with far-away storms brooded a vast desert the horizon could not contain.

Its sands appeared coarse, greyish in colour, but closer inspection revealed them not to be sand at all, but crushed bone. In some of the smaller pieces the delicate lattice of desiccated marrow was visible, clinging to sharp-edged shards. The larger fragments were recognisable as the knobbed heads of femurs or curved portions of skull, like pebbles and stones. Few people ever saw the desert and fewer still lived to tell the tale. The realm of Shyish abounds with lands that do not take kindly to the presence of the living. The Bone Sands were among them.

Unlike in a mortal desert, there were no traces of any living creature; no mummified plants awaiting the next rain, no tracks in the rough sand to hint at small creatures eking out a life. There was bone, and more bone, and nothing else, for league after league until the purple sky and grey sand touched at the edge of sight.

But the Bone Sands were not quite empty.

At the very centre was a monumental archway. Though huge, it cast no shadow in the directionless gloom. Two giant plinths stood either side, as tall as towers, their sides covered in bas reliefs depicting the bloodless wars of the dead, still crisp after aeons in the changeless desert. Atop the plinths waited a pair of giant necrosphinxes, facing each other across the broken bones cluttering the ground. The statues were massive beasts of stone and metal with men’s torsos atop lions’ bodies, barbed scorpions’ tails, outstretched wings and twin blade shields on their arms. The statues held their bladed limbs forward to point at one another, forming a lesser arch under which a traveller had to pass on entering or exiting the greater.

The sphinxes were huge, but the gate was bigger. Stacked vertebrae threaded onto green copper rods made the posts of the archway, curving together like monstrous tusks. The bones at the base of the columns were the size of buildings. Those at the apex were tiny, stolen from dead animals of the fields and hedgerows of distant lands. Many of the bones had crumbled. The left column leaned a little because of this erosion, but the structure held and the distortion robbed the edifice of none of its power.

The desert around the gate had a vital tension entirely lacking from the rest. The feeling of magic was strong there, and perhaps it was for this reason that the arch was surrounded by generous heaps of skeletons. All lay face down, their outstretched arms reaching for the arch. They were piled around the base of the plinths, and cluttered the span of the gateway three deep. Examples of all the strange races of the Eight Realms could be found, for all things that die find their way to the underworlds of Shyish in the end.

Pitted weapons were tangled with bones. Brittle cloth was draped over fleshless limbs, ready to vanish into threads and dust at the slightest touch of the desert’s rare winds. Banners were planted in the ground, leaning drunkenly, all colour leached from their blazons. Shields of every conceivable kind hid their designs under the bones of their bearers.

A thing walked out of thin air, growing from ethereality to solidity in the space of five long steps. It was a curious creature, with arms and legs so thin it should not have had the strength to move, but it walked with energetic purpose, its staff clacking down onto the bones with every decisive step. Its long cloak of fluttering eyes stirred the dust into lazy whorls that settled slowly.

This was the Many-Eyed Servant, agent of Tzeentch, but now unwilling vassal of Archaon.

It came to a halt fifty yards before the arch. The aura surrounding everything there – bones, gate and guardians – revealed itself to the sorcerer’s supernatural vision as a deep purple. Very rarely was one colour of magic so clearly presented, and the sorcerer stopped to admire its patterns. The creature remained in contemplation until the weight of its enslavement became palpable, invisible chains of sorcery binding it to the Everchosen’s will. The Many-Eyed Servant became uncomfortable. Archaon saw all, and he was impatient. If the Many-Eyed Servant was not swift, it would be punished.

The Many-Eyed Servant set to work. With keen magesight it pinpointed the parts of the gate that had to be charged with magic. This realmgate had long been dormant, locked and barred by parties unknown through the long centuries of the Age of Chaos.

The Many-Eyed Servant gripped its staff with reedy fingers and raised it over its hoe-shaped head. The line of eyes that crested its face closed in concentration. It began to chant.

It was a powerful sorcerer, and so its magic took effect rapidly. Power blazed from the ends of its staff in braided torrents that unfurled into individual tendrils of lightning, each striking at the gate columns’ vertebrae. They skittered about, probing for the points the Many-Eyed Servant’s magic required. Finding them, the lightning rooted itself in the bone, joining gate to sorcerer. The space between was quickly filled with jumping, arcing currents of yellow, blue and purple. The gateway vertebrae shifted on their copper supports, flexing like trees in a storm. Hidden runes carved into the bone revealed themselves in blazing colours.

The gate glimmered, the air framed by the arch growing thick with light, blurring the vista behind it, then turning opaque.

The Many-Eyed Servant cried out in pain from the magic coursing through it and in exhilaration of its mastery over the energy. Slamming its staff down, it uttered a deafening word of power. The lightning ceased. A blast of energy emanated from the base of the staff, sending a shock wave out across the plain that whipped up an expanding circle of dust and sent it racing towards every horizon. The Bone Sands moaned, a sound akin to the last breath expelled from the lungs of a corpse.

The staff remained embedded in the bony ground, quivering with potency. The Many-Eyed Servant lifted its hands, placed them back to back, and pushed them wide as if it were parting a curtain.

With a silken tearing sound, the realmgate opened onto another world. Some difference in the atmospheres caused an imbalance in the wind, and a gust of tomb-dry air blasted out from the desert, exchanged for the brief, moist scents of leaf mould and animals. The Many-Eyed Servant looked through onto a broad rise of forested mountains somewhere in the realm of Ghur. Men knelt on the other side, two hundred huge killers warped by the power of Khorne, a pair of chained khorgoraths in their midst. The Bloodslaves had been praying to their god to open the way, but as the gate opened they stood. They hefted their weapons and looked suspiciously through into the world beyond. The slaughterpriest Orto, the blood warrior Skull, Danavan Vuul the bloodstoker and the taciturn skullgrinder Kordos, smith of Khorne, who rarely deigned to speak to mortal men, all looked on. These were the leaders of the Bloodslaves, and they gathered around their lord, Ushkar Mir, another silent killer, although unlike Kordos his silence was not by choice. Mir was taller than a man ever should be, massively muscled, his burn-scarred head bound with a tight ring of brass that covered his eyes. The runes stamped into the band were dark for the moment.

‘The way is open! Khorne gives to those who take! Onwards to battle,’ shouted their priest. The Many-Eyed Servant winced at his bellowing. So obnoxious, the priests of Khorne. It pained the sorcerer to make use of such crude pawns.

Ignorant of the sorcerer that had opened the way, Orto lifted his double-handed axe in one fist and pointed it into the bone desert.

The Bloodslaves moved forward with a rattling of armour. They stank of blood and sweat, their beards were stiff with gore, and their filed teeth were yellow. Eyes wild with rage and desperation looked right at the Many-Eyed Servant, but they did not see it. The Many-Eyed Servant was visible only to those it allowed to see.

Mir rumbled a soundless warning and held his hand up. His men stopped.

‘See, my lord!’ said Skull eagerly. His blood-and-blue marbled face was full of triumph. One day this warrior might be a danger, thought the Many-Eyed Servant, but that was a concern for another time. ‘Why do we wait? Khorne has provided!’

Ushkar Mir stared into the Realm of Death. In his head the call of Archaon rang loud. The Many-Eyed Servant could hear it too. For each of the champions it was different; for Mir it was the brazen blare of harsh trumpets and the cries of angry daemons.

The Bloodslaves looked to Ushkar Mir expectantly. For five minutes he stood, before moving without warning straight towards the gate. The Bloodslaves followed unhesitatingly.

They stepped from lush turf to dusty plain in a single step, leaving one realm for another, their boots crunching on shattered bones as they passed into Shyish.

‘Is this the land of Khorne?’ asked one. He kicked a skull from the shoulders of a skeleton. ‘There are many skulls here.’

The khorgoraths sniffed at the bones, but quickly withdrew and mewled. Crumbling bone had no interest for them, and they were hungry.

To the Many-Eyed Servant, the Bloodslaves’ disappointment was obvious. They were wary. This was not the warrior’s welcome they expected Archaon to lavish on them.

‘No,’ growled Orto. ‘Fool! This is Shyish, the Realm of Death. These are bones stolen by the Lord of Death from the Lord of Fury. This is an unholy place.’

‘But where in Shyish?’ asked Skull thoughtfully.

‘Who knows?’ said Orto. His nostrils flared, sniffing at the wind. ‘Shyish is a million underworlds, with ten deaths for every mortal in each.’ He snorted and spat bloody phlegm onto the bones. ‘Khorne will rule it all. It is his right. This is the start.’

Such confidence, such naivety, thought the Many-Eyed Servant.

It was then that the sorcerer chose to be seen, although not in its favoured form. It drew the shape of another over its being and manifested. The champion’s test had begun.

A stirring of dust fifty feet from the gate caught Skull’s eye. He patted Mir’s massive bicep and pointed as the disturbance grew to a tiny whirlwind. Mir looked with his Khorne-given blindsight and saw fragments of bone leaping up from the ground. To Mir’s eyeless vision, the maelstrom was surrounded by flickering fires of magic. He growled and drew the axes Bloodspite and Skullthief. They howled, eager to prove themselves against weakling sorcery.

The whirl of dust grew until a column writhed before Mir. Then it abruptly stilled, what little fragments were carried on its currents pattering to the floor. In its stead stood the skeleton of a man, garbed in the ancient panoply of war, a spiked helmet on its skull, a visor covering its face and ragged robes about its legs. A dull steel sword hung at its side.

Skull took a step. Orto moved forward, axe up. Mir stayed them with the flats of his axes.

The skeletal warrior lifted up its hands to its head and removed the helm, revealing a bony face set with five eye sockets. In each one a lidless eye glistened.

‘What is this?’ asked Skull. He loosened his sword in his scabbard. The Bloodslaves drew around their leader, fear tainting their divine fury.

‘Ushkar Mir hears the call of the Grand Marshal of Ruin!’ pronounced Orto. ‘He comes to serve him!’

The skeleton remained silent.

‘Who are you?’ said Skull. ‘Answer, or I will add your malformed head to Khorne’s bone piles.’

‘It is a test,’ growled Kordos, speaking for the first time in weeks. ‘One does not walk into the camp of Archaon. Mir must prove himself worthy.’

‘Where is he? What do you know of Archaon?’ demanded Skull. But Kordos said no more.

‘Ushkar Mir is worthy,’ said Orto. He clacked his sharpened teeth at the skeleton in challenge.

‘None are worthy until they have proven themselves,’ said Danavan Vuul. ‘A simple truth.’

‘Pah! Let us cut this corpse thing down,’ said Orto. ‘Let us gather fresh skulls for Khorne. Who cares for the glory of Archaon, when Khorne’s hunger is never sated?’

‘Khorne’s fires are not what Mir desires,’ said Skull.

Orto looked at Mir uncertainly. He was still not comfortable with Mir’s blasphemous desire to challenge Khorne, and yet his might was undisputable, as was Khorne’s favour of him.

‘Kordos spoke of tests. Who will set them?’ asked Skull. ‘This creature?’

‘Khorne sets all tests for Mir,’ said Orto.

‘Archaon serves all the four powers,’ said Vuul. ‘We must be wary.’

‘A test of the gods then,’ said Skull. ‘Four in number.’

‘We should attack! Kill it again.’ Orto advanced. Mir motioned again for him to hold. Orto did so reluctantly.

That will be the way, thought Mir. The creature sports many eyes, as did the herald I saw in the sky. He struggled to keep his thoughts straight against the rage of Khorne. The red haze in him thickened daily. He must not forget who he was. Four tests it would be – one for each of the gods. To serve Archaon will aid me, he thought. I will brave these tests. No matter the outcome, there will be bloodletting, and that will take me closer toward my vengeance.

Mir nodded to the skeleton. It inclined its head in response.

‘Mir has accepted the challenge,’ said Orto. ‘Praise be to Khorne.’

‘Stand ready!’ said Skull. He drew his sword and the warriors of the Bloodslaves raised their weapons in response.

Ushkar Mir saw. In his blindsight he saw a dread purple glow creeping across the desert ground, gathering about the skeletons lying there. It was strongest around the great statues guarding the gate.

The first test begins, he thought.

A creak of metal, so loud in that endless silence, made the Bloodslaves start.

The purple light of death magic was strong enough now to be seen by mortal eyes, glowing from every skull. Suddenly the Bloodslaves began slashing downward, smashing bony hands that were stretching out to grasp their ankles and stamping ancient skulls to fragments.

A great host of the dead was clambering up all around them. A bloodreaver went down, bellowing out glory to Khorne as he was torn to pieces by raking fingers.

The worst was yet to come. Mir pointed and growled a warning. The eyes of the necrosphinxes glared with amethyst magic. With the grinding of stone muscles, they turned their heads to look upon the trespassers. At their awakening, the skeletal warriors presented arms, adopting attack positions. The dust of ages poured off the statues as they stepped down from their plinths, revealing skin of black stone and the dull bronze of their mighty weapons. The ring of dead warriors surrounding the Bloodslaves parted noisily to let the sphinxes through, closing ranks once the beasts had trodden heavily past. The Bloodslaves waited uncertainly, brandishing their axes and cursing the silent dead.

Mir did not wait for the attack. Roaring loudly, he shoved his way through his own men and ploughed into the skeleton horde.

‘Skulls! Skulls for Khorne!’ yelled Orto, and the Bloodslaves followed their master.

Sightless eyes tracked axe swings. Skeletons dodged and parried with all the alacrity of the living. This was the Realm of Death, and its servants were strong there. The Bloodslaves roared out their cries to Khorne, but the skeletons fought soundlessly, having no voices with which to speak. They moved mechanically fast, their ancient weapons ringing from dark iron, bones clacking a rapid tattoo.

The Bloodslaves split, each of them heading into a different part of the undead army – all save Skull, who was ever by Mir’s side. Orto went at the head of a phalanx of blood warriors, sweeping his giant axe through brittle ribcages. Kordos strode on alone, his flaming anvil roaring through the air on its chains as he swung it around his head. Every pass decimated the skeletons, shattering them into burning flinders of bone.

Mir made straight for the sphinxes and attacked one head on while the other ploughed into the body of his warband. Though huge and fashioned from stone, they too moved quickly, slicing their arm-blades through the air at such speed that they blurred. The wind of their passing stirred Mir’s fire-scorched hair. He leaned backward, barely evading the cutting edge. Mir swung Skullthief at the living statue’s leg, seeking to cripple it, but the great blade attached to its left fist swept the blow aside and its scorpion tail stabbed down, the gems on it glowing with evil magic.

Mir dodged the sting, and the tail smashed into the carpet of bones on the ground. He swung Bloodspite around with all his considerable might. The daemon axe crashed through the enchanted stone of the tail. The tip came away, and the tail whipped back. The face of the sphinx was an expressionless mask, but it reared up in response to the wound. Its broad lion’s feet pawed at the air before stamping down in an attempt to crush the life from the Chaos warlord. He spun aside, axes whipping round. Bloodspite shrilled in excitement as it bit a chunk of onyx from the left foreleg. Cracks spread from the impact. Mir followed with a hit from Skullthief, and the cracks widened. Splinters of stone sprayed outward and the leg came free, falling to the ground and smashing more of the bones there. The sphinx staggered back, its remaining forepaw thumping down heavily. It limped around on three legs, the veins of minerals in its shattered limb bleeding magic.

Mir attacked again. Deflecting the axe unbalanced the sphinx, and Mir leapt high over the construct’s sweeping blades, twisting his back and body to clear them by inches. He landed on the other side. The crippled necrosphinx staggered around, but Ushkar Mir was already clambering up the decorative bronze-work studding its hide. The creature’s human torso twisted around, but it could not bring its arms, bound as they were into its blades, to bear on Mir.

Howling madly, Mir drew both axes back to his right and swung them together at the creature’s neck. Their supernatural blades cut through the bronze like paper, and clove deep into the stone.

The necrosphinx went rigid and its head toppled from its shoulders. Mir leapt from its back as it fell over onto its side, now only a defaced statue, metal bending and stone limbs cracking free as it crashed down.

The second necrosphinx was in the thick of Mir’s warriors. They attacked from all sides, their weapons marking its smoothly polished hide with chalky scratches, but they could not bring it down. Seeing an opening, Vuul whipped the khorgoraths into the attack. Both took long, deep wounds from the animated statue’s blades, but they did not fall. Driven to greater heights of fury by the bloodstoker’s expert goading, they grappled with the sphinx, holding its arms in place while the rest of the warband laid about it with their weapons. Orto hacked at its back leg, taking chips from the stone with his two-handed axe.

One of the khorgoraths roared, wrenching off the blades from the construct’s stone arm with a squeal of rending metal. The sphinx lashed out with its fist, slashing the khorgorath’s hide with the twisted remnants of its weapon. The khorgorath bit down hard, shattering its own teeth on the arm, but crushing stone nevertheless, and the arm came away.

Mir moved in for the kill, pounding through the swirling melee. He smashed into the side of the necrosphinx, battering at its side with his daemon axes. He howled as his rage was stoked higher by Khorne and the runes in his punishment band burned. Stone chips flew and cracks ran all over the statue’s sides. His followers joined him, jabbing weapons into the crevices Bloodspite and Skullthief had opened up and levering them wider.

Vuul goaded the khorgoraths, manoeuvring one into position on the far side of the statue to Mir while the other hung off the sphinx’s remaining arm. The poisonous tail of the necrosphinx stabbed down, the bronze barb plunging deep into the khorgorath’s back. The crystal bulb on the tail pulsed, and the poison drained away, pumping into the twisted Khornate beast. Bellowing, the khorgorath raised its fists and pummelled at the statue’s back, ripping open its own skin on spined armour as it tore it from its mounts, exposing the fixing pins beneath. Three times the khorgorath’s fists pounded down, each blow weaker than the last. Mir and the Bloodslaves hacked away at the living stone on the other side. Then the khorgorath’s fists descended a final time, and the statue shattered into two pieces joined only by twisted trails of wire.

Its unnatural life left it instantly.

Around the gate the battle was nearly done. The last few skeletons fell under heavy axe blades. Silence returned to the Bone Sands.

The five-eyed skeleton alone remained. Its glistening eyeballs rolled in their sockets in different directions as it took in the aftermath of battle.

Skull leaned panting on his sword hilt not far from Mir. ‘The first test. Fury for Khorne. What is the nature of the second?’

The skeleton raised one hand and pointed. Whether north, east, west or south had any meaning in this realm was unknown to the Bloodslaves, but the purple glow of the sky was brighter in that direction.

The skeleton herald collapsed into the bone carpeting the floor.

Skull turned over its head with a foot, revealing five eye sockets full of dripping ooze. ‘I don’t trust this,’ he said.

Mir grunted. A soft wind whispered over newly shattered bone. Behind him, the poisoned khorgorath was choking out its last painful breaths. The other plodded around the field, stuffing dry skulls into its maw and lowing mournfully, perhaps for the lack of meat to savour, perhaps in sadness for its companion.

‘Ushkar Mir brings us victory!’ shouted Orto. His loud voice was immediately swallowed by the dry vastness of the desert, and the slaughterpriest looked dismayed for a moment.

‘A hard victory,’ said Vuul. He looked at the dying beast. With a last rattling moan, it expired.

Many Bloodslaves had died on the march to the gate. Two dozen at least had fallen to ancient blades here. There had been two thousand Bloodslaves only months ago. Less than a tenth remained.

‘Mir leads us. What does Mir command?’ asked Skull.

Ushkar Mir grunted and pointed with his chin to the lighter patch of sky.

‘Onward, then,’ said Skull. He plucked his sword from the dry earth, and sheathed it. ‘More skulls await, though precious little blood in this dusty place.’

If a sun shone over the Bone Sands, it was forever hidden by louring clouds. There was a day and a night of sorts, but the cycle played inconstantly. A day might last ten hours, or one. The land never grew any brighter than when they had first arrived, and the nights were utterly black, starless and frigid. The Bloodslaves’ lips blued and they shivered in the chill. They had nothing to burn and nothing to hunt. Each man carried only scanty provisions. There was no change to the relentless landscape. Horizons receded before their march to reveal yet more endless flat land, its featurelessness broken only by isolated skulls or ribcages that had escaped the attentions of time.

All save Kordos felt the punishments of thirst and hunger. The skullgrinder was sustained by the unholy fires of his chained altar.

By the end of the third day, their meat and drink had been exhausted.

The Bloodslaves’ confident march became halting. They dragged their weapons through the dust, leaving wavering trails behind them.

On the fifth night, the Bloodslaves fell on the weakest among them.

Darkness came suddenly. They huddled together as close as they dared as the temperature plummeted. Some instinct took a sole bloodreaver away from the rest. One too many hungry glances in his direction, maybe. He sat crosslegged, his hands on his weapons, but he could not defeat sleep. He had had no rest for days. No power can keep man from rest forever, unless he is highly favoured by the Four.

Three men attacked as soon as the drowsy bloodreaver’s head nodded onto his chest. He was up quickly at the sound of their approach. He desperately dispatched one of his attackers, but if he had hoped that this provision of unlooked for meat would save his life, he had been mistaken. He had been marked for death, and in that realm death did not relent.

Skull, Vuul, Mir, Orto and Kordos watched as the bloodreaver was killed. The warrior’s axe halted a blow aimed overhand for the crown of his head, but he had nothing to stop the knife that one of his erstwhile comrades plunged up under his ribs, piercing his heart. He fell dead instantly – a mercy. The Bloodslaves were not above eating their victims alive.

‘Fresh meat!’ rumbled Orto. The brassiness of his god-voice was diminished by thirst, and the desert was quicker to steal it the further they went into it.

‘Aye,’ said Skull. ‘We eat, but there are fewer of us.’

‘The weak perish,’ hissed Vuul. His lips dripped at thought of the feast. He wiped them on the back of his arm.

‘That they do,’ said Skull. ‘But there can only be one who is strongest. Do we devour each other until he remains, then starves himself?’ He half drew his sword, then slammed it back into its scabbard.

The rest of the band gathered around the corpses of the bloodreaver and his felled killer. They waited, glassy-eyed with hunger, as the bodies were stripped. Two skullreapers hoisted the slain bloodreaver up by his ankles. A third crouched and slit the throat. Life fluid drained from the cut neck, splattering on the dust.

‘Meat for us, blood for Khorne,’ said Orto, his voice growing stronger at the sight of the blood.

‘Meat! Khorne provides!’ responded the others.

They cut their dead comrade’s head free.

‘Skulls for Khorne!’ shouted Orto.

‘Skulls! Skulls! Skulls!’ howled the others.

‘No,’ a voice boomed across the desert. The Bloodslaves looked around fearfully.

‘Look!’ cried one. He pointed at the ground, and they all stepped back. Where the blood wetted the bone dust it bubbled and hissed.

They readied their weapons. A figure rose from the ground, slathered in blood at first, but the fluid froze and cracked away to reveal a greenly glowing phantom within. Its ghostly eyes were blank orbs and its face bore no expression, but its mouth jerked to a will not its own.

‘This land belongs to Lord Nagash. All who perish are his,’ spoke the phantom.

Spectres arose from the ground all around the Bloodslaves and flew over to spiral around the first, making a terrible shrieking that had the Bloodslaves clapping their hands over their ears.

‘No!’ shouted Orto. ‘These skulls are Khorne’s! Begone!’

Three skullreapers lunged for the spirit. Their twin blades slashed the air, cutting nothing. The spirits moved around them like weeds disturbed in water, swirling about but never snagging. Their eyes grew brighter and they shrieked, diving down on the Bloodslaves. Their touch was death. Ethereal claws slid into chests and men’s eyes bulged as their hearts stopped. The Bloodslaves were brave and fired by the righteous wrath of Khorne, but against a foe that no weapon could touch they began to waver. The remaining khorgorath moaned, batting at the untouchable spirits as their hands caressed its warped flesh, leaving blackened trails of necrotic tissue in their wake. One swooped low, scooping up the half-flayed head of the slain bloodreaver, and started to retreat.

Mir had no fear of the spirit host. His men drew strength from his example, forming up as best they could around him as he strode into the thick of the spirits. Skullthief and Bloodspite hissed through the air. The daemons within whined at the touch of the dead, for they were of fire and hate and the coldness of the grave was unpleasant to them, but Mir forced them to strike. Wherever the axes fell, the spirits dissipated into shreds of vapour that were sucked screaming into the blades. They tried to flee, what little was left of their mortal souls terrified of the deathbringer’s axes, but they all fell to Mir and were consumed. He pursued the last, that which had stolen the skull of the bloodreaver, and hewed it from the air. Orto plucked the head from the dust and brandished it triumphantly.

Only the first phantom remained. It turned doleful white eyes on the deathbringer. Once again, its mouth seemed puppeted by some distant, malign entity.

‘You shall suffer for this insult. These are the lands of death!’

With a mighty cry it departed, shooting skyward as a pillar of green light. Where it hit the clouds above there was a flaring, and a single peal of thunder boomed across the sky. It echoed across the desert for an age.

‘Khorne’s meat! Khorne’s blood!’ shouted Orto.

There were many corpses now, thanks to the spirits’ attack.

‘We feast! To victory! To Mir!’ bellowed Orto.

‘Ushkar Mir! Khorne! Blood and flesh!’ The Bloodslaves cheered and drew their knives, advancing hungrily on their dead.

From nowhere, a sudden wind blew, dry but laden with the scent of slow putrefaction, whipping hair into eyes and choking the men with whirling dust. The Bloodslaves’ looks of anticipation turned to horror and woe, for the corpses withered in front of their eyes. Skin turned grey and flesh wizened. Lips drew back in hideous black grins. The bodies of the fallen dried to husks in an instant. Their skeletons collapsed to the ground where they fell into brittle pieces, as ancient in appearance as the bones they joined. Most were reduced to a powder that was carried away by the fell wind.

A few corpses held together, scraps of dried flesh adhering to their bones. Two bloodreavers, one desperate in his hunger, the other disdainful of the magic of the dead, tore off strips of this matter. It was tough, leathery as jerky. They worked their mouths on it hard, the hungry man fearful, the other laughing in his boldness.

They died choking on the flesh of their fallen brethren. Black lines ran over their skin, a map of corruption depicted by tainted veins. They fell, fingers scrabbling at the ground.

The Bloodslaves watched nervously. The wind did not return, and the bodies remained whole, but they did not eat these last casualties. Nor did they attempt to slaughter one of their own again. The servants of Khorne had learned wary respect for Nagash’s domain.

‘Onward,’ croaked Skull.

The Bloodslaves’ ranks thinned further as they succumbed to thirst. At first those falling listlessly were the weaker bloodreavers, but it was not long before the blood warriors started to drop, then even the mighty skullreapers, whose Khorne-given might availed them not against the harshness of the desert. Still the Bloodslaves followed Mir, who was fixed single-mindedly on the call of Archaon. Always it sounded in his ears, sometimes so faint he had to strain to hear it, at other times blaring so loudly in the night that all his followers heard it. Orto exhorted them to go on, while Skull whispered terror into their ears. Kordos said nothing.

One pale morning, the last khorgorath left them. As the Bloodslaves twitched awake from dreams of corpse banquets, the beast consumed the skulls of four warriors dead of thirst in the night. Ordinarily the creature would have continued its snuffling after fresh skulls to devour, whimpering at the endless pain that dogged it. Not this time.

The last skull eaten, the khorgorath stood erect, head held high and eyes wide. It came out of some stupor, for it gazed around the warband as if seeing it for the first time. It took up the chains that hobbled it in paws that had mutated into snapping mouths. Weighing them for a moment, it tugged hard, then wrenched, until it had split them asunder.

‘The beast!’ hissed Skull, kicking the bloodstoker, Vuul. ‘It is loose! Use your whip! Do something!’

Vuul looked up, startled.

‘Catch it!’ roared Orto. ‘Stop it from escaping!’

Several warriors advanced on it, grabbing at its manacles, but the khorgorath was indifferent to their efforts. It walked away, dragging the men that would not let go behind it and swatting at those who attempted to bar its progress.

Ushkar Mir reached for his axes, but the pudgy, calloused hands of Danavan Vuul stopped him.

‘No my lord, it cannot be stopped,’ he said. ‘Orto! Skull! Do not stand in its way.’

The others faltered, looking to Mir. Mir nodded that they should obey. The men got out of the beast’s path.

‘It has eaten its fill of skulls,’ explained Vuul. ‘Now it must return to the Lord Khorne and vomit them at his feet. Later it will return to the Mortal Realms. Maybe it will come back to us, maybe not.’

‘Let us hope,’ said Skull, rejoining his lord.

Orto stood at the edge of the crowd and watched the khorgorath go, then his long, mutated legs brought him back to the side of the deathbringer and bloodstoker. ‘It is true. It is the sacrament of beasts. As we smash skulls upon Kordos’ anvil, or stack them into cairns so that they might be taken up by Khorne, the khorgorath has its own way of honouring the Blood God.’

‘You should have prevented it from feasting!’ said Skull. ‘That is a sore loss.’

Vuul shrugged. ‘I kept watch upon it and my whip kept it from consuming too many skulls. Who else took upon themselves this duty? I am no beastmaster. If it is time for it to depart, then that is as Khorne wishes. The khorgoraths are his creatures.’

‘It is the will of Khorne,’ agreed Orto. ‘Do not question it.’

They watched the Khorgorath plod away from the warband. The desert air was clear, and even after they took up their march again in the opposite direction, the khorgorath could be seen as a dark shape far away, until a flash of fiery light carried it away from the Bone Sands and the realm of Shyish.

‘It is still a sore loss,’ spat Skull.

The twelfth day came. Armoured corpses marked the Bloodslaves’ trail as far as the horizon, lonely metal islands in the bone dust. Above, the clouds cleared a little, finally revealing glimpses of a dim, purple sun. When it shone, the desert turned violet and made their eyes ache. There was no change to the desert until Skull stopped and raised his hand to shield his eyes against the glaring sky. He caught Mir’s wrist.

‘My lord! Look!’

Some distance away there was an irregularity on the horizon. The Bloodslaves picked up their pace, staggering and half dead though they were, desperate for something other than ceaseless dust and bone to look upon.

Giant stone skulls were set in a circle facing outward. The spaces between them were tangled with a thicket of black-leaved thorns. As they grew nearer, the tell-tale glint of water shone.

‘An oasis!’ they cried. ‘Water!’

They jogged toward the oasis, many abandoning their weapons and throwing themselves at the bushes to get at the pool they guarded. Thumb-sized spikes of wood tore at their skin as they fought their way through. Others, more circumspect, hacked at the branches with axe and sword.

Mir marched up and swung Bloodspite at the bush.

‘I am no woodsman’s axe, to cut back the weeds!’ protested the weapon. ‘I am the chosen killer of Khorne!’

Down Bloodspite came anyway, forced to do Mir’s will. Where it cut into the tangle, the thorn bushes curled back, shrinking away like paper from fire. In a moment, the way was clear and the Bloodslaves were through. A silver-grey pool awaited, as still as a mirror. Mir’s men bounced from his back as they struggled past him, throwing themselves at the water. Mir watched them.

‘Stop! Stop!’ shouted Orto, his commanding voice ruined by thirst. He went to the men and pulled them from the water’s edge, but those there did not heed him and drank deeply. ‘This land is cursed!’

The men started to cry out. Those not yet at the water backed away cautiously as several of their comrades were afflicted by wracking pain. They splashed around in the water, crying for mercy and gripping at their heads.

Flesh convulsed and warped, limbs withered, and new ones sprang in profusion from backs bent into fantastical shapes. One man screamed as his bones tore themselves from his skin, the bloody skeleton running laughing into the desert, leaving the man’s soft parts behind as a heaving mess. Another lit up with blue flames that did not consume him as they burned, and the bloodreaver writhed and screamed until Orto cut off his head. The rest mutated rapidly, dying as their hearts gave out under the strain.

Orto pointed into the oily water. Green light pulsed in the depths.

‘Warpstone. This oasis is poisoned.’

There was a crack of thunder and a smell of brimstone. Over the water the messenger of Archaon appeared.

It was the same being as before, but in a different form, one assembled from other remains. The eyes were the same, nestling moistly in a skull ten thousand years dry, but the skull was different, as were the clothes and the rest.

‘New bones for our examiner,’ croaked Skull. ‘Why does it show itself now? Is it another test?’

‘I say Mir has completed three,’ said Orto. ‘Fury for Khorne, endurance for Nurgle,’ he looked at the shivering remains of the mutated Bloodslaves, ‘and restraint for the Dark Prince.’

‘You guess. These tests could go on forever,’ said Vuul.

Skull scowled at him. ‘You were vocal in your support for Lord Ushkar Mir.’

‘That was then, this is now. This gambit offers no reward. The call of Archaon could be false.’

‘It is not false.’ Skull pointed back at the desert. ‘If you are unhappy, leave. My lord is ready for the fourth test,’ said Skull.

‘Then what is it?’ snapped Vuul.

The skeleton responded by pointing to the water.

Now Skull felt doubt. ‘No, no! The water offers only death.’ He drew his sword and waved it at Archaon’s herald.

The skeleton gestured and the sword flew from Skull’s hand. Another gesture stayed his attack, freezing him in place, and a third lifted him into the air. Skull made a strangled noise.

‘Maybe, maybe,’ murmured Orto. ‘To drink deeply of this oasis is to die as you have seen. But to take one drop – could it bring power, visions, wisdom?’

‘It will kill him,’ said Vuul.

‘I drink of the slaughtergruel. That is deadly, if one is unworthy. Mir is worthy.’ Orto addressed Ushkar Mir. ‘You, Ushkar Mir, must face this trial and triumph, or the way to Archaon will be closed to you and we will all die.’

‘How can you know?’ said Vuul.

‘Khorne whispers in my ear. He must drink but a single drop!’

‘It is his choice, not yours, slaughterpriest. What will Lord Mir do?’ asked Vuul.

Orto grunted. ‘Cowardice is not Khorne’s way!’

Ushkar Mir was already kneeling by the pool. He extended one huge finger to the surface, and touched the water. The mirror surface broke but slightly, rings of ripples chasing each other and fading fast.

Skull fell to the ground with a clatter.

‘I do not see we have much choice,’ he said.

‘Nevertheless, it is our lord’s choice,’ said Orto. ‘It is not ours. He is the chosen of Khorne!’ He held his axe aloft in his hand and the remaining Bloodslaves fell to their knees.

Raising the finger to his exposed teeth, Ushkar Mir looked at the herald of Archaon. Its five eyes stared back.

‘But one drop!’ warned Orto.

Mir extended his crimson tongue, and licked the tip of his finger.

Immediately, the world went black.

Ushkar Mir fell through darkness. Wind rushed past him, but even its roaring could not subdue the far-away bellows of Khorne, demanding more blood and war. The call of Archaon he heard also, a trumpet blast that went on and on, unvarying in pitch and volume.

Then it was over and he was upon solid ground. Rain hammered off his head. It revived him, washed the dust from him. He licked at it, running his tongue over his arms and his chin to catch the moisture and moaned at the relief it brought from days of thirst. Noise of a different sort came to his ears – the sounds of battle. A wall of rough stone met his hands, and he scrabbled at it ineffectually. Shakily, he got to his feet, alarmed at the weakness in him, but it quickly passed. His sight returned and he found himself leaning upon a parapet looking down into a cauldron of war. Daemons and mortal followers of Khorne seethed around the base of mighty city walls, as numerous as ants.

Towering bloodthirsters whipped on lesser daemons and humans alike as they pushed at the bases of brass siege towers, two hundred feet tall. There were dozens of towers, absurd in scale. They should not have moved at all. But Chaos has no respect for the natural laws of Mortal Realms, and move they did. Gargants and other, less recognisable things strained in harnesses at the towers’ fronts. As Mir watched, one was speared by nine long bolts hurled by war machines from the wall, and fell howling. It did not matter. Its traces were cut, its body hauled aside by dog-faced beastmen, and the siege tower ground forward. The towers moved slowly, but were indomitable. Boulders rattled off their thick plating. The fire from magical artillery fizzled harmlessly from their spell wards. Every hit that was turned aside marked another dozen feet moved toward the wall.

Lightning boomed in stormy skies. The churning clouds were black, patterned with bright blue lightning. The wall on which Mir stood was deserted by the living, and choked with the dead. Proud knights and humble soldiers lay contorted in the positions of final agony, commoner and lord intertwined. Death holds no regard for rank.

The rain pouring out of the gargoyle spouts set into the wall’s outer face was coloured red with blood washed from the wall-walk. Mir knew, remembered, that soon the skies would send down not water but blood. A great tear would open in the very stuff of the realm, and the kingdom of Khorne would send forth its mightiest daemon legion. Already three of the five bastions he could see from his position had fallen, and the wall was riven with cracks. It would not be long now.

He looked again on the last day of Mir, and his last hours as a mortal.

‘I should kill you where you stand, traitor,’ said a voice behind him.

Mir turned suddenly, taken unawares for the first time in decades.

A tall, powerfully built man stood there. He wore a lamellae coat of iron plates enamelled red and gold, and a tall helmet with a horse hair plume. In his hands he held twin axes of blue steel.

‘And yet why do I not?’ asked the man curiously.

Ushkar Mir gaped, the rain running into his lipless mouth.

‘Ushkar Mir,’ he said, discovering to his amazement that he could speak once more. The words were clumsy, his lack of lips hindering his ability to talk, although less than it should. The man before him was Mir as he had been, before that terrible choice. A choice that, the Mir of the future realised, must soon be made again.

‘That I am. General of this city, and until hours ago bearer of its last hopes. But hope has deserted me.’ He looked hard at Mir. ‘How came you here to the top of this wall? None of the Blood God’s servants have surmounted it alive. Are you an assassin, come to kill me before the final attack? I did not think that your lord’s way, but then, we have irked him for some time.’ He smiled sorrowfully. ‘Tell me, before I kill you, what is your name?’

‘Ushkar Mir,’ said the future Ushkar Mir.

The Mir of the past shifted back in alarm. ‘What?’ He searched Mir’s face for any recognisable feature. ‘That may be so. I have fought too long against the madness of Chaos to discount anything. That time is not free from the perversion of the Four surprises me not at all. But if it is the case, then I am much changed.’

‘Khorne,’ said Mir. ‘He... Argh!’

This latest test was the worst of all. Pain attacked Mir from every angle. His punishment band glowed with heat, his heart thudded with anger fit to burst, his blinded eyes ached. Worst was the pain in his soul. All the rest was imposed from without, but this pain came from deep within and tormented him mercilessly.

‘Look at you grovel. How could I become such a thing? No doubt I am offered the choice of the Dark Feast.’

Mir nodded.

‘And I fail?’ said the Mir of the past.

‘Not failure!’ gasped Mir. He pitted his will against his punishment band, pushing back the heat. He managed with effort, a feat he had not accomplished before. Perhaps this was some effect of his journey through time, or perhaps he was strengthened by the presence of his purer self.

‘Revenge?’ said the Mir of the past.

Mir nodded. ‘I fight in his wars, but I have but one goal. I will stand before him and spit in his face, and bury my axes in his head.’

The Mir of the past laughed. ‘That does sound like me.’ His laughter deserted him. ‘How many innocents have you slaughtered to further your vengeance?’

‘Thousands,’ said Mir. ‘They would have died anyway, and for ignoble ends. There is nothing good left. Better a quick death for the weak. After Mir falls, there is only Chaos. Revenge is all there is.’

‘Revenge that can never be achieved!’ said Mir of the past. ‘They say Khorne is as tall as a mountain and as mighty as the sun! Nothing can fight him. No man or daemon can kill the Blood God.’

‘Gods die,’ said Mir.

‘By the hand of the likes of us?’ Mir frowned. ‘Impossible. The realms are large and not all the free people will fall. I still harbour hopes of that. Better to kill as many of these filth as I can, and die with honour.’

‘I once thought so, but all kingdoms fall, one by one,’ said the Mir of the future bitterly. ‘To serve Chaos is your only chance at survival, and the only path to revenge.’ He shook his head. ‘This cannot be. This is an illusion. I have not been as you are for five hundred years.’

The Mir of the past silently contemplated their situation. ‘If it is an illusion, then you are the illusion, not I – one last torture before I die. The Chaos Gods are boundless in their cruelty.’ But then he closed his eyes. ‘No. This is real. I feel it.’

The Mir of the future felt it too. He felt his memories change. He recalled this meeting from the other side, many years ago. Within a minute, he could not remember ever having not recalled it.

They watched as magical fire shot in a giant plume to engulf one of the towers, burning so hot the metal of its superstructure glowed red and ignited. Screams of pain and outrage sounded from that quarter, as showers of burning brass mingled with the rain fell among the warriors of Khorne.

‘If you are myself from some distant time, tell me what befalls me,’ said the Mir of the past. ‘How do I go from this to you.’

‘In but a short time, the rain will turn to blood. The Lord of Skulls will open the gates to his own realm, and the worst of his hellish legions will come out. The city will fall. You will fight every step of the way while everything you care for and love is destroyed. Finally, in despair you will be taken, alive, at the steps of the Old Palace, and given the choice by Korghos Khul himself.’

‘You said yes to this choice.’

‘With my voice I did. With my heart, I did not,’ said Mir. ‘I say no every day. Khorne took my voice for defying him. He put this band upon me to torment me. But I amuse him, I think. He keeps me alive. That will be his mistake.’

The Mir of the past looked at his twisted future in disgust. ‘Then I thank you for showing me the consequences of revenge. I shall make sure to choose differently.’

‘No!’ shouted Mir. But his earlier self had brought his axes up with blurring speed. Mir’s arm was cut deep.

‘Stop! Wait!’ he shouted.

‘I will slay you first. You have become what I most fear, all for a coward’s moment of weakness. Death is preferable to this.’

The steel axes came at Mir’s head. But the Mir of the past stopped suddenly, his eyes wide with surprise. His axes fell from nerveless hands.

Mir of the future wrenched Skullthief out of his earlier self’s chest. The Mir of old had been a mighty hero, but the Mir of the Bloodslaves was blessed by Khorne. No normal man could best him.

‘No!’ screamed Ushkar Mir. ‘No!’

Then a most curious thing happened. A lightning bolt smote the wall-walk where Ushkar Mir had died. The Mir of the future was thrown back, dazed. When he recovered his wits, his earlier self had gone.

Ushkar Mir had no time to ponder this new development. The first of the siege towers hit the wall. Its brazen drawbridge clashed down onto the parapet and the warriors of the Blood God streamed across.

Very well, if his earlier self was not here to fight, then Mir would take his place. Mir ran forward to engage them, to spill their blood again and try vainly to save his home. But the wall dissolved beneath his feet, and the battle’s noise vanished. He wheeled his arms as he fell back into blackness, helplessly falling.

Ushkar Mir’s body convulsed. He sat bolt upright, coughing hard. Black sludge poured from his mouth. When he reached his hand up to wipe it away his arm twinged with pain. Looking down, he saw the gash inflicted by the Ushkar Mir of the past, and marvelled at it.

‘You have succeeded,’ said a voice from the sky. The skeleton fell apart, splashing into the pool. The sky wobbled, and a huge skull set with five eyes shimmered into being in the heavens. The sky convulsed again, and the daemon-thing that Mir had seen in the Bloodbloom Fields revealed itself to all the Bloodslaves.

‘The way is open!’ said the Many-Eyed Servant. Its voice sounded loudly, from everywhere, and the Bloodslaves shrank back from it. ‘I judge you worthy. Go to Archaon and submit your pledge. The final decision rests with him. You will find him elsewhere in Shyish. Beware, for others come also.’

‘Do we fight them?’ shouted Skull.

‘That is up to Mir,’ said the herald.

The vision, Mir tried to say. Was it real? All that came from his mouth was animal moaning. The herald understood.

‘All choices carry consequences, Ushkar Mir. Choose wisely!’

A crackle of magic ran from horizon to horizon. The bushes withered to nothing and the pool was sucked away into the ground, leaving no trace of its existence. The skulls pulled themselves under the ground. Endless desert once again greeted the Bloodslaves, and they wailed in despair.

‘A trick!’ hissed Vuul.

‘Wait,’ said Orto.

A light shone over the place where the pool had been. A bright star as large as a fist flared into being before Mir’s face, rays of hard light stabbing out from it. The desert wavered through its light. The star burst outwards. A shower of sparkling motes hit the ground and a way opened up.

The Bloodslaves looked through the portal and saw a new land where a kinder sun shone. Dark against the horizon was a range of low hills covered in sere grasses. The tiny dots of birds wheeled in the sky. It was arid, but a paradise in comparison to the Bone Sands. Warm wind blew through the gate.

The horns of Archaon blared again. Ushkar Mir stood. He probed the wound he had taken in his vision, uncertain what it meant. Was what had happened real or illusory, or both?

Skull sniffed at the wind. ‘I smell decay.’

Orto pointed through the gate. On the faraway hills a line of marching figures went along a ridge. The faint strains of cheerful music reached their ears along with the foetid reek.

‘The servants of pestilence. Filth-eaters,’ said Orto.

‘The others the herald spoke of,’ said Vuul.

‘Some. There will be more,’ said Orto. ‘We will slay them all.’

Mir was not listening. He put the vision from his mind. There was only blood and skulls, and the distant possibility of vengeance. Nothing else mattered.

He sheathed his axes, and set out towards his destiny.

IN THE LANDS OF THE BLIND

Rob Sanders

The Many-Eyed Servant, whose many eyes were everywhere at once, blinked his way across the Mortal Realms. Sights. Scenes. The serenity of horror observed but not experienced.

A banquet for the eyes. The daemon drank in the multiplicity of the realms, and of existences beyond that.

Life, death and everything in between played out before him like an unpleasant fiction. Children were born, their cries echoing those of their mothers just moments before. Men roared their rage, groaned in agony and spoke their secret and most desperate thoughts to themselves. Kings and beggars ached for what they couldn’t have, while the beasts that roamed the realms around them knew only the living moment. Here in the lands of the blind, where mortal wretches understood nothing more than the immediacy of their world and their miserable place in it, the Many-Eyed Servant was all-seeing, all-knowing.

The daemon’s gaze focused. In a blink it was drawn back to a story unfinished and a tale untold. Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, was near. A fellow disciple of fate’s dread architect, the god Tzeentch, and a sorcerous champion of darkness, it was he who would find a place in the ranks of the Varanguard – those ushers of the apocalypse, those knights of almighty Chaos selected by the Everchosen to serve the Ruinous Pantheon by his side.

The prince had come far since the Many-Eyed Servant had first seen him. He who had been far was now nearing. He had already faced great trials but he had to be tested anew, for the Everchosen was exacting. Only those of the blackest soul and darkest talents would fight in the company of living doom.

It was for that reason that the Many-Eyed Servant kept his eternal watch. He was Archaon’s terrible gaze cast far across the realms, but here he found an aspirant before their gates.

The Great Spoilage. A rotten wasteland.

Death, as far as the eye could see. Bodies carpeted the land, lying as deep as a lake or shallow sea. Mouldering. Putrefying. Liquefying. Whatever cataclysmic event had been responsible for such devastation was lost to time. Thousands, perhaps millions, had died or been dumped there. Had it been a battle to end all battles? There were plenty of butchered warriors rotting there, but it could just as likely have been a genocidal slaughter, a grand suicide pact or some unnatural disaster that had visited its elemental wrath upon the masses, with corpses raining from the sky.

Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, negotiated the cadavers with difficulty. From the Beaten Path, Zuvius had followed the crows. He had followed them as they moved from battlefield to common butchery. He had followed them as they feasted upon lone travellers and slaughtered armies alike. He had followed them to the Great Spoilage, where it seemed every other crow in the realms was enjoying a scavenger’s bounty.

Like harsh, hilly terrain or the crests of powerful waves, the Great Spoilage was an undulating landscape of cankered flesh and bone. Ribs gave, soiled cloth tore and rotting meat turned to maggot-choked, watery mush about Zuvius’ boots. However, while the land reeked of death, the place was very much alive. Blankets of fat flies smothered the sea of carcasses, filling both the ear and mind with their incessant drone. Rats swarmed through the dead, gnawing, tunnelling and expanding their rancid nests. Crows feasted on both flesh and flies, hopping, swooping and wheeling about Zuvius and his warband as the Tzeentchians made their way across the corpselands. So great was the plague of carrion birds that they blacked out the horizon ahead. Larger pot-bellied scavengers scrambled up and down the fleshmounds, tearing yellowing flesh from bodies and crunching the marrow from bones.

Zuvius held the ragged edge of his cloak over his mouth. The web of melted skin that stretched across the rawness of his scorched face squirmed with revulsion. This place was undoubtedly sacred to the Great Lord of Decay. Its stench saturated the blue straggles of the prince’s hair. Its rank taste was on his smeared lips and silver tongue. Zuvius detested it but in truth could think of no more suitable test or obstacle to place between a servant of the Great Changer and his goal than an expanse of stagnant rot.

The bird Mallofax circled their progress, riding on the rising stench, watching for potential threats. The warband had come across few. Small nests of ghouls picked over the bounty in places, while nomadic looters crossed the corpselands, neither interested in Orphaeo Zuvius or where he was headed. Even Zuvius had doubts about that. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos and Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, had called for him. Zuvius had followed the signs, followed the crows, but they had led him to a carrion paradise, a mouldering land of dead flesh that undoubtedly attracted every bird in the realm.

Behind the Prince of Embers, Sir Abriel followed. The groaning knight had once been the captain of the royal guard. What remained of that band was now the Hexenguard. They trudged through the spoilage in silence, dark knights of Tzeentch whose plate glowed with enchantments. In their footsteps followed the Unseeing – Zuvius’ coven of blind sorcerers. The wretches staggered and tripped through the dead, one gnarled hand laid upon the shoulder of the sorcerer in front. They looked ancient and helpless, but their appearance belied their true power. With a gesture, the sorcerers could re-craft the flesh of nearby foes into representations of their twisted visions.

Using the sorcerous glaive A’ cuitas to cut a path, Zuvius waded through the morass of breaking bones and sloughing flesh. Hauling himself up onto the corpse of a festering gargant, the prince knelt and rested, putting the raw skin of his forehead against his weapon’s haft. As Sir Abriel, the Hexenguard and Zuvius’ wretch-sorcerers climbed up onto the monstrous cadaver beside him, Mallofax returned, perching on the bill-hook of the glaive’s crowning blade.

Zuvius tapped the pommel of the glaive on the gargant’s hide. It was hard, waxy and mummified. Fungi bloomed across the giant carcass. Looking out across the corpse mounds, the prince watched as crows spooked by other scavengers took to the skies, wheeling about in rancid formations before settling once more. He tried to catch his breath but it was difficult. Every lungful of air was concentrated corruption that closed the throat and heaved the stomach. Mallofax flapped. The Hexenguard stood like warped, knightly statues. The Unseeing broke up and spread out across the gargant’s chest, feeling their way across jutting bone.

‘The Varanspire,’ Zuvius said. ‘Where is the damned thing?’

‘Everywhere and nowhere, my prince,’ the reptilian bird told him in a series of hisses and squawks. ‘It exists in the Realm of Chaos. It is here but also there. Near but impossibly far.’

‘Enough with the riddles,’ Zuvius warned.

‘I speak only truth,’ Mallofax said.

‘Well, you’re bad at it,’ Zuvius told him. ‘You should stick to lies, they’re more convincing. I’m beginning to think that we are going to end up the same way as these miserable souls.’

‘My lord?’

‘Perhaps they all set out for this palace of Chaos,’ Zuvius mused, ‘and died on the journ–’

Zuvius felt a quake through the soles of his armoured boots.

‘What is it?’ Mallofax squawked.

Zuvius stood, looking down at the yellowing flesh of the gargant. The quake turned into a series of thrashing tremors that shook the colossal carcass. The Unseeing froze while Sir Abriel and his malformed knights drew the notched blades of their longswords. In front of them, a sorcerer of the Unseeing suddenly disappeared. One moment he stood there in his rag-robes, the next he had been swallowed by the cadaver.

Disappearing into a pit of chewed flesh, the sorcerer screamed his way to death. The gargant’s corpse bucked as a terrible creature erupted from it. Feeding quietly on the underside of the great carcass, a horrific maggoth had smelled their freshness. Chewing up through the rot with the shredding teeth of its maw, the thing erupted from the gargant like a monster of the deep. Its arms and legs were but stunted remnants used to propel it through the dead, and its skin was sticky with spoilage. It held there for a moment before blasting a stream of half-digested rot back at the sky.

As Mallofax took off, Sir Abriel and the Hexenguard came forward with swords presented to protect their master. The maggoth went under once more, wriggling itself loose of the carcass. The Unseeing grasped for one another while the Hexenguard pulled Zuvius back from where the giant corpse met the sea of bodies. Cadavers twitched and death-stiff limbs moved as the monstrous maggoth swam and ate its way through the corpses. Zuvius turned A’ cuitas about in his gauntlets and pursed his lips in disgust. Not only did the prince have to wade through the Great Lord of Decay’s detritus, he now had to suffer the attentions of some Nurglesque monstrosity stalking them through the killing fields.

Zuvius felt the cadaver buck beneath them again as the maggoth rose once more. Chewing up through the body, it exploded from the gargant king’s gut. Another sorcerer of the Unseeing fell back into the pit of shearing teeth and rotting mulch. As he instinctively reached out, a member of the Hexenguard grabbed for him.

‘No!’ Zuvius called.

As the sorcerer thrust out his hand blindly, the tattooed symbols on his bony palm burned with fear. The Hexenguard knight, already a twisted, god-pleasing thing, clutched his chest, his screams joining the sorcerer’s own. His plate screeched as he began to contort and change shape, becoming the frightful vision of terror that flashed through the sorcerer’s mind during his last moments.

Toppling forward, the monstrosity knocked into another member of the Hexenguard. The knight slipped, his armoured boots scrabbling down the pit of rotting flesh. His dark blue steel sword bounced behind him, down into the maggoth’s great trap of teeth. Zuvius lunged and grabbed the knight by the arms. Surging once more, the maggoth clamped its obscene jaws about the knight and thrashed its teeth. Cutting the warrior of Chaos almost in half, the creature tugged, dragging Zuvius over the ragged lip of the pit. Sir Abriel reached for his master. Zuvius scrambled away from the great maggoth but his boots and gauntlets slipped through the slime of the gargant’s entrails.

The Unseeing moaned in their blindness. Mallofax squawked overhead. Zuvius kicked and turned, freeing himself of Sir Abriel’s ghoulish grip. The maggoth’s jaws gaped open and a black pool of digestive rot rose up from within. A warty tongue shot out of the pool like a serpent, wrapping itself around the prince’s leg. As Zuvius kicked and slid towards his doom, the muscular tongue retracted, hauling him to the edge of the maggoth’s fang-lined jaws.

From above, Zuvius heard Mallofax’s half-stifled squawk. The bird was flapping his wings with effort, trying to stay above the cadaverous pit while clutching the metal shaft of A’ cuitas in his scaly talons. As the weapon dropped, Zuvius watched the glaive tumble blade over pommel. Both the prince and his weapon were heading for the same place – the maggoth’s foetid mouth.

Zuvius snatched the daemon-forged glaive out of the rank air. Spinning the weapon around, he cut through the monster’s scabrous tongue with one sweep of the heavy blade. It did not stop the beast. Turning A’ cuitas about, he aimed the pommel of the weapon down the creature’s cavernous throat. The eye at the end of the glaive’s shaft opened and a stream of lightning leapt from the weapon. Lighting up the darkness of the doom within, the lightning caused the maggoth to retract, tremble, boil, and finally explode.

Zuvius held his position through the black tempest of rot that erupted about him. As a putrescent mist drifted back down, Zuvius used the glaive to climb out of the gargant-corpse’s abdomen. Reaching down, Sir Abriel hauled his master up. With the exception of Mallofax, who circled above, the whole warband dripped with stinking corruption.

‘We are being tested,’ Zuvius said through gritted teeth. Spitting rot from his lips, he once more descended into the sea of the dead and set forth, leading the warband onwards.

‘Where is it?’ the Prince of Embers demanded. They had been walking for days, the rankness of rot and death coating them like a blanket. There had been no sign of the dark citadel that Zuvius had seen in his vision or the gateway leading to it. The Great Spoilage seemed to extend forever, in all directions. The flocks of crows blacked out the sky, the cacophony of their incessant cawing an invitation to insanity.

‘We shall find it, my lord,’ Mallofax assured him.

‘Will we indeed?’ Zuvius roared. ‘Will that be before or after we join the fallen at our feet?’

He turned A’ cuitas on the bird, whose cryptic explanations were almost as infuriating as the endless horizon of crow-pecked corpses, and unleashed a blast of lightning that arced across the mouldering landscape and scalded the stench about it. Narrowly missing Mallofax, the stream of energy sent the bird flapping and squawking for the safety of the sky.

He wasn’t the only one. Disturbed by the sudden crack of lightning, the crows carpeting the wasteland ahead of the warband took to the air in a storm of black feathers. As the flock lifted and cleared the path before the Prince of Embers, a fortress was revealed. The colossal castle reached into the skies with clawed turrets, citadels and towers of brick and blade. It was an abominate construction, its concentric walls an unbreachable barrier of dark stone and iron, each more towering than the last. They surrounded a central spire that pierced the heavens and resembled a spiked gauntlet punching victoriously at the sky.

The infernal architecture of the place was as disturbing as it was impressive, a fortress-shrine to Chaos, blasphemous in sculpture and indomitable in design. Its very presence brought forth storms that tore the sky asunder. Daemonic furies perched amongst the spires and circled in furious unnatural squalls. Elevated walkways of blood-stained stone spanned the fields of perpetual flame that raged about the castle and its moat, while its gargantuan gates were lined with monstrous metal teeth.

‘The Varanspire,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘What else could it be?’ Mallofax agreed, coming in to land on his master’s glaive.

‘Let’s find out,’ Zuvius said.

The corpselands, though they had sapped the vigour of the warband with their stench, their marshy putrefaction and their bone traps, were now nothing to the Tzeentchians. Every crunching, squelching, spore-cloud-disturbing step took them closer to the dark majesty of the Varanspire – the fortress of Archaon, the Destroyer of Worlds.

As the cadavers began to thin and Zuvius’ boots found the blasted black grit of the solid ground that lay beyond the corpse marshes, the prince noticed other groups moving towards the fortress. Some were armoured and rode on horseback, while others moved in great barbarian hordes. Champions of Chaos and their doomed followers. The Blood God’s butchers. Slaaneshi deviants. Other sorcerers of Tzeentch, and the diseased of the Great Lord of Decay. He shouldn’t have been surprised at the sight, and yet he was. These were other warriors who had fought their way to this dark place from across the Mortal Realms, intent on impressing unholy Archaon with their dark talents and commitment.

Grit became shattered stone and shattered stone the blood-polished marble of an elevated walkway. It trembled with the killing taking place there. Zuvius became part of the madness. Perhaps it was the infectious doom of the place, or perhaps it was the collective insanity of ruinous champions who had fought through so much to be there. In reality, Zuvius knew that the servants of the Chaos pantheon did not really need a reason to fight. Like territorial predators, it was in their nature to kill their competition. Through such unnatural selection did the forces of ruin grow ever more powerful. The weak were sacrificed for the Chaos Gods on the dark altar of the strong.

Warriors of Chaos threw themselves at the prince and his warband. Battle cries and all manner of damned weaponry cut through the air. It was a bloody free-for-all, an unspoken quest to be the last champion standing on the bridge. Zuvius became one with the slaughter. He needed no invitation. With his Hexenguard fighting behind him and the sorcerers of the Unseeing casting nearby champions into horrific new forms, Zuvius fought his way across the bridge. In the shadow of the Varanspire and with, he hoped, the gaze of the Three-Eyed King upon him, Zuvius killed for his new master, for his place in the ranks of the Varanguard. For the Everchosen’s entertainment and for his own murderous whim.

Zuvius moved through the dread butchery. Khornate savages jangled with teeth and skulls while swinging serrated axe blades at sorcerers who smouldered with unnatural powers. Slaaneshi hedonists gutted Nurgle’s children, who were already one with their own agonies. The diseased, in turn, seemed desperate to spread their suffering to all. The greatest hostility seemed to erupt between champions of the same patron. Blood knights on horseback hacked their way through barbarian hordes pledged to Khorne, while the witchbreeds and warriors of the Great Changer couldn’t take their eyes off one another for fear of the treachery they all too well knew existed in the hearts of their compatriots. Mouthing dark enchantments and blasting Tzeentchian flame at one another, they created a spectacular firestorm of mutually assured death and damnation. No champion of Chaos wished to show their weakness before Archaon and his monstrous shrine-fortress, especially not the Prince of Embers.

Zuvius stabbed and skewered servants of the Dark Prince, who moaned their ecstasies while impaled on the daemon-forged weapon. The infected spilled pus and entrails before his boots. Monstrous knights in bone-lined armour stained their plate with their own gore as Zuvius passed his heavy blade through their throats. He stove in the skulls of warrior-enchanters like himself before the cursed incantations that resided there could reach blue Tzeentchian lips.

As Zuvius fought up the walkway, with unnatural flame roaring about him from the broad, infernal moat, he noticed the daemonic furies thunderbolting from the sky. Bringing their leathery wings in close, the fiends snatched warriors from the many walkways leading up to the great iron gates and portcullises of the castle. Tearing horses apart and tossing the remains of Chaos warriors between them like rag dolls, the flocks of furies seem to delight in their sport. Champions screamed as they were dropped from the storm-wracked skies and knocked into the roaring inferno that surrounded the Varanspire.

As the warriors of Chaos killed each other, the daemons thinned out their number, further, protecting the Varanspire from those who would threaten it. Zuvius tried to remain calm as the champions he was fighting were torn from the walkway about him and savaged by the flying monsters. A ragged fury landed on one of the Hexenguard and proceeded to snap his head from his shoulders and feast on his warped flesh. Zuvius heard Sir Abriel issue the low groan of an order. The Hexenguard brought up their battered shields.

Striding on towards the fortress, buried in the shadow of the Varanspire’s mighty walls, the Prince of Embers held his nerve. The raw stench of death was intoxicating. He drank it in, uncaring of the daemons that swooped by. The furies’ attacks became ever more savage and indiscriminate. A muscle-bound barbarian of the Blood God, as broad as he was tall, was knocked from the walkway and into the flames below. A bloated knight of Nurgle exploded with the rank gases of decomposition as a daemon sank its talons into him, while a smooth-skinned marauder screamed in pleasure as he was dragged up into the sky and shredded.

Zuvius tried not to flinch as another of his Hexenguard was snatched from the walkway and his flesh stretched between winged monstrosities trying to tear him apart. A moaning sorcerer of the Unseeing was next, and then another, the wretches never setting eyes upon the horrors that were their end.

Zuvius felt the blood-bead eyes of some plummeting beast upon him. It was a thing unknowing of the Prince of Embers’ destiny. Zuvius’ gauntlets tightened about the shaft of his glaive. He killed the Khornate crusader before him, knowing the fury was sweeping down towards him. With savage beats of its wings it surged, claws and talons ready for the kill.

The prince held on for as long as he could. As he turned the glaive to present it to the beast, however, the thing’s infernal reflexes saved it. Crashing down onto the walkway, it skidded and hauled its head back. Zuvius swung the glaive about him with a devastating reach, but it was not enough. The arc of the blade should have passed straight through the monster’s ugly skull but instead whistled past it, incensing the beast. Screeching its rage, it drew others from the sky and away from their slaughter. Zuvius felt a throng of furies, all enraged by the champion’s challenge, swoop down towards him.

Like some hellish hound, the fury on the walkway snapped and shot forward. Jabbing with the glaive, Zuvius held the creature’s blood-stained jaws at bay. Pretending that he hadn’t seen another fury dropping down at him with outstretched talons, the Tzeentchian kept his focus on the beast in front of him before bringing the weapon up suddenly. Skewering the airborne monster with the force of its own momentum, Zuvius heaved it aside, smashing it into the stone of the walkway. As the first daemon surged, it found the thrash of wing and claw and the spear-point of Zuvius’ glaive. Holding tightly onto the weapon as the thing impaled itself, the champion leaned back out of the snapping, spitting death-rattle of the beasts.

As a third landed behind the sorcerer, cracking the stone, Zuvius unleashed the sorcerous power of the glaive. With the weapon still skewered through the daemons, he blasted the newcomer off the walkway with a stream of lightning. As scraps of the creature and a mist of infernal blood hissed across the surface of the flames below, more furies swooped in on Zuvius. Putting his boot against daemonflesh, he freed his glaive from the bodies of the impaled creatures. Behind him, the Unseeing moaned their blind fear and the Hexenguard stood with shields raised.

‘Protect your prince,’ Zuvius ordered, prompting the Tzeentchian knights to run forward and surround him. Beasts smashed their horned heads against the blue steel and tried to push their snaggle-toothed jaws between the shields. Sir Abriel put his ghastly form between Zuvius and an attacking fury, distracting the creature while the Prince of Embers thrust his glaive over the knight’s shoulder and into the daemon’s open mouth. Retracting the polearm and pulling half the monster’s warped skull out of its jaws with it, Zuvius turned to find another fury almost on top of him.

The beast reared and brought up a wicked claw, aiming to rip down through the Tzeentchian champion. Its eye bulged suddenly and its jaws chomped in surprise as its flesh suddenly rebelled against it. Bones broke within it and leathery skin stretched over the new form it was taking. As it fell to one side, Zuvius could see a sorcerer of the Unseeing behind, visiting the damnation of his dark magic on the thing.

It suddenly came at Zuvius, morphing into something warped, ungainly and even more terrifying than before. The prince ducked a pair of jaws within jaws and rolled between the spawn’s erupting legs. As it turned to reacquire him, the wretch-sorcerer visited his dark visions upon the daemon once more – twisting and sculpting the monster into ever more horrific forms. As a second head and a pincer ruptured from the body, Zuvius batted them aside with the pommel of his glaive. Aiming the opening metal eye of the weapon at the abomination, he prepared to blast it to shreds, but the transformation inflicted upon it by the Unseeing finally – horribly – wrung the life out of the creature.

As Orphaeo Zuvius and his warband fought their way towards the fortress, other warriors of Chaos kept their distance. Some even watched with bitter amusement as daemons rained from the sky to attack their competition. Zuvius spat. He would kill them all. Flicking infernal ichor from his glaive, Zuvius turned around and then around again. Up until now there had always been some winged thing behind him ready to pounce. Suddenly there was not. Looking up, he saw that rather than hauling off or losing interest, small throngs of furies were simply hovering, flapping their bat-like wings. They were waiting for something.

The fortress before him shimmered in shadow and heat. Zuvius looked about. Something was not right. In fact, everything seemed wrong. The flames around them seemed higher.

‘Mallofax,’ the prince called, catching his breath.

‘My lord?’ the bird squawked, swooping in to land on the warrior’s shoulder.

‘Fly on ahead,’ Zuvius ordered. ‘I want to know what we’re walking into.’

Zuvius could see now a tidal wave of fire rising through the flames surrounding the fortress. It was a doom conjured by Archaon’s fell sorcerers. Roaring its way around the Varanspire, the wave would engulf the elevated walkway. That was why the furies had taken to the skies. Zuvius would be damned before he let himself be seared free of the Varanspire like an insignificant insect.

‘Hexenguard,’ the Prince of Embers called. ‘Form up and lock shields.’

Sir Abriel and his Tzeentchian knights moved to create a shell of battered blue steel. Bringing in the Unseeing behind the shield wall, Zuvius watched for warriors of Chaos attempting to take advantage of their distraction. A mounted Slaaneshi warlord in immaculate plate looked down his nose at Zuvius. Khornate killers bedecked in spikes and horned helms fought on towards the Varanspire.

A nearby figure stood regarding Zuvius and the shield wall with suspicion. The champion was a Tzeentchian warrior whose ensorcelled blade crackled with dark energies. He held out the weapon between Zuvius and himself as a warning, slipping off his helmet. A nest of tentacles that had been squirming within dribbled down his breastplate like a beard. The change-blessed warrior regarded Zuvius with dead, deep-sea eyes, before considering the apocalyptic tsunami of flame rolling towards them. Shouting to his cerulean-skinned followers, the champion of Tzeentch and his horde of warrior witchbreeds took cover behind the shield wall of the Hexenguard.

A chain reaction was initiated along the stone walkway. Champions and the servants of Chaos behind Zuvius saw what was happening and saw the blaze encroaching with their own eyes. Some emulated the Hexenguard, locking shields if they had them to present a unified front against the wall of flame. Others abandoned their warped steeds, skidding and scrabbling down behind blue steel.

Zuvius watched as a hulking warrior of Nurgle ran towards him, slimy, pale rolls of fat spilling out of his rusted chainmail. The warrior shook the stone beneath Zuvius’ feet with his determined steps, grubs, maggots and leeches raining from his blight-festered flesh as he ran. Ducking down beneath the shield wall Zuvius waited for the blast wave. The Tzeentchian smiled to himself. He cared nothing for the followers of other fell gods, disciples of his own or champions of Chaos competing with him for the Everchosen’s favour. He only cared for what might be achieved through saving their lives in the undoubted challenges to come.

Zuvius heard the boom of the inferno against the shield wall and felt the shudder of the stone walkway. He watched the Lord of Decay’s monstrous warrior disappear in a rush of flame. Slaaneshi swordsmen on steaming horseback lost their race with the firestorm, while there was little the blades, muscle and fury of the Blood God’s brutes could do to save them in the face of such fiery destruction.

The Prince of Embers felt his hair burn and his flesh blister. The raging flame boomed about him – and then it was gone. The Hexenguard unlocked their shields and the Chaos warriors that had sheltered behind them brought up their heads. They watched the bank of flame roll away.

Zuvius heard the flapping of wings. Mallofax was back. He had flown above the fire and scouted out the fortress approach, its portcullis gate and defences.

‘The gate?’ Zuvius asked as the bird landed on the blade of the glaive.

‘Carnage, my lord,’ Mallofax told him. ‘The gate stands firm against all assaults. Archaon’s warriors wait within.’

‘And the wall itself?’

‘Sheer,’ Mallofax told him. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘There’s always a way in,’ Zuvius growled. ‘There has to be. All those who stand in service of Archaon within once stood beyond the fortress walls.’

Zuvius knew he had to keep pressing forward. He wasn’t going to wait for the infernal wave to come back around. He wasn’t going to wait for the furies to attack again. He had saved the warriors of Chaos on the walkway. If he could just get them and others into range of the fortress’ warped defences, a retaliatory assault on the Varanspire might be able to achieve some momentum. He would lead by example, down a doomed path the warriors of Chaos had already chosen.

Zuvius ran. The bridge between him and the Varanspire was all but clear of warriors. Only those champions already close to the Varanspire’s walls had managed to find shelter from the bank of flame and, hiding in the architectural flourishes of the dread fortification, they had survived the inferno. Now, they were dying.

Arms of sorcerous stone shot out from the Varanspire wall, grabbing warriors and dragging them to their deaths in the solidifying wall. Boiling spawnflesh spurted from the mouths of daemonic gargoyles decorating the ramparts, splattering down on the warriors below. Coated in liquid horror, the spawnflesh assumed the shape of lesser daemons that assimilated the warriors’ dissolving forms. Braziers situated either side of the gate smouldered with a debilitating fog that, when breathed in, afflicted the victim with blistering burns to the skin, an agonizing blindness and a lung-curdling cough. Arrow slits sang with the thud and whoosh of crossbows and monstrous spear-shooting ballistas. Each bolt was crafted from hell-forged iron and carried a bound daemon within. Even if a striking bolt or spear failed to kill an approaching warrior, the blood-mad daemon that bled from the iron to possess the injured victim shredded both their flesh and soul.

Zuvius ran towards the fortress with his warband following, while the knights, butchers and swordsmen who had taken shelter behind the shield wall stomped across the bridge after him. Zuvius didn’t care whether this was out of a desire to kill him or to attack the Varanspire. Once they were in range of its dread defences, intentions would matter little. The Chaos fortress was a challenge that could not be ignored. The Chaos warriors accelerated across the bridge. The energy of their charge was almost infectious: blood knights in full plate, wasted warriors in leper’s robes, barbaric pleasure-seekers whose flesh was stuck with pins and shards of bone, and sorcerous champions like himself, wielding daemon-forged blades. The growing horde charged along the walkway. The fortress wall grew higher above them and the monstrous gate hove into view, shimmering in the heat of the broad moat.

A great arch lined with iron teeth, it was sealed by a series of warped portcullises, each lowered one behind the other. Through the grille of the bars Zuvius could see the warriors of Archaon, armoured silhouettes in thick plate mounted on fearsome steeds. They waited, weapons sheathed, seemingly unconcerned. They were confident in the Varanspire’s defences. Zuvius snarled. He would make them pay for their arrogance and serve Archaon all the better for taking their place. No warrior would breach the Varanspire while the Prince of Embers stood in their path.

Suddenly he was amongst bodies – the unfortunates who had failed to breach the Varanspire’s defences before him. Zuvius would not fail. Their remains were trapped amongst a forest of iron shafts and ballista bolts embedded in the stone. Zuvius could feel the raging daemons bound to the iron reach out for him in their fury. Savages and warriors who had shed their plate sprinted ahead of Zuvius, desperate to get out of the killing ground. They could not, however, for the fortress was designed with such desperation in mind.

Within seconds, the vanguard of the horde was dead. Such was the power behind the crossbows and the infernal ballistas that within a blink, daemon-bound bolts and spears were thudding into the stone about them. Marauders were thrown off their feet by shafts that hammered into their chests. Black projectiles hit the ground about Zuvius’ feet while shards of stone showered him where the missiles from ballistas shattered the walkway. A daemonic roar could be heard with their passing. Half-stifled screams and grunts of sudden death filled the air as Chaos warriors were impaled by the missiles and staked to the bridge.

There was no avoiding such an onslaught. Mallofax, who soared above the stabbing storm, had called it carnage; the bird had not been wrong. Aspiring champions, pledged to all manner of Dark Gods, died with brutal indifference. They had braved the lethality of the realms to reach the Varanspire and now it was their undoing. Alongside them, Zuvius heard members of his own warband dying. He ran on through the forest of iron and the impaled warriors. The heart-stopping whoosh of a ballista bolt nicked Zuvius’ ear and thudded straight through the battered breastplate of a Hexenguard knight. Zuvius heard the daemon in the missile rip the armoured warrior apart in seconds.

Step after feverish step took the Prince of Embers on towards the gate. It grew before him, its iron teeth threatening to swallow him whole. Madmen and driven warriors of darkness ran beside him. Behind them pounded a swollen blightking of Nurgle, who seemed to soak up bolts and the Varanspire’s daemonic heralds with his diseased flesh. As they neared the gate, the hail of bolts from above began to ease. Confidence welled up once again in Zuvius and those about him.

Suddenly, Sir Abriel’s shield flashed before him. The Tzeentchian knight put his willowy fingers on Zuvius’ chest to slow him. The prince heard the thud of several opportunistic bolts slam into the shield – daemon iron that had been meant for him. He didn’t usually waste sentimentality on the Hexenguard but immersed in the death and destruction, he found himself grinning hysterically at his father’s former captain of the guard.

When the ballista bolt came, it sheared the shield in two and did much the same to Sir Abriel. Skewered through his ruined chest and down into the stone, the groaning knight was pinned. Zuvius wasted a few precious moments trying to pull Abriel free before coming to his senses. The knight was all but dead already; Zuvius would not end the same way.

‘Sorry, old friend, but this is the price of entrance,’ the prince told the warped knight as the bound daemon ravaged what was left of him. With screams echoing about him, Zuvius ran for the gate.

A huge Khornate knight in baroque plate smashed into the portcullis with his colossal axe, causing the metal gate to shake. Feverish berserkers thrashed at the grille with their axes, while pus-swollen warriors of the Lord of Decay put their backs and bellies into lifting the colossal portcullis. It would not move, however. Even if it had, two more lay behind it, as secure as the first. With a metallic squeal, the hell-knights beyond the gates thrust the length of their fellspears through the gate grilles and skewered the Chaos champions hammering to get in. With infernal discipline, the knights withdrew their weapons and allowed their victims to fall before thrusting forth and impaling those that took their place.

Dark champions, filled with a warrior’s ecstasy at surviving the sorcerous flames and the storm of bolts, threw themselves at the fortress gate. Sparks flew where their hammers bounced off daemon-forged metal. Light-armoured deviants covered in tattoos, chains and studs reached through with their cruel blades, attempting to slash at the machinery that raised the gates, but nothing worked. Archaon’s hellish garrison were ready for them. The interlopers would die at the gate. With a whoosh of steam, a foul liquid cascaded down the walls and turned the besiegers to screaming statues of melting flesh. All the while, the skin of champions blistered as they stumbled blindly through the diseased smoke of braziers.

Zuvius felt the fight leaving the attacking horde. Even dread warriors such as these needed some expectation of success, but the Varanspire gave them none. For a moment the prospect of braving the ballistas back across the walkway began to assume a grim appeal. Zuvius knew he had to rally the besiegers. He had to find an advantage.

‘My sorcerers,’ Zuvius called. ‘My Unseeing, move on. Show me what you can see through this wretched gate.’

The Prince of Embers knew the cost of the sacrifice and accepted it. Before the Varanspire and under the gaze of the Three-Eyed King, he had to relinquish the trappings of a Tzeentchian warrior. Those that fought for Archaon cared not for the Dark Gods they formerly served or the warbands that in turn served them. Their only concern was the wish and whim of the Everchosen of Chaos – for to be one of his knights was to forsake all other things.

The Unseeing moaned as they stumbled through the bodies before the gate. They flinched as they bumped into the grille and laid their gnarled hands on the bars. Several died immediately, the cruel points of fellspears bursting from their backs. Reaching through the warped grille, the wretch-sorcerers struck out their palms.

Tattooed symbols burned in their flesh as the horror of their visions was unleashed on the armoured warriors beyond. The screams of the Varanspire’s hell-knights fortified the resolve of the faltering champions of Chaos trapped outside the fortress walls. Through the grille, Zuvius could see the twisted silhouettes that the Unseeing had created. As a fresh cascade of boiling oil came down the towering walls, the sorcerers’ screams joined those of their victims – robes were set alight and flesh was burned from bones.

‘Get back!’ Zuvius called, gesturing to the knights of the Hexenguard and the rest of the champions clustered at the gate. He raised his glaive. The gates would resist a sorcerous blast from the daemon-forged weapon, but the stone of the wall might offer a different opportunity. He adjusted his aim, pointing the glaive to one side of the portcullis.

The metal eye of the pommel opened and Zuvius blazed a continuous stream of lightning at the wall. It crackled and glowed with the blinding power of the arcing blast. As the sorcerous stream ceased, Zuvius walked up to the point of impact. All about the side of the portcullis the stone of the gate had turned to a dark glass. Jabbing at the smouldering crystal with the pommel, the prince shattered the wall around the edge of the portcullis grate.

The Hexenguard filed through first. The Tzeentchian knights found only warped sculptures of mangled flesh, bone and plate on the other side. The horde swarmed the opening, a lord of Khorne pushing past in his blood-dripping cloak and great horned helm to lead the way. Newly filled with resolve and a desire both to impress the Everchosen and destroy the unworthy among his servants, champions of all powers and patrons followed him. Zuvius watched pleasure-bound killers enter, armed with blades that glistened with poison. Hulking sacks of indomitable pestilence followed, with the cerulean-skinned warriors of Tzeentch. Barbarian berserkers jangling with skulls clawed at each other to be the first to the fighting within. They were a horde of unwitting puppets, all serving as a distraction for the Prince of Embers.

As Zuvius entered and moved through the gallery of twisted death the Unseeing had sculpted in the barbican, he found Mallofax. The bird had risked the sky-bound furies to fly over the wall and gather intelligence for his master of the trials to come.

‘Speak,’ Zuvius commanded.

‘Daemons, my prince,’ Mallofax told him, hopping from statue to statue. ‘The legions of hell, fighting for the Everchosen.’

As the barbican opened up onto another stone walkway, Zuvius found that his horde had run straight into the determined resistance of the hell-knights who had escaped the gaze of the Unseeing, and a throng of daemon shock troops – things unleashed to immediately check the advance of any besieger entering the fortress.

Beyond the barbican troops, the lord of Khorne had dived straight into combat, his cloak and monstrous axe wheeling about him in a spatter of blood. Inspired by his fearless example, the champions of other dark gods fell in behind him – the Chaos lord was the point of a wedge that the horde was driving through the ranks of savage Varanspire daemons. Horned plaguebearers tore warriors of Chaos limb from limb with their diseased claws. Pallid nightmares of claw and dread feminine form snapped off heads with cruel elegance. Fury-red fiends of horn and claw danced death through the horde, wielding hellblades in devastating arcs of destruction. The lord of Khorne found himself fighting for his life against a trio of bloodletters, turning a storm of swords aside with brutal swings of his axe.

No less devastating were Archaon’s Knights of Ruin. Decked in plate of black and gold, they were broad and powerful, and thrust their fellspears through champions of Chaos, sometimes two or three at a time, impaling them like stuck boars.

The Hexenguard moved about their master, giving Zuvius the protection of their shields while sweeping through lesser daemons with longswords. As change-blessed flesh and bone stretched, the arcs of the tapering blades surprised the infernal creatures and opened up throats and bellies. As a plaguebearer clawed through the Hexenguard shields, the daemon batted one of the knight’s heads from his armoured shoulders with a diseased hand. It beat another into the ground with a fist before pulling out a jagged, rusted cleaver and swinging it with droning abandon at Zuvius.

Like his former patron, the Prince of Embers had a special hatred for the Lord of Decay’s foetid daemon foot soldiers. Bringing the blade of his glaive down, he knocked the creature’s weapon to the floor before slicing its hand from its gangly arm.

With the foul thing at a disadvantage, Zuvius brought the pommel of the glaive around to smash the daemon in the face, before turning the shaft in his hands and ramming the blade straight into its swollen belly. Pushing through the shields of his Hexenguard protectors, Zuvius forced the plaguebearer back. Rot-infested entrails tumbled from the thing’s cleaved form. Slamming it into the back of one of the Everchosen’s ruinous knights, Zuvius turned the glaive blade like a key, bursting the rest of its putrid organs.

Feeling the blow, the blood knight turned around. Despite the weight of his thick plate, the warrior moved like a striking serpent, his ensorcelled blade a blur of runes and dark steel as it smashed A’ cuitas aside. The knight seemed drawn to the Prince of Embers’ confidence and lethality, recognising the competition. Perhaps, Zuvius thought, he had seen him issuing orders to the horde outside the gate and gain entrance with his crackling power. The knight stared at the prince through the eye slits of his helm, the ornate headdress of metal horns thrumming with dark power.

Zuvius felt the intensity of the knight’s attentions. He was hungry for the kill. The prince’s life was his to take and every second Zuvius was allowed to breathe was a grievous insult to the Everchosen of Chaos. His sword was a stabbing, sweeping, cleaving instrument of cold steel. Relentless in the economic savagery of his attacks, the warrior backed Zuvius towards the barbican wall, away from others of his warband and the horde that might help him. Away from the other dark knights of the fortress who might take the honour of the kill.

Working his glaive around, Zuvius turned the cuts and swings of the ensorcelled blade aside. The knight moved with incredible speed and assurance, pressing the prince to his limit. He felt the warrior’s attacks burn with the desire to end him. Zuvius backed into the barbican wall and sparks flew as the knight carved his blade into the stone. The prince ducked and weaved around into an alcove doorway.

‘Expect to get no further,’ the knight hissed through his helm. A haft-ringing deflection knocked Zuvius’ weapon aside. A brief stream of lightning scorched and crackled away to nothingness on the smooth stone. The knight had the measure of him now. He wouldn’t allow Zuvius to press his sorcerous advantage.

As the murderous thrusts and stabbing attacks forced Zuvius through the spike-inlaid doorway and up a crooked spiral of stairs, the prince felt the dread knight gearing up for the kill. Even with the advantage of higher ground, Zuvius could not get past the warrior’s defensive sweeps. It was as though his weapon were part of him, moving with speed and force to knock the glaive aside.

As the walls opened out onto a stone landing, Zuvius readied himself for the end. Archaon did indeed only select the very best warriors for his ranks. As their blades clashed and the knight backed Zuvius across the landing, barbican archers in dark helms and with bare, scarred chests moved their bows, arrows and ballistas across the stone floor. With the sound of battle within the walls alerting them to a breach, the archers were intent on moving their deadly weaponry over to the arrow slits on the other side of the landing so that they could once more target the horde below.

‘Think never to wear the dark plate of the Everchosen,’ the unhallowed knight spat as he attacked. Sparks lit up the landing as Zuvius turned the ensorcelled blade away, each deflection a little slower, each lethal lunge of the blade a moment closer to ending the prince.

As they reached the end of the landing, Zuvius saw the knight’s eyes widen with surprise and hostility. Instead of skewering Zuvius, the rune-encrusted blade pointed towards an archer standing behind the prince. Turning, the prince saw that the archer was standing next to an unloaded ballista and was holding the heavy, iron bolt above his head like a cudgel.

‘This dubious honour is mine,’ the knight shouted at the archer, warning him off.

Zuvius knew that this was his last chance. This knight of ruin, this warrior acolyte of the Destroyer of Worlds, would slay him. Touching the pommel of the glaive to the metal of the knight’s weapon, Zuvius allowed the briefest stream of lightning to course through the blade. The sword leapt from the knight’s gauntlet with a sudden shock and rattled across the floor, away from them both.

As the knight and Zuvius stared at one another, the sorcerer thrust the crowning blade of A’ cuitas back, stabbing the archer through the chest. Without looking, Zuvius listened for the cacophonous clatter of the heavy bolt on the floor. Zuvius knew what to expect next. The knight was so skilled with the sword, the prince wagered, that he wouldn’t continue the combat without it.

Grunting his hatred, the knight made a run for the ensorcelled blade. Zuvius was right behind him. With the haft of the glaive in both gauntlets, Zuvius thrust the weapon over the knight’s head. As the warrior’s ornate helm was knocked to the floor, Zuvius hauled him back. The knight reached for his blade, but it was just out of reach. Zuvius pushed the glaive’s blade to the knight’s throat, and the warrior was forced to grasp the weapon at his neck instead.

Without his helm, Zuvius could see the knight was some kind of albino, with unnaturally pallid flesh. His mouth opened, gulping for air, and the sorcerer caught a brief glimpse of his black tongue and needle teeth as he bucked around. Like a tormented animal, the dark knight – who had been so deliberate in his murderous bladework – reared with Zuvius on his back and flung them both at the wall. Zuvius held on for his life as the knight backed and battered them both against the stone. Heaving the shaft of A’ cuitas ever closer, his arms burning with the effort, the prince felt something give, and the knight suddenly go limp. Riding the cascade of hell-forged plate and muscle to the ground, Zuvius held the knight there for a few moments longer, just to make sure. Getting to his feet, Zuvius turned his blade about in his gauntlets and struck the dread knight’s head from his shoulders.

‘You fought well,’ Zuvius told the corpse. ‘Just not well enough. The honour might have been yours but the pleasure was mine.’

Archers came around the corner armed with their bows and improvised weapons. Turning A’ cuitas on them, Zuvius arced lightning from one killer to another, turning each into a wall-splattering eruption of blood.

Leaning against the glaive, Zuvius took a moment to catch his breath. At the arrow slit he heard the flap of wings. Mallofax settled in the opening, watching his master with beady, black eyes.

‘Where have you been?’ the prince asked.

‘Our siege does not go well, my lord,’ Mallofax squawked. Zuvius went across to the arrow slit and peered down at the walkway leading from the barbican. The Varanspire’s daemonic shock troops were taking the Chaos horde apart. The Hexenguard were all dead. Champions of different fell gods fought side by side against the Everchosen’s monstrosities, killing the dread things when they could. Only the Khornate lord in his blood-baroque armour and gore-drizzling cloak seemed to be making headway. With his axe dripping with infernal ichor, the bodies of bloodletters, plaguebearers and daemonettes twitched at his feet. Zuvius thought on the mess he had made of the archers who had been about to open fire on the walkway.

‘The siege goes better than it might,’ Zuvius corrected the bird.

Zuvius looked down on the horde below, the champions of Chaos doomed to become little more than a daemon-slain distraction. His gaze followed the walkway spanning the exterior wall and the next. While the Everchosen’s knights, sorcerers and daemons haunted the fortress corridors and clung to the architecture like warped gargoyles, the colossal courtyard in between blazed with torches: an assembly ground for monstrous hordes, led by countless champions and Chaos lords who fought under Archaon’s banner. They waited to be summoned to battle at the Everchosen’s order, somewhere in the Mortal Realms, while other armies of darkness arrived with the spoils of war to take their place.

There was no way that the invading horde could fight through such numbers and horror. Zuvius would have to find another way. The horde could still serve his interests as a timely distraction. He would not tolerate a challenger for the Everchosen’s attentions, however. Scooping up the iron bolt the archer had dropped on the floor, Zuvius loaded and cranked the ballista. He could feel the hate of the bound daemon radiating off the cursed iron. Aiming the weapon down through the arrow slit, he lined it up with the back of the Khornate lord that was still leading the fighting.

Allowing the Blood God’s champion to finish one of Archaon’s black-armoured knights with a bludgeoning swing of his axe, Zuvius fired the ballista. Mallofax flapped his wings at the sound and hopped onto the prince’s shoulder.

The iron bolt speared through the warrior’s back and out from his chest, and the lord of Chaos staggered. The released daemon savaged at the warrior’s soul while a daemonette leapt on him, scything with her claws, but the Khornate champion somehow fought on. Tearing the creature from his pauldron, the Chaos lord smashed her into the ground. Falling to his knees, he took the legs out from beneath another daemonette as she ran at him. Dropping his axe and falling onto all fours, the Khornate lord was surrounded by stalking bloodletters. The daemons waited for a moment and then pounced, tearing into the Blood God’s champion with horn and claw, pulling free his skewered heart and snarling skull.

‘What now, my prince?’ Mallofax asked.

‘Now we find the Everchosen of Chaos,’ the Prince of Embers told him.

The Varanspire.

Orphaeo Zuvius negotiated the leagues of fang-lined battlements. He stood in the monstrous claws of tower turrets, watching greater daemons on the wing, hunting furies in the storm-wracked skies.

In search of Archaon, Zuvius explored the citadel, its towering heights and corrupting depths. There, all the Chaos Gods and Archaon, as their undisputed champion, were celebrated. Shrines and temples dedicated to the Ruinous Powers turned Zuvius’ heart black. Labyrinthine libraries of sorcerous tomes threatened to claim years of his life, while crowded fighting pits were places of perpetual death. Zuvius walked through miles of corridors sizzling with dark intent. He found lavish chambers that were nests of writhing daemonflesh, and stagnant ruins in which time almost stood still. Indeed, the heart of the Varanspire barely seemed to observe the natural laws at all – an architectural nightmare crafted in darkness, stone and fire.

On the courtyard expanses he passed beneath banners depicting the symbols of the Everchosen and the unruly hordes of ruin: spawn, savages, Chaos knights, enslaved monstrosities, charismatic champions and dark warlords, all serving dread Archaon. Mallofax warned his prince of lesser daemons and infernal beasts haunting the fortress corridors ahead.

While the diversionary sacrifice of his warband and the besieging horde had allowed Zuvius within the Varanspire’s walls, it had been his patience and cunning that had allowed him to traverse the walkways and courtyards, the ramparts and corridors. When he needed to, the prince murdered with silent impunity, strangling the lesser guards of the fortress garrison with the A’ cuitas’ haft and stabbing the blade up under chins, through backs and into helms.

With every treacherous blow Zuvius got nearer to his goal, until he walked straight through the monstrous gates of the citadel spire itself. Mallofax hopped and flapped down empty corridors ahead of his master.

Lost in this hellscape, each twist, turn, deathly drop and corrupting flourish was dedicated to the Everchosen of Chaos. Only the strangest of daemonic creatures stalked the dream-like depths, feverish abominations writhing with tentacle. Daemon monstrosities that struggled to keep their form, erupting with mouths and limbs that spewed forth sorcerous flame, drove Zuvius on through the insanity. Magical hellfire not only thundered up corridors and through chambers but scorched the very nature of reality itself. Zuvius stumbled away from the heat, light and sound, driven down into one corridor and then the next, until he could no longer escape the corruptive bloom of daemon flame coming at him from all directions.

As the booming inferno enveloped him, Zuvius simultaneously lost and found himself. Blinking the nightmare from his eyes, the Prince of Embers stumbled across a gargantuan chamber of black marble that he couldn’t remember having entered before. It was dark magnificence given form. Mallofax hopped and staggered behind him across the polished floor. A forest of colossal pillars rose to the ceiling and Zuvius stumbled between them. Into each was crafted the horror of screaming faces.

Pushing himself between two pillars, Zuvius suddenly caught sight of the back of a monstrous throne, a thing sculpted of darkness and ossified ambition, a thing that radiated unholy power and struck a chord of dread in the Prince of Embers’ heart.

‘This is it,’ Zuvius said to Mallofax. ‘This is a throne room fit for the Everchosen of Chaos. A place of doom and dark majesty. We have made it, Mallofax.’

Zuvius staggered about the corruptive splendour of the throne, keeping his distance as he moved around in front of it. The throne itself was blinding in its dark brilliance and the prince found himself crashing to his knees in exhaustion and dread.

‘Mighty Archaon,’ Zuvius managed, his helmet off and forehead to the floor. ‘You have summoned and I have answered. I have travelled far and fought hard in your name, all to take a place at your unholy side. Archaon, Everchosen of Chaos, Destroyer of Worlds and men: I supplicate myself before you. I pledge myself to you in bringing an end to this world and all others.’

‘You seek Archaon?’ a voice came, burning with age and sorcerous power.

Zuvius brought up his head and stared into the radiating darkness. He got the impression of a gaunt figure rising from the throne, at one with the unholy dread of the object. It walked down the steps towards the kneeling Zuvius. The prince rubbed the darkness from his eyes. He could make out a skeletal figure and sorcerer’s robes. The thing’s features were warped, and blinked with a thousand eyes. Zuvius burned under its fell gaze.

‘I seek Archaon,’ Zuvius confirmed, holding his hand out in front of him to ward against the darkness, and getting to his feet.

‘In a fortress he has barely set foot in?’ the sorcerer said. ‘Before a throne upon which he has never sat?’

‘Archaon is not here?’

‘And never shall be.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Zuvius told the sorcerer honestly. ‘I am–’

‘You are blind and foolish,’ the sorcerer said. ‘That is all that matters. How came you to be in this place?’

‘I followed the crows,’ the Prince of Embers said.

‘For where the Everchosen treads, the crows indeed follow,’ the sorcerer said.

Zuvius heard it. Faint at first. The distant flapping of wings. The caws of hungry carrion birds. The sound grew, booming about the cavernous chamber. Suddenly they were everywhere. Birds, black of feather and sharp of beak. A storm of crows swarmed through the pillars in all directions – flying at Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers. A squawking Mallofax was lost in the thunder of the flock. Zuvius was lifted from the ground but remained in place, being shredded from all angles. They ripped his armour from his form and tore at his skin with their beaks and talons. Zuvius screamed as they pulled the remaining hair from his scalp and his eyes from their sockets. Like a torrent of darkness, they baptised him in death.

Zuvius crashed back down to the marble floor. Black feathers floated down beside him, an agony on his raw flesh. He felt blood spill down his face from the empty sockets and drip to the floor. He heard Mallofax squawk his misery from nearby.

‘My prince…’ the bird said, but got no further.

The sorcerer moved painfully close to the Prince of Embers and leaned in, causing Zuvius, blind, to angle his head awkwardly this way and that, trying to fix on the presence.

‘Your trials are over,’ the sorcerer told him. Orphaeo Zuvius didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead he settled on a dumbfounded silence. ‘What did you expect? Some kind of dark coronation? The Everchosen of Chaos here to recognise you personally for your dread service? Service to Almighty Archaon is recognition enough.’ Zuvius nodded slowly in his private agony.

‘Don’t worry,’ the sorcerer said as he left him, the horror of his voice growing distant. His words were laced with a dark amusement. ‘There are none so blind as those that will not see.’

The Prince of Embers knelt there, the sorcerer’s parting words echoing horribly about the colossal chamber. They were everywhere, melting into his mind behind the empty sockets of his eyes. There, on his knees before the empty throne, Orphaeo Zuvius came to know the true nature of damnation. He had forsaken all in his search for the Everchosen of Chaos and Archaon, in turn, had forsaken him. Letting the torturous darkness where his eyes used to be sink down into his soul, the Prince of Embers became one with the potent doom of the place. The wicked laughter of insanity. A haunting whisper in the fortress depths. A cautionary tale never told.

BLOOD AND PLAGUE

David Annandale

In a dead land, the cold arena waited. Echoes of battles past and civilizations forgotten lined its cliff walls. The land did not remember the glories that had been. It remembered their loss. It remembered their fall. And it muttered to itself with the whisper of tombs. The whispers spread across the floor of the arena: broken archways, depressions of absent foundations, doors to emptiness. Eroded walls faded to nothing, sentences trailing off into silence.

Above the cold arena, on a projecting spur of rock, a sorcerer watched the whispers. He watched the land beyond. He watched as the waiting came to an end.

The Many-Eyed Servant faced south, seeing much further than the arena. The carriers of his vision flew over the land. A multitude of fragments became a composite panorama of the battle to come. From the east and west, warbands approached through the canyons of vanished waterways and time-gnawed sepulchres of civilisations. ‘They are almost here,’ he said.

Heavy footsteps crunched the stone behind him. A presence loomed at the daemon’s back. The Many-Eyed Servant’s master had come. He said nothing, but the daemon sensed his satisfaction. The Everchosen had arrived to witness the final display.

‘Where have you brought us?’

Copsys Bule thought before answering. Fistula’s words were less a question than an accusation. They had marched for a day and a night since passing through the gate. Until now, Fistula had said nothing to challenge the lord of plague’s command. Since their escape from the seraphon, Fistula had been less and less inclined to hide his anger and impatience. The blightlord had, for a time, been willing to accept that abandoning a second battle to the Stormcast Eternals was the right price to pay for the greater glory of joining the forces of Archaon. But that promise still showed no sign of being fulfilled. Instead, they travelled through nothing. The land was cracked, bare stone. The gate had brought the Rotbringers to the floor of a wide, twisting canyon. The riverbed had dried out centuries before. The journey between the cliffs took them through the traces of fallen cities and immense, fading graveyards. There was no life at all. Bule had abandoned a realm bursting with the gifts of Nurgle’s garden for a wasteland. No disease could flourish here. There was nothing here to decay. There was only the slow erosion of wind, and the fading into a greater silence. The groans of this realm’s flesh had been spent long ago.

But this was the way. The call of Archaon was as clear to Bule now as it had been mysterious before. The land held no promise, yet Bule followed the certainty of destiny.

‘We are where we must be,’ he said. ‘I have not brought us here. Archaon has. The blessing of Grandfather Nurgle has. There is no reason for anger, Fistula. Rejoice instead, and learn patience.’ Fistula fought well, but he had too little experience of the larger ebb and flow of war. Plague waxed and waned, but in the end, it consumed all. To deny this was to fail to understand the nature of disease. Rage was useful, but had its limitations.

Bule’s exhortation had little effect. The blisters on Fistula’s bald head crowded each other with suppurating anger. Bule watched Fistula’s grip tighten on his blades. He gauged the other Rotbringer’s stance. Are you going to attack? Bule wondered. He followed his own counsel and remained patient. His armour was heavier than Fistula’s. He had the advantage of bulk. He could absorb a first blow. But there was no need to precipitate a struggle; ahead lay glory for all. He would lead by example.

‘You don’t hear the call?’ Bule asked.

‘No.’ More anger in that single word.

‘Then put your faith in the path we have followed.’

‘From one retreat to another?’

‘The call I heed led us to that gate. Now it takes us to a culmination.’

Fistula grunted, but he plodded on. Bule looked back over the rest of the band. It was a much smaller horde now, consisting of only those who had followed him into the polluted river to find the gate beneath the foundations of the humans’ temple. The newly constructed symbol that rejected Nurgle’s gifts had concealed in its heart a cancer: the key to a greater victory. The loss of the rest of the warband, abandoned to the Stormcasts, had been a small price. Patience would see the coming of a greater bloom; of this, Bule was sure. Did the rest of his warriors share this certainty? Did they have faith, or did they doubt like Fistula?

He pushed the question aside. Though the canyon stretched onward, twisting in its grey death, the summons was clear to him. The flies that birthed from his head and swarmed about him buzzed with greater intensity. Faith would soon no longer be necessary. It would give way to proof.

If not around the next bend, then the one after that. The march through desolation would end soon.

Bule lengthened his stride. His gut bounced and roiled with his steps. Putrid gases rose from the rotting sores in his flesh. The garden was alive in him, and he would see it flourish in service to Archaon.

There were too many silences. Some were offensive to Ushkar Mir. Others were dangerous.

The snarl of his breath tried to fill the silence of the land. The absence of blood and fire was a frustration so intense it was agony. He saw bones. He saw skulls. But they were old, meaningless. They crumbled to nothing beneath his steps, giving off puffs of grey dust. There was no war here. If there had been violence once, even its memory was buried in stone. The emptiness of the canyon and the emptiness of the days: these were the silences that offended the exalted deathbringer.

It was the silence of Danavan Vuul that was a potential threat. The bloodstoker had said nothing for many hours now. With each day that had passed since Mir’s last trial, each day absent of any foe, each long day in the empty land, Vuul had said less. They were still in the Realm of Death. The longer the march had gone on through this cursed canyon, the more Vuul’s silence had expressed his doubts about the direction the Bloodslaves were taking. His face was hidden by his helmet. In his heavy crimson armour, he marched with a steady gait, leaning forward as if ready to break into a charge. Ushkar Mir monitored his every step out of the corner of his eye. He was braced for an attack. He contemplated killing Vuul, terminating the threat before it declared itself. He would have already done so were it not for the call. Archaon’s summons pulled him forward. He would find the Everchosen here, and soon. There was battle in this realm, and Archaon was at its forefront. The scent of war and bloodshed had brought him this far. It was immaterial whether the rest of the warband felt the summons too. Destiny was close, and the moment was coming when there would be an enemy to shatter.

Mir stayed his hand. In so doing, he surprised himself. Regardless of Vuul’s anger, his ambition was obvious and dangerous. He resented Mir’s status as one of the Exalted. He made no secret of that, and obeyed orders with grudging reluctance. Two days ago, Mir would have treated the prospect of a prolonged period without a foe as intolerable. He would have assumed Vuul would move against him. He would have killed Vuul at the first opportunity.

Now he didn’t. For perhaps the first time in his life, another goal superseded self-preservation. The greatest need to was to find Archaon, and to become his champion. To achieve that goal would make him stronger yet, ensuring his survival and perhaps the immortality of his name. But now he wondered if perhaps he was reaching for something even greater than that. To fight alongside a being who refused to be the vassal of any single god would be a personal victory beyond any other. The brass band over his eyes burned his flesh. The endless pain of the metal and the miracle of his continued sight were perpetual reminders of his unwilling allegiance. Khorne owned him. His existence was devoted to the reaping of skulls for the Blood God, and so it would ever be.

Until he could achieve his vengeance.

But to be a champion of Archaon, to be among the number who fought for Chaos under the banner of the warrior who was a force unto himself – there would be pride in that achievement. There was no such thing as redemption. The concept was meaningless. He had witnessed the immolation of all such hope. He would grasp instead the chance to shed blood no longer for the sole benefit of Khorne.

The prospect of soon standing before Archaon subsumed all other thought and so he kept his eye on Vuul, but he did not instigate the duel. He had no patience for such a pointless delay. Even his axes were eager to reach their destination: Bloodspite, black as old blood, and Skullthief, red as a fresh arterial fountain, each containing a bloodletter daemon. The perpetual rivals for greater slaughter vibrated with their hunger, and they pulled him forwards. They too wished to fight for Archaon. Let Vuul stew in impotent rage. Let him witness the truth.

The canyon took another turn and beyond it, revelation unfolded. It opened up into a vast bowl, with a second entrance to the west. A great host lined the top of the north wall, but from the floor of the arena, he could not judge its full size. It extended along the entire wall of the arena, and he could hear the clamour of ranks upon ranks. Black smoke rose in the distance, and from somewhere in that direction came the screams and moans of prisoners.

Mir had never beheld such an army before. He saw exalted deathbringers and skullgrinders. He saw a warrior in huge and terrible crimson armour, a warrior who could only be a Lord of Khorne. And these powerful servants of the Blood God stood beside those sworn to the Plaguefather, and the Changer of Ways, and the lost God of Excess. Vuul even saw the tall, angular shape of one of the Great Horned Rat’s corruptors. The most powerful knights of Chaos in all its forms were gathered in a unity Mir could barely comprehend. They looked down upon him and they waited, for they did not command.

They followed a being greater than all of them.

‘I never imagined…’ said the slaughterpriest Orto. He who had been so confident in his preaching of Khorne’s will was at a loss.

You serve Khorne utterly, Mir thought. This army serves Archaon. You knew this was our goal. But you never imagined? Is your faith inflexible, slaughterpriest? Can it not survive paradox?

Below the host, a stone staircase descended to the floor of the arena. The staircase was huge. Its width took up half the cliff. It was badly eroded. It had become a majestic ghost.

A narrow spur projected far into the air from the centre of the north wall. On it stood a towering figure in black armour.

Archaon.

And at the sight of that being, that supreme warrior of Chaos, Mir too thought, I never imagined.

The Everchosen spoke.

Bule guessed what he would say. The lord of plagues saw the other warband enter the arena at the same time as his. Even though Bule knew the test that lay ahead, Archaon’s words rooted him to the spot. The voice, terrible in power, echoed across the arena. It was more than the voice of destiny. It was the voice of a being who had made destiny his slave.

‘Champions,’ Archaon said, ‘I welcome you to the Ossuar Arena. You have fought well. Now you are at the end of a journey. One will be found worthy to join my Varanguard. One.’ Archaon paused. His great horned helm tilted downward. He was gazing at the two warbands.

‘You will exact your own judgement,’ he said.

Across the line of the Everchosen’s warriors, war horns lifted. The arena resounded with the deafening blast of the call to war. The air trembled and cracked. The moment had come for the act of killing to return to this corner of the dead lands.

At the signal, Bule turned his gaze from Archaon and signalled to his warband. They began a rolling charge across the arena. The enemy was clad in armour the colour of blood and fire. Warriors of Khorne. He focused on their leader. Hundreds of yards separated the two forces, and Bule could make out few details of his rival. He was easy to identify, though, as he led his attack, fronting the warband’s collective howl of rage. In contrast to his followers, he wore no armour. A brass band covered his eyes. It gleamed, though no sun pierced the heavy clouds. His flesh was marked with burning runes. He was already outpacing the rest of his band. He was fast. Faster than Fistula.

The Bloodbound were a real threat. No matter. Here, at last, was the destiny that had guided Bule through three realms. No one would stand between him and his apotheosis. He would strike this pretender down, and, at Archaon’s side, he would see the Grandfather’s garden flourish as never before.

Bule answered the snarl of the Bloodbound with his own roar. He revelled in its wet ratcheting. It was the sound of disease at war. He would drown the rage-possessed in the joyous flood of pestilence.

Behind him, his Rotbringers joined in his call.

Plague rushed forward to clash with Blood.

Then, from the skies, came a storm of wings.

There was his challenge. The putrid worshippers of Nurgle. Their charge made Mir snarl with disgusted rage. Their gait was a shambling rush. Their stench washed through the air in waves. Their blood would be a polluted stew. Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, he thought. Nor does he care for its purity, as long as it flows.

The Rotbringers were one more threat to his survival. He would tear them apart, and he would join Archaon.

He ran across the uneven floor of the arena, leaping over empty tombs and crumbled walls. As he did, he saw movement on the spur of rock. He looked up. Archaon had stepped back. A daemon moved to take his place at the end of the spur. It was a thing of skeletal majesty. Mir could feel its manifold gaze burning down on him from a hundred angles at once. The daemon spread its arms wide. A flapping cloud came into being around the daemon. It spread and swooped down into the arena, bringing winged night with it.

It was a gigantic murder of crows. Thousands upon thousands of the birds. They cawed and whirled. They were everywhere. They covered the space of the arena. And as they beat their wings and gave voice to their raucous song, the land began to change.

The ground rippled. It dipped and rose, transforming into hills and gullies. Stone became malleable. It turned into a liquid, then smoke. It lost its form. Barrenness gave way to convulsive life. Naked stone became muck. Mir’s boots sank past his ankle. Clouds of insects descended on him. Trees speared out of the mud. They unfolded branches heavy with rotting leaves. Growths twisted the limbs, and from them, things squirmed to be free, worms with pale, grasping hands. The trees reached out to each other, and the worm-things clasped and clawed across the growths, and a tangle of wood, soft, rotten, yet resilient, surrounded the warband. Blackened vegetation flowed around their legs. It was a rising tide of dying mulch. It fell apart, blossomed, sickened and died, then rose from its own decay in the space of a breath.

Mir could no longer see the enemy. The Rotbringers had vanished behind the wall of embodied putrescence. The crows dived through the canopy. They perched on branches and circled above the warband. Some of the birds were rotting as they flew. Others were on fire. They all had too many eyes. They cawed their mockery. Mir slashed at them and at the vegetation blocking his way forward. His advance slowed to a crawl.

‘You have turned Khorne against us!’ Orto shouted. ‘Archaon favours the followers of Nurgle.’

‘Are you already defeated?’ Skull answered. In the blood warrior’s words, Mir heard his own thoughts given voice. Khorne had rendered him mute, but Skull always spoke for him. Skull, whose loyalty was so unshakeable, it had to be a form of enslavement. ‘Do you abandon your duty to the Blood God?’ Skull demanded.

Vuul answered before Orto. ‘The transgression is Mir’s, not ours,’ he snarled. To Mir he said, ‘We followed you and this is our reward.’

Mir swung his axes. Branches fell, burning at their touch. I will have your silence and your effort, or I will have your head, he thought.

Skull said, ‘The enemy is close, and Ushkar Mir will not let a few trees stand between us and their skulls.’

Mir paused and faced Vuul. He parted his jaws, his teeth ready to tear flesh. He felt Vuul’s gaze on his face. There were no eyes for the bloodstoker to see, but Mir knew his band of brass blazed in the foetid shadows of the forest. Vuul hesitated, then, with a snarl, he turned back to hacking at the growths.

Vines tangled around Mir’s arms. He tore the lanyards apart. Spores burst from the ragged ends. The air thickened and sought to choke him. He spat it out and forced his way through the wall of rot. With each slowed step, his anger grew, and the forest began to shrivel at his touch.

He moved faster, a vector of wrath burning through the woods. He still could not see the Rotbringers. Nor could he hear them. He could barely hear his own troops over the shrieking of the birds. The stench of putrescence drowned out the scent of his prey’s blood.

No matter. He drove forward. If he did not reach the foes himself, the foes would come to him. And his rage would reap the harvest of their skulls.

The land erupted with violent death. Rivers of flaming blood ran between hills of skulls. Through the darkness of the crows’ wings, everything was the red of fire and the crimson of gore. Bule had been running across a barren plain, and then it had heaved skyward, stone transforming into bones soaked in blood, steaming and burning. Bule struggled up the slope. Skulls and femurs rolled and shifted. The ground tried to swallow his legs in avalanches of remains.

The Rotbringers reached the top of the rise. The walls of the arena had vanished. Bones, blood and flame stretched out to burning horizons in every direction. Overhead, the crows wheeled. Their many eyes glittered and judged.

‘We are abandoned,’ Fistula said.

There could be no garden here. There was no life. Only the perpetuity of pyres and the scarlet flow of rage.

‘We are challenged.’ Bule said. He would not despair, though the omen of the transformation was an ill one. Let it be a further trial, then, another means by which he would prove himself worthy of serving Archaon, and of the blessings of Grandfather Nurgle.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing, ‘we have an opportunity.’

The Bloodbound were further away than they had been before the land had transformed. The wall of the arena had vanished, and the battlefield was infinite. Still, the Khornate warriors were on the same heading. There was something odd about their advance. They moved more slowly than Bule had expected. Their gestures were strange. They were slashing at the air as if battling invisible enemies.

‘What are they doing?’ Fistula wondered.

‘I don’t care, as long as it does them no good.’ Bule thought for a moment. The Bloodbound warband looked strong. Whatever the confusion of the warriors’ gestures, they were striking forward with the coherence and force of a battering ram. Bule had little doubt that a head-on collision would go against him. That would be playing to the strengths of the wrathful. Neither band was very large. The possibilities for manoeuvring were few. But they still existed.

‘Embrace the enemy with the generosity of Grandfather,’ Bule ordered. He would take advantage of the Bloodbound’s apparent distraction. ‘Advance to meet them, encourage their charge, then split up and hit their flanks.’

Fistula nodded. Of course he’s pleased, Bule thought. He will lead half our band.

It was a risk, but one he saw no way to avoid.

Bule resumed the charge. He bellowed and stormed down the hill of bones. The footing was treacherous. He stomped hard on the shifting bones, shattering them, splashing through rivulets of blood, imposing his bulk on the burning land. The distance between the two bands narrowed. Though both struggled, it seemed as if the field were contracting once more. The crows called their excitement as the champions hurled towards each other.

We’re closing too fast, Bule thought.

There was nothing but the forest, nothing but the black, viscous, rotting density of the vegetation. Mir heard the Rotbringers, but could not see them. The sound of their tramping was muffled by the vegetation. There was no way to gauge their distance.

And then the forest fell away, shrivelling and burning at his touch, and the Rotbringers were before him. He roared. His hatred fuelled by frustration, he shot forward, axes raised. They screamed their hunger. The warrior at the Rotbringers’ head was huge, a festering mass of muscle and bulk. The spikes of his armour squirmed with rotting meat. His helmet was featureless except for a down-curving horn and a cluster of three eye-shaped holes. Mir saw in the design the idiot implacability of an insect, and his jaws parted in anticipation of the foe’s blood.

The Rotbringer was faster than he looked. He took a step back and pivoted to the right. Mir’s momentum carried him forward, too powerful to alter course. Skullthief slashed into the Rotbringer’s torso. Dark, stinking blood erupted into the air, boiling from the strike. The axe blade scraped against ribs. The Rotbringer shouted in pain, but kept moving, pulling free of Skullthief. Behind him, a second warrior, lighter in build and armour, broke left. He was very fast. He escaped harm. The knight coming up behind him was not as lucky. Mir brought his two blades together. The daemons within, as frustrated and raging as he, bit deep into the rotting, rusted armour. The double sweep slashed through flesh and bone. The knight’s head flew off. Blood fountained over Mir. It was thick with parasites. He snarled and batted the slumping corpse aside and the head rolled into the muck and vegetation. The plants rotted to nothing, as if the touch of the dead plague-bringer broke their hold on reality and they withdrew before the greater force of wrath.

Behind the fallen knight, a trio of marauders hurled themselves at Mir. They hacked at him with blades dripping with filth. The edges of his wounds turned black. The pain squirmed. He roared. Rage turned his vision red. It burned his veins clear of the infections. He brought Bloodspite down on one marauder’s skull, splitting it in two. Skullthief took another’s sword arm off at the shoulder. The wounded Rotbringer howled but pushed in closer, his rotten blood washing over Mir. Insects and worms tried to burrow through the brass. They succeeded in smearing his vision. Behind him, the rest of his band pushed forward.

But as he swiped the slime from his face, he saw that most of the Rotbringers had moved out to the left and right, flanking his warriors.

The wound burned. Not with the generous malignancy of Grandfather Nurgle’s munificence. It burned with a destroying fire, one that put the torch to the beauty of decay and left nothing but bone and ash. Bule hissed. His breath was pained and angry. The Bloodbound had hit so hard, so fast. Bule had seen them coming. He should have been able to judge when to move out of the way. But the distances in the battlefield were fluid, treacherous. He could not trust them. Fistula was right – there would be no blessings to look for from Nurgle. Everything was up to Bule. He would not find the garden in this landscape of skulls. It would be up to him to bring it here by fertilizing the ground with the blood of the wrathful.

Reeling from the blow of the Bloodbound champion, he moved in an arc away from the enemy horde. He glanced back. Just over a third of his knights followed him. The marauders took the brunt of the Bloodbound charge. They would be dead in moments. That was all the time he needed. On the other side of the enemy, Fistula kept pace with another third of the warband, mirroring his manoeuvre. The Khornate fighters smashed through the Rotbringers that stood in their way.

That’s right, Bule thought. You have broken us in two. Hold that belief.

He angled back in, ploughing through the bones, splashing through blood, bringing the weight and disease of his troops against the rear flank of the Bloodbound. The enemy turned, eager in rage to meet the challenge. But the ragged line was narrow. A concentrated wedge of Rotbringers hit it from both sides. Plague-ridden Chaos knights clashed with Khornate ones. Rotting armour and slimy, rusting blades met iron glowing red with the forge of anger. Barbarians in joyous states of decay fought counterparts whose faces were frozen in a rictus of perpetual wrath. Bule raised his battle axe. A green miasma spread out from it. The air itself sickened. Some of the foe began to stumble even before he made contact. One doubled over, choking with violent, rib-shattering coughs. His lungs, already half dissolved, pushed out through his straining jaw.

Bule brought his axe down. The pain in his chest faded into the background as the blade smashed down through a skullreaper’s shoulder and halfway down the torso. The warrior’s face screamed with hatred and pain. He struck at Bule with his other arm, wielding a sword the length of a man. It bled its own ichor. The blow struck just above Bule’s pauldron. The skullreaper had been aiming for his neck, but was weakening from more than loss of blood. The axe’s venom was running rampant through his body. Anger was impotent against the surge of transformative decay. Bule absorbed the blow and hit the skullreaper again in the other arm. The Bloodbound fell. Bule stepped over the still-breathing body. Where the blood of the Khornate warriors flowed, the land cooled. The low flames that flowed like oil over the mounds of skulls dampened. The bones crumbled into mulch. Shoots burst from the ground, pendulous with growths.

‘Break the hold of wrath!’ Bule shouted. ‘Let the garden flourish in victory!’

To his right, he heard a snarl so fanatical in its rage it withered the sprouting vegetation.

Mir decapitated another marauder and turned back in time to see the rear half of the warband caught in a vice. Where the Rotbringers attacked, the diseased vegetation exploded with a new exuberance of rotting life. Vines and branches rose in tangled exultation towards the sky of crows.

He snarled at Vuul. The bloodstoker was fighting at his shoulder, flaying a Rotbringer knight with his great whip.

‘Why are you here?’ Skull said to Vuul. ‘Lord Mir commands you go back up the line. Hold the centre.’

‘And you?’ said Vuul, challenging.

‘Do it.’

There was a single moment’s hesitation. Had there been a second, Mir would have attacked. But Vuul turned and saw the imminent collapse. The triumph of the enemy was too hateful to be borne. He raced down into the thick of the fray.

Mir killed the last of the Rotbringers at his position. The blood warriors around him paused, uncertain. They were poised to lend support to Vuul and push back the enemy attack. Mir shook his head. He gestured with Bloodspite. With me. Skull, the skullgrinder Kordos and the rest of the leading warriors followed as he turned right, off the clearing forged by the battle, plunging back into the festering green. He knew exactly where the Rotbringers were now. He would use the obscurity of the foliage against them. He would even turn their own manoeuvre against them. He would smash their illusions of strength. They flanked us, he thought. Now we flank them.

He wanted the skull of the Rotbringer champion. Killing him meant more than achieving the task set by Archaon. It meant more than destroying the principle threat. Skullthief had tasted the champion’s blood, and it was hungry for more. Bloodspite, envious, sought to steal its twin’s kill. Mir shared their hunger and their frustration. The Rotbringer should already be dead at his feet. The absence of the corpse was an insult.

The forest was thick with disease and insects. Almost immediately, Mir’s sight was reduced to a few steps in front of him. All directions were the same. The sounds of the struggle were too close to muffle now, though. He knew where he was going. Nurgle’s profusion would do nothing now to impede the path of rage.

He slashed through vegetation. It barely slowed him. He moved in a fated arc. There was no doubt, no confusion. He came in behind the lord of plague’s contingent. Around the struggle, the land was in flux. Vegetation burned and fell away, revealing a terrain of skulls. Blood flowed between the bones, turned black, and fertilized the ground. Growths and flame blossomed, the marks of the gods battling each other for supremacy with the same fury as the warriors. The Rotbringers had their backs to Mir. He could catch them in their own trap, crushing this part of the horde with greater numbers, then annihilating the other.

On the point of beginning the attack, Mir stopped. He raised his right arm, calling a halt.

‘Why do we stop?’ Kordos asked. It took much to move the skullgrinder to speak. His confusion must have been great. Since when did the Bloodslaves stop mid-charge?

‘Why do you question Lord Mir?’ asked Skull.

Kordos didn’t answer. Mir turned his head in Kordos’ direction for a moment, letting the skullgrinder know he had Mir’s attention. Then he faced forward again.

Vuul was fighting with ferocious skill. The Rotbringers attacked on two fronts, but the bloodstoker held them off. His whip and torture blade were blurs. His voice rose in a howl of thirst. He took the skulls of the enemy in a frenzy of blows. He cut through the Rotbringers as though they were no more of an obstacle than the forest. He was a towering storm of wrath.

Archaon had said there could be only one champion.

Mir had understood what that meant, but he had pushed the consequences aside until now. The priority was the defeat of the Rotbringers. Afterwards, he would deal with any of his warband still standing. But now, as he saw Vuul fight, his priorities changed. Vuul was fighting too well. His rage was fuelled by desperation and ambition. He understood the import of Archaon’s words too. Vuul sought to become the Varanguard.

Skull and the others with Mir obeyed when he signalled them to stop. Did they realize what he was doing and why? Did they understand what awaited them? Or were they too blinded by their dedication to Khorne? Perhaps they thought no further than the next kill, the next skull. Perhaps they dared not think any further. Certainly they dared not challenge him. To do so would be to invite the end of their lives even sooner.

So they obeyed. Even Kordos. They stopped. And with Mir, they waited.

Vuul fought through the violent roil of battle to reach the lord of plagues. Fire clashed with thick green fog. There were too many warriors in the way. Mir watched another Rotbringer, a blightlord, close in on Vuul. He was lightly armoured. He was fast. His lips were pulled back in a snarling rictus. His body was riddled with sores, but his rage was so great that it rivalled that of the Bloodbound he cut down.

Vuul sensed the approach of the blightlord and turned to meet him. The bloodstoker blocked a dual-bladed attack with the hilt of his blade. The Rotbringer stepped back, pulling his swords away. He feinted forward as Vuul lashed out with the whip, aiming at his neck. It was a trap, and Vuul fell into it. The blightlord took another step back. The whip went wide. The blightlord tangled it with one of his swords and yanked. Vuul stumbled forward. The blightlord came in and brought his other blade down on the bloodstoker’s right upper arm. The sword cut deep, slicing through armour, flesh and bone. The arm hung limp, swinging on the end of a flap of skin. His whip fell to the ground.

Vuul’s wrath gave him speed. He still had his torture blade. He stabbed forward. ‘Behold your champion, Everchosen!’ he cried. The Rotbringer sidestepped. The blade glanced off his torso, hacking away a chunk of flesh. It was not enough to slow the blightlord down.

Archaon sees nothing in you, Danavan Vuul, Mir thought.

The blightlord brought his right blade up, into Vuul’s forward momentum, and used the bloodstoker’s mass to ram the tip through the left eye-slit of his helm. Vuul stiffened. His war cry turned into a stuttering, wordless howl. Then it stopped. His knees buckled. The blightlord yanked his blade free, and blood gushed forth. On contact with the air, it turned into a black froth. Tumorous fronds unfurled to embrace his corpse.

The blightlord moved forward, leading his forces through the few Bloodbound that separated him from joining up with his chieftain. One of them was Orto.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ the slaughterpriest shouted. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

His zeal was unbroken. Mir knew that the Orto had found his path – he too understood how the contest must end, and he welcomed that meaning. He kept to the simplicity of fidelity to Khorne. He fought for the Blood God, and only the Blood God, to the end. He swung his bloodbathed axe with a speed that defied its size. The heads of rotted knights and barbarians flew in its wake. But there were too many, and the blightlord drove his blades into Orto’s back.

Mir roared. Now! His game was over. His rivals were falling. Time to finish off the others. He ran forward, blood boiling with the taste of victory.

Bule saw Fistula kill the bloodstoker. A few moments later, as the two groups of Rotbringers made contact, crushing the remaining Bloodbound between them, he heard the roar of the Bloodbound champion. The flames shot higher with the Khornate charge. Blood geysers erupted on either side of the warriors’ path.

Bule had seconds before the impact. There would be no evasion this time. The Bloodbound had been slow to arrive, though. The Rotbringers now had the numerical advantage.

But Bule turned away from the enemy. He had seen Fistula kill the slaughterpriest.

He had seen the skill, the speed and the rage. The skill and the speed were threats. The rage was an opportunity he must seize.

‘Fistula betrays us!’ he shouted. ‘He is apostate! Look how he abandons Nurgle for Khorne!’

Fistula blinked in astonishment, his blades deep in the corpse of a blood warrior. His battle rage gave way to blank surprise, and then returned, greater than ever, as he realized what Bule was doing. He snarled, freeing the swords, and played right into Bule’s hands. The violet blotching of his face and the contorted tendons of his neck were clear for all to see. He had always been the impatient warrior. His faith in Nurgle had been a crusading one, but only in the sense of the destruction of the Plaguefather’s enemies. He had shown little interest in the cultivation of the garden.

Now his anger doomed him.

Bule hurled the accusation. The Rotbringers heard and saw Fistula’s reaction. And Bule acted. He did so without pleasure. He swung his axe because he must, because only he could be Archaon’s champion, and Fistula’s visible wrath meant this was the moment his apostasy was plausible, and there was no chance Fistula could turn the warband against Bule.

He also swung the axe with conviction. Fistula’s rage was suspect. Bule believed the blightlord was a threat to the garden.

Even taken by surprise, Fistula’s reactions were fast. He swiped a blade across Bule’s torso. He tore the wound left by the Bloodbound champion wider and left a new furrow, dragging down deep into Bule’s gut. The filth on the blade reacted with the filth in Bule’s blood. Strains of plague did battle. Bule welcomed the conflict. It could only bear fruit, wonderful and dark.

Bule accepted his injury, gave thanks to Nurgle for the violent spread of infection, and smashed the massive axe blade down on Fistula.

The blightlord managed to jerk his head out of the path of the blow at the last second. It did him little good. The axe shattered his chestplate. It shattered his sternum. It split him open. He flailed. His arms batted at the weapon buried in his body. Their movements were so loose, so independent of one another, it was as if Fistula’s mind had been divided too, each half pulling at one set limbs.

Fistula staggered backwards, choking and gargling. Bule yanked the axe free and brought it down again. This time he smashed Fistula’s skull. The blightlord collapsed, his body erupting with maggots and rot. Its shape softened. The flesh rippled, then crumbled. Blood spread over the land. Where vegetation had grown from the death of Bloodbound warriors, it burned at the touch of Fistula’s blood.

‘Behold his treachery!’ Bule yelled, though his belief in his lie collapsed. Fistula’s blood had the same effect as that of his brothers in disease. Bule shouted to keep the lie alive in the minds of his warband just a bit longer.

Then the Bloodbound champion was upon them, and Bule abandoned all thoughts of strategy. There was no deception, no forethought.

There was battle, and there was his faith in Grandfather Nurgle.

And that was all.

Mir led the charge into the Rotbringers, and Chaos embraced the conflict. The land heaved and bucked. It burned and flourished. It was bone, it was muck, it was brackish stream and it was flaming blood. The order of the warbands broke down at once. There were no longer enough warriors on either side to maintain coherence after the initial shock, and as the numbers fell, the significance of Archaon’s words was felt by all. Mir embraced the disorder. From the moment he struck, from the moment Bloodspite and Skullthief began to feed, he saw only red. Every presence on the battlefield was a threat. The existence of any other being filled him with desperate rage. He waded in, killing any warrior within reach.

To Mir’s right, Kordos laid waste to the plague warriors with the burning fist of his anvil. He fought in silence, he killed in silence, until the anvil buried itself in the corpulent body of one of his foes. The Rotbringer slumped, his corpse smouldering, and the collapsing mass held the brazen weapon for a moment. Kordos grunted in anger, and that was the last sound Mir heard from him. The rhythm of his blows was disrupted just long enough for the huge lord of plagues to attack his flank. Mir saw Kordos’ death coming just as he cut down another barbarian. Two steps to the right and he could have joined Kordos, blocking the lord of plague’s attack.

He stepped forward instead. He heard the axe blow. The shattering of armour and the rending of flesh. When he heard the axe hit again, he knew Kordos was dead.

Mir fought on, killing his way toward glory, each corpse another step toward vengeance.

The land mirrored the storm of the war. It rose and fell with greater violence, as if Bloodbound and Rotbringers fought on the heaving chest of a great beast. It burned and flourished. It was turbulence itself.

Mir kept his feet. He lost himself in murder and wrath. He howled in an ecstasy of rage. He filled the air with his hatred for his enemy, hatred for his rivals, hatred for the other Bloodbound, hatred for himself. And the air answered. A fresh storm broke. Thunder roared, and blood lashed down in torrents and vortices. It blinded. It filled lungs. It surrounded Mir in a perfection of violent death. It turned blades away. He was coated in the bloody manifestation of his hate.

Every warrior fought for his own survival. Mir no longer knew whom he was killing. Nothing mattered except that those who stood before him fell to his blades. His axes, maddened and drunk on gore, screamed for more. And the storm of blood battled with another tempest, one of pestilence. A diseased wind battered Mir. It shrieked in his ears. It forced itself into his lungs. It was hot with decay. Each breath took in a legion of parasites. He burned the sickness out with the fever of his hate, and then in it came again.

The threat made him more furious yet. He slashed as if he would kill the air itself. He became part of the vortex of blood. Every blow was lethal. The death fountains of his enemies anointed him with victory and survival.

He saw no faces, only prey. Only shapes to be torn apart. Only skulls to be severed from their necks.

But then one spoke to him. One word, in the moment before the slavering Skullthief made the killing stroke. One word, in a voice so familiar, so in tune with his thoughts, that he had come to think of it almost as his own.

‘Lord–’ said Skull. Then Mir killed him.

He paused, suspended in his blood haze. He stared at the severed head of the blood warrior. Pale blue eyes in pale blue skin looked back at him with the final glimmers of life, and in them Mir saw not rage, but betrayal and grief.

What happened could not be helped. Only Mir could survive this war. Only Mir could be Archaon’s champion.

But this was Skull, who in all the warband had displayed a loyalty that went beyond an alliance of convenience. A loyalty that Mir now recognized, too late, as the last thing of value, the last thing unconsumed by wrath, that he would ever know.

He was vaguely aware of replacing Skullthief on his belt and picking up the head. Then he fell into the crimson fire once more, and there was nothing else. He killed and he killed and he killed. He was incoherent with rage and self-loathing. The world fell into ruin. All was storm. All was chaos. All was blood.

No longer for the Blood God. Blood for himself.

Killing and killing and killing.

Blood and blood and blood.

And…

And then Bule was alone. Alone against the being of wrath.

The storm raged on. Flame and pestilence whirled around him. The earth on which he stood shifted from loam to bone to blood to rock to all and none. There were bodies everywhere, rotting, burning and being devoured by the shifting land. The horizons had vanished. He and the Bloodbound champion faced each other in the midst of the collapse of all form.

The exalted deathbringer stood with an axe in one hand and a skull in the other. The head had been used as a weapon, and was a battered, smashed relic, but Bule could see it had been one of the Bloodbound, not a Rotbringer. The deathbringer looked at the skull with his head cocked, almost with regret.

How many of his own Rotbringers had Bule killed? He did not know. The answer did not matter. What mattered was the fulfilment of destiny. What mattered was to ascend to Archaon’s side as a warrior of the Varanguard.

His mind cleared of battle frenzy. He braced himself for the charge of the deathbringer. Bule was no match for his speed. This warrior was faster and more powerful than Fistula. Bule could not evade. He would not get the first blow in, but he would, with the Plaguefather’s blessing, get the last.

Against the quick, he had always used his great bulk. He won by being the hardest to kill.

The deathbringer dropped the skull and seized his other axe. He turned his maddened eyes to Bule and rushed in. He was a thing of crimson hate. His blades howled with him.

Bule braced for the impact. He stood with all the strength of a warrior for Grandfather Nurgle. He knew the fevers and the bodily erosion of a legion of diseases. They made him strong, for Nurgle valued the great resilience of life, and its ability to decay into ever more bounty, ever more life. Bule gathered the great endurance gifted to him by the Plaguefather. He would let fury spend itself against the bulwark of illness.

The deathbringer hit. He stabbed the axes low. He plunged both blades deep into Bule’s exposed belly.

It was exposed because it was a trap. Bule’s organs had long ago ceased to function in any mortal fashion. They were reservoirs of disease. His body was the carrier of pestilence. He was beyond the reach of ordinary weapons, no matter where they stabbed him. Time and again, foes had plunged their blades into his festering mass only to find their weapons stuck, and themselves left open to his counterblow.

This time was different. Wrath itself was upon him, with speed and fury and the frenzy of boiling blood. The deathbringer’s axes had their own will. They were a higher order of death-dealer. They went too deep. They burned too profoundly. They severed something too important.

Bule felt himself come undone. The strength went out of his legs. He lost feeling in the lower half of his body. His knees must have buckled because he was sinking toward the ground, drawing the wounds even wider. The exalted deathbringer’s face twisted into an expression of hate-filled triumph. The weakness spread up Bule’s arms. He dropped his axe.

He had lost without landing a single blow.

No, he thought. Not like this. I will not fail you, Grandfather. I am still your gardener.

He held on to the most fundamental fact of his being. Death was coming to Bule, but Bule was just a name. He was a lord of plagues. To the end, this was his truth, and so he took all that he was, all the vast strengths bestowed upon him by Nurgle, the power that was more important than his axe, more important even than endurance, the essence that shaped his physical form into a poor mirror of its full reality. He became infection. As he fell, he reached out for the wounds on the Bloodbound champion’s body. His arms were weak. His blow was glancing.

But infection needed only the slightest touch to take root. All it needed was a point of ingress. All it needed was blood.

Bule found the other champion’s blood. And with the totality of his being, with the pure transmission of disease, he stole this blood from the Blood God.

The land became quiet. Fire, rot and bones became simple stone again. The empty wastes of the arena returned. The crows flew off, vanishing against the dark of the sky. The Rotbringer fell at Mir’s feet. He spasmed and twitched, still alive but fading quickly. There was no need to strike again. Even so, Mir prepared to mark his triumph with the decapitation of his foe.

He tried to raise his arms.

He could not.

He staggered back from the body. Something crawled over his flesh and through his veins. He shook so hard that he lost control of his limbs. His lungs could not draw air. He was suffocating. His gasp was the sound of iron dragged across stone.

Mir wheeled away from the Rotbringer. The stairs of the arena seemed leagues away. But Archaon stood on the end of the rock spur once more. The Everchosen waited for his champion to climb up and claim his prize. Mir would climb.

Except he was on all fours. The tremors had him in their jaws. Cold and fever hit him in waves. Thick, bloody mucus poured from his nose and mouth. He crawled toward the stairs. They were too far, too far. Behind him, he heard the Rotbringer drag his carcass forward with slow, pitiful scrapes.

Mir gasped. Everchosen, he thought. The victory is mine. Free me of this pestilence. Induct me into the Varanguard. Heal me, he thought. Let me live.

‘The final blow was mine,’ said the Rotbringer, his words barely audible. ‘Let me serve.’

Mir collapsed onto his stomach, racked by coughs. There was nothing either of them could do. Archaon knew who the victor was. He would raise that warrior up and save him.

Archaon’s laughter rumbled across the arena. ‘And thus do both exact judgement. Well done. On this day I witnessed more than a struggle between wrath and pestilence. You presented me with the contest between survival and fealty. It was instructive. And, for both of you, futile. I chose my champion before your arrival.’

No, Mir thought. His anger flared, but it could do nothing for him now. He watched Archaon walk away and out of his sight. Darkness fell over his eyes. In his last moments, he regarded the monstrosity of his years, and he recognized the fitting pointlessness of his end.

He thought he heard the laughter of crows.

The Many-Eyed Servant watched Mir and Bule die. And then it was done. He had witnessed every moment of the contest across the realms. He had looked through the eyes of insects and crows, and he had seen all there was to see. The compound tableau of vision was complete.

Except it wasn’t. There were gaps. He had not seen through the eyes of the combatants themselves. Their thoughts were closed to him. So were Archaon’s.

The Everchosen stopped up beside the sorcerer. ‘More eyes, Gaunt Summoner,’ Archaon said, in answer to an unasked question. ‘I always need more eyes.’ He gestured to the corpses below. ‘They were blind. My champion is not. And it is time he assumed his duties. Return us to my fortress.’

‘My lord,’ said the Many-Eyed Servant. He moved his arms in eldritch signs. Mystic energies gathered around him and Archaon. They grew into a great pillar of fire. It rose to the heavens. And with a clap of implosive thunder, the cold arena vanished.

‘Rise.’

Orphaeo Zuvius stood. He knew he was in the throne room. He was conscious of his body. It was healed, it was strong, and yet it retained a wound. His sight was odd. It was off-centre. He raised his fingers. He moved them toward his eyes, and when he did, his vision turned and he saw his own face from the perspective of his shoulder.

He was looking through Mallofax’s eyes.

The blue daemon bird watched what Orphaeo needed him to see. A blue jewel sat in Orphaeo’s right eye socket. A pink one occupied the left.

Orphaeo tilted his head back, and Mallofax looked up at Archaon. ‘Why have you spared me?’ Orphaeo asked.

‘Spared you? I have made you my champion. And why? Because you have vision. Because you think to look and see where others race to pointless combat and die. You sought me here, not on the battlefield. For your trespass, I have punished you. For your vision, I have blessed you.’

‘But you have stolen my sight.’

‘Have I? Look further.’

Through Mallofax’s eyes, Orphaeo examined his face again. He considered the jewels. Their facets. So many planes and angles. So many perspectives.

Of course.

With understanding came more sight. He saw as Mallofax, and he saw as the warriors under his command. He was in the fortress. He was outside its walls.

He was everywhere he would send his forces.

All the facets of the battlefield would be his.

‘Do you see?’ Archaon asked.

‘I do, Everchosen. Oh, I do.’

‘Then it is time to go to work, champion. I have wars for you to witness and to shape.’

SEE NO EVIL

Rob Sanders

The searing gaze of the Many-Eyed Servant travelled far. Nothing was beyond his regard. He could see an entire people put to the blade and moments later the cavernous emptiness in the heart of the man who had ordered such an atrocity. He saw what the Everchosen could not see, and went where the Everchosen could not be.

Archaon exercised his omnipotence through the black-hearted loyalty of those who were pledged to the Chaos gods. The realms were nothing without the mortal souls infesting them, and souls could be corrupted, bought and bartered. Those wretches already lost to the myriad corruptions of existence found deeper damnation in Archaon’s fell ranks.

The Many-Eyed Servant peered through the storm of a land long sundered. A place the Everchosen’s armies had conquered an age before. A haunted corner of the realms, empty of the people who had existed there – for either they had been assimilated into Archaon’s conquering hordes, or their skulls now made up the bonemeal beaches of the shoreline.

The Many-Eyed Servant’s gaze had passed across this dead place before. There he had seen something that he knew would anger his master and shake the realms with his fury. What the Gaunt Summoner saw was a land retaken by an enemy force. For now the darkness of these craggy fortifications had been scalded away by columns of lightning reaching down from the heavens. From these blazing conduits came the Stormcast Eternals. The God-King’s weapons of war. Sigmar had been busy and so had the forges of the Celestial Realm, crafting immaculate plate, weaponry and souls to wield them.

The Stormcast Eternals appeared on a dead peninsula called Cape Desolation. They took the fortresses lining the hellish coast without raising a weapon, and had clear plans to expand their invasion. They would bring freedom to the people of the darkness beyond the peninsula – the Shatterlands – which the Everchosen had held in his crushing grip for a thousand years.

The Many-Eyed Servant whispered what he seen to his master.

‘There is a light in the darkness, Exalted One.’

‘Light is but a brightness of the moment,’ the Everchosen said, his words burning on the air. ‘The spark of flint. The strike of lightning. It passes. Darkness is forever.’

‘This spark,’ the Many-Eyed Servant said, ‘has started a fire, my lord. A fire from the sky that threatens to rage through the Shatterlands and bring hope to peoples beyond. The God-King’s warriors rain from the heavens and have made landfall. Our bastions along Cape Desolation are theirs.’

‘Sigmar’s warriors,’ Archaon said, ‘in the Shatterlands?’ The Many-Eyed Servant heard both searing outrage and relish in his master’s voice. ‘Its people will come to know the exquisite torment of hope dashed and the terror of lights extinguished.

‘Send word to my warlords, my champions and the fell kings of the surrounding regions. Summon my unholy Varanguard. I shall lead the Knights of Ruin myself in a counter invasion. Those bastions shall be mine again. The God-King’s light shall be banished and his warriors shall flee for the skies. I want Sigmar to know that he will find no purchase in lands forever dedicated to the Chaos gods.’

Peering down through the tumultuous skies of the God-King’s storm, the Many-Eyed Servant could see his master. Riding atop the monster Dorghar – an abominable creature of twin-tail, colossal wings and three terrible heads – Archaon led the way through the holy tempest. With his cloak streaming in the maelstrom and the Slayer of Kings held out in front of him, the Destroyer of Worlds rode out the storm at the head of his fleet.

A thousand dreadships coursing through the crash and squall of a spectral sea, all flying the flag of the Everchosen. The sea was a ghostly swarm of lost souls, the crash of waves and the hiss of the surf the sound of spiritual suffering.

Thrashing with their galley oars and with flayed-flesh sails full of sacrifice-bought winds, the armada surged on towards the black peninsula. Each ship carried hordes of Chaos warriors and Archaon’s own Knights of Ruin – thousands of dark templars, clad in plate of black and gold, utterly committed to the Everchosen’s service and the absolute destruction of his enemies. Among them was a worthy warrior the Many-Eyed Servant recognised from a past trial – the sorcerous warrior they called Orphaeo Zuvius, the Prince of Embers, now a knight in the Everchosen’s service.

The Prince of Embers burned for battle.

Standing on the deck of the dreadship Aftermath – so named for the death and destruction left in its blood-churned wake – Orphaeo Zuvius felt the surge and drift of the vessel through the spectral sea. Crafted from the torched wood of treelord ancients that groaned their suffering still, the landing galley’s black prow cut through the ghostly seas. Riding the swell, he looked to the flesh-sails, filled with the doom-laden winds that took the Everchosen’s armada on towards the skull beaches of Cape Desolation. Bloodreavers scrambled up and down the rigging of raw tendons while masts of braced bone creaked with the weight of wind and sail.

Zuvius made his way across the deck. His plate was black and gold and hell-forged to fit his slender frame. While one pauldron bore the crafted symbol of Archaon, the other had a metal spike. On the spike perched the familiar Mallofax, a reptilian bird of blue feather and black heart. It had been Mallofax that had guided the Prince of Embers down his destined path and into Archaon’s dark service. The wind ruffled the intense blue of the bird’s plumage.

About the main mast the deck was crowded with warriors of Chaos – Varanguard like Zuvius who had proved their worth to the Everchosen. The bloodreaver crew gave such warriors and their monstrous, armoured steeds a wide berth. The planks smouldered where the hooves of the mounted Varanguard held firm to the deck. The ruinous knights bled malevolence and, despite the subtle differences in their appearance and the myriad blessings of their dark gods, all wore the black and gold of their master. He was the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse and they were his instruments of doom.

Zuvius mounted his own steed, Hellion. A muscular abomination that seemed mostly horse, Hellion blinked multiple dead eyes that ran the length of its fang-filled snout. Horns erupted from its malformed skull and its transparent hide revealed the ghastly inner workings of the beast’s grotesque body. Hellion’s spiked hooves clopped across the deck. Zuvius’ daemon-forged glaive A’ cuitas sat in a saddle sheathe like a spear ready to be drawn in the charge.

Around the prince, warriors of the Varanguard were making preparations. Some were readying weapons and armour. Others were bringing their steeds to heel with vicious tugs on the reins. Some were even mumbling dark prayers to the Ruinous Pantheon, bidding the gods to grant them worthy foes and a merciless victory for their Everchosen.

Nearby, Zuvius saw fellow former acolyte of the Great Changer, Aspa Erezavant. Like him, the prince had forsaken his dread god in favour of service to Archaon. Through the Everchosen, Zuvius had pledged his soul, blade and talents to the unified forces of Chaos. Aspa Erezavant never spoke of such a pledge, however. The Varanguard warrior said nothing. He never did. There was only flesh where his mouth used to be.

Zorn the Brazenfleshed, however, always had something to say. A knight of dread threats and bombast, the Varanguard had once belonged to the Blood God. Now he commanded the Aftermath for the Everchosen, ensuring the vessel – in coordination with others cutting through the souls of the spectral sea – landed their Varanguard and meatshield hordes on the beach.

‘By the fell gods,’ Zorn roared through the storm at the ship’s bloodreaver crew, ‘if you don’t get more flesh to the wind I’ll flay your hides for extra sail!’ He turned to a pair of bloodreavers attending to the rebellious tiller. ‘Hold your course, damn you. And you,’ the Varanguard warrior bellowed at a bloodstoker called Killian, ‘get below decks. More power on the stroke. Take your lash to the oar crews. I want them sitting in a pool of their own blood. The Exalted Grand Marshal demands from them everything they have to give. Gods help the wretch who holds back his best from the Everchosen of Chaos!’

Zuvius watched the Varanguard warrior knock a passing bloodreaver brutally to the deck and then deliver a vicious kick with his armoured boot.

‘Fetch my weapons and my steed!’ Zorn roared at the unfortunate.

‘The Everchosen watches,’ Sarsael Hedra said. ‘The Brazenfleshed bids to be first on the beach for our master’. The Varanguard slipped his helm down over the oily flesh of his handsome face. The warrior’s words were slick with suggestion – insolence even. No one would actually level such an accusation at Hedra, however. He had killed too many in Archaon’s name.

‘I think he just might be,’ Kadence Salivarr said, looking from the saddle out across the ghostly waves at the rest of the fleet. His eyes were bright within his twisted helm. Like Salivarr, Zuvius could see that the Aftermath was pulling ahead.

‘Not if I get there first,’ Sarsael Hedra said, pulling on the reins to line up his fell steed with the ship’s prow. An armoured mountain of filth, Vomitus Grue, shook the deck with the boom of his laughter.

‘The Everchosen watches,’ said another Varanguard warrior through the ranks of mounted knights. Known as the Unslaked, his words were barbed much like his blood-stained blade. ‘He sees all. He hears all. He hears the prattling of his warriors. Witless boasts to calm the nerve and steady the cowardly soul.’

The deck fell silent but for the clop of hooves and scolding tongue of Zorn the Brazenfleshed. The Prince of Embers moved Hellion around, edging the steed ahead of Sarsael Hedra’s own. He licked his lips with a silver tongue.

‘The Varanguard will see the dark will of the Everchosen done,’ Zuvius said, his voice assured and even. ‘Each according to his gifts. We can all trust in that – as the Exalted Grand Marshal puts his trust in his Varanguard.’

Kadence Salivarr nodded his helm slowly at Zuvius. As the storm raged about them and the ship, that seemed to be the end of the matter. The dark templars waited. Waited to disembark, to take the beach and then the bastion beyond for their dark master. If every warrior of the Varanguard did their duty well, each fortress along Cape Desolation would be taken back in the Everchosen’s name. The warriors of the God-King would be naught but the blot of an afterglow on the eye. The Shatterlands beyond the dark peninsula would belong stone and soul to the Chaos powers once more. The Varanguard about the Prince of Embers weren’t wrong though. Archaon and his sorcerous servants would be watching. They always were. Orphaeo Zuvius aimed to give them a sight to see. The Prince of Embers would make it his honour to lead the warriors of the Aftermath in their charge up the beach, behind the Everchosen himself, who would ride on ahead and strike the first terrible blow.

As well as the unhallowed ranks of the Varanguard, the Aftermath carried a small horde of Chaos killers to help take their section of the beach and soak up enemy fire: hulking khorgoraths of the Red Death, Tzeentchian sorcerers of the Glass Spire, and spindle-limbed bloodletters of twisted horn and daemon wrath. The largest contingents were the indomitable plague-bloated warriors of the Rank and Vile, led by a sack of corruption called Bloatus Belch, and the Chaos knights of the Mazarine in their glowing blue plate, directed by a two-faced champion called Vitas and Volitae. Even the Fleshblessed, the Slaaneshi spawn shackled below decks, had their role to play in the battle to come. But they were all nothing to Archaon’s chosen.

A bloodreaver walked past Zuvius with his eyes on the deck. He carried a crude spyglass in his hand for scanning their landing at the beach and the approach to their target fortress, called the Ebon Claw. Unlike Zorn the Brazenfleshed, Zuvius needed no glass. Isolated straggles of blue hair danced in the wind, while the remaining threads of his skin squirmed over the red raw flesh of his face. His silver tongue licked at scorch-smeared lips. The prince’s crow-pecked sockets now contained jewels instead of eyes – sorcerous gemstones, one blue and one pink to honour his former patron. These eyes saw for Archaon now, the labyrinthine facets of the precious stones giving him unparalleled vision.

He could see the spectral sea lapping up along a beachhead of weathered skulls. He took in the Ebon Claw beyond, a craggy edifice of petrified, black stone. Its battlements were razored like flint, while its towers were jagged like the crooked fingers of a grasping talon. Across the phantasmic waves, Zuvius saw other dreadships of the Everchosen’s armada, carrying knights like himself to take the Ebon Claw and all the other enemy-occupied forts along the coast of Cape Desolation.

Zorn had instructed the bloodstoker and his bloodreavers to keep the tiller trained on the lightning stream coursing down through the stormy skies into the Ebon Claw. It was just one of many pillars of searing power that carried the God-King’s warriors and their reinforcements into the bastions that punctuated the peninsula coast.

The dreadships converged on the shoreline. Zuvius could feel the rancid excitement on the air. Below decks, the spawn of the Fleshblessed were whipped to an ecstasy while bloodreaver oarsmen surged the galley towards the beach. The oars of the Aftermath tangled with those of another closing dreadship. Every knight of Chaos in the fleet wanted to be the first to reach the beach and earn the approval of Archaon.

Peering down the coast, however, Zuvius saw that his unhallowed master was busy. He had already reached the peninsula on the back of his monstrous daemon steed. The beast flapped his giant wings and soared across the battlements. While most would flee before the sight of the Everchosen astride his monster as they might a city-razing dragon, Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals stood like golden statues: cold, implacable and unimpressed. As Dorghar banked, Archaon swept helms and heads from shoulders with the Slayer of Kings. Dorghar stove in towers with his lashing twin-tail and tore away sections of battlement with his great claws, sending Stormcasts raining to the ground.

‘Pass the word,’ Zorn the Brazenfleshed called down the length of the ship. ‘Prepare to disembark and fight for your lives.’

Zuvius heard Bloatus Belch and the Tzeentchian Vitus and Volitae readying their warriors below decks. He knew that the Red Death would barely be able to contain their fury and that the predacious bloodletters would be hissing their anticipation of the kill. The Varanguard would go first, however, for there were no servants of Chaos worthier than Archaon’s dark templars. And among the Varanguard ranks, there would be none as worthy as the Prince of Embers. Zuvius promised both himself and his Exalted Grand Marshal that.

‘The honour is mine,’ Zuvius hissed to himself. He worked Hellion around, lining the beast up for disembarkation. He could hear raised voices beyond.

‘My lord…’ Bloodstoker Killian said.

‘Hold your damned course,’ the Brazenfleshed spat. Zuvius looked down the coastline. Dreadships were taking in sail and stowing oars, coursing through the shallows the rest of the way to the shore. The Aftermath would not take such precautions on the approach. Zorn meant to hit the coastline at ramming speed and ride the galley as far up the skull beach as he could get.

As the vessel coursed through the shallows ahead of the armada, Zuvius saw bloodreavers wind their arms and legs about the rigging. The Chaos warriors below the decks began to chant their bloody expectation, while the ruinous knights settled into their saddles and stirrups, ready to follow the Prince of Embers.

‘For the Everchosen,’ Zuvius roared, kicking his heels into Hellion’s flanks. It was as much a challenge as an announcement. ‘May he and all who follow in his shadow know absolute victory this dark day.’

Standing up in the stirrups, Zuvius urged his steed down the length of the ship. With the steed’s spiked shoes tearing up the deck, the unnaturally swift and strong beast hit a gallop by the time it passed the mast. Dread knights of Chaos watched the prince thunder by, readying their own steeds for impact. Even on Hellion, Zuvius felt the Aftermath shudder as the vessel’s keel bit into bonemeal and then the shattered skulls of the beach. He readied himself for the inevitable. In the contest between the galley and the land, the land would eventually win.

The prince’s timing was perfect. The Aftermath had rammed its way out of the shallows and cut into the skull beach. As the vessel ground to an abrupt stop, the mast let out an excruciating creak and the flesh-sails billowed the other way. Steeds stumbled and bloodreavers were thrown from the rigging. Hellion made his jump just as the full force of the impact struck. Clearing the bulwark, the monstrous steed soared across the skulls. Hitting the beach of shattered bone at a gallop, Zuvius slipped the glaive A’ cuitas from its sheath and spun it in his gauntlet. His exalted master had been the first to achieve an enemy kill on the cape. Zuvius would be the second. At his side, keeping pace with the monstrous steed, flew Mallofax.

‘Find me a way in,’ Zuvius said. The bird squawked an acknowledgement before taking to higher altitudes. Looking back, Zuvius saw that only now the other dreadships were slowing in the shallows and lowering their ladders for disembarkation. The Aftermath, however, with her keel torn out and hull well and truly beached, was disgorging her fell cargo. Inspired by the prince’s example, the knights of Archaon’s chosen had followed Zuvius and were riding up behind like a tidal wave of blade, plate and doom.

The khorgoraths of the Red Death hadn’t waited for bloodreavers to open the vessel’s fang-lined boarding-maws. The monstrous creatures of red flesh and fury had smashed their way through the hull and were lumbering up the beach towards the enemy. While the Fleshblessed spawn were unleashed upon the beach and made their mindless approach at unnatural speed, Bloatus Belch and the two-faced Tzeentchian exited the vessel through the holes the khorgoraths had left behind. They led their warriors past the sorcerers of the Glass Spire and out onto the bonemeal. Bloodstoker Killian cracked his whip and blew a horn, prompting the Aftermath’s bloodreaver crew to grab their blades and leave the ship.

Racing towards the Ebon Claw, Zuvius could see the golden shapes of the Stormcast Eternals. The God-King’s warriors had been busy. The black talon of petrified stone was now but a derelict shell. Like the petals of a dead flower, the sharp walls and cragged towers of the fort had given way to new fortifications built within the ruins. About the column of lightning streaming down, new and glorious fortifications had sprung up – domed citadels of silver and gold. Immaculate structures of globed indomitability, at odds with the petrified jaggedness of the surrounding fortifications. It was as though the Ebon Claw suffered some kind of taintless cancer, with towers of metal, light and storm blooming amongst the twisted architecture of the malefic bastion.

Zuvius read the enemy’s defence of the fortress. Archers in glorious plate and their watching lords took position on razor-sharp battlements and looked down on the beach approach through crooked arrow slits. Meanwhile, destroyers in burnished plate collapsed the fortress gateway, turning the entrance into a barricade of smashed rubble with earth-shaking blows from their crackling hammers. Atop towers and derelict ramparts, Stormcasts waited for the Chaos invaders with glaives and great shields, their impassive stillness an invitation to death.

Suddenly everything was gold and bone. Zuvius resisted the urge to haul upon the reins as the beach exploded before him. Hitting the ground and throwing skulls and bone shards into the air with the force of their landing were the warrior-heralds of the God-King. Launching from the walls of the Ebon Claw, armoured warriors had flown down to the shoreline, dropping with the force of a meteorite shower crashing to the ground. Their wings were a spread of lightning blades whilst they clutched a pair of ornate hammers in their gauntleted hands.

Zuvius would not be stopped. Urging Hellion on into the warrior heralds, the prince extended A’ cuitas out in front of him like a spear. Zuvius crashed into his foes.

The knight’s glaive punctured its way through a faceplate, impaling the skull of a landing herald. The Prince of Embers allowed himself a flesh-smeared smile. As the weapon skewered the head clean off the armoured warrior, Hellion rammed his horn straight through the breastplate of another and tossed the enemy aside. With the death of each Stormcast, soul-lightning leapt for the sky with a satisfying crack and flash. Battering another Stormcast aside, Hellion turned the warrior into a staggering mess of celestial plate. Allowing the glaive shaft to slide forward in his grasp, Zuvius smashed the heavy metal pommel of the weapon down through the herald’s helm. Braining the warrior with the bulbous counterweight, Zuvius saw another flash of lightning rocket up to the heavens.

Thundering through the heralds’ freshly landed ranks, Zuvius heaved on the reins and turned Hellion about. He would ride them down from behind, pounding their plate into the skull beach with his mount’s hooves.

The warrior-heralds had recovered quickly, however. Having turned to receive the knight’s attack, they threw their celestial hammers head over haft at Zuvius. It was all he could do to lean out of their pulverising path. As one smashed his gauntlet, while another grazed his pauldron. Zuvius didn’t see a hammer flung at the last moment towards his head.

Smashed in the face, Zuvius almost tumbled from the saddle. His skull felt as though it had been split in two and though he fought to stay alert, consciousness started to slip away from him. The prince shook his head. He could not allow himself to fall. He would be butchered by the God-King’s warrior heralds.

Zuvius was suddenly at the eye of a storm of hammer blows. Hellion reared and the prince tried to turn the beast while fending off as many of the strikes as he could. He heard something crack in his side as both plate and bone gave in to the force of a righteous smash. Zuvius grunted. There was nothing his serpentine words or silver tongue could do to get him out of this. Hellion was drowning in a sea of plate, while heralds smashed at Zuvius, attempting to pierce his hell-forged armour and drag him down.

Zuvius briefly entertained the blasphemous notion that he was finished. That his service to the Everchosen would end here on Cape Desolation. Zuvius turned A’ cuitas about in his gauntlet and clutched the shaft under one arm. Aiming the pommel at the advancing heralds, the prince unleashed a crackling arc of lightning. The Stormcasts trembled for a second as the sorcerous energies of the daemon-forged glaive coursed through them before exploding in a shower of blood and crackling soulfire, their spiritual essence rocketing for the sky.

Untouched by the arcing bolt, a surviving herald lifted his hammers to pound Zuvius into the bone beach. The prince put his glaive between him and his enemy, deflecting the hammer heads with the shaft. Pulling the glaive back with sudden violence, the prince cut the crowning blade through his enemy’s throat before heaving it back to take the herald’s head off his armoured body.

As the bloody mist cleared, Zuvius saw other newly landed warrior-heralds racing for him, hammers held in both hands. Zuvius felt thunder rolling up the beach. His brothers in corruption had arrived. Riding their monstrous mounts like a black wave crashing up the beach, the knights of the Everchosen’s calling crashed through the God-King’s ranks. While some warrior-heralds managed to land blows on the armoured steeds or knock the warriors of Chaos from their saddles, most succumbed to the earth-trembling charge. Fellspears sheared straight through plate and the blessed flesh within. Daemon-forged swords and great ensorcelled axes chopped down the Stormcasts as the line of steeds passed through, sending columns of lightning arcing for the heavens.

The horde from the Aftermath stormed the beach after their Varanguard, making their way towards Zuvius. The spawn of the Fleshblessed, gibbering with expectation, and the bloodreavers ran ahead of the mob. The Mazarine and the lumbering fury that were the khorgoraths of the Red Death weren’t far behind, with the Glass Spire sorcerers and Bloatus Belch’s Rank and Vile making more sedate progress up the beach. They would all play their part in the horror to come. As a meatshield before the mighty Varanguard or as scavengers devouring the scraps Archaon’s chosen left behind, the horde would find service to the Dark Gods.

As injured warriors tried to get to their feet, more heralds glided across the charging columns of knights to fortify their number. Zuvius turned Hellion about and raced off to join the mounted ranks of the Varanguard, leaving the warrior-heralds to be swamped by butchers, monstrosities and dread swordsmen.

Cape Desolation was a vast shoreline of bone and darkness, swarmed by the Chaos hordes of Archaon’s monstrous army. It was swallowed by the charging ranks of Varanguard, their mounted number shattering the skulls of the beachhead and closing about the twisted forts lining the peninsula. The Everchosen was everywhere, soaring through the storm, setting the monstrous Dorghar on fortification after fortification. As Archaon cut Stormcasts from the ramparts with blazing sweeps of the Slayer of Kings, the daemon mount tore down sigmarite towers erected amongst the razored ruins of Chaos bastions.

To any other mortal in the nine realms, the sight would have shredded their minds and turned their hearts white with terror. Like the fires of doom, the Everchosen and his World Enders had arrived. Suffering and death awaited all in Archaon’s path. The God-King’s Stormcasts were not just any other mortals, however, if they were mortal at all. Crafted of immaculate plate and righteous flesh, the Stormcasts were Sigmar’s cold wrath incarnate. They knew no fear and lived for the sole purpose of driving the scourge of Chaos from the realms.

All along the coast, the beach was lit up by streaming shots of celestial energies. Flights of skybolt arrows blazed up out of the fortresses before dropping back down onto the beach in searing volleys. Lightning blasts created craters in the shattered skulls and blasts were shot through rough arrow slits from boltstorm crossbows. Zuvius rode up through the lines of mounted knights and the blinding storm of celestial energy being visited upon the approach to the Ebon Claw.

‘Damn these armoured curs,’ Sarsael Hedra roared from the saddle as Zuvius pulled level with the dread knight.

‘Hiding behind our walls with their craven weapons,’ Vomitus Grue rumbled from along the line. Aspa Erezavant, who was riding up behind, said nothing. Drawing ahead of the Prince of Embers, Sarsael brought up his warpsteel shield. Riders along the line did the same. Skybolt arrows rained from the sky, stabbing into the beach about the hooves of the knights’ steeds and fizzling to nothing against the surface of their shields.

‘Behind their breastplates they fear us,’ Zuvius roared. ‘Let us be the realisation of that fear in flesh and blood. Let us besmirch these lands once more and send the Stormcasts shrieking back to their God-King.’

‘For the Everch–’ Zorn the Brazenfleshed called, riding up behind them. The red-skinned knight never got to finish his proclamation as both he and his blood-sweating steed disappeared in the blast from a thunderbolt crossbow.

As lightning struck the beach, reaching out from the impact site with spidery arcs of energy, armoured warriors went down. Steeds crashed into the skulls, throwing their Varanguard riders, who died in crackling cages of arcing power.

Zuvius and Sarsael’s steeds jumped the fallen. As Hellion crushed skulls to bone dust on the other side, Zuvius hauled the reins from one side to another, avoiding more sizzling arrows dropping from the sky. The Prince of Embers spat his disgust. The Stormcast Eternals aimed to thin out the Everchosen’s warhordes before they even reached the bastion and mounted their siege. Varanguard were dying. The approach to the fortress was a lightning-scalded killing ground of havoc and confusion. With Zorn the Brazenfleshed and a number of veteran Varanguard dead, the Prince of Embers felt the eyes of the Everchosen on him. Archaon swooped overhead astride his daemon mount, momentarily drawing the lightning storm of fire from the Ebon Claw. Zuvius would not fail his dread master.

‘With me…’ Zuvius started to say to Sarsael Hedra, but the dread knight was dead – a skybolt arrow finding its way around his shield to skewer his horned head.

‘Come on!’ the Prince of Embers called down the line. Savagely digging his boot heels into Hellion’s ghastly flesh, Zuvius drew ahead of the charge. Galloping headlong through the celestial streams, explosions and lightning traps, the ruinous knight led by example. Other warriors in gold and black plate similarly urged their steeds onwards through the tempest of light. In cutting down the amount of time spent on the approach, Zuvius hoped to limit their casualties. It was imperative that the Chaos forces arrived to besiege the forts in unstoppable numbers. With the lightning column blazing down into the Ebon Claw supplying fresh Stormcast Eternals, the Varanguard would have to overwhelm the Stormcasts there and cut off the God-King’s reinforcements.

As the charge entered the deep shadow of the Ebon Claw, the bolts and shafts of celestial energy began to dwindle. With Archaon’s chosen all but to the walls, the angles became too tight for the Stormcast archers. Instead Zuvius felt the arrow storm pass overhead, destined for the advance of Archaon’s hordes making their way up the beach. It was a gauntlet that Bloatus Belch and the Tzeentchian Vitus and Volitae would have to run.

Zuvius slowed Hellion before the petrified black rock of the Ebon Claw’s walls. Above, the magnificent sigmarite towers reached up out of the jagged talon of the fortress’ damned architecture. Zuvius hauled on the reins and had his steed come to a stop on the shattered bone of the beach. As Archaon’s chosen arrived at the fort walls they did the same, drawing their daemon-forged battle-axes and ensorcelled sword blades.

Zuvius heard the flap of wings. Landing on the prince’s pauldron spike in a cascade of cerulean feathers was Mallofax, returned from his reconnaissance. From his singed wing, Zuvius could see that the bird had also suffered the attentions of Stormcast archers.

‘Speak, bird,’ Zuvius said as the creature got its breath back. ‘How many?’

‘Hundreds, at least,’ Mallofax squawked, ‘with reinforcements coming down from the sky.’ Zuvius looked up at the column of lightning blazing out of the heavens into the fortress. It was going to be a problem. The Varanguard would have to find a way to cut it off.

‘Does the host have a commander?’

Mallofax squawked his incredulity. ‘They all look the same to me.’

‘A Stormcast,’ Zuvius pressed the bird, ‘surrounded by banner men, coordinating defences, issuing orders…’

‘Yes,’ the bird said. ‘There’s one sat astride a great reptile.’

‘Where?’

‘The courtyard,’ Mallofax squawked. ‘With the main body of the host.’

Zuvius snarled at the thought of the enemy commander so close beyond the wall.

‘Entry?’ he demanded of the bird.

‘All the entrances have been collapsed,’ Mallofax said, hopping about on the pauldron spike as grit rained from above. ‘There’s no way in.’

‘There’s always a way in,’ the Prince of Embers insisted. He had besieged all manner of fortresses. Not even the Everchosen’s own Varanspire had stopped him.

‘The Stormcast fortifications favour the north and west structures, reinforcing the demolished towers there. The walls are thinner,’ Mallofax said, ‘more dilapidated on the southern side.’

Zuvius nodded his approval, grit pitter-pattering off his plate.

‘Fly,’ he told the bird. ‘Bring the sorcerers and breachers for the walls. We shall need a shield of tainted meat before us as we enter.’

The Ebon Claw blazed with energies launched from the jagged ramparts and Stormcast towers. Mounted Varanguard charged up to the walls, leaving smouldering mounds of corrupt flesh and hell-forged plate in their wake – Knights of Ruin and their mounts who had failed to run the blinding gauntlet of the Stormcast archers. With many veteran Varanguard dead on the beach or struggling their way up it, Archaon’s chosen had stalled. They needed an objective. All that faced them, however, was the petrified black stone of the fortress wall.

Zuvius watched the warhorde advance up the beach. While the spawn of the Fleshblessed made a maniacal dash across the open, crossbow-blasted ground and the horrific khorgoraths of the Red Death cared little for the searing streams and explosions, the rest of the horde followed the Glass Spire sorcerers. The Tzeentchians used their unnatural talents to create changes in the landscape about them. Moving their willowy arms and fingers in strange patterns, they caused the skulls of the beach to tremble and part to admit glowing blue shafts of crystal. Creating natural shields for the advancing hordes, the sorcerers strode up the beach with Bloatus Belch’s Rank and Vile, the Mazarine knights and the bloodreaver crew of the Aftermath.

Moving from outcrop to crystalline outcrop, the warhorde made good progress. The bolts and streams of lightning blazing from the Ebon Claw scorched the crushed-bone beach about them. There were casualties across the killing ground, however. Mindless spawn were reduced to charred meat by the eruption of lightning storms. Slow moving members of the Rank and Vile exploded in plague-swollen splendour as streams of celestial energy struck their outliers.

As crystal shuddered up through the skulls to absorb the worst of the lightning storm and the warhorde took advantage of the cover, the surviving warrior-heralds on the beach smashed into the mobs of Chaos warriors. The warhorde was a monster, ravenous for its first taste of slaughter. While the heralds fearlessly ran at the ruinous horde, they were enveloped by corrupt killers and torn apart. Khorgoraths snatched up the Stormcasts, wings and all, and hurled them furiously into the bone-shattering surface of the conjured crystal. The knights of the Mazarine went toe to toe with the warrior-heralds, while bloodreavers slit their throats. Those Stormcasts unfortunate enough to smash their way into the Rank and Vile found a host of implacable foes. Their diseased flesh soaked up all the punishment the God-King’s servants could mete out, all with the rancid smiles of their jovial patron plastered across their pox-marked faces. With the blaze of fallen Stormcasts shooting for the sky, the warhorde made their approach on the fortress.

The Varanguard known as the Unslaked sidled his steed aggressively up against Zuvius’ own. He had seen Zuvius despatch his bird for the hordes following the Varanguard up the skull beach.

‘Zorn would have smashed through that barbican,’ the Unslaked stated.

‘Zorn’s dead,’ Kadence Salivarr called across the storm.

‘The Stormcasts will expect it,’ Zuvius told the Unslaked. ‘While we’re excavating the rubble from that gateway, they’ll rain down destruction upon us. Look,’ Zuvius said, indicating the way in which the Stormcast fortifications had grown up out of the shattered stone of the Ebon Claw. He then pointed at the approaching sorcerers of the Glass Spire and the shafts of crystal they were drawing up through the beachhead. ‘There will be losses beneath the barbican. There will be no siege. We shall create our own entrance. Large enough to admit a meatshield and our mounted ranks. We shall rush the Stormcasts from within.’ Zuvius saw Vomitus Grue and Aspa Erezavant nod their approval. Salivarr stared at the Unslaked, who seemed to rage within his helmet.

As a storm of celestial energy blazed from the ramparts, something else dropped down from the battlements. Before the Unslaked could respond, towering Stormcasts in ornate armour landed about the knights and their steeds. Dropping down from the castle walls, the Stormcasts carried massive battle hammers that seethed with celestial power. A huge warrior landing with assuredness next to Zuvius brought his colossal hammer down on Hellion’s back with a blaze of power. The steed almost buckled, staggering away from the Stormcast warrior. As Zuvius recovered his balance and hauled Hellion back, the Stormcast turned swiftly on Zuvius.

The prince thrust his glaive at the God-King’s warrior with enough force to skewer a gargant. The Stormcast was swift as well as huge, however, and twisted his ornate helm to one side to avoid the glaive blade. Knocking A’ cuitas aside with the shaft of his hammer, the Stormcast spun around and landed a hammer blow on the prince’s leg. Knocked back with Hellion into the unforgiving stone of the fortress wall, Zuvius felt both the wind and all sense knocked out of him. His armour plate was buckled and a pain in his thigh blazed to agonising intensity.

Struggling to see through the pain, Zuvius just got his head out of the way of a hammer blow that stove a hole in the stone of the exterior wall. As Zuvius hauled Hellion away from the wall and the plunging arc of the great hammer, he could see hulking Stormcasts and Archaon’s chosen fighting a ferocious battle along the fort wall. Another huge Stormcast landed nearby, falling into a crouch to absorb the distance of the drop. Zuvius rode up behind him, thrusting the glaive down, stabbing him in the back. Punching the heavy blade through the golden plate, Zuvius feverishly stabbed him twice more before kicking him forward. Crashing faceplate first onto the skull beach, the dead Stormcast turned into a vaulting arc of lightning.

With blood on his teeth and scorch-smeared lips, Zuvius pulled Hellion around. He shot the first Stormcast a contemptuous grin. The towering warrior swung the hammer about him, stepping forward to smash the knight to oblivion. The prince allowed the Stormcast to advance. He kept Hellion moving and jabbed at the warrior with his glaive to keep his attention.

‘Erezavant,’ the prince said finally, ‘just kill him.’

The Stormcast turned to see another of Archaon’s chosen behind him. The dark knight’s eyes said everything. They narrowed, serpent-like, right before the strike. Erezavant already had the broad and smoking blade of his ensorcelled sword up and ready. At Zuvius’ words, Aspa Erezavant swung the cursed weapon and cut the top of the Stormcast’s head off. As the sorcerous smoke cleared, the warrior’s open helm and skull were revealed to the sky.

The Stormcast crashed down onto his knees and fell face forward. By the time the spirit of the God-King’s servant had blazed away, Erezavant was gone – on the bloody trail of another foe.

Turning, Zuvius saw the Varanguard fighting hard against Stormcasts who were dropping down the rough wall from the ramparts. The fighting was bloody. Stormcasts hammered monstrous steeds to death before pulverising their trapped riders with polished, crackling hammers. The dread knights of Archaon fought back, spearing lone Stormcasts or hacking them apart with daemon-forged blades. Vomitus Grue, whose fell blessing was to know no pain, took several blows to the head with a lightning-wreathed hammer. Almost knocked from the saddle, the indomitable warrior leant down to grab the armoured Stormcast by the helm and smashed him repeatedly against the fortress wall.

The battle was turning. The Stormcasts were fearless and powerful but while they were undoubtedly the living weapons of a god, their god was not with them. Archaon, the Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse and demigod of Chaos, fought side by side with his dread armies. Every damned wretch on that beach simultaneously adored and loathed the Everchosen. He led by example, inspiring his slaves to darkness with monstrous acts of destruction, and through the heart-stopping incentive of fear. Battle-hardened champions, lords of Chaos and abominable daemons dared not fail him and, if asked to, would walk into certain death for Archaon.

‘Come on!’ Zuvius roared back down the beach, riding around to the south wall through throngs of knights and Stormcasts in desperate combat. Kadence Salivarr gave chase, Vomitus Grue and Aspa Erezavant on his heels, and the Unslaked in their wake.

Mallofax had returned. With him he had brought the warhorde: spawn, monstrosities, daemons and men of dark purpose.

As Zuvius and two other ruinous knights carrying fellspears impaled a trapped Stormcast in an excruciating three-way skewer, he saw the Glass Spire sorcerers approach. Ripping A’cuitas out of the unfortunate warrior, the prince left him to the other two warriors.

‘Sorcerers,’ Zuvius called. ‘The Everchosen has need of your wretched talents.’ Salivarr and the Varanguard drew up behind the Prince of Embers.

‘My lord,’ the first of the robed creatures said, his eyes on the ground.

‘The Stormcast have denied us entrance to our own fortress,’ Zuvius said. ‘I want you to create another. I’m assured the wall is thinner and weaker here. Bring forth your creations and split the stone apart.’

‘At once, my lord,’ the Glass Spire sorcerer said, signalling to nearby enchanters with his third arm. Zuvius turned to see the knights of the Everchosen’s calling and the monstrous horde gathering at the south wall of the Ebon Claw.

‘Well,’ Kadence Salivarr said. ‘Tell them.’

Zuvius spat at the beach of skulls.

‘This miserable scrap of land is ours,’ the prince said. He slapped the petrified stone of the wall beside him. ‘This is ours. The realm is ours and all others beyond. Ours by dark right. By right of conquest. Ours for the taking. The warriors of the God-King trespass on unholy ground.’

Zuvius directed the sorcerers of the Glass Spire to work their dread magic. ‘For corruption’s sake, for the coming end, for Almighty Archaon. Bring it down.’

Shafts of blue crystal burst from the wall of the Ebon Claw. The columns of crystal sheared away sections of the wall. Working their way through the rock like a wedge, they pulverised the crumbling material in between, creating not only a large, ragged entrance but also crystalline columns to support it.

‘Now!’ Zuvius roared.

Bloatus Belch ordered his Rank and Vile in through the breach. Putrid warriors, green and distended with disease, they wore rusted scraps of plate and mail. Smiling like mad men, the blightkings pushed on.

Archaon’s chosen held back, despite their eagerness to let loose. Such dread warriors could not be wasted on a wall breach. The cankered and inexorable troops of the Great Lord of Decay were perfect for such a duty. Unrelenting, uncaring sacks of rancid filth that would soak up the worst the Stormcasts had to throw at them, a rancid meatshield advancing before the mounted doom of the Varanguard.

Over the wall, Zuvius could hear movement – the trembling of stone beneath boots and the rattle of plate. The breaching of the south wall had been unexpected but the Stormcasts had hundreds of warriors within the fortress ready to respond and repel enemy invaders. As Bloatus Belch allowed the rusty chains of his flail to fall ready from his meaty, green fist, he filed in with his warriors. There was unremitting death and destruction to be had within and the blightlord wanted to be part of it.

As Zuvius heard the clash of Stormcast weaponry on the corrosion-pitted blightblades of Belch’s soldiers, he knew that the Stormcasts intended on destroying the interlopers without mercy and plugging the breach. With countless warriors inside the courtyard surging towards the south wall, the Prince of Embers knew exactly what to do. The khorgoraths of the Red Death had thus far only been unleashed on the last of the hammer-wielding Stormcasts outside of the walls. Now it was time to set them against the packed ranks of hallowed warriors within.

The hulking creatures of the Red Death enlarged the ragged entrance with their muscular bulk. With them Zuvius sent the daemon bloodletters, the fast and rangy killers being the perfect complement to the destructive khorgoraths.

A Mazarine knight and one of the bloodreavers suddenly disappeared in a flash of celestial energy. Arcs of lightning crackled through the tight ranks of Fleshblessed spawn and blightkings. Looking up, Zuvius saw Stormcast archers on the battlements above, aiming bows and crossbows.

‘More,’ Zuvius growled at the Glass Spire sorcerers. ‘And take care of those.’

As the Tzeentchian sorcerers drew on their powers, spikes and shafts of crystal erupted up through the black stone of the fortress. Crystal-braced holes opened up in the wall, while the ramparts above cracked and sheared away, plunging the Stormcast Eternals earthward.

Above, Zuvius felt the mighty beat of Dorghar’s wings as the daemon steed took Archaon swooping overhead. The Varanguard roared their jubilation. The prince took this as a good sign. The Everchosen was departing to visit his monstrous wrath and that of his daemon upon the other bastions. He was leaving the Ebon Claw in the hands of his Varanguard, having seen them breach its walls.

It was time. The Varanguard needed to overwhelm the defenders with a single, decisive action. They had not landed their hordes and taken the beach to be target practice for the Stormcasts. The enemy held fortified positions and could afford to wait them out. Besides, within the fortress the enemy would think twice about loosing into their own lines.

Archaon was watching. Expecting. Zuvius felt the dark energy about him. It was the seething desire of the Varanguard to see their warlord’s will be done.

‘For the Everchosen!’ the Prince of Embers roared across the ranks.

Archaon’s chosen stormed the breach, clutching monstrous spears, warpsteel shields and hell-forged blades that smoked with murderous expectation.

The air was thick with lung-shredding dust. With A’ cuitas held ready for the thrust, Zuvius charged through the breach. Within the fortress, Zuvius saw that crystalline shafts had ripped up through the foundations, burying nearby Stormcasts in rubble.

The Ebon Claw was a pit of unrelenting slaughter. Death waited but moments away for all fighting within its walls. There were Stormcast Eternals everywhere – their plate almost blinding as it reflected the light storm funnelling down from the sky and into the scorched ground of the courtyard. Crackling silhouettes ventured forth from the lightning column, becoming searing realisations as their boots touched stone. It became clear to Zuvius that the God-King’s hallowed warriors had no intention of giving up the fortress. It was carnage – with Stormcasts and warriors of Chaos barely having room to raise their weapons.

As Zuvius rode through the wreckage, hammers came crackling up at the prince’s head. Leaning out of their path, Zuvius evaded them, allowing them to pulverise the petrified stone. The prince cut two of the Stormcasts down. A third leapt into his path, swinging a blazing mace. Zuvius pulled back on the reins. He drew Hellion out of the way of the bludgeoning, angular edges of the weapon before kicking the Stormcast back at the wall. The precarious stone above his foe came loose and buried the celestial warrior while the Prince of Embers dug his heels into his steed’s side, prompting the beast to surge on.

From rock dust Zuvius entered a haze of blood, cooked in the air by the passage of skybolts shot down into the courtyard from the battlements. The prince had been wrong about the Stormcast archers. Confident in their aim, they were unafraid to fire into the seething melee below with the furious energy of their lightning bows.

Zuvius scanned the brutality and bloodshed. Stormcast warriors with mighty warblades were hacking at the Knights Mazarine, battering them back with their sigmarite shields, while the khorgoraths of the Red Death snatched up the golden warriors and tore off their heads. Bloatus Belch was dead, a Stormcast hammer still buried in his plague-swollen corpulence. His Rank and Vile advanced still, soaking up the God-King’s wrath. As hammers knocked sprays of flies from their mouths, stove in ribcages and splattered pus-ridden limbs, the blightkings fought on. They relentlessly hacked and stabbed with their diseased blades, the smiles of Grandfather Nurgle on their maggot-eaten faces.

The Glass Spire sorcerers were held high above the rabble, impaled on the long blades of Stormcast glaives, the last of their number bringing down ramparts and stone stairwells with their crystal blooms to reveal the polished metal of Stormcast towers and fortifications.

Bloodstoker Killian and his bloodreavers, however, hopelessly outclassed by divine warriors in full celestial plate, were fighting rabidly. Driven on by the lash, they rolled fearlessly under the lumbering weaponry of the Stormcasts, despite suffering continuous losses. They came at their foes in gorethirsty throngs: gouging throats, plunging reaverblades into backs and feverishly stabbing Stormcasts in the sides of their helms.

Zuvius caught sight of the Fleshblessed. The monstrous spawn swarmed over the golden paladins like a plague of deranged spiders. Putting their extra limbs to good work, they prized plate from the warriors and tore out throats, hearts and entrails. For their part, the paladins wielded mighty axes that lopped limbs and heads from the wretched spawn. Above the din of clashing blades and battle, the Fleshblessed took their grotesque talents to the ramparts. Leaping from paladin to wall, the abominations clawed, hauled and swung their way up the ramshackle architecture of the fortress. Latching onto Stormcast archers, the plague of spawn tore warriors from their footings. As the Stormcasts crashed down onto the battlements and then fell the distance to the crowded courtyard, the Fleshblessed suffered shafts of celestial energy and crossbow blasts. Those who survived leapt for the armoured archers and began tearing at heads and limbs.

A rogue shaft of celestial energy from a skybolt bow caught Zuvius in the back, causing the prince to snarl his pain. As a hammer landed a glancing blow on his pauldron, knocking him to one side, Zuvius clasped his glaive in one gauntlet and against his arm. Flinging the glaive around in a furious arc from the saddle, the Prince of Embers cut the Stormcast in half.

There was polished plate everywhere. Weapons clashing. Blades thrusting for the kill. Hammers decapitating Chaos invaders. Tzeentchian knights fought side by side with bloated blightkings. Bloodreaver savages died in their droves amongst Slaaneshi spawn thrashing their lives away to defend them. Love and fear of the Everchosen in equal measure pushed the warhorde on to feats of suicidal valour. No-one wanted to be left alive, should the invasion of Cape Desolation be a failure. Not at the mercy of the Everchosen’s boundless wrath.

Through the hordes emerged Archaon’s chosen. Pale reflections of the Everchosen himself in their dark plate, they were almost the opposite of the Stormcast Eternals.

The Varanguard fought like tempests of black-hearted vengeance. Charging through the Chaos ranks and into the enemy with the cold confidence of warriors undefeated, they thrust their fellspears through throats. They battered Stormcasts to smashed armour and bloody pulp with their warpsteel shields. They hacked limbs and immaculate helms from shoulders with tight and ruthless strikes of their daemon-forged blades.

Turning Hellion amongst the mayhem and desperation of battle, Zuvius raised A’ cuitas to stab and blast the God-King’s warriors out of his path. Shrugging off glancing blows of polished blades and the sparks of lightning hammers, the prince heaved his steed around to find his weapon raised at other Varanguard. Aspa Erezavant said nothing. Kadence Salivarr spoke for both of them.

‘Hold, brother,’ the knight called, knocking aside the disciplined thrust of a Stormcast glaive. Zuvius could hear the rancid boom of Vomitus Grue’s laughter through the clash of blades as he watched the plague-ridden warrior almost spear one of his own kind.

‘This isn’t working,’ the Unslaked said, riding up between them. ‘As fast as we send these craven filth back to their weakling god, more of them arrive.’

Cutting a Stormcast’s head from his shoulders with an elegant sweep of his blade, Salivarr nodded his agreement.

‘We need to kill all that we can,’ Zuvius answered. He gestured to the column of lightning blazing down into the fort, before bringing A’ cuitas brutally down through an attacking herald. ‘But more will follow, while that conduit remains open. Find and destroy their lords. No doubt they hold the key to such sky-rending sorcery. Spread the word. Let us justify the Everchosen’s faith.’

As Zuvius and the Knights of Ruin took the fight deeper into the courtyard, the sky lit up with souls rocketing for the heavens. As the Stormcasts disappeared in blazes of lightning, Zuvius found their comrades to be undaunted.

Seizing a glaive blade that had sliced into his side, Zuvius held the Stormcast who wielded it steady. The prince’s grimace of pain turned into a triumphant snarl as an enraged khorgorath of the Red Death bit the golden warrior’s head off, only to have his prey disappear in a flash of lightning. This seemed to infuriate the khorgorath even more – the thing already stuck with the quivering shafts of spears and glaives. The monster swept the advancing line of Stormcasts aside before settling upon one to beat into the courtyard floor.

‘Feast!’ Zuvius commanded a nearby horde of bloodletters. At the Varanguard’s command they jumped onto the remaining Stormcasts, who were swinging their glaives at the Prince of Embers. The rangy daemons tore at heads and plunged their brazen blades into metal then flesh. ‘Blood for the Blood God…’ Zuvius said in mock gratitude.

The prince’s jubilation was short lived. Although the horde seemed to be soaking up the worst of the Stormcasts’ punishment and Archaon’s Varanguard were intent on cutting a path of bloody death through the enemy, the celestial warriors still came. Reinforced by the lightning column, it was only a matter of time before the battle turned in the God-King’s favour. The forces of the Everchosen had thrown hordes in their entirety at the fortifications along Cape Desolation. With the ability to replenish their warriors within the walls, however, the Stormcasts had the advantage. The day would be theirs unless the dark warriors could even the odds.

Looking up through the bloody mist of the crowded courtyard, Zuvius saw Stormcast reinforcements take their positions. The derelict ramparts of black stone, speared by the silver and gold of sigmarite towers erected through the fort, were crowded with the God-King’s warriors. Silhouetted against the blazing column of lightning, the prince saw a Stormcast lord riding a reptilian beast giving orders to a skull-helmed warrior. Zuvius calculated that his only chance to destroy the conduit was to kill the lord.

‘Varanguard,’ Zuvius called to Archaon’s chosen. ‘There upon the battlements. Let’s take our fight to a foe deserving of our hell-forged steel.’

Zuvius saw Vomitus Grue headbutt a paladin in the faceplate and toss him to the Rank and Vile before urging his powerful steed up the rubble of the south wall. Like Grue, other knights in their plate of black and blood-splattered gold finished their present foes before making for the battlements.

Zuvius saw the Unslaked mount the shattered steps of a half-demolished stairwell. He fought through the axe-wielding Stormcasts holding it from the Knights Mazarine. Meanwhile, Kadence Salivarr’s elegant monstrosity leapt up through the ruin of the south wall, bounding and balancing from purchase to precarious purchase. All the while, the Varanguard warrior stabbed and slashed his blade through surrounding Stormcasts.

The Prince of Embers grunted his derision. Zuvius would be damned anew before offering up such a prize to his brothers in darkness. As he saw an opportunity to reach the battlements ahead of them he raced away, only to be suddenly torn backwards.

A Stormcast hammer had struck him in the shoulder, puncturing the pauldron and hooking him back. Tensing his thighs about the saddle and clinging to the reins, Zuvius held on. As the pull of the hammer hauled him and the steed around, the immaculate gauntlet of a Stormcast smashed him across the face. Zuvius reeled. His face was already a mess but now his nose was broken and blood-splattered.

‘Unholy wretch,’ the Stormcast said through the mirrored finish of a glistening helm. His words crackled like the divine metal of the Stormcast weaponry. Swiping again at Zuvius, the celestial warrior cracked his cheekbone and ripped the thin flesh of his face where the ornate gauntlet caught him. ‘The spawn of corruption. You are a thing of evil.’

‘Indeed I am,’ Zuvius snarled before being savagely hammered in the jaw by the Stormcast’s righteous fist. Blood and teeth went flying, tapping and spattering against the glorious pauldron of a nearby paladin.

‘The God-King comes to claim what is his,’ the Stormcast snarled. ‘Soul, stone and sky. All belong to Sigmar. Do you hear me, creature?’

As the skull-helmed warrior rushed to attack once more, the Prince of Embers was ready. Clutching his glaive close to its crowning blade, the knight used the momentum of the next savage tug to thrust A’ cuitas down into the Stormcast’s chest. Zuvius pulled him close and watched as blood streamed from the mouth slit of the skull helm. Zuvius thrust again with the glaive, down through the diaphragm and into the gut. The prince felt his foe tense with every plunge.

‘Yes,’ Zuvius told him. ‘I hear you.’

Zuvius ripped the glaive out of the warrior. The Stormcast staggered back, a bloody hole in his chest that cascaded gore down his beautiful suit of armour. The prince pulled the hammer from his ruined pauldron and dropped it on the ground with disgust. He didn’t like the feel of the celestial weapon.

‘Hear this,’ Zuvius spat. ‘Now I go to ensure that your God-King forfeits his claim.’

Leaving the Stormcast to waver and stagger in his last moments of life, Zuvius rode across the courtyard. Barging Stormcast and warhorde warriors aside with Hellion’s armoured flanks, the prince used the shaft of his glaive to smash a lunging Stormcast aside. As another took a swing at him with his grandblade, Zuvius leant down out of its devastating path. Jabbing the blade of A’ cuitas through his faceplate, Zuvius rammed the glaive home in the warrior’s skull. Leaving a trail of vaulting lightning storms in his wake, Zuvius reached the other side of the courtyard.

Jabbing his armoured heels into Hellion’s sides, Zuvius prompted the beast to leap up onto a collapsed section of wall, then from the back of a mortally wounded khorgorath, who roared its blood-gurgling defiance. As lightning shafts scorched the stone about him, the Prince of Embers thrust his glaive up into an armoured archer who fell forwards into the courtyard. Urging Hellion on, Zuvius risked the scrabble up the twisted architecture of the wall. A monstrous leap demolished the structure below. As Zuvius held out his glaive to balance, Hellion’s hooves reached the battlements and carried the knight to stable ground.

At last, the Prince of Embers saw the Stormcast lord. He was backed up onto the steps of a gold, sigmarite citadel. The crowning tower was the tallest of the God-King’s fortifications.

His reptilian mount wore extravagant gold plate like its master. Zuvius was sure that he was the leader of the warriors fighting for the Ebon Claw. He was not alone in that assumption. While the armoured bodies of Archaon’s chosen lay about the battlements where the Stormcast lord and his beast had slain them, the Unslaked, Vomitus Grue and Kadence Salivarr still lived, and they had surrounded him.

Zuvius promised himself that victory would not be theirs. Pushing Hellion on, Zuvius raced for the tower. Leaping the razor-edged crenulations between battlements, he dodged several shield-bearing warriors of the God-King. Hellion cleared a section of wall demolished by a mace-swinging Stormcast just moments before and leapt the opportunistic gladius sweeps of others desperate to put themselves between the Varanguard and their lord. As Hellion leapt back down onto the battlements, Zuvius thrust his glaive through two of the Stormcasts. As their swords clattered to the floor, Zuvius ripped A’ cuitas free. With lightning souls erupting about him, the Prince of Embers drove his armoured steed on towards the tower.

Everything hurt. Every twist and turn was agony. Every muscle screamed for respite. But Zuvius would not relent.

As Zuvius reached the ruined tower at last, Vomitus Grue died. The pestilent knight had felt no pain when the great hammer of the Stormcast lord smashed him aside. He had felt nothing as the reptilian beast breathed storm-lightning into his pox-scarred face. Zuvius didn’t know if Grue had felt the beast’s jaws tear his head off and spit it into the courtyard below, but it didn’t matter. The body followed moments after.

Kadence Salivarr and the Unslaked tried to take the Stormcast lord together. With their daemon-forged blades a deathtrap of cleaving and thrusting lethality, the Stormcast reared his beast and smashed the blades aside with the crackling power of his colossal hammer. The lord kicked the Unslaked’s bloody mount back while breaking the back of Salivarr’s beast with a downswing of his mighty weapon.

The reptilian mount backed up the tower steps and leapt clear over the two knights, bounding about them to get into a better position.

As a warrior-herald landed nearby to come to his lord’s aid, Zuvius skewered the Stormcast and kicked in his faceplate, sending him toppling over the sharp battlements. The Unslaked attacked next, and tried to unseat the Stormcast lord. Instead, his horned helm was smashed to brain-dribbling scrap by the Stormcast’s hammer. Kadence Salivarr tried to bring his infamous bladework to bear, but was felled by the thunderbolt blast of a crossbow bolt in the back.

As the smoking shell of the dark knight crumpled before the Stormcast lord, Zuvius drove at him. The Stormcast hauled on his mount’s reins and pointed the head of his hammer at the Varanguard before him.

‘No,’ the Prince of Embers told him. ‘It shall be you to taste oblivion.’

Such words seemed to provoke something in the Stormcast lord. Digging his heels into the scaly flanks of his steed, he urged the beast on.

Zuvius roared his defiance at the Stormcast who stood up in the saddle, his hammer aloft. Hellion wanted to charge but Zuvius kept the reins tight in his armoured grasp as he turned the shaft of A’ cuitas about in his other hand.

As the Stormcast lord charged, Zuvius pointed the pommel of A’ cuitas at the ground. The metal eye opened and a blaze of dark lightning scorched the stone battlements, turning them from black to a glowing red, melting the stone in the Stormcast’s path. As the reptile’s claws met the molten stone they sank, before becoming trapped as the stone cooled to glass. The beast’s momentum suddenly arrested, it threw its rider from the saddle and over its head.

As the Stormcast lord hit the battlement floor face first and skidded to a halt before Zuvius, Hellion bridled. The golden warrior’s hammer skimmed across the stone and fell into the courtyard. The Stormcast rolled over. Zuvius held the point of his glaive over his scuffed helm.

‘Unworthy,’ Zuvius told him, before stabbing down. A lightning storm raged about him as the Stormcast lord died.

The reptilian beast roared its grief and anger at Zuvius, straining to tear its legs free. It opened its jaws wide to unleash its lightning at Archaon’s chosen.

‘Enough,’ Zuvius told it before spearing it through the mouth.

Zuvius urged Hellion to the edge of the battlement. He looked down into the courtyard. He waited. The warhorde fought on against the Stormcast defenders, while other knights arrived behind them, too late to take their part in the glory and destruction of the celestial lord. Among them was Aspa Erezavant, the silent killer whose blade dripped with gore. The battle had turned. While the wretched warriors of Chaos had to step through a carpet of their own dead, the Stormcasts were being backed up to the column of lightning.

The prince’s smeared lips curled. The celestial lord was dead but the column went on burning and with it came endless reinforcements.

He had been wrong.

Zuvius furiously looked across the battle, across the golden paladins fighting for their God-King and the living corruption attempting to destroy them. He saw the Stormcast Eternal who had been speaking to the Stormcast lord earlier. The indomitable warrior was still alive and deep in prayer.

‘You…’ Zuvius said. He realised this warrior must be controlling the column of light. He lifted A’ cuitas up like a spear, took aim and threw it. The Stormcast looked up just as his comrades tried to warn him. The glaive squealed down through the skull-helmed warrior’s armour, impaling him to the ground and silencing his prayer.

As the skull-helmed warrior became a coruscation of surging, spiritual energy blazing for the skies, the column of lightning stuttered and disappeared, leaving only burnt air and a sharp afterglow. Zuvius had severed the conduit. The Stormcasts remaining were as indomitable as ever but the tide had turned. The forces of Chaos fell upon them in droves as the followers of Archaon butchered their way to a crude victory.

The Prince of Embers heard the flap of wings. It was Mallofax, returned after the worst of the fighting. The bird rested on Zuvius’ ruined shoulder guard.

‘You saw?’

‘I saw, my lord,’ the bird squawked.

‘The Stormcast in the skull helm?’

‘Aye, master.’

‘Then fly to the other fortresses, to the other hordes,’ said Zuvius. ‘Tell our Varanguard brothers how to sever the storm. Tell them how the God-King’s warriors can be defeated and driven from this miserable land.’

With the beating of wings, Mallofax peeled off into the sky. Orphaeo Zuvius leant back in the saddle. With his injuries, he almost fell. Aspa Erezavant nodded at him before urging his steed back down the ruined steps leading from the battlements.

Zuvius looked down into the courtyard and to a victory declared in blood and lightning. The Ebon Claw was theirs.

Weary, Zuvius had one more thing he needed to see. He steered Hellion up the glorious steps of the sigmarite tower, to the highest part of the Ebon Claw, and stared out across the dark peninsula. Cape Desolation belonged to the Everchosen. The columns of lightning connecting each of the fortresses were being snuffed out like the flames of distant candles. He could hear cheering, sorcerous chanting and the screams of the dying. They all came together in an unholy cacophony.

Zuvius felt a ravenous pride eat away at him as he looked out across the Varanguard swarming the conquered peninsula. He felt part of something abominable and powerful. He had been a warrior, pledged to Chaos. An acolyte of dread Tzeentch. A blind man leading the blind, without true purpose. Alone among wretches, he had become complacent. Content in personal damnation.

He understood that he would never know the meaninglessness of spawndom or the monstrous powers gifted by the Great Changer. He was not the one but the one among many. Only in service to the Everchosen of Chaos had the Prince of Embers come to know the true power of damnation. Damnation of all for all. The harnessed strength of corruption, the glorious darkness of a fell blade wielded by the greatest of their kind. Archaon was a dire warlord who united not only the Varanguard behind him, but all servants of the Dark Gods as he stormed through the victim realms.

A dark silhouette in the rising dust, the Prince of Embers could see his master. Archaon. A horned shadow in his monstrous plate, his daemonsword and runeshield held in tight as he prepared to take once more to the air. The daemon steed launched into the sky, extending the great expanse of his wings. While Sigmar’s tempest continued to rage across distant skies, over Cape Desolation all was still.

Orphaeo Zuvius watched the Everchosen and his daemon steed fly high over the Ebon Claw. Gliding on Dorghar’s powerful wings, Archaon steered the monster towards the dark lands beyond. Zuvius nodded to himself. There would be more fighting. More killing to come. The arrival of the God-King’s Stormcast Eternals would have given people living beyond the peninsula hope – hope for a realm without the tyranny of a ruinous overlord like Archaon. As the Prince of Embers took up his glaive and turned Hellion back down the steps, he came to realise that hope was a truly terrible thing.

FURY OF GORK

Josh Reynolds

PROLOGUE

The Eight Lamentations

‘Speak, shaman – tell us the tale of Marrowcutter,’ Goreshroud growled. The Bloodbound was a tall man, covered in muscle and piecemeal armour scavenged from a hundred fields of slaughter. His eyes were obscured by a great scar in the shape of the rune of Khorne that covered the upper half of his skull, rising to meet his mane of fat-stiffened, crimson-dyed hair. Though he had no eyes, it was said that Goreshroud could see through those carved into the blade of his heavy, broad-bladed battle-axe. As he spoke, he thumped the ground with the bone-haft of the weapon. ‘Speak and tell us of that which I seek.’

His gathered chieftains growled assent, pounding the earth or clapping their hands. ‘Speak,’ they murmured as one. They were a varied lot: hillmen from the Ghurlands and silver-haired savages from the Boiling Mountains of Chamon, obsidian-clad reavers from the Shadowlands and Calderan horse-lords from the Felstone Plains of Aqshy. Goreshroud had stirred the embers of a conquering fire from the ashes of his past victories, binding his defeated opponents to his skull-bedecked banners. Soon, his armies would sweep across the Ghurlands, from the Gholian Heights to the Sea of Monsters. Or so he claimed, at every available opportunity.

Zazul of the Radiant Veil hunkered closer to the fire around which Goreshroud and his chosen headmen were gathered. The fire was one of a dozen that flickered amidst the long shadows of the boneyard. Goreshroud’s warriors had chosen the massive ribcage of some ancient leviathan as their encampment, trusting in the old bones to act as a palisade against the horrors that roamed the vast plain. They were overconfident and inobservant, and it would be their undoing, Zazul thought.

The Gargant’s Graveyard, as it had come to be known, stretched from one amber horizon to the next. It was covered in the sun-bleached remains of thousands of gargants, as well as other beasts, some larger, some smaller. Immense ribcages and titanic skulls the size of duardin citadels dotted the plain, dwarfing the bones of ogors and other nameless monstrosities that hunted the Ghurlands. The bones spread outwards like a grisly maze from a central point that few had seen and even fewer had lived to speak of. It was this point, and what lay within it, that Goreshroud had come to find.

‘On your feet, rag-and-bone man,’ Goreshroud said, gesturing sharply. ‘Up and speak. Speak to me of the glories that await me in the Howling Labyrinth. Speak to us of the hell-blade, Marrowcutter. Up! I command you.’ His chieftains added their voices to his, glaring at Zazul with impatience and eagerness. Some of them wanted to hear the story. Others were looking for any excuse to carve out his heart and offer it up to Khorne.

Zazul sighed and stood, careful not to let the illusions that cloaked him slip. To Goreshroud and his servants, he appeared as nothing more than a fur-clad shaman, bedecked in feathers and mouldering pelts, his filthy skin marked with crude scarification and tattoos. The Blood God was no friend to those who wove the skeins of magic and fate, and his servants dealt harshly with any sorcerer that they could not cow into subservience – especially if that sorcerer was a servant of the Changer of Ways.

‘In the beginning, before the Age of Blood, before the realms cracked and the four brothers made war upon one another, there was fire. From fire, came heat. From heat, shape. And shape split into eight. And the eight became as death,’ Zazul intoned. As he gestured, the fire flared up and things took shape within the writhing flames.

‘The eight were the raw stuff of Chaos, hammered and shaped to a killing edge by the sworn forgemasters of the dread Soulmaw, the chosen weaponsmiths of Khorne. To each forgemaster was given a task – to craft a weapon unlike any other, a weapon fit for a god. Or one as unto a god,’ he said, meeting Goreshroud’s eyeless gaze meaningfully. The deathbringer’s lip curled in a sneer, and he thumped the ground with the haft of his axe.

Fool, Zazul thought, even as he continued his tale. ‘Some, like Wolant Sevenhand, forgemaster of Chamon, crafted weapons of great size and little subtlety. It was said that the great iron-banded mace Sharduk, the Gate-smasher, could shatter walls and crack citadels.’ In the flames, a gigantic warrior clad in blood-stained armour struck a looming gate with a heavy mace, obliterating it. At this, the chieftains whistled and stamped their feet. Goreshroud chuckled and motioned for silence.

Zazul inclined his head and continued. ‘Others, like Qyat of the Folded Soul, forgemaster of Ulgu, crafted things of great subtlety – the spear called Gung, the Huntsman, which would always strike home, no matter how far or how fast its intended prey fled.’ He gestured, and in the flames the image of Gung took shape, a long haft of solid shadow and a broad blade of blackened silver. It squirmed like a thing alive, and Goreshroud’s chieftains murmured in awe. Zazul motioned again and the image was lost to the flames.

‘But one weapon was prized above all others,’ he said, ‘for a hundred and one greater daemons had been sacrificed in its forging by Volundr Skullcracker, the forgemaster of Aqshy. Their screaming essences were folded and beaten on an anvil of living bone, until they flowed together into the sword called the Worldsplitter – Marrowcutter.’

‘Marrowcutter,’ Goreshroud growled, as his chieftains murmured. ‘The Ur-sword, the Kinslayer, the Unmaker.’ He looked around. ‘A weapon worthy of an Eightfold Lord.’

‘Indeed, O most mighty Goreshroud,’ Zazul said meekly. He heard a caw, somewhere far above him and glanced up, through the latticework of cracked bones, towards the night sky. Black shapes circled above and he smiled thinly. Ah, finally, he thought.

‘Eight weapons in all were forged by the daemon-smiths,’ he continued. ‘Two for each of the four brothers, gifts to them from the eldest and mightiest of their number, and to himself as well. But the gods soon turned their thoughts from friendship and camaraderie, and towards domination. The four brothers were ever aligned only in opposition, and when their foes fled or faded, Khorne’s boundless fury was turned upon his kinsmen.’

The Bloodbound laughed at that. Khorne cared not from where the blood flowed, only that it flowed. Zazul hid a frown and said, ‘And as the realms shuddered and the Age of Chaos gave way to the Age of Blood, the weapons known as the Eight Lamentations were lost.’

‘Aye, but we have found one, eh, brothers?’ Goreshroud said, slapping his knee. ‘And guarded only by a few thousand greenskins... Easy pickings.’ He motioned to the nets full of orruk skulls that hung from the Khornate icons and lodge-poles thrust into the ground all about the campsite. ‘Good prey, the brutes, but hardly a challenge for Khorne’s own.’

‘Indeed, O most cunning of killers,’ Zazul said, bowing. In truth, the orruks were far more numerous than Goreshroud realised, and growing stronger all the time. The sound of their drums filled the night, echoing up from the depths of the Gargant’s Graveyard. They were gathering in the dark, and would soon flood the plain like a green tide. And there were others – champions of the Ruinous Powers from across the Ghurlands were stalking the boneyard, following the stories of Marrowcutter. ‘Marrowcutter waits at the heart of the Howling Labyrinth for a worthy claimant.’

‘And I shall be that claimant,’ Goreshroud said. ‘Goreshroud, wielder of Marrowcutter.’ He shoved himself to his feet and spread his arms. ‘Aye, has a nice ring to it, eh? What say you, brothers?’

As the Bloodbound cheered their leader, Zazul raised his hand. The flames flared once more, higher and brighter than before, turning from orange to red to purple. The gathered chieftains staggered away from the coruscating fire, blinded, their flesh singed. Goreshroud yelped and fell backwards. From deeper in the camp came a sudden cry, swiftly silenced. Goreshroud turned, eyeless face twisted in a grimace of consternation. ‘What–’ he began.

All at once, the night was alive with the sound of violence. Warriors cried out in alarm as shapes burst from the darkness and lunged between the thick bones around them. The air throbbed with the song of sorcery, and screams became screeches as men were transformed into mewling beasts or reduced to motes of coloured light. From above, a flock of ravens dived down through the vaulted reaches of the great ribcage. Goreshroud’s chieftains looked up in alarm as the birds plummeted towards them.

As the ravens filled the air above the fire, Zazul let his illusion lapse. Ragged furs and filthy flesh evaporated, replaced by robes of all colours and none, and armour made of beaten gold. His featureless helm was crafted from lazuli, carved by the silken chisels of the seer-masons of the Dusty Sea. Zazul spread his arms and lifted his staff.

‘Reveal yourselves! Let the Ninety-Nine Feathers show their talons, in the name of the King-of-all-Ravens and the debt you owe me,’ he chanted.

Ravens twisted and changed in mid-air, shedding feathers and growing arms and legs. Black-robed killers tumbled down among the awe-struck chieftains, and laid about them with curved swords and knives. Clad in black scale mail and robes beneath their feathered cloaks, their faces hidden behind black iron masks wrought in the shape of birds’ heads, the Ninety-Nine Feathers made for an intimidating sight. They fought in silence, wielding blade and magic with consummate skill.

Zazul watched the slaughter with detached amusement. A raven fluttered down and perched on his shoulder. ‘Thrice you have called upon the Ninety-Nine Feathers, and thrice we have aided thee, Radiant One,’ the bird croaked in a woman’s voice.

‘Yes, and one marker yet remains to be paid, my lady,’ Zazul said. ‘Four debts thy cabal owes me, and four services shall ye perform.’

‘And then we are free?’

‘As free as any in this world,’ Zazul said, after a moment. He heard a bird-like scream and saw one of the black-clad sorcerer-champions slump, Goreshroud’s axe buried in his skull. As the deathbringer wrenched his weapon free, Zazul waved the Ninety-Nine Feathers aside, opening a path between himself and Goreshroud.

‘Who are you?’ the deathbringer growled.

‘I am Zazul, mighty Goreshroud,’ Zazul said, one gilded claw resting on the azure pommel stone of the curved sword sheathed at his waist. ‘I am one of nine, ordained by the Architect of Fate. The twisting paths of the future are mine to scry and walk, the webs of fate mine to weave... or cull.’ The sounds of battle rose up from within the palisade of bones. Goreshroud’s warriors were faring badly by the sound of things. With their chieftains dead and their commander preoccupied, they were at the mercy of their enemies. Those who did not fall here would scatter into the Gargant’s Graveyard, there to become prey for orruks or worse things.

Goreshroud raised his axe. ‘Pretty words, worm. Even so, I will mount your veiled skull on my lodge-pole,’ he said. One of the raven-warriors leapt at him, and the deathbringer bisected him with a lazy sweep of his axe. Goreshroud charged through the fire, scattering embers, axe raised. Zazul gestured, and Goreshroud’s axe slammed down against a shimmering prismatic shield. Goreshroud howled and hacked at the shield, seemingly unable to grasp that his weapon could not pierce it.

Zazul looked past the deathbringer and caught sight of a shimmering figure striding through the dark. He chuckled. Of course – she wishes to be in at the kill, he thought, as the newcomer struck an icon with the flat of her sword.

At the quavering peal, Goreshroud turned, scarred features crinkling. ‘You... I know you,’ he said.

‘I daresay you do,’ the newcomer said. She wore armour composed of what appeared to be multicoloured crystal or glass. Intricately wrought and delicate looking as it was, Zazul knew that it was stronger than steel. Upon her head was a high-crested, open-faced helm of the same material. The crest was made from flowing streamers of pale smoke, as was the buckler on her arm. The curved blade of crystal in her other hand was stained crimson.

‘I heard you were driven from the mountains by the lightning-men, Sharizad,’ Goreshroud said. ‘They killed your siblings and cast down your standards.’

‘And they shattered your conclave and drove you from Hookjaw Cove, eyeless one,’ Sharizad, the Shimmering Countess, said demurely. She extended her blade. ‘As the Great Black Fox whispers, defeat is but the lesson one must learn to achieve victory.’

‘Those are your wolves out there, then, attacking my followers,’ Goreshroud grunted. ‘Trust a sorceress to attack in so cowardly a fashion.’

‘If by cowardice you mean cunning, well... we are but as the gods made us,’ Sharizad said, with an elegant shrug.

Goreshroud licked his lips and spun his axe. ‘I was raised by the wolf and the stallion, witch,’ he said. He stepped towards the Shimmering Countess, his weapon raised. ‘An eagle circled my mother’s birthing-yurt eight times. My destiny–’

‘Your destiny is to be but a footnote in my own,’ Sharizad said. ‘A fate for which you are well suited.’

Goreshroud gave a roar and charged towards her, his axe sweeping out in a savage arc. The two warriors traded blows as they spun about the campsite in a brutal gavotte. Goreshroud was the stronger of the two, but lacked his opponent’s finesse. He could turn bone to powder with a single blow, but that blow first had to land. Sharizad twisted and whirled, avoiding the broad sweep of her opponent’s axe with calculated ease. Goreshroud grew angrier with every missed strike, and what little discipline he possessed began to fray. Soon, he was frothing at the mouth and howling every curse he knew. His blows grew wilder and more desperate, but still Sharizad stayed out of reach, baiting him with light caresses from her own blade, drawing blood and wounding her foe’s pride.

Finally, the deathbringer could stand it no more. With a howl fit to shake the boneyard, he hurled himself at the Shimmering Countess, axe raised over his head. Zazul watched with no small amount of pleasure as the Shimmering Countess sidestepped the deathbringer’s berserk charge and buried her crystalline sword in his back. Goreshroud fell onto his hands and knees, vomiting blood.

Sharizad set her foot against the back of his neck and wrenched the sword free. Goreshroud sank down and lay still, his axe sliding from his grip. The countess held her sword up to the firelight, watching as her opponent’s blood was absorbed into the irregular facets of the weapon’s blade.

‘Such a fine weapon,’ she murmured. ‘But there is a finer one by far to be had, is there not, my Zazul?’

Zazul inclined his head. ‘So my little birds have said.’ He stroked the raven perched on his shoulder. ‘They also bring word – time grows short. Goreshroud will not be the last. Every warlord in the region worth his salt will be hurrying this way. Not just Bloodbound, but Rotbringers and pleasure-hounds as well. Even the ratkin. Many are here already.’

‘Of that, I am well aware. I traded sword-strokes with the Knight of Silk not a day ago before the poltroon fled, and heard the wheezing bellows of the Black-Iron King at a distance.’ Sharizad sheathed her sword with a flourish. ‘And yet, what of it? Is my destiny not paramount in this moment, in this place? Why should I fear lesser fates?’

‘Things grow uncertain when many destinies converge,’ Zazul said patiently. Sharizad was demanding and ambitious, as well as cunning, and the combination made her tempestuous. ‘The skeins of fate overlap and interweave confusingly here. What was once solid becomes fluid. Your victory is assured, O Destined Queen, but so too are the destinies of those who move in opposition to you. Fools like Goreshroud, or the Black-Iron King,’ he continued. ‘A hundred chieftains, champions and heroes are even now stalking these bone-fields, and each one has as much claim on victory as you.’

‘None have as much claim as me,’ Sharizad said.

‘None, perhaps save the dogs of Sigmar,’ Zazul said. He motioned to the dark sky. ‘You heard the thunder, yes? A storm pursues you, Sharizad. And it will find you before you leave here. That much, at least, the spirits say.’

Sharizad glared at him. ‘I fear no storm, celestial or otherwise. But I take your point.’ She looked down at Goreshroud. ‘We must winnow the grain from the chaff. I will not be denied again, sorcerer.’ She pointed at him with her blade. ‘Marrowcutter will be mine. You have sworn it, my Zazul, and I will hold you to that promise.’

Zazul bowed obsequiously. ‘I have sworn to aid thee, O Many-Splendoured One, and so I shall.’ He caught sight of one of the skull-nets dangling from the Khornate icons planted about the fire. As he straightened, he gestured and the net unravelled. One of the orruk skulls floated into his waiting hand and he proffered it to Sharizad.

‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I believe I have just the tool for the task...’

CHAPTER ONE

The Fist of Gork

The Black-Iron King roared hollowly and charged. The deathbringer’s baroque, smoke-spewing armour creaked shrilly as he trampled over bloodreavers and the orruks they battled alike in his haste to reach his foe. The fiery maul he wielded tore flesh and crushed bone as he swept it out in a vicious arc to clear his path.

‘Deliver thyself to me, beastling – I am thy doom, and the doom of all thy kind!’ the Black-Iron King thundered, pulverising an orruk too slow to get out of his way. He had been shouting the same thing for hours, calling for Gordrakk. And, at last, Gordrakk, the Fist of Gork, had decided to oblige him.

After days of skirmishing, the orruks had cornered their foe in a narrow canyon made from the spread skeletal jaws of some long-dead monster. Now, the Five Fists of Gordrakk pummelled the Black-Iron Legion with a relentlessness that set even the most hardened worshippers of the Blood God back on their heels. Ardboys, led by brawling brutes, clashed with armoured reavers amid a forest of sun-bleached fangs. Their confrontation saw thick clouds of dust thrown into the air, blotting out the light of the amber suns far above.

The maw-krusha bounded forwards with a peculiar hopping gait, its scaly jaws wide. It was larger than anything else on the battlefield, save perhaps the Black-Iron King himself. The beast crashed down, flattening an unwary blood warrior beneath its bulk. Gordrakk thumped Chompa on the head with the haft of one of the axes he carried, eliciting a thunderous bellow. Those blood warriors closest to the maw-krusha died instantly, bones shattered and brains burst by the incoherent force of that furious sound. Those who survived, and made it past the maw-krusha’s jaws and talons, leapt onto the creature, scrambling towards its rider.

Gordrakk laughed and stood up in his saddle. He clashed his axes together and tore them apart in a spray of sparks. Kunnin’ hummed in his grip, whispering in one ear, while its twin, Smasha, bellowed in his other. Gordrakk’s head was always filled with noise – just the way he liked it. Silence was boring. The axes had been silent until he had pulled them apart, making two weapons where there had once only been one. Two axes were better than one; this way he had one for each hand, and could crack twice as many skulls.

The boss-of-bosses whipped Kunnin’ out in a shallow arc, cutting the legs out from under a blood warrior, even as he crumpled the chest-plate of another with Smasha. He blocked a blow from an enemy axe and gutted its wielder. He twisted, driving an armoured shoulder into an opponent’s chest, and knocking him backwards off Chompa’s skull. Before the warrior could rise, Chompa crushed him with a massive fist. Gordrakk thumped the beast with his foot.

‘Oi, he was mine, ya greedy git. Get your own!’

Chompa roared in protest and swung its thick arms, slapping Bloodbound from their feet. Axes and heavy blades bounced off the monster’s thick hide even as it smashed their wielders into paste. Gordrakk bellowed laughter and fell back into his saddle as Chompa surged instinctively forwards, carrying them towards the heart of the fray. Gordrakk had ridden many maw-krushas in his life, but only one equalled his sheer, unbridled lust for battle. He urged Chompa to greater speed, kicking its flanks.

The Black-Iron King held court at the centre of the narrow battlefield, surrounded by the broken bodies of brutes and ardboys. The Chaos-nob was tough, no two ways there. Gordrakk leaned forwards in his saddle, eager for the fight to come. At Chompa’s roar, the smoke-wreathed shape of the deathbringer whirled about and extended his maul.

‘Yes. Come to me, beastling. Come, Gordrakk, and meet your prophesied doom,’ the Black-Iron King shouted. ‘The Allslaughter has been drawn and the wings of death shadow you!’

Gordrakk blinked and glanced up, and saw carrion-birds circling overhead. He laughed. The Chaos-nobs always talked rubbish. They talked before they fought and while they fought – talk, talk, talk. Even so, Gordrakk couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride. Everyone had heard of Gordrakk, the Fist of Gork. Even the iron-shod Chaos-things and the duardin in their deep-holds. It was good that they knew him and came looking for a scrap. It meant he always had a fight waiting, wherever he went, even if he didn’t know where that was until he got there.

He urged Chompa forwards and roared, scattering his warriors. This was his fight and his alone; his boys knew better than to get between the Fist of Gork and his foe. For his part, the Black-Iron King seemed to welcome Gordrakk’s charge. He spread his long arms and set his feet. As Chompa drew near, the deathbringer took a two-handed grip on his maul and swung it out. The weapon slammed across Chompa’s scaly jaw, staggering the beast.

Gordrakk growled and vaulted from the saddle as Chompa swayed drunkenly. He slid down the maw-krusha’s snout and dropped to the ground, axes whistling out in opposite directions to drive the Black-Iron King back several steps.

‘At last,’ the deathbringer rumbled. ‘The gods have spoken, brute, and your death shall be my stepping stone to–’

Gordrakk lunged, driving his skull against the ridged helm of his opponent. The deathbringer reeled with a metallic squawk. Gordrakk bulled into him, knocking him back.

‘Talk or fight, not both,’ he snarled as they broke apart.

‘Ho, it speaks!’ the Black-Iron King rasped. ‘Good. You shall be able to beg for mercy.’ He tromped forwards, joints creaking, vents hissing. The fiery maul looped out in a blow that would have removed Gordrakk’s head, had he not swayed beneath it. Kunnin’ whispered to him in Mork’s voice, or maybe Gork’s, calling his attention to his foe’s armour. There – a chink in one of the joins.

Swiftly, Gordrakk whipped both axes up and around, slamming them into the weak spot as one. The Black-Iron King screamed and stiffened. Gordrakk tore Smasha free and drove it down again. Cracks formed, running along the seams of the daemon-armour. Wherever Smasha struck, even the strongest iron buckled. Foul gases and smoke spewed from the deathbringer’s armour as he sank to one knee.

Weakly, desperately, he swung his maul, trying to drive Gordrakk back. ‘Doom... I am your doom... It was written...’ the Black-Iron King gasped in disbelief. Gordrakk laughed and hit him again. He used the edge of one axe to hook the head of his opponent’s maul and tug it from his grip. The Black-Iron King lurched forwards, clawing for the weapon. ‘Doom...’ he wheezed.

‘Shut it,’ Gordrakk growled. He drove the other axe into the back of his foe’s helmet. Hell-forged metal crumpled and split. Ichor spewed and a convulsion ran through the Black-Iron King’s gigantic frame. Then, with a whine of abused metal, he toppled forwards and lay still. Gordrakk set his foot on the dead warrior’s skull and lifted his axes. ‘Gorka-MORKA!’ he roared.

‘GORKA-morka-GORKA-morka!’ his warriors began to chant, stamping their feet and clashing their weapons, until the bones that rose up around them trembled. The remaining Chaos-things were fleeing now, scarpering back into the maze of bones. All the fight had been knocked out of them by the death of their chieftain.

Gordrakk spread his arms, soaking up the adulation of his boys. This was what it meant to be the boss-of-bosses. He was the best, the biggest, the baddest and the most blessed. Gorkamorka spoke to him, in his head, and punched him in the heart, filling him with divine fury. His fury was shared by the rest of the Ironjawz. The Big Waaagh! was coming. They could all feel it in their bones, rising up from the soles of their feet to the tops of their heads – it was like being hit by lightning all the time. Gordrakk threw back his head and roared wordlessly.

It didn’t matter what their enemies did, how hard they fought or how well they hid – the Ironjawz always found them and gave them a beating. He lowered his arms, looked down at the trio of heads that dangled from his belt and gave them an affectionate thump. He knew all their names: Oleander Hume, the Knight of Silk; Poxfinger; Baron Slaughterthorn. It was good to know the names of those you had beaten. That was the word of Gorkamorka, and it was good enough for Gordrakk.

He hefted Smasha and hewed through the Black-Iron King’s gorget with a single blow. The smoking helm rolled free and Gordrakk snatched it up. It would look fine hanging from his back-banner. Fights were already breaking out as the boys fell to looting the dead. The Chaos-things had good armour and sharp weapons, needing only a bit of work to make them properly fighty. Gordrakk ignored the brawling as he looked around. Chompa snuffled at the ground nearby, piggy eyes glaring angrily at an approaching mob of megabosses. He punched the maw-krusha before it could get any ideas, and took hold of one tusk. He met the beast’s glare with his own and, after a few moments, Chompa grumbled and settled down.

Gordrakk turned to watch the other bosses draw near. He had cracked the skulls of each of them, thumping them into line, the same as he had done to Chompa. They didn’t resent it – if you got your head smashed, you followed the one doing the smashing. That was just the way of it. Granted, if you thought you could smash the boss’ head, you were expected to try. Gordrakk clashed his axes together as they got close, just to remind them that he was the killiest and smashiest. Kunnin’ murmured observations in his head: Drokka was still favouring his right knee and Grotrak had gone mostly deaf after taking a blow to the head. Morgrum was getting bored and Roklud wanted to krump Morgrum. And Stabbajak, the one-eyed grunta-boss, was thinking that Gordrakk’s head would look good on the end of his gore-stikka. Gordrakk smiled toothily.

The megabosses weren’t alone. Warchanter Grund was idly smacking the carved femurs he carried together, forever lost to a wild rhythm only he could hear. Clad in a harness made from the tusks of gore-gruntas and other beasts, Grund was a hulking brute, made all the more fearsome by the scars that covered his knotted flesh and the crude tattoos that covered what the scars didn’t.

Gordrakk knew the warchanter’s head was empty of everything save the drumbeat of the twin hearts of Gork and Mork, calling all proper orruks to war.

‘Good scrap, good,’ Grund said. He sank into a crouch beside the body of the Black-Iron King and began to beat out a rhythm on the dead warrior’s back. ‘They know us now – know we is the best,’ Grund continued. ‘Soon, everybody going to know that Ironjawz is the best.’

‘They already know,’ Gordrakk rumbled. ‘We’re just reminding them.’ He looked at the other megabosses. ‘Loot ’em quick, then get your boys up on their boots. We got to go.’

‘Go? Go where?’ Stabbajak said, scratching up under his eye patch with the tip of his stikka. Gordrakk’s lip curled. ‘We got somewhere to be?’

‘We’re going where I say, Stabbajak. You got a problem with that?’

‘Maybe.’ Stabbajak’s good eye narrowed. Gordrakk met his gaze and held it, until the other megaboss looked away. ‘No,’ Stabbajak muttered.

‘No, you don’t,’ Gordrakk said. He set his axes across his brawny shoulders, the Black-Iron King’s helm dangling from the blade of Smasha. ‘But I’ll tell you anyways, you git. We’re goin’ to the Big Skull, lads. Make a good jaw-fort, that.’ He jerked his chin towards the distant shape of the Big Skull. The megabosses murmured among themselves. Gordrakk ignored them.

The Big Skull was the biggest bone in the Gargant’s Graveyard. It rose like a cracked and yellowing mountain above the plain. The maze that was the boneyard radiated outwards from it in all directions. Some boys whispered that the skull had belonged to one of the monsters Gorkamorka and the Hammer God had beaten to death in order to make the foundations for all the worlds. Gordrakk liked that story, and he liked the Big Skull. But more importantly, he liked the thing that sat atop the skull.

It was never the same shape twice... Sometimes it was a crown, sometimes a tower. Once it had looked like a box. When the wind was right, he could hear it groaning and shifting, like iron rubbing against iron. Occasionally, he could even hear it howling.

Something about it plucked at him. He felt like Gork’s – or maybe Mork’s – finger was on his head, forcing him to look at the Big Skull and whatever strange thing sprawled across the top. He could hear the gods whispering in his ears, urging him on. They had called him and his fists to the Gargant’s Graveyard, promising a scrap to remember, a fight to end all fights. So far, it had been fun enough, but the need to scale the Big Skull, to see what was at the top, was getting harder and harder to ignore.

Gordrakk kicked the Black-Iron King’s body, eliciting a hollow creak. ‘Ain’t seen any more Chaos-things. They hiding. Or running. Maybe we could find ’em easier from someplace high, yeah?’ he growled. He glared about challengingly. Only one set of eyes met his. The hunched, hooded shape of the shaman, Jabberjaw, stood off to the side, scratching himself idly. No one liked to get too close to the weirdnob. He smelt funny, and skulls tended to pop when he started twitching.

As always, a bevy of carrion-birds circled him, or hopped on the ground at his feet, cawing and scolding any boy who got within pecking distance. Like with their master, there was something... off about the birds. More than one orruk had tried to make a snack of them, only to go missing. Gordrakk didn’t care if they ate a few stragglers. Chompa’s appetite was far worse. The big maw-krusha had eaten an entire war-sty of gore-gruntas once. Stabbajak had been beside himself.

‘You got something ta say, Jabberjaw?’ Gordrakk asked. He already knew the answer. Jabberjaw was called that for a good reason. He was always saying things, yammering on and on and on.

‘Just thinking,’ Jabberjaw said, eyes unfocussed. ‘Spirits are whisperin’...’

‘Talk, you git,’ Gordrakk grunted, slugging the weirdnob. The shaman stumbled and sank to one knobby knee. His birds squawked and shot into the air, circling overhead, their beady eyes gleaming. The megabosses lurched back, eyes narrowed in nervous anticipation. Most orruks didn’t beat on weirdnobs, even if they deserved a kicking. The shamans tended to explode if they were treated too roughly. But Gordrakk wasn’t most orruks.

Jabberjaw rubbed his face and glared at Gordrakk. Gordrakk placed the flat of Kunnin’ underneath the shaman’s chin and lifted his head. ‘Tell me what you seen, Jabberjaw, or I’ll feed you to Stabbajak’s gore-gruntas one bit at a time,’ he growled. ‘Just like I did to the last four weirdnobs who made me angry.’

‘No more Chaos-things,’ Jabberjaw said.

‘Yeah,’ Gordrakk said slowly. ‘I said that, didn’t I?’

‘Don’t mean ain’t no more fighting to be had,’ Jabberjaw said, slyly. He snatched a bird off his shoulder and stroked its head roughly. ‘Spirits hear things, see things... Hear a rumbling in the sky, O mighty Fist of Gork...’

Gordrakk blinked. ‘A storm,’ he grunted. There were always storms, these days. The skies were always thick with clouds and rain. Lightning burned holes in the ground, and set fire to the grasslands. Thunder growled and set the herds to stampeding. It was a war-storm. Wherever the Chaos boys were, the storms followed, spitting armoured warriors down. ‘Storm means storm-things,’ he said.

‘Spirits say they coming, marching through the bones,’ Jabberjaw said. He released his bird and it flew away, croaking. Chompa reared up and snapped at it, but the bird flapped out of reach of the maw-krusha.

Gordrakk glanced up at the dracoth skull on his back-banner, eyes narrowed. He scraped the blade of Kunnin’ against one of the lightning-bolt glyphs he had hammered onto his armour after the last time he had krumped the storm-things.

‘You think the Hammer God wants another fight?’ he grunted, looking back at Jabberjaw. ‘That’d be good, yeah?’ He looked around. Orruks nodded eagerly, excited by the prospect. There was nothing Ironjawz loved more than a good scrap, and the storm-things scrapped better than most. If nothing else, it would make a nice change from the Chaos-things. ‘Yeah,’ he rumbled.

He looked at Grund. ‘Thump the bones, warchanter,’ Gordrakk growled. Grund chuckled and began to beat on the ground with his makeshift clubs. He let loose a howl that was soon picked up by the megabosses and, finally, Gordrakk himself.

Somewhere, back among the brawl, the other warchanters began to howl and stamp their feet. Gordrakk could feel the drumbeat of war in his head and heart, and his axes were talking to him, telling him where to go and what to hit. The Big Skull could wait.

Gordrakk threw back his head and slammed his axes together. ‘GORKA-morka! Gorka-MORKA! GORKAMORKA!’ he roared, and the Ironjawz roared with him.

From behind his shroud of illusion, Zazul of the Radiant Veil watched Gordrakk bellow in barbaric joy. The temptation to simply incinerate the brute then and there was nigh-irresistible. It had dared to strike him, and he had never been the sort to allow such humiliations go unpunished. But the creature was no fool, despite its single-minded nature. It hungered for battle the way another beast might hunger for meat. But it was no blood-simple lunatic like Goreshroud or the recently deceased Black-Iron King. There was an ember of cunning there; he had to be careful, lest it grow into a flame.

It was much the same with Sharizad. The Shimmering Countess was too clever by half – if she learned of his true purpose, she would not be pleased. She thought of him as a servant, one slave amongst many, and he intended to keep it that way. Until the time was right and he forced her to kneel at last before the Grand Marshal of Chaos himself. He cherished that thought, and her probable reaction. Such a moment would make every trial and degradation he had endured in the course of this venture worthwhile.

It had taken him years of careful study and relentless searching to find the Howling Labyrinth, and even longer to find a champion capable of penetrating its tangle of corridors. How many had he fed to the maze – a hundred? Two hundred?

I have not failed one hundred times, merely found one hundred ways that will not work, he thought. An old saying, in the incense-choked libraries of the Forbidden City, and one often associated with the works of the being known as the Daemoniac Conundrum.

The Daemoniac Conundrum was – or had been, or perhaps would be – a trickster without equal. Even such dread pranksters as the Changeling or the Queen of Foxes could not hope to equal the Conundrum for japes and drollery. The Conundrum was malevolent and troublesome, and it was whispered that even the Architect of Fate was wary of its schemes. The Conundrum had been banished from the Forbidden City, the only creature Zazul knew of to suffer such a fate.

A favoured ploy of the Conundrum was to craft cunning structures – mazes and labyrinths, folded citadels and furled castles – and place at their heart prisoners and items of importance. How the Conundrum acquired these prizes in the first place was unknown. Some thought it had spies in every realm, seeking out such things as might be fit for its purposes. Others said that the Daemoniac Conundrum simply waited until one of its puzzles was solved, and then ensured that what was found within was stolen away at some earlier point along the thread of history.

Zazul was of the opinion that the Conundrum was a test, a tool of the Great Deceiver, a stone on which the minds of the faithful could be sharpened. He glanced up at the distant shape of what the orruks so eloquently called the Big Skull. He had wrested the location for the labyrinth from daemons. They had claimed that the skull was that of Agorath, one of the great star-leviathans that prowled the black seas of infinity. Supposedly, the Daemoniac Conundrum had used Marrowcutter to slay the beast, after a hunt lasting centuries. Now, the vast skull marked the tomb in which the Worldsplitter rested...

Unless, of course, the daemons were lying, Zazul thought. That was always a possibility. Daemons were little more than falsehoods made flesh, and one had to sift carefully through their words to find the merest kernels of truth. More than one of his schemes had gone awry thanks to a daemon’s gleeful whispers. It would be unfortunate if that were the case now.

The orruks had been a surprise. They were everywhere, but he had not expected such... discipline, for lack of a better word. The daemons he had consulted had not warned him of Gordrakk’s interest in the Gargant’s Graveyard. The Ironjawz had flooded the plain of bones, driving every living thing before them.

It hadn’t been easy, ingratiating himself to the horde. Zazul had a thousand faces, but most were human. The orruks were suffused with a strange, belligerent form of magic that wore on his mind and soul. It was akin to clinging to a stone, amid a roaring river. One false move, one slip, and his illusions would be washed away, leaving him stranded at the heart of the warhorde, surrounded by thousands of angry orruks.

Zazul had no doubt that he could fight his way free. Armies of savages were as nothing to the sorcerer who had seared the skies of Yithe and shattered the vast heart-columns of the Living Fortress. For the moment, he had Gordrakk aimed away from the Howling Labyrinth. But there was no telling how long that would last.

Something was drawing the brute to the Big Skull, though whether it was instinct or something more sinister, Zazul didn’t yet know. Nor did he intend to let his curiosity get the better of him. Not this time. The Stormcasts would keep Gordrakk occupied long enough for Sharizad to penetrate the mysteries of the Howling Labyrinth. Once Marrowcutter was in her hands, no force in this realm would be able to stand against the Shimmering Countess.

And then... Well. He sighed in satisfaction and reached up to stroke the raven perched on his shoulder. ‘The dogs of Sigmar are sniffing at our threshold, my dear. Have you ever had the pleasure of their company?’

‘No,’ the raven cawed. ‘They make the world feel... wrong.’

‘Indeed. They burn the air and land, erasing illusion and whimsy where they pass. Fit prey, I should think, for your sort.’ Zazul looked around. None of the orruks gave any sign that they thought it strange that Jabberjaw should speak to birds. ‘They will have scouts – winged killers, riding the storm-winds,’ Zazul murmured to the raven. ‘Find them. I want the dogs of Sigmar blinded and stumbling, dear sister. I want to know where they are at all times.’

‘Not your sister,’ the raven croaked. ‘You are not of our cabal, crooked soul. This will be our final service to you, magus.’

‘No, my dear. This is but the first part of your final service. An enemy for an enemy, as we agreed so long ago in the City of Corkscrew Towers,’ Zazul whispered, stroking the raven gently. ‘One more enemy, and then you and the rest of the Ninety-Nine Feathers are free to flee this realm if that is what you wish.’ He flung the raven into the air and it circled him once before flapping off. The others rose from their perches and joined their sister.

Zazul watched them go. It would be a shame the day he lost the services of the Ninety-Nine Feathers. They were useful tools. Unlike many sorcerers, the raven-cabal were focussed in their studies to an incredible degree. They had been pre-eminent assassins once, hunting the mad shadows of the Sideways City and serving the quarrelsome sorcerer-lords of the aerie-citadels of the Amber Veldt in their internecine feuds. He wondered if there was a way to retain their servitude, short of outright force – then discarded the thought as a problem for another day.

Right now, there were more immediate issues to consider. Neither Gordrakk nor the Stormcasts could be allowed to interfere with Sharizad’s quest. Marrowcutter had to be found, and it would be Zazul’s tool who found it.

Once Marrowcutter and the rest of the Eight Lamentations were in the hands of Archaon’s chosen champions, the true war could begin – the final war that would see the entirety of the Mortal Realms consumed by the Realm of Chaos. That was the singular goal of Zazul and his fellow Gaunt Summoners.

And when that day comes, brute, your head shall be first on the block, Zazul thought, glaring at Gordrakk.

The boss-of-bosses had clambered back into his maw-krusha’s saddle. He hauled on the chains that were wrapped around the beast’s neck, forcing the monster to rear up. The maw-krusha thumped its barrel chest and gave vent to an earth-shaking bellow, echoed by its rider. The Five Fists of Gordrakk were marching to war. And the dogs of Sigmar would never know what hit them.

CHAPTER TWO

Stormwalkers

‘Hold them back, Beast-bane!’ Zephacleas bellowed, as the horde of orruks crashed against the shield wall of the Astral Templars in a frenzied wave. The Lord-Celestant of the Beast-bane tore his runeblade free of an orruk’s gut and booted the creature backwards into its fellows. He was a giant of a man, even among the Stormcasts, and he laughed savagely as he wielded hammer and blade alongside his warriors.

He, and by extension his Warrior Chamber, had earned their war-name in the wilds of Azyrheim, hunting the monstrous beasts that still lurked in the high crags and deep canyons of the mountains of the Celestial Realm. At the head of his chamber, Zephacleas had slain the Black Bull of Nordrath. Together, they had harried the beast-packs of the Antarktos Ridge to extinction, slaughtering the white-furred goat-headed servants of Chaos to the last scrawny beast-warrior.

But Ghur was not Azyr, and its dangers were its own. Everywhere he looked, orruk clashed with Stormcast. The brutes bellowed joyfully as they traded blows with the equally vocal Astral Templars. Shields crunched into green faces and saw-toothed clubs drew sparks from sigmarite plates as the two sides shoved against one another in the wide canyon of bone. Over the clangour of battle rose the steady beat of orruk war-drums from somewhere deep within the Gargant’s Graveyard.

The orruks had attacked suddenly, rushing wildly out of the heaps and crags of piled bone that made up the canyon walls and the vast, vaulted archways of ribcages and broken spinal columns.

‘Steady the shield wall, Nine-strike, we have to keep their attention,’ Zephacleas shouted.

‘I know my duty, Lord-Celestant. See to your own,’ Taros Nine-strike said, grinning slightly. The Lord-Castellant of the Beast-bane was almost as broad as Zephacleas was tall, and his thick amethyst war-plate was covered in the marks of battle. A pack of screeching gryph-hounds paced at his feet. They were heavy-bodied creatures, each with the limbs and torso of a great hunting hound and the head of a bird of prey. They could rip the throat out of an unarmoured man in a matter of moments, and had been known to give even Stormcasts a few uncomfortable minutes, if they were of a mind. Occasionally one of the raptor-headed beasts would dart out from between the Stormcasts in the shield wall to hamstring or disembowel an unlucky orruk.

‘Aye,’ Zephacleas said. ‘So I shall.’ He raised his weapons and brought them together. Lightning flared and crackled between hammer and blade as he wrenched them apart, casting strange shadows across the purple armour of his warriors. ‘To me, Beast-bane! Duras, Thetaleas – bare your fangs, my brothers,’ he roared, as he stepped back, out of the fray.

As he called out to his retinues, Zephacleas scanned the battle-line, searching it for weakness. He gave a grunt of satisfaction when he found none. His warriors knew the ways of the orruks of old – the greenskins were as dangerous as any Chaos-tainted warhorde, at twice the numbers. But for all their savagery, they were not things of Chaos. Indeed, they had even been allies of men once, in the dim days of ages past, before the splintering of Sigmar’s pantheon and the fall of the Allpoints.

Sigmar willing, they will be allies again, Zephacleas thought. Hopefully before he had to kill too many of them.

‘Brothers,’ he said, as Duras and Thetaleas joined him. ‘It’s time for a sortie. Care to join me?’

‘Always, my lord,’ Duras said. The Liberator-Prime scraped together the two warblades he carried. Zephacleas nodded in satisfaction. Duras was a fierce one. He had earned his war-name in the Boralis Mountains, after stalking a Chaos-touched crag-bear for seven days, tracking it to its lair and slaying it. And like Thetaleas, he too had been at the Gnarlwood, and learned its lessons well. As had they all...

He looked at Thetaleas. The Decimator-Prime inclined his head.

‘Let us bring them peace, one stroke at a time,’ he rumbled, hefting his thunderaxe meaningfully.

Zephacleas laughed. ‘Yes. Taros!’ he called, turning towards the Lord-Castellant.

Taros nodded and raised his halberd. ‘Arcos, take your warriors forwards five paces, staggered formation,’ the Lord-Castellant called out to a nearby Liberator-Prime. ‘Form a barbican, as we did at Black-Claw Ridge. The rest of you, hold fast.’

‘Aye, Lord-Castellant,’ Arcos said. Liberators advanced behind their shields, warblades held low to thrust into bellies and legs. A crippled foe was as good as a dead one, in close quarters. The Liberators pressed the orruks back, and the shield wall tightened behind them, creating a bubble of sigmarite in the battle-line.

‘Brace yourselves,’ Taros shouted, as a knot of orruks breached the closing wall of sigmarite and forced their way past the Stormcasts. The Lord-Castellant whirled his halberd out in a tight circle, and the orruks were knocked sprawling by the blow. Stunned, the greenskins made easy prey for the warblade-armed Liberators who waited behind the shield wall. Those orruks that escaped the butchery were bowled under by yowling gryph-hounds, and torn apart by savage beaks and talons.

‘Your gate awaits,’ Taros said, glancing at Zephacleas as he wrenched his halberd-blade free of an orruk’s skull. Zephacleas dipped his head in acknowledgement and turned towards the shield wall, Thetaleas and Duras at his heels. Liberators pulled their shields in and stepped aside.

Without stopping, Zephacleas caught the edge of his sigmarite warcloak and swirled it, unleashing the enchantment woven into its folds. Mystic hammers erupted from the edges of the cloak and hurtled into the onrushing ranks of orruks. Green flesh was pulped and torn, and the orruks retreated in disarray. The lull wouldn’t last for long, Zephacleas knew.

Zephacleas and the others advanced as the greenskins retreated. The warriors formed a ragged line and began to trot towards the regrouping creatures.

‘We are ruin,’ Zephacleas said.

‘We are destruction,’ the warriors around him responded, as they moved. Their savagery matched his and, for a moment, he was a mortal again, fighting alongside his clansmen, the heat of battle rising in their veins, their foes falling before them.

‘We are death!’ Zephacleas roared.

‘Death and ruin!’ His warriors bellowed in reply, their voices mingling, becoming a single fierce note of promise. It was a simple sort of cry, and prone to being bent out of shape, when the mood struck him or his auxiliary commanders. He did not hold with words set in stone or prayers forged from iron. For the Beast-bane, the song of battle was always different. Yet it served its purpose as well as any hammer or blade.

In this case, it was an enticement. The orruks responded as he had hoped, bellowing their own war-songs as they lunged forwards to meet Zephacleas and his warriors.

That’s right, keep looking at us, he thought. It was an old hunter’s trick: keep the prey focussed on what was in front of or behind it, rather than what might be coming up alongside. And the easiest way to do that with orruks was to give them someone to fight. Someone out in the open.

That was the lesson of the Gnarlwood. Four Warrior Chambers of Astral Templars had entered that bleak forest and cleansed it of its loathsome inhabitants, despite heavy losses. Zephacleas himself had taken the three monstrous heads of Grand-King Gidhora, the beastlord who had ruled there. It was while fighting the beastlord’s innumerable war-herds that his Warrior Chamber had learned that no shield wall, no matter how strong, could last indefinitely; that no defence was impregnable, and no foe unbreakable. And, perhaps most importantly of all, that the best defence was a good offence.

Zephacleas cracked a green head with his hammer and tore his sword free of the dying orruk’s chest. They took a lot of killing. They were sturdier than most things that walked the Mortal Realms.

A crude blade, made of jagged metal and studded with fangs ripped from the jaw of some beast, crashed down on his shoulder-plate. Zephacleas spun and drove his runeblade up through the brute’s torso. The orruk scrabbled at his helm, chuckling, as Zephacleas twisted his sword, hunting for its heart. Before he could find it, a thunderaxe sank into the orruk’s skull, silencing its barbaric laughter.

‘A stubborn sort of chaff, eh, Lord-Celestant?’ Thetaleas said, as he hauled the orruk back and tore his axe free.

‘That one was mine,’ Zephacleas said as the orruk slumped.

‘My apologies, my lord,’ the Decimator-Prime said. ‘I thought you in distress.’

Zephacleas shook his head. ‘I know you, axe-man. There’s not been a skull made that you could resist splitting with that blade of yours. I’ll forgive it this once, but ply your trade elsewhere – this killing ground is mine.’

Thetaleas laughed. ‘As you command, Beast-bane,’ he said, turning to wade back into the fray. Satisfied, Zephacleas turned, weapons lashing out. Soon, he had fallen into the old familiar cadence. He was an island of sigmarite, surrounded by an ocean of foes. For Zephacleas, there was no pleasure greater than to lose himself to the rhythm of death. He felt it in his soul, and with it a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction. He removed an orruk’s head with a sweep of his blade.

Memories – the smell of cooking fires and the weight of crude bronze armour, the warmth of his tents in winter and the voices of his clan – flooded his mind. Not so strong as they once might have been, but still there, still vibrant. He heard the lilting songs of the rabbit-boys as they brought home their kills, and the roar of old battles with rival clans, the reasons for which were long forgotten.

His folk were dead now, though the descendants of his clan might yet survive somewhere on the great northern taigas of the Ghurlands.

They are dead, as I am dead. But I fight on. And while I remember them, they live, he thought.

That had always been the way of it, even when he had been mortal, and he would not weep or feel sorrow. The living died, the mountains crumbled and the seas dried, as the seasons changed. Once, he had fought simply for food or for the survival of his tribe in a land full of monsters. Now, he fought to sweep the Mortal Realms clean of Chaos in all of its forms and manifestations.

But that was easier said than done. He parried a descending axe and sent its wielder reeling with a blow from his hammer. The Stormcast Eternals were but brief flickers of light against an all-consuming dark. They needed allies if they were to persevere.

By Sigmar’s command, Zephacleas and his chamber had been sent into the wildest regions of the Ghurlands to seek out any sign of the deity known as Gorkamorka, the double-headed god of the orruk race. The bellicose Gorkamorka had once been a member of Sigmar’s pantheon, in the days before the coming of Chaos. But as the pantheon had splintered, so too had Gorkamorka. Where once there had been one, sometimes now there were two, or so the seers of Sigmaron said. Zephacleas wasn’t sure whether he was looking for one god or two, but he intended to fulfil his mission. One way or another, the huntsman would have his quarry.

At the moment, however, Gorkamorka would have to wait – they had prey closer to hand. As Zephacleas had led his chamber through the wilds of the Ghurlands, following the whispered rumours and wild tales of the two-headed god, Sigmar himself had spoken to him. The God-King commanded and Zephacleas obeyed, leaving the Amber Steppes behind and marching hard for Nettlefang Mere, in the southern Ghurlands. There, he and his chamber had met the battered remnants of another Warrior Chamber, and learned of their mission – a mission more imperative than the locating of an unruly godling.

Zephacleas shoved an orruk back. The creature was large, its green flesh covered in scars and iron plates, beaten into shape and bent around its thick, twisted limbs. He opened the bulky creature’s guts with a sweep of his sword, parting crude armour and flesh with ease. It staggered towards him almost immediately, stumbling on loops of intestine. Zephacleas parried its next blow and slammed his hammer down on its broad skull. The orruk dropped and he turned, scanning the battlefield. Thetaleas and the others were keeping the bulk of the orruk forces occupied, as he had hoped. But they couldn’t do so for long. Already, mobs of orruks were surging past the thin line of skirmishers towards the shield wall.

A crackling column of lightning speared upwards as one of Thetaleas’ warriors was pulled down by the orruks and hacked to death. Close by, a Liberator was tackled off his feet by an orruk brute wielding a spiked club. As it hunched over the fallen Astral Templar, it raised the weapon over its head and chortled. Before the blow could fall, Duras was there. His warblade removed the orruk’s hand, sending it and the club it clutched sailing away. Unperturbed, the orruk twisted about and caught the Liberator-Prime about the throat with its remaining hand. Duras spun his swords and drove them down through the orruk’s shoulders and chest, seeking the beast’s heart.

Zephacleas lost sight of the Liberator-Prime as he dispatched an orruk wielding a jagged spear. A moment after he felled the beast, something heavy struck him in the back, knocking him to one knee. He turned. The orruk was massive, far larger than any of the others, and clad in thick, barbed armour. The skull of some massive beast served it as a pauldron, and in one thick hand it hefted an axe larger than a dracoth’s head.

‘Drokka!’ the orruk bellowed, filling the air with noise and spittle.

‘Indeed,’ Zephacleas said, heaving himself to his feet. He looked around and noticed the other orruks pulling back, giving them space. Most were hunting for other opponents, but some appeared to be settling down to watch. They slapped their armour with the flats of their blades, chanting what he guessed must be the big one’s name.

‘Drokka-snik!’ Drokka roared, spreading his arms.

Zephacleas understood the meaning. He studied the beast. Drokka was a mountain of ill-tempered muscle, wrapped in armour that looked as if it had been beaten into shape, rather than forged. Grisly trophies hung from every surface. Scars marked the orruk’s face and he hunched forwards awkwardly. Favouring his right knee, Zephacleas noted. The orruk snorted impatiently and gestured. ‘Come, come fight Drokka,’ he growled. ‘Come fight Drokka, storm-thing! Fight Drokka!’

Zephacleas lunged forwards. His runeblade scraped down across the orruk’s chest, staggering the beast. He narrowly avoided the bite of the axe as it swooped down in reply, and turned, slamming his hammer into the small of the orruk’s back. Drokka roared. His free hand snaked out, quicker than Zephacleas had expected, and caught the Lord-Celestant by the head. Green fingers enveloped his skull, and then he was flying through the air.

Zephacleas crashed down and lay still for a moment, fighting to regain his breath. He had lost his weapons, and there was no time to find them. The ground trembled as Drokka trudged towards him. The chanting of the orruks had reached a crescendo. He rolled aside as Drokka’s axe crashed down, tearing his warcloak. Zephacleas twisted, driving his foot into the side of the orruk’s knee. Something popped, and Drokka howled.

The orruk dropped his axe and sank down, clutching at his leg. Zephacleas thrust himself to his feet and snaked his hands around Drokka’s head. Even as Drokka began to struggle, Zephacleas braced himself and wrenched the creature’s head around. Bones crackled and flesh tore as Drokka heaved himself upright, dragging Zephacleas into the air. Zephacleas braced his feet on the back of the orruk’s shoulders and hauled back, his fingers digging into Drokka’s pulpy flesh. Drokka gurgled and clutched uselessly at the air.

Then, with a wet sound, the orruk’s head came free of his neck. Zephacleas fell to the ground, clutching his gory trophy. Drokka’s body took a tottering step forwards, then another, and a third before sinking to its knees and toppling sideways.

The watching orruks closed in almost immediately. Zephacleas scrambled to his feet. He took a two-handed grip on the dangling remnants of Drokka’s spinal column and swung the head out like an improvised club, flattening an unwary orruk. Before the others could respond, the air hummed with lightning and several of the brutes dropped in their tracks, blackened to a crisp by a crackling shroud of celestial energies. As the remaining orruks retreated, Zephacleas turned towards the source of the lightning. He held up Drokka’s head.

‘I have a new trophy for you, Gravewalker,’ he said.

‘Your generosity is rivalled only by your impetuousness, Zephacleas.’ Seker Gravewalker was a formidable sight. He was clad in the heavy, ornate armour of a Lord-Relictor, which was marked with sigils of death and rebirth. The ragged hide of a fire-wyrm flapped from one shoulder-plate, and the beast’s narrow skull was set into the Gravewalker’s reliquary standard, alongside other ornaments of gilded bone. ‘Pull back, Zephacleas,’ he said. ‘Greel is here. We’ve bloodied them. Let our brothers make the kill.’

‘Greel? Finally,’ Zephacleas said, as he recovered his weapons. ‘I wondered how long it was going to take him to get here.’ He impaled Drokka’s head on his runeblade. The ground trembled beneath the tromp of many feet. At his command, Thetaleas and the others began to fight their way back to the shield wall.

Even as the Astral Templars reached their lines, the wall of bone that lined the makeshift canyon exploded outwards, revealing rank upon rank of black-armoured Stormcast Eternals. They drove forwards, through the cloud of dust and splintered bone, ploughing straight into the orruks without hesitation.

The Sons of Mallus had come.

‘Judicators, kill the leaders as they reveal themselves,’ Lord-Celestant Gaius Greel said, his deep voice carrying easily over the clamour of battle. ‘Ignore the chaff. Leave it to the rest of us.’ He started forwards, walking slowly through the cloud of dust. It had taken his warriors hours to smash a path through the boneyard, but the effort had been well worth it. The orruks had been caught by surprise, and they were as good as beaten.

The Astral Templars had done their duty well – they had pulled the orruks into the narrow canyon and held their attention while Greel’s warriors flanked them. Now, with the foe caught between hammer and anvil, they could be eliminated.

The orruk ranks split, disgorging a disorganised mass of brutes and black orruks, who charged towards the advancing Stormcasts. The Sons of Mallus had been forge-struck under the zenith of the Dark Moon, and their armour was a polished black, edged in purple and gold, where it wasn’t wet with orruk blood.

Greel swept his hammer out as the first orruk reached him, crushing crude armour and the flesh beneath. He fought with a mechanical precision, no movement wasted. His runeblade thrust out again and again with deceptive speed, slashing at joints. Felling an orruk inevitably required more than one blow. If they survived blade and hammer, he left them to be ground under the sigmarite-shod feet of the warriors marching in his wake.

The Lord-Celestant of the Iron-sides Warrior Chamber fought at the head of his men, as was the proper way of things, surrounded by his Decimator retinues. The axe-wielders moved alongside him in a steady line, their weapons carving a gore-ridden path through the flank of the orruk force. The rest of the Stormcast Eternals marched in close formation behind them, the Liberators shielding their Judicator brethren from the orruks. The Iron-sides moved forwards resolutely. Skybolt bows crackled, picking off the bigger, more boisterous orruks, as hammers and thunderaxes felled any who got too close. ‘Remember Hreth,’ Greel said, removing an orruk’s head with an efficient slash of his runeblade.

Hreth. The Iron-sides had earned their war-name there, on the basalt fields of that fiery kingdom, where they had endured the attentions of a warhorde of bloodreavers, culled from a thousand savage fiefdoms. The Iron-sides had waded into the heart of the enemy to make their stand beneath the blind gazes of the great obelisks of Hreth. After five days of fighting, the foe had at last broken themselves on the shields of Greel’s chamber and melted away.

It would be the same here. No foe could withstand them. No foe could outlast them. Not even one as resilient as the orruks. Not even her, Greel thought. He immediately chided himself. Now was not the time. Such thoughts were a distraction from the task at hand, and he could not afford to be distracted. Distraction was weakness. One moment of inattention was all an enemy needed. He must be as sigmarite – without fault.

He heard the thump of drums, and a howl went up from the greenskin mob. Caught between the Sons of Mallus and the Astral Templars, the orruks had been ground into bloody disarray. Their thirst for battle had been quenched and then some, and now they were starting to flee. While the greenskins could be fierce foes, they were not without some sense; they knew when they had been beaten. Regrettably, the lesson rarely stuck. He lifted his hammer over his head.

‘Halt. Let them flee,’ he said, with some reluctance. His warriors crashed to a stop and waited, shields raised but weapons lowered. He planted his runeblade in the ground and rested his hand on the pommel, watching as the enemy left the battlefield.

Orruks loped past the Iron-sides’ shield wall, growling and snarling at one another in their own barbarous tongue. Greel watched them go, and wondered that creatures such as this had once fought side-by-side with Sigmar’s armies.

Had Sigmar himself not declared it to be so, I would not have believed it, he thought, but then, Sigmar’s armies had their own share of savages. He heard a voice cry out in greeting and turned.

As the orruks retreated, the Beast-bane shield wall had followed. Zephacleas trotted at the forefront, his armour stained with orruk blood and the massive head of one of the brutes’ chieftains dangling from his grip. Zephacleas was bigger than Greel, and loud. His voice carried, even at a whisper. He strode towards the Iron-sides’ Lord-Celestant, hammer dangling loosely from his free hand.

‘Ho, Greel. Now what do you think of my plan?’

‘An adequate stratagem, I must admit,’ Greel said, grudgingly. He had initially been against dividing their forces. Too much could have gone wrong. The Gargant’s Graveyard was vast, and it would have been easy to become lost. ‘We have scattered them, at any rate.’

‘For the moment,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Orruks have short memories. They’ll be back, and in greater numbers. But not until they recover their courage.’

‘Perhaps now we can continue with our true mission,’ Greel said. ‘Are you going to keep that?’ he asked, gesturing to the orruk head Zephacleas held.

‘What, this? This is Drokka,’ Zephacleas said. ‘I’m going to mount him on a pole, so his ghost can enjoy the fighting.’

‘That’s abominable,’ Greel protested.

‘It’s the orruk way,’ Zephacleas said, with a shrug. ‘It costs nothing to show a fallen foe some measure of kindness, and besides, as you said, they’re not our real enemy.’ He looked out over the battlefield. ‘Speaking of which... Any sign of her?’

Greel shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But she is here. If Sharizad has not already reached the Howling Labyrinth, then she is close.’ He turned, staring at the immense skull that marked the centre of the Gargant’s Graveyard. Something at its apex caught the light of the setting sun and flashed. He felt his stomach lurch.

It is even as the God-King said... It drinks in the light and traps it, he thought.

Zephacleas followed his gaze. ‘So that’s what that is,’ he said. ‘I was wondering.’ He laughed. ‘A labyrinth within a labyrinth.’

‘It is no laughing matter,’ Greel snapped. He gestured to the bones around them. ‘This monstrous charnel ground is all that remains of those forced to build that abominable structure. Hundreds of gargants and men and orruks, sacrificed to construct a daemon-engine of unknown purpose. A thing that has crouched here for an age, undisturbed.’

‘Until now,’ Zephacleas said.

‘Yes, until now,’ Greel said. ‘That is where she is going. And we must stop her.’

‘And so we shall, my friend,’ Zephacleas said. He looked up. ‘Heratus, get down here,’ he shouted, signalling the amethyst-armoured Prosecutors circling overhead. One dropped to the ground, scattering dust and fragments of bone as he landed. The Prosecutor-Prime folded his crackling wings back and straightened.

‘You bellowed, my lord,’ Heratus said. He spoke with the impertinence that was so characteristic of the Astral Templars, in Greel’s opinion. He bore a round sigmarite shield and a stormcall javelin, which he leaned nonchalantly over his shoulder. His armour was decorated with ribbons of purity, and the fanged jawbone of an Azyrite sky-shark was mounted on his gorget. The Beast-bane had an unseemly predilection for covering themselves in such totems.

‘I did. Are your warriors in the mood for a hunt?’

‘Always, my lord,’ Heratus said. ‘South?’

‘East,’ Zephacleas said. He dropped a friendly fist on the Prosecutor-Prime’s shoulder-plate. ‘Follow the drums, huntsman. Find me my prey.’

‘As you command, Beast-bane.’ Heratus swatted his shield with the flat of his javelin’s blade and stepped back. A moment later, he was soaring skywards. Greel watched him go, then looked at Zephacleas.

‘Your prey, or our prey?’ he asked.

‘The one will show us the location of the other, in this case,’ Taros Nine-strike, the Lord-Castellant of the Beast-bane said, as he joined them. ‘We’ve passed over the detritus of a dozen battles in the past few days, and these orruks are wearing fresh trophies.’ He used the end of his halberd to roll an orruk body over, revealing the sections of brass-and-crimson war-plate dangling from the orruk’s armour.

‘Your Shimmering Countess isn’t the only follower of Chaos looking for the Howling Labyrinth. It seems the orruks have dealt with the others, Sigmar be praised for small favours,’ Taros said. ‘Indeed, I’d wager that wherever she’s lurking, the orruks will be nearby, hunting for her, whether she’s reached the Howling Labyrinth or not. They want a fight, and we know well enough that she’s capable of giving them one, after what happened at the Temple of the Empty Heart.’ He looked pointedly at Greel.

Greel looked away. The battle for the Temple of the Empty Heart had been a disaster for the Stormcast Eternals. Warrior Chambers from several Stormhosts, including the Lions of Sigmar, the Sons of Mallus and the Astral Templars, had been all but obliterated thanks to the cunning of the Triumvirate of Charn. The three sorcerer-champions had ruled the three great duchies of the Charn Mountains for centuries before the servants of Sigmar at last cast down their standards. Greel had been among those claimed in the conflagration, his heart split by the crystalline blade of the creature known as Sharizad.

And now he lived again, his heart beating anew. He had been reforged and returned to this harsh realm for one purpose and one purpose only. The Shimmering Countess had come to the Gargant’s Graveyard looking for a weapon, a thing of horror and power in equal measure. A thing with which to split worlds – a daemon-weapon of inestimable power. A weapon she must not be allowed to claim.

He closed his eyes, remembering how the words of Sigmar had struck him like hammer-blows, even as he was pulled apart and remade, his flesh boiling away from god-forged bones and needles of lightning thrust into his mind. His joints had been shattered and reset on the God-King’s anvil, and his soul scoured clean of weakness. Gaius Greel had been remade, to make good on his failure.

He would destroy Sharizad, even if he must die again to do so.

CHAPTER THREE

Hungry Ghosts

Sharizad the Many-Splendoured One, the Shimmering Countess of Charn, sat cross-legged at the centre of the chamber, arms contorted in the seventh gesture of Hloo. A web of bound spirits, visible to no eye but her own, stretched from her crooked fingers, their murmurs filling her skull.

‘How can such a short time feel so long?’ she said, to no one in particular.

It had been months at best since the fall of the Three Duchies, or so it seemed. Time flowed strangely in the Ghurlands. Beasts had a peculiar perception of time – things grew vague the further from the present they moved. Even her spirits were confused. Their auguries were cryptic when they were not whining and abrasive. Then, such was the nature of the Howling Labyrinth. It was like the stink of a prairie fire on the wind, or the soft padding of a predator’s paws. It was a trap for flesh and soul alike.

Before her, following the curve of the wall, rose twenty-seven different archways. Each one was decorated in a unique fashion, engraved with words or shapes from across the width and breadth of Ghur. What lay beyond the archways was obscured by a thick ochre mist that spewed from gaping, fang-like vents set in the floor. To take the wrong path was to invite death or worse. To take the right path was almost as bad.

The walls that rose around her were made from polished blocks of amber which stretched and twisted the reflections of those who passed by. Sometimes she caught sight of other shapes within them, vague suggestions of things that did not now exist, and perhaps never had. Some of them were souls, she thought. The souls of those who had died in the construction of this place, and were trapped within forevermore.

According to legend, the Daemoniac Conundrum had enslaved thousands to build the Howling Labyrinth atop the skull of Agorath, the cyclopean star-wyrm. Entire tribes of gargants and other primitive beasts had been chained and goaded into titanic labours, first to wrest the amber from the earth, and then to erect the hideous structure. When they died, as they invariably did, their carcasses were dumped to the wasteland below, creating the Gargant’s Graveyard. The bones of those who came seeking the Howling Labyrinth soon joined them.

Like all of the Conundrum’s creations, it was a flame, attracting moths from every realm. Champions, sorcerers, seers and warriors from the gardens of Nurgle, the pleasure-pavilions of the Ur-Slaanesh and everywhere in between came sniffing. To brave the artifice of the Daemoniac Conundrum and survive was to gain a treasure unparalleled in all of creation. Few survived such quests. The Howling Labyrinth had remained inviolate for millennia. Until now. With Zazul’s help, she had found its location. The strength of her warriors and the magics at her disposal had served to breach its exterior.

But once inside, things had become more difficult. The interior of the labyrinth moved constantly, like a thing alive. The corridors twisted and bent upwards or downwards with no warning. Floors and ceilings met like gnashing teeth. Walls expanded or shrank, revealing new corridors or taking them away. The air throbbed with the persistent hum of unseen mechanisms and the moans of trapped souls. Auguries twisted back in on themselves and daemons could not manifest within the corridors without being refracted and torn into gossamer shreds by the strange pull of the walls.

That was due as much to the skull of Agorath as it was to the malign cunning of the labyrinth’s creator. The star-wyrms were things of sorcery as well as flesh, fading in and out of reality as they slithered through the black spaces between the stars. They were of a type with the great drakes, but more primitive – fierce hunters of the void, and a trophy worthy of any hunter. Only a weapon like Marrowcutter could pierce their scales, and only a creature as mad as the Daemoniac Conundrum would dare to try.

Then, with a weapon like Marrowcutter, one’s concept of what was possible expanded greatly. Sharizad tilted her head, listening to the quiet whisper of the blade’s voice in her head. It cut through the murmurs of her spirits and pressed close to the core of her thoughts. There was a horrid clarity to it, a purity of purpose that belied all attempts at misdirection. It knew she was here and it called to her with a passion second only to her own.

With the Worldsplitter in her hands, she would be unstoppable. It was said by the blind pox-monks of the Ruptured Expanse that there were weapons so keen as to be able to cut through the skin of reality, weapons like the Fang of Kadon or the Cat’s Claw. Marrowcutter was among their number. Indeed, it was the greatest of them. No realm would be barred to her with the daemon-sword in her hands, and no foe would be able to stay her wrath.

‘Countess no more. Queen, at least. Empress, perhaps,’ she said, as she opened her eyes.

She unlaced her arms and slapped her palms to the warm amber flagstones beneath her. ‘The spirits are confused. Odak, your cards. Make me a trail through the unwritten moments, my love,’ she murmured, glancing at the warrior standing behind her.

‘As you wish, my countess,’ Odak-of-the-Nine said. Armoured in ruby and glass, his burgundy robes rustling softly, Odak was almost the mirror image of his brothers, save for his chosen war-colours. Then, that wasn’t so strange, given the nature of the Nine-in-One. Odak opened the gilt case hanging from his belt and removed a deck of cards. The cards were crafted from pressed ivory and threaded through with gold and silver. On each was a symbolic image – a fiery skull, a daemon, a beast, among others – and with them, Odak could foretell dooms and futures. Or so he claimed.

‘How will he do it, do you think, brothers? Will he scatter them like pebbles, or perhaps craft a tower from them?’ Sardak murmured. Unlike Odak, he was clad in turquoise and silver. ‘What use pasteboard and ivory when I have my speaking bones, my countess?’ he continued, bowing to Sharizad. ‘Let me cast the bones, and I’ll find our way, true enough.’

‘Bones and cards are for children,’ Kuldak, another of the brothers, said flatly. Armoured in bronze and ochre plate, Kuldak was a master of sand and heat. Of the nine, he was the closest to their late, unlamented father in temperament. ‘Let me cast my sands, Sharizad, and I shall seek us a proper route.’

‘What would you know of it, brother?’ Sardak said.

‘As much as you,’ Kuldak said. The two glared at one another, until a fourth brother stepped between them. Silent Yuhdak, clad in silver and obsidian. Yuhdak the peacemaker. Sharizad laughed softly. Yuhdak never spoke, never fought with the others, but simply watched. He was too observant, too patient. Sharizad had already marked him to die, when the time came.

By their own admission, only one of the nine sons of daemon-sultan Vath’hek would survive. That was their fate and they pursued it assiduously. Tainted in their mother’s womb by the machinations of the Architect of Fate, the nine had once been one. A single iridescent child, split into nine mewling brats. One soul, split between nine bodies and nine minds. Those bodies would never be joined again, but the mind and the power it wielded was impressive. She often wondered at Tzeentch’s purpose for such a sundering.

Sharizad studied the Nine-in-One bemusedly. Besides the other four, there was joyful Bodak, savage Redak and morose Curdak. Two of the Nine had died before they reached the Howling Labyrinth – grim Adak and greedy Taldak. Adak had fallen not long after they had entered the Gargant’s Graveyard, cut down by the perfumed blade of Oleander Hume, the Knight of Silk, before Sharizad had put the coward to flight. And poor Taldak had vanished as soon as they entered the labyrinth. She suspected the hand of Bodak or perhaps cunning Sardak.

Regardless, soon there would be only one: one mind, one soul, one body, culled from nine. A potent champion, and blessed. If they – he – proved himself worthy. As she was worthy. How else to explain her continued survival, after all?

She had ruled the largest of the Three Duchies of Charn. Her siblings had ruled the lesser kingdoms. Together, they had held Charn tight in a grip of magic. It had been an adequate existence. The nobility had played games of death and deceit with one another, and she and her kinsmen had participated when it suited them. Small amusements, to assuage the tedium of eternity. There was joy in the taking, but little in the having.

Then had come the storm, and those who walked on it. Armoured hulks, larger than any mortal and stinking of the high magics of Azyr. They had wielded lightning and smashed aside the armies of the mountain-kingdoms as if they were nothing more than children. She closed her eyes, remembering the excitement of the moment when she had first realised that her kingdom was in danger. It had been... exquisite.

Her mind, grown feeble with boredom, was revived. A thousand plots blossomed within her, even as her brother lost his head and his duchy both. Ancient sorceries, half forgotten, were stirred anew and invoked. The sky had wept tears of boiling gold and the ground had burned with cold fire as she set herself against these new foes.

Her people too had been roused: serfs turned against their masters; her own chamberlain had called forth petty daemons to attack her while she was preoccupied. She had flayed him for his temerity, but not before thanking him.

It had been so interesting. And so short. Too short. The running had been more interesting: despoiling the lands she had once forced her slaves to tend, waging war on those petty mountain-fiefdoms that stood between her and the veldts of the Ghurlands. And her foes running after her, trying to outwit her, to outmanoeuvre her. Even better, sometimes the dead ones came back, to try their luck again.

Of course, it was hard on her warriors. Barely a few score of them remained – her chosen bannermen, the Knights of Malachus, and a few packs of tribesmen who had sworn oaths to her upon the deaths of her siblings. Too, there were the silk-and-steel-clad followers of the Nine-in-One: waste-dwellers who murdered one another too readily for the amusement of their princes. There was the seed of a great army there, but she needed Marrowcutter.

She looked around, letting the brothers bicker. Eventually she would allow one to do as she asked, but it was best to keep them at each other’s throats. Odak claimed that an eyeless crow had spoken to them in the ruins of their father’s nine-tiered palace, and commanded them to put aside their internecine feuding. The crow had sent them on a quest of their own, to find the Destined Queen. To find Sharizad.

Sharizad had no doubt that such a thing had happened, nor did she doubt that the Nine-in-One were but credulous children when it came to vagaries of fate. She suspected that the crow had spoken with Zazul’s voice. The Radiant Veil had chosen to aid her, though she knew not why. Perhaps he had seen or heard something that told him her fate. If so, he had never shared it with her. She did not trust him, for followers of the ninefold path could not be trusted.

But she could use him, as he likely intended to use her. As she could use all of her tools. She looked at those few warriors she had brought into the labyrinth. Several of the green-armoured Knights of Malachus stood sentinel by the entrance to the chamber, and a few hillmen, faces painted with ash and blood, squatted patiently nearby, watching the Nine-in-One squabble. She had left most of her forces outside, to guard the routes to the labyrinth. Zazul swore that he could keep the orruks distracted, but she didn’t intend to leave it to chance. In any event, her warriors would see to it that no one interrupted her.

Sharizad turned her attention back to the brothers and clapped her hands together. ‘Cease your bickering, my loves. I asked Odak, and it is Odak who shall have the honour of finding our path ahead,’ she said, loudly.

Odak laughed and bowed, shoving Kuldak aside as he did so. Kuldak groped for his blade, but Yuhdak caught his wrist and calmed him. Sharizad tilted her head and stretched out her hand.

‘Come, Odak. Cast our fates, and show us the way forwards.’

He took her hand and she led him around. As she released him, he moved past her, shuffling his cards. He spread them with a flourish, and they hung waiting in the air. At his merest gesture, the cards turned, twisted and moved, shifting position. Odak touched one – a queen, astride a dragon of many hues – and dragged it through the air, scattering the others like startled birds. He stepped back, arms spread.

‘What do your cards say, Odak?’ Sharizad murmured.

‘Many things, my queen. They speak of the past and the future, the written and unwritten. In my cards is the story of all things, and the fate of all men.’

‘I am concerned only with the fate of a woman, dear Odak. My own. Have you found a path, or must Sardak cast his bones?’ Sharizad said. Sardak chuckled, but a glare from Odak silenced him. Odak collected his cards with a sweep of his hand and pointed to an archway.

‘There,’ he said.

‘You are certain?’ Sharizad asked. Stepping through the wrong archway could lead to collapsing corridors or worse. The Daemoniac Conundrum had made a cage of hazards for Marrowcutter.

‘Yes, my queen,’ Odak said, bowing low.

‘Not a queen, not yet,’ Sharizad said, as she moved past him towards the archway he had indicated. ‘But I will be.’ She stopped, turning. A thought had occurred to her. ‘Show me,’ she said. ‘A queen-to-be must be preceded by her herald... Will you be my herald, Odak?’

Odak hesitated. Sharizad cocked her head. ‘Are you frightened, dear Odak? Could it be that you are not so certain as you appear to be?’

‘Allow me to go first, my queen,’ Sardak said, stepping past his brother. ‘I fear nothing.’

‘No,’ Odak snapped. ‘I am the pathfinder. I will do it. Make way, Sardak.’ He pushed Sardak aside and stepped forwards, pausing only to bow to Sharizad. ‘I will test the path ahead, O shimmering one. No harm shall befall thee.’

‘I should hope not,’ she said, reaching up to stroke his featureless helm. ‘Go.’

Odak stepped through the smoke. As he did so, he flung out his hands, dispersing it and clearing the way. His cards fluttered about him like excitable birds as he stepped into the corridor beyond, one hand on the hilt of his sword. The corridor was the same as all of the others they had passed through, made from slabs of polished amber. When nothing untoward occurred, Odak turned.

‘You see? As I said, my cards have shown us the way,’ he said.

A hand, composed of amber and as large as a man, sprouted abruptly from the ceiling and enveloped Odak, even as the words left his mouth. His struggles were barely visible through the semi-opaque surface of the amber, and his screams were muffled. The hand was followed by another, and in the gleaming surface of the ceiling Sharizad could see what looked like the reflection of an immense skeleton, much like those that populated the Gargant’s Graveyard. It towered above the corridor, like some massive beast reaching into the water to grasp its prey.

The hands tightened about Odak and his body contorted. Sharizad knew that he was being crushed. Before any of them could react, the hands slid back into the ceiling, taking Odak with them. As they vanished, the walls of the chamber suddenly bowed outwards, as if a great weight had settled atop them. The corridor Odak had stepped into slid about as the archway cracked and came apart in an explosion of smoke and dust. The walls shifted, the slabs moving and making way for others. And with them came the thud of monstrous feet. Skeletal feet, which pounded and stamped as they hurried forwards.

Vast shapes took form in the gleaming walls, floor and ceiling as long-dead beasts howled hungrily. They squeezed and squirmed, fighting to cram themselves into the rapidly expanding chamber from all sides. Everywhere Sharizad looked, giant skeletons pressed eagerly against the surface of the amber, their malformed bones slamming against one another in a frenzy. Hands sprouted from the walls and floor and ceiling, followed by bestial faces that leered and gibbered. When the ghostly gargants emerged, they were clad in amber flesh and muscle, in a hideous parody of life.

‘Defend yourselves,’ Sharizad said, as she drew her crystalline blade. Her warriors reacted with admirable speed. The Knights of Malachus were potent warriors, forged in the fires of Chaos and loyal only to the whims of the Changer of Ways. Her hillmen fared worse. They were savage and fierce, but their blades of bronze and iron made little impression on the monstrous apparitions.

The Nine-in-One fought as individuals, each one employing those methods that most suited him. Bodak fought with a brass-banded club made from the thighbone of a toad-dragon, which tore through the ghostly limbs with ease. Sardak spat withering incantations to shrivel the grasping hands into clouds of amber dust. Yuhdak wove glittering shields of light and sound to protect his more inobservant brothers.

Sharizad spun and danced, avoiding the clutches of the forest of fingers that filled the chamber. Her mind whirled with possibilities – she had centuries of magics at her disposal, but all required time, a moment of clarity and more room than she currently had.

‘Look out,’ Redak snarled suddenly as he swept his curved runeblade out towards her head. The fiercest of the Nine, Redak wore the turquoise and amethyst pelt of a demi-gryph across his shoulders, and bore a shield of polished silver. As she bent forwards, he sliced through a groping limb, separating hand from wrist before it could snatch her up. The hand splashed to the floor and melted away as if it had never been. The amber gargant reeled back, wailing. Sharizad avoided a clutching paw and spat an incantation. Her magics flared brightly, before they were drawn into the polished walls.

One of her knights was pulped by the foot of an amber-hued gargant. The great beast whirled as other knights attacked him. It knocked them sprawling with a blow, and hands reached up from below to ensnare them. In moments, her forces would be nothing more than a memory. Anger pulsed through her. ‘How dare you,’ she hissed, slashing at a hand that drew too close. ‘You are nothing – less than nothing. The memory of a fate cut short. You shall not stop me, not now.’ The smoke that made up the crest of her crystal helm suddenly billowed, growing thicker. The facets of her armour darkened and began to shimmer.

The smoke flared about her like the hood of a cobra and flowed forwards, growing swifter and more solid as it went. As the first coils of smoke reached the amber gargants, they erupted in shapes: men and women, warriors, kings and sorcerers. Goreshroud was among their number, still wearing the wound that had killed him. He stalked alongside the Three Queens of Ferro, trailing their life’s blood in their wake like shimmering cloaks. Bloodbound moved forwards alongside hulking Stormcast Eternals, their groans of agony like the sweetest music to her ears.

Sharizad swept her sword out as more and more souls spilled from the facets of her armour. Their freedom was only momentary. Once she claimed a life, it was enthralled until she decided to release it. Only one soul had ever escaped her, the last she had sought to claim before she had fled the Temple of the Empty Heart.

The use of the chained souls was a powerful magic, one of the greatest at her disposal. But it was not without risk. The souls hated and feared her. She could unleash them, but there was no guarantee that she could control them. They swept ahead in an unstoppable wave, swarming over the gargants. The air throbbed with the roars and groans of the dead as they fought. One by one, the spectral gargants retreated, rising and falling away into the depths of the amber with wails of frustration.

Sharizad extended her hand as the ghostly shape of Goreshroud turned towards her. The scar-faced warlord glared blindly at her, his axe half raised. The other ghosts spread out around him, their voices a quavering susurrus. He was the freshest, and the strongest. That meant he was the most dangerous. He stepped towards her, teeth bared in a snarl.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You are mine. Your fate is mine. And you will come to heel.’

Goreshroud snarled silently and lunged for her, axe raised. His mind and will crashed against hers like a tempest. But he was nothing. His fate was a puny thing, next to the weight of hers. Sharizad whipped her sword out and his form wavered and came apart all at once. She glared at the remaining souls. ‘You are mine. All of you are mine. Now back to your kennels.’

The ghosts returned to the smoke they had emerged from and flowed back into her crest and armour. The six remaining brothers of the Nine-in-One gazed at her with awe as she sheathed her sword. She looked about her. The chamber had become a corridor, and the archways were gone, leaving only two possible directions. Somehow she knew which way to go. She felt the pull of something, like a snatch of a half-heard song. She turned towards it.

‘Shall we proceed?’ she asked, glancing over her shoulder at her followers.

Zazul sensed his champion’s frustration and barely restrained a laugh. So sure of yourself, my lady, so certain, he thought. The Howling Labyrinth was designed to confound even the most cunning of minds, of which the Shimmering Countess was certainly one. He had no doubt that she would navigate the maze in due time, but for now her anger was amusing.

It was in the nature of the Changer of Ways to find as much joy in the unravelling of schemes as in the weaving. Plots were meant to rise and come undone, else what was their purpose? Zazul himself had schemed to undo his own stratagems, in times past. To play both sides of the board with equal skill was the mark of a true gamesman.

But this was not that sort of game. He had to retain control of Gordrakk until the beast had served his purpose. And when the Fist of Gork had accomplished what Zazul wished him to, it would be time to cut the thread of his fate short. For that, he would need the right tools.

He scanned the noisy expanse of the scrap-camp, reading the mood of the gathered orruks as easily as he might read a missive. They rarely stayed in one place long enough to do more than render an area uninhabitable for anyone else. The stink of the gore-grunta war-sty and the ever-growing refuse piles that the overly aggressive swine were fed from hung heavy on the air.

Mingled with it was the stink of burning meat, as the orruks devoured an assortment of the unlucky beasts that inhabited the boneyard. Everything from sabretusks to stonehorns prowled the skeletal heaps and cul-de-sacs, preying on one another and anything stupid enough to cross their path. Gordrakk had lost a dozen warriors within hours of entering the Gargant’s Graveyard, all to hungry beasts. Since then, the animals had wisely learned to keep their distance. The orruks weren’t particular about what they ate.

Cloaked in the mask of Jabberjaw, Zazul made his way through the camp, listening to the muttered conversations. He had run the beasts ragged for days on end, sending them chasing illusions and shadows, allowing the Stormcasts to advance farther into the boneyard. Gordrakk was growing sullen and his warriors were frustrated. Now, thanks to the Ninety-Nine Feathers, he knew that the Stormcasts were close enough to allow the orruks to finally find them. Indeed, one of the megabosses, Drokka, had already fought them.

Drokka had demanded the right to attack the Stormcasts the moment they had been spotted. Given that he had won the scuffle that had followed, as the other megabosses showed their disapproval, Gordrakk had obliged him. Drokka would fail, of course. Gordrakk had known that, Zazul suspected. The Fist of Gork had sent his own scouts out, watching the battle, studying the enemy. He was no mindless brute, whatever his inclinations. And that made him dangerous.

With the tiniest gesture, Zazul sparked brawls or strengthened growing resentments among the gathered Ironjawz as he weaved through the camp. It wasn’t hard, and amusing as it was, it served an important purpose. The orruks must pose no threat to Sharizad, once she had succeeded. They would destroy the Stormcasts for him, and then he would twist the force of their fury in on itself. Gordrakk’s destiny – whatever it was – would be cut short, and the orruks that remained would be easy pickings for the Shimmering Countess.

Zazul made his way to the centre of the camp, leaving a trail of violence and confusion in his wake. Given the nature of an orruk camp, no one noticed. He saw several of the megabosses gathered together around a fire-pit. It was a rare enough sight that it gave him pause. Orruk bosses had an aversion to being within arm’s reach of one another. Then, Gordrakk intimidated them all so much that he suspected they sought comfort in each other’s company. Orruks were social creatures, by and large, despite their brutal inclinations.

He sidled close, listening to them. Stabbajak was the most vocal, but that was no surprise. The one-eyed orruk was the most troublesome of Gordrakk’s lieutenants. And potentially the most useful. He had been the most incensed by Drokka’s demand, and Gordrakk’s granting of it.

‘Thinks he’s so big,’ Stabbajak muttered, chewing on a bone. ‘Who does he think he is?’

‘The Big Punch,’ Roklud said, picking at his teeth with a splinter of boar-tusk.

‘I know that,’ Stabbajak said, as he walloped the other orruk with his bone. Roklud snarled, but refrained from lunging at the one-eyed grunta-boss. Stabbajak was as nasty as the beast he rode, and twice as tough. He was second only to Gordrakk, and had been the last of them beaten into servitude by the Fist of Gork.

‘Then why’d you ask?’ Roklud muttered, rubbing his head.

‘Cause he’s thinking, ain’t you, Stabbajak?’ Zazul murmured, cringing slightly as the brutish words left his mouth. The orruk tongue was almost as painful to speak as it was to hear.

‘Shut up, Jabberjaw,’ Roklud growled, tossing a chunk of burned meat at Zazul. Stabbajak walloped him again.

‘You shut up, Roklud.’ Stabbajak pointed his bone at Zazul. ‘You talk, Jabberjaw.’ His one eye glittered with cunning. ‘But you’d better make it good.’

Zazul smiled. ‘Nothing to say, Stabbajak. Only making an observation.’ Stabbajak was a weapon loose in its sheath. He had the cunning and the ambition to make himself boss-of-bosses, but not the ability. Gordrakk left him alive and ignored his veiled taunts, hoping he would try. Unlike Roklud and the others, Stabbajak didn’t know when he was beaten. That made him perfect for Zazul’s purposes.

It was a hard needle to thread, keeping Stabbajak and the others grumbling but not allowing them to follow their natural instincts. Orruks did not dissemble or plot. They were honest beasts, whatever else. He needed the megabosses unhappy, but not so unhappy that they might simply seek to take that unhappiness out on Gordrakk. Only once the Stormcasts had been defeated would he step back and let nature take its course. Whatever else happened, this horde would no longer be a threat to Sharizad or his plans for her.

As Stabbajak settled back to continue grumpily gnawing on his bone, Zazul turned his attention to the object of Stabbajak’s ire. He glanced towards the throne. Gordrakk was staring up at the Howling Labyrinth again. Zazul grimaced. In a perfect world, the orruk would have already hurled himself into battle with the Stormcasts. But something kept drawing his attention away from them. Some force was fighting him, bending Gordrakk away from his chosen course.

Zazul felt his illusions flicker and bit back a snarl. The force, whatever it was, was growing stronger, and it was becoming harder to stay hidden behind Jabberjaw’s brutish face. Soon he would no longer need this veil, and could free himself from the stink and crudity of this barbaric place. He wondered where he would be sent next. Archaon was drawing his champions to him from across the length and breadth of the Mortal Realms, and the Gaunt Summoners would show them their paths.

Perhaps he would overthrow a kingdom next, or poison a long-forgotten realmgate in preparation for battles to come. Sigmar’s storm was spreading swiftly over the Mortal Realms. Many regions of Aqshy roiled with the flames of war, as did the kingdoms of Ghyran. The dead stirred in the deep places of Shyish, and old foes readied themselves for battle. He had seen it all, and more besides in his dreams and meditations. The mortal gods stirred once more from their hiding places, daring the wrath of the Ruinous Powers.

Something growled, deep in his mind. He glanced up and then quickly back down. The shapes crouched low over the scrap-camp, leaning on their knuckles, eyes like balls of fire. They were indistinct things, more suggestions of shapes than shapes themselves, but powerful for all of that. He could feel the weight of their gaze whenever it passed over him, and he shuddered deep in his core. They were part of Gordrakk, and were attached to him in ways that Zazul did not fully understand. The orruks could not see them, he thought, but they could feel them. Sometimes, they would become agitated, and begin to brawl with insubstantial ferocity. Other times they vanished for days at a time, only to return when he least expected it.

Whatever they were, they were unduly interested in the Howling Labyrinth. Often, he would catch sight of one or the other, leaning down as if to whisper with comedic delicacy into Gordrakk’s ear. And when they whispered, Gordrakk listened. That was dangerous.

Surreptitiously, he gestured. Gordrakk shifted on his throne, and his eyes turned towards Zazul.

‘Where are your birds, shaman?’ Gordrakk rumbled.

‘Gone hunting,’ Zazul said, and smiled.

Heratus swooped through the muggy air, followed closely by his huntsmen. They flew with grace and precision, despite the weight of their armour and the weapons they carried. The five of them had hunted together since the founding of their Warrior Chamber. As a group, they had harried the Black Bull of Nordrath to exhaustion, drawing blood from its armoured flanks with their javelins.

That had been a good day. Mantius Far-killer had pierced the abomination’s brain with his arrows, once Heratus and his warriors had run it to ground. Heratus frowned as he thought of the Knight-Venator of their Warrior Chamber. The Far-killer had fallen on the battlefield, as a Stormcast ought. Heratus knew it was only a matter of time until he joined the Far-killer in the fires of Reforging. That was the fate of all warriors pledged to Sigmar. The fate of all of the Beast-bane, to fall and burn and rise to fall again.

May that day be long in coming, he thought. He did not wish to burn and be reforged, but neither did he fear it. Why fear what could not be prevented? Better to embrace it and make the moments between count. He banked sharply, his keen gaze sweeping over the vast boneyard below. It stretched for miles, seemingly farther than a mortal man could travel in a lifetime. The air trembled with the pounding of orruk drums.

Below him, herds of great beasts – thundertusks, stonehorns and other creatures – fled before the incessant beat. The sound of their fear reached him, even at a distance. It was ever the way with orruks. They drove lesser beasts before them like a forest fire. The greenskins were not truly an army; rather they were a force of nature. Walls and towers could not stop them, any more than armies in the field could resist them. A thousand kingdoms had learned the folly of that over a thousand lifetimes.

One of his warriors, Agatus, motioned with his javelin and Heratus followed the gesture. Down below, orruks filled the narrow canyons of the boneyard, squatting around stinking fires. They were all around the Warrior Chambers, and if the Stormcasts didn’t change their route they would march right into the largest concentration of the creatures.

While that might suit Zephacleas, the others would not be so eager to run afoul of the full strength of the orruks. There were more of them than Heratus had expected – too many. There were hundreds of smaller concentrations scattered across the boneyard. Isolated scrap-forts and war-camps occupied narrow defiles and canyons. It was as if something were drawing orruks from every corner of the Ghurlands. Instinctively, he glanced towards the immense bestial skull that occupied the centre of the Gargant’s Graveyard, and the shimmering... thing that surmounted it like some unnatural crown.

The Howling Labyrinth, he thought, and felt his spirit quiver.

The Mortal Realms were studded with places of foulness. In the centuries since the closing of the gates of Azyr, the hordes of Chaos had run wild across the Mortal Realms. And in their wake, they had left deep wounds in the very fabric of reality – monstrous citadels and foul temples raised to unnatural eidolons, ruined cities where no city had ever existed before. The Howling Labyrinth was one of those structures.

The bird fell out of the sky in a swirl of feathers, shocking him out of his reverie. It struck Agatus with bone-cracking force. As Heratus swooped to his aid, the Prosecutor tumbled through the air, caught in the talons of something that twisted and changed even as he sought to come to grips with it. More birds – ravens, Heratus thought – dived down, screeching. There were dozens of them, and their forms swelled and stretched in abominable ways as they fell towards his huntsmen like an oily rain.

A Prosecutor hurled his javelin, piercing a raven through and killing it in mid-transformation. Something that was not quite a bird, not quite a man, fell twitching to the ground far below. Others fell on the Prosecutor even as another javelin crackled into being in his waiting hand. Heratus swooped on towards Agatus. He saw that his subordinate’s attacker had become a black-armoured warrior, clad in a cloak of glossy feathers.

As they tumbled through the air, the warrior drew a thin, curved blade and slid it through a gap in the plates of Agatus’ armour. The Prosecutor jerked and blood spurted from the mouthpiece of his helm. Heratus drove the blade of his javelin through the back of the killer’s neck as Agatus’ body dissolved into a searing bolt of lightning.

Heratus arced upwards, jerking his javelin free of his kill as he did so. More flashes of lightning greeted his eyes, and he cursed his earlier inattention. He had led his huntsmen into an ambush, and now they were paying the price for his lack of awareness. But they were not alone in paying that terrible toll. Strange black-clad warriors plummeted towards the boneyard below, their bodies burned and pierced by javelins, or their skulls crushed by desperate blows. But for every one that fell, two more swooped down to join the fray.

As the last of his warriors fell, his body coming apart in streamers of crackling light, Heratus ducked his head and strove forwards, wings slicing through the air. He had to break free of his attackers. Lord-Celestant Zephacleas had to be warned.

Things that were neither birds nor men lunged through the air towards him. Strange energies rippled around them, and the air stank of foul magics. Heratus whipped his javelin out, slashing the tip of the blade across a metallic, beaked mask. Feathered cloaks swirled, obscuring his vision. He felt a great weight slam into his back and his wings struggled to hold him aloft. Everywhere he looked, clawed gauntlets and iridescent blades dug for him. Talons pierced his helmet, tugging his head back. He roared in fury and swung his shield-arm out. He felt bone splinter at the point of impact.

His attackers scattered, flapping away with raucous cries. Only a single figure hovered before him, arms spread – a woman, clad in ornate, obsidian-hued armour and robes. Great wings, as black as the void between stars and a match for his own, flapped slowly from her back and her narrow helmet was shaped like the head of a raven.

Heratus hurtled towards her. He could feel the air becoming heavy with growing pressure, and knew, with a sinking certainty, that the sorceress was preparing to unleash a spell. She had begun a series of complicated gestures, and as she completed them, Heratus hurled his javelin. As it left his hand, the air suddenly became hot and close, and he couldn’t help but scream as oily flames enveloped him.

Then, he was falling, and burning. And soon, in a flash of lightning, he was rising.

But still burning.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bones and Beasts

Gordrakk closed his eyes as the gods squabbled in his head.

Gork was winning, or maybe Mork. It changed moment to moment, as did their location. He could almost see them, in his mind’s eye. He could certainly hear them. He had always been able to hear them. That was how he knew he was who he was. He was the Fist of Gork, the dead-hard boss-of-bosses. He was the first-born son of brutality and cunning, and stronger than either. That was what the gods whispered to him, and he saw no reason to doubt them.

He sat on a makeshift throne made from the shattered ribcage of a gargant and the gaping jaws of some deep-sea leviathan, covered in the still-dripping hide of a gore-grunta. What was left of the beast was swiftly sliding down Chompa’s gullet. The maw-krusha gave a rumbling purr as it ate, satisfied for the moment. But only for the moment. Chompa’s satisfaction rarely lasted longer than the moment between the last bite of one meal and the first bite of the next. Gordrakk knew how the great beast felt.

The orruks had made a temporary scrap-camp in the remains of the one once populated by the Black-Iron King’s warhorde. The Chaos-things made good camps, building palisades and stretching vast canvases between jutting bones to block out the harsh light of the suns above. Now, those tents were being used by his boys. Everywhere he looked, he saw Ironjawz prying armour off the bodies of Chaos worshippers or beating new weapons into shape with their fists. Black orruks watched their larger cousins enviously. They weren’t strong enough to do the same, though they sometimes tried.

‘Nobody’s as strong as us,’ Gordrakk murmured. He glanced up at the top of the throne, where what was left of the Black-Iron King had been crucified and left to dangle and clatter in the hot breezes that ran through the bone-canyons. ‘Ironjawz is the strongest there is,’ he continued. ‘When Gorkamorka beat us into shape, he made us out of the hardest iron.’ He was speaking to himself more than he was his followers.

He studied the high canyon walls, composed of bone piled atop bone. There were boneyards like this throughout Gorkamorka’s realm. Some were larger, some were smaller, but all were signs of Gorkamorka’s passage. The gods travelled and fought from one end of the realm to the other, and the orruks followed in their footsteps. To fight where the gods had fought was a great thing. The echoes of those long-ago struggles still waited in places, like ancient wisdom. There were caves in the Ghurish Heights where an orruk could hear the curses of his gods as they punched and kicked one another, and deep holes gouged in the earth where Gorkamorka had dragged dark-dwelling monsters into the light of the suns.

There were monsters aplenty in the Gargant’s Graveyard. Even a few hill-troggoths lurking in the higher piles. The centuries had piled dust and loose soil in amongst the older conglomerations of bone, making natural eddies, tunnels and caves. Water collected in upturned skulls and ran along the cracks in mammoth femurs. Sometimes it dripped down through the bones and collected deep in the piles, and strange things swam in those unseen pools.

There was always good hunting in boneyards. Always tribes of men or monsters, trying to build something out of the dead. Something the orruks could knock over. But Gordrakk wasn’t interested in men or monsters. No, he was only interested in one fight right now.

The storm-things were close. He could smell them on the air. The Hammer God made good, tough warriors. That he sent them to fight orruks showed that he still respected Gorkamorka. It had taken days to find them – days of chasing sounds and shadows. He had killed more than one of his scouts out of sheer frustration, and now most were hiding out in the boneyard, waiting until it was safe to return. The braver ones had brought him word that the storm-things were close.

Gordrakk was not, by nature, patient. Only the whispers of Kunnin’ kept him from leading all of his fists straight towards the foe, the moment he had learned their location. But the axe said something was up. There was something in the air – not the storm but something else. There was an opponent out there somewhere, begging for a fight. And Gordrakk intended to give them one. That was why the gods had made him.

His skull echoed with the pleasing sounds of the deific scuffle, as Gork and Mork traded blows and insults. His bones reverberated with the force of their punches and bellows, and his flesh prickled in a pleasing way. Ironjawz worshipped the gods equally, with no favouritism. Gork and Mork were one as often as they were two, and neither was pre-eminent. Not for long, at least. It was a constant fight for dominance, just the way orruks liked it.

He cracked an eye, and glanced down at the axes crossed over his lap. One spoke with the voice of cunning, the other with the voice of brutality. They talked constantly, urging him first one way and then the other. Provoking him and warning him. It was the axes that had told him about the thing at the top of the Big Skull, and it was the axes that wanted him to see what was up there, and take it or break it, whichever seemed profitable at the time. There was something up there that they wanted – to have or maybe just to fight. The axes were always looking for a fight, which suited him just fine.

Drums thumped and a howl went up, half mocking, half warning. He opened his eyes fully and leaned forwards. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Drokka beat ’em?’

‘Birdies say Drokka is – ksst,’ Jabberjaw said, dragging his thumb across his wattle-laced throat. ‘Storm-things walloped him but good.’ The shaman crouched near Gordrakk’s throne, surrounded by his carrion-birds. He had been muttering to them since they’d returned.

‘Hnh.’ Gordrakk sat back and chuckled. Drokka had insisted on making the first attack, and Gordrakk, in a display of magnanimity meant to appease Drokka and annoy his other chieftains, had allowed it. Drokka had been as thick as two rocks tied together, and about as useful, but he had managed to thump the other megabosses. ‘Good. Never liked old Drokka anyway. Where they at now?’

‘Coming up slow, marching through the boneyard,’ Jabberjaw said, stroking his raven’s head. ‘No scouts now, though. Marching blind,’ the weirdnob chortled.

Gordrakk grunted.

‘You kill ’em?’

Jabberjaw just grinned. Gordrakk was tempted to feed the shaman to Chompa on general principles. Nobody grinned at him, not even a weirdnob with a head full of god-juice. But Kunnin’ cautioned him quietly, and he restrained his ever-present volcanic urge to do violence. Smasha, however, urged action of some sort. He might not be able to bash Jabberjaw, but he could bash somebody.

‘Right,’ he said. He shoved himself upright and slammed his axes together. ‘Drokka had his chance. They krumped him. Now we know we got a fight. So we go fight.’ He looked around at his megabosses, judging their readiness. That too was his purpose. Gork had punched him to life to find the biggest and best fights, but Mork had breathed his cunning into Gordrakk so that he could test his people, to find the biggest, baddest bosses for the fight-of-all-fights. The ones who would krump the gods themselves and throw down every wall and topple every tower.

‘Fight’s good. But not proper, lettin’ Drokka go first,’ Stabbajak grunted. ‘Gore-gruntas go first. Always!’ He thumped his chest with a fist. His warriors murmured in agreement. He was right, Gordrakk knew. Gore-gruntas were always first, always at the front of a good fight. While their riders were after a fight, the pigs were after food. The big boars ate everything, even other boars. Even orruks. The only thing they couldn’t digest was iron.

‘Gore-gruntas go when I say they go, one-eye,’ Gordrakk said. ‘Unless you got a problem?’ He fixed Stabbajak with a glare. Then he looked around, letting his gaze rest on the others, each in their turn. ‘Anybody got a problem?’ None of the others looked at him.

Gordrakk waited. Then, finally, he grunted in disappointment. They never wanted to fight any more – not openly, anyway. He didn’t think any of this lot would last much longer. He hawked and spat, then smacked Stabbajak with the flat of Smasha’s blade.

‘Take your gruntfist and punch ’em inna face,’ Gordrakk growled, looking down at the one-eyed orruk. ‘Gore-gruntas go first, right?’ It would take him time to get the rest of his mobs moving in the right direction. Stabbajak and his gore-gruntas would reach the enemy first, and keep them pinned in place. Gordrakk had learned the value of keeping his opponents from running off. Also, Stabbajak might do Gordrakk a favour and follow Drokka’s example in getting himself killed. That’d save Gordrakk some effort later on.

Stabbajak grinned toothily. ‘Right.’ The one-eyed orruk turned and began to bellow orders to his subordinates. Stabbajak’s clan of grunta-riders were heavily armoured and bellicose, as befitting their kind. It was no easy thing to keep a gore-grunta in line. The big, carnivore-fanged pigs would bite off an orruk’s arm as soon as look at them, and it was a constant battle for dominance.

Not much difference between a gore-grunta and this lot, really, Gordrakk thought, glancing at his other lieutenants. The megabosses were agitated, wanting a scrap, but not wanting to challenge Gordrakk’s decision. They weren’t afraid of him – not really. They were just afraid that he’d knock them out before they got a chance to enjoy the fight to come. No orruk wanted to miss a scrap, especially if they were Ironjawz.

Squeals rose from the war-sty where Stabbajak’s warriors had corralled most of the gore-gruntas. The monstrous swine grunted and clattered within the ring of interlaced bones, metal plates and jutting gore-stikkas, their bodies weighed down by the iron that had been hammered onto them by the fists of their riders. It took a lot to wrestle one of the pigs down long enough to get the iron on, and sometimes neither the gore-grunta nor its owner survived the experience.

Stabbajak clambered to the top of the sty and held out his hands. Then, with a howl of challenge, he dived into the pen of angry and ever-hungry war-beasts. His warriors followed him, hurling themselves over the top of the sty or else ripping pieces of it away so that they could meet those gore-gruntas that tried to escape head-to-head. Orruks wrestled snarling gore-gruntas to the ground long enough to climb onto their backs, or were trampled beneath the hooves of the beasts. Stabbajak clung to one of the largest, and the beast bucked and writhed, trying to dislodge him.

Finally, the melee knocked the walls of the sty flat and gore-gruntas and their riders spilled out into the camp proper. Stabbajak led the way, swatting his mount’s rump with the flat of his serrated spear. They thundered through the camp, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Mobs of brutes and black orruks scrambled to get out of their way.

Gordrakk hauled himself into Chompa’s saddle as the gore-gruntas charged into the canyon beyond the camp in a squealing, stinking flood. ‘Everyone up!’ he bellowed. ‘On your feet. The Hammer God is here. He wants a fight and I aim to give him one.’ He half stood in his saddle and clashed his axes together, then he extended Smasha towards the hulking form of his warchanter, Grund. ‘Grund! Let the gods know where we’re going. Sing us a song of war, and make it good and loud.’

Grund chortled in pleasure and began to slam his bones together, and against anything his arms could reach. ‘Gorka-Gorka-GORKA,’ he rumbled, ‘Morka-Morka-MORKA! GORKAMORKA!’ He began to dance, as he sang and slammed his bones together. Dust whirled about him, forming leering, brutal countenances, and sparks of crackling green light danced across the faces of those warriors closest to him.

Gordrakk’s warriors roared out in accompaniment to the warchanter’s song, slamming their weapons together and stamping their feet. The noise rose up and spread outwards, filling the air. The light filled every eye and crackled along the edge of every weapon. Gordrakk felt his muscles swell with strength and he joined his voice to that of his followers.

It was time to go to war.

Sardak-of-the-Nine cast his bones across the floor of the Howling Labyrinth and cursed. The bones had their story, and they stuck to it. The future was still unclear, despite the deaths of his brothers. Six of the Nine remained, and five more than he was comfortable with.

I really should have killed a few, before that eyeless crow showed up and croaked out its prophecy, he thought, looking up at the corridor of amber slabs.

The War of Tiers had raged for fifteen years before the crow had appeared and ruined their fun. The nine-tiered citadel-palace of their father, the Daemon-Sultan Vath’hek, had provided a challenging battleground. It rose up over the Red Wastes like a termite mound, each tier a fortress-city in its own right. A man could be born, live his life and die without ever seeing the sun or leaving his tier of birth. Sardak still thought of it fondly, when he thought of it at all.

When their mother had at last devoured their father on the forty-fifth day of his apotheosis, and ascended into the realms beyond, Sardak and his brothers had begun their war. It was a small thing at first, barely more than a duel. But it grew, blossoming into a glorious stalemate, an unending game of plot and counter-plot as each of them sought to undo the schemes of the others. Only Yuhdak had not participated. Instead, their silent brother had drifted between the tiers, watching and taking part where it pleased him. More than once, Yuhdak had saved one of them from the schemes of another. He showed no favouritism, his only concern seemingly their good health.

Kind Yuhdak, silent Yuhdak. Sardak suspected that Yuhdak derived some pleasure from seeing the conflict from all sides. Perhaps he simply didn’t care. Or, more disturbingly, perhaps he did. Sardak shook his head. His other brothers were easier to understand. They were fools and monsters, none more so than Kuldak.

He glared at Kuldak. He was certain that his bronze-armoured brother had done for Taldak, not long after they had entered the Howling Labyrinth. The greedy one had wandered down a side corridor and never returned. Or so Kuldak claimed.

And Bodak supported those claims, as always, Sardak thought. His glare slid towards the heavy-set shape of his other brother. Boisterous Bodak, with his brass-banded club and his infectious laugh. He had ever thrown his considerable weight behind Kuldak, for reasons that Sardak found unfathomable. Then, they all made strange alliances: Sardak himself had always fought alongside Redak against the others, though the latter was by far the most unpleasant of his siblings.

Strange alliances indeed, he thought – and none stranger perhaps than their alliance with the Destined Queen. She was a cunning thing, of all shapes and none. Their auguries ever went astray when they bent them to fathoming her fate, or theirs while they stood with her. She had ruled a kingdom, much like theirs, but had dashed it to pieces at a whim. The blood of her siblings was on her hands, the spirits said, and she followed her course with a precision a blade would have envied.

There was much to admire in her, and much to fear. Why had the crow sent them to her? It was a question none of them, save perhaps Yuhdak, knew the answer to. She had led them into battle with enemies by the score, names and faces that had only been whispered in the City of Tiers: Koh-dash of the Eighteenth Culmination... Drakas Gorger... the Striding Folly... Oleander Hume... Goreshroud. Sharizad’s enemies, the obstacles in her path.

Are we your weapons then, my queen? The thought was not as unpleasant as it might once have been. Sardak had grown used to being manipulated. He and his siblings were things of Chaos, toys that bent and fell for the amusement of the gods. His fate, whatever it might be, was already sealed, he feared.

‘Do not seek to be a thing unto iron, Sardak-of-the-Nine. Be like water instead,’ Sharizad said suddenly as she studied the floor. Sardak looked at her. As ever, the Shimmering Countess seemed to know what he was thinking. Or perhaps he simply lacked the subtlety to hide his fears.

‘What?’

‘Water, Sardak. What is the strength of water?’ Sharizad said, not looking at him.

‘Water has no strength.’

‘Yes. And no. Water’s strength lies in its lack of strength, its shapelessness. Water takes the shape of whatever contains it, whatever situation it finds itself in. Water can drip, flow or crash. It does not break or bend – it simply flows forwards, always, unless it becomes trapped in one shape and thus grows stagnant. Do not grow stagnant, Sardak. Rather, flow and crash. Be water, not iron.’

Sardak was silent. He watched Sharizad, watched her fingers play across the floor, hunting the proper path. Then he looked at his remaining brothers, studying them. Did they seek to be iron? To be one thing and no other? Locked into a single fate, paying no mind to what might be and could be?

Is that our fortune, then? Is that what we seek? A single, indivertible fate – one moment plucked from amongst many, he thought. It occurred to him, in the same moment, that he had never truly thought about it, until he’d entered the Howling Labyrinth. Something about this place provoked such thoughts.

He watched the ghosts lope by, within the murky surface of the amber slabs of the walls and ceiling and floor. More and more of them every hour, pressed against the surface like corpses bobbing beneath frozen waters. They pursued Sharizad’s host like scavengers, waiting for the weak to fall. The Howling Labyrinth held a generation’s worth of souls within its walls and was ever-hungry for more. He shuddered, trying not to think of what it might mean to die here. Would his soul be dragged into the amber, to flock with the others?

No. No, he could feel the weight of Odak’s soul within him. When one brother died, all that he had been, or could be, was splintered and scattered amongst his surviving brothers. When one fell, the rest grew stronger. More real, he thought.

The future was a path yet unknown. It could only be travelled when the Nine were the One, and the weight of all of the diverse possibilities shed. Or, at least that was what he had always told himself. What they had always told themselves. The destiny of the Nine was to be One. But which one? And in all the manifold turns of the wheel, would not each assume that burden and blessing? His victory was assured, or so his bones said. But Odak’s cards had said the same, hadn’t they? And now his brother was dead.

Of them all, only Yuhdak appeared to have no certainty. Sardak studied his ever-silent brother, wondering what thoughts were concealed behind that featureless mask. As if sensing his thoughts, Yuhdak turned to look at him. His sibling motioned surreptitiously, and Sardak returned the gesture. Yes, brother. All is well, he signed.

Yuhdak inclined his head and turned away, apparently listening to something Bodak was saying. Bodak slapped Yuhdak on the shoulder, and laughed. Sardak’s hand dropped to the pommel of his blade.

‘Yes, brother... All will be well,’ he murmured.

Zephacleas stopped and lifted his hammer. ‘Hold,’ he said. The Stormcasts crashed to a halt behind him. Instantly, Liberators from the Astral Templars moved forwards. They arrayed themselves in a rough line across the path ahead and sank down to one knee, waiting for further orders. The canyon bent slightly to the left up ahead, creating a natural choke point. There was no clear line of sight to the trail ahead. They would need to send out scouts.

The Lord-Celestant looked up. Heratus and his huntsmen still hadn’t returned. Only a single Angelos retinue had accompanied his forces into the Gargant’s Graveyard. The others were scattered across the Ghurlands, searching for any sign of Gorkamorka, under the direction of his chamber’s Knight-Azyros, Gulos Fellwing. Without Heratus, the Beast-bane were as good as blind in this maze. He thought of the lightning they had seen, and glanced back at Seker, who led the column behind him.

The Lord-Relictor shook his head. Zephacleas growled in frustration.

‘They have returned to Azyr, and to Sigmar’s forge,’ Greel rumbled.

‘We don’t know that,’ Zephacleas said, more sharply than he had intended. He looked at the other Lord-Celestant, standing nearby. The Iron-sides were arrayed about him in close formation, their shields held at the ready. The Stormcasts marched in two columns where possible. The Sons of Mallus seemed to have little inclination to mingle with their fellow warriors. Zephacleas didn’t know whether to feel insulted or relieved.

‘Even your warriors are not prone to such long absences without good reason, Beast-bane,’ Greel said. ‘We should make for the Howling Labyrinth without delay and smash aside anything – orruk or otherwise – that attempts to bar our path.’

‘Easier said than done,’ Taros said. The Lord-Castellant knelt and set his lantern down. He placed his palm on the ground. His gryph-hounds pressed close about him, chirping. The vibrations were making them uneasy. ‘Something is coming.’ He looked up. ‘Something big... Or many small things.’

‘How far?’

‘Not far enough. Liberators, forwards,’ Taros said, as he rose to his feet. ‘Judicators to the vanguard, staggered formation. Skirmishers–’

‘Skirmishers to me! Duras, Thetaleas. Decimators and Liberators,’ Zephacleas bellowed. ‘We need to see what’s coming this way. Without Heratus, we’re stalking blind.’ He looked at Greel. ‘Care to join me, Iron-side? It’s a rare thing when Lord-Celestants get to do their own scouting.’

Greel hesitated. Then he nodded and stepped forwards. His warriors moved to follow him, but he waved them back. ‘Calithus, see to the line,’ he said to one of them. ‘Follow the Lord-Relictor’s orders. I will return.’

Zephacleas nodded in satisfaction. He looked at the other Lord-Celestant. Gaius Greel was almost a thing of iron. Zephacleas wondered how much of that was due to the Iron-side’s personality and how much of it was due to the Reforging he had endured. Regardless, he wished to know him better. It was not good for a warrior to hold himself apart. It often led to misunderstandings.

Part of it, he suspected, was that Greel reminded him of the Hallowed Knight, Gardus. The Lord-Celestant of the Steel Souls was the epitome of a Stormcast Eternal. His purity was such that he had fought his way free of Nurgle’s garden. It was Gardus who had reached Alarielle in her Hidden Vale, and brought her into the war for the Mortal Realms. More importantly, Zephacleas regarded the Steel Soul as a friend.

But Gardus had fallen in the final moments of the war for Alarielle’s haven. Now his soul was undergoing the Reforging. Zephacleas couldn’t help but wonder whether the warrior who emerged from the fires of that tribulation would bear any resemblance to the Gardus he had known. He hoped that by coming to know Greel, he might get an answer to that question.

He led Greel and the others into the twisting confines of the canyon ahead, moving swiftly, but cautiously. They were not looking for a fight, merely confirmation of what the Lord-Castellant had said. Sound carried oddly in the Gargant’s Graveyard, and he could not tell whether the cause of the vibrations Taros had detected was drawing closer or receding. Sloped cliffs of piled bones, interwoven with thick, brown vines and scraggly brush, rose to either side of them, and the ground was covered in broken bones and ochre dust. A million-million bones filled this wasteland, and more were added to it every day.

‘Eyes and ears open, brothers,’ Zephacleas called out, as the thin line of skirmishers spread out. ‘If it comes to it, we’ll draw them in and let the others have a chance, eh?’ Duras and Thetaleas and their warriors laughed. Greel didn’t.

Carrion-birds circled far above them, their shadows stretched long by the light of the suns. Bones occasionally clattered down from above as some beast moved through the rickety tunnels that time and hungry animals had dug in the piled remains. There were hills in the Ghurish Heights that were nothing more than thin shrouds of earth and rock over similar heaps of ancient carrion, Zephacleas knew.

‘The air is so still here,’ Thetaleas said, from off to Zephacleas’ right. ‘It fills my lungs like mud.’ The Decimator-Prime shifted his grip on his axe. His voice bounced off the walls of the canyon, rising up to startle something that might have been a bird.

Zephacleas watched it flap awkwardly away and shook his head. ‘There’s been too much death here,’ he said. ‘It sours the air and the soil. Whatever this land was once, now it’s nothing more than a killing ground.’ There were hundreds of places like the Gargant’s Graveyard scattered throughout the Realm of Beasts, places where no civilisation had ever set roots, where no tribes had ever made camp – wild places, full of hungry ghosts and hungrier monsters. There were no fallen temples here, no ruins, no ancient duardin roads. Only bones and beasts.

Birds flocked through the air overhead, flapping in the direction of the rest of the Stormcasts. Zephacleas scanned the upper reaches of the canyon, where the hairy shapes of sabretusks and other creatures fled in the same direction.

They’re running from something. Taros was right, he thought.

Roars and shrieks drifted down, and he raised his hammer. ‘Halt. I think this is far enough. Nine-strike was right – something is heading this way.’

‘Why is he called Nine-strike?’ Greel said, suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Lord-Castellant Taros,’ Greel said. ‘Nine-strike... An odd war-name.’

Zephacleas looked at his fellow Lord-Celestant. He chuckled. Greel stiffened. Zephacleas shook his head. ‘No offence meant, brother. It is an odd name. And in truth, I do not know. Taros has been called Nine-strike for as long as I have known him. Some in our chamber think it has to do with his Reforging... Nine strikes of Sigmar’s hammer to bend Taros into shape, where most of us require but one. Others think it is a name earned in the Boralis Mountains, while Taros was on his proving quest. Supposedly, he slew a great cave-beast with nine blows from his fist.’

‘Supposedly?’

Zephacleas laughed again. ‘He’s never said. And I’ve never pressed him.’

‘You do not wish to know?’

Zephacleas shrugged. ‘I am his Lord-Celestant, not his nursemaid. If he wishes to tell me, he will. Until then, I am satisfied.’ He looked at Greel, and for a moment wondered what was beneath the other man’s helm. Was there still flesh there, still a face? Or something else? What was left of a warrior, once he endured a second Reforging?

‘Satisfied,’ Greel repeated. He looked away.

Zephacleas hesitated, considering. Then, ‘Do you remember it, Gaius?’

Greel didn’t look at him. ‘Remember what, Beast-bane?’

‘Your death.’ Zephacleas cursed himself the moment he said it. A shudder ran through Greel’s frame. The Lord-Celestant said nothing in reply. Zephacleas reached for him, but after a moment he let his hand drop. ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ he said, softly.

‘For what? No– Be silent, Beast-bane. I think I hear something,’ Greel said harshly.

‘Orruks. I’ve been hearing them since we rounded that last bend,’ Zephacleas said.

‘No. Not orruks,’ Greel said. Before Zephacleas could reply, something exploded out of the canyon wall in a cloud of shattered bone and rock. It was a big beast, shaggy, with long tusks rising from its bestial, bear-like muzzle.

‘Mournfang,’ Zephacleas snarled. In his mortal life, he had hunted such creatures for food and sport in the high caves of the Ghurish Heights. ‘Mournfangs,’ he corrected himself as more of the creatures followed the first, their splayed paws skidding on the scattered bones. ‘Let them pass – stay out of their way,’ he called out, as Thetaleas moved to confront the shaggy monsters. ‘They’re running from something. Leave them to it.’

The creatures gave out warbling howls as they bounded away, avoiding the Stormcasts. He had been right. They didn’t want to fight. They wanted to run. Mournfangs weren’t easy to panic. The cave-monsters would fight an avalanche over a scrap of meat, if it came down to it. If whatever was coming had set them to flight...

The air filled with the sound of grunting and squealing. One big something, or lots of little somethings. Or maybe both, he thought, as Taros’ words came back to him. The ground began to judder, as the thunder of cloven hooves swelled up through the canyon. Zephacleas waved Thetaleas and the others back. ‘Back! Back to the others – go,’ he said, as he grabbed Greel’s shoulder and jerked him back. ‘Run!’

CHAPTER FIVE

Gore-charge

‘Be at your ease, Spur, my girl,’ Taros Nine-strike murmured, stroking the gryph-hound’s narrow skull. Spur chirped and scraped her beak against his shoulder-plate. The other members of the pack sat or lay around him, patiently waiting. That patience was what he admired the most about the animals. They were expedient beasts, wasting nothing.

He smiled, recalling the eyes of his teachers as he returned from the madness-inducing mists of the Boralis Mountains, his new pack nipping at his heels. He’d saved the kits from one of the monstrous cave-bears that roamed the highest crags. With their parents slain, the young creatures would have surely perished. There had been nothing for it, really.

If we abandon the weak, our strength is built on falsehood, he thought.

A beak closed on his finger and he thumped the offender’s skull. ‘Cease, Spur. There’ll be prey aplenty before the sun is set,’ he said, catching the gryph-hound by the curve of her beak. She chirped and butted him in the chest with her head.

‘There are chains everywhere,’ the Lord-Relictor said. Taros looked up from Spur’s antics, and then at the heavy manacles and rusty chains that dangled from the unstable walls of the canyon. He had made note of that instability earlier and had already devised a number of stratagems to put it to use, should the need become pressing. The terrain of a battlefield was as much a weapon as a blade, in the right hands.

‘They left them on the gargants when they dropped their bodies here,’ Taros said. ‘Hard on their tools, the things of Chaos.’ He uprooted a length of rusty iron from the ground, testing the links. ‘Still serviceable, after all this time.’

‘You intend to use it?’

‘I use the tools I am given, Gravewalker. Unless you believe them to be tainted by Chaos?’ Taros asked, extending the section of chain. The Lord-Relictor shook his head.

‘Only by pain and fear. The brutes whose bones make up the roots of this maze died in agony, pushed past even their limits. I can hear them screaming, when the wind is right...’

Taros studied the other Stormcast for a moment. ‘It cannot be easy,’ he said, as he stood. ‘Hearing the voices of the dead, I mean.’

Seker shrugged. ‘They are not a talkative folk, by and large. And there are worse voices in the dark than those of pain-addled gargants.’ His voice became soft. ‘I hear another sometimes, echoing up out of some vast, lightless chasm... A voice like a funerary bell, calling his children home.’ He shuddered slightly and shook his head. ‘I first heard him in the Gnarlwood, and have dreaded the sound of his voice ever since.’

Taros looked at him.

‘How many of us fell that day, Seker?’ he said, quietly. ‘How many ascended, broken, to be forged anew?’

‘More than I care to think about,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘Those were grim days. The beasts came without regard for life or limb. When their axes shattered on our shields, they used their teeth and claws. When those splintered, they hurled themselves at us, seeking to tangle our limbs with their bodies.’ He looked at the Lord-Castellant. ‘But this is not the Gnarlwood.’

‘No. Things were simpler in the Gnarlwood,’ Taros said, settling the haft of his halberd in the crook of his arm. ‘We waited and they came. But here, we seek out the foe not to eradicate them, but to talk.’

‘That is one of our tasks, yes,’ Seker said. ‘The other is to finish what was started in the Three Duchies. The Shimmering Countess is here, somewhere.’ He lifted his staff and gestured to the immense skull that marked the heart of the Gargant’s Graveyard. ‘Though, I rather expect that “somewhere” is there.’

‘Yes,’ Taros said. ‘They always go for such places, don’t they?’

‘Broken things seek the strangest holes to crawl into,’ the Lord-Relictor said.

‘Broken isn’t the word I would use for her. She felled Greel,’ Taros said. He reached down and rubbed Spur’s narrow skull. ‘The Iron-side is a swordsman second only to Thostos Bladestorm. That creature met him blade-to-blade and beat him.’

‘And so?’ Seker said. ‘He marches beside us again, forged anew.’

‘You say it so casually,’ Taros said. The Lord-Relictor looked at him. He made as if to speak, but then turned away. Taros waited, tapping a finger on his gryph-hound’s skull. Spur twisted about with an annoyed chirrup and snapped playfully at the offending finger.

‘Do you remember your mortal life, Nine-strike?’ Gravewalker thumped the ground with his staff. ‘I do, somewhat. I grew to manhood in a place like this, where beasts screamed beyond our campfires. My people died in battle, from sickness. I sought to help them, but...’ He held up his hand. Lightning shimmered in his palm and crawled across his bent fingers. ‘I bargained with fell spirits and wrestled ghosts, but nothing could prevent the dying. Then, the hounds of Chaos came, stinking of blood and offal, harrying us from our hunting grounds.’

Taros said nothing. It was an old story, and one most Stormcasts knew intimately. His own memories were more fragmented than most. He could recall the smell of smoke rising through the flues built into the curved high walls of the parapet. He could hear the rattle of iron spears as they were passed out to the men on the wall, and the screams of the wounded. He remembered the weight of heavy iron armour and the unwieldy two-handed sword he had carried into his last battle. The memory of it made his halberd seem as light as a feather by comparison.

‘My people died, and I could do nothing to help them,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘And I will die a thousand deaths, endure a thousand Reforgings, before I let that happen again.’ He looked at Taros. ‘As would you. As would Zephacleas. We are Beast-bane. Death to the dealers of death...’

‘Ruin to the bringers of ruin,’ Taros replied, absently. ‘The air is trembling.’

‘So it is.’ The Lord-Relictor turned and lifted his staff. ‘I shall see to our brothers.’

Taros watched the Lord-Relictor stride off, towards the neatly arrayed ranks of the Sons of Mallus. He shook his head as the cries of beasts reached him. A moment later, a pack of Mournfangs burst around the bend in the canyon wall and pounded towards the Stormcast lines, howling and roaring. In their wake came Zephacleas and the others, running as swiftly as they could in their heavy war-plate. Zephacleas shouted again, and Taros swept his halberd out.

‘Let the monsters through. No need to waste the arrows if they’re not looking for a fight,’ he called out to the warriors in the vanguard.

The shield wall split, and the Mournfangs loped through the Stormcast ranks unhindered. Taros watched the beasts thunder by before turning back towards Zephacleas. He saw Greel break away from the group and hurry towards his warriors. Zephacleas and the others reached the safety of the shield wall a moment later, the breath rasping in their lungs.

‘Which is it? One big, or many small?’ Taros asked, as Zephacleas reached him.

‘Both,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Gore-gruntas.’ He drew his runeblade. ‘I’ll see to the right flank, and I’ll take Thetaleas and Duras with me. The fighting will be heaviest there.’

Taros nodded. ‘Aye, and I’ll hold the left. We’ll try to drive them towards you. Polarus,’ he called, turning. ‘Bring your bowmen forwards. We’re going to need them.’ As the Judicators hurried up to the front, he heard a shout from Arcos, the Liberator-Prime in command of the shield wall, and turned back. The air reverberated with the thud of heavy hooves and the first of the cannibal-hogs, orruks crouched atop them, burst into sight, galloping awkwardly around the bend in the canyon wall.

‘Polarus, bring them down,’ Taros said as Zephacleas moved towards the right flank, shouting orders. Skybolt bows crackled as the Judicators began to loose with a smooth rhythm. The gore-gruntas did not slow, even as dozens fell. The orruk riders bellowed in what might have been excitement, despite the losses of their comrades.

‘Liberators to the vanguard. Two ranks, quickly,’ Taros said, sweeping his halberd forwards as the Judicators loosed a final volley. ‘Polarus, fall back to the second rampart.’ A second, smaller shield wall waited midway back along the canyon. Arrayed in a loose line before it were the chamber’s Retributors. The Retributors were nigh immoveable when they put their minds to it. In this formation, they acted as a living bulwark, breaking up the enemy’s momentum before it could reach the second shield wall.

It was an old tactic, and one Taros had brought with him from his mortal life. The highborn men of his clan had fought in similar fashion, clad as they had been in thick, albeit crude, armour and carrying swords longer than they were tall.

Though I never saw that tactic performed as smoothly in those days, he thought, somewhat ruefully.

Liberators moved quickly to interpose themselves between the retreating Judicators and the approaching stampede. The bowmen fell back towards the waiting Paladins and the second shield wall, as Arcos chivvied his own warriors into position in the vanguard. Sigmarite crashed as shields were raised and braced.

Out of the corner of his eye, Taros saw the ranks of the Sons of Mallus swing into position, creating an unbreachable phalanx on the left flank. Their shield wall would deny that side of the canyon to the orruks, forcing the bulk of their forces towards the warriors of the Beast-bane. Seker still stood with them, beside Greel.

‘Stay safe, my friend,’ Taros murmured.

He lost sight of the Iron-sides as the first of the gore-gruntas reached the front ranks of the Astral Templars. The fanged boars were larger than their more common cousins, and far fiercer. They slammed into the shield wall, nearly buckling it. Hooves dug into the ground as tusks slammed into sigmarite shields and armoured boots skidded. Dust billowed into the air, momentarily blotting out the suns. The orruk riders stabbed and hacked at the Stormcasts, trying to break the line. More and more gore-gruntas flooded into the canyon, ploughing into those in front of them. Some peeled off to engage the Sons of Mallus, but not many and not enough.

‘Hold them,’ Taros shouted. Even as the words left his mouth, he knew it was futile. The orruks were blind to anything save what was in front of them and they had the advantage of momentum. The Stormcasts needed to take that advantage away from them. He caught sight of Zephacleas, and raised his halberd in a signal. The Lord-Celestant nodded and crashed his weapons together, catching the attention of those warriors closest to him.

‘Left flank, give way,’ Taros roared. ‘Let them in, if they’re so eager to die!’ Zephacleas bellowed similar orders on the right flank, and slowly the shield wall buckled, splitting in two. The two halves folded inwards as the Liberators let the gore-gruntas shoot past them, towards the waiting Retributors. Taros raised his halberd, and the Retributors acted with well-trained precision, slamming their heavy hammers down on the ground as one. Lightning crackled across the ochre soil as the bedrock burst and heaved.

The front rank of gore-gruntas stumbled and fell as the ground churned beneath their hooves. Soon, the whole stinking, squealing mass had become a disorganised tangle of flailing limbs. Task done, the Retributors fell back, as the Judicators loosed volley after volley. Trapped as they were, the orruks and their savage mounts died in droves. But there were still too many remaining. The Stormcasts had to finish them off, before they could regroup.

‘Seal the gates,’ Taros cried, and the foremost shield wall reformed itself, cutting the orruk advance in two. ‘Arcos, hold the rest of them back,’ he commanded. He gestured to a nearby Liberator-Prime, carrying a shield and warblade. ‘Keldamus, with me.’ As he and Keldamus’ retinue moved towards the milling orruks, he caught sight of Zephacleas doing the same, followed by Thetaleas and his Decimators. Now that they had part of the orruk force caught between the shield walls, they could grind them under, Sigmar willing.

Behind him, he could hear the sounds of the Iron-sides beginning their advance. The sky darkened above the canyon as bolts of lightning caromed down at the Gravewalker’s command, striking the orruks still pouring through the choke point. Spur and the rest of the gryph-hounds padded silently about Taros, waiting for his command to attack. As they closed with the gore-gruntas, he said, ‘Spur, go!’

The gryph-hounds surged forwards as one ahead of the Stormcasts, winnowing into the morass of confused pig-beasts. The hounds employed beaks and talons in swift, darting attacks, hamstringing or gutting the squealing monsters. A few moments later Taros and his warriors joined them. Taros swept his halberd out in a wide arc, smashing an orruk from the saddle. He turned and rammed his shoulder into a snarling gore-grunta’s flank and knocked the beast sprawling, deftly avoided its flailing hooves and slammed his halberd down on its head. Before its rider could free himself, Spur had torn out the orruk’s throat. Taros heard Zephacleas’ familiar bellow as the Lord-Celestant joined the fight, and turned.

The orruks were starting to recover their wits, but not quickly enough. The secondary shield wall was advancing steadily, keeping the gore-gruntas hemmed in. Those that got past the Liberators were cut down by the Judicators, or crushed by the Retributors. The rest of the greenskins were trying to fight their way past Taros and the others. The Lord-Castellant spun his halberd and thrust it out lengthwise to catch two orruks as they sought to gallop past him. Both brutes were knocked from their saddles, and he dispatched them before they could rise. Jerking his halberd free of a sagging body, he saw a huge gore-grunta lumber past him through the dust kicked up by the melee, heading back the way it had come.

The beast was bigger than the others, and covered in scars and chains and scrap-iron plates. The orruk crouched on its back was equally massive, and clad in filthy furs and makeshift armour. It trampled an unlucky Decimator and barrelled through Keldamus’ retinue, knocking Liberators aside. The orruk thrust a jagged spear through the helm of a Liberator, killing the warrior instantly. The gore-grunta stamped through the flare of lightning and ploughed on.

Ah, there you are, Taros thought. There was always one orruk smarter and meaner than the rest. That was usually the one in charge. If you could kill him, it made life much easier.

‘Spur,’ Taros barked. He whistled shrilly and Spur and her pack mates exploded out of the fray, pelting after the orruk chieftain. The gryph-hounds outpaced the gore-grunta easily, and began to harry it, snapping at its legs and darting towards its snout. The orruk cursed and roared, slashing at the gryph-hounds as the gore-grunta slewed sideways, hooves thudding.

Taros stepped in front of the creature, halberd at the ready. The rider thrust its jagged spear at Taros. The crude blade skidded off the Lord-Castellant’s shoulder-plate, tearing through several parchments of holy text and staggering him. He quickly regained his balance and readied his weapon once more. The gore-grunta shrieked and circled him. Taros moved swiftly and slammed his halberd down, catching the beast between the eyes.

It crumpled without a sound as Spur and her pack fell on it, ripping and slashing. The rider rolled free, booting a gryph-hound aside as he did so.

‘Killed my grunta,’ the orruk growled, hauling itself to its feet. It snatched a heavy scrap-tooth blade from the thick belt lashed about its waist. The orruk only had one eye, and its face was off-kilter, thanks to a plethora of scars. ‘Gut yer for that, storm-thing.’

‘Aye,’ Taros said. ‘You’re welcome to try.’ The orruk lunged forwards, faster than he’d been expecting, and their heads connected with a hollow clang. They staggered apart, both of them dazed. The orruk recovered first and the cruel blade in its hand whipped out. But for the Lord-Castellant’s sigmarite armour, he would have been gutted. Taros rammed the ferrule of his halberd into the orruk’s belly, knocking the beast back a step.

Before he could retract the halberd, the orruk caught hold of it and dragged him forwards, off balance. The creature extended an arm and caught him in the throat, knocking him flat. He barely managed to hold on to his halberd as he fell. The orruk raised a foot, and Taros rolled aside as his opponent stamped down where his head had been. He smashed the end of his halberd into the bottom of the orruk’s jaw, stunning the beast. Before it could recover, he was on his feet and sweeping his halberd out in a vicious arc. He drove the orruk back, step by step, drawing blood with every slash.

Furious, the orruk howled and flung itself at Taros. The Lord-Castellant sidestepped the lunge and brought the length of his halberd down across the orruk’s back, flattening the brute. As it sought to rise, Taros planted a foot between the orruk’s shoulder blades and raised his halberd in both hands for a killing blow.

‘No,’ Zephacleas said, catching Taros’ halberd by the haft. As he pulled the Lord-Castellant back, he cracked the orruk in the skull with his hammer, rendering the brute senseless.

Taros looked at him. ‘What? He’s an enemy – a beast.’

‘No. Orruks aren’t beasts. I’ve fought them enough to know that much,’ Zephacleas said. ‘There’s a sense to them, whether we see it or not.’ He looked down at the unconscious orruk. ‘We’ll chain him up. I have a feeling that he might be useful.’

The orruk did not welcome its survival. Upon regaining consciousness it roared in its bestial tongue and tried to rise. The weight of the scavenged chains looped about its bulky form prevented it from standing, but only just. Green muscles bulged as the rusty links strained to hold it tight, and more than once, nearby Stormcasts were forced to grab hold of the chains and haul the beast back. It glared about it, its single eye bulging in fury. Zephacleas replied to its bellows in kind, and soon its attention was entirely on him. It sank down into a crouch, still shouting, and Zephacleas followed suit.

Lord-Celestant Greel watched Zephacleas crouch before the beast, and wondered at the dichotomy there. The Astral Templars were famed among the varied Stormhosts for their ruthlessness. They were merciless warriors who fought with a savagery that equalled that of their foes. But for all that brutality, there was something else there – an innate understanding of the ways of this realm that Greel lacked. To Zephacleas and his warriors, the orruks were not a pestilence to be stamped out, but rivals to be beaten in honest battle.

‘I do not understand,’ he murmured, to himself.

‘What is there to understand?’

Greel turned, and saw the Lord-Relictor standing behind him. The Gravewalker had fought ably beside the Iron-sides during the battle, using his lightning to clear them room enough to charge the orruks and break them at the end. He hesitated and then nodded towards Zephacleas. ‘Him. I do not understand him. There is death to be dealt, and enemies to be cast down, and he wastes time talking with monsters. I was told that the warriors of your Stormhost were merciless, lacking in pity or hesitation. But now I see both...’

‘What were you, in life?’ the Lord-Relictor asked, not looking at him. ‘Do you remember those days, the person you were, before Sigmar’s hand plucked you from death’s grasp?’

Greel was silent for a moment. Then, ‘I remember... water. The sound of waves against a hull, and the rolling of a deck beneath my feet. I remember the smell of fire. Little else – names, faces, but nothing I will share with you.’ It came out more bluntly than he had intended, but Seker seemed to take no offence.

‘Zephacleas was a chieftain,’ he said.

‘So he has claimed,’ Greel said.

Seker chuckled. ‘He likes to talk. It is his weakness and his strength.’ He looked at Greel. ‘There is more of the mortal he was, in Zephacleas, than in some of us. It is not hesitation you see, but consideration. Zephacleas is many things, but he is not a fool. Not all enemies are the same. In the Jade Kingdoms, he fought like a bear, loud and brash, to give heart to his chamber. In the Crawling City, he was a hunter, harrying his prey to exhaustion and death. Here, he fights like a chieftain, seeking to win not simply a battle, but a war.’ The Lord-Relictor tapped the side of his head. ‘He has learned the cost of exuberance, you see.’

‘You admire him,’ Greel said.

‘I have hopes for him, yes,’ Seker said. ‘And what of you, Gaius Greel? Have you learned anything?’

Greel turned away. ‘I have learned that your Lord-Celestant is not the only one who likes to talk.’ As he strode away, he heard the Lord-Relictor laugh. They laugh too much, he thought irritably. His own Lord-Relictor never laughed. It was not seemly for such as they to succumb to merriment.

Angry now, though he could not say why, Greel strode towards the bend in the canyon, where his warriors waited, arrayed in a loose formation. The might of the Iron-sides was much diminished since the battle in the Temple of the Empty Heart – barely a third of the retinues under his command had survived. The rest even now endured the fires of the Reforging. Those who remained had been split between himself and Ogarus Fane, the Lord-Relictor of his chamber, after Greel had returned to resume command as his warriors crossed Nettlefang Mere. There, in the wide ruins of Nettlefang Keep, the Iron-sides had joined forces with the Beast-bane.

It irked Greel that such had been necessary. The Iron-sides had proven at Hreth that they needed no aid. He had failed once. He would not do so again. Even so, it was Sigmar’s command that he fight alongside the Beast-bane, and he would do so. The God-King’s wisdom could not be questioned, no matter Greel’s own feelings on the subject.

Fane had marched south in pursuit of the perfidious Count Bator, one of Sharizad’s minions. With the fall of the Charn Duchies and the deaths of her two monstrous siblings, Sharizad’s remaining armies had scattered, as had those fell champions who had flocked to her banner – twisted creatures like Bator or Sataka of Rhu’goss. Lord-Relictor Fane and others, including warriors from the Hallowed Knights and the Lions of Sigmar, ranged across the Ghurlands, looking to run down these disparate enemy commanders as they fled towards the riftcoasts of the Amber Sea, or to the humid jungles of the Southern Reach. Such creatures could not be allowed to find new demesnes or gather new armies, not if the Ghurlands were to finally be freed from the clutches of Chaos.

Greel missed his Lord-Relictor’s quiet counsel. Fane was a warrior of few words, but of a sure and certain judgement. And he does not laugh, he thought, casting a glance back towards the Astral Templars.

Shaking his head, he studied his warriors. They waited silently, arrayed across the width of the bend, shields ready. Judicators stood at ease behind the Liberators, as did his remaining Decimator retinues.

‘Calithus,’ Greel said.

Calithus snapped to attention. The Liberator-Prime gestured with his hammer. ‘Drums, my Lord-Celestant. The orruks are not finished with us, I think.’

‘No, they’re not,’ Zephacleas said, as he trotted towards them. Greel turned, annoyed.

‘Did your new pet tell you that?’ Greel said, trying not to let his anger show. Zephacleas was dawdling, wasting time talking to the beasts instead of smashing them aside. And every moment they spent fending off greenskins was a moment the Shimmering Countess drew closer to accomplishing the horror she had come to achieve.

‘No. Experience did.’ Zephacleas pulled off his war-helm, and took a deep breath. His shaggy hair was bound back in a thick braid, as was his beard. Keen, dark eyes met Greel’s own. Zephacleas scrubbed at his scalp and said, ‘The boar-riders are always far ahead of the main body of orruks. They get carried away, you see. Orruks aren’t disciplined – at least, not in any way we’d recognise. The rest will be along shortly. Lucky for us, this bend makes for a fine defensive position. The canyon is narrower here, and Taros thinks he’s found a way to block it off, should it become necessary for us to retreat.’

‘That’s your plan – to simply sit and wait?’

‘My plan is to beat them,’ Zephacleas said. ‘But to do that, we must weather the coming storm. If we move, they’ll swamp us. So we must stay and throw them back, until we know the limits of their strength.’ He looked at Greel. ‘I know orruks. They’re stirred up now, and we can’t simply bull through them.’

‘You sound as if you’re afraid of them.’

Zephacleas grunted. ‘And you know about fear, do you?’

‘I knew fear... Just for a moment,’ Greel said. ‘An instant, but it was enough. And then, I knew nothing save the storm.’ He didn’t look at Zephacleas. Instead, he stared out over the ranks of his warriors. ‘I was weak. I failed, and the witch escaped. How many died because of my weakness? How many have suffered since the fall of the Three Duchies?’ Greel bent his head. ‘I remember... I can smell the charnel pits still. Hear the crack of my cousins’ bones. I can hear the screams of my chamber as they fell around me.’ He spun and Zephacleas stepped back. ‘I will not be weak again. We will meet these orruks and we will break them.’

Zephacleas laughed. He held up his hand as Greel glared at him. ‘Fear is not weakness, brother. It is a part of being mortal, like courage or sadness. Joy, rage. Among my people – when I had a people – it was said that a man who had never felt fear was one who had never truly lived. The fear of facing a sabretusk, with only a spear between you and it. The fear of starvation, of daemons in the night. The fear of pain, as your enemy’s blade draws close. The fear of... surviving, where others died.’

‘I was told you were a warrior, not a philosopher,’ Greel said.

Zephacleas snorted. ‘Hardly a philosopher. I was a chieftain, Iron-side. Not a hunter or a warrior, or even a tender of the sick, but a ruler. And I have had this talk more times than I can remember. You still know fear, brother, but now you fear failure rather than death.’

‘And is that better, or worse?’

‘Only Sigmar can say,’ Zephacleas said. He straightened, and spread his arms. ‘For me, I fear nothing save the loss of fear. For when fear goes, can courage and honour be far behind?’

‘It is not like that,’ Greel said. Zephacleas looked down at him. Greel stared out over the shield wall at the tangled pathways of the boneyard, his body as still as the statue he resembled. ‘I cannot say what was lost, if anything was. Death was like sleep, a dream, and now I am awake and I do not know what was a dream and what was reality.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, I know only that I must find the witch and kill her.’ He tilted his head. ‘Sigmar himself told me, as what I had been was burned to ash and forged anew,’ Greel said, his voice hesitant. ‘He spoke to me in a voice like seven thunders, and burned my purpose into me. It is in every drop of blood and strand of sinew. I was reforged for one purpose – to kill the one who killed me. To split her heart, the way she split mine and spill her life’s blood in the dust.’ His hands clenched on the haft of his hammer, and his voice became harsh.

‘He brought you back for what? Vengeance?’ Zephacleas asked.

‘Isn’t that what we are? Sigmar’s vengeance made manifest, the tools of his wrath given form?’ Greel rasped. He shook his head. ‘But no. The crimes of the Shimmering Countess are legion, but it is not what she has done that sees me on her track – rather, it is what she may do.’ He looked at Zephacleas. ‘Every moment we delay, every hour we waste, fighting these beasts, she draws closer to her goal. She seeks... something. I know not what. But she must not find it. Whatever else happens, she must not find it.’

‘And if she does?’

‘Then she must not live to keep it,’ Greel said. He cocked his head. ‘The ground is shaking. Another stampede?’

Zephacleas paused. Greel knew what he was listening to, for he could hear it as well: the tramp of many feet, and many voices bellowing in unison. He took a tighter grip on his hammer. Zephacleas shook his head ruefully, and slid his helm back on. ‘No. Not a stampede. I told you they’d be along shortly.’

The first orruks burst into sight a moment later, running flat out, their brutal weapons raised as they hurtled towards the warriors arrayed across the bend. As they ran, they chanted a single word. A name, Greel realised, even as he shouted orders.

‘Gordrakk!’

‘Gordrakk!’

‘GORDRAKK!’

CHAPTER SIX

Gordrakk

Sharizad traced her fingers along the amber wall. Her reflection changed as she moved, becoming youthful and ancient, or changing from a woman to a man to a beast and back again. Every time she looked, the face looking back was different. Always familiar – herself as a child, her mother, her siblings – but always different.

‘What are they?’ Curdak asked, watching the shapes. He sounded on the cusp of tears, as always. Curdak the sorrowful, the guilty. His reflections were simple things, unformed and indistinct. The Nine-in-One had only one true fate, until the Changer of Ways decreed otherwise. All else was but a shadow cast on a cave wall.

One of them was always next to her. It changed, moment to moment, but she was never without the company of at least one of the brothers. All save Yuhdak. Of them all, she preferred Sardak. Bodak was a brute, Kuldak arrogant, and Curdak... Well. Curdak was simply annoying. She glanced at him, clad in white damask and pearl.

‘Moments stolen from the past, the future. Roads not taken, or else forgotten,’ she said. She stopped and stared at the woman now watching her from the amber. She wore rough homespun, her weather-beaten skin marked by grime and tribal tattoos, her hair matted and tangled. Her eyes were empty of hope, of desire, of anything save resignation. Sharizad wondered if she had ever been that woman, or if this was but the shadow of a life not lived.

Memories were treacherous where the gods were concerned. They grew bored so easily, and wrote better stories for their chosen playthings. Her life changed from one moment to the next: a scullery maid, rising to rule; the spoiled daughter of a count, giving in to her darkest desires; a dream made flesh, stepping from a pedestal of bone and meat – all of these and none of these were her. She was a story, with no more weight than an idle whim.

She reached out with crystal-clad fingers and touched her reflection. The woman in amber did the same, her eyes sad. Sharizad felt a wrench of pity for her, for the woman she might have been, for roads not travelled. Her hand passed through the surface of the amber, sinking into the curdled warmth. Sharizad’s fingers slid past the woman’s, and curled around her throat. The eyes of her reflection widened, as Sharizad’s grip tightened.

‘My fate is my own, and shadows should know their place,’ Sharizad said, as she choked the life from the woman in amber.

The woman came apart, like drifting ochre smoke, leaving Sharizad holding nothing. She withdrew her hand from the amber and turned away. Curdak stared at her.

‘You killed her,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Why would you kill your brothers, Curdak-of-the-Nine?’ she asked, as she continued down the corridor. ‘Because it pleased me to do so.’

‘But she was...’ he began.

‘A shade. A false thing. Look around you, dearest Curdak. What do you see?’ She stopped and turned, hands held to indicate the walls to either side of their group. Clusters of reflections followed her entourage like carrion-birds trailing a wounded beast. For every warrior in her band there was a plethora of reflections, not all of them human. ‘Falsehoods, Curdak. This place is nothing more than a lie concealing a greater truth. A lie we seek to unravel...’

As she spoke, the floor beneath her feet shuddered and she heard the groan of unseen mechanisms. The walls fell away as the ceiling receded, eliciting cries from her warriors. Ochre smoke plumed from the tumbling walls and the floor swung sideways.

‘Steady yourselves, fools,’ she cried. ‘Hold fast and do not fear. It is but another trick!’

It had happened before. The Howling Labyrinth could change shape at but a moment’s notice. Corridors became balconies, balconies became tunnels, tunnels unfurled to tiers, and then it all began again. Mostly, it moved. The corridors oscillated, rotating around some unseen core, which was never in the same spot twice. The structure was as much a shape-changer as its creator was reputed to be.

As the smoke cleared, she felt the heat of the sun and the harsh rasp of the wind. The Gargant’s Graveyard spread out far below her, stretching in concentric circles around the great star-wyrm’s skull.

‘A very good trick though, I must say,’ Bodak said, rising to his feet. The most boisterous of the Nine-in-One, he was clad in bronze and yellow. ‘And a welcome one. It has been days since we have tasted clean air.’ He laughed and slapped his rounded cuirass.

The corridor they stood in extruded from the labyrinth, which now had the shape of a crumpled, rotating blossom. They stood on a narrow petal of amber, high above the boneyard below. As the platform slid slowly through the air, a hillman slipped from the edge. His screams echoed up and up, as he dwindled to a speck. Sharizad paid his shrieks little attention. Instead, she focussed on the sounds of battle rising up from the bone canyon. Lightning flashed down repeatedly in the distance, and she laughed.

‘Look, my warriors, look! See how our enemies waste their strength on one another even as we draw closer to our goal,’ she said. The wind whipped around her, tearing at the smoke of her crest.

‘How can you tell?’ Kuldak shouted, clutching the edge of the petal. The rest of her warriors crouched or stood braced as the amber moved.

‘The sound, the lightning,’ she said, turning towards him. ‘We are blessed, my warriors. The Architect of Fate weaves a web for us to follow.’ As she spoke, the petal of amber began to tremble anew. ‘Stand fast, all of you. It’s retracting.’ With a squeal and a groan, the petal began to slide back into the structure. Shadows fell across them as the other petals rose and bent, or slithered back into place. Dust sifted down, swirling in the wind as the walls of the Howling Labyrinth closed over them once more and the sounds of the Gargant’s Graveyard were lost. The corridor stretched before them much as its predecessor had. The only difference Sharizad could detect was in the shape of the walls, and the slabs on the floor.

As everything settled into shape, a vast, cataclysmic chuckling echoed through the new corridor. The amber walls shuddered and the floor undulated like the tongue of a beast. As the sound faded, so too did the groaning of the unseen mechanisms, until at last, all was still.

‘What was that?’ Kuldak demanded, glaring at the walls. ‘Who dares laugh at us?’

‘The Daemoniac Conundrum, I expect,’ Sardak said, calmly. ‘It is written in the scrolls of Patak that it sees and hears all that occurs in the places of its devising. Perhaps it finds our efforts amusing, eh, brothers?’

Before Kuldak could reply, laughter boomed out all around them, and in the polished walls of amber, wide mouths, large enough to swallow a man whole, took shape. The mouths were the source of the laughter and the sound increased in volume, until Sharizad and her entourage had to clap their hands to their ears in an attempt to block it out.

‘I am a son of the Great Kingdom, and I shall not be mocked by a giggling apparition,’ Redak roared and flung out his hand. A stream of changefire erupted from his palm and washed across the section of wall nearest him.

As if that had been a signal, the jaws shot forwards, tearing free of the walls and lunging from all sides. Sharizad’s warriors moved to defend themselves, or to settle old debts. She saw Redak raise his blade over Curdak’s head while the latter was weaving an incantation. Bodak stumbled, avoiding a set of gnashing jaws, and fell into his savage brother. Redak staggered, off balance, and a set of jaws crunched down on him before he even had a chance to scream. Bodak picked himself up and brushed at his robes.

‘Oh, how clumsy of me. Forgive me, brother,’ he called out to Redak’s convulsively kicking legs.

The jaws retreated, sliding back into the walls and fading away, taking the unfortunate Redak with them. Another toll claimed, Sharizad thought. The Howling Labyrinth demanded death, it seemed. Blood to grease the unseen gears, death to feed the hungry ghosts that populated the unseen spaces of the labyrinth. The laughter began again.

A soft moan rose up from the walls to join it. Insubstantial shapes pressed themselves against the slabs, pawing uselessly at the barriers that separated them from the living. There were thousands of them. Some were hulking giants, others the size of men or crouching beasts. All wailed or howled in seeming agony. Annoyed, Sharizad thrust her hands out and muttered a simple incantation. For a moment, her hands glimmered with amethyst fire. Abruptly, the spirits fell silent.

The laughter, however, continued.

Gordrakk roared in pleasure as Chompa slammed full tilt into the Stormcast shield wall, scattering black-armoured bodies. The maw-krusha bellowed and a hammer-wielding warrior was knocked sprawling, his body coming apart in streamers of lightning. Gordrakk watched the azure energy spear upwards and gave a guttural laugh.

‘That’s right – run home, you git,’ he shouted. ‘Run and tell the Hammer God that Gordrakk is the best!’

He hunched forwards in his saddle as Chompa barrelled ahead, deeper into the ranks of the storm-things. They resisted the maw-krusha’s advance every step of the way, trying to hold the monster back with their shields and muscle. He admired that sort of stubbornness in an opponent, even if they weren’t Ironjawz.

They had reacted quickly when his warriors had charged towards them. Now most of his warriors were still caught on the wrong side of the shield wall. That suited Gordrakk fine. More opponents for him. Kunnin’ whispered a warning and he twisted around. Shimmering arrows sped towards him, loosed from the bows of the Stormcast archers huddled behind the shield wall. Gordrakk spun Smasha and split the first arrow to reach him. Kunnin’ took care of the others, chopping the lightning into harmless sparks.

Dead gore-gruntas and orruks lined the canyon floor, and Gordrakk wondered whether Stabbajak was among them. He hoped so. It was better that way. More proper. He hadn’t really wanted to kill old Stabbajak, but he would have had to, eventually. That was always the way of it – you could only bang their heads together for so long before it stopped hurting and they decided to try their luck. Gordrakk had killed dozens of bosses, even megabosses, in the same fashion over the years. He was the best, and they knew it, but no orruk could resist trying to beat the best. That was what made orruks orruks.

Chompa roared and lunged, hopping into the air. The maw-krusha slammed down, scattering the bowmen. The maw-krusha snapped out, catching a warrior in its jaws. Teeth pierced the black armour and a moment later, Chompa belched lightning. The shield wall started to give ground grudgingly, their line splintering beneath the force of Chompa’s fury. Gordrakk leaned forwards, Chompa’s chains wrapped about his brawny forearms, and hacked at any Stormcast who got too close.

A voice cried out, catching Gordrakk’s attention. He turned in time to see a heavy shape, clad in ornate armour, set one foot on Chompa’s snout and steadily begin to scale the confused maw-krusha’s head. Hammer-boss, he thought, laughing out loud.

The storm-things had their own bosses. Sometimes they rode lizards, other times they fought on foot. Either way, they always made for an entertaining few minutes. This hammer-boss was wearing black like his warriors, and he carried a choppa and a hammer, both of which he put to quick use.

Gordrakk spun Kunnin’ in a hard circle, parrying his opponent’s sword. Chompa reared, lifting them both into the air. Smasha snarled in his head, and Gordrakk obliged the weapon, bringing it down to meet the rising hammer. Lightning crackled and fire sparked as they traded blows, swaying atop the maw-krusha’s broad neck and head. The hammer-boss was strong, but not as strong as Gordrakk. He could still feel the rhythm of Grund’s chant deep in the marrow of his bones, and knew Gork’s eyes were on him.

All around Chompa, his boys drove the shield wall back, step by step. The biggest and surliest of his brutes knocked the Stormcasts sprawling, as black orruks charged forwards, daring each other on to greater and more maniacal acts of bravery.

Swiftly, he swept both axes out in a wild blow, knocking both of his opponent’s weapons aside. Before the hammer-boss could react, Gordrakk lurched forwards and drove his broad skull down against his foe’s helm. Their heads met with a thunderous clang, and the hammer-boss pitched backwards, tumbling off Chompa. The maw-krusha gave an eager gurgle and lunged, jaws wide, but its fangs snapped shut on empty space as the hammer-boss rolled aside. He came to his feet with a hollow roar.

Chompa was determined to eat the warrior. The maw-krusha surged about, snapping at the hammer-boss as he circled the beast. Chompa smashed aside storm-thing and orruk alike in its eagerness to catch its prey. One of its wide paws crashed down on the warrior, knocking him flat. Gordrakk yelled in pleasure.

At that moment, a second hammer-boss, this one the colour of bruised meat, slammed into Chompa from the side, driving his shoulder into the maw-krusha’s head. Chompa staggered, off balance. The newcomer stumbled back and kicked Chompa in the side of the jaw. Gordrakk swung Smasha down, but the storm-thing twisted aside.

‘Stand still and fight,’ Gordrakk snarled. He wrenched back on Chompa’s chains, hauling the beast around to face this new threat.

Chompa swung its head towards the new hammer-boss, bellowing. The warrior backed away. He whirled around, and his cloak flared out. Lightning sparked, momentarily blinding Gordrakk. Chompa howled in pain as bolts of something slammed into it. Its claws slid as it tried to maintain its balance, gouging the ground. Gordrakk hauled on Chompa’s chains, and the maw-krusha bellowed in protest. He saw the purple warrior drag the black one to his feet. Together, they hurried back towards the broken shield wall. As they reached it, the other storm-things began to give ground.

‘They’re running away?’ Gordrakk snarled, in surprise, as they started to withdraw. The storm-things never ran away. Disappointment turned to anger and he stomped on Chompa’s skull, urging the maw-krusha forwards. ‘Get up and at ’em, gitface,’ he growled. ‘Nobody leaves the fight, not until I’ve krumped ’em.’

More arrows hissed up over him as he urged his mount forwards. The volley fell with deadly accuracy. Explosions rocked the canyon, as chain-lightning tore through the mobs of orruks. Gordrakk laughed. Any boy who died from a bit of weather wasn’t fit to take part in his Waaagh! – the storm-things were practically doing him a favour. The harder you got hit, the harder you had to fight. The harder you fought, the bigger you got. Gordrakk beat on his chest, striking his iron chest-plate with the flat of Smasha. His boys were yelling and all the earth was howling at the sky. The cliffs of bones that rose to either side of him were rattling cacophonously. It was a good day to be alive, and a good day to die.

Gordrakk straightened, forcing Chompa to rear up. ‘WAAAGH! Give me a fight,’ he bawled. ‘Fight me-fight me-FIGHT ME!’ All around him, nobs and boys alike took up the cry and redoubled their efforts to reach the retreating storm-things. ‘Oi, stop running,’ Gordrakk bellowed. ‘Stop running and FIGHT!’

But they didn’t. As the armoured shapes retreated beneath the cover of the incessant volleys, other storm-things advanced. These were clad in bulky iron and wielding heavy, two-handed hammers. They too wore purple armour, rather than black, just like the other hammer-boss, and Gordrakk wondered idly how many colours of storm-thing there were as he urged Chompa through the rain of crackling arrows. As he closed in on them, the big storm-things began to strike the sides of the canyon wall.

The great cliffs of piled bone began to tremble and creak, and Kunnin’ murmured suddenly, urgently. Gordrakk pulled Chompa up short at the weapon’s warning. He realised why the storm-things had run, and the anger left him all at once. The maw-krusha shrieked resentfully as Gordrakk hauled back on the chains, laughing. The beast came to a stop just as the way ahead was suddenly filled with dust and falling bones. He looked up, as the sides of the canyon began to heave and writhe like a beast in pain. Lightning crawled across the stacked bones, radiating outwards from every strike of the hammers.

‘Stop,’ Gordrakk howled, as boys poured past him, into the shadows of the shuddering bones. ‘Stop, you gits! Stop!’

‘They’re getting away,’ Grotrak roared, foam clinging to his jaws, as he barrelled past Chompa, leading his nobs. He lurched after the retreating storm-things, his eyes bulging. The song of the gods was bouncing around inside the megaboss’ head. His muscles were bulging and his eyes were shiny with fire.

‘Let them,’ Gordrakk snarled after him, one eye still on the canyon walls.

‘Bash them!’ Grotrak bellowed, giving no indication that he had heard Gordrakk’s command. He was still half deaf to everything but the song of the gods. He bounded towards the enemy, axe raised. Orruks streamed after him, yelling in excitement.

Gordrakk watched him go. Goodbye, Grotrak, he thought, not entirely unhappily.

He wheeled Chompa round and set about putting a safe distance between himself and what Kunnin’ said was about to happen. Smasha protested loudly, quivering in his grip, but Gordrakk knew better than to listen to it in this instance. Smasha was like Grotrak, or Drokka – it wanted to fight, and nothing else. But Kunnin’ wanted to win. That was why Gorkamorka had given them to Gordrakk, to teach him the difference. Having fights was all well and good, but you had to win some of them for it to count.

Some orruks followed him as he withdrew. Some didn’t. He let those that didn’t go. They had the song of the gods echoing in their skulls, like Grotrak, and there would be no stopping them. The ground was shaking beneath Chompa’s talons when Gordrakk finally turned. Dust flooded the canyon as the walls bulged, swayed and finally shattered.

The shattering shook the Gargant’s Graveyard down to its roots. The path vanished in an avalanche of bone and dirt. The ground shook and the air was thick with dust. It billowed outwards and flooded the canyon, painting green skin white and clogging Gordrakk’s mouth with the taste of dried marrow. He squinted through the dust, hacked and spat.

The storm-things had blocked off the trail, and buried every orruk who hadn’t been smart enough to follow Gordrakk. Orruks like Grotrak. Just like Kunnin’ had said.

It was smart. Smarter than Gordrakk had expected. Every other time he had fought the storm-things, they had tried to match orruks strength for strength, until one side or the other gave way, just the way Gork liked it. But this time, they had done things the Morky way. Gordrakk laughed again.

If the storm-things could learn, they might make good opponents after all.

‘Back, fall back,’ Zephacleas shouted. The air was thick with dust and noise from the collapse. The echo of tumbling bones still hung heavy on the air. Taros’ plan had been a good one, if loud. The Gargant’s Graveyard as a whole was fairly unstable, thanks mostly to the orruks. No foundation was steady when orruks were about. One blow in the right place in these boneyards could cause an avalanche.

‘Reform twenty paces to the rear. Arcos, get your warriors into position,’ he shouted. Astral Templars streamed past him, forming up in a second shield wall across the width of the dust-filled canyon. ‘Polarus, ready your arrows. They won’t let a little thing like a collapsed canyon wall slow them down for long,’ he added, signalling to the Judicators.

Greel, his armour dented and turned grey with dust, coughed and said, ‘That was your plan?’ Zephacleas turned to his fellow Lord-Celestant. Greel glared at him. ‘We’re trapped now, and on the wrong side. The orruks are still between us and our true quarry, Zephacleas.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Zephacleas said, bluntly.

‘What?’

‘For saving your life,’ Zephacleas said. ‘And we’re not trapped. But we will be if they get to grips with us.’ He pointed his runeblade towards the collapsed section of the canyon. Greel turned. Orruks were crawling through the fallen bones, emerging in ones and twos like dusty maggots from the roots of the newly made escarpment. As the two Lord-Celestants watched, a massive orruk, wielding a broad-bladed axe, hacked his way free of the bones and staggered towards the Stormcasts. The beast bellowed a wheezy challenge and stumbled forwards, seemingly none the worse for wear despite having half a canyon dropped on his head.

‘They survived?’ Greel sputtered.

‘They’re orruks,’ Zephacleas said, simply. Thetaleas and his Decimators charged forwards to meet the creatures. Thunderaxes licked out, lopping off heads or severing sword-arms. The orruks were in no shape to put up an organised resistance, and they fell quickly to the axemen of Azyr. Those that got past Thetaleas fell to the hammers and warblades of the waiting Liberators.

Satisfied that the situation was in hand, Zephacleas looked around. ‘Nine-strike, we need to keep them on the other side of that new wall of yours,’ he called out to the Lord-Castellant, as Taros hurried towards them. He was accompanied by several retinues of Judicators and Retributors.

‘Easy enough. A few more well-placed blows and I can collapse the cliff-faces to either side, make them impassable,’ Taros said. ‘But we need to keep the orruks off the escarpment to do it, and keep any more from coming over or worming through.’ He turned. ‘Carachus, Daximedes – take your retinues forwards,’ he said. ‘Lend our brothers aid.’

‘We should go as well,’ Greel said.

‘No need.’ Zephacleas shook his head as the Judicators hurried off. ‘Thetaleas has it well in hand.’ He sheathed his runeblade. The Decimator-Prime had engaged the bellowing megaboss, even as his retinue spread out to take on the other orruks. Soon the air was filled with the whistle-crack of skybolt bows, and the screams of orruks as they fell to the irresistible volleys or swift axes of the Stormcasts.

‘How much time before they try climbing that wall?’ Taros asked, as they watched the brutal fight wind down to its inevitable end. As the last of the orruks fell, the Judicator retinues of the Astral Templars began to scale it. Once they reached the top, they would drive the orruks on the other side back, loosing volleys at the mobs and the canyon walls alike.

‘Hard to say. This is a stopgap, at best. We need room to breathe. Something to slow them down long enough for us to regroup,’ Zephacleas said. Greel stiffened, and Zephacleas could tell the other Lord-Celestant was unhappy with his conclusion.

‘What we need is a palisade or a bulwark of some sort. You saw how quickly they smashed our shield wall – if we hadn’t been here, the Iron-sides would have been overwhelmed,’ Taros said. Zephacleas smiled. It was the natural inclination of a Lord-Castellant, whatever his chamber of origin, to build a wall. They were artisans at heart, every last one of them. Otherwise they would not have been chosen to bear the warding lantern and halberd.

‘I’m inclined to agree, but anything that slows them down will slow us down as well,’ he said, doubtfully. He watched Thetaleas slam his axe repeatedly into the head of the dying megaboss. The creature was still full of fight despite being struck by dozens of arrows, surrounded and alone. Blood glistened on the orruk’s ridged war-plate, and its agonised bellows filled the air as it swung its axe clumsily at Thetaleas. The Decimator-Prime parried the blow, and struck the orruk in the skull again. The beast sank to one knee and shook its bloody head as if weary. Thetaleas struck it one last time, and the orruk toppled forwards.

‘A stubborn sort of chaff,’ Zephacleas murmured.

‘What?’ Greel said.

‘Ignore him, Lord Iron-side. It’s another of his jokes,’ Seker said, as he joined them. The Lord-Relictor’s armour was covered in dust and blood. ‘The wounded are ready to move now, should we wish to.’ As he spoke, a cooling rain began to fall over the canyon, carving trails in the thick patina of grime that covered their armour. ‘And I thought you’d like to know that our prisoner is still in hand,’ he added, looking at Zephacleas.

‘Stabbajak,’ Zephacleas said, idly. He felt Seker staring at him and sighed. ‘His name is Stabbajak. I got that much out of him, amid all of the cursing, before his clansmen arrived spoiling for a fight.’ He looked at the Lord-Relictor. ‘Did he try to escape?’

‘Surprisingly, no. He seemed quite entertained by our efforts to hold back his kin, however,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘Particularly when we dropped the canyon on them.’

‘Yes,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Strange sense of humour, these orruks.’

‘You would know,’ Greel said.

Zephacleas looked at the other Stormcast. ‘Was that a joke, Iron-side?’ He looked at the others. ‘Was he making a joke?’

Greel shook his head. ‘Merely an observation.’

Taros snorted and peered up at the escarpment. ‘If you’re finished, Beast-bane... I can make it defensible, with a few hours. Brace it here, loosen it there. An adequate bulwark, at least. Judicators at the top, Liberators on the interior slope. Retributors and Decimators at the bottom to knock out the supports when the time comes. We can bury the brutes, if nothing else.’

‘No,’ Greel said, without preamble. He swept his blood-coated runeblade out in a dismissive gesture. ‘We should press forwards now, while they are disorganised. We require no scouts this time – our hammers shall guide us,’ he said flatly. He swung his hammer down, shattering a section of bone for emphasis. ‘We shall make a road straight through this maze, and no orruk shall hinder us.’

Taros thumped the ground with the haft of his halberd. He glared at the Lord-Celestant. ‘But they’ll try. Unless we give them something appealing to focus on. Nothing an orruk likes better than trying to kick over a wall.’ He gestured with his halberd. ‘We can defend this point until they’ve exhausted themselves, then fall back past the next bend and collapse the canyon walls on either side. We can keep doing that as long as we have boneyard to work with.’

‘You are forgetting our quarry, Lord-Castellant. In a few hours, that witch will have accomplished whatever it was she came to this wasteland to do,’ Greel said. ‘I can feel it. We must reach the Howling Labyrinth, the sooner the better. We can’t waste any more time on these beasts. I say we move, and now.’

‘Aye, and if we don’t take those hours, the orruks will simply fall on us from behind and carve us up piecemeal,’ Taros said. ‘We are not fast enough to outrun them, nor are we strong enough to bull through every obstacle. We must use their strength against them.’

‘How? By hiding?’ Greel demanded.

‘No. The opposite, in fact,’ Zephacleas said. Taros and Greel looked at him. ‘Lest you’ve forgotten, we have two goals – not one. So why not accomplish them both?’

‘You’re talking about splitting our forces,’ Greel said doubtfully.

‘Initially, yes. If all goes well, we’ll have doubled our strength by the end.’ Zephacleas looked around. ‘The orruks are not leaderless. You saw that brute on the maw-krusha, aye, and recognised him as well. No other orruk would dare to mount the skull of one of Dracothian’s children on his banner-pole.’

‘Gordrakk,’ Seker said, before Greel could reply. The Lord-Relictor traced a crude sigil in the dust with the haft of his reliquary staff. ‘The Fist of Gork, born from a blow that broke the world, and the blessed of Gorkamorka. Or so the seers of the forest temples of Ghur-Klesh say. Boss-of-bosses, the brutal hand that directs the Ironjawz in their unending Waaagh.’

Taros shook his head. ‘And so? For every five orruks there’s at least four of them claiming to be the boss-of-bosses. It’s in their nature to boast so.’

‘Not around Gordrakk,’ Zephacleas said. ‘He is as much the voice of his god as the Lady of Vines was for Alarielle, though not in the same manner, I’d wager. If any being alive can aid us in finding the whereabouts of Gorkamorka, it’s Gordrakk.’ He looked at Taros. ‘Build your palisade, Nine-strike, and he’ll linger out there to knock it down. What sort of boss-of-bosses could resist kicking over a fortification built and defended by Stormcast Eternals?’

Taros laughed. ‘Ha! Aye, that’s true enough. He’ll storm towards us as quickly as he can, once he sniffs out what we’re up to. But how will he know?’ He glanced back at Stabbajak. ‘Ah. I wondered why you were keeping that brute alive. He’ll tell him.’

‘Aye,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Either because he thinks we’ll kill Gordrakk, or because he wants Gordrakk to kill us, but he’ll do it.’

Greel shook his head. ‘This stratagem will still require time that we do not have. If the Shimmering Countess achieves her goal – if she pierces the secrets of the Howling Labyrinth – who knows what horrors she will unleash upon this realm.’

‘Be at ease, brother,’ Zephacleas said. ‘While we occupy the orruks, you shall lead your chamber forwards, as swiftly as possible towards the Howling Labyrinth.’

‘But without reinforcements...’ Greel began.

‘You will have reinforcements, and then some,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Once we’ve convinced the orruks to join our cause.’

Seker laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder if there might yet be hope for you, Zephacleas.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Greel said, exchanging a look with Taros. ‘They are our foes. We’ve killed hundreds of them these past few days. Why would they ally with us?’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ Zephacleas looked at Taros. ‘You said it yourself earlier, Nine-strike. They were moving towards the Howling Labyrinth, and the forces arrayed there. Orruks like high places, especially if they have to fight to claim them. We distracted them.’ He laughed. ‘If we hadn’t interfered, I’d wager Gordrakk would have defeated the Shimmering Countess for us.’ He looked around. ‘Orruks aren’t particular – they want the biggest fight they can find, and the most interesting. Well, we’re going to give it to them. But first, we need to get them looking in the right direction.’

‘And you think the best way to do that is to – what? – confront Gordrakk?’ Taros said.

‘No, Nine-strike. I intend to challenge Gordrakk,’ Zephacleas said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Challenges

A cloud of dust flooded the canyon, choking and blinding the orruks in equal measure, and the ground shook violently. Caught amongst them, well away from the dangers of the vanguard, Zazul of the Radiant Veil reeled, coughing. Orruk bodies stumbled against him, bellowing and cursing, the stink of them even more cloying than the bone dust. Annoyed and frustrated, he hissed a single, abhorrent syllable. Green flames swept from his hands as he swung them out, trying to clear himself room to breathe.

Orruks shrieked as the flames consumed them. The rest fought to give him room. Breathing heavily, he looked around. His senses still ached from the force of the power that had, until only moments ago, flooded the creatures around him. Once the Waaagh! got started, there was no telling what it would do. There was no controlling it; one could only ride it out and hope to survive. Now that it was beginning to fade, he was in full control once more.

It would be a good day when at last the Dark Gods turned their attention to eradicating this pestiferous race. The orruks did not deserve even slavery – better to be done with them entirely, to wipe them from the canvas of history once and for all.

Zazul stumbled as the ground shook again, and his illusion flickered. There was still too much raw Waaagh! energy in the air. It was reducing his own carefully woven magics to uselessness. He hunched forwards, clawing at the skeins of sorcery, trying to keep his true face hidden. So intent was he on this that he failed to notice Gordrakk stalking towards him until it was too late. All around him, orruks sidled back. Zazul looked up into Gordrakk’s eyes. Before he could speak, the Fist of Gork had knocked him sprawling with a backhanded blow.

‘Where were you, shaman?’ Gordrakk growled, as Zazul tried to squirm to his feet. ‘Where was your magic? Where was your spirits?’ The Fist of Gork embedded one of his axes in the ground and caught the back of Zazul’s neck with his free hand. It took every ounce of willpower the sorcerer possessed to not simply obliterate the orruk oaf then and there. Gordrakk yanked him easily into the air and pressed the edge of his axe to Zazul’s throat.

Zazul cocked his eye skywards and saw the Ninety-Nine Feathers circling. Watching.

Hoping he’ll kill me, eh? Well, you won’t get out of our bargain that easily, carrion-eaters, he thought.

He pressed the tip of his fingers against the axe, and felt alarm as his spells of illusion wavered and snapped. His head throbbed. Something about the axe was gnawing at the edges of his sorcery. Gordrakk’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment, Zazul wondered if the megaboss had seen past his veil. Then, with a snort of disgust, Gordrakk tossed him to the ground.

‘When’s Mork going to bring me a proper weirdnob,’ he muttered. ‘Either they pop too many heads or not enough. Morgrum! Where are you, ya git?’ he called out, turning. The other megaboss thrust his way through the crowd of orruks, followed closely by his rival Roklud, and their nobs. Morgrum was as wide as he was tall, and smelt worse than a sty full of gore-gruntas. Zazul scrambled upwind as quickly as he could manage. Orruks laughed and kicked at him as he did so. He ignored them. Patience, he thought. Patience. This too shall pass. Play the long game, as you were taught.

‘They’re shooting arrows off the bones,’ Morgrum said. His wide-horned helmet was dotted with dents and soot marks, signs that he had found out about the arrows the hard way. ‘Had to pull back, or I’d run out of boys.’

‘Or maybe you was just scared,’ Roklud said belligerently. The other megaboss was wounded, blood pouring down his scalp and arm, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Morgrum swung his head towards the other megaboss. ‘Who says I’m scared?’

‘Me,’ Roklud growled, lifting his boss choppa.

‘I don’t see you climbing that hill,’ Morgrum said, lifting his gore-stikka and aiming it roughly in the direction of Roklud’s belly. The two megabosses glared at one another, and Zazul considered giving them a little push, just to fan the flames of dislike. He discarded the idea almost immediately – while amusing, Gordrakk would only kill them both, giving him uncontested control of the horde.

‘Nobody’s climbing that hill. Not until I say. For now, we pull back,’ Gordrakk said, wrenching his other axe free of the ground.

‘What?’ Roklud said. ‘Why don’t we just kick over that wall and finish them off?’ He looked at Morgrum for support, but the other megaboss looked away. Roklud growled as his rival started to whistle. ‘You cowardly git,’ he hissed, taking a half step towards Morgrum.

‘We gave them a kicking, but it’s no good killing them all. Not yet,’ Gordrakk said, glaring at Roklud until he stepped back. ‘We got to find another way to get at them.’

‘But...’

‘You want to go over that wall, Roklud? Fine. There it is,’ Gordrakk said, extending his axe between them. ‘Take your boys and go. Only, I don’t see Grotrak coming back, do you? Or Stabbajak? Or Drokka?’ Gordrakk snorted. ‘Besides, why go over when we can go through?’

The two megabosses stared at Gordrakk in confusion. Gordrakk smiled, and Zazul couldn’t help but shudder. Even Korghos Khul himself was not half so savage as the creature before him. The Bloodbound were barbaric, but predictable. Gordrakk was anything but.

‘We got a shaman, right?’ Gordrakk gestured to Zazul with Kunnin’, and the sorcerer felt his skin crawl at the thought of that blade touching him again. ‘Grund will play the war-song and get the boys ready, and Jabberjaw will brew up the big magic,’ Gordrakk said, fixing Zazul with his eye. ‘Then we’ll knock that wall down, and finish what we started.’

He scraped his axes together, and the sound set Zazul’s teeth on edge. ‘Yeah. We’ll finish it then,’ Gordrakk continued. ‘One way or another.’

Zephacleas thrust the broken orruk spear into the wet ground, a head mounted on its haft. He looked down at the prisoner, wondering how best to go about things. The one-eyed orruk glared up at him in silence, its breathing like a bellows, its chains clinking softly. It squatted in the rain like a malevolent toad, arms bound to its chest, and the rusty chains looped about its torso, shoulders and neck. Taros’ gryph-hounds lolled nearby, watching the orruk the way a hawk might watch a mouse.

Around them, Stormcasts worked to make the area defensible. Judicators patrolled the heights as Retributors closed off the other points of entry to the canyon, and Liberators worked to shore up the escarpment under Taros’ observant gaze. Elsewhere, Seker saw to the wounded, murmuring prayers and keeping up the healing rain.

‘You didn’t try to get away,’ Zephacleas said, finally.

Stabbajak shrugged sullenly. ‘Where am I gonna go?’ he growled, looking away. ‘You gonna kill me, storm-thing?’

‘Maybe,’ Zephacleas said.

Stabbajak grunted and peered at him. ‘Gonna let me have a stabba or a choppa, before you do it?’ He shuddered. ‘Don’ wanna die in chains.’ He looked up. ‘Or wet.’

‘You won’t,’ Zephacleas said. Stabbajak chuckled.

‘Good. Why you got Drokka’s head onna stick?’ he said, peering up at the grisly trophy.

‘So he can watch me beat the rest of you,’ Zephacleas said. Stabbajak nodded.

‘That’s good. That’s proper. You know us, storm-thing.’ Stabbajak grinned. ‘Everybody knows us. Ironjawz is the best.’ The grin faded. ‘You kill Grotrak too, hammer-man?’

‘No. That was him,’ Zephacleas said, gesturing towards Thetaleas. The Decimator-Prime stood nearby, with his retinue. Like the gryph-hounds, they watched the orruk closely, alert for any sign of treachery.

‘He just going to leave Grotrak laying there in the rain?’ Stabbajak asked, staring at Thetaleas.

‘No. We’ll put Grotrak’s head beside Drokka’s,’ Zephacleas said.

‘Good. Maybe his ghost will learn something,’ Stabbajak said. ‘Gordrakk is going to kill you, hammer-thing. Put your head on his banner-pole, and claim your ghost.’ He said it bluntly, with no hint of boastfulness. As far as Stabbajak was concerned, it was a foregone conclusion. The one-eyed orruk grinned again. ‘Gave him a good fight, though. Sneaky, too, knocking them bones down like that. I laughed.’

‘That’s the way of it,’ Zephacleas said. He held up a fist. ‘The Gorka...’ He held up his other fist. ‘And the Morka.’

Stabbajak gave a guttural laugh. ‘What you know about Gorkamorka, hammer-man?’

‘I know he once fought beside the Hammer God.’

Stabbajak peered at him. ‘Yeah? So?’

‘Hammer God wants to fight beside him – or them – again.’ Zephacleas brought his fists together. ‘A big war is coming. The drums are sounding in the places between worlds.’ He sank down into a crouch before the orruk. ‘The Hammer God wants Gorkamorka to join him. But I can’t find him to tell him so.’

Stabbajak chortled, rattling his chains. ‘Gorkamorka is never where you look, yeah? Always and everywhere, except where you look.’ He fixed Zephacleas with his good eye. ‘But you know that, hammer-man. So... what do you want?’

‘Gordrakk,’ Zephacleas said. Stabbajak grunted and rocked back on his heels. Zephacleas continued. ‘Gordrakk is the Fist of Gork. He speaks with the god’s voice, calling the Ironjawz to war, doesn’t he? What he hears, the gods hear?’

Stabbajak nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Yeah.’

‘If I let you go, will you tell Gordrakk I want to fight him, so I can give him the Hammer God’s words?’ Zephacleas said, studying the orruk’s brutal features. He didn’t trust the creature. Orruks couldn’t be trusted to do anything but fight. They didn’t swear oaths or have anything remotely resembling a sense of honour. But it also never occurred to them to lie.

‘You want me to tell Gordrakk you want a fight?’ Stabbajak said doubtfully. He shook his head. ‘He already knows that, hammer-man. Why else would he come here?’

‘Will you tell him that I bring the word of the Hammer God?’ Zephacleas pressed.

Stabbajak looked at him for a moment. Then, he said, ‘Hammer God and Gorkamorka got into an eatin’ contest, yeah? And Gorkamorka ate a whole kingdom, castles and all.’ He thrust a warty finger up beneath his eye-patch and scratched furiously, causing his chains to clatter. ‘Still there too,’ he added.

‘And what does that have to do with anything?’ Taros said.

Stabbajak peered up at him. ‘Best be careful Gordrakk doesn’t swallow you up too,’ he grunted. He looked at Zephacleas. ‘You’re brave, storm-thing. Almost as tough as us Ironjawz. Be a good fight, Stabbajak thinks.’

‘The fight-of-fights,’ Zephacleas said. He took the chains that bound the orruk in his hands and snapped them. Stabbajak rose to his full height, shedding the bonds with a splash. He looked around and sniffed.

‘We’ll see.’

Zephacleas watched the orruk lope through the rain towards Taros’ wall. Stabbajak lunged past the Liberators at the foot of the slope, and, with simian agility, began to climb, bones tumbling in his wake. The Stormcasts on the scarp face moved aside to let the creature pass, and soon he was clambering down the other side and lost to sight.

‘Do you trust that creature to do as you ask?’ Greel said, from behind him.

‘No. I trust him to be true to his nature. Either way, Gordrakk will come. The rest is in Sigmar’s hands,’ Zephacleas said. He turned. ‘You’d best go, before the orruks start massing. Otherwise you’ll be fighting every step of the way.’ He held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Greel took it.

‘Go with Sigmar, brother,’ Zephacleas said, clasping Greel’s forearm.

‘And you, Beast-bane.’ Greel hesitated. ‘Do your best not to get killed, if you would.’

‘I shall,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Now go – hurry. We’ll keep them looking this way, as long as we can.’ Greel nodded and turned, moving away through the rain. The remnants of his chamber awaited him. They were a pitiful few, compared to what they had been, but even a few Stormcasts were more than a match for most things in this realm or any other.

Zephacleas sighed and looked at Drokka’s head. Droplets of rain rolled down the slack features of the orruk. ‘I wonder if I’m making a mistake,’ he said. ‘Then, I suppose you never worried about that. Even right there at the end.’

‘Orruks do not think of death as we do, or did. For them, it is inevitably sudden and surprising, and they waste little time worrying about it.’

Zephacleas glanced at his Lord-Relictor. ‘The wounded?’ he asked.

‘Recovering. You are worried,’ Seker said. ‘Greel is worried as well, if it helps.’

‘It doesn’t,’ Zephacleas said.

‘I doubt the orruks care either way. Where is your head, Lord-Celestant?’ Seker said.

‘Here and there. Unlike some, I can hold more than one idea in my head at a time, Gravewalker,’ Zephacleas said. ‘A chieftain must be broad-minded.’

‘You are still in the Jade Kingdoms,’ Seker said, bluntly. ‘Even after all this time. Why?’

‘Gardus,’ Zephacleas said. ‘Are you not curious? The Steel Soul died in the Hidden Vale, but he will return. Mantius Far-killer died in the Crawling City, but he too will be reforged, as Gaius Greel was reforged. Will they be the same, or will something different come back to us? Something that we do not recognise as our brethren, save in name alone?’

‘I know the fates of the Steel Soul and the Far-killer weigh on you, Zephacleas,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘But now is hardly the time to be worrying about the dead.’

‘Funny words, coming from you. And I am not worried about the dead,’ he said. ‘Because they are not dead, are they? No more than any of us are dead. We will not die. We cannot die.’ He tapped the Lord-Relictor on the shoulder with his hammer, scattering droplets of rain. ‘That is what worries me, brother. Not death, for every warrior dies. Save we blessed few. But if not death, then... what? I am – I was – a chieftain, Gravewalker, and the Beast-bane is my tribe. And it is a chieftain’s duty to worry for the fate of his tribe.’

Seker shook his head. ‘I think I like you better when you are singing and hitting things.’

‘I like myself better then as well,’ Zephacleas said. He peered up at the sky and the thick clouds, which still wept with the storm the Lord-Relictor had called down. He held out his hand, letting the rain wash some of the grime from his gauntlet. ‘It’s a foolish thing I’m doing here, I know. Gordrakk might kill me before I can get through to him. But we must take the chance, if we are to win.’

‘I said nothing,’ Seker said. ‘You are Lord-Celestant, and I but advise and say the prayers for the dying. I call the storm, but I do not direct strategy.’

‘Are you finished?’ Zephacleas said.

‘I believe so. This is foolish, yes, but we are caught in a trap. We were caught in a trap in the Gnarlwood as well. Discipline must be flexible, else it is simply a tomb waiting to be filled.’ The Lord-Relictor thumped the ground with his staff. ‘Do you remember when you spoke to the seraphon, in the Crawling City?’

‘Yes,’ Zephacleas said.

‘And the sylvaneth, in the Jade Kingdoms?’

‘Yes. What is your point?’

‘Sigmar chose us to accompany Greel for a reason, Zephacleas. Perhaps he foresaw this moment, or perhaps he wished for you to stir the embers of the warrior Greel was. Perhaps Sigmar fears what we will become as much as you. Did he not send the Hammerhand with Thostos Bladestorm? Maybe your purpose here is not what you think, brother.’

Zephacleas was silent for a moment. ‘Seker?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Lord-Celestant?’

‘I think I like you better when you don’t talk.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Lord-Celestant Greel led his warriors through the hole the Decimators had chopped in the face of the bone scree. The Sons of Mallus moved swiftly, shields held over their heads. If the hastily made path threatened to collapse, the Liberators could keep the rest of the chamber from being buried, while the Decimators hacked them free. It was a risky gambit, but Greel was in no mood to waste time navigating the twisting canyons of the Gargant’s Graveyard. They would hack their way through the canyon walls, straight to the enormous skull that marked its centre. Sigmarite shields scraped against bone as they moved, and the only light was from the soft azure glow that outlined their weapons.

He could hear the thump of orruk drums, and the entirety of the boneyard seemed to tremble with the force of their impatience. It reverberated through every bone and root. He glanced back the way they had come. A tiny circle of amber light marked the canyon. Part of him wondered if he should go back. If Zephacleas was wrong, if Gordrakk ignored his challenge, then the Astral Templars would need every shield and hammer to repel the orruks.

He thrust the thought aside. His fellow Lord-Celestant had made his decision. Greel had his own task, and he intended to see it through, one way or another. He looked ahead. His Decimators swung their axes, hewing through the tangled roots and bones, occasionally striking sparks from forgotten chains. Skulls and leg-bones crunched beneath their feet as they marched. Occasionally they would be forced to take a detour around an immense skull or the vertebrae of some long-dead leviathan that proved too tough to hack through.

As Greel led his warriors forwards, bits of bone ricocheting off their war-plate, his mind turned inwards. Zephacleas’ incessant questions had awoken in him things he had not thought of since he had emerged from the cascade of lightning that had returned him to the Realm of Beasts. He had felt pain, then. The pain of rebirth, the pain of being sent back to the place where he had failed. Where he had died, where the echoes of his screams seemed to be carried in every stray breeze.

The moment of his death was like a sore spot in the body of his memory, an ache that only time would heal, if that. Other Stormcasts had died since the opening of the great gates of Azyr and the Harrowing of Aqshy. Some even now burned in the fires of purification, while others marched once more, as Greel did. He wondered if they, like him, could not shake the feeling of something lost.

We were made for battle. Imbued with the strength of the God-King and crafted in his image, he thought. So how then can we fail?

Greel did not think himself a fool, but he felt a vague sense of unease as he considered the implication. Sigmar had never denied his fallibility – far from it. As great as his deeds were, so too were his failures, and those stories were not forbidden to the scholars of the Sigmarabulum. Learn, the God-King commanded. See my mistakes and learn from them. In truth, the God-King was not as Greel or even the Hammerhand. Not a warrior, but a chieftain, Greel thought, smiling slightly.

A chieftain, who forgave his tribesmen’s failures and helped them stand when they stumbled. A part of him wished that he were a being without need of either help or forgiveness. Something in him yearned for the peace of the drawn blade, the simplicity of the hammer. Maybe then, he could begin to shed the shadows of failure that clung to his mind.

That, in the end, was the story of Gaius Greel – failure. He had failed in life, and been spared the meathooks and bait-cages of the Bloodbound only through Sigmar’s mercy. And he had failed again, in the Temple of the Empty Heart.

He had hesitated, and he had paid the price. But he could not – did not – understand why. That part of his memory was nothing but sound and fury, with no meaning to it. He heard the hollow clatter of weapons, and the screams of his brothers-in-arms as Sharizad danced among them, killing warriors with every step, an army of ghosts at her beck and call.

The spirits had rolled forwards like a fog bank. The shield wall that had withstood the hordes at Hreth had come undone in moments. Their weapons had been almost useless. Those who had not fallen to the ghosts had been consumed by fell sorceries, burned alive in their armour by changefire or reduced to screaming strands of smoke. As the shield wall reeled, Greel had taken his chance, and... what?

Something had happened. Something he had seen or felt had made him hesitate, his hammer raised over her head. It had lasted but a moment, but she had turned and spitted him smoothly, her crystalline blade piercing his blessed armour as easily as if it had been parchment. She had laughed then, and he had felt... something. Something clawing at him, tearing at his insides.

Tearing at his very soul.

Greel closed his eyes, banishing the memory. Whatever had happened in the Temple of the Empty Heart, it would not happen again.

Whatever else, Sharizad would die.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Questions

‘They want me to kick it over?’ Gordrakk said, leaning forwards in Chompa’s saddle. He scratched his cheek with Kunnin’, listening to its murmurs. The air was still thick with bone dust from the collapse of the canyon walls, and the echoes as well. He’d pulled his warriors back, waiting for the ground and the bones to settle. Roklud and the others were grumbling, but that was to be expected. He peered at the escarpment, considering. It wasn’t much of a wall, but there were storm-things moving around on top of it.

When he had caught sight of Stabbajak sliding down the slope, he’d almost thought the grunta-boss had somehow come back from the dead. He had only been captured, though, which was worse. Dead, an orruk could still fight other ghosts. But captured? That was the worst thing of all for an orruk. Gordrakk didn’t particularly like Stabbajak, but that wasn’t the sort of fate he would wish on another Ironjaw. Even a sneaky, one-eyed pig-snatcher like Stabbajak.

‘The big boss wants a scrap,’ Stabbajak said, with a shrug. ‘Said he wanted the fight-of-fights. Said he wanted to beat us flat and stomp on us until there was nothing left.’

‘Fight-of-fights,’ Gordrakk repeated. He nodded as a murmur swept through the gathered Ironjawz. ‘What was he like, the big boss?’

‘Tore off Drokka’s head,’ Stabbajak said. He gestured. ‘Put it onna stick.’ He hiked his thumb over his shoulder, at the escarpment. ‘Put all of their heads on sticks.’

Gordrakk nodded approvingly. That was the proper way of it, giving the ghosts of Drokka and the others a chance to see the fighting. These storm-things knew something, at least.

‘You lost your gore-grunta,’ he said. Stabbajak scratched his eye socket furiously.

‘Broke ’er neck,’ he said, mournfully. Stabbajak had doted on the beast, Gordrakk knew. After a moment, the megaboss shrugged. ‘But he broke my chains,’ he added, as if the one balanced the other. ‘Sent me to challenge you.’

‘That he did,’ Gordrakk said. He leaned forwards. ‘Why is that, you think?’

Stabbajak laughed. ‘He knows Ironjawz are the best. He wants to be the best, so he’s got to beat us. The purple hammer-boss is smart. Smart like an Ironjaw.’

‘Hnh. Can’t be that smart, wanting to fight me,’ Gordrakk said. He sat back, thinking. This was the sort of thing he lived for, when all was said and done. Proving he was the best, one-on-one – that was the purpose Gork had punched him into the world for. ‘Still, who am I to say no?’ he said, glancing at the escarpment.

‘I say no,’ Jabberjaw shrilled. ‘Spirits say no!’

Gordrakk rolled his eyes. The weirdnob was stamping on his last nerve, and had been since the storm-things had collapsed the canyon. It was Jabberjaw behind Roklud’s mutterings, he knew. Weirdnobs were always the same, always had to interfere in things that weren’t their business. It wasn’t healthy, listening to spirits all the time. It dulled an orruk’s mind. Too, the weirdnob hadn’t got stuck in at all, or exploded a single head. Further proof that he was less useful than Gordrakk had initially thought.

‘Spirits say a lot of things, Jabberjaw.’ He stared down at the weirdnob. ‘Spirits say attack an army of storm-things. Now they say hide like a sprog from one? Maybe I’m tired of listening to your spirits, shaman. Maybe I’m gonna listen to my own.’ He hefted Kunnin’ meaningfully.

Jabberjaw twitched, though whether it was from annoyance or a surplus of energies, Gordrakk couldn’t say. ‘What about my big magic, eh?’ the shaman said slyly. ‘Let me knock that wall down – we’ll fight them then.’

‘But he challenged me,’ Gordrakk said, speaking slowly, as if to a troggoth.

‘So?’ Jabberjaw nearly shrieked. His form flickered, as if it were lit by a fire inside.

Every orruk within earshot fell silent. Stabbajak, good eye wide, stepped back. Gordrakk’s expression didn’t change. He studied the shaman, and listened to the murmurs of Kunnin’. At its insistence, he glanced at Jabberjaw’s shadow, and saw that it was... wrong. It wasn’t an orruk’s shadow at all. It was too thin, too long.

Gordrakk closed his eyes, thinking. It was a rare thing when he didn’t simply follow his first impulse, and right now his impulse was to tear Jabberjaw’s tongue out and feed it back to him. Jabberjaw was still talking, trying to browbeat the others into agreeing with him, even though they weren’t responding, all of them watching Gordrakk. The weirdnob didn’t seem to understand how orruks worked. It didn’t matter what the others said – Gordrakk only did what Gordrakk wanted to do. That was what being the strongest meant, after all. Nobody made Ironjawz do what they didn’t want to do – not other orruks, not Chaos-things, not the Hammer God, not nobody. Not even Gorkamorka, when it came down to it.

But Jabberjaw didn’t understand that, and his shadow was wrong and he hadn’t popped any skulls. Set a few on fire, but that wasn’t the same. It was Jabberjaw who had sent him after the storm-things, and Jabberjaw who had led him to the Chaos-things. And all for what? Gordrakk opened his eyes and looked towards the Big Skull. His mind itched, and the axes snarled in unison. There was a fight there, waiting on him, and it seemed like Jabberjaw was trying to keep him from it. Decision made, Gordrakk said, ‘You hear that, Jabberjaw?’

Jabberjaw stopped talking and looked up at Gordrakk. ‘What?’ he said.

‘The sound of drums,’ Gordrakk said. ‘The gods are playing the war-song. Can’t you hear the sound of the drums?’ Stabbajak and the others nodded. Grund, standing nearby, began to chant softly, thumping his head and his knee in time to a disjointed rhythm. The war-rhythm, the battle-song. Never the same twice, because orruks got bored easily. But always recognisable, despite that. Jabberjaw stared at him.

‘I’ll meet the hammer-boss. Then we’ll see what’s what. We’ll see who’s best,’ Gordrakk said, holding the shaman’s gaze.

And we’ll see what you’re hiding, shaman, he thought. We’ll see what you don’t want me to see...

Curdak was the next to die.

He fell silently, with barely a whimper to mark his passage. Something fleshed in amber and bearing a reptilian countenance emerged from the darkness of a side corridor and tore the sorrowful one apart before he could muster a defensive incantation. The amber monstrosity turned upon the rest of them a moment later. Tribesmen and knights alike died beneath its scything talons, until Bodak and Kuldak between them put an end to it. Unlike Curdak, it died laughing.

Its laughter was the same as that which had haunted them intermittently since Redak’s death, hours or days before. Time had little meaning in the labyrinth, Sharizad thought. It passed more slowly in some corridors than others. Her warriors had grown silent and moody, and their courage wilted in the face of the seemingly endless convolutions of the Howling Labyrinth. She had but a few men left. Others had vanished down side corridors or been drawn into the mirror-like slabs that lined the walls. One of the Knights of Malachus had stepped through a smoke-spewing archway only to emerge moments later, his armour corroded and his limbs feeble with the weight of a thousand years. He had collapsed into dust soon after.

The spirits spoke to her of something watching them. Whether it was the Daemoniac Conundrum or the Howling Labyrinth itself, they did not know. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Some force was diverting them. She could hear the corridors moving and shifting, like the coils of some vast serpent. As if it doesn’t want me to find what I am searching for, she thought. Even her strongest spells of seeking were swallowed up by the strange corridors.

‘Cast your sands, Kuldak, and tell us which way we are to go,’ she said. They stood at an intersection. Before them, the corridor split into two winding paths: one that curved upwards, the other downwards.

Kuldak scattered a handful of sand across the air, as the others watched. The grains shone with an odd light and hung suspended in the air, twisting first one way and then the next.

‘Like the great snakes of the Ochre Desert,’ Bodak said, looking at her. ‘He followed their trails, collecting the sands that they slithered across. He thinks they carry a potent magic in their scales, eh?’ He gestured, mimicking a snake’s undulations.

‘And what do you think, Bodak-of-the-Nine?’

‘I? I do not think. My magics are instinctive. We were born of magic, and I see no reason to clutter the issue with ritual and rite.’ He tapped the length of his club. ‘This is all the magic I require, O Destined Queen.’

‘Did you kill it yourself, then?’ she said. It was no small feat to slay a toad-dragon. The bilious beasts were impossibly tough. The strongest magics cascaded off their scales.

‘Eventually,’ Bodak said. ‘My brother loves you.’

‘Which one?’ she asked, watching Kuldak manipulate his coiling sands.

‘Sardak, of course. He’s always been the weakest of us. Even more so than Curdak, or gentle Yuhdak,’ Bodak said. ‘I do not love you, for I know you. There is no love in you, only hunger. I admire that, the way I might admire a roaring flame.’

‘But you are wary of it,’ she said. There was more to Bodak than she had first thought.

He nodded. ‘You do not trust me, do you, woman?’

‘Trust is as ephemeral as a morning mist,’ she said.

‘Ha!’ Bodak slapped his club and inclined his head. ‘I still wonder why the crow put us in your shadow, but I think I am beginning to understand. I–’

A shriek cut him off. One of her hillmen staggered, his leg pinned between two great talon-tips, rising from the floor. Something massive yet indistinct floated beneath them in the polished stones of the floor. Swiftly and surely, it dragged the unfortunate barbarian down, until only his face and hands remained free of the amber. Sardak stepped forwards, blade drawn, but Sharizad waved him back.

‘Do you not understand? We must pay the toll to go any further. Let it have him. He was born to die for me, and now he does so, fulfilled.’ She knelt beside the struggling warrior, and gently stroked his fear-struck features. Then, as he babbled in protest, she pushed him fully into the amber, until he was lost to sight. She stood. ‘Every time we stop, a toll is required. A new soul added to the mortar of this place.’

‘And that’s a price you’ll happily pay, is it?’ Bodak said, staring at her. Yuhdak placed a warning hand on his arm, but Bodak shrugged him off. ‘As I said, you are hungry, countess. And I fear you will devour us all, before you are satiated.’

‘Perhaps... or perhaps only the strong are fit to serve me. That is the way of it, Bodak. The weak are broken underfoot, and the strong stride forth. Which are you?’ Sharizad said.

‘We will find out by and by, I expect,’ Bodak said. ‘Ah, brother, your sands seem agitated.’ Sharizad turned and saw Kuldak gesturing frenziedly as his sands whipped around him. Abruptly, they flowed away from him and down one of the corridors.

‘Not agitated,’ Kuldak said. ‘Excited.’ He bowed floridly to Sharizad. ‘I have found the path, my queen.’

‘Or have been allowed to find it,’ Sharizad said. ‘Come, my warriors, my loves. Let us tarry no longer. Sardak, would you walk beside me?’ Sardak hurried to her side, as his brother stared in what Sharizad thought was either consternation or envy. Only four of them remained. She wondered whether she would be forced to cull the other three herself, or whether the Howling Labyrinth would do it for her.

‘You have lost five brothers so far, Sardak,’ Sharizad said, as they entered the corridor. Sardak didn’t look at her. He was seemingly rapt by the play of light across his gauntlet.

‘And we – I – feel all the better for it. Each one who falls adds to the strength of those remaining. Soon, only one of us will be left.’ He curled his clawed fingers. ‘And then we – I – he – shall know what it was all in service of.’

‘Strange are the ways of Tzeentch,’ Sharizad said.

‘And mighty his machinations,’ Sardak said, still gazing at his hand. ‘Did you know that we all have the same memories, until the moment of our sundering? And then our lives diverge like paths in a wood. I wonder, are we but possibilities? Is our contest nothing more than a winnowing of alternatives, until the moment when the true path makes itself known?’

‘And if it is?’ Sharizad asked, genuinely curious.

‘Then I intend my path to be the true one, my queen.’ Sardak reached out, as if to take her hand, but stopped himself. He turned away and she restrained a smile. Of all the Nine, Sardak was the easiest to predict. She hoped he was right. He would be powerful, and all the more useful for it. A potent champion to head her armies and carry her standard.

‘Who is Archaon?’ he asked, suddenly.

She looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Archaon. Who is he?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘When one of us dies, our fate becomes more clear. I see things, hear bits and pieces, rags and tatters of what may come to pass. When Curdak died, I heard a great voice call out a name – Archaon – and I knew... fear? And then, anticipation. Who is he?’

‘No one,’ Sharizad said, frowning. ‘A fable. A myth.’

‘You’re lying,’ Sardak said, softly.

Sharizad caught him by the throat and bore him backwards. He made no sound as she pinned him against the wall. A murmur swept through her warriors, and she felt, rather than saw, Sardak’s brothers move towards her. She ignored them. They were nothing. Lesser fates. ‘He is nothing. He bears a title no one gave him, and makes demands upon his betters. You do not serve Archaon, Sardak-of-the-Nine. You serve me.’

There was no anger in her voice, and none in her heart. Anger was useless, where the Grand Marshal of Chaos was concerned. Archaon was more myth than man, and more a force of nature than an enemy to be fought. His servants were legion and his aims simple: the complete and utter subjugation of the Mortal Realms in the name of the Ruinous Powers.

But the Ruinous Powers already had dominion here. It had been theirs for centuries. And what good had it done them? What good was absolute control, without an enemy to test yourself against? Archaon was a raging fire that would devour everything and snuff itself in the process. ‘You... serve... me,’ she hissed.

Sardak nodded, choking. She released him and stepped back. She turned. ‘You all serve me. Your fates are chained to mine now, as surely as those souls that I hold caged,’ she said, tapping a finger against the facets of her armour. ‘And if you test me I shall bring you to heel as I do them.’

One by one, they dropped to their knees before her. And Sharizad smiled.

CHAPTER NINE

Fight-of-fights

‘Bring that big one’s head, and any others that are in good shape, eh?’ Zephacleas said, knocking his knuckles against Thetaleas’ shoulder-plate. ‘I’ll set up the first few, you mount the others.’ The Decimator-Prime nodded and strode off, leaving his Lord-Celestant standing at the base of the escarpment. Taros joined Zephacleas, his gryph-hounds trailing in his wake.

‘More heads?’ the Lord-Castellant asked.

‘As many as are in good shape. We want to show our friendly foes that they’re welcome, after all,’ Zephacleas said. He hefted several makeshift poles made from longer bones onto his shoulder. An orruk head was mounted on each one.

‘Friendly,’ Taros repeated, flatly.

Zephacleas looked at him. ‘Orruks aren’t like the Bloodbound, or Rotbringers, brother. They are not things of Chaos. Rather, they are forces of nature. Your folk tilled the earth, did they not? Do you drain a river that threatens your fields, or do you merely divert it?’

Taros grunted. ‘Sometimes I forget you’re not half the fool Seker claims you are.’

‘Not half, no,’ Zephacleas said. The sound of orruk drums rose up from the other side of the escarpment. ‘Sounds like Stabbajak passed along my message. Took him long enough.’ He started up the slope, bones crunching beneath his feet. He stopped and glanced at Taros. ‘Are you coming?’ Taros shook his head and followed Zephacleas up the slope.

‘This is tantamount to suicide, you know,’ Taros said, when they reached the top. He looked down at the milling orruks. ‘That beast isn’t natural – he’s god-forged, as much as we are. You can smell it on the air.’

‘For shame, Nine-strike. Have you no faith in your Lord-Celestant?’ Zephacleas said. He set each of the makeshift poles with their grisly adornments into place. He angled them so that they faced the horde below. It was an old custom, though when and where he had learned it he could not truly recall. There was nothing an orruk feared more than missing a fight. This way, their ghosts could at least taste some of the blood that would be spilled in the coming hours.

‘I have faith that you’ll give a good accounting of yourself,’ Taros said doubtfully. ‘That monster has defeated at least three Warrior Chambers, Zephacleas. Remember what happened at the Biting Gorge, when the Lions of Sigmar tried to bring him to heel? Or in the Ghurvale, when he slaughtered an entire chamber of the Blades of Dawn? Hundreds of warriors have fallen to the axes of this creature.’

‘I remember,’ Zephacleas said. He finished fixing the last pole in place, and gave the head that surmounted it a friendly pat. ‘But there is an obvious difference between this moment and those that you are forgetting, my friend.’

‘Oh? And what might that be?’

‘None of those warriors were me.’ Zephacleas raised his weapons and shouted something in the harsh tongue of the orruks. Down below, the orruks reacted, screaming at the bulwark. Zephacleas continued to shout, and slammed his weapons together for good measure. The orruks matched him shout for shout, and began to stamp their feet and shake their weapons.

‘What in Sigmar’s name are you saying to them?’ Taros said.

‘Insults,’ Zephacleas said. ‘The orruk language is mostly insults. Well, insults and threats.’ He glanced at the Lord-Castellant. ‘The trick is getting the right mix. Too much, and they’ll just charge up the slope and attack. Too little, and they’ll laugh.’ He turned and shouted again. This time, from somewhere back amid the ranks of the orruks, a single voice replied. It was as loud as the thunder of Azyr, and as brutal as any beast’s roar. Bones rattled, and the Stormcasts at the top of the slope tensed. The other orruks fell silent. Zephacleas nodded in satisfaction and sheathed his sword. ‘There he is. Get ready.’

‘If this doesn’t work...’ Taros began.

‘If it doesn’t work, I’ll be bound for Reforging, and you’ll have to do what you can,’ Zephacleas said, bluntly. He looked at Taros. ‘But it will work. Why else would Sigmar have sent me?’

‘Necessity?’ Taros said.

‘Exactly, my friend. Necessity,’ Zephacleas said. He dropped his fist down on the other Stormcast’s shoulder-plate. ‘Hold fast. I’ll be back soon.’ Then he turned and stepped over the edge of the bulwark. He skidded down the slope of bones, slowing his descent with his free hand. He reached the bottom with a clatter and stood. The orruks spread out before him in a disorganised line. As ever, clan stood with clan, and were easily distinguished from one another. Gordrakk had bullied hundreds of smaller tribes into joining his horde.

Fist of Gork indeed, Zephacleas thought. That was only one of Gordrakk’s names. He was known in every corner of the Realm of Beasts and beyond. Wherever the Ironjawz ravaged, the name of Gordrakk went with them. He was the personification of a storm worse than any to have swept the Mortal Realms since the coming of Chaos.

Zephacleas walked towards the orruks, and was enveloped in an almost solid shroud of noise. They were louder than men. The creatures howled, cursed, thumped their shields, stamped their feet or otherwise added to the general cacophony as enthusiastically as possible. Sometimes he wondered if they made noise not to frighten their foes but to attract the attention of their gods. An orruk probably thought it had to make a lot of noise, given how many of them there were and how many battles their kind were waging throughout the Mortal Realms.

He slammed his weapons together as he walked. He suspected that Gordrakk was on his way to meet him, given the agitation in their ranks. When he caught sight of the lumbering shape of the maw-krusha, he knew he had been right. With a roar, the scaly beast lunged into the air and flew awkwardly over the heads of the orruks in the front ranks. It crashed down between the orruks and Zephacleas, shaking the ground. The wide head undulated forwards, and the maw-krusha bellowed in challenge.

Zephacleas crossed his weapons before his face and endured the wave of noise, though it shook him to his marrow. A maw-krusha’s roar could flatten a wall or pulverise flesh and bone in the right circumstances. The massive orruk sitting astride the monster’s neck slammed the haft of one of his two axes against the maw-krusha’s skull.

‘Shut it,’ Gordrakk roared. The monster subsided with a petulant rumbling.

Zephacleas looked up at Gordrakk, examining him. The orruk was the largest he had ever seen, larger even than a Stormcast, and clad in crude piecemeal armour. Savage trophies hung from every available surface, and his broad features were heavily scarred. It was the first time he had ever seen the beast known by some riftcoast tribes as Bastion-killer up close and in the warty flesh. The hillmen called Gordrakk the Mountain-cracker, and the folk of the Crawling City of Shu’gohl knew him as Obol’Ogar – the King of Death. None of those names truly captured the monstrous savagery of the orruk who glared down at him. A pall of implacable fury hung over the creature, and he stank of violence and brutality in a way that not even the followers of the Blood God could manage. Gordrakk was nothing less than the rage of a god given form.

But so too was Zephacleas – so too were all Stormcasts. Sigmar had forged them in wrath and they were as much things of divine rage as Gordrakk.

Zephacleas took a deep breath. Let us see whose rage is greater, then, he thought.

He pointed his runeblade at Gordrakk. ‘Are you going to hide up there all day, or are you going to come down here and fight?’ he shouted.

Gordrakk cocked his head. ‘You want to fight?’ he rumbled.

‘In a moment – first I want to talk,’ Zephacleas said. This was the most dangerous part. He had Gordrakk’s attention. Now he had to keep it. Otherwise the brute would just order his monstrous steed to swallow Zephacleas whole, and his forces to attack.

‘Talk?’ Gordrakk growled.

‘First we talk. Then we fight,’ Zephacleas said.

Gordrakk gave a harsh laugh. He thumped the maw-krusha’s head with the haft of one of his axes and the great beast lowered itself with a querulous grunt. The orruk slid down and lumbered towards Zephacleas.

When he reached the Lord-Celestant, Gordrakk buried both of his axes in a large skull half covered by earth and crossed his thick arms over his chest. ‘You wanted to talk, so talk, storm-thing,’ he growled. The creature’s voice was like a sack of rocks caught in an iron drum, but there was a savage intelligence in his eyes.

‘Zephacleas,’ Zephacleas said.

‘What?’

‘My name is Zephacleas,’ he said. ‘And I bring the word of the Hammer God.’

Gordrakk laughed. ‘Oh? Does the Hammer God want to fight Gordrakk, or just you?’

‘The Hammer God wants to talk to Gorkamorka,’ Zephacleas said.

‘So?’ Gordrakk said, waving his hand.

‘The Hammer God doesn’t know where Gorkamorka is. He thinks you do.’

Gordrakk cocked his head, as if listening to something. Or perhaps someone. The creature studied Zephacleas for a moment. Then he grunted and looked up. He caught sight of the heads on their poles, jutting from the bulwark. One in particular caught his eye.

‘Drokka,’ Gordrakk grunted, peering up at the head. He looked at Zephacleas. ‘Good fight?’

Zephacleas shrugged. ‘I’ve had better. He had a bad knee.’

Gordrakk threw his head back and laughed uproariously. Still chuckling, he said, ‘You want to find Gorkamorka?’

‘I do.’

‘If you win, I tell you,’ Gordrakk said. He thrust a finger in his ear and twirled it. ‘You lose, maybe you meet Gorkamorka anyway.’ He pulled his finger out of his ear and sniffed it. Then he looked at Zephacleas. ‘You ready to fight Gordrakk now?’

‘Why else would I be standing here?’ Zephacleas said. Then, ‘Maybe Gordrakk doesn’t want to fight me, eh?’

Gordrakk stopped laughing. He cocked his head and put a hand up to his ear. ‘What?’

‘I said...’ Zephacleas began. He knew what was coming, and he rolled with the blow as Gordrakk punched him in the face. He staggered, armour reverberating, ears ringing. Gordrakk tore his weapons free of the skull and charged towards him with a bellow.

Zephacleas backed away, trying to clear his head. Gordrakk was strong – stronger even than he had anticipated. Zephacleas had been struck by ogors and gargants, but rarely had his wits been so addled by a single blow.

Gordrakk swung wildly at him, his axes hissing through the air. Zephacleas, ears still ringing, ducked aside and booted his opponent in the small of the back. Gordrakk roared and stumbled.

‘You want to fight dirty?’ Zephacleas called after him. ‘We’ll fight dirty.’

Zazul watched the duel begin with mingled satisfaction and agitation. As with every twist of fate, here was a chance for success and failure all in one. If the orruk won, the Stormcast Eternals would be summarily defeated. If the Stormcast won, then Gordrakk’s threat would be ended once and for all. But... he had not planned for this. He had not foreseen it. The strands of fate trembled, uncertain, loose in all the wrong places. He heard a croaking and looked up. Ravens circled overhead. One of them swooped towards him.

‘They have tricked you, Zazul,’ the raven croaked as it landed on his shoulder.

‘What?’ He glanced at the bird, and then up, where the others circled.

‘The Stormcasts are moving towards the Howling Labyrinth. This is but a distraction.’

‘Why did you not warn me?’ he snarled.

‘I just have warned you,’ she replied. The raven fixed him with a glittering eye.

‘We had a bargain, witch. You and your flock owe me a debt, and you shall not squirm out of it,’ he said. He caught hold of the bird before she could flee. Briefly, he considered crushing her. But to do so would enrage the remaining members of her flock. He could not afford to fight the Ninety-Nine Feathers, not here and now. He glanced up, watching the circling forms of the others, and frowned. No, he could still get some use out of them.

Still clutching the raven, he sidled towards Stabbajak and the others. The remaining megabosses crouched, watching the duel. They did not watch as deathbringers might have watched, or any other champions of the Ruinous Powers, seeking opportunity and searching for weakness in an opponent. Instead, they were rapt, hypnotised by the spectacle being played out before them. He winced as something passed between the orruks and his veil flickered. He glanced back at the duel.

It was hard to tell who was winning. Gordrakk was the stronger, but the Stormcast fought with a fury that Zazul had seldom witnessed. The two traded blows that would have killed a lesser being. Every time their weapons connected, lightning sparked. The longer they fought, the greater Gordrakk’s rage grew, and the greater the orruks’ excitement became. His head ached with the weight of it all. He could feel the strands of magic he had woven about himself coming undone. He didn’t have long.

‘Gordrakk ain’t looking,’ Zazul hissed, trying to worm his way into Stabbajak’s thoughts. His voice pulsed on the air, bleeding into the orruk’s mind. Or so it should have done. Instead, Stabbajak simply scratched his jowls and gestured irritably. ‘You can go give him a kickin’, Stabbajak... You and all the others,’ Zazul pressed.

‘Shut up, shaman,’ the one-eyed orruk grunted, without looking at him. His eye, the eyes of all of his fellow megabosses, were on the fight. They growled with pleasure every time a blow was struck. To Zazul, the orruks’ minds glowed like the embers of a brazier, pulsing with a power he could not fathom. The orruks drew what brute sorcery they possessed not from the gods, but from within themselves. Each one was like a fire, stirred to life and fed by carnage and violence. It blazed within the soul of every orruk in sight, Ironjaw and otherwise. Some chanted, others thumped the ground with fists and feet, and blinding sparks of emerald light bounced from skull to skull and soul to soul.

It was a hurricane, battering against the walls of his psyche, a raw, elemental force that he had no counter for. It was a hungry thing, almost alive. For a moment, Zazul almost felt fear. There was no controlling such a force. One could only divert it for a time. And his time was almost up. He felt Stabbajak’s eye on him, and he snarled. The megaboss stared at him openly.

‘You don’t look right, Jabberjaw...’

Zazul hissed. He could feel his spells beginning to bend beneath the force of that hurricane. ‘Fine then, and fie,’ he said. His glamour faded, and he stood revealed in gold and azure, his brutish totems transformed into the tools of his art – his grimoires, scrolls and talismans. The wood of his skull-topped staff shifted and ran like water, shedding its crude shroud to become a war-staff, surmounted by the witch-rune of Tzeentch.

The orruk gaped at him and then snarled, reaching for the blade on his belt. Zazul thrust his taloned gauntlet forwards and into Stabbajak’s chest. The megaboss howled and convulsed as bale-fire filled him and burned him up from the inside out. Zazul tore his hand free of the ashes and spun, filling the air with fire and death.

‘Fie on all brutes and savages,’ he roared, as orruks screamed. With a gesture, he condensed the ashes and scraps of bloody flesh into the shape of a disc. Blades of bone sprouted from its rim and slashed at the closest orruks with predatory intent. Stinger-tipped tendrils flicked out, helping him to step up onto it.

He hurled the raven into the air.

‘One last service, witch – kill them!’

‘He’s doing well enough, don’t you think?’ Taros Nine-strike said, watching the duel as its participants careered back and forth below. Stormcasts stood arrayed on the wall of bone, watching as their Lord-Celestant fought the orruk megaboss.

Seker Gravewalker inclined his head. ‘Whatever his faults, Zephacleas is a match for most warriors, living or dead.’ He watched his Lord-Celestant parry a wild axe-stroke and reply in kind with his hammer. The combatants’ weapons clashed loudly as they staggered and stumbled back and forth. Despite his faith in Zephacleas, it was obvious that the Lord-Celestant was all but outmatched by his monstrous opponent. Gordrakk fought wildly, and seemed to grow in strength the harder Zephacleas resisted him.

Seker could almost see the spirits that clung to the orruk’s axes. They were indistinct things, more hint than substance. They grew more vibrant as Gordrakk became stronger, and seemed to guide his hand. They fed off each other, though the Lord-Relictor could not say which it started with. He had fought orruks often enough, both as a mortal and since, to know that it didn’t truly matter.

He could see the heat of the Waaagh! growing amongst the mobs of orruks who chanted and watched as their boss-of-bosses battled Sigmar’s chosen. It was a flame easily fanned, and it grew in direct proportion to Gordrakk’s fury. It beat against the surface of Seker’s thoughts with palpable force, and he murmured a prayer of protection. The battle-madness of Gorkamorka was akin to a sickness, and could infect and weaken even the strongest of wills. He prayed that Zephacleas could resist it.

His worries faded as he caught a hint of unnatural radiance hovering amongst the orruks. It was a sour glow, like the shine on infected flesh. Seker recognised that light easily enough, and felt a chill.

‘No...’ he murmured.

He turned to Taros. ‘We must–’ He was interrupted by a sudden explosion from within the orruk ranks. Burning bodies were hurled into the air, or sent tumbling across the ground like windblown leaves. Zephacleas and Gordrakk, weapons locked together, ceased their battle and turned as one.

Moments later, there was a harsh cry from above and a flock of ravens swooped down towards the two, croaking and shrieking. The birds twisted as they fell, sprouting arms and legs and curved black blades, becoming robed and armoured warriors who attacked Gordrakk and Zephacleas.

‘Judicators!’ Taros roared, sweeping his halberd down. Skybolt bows crackled and black shapes fell, but not all, and not enough.

Orruks roared and charged forwards, but before they could reach the combatants, multi-hued flames exploded outwards and consumed them.

‘What in Sigmar’s name was that?’ Taros snarled.

‘Sorcery,’ Seker said. ‘There – look!’

The sorcerer hurtled towards Zephacleas and Gordrakk. He stood atop a shrieking daemon-disc, clutching a staff wreathed in baleful flames and clad in shimmering robes and armour of beaten gold. In his wake came a chortling horde of gangly-limbed monstrosities. The pink-fleshed daemons were truly bizarre, their spindly limbs flailing about blocky torsos that sported leering faces. They emitted shrieks of excitement as they floundered towards Zephacleas and Gordrakk, or else fell upon the nearby orruks with cheerful ferocity.

Trails of pinkish smoke and shimmering lights surrounded them as they ran, scampered and caterwauled through the greenskin ranks. Sickly hued warp-flames erupted from their constantly moving paws, and whole mobs of orruks were incinerated. Others were twisted into wholly monstrous shapes by the unnatural fire. The bodies of the daemons resisted all save the strongest blows, and any wound that did not kill them vanished as if it had never been made. Only Gordrakk’s maw-krusha seemed to have no difficulty in tearing them apart, but for every daemon the beast ripped in half, two smaller blue ones emerged from the carcass to clutch and claw at the monster.

Gordrakk headbutted a raven-warrior, flattening him, and caught sight of the sorcerer gliding towards him.

‘I see you, Jabberjaw,’ he bellowed. ‘You thought you could fool me, but I see you! I’ll have you, Jabberjaw, no matter how many gigglers and bird-boys you got!’ The orruk started forwards, but a darting, bird-like shape slid past him, its sword scraping against his chest. Gordrakk stumbled back with a roar of anger as more of the raven-warriors darted towards him, moving with unnatural speed. Black, curved blades drew sparks from Gordrakk’s armour, keeping him off balance.

Zephacleas moved to aid the orruk and soon the two were fighting back-to-back against daemons and raven-warriors alike. Behind them, creatures were scrambling up the slope of bones towards the Stormcasts. The Judicators loosed volley after volley, but the daemons seemed limitless. At Taros’ order, the Liberators set themselves, awaiting the talons and Chaos-fire of the foe. Seker stepped to the edge of the slope, the words of a prayer on his lips. He lifted his reliquary staff in both hands and brought it down with a dull crunch.

Lightning streaked down, striking the reliquary case. It spilled through the staff and spread in a rippling azure wave through the bone escarpment. Daemons shrieked as the celestial energies reduced them to motes of ash. Without pausing for breath, the Lord-Relictor uprooted his staff and leapt off the top.

Seker slid down the slope of bones, his reliquary staff extended before him. Lightning flared from the eye sockets of the fire-wyrm skull mounted within it, and washed across the closest of the black-robed warriors attacking Zephacleas, staggering some of them, killing others. The Lord-Relictor reached the bottom in a spill of bones, and lunged forwards, his hammer snapping out to catch a shrieking pink monstrosity in its malformed face. The daemon pitched backwards with what might have been a whoop of happiness, its body splitting into two. Lean limbs sprung out of the collapsing pink carcass, but before the blue daemons could free themselves, Seker incinerated them with a burst of lightning. More daemons bounded towards him, outsized paws reaching for him.

He spat a prayer, calling down Sigmar’s fury. Lightning cascaded from the sky, and the daemons caught in its path jerked and twitched in agony. But still more of them tumbled towards him, shrieking in glee.

It is the sorcerer who has called them, he thought. Kill him, and they will lose their hold on the world.

He crushed a giggling horror with a blow from his hammer and stepped towards the sorcerer, who stood atop his daemon-disc, untouched amidst the carnage, surrounded by his flames.

The Lord-Relictor fought his way through the gambolling daemons. When he was within striking distance, he called down the lightning once more with a shouted incantation. It slammed to ground, lighting up the battlefield and nearly blinding every eye that saw it, mortal or otherwise. The sorcerer was caught unawares. His daemon-disc screamed like an infant and came apart in strands of bloody smoke, tumbling him to the ground. He staggered to his feet, flames momentarily snuffed, his golden armour blackened, his featureless helm cracked. Seker lunged forwards, hammer raised.

But before he could land a blow, a slim, feather-shrouded shape intervened. A curved blade scraped sparks from his skull-faced helm, driving him to one knee. Stunned, he looked up at his attacker. He saw a woman, clad in obsidian armour and robes. Two great wings, as black as the void between stars, stretched out from her back. Her narrow helmet was shaped like the head of a raven, and the eyes within glittered with a darkling radiance. She pressed the tip of her sword to his throat and cocked her head.

‘Your soul is made of lightning – do you wish to return to the storm, as the others did?’

Before he could answer, she threw back her head and gave a croaking laugh. Then she turned to the sorcerer, who was staring at them in what Seker thought must be consternation. Seker thrust himself to his feet, hammer raised.

‘Our bargain is finished, Zazul,’ the woman in black cried, as she whirled aside, avoiding Seker’s blow. ‘A life for a life! Our debt to you is paid, Radiant One, and the Ninety-Nine Feathers bid you farewell!’ She leapt into the air with a shriek, and the others followed her. Black-feathered birds swooped skywards as the sorcerer stared after them.

‘No! Cheat! Your debt is not... Fine. Fie on it, and fie on you, Stormcast,’ the sorcerer snarled, as he turned his attention on Seker. He drew his curved sword. ‘You thought you could kill me? My destiny lies elsewhere – but yours is here.’ He lifted his staff, and the air before him split like a wound. Pink daemons pressed against the rent in reality and spilled, chortling, to the ground. They capered towards Seker, their fiery paws blackening his sigmarite. More and more of them, a flood of unnatural flesh and leering faces. He fell back, defending himself as best he could. There was no time to summon the lightning, and for a moment he feared he would be overwhelmed.

Then, all at once, a blazing light swept over him, and those daemons closest to him were reduced to ash and dust. Seker turned.

‘Stand fast, brother,’ Taros said, striding forwards, his warding lantern raised. ‘I am here and I shall not let you fall.’

The light of the lantern washed out, incinerating any daemons that drew close, including the ones still surrounding Seker. Those that managed to avoid the holy light fell to Taros’ halberd, or the sharp beaks and talons of his gryph-hounds. Behind the Lord-Castellant marched the rest of the Beast-bane, shields raised.

Seker thrust himself through the ash-cloud of dissolving daemons towards the sorcerer. The creature was intent on killing Gordrakk, and his flames enveloped the bellowing orruk even as Seker closed in. The sorcerer turned at the last moment, alerted by some instinct, and Seker was forced to duck beneath a gout of coruscating witch-fire. As the flames died away, he lunged forwards and smashed the ferrule of his reliquary staff into the sorcerer’s chest, knocking him backwards. Off balance, the sorcerer slashed out with his blade, and knocked Seker’s hammer from his grip. Knowing that to pause was to die, the Lord-Relictor brought his reliquary staff around, driving the fire-wyrm skull into the side of his opponent’s head. Bone cracked and the sorcerer staggered.

‘You...’ the sorcerer began.

‘I told you, Jabberjaw,’ a deep voice rasped. The sorcerer turned. Gordrakk stepped forwards, smoke rising from his armour and axes. ‘I ain’t so easy to kill. And I told you I’d feed you to the gore-gruntas, one piece at a time.’ Faster than Seker could react, the orruk drove one of his axes down through the sorcerer’s head with a wet sound. The sorcerer convulsed, his flames dying, the sword falling from his hand. ‘Kunnin’ says be quiet,’ Gordrakk growled. He slammed his other axe into the sorcerer’s side, nearly splitting his enemy in two. Gordrakk wrenched his axes free of the sorcerer with a roar and, as if in response, every remaining daemon, whether pink or blue, wavered and vanished.

Breathing heavily, Gordrakk glared at Seker. He extended his axe towards the Lord-Relictor. ‘This your shaman, hammer-boss?’

‘Aye,’ Zephacleas said.

‘Does he talk a lot?’

‘Less than you’d think,’ Zephacleas said.

Gordrakk nodded. ‘That’s good.’ He looked around. Orruks and Stormcasts watched each other warily, both sides bloody and battered from the battle. ‘Good fight.’ He turned back to Zephacleas. ‘Ready to finish what we started, hammer-boss?’

‘No. You win,’ Zephacleas said. Gordrakk blinked. Then, a slow grin spread across his brutal features. Gordrakk lifted his head and bellowed in triumph.

Zephacleas waited for him to finish. ‘Now, will the Fist of Gork heed the words of the Hammer God?’ He gestured towards Seker. ‘Speak, shaman – what does the Hammer God say?’

Gordrakk looked at Seker, and the Lord-Relictor was momentarily taken aback by the savage intelligence in the orruk’s eyes. Thinking quickly, he said, ‘The Hammer God says that there is another enemy. The enemy who tricked Gordrakk...’

Gordrakk growled. Seker went on. ‘The enemy who hides atop the skull of the great star-wyrm,’ he said, and pointed towards the centre of the Gargant’s Graveyard. ‘The enemy who hides from Gorkamorka and the Hammer God both.’

Gordrakk fell silent. The orruk’s head was cocked, as if listening to something. Seker could see the great, green forces that clung to him pulsing like dying suns and he wondered what might be passing between them.

Is this then the god we seek, he thought, or something else? He looked around, and to his eyes, green flames flickered in the gaze of every orruk, growing brighter and brighter.

At last, Gordrakk looked at Zephacleas. ‘You put Drokka’s head on a stick. And you fought beside me, against the gigglers and the bird-boys.’

‘I did,’ Zephacleas said.

Gordrakk laughed and spread his arms. He howled with what might have been joy, or excitement, or perhaps warning. Every orruk howled with him, and Seker shivered as he felt the edges of the power within that sound.

‘Maybe I bash you first, and then them, hnh, hammer-boss?’ Gordrakk said.

‘Would that be any way to treat your friends, Gordrakk?’ Zephacleas said. His response only made Gordrakk laugh.

As the orruk’s harsh chortles scraped his eardrums, Zephacleas shook his head. Not for the first time, he wondered whether this was the wisest course. Not simply his own actions, but those of Sigmar as well. Zephacleas was not alone in seeking out the gods who slumbered hidden in the Mortal Realms. Others had been dispatched to Shyish and Ulgu, to find those who had once stood beside Sigmar: Nagash, Tyrion and his brother Teclis, Malerion, as well as Gorkamorka.

Of those other quests, Zephacleas knew little save that the warriors sent to seek the Starless Gates in the Realm of Death had met some terrible fate. The forge-seers whispered of shuddering spirits, almost too broken to be reforged, and of a single soul as yet missing.

A chill passed through Zephacleas at the thought. Orruks were dangerous, but the dead were even worse in some ways. At least orruks wouldn’t swallow your soul. He eyed the battered trophies that hung from Gordrakk’s back-banner. Not so far as he was aware, at any rate...

He controlled his revulsion at the sight of the dracoth’s skull, and the shattered husk of a Lord-Celestant’s helm. Davos Silverclaw, he realised, recognising the helmet’s markings. The Silverclaw was a Lord-Celestant of the Lions of Sigmar, and had been one of the first Stormcasts to be unlucky enough to cross Gordrakk’s path.

Gordrakk caught him looking and smiled unpleasantly. He reached up with one of his axes and tapped the helmet.

‘Good fighter, him. Took two chops with Smasha to take his head off,’ the orruk said, chuckling. Zephacleas felt his stomach twist.

‘I’ll let him know you said that. And that you have his helmet. He’s been looking for it,’ he said, with forced cheerfulness. Gordrakk’s smile faded.

‘You said that the Hammer God wants to meet Gorkamorka?’ He looked at Zephacleas. ‘Where’s the Hammer God?’ He looked around. ‘Why isn’t he here?’

‘He’s in Azyr,’ Zephacleas said. Gordrakk looked at him blankly. Then, ‘In the storm, and the rain and every rumble of thunder. He can’t come, because he’s fighting. But he sent me to talk for him, and I know where he is.’

Gordrakk nodded in understanding. ‘Good. That’s good. You should always know where your god is, in case he forgets and gets lost.’

‘Is Gorkamorka lost, then?’

Gordrakk threw back his head and howled with laughter. ‘Gorkamorka isn’t lost. Gorkamorka is everywhere,’ Gordrakk rumbled. ‘He’s in the wind and the rocks and the howling of the beasts. Gorkamorka is in us and beside us and around us.’

‘So he’s here now? Can he hear us?’ Zephacleas looked around.

‘Maybe, if he’s listening,’ Gordrakk said, with a shrug. ‘Maybe one of him hears, and not the other. Maybe both. Maybe neither.’ He grinned at Zephacleas. ‘Maybe he doesn’t like what he hears and tells me to bash you in the noggin, hammer-boss.’

‘The Hammer God misses his friend. He misses his brother. He misses fighting beside Gorkamorka and wishes to do so again, in the coming war,’ Zephacleas said. ‘He wishes that his warriors, and those of his brother, could march side-by-side, as we do now, to fight the Old Enemy.’

‘Gorkamorka has been fighting them, hammer-boss,’ Gordrakk rumbled. ‘He’s been fighting them forever. But where is the Hammer God? Why has he not been fighting alongside Gorkamorka?’

‘The Hammer God thought Gorkamorka didn’t want to fight beside him any more,’ Zephacleas said. ‘The Hammer God thought Gorkamorka had become his enemy.’

Gordrakk laughed. ‘Yeah? So?’ He snorted and tapped the side of his head. ‘Hammer God never understood Gorkamorka, never saw. Gorkamorka wants to fight forever, but the Hammer God doesn’t. Hammer God wants to build walls and towers and castles... But what’s the point of that if you never knock them over?’ He snorted. ‘Even the Chaos-things don’t understand. They think the point is to kill everyone, but then who’d be there to fight? Nobody understands but Ironjawz, because we’re the smartest and the toughest.’

Zephacleas stared at the orruk. Despite himself, he was beginning to comprehend how Gordrakk saw the world. For the orruks, there was no difference between an enemy and a friend. A friend was just an enemy you weren’t fighting at the moment, and an enemy was just a friend who was trying to kill you. He cocked his head, considering. Then, he said, ‘So? Why not show us?’

Gordrakk stared at him. The moment stretched and Zephacleas began to think he had made a mistake. Finally, Gordrakk grunted and spat. He clashed his axes together.

‘I came here to see what’s at the top of the Big Skull, and if you want to follow me, you can. If you can keep up.’ The orruk leaned forwards. ‘And if there are Chaos-things up there, I’ll thump ’em but good and show them who’s the boss of the boneyard. Boss-of-bosses,’ he growled. ‘Not even gods give me lip. Gordrakk is the best!’ He turned and raised his axes in a defiant gesture.

‘They think they can trick me? Hide from me? You hear, Chaos-things – nobody hides from Gordrakk,’ he roared. ‘Gordrakk is coming to get you!’

CHAPTER TEN

Skull of the Star-wyrm

The skull of the great star-wyrm was half sunken in the earth. Even so, its shadow covered the closest canyons and paths that the Sons of Mallus smashed their way through to reach it. Curtains of tangled roots filled its gigantic eye sockets, and great slopes of dust and scattered bone filled its cracks and followed its contours, creating wide, curving paths from the ground to its crown. A shrill wind blew through the wide cracks in the immense skull, and clouds of dust billowed across the heart of the Gargant’s Graveyard. Dust devils spun through the empty spaces, making it nearly impossible to see anything save the skull itself, rising like a mountain, and the abominable structure that crowned it.

It had taken what felt like hours to traverse the shadowed emptiness between the boneyard and the skull that was its centre. At the summit, the gleaming, ever-changing shape of the Howling Labyrinth taunted Greel. It seemed to be beckoning him, calling him. At first, he thought it was simply eagerness, or his earlier determination. But as they drew closer to the palisade of brown fangs, each as tall as a watchtower and sunk deep into the ground, Greel began to feel doubt. It was not born of fear, or worry, but suspicion. Suspicion that he and his warriors were being led into a trap. That things had been too easy.

His suspicions only grew as they passed through the field of skulls. The skulls – both human and orruk – hung in bunches from spears that had been thrust at random intervals into the lower slopes of the skull. Hungry birds squawked and squabbled over the choicest morsels, and hopped from spear to spear, thrusting their beaks into eye sockets and sagging jaws.

Someone is defending this place, he thought.

‘Stay alert,’ he said, as they climbed the widest of the windblown paths that wound their way up the side of the star-wyrm’s skull. The path was long and twisting, narrower in some places than others. The air became thin and foul the higher they went. Sometimes, Greel caught the briefest snatch of sound, of the clangour of battle, from far below and away among the canyons of the boneyard.

When the first arrow caromed off Greel’s chest-plate, it didn’t come as a complete surprise. Dust scraped against his armour as he peered up at the force occupying the upper reaches of the path. The Stormcasts were halfway to the summit, and the ground stretched far below. The warriors above them were mortal, clad in steel armour and silk robes. They wore conical helms and carried heavy war-bows, which they loosed with deadly accuracy. A Liberator pitched backwards as an arrow sprouted from the eye-slit of his helm. His body jerked and came apart in a burst of lightning. Greel cursed and chopped an arrow in two as it sped towards him.

‘More dangerous than they look,’ he muttered. ‘Raise shields.’

The Liberators moved forwards, one rank kneeling, the other moving up behind them. Two rows of shields formed a curved bulwark of sigmarite on the slope, protecting those behind against the arrows raining down from above. Greel twitched as an arrow spanged off his helm. He turned. ‘Judicators, to the front. Match them arrow for arrow. Teach them that we are better at this game than they could ever hope to be.’

Crackling volleys sent the mortal archers searching for cover. Before Greel could order his chamber forwards to take advantage of the enemy’s disarray, he heard a strange trilling and the thunder of hooves. He turned and cursed as he saw armoured horsemen galloping up the path towards his warriors.

The Chaos knights wore heavy, hell-forged armour the colour of malachite, and their steeds were scaly with strange gemstones that erupted from their flesh. Some wielded axes and swords, others held broad-bladed spears. They sang an eerie trilling hymn as they galloped up the slope of bone and soil. Fur and feather-clad hillmen loped after them, howling out arrhythmic war-songs as they slammed their weapons against their brightly painted shields.

‘They’re behind us,’ Greel snarled. ‘Hold fast, shields to the rear.’ Those Liberators not already engaged at the front moved quickly, readying themselves to meet the enemy charging up towards them. The Iron-sides had formed a rough square, but they were caught between two enemies on a narrow path. They could neither advance nor retreat, not without incurring casualties.

Greel shook his head in frustration. If it must be done, let it be done quickly, he thought angrily. I will waste no more time.

‘Lycos, ready your axes,’ he called. The Decimator-Prime lifted his thunderaxe in a sign that he had heard. ‘The rest of you, we must split the square. Two phalanxes. Calithus, take the high ground. Whatever else happens, you must reach the Howling Labyrinth. Let nothing stay you from your goal.’

Greel turned back to the approaching Chaos knights. He tapped his hammer against the shoulder-plate of one of the Liberators standing before him. ‘Gorenus, concentrate on the savages. Leave the knights to Lycos’ axemen. Let nothing get past you to endanger Calithus’ rear.’ The Liberator nodded silently. Satisfied, Greel drew his runeblade and glanced at Lycos. ‘Ready?’

‘Yes, Lord-Celestant. Let us teach them to fear the axes of Azyr,’ Lycos said. He and his Decimators stepped forwards, past the shield wall. Greel joined them, and with barely a sound, the Sons of Mallus moved to meet their attackers. The Chaos knights did not slow, but instead spread out, so that more of them could join the madcap gallop.

As they reached the waiting Decimators, Lycos barked a command. The Decimators sank down, and their thunderaxes licked out to cut the legs out from under the charging horses. The daemonic steeds fell with squeals and disturbingly human screams. Their thrashing bodies tangled those of their fellows racing behind them, and the second rank of riders fell in their turn, or else found their charge blunted. The Decimators stalked forwards, giving their foes no chance to recover. Axes rose and fell, reaping a red harvest from amongst the helpless knights. Those who survived rushed to encircle the Decimators.

Greel started forwards, Gorenus’ Liberators at his back. They picked up speed as the tribesmen loped through the melee. Shields crashed into tattooed flesh as the Liberators forced their savage foes back with bone-crushing inexorability. The tribesmen’s weapons skittered harmlessly off the sigmarite, and soon they were put to flight, leaving only despairing howls in their wake. But the Chaos knights held their ground, still emitting their eerie trill. Their armour was almost as tough as sigmarite, and they fought almost as well as the Stormcasts.

Those Chaos knights who were still mounted tried to use the bulk of their scaly steeds to force a path through the Liberators. One, his armour more ornate than that of his companions, drove a heavy spear through the gap between Gorenus’ helmet and his chest-plate, killing him instantly. As the Chaos knight’s steed reared, startled by the crash of lightning that followed, Greel charged him from the side. The knight wheeled his mount around with a hollow oath as he caught sight of the Lord-Celestant.

Greel struck the daemonic horse, breaking its scaly neck with a blow from his hammer. As it fell, its rider tumbled from the saddle and crashed down. Greel raised his sword as the Chaos knight scrambled to his feet, drawing his own blade as he did so. The Lord-Celestant parried the warrior’s blow, and swung his hammer. The Chaos knight twisted aside. They circled one another.

‘You are the one the Destined Queen killed in the Temple of the Empty Heart,’ the Chaos knight said, his voice almost a moan. ‘I recognise your soul-scent.’

Greel didn’t reply, though a chill swept through him. He rained down blow after blow, driving his opponent back towards the edge of the slope. The Chaos knight laughed hollowly as he retreated, his sword extended in a two-handed grip. ‘I was there that day... You fought bravely, for a storm-born cur. But bravery is no substitute for skill, is it? I was like you, once. I thought to match blades and cunning with her, but my skills were as nothing to hers. I knew when I was beaten.’

‘That is the difference between us,’ Greel said. ‘I know no such thing.’ He lunged and the Chaos knight reared back, sword lifted over his head. Before he could strike, however, the slope gave way beneath him and he toppled backwards with a cry. Greel watched the emerald shape of his opponent grow smaller and smaller, until it was gone, and the only sound was the cry of carrion-birds. Then he turned and began to ascend, picking his way over the trail of dead, trying not to think about his opponent’s parting words.

When he reached the others, he saw that Calithus had smashed the bowmen, scattering their bodies for the crows. Lycos and his Decimators waited nearby, their axes dripping with the ichor of the Chaos knights. Without a word, they fell into step behind Greel and followed him. He led them along the path in silence. Every so often, the ground beneath his feet trembled, as if the skull were stirring in its eternal slumber. Everything about this place had an air of anticipation.

It grew worse the closer the Stormcasts drew to the summit. The air became treacle-like and foul, as if the Howling Labyrinth radiated some vile miasma. The sound of unseen gears and mechanisms throbbed, causing Greel’s teeth to rattle in his jaw. His first glimpse of the Howling Labyrinth in all of its glory brought him to a horrified standstill.

It was all shapes and none, constantly shifting, expanding, shrinking. It clung to the curve of the star-wyrm’s skull, held fast by massive iron hooks and tendrils of amber that had long ago merged with the bare bone. Pylons of stone braced the ever-moving structure, grinding softly as they were thrust aside or pulled in. Dust spilled from its joints, filling the air and hiding its true scope. Facets of amber slid into place, rising and falling with arrhythmic precision. Towers grew from its body, only to bend and burst, rejoining the sprawling structure. Carrion-birds perched precariously on jutting flanges of amber, croaking disharmoniously.

‘Sigmar above, it’s a monstrosity,’ Lycos whispered hoarsely. Greel nodded.

‘It is the work of Chaos,’ he said simply. He saw no entrance. Archways formed like blisters only to shrink and vanish in moments. The surface of the walls was lit by an oily sheen, and strange, unformed shapes moved within them. He stepped forwards and raised his hammer. What had served in the boneyard would serve here – he would simply smash his way in, if he had to.

‘I... see... you, child of Azyr. Long have I awaited thee, little carcass.’

The voice echoed out over the crown of the skull, and set the carrion-birds to flight. Greel felt a wave of repulsion as its words insinuated themselves in his mind. He stopped, hammer raised.

‘And who are you? Some daemon, set to guard this place? It matters not. You shall not stop me.’

‘And why would I wish to do that, Gaius Greel? I have been waiting for you for many lifetimes, warrior. I have kept her running in circles, chasing shadows, until you could reach me.’ Then, somewhat petulantly, ‘You took quite a long time, my friend. I began to despair of you, if you must know...’

‘Her – you mean Sharizad?’ Greel said, though every instinct warned him against speaking to whatever this thing was. It knew his name. It knew why he had come.

‘Who else? The daughter of the Manifold Path has come to her chosen moment, and fate will and must decree that you be there to oppose her. It has always been and so it will be.’

The voice laughed, and Greel’s skin crawled.

‘Silence – if you would take me to her, then do so. If you will not, then I shall tear this labyrinth apart, brick by brick,’ he growled, hammer raised. The laughter tapered off.

‘Careful, careful, son of the Dark Moon. Your fate is not so straight as all that, and if you insult me, I might just trap you both for an eternity to amuse myself.’ The unseen entity gave a vast sigh, and the skull trembled underfoot. ‘But... I am tired. So tired. I would see it all at an end.’

Before Greel’s eyes, the bricks of amber began to ripple like water and, one by one, they split. A gigantic, dripping orifice opened in the wall and the dark corridor beyond squirmed as if in invitation. His warriors murmured in consternation as the darkness fled, and strange lights lit the path. At the other end of its length, he could see a high, wide archway, full of ochre smoke.

‘What is this?’ he said. ‘Some trick?’

‘No trick. You are expected, after all. The Howling Labyrinth knows its own. Your coming was etched into every brick and slab of my prison, warrior.

‘Enter, Gaius Greel... Enter and be damned.’

Zephacleas and his warriors ran smoothly in the wake of the orruks. The greenskins chanted, argued and, in some cases, fought as they loped. Noise rose from the warhorde constantly, merging into a wordless dissonance that shook the bones of the canyon even more than the bellowing of Gordrakk’s maw-krusha. It was the rumble of an avalanche and the snarl of raging waters. They truly are like a river, he thought. A force that could not be stopped, only diverted.

He glanced aside at Seker. The Lord-Relictor showed no ill-effects from his confrontation with the Chaos sorcerer. He kept pace with Zephacleas easily, as did those warriors Zephacleas had chosen to accompany them. He had taken barely a third of their forces, knowing that any more might provoke the orruks, who were spoiling for a fight.

Despite the fact that they had joined forces to defeat the daemons, the orruks had initially seemed quite happy to pile into the Stormcasts. Only Gordrakk’s bellowed imprecations, and the threat of his axes, had seen the creatures subside. Now they charged ahead of the Stormcasts, smashing a path towards the heart of the Gargant’s Graveyard and the enemies that awaited them there.

Taros would follow Zephacleas and the others more slowly, ready to reinforce them should it become necessary. Or, failing that, prevent Sharizad from escaping the Gargant’s Graveyard. The Lord-Castellant intended to ring the vast skull in sigmarite. Zephacleas hoped Taros’ defences wouldn’t be put to the test. The Shimmering Countess had escaped once. He didn’t intend for her to do so again.

Far ahead of them, Gordrakk’s maw-krusha led the way, galloping through the canyons of bone, or occasionally breaking into flight for short distances. Zephacleas didn’t understand how such an awkwardly made beast could escape the pull of the earth, but then, much about the orruks didn’t make sense. From moment to moment, they defied expectation. They were not simply beasts or fools, but instead utterly alien in their view of the world. Ready to join forces with an enemy at a moment’s notice, when given the proper encouragement. It was no wonder Sigmar had found Gorkamorka’s presence so taxing, if some legends were to be believed.

‘There it is,’ Seker said, startling the Lord-Celestant. He looked up, and up, and up... The skull of the star-wyrm towered over the cliffs and crags of bone around it. Its shadow blighted the land, and there was nothing save chalky dust as far as the eye could see. The host spilled out of the boneyard and the orruks picked up speed.

The skull was half sunken into the dust, and ancient pathways wound up and around its contours. Too, there were bodies, littering those paths.

Greel has been this way, Zephacleas thought.

There was no way of telling how Gordrakk would react if he knew someone had reached the top before him. He hoped that they hadn’t come this far just to wind up fighting the orruks again.

Far ahead of them, Gordrakk howled. Orruks took up the cry, as if unable to stop themselves. Zephacleas found his eyes drawn inexplicably upwards. A vast shape, like a shadow stretched across the sky, strode along at once beside and above the mingled host of orruks and Stormcasts. It had no features that he could discern, save for its blazing eyes. Sometimes there were two, sometimes four, but as they burned brighter and brighter, he could almost hear the sound of titanic footfalls.

The loping orruks began to chant a name, though whether it was Gordrakk’s, or Gorkamorka’s, Zephacleas couldn’t say. Their voices seemed to merge and swell, filling the horizon from end to end, until the whole of the world shuddered from the force of it. The earth shook underfoot as the orruks picked up speed, and the great shadow seemed to darken and grow more real as it loped among them.

Zephacleas felt his heart begin to pound in sympathy with the immense footfalls. He thought he heard a great voice, roaring in the distance, urging them on. It was a voice as fierce and as wild as Ghur itself, a tempest more savage than any that wracked the seas of Azyr. It was the voice of a beast and a god and a world all in one. It was a cry of cosmic challenge, cast into the teeth of a hostile universe.

Unable to contain himself, Zephacleas joined his voice to that of his allies. Seker did as well, and the retinues following them, each and every Stormcast roaring out their loudest war-cries. The orruks seemed to take it as a challenge, and they redoubled their efforts, until sky and ground alike shook with the mingled fury of Azyr and Ghur.

And for the first time, and maybe for the last, Stormcast Eternals and Ironjawz orruks marched to war together.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Marrowcutter

They found the centre suddenly, as if whatever force that had been playing with them had grown bored. The corridor expanded, widening into an immense chamber, far larger than the Howling Labyrinth itself. It was a cavernous void, occupied only by a structure-within-a-structure that rose up over a seemingly infinite web of walkways and bridges, extending from every angle and direction. Sharizad stared and said, simply, ‘We have arrived.’ Her voice carried out over the void, and for a moment, all was still. In the dark, something sighed, as if in relief. Then the silence faded, and the cacophony rose anew.

The heart of the labyrinth resembled an inverted beehive citadel of rotating amber tiers. Archways lined every tier, and the bridges trembled as they slid into place against each one in their turn. Dust filled the air, and the moans of the dead made for sweet accompaniment to the clashing rumble of amber. Down in the depths, far below the web of walkways, monstrous shapes, stretched like shadows, writhed against one another in eternal agony.

‘Enslaved in life and death... Truly this place is sacred to the Architect of Fate,’ Kuldak said piously, as they started across the bridge of amber connecting them to the citadel.

‘When the Daemoniac Conundrum set this place to moving, it is said that it did so with a great sacrifice – a realm’s worth of lives, made grist for this mill of abomination,’ Bodak said. ‘I can think of better things to do with that many lives, myself, but then, I’m not a daemon afflicted with lunacy.’

‘Or it could simply be that you lack imagination, brother,’ Sardak said, walking beside Sharizad. ‘This place is a monument to fate and all of its vagaries. It is a trick and a trap, a prison and a fortress all in one. At once a truth and a falsehood.’

‘Well, you know about one of those at least, brother,’ Kuldak said. Bodak laughed. Sardak made as to turn, but Sharizad laid a hand on his arm.

‘Water, Sardak. Not iron,’ she murmured. ‘We are so close now, do not sully it with your childish squabbling.’ She could feel it now, stronger than ever before, calling to her. Her multitude of potential fates narrowed, honed to a single point of destiny. Irresistible, and unalterable. She felt neither fear nor doubt, only... longing. This then was the moment she had come into the world for. This was her fate, to be plucked from an unworthy sea.

Moments yet to be, memories of things to come, swirled in her mind, nearly overwhelming her. She saw herself, blade in hand, leading an army across the face of Ghur. All would fall before her, or bend knee to her. Or perhaps no army, for what did she need with servants, with squabbling champions, when she had Marrowcutter? A sword that could cut a god, or carve open the universe. Why, with that daemon-sword in hand, she might even challenge the Grand Marshal of Chaos himself. He whose war was long over, and whose time had passed.

Yes. Yes, that was the way of it.

A new war was coming. New enemies fell like lightning from the heavens. The servants of the Ruinous Powers had grown soft and indolent, content to fight amongst themselves and rule petty kingdoms, even as she had done. It was time for something new. That was why Tzeentch had set her on this path, she knew.

I am the Destined Queen, and I will bring about a new age – not of blood or Chaos, but instead one of... change, Sharizad thought.

The prospect lent speed to her step as she led the tattered remnants of her warband through one of the yawning archways and into the chamber beyond.

The chamber was an abstract shape, full of movement – the clockwork heart of the Howling Labyrinth. Light speared through continually opening and closing squares of amber, illuminating centuries of dust. The floor moved with a steady clunking rhythm as the walls expanded and shrank in sections. Beneath the grinding thump of unseen mechanisms came the groaning of the innumerable spirits enslaved to this place.

It was their efforts, she realised, that kept the structure constantly moving and changing. The Daemoniac Conundrum had bound them, alive and dead, to this ever-shifting architectural monstrosity.

Marrowcutter hung suspended at the chamber’s centre in a web of opalescent tissue, streaked with pulsing veins and capillaries. The Worldsplitter’s cage had been made from the vivisected remains of a gargant, and the beast’s idiot-face and knobbly arms hung low over the hell-sword, suspended by marionette strings of muscle and corded flesh. The rest of its body had been stretched and scattered about, pulled all out of shape by the strange undulations of the chamber. Runnels, filled with dried blood, lined the oscillating slope of amber bricks leading up to the cage of bone and meat that encased Marrowcutter.

As she stepped into the chamber, its constant grinding came to a sudden halt. Dust billowed between the seams of the floor and walls, and the groans of the spirits fell silent. Sharizad waited, counting the moments. She knew now that there was a rhythm to these places, and so she waited for it to reveal itself. She didn’t have to wait long. The slack-jawed features of the butchered gargant twitched, and its empty eye sockets blazed to sudden life.

The sagging flesh of its head swelled, as if it were a mask. The jaw opened, revealing a blazing corona of multicoloured lights. The same lights danced in its orbits and within the old wounds in its flesh.

‘Who... comes?’

The voice came like a wave striking a shore. It washed over her like a stinging salt-spray, causing her flesh to prickle and her soul to twist in anticipation. She lifted her chin.

‘Who asks?’ she said, resting her hand on the pommel of her blade.

‘Why... ask who?’

‘Who asks why?’ she said, smiling slightly. The voice stuttered in laughter. Whatever spirit lurked here was easily amused. The gargant’s head bobbed on its ruined neck. Sharizad cocked her head. ‘The why is easy enough. I come to lay claim to the daemon-blade, in the name of fates-yet-to-be-written. The who is more difficult, for are any of us truly who we claim, or are we but shadows cast by the fires of what is, what was and what will be?’

‘You lack... certainty, daughter of the Manifold Path.’

‘Certainty is an anchor, dragging all potential into oblivion. Reality is vast and contains multitudes – why then should I limit myself? My fate is stronger than all others, for mine is not iron, but instead water. I go where I will, and cannot be denied.’

‘Ahhh... I once thought as you. Perhaps I shall again, by and by.’

‘And who were you? Not the flesh you inhabit, I expect,’ she said. More stuttering laughter, like the crackle of flames or crumbling stones, followed her words.

‘No. Not this sad flesh. Its owner is long since lost and gone forever. I am that which was Agorath, and will be again, once my burden is taken from me.’

‘Agorath is dead,’ Sharizad said. ‘We stand upon his skull.’

‘What is death to that which hunts the stars, O daughter of the Manifold Path? I was Agorath and I shall be again, once you have passed my test.’

‘Why a test, when we both seek the same end, O mighty Agorath?’

‘Not all paths follow the same course, woman. Though our destination is the same, the route we must take to reach it is vastly different. I am bound by geas and guile, and I owe you no friendship, no consideration... Only the mildest of courtesies.’

Sharizad inclined her head. The spirits were murmuring to her now, insistently, urgently. Trying to warn her of something. ‘If it must be so, then let it be, Agorath. Set your test, mighty one, and I shall pass it.’

‘O darling child of fate, it has already begun!’

‘Monster!’

The voice echoed out over the grinding of the amber slabs as they shifted position and rotated abruptly away from the centre of the chamber. A wall had dissolved into swirling tawny dust, and black-armoured warriors stalked into sight. They stank of the storm, and of heavenly magics. To Sharizad’s eyes, attuned to the subtler arts, each one was a puppet, dancing on strings of lightning.

‘Greel,’ she breathed. Her armour quivered in anticipation as she spoke, for here at last was the one soul who had escaped her.

She could not say how he had survived, or even how he had come here. Anger warred with pleasure in her. An old foe, already bested – if this was Agorath’s test, then it was surely as good as passed. Nonetheless, a trickle of doubt wormed its way through her surety.

‘Monster!’ Greel roared again, as he stepped between her and the daemon-blade. ‘I see you there, witch.’ His warriors, few in number as they were, took up positions before the oscillating slope of bricks. ‘Long have I hunted you, since the fall of your abominable kingdom.’

Sharizad tore her sword from its sheath.

‘You let them in?’ she shouted, glaring at the bloated features of the gargant, where it hung above the newly arrived Stormcast Eternals. The slabs beneath her feet trembled as she was forced backwards, away from the slope of amber bricks and Marrowcutter.

‘As I said... A test. An old enemy, come again. How will you get past him, O child of the Forking Path? Guile? Force? Show me your cunning, Destined Queen.’

‘Sharizad,’ Greel rumbled. His voice was much the same as she remembered. Like lightning trapped in an iron box. ‘Turn, hag. Turn, daemon. You shall not pass. You shall not claim whatever daemon-weapon hangs there, in its cage of flesh and bone.’

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not,’ she called out, regaining her composure. ‘Then, who can say what fate has in store? For I surely did not expect to see you again, Greel. Not after I left you gasping out your life on the floor of the Temple of the Empty Heart.’

Greel tensed, and she laughed. ‘You drape yourselves in the skin of a dead world. What have I to fear from shadows who wear the price of failure so openly?’ She spread her arms. The Stormcast Eternals outnumbered her own forces somewhat, and her warriors would be no match for the war-hounds of Azyr. But they didn’t have to be. They just had to occupy them.

‘Bodak, Kuldak, Sardak, Yuhdak. Come to me, you princes of the Great Kingdom! This is thy moment, Nine-in-One... This is thy destiny.’

‘We stand at thy shoulder, Destined Queen,’ Sardak said, as he slid his blade from its sheath of bone. He glanced around at his brothers. ‘Well, brothers? Shall we settle this affair once and for all?’

‘Aye, and why not? I grow tired of hearing your voices,’ Bodak said, hefting his club. ‘Come, Kuldak. Scatter your sands and let us go to war one last time, as befitting princes of the City of Tiers.’

‘Pray you die quickly, Bodak,’ Kuldak said. ‘For should we two survive, I shall have no mercy on you, brother.’ He glanced at Sardak. ‘Or you, Sardak.’

‘Ah, Kuldak, if they don’t crush that thick skull of yours, I think I’ll take your head and use it to adorn my standard, so that you will ever bear witness to the victories that might have been yours,’ Sardak said, his voice mild.

Yuhdak, as ever, took no part in the banter. He stood behind his three brothers, blade in hand, a shield of sorcerous light on his arm. He looked at Sharizad, and for an instant she thought he might be weeping. She dismissed the thought a moment later – it was simply the way the witch-light played across the curves of his helm. She laughed and lifted her sword high.

‘Awaken, spirits,’ she said. ‘Awaken, O failed ones, O broken and beaten ones. Come forth and witness the culmination of that which you died in service of.’ She turned, casting a last, lingering glance over her remaining warriors – the Knights of Malachus, softly trilling their eerie war-song, and her fierce hillmen, who trembled like hounds on the scent, ready to die at her word. She turned back to the Stormcast Eternals and cocked her head. ‘Woe to thee, who stand between the Destined Queen and her chosen fate,’ she said, softly.

She darted forwards, smoke spewing from the facets of her armour. Sardak and the others leapt into motion, followed by her knights and hillmen. As she charged, the spirits of the bound dead took shape around her, Goreshroud at their head. The Three Queens of Ferro were there, and the Brothers Absinthe. The Duke of Quatr, and the Sisters Night. Bloodbound and Stormcasts. All of the foes and weaker fates that had fallen before her own.

The bound souls crashed into the Stormcast shield wall like a wave, staggering them. Their hammers passed harmlessly through their phantasmal opponents, but the weapons of the dead struck sparks from the blessed sigmarite. Goreshroud roared silently and hacked her a path through her enemies. Greel traded blows with the ghostly deathbringer and was soon lost to sight. She heard Kuldak scream out incantation after incantation, and the air grew warm and ugly with the magics of change and death.

As she parried a hammer-strike and slid her blade through the eye-slit of the warrior’s helm, she saw Bodak send a Stormcast flying with a strike from his war-club. She heard the hissing crackle of the Stormcast bowmen, and the scream of her warriors as they died. She saw a Knight of Malachus stumble and sway, his malachite armour pulverised by hammer-blows. All these scenes and more passed before her eyes as she winnowed through the melee, and darted up the oscillating slope. As she drew close to the daemon-blade, a rancid humidity enveloped her. She could hear a voice murmuring eagerly in her ear, urging her on. Whether it was Agorath or the voice of the blade itself, she could not say and did not care. Her armour cracked and came away in shards as her hand stretched towards Marrowcutter’s hilt.

Pain speared through her and she staggered, just short of her goal. She twisted and caught sight of the crackling arrow jutting from between her shoulder blades. Another arrow caught her in the chest as she turned, and the lightning that clung to it was dispersed across the facets of her armour. She stumbled. More arrows thudded home as she gestured and unleashed a wash of bale-fire to envelop the bowman. More arrows hissed towards her, and she sliced them from the air. She spat one of the Nine Black Sutras, and an archer screamed as his celestial flesh expanded within his armour.

The Stormcast staggered forwards, clawing at himself. His armour cracked and burst open, allowing the transforming shape within the room it needed to grow. Mottled flesh spilled out of the shattered husk of sigmarite, sprouting eyes and circular, pulsing maws. The Chaos spawn flopped hungrily towards the remaining bowmen, enfolding them in rubbery flaps or gnawing at them with its newly sprouted fangs. The Stormcasts drew short, stabbing blades and hacked at the corrupted shape of their former comrade.

Hissing in pain, Sharizad turned. More Stormcasts thudded up the slope towards her, hammers raised.

‘Now, witch, you die,’ one of the warriors said. Sharizad whipped her sword up and out, scoring the warrior’s chest-plate. He staggered back, unable to maintain his balance on the fluctuating bricks. She lunged up and slammed her sword through a gap in his armour. He groaned and toppled backwards, yanking her blade from her hand. She let it fall and turned back. His soul would be lost to her, but she no longer cared. She had a new weapon to claim – a better one. A weapon fit for a queen.

As the others raced to stop her, her bare flesh touched the strangely barbed hilt of the daemon-weapon and she felt something gnaw at her palm. The weapon seemed to undulate towards her, and she felt thin tendrils of unnatural metal slide through the newly made wounds on her palms and beneath her flesh. She heard something sing out with barbaric joy inside her mind, and she knew that it was the song of Marrowcutter. A hellish light flared, driving the Stormcasts back and nearly blinding her.

Sharizad tore the blade from its cage of meat, and time slowed to a trickle. Marrowcutter seemed to leap after her, like an eager pet... or perhaps a hungry predator. The blade gleamed with an oily light, and it changed shape moment to moment – first a straight blade, then curved – broad, then slim. Sometimes it was made of bone or steel or even the serrated, crimson flesh of a daemon. Her mind reeled from the enormity of it. Marrowcutter was less a weapon than the idea of a weapon, taking whatever shape suited it at a given moment.

It spoke to her, sang to her, beating aside all thought and cunning with a simplicity of purpose which was at once relief and anathema. Marrowcutter desired only one thing, above all else: a hand to hold it, an arm to wield it and a mind to guide it. It desired blood and fire, war and death. It desired the quick thrust in the dark, and the heroic slash amid the clangour of war. It was a weapon forged for gods rather than mortals. Its desires beat upon her mind relentlessly, drowning her schemes in the night-black sea of its alien and monstrous will.

‘Do you hear it, child? Do you hear the song of the Worldsplitter? It was forged in the heat of a caged star, and its metal was cooled in the blood of daemons. I have endured its maniacal demands for untold centuries, but now... now, at last, I am free.’

Agorath’s voice stirred the embers of her intent, and she sank down, planting Marrowcutter point-first into the brick slope. Pain rippled outwards from her sword-hand, pulsing through her lean frame. The remains of the gargant that had served as Marrowcutter’s cage slumped, and something that might have been starlight bled upwards. A vast, serpentine face leered down at her, and the star-wyrm’s laughter filled her mind.

‘A thousand paths once spread before you, child. Now only one remains. You have chosen your fate and etched it in blood, O Shimmering Countess. Be jubilant, now and evermore, for certainty at last shackles you. Do you see it in your mind’s eye? Do you feel the light of apotheosis, as time itself loses its clutch upon your flesh? You will be like me, one with the black between the stars... Hail, Sharizad. Hail and farewell!’

Sharizad threw back her head and screamed, as the starlight streaked upwards in a gout of blinding flame. The Howling Labyrinth shook like a beast in pain as the consciousness of Agorath fled its long captivity, and hurtled towards the sky, back to the dark of the void. As the echoes of its passage faded, threads of cold fire raced through her and she felt her blood boil in her veins. The noise of battle, Agorath’s laughter, the groaning of the Howling Labyrinth, it all faded to a dull throb. Marrowcutter’s voice rose to fill her skull, singing a wordless song of change. It was the weapon of a god, and only a god or something close to a god was worthy to wield it.

Her crystalline armour stretched and cracked as her form expanded with agonising alacrity. Her limbs elongated, the joints popping painfully and her flesh going taut. Her torso lengthened, squeezing her breath from her lungs, and two great leathery wings unfolded from her back with a wet, ripping sound. She screamed as they snapped out to their full width, scattering crystalline shards. Strange, iridescent feathers slid from the pores on her wings and limbs, rattling like spear-blades. And Marrowcutter purred in her grip as she continued to scream away what was left of her humanity.

Greel turned at the sound of Sharizad’s screams. Or, rather, the screams of the thing that had been Sharizad. She towered over those Stormcasts who advanced cautiously towards her, up the grinding slope of amber. His heart sank as he caught sight of the unholy weapon clutched in one inhuman talon. It was the blade Sigmar had spoken of, the blade whose edge could cut away the very threads that bound reality together. I have failed, he thought.

Shaken, he almost didn’t notice the spectral shape surging towards him once more. At the last moment, compelled by instinct, he spun and blocked the great axe as it swept down towards him. The eyeless apparition cursed soundlessly at him as he shoved its insubstantial bulk back. More spirits swirled about, dissipating and reforming to attack his warriors. Disturbingly, there were Stormcasts among them – ones he recognised. His own warriors, their souls bound in abominable magics and kept from the cleansing flames of Azyr. Somehow, the witch was keeping them captive.

No. No, this shall not be, he thought, fury lending him strength even as a newborn fear blossomed in his heart. Was that what he had seen, in the Temple of the Empty Heart? Was this what had made him hesitate that day?

The eyeless warrior swept towards him again, raising its spectral axe. Greel avoided the blow and slid his runeblade through his opponent’s smoky torso. He encountered no resistance, but the spirit spasmed as if mortally wounded. Lightning crawled up the blade and flared outwards, reducing the eyeless soul to tattered wisps of mist.

‘Go to your rest, butcher,’ Greel snarled. More ghosts converged on him – these clad in spectral sigmarite, their eyes empty of everything save hopeless fury.

‘Brothers, stay back,’ he said, sweeping his weapons out in a wide arc. ‘I would not cause you more harm.’ They ignored him, attacking in awful silence. He fought back as best he could, trying to ignore the fear that cut through him.

This is what he had feared – not simply failure, but to lose his soul, to become nothing but another weapon in her monstrous arsenal. He parried a blow from a ghostly warblade, and ducked aside as another scraped across his shoulder-plate.

Fear is not weakness. That was what Zephacleas had said. And Greel had already died once. He had tasted the ashes of defeat, but risen to fight anew. I fear nothing save failure, he thought, hardening his heart.

‘I am sorry, brothers, but you will not deter me. I will not fail you here, as I failed you then. I am Gaius Greel. I am your Lord-Celestant. And I bid you lay down and fight no more!’ He brought his weapons together with a resounding clash, and lightning sparked, spreading down blade and across hammer.

With a roar, Greel slammed his hammer down against the floor. Lightning speared from the point of impact, and the spirits of his warriors stiffened as the fury of Azyr caught them and wrenched them from whatever half-life held them. The lightning danced from phantom to phantom, trapping them in a flickering cage even as it enveloped the weapons of the living Stormcasts.

‘Strike, Iron-sides,’ Greel cried. ‘Strike and free the souls of our brothers!’

Warhammers rang down, dispersing the trapped spirits. A moan swept the chamber, and a full third of the spectral host wavered and vanished. But others yet remained, and these pressed the assault as savagely as before. As his warriors continued to fight, Greel turned, seeking out their true foe. Some instinct told him that if Sharizad could be felled, her phantom host would follow her into oblivion, or else be freed to pass on to whatever fate awaited them.

He saw her, crouched atop the slope, sweep her blade out in a vicious arc. The daemon-weapon sheared through shield and armour alike, reducing those warriors who faced her to drifting sparks of lightning. Greel roared in denial and heaved himself towards her. Amber bricks cracked beneath his weight as he surged forwards. ‘Sharizad!’

‘At last,’ she hissed, as she turned. ‘My old sword failed to take your soul, Greel. But Marrowcutter is stronger than your godling’s magics.’

And, with a shriek of joyous savagery, the Shimmering Countess sprang to meet him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Weapons of the Gods

Lightning struck the shifting amber face of the Howling Labyrinth, and, for a moment, the unnatural surface of the structure gave way.

‘Ha! That’s the way, Gravewalker,’ Zephacleas said. As soon as they had come in sight of the place, the Lord-Relictor had called down the lightning. Gordrakk bellowed and thumped his beast’s skull with the flat of his axes. The maw-krusha roared and picked up speed as it bounded up the slope towards the writhing structure.

The creature didn’t slow down as it reached the summit, but instead roared again, this time loud enough to rattle Zephacleas’ bones down to the marrow. The force of its cry obliterated the lightning-scorched wall before it, allowing the maw-krusha to barrel through into the daemon-structure. Shards of amber pinged off Zephacleas’ war-plate as the Stormcasts charged after the orruks into the Howling Labyrinth. The monster slewed to a halt at Gordrakk’s urging as greenskins spilled past the maw-krusha in a bellowing flood.

‘Bigger on the inside,’ Gordrakk grunted, looking around. Zephacleas nodded. They stood on a massive balcony, overlooking a great void. Walkways and bridges of amber stretched from every direction and angle to the slowly oscillating hive-shape structure that hung suspended at the centre of the web of bridges. Everything was shaking, and as they watched, one of the bridges cracked and came apart, tumbling upwards to vanish into the darkness above. A rain of amber shards ascended noisily from the void below, as if something were tearing apart the roots of the labyrinth from within, and a strange glow rose from the depths. Zephacleas looked over at Seker.

‘What’s happening?’

The Lord-Relictor shook his head. ‘I know not, though I fear this place has served its purpose,’ he said, shouting to be heard over the noise. ‘Whatever the answer, I think we will find it there.’ He gestured towards the rotating structure. ‘We should go now, and quickly.’

Zephacleas glanced at Gordrakk. ‘You heard the shaman,’ he said. Gordrakk gave Zephacleas a long look before he finally nodded and hauled on his maw-krusha’s chains, eliciting a shriek. The beast began to lumber forwards, towards the walkway that connected their balcony to the structure. As it picked up speed, the discordant crashing grew louder and a monstrous hand, composed of glistening amber and ancient bones, clamped on to the edge of the balcony.

An amber gargant hauled itself up with a fluidity it had not possessed in life. Another followed it, and another. The balcony cracked and shifted beneath their weight as they groped towards orruk and Stormcast alike. A gleaming hand snatched up an orruk brute, and amber teeth bit its head off. A Liberator was crushed in amber fingers, his flesh and bone pulped inside his sigmarite war-plate.

‘Beast-bane, raise shields,’ Zephacleas shouted. He looked at the Lord-Relictor. ‘Seker–’

‘Go,’ Seker said, as he smashed a gargant’s hand. ‘You must get inside that chamber, Zephacleas. We shall join you when we can.’

‘Shaman’s right, hammer-boss,’ Gordrakk snarled. ‘Kunnin’ says this is a little fight. I’m here for a big one,’ he roared and slashed out with his axe as the maw-krusha loped between two of the abominations. The amber gargant shattered, its pieces tumbling into the void above, drawn upwards by whatever force was tearing apart the labyrinth.

Zephacleas ducked the flailing paw of the other gargant, and slammed his hammer into the side of its head. Thin cracks spread across its frame and it too exploded into shimmering shards and brown, broken bones. Then he followed Gordrakk. The maw-krusha was past the gargants and galloping across the walkway. The Lord-Celestant turned and looked back. Stormcasts and orruks fought side-by-side against the amber gargants, occupying the full attention of their foes.

A moment later he was across the walkway, pulled in Gordrakk’s wake through the archway into the chamber beyond. The clash of weapons greeted them. Zephacleas saw the few remaining Sons of Mallus engaged in battle with a small force of green-armoured Chaos knights and swirling, phantasmal warriors. He saw Greel as well, lying weaponless and prone on a slope of amber, a monstrous shape that could only be Sharizad, the Shimmering Countess, standing over him.

The thing had been a woman once, but her form was stretched and twisted all out of sorts. It was as if something abominable had pulled her flesh and tattered armour over itself. Iridescent feathers framed a face of inhuman perfection, and a mouth full of needle-thin fangs opened in a shout of triumph as she raised the daemon-blade she held.

The maw-krusha’s roar startled her, and Greel managed to crawl away from her. Gordrakk laughed as he caught sight of her and he slammed his axes together.

‘The Chaos-thing is mine, hammer-boss,’ he growled. He stamped on the maw-krusha’s head. ‘Go, Chompa – go fasta!’ The creature leapt into the air, stubby wings flapping.

The maw-krusha swooped over the melee, and Zephacleas hurried after it, smashing aside howling hillmen as he fought his way towards Greel and the Sons of Mallus. The beast had crossed half the chamber in a single leap, but it couldn’t hold itself aloft for long. A few moments of frantic, awkward flight later, the maw-krusha fell from the air like a stone. A Chaos warrior clad in dark robes and armour looked up at the last moment, his banded war-club half raised, even as the scaly hulk slammed down atop him. The monster roared as it tore at what was left of the unfortunate warrior.

‘Bodak,’ another warrior, clad in ochre and bronze, cried. Sinuous clouds of sand rose up around him at his gesture, and slammed into the maw-krusha’s side. The monster shrieked in anger as the sand scraped across it.

Zephacleas lunged forwards and swept his runeblade out. The warrior slid back, his hand falling to the hilt of the curved desert-blade sheathed on his hip.

‘You have made a deadly mistake, dog of Azyr. Kuldak-of-the-Nine knows no equal when it comes to swordplay.’ He drew his blade in a single motion and parried Zephacleas’ next blow.

‘Good thing we’re not playing then,’ Zephacleas grunted, as the scimitar skidded across his shoulder-plate. It burned with a fierce heat, and the sigils etched into the blade gleamed red. He rolled into the blow, and drove his hammer into his opponent’s stomach as hard as he could. Kuldak staggered back, wheezing. Sands lashed at Zephacleas, stripping his armour of colour and gilt. He crossed his weapons before his face and pressed forwards, into the stinging storm.

When he judged himself close enough, he wrenched his weapons apart, momentarily dispersing the sands and leaving his opponent exposed. Kuldak raised his scimitar, but not fast enough. Zephacleas swatted the blade aside and drove his own sword through his foe’s armoured torso with a tooth-rattling crunch. Kuldak folded over him with a sigh. As Zephacleas tore his blade free, he turned, looking for Gordrakk.

He saw the orruk and his maw-krusha galloping through the fray towards Sharizad, scattering Stormcast and Chaos warrior alike.

‘Who’s the best,’ Gordrakk roared, urging his maw-krusha forwards. ‘Gordrakk is the best!’ The monster crashed into Sharizad, sending her staggering. She whirled, her daemon-blade nearly cleaving the beast’s scaly skull from its neck. The maw-krusha wailed and staggered, blood pouring from the wound. It slumped forwards and Gordrakk howled in fury. The Fist of Gork flung himself from his injured mount and slammed into Sharizad. His axes flashed as he hacked at her. The Shimmering Countess shrieked and backhanded the orruk, sending him flying.

Zephacleas ducked aside as the orruk hurtled past him, and charged, hammer raised. An armoured shape interposed itself before he could strike Sharizad, and his runeblade crashed against a Chaos-wrought sword.

‘You shall not have her, spawn of Azyr,’ the Chaos champion said. ‘So says Sardak-of-the-Nine.’

‘Maybe not, but you’ll do well enough,’ Zephacleas snarled. He smashed his opponent’s blade aside and lunged forwards. His head connected with his foe’s, and the warrior reeled. Before he could recover, Zephacleas slammed his hammer into the side of his opponent’s cuirass, crumpling the ornate armour and flinging him aside. The Chaos champion hit the ground and tried to scramble upright. A strange light formed around his fingers as he raised his hand, but before he could unleash his spell, Zephacleas chopped through his wrist.

‘I’ve fought enough sorcerers to last me a lifetime,’ the Lord-Celestant growled. His boot crunched against the Chaos champion’s helm, and the warrior slumped with a groan. Satisfied that the creature was no longer a threat, Zephacleas turned. A shadow fell over him and he looked up into the too-perfect features of Sharizad.

Her blade sang down, and Zephacleas barely managed to interpose his sword. Her strength was greater than he had expected, her too-long arm bulging with oddly rolling muscles beneath the facets of her armour. The floor cracked beneath him as he struggled to hold her weapon at bay. Lightning crackled between the swords, and the daemon-blade wailed like an injured animal. With a hiss, she forced him back a step. A deafening crack sounded, and his runeblade snapped in two. The explosion of lightning forced them apart.

Zephacleas spared a glance for his broken sword, and then tossed it aside in order to take a two-handed grip on his hammer.

‘Good sword,’ he said.

‘It is a better weapon than any in this realm,’ she said. ‘And soon, it will be greater than any weapon in existence.’ Her clawed feet scraped on the floor as she circled him. ‘Marrowcutter is weak after its long imprisonment, but soon it will regain its strength.’

She wove aside, avoiding Zephacleas’ blow, and Marrowcutter moaned hungrily as it carved a gouge in his war-plate. Zephacleas tottered back as she pressed her attack. The air seemed to thicken around her, and ran with searing colours.

‘This is my fate, Stormcast. My fate and mine alone. Greel will die. You will die. And I will rise.’

Marrowcutter slammed into Zephacleas’ arm, and the force of the blow lifted him from his feet and sent him tumbling through the air. He fell heavily, and pain reverberated through him. Sharizad shrieked with laughter, but her amusement was cut short when Gordrakk careered into her. The orruk tackled her to her knees. One of his axes sank into the remnants of her armour and he reared back, ready to bury the other in her skull. Sharizad drove her elbow back into the orruk’s face with a loud crack.

Gordrakk shuffled back, shaking his head. Sharizad rose to her feet. ‘You – you would dare to attack your betters, brute?’

‘Ain’t nobody better than Gordrakk,’ Gordrakk said. ‘I’m the best. Me. Gordrakk!’ He bulled forwards into Sharizad, knocking her back through sheer fury. The two traded bone-rattling blows. Zephacleas tried to get to his feet, but his injured arm prevented him from doing so. As he struggled, hands found him and helped him to sit upright.

He turned. ‘Greel. You live.’

‘Not for long. I am... dying. Again,’ Greel said. Blood stained his broken armour. His breath rasped brokenly in his lungs. ‘She shattered my weapons. Humbled me. That hell-blade has added to her strength.’

‘So I noticed,’ Zephacleas said, trying to catch his breath. His ribs ached, and his arm was numb and leaden. He couldn’t even make a fist. Gordrakk roared in pain as Sharizad slashed him across the chest. He drove her back with a wild sweep of his axes, but she closed with him again almost immediately. The orruk was powerful, but outmatched. Whatever Sharizad was becoming, it was stronger even than the Fist of Gork.

‘We have to help him,’ Zephacleas said, using his hammer to lever himself to his feet.

All around them, Stormcasts still fought their enemies. Sigmarite rang against hell-forged armour. The Sons of Mallus were nothing if not determined. The chamber shuddered and bucked, like a thing in pain. Cracks had begun to run up the ever-shifting walls, and things that were not stars were visible between them. Chunks of amber plummeted from the ceiling, to crash down and scatter across the floor.

‘I must find a weapon,’ Greel coughed. Zephacleas looked at him. His fellow Lord-Celestant was trembling, blood pouring down the plates of his armour. Zephacleas caught him by the shoulder. Then, with a nod, he launched himself back into battle.

Sharizad’s blade rang down on Gordrakk’s axes, filling the air with the sound of animals caught in a life-or-death struggle. In the air above, vast, shadowy shapes were locked in combat. Gorkamorka is a killer of monsters, Zephacleas thought, as he brought his hammer around and struck Sharizad in the back. Had the two-headed god come to aid his truest follower?

Sharizad laughed and backhanded him, knocking him from his feet. He hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. Her wings stretched out, covering him in their shadow, and for a moment he struggled for breath. The blade in her hand glowed with an unhealthy light. It was an open wound in the skin of reality. A seeping soreness that grew more inflamed with every thrust and slash. He could hear a voice, like the tolling of a brass bell, far away in the deep places between worlds – but he could not understand its words.

Choking, half blind and sick of shadows, Zephacleas struck the floor with his hammer. Sharizad staggered back as the amber ruptured and cracked beneath her feet. As her shadow was pulled away from him, Zephacleas gratefully sucked in a lungful of air. He could see Gordrakk on one knee nearby, head bowed, blood dripping from his wounds. And someone else.

Greel.

‘Sharizad,’ the Lord-Celestant said.

Sharizad turned. Greel lunged forwards, a crystalline blade held in his hands. He drove the sword into her chest. She stepped back, eyes wide, and stared at the protruding hilt.

‘You took my weapons... so I borrowed yours,’ Greel said. Sharizad reached up, as if to wrench the blade free. Before she could, a smoky axe slashed down through one of her wings as the monstrous spirit of an eyeless Bloodbound chopped at her. Sharizad shrilled as more spectral weapons pierced her feathered flesh, opening bloodless wounds.

‘No! I killed you once, fools, I can do so again,’ she howled. ‘Back, get back! I will not be denied by broken fates and inferior destinies. This is my moment, my future! I will be queen!’ In moments, she was surrounded by the hazy shapes of the phantasmal warriors. There were Stormcasts among them, Zephacleas saw, and Bloodbound, and others he didn’t recognise. They attacked as one, from every direction, even as they began to dissolve. Sharizad struggled against them, but whatever Marrowcutter’s other powers, it seemed to be no more use against the dead than any other weapon.

‘Your... your chains are broken, witch,’ Greel said, swaying on his feet. ‘Your slaves rise up, even as they did in the Temple of the Empty Heart. Your destined empire crumbles...’

Lightning speared upwards as the ghostly Stormcasts began to vanish, one by one, tearing through the vaulted ceiling of the chamber. Sharizad’s screams grew in volume as the lightning washed over and through her, setting her feathers aflame and boiling her eyes in their sockets. Smoke plumed from her fanged mouth and her wounds widened, gleaming like veins of gold in her flesh before she finally managed to rip the crystalline sword from her chest and crush it in one bloody talon.

As the fragments of the sword fell from her hand, the ghosts began to disappear. Their vaporous shapes bled upwards, stretching and fading. Reeling, smoking, Sharizad stumbled away from the dissolving spirits. Greel followed her, lightning crawling across his body. He was coming apart, even as the last of his life’s blood dripped down the contours of his armour. He crashed into her with a roar, grappling with her. His eyes met Zephacleas’, in the instant before the lightning took him. When it flashed, Sharizad’s scream filled the shuddering chamber. As the light faded, her feathers were blackened and crumbling. Her too-long limbs were burned and bloody. But she did not fall. Blinded by the light of Azyr, she swayed drunkenly.

‘I will not... This is my age. My time,’ she croaked. ‘I will... I must...’ She stopped, and her blind gaze fixed on the floor. Her features twisted into an expression of loathing, as if she had seen something unwelcome, and she lifted Marrowcutter in both hands and drove it down. The floor heaved and cracks sped across the slabs of amber.

‘My fate is my own, and shadows should know their place!’ she howled as she tore the sword loose.

Zephacleas heaved himself up and saw Gordrakk doing the same. He met the orruk’s gaze and nodded. They would only have this last chance – she was simply too powerful. Now she was stunned, wounded. But it wouldn’t last. Already new feathers were sprouting on her healing flesh, and her eyes were beginning to clear.

Gordrakk roared and brought an axe down on Sharizad’s wrist, hacking through it in one blow. She screamed and the daemon-blade whirled from her mangled grip. It sank point first into the floor and quivered there for a moment. Then, with something that might have been a sigh, it slid through the floor and vanished from sight. The chamber’s shudders grew in intensity. A light swelled in the depths of the amber, growing brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding.

‘No,’ Sharizad moaned. ‘Mine... It was mine.’ She clawed at the floor with her remaining hand. Her body seemed to be caught halfway between being one thing and another. Without Marrowcutter, the changes that had been wrought upon her were coming undone. Her flesh began to peel away from her bones and slip upwards, joining the swirling shards of amber. She lurched upright, screaming.

As one, Gordrakk and Zephacleas struck. Hammer and axes slammed home, and Sharizad, the Shimmering Countess, came apart in a storm of iridescent splinters. The splinters whirled in place for a moment, her face screaming from within each one, and then they sped upwards and vanished. The floor followed suit, uprooting itself and dissolving into ochre dust as it billowed around Zephacleas.

Deafened and blinded, he fought to remain standing as the Howling Labyrinth tore itself apart around him. He felt as if he were sinking into a stifling mire. Chunks of amber struck his war-plate, and he thought he felt something clutching at him. Then, all at once, it was done and he was left standing in the open air on the great skull of the star-wyrm. His vision cleared and he could hear again. He saw the surviving Sons of Mallus, standing nearby, their faces turned towards the sky. He saw Seker and the warriors of his chamber, and orruks as well. The greenskins looked about in obvious consternation.

Zephacleas looked up, and watched the hurricane of amber shards, all that was left of the Howling Labyrinth, spiral up into the sky, until it was lost to sight. When it had gone, he looked down. Seker was leading the surviving Stormcasts from both chambers towards him. He heard a growl behind him and turned. Gordrakk stood beside his wounded maw-krusha, which snuffled at its master. The battered remnants of his horde gathered around him.

Zephacleas met Gordrakk’s gaze and said, ‘Good fight.’

Gordrakk was silent for a moment. Then, ‘Good fight, hammer-boss.’

‘Maybe we’ll fight again, Gordrakk,’ Zephacleas said.

‘Maybe. Maybe the Hammer God sees now, eh? Or maybe next time I’ll put your head on a stick,’ Gordrakk grunted, smiling crookedly. He clashed his axes together and threw back his head. The Fist of Gork roared out the name of his gods, and his warriors roared with him. Zephacleas looked up. For a moment, he thought he could see two great shapes, as wide as the horizon and as tall as the stars, staring down at him. Then they were gone.

‘Lost once more,’ Seker said, softly.

‘No. Not lost,’ Zephacleas said, watching the orruks celebrate their victory. ‘Gorkamorka is everywhere. Gorkamorka is in them and beside them and around them.’

‘Very poetic,’ Seker said.

‘Yes,’ Zephacleas said.

‘We still have to find him. Wherever he is.’

‘I know,’ Zephacleas said.

‘That was our mission, you’ll recall,’ the Lord-Relictor said.

‘Seker?’

‘Yes, my Lord-Celestant?’

‘Please be quiet.’

Seker laughed. After a moment, Zephacleas joined him.

EPILOGUE

The One-in-Nine

Sardak coughed. The hammer had crushed his ribs and spine, and numbness crept through him on cat-feet. Yuhdak held him, and he wondered to hear his brother weeping. Somehow, Yuhdak had dragged him from the chamber, away from the battle. Caring Yuhdak, kind Yuhdak. Sardak laughed, until the pain turned it into a groan. Of course it would be Yuhdak. The only one to never fight, the only one with no ambition.

‘Why do you weep, brother? You are now the One... The One-in-Nine. Your fate eclipses ours, brother. Bodak... Kuldak... All dead. Our fate is... yours...’ he wheezed.

‘No,’ Yuhdak said, softly. Sardak twitched. It was the first time he had ever heard his brother speak. ‘There has only ever been my fate, brother,’ Yuhdak continued. ‘When I was but a child, I begged a boon of the Master of Manifold Paths. I was lonely, you see. Father ignored me, for I was but a shadow of him, and who pays attention to their shadow?’

The dark closed in around Sardak. The last dark, the true dark, where no daemons dwelt and no gods listened. Fear gripped him and he looked at his brother.

‘What... what boon?’ he croaked, unable to deny his curiosity, even this close to the precipice. He could feel the labyrinth shaking around him, and hear the sounds of battle.

‘I asked him to give me brothers,’ Yuhdak said. ‘I asked him and he split my fate into nine, so that I would never be alone.’ He bowed his head, and shimmering tears spilled through the cracks in his mask. ‘And now, I can never be anything else.’

Sardak reached up, trying to touch his brother’s face, but the dark was faster and stronger, and it claimed him, as he had feared it would. And all of this Yuhdak knew, in the part of him that was Sardak, that was Redak and Bodak and all of the others. His eight querulous brothers, who had ever been a part of him. They had taken his voice, his fear, his courage and even his sorrow. They had made him the shadow he’d always thought himself to be.

But it had been a good bargain, if only for a little while. He had enjoyed playing their brutal games in the City of Tiers, and for a time he had forgotten what it meant to be lonely. But the moment the eyeless crow had come, Yuhdak had known that an end was coming. An end to joy, an end to childish amusements.

It had not simply been a god’s jest, or a darkling boon, it had been a test as well. A test of him, a test of fate and chance. A gambit of souls that only a god would understand.

Nine possible paths, and only the truest and strongest could bear our – my – weight, he thought as he looked down at his brother’s cracked and crumbling helm.

Sardak’s body came apart like sand, and slid out of his grip. Yuhdak hunched forwards, whole for the first time in a long time. He did not care for the feeling. The Howling Labyrinth shuddered around him, as somewhere, Sharizad met her fate. Part of Yuhdak, the part that had just recently been Sardak, longed to go to her aid. Another part of him whispered that he ought to go back and claim Marrowcutter for himself.

But he was not Sardak. He was not Bodak or Redak. He had no illusions as to what awaited him, should he follow those impulses. He was Yuhdak and he intended to remain whole for the foreseeable future. He stood slowly, as the dust that had been his brother spilled from his robes and swirled away.

The Howling Labyrinth shuddered in a paroxysm. It would not long outlive his brother. He wondered where Marrowcutter would go, now that it was free. Perhaps it would slice through reality and tumble into the void. Or perhaps the Daemoniac Conundrum would come for it and hide it away once more. He found that he didn’t care.

Yuhdak lifted his sword in silent salute to the Destined Queen. Perhaps they would meet again one day. Somehow, he doubted it. The crow had been right, so many moons ago. In helping her meet her fate, he had found his own. The bargain was fulfilled, and he was whole once more. There was no more need for him to tarry. As she had claimed so many times, her fate was her own, and he felt no urge to witness it.

He had seen the world through nine pairs of eyes, and learned its secrets with nine minds, but now that knowledge had to be put to use. Somewhere, at the mad heart of all reality, the Grand Marshal of Chaos waited, gathering those like him, who had been purged of the old fears and indulgences of childhood. Those who saw the world for what it was and what it must be. His time in the shadows was done. Now he would stand in the light. He left the oscillating structure behind, even as lightning tore through its walls. As he strode along the trembling bridge of amber towards a fang-lined archway, he heard Sharizad’s scream of denial, and the great animal cry of the Worldsplitter, as it fell once more into legend.

And, as the Howling Labyrinth shattered and came apart around him, Yuhdak of the Nine, last prince of the City of Tiers, stepped through the archway to meet his fate.

BLADESTORM

Matt Westbrook

CHAPTER ONE

Vengeance Eternal

They gathered in their hundreds to hear the words of their God-King. Azyrheim was a changed place since the blessed hammer Ghal Maraz, symbol of Sigmar’s might, had been returned. It had always been a city of wonders, of soaring archways and winding crystalline stairs, of boundless treasures that echoed an age when the light of humanity had shone in every corner of the realms, but now its glory appeared greater. When the first realmgate had been opened by the heroism of Vandus Hammerhand, there had been relief and joy, and then a frisson of nervous excitement as the Stormhosts poured forth into the Mortal Realms, taking the war to the great enemy with the indefatigable fervour of the righteous.

But it was symbolic victories that incited a people at war like little else, and nothing could be more emblematic of the changing times than witnessing the God-King take up his fabled weapon once more.

The hammer had been reclaimed, and with that triumph the halls of Sigmaron rang with renewed purpose. Mortal servants and workers rushed here and there, filling serene halls and quiet chambers with a flurry of excited whispers. Stormhosts were despatched in ever greater numbers, marching to war with thunderous fanfare, roaring their hymns of faith in a tumult so loud it could be heard all across the great city. And then there was the rhythmic ringing of the forges, which truly never ceased; Azyr’s armouries were the miracle that kept the gears of re-conquest moving at their relentless pace.

The Bladestorm, a Warrior Chamber of the Celestial Vindicators, had barely rested since their return from the Eldritch Fortress. They had forged countless new legends in their pursuit of Ghal Maraz there, and now they were summoned to Sigmar’s throne room. From there, the God-King himself would send them forth once more. Mortal warriors might have balked at being thrown back into the war so quickly, but these demigods were no mortals; they were giants, forged for war and destined for battle.

The Stormcasts’ boots beat a perfect rhythm on the gleaming floor of Sigmar’s throne room, a vaulted wonder filled with flawlessly carved sculptures and artisanal iconography celebrating the countless legends of the God-King. All this splendour was nothing compared to the vision of Sigmar himself. He sat upon his throne, watching proudly as his loyal warriors assembled, an avatar of righteousness and strength, radiant armour glittering, eyes burning with resolve.

Lord-Castellant Eldroc’s heart rose to see his master’s glory. It felt like an age since they had last returned to Azyr, and he drank in every wondrous sight anew, from the breathtaking statuary to the masterful paintings and tapestries that draped the walls. This was what they were fighting for, he reminded himself: to return the light of civilisation to every corner of the Mortal Realms, to bring about a world where smiths and artisans could create such works, and where simple, honest folk could bask in their glory. They would earn that future, he swore, as he took his place in the front rank of warriors. Armour creaking under the weight of relic-bones and holy parchments, the Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden came to a halt by his side.

‘I cannot help but wonder at this place, no matter how many times I see it,’ Eldroc whispered.

‘It has a certain grandeur to it,’ the Lord-Relictor said, briefly regarding the vaulted ceiling above, which was immaculately painted with images of great heroes, captured in the moment of their triumph.

‘You have no art in your soul, my friend,’ said Eldroc, grinning. ‘You would be just as happy if we gathered in some dusty old crypt to hear Sigmar’s words.’

‘In my experience there is often a great deal to be learned from dusty old crypts.’

They ceased their conversation as Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm strode past and his cold blue gaze briefly washed over them. Their liege made his way to the foot of the stairway leading to the throne, and took his place at the head of his Warrior Chamber. There he stood, still as one of the statues lining the great hall, and waited for the word of the God-King.

‘How is he?’ Tharros asked.

Eldroc felt a pang of sadness and frustration seize him. It would be a better, easier world if he knew the answer to that question.

‘He is… still not himself,’ he said. That was understating things to a laughable degree, but Eldroc had not the words to describe what he felt when he looked upon his lost friend.

‘No,’ Tharros said. ‘And he never will be. To be reforged…’

Tharros paused a moment, then turned his skull-faced visage to Eldroc.

‘There is always a price for cheating death, brother. We will all pay it, before the end. Too many of us forget that. They think this is a game we play.’ He shook his head. ‘No. We fight a war beyond mortal comprehension. There is always a price.’

There was a creaking yawn as the grand double doors to the throne room opened. Again, the floor rumbled with the steps of hundreds of warriors. Marching into position alongside their brothers came a second Warrior Chamber of the Celestial Vindicators. These warriors wore the same turquoise armour as the Bladestorms, trimmed with golden sigmarite and deep red leather, but where Thostos’ officers wore purple helmet crests and plumes signifying their rank, the newcomers wore a rich, royal blue. Their leader was tall even for a Stormcast, and carried a grandblade across his back, the huge weapon almost reaching to the floor.

‘Lord-Celestant Argellon and his Argellonites,’ Eldroc murmured. ‘His star rises, it is said.’

‘His head swells, you mean,’ Tharros said.

Mykos Argellon took his place at the head of his chamber, before the throne. His mien could not have been more different to that of Thostos. Where the Bladestorm stood stock still, his fellow Lord-Celestant burned with pride and righteousness, his hands clenching and unclenching, his body fairly trembling with fervour.

‘By all accounts he has performed admirably thus far,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘Perhaps we should give him a chance.’

‘Perhaps,’ Tharros replied.

The God-King rose from his throne, ending the conversation. He was as magnificent a figure as ever, but now emanated an even greater power with Ghal Maraz held in one mighty fist. His radiance was so bright that it almost hurt to look upon him, but not one of the Stormcast Eternals averted their eyes.

And Sigmar spoke.

‘The realms shake beneath our righteous justice!’ he roared, and the throne room erupted in an echoing chorus of shouts and cheers. Sigmar smiled fiercely as he looked upon his warriors, and he let the cheers fill the room for many moments before resuming. ‘On all fronts your valiant brothers purge the taint of Chaos with the hammer and the storm, and thanks to the legends you yourselves forged in pursuit of Ghal Maraz, we can now prepare for the next stage of the great war.’

There was a breathless silence as the Celestial Vindicators waited to hear where they would bring the light of Sigmar.

‘You will travel to Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, to a wild region known as the Roaring Plains,’ the God-King proclaimed. ‘There lies a foul bastion of Chaos known as the Manticore Dreadhold. This fortress guards a realmgate that is critical to our next offensive. Destroy the dreadhold and secure this gate. Put its cursed defenders to the sword, and send their wretched souls screaming to their dark masters. This I task to you.’

Another cacophony of cheers resonated throughout the hall. Sigmar held up a hand for silence.

‘There will be many dangers,’ the God-King said. ‘The Roaring Plains is an untamed wilderness, and its dangers have already sent many of my loyal warriors back to the forge.’

His eyes bored into Thostos, whose own blazing blue orbs stared back implacably. Eldroc felt that Sigmar’s iron gaze softened for just a moment as he as he studied his champion.

‘Look to your brothers,’ Sigmar said, eyes full of pride as he surveyed his conquering heroes. ‘Trust in the gifts I have given you, and remember your oaths. Remember what it is that we fight for.’

He raised Ghal Maraz, and the light caught the intricate craftsmanship of the legendary hammer, reflecting back off the gleaming turquoise ranks of the Celestial Vindicators. There was no darkness, no cruelty or malice that could stand in the face of that holy brilliance.

‘Vengeance for the lost,’ bellowed the Celestial Vindicators. ‘Glory to Sigmar’s chosen!’

Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon parried a rat-thing’s wild swing and slammed his fist into the creature’s eye socket. It yelped and toppled backwards, and he thrust his grandblade, named Mercutia, into its panting chest. Its scream cut off abruptly, and Mykos slipped his blade out and swept it to the side to draw a red line across another creature’s throat. Alongside him, his warriors hacked their way through the last of the skaven stragglers.

Liberators battered the creatures to the ground with their heavy shields, then ran them through with swords, or crushed them with hammers. Retributors cared not for such precision; they barrelled in with heavy hammers, breaking through the ratmen’s weak guard, and shattering bones with every swing. There was no gap in the Stormcast line, no weakness for the skaven to exploit. In every direction the creatures turned they were met with sharpened steel and an impassable wall of storm-forged metal. The Lord-Celestant felt a surge of pride as he watched his men make perfect war.

Mykos looked around the cavern. No sign of Thostos and his chamber, though judging by the shattered and broken bodies that were already lying in heaps before the Argellonites had entered, they had certainly passed through this way. Mykos frowned, not for the first time concerned about his fellow Lord-Celestant’s incautious approach.

‘Sigmar casts us in blessed sigmarite, hurls us out into the realms, and there we find our true calling,’ roared Knight-Heraldor Axilon, shaking his broadsword free of gore. ‘We are gilded tavern cats, tasked with hunting mice!’

The warriors laughed, and Mykos couldn’t help but smile. ‘Pray, do not speak again, brother Axilon,’ he pleaded with mock sincerity. ‘Else you’ll bring these walls down upon us.’

The Knight-Heraldor covered his mouth with one gauntlet and nodded fervently. That earned another chuckle from the others. Axilon was the implacable herald of the Argellonites, his voice a roar of thunder that could be heard across a battlefield, extolling his brothers to ever-greater acts of valour. It was joked amongst the warriors that Axilon need not bother with his battle-horn – the radiant instrument that all Knights-Heraldor carried – for his voice alone would suffice.

‘Not good terrain, this,’ said Axilon, approaching Mykos and gesturing at the rough stone walls and winding, gnawed-out tunnels. ‘It favours the stinking rats. We cannot see ahead, and we cannot guard our flanks. I cannot even give them a taste of the God-King’s thunder, lest it brings this cursed labyrinth down on our heads.’

‘Brother,’ said Mykos, shaking his head and pointing one finger down at the floor. ‘The ground is below us, and the ceiling above. Consider our last venture, and thank Sigmar we are not battling through the warped geometry of the Tower of Lost Souls, pursued once more by the mutant scions of the Broken Prince.’

‘A fair point, my Lord,’ Axilon smiled, but his mirth did not last long. He lowered his voice as he came closer. ‘Lord-Celestant Thostos has pushed too far ahead without us. He’s going to get himself surrounded.’

‘I am certain that the Lord-Celestant’s tactical situation shifted,’ said Mykos, a note of warning in his voice, ‘and he was forced to adjust our battle plan.’ It would not do for the rest of the chamber to start voicing their own concerns about Thostos’ behaviour.

‘As you say, lord,’ said Axilon.

The Knight-Heraldor kicked one of the dead ratmen disdainfully, turning it over with the tip of his boot. The creature was ridden with boils and rashes, and wrapped in black leather marked with obscene symbols that Mykos did not care to look upon.

‘So soon we see battle,’ Axilon said. ‘We barely made it out of the realmgate before we came upon these foul creatures.’

‘Who had taken up position throughout the only pass that leads down to the Roaring Plains,’ Mykos nodded gravely. ‘It has not escaped my notice, my friend. It feels uncomfortably like these creatures were sent here to bleed us.’

That was not a pleasant thought. They had been counting on the element of surprise, but if the enemy was already aware they were coming… He shook his head. It was no use second-guessing their mission now. They could do nothing but push on and try to find a way out of these warrens, which meant his force had to link back up with Thostos as soon as possible.

‘We will push forwards, into the central passage,’ Mykos said, pointing a gauntleted finger at the largest of the three tunnels that split off from the cramped nexus that they currently occupied.

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather stepped to the tunnel entrance.

‘Battle has been joined, my Lord-Celestant,’ he said, in his clipped, distinguished voice. Goldfeather was so named for the fabulous golden quill he kept tucked into his war-helm. When asked about it, or even when none had asked, the airborne warrior would loudly proclaim that it was a gift from the ‘Father of Griffons’, in return for his slaying of a rampaging manticore, and proceed to tell that tale in punishing length and detail. Mykos considered this a small price to pay in exchange for the man’s keen senses.

‘They have encountered heavy resistance,’ he continued gravely. ‘It’s not just swarm rats – I can hear the vermin’s heavier weapons in the field. Foul, sorcerous siege pieces.’

Mykos approached, and even without the Prosecutor’s superior senses, he could hear it too. The spatter-whine of the skaven’s filthy magic, and the barking crack of their bizarre weapon-pieces. Undercutting those alien sounds, faint but unmistakable, were the battle-hymns of his Vindicator brothers, the tramp of booted feet, and the cleansing celestial thunder of Sigmar’s storm.

‘We must move quickly,’ Mykos muttered, and raised his runeblade high. ‘To me, Argellonites. Forwards to glory!’

Thostos Bladestorm swept his runeblade back and forth in great arcs, hewing his way through dozens of the shrieking vermin. Heads flew. Limbs shattered. The warren stank of fear, the sour terror of the ratfolk and the foul reek of their diseased blood. One of the degenerates, bolder than its fellows, jabbed at Thostos with a crude shortspear. The blow skipped off his blessed sigmarite, barely denting the god-forged metal. The Bladestorm replied with a backhand sweep of his sword that bisected the unfortunate creature, sending its torso spinning away over the heads of its fellows. Hot blood splashed across Thostos’ battle-mask, and he roared in exultation.

Exultation? No, that implied that pleasure was found in the act. Fury? That came closer, but what he felt lacked the cleansing, satisfying heat of true rage. He settled for whatever it was he did feel, because he felt something, and that was enough.

In truth, the filthy skaven were poor subjects for his anger. They fell before him in their dozens, hacked and hewed apart. Those nearest to him barely even attempted to block his attacks. Instead they scampered as far away as they could in the cramped confines of the warren, scratching and pulling at their fellows, dragging others into the path of blows aimed at them. He was dimly aware of his brothers following in his wake, launching themselves at the skaven in a sea-green blur.

In the face of Thostos’ onslaught, the pack broke. Dropping weapons, abandoning all pretence of organised retreat, they swarmed from the cavern in a ragged tide of brown-and-grey fur. Something buried deep within Thostos called for caution; the skaven were unpredictable and treacherous foes, and these tunnels were suited to their deviant, backstabbing form of warfare. That caution met the desperate battle-lust that filled him, and evaporated in an instant.

‘Vengeance,’ he roared, his voice thick with hatred, ‘Vengeance in the name of Sigmar!’

The Lord-Celestant charged after the fleeing vermin. Bellowing battle-hymns of praise to the God-King, the Bladestorm Warrior Chamber followed him to war.

The Celestial Vindicators followed the skaven through a rough-hewn corridor no taller than a mortal man, losing pace with their quarry as they bent to force their way through the cramped confines. The Stormcasts had many reasons to be thankful for their blessed armour, but here, in the skaven’s favoured terrain, it slowed them and made movement cumbersome.

Thostos simply smashed his way through the dry earth, his momentum hardly slowed by the ramshackle, makeshift nature of the skaven excavations. He broke free of the tunnel in a rain of debris, sword and hammer raised.

He had entered a central chamber of the warren, some thirty feet high and maybe four times that across. In the centre was a raised mound of dirt, flecked with rat spoor and other filth, around which the fleeing ratmen swarmed in their hundreds. Upon the raised earth stood several larger beasts. Near three times the height of their multifarious kin, these skaven rippled with muscles. Bizarre, arcane devices were bolted to their flesh, strange, cylindrical tubes of metal capped with several small nozzles. As Thostos burst into the chamber, the creatures screeched as one, and as one their strange weapons blared with a vile eldritch light, and let loose a repeating blast that echoed like thunder.

Retributor Arodus was the first Stormcast to follow his Lord-Celestant into the central chamber, and was rewarded with a hail of bullets that blasted him backwards into his fellows, blood pouring from countless holes punched through his armour. Retributor Wulkus leapt forwards in fury at his brother’s death, crushing a one-eyed skaven foot soldier into the dirt with a wild overhead swing of his hammer. As he brought the weapon back up there was a loud crack, and a hole appeared in the centre of his faceplate, releasing a faint pink mist. He collapsed, and both Stormcast bodies disappeared in a blast of pale light. As the main force of Celestial Vindicators poured out to meet the skaven infantry, a whickering storm of fire met them.

The cavern was strobed with violent green light as the strange contraptions continued to fire. Those skaven unfortunate enough to be nearest to the Stormcasts exploded in torrents of gore, and others went down howling as ricochets found thighs, ankles and fingers.

Even the devastating hail of bullets could not hold back the fury of the Celestial Vindicators, who broke into the main chamber and launched themselves at the enemy. Thostos ignored the chattel that snapped at his heels, barrelling further into the press of bodies, straining to reach the escarpment. Daggers were thrust at him as he ground his way into the skaven ranks, tapping out a staccato rhythm as they scraped against his war-plate. He butted a taller, wire-furred rat-thing, splattering its nose, then slammed his hammer into its gut and trampled over its mewling, bleeding form. On to the next, a pot-bellied fiend encased in pockmarked iron. That one died quickly as his sword bit into its skull, blessed sigmarite tearing through bone and tissue as if it were parchment. To the next, a runt of a thing wearing robes, which tasted the blunt face of his hammer and burst apart in a spray of viscera.

And on to the next…

Lord-Castellant Eldroc realised, with a horrible clarity, that they had been baited neatly into the skaven’s trap. Caught up in their fury, they had pushed forwards too far from their brothers, and now the enemy hurled fresh troops at them from every angle. Eldroc’s loyal gryph-hound Redbeak snarled and spat at his side, his trusty senses overwhelmed by the stench of the enveloping skaven mass. Ratmen dropped from hidden holes in the roof of the cavern, clawed their way free from cunningly disguised apertures in the walls, and leapt upon the Bladestorm’s exposed flanks. Suddenly the Stormcasts were an island of turquoise in a sea of wretched grey fur.

Cursing their foolhardiness, and cursing himself for allowing the joy of righteous battle to overrule his caution, Eldroc scanned the packed ranks of the Celestial Vindicators for a glimpse of his Lord-Celestant. He found him, of course, at the very forefront of the battle.

Vermin assailed him from every side, but they could not slow his furious advance. Eldroc knew well how mighty Thostos was in battle, but even he was shocked at the raw-edged brutality his commander displayed. The Bladestorm had always tempered fury with caution; that was why he was chosen to lead, because he could channel the rage and lust for vengeance of the Celestial Vindicators – ever the most aggressive of Sigmar’s sons, ever the first to leap into battle – to its true potential.

Now, he barely seemed to acknowledge his brothers. He never looked back, merely ploughing forwards into the packed ranks of the enemy like a tormented hound let loose.

In such numbers, even the primitive weapons of the skaven clanrats began to take their toll. Stormcasts were dragged down by dozens of the creatures, which stabbed and cut at them in a frenzied orgy of carnage. Daggers found eye sockets, the gaps between gorgets, and vulnerable spots where the barrage of bullets had weakened even the mighty sigmarite battle-plate. It was honourless murder, of the sort at which the ratmen excelled. Eldroc rushed to one fallen Stormcast, stuck with half a dozen blades and weakly pawing at a band of wretches who cackled as they clambered over him, dissecting him with wicked glee. Redbeak hurled himself onto one of the creatures, ripping with his sharp beak and raking with four powerful talons, but another skaven quickly scrabbled up to replace it.

Eldroc raised his warding lantern and intoned the name of blessed Sigmar as he unleashed its celestial energies. Warm, cleansing light washed over the stricken Stormcast, wrapping his form in a halo of flickering luminescence. The skaven skittered back from the power of the holy light, screeching as it burned at their cruel, beady eyes. The fallen warrior’s back arched, and as the glow washed over his body, the sigmarite melted and flowed like wax, refashioning the rents in his armour so that his hallowed war-plate glistened as if it had been freshly forged. Up came the Stormcast, blade in hand, howling his hatred at the enemy with renewed vigour.

Yet Eldroc could not reach all his brothers. Bursts of lightning rippled across the cavern walls as loyal warriors were called back to Azyr, strobing the unfolding carnage with blue light. Even these few losses were too many; they had barely begun their holy purpose, and already they were weakened.

Thostos had reached the central mound now, and was hewing his way through the Stormfiends that had opened fire on them. He thrust his sword into the neck of one creature, then swept his hammer across, low, to snap the vermin’s legs. It screeched in agony and toppled to the floor. As Eldroc watched, Thostos let gravity drag the broken thing from his blade, then caved in its chest with another mighty blow from his hammer. Ahead, cowering behind its taller bodyguards, was a wiry, grey-mottled creature whose yelps and screeches echoed over even the general clatter and chaos of battle. Its bronzed armour carried a shoulder-rack upon which were mounted several strange icons, ragged banners and shrivelled heads. The skaven commander, Eldroc surmised.

Thostos was killing his way towards the warlord, bleeding now from a dozen wounds. More Stormcasts hauled themselves up onto the mound, but still the skaven guns blazed, now joined by an enfilade from the right flank. The skaven had brought forth a heavy wooden shield, from behind which several long-barrelled rifles laid down a vicious crossfire. Another Liberator went down, crimson spurting from his ruined gorget, spasming as he fell. Eldroc felt a dull thud on his thigh, and growled as it was followed by searing, white-hot agony. Not the sharp, honest pain of a flesh wound, but something more sinister, a rapidly spreading toxic ache that burned across his leg. He lowered his warding lantern and let the blessed light bathe his smoking limb.

They had pushed too hard and too fast, and they had fallen for the enemy’s trap.

Then, the blaring of a war-horn shook the cavern.

The battle was over as soon as the Argellonites crashed into the flank of the skaven horde. At the tip of the spear, Knight-Heraldor Axilon and his retinue, hardy Retributors wielding mighty two-handed hammers, smashed apart the skaven’s vile weapon platforms, slaughtering the operators and ending their savage crossfire. More Celestial Vindicators followed in their wake, shields together in a line of blessed sigmarite that crashed into the enemy’s softened ranks, battering broken ratmen to the floor where they were either ground underneath the boots of onrushing Stormcasts, or despatched with swift blows.

As the first wave pushed left to clear the flank of the besieged Bladestorm, Mykos Argellon led the rest of his warriors straight through to the mound and Thostos. The Argellonites’ Lord-Celestant was the very image of the God-King’s glory in his ornate plate, luminescent even in the darkness of the cavern as he cut a bloody swathe through the enemy horde.

‘Forward, Argellonites!’ he shouted, voice rising even above the chaotic din of battle. ‘Show them the fury of the Celestial Vindicators.’

He wielded Mercutia in a blur, thrusting, slashing and battering with the heavy pommel in a whirlwind rush so fast it seemed impossible that he could retain any measure of control. Yet not a single strike was misplaced, and the Lord-Celestant left great piles of broken and torn skaven behind him as he went.

‘Take the Stormfiends,’ shouted Prosecutor-Prime Goldfeather to his men, finally given space to stretch his wings in the vaults of the cavern.

His retinue swept above the fray, calling lightning-wreathed javelins into their hands to hurl at the towering beasts. One went down under a hail of missiles, still firing its bizarre weapon as it toppled from the central mound. Another turned and fired at the Prosecutors, projectiles stitching across the roof of the cavern and cutting down two heralds in clouds of bloody smoke.

Emboldened by the arrival of their allies, the Bladestorms renewed their own vicious assault. Now the skaven’s superior numbers became their downfall; pressed against two unyielding walls of steel, there was no room to scrabble free, and barely space to gasp a desperate lungful of air. Dead skaven were packed so tight in the melee that they were held upright by their fellows, who scratched and tore in panic but could find no escape. Those vermin fortunate enough to be on the outskirts of the battle wavered, their fear-musk foul and pungent.

Blessed with that uniquely skaven insight of when to cut your losses and scamper away, Warlord Zirix cursed, spat and turned to flee, content in the knowledge that his filthy kin would keep these metal warriors busy long enough for him to disappear into the darkness.

As he turned, he met a pair of blazing blue eyes.

Terror escaped him in a sharp, sour odour as the giant before him snapped out a gauntlet to wrap around his neck. He tried to scrabble for his blade, a rusted, green-tinged shard of metal whose toxic coating had eaten away the flesh of many man-creatures in his short and wretched life. The blade was slapped free from his paw and skittered away.

Zirix screeched and gasped as he was lifted slowly into the air. The giant was so strong. He scratched and clawed at its arm, but to no avail. His eyes bulged and his vision swam with crimson as blood vessels burst under the pressure of the vice-like grip. The giant brought him closer.

‘Vengeance,’ it growled, its voice the pitiless inevitability of an avalanche. ‘Ever vengeance.’

The creature stopped struggling, and Thostos placed one gauntlet behind its neck, wrenched its head around with a sickening crunch and hurled the dead thing into the sea of ratmen that surged around the foot of the raised knoll, where it was swept up like a leaf in a rushing river.

The warlord’s death marked the end of any semblance of skaven resistance. Away the ratmen scurried, hurtling down hidden passages and burrows, scrambling over each in terrified desperation. The Celestial Vindicators culled those too slow to run, and Mykos’ warriors flowed around the Bladestorm formation, forming a wall of steel at every entrance to the cavern in case of counter-attack.

The Lord-Celestant of the Argellonites surveyed the carnage. The Bladestorm had wreaked a horrific toll on the skaven. The cavern was a charnel-pit of dead vermin, their stinking blood marking every surface, spattering the armour of the Celestial Vindicators from helm to boot. The nature of the Stormcasts’ god-given immortality meant that it was hard to judge losses, but there were more than a few stricken warriors lying amongst the wreckage of corpses. They were being tended to by Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden, who went from man to man, salving their wounds with the power of his healing storm.

Alone at the heart of the wreckage stood Thostos himself, surrounded by the broken and hewn corpses of the skaven Stormfiends, weapons hanging limply by his side. He stared at the dead creatures, barely moving. Mykos approached him and as the Lord-Celestant turned, he felt a shiver run down his spine as those pitiless eyes bored into him.

‘Their leader is dead,’ Thostos said. ‘The vermin will not trouble us further as we progress through these warrens.’

Mykos cleared his throat. ‘You slew many of these foul beasts today, brother,’ he said, cautiously. ‘You and your men fought a valiant battle.’

He paused, on the verge of saying more. There was a silence that dragged on too long, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the low, droning chant of the Lord-Relictor at work. The Bladestorm had a way of leaving him tongue-tied.

‘You wish to chastise me for my rashness,’ said Thostos. ‘For not regrouping with your Argellonites before making a push into the core chamber.’

‘I…’ Mykos blinked in surprise.

‘The movement of the enemy force suggested coordination, which meant there had to be a leader directing the vermin. The largest concentration was coming from a single direction, where I judged that the leader was likely to be. There was no time to inform you of my decision, so I trusted that the sound of battle would lead you to us.’

Mykos smiled behind his mask and shook his head.

‘You disagree with my actions?’

‘No, not entirely. I would prefer that our communication was more open, but I understand the value of risk in war. That is the Celestial Vindicators’ way.’ The Lord-Celestant shrugged. ‘It’s simply that this is the most words we’ve exchanged since we first joined our forces for this mission.’

If he was hoping that some comradely small talk would thaw the Bladestorm’s icy mood, Mykos found himself disappointed. His fellow warrior simply stared at him, saying nothing. Mykos heard the approaching steps of Lord-Castellant Eldroc with something approaching relief.

‘The men are ready to move out,’ he said, limping slightly on one leg as he approached. Redbeak was at his side, blood staining his noble features, proud eyes narrowed. ‘We lost twenty-six warriors, Liberator-Prime Lucos among them.’

Thostos nodded without any sign of regret. ‘The air is fresher this way,’ he said, pointing at the northern end of the cavern, the opposite side to which they had entered. ‘It may lead to a way out of these warrens. You can feel the wind. Move the men out.’

‘You are wounded, sire,’ Eldroc said, his voice rising in concern. Mykos saw that the Lord-Castellant was right. Thostos’ arm was bleeding heavily, and he could see several small holes dotted across the Lord-Celestant’s plate where bullets had penetrated.

‘I… had not noticed,’ said Thostos quietly, staring at the blood.

Eldroc went to his Lord-Celestant’s side and bathed Thostos in the renewing glow of his warding lantern. The Bladestorm bowed his head, and the blue flame behind his eyes flickered and dimmed. Mykos thought, with no small amount of surprise, that he could hear an exhausted sigh – but the Bladestorm seemed beyond such mortal displays of fatigue. As he watched, the Lord-Celestant’s wounds closed, and sigmarite flowed across the ruptured areas of his plate armour.

Thostos nodded to his Lord-Castellant and rotated his shoulder, testing the joint and stretching his arm.

‘Move the men out,’ he said again, and the emptiness was back. He gave Mykos one last look, the briefest nod of his head, and then strode away.

The Stormcasts emerged from the stinking warrens onto a wide shelf of rock overlooking the Roaring Plains. Pale yellow grass stretched to the horizon, shifting so violently in the restless wind that it almost seemed to ripple like fire. Clouds rushed across the sky, swirling and reforming in an endless, roiling tempest. It was a foul-tempered wind. At this height, a mortal man would be at risk of being blown clean off of the mountaintop – only the Stormcasts’ weight and strength kept them rooted. A single, steep stair was cut into the edge of the platform, winding away towards the foothills below, which reached out to the grasslands in raised veins of blackened rock, ridged and twisted, almost skeletal.

‘The Roaring Plains,’ Eldroc said, stepping up to the brink of the ledge and peering down at the vista that spread below. He raised his voice as a lash of thunder broke, rolling across the sky so loudly that the mountain itself seemed to shake beneath them. ‘Seems a pleasant enough place,’ he said, with no little sarcasm.

‘Across this plain lies the Manticore Dreadhold,’ said Thostos, his voice a granite rumble. ‘We must make haste. The next stage of Sigmar’s plan cannot proceed until we secure it and hold it.’

Mykos watched the Lord-Celestant. Thostos showed no interest in the grand spectacle of the plains, nor did he make any attempt to bolster his warriors’ spirits after their struggle through the warrens. His hands were clenched at his sides, and he stared listlessly at the distant horizon as the Celestial Vindicators formed up behind him. The fervour and the anger were long gone, and in their place was stillness, but not calm. His armour and battle-mask obscured any expression, but Mykos could feel the tension in him even at this distance. He was coiled like a spring, ready to snap at the slightest opportunity.

‘Goldfeather,’ Mykos shouted, dragging his mind back to more immediate matters. The Prosecutor-Prime dropped neatly off the rock where he had been perching, and glided down to where the Argellonites were still ranking up.

‘My Lord?’ he asked.

‘Take your swiftest men and survey the foothills and the immediate area. I want no more surprises. Anything suspicious, anything at all, and you report back to me. This land has already sent many broken brothers back to Azyr, and I do not intend to take its dangers lightly. Go.’

The Prosecutor-Prime nodded and went to gather his fellow heralds. The rest of the Argellonites and the Bladestorm had begun to filter down the winding stair, though it was so narrow that only two could walk side by side. It would take several hours to reach the foothills and redress once more into proper fighting ranks. That worried Mykos. Of the Stormcasts’ manifold virtues, stealth was not one; they were exposed here, and the skaven had amply proven the potential of a swift surprise attack.

As the Argellonites began to file down the twisting steps, Eldroc came to Mykos’ side. His armour was freshly repaired, and the hint of a limp that had marked him in the warrens had disappeared. Once again he was an image of strength and implacable fortitude. Of all the Bladestorm’s warriors, Eldroc had been the most forthcoming, and Mykos was grateful for it. He liked the man’s simple honesty and level-headedness.

‘You seem troubled, my friend,’ Eldroc said.

‘It is nothing, Lord-Castellant. Merely concern that we found battle so soon. I had hoped to arrive at our destination without issue.’

‘How fine that would be,’ Eldroc chuckled. ‘In these times that would be a rare blessing, in any corner of the realms.’

He rested his halberd on his shoulder and leaned upon the haft. They were silent a moment, listening to the tramp of boots and the howling of the wind as it whipped its way through the mountain pass.

‘He can be difficult, I know,’ the Lord-Castellant said, quietly.

Mykos said nothing. It was clear that Eldroc was choosing his words carefully, and he gave the man time to gather his thoughts. It was no easy thing for a Stormcast to question a fellow warrior, let alone his leader. Absolute loyalty and brotherhood was as much a part of them as their armour, as their weapons and their fearlessness.

‘I have spoken to many of our reforged brothers,’ Eldroc sighed, ‘and the change is more marked in Thostos than in any of them. He used to be such a thoughtful man. I think that was why he was chosen to lead. We are a wrathful host, and we need such men to temper us.’

Eldroc turned to Mykos. There was a pleading edge to his voice, and Mykos realised that the Lord-Castellant had likely never spoken to another soul regarding his concerns.

‘Give him time, my lord,’ Eldroc said.

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather enjoyed the spiteful power of the winds of the Roaring Plains as they buffeted him mercilessly. It was pleasant enough to glide in the tranquil air of the Singing Gardens, or even over the celestial valleys of Erianos, but if there was one thing Goldfeather valued, it was a challenge. The wind here had no sense to it; a zephyr would drift west, allowing him to glide on its gentle arc, then a wall of force would slam him back the other direction, blasting him so hard that he dropped several yards, and spinning him so fast that he could barely control his descent.

At first it was unsettling, but he quickly found himself relishing the unforgiving nature of the place. There was a pattern to be found in the midst of the madness. He caught a rising gust and let it lift him, felt it sway and weaken, and sought a westerly gale that filled his radiant wings with air, letting it take him on a wide arc over the churning grass of the Roaring Plains. His fellow Prosecutors followed in his wake, though he noted with no surprise, and no small amount of satisfaction, that they were finding the turbulent winds far trickier to deal with. Galeth and Harion had already been blown off course, despite the power of their Azyrite wings. He would have to speak to them later; he demanded a certain level of excellence from his men, after all.

He returned his gaze to the plains. It was an astonishing sight, the Prosecutor-Prime had to concede. The great grass seas stretched for miles in every direction, punctuated by jagged, twisting spears of rock and wind-scoured mesa clusters that broke through the earth’s surface, clutching at the sky. In all that space one might expect a measure of stillness, but that was not the case; everywhere Goldfeather looked, there was motion. Around the base of the rocky protrusions the grass grew longer, grasping at the escaping formations, wrapping around them in choking vine clusters. The wind shifted and pulled at these vines, tightening them like a hangman’s noose. As the shifting clouds passed overhead and darkened the plain for a moment, Goldfeather thought he saw one great claw of rock lurch, dragged down towards the earth by a thick belt of thorns that encircled it. Then sunlight speared though the clouds once more and it was still. Just a trick of the light, he supposed.

He was distracted by a low, rumbling noise that built into a roar. In the distance, the earth itself split. Dirt was kicked up as a great gouge tore across the plain, as if something monstrous was attempting to wrench itself free. No sooner had the earth ceased its writhing movement than a second rent appeared, following the path of the first. There was a tremor, signified by a series of great cracks that rippled across the ground, and then an uneasy quiet.

Soaring higher, Goldfeather saw more terrible wonders. A carpet of flesh roiled across the plain far to the Stormcasts’ left, a shifting mass of stampeding beasts so thickly packed together that he could not see the ground beneath them. They were flat-headed, quadruped grazing beasts, with mighty horns that wrapped backwards around their skulls. There were thousands… hundreds of thousands of them.

The Prosecutor-Prime dropped closer and saw another flock of creatures, scaled and lizard-like, but with brightly coloured feathers across their wings and hindquarters. Each was bigger than a man, almost the same size as a Stormcast, and as Evios watched they rolled and dived into the stampede, nipping at the flanks of the beasts and trying to drive them into one another. As he watched, one of the larger avians succeeded in tripping an unfortunate creature; there was a horrific avalanche of hooves and screaming flesh, and a great chunk of the onrushing tide collapsed in on itself. Nothing could survive such carnage and Evios watched, impressed despite himself at the winged creatures’ ingenuity, as a mountain of crushed beasts piled up, ground to pieces under the sheer weight of the onrushing mass. They would eat well once the stampede had passed on.

One of the avian creatures noticed his presence and began to shriek, and Goldfeather decided it was time to move on. He signalled his retinue, and as one they peeled away from the massacre.

He dropped again and found another gust of wind, and let it sweep him back to the south, towards the Stormcast position. The Prosecutor-Prime had almost satisfied himself that he had a clear reading on the region when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Heading in a lateral direction towards the foothills that the Stormcasts were heading to, he saw a number of specks. He signalled his men to follow and soared towards the movement.

As he swept closer, he saw that a large mob of creatures was pursuing a smaller, scattered band across the plain. The pursuers numbered a couple of hundred, perhaps, and their size, lumbering gait and bulky, crudely grafted armour marked them out as orruks.

Prosecutor Omeris finally caught up with him. ‘They head towards our brothers,’ he said, straining to be heard above the howl of the wind. ‘We should head back to inform the Lord-Celestants.’

‘Orruks,’ spat Goldfeather. ‘Low-minded filth, the lot of them.’

‘They almost have their prey,’ said Omeris.

‘Hardly surprising,’ Goldfeather replied. ‘The cursed brutes can run for hours when their blood is up.’

His gaze fell upon the fleeing band. They were scrawny and battered, and they wore ragged scraps of leather not much more refined than that of the primitive savages chasing them, but there was no mistaking it.

They were human.

The Stormcasts wound their way through the bluffs, alert at every howl, every creak of earth. Eldroc marched at the head of the column, a few paces behind Thostos. He watched his lord stride onwards, heedless of the noises around them. Eldroc, and all of his brothers in the Celestial Vindicators, had seen their families and friends slaughtered by the vile hordes of Chaos. As the blades finally came for them too, they had bellowed their defiance to the skies, and prayed to mighty Sigmar for the chance to wreak their vengeance upon the hated minions of the Dark Gods. This oath had been offered willingly, and any price had been a price worth paying.

And yet, looking at what had become of his Lord-Celestant, Eldroc was filled with doubt. The man was hollow, an unfeeling shell filled with nothing but an insatiable need to exact his vengeance. Gone was the thoughtful, righteous man that Eldroc had battled and trained with for so many years leading up to the great venture into the realms. They had talked together once, sharing dreams of a new era of hope and glory for the scions of Sigmar, both knowing that they would never get to experience that peace for themselves. They had accepted that truth gladly, but it was one thing to welcome an inevitable, honourable death, and another to die eternally, each fresh Reforging bringing a symphony of agonies, further draining and weakening the soul.

And what else did the Stormcasts risk, every time they went to war for the God-King? The truth only Sigmar knew. Each warrior came back altered in his own way. There was a Liberator in the Bladestorm who returned unable to remember any of his former friends, but able, with perfect clarity, to recall hundreds of ancient sonnets in some archaic language that could barely be deciphered. Others remembered only fragments of their former lives, as though they were seeing them through the eyes of another person.

Eldroc himself had felt the agony of Reforging. Yet somehow he had emerged without the traumas that his friends and brothers had suffered. His memories had faded, yes, like a rich tapestry left in the blazing sun, but deep down he knew himself; he remembered the man he had been and what he fought for.

There was guilt, too, when he looked upon the haunted visage of his Lord-Celestant, the broken shell that Thostos had become. Why had he not suffered as brutally as his friend? This terrified him more than any malady or sickness of the mind. A gnawing thought echoed inside Eldroc’s head: he had not yet discovered just what he had sacrificed – when he did, would it make what Thostos had gone through seem minor?

Absolute loyalty and devotion to his God-King ran through Eldroc like a rich vein through unyielding stone, but still he could not set aside his misgivings. Nor could he sleep at night.

The beating of wings stirred him from his dark thoughts. The Argellonites’ Prosecutor-Prime had returned, arriving some way ahead of his fellow scouts. He dropped nimbly from the sky, landing before Lord-Celestant Argellon with ease.

‘My lord,’ he said, his voice tight and urgent. ‘A mob of orruks is heading towards us, pursuing a band of mortals.’

Mykos visibly tensed. ‘Have they fallen? Do they bear the mark of the Dark Gods?’

The Prosecutor-Prime considered this a moment, and shrugged. ‘They are savage-looking, wrapped in animal skins like primitive brutes,’ he replied, and Eldroc could hear the disdain in his words, ‘but I saw none of the wretched symbols or marks of Chaos. I cannot say for certain, though I do know they will not make it much further before they tire and the orruks run them down.’

‘How many orruks?’ said Thostos, and Goldfeather gave a start at the Lord-Celestant’s sudden presence.

‘Roughly two hundred,’ he replied.

Mykos exchanged a look with Thostos. ‘We do not need a fight with the orruks,’ he said. ‘Our mission will be difficult enough already without their interference. Yet these mortals may be able to provide us with valuable information regarding this region. We should show our strength.’

The Bladestorm stared at Mykos for a long time, then gave an almost imperceptible nod and turned to survey their current position. They were coming to the mouth of the foothills, and the terrain was sloping down to meet the plains. It was still rough ground, jagged, heat-baked and dry, but it formed a natural defensive position against an infantry assault. The embankments that channelled them were roughly the height of two Stormcasts, and the ground between was narrow enough for two-score warriors to hold the line without threat of being outflanked. Some thousand yards or so ahead, the rocky earth sloped down one final time, and beyond that Thostos could see a glimpse of open ground.

‘Retributor-Prime Hyphon,’ he shouted, ‘summon your warriors. Lord-Celestant Argellon, we will take a hundred men and make haste for the ridge ahead of our main force.’

Liberators dashed to the summit of the ridge, forming into lines and smashing their colossal shields down into the dirt to form an impenetrable ring of steel. Behind them the Judicators judged their range and held their bows taut and ready as the orruks rumbled closer. It was easy to hear them now, hooting and hollering their bestial war cries as they drove themselves ever harder, desperate to catch the fleeing mortals.

Staggering with the half-drunk sway of exhausted prey, the beleaguered humans spotted the formation of Stormcasts and stopped still. Several dropped to their knees, exhausted.

‘Move your idle backsides,’ roared Goldfeather, hovering above the ragged band. He scanned the group to indentify the leader and settled on a wiry female who was down on one knee, a curved blade in her hand. She seemed to be the one the others looked to.

He swooped down to meet her. ‘Get your people behind those shields, or we’ll leave you to the greenskins,’ he said.

The mortals’ nervous eyes flicked towards the woman, who stared up at the Prosecutor-Prime with a familiarity and lack of fear that made him feel surprisingly uncomfortable. He was used to little more than servile deference from mortals. Finally, she nodded, put two calloused fingers between her lips and gave a sharp whistle, clearly deciding that a slim chance of survival was better than the certainty of death. Summoning up one last reserve of energy, the mortals dragged themselves forwards, scrambling up the shallow incline towards the Stormcasts’ shield wall, which opened to let them through. As they passed, the Celestial Vindicators slid back into position expertly.

‘They’re a ragged lot,’ said Knight-Heraldor Axilon as the humans passed. Mykos could hardly disagree.

They were wiry and weathered, with a leanness to their frame that suggested many nights had gone by without a decent meal. Ritual scars and red-ink tattoos covered their sun-browned skin; they wore little armour besides thin hide shirts and breeches, and leather wrappings on their feet and hands. The tall, raven-haired warrior who led them in had her hair bound up on one side with leather scraps and shaved clean on the other. As her party staggered past, her eyes locked with those of the Lord-Celestant. They were cold, grey and hard – a hunter’s eyes, a wolf’s eyes. She showed no fear, and no surprise or awe that he could discern. These are killers, Mykos thought. He signalled Liberator-Prime Julon, who nodded and began to secure the mortals, stripping any weapons they carried and examining them for any overt signs of corruption.

The orruks howled, denied of their prey, and thundered forwards into a wide, loose semicircle some twenty yards ahead of the Stormcasts. They grunted and snarled, spat and snorted, but for now they seemed curious enough not to hurl themselves into the Stormcast line. Shoving his fellows out of his way, a hulking specimen stomped forward, lazily scratching his thick neck, a wicked-looking greataxe held loosely at his side. Several burly warriors followed him, each bearing a smeared, red claw mark upon their black-iron breastplates.

‘What now?’ asked Goldfeather, gently dropping to the ground beside his Lord-Celestant, a stormcall javelin held at the ready in one gauntleted fist.

‘Now we parlay,’ said Mykos grimly, looking to his fellow Lord-Celestant, who was gazing at the orruks dispassionately. Thostos said nothing, though his weapons were drawn and held in steady hands. ‘Humanity has known a common purpose with the orruks before. Perhaps we can avoid a skirmish that will gain us nothing.’

He signalled to Axilon, and the Knight-Heraldor nodded and selected five broad-shouldered and eager Retributors. If this did come to blows, he wanted the orruks down and dying as soon as possible. Together, the retinue stepped out from the shield wall.

Mykos held Mercutia, and the wondrous grandblade caught the sun, sending a ripple of light over his armour. He motioned his men to halt and strode forwards, sword raised high. The orruks watched, their ape-like brows furrowed. With elaborate slowness, the Lord-Celestant made a show of lowering the weapon, sliding it securely into the scabbard at his thigh.

The orruks looked to their leader, inching forwards slowly. He held out a meaty palm to stop them, and raised his own weapon. Tongue protruding in mock concentration, he lifted the greataxe and slotted its haft through an imaginary scabbard. His warriors guffawed idiotically. He smirked, and barked something indecipherable at his warriors. Eight came forward, while the others loomed menacingly in the background.

‘That, I think, is as close as we’re likely to get to a formal truce,’ said Eldroc from the shield wall.

‘Follow me,’ said Mykos. ‘And keep your hand near your blade.’

Mykos and Eldroc led the way, armour gleaming bright turquoise in the midday sun, in stark contrast to the dull, crude metal scraps and chains that the orruks had wrapped around themselves. Thostos walked behind them, his eyes locked on the warband’s leader. The orruks snickered and hollered amongst themselves in their crude tongue, and one began a mock drumbeat upon its chest plate. Its fellows roared with laughter at this lack-witted attempt at humour.

Behind his battle-mask, Mykos couldn’t help but sneer. Orruks. It never failed to amaze him how such a savage, dull, self-destructive race could be so resilient. They possessed no honour, no discipline or ambition beyond finding their next brawl, and yet the foul creatures propagated in every corner of the realms. One of the first tasks of the Stormcast Eternals, after their forging in the halls of Azyr, had been to clear the wilds of the Celestial Realm free of orruks. They had torn down the creatures’ crude icons and the totems erected to their bestial gods, and put the beasts to the sword. The greenskins had fought savagely – orruks always did – but against the plated fist of Sigmar’s avenging warriors, their only fate was death. Mykos remembered those battles with little fondness. It had been a grim task, valourless butchery that was necessary before the Stormcasts took their war to the true enemy.

Despite his disdain, Mykos could not help but note the difference between these hulking creatures and the wretched, feral scraps that they had ground underboot in Azyr. Their armour, for one. These orruks had bound themselves in thick plates of black iron, with wicked armour spikes upon the joints. Whereas the sigmarite armour of the Stormhosts was sculpted to artisanal perfection, the orruks’ plate was worn, scratched and dented, and daubed haphazardly with slashes of red paint, forming fangs and jaws on greaves and vambraces. The quality was crude, and the effect should have been ludicrous, but on the heavily muscled, scarred forms of the orruks, it instead spoke of blunt efficiency, of the race’s atavistic, uncultured love of war.

They were bigger, too, broader and more heavily muscled, and marked from head to toe with scars, burns and all the other trophies that battle bestowed upon a warrior’s skin. Most wore pot helms decorated with horns or more wicked spikes, though others went bareheaded. The leader, an anvil-jawed monster with a wicked scar that cut an angry red line across his porcine right eye as it travelled down to his jaw, was as tall as the Stormcasts. He leered at the Celestial Vindicators and swaggered forwards to meet them. His warriors spread out in a semicircle around him, hands resting on jagged axes and spiked mauls. Mykos felt his hand drift down to Mercutia, who yearned to break free of her scabbard. There was a pregnant silence, broken only by the howling wind, and then the orruk leader spoke.

‘Ain’t seen yore kind before,’ he rumbled in a crude tongue that the Stormcasts could understand, licking his lips like a starving man presented with a bountiful feast. ‘Very shiny, ain’t ya?’

His warband rumbled with amusement, their leader gave a broken-toothed grin, and Mykos resisted a strong urge to slice his head off. Eldroc stepped forward.

‘We are the Celestial Vindicators, the blessed swords of Sigmar,’ he said in his deep, resonant voice. ‘We have no quarrel with you or your kind, but these humans are now under our guard.’

‘’Sat right?’ the orruk growled, scratching one filthy ear with a yellow-taloned finger. ‘Here,’ he turned to his warriors, cocking his great head, ‘who ’sis land belong to, boyz?’

‘Ironjawz!’ they roared as one.

‘An’ who says what goes around ’ere?’

‘Drekka! Drekka! Drekka!’

The orruk leaned in conspiratorially. ‘There’s that then,’ he chuckled. ‘Reckon I won’t take no orders from some tinpot git dropped outta the sky. We’ll be taking those humies, and they’ll go right t–’

A sword whipped through the air and buried itself between the orruk leader’s eyes.

The momentum of the throw hurled the creature back into the orruk standing behind him, knocking both to the ground with a clatter. Mykos turned and saw Thostos drawing his warhammer, an empty scabbard at his side.

Silence. A sharp peal of astonished laughter came from Goldfeather. Then the orruks charged.

Roaring more with eager battle-lust than any feelings of betrayal at their leader’s death, the orruks poured forwards. The Retributors met them, hammers drawn and swinging. The close quarters robbed the majority of the momentum from the charge, but Mykos saw Stormcasts go down under the greenskins’ boots and blades, trampled and broken. As a bellowing orruk wielding two axes charged him down, he drew his sword, spun to the side and let his momentum add power to a lateral swing. Mercutia sliced straight through the creature’s torso, opening its belly horizontally, spilling its innards to gush over Mykos’ boots. The dying orruk attempted a wild swing at the Lord-Celestant, but he avoided it easily and put his boot in its chest, sending it crashing backwards to land in a crumpled heap.

By now the front ranks of the larger orruk mob had reached the fray, though Mykos could also hear the stomping of heavy boots and the battle-hymns of the faithful as the Liberator shield wall abandoned its defensive position and rushed forwards to protect its leaders.

Eldroc had set his halberd, and Mykos saw him skewer an orruk though the shoulder blades, twist his weapon and send the creature spinning to the floor. Another charged him from the side, and the Lord-Castellant retracted the halberd and thrust again, driving its heavy spike deep into the beast’s gut. It squealed in fury and hurled its axe in a last desperate act of spite. It sailed past Eldroc, staving in the chest armour of an unfortunate Stormcast, who collapsed immobile on the ground. Redbeak snarled and hurled himself at the dying orruk, tearing out its throat and ending its defiance.

The ridge ran red with blood, orruk and Stormcast, but the impact of the orruk leader’s death had swayed the momentum in favour of the Celestial Vindicators. Without his bellows and beatings, whatever strange, mob mentality bound the orruk band together in battle was shattered by the rage of the Stormcast Eternals. They were simply too strong and too skilled for the artless form of warfare that the orruks favoured. Liberator shields intercepted axe blows, then were shifted to one side for a killing thrust of a sword, or the crushing blow of a warhammer. Retributors swept their heavy hammers from side to side, breaking bones and smashing skulls to pieces.

Thostos was a blur of turquoise fury at the heart of the melee. He had replaced his thrown sword with a gladius, holding the short blade in a reverse grip and using it to stab and drag the nearest greenskins towards him, where he bludgeoned them to the ground with his warhammer.

It quickly became a slaughtering field. Not a single orruk left the ridge alive.

The runeblade was still lodged in the foul creature’s idiotic smirk. Thostos put his foot on the dead orruk’s forehead and wrenched his weapon loose. It came free with a spurt of gore, yellowed teeth splinters and torn flesh.

He heard boots thumping towards him on the hard earth. Two pairs, one fast and angry, one slower, more tentative.

‘What in the name of Sigmar was that, Bladestorm?’ barked Mykos Argellon, loud enough to draw the stares of several Stormcasts who had been dispensing Sigmar’s mercy to any injured orruks. ‘We were at parlay. They did not threaten us.’

‘They have killed children of Sigmar,’ Thostos said. ‘That is reason enough for them to die.’

‘They are cruel, unthinking savages, but they are not our enemy here. Sigmar gave us this righteous purpose, and you would risk it all to sate your bloodlust,’ Mykos spat. ‘We could have avoided all of this. Men have died for nothing.’

Thostos rolled the orruk over with his boot. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, his voice betraying not a hint of tension. ‘He decorates his flesh with trophies. Human bones, hands, ears. He keeps a tally upon his armour, see?’

It was true. The dead orruk’s chain hauberk was heavy with knucklebones, stolen jewels and other trinkets, all recognisably of human origin. Thostos reached down to snatch a trophy from the brute’s belt. It was a gauntlet of spiked black iron, and upon the palm there was the eight-pointed star of the eternal enemy. Eldroc cursed, and Thostos threw the gauntlet for Mykos to catch.

‘Have you ever known orruks so bold?’ he asked. ‘Look at their armour, their weapons. Hardly the sticks and stones that the greenskin rabble brought to bear on us in the Amaris Foothills. These are stronger, more vital. They are blooded and battle-hardened. They have met the forces of the Dark Gods in battle and triumphed.’

‘They did not attack us,’ insisted Mykos, ‘not until you gave them reason to. This is not the first time your reckless fury has cost us lives.’

‘Their curiosity was all that stayed their blades, and that would have lasted scant moments longer. Your indecision would have endangered us, and so I acted in your stead.’

Mykos started forward, but Eldroc placed himself between the two Lord-Celestants and slammed his halberd down into the earth.

‘Enough,’ Eldroc hissed. ‘The men are watching. Remember yourselves.’

Mykos glanced back. Thostos’ men stood there, staring impassively. His own warriors were looking at each other in uneasy confusion. He could not see his warriors’ faces beneath their battle-masks, but he could sense their tension, and he cursed himself for losing control.

Thostos sheathed his weapons.

‘You are right, brother,’ he said, staring at the hewn corpse of the orruk leader. ‘They are not our enemy here.’

He turned back to look at Mykos, who returned his blue-flame gaze without flinching, no matter that he felt that familiar ache of discomfort.

‘But they are never allies,’ Thostos growled. ‘Sigmar’s light has been gone from this place for too long, and these savages have grown bold in its absence. We will meet them in battle again, do not doubt.’ He stalked away.

Mykos Argellon had never felt true anger at a fellow Stormcast before. He tried to calm his breathing and centre his humours, but all he could feel was a white-hot fury and an aching sense of betrayal. How could he command this expedition alongside a man who trusted only in his lust for battle? Thostos could not be reasoned with, and his recklessness had already cost them lives that they could ill afford with such a lengthy, dangerous quest ahead of them. His anger was so keenly focussed that he barely noticed Lord-Castellant Eldroc was still standing beside him, until he sensed that the man was about to speak.

‘Say nothing, brother,’ Mykos warned. ‘I do not wish to hear it. Do not tell me that he needs time, or tell me of how he has suffered. Tell it to the Stormcasts who fell here, when they make their own return from the forge.’

He turned to Eldroc, daring him to say a word in his lord’s defence. To his credit the warrior did not avoid the Lord-Celestant’s wrathful gaze. Neither did he speak. Instead, he simply gave a sad nod and strode off after the Bladestorm, leaving the lord of the Argellonites standing on his own on the blood-soaked ridge, amongst the dead.

CHAPTER TWO

Righteous Blood

‘You put your trust in witchcraft?’ spat the masked warrior. Bloody phlegm dribbled over his gore-encrusted chestplate, trickling down past obscene runes of devotion and damnation.

‘I put my trust in this,’ said Varash Sunken-Eye, raising his wicked blade, a hand-and-a-half of cruel obsidian. ‘It has never failed me.’

His opponent circled, as did the warrior’s two accomplices. A rabid pack, pink-eyed and drooling with hunger. Not hunger for sustenance, but for carnage, for spilt blood and shattered skulls.

Though to any true warrior of the Blood God, such things were as vital as water and bread.

Varash kept in step with his assailants, a wide grin splitting his ravaged face. It had been a while since anyone had challenged him – no surprise after what he had done to the Eyegouger and his men. Varash had kept his killers largely in check while the sorcerer did the necessary work, but a Bloodbound warband needed… pruning every now and then. If you wanted to lead, you killed your rivals so brutally, so painfully, that nobody dared to step across your path. Then you repeated that process any time they showed signs of forgetting who was in charge. It was a pattern that he had repeated a hundred times over the decades he had spent slaughtering in the name of the Blood God.

‘The sorcerer works a ritual at my command,’ Varash said. ‘No weakling magic, but an offering that will tear down the veil between worlds and free our blades to make murder once again.’

He said this for the audience’s benefit, of course. Hakkos and the two fools he’d brought along in this failed bid for power were dead already, they were just too foolish to realise it. They had staged their ill-considered ambush in the main courtyard of the dreadhold, under the great shadow of the Everchosen’s statue. The colossal monument had been repaired and enlarged since the orruks’ last attempt to tear it down, and now towered over even the mighty fortress. Sword raised, imposing horned helm proclaiming his dominance of not only the dreadhold but of this entire realm, the statue captured just a sliver of the real Archaon’s astonishing presence.

The dreadhold itself was a wedge of black metal built into the mountain, its walls lined with bronzed skulls and jagged spikes of obsidian. Daemonic faces glowered from beneath the battlements, eyes burning like hot coals, and banners of stitched skin marked with vile runes flew from the three watchtowers equidistant along the wall. Hooting, snarling, scarred killers formed a circle around the duelling warriors, or peered down from the skull-adorned ramparts.

Hakkos dashed forward, axe raised. At the same time, his two lackeys came in from each side, one swinging low, one aiming at Varash’s back. Perhaps they hoped that the ruined left side of his face wouldn’t catch the flanking attack.

Fools.

The Chaos lord was unthinkably fast. His bastard sword snapped out low, deflecting the attack from the left and hooking underneath the axe blade. He dragged the blade to his right, and sent the unfortunate warrior stumbling into the path of Hakkos. The traitor’s swinging axe struck him in the side of the neck, and a spurt of crimson arced out, splashing across Varash’s armour.

He didn’t waste a moment to savour the taste, but instead untangled his blade, and somehow got it raised in time to meet the axeman on his right. He stepped in close and smashed the pommel of the sword into the man’s face, pushing him back into an awkward stumble, then turned again and kicked the dying warrior on the floor into Hakkos. The traitor went down under the dead weight. Varash swept his blade in a figure-eight pattern, and roared in laughter.

The crowd roared with him.

‘It’s a great shame, Deathbringer,’ he said, smiling broadly as Hakkos scrambled to his feet. ‘The carnage. The mountains of skulls that we will tear from the orruks once Xos’Phet completes his ritual. The oceans of blood we’ll bathe in, Hakkos. You’ll miss it all.’

‘Your time is done, cripple,’ snarled Hakkos. ‘I’ll put out your other eye when I’m done here. I’ll flay you alive and hang you from the ramparts.’

He charged again, his accomplice in tow. Varash quickstepped back, dodging and blocking, letting Hakkos’ mad swipes rush past him. The man was devilishly strong, but faced with a competent opponent he had no answer but clumsy rage.

Varash ducked a wild swing and cut a gouge into the remaining accomplice’s leg. The man dropped with a howl, and the Chaos lord turned with the momentum of his strike, spinning and bringing the blade across in a backhand slice that swept the fool’s head from his shoulders.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he screamed. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

Hakkos bellowed in return and leaped at him, axe leading. Varash sidestepped and sliced the traitor’s leg off at the knee, sending him skidding and bleeding across the floor. There was a roar from the crowd, and the lord of the dreadhold raised his blade in salute to his warriors, drinking in the applause.

He approached the stricken Hakkos, grabbed the warrior around the neck, and hauled him upright to stare into his ruined face.

‘You betray me?’ he growled. ‘You think to cut me down? You? I am here by Archaon’s command, you pitiful worm.’

He smashed a fist into Hakkos’ face, and hurled the broken man to the floor.

‘Witness this, you filth,’ he roared, and he felt blood trickle from his shattered eye socket. It had never healed, but he welcomed the agony, drank it all in. ‘Follow me and I’ll lead you to a slaughter that the Blood Lord himself won’t be able to tear his gaze from. Challenge me and I’ll tear the skin from your bones. I’ll drink your blood, you witless vermin.’

He drew his flensing knife from his belt, a short, wicked blade with a pronounced curve. He kneeled down beside Hakkos, felt ropes of bloody saliva drape across his chin.

‘Flay me alive, will you?’ he laughed, grabbing a fistful of the man’s lank hair. ‘Put out my eye?’

He leaned in close, and the smell of gore, sweat and fear was exquisite.

‘We can do better than that,’ he hissed, and brought the knife down.

Hakkos’ scream was a pitiful, high-pitched thing, drowned amongst the blood-crazed cheers of the men of the dreadhold.

Sun broke across the Roaring Plains, drenching the land in soft crimson light. The sky was a blood-red promise of agony and slaughter. Lord Varash Sunken-Eye savoured it like a fine wine.

The warrior stood at the very top of the great Manticore Tower, looking out across the jagged, broken earth towards the west. From here he could see the mouth of Splitskull Pass, beyond which were camped the numberless orruk hordes, mere miles from his position. He glanced down and smiled as he looked upon the flayed, ruined corpse of Hakkos, impaled on the spikes of the fortress wall. A satisfying kill, but little more than a momentary distraction from the real enemy.

The Blood God’s favoured and the endless hordes of the orruks were well acquainted. They had slaughtered each other across the Roaring Plains for centuries beyond counting, and no fortress there had seen more bloodshed than the Manticore Dreadhold. It had almost become a ritual by now; the green-skinned beasts would sally forth, hollering and screeching their war cries as they poured towards the dreadhold, drawn by the promise of death and slaughter. Warriors of Chaos would meet them just as eagerly, keen axes swinging. Khorne himself would smile to see such carnage. But this was the orruks’ land, and their numbers were beyond counting. They would take the dreadhold, they would deface its ruinous icons and the grand statue of Archaon and then, idiot brains sated by battle for a short while, they would retreat back to their stinking hovels. Archaon would rage at the creatures’ impertinence, and order fresh defences and reinforcements. And the cycle would begin again.

Save that Varash Sunken-Eye was in charge now, and he had no intention of letting it happen again.

‘The wretches have been quiet lately,’ came the voice of the Slaughterpriest Slaadh, Varash’s second in command. The towering warrior loped towards the Chaos lord, and Varash caught the sound of weight dragging across stone. Slaadh still favoured his left leg, the result of a wicked strike from an orruk flail that had torn most of the flesh from his right.

‘We hurt them last time,’ said Varash. ‘The orruks are reckless, but their leader is no fool. He bides his time, replenishes his ranks. This is a place of strength for them.’

‘So it is for us. The blood we have spilled here…’ Slaadh ran a dry, torn tongue across his razor-filed teeth, and blood stained his lips scarlet. ‘Our master does not forget our sanguine offering. The orruks will come again soon and we will make a mountain of their skulls.’

‘Do not underestimate them,’ said Varash. ‘The creatures have routed this place twice already. I saw Archaon’s fury when they defaced his great statue. I was one of the few to survive it.’

Slaadh grinned. ‘That is why we are here,’ he said. ‘The Everchosen sends his favoured killers. He gives us a flesh offering that will drown these plains in blood.’

Varash nodded and wiped away a trail of blood from his eye. He had earned his name thanks to the tender administrations of an orruk war-chief. The beast’s club had smashed into the Chaos lord’s eye, shattering the socket and pulping the orb within. Such a wound would cripple a mortal warrior’s ability to fight, but these days Varash was some way away from being mortal.

A fresh lance of agony stabbed through his skull, and Varash growled, grinding a mailed fist into the ruined socket. Every moment during which the Sunken-Eye was not spilling blood he was plagued with nausea and sharp, unforgiving headaches. Only in battle, only when he was claiming skulls and souls in the name of his dark master, was Varash free of this constant discomfort.

Screams echoed up the winding stairs of the tower. The gorepriests had begun carving their runes.

‘No more waiting,’ growled Varash. His ruined eye was drooling blood again, and it stained his vision crimson. ‘No more defending.’ The word left an acrid taste in his mouth. ‘We will carve open the sky and birth an army that will rip and tear its way across the Roaring Plains.’

‘The witchkin is already weaving his magic,’ said Slaadh, not bothering to mask his disdain and revulsion. Followers of the Blood God put no stock in weakling magic-users. Only fear of Varash had prevented his pet sorcerer from being torn limb from limb the moment he set foot in the Manticore Dreadhold. If his men did not shed blood soon, they would become even more restless. The Chaos lord cared nothing for the sorcerer’s life, of course. Once he had finished what needed to be done, Varash had half a mind to tear the snivelling wretch’s heart out himself.

No. Patience. Varash relished the flow of spilt blood as much as any warrior of Khorne, but he was no gore-crazed, reckless fool. That was why he was so high in the favour of the Everchosen, and why he had been trusted to defend the dreadhold.

‘Gather a raiding party,’ he said to the Slaughterpriest. ‘Send them out through the pass. Have them bring back more bodies for Xos’Phet’s ritual.’

‘And some meat for the cooking fires,’ said Slaadh, wistfully. ‘We haven’t eaten well in a good long time.’

‘We were foolish,’ said the scarred woman, and Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon could hear the anger and shame in her words.

‘We were hunting, and seeking water,’ she continued. ‘It has been a hard season, and our supplies are low. We rode hard, day and night, and when we came upon the spring I let my warriors drink deeply. We let our guard down for a moment, and they were on us.’

She spat. ‘Foolish. They hacked our mounts to pieces, killed Jevir and a dozen others. The rest of us ran.’

‘And you survived,’ said Thostos Bladestorm.

The woman looked up and stared right at the Lord-Celestant. Her wolf-grey eyes met his own unnerving gaze and did not falter for a moment.

‘They could have slaughtered us all, but instead they welcomed the chase. We made good sport.’

‘What do they call you?’ asked Mykos.

‘I am Alzheer Nahazim,’ the woman said. ‘And this is what is left of my hunt.’

As she gestured, one of the prisoners let out a low groan and doubled over. Alzheer rushed to his side. Thick leaves of grass were bound around the man’s waist, stained a dark red. Alzheer gently removed them, and Mykos caught a glimpse of angry purple. Blood poured from the man’s midriff, and his pale face contorted in agony. A gut wound. If it was as bad as it looked, it was fairly remarkable that the man had made it this far. The Celestial Vindicators could do little to help. They carried no medical supplies, and the healing touch of Lord-Castellant Eldroc’s warding lantern only soothed the wounds of the storm-forged scions of Azyr.

‘How many of your people live?’ asked Mykos.

She shrugged. ‘We number a few thousand. Perhaps less, now. As I say, it has been a hard season. The orruks grow restless, and several of our hunting parties have disappeared without trace. Without food and water…’

Thostos turned to Mykos, and signalled him and the Lord-Castellant Eldroc over. The trio moved away from the prisoners, and were joined by Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather and Axilon, the Knight-Heraldor.

‘What do we do with them?’ asked Eldroc. ‘They may look savage, but they do not bear the marks of Chaos.’

‘Lord-Castellant,’ said Evios, ‘I do not think we can discount the possibility that these mortals may have been corrupted by the dark powers. We shouldn’t blindly trust them simply because they aren’t covered in flayed skulls and severed extremities.’

Mykos frowned. ‘Neither should we judge them simply because they aren’t well-dressed enough for your liking, Prosecutor-Prime. Look around you. This is a harsh place, and it breeds hard people.’

Goldfeather’s helm twitched slightly, and for a moment it seemed like the Prosecutor was about to argue the point. Instead he nodded abruptly, and fell silent.

‘We leave them,’ said Thostos.

‘They will die here,’ said Mykos. ‘They have no mounts and they’re deep in hostile territory. They’re exhausted and malnourished. Why did we save their lives, if we are simply to abandon them now?’

‘We cannot spare the men to guard them, and we do not have time to wait for mortals to keep up with us,’ said Thostos. ‘They will obstruct our mission.’

‘Our duty is to protect the sons and daughters of Sigmar,’ said Mykos.

‘You are wrong. Our duty, our only duty, is to defeat the forces of Chaos. If we fail to take the Manticore Dreadhold, the life of every mortal in this region is forfeit. Do not let emotion blind you to the importance of our task.’

‘We do not know the Roaring Plains,’ insisted Mykos. ‘These people do. They have survived here against all the odds. Their resilience and bravery is not in doubt, and their advice may be invaluable.’

Thostos looked out across the plain. Carrion birds were already circling above the piles of dead orruks. The wind was picking up again, whistling as it whipped through the clusters of long grass.

‘If they fail to keep the pace, we will not stop for them,’ he said. ‘Keep them under watch at all times.’

By the time the column was moving once more, the field of dead orruks was almost entirely carpeted by scavengers. Rat-mawed canine beasts ripped and tore, snapping at each other as often as they did the flesh of the corpses. Wiry, vicious-looking avian creatures tore strips of skin free and gobbled them down, while the ground itself began to crumble away as something unseen opened up great sinkholes to claim its own meal. Mykos Argellon watched the carnage with a kind of horrified fascination. Before the Stormcasts had passed out of sight of the battlefield, almost every scrap of matter had already been dragged away or consumed, even the orruks’ thick iron armour.

‘So much for the orruks stumbling across our little encounter,’ said Knight-Heraldor Axilon. ‘Almost makes one feel a little hungry, doesn’t it?’

‘Your appetite concerns me,’ replied Mykos.

They advanced out onto the open plain, the Celestial Vindicators setting a fierce pace that quickly saw the craggy foothills shrink into the distance behind them. The prisoners marched along behind the Stormcast column, guarded closely by the Liberators, who formed a rough circle around the group. Despite the harsh pace, the mortals showed no signs of exhaustion, save the wounded man, who was being supported by two of his fellows. His skin was pallid, and sweat poured down his face. It was astonishing that he was still standing, let alone keeping up with the others. Whether that would last, Mykos was uncertain. The Lord-Celestant felt the mortal leader’s eyes on his back. He turned, and she met his gaze unbowed.

‘What do you seek here, sky warrior?’ she said. Her voice had a soft, sing-song quality, at odds with her barbarous appearance.

‘Silence,’ said Liberator Phalryn, but Mykos held up a hand.

‘I cannot tell you,’ he said. ‘We do not know if you are trustworthy yet, and I will not risk my brothers’ lives on a hunch.’

She nodded. ‘Wise. But you have no need to mistrust us. You are sons of the Sky God, and you are our salvation. It is written.’

‘This Sky God you worship,’ asked Mykos. ‘Tell me more of him.’

‘Zi’Mar, the Rage upon the Storm. It is he who guides our arrows. He who welcomes brave warriors home when they fall in battle. He who blesses the hunt. He is far from us, but his strength guides us still. I am his daughter, and his priestess.’

‘You’re not exactly what I expect from a priestess, my lady,’ said Mykos.

She smiled, pulling aside the leather armour at her neck to reveal a lightning tattoo that reached from beneath her jaw to just above her collarbone. A symbol of a god of the sky, of battle and of lightning. It had been observed before amongst mortals who had survived the age of darkness without succumbing to the wiles of Chaos. Faith in a being as mighty as Sigmar did not die easily, even if the finer details of worship had been altered during the long years of his absence.

‘He sent you, didn’t he?’ she went on. ‘He sent you to kill the orruks and help us reclaim our lands.’

Mykos marched beside her in silence for a while.

‘No,’ he said, finally. The truth was best, always. ‘The God-King Sigmar created us, forged us in celestial fire. Our task is to take back the Eight Realms from Chaos and restore the law of order. But we are not here for you. Not today.’

She fell silent for a while.

‘Chaos?’ she said at last. ‘You mean the orruks?’

‘No,’ Mykos replied. ‘Warped human warriors. Minions of the Dark Gods.’

‘The Bloodstarved,’ she said. ‘The men of the fortress.’

‘You know of them?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. They have held that place for many years. Once their raiding parties were common. Now that the orruks have them holed up in the mountains, they rarely bother us.’

‘You don’t seem to bear them much ill will,’ said Mykos.

‘On the plain, everything but your fellow tribesman wants you dead,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘The Bloodstarved are cruel, and despised amongst my people, but they are one of many foes. For us, it is good that they hold the dark fortress. It keeps the greenskins’ eyes fixed on them.’

They walked in silence for a while, Mykos mulling over this latest revelation. The presence of the orruks complicated things, especially since they appeared to be far stronger than the Celestial Vindicators had anticipated, but the fact that the Chaos filth were holed up in the dreadhold could only help their plans.

‘We can help you,’ Alzheer said at last. ‘Whatever you are looking for here, we can help you find it. The Sky Seekers know every hand-width of this land. It is our home.’

‘I believe we can trust you,’ Mykos replied, ‘but you must understand that this is no simple thing for us to risk. We cannot know for sure that you are not tainted by the touch of Chaos yourselves.’

‘Come with us,’ said Alzheer. ‘Come to the camp of the Sky Seekers, and you will know the truth of my people. We can help you.’

‘Enough,’ came a growl from ahead, and Mykos saw the blue eyes of Thostos gazing back at them. ‘We know our business, and we need no help completing it. There are many miles left to march. Keep up or we will leave you behind.’

Constant, furious motion defined the Roaring Plains. The grass whipped and churned in the howling wind, giving the impression that the Stormcasts were wading through knee-deep water. The flocks of carrion-birds and flying lizards that had feasted on the dead orruks now followed the war party, as if they sensed the strangers’ impending doom and were simply waiting for their opportunity to swoop down for the feast. The clouds boiled and surged overhead, and in the distance the striated forks of a lightning storm heralded a rumble of thunder loud enough to shake the earth. The Stormcast Eternals watched as a distant spear of rock was struck by an arc of lightning and exploded into a cloud of shattered stone and displaced dust.

‘I do not like how exposed we are out here,’ grumbled Axilon. ‘It feels like I’m marching out onto a frozen lake with a weight tied around me.’

‘Lord-Celestant Thostos!’ shouted a Bladestorm warrior at the head of the formation. ‘Movement.’

Immediately the Stormcasts moved into position, readying their blades on all sides in case of an ambush. Mykos, Thostos and Lord-Relictor Tharros ran forwards and glanced out across the plain. In the distance, the earth shifted. At first, Mykos thought it was some sort of herd animal that drifted across the plain towards them, but as he came closer he saw the truth of it.

They were plants. Vaguely spherical, enclosed entirely in bands of thorns that protruded like knives from the centre. Each spike was tipped red, as if it had already been doused in the blood of its prey. They roared along on the wind, picking up impressive speed as they bounded and rolled across the plains. They were heading just past the Stormcasts, their path taking them ahead of the front ranks of Liberators by a few dozen meters.

Liberator Iodus strayed too close. One of the razor-spheres veered tightly to the right, lurching so quickly that it seemed more like a hunting creature than a plant. It hurtled through the air, striking Iodus in the chest and wrapping itself around his body with a shriek of scored metal. He gasped in pain, and Mykos was astonished to see the armour that encased the Liberator warp and crack under the pressure.

‘Help him!’ roared Eldroc, as Stormcasts ran to the prone warrior.

They tugged and hacked at the vines, but could not dislodge them without striking hard enough to damage the stricken warrior. Iodus gasped in agony as his armour began to crumple under the extreme pressure. He was being crushed to death.

‘Halt!’ shouted Liberator Galven, and Mykos turned to see what had happened.

Alzheer had slipped from the circle of guards, and she rolled right past a Judicator who tried to grab her. As she came up, her hands went to her neck and yanked at the necklace she wore around her throat. It came loose, and Mykos saw her grasp the wicked tooth that sat in the centre in one hand.

He moved to block her, thinking that she was trying to escape them.

Alzheer grabbed her wounded warrior and drove the makeshift blade into his neck. The man’s eyes bulged and he gasped in shock. A mist of blood sprayed across the woman’s face, but she did not look away. One calloused hand wrapped the dying warrior’s face, and she whispered something in his ear. Her other hand drove the knife in again, and the man’s eyes glazed over.

Not wasting a second, Alzheer hauled the body upright, staggered over to where the stricken Stormcast lay, and dropped it to the floor. Blood poured from the dead man’s ruined throat, staining the earth a dull brown.

‘To the sky, my friend,’ said the priestess.

The razor-vine that had wrapped itself around Liberator Iodus went suddenly slack, gently slipping from the Stormcast like an unspooling rope. It whipped across the ground and looped around the bloody corpse. The wicked thorns tore into the dead man’s flesh, and the vines pulsed hideously as they began to exsanguinate their fresh prize.

‘Back!’ shouted Alzheer.

Mykos grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him.

‘Drake’s blood, woman!’ he shouted. ‘What have you done?’

She wrenched her arm free.

‘He was dying,’ she said. ‘His death saved your man’s life. Blood for blood.’

‘Did I not say these people were tainted?’ said Goldfeather, who had a javelin readied in one hand. ‘Murderous savages.’

‘Hold!’ shouted Thostos Bladestorm. He was looking back at Liberator Iodus, who was staggering to his feet, aided by several of his fellow warriors. Lord-Castellant Eldroc approached, drawing his celestial lantern. Radiant light washed over the Stormcast’s ruptured armour, and the rents in the sigmarite began to heal over. Thostos turned to Alzheer, and blue eyes met unflinching grey.

‘You saved me a dead soldier,’ said the Lord-Celestant, giving Alzheer the briefest nod. ‘You have my gratitude.’

‘My lord,’ spluttered Evios, ‘she butchered her own man, she–’

‘Her man had a gut wound, and would have died slowly and painfully,’ said Thostos, and the Prosecutor-Prime seemed to wither under his glare. ‘He was done. The priestess made the hard choice. Thanks to her quick thinking, a warrior remains fit for duty.’

The unfortunate mortal’s body crumpled as the vine wrapped ever tighter around his frame, squeezing out every drop of blood like juice from a fruit. As they watched, the dead man’s skin turned more and more pale, and the vines of the carnivorous plant swelled and took on a crimson hue.

‘We should be gone from here,’ said Alzheer, staring expressionlessly at the gruesome sight. ‘The blood will draw other creatures.’

‘We are nearing the mouth of Splitskull Pass,’ said Mykos. ‘Prosecutor-Prime, take your men and survey the area. Stay out of sight, and report back to me the moment you come into the contact with the enemy.’

Goldfeather was still staring at Alzheer, who was wiping the blood from her hands with fistfuls of grass and muttering some sort of mantra under her breath.

‘Of course, Lord-Celestant,’ he said, and gave a curt nod.

‘We have no time to give your man proper ceremony,’ said Thostos. ‘Say your words quickly, and then we must continue on.’

‘There is no need,’ said Alzheer. ‘He came from the earth, and he will be claimed by the sky.’

She gestured at the circling flock, who had dropped lower now, anticipating their next meal. Mykos could see wicked toothed bills, curved talons and piercing, hungry eyes.

‘His search is over,’ said the priestess.

‘Well,’ said Goldfeather. ‘This certainly makes things interesting.’

An orruk camp of colossal size covered the mouth of Splitskull Pass, a sprawling, haphazard mess of crude huts and tents. It stretched at least a mile in every direction, and Evios could see that it contained thousands upon thousands of broad, heavily muscled figures, some milling aimlessly, others lazing in the heat of the sun. Clouds of dust highlighted several small-scale skirmishes dotted all over the camp – with no enemy in sight, it was only a matter of time before orruks began one of their self-destructive brawls. He caught the glint of yellow from their armour, and upon the seemingly endless stream of banners and totem poles was emblazoned an ugly image of a pair of gauntleted hands snapping a bone in two.

The Prosecutors stayed high, and well clear of the camp, using the clouds for cover. Their resplendent wings did not lend themselves to subterfuge, and if even one orruk happened to look up and see them it could spell disaster for the rest of the Stormcasts. It was hardly as if they needed to get any closer, thought Evios. Any fool could see that this force of orruks outnumbered the Celestial Vindicators’ own army several times over.

‘I’ve never seen the like,’ said Prosecutor Galeth, who was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘How can we possibly triumph against such numbers?’

Normally Evios would have chastised the warrior for such a comment, but in the face of the apocalypse gathered below them, it hardly seemed appropriate.

‘We cannot break through that,’ said Omeris, and there was no fear in his voice, just simple and unavoidable logic. ‘Not if we wish to have anyone left to complete our mission.’

‘There must be some other way,’ said Galeth. ‘Some way to circumvent this.’

‘Just keep watch over the orruks,’ said Evios. ‘And keep out of sight. If they move even an inch, I want to know about it. If this force catches us in the open field, we are lost.’

He turned to let the roaring wind fill his wings and carry him back out across the plain towards the main force of the Celestial Vindicators. The Lord-Celestants would not welcome the news he bore.

‘So the pass is blocked,’ said Eldroc. ‘That complicates things.

‘How many orruks are camped there?’ asked Thostos.

‘Many thousands,’ said Goldfeather. ‘Many, many thousands. We did not get close enough to provide an entirely accurate estimation, but their wretched hovels are thick across the ground. I can still smell the stench from here.’

Stormcasts spent so much time with their faces masked beneath their war-helms that, for a leader like Mykos, reading his warriors’ voices was almost second nature. He could tell that Evios was worried. That concerned the Lord-Celestant as much as the grim news, because for all his bluster the Prosecutor-Prime was one of his most eager and unflappable fighters. It must be a mighty force indeed that they faced.

‘If we strike hard, before they are ready,’ said Thostos, ‘can we push through their line?’

‘They do not have any lines, Lord-Celestant,’ said Evios, shaking his head. ‘Just one huge mass of iron. A force a quarter of their size could hold that pass. We would be surrounded and picked apart.’

‘Then we examine our options,’ said Mykos. ‘The mortals. Alzheer says they know every inch of this region. Perhaps they know an alternative route through the mountain.’

‘Time runs short,’ said Eldroc. ‘The God-King stressed the importance of completing this mission as quickly as possible. The longer we delay, the more likely it is that the forces of Chaos will discover our presence and reinforce the dreadhold.’

‘Then our choices are limited,’ said Thostos.

The Lord-Celestant signalled for the mortals to be brought forward, and in short order Liberator Phalryn had gathered them. They looked even more ragged than when they had first been rescued. The Stormcasts had given them what water and food they could spare, but exhaustion and dehydration had already taken their toll. Their lips were cracked and dry, their eyes bloodshot. Mykos felt a stab of guilt for pushing them so hard, but quickly pushed it aside. Better they were given the chance to survive than left to a certain death out on the plain.

Thostos came forward, approaching the priestess and ignoring her fellow warriors.

‘You aided us once,’ he said. ‘I require you to do so again. A large orruk camp blocks Splitskull Pass, preventing us from reaching our objective. We need an alternate route.’

‘You seek the dreadhold, and the gate of fire,’ said Alzheer, nodding as if that was the clear and obvious answer. ‘The Sky Seekers can help you, son of Zi’Mar. There are ways to reach the fortress.’

‘You can lead us there?’ asked Mykos.

‘The paths through the mountain are dangerous and twisted,’ said Alzheer. ‘To traverse them, we will require the help of my people. I can take you to our camp, and our scouts will be able to guide you.’

Thostos stared into the priestess’ eyes, and again she did not avert her gaze.

‘I believe that I can trust you,’ said the Bladestorm. ‘I warn you, however, that if I sense even the slightest hint of betrayal, you and your people will not live long enough to realise the depth of your error.’

Alzheer nodded.

‘The God-King granted me this quest, and I will let nothing interfere with its successful completion. We are clear?’

‘We are.’

Before the Stormcasts rose two great towers of wind-scoured, vine-wrapped rock, one shaped like a spear, the other a wide, rough semi-circle that enclosed the smaller formation. Together, they provided a small lee of natural cover from the blazing sun, and in this sheltered valley Eldroc could see the leather coverings of tents and yurts. As they marched closer, they saw no occupants.

‘We are here,’ said Alzheer.

‘Abandoned,’ said Mykos. ‘Perhaps your people came under attack?’

Alzheer simply smiled, put two fingers to her mouth and gave a series of sharp whistles.

Lean human warriors appeared suddenly from every angle, dropping from cleverly disguised apertures in the walls of the mesa, or bursting forth from tents and thickets of grass.

‘Shields,’ roared Axilon, and the Stormcasts put a wall of sigmarite between themselves and the mortals. Evios and his warrior-heralds took flight, wings glittering in the midday sun as they readied their storm-called javelins.

‘Hold,’ yelled Alzheer, breaking free from the line of Stormcast Eternals and raising her hands. She approached the tribesmen, speaking fast and low in a language that Eldroc did not understand.

Two warriors came forward, one male and one female. Both wore chitinous chestplates and greaves, painted with the same lightning-bolt sigil that was tattooed upon Alzheer’s neck.

‘Priestess,’ said the woman, coming forward and lowering a forked spear. ‘You bring strangers to our home. Well-armed strangers.’

‘Saviours,’ said Alzheer. ‘Warriors of the Sky God, sister. They slaughtered a greenskin warband as if they were lame dogs.’

Mykos came forward. In his turquoise plate, emblazoned with lightning bolts and the flaming comet of Sigmar, his blue eyes blazing through his unforgiving war-mask, he looked every inch the herald of a vengeful god. Several of the mortal warriors dropped to their knees and traced a lightning bolt down their chests with the first two fingers of their free hands. Most stayed standing, weapons levelled and ready. These people have been battered, but their spirit is not broken yet, the Lord-Celestant thought with some admiration.

The female warrior whistled, and looked to her companion.

‘He’s a big one, alright,’ she said.

The other warrior was a wiry, flint-eyed greybeard, still corded with muscle despite his advanced years and obvious signs of malnutrition. He stepped forward, an arrow nocked on his bow but lowered to the floor, and peered at Thostos’ armour.

‘This metalwork,’ he said, and his voice was full of awe. ‘I’ve never seen the like.’

‘Elder Diash is our smith and weapon-crafter,’ said Alzheer, smiling warmly at the man.

‘By which she means I spend my days tying flint to arrows,’ said Diash. ‘There’s no good, solid metal here, sky warrior, unless you fancy asking the orruks for some of theirs. Mind you, don’t seem like you need any.’

‘This warplate comes from the forge-castles of blessed Azyrheim,’ said Mykos. ‘It was crafted from the remnants of a dying world, shaped by the matchless skill of the Six Smiths. It has saved my life a hundred times.’

Diash’s eyes went wide. He thought for a moment, and then slapped a palm against the rough chitin of his own chestplate.

‘Got this from a sand-crab,’ he said. ‘Biggest one I ever caught. Devilish, irritable little creatures they are, but smoke ’em right and they make a nice meal.’

There was a pause, and then Knight-Heraldor Axilon laughed hard enough to shake the walls of the mesa. Mykos chuckled too, behind his war mask.

‘It seems we have much to teach each other, my friend,’ he said.

Thostos came forward, and the mortals shied away from his cold glare.

‘Enough. We are here to speak with your leaders,’ he said.

Diash and his fellow warrior, the tall, scarred woman called Emni, led Mykos, Thostos and their entourage through the camp. Axilon had stayed with the main force, and he and Lord-Relictor Tharros were now organising them into a defensive screen around the encampment. As the tribespeople filtered out of their tents to stare at these elaborately armoured strangers, Mykos began to appreciate just how difficult life must be out on the plains. Barely a single mortal was unmarked by some sign of combat, and not a single one went unarmed. Grey-haired, weather-beaten elders scowled at them suspiciously as they passed, clutching crude daggers and stone hatchets. The younger warriors were better armed, though not by much. They favoured axes and short, curved sabres. Cavalry pieces, designed for slashing and hacking. He noted only a very few children, scrawny little things that stared defiantly at the Celestial Vindicators as they passed.

A circular clearing in the centre of the camp was home to a few-score tired-looking horses, lazily munching on bundles of tall grass. Behind the enclosure was the largest structure in the camp, a vaguely oval tent with a tapered entrance to the fore, guarded by four warriors. It was tall enough for even the Stormcasts to enter without ducking. Several huge, yellowed tusks anchored the structure at each corner, dug deep into the ground and secured with leather straps. Across the floor were scattered hides of all descriptions – great, thick ursine furs, mottled reptilian skins and strange diaphanous veils. In the middle of the tent a great pit had been dug out of the earth and filled with stones, and in the centre of this pit a fire spat embers out across the gathering hall.

Several figures crouched at the far end of the tent, which lay flush to the side of the mesa. They were wrapped in yet more furs, and the light of the fire flickered across them, giving them an eerie look.

There were seven in total, and as Mykos drew nearer he could see that they were of varying age, though all were weathered and bronzed from a life spent under the harsh sun. Two carried great hornpipes, and a slightly nauseous scent of burning spices filled the tent. Smoke spiralled into the air, lending the place a misty, ethereal quality.

‘Who do you bring to us, daughter of Zi’Mar?’ said the figure on the far left, pulling back the furs he wore to reveal a wizened, lined face with two milky-white eyes. ‘They smell of metal, and of the night sky.’

‘The Sky God has sent warriors to protect our lands, Elder Patiga,’ said Alzheer. She moved to the ancient figure, and gently lifted him up. Holding his hands in her own, she approached Mykos, and he let her run the elder’s liver-spotted hands across his gilded armour, tracing the wondrous lion’s-head breastplate and the lightning-and-hammer symbol that he wore upon his pauldron.

‘Warriors wreathed in metal,’ said Patiga, and he shook his head. ‘But not orruks! No, no, no. The wind will cease before those brutes learn to craft such wonders.’

‘You come to help us wipe out the greenskins,’ said another figure, standing and casting off his furs. This one was tall, for a mortal, well muscled and covered in a latticework of scars and burn marks. Trophies hung from his thick leather clothing, fingerbones, ears and teeth taken from slaughtered orruks. Knives were tucked into his armour, and he carried a short, curved blade at his hip. He had shaved his hair, aside from a ponytail that draped down his back, and his beard was thick and wiry.

‘No, we do not,’ said Thostos, and the speaker’s eyes narrowed.

He was a fierce one, this mortal. Mykos sensed the same ruthless competence from him as he had sensed from Alzheer, but while the priestess was measured and calm, this one did not even bother to conceal his anger.

‘So why are you here?’ the man snapped.

‘They seek a way through the mountains, Rusik,’ said Alzheer. ‘And you will guide them. You know those paths better than any other warrior.’

The man called Rusik narrowed his eyes at the priestess.

‘We are tasked with taking the Manticore Dreadhold, a fortress of Chaos,’ said Thostos. ‘You must have encountered the men that dwell there.’

‘They stay in their holes,’ said Rusik. ‘They barely venture out on the open plain. Because of the orruks. Those creatures have slaughtered thousands of our people. We were once a proud and numerous tribe. We were lords of this plain. Now we are a pitiful remnant of our former selves, a fading shadow.’

‘We are not gone yet,’ said Alzheer.

‘The orruks despoil the land,’ said Rusik, his voice rising in anger. ‘They slaughter the herdbeasts, they trample the kishwa plants under their iron boots. Hunger and thirst will kill us while we sit here and do nothing.’

‘Our cause is more important than the fate of your people,’ said Thostos.

‘Your cause?’ spat the mortal warrior. ‘What does your cause matter to us if we are to die here?’

‘If we fail, millions of souls will be lost to the Dark Powers,’ the Lord-Celestant continued. ‘Whether by the next season or the next decade, your people will fall too. I have seen what happens when Chaos conquers, mortal. Trust me when I say that you would not wish to witness it for yourself.’

‘You think you can scare me with dire proclamations?’ said Rusik, with a bitter laugh. ‘The orruks have already burned everything I held dear to the ground.’

He pointed east. ‘You wish to die against the walls of the dreadhold? A half day’s ride or so and you’ll find the entrance to the Dragonmaw Canyons. Find your own damned way through.’

Rusik made to leave. Before he had gone ten paces Thostos had grabbed hold of the man’s leather jerkin and hauled him into the air. The Lord-Celestant’s eyes held no fury, simply an implacable resolution.

‘You will guide us,’ he said, and his voice was as cold and steady as the mountains.

Swords were drawn. The guards raised their spears more in alarm than aggression, but several figures emerged from the shadows with more of those wicked cavalry sabres. These men wore black cloaks of raven feathers, and their armour was of better quality than those borne by most of the tribe. Rusik’s men, Mykos guessed.

‘Thostos,’ he hissed. ‘Release him. This is not the way.’

The Bladestorm ignored him.

‘You think those little blades will scratch sigmarite armour?’ growled Thostos, his war-helm less than an inch from Rusik’s face. ‘You are welcome to test them. Or you could simply guide my warriors to where they need to go, and I will release you. Either way, I am running short on both time and patience. Choose.’

Rusik held out a hand as his men inched forward to surround the Lord-Celestant.

‘Hold!’ he shouted. ‘Sheathe your blades.’

Reluctantly, his entourage did as commanded. Rusik stared into Thostos’ eyes with a mixture of fear and anger.

‘We will do as you ask,’ he said. ‘If you wish to die under the shadow of the dreadhold, I will lead you to its gates. Release me.’

Thostos lowered the man to the floor.

Two of Rusik’s men rushed to help him as he stumbled, but he battered their outstretched arms aside angrily.

‘Very well, noble sky warriors,’ he spat. ‘I will gather my men. Night falls, and we had best leave soon if we are to reach our destination before dawn.’

With that he stalked from the tent, retinue in tow. An uneasy silence remained.

Eldroc placed the warding lantern on the ground and kneeled in front of it. The celestial energy washed over him, and suddenly his burdens were lifted and his heart soared as if he was back in the throne room of Sigmar, in the presence of his beloved God-King. Doubts and worries vanished in the soothing luminescence. Redbeak growled softly at his side, and the Lord-Castellant ruffled the gryph-hound’s neck fondly.

‘What do you make of these people?’ came a voice at his side, and Eldroc’s hand instinctively went to his halberd. Lord-Celestant Thostos stood in the shadows of a nearby tent. He glanced pointedly at the weapon.

‘Apologies, Lord-Celestant,’ said Eldroc, shaking his head. ‘I did not notice your approach.’

Thostos said nothing.

‘I think these Sky Seekers are a brave and loyal people,’ Eldroc said, gathering his thoughts. ‘To have lost so much, to be torn down and hunted like beasts yet still retain their faith. It is humbling.’

‘You believe they can be trusted?’ asked Thostos.

‘I do. Though I am not sure we have much of a choice in the matter regardless.’

The Lord-Celestant nodded. They stood together awhile, watching the sun dip below the far horizon. Mortals moved quietly around the camp, lighting torches and cooking fires.

‘The lantern, it gives you comfort?’ asked Thostos eventually.

‘It… does,’ Eldroc replied, surprised at the question. ‘It focuses my thoughts, banishes my doubt. ‘

‘You have doubts,’ said Thostos. ‘About our purpose.’

Eldroc considered his answer. ‘Not our purpose,’ he said. ‘Chaos must be banished, and the rule of law and justice erected in its stead. I question myself. My role in this war. The true cost of fighting it.’

‘I do not remember doubt,’ said Thostos, and his voice was a mere echo of his usual harsh tone. ‘I simply act. The battlefield shifts, and I move with it. I anticipate, I react.’

‘Do you remember anything, my friend?’ asked Eldroc.

Thostos shook his head. ‘Sometimes an image, a sensation of recollection. Then gone. Like grasping smoke.’

‘Sit with me, my friend,’ said the Lord-Castellant, gesturing to a spot next to Redbeak. ‘Let the lantern’s light soothe you. I will tell you of our time in the Gladitorium. It will all come back, if we give it time.’

Thostos hesitated, then took a step forward.

Redbeak rolled upright, feathered ears narrowed to daggerpoints, eyes shining in the light of the campfires. He let out a harsh shriek, and pawed and scraped at the ground.

Eldroc and Thostos had their blades drawn in an instant. One did not ignore the warnings of a sharp-eared gryph-hound. From the darkness beyond the ring of tents, dozens of flaming projectiles launched into the air, arcing up high to fall into the camp. The screams began.

‘Ready the men,’ said Thostos, and his voice was pitilessly calm once more. ‘Take Phalryn and his Liberators and secure the camp.’

Without a single glance backwards, the Lord-Celestant charged off through the tents, into the darkness.

Arrows whickered through the air, pinpricks of searing light amongst the darkness. The flaming arrowheads slammed into the rawhide tents, and fire spread across the village as dry brush combusted. More screams rent the air.

Out came the Stormcast lines, Liberators angling their great shields up to intercept the barrage, while the Judicators searched the horizon, looking for targets. The Stormcasts could pick none out in the pitch black, though the arc of the flaming arrows revealed their likely position some hundred yards away from the tribal camp.

‘Take them down!’ roared Thostos, and a torrent of silver flame rippled away into the darkness as the Judicators loosed. Liberators advanced under the storm of fire, trusting in the skill of their brothers as projectiles whipped past them.

Figures emerged from the gloom. Burly, heavily muscled men in scraps of leather armour and chain, wielding axes and spiked clubs. Their eyes gleamed in the darkness, burning with foul bloodlust.

As strong as the battle-joy of the savages was, the rage of the Celestial Vindicators was equal to it. Of all the Stormhosts of Sigmar, they were the fiercest and most implacable foes of Chaos. Every single one of the turquoise warriors had lost something irreplaceable to the depredations of the Dark Gods, and though the trauma of Reforging had stolen the memory of that loss from many a Vindicator, the white-hot, raging hatred of Chaos remained.

They met the enemy head on, and neither side gave a solitary moment of quarter.

‘Death to the servants of Chaos!’ roared Thostos, leaping into battle with his sword leading. His blade pierced the chest of a loping warrior, and as the dying wretch collapsed to the ground, the Lord-Castellant spun expertly to crash his hammer into the bare, scarred chest of another.

These were scraps, he realised. Not the heavily armoured, battle-forged avatars of destruction that formed the elite of a Khornate army, but the filthy, gore-drunk masses that comprised its meat. Numbers, and not skill, made such creatures dangerous. This was a raiding party, searching for fresh meat to devour, and not a warband.

Against the roused fury of the Celestial Vindicators, the enemy would be completely outmatched.

Judicators lit up the night with streams of starfire, their bolts and arrows illuminating the carnage of the assault and burning smoking holes through any servants of Chaos unfortunate enough to get in the way. The ripples of glowing ammunition strobed across the darkness, lending a bizarre, dreamlike quality to the battle.

Thostos saw a tall, broad-chested creature barrel towards him, its bloated forearms capped with blood-soaked, rusting cleavers. The afterglow remained etched across his vision as the archers reloaded, and he made a split-second guess as to where he should strike. He held his hammer up defensively and swiped across with his sword. There was a wet impact, and a howl of pain.

Again the battlefield was washed in blinding light as the archers loosed again, and Thostos saw the brute reel backwards, belly opened.

‘Leave none alive,’ he shouted above the clangour of battle.

Rusik crept through the night, curved blade drawn and readied. He had already cut down two howling, shrieking bloodreavers that had rushed at him from the darkness, swinging their meat cleavers and drooling bloody spittle. He had savoured the scrape of bone as his sword ran down the spine of one, laughed as he took the hand from the second with a savage swipe.

He remembered leaning down beside his stricken opponent, enjoying the fool’s last gasps of desperate agony. His blade had come down, again and again and again. Things had gone black for a while, and when Rusik had regained control of his senses there was little more left before him than a gutted, ruptured pile of flesh. He could taste blood at the back of his throat, and his hands were caked with gore.

He shook off his disturbing thoughts. What did it matter how he killed the enemy, so long as the job was done? Leave Alzheer and her rabble to their endless talking. He would do what no one else could. He would protect their ancient lands, against the orruks and against whoever else tried to take what was his.

Rusik came around the side of a burning tent, stepping over two dead warriors. Besik and Tavo. Alzheer’s loyal men, so no great loss. Men who would rather run and hide from the greenskins than meet their fate in honest battle. Cowards. Arrows protruded from their chests, still smouldering. Besik had also taken one in the neck. Rusik smelled burned flesh.

He looked up, and he saw her again.

A shiver ran down his spine, and his heart hammered in his chest. There she was, as beautiful and strong as the day they had met.

‘Zenia,’ he whispered, and the figure turned to him and smiled. Then she faded into nothingness.

‘No!’ he shouted, scrambling across the carnage of the battlefield towards the spot where she had stood. ‘No! Zenia, come back to me!’

With the encampment aflame, the enemy dropped their bows and drew their crude weapons, desperate to shed blood face to face. They charged into the burning camp, expecting, perhaps, to meet beleaguered mortal warriors in battle. Foes that could be hacked apart, torn down and excruciated, their remains carried off to the cooking pits for the night’s feast.

Instead, they met a wall of unyielding sigmarite, and the blades of the Celestial Vindicators.

Oh, it was good to match blades against the eternal foe once more, thought Mykos Argellon, smiling broadly as he sliced Mercutia diagonally through the torso of a shrieking berserker. The filth fell apart in two neat pieces, and the Lord-Celestant slammed the pommel of his grandblade into the face of another screaming warrior. The blood-starved wretch spat teeth, and staggered backwards. Mykos followed, crashing the pommel into the man’s face again and again. Finally his enemy toppled to the ground, his skull little more than a ruined crater.

This was what they had been created for. This was the honest freedom of battle against a hated foe.

Another volley from the Judicators rippled through the ranks of the blood-crazed enemy, and dozens came apart in a lightning burst of gore and scorched flesh.

She waited for him at the twins. This had been their place, once. They had sneaked away in the night, he from the warriors’ tents, she from her father, who had never approved. They had never had much time together. There was always the hunt, always the threat of a warband appearing on the horizon. They had lived their lives in snatched moments, even when the priestesses had blessed them and their son had been born. Even afterwards.

As he clambered onto the taller of the two rocks, he saw her. She turned to him and smiled.

‘Husband,’ she said. ‘Do you remember?’

The figure shifted, becoming an insubstantial cloud of mist. Within its limits Rusik could see the same images that had haunted him every single night since he had lost her. He saw the charging orruks, raising and swinging their jagged cleavers. He saw his son, brave little Achren, fall, trampled under their iron boots. He saw Zenia, her own sword wet with enemy blood, a song of vengeance upon her lips. Spears ran her through from all sides, and she arched her back and screamed in agony. She turned to him. Her dead eyes bored into his own, and Rusik felt her agony, her sense of betrayal. A pair of mighty hands closed around her neck, gauntleted in jagged yellow iron. There was a sickening snap. Zenia fell, and so did Rusik.

‘I tried to reach you,’ he sobbed, collapsing to his knees. ‘I did. I rode my steed until it collapsed, and then I dragged myself for miles across the plains. I was too late.’

‘Such bravery, husband,’ his dead wife snarled. She lay in a pool of blood, her head swivelling on a broken neck with a groan of creaking cartilage. ‘Tell your dead son how you tried so hard to reach him. Tell your fellow tribesmen, left bleeding and broken.’

‘Zenia, please,’ he begged, hot tears running down his cheeks.

‘You were weak,’ she snarled, beautiful face twisted with pain and hatred. ‘You let them die. Worse, you left them unavenged.’

‘I have killed so many of them,’ said Rusik, shaking his head.

‘You think cutting down a few scouts assuages your sins?’ Zenia spat. ‘You think our tortured souls can be soothed by such paltry offerings? No, husband.’ She made the word a curse.

‘Only when the plains run red with orruk blood will we be calmed,’ she continued. ‘And your pitiful Sky God cannot give you the strength to do this. He has abandoned you, husband. You know it to be true.’

‘He sends warriors,’ said Rusik. ‘Giants in fine metal armour.’

Zenia was silent for a moment. ‘And these warriors have pledged their aid to you in destroying the orruks?’ she asked.

‘No,’ growled Rusik. ‘They refuse to aid us, and say they have their own mission here.’

‘Then they are no servants of Zi’Mar,’ said Zenia. ‘They are impostors, and they mean to use our people to achieve their own ends. They are not to be trusted. There is only one power in the realms that can offer you what you seek.’

‘Tell me,’ pleaded Rusik. ‘I will do anything to avenge you, my love.’

Zenia smiled a blood-red smile.

Eldroc strode through the wreckage of the camp, Redbeak at his side. The Lord-Castellant’s anger rose as he passed fallen mortals riddled with arrows and burned by the rising flames. The surviving tribespeople stared out from the ruins of their tents, faces blackened by smoke. He saw no fear or anger on their faces, just the weary resignation of a people worn down by constant war. He leaned down and gathered up the body of a fallen youth, pale hands clasped around the wicked arrow shaft that had pierced his belly.

The Lord-Castellant laid the corpse down in a row next to a score of other casualties. The boy’s dead eyes were wide with pain and shock. Eldroc brushed them closed, snapped off the arrow shaft, and crossed the dead youth’s hands over his chest in the same manner as his fellows. He caught Elder Diash’s eyes, and the old man nodded gratefully.

‘I am sorry for your losses,’ said the Lord-Castellant. He felt as if he should say something more, but words escaped him. He was not used to dealing with mortals.

‘We will commit their flesh and their souls to the Sky God,’ said Diash. ‘They will return to the earth, where they will remain with us, always.’

Eldroc bowed, intrigued by the strangeness of the nomads’ rituals. Stormcasts were deeply faithful, but that faith was rooted in the physical presence of a living, breathing god. These mortals had survived centuries without a glimpse of their deity, and even in the midst of terrible loss and hardship, they still believed. That impressed and terrified him in equal measure. Would he fight so hard in Sigmar’s absence, he wondered? He supposed he had, once. That was the hallmark of a Celestial Vindicator’s ascension, after all.

The Lord-Castellant was shaken from his musing by the sound of armoured boots. He turned and saw Mykos Argellon approach, wiping his grandblade clean of gore with a few strands of grass.

‘They have scattered,’ he said. ‘The scum didn’t put up much of a fight.’

‘I don’t believe they expected to find us here,’ replied Eldroc. ‘They meant to draw the tribespeople out. To capture as many of them as they could.’

‘For what reason?’ asked Mykos.

‘Who knows?’ replied Eldroc. ‘Perhaps they require slaves. Perhaps they require food.’

Mykos shook his head in disgust. ‘Cannibals. How does a man fall so far?’

‘I have long since ceased asking myself that question,’ Eldroc replied. ‘Where is Thostos?’

‘Somewhere out there,’ said Mykos. Eldroc could tell his friend was attempting to keep his tone neutral. ‘He took a score of warriors with him in pursuit of the fleeing enemy. He wants them all dead, so none can reveal our presence to the main host.’

‘Sound strategy,’ said Eldroc.

‘I suppose so,’ replied Mykos.

Eldroc sighed. ‘Speak, brother, I beg you. I have suffered enough brooding silences of late to last me several lifetimes.’

‘You wish me to talk directly?’ said Mykos, a hint of anger in his voice. ‘Very well. The Bladestorm is a danger to his men. He is no longer the hero that led your chamber to victory at the Eldritch Fortress. You must see it.’

‘I see a man traumatised by the torture he has suffered in pursuing a just cause. I see a man who has survived unthinkable agonies, and yet continues to fight against the darkness with all the strength he can muster.’

‘Lord-Castellant–’ Mykos said, shaking his head.

‘With respect, Lord-Celestant,’ said Eldroc, ‘you are yet to experience the true cost of this war we fight. You have not been reforged a second time.’

The Lord-Castellant stared out across the field of corpses.

‘Agony,’ he said at last. ‘An infinity of torment. And at the centre of it all, a sure knowledge that you will never be the same even if you survive. It almost broke me, Argellon.’

‘Yet you remain calm. Thoughtful,’ said Mykos. ‘You do not carelessly risk your life or those of our fellow warriors.’

‘I can afford to be the voice of reason. Thostos must lead. He must be the epitome of what every Celestial Vindicator aspires to be. That is no easy task, especially for one suffering as he is. Yet despite your concerns, Thostos has not led us astray.’

‘He has been reckless,’ insisted Mykos.

Eldroc turned to the Lord-Celestant.

‘Are you sure it is the Lord Bladestorm that concerns you, my friend?’ he asked, softly.

Mykos bristled. ‘What do you imply, Lord-Castellant?’

‘Thostos unnerves you because you know that in time every Stormcast Eternal will fall in battle. Including you.’

‘I do not fear death,’ said Mykos.

‘But we do not talk of death, do we?’ Eldroc replied. ‘You are a man who prides himself on his humanity, and the thought of losing your grip on that is what you fear.’

Mykos said nothing.

‘I tell you truly, my friend,’ said Eldroc. ‘The Reforging was a crucible that almost destroyed me, but I came out of it a stronger man, and a greater warrior. Thostos will too.’

Mykos shook his head. ‘I hear your words, my friend, but I know you do not believe what you say. I see the way you look at him. I hear the concern in your voice when you speak his name. You are as afraid at what is happening to Thostos as anyone.’

Varash heard the sorcerer’s cackling before he even entered the grand tower. It was a high-pitched, joyless sound, and he had only ever heard the stunted whelp utter it when he was taking some poor wretch apart on the ritual tables. It echoed around him as he climbed the circular steps that wound towards the battlements. Even now, before they had begun the ritual proper, blood was dripping down the central shaft of the tower, pooling in the recesses of the great bronze skull that adorned the ground floor chamber.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ came that voice again. ‘Scream and curse all you like, for all the good it’s going to do you. You cannot halt progress, my unfortunate friend.’

Reaching the top step, Varash swung the wrought-iron door open and stepped out into a scene of butchery.

The gorepriests were busy removing the innards of the latest unfortunates to be chosen for Xos’Phet’s haruspicy. They worked in silence, mouths stitched closed – the sorcerer hated any noise while he worked, save for his own blathering – and dirty smocks stained red and brown with dried viscera.

The centre of the tower was slightly concave, forming an oval bowl into which drained the blood of the slaves and prisoners that had been sacrificed in the name of the sorcerer’s work. Running around the outside of the tower were cages, and as Varash passed he saw dead-eyed mortals stare out at him. They no longer screamed or begged. They knew that doing so would only mark them as the next to be given to the gorepriests.

Xos’Phet stood on the other side of the charnel pit. Before him was a wooden rack, upon which was impaled the hulking, green-skinned figure of an orruk shaman, its eyes and mouth stitched shut. The sorcerer turned.

‘Lord Sunken-Eye,’ he chirped, in that obsequious squeal that made Varash want to crush his skull to dust. ‘We have made much progress today, much progress.’

The sorcerer was hardly an imposing figure. A stick-thin sliver of a man wrapped in blood-stained purple robes, he hardly reached past Varash’s waist. He was bald and ill-looking, with watery eyes and a mouthful of yellowed teeth. The right side of his face, from temple to chin, was covered in iridescent scales like those of a fish, no doubt the result of some sorcerous accident. Varash despised every inch of the man.

‘You will make this work,’ he said, and it was not a question.

Xos’Phet wiped blood from his face with the hem of his robe, and gave a grin that turned his sallow face into a leering skull.

‘Oh yes,’ said the sorcerer. ‘So much power here. The gate of the Manticore, it has been doused in blood, saturated in it. They sense it. They taste it. All that is left is to send the invitation.’

‘You asked for more slaves for the sacrifice,’ said Varash. ‘I have already dispatched a raiding party, and they should return soon with fresh mortals.’

Xos’Phet giggled, and foamy yellow froth formed at the corner of his mouth.

‘Oh, I’m afraid not, Lord Varash,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid your little man-eaters have run into some trouble.’

He made a series of intricate gestures with his wrinkled hands, and the blood pooling in the grooves of the stone floor dribbled into the air, coming together to form a flat, circular disk. The blood-mirror shimmered, and an image formed like a reflection on the surface of a lake. It was dark, and hard to pick out, but Varash saw dozens of torn and broken corpses scattered across a field of grass. They wore scraps of leather and chain, and their flesh was marked and seared with both old ritual scars and fresher wounds. His men, he realised.

‘Dead,’ he growled. ‘Orruks?’

‘No,’ replied Xos’Phet. ‘Something far more interesting. Observe.’

As the sorcerer gestured at the image, a towering armoured figure stepped into view. This warrior was broad and tall, his imposing physique exacerbated by wondrously crafted warplate decorated with lighting bolts and the angry maw of a lion. His helm was a stern mask of cold fury, and he carried a warhammer and longsword of equally magnificent quality as his armour.

‘Sigmar’s whelps,’ snarled Varash, and cursed.

‘They fight impressively,’ said Xos’Phet. ‘Perhaps as well as you and your chosen warriors. None of your scouts will return, and they will bring with them no fresh meat for the sacrifice.’

Varash grabbed one of the gorepriests around the neck, and smashed the mute creature’s head into the table upon which he was working. Once, twice, three times. He felt its skull collapse and let the dead thing fall to the ground. The Stormcasts, these warriors called themselves. They had fallen to earth on bolts of lightning in all corners of the realms, taking the fight to the bastions of Chaos with the sickening fervour of the righteous. At any other time, Varash would have welcomed their appearance and the opportunity to match blades with the preening upstarts, but the timing here was too delicate for such complications.

‘Do not be concerned, Lord Sunken-Eye,’ said Xos’Phet. ‘I have taken steps. We will have our sacrifices.’

‘Explain.’

The sorcerer’s eyes flared suddenly, and his smile disappeared. Xos’Phet might be a stunted weakling, but he was not used to being spoken to in such a manner.

‘The human tribes that dwell here are on the verge of extinction,’ the sorcerer said. ‘They are weak and near broken, and in the absence of hope all that is left to them is shame and regret. Easy emotions to prey upon.’

He waved a pallid hand, and the blood-mirror warped and twisted again, now showing a solitary mortal warrior kneeling amongst several corpses. The man shook and wrapped his arms around himself, and Varash realised he was sobbing.

‘In truth I am not so skilled at the more delicate uses of magic,’ said Xos’Phet, considering the weeping figure. ‘This one, however, barely needed any prodding at all. It is all in hand, Lord Varash. I will have my subjects and you will have the opportunity not only to wipe out the orruk threat, but to take care of these new interlopers as well.’

He snapped his fingers and the blood-mirror collapsed. The sorcerer crossed to the inner wall, and Varash followed. They looked out across the courtyard, to the rear wall where the fortifications met the mountain. Rough stone steps wound into the rock, leading up to the hollowed-out platform upon which the gigantic Manticore Realmgate stood. Tendrils of baleful red light lashed across its rune-scarred surface, bathing the rear of the fortress in a crimson glow. Above the gate, crouching with wings outstretched and so intricately carved and engraved it seemed perpetually on the verge of bursting into life, was the gate’s namesake, a monstrous, bat-winged fiend with a leonine head.

‘See how it hungers, Lord Varash?’ whispered Xos’Phet, staring at the portal like a starving man at a grand feast. ‘Such incredible power. This realmgate is different. It has been awakened, weaned on blood and fear. Given the proper sacrifice, it will birth a legion that will drown the Roaring Plains in blood.’

The sorcerer looked up at him, crimson light shimmering in his eyes and across the iridescent scales that marked his face.

‘I will unlock the secrets of this realmgate, and you will have your army. And together we will tear the Mortal Realms apart.’

CHAPTER THREE

The Manticore Dreadhold

They said goodbye to their dead upon the dawn. There was little ritual to speak of; a score of tribespeople slain in the raid were carried out of the town to a cluster of flat-topped rocks stained a vibrant green with moss and lichen. While several of the elders droned a deep, sonorous prayer, the bodies were laid gently upon the stone, hands crossed over their hearts and eyes open towards the sky.

As the funeral party made their way back to town, the carrion birds began to descend, in a flock thick enough to blot out the early morning sun. They whirled and circled, a murmuration of black and grey specks that was oddly beautiful despite its predatory intent.

‘There’s a savage sort of poetry to it,’ said Knight-Heraldor Axilon, glancing back. ‘Though I’m not sure I would choose to be devoured by crows upon my death.’

‘Death feeds life,’ said Alzheer, priestess of the Sky Seekers. She still wore her leather armour, and carried a curved blade at her hip. ‘We return our bodies to the sky, and begin the circle anew.’

‘I am sorry for your losses,’ said Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon.

‘They would be much greater if you had not been there to defend us,’ said Alzheer. ‘We will not forget this.’

‘I wish I could promise your people more than further battle and bloodshed,’ said Mykos. ‘I wish I could say that the armies of Azyr will pour into this realm and make it safe for humanity once more, let you hunt the plains and grow your crops in peace.’

He shook his head, and lifted his war helm. It was the first time he had done so in her presence. His skin was a rich, dark black, almost perfect in complexion, unmarked at all by the many battles he must have fought. He had a round, boyish face, topped with a strip of shaved hair that ran down the centre of his skull.

She looked upon him, and for a moment she was surprised that she pitied him. His fight would never end, she knew. There must be uncounted realms that were equally stricken as this one, endless, shattered remnants of humanity praying desperately for relief from the long darkness. Mykos and his warriors would likely never see their task completed. How could even warriors as brave, as skilled as this defy so great an evil as the shadow that lay across the world?

‘I can only promise that the Celestial Vindicators will make our enemies pay,’ he said, and there was a fire in his voice that she had not heard before. His stark brown eyes bored into her. ‘We will seek them wherever they hide, in their fortresses where they think themselves safe from justice. We will tear down their walls, and we will put them to the sword. They will die as their victims did, begging for a mercy I shall not grant them.’

As quickly as it had flared, his rage was gone. He blinked and swallowed, and looked almost surprised at his own vehemence. She smiled sadly, and traced her fingers across the lion carved upon his breastplate.

‘Your vengeance is Zi’Mar’s justice,’ she said. ‘But do not lose yourself in it, my friend. You are a good man, in a world where few exist. Do not let revenge define you.’

They did not spare much time for grief. Led by the warrior Rusik’s horsemen, the Celestial Vindicators made good time to the mouth of the Dragonmaw Canyons. It was easy to see how they had earned their name. Jutting out of the low range of mountains like a snapping jaw, the entrance was a jagged cluster of sharp stone that seemed almost impassable, a twisting spiral of serrated rock keen enough to draw blood. As the Stormcasts approached, a thunderous rumble shook the earth beneath their feet. It was a drawn-out, grating roar, the sound of a hundred fortress walls collapsing.

‘The earth here, it moves and shifts,’ said Rusik. ‘One moment the path through the mountain may be clear, the next it is a forest of razor-sharp stone.’

‘Then how in Sigmar’s name are we going to march several hundred plate-armoured warriors through it?’ snapped Prosecutor-Prime Goldfeather.

‘We will pass through because I know this land well, and I know when it is about to betray me. Priestess, I will need your riders,’ Rusik said. ‘We will scout ahead on horseback, find a route through. Once we are sure, we will send back a rider to signal that things are safe and guide you in.’

‘You require every single rider?’ asked Lord-Celestant Argellon.

Rusik nodded. ‘These canyons are vast, and not friendly to trespassers. Many dangerous creatures hunt within.’

Alzheer’s force numbered around a hundred mortals, fifty or so on horseback and the rest lightly armoured skirmish troops carrying bows and simple hatchets. Rusik led another fifteen horse riders – dour, battle-scarred men who eyed the Stormcasts sullenly. Clearly their leader had not extolled the virtues of the Celestial Vindicators to them after his treatment at the hands of Thostos.

‘Be careful, priestess,’ said Mykos as Alzheer made her way over to Rusik’s band.

‘I am always careful, my friend,’ she replied. ‘And besides, I would not miss the chance to see you and your warriors in battle once again.’

As she and the rest of the riders filtered into the maze of jagged rocks, Mykos Argellon got the uneasy impression that those had been the last words he would ever hear her speak.

Diash felt the hard ground beneath him clatter his old bones with every step taken by the ancient, rheumy horse that carried him. Not for the first time he wondered why he had decided to join this damned fool expedition. He had never intended to. Then that foul-tempered troublemaker Rusik had opined loudly that it was good he was not coming, as coddling old, frail warriors past their prime would only slow them down. Well, he could hardly stay after that, could he?

They had been travelling for almost an hour now, and the sunlight of the plain had given way to a gloomy darkness as the canyon walls loomed overhead, knotted together far above with a canopy of twisting vines. As they rounded a sharp turn, dust fell from the canyon wall, and another loud groan echoed around them.

This was a cursed place, as the tales said.

‘Stay close,’ growled Rusik, at the head of the line. ‘Another five hundred yards and we will send back a rider to the sky warriors.’

As he spoke his men, identifiable by those ragged, crow-skin cloaks, dropped back to the flanks. Their hands rested on their curved sabres, ready to draw at a moment’s notice. Diash frowned. A lot of good that would be in such tight quarters. It would take a single rockfall or a few good bowmen to end this little expedition in short order.

‘I do not like this place,’ said Emni, riding at his side. ‘It has an ill feeling.’

They emerged from the tight canyon into a small, oval clearing, mottled with fallen sunlight. Vines wrapped around the edges of the space, pouring forth from the pockmarked and crumbling walls. Here the canyon forked left and right, and Rusik’s men spread out to guard each exit.

‘We are stopping here?’ asked Alzheer. ‘We should send back a messenger to inform the Stormcasts that it is safe to progress.’

A blood-curdling roar split the air, echoing loud enough that Diash cursed and covered his ears. Then, the sound of dozens of iron boots rattling on stone.

‘Orruks!’ shouted Alzheer, drawing her sword.

‘No,’ said Rusik softly. His own blade was in his hand. He sliced it into the neck of Alzheer’s horse, and the animal gave a horrifying shriek, rearing and kicking out as arterial blood fountained into the air. Alzheer gasped and toppled from her mount, and the beast collapsed on top of her, writhing and whinnying.

‘We are betrayed,’ shouted Diash, scrabbling for his own blade.

‘To the priestess!’ shouted Emni, but it was already too late.

Ragged, filthy warriors came towards the Sky Seekers from all sides, hurtling from hidden gaps in the canyon wall, brandishing cleavers and wicked, serrated blades. They leapt at the surprised riders, slashing, hacking and dragging them from their mounts.

Emni was already in motion. She hefted her spear, aimed and hurled it in one fluid motion. It sailed through the air, hitting one of the reavers in the gut and dropping him screaming to the floor.

‘Come on, old man!’ she shouted, drawing her sword and gripping the reins of her horse as it reared in panic. ‘We must break through.’

Diash was still fumbling with his blade, which he had tangled awkwardly in his reins. He got it loose, and slashed at a warrior who was charging at him with blood-flecked saliva dropping from his screaming mouth. The blade sliced flesh and scraped across teeth, and the weight of the blow flipped the attacker to the ground like a ragdoll.

‘Run, Diash,’ screamed Emni, and through a blur of sweat and blood he saw her fall, unhorsed by a wicked, hooked glaive. ‘Warn them!’

Someone struck her in the face, and she spat blood before she struck back. Her assailant howled, and as he spun around Diash could see the knife Emni had left in his eye.

‘Run, you old bas–’ she yelled, and her voice was cut off as someone struck her with an axe haft from behind.

Grinning, gore-streaked faces turned to him, and fear cut through the haze of pain and confusion. He wheeled his horse around, saw a spear arc through the air and miss his head by only a hair’s width. He kicked the beast into motion, making for the path they had entered from, angling his mount away from the screaming reavers that were bludgeoning and battering his fellow warriors into submission.

Something punched him hard in the chest, and Diash reeled, almost toppling out of the saddle. Gods, but it hurt. Whatever was attacking him struck his leg, in the meat of his calf, and scratched at his cheek. His vision blurred, and he hacked and coughed blood. Desperately, drunkenly, he kicked his horse forwards, leaning down low as the creature built up speed and barrelled through a cluster of painted warriors wielding barbed axes.

He was dimly aware of a jolt in his gut as his mount leapt over another obstacle, and the clattering of spears as more of the enemy sought to strike him from his saddle. Then the horse was running free, every single step taking him closer to the Stormcasts and hammering a nail deeper into his chest.

‘Lord-Celestant Thostos,’ came the cry from one of Goldfeather’s Prosecutors. ‘A rider.’

A pale horse broke free from the teeth of the cavern at a gallop, carrying a solitary figure upon its back. The rider was slumped low in the saddle, and as the beast drew closer Eldroc could see arrows protruding from his chest. Within his bloody, matted hair could be seen streaks of silver-grey. It was the old warrior, Diash.

The Lord-Castellant rushed forwards, placing himself before the terrified horse, which was frothing at the mouth with pain and fear. It came to a stop, and made to rear back, but Eldroc grasped its reins and placed a calming hand upon its panting chest.

‘Easy, my lad,’ he whispered, ‘easy there. Your task here is done. Be at rest.’

The creature whinnied and shook, but allowed him to gently lift Diash free and lay him on the floor. He was in a bad shape. Two arrows had struck him, one in the shoulder, just under the collarbone, and another between his ribs.

‘He’s lost a lot of blood,’ said Eldroc. ‘Removing the arrowheads may kill him.’

‘Let me see,’ said Yereth, the leader of the tribal infantry that had remained behind with the Stormcasts. He was a squat, bullish man of middle years, with a shaved head covered in intricate tattoos. He knelt down beside Diash, and studied the wounds, then reached for a pouch at his belt.

‘You can help him?’ asked Mykos.

‘I can clean the flesh and numb the pain, but these are deep wounds,’ Yereth said. ‘He will likely not survive.’

Diash’s eyes snapped open, and he gasped and choked for air.

‘Easy, old man,’ said Yereth. He dipped his fingers into the leather pouch, and when he withdrew them they were covered in a thick, green paste. He began to apply the ointment to the arrow wounds on Diash’s chest.

‘They… they,’ gasped Diash. He coughed blood.

‘Do not speak, friend,’ said Eldroc. ‘Rest now.’

The old man shook his head furiously, and looked fiercely at the Lord-Castellant, reaching out to grasp the warrior’s arm in one trembling hand.

‘We were… betrayed,’ he whispered. ‘Rusik.’

‘The others,’ asked Mykos, ‘where are they?’

But the old man’s eyes had lost focus, and his hand fell limply to the ground. Yereth shook his head and cursed.

‘Bury your dead,’ said Thostos, ‘and return home.’

Yereth opened his mouth to protest, but the Lord-Celestant ignored him and turned to Mykos.

‘We must make haste,’ he said.

Unheeding of their own safety, the Stormcasts hurled themselves into the depths of the pass. Each dark corner of the path promised an ambush that did not come. There was little time for an ordered, safe advance. Instead they marched apace, in loose formation, shields raised, while Prosecutors swooped overhead with celestial hammers and javelins raised and ready.

After some time they emerged into an oval clearing, where dead mounts and shattered weapons covered the floor. Blood was spattered liberally across every surface, though only a few bodies littered the ground.

‘Reavers,’ spat Axilon, turning one of the corpses over with his boot. ‘Flesh-hungry savages. Chaos filth.’

‘No tribal corpses,’ said Goldfeather, scanning the scene. ‘This was a swift and well-planned ambush. They intended to capture, not slay.’

‘Food for their vile feasts,’ spat Axilon. ‘No loyal mortal deserves such a fate. We must pursue this raiding party and crush them beneath our boots.’

The Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden knelt, examining one of the dead horses. It had been run through with a barbed spear, and hacked apart with axes. Pointless barbarism of the sort that the enemy hordes delighted in.

‘There were fifty warriors here,’ he said. ‘Blood-crazed reavers would have not the wit or self-control to capture every one of them. So why are there no mutilated remains?’

‘Perhaps they desired prisoners?’ asked Mykos.

‘Then why not just take a few, and kill the rest?’ said Thostos. ‘No, this has the stench of something darker about it.’

There was a silence. Each Celestial Vindicator was imagining in horrifying detail why a servant of Chaos might require a few dozen living prisoners.

‘We march,’ said Thostos at last. ‘These are no aelves – they will not pass without leaving a trace. We follow them, at pace, and when we find them we kill them.’

‘And if they make it back to their cursed fortress before we catch up with them?’ asked Mykos.

‘Then we attack. With full force, and no quarter,’ said Thostos, raising his voice so that every Stormcast in the clearing could hear him. ‘Let the might of our Warrior Chambers be unleashed. Let the enemy see what doom awaits them. No more waiting. We tear that place down, and we put every single one of its cursed defenders to the sword.’

Both the Argellonites and the Bladestorm had brought the greater number of their Warrior Chambers into the Roaring Plains, some five hundred warriors in total. A fighting force strong enough to tear down all but the most redoubtable bastions of the enemy. The Stormcasts roared, and songs of vengeance and of the glory of Sigmar shook the walls of the Dragonmaw Canyons. Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon nodded.

‘For once we agree, Lord Thostos,’ he said. ‘No waiting to discover what fell purpose the enemy intends to use those captured warriors for. We fall upon them in full force.’

The Manticore Dreadhold was a cancer nested in the midst of the mountains, a brutal, imposing wedge of iron that comprised three grand towers and a semi-circular perimeter wall. As the Stormcasts broke out through the canyon and into the valley that housed the fortress, each of them felt the oily, nauseous touch of fell magic. The grand statue of the hated Everchosen, Archaon, loomed over them, cut into the heart of the mountain itself, casting a great shadow across the valley floor. Thostos felt the pitiless eyes of the monument bore into his own.

Build your self-aggrandising statues, Chaos filth, he thought. Watch as we hunt them down and shatter them beneath the lightning storm of Sigmar.

‘They are at the gate,’ shouted Goldfeather, high in the sky above the Vindicators’ position, accompanied by his Prosecutor retinue. ‘They have the prisoners!’

‘Then we are not yet too late,’ said Mykos. His grandblade Mercutia was already in hand, and Thostos could feel the man’s eagerness for battle. It very nearly rivalled his own.

‘We promised them hope, brother,’ Mykos continued, ‘and we let them all be taken. We failed them. I cannot accept that. I will not.’

‘We will rescue those we can,’ said Thostos. ‘But remember our mission, Lord Argellon. You know the consequences if we fail to secure that realmgate.’

‘Prisoners, Lord Varash,’ boasted the leader of the Bloodreavers, a balding, anvil-jawed creature with putrid, yellowed teeth. ‘Meat for the fire!’

Varash backhanded the wretch as he passed, sending him flying into his fellows, unconscious and drooling blood.

‘There will be time enough to fill your bellies later,’ he bellowed. ‘These ones are for the ritual tables. Slaadh?’

The Slaughterpriest loped over, his perpetual, razor-toothed grin etched across his face.

‘You see a man here touch one of these slaves without my permission, you give him a meal. Feed him his own lungs, and make sure he’s still alive so he can savour the taste.’

Slaadh chortled. ‘Yes, Lord.’

They were interrupted by the sound of a deep, booming horn, which emanated from the central tower. Almost at once the atmosphere inside the fortress changed. Warriors who had been gleefully taunting the captured tribesmen drew their axes and blades at once, and rushed off to form into their kill-packs.

The Bloodreavers began to holler and howl, like dogs promised fresh meat. Memno, one of Varash’s chosen Blood Warriors, hurtled from the tower, pulling on his horned, grilled helm as he ran.

‘Lord,’ he said, and his eyes were shining with joy. ‘Warriors in turquoise armour. Not orruks, but larger than men.’

Varash cursed. ‘Sigmar’s whelps,’ he spat. ‘Very well, let them come. To the walls.’

By now the inner courtyard was swollen with blood-mad killers, twitching and growling as the voice of the Lord of Skulls filled their heads with promises of torn flesh and spilt blood. The bloodlust was so thick about the fortress that Varash could almost see it as a tangible cloud over their heads. His ruined eye ached, and he delighted in the pain. It promised much.

He ascended the stairs of the central tower, pushing past the dull creatures that Xos’Phet used as his servants. He despised the things. They stank of the sorcerer’s weakling magic. One blocked his way at the iron door leading out onto the tower, so he grasped its head and snapped its neck with a satisfying crunch, then hurled the broken thing down the stairs.

Out on the battlements, Xos’Phet was putting the finishing touches to his twisted masterpiece. Three orruk shamans had been crucified at the far end of the tower. Over the course of several weeks they had been mutilated and otherwise prepared according to the profane texts.

‘They live, still?’ said Varash, as one of the things gave a low groan.

‘Oh yes, most resilient creatures,’ said Xos’Phet. ‘And powerful, of course. Their latent magic is degenerate and savage, but it will serve my purpose. There.’

The sorcerer finished cutting into the orruk’s flesh, and stood back to admire his work, wiping a bloody knife on the hem of his robe. The creature’s tough, green hide was now covered in runes and symbols that meant nothing to Varash, but still set his teeth on edge. The work was fine, as legible and neatly inscribed as any book. Xos’Phet was nothing if not a perfectionist.

‘The enemy comes,’ said Varash. ‘Are you done, witchkin?’

The sorcerer gave him a sickly, yellow-toothed smile.

‘Indeed, Lord Varash,’ he said. ‘Let us begin.’

Varash felt a surge of excitement. This was it, his chance to end the threat of the orruk tribes and to earn the favour of the Everchosen. He had seen Archaon’s fury when the Dreadhold had been overrun, when the great statue erected in his honour had been defaced with the image of the greenskins’ idiot gods. When the burning hooves of the Blood God’s eternal servants burned the grasslands of the Roaring Plains to cinders, then the name of Varash Sunken-Eye would be spoken of in awe in the halls of the Varanspire itself, the dread fortress of Archaon. Perhaps such a feat would even earn him his rightful place in the Varanguard.

He stood at the wall of the tower, overlooking the inner courtyard. From here he could see the hateful glow of the Manticore Realmgate, the ravenous essence that dwelt within its shifting, roiling depths already sensing the promise of spilled blood. Soon the sorcerer’s ritual would draw the full power of the ancient structure forth, and he would have his grand army. Let the weakling minions of Sigmar be the first to fall before him.

As the Stormcasts rushed towards the fortress wall, the first of the missiles began to fall. The crude projectiles of the human defenders, javelins and thrown axes hurled from the battlements, did little against the fine armour and shields of the Celestial Vindicators. Yet as they drew closer, the Dreadhold’s true defences roared into life.

The leering daemonic skulls carved into its surface began to smoulder, eyes burning with baleful light. This light grew in intensity until it burst forth from the carvings in a shower of white flame. Arcing jets of molten fire spat into the midst of the Stormcasts, searing and melting sigmarite, enveloping warriors in shrouds of flame. Celestial Vindicators went down, screaming in agony as the daemonfire devoured bones and turned their flesh to cinders.

In response, the Judicators knelt and loosed the latent celestial energy that coursed through their heaven-forged weaponry. Great, glittering arcs of lightning smashed into the tower, crumbling the cursed stone and sending chunks of shattered masonry tumbling to the ground. While those warriors wielding powerful boltstorm crossbows turned the fortress’s deadly defences to rubble, skybolt bows sent a cascade of light pouring over the perimeter wall to find its home in the tainted flesh of the Dreadhold’s defenders. Smoke rose from the battlements where the devastating barrage of lightning scorched and burned the unworthy.

Shields raised and clattering under the incessant rain of projectiles, the Liberators pushed towards the great gate of the Dreadhold. The sky boiled above them, blood-red clouds swirling and reforming furiously, thunder bursts rolling across the battlefield, almost drowning out the calamitous sounds of battle. Then a sudden, violent crack split the air, louder even than the hammers of the great forges of Azyrheim. Tendrils of violent scarlet energy trailed across the main tower of the Dreadhold, wrapping around its surface like a cluster of vines. Mykos Argellon turned his eyes to the heavens, and felt a soft tapping sound on his mask and across his armour.

The blood rain fell. Inside the Dreadhold, the warriors of Khorne whooped and shrieked with joy at this sign of providence from their monstrous master. They turned their faces to the sky and let the iron taste roll down their tongues. They beat their chests and brandished their weapons and howled. Above them, the sky darkened and swelled, and the tendrils of fell energy crept over the edge of the tower. The sorcerer Xos’Phet stood upon the battlement, laughing in delight.

‘It begins!’ he chortled. ‘The gate swells in power. Now we must feed the link between this world and the other.’

He looked at the prisoner that the gorepriests held, a straggle-haired man with wide and frightened eyes. ‘This is your task, my friend. You are truly blessed.’

The knife was in his hand in a flash, and he cut the man’s throat with one swift motion. The prisoner’s eyes rolled back in his head, and the gorepriests hurled him into the oval pit at the centre of the tower. Blood spilled, and seeped through the grilles cut into the floor.

‘Fetch me another!’ said Xos’Phet, grinning widely.

Despite the rain of projectiles and the blood that now churned the earth and bogged them down, the Celestial Vindicators pushed to the main gate, a monstrous slab of iron covered with foul symbols and wrapped in dust-dry human skin.

Here the phalanx of shield-bearing Liberators peeled apart, allowing the breaching teams to rush through. First came the Knight-Heraldor Axilon, and the men cheered to see him raise his war horn, the blessed instrument of Sigmar that all of his rank carried.

‘What say we play an old Azyrheim tune for this Chaos filth?’ he roared above the clatter of weapons and the belching fire of the wall defences. He raised the horn to his lips.

The note that issued forth was one empowered by the fury of Sigmar’s storm, a pure wave of destruction that swelled the heart of the faithful and echoed in the ears of the damned as a promise of obliteration. The strong metal of the castle gate crumpled in the face of its awesome power, as if struck by the armoured fist of a towering giant. The gate was bound and reinforced, and it was not breached, but in the wake of Axilon’s strike, the tall warriors of the Paladin retinues that carried wondrous starsoul maces came forwards, and began to beat a furious rhythm on the ruined surface. Explosions of storm-light marked each strike. Shards of metal and chunks of stone fell, and the gate groaned under the assault. Axilon even found time for a theatrical bow as the Celestial Vindicators beat their shields and chanted his name.

Rusik watched as, one after another, his people were led to the slaughter. This next one was of his own retinue, and his eyes were full of terrified anger as the pallid, nightmarish creatures that served the sorcerer dragged him over to the pit of corpses.

The knife tore flesh, and Rusik did not look away.

‘Betrayer,’ hissed a voice at his back, and he turned to see Alzheer, leg bloodied and one eye swollen shut with blood. She gripped the bars so tightly that her hands were white. ‘Faithless, murdering scum.’

He turned away as the next prisoner was dragged forwards.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am faithless. My faith died along with my family and my friends.’

‘And murdering others gives you peace?’

‘There is no peace,’ he spat. ‘Nowhere. There is only war and bloodshed. An eternity of slaughter that will not cease and cannot be quelled. Varash and his men understand that, and so do I.’

‘Zi’Mar sends his heralds,’ Alzheer said. ‘You see them for yourself. We are not alone. The light of humanity shines on, even in such darkness.’

Rusik whirled, his dark eyes burning with rage.

‘They come now, when we are already lost,’ he shouted, and he could taste the blood rain seeping into his mouth. ‘We are already dead, woman, you are just too blind to see it. I will no longer hold on to what is lost. If this is our future, I embrace it.’

Under the combined assault of Knight-Heraldor Axilon and the hammers of the Retributors, the gates fell inwards, and the Celestial Vindicators met the enemy face to face. The true enemy, not the simple-minded bloodlust of the enemy’s reavers, but warriors who had fully embraced the touch of Khorne. These were hardened killers, tall and broad, encased in ornate plate armour of imposing design and wielding vicious, jagged axes. They did not fall before the charge of the Stormcasts, but leapt and charged into the mouth of the storm, hacking and slicing, songs of devotion to their twisted god upon their lips.

The two waves crashed together, the gleaming turquoise of the Celestial Vindicators and the spoiled-meat red of the Bloodbound warriors, and the carnage was total.

Many Stormcasts fell in that initial clash, even their mighty warplate unable to defend them from the enemy’s wild, delighted frenzy. A screaming fiend with a bronze crest took the head from a Liberator with his twin axes, then was crushed under the heavy swing of a sigmarite hammer. Drooling and chortling, a warrior wearing a flayed orruk-hide cape ground a Celestial Vindicator’s face into the ground, hacking at the stricken figure’s back with a wide-bladed gladius as he did so.

Mykos Argellon put his blade through the warrior’s back. The man gasped and choked, and Mykos kicked him free to sprawl in the dirt.

‘Push forwards, brothers,’ he shouted above the grind of battle. ‘Forge a breach!’

They were in the gatehouse tunnel, which stretched for a dozen yards ahead, culminating in a wide staircase that led up. Dull red light shone down those stairs, telling Mykos that if they could push the enemy back they would emerge in the fortress courtyard, below the main tower. Easier thought than achieved. The forces of the Dreadhold outnumbered the two hundred fighters that Mykos commanded at least four to one.

‘They’re thick as a rat swarm in here,’ Axilon shouted, his own broadsword wet with gore, and a great rent torn across his breastplate. ‘We’ll not get past them easily, and more are on their way.’

‘Come on, Bladestorm,’ Mykos said, searching for a gap in the line where he could bring his sword to bear. ‘Where are you?’

Up came the Prosecutors, over the wall of the Dreadfort, nimbly weaving past the poorly aimed missiles that were hurled their way. First, they cleared the ramparts with a flurry of their own. Lightning swept aside the throng of bloodstarved that garrisoned the wall next to the central tower. Celestial hammers and javelins hurled Chaos-warped figures to the courtyard, where they broke upon hard stone.

No sooner had they struck than the winged warriors were on the move again. This time they dropped over the perimeter wall, swooping low to pass over the heads of the defenders, releasing more lightning-wreathed javelins. Howling in outrage, the Bloodbound charged after this new quarry, abandoning their attempts to get at Mykos’ force currently pushing through the main gate.

It also drew their attention from the wall itself.

Thostos Bladestorm and the ten-score warriors of his chamber hauled themselves up the grappling ropes, using the indentations and ornaments that covered the face of the Dreadhold to ease their ascent. Belatedly, they were spotted by the remaining defenders, who rushed to the spot on the wall that the Prosecutors had cleared and began to hack and tear at the ropes, and hurl spears down at the ascending Stormcasts in an attempt to dislodge them. Several of Thostos’ men were taken down by the volley of missiles, dropping like stones to land with a bone-shattering clatter on the hard earth below. Others were unfortunate enough to pass too close to one of the daemonic mouths, and burst into flame as the deadly trap covered them with flammable liquid.

Try as they might, however, the defenders could not dislodge the heavy grapples or hack through the thick rope. Their blades met looping wires of hard metal woven into the hemp, which turned all but the heaviest axe blades. Spitting with frustration, the Chaos warriors hurled their last few missiles and waited for the heads of their foes to emerge above the parapet.

Before they had a chance to strike, Goldfeather and his Prosecutors returned with another volley of storm javelins. Yet more defenders fell shrieking and burning to the floor, and in the confusion Thostos and his warriors hauled themselves over the lip of the wall. The Lord-Celestant whirled his hammer as he pulled himself up, crushing an opponent’s hand into pulp against the wall, and rolled over onto the rampart. He drew his blade, and began to hack his way through the staggered enemy towards the nearest stairway down to the courtyard.

A reaver came at him, swinging a glaive at his neck, and the Lord-Celestant managed to get his hammer up in time to block. He reversed his grip on the weapon and struck low, and the man’s knee bent backwards. His opponent screamed and fell, and Thostos drove his runeblade into his chest.

The lines had broken. Battle had dissolved into a wild melee, aside from a few pockets where the Stormcasts had managed to maintain a semblance of discipline. While Thostos’ warriors hacked into the rear of the Blood Warriors holding the gatehouse, the Argellonites pushed forwards relentlessly. Caught between the pincers of the two Stormcast forces, the defenders were forced back into the courtyard proper. Yet despite the Celestial Vindicators’ impressive gains, the enemy was not done. More and more reavers poured from the cliff tunnels behind the fortress, swarming around the huge realmgate itself and crashing into the press of bodies, straining to get at the enemy.

‘Thostos!’ came a cry, and he turned to see Mykos at the foot of the wide stairs that led from the gatehouse into the courtyard. His fellow Lord-Celestant despatched an enemy warrior with a backhand swipe, and gestured to the main tower. The sky was now a patchwork of striated red lightning, broken only above the tower, where there now hung a circular vortex around which the baleful energy swirled. The build-up of pressure in the air was a physical ache that spread across the battlefield, a drying of the mouth and a ringing of the ears.

As they watched, the vortex vomited a torrent of blood, a coruscating pillar of viscera that swirled and lapped at the edges of the tower, but remained in place, enclosing the structure like a gauntlet over a fist.

‘We must break through,’ yelled Mykos, above the cacophony of roaring liquid. ‘We must stop this, brother.’

Thostos stood. He swayed to his left as a raging berserker hurtled past, narrowly missing the Lord-Celestant with a swipe of his dual axes, and barrelled into the thick of the battle, battering his way through to the steps leading up to the tower.

Leering faces pressed against his war helm, and he hacked and smashed at them with warhammer and blade. He shoved, strained, kicked and levered bodies aside, accepting a dozen minor hits in his haste to break free. Suddenly his path was clear, and he saw the steps arc up over the gatehouse entrance towards the central tower. He leaped up them two at a time, lifting a filthy, tattooed mortal over his shoulder as he went, pitching the man over into the swirling melee below.

On the other side of the gatehouse, Mykos Argellon made his own ascent. As he reached the tower entrance, a shadow fell across him. The figure was something from a nightmare. Impossibly tall for a mortal man, thin and long-limbed in a manner that made it look entirely unnatural. Its neck was stretched and corded with muscle, and a burnished skull on a chain of brass dangled over the creature’s chest. The monster held a great, two-handed axe in pallid, scarred hands.

‘You should not have come here, son of Sigmar,’ the Slaughterpriest hissed, and then he grinned wide enough to expose bloodstained, razor-sharp teeth. ‘But I am glad that you did.’

‘Silence, creature,’ said Mykos, raising his grandblade high. ‘Your bleating offends me.’

The blood priest’s eyes narrowed, and with a bellow of rage he exploded forwards, axe swinging at Mykos’ neck. The Lord-Celestant stepped backwards and, rather than blocking, angled Mercutia to push the axe blade aside. Against any normal foe this would have opened up an opportunity as he struggled to get that heavy great axe back into position, but this creature was blindingly fast. He rotated the axe, jabbing with a spike attached to the bottom of the haft, and in an instant had it up and swinging again, this time a wild swipe at Mykos’ midsection.

The Lord-Celestant picked that blow off too, and there began a series of lightning-fast parries, dodges and blocks. After several seconds the momentum played out, and each warrior took a step back, breathing heavily.

‘You fight well,’ said the blood priest, wiping blood from a gash than ran down the side of his angular face. ‘You would reap a fine skull-tally for the Blood God.’

‘I spit on your wretched god, vermin,’ growled Mykos.

‘You will join the tide, or drown in it,’ said the Chaos priest, gesturing at the torrent of gore that spiralled around the tower. The heat of it was astonishing. Where it met the ground steam rose, a boiling vapour that billowed out over the surrounding melee.

‘The blood is life,’ he said, and his smile was wide. ‘Let me show you.’

One hand reached out at Mykos, a claw aimed at his heart, and the priest spoke eight profane words.

Mykos screamed as his blood began to boil.

Thostos saw his fellow Lord-Celestant fall to the floor, writhing in agony. A twisted, misshapen blood priest advanced upon him, chanting in a dread tongue. He was too far away. Thostos could not possibly reach him in time. He smashed a fist into a jaw, felt it snap and battered another foe aside with a sweep of his hammer. A dozen paces now, but still too many of the enemy in his path.

‘Argellon,’ he roared. ‘Get up, brother!’

Mykos Argellon’s world was a storm of crimson agony. He could not see past the blood that poured from his eyes, could not feel anything but the fire that devoured every inch of his body. Distantly, as if from the other side of a rushing waterfall, he heard a voice he recognised. There was laughter too, deep and pitiless.

Endless, burning agony and the laughter of cruel men. The vow, the screamed oath. Then, the storm, the lightning. The rage, tempered and focused. Hope and duty flowing through his veins. The knowledge that he would never again feel so helpless and weak, and would let no other good-hearted soul feel that way if it was in his power.

Through the wave of torment, one thought coalesced. He would not fall here. Not when there were people counting on him.

Slaadh watched the stricken Stormcast with amusement. These fools. They thought they had power within them to rival the Lord of Skulls. They thought a set of shining armour and some heaven-wrought weapons gave them license to defy the true power in the realms. Their arrogance had not only doomed them, it had revealed the presence of the last bastion of humanity. Gates opened two ways.

Astonishingly, the warrior in sea-green and gold armour was still moving, despite the blood that boiled in his veins. Slaadh felt his heart sink. These were such worthy foes, but someday soon they would all be dead, their idols cast down and their cities burned around them. Who would be left then to challenge the might of the blood-chosen? It was almost a waste.

Still, there was a tally to collect. He raised his axe for the killing stroke.

Mykos could not see through the haze of pain, but he could hear the heavy steps of the scarred warrior coming towards him and could smell his rancid, rotten-meat stench. He wrapped his fingers tightly around the hilt of his grandblade, which lay in the dirt only a few inches from his face, and waited. He would only have one chance.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ came the creature’s ragged, eager hiss. Too close.

Mercutia sang as she whipped through the air.

The blade swept across so fast that Thostos could not see if it had struck home. Through the rain of blood he saw the Chaos priest standing before Mykos, axe raised and ready to strike.

The brute’s head slowly slid free, tumbling down to splash in a puddle of gore, a grin still etched across its savage features.

Mykos was struggling to his feet, digging his grandblade into the earth to lever himself upright. Thostos hacked another enemy down to the ground, finished him with a crushing blow from his hammer, and ran to his fellow Lord-Celestant. Argellon was staggering towards the curtain of blood that enclosed the tower. One hand was outstretched, and Thostos could see the sheer heat of the sorcerous power begin to melt the sigmarite.

‘Hold, brother,’ he shouted over the roaring, boiling sound of the bloodfall. ‘You cannot pass.’

‘Someone must,’ said Mykos, collapsing to his knees. His voice was little more than a ragged whisper. ‘We must end whatever is happening, and I am near dead already. Let me go.’

‘This is my task,’ said Thostos. ‘You will stay, and you will lead our men to victory.’ He grabbed the man around the shoulders, and locked eyes with his brother. ‘They must reach the muster point. You must lead them there, as Sigmar ordered us. You will do this.’

‘Thostos–’ Mykos said, but the other Lord-Celestant was already moving.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he stepped into the curtain of boiling blood.

Where it fell, the acidic gore ate through sigmarite and flesh with contemptuous ease. Thostos could feel his glorious armour, forged to deflect the blows of Chaos-forged axes and deny the spell-fire of twisted wizards, coming apart around him. The finely wrought image of the lion that he bore on his chest melted away. The icons of his beloved Warrior Chamber were obliterated. Yet Thostos did not fall.

Where once his flesh had been pale-white, now it glinted with the strength of purest sigmarite. A gift from the sorcerer Ephryx, the Ninth Disciple and lord of the Eldritch Fortress. Where once it had nearly destroyed him, now it saved his life. The blood ate away at the metal of his flesh, searing and scarring him, but where soft flesh would have been utterly destroyed, his new form endured. Soon he was through the burning bloodfall, and he collapsed to a hard iron floor.

He growled, trying to fight back the waves of agony that enveloped him. Smoke rose from his mutilated body, and melted sigmarite dripped free to spark and smoulder on the ground. Gritting his teeth and roaring in defiance, he punched one gleaming metal fist down, and forced himself to his feet. He staggered and almost fell, but reached out to grab a wrought-iron sconce shaped in the image of a screaming face. Through the blue-red haze of his vision, he took in his surroundings.

Inside the tower a circular staircase wound to the upper floors, while a steady stream of blood, shed naturally rather than summoned from some hellish realm, fell to pool in the indentations of a great bronze skull engraved upon the floor.

There was a sharp hiss, like the sound of a punctured lung, and Thostos heard movement above him. From an upper landing, two creatures bounded down the iron stairs to meet him. They were tall, spindle-limbed, with bloodied, bandaged faces and smocks stained with gore. One clutched a short, rusted bone-saw, while the other wielded two thin-bladed knives.

Thostos pushed away from the wall, and set himself upon the lowest stair. As the saw-wielding creature drew close, it leaped down at him. As it fell, Thostos could see the stitches that bound its mouth and eyes closed. Blood flecked its maggot-white skin as it hissed in fury.

He raised his blade, shifted to the side and let the thing impale itself. It groaned and wailed, yet still tried to hack at him with the saw. He let it slide free of his sword, and brought his hammer up to fend off the second creature. Somehow it got a knife past his guard, but it skittered off his metallic flesh. He stuck his sword through its chest, and as it gurgled he brought the hammer down to crush its head in a splatter of bone fragments and pink meat. The first attacker had staggered upright, so he spun and planted a boot in its chest. Bones shattered with an audible snap, and the thing flew away to land with a splash in the pool of blood at the tower base.

Thostos turned, and began to ascend the stair.

Mykos Argellon could barely stand. His entire body was aflame, and the slightest motion sent a ripple of torment through his wracked body. Around him the battle raged. The Stormcasts had established a defensive position in front of the gatehouse, but even as they hacked down scores of Bloodreavers, more rushed from the depths of the fortress or around the rock formation upon which stood the Manticore Realmgate. They could not hold here forever. Unless they could break the back of the enemy, they would be slowly picked apart.

The great relic-staff of Lord-Relictor Tharros was a blazing totem of celestial energy at the rear of the formation, but even the waves of healing energy that emanated forth and closed the wounds of stricken warriors could not reach every corner of the battlefield. Despite the attempts of the Prosecutors to clear the wall, more and more axes were being hurled down into the ranks of the Celestial Vindicators, and Mykos could see explosions of light all across the field as fallen warriors were called home by the storm.

He staggered down the steps, where a band of Argellonite Liberators held the stair leading to the central tower. They fought as one, shields intercepting the frenzied strikes of the enemy and opening just long enough for the warriors to thrust their runeblades through chests, stomachs and throats, or crush skulls with their heavy warhammers. In front of their formation lay a carpet of ripped and torn bodies, but the Stormcasts’ numbers were steadily dwindling. As Mykos stumbled forwards to join them, a flaming anvil head attached to a wicked, barbed chain sailed over the top of a Liberator’s shield, caving in the man’s helm with a splatter of flesh. Booming laughter echoed over the din of clashing blades as a broad warrior with bare, burn-scorched arms barrelled into the Stormcasts, whirling and rattling skull-tipped chains. He brought the anvil and chain around in a full circle, and swept it low, underneath the shield of another Liberator, who went down with a cry as his leg folded sideways.

‘Come, little warriors,’ roared the man, a mocking leer visible underneath a towering horned helm. ‘Give your skulls to me!’

Mykos half-staggered, half-ran forwards, and ducked as the warrior swept his burning anvil back around. He felt the heat of it as it rushed past his head, and brought Mercutia up in a thrust aimed for the fiend’s throat. His opponent ducked back, spinning with unsettling grace for one so large, letting his momentum add to an overhead swing that had Mykos scrambling backwards, falling to the ground with his blade out of position. The warrior flicked the chain back up, and the anvil smashed into the bottom of Mykos’ war-helm. He felt the bones in his jaw come apart, and sprawled backwards, head spinning.

The brute stalked forwards, laughing.

‘Well fought, little general,’ he chortled. ‘You have earned a place on my trophy belt.’ He gestured to a row of chipped and broken skulls that had been bronzed and arrayed on a chain around his midriff.

He raised the flaming anvil.

A thick blade punched out from the front of his throat. The warrior glanced down in surprise, and blood poured down the front of his battered iron armour.

Lord-Castellant Eldroc retracted his halberd, switched his grip on the long haft and swung it sideways at the Skullgrinder’s neck. His head tumbled free as his body collapsed awkwardly and rolled down the stairs. The Gryph-hound Redbeak spat a clump of flesh from his jaws and trilled briefly in appreciation.

Mykos watched, blearily, as the Lord-Castellant rushed over to him.

‘Do not move, my friend,’ he heard, as the cloud of darkness at the edge of his vision threatened to engulf him. Suddenly the blackness was washed away in the face of a soothing beam of light, like a breaking dawn.

‘Come back to the light, brother,’ he heard Eldroc say.

Thostos kicked open the door, his metallic skin still dripping molten sigmarite and hot blood, and emerged into a storm of profane magic. Coils of twisted, baleful light spiralled and curled around the tower summit, enveloping three forms that were raised above the fortress wall on jagged iron crosses. These figures flickered and jerked spastically as the onslaught of fell energies wracked through them. In the sky above clouds rolled back, exposing a dark vortex that crackled and howled. Thostos could see shifting, roiling shapes within. A terrible sound echoed in his ears, the laughter of something impossibly old and unimaginably vast. The veil between the realms was being torn apart.

Before him stood a tall, powerful man in ridged black armour, hands resting easily on the pommel of a bastard sword with pulsing veins running through its obsidian blade. On one side the man’s face was almost concave, and where the eye should be there was instead a red jewel that wept blood. The man smiled.

‘My name is Varash Sunken-Eye,’ he said, in a measured, almost soft voice that seemed at odds with his fearsome appearance. ‘I am lord of this Dreadhold, and I will claim your skull.’

‘I am Thostos Bladestorm, and you are welcome to try.’

‘I knew you would meet me here,’ said the warrior, circling around the pit of bodies with a wide grin on his ruin of a face. He gestured to the boiling skies. ‘Symbolism. Ritual. This confrontation was inevitable, as soon as you arrived in the Roaring Plains.’

‘It was,’ said Thostos, settling his weapons in each hand and fighting away the waves of pain that threatened to bring him to his knees.

A small, pallid rodent of a man dressed in garish purple robes appeared from behind the Chaos Lord and glared at Thostos, seemingly more in irritation than anger. He clutched a small, serrated blade and inched towards the cage on the far left side of the tower, where a clutch of blank-eyed human prisoners crouched. They were guarded by more of the bandaged, stitch-mouthed monsters that Thostos had fought in the tower below.

‘There must be no interruptions,’ the small man said. ‘Finish this thing quickly, Lord Varash. It disturbs my work.’

With a roar, Varash leaped across the pit of blood, his flayed-skin cloak spreading out behind him like the wings of a bat and his obsidian blade reaching for Thostos’ throat.

‘Lord Thostos,’ Alzheer whispered. She could hardly believe that the twisted, melted thing before her was the grand and imposing Lord-Celestant she had met on the plain. His armour was a smouldering wreck, and his exposed flesh was a dull, ash-covered gold. He moved slowly, shorn of the terrifying speed and surety he had displayed in battle against the orruks. The Chaos warrior that faced him was smiling as he ducked and wove out of the path of the Lord-Celestant’s attacks, occasionally dragging his blade across an exposed flank or knocking Thostos off-balance with the heavy pommel.

‘He will fall,’ said the warrior Emni. Her dreadlocked hair was matted with blood, and her scarred face was bruised and swollen where she had been struck. ‘Look at him. He is done. We must escape, priestess.’

‘There is no escape from that,’ said Alzheer, nodding at the boiling blood that rushed past the edge of the tower.

‘Then we kill as many of those monsters as we can,’ Emni replied fiercely. She nudged Alzheer, and gestured down. Though she kept her hands together, the priestess could see that her friend’s bonds were cut. She wondered how Emni had done it, then saw the dead prisoner behind her, bone protruding from a shattered leg.

‘One of Rusik’s lot,’ whispered Emni, and she was grinning. ‘Cursed traitor at least managed to serve us in death.’

‘Hush,’ said Alzheer. The wizened man was returning, and as he gestured, two of the bandaged servants bent to unlock their cage. Alzheer held her breath, and gripped her claw-hound tooth necklace tight enough to draw blood. She had taken the trophy from her first kill, and the fang was still sharp, after all these years.

‘Take me, you filth,’ shouted Emni, as one of the figures reached for a man with one ear missing and started to drag him out, kicking and screaming.

Its foul head snapped around, eyes weeping, stitched-together mouth drooling. It grabbed Emni, and began to haul her free of the cage.

The warrior let the creature drag her until she was half-in, half-out of the cage door. Then, in one fluid motion, she pulled the thing off balance and wrapped her legs around its neck. It struggled and moaned, but Emni made a dagger of the first two fingers of her right hand, and jabbed them into one rheumy eye. Stitches tore free as the creature gave a strange, ululating howl. Emni grasped the corpse-knife that the thing carried in its belt, and drove it into its neck.

‘Insolence!’ roared the sorcerer. ‘Grab her! She will be the next to bleed.’

Another of the bandaged servants reached at Emni. Alzheer tucked in her legs, forced her bound arms underneath, and rolled them free. As the creature grasped at her friend, the priestess clenched the claw-hound tooth between two fingers, and punched it in the face once, twice, three times. It screeched and reeled back.

The two women crawled free, and the other prisoners, given fresh hope of escape, scrambled after them.

‘Enough!’ shrieked the sorcerer, and gestured at Emni. A white-hot bolt of energy spat out from his finger and burned into her chest. She screamed and fell to the floor.

Alzheer did not have time to worry for her friend. She scooped up the knife as it clattered to the floor and charged the mage. He laughed, stepping backwards and weaving another spell. She felt her muscles constrict, and suddenly she could not move at all.

‘Oh, very good,’ he giggled. ‘Very brave. But you cannot stop what is happening, girl. No, in fact you will watch. I will slaughter all your friends, and then, at last, I will allow you a slow death.’

More prisoners scrambled across the blood-slick stone to get at the sorcerer, and he cackled and waved a hand at them. A curtain of flame enveloped them, and a dozen men and women went down, burning and screaming. Alzheer felt a finger twitch. The sorcerer took a pace backwards, stepping out of the way as a blazing figure collapsed in front of him.

That step brought him too close to one of the other prisoner cages. Hands reached out of the bars, grasping at his robes, pulling at his hair.

‘No,’ he screamed. ‘Release me!’

Alzheer took a step forwards. She stumbled as the spell released her from its control. Her legs ached as if she had just run a thousand leagues, but she did not stop. She took another step, then another, then she was sprinting. The sorcerer brought one hand up to fend her off, and she could see the fear in his eyes. She stabbed the blade in between his ribs. He squealed like a dying rat, and his eyes were wide with terror and pain as she twisted the knife. Then he was writhing and melting, falling in upon himself with his last scream still echoing in her ears. The purple robes fell to the floor, with no body to be found.

Thostos could not win. He had known this from the moment he matched blades with the Lord of Chaos. His opponent was too fast, too fresh. His own reflexes were slowed by pain and exhaustion. Each step backwards, each block and parry sent a sheet of lightning roiling through his body.

He blocked a downwards swing on his blade and swept his warhammer around at Varash’s side. The man turned and spun, neatly avoiding the strike, and flicked his blade along Thostos’ arm. Whatever twisted, Chaos-tainted alchemy had forged that obsidian blade, it had imbued it with astonishing power. It cut deeply into his transmuted sigmarite flesh, and the pain caused him to open his hand. His warhammer bounced away on the hard stone.

Thostos tried to step back, to gain some space, but the Chaos lord was too fast. His bastard sword swept out and cut across the Lord-Celestant’s leg, and as Thostos stumbled, a backhand swing tore a shard of metal from his face and snapped his head violently to the side. His vision swam, and he felt himself clatter to the floor.

‘I had expected more,’ said Varash, wiping bloody tears from his ruined eye. ‘This is a disappointment, truly.’

There was only one chance, only the briefest of opportunities as the monster standing before her revelled in his apparent victory. Alzheer knew that taking it would in all likeliness mean her death. She had never been concerned by that possibility before, despite living every moment of her life in some form of life-threatening danger. As fervently as she had preached the wisdom and benevolence of Zi’Mar, she had always believed that her people were dying, and her god was gone. The sacred words and rituals were simply fragments of a better past that she could not quite let go.

That was until they had come, these warriors in burnished plate. These demigods who spoke like men. Now, she had a reason to live. They all did. Hope. Hope that they would see this new future that the Sky God had offered them, hope that the orruks and the forces of the Dark Gods and all the other cataclysms that had seemed so insurmountable could in fact be resisted – could even be defeated. She wanted so badly to live to see that future, and conversely that made her choice so much easier. Life meant something now. Life, and what she chose to do with it.

She did not waste her opportunity.

Staggering across the gore-slick ground, she jumped onto a table covered in the innards of unfortunate prisoners, and from there leapt onto the creature’s back, scrabbling for purchase on the trophy-racks and chains that wrapped his gore-encrusted plate armour. He was lightning fast, snatching at her with a spiked gauntlet that ripped into her flesh, but she had surprise on her side and a hunter’s instinct for the kill.

The claw-dog tooth she held in her fist sank into the Chaos Lord’s eye, and she twisted and dragged it, screwing it deeper and deeper. She returned the pain that ran through her a hundredfold, screaming a prayer of vengeance for her fallen friends.

He roared in agony, and suddenly she was flying through the air. Something rushed forwards to meet her, and the world went blank.

The Chaos lord staggered back, cursing and pawing at his face. There came the sound of shattered earth, of rushing water, of a thousand siege-stones striking a thousand castle walls.

The sky opened once more, but this time it was not the bloody horror of Chaos that issued forth, but the searing righteousness of the storm that was Sigmar. A fork of lightning as tall and wide as a mountain blasted into the vortex, exploding in a coruscating web of blue energy that arced across the sky. For a moment it seemed as if Sigendil itself, the High Star that bathed blessed Sigmaron in purifying, celestial light, had descended over them.

That purifying bolt of light turned the rain of blood to mist, banished the darkness that had fallen across the Dreadhold, and fell to strike Thostos Bladestorm in the chest.

Thostos screamed as the storm enveloped him. It tore him apart and reassembled him. He felt the agony of transformation as armour and sigmarite flesh moulded and reformed around his body. With the pain, the honest, cauterising pain, came memories. He remembered the agony as the vile minions of the Dark Gods cut into him. He remembered the sorrow of loss, the ecstasy of his grief as he looked for the last time upon the smoking ruins of his lands. He remembered the helplessness, and the shame of knowing that his people had counted on him to protect them, and that he had not been there in their hour of greatest need. Thoughts and memories seared through his consciousness, too many and too vivid for him to process.

As quickly as it had come the storm was gone. Varash blinked as the flare slowly receded from his vision. His eye burned as if molten steel had been poured into the socket, but from somewhere in the haze of torment a figure swam into view. The storm warrior still knelt before him, but where once his warplate had been melted and seared, it was now resplendent in gleaming turquoise. There was not a mark upon its surface, and it shone as if it was freshly polished. The figure, despite its miraculous transformation, showed no sign of movement.

‘A clever trick,’ spat Varash, ‘but it makes no difference. You will die now, and know that every one of your warriors will die with you.’

As he spoke, he brought his bastard sword up and over, rolling his shoulder in a circular motion, adding furious momentum to the killing strike.

Thostos Bladestorm, warrior of Sigmar, who once had been the mortal warrior Prince Caeran of Wolf Keep, reached up and caught his enemy’s hands as the sword fell. The blade came to rest an inch from his eye.

‘No!’ shouted Varash, and his ravaged eye widened with shock.

Thostos stood, and as he stood he brought his runeblade up, roaring in defiance as he tore its edge through the Chaos Lord’s thick mail armour, cleaving devotional totems and skulls in half as he cut a bloody, vertical line into the man’s pale flesh. He ripped his sword free, and a mist of blood covered his armour.

Lord Varash stood, eyes fixed in astonishment at the ruin of his chest. As he swayed, he turned his gaze to Thostos.

Blue eyes bored into his skull, not the emotionless reservoirs of cold fury that they had been, but alive with righteous fervour, the eyes of a man who fought for a cause that he embraced with every fibre of his being.

‘Tell your gods that we are coming for them,’ said Thostos, ‘and that their realms will burn as ours did.’

Varash Sunken-Eye, master of the Dreadhold, collapsed in two separate pieces, toppling to the floor of the tower in a shower of gore.

The bloodstarved hordes were no cowardly ratmen, and their resistance did not end with the death of their master. When Thostos Bladestorm emerged from the great tower with his runeblade in one fist and the severed head of Varash Sunken-Eye in the other, more than one crazed warrior hurled themselves at him in desperation to claim a worthy skull.

None landed a blow. Thostos was renewed, healed and imbued with fresh purpose. He spun, whirled and sliced, a whirlwind of destruction that cut deep into the enemy ranks. Emboldened at the glorious sight of their Lord-Celestant and the death of the enemy lord, the flagging Stormcast offensive surged once more. Judicators lined the inner wall, using the higher ground to their advantage now and loosing devastating volleys into the Bloodreavers.

‘Bring down the icon-bearers,’ shouted Evios Goldfeather, hefting a javelin and sending it soaring down to burst through the back of an obese brute wielding a heavy chain and flail. The missile flared with white-blue light as it struck, and the man toppled to the ground, his back a smoking ruin.

In the courtyard the sheer might of the Retributors was beginning to tell. In such close quarters their heavy hammers reaped a horrific toll, smashing in breastplates and caving in skulls with furious precision. The ground was slick with gore, and the Bloodreavers were so hemmed in by the aggression of the Stormcasts’ assault that as many slipped and were trampled by their fellow warriors as were slain in honest battle.

For the majority of the defenders there was no retreat. Neither the tight confines of the Dreadhold nor the single-minded battle-lust of its defenders allowed for even the thought of it. They died hard, hacking and slashing and screaming with the pure joy of the slaughter even as the tide claimed them.

Only a few battered survivors scattered, rushing into the cave passages that wound into the mountains behind the realmgate, choosing a long, dangerous trek through the darkness in favour of the vengeance of the Celestial Vindicators. Rusik paused as he made the entrance of the cave, and looked out across the inner courtyard at the shining warriors who had denied him his chance for revenge. Then he turned, and raced away into the shadows.

As the sun began to fall, a soft pink glow fell over a scene of devastation. As it had so many times down the centuries, the Dreadhold ran red with blood.

Thostos Bladestorm stood in front of the Manticore Realmgate, staring into the pulsing, warping maelstrom at its centre. He could feel its hatred and cruel malice, its rage at being denied so many souls.

‘What will you do now?’ came a voice from behind him. He turned to see the priestess Alzheer, limping and heavily bandaged, one eye wrapped in a poultice. She stopped at his side, and gazed into the portal herself. Red light played across her face, and she winced at the hateful power of it.

‘Sigmar’s plan for the next stage of the great war is unimaginably complex, and the Celestial Vindicators have their part to play,’ said Thostos. ‘Through this realmgate lies our true goal. But first it must be cleansed, made safe for our passage. Until then, the fortress must stand.’

Roaring and snuffling with barely constrained fury, the beasts raced across the broken earth towards the fortress of the statue, from which the sounds of battle had been heard. These were not agile creatures. Where more graceful animals would nimbly jump from rock to rock, navigating the tortured highlands with precision, these beasts simply smashed and ripped their way through. They lowered the horns that jutted from their snouts and hurtled into stone formations, blasting them into fragments as they hauled their great bulk through the gap they had created.

Barely holding on to the crude iron bands that served as saddles, the beasts’ riders whooped and hollered, beating their mounts with axe hafts and clubbed fists in an attempt to push them further and faster.

Eventually the riders came to the end of the mountain ridge overlooking the canyon below and behind, and the valley plain that stretched out before them. To their right was the fortress of the red-iron men and the colossal monument that loomed over it – the statue of the warrior with the horned helm and the pitiless gaze.

There had been a battle, that much was obvious. Corpse-fires were visible within the interior of the fortress, and the ground surrounding the structure was stained red like an open wound. More interesting still was the fact that the tiny figures within wore not the red-and-black iron of the expected defenders, but a rich sea-green trimmed with gold that glittered in the midday sun. New banners flew from the fortress walls, proudly displaying a hammer wreathed in lightning bolts.

From here the beast riders could not pick out the specifics of the enemy force, but one thing was certain. If they had managed to dig the red-iron men out of their hole, they were a worthy foe.

The riders shared an eager, toothy grin.

Then they wrenched on the reins of their mounts, and raced off back the way they had come, leaving a trail of dust and shattered stone in their wake.

CHAPTER FOUR

Iron Tide

‘Lord Thostos,’ said Alzheer, running after the Stormcast as he made his way across to the realmgate. ‘I would ask a favour of you.’

He turned, and looked at her. To her surprise he gave her a quick salute, beating one gauntlet upon that fabulous gilded chestplate. She still did not understand how it had been repaired so thoroughly. The Lord-Celestant had been a half-melted ruin before the coming of the storm, and the renewing light. Alzheer’s faith had always been strong, but it had never blazed brighter than when the lightning cleared and she saw Thostos stand, restored and defiant.

‘I am aware of what you did upon the tower, priestess. Your bravery saved my life. You have my thanks.’ He paused. ‘If what you request is within my power to grant, I will do so.’

‘I aim to hunt the traitor Rusik down,’ she said. Even saying his name filled her with bile. ‘He must die for what he has done.’

‘And you wish me to provide you with a cadre of warriors,’ said Thostos, understanding immediately. ‘I am sorry, priestess, that is not something I can allow. Our mission is only just beginning, and I cannot afford to spare a single one.’

Her heart sank, but she would not give in that easily.

‘I heard what you said at the Manticore Gate,’ she continued. ‘That portal will take time for your people to restore. In the meantime, the cave systems that open out into the back of this fortress remain vulnerable. If the enemy stages a counter-attack, they could tear into your force before you know they are upon you.’

Thostos considered this.

‘It is a potential weakness,’ he admitted. ‘What do you suggest?’

‘Lend me just six of your warriors,’ she said. ‘They will join the thirty fighters I still command. My people are fine trackers. We will find Rusik and whoever else managed to escape with him, and we will make sure they do not pose a threat to you any longer.’

‘I can afford to give you three,’ said Thostos. ‘I will not risk my mission and the coherence of my fighting force by offering any more than that.’

Alzheer considered this. ‘Three men will do,’ she said. ‘A small force will be able to move more quickly through the tunnels. Thank you, Lord.’

‘Thank me by bringing my warriors back in short order, priestess,’ said the Lord-Celestant. ‘By rights I should not grant your request, but you have aided me and my men well and deserve your chance at vengeance.’

He glanced across the courtyard, which was carpeted with enemy dead.

‘And if there is one thing the Celestial Vindicators understand, priestess, it is vengeance.’

Lord-Castellant Eldroc led the detachment of Celestial Vindicators that were tasked with disposing of the corpses left in the Manticore Dreadhold’s main courtyard. In places the piles were knee-deep. It had been an inglorious slaughter at the end, when the ranks of blood-starved warriors had finally begun to break and flee. No Celestial Vindicator had given the foe a moment of mercy. They were tainted. They were traitors. There was no question of quarter. The men had killed with a song and a smile upon their lips.

Perhaps the Hallowed Knights would shake their heads at such joyous slaughter. Perhaps the Hammers of Sigmar would see it as beneath them. So be it. Let their brother Stormhosts be the proud and noble warriors. The Celestial Vindicators would fight as they had always done – with the fire of vengeance burning in their hearts.

Lord-Celestant Thostos approached.

‘A fine tally,’ said Eldroc. ‘Many have been avenged this day.’

‘This is but a taste of what awaits us,’ Thostos replied. ‘But yes, it will do for the moment.’

The Lord-Castellant studied his friend. It was hard to describe the exact difference in the Bladestorm’s mien, but something had certainly changed. He remained reserved and distant, but where previously being around the man had made one feel awkward and uncomfortable, as if he radiated a cloying sense of unease, now there was simply a quiet intensity.

‘What happened on that tower, Thostos?’ asked Eldroc.

His friend did not answer for a long while.

‘Truly, I do not remember,’ he said at last. ‘Sigmar reached out to me, that much is clear. I was broken, defeated. He restored me. The rest is but a fragment of a dream. Images, emotions.’

He shook his head. There was an element of frustration in that movement, but also, it seemed to Eldroc, an acceptance.

‘I have never heard of such a thing, of the storm of Azyrheim reaching out to restore a warrior in the midst of battle,’ said the Lord-Castellant.

‘Nor I,’ said Thostos. ‘Yet you saw how the retrieval of Ghal Maraz ignited the fire within the God-King. Do any of us truly know the limits of his power, especially now that he is reunited with that marvellous weapon? Whatever the storm revealed to me was lost in moments,’ Thostos continued, ‘but the echo of it remains. I do not remember the life I have lost, but I recall the vows that I made. That we all made. If this is now what I am, the fury of those oaths wrought in sigmarite and unleashed to destroy the taint of Chaos wherever it may be found, then I embrace it.’

Eldroc opened his mouth to say something, but Thostos raised a hand to cut him off.

‘We will speak of this again, but not now,’ he said. ‘Lord-Relictor Tharros requires our presence at the realmgate. We still have a mission to complete.’

The Manticore Realmgate no longer spewed out tendrils of eldritch fire, but it still resonated with ill intent. The monstrous carving that topped the archway of rune-carved black stone glared down at the Stormcasts, its leonine head promising obliteration to anyone who dared trespass upon its territory. Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon made the mistake of staring too long at the symbols carved into the unyielding stone of the structure, and immediately regretted doing so. His head ached, and sour bile filled his mouth.

‘We must pass through this gate,’ said Thostos. He could see that no one present relished the prospect. ‘You all know the part we have to play in Sigmar’s grand plan. Our task was to secure this path to the mustering point, where we shall join a host the like of which the realms have never seen. The God-King aims to bring the war to the Everchosen’s doorstep, but unless every piece is on the board at the allotted time, that cannot happen.’

‘The Allpoints must fall,’ said Eldroc, softly.

The Allpoints. The nexus through which was linked every single Realmgate. An island adrift, set apart from the Mortal Realms yet intrinsically linked to them through its web of eldritch passageways. As long as the forces of Chaos controlled the mighty fortresses that guarded these portals, the enemy’s great armies of daemons and dark warriors could be sent forth anywhere in the realms to burn and despoil.

‘It must,’ agreed Thostos. ‘But first we must shatter the formidable defences that guard it. That is our task, and the Manticore Realmgate will lead us to the Crystal Forest of Chamon, and to the next stage of the war.’

‘These gates – the magic that binds them is strong but easily warped,’ said Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden, leaning on the ornate staff that was his mark of office. ‘The fell powers can easily twist them to their purpose, redirecting and refocusing the latent energy to their own dark ends.’

‘We had actually noticed that,’ said Evios Goldfeather. The Prosecutor-Prime was perched on a rock cluster slightly above the ancient structure, staring grimly down.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ snapped Tharros. ‘My point is that we cannot trust that this portal will not drop us in a lake of fire, or a pit of blood demons. Throne of Azyrheim, we could even end up in the court of the Blood God.’

The realmgate stood at the rear of the fortress courtyard, on a raised platform built against the great mountain wall. Around it was a cluster of jagged rocks, and to each side of the stone-carved dais were tunnels that led deeper into the mountains. To hold this position, one needed to control both the fortress and the gate. At any moment, they all knew, fresh reinforcements could come pouring through this portal to smash into their exposed flank.

‘How long will it take for you to purge the taint, Lord-Relictor?’ asked Thostos.

‘How long will it take me to restore this realmgate to its original state? How long will it take a man to unravel the dark enchantments and twisted blood rituals that have fed this thing for centuries upon centuries?’

Tharros tapped his fingers rhythmically on the metal of his staff.

‘Somewhere between half a day and a hundred years,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll have no idea until I begin, and once I commit to this…’

Thostos nodded. ‘Begin, Lord-Relictor. If we do not pass through this gate, our mission is forfeit regardless. Eldroc, how goes the refortification?’

‘Our assault kept the fortress largely intact, aside from the main gate,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘I have ordered the breach secured with caltrops and spiked wolf holes using iron taken from the ramparts. We do not have time to repair the gate entirely, but if we are attacked, forcing an entrance will cost the enemy dearly.’

‘Good,’ said Thostos. ‘I will not trust to luck that our engagement with the Chaos scum went unnoticed. The orruks are too close, and there is every chance they heard the sounds of battle, or saw the sky darken with sorcery. You do not need me to tell you your business, Lord-Castellant. Make this place as secure as possible.’

Eldroc struck a fist to his chest in salute, and turned to make his way back to the wall, Redbeak loping along at his heel.

Tharros rested his chin in the crook of his hand. Wisps of celestial light coalesced around the haft of his relic-staff, and he reached one gauntlet out towards the burning portal.

‘This is a stubborn, defiant old thing,’ he spat, through gritted teeth.

‘If that’s the case, I feel it may have met its match at last,’ said Goldfeather. He had removed his helm, and a slight smile was visible on his angular features.

‘Pray find something to keep yourself occupied, Prosecutor-Prime,’ said the Lord-Relictor. ‘I require concentration, and must be free from the jabbering of pompous buzzards.’

Xos’Phet howled and wailed and spat as he was carried deeper into the gloom of the caverns, the volume of his screeching growing louder every time the gorepriests that carried him stumbled over another rock formation or a cluster of the great conical fungi that grew throughout the tunnels.

He fumbled at his side, underneath the stinking rags that now enveloped his bleeding form, and as his fingers touched the wound that the savage had left in his flesh he gave another yelp of pain.

‘Watch where you step, you brainless fools,’ he snapped, though conversing with the creatures at all was largely pointless.

The first of them had been accomplices of his, those he had consulted with now and then on the various intricacies of blood magic. There had been a reasonable level of collaborative progress for a while, but as always happened in the sorcerer’s experience, their professional partnership had eventually become strained. They had made the unforgivable error of disagreeing with him on several key theoretical points. He had removed their troubling capacity for reason and defiance along with their eyes and their tongues. Over the years he had added to his collection, until he had quite the retinue of mute, compliant slaves that were little more than husks, bound to his will.

Clumsy, stupid, inconsiderate husks who were going to be the death of him.

‘How did it come to this?’ he moaned, as his bearers splashed through the freezing waters of an underground stream, which sent ripples of silver, phosphorescent light playing across the stone walls.

He had been so close. So damnably close. The ritual had worked, and he had been mere moments away from summoning a horde of screaming neverborn into being, and into his service.

‘That fool Varash, how I would have savoured the look on his face when I ordered my army to tear him and his men limb from limb,’ he said. ‘Yet the dullard could not even hold a few overzealous warriors at bay.’

Xos’Phet was dimly aware of just how much blood poured from his stab wound. He was also beginning to feel light-headed and weightless, as if he had just drunk a bottle of duardin fire-ale after a week without water. If he did not make it to his sanctum soon, he would die. The thought terrified him. There was so much left to do, so many secrets on the verge of being uncovered.

The gorepriests rounded a corner, and the wall to their left simply fell away. The cavern they had entered was enormous, so wide and high that it could have housed the Dreadhold itself with room to spare. The path they travelled narrowed, and hugged the right-hand side of this enormous chamber, winding up towards the far wall. They were halfway across the chamber, so close to the safety of Xos’Phet’s subterranean sanctuary, when the gorepriest carrying him staggered to a halt.

‘Did I order you to stop?’ shrieked the sorcerer, flailing weakly at his servant with one pallid hand.

The creature took one step forwards, and then toppled to the floor. The other gorepriest just above managed to keep its burden upright, but then a blade flashed in from the shadows, and its throat sprayed dark, clotted blood. Xos’Phet rolled onto the hard floor of the cavern with a yelp, and saw more blood spray as a wiry, thin man with a dirty beard and the rags of a plains-dwelling savage knelt over his servant, hacking and slashing with maniacal intensity.

Had he been his normal self, Xos’Phet would have slain the man in an instant. Perhaps with a single sheet of magical flame, or a sizzling bolt of acid. As it was, he could barely concentrate enough through the blur of pain to raise his hands in a futile gesture of surrender before the attacker was upon him.

Wild, frenzied eyes. Dried blood staining a narrow, angular face with dark, sun-baked skin. And, most importantly, a wicked curved blade in hand that was currently cutting into his tender neck.

‘Wait,’ he gasped. ‘The plains rider. Rusik.’

His captor growled, and the sword dug a little deeper. Xos’Phet summoned every ounce of his self-control, and whispered an arcane phrase while weaving a complex pattern with his free hand.

He gestured, an open-palmed push, and his assailant flew to crash into the wall of the cavern with a bone-shaking thud. The man slid to the floor and rolled, coming to a rest only an inch from the lip of the abyss.

Xos’Phet clambered to his feet, still holding his hand out, locking the man in place. Rusik roared and strained, but could not break free of the binding spell.

‘I should cut your heart out,’ the sorcerer spat. ‘Filthy savage, daring to attack me. After all I have done for you.’

Rusik shouted something unintelligible, and spat at him.

‘I should,’ Xos’Phet continued, ‘but given our current situation, I may require your assistance. Those warriors in turquoise, they think us defeated. That wretched woman thinks she has slain me, but Xos’Phet the Eternal does not pass so easily.’

The warrior continued to grunt and snarl. Xos’Phet sighed. It had been an easy thing, to play upon this one’s guilt and shame, but the trouble with tempting a man into sacrificing his soul to the Dark Gods was that they tended to take the whole thing very seriously.

‘You want revenge, don’t you?’ he said, staring into the man’s haunted eyes. ‘I can give you that. I can give you the slaughter you desire, that and so much more.’

He stepped closer. The man’s dark eyes had gone strangely still, as if he had slipped into a trance.

‘Would you like that, Rusik?’ he whispered. ‘To have your revenge on those that have wronged you? To have power, true power?’

The warrior’s eyes flashed, and he broke from Xos’Phet’s hold for just a moment, swiping his curved blade up at an awkward angle, trying to slash the sorcerer’s throat. Xos’Phet skittered backwards, laughing.

‘Oh, very close,’ he laughed. ‘You almost had me fooled. In truth, however, it does not matter if you want this or not. I have great plans for you, my savage friend.’

He stepped to the body of one of his gorepriests and knelt to run his fingers through the thing’s belt. He found the knife, and turned back to his prisoner.

‘I mean to make you useful to me regardless,’ he said.

‘Something is wrong,’ said Thostos.

They had been watching the Lord-Relictor weaving his spells upon the gate for over an hour, and for the majority of that time he had been as still as stone, only the sonorous muttering that came from deep in his throat any indication that he was at work. Now he was twitching, jerking as if wracked by lightning. Gone was the calm authority of his magic. His face was masked by the grinning skull that all Lord-Relictors wore, but Thostos could see the tightness of his posture and the shudder that ran through his frame.

‘The gate,’ gasped Mykos.

The harsh but pure light that poured into the Manticore Realmgate began to darken and twist, turning to thick red veins of spiralling, crackling energy that pushed back at Tharros’ storm magic. The Lord-Relictor set his feet and leaned into the onslaught, but it did not cease. The surface of the realmgate began to boil and surge, and a choir of sibilant whispers echoed around the fortress.

A grasping, red-scaled limb reached through the membrane of the portal.

‘Shield!’ shouted Mykos. ‘Raise your blades.’

They belched forth from one reality into another, spewing into the mortal realm with eager hunger and the thunder of brimstone fire. They were slaughter given flesh, the psychic resonance of the violence and fury of battle condensed into a brutal physical form. Their flesh was the deep red of a sword wound, corded with powerful muscles and branded with runes of loyalty to their dread master. Sharp tongues hung over wicked, finger-length teeth, drooling acidic spittle that hissed as it dropped onto the hard stone floor. Great, curving horns capped their heads, wound with brass rings and capped with bronze. Each carried a wicked sword of unique design. Some writhed like snakes in their wielder’s hands. Others bore eyes that blinked obscenely as the blade swept through the air, or blue-red veins that pulsed with blood.

‘Form ranks!’ yelled Thostos. These were no simple, mortal warriors. They had to hold them here, for if the bloodletters overran the defenders all would be lost.

The Liberators began to lock shields, responding with admirable speed to the shocking emergence of the daemon warriors. They formed a wall of gleaming sigmarite upon the platform before the portal, using the rock cluster that wound behind the realmgate to hem the attackers in and prevent them from breaking out into the fortress proper. Against a mortal enemy the Stormcasts’ defence would have been almost impregnable.

With howls of atavistic rage the daemons leapt at the Stormcasts, hell-forged blades digging deep into sigmarite and reaching over the defenders’ shields to pierce chests and helms. The bloodletters gave no thought to their own safety. All they knew was aggression, and this single-minded rage forced breaches in even the disciplined shield wall of the Celestial Vindicators. A dread note reverberated from the bronze, spiral warhorn of one of the daemons, and its fellows hacked and slashed with ever-greater fervour.

Yet the Celestial Vindicators did not fall back a single step.

Heaven-wrought warhammers sought daemonic flesh, pounding and blasting the hated foe back into the nightmare realm they called home. As fallen Stormcasts disappeared in flares of light, new warriors stepped in to take their place so quickly and efficiently that it almost seemed as if the movement was mechanical, that of a magically-charged automaton. There was no fear or uncertainty in the Stormcasts’ mind, simply a surety of purpose and a fierce joy at the destruction of their most hated enemy.

‘Vengeance for the lost!’ they shouted as they fought. ‘Glory to Sigmar’s chosen!’

Thostos entered the fray, crossing his warhammer and runeblade to intercept a falling sword that screamed in some unknowable tongue as it fell, wrenching the leering daemon’s blade down low, and reversing the momentum to send the creature stumbling to the side. It hissed and cut across with a backhand slice, but Thostos span inside the cut and sank his blade into the monster’s chest. It gurgled and choked, and as he let it fall to the ground its body burst into flame. He blocked another strike, left a bloodletter reeling with a returning blow from his warhammer.

Something heavy struck him a mighty blow on the side. He felt the air rush by as he somersaulted through the air, rolling twice in the dirt before coming to rest on his side. He was up in a moment, weapons raised and ready.

A colossal metal abomination paced towards him, a bloodletter perched screeching on its back. It was the rough shape of a horse, but squatter and far more heavily muscled, encased entirely in dull red metal and bronze. Steam hissed from its nostrils, and its smouldering hooves left brimstone prints in their wake.

The beast’s dread rider cursed at him in a tongue of molten hatred.

Thostos charged. The creature came right at him, scattering Stormcasts before it, kicking itself forwards on powerful hind legs, the daemonic rider lowering his heavy blade like a tourney lance. It ate up the ground towards him at a terrifying pace, bellowing with mindless rage.

A few yards from the creature, close enough to smell its brimstone stench, Thostos hurled himself forwards and to the right. As he passed, he heard the crunch of the beast’s hooves narrowly missing his skull, felt a blade rush past his head so close he could feel its foul heat.

He swept his sword across, allowing the beast’s momentum to add to his own. It sliced deep into the thing’s flank, and hot black liquid spurted out. The creature bucked, swaying to one side, and the rider came free, clattering to the ground with a metal thud. Dragging himself to his feet, Thostos ran the ten paces to the downed daemon, and swung his hammer at its head. The bloodletter screeched in rage as the weapon fell, a scream that was cut off abruptly as its skull shattered into fragments.

Ahead, the beast was struggling upright. It kicked out savagely with its rear hooves, and an unfortunate Stormcast was sent sailing backwards into his fellows, chestplate battered and deformed. Outraged, the warriors fell on the daemonic steed, hacking and blasting it apart with furious blows.

‘Lord Thostos!’ came Eldroc’s voice, and Thostos turned to see the Lord-Castellant barrelling towards him, clearing a path with his halberd and gesturing wildly towards the gate itself. ‘The Lord-Relictor is overwhelmed!’

Tharros was kneeling, hands clasped together around the haft of his stave, which was pointed at the enemy like a spear. Coruscating energy surged and crackled around the artefact, spools of lightning sparking out at the bloodletters desperately trying to reach him. They could not get close without Sigmar’s storm searing the flesh from their bones, but Thostos could see that Tharros would not be able to maintain his heroic defence for long.

‘With me, brother,’ he shouted to Eldroc, and together they surged into the fray, clearing a path towards their fellow warrior.

Rusik screamed. In all his life he had never felt such a pure and constant agony. Yet there were no knives digging into his flesh, no flaming brands or bone-crushing mallets mutilating his body. Instead it was as if he was being devoured from within, great strips of his flesh being torn away, fingers running across his brain.

‘By the Great Changer, silence his whining,’ came a voice from his side.

Strong, cold hands forced a filthy wrap into his mouth. He choked and felt his gorge rise as he tasted dried blood, but his hands were bound and the gag was tight. His back ached with the chill of cold stone.

His eyes flicked about, taking in a low, roughly-hewn stone chamber, walls lined with bookcases and display cases filled with all manner of sorcerous ephemera. Shrunken heads screamed silently at him from jars filled with pulsing green fluid. Bones, hides and other fragments of almost-human things lined the walls, and around each specimen were notes scrawled in luminous blue, in a language Rusik could not read. There were other slabs like his, and other figures were draped across them. They were all long dead. He could smell the sweet stench of putrefaction, mixing with the spicy, metal tang of fresh blood.

A face leaned over him. A thin, sallow face that shimmered oddly in the flickering blue light that filled the chamber.

The cruel face spoke. ‘You may not recognise me, my friend, but I know you so very well. Oh yes. Rusik the betrayer.’

A cackle turned into a hacking cough.

‘I walked amongst your filthy tribesmen many times,’ the voice continued. ‘It was something of a hobby of mine. A word in the ear here and there, and the next time you sent out a hunting party, it would go exactly where I wanted it to. Well, those savages at the Dreadhold needed to eat, after all.’

More pain. Rusik screamed again, louder and longer than before.

‘To gather the quantity of sacrifices needed for the ritual, though, that required a defter touch,’ the figure continued to talk. ‘And that was where you came in. So angry. So guilty. So mortal.’

No. Rusik knew what the man was going to say, but he tried to turn his face away. He did not want to hear the words.

‘Oh so very easy,’ came the voice again. ‘I barely needed to tax myself. You saw what you wanted to see, heard what I let you hear.’

He strained against the bonds that held him fast, spat and cursed and raged. Try as he might, he could not break free. Something struck him in the face, and his vision swam.

‘You made it so simple. I did not even know what your dead woman looked like, but that hardly mattered to you. You chose to see her. You tried to salve your conscience by pretending it was she. But it was you, Rusik. This is what you wanted.’

A blade sank into his chest, and began a long, circular cut. He screamed and choked on the foul gag in his mouth. Deeper and deeper went the knife.

‘Hush, hush,’ said the voice. ‘Your moaning is really quite irritating, and most unnecessary. Think of this as a gift. When I am finished with you, you’ll be much improved. More powerful than even those toy soldiers who dared destroy my work at the Dreadhold. And no more guilt, Rusik. No more regrets, no more shame.’

The knife made a complete circuit, and Rusik felt something pull the torn flesh of his chest apart. He dared to look down. In one pale hand the sorcerer grasped a fleshy, pulsing organ.

‘Only pain,’ the man said with a broad smile.

Judicator Atrin held his boltstorm crossbow high, jammed tight to his shoulder and ready to fire the moment that the shadows shifted. It had not happened yet, but he was sure it would. This place had an ill feel to it.

Atrin had a second sense for trouble. It took a good eye to join the ranks of the Vindicators’ archers, but even amongst that hallowed number, Atrin was known to have the sharpest vision. The rest of the warriors called him Eagle-Eyes, much to his embarrassment. Titles and glory had never meant much to Atrin, and he always felt slightly awkward and uncomfortable when others lavished praise upon him.

This was what he lived for. The hunt. The chase. In another life he had been a forest ranger, and the skill of navigating a landscape without disturbing it had not been lost in the forges of Azyrheim.

‘Yet no sign of the enemy,’ came the deep bass of Retributor Callan. ‘How long shall we traipse through these wretched caves before we accept that this is a waste of our time?’

‘With due respect, Paladin,’ said Judicator Oreus. ‘The Lord-Celestant gave the order, and we obey.’

His brother’s tone was even, but Atrin knew Oreus well enough to recognise that the warrior was no happier than Callan about being sent off with the mortals while the rest of the Chamber prepared for war. He was simply far too reserved and professional to complain.

Callan, however, was not.

‘Who knows how long it will take for Tharros to unseal the realmgate,’ he muttered, loudly enough so that the rest of the mortals, and indeed anyone in the surrounding few miles, could hear his every word. ‘Imagine it. We return to find our brothers gone on to glory without us, while we wasted our time wandering around in the dark.’

Atrin could hear the irritated murmurs of the mortals who had accompanied the priestess Alzheer on this expedition. They might see the sky warriors as heralds of their sky god, but they had formed a distinctly negative impression of the belligerent Callan.

‘The Lord-Relictor believes it will take many hours to finish his work,’ said Oreus. ‘We were given strict instruction by the Lord-Celestant as to how long we continue this search. They will not leave us behind.’

‘So you hope,’ said Callan, and lapsed into sullen silence.

The Retributor barely even raised his head as they passed into a cavernous chamber so vast it could have housed the entirety of Sigmar’s grand throne room. They trod a path that wound around the right side of the cavern, and on their left was a sheer drop coloured an azure blue by phosphorescent light. Above, a forest of stalactites as large as dracoliths hung, so thick and jagged it seemed to the party like they stared up at the teeth of a shark.

‘Throne of Sigmar,’ muttered Atrin.

‘Look,’ said Alzheer, ignoring the sight before them and kneeling down to study the rough-hewn path of stone. ‘Fresh kills.’

Several yards down the path lay two corpses, both mutilated by deep wounds. There was a spatter of gore on the ground, as well as an arc splashed across the cavern wall. The priestess turned one of the bodies over, examining it. She traced the edge of the wounds, and winced slightly as the stench of the dead things hit her. They looked humanoid, but their too-thin figures were hidden under leather smocks and bloody, rotting bandages. The eyes and mouths of both bodies were stitched closed. They reeked like month-old corpses.

‘This may not be the work of your man,’ Callan said. ‘More than a few Chaos scum fled into these mountains after we broke their back. This could be down to any number of them.’

Alzheer shook her head.

‘These wounds,’ she said, indicating the long, wide slashes in the creatures’ flesh. ‘These are from an eskar, a curved blade. See the wide, deep cuts? Cleaner work than the jagged axes and cleavers of the fortress men. No, this is Rusik.’

‘And what in Azyr are these things?’ said Callan, indicating the corpses.

She frowned. ‘The sorcerer in the tower used them as… servants. Butchers. They answered only to his command. I thought that we slew them all.’

‘Evidently not,’ said Callan. ‘Perhaps we’ll find ourselves a fight down here after all.’

‘We should move,’ said Alzheer. ‘The blood is still flowing. These kills are fresh. He is close.’

The daemon was only an inch from Tharros’ face, but he could not release his magic, for that would not only spell the end of the Celestial Vindicators’ hopes of carrying out Sigmar’s word, but would in all likelihood force open the already-substantial breach and allow yet more of these filthy creatures through. He managed to raise his relic staff to block the swing of the creature’s blade, but its strength was hideous. Its leering, coal-black eyes stared deep into the apertures of his skull helm, and he felt its sulphurous breath sear and scorch his armour.

There was a sharp rush of air, and suddenly the beast had no head at all. A gaping neck wound pumped boiling black ichor across his face, until a gauntleted hand grasped the dead thing and flung it away to crash in the dirt.

‘Are you injured, Lord-Relictor?’ came the soft, alarmed voice of Mykos Argellon.

Tharros did not risk speaking, but managed to shake his head as he continued to chant the ritual of cleansing.

Around him, he saw, the battle continued to rage. The Celestial Vindicators had recovered from the shock of the initial incursion, but these were no blood-mad savages that they faced. These were the shock troops of the Blood God himself, creatures forged and hardened by countless millennia of warfare.

Throne of Azyrheim, he was tired. His old bones rattled like dice in a cup as he staggered to his feet.

Another red-skinned nightmare capered forwards, and Lord-Celestant Bladestorm met it with a flurry of strikes from warhammer and blade. The thing toppled to the floor, bursting into flames as it was banished to the hellish realm that it called home.

‘Close this breach, Lord-Relictor,’ shouted Thostos, who was already assigning a formation of shield-bearing Liberators to surround Tharros. ‘And do it now.’

Tharros declined to launch into a lengthy explanation of exactly how complex the magic at play was, and how one did not simply decide when it was done. Thostos Bladestorm was a warrior, a being of action. Let him be about his work. The Lord-Relictor felt the song of the storm surround him, let its power course through every fibre of his being. He heard the rabid howls of delight that echoed from the mouth of the Manticore Realmgate, and beneath that frenzied madness he heard a softer whisper, that same cold and ancient promise that haunted his dreams and his nightmares. The promise that one day, the scales would be balanced, and his eternal soul would be reclaimed. Perhaps that would be this day.

So be it.

‘Something nears,’ said Alzheer. She was sharp, that one, thought Atrin. She did not let much show, but she took things in. You didn’t live as close to the earth as her people without being able to tell when danger drew close.

‘Let us take the lead,’ he told her. They had left the grand cavern and passed through a seemingly endless coil of tunnels and hollows, eventually entering a far smaller chamber packed with glistening stalactites, each of which shone with a faint, flickering luminescence. Ahead, a vague path led through a field of mushrooms, before spiralling up around a colossal column of black rock to a shelf of stone some dozen yards above them. The roof of the cavern was far overhead, and in the soft light Atrin could see movement up there – a flock of small, dark creatures that twitched and jostled nervously as the warriors passed.

‘Cave hawks,’ said Alzheer, gesturing at the movement. ‘Their presence is a good thing. They would not nest here if other predators were close.’

As one, the entire flock of dark, black birds took flight.

They whipped around the heads of the hunting party in a mass of whirling feathers and jabbing beaks. They moved too fast and the light was too poor for Atrin to get a good look at them, but he caught a glimpse of pale, milk-white eyes and sharp, toothed beaks.

‘And what does this mean?’ shouted Callan, buffeting the small birds away irritably with the haft of his great hammer.

‘Either we made too much noise,’ said Alzheer, drawing her shortbow and peering into the darkness, ‘or something worse…’

A terrible, hollow shriek echoed around the cavern, and they heard the sound of running boots. The sound reverberated around the cavern, making it almost impossible to pick out which direction it originated from.

‘Something worse then,’ said Retributor Callan, hefting his weapon and not even attempting to hide his delight. ‘Finally.’

No sooner had he spoken than the shadows before them shifted. A figure stood on the ledge before them at the top of the stone stair, curved blade in hand. Its eyes shone with a cold, white malice, and it bellowed in a voice that could not possibly come from a mortal throat.

It was him, Alzheer was sure. Rusik the betrayer, the man who had abandoned her people to the depredations of the men of the fortress.

She stood, raised her bow and felt the tickle of the crow-feather arrow at her cheek. She loosed, and it zipped away into the darkness and struck the thing that looked like Rusik in the chest. He did not even stagger. The arrow whipped away as it struck something hard as stone, and he looked straight at her.

His pale eyes glittered, and he raised his blade towards her silently.

‘Get back,’ said Atrin, stepping forwards and unleashing a flurry of shots with his crossbow. Each bolt that issued forth crackled with the power of the storm, and the far wall disintegrated as the volley slammed home. Alzheer caught a blur of movement in the strobing light of the cavern as something impossibly fast dived out of the way of the barrage.

‘Did you get him?’ asked Oreus, who had his own bow raised.

Atrin said nothing. He was still scanning the rise, searching for a hint of movement. Something dropped from the far left wall of the cavern. More shapes emerged from the depths of the mushroom field. He held his aim until one passed into the shimmering light. Thin, unnaturally so. Eyes hidden behind a wrap of bloody bandages. Air wheezing from behind a stitched mouth.

Oreus loosed an arrow. It struck the thing in the chest, and an explosion of light blasted the creature backwards.

‘Ambush!’ the Judicator shouted. ‘Ready your blades.’

The mortals were already loosing arrows into the thick of the creatures that rushed at them, but in the darkness and the chaos, few found their mark. Oreus and Atrin continued to shoot, blasting chunks of stone free and shredding the fungi as they hammered the advancing mob. Those that survived the barrage met the hammer of Retributor Callan. He moved the heavy weapon as if it weighed less than a child’s toy, sweeping it from side to side to clear out groups of the creatures, letting his constant momentum add fearsome power to his attacks.

Atrin had no idea where the damned things were coming from, but there appeared to be no end to them. He heard screams from behind and turned to see more of the bandaged creatures hacking and slashing their way into the ranks of the mortal warriors. He tried to aim, but there were simply too many bodies in the way for him to get a clear shot. He slung his crossbow and drew his gladius.

‘Out of the way,’ he yelled, grabbing hold of a tribal warrior and yanking him backwards to safety, trying to get his sigmarite armour in the way of the enemy’s frenzied attacks. To their credit, the mortals had responded well, falling back and forming a defensive circle of blades and spears. Yet from every direction more of the creatures dropped, scrambling through holes in the wall or appearing from behind the great clusters of fungi that spiralled around stalagmites and across the cavern walls.

Atrin grabbed one of the creatures around the throat, stabbed his gladius into its chest and threw the thing away, then landed a punch that snapped another’s jaw with a sickening crunch. He leapt out in front of the mortals, stabbing and slicing with his blade, forcing a breach for them to exploit.

‘Atrin!’ shouted Oreus from behind. ‘More of them come. We will be surrounded.’

He cut another bandaged horror down with a diagonal slash that opened its wrappings from throat to belly, and turned to see Callan almost drowning under the sheer number of hacking, slashing creatures. The Retributor battered away at the swarm, but there were too many of them inside the range of his hammer. Oreus risked shots where he could, blasting several into smoking ruins.

‘Hold them here,’ yelled Atrin, grabbing the shoulder of the nearest mortal. ‘Keep them at bay with your spears.’

With that he rushed to aid his stricken brother, drawing his crossbow once more.

‘Callan, get down,’ he shouted, and the Retributor trusted his comrade’s word instantly, dropping to the floor and shielding himself as the enemy fell with him, dragged down by his weight.

Atrin loosed, sending a volley of deadly projectiles ripping through the ranks of the enemy. Fragments of scorched wrapping and torn flesh splattered the walls of the cave as Oreus added his own missiles to the barrage.

No sooner had Callan staggered to his feet amongst the wreckage of his assailants than something struck Atrin with astonishing force, propelling him across the clearing and into a cluster of rocks, which crumbled under the weight of his armour. He groaned in shock and pain. By the Eight Realms, that one had hurt. Distantly, as if he were underwater, he heard a muffled, high-pitched laughter, and a fell green light doused the walls of the cavern.

Someone was screaming. It was Callan. His armour was on fire, a curtain of searing viridian flame clinging to him even as he rolled on the ground in an attempt to quell it.

‘Brother!’ shouted Oreus, drawing his gladius and barrelling, shoulder down, into the press of bodies, smashing his way through to his fallen comrade.

The Judicator made it a dozen paces before a swirl of purple and yellow motes enveloped him. They looked harmless, but as Atrin watched on helplessly his brother’s armour sloughed away like dust, bursting into the air as if someone had rustled a great field of pollinating flowers. The warrior turned, and looked straight at Atrin, then down at his hands. He did not even scream as his body came apart.

Tharros could feel his skin starting to burn. One did not summon the celestial storm without cost. It was a pure and violent power, wondrous yes, but not something to be taken lightly. Channelling it, shaping it was akin to grasping a burning ember from a roaring fire. Leave your hand in that fire too long, and the flames would begin to consume you.

Yet he could not relent. Daemons still poured through the Manticore Realmgate, and while the Celestial Vindicators were keeping them at bay thus far, they could not hold out forever.

He must end this now.

Tharros released the storm, let it flow through him unrestricted and unconstrained. He focussed only on the realmgate, and the fell magic that was woven into every fragment of its being. It had been crafted by old and powerful means, sorceries and sacrifices that had allowed it to stand for centuries upon centuries in the service of darkness. He saw the history of it, the bloodshed it had sown and the souls it had eagerly devoured. Old heroes had fallen here, their defiance and heroism long forgotten. In the little time that was left to him, Tharros honoured their bravery.

Spirits spiralled around him, singing the same mournful song that haunted his dreams. Every death brought him closer to a reckoning that had been inevitable since he had pledged himself to Sigmar’s service, but there was nothing to be done. His brothers needed him, and he would not let them down.

The storm that enveloped the dread realmgate flared, brighter and stronger than before. Nothing could stand in the light of that power. There was a scream of shearing stone as an arc of lightning slammed into the great manticore statue that stood above the gate. The lion’s head fell free, crushing a hollering daemon beneath it as it crashed to the ground.

Tharros could barely stand now. He felt the exquisite agony as the power he had unleashed devoured him from the inside. Still, he did not relent. Bolt after bolt of aetheric power slammed into the ornate carving of the realmgate. The fell runes and sigils that lined the obsidian archway were burned and scorched away, and as they were cleansed Tharros could hear the terrified, agonised scream of whatever foul consciousness inhabited the monument. It writhed and burned as he did.

He allowed himself a smile.

The Lord-Relictor did not relent, even as the daemons ceased to pour through the portal, and the Vindicators began to break up and slaughter the outnumbered bloodletters that remained.

The green fire had ceased, but Callan lay still. His armour had melted until it was almost unidentifiable, the sigils and symbols of his allegiance now warped and seared.

‘Callan,’ yelled Atrin. ‘You must get up!’

Even as the Judicator spoke, the creatures were upon his brother. They did not attack him with their long knives, but instead wrapped great chains around his arms and legs.

‘Oh, this will be most enlightening,’ came a voice from above. Atrin craned his neck to see a small, pale figure floating in the air, pinched face split by a fierce grin. ‘I will crack him open, and see what you fellows are made of. Are you men under there I wonder? How much pain can you stand before you expire? So many questions.’

Atrin did not bother to respond and simply snapped his crossbow up to blast the snivelling weakling from the sky.

Something cut deep into his flesh. He gasped and turned, and looked into eyes that burned with a cold and terrible fire. The face they belonged to was mortal, though warped and broken as if something had tried to force its way free from the inside. The skin was stretched taut, split in places to show the flesh beneath. It was the traitor Rusik, or it was something wearing his face as a mask.

Atrin tried to slash his gladius across the thing’s neck, but it slammed a clawed arm into his chest and he crashed to the ground, stunned at the sheer power of the blow.

‘I was so close, so very close to binding my army, to finally having the power necessary to punish those who have wronged me,’ ranted the floating figure. ‘And then you came, and you ruined it all.’

Invisible hands grabbed Atrin and slammed him into the ground again and again.

‘Now I am forced to turn to new avenues of research,’ continued the figure. ‘I will start by taking one of your kind, and tearing them apart until I discover how they work. Perhaps I will discover something useful, perhaps not. Either way it will improve my mood immensely.’

A simple gesture from the sorcerer, and the ground that was supporting the Judicator’s weight turned to sand. He fell, grasping desperately for a handhold. Below him was only darkness. He caught the edge of the abyss and hung there while the immense weight of his armour did its best to dislodge him. The thing that had been Rusik stared down at him with those cold-fire eyes.

‘Unfortunately for you, my friend,’ said the sorcerer, ‘I need only one subject.’

Atrin could hold on no longer. His hands slipped free, and fading laughter followed him into darkness.

‘Lord-Relictor?’ shouted Mykos Argellon, over the thunder of the aetheric storm. ‘Tharros, the daemons are gone.’

The soul guardian knelt as if in prayer, his reliquary staff planted in the earth and his head bowed. Mykos felt a surge of static as he moved close, enough to make him take a backwards step.

‘He cannot hear you, brother,’ said Thostos, sheathing his runeblade and hammer as he approached. ‘He is too deep in concentration. The sheer will that it must take to keep this gate contained, to prevent its energies from being unleashed. Whatever the Chaos filth were doing here, it has awoken some fell presence within this structure.’

He gestured to the Lord-Relictor. ‘Only the strength of one man kept it at bay. Now Tharros Soulwarden ceases defending and launches his own assault. We must hope he still has the strength left to overcome.’

‘It will kill him,’ said Mykos.

‘Perhaps. Even a master of death is not immune to its touch,’ said Thostos. ‘If Tharros falls here, he will do so performing his duty. He could ask for nothing more.’

Around the Lord-Celestants four-score warriors of the Celestial Vindicators were arranging themselves in a tight defensive formation in front of the gate. None of them wished to be caught by surprise again. Thostos turned to oversee the deployment, leaving a complement of Judicators and Liberators to guard the Lord-Relictor and the gate, while the rest of the men continued the business of clearing and refortifying the Dreadhold. The stench of brimstone still lingered in the air, blending with the aura of rotting flesh and stale sweat that permeated the fortress. By Sigmar, Mykos hated this place. It offered nothing but death and misery.

‘He’s a stubborn old creature,’ said Lord-Castellant Eldroc. Mykos had not heard him approach. ‘He won’t give in lightly, believe me.’

‘You know him well,’ said Mykos.

Eldroc chuckled. ‘As well as anyone can know a storm priest. They tend not to be the most companionable sorts.’

‘He does not speak of his position? Of the nature of his magic?’

‘Not a word,’ said Eldroc. ‘Lord-Relictors are the keepers of secrets, my friend. They are the guardians of knowledge lost, and they know things that elsewise only Sigmar is privy to.’

‘I would like to have known him better,’ said Mykos.

‘He is not gone yet. As I say, he’s as stubborn as an ancient dracolith and twice as hard to kill.’

Mykos glanced at his friend. He could not help but suspect that Eldroc was trying to convince himself as much as anyone else.

Liberator Archus hauled the corpse of the bandaged creature over his shoulder, marched over to the makeshift pyre they had built in the centre of the tower, and dumped it into the flames.

‘Sigmar’s blood, the stench of these things,’ he said.

‘This entire place smells wrong,’ said Tyron, dragging two more of the creatures over, leaving a fresh trail of blood across the stone. ‘The Lord-Relictor might say he can purify the realmgate, but there’s no removing the taint from this place.’

Archus looked at the far end of the tower, towards the burned and withered figures still bound to those barbed iron crosses.

‘We should cut those down, whatever they are,’ he said.

‘You’re very welcome to do so, brother. I’ve another five of these delightful things to attend to,’ said Tyron.

Archus sighed, drew his gladius from the sheath on his belt, and strode across to the crucified figures. As he approached he had to wince at the awful smell. It wasn’t just the acrid tang of burned flesh – the stench of loathsome magic clung to each of the desiccated forms, and it made Archus nauseous. This close, it was obvious these things had once been orruks. Cracked, blackened teeth jutted from their thick jaws, and the vaguely porcine outline of their faces was still just about visible.

He lifted his gladius to cut the spiked wire bindings that locked the thing in place.

Behind him, from a great distance, there came a roll of thunder. He turned in surprise. It did not seem the weather for a storm. He cocked an ear. Again the same sound. It wasn’t thunder. It echoed and reverberated, not a single noise but an atonal choir of thousands of voices roaring a single word as one.

‘Wwwaaaaaaaagggghh!’

He spun around, gladius raised.

The three broken creatures that languished upon the cruel spikes of the Dreadhold were not dead. Archus saw the eager madness in their pink, bloodshot eyes. Their mouths were open, and as one they droned the same jarring, cacophonous refrain, a blissful response to the call that echoed from the mouth of Splitskull Pass.

CHAPTER FIVE

Battle for Splitskull Pass

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather soared high into the air, racing away from the relative safety of the Manticore Dreadhold. Ahead lay the canyon that led out onto the Roaring Plains, a narrow pass bracketed by towering walls of jagged stone. His warriors followed in his wake, storm-forged weapons already summoned to hand, faces grim. They knew what was coming.

They could still hear the sound.

Thousands upon thousands of brutish voices raised in a bestial choir, a savage howl of battle-lust that shook dust from the canyon wall. No small force could make such a sound. This was a war-band. A gathering with nothing but destruction on its mind.

The canyon snaked below them as the Prosecutors flew on. It stretched on for at least a mile and a half, gently curving to the right and left before breaking out of the mountain range and spilling out into the grassland of the great plain. It was here that they found the main complement of the enemy force, and Goldfeather felt his heart sink as he saw just what the Celestial Vindicators now faced.

An army of orruks so vast that it was beyond counting poured into the mouth of the pass, bellowing and roaring with delight as they clattered towards the Dreadhold on stocky, powerful mounts wrapped in crude, yellow-painted armour. The rhythmic thump of war-drums combined with the clatter of the orruks’ mounts was almost deafening. The enormous dust clouds thrown up in the wake of the advance billowed above the canyon.

‘They have a dozen times our number,’ said Galeth, coming to a stop in the air at Goldfeather’s side, ornate wings glittering in the midday sun. ‘Ten thousand at the least.’

‘And cavalry too,’ the Prosecutor-Prime replied. ‘Those creatures they ride are fearsome-looking things.’

‘They’ll be here well before nightfall. We must warn the Lord-Celestants.’

Goldfeather nodded and signalled his men to fall back. He had no idea what the Celestial Vindicators could do to halt this tide of iron and flesh, but whatever it was, it would have to be quick. If this force fell upon the Dreadhold unopposed, the garrison would be quickly overwhelmed. With Lord-Relictor Tharros still in the process of removing the taint from the cursed Manticore Realmgate, they could not give up the fortress.

The Prosecutor-Prime cursed. That meant they would have to meet the orruks in battle, one way or another.

‘Back to the fortress, brother,’ he told Galeth. ‘Let us deliver the good news firsthand.’

Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon had not expected pleasant tidings from the Prosecutors’ return, but the news that the entire orruk camp had been mobilised against them was still a sobering revelation. The Argellonites and Bladestorm Warrior Chambers of the Celestial Vindicators had already been battered and bloodied by the myriad dangers of the Roaring Plains, and though even a battle-worn army of Stormcast Eternals was a dangerous proposition for any foe, engaging the orruks was not the task given to them by the God-King. That objective lay through the Manticore Realmgate, in a distant corner of the Mortal Realms.

‘Ten thousand,’ muttered the Lord-Castellant Eldroc, shaking his head. ‘And several thousand of those mounted on war-beasts. The Dreadhold offers us a strong defence, but not against such numbers.’

Mykos’ fellow Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm stared off into the distance, showing no apparent sign of concern.

‘We cannot allow them to breach the walls,’ he said at last. ‘The Lord-Relictor still works his magic. Until he has completed his incantations, the Manticore Realmgate is closed to us.’

He strode to the rampart wall, and rested one gauntlet upon the black iron, pointing out at the canyon mouth with the other. The craggy corridor of stone lay a few hundred yards to the west of the Dreadhold, the ghoulish howl of the orruk horde still echoing from its jagged mouth.

‘The canyon is narrow,’ he said. ‘Narrow enough for a few hundred men to defend it wall to wall. If we can hold the enemy charge, we will bottleneck their force. Thin it out. Buy the time we need for the Lord-Relictor to finish his work.’

There was a silence. Mykos was sure every Stormcast present was thinking the same as he. Any force sent out to perform such a task would likely never return. It was a solid enough position to defend, but the moment the enemy force broke through they would be surrounded and destroyed. Against a cavalry charge, they would have no opportunity to retreat even the relatively short distance back to the fortress.

‘We have no choice,’ said Eldroc, and all present acknowledged the defensive expertise of the Lord-Castellant, the Keeper of Keys. ‘This fortress will not withstand an assault by several thousand fresh troops. We must deny them the pass. It is a natural choke point, and the only method we have of evening out this fight.’

Thostos nodded. ‘The Bladestorm will march,’ he said. ‘We will hold the pass. Lord-Celestant Argellon–’

‘No,’ said Mykos. His heart hammered in his chest, but he felt a sense of surety and purpose that he had not felt in a long time. ‘No, Lord-Celestant Thostos, this is the Argellonites’ task.’

Thostos looked at him, and for once Mykos did not feel uncomfortable gazing into the harsh blue glare of his eyes.

‘You must lead them,’ he said. ‘This is your mission, brother. Let me and my men buy you the time you need to complete it.’

‘This is our mission, not my own.’

‘Think of your battle against the lord of the Dreadhold, Thostos,’ said Mykos, shaking his head. ‘Did Sigmar reach out through the realms to restore you, only to have you fall here? No, your task is still to come. This is mine.’

There was a long silence, with nothing but the roar of the wind and the faint sound of drums in the distance. Finally, Thostos nodded stiffly. He snapped one gauntleted hand to his breast in salute, and Mykos did the same.

‘We have had our differences, Lord-Celestant Argellon,’ said Thostos, ‘but I have never doubted your courage or your ability. Hold the line, and do not give them a single bloodless step forward.’

‘For Sigmar, and for the lost,’ said Mykos. Then he turned to Eldroc. The Lord-Castellant placed a hand on his shoulder.

Mykos smiled. ‘Goodbye, my friend,’ he said.

‘Hold to your oaths, brother,’ said Eldroc. ‘We shall meet again.’

There was little time to waste, and so in only a few minutes the five hundred warriors of the Argellonites Warrior Chamber were marching out of the Dreadhold, passing through the shattered gatehouse with its warped symbols of ruin and bronzed skulls. As they marched through, the Stormcasts assigned to shore up the ruined entrance saluted solemnly, striking a single fist against their chests. Despite the danger that awaited him, Mykos was not sad to see the last of the cursed fortress. It was tainted in a way that could never truly be cleansed, and the Lord-Celestant hoped that one day the forces of order would find the time to tear it down, stone by stone.

Knight-Heraldor Axilon marched at his side, singing along in his deep baritone to the Battle-hymn of Defiance, a favourite amongst the ranks of the Argellonites. The deep, determined voices of the Stormcasts drowned out the witless howl of the orruks.

‘Send them a message, Knight-Heraldor,’ said Mykos as they stepped out onto the dry earth outside the Dreadhold. ‘Let them know that Sigmar reclaims this land.’

‘As you say, Lord-Celestant,’ said Axilon with a grin, reaching for his battle-horn.

The voices of the Bladestorm warriors on the battlements blended with the singing of the Argellonites as they marched towards the mouth of the canyon. A clear, perfect note issued forth from Axilon’s battle-horn, a radiant sound of hope and glory that echoed out across the savage wilderness.

‘He will give us the time we need,’ said Eldroc, watching his friend march out towards an almost certain death.

‘Let us hope so,’ replied Thostos. His voice was as cold and emotionless as ever. ‘All rests on the next few hours. If the fortress falls, we will not be in position at the Crystal Forest as Sigmar demands. The entire offensive may unravel.’

Eldroc understood his Lord-Celestant’s concern. The timing was too tight. They must cleanse the Manticore Realmgate and pass through it into hostile territory, there to meet with the contact that would lead them to their ultimate objective. Sigmar was once again set to take the war directly to the forces of Chaos, and to do so every piece on the board had to be in the correct place at the correct time. There was a long path still to travel, and doubly so considering the losses they had already taken.

‘He will give us the time we need,’ he repeated.

‘It will hurt us to lose him,’ said Thostos. ‘Too often he lets his emotion rule him, but he is a fine warrior and a clever leader. His Argellonites fight well.’

‘He is a good man,’ agreed Eldroc.

The Lord-Castellant sighed, deeply and wearily. Mykos Argellon would likely die this day, and in a flash of celestial power he would be called back to the halls of Azyrheim, where he would be reforged by the wondrous power of Sigmar’s storm. Perhaps he would retain a memory of the man he had been. In all likelihood, he would not. The thoughtful, noble man that Eldroc had grown to admire would be gone, and in his place would be… someone else. Someone damaged, and uncertain. Or perhaps someone cold and distant, like Lord-Celestant Thostos himself.

This war would claim the best of them all.

The sky above the Roaring Plains crackled and thundered, great grey clouds rumbling above the Manticore Dreadhold and bringing with them a stinging sheet of rain. Evios Goldfeather felt the downpour on his armour as he spiralled into the sky, climbing high above the canyon and searching for signs of the enemy.

He could see them now. The walls of the canyon had a slight overhang which masked the winding tunnel, but even through the heavy rain he could see the bright yellow of the orruks’ spiked iron armour, splattered liberally with red symbols that contrasted violently with the green flesh of the brutish creatures.

They had made the mouth of the cavern just in time. It would be only a few moments until the leading edge of the orruk horde crashed into the shields of the Celestial Vindicators. Evios was no coward, but he did not envy the Liberators who would stand in the front ranks, the first wall against which the tidal wave of enemy cavalry would crash.

Movement above the canyon wall caught his eye. Out into the open air came strange, bloated, reptilian creatures, each with a whooping orruk astride its back. They were so stocky and powerful that it seemed impossible that their leathery wings could keep them aloft, let alone with a heavy creature upon their backs, but on they came at a fair speed, accelerating now that they saw Goldfeather’s Prosecutors heading towards them. Goldfeather nodded, satisfied.

His first target of the day.

Ideally, Mykos Argellon would have liked to push further into the canyon, establishing fallback points and switchbacks from which his reserve could launch fresh attacks when the momentum of the enemy charge played out. The ground here was stable, only just beginning to dampen and fill with the constant downpour. There were divots, potholes and occasional scattered rocks, but it was still decent cavalry terrain, largely flat and featureless.

‘Give me an hour and I could make this a killing ground,’ the Lord-Celestant muttered in frustration.

There was simply no time. Perhaps two hundred yards into the canyon they halted and began to form up. The sound of the orruks’ chanting was overwhelming now, backed by the chaotic, arrhythmic sound of thousands of iron-shod hooves. The ground shook beneath their feet, and rocks crumbled from the canyon wall and clattered off sigmarite plate.

‘Form the line!’ shouted Axilon. ‘Quickly now.’

Barely heeding the cacophony that grew louder and louder with each passing moment, Mykos’ Warrior Chamber began to take up their assigned positions. Liberator-Primes bellowed orders, forming their men into compact blocks, wondrous tower shields raised, warhammers and blades held at the ready. This would be the solid core of the Argellonites’ defence, the beating heart of their formation. If they could hold the line in the face of the enemy charge, the Paladin retinues could push forwards from the second rank, exploiting gaps in the enemy line with ruthless aggression.

Behind the infantry were the Justicars. They held their bows taut, ready to pour lightning up and over the heads of their brothers and into the orruk ranks.

His warriors had barely finished manoeuvring into position when Mykos Argellon saw the leading edge of the enemy charge.

‘Sigmar’s blood,’ said Axilon beside him.

It was no army. No organised fighting force. Such definitions seemed entirely inappropriate. This was an extinction event, roaring down the channel of the canyon towards them. It was a tidal wave of rusting iron and hollering green flesh, borne aloft on tusked beasts with eyes that glowed with murderous red delight. There was no measured charge, no effort to form a cohesive line. They charged as a great spear, bounding towards the Vindicators’ position with no thought to their own, simply a demented glee at the prospect of battle. Mykos saw more than one rider disappear under the storm of iron as his mount stumbled and fell. Others were crushed against the canyon wall, the momentum of their fellows grinding them to pieces upon the unyielding stone. The first arrows of the Judicators fell in arcs of searing lightning, scorching and blasting riders from their crude saddles. It was like throwing pebbles into an ocean. They were only two hundred paces away now, and gaining speed.

‘Stand firm, brothers of the storm,’ Mykos shouted above the noise of the enemy charge. ‘Here we make these witless creatures pay for every loyal human life they have taken. They will break upon our shields and die upon our blades.’

Axilon blasted another note from his battle-horn, and the sound soared and bounded around the canyon, filling Mykos’ heart with hope and determination.

‘Stand firm, warriors of vengeance! Stand firm, seekers of justice. Stand firm!’

Liberator Archus was in the very front rank of the Stormcast position. He held his shield forwards and raised, his legs bent slightly, his back pressed firmly against the shield of the warrior behind him. Shields. He felt like laughing. As if a shield, even a wondrous one such as his, which had saved his life from countless dangers faced in the service of Sigmar, could protect him from the apocalypse that surged towards him.

He shook his head, clearing away the doubt and the fear. He was going to die, but his death would slow the enemy charge just a fraction. The man behind him would die as well, but again his fellow warrior’s death would absorb a portion of that hideous momentum. With their deaths, they would mire the enemy, slow it down and leave it vulnerable to the hammers and blades of their fellows. What would this death be like, he wondered? He had never been reforged. He had heard tales, though, of hollow souls and lost memories. He wondered if it would hurt as much as his first death, when the Skullsworn had taken his scalp and left him to bleed out upon the stairs of his home, screaming his agonised oaths of vengeance.

He would not miss that memory.

They enemy was only a few dozen yards away now. The noise was astonishing. He could feel the vibration deep in his bones.

‘I’ll find you back in Azyrheim, my friend,’ shouted Tyron at his side. ‘The first ales are on you.’

Archus heard laughter, and realised with surprise that it was his own.

Lightning began to fall into the orruk swarm. Riders were pitched from their mounts, sent tumbling to the ground to disappear under the hooves of the creatures behind them. Archus’ eyes locked upon a monstrous orruk that barrelled straight at him, roaring and drooling in the throes of his battle rage. Time seemed to slow. He saw the blazing red eyes of the colossal boar, only a few yards away now. He heard the ragged panting of its breath, and smelled offal, sweat, and the tang of rusted iron.

He roared his God-King’s name as the beast crashed into him. He felt an agonising crack as the arm that held his shield snapped, felt something crunch into the top of his skull. There was a burning pain that flashed across his body, a burst of searing light, and then nothing at all.

The orruk charge struck home with the force of a falling mountain. The creatures’ great war-beasts smashed aside the shields of the Stormcasts with their mighty hooves, or tore straight through them with their heavy, iron-wrapped tusks. There are few sights so terrifying in war as a cavalry charge striking an infantry formation, and the sheer power and ferocity of the orruks only made the spectacle more violent and potent. Stormcasts were hurled through the air, broken and torn, or trampled into unrecognisable shapes under the incredible weight. The battlefield was strobed with flashes of blinding light as Sigmar’s fallen sons were called home. Shields forged by the greatest smiths of the age were torn asunder. Sigmarite armour was rent and malformed. Unfortunate orruk riders too caught up in the madness to retain control were catapulted into the depths of the Stormcast ranks, their beasts sent tumbling and rolling, squealing and dying.

The shield wall should not have held. Against the sheer, overwhelming force of the orruk charge, the front ranks of the Argellonites should have been swept away, their lines disintegrating and the rear ranks swallowed up as they turned to flee. The simple dynamics of war demanded it.

Yet the three hundred stoic Liberators that formed the wall did not falter. The front ranks were utterly destroyed, but the compact formations behind them did not break, did not shy away from the monstrous tonnage of flesh and iron that crashed into them. Every warrior had a veteran’s knowledge of warfare, and they knew that if they lost their solidity, they would lose everything. Grim-faced Celestial Vindicators accepted their deaths, setting their feet and refusing to move a single step in the face of their obliteration.

‘Senseless, foolish creatures,’ spat Axilon, as he watched the spear of orruk cavalry grind itself further into the breach it had created. He stood with Mykos at the side of the battle, on a jutting spur of rock to better observe the chaos. ‘How does this bloodshed profit either of our races? To think that we once called these beasts allies.’

‘Not these creatures,’ said Mykos. ‘Look at them, brother.’

These orruks were broad and tall, rippling with muscles and wrapped in crude yet formidable iron armour. They had none of the savage desperation that Mykos had seen in others of their race. They radiated power, confidence and strength.

‘They have thrived in Sigmar’s absence, grown strong and bold,’ he said. ‘If these orruks were to gather in numbers, the Mortal Realms would tremble.’

‘Then we must slaughter this lot before they get any grand ideas,’ said Axilon. He raised his battle-horn to his mask, and blasted out another series of triumphal notes.

‘Paladin retinues forwards,’ shouted Mykos, raising his grandblade and indicating his heaviest shock troops, towering Retributors with their crackling, lightning-wreathed hammers, and grim Decimators, carrying broad executioners’ axes. Unleashed at last, these warriors charged eagerly through the small channels that now opened in the Liberator shield wall, crashing into the orruks that now pushed deeper into the Stormcast position.

Prosecutor-Prime Goldfeather was enjoying himself, which was possibly somewhat unseemly given the dire circumstances, but undeniable nonetheless. As the battle raged below, the heralds of the Argellonites found themselves outnumbered and surrounded by the reptilian flying mounts of the orruks. The bulky creatures swooped and snapped at the Prosecutors, and their howling masters hurled axes and spears or tried to grab the wings of the Stormcasts as they swept past. The orruks had the numbers, but they lacked the manoeuvrability of their foe.

Goldfeather tucked his wings in and dropped out of the way of one of the creatures, hearing the crunch as its slavering jaws snapped closed just a few inches above his head. He let himself fall several feet, summoning another storm javelin into his hand as he did so, and then spread his wings wide, catching a rising squall and hefting his weapon. He hurled, and the javelin burned a hole through the skull of an orruk rider, flipping him sideways in a somersault that dismounted him and sent him spinning off into the rain.

As much as he welcomed the chance to battle in the violent, unpredictable gales of the Roaring Plains, this needed to end quickly. The Lord-Celestant needed their assistance on the ground, and the longer the Prosecutors were tied up here, the longer they would leave their fellow warriors exposed without aerial support.

Decimator-Prime Kyvos felt righteous rage course through him as he and his warriors pushed forwards through the narrow gaps that the Liberators had efficiently created between their shield wall squares. Across the entire Stormcast position the Warrior Chamber’s elite shock troops were rushed to the front line to combat the orruks that had broken through. As exemplary as every Liberator was at the art of combat, vicious, cramped close-quarters battle was the specialty of the greenskin.

Kyvos had fought the things before, and while he despised their short-sighted lust for battle and their witless, artless lack of culture, he would never deny their skill at arms. Ahead he could see the colossal shapes of the orruks’ grunting war-beasts, which kicked and spat and bucked with furious abandon in the midst of the melee. The greenskins were hurling themselves at the Liberators’ shields, smashing and hacking gracelessly but effectively with jagged axes and spiked clubs.

‘No quarter!’ Kyvos shouted as the battlefield opened up before him. ‘No mercy for the enemies of the God-King!’

A sneering face, splattered with blood, leered up at him, and he put his hammer in its porcine snout. There was a static burst of energy and the creature’s skull exploded into shards of smoking bone and scorched meat. He roared in triumph and continued forwards, making for the nearest war-beast. It turned its narrow, malicious eyes towards him as he advanced, and lowered its head to aim that jagged row of tusks.

‘Bring your pretty face a little closer,’ he muttered, as the creature staggered towards him, swinging its great head.

Kyvos made to move aside, and realised that he could not. The press was simply too tight. Worse still, the ground was churned by rain and blood, a morass of brown-red filth that clung to his boots and tried vainly to drag him down. The creature’s snout struck him in the chest, and the force of the blow sent him sprawling into his warriors, off-balance and dazed. Something hooked under his leg, and then he was tumbling through the air, his leg burning with pain. He landed with a clatter that took his breath, and felt his arm sinking into mud.

A snarling, yellow-fanged face appeared out of the blur of his vision, a great axe raised in one hand. Acting on pure instinct, Kyvos shifted to his right, and the axe spattered into the filth beside his head. He wrapped one arm around the weapon, holding it down, and kicked out, catching the orruk in the groin. It folded over, and he grabbed his axe with two hands, jabbing out with the top of the weapon at his opponent’s knee. There was a splintering sound, and the creature dropped to the ground, roaring in fury and pain.

He raised himself on unsteady legs. His right had been pierced and shredded by the war-beast, and putting his weight upon it sent a twinge of agony shooting through him. He growled, and spat blood. Pain was easily ignored. The orruk he had taken down surged towards him awkwardly, dragging its shattered limb behind it. Kyvos put his thunderaxe into its chest, and with an explosion the thick iron bands that formed the brute’s armour collapsed inwards, crushing its lungs and sending it to the earth for good.

Horns sounded in the distance, bizarre and atonal. No, he decided as the ringing in his ears began to subside. Not horns. More of the creatures’ infernal howling, in the distance now but approaching faster with every second. He heard a clatter from above, and looked up to see a broken orruk body crash into the canyon wall and tumble down the face, clattering off ledges and rocks as it fell. It landed with a dull thump in the mud.

‘Reform! Reform!’ came a desperate yell, again from over their heads. A Prosecutor was gesturing frantically at the far end of the canyon. ‘A second wave comes. Reform the line!’

Something fast and heavy, a bundle of leathery wings and snapping jaws, slammed into the flying warrior, and then lifted higher into the air, golden armour visibly struggling in its maw.

Stormcasts began locking their shields together once again. Kyvos could feel the thunder of the orruks’ approach now. Ripples spread across the waterlogged earth, and the demented roar of the enemy rose to a crescendo.

‘Brace!’ Kyvos yelled. But it was far too late.

The first wave of orruk riders had crashed straight down the middle of the canyon, into the Stormcast lines. They had hit hard, and caused many casualties, despite their inability to break the defenders down entirely.

The second thrust angled around the initial spear, striking at the flank and pushing inwards. Whether it was born of any primal tactical insight Mykos could not say, but it broke the cohesion of the Celestial Vindicators’ ranks in a way that the initial assault had not managed. Caught between the relentless press of the main orruk force and these new, flanking pincers, the Liberators could not simply close ranks and absorb the power of the attacks.

A torrent of mud and water was thrown up in the impact, obscuring Mykos’ view. He could see broken, turquoise shapes hurled through the air, or sent crashing into their fellows. Orruk beasts fell, tripping the creatures behind them, and soon a mountain of writhing flesh and flailing limbs had formed, a grinding mass of destruction that rolled across the battle line, crushing everything in its path. Dozens of Liberators were crushed as they turned to meet the new threat, or left exposed and cut down as the cohesion of the shield wall fractured into a series of smaller skirmishes.

‘The time has come to enter the fray,’ said Mykos, placing a hand on Knight-Heraldor Axilon’s shoulder and indicating the left flank with the other. Here the orruks had pushed through in numbers, and were rolling back the Stormcasts with the sheer fury of their assault. ‘This is the hour, my friend.’

‘Give me the left,’ said Axilon, and raised his hand when Mykos began to object. ‘Trust me, my Lord-Celestant. I will hold the line. I’ll play a tune that these brutish creatures will remember for the rest of their miserable lives.’

Mykos nodded, and he and Axilon grasped each other’s wrist.

‘They will write songs to celebrate our fine work this day,’ said the Knight-Heraldor. ‘I’ll be singing them in the taverns of Azyrheim upon our glorious return.’

‘Driving innkeepers out of business was ever your specialty, brother. Good fortune.’

With that, Mykos turned to the retinue of Retributors that formed his personal guard. He raised his grandblade Mercutia high, and as he did so it caught an errant ray of sunshine that broke through the rain. The oath-marks and runes upon its surface glittered. His warriors cheered until their voices were hoarse, and formed up in his wake as he surged towards the front line, a hymn of vengeance and glory upon his lips.

The left flank was in chaos. Knight-Heraldor Axilon hurdled great mounds of dead and dying orruks, making for the thick of the battle ahead, where a ragged line of Liberators was just barely holding a mob of dismounted orruks at bay. Broken, turquoise forms moaned and shifted in the mire, wounded but not yet ready to be called home by the storm of Sigmar.

‘To me, warriors of Azyr,’ he shouted, raising his broadsword high in a two-handed grip. His Decimators followed with him, roaring with fury as they charged into the fray.

Axilon leapt forwards at the last moment, his blade swinging down with the force of an executioner’s axe. An orruk head fell free to splash in the mud, and suddenly the Knight-Heraldor was surrounded by snarling, laughing faces. It was a coarse, ugly sound, but the beasts were definitely laughing. Chortling as they cut down Stormcasts, giggling and hollering as they butchered.

Axilon answered that laughter with the edge of his blade. He parried a clumsy axe swing, punched out and felt teeth shatter under his gauntlet, angled his sword and thrust it through his assailant’s belly. The wondrously crafted weapon sliced through the orruk’s iron armour as if it were parchment, and Axilon let the dying creature slide from his blade. Beside him the Retributors swept their great hammers in wide arcs, clearing space for the Liberators to fall back and regroup.

‘Not today, lads,’ he roared, clapping warriors on the shoulder as they fell back past him. ‘There’s a war on, you know. Can’t be heading back home with the job half done.’

There was only a temporary reprieve. More orruks poured towards the Stormcasts, scores of them, scrabbling and leaping eagerly through the stinking swamp that the battlefield had become. Rain whipped across their faces, which were twisted in frenzied delight at the prospect of yet more murder. Great chunks of stone sloughed free from the canyon wall, loosened by the thunder of battle and the ceaseless downpour. Several orruks were struck by the falling debris and tumbled to the floor, to be crushed under the heavy boots of their allies. It was not enough to make a dent in their numbers, but it gave Axilon an idea.

‘Raise your shields,’ he shouted. ‘And brace yourselves.’

He raised his battle-horn to his lips, and unleashed the full power of the wondrous artefact. What issued forth from the instrument was not a perfect note, not an echo of the valour and glory of Sigmar. It was a wave of thunderous devastation, a blast of cacophonous noise that slammed into the wall of the canyon with the power of a dozen siege rams. The rock face spider-webbed with deep fissures, rippling out from the point of impact. Then a twenty-foot section of shattered stone simply fell away. It crashed over the orruks, and the leading edge of the creatures simply disappeared in a cloud of displaced stone and tumbling rock.

The avalanche did not stop. As both Stormcasts and orruks scrambled to escape the deluge of stone, more and more of the wall began to slough away. Choking dust filled the air, and warriors on both sides could no longer see further than a few feet ahead. Axilon spat out dirt and peered into the swirling debris. A few feet ahead there now sat a mound of rubble and broken bodies, a physical barrier that blocked off the left flank assault. He saw orruks trying to drag themselves up and over this new obstacle, but it was loose and treacherous. He had bought them a few minutes at least.

Mykos heard the roar as the left-side wall fell, and muttered a quick prayer to Sigmar that Axilon had not been crushed amongst the rubble. There was no more time to dwell upon the fate of his friend. Though the right flank had managed to hold position, they were losing warriors too fast. The sheer weight of numbers was beginning to swamp the Stormcasts, robbing them of the cohesion that gave them their greatest strength. As soon as the orruks pushed their way in behind the Liberators the battle would be lost, and that was in danger of happening any moment.

‘Push them back,’ he roared. ‘Allow them not a single step forward!’

Blessed Azyr, those beasts the orruks rode to war were vicious things. It was enough that a rider managed to get a single one of the creatures in the midst of his ranks – their furious kicking, thrashing and biting would do the damage of a half-dozen men. Mykos had seen one open its jaws wide to close around a Stormcast Eternal’s torso, trying to bite the warrior in half even as it attempted to force the still-moving body down its throat. When the warrior’s death had seen him disappear in a burst of white light, the creature had only been driven to greater heights of rage at being denied a meal.

‘Take them down,’ he yelled, aiming Mercutia at the nearest of the foul beasts. ‘The legs, aim for their limbs.’

The beasts’ armour was thick upon the flank and belly, but their powerful limbs were exposed. Cripple one, and it would soon become as great a danger to its fellows and to the orruks as it would to the Stormcasts.

Retributor Bhorus slammed his lightning hammer against the closest creature’s leg, smashing the joint so hard that it bent to the side with a loud crack. The war-beast howled and snorted in pain, and tried to snap at Bhorus with its viciously tusked jaws. He swayed back just in time, but a wild axe swing from the thing’s whooping rider struck him across the shoulder and pitched him to the floor. More Retributors piled in, penning the beast and smashing into it from all directions, slowly forcing it to the floor. The rider went down under it, trapped but still swinging his axe at anyone who came close. Elrus made to finish the prone creature, but another massive body pressed through a gap in the line, and barrelled into him. Its vicious tusk punched through his armour, and the beast continued to charge forwards, the Retributor impaled upon its jaws.

‘Finish the downed creature, this one is mine,’ Mykos shouted.

The war-beast’s momentum carried it past the Lord-Celestant, and the oblivious rider failed to see his sword stroke until it was too late. The blade crashed into the orruk’s chest, sending him falling backwards off his mount, thick, dark blood staining his yellow armour. As he fell, Mykos leapt forwards and grasped the iron bands that were wrapped so tightly around the beast’s neck that the flesh beneath was torn and septic, oozing a pale yellow fluid. He swung himself up onto the beast’s back. Elrus was still impaled, dangling across the giant boar’s snapping maw, somehow still stabbing at its neck with his gladius.

‘Kill it, my Lord,’ he gasped, blood seeping from underneath his mask. His voice was resigned, strong despite the agony that clearly wracked him.

Mykos had no time to dislodge the man. A wound as grave as his meant only death in any case, without a healer nearby. He reversed his grip on his grandblade, and drove it deep into the rampaging beast’s skull. It collapsed in motion, and the Lord-Celestant saw the ground rush up towards him as he was pitched over its head. He hit with bone-shuddering force, though thankfully the wet earth absorbed most of the impact. He rolled over once, twice, and came to a halt on a pile of orruk corpses. He tasted blood and the foulness of the churned earth, and spat.

There was no time to rest, even for a moment. He hauled himself to his feet, glancing back at the advancing greenskins. There were too many. His chamber had fought heroically, but they were losing too many men, and gaps were opening for the orruks to exploit.

Another rain of lightning fell upon the advancing enemy from above, throwing burly figures to the ground and sending geysers of water into the air as bodies and projectiles splashed into the filthy mire. More figures hurtled forwards to take the place of the fallen. The enemy’s numbers were endless. It was over.

‘No,’ he whispered. ‘We are not yet done.’

They had already forged a legend here, and there was more killing to be done before the Argellonites would admit defeat. His pride in his warriors surged.

‘To me, Argellonites!’ he roared. ‘We march to glory!’

Ahead of him, a Decimator Paladin ran forwards, sweeping his great starsoul mace into a cluster of the enemy. The fabulous weapon exploded with heavenly radiance, and a wave of star motes slammed into several orruks, sending them flying backwards, smoking and smouldering. The Decimator turned, searching for more targets.

There was a clamour that echoed above the chaos of battle, the sound of primal savagery made manifest.

From out of the swirling dust roared a colossal figure, half a head taller than the Stormcast. Skulls and other grisly trophies hung from its mighty iron battle-plate. Every inch of the creature rippled with muscle, and its head was a brutal slab of scarred flesh that culminated in a wedge of a jaw filled with filthy, yellowed tusks. The creature raised a huge, jagged cleaver that dripped with gore, and brought it down into the Decimator’s back.

As the creature came forwards, it shook the Stormcast’s body free of its cleaver, a nimbus of light briefly crackling around the weapon as the corpse of its victim was claimed by the storm. Its cruel eyes, filled with primal cunning, fixed upon Mykos, and it smiled.

Around the figure, orruks gathered, brandishing their weapons and chanting in their crude tongue.

‘Drekka! Drekka! Drekka!’

Decimator-Prime Kyvos had no idea where he was, or indeed where his warriors were. The battle had surged forwards and lost its shape in the frenzy of the carnage, and to make matters worse the cloud of dust and the torrential rain made the combat a baffling, fragmentary mess. He would stagger, come face to face with an orruk just as confused and lost as he, then struggle for a few violent seconds. He would stumble over a groaning body, so thickly caked in grime that he knew not whether it was one of his own or a wounded enemy. His injured leg burned fiercely with every step.

Gradually, the dust began to settle enough for him to peer a dozen or so yards ahead. Chaos. Dull, dust-covered turquoise clashing with ugly yellow, blood spilled on both sides. Orruks hacked away in a graceless but effective frenzy, hollering and chortling in their idiot voices as they did so. Celestial Vindicators fought with ruthless competence, despite the disarray. They clustered in makeshift groups, forming ad-hoc defensive formations, islands of calm order amidst the swirling madness. Orruks died by the dozen around them, bludgeoned by warhammers, hacked down by axes or sliced open by measured cuts from sigmarite blades.

Above the sound of battle could be heard the clear notes of Knight-Heraldor Axilon’s battle-horn, and it was towards this rallying sound that Kyvos headed. As expected, he found the man in the midst of the thickest fighting, backed by several worn-looking Liberators and the few surviving members of a Paladin retinue. His armour was stained with blood and grime, and his helm had been split by a vicious cut that ran down to his collarbone, but still he wielded his broadsword with deadly skill. As Kyvos came closer, the Knight-Heraldor glanced at him.

‘Who’s that there?’ he said, and Kyvos could hear the undercurrent of pain that ran through his words. The Knight-Heraldor had been wounded, and badly. ‘All this cursed dust everywhere, I can barely see. Of course, no one to blame for that but myself.’

He laughed and spun, spitting an onrushing orruk on the tip of his sword. The creature gurgled and fell to splash in the knee-high water that swelled around them.

‘Decimator-Prime Kyvos, my Lord,’ he said, raising his thunderaxe and taking position next to Axilon.

‘Ah, good man. Where are your warriors?’

‘I do not know,’ he said, and felt a stab of worry and shame. He had called and looked for them, but it was impossible to find anyone in the middle of such chaos. ‘Several fell in the last charge. The rest I could not find.’

‘No matter, son,’ said the Knight-Heraldor. ‘What say we meet this next lot together? Give them something to remember us by?’

A fresh mob of orruks was advancing through the filth towards them. He could see the eager bloodlust in their tiny, pitiless eyes. They scrambled over the heaped corpses of their fellows, splashing and stumbling in the mud in desperation to get at the Stormcasts.

‘It’s been quite a day, has it not, Kyvos?’ said Axilon. ‘Quite a day. Tell me, do you remember your past life, before all this madness?’

Kyvos nodded. ‘I was a baker,’ he said, and the memory brought a sad smile to his lips. ‘Before my village burned. Before I took up the sword. And you, my Lord?’

‘A fat and foolish king, whose only honour came in death,’ Axilon roared with laughter and clapped the Retributor-Prime on the back hard enough to make him stumble. ‘The baker and the king. Look at us now, eh?’

Goldfeather alighted on the back of the creature, so deftly its dull-brained master did not even notice his presence until it was too late. He grabbed the orruk’s head, forced it down, and stabbed his javelin deep into the neck. Blood drenched his armour, and the rider gurgled and choked. He slashed the precarious series of leather bindings that kept the orruk in place, and it slipped free, falling into empty air.

That was the last of them. Crazed, panicking beasts still spiralled and whipped through the air, shorn of the limited control of their dead riders. The surviving Prosecutors – Goldfeather winced as he saw the full toll they had suffered – formed up around him.

‘We go straight down their throat,’ he roared. The joy of battle pumped through his veins, filling him with fervour. ‘Sigmar is watching, warriors of the Ceslestial Vindicators. Let us show him our worth.’

The orruk was colossal, even by the standards of those they had fought thus far. It towered above even the Stormcasts, a mountain of green flesh that radiated sheer, terrifying power. It killed with contemptuous ease, whipping a jagged cleaver about itself with a fury that belied the precision in its movement. An almost casual swing to the left sent two Vindicators tumbling, blood seeping through ruined chestplates. A downward slice split another warrior in two. Lightning claimed both segments of his body as they fell away.

It roared a challenge in its rough and brutish tongue, and from all sides the brave champions of Mykos Argellon’s Warrior Chamber answered. As the Lord-Celestant fought his way towards the behemoth, he watched them all die.

Patreus, the warrior who had held the Shining Door against the roiling, surging tides of the Pandaemonium fell, his head crushed by an axe blow. Liberator-Prime Thayon, the Hero of the Flamepeak, was cleaved in two. Olren, Tavos, some of the best and brightest warriors of his chamber. Killed and thrown aside by this creature as if they were little more than mortal serfs.

Mykos roared and charged, bringing Mercutia down from a high guard in a diagonal slice aimed at the beast’s neck. The orruk leader did not feint or move to avoid the blow, but simply shifted and let it fall across his chestplate. The blade screamed as it gouged a jagged line through the strong iron, but it did not reach through to wound the orruk, who returned the strike with a backhand swing of his axe. Mykos dropped to one knee in the dirty water, leaning back. He heard the orruk’s wicked axe rush past his face, mere inches away. Then he was up, spinning and putting distance between him and the monster. It laughed, enjoying the game, and advanced after him, sloshing through the mud and gore.

‘Drekka Breakbones claims your skull, little man-thing,’ it chuckled, in a voice like an avalanche. ‘I’ll ’av that little pig-sticker you got there, too.’

‘Come and take it,’ Mykos muttered, turning Mercutia in his hand, searching for a weakness he could exploit.

He could not see one. The creature was huge, but not so huge that it could not react with frightening speed. It was aggressive, but it did not fight like a blood-crazed cultist, all power and rage. There was cunning to its attacks. It rushed at him, swinging low with that great axe, forcing him backwards, then feinted a sideways step. Instead of the cleaver it swung a mighty punch with its left fist, upon which it wore a band of heavy iron tipped with needle-sharp blades.

Mykos just got his sword up in time to block, but the power of the blow sent him reeling backwards to crash against the carcass of a war-beast. On came the orruk leader, swinging its axe down in a vertical chop aimed to split the Lord-Celestant in two. Mykos barely shifted aside in time, and felt the splash of blood across his armour as the axe cleaved the dead boar in half. The orruk’s eyes narrowed in frustration as it tried to tug the weapon free, and Mykos took advantage of the momentary distraction to hack into the monster’s hip, at the join between two armour plates.

It roared in pain, and struck out with its bladed fist. The strike was blindingly fast, and Mykos could not get his blade back up to block it. It struck him square in the chest with astonishing force. He flew backwards to splash in the mud and gore, gasping for breath. Looking down, he saw great rents in his sigmarite plate. As he stared, blood began to seep through the holes. The orruk’s weapon had punched deep. He groaned and got to his knees, feeling around in the sticky, foul-smelling mud for Mercutia. He found her at last, and took comfort in her familiar heft as he focused through the stabbing pain in his chest and hauled himself upright.

‘Got me good, little ’un,’ the orruk leader spat, chortling happily as reeking blood poured over the ugly yellow of its armour. ‘Drekka remembers the last one who got him that good.’

The orruk’s great, gnarled finger tapped the fanged skull it wore upon its left pauldron.

‘I’m honoured… to be in such esteemed company,’ said Mykos. The creature boomed with laughter again, then rushed forwards, seemingly unworried by the vicious wound it had been dealt.

Too many. Kyvos had slaughtered a dozen or more of the creatures, crushing their heavy iron chestplates under devastating blows of his thunderaxe, dashing skulls to pieces or slicing through legs to leave their owners drowning in the stinking quagmire at his feet. On they came, an endless, howling swarm of them, and the more they slew, the more eager they seemed. These warriors fought on foot, either fresh troops or riders who had been dismounted and had been lucky or thick-skulled enough to survive the fall.

‘Is this all you have, you mindless wretches?’ roared Axilon at his side, kicking another dead orruk from his blade and letting it tumble down the mound of dead they had created. ‘I thought your kind lived for war? I’ve barely broken a sweat.’

His words brought a tired cheer from the remaining Vindicators, but despite his bluster it was clear to Kyvos that the Knight-Heraldor was tiring. Gone was the deft, cultured bladework for which he was known throughout the halls of Azyrheim. His broadsword looked heavy in his hands, and he was favouring his right leg.

And on the orruks came.

Axilon rested a hand on Kyvos’ pauldron, and the Retributor-Prime heard him gasp a ragged breath.

‘My time draws near, son,’ said the Knight-Heraldor. ‘When I fall, you lead them on. You kill as many as you can, you hear?’

‘Aye, sire,’ Kyvos said. ‘Though I’d say we’ve accounted for our fair share already.’

‘Not enough. Not nearly enough.’ Axilon shook his head.

‘Then let’s draw them in,’ said Kyvos. He looked up at the canyon wall. Axilon’s previous efforts had brought down a huge chunk of stone and gouged a great hole, but now that they had been forced back several dozen feet they were underneath another overhanging ledge. ‘As many as we can. See if we can’t add a few more to the tally.’

Axilon nodded, and Kyvos could hear a wet, pained chuckle.

‘Leave it to me,’ said the Knight-Heraldor.

He stepped forwards, stabbing his broadsword into the dirt and raising his battle-horn. Kyvos formed the remaining Liberators in a defensive line around the Knight-Heraldor. Axilon drew in a breath.

‘All right, you gutless lot,’ he bellowed, and blew an ear-shattering note from the battle-horn. ‘Call yourself warriors, do you? I’ve seen cellar rats that fight better. You’re a disgrace to your cretinous gods, you weakling cowards. Not a one of you has the stones to take me down, and I’m fighting with half my organs carved in two!’

Whether the orruks understood a word of what the Knight-Heraldor was saying, Kyvos had no idea at all. Regardless, his booming voice and the clarion call of his battle-horn drew them like moths to a flame. There were hundreds of them now, mounted on their war-beasts or charging towards the Stormcasts on foot. They were an island in the middle of a surging sea. Axes clattered against the Liberators’ shields, and the press of bodies began to crush the Vindicators back into the wall of the canyon. Kyvos headbutted an orruk that pressed its leering face into his, then drew his gladius to stab it in the gut.

‘Knight-Heraldor, do it now!’ he shouted, and felt an axe slam into his shoulder. Suddenly he was on his knees, and all he could see was a forest of yellow iron. Something struck him in the face, and he spat blood. ‘Now!’

He glanced up, trying to see through the mass of bodies. The Knight-Heraldor still stood, ignoring the barbed spears that pierced his chest. He raised the battle-horn to his lips as the swarm of bodies reached up to haul him down into the fray. The last thing that Kyvos heard was the sound of thunder and falling stone.

Mykos Argellon’s world was a storm of sigmarite and iron. He had never fought a battle such as this, so furious that it was governed by sheer instinct and reaction, rather than skill at arms. This Drekka was so fast, so blindingly fast. No sooner had the Lord-Celestant picked off one attack, than he was forced to adjust to another, and another. He was being driven back, and in the bloody mire in which they battled that was dangerous indeed. One wrong step, one moment too long in pulling his boot free from the grasping mud, and the orruk would have him.

His beloved Argellonites were dying around him. Against the numbers that now came down upon them, there was no chance at all. From the corner of his eyes he could see his warriors fall, surrounded and hacked to pieces. Flashes of light signalled another lost friend, another sent back to the forge to be recast and remade. He would join them soon.

It happened as he stepped backwards over a body left half sodden and bleeding in the murk. Something grabbed his foot. He looked down, and saw that the orruk beneath him was not dead. Its porcine eyes glared up at him maliciously. It snarled as it drew a short, broad knife and attempted to drive the blade deep into the Lord-Celestant’s leg. Mykos stamped his foot down upon its neck and ground it deeper into the mud, then brought his grandblade up to intercept the inevitable attack from the pursuing Drekka.

He was too slow, by a fraction of a second. The orruk chieftain’s axe skipped from the edge of Mercutia, and Mykos did not have the strength left to deflect the blow. It tore through the sigmarite armour at his elbow, and sheared the limb free. Pain blurred the Lord-Celestant’s vision, and he fell to his haunches.

Drekka Breakbones loomed over him, and he heard the creature’s cruel laughter echoing in his ears, as if from a great distance.

‘That it?’ the orruk asked, and Mykos looked up to see a gap-toothed grin cross its ugly, scarred face.

He heard the sound of thunder roll across the battlefield again. He saw the confusion on Drekka’s face, and glanced to the left. Another rent had been torn in the canyon wall, even greater than the last. He saw rocks the size of carthorses scything and spinning through the orruk ranks, crushing scores of the creatures to death. One last gift from Axilon, then. He would see his friend back in Azyr. Would they recognise each other, he wondered? All they had been through together since Sigmar had opened the realmgates and hurled them out into the world – would they recall any of it? All those moments of heroism, of sacrifice. Would they be lost? Mykos Argellon did not want to die. He did not want to come back like Thostos, cold and distant even to those he had once called brothers.

The orruk chieftain raised the axe high. As the pouring rain hit the dull iron, blood ran down the blade to drip aross Mykos’ war-mask.

This was not the end. He feared what would become of him, but he did not regret his choice to give his life for a moment. This was the truth of the Stormcast Eternals. They would make this sacrifice, over and over again, so that one day no mortal would have to. For some reason he thought of the priestess Alzheer, and hoped she yet lived. She was the bright future, the hope that he gave his life for.

He closed his eyes.

Goldfeather saw the towering orruk bring the axe down. He saw it strike his Lord-Celestant in the side of the neck, and he saw a brief, bright flare of lightning as Mykos Argellon’s body toppled to the floor. Then the cloud of dust from the shattered rock on the left-hand side of the canyon rushed across the battlefield, and he could see nothing at all.

They had killed the Lord-Celestant. The chamber was shattered. The Prosecutor-Prime could not see a single speck of turquoise amongst the sea of green and yellow below. It was over.

‘We must go to his aid,’ shouted Galeth. ‘We will kill the beast that slew him.’

‘No,’ said Goldfeather softly. Something was there, at the back of his mind. Some vital memory that he was missing. There was a way to tip the scales here, a way to make these wretched savages pay for every Stormcast lost this day.

‘No?’ echoed Galeth incredulously. The shock of this defeat had made him forget himself. ‘Are you craven, brother? We must avenge this insult. We must kill these beasts, even if we die doing so.’

‘What we must do is win,’ shouted Goldfeather. ‘Do you wish to die alongside our brothers, and render their sacrifice meaningless? Or do you wish to follow me, and win this battle in the Lord-Celestant’s honour?’

‘Follow you where? To run from the battlefield in shame?’

‘Trust me, my brothers,’ said the Prosecutor-Prime. ‘One last time. Do so, and we will kill every last orruk on the field.’

It was against every instinct that had been drilled and forged into them, to leave that field with the fight still raging. Galeth and the remaining Prosecutors swayed, on the verge of rushing to their deaths, and for a moment Goldfeather thought he had lost them.

‘You have never led us wrong, Prosecutor-Prime,’ said Galeth at last. ‘We will follow you.’

He had never been more proud of his men.

‘We must make haste,’ he said, and with that he opened his wings and flew out over the canyon where the Argellonites had fallen. He soared away from the Dreadhold and towards the grasslands of the plain, hope surging alongside the sorrow in his heart.

CHAPTER SIX

Chosen of Sigmar

The torrential rain finally ceased as the first figures began to emerge from the mouth of Splitskull Pass. They did not wear the sea green, white and gold of the Argellonites Chamber of the Celestial Vindicators. They were stout, savage-looking creatures wrapped in bands of yellow-painted iron. Some strode on foot while others were mounted on fearsome, tusked beasts.

‘He has fallen then,’ said Eldroc.

‘As we knew he must,’ said Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm, standing at the Lord-Castellant’s side upon the battlements of the Manticore Dreadhold. ‘Let us hope Lord-Celestant Argellon took as many of the orruks with him as he could, before the end.’

Eldroc nodded. Even as they spoke, the essence of Mykos Argellon was being carried home upon the celestial storm, back to the halls of Azyrheim. There he would be reforged anew, to be sent out once more against the forces of Chaos and darkness. But immortality did not come without a price. The Lord-Castellant glanced at Thostos. His friend was the living embodiment of such sacrifice. Once he had been a thoughtful, introspective man, a counter-balance against the raw fury and desire for vengeance that was the hallmark of the Celestial Vindicators.

The Reforging had taken that from him, had hollowed him out until all that was left was the fury and the need for retribution.

‘He will fight beside us once more,’ said Eldroc. ‘He is strong. He will be remade, and he will emerge through the flame as a better man.’

‘No,’ said Thostos, and his voice was soft yet filled with surety. The Lord-Celestant turned to Eldroc, and looked him in the eye.

‘It will break him,’ he went on. ‘He will enter the storm and it will break him down, tear him apart until there is nothing left of the man he once was. This is the sacrifice we made, brother. We are all here because we swore the same oaths. We knew there would be a price. It is one worth paying, for what we must do.’

Without another word, Thostos made for the interior stair that would take him down to the inner courtyard of the fortress. Arrayed at defensive positions around the Dreadhold were the two hundred and fifty men at his command, securing weak points and stacking barricades at the breached main gate that would hinder the orruks’ progress if they decided, as they inevitably would, on an all-out frontal assault. Two-score of that number faced in the opposite direction, a wall of sigmarite that guarded the Manticore Realmgate, the structure that the Celestial Vindicators had been sent here to secure.

Eldroc and Thostos crossed the inner courtyard, and made their way up the wide stair atop of which lay the gate. The structure stood on a wide plinth carved into the mountain, and it was here that the Stormcasts had organised their defensive position.

‘Keep up your guard,’ said Thostos, as they passed the men. ‘The forces of Chaos may come pouring through this portal at any moment.’

The Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden knelt before the structure, still working the magic that would cleanse the taint of Chaos from the portal and allow the Stormcasts to pass through.

‘He has not spoken or moved since the daemonic incursion?’ asked Thostos.

‘No, my Lord,’ said Liberator-Prime Arestes, a stolid, reliable warrior known for his lack of humour as much as for his skill at arms. ‘But the gate’s fell light dims by the moment. Whatever the Lord-Relictor is doing, it is quelling the power of this Chaos-warped thing.’

‘But not fast enough. Our time has run out,’ said Thostos. ‘The orruks march on us, and we have not the men to hold back their numbers.’

‘The fortress can hold out a little longer,’ said Eldroc. As Lord-Castellant, he was responsible for the fortification and defence of locations that the Stormcasts had claimed. ‘We have little choice in the matter. We must give Tharros as much time as he requires, and hope that Sigmar is watching over us.’

Thostos nodded. ‘You will defend the wall, Lord-Castellant. I shall take the gatehouse. Despite the damage to the main gate, we can bottleneck them there as long as the ramparts remain clear.’

Eldroc nodded, even though he knew as well as his Lord-Celestant that they could not possibly hold out. Oh, they would bleed the orruks, they would make them pay a heavy price for every inch of ground, but in the end it would not be enough. The sun broke through the clouds once more, rising behind the great statue of Archaon, and the figure’s shadow fell across the valley floor ahead of them.

Atrin Eagle-Eye found that not an inch of his body was free from pain. He tried to focus through the haze of agony. He had fallen a great distance, hurled to his death by the mortal witchkin that called itself Xos’Phet. Yet, as the stabbing pain that arced down his spine and throbbed through his legs was quick to remind him, he was not in fact dead.

He felt around, and his hands touched a mushy, viscous substance. He lay on a bed of the stuff, and could smell its pungent, chemical odour. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the faint glimmer of lichen on the walls revealed a forest of fungi that stretched far into the distance. Glancing up, he could see the stone chimney through which he had fallen. Water dripped down to fall on his armour, and he pulled off his war-mask for a moment to let the downpour cool his face.

‘Well, warrior of Azyr,’ he muttered. ‘You’re a long, long way from home.’

Suddenly, the memory came back to him. His brother Judicator, Oreus, blasted into nothingness by a ray of fell magic. Retributor Callan, burning and screaming, claimed by the foul minions of Xos’Phet. And what of Alzheer, the mortal priestess of the nomadic tribespeople? He had no idea where she had gone, but if the creatures that the sorcerer commanded were still roaming these caverns, she was in terrible danger. He had no time for the luxury of rest. There had to be some way back up to the site of the ambush. From there he could track Xos’Phet down, rescue Callan, and wring the scrawny witchkin’s neck in the process.

With an effort that sent a fresh wave of torment rolling across his frame, Atrin hauled himself to his feet. His left arm was stiff and painful, probably broken in a couple of places. His head rang with what felt like a minor concussion, and one ankle would barely support his weight. He still had his gladius, but there was no sign of the boltstorm crossbow he had carried.

Half crippled. Lacking a weapon. Lost in a subterranean maze of caverns.

‘Sigmar, I could use your favour now,’ he sighed.

Atrin drew his gladius and began to push through the field of mushrooms. There were wide, thin plates of fungi that felt almost springy beneath his boots, and massive, bell-capped specimens as big as trees. The smell of the place was powerful, but not entirely unpleasant – sickly sweet, with a lingering bitter aftertaste that sat upon his tongue. After a few minutes of pushing through these thick stalks, Atrin was met with an unyielding wall of stone. With little else to guide him, he decided to follow it along, and hope by some miracle that it led to a way out of the chamber.

After at least an hour of stumbling through the cavern, the pain in his arm growing worse and worse by the moment, Atrin had a stroke of good fortune. A narrow tunnel – a tight squeeze for the tall and broad Stormcast – curved around in a spiral, heading upwards. There was the hint of a stair carved into the slippery stone, and Atrin began to feel that this was no natural complex he was travelling through. He could see no signs of civilisation down here, but the mushroom forest in that wide, open chamber, with its adjoining access route, had all the hallmarks of mortal cultivation.

The thought reignited his determination. If humans, or some other cultured race had once dwelt down here, it was far more likely that there was a way back to the upper tunnels.

It was as he dwelled on this pleasant thought that something long, thin and dripping with acidic mucous coiled itself with vice-like strength around his neck.

How many orruks were left to rot in the slaughtering ground of Splitskull Pass, Eldroc had no idea, but the army that loped out to cluster at the foot of the Dreadhold seemed undiminished. They hooted and hollered, swaggering towards the fortress with eager grins on their foolish faces. In the midst of the mob, the Lord-Castellant spotted what had to be the leader. The brute was half again as tall as an average orruk, a monster wrapped in heavy iron plate topped with trophy skulls and relics, clutching a wicked cleaver stained red with the blood of slain Vindicators. It was by some distance the biggest orruk Eldroc had ever seen.

‘When they fall within our range, kill that one first,’ he said to the leader of the Judicator retinue that lined the wall alongside him. ‘Hit it with everything you have.’

‘Aye sire,’ said the Judicator-Prime at his side.

He doubted it would be that simple to kill such a monster, but in his experience orruks gathered around their strongest and most brutal specimens. Take off the head, and the rest of the mob would begin to fracture and self-destruct. At least that was the theory. For such simple-minded, warlike brutes, orruks could be dangerously unpredictable.

‘They’re bloodied, sire,’ said Lorrus. ‘Plenty of the creatures left, but Lord-Celestant Argellon and his warriors certainly dealt some damage before they fell.’

Eldroc could see that the man was right. Though the orruks were full of their race’s usual post-battle cheer, more than a few of the creatures now coming towards them bore the scars of their encounter with the Celestial Vindicators. Bodies dropped as the great horde crossed the plain towards the fortress, the adrenaline surge of combat no longer enough to hold them upright.

‘It is a miracle that he managed to hold on as long as he did against such numbers,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘We must endeavour to match his bravery.’

From below his position, he heard the creaking of iron, a great scraping sound as something heavy was dragged across stone. His blood ran cold. Who had opened the main gate? The moment they saw such a breach the orruks would hurl themselves at it in force, and all would be lost.

‘Lord-Castellant,’ came a shout from Judicator Samius, who was pointing at the open ground before the fortress. Eldroc rushed forwards.

There was Thostos Bladestorm, hammer and blade in hand, marching out alone towards the roiling horde of green flesh.

‘Thostos,’ whispered Eldroc.

The wall itself was trying to eat him.

No, realised Atrin as he gasped and hacked at the tendril that held him several feet above the ground, it was something that had nestled into the wall. The central mass looked like little more than a fleshy curtain of mottled brown, draped across several feet of stone. He saw a cluster of eyes, multifaceted and glinting in the phosphorescent light, like those of a giant insect. Below this, there was a nightmarish maw, crammed with twisted, overlapping teeth. From around this mouth came several thin, wiry tentacles, tipped with what looked like thick hairs that dripped a clear blue liquid.

Some kind of poison, perhaps. If so, it was thankfully being held at bay by his battle-plate. What was markedly less promising was that with one fully functioning arm, he could not possibly fend off the tendrils that whipped and flailed around him, dragging him ever closer to those grinding fangs.

He managed to lever his gladius under one of the tendrils, and sliced it in two. A furious hissing sound came from the hideous wall-creature, and two more arms whipped out to take its place. One wrapped around the wrist that held the blade, and the other around Atrin’s helm, wrenching his head back violently. Closer and closer he was drawn, a fly reeled in by the spider. How foolish a death. The Judicator finally pulled his gladius free, and stopped struggling. Perhaps if the creature thought he was unconscious, it would relax its hold. Then he could drive his sword into its eyes once he was close enough.

Hopefully he could either kill it or force it to drop him. It was that, or face a most unpleasant end indeed.

Light flared below him. He could not arc his head to look, but he saw the blur of orange as a flaming arrow flittered past his head and struck the abomination in the middle of its eye cluster. There was a horrible, rattling squeal, and the curtain of mottled flesh rippled and twisted. The arrow was followed in short order by two more. They were well placed. One struck above the first shot, and one below. In the glow of the smouldering missiles, Atrin saw dozens, hundreds of tiny legs emerge from underneath the wall-creature’s central body, hooked and insectile like those of a centipede. The horror skittered along the surface of the wall, away from the punishing arrows, dragging Atrin along with it.

He had a chance, while the monster was blinded and distracted with pain. He swung his gladius, slicing through several of the tendrils that held him around the waist. He fell, his weight no longer supported, and growled in pain as his injured leg smacked against hard stone. Still the creature dragged him along the floor by the tentacles wrapped around his neck. He tried to hack at them with the gladius, but the angle was poor and he was forced to awkwardly swing behind his head.

‘Stop, my friend,’ came a familiar voice. ‘I have this.’

He ceased his swiping, and heard the sound of rushing air as a sword whipped through the air. Suddenly he was no longer being dragged backwards, and twitching, severed tendrils spilled around his legs. He looked upwards, and saw the bizarre cave-crawler scuttle out of sight on its multitude of limbs, dragging a fleshy, tuber-shaped stomach-organ behind it.

‘A porsuka,’ said the warrior Alzheer, slinging her bow across her muscular shoulders. ‘You were fortunate to escape. It is said they can feed for many years from just one kill, dragged alive into their stomach and slowly devoured.’

‘This really is a charming place, priestess. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here.’

Alzheer smiled, the white of her teeth glinting in the dim light.

‘Thank you,’ said Atrin, and she gave a brief nod.

He pulled the last ropes of flesh free from his armour, and wiped his gladius on a cluster of lichen. The priestess, meanwhile, dropped to study the shorn tendrils that scattered the floor. Drawing several arrows, she began to cover them in the clear blue liquid that seeped from the thick bristles.

‘Some kind of poison?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘It can freeze a man’s muscles in moments. The porsuka uses it to numb its victims, to make the feeding easier. It will be useful.’

Atrin watched her work.

‘Where are your people?’ he asked at last.

‘Slaughtered or forced to run,’ she said, and he saw a deep sigh run through her body. ‘I misjudged the sorcerer, sky warrior. I thought he was weak, near death.’

‘Witchkin have a nasty habit of surviving. Like cockroaches.’

‘He must die. And so must Rusik, whatever that creature has made of him.’

‘We agree on that,’ said Atrin. ‘Know that we will likely die in the attempt. My arm is broken, and my leg likely fractured. I have lost my crossbow also. The odds of us surviving are… comical.’

She looked at him, and he was once again surprised by the determination and ferocity in her mortal eyes. Another time, another place, and this one would have made a fine Celestial Vindicator.

‘I do not fear death, sky warrior,’ she said. ‘My people have lived in its shadow every day of our lives.’

He knelt, so that their eyes were level.

‘I know your quality, and that of the Sky Seekers. But this does not have to be your fight, daughter of Sigmar. Your people need your leadership.’

‘Enough,’ she snapped. ‘As long as this Xos’Phet creature lives, we will never be safe. So it is with the traitor Rusik. In any case, your fellow warrior is still alive, and I would not abandon him to death and torment. No more of this talk. We go together, and we die together if that is what Zi’Mar wishes.’

Atrin smiled underneath his war-mask, and nodded.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘In any case, I confess I am quite lost. Your guidance out of this wretched hole would be much appreciated.’

‘You’re a fine shot with the bow,’ said Atrin, breaking the silence as they trudged through the tunnels.

Alzheer smiled. ‘Out on the plain, that is often the difference between life and death. My father taught me, and he was the finest hunter our tribe has ever known.’

They walked on, the water that dripped and ran from the cavern ceiling the only sound aside from the tramp of their boots.

‘He took me on my first hunt,’ the priestess said at last. ‘I was too young, but it had been a hard season, and everyone was needed. I carried the weapon he had crafted for me, and in all the years since I have never held a finer bow.’

She smiled at the memory.

‘So proud, I was. So excited. And then we came upon a pack of qualhorn, by some miracle. Most had been slaughtered by the orruks, but these were fine, strong beasts. My father guided my arm, taught me where the arrow rested, how to breathe before I loosed. I remember the wind rushing through my hair, the rumble of hunger in my belly. My first arrow took the nearest creature in the heart.’

‘That was a fine shot,’ said Atrin.

‘Lucky, perhaps. In any case, it was a swift death. Clean. My father said that was what a hunter owed his prey. He was not a man easily given to words of encouragement, but I saw the pride in his eyes and that was enough.’

They passed a chimney of rock, through which trickled a steady stream of clear water. Alzheer stretched out a hand and let the liquid spatter off her palm.

‘My father said the words, gave thanks to Zi’Mar for the kill. Then we headed home, imagining the taste of good, rich meat after months of surviving on little more than nuts and scraps. We were almost home when the claw-hound struck.’

Her hand went to the necklace she wore, gripping it tightly.

‘It was half-mad from hunger. Thin, ragged, but with the strength of desperation. That was the first time I felt true terror. I remember that, and nothing else but a frenzy of teeth and claws and stabbing blades. When I finally gathered my wits the creature was dead and its blood was everywhere. In my eyes, in my mouth. My arms, up to the elbow. My father lay there, his chest torn open. I met his eyes, and we both knew the truth of it. I stayed with him for hours, holding his hand while his breathing slowed and his blood drained. He never cried out, not once. His skin went grey, and his breathing shallow. He spoke his last words to me before he left. ‘This place wants you dead, Alzheer. Every plant, every creature. The land itself. All you have is the tribe. Keep them together, my daughter. Keep them strong.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Atrin, knowing from experience how little such words mattered to the grieving.

‘I had a choice, once my father was gone. I could drag his body back to the camp, where the elders could say the words and give him the hero’s funeral he deserved. Or I could return home with our kill, and at least a few of my people would go to their sleep without the ache of hunger in their bellies.’

She looked straight at him, and he saw the sorrow and the strength in her deep, brown eyes.

‘Diash found me stumbling into camp at dusk, near-dead from exhaustion. But my people did not go hungry that night.’

‘You did what your father would want,’ said Atrin. ‘And in the years since you have kept your people alive. He was proud when he died, and he is still proud of you now.’

She showed him the necklace. Upon a simple leather bond was a single jagged tooth.

‘I keep this, not as a trophy, but as a reminder of my father’s last words to me. All you have is the tribe.’

Her hand clasped the tooth so hard her knuckles turned white, and blood trickled down her palm. Her eyes were no longer filled with sorrow, but with a burning rage.

‘The traitor Rusik made a mockery of those words. He abandoned us, sent my warriors to their deaths. That is why I will not leave these caverns until I have driven a knife into his foul heart.’

They did not speak again for a long time. Finally, they reached the site of the ambush. It was eerily quiet. Blood was spattered across the ground, though various insects and glistening molluscs were currently in the process of siphoning it up. They squelched and crunched underfoot as Atrin moved cautiously forwards into the cramped chamber, gladius raised. With some surprise and a little relief, he saw his boltstorm crossbow nestled next to the gap in the stone through which he had fallen. He gathered it up and checked the firing mechanism and the limbs. It seemed in workable order – Sigmar’s craftsmen forged weapons to last. He tried handling it, using his damaged arm to depress the trigger and his stronger arm to support its weight.

Workable. He had to awkwardly cradle the weapon and thus his usual standard of accuracy would suffer, but it could be done despite the lance of agony that it sent down his arm.

‘They went this way,’ said Alzheer. This time the trail was so obvious that a child could have spotted it. The bandaged servants that the sorcerer employed had simply dragged Callan along, by the look of things, and a great scuff was scraped across the stone. ‘They were not travelling at great speed.’

‘A Stormcast in full armour is no easy burden,’ said Atrin. ‘These creatures must lurk nearby, or have some stronghold close to here.’

‘I think you are right,’ the priestess nodded. ‘In his ranting, the sorcerer spoke of some hidden refuge within these mountains.’

‘Then we must push on. I will not leave Callan at that madman’s mercy for a moment longer.’

Corpses littered the cavern floor. The Stormcasts had accounted for many of the sorcerer’s wizened pets before they had fallen, and the surviving enemy had left their dead to rot. Carrion organisms had already begun their work.

Amongst the carnage lay a small, scattered pile of faintly purple dust. All that was left of Oreus. Atrin knelt by the pitiful remains. He hoped his brother would find his way back to Azyr, but in truth he was not sure if such a death would allow Oreus to make that journey. Magic violated everything it touched. He had fought at the Eldritch Fortress, against the vile minions of the wizard known as the Ninth Disciple. He had seen brothers warped and twisted beyond recognition by powers no mortal should ever wield. Many of those touched by such raw sorcery had never returned to the forge. He whispered a prayer to Sigmar, that he might see his brother again.

‘We must go,’ said Alzheer.

Atrin nodded and, hefting his crossbow, turned to follow her.

This far into the tunnels, the signs of some forgotten civilisation were obvious. The caverns here were circular in shape, and had a rough, natural quality that suggested to Atrin that they had originated as ancient lava flumes, and had been converted for civilian function many hundreds or thousands of years ago, after the volcanic activity in this region had ceased. Finely carved cobbles, traced with an orange-gold metal he did not recognise, made up the floor, and the walls had regularly placed apertures in which were hung sconces shaped like drakes’ heads. Dust and cobwebs marred the impressive quality of the metalwork.

‘I hear movement,’ whispered Alzheer. She raised her shortbow, a recurved weapon of simple yet impressive design. Like the sabres that the Sky Seekers favoured, this was a cavalry weapon. It lacked the range of a longbow, but it was far easier to draw and loose from horseback, and powerful at close range. As she drew one of her poison-tipped arrows and eased back the string, the sinews and wood that formed its powerful composite structure gave a slight creak.

A scream echoed down the hall. Ragged and drawn out.

‘Callan,’ whispered Atrin. He had never heard the redoubtable warrior utter so much as a grunt of pain, yet somehow he knew it was his comrade that suffered. ‘We must hurry.’

They set off down the winding tunnel, which eventually opened into a junction. To the right a set of curving stairs led down, while to the left the cave opened into what looked like a burial chamber. Thick, dark stone blocks lay stacked in neat rows. The dim flicker of his torchlight revealed lines of ancient runes that covered the surface of each block, but from where he stood, Atrin could not tell in which language they were carved.

‘The sounds came from below us,’ said Alzheer. She did not wait for Atrin, simply drew an arrow to her cheek and headed for the stairs.

‘Wait,’ he hissed, but she took no notice of him, slipping down the stairs as quickly and quietly as a hunting cat.

For all their manifold virtues, stealth was not the domain of the Stormcast Eternals. Especially not one who had recently been dropped down a very deep hole, and subsequently almost devoured by a cave-dwelling predator. Atrin could not keep up with her without breaking into a shuffling run, so instead he put out the torch and drew his crossbow, then followed on as quietly as he could manage. He was uncomfortably aware of the shift-scrape his heavy boots made on the stone cobbles.

The steps ended at the foot of another tunnel. This one was wider, with channels that opened into small chambers on each side. As he made his way forwards, he could smell the stench of burned flesh and charred bone, and underneath that a pervading odour of spoiled meat. The floor here was stained a muddy brown. Slumped against the wall to his left was a gangly, stick-limbed figure with an arrow in its gut. Another of the bandaged creatures that the sorcerer favoured as minions. Coming closer, he saw that its throat had been neatly sliced. Foul-smelling, dark blood had already clotted around the wound. Atrin wrinkled his nose in distaste. He did not know what gave these foul creatures life, but they stank of the grave.

‘Interesting, interesting,’ came a high-pitched voice from the far end of the corridor. The sorcerer. ‘You have the anatomy of a mortal. Stronger and larger, of course, but you bleed as well as any man. Yet I saw your kind fall at the fortress, and disappear in a burst of light even as your corpse hit the ground. There is magic in you. I must not yet have cut deep enough to find it.’

There was another ear-splitting scream. Atrin abandoned all attempts at stealth, and rushed forwards. The sound of his boots on the rough stone drew two more of the bandaged horrors forth from the chamber at the end of the hall. He fired his crossbow, gritting his teeth and ignoring the pain it sent shooting down his shattered arm. Bolts of burning blue light roared down the length of the tunnel, and the two creatures simply came apart under the barrage. Dark chunks of flesh splattered the walls, and a mist of gore spurted forth. What was left of the things slumped to the floor, and Atrin charged down the hall towards the sound of his brother’s torment.

He entered a low-ceilinged chamber dimly lit by several blue-glowing lamps set into thick columns of carved, spiralling stone. In the centre of the chamber were more of those carved stone slabs, though the runes that covered their surface were masked by brown and red stains, or chipped and broken. Fragments of bones littered the floor, along with filthy strips of cloth and tattered parchments. Arranged on shelves, warped by the crude glass containers that kept them, were all manner of gruesome paraphernalia, from severed digits to grinning, polished skulls whose dimensions were unnaturally stretched. Across the walls someone had scrawled unknowable celestial configurations and twisted, sickening symbols in a child’s hand. A scored and seared archway of stone lay in pieces against one wall, the runes that ran across its surface pulsing softly with a wan green light. The room smelt of acrid chemicals and rotting filth.

‘Callan,’ he shouted, seeing no sign of his brother or the fiend that kept him. ‘Where are you?’

More of the bandaged wretches scampered towards him from the gloom, their silence as unnerving as the howls of a blood-crazed warrior. He tucked his crossbow to his chest and drew his gladius, ramming it through the chest of the first creature and whipping it across the throat of the next.

He carved them apart as if they were little more than straw mannequins. The air was thick with the tattered remnants of age-old cloth, and reeking blood spattered across his war-mask. Suddenly the aches and pains that wracked his body faded into insignificance. All he felt was the rapture of battle, the joyous roaring of his blood and the ecstasy of righteous vengeance.

‘Sorcerer,’ he shouted. ‘Face me, coward!’

The rain had ceased and the sun was shining down with furious strength once more as Thostos Bladestorm strode out to what would likely be his death. He did not fear the prospect. He cared only that the Celestial Vindicators still had a task to complete, and that if the fortress fell before Tharros could complete his spell and make safe the realmgate, his mission would fail. The only currency that mattered now was time, and Thostos could see only one way to prevent the orruks throwing themselves against the walls of the Dreadfort for even a few more minutes. Eldroc would be able to lead the men on without him, he had faith in that.

Archaon’s pitiless eyes stared down at him as he passed beneath the great statue of the Everchosen. Lord of the armies of darkness. Symbol of everything that Thostos had dedicated his life to destroying. The stonework was not as fine as that of the marble sculptures found in the halls of Azyrheim, yet the statue possessed a blunt and foreboding presence. If they had time, the Lord-Celestant would have had it torn down, piece by piece. Its very presence was an offense to the divine rulership of Sigmar.

One day, faithless traitor, he thought to himself as he gazed upon it. One day there will be a reckoning. One day we will march upon the hell you created and we will burn it to the ground.

He was aware of the orruks surging towards him now, hollering and jeering. He took a step forwards and held his blade and hammer readily at his side. Time to roll the dice.

‘I am Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm of the Celestial Vindicators,’ he said, ‘and I am here to kill your leader.’

His voice rang out across the plain, not a shout but a loud and clear statement of fact. For a moment his surety and apparent lack of concern stunned even the howling orruks. They stopped in their tracks. Then they began to laugh the deep, booming belly roars of a drunken mob. The war horde started forwards again, eager to strike down the foolish warrior who had walked into their midst.

A voice like thunder stopped them once more. It spoke a single word in a guttural tongue that Thostos did not understand, but the implication was clear. The owner of that voice had claimed this kill as his own.

‘Drekka! Drekka! Drekka!’ the horde began to chant. Thostos simply waited, every muscle primed to burst into motion. He knew the futility of fighting if these creatures decided to rush him. It seemed that he had judged the creatures correctly. These orruks might be stronger and fiercer than any of their kind he had seen before, but the same savage warrior culture united them. One amongst them, surely the largest and most brutal of their number, dominated the others. It was fear of this pack leader – fear or some other primal instinct he could never fully understand – that kept them from taking the Lord-Celestant’s head.

Pushing through the mass of whooping creatures came a true behemoth of an orruk. It towered over Thostos, eight feet of corded muscle and predatory instincts bound in a suit of iron armour so thick and heavy that it seemed truly impenetrable. Its eyes were alight with the same madness that shone in those of its fellows, but this one had a glimmer of fierce cunning behind the aggression.

‘Come in twos, eh?’ the creature asked, grinning widely. ‘Hope you’re more sport than the other one.’

Thostos raised his weapons, holding his blade forwards, the hammer up and ready to strike.

‘My name is Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm,’ he said. ‘You have taken up arms against an army of Sigmar’s divine will. For that, I will take your head.’

The orruk leader’s eyes narrowed, and it flexed its muscles. A ripple of sheer power ran through its body, making the iron plate creak and squeal, and its toothy grin widened. Chipped and broken fangs jutted out from its lower jaw, and it slapped its great cleaver into one thick palm. The weapon was little more than a gigantic block of saw-edged iron, entirely lacking in ornamentation or craftsmanship. In the hands of the beast that held it, Thostos could only imagine the carnage that could be wrought.

‘Spat out bigger lumps than you, little lord,’ the beast called Drekka growled, and now there was little mirth to be found in that rumbling growl.

Thostos’ eyes drifted over the orruk, searching for a weakness. The bulwark of yellow-daubed iron that it wore was thick and heavy, though given the beast’s size it seemed unlikely to slow him down overmuch. Still, it was crudely fixed at the joints. A solid strike from a good sigmarite weapon and he could wreak some terrible damage. That was his only chance, to wear the creature down and bleed it out under the force of multiple blows.

In a burst of motion unthinkably quick for such a huge creature, Drekka charged forwards with his cleaver raised.

Thostos backed off, circling quickly to his left to force the orruk to turn and meet him. The great cleaver came down and met the crossed weapons of the Lord-Celestant. Sparks flew as brutal iron chewed into fine sigmarite, and the sheer weight of the blow buckled his knees. A heavy boot crashed into his chest, and he was thrown across the floor to land heavily in the wet earth. Mud splattered across his armour, and he felt the air rush from his lungs. There was no time to catch his breath, however. He heard the wet thump of the orruk’s boots as it thundered towards him, and rolled to his feet. Drekka was already nearly upon him. He feinted left, and as the cleaver came down he stepped inside the blow. The mighty weapon tore a great gouge out of the earth, and Thostos slammed his hammer into the creature’s side. He raised his blade to thrust between the gaps in its iron plate, but Drekka’s fist whipped out sideways and slammed into his chest.

Thostos staggered backwards, but caught himself before he lost his footing. The orruk leader chuckled as he paced like a hunting beast, a wide smile splitting his scarred face.

‘Almost got me there, little ’un,’ he chuckled. ‘Can’t have that.’

‘We shall see,’ said Thostos.

The place was a chamber of horrors. Atrin pushed further into the mortuary tunnels, and was met with new nightmares at every corner. Hideous, deformed monsters, their flesh warped and twisted, screamed at him from the glass jars that contained them. Books bound in decaying flesh whispered obscene promises at him as he passed. In one room he found a font filled with softly simmering blood. Within, for just a moment, he thought he saw a man’s screaming face, before it was dragged beneath the surface. Nauseated and disgusted, he pushed on.

The next hallway ended in a high, arched chamber, and it was here that he found Callan. The Retributor was held upright in the centre of the room by chains that stretched from all four corners. His melted armour exposed raw flesh beneath, and blood dripped from open wounds to gather in a trough below. Books were scattered about the floor around the warrior’s tormented figure, and the sorcerer’s insane scrawling covered the walls. More great glass jars full of pale, cloudy liquid were placed around the room, and Atrin could see horrors drifting and writhing within their murky depths.

‘Sigmar’s wrath is coming, for you and all your degenerate kind,’ he shouted into the echoing halls. ‘Come face me, and I will make your end a quick one.’

‘As you wish,’ came a chortling voice from the shadows. ‘For my part I make no such promise.’

As he scanned the room to find a hint of the man, Atrin could hear the sound of whispered chanting, and could feel the room grow cold. A pale pink glow surrounded him. Gibbering, disembodied mouths appeared in the air around him, sinking discoloured fangs into his armour. Sigmarite twisted and tore even as the sound of cackling laughter filled his ears. He swiped at the maws with his gladius, and felt a burst of fluid as several came apart with a splatter of crimson gore. More appeared in their stead, and he growled as one attached itself to his wrist, crunching the metal of his gauntlet so that it bit painfully into his hand. How he hated fighting magic users. There was no honour in this mummery, no dignity in it at all. Again he scanned the room for a sign of Xos’Phet, but he could see nothing.

Atrin cut another sniggering maw from the sky, and turned to repeat the manoeuvre when a fist made of glowing blue energy rushed across the room and struck him full in the chest with astonishing force. He staggered backwards to crash against a stone coffer, coughing and gasping for breath.

‘All your strength, all that training,’ came a high-pitched voice that echoed around the chamber. ‘And you are undone by the simplest of magic. You people understand only the hammer and the iron fist, and refuse to accept your simple insignificance next to the power of the arcane. Lord Varash was the same, curse his bones. His only ambition was that which I fed to him, like scraps to a hungry dog.’

Atrin blocked out the words, taking advantage of the momentary calm to focus and think. His enemy was toying with him, and that gave him time.

Thostos spun inside his opponent’s reach, ringing strike after strike off the orruk’s armour. Sparks and shards of metal flew as he pummelled his enemy. Drekka threw an elbow that snapped the Lord-Celestant’s head back, and Thostos responded with a headbutt that cracked into the orruk’s face, crunching bone and further flattening its porcine nose.

‘Good one!’ roared Drekka, as if he was applauding a fine joke.

This one’s skull was as thick as the walls of Sigmar’s palace.

They exchanged yet more blows, weapons cutting back and forth so blindingly fast that they seemed like little more than blurred extensions of each warrior’s limbs. Thostos rolled awkwardly in his heavy plate, and Drekka’s great cleaver soared past him, taking the head from an unfortunate orruk spectator. The dead creature’s fellow threw a punch at the Lord-Celestant, who swayed back to avoid the blow, and brought his foot up into his assailant’s groin. The orruk doubled over, and Thostos planted a foot in its face and kicked him back into the path of Drekka.

The great cleaver burst through the dazed orruk’s chest, lifting it into the air. Drekka whipped the dying brute back and forth in an attempt to dislodge it, brow furrowed in irritation. Blood and ruptured organs spilled out, splashing into the mud at his feet.

‘Get out of my way, ya useless gits,’ he bellowed.

Alzheer regretted leaving the Sky Warrior behind, but he would insist that they stay together, and she preferred to hunt alone. In any case, it was hardly as if he was more vulnerable in her absence. Even with a shattered arm and likely a broken leg, the man still held his blade strong. Such strength and fortitude was incredible. She wished that her father were alive to meet these warriors. She would have liked him to pass knowing that Zi’Mar had come for his people.

All you have is the tribe.

She had lived her life by those words in honour of her father. She had taken the old oaths and joined the ranks of mighty Zi’Mar’s priests. Time and again she had brought home food when her people were in danger of going hungry for another night. She had learned to master the bow and the sword, and had used both to protect her home. She had kept her faith, even as her people diminished, because she knew that if only they stayed strong together, the sky god would not abandon them and leave them to fade into nothing.

Yet something within her had died when Rusik the betrayer had led her warriors to the slaughter. He was here, somewhere, and she would not rest until he was dead.

She slipped into the shadows, an arrow strung and ready on her bow. Movement ahead made her stop. Two of the bandaged horrors rushed out of a nearby chamber towards the sounds of battle in the distance. Atrin had clearly introduced himself.

These were not her quarry, but she could not leave her friend to face every wretch in these tunnels alone. Her first arrow took the trailing figure in the back as it scuttled down the corridor in front of her. Its companion turned with a hiss of alarm, and she stepped out of cover to put an arrow through its throat. It fell with a gurgle, smashing into a smouldering brazier as it dropped.

Stringing another arrow, Alzheer made her way forwards.

Somewhere close, the Stormcast had encountered the sorcerer Xos’Phet. Alzheer could hear bizarre, unearthly laughter and the sound of Atrin bellowing and cursing at an unseen enemy. Unnatural sounds that could only be the wizened monster’s hateful magic echoed throughout the halls. She cursed. It seemed the sorcerer had recovered fully from the knife she had left in his gut. Leaving Atrin to battle weakling minions alone was one thing, but she could not abandon him in the face of such a dangerous foe.

Alzheer sprinted down the corridor ahead, turning left at the next junction towards the commotion. In her desire to come to the aid of her ally, she abandoned caution for haste.

Even so, the sheer speed of the blow took her by surprise. One moment she was running, the next she was sailing through the air to strike the far wall with staggering force. She slid down to hit the floor, moaning in agony.

Rough, cold hands dragged her upright. Alzheer looked into the face of the betrayer Rusik.

Or something that wore his face. The man’s angular features were there still, the hooded eyes and the high, sharp cheekbones. Yet they registered unsettlingly, as if the bone beneath had been shifted and warped. The skin was torn and raw, and the eyes were the grey-pink colour of spoiled meat.

‘Look what you have made of yourself, traitor,’ she spat, choking the words out through the iron-hard grip that held her. ‘To gain revenge on the orruks that slaughtered your family, you let this madman tear apart everything that you were. Look what your betrayal has wrought. You disgust me, monster.’

When he spoke, his words hissed forth like the gasps of a man with his throat cut.

‘I have been forged for what must come. I am the spirit of vengeance, priestess. I will slaughter the greenskins one by one, but first you die.’

He began to squeeze her neck. The pressure of his grip was incredible. She felt blood swell in her eyes, and the inexorable press began to crush her windpipe. Desperately, she fumbled with one hand at her back, and grabbed an arrow from her quiver. She rammed the arrowhead into Rusik’s chest, but his skin was like that of an arralox, so thick and leathery that the arrowhead could not penetrate. He laughed at her.

‘You think your crude weapons can harm me? No, priestess, I can no longer be–’

Alzheer switched her grip on the makeshift weapon, and plunged the tip straight into his eye.

He roared in surprise and pain, and lost his grip for just a moment. Alzheer dropped to the floor, hacking and coughing, trying to force some air down her throat. Rusik staggered behind her, crashing into the wall of the corridor. She had laced each arrow with enough of the porsuka’s poison to bring down a herd-beast, but still he stood. She just hoped she had bought herself enough time. Grabbing her fallen bow, she staggered down the corridor away from the traitor and towards the sounds of battle in the distance.

Whatever spell the sorcerer had woven, it rendered him invisible to Atrin. Even his keen eyes, regarded as the sharpest amongst his Judicator retinue, could not find him. The laughter seemed to echo around the room at random, so it likewise could not be used to locate his enemy.

In such situations, one must be decisive.

Atrin shouldered his boltstorm crossbow, ignoring the agony in his arm as he raised it to his shoulder and loosed. The lightning-wreathed projectile scorched through the air and struck one of the glass cases on the far side of the room. Foul-smelling liquid poured across the floor, along with broken glass and what appeared to be a number of eight-fingered hands. Nothing else. He shattered a second jar. Nothing. A third and a fourth, which spewed out tentacled limbs that writhed and slapped at the stone floor.

A bolt of blue flame struck him in the side, searing a gaping hole through his armour, and he staggered to the floor.

‘Stop!’ screamed Xos’Phet. ‘Enough! Do you know the value of my work? The hours, the years I have spent gathering these samples?’

Atrin spun, and destroyed another jar. This one contained a flayed torso with only a circular maw like that of a lamprey upon its short, squat neck. Hands that ended in razor-sharp claws dragged the thing across the floor, and it let loose a horrifying wail. Of greater note was the fact that when the fluid from this jar flowed, it diverted from its natural path just a fraction of a second.

‘And there you are,’ muttered Atrin. He let loose one more bolt.

The projectile exploded in mid-air, and whatever magic had concealed Xos’Phet sputtered and died as the sorcerer was thrown screaming through the air to strike the far wall. One shoulder was a ruined, smoking mess.

‘You… you… could never,’ the man wailed, his rheumy eyes wide with fear and shock.

‘It is always arrogance that brings your kind low,’ said Atrin, wincing as he lowered his spent crossbow and drew his gladius. ‘You could have killed me a dozen times, witchkin, but you had to fuel your sadistic ego. That was a mistake.’

The thing that had escaped from the cage lifted its vile mouth into the air and a tongue protruded from between its fangs, licking and tasting the air. Its head snapped towards Xos’Phet and the sorcerer moaned and tried to scrabble away across the floor.

‘You say these specimens are valuable,’ Atrin said. ‘In that case I will leave this one be. This is for Oreus, you twisted filth.’

Atrin was not proud that he took such satisfaction in the vile sorcerer’s terror as the wretched thing scrabbled towards Xos’Phet and leapt upon his bleeding form. The Judicator turned away as the screaming began, and went to Callan, still chained in place.

‘Easy, brother,’ he said, as the Retributor groaned.

He hacked and smashed at the chains that bound Callan with his gladius, but they were thick and sturdy. Retrieving his crossbow, he loaded a fresh cartridge of bolts, aimed and loosed. The chain securing Callan’s upper arm was shattered, tiny fragments of iron bouncing off his armour as the metal came apart. He repeated the same trick on the lengths securing his comrade’s leg, and was about to free the remaining arm when he heard footsteps coming from the far side of the room.

It was Alzheer. The woman came staggering into the chamber, one hand holding her throat, the other clutching her bow.

‘Rusik,’ she gasped, and the word was almost inaudible as she choked it out. He saw the purple bruises around her neck.

Something struck her from behind. She flew into the air, somersaulting once and landing amongst a pile of scrolls and leather-bound books in an explosion of dust.

The thing that had struck her burst from the shadows, hunched and powerful. It had a man’s face, but was too fast and strong to be mortal. Blood poured from one ruined eye, and its cracked and broken teeth were bared in an insane grimace.

It roared, an inchoate blend of pain and rage, and leapt across the room at him. He loosed his crossbow as it came, but the thing was blindingly quick. Bolts skipped off the floor and wall behind it and the creature crashed into him, bearing him to the floor despite his greater mass. He punched it in the side, but it was like striking stone. It responded by clubbing his broken arm, and the pain almost made him lose consciousness.

‘You stole my vengeance from me!’ screamed the thing that had once been Rusik. ‘The men of the fortress promised me the strength to slaughter the orruks, and you slew them before they could grant me it.’

‘They offered nothing but damnation, you fool,’ gasped Atrin, shocked at the man’s new-found strength. Try as he might, he could not prise those arms from around his neck.

He slammed his fist into Rusik’s side, again and again. Blows that should have shattered the mortal’s ribcage seemed to cause him no concern at all. Atrin hooked the warrior’s left leg and rolled, trying to gain purchase. He could not gain the upper hand. Rusik writhed like a serpent, slipping free of his clutch and wrapping his arms around the Stormcast’s throat. The sigmarite held, but then the traitor launched vicious punches to Atrin’s chest, as powerful as strikes from a warhammer. The armour groaned and creaked under the assault, but still the Judicator could not prise his opponent loose.

Arrows whipped across the room, striking the thing that had been Rusik in the face and chest, skipping away on the stone floor as they deflected off his thick hide. The distraction gave Atrin a moment, and he put his good foot into the man’s chest, launching him away. He tried to draw a few breaths, but no sooner had he struggled to his feet than the creature was on him once more. This time it had his fallen gladius in hand, and Atrin just barely got his hands up to block a thrust that would have split his visor and sunk deep into his eye. He strained with every fibre of his being, but whatever unnatural power gave Rusik his strength would not be denied. The blade slowly dropped lower, scraping against the brow of his war-mask.

Something grasped Rusik around the neck, and hauled him backwards. The gladius clattered to the floor. Callan stood behind the traitor, one massive arm locked firmly around his throat. Armour melded with his flesh where Xos’Phet’s magical fire had struck. He bled from a dozen surgical incisions that had been cut into his living flesh, but still he would not relent his grip. Rusik scratched and beat at the arm that held him.

‘The sword,’ Callan gasped, with a voice that sounded as if his throat was filled with broken glass. ‘Faster would be better, my friend.’

Atrin, grasped his gladius in two hands, and with every ounce of strength he had left to him, drove it deep into Rusik’s chest.

The traitor’s eyes went wide, and he roared in pain. He began to shudder and howl, eyes rolling back into his head. Callan hurled the man’s body away. Rusik landed, his body convulsing. As they watched, great swathes of his skin peeled away, exposing the muscle beneath. He vomited blood, which hissed and smoked as it burned into the floor.

And then he began to laugh, as he hauled himself upright with unnatural grace.

‘Not here,’ he chortled through broken, blood-smeared teeth. ‘Not yet. Still so much to be done.’

He paced towards them, his movement bizarre and unnatural.

‘Sky Warrior!’ shouted Alzheer. Blood poured from a wound on the woman’s head, but still she stood. She was dragging Atrin’s boltstorm crossbow behind her, the weapon’s great weight too much for the mortal to wield.

Atrin grasped the weapon, but he could not lift it with one arm shattered.

‘Brother,’ he shouted. ‘Kneel!’

Callan did not hesitate, dropping low. Atrin hauled the crossbow up in his good arm and propped it on his comrade’s shoulder. Rusik’s eyes went wide, and he skittered forwards unnaturally fast, reaching for them with arms that now ended in vicious, curved talons.

Atrin loosed the volley, point-blank. A dozen sigmarite bolts rippled through the monster’s flesh, tearing him apart and sending what remained splattering across the chamber. The smell of sulphur and rotten flesh filled the room, and the two Stormcasts slumped to the floor. Atrin heard Alzheer do the same behind them, and heard her ragged sigh of relief.

‘I tell you truly, brother,’ said Callan, staring at the ceiling above and panting heavily. ‘I feel terrible.’

Thostos had crossed blades with many warriors of Chaos, and had tested his martial skills against countless other monsters and fiends. This battle was amongst the most vicious he had ever fought.

Drekka seemed simply impervious to pain. The Lord-Celestant had struck half a dozen solid blows on that iron carapace and had drawn blood each time, but if the orruk was suffering from his wounds he made no sign of it. He simply came forwards again, that foolish grin still upon his ugly face.

The cleaver came swiping across. Thostos stepped back, recognising now that it was foolish to even attempt a block or parry unless he had no other choice. The beast’s strength was simply too great. The blade whistled past his face, and he darted forwards to jab his sword at the orruk’s midriff, between two of the iron plates. He struck home solidly, but his blade caught as the orruk reared back in pain, and he was a fraction too slow in avoiding the backwards swing of the cleaver. It opened a great rent in the armour across his chest, tearing through flesh and spraying blood, and sent the Lord-Celestant spinning through the air.

He landed hard, and could feel the blood pouring down the inside of his war-plate. That strike had shattered ribs, possibly ruptured organs. A fatal strike, in all likelihood. He managed to haul himself unsteadily to his feet, though even holding his weapons high was draining what remained of his strength.

‘Tough little soldier, ain’t you,’ came the mocking voice of Drekka. The orruk approached with a victor’s swagger, backed by the chorus of his minions as they chanted his name. ‘Tougher than the last one. One good smash an’ you fall the same, though.’

Thostos rushed forwards, runeblade arcing out to cut a deep line across the orruk’s forehead. Drekka reared back, cursing, and the Lord-Celestant followed up with a hammer to his gut. It clanged off the thick bands of iron, the dull echo of the impact ringing out across the plain. As the creature finally clutched its midriff in pain, Thostos leapt into the air, twisting his body as he rose, and drove his blade down at the beast’s collarbone. Drekka snapped a hand out and grasped him by the neck, snatching him out of the air.

‘Slippery little git,’ he snarled. His great plated fist lashed out once, twice, three times. Vision swimming, fires burning behind his eyes, the Lord-Celestant felt blood pour down the inside of his war-mask. Shattered metal was digging deep into his temple, and he could no longer see clearly from the bloody ruin of his left eye. Drekka slammed one last punch into his chest, and hurled him through the air.

Thostos hit the earth hard, the air rushing from his lungs from the force of the impact. The sky above was a bloody smear, and the earth spun beneath him. Shattered ribs drove daggers of bone deep into his vital organs. He let the infinity of agonies that wracked his form fuel his rage. He would not fall here, to this dull creature.

He would not leave Lord-Celestant Argellon unavenged.

Tortured body groaning in protest, Thostos hauled himself to one knee, spitting blood. Drekka was pacing towards him again, holding his wounded torso, the humour gone from his eyes.

Thostos knew he could not win this fight in a straight contest of strength. Yet he still had one last card to play.

‘Is that all you have, orruk?’ he spat through broken teeth. ‘You punch like a pox-ridden ratman, you simple-minded scum.’

Drekka’s eyes went wide, and then narrowed slowly and dangerously. Veins rippled around the beast’s muscular neck as he let loose an inchoate bellow of rage. Raising that wicked cleaver above his head, he charged the Lord-Celestant, thick legs eating up the ground between them with terrifying speed.

All thoughts of his own defence were forgotten.

Thostos spun, and as he turned he muttered the arcane phrase that unleashed the potent magic woven into the trailing leather straps of his cloak. At the bottom of the garment hung small hammers of burnished metal, seemingly little more than ornaments.

As the spell was unleashed, these hammers were transmuted into a cloud of celestial energy, and rocketed towards the unsuspecting Drekka like tiny comets. They struck with the force of the heavens, blasting apart the thick armour at the orruk leader’s neck and sending him stumbling in shock. On their own, the missiles would not have been enough to take down the monstrous orruk, but Thostos Bladestorm was already moving in their wake.

Leaping towards Drekka, he put everything he had into one last strike. Both hammer and blade came down on top of the orruk’s skull. The beast’s ugly face came apart under the force of the strike, the skull splintering and the blade hewing down deep into its throat.

Drekka staggered. Half the creature’s head was missing, and yet still it would not fall. Bloodshot eyes, narrowed with focused anger, locked on to Thostos. The orruk lurched forwards one step, its cleaver still raised high and ready to fall. Another step. Thostos hobbled backwards before it, raising his weapons in futile defence. Drekka came forwards again, and the cleaver gleamed in the blazing sun, a beacon of light in the bloody mist that was the Lord-Celestant’s vision.

Then the orruk leader’s eyes rolled back into its head, and the weapon slid from its grasp.

Thostos rolled out of the way of the Drekka’s body as it fell, sending a spray of mud into the air. The Lord-Celestant came up on one knee, weapons in hand.

‘Which of you is next?’ he roared.

For once, the orruk mob fell quiet. The wind whipped Thostos’ cloak and blew dust across his face. In the distance, he could hear the caws and shrieks of carrion birds as they circled overhead.

When the orruks finally regained their sense, any semblance of unity amongst their ranks was lost. Shorn of the unifying presence of their leader, they embraced their natural inclination for self-destructive savagery. The nearest orruks leapt upon the corpse of Drekka, hauling off fragments of his armour or loudly claiming trophies as their own. Some simply milled in confusion. Others began to fight amongst themselves, as long-abandoned grudges and rivalries rekindled in an instant.

Still more decided that they would like to claim the head of the warrior that had slain their mightiest champion.

Thostos backed off as scores of the enemy bounded towards him. The first to reach him died with his sword in its chest, the next fell under a mighty blow from his warhammer. Yet there were simply too many, and wounded as he was he knew he had bought his warriors all the time that he could.

A horn sounded from behind him. He looked back to see the fortress gates thrown open, the Paladin warriors of the Celestial Vindicators bursting forth with Lord-Castellant Eldroc and his loyal gryph-hound at their head. Roaring oaths of vengeance and prayers to Sigmar, mighty Decimators barrelled into the advancing orruks with their two-handed axes, smashing the enemy aside with explosive peals of thunder. Retributors dealt the God-King’s justice with their lightning hammers, this fractious melee the arena in which they excelled.

Eldroc reached the Lord-Celestant, and Thostos allowed his friend to haul him to his feet.

‘You should have stayed in the Dreadhold,’ he gasped. ‘You should have let me fall.’

‘You’ll have plenty more opportunities to get yourself killed,’ replied Eldroc, battering an orruk aside with the haft of his halberd as he and Thostos staggered behind the lines of the Paladins. As they ran, the elite warriors were falling back to the fortress in perfect order. Thostos saw a shield wall of Liberators arrayed in front of the ruined gate, and saw them open the line to let the sallying party back inside to relative safety.

‘They already recover their wits,’ continued Eldroc. ‘This is not yet over.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Spiral Tower

‘To fully purge the taint from this gate would take me many hours, perhaps even days,’ said Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden. His voice was strained and hoarse, and nowhere near his usual ornery tone. He sounded exhausted. Lord-Castellant Eldroc knew his friend was on the verge of collapse, and it was only his stubborn will that kept him upright.

‘We cannot use it?’ asked Thostos Bladestorm. The Lord-Celestant’s own voice was tight with pain, though the restorative glow emanating from Eldroc’s warding lantern was slowly knitting together the gruesome wounds upon his chest and head. He had been even closer to death at the hands of the orruk leader, Drekka Breakbones, than the Lord-Castellant had thought.

Out on the plains the greenskins’ hoarse voices still bellowed in maddened rage. The death of their general had sent the dull-witted beasts into a frenzy, and even now they were throwing themselves against the walls and gate of the Manticore Dreadhold.

‘I did not say we could not use it,’ said Tharros, ‘only that it will require my full strength and concentration to keep the gateway open.’

‘We cannot abandon the Dreadhold,’ said Eldroc. ‘Even if we were to pass through the Manticore Realmgate, the orruks would likely follow us. Besides, Sigmar required us to hold this position. Azyr’s armies will pour through this route on their way to the front.’

The front was located in the Realm of Metal, where the next stage of the God-King’s plan called for a full assault on the fortresses known as the Ironholds, which in turn guarded the path to the nexus of arcane travel known as the Allpoints. It was from there that the armies of darkness sallied forth into the Eight Realms.

‘I can hold the fortress,’ said Eldroc. ‘Lord-Celestant, take a small expeditionary force. Make contact with the Knight-Azyros. He can signal for aid in securing the Dreadhold.’

‘I cannot leave the chamber behind,’ said Thostos, glancing back at the fortress wall. The Judicator archers were already loosing arrow after arrow into the ranks of the enemy. They could not see the gatehouse from their position at the rear of the structure, but the fighting there would be thick. The main gate was a twisted wreck, and such a breach would draw the orruks like flies around meat.

‘This is my area of expertise, brother,’ said Eldroc. ‘Trust me, I know how to hold a fortress under siege. I swear to you the Dreadhold will not fall while I stand.’

‘If you could decide what you wish to do quickly, that would be wonderful,’ came the faint voice of Tharros Soulwarden, with a hint of his usual curmudgeonly temper.

Thostos nodded. ‘Twenty men should suit my purpose. Ware the orruks, Lord-Castellant. Without their leader they will be reckless and disorganised, yet their battle-madness will give them strength. They will not relent, not now their blood is up.’

‘I know, Lord-Celestant. This place will hold until your return. Go now.’

Thostos chose the fastest and the most keen-eyed warriors to join the ranks of his war party. Eldroc needed the strongest fighters at his disposal, and in any case the Lord-Celestant was not looking for a fight. The faster they found the Knight-Azyros, the sooner they could bring help to the fortress defenders. As he chose the last of his warriors, word came that the small force he had sent into the mountains had returned. There was Atrin, hobbling along with his crossbow rested over one shoulder. Callan was at his side, supported by several of the Liberator rearguard who were still stationed at the realmgate. The Retributor was a ruin of melted sigmarite and scorched flesh. It was almost incomprehensible that the man had managed to survive long enough to reach the Dreadhold.

‘Oreus fell,’ said the Lord-Celestant. It was not a question.

‘Aye, Lord-Celestant,’ the Judicator replied. ‘Slain by the sorcerer Xos’Phet’s magic. We slew the fiend in turn, as well as the traitor Rusik.’

‘Then you performed your task admirably. There is yet more fighting to be done, and I would have you at my side if you are capable. Let the Lord-Castellant see to your wounds, then report to the realmgate.’

Atrin nodded, and made for the wall, where Eldroc was organising the defence. Behind him, leaning against the rocky outcrop upon which lay the realmgate itself, sat Alzheer, the mortal priestess of the Sky Seekers tribe. Thostos felt a tension loosen as he saw her, and realised with surprise that he had been worried she would not return from the mountain paths.

‘Priestess,’ he said, approaching her. ‘I am glad that you return unharmed. Judicator Atrin tells me that you found the vengeance that you sought.’

She gazed up at him, squinting slightly in the sunlight. Her face was bloody and bruised, and deep cuts ran across her arms, but aside from that she was largely unharmed.

‘I did, Lord Thostos,’ she nodded. She did not seem triumphant, merely tired and somewhat distant. That was understandable. She had lost many of her people over the last few days.

‘I am afraid I can offer you only water and rest, not safety,’ he said. ‘The orruks assault in force, and I must depart on my own mission. We cannot lead you home just yet, priestess.’

‘I can still wield a bow, Lord-Celestant,’ she said, and she hauled herself to her feet, staggering slightly. Thostos stretched out a hand to steady her.

‘You will rest, my lady,’ he said, in a voice that brooked no complaint. ‘And you will let us do the fighting. You have done enough. Fought enough. More than any mortal should be expected to. We are the Celestial Vindicators, Alzheer. We were forged for battles such as this. Let us do our duty, and let yourself heal.’

The fighting at the gatehouse was some of the most vicious that Liberator-Prime Relius had ever known, and he had been a veteran of countless wars even before his Reforging as a Celestial Vindicator.

‘Namuth, keep that shield tight,’ he roared, as the orruks surged forwards once more, clattering against the wall of sigmarite that guarded the tunnel.

The gate itself had been torn off its hinges, and had fallen diagonally to half block the main entrance. The enemy could still slip under the shattered iron, but as more of them fell that was becoming increasingly difficult. Not that the orruks seemed wary of the danger. Even as he glanced over the rim of his shield, Relius saw one of the creatures spitted through the belly on a vicious shard of black iron. Lord-Castellant Eldroc had ordered the tunnel filled with dozens of these wicked spikes, scavenged from the walls of the Dreadhold. The dying orruk was still hacking away with its crude cleaver, seemingly unaware or uncaring of its predicament.

‘Kill,’ Relius shouted, and as one the front rank of Celestial Vindicators brought their shields to the side, stabbing out with longswords or smashing skulls and bones with their heavy warhammers.

‘Hold,’ he yelled, and just as swiftly the unforgiving wall of sigmarite was restored. Dead orruks toppled along the line, joining the barricade of dead that littered the floor. Their fellows behind scrabbled over the corpses of the fallen, hurling themselves at the Stormcasts with maniac howls and whoops of glee.

The Stormcast line was pushed back, no more than an inch or two, under the pressure of the assault. Such margins, Relius knew, could be fatal. This battle would drag on for hours, perhaps even days. They could not afford to lose the bottleneck provided by the gatehouse tunnel. Once the orruks broke out, it was all over.

‘Kill!’ the Liberator-Prime shouted again.

The first thing that Thostos Bladestorm noticed, as he stepped forth from the archway of carved obsidian and into the glimmering light of the Crystal Forest, was how different the air felt here. In the Roaring Plains it had been fresh and harsh, with the earthy taste of grass and churned soil. Here it was so close it seemed to wrap around his skin like a second cloak. A slight but noticeable static thrum raised the hairs on his neck, and he smelled the sweet, chemical tang of copper and iron.

‘The Crystal Forest,’ said Liberator-Prime Amon Steelhide, emerging behind him. ‘The name hardly seems to do the place justice.’

Ahead of them, beyond the bed of carved stone upon which the realmgate lay, stood the forest. It was unerringly beautiful. Spiralling towers of multicoloured crystal reached high into the sky, twisting around and encircling their fellows to form a thicket of glittering, shimmering light. It was as if a rainbow had crashed to earth and splintered into a thousand pieces. Smaller crystal copses ran underneath these grand structures, casting their own dizzying array of tints and tones amongst the ground cover. In the distance, many miles away, Thostos could see mountains of dull brass, peaks of copper and great mesas of black iron. The sky was a dark purple, yet the ground was washed with soft moonlight and the flickering colours of the crystal spires overhead.

‘Form a perimeter,’ Thostos ordered. ‘Make safe the gate. Prosecutor-Prime?’

Zannus snapped to attention, four fellow warrior-heralds lining up behind him. Even amongst the fabulously armoured soldiers of the Stormcasts they made an impressive sight, with their gleaming, radiant wings and plumed head crests.

‘Sire?’

‘Take to the skies. Give me a preliminary assessment of the area. We are to meet the Knight-Azyros Capellon here, the guide who will lead us to our assigned position for the offensive. Find him.’

Zannus saluted, and with a powerful beating of his wings, soared into the sky at the head of his retinue. The rest of the Lord-Celestant’s advance party, some twenty-five men on foot, arranged themselves in loose formation around him. Amon Steelhide led the Liberator contingent, all of whom bore twin hammers or runeblades rather than the more familiar sigmarite shields of their conclave. Judicator Atrin’s wounds had been healed by the heavenly power of Lord-Castellant Eldroc’s warding lantern, and now he led an ad-hoc group of five Judicators, survivors of retinues that had taken heavy losses during the assault on the Dreadhold. Each carried a rapid-firing boltstorm crossbow, and they were currently scanning the crystal treeline intently, ready to unleash a torrent of sigmarite bolts against any emerging threat.

‘Capellon was to meet us here,’ Thostos muttered under his breath.

The Knights-Azyros were the messengers and heralds of the greater Stormcast force. Each was a mighty warrior, given the gift of flight and the possession of a wondrously crafted lantern, a celestial beacon with which they lit the path for Sigmar’s Storm to follow.

‘Perhaps he thought it safer to lay low, sire,’ said Atrin. ‘These are dangerous lands, as yet unclaimed by Sigmar.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thostos, staring off into the depths of the crystalline forest. ‘But thus far in our journeys we have not often been blessed by such good fortune.’

Zannus circled high above the forest, trying to keep his focus and not get distracted by the sheer beauty of the sight below. The luminous tangle of multicoloured crystal stretched on below him for several miles, gently creeping towards the foothills of the mountains on each side of the valley in which they found themselves.

‘No sign of movement, friendly or otherwise,’ said Tonan at his side.

‘Take two men and survey the foothills to our east,’ said Zannus. The mountain range was closest there, a smooth cluster of rolling hills that rose towards a series of curiously even conical peaks. Unweathered and geometric in arrangement, the range did not look like a natural formation.

‘Do not tarry,’ he continued, ‘and return to me with your findings as soon as you are done.’

There was something about this place that unsettled Zannus, despite the obvious grandeur of his surroundings. It was the stillness of it, he thought. After his time on the Roaring Plains, where the wind howled constantly and furiously, and the earth below was ever in motion, the stillness of this place felt… untrustworthy.

‘To me, Prosecutors,’ he shouted to the rest of his warriors. ‘We will spread out and fly low over the canopy.’

It took them an hour of searching before they found what they were looking for. Dipping beneath the canopy, carefully weaving his way through clusters of jagged azure and great columns of vermilion and aquamarine, it was the Prosecutor-Prime himself that came across the clearing. He spread his wings and slowed his flight, dropping lightly to the ground to take in the scene.

It was carnage. Torn corpses were scattered across the ground, bathed in the soft pink, refracted light that shone down from the great crystal canopy above. Some were sprawled on the floor, others impaled on sharp clusters of quartz. Zannus approached the nearest, and rolled it over with his boot. An ugly, scarred face twisted in a death mask of torment. A half-moon tattoo covered the left side of the human’s face, and piercings linked with fine silver chains ran from eyebrow to nose. The armour was of decent quality, painted a deep blue with silver highlights, though it bore the chips and scrapes of regular use.

‘Minions of the Dark Gods,’ he said with no small amount of distaste. ‘But not the Blood God’s faithful.’

‘It was fine swordwork that slew them,’ said Ephenius, examining the deep slice that had cut through the spine of another warrior. ‘Neat, deep. A fine blade held in a sure hand.’

‘We have a live one,’ shouted Orestes, from the edge of the clearing. In the shadow of a spiderweb of shattered crystals lay another of the mortals. His leg had been cut through at the knee, and hung by only a scrap of flesh. His skin was sallow, and his eyes were tired as much as they were fearful. This one had been left to die some time ago, and blood loss and thirst had left him dazed and weak. Looking at the wounds, Zannus doubted he would last much longer.

The Prosecutor-Prime grabbed a flask from one of the dead men and strode over to the survivor.

‘This will not be an easy passing,’ he said to the man. ‘If blood loss does not take you soon, then hunger and thirst will do their work.’

He held out the flask, and the man groaned and reached for it with a shaking hand. Zannus drew it back.

‘Tell me what happened here, and you can drink your fill. Speak.’

Beyond the point where pride or loyalty might have sealed his lips, the man was only too happy to tell them what he knew.

‘The angel,’ he choked, and blood dribbled from his dry mouth. ‘We set upon him. He was hiding in the forest, but Lorchis always sees. He always knows. You can’t hide from him.’

Zannus held the flask out, and let some of the contents dribble into the mortal’s mouth. The man sighed with relief, and his eyes closed contentedly. The Prosecutor-Prime clipped him about the ear.

‘Rest when you’re done,’ he snapped.

‘The angel, he slew us so easily,’ the man continued. ‘Like we were nothing. Twenty of us there were, and even striking first we could not touch him. He tried to soar away, but Lorchis got him good. Sent him down in the dirt.’

He laughed a bitter, mirthless laugh.

‘Oh, he struggled, but we had the nets on him. Had him down, burned and beaten.’

Orestes went to strike the wretch with the flat of his hand, but Zannus grasped his arm before the blow fell.

‘Where did you take him?’ he asked. ‘Speak.’

The mortal looked at him blankly, as if the question had been spoken in a different language to his own. The Prosecutor-Prime reached down and grabbed a fistful of his chainmail hauberk.

‘The angel,’ he snarled. ‘Where did you take him?’

Zannus and his men returned after a few hours, coming to rest in front of the orderly Stormcast line, which formed a defensive shield wall around the realmgate.

‘Lord-Celestant.’ He saluted as Thostos approached.

‘What did you find?’

‘We came across the scene of a skirmish, Lord. Several enemy dead. One alive enough to tell us that the Knight-Azyros has been captured.’

There was a round of muttered curses from the warriors present.

‘Tell me that you discovered where the enemy took him,’ said Thostos.

‘I believe so. The enemy is clearly active in this region, Lord-Celestant,’ the Prosecutor-Prime replied. ‘Soldiers are stationed amongst the foothills to the east, and more guard a structure hidden in the mountains nearby. A spiral tower, half collapsed. This is where the wretch says that the Knight-Azyros was taken.’

‘What numbers does the enemy have?

‘Our prisoner died from his wounds before we could interrogate him further,’ said Prosecutor Tonan. We scouted the area before we returned. Their defensive positions are carved into the mountainside, so it is hard to be exact. We saw at least three hundred at camp. Fewer still were guarding the perimeter of the tower. No more than a score.’

‘Though certainly there will be more within the structure,’ said Thostos. ‘And if they can capture a Knight-Azyros, they likely have either powerful magic or capable fighters on their side.’

The longer the Knight-Azyros remained in enemy hands, the greater the chance that the enemy would discover something of value. No Stormcast would ever volunteer information under duress, of course, but Thostos knew that simple physical torment was hardly the only tool at the great enemy’s disposal.

‘How far is it to the tower on foot?’ asked Judicator Atrin.

‘No more than a few hours,’ said Zannus.

‘Not good enough,’ said Thostos. ‘We march at pace. Prosecutor-Prime, return to the area and scout ahead. See if you can gather a more accurate estimate of their numbers. We will join you soon.’

He turned to the rest of his warriors. He could feel their eager tension and their fury. No Stormcast could stand idly by while a fellow warrior suffered at the hands of the enemy. They would run as long as they had to, no matter what it took out of them to do so.

‘You know what is at stake here,’ he said. ‘Let us retrieve our lost brother.’

With that, the Stormcasts set off at pace, following in the Prosecutors’ wake as they soared towards the mountain range.

It took Thostos and his men half the time Zannus had estimated to reach the foothills amongst which the tower lay. They had run near ceaselessly, even when they had reached twisting paths made treacherous by the crooked spikes of crystal that jutted out from nearby boulders, and in spite of the smooth, slippery ground beneath their feet. Every step had to be taken carefully, lest a warrior lost their footing and tumbled into a cluster of razor-sharp, pellucid quartz that could shear through armour with unsettling ease.

It was poor ground for stealth, littered with tiny fragments of crystal and shards of rough stone that crunched underfoot. The weight of the Stormcasts in their full battle array caused each footstep to echo like a falling boulder. Yet until now, at least as far as Thostos could tell, they remained unspotted as they made their way up the winding paths towards the great brass peaks in the distance.

After another hour or two of travel they hauled themselves over the lip of a great bluff of burnished brass, and caught their first glimpse of the spiral tower. It sank into the ground at a tight angle, leaning against the far edge of a towering peak like a resting spear. Though it shone with soft silver light, the surface was strangely organic in texture. It reminded Thostos of the great shell of some kind of ocean-dwelling crustacean. Spiral patterns wound into the surface, and great jewels of many different colours shone from within.

‘Down,’ whispered Atrin harshly, and the Stormcasts ducked low, hands grasping weapons firmly.

They were in a sort of sheltered bowl within the mountains, which rose steeply on all sides. The ground ahead of them was even for several hundred yards, and was patrolled by several groups of mortals dressed in silver chainmail and carrying short spears and curved blades.

Two such warriors, faces hidden by chainmail masks, were approaching the Stormcasts’ position, idly chatting as they came.

‘I have the one on the left,’ Thostos muttered to Liberator-Prime Steelhide. ‘Take the other.’

Pollux drew his twin warblades and crouched behind the nearest cluster of rocks, looking to his Lord-Celestant for the signal to move. The soldiers’ footsteps came closer and closer, and after several moments they rounded the boulders and came into view. They stopped dead in their tracks, eyes widening in shock as they saw the score of turquoise-armoured giants that crouched before them.

‘Who–’ managed the lead figure, before Thostos cut his words short with a thrown hammer. The heavy sigmarite weapon clattered to the floor, as did the broken body of the warrior. Steelhide darted from cover, thrusting one of his swords into the remaining figure’s chest, and bringing the other across backhand to strike the head from his shoulders.

There was a tense silence, then the sound of shouting voices.

‘No more time for subtlety,’ said Thostos, picking up his blood-smeared hammer as he ran forwards. ‘Kill fast, and move quickly.’

As one, the Stormcasts broke forwards over the lip of the bluff, following the Lord-Celestant into the clearing. There were only a score or so of warriors scattered about the place, and not a man amongst them was prepared for the onslaught that the Celestial Vindicators unleashed. Atrin opened up with his crossbow, and a volley of sigmarite bolts sped across the clearing to send two figures tumbling away. Two more, unlucky enough to be within reach of Thostos, fell to vicious strikes from sword and hammer. The rest of the Judicator retinue unleashed a volley from their crossbows, and five more of the enemy were blasted off their feet.

The greater part of their number dead in seconds, the remaining mortals turned and ran up the curving stair towards the entrance to the tower.

The Stormcasts followed close behind.

Eldroc caught the axe blow on the haft of his halberd, forced the orruk’s weapon down low, and slammed his fist into the creature’s ugly face. It stumbled back, and he hacked it down with his weapon’s axe blade. Redbeak leapt upon the fallen orruk, and tore its throat out with a snap of his beak.

‘Lord-Castellant, they have made the wall,’ came a voice from behind.

‘Paladins, with me!’ he shouted, hoping beyond hope that the orruks had not managed to force their way through the main gate. If the enemy breached in two places, they were done. They simply did not have the numbers to fight an open battle on two fronts.

Focus on the task at hand, he reminded himself. These walls must be cleared. He could see the orruks ahead, in the shadow of the Dreadhold’s central tower. A band of Liberators was trying to stem the tide of yellow-clad warriors, but they were slowly being pushed back, and more orruks were hauling themselves up the wall at their flank.

For all its lack of martial discipline and tactical expertise, Eldroc found the orruks’ bluntly simplistic assault a horribly effective one. The creatures hesitated not a single second, dragging themselves up the fortress wall with astonishing speed despite their weight. With no Stormcasts versed in their operation, the fire-spewing daemonic mouths that lined the Dreadhold’s exterior were effectively little more than welcoming handholds. Though hundreds of orruks were slaughtered by the lightning bursts and crossbow bolts of the Celestial Vindicators, there were simply too many of the enemy, and too few Stormcasts, to keep the ramparts clear.

Eldroc roared with fury as he charged forwards, swiping the head from an orruk that poked its ugly face over the wall with a vicious slice from his halberd. He spun the weapon, holding the haft horizontally to smash it into the face of another creature. Yet another hauled itself over the edge behind him, but as he turned he saw it go down under a hammer-strike from a Retributor. Dark blood splattered across his armour, and the twitching body of the orruk was lifted and pitched back over the wall.

Now the lines of battle were hopelessly chaotic. Orruks flanked the band of Liberators, and were in turn attacked from behind by the great hammers and mighty axes of the elite Paladin warriors. Still more of the enemy crawled up and over the wall.

The press was so tight that it was difficult to move, and harder still to find the space to wield his halberd effectively. He thrust with the spear-tip at any orruks that came close, aiming for throats and eye sockets. The stone beneath his feet was slick with blood, and he found himself treading upon broken forms that moaned as they were crushed by the sheer weight of surging bodies.

Eldroc’s advance swept clean the left side of the Dreadhold’s ramparts. Freed from their precarious, flanked position, the Liberators and Judicators on that side of the fortress began to recover and push back those orruks that remained. The Paladins began to lift up the heavy, dead bodies of the orruks and hurl them back over into the roiling mass of green flesh, relying on their sheer weight to crush the unfortunate creatures below.

The Celestial Vindicators burst through into the interior of the tower, hot on the heels of the fleeing mortals. Most of the soldiers ran for the great, wide stair that curved upwards from the interior hall, but one made instead for a strange device on the far side of the room. It resembled a great shell, several handspans across, the whorl spiralling out to join a funnel that ran alongside the great stairway, stretching to the roof above. Before Thostos could reach him, the warrior put his lips to this device, and an ominous note issued forth – a great, resonating blast that echoed around the structure loudly enough to shake the teeth.

Thostos reached the man and cut him down, but the damage had been done. Every single being in this place would be aware of their presence now.

He glanced up. Above the Stormcasts soared a dizzying spiral of hundreds of cells, each carved from a strange, metallic coral-like substance. The complex stretched on and on over their heads, so high that the very dimensions of the place seemed unfathomable. From the outside, there had been no indication of such a colossal space. The angle, too, was wrong – vertical instead of lying askew, as it had first appeared. Thostos felt the sway of vertigo, the nauseous resonance of sorcerous power. There was something else up there too, an orb of glowing light that bathed the walls in a silver-blue glow.

Arrows whipped down from on high, skittering off the armour of the Stormcasts. Those that bore shields raised them to fend off the barrage, while the Judicator bowmen returned with a volley of their own. Dozens of yards overhead, the spiral walkway with its ammonite guardrail rippled in explosions of light, and a shower of coral fragments and ruptured bodies toppled down the central column to burst upon the floor.

‘Forward!’ yelled Thostos. ‘To the summit.’

The Prosecutors rose into the air, circling their way up the main tower and unleashing devastating strikes with their celestial hammers, which smashed through crystal and stone-coral as if it were kindling. As each warrior hurled his magical weapon, he summoned one anew from the aether.

Those on foot began to advance. They moved slowly, checking each cell as they passed by. The bars were not metal, but razor-sharp spears of blue crystal stabbed deep into the floor. Each cell contained a rough stone slab set with leather straps. Most of the cells were empty, containing nothing but the dark stains of spilled blood, but in others they saw shattered skeletons, or pitiful, wasted figures that cringed and scuttled away in terror as they passed.

The sheer quantity of arrows loosed by the mortal guards above began to take its toll. A Judicator fell, clutching at his throat. As he toppled over the guardrail he turned once in mid-air before disappearing in a burst of light. Other Stormcasts fell to the floor, crashing back down the path to the levels below.

‘Do not stop for a moment,’ shouted Thostos, as his warriors began to pause in order to aid their stricken fellows. ‘We keep moving or we die here.’

And so they pushed on, floor after floor. Mortal warriors wrapped in silver chainmail and tattooed with blue ink rushed at them from anterior tunnels and guardposts. These men were hardy fighters, disciplined and resilient. They attacked Thostos and his men with measured skill, not the unbarred aggression of the Blood God’s faithful. They feinted forwards to hurl a volley of javelins and axes, then fell back and flanked from different angles. They used their knowledge of the tower’s hidden pathways admirably.

Yet for all their skill, they were still merely mortals.

Relius had lost his sword in the melee, dropped when an orruk had slammed its axe into his shoulder and split his flesh to the bone. They were perilously close to the inner courtyard of the fortress now, having been steadily pushed back by the unrelenting ferocity of the enemy assault. The corridor was thick with corpses, yet the creatures came on regardless, slipping over the ruined remnants of their dead. Relius slammed his shield into a leering face, felt bones shatter under the heavy sigmarite, and raised it high to deflect another falling axe.

‘We can’t hold this,’ shouted the Liberator at his side. Relius could not spare a glance to check, but it sounded like Vallus.

‘We must,’ he shouted. ‘If they break through it is over.’

Something struck his leg, and there was an explosion of agony. Foolish. The orruk he had smashed to the floor had not been killed, and it had sunk a cleaver into the flesh of his thigh. Relius cursed as his leg gave way. He held his shield over his face, and felt heavy boots force him further to the floor as another of the creatures vaulted over his prone form and deeper into the Stormcasts’ ranks. His world was a forest of struggling, kicking boots and splattered blood. He tried to drag himself upright, but there was simply no room. He was stuck fast, and would be until the enemy noticed him and drove an axe into his skull.

‘Glory to Sigmar!’ came a booming voice, resonating within the cramped gatehouse tunnel. ‘Not a single step backwards, brothers. Death to the enemies of Azyr!’

Through the chaos of twisting, flailing bodies Relius caught a glimpse of Lord-Castellant Eldroc at the head of a formation of Retributors.

He barrelled straight into the orruks, his wondrous halberd smashing and stabbing as he hacked a path for the warriors to follow.

They did so mercilessly. Of all the elite Paladin disciplines, it was the Retributors that most closely symbolised the Celestial Vindicators’ way of war. Simple, straightforward power, the fury of unleashed aggression. Vengeance dispatched with cold fury, and delivered with the killing face of a sigmarite hammer.

These warriors amongst warriors pushed through to the front of the melee, battering the enemy aside with thunderous swings of their two-handed weapons. Lightning arced in the narrow confines of the tunnels as the hammers impacted, pummelling iron armour into a shapeless mass, crushing skulls and scorching flesh.

‘Up you get, Liberator-Prime,’ said Eldroc, hauling Relius to his feet.

‘I am sorry, Lord-Castellant,’ he said. ‘I have failed. There were too many, and we could not hold them at the gate.’

‘Do not speak of failure again,’ said Eldroc sternly. ‘We were never going to hold a shattered gateway for long, especially against such numbers. You have killed as many of the creatures as possible, and that is all I could ask. Our hope now lies in the hands of others.’

The Lord-Castellant turned to him. Relius noticed that the man’s helm bore a nasty cut from temple to jaw, through which blood was seeping. Countless minor wounds covered his fine armour. It seemed that the fighting upon the walls had been no less fierce than down here.

‘Do not concern yourself, brother,’ said Eldroc, clapping him on the shoulder reassuringly. ‘I fear a minor scratch will be the least of our worries, come the day’s end. Here.’

Eldroc held out a gladius, and Relius accepted it. The weight of the blade was reassuring, and he clasped it tightly.

‘Onwards then,’ said the Lord-Castellant, hefting his halberd. ‘Let us see if we cannot thin the herd a little more.’

‘Onwards,’ shouted Thostos, sweeping another foe aside with his hammer. The mortal slammed against the wall and slid to the floor, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

It felt as if they had been running for days. They had killed their way upwards, smashing through the resistance they encountered on each level of the structure, pushing onwards and onwards relentlessly.

At the apex of the tower above them hung a great, multifaceted orb of silver and blue, sending floating lights dancing around the tower as they drew closer. Not knowing where the Knight-Azyros was held, Thostos pushed his warriors hard for the summit, knowing that the leader of these accursed mortals likely dwelt there. There was little time. Strange, fluting horns echoed around them, an atonal cacophony that drew more and more soldiers towards them. They had struck fast, and with the advantage of surprise, but the enemy was waking up.

They were close, now. They drew level with the huge form of the crystal, and Thostos glanced into its shimmering depths. Faces swam within, distant as if viewed beneath the waters of a frozen lake. There were dozens, scores of them. They were screaming.

‘Few are the warriors who come to the tower of Lorchis willingly,’ came a voice from on high. The shadows overhead warped and twisted, and from them dropped a disc of shining metal, its edge thick with vicious spikes. Upon the disc crouched an impressive figure – a warrior clad in robes of bright azure, clutching in one hand a glaive that ignited with a pure yellow flame. In his other he grasped a fine buckler, painted with the image of a rampant drake. He wore a full-face helm with sweeping horns, edged with gold and scores of precious gems.

‘This is a place for lost souls, shining warriors,’ Lorchis said as he came to a halt in the air several feet above their heads. ‘A place of stolen secrets. I wonder what mysteries I may prise from you. A greater bounty than your winged brother offered me, perhaps?’

‘You will release him,’ said Thostos.

‘Will I?’ the man laughed. His voice was surprisingly soft, more curious than angry. ‘You are few, knight of justice, and my men are legion. Neither is time on your side. Your fellow warrior was very accommodating of my inquiries. I hear your weakling god weaves new battle plans as we speak.’

Atrin stepped forwards and let loose a volley. The lord of the tower laughed as he dipped backwards upon his floating disc. The sigmarite bolts skipped off the underside of the artefact, and the man rose into the air away from the Stormcasts.

‘Enough talk, then,’ he said, laughing good-naturedly. ‘Vitenoryx, thin our guests down to a more manageable number.’

There was a deep, predatory snarl from above. Something huge and terrible unwound itself from the roof of the tower, and dropped gracefully to land on top of the great crystal. Thostos saw a powerful, muscular form, recalling that of a lion, save for the pair of leathery wings that protruded from its torso. Not one, but three pairs of blazing eyes looked down upon them, glowing with a cruel, feral hunger.

Three monstrous mouths opened wide as the monster tucked its wings and fell towards the Stormcasts. From the central, draconic maw a stream of blue-white flame spat forth. It splashed across the front ranks of the Celestial Vindicators, and three warriors fell to the ground, writhing and screaming as the magical fire ate away at their plate armour. The chimera spread its wings once more, arresting the speed of its descent and dropping to land upon the spiral walkway. The lion’s head snapped out, engulfing another Stormcast’s upper torso. The creature shook its prey violently and hurled the broken body into empty space.

Lightning arrows and crossbow bolts skipped off the creature’s thick hide as the Judicators opened up with punishing volleys. The creature roared in fury, and another gout of flame spat out at the Stormcasts. The platform upon which Thostos and his men stood began to bubble and warp under the furious heat. Vitenoryx continued to spew fire as it shook and tore at the ground with powerful forelimbs.

‘Back!’ shouted Steelhide. ‘The ground gives way!’

The chimera leapt from its perch, and as it did so great chunks of stone-coral began to fall, toppling the several hundred yards to the floor below. As one, the Stormcasts fell back, scrambling to safety as the platform disintegrated.

Only Thostos ran on. To fall back now would leave the sorcerer and the Knight-Azyros, who must be held nearby, out of reach. The Lord-Celestant ignored the cries of his warriors and the furious heat of the bubbling stone beneath him as he rushed forwards, leaping between falling sections of stone. Before him the curving path that led to the summit collapsed, leaving a chasm of several feet in its wake. He did not stop his charge. He leapt into empty air, grasping for the far edge. He slammed into it with astonishing force, striking the ledge with his chest, feeling the air rush from his lungs. With a fierce effort he swung one leg up over the side, rolling onto the safety of the platform.

He saw the war party below, continuing to send a torrent of bolts and arrows up towards the roof of the tower. As he watched, the chimera opened its wings and dived down at them once more. Gritting his teeth, Thostos dragged himself to his feet.

‘Very impressive, my friend,’ came a voice from above. ‘I admit, I was hoping I would have you all to myself.’

Ahead, the horned warrior floated on his disc of metal, burning glaive held easily in one hand. The platform at the summit was wide and open, circling around the colossal structure of the hanging orb. The air was thick with the stench of magic, but Thostos could see no sign of the Knight-Azyros.

He drew his hammer and sword, and strode forwards.

‘First you die,’ he said, aiming his runeblade at his opponent. ‘Then I find my messenger. Then I shatter this tower around your twitching corpse.’

‘Kill the flame-breather,’ shouted Prosecutor Zannus, calling another hammer to his hand. He hurled the weapon, and there was an explosion of purple blood and green scales as it struck the beast upon the neck. The chimera screeched in rage and beat its wings furiously, hauling its bulky form into the air once more. As it did so, it kicked against the guardrail with its powerful hind legs, launching itself across the central chasm with shocking speed.

‘Brother!’ shouted Atrin, but it was already too late.

Zannus’ eyes went wide and he tried to lift himself out of the way, but there was no time. The chimera barrelled into him, and its bird-like head snapped out to clamp down upon the Stormcast’s radiant wings. The beast hurtled across the gap and into the far wall, crushing Zannus against the hard coral, which crumbled and split under the weight of the collision. When the creature turned, the Prosecutor’s corpse was nowhere to be seen. Another warrior recalled to the halls of Reforging.

‘We have to take that thing down,’ said Atrin, taking aim and sending a sigmarite bolt whistling into the creature’s back.

‘You think so, brother?’ shouted Liberator Pollux, with mock incredulity. ‘Its hide is thicker than your skull.’

As he spoke, the creature whirled again, leathery wings beating furiously as it circled the walkway, strafing them with another gout of flame. Stone-coral melted away beneath their feet, and Atrin rolled aside just in time as the guardrail upon which he was leaning crumbled and fell down the central chasm, shattering into a thousand pieces on the floor, far below.

It was then that Judicator Atrin did something very foolish indeed. He drew his gladius and took a step backwards, waiting on the precipice of the disintegrating balcony until the chimera swooped past once more, and then leapt into the empty air.

He slammed into the beast’s flank with jarring force, sliding down its tough and leathery skin until he stabbed the gladius deep into its flesh. The chimera screamed and dipped its wings to throw him off. Straining with effort, he managed to lock his legs around its lower back, feeling a stab of agony as one of the barbed spikes that ran down its back sank into the flesh of his leg. The chimera wheeled lower, dragged down by the weight of the Judicator. Atrin yanked the gladius free and sunk it in again, feeling hot blood seep across his armour. He glanced below, saw the edge of a lower gallery rushing towards him, and tried to roll up and onto the beast’s back before the impact crushed him. He made it just in time, felt the hard stone rush past his cheek.

Something struck him in the neck, and clamped on hard. He glanced back, groaning as the armour at his shoulder crumpled and crushed his flesh. It was the monster’s tail, tipped with the head of yet another beast, a smaller version of the great draconic maw. Its jagged teeth clamped down and the tail flexed back, trying to drag him free. He swept the gladius over his shoulder, felt it hack deep into the flesh of the tail. He was so near to falling now, and the world was a dizzying blur as the chimera spiralled lower and lower, three heads screeching horribly.

With a final slice he hacked through the tail, leaving the head clamped mercilessly to his shoulder. He grabbed a tail spike to steady himself, hauled himself forwards, and drove his gladius deep into the chimera’s neck, feeling the wicked blade slice through meat and carve deep into bone. Another howl of pain, so high-pitched he felt his eardrums throb in protest. As he and the dying creature tumbled and spun in the air, he glimpsed the floor of the tower, only a few paces away and rushing up at him with horrifying speed.

He closed his eyes and waited for the impact.

The glaive came forwards, viper-quick, carving a glaring line of flame through the air as it did. Thostos swayed back, let the weapon sail past an inch from his chest, and made to return the strike with one of his own.

The disc upon which Lorchis stood hurtled towards him. The wicked teeth upon its edge crashed into his shoulder, and he was knocked to the floor. The Chaos warrior continued to soar into the air, laughing.

‘This stubbornness, it is all so pointless,’ said Lorchis, as the Lord-Celestant hauled himself upright. ‘The Lord of Change sees all, insignificant one. You truly believe you can fight that which is infinite and all-knowing? Your defiance does not shock us, warrior of justice. It does not take us unaware. It is but the latest act of futility in a cycle that has spun on for eternity. You will fall. Your kind always does.’

‘He told you nothing,’ Thostos said, his voice cold, even and utterly assured.

Lorchis stiffened in anger, and when he spoke again his tone had lost its teasing quality.

‘You cannot take a sword to fate itself, you fool,’ he spat. ‘You cannot fight that which has already been decided.’

‘We can. We have. Now cease your prattle, and meet your death.’

With a roar, the warrior came at him. The disc rushed forwards, towards the Lord-Celestant’s chest. The burning glaive sliced through the air, spitting flame. Thostos went down low, feeling the heat of his enemy’s weapon scorch the air above his head. Lorchis sent the disc into a spin, the blades cutting through the air at furious speed as the strange device descended. Thostos darted aside, searching for an opening as he went.

His opponent was skilled. He used the disc’s wicked blades to keep the Lord-Celestant at bay, and even when Thostos managed to get inside that guard, the Chaos champion’s fine buckler snapped across to deflect the strike.

Lorchis came forwards again, glaive leading. It scraped across the Lord-Celestant’s pauldron as he dodged to the side, and the sigmarite bubbled where its flaming edge touched the metal. The disc whipped past Thostos, and one of the hooked blades sank deep into his chest plate. Metal pushed painfully against his ribs, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air, dragged along with the strange device. Lorchis laughed, a shrill, joyless sound, and sank the flaming glaive into Thostos’ shoulder. The white-hot edge of the weapon tore through his fine armour, and the Lord-Celestant felt bone shatter. Then the glaive struck him again, this time just under the throat. The strength of the blow levered him free of the disc’s protruding blade, and he found himself falling. His skin cooked and peeled, and he grunted in pain as melted sigmarite seared its way down his chest. He struck the ground hard, rolled and cracked his skull against the wall of the tower.

Lorchis descended from above, still chuckling to himself.

‘Oh, it has been a long time since I have fought such a battle,’ he said, and dipped his horned helm towards Thostos in a mock bow. ‘Most enjoyable. I will come to value your company, I think, over the long years. So many secrets to discover.’

He peered at the Lord-Celestant, and inched closer.

‘That is considering that I have not already killed you, of course,’ he muttered. ‘Your kind is stubborn, redoubtable even. Yet even the greatest of us have our breaking point, do we not? Just look to your winged friend for proof of that.’

Cold anger flowed into Thostos, an icy torrent of vengeful fury that swept away his pain and his exhaustion. The agony that lanced through his chest and burned flesh faded to irrelevance. Only vengeance remained. Pure and honest vengeance, a link to the man he had once been. Perhaps the only link that yet endured.

He stood, and one hand reached up to wrench free his helm. The metal clattered to the floor, and Lorchis flinched as he saw the twin pits of blue fire that burned within the Lord-Celestant’s pitiless death mask of a face. There was no mercy in that gaze. It promised only a swift and painful death.

‘I am Sigmar’s wrath made manifest,’ Thostos growled, feeling the truth, the power in the words as he spoke them. ‘I am the hammer of retribution. I bring the God-King’s justice for every life you have taken in service to darkness.’

Lorchis spat a curse, and sent his disc streaking towards the Lord-Celestant, his glaive held ready like a tourney lance.

An eye-blink before the glaive spitted him, Thostos ducked to the side, feeling the rush of air as the disc’s ravenous blades whistled past his head. He dropped to one knee and spun, sweeping his cloak out wide as he did so and muttering the arcane phrase that activated the garment’s dormant magic. The cloud of glittering hammers burst forth from the ornamentations at the hem of the cloak. Lorchis was turning to get the disc back in line for another charge as each missile slammed home, blasting him from his perch. The spinning contraption whirled away, smashing into the hanging orb. Sparks and shards flew as the blades hewed into the crystal and skipped away. The fallen Chaos lord dragged himself upright, but Thostos was already upon him, striking relentlessly with hammer and runeblade.

Lorchis blocked the hammer, and Thostos ignored the flash of pain as the flames washed across his gauntlet. The runeblade struck home, gouging into the Chaos champion’s ornate armour. Lorchis howled in pain, and stumbled backwards. He sliced his glaive out, and the weapon carved another deep line across the Lord-Celestant’s chest. Thostos barely felt the blow.

‘You… you cannot win,’ the lord of the tower wheezed. ‘Even if I fall here…’

‘Others will take your place. And they too will die,’ said Thostos.

He came forwards fast, raining blows from his dual weapons. His opponent was skilled. The glaive snapped back and forth, picking off the Lord-Celestant’s attacks and even scoring a couple of glancing blows as Lorchis whipped it back and forth with impressive speed. Yet Thostos did not relent. He pushed forwards, battering away at Lorchis with no pause until the wall was at the mortal’s back. He hammered the glaive out wide, and before his enemy could bring it back to block, he sliced out with a diagonal cut of his runeblade. The blow severed Lorchis’ arm at the elbow, and he collapsed to the floor, grasping the bleeding stump. Thostos put the edge of his blade to Lorchis’ throat.

‘Where is he?’ he growled. ‘Where is the prisoner you found out in the forest? The angel.’

‘Well fought,’ panted the warrior, holding up his good hand in a gesture of surrender. ‘You have skill and fury in you. Too much for me. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you have the strength to unweave the great tapestry.’

Thostos paused. There was something in the man’s voice, some remnant of satisfaction. From a distance he heard a whistling sound, as if something was whipping through the air at an incredible speed.

Instinct took over. The Lord-Celestant fell to the side, turning as he did so. He saw the sorcerer lord’s metal disk fly through the air, cutting through the spot where he had been standing mere moments before. It carved neatly through Lorchis’ helm, just underneath his eyes. The rest of the Chaos lord’s body toppled over, gore dribbling from the bisected skull.

‘Justice,’ said Thostos, feeling a surge of righteous satisfaction. Yet his fury still simmered. The vermin in this tower still held the Knight-Azyros Capellon, and he would revisit every torment his brother had suffered upon their wretched hides.

The sounds of battle echoed from below, though he could no longer hear the screeching of the dread chimera. Time was running short. Doubtless the enemy was already regrouping, and they did not have the numbers for a protracted battle.

He glanced around the chamber. There was a single grand door, leading out towards a short corridor. Thostos was about to make his way across, when he heard a whisper from behind him.

‘Thostos Bladestorm,’ it said. ‘You seek me, my friend.’

He turned, runeblade raised.

Before him was the surface of the great orb, and within its depths the half-glimpsed faces that screamed and surged. Only one was still. An open, friendly face, now twisted in agony. Though the opaque crystal obscured the man’s features, Thostos recognised him at once.

‘Knight-Azyros Capellon,’ he said, approaching the lip of the summit. Below his feet the central chasm dropped away, many feet to the entrance chamber. ‘I am sorry we did not find you in time.’

‘The face shimmered, and the man gave a pained smile.

‘It was my fault,’ said Capellon. ‘I was careless. I jeopardised everything that Sigmar plans.’

‘No,’ said Thostos. ‘You did not give up your secrets. There is still time. Where do we muster, brother? Where do the forces of Sigmar gather?’

‘You must travel through the forest of crystals, and across the mountains to the north of the realmgate,’ said Capellon. ‘Look for the Nine Anvils, an ancient duardin fortress built into the cliffs. There lies your path. The coastal road is long, and dangerous, but it will lead you to the Silversands, and to the fields where our fellow warriors gather.’

Capellon screamed, and his image warped like a reflection in a rippling pool.

‘Now go!’ he screamed. ‘Before more of the enemy come. You cannot undo what they have done to me, brother. I am dead, and it is only foul sorcery that binds me here to suffer.’

Thostos looked around the floor. Great chains secured the orb to the ceiling, stretching from the top of the crystal to anchor points along the upper wall. They were forged of thick iron, the links as thick as a man’s torso.

‘You have done your duty,’ said the Lord-Celestant. ‘And I will not leave you here.’

For the second time in the last two days, Judicator Atrin awoke blearily to find himself lying broken and battered at the business end of a long fall. He glanced above, and could see the flicker of lightning that marked his fellow Stormcasts’ position. They were making their way down the tower, still exchanging arrows with whatever remained of the structure’s defenders.

Something wet covered his armour, and the ground beneath him was oddly soft. He shook his head, bleary-eyed, and looked down.

Oh yes, he had landed on the chimera.

Somehow he had survived the creature’s dying descent with little more than a few scrapes and bruises. True, every single bone in his entire body seemed to rattle like a bag of dice as he stood, but at least he could support his weight. He stumbled free of what remained of the chimera, and did his best to wipe the spattered remnants from his armour. Then he felt around until he found his gladius, and held it ready. The war party was descending, but they were still under assault. Just about the last thing Atrin wished to do was haul his battered form up all the way back up the tower, but he could hardly leave his fellows to battle their way down to the ground floor while he rested there.

He was just striding towards the circular walkway when the noise began. It was the sound of a fortress wall collapsing, or the sound of an avalanche crashing down a mountainside – yet oddly resonant. It was coming from far above him.

He glanced up. He could see the colossal orb at the very top of the tower. It seemed to be swaying. A torrent of dust and shattered stone was pouring down from the ceiling. The groaning, grinding sound continued. A chunk of the strange calcified coral almost as large as Atrin smashed to the ground beside him, and the impact sent him sprawling to the side. More rocks fell, and he began to drag himself around the edge of the room, towards the exit. There was one last apocalyptic crash overhead. Atrin glanced up. It almost looked as if the colossal orb was falling towards him, smashing its way down past gallery after gallery, picking up horrific speed as it came.

‘Throne of Sigmar,’ Atrin muttered, realising that the orb was in fact doing exactly that.

The Judicator had no choice but to run. Rocks and fragments of stone-coral exploded around him as he dashed towards the tower entrance. Shrapnel of chipped rock battered against his armour. He was only a few feet from the door when a slab of stone as big as one of Azyrheim’s great glass windows slammed into the floor, mere inches from carving him neatly in two. He staggered back and made the mistake of glancing up again. The gigantic orb was only a few seconds from impact.

With a final, straining effort, Atrin hurtled across the floor and threw himself bodily out of the main door to clatter painfully down the stone steps. There was a horrifying sound of impact, loud enough to send blood pouring from his ears, and then a sharper, higher-pitched noise – the sound of a million glass windows shattering at once. He tucked his arms around his head and lay there as fragments of broken crystal whipped past his prone form. He heard them thudding into the ground, or skipping off the dull metal surface of the mountainside. It was several moments before he dared open his eyes and stand.

The ground was covered in every direction with fragments of shattered crystal and broken stone. The entrance to the tower had been shredded by the storm of projectiles, though since it had already lain toppled against the cliff-side, it did not seem in danger of collapsing.

Strangest of all was the mist that spiralled out of the tower entrance and into the air. There were forms moving and shifting within, though Atrin could not make them out. Then there was the briefest crackle of light, and the mist evaporated.

He waited there, amongst the field of broken crystal, until the war party appeared in the doorway. Following behind was the Lord-Celestant himself. Atrin strode forwards.

‘Judicator?’ said Steelhide in surprise. ‘Sigmar’s blood, if you’re not the luckiest fellow in the chamber. How did you survive that fall?’

‘The monster was kind enough to provide me with ample cushioning,’ Atrin said. There was a round of laughter, and more than one warrior shook his head in disbelief.

‘There will be time to swap tales later,’ said Lord-Celestant Thostos. ‘We have what we need. Now we must leave this place before more of the enemy arrive.’

The situation in the gatehouse tunnel was still dire, but Eldroc had no choice but to trust in the men to hold out a little longer. He made his way out of the packed corridor, shouting encouragement to the warriors as he went.

‘Hold them here, brothers,’ he ordered. ‘The Lord-Celestant will return, and we will drive the orruk before us.’

Eldroc had little faith that would be the case now. The Celestial Vindicators had cut down countless scores of the enemy, but now their own losses were taking their toll. They were losing cohesion, and that would spell their end.

He made his way out into the blazing sun of the inner courtyard, his Paladin retinue close behind, and emerged into a scene of chaos. The orruks had cleared the wall, and now the lines of battle had broken down entirely. Across the clearing the gleaming turquoise of the Celestial Vindicators clashed with the yellow iron of the orruks, and more of the creatures were leaping from the rampart stairs even as Eldroc and his men barrelled into the fray.

The Lord-Castellant took in the carnage in an instant, searching for the spot where he was most needed. On the left-hand side of the courtyard, a dwindling group of Liberators was battling a mob of five orruks that towered over their fellows. They were broader, more strongly muscled, and though their armour eschewed ornamentation, it was thicker and more garishly painted. Each figure bore a red hand-print across its ugly face and carried an array of crude yet savagely effective weaponry.

‘With me, Vindicators,’ Eldroc shouted, and headed in the direction of these painted warriors. Howling orruk faces bore down on him as he ran, but the Retributors of his personal retinue cleared the way ahead with brutal efficiency, their hammers sweeping out to send the enemy flying, limbs broken, skulls shattered.

The last of the Liberators fell, the orruk elites falling upon him with cleavers and axes, hacking and tearing at him until his head came free. The helm rolled across the floor, leaking blood, before it evaporated in a flash of light.

‘For vengeance!’ roared Eldroc, and crashed into the nearest of the warriors. The orruk reacted with astonishing speed, crossing its axes to intercept the Lord-Castellant’s falling halberd. Eldroc sent the weapon into a spin, and turned with it, sending the haft out in a horizontal strike that hit the creature in the face. Its ugly nose burst, and the orruk went into a frenzy, launching itself into the fray with both its weapons. There was little skill or thought to its wild swings, but they were effective nonetheless.

The Lord-Castellant gave ground, deflecting desperately with his halberd, but poor fortune saw him crash against another orruk behind him. He stumbled, just a step. The face-painted orruk’s axe crashed into his right pauldron, and the force of the impact sent him down on one knee. The brute at his back sensed a chance to spill blood and lunged forwards with its spiked mace. Eldroc ducked one shoulder, and the creature missed its swing and stumbled past, crashing into the face-painted orruk. The bigger creature hammered this new inconvenience to the ground, but the brief scuffle gave Eldroc a few precious seconds, and he did not waste them. He set his halberd, and rammed the tip of the weapon through the painted orruk’s throat. The creature’s brow furrowed, and it glanced down with almost comic confusion as its lifeblood drained away. Eldroc twisted the weapon, and sent the greenskin tumbling to the ground.

Two more orruks bounded forwards in the dying brute’s wake. He hacked one down, scything deep into its thigh and sending it sprawling to the floor. The other was close behind – too close for Eldroc to possibly get his halberd up in time to block the axe it held raised and ready to swing.

An arrow whipped past the Lord-Castellant’s head, and sank into the beast’s eye. The orruk howled, one hand reaching to pluck the shaft loose, and Eldroc sank his halberd’s blade deep into its skull. As the orruk fell, he glanced across in the direction the arrow had come from. A few yards behind him, Alzheer knelt on the rampart stairway, calmly loosing arrow after arrow into the chaos beneath her. She seemed a tiny, helpless figure indeed amongst the chaos of the battle, dwarfed by both the towering Stormcasts and the savage orruks.

The several dead orruks lying before her with white-feathered shafts protruding from eyes and throats put the lie to that.

‘Priestess,’ Eldroc said, making his way towards her. The arrival of his force had pushed back the orruks momentarily, though that would not last for long. Even now, more of the savages were dropping down amongst the defenders, and light flared across the wall as more Vindicators made the journey back to Azyrheim. Redbeak hopped down the steps and came to a halt by Alzheer’s side, head and feathers spattered with dark blood.

‘Lord Eldroc,’ she said, patting the gryph-hound affectionately on the flank. ‘Do we yet hold the gate?’

‘For a few minutes longer at least,’ he said. ‘I believe the Lord-Celestant said you should rest, my lady.’

She laughed. ‘It hardly matters now, does it? Our time has run out. The orruks will slaughter every living being in this fortress, sound asleep or not.’

Eldroc took in the battlefield. The orruks were everywhere. The section of wall directly over the gatehouse was the only spot that the Stormcasts still held, and even then just barely. With every passing second more warriors fell, and the closer the end came.

‘A fair point,’ he conceded. ‘Though you need not fall here. You could still make for the mountain tunnels. It is a chance at survival, at least.’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It ends here, one way or the other. I will die fighting by your side. It is what Zi’Mar would wish.’

‘It would be an honour on my part, priestess. Whatever happens here, the orruks in this region will be but a shadow of their former selves. Without their leader to keep them in line, they will fall to infighting and squabbling. Take comfort in that, for your people will find them far less of a danger in the coming days. At least for a time.’

‘I hope that is so,’ she said, and flashed him a tired smile. Then she furrowed her brow in confusion.

Eldroc heard it too, a thunder that reverberated through his bones, shaking his teeth and pounding in his skull. The orruks beneath the wall also noticed the growing noise. They turned, confused, to the source of the sound. It was coming from the pass. The curved walls of the canyon channelled and amplified the sound, until it seemed as though the ground itself would tear apart, ruptured in the advent of some catastrophic tectonic disaster.

‘What new calamity assails us?’ Eldroc muttered, as he and Alzheer raced up the steps to the rampart wall.

The answer emerged from the mouth of the pass like the surging tide of a flash-flood. A carpet of brown and tan flesh, a thousand, thousand powerful limbs and heavy bodies surging together in the unity of panic. They screamed and snorted as they ran, drowning out even the bellowed chants of the orruks. Above the oncoming apocalypse, Thostos saw spiralling, swooping figures with wings of silver flame, hurling streaks of lightning into the throng and dropping low to skim above the beasts’ terrified heads. They were herding the animals, Eldroc realised. The leader of the flying warriors dived in an audacious corkscrew, pulling up at the very tip of the spear of living flesh, and Eldroc saw a bright blue plume, radiant in the breaking sunlight.

‘Goldfeather,’ he said, and shook his head in disbelief.

The stampede hit the orruk flank like the fist of a vengeful god. Bodies were hurled high into the air, to tumble like ragdolls into the surge. Others were ground underneath the appalling weight or spitted on vicious horns and carried along with unstoppable momentum.

With nowhere else to turn, and their simple minds ruled by sheer terror, the mass of herd animals continued to plough into the obstacle before them, rolling through the massed infantry and cavalry with ease. In a moment, the fragile cohesion of the leaderless orruk horde collapsed. Great swathes turned to run. Not to flee, but to give chase to this new and unexpected aggressor. Orruks leapt onto the backs of passing herd-beasts, hooting and whooping with delighted stupidity as they were carried along. Others hacked and smashed at any animals they could see, only exacerbating the panicked violence of the stampede. All was chaos, and the sounds of screaming, roaring, bellowing and the relentless pounding of hooves rose to a deafening crescendo.

In a moment, the single-minded aggression of the orruks was switched from the assault of the fortress to the reckless pursuit of this new foe. It mattered not that the herd-beasts were simple-minded animals. They promised violence and chaos, and so the tide of orruks joined in.

‘To the gate!’ ordered Eldroc. It was now or never. If they could drive back the distracted orruks that remained, they could still taste victory this day.

‘Lord-Castellant!’ came a voice from on high.

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldeather dropped from the sky, hurling a javelin that crackled with arcs of white light. The missile struck a climbing orruk in the back, pinning it neatly to the exterior wall. Another projectile appeared in the herald’s hands, and as he levelled out over the heads of the nearest orruks, he thrust it like a lance to pierce the chest of another creature. Around him, more and more of the creatures were driven from the wall, and they were no longer replaced in an instant by their fellows.

‘I see you decided to take on an entire army by yourself, Lord-Castellant,’ he said, as he dropped neatly to the rampart wall beside Eldroc, his fabulous, gleaming wings tucking neatly behind his back. ‘Perhaps a little rash, though you seem to be doing rather well, considering.’

‘Your timing is impeccable, Prosecutor-Prime,’ said Eldroc, his heart flooding with relief. ‘We had thought you lost.’

‘Not today, my Lord. My warriors and I… We are the last of the Argellonites left standing.’ The Prosecutor-Prime’s voice cracked just slightly as he spoke. He removed his helm, and his stark blue eyes looked at the Lord-Castellant imploringly.

‘I left him there,’ he said, quietly. ‘In the canyon. He fell, and I left him unavenged. Him, and the rest of my chamber.’

Eldroc placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘Lord-Celestant Argellon will be filled with pride when he hears what you did. You saved the mission, Evios. Without your intervention we would have surely fallen. I will tell Mykos of your ingenuity, when he returns from the forge.’

Goldfeather nodded.

‘I cannot believe that you did this,’ said Alzheer, shaking her head and staring at the chaos unfolding before them. Thousands of orruk dead littered the plain. If they had re-gathered then, the creatures may still have carried the day, but all thought of taking the Dreadhold seemed to have left them.

‘Well,’ said Goldfeather, stepping to the rampart alongside the woman, and gazing out at the carnage alongside her. ‘It was actually something you said that gave me the idea.’

‘It was?’

‘You told us that everything on the plain wants us dead. I rather thought the same thing might apply to the orruks.’

Night had fallen by the time Lord-Celestant Thostos made his way back through the realmgate. He brought with him the sad tale of Knight-Azyros Capellon’s demise, but also the hopeful news of the mustering point at the Silversands.

‘You held the fortress,’ he said, as he saluted Eldroc. ‘As I knew you would.’

‘I think we have Prosecutor-Prime Goldfeather to thank for that more than I,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘And the men. I have never seen them fight so fiercely.’

They kept a heavy guard through the night, familiar as they now were with the myriad dangers of the Roaring Plains. Though they could hardly relax, the immediate danger had passed, and songs of praise to Sigmar and of the glory of the Argellonites Warrior Chamber rang throughout the mountains until dawn.

As the sun broke, they were greeted by yet another gladdening sight. Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden rose from his vigil at the realmgate, having at last seared the fell influence of Chaos from the ancient structure. With the portal cleansed, the path to the mustering point was made safe. It was time to leave the Roaring Plains. The warriors of the Celestial Vindicators arrayed themselves before the Manticore Realmgate, their sea-green armour gleaming and radiant despite the scars and dents that the last few days had left upon them.

Alzheer stayed long enough to watch the march of the Stormcasts, and Eldroc saw tears brimming in her eyes as the glorious warriors fell into perfect order. Above them, on the walls of the Dreadhold, the comet of Sigmar still flew, fluttering in the soothing wind. The last of the clouds had parted, and the sky was a brilliant azure canvas. It was the first time that the heavens had been free of swirling clouds since the Stormcasts’ arrival.

As they watched, a single speck of light appeared from the west, and streaked across the endless expanse of blue. It left a searing contrail of white-orange across the sky, like the afterimage of staring into a raging fire.

Eldroc felt his heart soar at the sight. He said not a word as the light fell behind the mountains, and the glowing trail in its wake slowly faded from sight. He glanced at Alzheer. Tears streamed down her face, and she clutched the hound’s tooth necklace she carried in one trembling hand.

‘This is just the beginning,’ he told her. ‘More warriors will come from Azyr, priestess. All across the Mortal Realms the armies of Sigmar reclaim the land that was stolen from us. Wherever Sigmar’s light shines, we will find the remnants of his lost people. And we will bring them back.’

‘Hope,’ she said, simply, as she watched the banners of the Celestial Vindicators soar beneath the morning sun.

For once, and Eldroc could not help but praise the God-King for this unexpected boon, the Bladestorm Chamber did not come under attack as it wound its way through the foothills of dull brass towards the rally point. The warriors were tired and beaten, but still they remained in good voice as they marched. Battle-hymns echoed across the mountain range, and those gifted with musical talent or a strong singing voice began to compose their own odes to the bravery of the fallen Argellonites, and the heroism of Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon and his men.

‘When Mykos and his men return to the field the bonds between our chambers will be stronger than they have ever been,’ said Eldroc, as he caught up to his Lord-Celestant. Redbeak trilled in agreement, padding along in his wake.

‘His loss will be felt in the battles to come,’ said Thostos, with a nod. ‘Yet we have his sacrifice to thank that we can fight them at all. Had the full force of the orruks not been shattered at Splitskull Pass, the Dreadhold would have fallen to their assault.’

‘We prevailed,’ said Eldroc. ‘And now we march to a far greater challenge. The Ironholds are the greatest of the enemy’s bastions. It is said that no army could ever hope to break down their walls.’

‘No army but that which Sigmar has brought forth,’ said Thostos, as they rounded a pass and the ground fell away before them, sliced through by rivers of streaming silver that roared down from the west to form a wondrous estuary of shimmering, molten metal.

Yet it was not this sight that stole Eldroc’s breath.

Gathered on the estuary plain was the mightiest force that the Lord-Castellant had ever laid eyes upon. They mustered in their thousands, warriors from a dozen or more Stormhosts, banners fluttering in the wind. Everywhere one looked, there flew the icons of the God-King. The regal gold and purple of the Lions of Sigmar, soaring high above columns of glittering Liberators. The morose black of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, held aloft by grim swordsmen. Royal blues, fierce reds. The full panoply of Azyr’s finest warriors, arrayed in perfect order before them. Lines of cavalry mounted upon proud and noble dracoths, spears glinting in the moonlight. Angels and heralds of war swirling in the skies above, their trumpets and war-horns filling the air with a fierce and radiant harmony.

A force to sunder worlds. An army to strike down the gods themselves.

‘By Sigmar,’ he whispered.

‘Now the war begins in earnest, my friend,’ said Thostos. ‘Now the power of the God-King is truly unleashed. And the realms themselves will tremble at our passing.’

THE PRISONER OF THE BLACK SUN

Josh Reynolds

I still endure.

I still stand.

This realm is mine.

Spiders have spun their webs across my eyes, and worms burrow in my chest. But I still live. I yet stand against my enemies. I shall always do so, for I can do naught else. My will gutters and flares, like a fire newly stoked. The Great Necromancer awakens.

I still endure.

The Three-Eyed King crushed the ranks of my servants. His daemon-blade shattered my bones, and cleaved my heart in two. My rites and magics were torn asunder, my power broken on the altar of fate. My body was left to the dust, and to the dust I returned. My soul fell shrieking into the darkness as a black comet, streaking across the underworld, and the impact of it cracked the roots of this world.

I still endure.

Nagashizzar is toppled. Its great towers and basalt pillars are dust. Where it once stood, there is now only broken earth; in the streets where a thousand warriors marched, the only sound to be heard is the wailing of jackals.

Yet I still endure.

I have pulled down the sun, cracking the seals of the underworld, and dried the seas and burned the grasses. I have humbled my enemies and cast the earth into the sky, walking to and fro in the deep places, and still I am returned.

Nagash has risen.

Something stirs in the wild places of all that which is mine. Some power, stinking of the storm, comes slinking into my demesnes. I sit upon my throne in starless Stygxx and feel it rising all about me, drawing to it that which is mine. Souls slip my grasp, spirits flee my voice. Thieves and invaders stalk my realm. They think me gone.

I still endure.

Heed me. Listen to my words, those of you who have the wit to hear. The Realm of Death is my body. Its caverns are my bones, its peaks my crown. The realm is as large as my word, as small as my wish. I bestride the seas of the east, and shatter the mountains of the west. My throne is in the north, and my shadow in the south. Wherever you so seek, I am there. Wherever you make worship, so Nagash strides.

Whosoever believes in me, whosoever follows my will, the will of Nagash, shall prosper. I have awakened, and my enemies shall know my name again. Seek out my foes, and make them yours. Seek out these thieves, and take from them as they have taken from me.

Hear me. Heed me.

Listen, and be joyful.

Nagash is all, and all are one in Nagash.

Nagash has risen.

Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, gave voice to a full-throated bellow. He brought his hammer down on the crimson helm of a howling bloodreaver and the warrior fell, its skull split in two. Tarsus whirled to open the belly of a second opponent, the sword he held in his other hand slashing in a deadly arc. His weapons crackled with holy lightning as he struck out left and right, dropping foemen with every blow.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he roared.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply, from the small host of Stormcasts that streamed in his wake. Liberators, Prosecutors, Judicators and Retributors – all were clad in star-forged sigmarite, and bearing weapons of the same material. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not rich gold. Their shoulder guards bore their sigil – the curling white slashes of a bull’s horns – and, like their heavy shields, were of deepest regal blue. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire. Now, they swept them out to smash down any enemy who managed to avoid the attention of their Lord-Celestant.

He stepped over the body of a bloodreaver and looked ahead. Through the ranks of the enemy, the path they had been following since they had arrived some days previous was visible. Sigmar had cast his lightning down upon the shattered husk of a once-proud citadel, now overgrown with grey lichen and nodding, vast-rooted trees. A carpet of yellowing grass had clung to the cracked stones of the courtyard, obscuring the heaps of bones that clustered thickly throughout. The thunderous arrival of the Stormcasts in the Vale of Sorrows had set thousands of crows to flight, and a black cloud of the croaking birds had followed them ever since.

The path ahead had previously been a road, but was now mostly overgrown with the stiff, yellow grasses that seemed to cover this region. Ancient ruins and shattered hovels stretched out across the landscape to either side of the path. At one time there had been a city here. Now it was only a howling wilderness full of enemies and carrion birds.

‘Who shall win Sigmar’s favour?’ Tarsus cried, swinging his hammer over his head. He brought it down on a bloodreaver with bone-shattering force. With his sword, he chopped through the deplorable icon the blood-cultist had borne and trampled it beneath his feet.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Stormcasts around him shouted, as one.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tarsus echoed as he whipped his sword around in a deadly pattern, splitting the gullets of the enemy who pressed close. He smashed the dying bloodreavers aside, using his greater weight to grind them under.

Tarsus’ warriors called him the Bull-Heart, a name earned at the Battle of the Cerulean Shore, when Tarsus had crashed in amongst the enemy ranks with a ferocity few could equal. It was a fitting war-name for both he and his Warrior Chamber, and they bore it with pride. Their swords were as horns, their hammers were as hooves, and they employed both against the enemies of Sigmar in equal measure.

‘Smash them,’ he bellowed. ‘Grind them under, in the name of Sigmar and the Realm Celestial!’

Bodies littered his path as he drove forwards, into the very teeth of the foe. The bloodreavers were maniacs, but mortal, and none who were such could stand before Tarsus. He was a Stormcast Eternal, and in him flowed the might of Sigmar Heldenhammer. He roared and stamped, battering opponents from his path as he led the way towards the knot of heavily armoured blood warriors that formed the raging heart of the enemy battle line. The latter charged to meet him, chanting the name of the Blood God as they smashed aside their own followers in their eagerness to come to grips with the Hallowed Knights.

‘Who will be remembered?’ Tarsus cried.

‘Only the faithful,’ thundered his Stormcasts as the leading retinues of Liberators came to grips with the blood warriors. Spread out in a line, they closely followed the vanguard of Retributors and Decimators led by their Lord-Celestant.

Tarsus caught one of the blood warriors in the belly with his shoulder, and flipped the frothing berserker over his back even as he plunged on without slowing. The hammer of a Retributor from one of the retinues marching behind him slammed down, ensuring that the blood warrior remained where he’d fallen. Tarsus caught a second across the head with his hammer, and rammed his sword into the belly of a third, plunging it all the way to the hilt. His blade became lodged in the baroque plates of the blood warrior’s armour, forcing him to spend precious moments wrenching it free. Even as he did so, a saw-toothed axe crashed down on his shoulder plate.

The force of the blow drove him to one knee. A second blow clipped his head, and he teetered off balance. Brass and crimson shapes surrounded him, and axes covered in daemonic sigils chopped down. For every one he turned aside two caught him, drawing sparks from the sigmarite plates. No blow had yet pierced his armour, but it was only a matter of time.

‘Hold fast, Bull-Heart,’ a voice thundered.

Lightning speared down, washing over Tarsus and his attackers. He grinned fiercely as the blood warriors shuddered and jerked in the clutches of the storm. Smoke boiled from their mouths and eye sockets, and what flesh was visible beneath their armour was charred black.

Tarsus surged to his feet and caught one of the smoke-wreathed blood warriors beneath the chin with his hammer. The warrior pitched backwards and then lay still. Tarsus hacked another down and turned to greet his rescuer. ‘Nicely done, Ramus,’ he said. ‘A few more moments and I might have been sorely pressed indeed.’

‘Think on that, the next time you find yourself so eager to meet the foe that you outpace the rest of us,’ the Lord-Relictor of the Bull-Hearts said. ‘There are not so many of us that we can spare you, Tarsus.’

Like all those of his rank, Ramus of the Shadowed Soul bore weapons and armour replete with icons of faith, death and the storm. It fell to him to keep the souls of the Hallowed Knights of his Warrior Chamber from the gloom of the underworld with words and fire.

Tarsus nodded. ‘I shall. But for now – show them your power, my friend.’

Ramus raised his reliquary and murmured a soft prayer, his words lost amidst the clangour of battle. The sky overhead was already dark, and roiled and jagged as spears of lightning struck the enemy, burning them to ash or reducing them to stumbling, screaming torches. Tarsus raised his hammer, bringing his Stormcasts to a halt as the lightning continued to strike again and again, until all was silent, save for the soft crackle of flames.

‘Who will be victorious?’ Tarsus murmured, as he gently tapped his Lord-Relictor on the shoulder with his hammer.

‘Only the faithful,’ Ramus intoned, glancing at Tarsus. ‘The road ahead is clear, Lord-Celestant. We are free to continue our march.’

‘Indeed, and we shouldn’t tarry,’ Tarsus said, as he signalled for his retinues to fall into a proper marching order.

The Stormcasts swung fluidly into position with an ease born of centuries of training. Liberators moved to the fore and flanks, encircling the Judicators, while the Prosecutors swooped overhead. The retinues of the winged warriors would range ahead of the host as it marched, keeping a keen eye out for any more would-be ambushers.

Not that such a tactic had succeeded yet, and nor would it if Tarsus had anything to say about it. Had he been anything other than a Stormcast Eternal, he might have taken the continued attacks for an omen, but fear had been burned out of him long ago and left only faith in its wake. He and his warriors were heroes, their valour proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their reforging. The Hallowed Knights had been the fourth Stormhost to be founded, the ranks of their Warrior Chambers filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle – and been heard – and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause.

Tarsus could but dimly recall the days of his own mortality. He remembered the weight of his sword and armour, and the rustle of a war cloak of deepest purple. He remembered screaming himself hoarse on the stone battlements of a burning citadel as red, lean-limbed daemons scrambled up the walls and across the causeways towards him and those he led. He remembered a name – Tarsem – and a word – Helstone – and the moment a monstrous shadow had fallen across him and the air had writhed beneath the beat of great wings. Then a roar, and… nothing. Nothing until he’d awoken in Sigmaron, forged anew.

That was the way of it, and Tarsus was glad. His enemies had not changed, but now he had the power to meet them, and break them. He was Stormcast, and they would learn to fear that name, before the end. His reverie was soon broken by Ramus.

‘This is a fell place,’ Ramus said, as he and Tarsus led the host.

‘Parts of it, yes,’ Tarsus said. He thought of the things they’d seen since arriving: strange hourglass-shaped mountains that rose along the far horizon, and clumps of pale flowers that softly sighed when one walked past them.

‘A land of endings and silent decay,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘This is a place of whispers, where forgotten ghosts wander roads and paths that lead nowhere. A place where mountains crumble only to be raised anew with the sun, and birds and beasts are born and die in the same day. All is in decline here, though I know not whether it is the doing of our foes or the dread master of this realm.’ He looked at Tarsus. ‘Do you think he will listen?’

‘I do not know,’ Tarsus said. ‘Nagash betrayed Sigmar once. Mayhap he will do so again. But that is not for us to worry over… Our concern is to gain audience with him and make common cause, so that we might begin to wrest this realm from the enemy.’

‘But first we have to find him in this wilderness,’ Ramus said.

They had been searching for a way into the underworld since their arrival – one of the legendary Nine Gates into the underworld of Stygxx. The Great Necromancer had vanished, disappeared into the depths where none could find him. But Sigmar had set his scribes the centuries-long task of scouring the ancient records, compiled long before the Allpoints War, for any hint of where the Nine Gates might be. That knowledge had been passed on to the Stormcasts charged with seeking out Nagash. The Nine Gates had been housed in nine citadels, some massive and well-defended, and others so small as to be forever hidden from the eyes of the enemy. Nine Warrior Chambers had been despatched to find these structures and the gates secreted within their walls.

So far the gates had proven elusive, but Tarsus had hope; Sigmar would not have sent them to this place were victory not achievable. A gate was within reach, somewhere. And they would find it.

The trail grew rougher and steeper as the Stormcasts marched on, leaving the detritus of battle far behind them, winding through verdant fields that withered in the moonlight only to flourish once more as the sun rose, and trees that shuddered and sighed in the slightest of breezes. The sky overhead was pale and dim, even in the middle of the day, as if the sun feared to show its face in the Realm of Death. The crows were still overhead, circling and wheeling amongst the Prosecutors as they swooped above on wings of lightning.

‘Aye,’ Tarsus said. ‘And we will do so, even if we must fight our way across this land to do it.’ They had come into conflict with the deranged servants of the Ruinous Powers more than once since their arrival. The worshippers of the Blood God were as thick as fleas in the crags around them. The Realm of Death was under siege, and every peak and valley was infested with the followers of the Dark Gods. He shook his head. ‘Though I’d not turn down aid in that regard, if it were offered.’

A cry from above caught his attention, and Tarsus looked up. One of the Prosecutors swooped low and pointed towards a rocky outcrop that rose abruptly from the surrounding landscape, towering over the bare trees.

‘Something ahead – a structure of some sort at the top,’ he cried. Tarsus waved them forwards, the winged warriors hurtling into the distance, towards the dome-roofed ruin that occupied the summit of the tor.

‘Another ruin,’ Ramus said.

‘And perhaps a way into the underworld,’ Tarsus said. He raised his hammer, signalling to his retinues. ‘Liberators to the flanks, shields out,’ he said, his voice carrying over the gleaming ranks of his Warrior Chamber.

Liberator retinues moved to the flanks of the formation, shields at the ready, in case there was an ambush in the offing. If it were the place they sought, it could be defended and such a place might well provide refuge for warbands like the ones that had relentlessly attacked them since their arrival. With a single gesture from Tarsus, shields raised over the heads of the Stormcasts and to the sides, transforming the Stormhost into a veritable serpent of sigmarite. Their protection allowed them to weather arrows, rocks and even sorcery as they moved. Satisfied, Tarsus swung his hammer towards the ruin.

‘Forwards,’ he bellowed.

A wide path wound around the outcrop and led to the top. Tarsus led the way, and saw that the path ahead was lined with skulls as he rounded the slope. Mounted on spikes of brass and iron, the skulls twitched and champed yellow, cracked teeth, as if in protestation of their fate. Bones were scattered below them, mixed with bits of rusty armour and broken weapons, and piled up in drifts alongside the path. Tarsus stared at the skulls, pity warring with disgust. ‘They still live,’ Tarsus murmured. ‘Even now.’

‘No, Tarsus,’ Ramus said. ‘They do not. And that is the horror of it. Nothing in this realm ever truly dies, even now,’ he said, looking at the skulls. ‘Their souls are bound here, in chains of magic of the darkest sort.’

Tarsus shook his head. ‘Keep moving,’ he called over his shoulder.

More bones awaited them at the summit of the tor. They were scattered and in piles – some whole, though most cracked and broken. Crows hopped among the heaps, cawing to one another. Everywhere dolorous icons and foul standards, marked with sigils of murder and slaughter, had been stabbed into the rocky slope. Jawbones and finger bones hung from many of these, softly clattering in the breeze.

‘We are not the first to come here,’ Ramus said.

‘No,’ Tarsus replied.

The structure crouched ahead of them, partially built into the massive fang-like crag of rock that topped the outcrop, and resembled nothing so much as a dome. Its walls curved outward in an immense semicircle from the crag, dominating the slope below despite the ragged gaps in their length. A curved roof surmounted the walls, resting in the crook of the crag, crows circling it in great numbers. Vast symbols had been carved into the outer walls – symbols representing the sun, moon, stars and other, more esoteric shapes.

‘It’s as large as any citadel I’ve seen,’ Tarsus said. ‘Though in worse condition than most.’ Despite the state of it, he could see that it had taken great skill to shape the stone. Sundials and dry fountains decorated the courtyard, and Tarsus thought that it might once have been a beautiful place before the occurrence of whatever evil had befallen it. As Tarsus studied it, he felt a pang of something – sadness, perhaps, or the twitch of some long forgotten memory, newly stirred – and his hands tightened on his weapons.

‘I have seen this place before,’ he murmured.

‘Lord-Celestant?’ Ramus asked.

Tarsus shook his head, irritated. ‘I’m fine. This place – there is something about it.’ Overhead, the Prosecutors had dropped onto the dome, scattering the crows, who croaked in agitation. The Stormcasts moved into the ruins and through the remains of what had once been an outer wall, collapsed for many years into irregular piles of stones and shattered columns.

Tarsus left several retinues of Judicators and Liberators on guard in the courtyard and led the rest of his warriors into the ruin. More bones greeted them inside the gargantuan entrance hall: crushed, splintered and scattered about at random. The entrance itself was composed of heavy stone slabs, marked by more symbols – suns and moons, comets and falling stars, all carefully carved into the rock face.

Tarsus traced one of the latter with his fingers as he passed, wondering why it all seemed so familiar.

‘What was this place?’ he asked, as he gazed up at the faded mural that had been painted on the curve of the roof above, depicting a vast field of stars and a black-cloaked scythe-wielding figure hard at work, reaping a cosmic crop.

‘An observatory, perhaps,’ Ramus said, looking around. ‘There are places in the Nihiliad Mountains that this reminds me of. They were places of contemplation, for stargazers and sky-worshippers, maybe this is one. This outcrop is the highest point in the vale – a perfect place to watch the night sky.’

‘Perhaps, but watch it for what?’ Tarsus said. ‘The stars in this realm are all askew, and the night sky is in upheaval.’

‘It was not always so,’ Ramus said. He gestured to the strange carvings that marked the walls. Tarsus thought they resembled the star-fields depicted in the mural above. ‘I suspect that these are the patterns of the stars as they were, before the coming of Chaos.’

‘As they could be again,’ Tarsus replied. He pointed down the corridor with his hammer. ‘There. The central chamber.’ He moved through the archway at the end of the hall and into the heart of the observatory. Despite its outward facade, the observatory was, in reality, merely a single, immense room.

The central chamber was massive – easily large enough to accommodate a hundred men – with high vaulted ceilings that curved upward to meet at a central open skylight of stone. Crows clustered about the circumference of the skylight, staring down at the Stormcasts below. A massive dais occupied the centre of the chamber, directly beneath the stone. Sloped, circular steps led upwards to an enormous wheel-like orrery, crafted from black iron and made in the shape of a sun. The orrery was larger than three men, and its colossal rings were spread outward, so that the dull light from above streamed down through the holes in them, casting weird shadows upon the walls and floor of the chamber.

Ramus gazed at the orrery. ‘More stars,’ he said, his voice echoing through the chamber. ‘The holes in the iron correspond to the patterns on the walls. This used to be a place of study and contemplation.’ He sounded almost wistful.

‘Now it is nothing save a curiosity,’ Tarsus said, looking around.

As with the rocky slopes outside, the floor of the chamber was obscured by broken bones and scattered pieces of armour. All the walls were covered in faded murals and tenacious lichen, except one that was occupied solely by a basket-hilted sword, wedged deep into the stone. Dead clumps of the lichen marked the floor beneath the blade, and the steel had turned cracked and powdery where it had touched the stone. Something about the blade bothered him. He felt a chill, though he could not say why.

‘We should go. I was wrong, there is nothing for us here,’ he said.

‘Tarsus, wait. Look at the orrery,’ Ramus called out. Tarsus turned towards the great dais and peered at the orrery. He blinked, startled. There was something caught in the rings. No, not caught, he realised; trapped. He hadn’t seen it before, because it had been hidden by the rings. But now, he could see it clearly.

Quickly he climbed the dais, Ramus one step behind him. ‘It’s a man,’ Tarsus said.

‘Alive?’ Ramus asked. Around the dais, the Stormcasts spread throughout the chamber. Though they were wary, they were curious about this realm and all it held. Many of them, after all, might have stood in this very chamber in centuries past. They might even have died in its defence, or in defence of any one of the great and shattered citadels thrust up from the dry sod of these lands like scattered tombstones.

‘I do not think so,’ Tarsus said, softly. The orrery moved, albeit very slowly, clicking and creaking along its runnel, and allowed the sunlight to flow through the holes in the iron. The man’s body was held aloft by brass spikes hammered through his wrists and into the curve of one of the orrery’s rings, leaving him to dangle within a makeshift cage. Dried blood coated the marble flesh of his bare arms and head, staining the ornate armour he wore on his torso and legs. Wounds marked his arms and face. His armour too was marked, and by many weapons. A tattered crimson cloak was pooled on the ground at his feet, as if it had been ripped from him and then summarily discarded. The body stank of blood and death, and the aquiline features were slack.

Something about the dead man’s face held Tarsus’ attention. It was not familiar, and yet… was. Were you there, in that final battle when I proved my worth to Sigmar? But how could that be, for that was centuries ago, the Lord-Celestant thought.

‘Help me move these rings.’ Tarsus caught hold of the outer ring and began to push it back, so that the others folded into it. The metal squealed as rusted joints and hinges were propelled into motion. ‘We must release him,’ he said, looking at Ramus. ‘Whoever he was, no man deserves such a fate.’

Ramus did not question him, and together the two Stormcast Eternals managed to move the ancient mechanism so that the body was no longer trapped out of reach.

Ramus caught hold of the dead man’s jaw and looked to Tarsus. ‘These wounds on his flesh – the followers of the Blood God are known for their brutality to those taken in battle. Perhaps he had the ill luck to be taken alive…’

‘Come… closer… and mayhap… I shall tell you.’

Tarsus drew his sword as the stink of old blood washed over them. ‘Ramus, beware,’ he said.

The body twitched in its bonds. Metal scraped metal, and the battered head rose, eyes red and alight with a terrible need. Quicker than either Stormcast could react, the thing’s feet suddenly slid up to brace against the curve of the ring, and the body lunged forwards, held in check only by its pinned wrists.

Bones popped and shifted hideously as it snapped long fangs together, just shy of Ramus’ face. The Lord-Relictor stepped back, hammer ready, as the thing thrashed wildly, biting at the air in a frenzy. Around the dais Stormcasts snapped to attention, weapons raised. A retinue of Decimators began to move towards the dais, axes ready to chop the creature apart. Tarsus waved them back.

‘Hold,’ he rumbled. ‘Stand fast.’ Whatever this thing was, he was confident that he and the Lord-Relictor would be enough to handle it.

‘Enough,’ Ramus said. His hammer snapped out, catching the thing in the stomach, and knocking it from its perch. It squalled as it fell and the spikes tore its flesh. It dangled, shuddering, then coughed and looked up.

‘Haaaa…’ The vulpine jaws sagged, and a bloody stink swept over Tarsus again. The red eyes faded to orange, then yellow, and the tension drained from the dangling shape. ‘Do… do forgive me, I am… I am not at my best,’ the thing croaked.

Tarsus extended his hammer and used it to lift the creature’s head. ‘What are you?’

Even as he asked the question, he realised that he knew the answer. Vampire. The word was jostled loose from the depths of his memory. Had he encountered such creatures before, in his previous life?

Withered lips peeled back from long fangs, and the vampire gave a rattling laugh. ‘A better question might be… what are you?’ One sunken eye narrowed. ‘I smell… storms and clean water. You are not mortal men.’

‘Not for a long time,’ Tarsus said.

‘The same might be said of me, I suppose,’ the vampire rasped.

‘What is your name?’

‘What use is a name, when one is bound thus?’ The creature twitched its thin fingers, causing the brass spikes to screech against the iron rim of the orrery. It winced, in obvious pain. ‘If you release me, perhaps I shall tell you, eh? How curious are you?’

‘Not enough to release a monster,’ Tarsus said, lowering his hammer. ‘Vampires are not to be trusted. They lie as easily as other men breathe, and treachery festers in their veins.’ Even as he spoke, he wondered where the words came from. They felt familiar on his tongue, as if he’d spoken them before. Helstone – the word floated to the surface of his mind.

‘Then kill me,’ the vampire croaked. ‘I would be free of this place one way or another.’ The creature peered at Tarsus, and then gave a harsh chuckle. ‘Unless you lack the fortitude to do so, Stormcast?’

Tarsus’ eyes narrowed. The old, faded memories receded, as suspicion flared. He traded a glance with Ramus, and then replied, ‘I thought you didn’t know what we were.’

‘Did I say that?’ the vampire said. ‘I merely asked a question. The implications thereof were of your creation.’ He showed his fangs. ‘I know what you are, well enough.’

‘Why were you here?’ Tarsus demanded. ‘Speak plainly, or I will leave you here for the carrion birds,’ he said, gesturing to the crows gathered above.

‘Implying… what? That if I answer truthfully you’ll free me?’

‘Enough of this,’ Ramus said. He looked at Tarsus. ‘We have wasted enough time here, bandying words with a talkative corpse. Let us leave this place, Bull-Heart.’ He started down the steps. Tarsus turned to follow.

‘Wait.’

Tarsus turned.

‘I was looking for something.’ The vampire grimaced. ‘A gateway into Stygxx.’ He smiled, though there was little humour in the expression. ‘I was looking for a way… home.’ His hands twitched, and the smile twisted into a snarl of pain.

‘Where is it?’ Ramus demanded.

‘Why do you care?’

‘We seek an audience with the Great Necromancer,’ Tarsus said.

The vampire blinked.

‘With Nagash?’ he hissed, in evident disbelief. ‘Are you mad?’

Tarsus frowned. ‘No. But we have a duty, and we will fulfil it or die in the attempt.’

‘Yes, one or the other is quite likely. Both, even more so,’ the vampire said. He shook his head. ‘I was right. You are mad. Leave me, madmen. Let me rot in peace.’

‘Did you find the gate?’ Tarsus demanded.

The vampire snorted and closed his eyes. ‘No,’ the vampire said. ‘Before I could do so, I was set upon by a servant of the Blood God calling himself the Woebringer. He and that pack of beasts he calls a warband cast down my servants, and bound me here. They thought it amusing, given my nature, to imprison me inside a sun, black iron or otherwise.’

‘Why not simply kill you?’

The vampire’s smile widened. ‘How can you kill what is already dead?’ The smile faded. ‘In truth, I think they took my durability as a challenge…’

Tarsus’ eyes strayed to the many wounds that covered the vampire’s exposed flesh and the blood that stained the dais. ‘They tortured you,’ he said.

‘They are torturing me,’ the vampire hissed. ‘Every few days. The sunlight, weak as it is, and a lack of blood have kept me dangling here – a prisoner of mindless brutes. I have no doubt you’ve encountered the Woebringer’s foraging parties – he sends them out, looking for worthy prey, while the rest of the warband wanders about these hills, fighting anyone and anything they come across, including others of their ilk. When that gets boring, he comes here and carves his name on my flesh.’ The vampire grinned suddenly, and his eyes flashed with amusement. ‘In fact, he’s due any moment now, I’d say.’

The sound of horns suddenly echoed through the chamber.

‘Lord-Celestant, the enemy approaches,’ one of the Prosecutors called from the dome above.

‘How many?’ Tarsus asked. Inwardly, he cursed his inattention to priorities. He’d failed to send the Prosecutors to scout the area around them, and now the enemy was almost upon them.

‘Twice our number, easily,’ came the reply. ‘They’re climbing the eastern slope, and with war-beasts.’

‘Khorgoraths,’ the vampire hissed. ‘Ugly brutes, and hard to kill. The Woebringer quite likes his pets. Dotes on the beasts.’

‘Then we shall make ready for them. Ramus, fortify this chamber for war. It is no keep, but it must do,’ Tarsus said.

‘And what of you, Lord-Celestant?’ Ramus asked.

‘I wish to see the enemy’s strength and disposition for myself,’ Tarsus said, striding towards the largest of the gaps in the wall. As he did so, the Stormcasts he had left outside streamed into the observatory, as their training dictated. The enemy outnumbered them, and only proper discipline would ensure the Bull-Hearts’ victory.

‘Hold,’ Tarsus said, casting his voice to carry over the clatter of sigmarite plates. ‘Shields to the vanguard. Sigmar has provided the room, let us make use of it. Who will hold, when the daemon-winds rage?’

‘Only the faithful,’ his Stormcasts cried. Liberators turned and sank to one knee in the gaps until a low hedge of shields lined each one. Soon more retinues joined them, dropping the bottom rims of their shields atop those of their brethren, creating an improvised wall. Tarsus stepped forwards into an opening the Stormcasts provided for him and surveyed the approaching enemy.

‘By the Realm Celestial,’ Tarsus muttered, as he looked out over the brawling horde. Foul standards rose over seething ranks of howling barbarians and armoured blood warriors. Their numbers dwarfed the small warbands they’d encountered earlier in their travels. This was a horde, in the truest sense of the word. Worst of all were the chained monsters – the khorgoraths – that bellowed and thrashed amidst the mortal warriors, including those who prodded and whipped their charges, driving them into a frenzy.

Despite the clamour of these monstrosities, Tarsus found his eye drawn to a lean, loping shape. The creature was made not of flesh, but of dark metal and other, less identifiable things. Its bat-like features were twisted in an expression of inhuman agony, and he could see that it was held in check by brass chains and festooned with ruinous icons. A febrile steam rose from its twitching, catlike form as it stalked forwards, goaded by a number of bloodstokers who continuously slashed its flanks with barbed whips and prods.

‘What in the name of the great drake is that?’ he murmured.

‘Its name is Ashigaroth,’ the vampire called out, weakly. He had overheard him, somehow.

Tarsus glanced over his shoulder. The vampire wasn’t looking at him, but he noted something in the voice. ‘What is it?’ he asked Ramus.

‘Mine,’ the vampire hissed.

‘A dread abyssal,’ Ramus said, as he joined Tarsus at the wall. ‘They are things of darkness, bound by necromancy.’ He looked at the vampire. ‘He is no mere pilgrim.’

‘No, but I can be of service to you… Free me and I shall aid you,’ the vampire said.

‘We do not need your aid,’ Ramus began. Tarsus waved him to silence, and looked back out over the slope of the tor. The ranks of the enemy stirred, and a broad, muscular shape pushed its way through, dragging a screeching khorgorath in its wake. The warrior was no mere bloodreaver, Tarsus knew. No, he was of the elite – a champion of the Ruinous Powers. His skull was surmounted by great, curling horns and his thick chest, where the armour did not cover his flesh, was branded with the sigils of the Blood God. He carried a wide-bladed axe in his free hand, and the arm that held the monster’s chains was protected by a heavy gauntlet topped by claw-like blades.

‘I am Tarka Woebringer,’ the Chaos champion roared. ‘Exalted amongst all deathbringers, and master of a hundred beasts.’ The khorgorath whose chains he held slavered and gnashed at the air. The champion hauled back on the chains, fighting to keep the beast from breaking loose. ‘This is my place, earned with the red coin of crushed shield and splintered spear. Who are you to walk these stones without my permission?’

‘He’s a talkative one,’ Ramus said, one foot braced on the broken wall, the haft of his hammer resting across his knee.

‘The more he talks, the more time we have to make ready,’ Tarsus said.

‘I know you, for you reek of lightning, and word travels quickly on the roads of ruin,’ the Woebringer continued. ‘The Blood God will smile on me for delivering up your skulls. Aye, and the skull of my slave as well, for I’ve grown tired of cutting his ever-healing flesh.’ The khorgorath roared and shuffled forwards, dragging Tarka a few steps. The champion laughed. ‘Bloodswiller is eager to sup on your entrails, silver-skins. He and his brothers did for the vampire’s bony servants, and they’ll do for you as well – go, Bloodswiller!’ Tarka released the chains and stepped back, as the monster surged forwards.

It was not alone in its mad charge across the broken courtyard that separated the Stormcasts from their foes. From behind the Woebringer, several more of the beasts plunged past, freed from their chains by Tarka’s oncoming warriors. The khorgoraths bounded through the rubble, covering the distance more swiftly than any man or Stormcast. Tarsus’ Prosecutors hurtled down, hammers whirling from their hands to strike with meteoric force. One of the khorgoraths stumbled and fell, its crimson flesh puckered by smoking impact craters.

‘Shields up,’ Tarsus roared, as the first of the monsters thundered towards the gaps in the observatory wall, smashing aside a sundial in its haste.

Liberators were thrown back as the khorgorath barrelled into them. Hammers thudded into its flesh, and warblades bit at its flanks, but it refused to fall. The shield wall disintegrated into flying bodies as the rest of the monsters tore at their foes.

‘Ramus,’ Tarsus said.

‘At your command, Lord-Celestant,’ Ramus cried, as he thrust his reliquary forwards. Lightning crackled about the standard, and then sprang forth in a blinding flash to strike the beast in the chest. The khorgorath stiffened and shrieked.

‘Judicators,’ Tarsus roared. Boltstorm crossbows hummed, and explosive bolts peppered the monster, dropping it to its knees. Liberators swarmed over it, hammers rising and falling in deadly rhythm. Tarsus looked around. Two more of the beasts were locked in combat with the Decimator and Retributor retinues just inside the chamber, and a third was still outside of the observatory, swiping blindly at the swooping forms of the Prosecutors who were holding its attention. But the last, the beast the Woebringer had named Bloodswiller, was charging across the observatory floor towards Ramus, whose attention was on the creatures fighting his Decimator bodyguards.

Tarsus moved to intercept the beast. Hearing the monster’s approach, Ramus turned, but not quickly enough. Bloodswiller’s talons smashed down, knocking the Stormcast Eternal from his feet, his reliquary clattering from his grip. Ramus rolled aside as the khorgorath stomped down, but even as he came to his feet, hammer raised, the monster caught him and lifted him up.

‘Unhand him, beast,’ Tarsus snarled, as he reached them.

His hammer crashed against Bloodswiller’s back, but before he could strike a second blow, the creature backhanded him hard enough to rattle his armour. He was sent flying backwards and crashed down on the dais, cracking the stone. As a Decimator tried to hack through the wrist of the claw holding Ramus, Bloodswiller screeched and tore an unlucky Stormcast apart. It slung the Lord-Relictor down, battering him against the floor and wall.

Ramus’ struggles grew weaker, and none of the nearby warriors could land a telling blow against the frenzied beast to free him. Blue bursts of lightning, spearing upwards towards the heavens, attested to the fate of those who tried. The monster was faster than it looked, and stronger than its kindred.

Tarsus pulled himself to his feet, and readied himself to lunge back into the fray.

‘I can save him,’ he heard someone say. He looked up to see the unsmiling vampire gazing down at him from where he hung.

‘I am faster than you, even now, and stronger,’ the vampire said. ‘You will not get close to it before it kills either you or your friend. More, I owe that particular beast for the blow that landed me here, in such a humiliating state. I can save him, Stormcast – free me. Or die. It matters not to me.’

Tarsus did not hesitate. He spun and brought his sword down, slicing through the rings of the orrery. It toppled forwards, and as it did so Tarsus dropped his weapons and caught it with a grunt of effort. Swiftly, he wrenched the brass spikes free of the vampire’s flesh, and the creature fell to the dais in a crouch as Tarsus chucked the orrery aside. The vampire glanced up at him. Then, with an eyeblink, he was suddenly at the far wall where the sword Tarsus had seen earlier was embedded.

As swift as lightning, the vampire tore the blade free of the wall and sprang towards Bloodswiller. The great crimson brute roared and swung a thickly muscled arm, but the vampire dodged the blow, and, with two hands, drove his blade down into the flesh between the beast’s shoulder and neck. The sword’s blade flared with unholy power, and a crimson steam spurted from the wound. The khorgorath shrieked and flailed, trying to fling the vampire loose. It dropped Ramus and Tarsus charged forwards, weapons at the ready.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, fools?’ the vampire snarled. ‘Help me kill this thing.’

Tarsus lunged forwards. His hammer crashed against one of the Bloodswiller’s bone-studded knees, splintering it. The beast shrilled and sank down, still clawing futilely at the vampire, who held tight to his perch on its shoulder. The vampire hissed and gave the hilt of his sword a vicious twist. Then he tore it free in a welter of gore and leapt away. The khorgorath fell forwards, its talons gouging the ancient marble floor of the observatory. ‘Now, Stormcast – strike now!’ the vampire said.

Tarsus drove his hammer down on the exposed crown of the Bloodswiller’s skull, cracking it. Ramus, having regained his feet and his hammer, joined him. Together, they struck it again and again, until black ichor spilled across the floor, and the beast fell still. Tarsus looked around – the other khorgoraths had met similar fates, brought down by the weapons and divine fury of the Stormcasts. Already, his warriors were reorganising their lines, and readying themselves for whatever might come next. He looked at the vampire, who said, ‘What now?’

‘Now? Now we finish this.’ Tarsus turned towards the gap and extended his sword towards the distant shape of the Woebringer. ‘Is that the best you can muster?’ he shouted, clashing his weapons. ‘We are still here. Who will stand?’ he bellowed.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Hallowed Knights roared in response. Hammers crashed against shields. ‘Only the faithful!’

Tarka threw back his head and screamed in rage. The Woebringer sliced the air with his axe and his warriors surged forwards – a snarling horde, clad in the colours of blood and brass – bloodreavers, blood warriors and worse things bounding in the wake of the mortals.

Tarsus stepped back from the gap. ‘Stand fast, Bull-Hearts,’ he said. ‘We have won a short reprieve, but they come again, in strength. Judicators, thin their ranks. Fall back when they reach the gaps. It’ll be close work then. Hammer and shield work, eh, my friends?’ he said, swatting a nearby Liberator’s shield with the flat of his sword. ‘Who will be triumphant?’

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply. Tarsus nodded.

‘Only the faithful,’ he said firmly. ‘Stand fast, and fight as if Sigmar himself were watching. Or as if Ramus were watching, for he’s closer.’

The air throbbed with the hum of boltstorm crossbows firing and men screaming. Tarsus glanced quickly towards the gaps in the wall where the Judicators had formed two firing ranks: one kneeling, one standing. Together they fired into the disorganised mass of foes climbing towards them. The Prosecutors harried the enemy as they charged, adding to the tally claimed by the Judicators. They had earned a few moments of peace before the battle would be well and truly joined. Nevertheless the enemy pressed on, and soon they would be spilling into the observatory.

Tarsus caught Ramus staring at the vampire. ‘You do not trust him.’

‘You said it yourself – he cannot be trusted.’

‘He saved you,’ Tarsus said.

‘He saved himself. My fate was incidental,’ Ramus countered.

‘Indeed it was,’ the vampire said, striding towards them. ‘But, for the moment, our paths align. They have my beast. I would have him back. He is… precious to me.’

Tarsus nodded. ‘So be it. But if you turn on us, know that it will be my hand that strikes you down.’ He raised his hammer for emphasis. The vampire smirked.

‘Duly noted,’ he said, as he laid his sword across his shoulder.

There was a clatter of sigmarite as the Judicators fell back, and the Liberator retinues moved to take their place in the vanguard. ‘Shields up,’ Tarsus said, his voice carrying throughout the chamber. Shields rose, and then slammed together, rim to rim, forming a wall of steel.

‘Hold the line,’ Tarsus continued. He tightened his grip on the hafts of his weapons. ‘Move on my order.’

‘Where do you wish me to go?’ the vampire said, bowing shallowly. ‘Shall I take my place in line and fight alongside your warriors?’

‘Fight as it pleases you,’ Tarsus said, watching the approach of the enemy. ‘You are no longer a prisoner.’ He glanced at the vampire. ‘You are free.’

The vampire blinked. Then, he inclined his head. ‘As you say.’ He turned towards the broken wall as the howls of the blood-worshippers filled the air. The first bloodreaver burst through the gap at a run – an axe in either hand – and more followed. Soon a wave of murderous fury swept towards the waiting Liberators, who continued their war-rhythm, waiting for their Lord-Celestant’s order.

Tarsus stepped off the dais, arms spread and weapons ready. ‘Hold, Bull-Hearts. Hold,’ he rumbled. ‘Ramus, call the storm.’

Ramus lifted his reliquary and slammed the haft down so that the sound quavered through the air like the peal of a bell. Outside the observatory, a heavy rain began to fall. Thunder rumbled, and the blood-worshippers still outside screamed as crackling streamers of lightning slashed through their ranks, speeding along armour and edges of weapons to lance into branded flesh. Men died in droves, cooked in their armour, or else set aflame as they ran. Confusion swept throughout the enemy.

‘Lower your horns,’ Tarsus roared, pushing through the ranks to the front. Liberators bent, their shields thrust to the fore and hammers held low. ‘And… forwards.’ As one, the Liberator retinues began to march on. Tarsus led the way, picking up speed with every step. His warriors kept pace and, with a thunderous crash, the shield wall met the front rank of the bloodreavers. Shields locked as the Liberators pushed against the enemy, driving them back. Tarsus fought at the fore, making room for his warriors to move forwards with every blow.

More enemy warriors continued to press through the gaps, even as the front ranks were forced back. Frenzied blood warriors tore through their own fellows as the crush of battle intensified. The Liberators fought efficiently, using their foe’s numbers against them. Hammers cracked against knees and shot forwards to crush chests. In other such encounters, it had been enough. The Stormcasts were as relentless in their own way as the servants of the Blood God were in theirs, and when they marched no enemy could stand against them.

But soon, numbers began to tell against discipline. Howling blood warriors hooked shields and arms with their axes, dragging the Stormcasts into the depths of the mob and ripping them asunder in explosions of blue light. The hulking shapes of khorgoraths lurked outside the observatory and tore at the remaining walls in a frenzy, trying to widen the gaps. Debris sifted down from above as cracks raced across the roof and walls of the structure. A section collapsed with a roar, crushing Stormcasts and bloodreavers alike.

‘Fall back,’ Tarsus shouted as he blocked an axe blow. ‘Tighten the line and fall back from the walls.’

Those Liberators who could began to back away, shields still locked. Others could not break away from their opponents and were swiftly surrounded and brought low. More explosions of searing blue light streaked skyward, and Tarsus cursed. He looked around, watching Ramus organise the Retributors and Decimators for a counter-charge.

It wasn’t going to be enough. They were outnumbered ten to one and the enemy wasn’t afraid of death. They didn’t care if they were crushed, mangled or pierced. They kept coming regardless. He needed a new strategy.

‘Lock shields,’ he cried, setting his feet. Around him, Liberator retinues stopped their retreat and did as he ordered, forming up around the wide steps of the dais. ‘We hold here. Not one step farther.’

As he spoke, the Prosecutors hurtled into the chamber, striking like lightning and retreating swiftly, trying to take some of the pressure off their comrades. Celestial hammers crashed into the closely packed mobs of bloodreavers, hurling broken bodies into the air. But the remainder pressed on. Tarsus waved the Judicators forwards. Several of the retinues had made the dais defensible, moving the heavy bookshelves and stone biers into place like barricades. Those who were not firing from behind their improvised ramparts moved quickly to take up position behind the Liberators.

Lightning flickered across the ranks of the enemy, blinding and burning them. A section of the shield wall opened, and Ramus led his Paladin brotherhoods forwards. The great two-handed axes of the Decimators chopped through crimson armour with ease, as the lightning hammers of the Retributors smashed the strongest Chaos champions from their feet. But the enemy pressed close about them, and even the heavily armoured Paladins could not stand alone against such a tide. Still too many of them, he thought. He’d hoped the observatory would provide some defence against numbers, but it wasn’t enough.

Over the heads of his warriors and the heaving ranks of the enemy, Tarsus saw the Woebringer fighting his way through his own followers, dragging the creature the vampire had named Ashigaroth in his wake and striking down anyone too slow to get out of his way. The dread abyssal came unwillingly, continuously fighting its chains.

As Tarsus took a step towards them, he caught sight of the vampire crouched atop the shattered dome of the observatory with arms spread and body angled so that he leaned over the chamber below. A guttural chant rose from his lips as he threw back his head. The dread abyssal began to buck and scream in its bindings. The bloodstoker struck the creature with his lash again and again, but the beast only grew more agitated. A weird purple light played across the piles of bones scattered on the floor and in the corners of the great chamber. They began to shiver and rustle, and Tarsus felt his hair stand on end.

‘Stop him,’ Tarka howled, motioning towards the vampire with his axe as he stepped into the observatory, hauling Ashigaroth after him by its chains. The bloodstoker followed him and struck the dread abyssal again before smashing off the chains that bound it, gesturing at the vampire with his blade. But rather than lunging immediately towards its former master, the creature twisted about and snapped its ebony jaws shut on the bloodstoker’s head. Tarka lashed out at Ashigaroth with his axe, and the monster struck at him with its talons, scraping his armour and knocking him back a step as it bounded over him and towards a nearby Stormcast. The latter was crushed to the ground, his body evaporating into blue light. The dread abyssal screeched and flung itself into the melee, ravaging all those it could reach, without distinction. Blood warrior and Stormcasts alike fell to its frenzy.

Tarsus charged towards the Woebringer, bulling aside any bloodreaver foolish enough to get in his way. Behind him, he heard the vampire’s chant growing louder, but the Woebringer was his only concern. Even as Tarsus closed with his foe, the Chaos champion staggered to his feet and sent his axe slicing out. Hammer, sword and axe clashed in a whirring dance of death as the Bull-Heart and the Woebringer traded blows.

‘I will take your armour and mount it upon my lodge-pole, warrior. Your skull will be my drinking cup, and your weapons I will give to my slaves,’ the Woebringer growled, as the clawed gauntlet he wore tore Tarsus’ warcloak. ‘After I am finished with you, I shall peel the flesh from the bones of a dead man, and wear it as my cloak!’ He sliced at Tarsus’ gut.

‘Are you here to talk, or to fight?’ Tarsus said, as he avoided the blow. His hammer thudded down, cracking the red armour that covered Tarka’s shoulder. The Chaos champion howled and reversed his axe, digging it upwards in a mighty blow. Tarsus stepped back, but not quickly enough, as the edge of the axe drew a spray of sparks from his chest plate and sent him staggering back. The Woebringer crashed into him, driving an elbow into the side of the Lord-Celestant’s head. His opponent was strong, stronger than any Tarsus had yet faced.

Tarsus fell, and only narrowly managed to avoid his opponent’s axe as it crashed down where his head had been. Before the Woebringer could launch another blow, however, a broken sword crashed against him. Tarsus looked up and saw the fleshless limbs of several skeletons gathered about him protectively. The undead warriors attacked the Woebringer, jabbing at him with splintered spears and hacking with blunt, chipped swords. More clung to him, grabbing his arms or the great horns that topped his bestial head. He roared wordlessly, lashing out to shatter a skeleton. The dead thing fell, but crawled back towards him.

Khorgoraths screamed in agony as they were swarmed by skeletons and dragged down through sheer weight of numbers. The dead rose up amidst the press of the melee and fell upon the Woebringer’s warriors with silent savagery, cutting them down even as they fought the Stormcasts. Everywhere, the silent legions hurled themselves into the fray, compelled by the vampire’s will and sorcery.

Tarsus got to his feet as the Woebringer whirled towards him, bleeding from a dozen wounds, but showing no signs of weakness.

‘I defeated the dead before, and I will do so again. But first, I will take your skull, silver-skin,’ the Chaos leader shrieked as he charged towards Tarsus, smashing aside the skeletons in his path. Tarsus raised his hammer, ready to meet his foe’s charge, when a black shadow spread over them both.

The Woebringer looked up. Tarsus took advantage of his opponent’s distraction and caught the Woebringer with a blow that rocked him off his feet. As he fell, the dread abyssal dropped out of the air and onto the Chaos champion with a cry. The vampire sat astride the creature, and laughed as Ashigaroth’s claws tore the life from the fallen warrior. As the creature tore at the body, the vampire looked down at Tarsus.

‘I do apologise, my friend, but… debts of blood were owed to both Ashigaroth and myself,’ he said. He smiled thinly.

Tarsus shook his head and looked around. The battle was over. And now, the living and the dead stared at each other warily across the bodies of their common foe. He looked up at the vampire.

‘You have my thanks,’ Tarsus said, careful to keep his weapons lowered, reminding himself that the dead could not be trusted. The vampire chuckled, as if reading his thoughts.

‘Mannfred,’ the vampire said. ‘I am Mannfred.’

‘Mannfred, then,’ Tarsus said. He hesitated, then extended his hand. Mannfred stared at it for a moment, as if puzzled, then he clasped Tarsus’ forearm. ‘I am Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of these warriors.’

‘And I am Mannfred von Carstein, Count of the Hanging Wood,’ Mannfred said, bowing deeply. As he straightened, he said, ‘Do you still wish to find a way into the underworld, friend Tarsus?’

‘Then you did find a gate here,’ Tarsus said.

‘No,’ Mannfred said. His smile widened. ‘Not here.’ He slid from the back of his monstrous steed. ‘But I know of one, and can lead you there.’

‘Why?’

‘Call it a debt of honour,’ Mannfred said. ‘I owe you, for freeing me, Tarsus of the Stormcasts.’ He paused, as if thinking, before adding, ‘Perhaps for more than just that.’ He extended his hand. ‘And as you’ve seen, I pay my debts.’

Tarsus hesitated. He looked up, into Mannfred’s unblinking yellow eyes, judging. Somehow, he felt as if he had lived through this before, and wondered if it had turned out for the best then. Somehow, he didn’t think so.

But he had a mission to complete. And live or die, he would see it done.

Tarsus clasped Mannfred’s hand.

‘Lead on then, Mannfred von Carstein. Where you go, the Stormcasts will follow.’

SANDS OF BLOOD

Josh Reynolds

The dead are mine.

I rule the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead. I am the final moment given form, the terminus of all existence. And yet… souls slip my grasp, one by one. They leave only the stink of iron and lightning to mark their passing.

I see nothing. I hear nothing.

My realm is silent.

My spirit strides the night wind, hunting these stolen souls, accompanied only by wailing nighthaunts. I cross vast oceans in the blink of a mortal eye and stalk invisibly along the crooked rooftops of cavernous cities whose folk burrow down, ever down, seeking my favour. I see my legions clash again and again with those of the enemy, and where I pass, unseen, the servants of the Ruinous Powers shudder in unspoken horror. Even now, my enemies fear me. Even now, they know dread at my name.

Nagash has risen. And soon… soon, I will stride forth in all my terrible glory, to bathe this realm anew in the light of my black sun. I will burn it clean of impurities, of mistakes. But first, I must find the answer to the question which vexes me.

Who has taken what is mine?

I hunt these missing souls… I follow their trail from rime-encrusted Helspoint to the toppled towers of Morrsend; from the smog-choked jungles of the Skull Islands to the hourglass-lined streets of the City of Lost Moments; I seek and I hunt, but they rise up out of reach, swirling away like leaves caught in a cold wind.

So many souls… gone. I endure, but my strength… wanes. The dead fall and do not rise again. My will is thwarted.

This cannot be.

Nagash is inevitable. I will remake all reality in the image of my soul. And when at last I turn to look upon the desolation of all that was, and all that I have wrought, I shall call it good, and know contentment. I am the ur-death, the nightmare force at the core of all things. When the living cry out in their dreams, it is Nagash they see. I shall crush all under the rock of my unyielding will, and all will be one – Nagash. When Nagash stirs, mountains tremble and suns flicker. When Nagash reaches out to crush his enemies, it is with a million hands. When Nagash seeks out his prey, it is with a million eyes.

And yet, Nagash cannot find these thieves. And thus, he grows… weak.

I am blind. Souls flee my realm and my body withers on its basalt throne. My spirit gutters like a flame deprived of fuel. The shadows gather. Jackals claim the bones of my servants and night birds screech in my empty citadels.

I must find them.

I must know.

Nagash must not die. This cannot be.

This shall not be.

‘Retributors to the vanguard,’ Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, roared over the howl of the wind that whipped across the Blood Wastes. It whined through the crumbled remains of walls and other, less recognizable, structures which rose from the red sands below like gravestones. At the bottom of the enormous dune on which he stood, Tarsus saw the Bloodbound loping through the rising storm towards a straggling line of carts and robed figures. Howling bloodreavers sprinted ahead of more heavily armoured blood warriors, crying out the name of their foul god.

The mortals in the caravan below, blinded by the storm, had only just become aware of the doom about to fall upon them. They were dressed as pilgrims, in heavy robes, and some wore chains and funerary bells which clanged as they moved. Others wore armour over their robes, and he saw these draw weapons as the other pilgrims hurried to escape. The former were outnumbered, and the rest too slow.

‘Brave, if futile,’ Tarsus said. ‘But they will not fight alone.’

He cast a look over his shoulder at his Warrior Chamber as they took up position across the crest of the crimson dune. As he spoke, the Liberator retinues moved aside in precise formation to make way for the Retributors.

‘Who will be triumphant?’ he cried, lifting his sword and hammer high.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Retributors rumbled as one. Their heavy, ornate armour was prominently marked with the lightning bolt of Sigmar, and the massive two-handed hammers they carried shimmered with electric energy. As they strode forwards at Tarsus’ command, they slammed the great weapons together, adding to the clamour of war. They were not alone in this, for the Liberators too thumped their hammers against the inside of their shields in a brutal rhythm.

‘Separate the Bloodbound from their prey, Bull-Hearts. Liberators, shield the mortals!’ Tarsus started down the dune towards the enemy, many of whom had slowed, their attention drawn by the noise rising from the Stormcasts’ ranks. He grinned fiercely beneath his war-helm. ‘Soros, you and your Retributors are with me.’

‘Aye, Lord-Celestant – where you go, we follow,’ Retributor-Prime Soros bellowed, his hammer held at the ready across his chest. His brethren roared in agreement, and their hammers clashed and sparked as they followed Tarsus down the slope of the crimson dune. Overhead, a retinue of Prosecutors hurtled through the swirling wind-borne dust clouds on crackling wings. Their hammers whirled from their hands, thrown with incredible force to smash into the space between the servants of Chaos and their quarry. Sand exploded upwards, and the foremost bloodreavers stumbled back in surprise. The Prosecutors had broken the enemy’s momentum, as he had planned. Now all that was left was to gore them.

Tarsus pounded towards the milling Chaos warriors. He heard the clanging of the bells on the carts, and the screams of men, women, and dray animals as he plunged into the enemy ranks, and despatched one of the warriors with a blow from his hammer. From behind him came the snarl of lightning as the hammers of the Retributors swept down on the foe. He and his vanguard had torn a gaping wound in the horde with their attack, and its effect was immediate. As they fought, more and more bloodreavers turned away from their original quarry and doubled back towards the Stormcasts. Soon, flashes of blue lightning were streaking upwards as Tarsus’ men fell to the axes of their foes – but not many, he was glad to see. He had few enough warriors, and could ill afford to lose them.

As he cut down another bloodreaver, he saw that the Liberators had reached the struggling line of mortals and enveloped them in a protective shield wall. He spun as a roar assaulted his ears, and quickly interposed his sword, catching an axe before it reached him. His attacker was armoured in crimson and brass, and the air seemed to shimmer around him as he stabbed a spiked gauntlet at Tarsus’ stomach. Blood warrior, he thought. One of Khorne’s chosen.

Tarsus slammed his hammer down onto the spike, parrying the blow. He rammed the weapon into the Chaos champion’s chest, denting the cuirass, but the warrior only took a single step back before lunging forwards with a snarl. The champion swept his axe out in a wicked arc and Tarsus retreated, the sand shifting beneath him. His enemy followed, growling a low chant to his deity as he came. They traded blows back and forth, weapons clashing. The servants of the Blood God were renowned for their ferocity, but this one, at least, was a seasoned warrior as well, matching Tarsus blow for blow.

At the last moment, the sand shifted beneath his feet, and he momentarily lost his footing. He teetered, off-balance, but it was enough for his opponent. The blood warrior gave a roar and swung his axe, tearing a spray of sparks from Tarsus’ chest plate and nearly knocking him off his feet. Tarsus staggered and lost his grip on his hammer. He whipped his sword up as the axe fell, parrying a blow that would have otherwise split his helm and skull. The blood warrior wrenched his axe up in a two-handed grip, readying it for another strike.

Suddenly, Tarsus heard a keening shriek and glanced up as a black shadow fell over them. He swiftly stepped back as a monstrous shape pounced on the champion from above. The unsuspecting warrior disappeared in a spray of blood as the thing struck with the force of a meteor and smashed the Chaos champion into the shifting sands.

The golden and black monstrosity rose up from its victim with a shriek. The creature was made not of flesh, but of dark metal and other, less identifiable, things. Its bat-like features were twisted in an expression of vile hunger, and it snapped its heavy jaws shut on the dead warrior’s skull. With a toss of its head, it tore something wispy and squalling from the pulped remains, and Tarsus knew it was his former opponent’s soul. With a rattling sigh, the dread abyssal sucked the whimpering spirit into its gullet. It turned its smouldering gaze on Tarsus, who shook his head.

‘He was mine, Mannfred,’ he said.

‘So he was,’ Mannfred von Carstein said as he leaned forwards in his saddle on the back of the dread abyssal. The vampire’s black, ridged armour was pitted and scored with the marks of battle, and the red cloak he wore was tattered, but Mannfred himself did not look in the least tired. He never did, no matter how fierce the fighting.

Tarsus raised his weapons warily as the creature growled and took a tentative step towards him. The vampire smiled thinly and patted his mount’s neck. ‘Ashigaroth eats only those souls I allow him to. And for the moment, that is not you.’

‘For the moment,’ Tarsus said, as he looked about. The battle was all but over. The enemy had been routed, bodies littered the sands and those who had survived the Stormcast attack were fleeing into the growing storm.

Mannfred chuckled. ‘A joke, Tarsus. We are allies, you and I. You saved my life, Stormcast, and now I have saved yours.’

‘I did not require it,’ Tarsus said. It had been many days since they had freed the vampire, and Tarsus had no cause to regret it, yet.

At least this time he did not have to summon the dead to aid us, Tarsus thought. There was something indefinably monstrous about the act of wrenching the slain from their slumber, and propelling them into battle once more. But despite his misgivings, the Lord-Celestant did not begrudge the vampire’s help – they were alone in hostile territory, and surrounded by hundreds of nomadic warbands in service to the Ruinous Powers.

Mannfred smiled. ‘Yet I gave it freely. Letting you die in such an ignominious manner would hardly serve my cause, now would it?’

Tarsus frowned. ‘Is that why you led us into this wasteland?’ he asked, gesturing to the rolling dunes which surrounded them and the high crags which marked the horizon. ‘It seems empty of anything save sand.’

‘Is that what you think?’ Mannfred threw back his head and laughed. ‘These are not sands, at least not entirely – they are blood. Reduced to powder, drained of all vitality, but blood all the same.’ He swept his arms out. ‘For a thousand years, the lands which once made up the Blood Wastes were fought over by the Duchies of Gheist, whose nobles rode great bats to war, rather than horses. But then came Nagash, and, well…’ Mannfred leaned back. ‘Here, Stormcast, is the will of Nagash made manifest. A desert of broken stones, covered in red sands and haunted by the ghosts of the slain and the great beasts they once rode to battle.’

‘We have seen no ghosts,’ Tarsus said.

‘We will,’ Mannfred said. He gestured lazily to a point over Tarsus’ shoulder. The Lord-Celestant turned and his eyes widened. He had thought the wind had been bad before, but what was now coming over the distant dunes towards them was of a far greater magnitude: a roiling wall of sand – no, blood, he reminded himself – sweeping across the landscape, blotting out the sky and stars overhead.

‘We must get the mortals to shelter,’ Tarsus said. He glanced at them, taking in their ragged robes and the carts with their clattering funerary bells. It seemed that even in the Realm of Death, faith of some sort flourished. Their dray oxen bellowed and pawed the sands nervously as the wind whipped up. He looked towards the distant crags which marked the desert’s edge. It would take days to reach them. The storm would catch up with them before then.

He looked at Mannfred. ‘There must be something nearby.’

Before Mannfred could reply, a voice spoke.

‘You saved us.’

Tarsus turned and found a number of pilgrims looking up at him in awe. The one who had spoken was an older man, leaning heavily on a staff topped by a smoking censer in the shape of an hourglass, and wearing the same dark, heavy robes as the others.

‘I am Gerot of Morrsend,’ the old man said. ‘We are grateful for your assistance, warrior. Without you, the skull-takers might have claimed us.’

‘Do not thank me yet,’ Tarsus rumbled. ‘We must still get your folk to shelter, before that storm catches up with us.’

‘There is a place – the Temple of Final Rest, in the ruins of Sepulchre,’ one of the other pilgrims, a woman, said. Tarsus looked at Mannfred, who nodded and sat upright in his saddle.

‘I know of it. One of the few remaining structures left in the region. If we move quickly, we can reach it before the storm,’ the vampire said.

‘Lead us there,’ Tarsus replied. ‘And be quick about it.’

Mannfred laughed and kicked his beast into motion. Ashigaroth took a running leap and hurtled into the air. Tarsus shouted orders to his Warrior Chamber, readying them to march. The Stormcasts snapped to attention and fell in along either side of the column of pilgrims.

Tarsus turned his attention back to the pilgrims. The one who had spoken of the temple wore a heavy, much-dented breastplate over her dark robes, with a gorget in the shape of a jawbone. Her long, black hair was tightly braided and woven about her head, and her dark skin was marked by pale scars where it was not bound in rags or hidden beneath rusty chainmail. She carried a heavy hammer in one hand, its wide head decorated with intricately carved skulls, and he had no doubt that she knew how to wield it.

‘You were heading to this… Sepulchre, then, lady…?’

‘I am Aisha,’ she said, not quite meeting his gaze. ‘I stand watch over our flock, on our pilgrimage to the great temple.’ She trembled as she spoke, though whether in awe of him, or something else, he could not say. He recognized her as one of the pilgrims who had sought to put up a defence against their attackers earlier. He inclined his head, one warrior to another.

‘I am Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights,’ he said, looking down at her. She was afraid, but her fear did not control her. ‘You have nothing to fear from us,’ he rumbled. ‘We will let no harm come to you.’

‘I know. That you bear that symbol says as much,’ she said, reaching out as if to touch the sigil emblazoned on his hammer. She pulled her hand back at the last moment.

Gerot cleared his throat. ‘We have heard the rumble of thunder, and seen lightning flash in the dark clouds. Travellers whispered that the storms which have wracked our lands these past months have brought with them warriors, clad in shimmering armour. We in Morrsend did not believe it.’

‘Sigmar has not deserted you,’ Tarsus said.

‘No,’ Aisha said, ‘not Sigmar.’

Before Tarsus could ask her who she meant, the old man spoke up.

‘Hush,’ Gerot said, though not sharply. ‘Forgive her, my lord. Aisha has ever spoken her mind, in all things.’

‘There is nothing to forgive. Will you allow us to accompany you to this temple?’ Tarsus asked. It was not a request, though he phrased it as such. A structure such as this temple might just be one of the nine citadels they were searching for, whether Mannfred was aware of it or not. While it was his mission to find a route into the underworld, it was his duty to see that no harm came to the downtrodden.

‘We would be glad of it,’ Gerot said, with only a moment of hesitation. He bowed his head and led his people back to their carts as Tarsus made his way to the head of the column. In moments, it began to move with a clatter of bells and the crash of sigmarite. Mannfred and his dread abyssal swooped overhead, driving against the wind, followed closely by the winged Prosecutors, who would keep watch over the flanks of the column.

The landscape was as ragged as the mortals who sought to traverse it. Immense dunes of powdered blood rose up to slouch against the cracked stones of half-buried towers. As they marched, Tarsus saw what remained of an ancient guard tower, split in two with sand pouring down from its upper levels like a waterfall, or perhaps an hourglass. The strengthening wind carved the dunes into sepulchral shapes – yawning skulls and hooded figures which seemed to pursue the column from dune to crimson dune.

More than once they found themselves walking across flat stones, or in the lee of a shattered wall or through the ribcage of some long-dead titanic beast. There were many of the latter in evidence, and Tarsus thought of the great bats Mannfred had spoken of. He glimpsed fragments of bone and broken weapons scattered across the landscape, as the wind whipped the blood-sands into a frenzy. Skulls, human and otherwise, were nestled in the cracks and crevices of the tumbledown ruins they passed. They burned with an eerie purple light which cast strange shadows across their path. Worse were the uncanny shrieks which at first seemed to be merely the wind slashing through ruin and wreck, but which soon became hideously distinct.

‘This realm has been at war for centuries,’ Lord-Relictor Ramus said as he joined his Lord-Celestant at the head of the column. ‘Here lies proof of that. How often have we seen similar devastation since coming here?’ The reliquary staff he carried pulsed with a blue nimbus, which kept the worst of the wind at bay.

‘This realm is not unique in that regard,’ Tarsus said, glancing at the other Stormcast.

‘How are the mortals?’ Tarsus asked.

‘Fearful, but grateful,’ Ramus said. ‘We are being followed. The enemy were merely routed, not destroyed. They pursue us.’

‘Are they close?’

‘We outpace them for the moment. They are wary. I suspect that they too seek shelter from the coming storm. Even daemon-kissed flesh is no proof against the fury I feel in the air,’ Ramus said. ‘I can feel the dark magic which created this place rising with it. There are spirits trapped here, bound to this place of slaughter in the moment of their death. They press close about us, Tarsus, hungry for our lives and light. Look – see.’

Tarsus peered ahead, where flickering half-shapes moved through the stirring sands and ruins. His eye could not properly fix on them. They were there, but not. Men, he thought, or so they had once been.

‘I see them,’ he said. ‘We cannot stop, Ramus. The mortals will die without proper shelter, and I shall not abandon them to either the angry dead or the Bloodbound.’

‘Indeed, stopping would be a singularly foolish decision,’ Mannfred said, as Ashigaroth dropped from the sky and landed close by.

The keening wails of unseen predators rose and fell amidst the surge of the wind and the hiss of the blood-sands, vile shrieks which chilled the blood and set the pilgrims’ animals bellowing in fear. ‘What are they?’

‘Hungry,’ Mannfred said. ‘They hunt the skies, as they did in life, when the black wind blows and old magic stirs.’

He held up a hand, and Tarsus saw that it was limned with a darkling light. ‘Behold the curse of Nagash, my friend. Where he has passed, the dead do not rest easy, and even now they hunt our foes. Luckily for us, we have found sanctuary just over the next rise. Come.’ Mannfred turned Ashigaroth about and set off without a further word.

The temple rose up from a cradle of shattered streets and half-collapsed buildings like a crown on a corpse. Its minarets were broken and its walls were sagging and derelict, but they still stood, which was more than Tarsus could say for the ruins which spread out around it.

‘A dreadful fate befell this place,’ Ramus said, as they led the column towards the scattered remnants of what had once been the city gates. ‘If Nagash could do this…’

‘Then he will be a powerful ally,’ Tarsus said. ‘I understand your worries, my friend. But we have our duty and we must see it through, to whatever end awaits us. We must trust in Sigmar. We are Stormcasts, and we can do no less. Much is demanded of those…’

‘…to whom much is given,’ Ramus replied.

Mannfred led the column swiftly through the ruins, and the Stormcasts did what they could to hurry their charges along. Eerie shadows stretched through the ruins, keeping pace with them, and the Prosecutors reported seeing enormous forms hurtling through the storm, riding the winds as they grew ever stronger.

More than once, strange, ghostly shapes coalesced from the whirling blood-sands and lunged towards the pilgrims and their protectors. The Stormcasts met these spectral assaults staunchly, and the phantoms burst into clouds of red as they were struck by sigmarite weapons or by Ramus’ lightning. Mannfred alone bore the winds without concern. His dead flesh remained untouched by either the stinging sands or the phantoms, which shied away from him like jackals avoiding the attention of a lion.

The sounds of battle echoed from the dunes beyond the ruins, and immense, soul-cutting screams echoed out over the crumbled walls and tumbled towers. The undead horrors which hunted this wasteland had found other prey.

By the time they reached what had once been the gates of the temple, the storm had grown so strong that Tarsus could barely see past his hand. The Stormcasts had been forced to surround the pilgrims and their carts. The Liberators raised their shields and faced them outwards, creating a moving enclosure of sigmarite that protected mortal flesh from the flaying winds and hungry ghosts darting out of the storm. Mannfred led them through the ruined gatehouse and towards what had once been the inner wall of the temple. There, an open archway invited entrance. As the Stormcasts and their charges approached it, the ghosts faded away, retreating back into the storm.

‘They flee,’ Ramus said.

‘No,’ Mannfred said, as he led them through the archway. ‘But they are wary of this place.’

Tarsus scanned the broken walls which protected the inner structure of the temple, but saw neither guards nor even lookouts. Where they were in one piece, the walls provided some protection from the wind, and the main bastion of the temple looked to be in relatively good shape. The Stormcasts followed the vampire into the temple courtyard, where a line of robed and cowled shapes awaited them, hands folded into their sleeves. There were at least seventy, the Lord-Celestant thought.

‘Priests,’ Tarsus murmured.

‘But why are they out here?’ Ramus said, as he and Tarsus stepped forwards through the shields of their warriors. They were accompanied by Mannfred, who had dismounted. The vampire had one hand on his sword, and he cast a warning glance at Tarsus as one of the robed figures came to meet them.

‘Welcome, wayfarers, to the bastion of Final Rest,’ the priest said solemnly, his voice carrying easily despite the roar of the storm. He spread his hands as if to indicate the pilgrims, who now clustered within the walls, their voices raised in celebration. ‘We feared that the storm would arrive before you. I am Brother Markus. I bid you welcome and ask only that you leave behind some of the happiness you bring.’

He turned towards Tarsus. The Lord-Celestant caught the flash of a yellow gaze within the shadowed folds of the hood.

‘They are vampires,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Mannfred said. He watched the priests warily. ‘But not like me. I have heard rumours, but gave them little credence.’ He shook his head. ‘Fools and mad things, hiding away in this waste since the coming of Chaos. Much hardship has befallen the Realm of Death since the day Nagash fell, and only the strong persevere.’ As he spoke, Gerot and Aisha moved slowly towards Brother Markus.

‘We bid you greetings, restful brother,’ the old man wheezed as he approached the priests. ‘We come from Morrsend to honour the old debt and deliver to you your tithe, as we swore in bygone days.’ He glanced at the Stormcasts. ‘We would not have survived the journey, were it not for these warriors.’

Brother Markus looked at Tarsus and bowed his head. ‘Then they too are welcome. Stay, and be safe from storm and phantom.’ The vampire looked up, eyes flashing. He pulled his hood back, revealing a cadaverous countenance. He had a face like a skull, his skin stretched tight, and his eyes were cavernous pits. ‘We ask only that the debt be honoured and the tithe be shared, so that we might return to our contemplation of the Corpse Geometries.’

‘As was sworn, so shall it be,’ Gerot said, his voice trembling slightly as he extended an arm. ‘Take your tithe, brother, and with thanks.’

More pilgrims stepped forwards, rolling back their sleeves to extend their arms. Markus took Gerot’s arm and his thin lips peeled back from his fangs. Tarsus, suddenly aware of what was coming, made to step forwards, but Mannfred stopped him with a look.

A moment later, Markus sank his fangs into Gerot’s arm, and the old man winced, but did not cry out. The other priests did the same with the pilgrims who had stepped forwards, until all seventy-seven of the vampires had fed. It was over in moments.

Markus sighed and scraped a loose droplet of crimson from his mouth as Aisha and others saw to their wounded companions.

‘The tithe is… acceptable, my friends,’ he said slowly. ‘And we thank you for the gift we have received. Wait out the storm’s fury, or stay as long as you wish. There is water in the temple storerooms, and what we have is yours.’

The pilgrims began to unhook their oxen and unload their carts, some carrying heavy baskets of food and other supplies up the wide steps into the temple.

‘Why give them blood?’ Tarsus asked Aisha, as she helped Gerot bandage his arm.

‘Would you prefer that they take it?’ Mannfred said, smiling unpleasantly.

Tarsus ignored him. ‘What is this tithe?’

‘Morrsend owes a debt of blood to the seventy-seven Restful Brothers, my lord,’ Gerot said. ‘In the time after the coming of Chaos, when the ground and sky were in upheaval, they defended our people from the enemies of man. They fought and bled in our name. Now, they fight no more. And so we watch over them, as they once watched over us. The dead hold their honour sacred. Can the living do any less?’

He glanced at Mannfred as he spoke. The vampire frowned and pulled his cloak tight about him before walking away to confer with Brother Markus. Gerot watched them for a moment and then said, ‘That one, however…’

‘He has fought beside us, and bravely,’ Tarsus said.

‘The dead, like the living, come in many shades,’ Gerot said. He peered at Tarsus. ‘That one bears watching, my lord.’

Tarsus began to ask what the old man meant when he heard a shout from above. ‘Bull-Heart, the enemy is at hand,’ a Prosecutor called down, as he swooped overhead. ‘I see the gleam of their blades and hear their howls, even with the storm.’

‘It appears our respite is over,’ Tarsus said. He joined Mannfred and Brother Markus.

‘Will you fight with us?’ he asked the priest.

‘We do not fight. We make war no longer,’ Brother Markus said softly.

‘Regardless, brother, war is here, and you cannot avoid it,’ Tarsus said. ‘The foe is at your gate and you must stand or be trampled beneath him.’

‘We will not fight,’ Markus said, more sternly. ‘Let him come. Our choice is made.’ His eyes flashed as he spoke, from yellow to red. Tarsus tensed, wondering if, despite his words, Markus were readying himself to attack.

Mannfred quickly stepped between them. ‘So it is, brother – but our choice is to fight. Will you deny us that?’ he said smoothly.

The other vampire hesitated. He gazed at Mannfred searchingly and Tarsus wondered what they had been speaking of, before he had interrupted them. Then, head bowed, the priest stepped back. ‘As you will.’ He turned and led the other priests away, into the temple.

‘Why will they not fight?’ Tarsus demanded. ‘Are they cowards?’

‘Of a sort,’ Mannfred said. ‘Leave them be, for now. We…’ He trailed off as Aisha approached them. ‘Well, what have we here?’

Tarsus held up a hand, silencing Mannfred. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Aisha lifted her chin. ‘We wish to stand with you, to protect the brothers and our own.’

Tarsus shook his head, wondering at such loyalty. ‘You can, but inside the temple. We will hold the outside,’ he said.

‘We do not fear them,’ she said quickly, lifting her own hammer. ‘In Morrsend, we are taught that to send the enemy down into death is the greatest offering we can make.’

Tarsus inclined his head. ‘And so you shall, if we fail. For then it will fall to you to defend yourselves and this place. Fight well, Aisha of Morrsend.’ She opened her mouth as if to speak, but then closed it, nodded and turned away, calling out to her people. The pilgrims began to file quickly into the temple and Tarsus left them to it.

‘And what of me? Shall I draw the fallen from their slumber?’ Mannfred said, smiling slightly. He stretched out a hand, as if to clutch at the sand that hissed through the air about them. ‘The air here is thick with the stuff of death, my friend. It shall be but the work of moments to bind them to my will and set them loose…’

‘No,’ Tarsus said. ‘The dead have done enough. Leave the rest to the living.’ He did not want to owe the vampire any more than he already did. The Stormcasts could win their own battles.

And you would do well to remember that, he thought, looking at Mannfred.

The vampire shrugged. ‘Very well. I will not insist.’ He bowed low. ‘Direct me, my lord. Where would you have me? On the walls? At the gate? Shall I take up shield and hammer and stand in the vanguard?’

‘You mock me,’ Tarsus said.

‘Possibly,’ Mannfred said, straightening. He set his hand on the pommel of his sword. ‘Ashigaroth and I shall take to the sky to do what we can, if you have no objections.’

‘Fight well, Mannfred,’ Tarsus said. He held out his hand. Though he could not bring himself to entirely trust the vampire, he could find no fault in his courage. Mannfred looked at him for a moment, and then took the proffered hand.

‘May the day bring you glory, Tarsus,’ Mannfred said. He turned and leapt into Ashigaroth’s saddle. The dread abyssal reared up, shrieking, and leapt towards the wall. It struck the stones and bounced off, climbing the wind until it was lost to sight in the howling sands. Tarsus turned his attention to the preparation of the defences.

‘Move those stones into the opening. Get the wagons turned,’ he said, directing his warriors. The pilgrims’ oxen had been herded into one of the few outbuildings that clung to the outside of the temple, out of the way, and the carts were being manhandled by Stormcasts into the many gaps in the stone walls which surrounded the temple courtyard. Other Stormcasts were completing the destruction of the fallen pillars and dragging the oblong chunks into place inside the archway. They moved quickly, and within minutes the courtyard was as defensible as they could make it.

Liberators took up positions behind the carts and along the bottom of the walls as Judicators climbed to the rickety ramparts which lined sections of the wall above. He’d ordered the Prosecutors to the minarets and dome of the temple roof, to keep an eye on the enemy’s approach. As he helped one of his warriors wedge a cart into place, a Prosecutor dropped into the courtyard and shouted, ‘Bull-Heart, they come!’

Tarsus peered out through the gap. Outside, amidst the howling winds, a tall shape had clambered to the top of the shattered gatehouse and now stood watching them. He recognized what the warrior was easily enough – a doom-handed champion of Chaos, clad in hell-forged armour, and carrying a heavy, long-hafted mace in his hands. A cloak of scabrous fur flapped about the warrior’s shoulders, and his helm was moulded in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head. He appeared unconcerned by the stinging red sands which rose and fell around him.

‘There you are,’ Tarsus said to himself. It was ever the same – the champions of the Bloodbound could not resist announcing themselves.

‘Let us in, little men,’ the Chaos champion rumbled, his impossibly deep voice echoing from within his wolf-helm and carrying easily to the ears of the defenders, despite the storm. He spread his arms, and howling bloodreavers and savage blood warriors rose from the ever-shifting blood-sands where they had crouched, waiting. ‘We but seek shelter from the storm and the night-things which harry us.’

Tarsus looked out at the foe, trying to gauge their numbers, but the growing turbulence made it difficult. He guessed that his small Stormhost was outnumbered almost three to one.

‘I am Gorewolf. I take what I wish, and none may resist me,’ the champion continued, his voice growing louder. ‘Now, I take this place in the name of Khorne!’

He lifted his great daemon-headed mace over his head. At this signal, his followers started forwards with a roar, charging pell-mell towards the crumbled walls of the monastery through the undulating curtain of red sands.

Tarsus shook his head and clapped a hand on the shoulder of the Liberator standing beside him. ‘So many soon to be dead,’ he said.

‘We shall put them to rout as before, Lord-Celestant,’ the Liberator said.

‘Aye, that we shall,’ Tarsus said. He raised his hammer. ‘Who will be triumphant?’

‘Only the faithful,’ his Warrior Chamber roared in reply, as they began to beat upon their shields and stamp upon the ground.

‘Who will hold, when all others fail?’ he cried.

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Judicators – make your judgement,’ Tarsus bellowed to the retinues crouched behind the ramparts above him. Boltstorm crossbows cracked and death rippled out along the front ranks of the enemy. The fallen were trampled by those behind them, who plunged on, heedless of the casualties. ‘Liberators, hold the wall. Do not let them in. Fall back only when you must. Zarus,’ he called, as the Liberators readied themselves. Zarus, Prosecutor-Prime of the Bull-Hearts, dropped down into the courtyard from his perch on the wall.

‘Speak and I shall make it so,’ Zarus said, as he folded his crackling wings behind him and smashed a fist into his chest in salute.

‘Do you remember when we took the walls of Starhold, and what we did there?’ Tarsus said, clasping the other Stormcast by the shoulder guards. ‘When the enemy threatened to overwhelm the other Warrior Chambers, before we could come to their aid?’

Zarus laughed sharply. ‘I do!’

‘It may come to that again. It shall fall to you, as it did then, Wallbreaker,’ Tarsus said, using the other Stormcast’s war-name. He motioned to the wall. ‘Bring those ancient stones down and bury the enemy.’ He turned and gestured to Ramus.

‘Here, my Lord-Celestant,’ Ramus said. He stalked across the courtyard, surrounded by his Paladins. ‘We await your orders.’

‘You and your Paladins will hold the outer chambers. Protect the pilgrims. See that no harm comes to them.’ Tarsus glanced back towards the walls. ‘We shall hold here, until it is no longer tenable, then we will retreat and join you.’

‘You believe they will get in,’ Ramus said.

‘These walls are old and weak. They were not meant for war even when they were strong. Now, they are little better than cloth. Our foe fights not for victory, but for survival, and it is for survival’s sake that we must hold him at bay. When the time comes, we will retreat to the outer chambers of the temple, and you must be there to meet us. Inside the temple they will scatter into groups, looking for loot, food and slaughter, and then we shall smash them piecemeal.’

Ramus nodded and thumped the ground with the end of his reliquary staff. ‘It shall be done, Bull-Heart. This Gorewolf shall regret showing us his fangs. We shall trample this yelping pack into the dust, as they deserve.’

‘Who will be left standing?’ Tarsus said.

‘Only the faithful,’ Ramus replied, bowing his head.

‘Only the faithful, my friend. Go,’ Tarsus said, hefting his hammer. He drew his sword and went to join his men at the walls, just as the first of the enemy reached them. Axes hacked and chopped at the improvised barricades as the Liberators struck at their wielders. When a barricade fell, the Liberators were there, shields locked, to frustrate the efforts of their foes. But there were too many Bloodbound. Tarsus knew it was only a matter of time until a gap was opened in his lines.

The next moments passed in a whirlwind of clashing steel and dying screams. He saw a trio of Liberators bowled over by a wild-eyed blood warrior that charged its way through an overturned cart and fought on, despite the skybolts lodged in his torso and skull. Gripped by a murderous frenzy, he hacked and slashed at the Stormcasts until Soros brought his lightning hammer down on the Bloodbound’s head.

Tarsus killed a heavily scarred bloodreaver with a blow from his hammer, and saw more barricades shattered and broken by the berserk warriors of the Bloodbound. They were determined to gain the temple, and took no heed of their own casualties. He blocked a looping slash from a jagged blade and drove his shoulder into the chest of his attacker, crushing bone and tearing flesh. As the body fell he spun, bringing his weapons together to catch the edge of an axe as it dropped towards his head.

The blood warrior roared wordlessly as Tarsus forced him back. All around them, Stormcasts retreated, allowing the Bloodbound to enter so that the Judicators on the wall could fire on them. When he judged that the bulk of the enemy were either just inside the gaps or trying to push past those who were, Tarsus tore his hammer free of his opponent’s axe and waved it, signalling the Judicators to pull back from their positions. The blood warrior staggered forwards, off balance.

‘Wallbreaker – bring it down,’ Tarsus roared as he slammed his helm against the blood warrior’s head. His adversary reeled back, dazed, and Tarsus severed his axe-hand at the wrist. He smashed the dying warrior off his feet and sheathed his sword so that he could pull a wounded Liberator up.

‘Fall back, Bull-Hearts,’ he cried, swinging his hammer out to drive back any Bloodbound who drew too close. He saw Zarus lead his Prosecutors overhead and watched in satisfaction as they hurled their hammers at the sagging wall.

The walls came down with a roar, filling the courtyard with sand and dust. Red-armoured bodies were buried beneath the rubble, but not all of them. They charged out of the rising haze, howling like hungry beasts, with Gorewolf at their head. His great mace swung out and sent a Liberator flying backwards to land in a broken heap.

‘Back,’ Tarsus roared. ‘Back to the temple and lock shields as you go. Let no enemy pass you.’

Judicators continued to fire as they retreated along the remaining ramparts, pulling back towards the outer chamber of the temple. The Liberators gave ground grudgingly, making the enemy pay in blood for every step they took. Hammers rose and fell, and bodies littered the courtyard. Flashes of brilliant blue marked where a grievously injured Stormcast was wrenched back to Azyr, destined for Reforging.

The Stormcasts retreated up the steps of the temple, fighting the entire way. Broken bodies marked their ascent as Gorewolf’s warriors attacked again and again. Finally, they reached the great doors and were able to slam them shut, buying themselves a momentary respite.

‘Soros, lead our brothers to the rallying point,’ Tarsus said, as he retreated into the temple. The corridors were lit by weakly flickering stanchions, which glowed with an amethyst light. ‘I go to find the priests. The enemy will flood these corridors soon enough, and they need to be warned.’

‘It shall be done, Lord-Celestant,’ Soros said. Tarsus nodded in satisfaction and peeled off from the group, heading down a side corridor. The temple was large, but it was mostly a series of chambers that surrounded an inner nave.

Where are you? Tarsus thought, as he hurried along the corridor. They were allies, but there was no telling how long it would last. The dead cannot be trusted. The thought was never far from his mind. Some buried lesson from his old life, come to light again. No, Mannfred could not be trusted, but they needed him. The vampire swore that he could help them find a way into the underworld. And since this did not seem to be such a gate, they still required his aid.

But while he was an untrustworthy creature, he was also as brave as any Stormcast. There was a cruel sort of courage in Mannfred von Carstein, that in more savage times might even have been called heroism. Tarsus found the enormous iron-banded double doors which led to the nave and forced them open. Beyond them was a wide chamber. The vaulted ceiling was held up by rows of stone pillars which ran the length of the massive chamber. Flickering torches lined the walls, casting long shadows across the marble floor. At the centre of the chamber, on an enormous dais covered in sigils which represented the phases of the moon and the shapes of the stars, the seventy-seven Restful Brothers knelt in neat, orderly rows, heads bowed, faces turned away from the door.

Tarsus closed the doors behind him, but the priests did not stir. Swiftly, he strode towards them, noticing as he did so the great skulls, each as wide across as a Stormcast, which hung from the ceiling.

‘Terrorgheists,’ Mannfred said, from behind him. ‘Titanic bats. Their spirits hunt with the storm.’

Tarsus turned. ‘Why are you here?’

Mannfred didn’t answer. He patted Ashigaroth’s neck as the beast trotted out from behind a pillar. Tarsus was surprised at how silently such a large creature could move. He shook his head, annoyed by the vampire’s lack of response, but there was no time to press the issue.

‘The enemy will soon breach the inner chambers of the temple. We must get the brothers to safety,’ Tarsus said, starting towards the steps. Mannfred slid in front of him.

‘They are safe enough. And they will not go with you, in any event.’

‘They must, or they will die,’ Tarsus said as he pushed Mannfred aside.

‘Then they will die, Tarsus,’ he said. ‘Maybe that is what they want…’

‘Do you not recall the torments the Bloodbound inflicted upon you? Would you wish the same on them?’ Tarsus asked. ‘I know vampires are not as men, but even you cannot be so callous as to condemn your own kind to–’

Mannfred gave a bark of laughter. ‘My own kind? Do not insult me, Stormcast,’ he hissed. ‘I am better than these wretches. In my veins flows the blood of kings. I do not crouch in the dark, forgotten and forgetting.’

‘Then show me,’ Tarsus said. ‘Show me how I might convince them to save themselves, O son of kings. Show them how to fight as you do.’

Mannfred’s face twisted and his mouth moved silently. Then, with a growl, he stepped back. ‘It is too late. Our enemy is here. I hear his bestial tread, coming closer. Gird yourself, Tarsus. You wish to save them? Then we must fight. And let not one enemy past you.’

Mannfred raised his sword and turned towards the great doors to the chamber as they were smashed off their hinges. A horde of Bloodbound poured in, Gorewolf at their head.

‘Death! Death and ruin, for the Lord of Skulls,’ Gorewolf howled. His warriors plunged past him, chanting the Blood God’s name. The chamber echoed with their cries and the sounds of the battle outside as the Stormcasts clashed with the enemy in the corridors of the temple.

Tarsus brought his weapons together and stepped forwards, Mannfred by his side.

‘What is it you Stormcasts say at moments such as this? Some pithy mantra, regarding faith,’ the vampire asked, as he gestured to Ashigaroth, pacing nearby.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tarsus said.

‘That’s the one,’ Mannfred murmured. ‘How droll.’ He extended his sword towards the enemy. ‘Only the faithful, then.’

With a duellist’s grace, he sprang and cut down the first of the bloodreavers to reach them. Then, with a powerful leap, he was once more on Ashigaroth’s back and swooping towards the Bloodbound. Tarsus was only a half-step behind them, sword and hammer sweeping out in crackling arcs to knock his foes from their feet.

As he fought, Tarsus saw Gorewolf barrel towards the kneeling priests, cracking the marble floor with every step. He raised his mace high and roared. Tarsus lunged forwards to intercept the Chaos champion. He heard Mannfred call out behind him but he did not slow. His sword slashed out and a blood warrior fell, headless. His hammer cracked the skull of a second, and then he collided with Gorewolf, driving the surprised champion back into one of the pillars.

The haft of Gorewolf’s mace crashed down, and Tarsus staggered back. The mace swept out, nearly taking his head off. As he stepped back, he saw a group of Stormcasts, led by Soros, rushing through the doors to fall upon the Bloodbound. The Retributor-Prime roared and flattened a bloodreaver with a single blow from his hammer.

‘Soros,’ he cried, ‘protect the priests!’

Gorewolf howled and surged towards him. They traded blows back and forth between the pillars. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Mannfred fighting alongside Soros. Dark energies ripped from the vampire’s hands as he unleashed killing spells, and Ashigaroth tore the life from those opponents who got too close. Mannfred fought ferociously, but even so, a trio of warriors slid past him and charged towards Tarsus and Gorewolf. Tarsus lunged forwards and shoved his enemy off balance into a pillar, and whirled to face this new threat.

The first bloodreaver went down beneath his hammer then the second fell to his sword. The last came at him in a rush, howling out his dark god’s name. His blade skittered across Tarsus’ chest plate. The Lord-Celestant parried a second blow, smashing the warrior’s arm with his hammer in the process. He stepped forwards and drove his sword up into the bloodreaver’s stomach, picking the barbarian up off of his feet. Tarsus pivoted and hurled the body off his blade even as Gorewolf surged towards him, mace raised. They crashed together, weapons locked.

As he strained against Gorewolf, Tarsus caught a glimpse of the priests. They were no longer kneeling in a line. Instead, a number of them were clustered about the twitching body of the man he had just killed, their heads lowered like hogs at the trough. The others pushed and shoved at one another as if trying to get close, hissing and snarling. Suddenly, one reared up, head thrown back to reveal the blood which coated its face and robes. The vampire screamed as if in pain, and his cry was taken up by the others as all seventy-seven of them began to writhe and twitch abominably.

Limbs swelled and twisted with a sound like snapping branches, and human flesh grew thin and tore away to reveal bulky, bestial bodies. Twisted, bat-like faces, smeared with blood, swung towards Tarsus and his foe. Mad, bulging eyes fixed on them, and dark muzzles peeled back from yellow fangs. Varghulf, Tarsus thought suddenly, the word rising to the surface of his memory as the heaving, hairy shapes sprang forwards on bent wing-stumps and jointed legs.

Tarsus reacted quickly. He shoved Gorewolf back, towards the approaching monsters. Two of the beasts leapt onto the champion, bearing him to the ground. The Chaos champion managed to knock one sprawling with his mace, even as the other buried its great fangs in his throat, savaging him. Gorewolf’s cries were cut short as one of the seventy-seven brothers tore out his jugular, painting a nearby pillar with his blood. His struggles faded and his mace clattered to the floor.

Several varghulfs pursued Tarsus as the rest stampeded towards the doors and the warriors still locked in combat there. He darted behind a pillar as they came at him in a rush. One struck the pillar and swung around it, its claws tearing chunks out of the stone as it scrambled down towards him, jaws snapping. A second leapt to the pillar opposite, cutting off his escape route. Tarsus whirled as a third smashed into him, knocking him off his feet. It tore his sword from his hand as they slid backwards in a tangle. It ducked forwards, jaws wide, and he forced the haft of his hammer between its teeth. He could hear the screams of the Bloodbound and the cries of his Stormcasts as the other varghulfs fell upon the combatants, roaring and shrieking.

The varghulf on top of him jerked back and forth, trying to wrench his weapon from his grip. Its wing-stumps battered at him, but he refused to let go, knowing that to do so was to die. Then, suddenly, its snout was pried back, away from him. Mannfred crouched atop its back, one hand clutching its upper jaw and his other wrapped in its shaggy mane. The varghulf reared up, screeching, as Mannfred lost his footing and tumbled to the floor. Tarsus drove his hammer into the creature’s throat, knocking it back. Mannfred scrambled to his feet, hands crackling with cold fire. He spat a guttural invocation and the varghulf shrilled as black flames suddenly sprouted from its hairy form. It staggered away from them, howling in pain.

Another lunged for him from between two pillars, but was knocked sprawling by Ashigaroth. The dread abyssal hissed in warning, as it crouched protectively near its master.

‘Back,’ Mannfred snarled, hands raised towards the varghulfs. ‘Back, you wretches, or else I shall teach you the true meaning of torment.’ He glared at the other varghulfs, who stared back at them with glittering eyes. ‘I am Mannfred von Carstein, and I will not be prey for blood-mad beasts.’

Slowly, reluctantly, the beasts slunk away. Tarsus turned, watching them as they moved for the shattered doors, wailing like lost souls. The others joined them, leaving the savaged bodies of the Bloodbound where they lay and the remaining Stormcasts where they stood. In a frenzied mass, the varghulfs exploded out into the temple, the echoes of their cries trailing after them. Soros stepped forwards and raised his hammer in salute. Tarsus returned the gesture and turned back to Mannfred.

‘I tried to warn you,’ Mannfred said harshly. ‘It’s the blood – they cannot risk the taste of blood. It drives them into a frenzy. That is why they came here. To hide away from battle, and the slaughter that comes with it.’

‘They are cursed,’ Tarsus said.

‘They are weak,’ Mannfred spat. ‘Unable to control themselves and thus of no use to anyone. They are beasts.’

‘Even so, we should go and make sure that they are no threat to the rest of my warriors or our charges,’ Tarsus said. He retrieved his sword and they made their way back out into the temple corridors, followed by Soros and the others.

Bloodbound bodies marked the path taken by the varghulfs. When they came to the entryway, they were met by Ramus and his vanguard.

The Lord-Relictor gestured with his staff towards the storm-wracked courtyard. ‘I saw.’ Before Tarsus could speak, he went on. ‘They pursued a number of our foes out into the storm. They did not seem eager to match claws with our shield wall,’ he said, with some satisfaction.

‘Not when there’s easier prey about,’ Mannfred said. He peered out into the storm. ‘They will glut themselves on the enemy and perish in the storm, or the sun that comes after. And even if they do not, we will be gone by the time they return. We must go. Now.’

Tarsus shook his head. ‘We will stay until the storm has passed. The people here are under our protection and they will not survive either the storm or those beasts should they return looking for easier prey.’

Mannfred looked as if he wanted to argue, but said nothing. He swept his cloak about him and stalked back down the corridor, leaving Tarsus and the other Stormcasts in silence.

It took a night and a day for the storm to die down. All signs of battle in the courtyard had been buried beneath the sand and dust. The seventy-seven Restful Brothers had not come back, either in one form or another, for which Tarsus was grateful. As the weak sun faded to dusk, the Stormcasts readied themselves to depart.

‘What will you do now?’ Tarsus asked, as he stood on the steps of the temple. His Stormhost was already on the march, heading west towards the mountains.

Aisha shrugged. ‘We came to serve the brethren for as long as they require, until they go back to their contemplations. And so we shall, when they return.’

‘If they return,’ Tarsus said.

‘They always do,’ Aisha replied, with a sad smile. ‘It is our duty to care for them, as best we can, so long as they allow. The dead hold their honour sacred.’

‘Can the living do any less?’ Tarsus asked. He extended his hand. Hesitantly, Aisha took it, clasping his forearm. ‘Much is demanded, of those to whom much is given,’ he said. ‘That is our saying, but I think it holds true for you as well, Aisha of Morrsend. Hold fast to your duty, and may Sigmar hear your prayers when the song of swords is begun.’

‘May a good death be yours, Tarsus of the Hallowed Knights,’ Aisha said. She released her hand and turned to rejoin her people, hammer across her shoulder.

‘So worthy,’ Mannfred said. ‘Such devotion, such dedication, to creatures who deserve neither.’ He spoke absently, as if thinking of something else entirely.

Tarsus examined the vampire where he sat atop his monstrous steed, casually stripping the flesh from a bloodreaver’s severed head. Mannfred had one leg thrown over Ashigaroth’s neck and was leaning back in his saddle, the very image of insouciance. It was a good performance, but the Stormcast could see the tension beneath the mask. Mannfred was eager to be away. Tarsus decided to take that as a good sign. He strode towards the vampire.

‘I did not thank you earlier.’

Mannfred did not look up from the bloody skull he’d been idly carving crooked sigils into, but he said, ‘Nor did you have to. I owe you a debt, Stormcast. We travel the same road and for the moment, our causes align.’

‘And what is your cause, Mannfred?’ Tarsus said. ‘You never said why you were in the temple. What were you looking for?’

Mannfred looked at him. ‘A sign, my friend. A sign that I am on the right path.’

‘And did you find it?’ Tarsus asked.

‘Yes,’ Mannfred said. He kicked Ashigaroth’s flanks, and the beast rose to its feet. ‘Yes, I believe I did,’ he called down, as the dread abyssal flung itself into the sky.

Tarsus watched the vampire swoop over the heads of his Stormcast, Gerot’s words echoing in his head. The dead, like the living, come in many shades, he thought. And that one bears watching…

THE LORDS OF HELSTONE

Josh Reynolds

Nagash has risen.

The ur-death stirs and the worlds tremble. That is as it should be, and yet… there are things I cannot see. All souls belong to me. All the dead of all the worlds above and below are mine. Nagash has risen and all must pay fealty.

But some do not. Some flee to realms I can but dimly perceive, the how or why of their leaving a mystery even to me. They are snatched from me, as a thief might pilfer coins. Who has taken them? Who denies me my rightful bounty?

WHO?

Whoever they are, they are my enemy and they shall know my wrath.

Though I have grown weak and weary, though my body slumps on its basalt throne, its hollows and crevices filled not with strength but with worms and spiders, they shall know my wrath. The enemy draws near. The Starless Gates are blistered by the heat of war, as the servants of the mad gods hurl themselves against my defences in an unceasing assault.

Their champions call for me to show myself. They mock me. They think me nothing but a memory, an old ghost, forgotten and fallen. Nagash is dead, they say. The Great Necromancer is bones and dust and nothing more.

But Nagash endures.

A grave wind gathers in the dark as my loyal Mortarchs gather and my servants heed my call. Soon, I must stride forth and break the bones of those who would stand against me. I shall crack their limbs and sew up their skins, filling them with mouldering air so that their wails echo forevermore.

Nagash has risen.

I shall not be denied. Not by those who face me openly, or by thieves who come in the night. Nagash shall cast down the citadels of his enemies and make of them habitation for night-birds and hoofed things.

But first, I must seek out my secret foes, those who sicken me and steal the strength from my limbs. For I have seen them, at a distance, their souls glowing with lightning and power. My power, stolen from me by an old enemy. I am betrayed by the storm, and his laughter is in every peal of thunder and flash of lightning.

The dead are mine and they must learn their place.

I shall hunt them in the Vale of Sorrows and across the Blood Plain. I shall peer through the eyes of carrion birds, and through the hollow sockets of fleshless horrors. I shall hunt them, these thieves, for they hold the key to my weakness.

They know what I must know.

And so I shall run them to ground. I shall tear their secrets from them.

Nagash will not be denied.

Nagash must not be denied.

NAGASH SHALL NOT BE DENIED.

Tarsus slammed his shoulder into the beastman’s stomach and flipped the goat-headed creature over his back. As it tried to scramble to its feet, he twisted about and crushed its skull with a blow from his hammer before whirling back around and opening the throat of a second gor with the tip of his sword.

‘Come then,’ he shouted, clashing his weapons together. ‘Come and meet the storm.’

Beastmen spilled out of the overgrown ruins all about him, scrambling through once-majestic archways and the fire-gutted structures that made up the gateway to the mountain city of Helstone. They had sprung their ambush with characteristic ferocity, but the brighter creatures were beginning to realise that they had caught more than they had bargained for. A foamy-jawed bestigor, clad in rusty armour, hacked at him with a two-handed axe. Tarsus avoided the blow and thrust his sword through the beastman’s chest, killing it instantly. He wrenched his blade free.

‘Smash them, sons of Sigmar,’ he roared. ‘Drive them back – let no Chaos-touched beast bar your path!’ All around him, the retinues of his silver-clad Stormhost surged forwards, slamming into the enemy with a sound like thunder. Their heavy shields, upon which the sigil of Sigmar was emblazoned, were thrust out to absorb the blows of axes and clubs. Hammers wreathed in crackling lightning rose and fell, pummelling the foe to the ground.

Tarsus kicked a beastman back against a broken pillar and pulped its skull as it staggered. Though the Lord-Celestant had been forged anew in Sigmar’s realm, the man he had been was born here, in the Realm of Death. And now, here I am, fighting the enemies of Sigmar in these lands once more, he thought, as he drove his war-helm into the face of a beastman and knocked it sprawling. Before it could stand, he drove his sword through its chest, killing it. Lands that might once have been mine, he thought, as he jerked his sword free.

He spun as he heard the scrape of steel on stone behind him, and swept his sword out. He pulled his blow up short as he saw the black and golden creature crouched atop the crumbled wall behind him. It screeched and he stepped back warily as it snapped its heavy jaws shut on a dead beastman’s head. Bone crunched and popped as the bat-like jaws drew forth a squealing wisp. As Ashigaroth swallowed the wretched scrap which passed for the beastman’s soul, its master laughed.

Mannfred von Carstein leaned forwards in his saddle. ‘I did warn you not to make so much noise, my friend,’ he said. ‘One would think you Stormcasts wanted to call the enemy down upon you.’

‘It’s easier to kill them if we don’t have to look for them,’ Tarsus said as he parried a blow from an axe and gutted its wielder. ‘In any event, they were in our way.’

Momentarily free of the press of combat, he scanned the battlefield. Vaulted archways, broken by calamity and age, rose above the overgrown paving stones of the enormous courtyard. Tumbledown walls marked where guardhouses and the inner keep of the great gatehouse had once stood, before it had fallen to ruin. Yellowing vines and a brittle brown moss clung to almost every flat surface.

‘Is this all that is left?’ he muttered. ‘Are these shattered ruins all that remains of Helstone?’

‘Of the city that was? Yes,’ Mannfred said. He gestured, and cold black flames wreathed his fingers. All around Tarsus, the newly dead began to twitch, like sleepers waking from a nightmare.

‘Stop,’ Tarsus said. ‘There is no need for that.’

Mannfred looked at him and sneered, but he lowered his hand, snuffing the flames as he did so.

‘What did you mean, “the city that was”? Is there another?’ the Lord-Celestant asked.

‘Of sorts,’ Mannfred said. ‘The city once sprawled wild across this very slope which overlooks the acrid waters of the Bitter Sea. Its towers once stretched into the very clouds themselves.’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘Now, they stretch to the very depths…’

Before Tarsus could press him further, he heard the winding of hunting horns. The Chaos pack was in retreat. The beastmen had chosen the site for their ambush well, but they had not been prepared for the speed with which the Stormcasts had reacted. Now, all save a determined handful were vanishing into the ruins, leaving the dead and wounded behind. The handful in question, a pack of armoured bestigors, continued to hack and smash at the shields of the Liberators.

‘Allow me,’ Mannfred began, raising his hand.

‘No need,’ Tarsus said, and barked an order. The Liberators began to fall back, drawing the bestigors after them. ‘Ramus, finish this,’ he said, glancing at his Lord-Relictor, who was standing on a broken plinth, surrounded by his Paladins and the shattered bodies of beastmen. As Tarsus spoke, Ramus raised his staff and murmured a sonorous prayer. He thrust the staff forwards as the blue light about it grew almost unbearably bright. In a voice like thunder, Ramus uttered one word.

‘Burn.’

Lightning zigzagged down through the shattered roof above, arcing along the crude iron weapons and armour of the bestigors and burning them to ash and bone. Ramus wrenched his staff aside like a man pulling a rope taut and the burning beastmen came apart in clouds of charred flesh and scorched metal, which spattered the shields of the Stormcasts. He turned back to face Tarsus and inclined his head.

‘The rest flee, Lord-Celestant,’ he said, stepping off the plinth and striding towards his commander. ‘The beastkin have little stomach for real battle.’

‘They will return,’ Mannfred said, cleaning his sword with a scrap of cloth. The vampire sheathed his blade with a flourish. ‘There are thousands of them and worse things besides, roaming the ruins, warring on each other. We must hurry and descend into the depths before their courage returns.’

‘The depths? Have you led us to one of the Nine Gates at last then, vampire?’ Ramus growled. ‘Have you finally made good on your debt to us?’

‘If I recall rightly, I owe you nothing, Stormcast,’ Mannfred said looking down at the Lord-Relictor. ‘Tarsus freed me, and I repaid him by saving your life.’

‘No, Ramus – this is not the way to Stygxx,’ Tarsus said. Ramus looked at him, as did Mannfred. Tarsus shook his head. ‘I am not so much a fool as that, Mannfred. You were far too evasive when you guided us here. What was it you said, in Sepulchre? Our paths run together, but they are not the same. There is no way into the underworld here, is there?’

Mannfred was silent for a moment. Then he looked away.

‘No,’ he said, patting Ashigaroth’s neck. ‘No, there is no gate to Stygxx here that I know of.’

‘I thought not,’ Tarsus said. ‘Yet you brought us here for a reason – what is it?’

Mannfred did not turn as he spoke, instead keeping his gaze on the city, which spread out below them. ‘Coming here was a necessity, I assure you. There is something here which we must acquire, before we can continue on our journey.’

‘What is it?’ Tarsus asked. He stepped in front of Mannfred’s steed and looked up at the vampire. Ashigaroth stirred, but Mannfred calmed the beast.

‘Speak, vampire,’ Tarsus said calmly, giving no sign that he had noticed the dread abyssal’s restlessness. ‘You owe me that much at least, by your own admission.’

‘The Fang of Kadon,’ Mannfred said, after a moment. ‘An artefact which can point the way to the Nine Gates. The gates are born anew every nine months, and they grow and age and die in the same span, crumbling to dust before appearing elsewhere. An endless cycle of death and rebirth. That is why the Dark Gods have yet to find Nagash, for none can predict where and when the Nine Gates will open. But with the Fang…’

‘How did such a potent item come to be lost?’

Mannfred laughed. ‘It was forgotten by the Mortarchs as they carried the broken remains of Nagash into the underworld. Left behind in the care of Uzun, sage of the Sorrowful Order, who made his way from the Vale of Sorrows to Sepulchre, and thence to Helstone…’

‘Why this place?’ Tarsus asked. Uzun, he thought, the name plucking some chord deep within him. He pushed the thought aside, trying to focus on what Mannfred had said. The Vale of Sorrows was where they had discovered the vampire, and Sepulchre… They had just left the ruins of Sepulchre, only a few days before.

‘Helstone was a place of resistance, in those fear-fraught final days,’ Mannfred said softly. He turned away, gazing out over the ruins, his narrow features taut. ‘Where those who could stood for those who could not. As the legions of the dead crumbled beneath the storm, the living held firm. The fortress-state of Helstone was a bastion against the assaults of Chaos, and it was here, in the days after Nagash was cast down, that the full might of the Dark Gods fell.’

He looked down at Tarsus. ‘Uzun brought the Fang here, it is said, so that the people of Helstone might flee to the underworld and seek sanctuary in the halls of the Amethyst Princes.’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘Alas, it was not to be. Nagash alone knew the secret of its use. Nagash… and one other.’

‘You,’ Tarsus said. Mannfred inclined his head.

‘We cannot trust him,’ Ramus said. ‘He has deceived us, Tarsus. We should have left him where we found him.’

Mannfred laughed. ‘And if you had, you would still be wandering aimlessly, looking for something you had no hope of finding.’ He looked at Tarsus. ‘Tarsus, my friend… I swear, on my very blood and bone, that I am not lying. We need the Fang, else we could search for an eternity without finding that which we seek.’

Tarsus paused, examining the vampire’s face for any sign of deception. ‘Why not simply tell us what you intended?’

‘Would you have trusted me?’ Mannfred looked at Ramus as he spoke, and Tarsus could feel the anger radiating off the Lord-Relictor. A seaborne wind hissed through the ruins, bringing with it the far-off wail of war-horns. Mannfred was correct – the beastmen were returning, and in strength.

‘Enough,’ Tarsus said, before Ramus could speak. ‘This place is vast, and, by your own admission, full of enemies. How will we find this artefact of yours?’

‘Simple. We shall ask the lords of Helstone.’

‘They yet live?’ Tarsus asked. At the thought, something awoke within him. A flare of heat, as if he had been in darkness and was suddenly standing in the sunlight. Mannfred looked down at him, his expression puzzled, but he nodded.

‘Yes. They live. In the depths below.’

‘Take us to them,’ Tarsus said.

Mannfred wordlessly kicked Ashigaroth into motion. Tarsus raised his hammer. His Stormcasts fell into formation smoothly with an instinctive discipline. They marched as one, Tarsus and Ramus taking the lead. Prosecutors, led by Zarus, swooped out over the ruins ahead of the column, assessing the lay of the city.

More than once, Zarus or one of his retinue brought word of beastmen lurking nearby in the ruins. But no further attacks came. The beastkin were not ones for strategy. They knew only one way, and that way served them badly when they faced a foe that was prepared for them. Badly enough, perhaps, that they were reluctant to try again. Even so, Tarsus remained alert, for the sound of horns never faded entirely.

He was not alone in being tense.

‘I do not trust him, Tarsus,’ Ramus said, as they followed Mannfred. ‘He leads us to one ruin after the next, as if we were the servants, and he the master. I would teach him the error of his ways…’

‘I have no doubt that you would, my friend,’ Tarsus said. ‘And in truth, my faith in his intentions wanes by the day. But… we are close, Ramus. I can feel it. We are on the cusp of… something. The end of our mission. Mannfred, despite his deceptions, can lead us to Nagash. And if he says we must find some artefact to win an audience with the Great Necromancer, then we will do so. I will not fail. We will not fail. We will do what we must, even if it costs all of us our lives. We can do no less, and still call ourselves Stormcasts.’

‘As you say, Lord-Celestant,’ Ramus said. He laid his hammer across his shoulder. ‘Though if he does betray us, I will remind you that I said as much.’

‘I expect nothing less, my friend,’ Tarsus said, and tapped Ramus’ shoulder plate with his hammer.

When the Stormcasts caught up with Mannfred, he was waiting for them at the edge of what appeared to be a massive crater that stretched like a gaping wound in the belly of the cliff.

‘Behold, the hole where Helstone’s heart used to be,’ Mannfred said, standing in his saddle, arms spread. ‘Here stood the Deep Gate, the largest of the Hollow Towers, by which the folk of Helstone moved between sky and salt.’

The crater rim was marked by great shards of amethyst, the gemstones rising from the charred rock in eerily shimmering patches which cast strange, crawling shadows across the barren ground. No buildings stood within a hundred yards of those glittering markers. Even so, the area was not unoccupied – hundreds of roughly human-sized crystalline growths crowded around the crater like a forest.

As the Stormcasts threaded through the silent, stunted forest, Tarsus peered closely at one of the formations. Through a murky purple facet, a charred skull stared back at him, jaws wide in a silent scream.

‘In the Realm of Death, victory always has its price,’ Mannfred called out. ‘The servants of Chaos tore Helstone apart, stone by stone, but the city claimed its due before it perished.’

‘A spell gone awry perhaps,’ Ramus said. ‘Wild magic…’ He tapped his staff against one of the crystallized bodies and the amethyst began to glow softly. Soon, each of the shards was shining with an ever-shifting light. As the light grew in intensity, a low, soft moan, as of many voices all in pain, rose from everywhere and nowhere. The sound spiralled up and up, until it filled the air. The crystal shapes began to quiver, as if in sympathy to the moan. Purple shadows twitched and danced in the light and, as it began to fade, Tarsus thought he could see faces among them, human and otherwise.

‘If you are finished,’ Mannfred said, ‘we should descend, before the beastherds regain their courage.’ He turned Ashigaroth about and the dread abyssal gave a shriek as it leapt into the crater. Tarsus led his warriors to the rim and saw a curving expanse of wide, shimmering amethyst steps leading down to a circular landing some distance below, where Mannfred sat and waved them on.

‘Hurry, my friend,’ he called up.

‘More wild magic?’ Tarsus asked, as Ramus joined him at the edge.

‘Perhaps,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘It shows the marks of tools, however. Someone carved these steps, and that landing as well.’

Tarsus started down, Ramus’ words weighing on him. Carved by the folk of Helstone, perhaps? Then Mannfred wasn’t lying after all. The thought lent him speed as he descended. The amethyst landing gave way to more steps, but these were stone. Clumps of shimmering amethyst illuminated their way, but only barely, and they grew fewer and fewer the further down the Stormcasts went.

As they marched past the crudely carved support struts, which proved to be holding up the serpentine length of the steps above, Tarsus caught glimpses of the hollowed-out core of the seaside cliff upon which Helstone had been built. It was a sprawling network of broken aqueducts and tall, balcony-studded pillars – the Hollow Towers that Mannfred had spoken of – each one connected to its neighbours by a confusing web of stone walkways and bridges, most of them broken. The Hollow Towers stretched between the levels of the city, connecting one vast urban plateau to the next.

‘How far down does this blasted ruin stretch?’ Ramus said, as they continued their descent.

‘The city was – is – vast,’ Mannfred said. ‘Larger even than the grand port of Ossuary. When its turrets and towers scraped the sky it housed millions.’

‘And now?’ Tarsus said, as he looked past the support struts up at the vaulted archways which crisscrossed above them for what seemed to be miles. The uppermost reaches were almost completely hidden by stone paths, balconies and buttresses which extended from one great plaza to the next. Helstone had clearly been built over centuries, each generation building over the last. He sensed that not all of the building had been done by human hands.

What strange depths might these Hollow Towers be rooted in? he wondered. He thought that, once, he might have known.

Mannfred ducked his head as Ashigaroth padded beneath a shattered archway. ‘Helstone was a mighty city, in its time. It sat astride the ancient trade routes, which stretch from the Skull Isles to the great manses of the Amethyst Underworld. Even Nagash knew better than to obliterate it.’ Mannfred laughed. ‘Though it helped that the Princes of the Ninety-Nine Circles sued for peace as soon as the Great Necromancer appeared outside their gates.’

Something about that term piqued Tarsus’ curiosity, though he could not say why. ‘The Ninety-Nine Circles,’ he said, as he followed Mannfred through the archway and out onto an enormous landing. Three sets of steps descended from it, two going deeper into the depths of the city, and one leading to a wide avenue which curved through the crumbled towers and buildings beyond. ‘This city was built on them – ninety-nine levels, stretching from the deepest sea caves to the clouds above.’ He spoke without thinking, and could not say where his knowledge had come from.

For a moment, Tarsus thought he could smell the scent of foreign spices, and the cured meats which had once hung in market stalls. He could hear the clamour of life, as if from far away. He could feel…

Fire, rising from the depths of the city…

The screams of his people as they fled…

The sword in his hand vibrating painfully as he parried an enemy blade…

He blinked, and found Mannfred watching him, an inscrutable expression on his face. The vampire nodded. ‘Aye, and each level a kingdom in its own right, one stacked above the next. When the upper city fell, many of its people retreated to the lower levels, through the gates above, and these towers.’ He smiled. ‘They were a proud folk once, the lords of Helstone. Mighty in war, cunning in trade…’

‘Not mighty enough,’ Ramus said.

‘Mighty or no, if some of them survived then we must find them,’ Tarsus said.

‘And so we shall,’ Mannfred said. With that, he threw back his head to emit a monstrous shriek. It bounced from buttress to pillar, from arch to keystone, travelling far. As the echoes of it faded, something in the darkness answered in kind. Mannfred gestured airily, a cruel smile on his face. ‘Ah. As I suspected.’

Tarsus tensed as the sound of panting beasts and of claws scratching across stone rose out of the darkness. What horrors had Mannfred summoned?

‘You said you were taking us to meet the folk of Helstone, vampire,’ he said.

‘And so I have! Behold, the once-proud folk of Helstone,’ Mannfred said, as a number of gaunt grey shapes spilled into the open from out of the ruins below them. They were lean-limbed and starved-looking, their bare flesh pockmarked with scars where it was not covered by bits of animal hide or scavenged armour. Some carried weapons, crudely fashioned from bone or wood, but most bore nothing save their claws and fangs.

The sight of them tore at Tarsus more painfully than the talons of any mutant beast. He had expected men and had been given monsters instead. He watched them approach, torn between repulsion and sadness as, red-eyed and wary, they clustered at the edge of the light, mewling and snarling like wild beasts.

‘What have they become?’ he said softly.

‘Ghouls,’ Ramus said. ‘Carrion-eaters and marrow-drinkers. Foul things, more beast than man, more grave-worm than beast.’ Behind him, Tarsus heard the Stormcasts prepare themselves in case the newcomers proved themselves a threat. Shields were raised and hammers readied. He held up a hand, forestalling any premature action on the part of his warriors. The creatures clearly meant no harm, and despite his repugnance an ember of pity flickered within him.

‘Perhaps,’ Mannfred said. ‘But they are our allies, nonetheless. They have come at my call, and they will serve at my command. They will scatter throughout this city, and locate that which I – which we – seek.’

‘Can they be trusted?’ Tarsus asked.

‘As well as I,’ Mannfred replied.

Ramus gave a bark of laughter, but subsided at Tarsus’ gesture.

‘Then send them out,’ said the Lord-Celestant. ‘I would not tarry here any longer than is necessary.’

‘As you wish,’ Mannfred said. He moved down the steps, hands spread. The largest of the gathered ghouls clambered to meet him, moving with a curious simian gait. As Mannfred drew close, he held up his hands and dug his fingers into his palms, tearing his own flesh. The whines of the ghouls grew in intensity. Mannfred held out his bloody palms as if in benediction. The largest ghouls clustered about him, clutching at his arms as they drank his blood, or else licking up the droplets that spattered the stones. Ramus grunted in disgust, and Tarsus couldn’t help but sympathise with his Lord-Relictor’s feelings.

It was a vile ritual but, he suspected, an old one. As the ghouls nuzzled his hands, Mannfred spoke in a guttural language. Every so often, a ghoul would rear back, blood decorating its muzzle, and shriek out something that might have been a question. At last Mannfred wrenched his hands away from his grisly supplicants and snarled out a command. The ghouls turned as one and scrambled away, back into the shadows from which they had emerged. The vampire turned and climbed the steps.

‘It will be some time. There are miles to cover and these creatures must carry my word to the other packs. We should make camp.’

The dais and the avenue before the steps served them well enough in that regard, and the Stormcasts set up a field camp quickly. Liberator retinues took up a defensive perimeter around the bottom of the steps. Smaller chunks of rubble or fallen stones nearby were dragged into position to serve as improvised barricades, behind which Judicators took up position in order to watch the approaches to the dark avenue before them. Tarsus and Ramus stood at the top of the steps alongside Mannfred, surrounded by their retinues.

Stormcasts rarely needed rest, and the azure glow radiating from Ramus’ reliquary staff served to bolster the strength of all who were within reach, save Mannfred. The vampire shied away from the light and instead sat astride his monstrous steed, seemingly deep in thought.

Tarsus let his gaze roam across the plaza, taking in the grisly piles of gnawed bones and barbaric totems which seemed to occupy every nook and cranny in sight. Was this then all that was left of the city’s former inhabitants? A broken necropolis, full of beasts and shadows?

Shadows, wreathed about a column of flame, coming closer…

Men screaming, as red, lean-limbed daemons scrambled over the parapets…

The daemons scattering, fleeing before the approach of something worse…

A roar, like thunder…

He shook his head, trying to dislodge the errant mote of memory, as scenes of fire and death rose out of some deep place in his mind. Was this sunken place the citadel of his memories? Had he trod these stones before, in another life, in another time?

He watched the shadows dance in the light of Ramus’ staff, and tried to capture the flickering, fleeting memories as they slid across his mind, but it was like grasping smoke.

Some Stormcasts could recall their previous lives with almost painful clarity. Others could remember little, if anything. Tarsus was trapped between one life and the next, as were many of the Hallowed Knights. Their faith in Sigmar was like a chain, binding the facets of their two lives inextricably together.

He ran his fingers across the sign of Sigmar emblazoned on the head of his warhammer. Whoever he had been, he was Tarsus Bull-Heart now. That would have to be enough.

He looked up to find Mannfred gone. Tarsus rose to his feet and looked around. There was no sign of the vampire. He and his monstrous steed had vanished so silently that Tarsus hadn’t even noticed their departure.

He signalled Ramus.

‘I knew he would desert us at the first opportunity,’ the Lord-Relictor said, striding towards him.

‘This is not the first time he has disappeared,’ Tarsus said. ‘But the timing leaves much to be desired. We must–’

The air suddenly quivered with the tramp of hooves and the bray of bestial voices. Tarsus turned, drawing his sword.

‘Eyes front, Stormcasts,’ he said, his voice ringing out.

‘Is that what you call yourselves, then?’ a voice said, loudly. Tarsus saw a robed and hooded shape step out onto one of the balconies above them, a heavy scythe in one hand. The iron-shod haft of the scythe rang as the figure walked to the edge of the balcony and looked down at them. ‘Fitting, for creatures that come on wings of lightning.’

The newcomer threw back his hood, revealing a face that bore more relation to that of a reptile than a man. The scales that covered the creature’s scalp and cheeks were dark and infected-looking.

‘Stormcasts, then,’ he said, his voice slithering down through the dusty air. As Tarsus watched, he reached up and pried a warty scale loose from his face and tossed it aside. ‘You are trespassing. This city – and everything in it – belongs to the gods. The true gods.’ The creature thumped the balcony with his scythe. ‘It belongs to Sloughscale and his chosen followers. It is ours to do with as we wish, and none may gainsay us.’

Beastmen began to fill the streets and doorways ahead. They slunk out in knots and packs, slavering and howling in eagerness. The buzzing of millions of flies grew loud, nearly drowning out the stamp of hooves and the clatter of weapons. The heavy silhouettes of blightkings loomed behind the beastherds. Everywhere Tarsus looked, an enemy looked back.

‘He knew,’ he muttered. Somehow, Mannfred had known this was coming. Why else would he have slipped away? The ghouls, he thought. There was no telling what had truly passed between the debased creatures and the vampire. Had the vampire betrayed them?

Ramus nodded. ‘Of course he knew. We are a distraction, Tarsus. He knew these beasts were here, and he knew our coming would stir them to battle. We are the meat, to bait the trap.’

‘Then we shall have to disabuse him of that notion,’ Tarsus said. ‘But first, we must clear ourselves a path.’ He signalled for his men to ready themselves for battle. At his gesture, shields were locked together, forming a rough bulwark. Soros and his Retributors stood behind the shield wall, ready to charge once the enemy were within reach. He glanced at Ramus. ‘You know what to do.’

‘I do,’ the Lord-Relictor said.

Above them, Sloughscale brought his scythe down upon the stones of the balcony with a crash, and the servants of Nurgle started forwards. Ungors and gors led the charge, bellowing guttural chants as they rang funerary bells and beat skin-drums. Tarsus raised his hammer. ‘Shields up,’ he said. ‘Stand fast.’

As the front ranks of the enemy drew close, the more nimble beastmen outpacing the slower blightkings, Tarsus clashed his weapons together. ‘Stamp your hooves, Bull-Hearts,’ he bellowed. All around him, Liberators thumped their hammers against the inside of their shields in a brutal rhythm, akin to the sound made by the hooves of the great shaggy aurochs which roamed the vast plains of Azyr. ‘If we must return to Sigmaron, let it not be in shame. When next we meet death, let it be with open eyes. Who shall stand, though the realms crumble?’

‘Only the faithful,’ the Stormcast answered, as one.

‘Who will rise, when all others fall?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Who will be victorious?’

‘ONLY THE FAITHFUL!’ The echoes of hammers striking sigmarite filled the avenue, drowning out even the bestial cries of the approaching bullgors.

‘Only the faithful!’ Tarsus roared. ‘Liberators – at my command, break the wall. Soros! There is red work to be done, Retributor. Ready yourself.’

Soros’ reply was to strike the haft of his lightning hammer against the ground. His Retributors followed suit, adding a ringing note to the thunder of the Liberators’ war-song. Tarsus felt his heart beat faster, aligning with the battle-rhythm.

When he judged the enemy to be within reach, Tarsus snarled, ‘Now!’

The shield wall split before him, and he led Soros and the Retributors forwards at a dead run. They crashed into the enemy a moment later. The great two-handed hammers wielded by Soros and his warriors lashed out right and left, smashing beastmen from their feet or pulverising them in mid-stride. Tarsus clubbed and chopped at the enemy as he waded into their midst. The foe reeled, their momentum blunted by the sudden counter-charge.

A barrel-chested gor chieftain, scabrous skin covered in boils and sores, lurched forwards out of the press and attacked him. The creature carried an axe in either hand and lashed out at him with both. It hacked at him, bellowing in a berserk fury. Tarsus swept the weapons aside with a blow from his hammer and chopped the beast’s legs out from under it. As it fell, he drove his heel down on its throat, silencing its screams.

The air rippled and Tarsus looked up, just as Sloughscale spat an incantation. Sorcerer, he thought, even as sickly green light speared from the creature’s hand, and several Stormcasts were reduced to bubbling black masses of corroded armour and rotting flesh, before they vanished in flashes of blue light.

‘Take him,’ Tarsus cried, signalling for Zarus and his Prosecutors to occupy the sorcerer’s attention.

Even as the winged warriors swooped towards Sloughscale, Tarsus was forced to divert his attention to a trio of spear-wielding gors. The beastmen lashed out at him from all sides and he twisted, letting a spear scrape across his chest and a second beneath his arm. He managed to hook the third with his hammer and tear it from its owner’s grip. He killed the weaponless creature, but a moment later he was driven to one knee by a powerful blow. He peered up, dazed, and saw a massive bullgor looming over him, a stone-headed maul clutched in its wide fists.

The bullgor lifted its weapon for another blow, when the snarl of lightning filled the air. A crackling azure bolt struck the bullgor full in the chest, hurling it backwards. Ramus strode towards him, lightning crawling across his silver armour.

Liberators forged forwards in his wake, joining their shield-brothers in the line as Judicators moved up behind them, firing their crossbows into the milling ranks of the foe. Ramus led a retinue of Decimators forwards, their axes swinging out in deadly rhythm, to capitalise on the damage done by the charge of the Retributors.

Tarsus brought his hammer up and around, against the head of his remaining opponent. The beastman fell twitching, even as Ramus joined him, and they fought back to back.

‘The sorcerer,’ he said, as he planted a boot on a beastman’s chest and ripped his weapon free of the flabby flesh. ‘Can you do something about him?’

‘Of course,’ Ramus said, as he drove the haft of his staff into the stomach of a blightking. It doubled over and Ramus crushed its skull with a powerful blow from his hammer. ‘Much is demanded–’

‘–of those to whom much is given,’ Tarsus said, completing the oath. He traded blows for a moment with a shrieking beastman, before its head was briefly limned by lightning and it dropped where it stood, smoke rising from its shattered skull. A nearby Judicator saluted him and Tarsus returned the gesture as he took in the battlefield at a glance. The shield wall was holding. Ramus’ charge had bought them respite, but the enemy still pressed close. It was as if every herd of beastmen in Helstone had answered Sloughscale’s call to war, and for every gor that fell, three more took its place. ‘Where are you, vampire?’ he muttered, as he parried a saw-toothed sword blade and rammed his hammer into its wielder’s goatish snout.

Perhaps Ramus had been right. Mannfred had taken advantage of them, used them to distract these foes, so that he could retrieve his prize. When I find you, vampire, I will extract payment from your cold carcass for every fallen warrior, he thought, as a bolt of blue shot upwards, signalling the death of a Stormcast.

He heard Ramus’ voice rise in prayer, and then a searing bolt of lightning split the air. The balcony Sloughscale had been occupying ceased to exist, reduced to tumbling fragments by the wrath of Sigmar. As the echo of the lightning strike faded, Tarsus heard the wail of horns and saw that the pox-worshippers were falling back, retreating into the ruins.

‘The sorcerer escaped,’ Ramus said. ‘I saw him dart into the tower as my lightning struck.’ He hammered the ferrule of his staff against the ground. ‘We must hunt him down.’

‘Yes,’ Tarsus said. ‘Mannfred can wait. We will find him and this artefact of his after we have purged this place of the plague which afflicts it.’ He raised his sword. ‘Form up! In Sigmar’s name, we march,’ he roared.

The city unfolded around them as they pursued Sloughscale and his followers, revealing horrors and wonders in equal measure. Great holes, wide enough to swallow an army, had been dug in the earth, and strange lights glimmered in the darkest reaches. Slumped towers disgorged swarms of fireflies as the Stormcast marched past, and, once, something large scrambled away from them, deeper into the ruins.

The beastherds and pox-warriors ran far and fast, but the Bull-Hearts were as inexorable as the oncoming storm. As they marched, the Liberators pounded their shields, filling the dark with noise and sparks of light as sigmarite struck sigmarite. The sound reverberated upwards, and as if in response, an amethyst rain began to fall. Each drop glowed briefly as it struck, leaving purple streaks across the silver of their armour.

The way ahead was often blocked by fallen bridges or toppled pillars, forcing them to seek alternate routes – routes which Tarsus found as often as the Prosecutors who swooped beneath broken aqueducts and through the slumping frames of shattered towers. For Tarsus, it was as if he had walked these streets before, and the further they penetrated the ruins, the more the memories came flooding back. He said nothing of it to Ramus. The Lord-Relictor had enough misgivings as it was.

The distant rumble of falling stones accompanied the steady rhythm of their march, as some part of the city gave in to time and collapsed in on itself. Soon, Tarsus thought, in a century, maybe two, little would be left of Helstone save rubble. But perhaps one day, people might return and reclaim what had been stolen from them. Perhaps one day, the Stormcasts would again march through these streets, and be greeted not by silence or the brays of savage beastmen, but by the cheers of its citizens. That would be a good day, when it came.

A good day, Tarsus thought, but not this day. This day was not about cheers or reclamation of lost glory, but instead about grim necessity. He wondered how they would find Mannfred, once the enemy had been dealt with. Like as not, the vampire would come for them. It was a cunning stratagem – pit one foe against another, and claim victory over both. Perhaps the vampire simply had no more need of them, now that he had regained his strength. Or perhaps he served a darker master than mere ambition.

Nagash was no friend to Sigmar. The enmity between God-King and god of death was old and savage. Is it Mannfred who stands against us… or Nagash himself?

‘This place is dead,’ Ramus intoned, pulling Tarsus from his reverie. ‘It is a rotting husk.’ He thrust his staff out, indicating a crude effigy of stretched skin and bone, bound together by strands of greying hair, which hung from a nearby pillar. Its features were hidden beneath the remains of an ancient helm. Skulls and lumps of rotting meat had been scattered about the base of the pillar.

‘Offerings,’ Ramus said.

‘To Nagash,’ Tarsus said. ‘The folk of Helstone worship him now, rather than Sigmar. Those who are not slaves to a more pernicious darkness.’ As well as the grisly votives of the ghouls there were more abominable signs – crumbling walls marked with the triple circle of Nurgle or the sign of the fly, as well as the foul herdstones of the beastmen, erected in the plazas and squares where merchants had once hawked their wares. When they came upon these, Tarsus ordered them destroyed, and his warriors complied joyfully.

‘All the more reason to collapse this verminous warren in on itself,’ Ramus said. ‘Look around you, Tarsus. There is no light here… only darkness. This, I fear, is what comes of fell deities like Nagash.’ He gestured broadly to the boles of turned earth and cleft rock which surrounded them, marking new tunnels dug into the streets and walls of Helstone by inhuman hands, and to the scattered bones and grisly totems. ‘Can you smell it, Tarsus? It is the stink of evil.’

‘Evil comes in many forms, Ramus. And some are more tolerable than others, for the greater good,’ Tarsus said, as they passed the effigy. As it receded behind them, a purple light seemed to grow behind the visor of the helm, and he wondered for a moment if something was listening. The dead did not rest in this realm. He raised his hammer, and considered going back to smash the foul idol. Then, with a sigh, he pressed on.

‘Nagash was of Sigmar’s pantheon, my friend. He ruled the dead, even as Sigmar ruled the heavens. He is an evil thing, but a necessary one,’ he said. ‘Chaos is our enemy this day.’

‘And Mannfred,’ Ramus said.

Tarsus nodded slowly. ‘And Mannfred.’

Soon, the avenue before them widened into an immense plaza. Tarsus raised his hammer, and the host slowed its advance. Two enormous towers, covered in moss, rose above either side of the avenue, casting long shadows across the way ahead. There was no sign of their foe, and he wondered how much farther the beasts would run before they were finally brought to bay. No horns or drums… no noise of any sort. Where are you? he thought, looking around.

Behind them, rising steadily upwards, row upon row of mausoleums and tomb-faces gazed down. There were thousands of them, stretching upwards at an angle, away from the walkways and paths which connected them to the avenue and into the darkness. As he examined them, Tarsus wondered whether there was anything left in them, after all these years.

He heard a cry and looked up. A Prosecutor fell, spiralling down towards the street ahead, arrows jutting from the weak points of his armour. The rest of the winged warriors were swooping and diving, trying to avoid the storm of arrows which arced through the air around them.

‘To arms,’ Zarus called, moments before an arrow thudded home in the eye-slit of his war-helm. He fell like a stone, striking a roof and rolling off into the abyss below, his body reduced to a crackle of blue light as he vanished.

Before Tarsus could act on Zarus’ final warning, a foul haze of green light enveloped the avenue and the sound of rupturing stone rolled through the air.

‘Tarsus – the towers!’ Ramus roared, from behind him. Tarsus looked around and saw the two enormous towers begin to twist and pivot like drunkards as their bases decayed before his very eyes.

‘Move,’ Tarsus shouted, flinging out his hand even as the warriors around him caught hold of him. They dragged him forwards just as the towers toppled with thunderous groans, spewing dust and debris across the avenue. The towers struck the street one after the other like hammer blows, cracking the pavement open. The avenue shuddered and shifted as the great support columns beneath it quaked down to their roots.

Stormcasts were hurled from their feet or else buried beneath the collapsing structures. Some fell as sections of the avenue collapsed, flinging them down into the lower levels of the city where they were swiftly lost to view. A cloud of dust rolled across those who remained, filling the avenue and choking the air.

‘My lord, are you unhurt?’ Soros asked as he helped Tarsus to his feet.

‘So it seems. The others?’ Even as he asked the question, he looked at the wall of rubble which now covered the avenue. Parts of the road were simply gone, and what was left was now blocked almost to the ceiling. The fall of the towers had even torn down the roof in some sections. Dust obscured everything. Ambush… should have expected it, he thought, cursing himself and the piecemeal memories which had dulled his instincts.

‘I hear something,’ Soros said.

Tarsus did too – a wild grunting overlaid by a piercing creaking and a rumble, as of iron-shod wheels crossing stone. Before he could issue the order to form up, an appalling stink washed over them, as, with a roar, beastmen burst through the roiling cloud and fell on those Stormcasts furthest from the rubble.

Blue lightning slashed upwards as warriors fell to the Chaos pack.

‘Fall back,’ Tarsus cried. ‘Fall back and form up.’

The Stormcasts did as he ordered, backing away as more and more beastmen boiled out into the open. They came all in a rush, howling and waving flyblown standards. Monstrous, lumbering chariots drawn by snorting pig-like beasts rumbled out of the obscuring dust, each one filled with shrieking beastkin. Enormous monstrosities – multi-armed ghorgons and slavering bullgors – thundered in the wake of the chariots.

Around him, Stormcasts took up defensive positions, shields locked, but the enemy were already among them. A chariot careened towards Tarsus, hook-tipped chains rattling in its wake. A Liberator was torn from his feet by the chains and dragged behind the rumbling contraption until he dissolved into crackling azure motes.

Tarsus brought his hammer down on the head of one of the chariot-beasts, killing it as it charged past him. It stumbled and slewed, causing its burden to wobble on its ill-made wheels. He twisted away as the chariot-riders thrust at him with spears and crude blades, and swept his cloak out. Mystical hammers erupted from its folds and obliterated both the teetering chariot and its occupants.

He saw Soros lunge forwards and slam his shoulder into a second chariot. The Retributor-Prime gave a cry and overturned the chariot, spilling its riders to the ground. As the beast drawing it turned on him, he brought his hammer down on its hairy back, shattering its spine in a crackle of lightning. More chariots were reduced to fragments, their bestial crew slain, but the damage had been done. The Stormcast lines were in disarray.

The remaining chariots rattled away as the rest of the beastherd closed in. Bloated blightkings, clad in hell-forged armour, pushed through the savage ranks and lumbered to join the bestigors and bullgors at the front. The putrescent warriors surrounded the thin form of Sloughscale, who strode swiftly forwards, scythe in hand, a sickly green halo radiating about him. The sorcerer swung his weapon and a ripple of nauseating light erupted from the edge of the blade to strike a Retributor. The Stormcast had no time to scream as his flesh rotted from his bones. Sloughscale laughed wildly, the sound carrying above the clangour of battle.

‘You’re mine,’ Tarsus said, as he raised his sword. At his signal, Soros and the Retributors fought their way towards him. The rest of the Bull-Hearts had formed defensive phalanxes. They were isolated by the press of battle, but Tarsus knew that they would hold fast, especially if he could kill Sloughscale and break the enemy’s will to fight.

With the Retributors spread out around him, Tarsus smashed his way through the Chaos ranks, crushing bones and removing limbs with every strike. He and his warriors were like a blazing spear thrust into the belly of the foe, and Sloughscale took note. The sorcerer’s eyes widened as he saw the silver-armoured warriors battling their way towards him. Hastily, he shrieked out a command to his massive bodyguards.

A blightking lunged to intercept Tarsus as he drew close to Sloughscale, and hammer met axe in a spray of sparks. Tarsus traded blows with the blightking for a moment, when suddenly, a shaft of blue light shot between them. More shafts of light speared out, emerging from the rubble of the fallen towers. Then, with a bone-rattling roar, the wall of rubble exploded outwards and the air was filled with the howl of tearing rock and the snarl of lightning.

As the battlefield was struck by a rain of smoking debris, Tarsus saw Ramus stride through the smoke, staff and hammer raised. Stormcasts charged past him, moving to reinforce their brethren.

‘I seem to recall warning you once about getting ahead of your warriors, Lord-Celestant,’ the Lord-Relictor said as he struck the ground with the haft of his staff. Lightning flashed, striking a lumbering blightking. More of the pox-warriors closed in.

‘Such was not my intention, I assure you,’ Tarsus said as he locked blades with a second blightking. Flies buzzed in and out of the holes in the foul warrior’s helm, and his armour was covered in horny growths. Tarsus slammed his hammer into the creature’s knee, and the blightking sank down with a groan. He shoved it back and speared its throat with his blade. As it fell, he looked for Sloughscale.

‘The sorcerer – where is he?’ he barked.

‘I do not see him,’ Ramus said, as he crushed another blightking’s skull.

Beastmen flooded forwards, bounding through the smoking rubble to fall upon the newly arrived reinforcements. The shriek of war-horns rose over the din, and Tarsus cursed. The sorcerer had drawn them into the heart of enemy territory. They were cut off from any avenue of retreat, and surrounded by hordes baying for their blood.

‘Only the faithful!’ he said, drawing strength from the words. Around him, Ramus and the others took up the cry. It leapt from retinue to retinue, until the roar crashed against the maddened bellows of the Chaos war-horde.

As the din reached a crescendo, a wild howl suddenly split the clamour. It shivered down from somewhere far above. Beastmen and Stormcasts alike paused momentarily and looked up, as the vast slope of ancient mausoleums above them was suddenly swarming with bodies. Ghouls climbed and leapt down from the high places, spilling across the slope from the darkness. Among their number were larger creatures, like ghouls but massive and heavy with muscle. The bellows of these creatures echoed down, and the bullgors roared back in challenge.

The ghouls howled as one, and beat on the doors of the tombs with bones and clubs, filling the air with an abominable din. Above them, Ashigaroth loped down the slope, tearing apart mausoleum faces and tomb arches in its haste. Mannfred was hunched forwards in his saddle, cloak streaming out raggedly behind him. Ashigaroth bounded from the slope and crashed down atop the jutting archway of a tomb. As it landed, the ghouls ceased their caterwauling.

For a moment, silence reigned. Mannfred surveyed those below, his expression unreadable. Tarsus met his gaze, and the vampire cocked his head. Had he come to aid them, or to finish them all off? Tarsus tightened his grip on his hammer. We will have our reckoning, vampire, he thought. Mannfred would pay for his betrayal.

As if reading his thoughts, Mannfred smiled.

The dread abyssal reared with a shriek, and Mannfred drew his sword with a flourish.

‘Feast!’ Mannfred howled and the ghouls echoed him as Ashigaroth leapt from its perch and swooped out above the fray.

The ghouls scuttled down the slope of mausoleums in a deluge of claws and fangs. They swarmed across the sagging rooftops and bridges until, with wild screams, the creatures at the forefront hurled themselves bodily upon those who had dared invade their territory. The Stormcasts tensed, readying themselves for this new assault, but the grey-fleshed creatures streamed past them to swarm over the followers of Chaos.

Blightkings and beastmen alike were overwhelmed by the fury of the newcomers. More ghouls spilled forth from ruptured tomb-faces and scrambled from the shadows, more than Tarsus had ever dreamed might lurk within these ruins. More beastmen spilled out, and barbaric horns brayed in the distance. He smashed a bestigor from its hooves, and whipped his sword out to cleave the head from an ungor’s hunched shoulders.

‘Did you doubt me?’ Mannfred called out, as Ashigaroth flew past. ‘The word of a von Carstein is sacred.’ He laughed and beheaded a rearing bullgor as Ashigaroth pounced on another of the bull-headed monsters, bearing it to the ground. Mannfred stood up in his saddle as the dread abyssal tore the struggling bullgor apart. The vampire spread his arms and began to chant.

The air grew cold, such that even Tarsus felt it. Mannfred’s incantation beat upon the air, each syllable searing itself into the fabric of the world. And as the last one faded, the clamour of battle seemed to grow dim. A new sound invaded, insistent and omnipresent. The scratch of bones on biers, of fleshless fingers clawing at stones, the rattle of long-forgotten weapons, drawn for the first time in centuries.

And with a vast sigh, the tombs gave up their dead. They emerged like wisps of smoke, coiling and thickening, becoming solid as they sped down the slope – skeletal steeds, clad in archaic barding, their riders wearing the armour of a bygone age.

The dead swept forwards in a silent charge. This is our city, they seemed to say, try and take it from us, and only death will follow. They slaughtered beasts and pox-warriors without hesitation, remorseless and unstoppable. The true lords of Helstone had come, and none amongst the Chaos horde could stand against them. Tarsus wondered whether even his own warriors could have done so, and was glad that he would not have to find out today.

As he fought, Tarsus drew close to one of the undead riders. Its armour was of a make that seemed half familiar to him, as if he’d seen it somewhere before. An axe struck his shoulder plate, shivering to fragments as it did so. He spun and struck down a stupefied beastman. When he turned back, the dead man was close enough to touch.

The wight gazed at him with empty eye sockets, an eerie light illuminating its brown bones from within. It wore a tarnished circlet and age-blackened armour. In its hand was a long blade, which gleamed with cold fire. Slowly, it raised the blade, and Tarsus tensed. But instead of striking at him, it brought the sword up in a salute.

Tarsem… something whispered, in his head, and he felt a twinge of disquiet. Then, with a rattle of old bones, the wight turned its undead mount away and galloped back into the fight, its sword tearing the life from beastmen as it went. Tarsus looked around, searching for Sloughscale. He peered up at the ruins of one of the Hollow Towers rising above the battlefield and saw a flash of movement. He cursed. The sorcerer could not be allowed to escape. He would only rally more beastherds to attack them.

‘Ramus,’ he called. ‘The sorcerer – cut off his escape!’

Ramus nodded and began to chant. Motes of sizzling energy blistered the air around him as he called upon Sigmar, and drew the lightning to his staff. As the air grew heavy with the growing pressure of Ramus’ prayer, Tarsus charged towards the tower, bulling aside any foe foolish enough to get in his way. As he ran, he signalled to Soros.

‘Gather your warriors and follow me,’ he shouted. The sorcerer would not escape again.

As Tarsus sprang through the archway which led into the tower, the whole edifice shook suddenly. Dust and fragments of stone pattered across his armour. Smoke filled the stairwell as he climbed. There was no time to wait for Soros. He and his warriors would have to catch up. He heard a loud voice raised in a chant, and then a second sorcerous explosion rocked the tower. The stairwell above him was suddenly filled with falling stones and heat, and he was forced to hurl himself out onto a balcony, away from the worst of it. As he clambered to his feet, he looked up and saw the balcony above begin to tear away from the side of the tower with a thunderous, cracking roar.

It plummeted down, nearly obliterating the space he occupied. As the bulk of it careened past, he saw something drop from it. The figure hit the balcony, rolled to its feet in a swirl of stinking robes and rushed towards him, dragging the blade of its scythe along the stones as it came. Tarsus realised, as the scythe arced towards him, that Sloughscale had ridden the falling masonry down, out of reach of Ramus’ lightning.

Sloughscale struck at the Lord-Celestant in a spray of sparks, driving him back through sheer momentum. The sorcerer fought as fiercely as any beastman. As Tarsus parried his foe’s attacks, he could see scorch marks on Sloughscale’s breastplate and robes. The sorcerer had not emerged unscathed from Ramus’ storm.

As Tarsus drove his opponent back, he saw bloated shapes fighting through the rubble which blocked the steps. A blightking lurched towards him, rotting fingers clawing. He beheaded the pox-warrior even as a second and a third erupted from the archway and hurled themselves into battle.

‘Takes more than a bit of lightning to kill Nurgle’s own, Stormcast,’ Sloughscale hissed as he backed away. Rust-riddled blades hacked at Tarsus from every side, and he was soon on the defensive. But not for long. With a roar, Soros and his remaining Retributors burst out onto the balcony, hammers raised. As the battle was joined, Tarsus was free to concentrate on the true threat. He fought his way free of the blightkings and launched himself at Sloughscale.

The sorcerer flung out a hand and began to chant, baleful energies coruscating around his fingers. Tarsus charged at him, head lowered. Green fire washed over him, tarnishing his armour where it touched, and causing the stone beneath his feet to crumble. He lurched forwards regardless, forcing himself through the unnatural heat.

A wash of heat, blistering his flesh beneath his armour…

The roar of the greater daemon, as its axe cleaved the air…

The light… the pain… Tarsem…

Tarsus staggered as Sloughscale’s scythe drew sparks from his chest plate and tore through his cloak. Smoke rose from his armour as he tried to focus on his enemy. The scythe sliced towards him again. The force of the blow drove him back a step and ripped the air from his lungs. Pain blazed in his side. Sloughscale whipped the scythe around, driving Tarsus back. He hit the rampart and the scythe hissed down, but he rolled aside at the last moment and the cruel blade became lodged in the broken stones. Tarsus twisted around and drove his hammer down, shattering the wood and causing Sloughscale to stagger back, eyes wide.

The sorcerer tossed aside the broken weapon and began to chant, but Tarsus was on him a moment later. His sword chopped into Sloughscale’s skull, silencing him. As he wrenched the blade free in a welter of brackish blood, the sorcerer staggered past him, towards the edge of the balcony. Tarsus swept his hammer out, smashing the sorcerer from his feet and sending him hurtling over the edge.

Sloughscale’s squirming body struck ramparts and towers, broken skyways and moss-encrusted gargoyles as it tumbled down into the dark. As Tarsus turned away, he heard the ululating howls of ghouls rising from the depths, as if in thanks for the gift they had received.

He clutched his side. Breathing was painful. Something in him had been broken, but it would heal despite his exertions.

‘Oh, well done, my friend,’ Mannfred said, as Ashigaroth alighted on the balcony. He looked down at Tarsus. ‘Are you injured?’

‘I will recover.’

‘Yes, I expect you will,’ Mannfred said. He sat back in his saddle.

‘You found the Fang, then?’ Tarsus pointed to the artefact shoved through Mannfred’s sword-belt. It gleamed black with an oily radiance and was chased with gold. It was an old thing, Tarsus thought, and it felt somehow wrong.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mannfred said. He patted the artefact. ‘Right where the ghouls said it was. Your approach drew Sloughscale’s attention at just the right moment.’

‘I am glad we could be of service,’ Tarsus said harshly. He fought down his anger. ‘You used us, vampire.’

Mannfred cocked his head. ‘It was – is – necessary, Tarsus,’ he said. ‘This rabble were between us and the artefact. There was no way to get it, so I… improvised.’

‘And nearly cost us our lives.’

‘As I said, it was necessary.’ Mannfred frowned. ‘The Fang is ours, and with it, the route to Stygxx. Is that not worth it, in the end? Have I not proved to you that I can be trusted?’

Tarsus shook his head. ‘A part of me wishes that were so. But another part believes you are playing a deeper game. Every day sees a new layer to your tale, a new obstacle to be overcome.’ Mannfred looked at him, even as he had earlier, as if there was something he wished to say, some story he wished to impart. Tarsus pushed the thought aside.

‘That is not the first time I have been accused of such,’ Mannfred said. He met Tarsus’ gaze and frowned. ‘You have seemed out of sorts, since we arrived. As if you were not yourself, at times.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Tarsus said. ‘I feel as if I have seen this place before…’

‘Maybe you have.’ Mannfred laughed softly. ‘Many heroes made their stand here in those final hours besides unlucky Uzun – Count Vitalian of Morrsend, Prince Tarsem of Helstone, Megara of Doomcrag…’

‘Tarsem,’ Tarsus repeated. Tarsem. Tarsem. He saw a face in his mind’s eye, a dark face of noble bearing, spattered with blood and ash as he shouted a challenge to a nightmare made flesh. A shadow of fire and smoke, a beast of blood and carnage.

‘Aye,’ Mannfred said, eyeing him. ‘Tarsem the Ox, Tarsem of the Fourth Circle, who was slain by the bloodthirster, Khar’zak’ghul, one of Khorne’s huntsmen.’

‘You know much about it,’ Tarsus said, looking out over the city.

‘Indeed. I was there, in those last days, when the sky wept fire and the plazas of Helstone were drowned in blood,’ Mannfred said. He peered at Tarsus. ‘What about you?’ He frowned. ‘What are you, Stormcast? You are not dead, for I know the dead. You are something else entirely…’

Tarsus hesitated, momentarily uncertain. Then, he touched the sigil of Sigmar on his chest and shook his head. ‘Whatever I am, whoever I might have been, I am Tarsus, of the fourth Stormhost, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights. And this city, whatever it once was, is now but a tomb.’ He looked up at Mannfred. ‘Let us go. Stygxx awaits.’

Mannfred was silent for a moment. Then he inclined his head. ‘As you say, my friend. I shall meet you below.’ He swept his cloak about him and Ashigaroth leapt off the parapet to plunge into the darkness. Tarsus watched him for a moment before looking back out over the vast sweep of the city. For a moment, he saw it again as it once must have been.

He heard the rustle of pennants in the wind, and the call of vendors in the market plazas. He heard the voices of the dead, calling out to him from the dim reaches of his past, calling to the man he had been. Calling out for Tarsem. He saw faces, men and women, fellow warriors, champions of the final days, fighting alongside him… and one other, whose face he recognized – Mannfred von Carstein. Unsettled, Tarsus turned away and made for the stairs.

The past was done. Whatever had been was gone and forgotten.

All that remained was duty and honour.

THE BRIDGE OF SEVEN SORROWS

Josh Reynolds

The dead belong to Nagash.

Even those who flee my grasp are yet my chattel. I can feel them still.

I can feel them as they draw near.

For all that I have been searching for them, they have come to me. The dead know their master, and they come at his call. They do not belong to Sigmar. Sigmar the deceiver. Sigmar the barbarian. Sigmar the traitor, who almost cost the Undying King his kingdom.

None may challenge Nagash. Nagash is all. Nagash is the sun and the void. Nagash is the core of all things, and it is by his will alone that this realm is suspended. His shoulders bear the weight of the Realm of Death, and his will alone holds back the assaults of Chaos.

Nagash endures.

Nagash is inevitable.

Out of his desolation will come perfect order. By his hands shall the Corpse Geometries be aligned once more, and reality set to rights. Where Nagash stirs, Chaos recedes. I shall wreak terrible agonies upon my enemies. I shall not stay my wrath, wherever it leads, even unto the golden pillars of Azyrheim. He who takes that which is mine shall be broken on the altar of his own hubris.

I shall not be denied.

Nagash cannot be denied. He has come among you and there is no escape. When Nagash commands your surrender, his voice is legion. Where he strides, stars gutter out. Where he stands, the earth groans. With a gesture, he can dry the seas or melt the ice.

All other gods are but shadows of Nagash. Sigmar or Khorne, dark god or light, they will fall before Nagash. There will be no god but Nagash.

The sun has set forever. Nagash stands in its place. His Mortarchs return to him from their sojourns in the dark, to serve and obey as is their purpose. They are Nagash’s will made manifest, his cunning given form, his fury unleashed. All are one in Nagash.

See what I have wrought. Imagine what is yet to come. Where I pass, confusion and fear are snuffed like candle flames, for Nagash is the ur-fear. Nagash is the end of all things, and he will liberate you from your servitude.

I cannot be destroyed. The dark lord tried. He broke my bones asunder and cast my spirit into the void, but I cannot be destroyed. I cannot be stopped. I shall have vengeance on those who stood against me. Against all the thieves and the betrayers.

What has been taken shall be reclaimed. The souls of the stolen draw near, and what I cannot have, I will destroy.

In the ruins of all that is, I shall make a new order.

Such is my will.

Such is the will of Nagash.

‘Drive them back, Stormcasts,’ Tarsus said, as he swept his hammer out and smashed a bloodreaver to the ground. He parried a blow from a saw-toothed axe and drove his elbow into its wielder’s crude crimson helm, crushing it. His weapons crackled with holy lightning as he struck out left and right, dropping the enemy with every blow.

The bloodreavers were maniacs but mortal, and none of them could stand before the Lord-Celestant of the Bull-Hearts. They began to break away, falling back in confusion.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he roared, as the enemy began to retreat through the stinking fog that clung to the immense skull-cairns which dominated the plains. More than once, the clamour of battle caused one of these cairns to shed an avalanche of skulls or else collapse entirely, sending a flood of bone rattling across the ground.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply from the small host of Hallowed Knights who fought alongside him, arrayed in a battle line. Hammers rose and fell, and broken bodies were left in their wake, to lie forgotten amidst the tumult of white flowers which shrouded the ground as far as the eye could see.

‘Who shall walk at Sigmar’s right hand?’ Tarsus said, bringing his weapons together above his head. Lightning sparked between them. Many of the bloodreavers were running now, their fury fading in the face of an all-too relentless enemy.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Bull-Hearts bellowed in reply, thumping their hammers against the inside of their shields in a tribal rhythm, one that rarely failed to set the enemy ill at ease.

‘Who will stand, though the world burns?’ Tarsus cried, cutting down another bloodreaver. ‘Who will face death, with shield and hammer? Who broke the back of the foe at the Cerulean Shore?’

‘Only the faithful! Only the faithful!’ the Stormcasts shouted as they struck down their enemies. Tarsus nodded in grim satisfaction. The Bull-Hearts had fought their way over mountains and across trackless wastes, through shattered ruins and the bowels of the earth, all to reach this point. They had clashed with the servants of the Ruinous Powers again and again, but had always been triumphant in the end. As they would be now.

Not all of the bloodreavers had fled. Some flung themselves at the shield wall, as if to halt its momentum through sheer audacity. They were trampled underfoot, and the Stormcasts marched on after the others, pursuing them through the skull-cairns.

As the Stormhost passed between two great piles of bones, built amid the ruins of a pair of shattered pyramids, the slopes erupted in armoured warriors – skullreapers clad in crimson and brass. Dozens of the maddened devotees of the Blood God hurled themselves amongst the Stormcasts, leaping from the cairns to crash down through the fog and land amidst the shield wall. Those who survived the fall immediately rose and launched themselves at the closest enemy they could see. Bolts of blue light shot upwards as Stormcasts perished beneath the berserk assault. As the Stormcasts focused on this new threat, the skullreapers were joined by others of their vile kind, pouring out from between the cairns and howling out abominable hymns.

Tarsus swatted a leaping bloodreaver out of the air and chopped down a second. A moment later he staggered as a blow crashed against his back. He wheeled about to see a blood warrior lunging for him through the fog. The air seemed to shimmer around the berserker as he stabbed a spiked gauntlet at Tarsus’ face. The Lord-Celestant parried the blow at the last second, and a crackling burst of lightning swept his opponent up and sent him tumbling through the air, wreathed in smoke.

‘My thanks, Ramus,’ said Tarsus, glancing aside at the Lord-Relictor, who swung his staff out to knock a skullreaper flat.

‘Their rout was a trap,’ the Lord-Relictor said.

‘As he said it would be,’ Tarsus said. He caught a blow on his hammer and turned it aside. Before his attacker could recover, the Lord-Celestant removed the skullreaper’s head from his shoulders.

‘A child could have seen it,’ Ramus growled. ‘Where is he?’ His hammer thudded down, cracking the skull of a bloodreaver. Before Tarsus could reply, the cairns which rose above them began to tremble and clatter. The sound drowned out the clamour of battle, and was so pervasive that it even penetrated the mindless fury of the Bloodbound. Tarsus looked around and saw a faint purple haze rising from the piled skulls. With a rush of cold air, a pale mist began to spill down the slopes of the cairns to mingle with the fog below. It spread swiftly, threading between the legs of the combatants, obscuring everything.

‘There,’ Tarsus said, as a strange murmur, as if of a hundred voices all whispering at once, rose about the combatants. Ghostly hands rose from the fog to clutch at the Bloodbound. Weapons slashed uselessly at the grasping limbs, and cries of rage soon became screams of fear. One by one, the servants of Khorne were dragged down into the haze, which soon flushed red. Only a few avoided this fate, stumbling free of their ethereal attackers, but the Stormcasts did not let them get far.

One of the blood warriors tore his way clear of the mist and wheeled about with a wild oath, eyes blazing. Before Tarsus could move to go after him, something crashed into the side of the cairn above and then vaulted off to crush the warrior beneath it. Ashigaroth straddled its victim with a shriek, dipping its bat-like skull and snapping its heavy jaws shut on the warrior’s head, silencing his cries.

‘Well done, Mannfred. Even as we planned,’ Tarsus said to the beast’s rider.

Mannfred von Carstein leaned forwards in his saddle and nodded absently. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We should not tarry here.’

‘No,’ Tarsus agreed. The vampire’s manner made him wary. Normally, Mannfred was flippant, seemingly unconcerned about the world around him. But he had grown increasingly more withdrawn the closer they had come to the cairnlands. Something worried the vampire, and that, in turn, worried Tarsus.

‘We weren’t going to,’ Ramus said. ‘It was your idea to walk into this trap in the first place, instead of simply pushing through to our goal. We lost good warriors.’

‘You would have lost more, if we hadn’t flushed all of them out,’ Mannfred said. ‘You still might, if you don’t heed my advice – look.’ The vampire gestured towards the distant cairns, where the flower-strewn ground began a steep descent towards a flat, barren plain. The fog which clung to the cairns was thinner there, allowing them to see what lay beyond. They could hear the clash of weapons and the screams of the dying.

‘Sigmar’s oath,’ Tarsus said, as he stared at the slaughter which stretched out before him across the plain below. A massive edifice of stone and bone, wrought into a gigantic fortified gateway, dominated the face of an enormous free-standing rock outcropping, and in its shadow, battle raged. Bloodbound clashed with the followers of Nurgle, and, in the distance, standards bearing the iconography of Tzeentch rose above the fray as great hordes of warriors fought across the barren waste of the cairnlands.

‘There must be thousands of them,’ Ramus said. ‘Even we might have some difficulty fighting our way through that.’

‘It is ever the same,’ Mannfred mused. ‘Lacking other foes, the servants of the Ruinous Powers turn upon one another. They fight because they know nothing else. There are hundreds of warbands in this region. The full strength of the enemy fell here, in the final days of Nagash’s reign,’ he said. ‘They still swarm these regions, battling over the shattered husks of the black pyramids and the barrow-walls which once protected the Starless Gates.’ He pointed towards the distant edifice.

‘The Starless Gates,’ Tarsus said. ‘Then the gate to Stygxx is near.’

‘Aye,’ Mannfred said. His hand dropped to the black shard shoved through his sword-belt. The Fang of Kadon gleamed with an oily radiance that set Tarsus’ teeth on edge.

Mannfred leaned forwards. ‘Luckily, we will not have to attempt to fight our way through that.’ He gestured to the carnage below.

‘We do not fear battle, vampire,’ Ramus said, harshly.

‘Nor do I, Stormcast,’ Mannfred said, his annoyance plain. ‘But sometimes I question its efficacy. No, better to avoid it – you lack the numbers to punch through, in any event. Your ranks have thinned greatly since I joined you.’

‘You mean, since we rescued you?’ Ramus said. Mannfred shot the Lord-Relictor a venomous glance.

‘Enough. We have trusted his guidance this far,’ Tarsus said. He looked at Mannfred. ‘Lead on.’

Mannfred smiled and patted Ashigaroth’s neck. ‘It would be my pleasure, my friend.’ The dread abyssal leapt into the air and swooped away, followed closely by Tarsus’ Prosecutor retinues. The Stormhost was in motion a few moments later, marching across the cairnlands. Stormcasts could move quickly despite the weight of their armour, and they ate up the distance at a steady pace as they moved through the silent pyramids of piled skulls. Tarsus set his scouts on the flank facing the Starless Gates, to keep watch on the warbands fighting there. Despite his concern, their journey along the eastern rim of the hills and slopes which marked the barren stretch was uncontested. The Chaos forces in the region were seemingly more intent on joining the battle going on before the Starless Gates.

‘Even as he said,’ Tarsus said, to Ramus, as they marched at the head of the column. ‘They’re too busy fighting one another to notice us slipping around them.’

‘Or perhaps they simply don’t care,’ Ramus said. He looked up, tracking the dread abyssal as it flew ahead of them. ‘I do not trust him, Tarsus. Despite everything, he has ever pursued his own path. He is not guiding us – he is leading us, pointing us to where he wants us to go. But why?’

‘Because he wants what we want, though I’d wager for different reasons,’ Tarsus said.

Tarsus did not doubt Mannfred’s claims that they needed the Fang, though he did doubt the vampire’s true intentions with it. It was not, he was certain, for their benefit alone. No, Mannfred was playing a deeper game. The dead could not be trusted. An oath was an oath, a promise was a promise, and the vampire had sworn to lead them to Stygxx, but it wouldn’t be the first time Mannfred von Carstein had broken his word.

Ever since their venture into the ruins of Helstone, Tarsus had been haunted by memories from his past life, the faces of men and women, fellow warriors, champions of those final days, fighting alongside him. And among their number had been the face of Mannfred von Carstein. Mannfred, who had fought alongside the heroes of Helstone until that final hour when he had fled, leaving his allies to die in hopeless battle.

Tarsus looked up, watching the dread abyssal swoop through the slate-grey sky. The sun was a distant sphere of pale light, its strength held at bay by the will of Nagash, or so Mannfred claimed. Even so, the vampire had his hood up and his cloak wrapped tight about him to protect him from the watery light.

‘Were we allies once?’ Tarsus murmured. ‘Did you truly fight alongside me then, before I was chosen by Sigmar?’

Perhaps that was why he wanted to trust the vampire. But Mannfred had betrayed him, then. If he did so again… At the thought, Tarsus’ grip on the haft of his hammer tightened. He had told Mannfred nothing of his memories. Tarsem had died on the ramparts of Helstone and Tarsus Bull-Heart had a mission to accomplish, whatever the cost.

A cry from one of the Prosecutors above caught his attention and he motioned for the column to come to a halt. They had reached the mouth of a low, winding canyon that ran like a wound through the rocky ground. Enormous, rough-hewn cliffs stained purple rose up before them, and tapered back and down.

‘There,’ Mannfred said, as Ashigaroth landed nearby. ‘Is it not a thing of beauty?’

‘It’s a canyon,’ Tarsus said.

‘It is more than that,’ Ramus said. He raised his staff and a soft blue light washed over the ground before them, revealing where the hard ground of the cairnlands suddenly gave way to coarse amethyst sands such as Tarsus had never seen before. ‘The soil is different here. The air as well. It is as if some force dropped this canyon here.’

‘It did,’ Mannfred said. He touched the Fang as if to reassure himself that he still had it. ‘Such is the will of Nagash, that reality itself gives way to him.’

A field of shattered Chaos icons and blasted standards marked the entrance to the canyon. They stretched as far as the eye could see, as if planted by an army which had then advanced, leaving them behind upright in the purple sands. The wind rose, and the rags of tanned flesh and hanks of greying hair which hung from the standards flapped and twisted in unpleasant ways.

‘Beauty is not the word I’d use,’ Ramus said.

‘Beautiful or not, we’re going in,’ Tarsus said, motioning his warriors forwards.

As the Stormcasts advanced into the canyon, Tarsus caught sight of pale things wafting amongst the icons and heard the murmur of distant voices. He caught Mannfred’s eye.

‘Not all souls are fit to be forged anew and sent fresh into the fire of war. Some… are merely grist for the mill,’ the vampire said.

‘How long have they been here?’

‘How long have the stars hung suspended in the firmament?’ Mannfred said. He drew his cloak more tightly about himself. ‘Some of us must draw forth the dead with incantations, but Nagash draws them forth merely by striding across their graves. Where he walks, the dead stir and do not slumber again.’

‘You speak as if he were a god,’ Ramus said.

‘You speak as if he were not,’ Mannfred said.

‘A god would not have been driven into the dark, to cower among tattered wraiths and fleshless courtiers,’ Ramus said.

‘No, he would merely have shuttered the gates of his realm and left his people to die at the talons and blades of his enemies,’ Mannfred said. The Lord-Relictor turned towards him, but before he could speak, Tarsus interposed himself.

‘Peace, brother. We come in the spirit of peace. Let old grudges be forgotten and new alliances forged.’ He looked at Mannfred. ‘Even as we have done.’

‘Yes, and much has it profited us both,’ Mannfred said. He turned, to look back the way they had come. ‘The sun is stronger here than elsewhere, thanks to the attention of the Dark Gods, and I would rather not brave its glare any longer than I must. Shall we go?’

They had not gone much farther into the narrow, crooked confines of the canyon, however, when they were forced to halt once more. It had narrowed to a shallow point and in front of them rank upon rank of kneeling figures waited. Dust and white blossoms blew amongst them, but the figures did not stir. They were clad in baroque armour and clutched weapons of malign manufacture in skeletal hands. Where flesh might once have been visible, there was now only scoured bone. They filled the canyon, from one wall to the other, and their number stretched back to the great, bone-coloured archway set into its back wall.

The archway itself was more disturbing than the dead who knelt before it. It was a crooked thing of wrong angles and disorientating encrustations, shaped vaguely like a hooded figure bent forwards with arms outstretched. It was made from stone and bone and other macabre materials. Strange sigils gleamed from its surface, glowing with a sickly light, and their radiance made the archway appear to undulate.

‘The underworld lies through that archway,’ Mannfred said.

‘What are they?’ Tarsus asked, his voice echoing eerily in the silence.

‘The Desolated Legion,’ Mannfred said. ‘They were Bloodbound, once… champions all, and high in the Blood God’s esteem. They were the first to invade these lands, once the barrow-walls were breached, and the first to feel the unfettered fury of Nagash. Now, they are wights – a reminder of Nagash’s power, and a warning to those who would test it.’

Old bloodstains marked the purple stones of the canyon, as well as the weapons of the dead men. Tarsus knew that an ocean of blood had been spilled here, and would be again, before the war against Chaos was done.

‘How many have tried?’ he asked.

Mannfred smiled. ‘Enough to glut even the Lord of Skulls, for a time. Wherever the gate appears they seek it out and if they are unlucky enough to find it, they die in their thousands.’

‘Will we suffer the same fate, I wonder,’ Ramus said. He stepped forwards. As he did so, however, a ripple of motion shivered through the ranks of the kneeling dead. Ancient armour rattled as old bones twitched and bent heads slowly rose. Weirdling lights glimmered within every helm as the cold, mindless gazes of the dead became fixed on the intruders.

‘You will let us pass,’ Mannfred intoned. He raised his hand. Cold fire flickered around his fingers as he urged Ashigaroth forwards. ‘Stand aside, warriors of the Desolated Legion. Stand aside, I say!’ The armoured ranks did not move. The silence stretched for one moment, then two, and then, with a creak of rusted joints, the Desolated Legion rose as one.

‘They are not listening,’ Mannfred hissed, in disbelief.

‘Ready your shields,’ Tarsus said. ‘Hold fast, Bull-Hearts.’ With a rattle of sigmarite, the Liberator retinues locked their shields, forming a wall of gleaming azure and silver. Mannfred snarled wordlessly and thumped Ashigaroth’s flanks with his heels. As the dread abyssal leapt into the air, the first of the wights moved. Tarsus stepped forwards to intercept it and the rest of the Desolated Legion shuddered into motion.

The dead thing lurched forwards, its axe hissing down. Tarsus smashed the weapon aside with his hammer and rammed his sword through a gap in his opponent’s armour. The wight staggered but didn’t fall. It raised its axe again and Tarsus stepped back, jerking his sword free with a screech of abused metal as he did so.

The axe slashed out and he was forced to twist aside. It chopped down, tearing his cloak, and he snapped around, catching the wight in the back of the skull with his hammer and causing it to stumble. He hacked at its neck and his sword bit through rusty metal and into bone. The wight’s head rolled free and he drove his shoulder into its chest, knocking it off its feet.

Tarsus took in the battlefield at a glance. Mannfred was still attempting to bend the dead to his will, as Ashigaroth kept its master out of their reach. The Stormcasts were holding the enemy back, but only just. The dead knew no fear and did not hesitate. They kept coming with relentless ferocity. Worse, not all of those that fell stayed down. As he watched, a trio of blue bolts streaked skyward. Then another two. His chest tightened as he thought of the brothers he had lost since the Bull-Hearts’ arrival in the Realm of Death. There were scarcely sixty of his warriors left now. How many would survive to see the completion of their mission? He shook his head, banishing the thought. They would see Sigmar’s will done, even if only one of them survived. They were the faithful, and they would be triumphant.

A second wight charged towards him, hefting a broken sword as it came. He blocked its blow and smashed its legs out from under it, dropping it into the dust. It slithered towards him, quick as a serpent, and he stamped on its head. Even as he stepped back, it began to push itself erect. With a roar, he brought both hammer and sword down on it, splitting it in two.

Even then, it struggled to rise. Ramus drove the haft of his staff into its chest and muttered a prayer. Lightning snarled down the length of the staff and into the dead thing, reducing it to a blackened husk.

‘They are proving more resilient than we were led to believe,’ the Lord-Relictor said, casting a glance up towards Mannfred.

‘Then we shall have to do this the hard way,’ Tarsus said. ‘We need to smash ourselves a path to the Corpse Road, and we need to do it now.’ More and more of the dead marched forwards, breaking into awkward runs as they drew near the Stormcasts. They fought in silence save for the rattle of armour and the rasp of weapons. Tarsus signalled the Prosecutors wheeling overhead. ‘We need breathing room – make a gap,’ he shouted, and motioned to the ground between the living and the dead.

The winged warriors swooped low over the ranks of the dead and sent their hammers whirling down. The front ranks of the Desolated Legion were hurled back, broken and smoking, as the ground was churned up and a cloud of dust thrown into the air.

‘Judicators, Liberators – fall back,’ Tarsus said, his voice ringing out through the canyon. He looked at Ramus. ‘They’re yours, Ramus. Guard our flanks. Retributors and Decimators, to the fore,’ he bellowed.

‘At your command, Bull-Heart,’ Retributor-Prime Soros said as he joined Tarsus. Both he and Gyrus, the Decimator-Prime, were covered in dust and their armour bore the signs of heavy fighting. Their retinues were holding the centre of the shield wall just behind Tarsus, holding back those wights which had managed to get past the Prosecutors.

‘The horns and the hooves, brothers,’ Tarsus said, peering towards the dust cloud thrown up by the Prosecutors’ hammers. They would need to be quick, but if they could reach the entrance to the underworld, they could reform their lines and make a fighting withdrawal.

Soros gave a harsh laugh and he and Gyrus slammed their weapons together. ‘Horns and hooves,’ Soros growled. ‘It shall be done, Lord-Celestant.’ They hurried to rejoin their retinues, barking orders as they went.

‘Who will be triumphant?’ Tarsus cried, lifting his sword and hammer high.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Paladins rumbled, as one. Their heavy, ornate armour was prominently marked with the lightning bolt of Sigmar, and the massive two-handed weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire. As they strode forwards at Tarsus’ command, they slammed the great weapons together, adding to the clamour of war. Swiftly, the Decimators took the lead, with the Retributors spreading out as they followed behind.

Ramus led the remainder of the Stormhost behind the vanguard, the Liberators moving to the flanks and the rear, where their shields could do the most good, and the Judicator retinues moving up the centre. The latter continued to fire as they moved, peppering the wights with their boltstorm crossbows. Ramus chanted as he strode forwards, calling the lightning from the sky and sending it lashing among the ranks of the dead as they drew close.

Tarsus led the Paladin brotherhoods forwards, and as he picked up speed, he broke into a lumbering run. The Decimators spread out around him, making a semicircle with their Lord-Celestant at the centre. They struck the dead with a crash, great axes smashing out to chop through legs or arms even as they used their momentum to bull the wights aside or bear them under. Tarsus led by example, knocking his opponents sprawling but not slowing down to finish them off. That was for the Retributors.

From behind him came the crackle of lightning hammers as they slammed down on the fallen wights, creating a path of bones for the Stormcasts following behind. Tarsus ducked a sweeping axe blow and kicked its wielder in the chest, staggering it. He lunged forwards, breaking the wight’s arm with his hammer and decapitating it with his sword. He brushed its stumbling, headless body aside as he continued to move forwards.

He caught sight of Ashigaroth flying overhead. The dread abyssal swooped low and ploughed through the dead, scattering broken bones and bits of armour as it cleared a path for him. Mannfred had seemingly given up on trying to control the wights and had settled for destroying them with sword and magic.

Slowly but surely they reached the back of the canyon, where the archway rose.

‘Shields to the rear,’ Tarsus called out. Liberator retinues fell back, forming up into a semicircle about the space before the archway. Hammers slammed down from above with meteoric force as the Prosecutors swooped overhead, holding the dead back while their brothers fell into formation.

Ramus stood just behind the Liberators, his hammer across his shoulder.

‘Hold fast, sons of Sigmar,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘The dead are strong, but sigmarite is stronger.’ His voice echoed from the canyon walls.

Tarsus drove his head into a wight’s grinning skull, dropping it to its knees. He finished the job as it tried to stand.

‘Gyrus, Soros, lead your warriors through the archway. Mannfred – go with them,’ he said, over his shoulder. As the vampire led the Paladin brotherhoods into the underworld, Tarsus signalled to the Judicator retinues.

‘Fall back through the archway. Cover our retreat, brothers,’ he shouted. The Judicators reacted instantly, following the others, loosing their crackling bolts as they went. The Prosecutors were next, hurtling through the archway. The shield wall steadily contracted as Liberators fell to the enemy, or were pulled from the line by Ramus and sent towards safety. Soon, only half a dozen Stormcasts were left before the twisted shape of the massive bone-coloured archway, including Tarsus and the Lord-Relictor.

‘Back, Ramus,’ Tarsus said, as they drew close to the canyon wall. ‘I will hold the line until you and the others are through.’ He brought his weapons together, crushing the skull of another wight. He hurled the twitching cadaver aside and parried an axe blow that might have split his helm. He steadily backed towards the archway as he fought, leaving a trail of broken bones and crawling corpses in his wake. Only when the last Stormcast was past the arch did he turn and hurl himself through.

Tarsus crashed to the stone and staggered up, into the steadying hands of his warriors. He turned, ready to continue the fight. The Desolated Legion did not seem inclined to follow. The wights stared through the archway at the Stormcasts, eyes flickering with witch-light. Then, as one, they turned and began to trudge away.

‘The archway is the limit of their malice,’ Mannfred said. ‘They could not pass it in life, and they are barred in death. Such are the caprices of Nagash.’

Tarsus looked around. Barely half of his force had made it to safety. Thanks to the glow from Ramus’ staff, he could see that they stood in a pillared vestibule of stone. Strange carvings adorned the walls and the flagstones beneath his feet were worn smooth as if by the tread of many feet.

‘How many more traps await us?’ he asked, looking at Mannfred. His voice echoed strangely in the vaulted space. He thought it changed subtly as it bounced from stone to stone, leaving him with the eerie feeling that he was somehow being mocked.

Mannfred shook his head. ‘Who can say? Nagash is mad, and fearful in his madness. He stations guards to watch other guards, and then forgets them for centuries at a time. There may be an army in these catacombs, or nothing at all, save the bats.’ He stroked his chin in thought. ‘The true danger is in the catacombs themselves. There are many routes to the heart of Stygxx, all with their own perils.’

‘We take the most direct route,’ Tarsus said. ‘We are few enough in number as it is and I would lose no more warriors stumbling about in the dark.’

‘The direct route is the most dangerous. There more than anywhere else there will be eyes upon us,’ Mannfred said.

‘Good. The sooner we are confronted by the Undying King or one of his servants, the more likely we are to accomplish our mission.’ Tarsus pointed forwards. ‘Lead on.’

‘As you will,’ Mannfred said, after a moment of hesitation. He turned Ashigaroth about and the dread abyssal loped away, the Stormcasts following behind.

The path by which Mannfred led them was one of twists and turns. More than once he stopped and they were forced to crouch in silence, waiting for the vampire to prod Ashigaroth into motion again.

Tarsus heard faint whispers of sound, like leaves caught in a wind, as they trudged through the dark. What might have been a bat’s wings brushed against his helm. At one point, they were forced to stop as a herd of skeletal horses, their bones gleaming with cold fire, galloped silently through the tunnel ahead, vanishing into the stone. Another time, Mannfred rode ahead to parley with a silent, hooded figure, who dissolved into mist and shadows as the Stormcasts approached.

Other, larger things moved in the dark around them, slithering through side tunnels and causing the ground to tremble beneath their feet. Nagash might have laid claim to the underworld, but there were more things crawling in its depths than the dead. Everywhere Tarsus looked he saw strange sigils carved on the walls and floor and wondered what horrors they had been placed there to ward against.

At last they emerged from the cramped tunnels and out into a huge cavern, which was bisected by a wide gorge. Ancient columns lined the walls of the cavern. Most of these were broken, as were the statues which stood atop them. A wide stone bridge stretched across the gorge. Mannfred gestured towards it.

‘Behold… the Bridge of Seven Sorrows,’ he said. ‘Once, the legions of the underworld marched across it, to do battle with their enemies, in the days before the coming of Nagash. Now, the great manses of the Amethyst Princes lie in ruins, and their armies belong to Nagash, body and soul.’

The vast span of stone was crudely carved, as if by unskilled hands. But it looked sturdy nonetheless, and it was wide enough for the Stormhost to march across ten abreast. Great railings marked at intervals by high plinths lined its edges. Large stone bowls topped most of them, containing purple crystals which flickered softly with a hazy radiance, casting a pale light over the bridge and the gorge beneath.

Seven of the plinths, however, were occupied by tall statues – women, clad in robes and ceremonial armour with weapons in hand, their bodies contorted in agonised poses as if each had been captured in the moment before death. They were at once regal and nightmarish, their tormented expressions seeming to shift and change in the flickering light of the crystals.

‘Those statues…’ Tarsus began.

Mannfred interrupted him with a shake of his head. ‘Not statues. No, my friend, those are nothing less than the remains of seven queens of the Skull Isles, who were betrothed to Nagash in times long past. They traded their freedom for the lives of their people.’ Mannfred chuckled. ‘A bad bargain, in the end. They were left here in the dark and the Skull Isles burned regardless, at Nagash’s command.’

‘More and more, I come to doubt the wisdom of our task,’ Ramus said. ‘What sort of being is this, to whom we intend to offer alliance?’

‘I warned you,’ Mannfred said. Ramus looked at him, but said nothing.

‘It is not for us to say what is wise and what is not, my friend,’ Tarsus said, looking at the bridge. ‘It is Sigmar’s will that we are here, and Sigmar’s will that we seek audience with Nagash. Much is demanded of those to whom much is given, and we shall not be found wanting.’ He extended his hammer. ‘Lead on, Mannfred.’

‘As you wish,’ Mannfred said. Ashigaroth leapt into the air with a great cry and the vanguard of the Stormhost followed in the dread abyssal’s wake.

Tarsus and Ramus marched at the front, and the cavern echoed with the crash of boots on stone.

‘What lies below us?’ the Lord-Celestant asked.

‘The deep caverns, through which runs the black blood of the underworld,’ Mannfred said, glancing down at him. He trailed off and shook himself. ‘Or so it is said,’ he added. ‘In any event, our destination lies not down, but across.’ He pointed to the other side of the gorge, where an enormous stone archway rose. The archway was covered in carved sigils, and heaps of dust and bone lay before it. ‘That is where we must go to see through our cause… past the Lichegate, and along the dirge-road, into the heart of Stygxx.’

Tarsus glanced at Ramus, who nodded slightly. The Lord-Relictor was ready, whatever came next.

‘Your cause, you mean,’ he said, pointing towards Mannfred. ‘Expedience made me hold my tongue before, but now, before we go any further, I would have the truth… Why help us? Not merely for gratitude’s sake, I think.’

‘Mannfred von Carstein does not know the meaning of that word, I fear,’ a harsh, sepulchral voice said. ‘Or if he does, he has never shown it.’

Mannfred whirled, his lips peeling back from his fangs in a feral snarl.

‘Arkhan,’ he hissed. He drew his sword. ‘Where are you, liche?’

‘Where I have always been. By Nagash’s side. As you should have been.’ The sound of iron striking stone carried across the gorge as a thin, robed shape stepped into the amethyst light of the crystals. ‘Have you come to throw yourself on his mercy, vampire?’

‘Nagash has no mercy,’ Mannfred spat.

‘No. He does not,’ Arkhan the Black said. The liche was tall and his bones were encased in ridged armour of archaic design and ragged robes, which rustled softly. He wore an ornate headdress and carried a long staff, around the tip of which strange black flames pulsed. Behind him stalked a dread abyssal, its horned skull lit by an internal fire. It screeched out a challenge and Ashigaroth replied in kind. Arkhan set his staff and rested one palm on the hilt of the tomb-blade sheathed at his side.

He gazed at the ranks of Stormcasts and inclined his head. ‘You have brought allies, I see. How… unexpected.’

‘Save your mockery,’ Mannfred said. ‘Stand aside. I would see Nagash.’

‘No. No, I do not think I will do that. Nagash himself sent me here to turn back those who dare invade his realm. That includes you, schemer.’

Tarsus stepped forwards. ‘We do not come seeking battle. We wish merely to request an audience with the Undying King. We bring word from–’

‘Sigmar,’ Arkhan said.

Tarsus hesitated, surprised. ‘Yes.’

‘Nagash has no wish to hear the lies of Sigmar. Sigmar the deceiver. Sigmar the barbarian. Sigmar the traitor…’ Arkhan said, without apparent rancour.

‘Be silent and step aside, you withered husk,’ Mannfred spat. ‘This is not Nagash’s will – it is nothing but spite! You have always feared me, feared that the Undying King might favour my counsel over yours…’

‘No,’ Arkhan said. ‘I do not fear, for it has long since been burned out of me. I know only duty. The Undying King raised me up, and I shall serve him all my days. But you…’ He pointed at Mannfred. ‘Fear has always been your weakness, Mannfred. It has killed all that you might have been, and all that you were destined to be. You were one of his Mortarchs, highest of the high. Now you are nothing more than a cur, snarling for scraps.’ He lifted his staff. ‘Away with you, cur. Go, and never return.’

‘It seems we have chosen a poor guide if he cannot even get us past the door,’ Ramus said. Mannfred whirled, a snarl on his face and his fist raised. Ramus raised his staff warily, and the vampire growled and turned back.

‘No, Arkhan!’ Mannfred shouted. ‘No, you will give way or I shall peel whatever passes for your soul from your fleshless frame and feed it to Ashigaroth.’

Arkhan looked at Mannfred for a moment, and then at Tarsus. ‘Go back, sons of Sigmar. Go back, and I will not be forced to kill you.’

‘We cannot,’ Tarsus said. ‘We have our duty and we will fulfil it or die in the attempt.’

Arkhan was silent for long moments, his eerie gaze fixed on Tarsus. Then he nodded. ‘So be it. Hold fast to your duty, as I shall to mine.’ He raised his staff. ‘Awaken, O sorrowful ones – awaken, you brides of death. Awaken.’

A sound like cracking ice filled the cavern. Tarsus looked up and saw that one of the seven queens was looking down at him, chunks of stone falling from her face and form. Her ravaged features suddenly twisted into an expression of utter loathing and her mouth opened. A wild, keening wail emerged. The sound struck Tarsus like a hammer blow and he staggered back.

‘Banshees,’ he cried, but too late, as the seven ghostly women leapt from their perches, weapons in hand. They streaked through the air over the Stormcasts, shrieking and wailing.

Tarsus’ sword chopped through one of the banshees as it flew past, meeting no resistance. The dead woman bent forwards with serpentine grace, her screams tearing at his mind and soul. Everywhere he looked, Stormcasts fell to their knees, clutching at their heads or clawing at the ground as the banshees tore the life from them with unceasing wails. A sword, rust-edged and age-pitted, chopped down at his head. He jerked aside and the banshee hurtled away, still screaming.

A second sped towards him, her ancient spear drawing sparks from his shoulder plate even as the force of the blow spun him around. A third stalked along the centre of the bridge, head thrown back, mouth wide in a cry that sent another six Stormcasts into death.

‘Mannfred,’ Tarsus snarled. ‘Do something!’

‘I am,’ Mannfred growled in response. ‘I intend to kill Arkhan. He’s more dangerous than any wailing ghost.’ Ashigaroth galloped forwards, surging through one of the banshees as it attempted to interpose itself.

‘I welcome your attempt, vampire,’ Arkhan said. He climbed atop his own steed, drawing his sword as he did so. ‘Another chance to feel alive.’ He extended his blade. ‘Step forwards, and you will find that your greatest folly is thinking that you could ever beat me.’

The two dead men and their monstrous steeds came together with a crash. Mannfred fought savagely, with less grace than ferocity. Arkhan, in contrast, fought with a precision that was almost impossible to credit. He parried every blow, and his own slid past Mannfred’s defences with ease, eliciting increasingly frustrated snarls from the vampire. The dread abyssals tore at one another, rolling through the air over the bridge even as their riders traded blows.

Tarsus cursed and slashed at a banshee as it flew past, wailing. His warriors were dying and there was little he could do.

‘Ramus – call down the lightning,’ he roared. The Lord-Relictor thrust his staff forwards, driving one of the creatures back, and glanced at him.

‘As you command,’ Ramus said. He caught his staff in both hands and drove the haft down. As it connected with the stones, the reliquary mounted on it burst into blazing blue light. Energy snarled about it and seared the nearest of the howling banshees as if she were a being of flesh, rather than spirit. But the lightning did not stop there. Instead, it leapt from warhammer and axe-blade, dancing across the weapons and armour of the remaining Stormcasts, including Tarsus’ own. He clashed hammer and sword together, and as he pulled them apart, a crackling web of lightning stretched between them.

‘Strike now, Stormcasts, and strike true. Strike!’ Ramus thundered.

Tarsus did so. His hammer crunched down on a banshee’s arm and her shriek changed, becoming a cry of pain. Head throbbing with the reverberations of that cry, he swept his sword through her neck, silencing her screams. Across the bridge, his surviving warriors followed suit, lashing out with lightning-infused weapons to bring down their ethereal attackers. As the last of the banshees came apart in tatters of fog and rotting silk, Tarsus hurried towards the centre of the bridge where Mannfred still clashed with Arkhan.

The dread abyssals still fought in the air, but their riders had fallen from their saddles. Now liche and vampire continued their duel on foot. Mannfred’s flesh was aflame with sorcerous fire, as were Arkhan’s robes. They had locked blades and now strained against one another, neither willing to retreat. Arkhan spoke an incantation and the air shuddered. Mannfred was knocked back, his armour crumpling from an unseen impact.

Tarsus sprang to the bridge’s railing as Mannfred staggered back, and leapt down, his sword streaking towards Arkhan’s skull. The liche whirled about, parrying the blow. He thrust a skeletal claw forwards, but Tarsus was quicker. His hammer slammed down on Arkhan’s hand, and as the liche reeled, Tarsus bulled into him, carrying him backwards into a pillar. Arkhan drove him back with a wild slash, but before he could recover, Mannfred’s blade chopped down, severing Arkhan’s sword hand at the wrist. Even as his hand fell, however, Arkhan gestured, and his sword leapt into his remaining claw.

The liche lurched around, ready to continue the fight, and Mannfred hacked through his shoulder and into his sternum. He hefted his rival and slung him away. Arkhan crashed down on the other side of the bridge, where he lay unmoving.

‘Stay down, liche,’ Mannfred spat, as he swatted at the flames which still clung to his flesh and armour. ‘Once more, I have proven myself your superior. Why Nagash chose you as his right hand is a mystery.’

‘Mayhap he prizes loyalty over power,’ Arkhan said. He lifted his sword and set it point first into the ground. His dread abyssal crouched nearby, as if awaiting orders. ‘Maybe you have grown stronger in your exile. Or maybe this was never about winning…’

Mannfred’s eyes widened.

‘What are you…?’ he trailed off, and cocked his head.

‘What is it?’ Tarsus asked.

‘I– something. What is that? Some new ploy, Arkhan?’

Arkhan the Black gave a raspy chuckle. ‘No ploy, Mannfred. He merely wished to see if you had learned any new tricks in the wild.’

Mannfred looked at Tarsus. ‘We must retreat… Fall back to some more defensible position.’ He clutched at his head suddenly and gave a hiss of pain. Tarsus made to help him, but Mannfred slapped his hand aside. ‘We must go!’

‘Too late, vampire,’ Arkhan said as he dragged himself to his feet. ‘Too late to run, too late to do anything but regret all that might have been. Death is not a thing to be played with. And now he comes for you.’

‘No,’ Mannfred said. He took a step back, still clutching at his head.

‘Yes.’

The word reverberated through the cavern, shaking the bats above and the monsters below from their slumber. The sound of it was a wound on the skin of reality, throbbing painfully. The crystals which lit the gorge dimmed, and Tarsus felt an ache build in his head. ‘What is that?’ he demanded.

‘Nagash,’ Mannfred said, backing away. ‘Nagash is coming.’

‘No, little prince. Nagash is here!’ A pale mist, struck through with glimmering veins of amethyst light, flooded across the ground, roiling and expanding as it approached the bridge. ‘Nagash is always here. Nagash is everywhere. This realm is his and he is the realm. He is in the air and the water, in the blood and marrow. Nagash is all, and all are Nagash.’

The mist swelled, enveloping the broken form of Arkhan before washing past him and coalescing into a towering, nightmare figure. A skeletal giant, clad in dark armour, surrounded by a flickering corona which changed hues, ever-shifting from green to black to purple and back again with painful rapidity. Nine heavy tomes floated around him, tethered by thick chains, their pages flapping with a sound like the snapping of jaws. Moaning spirits swirled about him, blending together and breaking apart in a woeful dance of agony.

The wide skull, lit by its own internal flame, gazed down at Tarsus and his warriors, and the blazing orbs that danced in its cavernous sockets brightened briefly as they lit on Tarsus. Then the rictus grin turned to Mannfred. ‘You have called, my child, and I have come. Speak, exile. Speak, traitor.’

Mannfred looked at Tarsus, and then took a hesitant step forwards. ‘O Undying King, I have come to throw myself at your feet. I have learned humility in my time in the wilderness, and would beg thy forgiveness for past trespasses.’

Nagash said nothing. Mannfred licked his lips and drew the Fang of Kadon from within his cloak.

‘A gift, great Nagash,’ he cried, proffering the artefact. ‘A gift for you, a symbol of my fealty, of my loyalty…’ He trailed off as a crackling rasp, like the shattering of ice floes or the crunching of bones, filled the air.

‘A bauble. One that I could have reclaimed at any time. You think to buy my forgiveness, Mortarch. But Nagash does not forgive. Nagash is death, and death is without mercy, honour or pity.’ One great claw reached out and Mannfred gazed at it like a bird might stare at an approaching serpent. Tarsus stepped forwards, caught the back of his cloak and jerked the vampire back, out of reach. Nagash paused, looking at the Lord-Celestant.

‘You stink of the raging storm.’

‘I am Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights,’ he said. ‘I have come to–’

‘Sigmar sent him,’ Mannfred said, suddenly. He shoved away from Tarsus. ‘The lord of lightning mocks you, O mighty Nagash! He plucks souls from your realm, and sends them back to you as emissaries.’ He sank to one knee. ‘And I have led them to you, that you might do with them as pleases you, as a sign of my adoration.’

Tarsus stared at the vampire in consternation. The dead cannot be trusted, he thought. He turned back, to see Nagash staring down at him.

The Undying King was silent for long moments. Then, with a sigh like the creaking of a coffin lid, he said, ‘At last.’

‘Great Nagash, I have come…’ he began.

‘You have come as a thief. You have come in the company of a traitor. You have come to die.’

Tarsus felt a chill and lifted his weapons. Nagash flicked a finger and a coruscating bolt of black force slammed into his chest, pitching him into the air and over the heads of his remaining Stormcasts. He struck the bridge with a loud clang and skidded backwards in a spray of sparks until he struck a plinth. Pain enveloped him for long moments. He couldn’t move or speak. He could barely breathe. All he could do was watch as Ramus led the last of their Warrior Chamber in battle against the Undying King.

Warriors fell at Nagash’s merest gesture, their bodies wreathed in black flames or amethyst light. The souls which swirled about the Great Necromancer launched themselves at the Stormcasts, tearing spirit from flesh wherever they passed. But no blue light shone and no bolts of crackling lightning streaked upwards from the fallen. Something was preventing their escape. Tarsus shuddered and tried to pull himself up. Nagash was not simply killing them, he was capturing their spirits somehow, preventing them from returning to the soul-forges.

Soon, only a scattered few remained, and Ramus himself. Lightning splashed across Nagash as harmlessly as water. The Undying King motioned and a Liberator fell, enveloped in flames. Ramus dropped his staff and lunged forwards, hammer clutched in both hands. His first blow made Nagash take a step back. His second thudded into a waiting palm, and Nagash’s hand closed about the hammer’s head. The blessed sigmarite flared once and then came apart as if it were nothing more than sand. Ramus staggered back and Nagash caught him up, enveloping his head in one metal talon.

He jerked the Lord-Relictor into the air. He turned to swat a Liberator into the side of the bridge hard enough to shatter the stone railing, and sent the Stormcast into the abyss below. The remainder fought on, but to no avail. Nagash was no mortal enemy or daemonic servant. He was death itself, and wherever his gaze fell, Stormcasts died.

‘You still live.’

Blearily, Tarsus looked up, as Mannfred dropped from Ashigaroth’s back to crouch beside him.

‘Can you stand?’ the vampire asked.

‘Why help me?’ Tarsus groaned. Past Mannfred, he saw a retinue of Judicators torn apart by Nagash’s dark magic. The last of the Prosecutors fell, lightning wings dimming. A Retributor staggered back, clawing at his helm as a dark mist engulfed him. His warriors were dying, and he was helpless to aid them.

‘Why, he asks,’ Mannfred said, helping him to sit up. ‘You freed me, Tarsus. You trusted me, though every instinct must have told you that I was not to be trusted.’ Mannfred hesitated. ‘You… remind me of someone. From another time. Another man who fought beside me and trusted me, though he knew better. For his sake, I will see you to safety. And then my debt to you – to him – is paid.’

‘Go,’ Tarsus said, as he pushed himself to his feet.

‘What?’

‘Go, Mannfred. No more is required of you. Your debt is paid,’ Tarsus said as he retrieved his hammer. His sword was gone, likely lost to the gorge. He heard Ramus cry out, and the roar of lightning. Mannfred stepped in front of him.

‘This is madness!’ he said, speaking quickly. ‘Nagash has what he wants. You’ve tried to deliver your message. I still have the Fang – we can escape. I will take you anywhere you wish to go, back to Azyr, even, but let us go now.’

Tarsus pushed Mannfred aside with his hammer. ‘There is nowhere to go. I am Stormcast and my duty is clear. Nagash must be made to see reason. He traps the souls of my brothers, and I cannot allow that.’

‘You cannot stop him. Nagash cannot be defeated, not here in this place of power,’ Mannfred snarled. He grabbed Tarsus’ arm. Tarsus shrugged him off and turned.

‘You did not always believe that to be so, Mannfred. Else why would you be here now? Why would you have stood with me in Helstone’s final hours?’

Mannfred stepped back, eyes widening. ‘What?’

‘Run, Mannfred. Run as you did then, when fire rained down and the earth trembled in sorrow. Take your freedom and run. I will hold Nagash’s attention for as long as I can.’ Tarsus gestured back the way they had come. ‘But go now.’ Tarsus laughed softly. ‘Unless you intend to stand with Tarsem of Helstone once more.’

‘Tarsem…?’ Mannfred said, peering at him. ‘What are you?’

‘I am Stormcast,’ Tarsus said. He raised his hammer in salute and turned. Mannfred did not follow him, as the Lord-Celestant began to run. He heard Ashigaroth shriek, as Mannfred coaxed the beast into the air, but he did not look back.

Memories of his past, of his final mortal moments, rose wild within him. Fire and shadow, the clash of steel and the pain of a mortal blow. Mannfred had fought beside him then, his reasons his own, but then, as now, he had fled when hope was lost. Such was his nature, and Tarsus did not fault him for it. The dead could not be trusted, after all.

It didn’t matter. Even then, he’d known that Mannfred had his own destiny. Helstone had been Tarsem’s. And the Bridge of Seven Sorrows was Tarsus’. However fast he fled, however far he ran, fate would catch up with Mannfred von Carstein in the end.

Nagash still held Ramus. The Lord-Relictor struggled against the titanic liche’s grip, but could not break free. As Tarsus drew close, Nagash seared the life from the last of the Retributors with a bolt of sorcerous fire. He closed his eyes.

‘Only the faithful,’ he said, to himself. Then, more loudly, ‘Nagash – release him.’ Tarsus stalked towards the towering figure as he spoke, weapon in hand.

Nagash looked at Tarsus, and then down at Ramus. The Lord-Relictor clawed at Nagash’s hand, beating on it with useless fists.

‘Yes, I will release him,’ Nagash intoned. Purple light flared and the Lord-Relictor went limp, smoke rising from the joints of his armour. Nagash examined him for a moment, and then tossed him aside. He looked at Tarsus.

‘You do not flee.’

‘I – we – came to bring you a message. And I will deliver it, whatever the consequences,’ Tarsus said. ‘Sigmar would have words with you. He wishes to speak of the past and the future. Of what has been done, and the work yet to do.’ He strode forwards as he spoke. He heard the voices of the dead, calling to him out of the dim reaches of his past, calling to the man he had been. Calling out for Tarsem. He saw faces, the champions of the final days, walking alongside him as he stepped over the bodies of his fellow Stormcasts. He could see blue strands of lightning struggling within the fallen Bull-Hearts. The souls of his warriors yearned to return to Azyr, but Nagash had ensnared them.

As he watched, he saw a spark of blue bulge upwards from Ramus’ smoking form, fighting to be free. Nagash gestured sharply and the Lord-Relictor’s spirit thrashed, as if in agony. Another body began to dissolve into motes of azure lightning, and Nagash swept a talon out, forcing the body to cohere once more.

‘You will not escape me, little souls. I am the master here, not Sigmar.’

No, you are not. Not as much as you pretend, Tarsus thought. If he could distract Nagash, the spirits of his fallen brethren might yet be able to escape the Realm of Death. If nothing else, some of them might be returned to Sigmaron, where they could tell Sigmar of all that they had learned. But first, he had to distract a creature whose power rivalled that of the God-King himself. It was a slim hope, but he held firm to it.

‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given,’ he murmured as he began to run.

Nagash leaned towards Tarsus as he drew close, terrible energies coalescing about his claw. ‘I care not what Sigmar wants. I will hurl him from his throne, as surely as I will cast down the Dark Gods. I am Nagash! None may make demands of me.’

Tarsus caught hold of the hem of his cloak and twisted about, letting it flare out around him. The enchantment within its weave was unleashed, and phantasmal hammers hurtled forwards to strike the looming shape of Nagash in a flash of lightning.

A bellow of surprise shook the cavern and nearly knocked Tarsus from his feet. Stalactites fell from the ceiling to crash into the bridge, filling the air with splinters of rock. Shattered columns tumbled from their pedestals to break apart and shake the floor, throwing clouds of dust into the air.

For a moment, he thought it hadn’t been enough. Then, the first explosion of blue light streaked upwards, to vanish into the darkness above. More followed, one after the other, until the whole cavern burned with the light of the Hallowed Knights’ passing.

‘No!’

A massive claw, sealed in black iron, erupted from the dust and slammed Tarsus from his feet. He hit the ground hard enough to crack the stone. He shoved himself to his hands and feet, trying to suck air into his bruised lungs. Nagash strode out of the dust, even as the blue glow faded. ‘They were mine!’

‘They are Sigmar’s,’ Tarsus said hoarsely, as he pushed himself to his feet. He swayed slightly. Something was broken within him, and every intake of breath sent a pulse of agony through him. ‘And they will be forged anew, by his hand.’

‘Then I will kill them again.’

‘Perhaps, but not today,’ Tarsus said, as he lifted his hammer. ‘Who will be victorious?’

Nagash cocked his head.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tarsus said, as he stepped up onto one of the fallen columns and leapt, hammer raised. Nagash swept out a hand, filling the air with amethyst light.

And Tarsus Bull-Heart was no more.

You are mine.

Take consolation in the fact of your insignificance. Your soul struggles yet, like a fly caught in a spider’s web. But Nagash is no spider.

He is your master, Tarsem of Helstone. He is your master, Tarsus Bull-Heart. Whatever name the thief Sigmar has cloaked you with, you are still mine.

I will pluck you apart, strand by strand, and dig from you the secrets you keep. You will scream, but you shall not find respite in oblivion.

Not until Nagash knows all.

I will know how Sigmar has done this, how he has stolen what is mine.

And when my curiosity is satisfied, I shall rise from my throne and shake off the dust of ages. I shall stride forth like a conqueror of old and shatter the shields of my enemies. I shall pull down their towers and tear their beating hearts from their chests. I shall find the treacherous princeling wherever he has fled and chain him to my throne. None may defy Nagash and escape retribution.

My loyal Mortarchs gather in the dark places, readying my nine hundred and ninety-nine legions for the war to come. Soon, they shall march at my command, to once more impose my will upon all that is, and all that shall be. I shall not be denied. I shall not be thwarted. All shall kneel before Nagash. All shall bow. Even those who cast off my protection and flee into the wilderness. Even the God-King, on his throne.

The only reason you exist is to serve my will.

Nagash is all things. All are one in Nagash.

I am the dark at the end of everything.

The end of all things, made real.

I am Nagash.

I HAVE RISEN.

THE BEASTS OF CARTHA

David Guymer

The sky crackled and burst, stars wheeled, and by hammer and lightning upon the Anvil of the Apotheosis, Ramus of the Shadowed Soul was reborn.

No, not reborn. Reforged.

Lightning was beaten into him with hard, incessant blows, strengthening him, shaping him, the impurities of mortality driven from him like sparks hammered from a blade against an anvil.

Withered lips peeled back from long fangs, and the vampire gave a rattling laugh. ‘A better question might be… what are you?’ One sunken eye narrowed. ‘I smell… storms and clean water. You are not mortal men.’

‘Not for a long time,’ Tarsus said.

‘The same might be said of me, I suppose,’ the vampire rasped.

‘What is your name?’

‘What use is a name, when one is bound thus.’ The creature twitched its thin fingers, causing the brass spikes to screech against the iron rim of the orrery. It winced, in obvious pain. ‘If you release me, perhaps I shall tell you, eh? How curious are you?’

No!

He focused on that shard of himself and held it close, even as it burned. Alloyed to that memory was an emotion: fury, rampant, barely human wrath, and sputtering from it with white heat, the raw need for vengeance. It was strength, not weakness.

With each stroke of the hammer he felt the lightning enflame him for a little longer before dissipating. The divine had no form, but he did, or at least his soul remembered, and with each blow the smith drew that recollection from him until the lightning burned, caged, within a nascent human form.

His form.

‘Sigmar sent him,’ Mannfred said, suddenly. ‘And I have led them to you, that you might do with them as pleases you, as a sign of my adoration.’

Wrath clad his heart even as the god of the anvil encased his recast flesh in holy sigmarite. He remembered.

Warriors fell at Nagash’s merest gesture, their bodies wreathed in black flames or amethyst light. Soon, only a scattered few remained, and Ramus himself. Lightning splashed across Nagash as harmlessly as water. The Undying King motioned and a Liberator fell, enveloped in flames. Ramus dropped his staff and lunged forwards, hammer clutched in both hands. His first blow made Nagash take a step back. His second thudded into a waiting palm, and Nagash’s hand closed about the hammer’s head. The blessed sigmarite flared once and then came apart as if it were nothing more than sand. Ramus staggered back and Nagash caught him up, enveloping his head in one metal talon.

He jerked the Lord-Relictor into the air. He turned to swat a Liberator into the side of the bridge hard enough to shatter the stone railing, and sent the Stormcast into the abyss below.

New-forged muscles swelled as he experienced the slaughter anew. He and his entire Warrior Chamber dismantled by the dark god, Nagash, and the soul of the Lord-Celestant imprisoned in his underworld.

Because of a betrayal.

The name lit up his mind with an electric fit of hate. Von Carstein.

A voice came, a voice that spoke into Ramus’ soul and gave him new life and greater-than-human strength.

‘Bring me the prodigal vampire.’

Sigmar…

Lightning played around the edges of Ramus’ armour, ready at a word to cast him into the Mortal Realms once more. His wrathful heart sang with praise.

‘I will present him to my old foe in silver chains.’

The lightning struck. It hit not with the impulsive stab-and-return that a bolt from the heavens should, but with a raking stroke. It timed its moment, brightening until the air it touched hummed with the pent-up might of Azyr. Release came in a thunderclap of such staggering force that the resultant blast wave ripped into the leaves of the surrounding trees.

The light faded, and Lord-Relictor Ramus opened his eyes. Smoke rose from his armour, residual energies arcing from gauntlet to gauntlet, snapping between his fingertips and his bowed head. He was alive, whole, and his war-plate was once again unmarred. His reliquary blazed like a lightning rod in his hand, a halo flickering about its crown and bestowing fateful animation on the imagery of faith, death and the storm.

From his shoulder, a shield of mirrored silver carrying a relief of a twin-tailed comet hung on a strap. A gift from Sigmar. He was on bent knee, the closing utterance of a prayer on his lips as the last of the storm faded.

‘Only the faithful...’

‘Only the faithful!’ came the reply.

Sixty warriors stood at order behind him, their armour a perfect silver-gold. They were the Hallowed Knights, warriors who had spent their last breath before death to call out to Sigmar and who had been answered.

Retributors with spitting lightning hammers; Decimators, gauntleted fists grimly locked about their thunderaxes; Protectors, their proud bulk distorted by the mystic shimmer of their stormstrike glaives; and finally the Prosecutors, their celestial weapons alight with the glory of Azyr.

Ten of each stood in ranks. An Exemplar Chamber. The God-King’s elite. Surrounding them, twenty Judicators summoned bolts to their crossbows, locked the weapons’ stocks to their breastplates and made ready. Ramus could see no Lord-Celestant or ranking champion amongst their number. It appeared that Sigmar had tasked Ramus with the role of leadership.

His view was limited to two discontinuous portals by the bony sockets of the helm that encased his head like a second skull, and he darted his gaze from point to point until he had a sense of their new battlefield.

The Hallowed Knights had been delivered into a V-shaped plaza, not made of stone but wood, and staked out with fire-poles and animal skins that moved under the most stilted of breezes. The air was clammy with the respiration of slow, giant things, and bitty with wood smoke. It tasted third-hand and passed torpidly through Ramus’ lungs.

The scuffed wooden ground was carpeted with dried leaves bigger than both of his hands. Noticing them, and noticing the incongruity between what he could see and feel and the oceanic roar of wind through trees, he looked up. His head spun with unexpected vertigo. It was not the height, but rather a sudden reinterpretation of scale.

Contrary to his initial flash impression, he was not amongst trees but high, high up in the canopy of a tree. The sky wore a cloak of purple-red scales and rustled as if to conceal something dark. The hoots and cries of beasts and birds, and things that were neither, called out from myriad hiding places in the wooded fastness.

‘Who brings fire to the lightless places?’

‘Only the faithful!’

Tilting his head back, Ramus scanned the plaza’s high, sheer walls. They had been cut from a pair of gnarled, monstrous branches, and were banded with lines that more closely resembled a cliff face than the growth lines of a living tree. Twinkling eyes watched intently from above. Leaves stirred.

At every level of the exposed wood, rude huts had been cut. The frontages were hung with shaggy furs that swallowed them entirely, rippling sedately in the breeze. In death they were monstrous, and Ramus felt that even he might hesitate before confronting beasts so large in the flesh.

Under such a commotion of noises it was impossible to pick out what was happening beyond the first row of huts. He could see no one but his own warriors, but death had a way of breeding caution, and he could feel the threat closing in.

‘Anything?’

‘No, Lord-Relictor.’

‘No.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing also.’

The leaders of the Retributors, Decimators, Protectors and Judicators sounded off.

Ramus raised his crackling reliquary aloft to stir texture into the murk.

‘Draw back,’ he ordered. ‘Form lines.’

Through the plaza’s wider, open end, the slow fall of reds, browns and golds permitted a partial and changing view of a city on a grand scale. A tangle of wooden girders and gantries, wire-trained branches and great winding staircases supported vast platforms that were smoky with fortified wooden townships. Both high up and way, way down, little squares of light flickered.

At the other end, it narrowed. An ever-constricting row of steps climbed towards the wooden plinth of a two-faced gargoyle – one man, one beast, both appearing to strain apart from the other – from which water trickled into a basin.

Judicators took position on the steps and swung up their crossbows with a rattle of sigmarite. They aimed.

The boards trembled underfoot. Ramus had not noticed that before, but now he was still it was as clear as the might of Sigmar. As though something massive was pounding on the same piece of wood. Retributors and Decimators formed staggered lines along the lower steps, reinforced every second or third warrior by the blurred mass of a Protector.

Ramus moved to join the crossbows where his view would be better.

‘Be alert,’ he said. ‘Whatever comes for us – and have faith that it comes for us – remember that Mannfred von Carstein is mine. Should I prove unworthy in that task and fall, then the vampire is a prize for whoever may claim him.’

‘Lord-Relictor!’ called the Judicator. ‘The skies.’

With a beat of broad, luminous wings, a being foreshadowed by its own otherworldly halo descended into the plaza’s hollow. Ramus’ first thought was of Mannfred’s abyssal mount, Ashigaroth, but one look was enough to see that it was something else.

The armoured angel flew in the characteristic mode of the God-King’s winged heralds, big powerful strokes generating uplift, then an earthbound plummet as mass told. It was peculiarly ungainly, a swan coming into land, but then nothing so graceful should ever have been compelled to fly.

‘We are here for the vampire,’ Ramus shouted up.

The beams of light that feathered the warrior’s wings slid down his helm’s sockets like knives from heaven. That which bled around the gilded shutter of the flyer’s lantern simultaneously soothed and strengthened.

‘Where is he?’

Confusion showed within the eyeholes of the warrior’s helm as he regarded Ramus and his weapons. Then he shook his head, wings working hard to lift him from his hover and into a climb. More lambent wing-shadows arrowed through the dark above him, lightning crackling from javelins and hammers unseen.

‘No time! I am Vandalus, Knight-Azyros of the Astral Templars. Fight first, and then we can all be brothers.’

The knight unshuttered his lantern, the full force of its illumination searing the gloom away. To Ramus, it was as though the light of all the stars that ever were had been lensed through that lantern, the disparate colours of the divine merging to white gold. It should have burned, but it was like cool water in tired eyes. It should have been blinding, but the coruscating glory highlighted every detail with a brilliance that could not be ignored.

And with the despatch of the leafy dark, Ramus saw.

They were huge, lumbering creatures, fully half again the size of a Stormcast with that excess made up in equal parts by muscle and by fat. Guts girdled with heavy armour plates swayed side to side as they charged the steps that came up from the tree-city into the plaza. Mail flapped from their arms. Wheezes and grunts turned to howls of agony as eyes were sizzled dry and melted to the backs of eyelids. What had been a headlong charge under cover of darkness became a fumbling advance on hands and knees, blood streaming down jowly cheeks.

Vandalus slammed his lantern shut. The light snapped out, but by glowing, multicoloured outlines, Ramus could still see.

‘On them!’

The Prosecutors, visible now as a retinue about two dozen strong, strafed the ogors from above. Ramus’ own winged warriors moved to join them. Despite their speed, each was able to loose two or three missiles before reaching the mouth of the plaza, where they banked up and corkscrewed towards the canopy.

Javelins fell amongst the ogors, less like rain than bolts of lightning. Half-blind brutes skewered with several of the long shafts frothed and seized, Azyrite energy fizzing through their muscles. Thrown hammers smacked through the thunderstorm with stone-cratering force, punching down those creatures tough enough to still be standing.

The last of the Prosecutors turned their wings of light to the breeze and speared upwards, leaving a field of dead and moaning in their wake. Ramus smiled. This was not the foe he had been sent for, but their obliteration was beautiful, he could not deny.

‘Judicators, loose,’ Ramus instructed.

More ogors, these armoured even more heavily than the initial rush and supported by mounted warriors on huge shaggy war-beasts, shouldered through the remnants of the first wave. The first rank, a sweating line of about thirty with cavalry keeping pace on the flanks, cleared the final step and entered the plaza.

A vast brute waved a black standard carrying a bat-wing motif. The horde gave a roar and surged past into a rattling volley of fire delivered by the Judicators’ boltstorm crossbows. A handful went down, but the majority pushed through, armour and thick hide both bristling with sigmarite-tipped bolts.

‘You will need to do better than that!’ Vandalus roared.

With a scowl, Ramus raised his reliquary. He murmured a grim prayer, his words lost amidst the grunts as the first of the ogors’ heavy hitters smashed belly first into the thin rank of Protectors and sent them flying. Further back, the mounted ogors goaded their war-beasts into a ponderous trot, staying close in to the row of huts as they urged their steeds towards the Hallowed Knights’ flanks.

The purple sky darkened and roiled, flashes of sheet lightning visible beyond the bowing leaves. A bolt jagged down from the heavens and struck the upraised reliquary. Energy crashed outward, knocking an ogor flat, tendrils squirming over his armour. Ramus could feel the hairs of his body standing on end and tasted the charge in his mouth.

With a word and a gesture he blasted a lightning bolt through the flanking cavalry, reducing ogors to ash and turning their massive mounts into squealing fireballs. Teeth bared, he unleashed the lightning again and again until his power was spent and all around him was brittle devastation. His body was aglow with its after-effects.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he called.

‘Only the faithful!’ the Protectors responded as they redressed their line.

‘Now I feel your passion,’ Vandalus laughed, opening his lantern’s cover again and sending scores more of the ogors to their hands and knees, crying blood.

Ramus smashed the butt of his reliquary through the neck of an ogor that was writhing in pain on the lowest of the fountain steps. The first real shouts of panic went up from the ogors and they began to fall back. Ordered to hold, the disciplined line of Hallowed Knights simply disengaged and watched them go.

Ramus saw them dash against a second line of maroon and gold and animal pelts that had pivoted across the plaza’s entrance like a raising drawbridge. The gloom was too heavy for him to see what happened next, but he could hear well enough.

With a two-footed thump, the Knight-Azyros landed beside him, in his way as strange a sight as the ogors had been. His golden helm had been picked out with several small ideograms like tattoos, representing stars, storms and wild beasts. Odd, rustling totems of feathers and leaves had been affixed to his armour, partially masking the intricate, amethyst scrollwork. He took Ramus firmly by the shoulder.

‘A fine anvil you make, brother,’ the Azyros said. ‘Come, meet the hammer.’

The burly warrior stood with one armoured boot on the back of a particularly large and messily slain ogor, a wooden cup in his hand. The cup was empty, but the prop seemed important to his sense of theatre.

He carried his helm under one arm, its absence revealing a shaggy bearded face cut by shallow scars. Given that such injuries could not survive the Reforging they must have been relatively recent and, judging from the patterning, Ramus suspected self-inflicted to some ritual end.

‘His name is Hamilcar,’ Vandalus explained. ‘He is Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars, Eater of Bears and champion of Cartha.’

The Lord-Castellant’s heavy armour was decorated, if that was the word, with bloody palm prints to which scraps of animal hair had been stuck. He looked like a man-wolf from Azyr’s Eternal Winterlands. To Ramus, it appeared he and his warriors had ‘gone native’ to an alarming degree.

‘See how even the greatest fall to the halberd of Hamilcar Bear-Eater,’ the Lord-Castellant said, addressing all present. ‘The ogors have come before and we have beaten them back. They will come again and be beaten again because I am still here!’ His voice rose to a shout, disturbing the trio of gryph-hounds curled up around his feet where they dozed off a feast of ogor flesh. They growled sleepily as he went on.

‘You are men and women of Azyrheim. You could have lived your lives in safety and comfort, but instead you came here, returned to your homeland to reclaim it from Chaos in the name of the God-King Sigmar. Your courage is proven beyond question. But if anyone here now doubts their courage then let them not doubt mine. I am your protector and I will protect you all.’

He raised his cup high. The forest’s growl filled the pause.

‘To my protection!’

The mortal men and women assembled in the plaza mumbled back with a weary chorus. It put Ramus in mind of the surly response of a starving wolf pack.

They were gathered into auxiliary bow and spear detachments, between ten and twenty strong, marshalled around a host of Stormcasts in maroon and gold, of which there were about forty. Liberators and Judicators mostly, their armour embellished with a variety of odd fetishes and tribal markings.

A Protector with the hissing head of a leopard painted over his face walked between them, delivering each mortal a wooden thimble bearing his dole of oozing grey liquor. At Hamilcar’s nod, they downed them, sucking on the emptied thimbles for every last sticky drop.

Its nose was of tree sap with a familiar, coppery trace.

Crushing his empty cup in his hand, Hamilcar threw it aside.

‘To your posts. I want the gates repaired and men upon them ready for the next attack.’

Another chorus of semi-human grunts and the auxiliaries filed out.

Vandalus put his hand upon Ramus’ shoulder, ushering him forwards. ‘Come. Perhaps Hamilcar can tell you something I cannot.’

‘Vandalus! Victory is ours!’ the Lord-Castellant bellowed, greeting Vandalus with a powerful embrace. He pulled away, his smile disappearing as he looked Ramus up and down. ‘Maelstrom of Light?’

‘Hallowed Knights.’

‘Ahh.’

‘Ramus is hunting a vampire called von Carstein.’

The informality of address made Ramus wince. Hamilcar’s bark of laughter hardened it into a scowl.

‘Mighty game indeed – one that would not survive an hour in this wood.’

‘He is here,’ said Ramus. ‘Sigmar would not have sent us to you if he were not. The God-King desires him dearly.’

And I want him, he thought, but did not add.

‘This is a dark land, and Sigmar sees little of it from Sigmaron.’

‘You sound as though you question him.’

‘A mighty gift you have there, Ramus, to know so keenly what is in here.’ He tapped on the side of his grizzled head. ‘What am I thinking now?’

Vandalus cleared his throat tactfully. ‘It was my beacon that guided you here. It is possible that your Mannfred is nearby, but our blindness spreads over a dozen cities, and many thousands of acres of forest, mountain and plain.’

‘Sigmar has never yet led me astray,’ said Ramus, stiffly. There had been as many Stormhost forgings as there were varieties of men, Ramus knew, but he could not entirely dismiss the indulgence that Sigmar was surely testing him in some way, by sending him to these Astral Templars. ‘Perhaps the ogors are involved? I can... sense... something evil behind them. It seems as though they have had you besieged for some time.’

‘They will fail,’ said Hamilcar dismissively. ‘Hamilcar’s arm never tires.’

‘I do not need your protection, Lord-Castellant. From truth least of all.’

Hamilcar grunted, stepping aside as equerries with stiff brushes, pails and what must have been grooming knives moved in to tend to his hounds.

‘Another few months and we would have been secure enough here to scour the brutes from their land ourselves. But then the darkness came. Rumours of dead men crossing the Junkar Mountains. Orruks on the plains, bigger than any yet seen. Something’s stirred them up, and ogor tribes have been heading this way for weeks. Any fewer of them and they might have passed right beneath us, but the forest floor is dark as all death.’ He was silent for a moment, scratching his bearded chin. ‘There’s nothing to eat down there, so while we’re still here they won’t stop coming.’

The leopard-faced Protector passed his cup to the leader of the final group of auxiliaries. She practically snatched it from him, spilling some and spattering his gauntlets with what looked like blood.

‘What is in the cup?’ asked Ramus.

‘Sap from younger branches, mixed with a little blood from the birds and animals the auxiliaries catch,’ Vandalus told him.

‘Blood drinking?’ Ramus hissed, aghast.

Vandalus chuckled. ‘When I was a man I was king of a desert kingdom, and we would often mix the blood and milk of our mounts to sustain us between oases.’ He touched fingers absently to his lips. ‘Funny. I remember the taste of it more than all the fine foods in the world.’

Ramus scowled. He would die again before confessing it, but he envied those who recalled lives as warrior-lords and champions. As well as he could piece his own mind together – and the pieces there left to him were fewer than they had once been – he had always been a priest. A translator of the divine will and a judge. A shadowed soul.

‘You do not remember fully or truly. None of us do.’

‘Indeed we don’t,’ Hamilcar rumbled. ‘But we are Astral Templars, and we are proud of what we do remember.’

‘But you have water,’ said Ramus, pointing his reliquary accusingly back to where the twisted gargoyle dribbled liquid from the cored trunk into a font.

Vandalus and Hamilcar shared a look. The Lord-Castellant sighed.

‘Tainted. Not a long story, but one that never changes. My walls however are another matter. Vandalus may have called for more of our own host, but I’ll not turn away an Exemplar Chamber, whichever colours they wear. Walk with me, Ramus. Help me hold Cartha and then perhaps I’ll be able to help you.’

They walked down steps, up others, over bridges trained from tangled branches, from one war-torn platform township to the next. Hidden things clicked and twittered at their passing, the boards creaked, and for miles in every direction giant leaves rustled and points of light winked, like stars but not. It was like the centre of a strange, living universe.

The path led through the camp to a roped bridge. From the cleanly sawn stumps protruding from the edge of the platform, the original bridge had been recently brought down, presumably to repel an earlier attack. The new structure swept over a moat that might as well have been bottomless, a febrile chasm of animal howls and thrashing leaves that awaited the unwary and the invader.

On the other side, a barracks yard bustled with Liberators. A hundred or more bow- and crossbow-armed Judicators stood on the walls, towering over the human auxiliaries that moved among them.

As with everything else Ramus had seen here, the walls were wood, entire trunks carved with battlements and hollowed out to function as towers. Workmen crawled over a gate made from planks thicker than a man was tall, hanging like spiders from a complex harness of ropes to patch a breached section.

The Lord-Castellant led him through the drizzle of sawdust to a set of steps that had been cut into the defensive wall, where five mortal auxilia in leather jacks and holding spears stood guard.

Four immediately stiffened as the three Stormcasts approached, but the fifth sat and did not seem to notice them at all. He was scratching at his bare forearm and clearly had been for some time. He stared at the blood that speckled the wooden steps as though he could see his future there. Two of the standing spearmen shuffled across to hide him, but only served to draw attention. Hamilcar glowered at them.

‘What’s this?’ the Lord-Castellant demanded.

The eldest and least ragged of the two straightened. ‘Gut fever.’

‘Wheezing sickness,’ offered another, speaking over his fellow.

The Lord-Castellant drilled each man with his gaze until all four had wilted. The seated man panted, scratching.

‘Has he drunk the water?’

The elder spearman shook his gaunt head. ‘He’s not. I swear it by Ghal Maraz.’

‘Then explain this.’

‘Explain it to me,’ said Ramus, stepping forwards.

Hamilcar dismissed the two mortals with an angry jerk of the head, and squatted down beside the scratching man.

‘The fountain is the only source of water here and draws directly from the Great Tree’s roots. It has two faces, that of beast and that of man, and it follows a cycle. Now is the time of the beast. The beasts may drink – my hounds, the birds,’ he nodded to Vandalus, ‘and we must take what we can from them, but a man that drinks from the fountain at this time will eventually himself become a beast.’

‘And Stormcasts?’

‘Would you risk it?’

‘Is this fountain not guarded?’

‘Of course!’ Hamilcar snarled. ‘But somehow, this keeps happening.’ He gestured to one of the auxilia. ‘Take him to the tents. See that he’s restrained.’

Shaking his head as the unlucky man pulled his sick comrade up and walked off towards the rope bridge, Ramus took the steps to the parapet and looked out.

The darkness was in constant motion, branches sighing in the wind, leaves fluttering slowly downward. More gargantuan trees, some larger even than Cartha’s, rose through the void, shadowy pillars of grey and brown and mouldy orange, glittering with hundreds of thousands of tiny lights. Each that Ramus could see was connected to others by mile-long wood-turreted suspension bridges.

Cartha was not a city. It was a cluster of island states up here in the trees. With his soul’s eyes Ramus could see the cloud that hung over all. If von Carstein was not behind this place’s ills then the Lord-Relictor was a dracoth.

Vandalus appeared beside him. ‘We retook them once and will again. Once reinforcements arrive from our realmgate on the Sea of Bones–’

A warning blast sounded out from the sentry post on the gatehouse. The raucous calls of the forest itself almost immediately drowned it out, but the mortal sentry had clearly earned his position for the power of his lungs.

‘Flyer!’

Vandalus looked upward and suddenly tensed. ‘Sigmar...’

The Knight-Azyros’ light wings exploded out and lifted him off the ground. The incomer was already over the palisade and descending hard, motes of feathered light fading fast behind him. It was a Prosecutor. His armour was a deep, bruised purple. His wings were almost gone.

Vandalus collided with the injured Stormcast in mid-air. Arms squirmed around crippled war-plate, wings billowing out as the Knight-Azyros fought to halt his comrade’s fall and fell with him.

Ramus jumped aside as the two armoured bodies hit the ground like a comet. Coming in at a steep angle, they crashed onto the rampart walkway, the Knight-Azyros with arms and wings wrapped protectively around the Prosecutor’s body, and bounced on over the inner courtyard. They came to rest under a mound of wooden shields, Stormcasts and auxilia both running in to help. Hamilcar waved them brusquely back.

Shrugging off a shield, Vandalus unfolded his wings from about his chest. The Stormcast in his arms was pale from loss of blood, his wings skeletal. His armour carried a number of severe dents and blood trickled through the small slit over his mouth. His breathing was shallow, furtive, as if edging towards the point where the pain of a broken rib became too much.

It took a lot to kill a Stormcast. To beat one this hard took a lot more.

‘Brother,’ Vandalus spoke quietly, ‘what did this to you? Where is the rest of the scout retinue?’

The Prosecutor’s mouth worked drily before sound came out. ‘I... am... sorry...’

Vandalus shook his head. ‘Do not be. We will tell stories of your epic flight until the end of days.’

‘No... I am sorry... The Sea of Bones is lost. Our cities are gone and... there will be no reinforcements. I feared Cartha would have suffered the same.’ He closed his eyes, tightened his hand around Vandalus’ forearm and clasped it in a warriors’ embrace. ‘But you are here. Praise Sigmar. You will tell our stories... to the reforged.’

‘And they will retell them.’

Hamilcar growled. ‘What happened to the other colonies?’

The Prosecutor made to speak, but the light left his eyes, departed to the same heavenly abode as his wings. Vandalus slid the warrior from his lap and stood, just as the body dissolved into a bolt of lightning that blasted open the forest canopy on its return to Sigmar. Ramus mouthed a prayer for him. It was a journey he would wish on no one. For a moment those gathered looked to the heavens or at the scorched ground in silence.

Another blast of the horn broke it. Again, the forest sought to clamour it down, but this time the trumpeter refused to be drowned out and held his note. Soon, others took up the call until the full length of the palisade was ringing.

Gripping his reliquary, Ramus turned back around to the great suspension that yawned into the dark. He could feel vibrations underfoot, ripples running through the connected boards from the approach of something massive.

Ramus muttered a different prayer.

One of war.

The ogors were coming, and this time they came with shields. Tramping over the forest bridge three abreast, every first and third bore a shield of metal the size of a man and bossed with a ten-thumbed stab at a gaping maw. Arrows clattered off the iron shell. Even the foot-long sigmarite-tipped bolts of the Judicators could not punch deep enough to trouble the hulking ogors behind.

Hamilcar’s voice boomed from his fearsomely daubed helm, and he waved his arms wildly as though he held the power to bleed the ogors with the knifing motion of his hands. ‘From the side! Aim for their legs. Bring them down!’

The archers shifted their aim to little effect. These ogors were shock troops held in reserve for the final push. Occasionally, one would tip over the edge with a Judicator bolt splitting their knee but the integrity of the formation held, the unshielded ogor in the centre file of each rank having two hands spare to hold his shield-mates in line. The clank of ill-fitting greaves on iron boots rang over the dark-leafed abyss as they pushed through the arrow-storm to the gate.

Ramus was in the barbican, the rough-walled wooden tunnel between the inner and outer gate where the body-odour haze was thickest. He grunted, hammer locked with an ogor’s steel-toothed maul, shoulder to its gut plate and straining. There was a darkness driving it, pushing against his will even as the ogor pushed against his body.

‘Who holds the gates of heaven?’

‘Only the faithful!’

The Protectors and Decimators were far from their element in such cramped confines, so the honour of vanguard fell to the Retributors. The explosive crump of their weapons reverberated through the tunnel. Bow auxilia from the gatehouse garrison leaned over the internal battlements and loosed directly down.

Ramus pushed back against the ogor’s strength until it felt as though the pressure against the inside of his skull would crack his helm.

‘Who is the shield between Sigmar’s foes and the weak?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Who fights with the hearts of bulls?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Only the faithful!’ Ramus roared, slamming every ounce of reserve behind his shoulder.

The ogor staggered. Ramus drew back, opening a space between them, and then thrust his reliquary aloft. At a muttered prayer, lightning crackled about its pole and spat a bolt at the recovering ogor. The massive brute jabbered, spraying Ramus with spittle, but stumbled for him regardless on bandy legs that spasmed with Azyrite energy.

Hamilcar appeared on the battlements above. ‘A useful prayer! But you are in the Carthic Oldwoods now, and Sigmar cannot hear you unless... you... shout!’

The Lord-Castellant jumped onto the parapet and thrust his warding lantern over the tunnel, drawing back the shutter with his other hand in the same motion. Golden light flooded the tunnel. Ramus’ armour glowed as barriers of arcane protection enshrouded it. He felt himself strengthen, enough to push the ogor back, then mash its head so emphatically into its neck that its ribs exploded in his face.

Ramus found he had space to move. The pressure from the front was easing off. ‘They are retreating.’

‘Of course they are! Hamilcar Bear-Eater is always triumphant!’

Ramus dismissed the bluster with an irritable wave of his hand. Somewhere behind the sweaty scrape of withdrawing ogors, bells were being vigorously rung and drums thumped.

‘This is no act of panic. They are being called back...’ A cold wind washed against his face and he turned from the bridge towards it.

The sepulchral chill whistled through his helm’s eyeholes and pinched his eyes as a bat-like horror the size of a dracoth shrieked past them. Snapshots rattled off its hide – not flesh but some dark, gravestone metal – or simply passed through its ribcage in wisps of corpselight.

The monster turned from the walls, the thrashing torment of a nimbus of spirits somehow keeping it airborne. Then, with a shriek that killed the nerves, it bounded down, thumping into the bridge amidst a buffeting wail of ethereal dead.

Ramus gripped his reliquary so tightly that it creaked.

Hatred should be hot, a storm that struck wild and hard, but what he felt instead was cold, his heart deadened as though encased in a block of ice. The dread abyssal stamped around as though claiming some of the ground’s solidity for its own. Its eerily glowing nimbus moaned as it dimmed to reveal the beast’s master.

Hamilcar called out from the walls in astonishment. ‘Vampire!’

Ramus growled. ‘Mannfred.’

The vampire shortened the reins around his wrist, then leaned forwards in the saddle to execute a bow for the watching Stormcasts. ‘In accord with the finest traditions of war, I offer you this one chance of surrender.’

Hamilcar held up his weapon arm so that all could see it. ‘If you want surrender, then come to my wall and beg for it.’

Mannfred offered an indulgent smile. ‘I salute your sense of occasion, Lord-Castellant. Truly. But you have nothing for me and nothing for them.’ He gestured to the ogors behind him who inched forwards, salivating, in a rustle of mail. ‘Those you shelter, however... They will be dead in a week whatever we do here. Let us in, give them up to us, and together we might all survive what is coming.’

Ramus did not believe that Hamilcar gave genuine consideration to the vampire’s terms, but something in the warning had given the Lord-Castellant pause. Was it the talk of orruks and ogors on the march that troubled him more than the Betrayer of the Hallowed Knights?

‘Do not heed the poison that spills from this adder’s mouth!’ Ramus hissed. He slammed his staff down onto the bridge, energy arcing off in wild flares. Mannfred regarded him with amusement, but no hint of recognition. That he could enact such treachery and not even recall his victims only made the lightning storm more furious. Ramus turned to the ogors and raised his voice. ‘Whatever deceits this missionary of lies has used to delude you, discard them from your minds.’

‘Our need is mutual,’ Mannfred said, smoothly. ‘You do not know what is behind us.’

‘It can be no worse that what awaits them. Treachery. That is how you reward your allies.’

The vampire sat back in the saddle and looked him up and down. ‘Do I know you, Stormcast?’

‘I am Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, and I fell the day you betrayed Tarsus and the Hallowed Knights to the Great Necromancer. I know you, Betrayer, and for your crimes, Sigmar now knows you also.’

At the God-King’s name, lightning bolted from his reliquary, flaring off against a screaming barrier of tortured souls before Mannfred’s negligently upraised hand. With a predatory grin, Mannfred raised his hand above his head, fingers spread, the residual charge of Ramus’ lightning bolting from finger to finger. He looked past him to where Hamilcar stood with gauntlets clenched over his battlements.

‘Have you noticed your dependents acting most oddly of late, Lord-Castellant? Blood. It changes one, do you not agree?’

The vampire clenched his fist and a wave of power spilled out. It buckled the ogors’ shields, caused the banners above Cartha’s palisade to pull at their poles until they snapped. Stormcasts braced into the wave, buffeted as the dark grey wall of force hit their armour and passed around them as if they were rocks in a river.

The effect on their auxilia was markedly different. They were not rocks. They were sand, and the wave broke them. Blood vessels burst in their eyes and skin the moment it touched, men screaming or simply gargling on their own lungs’ blood as the wave passed through and splattered out the other side. Convulsions cracked bones, sent men wailing from the parapet, the survivors turning mad, bloodshot eyes onto the corpses and moving on them with an animal hunger.

Ramus spun around as the defensive line disintegrated before his eyes. ‘What bedevilment is this?’

Mannfred spread both arms in a flourish, urging his dread abyssal to rise on a column of weeping souls. A pack of subhuman creatures with torn clothes much like the folk of Azyrheim and tatty bat-like wings flapped over the gulf from the neighbouring tree in answer to their cries. Their wings were the same dull red as von Carstein’s cloak, their flesh fluted and spiked like his armour, their faces painfully drawn with the same patrician lines.

They had been remade in his likeness.

‘Blood does not cheat or lie, Stormcast. It belongs to the beasts, and the beasts want it back.’

A tortured shriek rang out from the palisade, a hunger for human flesh so acute it was no longer even remotely human. An auxilia sprinted along the parapet, weapon gone, mind gone, mouth covered in bloody drool, and hurled himself headlong into an Astral Templar.

The man – if the flailing, blotchy animal could still be called that – rebounded off the armoured giant, but not before another had leapt onto the warrior’s back and started tearing at the gorget spikes with his teeth.

Across the length of the wall, Stormcasts were being overwhelmed, torn from their war-plate like carrion pulled apart by hyenas. Flurries of lightning stole their bodies from around the teeth of the very men they had been despatched to defend, blasting the savages apart like flesh-wrapped fireworks.

Ramus caught sight of Vandalus and his Prosecutors taking to the skies, abandoning the wall entirely in favour of engaging the ghoulish crypt flayers struggling in from the deep forest sea. Behind them flew the Prosecutors of the Hallowed Knights, wheeling after the creatures.

Several beast-born threw themselves from the walls in grasping pursuit. Some caught trailing legs and dragged the winged warriors down. Others flailed, impacting in disjointed heaps on the berm. A handful staggered up on broken limbs and, whimpering in pain and hunger, dragged themselves towards Ramus.

From the other direction, the ogors once again lifted up their wall-shields and advanced. The bridge trembled with their tread, Mannfred’s mocking laughter a counterpoint in gusts and whispers.

Hamilcar backed up from the rampart, staring at the blood daubed over his gauntlets. ‘I did this...’

‘Back from the wall, to the city! We will hold the second bridge and make a stand there,’ cried Ramus.

Ramus spat, turning and blasting a ghoul from the wooden berm with a bolt from his reliquary. The burning creature plunged, shrieking, through snapping leaves and on into the dark. Ramus came about, mouthing a prayer, and sent lightning to scorch the front rank of ogor shields.

Hamilcar bellowed again, swinging his halberd overhead and cleaving the pair of man-beasts that came gnashing for his throat. ‘I did this! With Sigmar as my witness, Lord-Relictor, I will undo it!’

Blasting and bludgeoning a path, Ramus retreated from the ogors’ advance, through the splintered outer gate and into the barbican. Where, a few minutes prior, bowmen had stood and loosed, they now hurled themselves into the tunnel. Ramus’ reliquary drove forked lightning through those that blocked his way.

Taking the glowing staff in both hands, he looked back over his shoulder as an ogor in a studded helm crashed through the open gate, deep-set eyes peering over the top of its shield. It saw him and opened up to charge.

‘Down, Lord-Relictor!’

Ramus ducked as a rank of Judicators in Azyr-blue and silver levelled crossbows as one and unleashed a storm of bolts into the tunnel. The ogor fell, bolts bristling from shield and helm and jowly face. Retributors and Decimators moved in to shore up the inner gate with crates dragged over from the drill yard, and with the bodies of the dead.

The yard had slipped into a demented nightmare. Tortured screams abounded. Shadows darted, men and women gouging each other’s eyes out amidst tumbling leaves. Half of the Stormcasts pivoted to face them, but the ghouls seemed more interested in each other.

With a sudden inhalation, one of the corpses being piled into the barricade made a grab for the Retributor carrying it. Surprised, the Stormcast struggled with it for a moment, its arms squirming around his neck, then tore it off him and hurled it against the wall where it broke and did not rise again. The Protectors formed a cage around Ramus, stormstrike glaives striking up a static hum that almost drowned out the moans of the reawakening dead.

The barricade began to pull itself apart. Ramus noted Hamilcar’s absence and the incoherent cries coming from the Lord-Castellant’s last position, and broke into a run.

‘Back to the bridge!’ he ordered.

A small band of Astral Templars held the rope bridge. Subhuman beasts battered themselves against the Liberators’ shields and fell to their hammers by the score. Against such guileless opposition, the warriors might have held their position for hours, if not indefinitely, but they were beset from both sides.

Ramus felt cold spear his chest. Mannfred had not restricted his call to those on the walls. It had turned everyone. Everyone who had drunk, even once removed, the blood of Cartha.

With a doleful prayer, Ramus raised his reliquary again. After so much use it felt like lifting a stone block but he thrust it high, as if to rip open the sky in person, and dropped a thunderous barrage of lightning strikes onto the flimsy bridge. Obliterated, bits of wood and wailing beast-touched people plummeted into the forest’s depths.

The Judicator-Prime looked on. ‘It falls on me to point out that there is no other way out.’

‘Sigmar is our way out. And I will face the pain of that reunion gladly if I can push Mannfred von Carstein through the door ahead of me,’ snarled Ramus. ‘Astral Templars, to me!’

Cartha was gone. They had no cause to fight for now but his. He turned, scanning the chaos behind him.

‘The Lord-Castellant hunts for the Betrayer. Good. His is the only life of consequence in Cartha now.’

The Stormcasts formed up into a block around him, shields, blades and crackling hammerheads held outwards, the three corners facing away from the ruined bridge anchored by bulky Protectors. The savage-looking Astral Templars slotted in at the rear. The join between the two cohorts was seamless.

At Ramus’ gesture, the Decimators each doubled up with a Judicator and ranged ahead. The rest of the Stormcasts snapped to a forwards facing, brought weapons to marching order and, as one perfect unit, broke into a run back towards the gate.

Their bodies were sacrosanct and of no value either to the ogors’ bellies or to the vampire’s ravenous new minions.

And so they had turned on each other.

An ogor encased from the waist down in heavy plate came blundering through the thin wooden partition of a barracks hall with a beast-touched man struggling in a lock under one arm and a shank of flesh dribbling from its mouth. Several more loped after it, evading the long swings of its fist and chasing it through the splintering wall of another structure on the opposite side of the yard.

Elsewhere, another lay dead on the ground, the leaf bed around it whisked up by the frenzied attacks of the beast pack that mobbed it. Somewhere in the bedlam, an animal like a wolf, yet not quite, howled. Several scattered beast packs lifted bloodied mouths from the glut and loped off towards the sound.

There, higher up in the canopy, a light pulsed in the gloom. Vandalus’ lantern. Even through the crowding foliage Ramus could feel the golden warmth of its summons.

Sigmar did not bestow the Knights-Azyros with wings simply to serve as messengers and heralds. They were the sigmarite-tipped blade of the God-King’s spear. It was in their nature to be at the sharp end of any engagement, and the pride they took in that fact was legendary. Ramus knew little of the Astral Templars, and did not care to learn what the Reforging might one day take away, but he understood the temperament of the Knight-Azyros well.

Wherever Vandalus fought, Mannfred could not be far.

He lowered his reliquary to point out the pulsing lantern to his retinue, just as the breathless pant and claw-on-wood scrabble marked the approach of something four-legged and frantic. Ramus took a firm breath, ready to again loose lightning, as a gryph-hound burst through the leaves and skidded to a halt in front of him.

It was limping, carrying one paw, its beak frothed and its fur matted with blood. Its sapphire-blue eyes were piercingly intelligent, but dancing with an animal fright almost painful to behold.

The air grew chill, a sense of spiritual pressure building. The hound sniffed the air in alarm, then looked up and shrank to the ground with a whine.

Ashigaroth dropped from the sky, slamming the gryph-hound down and ripping into its throat in a single, crushing instant. Tearing out muscle and tendons and spraying the ground with blood, the dread abyssal swallowed a chunk of flesh, and then shrieked its challenge as a wave of beast-born loped in from the shadows.

‘Judicators!’ Ramus called. ‘To your duty.’

Swaying in the saddle of his unholy beast, Mannfred observed the rank of boltstorm crossbows with indulgent good humour. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that Sigmar felt compelled to burden you with such poor imaginations? Very well. “Judicate” me, if you can.’

A volley of fire ripped through empty space as the dread abyssal leapt skywards. With a war cry from their retinue, the Retributors stepped forwards to meet the charge of Mannfred’s beasts. Ramus turned from the slap of meat on metal and the ripping of joints from bone to follow Ashigaroth’s flight.

‘Spread out, Judicators! Follow his...’

The order died on his lips as the monster reached the apogee of its arc and began to descend. Strong hands on Ramus’ back pushed him clear. He hit the ground and immediately rolled over, just as Ashigaroth landed on top of the Protector that had saved him.

The Stormcast went under in a shriek of metal. The dread abyssal’s knife-like mouthparts went straight for the warrior’s chest, splitting his breastplate in two and digging in. With a toss of the head, it pulled something wispy and golden from the warrior’s ruptured chest cavity and swallowed.

The bolus glowed brightly through Ashigaroth’s skeletal neck as the monster struggled to get it down. It opened its jaws as though to gag, and vomited a bolt of lightning that struck towards the sky. The undead monster slumped forwards, eyes quivering, and gave a rattling heave.

Ramus thrust his reliquary up towards the sheets of lightning flashing across the crowded sky. ‘His soul belongs to Sigmar. As does mine. As does yours.’

Ashigaroth heaved forwards and knocked his staff from his hands with a swipe of its claws, then struck him in the chest with the bony bridge of its skull and sent him stumbling. Mannfred stood up in the stirrups, a soft golden light nicking the edges of his armour, and pointed with his sword. ‘Outclassed and ready to die – now I remember you–’

‘Hold, blood-drinker!’

Lord-Castellant Hamilcar strode in from Ramus’ right with his lantern held high, halberd scraping across the wooden ground. Two snarling gryph-hounds came at his side, bursting forwards with a snap of their vicious beaks.

At his back marched a phalanx of Astral Templars, armour scraped and bloodied, adorned with savage icons, but Ramus could not recall any sunrise over Azyrheim so magnificent.

Hamilcar broke into a run. Then his hounds. Then his Liberators. Sigmarite pounded excitedly on thick wood.

‘Cartha is my city, vampire. I am the Bear-Eater, and today you are my prey.’

The Liberators crashed through the beast-born with the pleasure and ease of men kicking in empty packing crates, crushing open a path long enough for Hamilcar and his whirling halberd to charge through.

Ashigaroth twisted to get out of the way. Hamilcar’s blade cracked its shoulder and shards of blackened metal flew loose. The monster bellowed, throat still shivering, and fought to be airborne. Mannfred reined it in with a harsh tug, urging it forwards instead to trample the Lord-Castellant under its hell-metal bulk.

Hamilcar raised his halberd across the abyssal’s throat like a barrier. Ashigaroth chomped furiously over the top of the haft for his armoured face, driving the mighty Lord-Castellant a dozen strides back for every snap of its jaws.

With a snarl, Mannfred stabbed for Hamilcar’s neck. The Lord-Castellant ducked the shoulder, bent his neck to the other side, and the blow pierced his cloak to glance off his armour. The abyssal twisted out from Hamilcar’s halberd with a furious shake of the neck and snatched a gryph-hound mid-leap from the air. It shook it hard, and tossed the brutalised animal clear. The second circled in low, clamped its beak on the abyssal’s hind leg, and brought those infamously powerful jaw muscles to bear.

Did unnatural beasts such as this feel pain? Ramus did not know. But he certainly felt the crack of fell metal as the gryph-hound bit down.

The dread abyssal retaliated with a head swipe that sent the Lord-Castellant reeling. Swift as a turning wind, Mannfred twisted in the saddle and plunged his sword through the gryph-hound’s spine.

Ramus snarled. ‘Bring him down! Forget everything that I said. The warrior who slays the vampire will be exalted by Sigmar forevermore.’

Mannfred brought his sword up. ‘Don’t think to forever just yet, Stormcast... You wish to return me to Nagash, but that is a journey I fully intend to make on my own terms.’

Ramus risked a quick backwards look.

His Paladins staggered under bodily blows as beast-born beyond counting ran into them headlong. There was barely room to deploy a shield, much less a thunderaxe, and even the Decimators who would ordinarily relish such a numerical mismatch were dragged into a melee that was literally hand-to-hand. Arriving piecemeal through the scrape of leaves and the snap of reluctant joints, dead things shambled into the stragglers’ backs, driving the ghouls’ unnatural frenzy into the surrounded Stormcasts.

Ramus glanced across to where his reliquary had been tossed. Mannfred was far too fast to let him reach it, far too strong to let the attempt go unpunished.

Hamilcar’s halberd beat a long dent into Ashigaroth’s shoulder blade, shoved it sideways with a shriek, and gave Ramus the time to unsling his silver shield. The Lord-Relictor fed his arm through the straps, and swung in behind the monster.

Sigmar’s Gift was heavy and polished, and carried an unusually wicked edge for a shield. It loosened an old memory, something he had once said to the warriors of his mortal nation as they had marched to war – a command to return with their shields, or on them.

That was how Sigmar wanted the Betrayer, and that was how he would get him.

Ramus struck for the slowly reknitting gash that the gryph-hound had put into Ashigaroth’s hind leg, but rather than putting the dread abyssal onto its belly, his hammer somehow crashed into Mannfred’s steel.

It was like punching a wall. Impact spasms jerked up his neck. He swung his shield across the vampire’s counter, turned the blow over his shoulder and stumbled back from the force. He got his feet into place under him, caught a glimpse of Hamilcar and Ashigaroth trading hits a few feet away, then Mannfred’s meteoric downstroke forced him under his shield again.

‘This realm will be mine, Stormcast. You cannot stop me. If Nagash will not welcome me then I will make him fear me.’

Ramus brought up his hammer as an arcane bolt leapt from Mannfred’s fingertips and scorched his breastplate. In that same moment he saw Hamilcar finally falling under Ashigaroth’s claws. The determined thumps of his halberd against the abyssal’s lower ribs continued, even after the ripping open of his faulds turned curses into screams.

Unable to reach Ramus while his beast finished with the Lord-Castellant, Mannfred let go of the reins and pounced from the saddle, launching himself into a spin of such power that he became a blur. He cannoned into Ramus, smashing him through the struggling cordon of Stormcasts and into a pack of feral beasts. Hands smothered him, scratched and bloody, individually weak but irresistible in such volume. Fingernails dug in between helm and gorget. They pulled at his arms and legs, pounded on his bruised chest. He felt the join between boot and greave creak and fought in vain to draw in his leg. Something bit down on the narrowly opened gap but, to his astonishment, the pain faded almost as quickly as it had flared.

He saw light, golden light, and he was the only one not screaming.

Vandalus.

Finished with the crypt flayers, the Knight-Azyros and his Prosecutors had returned. Beast-born reeled, screams bubbling from their throats as their corrupted flesh steamed, and Ramus immediately shook them off to sit upright. The light eased away his hurt and replenished his heart with faith. He saw Mannfred back warily from the aura, winding his wrist again through Ashigaroth’s hanging reins.

Ramus picked up his shield from where it had fallen on the ground. In that flash of the divine he knew what it was for, as though he had been gifted with it and despatched to the light of Sigmar’s herald for no greater purpose than this.

‘Betrayer,’ he called to Mannfred. ‘I told you that Sigmar knows you.’

He tilted his shield forwards, its mirrored face cutting the light stream and turning its full force onto the vampire. Mannfred screamed as though he had been set ablaze, and a moment later the dead thing did indeed burst into purifying flame. Ashigaroth pulled on its wailing master, dragging him off the ground by the reins wrapped around his wrist in its own panic to escape.

‘No!’ Ramus gave a howl of frustration and looked upward. He could not see the Prosecutors directly, but he could tell from the faint shimmer of their wings they were up there. ‘Follow him! Do not allow him to escape again!’

In a sparkling impact of steel and thunder, Vandalus made landfall. The Astral Templar folded back his wings. The glow of burning buildings reflected in his armour made the animal iconography appear to dance.

‘I swore an oath of my own to hold this realm for Sigmar. I cannot fulfil yours for you as well.’

Ramus bustled to his feet in a fury, pushed immediately to the ground again as an ogor came barging through the heaving mass of beast-born, so desperate to pull away from something behind it that even the Hallowed Knights Paladins broke before it. The fat brute stubbed its toe into the ground and tripped. Its face slammed down, blood and spit leaking into the grain. A huge-bladed and oddly shaped axe was stuck in its back.

Ramus turned to look over the crushed bodies it had left in its wake.

Standing there was a dark-skinned orruk in thick armour, painted red and black and marked with a pair of crude glyphs, carrying a heavy, well-made shield. Its face was covered by an up-cutting iron jaw. As difficult as it was to judge an orruk’s mood through a layer of steel, it looked as surprised to see Ramus as Ramus was to see it. Is that what Mannfred had been afraid of? Orruks? Hardly a peril worthy of notice to someone with two gods after his blood. Before he could finish the thought, the orruk was gone.

Vandalus dropped to one knee beside Ramus and hauled him up. ‘Did you see the markings on its armour?’

‘What of them?’

‘They said “Great Red”.’

‘What of it?’

Vandalus clasped his forearm in one hand, his shoulder in the other, and ignited his wings. ‘Come, brother.’

From within the squall of animal cries and shrieking beasts, deep-voiced drums sounded out an urgent rhythm. Faster than a human beat, the tempo of something for whom the killing could not come quickly enough. The occasional, muffled cry of ‘Waaaaaggh!’ rose over the din.

‘Sigmar repopulated other cities here,’ Vandalus explained. ‘Cartha is lost but we have others to protect. Come with us, and perhaps there you will find your vampire again.’

Despite the tension cramping his jaw shut, Ramus nodded.

Cartha had fallen. Now was the time of the beast.

FIST OF MORK, FIST OF GORK

David Guymer

The fire had been banked with earth and soot, and splinters of creamy white bone sat like teeth in the ashes. Embers spat resentfully at the night. It was almost smokeless. Say what one liked about the Astral Templars – and in the sanctity of his own thoughts, Ramus said plenty – they were not careless. Though they neither felt the cold nor feared the dark, the brooding champions in maroon and gold sat close to the fitfully glowing pit.

Vandalus stared right into the heart of the embers. Even sat as he was with his wings unlit, the Knight-Azyros carried a barbaric kind of nobility. His eyes sparkled like sacred pools, his helm shining in his lap and his long golden hair falling free. He kept his voice low, as though speaking to the fire.

‘The ogor was eighteen feet tall...’

He glanced up. Shadows danced across the metal-cast faces around him. A few were survivors of the siege of Cartha. They had been changed by their time in the wildwood – their armour was scratched and marked with feral icons, their cloaks grimy and torn. The others had been called down in the days and weeks since by the light of Vandalus’ beacon. They were keener in every respect: the bright colours of their armour, the edges of their gladiuses, their faith in their purpose. They sat forwards, attentive, rapt.

‘Eighteen feet tall, and heavier than seven men. Hamilcar had already slain a dozen of the ogor’s best warriors, but we were all tired, all hungry, and this was a brute altogether more formidable than any yet to have breached the gates of Cartha.’

‘There is no ogor so large...’

Ramus was only half attentive, half interested. The warmth of the fire was on his back, his eyes on the dark where he preferred them.

Hacked into by axe and by fire, the Carthic Oldwoods’ northern border looked like the site of any of the thousand massacres that Ramus had seen, after the armies had moved on and the crows were done. Jagged bits of tree stuck out of the ground like the unburied dead, gleaming white in the moonlight where animals had stripped them of bark.

The forest clicked and twittered. An odd snuffling moved through the undergrowth not far from the camp. Gorse, tangled and black and crisp, crunched underfoot as a small party of Hallowed Knights ventured warily ahead. Crouched and alert, Ramus watched the night breathe. ‘Moreover, I doubt there ever has been.’

‘Never is a powerful word to throw around so fearlessly,’ said Vandalus.

Ramus scowled. For him it was comfortable, a settling of facial muscles into positions to which they were well accustomed. No one could see what he thought behind his skull helm in any case. ‘The Lord-Castellant’s deeds that day were impressive enough. Why embellish them?’

Vandalus sighed and leaned forwards, goading the embers to sparks with a dead branch. ‘Hamilcar will return, but what will he remember after his Reforging? Who knows?’ He gestured to the Stormcasts sitting around him. ‘So we will remember for him.’

The animal in the woods snuffled nearer. Hunger coiled Ramus’ guts into knots. He did not know how long it took for a Stormcast to die of hunger. He willed it back. He did not want to be the first Lord-Relictor to return to Sigmar with that knowledge.

The creature stopped moving. A grunting, scraping noise followed, accompanied by the swaying of a pale tree about twenty feet into the forest. Ramus picked up his reliquary, black soil crunching under his grip on the morbid icon. The animal sounded big, which was strange.

Stranger, it sounded careless.

‘If it is untrue then what purpose does it serve?’

‘He died for Sigmar,’ said Vandalus. ‘Is that not worth a little glory?’

One of the fresher-looking Astral Templars leaned in towards the firepit. ‘Perhaps you could tell us the tale of Hamilcar’s fall, Lord-Relictor?’

Vandalus’ eyes sparkled. After weeks of pursuit by ogors, ghoul packs, orruks, and things his language had no name for, this lack of respect was still the most disagreeable thing Ramus had seen since his last death. He could speak of how he and his retinue had held the gates of Cartha, of how he had destroyed the bridge to spare the Astral Templars from being overrun by ghouls, or how he and the Lord-Castellant had fought side by side against the great betrayer, von Carstein. He could have said all that.

‘Sigmar demands much of those to whom much is given. He died for Sigmar. If he desires more glory than that, then I pity him.’

‘Careful, Ramus, a poet lurks somewhere under the black.’

Ramus took a deep breath. The tree had stopped swaying and the rustle of leaf litter was coming nearer. Maybe fifteen feet away now. He strained to see through the tangled moonlight. A twig snapped. He turned towards it, raising his reliquary.

Standing half in shade, sheared by a beam of glittering silver light, was Iunias of the Retributors. He silently gestured for Ramus to follow. The Lord-Relictor nodded, equally silent, and glanced to Vandalus as he pushed off on his reliquary and rose to follow the Retributor.

‘Be ready to move again when I return.’

Iunias clasped Ramus’ pauldron in welcome as he approached, and pointed through an ethereal arch of leaning saplings, bent by wind and scratching beasts, to where Sagittus was standing in a puddle of moonlight, crossbow aimed at the shifting wind.

‘Shhh...’

The Judicator held up a gauntleted finger, listening.

Crouched beside a bole that had been so well polished it shone like a slice of the moon, an Astral Templar wreathed in the skin of a wild boar glanced across at his comrades. In spite of his expressionless dark mask he looked somewhat embarrassed by their attention. He said nothing, however, and returned to his work, chipping at the pale trunk with the glinting tip of his gladius.

Behind the sigmarite of his faceplate, Sagittus exhaled slowly. He dropped his hand, lowered his aim only slightly less grudgingly, and turned to Ramus.

‘I heard... I thought I heard...’

He pulled himself together, shook his head, haloed in moving streams of silver.

‘I thought I heard something.’

Ramus lay a gauntlet on his second’s shoulder. Ghosts. Trees that walked. Animals that could speak as men and adopt human form. Ramus did not doubt that most of the myths of this realm had some truth. Chaos had twisted the realms in countless ways, but Chaos was not the half of it.

The world had been well twisted long before the betrayals of Nagash and Gorkamorka brought the golden Age of Myth crashing down on mortal heads. He sighed.

Betrayal. It always came to that, as constant as a turning world...

But he was Lord-Relictor. His first duty was to abjure and forefend, to keep the souls of his charges pure.

‘Faith, Sagittus. If something calls, let it call the night away. If it comes, I expect it to be filled with bolts.’

Ramus saw the Stormcast relax a little. He clasped his pauldron once more and moved on.

The Astral Templar looked up as he approached. Brakka was, according to Vandalus, something of an unlucky legend. No one had been despatched to the soul-forges more times and been remade. So it was said.

The deep maroon of his armour was almost black, haloed with gold. His cloak was unkempt, similarly colourless in the dark but for a smear of old blood. There were days when Brakka recalled little beyond his name, Sigmar’s, and how to use his hammer, but he could tell dirt from dirt like no one else, alive or dead.

Silently, the warrior indicated a streak of black paint that had been scraped across one flank of the tree – from a shield, perhaps, or an armour plate. He showed Ramus his gladius. There was a tiny sliver of steel there that he had dug out of the wood.

‘They passed this way.’ Ramus did not intend it as a question. He did not need to ask the man whether he was sure.

Brakka nodded.

‘How far ahead?’

The Templar held up a finger and stood, backing off soundlessly, and waved for Ramus to follow. The surrounding trees thinned as he picked his way expertly around them, another flood of moonlight making his armour’s gold edging shine. He pointed through the opening. Ramus turned to look.

The pale tree stubs climbed towards a low rise. Poking out of the summit like snaggled teeth, partially screened off by hanging greenery, the angles of a stone circle gleamed an unquiet white.

A tower made up of bent metal plates, streaked with rust, leaned incongruously into the overgrown henge, like a troggoth spreading out on a sylvaneth’s leafy bed. A dark glyph depicting an iron-fanged jaw with a monstrous underbite caught the moon in its full, faded glory.

Sagittus did not shift his gaze from the forest.

‘A strong vantage point.’

‘Difficult to take by surprise.’

With his eyes, he tracked the most likely path up the slope. He could see where trees had been snapped and brushwood flattened. There were even bits of discarded gear glinting metallically in the undergrowth. Either the ogors had become desperate or the skills of Brakka’s past life were rubbing off on him.

Had the Betrayer got wind of their approach and pushed his warband hard for a last stand on favourable ground? Ramus had wounded the vampire badly in their last encounter. It would be reasonable to conclude that a rematch was low on his list of desires.

‘It is an orruk fort.’

Ramus looked again at the dark stain on Brakka’s cloak. The fight with the black-skinned orruks the first day out from Cartha, or maybe the ambush at the river? The woods were crawling with them, splinter bands of a hundred or so left by the main horde as it pushed forwards, through Cartha and on.

Where to, and why? Easier to ask why the tide rises. The going had become easier now the orruks’ front line was behind them, but still...

‘We’ve already lost half an Exemplar Chamber, and I can ill afford to lose more. We should break camp now. We might yet catch them before the dawn.’

‘The vampire will be weaker if we wait for the sunrise, and a little rest will benefit us far more than it will his ogors.’

Iunias’ dry chuckle strained through his mouthpiece.

‘The vampire would move faster without them. He fears this forest’s inhabitants more than he fears us.’

‘And who will teach the Betrayer of his error?’

The dawn would see the return of Mannfred von Carstein to Sigmar, and then the God-King would present the Betrayer to Nagash and the Dark Powers would tremble at what Ramus of the Shadowed Soul had made be. Peace between the two great deities of Order, and Lord-Celestant Tarsus’ soul set free to lead the Hallowed Knights into the great battles that would follow.

Wary despite the excited beating of his heart, he touched his fingertips to the silver rim of his shield, Sigmar’s Gift, and drew his warhammer.

Sagittus and Iunias likewise reached out and brushed the two-tailed comet emblazoned upon it. ‘Only the faithful,’ they intoned in unison.

The summit was empty. More or less.

Birds crowed from the bushes, and from gaps in the odd crushed-together construction of the tower’s rusted outer shell. Ramus could see their beady eyes from within the tangle, hear the impatient shuffle, the rustle of feathers. The birds he could live with. It was the ogors that were causing his senses offence.

There were about three dozen of them lying in wait, hidden from view of the forest by the way the knoll lipped, then dipped, then rose again before reaching the henge. Staked out in neat, slouching files.

Ramus’ nose wrinkled from the stench. He raised his reliquary to indicate a halt, and the Stormcasts’ uphill march clattered to a standstill. Vandalus and the Prosecutors beat hard to hold their positions overhead.

Ramus had been a priest of Sigmar long before he had entered the Temple of Ages and endured the twelve rituals to become Lord-Relictor. The divine storm did not merely imbue him: it was his to channel. He could glimpse into the spirit world and view the soul-eternal.

Something was amiss here. Slimy against his skin, filling his mouth with its taste. Evil had settled into the rugged hilltop’s depressions like stagnant water.

‘Keep your distance.’

He kept an eye on the sagging ranks of ogors as he sidestepped them to a crumble of old wall. Something moved there, slippery, like an eel squirming over his spiritual sense. He brushed aside a creeper.

The ruin was daubed with finger art, just enough paint left to make out the shapes of beasts and monsters. A chill passed through his empty belly, as if he could hear the trumpeting of the herds through his fingertips on the stone.

He shivered. Without them altering in any discernible way, the images seemed to slide across the wall and back into cover. Stick figures carrying spears followed them. They were green-black, faded, thicker drawn around the arms than the legs.

‘Be this the work of men or orruks...?’

He withdrew his hand. The wall was empty.

Chanting a prayer for the rebinding of his soul, he turned away, aware without needing to see it that the images would be spreading back. This had been someone’s holy site once, long before the Age of Sigmar, a place where men had worshipped the turning of the seasons or the migrations of the herds.

‘And Mannfred has taken the time to defile it. Why?’

‘Lord-Relictor.’

Iunias pointed with his star-soul mace.

‘Over there, by the tower.’

Ramus looked. A set of stone steps led up to a bulging metal doorframe, bent outward in the middle as though by generations of too-wide elbows. The door itself had warped almost off its hinges. The lintel stone was festooned with bone fetishes made from small animals and birds, which clinked together like wind chimes.

What Iunias was pointing to, however, was on the steps, or flanking them – two more rows of stakes each topped with a human skull at a jaunty tilt, and articulated to a crudely wired skeleton. Some of the bones were still fleshed, and even had thin bristles of hair, but they had clearly been here a lot longer than Mannfred’s ogor allies.

An outraged murmur passed through the Astral Templars. Azyrheimer or native tribespeople, the people of this land had been sworn to their protection. Loudly muttering oaths of vengeance to his brothers, against ogors and orruks in equal measure, one of the Liberators wandered towards the front rank of stakes.

Ramus received the sudden sense of something buried deep inside the nearest ogor’s dead flesh. Wispy and faint, it glowed torpidly.

A soul. Sigmar, the ogor was not dead.

‘Away from it. Away, now!’

The ogor gave a deep, fleshy moan and made a grab for the Liberator. The stake creaked forwards, but had been set deep into the hard ground. The ogor flailed as though it were drowning in mud.

The Astral Templar gave the bloated zombie a moment’s baleful look, then mashed in its head with a side-on crack from his hammer. It caved like an oversized fruit, splattering rotten mush all over the Liberator’s armour.

The undead thing stopped jerking and slumped back. Its neighbour however turned its neck towards the Stormcasts, eyes rolling like dice in a cup, and began to moan. Then its neighbour started to struggle against its stake until the whole hilltop rumbled with grunts and barks.

Ramus backed off, arms spread to dissuade anyone else from getting any closer. The cacophony echoed from the tower, carrion birds billowing through cracks and windows in a panic. It rang from the old stones of the henge, pealing out over the bleak wood like a funerary bell.

With his reliquary a barrier in front of the line of Stormcasts, he pressed a finger to his helm’s gumless teeth. The warriors fell silent. After about a minute of unrewarded thrashing and moaning, the ogors too fell still.

‘A curse on this place.’

It dawned on him then that Mannfred’s ogors must have perished weeks ago. That was how they had kept ahead of the Stormcasts without food or rest. In the time he had wasted chasing down a shambling decoy, Mannfred and his abyssal mount could be anywhere. The Betrayer had never even been here at all.

‘Damn it!’

He raised his reliquary and unleashed a bolt of lightning upon one of the standing stones. It blasted apart, rubble clattering against the wall of the derelict tower and tumbling down the opposite slope.

Vandalus descended slowly, dropping the final dozen feet to land beside him.

‘Better?’

‘No.’

With a jab of his reliquary that clinked the dusty relics stored within, Ramus pointed to one of the dully moaning corpses.

‘Let it down.’

The gore-splattered Liberator shrugged, set down his hammer as he moved round behind the corpse, and then raised his boot.

The kick snapped the stake in half. The ogor barked out a moan, raising the dead trunk of an arm at its assailant, but missed by a foot as its face crashed into the dirt. A gut that rigor mortis had made no firmer rippled under it as the ogor dug fingers into the dirt and tried to rise.

It moved as a dead thing moved, uncaring for the fingernail that snapped off against a stone or the awkward bend demanded of its elbows and knees. With a wet groan it fumbled to its feet, tottered for a moment, unbalanced by its own tremendous paunch, and then lunged for Ramus with a snarl.

It came at him so clumsily that even as a mortal man he could probably have got out of the way, the sway of its gut dragging it a foot off to the side for every forwards stumble it took.

But Ramus could barely recall what mortality must have felt like, and he had no intention of going anywhere. He ducked under the shambler’s swinging arm, stepped in close to its sloughing chest, and forced fingers around its throat.

His grip could have bent iron. The ogor’s neck squelched and popped as flesh and ligaments gave, but it was well beyond the need for breath. Semi-congealed fluids leaked through Ramus’ fingers as it pushed against his grip.

With its greater reach and uncaring strength it clobbered him. Massive arms bashed his helm one way and then the other. He gritted his teeth and bore it, squeezed harder. The ogor’s eyes bulged, and then something in its neck went snap.

The body fell limp, collapsing into Ramus’ grip. With a grunt of effort, he drew the ogor a little higher so his arm was outstretched and almost vertical, supporting the ogor’s weight by its broken neck. Bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets. Its jaw worked drily.

Ramus snarled through gritted teeth.

‘Yield.’

He spoke not just with his own voice, but also with his spirit voice. The weird doubling effect gave the watching Stormcasts chills.

The ogor’s eyes flickered, seeming to focus on him, then went placid. Its tongue creaked and rolled, a gasp of stale air wheezing from the back of its throat.

‘Never, shiny man. Skraggtuff won’t never yield to no one.’

Vandalus and the watching Astral Templars murmured in surprise and revulsion.

Even Brakka glanced over and made a warding sign of some kind across his chest. Ramus ignored them, bending his will towards the ogor’s small, confused soul. It was likely that the trapped spirit did not yet even realise it was dead.

‘Mannfred has betrayed you, left your tribe here to die. Join us, Skraggtuff, and help me take vengeance upon him.’

The ogor’s throat rattled, eyes rolling inwards as it remembered.

‘Betrayed... Gaarrgh, I remember... I remember, the slimy gnoblar... I’ll have out his guts and eat ’em.’

‘Tell me what you remember.’

‘Promised us food. Promised our lands back... But he didn’t care. Only wanted someone to fight him through the Ironjawz. Us and them eaters he took from the Tree City...’

‘Ironjawz?’

If Vandalus was troubled by this news of the ghouls that Mannfred had made of the citizens of Cartha then he hid it well.

‘I’ve heard of them. An orruk tribe that once dominated here, before the Age of Chaos gave them greater battles in other places. Do they make a return?’

He stepped nearer.

‘Have they come to fight us?’

But Skraggtuff did not answer. He could see or hear no one but Ramus.

‘And where did Mannfred want you to take him? Where has he gone?’

‘Over the mountains... The Bone Sea... Talks about it always, never stops...’

Ramus glanced to Vandalus. From the first day, the Astral Templar had sought to convince him to seek out the Celestial Realm within the Sea of Bones. The convergence of their two objectives could only have been a sign that Sigmar yet smiled on his quest.

‘What does he seek there?’

‘Dunno. Talks about it always, but never says anything...’

‘Do you think it’s the realmgate itself that Mannfred is after? Does he seek to take an army to Azyrheim?’ Vandalus asked.

Ramus gave a curt shake of his head. ‘Mannfred is many things. I’ll say this for him, he is no fool.’

He turned back to the ogor, but before he could interrogate the soul further a set of iron shutters mounted just below the tower’s conical roof squealed open.

An orruk of staggering immensity squeezed his head and shoulders through the window and looked down. Jewellery dangled perilously from flappy ears, from a lower lip thicker than both of Ramus’, and from a heavy, sloping brow.

Had the brute been squatting on the henge-side of the tower then Ramus could begin to imagine why the structure would have such difficulty remaining upright. He was that big. A tatty cloak of what looked like human flesh with iron squares sewn in scraped against the window’s metal sides.

In a guttural patois, the orruk spoke.

‘Dis is Weird Zog’s hill!’

Ramus made to raise his reliquary and call down Sigmar’s storm, but Vandalus’ hand was the faster. The Knight-Azyros caught his arm at the gardbrace and eased the reliquary back down.

‘There was a truce once, brother, between the orruk tribes and the native men of the Oldwoods. They aren’t unreasonable, if you can convince them to respect you.’

Pushing Ramus aside, he stepped forwards, his celestial beacon and his starblade held out wide to make himself appear large. He ignited his wings in a scream of lightning.

‘My name is Vandalus. Men once knew me as the King of Dust, the conqueror of the Yellow Sea, and now Herald of Sigmar. My lord and yours are the best of rivals, orruk, but there is no hatred between them. Tell us how you came by these ogors, and we will pass.’

The orruk’s face twisted in anger. He jabbed a thick finger, metal ringed, at the broken zombie still in Ramus’ grip.

‘Dat woz mine.’

‘But how–’

‘Mine! Traded good iron fer it. Now look.’

He looked over the armoured Stormcasts and gave a yellowing, gap-toothed snarl.

‘Wot’s meat worth, thunder man?’

The orruk uttered no prayer, performed no arcane gesture, but his eyes suddenly began to glow green. A halo whooshed up from his slab shoulders, as though he had doused himself in oil and been set alight. The green flames rose into the hulking form of a looming orruk, two heads thrashing to tear their conjoined body apart.

Ramus saw it, though he was not sure the others did. This Zog was a weirdnob. A shaman. The orruk gave a drunken, demented laugh.

‘Mine!’

Ramus spat a hurried counter-prayer, but abandoned it before the opening line was out as a massive ectoplasmic fist condensed above his head. It crackled with white veins. A ghostly umbilical ribboned back to the weirdnob in his tower.

The orruk pulled up his shoulder, and hefted his magical fist high. Ramus swore, wrestled Vandalus back with his arms around the Knight-Azyros’ shoulders, and both went tumbling as the great fist slammed down.

Rock blasted apart in a roar, arcs of green lightning mushrooming from the crater. The mace-wielding Astral Templar that had been directly under the impact was obliterated. Ramus saw the warrior come apart through the fizzing green: a man, then a statue made of dust that burst apart as the bolt of lightning tore his soul back to Sigmar.

Energy surged out from the impact site at terrific speed. Stormcasts hit by the blast screamed, armour seared, bent, buckled, all in the span of a split-second as the force bubble enveloped them and then threw them out across the hilltop.

Ramus was already down when the bubble burst, and that was probably what saved his life. He felt the ground tense up, recoil from the blow, then flex back with a vengeance, flipping him over.

A Prosecutor of the Astral Templars cartwheeled across his line of sight. A Hallowed Knight hauled himself from the rubble of a wall. He heard Vandalus yelling orders, felt the rush of wings and saw him shoot into the air. Ramus stabbed his reliquary into the bucking ground like an oar into wild waters, and, dizzied but unbowed, he stood.

He called for the Retributor and Protector Primes, his vision spinning with bodies and residual force.

‘Iunias. Cassos. Spread out and fall back to the forest. Make way for the Judicators. Sagittus!’

‘Here, Lord-Relictor.’

‘Bring that shaman down.’

The Judicator retinues were pushing into the foliage that blocked up the henge, squatting amidst the rubble walls for cover when the order was given.

‘Loose!’

Their aim was exemplary, but with the ground shaking and the tower swaying it would have taken a god to score a hit and the sigmarite-tipped bolts duly plugged the surrounding metal walls.

A moan arose from the small rocky crater that the weirdnob had punched out of the hill. One of the stakes had been knocked over and the captive had rolled in – still impaled, the ogor was crawling up the near side.

Sagittus half-ran from his retinue to the lip of the hole and loosed his crossbow. The bolt fizzed through one ear and spat out the other, pitching the shambler face down into the mud.

Weird Zog screamed, smouldering green eyes bulging from his face.

‘Miiiine!’

With the back of his fist he banged on the tower’s exterior wall, another half-formed spectral hand slicing back and forth across the face of the moon.

‘I know you boyz ain’t still asleep in dere. Get out here you lazy sloggerz. Weird Zog’s Weirdmob. Great Red. Waaagh!’

There came a pounding from inside of the tower. Ramus turned towards the rusted gate at the top of the skeleton-lined steps just as a monstrous iron boot kicked the doors open.

Ramus gripped his staff tight. The figure blocked the door. His first thought was that it was an armoured construct of some kind. Surely nothing natural could be large enough to have been encased inside.

It thumped down the steps, four at a time, and turned its fang-like face grille as an Astral Templars Liberator charged it with a feral yell. The thing hit the Stormcast with a metal bludgeon so hard that the warrior was almost knocked out by his own shield.

The Liberator staggered into the tower’s wall, shook out his shield arm and barked like a wounded savage as the thing came at him with its other weapon. A huge iron gauntlet, claw-hooked and painted red, clamped shut over the warrior’s breastplate and the Astral Templar was lifted, snarling, from the ground.

Unyielding sigmarite and pitted iron scraped against one another, and then the armoured orruk slammed the Liberator hard into the ground. It turned to Ramus.

The face grille passed through the moonlight, and Ramus saw the dark green flesh and brutish yellow eyes banded in shadow inside. He saw the whole thing swell up with a deep breath.

‘Waaaaaaggh!’

More clanked down the steps, far too big to run, big enough that it did not matter. Eight. Maybe nine. They were too large, their armour too mismatched and misshapen, to count them properly. Ramus knew that orruks grew throughout their lives as they aged and fought, but he had never encountered even the mightiest warboss as big as the least of these... these... Ironjawz.

Ramus raised his reliquary like a standard and let it crackle with Azyrite energy as another swing of the claw smashed in a Liberator’s faceplate and blasted him back to Sigmar.

‘Faithful, to me!’

The remaining Astral Templars converged. A similar body of Hallowed Knights would have formed a shield wall, trusted to their comrades in arms to protect them, but the Astral Templars came at the orruks like wolves in winter.

Hammers of holy sigmarite crashed against iron plating. Axes, clubs and mace-like gauntlets beat on shields. A Liberator was suddenly hoisted like a banner above the melee in the first brute’s claw, kicking uselessly at its head.

Another warrior drove the pointed base of his shield into the joint behind its knee. It grunted and buckled slightly. The suspended warrior got his fingers into the orruk’s grille and tore at it with a vicious, animal sound burbling from behind his own mask.

The Ironjaw bellowed back, spraying both helms with spittle, and grunted in sudden pain as a shaft of light scalded across his grille.

Vandalus dropped out of the night sky like a falling star, trailing fire, and threw out a beam of golden light that hammered the big orruk full in the chest. The brute was thrown back, armour charred, as though taken out by a charging knight with a lance. Vandalus shot past.

Stabbing light beams blitzed the confusion of metal bodies, burning orruks, invigorating the Stormcasts, and in a rumble of thunder the Azyros flashed over the henge and was gone. His Prosecutors followed through the smoke in close formation, hammering the standing Ironjawz with javelins.

A broad brute in spiky plate adorned with glyphs and with a javelin sticking out of his immense pectoral armour shook a fist at the passing heralds, punched away an Astral Templar’s shield and hacked the warrior almost in half down to the groin.

‘Only the faithful!’

Ramus watched as Iunias led the Hallowed Knights Paladins forwards. Of the thirty despatched with him from Sigmaron, just ten were left, the losses felt most keenly by the Decimator and Protector retinues.

The last of them remained close to Ramus as a bodyguard while the Retributors broke forwards. There was no shield wall here, but no man ran a single stride ahead of another. They were a storm of thunder and faith that would break the enemy as Sigmar would one day break the hosts of Chaos.

A lightning hammer split open an Ironjaw’s crude belly plate in a violent thunderclap, doubling it over. Iunias was already following through, star-soul mace rising, cracking back its head and breaking its neck in one powerful blow. The remainder of his retinue piled in behind.

The Judicators meanwhile were keeping up their barrage on Weird Zog. The second fist coalesced out of the rain of moonlit debris, the left to the other’s right. The green was lighter, less corded with veins, knuckles knobbled with bone rings. That was where the differences ended.

The henge and five of the Judicators disappeared under the falling green slab, nothing left of either but a hole in the ground.

They could not afford these losses. They were few enough as it was. Ramus pushed up his reliquary just as it thumped out a crackling wave of power.

‘Pull them away from the tower, Sagittus! The shaman is mine...’

Overhead, black clouds boiled in the dark sky. He roared into the sudden gale.

‘Sigmar! Heldenhammer! Stormlord! Show this beast the light of Azyrheim!’

Lightning cracked down from the churning thunderhead and blasted the roof off the tower. Scraps of hissing metal rained down, what remained resembling a twig that had been brutally twisted off its branch. The weirdnob leaned out and looked up, livid.

Power leapt from the tip of Ramus’ staff and earthed in the crooked iron conductor that was the orruk’s tower. Ramus gritted his teeth, tasted salt and copper, charge pouring from his staff and into the tower until the structure began to glow blue, tendrils of Azyrite power ribboning up and down its length.

The weirdnob gripped the sides of his window and seized. Saliva foamed from his mouth. Energy ran through his chest, lit up his eyes, and sprayed from his ears.

Finally the orruk managed to let go, coughed up a smoke ring and tipped forwards. Ramus lowered his staff.

The orruk hit the bottom step like a sack of nails, managed a half-somersault and slammed into the ground face down, neck bent under its own massive shoulders.

The silence that fell was so abrupt that even the ogors with their moans seemed too taken aback to fill it properly. Smaller pieces of glowing metal pattered over the two new craters.

Ramus turned to Brakka, who pulled a bloody gladius from an Ironjaw’s throat between helm and gorget and–

He stopped, and looked back to the fallen weirdnob.

‘Sigmar, surely not...’

With a stiff grunt, the weirdnob pushed himself off the ground. Ramus watched with amazement as the orruk continued to unfold. Even his own hulking warriors, even the ogors, straining to grab at his cloak, had little over him by way of height and all were shamed in a comparison of muscle.

The orruk bulged. Brushing some of the black, peeling bits from his arm with a clink of his metal-sewn cloak, the weirdnob looked at Ramus and cackled. His teeth were as wide as Ramus’ fingers and yellow as off milk.

‘Morky. Very Morky.’

The orruk’s grin devolved into something rubbery and evil. His eyes flashed green.

And then his head exploded.

Vandalus’ starblade carved through the weirdnob’s skull and deep into the dense muscle of the neck as the Knight-Azyros dropped from a great height, slamming bodily into the dead remains of the orruk a split-second later.

He whipped up, agile as a mountain cat, holding out his lantern and tearing back the shutter to burn the Ironjawz coming towards him. Cassos despatched the last with an explosive uppercut from his stormstrike glaive.

Leaning against his staff, Ramus pushed away the sudden wave of weariness. He turned to Vandalus, voice even, choosing to ignore the fact that they were both breathing hard and doused in gore, as if their earlier conversation had never been interrupted.

‘I assume you know how to reach the Sea of Bones?’

‘The Belial Ocean Pass is the only way to move an army over the mountains and it is a month or more in the taking, at least. But we are few now, as Mannfred’s own forces must be. It is possible that we could risk the Heldenline.’

A shiver passed through Ramus at that, and he had to look up to reassure himself that a black cloud had not just stolen the moon away. He turned his skull-faced mask to look north.

There, beyond the ghostly prickling of lifeless woods, an ugly, heavily weathered old mountain range cast long shadows over the landscape. They were lumpen and misshaped, and appeared almost to move as Ramus watched them. A trick of the dark, surely?

But he had heard of the Heldenline...

‘Lord-Relictor?’

The shiver ran down Ramus’ arm and prompted his fist to clench. He squatted down and took hold of Skraggtuff’s neck where he had dropped the ogor. The brute’s features still held their ghoulish semblance of un-life.

‘Get off! Skraggtuff doesn’t want–’

The corpse’s spine crunched, his head coming away from his shoulders in a wrenching of crushed bone and fleshy tendrils. His eyes twitched.

‘Ow.’

The head bobbled over the broken ground to Brakka’s feet. The Astral Templar looked down at it without a word.

‘We have a guide. We take the Heldenline.’

‘You have heard of the Heldenline, Lord-Relictor?’

Sagittus, tramping through the rugged scree of the mountain pass, held out his arms for balance on the loose ground. Dawn was creeping over the peaks, leaving slashes of pink here, or gold there, while in creases and folds the old night lingered.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Your reaction when Vandalus mentioned it. I have fought alongside you for some time now, Lord-Relictor.’

Ramus nodded. He was Lord-Relictor, of the fourth Stormhost to be forged. Of the twelve rituals he had endured, the first had been of Recitation – to weed out the unworthy early, he supposed, for the histories of the realms were neither pleasant nor short.

He carried those stories proudly, like scars. History was a passion, and he had few enough of those. His knowledge of it went deeper and further than most men would dare.

‘Long ago, early in the Age of Myth, there was a tribe of orruks known as the Junkar that lived in these mountains. Favoured by both halves of their unruly god, revelling equally in trickery and in war, they were unbeatable in any arena. Men fled the cities in their millions, sealing the realmgates behind them as they went, and the Junkar rampaged up and down the realm for generations.’

Like almost every such tale Ramus had committed to memory, it was one of unparalleled might leading to an even mightier fall.

‘So glutted on battle had the leaders of the Junkar become, so massive had they grown that, unassailably mighty though they were, every battle left them wearier than the last, and every march to new fields became more arduous. In the end, they no longer moved at all, settling in the mountains that they had once called home.’

Sagittus pivoted his boltstorm crossbow almost imperceptibly towards the brooding line of unpleasant peaks.

‘The Junkar Mountains...’

‘A name not lightly bestowed, not here.’

‘I assume they must have perished long ago.’

‘An orruk’s need for conflict knows no bounds and over the centuries, the Junkar abandoned their god and turned their war upon each other. Some treatises claim it to be the longest unbroken war in the history of the realms or the world-that-was. They say it continues to this day. Only a narrow strip of neutral ground holds the two sides apart: those pledged to Mork – he who was cunning but brutal – and those pledged to Gork – he who was brutal but cunning. It was called the Heldenline.’

He rapped his staff on the stony ground.

‘For Sigmar Heldenhammer. It was he, in the closing days of the age, who had personally bested both sides’ champions and wrought this thin margin of peace, hoping one day to reunite them again and turn them against the Dark Powers.’

He snorted, unsure whether to continue.

‘In some of those accounts, it was said that the God-King was so badly beaten that his men did not initially believe it was truly him when he returned to Sigmaron.’

Ramus plunged his staff into the rocky scree, rubble sliding around his boots, and looked darkly over the misshapen piles of rock that loomed high on either side.

The largest was little over half a mile high, but they were rugged, intimidating, bunched up against one another like a wall of barbarian hillsmen about to pour into the pass. Coarse black vegetation coated their upper reaches, the occasional spindly tree hanging from a crag and nodding in the wind.

That wind was strangely humid and sulphurous. Furrows blew through the short grasses, flattening and stiffening them, reminding Ramus horribly of human hair.

An odd grunting sound echoed amongst the flat-topped peaks. An animal, perhaps, or a pack of them, but Ramus could see nothing move and the sounds seemed to come from nowhere in particular before the echoes took them on and carried them.

Iunias and the Retributors were several hundred yards deeper into the pass, walking slowly, arranged in a lopsided chevron with the Prime at its head. From right to left the pass was steeply sloped, the ground loose so the warrior on the far left wing was struggling to push his feet through the stones.

Following a few hundred paces behind, spread out in no particular formation, the Judicators covered their brothers’ advance. They were wary, very wary, strain showing in every stop, start and shift of their crossbows.

Ramus tried, and failed, to shake off the sense that the mountains themselves were watching him, growing taller, inch by inch.

Or moving closer. Inch by inch.

‘Easy. Have faith, brothers.’

He shook his head firmly, resting a hand on Skraggtuff’s large skull, which now hung from his hip – Brakka had shown an uncommon artistry with a knife. The skull’s jaw opened and closed silently, wordlessly, still animated by whatever dark magic clutched at the ogor’s soul. It and the shield on Ramus’ back clanked against his armour as he walked. The echoes were aggressive and over-loud.

Half an eye on the peaks, he tried to walk more evenly, but the moving ground made even that impossible, and two-score armoured Stormcasts simply could not move silently.

The Astral Templars took the rear, quiet for perhaps the first time in their lives, carefully watching the mountains.

‘Our destination is in sight!’

Vandalus’ cry called Ramus’ attention upwards. Prosecutors in maroon and gold banked and soared on wings of light. They looked tiny, specks of gold with their own glowing haloes. They were spread out in a long line, the most distant far out of sight, and likely already overflying the Sea of Bones. He tried to draw reassurance from that, but for some reason could not.

He watched Vandalus swoop towards the right hand of the range. He felt his heart jump into his mouth, struck by a sudden fear of those mountains that was all the more crippling for being an emotion he had never thought he would experience again. He stumbled, wargear clanking, let go of Skraggtuff and tightened his grip on his reliquary as though the safeguarding of Sigmar’s realm depended on it.

‘Do not venture from the Heldenline!’

The pass pulled his voice apart and scattered it.

The Heldenline... The Heldenline... The Heldenline...

Rather than simply diminishing, the echoes became successively more brutish, grunts and growls in place of syllables, and what came back was a horrific distortion of his words.

HELDENLINE.

Wincing, Ramus waved his arm in from the right.

‘Keep back...’

Back... Back... Back...

Signalling that he understood, the Knight-Azyros veered off, but Iunias raised his hand sharply and the Retributors ground to a halt.

BACK.

There was something there in the pass ahead of them, a hump, like a sand dune made of stones or some kind of cairn. Its presence alone could not explain the odd prickling that the sight of it gave Ramus inside his skull. People died and were buried under piles of stones in mountains across the Mortal Realms, but no one had passed this way in centuries.

Except for Mannfred, of course. Except for Mannfred.

‘Weapons!’ he roared – to hell with his guttural echo! – tearing free his hammer just as the first skeletal arm burst through the stone pile and seized Iunias’ leg. The Retributor swept up his mace, but was pulled to the ground, fleshless limbs sprouting from it to claw at his breastplate.

More were rising. Dozens. Hundreds. The split-crack report of the Retributors’ lightning hammers already echoed around. Sagittus gave the order and the Judicators poured a salvo of bolts into the half-buried horde.

A rattle from further up the pass spun Ramus around. Another legion of skeleton warriors was digging itself up out of the ground.

‘It’s an ambush!’

Brakka thrust his warhammer and gladius to the heavens, gave a bloodcurdling howl, and charged alone towards the second force. As though granted permission, the other Astral Templars erupted with cries, each one their own, and tore off in ragged pursuit.

The Astral Templars could fight – by the Celestial Dragon, could they fight! – but Ramus wasn’t about to rely on them to be as diligent in defence of their brothers as they were in the persecution of their foes. And forwards lay the path to the Betrayer.

‘Who shepherds the souls of the lost to Sigmaron?’

‘Only the faithful!’

No one was bothering to be quiet now and to Ramus’ surprise it felt good. He almost smiled. That was how good it felt.

Bellowing a prayer to Sigmar that was as loud as any he had ever made, he sent a bolt of lightning splintering through the ranks of undead.

‘Who confronts the blasphemous and the unclean?’

‘Only the faithful!’

Lightning whipped and arced from his reliquary, his ghoulish helm strobing blue-white and black. Skeletons exploded, bone chips scything through the horde and littering Ramus’ path with blackened shrapnel that popped under his boots.

A bony legionnaire in a tarnished breastplate and helm, missing one arm and half its ribcage, tottered towards him. With a growl, Ramus hefted his reliquary staff, staving in the undead warrior’s skull and sending what was left of it sailing into the melee.

‘Who will be victorious?’

‘Only the faithful!’

A beam of light lensed down from the sky, strafing through Ramus, Iunias, Sagittus, and back up the pass. For the moment that it illuminated him, Ramus felt uplifted, as though faith in Sigmar’s will alone was enough to carry the day. Vandalus arrowed overhead, low, fast, the golden light of Azyrheim shining from his lantern and burning a trench through the undead.

‘Back to your graves, damn you!’

The light was Sigmar’s gaze, and where it fell on them the spirit that animated the undead warriors simply evaporated into the air, leaving lifeless bones that collapsed like dominoes in the Azyros’ wake.

He banked hard and pulled up, beating his wings to go chasing some screeching ethereal thing that rippled over his head.

Iunias delivered swift and crushing blows with his star-soul mace, blasting skeleton warriors apart.

‘Praise be to Sigmar, Lord-Relictor!’

Ramus grinned.

‘Praise be to Sigmar indeed. Shoulder to shoulder! Form a wedge and drive through – let us show these Astral-savages how the Hallowed Knights wage war!’

His warriors cheered with one voice, the clashing of plate making them a single armoured body. Theirs was not the war of hotheads or angry hearts. That was the purview of the Astral Templars and the orruks, and they were welcome to it. The Hallowed Knights’ strength was in discipline, conviction, faith in each other. It was worship in silver and blue, and it led Ramus’ heart in song.

‘Forwards!’

The phalanx advanced. Skeleton warriors, still spread out and facing the wrong way to confront the change in formation, broke against a rolling wall of sigmarite. Lightning hammers spoke with ear-splitting booms.

The last two Decimators took the edges, handling their long-hafted thunderaxes with consummate skill and no little grace, armoured Paladins weaving about themselves ribbons of bone fragments and seething energies. As one they ground forwards.

A notched blade slid under a Retributor’s armpit. He screamed and then dissolved into a rising bolt of lightning, back to Sigmar.

The Judicator at his back smashed open the skeleton’s skull with a torrent of bolts. The warrior to his left stepped in to fill his place, crushing the skeleton underfoot. The formation narrowed. Ramus yelled over the din of battle.

‘On! On! I can see the end!’

Or, at least, he believed he could, and belief had always been enough.

The echoes of battle creaked through the sullen range, changing as Ramus’ voice had been changed. The crack of rock, the tearing of roots, the split of stone.

But not of stone.

The ground shuddered and groaned, a reverberating string of snaps of knotted old muscle and cable-tight sinew. Ramus swayed with the tremors. From where he was standing, at the far left edge of the Heldenline, the mountain that Vandalus was flying over seemed to uncurl. He stopped fighting for a moment to stare upwards.

‘Sigmar give me courage. Sigmar give me strength.’

That explained the disappearance of the Junkar. The legend had said they had grown massive...

Ramus could only watch as an arm to rival the great spires of Sigmaron rose slowly up into the sky, blocking out the sun and plunging the pass into shadow.

‘I told you, Knight-Azyros – do not cross the line!’

Watching that mountainous limb come down was like watching a glacier wall falling away – apparently slow, but only because it was so very, very large. Vandalus was already moving out of its path, wings folded and dropping like a stone.

The arm missed him by at least a hundred feet but it was so impossibly big that it dragged a void behind it that the surrounding air rushed in to fill. Ramus saw the Knight-Azyros snatched up, wings rifling, rushing back up over the Junkar’s swing, and then sent spinning out of control.

A great wrenching from the opposite side of the pass turned Ramus around. Immense pillars of legs were unfolding, light coming through newly opened gaps, drawing away from the soil they had become rooted in over thousands of years.

His head tilted as far back as the join between helm and gorget would allow, he backed away. As if he could escape that.

A monster that defied his ability to describe stood tall. The crack of a neck thicker than the Hallowed Knights’ formation sent trees and rubble cascading down its chest.

‘Beware!’

Sagittus dropped to his knees and raised his arms over his head as boulders fell amongst them. Cassos fell, but his blessed sigmarite armour held firm.

Ramus looked back to the mountains. The pass was suddenly about a hundred yards narrower. Half of the fragile skeletons still in front of them were gone, obliterated utterly.

More Junkar were stirring on both sides of the line. A question, wildly, inappropriately urgent, arose in Ramus’ mind.

Which side is for Gork, and which for Mork?

The answer was irrelevant, but for a paralysing moment his mind refused to consider anything else. He thumped the side of his helmet, stabbed his staff into the ground to push himself back up, and then raised it high.

‘Sigmar, be my hammer!’

Lightning lanced from his reliquary and blackened a portion of the mountain. It was like trying to burn down a cliff face.

Vandalus was having similar luck. The Knight-Azyros had stabilised himself now and was sending tight beams of light into the mossy eyes of the Junkar on the other side of the pass. They simply rumbled in annoyance and shut their eyes, their eyelids thick like curtain walls. It slowed them if nothing else, but the Heldenline was continuing to close.

Those enormous eyes ground open again and, for a moment, Ramus thought he saw a glimmer of recognition, as though the Junkar felt the touch of something to be feared in his power.

It was not just his imagination that made the word Sigmar from those echoing, brutish grumbles.

Ramus spread his arms wide, to both sides, as though when the moment came he would hold the truce that the God-King had won in battle with his bare hands, and dug deep of the divine storm.

‘Lords of the Junkar. In the names of Mork and of Gork and of Sigmar before whom you swore peace, I command you back.’

Nothing but the tearing of rock and the calamitous pounding of the earth. Vandalus circled overhead, coming heavily in to land alongside Ramus.

‘We are warriors of Sigmar!’

He held his lantern aloft and let it bathe them both in light. Ramus’ reliquary blazed.

‘No one relishes a fight more than us, but when there are greater foes to be found, you orruks and we men of Sigmar have always fought side by side. Fight with us now!’

The nearest of the Junkar lowered its immense fist. It blinked glacially. A confused grumble trembled out into the deepest reaches of the range.

Ramus gave a snort of disbelief. They were heeding Vandalus and not the power that imbued him? But no. He realised. They were heeding the both of them, together. One Mork, the other Gork, Sigmar the divine and Sigmar the barbarian king.

A skeleton rattled towards him, the Stormcasts’ tight formation well and truly broken open. His hammer’s sideswipe knocked its teeth through the side of its skull. Vandalus stamped through the ribs of another that was crawling towards him.

The Junkar gave an ominous rumble.

Ramus cursed them, inwardly. He was not Sigmar. If asked, he would fight the Junkar and give praise for it, but theirs was not his war. It was time to get out.

‘Ruuuuuuuuuun!’

It was an unfamiliar order, but came surprisingly naturally in that moment.

Iunias smashed a skeleton apart, shoulder-barged another as it blundered into Ramus’ path and roared as two more grabbed him from behind and threatened to wrestle him to the ground. Ramus stopped to help him up.

‘Leave me!’

Iunias dropped his mace to reach back and haul the skeleton over his shoulder. The Retributor wrung its spine between his massive hands. Another charged into his back, almost knocking him flat.

‘I will hold them here. Go.’

Ramus grimaced, but nodded, already backing off.

‘Tell Sigmar when you see him, he will soon have his vengeance.’

Iunias was chanting the canticles, joy in his voice, as he went under. Ramus turned and almost ran straight into Vandalus.

‘My men, brother. They’re trapped further back in the pass. I’ll not abandon them!’

‘You will see them again! You cannot fight an army and I cannot hold back a mountain! We have to leave!’

With a howl of anguish, Vandalus spun around and took to the air, leaving the Lord-Relictor alone. Ramus turned to watch the Astral Templars fight. They died for Sigmar and the least he could do was remember their story to tell of it.

And, by the Celestial Dragon, could they fight.

The last thing he saw was Brakka, the last man standing, hammer in one hand and gladius in the other, bellowing for all he was worth atop a pile of bones. No one had been despatched to the soul-forges more times and been remade.

An unlucky legend that would not end today.

A dry wind breathed over the Sea of Bones, like a bored and ancient ghost blowing dust from the flat expanse. A pall hung over it, bone white, cloaking the sky with the diffuse, eerie glow of endlessly refracted sunlight.

But there was no sun. Twisters of dust twice the height of a man snaked over the barren wastes.

Ramus had been expecting the sea that the name implied, but what dragged at his boots now was a vast desert, not one of ice or sand, but of bone. Bones of every type. Bones of every age and species and extent of decay.

And there was dust. He would not have been surprised to learn that it was endless. Such a natural barrier was surely impassable, even for the Junkar of old. That was how it had come to be named.

How many millions – billions – must have perished here? What disaster had slaughtered them, and what madness allowed the creation of this mass grave? Those were questions that even Sigmar might struggle to answer, but there was one that Ramus felt he could now answer for himself.

He knew why Mannfred von Carstein had come here.

‘What is that?’ murmured Sagittus. Dust had built up around his eyeslits and mouthpiece, and ground from his joints like pepper from a mill when he raised his arms to cover his eyes and peer into the dust storm.

Ramus waded forwards. The wind had lifted the dust from one corner of a partially buried structure. It had been scrap metal, painted red, and covered with glyphs of a painfully familiar design.

‘Orruk,’ said Vandalus, bent with exhaustion, hauling himself one foot at a time to Ramus’ side. ‘I can read it a little.’

‘What does it say?’

‘It’s an Ironjawz fort, what do you think it says? It says “Back off, begone, you’re not welcome. The boss of this place is the Great Red, and he’s bigger than your boss.”’

‘Eloquent. But no one is greater than my lord. We will defeat this Great Red too, if we must.’

Vandalus laid a comradely hand on Ramus’ shoulder. His blue eyes smiled.

‘We will do it together. Brother.’

GREAT RED

David Guymer

Forwards, thought Ramus, as though it were sheer will rather than Azyr-forged muscle that thumped his boot into the dust and dragged the other past it.

He could see nothing through the swirl of dust beyond the spitting candle flare of his reliquary staff, hear nothing but howling and the nail-like rap of fine grains of weathered bone hitting his black plate. He did not pity himself the loss of his senses. If there was anything that could be felt anywhere on the Sea of Bones then it was dust and sand and endless wind.

On, his mind intoned, and his body responded to the word as though it were a rod across his back. I will cover every grain of this accursed desert if that is what it takes to have Mannfred von Carstein’s neck between my hands, he swore silently.

The shield, Sigmar’s Gift, clanked against his back. The skull of the ogor, Skraggtuff, swung out and in and banged against his thigh. And he pushed on, forwards.

‘We should ride this storm out, brother,’ yelled Vandalus. The Knight-Azyros was to Ramus’ left and half a dozen paces behind, walking bent into the wind, the skeletal frame of his wings tugged back. Wind-whipped totems of feathers, leaves and bits of bone swirled around his maroon armour, partially obscuring the depictions of stars, storms and wild beasts in gold. ‘My Prosecutors saw a huge number of Ironjaw orruks moving ahead of us. We could be on top of them already. The dust will give us no warning.’

Ramus snorted. ‘I thought men once called you the King of Dust.’

‘An easy title to claim and an easier one to give to another, but the dust respects me no more for it.’

‘We go on. Our guide is insistent that this is the Betrayer’s path.’

‘An ogor, and a dead one at that. The dead cannot be trusted.’

There was a dull pain in Ramus’ chest. Lord-Celestant Tarsus had used to say that. He shook his head and ploughed on.

He touched his fingers to the shield banging against his shoulders. There was a sudden hiss of burning metal and he snatched his fingers back. He smiled a grim smile as he shook off the sting. Sigmar’s Gift had delivered unto the Betrayer the God-King’s fire, and it remembered. The closer they drew the hotter it burned, and Ramus ardently prayed that the same would be true for Mannfred von Carstein’s undying flesh.

The ogor skull butted his thigh plate and bounced, out, in, and banged again. Skraggtuff had initially been part of a trap left for them by the Betrayer, but Mannfred was not the only one with talents.

Was he not Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, Lord-Relictor of the Fourth-Forged Host, the Hallowed Knights? His will was a conduit for the divine storm. Life and death were his to go between.

Splaying his fingers over the skull’s broad features so that they scratched in the sand over its eyes and mouth, he closed his eyes, and bent his mind towards the soul-eternal. He could see it still, a dull ember bound by the Betrayer’s dark necromancy to the ogor’s bones.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’ His spirit voice darted in and around his flesh like a sibilant, quicksilver tongue.

The sepulchral echoes that rang back from the storm brought an animal growl from Vandalus’ mask. He raised his lantern and readied his starblade, warily. ‘I still don’t like this, brother.’

Ramus ignored him. He did not like it either, but Sigmar demanded much of those to whom much was given, and the ogor was what Ramus had been given. If he was to recapture Mannfred, and in so doing atone for the failure of his embassy to the Great Necromancer and the loss of the Hallowed Knights’ Lord-Celestant, then he could ill afford to dismiss such gifts from his enemies.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff. It is I, Ramus, your brother in vengeance.’

Frost rimed the weathered metal of Ramus’ gauntlet where it covered the skull’s mouth. A spark of blueish light took up deep within the dead thing’s eyes.

‘Ungh. You.’ A pause. They were creeping in more often, growing longer. ‘Are we there yet?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He’s near. I can smell him. Can’t you?’

Ramus pulled his hand away. He felt the tenuous bridge between them snap and the light guttered and died. The frost on his palm needled to nothing, scoured to bare metal by the wind.

‘What did it say?’ Vandalus shouted after a moment.

‘He is near.’

‘That still leaves the problem of the Ironjawz.’

To the left and right, haggard-looking Hallowed Knights marched, draped in dust cloaks so heavy that only the meanest sliver of gold or silver glinted through the storm. Nodding in thought, Ramus forced himself on into the wind.

Were the Ironjawz a problem? Or were they just another gift from his enemies?

‘Sigmar has seen us this far, my friend. Have faith that he will not let us stray now.’

The broad axe hit Ramus’ shield with the weight of a felled tree. It scratched, snarled, squealed for purchase, but the shield held firm. Sigmarite was more miracle than metal, able to take many colours and forms, and this part of his mortis armour was far tougher than the mirrored silver it appeared to be. All that force had to go somewhere though, and if the shield did not yield, then it would go through Ramus.

He grunted with effort and the throbbing pain. His arm yielded, and the back of his shield struck his skull helm, twisted his face in, and drove his shoulder remorselessly down towards his bent knees. Metal scraped over metal. The crushing weight lifted, dragged back for a final, cleaving blow. Ramus imagined it scuffing along the dusty ground and looping up, up, glinting at arm’s length above his assailant’s monstrous head. The moment.

With a roar, he uncoiled and slammed his shield through the brute’s unguarded jaw.

The big orruk grunted. It was an ugly mound of muscle, sinew and scar tissue encased in armour plates, impractically thick. Sand-worn spikes thrust out from shoulders, forearms and thighs. Another set curved up from the collar, so long they almost doubled as a visor and forced the orruk to squint between the notched edges. There were no conventional ‘joints’ or obvious points of weakness. There were no buckles or straps. Rather, the plates had been bent into one another as if by hand.

It swayed back maybe half a foot, braced its back leg, then drove a knee that sliced the lower rim of Ramus’ shield into his groin and knocked the Lord-Relictor’s legs from under him.

Not the reaction he had been hoping for.

‘Tough, these Ironjawz,’ he muttered as he rolled sideways.

He caught a glimpse of silver and blue where a Retributor and something hunched and dusty tussled in the wind, and then the orruk stomped down a boot.

Ramus came up onto his haunches, grey sand spraying from his hammer as he smashed aside the orruk’s axe. This was not a duel. Neither axe nor hammer was a weapon of refinement. Each was designed for smashing and killing, as the orruks and Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals had themselves been so designed.

A lot of blood had been shed since Ramus had last crossed an opponent he could not overpower with the simple virtues of smashing and killing.

They crossed hafts and strained, beast versus divine. The orruk’s nose flapped wetly where Ramus’ shield had broken it, green-black blood and snot bubbling out with every breath, but it concerned the brute not at all. Ramus felt the desert dust sink around his boots. His arm began to burn with the effort.

‘We are not... your... enemy!’

Putting all his remaining strength into it, Ramus levered his haft up, turned the locked weapons like two halves of a wheel and forced the orruk to be turned with it or let go. It chose wrong. Ramus guessed right.

‘Hah!’

The orruk folded after its weapon, its nose cracking against the headbutt coming the other way. Ramus heard the crunch and splatter of a half job being messily finished. The orruk bent across him, off balance, axe blade in the dust. Ramus rammed his shoulder into its ribs, this time sending it stumbling away, then lashed his shield back across its jaw with a sound like an iron pot being smashed through a wall.

The blow actually straightened the orruk up. Its head snapped almost fully around, but it did not seem to feel a bit of it below the neck. It stuck out an arm and grabbed his throat.

Ramus felt his feet kick away from the ground as the Ironjaw hauled him to the level of its spiked grille. It glared at him with scrunched up red eyes. The visible bit of its dark face, wedged in tight, was scabbed with tough stubble. Its breath stank of leaf mulch and mushrooms.

Metal squealed as the Ironjaw tightened its grip, seeking to shape Ramus’ armour with its bare hands as it had presumably shaped its own. Like his shield, the armour held. It would take more even than the grip of an Ironjaw to make sigmarite bend. It still felt as though his eyeballs were going to burst out of his face.

He smashed his hammer into the orruk’s grille, but could not deliver force enough to break it. At the same time he drove his boot into its gut, but could not hit anything more vulnerable than muscle and iron. He managed to hook a finger up the orruk’s nose and dragged it up towards him. The creature twisted irritably and snapped at his hand, spraying his faceplate with spittle.

His vision began to blur. Bent, disjointed figures stumbled through the beating dust into his peripheral view and then faded to black. His ears, however, seemed to grow keener to compensate. The rasp of sand on dead throats, the pop of old joints.

‘Not... your... enemy.’

There was a hiss, a string of metallic thunks and a row of foot-long Sigmarite-tipped bolts stitched up the Ironjaw’s side. It grunted, in surprise rather than pain, and glanced down at the striking line of starmetal piercings running from hip to armpit. Ramus swung his boot up onto the lowest bolt. The sigmarite shaft held true, blessed be, his kick twisting the bolt sharply and driving it deeper into the orruk’s guts.

And that, by almighty Sigmar, it felt.

Ramus had his feet on the ground and dry, dusty air in his lungs before the orruk had thought to let rip a howl. Letting his shield hang from the wrist strap, he took his hammer two-handed like a mallet and cracked it across the side of the Ironjaw’s head. Moving around behind it, Ramus hammered his weapon into its back and shoved it down onto its face. It struggled to push itself up only for its arms to sink into the sand and Ramus’ boot to step on the back of its neck.

He ground in his heel until its spine finally snapped. The Ironjaw went limp, and Ramus made sure with a last hammer blow that cratered the back of its head and stippled his black greaves with gore.

‘Tough, these Ironjawz.’ He glanced sideways and nodded. The Judicator lowered his boltstorm crossbow, his dusty armour silver and blue. ‘My thanks, Sagittus.’

The Judicator-Prime gave a quick nod, redressed his aim to a point just above Ramus’ shoulder and fired again. Bolts fizzed past, and punched into the shambling corpses until there was no longer enough meat left on them to stand.

‘Only the faithful, Lord-Relictor.’

‘Only the faithful.’

With another tilt of the helm, the Judicator turned back to the fight.

Ramus did the same. He spotted his reliquary where he had left it, plunged into the shifting bone sands, both a battle standard and a waypoint should any of his knights become lost in the swirl. A fuzz of Azyric power spread into the grey around it, illuminating the morbid imagery of faith, death, and the storm depicted thereon in fits and snatches. Big, hulking shadows brawled around it, tusks, blades, and iron plates glinting blue, on the ground and in the sky above.

As Vandalus had predicted, the dust had allowed the Stormcasts to walk right into the Ironjawz and given neither side warning. Finding the orruks themselves beset was something neither had anticipated. Mannfred had been wily enough to avoid an encounter with the warclans of the Great Red thus far.

If Ramus had expected the orruks to be grateful for his aid – and in that initial flush of self-righteous glory in which he had almost felt his breath upon the vampire’s back, he had expected it – then he should have expected too his disappointment.

It was impossible at a glance to tell who had the edge. Sigmar’s Stormhosts excelled in close combat, as they had been forged to excel in all things, but the Ironjawz took a savage delight in it, as if they had been purposefully bred to go toe to toe with the mightiest warriors in the realms, and some of the largest carried twice the weight in muscle and half again the breadth.

Ramus stowed his shield and ran for his reliquary. He snatched it up, feet sliding in the shifting dust before he regained his footing, boot wedged under a sand pile of long, partially buried bones.

‘You!’ came the grunted, straightforwards challenge, from a veritable behemoth of armour plate mounted on a seething, boar-like beast veering from the churn of bodies. ‘You’re mine! The Great Red’s gonna be the first over the Bone Sea, and I’ll be there with ’im.’

Its iron frame was so massive that it was almost as thick across the shoulders as it was tall. Each pauldron looked to have been remade from a complete anvil, and its elbows struck out like the two points of an upended diamond. Its mount was itself dressed in knotted sheets of mail that abraded its grizzled fur with every step and no doubt accounted for a measure of its wild-eyed ill temper.

The beast swept itself a path through the dust with long, saw-edged tusks, snorted, and thundered into a charge.

Ramus drew back his reliquary, lowered it as though it were a spear and the orruk a charging juggernaut. He growled the opening bars of a prayer. Lightning played around the metal haft. He felt a static tickle under his gauntleted fingers.

Before he could unleash it, the orruk was gone.

There was a creak, then a groan, as the Ironjaw’s hands flapped up despairingly, and it sank rapidly into the ground. Ramus backed up quickly, his own feet sinking into the sudden flow of dust.

‘Grindworm!’ he roared, biceps bulging as he pushed back with his staff against the swelling current. He sought out Sagittus and his other Primes, couldn’t see them in the confusion, but waved his arm back anyway. ‘Stay clear!’

The ground flexed like a muscle and an Astral Templar Liberator disappeared in a plume of dust. There was a trembling deep underfoot. Stratified layers shuffled and restacked, the subterranean flows of sand shifting to accommodate the approach of some kraken of the desert sands, and then a terrific explosion carried the lot of it sky high, bones and debris blasted like grapeshot around the bolt of lightning that jagged up in search of the sky.

Ramus swore as his body plunged a foot deeper into the sand. Knuckles and teeth and weathered nubs of bone he could not identify swirled around him like the surface manifestation of a developing whirlpool. Everywhere, fissures opened to drink in the desert dust and the shambling undead, while Stormcasts and Ironjawz wrestled for the skeletal islands the retreating sands laid bare, carcasses so vast that entire armies could have fought over them unnoticed.

And then the Ironjaw leader and his boar mount reappeared.

Thrashing about under six feet of dust, both orruk and beast were trapped in a hellish, faceless orifice large enough to swallow both whole with room to spare. Dust spouted around the struggling orruk and a segmented body that seemed to be made wholly of sand reared up out of the desert floor.

Ramus scowled, trying to draw further away from the rising worm, but the suction on his legs was tremendous.

He did not know whether the creatures were truly living predators or a natural phenomenon of the Sea of Bones. The Astral Templars, however, had dubbed them grindworms, for the screeching, sand-scratching roar they made as they appeared and killed. Their attacks seemed random, drawn by fighting or the movement of large numbers on the surface, but Ramus could not with certainty say that there was not some malign will driving this monster onto him before all others.

He forced his staff into the sand, not deep enough to arrest his downward slide, but enough to slow it. He clamped his hammer to his belt and took the reliquary in both hands. Overhead, storm clouds boiled through the gravel-white sky. ‘If you hear this, Mannfred, if you see it, then pray tell me how this feels.’

A bolt of lightning tore through the sandstorm and detonated the grindworm’s emerging head. Clods of sand and tiny pieces of glass rained over the desert. The Ironjaw, torso blackened, legs gone, hit the ground with a muffled clank.

Ramus gave a roar of defiance as the headless sand-beast thumped to the ground not far from where he was caught. Every muscle heaved in the direction of one last gargantuan pull towards freedom. There was some give. He felt his legs beginning to slide out of the dust, could see the weathered black plate of his thigh. He bared his teeth for the coming effort.

‘Can I help you, Ramus?’ Vandalus called down. ‘Or do you mean to climb out yourself for a greater tale?’ The armoured angel beat his wings, dust fizzling and popping as it was blown through his lightning feathers. His attention was down, pointing at Ramus with his sword, clearly blind to the gaunt shape flapping furiously towards him.

‘Attend yourself, Azyros.’

Vandalus turned his head, lifted and unshuttered his lantern in the same moment it must have taken him to recognise the threat, and burned the ghoul from the sky with a searing shaft of celestial light. The ghoul simply evaporated. By the time he had closed his lantern again and looked down, Ramus had dragged his body out and onto more stable ground.

He looked around. The grindworm was sinking into the desert, the dust it had disturbed beginning to resettle into new formations, burying titanic skeletons greater than dragons and lifting still more from the depths. Already a whole new landscape, utterly alien to what had been before, lay about them. The surviving Ironjawz were withdrawing – and it was a withdrawal – into the storm. The remaining undead were being methodically hacked apart by the Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights. Ramus counted exactly two dozen of the former and about double that of the latter.

More losses.

Vandalus touched down on the sand and walked towards him, blade pointed accusingly at Ramus’ hip. ‘I told you that the dead cannot be trusted, brother. That thing you carry led us right into that battle.’

‘It took us on Mannfred’s trail, which is all it can be expected to do. The battle is on us.’

The Knight-Azyros snorted and stowed his weapons. ‘As it should be. And with the Ironjawz occupied with the dead it was a battle we had every chance to avoid. Astral Templars will never grieve over a pointless exercise in killing, but I know you saw it too.’

‘I had believed that if the Ironjawz could see us fight alongside them then they might be persuaded to aid us in our quest. The Sea of Bones is vast. Even I am not so proud as to deny that we could use their aid if we are to search it fully.’

‘What you could use, brother, is ten full Stormhosts scouring this wasteland west to east, and driving your vampire into the desert sun. We should focus our energies on seeking out the Celestial Realmgate.’

‘No!’ Ramus snapped, startling himself with his vehemence. ‘No,’ he growled, more softly, but with teeth still. ‘This path has been set before me by Sigmar himself and I will not veer from it one inch.’

‘Peace.’ Vandalus clasped Ramus’ forearm and with the other hand gripped his pauldron plate. Some barbarian embrace from the Azyros’ mortal heritage. ‘My Chamber has enough bad blood with Mannfred to follow you, you know that, but did the black-skinned orruk we captured on the Marrow Delta not tell us it was the Great Red himself who took the realmgate from my brother Lord-Castellant in the first place?’

‘A realmgate you cannot now find.’

Vandalus flung out an arm. ‘Light of Sigmar I may be, but I defy anyone to find their way in a landscape that changes from moment to moment.’

‘And was it not also you who once spoke to me of the reasonableness of orruks? That all one needs to earn their trust is to win their respect?’

‘The orruks I knew,’ Vandalus muttered darkly. ‘These Ironjawz are another breed entirely. I don’t know what you would have to do to earn the respect of such foes.’

Ramus shook his head, his hand drifting to the skull at his hip, a faint but reassuring whisper occupying the darker corners at the back of his mind that might otherwise provide a purchase for doubt. ‘I am resolved. If the Great Red can be convinced that Mannfred is the threat he surely is, if he can be won around by our strength...’

He clenched his gauntlet and Vandalus took a step back. The look Ramus felt from behind that gilded, implacable mask was searching. The Knight-Azyros shook his head and raised his hands. ‘As you want it, brother. I had my Prosecutors follow the Ironjawz retreat. I heard one of them speak of a fort not far from here.’

‘Then gather the host, Azyros. We march the moment they return.’

The Ironjawz had erected their fortress on what must have been the only example of static geography for a thousand leagues. It was certainly the first that Ramus had seen since crossing the Junkar Mountains.

It was a skeleton, the mountain-sized remains of a Titan of the Age of Myth, and cold proof, were it needed, that Mannfred von Carstein could never be allowed to possess the Sea of Bones. The skull was buried under a massive dune, vertebrae arching high up into the dusty sky where a scrap heap of rust-brown walls, towers and metal gangways vied for height and space. Ribs that had been weathered smooth by aeons of wind curled beneath it like a dead spider’s legs. Sand devils whipped and swirled around the half-buried bones. Partially sheltered under the gargantuan cavity, a fleet of ironclad war-junks – ships of all things – creaked and listed and banged together.

Vandalus had told him that orruks liked to build high, that the size and towering nature of a boss’ stronghold spoke directly to his status. The Ironjawz seemed even more itinerant and warlike than the orruks of Ramus’ experience, but they were every bit as territorial. Whatever warboss ruled from this structure was surely very high indeed.

Perhaps even the legendary Great Red himself.

Green shapes cavorted over the distant walls, jeering. The scrap fort’s windswept turrets clattered and clanged with gongs, cymbals and pans.

‘Rank up, shields ready, weapons high, Prosecutors in formation,’ Ramus barked.

He looked left, seeing the two lines of Hallowed Knights, mixed Paladins front, Judicators back, glittering silver and blue, as straight as statues in the wind. To his right were the Liberators of the Astral Templars, their battered maroon and gold decked out in eclectic war paint and charms that wagged about them like animals’ tails. Above, Astral Templars Prosecutors hung in the sky like baubles of light. The harsh wind tugged at their fur cloaks and the strips of scripture stuck to their war-plate. It had even managed to tease some of the hair from under their sealed helms and whipped it giddily about them as though triumphant at what it had done. They had been beaten hard, but they were all the more magnificent for it. By Sigmar, they stood yet.

‘Let them see what the strength of the finest two chambers in Sigmar’s host looks like. Who shines with his light?’

‘Only the faithful!’ shouted the Hallowed Knights, and even a handful of the Astral Templars, gamely attempting to out-shout their brothers-in-arms.

Bursting with pride in them all, Ramus returned his attention to the fort.

‘Three of its sides overhang the monster’s ribs,’ observed Vandalus, pointing them out. ‘An aerial assault on that quarter would almost certainly find the orruks’ defences unprepared.’

‘You have not the numbers to carry out such an attack,’ Ramus returned.

Vandalus clapped his shoulder. ‘Which is why I’ll need my brother to relieve me.’

Ramus shifted his gaze to the gate. According to millennia of military theory, it should have been the weakest point. The Ironjawz were clearly unfamiliar with this theory. Their gate was a lump of iron that, at first glance, actually looked fractionally too large for the frame it had been wedged into. It would take a monstrous application of force simply to get it open, much less to knock it down.

The approach to the gate however was the first, and arguably greater, obstacle. An uncertain-looking stairway of iron planks, not all of them flat, zig-zagged up the titan’s spine towards the fortress. It was presumably stable enough to bear the tremendous weight of an Ironjaw but it was a challenging path, and every second that the Stormcasts’ attention was on not falling to the desert floor was a second in which the wall’s defenders would be showering them with missiles.

‘Restrain yourself, Azyros. We do not need to take their position outright, just impress upon their leader our strength as allies.’

Vandalus waved a clenched gauntlet in the direction of the fort. ‘What did you think I was proposing?’

‘But first,’ muttered Ramus. ‘To get their attention.’

Ramus raised his reliquary and muttered a grim prayer. The sky began to bruise, deeper, blacker, and a sudden wind blew against Ramus’ back and swept the dust off it to leave the smell of thunder and fresh rain. Sheet lightning flashed. The thunderhead folded and churned, the wind whipped into a howling cyclone with Ramus the eye of the storm.

‘I am Ramus of the Shadowed Soul,’ he roared. The wind stole his voice from his mouth, but it rumbled from the black clouds like the anger of the storm itself. Rain lashed the scrap fort, deadening the chaotic clangour. ‘I am Lord-Relictor of the Hallowed Knights, the Fourth-Forged of Sigmar’s Eternal Host. I seek embassy with your leader. The one that calls himself the Great Red.’

‘That should do it,’ Vandalus yelled.

Thunder rolled, unappeased, and the rain picked up. Ramus saw several of the Astral Templars turning their faces towards it, letting the water rinse the dust from their faceplates. The Hallowed Knights stood still, statues come rain or storm. From the fortress however, something moved.

A horn was blasted, a set of deep drums enthusiastically pounded, and in a tooth-aching squeal of metal along bone, the scrap fort’s great gate began to grind open.

As Ramus watched, a huge orruk in garb garish enough to be seen even through the downpour danced through the opening gate. It was clad in a spiked and heavily decorated half-plate of mismatched iron scraps and painted bone that clapped as it dropped, leapt, and spun down the stairway. It was unarmed in the conventional sense, but carried a club-like length of bone in each hand, using them to slap its thighs, its wrists, its iron garb and each other, in a frantic, strangely thrilling rhythm.

A mob of black-skinned orruks in conventionally wrought heavy armour, full helms and shields stomped out behind the weird warchanter.

Following them with a swagger came the true Ironjawz themselves. Ironclad behemoths, each one clanked inside a personal battle-frame that made the black-skinned orruks look like whelps, wrapped for their own safety in foil. They nodded metal-encased heads to the warchanter’s rhythm, bashed axes, maces, and articulated fist-claws to the beat.

‘I’d say they weren’t impressed,’ shouted Vandalus, wings shrieking into energetic life as he lifted himself off the ground.

‘Lines of battle,’ Ramus snapped.

The Astral Templars clumped forwards and locked shields. His own Exemplar Chamber bore no shields – wielding instead a deadly blend of two-handed thunderaxes, stormstrike glaives and lightning hammers – and simply took a forwards step to maintain a perfect line with their more eager Astral Templar counterparts.

As they positioned themselves, the first of the greenskins reached the rain-packed desert floor. There they spread themselves into battle lines that mirrored those of the Stormcasts, except for being half again as long and several ranks deep. Ramus estimated that they were outnumbered at least three to one. The big Ironjawz brutes held the centre, flanked by disciplined detachments of the sober black orruks. On the left flank, opposing the Astral Templars, was a vast and unruly mob of grots, armed with anything that was going and cursing shrilly across the rain-driven gulf. On the opposite flank, two full ranks of boar cavalry drew themselves into a roughly unified mob and snorted impatiently for the signal to go.

‘No flyers,’ Ramus muttered, choosing to focus on that advantage, however small.

The Protector, Cassos, scoffed at his Lord-Relictor’s attempted optimism. He was the last of that particular calling left. Ramus had never seen a man more adamant in avoiding his return to Sigmar’s keep.

Ramus thrust his reliquary above his head and looked down the line. ‘Who fights with Sigmar by his side?’

‘Only the faithful!’ sang the Hallowed Knights.

‘Who will be victorious?’

‘Only the faithful!’

The warchanter took the last few steps in a leap and began to flap about in the sand, hunched over as he danced up and down the greenskin line, sticks a blur, huffing and grunting in a singsong growl. Faster, louder. The orruk sank to his knees in front of the Ironjawz brutes in an ecstatic crescendo, bone sticks drumming on his thighs. The rain lashed his upturned face as he roared, and the entire greenskin line erupted with him.

First to break forwards were the brutes, then the black orruks. The boar cavalry, for all their impatience, got themselves together last but quickly pulled ahead as the vicious beasts thundered into a gallop. Only the grots held back, loosing a volley of arrows that sucked wet sand well shy of the Astral Templars.

‘Hold,’ Ramus muttered, conscious of the Astral Templars edging forwards, then turned to glance over his left pauldron. ‘Judicators, loose.’

A rattling volley of sigmarite-tipped war-bolts fizzed towards their distant targets, arcing up, up into the rain, and droning down, their accuracy and potency far superior to the missiles fired by their greenskin counterparts. The bolts fell amongst the boar cavalry, thunking into heavy armour. One boar-beast slammed to the ground with a foot-long bolt in its shoulder and crushed its rider. The beast behind barged it out of the way on its tusks without slowing down. The rest rode on, armour bristling with shafts and crackling with Azyrite power.

‘Again. Loose.’

Another volley shot across the distance. This time there was no need to correct their aim for range. The boar cavalry were a wall of scrap iron and bludgeoning power. The ground shook. Another Ironjaw rider took an impaling hit in the belly, grunted, but did not fall. To the right, an Astral Templar in shining bright maroon and gold, called only recently from Sigmaron to Vandalus’ beacon, aimed high, and drew back on his enormous shockbolt bow. There was a rush of charged air as the giant arrow twanged from the bowstring. It looped over the running black-skinned orruks, fizzing like a firework, and exploded amongst the grots in a storm of lightning.

The boars picked up speed. Wet sand flew from thundering, iron-shod trotters. They were now just moments away – close enough for Ramus to see the red of their slathering mouths. Grasping his reliquary, Ramus closed his eyes. He could hear their grunting breaths, feel the shaking of the ground, but he set it aside to focus his senses on the rampant energies of the divine storm that raged around him. It was untouched, as wild as Azyr’s Eternal Winterlands.

‘There is no shaman here,’ he muttered as he opened his eyes.

‘That will level the field,’ said Cassos.

‘Yes, it will.’

Feeling his power rise to fill him, Ramus lifted his reliquary. He felt its unsubtle pull, as though it would lift him from the ground and make him as one with the broiling storm clouds if he did not fight to control it.

‘Sigmar, lord of lightning!’ he roared. ‘Bare their flesh to Azyr’s fire.’

He blasted a lightning bolt into the onrushing cavalry, reducing orruks to ash and turning their brutish mounts into running meat. Teeth bared, he unleashed his power again and again until his body glowed. Lightning blitzed the terrified beasts, bolt after searing bolt, until armour bubbled over scorched flesh, and hulking warriors squealed like pigs as they rolled in sand to quench the flames.

‘Sigmar!’ he cried, breaking into a charge with his steaming reliquary held aloft. ‘He fights beside us!’

The two armoured blocks slammed together in a splintering squeal of shields and blades and split pig-flesh. A thunderaxe hacked off an Ironjaw’s arm at the elbow in a clap of noise. A riderless boar impaled a Retributor on a tusk. Bolts whistled from behind. An orruk bellowed a curse, and a moment later was spit through. Weapons hummed with Azyric charge. Two Ironjawz shoved towards Ramus, barding grinding until it shrieked. There was a snap of energy, a crimson blur that cut left to right, and both orruks slumped headless from their mounts. Cassos swept in front as the boars pulled apart and galloped past, stormglaive whirling with such venom it looked as though he must be holding two of them. It threw a barrier of spattered red between Ramus and the press of Ironjawz, and flicked the desultory shower of grot arrows waspishly from the air.

The Retributors and Decimators surged into the break, the Astral Templars a yard ahead as always. Ramus heard the Stormcasts’ savage howls and the ring of starmetal as the Liberators crashed into the black orruks and through to the brutish Ironjawz behind. Smashing and killing. War as the God-King had always meant it to be.

Vandalus lanced overhead, beams of light from his lantern punching golden holes through the orruk ranks, then rolled left while the Prosecutors that followed peeled right.

Flight alone was a mighty task for these angels in armour, and to do it with grace demanded not only a fluidity of body, but a finesse of mind and will that transcended even the superhuman. Wielding javelins like lances and celestial hammers two-handed, they thumped into the terrified grots like comets. Bodies flew, and to a cacophony of ululating war cries, the Stormcast barbarians set about tearing the light skirmishers apart.

The grots were broken almost as the first Prosecutor fell to earth amongst them, and they were already fleeing for their weird ironclad paddle ships.

‘Ardboyz!’ bawled the heaviest brute in the block of Ironjawz ranks, clacking a big, clunky grabber claw, all rivets and red paint, at the second mob of black orruks. ‘I has this. Go sort out those ones with wings.’

The second mob wheeled one hundred and eighty degrees and tramped back towards the grounded Prosecutors.

‘The centre holds,’ called Sagittus from somewhere nearby.

‘Judicators to the flanks!’ shouted another Stormcast.

Ramus drove his boot heel into the face of an Ironjaw that was trapped under his dead boar. Cassos’ stormglaive hummed around him like an angry guardian spirit. Somewhere amidst the smoking remains and the iron clamour, Ramus could hear the orruk warchanter pounding away with his bone sticks. A vicious tempo that the orruks strove to match with their weapons.

‘The brutes rally to him,’ growled Cassos. ‘See how they shield him.’

An Ironjaw rose up in front of Ramus like a wall. It was the claw-toting boss, and the brute alone occupied the width of two others. Ramus dropped his shoulder and slammed into the Ironjaw’s pectoral before he had the chance to turn his weapons on him. Air woofed out of him, but he did not yield an inch. The grabber claw champed shut inches in front of Ramus’ neck. The Lord-Relictor swayed back, whipped up his hammer and deflected the moon-shaped axe that had been scything for the crown of his helm.

A crackling stormglaive spat across his turned shoulders. The Ironjaw bent out of reach, swatting the blade gruffly aside on the back of its claw. It was a split-second distraction and Ramus took it. His hammer dented the iron cladding the Ironjaw’s right side and drove all the brute’s weight onto his left. It gave a threatening growl and paddled its arms for balance, but had nothing free to stop Cassos punting his stormglaive into its throat and tipping it onto its back.

Ramus knelt over the big boss and smashed the brute’s helm open with a blow from his hammer.

‘Sagittus!’ he roared, as Cassos moved protectively in front of him. The warchanter’s tempo had picked up, and it seemed to thump out of the bloody air. Ramus caught glimpses as the rest of the Ironjawz mob pressed forwards to defend the performer. Its eyes shut, mouth open, it played through the grip of some wild, degenerate rapture. ‘Take him down, Sagittus.’

Heavy bolts hammered into the Ironjawz but they held firm, too thickly packed for the missile fire to get through. Even the Prosecutors that had managed to retake to the skies before the black orruks’ charge had hit home found their javelins and thrown hammers blocked or knocked out of the air. And driving it all to ever greater heights of aggression and fury, was that drumming beat.

‘I have him, brother.’

Vandalus swooped in behind the block of brutish heavy infantry, and there executed a barrel roll that dragged him across the rear of their formation. He unshuttered his golden lantern. Ironjawz howled as the wondrous light of Azyrheim burned across their backs, bled through cracks too slight for any boltstorm bolt or stormcall javelin to reach, and even tightly shut as they were, brought green smoke from the warchanter’s eyes.

The orruk’s demented chant bubbled off in a rabid scream.

Ramus saw the Ironjawz waver, enough for him to barge through the heavier orruk warriors and put the warchanter out of his torment with a hammer blow to the temple.

That was enough for the remaining black orruks, who immediately began to break off and run after the scattered grots. The Ironjawz however, outnumbered and surrounded, fought on.

Vandalus flung out his wings and speared upwards into the rain. The pall around him thickened. Lightning flashed. Ramus felt the hairs on his body respond to the rising charge and sparks dance along the points of his reliquary’s sigmarite halo. The Knight-Azyros slid his lantern’s aperture to its widest setting and the full force of its illumination seared the dark of the storm away. For a moment, for one divine moment, Ramus felt the eyes of the God-King upon them all.

The throaty screams that greeted his gaze were affirming – the sudden, burning blindness of the apostate. The sky cracked open and lightning jabbed again and again into the desert floor like a chisel against a tooth, until the rain-soaked ground was cloaked in bone dust and all Ramus could see were the flashes.

Cassos laughed as cries of ‘Sigmar!’ greeted the Azyros’ display of might.

The cloud began to settle, thinning as it did to reveal the glitter of maroon and gold, perfect as gemstones. Two dozen Stormcast Eternals, fresh from the barracks of Sigmaron and perfect to the finest facet of their war-plate, gave voice to a thunderous cheer and charged the Ironjawz’ rear.

Breathing heavily, Vandalus landed beside Ramus.

‘Difficult to win an audience when everyone’s dead.’

Ramus smiled grimly. ‘The Astral Templars were not part of the embassy to Shyish, were they, my friend?’ With an amused snort, he pointed over the determinedly fighting Ironjawz to the scrap fortress, seemingly abandoned on its lonely, bone-top promontory. ‘A day or two of rest will serve us well. We will regroup, resupply, and recover the Betrayer’s trail. And maybe someone will show up to reclaim it.’

The Ironjawz’ clan hall was cold. Air came in through a pair of iron-grilled fireplaces in the long side walls and ruffled the dyed skin hangings. A long feasting table filled most of the floor space, a mishmash of metals so beaten, rumpled and chewed on there was not flat space enough to set a jug.

Ramus took it all in with a cursory sweep of his gaze. He stood with the open door behind him where it was coldest, dust circling, the big fireplaces either side, the table extending before him to a large, bloody iron throne. A hide banner covered the whole wall behind it, depicting two crudely drawn glyphs on a red background. He knew little of the orrukish languages, less of their written forms, but these he had seen everywhere.

Great. Red.

‘We have searched the compound thoroughly, Lord-Relictor.’ Sagittus stepped in from outside, letting in the dull clangour of pots and pans, strung up wherever they might catch the wind. Mist clung to his grim-faced silver mask. His boltstorm crossbow hung by his side in one heavy gauntlet. ‘It is empty.’

‘Very good,’ Ramus murmured. In his mind he pulled those two symbols apart, turned them over, searching for the hidden complexity that was so jarringly absent.

‘Lord-Relictor?’

‘Look again.’

‘My lord, I assure you.’

Ramus turned his head towards his second, the deep sockets of his skull helm boring in. ‘When I feel assured, I can guarantee that none will know of it before you.’

The Judicator gave a stiff bow from the neck. ‘Very well, my lord. Once more.’ His boots clicked on the metal floor as he walked back outside.

Ramus returned to his contemplation of the fluttering banner. Sagittus had not been part of the Warrior Chamber at the Bridge of Seven Sorrows and had not experienced the Reforging. He had not been given the time to reflect on the consequences of that quest’s failure. Tarsus was Sigmar’s and he had been stolen. To Ramus’ exhaustive knowledge of the histories, such a violation had never befallen another Stormhost and the shame of his participation in it seared. And if he should fail to recover the Lord-Celestant now…

The Hallowed Knights were a company of immortals. There was no precedent for the elevation of one of their number to leader.

He touched his fingers to Skraggtuff’s skull and closed his eyes, giving himself to the cold. His lips parted in a wisp of vapour. They were numb and pinched.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’

‘Mmmmm,’ came the answering echo, the dull murmur of a dreamer.

‘How much ground has Mannfred gained on us? You are connected through the ether, Skraggtuff.’

‘Mmmm.’ Ramus felt the impression of a wretched spirit, tossing and turning, eyes flickering between sleep and wakefulness. ‘Not far. Time to sleep maybe. Just for a bit.’

Ramus withdrew his fingers with a start and opened his eyes, his perceptions suddenly, jarringly normal. He blinked a few times, licked his lips, worked his fingers to restore them to some kind of warmth, and as he did so a door clicked open at the far end of the hall where there had been none. It put a ruck into the banner that had been draped over it and blew dust in underneath. A golden gauntlet felt under the fabric, swept it up and back over the top of the thick metal door. Vandalus peered around, looking slightly lost, then turned to Ramus and pointed to the ceiling.

‘I came in from the roof. Don’t be too harsh on Sagittus, it was bolted from this side.’

‘Did you–’

‘No,’ Vandalus sighed. ‘I did find a grot hiding back here, but I suspect it was his duty to open the door for whoever sat in that throne.’ He pointed to it and gave a dead-eyed smile. ‘Orruk bosses prefer high spots. It shows everyone else how important they are, and lets them see everything that’s theirs.’

‘See how far?’

‘The dust covers everything. Not far.’

‘Show me.’

White, as deep as the eye could show. The one thing from his experience that Ramus could compare it to was being trapped in mist. It looked like mist, superficially perhaps, but to stand within it was to know what deceptive devils appearances could be. It was bone dry and bitingly cold. The wind hissed. Bone shards tinked against his armour and further out where he could not see, all around, the chitter of bone whispering across bone was constant. If the dead were to converse away from the ears of the living, then Ramus knew by the chill in his soul that this was how it would sound.

He moved to the spiked, metal rampart, set his gauntlets on the sharpened edge, and peered down. White. All the way. He could not even see the spiral stair any more.

The wind moaned against his helm’s frozen sides. Sound moved strangely in the Sea of Bones. It hung in the air, making it seem sometimes more like being under water than on a desert. The dull mutterings he heard could have been an army passing under his nose, a lone beast trumpeting a thousand leagues away, or even the tectonic wars of the Junkar, far, far behind them.

Something on the rampart beside him blew its nose and he turned his scowl upon it. He had reasonably assumed that ‘found a grot’ meant ‘killed a grot’ but now the wretch was looking up at him with wide wet eyes, ears flat back against its head, Ramus had to concede that the mood was not exactly on him either.

Gorkamorka had once been part of Sigmar’s great pantheon, he reasoned. It was belligerence, rather than fundamental theistic differences, that set the two powers at odds.

‘We are looking for the Great Red,’ he said, speaking firmly. ‘Where is he?’

‘’s not here,’ the grot squeaked.

‘I see that. I asked where he was.’

‘Gone.’ The grot swallowed, the big lump in its throat bobbing up and down. ‘Gone to fight at the thunder door.’

The scrawny greenskin nodded vigorously.

‘Why?’ asked Ramus.

‘To fight.’

‘But why?’

‘To be first over the Bone Sea. Think of the fame. Even the old Junkar never did that.’

Ramus turned to Vandalus, over by the door onto the stairwell.

‘The desert nomads that greeted us on our first arrival believed the Sea of Bones went on to the edge of the world. In Cartha’s libraries, we found texts describing distant lands, so far across the lifeless plain that even the Age of Chaos had yet to reach them.’

Ramus snorted. ‘Stories told to give hope to children.’

‘’s true,’ piped the grot. ‘And the Great Red was all about to head off too. Had his boats loaded and everything, before the dead one snuck in and took his thunder gate.’

Ramus’ jaw clenched. His chest had gone suddenly cold.

Mannfred.

‘He means the Celestial Realmgate,’ said Vandalus, moving across.

‘There’s another fort there,’ said the grot quickly, warming to its theme. ‘’s very important. The Great was gonna use it to bring in stuff and store it. ’s a long way over the Bone Sea.’

‘Tell me about the dead one,’ Ramus demanded, dropping down beside the grot and eliciting a terrified squawk. ‘Tell me everything you know about Mannfred.’

‘Wait,’ said Vandalus, turning to the deep white view and cocking a gold-helmeted ear. ‘Do you hear that?’

Ramus gave an irritated wave, but as soon as he did it he realised that the distant susurrus had changed. It was no longer so distant, for one. Drums. It was scores and scores of big, deep drums. The cracked chant of guttural voices. The tramp of armoured feet.

‘Clear the skies,’ said Vandalus urgently. ‘As you did before.’

Though he ached body and soul from his efforts in the battle, Ramus raised his reliquary and gave voice to a doleful prayer. The wind picked up and the dust pall began to thin, the sky so cleared blackening and producing a rumble of distant thunder.

‘There!’ Vandalus shouted.

Wearily, Ramus looked in the direction the Knight-Azyros pointed. The stamp and clank of massed ranks rolled in from the desert plain towards the scrap fort. Several score of the damnable warchanters cavorted ahead of armoured columns, each a thousand strong, beating out a marching rhythm that held little in common with their neighbours’ to create a raucous banging. Steaming between the formations, vast ironclad paddleboats, top heavy with crowded siege decks and bristling with artillery, chugged through the sand. Energy coursed through them and occasionally arced off. Ramus could see one of the strange Ironjaw shamans enthroned on the main deck of each monstrous vessel. He could sense their power, swollen to near god-like proportions by the weight and vibrancy of their greenskin kith around them, and somehow understood that these vessels served equally as troop transports, shock weapons, and amplifiers to ward off the grindworms.

The Great Red had planned his warclan’s migration well.

Searching the marching files, Ramus saw him at last.

‘There he is. The Great Red.’

A dark shape, a knot of ill-defined aggression, hung over the front ranks, mounted on a lumpen monstrosity of a creature that beat furiously at the surrounding air as though to physically subdue it with its small but muscular wings.

Ramus was aware of Sagittus shouting from under the iron floor beneath him, Judicators charging for the walls and priming crossbows.

‘So many,’ Ramus muttered.

‘Too late to worry about that now,’ Vandalus snapped. ‘You wanted to impress the Great Red and I’d wager that’s him right there. Impress him. Be strong, show no fear, and if he doesn’t kill us both then maybe he’ll be intrigued enough to hear your piece.’

Nodding his understanding, Ramus turned back and channelled his voice into the storm. ‘I am Ramus of the Hallowed Knights, orruk, and I have been waiting for you. Come to me, and let us settle this as equals.’

He strained to catch the Great Red’s reaction as the wind failed and cloaked the space between them in dust. The last thing Ramus saw was the Ironjaw’s beast pulling ahead of his army and striving for height.

‘A maw-krusha,’ said Vandalus. ‘I saw one in the Carthic Oldwoods once. The native ogors used to leave living prey in the forest to keep the monster from their tribes.’

Ramus caught the grot staring at him in open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and flat-eared horror. He grunted and turned to Vandalus. ‘Will he come?’

‘He will. No orruk would let a challenge like that go unan–’

The Azyros looked sharply up. Ramus heard it at the same time. It sounded like–

‘Waaaaaaggh!’

Ramus pushed himself back against the spiked battlement as an armour-plated boulder smashed into the centre of the rampart.

The structure tilted sharply and squealed. Ramus clung grimly onto the rampart spike with one hand, arm hooked behind it and grinding on the metal. He saw the grot tumble past him, smack once against the wall, again on the skeletal structure, coming apart like a ball of yarn and disappearing into the pall.

Unconcerned by the swaying tower and the alarmed clangour of chimes and bells, the maw-krusha unfolded arms and legs and rose up onto knuckles the size of Ramus’ fists. Forelimbs covered in hard scales, some of them carrying faded red paint, opened out like a pair of shield walls to reveal a head that was almost all mouth. A massive underbite, made even more pronounced by a muzzle of huge prosthetic fangs, chomped up over its small red eyes.

Stooped under a mass of wargear with ironclad thighs around the monster’s neck and toes scraping the ground, was the largest greenskin Ramus had ever seen.

He had had cause to say that many times over the past months, but he doubted he would ever have another. The brute was gigantic, clad in thick armour daubed half and half in red paint and black, with massive, clawed gauntlets and spiky boots, dull red with old blood. Only its head was exposed, the black and red pattern reversed with a slash of red paint over its brutalised, dark hide. One eye was nailed shut with an iron plate, a wandering green eye crudely drawn over it. The megaboss grinned down at the Stormcast, a slow, ape-like drawing in of muscles to reveal a mouth full of sharp, oversized metal teeth, bloody where they must have bitten into the roof of its own mouth.

If Ramus and Vandalus had stood together and been clad in a single piece of armour, they could not have been as large.

‘I’m da Great Red,’ the megaboss bellowed, voice so deep it seemed to come up out of the ground. The beast snorted and dragged its knuckles over the floor in an agonising screech. The Ironjaw glared at Ramus with his one eye, then twisted to mark Vandalus with a squeal of metal plates. He turned back to Ramus. ‘Kill my boyz, take my stuff, you fink you’re big enough to take Korruk da Great Red?’ He dropped his heavy jaw and roared with laughter.

Ramus planted his reliquary into the metal between them. ‘This land has been claimed. From the Celestial Realmgate to the Junkar Mountains and beyond the forests of Cartha, this land is Sigmar’s.’

At the name ‘Sigmar’ power lashed from his staff and stung the hulking Ironjaw a blow to the shoulder. Korruk jerked back, bellowed in pain and shock, electric spasms forcing out a grunt of annoyance as he involuntarily yanked on the chain attached to his mount’s spiked collar and locked his thighs down on its neck. It choked out a growl and instinctively threw out a battering-ram punch that smashed Ramus in the gut and off his feet.

His legs flipped over his head. Light to dark. Sky to metal. His face plate smashed the top of the crenel spike, a crack spidering from the left eye socket of his helm. Dark to light, the sky above him. He flung out a hand and caught the spike. His arm snapped taut and jerked him back, slammed his body hard against the fort’s metal wall. Ramus’ feet slid across the wall without getting any kind of purchase.

‘Haha!’ roared the Great Red. ‘Maybe you should both have a go. Hah! Take turns, maybe.’

A flash of light burned like forked lightning through Ramus’ shattered orbit as Vandalus explosively took wing. There was another bark of pain from the Ironjaw, and the clash of blades.

With a grimace, Ramus tested his bicep against his weight and heaved. He began to lift, bellowed as his shoulder passed his elbow, and then tossed his reliquary back inside and hauled himself after it. He collected his staff and rose, lightning pouring into him until the metal beneath him turned blue.

Vandalus and the Great Red were fighting high up above the fort’s roof. The Azyros flitted agilely around the Ironjaw’s monstrous axes, leaving a glowing trail where he passed as though it were a net, cleverly lain to trap the brute in his own savagery.

The megaboss’ metal teeth glinted hungrily, one booming growl rising from his vast jaw without any apparent need for breath. He was a green storm, destruction made manifest, his brute physicality merely the solid housing for a force of nature. His axes flashed down together, forcing Vandalus into a parry that sent the Azyros spinning. The maw-krusha’s claws clenched as though taking the air in its grip and then lunged out. A paw like a gargant’s spiked mace smacked the careening Azyros, and hammered him back down.

Vandalus hit the roof in a blaze of spinning pinions and rolled until he hit the inside of the parapet. Ramus could hear armoured boots pounding up the staircase below. It would be Cassos.

‘Sigmar is the true lord here, beast!’

Lightning stabbed from Ramus’ staff and coursed through the megaboss and his monster. The Ironjaw sprayed Vandalus in phlegm before he could grind his metal jaws shut. Blood ran down his chin as his enormous body seized. Howling, flapping with erratic fury, the maw-krusha crashed back down. Exhausted, Ramus recalled the flow of current and turned to check on Vandalus.

The Knight-Azyros stood up, almost fell right back over, but steadied himself with a widened stance and shook out his light wings, creating a dazzling show of might and colour, as if to ward off a rival or a predator. To Ramus’ surprise, Korruk gave a rumbling chuckle. The Ironjaw dismounted with a gravely structural clang and kicked his war-beast out of the way.

‘You fight good for thunder men. Better than the big boss I killed at the thunder door.’

Vandalus started forwards, only for Ramus to hold him back.

‘Take him,’ hissed Skraggtuff, down by his hip. ‘While his guard’s down.’

Of their own volition, Ramus’ muscles tensed to lift his reliquary, but then he frowned. ‘I did not summon you.’

‘He’s too strong. He doesn’t need you. He won’t listen. End him while you have the chance.’

Ramus lowered his staff. ‘That is Skraggtuff’s voice. But those are not his words.’

A sepulchral chuckle issued from the skull. Not one, in fact, but two, an eerie echoing effect as though he were being laughed at from both sides. The first was gruff and breathy, recognisably Skraggtuff, while the other was the sound of courteous good humour. Korruk ground his thickly armoured slab of neck around, one eye narrowed in annoyance. It was that, rather than the voices from the other side, that turned Ramus’ insides colder than the desert wind.

Ramus was the conduit for the divine storm, the beacon for the soul-eternal.

Only he could speak with the dead.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff,’ whined the skull in a wheedling falsetto. The ogor’s voice was gone, replaced entirely by the urbane imposter that Ramus recognised all too well. ‘So tediously stentorian. Where is Mannfred, Skraggtuff? You are connected through the ether, Skraggtuff.’

Now that it was presented to him, it was clear that the voice had always been there behind the ogor’s words. How had he not heard it before?

‘That voice,’ breathed Vandalus.

‘The Betrayer.’

‘Here, O conduit of the tepid squall, beacon of arrogance eternal. Tell me, are the Stormcast Eternals prone to delusions or is it just you? Imagine, believing that your quaint, half-mastered talents could begin to rival mine.’

The voice tutted, and Ramus realised that it was no longer coming from the skull. A hazy human figure had appeared, wavering about a foot above the rampart. His black, ridged armour was dented and scratched from countless battles, and the red cloak he wore, though magisterial still, was tattered. The wind blew through him, his long dark hair fluttering in some other breeze. His hair was wilder than Ramus remembered, his teeth longer, his eyes redder. His patrician features were horribly burned. Sigmar’s gaze was not so swiftly healed.

‘Poor, pathetic hero.’

‘You brought me here,’ Ramus yelled, fury making his voice crack. ‘You led me by the damned nose. Why?’

‘Temper, temper, Lord-Relictor. What kind of example does that set the peasants?’

‘Why!’

Mannfred laughed. ‘I think we demonstrated back in Cartha that I have little to fear from you.’ He half turned towards Korruk, one melted, hairless eyebrow suggestively raised, like a school master trying to goad the proper answer from a well-intentioned but slow-witted pupil.

‘Me?’ rumbled the Great Red, scrunching up his face in thought.

‘Where have you just been?’ Mannfred prodded.

‘The thunder door.’

Vandalus’ face dropped in understanding. ‘Just think, my friend. Had you gone straight to your realmgate as you suggested then I might never have been able to get by the Ironjawz to take it.’ The megaboss drew up at that. ‘Of course, Great Red here would have killed you out of hand, but we can’t have everything can we, and as he’s likely going to do that anyway, that would have come at no real cost to you.’

The apparition turned to Ramus and bowed. ‘Of all the Stormcasts I have encountered, dear friend, you are the most rigid.’ He grinned, teeth sharp and somehow brighter for their transparency. ‘I appreciate rigidity in my friends. It makes them so much easier to bend.’

‘I am no friend to you, Betrayer,’ Ramus spat, but Mannfred continued as though he had not heard, and turned to the glowering Ironjaw with a long, low bow, cloak falling to a floor that was not there.

‘It will be I, not you, who will be the first to cross the Sea of Bones. The march of my horde will be felt in the Realm of Death.’ With an elaborate flourish, he rose and turned back to Ramus. ‘I will hold our mutual friend Tarsus with affection, when he is my prisoner instead of Nagash’s.’

With a spluttering cry, Ramus thrust his reliquary into Mannfred’s wavering face and cried out to Sigmar for lightning. His staff pulsed blue-white and sprayed power in indiscriminate, arcing forks that carved through the apparition without effect. The vampire replied with a tolerant smile, swept his cloak across him and became a cloud of red that disintegrated on the wind.

‘Dwell upon your failures, Stormcast,’ came the disembodied voice, ‘as I make the Sea of Bones mine.’

Korruk’s sudden howl of fury struck Ramus from any fixation on his own boiling blood. Stomping around without another intelligible word, the Ironjaw jumped onto his maw-krusha’s back and kicked the beast into the air. It gave a bellow, flung out its vestigial, leathery wing-flaps and leapt from the parapet. It dropped into the pall like a stone.

Ramus listened as the megaboss’ livid cries receded. He bowed his head as though in prayer. His eyes stung. It was impossible to hear the Ironjaw and not be reminded of the same unthinking rage that had driven him to this place. Despite it, his heart hammered for further vengeance.

If only his own intemperance could be soothed away as readily as the bone cloud took the Ironjaw’s.

‘Vandalus. Brother, I–’

‘What’s done is done, brother. Sigmar will judge you, but not I.’

Ramus hung his head. Such a covenant should have been reassuring, but for some reason the prospect of receiving Sigmar’s judgement gave him a flutter of apprehension.

The Knight-Azyros spread his wings, stowed his starblade, and offered Ramus his hand. ‘What are we waiting for, brother? Would you leave all the fighting to the Ironjawz?’

Ramus lifted his face to the golden light of the Azyros and felt an icy peace quell his heart – the peace that only a certainty of purpose could bring. The Hallowed Knights had departed Azyrheim to renew old alliances, and perhaps a truce with the warriors of Gorkamork had always been Sigmar’s will.

‘They will have all the fight that they please,’ he said as he clasped the Azyros’ gauntleted hand. ‘But Mannfred is mine.’

ONLY THE FAITHFUL

David Guymer

Vandalus cut through the ethereal pall like a javelin. Clouds ripped by. Clouds with faces that screamed with horror and hatred. Clouds with claws that scratched his purple and gold armour.

‘I am a Knight-Azyros of the Astral Templars,’ he shouted into the wind, his warrior’s heart urging that the dead-storm’s challenge be met with a response. ‘I am storm-forged, a herald of Sigmar. I have fought daemons of air and lightning over the molten sky rivers of Chamon. I was forged to fly!’

The wind moaned and cried. Too many voices to comprehend. What Mannfred von Carstein had conjured to conceal his fastness in the Sea of Bones was no mere storm.

Only the restless souls of billions could carry such anguish.

The air was so thick he could barely see his fingertips, could hear little beyond moaning whispers and the crackle of his wings. He only knew which way was down because if he stopped beating his wings for long enough then that was the direction he fell. His first inkling of the Prosecutor in front of him was the repulsive hiss as two sets of Azyrite wings came into contact with a crack of discharge. His shoulder clanged into the other warrior’s hip and both were sent spinning.

‘Vand… ou… doing… ere.’

Vandalus fell, clung to by insubstantial hands. Air whistled through his thrashing wings. He fell for one painfully beaten out heartbeat before managing to right himself, wings flaring out to arrest his descent.

His heart hammered on, regardless. Head spinning, he scanned the boiling souls around him and spotted the glint of purple and gold of an Astral Templars Prosecutor. Dust and sand battered the warrior’s already badly scuffed armour, the halo thrown off by his beating wings humming with static. Vandalus recognised him as Kanutus, one of the warriors called from Sigmaron to pursue the vampire into the desert.

‘You’re supposed to be on the left flank,’ Vandalus yelled, swinging his arm in that direction. ‘The left!’

‘…what… say… on… right.’

Vandalus shook his head and banged the side of his helm with his gauntlet. What he wouldn’t give to look into Kanutus’ eyes and see his lips move.

‘Any sign of the vampire? Or the Celestial Realmgate he holds?’

‘By… the… agon… see… thing.’

‘All this time he’s been ahead of us, brother. Now he makes the mistake of standing still and we have him. The orruks and our brothers punish the undying’s legions, but they can’t fight the entire Sea of Bones.’

The Prosecutor shrugged off a clutching shade. ‘Spe… for your… elf. I will… gladly… em all.’

‘We need a direction to attack if we are to take the head of this snake.’

Vandalus gestured to signal that he was going down. His wings dipped. The relentless soul-drag on his shoulders waned. For a moment he hung, unsuspended, pulled under by shapeless fingers – then he tilted forwards. The blood rushed to his head and he grinned.

With a whoop, he dropped. The dead surged to smother him, but he was an arrow and pierced them layer by layer, reducing them to tatters in his wake, the Sea of Bones a dust-strewn target billowing up to greet him. He saw a patch of dark against the churning white of the sky, then the curve of a dune and the spiky outline of gigantic bones. They became more defined as the soul-clouds were stripped away, almost as if they were growing out of the Sea of Bones to impale him.

From the ground, the Sea of Bones was dust: rising dust disturbed from the earth by the march of armies; falling dust carried in on the cry of the soul-wind. And where the two met and merged, blinding dust, shrinking each warrior’s battlefield to a gritty fugue of rattling bone and bobbing witchlights.

From the air however, it became more. It moved, undulated, almost a living thing comprised of the two vast armies that pushed and strove against each other.

The warclans of the Great Red Ironjawz were a wall of red and black, fifty thousand of them or more in impressively monstrous armour, lumping forwards like flowing lava. The deathless legions crushed against them were of another order entirely. Rank upon rank, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder and marching tirelessly, went way back into the haze. Stick shadows, lurching through the dust cloud. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of bony, scrappily armoured heads and shoulders, spears waving above them.

The Great Red’s ironclad siege boats lobbed green-tinged energy that blasted open the skeletal legions, while gargants of bone and weird horrors of dust waded through entire mobs of Ironjawz. Dead things screamed. Orruks howled. Catapults twanged back and forth. Hundreds of warchanters drummed out a dervish beat. A charge of gore-gruntas – the orruks’ savage boar cavalry – momentarily filled the air with grunts and snapping bone before a weirdnob brought a massive ectoplasmic foot stamping into the ground. With a great ripping of bone, a skeleton so vast that the clouds had to part around it tipped into the hole that the orruk’s magic had thumped into the ground, and began to collapse.

Vandalus saw more devastation in that one moment than in all his lives before.

‘Thunder man.’

Korruk the Great Red hung in the air, his maw-krusha working vestigial wings to carry him towards Vandalus. His massive, clawed gauntlets each held an axe, one an enormous half-moon in black, the other flat-bladed like a butcher’s cleaver and blood red. His head was the one part of his body left unarmoured, the black and red pattern reversed with a slash of crimson paint over the dark, scarred flesh. He grinned a mouthful of bloody iron teeth.

It had been the Great Red who had first taken the Celestial Realmgate from the Astral Templars tasked with its defence and then built a fort on it. But common enemies demanded uncommon allies.

‘A good enough fight for you?’

‘Hah!’ Korruk replied simply.

‘This landscape has changed since I saw it last. Do you know which way our... your... old fortress lies?’

The hulking Ironjaw pointed Red Axe into the murk. Vandalus held up his celestial lantern and drew back its gilded shutter. Golden light streamed from the opening and, for one brief moment, burned a clear path through the wailing spirits.

Made bitty by dust and distance, lapped at by an ocean of bobbing spears, a citadel rose from the Sea of Bones like the spines of a surfacing kraken. The ossified edifice was blistered with Ironjaw scrap fortifications. Most of those structures had suffered damage or been torn down, and the latter made a jagged earthwork of mangled iron around the basilica’s dust-shrouded basin.

The Ironjaw defences were new to him, but even the citadel itself was different to Vandalus’ memory of it. Cancerous, bony growths threw up bizarrely shaped towers, twisting battlements and ridges. The realmgate was there, strobing a fitful blue at the citadel’s heights where the original, long-destroyed stronghold had been raised to control it. He was no Lord-Relictor, but he could see that it looked damaged somehow. Scores of fizzing, intermittent copies of it slashed the sky, others partially or wholly buried under the ground and spitting out great geysers of sand.

‘What madness is this?’

‘Dunno,’ rumbled Korruk. ‘It wasn’t broken when my boyz were here.’

‘Then the vampire did this. I have to tell Ramus.’

The Great Red gave a huge shrug and dropped. Vandalus saw the maw-krusha thump into the middle of a block of skeleton warriors like a bludgeon scattering sticks.

Listening to the bellows of ‘Waaagh!’ as Korruk and his beast got stuck in, Vandalus followed him down.

Levelling off gracefully, he plunged between a yawning pair of ribs a hundred feet high and flashed across the length of the battlefront. Tarnished helmet. Ragged banner. Snap of claw. Splash of red. Orruk. Undead. Orruk. The undead forces were essentially interchangeable throughout, numerous as grains of sand in the desert, and like sand, no hardship at all to throw in an enemy’s face.

The line stretched over several dozen miles and scores of brutal clan-scale melees, and even at his speed and altitude he could not yet make out the far end of it.

Lightning laced what was nominally earth to what was notionally sky, stitching bone dust and soul-ash with a sputtering light. It was there that the Hallowed Knights lent their disciplined solidity to the sheer numbers of their Ironjawz allies.

Vandalus raced towards it.

Bone crunched under Ramus’ boot. He was surrounded, packed in tight by rattling, whispering dead. Sacrificing what would have been a vital forwards step, he shoulder-barged the spear-warrior pressing his right side. It crumbled under the might of sigmarite, the press of bodies knocking down several others behind it. The ground trembled slightly underfoot, but he ignored it. With space to swing his hammer, he swung – a fierce underarm swipe from right to left that launched a grinning skeleton warrior six feet into the air.

‘Who is the hammer in the God-King’s hand?’ he yelled.

‘Only the faithful!’ came the fierce reply.

Just a few paces behind, the small Exemplar Chamber of Hallowed Knights crunched in his wake. Their armour gleamed silver and gold under the weak sun, and the weapons they carried crackled with the energies of the divine storm, responding to the power of their Lord-Relictor’s reliquary as though challenged to demonstrate their potency.

‘The line is uneven,’ called Sagittus.

‘It will do,’ Ramus returned.

A pity it had taken the exploitation of his own failings by Mannfred von Carstein to teach what it was to forgive.

‘Of the sixty cast into the hell of Cartha to bring vengeance upon the Betrayer, few of us now are left,’ he shouted, the dead falling to pieces under his hammer with every word. ‘Lesser men might waver, but there is naught lesser about we Hallowed Knights. Every one among you is a proven hero, tested in battle, and remade in the fury of the Reforging. Each of you has called upon Sigmar’s name in battle and been heard. Who will shed his mortal flesh in the name of the God-King’s righteous cause?’

‘Only the faithful!’

The ground trembled again, more vigorously this time, enough to shake the Bones of Heroes stored in Ramus’ reliquary.

‘Do you feel that?’ spat Cassos, the warrior’s stormglaive humming with protective energies.

Ramus turned the deep sockets of his mortis helm towards the coming horde. The fell glow of their eyes turned the churning soul-winds an uncertain blue. A huge bone formation rose into the cloud behind them, a lattice of dim, dark lines that wavered like dead trees in a storm. There was a dull thump, and Ramus felt the tremors run through his armour.

With a roar he raised his reliquary. Lightning arced across the morbid imagery of faith, death and the storm depicted thereon, spitting between staff and sky and back again.

‘Who is the lightning in his heart?’

‘Only the faithful!’

To the shouts of his warriors, the snap of bone, the clap of thunderaxes, lightning sprayed from his staff in a blazing torrent. The reliquary shook in his hand as he commanded the current to widen, and roared as he drove it deep and hard into the horde. Bone blackened and cracked as armour cooked. Bodies were blown apart, lightning scything through the enemy ranks again and again until all before him was black and ruined.

With muffled whoops and yells, the Ironjawz mob on the Hallowed Knights’ right flank spilled into the opening, shinned aside blackened, grasping hands, and began to wade ahead. Ramus could hear the heavy thunk of their armour on the sand, even over the wind, and the insults they shouted at each other and at the Hallowed Knights behind them. More distantly, dim cries of ‘Waaagh!’ wove in through the howl.

Ramus’ hard-earned humility slipped away in a moment as he sneered at the raucous display. The Ironjawz lent sheer numbers to the Hallowed Knights’ measured advance, but it was on the shoulders of the Stormcast Eternals that victory or defeat would ultimately be carried. Mannfred was here. Somewhere. The warmth of the shield, Sigmar’s Gift, slung across his back attested to it. In punishment for the wrongs done upon the Hallowed Knights, the relic had delivered unto the Betrayer the God-King’s fire, and it remembered. Ramus ardently prayed that Mannfred’s undying flesh remembered it too.

‘They are coming again!’ came Sagittus’ cry. ‘Decimators to the fore. Judicators, loose.’

The ground shook again, violently. Ramus swayed with the tremor. A bolt whizzed loose over his head as the Judicator retinue moving up behind the Paladins stumbled. Ramus watched it whisper into the dust, already high and rising, and a second later heard it dink off something massive. Ramus grasped his reliquary and looked up as the soul-storm swept away from that lattice of bone shapes to admit a ribcage the size of a war-barge. A kneecap wider than a Liberator’s shield swung forwards. There was a thunderous shake as the skeleton’s giant foot slammed into the ground.

‘Bone gargant!’ Ramus yelled, holding his reliquary for stability as the Ironjawz poured forwards. A flurry of bolts chipped the monster’s skeleton to little avail.

It was at least seven... eight... no nine times taller than a man. Its brow was flat, shoulders heavy and hunched, arms long and thickly boned, but despite its gross misproportions it was roughly man-shaped. In one hand, it dragged the thighbone of a beast that must have been even larger. The witch glow from under its ridged brow was piercingly bright and evil. In unnerving silence, it drew its bone club up over its head and smashed it down on the Ironjawz.

Where there had been a hulking slab of armour brandishing an axe, there was a squeal of metal and a bloody splatter. A hunk of meat soared through the air and slapped wetly into Cassos’ rerebrace. An orruk bellowed at the crushed ruin of its foot while, on the other side of the club buried into the sand between them, another gawped over its shoulder plating to where it remembered having an arm.

The rest of the mob surged forwards with a roar, only to be brushed away like dead leaves by the sweep of the giant’s club. A kick broke an Ironjawz brutish boss in half and sent him back at the Hallowed Knights like a missile.

‘Down, Lord-Relictor!’

Cassos dragged Ramus aside, and the mangled body hurtled past and smashed down a following Judicator. The Stormcast’s broken body took on a glow, then dissolved into Azyrite energy and blasted the hero’s soul back to Sigmaron.

Pushing Cassos aside, Ramus raised his reliquary high. Fear had no hold on him now, and what little he still remembered of the feeling had been beaten out in successive Reforgings. But even had he still been mortal, he did not believe that he would have been afraid. He would surely have laughed as he laughed now.

‘The Betrayer sends his mightiest against us. He is close. Our hands are around his dead heart, and all we need do is squeeze.’ His voice broke with fury. ‘Who will rip the Betrayer’s head from his inhuman neck?’

‘Only the faithful!’

‘Only. The. Faithful!’

He could feel his reliquary being drawn skywards, charge dragging on monstrous charge. With a godly effort, he pulled it back, the sky itself seeming to split open as he drew a titanic bolt of lightning from the heavens. There was a flash as it struck the giant’s elbow. Its bones were lit black, the gaps between them white. Thunder rattled every piece of armour for miles around, and the goliath’s arm was blasted off at the shoulder in a blizzard of splinters.

The Hallowed Knights shouted words of glory and praise as bone fragments pattered across their armour.

Ramus raised his hammer for discipline. A strange corruption of the familiar scent of the divine storm gusted across him. It was foetid water, languid energy. His spiritual sense, that which even as a mortal had marked him apart, jangled like a string of bells. It bade him look up.

He had the impression of corporeality being split, of things that should not have been being made. A besmirched sliver of Azyric light bled through the soul-wind and sputtered wide.

‘The realmgate,’ cried Sagittus in confusion. ‘How can this be?’

With eyes trained to the soul-eternal, Ramus thought he saw something. For a moment, he glimpsed an iron turret and a red-cloaked figure in ridged black armour, clutching some manner of arcane artefact. He was surrounded by slavering ghasts that fawned over his every gesture, the jewels around their clawed fingers in stark contrast to the bloodied rags draped over their shoulders.

Betrayer.

Into that singular moment was also forced a dozen dizzying perspectives of the battle being fought around him. Orruks charging. A clatter of spears. Ghouls tearing skywards on ragged wings. A bloom of green-tinged fire. Perhaps this was how Sigmar or Nagash might see this battle played out, but it was too much to carry. His final impression was of Mannfred. The vampire seemed to turn to him, to see him across the void, and grinned.

‘It is not the realmgate. Sigmar must have sealed the way once he was aware of Mannfred’s tampering.’

‘Trapping us here,’ Sagittus muttered.

Ramus nodded. The least of their concerns. ‘It is a copy. The vampire taps the energy of Sigmar’s gate. He is directing it somehow to open new portals at will.’

‘If a few miles is the best he can muster then I am not worried,’ Cassos sneered.

‘We all should worry, Cassos. He practices on us. With such a weapon, and the Sea of Bones at his disposal, the Betrayer will be a formidable enemy.’

As if the vampire had been listening, the portal flashed and a second gargant made of bones staggered through. It stamped on a tottering Ironjaw and sent another flying with the smash of a splayed metal club. A third colossus walked into the other’s back. It was half as tall again with long, slender bones.

‘Hallowed Knights, forwards!’ Ramus roared. ‘For Sigmar, for Tarsus, and for the soul-eternal.’

The Stormcasts gave a roar, echoed by faceplates and distant voices, and broke into a charge. Ramus turned from them, hammer drawn back, and spotted a glimmer in the sky. He glanced towards it and it brightened, firing a beam of golden light that sheared cleanly through the taller bone gargant.

Vandalus shot through the rising plume of bone dust.

The Knight-Azyros shone like a solitary candle in a storm, his battered war-plate a magnificent gold, finished with the Astral Templars’ purple. The second gargant swung its metal club. Vandalus dodged agilely out of the way, and the club smashed through the other’s spine. Vertebrae sprayed out and the already struggling monstrosity collapsed as though hidden necromantic wires had been cut.

The surviving Ironjawz, and those clumping forwards to reinforce them, pumped their weapons in the air. Warring shouts of ‘Gorka’ and ‘Morka’ gave way to uncertain cries of ‘Sigmar.’ The Knight-Azyros swung about and brandished his golden starblade, which the Ironjawz lapped up with an approving roar.

Vandalus came heavily into land, balancing uneasily on the carpet of bones. Ramus strode towards him while the exuberant Ironjawz and the Hallowed Knights pushed on, making brutal work of the remaining gargant.

‘We’ve found him,’ said Vandalus.

Ramus indicated the guttering portal, now slowly fading. ‘I saw.’

‘The Liberators of the Astral Templars hold the right flank as you do the left. The Ironjawz advance slowly, but advance they do, and Korruk himself now drives for the realmgate citadel.’ He turned and pointed with his shuttered lantern. ‘The Great Red is about half a mile in front and fast pulling ahead. He is like an engine, brother, built for killing. We may win this yet.’

‘You doubted?’

Vandalus shrugged.

‘Part of me wonders how we will rid the citadel of the Ironjawz once they have reclaimed it,’ said Ramus.

‘I’m tempted to let them keep it.’ Vandalus laughed at Ramus’ sudden glare and held up his hands to show that he was not serious – at least not entirely. ‘One battle at a time, brother. Worry first that the Great Red will be done with the vampire before you catch up.’

‘Never!’

Vandalus spread his wings and prepared to take flight once more. ‘Then up your pace, brother. One way or another we drink this eve in Sigmaron.’

His Imperial Majesty Angar Utrech XVI, Abhorrant Ghoul King of the Carthic Oldwoods, growled and slurped a string of jellied consonants. One heavy hand formed a ring around his eye. It was a sickly, sightless yellow, and a jelly-like substance oozed out of the tear-duct as he squinted. The left hand made another ring about nine inches in front of the right, slowly rotating the focus of an imaginary eyeglass.

‘I see no sign of these would-be besiegers, Lord von Carstein,’ was what he thought he said. Mannfred allowed the flesh-eater’s warped reality into his mind so that he could hear him properly.

The vampire leant over the thick Ironjaw battlement, the oily cool of the Fang of Kadon between his hands, the point wedged into the graffitied metal. He had used the artefact to locate the hidden gates to Nagash’s underworld, but its powers over the lesser portals that existed within realms went far beyond mere divination.

‘Trust me,’ he whispered, strained, almost forgetting to add, ‘my liege.’

As potent as he was at his full strength, the flesh-eater court was, as a group, still more so, and he was far from his full strength. The Stormcast priest, Ramus, had seen to that.

The sand that blew into the melted ruin of his face cut like silver. The beating hearts of the ghastly court pounded in his ears. He heard their rasping breaths, the distant clangour of steel and the incongruous rattle of silverware where he knew there was none.

Click, click, click, went the imaginary dial on the imaginary eyeglass.

He tightened his grip on the Fang and murmured a calming incantation.

His monstrous legions would hold the Stormcasts at bay. And if by some miracle they did make it into his citadel, then Utrech’s court was always hungry.

‘A thousand marks says that the greenskins won’t make the outer walls,’ said Utrech, sliding his brawny hands smartly together and slipping the ‘eyeglass’ into a nonexistent coat pocket.

A growling chorus of ‘hear hears’ from the courtiers and sycophants in attendance intruded spontaneously into Mannfred’s pained reality. The backs of fingers were clapped lightly in bloody palms. Rings were rapped against the rampart’s thick iron cladding.

Mannfred hissed in pain and tried to ignore it.

When this strange court of ghouls had first found him, half-starved and barely alive, scrabbling through the Carthic Oldwoods for worms to feed on, he would have been easy prey. Instead they had fed him, feted him. By the rules of the odd little fantasy that the semi-vampiric Utrech lived through them, he was akin to visiting royalty. Through the blood of theirs he had taken, he had come to know glimpses of their world.

‘What say you, Sir Othamar?’ said Marquess Corinne, her drooling growl coming via her August Majesty’s imposed delusion as a lilting flutter of genteel elocution. She turned to the brooding templar standing guard on the stairs, hulking and obtrusive in black armour, the red paint scuffed out. ‘Would you not rather be bloodying your sword on these unruly savages?’

Sir Othamar, however, was an orruk and a dead one, commander of the garrison left behind by the self-styled Great Red, and said nothing. The Marquess pouted hideously.

A stabbing pain passed though Mannfred’s head, and he moaned. It was a sensation he dimly associated with the bringing up of vomit. Another imperfect reflection of the Celestial Realmgate split across the sky with a sound like shattering glass.

‘Bravo!’ slobbered the Viscount Henzel von Kurze.

Mannfred closed his eyes for a moment’s inner peace, then looked up to share the ghast’s wonder at what he had wrought. Scores of fizzing, intermittent portals pulsed feebly in the soul-tortured air. Some were side on, slits in the air. Others faced away. They seemed to contain eerie reflections of Mannfred and his court, but in every one there was something subtly incorrect in the image. There he was, cadaverously thin, the Twelfth Mark of Final Death hanging over him. And there again, surrounded not by fawning courtiers, but naked, horribly muscled beasts eyeing him with rapacious hunger.

The original realmgate stood within an arch of bone that by some arcane vicissitude had been braided with marble by Sigmar’s original settlers. It put Mannfred in mind of a man near death, suspended on the rack and somehow managing a fitful sleep between bouts of torture. Sigmar had abandoned it, left it for dead, a sacrifice to preserve more valued lives. But life was determined, whatever form it took. There was power in the gate yet, and the Fang of Kadon would drink it all.

He felt an ache in his gums, and his own fangs began to lengthen. The Sea of Bones was just the beginning. The Realm of Ghur was but the first step. Nagash would beg him to return, or he would cower in his crumbling keeps.

‘I require more time if I am to raise the mightiest and most ancient creatures,’ he said, speaking softly and patiently. ‘The Titans of Myth that sleep under the Sea of Bones. And the Fang needs far more of the realmgate’s power if I am to extend a portal to the lands beyond the Sea’s far border, where the gateway to Shyish is to be found.’

‘Time, is it?’ dribbled Utrech.

He waved over a hunchbacked ghoul bearing a tray that was at once half of an old wooden table and a fine silver tray. Utrech picked up a raw piece of spare rib. The last piece of Skraggtuff’s ogors, Mannfred presumed.

The delusory self-image the Abhorrant King shared with his court was of a young man with the swagger and errant confidence of birthright.

What he was was an abomination with no place in a world once trodden by gods. His breathing was quick and shallow and gurgled from his mouth. Long teeth for the ripping of uncooked flesh and powerful muscles for the grinding of bone had thickened his jaw and it hung low down his neck. His arms and chest were bare, a greenish grey, and ugly with hard slabs and cords of muscle.

The obliterated rib fell back onto the tray with a loud thunk.

‘You’ve been fair by us, von Carstein. You gift me a dragon to ride and an army to lead, and what time I have to give in exchange is yours.’

‘Most kind,’ Mannfred murmured, offering a brief nod of the head as the Abhorrant King turned with a swish of imaginary tails and sloped past the brooding Sir Othamar.

A few moments later, a terrible shriek made the unbound souls that filled the sky scatter, and a bone-grey terrorgheist carrying the Abhorrant King climbed into the wind. A pack of wolfish varghulfs chased them hungrily, their snarls and howls snatched by the soul-storm.

‘Good hunting, my liege,’ said Mannfred, with a predator’s smile. ‘May my good friend Ramus receive you well.’

Vandalus was still climbing into the shrieking gale when the portal shattered out of the storm above him. He tried to turn, but he knew it was too late. The portal was on him, a protean disk of Azyrite energy that filled his immediate sky. He didn’t know if the vampire had directed this portal specifically to target him, but it seemed akin to using a fireball to rid a gryph-hound of ticks.

Bad luck caught up with everyone in the end.

He struck the gate. The air became light. It was like hitting a mirror, fractures spreading out in slow motion, time dragging almost to the point at which it stopped.

He fell through. The fragments under him broke into ever-smaller pieces. And again. And again. The physical and the magical became indistinguishable and his mind struggled to translate what it perceived in the best way that it was able. He felt unearthly music on his skin, smelled colours through the tips of his fingers. He saw otherworldly suns rise and explode. Structures of unassailable marble, the white citadels of Sigmaron, soared and crumbled and rose again. Dust. Sand. Weeping spirits. The Sea of Bones caught from a hundred angles, every one of them the same. The ether burned on his skin, despite his armour. The fire became a single note, shrill and whining.

The barrier shattered, and the noise fell away in pieces.

Suddenly he was rolling, not through air or astral winds, but along the ground. Light sky. Dark ground. Light. Dark. Bones snapped under his armour as he crashed through. He could hear the rattle of skeletons and see the wink of bronze and the gimlet blue gleam of witchlight.

His light-wings exploded in a clap of thunder, blew a hole in the block of marching dead, and dragged him sharply out of his roll.

Straining hard and shivering, he beat into a climb. He was back on the Sea of Bones. Not where he had been, but it was better than some of the alternatives he could describe.

A ghoul shrieked, flying at him on tatty wings. The ghoul gibbered at the last second before smashing into him. It bounced off, broken, and before Vandalus could adjust he was mobbed by flapping red wings.

Ghouls hissed in his face and scratched his armour with their claws. Something tried to rake at his wings, received a snapping burn for its troubles, and fell off with a cry. The stink of burnt meat clogged his nose hole. A grey-skinned flesh-eater with high, sunken cheeks dragged its fangs down his thigh plate. Another wrestled itself around his leg and scrabbled. Bit by bit, he felt himself being dragged back to the ground.

He tried to work the shutter of his lantern, but he was still fuzzy from his journey through the vampire’s portal and his fingers couldn’t seem to recall how to do it. After several increasingly violent attempts to force it, he remembered to twist the catch and then pushed the shutter open.

For one cosmic moment, he felt himself burn. Hot and pure and loud, even if the void was too black for anyone to know it but him. Then it was gone. He closed the lantern’s shutter with a hiss of gold over gold, and it was raining burning ghouls.

‘Where have you sent me, vampire?’

No sign of Ironjawz. No sign of Stormcasts. He had clearly fallen well over the undead side of the battle. He had to find out where he was, and return to Korruk and Ramus quickly.

A death-shriek ripped open the soul-winds before Vandalus had a chance to use his beacon. A huge skeletal beast with shredded wings dropped through the tear in the sky, its long neck straddled by a subhuman monstrosity, hunched and slavering and gripping a gnawed bone club with scraps of flesh still attached.

Then the terrorgheist’s aural bow-wave hit Vandalus. He was rather more substantial than the ghosts of the Sea of Bones, but the monster’s scream still struck like the paralytic stinger of a venomous beast. It froze the strength in his muscles. It petrified the thoughts as they formed in his head. The magic that gave light to his wings held him aloft, but only until the descending monster snatched him from the air and crushed him to the dust beneath its weight.

Vandalus looked up at death’s ghoulish face through the claws that pinned his body to the ground. It was a ghoul king. He had seen the like skulking in the Carthic Oldwoods. It was as muscular as an orruk, almost as big even without armour. Its skin was a grot’s mealy green. Nasty yellow eyes appraised him as though a plate bearing something unfamiliar but not unappetizing had been pushed in front of it. The abhorrant made a slobbering, gurgling growl that sounded like speech.

‘What are you saying?’

The ghoul king’s eyes widened as though offended and it raised its club.

A flash of black and red smeared across Vandalus’ eyes. There was a crack of bone and a judder of iron, and the terrorgheist emitted a sepulchral shriek before flapping back like a gate struck open by a battering ram. Vandalus gave an involuntary gasp as the crushing weight was withdrawn from his chest. He dragged himself and his broken armour to his feet and re-established his bearings.

The thing that had hit the terrorgheist ground ironclad knuckles into the dusty ground and brought up a sullen, rolling growl. A wall of panting, iron-skirted pig flesh crunched and gored through bone, both ‘living’ and ‘dead’, to catch up with their megaboss. The weak sun winked off the polished iron of the gore-grunta Boyz’ spears. Vandalus had made it a point to learn the names of the Great Red’s major warclans. The knucklebone beads that that particular clan braided through the hair of their animals chattered as they rolled nearer. Running alongside them to the drumbeat of Gorkstikks and Morkstikks were the Wurld Masher Brawl with their giant hammers. And on the other flank, struggling to hold the same reckless pace in their ridiculously bulky armour, the Rok Nobz.

In the path of the advance, Vandalus thought. He’s brought me within reach of his stronghold.

The terrorgheist emitted a snake-like hiss, lifted its front legs off the ground and hoisted its neck, raising its abhorrant master high above the Ironjaw’s head.

There were no clever words. No pithy insults. The terrorgheist’s head simply snapped forwards on the end of its long neck, jaw wide to snap off Korruk’s head. The maw-krusha hammered the bone-dragon across the snout with a swinging fist. The terrorgheist made a moaning sound. A broken fang whizzed out and spanked off the Great Red’s armour, and its neck sawed across the Ironjaw’s shoulder.

The two monsters crushed into one another. The terrorgheist’s thick, bony neck wrapped over the maw-krusha’s back end and gnashed at his legs. The belligerent beast clubbed furiously at whatever the undead thing had under its ribs. Scratching, beating, biting, growling, the two monsters abused each other into a brutal stalemate, with the Great Red and the abhorrant hanging on, face-to-face.

The ghoul king’s vituperative gibber rang through the blizzard of bone chips that Korruk’s axes struck from his club.

‘Like speakin’ to a zoggin’ gore-grunta,’ the megaboss grumbled.

Korruk turned the abhorrant’s club on Black Axe’s curved edge, then thumped his forearm smartly through the flesh-eater’s teeth. The ghoul king blubbered from its bloody mouth. Its clammy hand grabbed Korruk’s wrist. The Ironjaw instinctively recoiled, then bellowed in surprise as the ghoul king sprayed his face with pinkish spit. While Korruk shook his head, the abhorrant smashed his elbow joint with its club. The big orruk didn’t seem to feel it. The broken joint mashed the ghoul king’s nose and, with a slurp of pain, the flesh-eater let go.

Pink snot dribbling over his eyes, Korruk gave vent to a titanic roar, flexed the muscles of arm and shoulder and pushed the elbow joint squealing back into place.

The terrorgheist drowned him out with a triumphant shriek. The monster, benefitting from having neither ligaments nor tendons, had worked its back foot double-jointedly over the maw-krusha’s champing teeth and pushed back its neck. Snapping and spitting for each other’s necks, the two beasts nevertheless managed to shove each other apart.

‘Stupid, zoggin’…’

‘I have him!’ Vandalus cried.

He spread his wings to take flight, then closed them immediately over his head as a furry comet punched into the desert between him and the Great Red hard enough to send the first wave of Rok Nobz flying. It was as though the soul-storm had finally judged that enough was enough and decided to settle matters with its own fists. Dust and bone shards exploded in vibrant colours as they struck Vandalus’ wings. The fizzling discharges died away. A hairy, winged, wolf-bat thing – a varghulf – shook out of its crater and threw itself at the shouting Rok Nobz with a howl.

Vandalus ran to meet it, a bounding leap carrying him over the Ironjawz, and slammed bodily into the rabid beast.

The impact forced it onto its heels and Vandalus’ starblade slashed a red mark across its chest. He dropped his shoulder and rammed it. It gave a little, but big as he was, it was bigger and wasn’t to be surprised again. An arm as long as two of his and shaggy with hair hit him across his breastplate from shoulder to groin. The air burst out of him and he felt his boots rise off the ground.

His wings flew out to arrest his fall and the varghulf, expecting him to be at least a foot further back than he was, howled in unexpected pain as his sword pierced pectoral muscle, then lung, then shoulder blade. He beat himself higher and in so doing ripped his blade out.

The bleeding varghulf lashed for his legs with its claws, missed, tensed to jump after him, then bellowed as a Rok Nobz axe sank into its shoulder meat. Then the swipe of a gore-grunta’s tusk yanked its steaming guts over the cold desert and the only noise it made was the gristly crunch of galloping boars.

More of the monsters continued to drop out of the sky like a rain of comets and, as Vandalus sought out the Great Red, braying hordes of ghouls loped ravenously towards the embattled Ironjawz. Skeleton horses ran alongside, barely keeping pace, with more howling varghulfs arriving on foot. The ground quivered, and Vandalus watched as the soul-winds appeared to swell and then shred apart before an entire phalanx of bone gargants on the march.

‘Is there no end to them...?’ he murmured.

‘I want my thunder door back!’ He heard Korruk roar, and turned towards the sound.

The megaboss’ maw-krusha was mobbed by ghouls and skeletons. A warrior in bronze armour stuck its spear into the beast’s armpit. It didn’t react as the shaft snapped, nor even as the monster dragged its fist through it – unless you counted being smashed to bits as a reaction. The Great Red booted a grinning head off a set of hanging pauldrons and hacked Red Axe through the arm of another as it stabbed for him with a halberd.

More kept on shambling in, steel blades and bits of bronze sweeping towards him on a tide of bone. Spears, pikes and halberds stabbed at the maw-krusha’s side while bony fingers grasped up for the Ironjaw’s weapons. The monster shattered a dozen in one blow. Billhooks swung up at Korruk from all sides. Red Axe and Black Axe sent them back to the Bone Sea in splinters.

‘The Great Red don’t lose!’

He flung wide his dusted weapons, pushed out his chest, and opened his dripping iron fangs to the choking sky.

‘Waaaaa-’ He rammed his heels so hard into the maw-krusha’s belly that the brute actually squawked. It beat its muscular, winged arms as though willing the ground to mock it for trying to fly and, against all odds, lifted off. It didn’t last long, but then it didn’t have to. ‘-aaaaa-’ The maw-krusha arced gracelessly over the broken, squirming skeletons and smashed into the terrorgheist’s side like a sledgehammer. ‘-aaggh!’

The terrorgheist went down with a rusty snap. Its ribs cracked under the blow. The maw-krusha made doubly, then triply sure with a series of blows to its head. The shovel-slams after that were overkill, but Korruk was too busy to stop him. Assuming he could.

Vandalus saw the abhorrant where it had rolled clear of its broken beast. The ghoul king came up in a spray of sand and hefted his club, breathing wetly and hard.

Korruk dismounted, leaving the maw-krusha to its retribution, and clanked towards him. Skeletons ran full into his armour and simply broke as he built up speed. Some notion of what was coming entered the ghoul king’s sickly yellow eyes and he started to back up, too afraid to actually turn his back on the giant Ironjaw and run. Korruk smashed apart a skeleton that got between them and swung Black Axe for the abhorrant’s head. Straight down. Quick and brutal. The flesh-eater snapped out of it just enough to beat the blow aside with his club, and recovered some of his sneer, only to drop it again when Red Axe hacked off the hand at the wrist.

Blood splurged from the shortened arm. Korruk kicked the flesh-eater in the chest, cracked a rib, and flung him back ten feet. The ghoul king crumpled in a heap under the fizzling portal that had spat out Vandalus.

Korruk lifted it by the neck as easily as he might a drunken grot and held it to the portal’s flickering light as though for a proper look. The dust and sand that clung to the ghoul king’s bloodied body made it a grainy white, jumping between shades from second to second. White. Blue. White. Blue. Only its chest and face, facing away from the portal, were a fixed, resigned black.

‘Tell Man… Man…’ Korruk bared his iron teeth and growled. ‘Tell ’im the Great Red’s comin’.’ With that, the Ironjaw plunged the flesh-eater’s head into the portal up to its lower ribs. The portal flashed like a lightning storm, and a sudden pull dragged on the Ironjaw’s hand. The body thrashed for a moment and then was still.

With a grunt of effort, as though he were dragging a sand raft out of a dust flow against the current, Korruk pulled the body out. What was left of it. Vandalus shivered at the sight of the flat, glassy tissue that now closed off the section through the abhorrant’s chest the way its head and shoulders had once done.

‘Morka...’ Korruk grumbled.

Orruks were a superstitious race. Even an Ironjaw megaboss wasn’t too tough for a healthy fear of the weird.

‘There are too many,’ Vandalus shouted. He smashed apart a skeleton with a blow from his hammer, and turned back to Korruk.

Vandalus didn’t fear a death in battle. It was one of the first human foibles that immortality took away. Korruk was not human, nor was he immortal, but Vandalus saw the same fearlessness in his one, savage eye. It was strange to stand before the orruk as an equal. It felt right, like the halcyon days long gone.

‘You and me then,’ Korruk said, hefting his big axes. ‘Try and keep up.’

Vandalus grinned. ‘I do have wings.’

The first of the running varghulfs charged towards them. They were shaggy and slobbering, long teeth sharply white against the pitch dark of their gaping mouths. Vandalus felt a familiar tingle on his skin and tasted tin on his lips. He had his lantern raised, but before he could operate it, two shots of lightning from above incinerated both beasts. Bits of gore with hair stuck to them slapped down, a lot of them over the broad target that was Korruk’s armour. Ramus strode towards them at the forefront of a line of Hallowed Knights Paladins.

‘Azyros,’ he said, by way of greeting as the Stormcasts surged past to bolster the Ironjawz and check, for the time being anyway, the vampire’s sally. He acknowledged the towering megaboss with a nod, but no words. The Great Red growled back.

All friends here, thought Vandalus.

‘We must take the realmgate at all costs,’ Ramus intoned. ‘End the Betrayer and all of this is over.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Vandalus replied. ‘Whatever we bring, the vampire has more. We are stalled, brother, and I’d guess several miles from his citadel yet.’

‘You don’t speak for me, tin man,’ rumbled the Great Red, and beat down a skeleton that had tottered through the lines, slipping on the glassy lightning scar on the ground. ‘No one steals from the Great Red.’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. The Astral Templars will fight to the death. But I would rather look my real enemy in his eyes before I’m returned to the forge.’

Ramus pointed his reliquary back towards the portal. It pulsed in the swirling dust, white and blue, unaffected by any of it. ‘In his hubris, the Betrayer leaves the path open to us.’

‘That’s no better choice,’ Vandalus cried, shaking his head with a sudden, unworthy fear. ‘I’ve passed through that door, brother, and you’ll find nothing on the other side but Chaos.’

‘The light of Azyr is incorruptible and indivisible. There are many portals, but one gate only, and it is there.’ Ramus swung his reliquary to where the bone gargants smashed into the thin line of Hallowed Knights, past the squeal of sigmarite and the stabs of lightning and into the soul-storm. ‘I have seen it. I have seen where the Betrayer waits, confident in his power over the storm and contemptuous of mine. Twice now he has bested me, but today his overconfidence will undo him. Have faith in me, brother. There is but one realmgate and I shall guide us there.’

Vandalus glanced towards Korruk. The Ironjaw looked at the portal and the messily halved abhorrant with a shudder, then towards the soul-shrouded bone gargants. Their massive arms rose and dropped like colossal hammers.

‘Nah. My way’s better.’

‘With me then, all who are faithful,’ Ramus cried, driving a bolt of lightning skyward from his reliquary and calling the surviving Hallowed Knights to him.

Vandalus watched the Lord-Relictor walk into the light. White. Blue. White. Blue. Then gone.

Just the soul-storm and the battle remained, the Ironjawz shouting as they ran in unruly formations to their dooms. Ramus was right. There could be no victory against these odds.

‘Only the faithful,’ he muttered, and followed.

There is one gate. Ramus repeated the mantra, over and over in his mind as foul, corrupted lightning lashed at his panoply of faith and etheric winds buffeted him, howling with the many voices of the unquiet dead. There is one gate. If he were to look then he knew he would see many, but they were falsehoods all and so he did not look. Eyes could be deceived, but the truth he kept in his heart where no evil could violate it.

There is one gate.

His Hallowed Knights were beside him. They shared a spiritual bond and their faith was his strength even as he felt them ripped away, one by one, cast into mirror portals that exited all across the physical battlefield. They would survive the experience as Vandalus had, but isolated from their allies, swamped by undead, their separation would ultimately prove fatal.

‘Sigmar demands much of those to whom much is given,’ he bellowed into the maelstrom, seeking with his words and his will to anchor their souls to Azyr and to the divine storm – but he could not even hear himself.

There went his second, Sagittus. The Judicator had questioned him often, and Ramus was aggrieved, but not surprised, that he should be amongst the first to falter. Then went Cassos. Ever prideful, ever arrogant. The Protector-Prime tumbled onto the Sea of Bones and disappeared under a shrieking mob of flesh-eaters.

There is one gate.

As far back into his mortal existence as Ramus could recall, he had always been a priest. There had been no life for him before Sigmar. He was without vulnerability, without vice. The Lord-Relictors were warrior priests, but for him, the ‘warrior’ part of that dyad had always come a distant second.

Discarding his hammer, he took up the shield, Sigmar’s Gift. Many lies shone upon its silver face, but it carried only one true reflection. It had delivered the God-King’s fire unto the Betrayer, and it remembered. He turned his head in the direction it pointed.

Portals whirled there like stars, a nightscape that had been hyper-accelerated in order to watch the full lifespan of creation in a few short seconds.

There is one gate.

But which one?

Suddenly, Vandalus was there beside him, and the celestial radiance of his beacon showed the pale imitations of Azyr’s light for what they were. The false portals dimmed and faded and the one true gate shone like the last star at the universe’s end.

‘There is one gate!’ The Knight-Azyros yelled into his mind.

The bedlam of energy and noise came together into a blinding wall of light and then shattered.

Ramus was kneeling as though in prayer on a rampart flagged with tiles of bone. Steam rose from his armour. The wind hissed. Bone shards hit sigmarite with a forlorn little sound like pebbles being dropped into a votive well. He looked up. A handful of Retributors and Judicators had made it with him, and Vandalus. They stood, lightning winding around their armour.

Their faith was a source of inspiration and joy.

At their backs, the realmgate sputtered and glowed. It was cold, sealed by Sigmar, a charcoal blue ember that was slowly guttering down. Ramus wondered whether it might be reopened, and how. The God-King had the power to seal the gates to his realm, but only from the other side could such gates be unbarred.

A hiss of fury came to him through the soul-gale. Mannfred von Carstein stood on the other side of the metal-over-bone rampart. The vampire’s white hair was wild and lashed about in the wind. His teeth were longer than when Ramus had first encountered him, broken and caged in the Land of the Dead, and his eyes were redder. An animal kind of madness affected them, a symptom of this realm perhaps, or the energies he had been attempting to barter with. Ramus focussed on the vampire’s face. His patrician features were horribly burned. The mark of Sigmar’s lash.

Stiffly, the vampire bowed, as though acknowledging the honour Ramus showed him by presenting himself thusly on his knees. The muscle-clad ghasts that surrounded him flexed and drooled.

With a scowl, Ramus rammed his reliquary between the bone flags.

At the same time, Mannfred drew his ancient, basket-hilted sword. In his other hand was the oily curve of the Fang of Kadon, wrested from the ghouls of Helstone with the good faith of Hallowed Knights. It was about the length of a dagger, and it dripped with power.

There was a crunch as the dread abyssal, Ashigaroth, descended on a nimbus of keening spirits that wefted and wove about its bulk, and clamped its claws onto the parapet behind its master. Even amongst the deathless horrors to which Mannfred had bestowed unlife, it was a rare and unique terror. Ramus had personally witnessed the beast swallowing a man’s soul, and savage a charging gryph-hound with the barest twitch of its beak.

‘You do not look as hale as the last time we met, Betrayer.’

‘Nor you, Stormcast.’

‘Looks can deceive.’

‘Most things will, if you allow them to.’

‘Distract the beast, Azyros,’ growled Ramus, eyes fixed on Mannfred’s. ‘The rest of you... the vampire is all that matters here.’

With an ululating war cry, Vandalus leapt into the air. The Hallowed Knights thundered forwards, as did Mannfred’s ghasts. The turret of the Ironjaw fort was too narrow for either side to build much momentum, but the two sets of inhumanly massive bodies carried force enough of their own to smack together with a sound like mallets softening up raw meat. Ramus saw Vandalus dart away from Ashigaroth’s snapping beak and disappear around a bartizan that projected from the turret’s corner. Then Ramus found his full attention occupied.

Mannfred strode towards him.

‘Step away from the realmgate.’

‘Never.’

‘I do not ask twice.’ Face twisted by a predatory snarl, Mannfred lunged for his throat with the tip of his sword.

Ramus swung his shield into it, knocking it aside. It was only then that he realised that he still did not have a hammer. He muttered a prayer, his reliquary bursting into Azyric light as he swung it like a mace and cracked the dead hand that wielded the Fang of Kadon. Mannfred cursed and spun away.

The vampire dropped low and stabbed under Ramus’ guard. The blade nicked his faulds before Ramus could counter. He stepped off in a bid to keep the distance between them that favoured his staff’s length, but the vampire was quickly on him. He danced, feinted, eyes everywhere, moving like a snake. The Fang of Kadon scraped an ‘X’ across the face of Sigmar’s Gift.

‘Behold the glory of Sigmar, vampire!’

Ramus stamped his staff’s black ferule onto the ground. Ribbons of energy stroked across air and ground, driving the vampire back. He took the moment granted to take in the carnage. A ghast took a thunderaxe in the gut and exploded outwards from the midriff, splattering everything in pink. Another ripped the right arm clean off a Judicator’s body and used the crossbow still in its grip to club in the screaming warrior’s helm. He heard Ashigaroth’s shriek and saw Vandalus crash through the bartizan’s iron walls. A beam of light sheared back through the jagged breach and drove the dread abyssal higher, out of reach.

‘Marquess,’ Mannfred hissed, still swatting at the tendrils of energy that ran across the dark ridges of his armour. ‘Take this one and I will see to it that you take Angar Utrech’s throne.’

The powerfully built creature he spoke to glanced hungrily towards the Stormcasts. Hulking, grey, peripherally female, it loped towards Ramus on its knuckles and opened its heavy jaws. Ramus slammed it aside with his shield, broke its neck, and used its momentum to propel himself into Mannfred as he lashed the shield back across him.

Mannfred recoiled in pain and shock. Blood was dribbling from a shallow diagonal line that joined his right temple to the left side of his mouth.

‘Only the faithful!’ Ramus roared as the vampire’s cut began to bubble and the blood dappling the blade-rim of his shield began to steam.

It remembered. And behind him, the realmgate responded.

It opened just a crack: not physically, but with the unsubtle energies of the divine storm. Light streamed through the opening with a pure clarion note like the trumpet call of Heaven, and Ramus felt all his bruises and aches soothed. The vampire shuffled away from him, blood dripping onto the metal flags.

‘What have you done? How?’

The skin sealing the gate vibrated like an ivory horn in the moments after it had been blown, and a shadow formed against the Azyr blue. It was a human shape, larger than a man, rounded by the bulk of armour. There was a rippling snap of discharge as the burly figure stepped through. He bore a long, gold-hafted halberd in one gauntlet and an ornately filigreed lantern in the other. His armour was the deep purple of sunset. As Ramus recognised him, his heart soared on the storm winds of Sigmar’s miracle.

His name was Hamilcar, Lord-Castellant of the Astral Templars, Eater of Bears, and Champion of Cartha.

The Stormcast whirled his halberd one handed and decapitated a ghast with a splitting blow to the side of the neck. ‘The Bear-Eater has your scent, undying,’ the Lord-Castellant bellowed with a thunderous laugh. ‘He has come back for you!’

Two more Astral Templars emerged from the gate behind him, and then two more, marching in column. Beside them, walking in a metronomic lockstep and also in ranks of two, came something that Ramus could never have dreamed to see marching under the light of Azyr – not given the outcome of his embassy to the Lands of the Dead. They were wights, encased in black armour, and clad in the bitterest, most unforgiving chill. The liche that led them out half a length behind Hamilcar’s giant stride was clad in ragged robes and encased in ridged armour of archaic design that rattled loosely against his bones. He carried a long staff, around the tip of which strange black flames pulsed, and a tomb-blade that summoned actual tears from the streaming souls it touched.

‘Arkhan the Black,’ said Ramus in disbelief. He turned back from the gate and thrust his blazing reliquary towards the no-longer-so-distant Heavens. ‘The gate between Sigmaron and Stygxx has been unsealed!’

Mannfred slithered back like an adder. He shoved a ravenous ghast into Ramus’ and Hamilcar’s path. Arkhan gestured with his staff and the flesh-eater was withered on the spot, consumed in a puff of black flame. Mannfred pressed back against the spiked metal battlements and cast about in desperation. Spotting something that Ramus could not see through the intervening combatants and the debris thrown out by the wrecked bartizan, he dropped down. When he sprang back to his feet he had his sword arm locked around Vandalus’ throat and the Fang of Kadon pulsing over the Knight-Azyros’ heart, a crowing sneer on his lips. The Astral Templar looked dazed.

‘No closer, Stormcast.’

Hamilcar gave a mocking laugh and impaled a ghast to the halfway point of his weapon’s haft. ‘Look at who you’re speaking to. Do you think I fear for my brother’s life?’

With a scowl, Mannfred turned to Arkhan. ‘The Sea of Bones is our freedom. I could have conquered this realm and lived as a god. Imagine, if you can, what we could do together.’

‘I know my duty as I have always done since the earliest of days,’ the liche returned, his voice sepulchral and harsh. ‘The Undying King raised you high. You are one of his Mortarchs. But your fear of him and your jealousy of your fellow servants has unmade you.’ He lifted his staff. ‘It is, as always, my pleasure to serve him as his instrument in this.’

‘Ramus,’ said Mannfred, wheedling, turning from the heartless liche. ‘Do you think that Nagash will ever release the soul of your Lord-Celestant? Do you think he would ever release a soul of his? I am your only chance if you want to see Tarsus made whole again.’

‘I too know my duty,’ Ramus intoned. He barged aside a ghast that was wrestling with a Hallowed Knight for his thunderaxe, and made to run at Mannfred – only for a hulking orruk-zombie to clank into his path. Its axe thumped into Ramus’ shield.

‘A less craven cur would jump,’ said Arkhan. ‘The fall is long, but Nagash’s vengeance on you, prodigal, will be eternal.’

‘Let Nagash’s wrath atrophy as he does. He shall never claim me.’ Mannfred glared at Ramus and Hamilcar and raised the Fang of Kadon high. ‘And neither shall Sigmar.’

‘No!’ Ramus screamed. He knocked back the armoured zombie and hurled his shield.

It emitted a discus hum as it carved through the air, slicing the vampire into halves through the belly at the same moment that the Fang of Kadon plunged through Vandalus’ breastplate and impaled the Stormcast’s heart. Both howled as though struck by lightning. The channelled energy of the active realmgate pulsed from the Fang and through them both, suturing them together with stitches of Azyr-light. The vampire’s pale skin shone white. The Azyros glowed like a forge through the joins in his armour as though his blood had been transformed into thunder.

The light emitted a shrill, bat-like scream, and the two bodies folded into one another, flattened, thinned, dragged towards a central point around the Fang of Kadon, and then slurred out into a spitting portal. It was purple, as though discoloured by blood, and larger than any that Ramus had yet seen manifested over the Sea of Bones. But it lasted for barely a second. Blood spatter and bent bits of roasted armour fell over the tower top as it collapsed back on itself.

There was nothing left but smoke and a black stain on the ground.

Arkhan and Hamilcar advanced together. The liche poked at the ground with his staff while the Astral Templar sniffed at the air.

‘Is he dead?’ said Hamilcar.

‘The dead are not so easily destroyed, and that one lingers more determinedly than most. He will be somewhere within this realm. The Fang of Kadon manipulates the pathways that exist within worlds.’

‘I’ll find him,’ growled Hamilcar.

‘And I,’ said Ramus, solemnly.

‘Not you,’ said Arkhan. ‘I bring a message from Sigmar. Your work here is done. Mannfred is beaten, his ghouls broken, and his army will crumble before the sun sets. Your lord has other duties for the Hallowed Knights.’

Ramus’ bow was forced. The thought of Mannfred finding justice at the hands of another – any other, he thought, with a glance towards Hamilcar – pained him. He sighed.

‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given.’

‘Quite so.’

Ramus felt himself smile. Perhaps the suffering endured by his chamber had all been part of Sigmar’s plan, had led him to this moment. The champions of the God-King and the Great Necromancer stood together in victory over a common foe. Somewhere in the far, far distance, something big and definitely alive delivered a cry of ‘Waaaggh!’

It was a reminder, if Ramus needed one, that the Sea of Bones must yet see one more battle.

And that not all alliances could last forever.

LORD OF UNDEATH

C L Werner

CHAPTER ONE

Darkness filled the great hall, a blackness more sinister than that of night and shadow. Great braziers of gilded bone blazed from their pillared stands, tongues of flame dancing up towards the vaulted ceiling dozens of feet above. Crystal lanterns carved into the shapes of skulls hung from marble columns, their translucent surfaces aglow with the sapphire, emerald and ruby lights of the soulfires imprisoned within them. From the ceiling, a colossal chandelier of volcanic glass and fossilised skeletons glimmered with the light of a thousand corpse-candles, each flicker fed by the fat of a slaughtered killer. Through the vastness, darting around pillar and column, weaving through the bony arms of the chandelier, ethereal wisps of ghostly luminescence flew about the hall.

The chamber was a riot of lights, but still there wasn’t enough to fend off the darkness. A darkness that went beyond a diminishing of vision. A darkness that struck at the soul with terror and oppression. A darkness that lounged languidly upon a divan fashioned from a mammoth chunk of drakstone and upholstered with silks stained in the heartblood of unblemished maidens. A darkness that raised a goblet of sanguine wine to velvet lips and took the most delicate sip of the morbid liquor.

To those mortals assembled in the hall, the sight of their sovereign drinking the blood-brew was a forceful reminder of their place in the scheme of things. They were servants, subjects and, if they provided offence, cattle. Some among them wondered who it was who had been bled for their monarch’s grim repast. Older and wiser men no longer entertained such questions, well aware there was no good to come from curiosity.

The immortals among the court were no less struck by the exhibition. They could smell the blood in the goblet, could almost taste it flowing across their tongues, the fiery bite of the mournweed used to spice the wine as it burned down their throats. A terrible longing rushed through them, pulsing in their blackened hearts. Had their sovereign taken some mortal, ripped his throat out and drained him dry, they would have known only a sense of envy. Seeing this display of control and restraint, these dainty sips in the face of their lust, struck them at a level not so different from that of the mortals. Without a word being said, they were being told how great was the gulf between their own status and that of the one they served.

Stretched across her divan, her bare flesh cool and pale where it wasn’t obscured by the sable veils of a web-like gown, the vampire queen regarded her subjects with regal detachment. There was no hint in either motion or expression of the agitation within her, of the anxiety that had been steadily mounting since the first reports had been brought to her throne. It was the first rule of power, the first lesson any ruler, no matter how experienced – never show weakness. As her eyes drifted to the armoured figure of Lord Harkdron, the slightest hint of a smile pulled at her crimson lips and exposed the gleam of a fang.

There were, of course, exceptions to every rule. Times when a show of weakness made it easier to exploit the aspirations of others. In all the numberless centuries of her unnatural existence, Neferata had made use of many would-be paramours. There was no loyalty so easy to abuse, no slavery so complete, as that which hoped for love. Even for a Mortarch, a mistress of death and the infinities beyond death, there was a delicious savour to preying upon the dreams and ambitions of lesser beings. The loftier the height they wanted to ascend, the more satisfying their inevitable fall.

Once the foolish swain had served his purpose, of course.

Neferata turned her attention from Harkdron to regard the rest of her court. She could see the fear that pulsed through the veins of her mortal subjects, a fear that, for once, was not provoked by the dread queen who ruled over them. Among the vampires and liches who swore allegiance to her, she could likewise sense unease. It was less visceral than the fright of mortals, but there nonetheless. Their anxiety vexed her, for it was a sign of faltering belief in her power. Her subjects were losing confidence in her ability to protect them.

She took another sip of her wine, but the taste was soured by the turn her thoughts had taken. It had taken many centuries to build her great city of Nulahmia. Every street and building had been translated from the dreams of memory into constructions of limestone and marble, into basalt walls and obsidian pillars. A thousand times had the colonnade leading to the Palace of Seven Vultures been built and razed, its workers impaled upon spikes of copper and gold, before the vision in her mind was perfected. Four hundred slaves had been entombed alive beneath the foundations of the Jackal Gate before the proper aura of death and despair lurked beneath its brooding archway. Ten generations of men had laboured to excavate the cavern of Nehb-kotz below the necropolis of Themsis, their bodies plastered into the cavern walls to entice the corpse-moths to nest within the empty skulls.

In all the Realm of Death, Nulahmia was hers alone. Every contour of the landscape, every brick in the walls and tile upon the roofs, every curl in a maid’s coiffure, every thread in a farmer’s tunic, all of them had been nurtured by her dark dreams of primordial memory. When the hordes of Chaos poured through the realmgates to conquer the lands of Shyish, it was to Nulahmia that Neferata had withdrawn. It was for Nulahmia that she directed her forces and powers. To keep and hold the kingdom she had built in accordance with her own vision, she had devoted spells of such magnitude that a mortal sorcerer would be reduced to ash merely trying to sound the letters of the first incantation.

Long had Nulahmia been hidden, veiled from the marauders of Chaos by a web of illusion and terror. Impenetrable shrouds of gravefog cloaked every approach. Spectral mires of liferot waited to drain the vitality of any invader. Ghostly echoes distorted the perceptions of any who drew too close to Neferata’s dominion, and phantom whispers excited their fears. While the rest of the realm had been despoiled and defiled, while the devotees of Chaos ravaged and pillaged at will, her city had remained inviolate.

Now that sanctuary was threatened. After years of seclusion, the enemy had finally pierced the skein of terror and illusion to strike at the city secreted within. It was a possibility that had haunted Neferata often when Shyish had first been overrun, but time had dulled her worries until she had come to share the belief she had nurtured amongst her subjects – that the defences of Nulahmia were inviolate.

Slowly, Neferata lowered her goblet and motioned one of her handmaidens to remove it. Then her gaze roved across the anxious visages of her court. There was a predatory quality in her eyes now. Among her subjects, the fear of Chaos was eclipsing fear of their queen. This was a situation she couldn’t abide. She needed a victim to remind them all what it meant to fail a Mortarch.

‘Repeat for me again what was revealed in your seance,’ Neferata commanded, pointing a pale finger towards one of her mortal retainers. He was a spindly, almost fleshless man, his skin afflicted with a leprous cast. The dark robe he wore was an imitation of those worn by the priests of immemorial ages, eldritch hieroglyphs embroidered into the fabric with purple threads. Ahkmet-bey, chief of Nulahmia’s necromancers, bowed his shaved head when his queen addressed him. Though magic had enabled him to extend his life beyond the usual mortal span, the mystic had never lost his terror of Neferata. It was one of the reasons he had been suffered to live so long, the other being that spirits were more readily drawn to a living conjurer than one who had already been given the blood kiss.

‘My dread queen.’ Ahkmet-bey abased himself at the foot of the dais. ‘The spirits have shown me many dire things. The enemy has penetrated the spells that have protected your kingdom for so very long. An army marching under the banner of the Serpent descends upon us to lay siege to the city.’

Neferata glowered at the necromancer, her pointing finger lengthening into a blackened claw. ‘Have the phantoms bound to my dominion not plagued these invaders? Have they not filled their minds with doubt and fear? How much of this horde has already deserted their snake flags? How many of them are lost in the gravefog?’

A tremor of fear shook Ahkmet-bey’s voice as he answered. ‘Highness, the enemy has lost few to the mists and fewer still to the phantasms. Their leader pushes them unerringly across the boneyards and mouldmires.’ The necromancer shook his head. ‘It is as though he is being drawn to us by some infernal enchantment.’

‘You speak nonsense, mortal,’ Lord Harkdron sneered. ‘Since the first realmgates were breached by the Everchosen, neither sorcerer nor daemon has been able to find Nulahmia.’ The vampire’s fangs glistened as he smiled at Ahkmet-bey. ‘Do you dare cast aspersions upon our queen’s powers?’

‘I report only what I am commanded to reveal,’ Ahkmet-bey declared. ‘The spirits have shown me the invaders marching into the kingdom. They have found a way…’

Neferata dropped down from her divan, descending the steps of the raised dais with a panther-like menace. She hesitated an instant beside Harkdron, letting her claw slide down his cheek in a languid caress. She could feel the vampire’s excitement at the display of affection. ‘Ahkmet-bey wouldn’t risk the life he’s used so much magic to sustain simply to spread disquieting rumours in my court. What the spirits have shown him must be true. The enemy has found a way to reach Nulahmia and threaten my domain.’

Harkdron brought both of his fists crashing against his breastplate in martial salute. ‘Allow me to command your armies, my queen. I will bring them against these invaders and give them cause to repent whatever doom allowed them to slip through your spells. They will be exterminated before they can even lay eyes upon your city.’

‘No, my eager champion,’ Neferata told Harkdron. ‘You will not sally forth to confront the enemy out in the open where the horde’s numbers can be brought to bear. You will stay here and hold the walls.’

‘It will be my honour,’ Harkdron vowed. ‘The Chaos vermin will smother the wormfields with their dead, and after the battle, I shall build an ossuary taller than the Throne Mount from their bones. The tribute of a general to his queen.’

Neferata smiled at Harkdron’s enthusiasm, enjoying how fully his devotion had trapped him. ‘Bring me victory first. Allow no harm to befall my city and it will be Lord Harkdron who is paid tribute.’

‘If your armies can hold the walls,’ Ahkmet-bey said, ‘then we might light the spirit-beacons and summon aid from the other Mor–’

The suggestion died on the necromancer’s tongue. Fast as a striking tomb-scorpion, Neferata spun about and raked her claw across Ahkmet-bey’s throat. Bright arterial blood sprayed from the man as he crumpled to the floor, his extended life extinguished in a heartbeat. The vampires of Neferata’s court gazed hungrily at the gory puddle that surrounded the twitching corpse, but none made a move to indulge their thirst.

‘Nulahmia has stood on its own strength this long,’ Neferata told her courtiers as she turned to face them. ‘We will not light the spirit-beacons. We will not be so weak as to beg for help from those who abandoned us long ago. When the enemy comes against us, we will hurl him back with our own magic and our own armies. It will be the might of Nulahmia alone that brings them to destruction. No others will share in our victory!’

Neferata climbed back onto her divan, letting the cries of devotion and praise rising from her subjects fill her ears. There was always a quality of fear in the voices of her courtiers, a quality she usually found pleasing. Now it had turned sour. The fear she detected wasn’t provoked by her, but by the advancing hordes of Chaos. Even after her callous slaughter of Ahkmet-bey before their very eyes, her court was more frightened of the invaders.

A wave of her hand dismissed her court. She watched Harkdron march away with the captains of her armies, listened for a moment to their mutterings about strategy in the coming battle. None of them dared so much as whisper about seeking aid, not when their queen’s sharp ears might hear them, but she knew the thought was on their minds.

She would not countenance the humiliation of begging the other Mortarchs for help. It would be a show of weakness they would be quick to exploit for their own ends. Neferata had worked too long to protect what she had built to share it with one of her rivals. Certainly she was anxious about the horde now moving against her kingdom. Any army that could breach her spells might likewise breach her walls.

Still, she wouldn’t order the spirit-beacons lit. To do so would undermine her dominion over her subjects. They would look to the outside for deliverance rather than to their queen. If that help never came…

Neferata stared down at Ahkmet-bey’s corpse. Almost absently, she waved her hand and allowed her entourage to feed. As she watched them lap up the necromancer’s blood, she pondered the futility of the man’s suggestion.

After so much time, with so much of Shyish overrun by Chaos, was there even anyone left to see the spirit-beacons? Was she the last of the Mortarchs?

Lascilion closed his eyes and leaned back in his saddle. Pursing his lips, he flicked out his forked tongue. The slimy organ quivered a moment, each prong licking the misty air and feeding observations to his brain. Much like a true snake, the Chaos warlord smelt with his tongue. Unlike a serpent, the smells Lascilion tasted were not scents or odours, but residues of emotion. They were spiritual stains imprinted upon their environment, fierce passions and terrible frights that had blazed up like bonfires for an instant and left their essence seared into their surroundings.

Yes, it was still there, borne upon aetheric waves of anguish and agony, the taint that had guided him through the gravefog and mouldmire. A delicious flavour of cruelty and sadism that sent a thrill of envy pounding through his veins. Lascilion had long been in the service of the Prince of Chaos, the sensuous god Slaanesh. Pleasure and pain had become his food and drink, each new experience feeding off those that had come before, creating within his soul a tapestry of excess and depravity. He had presided over numberless atrocities and outrages, glutted himself upon suffering until his senses had become jaded and dulled. Sometimes, for a rare moment, a single tear might evoke his old passion, a scream might once again echo through the corridors of his spirit, but such moments had become increasingly rare. All felt empty to him now.

There were those who said the god Slaanesh had been destroyed, consumed by his own sensual gluttony. Lascilion, in his darkest moments, wondered if such myths were true, if the god he had given himself to was indeed vanquished. If the Serpent no longer waited to reward him for his devotions, then what was the purpose of any of it? Mere indulgence of flesh? A wanton abandonment to shallow hedonism? Such simplicity might be enough for the half-witted marauders and bestial gors who marched under his banner, but for him, there had to be more than that. Something of value. Something of meaning.

As his tongue flickered in the air, Lascilion felt old urges stir deep within him – half-remembered lusts, half-forgotten desires. The suffering he sensed was beyond any he had tasted before. He had drunk often from the well of torment, but never had he encountered something of such terrible purity. It was like a fine vintage, set down long ago and carefully tended so that it might reach a perfection of cruelty. The air of horror that drew him on had been cultivated not over the lifetime of a single murderous tyrant, but was steeped in the malignity of centuries. A pall of nigh-incomparable agony clung to Nulahmia, and it was calling out to him as though drawing back to itself one of its own.

That was why, where so many others had failed, Lascilion would succeed. The disciples of Nurgle, the warlords of Khorne, the acolytes of Tzeentch, even the verminous spawn of the Rat God had all tried to discover the secret city to which Queen Neferata had retreated. Man, daemon or monster – all had failed. Lascilion wouldn’t fail. His devotions to Slaanesh would see him through. Bloodking Thagmok, overlord of the armies of Chaos in Shyish, would learn that, broken or lost, the power of the Serpent lived on in his servants.

The monstrous steed upon which Lascilion rode lurched beneath him, its sinuous body undulating with ripples of agitation. It was a gift from the Realm of Chaos, a daemon sustained by his own depraved spirit. In the Mortal Realms, daemons demanded certain conditions to exist – mighty relics, lavish sacrifices, mantles of flesh to possess or, most propitious of all, a landscape in harmony with their own dark essence. In all his wanderings, Lascilion had never sensed a place more in tune with the power of Slaanesh than Nulahmia. The warlord opened his eyes and gave his daemon steed a reassuring pat on its fluted proboscis. Only when the thing had quieted somewhat did he turn his attention to the being that had upset his mount.

Amala crouched in the mouldy filth of the ground across which the army marched, gossamer wings folded against her back. She stretched forth a ropey tendril and offered to Lascilion a curled portion of skin. The warlord noted the blood that dripped from the scroll as he plucked it from the chitinous tentacle. The insect-like mutant was a capable scout, but her lack of a mouth made it necessary for her to render her reports in writing. She was often too impatient to wait for stylus and clay, so made do with the horde’s stragglers.

Lascilion dismissed the mutant with a flick of his hand. There was only so long his steed could abide the sight of the luminous organs that oozed up from beneath Amala’s skin. When the winged scout withdrew to the branches of a gnarled tree some distance away, it was as though his mind surged up from beneath black waters.

Tokresh-khan, chieftain of the Sorroweaters, marched towards Lascilion when he had seen Amala fly away. The barbarian was a huge man, nearly as tall on foot as the warlord was in his saddle. Tokresh wore only a few ornaments and talismans, preferring to display his scarred and tattooed body and prove his devotion to Slaanesh by exposing himself to the slashing blades and raking claws of his enemies. The masses of grey scars etched across his sallow skin had transcended ugliness to become beautiful in their own right, weaving and flowing into one another like the coils of the Serpent himself.

Lascilion, by contrast, took great care to protect the magnificent body and handsome visage with which Slaanesh had gifted him. Once, he had been as ugly as one of Tokresh’s lizard-skin boots, but his devotions had transformed him into an entirely different being. His body was strong and fine, wondrous as a marble god and powerful as a daemon. His skin was as smooth as eiderdown, and the great mane of hair that cascaded down from his head and tumbled across his shoulders was like spun gold. His face transcended the limitations of human beauty, blending the nobility of a lion with the wisdom and determination of a king.

To guard these gifts, Lascilion wore plate armour cast from great slivers of pearl plundered from the noxious depths of the Obsidian Lagoon. Each segment of his shimmering armour had been etched with esoteric sigils and the secret names of his god, soaked in wyrd-dust until every piece was saturated in powerful magics. At his side, he wore twin swords crafted by the crazed swordsmith Nakadai, the vicious blade named Pain and its smaller brother Torment. Each new victim fed the blades, swelling their power with the anguish of those they cut down.

Lascilion let one hand slip down to Pain’s ivory grip, feeling the hungry hum of the aroused blade pulse through him. He fixed a stern gaze upon Tokresh. It had been an arduous ordeal, bringing his army through the arcane veils that guarded these lands. Many times he had been challenged, confronted by despairing chieftains and sorcerers who wanted to turn back. Their path through the gravefog was littered with the bodies of those who had tried to oppose his command.

Tokresh halted when he saw Pain inching from its sheath. The barbarian looked from the blade to the face of the man who held it. ‘You have sent the moth-eater ahead of us?’ he asked, nodding towards Amala. There was a woeful lack of deference in the chieftain’s tone. Lascilion would remember that.

‘I have her words,’ Lascilion declared, waving the fleshy scroll in his other hand. He looked across the bleak landscape through which his army marched, a jumbled terrain of barren mountains and winding ravines, dead trees and yellowed weeds. ‘We will soon be quit of these lands.’

‘It cannot be soon enough,’ Tokresh cursed. He slapped a calloused hand against his tattooed breast. ‘This place chills my heart and would unman me. Every step I take, I can feel my courage falter. There is witchery here, the stink of the necromancers and their ilk.’ He waved at the marching Sorroweaters as the marauders were approaching one of the withered stands of trees that spotted the edges of the trail the army followed. ‘My warriors sense it too. I can see it in their eyes, watch it crawling across their faces. We have heard much of Neferata and her might. There are some who worry you lead us not to glory but disgrace.’

Lascilion gazed across the ranks of the Sorroweaters. They were a formidable force, hundreds strong, each man built along the same hulking lines as their chieftain. Standards crafted from the still-moaning bodies of their victims rose above the heads of the marching marauders. Their shamans knew spells of such horrific potency that they could remind even the undead what it was to suffer. For their living victims, even more unspeakable tortures were their reward. Normally, the Sorroweaters drew strength from the misery of their living totems. Now, Lascilion could see that their ardour was dimmed. They glanced at their surroundings with furtive, worried looks.

Among the rest of his horde, he could see similar traces of trepidation. The brays and bleats of the Vorkoth warherd had fallen to almost nothing, the horned beastmen moved to silence by the oppressive atmosphere. The fratricidal Hellcast had drawn close to one another, something the gold-armoured knights usually did only when they charged into battle, all too aware of the Khornate curse that hovered over their heads and spurred them to strike one another when no other foes presented themselves. Even the Scalpfinders, the most savage and brutal of the tribes who followed Lascilion, had a subdued air about them, clutching their axes and flails as though they were talismans rather than weapons.

Mendeziron, the gigantic Keeper of Secrets, was less circumspect in his agitation, plucking gors and marauders from the midst of their tribes as though they were choice morsels in a box of sweetmeats. The more the army surrendered to their fear, the more they excited the appetites of the daemon. The four-armed monster needed such victims to invigorate him. The obscene reliquary Lascilion had stolen from the Crying Tower was enough to sustain Mendeziron in the Mortal Realms, but not enough to lend the daemon any measure of strength. That required more substantial offerings. Early in the march, there had been many among his army who considered giving themselves to Mendeziron a sacred honour. Now they fought or fled when the daemon came for them.

Lascilion scowled at the unquestionable lack of valour and determination on display. It was small wonder the followers of the other Ruinous Powers had come to hold those who served Slaanesh in such disregard. Was this the best that could be expected of them? Were they merely decadent hedonists, grown soft in their vices, no longer capable of the intensity of desire that drove them to ever more profound revelations of experience?

‘Can you truly be afraid?’ Lascilion sneered at Tokresh. ‘Can you not delight in the chill that curdles your blood? Is it not something new? Is it not something you haven’t felt before?’ He could see that his questions made no impact upon the barbarian. Creatures like Tokresh were too simple to understand the extent of experience the true disciple of Slaanesh must be willing to embrace as an offering to his god. ‘We have fought the coffin-worms before. The whole of Shyish was once their domain. But with sword and spell, we have brought them to ruin. The Lords of Chaos have conquered the Masters of Death. All that is left of them are lingering echoes, remnants hiding in the night. Can you not imagine the delights that await us? The wonders of pillage and conquest that stand before us?’

‘Their magic is strong,’ Tokresh protested.

‘The very magnitude of their spells should whet your desires,’ Lascilion told him. ‘The greater the effort to protect, the more magnificent the reward that waits for those with the determination to press on.’ He tapped the fleshy scroll against his breastplate. ‘Amala has seen the walls of a city just beyond the mountains. A day, less than a day, and we shall stand before those walls.’ A cruel smile twisted Lascilion’s leonine face. ‘We will tear down those walls. We will fall upon the city that stands beyond them. The last city of Shyish will be our playground. Your kinsmen will be free to loot and pillage, to defile and desecrate. You will abandon yourselves in murder and delight, and every indulgence will be an offering to Great Slaanesh.’

Greed and lust shone in the eyes of Tokresh. He had heard the stories from his tribe’s elders about the old days, when the hordes of Chaos had descended upon the mighty kingdoms and cities of Shyish. Long had he dreamed of such wantonness and savagery. ‘I will tell my people,’ he said. ‘We will see this city.’

‘You will do more than see it,’ Lascilion promised. ‘You will tear it apart. After we have finished, nothing of flesh or stone will have been spared our attentions. Nulahmia exists only to sate our desires.’

The warlord watched Tokresh as he marched back to his tribe. Lascilion had rekindled the chieftain’s lust, but not his loyalty. When the battle began, he would give the Sorroweaters the honour of acting as the vanguard. Whatever defenders Nulahmia possessed, they could inflict the worst of their efforts against the marauders. They would expend resources and spare Lascilion the effort of dealing with Tokresh later.

Lascilion’s tongue slithered out and licked the air once more. The exquisite taste of depravity burned his senses like an exotic spice. When the walls came down, he would lead his Amethyst Guard through the rubble. Let the others indulge their petty appetites. For Lascilion, there could be no treasure more precious than the creature that could preside over such a legacy of atrocity.

Neferata would be his.

CHAPTER TWO

From behind the battlements atop the Jackal Gate, Lord Harkdron glared down at the wormfields. A vast stretch of loamy ground spotted with ghoulish stands of morgueweed and the cadaverous blooms of cryptfronds, the fields were a carefully prepared killing ground for any foe so reckless as to threaten Nulahmia. Every foot of ground bore its hidden, eldritch mark, visible only to those versed in the dark art of necromancy. Each sigil denoted the distance from the walls, allowing the necromancers and vampires gathered on the ramparts to direct the arrows of the skeletal regiments under their command with fiendish precision.

There were more malefic magics bound into the morbid soil of the wormfields. Pockets of lethal corpse-gas erupted at a gesture from the necromancers, bursting beneath the marching feet of the Chaos horde and searing the life from their veins. Nests of marrow-maggots bubbled up from the earth to fasten their leech-like mouths about the toes and ankles of the invaders, digging fresh burrows in living flesh. The broken, mangled dead that over the centuries had been dumped into the wormfields like so much rubbish were reanimated with a spark of dark magic, clawing up to the surface. The maimed, battered things were too miserable to visit any true hurt upon the foe, but their noxious presence brought fear and confusion to the barbarians and beastmen, slowing their advance as they probed the ground ahead of them with spear and axe.

Crackling bolts of death magic hurtled down from the gnarled hands and skull-tipped staves of necromancers, withering clutches of brutish invaders at every turn. Gravestones launched from catapults smashed down upon the savage herds of horned gors. Spears of bone loosed from ballistas impaled hulking Chaos warriors, tearing through their heavy armour in sprays of gore. Showers of arrows rained down from the walls, lancing through the flesh of mutants and marauders. Havoc and carnage riddled the Chaos horde, yet still they came onward, trampling their wounded and dead underfoot as they continued their march.

Harkdron scowled at the enemy’s tenacity. He had expected them to relent under such punishment, to slink away in fright at the losses they were suffering. Perhaps he had grown too accustomed to the craven, servile mortals who dwelt in Nulahmia. Maybe it was his contempt for these crude, decadent creatures that made him underestimate them. Whatever the cause, Harkdron had to admit that the victory he had promised Neferata wouldn’t be as simple as he had thought it would be. The vampire could feel his queen’s eyes on him, watching him from her palace on the Throne Mount. He could feel her evaluating him, judging his every decision, noting his every mistake.

The Slaaneshi dead that littered the wormfields would be small consolation to his queen if Harkdron failed to keep them off the walls. Already there had been a few determined warbands that had managed to bring ladders to within a hundred yards of Nulahmia before the undead shot them down. A section of the Vulture Reach had been reduced to a steaming quagmire by the spells of a Chaos sorcerer. Other witches and warlocks cast withering lights and bolts of fiery magic up at the defenders, decimating scores of skeletal warriors beyond the potential of reanimation. One goat-headed shaman held his scalp-laden staff towards the Jackal Gate and evoked a soporific cloud that reduced a pair of deathmages to babbling wretches. Harkdron ordered his grave guard to dispatch the maddened spellcasters, then set his own magic against the bestial shaman. A bolt of dark energy speared down from his hand and burst the beastman’s heart. The shaman’s herd bleated in fright and fell back from the Jackal Gate.

The vampire lord looked away from the routed gors. He scowled at the sight of a large company of men and beasts advancing towards the Jackal Gate. At a glance Harkdron could tell these were more formidable foes than the marauders and brayherds they had faced thus far. This would be the main effort; he could feel it in his bones. Not only were these Chaos warriors better armed and equipped than the rest of the horde, but they also drew a hulking siege tower after them.

Harkdron stared at the tower behind the advancing horde, a mammoth cylinder of iron and wood, its top bound by a crown-like cap. He saw men behind the exposed framework of the tower, clinging to chains and ropes as the siege engine rolled forwards. He snarled a command to the ballistas mounted atop the Jackal Gate, directing them to engage the tower. As they hurled their missiles at the siege engine, a purplish light shimmered around the structure, shattering the bolts before they could strike it. Harkdron cursed at the stifled attack. He snapped a command to one of the necromancers who had survived the shaman’s spell, but even bolts of dark magic couldn’t pierce the arcane wards that shielded the structure. The enemy had their own fell magic to draw upon, and it seemed the most potent of their sorcery had been directed to keeping the tower from harm.

The vampire observed the tower’s advance with suspicion. Why was there only one tower? Were the invaders so arrogant that they thought they could seize the city from a single foothold? To defend the walls Harkdron had roused battalions of grave guard from their deathless sleep, and summoned dread wight kings from the oldest tombs to command them. Wherever the enemy brought their tower, they would find a remorseless foe waiting to receive them.

If such was truly their plan. Harkdron wondered if the tower was simply a ruse, a trick to capture his attention. All the elaborate precautions to protect it were perhaps nothing more than flavouring to make the deception more convincing. Down there, among the teeming mass of brayherds and warbands, the invaders might be hiding grapnels and ladders, or even more esoteric means of scaling the walls. The malignant spirits entombed beneath the gatehouses might claim some of the attackers, the skeleton warriors atop the walls still more, but if the assault was spread broadly enough, the foe might yet succeed in their purpose.

Harkdron gripped the edge of the crenulations before him, his fingers digging into the limestone as he gnashed his fangs in frustration. He wouldn’t abide the shame of failing his queen. Neferata was just cruel enough to let him linger in disgrace rather than destroying him outright. She had charged him with keeping the enemy outside the walls. If even a single barbarian made it into Nulahmia, he would know the queen’s wrath.

The tower. Deception or arrogance? Harkdron had to know. Pulling off his left gauntlet, he raised his bared hand to his mouth and brought his fangs stabbing into his pallid flesh. The stagnant blood of his undead veins bubbled up from the wound. Stretching out his hand, holding his bloodied palm towards the crawling tower, the vampire hissed an incantation. He was calling upon the vicious hunters that nested deep within the Black Grotto, calling to them in their hungry slumbers. He felt the creatures stirring, answering his call. Soon they would take wing and come to claim the prey he had chosen for them.

Harkdron smiled as he anticipated the onslaught to come. The invaders had preserved their tower against a few spells and spears, but how would they fare against a few hundred ravenous fell bats?

The shrieking, chirping cacophony that wailed across the wormfields drew every eye skyward. Lascilion was no exception. He cursed when he saw the swarm of gigantic bats that flittered above his army. Each of the monsters was as large as a horse, leathery wings torn and tattered, mangy fur peeling away from rotten flesh and yellowed bones. Sorcerous fires gleamed in the hollows of their broad faces, blazing with the most bitter malignancy.

Lascilion shouted commands to the warriors around him, calling them to guard against attack from above. The warning, he soon discovered, was unnecessary. The huge bats took no notice of the men and beastmen below but instead sped onwards. He cursed when he understood the objective towards which the fiends were flying. The aerial horrors were making for the great column of iron and wood his warriors were rolling towards the walls of Nulahmia.

‘With me,’ Lascilion snapped at his bodyguard. Arrayed in heavy coats of mail that glistened with stolen jewels and plundered gemstones, the Amethyst Guard looked too ostentatious to be dangerous. Many foes had spilled their lives on the axes of Lascilion’s warriors after dismissing them as pampered fops. The Amethyst Guard were connoisseurs of the blade, relishing the excitement of combat with the same ardour as a drunkard with his wine. In the whole of his horde, there were no fiercer fighters than these refined killers, at least not among his mortal followers.

Even with the Amethyst Guard ready to follow him, Lascilion hesitated as he drew the reins of his snake-like steed and turned its head towards the threatened siege engine. The swarm of bats was nearly on its objective now, rancid bits and pieces falling from their decayed bodies as they swooped in for the attack. He couldn’t reach the hulking spire of iron and wood in time to intercept the enemy. The wards and charms the horde’s sorcerers and shaman had woven to protect the construction from hostile magic would be of little effect against the undead bats. It was doubtful any of the warriors near the siege engine would climb up to confront the attackers; they were too aware of what it would mean if they were to fall inside the framework.

Lascilion looked away as the first of the bats struck at the framework, scrabbling at the iron fastenings, gnashing its fangs against the wooden supports. Instead, he studied the distance between the siege engine and the walls of Nulahmia. A bark of grim laughter rumbled from the warlord. Neferata had waited too long to unleash her flock. She had let Lascilion get too close, let his horde draw too near the atmosphere of wickedness and depravity that saturated her city. He could feel the defiled energy reaching out to him. Soon it would reach out to others, invigorating and intoxicating his warriors, feeding their lust for conquest. There was naught that her bats could do now to change the situation.

Or was there? Lascilion turned back to the great spire. The upper reaches were now coated in the leathery wings and decaying bodies of the giant bats. He could imagine the raw terror pounding through the hearts of those within the spire as the ravenous monsters tried to tear their way inside to reach them. It always struck Lascilion as ironic how even a man who knows he is going to die can still feel fear in such magnitude. Of course so few appreciated the strange relish of fear, or the thrill of anticipating one’s own mortality. Rare were those who could truly appreciate the art of a novel death.

‘Hold,’ Lascilion told his bodyguard as he stood up in his saddle. In a single motion, he drew Pain and Torment from their scabbards and held both swords above his head. As the two blades touched, a nimbus of purple light flashed from the contact, a signal to the siege masters following behind the lumbering spire.

Another flash of purple fire answered Lascilion, a flicker that started just behind the spire and then quickly grew into a conflagration that swept up the skeletal framework. Like a colossal torch, the whole of the spire was quickly engulfed in the sorcerous flame, from the base of the wheeled carriage to the spiked crown at its summit. The undead bats were consumed in the arcane pyre, some of the vermin trying to fly away, spinning through the air like blazing torches before plummeting earthward. Others were immolated as they clung to the framework of iron, their wings curling into charred strips, their bodies bursting as the deathly gases within them exploded.

Shrieks of nigh-unbelievable torment sounded from the spire. From top to bottom, the occupants were caught in the same flame that had devoured the bats. It was a fire that seared not only the flesh but the soul as well. Lacking the vitality to feed the abominable sorcery, the undead bats had been destroyed outright, but for the living victims within, a far more lingering and excruciating doom was their lot. What the vampires had mistaken as the crew of a siege tower were in fact offerings, sacrifices chained inside the framework, mortal fuel to feed an infernal flame.

The flames wouldn’t burn long. Had the bats set upon the spire a moment sooner, Lascilion would have faced a potential catastrophe. The undead had waited too long, however. The flames would last until the weapon was pulled to the walls. Indeed, the extra measure of fear the fell bats had extracted from the sacrifices was lending the fire an even greater potency.

Lascilion watched in fascination as the spire swung downwards. The Chaos horde scattered as the blazing framework slammed down upon the bed of the wheeled carriage. Ahead of the gigantic conveyance, immense mammoths were being harnessed to drag the construction forwards, their angry trumpets echoing across the wormfields. Small streamers of purple fire flickered along their harnesses, scorching the immense war mammoths and goading them to pull faster towards the city.

Howling his delight, the giant daemon Mendeziron marched to the rear of the carriage and gripped the base of the prone spire with his four arms, clinging to it as though to a lost lover. The agonies of the burning sacrifices rushed through him, blazing through his monstrous frame. The enormous daemon reared back, shrieking in obscene ecstasy. Scores of nearby marauders collapsed as the sound smashed down upon them, overwhelming their minds in a riot of sensation.

Mendeziron’s cry echoed back into the Realm of Chaos, reaching into the senses of his kindred daemons. The burning spire acted as a beacon to the ravening hosts that scratched at the barriers of reality. Shimmering rents opened across the wormfields, disgorging packs of depraved creatures. Lithe daemonettes with sinuous bodies and monstrous claws sprang from the fissures opened by Mendeziron’s shriek. Crab-like fiends scuttled out of glowing cracks, squealing with infernal delight as they drew in the debauched scent of Nulahmia.

The Keeper of Secrets cried out again, and in reply more daemons came creeping out from the gashes inflicted by his malign power. The defenders now realised the true nature of the siege weapon Lascilion’s horde had built. Not a tower to climb the walls, but an arcane altar to summon a daemon army to tear them down. A storm of arrows pelted the carriage, bolts of necromancy crackled from the claws of vampires and the staves of deathmages, stones flew from the arms of catapults. None of the attacks were sufficient to overcome the malignant magics that rippled across the fallen spire. Arrows were reduced to ash as they hit the purple flames, skull projectiles shattered into bony fragments and wisps of impotent enchantment, spells fizzled out into clouds of harmless smoke.

The agonies of the mammoths pulling the carriage drove them to ever-greater effort. By the time the purple fires overcame them and left them sprawled along the ground, the carriage had come less than a hundred yards from the Jackal Gate. Still shrieking his ghastly cry, drawing more daemons onto the wormfields, Mendeziron stepped down from the now-unmoving altar. His body steaming with purple flames, the daemon took hold of the burning spire. Wrenching it from the carriage, the Keeper of Secrets dragged it towards the gate. As a last effort by the defenders to halt the daemon, a torrent of boiling blood spilled from the jaws of the stone jackal that looked out over the gate, but it was to no avail. The blood sizzled as it struck the flames, sending an eerie crimson mist steaming into the air above the ram.

With a monstrous roar, Mendeziron struck the Jackal Gate – not at the gate itself, however, but at the walls of the gatehouse to the side of the archway. One arm still clenched about the burning spire, the daemon was bristling with the eldritch energies and supernatural sufferings of the sacrificial victims. Enticed to the edge of mania by the depraved atmosphere that saturated the whole of Nulahmia, the daemon’s blow connected with the force of a hundred battering rams. The tremendous magic that fed the purple flames was unleashed in a heartbeat. With a deafening clamour, the entire left side of the Jackal Gate exploded, flung back into the city by the perverse sorcery brought against it. Slabs of stone weighing several tons came slamming down into the streets, pulverising undead defenders, pelting the outer wards of the city with a crushing shower of debris.

Thousands of barbarous war cries boomed across the wormfields as the horde cheered the incredible destruction. A great surge of beasts and men rushed for the immense gap in the wall where the Jackal Gate had been. The Sorroweaters were in the vanguard, their chief Tokresh-khan leading his warriors into the breach. Lascilion saw some of the undead work their way free from the rubble and try to block the marauders, but they were too few to oppose the oncoming tide. An armoured vampire, his cape torn and tattered, appreciated the fact more keenly than the fleshless skeletons and wights he commanded. After cutting down a dozen of Tokresh’s men, the blood-drinker turned and retreated into the city.

Lascilion laughed at the vampire’s flight. The creature was only delaying the inevitable. The rest of Shyish was given to Chaos. Now Nulahmia would be added to those conquests.

Slithering across the rubble, flanked by the Amethyst Guard, the warlord’s steed carried Lascilion into the broad plaza just behind the ruined gate. All around him, swarms of marauders and daemons were streaming into Nulahmia. He saw a brayherd of goat-like gors battering their way into a squat building, and an instant later he heard the screams of the structure’s inhabitants. Neferata had peopled her city with the living as well as the dead, but they were a wretched and broken breed. Men who had spent generations brutalised and oppressed by the vampires would not suddenly discover the courage to fight now.

It was a far different story with the undead who served the Mortarch. The Queensroad, the main avenue through the city, was thronged with legions of armoured skeletons, shambling zombies and even worse horrors. While part of his horde dispersed to sate the obscene appetites that called to them, Lascilion mustered his own reserves of discipline. Twelve warlords had been dispatched by Archaon Everchosen to find Nulahmia and conquer it. Even the Bloodking had failed to conquer the city. Lascilion alone had succeeded. He wouldn’t allow his own desires to turn victory to defeat now, in the final hour.

Lascilion raised Pain and Torment once again, letting the purple light flash a second time. It was a signal, a summons to his horde, a command only the most debauched and depraved would defy. In an army such as his, Lascilion knew there were many who lacked the restraint to deny themselves. He scowled when he saw the hulking figure of Mendeziron lumbering off towards the inner wards, seeking the largest concentrations of mortal victims to glut his daemonic hunger. A great flock of lesser daemons followed the Keeper of Secrets, like scavengers loping after a hunting lion, eager to feed off the predator’s leavings.

The warlord cursed Mendeziron’s disobedience. It was true enough that the daemon had broken the walls and drawn multitudes of his own kind to augment Lascilion’s forces, but clearing the Queensroad would be far more difficult without his might. The lesser daemons and marauders engaging the undead legion were unable to break through the skeletal ranks. Their ferocity and savagery could not break the determination of beings devoid of thought or fear. The undead had to be annihilated, destroyed outright. There would be no rout, no easy victory.

‘With me,’ Lascilion ordered the Amethyst Guard. Digging his spurs into the flanks of his snake-like steed, Lascilion slithered across the skull-paved roadway and between the rows of impaled corpses that lined the street. He tried to deafen himself to the cries of outrage and brutality that rose from the dying city, smothering the urge to feed his own appetites. Later. Later there would be time for any abomination he could imagine. Once the city was conquered.

The warlord turned his face towards the summit of the Throne Mount deep within Nulahmia’s temple district. His forked tongue licked out. He could smell his prey. Neferata was up there, entombed in her palace. Her tyrannical scent was unmistakable. She’d had a long time to perfect her cruelties against her subjects, but Lascilion would show her what it was to truly be devoted to depravity. From her palace, she would listen and watch as Nulahmia perished.

The spectral blaze of the spirit-beacons stabbed into the smoky sky, staining the plumes with a ghostly green luminescence. Phantoms could be dimly glimpsed flickering in and out of the glowing beams, struggling to draw shape and form from the necromantic energies. Far below, spaced about the flattened plateau of the Throne Mount, the immense bone-clad braziers continued to consume the lost souls that fed the beacon lights. The shambling, grotesque creatures that bore the canopic jars to feed the fires were sometimes themselves consumed, their own miserable energies sucked out from their decayed bodies, their crumbling corpses shattering as they struck the bloodstone platforms upon which the braziers stood.

Neferata watched the eerie spectacle from the balcony high up in her palace. How many times had she stood here, gazing down upon her city, revelling in the golden lustre of nostalgia? She was more than queen and Mortarch for Nulahmia; she was the city’s mother. Every structure had been raised to her exacting specifications, demolished and rebuilt until they shone with the glory of perfection. The inhabitants, the mortal subjects who bestowed upon the city its vivacity, had been pampered and nurtured to excess. They wanted for nothing; even the least among them was spoiled beyond the imaginings of most men. They wore robes of velvet and gowns of silk, supped from golden plates and drank from cups of sapphire. Even their deaths were things of splendour, spectacles to be remembered and recorded.

All that Nulahmia had been was vanishing before her eyes. Neferata’s arcane vision allowed her to see through the smoke and darkness that enveloped the city. She could see the Chaos warriors pouring through the shattered Jackal Gate, ransacking and despoiling at will. The beasts and barbarians slaked their crude thirsts upon the flesh of her subjects, glutted their appetite for plunder with the treasures of her people. Among the throng she could see the lithe shapes of creatures devoid of mortal blood, daemonettes that danced through the streets butchering whomever aroused their fiendish interest. The vampire queen felt a shiver course through her. She had faced the handmaidens of Slaanesh before when they had sought her out. It was an experience even she found abhorrent.

Her legions still held the northern limits of the Queensroad, though they were sorely pressed by the forces of Chaos. That they had held this long was a testament to how much of the horde had quit the battle to ravage the city. Had the full might of the horde been loosed against the Queensroad, the enemy would already have prevailed. As it was, they were obliterating the skeletal warriors and zombies faster than her vampires and necromancers could reanimate them. Once the horde was finished there, only the temple district would be left. Then, the enemy would move against the Throne Mount itself.

Neferata raised her gaze to the spirit-beacon. She had resisted lighting the fires for as long as she dared. Perhaps some of her court would be motivated to fight harder if they thought help was coming. The delusion of hope could instil a terrible tenacity in the weak-minded. For her part, she doubted any of her fellow Mortarchs would answer the summons. If they hadn’t been overwhelmed by Archaon’s hordes, then they would be like herself – a hunted thing trying to survive in the shadows. To expose themselves to the enemy simply to relieve Nulahmia was something she doubted the likes of Arkhan or Mannfred would risk. Certainly, if the roles were reversed, she would not go to their aid. Not with the odds so heavily weighed against them.

That fool Harkdron! Neferata had expected him to fail, but she had anticipated an interval during which she could consider her options and plan her next move. The speed with which her consort had been defeated, the rapidity with which the hordes of Chaos had poured into Nulahmia, had caught her off guard.

The vampire queen turned her back on the view of her dying city and watched as one of her handmaidens stepped out onto the balcony. Though she appeared as the merest wisp of a youth, Kemsit had existed for millennia as a creature of the night. In better days, she had attended Neferata on royal hunts into the Cobweb Forest to kill werebloods and flayworms. During the great battles against Archaon’s armies, she had served as both spy and shieldbearer for her queen. Now, as she walked between the skeletal morghasts who flanked the balcony, the expression on her face was vulnerable and uncertain.

‘My queen, Lord Harkdron has returned,’ Kemsit announced, bowing before Neferata.

Neferata’s eyes blazed. For just an instant, her rage focussed upon Kemsit. If any other of her handmaidens had brought such tidings to her, they would have been pitched over the balustrade and down to the streets below. Her attachment to Kemsit made her hesitate for the split second she needed to compose herself. Callous bloodshed had its place, but right now it was cunning and strategy that would serve her best.

‘Send the fool to me,’ Neferata snarled, dismissing Kemsit with an imperious flick of her hand. All effort at remaining composed drained from her as her morghast guards stepped aside and allowed Harkdron onto the balcony. The regal glamour of the queen vanished from her pale face, driven out by the viciousness of a cornered predator. Fury smouldered in her eyes as she watched her lover advance towards her. His armour was battered and dented, soiled with the stinking gore of things human and inhuman alike. As he bowed before her, the vampire’s mail creaked and groaned.

Lord Harkdron kept his face lowered as he bowed to his queen, unable to meet her wrathful gaze. ‘My queen,’ he said, his voice subdued. ‘They were too many. I have failed you.’ He dared to look up at Neferata and immediately fell silent. There was death in his lover’s eyes.

Once more, Neferata hesitated as she forced some of the fury pulsing through her heart to dissipate. Harkdron had failed her, but the wretch still had his uses. ‘Of all my vassals, you have been the most precious to me,’ she told him. ‘I entrusted my city into your care and you vowed you would protect it from harm.’ She thrust a finger at the smoke rising from the burning city. ‘Your failure I could excuse, but you have done worse to me. You have broken your promise.’ Harkdron tried to answer his queen’s anger, but she gestured for him to keep silent.

‘I will give you a chance to prove yourself to me,’ Neferata decreed. ‘The enemy will soon move against the temple district and Throne Mount. A zombie dragon has been summoned as your new steed. It awaits in the crypts. You must keep them off Throne Mount. Help is on the way, but you must hold them.’

Neferata turned and pointed to the gibbous light of the spirit-beacon. Harkdron watched the spectral energies blazing up into the sky. The vampire nodded, a new determination settling across his visage. ‘When next we meet, you will think better of me,’ he swore.

‘See that I do,’ Neferata declared, turning her back on her lover and gazing out across her city. She could hear Harkdron rise and march away, hastening down to the crypts to claim his steed and hurry back into battle. His eagerness to redeem himself in her eyes would have been pathetic if it wasn’t so useful.

From her vantage, Neferata could see that the fighting on the Queensroad was all but over. A few wights and morghasts remained, but the creatures were surrounded by Chaos warriors and beastmen. Even the warlord who led the horde paid the lingering resistance no notice. She saw him slide off the back of his snake-like mount and remove his plumed helm. For an instant, she could feel his eyes staring up at the palace, almost as though the man were seeking her out. The sensation quickly passed. The warlord turned away from Throne Mount and the Queensroad, sprinting towards the nearest building. She soon lost sight of him as he vanished inside what had once been a bathhouse.

Let the scum gratify himself, Neferata thought. Distracting the slaves of Chaos was the last service Nulahmia could render its queen. When the horde turned to the temple district, Harkdron would have his defence organised. He might even hold them at bay for a time.

Neferata smiled, pleased at the act she had put on for Harkdron. The fool would do his best for her because she had led him to believe there was something to hope for. She didn’t ask him to annihilate the horde by himself, only keep them back until help arrived. That was all he needed to do to win his redemption.

Only there would be no redemption. While Harkdron fought, his queen would be making good her escape. Nulahmia was lost, but she needn’t burn with her city. Dozens of catacombs burrowed through Throne Mount, and one of them eventually opened to a realmgate. Neferata had already told Kemsit to prepare her most precious things. With her handmaidens, she would steal into the catacombs and withdraw before the enemy could complete their conquest.

A boom of thunder caused Neferata to look skyward. Somewhere above the smoke and the ghostly glow of the spirit-beacons, she could see vast stormclouds stretching out across the heavens. There was something uncanny in the manner with which the clouds spilled across the sky, as though they were being poured into the air from some phantasmal chalice. She could see flashes of lightning crackling within the angry clouds.

Then, with a near-deafening crack, great sheets of lightning crackled from the sky, forking downwards into the ravaged streets of Nulahmia.

CHAPTER THREE

Knifing down from the clouds, a blinding tempest of lightning slammed into Nulahmia. Across the despoiled sprawl of the noble quarter, where the manors of the city’s deathless elite sprawled across walled estates and morbid gardens, pillars of elemental fury plummeted earthward. Each thunderbolt sent a tremor rolling over the ground and a booming roar surging through the air. Smoke and steam rose from toppled walls and cracked streets, spiralling upwards to merge with the flashing flames of burning ruins. The marauding hordes of Chaos, those nearest to the storm’s violence, turned away from their depredations, staring in confusion at the sudden havoc.

Figures stalked out from the violence of the stormstrike. Huge shapes clad in ebon armour emerged from the smouldering craters inflicted by the lightning, mighty warriors encased in plate, their faces locked behind the glowering masks of their helms. Upon their breastplates they bore the symbol of the comet; on their shields was an anvil wreathed in lightning.

Shouts of obscene glee rose from the rampaging warriors of Chaos when they saw the black-clad knights. Their lust for atrocity whetted by the carnage they had inflicted upon the people of Nulahmia, the devotees of Slaanesh rejoiced at the prospect of further depravity. Howling their debased ululations, they rushed through the backstreets of the noble quarter, leaping over garden walls to converge upon the enemies who had so suddenly manifested among them. Even the most savage of the Slaaneshi creatures could sense the vitality that burned within the knights, for these were no undead horrors conjured by the Mortarch of Blood, but beings of flesh and substance, victims to torment and defile.

The knights met the first foes with swords and axes that crackled with lightning. A score of marauders were struck down in the blink of an eye, dozens of beastkin killed as they charged out from the wreckage of a mortuary garden, and baying hounds slaughtered as they came loping down alleyways. Unlike the snarling and shrieking of their foes, the knights preserved a grim silence as they brought death to the creatures of Chaos, plying their weapons with a stoic purposefulness that had more in common with the unfeeling undead than the wanton savagery of the barbarians.

Leading the remnants of his tribe, the immense Tokresh-khan rushed at the ebon warriors. The chieftain’s bare flesh was stained with the lives of his victims, strings of gruesome trophies dangling from his neck and arms. The barbarian pounded his chest in savage delight when he saw the ranks of enemies ahead of him. The soft, pampered subjects of Nulahmia had perished much too quickly to make a fitting offering for Slaanesh. These bold enemies would provide much more satisfying fare for the jaded god’s appetites.

Before the Sorroweaters and their hulking chief could assault the line of ebon knights, the sinister warriors opened their ranks. From their midst, a great dragon-like reptile lumbered forwards, steam hissing from its nostrils and sparks snapping about its horns. A knight in armour more resplendent than that of his comrades sat upon the beast’s back, a golden halo of metal radiating from the back of his helm and a long cloak hanging from his shoulders. In his hands, the rider gripped an enormous sword that sizzled with divine power. He raised the runesword and pointed it at Tokresh and his tribe.

‘Slaves of Chaos,’ the rider’s mighty voice rumbled, ‘the Anvils of the Heldenhammer bring you judgement. We give you the same mercy you’ve shown your victims.’

The jaws of the giant lizard-steed gaped wide, and from its maw, a blast of blue lightning immolated a swathe of charging marauders. Cries of agony rose from barbarian throats as their bodies were reduced to charred, blackened husks. A litter of smoking corpses lay strewn across the street, fouling the path of the men following after them. The armoured rider didn’t give the barbarians a chance to recover. He urged the scaly dragon-beast onwards, ploughing into the reeling tribe. Reptilian claws and fangs ripped into the barbarians, slashing armour and rending flesh. The dracoth’s lashing tail shattered bone and sent mangled men hurtling through the air. Upon its back, the rider brought his sword flashing down, cleaving through collarbones and splitting skulls with each blow.

Tokresh shuddered at the ferocity of the assault, but his fear only urged him onwards. The novelty of crossing blades with the ebon rider, the prospect of feeling the crackling bite of his reptilian mount – these would present new sensations, fresh delights to be experienced. For the first time in many years, the almost-forgotten delight of anticipation flowed through the chieftain’s veins.

He waited until the dracoth had set its jaws about the torso of a shrieking tribesman and the rider was plunging his sword into the breast of a fur-clad reaver before he lunged at his foe. Tokresh was stunned by the speed with which the rider reacted and the incredible strength he displayed. When the knight brought his sword whipping around to block Tokresh’s attack, he fairly flung the body of his dying enemy at the chieftain. Tokresh felt the impact throbbing through his bones, could almost hear the ensorcelled steel of his axe split as it met the intercepting blade.

‘Tokresh-khan will feed your soul to Slaanesh,’ he growled at the ebon knight. He brought his axe swinging around for another blow, putting all the strength in his brutish frame into the attack.

The rider met the assault with withering scorn. His crackling sword cleaved through the head of the axe, slashing Tokresh’s face with shards of metal. ‘Your god goes hungry tonight,’ he told the chieftain as he brought the sword’s edge raking across his throat.

Tokresh saw the sky flash above him then watched as the world rose up around him. His last sight was of the ebon rider and his mount. A hulking figure with tattooed and scarred flesh swayed unsteadily beside the reptilian creature. It was only when the headless bulk crashed to the street that he understood the body was his own. The realisation was a last novelty to speed him into the darkness.

The smell of burning flesh and spilled blood filled Lascilion’s senses like the aroma of sweet perfume. Cries of agony fell upon him like music. He could taste the smoke of blazing homes, could feel the warm lick of destruction tingling across his skin. Too long. It had been too long since he had felt these things, since he had surrendered himself to the abandonment of sensuality.

The Lord of Slaanesh finished buckling his breastplate, tightening the straps until he felt the delicious bite of leather digging into his flesh. He took up his plumed helm from where he had tossed it aside on the gore-stained floor, a goat-headed beastman sprawled where it had fallen after refusing to surrender to Lascilion’s urges. He stared for a moment at the tangle of purple entrails that spilled from the dead gor, caught up in the play of hue and shade as firelight flickered across the slimy organs. A moan from the thing that was splayed upon the wall behind him broke the fascination. The warlord glanced back at the creature he had pinned across the tile mosaic with the same knives he had played across its flesh. With all the skin removed, it was difficult to determine sex or age, not that such matters were of consequence to him. Since leaving the Queensroad to satisfy his appetites, Lascilion had claimed many victims. It was tiresome to remember them all.

As he stepped out into the street, Lascilion saw the amusing sight of his steed crushing some shapeless mass of meat and bone in its coils. He wondered if it was one of his own warriors or some luckless Nulahmian who had caught the daemon’s notice. Either way, he was certain their final moments had been deliciously excruciating.

He was less pleased to find Amala crouched upon an overhanging archway. The mutant stretched out one of her talons, displaying for him another one of her flesh-scrolls. Lascilion’s displeasure mounted as he read the winged monstrosity’s report. The black lightning he’d seen earlier had indeed struck the outskirts of the city. Amala had flown to investigate and come back describing an army of plate-clad knights unlike any she had seen before. Whoever the warriors were, they were cutting down the scattered elements of Lascilion’s horde that tried to oppose them.

The warlord cast the scroll into the gutter and glowered at the mutant. If he turned his army around, brought them against these strange foes, then the offensive against the temple district would suffer. It mattered little to him how much of his army these knights killed; what he wouldn’t risk was letting Neferata slip through his grasp. The conquest of Nulahmia would be a pyrrhic victory if the vampire queen escaped.

‘Bring me the Siren!’ Lascilion growled at Amala. The winged mutant had expected the command. Unfolding one of her beetle-like wings, she gestured at his steed and the object wrapped in its coils. On his order, the daemonic mount withdrew from its captive. What had been caught in its sinuous body was no being of flesh and blood, but the lithe body of another daemon, one of Slaanesh’s daemonettes.

Nothing remained of the warrior whose flesh served as the Siren’s vessel. The possession had erased his being entirely. Now there was only the Siren. Cast in the voluptuous semblance of a sensuous maiden, the daemonette’s beauty was marred by the barbed claw that engulfed one of her arms and the nodules of horns that sprouted from her scalp. The fibrous mane of hair that flowed down her bare shoulders was more like the fur of some anemone than anything that should grow from a woman’s head. The face was a maddening admixture of desire and horror, lustrous lips parting to reveal needle-like fangs and dagger-like tongue. In her eyes burned a rapacious hunger even more fierce than that of Lascilion himself. Only the coils of his steed had prevented the Siren from slipping away to glut herself on obscenities.

‘I am the chosen of Slaanesh,’ Lascilion reminded the snarling Siren. He raised his hand to his head, pushing back his hair to display the mark that grew just behind his ear. ‘My will is your command, my word is your law.’ He saw resentment smother hunger in her glare. He had been the one who summoned her and gave her a mantle of flesh to possess in the Mortal Realms. That power over her was a festering bitterness in the Siren’s mind. He was indifferent to the daemon’s anger. Let her hate, so long as she obeyed. He gestured to the gnarled horn hanging from the straps of the leather bodice she wore. ‘Sound your horn,’ he demanded. ‘I have need of my army.’

The Siren raised the grisly instrument to her lips, biting down upon it with her sharp fangs. The note that resounded from the infernal horn was less a sound than a vibration, a call that was heard not with the ear but with the soul. Anything that bore the mark of Slaanesh, anything that had sworn itself to the Prince of Chaos, would feel the call reverberating through them. Some, too debased and primitive to understand, would refuse the summons, content to indulge themselves on petty pleasures.

Most would come. Tribes and herds and covens, they would flock to the summons. Lascilion knew this. The greater their orgy of depravity, the more irresistible the call would become. The havoc they had inflicted on the city was but an appetiser, something to whet their hunger. Greater delights awaited them in the ornate halls of Neferata’s palace, pleasures undreamed and unspoken. Across the burning city, he could hear other horns being blown as more daemonettes hearkened to the call and rallied the ravagers to them. Throughout the city, his forces were converging, becoming once more an army of conquest.

Lascilion snapped his fingers and his serpentine steed lowered itself so that he could step into its saddle. Spurring the daemonic beast onward, the Lord of Slaanesh hastened to rejoin his Amethyst Guard. His course took him across crumbling avenues and corpse-strewn boulevards, the wreckage of a city on the edge of collapse. He fought the temptation to linger over the scenes of atrocity he passed, to study them with artistic appreciation. He had to remember his discipline, had to maintain his focus.

The intoxicating soul-scent of Neferata was more than a trail to follow now. It was his guide, his purpose. To Lascilion, it had the savour of ambrosia, a gift from Slaanesh himself if the warlord could but find the perseverance to claim it.

Lord-Celestant Makvar scowled at the few Sorroweaters who tried to flee back the way they had come. Arrows from the Judicators behind him brought the barbarians down, bolts of lightning stabbing into their backs. There was no pity to be spared for such degenerates. The creatures of Chaos warranted no respect in battle. They were a pestilence, vermin to be crushed underfoot and exterminated with utter dispatch.

Firelight flickered from the dark armour of Makvar’s Stormcasts, the glow of a dying city. The Chaos horde had been thorough in their campaign of havoc and destruction. Somewhere deep within him, he could feel revulsion for the depravity that was on display here. That many of the perpetrators of such outrages wore at least the semblance of humanity only made their crimes more abominable. The Ruinous Powers were aptly named and the greatest ruin they left behind was the blackened souls of those who worshipped them.

Makvar looked across the wanton devastation all around him. Nowhere had been spared the spectacle of violence and horror. Smoke and flame gushed from the windows of slender towers, blackening their marble facades. Mangled bodies bobbed in the alabaster basins of elegant fountains, darkening their waters with the corruption of death. Plunder lay heaped in courtyards, precious jewels glittering among stacks of stolen cutlery and crystal goblets, elegant tapestries sprawled beside bloodied piles of silk robes. The primitive despoilers had even pried wood wainscotting from walls and carved shutters from windows. Two ornate doors, ripped from their fastenings, leaned against a wall as though standing guard over the sandstone statuary collected beside them.

Nulahmia had been a rich city. It pained Makvar to see its splendour blotted out. Across the realms, the hordes of Chaos had already taken so much, destroyed so many things. Now here was yet another outrage to be added to the tally.

The Lord-Celestant let the sense of righteous fury smoulder in his heart. The God-King, Sigmar, had not sent him to the Realm of Death simply to avenge the destruction of Nulahmia. There was a greater purpose to the deployment of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. Makvar had been sent into Shyish to broker a treaty with the Mortarch of Blood, to renew the old alliances that had once seen the armies of death fight alongside Sigmar’s pantheon against their common foe. Saving the city had no place in the God-King’s plan, not when there were far more things of incomparably vast import at stake. Knowing this, accepting it, didn’t lessen Makvar’s disgust at the ravages of the Slaaneshi hordes.

He would use that fury, harness it, draw strength from it. Makvar and his Anvils of the Heldenhammer had descended upon Nulahmia to the rear of the Chaos hordes, where the enemy was dispersed and distracted by their pillaging. The Slaaneshi forces would have no time to converge upon them before the Stormcasts brought the fight to the barbarians.

‘Form ranks!’ Makvar called out, his voice echoing from behind the mask of his helm. ‘Liberators to the fore! Judicators at the centre! Paladins to the rear!’ He tugged the reins of Gojin’s harness, urging the dracoth to one side as the Stormcasts spread out across the road, stretching across it in a solid wall of ebon sigmarite plate. At his signal, the knights began to march deeper into the city. Woe betide whatever stood in their path, be it depraved barbarian, prowling beast or capering daemon.

From the midst of the marching Stormcasts, an officer with a golden halo about his stern helm and a shuttered lantern chained to his belt moved towards where Makvar sat astride his reptilian steed. Lord-Castellant Vogun dipped his halberd in salute to his commander before addressing him. ‘We have suffered no casualties from this skirmish,’ he reported, ‘but I fear we cannot depend on the enemy to throw themselves at us in so piecemeal and reckless a manner. Lord-Relictor Kreimnar is concerned that the stormstrike has put us too far from our objective.’

Makvar shook his head. ‘Sigmar has placed us where we need to be,’ he stated. ‘From this position, we can strike at the enemy where he is weakest and slaughter him before he can bring his greater numbers to bear.’ He pointed between the burning towers and smoking rooftops, indicating the flat-topped Throne Mount and the immense palace spread across it. The ghostly spirit-beacons stabbed their light skyward from behind those walls. ‘Chaos has yet to complete its conquest. The one we seek will be behind those walls. Queen Neferata is too vain to suffer the despoiling of her palace while her forces have strength to defy the enemy. The grace and might of Sigmar has given us passage through the veils of illusion by which Nulahmia was hidden. Now it is left to us to carve a path through the disorder of the enemy and reach the Mortarch’s stronghold.’

Vogun shifted uneasily as he heard Makvar’s speech. ‘Sigmar grant that we do not trade one evil for another,’ he said. He brought the butt of his halberd cracking down against the ground. Embedded in the roadway, frozen in a soundless scream, was a fleshless skull. One of many dispersed between the flagstones. ‘This city was beset by depravity long before Chaos breached the walls.’

‘These lands have been without the light of Sigmar for a long time,’ Makvar said. ‘They have been forced to find other sources of strength.’ He looked skyward once more, at the ghoulish spirit-beacons. ‘Sometimes to fight a monster, you must become a monster.’

The hordes of Chaos were advancing upon the temple district once more. From scattered bands of ravaging sadists, they were regrouping into an army again, an enemy united in malignant purpose. Neferata watched them for a while, saw the fur-clad marauders and armoured Chaos warriors crashing against the legions of skeletal warriors Harkdron now led. The vampire’s defence was tenacious, but he couldn’t do more than hold back the tide. The forces of Chaos knew that victory was within their grasp. All they had to do was smash through the undead to claim it.

The vampire queen watched as a file of grave guard was overwhelmed and the first invaders reached the Pathway of Punishment, the great road that climbed Throne Mount to end at the very gates of her palace. Neferata turned her back on the scene, withdrawing from the balcony into the shadows of her antechamber. Kismet and her other handmaidens were waiting for her, ready to attend their queen. Neferata unclasped the bloodstone broach that held her gown in place. The sable folds collapsed about her feet. A single step and she was free of them and gliding towards her attendants.

‘Quickly,’ Neferata snapped at her handmaidens. It was not modesty that provoked the demand that they redress her at once, but rather a sense of urgency. Neferata stamped her foot with impatience as the vampires slid a silken underdress up her naked body and drew a padded surcoat down her shoulders. Bit by bit, Kismet and the others strapped pieces of ornate armour to her, encasing her lithe frame in ancient plates of wightbone and steel. She could feel the protective enchantments woven into each piece growing, surrounding her in a shell of defensive magic. The golden war-crown of Lahmia dropped about her head, framing her face in the royal splendour of antiquity.

Kismet bowed before the queen, offering with outstretched hands the infamous Dagger of Jet. Countless innocents had perished upon that blade, the purity of their souls swelling the deadly magics bound into the dark dagger. Neferata nodded, raising her arms so that her servant might buckle the weapon belt about her waist. From another handmaiden, she received the potent Staff of Pain, each hieroglyph etched into its ancient haft laced with agonising sorceries and diabolical curses.

Arrayed in the accoutrements of war, Neferata looked down at Kismet. ‘You will remain here and keep things in order,’ she said. Was it disappointment or relief she saw flicker through her handmaiden’s eyes? She couldn’t be certain and it would make no difference. There was no other she could trust to keep the escape route ready for her in the event this gambit failed.

Neferata listened to the screams rising from Nulahmia. There was nothing that could be done to save her city now. It was lost, defiled and despoiled. Whatever the hordes of Chaos didn’t destroy would be too unclean to salvage. The very air would bear the taint of their triumph. No, her city was finished, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to be gained here.

The strange lightning that had slammed down into the outskirts, the weird warriors she had discovered in her scrying stone – these were things that presented opportunity for Neferata. For some time now, her agents in other kingdoms in the realm had brought her stories of storm-knights who opposed the hordes of Chaos wherever they were to be found. From captives and converts of a hundred lands, she had heard tales that these knights had been seen in Shyish, seeking the Mortarchs, trying to reforge the ancient pacts that had once united the Realm of Death and the Realm of Heavens against the corruption of Chaos.

Much might be gained by the one who received these emissaries of Azyr. They would be powerful allies if even part of the stories told about them were true. Neferata smiled to herself as she imagined the advantages she would enjoy. There was no man alive who could resist her charms and no mind clever enough to see through her intrigues. To wrap an alliance with Sigmar around her own ambitions was a prospect too enticing to jeopardise. She always considered the crudity of battle a last resort, but she couldn’t allow this opportunity to slip away.

The storm-knights had found Nulahmia despite all her spells and illusions. Neferata wondered if they might do the same with the other Mortarchs. Though she didn’t know where they had hidden themselves, or even if they yet lived, the knights might. She couldn’t risk another Mortarch spoiling the chance to establish an alliance with these warriors. Worse, she couldn’t allow the likes of Mannfred to exploit the storm-knights before she could.

Neferata stretched forth the Staff of Pain, letting the ancient relic add its own magic to her spell. Thrusting the gilded head of the staff towards the balcony, she drew upon the morbid essence of her palace, channelling it into the conjuration. Necromantic energies crackled and flashed through the archway, condensing into an expanding sphere of darkness.

Gradually, something took shape within that sphere, a fleshless apparition that swelled in size with each crackle of arcane power. Huge blackened ribs, claws as long as swords, massive plates of bronze and gold, an immense eyeless mask – all of these flowed into existence around a clattering core of skulls. Gigantic jaws stretched out from beneath the mask, fangs snapping at the spectral shapes that rippled around the huge, leonine creature. A tail of fused bone stretched out from the beast’s hindquarters until it was a dozen feet and more in length, a wicked barb thrusting out from its tip.

Neferata walked back out onto the balcony as the energies of the summoning dissipated and left a huge, skeletal abomination standing beside the balustrade. The grisly horror was Nagadron the Adevore, a dread abyssal bound into the Mortarch’s service.The Mortarch of Blood mounted the undead beast. At her gesture, Nagadron rose into the air, carried upon the spirits of those who had died to give it shape and substance. Neferata could hear them wailing to her, despairing of their plight. A simple spell deafened her to the ghostly protests. She was in no mood for such distractions now. She had to see these storm-knights for herself, determine to her own satisfaction their strength and capabilities. Only then would she know if she should linger over the bones of Nulahmia or make good her escape through the realmgate.

Behind the vampire queen, the skeletal morghasts flew after her, their phantom wings carrying them through the sky. Loyal beyond the limitations of mere flesh, her bodyguard would follow Neferata into the very Realm of Chaos should she demand it of them. For now, it was enough that they kept close to her. She had no intention of leading the defenders on the Pathway of Punishment or the other undead legions that yet struggled to protect the temple district. That task was Harkdron’s, and the fool was welcome to it.

No, Neferata was after much bigger things.

Mouldering armour and bleached bone crashed to the ground as Lascilion brought his glaive shearing through the advancing rank of skeletons. Around him, the warriors of his Amethyst Guard shattered limbs and smashed skulls with each swing of their axes and thrust of their swords. The fighters who followed behind those in front were careful to visit further destruction upon the bones of the fallen, smashing and scattering the vanquished foes. Too often during their slow slog up the Pathway of Punishment, some deathmage or vampire had infused the vanquished skeletons with a new store of unnatural vitality. Many marauders, and even a few of his Amethyst Guard, had been killed by such treacherous sorcery. It was the delay such tactics caused rather than the casualties inflicted that wore on the warlord’s temper.

Since spurring his steed onto the Pathway of Punishment, Lascilion’s obsession with conquering Neferata had swollen beyond measure. Everywhere he turned, he was confronted by the gruesome evidence of the Mortarch’s depravity. He felt humbled to behold such a blend of savagery and artistry. It was an effort to compose himself as he gazed upon the sadistic displays. Rows of iron spikes lined the road, a severed head gracing each stake. Gibbets cast their morbid shadows across the way, withered bodies contorted inside each cage, mummified faces stretched in expressions of incredible misery. At each turn of the switchback avenue, torture wheels waited to greet the invaders, the corpses strapped to each instrument betraying almost unimaginable brutality in their broken bones. Pillories with shards of glass lining each opening were interspersed along each approach, rusty stains flowing down their sides in mute testament to the fate of their prisoners when endurance at last deserted them.

Had the cavalcade of horrors been merely an ornament of past tyranny, Lascilion would have been impressed. Instead he was fascinated, captivated by the outrages of the vampire queen. Neferata had employed her dark arts to instil in the exposed corpses of her victims a heinous echo of life, compelling them to languish in their death agonies. Bodiless heads moaned from atop their spikes, withered skeletons begged for food from behind the bars of gibbets, bloodless corpses struggled in the grip of glass-edged stocks, vainly trying to keep their slashed veins away from the wicked shards.

Yes, Neferata was indeed a fellow artist, a connoisseur of agony. It was small wonder that her soul-scent had called to Lascilion, had allowed him to pierce the arcane veils that hid her city. Never had he experienced a mind so in harmony with his own. Once she was subjugated, once she was exposed to the glories of Slaanesh, she would be a fitting consort for him. Together they would rebuild the wonders and obscenities of the lost god.

Lascilion stabbed his spurs into the sides of his daemonic steed, forcing the creature to raise its sinuous body upwards. His forked tongue flickered in irritation at the seemingly endless ranks of fleshless warriors who filled the road before him. Beyond them, he could see the vampire general from the Jackal Gate using his magic to invigorate the undead legion. The vampire had secured the decayed carcass of a dragon to act as his mount, scaly strips of rotten meat dripping from its yellowed bones. Knowing that such a monster was ahead of them might have blunted the zeal of his warriors as they fought their way up the path, so Lascilion was careful to keep the presence of the dragon to himself. When the time came, he would employ his sorcerers and daemons to overcome the beast.

The roar of conflict from far below drew Lascilion’s attention away from the skeletal defenders ahead of him. Peering down the slopes of the Throne Mount, he could see the despoiled streets of the city below. Clutches of beasts and barbarians yet ravaged the outlying districts, and at first he thought it was infighting among these warbands that he had heard. He was swiftly disabused of such misconceptions.

Marching out from the burning city was a phalanx of armoured warriors unlike anything Lascilion had seen before. From head to toe, they were arrayed in ebon plates and the mighty hammers they bore crackled with dark flashes of lightning. These were the foes Amala had spotted, the enemies she had warned the warlord about. Now, as he watched them stalk towards the temple district, Lascilion appreciated the reason the mutant had been so alarmed. The rearguard he had left at the base of the mountain wasn’t half as strong as it needed to be. These lightning-men would plough through the tribes and herds at the rear in short order unless he reinforced them swiftly.

Lascilion glanced up in the direction of the Mortarch’s palace. He resented anything that would delay his conquest, felt the tugging of depression at his heart as he contemplated the frustration of his desires. There was no other choice to be made. He had to deal with the threat posed by these lightning-men, had to annihilate their menace before his army was trapped between two enemy forces.

‘Mendeziron!’ the warlord shouted, thrusting his glaive at the ranks of lightning-men advancing towards the mountain. He wasn’t certain where the great daemon was, what diversion he had found to amuse himself in the defiled city. Wherever he was, the Keeper of Secrets would hear his command. He would hear, and obey.

Lascilion hoped Neferata was watching. When Mendeziron was roused, there was no limit to his cruelty. The daemon might even teach her a thing or two about torment.

CHAPTER FOUR

Howling reavers crumpled before the onslaught of the advancing Stormcasts. Marching in formation, shields foremost, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer were like a moving wall of sigmarite as they marched through the temple district and towards the slopes of the Throne Mount. Such enemies as refused to give ground before the black-armoured knights were smashed by the crackling heads of mighty warhammers or chopped down by flashing swords. The Judicators following behind the protection of the shield-bearing Liberators raised their bows and sent volleys of lightning searing down into their brutish foemen.

Yard by yard, Lord-Celestant Makvar could see their objective drawing nearer. At the same time, he watched the Chaos forces upon the Pathway of Punishment with dismay. As rapidly as the Stormcasts were gaining ground, the vanguard of the Slaaneshi horde was cutting their own route through the undead.

‘We must draw their attention from the summit,’ Makvar declared, addressing his words to Lord-Relictor Kreimnar. Among the grim Anvils of the Heldenhammer, Kreimnar presented a sinister figure. His skull-shaped helm and the macabre ornamentation of his ancient hammer were trappings that wouldn’t have looked out of place adorning a wight king or Soulblight vampire. Kreimnar had a greater affinity for spirits and sorcery than any of his comrades, often experiencing eerie premonitions and uncanny twists of fortune.

The Lord-Relictor looked up towards the pinnacle of Throne Mount and the ghostly spirit-beacons blazing into the sky. ‘Neferata calls for help. Even if no other purpose drives them onward, the enemy will want to smother those fires before anyone hearkens to that call.’

‘Then we will offer them a menace greater than the one they fear lies ahead of them,’ Makvar said. He urged Gojin forwards, the files of Stormcasts parting as the dracoth lumbered out from behind their ranks. Kreimnar fell into position beside him, guarding his flank. Makvar only advanced a few yards before he directed his steed to attack. A stream of blue lightning erupted from Gojin’s maw, blasting into the Slaaneshi forces clustered at the base of the hill. A dozen of the enemy were reduced to smouldering husks in a heartbeat; others ran screaming through their own forces, their hair and rags set alight by the dracoth’s attack.

Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon to the sky, invoking the divine fury of the God-King. From the angry heavens, a shower of lightning bolts came crashing earthward, slamming into the barbarians with devastating force. Charred bodies were sent flying through the air, crashing through the roofs of abandoned temples and shrines. Smoking craters pitted the street, shreds of armour and bone the only reminder of those caught in the elemental barrage.

Makvar urged his steed onwards, sending another blast of lightning streaking above the rearguard to crackle into the armoured file of Chaos warriors climbing the path behind them. Only a handful of the Slaaneshi warriors were killed by Gojin’s assault, but it was enough to surprise them and make them forget their ascent while they sought cover among the nearby buildings. To ensure the Chaos warriors would stay where they were, the Judicators sent a volley of arrows crackling down into the rooftops.

‘Advance!’ Makvar called out to his knights. The clatter of sigmarite armour became a dull rumble as the Stormcasts moved on the hill, surging towards it like a black tide of retribution. Those marauders and beastmen that had escaped the assault of Makvar’s dracoth and Kreimnar’s spells were now confronted by unyielding ranks of ebon knights. Retinues of Paladins emerged from gaps in the Liberators’ shield wall, charging into the confused mobs of barbarians with gigantic mauls and enormous axes. What followed was more massacre than melee, but after the carnage they had seen in the streets of Nulahmia, there were none among the Anvils inclined to offer the Slaaneshi honourable combat.

Inhuman shrieks and roars rattled down from the winding path above the Stormcasts. Makvar looked up to see a clutch of goat-headed monsters struggling to send a stone sepulchre from some hillside tomb crashing down upon the heads of the knights below. Judicators sent a flight of searing arrows up into the monsters, the lightning lancing through the fur and flesh of the beastmen. For each brutish corpse that went sliding down the slope, another half-human savage rushed out to take the place of the fallen. Just as it looked like the gors would send the sepulchre crashing downwards, a strike of celestial fire pelted them from above. The heavy slab of marble exploded as the elemental force slammed into it, slivers of stone ripping through those beastmen not slain outright by the blast.

By calling down the power of Sigmar’s wrath, Kreimnar destroyed one threat to the Stormcasts, but in doing so, he left opportunity for another. The barrage of lightning he’d invoked against the path ahead had been diverted against the beastmen, and mounted warriors were swift to exploit the respite. Huge knights on hideously mutated steeds came galloping out from the first bend of the switchback, levelling barbed lances and hooked spears as they charged downwards. Behind them, leaping and lunging with alluring abandon, was a pack of claw-armed daemonettes.

The sight of such merciless foes charging towards them would have strained the resolve of even the bravest mortal warrior. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were more than mortal, however. They had transcended many of the limitations of mere flesh, their valour magnified to superhuman degree by their Reforging within the armouries of Sigmaron. Instead of dread, the Stormcasts felt a rush of expectancy, even eagerness to come to grips with their obscene enemies.

Makvar smiled behind the stern visage that fronted his helm. His ploy had worked. The Chaos commander had taken notice of the Stormcasts’ advance. The enemy was now sending some of his stronger warriors to assault the Anvils. When they vanquished the Chaos knights and daemonettes, the warlord would have to send more of his forces back down the hill – perhaps even some of those he was using to push his way to the summit. Every fighter the Stormcasts could lure down was one less blade trying to pierce Neferata’s defences.

Foot by foot, foe by foe, Makvar would cut his way up the Throne Mount.

Lascilion lifted the skeleton impaled upon his glaive high into the air. The undead myrmidon continued to slash at him, refusing to return to the grave its masters had called it from. The warlord leaned away from the struggling skeleton, keeping out of the reach of its sword. With a savage shake of his glaive, he dislodged the bony body and sent it hurtling down the hillside. He watched it for a moment, seeing different bones fracture and shatter as the creature tumbled down the slope. By the time it reached the Slaaneshi warriors on the path below, the skeleton had lost both its arms and one of its legs. The boot of a barbarian jarl crushed the snapping skull and extinguished the stubborn spark of animation that lingered in the dismembered husk.

The warlord’s steed slithered back, allowing some of the Amethyst Guard to move forwards and engage the fleshless defenders. Ancient spears scraped against their baroque armour in a futile effort to bring down the elite warriors. The blows from the jewelled axes and gilded swords of Lascilion’s bodyguard were far more telling, shearing through both iron mail and the bony limbs within.

Lascilion drew his mount upwards, unfolding its coils so that he might observe the battle raging both ahead and below. Before him, the undead maintained their stubborn defence, their numbers seemingly as vast as they had been at the start of the fighting. A few arrows flew at the warlord from archers deep behind the front ranks, taking advantage of his momentary exposure. The missiles glanced from his enchanted armour, and those that stabbed into his daemonic steed merely caused the beast annoyance, its unnatural flesh excreting them in a slime of ichor.

It wasn’t the archers that concerned Lascilion, nor the deathly magic of the necromancers who guided the skeletons. His worry was the vampire commander and the zombie dragon. So far, the pair had taken no direct role in the fighting. That worried Lascilion. He had fought vampires before, and though they could be as duplicitous and cunning as a Tzeentchian sorcerer, they weren’t known for timidity. The undead general was waiting for something. Try as he might, Lascilion couldn’t figure out what strategy his enemy had in mind.

Looking below, towards the foot of the hill, Lascilion could see the sable ranks of the lightning-men steadily gaining ground. He had sent a good portion of his reserves down the pathway to hold the knights back, yet the infusion of fresh troops hadn’t stopped their advance, merely slowed it. He felt a sense of both fascination and disgust at the formidable magic the dark warriors deployed against his horde – sheets of eldritch lightning drawn down from the heavens that blasted smouldering craters into the hillside and left even the stoutest formations shaken and mauled in their wake. The leader of these knights, himself mounted upon some manner of dragon-beast, wasn’t as shy of battle as the vampire general. He pressed the attack at every turn, bolts of lightning blasting out from his steed’s maw to cut through the Slaaneshi ranks, his own gleaming sword flaring out to claim any opponent bold enough to stand against him.

The Lord of Slaanesh grimaced, his forked tongue flickering in irritation. There was only one thing that could stop the advance of the lightning-men – an attack at their rear, something to put them on the defensive. Where was Mendeziron? Had the Keeper of Secrets become so lost in his perversity that he was defying even the Crying Tower’s profane Cup of Sorrows? Had the dominion of the lost god become so fractured that even his daemons no longer trembled before his authority?

A shrill horn blast sounded from among the lightning-men. The note was of such strange and pristine nature that Lascilion could feel it sting his ears. His daemon steed hissed its own irritation, offended by the noise. He clapped his hand against its wormy neck, trying to soothe its displeasure. The warlord had already forgotten his own discomfort. From his vantage, he could see why the lightning-men had sounded their horn. It was a call of alarm.

Lumbering out from among the burning buildings and ransacked palaces was the enormous figure of Mendeziron. The streets around the greater daemon teemed with his smaller kin, the infernal scavengers that had followed him through the Jackal Gate. A swarm of clawed fiends scuttled towards the base of the hill, long tongues flashing from their crustacean maws. Packs of daemonettes pranced through the rubble of fallen temples, their squeals of delight and depravity rising even to the Pathway of Punishment. Behind them all, the gigantic Keeper of Secrets himself marched forwards. Lascilion could feel the daemon’s eyes staring up at him, peering into his very soul.

Mendeziron is no mortal’s lapdog. Lascilion could feel the daemon’s words shiver through his mind. By pact and by promise do I suffer the summons of flesh. But though you live a hundred lifetimes, know the humility of flesh. Know that when death takes Lascilion, his spirit belongs to Mendeziron.

The daemon’s threat reverberated through Lascilion. For just an instant, he felt a tremor of doubt. Angrily he crushed the fear. He was a Lord of Slaanesh, marked and favoured by his god. He had been granted dominion over Mendeziron and his ilk. Even if such power one day was withdrawn, for now it was his. And he would use it.

‘Obey,’ Lascilion snarled. The sound of his command wouldn’t reach Mendeziron, but the daemon heard it just the same. Throwing back his horned head, the daemon vented a shivering roar and charged towards the hill, heedless of the lesser daemons he crushed beneath his hooves. The lightning-men had fared well enough against Chaos warriors and marauders, but an enraged Keeper of Secrets would be a far different foe. Doom was upon the ebon knights.

The sound of great pinions fanning the air drew Lascilion’s eyes back towards the slope above. A foul, rancid stink washed over him as he saw the zombie dragon take wing. The rotten corpse sprang from the roof of the mausoleum upon which it had been perched and circled above the massed legion of skeletons packed onto the pathway. The warlord called out to his sorcerers and warlocks. It was against this menace that he had held them in readiness, conserving their magic to protect his vanguard from the dragon’s breath.

The threatened attack never manifested. Instead of striking at Lascilion’s warriors, the dragon peeled away, diving down the far side of the hill. The warlord could see it soaring towards the ruined temple district. At first, he thought the vampire general was moving to intercept Mendeziron, for it was clear that the greater daemon’s arrival upon the battlefield was what he had been waiting for. But the dragon made no move towards the daemon or to prevent the assault against the lightning-men. Instead, it wheeled around the base of the hill and towards one of the defiled temples. Lascilion saw the rotting beast land amid the rubble. The vampire on its back stood in the saddle, gesturing at the Throne Mount.

Lascilion could almost see the necrotic magic suffusing the vampire lord as he invoked the dark powers. The hordes of Chaos had imagined their foe to be trapped on the Throne Mount. Now the Lord of Slaanesh wondered who had trapped whom.

Rusted gates and hidden doors creaked open in answer to the vampire’s call. Timeless catacombs and secret crypts gaped wide as necromantic spells called out to the entombed. From yawning tunnels all across the hill, mouldy legions of the undead emerged. A host of bone warriors and deadwalkers, the carcasses from untold generations, shambled out into the streets. By the hundreds, by the thousands, the armies of the dead surrounded the hill, moving with the uncanny precision of the unliving.

Once the undead encirclement was complete, the vampire lord drew his sword, crimson fire glowing deep within its blackened steel. His voice snarled across the smoking rubble as he ordered the ghastly host to the attack.

‘Kill!’ the vampire commanded. ‘Kill! Kill! Kill them all!’

The purifying light of Lord-Castellant Vogun’s warding lantern brought blessed oblivion to the grisly trophies that lined the Pathway of Punishment. Bodiless heads shrivelled under the purging glow of the lantern, caged skeletons crumbled into ash. From each corpse, a mote of luminance rose, flickering away almost in a heartbeat. None of the Stormcasts could say to what fate the released spirits were bound, but it could be no worse than their tortuous imprisonment upon the hillside.

Lord-Celestant Makvar detached a retinue of Decimators to guard Vogun as he brought mercy to the long-suffering spirits. As the Anvils moved up the Pathway, the opposition was growing steadily more fierce – too fierce for Vogun’s gryph-hound to protect its master. The warding lantern’s light was anathema to all creatures of darkness, repulsing daemons and rousing the ire of corrupted mortals. Packs of mutant hounds and clutches of beastmen tried to quench the offending light, rushing at Vogun from the shadows of blasted shrines and shattered ossuaries. Once, a troop of Chaos knights drove past the Liberators in an effort to reach the Lord-Castellant, heedless of the peril they invited by turning their backs on the Stormcasts. The silver-armoured leader of the knights had actually managed to strike Vogun with his lance, but had been cut from the saddle by a sweep of the officer’s sigmarite halberd in return. The Lord-Castellant’s personal crusade faltered for a few moments as he turned the healing magics of his lantern upon himself to mend the wound he had been dealt.

It was more than mercy that made Makvar agree to Vogun’s entreaty to bring peace to the cursed dead. The Stormcasts were filled with an even firmer resolve when they saw the relief Vogun bestowed. The palace atop Throne Mount was still far above them, but these damned souls were all along the road. Every yard, every step they gained brought with it an immediate and visible victory. It now became something of a personal affront to the Anvils, the persistent defiance of their Chaos foes. They had become more than just a hated enemy. They had become an obstacle between the Stormcasts and those they would help. Never did the Anvils of the Heldenhammer fight with more ferocity than when they felt the helpless crying out to them.

Makvar brought his sword shearing through the shoulder of an armoured beastman, its perfumed blood splattering across Gojin’s scales. A kick of his boot knocked the dying foe free and the carcass tumbled down the slope until it became caught in one of the gibbets.

It was a hard thing, to reconcile himself to the cruelty Neferata displayed across the Pathway of Punishment. Still, Makvar could only imagine the necessities that had demanded such extremes. With the whole of Shyish consumed by Chaos, the call of the Dark Gods would have reached even to the sanctuary of Nulahmia. To keep her own people from surrendering to Chaos, to drive the corruption from her city, the Mortarch had to present them with a threat even greater than the horrors of the Ruinous Powers. Only terror of their queen had kept Nulahmia from rotting from the inside. Without the light of Sigmar to guide them, any land could be driven to tyranny in its desperation to survive.

The strident blare of Knight-Heraldor Brannok’s battle-horn drew Makvar’s attention away from Vogun and his cleansing of the Pathway. The call Brannok sounded was one of not only divine wrath but of alert and alarm. Positioned with the Stormcasts’ rearguard, the clarion report could indicate only one thing. Enemies were moving upon the Anvils’ backs. Not the deranged stragglers that had harassed them throughout their march across Nulahmia, but a force large and powerful enough to pose a real threat to them.

‘Vogun, hold the advance here!’ Makvar called out to the Lord-Castellant. Until he knew what manner of threat had come stealing out of the conquered city, it would be imprudent to ascend further up the hill. By the same token, Makvar refused to surrender an inch of ground his warriors had fought to wrest from the foe. It was his conviction that no patch of earth was worth bleeding on twice.

Vogun saluted the Lord-Celestant as Makvar rode his dracoth back through the ranks of Liberators and Judicators. ‘Kreimnar, with me,’ he called out to the Lord-Relictor as he began a hurried descent. As a precaution, he also drew two retinues of Paladins from the flanks. On the Pathway, their thunderaxes and lightning hammers were seeing only sporadic use, striking down the odd Chaos warrior hiding among the funerary shrines. Below, there might be more immediate need for their weapons.

The rush back along the Pathway soon revealed to Makvar what had alarmed Brannok enough to sound his destructive battle-horn. Packs of daemons were slinking out of the ruins. Not by the ones and twos, but by the score. Obscene fiends of Slaanesh scuttled across the skull-strewn roads on chitinous legs, clouds of musk oozing from their slimy bodies. Demure daemonettes danced through the rubble, their laughter at once enticing and murderous.

Brannok winded his battle-horn once more, unleashing a violent thunderblast that roared through the daemons. An ancient temple toppled into the street, its foundations shattered by the pulverising clamour. Tons of rubble smashed down upon the daemons, bursting them in foul sprays of ichor. Yet still more of the abominations rushed towards the Anvils.

Makvar felt the presence of the Keeper of Secrets long before he saw the daemon’s bulk striding through the streets. It was an oily, repulsive sensation that seemed to seep through his armour, a sickly sweet stench that reached inside him and tried to defile his soul. Images of corruption and abandon struggled to plant themselves in his mind, fumbling to pierce the bulwarks of faith and devotion that fortified every Stormcast against the lures and lies of Chaos.

A snarl of frustration rattled above the ruins of Nulahmia. Stalking out of the smoke of a blazing temple, the Keeper of Secrets glowered up at Throne Mount with eyes of ice and fire. The daemon was colossal, four times the height of a Stormcast. Its body was cast in a rude semblance of human shape, with two sets of arms erupting from the shoulders. One pair rippled with muscle and ended in hands that sported vicious claws; the others were gigantic chitinous claws that glistened like pitch. The daemon’s pillar-like legs ended in a pair of stomping hooves, while its head was crowned with vast horns that curled away from a broad skull, both features suggestive of some bovine nature. Across its forehead were a series of welts not unlike those left by the kiss of a whip. The marks formed a symbol perverse and obscene, a rune that violated the eye of any that gazed upon it – the mark of Slaanesh himself.

Mendeziron. Makvar felt the name thrust itself upon him. A sneer stretched across the enormous daemon’s monstrous face, exposing the gigantic fangs lining his leech-like maw.

Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon, drawing down once more the celestial fury of the God-King. Lightning crackled all around Mendeziron, searing into the horror’s loathsome body. Flesh bubbled and bone melted in the divine wrath pronounced by the Lord-Relictor, but it wasn’t enough to overwhelm the daemon. Saturated in the essences of the victims he had claimed in the sack of Nulahmia, the Keeper of Secrets channelled his own magic, drawing on the perverse energies of his god. Destroyed bones re-formed and scorched flesh regrew. In just the time it took the Stormcasts to cover a few dozen yards, the huge daemon was whole and restored.

Brannok and the rearguard were under attack when Makvar reached them, beset on all sides by the smaller daemons of Mendeziron’s circle. The thick, reeking musk of the scuttling fiends saturated the air, a fug that crawled down inside the Stormcasts’ armour. Few were the mortal men who could withstand the allure of that reek, but those reforged upon the Anvil of Apotheosis carried within them the celestial fires of Azyr. The soporific musk that could drown a man’s mind found small purchase in the fastness of a Stormcast’s resolve. The daemonic foulness could discomfit the ebon knights, but it couldn’t debilitate them.

Not so the pincers and fangs of the hideous fiends. Two Liberators at the furthest end of the line were pulled down by the strange daemons. The arm of one was snipped from his shoulder by a crab-like claw, sigmarite plate and reforged flesh sheared clean through by the daemonic grip. The other was knocked off his feet by the whipping tail of his attacker. Before he could recover, or one of his comrades could render aid, the fiend was atop him. From the thing’s fluted proboscis, a razor-tipped tongue shot out and pierced the Liberator’s throat. Glowing streams of light erupted from each of the fallen Stormcasts, their vibrancy and purity at odds with the spectral flares that haunted Nulahmia. Swiftly, the soul-energies streaked into the stormy sky, drawn back into the God-King’s keeping.

The daemonettes followed close upon the scurrying fiends. Some of the feminine abominations wielded barbed swords and cruel whips; others were content to use the monstrous claws that grew from their pallid arms. Moving with a supple grace and lethal agility, they darted between the hammers and swords of the Liberators, lashing out with diabolic viciousness to break through the formation.

The agility and ferocity of the daemons was unlike anything Makvar had seen before. A daemon was no easy foe to overcome, even for a Stormcast Eternal, but these seemed endowed with a malignancy beyond what was to be expected of their kind. Whether it was the innocent souls upon which the horrors had so recently glutted themselves or if it was the malign influence of Mendeziron himself, he didn’t know. All he could be certain of was that the situation was dire. Even with himself and the Paladins to reinforce them, Brannok’s line might not hold.

A blast of lightning from Gojin’s maw immolated a clutch of daemonettes, bursting their voluptuous bodies in a spray of purple ichor and sweet-smelling smoke. Makvar rode to the line’s left flank, where the enemy was making the greatest effort to force a way through. His sword decapitated a slavering fiend, pitching its twitching body into the monstrosities behind it. Pressing his attack, he brought his dracoth’s clawed forelegs slamming down on the reeling daemons, stomping them beneath the reptile’s immense weight and sigmarite barding.

Mendeziron’s roar boomed across the rubble. Perhaps tiring of watching his lesser kindred battle, perhaps despairing of their ability to breach the line now that Makvar had reinforced it, the Keeper of Secrets prowled towards the Stormcasts.

As the greater daemon advanced, Makvar saw something soar through the sky above. The rotten husk of a dragon flew towards the base of the hill. Upon its back, an armoured vampire howled his defiance of Chaos and called on the ghostly might of Shyish.

At once, Makvar could feel the change that surged through the air, a numbing chill like the cold finger of death itself. All around the base of the Throne Mount, rusted portcullises were raised, revealing black passageways into the necropolis beneath Nulahmia. From that underworld, decayed legions marched. Skeletal warriors in corroded mail, desiccated corpses with withered flesh stretched taut over ancient bones. Armed with bronze falchions and iron spears, bearing adzes and khopeshes, the undead legion crept out from their timeless crypts. Dead eyes and empty sockets gaped at the daemonic onslaught. Then, without uttering either cry or challenge, the deadwalkers and bone warriors fell upon the Slaaneshi abominations.

Daemonettes were dragged down by gangs of skeletons, hacked to ribbons by the merciless action of rusted swords and axes. Fiends were pierced through by spears, impaled by cadaverous enemies immune to the numbing musk oozing from their pores. A veritable flood of deadwalkers besieged Mendeziron, cutting into the daemon’s hide with tomb-blades, clawing at him with rotten talons, worrying at his skin with decayed fangs. Like angry ants, the undead engulfed Mendeziron, defiant of his efforts to annihilate them. By the dozens, the undead lay smashed at the daemon’s hooves, yet still they came, relentless as an ocean tide.

A pulse of purplish light rippled through Mendeziron, a discharge of eldritch energies that burst apart the deadwalkers scrabbling at his body. Rotten flesh and mouldering bone exploded into greasy tatters and splashed across the streets. The daemon’s claws lashed out, skewering dozens of the undead. Arcane fire leapt from his eyes to sear the decayed warriors climbing up from the catacombs.

Makvar gripped Brannok’s shoulder, directing the Knight-Heraldor’s attention to the soaring temple across from the rampaging daemon. ‘Do you think you can bury that monster?’

Brannok nodded and raised his battle-horn to his mouth. The thunderous blare that issued forth from the instrument smashed into the old temple, blasting apart its tiled facade and spiral pillars. Mendeziron reeled, shaking his head as the sacred note assaulted his hyper-acute senses. His disorientation was already passing when he turned his glowering gaze upon Brannok. Mendeziron’s fang-filled grin promised that he would give the Stormcast no chance to sound another note.

The Knight-Heraldor had no need to. Weakened by the magical blast of the battle-horn, the temple spilled down into the street. Bat-winged gargoyles and skull-capped minarets hurtled down upon Mendeziron. The Keeper of Secrets raised his arms in an attempt to catch the descending avalanche of stone, but he had exerted too much of his energies against the deadwalkers and the openings of the catacombs. The cascade of rubble smashed into the daemon, entombing him beneath a mound of broken stone and a cloud of grey dust.

Whatever sense of relief Makvar felt at seeing the Keeper of Secrets buried was soon vanquished. A pack of bone warriors, after slaughtering a daemonic fiend, set upon a Retributor who had been fighting it. The Stormcast was savaged by the undead assault, pulled down to the ground to suffer the same fate as the vanquished daemon. A Liberator had his shield ripped away by the hooked axe of a deadwalker, before being impaled upon the spear of a skeletal champion. Pulled from the line of defenders, he was soon overwhelmed by the host of undead trudging up from the underworld.

‘Can they not see we are allies?’ Brannok cursed.

‘They make no distinction between Stormcast and Slaaneshi’, Kreimnar agreed, bringing his relic-hammer smashing down upon the head of a decayed adversary, crushing its rotten skull.

‘Form a shield wall!’ Makvar called out. ‘Close formation! Don’t let them bring their numbers to bear!’ Warrior for warrior, the Stormcasts were far superior to the undead soldiers. But for every knight under his command, Makvar could see ten, maybe twenty of the undead, with more crawling from their tombs every instant.

‘It would appear that Neferata isn’t interested in parleying with us,’ Kreimnar said.

Gojin whipped his powerful tail around, swatting a daemonette into the air and pulverising half a dozen zombies. Almost at once, a new rank of undead lurched forwards to take their place. ‘We don’t know that our offer has been rejected,’ Makvar said. His sword lifted a bone warrior from the ground and sent its wreckage crashing down on the heads of those behind it. ‘It may be she is unaware of who we are and why we’ve come here. There is no mind within these creatures. They do not differentiate between us and the invaders because no one has told them to.’

The rearguard began to fall back onto the Pathway, wary of being completely surrounded by the undead and the remaining daemons. The narrower constraints of the hillside would make it easier to guard against such strategy. Brannok kicked the severed torso of a deadwalker down the path, almost instantly finding another foe lurching towards him. ‘They had best decide we aren’t enemies soon,’ the Knight-Heraldor said. ‘This fighting will only benefit the Chaos vermin.’

Makvar looked up at the heights above. The delay here would impede the Anvils and prevent them from pressing the attack, perhaps giving the forces of Chaos the time they needed to gain the palace-temple and seize Neferata.

‘We need to make them aware of our mission,’ Kreimnar declared.

Brannok pointed at the zombie dragon and the vampire on its back. ‘He would be the one to talk to, only it doesn’t seem he’s interested.’

Makvar disagreed. Every moment more of the undead were converging upon the shield wall. A dominating will was directing the mindless corpses, an intelligence malignant and powerful. The vampire was deliberately setting his legions against the Stormcasts, aware that the Anvils were enemies of the Slaaneshi hordes. The question was, did he act on his own, or was he following orders from his queen?

If it was the latter, Makvar’s mission had already failed.

CHAPTER FIVE

As Nagadron flew through the smoky skies above the Throne Mount, Neferata was struck by the vicious tenacity of her foe. The reserves Harkdron had summoned from the necropolis beneath the temple district had surrounded the hordes of Chaos. Skeletons encrusted with centuries of calcification, deadwalkers with their rotten flesh lost beneath layers of mould and muck; these climbed up from the depths, bursting from concealed flues and chutes to spring upon the enemy from every quarter. Daemonettes darted among the animated corpses, snipping off limbs and heads with each sweep of their terrible claws. Silent files of grave guard stabbed at gaudily adorned barbarians with spears of bronze. Barbarian chariots thundered down the path to crush the ungainly bone warriors, smashing them to splinters beneath iron wheels and the pulverising hooves of foul daemonic steeds. Lurching mobs of zombies hacked branded beastmen into gory litter. Sorcerers in pastel robes and crystalline cloaks shattered scores of the undead with their obscene spells. Wight kings butchered armoured Chaos knights with their ensorcelled tomb blades.

Neferata could see that her forces atop the hill were without a commander. The vampires and deathmages had been exterminated by the enemy, leaving the lesser undead to maintain a stubborn but uninspired defence. Like a clockwork machine winding down, the skeletons guarding her palace were losing their momentum.

Angrily, the vampire queen peered through the smoke, searching for Lord Harkdron. At first, she thought her consort had been destroyed, though what she found instead was even more infuriating. Her general had flown down to the base of the hill to summon the catacomb-legions, but instead of focusing them upon the hordes of Chaos, he had set them against the storm-knights as well! She could see her consort on his dragon in the wreckage of the temple district, exerting his magic to push his attack upon the ebon-armoured warriors.

Neferata’s first impulse was to speed her abyssal steed down to Harkdron, to issue the vampire new commands. Even he had to see the absurdity of attacking the storm-knights when they shared a mutual foe. A cold fury running through her, she glared down at the general. He would pay for his poor judgement.

Focussed upon Harkdron, Neferata let her concentration falter for just an instant. The warding spells that shielded her from the Slaaneshi sorcerers below suffered from the momentary loss of focus. Beams of corrosive energy shot up towards her, searing into the flanks of her abyssal steed and causing several of the skulls trapped within its skeletal frame to crumble into powder. Her morghast bodyguards flew forwards, flinging themselves between their queen and the magic being turned against her. A pair of the winged skeletons burst apart into shimmering fragments as the arcane rays slammed into them. Neferata commanded the others to loose arrows from their bows into the enemy warlocks, and then quickly urged her injured mount earthward.

Driven from the skies, the vampire queen landed amidst her fleshless legions. She fumed at the indignity, frustrated that she would be incapable of reaching Harkdron to call off his attack upon the storm-knights. Every spirit and minion bound to her service was already committed to the fighting, leaving none to carry a message to either Harkdron or the storm-knights. All she could do was command those undead within her reach to refrain from combat with them and fix their efforts strictly against the hordes of Chaos. She could only hope the storm-knights would notice her efforts and understand that not all within Nulahmia were hostile towards them.

Drawing upon her magic, Neferata sent a surge of necromantic force rushing from the Staff of Pain. The pulse of dark energy saturated the broken bones and mangled husks of those that had fallen in battle upon the upper reaches of the Pathway. Only the most grievously damaged among the invaders’ dead didn’t respond to her conjuration. Hundreds of the slain enemy lurched back onto their feet and hooves to assault those who had once been their comrades, while the carcasses of the vanquished undead drew themselves back into a ghastly animation, all but the most brutally damaged rallying to the call of their queen.

Neferata scowled at the results of her magic. It wasn’t enough. The forces she had at her command wouldn’t be able to hold the hill. Not on their own. She glanced up at the palace-temple behind her, picturing the maze of tunnels that would bring her to the realmgate. Yes, there was escape for her there, but nothing more.

Looking below, she could see the storm-knights relentlessly forcing their way through Harkdron’s legions and the Chaos host alike. Never had Neferata seen such warriors! They were engines of destruction, elemental wrath unleashed. Nothing stood against them, not wight nor daemon. To reach an accord with these warriors, to harness their power to her own ends – that was a purpose worth tempting the caprices of battle. But as she watched the enemies closing around the ebon knights, she wondered if even they could prevail against so many.

If they fell, Neferata would hurry back to her palace. But if they could succeed… what power might then be at her service!

‘Close ranks!’ Lord-Celestant Makvar called out to his warriors. The Anvils had suffered only a few casualties in the fighting against both the daemons and the undead. Makvar wanted to ensure that they could keep it that way. The Liberators brought their shields in close, forming an unbroken wall of sigmarite at every side of the wedge-like formation they had adopted. In the middle of the wedge, Judicators raised their bows and sent lightning snaking down into the masses of enemies all around them. The Paladins held their thunderaxes and lightning hammers at the ready, waiting for any foe persistent enough to breach the defences.

‘We can hold, but for how long?’ Knight-Heraldor Brannok wondered.

Makvar shook his head. ‘We gain nothing holding this ground,’ he declared. He pointed his sword up at the Pathway of Punishment. The road was swarming with skeletons and deadwalkers, a sea of decayed corpses reanimated by dark sorceries. ‘That is where we’re going. We march to rejoin Lord-Castellant Vogun. And then we force our way to Neferata’s palace.’

Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon, drawing down an electrical blast that annihilated a dozen bone warriors. The Lord-Relictor grumbled in frustration when he saw several of those felled by his arcane assault begin to stir once more. ‘As many of these things as we destroy, the vampire’s magic simply brings them back to life.’

Kicking his heels into Gojin’s sides, Makvar caused the huge dracoth to rear up onto his hind legs. A bolt of lightning shot out from his gaping maw to splinter the restored skeletons once more. ‘We are the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, chosen by Sigmar!’ Makvar shouted, his words carrying to every Stormcast in the formation. ‘If these lifeless husks rise a thousand times to stand against us, we will smash them down. They will not keep us from standing beside our comrades. They will not cause us to falter in our sacred mission. Woe betide any who try!’

Slowly, the wedge began to climb up the Pathway. The crackling swords and hammers of Liberators battered down the files of skeletons that rushed at them, solid shields of sigmarite thrust back the decayed troops that tried to block the way. Flights of crackling arrows rose from the Judicators, cooking rotten deadwalkers and blackening ancient bone warriors. Foot by foot, then yard by yard, the Anvils pressed their advance.

Resistance intensified. Malignant spirits rose up from the very flagstones to drag at marching feet and claw at armoured legs. The wails of banshees and wraiths shuddered through the mind of each knight, a litany of pitiless malice and cruel sorrow to freeze the soul.

The Anvils pressed on, forcing their way through the deathly gauntlet. Shrieking banshees were knocked down by lightning-spitting bows, while other spectral horrors were seared by the blazing discharge of colossal maces wielded by Retributors and Decimators. Kreimnar drew the destructive powers of the storm down upon the undead formations waiting ahead of them, breaking their ranks and leaving their mangled remains strewn across the pathway. As their advance gained momentum, the Stormcasts smashed the undead underfoot even as the vampire sought to reanimate them yet again.

Through it all, Makvar’s voice rang out, reciting the holy catechisms and orisons sacred to their warhost. ‘Sigmar is my light in the shadow. With him there is no darkness. From the tomb are we redeemed and no death can lift from us the burden of duty. Fear has been burned from our blood, doubt has been scorched from our minds, and damnation has no claim upon our souls.’ With each recitation, Makvar could feel the cries of the ghosts weaken, the reach of their phantom claws lessen. Soon, their hold was as inconsequential as morning fog, and their howls little more than whispers.

Makvar could see the welcoming blaze of Vogun’s warding lantern ahead. He could feel the celestial light reaching out to him, pulling at him like a beckoning finger. The rest of the Stormcasts felt it to, their pace quickening, the ferocity of their attack upon the undead and Slaaneshi forces redoubling. Remorselessly, they smashed their way through their foes, eager to rejoin their comrades.

Vogun redeployed his warriors, spreading them out into a solid line. Judicators armed with boltstorm crossbows sent a withering barrage into the faces of the Chaos marauders who packed the road between the two contingents. A retinue of Protectors issued forth from Vogun’s ranks, plying their stormstrike glaives with murderous ferocity as they carved a path through the Slaaneshi invaders.

As Makvar urged the wedge onwards, he noted for the first time that, unlike the legions of undead that the rearguard had been forced to fight their way through, those around Vogun’s warriors exhibited no interest in the Stormcasts. They were fixed entirely on attacking the Chaos horde. It was tempting to put the change down to the light of the warding lantern, its energies repulsing the undead, but Makvar thought it must be more than that. The skeletons and zombies appeared to finally be drawing a distinction between ally and enemy.

‘Brannok!’ Makvar called out to the Knight-Heraldor. ‘Have the warriors bringing up the rear stay their attack. Keep the undead from breaking the wall, but otherwise visit no harm against them.’

The Knight-Heraldor was puzzled by the command but didn’t hesitate to execute it. Sounding a call upon his battle-horn, he relayed the order to the Liberators holding the base of the wedge.

For a time, the seemingly endless tide of undead that had pursued the Stormcasts up the hill continued to hurl themselves upon the shield wall. The Liberators drove them back, using sword pommels and hammer hafts to repel the decayed soldiers, but they quickly returned, stabbing and slashing at the Anvils with mindless tenacity. However often the undead were repulsed, they came again.

Then a change came upon the skeletons following behind the wedge. As they advanced towards the Stormcasts, they suddenly lowered their weapons. Without a sound, they marched onwards a few paces, but made no effort to assault the shield wall. When the wedge gained ground and moved forwards, the skeletons did likewise, but they didn’t make any further attempts to engage the Liberators. From Gojin’s saddle, Makvar could see the rear ranks of the undead continuing their menacing advance. Once they climbed to a certain point on the path, however, all the hostility seemed to drain out of them, as though they had crossed some invisible barrier.

‘Keep a careful watch on them,’ Makvar told Brannok. ‘Sound the alarm if they try to attack again, but I don’t think they will.’ He looked at the slope above, at the fearsome Chaos chariots ploughing through the undead warriors. ‘At least not while we share a common enemy.’

What happened after that, Makvar knew, would be the difference between success and failure.

From the back of his decayed dragon, Lord Harkdron watched as the storm-knights smashed their way through his warriors. Again and again, he used his magic to reanimate the fallen, to pour into their mangled flesh and shattered bones the eldritch power that would restore them to a semblance of life. However quickly he tried to reform and reassemble the broken skeletons and mangled zombies, though, he couldn’t match the rapidity with which the strange knights were destroying his troops.

The hordes of Chaos were likewise redoubling their efforts. Harkdron’s undead threatened to engulf the flank of the Slaaneshi army. To counter that threat, bands of daemonettes flitted through the skeletal regiments, hewing and hacking with their ghastly claws. Two terrifying chariots drawn by daemonic steeds sped through the streets of the temple district, their spiked wheels pulverising the undead warriors who fell beneath their charge. After them, an even larger chariot thundered across the broken corpses, reducing them to such shattered debris that even Harkdron’s magic could find nothing to infuse with animation.

Packs of daemons raged and howled, trooping through the wreckage of Nulahmia on slobbering mounts that were neither reptile, horse nor insect, but an impossible amalgam of all three. Crab-like fiends of Slaanesh scuttled along rooftops and clambered down walls, their slimy hides exuding clouds of musk. Hulking spawn, maddened wrecks of Chaotic energies and tortured flesh, dragged themselves through the ruins, striking all that dared to stand in their way with gigantic claws and whipping tentacles.

As his dragon flew above the battlefield Harkdron tried to direct his forces, to draw new legions from the most ancient of Nulahmia’s crypts. It was then that he saw a stirring of the rubble below. The Temple of the Bloodbat had been demolished by the storm-knights, cast down by the thunderous magic they bore with them. Beneath the mound of debris, the great daemon Mendeziron had been entombed. Much like the catacombs the vampire was emptying, the mound of rubble made for an unquiet grave. Lesser daemons flocked towards the shifting mound, gathering about it with a terrible air of expectancy.

Harkdron sent his will rushing through the companies of bone warriors and deadwalkers he had summoned, commanding them back towards the fallen temple. If he hurried, if he brought enough force to bear, perhaps his warriors could vanquish Mendeziron while the daemon was still weakened by the storm-knights’ attack.

Hope withered in the vampire’s heart when the rubble suddenly exploded outwards, chunks of stone spinning through the air as the thing buried under them erupted to the surface. Mendeziron had been bloodied by the storm-knights, his flesh ripped to tatters by the crushing enormity of the temple. Smoke rose from skin scorched by the electric fury of the battle-horn; steam vented from rivulets of boiling ichor that dripped from his wounds. Charred clumps fell from the daemon’s body as he stalked out from the rubble. The pain of a Keeper of Secrets, the unique agony of one of Slaanesh’s most terrible manifestations, was like a lodestone to the daemons that were marked by the Prince of Chaos. From across Nulahmia they came, intoxicated by the sensations flowing from Mendeziron. And as they drew near to him, their identities were subsumed under his hideous malignance. Ensnared by the power of Mendeziron, the daemon host could do naught but obey his commands. The command was to kill and conquer.

Pride kept Harkdron from repenting his decision to focus on the storm-knights, allowing Mendeziron to slip through his fingers. The daemon was a mighty tool of the enemy, but the storm-knights were something worse. They were interlopers. Chaos could defeat him, but the storm-knights could steal his victory from him. How would he redeem himself in the eyes of his queen if her salvation were bought only with the aid of these storm-knights? Harkdron would be her rescuer; he would allow none to take that from him! He would share the esteem of Neferata with no one!

Harkdron’s dragon soared above a pack of daemonettes, the rotting beast’s stench washing across them as it raked its claws through their ranks and used its bony tail to swat a handful of them into the rubble of a mausoleum. The bone warriors opposing the daemonettes rallied for a moment, revivified by the vampire’s necromancy. But it was only a momentary resilience. Harkdron had been pushing his arcane talents to their limit and beyond. Each spell he cast felt like drawing blood from a dry vein. He could feel his mind growing fuzzy as the residual harmonies of the spells he evoked broke through his overtaxed defences.

Seeing the resurgent Mendeziron and his daemons, Harkdron knew that only an even greater magic could stand against them. Something beyond his own fading energies. The vampire snarled defiantly at the Keeper of Secrets, letting his mockery stab at the abomination’s ego. There was a way to summon the power he needed to destroy the daemons, though only a warrior of Harkdron’s calibre was brave enough to draw upon it.

Even as Mendeziron sent a ray of searing magic rippling towards him, Harkdron turned his dragon’s climb into a sweeping dive. Over the heads of snarling daemons, he flew his steed onto the ruined Queensroad. There, rising amidst the wreckage of war, stood an object of such menace that even the rampaging hordes of Chaos had given it a wide berth – the Obelisk of Black, a forty-foot spire darker than night itself, a frozen fang of death. The hieroglyphs that shone across its obsidian surface hadn’t been cut into the Obelisk, nor had they been painted or seared into the glass-like stone. It was as if they had been pressed into the skin of the structure, pushed just under the surface so that they seemed to be scratching at it from within, as though trying to force their way free.

Harkdron didn’t know what the hieroglyphs said. They were of a time from beyond time, a relic of the world-that-was and hoary with age even in that mythical era. Once, in an unguarded moment, Neferata had told him even she could read little of their meaning, and even that much was enough to haunt a Mortarch.

The vampire lord didn’t need to understand the hieroglyphs to recognise the power bound within the Obelisk. It filled him with a sort of frightened awe, like staring into the fires of a volcano. The magnitude of the arcane force entombed within the obsidian monolith was such that even now he hesitated to draw upon it. Summon not that which cannot be dismissed was the first law of necromancy, a warning to all who would violate the rules of death.

Out from the smoke, the enormity of Mendeziron stalked towards Harkdron. The daemon’s hooves shattered the skulls embedded in the street, his claws smashed the statues lining the road, and his seductive malevolence dragged the ghosts of Nulahmia into the furnace of his infernal heart. The vampire could feel the Keeper of Secrets pawing at his mind, promising him the most excruciating torments before his spirit was consumed. Such was the fiendish lure of the daemon’s voice that it made Harkdron anticipate the promised torture with almost overwhelming desire.

It was the thought of Neferata, of failing his queen, that moved Harkdron to indulge his instinct for survival. Mendeziron was nearly upon him, reaching towards him to pluck him from the saddle of his zombie dragon, when he broke free of the daemon’s spell. Crying out in rage, he spurred his dragon to attack. The rotted beast reared back, its bony jaws gaping wide as it spewed a blast of decayed flesh and corpse gas into the face of the daemon.

Mendeziron stumbled back, skin bubbling and sloughing from his bovine skull as the dragon’s pestilence washed over his flesh. The daemon’s eyes flashed with pitiless enmity. A great sliver of scintillating flame erupted from one of his hands, swiftly cooling and solidifying into a gigantic blade. A second blast of draconic breath scorched Mendeziron, burning a great hole through the monster’s chest – but even such grievous injury wasn’t enough to blunt his assault. His mighty claws snapped closed about the dragon’s body, sinking deep into its rotting carcass. Held fast in Mendeziron’s grip, the dragon couldn’t avoid the giant sword as the daemon rammed it into the creature’s gut. Withered organs and nests of carrion worms spilled from the beast’s carcass as the daemon wrenched the blade crosswise. Heedless of the raking claws and smashing wings of his foe, Mendeziron twisted the sword deeper and drew the beast closer.

Harkdron jumped from the saddle of his mangled steed, leaving the zombie dragon trapped in Mendeziron’s clutches. Impaled upon the daemon’s blade, the beast could only writhe helplessly as its adversary ripped it apart. The vampire could feel Mendeziron’s rage clawing at him with obscene persistence, assuring him that he would suffer far greater atrocities of flesh and spirit before his own existence was extinguished.

The vampire looked to the Obelisk of Black. Rushing to the monument, he ripped the gauntlet from his hand and buried his fangs in his own flesh, tearing open his palm. Glancing back at Mendeziron as the daemon continued to butcher the dragon, Harkdron pressed his bloodied hand to the Obelisk and called out to the power buried within it. At once, the infernal whispers of Mendeziron were burned from his mind, exorcised by a deafening tide of spectral wails and ghostly moans. Through that tempest of phantoms, a commanding presence enveloped him. Without conscious thought, without even the concept of resistance stirring inside him, Harkdron found strange words of an unknown language slithering across his lips. Fresh legions of the undead stirred at his call, but so too did something else.

Mendeziron cast aside the mutilated ruin of the zombie dragon and turned towards Harkdron. The Keeper of Secrets grinned with what was left of his face, deciding to savour the vampire’s torment. All around him, flocks of lesser daemons came stealing up the Queensroad, eager to draw their own vicarious amusement from Mendeziron’s depravity.

The great daemon took one lumbering step towards Harkdron, then froze in place. His eyes fixed upon the Obelisk, growing wide with alarm as he saw the power slumbering within the monument respond to the vampire’s call. Before Mendeziron could retreat, that power erupted into a spectral wave of death. A black storm of ethereal energies spilled across him and his followers, ripping and tearing at them with ghostly claws. The chill of ancient graves stifled the burning ferocity of Slaanesh’s daemons, shredding their unnatural essence into tatters of desire and sensuality. The forms the daemons had taken on were cast down, burned away by the shrieking maelstrom.

The Keeper of Secrets crossed his arms, evoking the infernal magic of Slaanesh. A shimmering trapezohedron flared around his body, a cage of light to hold back the darkness. For an instant the barrier crackled with purple sparks and jade flickers, then the ghostly forces seeped through the breaches they had torn in the arcane ward. The daemon banished the first surge of phantoms with a nimbus of arcane flame, but more spirits swiftly rushed in to take the place of those he vanquished. As the howling phantoms swirled around him, the daemon found himself being consumed, his physical presence devoured by the maelstrom of spectres. Mendeziron’s claws crumbled as they were reduced to dust, his horns wilted like melting wax, his howls of defiance collapsed into a death rattle. Mighty as the daemon’s magic was, it was unequal to the power that now raged across Nulahmia and the dread being that was its master.

Spirits from the world-that-was, ghosts of the legendary past, the slumbering dead of numberless millennia – the spectral storm overwhelmed the Slaaneshi along the Queensroad, annihilating them utterly. Then, the ghoulish tide poured out across the burning streets, striking down the scavengers and despoilers prowling among the debris, slaughtering the few inhabitants yet hiding in secret refuges. The storm rolled onwards, sweeping into the temple district. The hungry spirits smashed down the hordes of Chaos trying to fight their way up the Pathway of Punishment. They crushed the regiments of bone warriors and deadwalkers trying to hold the approaches to the Throne Mount. The Anvils’ rearguard was beset by the spirit storm, even their mighty valour incapable of denying the spectral fury of Shyish’s dead. One after another, black-armoured Stormcasts were dragged from the shield walls to be consumed by the swirling fog of undeath.

The daemonette fell, the severed halves of her body streaming ichor. Neferata swung away from her fallen adversary to face a second snarling enemy, sending a bolt of withering sorcery searing into the clawed daemon’s limbs to leave the creature twitching upon the ground. Around her, the queen’s morghast bodyguard struggled to hold back the mob of Slaaneshi attackers, their halberds glistening with the filth of daemonic veins.

Though the undead continued to hold most of the Slaaneshi horde as they battled to reach the summit, the daemonettes had been able to slip through the lines. Stalking the vampire queen, they had proven persistent and malicious foes. Neferata’s steed had been so savaged by the claws and whips of her enemies that she could feel its energies draining out of it with each step it took. To restore Nagadron’s vitality, she let the dread abyssal feast on the lifeless husks of her fallen morghasts.

Distracted by raising new regiments of bone warriors to oppose the Slaaneshi forces, Neferata had lost track of the storm-knights and their progress punching through the Chaos horde. When she was at last able to spare a glance down the hillside, she was surprised to see how far they had come. Despite the fact that a veritable horde of enemies still stood between them, the ebon knights were proving unstoppable. Though the undead had ceased attacking them, the storm-knights remained wary of their decayed allies – a wariness that did as much to impede their advance as the blades of Chaos. Once again, Neferata cursed Harkdron’s foolish decision to attack the newcomers.

Casting her gaze further afield, Neferata looked across the burning ruin of Nulahmia for some sight of her lover. Instead of Harkdron, however, she saw a black cyclone of spirits raging through the desolation, a tempest of destruction that was obliterating all in its path. She could see the glowing apparitions that swirled out from the midst of the eldritch gale, spectral warriors that slew whatever stood before them. Phantom swords cut down skeletal soldiers while storm-knights expired on ethereal spears, their spirits streaking into the sky in bursts of blue light. The cyclone’s greatest havoc was turned upon the legions of Chaos, however. Droves of barbarians and beasts perished as the spirit hosts spilled across their ranks.

For an instant, Neferata wondered if, despite her doubts, one of the other Mortarchs had seen the spirit-beacons and come to her aid. The manifestation was certainly a feat of necromancy on a scale far beyond that of a deathmage or vampire lord. At the same time, it didn’t have the eldritch imprint of her fellow Mortarchs. There was nevertheless something familiar about the phantom storm, something that sent an icy chill rushing through her blackened heart.

Another swarm of daemonettes came dancing up from the Pathway, overwhelming her remaining morghast guards. Neferata set her magic against the assault, driving the creatures back. She could see the ghastly hunger in their eyes, the lascivious sneer on their faces. For the moment, she stood alone against them, a fact that emboldened these creatures of Chaos. Slithering up the jagged slope, bypassing the regiments of undead filling the Pathway, a serpent-like daemon-beast carried the Slaaneshi warlord himself into the Mortarch’s presence. The lion-faced mortal brought his glaive shearing through the skull of the last of her morghast defenders, the weapon’s enchantments shattering the ancient bone like an eggshell.

Before the warlord and his daemons could charge Neferata, however, they were beset by a barrage of crackling lightning. Winged storm-knights flew overhead, hurling javelins down upon the Slaaneshi horde. Each projectile became a lance of celestial fire before it smashed into the daemonettes. The infernal creatures shrivelled under the fulminating assault, their essence steaming away.

The fury of the lightning failed to stop the Chaos lord. Spurring his snake-like steed onwards, the warlord made one final push to reach Neferata. She could read the grisly determination in his eyes, the obsession that drove him to claim her even in the face of certain defeat. He cast the scorched ruin of his glaive aside, reaching for the swords hanging from his belt.

A thunderbolt struck just then, a blast more brilliant and furious than any that had come before. Neferata recoiled before it, driven back by its violence. When the blinding flash dissipated, she saw a black-armoured warrior standing in the smoking crater left by the lightning, a storm-knight with wings like those of the warriors flying overhead. Unlike his comrades, the lone knight bore a golden halo around his helm and a great lantern was clenched in his upraised hand. The vampire queen screamed at the searing sting of the light that blazed from within the lamp.

The winged knight noticed her aversion, angling the lantern away from her so that she was shielded from its rays. Even so, she could feel the azure glow piercing her with a sensation that was at once both cool and warm. She felt revulsion at the purity of the energy, yet also a desperate craving for it.

The Chaos lord’s steed hissed in terror as the azure light spilled across it, its charge arrested as it drew back in fright. Sparks glanced from the daemon’s steaming hide as the purifying rays washed over it. Only the vicious urging of the warlord goaded the monster onward. Swift as a striking tomb-cobra, the daemon’s head shot towards the winged knight. Swifter still was the flash of that warrior’s sword, shearing through the serpentine head in a gout of purplish ichor. The decapitated daemon crumpled back upon itself, writhing in agonised spasms. The lion-faced warlord was smashed against the ground, crushed beneath the undulating coils of his steed. The maddened thrashing of the monster at last brought the chaotic tangle of rider and mount to the edge of the cliff. With a final twitch, the daemon-snake rolled over the side, hurtling down the face of Throne Mount. As the creature’s vitality dissipated, its body faded away, leaving its master to plummet alone to the burning streets below.

The blinding light was extinguished as the winged knight snapped closed the latch of his lantern. He turned towards Neferata, bowing to the vampire queen. ‘Greetings, Lady Neferata,’ the warrior said. ‘I am Huld, Knight-Azyros of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. I hail from the Realm Celestial, and come seeking alliances as were of old.’

Before Neferata could answer Huld, the spectral tide that had been raging across the ruin of Nulahmia rose up from the city, sweeping across the summit of the Throne Mount. A black veil of death, glowing phantoms swirling within its current, howled all around them. The bones of her morghast guard were drawn up into the tempest, vanishing into its titanic whirlwind. Only the Mortarch and the Knight-Azyros remained, standing in the very eye of the morbid cyclone.

A hellshriek rose from the black storm, a sound of such enmity that it rattled across the whole of Nulahmia. Out from the swirling eddies of phantasmal forces and spectral warriors, a maleficent figure strode. Prodigious in stature, the fleshless revenant marched across the summit. Black robes were draped about his bony body, and chitinous plates of deathly armour shrouded his skeletal frame. In his withered hand, he bore a tall staff of bone surmounted by a funerary icon. Atop his skinless skull, he wore a tall crown of obsidian and gold that pulsated with arcane energies and glowed with an amethyst light.

Shakily, Neferata dropped from Nagadron’s back, prostrating herself before the advancing apparition. No mere Mortarch had descended upon Nulahmia, but rather the one being in all existence before whom even she knew terror. The Great Necromancer himself, Master of the Deathly Realm. The Death God, Nagash.

She could feel the gaze of Nagash upon her, studying her from the depths of empty sockets. Though he had long ago withdrawn to his underworld, she knew he was aware of her secret kingdom, her manifold manipulations and schemes by which she had thought to expand her own power. Nothing could be hidden from him. Nagash saw all, and what he saw did not please him.

Even as she trembled before her master, Neferata was stunned by the courage of Huld. Could it be that the Knight-Azyros was ignorant of whom he stood before? How else to explain that he didn’t fall to his knees in terrified worship? When Nagash turned his gaze upon Huld, a gaze that had reduced warlords to simpering wrecks and demigods to grovelling vassals, the storm-knight stood proud. He defied the tremendous will that emanated from the core of Nagash’s being. Instead of abasing himself, he rendered only the same slight bow he had offered Neferata. His salutations to the Great Necromancer were no different; no tremor of fear polluted his voice or dulled his words.

Neferata waited in dread for Nagash to respond to such arrogance. As impressive as Huld’s assault upon the Chaos lord had been, she knew Nagash could exterminate the knight almost without a thought. As the silence stretched on, her fear continued to mount. All of the ambitions she had entertained about harnessing the might of the storm-knights would be extinguished the instant Nagash loosed his wrath upon Huld.

‘Spoken like a true son of Sigmar,’ the sepulchral voice of Nagash hissed. The Great Necromancer swept his staff through the air, dispelling the swirling maelstrom of spirits, sending them streaming back into the underworld from which they had been called. He advanced towards Huld, staring down at the winged knight. ‘Unbowed. Unbroken. How like your god you are. An echo of his dream.’

A malignant glow rose within the pits of Nagash’s skull. ‘How many dreams may fade into nightmares.’

CHAPTER SIX

Stretching across the wilted fields, a vast double-column of bleached bone and withered flesh marched. What remained of the armies of Neferata, Mortarch of Blood, advanced with grim silence, only the rattle of rusted armour or the creak of ancient bones giving note of their passage. At the centre of the column, carried within funerary carriages, were the vampire queen and her handmaidens. The revivified morghasts surrounded the carriages, their bestial skulls leering with menace at the lands through which they passed. Ahead of the queen’s attendants rode Lord Harkdron and the few remaining blood knights of Nulahmia.

Behind Neferata’s entourage, a massive throne of bone hovered across the earth, supported upon phantasmal energies that moaned with spectral malice. Even the regiments of skeletons and zombies that marched silently to either side of the throne were loath to draw near to it, the embers of awareness within their rotted heads drawing back in fear from the entity that reposed upon the throne. Living or undead, all trembled in the presence of Nagash.

Trailing behind the column of undead strode the ebon ranks of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. Hundreds strong, the Stormcasts kept pace with the advancing skeletons and zombies but made no move to close the gap between them, observing the separation with an almost religious fervour.

The smoke rising from the ruins of Nulahmia was fading away in the distance, absorbed into the miasma of icy fog that inundated the dominion that had once been Neferata’s kingdom. The city they left behind was now as desolate as the terrain that had once hidden it, another lifeless necropolis littering the lands of Shyish. The ghosts and spectres that haunted Nulahmia’s cursed ground now did so without the interruption of mortal life and immortal sorcery.

A part of Lord-Celestant Makvar felt regret that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer had come too late to save the city and preserve its inhabitants from the depredations of Chaos or the spectral carnage that followed. He had not been deaf to the misgivings of Knight-Heraldor Brannok when the Stormcasts marched from Nulahmia. Brannok had wanted to detach a few retinues of Liberators and Prosecutors to search the ruins and ensure they were not abandoning any pockets of survivors. He felt that to do so would be a blemish on the honour of their Warrior Chamber, but even Lord-Castellant Vogun, who was sympathetic to Brannok’s concerns, felt such a dalliance would be a waste of time. Nothing alive had been spared by the black storm that descended upon Nulahmia – only those upon the slopes of the Throne Mount had escaped its consuming malevolence. To tarry in the haunted streets would simply tempt the anger of the unquiet dead or draw the attention of such daemons as had managed to slip away during the battle for the Pathway of Punishment.

Makvar’s concerns were more pragmatic. They had to be. The benefits of lingering to rescue a few dozen – even a few hundred – survivors hidden amidst the havoc had to be balanced against the scope of their mission to the Realm of Death. He simply couldn’t justify the risk. Not when so much depended upon their success. Not when the Anvils had been presented with an opportunity far greater than that which had been entrusted to them when they left the Realm Celestial.

They had come to Shyish to broker an alliance with a Mortarch, to secure the aid of one of the realm’s deathless lords. Instead they found themselves confronted by a god, a being that had walked among the divinities of Sigmar’s pantheon. Nagash, the Master of Death, one of the mightiest entities in all the Eight Realms. The daunting prospect of parley with a god was eclipsed only by the enormity of what stood to be gained by such discussion. If Makvar could sway the mind of the Great Necromancer, then it wouldn’t simply be the might of a single Mortarch but that of the Realm of Death itself which he would bring into the arsenal of Azyr.

‘To what purpose do we march?’ Lord-Castellant Vogun wondered. He held his warding lantern out, its rays dispelling the grave-gas that swirled all around the Stormcasts, pawing at them with phantom tendrils that left lines of frost on their armour. As far as the rays could pierce the fog, there was only the barren wastes of a withered land, lifeless fields spilling into stands of dead trees and jumbles of craggy grey stone. ‘These lands are spent, bled dry by the hunger of their masters as much as the rampaging armies of Chaos. What refuge do they think to lead us to?’ The question brought a worried growl from the gryph-hound that loped along beside him.

‘A crypt would be sanctuary enough to the undead,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar reminded Vogun. ‘The hordes of Chaos may have overlooked much in their rush for conquest and glory. A living city might draw the invaders like moths to a flame, but would a cairn offer the same lure to their ilk? It is the living they seek to dominate and corrupt, not the bones of the dead.’

‘It is a cheerless thought,’ Vogun said, ‘to leave one graveyard behind only to seek another.’ He turned and looked back at the winged Knight-Azyros Huld. Of them all, only Huld had stood in the presence of Nagash and traded words with the Death God. ‘Again, I question the reason for our sojourn and the reason we couldn’t be given an audience in Neferata’s palace.’

‘I can only repeat what was said to me,’ Huld replied. ‘There was concern that the taint of Chaos hung heavy about Nulahmia, that the presence of the Ruinous Powers lingered upon the Throne Mount. It is enough that the enemy is aware that we have descended upon Shyish, should we also reveal our mission where daemonic ears might be listening? No, I find this display of caution to be well reasoned.’

Brannok shook his head. ‘It is vexing,’ he said. ‘If we march, then we should be told where we march. Not simply commanded to follow where he would lead us.’ The Knight-Heraldor pointed to the retinues of Liberators marching behind the officers. The Stormcasts strained under the colossal weight of the obsidian obelisk that had been uprooted from the Queensroad. More than the physical mass of the monolith, it was the ethereal taint that exuded from its glassy surface that tested the endurance of the knights. The warriors carrying it had to be rotated every few hours lest its uncanny emanations become onerous to them.

Brannok’s words fed Makvar’s own concerns. Nagash had commanded haste in debarking from Nulahmia. A prudent decision, for if one army of Chaos could find the hidden city, there was no reason to believe another wouldn’t be quick to follow. Indeed, Neferata had been given little time to summon her attendants from her palace-temple and gather a few of her most treasured belongings. But the Obelisk of Black, for the plinth to be excavated and removed – for that the retreat from Nulahmia had delayed. Under the exacting supervision of Lord Harkdron, the vampire general who had fought against the Anvils during the battle for the Throne Mount, the Stormcasts had cut away the ensorcelled paving that grounded the obelisk. The lanterns of both Vogun and Huld had been necessary to hold back the gales of phantoms that swirled around the site, angry that the relic was being disturbed.

The potency of the arcane power infused into the Obelisk of Black was something it didn’t take someone of Kreimnar’s or Vogun’s nature to sense. It was a thing saturated in the dark energies of Shyish, a shard of death itself. Makvar didn’t need to understand its workings to know that the relic was a weapon, hideous in its potential. That Nagash would entrust the relic into the Stormcasts’ care was something that gave him hope for the success of his mission. However much of a burden the Obelisk might be, by carrying it they would be returning the faith the Great Necromancer had extended to them.

‘If you leave a battlefield, do you leave your sword behind?’ Makvar turned in his saddle and looked down at Brannok. ‘Our weapons are sigmarite and steel. The weapons of Shyish are those of magic. The more disquieting the instruments of that magic, the more potent its power.’ He swept his gaze across the rest of his officers. ‘We came here to gather warriors for the God-King. It is towards that goal we must all persevere.’ He nodded at the Obelisk. ‘However arduous our trials, we will persevere.’

Rising above the stagnant depths of a festering tarn, the castle snarled at the moonless sky with fang-like battlements and the jagged parapets of broken towers. The great rock upon which the fortress perched was pitted and scoured, immense fissures snaking down the crumbling cliffs and deep caves yawning blackly from ledges and overhangs. Swarms of bats flitted from the caves, swooping across the scummy water below to snatch insects from the rank air. Packs of wolves howled from the darkness of desiccated forests, their lonely cries echoing across the windswept moors.

The towns and villages that they had passed since leaving Nulahmia had been desolate and abandoned, not so much as a rat prowling among their ruins. Here, however, in this blighted place, signs of habitation greeted the Stormcasts. Lights shone from the windows of the castle and the murmur of voices rose from behind its walls, accompanied by the discordant sound of an untuned harpsichord.

All at once, the undead column came to a halt. Makvar raised his fist into the air, arresting the advance of his Stormcasts. The knights kept a wary hand near their swords, bracing themselves for whatever would soon unfold. Their wait wasn’t a long one. Riding out from among the undead ranks upon a steed as fleshless as any bone warrior, Lord Harkdron approached Makvar and his officers. Gojin snorted with agitation as the deathly stench of the skeletal steed struck the dracoth’s senses.

Harkdron scowled at the reptile, and the look with which he favoured its rider was no less hostile. ‘I bring salutations from Queen Neferata,’ he said. ‘She requests the company of Lord-Celestant Makvar and his officers.’

‘And where does her highness expect to entertain us?’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar asked.

‘You are to be guests in the castle,’ Harkdron stated, waving his hand in the direction of the sinister fortress. ‘Your troops may bivouac on the plain below.’ A malicious gleam shone in his eyes. ‘If they are vigilant, they should come to no distress.’

Makvar leaned back in Gojin’s saddle and studied the vampire general. He might be uncertain of Neferata’s intentions, and be even less sure of what he could expect from Nagash, but there was no mistaking the hate boiling inside Harkdron. The only question was how far he would go to indulge that hostility.

‘What of your queen’s master?’ Makvar asked. ‘When may we expect an audience with Nagash?’

Harkdron bristled at the note of expectation, the almost demanding turn of Makvar’s words. ‘Mighty Nagash will receive you in the great hall of Schloss Wolfhof,’ he said. The vampire’s lips pulled back, revealing his fangs. ‘It is rare quarry that is so eager to tempt the hunter’s hunger.’

Makvar returned the vampire’s cold stare. ‘Return to your mistress,’ he said. ‘We were sent here to treat with the rightful lords of Shyish, not bandy words with one of their more ineffectual minions.’ He drew back on Gojin’s reins, causing the dracoth to raise his head, the reptile’s jaws only inches from Harkdron’s shoulder. ‘Tell Queen Neferata I eagerly anticipate our conference, and my audience with the Great Necromancer.’

Seething at his curt dismissal, Harkdron wheeled his skeletal horse around and galloped back towards the motionless ranks of the undead column. Makvar waited until the vampire was well in the distance before addressing his comrades. ‘Brothers, the castle above us appears to be the refuge to which we have been marching. It would seem this is the setting Nagash has chosen to formally receive us. My presence and that of the officers of our Warrior Chamber has been requested. If fortune favours us… If my eloquence be equal to the task, it may be that our mission will soon be accomplished here.’

The Lord-Celestant’s announcement brought a subdued response from his warriors. Reserved even by the standards of the Stormcast Eternals, the spirits of the Anvils were further depressed by their sombre surroundings and the grim influence of the Obelisk they carried with them. As the Liberator-Primes and the commanders of the Paladin retinues issued orders to the knights to prepare the camp, Makvar noted the visible relief with which those carrying the plinth lowered it to the ground. Already it seemed to be drawing nebulous, ghastly wisps of energy up from the earth upon which it rested.

‘Vogun, I want you to remain behind,’ Makvar told the Lord-Castellant. ‘Your warding lantern may be necessary to fend off whatever wayward ghosts the Obelisk attracts to it. It seems to become at least partially dormant when a celestial light falls upon it.’ He shrugged as another thought occurred to him. ‘Besides, I need to leave someone familiar with Gojin’s habits and temper to look after him while I am being feted in Schloss Wolfhof. However dilapidated their castle has grown, I doubt they would welcome a dracoth in their great hall.’

Huld approached Makvar as he started to dismount. ‘Shall I remain behind as well?’ he asked. ‘It may be prudent to have my celestial beacon to support Lord-Castellant Vogun’s warding lantern.’

‘No doubt it would,’ Makvar agreed, ‘but I fear I need you with me. My pride can suffer the reality when I confess that my eloquence is that of a child beside your own. In a duel of blades one chooses to have his best swordsman at hand. It is no different in a contest of words.’

The Knight-Azyros bowed his head. ‘Sigmar grant that I am worthy of the trust you place in me.’

‘The God-King knows the strength within every soul,’ Kreimnar stated. ‘He knows the hour when that strength must be called upon, when each man must show his mettle.’

Yes, Makvar thought, but how often is the test of a man’s mettle to parley with the Death God?

Though it was a shameful thing to feel, Makvar was grateful that it was upon Huld’s shoulders and not his own that such an enormous feat had fallen.

The great hall of Schloss Wolfhof was a squalid, rotting ruin. The tapestries that hung from its walls were faded, moth-eaten and caked in mould – incapable of stifling the cold drafts that whipped through the multitudinous cracks that rippled through the stonework. The rugs that lay strewn across the floors were stained and threadbare, doing nothing to lend a semblance of refinement, or to dull the chill of the flagstones underfoot. The timber tables were splintered, their surfaces gouged and dented, the wood discoloured by the substances that had seeped into the grain. The chairs were worn, the carvings upon armrests and backs rubbed down to shapeless bumps by centuries of misuse and neglect. The cushions upon the seats stank of mildew, their feathers squeezed and compressed until they had a stony firmness. The candelabras that were arrayed about the tables were caked in verdigris, and wobbled on feet that had long ceased to be even. Overhead, a dusty mess of cobwebs and rust struggled to present itself as a chandelier.

More unsettling than the decayed splendour of the great hall were the efforts expended by its inhabitants to cling to the grandeur of the past. The lord of the castle, a decayed and monstrous vampire calling himself Count Zernmeister, draped his twisted body in scraps of rotten velvet and wore a crown of tarnished metal too small to fit about his misshapen head. The abhorrant made a great show of playing host to his guests, exhibiting a courtly solicitude that took no notice of the dilapidated surroundings.

Zernmeister’s court were no less hideous than their lord. Snarling, atavistic ghouls sat around the tables wearing ruffled rags and perfumed wigs, golden rings jammed down about their scabby claws. A naked, bat-winged monster stinking of crypts and coffins played the part of major-domo, announcing each guest by stamping its clawed foot against the floor and croaking out a stream of inarticulate garble from its fang-ridden mouth. A huge monstrosity with splinters of bone piercing its leprous flesh sat behind the ramshackle harpsichord that leaned against one wall, prodding the keys with clawed fingers and pumping its pedals with taloned toes. A bestial creature the size of an ogor sat in the chair beside Zernmeister, an embroidered collar pinned about its neck, and a gilded pectoral hanging against its furry breast. When the vampire introduced the thing as the Prince of Wolfhof and his heir, the monster stood up and spread its leathery wings wide.

The madness of the ghoulish entourage was heightened by the abominable repast they presented their guests. Platters of raw flesh were set before each table, sometimes exhibiting the curve of a rib or the tapering point of a finger. Soup was a broth of blood and worms. The wine was nothing but sludge drawn up from the tarn below. Yet to Zernmeister, the fare was extravagance itself and the vampire took pride as he described the wondrous boar hunt by which the main course had been brought to the table, utterly oblivious that what stared back at him from the tarnished trencher were the butchered remains of some luckless marauder.

Makvar shook his head as the horrible fodder was set before him. Turning to where Zernmeister sat, he apologised to their crazed host. ‘Forgive me, your grace, but I and my brothers have taken strict vows. We may neither sup nor drink until our sacred duty has been accomplished.’

The vampire crooked his deformed head to one side, as though suffering some internal turmoil at this disruption of his fantasy. After a moment, Zernmeister decided to fit the rejection into his delusion. ‘It is a pity, Lord-Celestant, for you will find no better fare in the kingdom. You do respect to your order by exhibiting such fidelity to your vows. There are few templars, I fear, who would adhere to such strictures.’ The abhorrant turned his attentions away from Makvar to nibble at the rotten meat on his own plate, sucking such blood as remained in the collapsed veins.

The Lord-Celestant looked away, turning his attention towards the head of the table. There, reclining in a seat fashioned of bleached bones, Nagash rested his cadaverous body. The inhabitants of Schloss Wolfhof had accepted the Great Necromancer as their liege lord, making a great show of presenting to him a coffer filled with finger bones – the tax they had collected from their serfs. The vampire had further sought to placate his visiting sovereign with a series of gifts, the least disgusting being a mouldy funeral shroud. Nagash had indulged the insane dementia of the ghoul-court, treating them as faithful vassals and accepting their deranged tribute. Watching Makvar follow his example appeared to amuse the Lord of Death.

‘You pay them a grand kindness, leaving them with their illusions,’ Nagash declared. ‘When a wretched reality persists beyond its time, there are many who would find succour in madness.’

The sepulchral hiss of Nagash’s voice reverberated through Makvar’s very spirit. He suspected that the Great Necromancer’s words only reached those whom he wanted them to reach. Many times when he spoke, the court of Wolfhof failed to respond. At others, his slightest murmur had the debased ghouls fawning over him to attend his needs.

Makvar had to be more cautious with his words. From everything he had seen, from all that Nagash had intimated, the only thing that kept the ghouls from falling upon the Stormcasts was the delusion that the knights were their guests. Anything that broke that fragile fantasy would turn the great hall into an abattoir. Even if the Anvils prevailed, Makvar sensed that they would have failed a test, a trail that the Death God had set before them.

‘Your realm has suffered greatly,’ Makvar said. ‘The taint of Chaos has taken much from your subjects.’ He frowned as he stumbled over the words, glancing down the table to where Huld sat beside Zernmeister’s monstrous ‘heir’. The Knight-Azyros was the one who should be here fencing words with Nagash and trying to keep from saying anything that would unsettle the ghouls. By design or perverse whim, the Great Necromancer had singled out Makvar for his attentions, sitting the Lord-Celestant on his right at the head of the table, well away from his fellow Stormcasts. The only ally near at hand was Neferata, seated to Nagash’s left, who gave a warning flutter of her lashes whenever he felt himself sliding into some verbal trap the Death God had laid for him.

Nagash took up the chalice Zernmeister had set before him, raising it to his fleshless mouth. The ghoul court was oblivious to the fact that none of the slop ever left the cup. ‘Chaos is a ravenous beast,’ Nagash declared. ‘The more it consumes, the more it demands. Nothing can sate its hunger. Even were Chaos to devour the whole of the Eight Realms, it wouldn’t be satisfied.’ He lowered the chalice and leaned towards Makvar. ‘There are some appetites that can never be appeased.’

‘The enemy is formidable, but not unstoppable,’ Makvar said. ‘Sigmar has held them back, kept them from breaching the gates of Azyr. The God-King’s armies range across the realms, taking the battle into the very strongholds of Chaos. Many realmgates have been wrested from the enemy, many lands and peoples have been liberated.’

‘If the God-King’s victories are so numerous, why does Sigmar send you to treat with me?’ Nagash asked. He gestured at the decayed hall around them with a bony talon. ‘Is his reality as much an illusion as that of these wretches?’

The Death God’s blasphemous mockery stirred a sense of pious outrage within Makvar’s heart. He held back the retort that would have so easily rolled from his tongue. It didn’t need a warning look from Neferata to tell him Nagash was trying to bait him into some injudicious remark. Still, he refused to let the slight against Sigmar go unanswered. ‘Chaos is a foe to test even the mightiest of gods,’ he stated.

‘True,’ Nagash conceded. ‘The War of Bones has taken its toll even upon me.’ He pointed a bony finger at Makvar. ‘Still, it must be remembered that I fought on while Sigmar simply locked himself away behind the gates of Azyr. Now that he has decided to stir from his seclusion and try to turn back the tide of Chaos, in his arrogance he sends his disciples to rebuild the old alliances and renew the ancient pacts?’

‘The God-King seeks to reassemble the divine pantheon,’ Makvar said. ‘The strength of Azyr and Shyish united once more against Chaos, committed to driving its creatures from the Mortal Realms.’

Once more, Makvar found the skeletal face of Nagash turned towards him, empty sockets studying him with the fiercest scrutiny. ‘Sigmar has been busy in his absence,’ the Great Necromancer conceded. ‘Never have I seen such armour and weaponry as those you carry. I have never encountered warriors such as your Stormcasts, men who bear the light of Azyr burning within them.’

‘We are but one Warrior Chamber,’ Makvar said. ‘There are multitudes of us among the armies of Azyr. This is the strength Sigmar is unleashing against the legions of Chaos. This is the power which–’

Nagash interrupted Makvar’s speech. ‘But why does such strength seek alliances? Why is it needful for Sigmar to send his underlings scurrying about the realms to draw others into his camp?’

Makvar had braced himself for such a question. The Great Necromancer was a being of darkness, existing in a world of suspicion and oppression. It would only feed his doubts if Makvar didn’t disclose the necessity that had seen the Anvils descend into the Realm of Death. ‘Archaon holds the Allpoints, seeking to corrupt it for his masters. If Chaos could be denied possession–’

‘And Sigmar doesn’t have sufficient faith in his Stormhosts to carry the day for him,’ Nagash chuckled. ‘He seeks to add my deathless legions to his forces.’ The Great Necromancer nodded. ‘It is a wise course to pursue. The only method by which Chaos may be beaten is to overwhelm them utterly.’ He raised his hand in warning to Makvar. ‘Before I can render assistance to Sigmar, I must regather my own resources. Most of the Realm of Death has fallen to Chaos since Archaon’s invasion.’

‘What do you require?’ Makvar asked. ‘If it is within the means of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer to secure, we will see it done.’

‘If it is not, then you will shake my faith in this army Sigmar has made for himself,’ Nagash cautioned him. ‘First we must find my other Mortarchs.’ He extended a skeletal claw towards Neferata. ‘My lovely Mortarch of Blood once more stands at my side, dutiful and loyal as ever. To help me in my magic, I will need her companions. Arkhan, the Mortarch of Sacrament, and Mannfred, the Mortarch of Night.’ The Great Necromancer rested his claws on the table before him, listening for a moment to the off-key dirge rising from the harpsichord. ‘It will be a perilous ordeal, unearthing my Mortarchs and returning them to me. Neither of them are so gracious as my dear Neferata, and they are prodigious sorcerers in their own right. Should they prove reluctant, it may be no simple task to bring them to heel.’

The taunting dismissal of the Stormcasts woven within Nagash’s warning offended Makvar’s sense of honour and pride, but this alone wasn’t what moved him to agree to help the Great Necromancer track down his errant acolytes. It was the knowledge that his mission depended upon securing an alliance with Nagash, and that it was the Death God’s province to dictate the conditions to secure his aid.

Part of the pageantry demanded to support the delusions of Zernmeister’s court was that his guests should retire to chambers within Schloss Wolfhof’s crumbling towers for the night. Nagash, as the count’s visiting liege lord, was given accommodation in the abhorrant’s own chambers, with Zernmeister displacing his son and initiating a ripple effect that would see the winged major-domo sleeping beneath one of the tables in the great hall alongside the ghoulish kitchen staff.

For Makvar and his comrades, as well as the vampiric entourage of Neferata, the ‘guest rooms’ within the towers were rendered for their use. Zernmeister had been most effusive in his assurances that the rooms had been exactingly prepared for them by his servants. In reality, this simply equated to the ghouls ensuring that there was still a room waiting behind the water-warped doors. The chamber Kreimnar had been given lacked an outer wall, its floor dropping away to offer an unobstructed view of the stagnant tarn. The room shared by Huld and Brannok had been a little better, though the lack of a roof overhead was worrisome considering the size of the bats flying about the castle.

Makvar almost felt spoiled when he discovered his room had both a ceiling and four walls, though the condition overall made him hesitant to touch anything. Mould and tradition seemed to be the only things keeping the place from falling apart. Even under better conditions, he wouldn’t have rested comfortably in a castle infested with insane vampires and ghouls. Instead, he kept his sword close at hand when he sat down upon the floor, his eyes fixed on the swollen door, his ears trained upon the corridor outside.

It was some hours into his vigil when Makvar heard a furtive sound in the hallway. Closing his hand around the grip of his sword, he waited as the sound slowly crept nearer. When the deformed horror that served as Zernmeister’s steward withdrew from his room, it had taken the creature much effort to close the warped door behind it. Now the portal slowly inched inwards, no sound betraying the creaking of its hinges or the scrape of its bottom against the floor.

The starlight shining through the narrow window of Makvar’s chamber illuminated the figure that quickly shifted around the open door. The Lord-Celestant recognised the enticing presence, the sensuous curves of slender limbs and the alluring swell of a generous bosom. Framed by her raven tresses, the pale face of Neferata was a vision of beauty to melt even the stoniest heart. The soft smile that flickered across her red lips was at once both innocent and suggestive. With a kick of her bare foot, she closed the door behind her.

Even a heart of stone would have been roused by the voluptuous vampire as she entered the room, but Makvar’s spirit had been forged from unyielding sigmarite, not simple stone. Yes, he could recognise the charms of his visitor, appreciate the enticing lure, but they presented no temptation to him. Neferata realised that fact when she saw the sword still clenched in his hand.

‘I mean you no ill, Lord-Celestant,’ Neferata said. ‘I come to you as one who would consider you a friend.’

Makvar nodded at the thin gown that was doing a feeble attempt at covering the vampire. ‘I dare say you’ve won many friends with visits like this.’

‘How else to convince you I mean no harm?’ Neferata asked. She turned around, holding her arms at her sides. ‘You can see I bear no weapon.’

‘There’s no weapon half so fearsome as what you choose not to hide,’ Makvar observed. ‘But understand – I am not one of your thralls like Harkdron.’

Neferata smiled again, this time without any imposture of innocence or seduction. ‘I was wrong to underestimate you, but do understand that my intentions are sincere. There is much to be gained through this alliance you seek.’

‘Surely that is Nagash’s decision to reach,’ Makvar said. ‘He is your master, is he not?’

A haunted look filled Neferata’s eyes. ‘You must be careful of him,’ she warned. ‘Do not trust him too far. Already he has dealt treacherously with your knights.’

Makvar sprang to his feet and seized the vampire’s arm. ‘What do you mean? What has he done?’

Neferata drew away from him, staring at the imprint of his hand on her milky skin. ‘The Obelisk of Black,’ she said. ‘He asked your storm-knights to bear it away from my city. He was testing your men, seeing how mighty they truly were. He knew that nothing mortal can long endure contact with the Obelisk.’

‘You knew this as well,’ Makvar accused, ‘yet you said nothing!’

‘It isn’t an easy thing to defy Nagash,’ Neferata said. ‘The only reason I have the liberty to do so now is because he has turned his attentions elsewhere.’ A look of fear twisted her face. ‘Don’t trust anything he tells you. Always be on your guard.’ She hesitated, as though drawing up some hidden reserve of courage. ‘If I ask it, swear to me you will protect me from him.’

Makvar shook his head. ‘Such a promise is one I cannot give. There are things greater than either of us at stake. They cannot be jeopardised. I cannot set aside my duty.’

‘Your duty may doom us all,’ Neferata told him. As quickly as she had slipped into his room, the vampire queen withdrew, retreating back into the hallway. Makvar watched as the door slowly closed behind her, cutting off his view of the corridor.

Alone again inside his room, the Lord-Celestant didn’t see the shadow that emerged from the end of the hall. He didn’t hear its silent approach or sense its lingering presence outside his door. Nor was he aware of it when it withdrew, following the same path Neferata chose when making her retreat.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Foul, reeking of decay and dissolution, the vast swamps seemed without end, a great sea of mud and morass that stretched away into eternity. Great stands of marrow-weed stabbed up from dank ponds and sinkholes like the bones of drowned men, their morbid flowers oozing poisonous nectar. Expanses of corpse-willows cast their shadows across boggy creeks and scummy streams, their trunks contorted into the semblance of rotten bodies, their finger-shaped leaves waving with sinister artifice in the marshland breeze. The croaking of toads bubbled up from every puddle, a groaning chorus redolent of sorrow and mourning. Crocodiles slithered down slimy embankments, their dark hides melting into the brackish gloom of sluggish channels. Crimson grave asps crawled through the shadowy branches of festering fenpines, their scales marked with death’s heads.

The armies of Chaos had rampaged through the Mirefells many times, scourging the swamps of those who hid in its wastes. Though the invaders had razed every shelter, massacred each camp, the swamp itself had resisted their conquest. It had sucked them down into bottomless quagmires and drowned them under stagnant streams. Venomous bats and pestiferous spiders had taken their toll upon the intruders. Choking miasma and glowing soulblight had consumed the essence of beasts and men, leaving their ravaged bones as grim warnings to those who followed. From the hundreds of cemeteries and tombs half obliterated by the mud and muck, vengeful spirits rose to slaughter all who defiled their forsaken domain.

It had been many lifetimes, as mortals reckoned such things, since the Great Necromancer had felt the dread vibrations of the Mirefells seeping into his bones. In centuries past, entire kingdoms had vanished within the expanding mire. The spires of sunken palaces and temples protruding from muddy islands were the only testament to their passing. Yet even in nameless oblivion, the forgotten dead stirred at Nagash’s approach. He could hear them crying out to him, wailing in the throes of their unquiet sleep, begging for a mercy unknown to the Lord of Death.

Nagash wondered how much of the swamp’s essence Sigmar’s warriors could sense. There were those among them with some affinity for the eldritch and the arcane. The morbid Kreimnar, certainly, would be aware of at least the most strident of the necrotic harmonies. Perhaps Vogun would feel some of the malignant energies, Vogun with his purifying lantern and his righteous zeal. The Stormcasts were an enigmatic admixture of honour and duty, faith and obedience. Concepts that were sometimes put at odds with one another, standards that were subsumed to the demands of their mission.

Among them all, Nagash most pondered the mystery of the knight who led them. He had lied to Lord-Celestant Makvar when he told the knight that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer were the first of Sigmar’s Stormcasts that he had encountered. But then, there were many things he had kept from Makvar. There were questions that Nagash would see answered, riddles that needed solving. Makvar and his Anvils were different from the other Stormcasts in a manner that nagged at the Lord of Death. Their resistance to the Obelisk of Black’s emanations was still a puzzle to him.

That experiment, at least, had run its course. After leaving Schloss Wolfhof, Nagash had commanded the better part of Neferata’s undead army to bear the relic down into one of the underworlds where it would be safe from harm. There was no need leaving it exposed to the Anvils any longer, and taking the risk that they might learn its true nature. From subtle alterations in Makvar’s demeanour, it seemed that he, at least, had begun to harbour suspicions about the Obelisk.

It would be a mistake to dismiss any of the Stormcasts as simple or foolish. Nagash could detect the great age of the souls bound within their physical incarnations, taste it like a vintage wine. These were spirits that had worn the mantle of flesh many times, purged in the flames of death and rebirth in a fashion far different to the black art of necromancy. Instead of being diminished, instead of carrying the taint of the grave in their bones, they had been reshaped and remoulded, transmuted into something greater than they had been. Only by the most exacting artifice could Nagash create warriors of such potentialities, and those entities often demanded the life-force of lesser creatures to sustain their might.

In the millennia since his withdrawal into the Realm Celestial, had Sigmar discovered some new path of resurrection? Or had he merely found a different means to the same processes Nagash had mastered long ago? What was this force that sustained the Stormcasts beyond their mortal span? What were the limitations of such power? That was the great question that dominated the Death God’s mind.

When he unlocked the secrets of the Anvils, then Nagash would know what course to follow.

‘The stink of this place will never leave my armour,’ Knight-Heraldor Brannok growled as he slogged through the filthy mire. ‘I’ll have to boil each rivet and plate to divest myself of this stench.’

‘That should avail you little,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar commented. He removed his skull-shaped helm, letting the foul air of the swamp strike his senses unimpeded by the layers of sigmarite armour and leather padding. After a moment, his stern features curled into a grimace of contempt. ‘The smell of this swamp is going to seep into our very flesh.’

Brannok shook his head at Kreimnar’s rejoinder. Reaching up to seize hold of a corpse-willow branch, the Stormcast pulled himself up onto a patch of weed-choked ground that at least feigned a semblance of solidity. Stagnant water drained out from his leg armour, streaming back into the mire in little rivulets. White leeches clung to the sigmarite plates, vainly trying to suck their way through the metal to reach the warm body within. With a grunt of annoyance, Brannok brushed the vile parasites from his legs.

‘You’ll only make room for new ones,’ Kreimnar told him. Grabbing hold of the same branch Brannok had used, he joined him on the tiny rise. From the slight vantage, he could see the file of black-armoured Anvils trudging along the boggy creek, their boots stirring up the layers of wilted leaves and dead amphibians embedded in the sediment, further contributing to the murkiness of the water. It said much of the treacherous state of the muddy earth confining the creeks and streams that Makvar had decided their passage would be easier if they plunged directly into the shallows. Many times, the column had been forced to slow its pace while a Decimator was extracted from some hungry quagmire or a Liberator was withdrawn from the watery depths of a gator-pit that had been hidden from view by a layer of weeping grass.

The Lord-Celestant reacted to each delay as though it were a personal affront. Kreimnar found it easy to sympathise with Makvar’s attitude. Nagash’s entourage didn’t allow the hazards of the swamp to inconvenience them. Their steady, tireless march never wavered, their course never faltered. When one of their number fell into quicksand or was caught in the jaws of a crocodile, the undead didn’t bother rescuing their hapless comrade. Sentiment had no claim upon them, only the surety of purpose and objective.

The Stormcasts had too much humanity within them to slide so easily into such callousness.

‘Have Huld and the Prosecutors returned yet?’ Brannok asked as he plucked an especially large leech from his pauldron and scrutinised it for a moment before flinging it into the creek.

Kreimnar shook his head. Makvar had dispatched the winged Stormcasts hours ago, charging them with scouting ahead and finding an easier path through the Mirefells – a course unknown to or forgotten by their undead companions, or perhaps one that they chose to keep to themselves.

‘I don’t envy them the task they’ve been given,’ Kreimnar said. He kicked the toe of his boot against the muddy soil. ‘From the air, all of this muck must look the same. It can be no easy matter to decide what is solid earth and what is simply grass hiding a bog beneath its roots from that vantage point.’ A cheerless laugh rose from his throat. ‘At least they won’t get lost. Vogun’s light is the only bright spot in this festering mire.’ He nodded in the direction of the Lord-Castellant. The officer was hidden around a bend of the creek, but the vitalising glow of his warding lantern could be seen through the trees and weeds.

Brannok suddenly turned from Kreimnar, his attention seized by something much closer at hand than Vogun’s light. The knight crouched down beside the corpse-willow’s trunk, clearing away the tangle of weeds and vines clumped around it. His efforts quickly disclosed a chunk of discoloured stone embedded in the base of the tree. The outlines of the stone were too even, too regular to be any natural formation. Uprooting more of the weeds and tearing away some of the dangling vines, he exposed more of what proved to be an oval. Leaning back, studying the sprawl of the trunk, he could detect a certain roundness about its outline, as though the tree itself had grown to conform to a definite pattern.

‘What have you found?’ Kreimnar asked, taking note of the Knight-Heraldor’s distraction. Brannok looked upward, ripping away still more of the vines. Faintly visible, just protruding from the bark, was the stump of a stone wrist and, further down, the outline of a knee.

‘A fountain stood here once,’ Brannok declared, gesturing at the traces of the statue buried within the tree and the evidence of the basin hidden beneath its roots. The Stormcast looked across the dismal mire surrounding them, gazing at the swamp as though seeing it for the first time. ‘There was a village here, perhaps an entire town.’

Kreimnar drew his morbid helm back down over his face. ‘Almost anything might be buried under this slime,’ he said. ‘The hordes of Chaos have long dominated the Realm of Death and destroyed much in their rampages. There is no comfort in pondering the things already lost to the enemy.’

Brannok shook his head. ‘But which enemy was this place lost to?’ he wondered, pressing his hand against the corpse-willow. ‘How long has this tree grown over the graves of a vanished people? Was it the depredations of Chaos that brought them doom or was it the creatures who claim mastery over the Realm of Death?’

‘Would knowing the answer make any difference?’ Kreimnar asked. ‘War demands sacrifice, and there is no sacrifice harder to bear than the sullying of virtue. The lofty ideals of nobility and righteousness are things to keep locked away within the heart, preserved in the one place where they cannot be soiled by the demands of necessity. Chaos has many enemies, but unless they stand together, they cannot stand at all. Sigmar has seen this. It is why we have descended into this blighted realm. It would be an easier thing if those we came to befriend shared our ideas of justice and order, but we must take our allies where we find them and as we find them. We must compromise if we would see the long night of Chaos brought to an end.’

‘Yes,’ Brannok agreed, ‘there is no need to remind me of our duty, or my role in it. Yet it is difficult to divest myself of foreboding. We have appealed to a malignant power in hopes of setting it against a greater evil.’

‘Place your trust in Sigmar,’ Kreimnar advised. ‘Do not forget that Nagash was once a part of the God-King’s pantheon and walked at his side.’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Brannok said. ‘My fear is that Nagash has.’

The dracoth’s head plunged beneath the muddy waters of the creek, emerging an instant later with a crocodile impaled upon his fangs. Gojin shook his head from side to side in a violent burst of ferocity, cracking his prey’s spine and reducing it to an inanimate mass hanging from his jaws.

‘Drop it,’ Makvar told his steed. The Lord-Celestant walked beside the enormous reptile, slogging through the muck. It had always been his maxim that a true leader didn’t spare himself the travails of his warriors but instead shared in them. While his Stormcasts were forced to trudge through the slime, Makvar didn’t have the heart to keep warm and dry in the dracoth’s saddle. That his knights wouldn’t begrudge their commander such comfort only hardened his resolve to shun it.

Gojin glanced back at Makvar, a snort of irritation spraying from his nostrils. The dracoth was too obedient to protest his master’s command, even if he didn’t understand the reason for it. With another shake of his head, Gojin sent the broken carcass crashing onto the embankment.

Makvar watched the carcass, observing the eerie animation that crept back into its sinews and set its long tail thrashing against the weeds. After a moment, it raised its head, oblivious to the broken vertebrae protruding from its scaly hide. Soundlessly, the crocodile slid back into the creek and sank beneath its scummy surface.

‘See – you don’t want something like that in your belly,’ Makvar cautioned his steed. The dracoth shook his horned head, long tongue rolling across his fangs as though to rid himself of the aftertaste of the would-be meal. Makvar patted his steed’s neck, reassuring him that he would find cleaner prey soon.

Makvar was certain the dracoth would find no such fare within the Mirefells. The further the Anvils pressed into the wasteland, the more nebulous the distinction between life and death became. On the fringes of the swamp, the demarcation between living flesh and necrotic corruption was readily apparent. Now it was all blurred together, flowing into a confusion of fecund growth and morbid decay. Swarms of hideous blue flies pestered shrivelled toads that snapped them up in turn. Bloated rats gnawed at the stems of yellowed weeds, only to have vampiric stalks wind around their throats and draw the blood from their furry bodies. Bedraggled crows pecked away at the rotted organs of cadaverous bats only to have the creatures suddenly erupt into violence and sink their fangs into the birds.

Somewhere in this ghoulish desolation, Nagash declared they would find the Mortarch of Sacrament, Arkhan the Black. Makvar knew little about the ancient liche-king beyond his name and title. There were legends, nay myths, about the skeletal warlock and his mighty sorceries, but he preferred information of a less lurid and imaginative nature. To question Nagash directly would have been to undermine the impression of staunch confidence and unwavering commitment Makvar hoped to convey. If his mission was to succeed, it was vital to make the Great Necromancer appreciate the formidable nature of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. He had to see for himself the benefit of numbering the Stormcasts among his allies and the danger of making the stormhosts of Sigmar his enemies. Anything that might suggest weakness was something Makvar couldn’t afford to risk.

The Lord-Celestant turned his head, following the progress of Lord-Castellant Vogun as he sloshed through the sluggish water. The azure light glowing from behind the shutters of his warding lantern was a stark reminder to Makvar that Nagash needn’t look too hard for evidence of the Stormcasts’ strength. Neferata and her vampires could scarcely abide the revivifying glow, much less the purity of Huld’s celestial beacon. As he had witnessed for himself during the fighting in Nulahmia, the arcane spark that animated lesser undead could be extinguished simply by prolonged exposure to the holy luminescence.

‘I think Gojin might swallow first and ask later the next time,’ Vogun said as he drew near Makvar. The Lord-Castellant had his gryph-hound, Torn, slung across his shoulders, carrying the beast well above the boggy mush of the creek. Torn seemed to appreciate the indulgence extended to him by his master, tail wriggling contentedly against the Stormcast’s back.

‘Then we will learn how well your healing light serves a dracoth’s indigestion,’ Makvar retorted. He scowled at the swamp around them. ‘Though I confess, I doubt anything could conspire to make this place smell worse.’

‘Never tempt the gods,’ Vogun warned with severity. After a moment’s thought, his voice grew still more sombre. ‘Especially when you march in company with one.’

Ahead of them, the Stormcasts could just see the ancient skeletons of Neferata’s army marching around the next bend of the creek. The bone warriors lacked grace in their movement, but at the same time, they showed no sign of being slowed by the mire. The Anvils prided themselves upon their stamina and endurance, but the undead legions were truly indefatigable. Neither hunger nor weariness caused them to waver in their march. So long as a greater will exerted its influence upon them, they would never stop. And there was no will more formidable than that of the Great Necromancer himself.

If there was an antithesis to the comforting glow of Vogun’s lantern, then it was the aura of dread that rose from the ancient bones of Nagash. Makvar didn’t need to see the Lord of Death to be aware of his presence. It was a phantasmal taint that sent a shiver through the soul, a spectral hiss just at the edge of his hearing. To a Stormcast Eternal, the sensation provoked a heightened wariness, but in mortal hearts, Makvar expected the feeling would provoke nothing short of terror.

‘It is a great and terrible force that we court,’ Makvar told Vogun. ‘It is precisely because Nagash is great and terrible that Sigmar seeks to draw him into alliance. If the legions of Shyish stand with us when we assault the Allpoints, it will be the turning of the tide. Archaon will suffer a defeat from which he will never recover.’

Vogun shook his head. ‘Can we trade the corruption of Chaos for the depravity of the undead? You saw the outrage and cruelty in Neferata’s city. From your own lips, I have heard of the madness within Schloss Wolfhof. My faith in Sigmar is as unshakable as your own, Lord-Celestant, but I confess, I lack the wisdom to reconcile myself to these injustices.’

‘To save the many, sometimes it is needful to sacrifice the few,’ Makvar said. ‘That is the hardest lesson to learn, but it is the first any leader must accept. Truth isn’t always pleasant, and necessity is sometimes as ugly as what it seeks to overcome. Should the hordes of Archaon prevail, should the dominion of Chaos extend yet further into the Mortal Realms, it will mean the extermination of all. Existence itself would be devoured, sucked down into the infernal madness of the Realm of Chaos. All light, all order would be extinguished, and only the dominion of the Ruinous Powers would remain. Beside such horror, even the evil of the undead would be a thing to be welcomed.’

A motion among the bushes along the embankment drew Makvar’s attention away from Vogun. His fingers tightened around the grip of his sword, ready to draw should some denizen of the swamps more formidable than a crocodile choose to show itself.

Instead, what emerged from the undergrowth was a lissom maiden arrayed in a simple gown of web-like silk. Her pale skin was nearly as colourless as her white raiment, and she shielded her eyes from the rays of Vogun’s lantern. Makvar recognised her from the grisly dinner in the ghoul-court. She was one of Neferata’s handmaidens, a vampire thrall named Kismet.

‘Please, cover the light,’ she asked, keeping her eyes averted from the Stormcasts. ‘My mistress sends me with tidings for the Lord-Celestant.’

Makvar nodded to Vogun, motioning for him to swing the lantern around so that it was behind him. At the same time, he gestured to the Judicator retinues to keep a closer watch on the embankments. It was discomforting to know that they had allowed Kismet to reach them without discovery.

‘The light has been withdrawn,’ Makvar told Kismet, walking towards the embankment. When the vampire lowered her hands from her face he could see the furtive, almost hunted look in her eyes. ‘You are safe with us,’ he said, trying to ease her fear. His assurance brought no change to her attitude.

‘Queen Neferata bids me pass warning to you,’ Kismet said, each word becoming lower and softer until her voice was reduced to a mere whisper. ‘At great risk to herself, she has used her magic to spy upon Nagash, to delve into his plans. She wishes you to know that we do not march to find Arkhan, but rather that Nagash has known where his disciple has been from the very start. Through his spells, Nagash has been in communion with the Mortarch of Sacrament. She desires that you should know of this subterfuge… and be ready for it.’

Makvar listened to Kismet’s warning, turning over each word, trying to decide what to believe and what to discard. That Neferata had her own ambitions was apparent, though he doubted she would entertain any ‘great risk to herself’ to achieve them. Even so, she was cunning enough to exploit the intrigue of others to perpetuate her own scheming. With a being as steeped in magic as the Great Necromancer, there was little that could safely be put outside of possibility.

‘Thank your mistress for her concern,’ Makvar said. ‘You may tell her that I will bear her message in mind and that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer will act accordingly.’ Kismet bowed to him before vanishing back into the undergrowth. When he saw how stealthily the vampire withdrew, Makvar repented some of his displeasure at the vigilance of the Judicators.

‘Someone is anxious to make friends,’ Vogun said when Kismet had gone.

Makvar frowned behind the mask of his helm. ‘Too anxious,’ he said. When he had described the strange reception at Schloss Wolfhof to Vogun, he had left out the details of Neferata’s nocturnal visit to his room. ‘The question we must ask ourselves is if we can afford her kind of friendship.’

‘You believe she is inventing this plot between Nagash and Arkhan?’ Vogun asked.

‘No,’ Makvar conceded. ‘I think she is too clever to lie to me.’ He turned and stared through the stands of corpse-willows, gazing in the direction from which Nagash’s deathly aura emanated. ‘What troubles me is how much of the truth she has decided I should hear.’

Harkdron watched as Kismet slipped away from the Stormcasts, dropping behind a clump of bat-thorn as she turned in his direction. At this late stage, it would be absurd for her to discover him now. Not after all the care he had taken in following her through the swamp.

The vampire glared in the direction of the storm-knights. He hadn’t drawn near enough to hear what Kismet told them, but he could guess. She had brought them some offer from Neferata. The queen’s pretence of fawning obedience to Nagash didn’t fool Harkdron. He knew she had aspirations of power, that she would rebuild her kingdom, if not in Nulahmia, then in some other land.

Neferata had some idea that the storm-knights could win that kingdom for her. Harkdron could just imagine her offering to share her throne with that interloper Makvar. She would make that usurper her king, bestow upon him all the honours she had withheld from Harkdron!

Directing a last glare towards the storm-knights, Harkdron hastened after Kismet. He had small worry that the handmaiden would notice him following her. If anything, she would be more concerned about drawing the attention of Nagash’s morghast guards. When Neferata sent her off on her clandestine liaison, it had been the Great Necromancer and his creatures they had been careful to avoid. Neither of them had given a thought to hiding their intentions from Harkdron.

The vampire gnashed his fangs as he considered that his queen had given him very little thought since the fall of Nulahmia. Neferata had turned a cold shoulder to her former lover and consort, treating him no better than any of her blood knights. He knew she blamed him for the ruin of her city, the breaching of the Jackal Gate and the defiling of the Throne Mount. He had done his best to redeem himself, but before he could annihilate the hordes of Chaos, Makvar and his damned storm-knights had appeared!

It was enough that Makvar had stolen from him his chance to prove himself to his queen. Harkdron wasn’t about to allow him to take his place in the queen’s favour.

There was no way to strike directly against Makvar. Harkdron knew this. Even if he discounted the displeasure of his queen, there was the danger of angering Nagash. The Lord of Death was interested in the storm-knights, at least for the moment. Perhaps he was even entertaining Makvar’s overtures of an alliance with Sigmar.

No, Harkdon decided, the only route open to him was to drive a wedge between Neferata and Makvar. He had to turn her against the storm-knights and make it seem her own decision when she did so. Then she would understand that Harkdron was the only consort worthy of her.

With a powerful lunge, Harkdron threw himself across a stagnant brook. As soon as his feet struck the ground, he was dashing through a stand of gallow-oaks. Kismet would take a more cautious course as she made her way back to her queen. Haste, not caution, was Harkdron’s goal. Darting around the boughs of the squat oak trees, the vampire felt the thrill of the hunt pulsing through him. He had let himself grow soft amidst the luxuries of Nulahmia. He had forgotten the excitement of being a predator about to fall upon his prey.

Kismet’s pale shape came gliding out from the undergrowth, hesitating as she peered in the direction of the undead column. Her fixation with the column and any threat rising from it made her oblivious to the menace stealing towards her from the gallow-oaks. Harkdron was nearly upon her before she sensed him and noted her peril.

Like a cornered tigress, Kismet spun about to meet her attacker. Raking fingers slashed at Harkdron’s face, missing the vampire only by a hair’s breadth. The foot she brought slamming into his midriff brought better results, connecting with such violence that he was knocked off his feet.

Harkdron was back on the attack almost at once. Snarling, he pounced at his fleeing quarry. One of his clutching hands seized a clump of Kismet’s hair, wrenching it out by the roots and spilling the handmaiden into the mud. The vampire loomed over her, staring down with blazing eyes.

Kismet saw death in those eyes. ‘Spare me, Lord Harkdron,’ she begged. ‘I will tell you whatever you want to know.’

The vampire sprang at her, driving his fist into her chest with superhuman, bone-splintering force. ‘Keep your secrets,’ he hissed into her ear. ‘You are more use to me this way.’ With a vicious pull, Harkdron’s hand came tearing out of Kismet’s mangled chest. Clenched between his bloodied fingers was the handmaiden’s dripping heart. He glared at it a moment, then tossed it into the weeds. Crouching over Kismet’s body he removed the silver talisman he kept hidden in his boot. He averted his eyes from the tiny hammer, an ancient relic from the ages when Sigmar had walked the kingdoms of Shyish. The God-King was long gone from the Realm of Death, but his power lingered on in the few symbols left behind. Symbols that were potent against the undead.

Harkdron stuffed the talisman into the gaping wound. There were times when he had disposed of vampiric rivals for Neferata’s attentions, using the little hammer to ensure they stayed dead when he destroyed them. While the hammer rested in the place where Kismet’s heart should be, she would remain with the truly dead. If some friend found her resting place, they might dispose of the talisman and allow her to revive, but Harkdron would ensure that didn’t happen. He picked her up and stalked off into the swamp. He had seen an especially deep bog when he had followed her away from the column. Just the place for someone to disappear.

Harkdron wondered what Neferata would think when Kismet failed to return from her meeting with Makvar. With some care on his part, he was certain he could help her come to the right conclusions.

Blackened hills and barren fields rushed past Lascilion’s foggy vision. Dimly, he perceived the dried beds of dead lakes and the gnarled boughs of charred forests, the broken walls of ruined castles and the shattered foundations of fallen temples. The rubble of despoiled tomb cities lay strewn across meadows of bleached bone. The husks of vanquished armies withered upon groves of stakes, fleshless skulls grinning up at the sky.

Everywhere, the taint of Chaos was in bloom. The megalithic flagstones of ancient roads were split and broken by the fibrous stalks of colossal flowers with petals of ice and fiery nectar. Streams of corrosive ooze eroded primordial barrow mounds, sending pillars of greasy vapour screaming into the air. Vast, amorphous things rippling with unclean vitality washed across the ghostly streets of desolate villages, caking all they touched in crystalline growths.

Awareness came roaring back into Lascilion’s brain, threatening to devour his senses in a paroxysm of pain. Reluctantly, the Lord of Slaanesh fought back the agonies that threatened to consume his reason and render him a dumb, mad thing. With his resistance came memories, the crushing torment as his daemon steed rolled across him and crushed the strength from his bones, the searing light of the storm-angel’s lamp as it pierced his eyes and stabbed his spirit. Most of all, he remembered the sight of Neferata, the delicious vampire queen, so close to him that his tongue swelled with the scent of her cruelty.

He had fallen then, hurtling down the side of the Throne Mount, the burning city rushing towards him as though eager to draw him into its dying embrace. Then, everything was lost in the darkness. The warlord knew no more.

Lascilion tried to move, to discover for himself the extent of his injuries. The effort sent a new spasm of pain rushing through him and a trickle of blood down his back. He could feel the sharp claws that were dug into his flesh, the bite of his splintered armour as it cut his skin. Managing to tilt his head, he could see the hideous face of Amala staring down at him. He knew then that he was held fast in the mutant’s claws as she soared across the sky. There was no hint of intention to be found in her inhuman eyes and no clue of her purpose to be had from the inarticulate slobbering that dripped from her jaws. Amala had been a dutiful enough servant when he had been the Lord of Slaanesh with an army of men and daemons under his command. Now, broken and disgraced, he wondered if any sense of loyalty lingered in her.

Amala’s purpose soon became clear to Lascilion, and when it was, he considered that it might have been better for him if she had simply carried him off to some craggy mountainside to devour his flesh. A vast encampment lay sprawled across the terrain below, a veritable city of hide tents and wooden shelters that stretched away into the mist-shrouded horizon. Lascilion could see huge stone idols with their blood-drenched altars. He could see massive slave pens with their spiked fences. There were great fighting arenas gouged where the followers of Khorne offered up the skulls of their victims, and the diseased cesspits where the disciples of the Plague God sought Nurgle’s putrid blessings. Eldritch towers bound in chains of copper and adorned with arcane sigils of gold flickered with weird energies and eerie lights as the students of Tzeentch practised their sorceries. Lascilion looked for the perfumed pavilions of Slaanesh’s initiates, but soon despaired of the search. Most of those who honoured the Prince of Pleasure in this realm had flocked to his banner and followed him to their doom in Nulahmia. Those who remained would view him with loathing, an affront to their absent god.

The winged mutant tightened her grip upon Lascilion’s shoulders. Wheeling through the air, Amala headed towards the gigantic tent at the centre of the encampment. Stitched from the hides of mammoths and dragons, it was supported by enormous pillars of skulls, each head branded with the grisly rune of the Blood God. Pennants of flayed flesh fluttered above each pillar, flags cut from the still-living bodies of kings and hierophants and stained with the murderous symbols of Khorne. Encircling the tent, their skinned bodies nailed to posts, were the eighty-eight warriors chosen as offerings to the Lord of Skulls. As each tortured warrior expired, he was replaced by another, an endless cycle of blood to ensure the Blood God’s favour.

This, then, was the stronghold of Bloodking Thagmok, mightiest of the generals left by Archaon to secure the Realm of Death in the name of the Dark Gods. Lascilion had been filled with pride when he had last stood in Thagmok’s presence, arrogantly boasting that he would succeed where so many others had failed. He had promised to find Nulahmia and capture its queen. The Bloodking wasn’t known for his mercy, nor his indulgence of broken promises. As Amala descended towards the tent, Lascilion found his gaze roving across the exposed muscles and organs of the warriors on the posts. He trembled as he imagined joining the gory offerings.

If Thagmok even considered him worthy of such a fate.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Huld soared across the blighted wasteland of the Mirefells, keeping close to the oozing earth, vigilant for any path that might provide his comrades a speedier journey than the creek they followed. Except for a few rocky islands and the occasional stand of twisted forest that seemed rooted in something with more solidity than a bog, his efforts had come to naught, as had those of the Prosecutors who shared in his labour. The nearest any of them had come was the discovery of a stone causeway sprawled across some fens, its supports dragged down into the muck so that the road was tilted on its side. The dilapidated construction looked as treacherous as the boggy ground that was slowly consuming it. Even had it been in a more amiable state, it was useless to the needs of the Stormcasts, winding its broken course away from the backwaters into which the Lord of Death was guiding them, as though the land itself were telling them to turn back.

Yet the Anvils couldn’t turn back. Too much depended upon their mission. Makvar cajoled every effort from the Stormcasts to keep from falling too far behind the undead. The winged scouts did their best to guide their comrades to paths less onerous than that taken by Nagash and his creatures, but never could they seem to find a route which would allow them to gain upon the undead. Makvar was compelled to keep pushing the Anvils and prevent them from losing all contact with the undead column.

The Knight-Azyros didn’t envy Lord-Celestant Makvar his burden. Every decision he made had to be weighed against the success of their mission. Whatever lengths it took to convince Nagash to lend his support to Sigmar and unite his deathless legions with those of the Realm Celestial, Makvar had no choice but to pursue them. Even when it meant putting his comrades at risk and marching them into a trackless mire. Huld’s comrades sometimes said he had been reforged with a silver tongue, but he wondered if his gift of eloquence would have counted for much when it came to negotiating with the Great Necromancer. He felt that it was deeds, not words, that were needed to sway Nagash.

Huld’s wings snapped tight against his armoured body as he sent himself into a dive, skimming just above the moss-ridden treetops with deceptive grace. His aerobatics were more than simple exuberance. He was keeping close to the trees to avoid being spotted from afar. Only the most debased and forsaken of the enemy’s minions would linger in a place like the Mirefells, but if there was one thing Huld had learned about the hordes of Chaos, it was to never underestimate the depths to which they could lower themselves. Some of the things he had seen perpetrated by the bloodreavers of Khorne would have made a ghoul’s gorge rise.

There were also the noxious creatures of the swamp itself to avoid. Several times, immense bats had taken wing at the approach of the Stormcasts, whether from hunger or to defend their territory. Most of the flying vermin had been routed easily, a single stormcall javelin enough to scatter their flocks and send them hastening back to the shadows. A few of the larger beasts had been more persistent, their eyes aglow with an appetite that uncomfortably recalled to Huld the hideous feast at Count Zernmeister’s castle. Only by sending their steaming carcasses plummeting down into the bog were the Stormcasts able to fend off the attentions of these unliving horrors.

The faint sounds of battle drifted back to him on the rank wind and made Huld forget about giant bats. The distinct clash of metal against metal rang through the air, but with the sound came even more savage noises. Ferocious howls and fearsome screams, bestial and exultant, the cries of wanton carnage and brutal conquest. Somewhere ahead of him, a vicious battle was being fought.

Signalling the Prosecutors, Huld sped onwards, towards the roar of combat. The stands of trees below became more sparse, their trunks wizened and even more twisted than the others he had seen in the Mirefells. Ugly patches of mist and vapour billowed up from the marshy ground, pulsating with a phosphorescent glow. Here and there, he could see clumps of broken masonry poking out of the mud and the severed stumps of stone columns half-engulfed by weeds and moss.

Evidence of ancient habitation increased the closer Huld drew to the clamour of battle. The few trees that thrust their trunks from the muck became still more sickly and dwarfish, their branches reaching out like decayed claws. The heaps of rock and stone protruding from the mire were now recognisable as structures, empty windows gaping from their abandoned walls, morbid carvings nearly obscured by sediment and slime. Certainly, Huld thought, what lay below him had once been a great city, perhaps a seat of empire in some long-lost epoch.

The sound of battle drew him still farther. He began to wonder if what he was hearing was some ghostly echo of this city’s death, some grim haunt conjured to lead him astray. The Knight-Azyros shook his head. The only way to be certain what was real and what was phantom was to press on and discover for himself where the phenomenon would lead him. Only then could he tell Makvar what lay ahead of the Anvils.

The obscuring mist suddenly evaporated, and Huld had an unobstructed view of what lay beneath him. Many strange sights had filled his eyes – the frozen fires of Chamon and the living forests of Ghyran – but never had he seen such an uncanny vista as what now lay below. He hesitated to call the surface either ground or sea, for it seemed to be a translucent substance which refused to be either. He could see through its wraith-like essence, peering straight down into the drowned streets and smothered buildings of the vanished city. At the same time, the ectoplasmic sludge was viscous enough to provide support for the few trees and weeds stubborn enough to persist this far into the forgotten ruins. He saw something resembling an enormous rat go skittering across the surface, plunging through the phantom muck like an ice-fox hopping through the snows of Yvir in the far-reaches of the Celestial Realm.

Now, the clash of steel and the cries of combat were close at hand. Warning the Prosecutors with him to be still more cautious than before, Huld soared close to the half-smothered roofs and crumbling minarets of the drowned city. Ahead, beyond the narrow streets, some tremendous conflict was raging.

When he was clear of the sunken streets, Huld could only gaze in amazement at what he had discovered. Before him, stretching away for thousands of yards, was a great clearing, a plaza covered with the translucent phantom sludge. Here and there, the top of some monolith protruded from the ectoplasm, the angular tips of colossal pyramids and the eroded faces of stone kings. The summit of a smothered mountain reared at one end of the clearing, its barren slopes littered with a carpet of bones.

Here was the site of the battle Huld had heard. Across the transparent slime, legions of fleshless warriors marched. Even from a distance, the Knight-Azyros was struck by the impression of antiquity conjured by their corroded armour and archaic weapons. The armies of Nulahmia had arrayed themselves in the relics of a living people, but the skeletal warriors he now beheld seemed devoid of even so fragile a connection to the mortal coil. The bronze breastplates strapped about their ribs had been pounded into the shape of leering skulls, and their tall helms were the shape of bony hands. The serrated edges of the falchions and adzes they carried had been cast into the semblance of rending talons.

Beyond the fleshless legions of infantry, Huld could see troops of cavalry mounted upon skeletal steeds, their caparisons as rotten and tattered as the shroud-like cloaks that clung about their undead riders. Ghoulish flames rose from each skeletal rider, flickering from beneath their tattered robes and rusted helms, rippling across the glistening edges of the wicked scythes they bore. With eerie precision, the malignant riders wove between the advancing formations of infantry, the ethereal slime doing nothing to arrest their speed.

Other, even less corporeal things wound their way through the undead legions. Masses of spectral energy eddied about the periphery of the battlefield, sometimes coalescing into great pillars of ghostly malevolence that rolled forwards before forsaking whatever cohesion held them and dispersing into wisps of glowing fog. When he tried to follow the flittering lights, Huld would see them draw near one another once more, again merging into clouds of deathly faces and spectral talons.

To the rear of the graveyard army, Huld could see baroque chariots and strange carriages; catapults fashioned from bone alongside hulking giants with fleshless faces; a strange altar lit by corpse-fires and borne aloft by a vortex of howling spirits and vengeful apparitions. Above them all, however, was the solitary presence that stood upon the summit of the drowned mountain. At such distance, Huld could only discern a skeletal shape mounted upon an abyssal steed similar to that favoured by Neferata. The aura of power and malevolence spilling from the figure was undeniable. He could almost sense the belligerent motivation exuding from the undead lord to fill the decayed ranks of his army with murderous purpose and animation.

It was an effort for Huld to look away from the sinister presence on the mountain, to turn his gaze from the undead legions to the foes they battled. Only the pronounced horror of the undead could have eclipsed the noxious foulness he now beheld. As vile as the decay and filth of the swamps themselves, a vast host of disease and corruption seeped across the clearing. As though responding to his regard, Huld’s senses were now struck by the fecund reek of that horde, the dirty taint of the pestiferous Nurgle.

Knights in corroded armour charged across the spectral slime, the hooves of their diseased beasts throwing up great swathes of translucent sludge as they galloped into the massed ranks of skeletons, smashing them to bony splinters with their lances. Hulking Chaos warriors, the fly-rune daubed upon their shields and helms, trudged through the ghostly mire to slam into the lines of their deathless opponents, shrieking their outrage as they brought destruction to the fleshless corpses. Grotesque brayherds plunged across the morass, shattering skulls and crumpling armour with clubs of stone and axes of bone. Prowling amidst the havoc, daemonic plaguebearers and swarms of giggling nurglings brought corrupt dissolution to even these lifeless enemies.

Gigantic and heinous, the bloated bulk of a greater daemon squatted behind the hordes of Nurgle. A veil of flies and gas rose from the monster’s leprous flesh and exposed organs, a discharge of abominable black liquid trickling from its limbs to sizzle on the ghostly surface that supported it. The daemon’s squat, toad-like head seemed to sink beneath the weight of its own horns, its single eye struggling to shrug off the fatty folds of its own lids. The monster’s cavernous mouth spread in a hungry grin, thousands of sharp, diminutive fangs jutting from its bleeding gums. Gesturing with one of its gigantic hands, the Great Unclean One encouraged its infectious followers to press their attack.

Huld lingered only a moment, then peeled away from the surging battle. Mighty as the undead legions might be, he knew they were no match for the enormity of the Chaos horde that opposed them. How long the undead could hold against their enemy was something he couldn’t say, but unless they could be reinforced, the outcome of the fight was certain.

There was little the Knight-Azyros and the Prosecutors could do to tip the balance, but the rest of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer could. They had fought greater odds before and emerged victorious. From what he had seen and felt, he was certain the undead general was the creature Nagash had brought them into the swamps to find – the Mortarch of Sacrament, Arkhan the Black. His duty now was to bring such news back to Makvar. The decision to intervene belonged to the Lord-Celestant.

The Lord-Celestant and the Great Necromancer.

Lord-Celestant Makvar was silent as he pondered Huld’s report. He balanced the Knight-Azyros’ observations against the warning that had been passed to him by Kismet. It would seem that even if Nagash knew where Arkhan was, if this foray into the swamp was a pretext of some kind, then his plot had developed a severe complication. The hordes of Chaos had discovered the missing Mortarch first.

‘Our course is clear, commander,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar said. ‘Arkhan fights the slaves of Chaos. We must come to his aid.’

‘It is certain that he will need it ere long,’ Huld agreed. ‘These bone warriors are enormously resistant to the pestilence carried by the disciples of the Plague God, but contagion isn’t the only weapon they carry. The horde I saw descending upon Arkhan’s army numbered in its thousands, with more emerging from the swamps to join it.’ There was a dour look in his eyes as he turned back towards Makvar. ‘There is a realmgate not far from the city, a pillar of mud and slime from which the creatures of Nurgle are vomited into the Mirefells. If we aren’t swift, Arkhan may be overwhelmed.’

Knight-Heraldor Brannok shook his head. ‘You forget, brother, that the armies of death are unlike those of mortal kings. What means their losses if with a few conjured blasphemies they can reinvigorate them and put their fallen back into the fight? Many and abominable are the powers of Chaos, but they do not infuse corpses with fresh vitality.’ He removed his helm, wiping away the sweat beading his brow. His face bore a hardened expression, implacable and resolute. ‘I advise caution,’ he said.

‘Caution is a luxury for the army in the field,’ Lord-Castellant Vogun declared, recalling a quote from the Fifteenth Canticle.

Makvar knew the parable well. Many times had he thought about its meaning and the wisdom locked within it. Quick to hesitance, slow to action. Recklessness could drive an army to destruction, but too much reserve could lead them to an even worse fate. Disgrace.

‘You surprise me, my lord,’ Brannok told Vogun. ‘I saw your indignation upon the Pathway of Punishment. You understand the limits to which these creatures may be trusted.’

Vogun patted the feathered neck of his gryph-hound, feeling the old scars where Torn had been struck by a Khornate daemon on campaign in the Realm of Fire. ‘There is no truce with Chaos,’ he stated, remembering the scene of unspeakable carnage they had found in the duardin tunnels. ‘Shyish has languished a long time under the invading hordes. They will have learned the lesson a thousand times over since the War of Bones. Whatever else they may be, they are no friends of the Ruinous Powers.’

‘If all had the nobility and valour of Sigmar,’ Kreimnar said, ‘then the Mortal Realms could never have been assailed by the hosts of Chaos. Archaon would have been hurled back into the shadows long ago. Such is not the way of things. Even among gods, such fortitude is rare.’ He laid his hand upon Brannok’s shoulder. ‘It is fruitless to despise the desert because there is no water within it. You must accept it for what it is, not what it isn’t.’

Brannok was unswayed. ‘This realm is a reflection of its god. Harsh and unyielding, devoid of pity or compassion. I don’t–’

Whatever more the Knight-Heraldor might have said never fell from his tongue. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer went on the alert as the chill of sorcery rushed along the creek, speckling the mud with beads of frost and turning the breath of each Stormcast into icy mist. A sandbar in the middle of the channel began to darken, becoming shadowy and indistinct. Liberators marched forwards, forming shields around the conclave of officers while Judicators raised bows and crossbows.

The shadow lengthened, thickening until it stood like a pillar of night. From its depths, the Great Necromancer stepped. The armour that enclosed his skeletal frame pulsed with dark energies, seeming to feed the nebulous doorway Nagash had conjured. The Lord of Death stared across the massed Anvils, contemplating their defensive formation and their readiness for action. His focus soon settled upon Brannok.

‘You are in error,’ Nagash declared. He wagged a bony talon at the dismal marshland that bordered the creek. ‘Much of this realm has slipped away since Sigmar’s leaving.’ Stretching his clawed hand, he caused one of the corpse-willows to wither, blackening to a crumbling husk in the blink of an eye. As it collapsed in upon itself, grotesque green moths dug themselves out from the ruin. Spreading their blotched wings, the insects quickly took flight. Brannok didn’t fail to note the unsettling pattern the markings of their wings assumed – three swirls that intersected in emulation of Nurgle’s fly-rune.

‘The force of death shaped the Mirefells,’ Nagash explained, ‘but no longer does it rule alone. Chaos has found its own strength here, drawing its own sustenance from the swamps. Even in this place, the enemy seeks to pervert my domain into its own semblance.’

Makvar stepped out from behind the line of Liberators. ‘Did you know the enemy was here?’ he asked. He pointed at Huld. ‘My scouts have found the second of your Mortarchs. He is beset by a horde of invaders commanded by one of the Plague God’s vile daemons.’ He tried to find any hint of surprise or emotion in the Death God’s reaction to his words, but the fleshless visage was as inscrutable as ever. ‘I have been conferring with my officers. If we don’t hasten to his aid, your vassal is certain to be overwhelmed.’

‘Is that your counsel, then?’ Nagash asked. He loomed over Makvar, his death’s head staring down at the ebon knight. ‘Would you advise a swift foray against the foe to rescue my layman?’

Makvar looked across the black masks of his knights. He knew each of them would follow his command without hesitation. Even if they had their reservations, like Brannok, they wouldn’t allow their concerns to influence their duty. It was upon him that the decision to act or hesitate would depend. What was it that Sigmar would expect of him?

‘We will march to relieve Arkhan,’ Makvar said, feeling no doubt that the decision was what would please the God-King. The Stormcast Eternals had been forged as warriors, an army to bring battle to the foe. It was their purpose and their strength. He trusted that, in his wisdom, Sigmar knew that these were the things which would bring them honour in the Realm of Death.

The shadowy gate behind Nagash expanded, seeming to reach out and enfold the Great Necromancer in its essence. ‘My layman makes his stand in the ruins of Mephitt, upon the slopes of Mount Khaerops,’ he said. He waved his claw at Huld. ‘It is a simple thing to find what is lost when you know where to look. I will bring my subjects against the enemy’s left flank. If your storm-knights can strike from their right, we will have only the foe between us.’ The darkness wrapped itself around Nagash, his final words echoing on as the shadows consumed him. Almost before Makvar was aware of it, the sorcerous cold was banished and the column of darkness evaporated. The Lord of Death had returned to his cadaverous subjects.

‘Which of us do you think he intends to bear the brunt of the fighting?’ Kreimnar asked as he drew near Makvar.

The Lord-Celestant shook his head. ‘I think the question counts for little with him,’ he said. ‘As Brannok observes, whatever losses his armies incur can be redeemed.’ He stared back at the spot where the Great Necromancer had faded from view. ‘The greater question is whether this battle is by chance or by design?’

‘You think Nagash means to see for himself our quality?’ Kreimnar asked.

‘We ask him to leave his realm and take the field against Archaon himself,’ Makvar said. ‘Before giving my answer, I think I’d want to know who I would be fighting alongside.’ He clapped the Lord-Relictor’s shoulder and led his friend back towards their knights. As Huld had said, they would have to be swift if they were to be any good to Arkhan. The Primes would have to get their retinues moving quickly.

Even as he relayed his commands to his men, Makvar couldn’t shake the warning Kismet had given him. How much of this conflict had been engineered? He felt certain he knew what Sigmar expected of him, but what was it that Nagash expected?

Mist boiled up from the spectral slime that had consumed the ancient ruins of Mephitt, rolling across the city in a ghoulish fog. The warriors of Neferata’s army became little more than hazy shadows in the grey veil, even the creak of their dry bones and the rattle of their rusty mail smothered by the glowing vapours. The vampire queen could barely detect the stolen life-energies that pulsated within the bodies of her blood knights, much less see them as they slowly trotted through the eerie expanse.

‘Shall my knights lead the charge, my queen?’ Lord Harkdron asked, his voice reduced to the merest whisper.

Neferata shifted around in Nagadron’s saddle, glowering at her vampiric consort. ‘You will hold my knights until I tell you to attack,’ she snapped. Since abandoning Nulahmia, Harkdron had become by turns insufferably presumptuous and annoyingly attentive. She knew he was fearful of his position, trying to impress upon her the invaluableness of his services. Ever since the Stormcasts descended from Azyr, he had gone to great pains to exhibit his ardent devotion to her. Neferata wasn’t certain if the display was pathetic or simply irritating.

‘Of course, my queen. Forgive me.’ Harkdron clapped his hand to his breast in salute.

‘Obedience pleases me more than initiative,’ Neferata told him. She smiled at the flicker of pain her reproof provoked on the vampire’s face. It was comforting to know that there were some things still firmly under her control.

Obedience and initiative. She turned the words over in her mind, sickened by the sound of them. Since the resurgence of Nagash from his underworlds, she had felt his abominable spirit towering over her like some smothering force. The least exertion of his awful malice and she would be crushed beneath him, her independence smothered by his all-consuming power. The Mortarchs drew their power from Nagash, a legacy bestowed upon them by the Lord of Death. Neferata feared for the moment when her dark master might repossess that power and leave her little more than a withered shell. She tried to convince herself that some things were beyond even the Death God, but there were times when such arguments sounded hollow even to her.

Now, riding through a sorcerous veil conjured by the Great Necromancer, feeling his dark spirit all around her, knowing that somewhere close by his corporeal form glided through the ruins, it was hard for Neferata to quiet the shivers that rippled through her dead flesh. Nothing seemed beyond him, not when his presence surrounded her. She wondered if everything might not be a facet of one of his eternal schemes – the War of Bones, the hordes of Chaos, even Archaon and Sigmar – all of them pieces he was moving in his endless game of domination.

The sounds of battle reached Neferata through the fog. She could smell the blood of Arkhan’s foes, the rancid, sickly stink of polluted gore and daemonic ichor. Idly, she wondered if the Chaos horde had simply stumbled upon her fellow Mortarch or if he had baited them to him. Of one thing she was certain – whatever Arkhan’s purpose in the wastes of Mephitt, it was by Nagash’s design. Of all the Mortarchs, Arkhan was most in the Great Necromancer’s shadow, sometimes seeming to be naught but an extension of his master. He could no more be separated from Nagash than one of the Death God’s hands. What, then, were they trying to accomplish?

The answer certainly revolved around Makvar and his storm-knights, but Neferata couldn’t be certain how. For her, Makvar and his warriors represented power and independence, a way to be free from Nagash’s dominion. They were a force strong enough to oppose the hordes of Chaos and perhaps even defy the malice of Nagash himself – if only she could harness them properly. Her overtures towards Makvar hadn’t been successful and she was troubled by the vanishing of Kismet. Was her handmaiden’s disappearance a reproof of her efforts to insinuate herself into the confidence of the Stormcasts? She had seen for herself how devoted Makvar was to cementing this alliance between Azyr and Shyish. At the same time, she prided herself on ferreting out the measure of the men she sought to catch in her web. Makvar’s sense of honour made it doubtful he had any penchant for intrigue of his own.

That left Neferata with the frightening possibility that Nagash himself had intercepted her messenger. Perhaps Makvar had never even received the warning about Arkhan. Certainly, if he had, it hadn’t been enough to keep him from marching to Mephitt.

The crash of battle rumbling from behind the fog intensified. Neferata could see flashes of blue light crackling behind the grey veil. War cries, too proud and righteous to bubble up from the diseased throats of Nurgle’s slaves, rang out. Makvar had sent his knights into battle. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were on the attack, charging to rescue Arkhan’s beleaguered forces.

Neferata turned towards Harkdron. She tried to tell her consort to spur his knights into the battle, to fall upon the flank of the Chaos horde. The command faltered on her tongue, crushed into silence by a will far greater than her own.

Nagash would tell her when it was time to help the Stormcasts. Until then, she would keep her forces back and stay hidden within the fog.

Until Nagash decided otherwise, Makvar was on his own.

‘For Sigmar!’ The battle cry rose from the throats of every Stormcast as they rushed out from the veil of mist, rolling like thunder across the brooding desolation of Mephitt.

Once again mounted on the back of his dracoth, Makvar led the charge of his warriors through the sunken avenues and out into the vast clearing Huld had described. The translucent ectoplasm had a viscous quality about it, sloshing around the feet of the Stormcasts like mud but at the same time proving far firmer than the bog they had crossed to reach the ghost city. He noted at once that it was more than physical laws that governed the substance. Despite Gojin’s immense weight, the reptile sank no deeper into the translucent sludge than the Liberators around him. It was as though the spectral muck refused to draw an animate body more than a few inches into itself.

The fog soon thinned and Makvar had an unobstructed view of the clearing. It was like a great plaza, bordered at one end by the sunken mountain and on the other sides by the ruinous sprawl of the city. A thick veil clung to the far side of the clearing, concealing the forces Makvar expected Nagash to bring against the Chaos horde. The end opposite the mountain had no such misty shroud clinging to it, but instead was a maze of walls and rooftops. Ahead of these ruins, squat and colossal, was the horned daemon Huld had seen. Around the diseased abomination, a scummy host of mortals and daemons gathered, abasing themselves before its frog-like feet before rushing away to give combat to their foe.

True to Huld’s dire prediction, that foe was swiftly fading. The great legions of bone warriors, the troops of malignant cavalry, the swarms of vengeful spirits – these had been battered and shattered by an adversary as persistent as they were obscene. The broken shells of skeletons lay strewn about the plaza, slowly being sucked into the ectoplasmic mire as the sludge drew the inert material down into its depths. The fleshless giants were gone, as were the catapults and chariots. Everywhere, the hordes of Chaos surged and swelled, engorged in their victories and inflamed by the noxious presence of the Great Unclean One. They poured into the undead ranks with an almost fearless ferocity. Beyond the dwindling line of skeletons, Makvar could see the figure of Arkhan on his gruesome steed. It wouldn’t be so very long before the enemy was climbing up the bone-littered slopes to reach the Mortarch.

‘For Sigmar!’ Makvar cried out. The foremost of his knights had already reached the flank of the Chaos horde. They struck down dozens of skin-clad marauders and goat-headed beastmen, slaughtering them with hammer and sword. The sparking flashes from their attack shone with magnified brilliance, an aspect of the arcane battlefield that caught Makvar by surprise and which drew the attention of the Nurglesque warriors. Those not embattled by the undead turned to address the assault on their flank. Howling their diseased fury, the brutish throng came rushing at the black-armoured Stormcasts.

Makvar drew back on Gojin’s reins. The dracoth spat a gout of lightning skyward. It was the signal to the Judicators massed behind the advancing Liberators and Paladins. From the archer formations, a withering volley of lightning came hurtling down into the charging brayherds and marauder tribes. Chaos warriors crumpled as smoke steamed from their scorched mail, and lesser daemons burst in greasy gouts of ichor. From above, the winged Prosecutors swooped down, hurling their stormcall javelins into knots of cavalry and the slithering foulness of Chaos spawn. A sheet of searing lightning hurtled into a swarm of nurglings, exploding the diseased mass before it could come flooding into the ranks of Liberators.

A note from Brannok’s battle-horn saw the Liberators fall back and close their line as the pulverising wrath of his clarion cracked one of the monoliths and sent its debris slamming down upon the Nurglesque warriors. Each Liberator braced his shield and secured his place in the new formation. The disorganised mobs of gors and barbarians crashed ineffectually against the shield wall, swiftly repulsed by blazing swords and crackling hammers. The Stormcasts pushed them back, taking no pride in repelling these simple foes. The real test of their stamina would come when the heavier troops came against them, when daemons and sorcerers turned their eldritch attentions upon the Anvils.

Makvar looked beyond the oncoming enemy, watching the far side of the plaza. Before the hordes of Chaos could turn the full strength of their diseased malice against them, he hoped that Nagash would give them something else to worry about.

A tremor rippled through the translucent ground, but this time it wasn’t provoked by Brannok’s battle-horn. Makvar felt his gaze drawn towards the end of the clearing. The horned daemon was moving, waddling across the carcasses of its own minions as it moved towards the fray. Content to sit back and watch before, now the Great Unclean One had taken it into mind to play a more direct role in the fighting.

With an obscene grin on its monstrous face and a malicious gleam in its cyclopean eye, the daemon was moving towards the Stormcasts.

CHAPTER NINE

From the shadows, the Great Necromancer watched as Makvar’s warriors met the rancid forces of Chaos. He observed the Stormcasts with cold deliberation, scrutinising their actions as he would any novel specimen he found worthy of study. The conditions were at variance with what he had intended to arrange, but there were things to be learned from this unexpected conflict.

Nagash was already aware of the steely resolve and nigh-unshakable courage that burned within the spirit of each Stormcast. It was a phenomenon that was, in many ways, an antithetical process to the black art of necromancy. Even amongst the highest forms of the undead, their revivification involved a diminishment of the soul, the peeling away of layers of identity until the spirit was reduced to a blackened core. Such reduction was needful, stripping away the residue of mortal attraction and confusion that would pollute the resurrection process. Only by breaking that connection to the mortal plane, breaking the link between life and undeath, could a new sense of purpose be instilled into the undead. Without that diminishment, there were few souls with the will to endure, capable of embracing eternity without a destructive yearning for the things lost with their mortal existence. Those undead with the strongest attachments to their prior existence would become crazed, hateful things, either denying the reality of their altered state or mindlessly lashing out at whatever recalled that condition to them.

Sigmar had found some different path to redeeming the spirits of his warriors. The process employed by the God-King was such that his Stormcasts weren’t reduced by their resurrection, but instead were magnified by it. Nagash appreciated the amount of effort and power it took to craft undead of strength and versatility near to what he had seen the Stormcasts exhibit. The thought that Sigmar could draw upon such a magnitude of arcane energy was something the Lord of Death found both disturbing and enticing. It made the armies of Azyr more formidable than he had imagined, but it also meant there now existed a power strong enough to drive back the spread of Chaos.

A power that could serve Nagash as well as Sigmar.

The burn of celestial light lanced down into the Chaos horde. Nagash’s might was such that he drew no discomfort from the purity of the blaze, but he could sense the painful reaction it provoked from Neferata’s vampires. Nearer to that discharge of celestial energy, the lesser undead that formed the basis of his legions would find the arcane bonds that invigorated them coming apart, breaking the cohesion of the spells that endowed them with animation. It gave the Lord of Death pause to consider how his creations could be dismantled by this oppositional force. It made him wonder if there might be a similar force that could break the magic which had reforged each Stormcast from a fragile mortal spirit into a mighty warrior of the God-King.

The Chaos horde, so near to overwhelming Arkhan’s battered regiments, was now turning the brunt of its fury against Makvar’s knights. Bleating brayherds trampled their own dead as they charged through the volley loosed upon them by Stormcast bows, rabid froth bubbling from their jaws as they snapped and slavered against sigmarite shields. Howling barbarians flung aside the smouldering bodies of their own tribesmen as they endured the divine storm set upon them by Kreimnar’s relic-weapon, brutal axes and flails crashing against the unyielding formations of Makvar’s knights. Despite the distance that separated them, Nagash could hear the Lord-Celestant calling out to his warriors, rallying them against the teeming masses of their foes. Lightning crackled from the scaly jaws of his steed, burning marauder horsemen from their saddles and reducing their grisly standards to smoke and ash.

Nagash watched as the first packs of daemons came boiling out from the Chaos tide to assault the shield wall of Makvar’s knights. How often he had watched mortal formations crumple before such an attack, their very flesh recoiling from the presence of creatures shaped from the raw stuff of Chaos. The malign aura of a daemon could even disrupt the crudest forms of undead, reducing their motivation to such a degree that they became easy prey for raking claws and slavering fangs. Yet the Stormcasts exhibited no change in their determination. They endured the rush of daemons with the same resolve with which they had opposed the advance of their mortal foes. Just as they had withstood the lascivious malignance of Slaanesh’s minions in the rubble of Nulahmia, so they found no terror in the diseased claws of Nurgle’s obscene progeny.

Courage and determination could accomplish only so much. Here and there, one of the Anvils fell before the enemy, slain by the blade of a daemon or incinerated by the bilious magic of a Nurglesque sorcerer. From each vanquished knight there blazed forth a flare of celestial light that streaked up into the darkened sky before vanishing into the aether. Nagash could feel the spirit nestled within each flare, could sense its trajectory as it pierced the veils of Shyish to return to Azyr.

The Great Necromancer reached out with his mind to those of his Mortarchs. His acolyte Arkhan responded immediately to the call of his master. Without hesitation, he acted. The undead legions around Mount Khaerops rallied for a renewed offensive. Necromantic energies crackled about their fleshless limbs, pouring redoubled ferocity into their desiccated frames. The deathly host surged forwards, smashing and battering their way through the brutish tribes that had only the instant before threatened to overwhelm their position. Arkhan remained upon the slopes of the mountain, dropping from the back of his steed and crouching upon the corpse-strewn ground.

Nagash’s commands extended to Neferata and her warriors. On his order, she spurred her vampiric knights into an assault against the enemy horde. The blood knights would act as the tip of the spear, plunging deep into the corrupt mass of Chaos. After them trooped regiments of grave guard and deadwalkers, flights of morghasts and covens of deathmages. The ghostly fog would magnify the scope of Neferata’s attack, inflicting upon the invaders the illusion of a far greater threat. Already he could see the waddling bulk of the Great Unclean One turning away from the Stormcasts, shifting his attention from Makvar’s knights to this new undead attack.

The pressure against the Anvils lessened as the minions of Chaos found their focus shifting. Nagash was pleased by the rapidity with which his design unfolded. He had seen how the Stormcasts acquitted themselves against the creatures of Nurgle, there was no reason to bleed their strength further by prolonging such an engagement. Not when there were far more important observations to be made.

Exerting his will once more, Nagash seized control over a swathe of Arkhan’s legion. At his command, the bone warriors flung themselves forwards in a reckless advance against a warband of hulking Chaos champions. The undead assault was swiftly broken, their shattered bones sinking into the spectral sludge. A bubbling cry rose from the savage victors, a shout of diseased jubilation. Vanquishing these last skeletal foes brought the Chaos warriors an unexpected boon. They had created a break in Arkhan’s lines, exposing a gap that left them with a clear path right to the slopes of Mount Khaerops. It was an opportunity the murderous invaders were quick to seize.

From above the clearing, Huld’s shout of alarm rang down to the other Stormcasts below, alerting Makvar to the peril that threatened Arkhan.

Now the real test Nagash had planned for the Anvils would begin.

Makvar brought his sword crunching down into the shoulder of a festering plaguebearer, a stream of putrid liquid and maggots bubbling up from the wound. Before he could strike again, Gojin’s claw came raking across the creature’s torso, ripping its organs and snapping its bones. The mangled daemon was smashed beneath the dracoth’s feet, its remains swiftly evaporating into a greasy smoke. The reptile threw his head back in a bellow of anger, offended by the unnatural dissolution of his prey.

Around the Lord-Celestant, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer slowly pushed their way through the morass of Chaos creatures. Blocks of Liberators sought to channel the monsters and marauders into the waiting axes, hammers and glaives of the Paladin retinues. Judicators armed with vicious boltstorm crossbows prowled behind the shield wall, ready to loose a deadly barrage the instant any hole appeared in the defences. More Judicators sent a steady wave of crackling arrows arcing down into the attacking barbarians, leaving their scorched bodies strewn along the course of the Stormcasts’ advance.

Overhead, Huld and the Prosecutors kept a wary vigilance, monitoring the ebb and flow of battle and warning Makvar the instant they spotted any shift among the Chaos forces. He knew the winged knights well enough to appreciate the frustration such restraint provoked, but the Lord-Celestant needed to conserve them until the last moment. Until it was too late for the foe to react and redeploy their warriors.

Grateful as he was that Nagash’s army had emerged from the fog to fall upon the Chaos horde, Makvar felt a sense of frustration as well. The undead who attended Neferata and the Great Necromancer had inflicted many casualties and an enormous amount of confusion with their sudden charge. Many of the enemy tribes and herds moving to engage the Anvils had withdrawn to confront this new threat to their rear – including the gigantic daemon that appeared to be commanding the diseased throng. It was only the lessening of pressure against his own lines that allowed Makvar any freedom of movement.

He had need of such liberty, and it was this that discomfited Makvar. The diminished regiments defending Arkhan had rallied and attempted to mount an assault upon the Chaos horde they simply lacked the strength to achieve. Whether they sallied forth to support Nagash or to aid the Anvils was of small consequence now. The damage had been done – the minions of Nurgle had ripped a hole in the undead ranks, enabling them to penetrate the perimeter the skeletons had been maintaining. A rancid mob of Chaos warriors now rushed unimpeded towards the rise where the Mortarch of Sacrament stood.

Even if they annihilated the whole of the Chaos horde it would bring no victory to the Stormcasts if they lost Arkhan. Nagash insisted his Mortarchs were essential to rebuilding the strength of his armies. How much truth there was in his claim made no difference. Finding Arkhan was one of the conditions Nagash had set before Makvar. If the Anvils failed now it would threaten the alliance they had been sent to broker.

‘Onwards!’ Makvar cried out to his knights. ‘For Sigmar and for glory!’ He spurred Gojin forwards, crushing another plaguebringer beneath the reptile’s immense bulk. His sword flashed out in a vicious arc, raking the face of a snarling daemon and sending the furry arm of a beastman flying into the air. More foes swarmed towards him to replace the slain and wounded, the stink of their oozing sores and corrupt breath blotting out even the musky smell of the dracoth he rode.

Press ahead. That was the tactic the situation demanded of Makvar and his command. If they couldn’t fight their way through the Chaos host, if they failed to reach Arkhan before the enemy, then nothing else would matter. A flash of light rose off to his right, a sombre reminder to him of the price such haste demanded. When the fighting was finished, he would learn the names of those Stormcasts who had fallen. For now, it was enough to know they were sustaining losses and that with each knight overwhelmed by the foe, the task ahead of them became that much harder.

The invigorating glow of Lord-Castellant Vogun’s lantern shone upon Makvar. He could feel the healing energies rushing through him, fending off the contaminated filth that dripped from his blade and spattered his armour. Gojin uttered an exultant hiss as the gashes in his scaly hide began to close and heal. Wails of pain rippled from the fanged maws of the plaguebringers, and they threw up their scrawny arms to cover their monstrous eyes from the celestial light. The resemblance to the aversion exhibited by their undead allies wasn’t lost on Makvar, and did little to comfort the dark turn his thoughts had taken.

‘Break upon the Anvil!’ Vogun shouted, holding his lantern high in one hand as he brought his halberd smashing down into the bearded face of a marauder with his other. The barbarian staggered back, clutching at his bloodied visage with something that more resembled a tentacle than a hand. Before he could recover his thoughts enough to resume his attack, the marauder was borne down by the raking claws and slashing beak of Torn. The gryph-hound made short work of his adversary and hastened back to Vogun’s side, ready to kill all who threatened his master.

By degrees, the Stormcasts were gaining ground, forcing the Chaos warriors back onto the rusted spears and primitive swords of the undead. Pressed between two foes, the marauders and beastmen broke ranks, descending into utter disorder. In their panic to escape destruction, they stampeded over their own comrades, turning their axes and clubs upon the daemons and chieftains who tried to force them back into the fight. The routed barbarians and gors were ripe for the slaughter. Makvar felt no compunction ordering his knights to obliterate their reeling enemy. The Stormcasts had seen for themselves the mercy Chaos extended to those who felt helpless before them.

The dark shapes of Huld and the Prosecutors soared close to the Anvils before climbing once more and speeding away to the right. Makvar responded to the arranged signal and urged his knights to leave their broken enemies to the pitiless attentions of the undead. Their own objective was elsewhere. Smashing through the few packs of beastmen and warbands of marauders who stood in their way, Makvar led the Anvils in pursuit of the armoured Chaos warriors trying to converge upon the summit of Mount Khaerops.

The Prosecutors cast their javelins down into the charging Chaos warriors as they flew past them. The missiles cracked against the spectral sludge with elemental fury. Great craters opened up in the ectoplasm, gouged from the ghostly material by the explosive bursts of electricity. The scorched bodies of mangled warriors were sent spinning through the air. Others fell into the ghoulish pits, screaming with the horrors of the damned as the translucent muck came flooding back in to fill the depression. Trapped within the spectral mud, they struggled to claw their way back to the surface before the ectoplasm smothered them. Few proved equal to the effort.

Huld landed on the bone-littered slopes of the mountain, wings unfurled, the light of his celestial beacon blazing around him. The Knight-Azyros put himself between Arkhan and the Chaos warriors who still sought to overcome the Mortarch. The first armoured brute who rushed towards him was sent flopping down the slope, cut in two by a sweep of Huld’s sword. A second warrior crashed to his knees and pitched forward among the bones after the winged knight sent his horned head bouncing from his shoulders.

The Prosecutors made a second pass over the Chaos warriors, scattering their enemy and breaking the momentum of their charge. A stream of sizzling foulness shot up from the mouth of a diseased warlock, the boiling spew engulfing one of the flying Anvils and knocking him from the sky. As the stricken Prosecutor slammed into the ectoplasm, a blue flare streaked skyward. Before the sorcerer could try to repeat his murderous feat, Kreimnar brought a cascade of retribution roaring down from the sky, engulfing the enemy warlock in a shower of thunderbolts.

Then, Makvar was leading the vanguard of his force into the scattered Chaos warriors. Steel plate pitted with corrosion and rust flattened beneath his dracoth’s claws, pox-ridden flesh branded with the viral sigils of Nurgle split before the cleaving edge of his sword. A bolt of lightning from Gojin’s jaws reduced a charging foeman into a steaming husk, the spiked mace in his hands splashing across the ground in a molten puddle.

Liberators rushed to support the Lord-Celestant, forming up to either side of Gojin to guard the dracoth’s flanks and keep Makvar from being surrounded by the enemies who remained. Though they had the numbers, Makvar doubted the Chaos warriors still had enough unity of purpose to coordinate such an attack. Those who came rushing at the Stormcasts did so as individuals, sparing no thought for any strategy greater than coming to grips with the ebon knights. The Anvils, by contrast, fought as though they were bound into a single sigmarite body. The Liberator who struck down a flail-wielding invader was guarded by the broad shield of the knight beside him when a slobbering axeman sprang at him. The Decimator who failed to finish a fly-headed Chaos champion with a blow of his thunderaxe was spared the bite of his enemy’s rusty claymore when a Judicator sent several bolts from his crossbow punching through the warrior’s chest.

Some few of the Chaos warriors still tried to climb the slopes of Mount Khaerops. Thinking to overwhelm Huld with ferocity and numbers, they failed to account for the speed and finesse of the Stormcast. Weaving between a half-dozen foes, Huld visited upon them a flurry of glancing cuts and shallow slashes. Death wasn’t the dominating concern of his swift blows, but simply a measure to dull the haste of the rancid invaders. Diseased blood spilled from each of the Chaos warriors as they tried to recover their momentum and make another rush up the slope.

Flapping his great wings, Huld hopped higher up the bone-strewn rise, keeping himself between the enemy and Arkhan. He risked a look back at the kneeling liche. He could make no sense of the incantation that tumbled from the Mortarch’s bony jaws or the symbols he scratched into the earth with his skeletal claws. But he could feel the power Arkhan was evoking, the magical chill that crept into the air and turned his sweat into beads of frost.

The enemy could sense it too. Huld could see the lethal resolve that wriggled in their eyes. Whatever spell Arkhan was working, these minions of Chaos were determined to disrupt his conjurations.

Huld pointed his sword at the biggest of the brutes, a barbarian with such a swollen gut that his iron armour had split open to expose the bulge of his belly. The Stormcast could see the blistering fury in the diseased man’s eyes. ‘You’ll have to get past me if you want him,’ he warned the invader. The bloated warrior scowled at him with what little of his face wasn’t hidden behind the rusted mesh of his helm. His pudgy fingers clenched tighter about the haft of the twisted axe he bore. Huld nodded as he prepared to receive the Chaos warrior’s attack.

Then the Knight-Azyros found himself thrown into the air. Before he could catch himself, he slammed into the litter of bones and started rolling down the slope. As his vision swirled, shifting between the slope and the sky, he had the impression of something rising up above him.

Something unbelievably gargantuan.

Something unspeakably monstrous.

Makvar gazed in disbelief as the entire top of Mount Khaerops reared up. An avalanche of bone was sent crashing down the slopes, spilling across the clearing in a clattering cascade of grinning skulls and broken skeletons. Up from beneath the mound of bones, an enormous talon erupted into the air, slamming down with pulverising force against the exposed rock of the mountain. Two smaller claws flanked the huge talon, all of them attached to a great skeletal framework that somehow recalled to Makvar the outline of a colossal hand.

The immense fingers stretched, revealing a skein of tattered flesh between them. Leathery, hideous, the decayed skin gave off a charnel reek. A dozen yards from where the first talon gripped the rock, a second enormous set of claws burst from beneath the mound of bones. These talons smashed through the layers of bleached bone to seize the rock buried beneath. Again there was the vast finger-like framework with its canvas of rotten skin stretched between each digit.

With both talons anchored in the rock of the mountain, a fresh avalanche of bones came crashing down the slopes. Rearing up from beneath the skeletal heap was a titanic shape. As big as a dragon, more hideous than anything that had haunted the cursed streets of Nulahmia, the beast lurched up from its hidden tomb.

Makvar saw now that the limbs it had first thrust forth were the behemoth’s forelegs, attached to its shoulders by thick knots of wiry sinew and exposed muscle. Its body, broad at the chest, tapered off to a long tail of naked bone. Masses of mouldy grey fur clung to the beast’s torso, rents in its skin displaying the raw meat and organs within. A great gash along its left side exposed the skeletal frame of its spine and ribs, and the withered husk that should have been its heart.

The colossal beast’s head jutted forwards on the merest stump of a neck. It was a hideous countenance, at once possessed of a long jaw and a squashed forehead. Grisly eyes gleamed from the pits that opened to either side of the yawning nasal cavity. Long fangs jutted from the bone stretch of its jaws, curving downward like scimitars, stabbing upward like a phalanx of pikes. The tatters of leathery ears dangled from the sides of the monster’s bestial skull, strips of skin and fur dripping from their rotted lobes.

The terrorgheist will destroy us all. The words echoed through Makvar’s brain, stabbing into his awareness like a knife. His gaze turned from the gigantic creature, drawn to the one who called out to him. He saw a skeletal figure retreating from Mount Khaerops on the back of an abyssal steed. Whatever relief he felt at seeing Arkhan intact was quashed by the realisation that the thing looming above the mountain was mighty enough to make even the Mortarch withdraw from it.

My magic has roused it, but I underestimated its strength. I can exert no control over it. Each thought Arkhan thrust upon Makvar carried an icy lack of emotion. There was no apology or shame that the creature his necromancy had conjured wouldn’t obey him. It was a statement of fact, nothing more. Arkhan had certainly adopted his master’s air of passionless detachment.

Makvar swung around in Gojin’s saddle, looking across the battlefield. The Chaos warriors who had been engaged with the Anvils were all but exterminated, and he could see that the remnants of Arkhan’s army had fared much the same. It was the army of Neferata that now bore the brunt of the enemy’s effort. He could see the grotesque Great Unclean One waddling about, snatching vampire knights from their saddles with his flabby claws or incinerating grave guard with bile from his gaping maw. Though he could feel the sinister presence of Nagash, he saw no trace of the Lord of Death within the raging melee.

The Lord-Celestant looked back to Mount Khaerops and the gigantic terrorgheist that now squatted upon its slopes. Gazing upon it, experiencing the air of hostility and evil that rolled off it, he didn’t doubt for a moment that the behemoth had the potential to turn the tide of battle all on its own. Under Arkhan’s control it would have ensured the annihilation of the Chaos horde. Free to vent its malignance at liberty, it represented a threat that couldn’t be ignored.

‘Makvar!’ Vogun cried out, gesturing with his halberd. ‘The beast has spotted Huld!’

It was true, the terrorgheist’s head had turned downward, contemplating the cadaverous mound beneath it. Among the litter of bones, the dark armour of Huld fairly shouted his presence to the gigantic undead bat. The Knight-Azyros was keeping still, refraining from any sudden motion that might provoke the beast.

‘The terrorgheist has slipped free of the Mortarch’s control,’ Makvar declared, his voice loud enough to reach every Stormcast gathered near to him. ‘How is a question for later. What concerns us now is what to do about it.’ He looked at Vogun’s lantern, thinking about the adverse way the undead reacted to the light of Azyr. Leave this task to us, he thought, hoping his intentions would reach Arkhan’s mind as the Mortarch’s had his own.

‘The undead are leaving us!’ Brannok called out. The Knight-Heraldor indicated the battered legions of Arkhan. The bone warriors were leaving the positions they had held, advancing across the clearing to support Neferata’s embattled forces.

‘Leave them,’ Makvar declared. ‘Against this enemy, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer will fight the better for being alone.’ He turned towards Kreimnar. ‘Call down Sigmar’s wrath against the beast.’

The Lord-Relictor nodded his skull-like helm. ‘One strike may not be enough to consume that monster,’ he warned.

‘So long as it gives Huld a chance to slip away, and the rest of us a chance to draw near,’ Makvar said.

Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon. On the mountain, the terrorgheist was slowly moving one of its clawed hands, gradually shifting the talons closer to Huld. Perhaps the undead beast thought if it moved slow then its prey would be oblivious to the peril. Perhaps it simply thought the Knight-Azyros was paralysed with fear. Whatever its motivation, the gigantic brute was unprepared when a crackling deluge of lightning seared down upon it from the dark skies above. As it reared back in shock, strips of fur and flesh burning in the fury of Kreimnar’s magic, Huld sprang to his feet and stretched his wings. The Stormcast became a dark blur as he threw himself from the slopes of Mount Khaerops and soared away from the bat-like behemoth that had been ready to devour him.

Enraged both by the blast of lightning that had scorched its bones and by the escape of its prey, the terrorgheist threw back its head and uttered a deafening shriek. Spreading its tattered wings, the beast rose into the air, diving down from the summit straight towards the Anvils’ black ranks.

The beast’s flight was too swift for Kreimnar to draw down another thunderbolt to intercept it. Instead, Makvar called upon the Judicators to loose against the oncoming behemoth. At the Lord-Celestant’s signal, the massed archers sent a volley of crackling energy searing up into the terrorgheist. Most of the lightning simply steamed against the beast’s hardened bones or tore ribbons of decayed flesh from its desiccated body, but a few provoked angry snarls and flicks of its bony tail.

Diving down upon the behemoth from above, the Prosecutors were the next to assault the flying horror. Throwing their stormcall javelins into the gigantic brute, the explosive spears detonated in the beast’s decaying bulk. Shreds of meat and bone were ripped from the behemoth, and its tattered wings were further mangled as skeletal shrapnel tore through them. A living beast, even one of the mighty dragons, would have been felled by such havoc, but if any spark of true life had ever burned within the terrorgheist, it had long ago been extinguished by the fell magics of Shyish. Abruptly turning its dive into a vicious climb, the gargantuan horror snapped at the Prosecutors flying above it, catching one of its tormentors in its enormous jaws. The sound of splintering mail echoed down to Makvar and his knights as their winged comrade perished under the bat’s piercing fangs.

Once more, Makvar called for the Judicators to loose against the titanic beast. This time, Gojin’s electric breath was added to the barrage that rose up to strike the terrorgheist. Again, the havoc visited upon the beast was hideous, but largely cosmetic to a creature that could endure with a shrivelled heart and bloodless veins. The gigantic bat wheeled about in the sky, chasing after the Prosecutors as though they were mosquitoes flying above the stagnant waters of Wolfhof’s tarn. A flash of celestial light marked the end of another Anvil in the monster’s jaws.

‘Keep after it!’ Makvar commanded. The Stormcasts spread out along the drowned plaza, trying to keep the terrorgheist overhead. Retinues of Judicators kept their skybows trained upon the beast, loosing whenever it drew within range. Among the Paladins, those armed with the brutal starmaces gripped their weapons with frustrated anticipation. Let the monster descend for but a moment, and they would let it taste the might of the Anvils.

The terrorgheist swung around once more, hurtling after a Prosecutor it had missed in its previous rush. Now the bat intended to finish its foe, its jaws stretched wide as it flew towards him. Before it could close with its prey, another winged Stormcast dived towards it. Makvar thought he caught the gleam of the golden halo fastened to Huld’s helm. An instant later, he knew for certain the interceptor was the Knight-Azyros. Interposing himself between the terrorgheist and the Prosecutor, Huld held his celestial beacon before the undead monster, letting the purifying rays sear into its grisly essence.

Stunned, shrieking, the huge monster plummeted earthward, slamming into the translucent syrup that covered the plaza with the force of an earthquake. Monoliths and statues that had stood so long above the spectral sludge now toppled under the force of the beast’s impact, sinking with eerie lethargy into the mire. The terrorgheist itself floundered in the ghostly slime, the crater inflicted by its impact swiftly filling again and threatening to suck the beast into the depths.

‘Before it can free itself!’ Makvar called out to his knights. Dozens of Stormcasts charged toward the trapped terrorgheist, striking it with swords and hammers. Makvar noted the blazing discharge of a starmace and watched as several feet of the monster’s thrashing tail went sailing through the air.

The beast’s claws lashed out at its attackers, crushing one Liberator and ripping a Retributor open from collar to groin. Then the terrorgheist drew back, seeming to fold in upon itself like a coiling serpent. For a moment, it held itself still, then it lurched forwards, its jaws stretching wide to let loose a murderous shriek. The terrorgheist’s cry proved as deadly as the blast from any dragon’s maw. Blue light erupted from several Stormcasts unfortunate enough to be too near the bat’s head when it gave voice to its rattling scream. The howl had extinguished their vitality in less than a heartbeat, hurling their spirits back to the Realm Celestial and the armouries of the God-King.

Makvar urged Gojin towards the hulking beast, hoping to save more of his knights from the terrorgheist’s malevolence. The brute turned its head towards him, coiling back to unleash another deadly shriek. Two things happened before the gigantic bat could sound its cry. The first was the bolt of crackling lightning that flew from Gojin’s jaws to blast one of its ears to ruin. The second was the blinding blaze of Vogun’s warding lantern as the Lord-Castellant shone it into the terrorgheist’s eyes. The beast’s agony was such that it forgot about Makvar and his dracoth, instead snapping its huge jaws at Vogun.

Vogun darted away from the terrorgheist’s bite and retaliated with a slash of his halberd that sent fangs rolling across the clearing. Growling at the undead monster, ignoring the colossal difference in their sizes, Torn sprang at the beast that had tried to eat its master. The gryph-hound’s beak ripped into the terrorgheist’s rotting face, slashing such meat as yet clung to its skull.

A snarling sheet of lightning crashed down into the terrorgheist as Kreimnar brought the fury of the God-King descending upon the undead horror. Flesh steamed in the elemental blast, bones blackened and fractured. One of the monster’s wings withered into a charred stump. The shriek that hissed from the monster’s jaws now was one of agony as the dark magic which fuelled its abominable animation was burned away.

Makvar brought his sword chopping down into the stumpy neck that supported the terrorgheist’s bat-like head. The blade sheared through the rancid flesh, gouging the thick vertebrae beneath. The decaying beast swung around, trying to snap at him with its blackened jaws. A crack of Gojin’s tail broke the momentum of its assault and sent more of its fangs tumbling onto the ground.

Gripping his sword in both hands, Makvar brought the blade slashing down in a vicious stroke. The sharp edge sheared through the already weakened bone. The terrorgheist’s head crashed to the ground, dislodging Torn from his worrying grip on the beast’s ear. The massive body twitched and writhed, tail whipping out in blind malignance, the remaining wing closing and opening in mindless spasms. A ragged shout of victory rose from the Stormcasts around the vanquished monster, their triumph tainted by the loss of their comrades to the beast’s rampage.

‘Now we must return to the real fight,’ Makvar declared, rousing his knights and recalling to them the greater battle raging above the drowned streets of Mephitt. Even as he did so, Vogun drew the Lord-Celestant’s attention to the turn that battle had taken.

The corrupt Chaos horde had come the worse for their struggle against the undead. Between Neferata’s vampires and Arkhan’s bone warriors, the slaughter had been monumental. Dire spells leapt from the eldritch staves the two Mortarchs carried as they rode about the periphery of the conflict, decimating entire warbands with each of their conjurations.

The bloated, toad-like daemon which led the forces of Nurgle, the hulking Great Unclean One that had seemed so formidable to Makvar when he led his knights to Arkhan’s rescue, was now beset by a power even more destructive. Nagash had sallied forth from the darkness to confront the daemon. The skeletal Lord of Death sent masses of clawing wraiths screaming across the huge daemon’s cancerous body, tearing great rents in his hide. He hurled shrivelling magics into the thing’s exposed organs, reducing them to empty husks. Chilling energies streamed from Nagash’s staff, cracking and splitting the Great Unclean One’s oozing skin, freezing its horns and nose, making them so brittle that they shattered when his foe tried to strike at him with a giant diseased sword.

Nagash’s other hand gripped a sword of his own, a blade of such immense darkness and malice that it seemed to drain the vitality from the very air around it. When the Lord of Death brought his blade against that of the daemon, the bilious sword was shorn in half, split asunder as though it were naught but a twig. The deathly weapon continued its murderous sweep, slashing into the daemon’s body, hewing through its vast maw and cyclopean eye. Relentless to the last, Nagash gave the blade a twisting flourish before tearing it from the daemon’s body.

Almost before Makvar understood what he was watching, the immense daemon of Nurgle lay corroding at Nagash’s fleshless feet in four gory segments.

The Stormcasts had exhibited their might for the undead. Now Nagash had shown the warriors of Sigmar why the God-King was so keen to restore the Lord of Death to his pantheon.

CHAPTER TEN

The translucent morass that had consumed Mephitt surrounded the Anvils of the Heldenhammer as they descended into the depths of the ruined city. Wispy orbs and weird lights flittered through the sunken streets, darting down empty avenues and through abandoned archways. Colossal statues sitting atop huge pedestals of marble and malachite flashed into view as the ghost-brands rushed past them. Pyramidal obelisks and ovoid menhirs were revealed as glowing motes swirled around their bases.

More macabre than the drowned echoes of the forgotten city were the gruesome objects that hung suspended within the ectoplasmic lake. Bones of every description, human and inhuman, hovered within the opaque mire, slowly drawn down into the depths of Mephitt. The corpses of beasts and men killed in the recent fighting, the splintered remains of Arkhan’s vanquished warriors, could be seen oozing their way down from the surface, sinking with almost glacial lethargy into the shadowy underworld. The broken husk of the terrorgheist was there, gargantuan and hideous, its monstrous bulk drawn down towards the long-hidden flagstones of Mephitt’s great plaza.

‘I can feel the chill of this place chewing into my bones.’ The words were spoken by Knight-Heraldor Brannok, but they could have come from any of the Stormcasts. The clammy, dank atmosphere was inescapable, too persistent for even Lord-Castellant Vogun’s lantern to hold at bay. It was a cold not of temperature but of spirit, the frigid clutch of an open grave, the slumbering malice of the dead towards the living.

‘This necropolis is offended that we are here,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar stated. Boldly, he reached out his hand, feeling the translucent wall beside him recede ever so slightly at his touch. ‘It has been a long time since anything that drew breath walked these streets.’

It didn’t take Kreimnar’s arcane sensitivity to feel the sullen hostility that oozed up from the ruins. Lord-Celestant Makvar felt it all around him, a creeping sensation that crawled through his skin. It was like having a thousand eyes watching him, glaring at him with pitiless hate. Every instinct in his body and all the fighting reflexes he had honed and developed were shouting to him, crying out to him to beware. It wasn’t fear – that emotion was all but unknown to the Stormcast Eternals. It was something more subtle, welling up from some primal aspect of his being. It was the same anxiety he could feel pulsing through Gojin’s reptilian bulk, could see hovering about the feathered head of Vogun’s gryph-hound. As Kreimnar said, life wasn’t welcome in Mephitt, and even the basest creature could feel itself trespassing upon a world in which it had no place.

Yet for all the malice, the atmosphere of bitter threat Makvar felt pressing in around them, he knew that the Stormcasts were in no danger. The spirits that haunted the desolation, the spectral malignity of Mephitt’s ruins, the deathly essence of the translucent mire, all of these were manifestations of the Realm of Death. Nothing of this sinister land would do them harm. Not while they were in the company of the god who claimed dominion over Shyish.

Makvar gazed at the eerie tunnel through which the Stormcasts marched, boring its way through the submerged streets, lit by a ghostly glow that followed the knights as they pressed deeper into the city. Ahead of him he could see the fleshless ranks of Arkhan’s skeletons, the crimson armour of Neferata’s vampires. Beyond them, towering over the undead legion, was the morbid throne upon which Nagash reposed, carried upon a phantom tide of writhing spirits, surrounded by the black essence of the Great Necromancer’s power.

When he had descended from Azyr, Makvar had imagined Nagash to be a dwindling force, a fading deity whose powers were waning. They had come to broker alliance with Neferata because they had believed the Mortarch to be a more active opponent of Chaos, a leader of such defiance as yet lingered within Shyish. Nagash, he had thought, was in retreat, sealed off within his underworlds, unable or unwilling to oppose the hordes of Archaon. Seeing his swift dispatch of the Great Unclean One proved to Makvar that whatever else, Nagash’s powers were still far from extinguished. Watching him stretch forth one of his bony hands and bore a passage through the ghostly sludge which buried Mephitt impressed upon him that this was still the realm of the Death God.

No, there wasn’t any question that Nagash was still a formidable power. He could stand against the tide of Chaos. What Makvar wondered was if the Great Necromancer was willing to do so. Perhaps he had been too long in his hidden vaults and underworld catacombs to believe victory was still possible.

‘Lord-Celestant, a rider comes,’ Huld called to Makvar. The Knight-Azyros waved one of his wings as something emerged from the undead ranks and crossed the gap that separated the Stormcasts from their allies. Makvar almost expected to see Neferata’s handmaiden drawing towards them, to relay tidings from her mistress or to pass along some veiled warning. Instead, what he saw was a withered husk perched atop a skeletal steed. The mounted corpse bore a bony standard in one of its fleshless claws, a golden icon mounted to the top of the morbid pole. The thing regarded the Anvils with its empty sockets, then dipped its head in a creaking extension of honour.

‘Mighty Nagash wishes you to attend him,’ the rider said, its jaws moving too slowly to match the words that rattled from them. ‘If Lord-Celestant Makvar would follow, he will be shown where he will be received.’

Brannok drew close to Makvar’s side. ‘Don’t go alone, commander,’ he cautioned.

Makvar cast his gaze up at the mass of ectoplasm above them, pondering how far below the surface they were now. ‘If Nagash willed, it he could bring this tunnel crashing down upon our heads,’ he said. ‘No, he has no need for subterfuge. Not while we are so completely in his power.’ It was hardly a comforting sentiment, but then they hadn’t been sent to the Realm of Death to play things safe. They had been sent to accomplish their mission and accept whatever risks were demanded to execute that purpose.

‘You should take someone with you,’ Kreimnar said, studying the undead horseman. ‘Someone to offer advice and council should it be needed.’

Like Brannok, Kreimnar was more worried about Makvar’s safety than any strategic concerns, but unlike the Knight-Heraldor, he was more cunning about expressing himself. The suggestion even had merit in its own right. Makvar was wise enough to appreciate that his focus on the success of their mission might blind him to other matters. Nuances of possibility that might have an oblique effect upon the alliance he strove to build.

‘I will take Brannok, Huld and Vogun,’ Makvar told Kreimnar. ‘I trust that will allay some of your worry, old friend?’ Of all of his officers, Brannok and Vogun were the ones most critical of the powers they had been sent to court. As a result, they would be the ones paying the most attention when he conferred with the Lord of Death. Huld, with his keen tongue, was someone he was certain would prove essential in any event.

‘Bring such servants as you deem needful,’ the skeleton declared. ‘Great Nagash will be waiting.’ Its message delivered, the undead herald collapsed in upon itself, its bones losing their cohesion. The horse disintegrated in similar fashion, crashing to the ground in a mess of decay.

By its disintegration, the undead rider impressed another message upon Makvar. It was that whatever served Nagash existed only because it had a purpose useful to him. Once it became superfluous, its existence could be snuffed out in a matter of a few heartbeats.

The weight of ages lay wrapped about the royal palace of Mephitt. The tomb-mire that had smothered the city made it impossible for dust to gather or spiders to spin their webs between the columns. No vermin scurried in the shadows, no decay pitted the gruesome frescos painted on the walls. Yet time had left its stain just the same, the years seeping down into the marble floors and limestone walls, tainting the bronze sconces and brazen braziers. A miasma of antiquity clung to it all in defiance of the arcane preservation of the spectral lake that had drowned the once-mighty city.

It needed only a wave of his hand for Nagash to send the tomb-mire rolling back, to drive the opaque sludge from the great hall where the necro-kings of Mephitt had once lorded over their people. As he marched to the barren throne where the ashes of the last necro-king lay heaped, he let the ancient vibrations of the dim past inundate him, welcoming him with ghostly harmonies and the silent howls of the grave.

The Great Necromancer seated himself on the jewelled throne. Dimly, he could feel the lingering essence of the last necro-king, its final agonies and entreaties bound into the place of its dissolution. Nagash banished the irritation with a thought, hurling the royal spirit into the formless shadows of the realm it had once ruled. The Mortarchs who followed him into the hall sensed his casual obliteration of the spirit. He felt the tremor of fear that pulsed through Neferata and the shiver of adoration that coursed through Arkhan’s ancient bones.

So vastly different in character, these two scions of death, yet each had an important part in Nagash’s vision. Makvar and his Stormcasts had their own role to play, even if they were as yet unaware of it. Their performance in the plaza had revealed much to him, allowing him to better place them within his design. Their potential was enormous. As hard as it came to him to accept Sigmar’s withdraw from the Realm of Death, he had to concede that the God-King had accomplished much behind the gates of Azyr.

Nagash looked up as he felt the presence of the Stormcasts enter the hall. The celestial energy that burned within them, the mark of Sigmar’s Reforging – he knew the alarm it evoked from Neferata’s vampires. The Mortarch of Blood’s reaction was more layered, less clearly defined. It was like her to view anything new in the context of both threat and advantage. If she felt the reward was grand enough, there was little she wouldn’t risk to further her pursuit of power. Sometimes she was overbold in her recklessness. Sometimes her lack of restraint left her exposed to hazards even she couldn’t see.

Arkhan’s contemplation of the Anvils was more like that of his master. The Mortarch of Sacrament pondered the methodology behind their creation, the limitations invested within them. He would be thinking of their armaments both as menace and as asset. Not with an eye towards his own advantage, but with the cold detachment of expanding his knowledge so that he might be of even greater use to the Great Necromancer. If Neferata’s failing was her selfish ambition, then Arkhan’s was his lack of the same. He suffered from a deficiency of imagination, an inability to ferret out the possibilities, to follow hope and fear to their furthest limitations.

Of course, when it came to dreams of avarice and schemes to power, there was one who made even Neferata’s intrigues appear childishly simple. Nagash intended to call upon that twisted mind quite soon. With the help of Makvar and his knights.

‘Lord Nagash,’ Makvar greeted him. The Great Necromancer noted that the black-armoured knight made no obeisance before him. It was more than pride – the Mortarchs had that in abundance yet they didn’t hesitate to prostrate themselves in his presence. No, it was that rarest of all things – an absence of fear. For why should a warrior feel fear if death would simply speed his soul back to the halls of Sigmar to be cast anew in the forges of the God-King?

‘I have summoned you, knight of Sigmar, to make my intentions known,’ Nagash told Makvar. He looked across the warriors who accompanied the Lord-Celestant. The flare of purity shining behind the shutters of the lantern fixed to the belt of one companion evoked a twinge of amusement. Such a weapon would discomfit Neferata or Arkhan, possibly even destroy some of the vampire queen’s entourage, but it was nothing to a being who had once walked beside Sigmar and withstood the aura of the God-King himself.

Makvar stepped forwards and pointed towards Arkhan. ‘We have helped to restore your disciple to you,’ he said. ‘It is my hope that we have displayed to your satisfaction the quality to be found in Sigmar’s servants and the advantage of fighting beside us against the common foe.’

‘Your command sustained casualties in the fight,’ Nagash stated.

Makvar’s voice had just the faintest edge to it when he answered. ‘Most of our losses were suffered putting down the monster Arkhan summoned with his magic.’

Nagash nodded, shifting around so that his deathly countenance glowered down at the liche-king. ‘Explain yourself,’ he hissed at Arkhan.

The Mortarch of Sacrament fell to one knee, bowing his head before his master’s ire. ‘The fault is mine, my liege. The invaders had forced their way past my guardians. In my rush to work my spells and conjure a servant mighty enough to defy them, I made an error in my incantation. My haste is to blame for rendering the terrorgheist beyond my control–’

A wave of Nagash’s skeletal claw silenced Arkhan’s apologies. ‘Your carelessness has brought harm to those that would befriend us,’ he said. ‘Be grateful that they were able to put down that which you so recklessly summoned.’ He turned back towards Makvar. ‘It is my hope that your casualties were not too severe.’

‘We still have strength enough to accomplish our mission,’ the winged Stormcast Huld answered. It was the sort of ambiguous response a skilled diplomat would give, acknowledging the situation while assuring it made no impact upon the relative positions of all involved.

‘That remains to be seen,’ Nagash cautioned. ‘Confidence is but the prelude to achievement.’ He waved one hand towards the undead who stood beside his throne. ‘I must rebuild the might of my legions if I would help Sigmar wage his battles. To do so, it is needful that my Mortarchs assist me in my labours. Two of them now stand at my side, but there is a third whose help is essential to me.’

‘You ask that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer find this missing vassal for you?’ Huld looked aside to Makvar before continuing. ‘Are you making that a condition…’

‘There can be no alliance based upon disparity,’ Nagash declared. ‘I will not treat with Sigmar unless it is as his equal.’ The Great Necromancer extended one of his fleshless hands. From his bony claws, a ripple of dark magic poured away, striking the cold floor of the forgotten palace. In response, streamers of spectral essence billowed upwards, growing like phantasmal vines. As the deathly energies wound about each other, they merged, fusing into a single pillar of writhing green light. When the pillar stood higher than any of the assembled Stormcasts, its summit began to fold in upon itself, transforming into a nebulous sphere-like shape. With each gyrating shudder that passed through it, the form grew more defined and distinct until finally the Anvils found themselves staring up at a grisly visage. It was almost bestial in its degree of cruelty, menace dripping from the vicious set of the jaws and the sharp beak-like nose. The eyes were sunk deep within shadowed sockets, the bald pate distorted by nodules of bone.

‘This simulacrum is the face of Count Mannfred, the Mortarch of Night,’ Nagash said. ‘I will need his powers to restore my legions.’ At a flick of his talon, he caused the phantom image to alter, now showing the vampire riding an abyssal steed into battle, wielding a ghoulish blade against unseen foes. ‘Of all my vassals, Mannfred has fared the best in his efforts to defy the spread of Chaos.’

Makvar pointed at the apparition Nagash had conjured. ‘There is no need to remind us of Mannfred’s visage. Well do we know that countenance. It is the face of an adversary the warriors of Sigmar have found themselves in conflict with before.’

The simulacrum disintegrated in a burst of wailing light as Nagash extinguished his spell. ‘He rests once more within the expanse of my realm, like a prodigal son slinking back to his home. Perhaps your comrades have taught him humility, or maybe the lesson he has learned is merely to be less audacious in what he would claim for himself. Repentant or unbowed, he is necessary just the same.’ Nagash let his gaze bore into the stern mask that covered Makvar’s face. ‘There are many past slights which must be set aside if there is to be an understanding between us. Do not think the Stormcasts are alone in the matter of old enmities they must forgive… if not forget.’

Silence hung over the hall as Nagash let his words echo in the air. Even if he had heard only Sigmar’s side of the tale, Makvar couldn’t be unaware of the manner in which the old alliance was broken, or of the fate which came upon the Realm of Death as a result. The Lord-Celestant was far from a stupid man – he had imagination enough to conceive how those events were regarded by the Great Necromancer and his followers. Beside the abandonment of an entire realm to Archaon’s hordes, of what consequence were the reckless aspirations of a power-hungry Mortarch?

‘As you say, Lord Nagash,’ Makvar stated, ‘there is much that must be set aside so that we may all focus upon the task before us. The fact that Sigmar has sent us to you is proof enough that the God-King understands this and is ready to forgive old conflicts.’

A rattling chuckle hissed across Nagash’s fangs. He turned aside, looking across his Mortarchs and their followers. ‘Eloquently spoken,’ he decided. ‘The very nature of an embassy is compromise. But do all your warriors share your sense of vision, Lord-Celestant?’ Nagash leaned forwards, fastening Brannok in his spectral sight.

The Knight-Heraldor met the Lord of Death’s cadaverous stare. ‘It isn’t necessary to share my commander’s clarity of vision,’ he said. ‘It is only necessary that I obey. That I remain faithful to my vows, my duty and my faith.’

Brannok’s answer both amused and provoked Nagash. ‘Faith?’ he repeated the word, turning it over as though dissecting it with his voice. ‘What is faith but a mask to hide doubt? What is it but a deceit evoked to goad the feeble-minded beyond the limits of reason? I had imagined it was something noble and rational that endowed the Stormcasts with such remarkable potential, yet within I discover only the atavism of faith.’

‘Faith is the source of my strength,’ Brannok retorted. ‘Faith in Sigmar God-King, trust in his divine power and wisdom.’

‘Be wary where you place your trust, knight, lest you find yourself abandoned.’

‘That is a warning which should be turned towards the creatures which haunt your court,’ Brannok said, pointing at Neferata and her vampires. ‘They are the ones that have been abandoned and left to slink through the shadows.’

‘You understand little,’ Nagash said, ‘and least of all what it means to serve me. Those who do are never far from my reach.’ He dismissed Brannok from his notice, instead focusing once more on Makvar. ‘There is nothing that transpires within the Realm of Death that can long escape my attentions. When Mannfred returned to this realm, he sought to hide himself within the vastness of his old castle of Nachtsreik. Within that labyrinth of crypts and vaults, he defies the hosts of Chaos that hunt for him.’

‘If he is so well hidden, how will we find him?’ Makvar asked.

‘By uniting our powers,’ Nagash answered. He gestured at Huld’s celestial beacon. ‘With the light of Azyr we can penetrate Mannfred’s illusions.’ His skeletal hand closed into a bony fist. ‘And with my might, the prodigal son can be brought to heel.’

The rich silks of the divan upon which he rested caressed Lascilion’s abused flesh the same way the sensuous perfume anointing their folds teased his nose. There was something almost tortuous about such indulgent luxury after the carnage of battle and the agonies of defeat. He wondered if Bloodking Thagmok had the acumen to appreciate the subtlety of such torment. If he did, then he had forgotten the desires of those who devoted themselves to the Prince of Chaos, those who plunged into that excess of experience and sensuality where the borderland between pleasure and pain wasn’t simply breached, but ceased to exist entirely. If Thagmok wanted to punish him, the worst he could have done to Lascilion was to shut him up in an empty box and leave him to rot.

‘You aren’t being punished. You are being offered the chance for redemption.’

The words drifted to Lascilion in a husky whisper, redolent of lewd suggestion and hedonistic promise. The Lord of Slaanesh felt his body longing to submit to those seductive tones, but the fierce will that burned within him resisted the temptation. It was all too easy to allow sensation to eclipse desire, to plunge into vacuous indulgence and lose all appreciation of the very lusts that enslaved the flesh.

‘I have told you before to stay out of my mind,’ Lascilion snapped, rising up from beneath the silk coverlet that sheathed his body. The companions disturbed by his sudden motion went scampering off into the scented darkness of his pavilion.

Strolling out of that darkness was a slim figure arrayed in a long cloak of feathers. A tall helm of reflective gemstones and mirrored glass cradled the proud head that rose above the onyx clasps that held the cloak across narrow shoulders. A pectoral of beads and bones spilled over the swell of more-feminine charms. Small, delicate fingers curled around the haft of a slender staff that seemed at once to be shaped from both crystal and clay. Nodules of metal embedded in its length blazed with some inner light.

Even if her features hadn’t been reshaped by the mutating gifts of the Lord of Change, Lascilion would have been hard-pressed to judge either age or origin when it came to the sorceress Molchinte. That she had strayed far from whatever tribe had produced her was obvious. Such was the way of Chaos. The gods favoured the wanderer, the one who always strove to go beyond the next horizon, endlessly seeking some new novelty of sensation with which to honour their god. Or, in Molchinte’s case, some new ember of knowledge to trap in the web of her scheming mind.

‘If you would put barriers between us, then you shouldn’t have allowed my magic to heal your wounds,’ Molchinte said. Though no sound issued from it, the vestigial mouth that opened across her cheek parroted the motion. ‘Of course, Thagmok would have small use for a crippled hedonist unable to leave his bed. A tidbit for the flesh hounds to toy with, certainly nothing more.’

‘Your ministrations have healed my injuries,’ Lascilion conceded, turning his head and looking at his recent playthings cowering in the dark. ‘I have regained much of my old stamina.’

Molchinte ignored the boast. ‘Thagmok feels you are whole enough to perform the task for which you were spared death upon the skull-wheel.’ A flick of her hand and the sorceress caused Lascilion’s forked tongue to rasp across his lips. ‘You found Neferata once, when all others failed in the task. The Bloodking demands you do so again.’

Lascilion scowled at the sorceress, baring his leonine fangs. ‘I have told him my condition. I have told him that I will hunt the vampire queen only with the understanding that she is mine.’

A contemptuous laugh rose from both of Molchinte’s mouths. ‘How childish are your ambitions, Lord of Slaanesh! Can you not rise beyond your brute instincts! Are you so dull that you don’t understand how things have changed! Did you truly think Thagmok spared you simply so you could glut your depravity!’

The warlord’s temper rose as the scorn of the sorceress whipped out at him. ‘I am the favoured of Slaanesh!’

‘The broken servant of a broken god with a broken army strewn about the ruins of Nulahmia,’ Molchinte returned. ‘Think, Lascilion! Why were you driven to defeat? The lightning-men, the warriors who came down from the sky. Yours isn’t the first horde to be decimated by them. Across the Mortal Realms, strange armies have appeared to oppose the hordes, seeking to stem the ascendancy of Chaos.’ Her voice dropped to a subdued whisper. ‘The Everchosen himself has communed with Thagmok and given the Bloodking his commands. Neferata has become a triviality, an inconsequence in the greater skein. Archaon is concerned that lightning-men have appeared in the Realm of Death, that they have struck where not even his daemon prophets predicted them to appear. He has seen possibilities behind their presence here. Possibilities that will not be allowed to come into being.’

Lascilion fell silent under the weight of Molchinte’s words. Even daemons trembled at the name of Archaon, the Everchosen who bore the favour of the Dark Gods and had been granted honours and powers beyond the scope of any mortal. There were some who venerated him as a god, and Lascilion wasn’t certain they weren’t right to do so. To know that the Everchosen had heard of his defeat made the warlord’s stomach sicken. But the idea that it was within his power to render a service to Archaon sent his pulse quickening.

‘Thagmok would have me sniff out Neferata as I did before,’ Lascilion said. ‘What then?’

‘Slaughter,’ Molchinte said.

At a gesture, Molchinte drove the shadows from where they clung about the pavilion. Lascilion was startled to find that others had entered the tent with the sorceress. In one corner, he saw the diseased bulk of Alghor Wormsword, his corroded armour straining to restrain the cancerous organs slowly oozing up from beneath his flesh. The semi-daemon Vaangoth, his limbs clothed in shaggy strips of crimson fur, his body encased in arcane armour that dripped with the blood of his countless victims. Orbleth the Despised, arrayed in a patchwork cloak woven from the scalps of wizards and priests, his pallid flesh scarred with the marks of all the Dark Gods and the brand of Chaos eternal.

Amala was among them, the winged mutant’s eyes somehow conveying a sense of uneasiness. Lascilion could imagine her disappointment, expecting reward for carrying the disgraced warlord to the Bloodking’s doubtful mercy. Instead, the Lord of Slaanesh once more held dominion over her. It was a temptation to reach to the table beside his divan and take up Pain and Torment. Striking down the treacherous mutant would be a delightful diversion. But Lascilion denied himself the pleasure. Amala had been useful to him before and could be so again. Later, once she wasn’t so useful, would be the time to dispose of her.

‘These are the most vicious killers among the Bloodking’s warbands,’ Molchinte said. ‘Between us, we carry the marks of the Ruinous Powers, the favour of the Dark Gods. We can slip unnoticed to the places where Neferata seeks to hide. Our command is to kill her, and those who would befriend her.’

Lascilion shook his head. ‘Thagmok expects a handful of warriors to succeed where my entire army found destruction? I have seen these lightning-men. Each of them is worth a score of warriors.’

‘We don’t need to kill them all,’ Molchinte said. ‘Only their leaders. Only those who would draw the armies of death out from their lurking seclusion in this realm…’

Knight-Heraldor Brannok paced across the dead courtyard, staring up at the terraces which climbed the side of the ancient palace. He tried to imagine what this place had been like when Mephitt was a living city and not a vast tomb buried beneath the Mirefells. The empty basins of fountains evoked the gurgle of bubbling water, the barren confines of planters conjured the smell of flowers, the skeletal frames of trellises summoned the comforting shade of vines. A little platform projecting from the flagstones suggested the sound of musicians drawing harmonies from flute and horn.

He closed his hand about the gilded horn that hung from his belt. Those who had dwelt here had been men, people with lives and dreams. At least of such sort as the Lord of Death permitted them to have. Brannok wondered if the city had perished before the conquering hordes of Chaos or if its end had been brought about by some caprice of Nagash, some offence that had provoked the Great Necromancer.

No good could come from such contemplation, Brannok realised. When the rest of the Stormcasts set up camp in the empty halls of the palace, he had drawn away to meditate upon the turmoil he felt within himself. Why was it so difficult for him to accept the situation? Why couldn’t he resign himself to his duty the way Makvar and the others did? Even Vogun, who shared Brannok’s misgivings, seemed more accepting of what was demanded of them.

Brannok didn’t for a moment doubt the wisdom of Sigmar in seeking this alliance with Nagash. The might of the undead was undeniable, the menace of Chaos unquestionable. For the greater good, Brannok knew this merging of forces must come to pass. Yet knowing it and feeling it were two different things. His conscience kept crying out to him, reminding him of those who had suffered under the dominion of Nagash and his disciples. Try as he might, he couldn’t still the loathing he felt for the monsters they had been sent to befriend.

A rustle of cloth and the sound of a footfall stirred Brannok from his meditations. Spinning around, his sword half-drawn from its sheath, he was surprised to see Neferata watching him from the shadows. The vampire queen’s expression was almost contrite, almost embarrassed. Almost. As she smoothed the dark gown that hugged her body, Brannok reminded himself that this was no woman walking out from the shadows, only a monster pretending to be one.

‘Forgive my trespass,’ Neferata said. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude on you.’

‘If there was any truth in that claim, you would have passed me by without making a sound,’ Brannok told her. ‘I am certain a predator like yourself has become quite skilled at moving unseen and unheard.’

Instead of responding to him with the regal disdain and arrogance Brannok expected of her, Neferata lowered her gaze, staring down at the flagstones. ‘You have seen through my pretence,’ she said. ‘I wished to speak with you.’

Brannok started to turn away. ‘If you want to talk, seek out Lord-Celestant Makvar or Huld. They have the authority and the skill to negotiate with a personage of your status. I am naught but a soldier doing as his duty compels him.’

Neferata walked towards him. ‘You hate me,’ she stated.

‘What I saw in your city makes it easy to hate,’ Brannok said. ‘The suffering and terror you inflicted upon your subjects–’

‘They should have fared far worse, storm-knight, had they been given into the grip of Chaos,’ Neferata answered. She shook her head, a tinge of disgust on her face. ‘Who are you to judge, who has only known the righteous protection of Sigmar? Do you know what it is to see everything around you despoiled and corrupted by Chaos? What lengths would you go to if it meant you could stave off that destruction?’

‘Lord-Celestant Makvar has proffered the same explanation,’ Brannok said. ‘I can find no sympathy for it. If everything good and innocent is destroyed to oppose Chaos, then for what do you fight? No, my lady, you should speak with Makvar. As you say, I have no kindness towards you.’

‘That is why I must speak with you,’ Neferata said. ‘Your antagonism towards us is known. None will expect me to seek you out.’ She hesitated, watching Brannok to see what impact her words might have. ‘In the swamp, I sent my handmaiden Kismet to pass warning to Makvar. She didn’t return.’

‘How can you be certain the Anvils aren’t responsible for her disappearance?’ Brannok asked. Despite his animosity and suspicion, he saw the threat such circumstances could cause the Stormcasts and their mission.

‘I am a judge of some quality when it comes to men,’ Neferata said. ‘If you were to reject my overtures you would do so openly, not in such sordid fashion. No, it is someone else who seeks to prevent any understanding between us.’

‘Nagash?’ Brannok nodded as he considered the notion. From what he had seen, what he knew, the Great Necromancer exerted complete control over his vassals. He wouldn’t abide one of his Mortarchs acting on her own.

Neferata merely nodded. ‘I cannot pretend to know his intentions, but understand that he does nothing without a purpose.’ She paused, her voice falling to a whisper. ‘When we seek Mannfred in Nachtsreik, Arkhan will not accompany us. He has been set another task by our master. While we are hunting for Mannfred’s crypt, Arkhan will be here removing the obsidian domes from the Temple of the Vulture. I don’t expect you to understand the import of that, but know the domes are fashioned from the same stone as the Obelisk of Black that was removed from Nulahmia. Such relics have arcane potential that can magnify the potency of any spell focussed through them.’

Brannok was silent a moment, trying to put himself in Makvar’s place, trying to find the arguments his commander would make. The explanations that would make him still believe in an alliance between them. ‘Maybe he needs these relics to summon the army he will send to aid us.’

‘Don’t be deceived,’ Neferata warned. ‘The terrorgheist that slew your comrades. You were told it slipped free of Arkhan’s control. Arkhan assumed responsibility for its attack. Yet I tell you, next to Nagash himself, there is no more skilled practitioner of the Art than the liche-king. There was another purpose behind that attack.’

Brannok drew closer, listening intently while Neferata whispered to him her theories of intrigue and deception.

Neither the Knight-Heraldor nor the vampire queen was aware of the eyes watching them from the darkness.

Or felt the burning malignance of that gaze.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wan, gibbous light flickered through the blackness, revealing just enough of the subterranean vaults to make the shadows beyond its reach still darker and more menacing. Arches of bone curled overhead, mineral encrustations dripping from them in gnarled spears and jagged fangs. Underfoot was a grainy surface of ash and dust, rippling and flowing as a phantom breeze wafted across it. The walls, when they loomed out from the shadows, were shaped from countless skeletons, each body entwined with its fellows, melding into stony solidity. Bare skulls stared out from the walls, seeming to bemoan the fate that had claimed them… or inviting those who gazed upon them to share in it.

‘This is an unclean place,’ Lord-Castellant Vogun declared, making the sign of the hammer with his hand as he gazed upon the morbid vastness. At his side, Torn whined in sympathy with his master’s uneasiness. The gryph-hound kept close to Vogun’s side, lingering near the warding lantern hanging from his belt as though to draw some comfort from the holy light.

‘We tread upon the dust of nations,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar said, emphasising his words by stomping down on the sand-like surface. The added pressure caused him to sink up to his knee in the ashes. One of the Liberators marching alongside him helped Kreimnar pull free from the hole. Throughout the dark tunnel, the rest of the Stormcasts pushed through the morbid drifts of ash and dust. Sometimes eerie energies would rise up from the ground and swirl around lone knights, fumbling at their armour with wispy hands and vaporous claws. Usually, the spirits vanished as swiftly as they appeared, but several times their persistence had drawn angry sparks from the black sigmarite plate. At such times, the repulsed apparitions uttered dejected wails before flying away into the darkness.

Worse dangers prowled the underworld of Shyish. The Anvils had caught fleeting glimpses of gangrel shapes lingering at the edges of the light. Things with gleaming eyes and slavering mouths, dripping claws and decaying flesh. Some of the stalkers were diminutive, wasted creatures, while others were grotesques far larger than a mortal human. Others still bore no resemblance at all to human shape, but instead suggested slithering reptiles and venomous arachnids in their nebulous outlines. Human or inhuman, tangible or phantom, the hostility and hunger radiating from the stalkers was undeniable, impressing upon each Stormcast that he was trespassing in a forbidden land. Only the presence of Nagash kept the horrors from rushing out of the shadows and consuming the intruders. It was a lesson that wasn’t lost on the Anvils.

Lord-Celestant Makvar felt the weight of responsibility pressing against him as never before. At every turn, the Stormcasts were exposed to the enormity of Nagash’s power. The grisly underworld through which the Great Necromancer led them was like nothing they had been prepared to imagine. The scope and magnitude of these endless vaults fashioned from the materials of death staggered credulity. The dust through which they trod represented an ocean of graves, each mote and speck a particle of some extinguished life. From these ashes, Nagash had shaped an entire world, an empire buried beneath the conquering hordes of Chaos.

Yes – when Kreimnar said the Anvils marched across the dust of nations, he spoke the truth. How many peoples had been vanquished? How many kingdoms drawn into the endless night? In death and destruction, they served Nagash more completely than they could ever have in life. Mortal debris became the brick and mortar of the Great Necromancer’s domain, spirits became the fuel of his magics. The transition from life to death fed Nagash’s power. It was this that made the Death God so mighty. It was this which also made the Lord of Death so formidable and fearsome. Each display of his power impressed upon Makvar not only his strength but the grisly source of that strength.

To cement the alliance between Azyr and Shyish, Makvar knew he had to gain the trust of Nagash. Without the undead to support the assault upon the gate of Gothizzar, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer would be unable to press their attack into the Allpoints. They needed the creatures of Shyish at their side. Facilitating that meant stifling his own qualms and suspicions. He had to believe in the purpose of his mission, had to embrace it with uncompromising conviction. He had to accept the realities of what they had seen in Nulahmia and Schloss Wolfhof and Mephitt, to appreciate that such extremes were the price of defying Chaos when the enemy had all but devoured the entire realm. Cruelty and terror were often the only things that could defy the lure of Chaos, to keep a people fighting when all seemed hopeless. Compassion was a luxury the conquered couldn’t afford.

It was towards a greater good that they had to rouse Nagash from his seclusion and draw his undead legions into the larger fight. Anything else had to be ignored. Even the security of Makvar’s own warriors. He knew how completely they were in Nagash’s power now. The forces of death were all around them, waiting in the dark. The slightest gesture, the simple withdrawl of Nagash’s protection, and those hungry wraiths would flood the Stormcasts in a sea of death. Even if they could find the path back to the desolation of Mephitt, Makvar couldn’t envision many of them making it back to the surface.

‘How much further do you reckon we must march?’ The question came from Knight-Heraldor Brannok. He kept his sword drawn as he walked beside Gojin’s flank, eyes roving across the lurking shadows. Of all the Anvils, it was Brannok who exhibited the most suspicion of their grim allies. It was telling of his sense of loyalty and duty that he expressed that suspicion by keeping close to Makvar in hopes of shielding the Lord-Celestant from harm.

‘The Realm of Death is vast,’ Makvar said. ‘Nor can we be certain these vaults can be measured in leagues or miles as we understand them. I cannot say how far we’ve come. It would be even more impossible to say how far we have yet to go.’

Makvar studied Brannok for a moment. It wasn’t the length of their journey that disturbed him, but the question of what they would find waiting for them at its end. He had brought Neferata’s message to the Lord-Celestant, tidings that gave Makvar much to ponder. The disappearance of Kismet in the Mirefells was certainly an ill portent, if it was truly as mysterious as the vampire queen suggested. The Mortarch of Blood had her own aspirations, a facet that added a new wrinkle to the web of intrigue that characterised the shadowy world of the undead. She was most eager to prove her friendship towards the Anvils, even at the expense of her fealty to Nagash. That very fact forced Makvar to be sceptical of her warnings. She could be trying to curry favour with him by sowing suspicion of her master.

Still, Makvar had to admit, there was some truth bound into Neferata’s warnings. Whether she was genuine or simply clever enough to clothe her deceptions in a mantle of reality, he couldn’t say. It was certainly true that the Obelisk of Black had exerted a disturbing energy on the Stormcasts who bore it away from Nulahmia. It was also true that Arkhan had remained behind in Mephitt, ostensibly to replenish the forces lost combating the minions of Nurgle by reanimating the city’s ancient dead. Might he also be gathering the relics Neferata had described?

Brannok stepped ahead of Gojin, placing himself between the dracoth and the rider who came galloping towards the Stormcasts. It was a messenger from the entourage of Nagash and Neferata. No skeletal herald this time, but a leering vampire in blood-red armour. Makvar recognised the cruel visage of Lord Harkdron as he drew his decayed horse to a halt several yards ahead of the Anvils.

‘Great Nagash extends his salutations to you, Lord Makvar,’ Harkdron announced, not quite able to keep the distaste he felt from tainting his words. ‘He commands me to inform you that the redoubt of Lord Mannfred is near.’ The vampire leaned forwards in his saddle, his face curling back into a sneer. ‘The seclusion of Nachtsreik has been disturbed. The enemy lays siege to it, seeking to force their way past its defences.’

‘Nagash expects us to lift the siege?’ Brannok returned Harkdron’s scorn.

Harkdron glared back at the Knight-Heraldor for a moment, his eyes glittering with hate. ‘The Great Necromancer expects nothing,’ he snarled back. ‘What Nagash commands is that Lord Makvar select a small contingent of his storm-knights to accompany him into the fortress.’ The vampire shifted his attention back to the Lord-Celestant. ‘Much time will be lost if we try to fight our way through the enemy host,’ he explained. ‘Mighty Nagash is aware of the urgency of your embassy and would spare a needless effort. A handful of your warriors – no more than a score – should suffice.’

‘What is Nagash’s intention?’ Makvar asked.

‘There are ways into Nachtsreik known only to him,’ Harkdron said. ‘Passages too small for an army but where a smaller company can move with ease.’

‘And, of course, Nagash will join this foray,’ Brannok’s voice came like an audible scowl. Makvar gave the warrior a reproving glance.

Harkdron nodded. ‘Great Nagash and Queen Neferata will accompany you, along with such attendants as they feel needful.’ The vampire smiled, displaying his sharp fangs. ‘Without them, it is doubtful you could even find Mannfred’s sanctuary, much less treat with him before he ripped out your throats.’

Holding his hand towards Brannok, silencing whatever rejoinder the Knight-Heraldor might be tempted to make, Makvar dismissed Harkdron. ‘Tell Nagash that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer stand ready to aid him in restoring contact with his vassal. Tell him that we appreciate this concession to the urgency of our mission and the furtherance of an alliance that will benefit both our realms.’

The vampire started to ride away, then turned back, an almost frightened look on his face. He hesitated a moment before relaying one last command from the Great Necromancer. ‘When you decide which storm-knights are to join you, Nagash asks that you include those who carry the Light Celestial among your entourage.’

Brannok watched as Harkdron rode off, then turned and spoke to Makvar. ‘Why does Nagash want to draw Lord-Castellant Vogun and Knight-Azyros Huld from our ranks? Why them specifically?’

Makvar felt he knew the answer. From all he had witnessed, even Arkhan and Neferata were sensitive to the light Vogun and Huld carried in their lamps. ‘I think Nagash is unsure that Mannfred will be as eager to submit to his master as the other Mortarchs. He may feel that Sigmar’s light is necessary to subdue the Mortarch of Night.’

A shroud of mist marked the doorway between the forbidden underworld and the secret redoubt of Nachtsreik. Even to Neferata, the mist had a clammy, parasitic feel to it. She knew that for a mortal, the phantasmal barrier would be even more repulsive, sucking at their veins and drawing out their essence. Such spectral walls had the potential to ward off all but the most powerful slaves of Chaos, though the arcane demands to maintain such barriers went beyond the abilities even of the Mortarchs to sustain for long. Only Nagash had such power. Walking through the mist, Neferata was reminded of his dominance and the strength of his fell shadow.

The barrier opened into the mouldy confines of an ancient crypt. The caskets had long ago been pulled from their niches in the walls, the bones of their occupants strewn about the floor. A winding series of steps rose up from the tomb, climbing towards the smashed timbers of a narrow doorway. Neferata could see the skeletal figure of Nagash already ascending those steps, one bony hand curled around the haft of his staff, Alakanash. With his other hand, the Lord of Death evoked the ancient spirits of the crypt, surrounding himself in a circle of ghostly energy.

Only a few of Neferata’s vampire knights accompanied her from the underworld, the rest remaining behind with the remainder of her army. Lord Harkdron followed the blood knights through the mist, his expression sullen. Her lover had grown increasingly attentive to her since his failure to defend Nulahmia, as though his eagerness to please could blot out his deficiencies. She had made no secret of her displeasure, fully aware how her disapproval only fed the vampire’s devotion. In the presence of beings like Nagash and Arkhan, it did her pride immeasurable good to have someone at her side who still worshipped her as a goddess.

The fearful adoration she had enjoyed in Nulahmia would be hers again. Neferata was determined to regain everything that had been lost. Even if it meant defying the intentions of the Great Necromancer.

Neferata turned to face the veil of mist, watching as Makvar and his Stormcasts marched out from the underworld. Not so much as a shudder passed through their armoured frames. The only evidence of their fearful passage was found in the gryph-hound that crept alongside Vogun. The half-bird’s feathers were ruffled and his lean body shivered with the trauma of his trot through the veil. Neferata considered it a testament to the might of the Stormcasts that they not only withstood the barrier, but had even been able to compel a simple beast to follow them through.

The vampire queen noted that Brannok was among the warriors Makvar had chosen to accompany him. She took that as a reassuring sign, evidence perhaps that he was taking her warnings to heart. Whether Nagash intended to support the Stormcasts or not, Neferata saw only advantage for herself by gaining their goodwill.

The rest of Makvar’s followers consisted of a mixture of archers and swordsmen, as well as the winged storm-angel Huld and the formidable healer-priest Vogun. The skull-helmed Kreimnar wasn’t in evidence, however. Left behind to command the rest of the Anvils while they awaited the return of Nagash and their commander.

Makvar looked around the crypt, seeming to take especial notice of the layers of cobwebs and mould that coated the walls and filled the niches. ‘What is this place?’ he asked Neferata.

‘You might call it an antechamber,’ she said. ‘A threshold between the underworld and the rest of Shyish. There are many such places in the Realm of Death, though only Nagash knows them all.’

Huld came forward, gesturing at Harkdron and the other blood knights. ‘Forgive me for what may seem an imprudent observation, but I expected you to bring more warriors.’ The words brought a frown to Neferata’s face and a glower to that of Harkdron.

‘You are in the presence of the Lord of Death,’ Nagash’s words echoed through the crypt. ‘There is no mightier power in this realm.’ The Great Necromancer turned from the top of the steps, staring down at the Stormcasts below. ‘If it is disparity of numbers that unsettles you, I will put your fear to rest.’

Neferata felt the power gathering into Nagash’s claw as he pointed down to the floor of the crypt. She recognised the nature of the magic he was conjuring, though it was of a magnitude that surprised her. The litter of bones tossed about the tomb began to tremble, bouncing upon the cold floor with spasms of animation. A green nimbus of energy gathered around each fragment and with a speed she found to be incredible, they leapt from the floor. A dozen whirlwinds of shattered bone gyrated about the crypt, waves of necromantic energy streaming from Nagash’s hand into each eddy.

The spirals of bone began to take a distinct shape as Nagash’s magic fused the fragments together. They were forms which Neferata realised could never have been natural to the occupants of the crypt. Skeletal apparitions, each as big as a Stormcast, that had tattered wings sprouting from their backs and canine jaws distorting their bestial skulls. The Great Necromancer wasn’t reanimating the dead, he was using the mortal debris as a shell to house the primordial spirits of his own guard. In appearance, they were not unlike the morghasts who served Neferata, but she knew the spirits that lurked within these skeletal monsters were far more powerful. These belonged to divine avengers dispatched aeons ago to destroy Nagash, only to fail in their purpose and be enslaved by the Lord of Death. These were the morghast archai.

The Stormcasts weren’t cowed by the frightful feat of necromancy that unfolded before them. Still, Neferata noticed that Vogun drew slightly ahead of his comrades and had one hand poised above the lantern he carried. Brannok, too, exhibited an increased wariness, drawing closer to Makvar. The Lord-Celestant himself, however, gave no sign of trepidation. Boldly, he walked towards the steps.

‘Lord Nagash,’ Makvar called up to the Great Necromancer. ‘We have no doubt as to your power. Accept my apology if any offence has been paid to you.’ He pointed to the shattered door at the top of the steps. ‘Mannfred’s refuge lies beyond that portal?’

Nagash turned, waving his staff towards the door. At his mere gesture, the remaining timbers decayed, collapsing into a heap of black dust. Through the doorway, a sinister red light spilled into the crypt. ‘Nachtsreik,’ he declared. ‘The Stronghold of Night.’

Neferata felt the mockery in Nagash’s voice, the sardonic amusement woven into his words. She glanced aside at the Anvils, but it appeared none of them had noticed the sinister tone. Yet when Makvar climbed the steps, the Lord-Celestant drew back. He had stood without flinching within a few feet of the morghasts as they clothed themselves in shards of bone, yet now he retreated from the doorway. The vampire queen rushed up the steps to see for herself what could alarm the stalwart Stormcast.

What she found beyond the door of the crypt was something that shocked even her jaded sensibilities. The crypt in which they stood looked out across an immense cavern, its furthest reaches lost in shadow. It wasn’t the size of the cavern that stunned her, however, but the fact that everything seemed inverted. When she gazed up, she saw not the roof but the floor of the cavern, covered with pools of murky water and a twisting road of colossal flagstones. Immense statues lay shattered about the rocky terrain, sprawled between a forest of stalagmites. More, there were creatures moving along that road and within the stony forest, a teaming mass of verminous shapes cloaked in filthy robes. It was as though the mouth of the crypt in which she stood was positioned above the cavernous landscape, and those within the tomb were hanging over it like flies on a ceiling. Even the sight of the great pulsating light that smouldered at the heart of the cavern like some miniature moon couldn’t match the uncanny sensation of standing on the roof of the world.

Nagash stepped between Neferata and Makvar, pointing outward with his staff. ‘When the War of Bones looked uncertain, Mannfred prepared this refuge for himself by pulling the city of Dyre deep beneath the ground.’ He drew their attention away from the scene below – or was it above? – them and to that which stretched away across the roof of the cavern. As far as could be seen, the streets and houses of a crumbling settlement were visible, the crypt itself standing within a great cemetery. ‘The lives of Dyre fed his power even as their souls were bound into the hidden moon he wrought for himself.’

Makvar had already overcome his surprise at the strange vista. He pointed at the fortress the swarms of skaven struggled to penetrate. ‘That is Nachtsreik? It seems we must hurry if we would find Mannfred before the ratkin.’ As he spoke, a section of the black walls was brought down by a great ball of corrosive gas hurled against it by a monstrous catapult.

A dry chuckle rattled from Nagash. ‘These walls have withstood the hordes of Chaos for many lifetimes. Every stone is steeped in blood, and the mortar made from bone. They are imbued with the same magic that feeds Mannfred’s moon. If the walls are brought down they will restore themselves. Speck by speck, they will draw themselves back.’ The Great Necromancer was silent for a moment, contemplating the scene below. ‘If the enemy were to bring sufficient force to bear, they might break the old spells long enough to get inside. Mannfred realised this when he left his refuge. Now that he’s returned, it is possible the enemy is aware of it and will stir themselves to greater effort.’

‘How do we get inside?’ Makvar asked.

Nagash leaned out from the doorway. As he did so, Neferata noticed that his cloak fell upwards, drawn towards the floor of the cavern. ‘We cross the city,’ he stated. Thrusting a bony claw, he indicated a slender tower that stabbed up from the mammoth fortress. The narrow window that opened just below its roof was only a few feet below the suspended streets of Dyre.

‘With a retinue of Prosecutors, we could cross that distance without delay,’ Makvar said, shaking his head. He stared at Nagash for a moment. ‘You desire to see how resourceful we are.’

‘Before entering any battle,’ Nagash said, ‘it is wise to know the capabilities of your allies.’

The moment he stepped out from the crypt, Huld found himself falling towards what had seemed the roof of the cavern. It was a simple matter to arrest his fall, unfurling his sigmarite wings to keep himself aloft. Reorienting himself to the strange geometry of Mannfred’s stronghold was another matter entirely. The eerie sight of Dyre’s streets inverted and hanging from the roof of the cavern was confusing enough, but when he drew close to the abandoned city, he found himself being pulled towards it rather than the true floor of the cavern. Whatever arcane spells governed the crypt exerted their influence across the rest of Dyre. Huld suspected it was some residue of the magic Mannfred had employed to drag the city below the earth, but the nature of that magic and its limitations were things beyond his knowledge and experience. The city appeared to be more than suspended in space, but in time as well, locked in that moment when it had been captured by the Mortarch.

He didn’t need to understand the Mortarch’s sorcery. He only had to overcome it. Makvar was depending on Huld, and that meant their entire mission was in the balance. It did no good to bemoan the conniving nature by which Nagash had arranged this test of the Stormcasts. As Makvar had pointed out before, whatever ordeals they had to endure to bring the undead into battle beside them at Gothizzar, the Anvils would overcome them.

Keeping just beyond the pull of Dyre, Huld flew towards the desolate sprawl of what had once been the city’s harbour. The spells Mannfred had used even captured part of the sea adjoining the city. Huld could see the weird reflection of the red moon shining from the suspended pool. Ships dangled from the frozen water, their masts and sails jutting out at weird angles as the pull from below fought to wrest them from the opposing pull emanating from the ceiling. It was towards these ships that Huld climbed, preparing himself for the instant when he would be drawn towards the ships rather than away from them, turning his climb into a dive. When he landed on the deck of a trireme, it was a descent of such ungainly awkwardness that he prayed none of his fellow Stormcasts were able to see him. That the most likely observer was Makvar at the door of the crypt only made the sense of embarrassment more pronounced.

Hunting across the decks of the ship, Huld inspected the thick coils of rope heaped beside the gunwales. Choosing the stoutest mooring line he saw, he drew a length between his gauntlets with a savage grip. His eyes studied the rope with dour scrutiny, watching for the slightest fraying of the cord. Only when the Knight-Azyros was convinced it would hold did he draw the heavy stack of rope away with him as he spread his wings and leapt back into the air.

Navigating the sorcerous inversion was even more difficult with the heavy rope in his hands, but it was a feat Huld was able to accomplish without the cord becoming tangled in his wings. He knew he would have to repeat the performance several times in his labours and made careful calculations about the best way to manage the manoeuvre. Of particular interest to him was the border between the drag from the ground and the pull from the suspended city. He saw how the phenomenon could be harnessed to serve the Anvils.

Huld flew back to the crypt, the rope trailing after him. By pulling it along the edge of the competing gravitational influences he was able to negate much of the burden, only that portion actually in his hands weighing him down. The rest snaked out along the border, levitating in the grip of the oppositional forces. Another complex mid-air contortion of his body and the Knight-Azyros was back in the crypt, proud to make his landing with much more finesse than he had before.

‘Your idea will work, Lord-Celestant,’ Huld said as he saluted Makvar. He proffered his commander the end of the rope he carried.

‘We will secure this length here,’ Makvar said, handing it off to Brannok.

The Knight-Heraldor looked at the cord with some surprise. ‘It is much hardier than I expected.’

Huld nodded. ‘Dyre appears to be caught in the very moment Mannfred dragged it from the surface. There are carriages standing in the streets, stalls lining the market place, boxes and barrels stacked along the quays.’ He looked towards the deathly shape of Nagash. ‘Everything is just as it was, as though the population had withdrawn into their temples for some religious observation and will be back at any moment. It is disturbing to understand that they are gone.’

‘It is their life-force that shapes the magic of Mannfred’s redoubt,’ Nagash told him. ‘Without the extraction of their spirits, this place wouldn’t exist. The most potent spells are those that demand the greatest sacrifice.’

‘I wonder if Mannfred offered these people a choice,’ Brannok said.

A cold snarl rose from Lord Harkdron. ‘The cowherd doesn’t ask the opinion of cattle. Mortals cannot be expected to understand the struggle against Chaos. They cannot look beyond their own brief existence, their own fears and pain to truly see the war for what it is.’

Vogun stepped between the two, silencing Brannok’s retort. ‘You are wrong, Harkdron,’ he told the vampire. ‘Perhaps you haven’t seen the fire of defiance that can burn in a mortal heart because you’ve sought to quench it under a shroud of subservience. We have fought in lands throughout the Mortal Realms. I can attest to the valour of men, how they can be inspired to fight on even when the outcome is hopeless. How they will willingly sacrifice themselves if their belief in victory is great enough.’

Harkdron laughed. ‘I will believe such courage exists when I see it for myself.’ His laughter fell away when he felt Neferata’s disapproving eyes on him. He sketched the merest apology to Vogun and withdrew to the recesses of the crypt.

Huld turned away from his observation of the exchange when Makvar asked a question of him. ‘How far do you think the rope will reach?’

The Knight-Azyros leaned from the doorway, pointing across the graveyard to the tile roof of a stonemason’s workshop. ‘I will need to secure the first line to that building. From there I can draw a second over to the market square. In total it will need four separate lengths to reach the tower.’ He paused, then gestured at the suspended line, explaining the phenomenon. His suggestion was that the Stormcasts could use the cord to pull themselves along, flipping themselves around once they were clear of the crypt so that they would be walking across the streets of Dyre rather than hanging above the cavern floor.

Makvar had another idea. Unbuckling his sword from his belt, he held the weapon across the cord, gripping its sheathed length by either end. He made a tentative sliding motion with it. A sigmarite blade was far stronger than mere steel. It would bear his weight without warping. Quickly, he explained his idea to Huld. ‘We will make better time if we slide down the ropes. If anyone gets into trouble, he can flip around as you suggest and let himself drop to the street. A far better prospect than plummeting down into the cavern.’

Huld nodded, inspired by the wisdom of Makvar’s plan. ‘I will secure each end of the rope so that they describe an arch. It shouldn’t be difficult to find appropriate heights to anchor them.’

‘Admirable strategy,’ Nagash said. He waved his skeletal claw towards Neferata. ‘Assist my Mortarch and her attendants across. I shall await you in Nachtsreik.’ Without another word of explanation, the Great Necromancer walked out from the crypt. Huld was stunned to see him glide across the cavern, a glowing nimbus of spectral energies billowing all around him. The skeletal morghast archai he had conjured into being leapt after their departed master, flying towards the distant tower on their tattered wings.

‘His magic is such that he could have carried all of us across,’ Huld heard Neferata say.

‘Perhaps he needs to conserve his powers,’ Makvar said. ‘He has expressed concern that when we find Mannfred your fellow Mortarch may not be so agreeable as we might hope.’

Huld found that prospect far from cheering. After all that he had seen, the thought of any being which could provoke caution from the Great Necromancer was a daunting one.

The morbid energies of Nachtsreik spilled across Nagash, soaking into his skeletal frame and seeping into his malignant spirit. Truly the castle Mannfred had built for himself was a thing of impressive horror. The few details of its construction he had revealed to Makvar’s knights were but a sampling of the atrocities that had given it shape. He could hear the shrieks of the souls bound into the foundations of the castle, envision the chained victims lying in their holes, watching as each stone block was lowered into the pits, listening to the screams of those who perished ahead of them.

Blood and terror, these were the true bricks and mortar of Mannfred’s redoubt. The souls of all those entombed within and beneath its walls were the force that guarded his stronghold against conquest. Nagash could feel the necromantic energies dripping from the stones around him, rivulets of blood that pooled upon the floor before evaporating back into the aethyr. Apparitions winked in and out of his vision, struggling to manifest yet always sucked back into their stony prisons.

Far below, he could see the verminous skaven trying to batter their way through the walls. The bones and debris of the many armies that had besieged Nachtsreik before them lay scattered about the cavern. For an instant, Nagash was tempted to stir the rotten carcasses and set a legion of skeletons loose in the midst of the ratkin. The enmity he bore the skaven was almost primordial, cascading back into the Age of Myth and beyond. Massacring them would be a delight, but at the same time, a frivolity. The slaughter could contribute nothing to his greater design.

Nagash gazed out across the suspended streets of Dyre. The ingenuity of Makvar and his knights reminded the Great Necromancer of the great failing that settled into the bones of his creations. Even the highest of the undead lacked the inspiration and enthusiasm of mortal minds. The luxury of time dulled their sense of immediacy. They were slow to conceive new ideas, slower still to adopt them. Time after time, they would fall back upon the same strategies they had employed before, like corpse-moths locked into the same migration. Of all his disciples, only the Mortarchs had any real ability for innovation.

The Stormcasts slid down the lines, gliding across the cavern high above the swarming hordes of skaven. They displayed no hesitation, no fear of the hazards they courted as they made their way towards the tower. Whatever doubts they had were subsumed to the demands of their mission. It was a degree of obedience absent even in Neferata’s vampire knights.

Truly, Sigmar had unlocked methods of resurrecting the life-force that were far different than those Nagash had crafted. The black art of necromancy devoured all it claimed. Something of the identity was lost, a spark of essence that refused to linger in the reanimated husk. Sigmar had found a way around that, a way to maintain the vibrancy of the soul while expunging all fear and doubt. Instilling an almost unshakable loyalty and obedience.

Nagash considered his past encounter with Stormcast Eternals. He had failed to learn all he needed on that occasion, but it had served to make him more aware of where his observation should be focussed. The might of the Stormcasts was something he had to quantify before he could properly fit them into his plan to purge his realm of Chaos.

The Great Necromancer turned from the window. Makvar would reach the tower soon. Then the search for Mannfred’s sanctum would begin. Nagash was interested to see how quickly the Anvils could penetrate the shroud of illusion his errant Mortarch had woven around himself. Would they fall prey to the phantasms conjured by his necromancy, or would they be the first to uncover the vampire’s secret refuge?

CHAPTER TWELVE

The moment Makvar climbed through the tower window, he was struck by a sense of lurking menace. Clambering down from the rope, descending the face of the tower, he had felt as though the very stones were trying to push him away, to send him hurtling to the floor of the cavern. When he looked at his gauntlets he found them slick with blood that evaporated before his eyes.

‘The blood is the life, son of Sigmar,’ Nagash’s voice rose from the gloom within the tower. The fleshless Death God drew one of his claws across the wall, gore dripping from his bones. ‘Mannfred has gone to great pains to invest his refuge with a life of its own.’

‘I doubt the pain was his,’ Makvar observed. He leaned back out the window, watching as Brannok began his own descent. ‘Mannfred has worked great evil in other realms. It fell to our brethren, the Hallowed Knights, to bring an end to his infamies.’

‘Forcing him back to this refuge,’ Nagash stated. ‘Your brothers are to be congratulated for sending my errant child back to me.’ The Great Necromancer stepped towards Makvar, his morghast bodyguards following him across the barren room. ‘A fearsome foe will be just as fearsome when set against the enemy. Bear that in mind, Lord-Celestant. Whatever discord there may be between Mannfred and the Stormcast Eternals, remember that he is no friend of Archaon.’ He waved his staff at the dripping walls. ‘The might of the Mortarch of Night will be a great asset in taking Gothizzar from the hosts of Chaos.’

‘But will he see it that way?’ Makvar wondered. ‘As you’ve said, it was Stormcasts who drove him from the Realm of Beasts to seek refuge in Nachtsreik.’

Deep within the hollow sockets of Nagash’s skull, a flash of fiery light briefly blazed. ‘He will obey,’ the Great Necromancer said. ‘It is his choice what condition he is in when he submits, but he will submit in the end.’

Makvar turned away, helping Brannok as the Knight-Heraldor reached the window. He clapped the other Anvil on the shoulder as the warrior gained his footing. ‘Help the others through,’ he told Brannok. ‘This fortress is immense and I suspect Mannfred will have concealed his sanctum with great care.’ He looked back towards Nagash. ‘Unless your powers can narrow our search.’

Nagash clapped the end of his staff against the floor. Ribbons of ghostly energy snaked away from the relic, crackling across the ground and shining up the walls. ‘Mannfred has soaked this castle in so much necromatic power that its vibrations crash together in deafening discord. With time, I would of course be able to extract his presence from the clamour that surrounds him. I could follow the signature of his magic back to whatever hollow he’s found for himself.’ He thrust his skeletal finger towards Makvar. ‘You have told me that your mission is urgent, that the God-King will need my legions soon. If that is the case then we shouldn’t tarry over rituals and spells.’

‘How are we to find Mannfred then?’ Makvar asked.

The Great Necromancer gestured at the stone steps leading down from the tower. ‘By defying the tricks and traps with which he guards himself. By using your remarkable abilities to uncover his hiding place.’

Makvar looked back to the window, watching as Brannok helped Neferata into the tower. The vampire queen looked alarmed by what she had overheard. Makvar wondered what kind of tricks and traps she anticipated her fellow Mortarch to have laid to ensnare those who trespassed within Nachtsreik.

Lord-Castellant Vogun was the first to descend the narrow steps which wound down through the tower. He held his warding lantern before him, its purifying rays burning through the cloying darkness ahead of him. The phantasmal blood dripping from the walls sizzled as the light struck it, vanishing in greasy puffs of smoke. Bodiless shapes woven from naught but shadows and malice fled from the Celestial glamour, their moans of pain and protest echoing through the dank corridors. Torn stalked just ahead of his master, snapping and snarling at the more tenacious apparitions before they could draw near to Vogun. The ghosts retreated from the gryph-hound, fading into the walls and floor before his beak and claws could strike them.

Makvar, Brannok and a retinue of Liberators followed after Vogun, each knight keeping his weapons at the ready. Despite the comforting glow of Vogun’s lantern, the sense of hostility that had greeted them when they climbed into the tower had only intensified as they penetrated deeper into the fortress. The air was growing heavier and more stifling, endowed with an abominable moistness that crawled down into the lungs. The high ceiling and empty chambers of the tower conspired to create eerie echoes that refused to conform to any rhythm or rhyme but persisted in rolling back to the Stormcasts in the most distorted and disordered manner. The play of light and shadow evoked fleeting suggestions of motion at the edge of vision, the images vanishing when an Anvil turned his head to face them directly.

Neferata and her vampiric guards were behind Makvar’s group, lingering just far enough back that they were spared the hurtful light of Vogun’s lantern. While content to allow the Stormcasts to precede her and assume the risk of whatever traps Mannfred had set, she was less comfortable with Makvar’s decision to split his knights into two groups. The second was following after the vampires, counting among them the Judicators and Knight-Azyros Huld. Makvar had claimed the deployment was to protect Neferata and Nagash should anything unexpected happen and they be forced to withdraw from the castle. Try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile herself to the Lord-Celestant’s claim. There was still the chance he expected treachery, and had set Huld and the others behind her so that the vampires would be caught between both groups of Stormcasts.

It was with a feeling of bitterness that Neferata reflected on Nagash’s own decision to remain at the rear with his morghasts. Though she knew her own sorcery wasn’t able to sift Mannfred’s presence from the arcane signature he had left imprinted in the stones of Nachtsreik, she was suspicious about the Great Necromancer’s claim that such a feat was beyond his abilities. The question that nagged at her was why he would make such a pretence. What did he hope to achieve by feigning weakness? Simply to conceal the extent of his power from Makvar? After his efforts at Mephitt, Neferata didn’t think such humility had a part in his intentions. He had gone to great effort to impress upon the Anvils the extent of his might, vanquishing the Great Unclean One under their watchful gaze.

No, there was some deeper purpose bound into Nagash’s decisions. A design that had so far eluded Neferata. It was certain that he was making use of the Stormcasts in some fashion, but towards what end? Did he truly intend to aid Sigmar’s forces?

The vampire queen had given that question deep thought. The Realm of Death had suffered tremendously after Sigmar withdrew from Shyish. That Nagash had provoked the God-King’s retreat was something she doubted the prideful Lord of Death would allow to mitigate his resentments. Still, even if Nagash didn’t forgive an injury dealt to him, he was a cunning pragmatist. If he saw advantage to be gained by helping Sigmar, he would set upon such a course. Regardless of who he had to sacrifice to realise his ambition.

In that, Neferata reasoned, lay the chief difference between her master and Makvar. Makvar had a firm code of honour by which he abided. Duty and necessity might force him to bend that code, but he wouldn’t break it. If she could set him into her debt just once, make him personally beholden to her, she felt she would have the key to the Lord-Celestant. If he felt obligation to her, she would enjoy the protection of his entire Warrior Chamber. She had once enticed the grandmaster of a warrior brotherhood into her grasp, gaining the use of his entire army as a result. The mortal had been possessed of notions of honour and loyalty, fealty and piety not so dissimilar to those the Stormcasts espoused. In the end, he had become her thrall all the same.

‘Highness, do you think these storm-knights can truly find Mannfred’s lair?’ Harkdron’s question had a hopeful note about it as he addressed Neferata.

‘Beware of wishing failure upon our allies,’ Neferata hissed at him. ‘Now that Nagash has decided to collect his errant Mortarch, if the Stormcasts fail to find him, the duty is likely to fall to us.’

Harkdron drew himself up as he turned towards Neferata. ‘I will protect you from any danger Mannfred could offer you.’

Neferata sneered at her consort. ‘A fool is always certain of things he knows nothing about,’ she hissed. ‘If you knew Mannfred as I have known him, you would be wishing success to the storm-knights. Mannfred is a shrewd adversary, as relentless as he is cruel. Cross him, simply get in his way, Harkdron, and you’ll have an enemy who will haunt you to the end of your days.’

Amala crouched within the frame of the window, her inhuman eyes roving across the darkened chamber. She kept raising her paws to her face, sniffing at the blood oozing from the walls. Lascilion left the winged mutant to her loathsome ministrations. He had more vital things to concern him than the eldritch seepage of a deathmage’s castle.

The Lord of Slaanesh pulled the plumed helm from his head, giving his leonine face its freedom. From between his fanged jaws, his forked tongue flashed forth, wriggling with ecstatic glee as it drew the scent of Neferata from the dank air. The object of his obsession had been here, and recently. There were other smells as well, but these were insignificant to him beside that of the vampire queen. Once more she was within his reach!

‘Focus upon the task Thagmok has set you.’ The warning rose from outside the window. Amala leapt down from her perch, stalking into the room as the feathered figure of Molchinte appeared outside. The sorceress hovered in the air, her feet sunk into the slimy back of an ovoid creature, a daemon of Tzeentch she had summoned to follow Lascilion into the tower. Beyond her, also supported upon disc-shaped daemons, were the other Chaos champions the Bloodking had sent to destroy the lightning-men.

Lascilion’s face curled in an expression of distaste. Perhaps, under other circumstances, he would enjoy the novelty of Molchinte pawing through his mind. Now, however, he found it to be an abominable violation. Even if it was doomed, his dream of claiming Neferata for his own was still the force that drove him on.

‘The lightning-men,’ Molchinte demanded as she stepped into the tower, wrenching her feet from the limpid flesh of the daemon. The weird disc broke apart in a burst of lights as soon as she was quit of it. ‘Were they here? Were their leaders here?’

‘Yes,’ Lascilion told her. ‘Not long past either. There is no mistaking the sting of their scent.’ His gaze strayed from the sorceress to the Chaos champions as they stepped through the window. Just as Molchinte’s daemon steed had done, the fleshy discs broke apart the moment their riders were clear of them. Alghor Wormsword and Orbleth the Despised paid small attention to their surroundings, unaffected by the sinister atmosphere and the dripping walls. Vaangoth the semi-daemon couldn’t keep his furry hands from the gory walls, dragging them across the surfaces before wiping the blood across his own dripping armour. Lascilion thought he saw a ripple pass through the bloodied plates each time he did so.

‘Then let us be about our task,’ Molchinte said. She stared about the room, eyes wide with alarm. More attuned to magic than her companions, she could feel the magnitude of necromantic energy flowing through the fortress. Lascilion decided it couldn’t hurt him to make the sorceress still more uneasy.

‘They aren’t alone,’ the warlord said. ‘I picked out other scents as well. The smell of vampires and reanimated bones.’ A cold smile played across his face. ‘And something more. Something powerful. Perhaps another of the Mortarchs.’

Molchinte gave that information a good deal of thought. The prospect of confronting one Mortarch and some lightning-men had been imposing enough. The idea of facing two of the powerful undead lords was fearsome. It took her only a moment to decide it wasn’t as frightful as defying the commands of Thagmok… or displeasing Archaon.

‘If they are colluding with two of the Mortarchs, then our task is even more vital,’ she said. ‘We must strike down these lightning-men.’ Her eyes glittered as she gave Lascilion a stern look. ‘Could you tell how many lightning-men were with them?’

‘Less than I encountered in Nulahmia,’ Lascilion conceded. ‘A dozen, perhaps more. Their smell is strange to me, so it is difficult to be certain.’

The sorceress was silent for a moment. Then, without warning, she spun around. A blade erupted from beneath the folds of her feathered cloak, a fat knife etched with cabalistic sigils. Before Amala could react, the knife was slashing across the mutant’s throat, sending a gout of her foul blood spraying across the haunted walls. Molchinte crouched over the twitching body, sawing her knife across the back of the neck. Soon, she had Amala’s head severed from the spine.

Much as it pleased him to see the treacherous mutant dispatched, the suddenness of her murder alarmed Lascilion. He and the other champions held their weapons ready to repulse the murderous witch, but Molchinte made no move towards them. Instead, she was dipping her finger in Amala’s blood and drawing strange symbols across the mutant’s dead eyes. A scratchy incantation rose from the sorceress, an invocation drawn from the squawks of birds and the yaps of dogs more than anything that resembled intelligent speech. As she worked her conjuration, a weird purple light shone from behind Amala’s eyes.

‘A shield of oblivion,’ Molchinte explained as she held the head before her. ‘A gift from Tzeentch. Its magic will hide us from our prey.’ A vicious laugh twisted her lips. ‘At least until we are ready to strike.’ She motioned to her remaining companions with the hand that yet held her dripping knife. ‘Draw near to me or its power cannot help you.’ She laughed anew when she noted their hesitation. ‘We need only one shield. Be thankful the mutant was the least valuable among you.’

Still keeping hold of Pain’s hilt, Lascilion approached Molchinte. The fact he could still see the sorceress seemed to belie the efficacy of her murderous spell, but when he drew close to her, he felt a shock run through him. As Alghor and Orbleth joined them, he could see the same expression of surprise and discomfort pass through their misshapen features. Certainly Molchinte had surrounded herself with some sort of magic.

‘Vaangoth!’ Molchinte snapped at the bestial champion of Khorne. ‘There is no time to waste.’

The semi-daemon had turned back to the dripping wall, once again raking his hand through the gore and then anointing his armour with it. He turned his brutish face towards Molchinte. ‘Go,’ he snarled. ‘I follow.’ Offering no explanation, he continued to paw at the ghostly blood oozing from the walls.

‘How he find us when we invisible?’ Alghor asked.

‘He won’t,’ Molchinte snapped at the Nurglesque champion. Without further delay, she stabbed the knife into Amala’s forehead. At once, the air around the sorceress and her companions took on a shimmering, hazy quality.

Lascilion smiled as he drew his helm back over his head. He had been mistaken to doubt Molchinte’s magic. If the spell performed as she claimed it would, they would be able to strike at the lightning-men with complete surprise.

What Lascilion had to do now was figure a way to exploit that magic to achieve his own purpose. It had to be the favour of Slaanesh that Neferata was being offered to him once more.

‘Look out!’

The cry sounded from Brannok as the Knight-Heraldor threw himself towards Makvar. The Lord-Celestant and his rescuer pitched forwards, spilling into the chamber they had been about to enter. The doorway through which they had passed was no more, sealed by the massive stone block that had come slamming down from the arch above it.

Makvar had to give a grudging degree of respect to Mannfred’s inventiveness. The trap had been deliberately calibrated to let the first few intruders pass before activating. Behind the doorway, he could hear the anxious shouts of concern from the other Stormcasts. Vogun and Torn, who had passed through moments before, turned in alarm at the sound.

Brannok rolled to face the block. He reached for his battle-horn, then hesitated. He could use the horn’s magic to shatter the block, but he didn’t know what else might be caught in the thunderblast.

‘Back!’ Makvar shouted. At the same time, he seized hold of Brannok’s arm and dragged the warrior with him deeper into the room.

Lying against the floor, Makvar had heard a faint sound, like sand running from an hourglass. It was all the warning there was. Fortunately, it was all the warning he needed. Glancing back at where they had been sprawled on the ground, he now saw a yawning pit. He had been wrong about Mannfred being inventive – he was a fiend. A pit timed to open shortly after the block fell, catching whoever went hurrying back to aid those caught beneath the crushing stone.

Snarls of rage rose from the corridor outside. Makvar at once guessed its meaning. Not content to catch those inside the room, Mannfred had set a second pit to open in the hall outside as well.

‘Quiet!’ Makvar called out. ‘We are unharmed on this side. How have you fared on that side?’

A grim voice called back to him. ‘Brothers Xi and Pericles fell. The bottom of the hole was lined with stakes. Their spirits have returned to Sigmar.’

Makvar clenched his fist in silent fury. To lose his knights in battle was hard enough, but at least there was honour and dignity in such defeat. For some of his Anvils to be snatched away through such deceitful enterprise was obscene. That the trap had been laid by a monster they sought to draw into alliance with Sigmar only made it still more enraging.

‘I find myself hoping Mannfred won’t submit to Nagash,’ Brannok said. His fingers closed around the hilt of his sword. ‘It will be a pleasure breaking him.’

‘Only if you find him before I do,’ Vogun said. Torn loped along at his side, feathers ruffled as he sniffed the mouldy air. Cautiously the Lord-Castellant came towards them, tapping the butt of his halberd against the floor to verify its solidity.

‘I doubt any of the Mortarch’s snares can be so easily uncovered,’ Makvar said. He looked around the chamber. It looked to be some sort of trophy room, grisly displays standing in dusty silence upon wooden platforms. Some of the stuffed creatures in the exhibition were beasts, others, hideously, had once been men. Still a third category represented a ghoulish hybrid of human and animal anatomy, pieces of mummified flesh and bleached bone that Makvar found it impossible to accept could ever have survived in such a state. Even compared to the mutations of Chaos, these things were blasphemies.

‘The exit is across from us!’ Brannok shouted, then drew up short, shaking his head as he found the doorway was no longer where he thought it had been. He turned about in frustration, only to spot the doorway now on his left.

Makvar appreciated Brannok’s confusion. Since descending the tower stair, the Stormcasts and their companions had been beset by a bewildering maze of halls and chambers, galleries and vaults. No sane mind could have conceived of such a castle, with stairs that climbed up to blank walls, windows that stared into chimney flues, doors that opened upon rooms sunk several feet below their threshold. More unsettling was the impression that the architecture shifted itself around when it wasn’t being observed. It was an idea so absurd that Makvar tried to dismiss it as soon as it suggested itself to him. Then he remembered Nagash’s warning that Nachtsreik had been fashioned from blood and bone, endowed with its own nightmarish vitality by Mannfred.

Makvar shook his head. He turned about, looking back towards the enormous stone that had so nearly crushed them. ‘Wherever it is, we’ll go nowhere unless we rejoin our comrades.’

Even as he spoke the words, Makvar was interrupted by the frenzied barking of Torn. The gryph-hound was glowering at the nearest of the trophies, a hulking mass of bones that looked like a troggoth with the skull of a crocodile fitted to its vertebrae. The animal backed away from the thing slowly, feathers ruffled and hackles raised. An instant later, the undead creature turned its saurian head around, staring at the Anvils with its empty eyes.

Vogun stepped towards the thing, brandishing the warding lantern. The light, however, did nothing to repulse the animated horror. With a creaking step, it dropped down from the wooden platform. Across the room, other trophies could be seen doing the same. Even the most twisted of the creatures, those horrible amalgams of man and animal, had been infused with a new vitality.

‘We are the Anvil…’ Makvar told his comrades as they readied themselves for the monstrous pack. They would make a good accounting of themselves, but he had no illusions about their chances against such odds.

Suddenly, a flight of crackling arrows seared across the room. The skeletal automatons shattered as shafts of lightning seared into their decayed frames. Before the rest of the gruesome host could advance, the icy chill of sorcery engulfed them. ‘Dust you are, to dust return!’ Neferata’s voice rang out. The Mortarch’s potent magic at once wrought havoc upon the shambling monsters. Bones crumbled to powder, shrivelled flesh fell away like dead leaves. One after another, the creatures collapsed into piles of funereal decay.

Advancing into the room were Neferata and her entourage, along with the Stormcasts Makvar had left with Huld. They emerged from a gash in the wall, an opening Makvar hadn’t seen before. He shook his head. Of course it was some secret door, allowing ingress without disturbing the traps Mannfred had set. Or had it? Perhaps opening the hidden door had provoked the animation of the Mortarch’s trophies.

Neferata walked towards Makvar, though her gaze kept shifting back to the demolished trophies. Even in their current state of dissolution, she appeared wary of them. Given her knowledge of necromancy, Makvar decided that if she was concerned then he should be as well.

‘Huld!’ he called to the Knight-Azyros. Makvar pointed to the heaps of dust. ‘Bring your beacon to bear upon that carrion. If there is any arcane life lingering in them, burn it away.’

Neferata turned away as Huld unshielded his celestial beacon and set its rays across the demolished skeletons. ‘I am uncertain if even that will work,’ she told Makvar. ‘At least in this place. Everything here has been perverted by Mannfred’s machinations. It is more than natural laws he defies in this place, but the rules which govern even the darkest magic.’ She pointed over her shoulder at the shattered skeletons. ‘That menagerie was his creation. He considers himself an artist in his way. Always seeking some new way to display his mastery of the black arts.’

The image of the vampire count cobbling together those monstrosities was a repugnant one. Makvar only prayed Mannfred’s ‘materials’ had been dead when he exploited them for his macabre art.

‘Thank you for your timely assistance, my lady,’ Makvar told Neferata. ‘Was it you who found the hidden entrance?’

Neferata nodded. ‘The moment the block fell and the pit opened, I knew there would be another way in.’ She frowned, a vengeful gleam sneaking into her eyes. ‘I underestimated Mannfred’s cunning, however. I didn’t expect even his private door to be trapped. I fear it was opening that door which set his menagerie in motion.’

Makvar mulled over her words. ‘I was loath to suggest it before, but you have some insight into the mind of your fellow Mortarch. Such knowledge could spare us the attention of more traps. If I were to send Vogun back to the main body, would you join me in the vanguard? I will try to mitigate whatever dangers such exposure presents to you.’

A brief smile flickered on Neferata’s face. ‘You must keep Vogun ahead of you,’ she said. ‘Without his light, the spirits of this place would beset you at every turn. It is their repulsion of the light that sends them fleeing before us.’ She threw back her head, tossing her dark hair in a regal flourish. ‘I will endure my own repugnance of the light,’ she declared. ‘My discomfort cannot be measured against the dangers that threaten your knights.’

Makvar bowed and took her hand in his. ‘Again, you have my gratitude. I am in your debt.’

‘It is a strange thing,’ Neferata said, ‘to have an Anvil of the Heldenhammer indebted to me.’

The fortress of Nachtsreik was proving as sinister and forbidding as Nagash had expected it to be. The illusions Mannfred had woven into the castle, the ghostly vitality that endowed every brick and stone with a malicious presence, the murderous traps that lay in wait for the unwary – all of these things combined into a vicious gauntlet to test any warrior. It was a creation the Mortarch could be proud of. Knowing the nature of Mannfred, that pride would be dressed in a robe of arrogance and perfumed with deceit.

Nagash followed behind the Stormcasts as Neferata led them through the treacherous environs of Mannfred’s refuge. It was a concession he was willing to indulge. Leaving the Anvils to their own devices had revealed much to him, but observing their interactions with the vampire queen was just as instructive. By it, he was able to gauge the earnestness of their overtures of alliance. The more he watched them, the more he came to appreciate that they had no facility for duplicity. Their faith in the God-King and their devotion to their mission were qualities each of them held to be inviolate. It was in regards to their own person and needs that they were given to compromise. Each of them was subsumed to the demands of his Warrior Chamber.

Even Knight-Heraldor Brannok, the Anvil with the most misgivings about the nature of their mission, had set himself at risk to rescue Makvar. Certainly Brannok had to know that without Makvar, their embassy was likely to fail, and he had hurled himself into danger without an instant of hesitation.

Such selflessness was to be expected from creatures like his morghast archai, beings without any true individuality or essence of their own. Nagash could command legions of such undead to march into the maw of a volcano and there would be no murmur of protest. Even the thought of disobedience was impossible for them.

Nagash was coming to believe that Sigmar’s Stormcasts were instilled with an equal degree of obedience. Yet it wasn’t compulsion that forced them to obey. They did so willingly, indeed, they drew a sense of honour from their unquestioning fealty. Brannok, steadfast and selfless as any of his comrades, was unsettled by the very virtue of his doubts.

The Great Necromancer listened to Neferata conferring with Makvar in Mannfred’s gallery. The vampire queen’s ambitions were almost as interesting as the Stormcasts themselves, and possibly of equal value to him. At least, once he set all the pieces in play.

Nagash stared into the gems set into the head of his staff. Images of the shifting vaults and halls of Nachtsreik flowed within the stones. His gaze penetrated the maze, piercing the mirages and illusions Mannfred had evoked to conceal himself. He saw the thousand snares by which the Mortarch thought to keep himself safe – the deadfalls and firetraps that lay under floors and within walls, hidden garrisons of deadwalkers and bone warriors, the cellars where still mightier guards lurked. The enormity of Mannfred’s defences could stave off armies even if they pierced the morbid walls. For a handful of Stormcasts, the prospect of finding the vampire’s secret tomb would border on the miraculous.

A miracle was just what Nagash would bestow upon his unsuspecting allies. As Lord of Death, there were no secrets in Shyish that could hide from him. It was a reality his Mortarchs always strove to deny, no matter how many times they were forced to re-learn the lesson.

Touching one of his claws to a huge bloodstone, Nagash conjured the image of Neferata in the crimson gem. Holding the staff close to his fleshless face, he began to whisper to the image, using great caution and subtlety as he worked his magic.

When Nagash was finished, Neferata wouldn’t be aware that she wasn’t guiding Makvar to Mannfred’s tomb on her own. Of course, there would be a few traps in the way, a few hazards and illusions to beset the Stormcasts. If the path was too clear, someone might get suspicious.

The time for suspicions would be after Mannfred joined them.

The stench of evil rose from the floor, crawling across the Stormcasts as they marched into the crypt. The caskets which lined the walls now stood empty, their inhabitants having risen in a mass of rotting flesh and decayed organs. Hundreds strong, it had taken Makvar and his comrades some time to destroy the revenants, even with the necromancy of Neferata keeping the things from rising again. Huld and Vogun shone their lights upon the carcasses, striving to banish whatever fell influence yet lingered within them.

Makvar glowered at the charnel house that stretched away as far as he could see. The ceiling above was vaulted, rising far into the darkness, supported upon pillars of fused bones that dripped with the same spectral blood they had encountered in the tower and throughout much of the castle. There was something about the way the disembodied gore slithered along the bones that offended him, some quality about the sight that rendered it more obscene than everything else around it.

‘Mannfred’s lair is here,’ Neferata declared. The vampire queen and her followers advanced towards a gruesome pillar. At first, Makvar thought it was simply their unholy hunger that attracted them, but then he noticed that sigils briefly flared upon the bleached surface of the bones whenever the Mortarch reached towards them. Each time the wards appeared she staggered back, a quiver of pain crossing her features.

After their arduous trek through the seemingly unending vaults and corridors of Mannfred’s fortress, Makvar was almost reluctant to hope they had come to the end of their search. Four more Stormcasts had been claimed by Mannfred’s traps and guards, as well as one of the blood knights who attended Neferata, yet never had there been any sign they were making progress. Now it was almost too much to believe the ordeal could be at an end.

‘Anvils of the Heldenhammer!’ Makvar called his warriors. ‘To me!’ While his knights rallied to him, Makvar approached the pillar. The reek of evil, if anything, was more pronounced around the grisly structure.

‘My lady, if you would,’ Makvar said, waving Neferata away from the pillar.

Harkdron rounded on the Lord-Celestant. ‘Do you presume to give orders to the Queen of Nulahmia?’ he demanded, oblivious to how empty the title had become.

‘No,’ Makvar told the vampire. He pointed his sword at the bleeding pillar. ‘I intend to bring that abomination down.’ He turned from Harkdron and addressed his Stormcasts. ‘Set the light celestial upon this thing,’ he told Huld and Vogun. ‘Judicators, keep your bows ready. Brannok… bring it down.’

As it had above, so the spectral blood again reacted to the light of Azyr, steaming away in puffs of greasy vapour. While the purifying light denuded the pillar of its cascading gore, Knight-Heraldor Brannok stepped away from his comrades. Drawing the gilded battle-horn from his belt, he raised the instrument to his lips.

The note that sounded from the horn wasn’t a simple battlefield signal or a rallying cry. It was a thunderous peal, a tremulous note that slammed into the pillar with pulverising violence. Such necromantic power as had saturated the pillar with its evil resilience now shattered as slivers of bone exploded across the crypt. The thunderblast cracked the base of the structure, splitting it in half and sending both monolithic sections smashing to the floor in a cloud of dust.

Gradually, as the dust dissipated, the Stormcasts could see the gaping hole exposed by Brannok’s demolition of the pillar. A flight of marble steps descended into the darkness. Instead of banishing the aura of evil that clung to the crypt, destroying the pillar had simply intensified it.

The source of the malefic energy was somewhere in the depths below.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The darkness closed around Lord-Celestant Makvar like the coils of some vast and monstrous serpent. Descending the steps wasn’t unlike plunging into deep waters, the pressure tightening around his body, crushing the breath in his chest. Steadily mounting, growing more burdensome the further he went, it was only his faith in Sigmar and the trust placed in him by the God-King that gave Makvar the strength to persist.

He knew the weight that dragged at him wasn’t a physical manifestation, but the repulsion Makvar’s noble soul felt for the miasma of evil that saturated the sunken tomb. The cloying, violating taint of the place wrapped itself about him, striving to defile his purity and righteousness with its spectral blight. He felt like an open flame exposed to a torrential downpour, his ardour sputtering as the rain strove to quench his fire.

Makvar forced himself onward, reciting canticles and orisons that described the holy might of Sigmar and the beneficence he extended to those who persevered in his name. Foot by foot, step by step, the warrior walked down into the secret refuge of Mannfred von Carstein, the infernal Mortarch of Night.

The tomb was prodigious in its dimensions, a long hall with an arching ceiling from which the wizened husks of immense bats were suspended. Gigantic statues lined the walls, sandstone idols hoary with age, jewels gleaming in the eyes of each animal-headed sculpture. Gothic columns stretched up from the tiled floor, iron sconces bolted to their sides. It was from these fixtures that a pallid blue light shone across the tomb, a sickly glow that somehow evoked images of midnight graveyards and prowling wolves.

At the very centre of the chamber, resting upon a raised dais, was a stone sepulchre, its sides richly sculpted with martial scenes. An ancient coat of arms, etched in gold, stood out amidst the carvings, its polished sheen gleaming in the eerie light. Surrounding the sepulchre, standing atop hexagonal pedestals, were an array of glassy black stones. Makvar could feel the nether-energy that throbbed within each of the stones, see the phantasmal forces trapped within their curiously angled facets. Streamers of ghostly power crawled down each pedestal before slithering up the sides of the sepulchre.

The sense of pressure and resistance against him swelled as Makvar approached the sepulchre. The effort to take each step became ever more difficult, like being back in the Mirefells and slogging through its bogs. He could understand how this forbidding atmosphere would ward off less determined intruders. Makvar, however, wouldn’t retreat. The vampire Mortarch had much to learn about the resilience of the Stormcasts.

While Makvar had been the first to descend into Mannfred’s lair, he wasn’t alone. The other Anvils had followed him, with the exception of a retinue of Judicators standing guard above. Neferata and her retainers had come along as well, the vampire queen’s expression unsettled by the forbidding environment in which she found herself. Makvar imagined that she knew far better than he did the amount of arcane power her fellow Mortarch had expended to protect this tomb. Also, she might be discomfited by the fact that her master Nagash had once again sent her forward while he lingered behind. The Great Necromancer was nothing if not cautious. The devious traps which infested Nachtsreik more than justified such caution.

Here, in the very heart of his stronghold, Makvar was certain that Mannfred would have surrounded himself with his most fiendish snares. Yet as he probed ahead, no physical menace presented itself, only the unseen aura of threat that pressed in around him. All such nebulous belligerence served to accomplish was to make him still more determined to reach the sepulchre.

‘Lord Makvar!’ Neferata finally called out to him. ‘Go no further! Stop where you are!’

It was with a strange reluctance that Makvar turned his head to stare back at the steps. He could see Neferata and her vampires standing there, but without exception, the other Stormcasts had drawn ahead of them, ranged across the floor of the tomb as they marched towards the sepulchre. Almost without volition, he found himself raising his foot to continue his advance. Firmly he stamped his boot back down upon the floor. It was an effort to fend off the urge to go onwards. He knew it was more than his own determination that was drawing him towards his objective.

‘Anvils!’ Makvar shouted. ‘Stand fast!’ He could hear the rattle of sigmarite plate as his knights strove to obey his command. Under normal conditions, such an order would have been implemented instantly, but now his warriors were uncharacteristically reluctant to arrest their advance.

A new appreciation for the subtlety of Mannfred’s sorcery filled Makvar. The Mortarch had indeed anticipated the intrusion of Stormcasts into his sanctum… and he had prepared accordingly. The frightful aura, the atmosphere of brooding evil – these were manifestations to simply distract the Anvils from a more insidious influence. Some eldritch force that sought out their courage not to fend them off, but to draw them in. A fiendish beacon to lure them to the doom von Carstein had devised for all who threatened his repose.

Makvar glowered at the sepulchre and the sinister stones that surrounded it. He still couldn’t see the danger that waited for them, but he was certain it was there. Fortunately, the Anvils had a beacon of their own.

Makvar turned around, gesturing to Neferata. ‘My lady, your warning is timely. It is best, however, if you withdraw and await us above. I fear the means to oppose Mannfred’s sorcery would be hurtful for you.’ He waited while the vampires retreated back up to the crypt before gesturing to Huld. ‘Ascend, brother,’ he told the Knight-Azyros, then pointed at the sepulchre. ‘Shine the light of your celestial beacon there. We will see if the purity of Azyr can overcome the spells which seek to entrap us.’

Spreading his wings, Huld flew up into the murky roof of the tomb, wheeling around the carcasses of the enormous bats dangling from the ceiling. Holding forth his lamp, he threw open its shutter and directed its holy light against the sepulchre. At once, a foul, penetrating odour filled the chamber, the stink of singed hair and burning flesh. Along with the reek came a cacophony of wailing moans, disembodied shrieks of agony that shivered through the room.

As the celestial beacon’s light purged the tomb of its malignant aura, Makvar could see the sepulchre changing. The strands of deathly energy trailing into it from the surrounding pedestals drew back into the black stones, reminding him of a child wrenching its hand away from a fire. A strange discolouration began to creep through the sepulchre, grey vines of ghost-rot that snaked through the carvings, causing them to split and fragment. The weird corrosion grew more pronounced with every heartbeat, soon denuding the sepulchre of its ornamentation, the scenes of war and slaughter reduced to piles of dust strewn about the dais.

Finally, with a shuddering groan, the coat of arms fell, clattering across the floor. The sound reverberated through the tomb with supernatural intensity. The Stormcasts tightened their hold upon their weapons as the dolorous crash pounded against their ears.

Makvar was the first to advance, motioning for his Anvils to stand back but keep themselves at the ready. Before him, the sepulchre continued to crumble, disintegrating as though millennia of decay had suddenly been poured into it. At the back of his mind, he wondered if this was the fate that should have taken them if they hadn’t broken Mannfred’s spell. Perhaps Huld’s beacon had turned the magic against itself.

A final shiver saw the unadorned sepulchre collapse. Its dissolution exposed its contents. An octagonal coffin fashioned from some impossibly dark wood now rested upon the dais, the same coat of arms nailed to its sides. Scarlet cloth woven from the pungent silk of the corpse-moth lined the lidless coffin’s interior, exuding a sickly sweet aroma of decay. Shining with an oily glitter, a haze hung about the coffin, some last magical ward that was strong enough even to oppose the unleashed fury of the trap that had consumed the sepulchre itself.

Disgust rose up within him as Makvar gazed upon the creature lying inside the coffin. Wearing armour that seemed to consume the light that struck it, the body of Mannfred was twisted with a monstrousness more vile than that of subhuman gors and the diseased mutations of Chaos. The abominations of the enemy were savage and unrefined, caprices of the Dark Gods. The horror that was the Mortarch of Night had been deliberately fashioned into its repulsive form. The long, lean hands with their predatory claws. The pale, clammy skin so devoid of health and vitality. The grisly countenance itself with its bare pate and sharp nose, close-set eyes and narrow mouth, high cheekbones that strained against the withered flesh, and bulbous nodules of bone protruding from the forehead.

The vampire’s eyes were open, gleaming like embers from within his ghoulish visage. A vicious smile drew pale lips away from long fangs. Around Mannfred’s body, several glassy rocks rested on the silk lining, small chips cut from the same stones resting on the pedestals. Fingers of necrotic energy extruded themselves from the rocks to vanish into the Mortarch’s body.

Just as it had sent the emanations from the larger stones retreating back into the glassy rock, so did Huld’s celestial beacon drive the ribbons of spectral force back into the stones surrounding the vampire. The reaction was immediate. Mannfred’s smouldering eyes blazed with a fearful intensity and the coffin around him exploded into a hail of wooden splinters. The slivers flew at the Stormcasts with murderous ferocity, uncannily darting at the gaps in their armour. Makvar felt one tear into his face, missing his eye by a hairsbreadth. The other Anvils were similarly afflicted by the coffin’s explosion. Huld was thrown back, smashing against the roof of the tomb. The rays of his beacon were diverted, no longer fixed upon the dais.

‘So the storm-men have hunted me to my lair?’ Mannfred rose from the debris of his coffin, his body alight with necromantic power. The vampire glowered at the reeling Stormcasts. ‘You will rue the misfortune that brought you to this impasse. But you will not regret for long.’ Stretching forth his hand, the Mortarch expended the merest portion of the fell magic that saturated him.

All across the tomb, things long dead answered the command of Mannfred. From the bases of the inhuman idols that lined the tomb, hulking monsters emerged, smashing their way out from hidden vaults. Crafted from both stone and bone, the monsters lurched towards the Stormcasts with immense khopesh swords. Secret graves beneath the floor disgorged malodorous skeletons, their armour clinging to them in strips of blackened decay. The awakened wights stole towards the intruders in a march of menacing silence. On the ceiling, the desiccated bats shrieked into hideous life. They flew after Huld, pursuing the Knight-Azyros through the tomb, preventing him from focusing the purging rays of his beacon. Out from the walls themselves a cloud of screaming apparitions manifested. The bodiless spirits surged around Vogun, striving to drown out the glow of his own warding lantern, heedless that they were being vaporised by his light.

Makvar knew it would do no good to tell Mannfred that the Anvils had violated his sanctum not as foes but as friends. Feeling cornered and pursued, the vampire wouldn’t listen. Not while there was any fight left in him.

The Lord-Celestant blinked away the blood dripping into his eye and brought his blade scything through the leg of the hawk-headed monster stalking towards him. Electricity crackled about his sword as he hewed through the obscene amalgam of bone and stone. Makvar swung again, tearing through the creature’s neck and sending its skull spinning into the darkness. Stubborn vitality lingered in the beast and it struck at him with one of its stony hands. Makvar fended off the stricken creature’s attack with a parry that hewed fingers from its fist. Unbalanced, the monster crashed to the floor, yet even then, its tenacious urge to kill caused it to crawl towards him.

All across the tomb, the other Stormcasts found themselves similarly beset by undead that simply refused to be destroyed. Disembodied arms clung to ebon armour, raking at the sigmarite plates as they tried to reach the warrior within. Huge bats fell in smouldering cascades as Huld’s beacon savaged their unnatural flesh, searing away their leathery wings, but the crippled beasts struggled to return to the attack by trying to drag their mangled bodies up the walls. Vogun stood in a pool of steaming ectoplasm, the residue of the waves of spirits vanquished by his warding lantern, and still more of the spectres came flying at him. Brannok stood atop the butchered debris of a dog-headed giant, driving his sword again and again into the brute in an effort to end its ability to fight.

The source of the fearsome persistence of the undead lay within the being who had conjured them from the shadows. Mannfred von Carstein exerted his infernal magic, evoking a grisly entity from the ghastly energies that saturated his sanctum. Billowing shadows spilled from the black stones that surrounded the vampire’s sepulchre, converging in a mass of darkness. From the darkness a monstrous creature prostrated itself before the Mortarch. It was a beast with obsidian claws, a bat-like head and long, blade-tipped tail. Like the dread abyssals that served Neferata and Arkhan, the morbid energies of enslaved spirits coursed through the monster’s skeletal body, though those bound into Mannfred’s steed burned with a hellish crimson light and worked their fleshless jaws in silent screams of endless agony.

Mannfred wrapped his arm about the stony neck of his steed and swung himself up onto the creature’s back. Ashigaroth, Gorger of the Meek, reared back as its master mounted it, huge claws pawing at the air. Ghostly wisps flew about the abyssal, swiftly growing from simple glowing orbs into shrieking phantoms that shot out across the sanctum to set upon the Stormcasts. The vampire howled in fury when he saw the first of the ghosts steam away as they were caught in the rays of Vogun’s warding lantern. Vindictively, he exerted his powers, summoning more of the spirits from the very walls, driving them to overwhelm the Anvils and suffocate them in a veritable fog of death.

Leaping over the dismembered bulk of his stony attacker, Makvar rushed towards Ashigaroth. As he ran, the Lord-Celestant spun the weighted length of his warcloak, hurling a shower of crackling sigmarite hammers at the abyssal steed and the Mortarch riding it. The electrical assault sizzled against the shield of protective magic Mannfred had woven around himself, but he had had no time to similarly protect Ashigaroth. The monster shrieked in distress as chips of obsidian flew from its grisly frame and crimson spectres were extinguished by the flying hammers. For an instant, Mannfred’s attention was diverted from the Anvils as he quieted his mount.

Makvar lunged towards the Mortarch as he tried to recover. His runeblade crackled with violence as he brought it sweeping up at the vampire. The sword glanced from Mannfred’s enchanted plate, an icy shiver flowing through the sigmarite tang as the armour’s foul energies pulsed into Makvar’s arm. The Stormcast fought the sensation and thrust his weapon at his foe’s breast. This time, the blow was fended off not by the ensorcelled armour that guarded the Mortarch but by the murderous length of the vampire’s own sword, the cursed blade Gheistvor.

‘You dare to touch me, storm-spawn!’ Mannfred snarled. Ashigaroth spun about, striking out with a claw that flung Makvar away from its master, throwing the Lord-Celestant back as though he were a child. Gnashing his fangs, von Carstein charged his steed at his reeling foe. Narrowly, Makvar brought his runeblade up in time to catch the downward sweep of Gheistvor. The impact of the thwarted strike knocked him to his knees.

Makvar could hear some of the other Anvils cry out in alarm, redoubling their efforts to fight through Mannfred’s spectral host to relieve their beleaguered leader. The vampire reacted to their alarm by conjuring still more spirits from the walls, then returned his attention to the Lord-Celestant. The Mortarch glared down at him, his face twisting into an expression of feral exuberance. The vampire took great delight in butchering the helpless.

‘Tell Sigmar to send better hunters if he would contest my power,’ Mannfred jeered as he slammed his foot into Makvar’s chest, spilling the Lord-Celestant onto the floor. Like a huge wolf, Ashigaroth pounced towards the Stormcast, eager to feed upon helpless prey. Makvar rolled aside, the claws of Ashigaroth raking sparks from the ground as they scraped across the tiles. Before Mannfred or his steed could react, Makvar rolled back, catching Ashigaroth’s claw a resounding blow with his runeblade. Lightning crackled through the undead beast, causing it to jounce back in a fit of agitation. The vampire’s body likewise crackled with searing energy, his magic armour unable to fend off the reverberations flowing into him from his mount.

With a howl of outrage, Mannfred jumped from Ashigaroth’s back and fell upon Makvar. The vampire’s boot smashed down upon the knight’s arm, pinning it and the runeblade it held against the floor. His other foot came kicking into the Stormcast’s face with such force that a mortal man’s neck would have snapped like a twig. As it was, the mask of Makvar’s helm was dented by the impact, breaking teeth as it was driven back into his jaw.

Before Mannfred could attack again, the brilliance of Huld’s beacon shone down upon him. The vampire flinched as the purifying light struck him, but it wasn’t the light that hurt him. Glaring down at Makvar, his face became livid with rage as he realised what had happened. Just as the Mortarch had laid a trap that would exploit the qualities of his enemies, so Makvar had baited his own pride and arrogance. In provoking Mannfred’s ire, he had distracted him from the larger fight raging around them. The enhanced ferocity and stamina he had been directing into his undead minions had relaxed, allowing the other Stormcasts respite from the vampire’s spirit hosts.

Vengefully, Mannfred stretched forth his hand. Makvar could feel the necromantic power leaching into him, slithering under his armour to sap the life from him. If the vampire was to know defeat, then he would at least claim Makvar before he fell.

Before darkness could close around Makvar, a searing voice hissed through the tomb. ‘The man is mine.’

The pressure upon Makvar’s arm vanished as Mannfred was thrown back, cast aside by some unseen force. The draining magic that had plagued the Lord-Celestant’s veins dissipated, exorcised from him with such abruptness that the rush of his restored vitality was like fire raging within his flesh. The sounds of battle within the tomb fell silent.

It wasn’t hate but fear that now gripped Mannfred’s features when Makvar looked at the vampire. He didn’t need to guess why. He could feel the awesome presence that descended into the sanctum, the orchestrator of the words that had brought him reprieve from a sorcerous death.

Aglow with a power that made even Mannfred’s exalted strength pathetic in comparison, Nagash walked towards his errant Mortarch.

The Great Necromancer could feel the terror that pounded inside Mannfred’s chest. The Mortarch of Night had gambled much on his excursion into the Realm of Beasts. He had thought he could free himself of his master, thought he could rebuild his power somewhere beyond Nagash’s reach. Forced back into the Realm of Death, he had thought himself safe within Nachtsreik, thought he could restore his powers by steeping himself in the energies of his sanctum.

Now, Mannfred was learning the foolishness of such thoughts. Humility wasn’t something with which the Mortarch was familiar. Every so often, it became necessary to remind him that there were powers mightier than himself. Powers before which he must make obeisance.

At a gesture from his skeletal claw, Nagash dispelled the withering enchantment with which Mannfred beset Makvar. A glance was enough to break the arcane bonds that animated the vampire’s guardians, causing them to collapse in heaps of bleached bone. A gesture sent Ashigaroth back into the shadows, banishing the dread abyssal’s corporeal manifestation. The Mortarch of Night was among the most powerful adepts to practise the profane art of necromancy to have ever existed, but Nagash was the father of that foul strain of magic, and there many were secrets about the art known only to himself.

It was amusing to see Mannfred retreat from his intended victim. He cringed away like some frightened animal, falling back towards the raised dais where his sepulchre had stood. The display of fright wasn’t entirely genuine, but seldom was anything the Mortarch did. He retreated because he thought to draw upon the power with which he had saturated himself, to harness it for one final effort of defiance.

Nagash allowed Mannfred to pull back, letting him reach the very cusp of his objective. Then an unspoken command gripped the vampire, freezing him in place as though he had been caught in a basilisk’s stare. At the last, he betrayed himself, darting a quick, longing look at the pedestals and the glassy black stones resting upon them. He even tried to cry out to them with his sorcery and draw their energy to him. It needed only the slightest exertion of his own will for Nagash to crush Mannfred’s last flicker of rebellion.

‘On your knees before your master, little one,’ Nagash hissed at the Mortarch. A wave of his fleshless hand had Mannfred bowing before him, as abased and servile as any serf. Only the Lord of Death could sense the resentment buried deep within him, locked away in the blackest reaches of the vampire’s essence.

The Great Necromancer turned towards Makvar, waiting while the Stormcasts’ commander picked himself off the floor. The other Anvils were drawing close to their leader, closing ranks around him in a remarkable display of fidelity and courage. They were battered and bloodied from their contest with Mannfred, but none had fallen in the fighting.

‘You must make allowances for my vassal,’ Nagash said. ‘It is not long ago that he came slinking back to his old haunts to lock himself away in this sanctum. Rousing him so abruptly from his repose has brought out the worst of him. He is somewhat of a kindred spirit to the vermin that besiege his castle, and like any cornered rat, it is in his lair that his bite is at its worst.’

‘These warriors are kindred to those who strove for my life in the Realm of Beasts,’ Mannfred warned his master. ‘The Hallowed Knights thwarted my ambition to build a refuge for you…’

Nagash glared down at the vampire. ‘The Realm of Death is mine,’ he hissed. ‘No power will take from me what is mine.’ He pointed a talon at the black stones. ‘You thought you could steal from me, but all you have done is because I have allowed it.’ Sweeping out from the darkness, the morghast archai answered the Great Necromancer’s command. The winged skeletons descended upon the pedestals and the wreckage of Mannfred’s sepulchre, poised about the glassy stones. ‘If there are yet any wards guarding what is mine, you had best dismiss them,’ he warned the Mortarch.

‘I was keeping them safe for you, Master,’ Mannfred claimed as he dispelled the magic protecting the pedestals. ‘It would have been calamitous if the enemy seized them.’

Makvar rose to Mannfred’s bait, suspicion in his tone as he addressed Nagash. ‘What are these stones? They seem similar to the Obelisk of Black and the relics from Mephitt.’

Holding forth one of his bony talons, Nagash called one of the smaller stones to him, the object rising from the debris of Mannfred’s coffin to fly into his outstretched hand. As it came into contact with him, he could feel the spectral energies coursing through his malignant spirit. ‘They are vessels,’ he told the Stormcasts, ‘prisms through which the power of necromancy can be magnified. With these, I can raise the legions Sigmar will need for his war.’

A look of shock gripped Mannfred’s face. ‘You have joined forces with Sigmar? Have you forgotten the God-King’s treachery so soon? Do you not understand it was his knights who fought against me!’

Nagash silenced the Mortarch with a wave of his hand. ‘We share a common foe and a common purpose. Chaos must be vanquished. It must be expunged from all the Mortal Realms. Archaon will be made to account for his manifold atrocities. The gate of Gothizzar will be cleansed of its defilers. This is my command.’ He turned back towards Makvar. ‘There is your answer, Lord-Celestant. The Realm of Death will fight beside the Realm Celestial once more.’

Veiled in the sorcery of Molchinte, Lascilion watched from the darkness of the crypt, his pulse racing as he beheld once again the sinister beauty of the vampire queen. The frustration of his defeat in Nulahmia was smothered beneath the fiery ardour that blazed within him. She would be his.

‘There are others in the chamber below,’ Molchinte told the three champions who shared her arcane protection. ‘Bide your time. Wait for them to return. Don’t underestimate them.’

Lascilion kept his eyes on Neferata, watching her as she conferred with the vampire knights who attended her. Their crimson armour made a stark contrast to the black plate worn by the lightning-men. Three of the celestial warriors patrolled the crypt, striding across the debris of destroyed skeletons, bows clenched in their fists. The warlord knew from past experience how formidable these lightning-men were. None of them had the look of command about them, however, so he judged that the leaders must be in the vault below.

The Lord of Slaanesh plucked the enticing scent of Neferata’s sadistic soul from the air, savouring it like a delicacy. The intoxicating sensation flowed through him, striking into the deepest recesses of his being. Nowhere had he ever found a spirit as cruel and inventive as his own. Never would he find such a spirit again. The vampire queen would open a new world of wonder for him, allowing him to revisit old delights and old outrages anew, to rekindle his jaded passions by dint of simply being there to share in them.

Patience! Lascilion had denied himself far too long. He recognised that Molchinte wanted the leaders of the lightning-men to offer themselves before springing their ambush. It was sound strategy, to have all of one’s enemies in a single place. But he also knew the vagaries of battle. She was concerned with eliminating the leaders. His ambition was to capture Neferata. He had a good chance to achieve his purpose right now. That opportunity might not be there when the rest of the lightning-men came back.

Lascilion forced himself to draw his gaze away from Neferata long enough to look at his companions. Alghor and Orbleth were both watching the sentries, Molchinte was focussed on the steps leading below. None of them were paying any attention to him.

Silently, Lascilion drew away from the invisible watchers. He wasn’t certain how far from Amala’s skull the effects of the concealing magic would follow him, so he braced himself for that instant when his enemies would spot him and recognise their peril. Cautiously he advanced, gaze fixed upon Neferata and her companions. He would come upon them from the flank, angling his approach so that his presence would go unnoticed until the last possible moment even without Molchinte’s spell to hide him.

When he was but a few yards away from his prey, Lascilion knew he was no longer under the veil of Molchinte’s magic. The discovery announced itself in the enraged howls of Alghor and Orbleth as they rushed at the lightning-men. Aware that the ambush would be lost to them either way, the champions of the Bloodking chose to at least eliminate what enemies they could swiftly. One of the black-armoured knights was struck down by Orbleth’s flail, a bright spark leaping from his body before it could crash at the champion’s feet. Another writhed upon the diseased length of Alghor’s vile sword, green tendrils of corruption worming through his mail.

Lascilion charged straight towards the vampires. As he reached them, he drew Pain and Torment in a flash of murderous steel. One of the vampire knights was decapitated by the vicious sweep of Pain, his body writhing on the floor like a crushed snake. The second vampire dropped as Pain slashed across his middle, all but disembowelling the undead lord. Neferata alone now stood before him.

The Mortarch of Blood raised her staff, sending a cascade of deathly magic slamming into him. Lascilion felt several of his teeth burst as the arcane energies ravaged him. The smell of his own burning hair was in his nose, tears of blood spilled from his eyes as they slowly boiled under Neferata’s assault. Too late, he appreciated his mistake. When he had confronted Neferata in Nulahmia, she had been exhausted by the demands of the battle. Now she was at the height of her powers and far more than his equal.

If Lascilion had made a mistake, then so too had Neferata. She had focussed too much of herself in annihilating the warlord and kept too little of her power back to guard against other foes. While he languished under the Mortarch’s spell, Molchinte’s sorcery struck out at the vampire. Bolts of coruscating light raced through Neferata’s body, burning into her in a furious barrage. The first few bolts dissipated against the wards she had raised to defend herself, but the others drove home. Neferata was knocked back, thrown against one of the walls. Smoke rose from her branded flesh and blood streamed from the corners of her mouth. She turned to face her attacker, but even as she did, another blast of shimmering light tore the staff from her hands.

Lascilion tried to rally, to subdue the weakened Neferata before Molchinte’s sorcery wrought even more havoc upon her. Even as he did, however, dark shapes came rushing up from the vault below. He saw more of the lightning-men, and this time, their helms bore the crests and halos that marked them as commanders of their kind. Alongside them another vampire rushed into the vault, a being of such fearsome aspect that even the Lord of Slaanesh felt a tremor of fear.

His fear counted for nothing when a still more malevolent apparition boiled up from the sunken tomb. Spilling upwards in a cloud of blackness, a towering skeleton wearing a morbid crown commanded Lascilion’s gaze. All thoughts of Neferata and his depraved desires were forgotten as the warlord stared at a being that had become legend to the hordes of Chaos infesting Shyish. He didn’t need to be told who this creature was, for only the Lord of Death could evoke such terror in the heart of one who had consorted with the likes of Mendeziron and attended the court of Thagmok. Out from the domain of myth and rumour, Nagash the Accursed had returned.

The Great Necromancer pointed his staff towards Neferata and immediately a blanket of darkness swirled around her, catching and absorbing the arcane fire Molchinte hurled against her. While Nagash shielded the vampire queen, the leaders of the lightning-men charged towards Alghor and Orbleth. Formidable as the Chaos champions were, they found themselves outnumbered by the ebon knights eager to avenge the comrades the pair had cut down from ambush.

Into the tableau, a colossal shape lurched. A charnel reek preceded it, splattering through the air in a stream of foulness. The stink of blood, old and rancid washed across the crypt, causing even the faces of the vampires to twist in revulsion. A thunderous, slobbering step brought layers of mould crumbling from the ceiling. The obscene figure drew out into the light, revealing its awful aspect. Swollen, engorged with internal fluids, the thing possessed only the most mocking semblance of human form about it. The legs were short and stocky, veins bulging from the tanned skin to drip a slime of gore down knees and calves. The feet were an array of clawed pads, the hooked talons gleaming like knives as they scratched against the floor. The body itself was prodigious in its dimensions, many times larger than that of a man. Thick ropes of muscle had broken through the flesh, leaving wet strips of meat dangling from its damaged hide. One arm was little more than a withered stump flapping uselessly against the shoulder while its opposite was a tree-like bulk of sinew tipped by a bear-like paw.

The thing’s head had sunk down into its torso, staring out with a nest of gigantic black eyes. Some mocking suggestion of a nose and mouth protruded just beneath the eyes. Blood bubbled up from the mouth as it cried out in a voice that filled Lascilion with horror, for it was the voice of Vaangoth, the champion of Khorne they had left behind in the tower. The bloodthirsty warrior had sampled too deeply of Nachtsreik’s phantasmal gore, drawing the attentions of the Blood God to him, filling him with the raw power of Chaos. At once, Vaangoth had become both exalted and debased, one of the abominable spawn of Chaos.

‘I follow,’ Vaangoth howled. ‘I bring doom. The Bloodking is come!’

As the spawn cried out the last words, the entire crypt was shaken by a tremor that bespoke some immense violence inflicted upon the castle itself. Lascilion chided himself for his credulity. Thagmok hadn’t wanted him to merely lead Molchinte and a few assassins after the lightning-men. The Bloodking himself was following the warlord, bringing his full might against the foes he had used Lascilion to find.

Lascilion looked upon the malignant spectre of Nagash. Thagmok was coming to claim the greatest prize in the Realm of Death, the one conquest even Archaon had failed to achieve. The Bloodking was coming for the Great Necromancer.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The cold shell of death magic closed around Neferata, guarding her against the sorcerous barrage conjured by the copper-skinned Chaos witch. It was a small thing for Nagash to fend off the magical assault that had come close to overwhelming his Mortarch. Powerful as she was, the attacking sorceress was but an insect beside the Lord of Death. There was only so much eldritch lore Tzeentch could pour into a human mind before it collapsed into madness. Nagash had no such limitations. He could feel the sense of shock that raced through the enemy witch when he intervened, her horror that her spells could so easily be brushed away.

But it didn’t suit the Great Necromancer for the Stormcasts to learn the full extent of his might. Instead, Nagash was more interested in the extent of the strength the Anvils possessed. This ambush in the depths of Nachtsreik was an opportunity to see how a small group of the storm-knights fared against foes who could pose a real challenge to them.

‘Attend to the others,’ Nagash told Makvar. ‘I will obstruct the spells of their sorceress.’ The Lord-Celestant nodded and hastened to join his warriors. The other Stormcasts were already engaged with the two Chaos champions who had vanquished the Judicators left to guard the crypt.

The bloated champion who bore the Mark of Nurgle brought his diseased blade slashing across the chest of the Liberator who rushed at him. The stricken Stormcast fell back, a black froth bubbling from the mouth of his helm as the daemonic energies within the Nurglesque sword raced through his body. The ebon knight collapsed, his hammer rolling free from his weakened grip. Nagash could feel the necrotic vibrations pulsating within the fallen warrior, ready to extinguish his life-force.

While the Liberator languished on the ground, Knight-Heraldor Brannok interposed himself between the stricken warrior and the Chaos champion. Ducking around the sweep of the Nurglesque sword, Brannok held the invader back while Lord-Castellant Vogun hurried to the dying Stormcast. He held his warding lantern over the wounded warrior, letting its rays shine down upon him. Nagash was surprised to observe the necrotic vibrations falter, gradually receding as the healing light began to burn away the daemonic infection.

Even with death so near, Vogun was driving it back. That was a power the Great Necromancer found more troubling than any he had witnessed heretofore, a power antithetical and oppositional to the very source of his own dark magics. If such power were harnessed properly, it could prove a threat to his dominion.

In the next moment, Nagash saw that he wasn’t alone in appreciating the menace posed by Vogun’s light. The Nurglesque champion Brannok fought lowered his guard, exposing himself to the Stormcast’s blade. As the sigmarite sword slashed across his swollen belly, however, what spilled from the wound was far from what the knight expected. Instead of gore and entrails, a swarm of snake-like worms splashed onto the floor. The grotesque parasites at once slithered away, speeding towards Vogun. Brannok stamped on one of the creatures, bursting it in a spray of stinking yellow ichor. He had no opportunity to attack the rest of the swarm, for the Chaos champion was swinging at him once again with his green blade, apparently indifferent to the gaping wound in his guts.

Across the crypt, Huld and the remaining Liberator fought against the black-armoured Chaos champion with the flail. Despite their superiority of numbers, the Stormcasts were having difficulty slipping through the invader’s guard. The flail swung with expert precision, the chains coiling about the blades of their swords to twist them aside each time the knights thrust at its wielder. Even the purifying rays of Huld’s celestial beacon, the light that so discomfited Nagash’s vampire minions, had little effect upon this barbarous fighter. Certainly not enough to dull his ferocity.

The impasse was broken when Makvar entered the fray. Coming at the champion from the flank, the Lord-Celestant swung at his adversary with his fearsome runeblade. Again, the invader turned and brought the chains of his flail whipping around to entangle and twist the descending sword. This time, however, the tactic brought electricity crackling up from the sigmarite weapon. Lightning sizzled up the flail and rushed into the champion’s body. The barbarian staggered back, smoke rising from the seared flesh inside his armour. In his hands, he held a gnarled length of iron that had been the grip of his flail. The bludgeoning skulls and the chains themselves lay scattered about the floor, many of the links melted by the electric discharge of Makvar’s runeblade. The stricken Chaos champion fell back, drawing an ornate dagger from his belt and reversing his hold upon the iron handle of his destroyed flail so that he might use it as a club.

Nagash noted the fearsome enchantments bound into Makvar’s runeblade. He recognised the peculiar arcane craftsmanship of duardin smiths. Long ago, he had learned to his cost how potently such swordsmiths could infuse a weapon with aethyric power. He didn’t envy the Chaos champion the destruction that would soon be his.

Yet before Makvar could close upon the invader, a new factor thrust itself into the battle. Lumbering through the doorway was a ghastly monster, a hideous spawn of Chaos. Nagash could see the rampant arcane energies shivering through the thing’s body, changing and mutating every organ and bone with each step it took. His witchsight revealed to him the murderous Mark of Khorne branded into the one bit of chest that had resisted the riotous transformation that swept through the rest of the abomination’s frame.

More than that, Nagash understood how this monstrosity had come into being. He could sense the phantasmal harmonies that saturated the spawn and recognised them as part of the ghostly force that Mannfred had employed to build Nachtsreik. A slave of the Blood God Khorne, this creature had glutted itself on the spectral gore seeping from the walls until it lost whatever integrity of form it had once possessed. The thing had become carnage incarnate.

A moment after it appeared, the spawn’s mouth made a savage utterance, declaring that the Bloodking himself had come to Nachtsreik. The next instant, the fortress trembled. Nagash knew it was from the impact of some tremendous projectile, though perhaps not something more destructive than those hurled against it by the skaven. The difference wasn’t in the missile, but in the castle itself. Just as the blood-soaked stones had responded to the Khorne champion, so too they were affected by the presence of the Bloodking. The necromantic resilience and regeneration with which Mannfred had infused his fortress had been disrupted. The fight in the Mortarch’s sanctum had weakened the resilience of his sorcery, stifling the adaptability of his fortifications. The Khornate spawn had further upset the arcane harmonies, establishing a sympathy not with Mannfred’s necromancy but with the bloodthirsty fury of Thagmok. For the first time since it was erected, Nachtsreik was vulnerable to the hordes of Chaos.

Nagash turned away from Neferata, letting his protection waver. He had no time left to play with the Chaos witch. It was time to end things. As she felt him focusing upon her, the sorceress tried to evoke the arcane concealment that had guarded her and her companions through Nachtsreik. Nagash saw the mutant skull she used to form her spell. At a wave of his bony hand, the skull exploded into morbid fragments, several slivers burying themselves in the sorceress’ body. Stunned, she fell back behind one of the caskets strewn about the hall.

Nagash’s skeletal fingers closed about the hilt of a sword as ancient and monstrous as himself. The wail of banshees and the shrieks of wraiths echoed in his mind as the Great Necromancer let the deathly pulse of Zefet-nebtar sizzle through his spirit. His own malignance flowed back into the Mortis Blade, establishing a fell harmony between them. As he stalked across the crypt towards his prey, the sorceress sent a coruscating bolt of Chaos magic rushing at him. Nagash whipped the necrotic head of his staff in front of him, spinning it in an arc of power that caught and dissipated the hostile vibrations. Striding through the vaporous residue of the witch’s spell, he closed upon the sorceress.

The Chaos conjurer was utterly desperate now, summoning all her reserves of aethyric might, channelling reckless amounts of magical energy through her body, heedless of the strain she put upon her merely mortal flesh and spirit. She formed the rampant energies into a great shimmering ball of mutating harmonies and flung it at the Great Necromancer. As she did so, the fingers of her left hand melted away, replaced by fibrous growths more akin to fungus than flesh.

Nagash caught the malefic spell with Alakanash. It would have been an easy thing for him to hurl its energy back upon the sorceress, but he had other plans for her.

The Great Necromancer could sense Mannfred watching him as he raised his sword to strike the sorceress. The Mortarch of Night had been using his magic to drive back the Chaos spawn, but now there was a respite, a moment for him to observe his master in action. The vampire saw Nagash poised to strike. Nagash knew he also saw the black stone held tight against the hilt of Zefet-nebtar, the same glassy stone Mannfred had surrounded his sepulchre with – a fragment of which was yet hidden under the Mortarch’s armour.

Feeling Mannfred’s jealous gaze on him, Nagash brought the Mortis Blade slashing down. The wards the sorceress had built around herself evaporated in an instant, winking out in a flash of purple light. Then, the black sword was shearing through her body, splitting her from crown to pelvis. Nagash could feel the Mark of Tzeentch pulsate with inimical energy as the witch’s spirit abandoned her dying flesh. The Great Necromancer’s pull proved greater, however. He could hear her scream of disbelief as her soul was dragged away from the waiting claws of Tzeentch and down into the black stone he held in his hand.

As the hewn body of the sorceress wilted at his feet, Nagash looked towards Mannfred. He needed but a single glance to be assured that the Mortarch had seen everything. The gleam in the vampire’s eyes bespoke a terrible inspiration. Nagash realised that his vassal had learned what he wanted him to learn.

Now he only needed the opportunity for Mannfred to put the lesson into practice.

All around Makvar, the crypt swayed and shuddered. It was more than the impact of the projectiles the besieging army outside the walls was hurling against Nachtsreik. The firmament itself was coming apart. Great sanguinary expulsions bubbled from wall and ceiling, spilling into the chamber in rivulets of gore. Clumps of bone rolled out from crumbling facades, clattering over the flagstones in a ghoulish tide. Clouds of wailing spectres billowed through the corridors, whipping around the Stormcasts and their Chaos foes before shrieking off into the darkness.

The fortress was tearing itself apart. The murderous necromancy with which Mannfred had built it was now sinking into a sort of suicidal madness as it responded to the influence of the arch-murderer Khorne, the Chaos God of Carnage. Makvar wondered how exalted the Bloodking Thagmok was in his god’s esteem to inflict such destructive confusion on Nachtsreik.

For the moment, the question would wait. Leaving Huld and the last Liberator to finish the black-armoured Chaos champion, Makvar rushed to intercept the injured spawn as it lumbered across the crypt towards Neferata. He saw Mannfred casting pulses of dark energy at the mutated horror, but the injuries he visited against it only seemed to make the beast even more crazed. The blood streaming from its wounds refused to splash onto the floor, but instead oozed back into the torn veins and slashed flesh.

‘I am the Anvil!’ Makvar cried as he rushed at the hideous monster. His runeblade lashed out in a flash of gleaming metal, hacking into the beast’s nearest arm. Lightning crackled from his sword as it ripped into the crimson flesh. The blood that erupted from the wound came as a gush of scarlet steam, rushing past him in a stagnant cloud. The spawn reared back, its head snarling in pain. The brute swung around, striking at Makvar with one of its cudgel-like fists. The blow missed him as he dived away, instead gouging a pit into the floor. Flagstones crumbled, exposing the catacombs beneath the crypt.

Makvar retaliated with another slash, this time raking the runeblade down the monster’s back. Again, there was the sizzle of steaming blood as the horror’s corrupt metabolism reacted to the purifying surge of electricity. The spawn started to round on him once more, then was struck in the leg by a blinding flare of arcane energy. He could see the head of Nagash’s staff ablaze with spectral light as the Lord of Death directed his malefic power into the monster. The beast’s leg expanded like a swelling bladder and then burst apart. Wailing in rage, the thing crumpled in a puddle of its own gore as the limb dissolved under its own weight.

The Stormcast moved in to finish the beast, yet he had underestimated its ferocious vitality. The horror reared up, supporting itself on one arm and its remaining leg. The other arm came slamming down, hurling the Lord-Celestant back as its claws scraped down his black armour, leaving deep gashes in the sigmarite plate. Makvar was tossed through the air and slammed down on his back. He felt the already weakened floor crack under his impact, heard stony fragments go clattering away into the darkness below.

As he started to rise, Makvar was struck by the charging spawn, smashed back against the floor. He felt something break inside him, a flare of pain tear through his body. Keeping hold of his runeblade, he managed to slide its edge across the mutated paw that pressed down upon him. The corrupt flesh steamed as lightning coursed through it. The Chaos spawn growled and grunted, but refused to relent. The pressure mounted. Makvar could taste his own blood in his mouth and his vision began to dim.

Before the pressure against his body could crush him utterly, the blood beast recoiled, screaming in agony. Black, nebulous strands of shadow were streaming into the thing’s body. It took Makvar a moment to realise that they were spirits – some of the trapped ghosts that infested Nachtsreik had been directed against the spawn. The monster stumbled back, unbalanced, and slammed down upon the floor. Cracks spread from its collapse. The fissure widened as the spawn writhed in torment. Its obscene flesh was expanding now, bubbling and undulating with grisly animation. Whatever the spirit hosts were doing to the brute, it was too much for its body to withstand. With a last howl of agony, the beast’s body ruptured, splashing the crypt with the spectral blood that so engorged it. The ruined scraps of mangled meat and bone crashed down against the floor, fracturing the weakened stone. A jagged hole opened beneath it and the spawn’s carcass plunged into the depths.

Makvar propped himself on one elbow as the orchestrator of the spell that had vanquished the abomination approached him. Mannfred gave the injured Stormcast an appraising look, then a smile that was reptilian in its coldness curled across the vampire’s face. Silently, he drew Gheistvor and crept towards the Lord-Celestant.

Fingers of pain still crackled through Neferata’s brain as she recovered from the sorcerous attack. If not for the intervention of Nagash, it was possible she would have been overwhelmed. She had invested too much of her powers in assaulting the Chaos warlord who had brought destruction upon her city. In her fury, she had allowed herself to lose focus, behaving like some newly turned thrall drunk on her own transcendence of mortality. That recklessness had left her hideously exposed, a weakness the invaders had been swift to exploit.

Neferata could see Huld and one of the other Stormcasts fighting a black-armoured Chaos champion. Across the crypt, Makvar and Mannfred struggled against the bloated Chaos spawn. Further still, Nagash pitted his powers against a barbaric sorceress, likely the same foe who had come so close to overwhelming the vampire queen. Nearer at hand, Brannok matched blades with a revolting warrior of Nurgle. She could see the swarm of hideous worms that spilled from the wounds the knight inflicted on his foe, a slithering horde that crawled away towards…

The worms were converging upon Lord-Castellant Vogun. He was kneeling beside a fallen Stormcast, using the light of his warding lantern to fend off the arcane infection that ravaged the knight’s body. Directing the light upon his comrade, he struggled to protect the Liberator not only from the disease within but the worms without, for the slithering tide was crawling all over Vogun. Though the things recoiled from the direct path of the celestial light, they seemed perversely drawn to it as well. The healer’s armour was slick with the wet, slimy parasites. Smoke rose from the sigmarite plate as the foul acids exuded by the vermin gradually ate away at his armour.

There was no question that Vogun was aware of his peril. Lying on the floor beside him was the corroded body of Torn. The ever-loyal gryph-hound had tried to protect his master, but without the protection of sigmarite armour, he had been overwhelmed by the slithering horde. Steam continued to rise from the animal’s pitiable remains.

Weakened as she was, Neferata seized the opportunity she saw. Vogun’s actions displayed for her in no uncertain terms the degree to which the storm-knights valued their comrades – and how favourably they would regard one who hurried to their aid. Mustering her concentration, she drew upon her magic, pointing the Staff of Pain towards Vogun and sending a wave of withering force into the parasitic worms.

It took all of Neferata’s focus to set the spell against only the worms and not the Stormcast they engulfed. Hence, she failed to note the return of an old threat until he was nearly upon her. The Chaos warlord with the plumed helm had recovered enough to make another assault against her. With both swords drawn, it seemed he had abandoned his notion of capturing her and had determined to destroy her instead.

Before the barbarian could reach her, he was intercepted by Lord Harkdron. Neferata’s lover, wounded by the warlord’s blade, dived at his enemy in a feral leap. Ferocity, however, wasn’t enough. The Slaaneshi warlord spun around, slashing Harkdron with the longer of his swords. The vampire’s armour shredded like paper beneath the keen edge and the force of the blow knocked him back among the caskets. The barbarian sneered, lips curling away from feline fangs, and turned back towards the Mortarch of Blood.

Worms continued to shrivel under the force of Neferata’s incantation. A few moments more and Vogun would be free from the parasites. Those few heartbeats would leave her exposed to the Slaaneshi warlord’s blades. Reluctantly, she realised she would have to sacrifice her ambition – and with it the Lord-Castellant. Agitated by her magic, the infuriated worms would burn their way through his weakened armour in seconds.

The dilemma was resolved for Neferata when Brannok interposed himself between the vampire queen and her foe. Hurling the severed head of the Nurglesque champion at the warlord, the Knight-Heraldor glowered at the barbarian. ‘She is under my protection,’ he declared. The leonine face dropped into a scowl of frustration, and with a roar, he lunged at Brannok.

Stormcast and Slaaneshi traded blows. Brannok’s sigmarite blade resisted the razored edge of the warlord’s long sword while his agility thwarted efforts to drive the shorter knife into his gut. A return sweep of the Anvil’s weapon cropped the plume from the warlord’s helm, leaving its wreckage to flop against the cheek-plate. The warlord snarled in wrath, his jaws distending, revealing a long forked tongue. From this organ, a viscous slime spattered across Brannok’s mask, boiling against the metal and momentarily blinding him.

Even as the warlord moved to capitalise upon the debilitation of his foe, Neferata turned towards him. Vogun was no longer threatened by the worms. Now she could direct her full attention against the fiend who had destroyed Nulahmia. A bolt of dark magic raced into his left arm, ripping through the limb in a gory discharge. Strips of armour and the deadly knife clattered away from the smoking arm.

The warlord staggered back. His gaze shifted between Neferata and Brannok, the Slaaneshi’s mind turning over the odds arrayed against him. He sketched a mocking salute with his remaining sword, then turned about and threw himself into the pit that had swallowed the blood beast’s carcass. Brannok rushed after him, but was too late to stop the warlord from leaping into the darkness.

A compulsion seized Neferata, diverting her attention away from the pit and to the scene unfolding on the other side of it. Makvar lay sprawled on the ground with Mannfred above him. The vampire was ready to bring Gheistvor slashing down into the Lord-Celestant. Refusing to allow her schemes to be ruined, Neferata unleashed a blast of spectral force at the Mortarch of Night. The ghostly vibration was just enough to turn aside the descending blow. Instead of striking Makvar’s head, Gheistvor simply sheared through the top of his metal halo.

The respite gave Makvar the chance to retaliate. His boot kicked out, slamming into Mannfred’s knee and knocking him down. Even as the Mortarch rose to make a second attack, he found a new foe leaping towards him. Hurtling across the pit was Brannok, the shout of ‘Traitor!’ thundering from behind his mask.

Mannfred decided not to risk himself against both Brannok and the rallying Makvar. Turning, the vampire rushed at the wall behind him. Some hidden catch responded to his retreat, opening a concealed panel and revealing a hidden passage. With Brannok close behind him, the Mortarch plunged into the secret corridor. A great block of stone came slamming down from the crumbling ceiling, sending a dolorous boom rolling through the crypt and burying the doorway beneath a mess of rubble.

‘After them,’ Makvar called, trying to drive his battered body towards the mound of debris. Vogun left the recovering Liberator in order to rush to his commander’s side. Huld and the other Liberator, having finally overcome their opponent, started towards the buried door.

It was the voice of Nagash that held them back. ‘They are beyond your reach,’ he declared. ‘Even should you clear away the wreckage, Nachtsreik is such a labyrinth of dungeons and tombs that it would take you years to explore them fully. And that is if Mannfred remains in the Realm of Death. The Cromlech of Avar-Sul is not so far removed from this place. It is certain the Mortarch has some way of reaching the realmgate from here.’

‘We cannot abandon Brannok,’ Makvar protested as Vogun shone his warding lantern on him. The Lord-Celestant’s wounds, lacking the sorcerous corruption that afflicted the Liberator, responded quickly to the celestial light.

‘Lord Nagash is right,’ Huld said, turning away from the rubble. ‘It would take too long to dig our way through.’ He looked up as the castle shook once more, streams of dust rattling from the roof. ‘That is if this place holds together that long.’

‘Brannok will either achieve his purpose,’ Vogun told Makvar, ‘or he will fall and his spirit will return into Sigmar’s keeping.’

Nagash raised a fleshless talon and pointed at the quaking ceiling overhead. ‘There are more pressing concerns for us now. These assassins have led Thagmok’s army here. They have penetrated the defences Mannfred crafted for this place. Soon they will be upon us.’ The Great Necromancer raised the Mortis Blade. ‘Unless we go forth to meet them. If nothing more, we can cut the head off the serpent. The Bloodking has vexed my domain far too long already.’

Neferata could sense Makvar’s hesitation. It wasn’t fear of the Bloodking’s forces that made him reluctant to quit the crypt, but concern for his comrade. However, he was strategist enough to appreciate the uselessness of mounting a search while the enemy stormed the castle. ‘What is your plan?’ he asked Nagash.

The Lord of Death looked down at Makvar. ‘We strike at the heart of the enemy. Kill the Bloodking, and his army will loose its cohesion.’ He gestured at the pit created by the blood beast. ‘As you’ve seen, those who follow Khorne don’t react well to confusion. I will muster the spirits bound within Nachtsreik and set them against the foe. Even now, my morghasts are collecting the black stones from Mannfred’s sanctum. With those to help channel my power, I will unleash a spectral flood to terrorise our enemy and grant us the opportunity to strike.’

Neferata felt more than a tinge of suspicion as Nagash turned towards her and told her to lead the Stormcasts through the vaults and to the walls of the castle. With the eerie shifting and restructuring of Nachtsreik stifled by the Bloodking’s assault, the path before them would be straightforward enough. The Great Necromancer would linger behind for a while to perform the ritual that would summon the spirit hosts.

As she watched Nagash descend back down into Mannfred’s sanctum, Neferata wondered if he was spending all their lives simply to give himself the chance to escape. Grimly she realised that even if such were the case, she could do nothing to disobey her master.

‘Can Nagash do what he claims?’ Huld asked her when the Great Necromancer had withdrawn.

‘There are no limits to his power,’ Neferata said, keeping her reservations to herself. She turned and glowered at the hole down which the Slaaneshi warlord had plunged. Hate blazing in her eyes, she raised the Staff of Pain and exerted her power in a spell that infused new animation into the shattered skeletons littering the crypt. The restored undead lurched to their feet and shambled silently towards the hole. One by one, without protest or hesitation, the skeletons stepped across the precipice and fell down into the darkness.

‘Just in case that scum is still alive after he hits the bottom,’ Neferata told the Stormcasts. She glanced at Makvar, impressed at the speed with which he had recovered. ‘If you are fit enough, Lord-Celestant, I will lead you from this place.’

Walking to where the carcass of Torn lay, Vogun looked back and shook his head. ‘Are you certain you can find the way?’

Neferata laughed, brushing her hand across the wall. ‘Nachtsreik no longer bleeds,’ she said. ‘What blood is being spilled is outside where the Bloodbound and the skaven squabble over which of them will conquer the castle. If there is one thing upon which you may be confident, Lord-Castellant, it is that a vampire can always follow the scent of blood.’

Nagash descended into Mannfred’s tomb. Here was one place that the Mortarch of Night had guarded with such spells and wards that even the onset of the Bloodking failed to disrupt the eerie atmosphere. Of course, von Carstein was always at his most clever when devising some safeguard to ensure his own survival. It was likely the sanctum had been created not simply to protect against Chaos and the Stormcasts alone, but to protect him from the wrath of Nagash as well. The vampire was always making that mistake, overestimating his abilities.

The morghast archai formed a circle around the pedestals. At a signal from Nagash, they brought the black stones together, releasing a surge of arcane energy. The Great Necromancer let the magic flow into him, replenishing such power as he had expended in the battle and on the journey to Nachtsreik. It wasn’t much, but the Lord of Death was always wary of even the slightest weakness.

Some of the power ebbing from the stones he channelled into a telepathic sending, linking his mind to that of Arkhan. The instructions Nagash passed to his acolyte were simple enough. The Mortarch of Sacrament already knew what to do – all he waited for was the command to proceed. Now that it had been given, he would carry out his orders.

As his body seethed with dark magics, Nagash started to exert his dominion over the spirits Mannfred had bound into the walls of his refuge. In extending his awareness outward through the halls of Nachtsreik, he detected the fading essence of Lord Harkdron. The Great Necromancer lingered over the vanquished vampire’s mind.

Such a festering mire of hatred, jealousy, adoration and dependency! Neferata had done a masterful job of enslaving Harkdron, binding him to her will with such skill that the vampire wouldn’t break free of her even if given the chance. Of course, such devotion brought with it a possessiveness that would brook no competition. Foremost in Harkdron’s thoughts was the bitter fear that the Stormcasts intended to usurp his position, particularly Makvar and Brannok. Harkdron had even worked against his mistress in his efforts to sow discord between her and the Anvils.

Nagash decided he could use the hate he sensed in Harkdron. Expending a fragment of his energies, he sent a surge of necromantic power pulsing through the vampire. Into the reviving vampire’s mind, he placed an awareness of Brannok’s presence in the bleak halls of Nachtsreik and an eldritch intuition that would lead the vengeful Harkdron straight to his prey.

When he sensed Harkdron hurrying away from the crypt to find Brannok, Nagash shifted his focus back to rousing the bound spirits. It wasn’t that he had any real doubt how a confrontation between the Knight-Heraldor and the Mortarch of Night would end, but with Harkdron taking a hand, he would make certain events proceeded as he intended them.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lord-Celestant Makvar’s heart turned cold as he gazed out across the great cavern in which Mannfred had raised the fortress of Nachtsreik. From the vantage of the curtain wall, he looked out across a veritable sea of foes, a host so vast that even with the fearsome might of Nagash on their side he didn’t see any hope of victory here.

The chittering swarms of skaven that had laid siege to the fortress were thick about the walls, the rancid stink of their mangy fur and diseased flesh engulfing the castle. Clad in robes of dirty green, squeaking putrid chants and sounding rusted gongs, the congregations of plague monks worked themselves into rabid bursts of ferocity. Swinging blazing censers that seeped diseased smoke, the ratmen rushed across the cavern, hurling themselves upon the enemies that had come to contest their claim upon Nachtsreik.

The trespassers matched the skaven in both numbers and ferocity. A vast crimson horde of barbarians, howling with murderous cries, slaughtered its way across the cavern. Makvar wasn’t surprised Neferata had been able to follow the scent of blood through the castle vaults, for the Chaos army was dripping in gore. Not a weapon or piece of armour had failed to be anointed with symbols of blood, or marked with the skull-rune of Khorne.

Roaring bloodstokers lashed their scourges across the scarred backs of barbarous bloodreavers, whipping the tribesmen into homicidal frenzies that found them plunging fearlessly into the choking smoke of plaguesmog congregations. Bands of blood warriors, their plate armour caked in dried gore, ripped their way through packs of rabid plague monks with axe and sword. Berserk wrathmongers, their faces locked inside horned helms, ploughed into the ratkin with crushing sweeps of the chained hammers they bore, trampling the bodies of their victims underfoot.

Where the row of plagueclaw catapults had stood, there was now only a litter of smouldering debris and mangled bodies. Amidst the wreckage, armoured barbarians mounted upon hulking daemon steeds of brass and bronze hunted the few skaven artillerists that had escaped the carnage of their charge. Makvar saw the molten metal that dripped from the jaws of the daemonic juggernauts as they worried at the ratmen, the savage glee that distorted the mutated visages of their riders as they shattered skulls and severed arms with mattock and axe.

The walls around Makvar shook once more as they were battered by a tremendous impact. He turned from the sight of the broken catapults to gaze upon the creatures that had taken their place. Three enormous gargants, their man-like bodies branded and tattooed with the Blood God’s symbols, were wrenching stalagmites from the ground. Hefting their huge burdens, the towering gargants whipped them around in a swinging motion and flung them at the castle.

‘The vermin are from Clan Septik,’ Neferata declared, gesturing at the swarming ratmen. ‘They were among the first of their breed to gnaw their way into the roots of the Bonegrooves and spread their pestilence across the Realm of Death.’ She pointed her staff to where a great mass of the robed skaven were pushing an immense carriage topped by a great arch of pitted stone. From this arch a vast pendulum swung, its counterbalance drawn back by a crew of chittering ratkin, the gigantic metal cage fitted to its opposite end spewing a foul green vapour.

‘Kingdoms have been exterminated by their poxes,’ Neferata explained, ‘the dead so defiled with disease that only a supreme effort can rouse them from their plague pits.’

‘Sorcery wicked enough to overcome the black art of necromancy,’ Vogun mused. The Lord-Castellant had tied Torn’s carcass to his back, unwilling to leave his faithful gryph-hound where his remains might become the plaything of deathmages and corpsemasters.

‘It seems their plagues aren’t potent enough to avail them here,’ Knight-Azyros Huld said. He pointed to where a monstrous hulk of muscle and claws ravaged a congregation of ratmen, decimating them by the droves as it splashed their black blood across its crimson flesh.

‘Yet while the skaven keep the attention of the Khornate horde, we will find our own opportunity,’ Makvar declared. He cast his gaze across the Chaos horde, trying to find the overlord who led them. ‘If we can reach the Bloodking before they can overwhelm us…’

Neferata drew close to the Lord-Celestant, pointing across the sea of carnage. ‘Thagmok will be where the scent of blood is strongest,’ she said. ‘The madness of Khorne burns inside him and calls out to the blood shed in murder and battle. There! We will find him there.’

The spot Neferata directed Makvar’s gaze towards was a solid block of armoured blood warriors and burly skullreapers. A massive barbarian marching before them brandished an enormous icon of bronze fitted to a steel pole. Behind the mass of warriors, a red light pulsated, throbbing from a dull glow to a blazing intensity with eerily organic palpitations. Makvar couldn’t gain even the slightest glimpse of what exuded this gory luminance, but he felt it had to issue from the Chaos warlord himself.

Makvar took a moment to study the battlefield, evaluating the shifting tide of carnage. There were yet enough of the plague monks to contain the Bloodbound on the right flank. Using some of the stalagmites for cover, they might be able to win their way through the conflict unnoticed for a few hundred yards. After that, it was certain to be a brutal fight to reach the overlord.

‘We will make our descent as near to this position as we can,’ Makvar decided. He commanded his fellow Anvils to regard the line of stalagmites he intended to use for cover. He offered no illusions about their prospects, but if most of them fell, it would be worth the sacrifice if even one of them came to grips with the Bloodking. When he had explained his intentions, he turned to Neferata. ‘You should stay here, my lady. Nagash may need your abilities when he musters his legions to aid Sigmar.’

The Mortarch of Blood laughed at Makvar’s concern. Reaching out her hand, she ripped a fragment from the crenulations in front of them. ‘I am more than capable of acquitting myself in the fighting, and you will never reach the Bloodking without my aid.’

‘I am thinking beyond this battle,’ Makvar told her. ‘You are more important to the battle that is coming, the fight to reclaim Gothizzar and take the Allpoints.’

Neferata turned, pointing her staff at the ground. A ghostly mist began to form, a dark shadow swelling within it. Soon, it was apparent that she was summoning her abyssal steed Nagadron to her side. ‘The choice is mine to make,’ she said. ‘You have worked hard to broker an alliance between us. Allies do not desert one another before battle.’

Makvar could see the determination in Neferata’s eyes. She wouldn’t be denied. His fears that her loss here would hurt the war had to be balanced against killing such goodwill as she felt towards the Anvils and their cause. One of Nagash’s Mortarchs was already their foe, could they risk making a second their enemy?

‘As you wish,’ Makvar conceded, ‘but keep close to us.’ He pointed at the skeletal Nagadron as its shape grew into a semblance of solidity. ‘Don’t hesitate to retreat on your steed if the fight turns from a hopeless endeavour to an impossible one. Spare no thought for us. If a Stormcast falls, his spirit returns to Sigmaron. Reforged, we will fight again.’

Mannfred von Carstein could feel the power being siphoned away from Nachtsreik. The refuge he had spent so much time and energy to construct was crumbling around him. The blood that held the stones together was being leached away by the Khornate horde outside its walls. Now the spirits themselves were being drawn out of the fortress. He didn’t need to exert himself to know this was the doing of Nagash. Only the Great Necromancer had the ability to pierce the wards that imprisoned the ghostly masses.

Hate boiled inside Mannfred as he reflected upon the prodigious abilities of his master. For truly, Nagash was the vampire’s master. At the least moment, he could exert his will and reduce the Mortarch to naught but a puppet, a mere extension of the Death God.

Mannfred had had a reminder of Nagash’s authority during the fighting in the crypt. The strange compulsion that had stolen upon him to attack Lord-Celestant Makvar – he knew that could only have been issued by the Great Necromancer. He suspected that Neferata’s intervention, the poltergeist that foiled Gheistvor’s thrust and spared the Stormcast’s life, was likewise provoked by Nagash.

Left to his own devices, Mannfred would have been far more cunning about turning on the storm-knights. It stung his pride to be used in so blatant and crude a manner, moreso when his fellow Mortarch spoiled the ambush. Yet, all of it was part of a greater design, a strategy the vampire had yet to piece together. Nagash was neither impulsive or capricious. Everything the Lord of Death did was towards some ultimate purpose. He wouldn’t push Mannfred into attacking Makvar just to repent the decision and move Neferata to intervene.

The scene had been staged, and Mannfred was certain that the reason for such theatre was pursuing him through the halls of Nachtsreik. His conviction was justified by the hesitance that seized hold of him when he would choose one passage over another or drop down a particular trap door, make use of some hidden portal or pass through the ghostly face of a gallowglass. He could have lost his pursuer a dozen times over, but always he had been compelled to hold himself back.

Rounding a corner, Mannfred found himself in the colossal confines of his library. Treatises and texts from across the Mortal Realms filled cavernous stacks that spiralled up to the ceiling hundreds of feet above. Winding stairways fashioned from polished bone and yellowed ivory climbed each of the columnar stacks, lit by the ghostly orbs bound within the skulls that hung from their banisters. He could see the niches cut into the base of each stack where the guardians of his library reposed. It would be a simple thing to call out to them, to draw to him a regiment of grave guard that would occupy his pursuer while he slipped away.

The idea quickly faded, and Mannfred left the skeletons to rest in their shadowy posts. Even more than the fortress itself, he had invested too much effort creating this library. He had razed whole towns simply to secure single volumes. He wasn’t going to throw it all away because a storm-knight was chasing him. Instead, he drew upon the necromantic energies residing within the guards, extracting them to fuel a greater conjuration.

Fortunately, it seemed the influence Nagash exerted upon him made no objection when Mannfred summoned Ashigaroth from the shadows once more. There was no protest when he dimmed the orbs around him and used his magic to cloak himself and his steed in a shroud of darkness. With Gheistvor in his hand, he stared across the floor of the library, waiting for the hunter to show himself.

The storm-knight soon appeared, his dark armour reflecting the uncanny glow of the orbs. Mannfred recognised the battle-horn that hung at the warrior’s side. This was the one his companions had called Brannok. The Mortarch always found it amusing to know the names of his victims. It added a certain savour to the taste of their deaths. Before he could spur Ashigaroth to attack the storm-knight, the vampire found his attention drawn to a figure moving through the darkness at the base of the book-filled columns. It moved with too much speed and agility to be a skeleton accidentally roused from its rest. Nor did it move with the bluster and arrogance he had come to associate with the storm-knights.

Mannfred smiled when he sensed the nature of the stalker and deduced his purpose. He was one of Neferata’s thralls from the unmistakable vibration that coloured his aura. It appeared that the Mortarch of Night wasn’t the only one with unkind feelings towards the storm-knights. Watching with keen interest, Mannfred waited while Brannok and the vampire drew closer.

Brannok was searching every shadow for sight of his quarry. As careful as he was to conceal himself, Neferata’s thrall couldn’t hide from the storm-knight’s vigilance. Sword at the ready, the warrior rushed at the stalker. ‘Traitor,’ he hissed as he lunged at what he thought was Mannfred.

The storm-knight’s sword clashed against the thrall’s blade as he moved to parry the descending blow. Lightning flashed from Brannok’s weapon, briefly revealing the face of his adversary. Surprise at finding a different enemy than he expected caused his attack to falter for an instant. It was all the time the thrall needed to twist his body around and slam an armoured elbow into the storm-knight’s mask.

‘Queen Neferata is mine!’ the thrall roared as he strove to press his assault. Though the vampire possessed a strength many times that of a mortal man, his attack had barely phased Brannok. The storm-knight retaliated by driving the flat of his sword up into the thrall’s chin, cracking teeth and all but breaking his jaw.

‘I have no time to waste on you, Harkdron,’ Brannok snarled at the thrall. ‘Relent.’

Harkdron staggered back from the blow he had been dealt, spitting chips of tooth onto the floor. ‘Lord Harkdron,’ he hissed. The vampire charged Brannok in a burst of bestial frenzy. Though the storm-knight intercepted the flurry of slashes and thrusts Harkdron directed at him, he was steadily pushed back by the intensity of the attack.

‘You Stormcasts have humiliated me before my queen,’ Harkdron accused. ‘You think to steal her favour from me!’

Brannok continued to fall back, letting Harkdron work himself into a still greater fury. From his vantage, Mannfred could appreciate what the storm-knight was doing. He was letting the thrall slip deeper and deeper into his rage. Not with the aim of tiring Harkdron, for the undead knew no weariness, but to goad him into the unthinking savagery that would cause him to expose himself. Brannok was hoping to bring the contest to a swift conclusion.

The storm-knight would get his wish, but hardly in the fashion he had intended. By falling back, forcing Harkdron to chase him, Brannok was drawing close to the very column where Mannfred waited in the shadows. The Mortarch knew it wasn’t coincidence. The will of Nagash had sent him into the library, and that same will now made use of Harkdron to move Brannok into position.

Without warning, Mannfred spurred Ashigaroth forwards and charged Brannok. The Knight-Heraldor was smashed to the floor by the impact of the dread abyssal, the sword flying from his hand. While he was stunned, Mannfred commanded his steed to rip the battle-horn from his belt with one of its black claws.

Harkdron lunged at the fallen storm-knight, sword raised for a killing blow. Mannfred glared at the thrall, a deathly blast of necrotic wind hurling him back. ‘He isn’t yours,’ the Mortarch snarled.

From where he had been thrown by Mannfred’s magic, Harkdron glared at him. ‘I will have vengeance,’ he declared.

Ashigaroth pressed its claw against Brannok’s chest, keeping the storm-knight pinned to the floor. Mannfred dismounted and stood over the prostrate Knight-Heraldor. He held Gheistvor over the warrior’s throat. His other hand closed about the shard of glassy black stone from his sanctum. ‘Then let us have true vengeance,’ he told Harkdron. Viciously he drove the tip of his sword into Brannok’s neck.

Immediately there was a searing crackle of energy. Mannfred felt his arm go numb as power pulsed through Gheistvor. He thought of the Chaos sorcerer he had seen Nagash kill and the way her spirit had flown through the Mortis Blade and into the black stone he carried, defying the Mark of Tzeentch the witch had borne. Now, the same thing was happening, only this time it was the spirit of Brannok that was in contest and the claim of Sigmar being defied.

Pain burned through Mannfred’s body as the spiritual discharge rippled through Gheistvor. He could feel Brannok’s spirit trying to escape, to fly back to the God-King in Sigmaron. If the Mortarch relented for an instant, he knew the soul would escape his grasp. A will greater than his own steeled him, commanding him to endure despite the agony that ravaged him. Nagash demanded more than obedience. He demanded success.

Smoke rose from his seared skin by the time the ordeal was over and Mannfred rose from where Brannok had lain. He gazed down at his hand and the black stone he held. Faintly, he could feel the echo of the storm-knight’s soul. Brannok had been killed, but the Mortarch had been unable to confound the mighty enchantments that bound the storm-knight to Sigmar. After the briefest instant, there had been a blinding flash of light and the Knight-Heraldor was gone, hurtling back to Azyr.

‘What have you done?’ Harkdron asked. He had seen the Stormcasts in battle enough to know that what he saw now wasn’t normal.

Mannfred held up the black stone. ‘Discovered something interesting,’ he said. ‘Something of great value.’ He turned his head and studied Harkdron for a moment. ‘Neferata has been friendly with these storm-knights. She won’t thank you for turning against them.’ He laughed, a sound as cruel as the edge of a knife. ‘Fear not, she won’t learn of this from me. Not while you are useful.’

Harkdron stiffened, glancing at where his sword had fallen. ‘I will not betray my queen.’

‘You already have by attacking the storm-knight,’ Mannfred said. ‘At least it will seem so to her. I know the truth, but even if I told it to her I doubt she would believe.’ He shook his head. ‘No, she won’t have it, I think.’ A sly gleam shone in his gaze as he looked again at the black stone. ‘Perhaps things will be different later. Find someplace to keep yourself until then. I will send for you when the time is right.’

Mannfred exerted some of his own dominance, compelling Harkdron to return to the shadows. Neferata’s consort might prove useful to him in his intrigues, allowing he could regain her good graces. It would be useful to have an agent so close to the Mortarch of Blood, one he had a hold upon that went beyond mere magic.

Plans for Harkdron were for the future, however. Looking at the stone, Mannfred appreciated that he had more pressing matters to attend to. He knew what his master had expected of him, and that he had failed to achieve that purpose. But in failure he had made a tremendous discovery, one that he knew Nagash would be most eager to learn.

For when Brannok’s soul crackled through Gheistvor, Mannfred had noticed something that he felt certain had escaped even the Great Necromancer’s attention.

The screams and howls of the dying rang out across the havoc-strewn cavern. Mobs of diseased ratmen strove to pull down tribes of bloodreavers, the contagion drifting from censers scorched the lungs of blood warriors and left them choking on bits of their own burnt organs. Skullcrushers stampeded across broken swarms of skaven, the brazen hooves of the juggernauts pulverising the furry carcasses into paste. An amok slaughterpriest wallowed in the gore of butchered plague monks as he clove them with his massive axe.

Around this carnage the small group of Stormcasts made their way. Spells of concealment conjured by Neferata hid them from all but the nearest of their enemies. The Mortarch’s illusions couldn’t deceive those who drew too close, however. Fortunately, there were none who paid especial notice to the sounds of combat as the Anvils vanquished slinking ratmen and packs of scavenging Chaos hounds.

It was a far different matter when they drew the notice of two enormous beasts, abominable monsters that seemed the very embodiment of Khorne’s primal savagery. They were bigger than ogors, immense slabs of muscle bulging from their vaguely humanoid frames. Masses of bone protruded from their crimson flesh, curving outward into enormous claws and talons. A crest of horns sprouted from each monster’s back, arching over the shoulders to frame the ghastly stump of its head, almost as though in mockery of the halos worn by the Stormcasts’ commanders. The heads themselves were blackened skulls leering above gigantic lower jaws rife with vicious tusks and fangs. Other skulls, wet and dripping, were embedded in the flesh of the monsters, slowly absorbed into their bodies. Branded across their chests was the murderous skull-rune itself, pulsing with a grisly hunger.

‘Khorgoraths,’ Neferata whispered the word. ‘Wolves of the Blood God.’

Makvar tightened his grip on his runeblade. ‘Whatever they are, they are in our way.’ Whipping his stormcloak around, he sent a flurry of sigmarite hammers crackling into the glowing sockets that served the monsters as eyes. The assault worked no great harm upon the Khorgoraths, but the dazzle of crackling lightning was enough to blunt their charge, allowing the Anvils to take the momentum away from them.

No war cry rose from the Stormcasts as Makvar led them to the attack. Amidst the confusion of battle, the clash of blades and the screams of death might be unremarkable, but invocations of Sigmar’s holy name were certain to draw attention, whatever spells Neferata used to conceal their presence. So long as there was a chance of striking at the Bloodking, the ebon knights would do nothing to worsen those chances.

Makvar’s runeblade slashed across the leg of one Khorgorath, causing a slop of syrupy gore to bubble from the wound. The beast retaliated by bringing one of its huge claws snapping at him. Shaped like the disembodied skull of a dracoth, the bony claws narrowly missed him as they ripped the left pauldron from his shoulder.

One of the Liberators was rushing to support Makvar’s attack when the warrior was struck by a ropey tendril that erupted from the Khorgorath’s body. Shaped like a spike-tipped spinal column, the tentacle stabbed into the knight’s chest, punching through his plate and bursting from his back in a welter of gore. The impaled Liberator struggled for an instant as the spinal cord wrapped about him and dragged his dying frame back to the Khorgorath.

Makvar saw the flash of light as the Liberator’s spirit deserted his mangled flesh. He saw something more however. He saw a scarlet glow infuse the Khorgorath’s body. The wound inflicted by his runeblade was closing, healing as the murderous aura spread across it. The monster was regenerating.

The Lord-Celestant glared at his hulking foe. He refused to accept that the thing was unkillable or that the death of the Liberator had been in vain. Strengthened by a zealous defiance, he lunged back to the attack. This time his sword met the downward sweep of the reptilian claw. Lightning seared through the Khorgorath’s arm as the runeblade sheared through one of the bony claws and sent it spinning. The monster swung around, bringing its other arm pounding downwards, seeking to smash him like a bug. Makvar rolled beneath the blow, raking the edge of his weapon across the underside of the arm, splitting the crimson hide and severing the thick knots of sinew and muscle within.

Roaring more from frustration than pain, the Khorgorath reared back. Again the ropey tentacle of bone shot out, hurtling towards Makvar this time. The Lord-Celestant threw himself forwards, using the monster’s own bulk to shield him from the attack. He slashed his runeblade across the beast’s flank, sending a half-dissolved skaven skull spilling from the wound.

Makvar risked a glance at the other Khorgorath to see how his comrades were faring. Huld and Vogun kept the beast disoriented by alternating the rays of their lamps. The Lord-Castellant would shine his light from below and when the brute lurched away, Huld would swoop down to assault its senses with his celestial beacon. Whichever of them wasn’t distracting the Khorgorath with the light would rush in to hack at it with halberd and sword. All the while, the last Liberator was circling around the monster and darting in to bludgeon it with his hammer.

The frenzied roar of his own foe set Makvar charging back around the beast. When the Khorgorath’s tentacle shot at him again, he leapt past it and raked his sword across the rune etched across its chest. The monster staggered back, forgetting the Stormcast for an instant as it pawed at its newest injury. The skull-rune had been disfigured by Makvar’s slash and the light that had suffused it was fading away.

Bellowing in outrage, the Khorgorath stomped towards Makvar. Even as it did so, ghastly shapes whipped around the beast’s body. Spectral hands clutched at the crimson hide, withering it with their deathly touch. Phantom teeth bit into coils of muscle, worrying at the monster’s strength. Charging forwards on the back of Nagadron, Neferata pointed the Staff of Pain at the brute, a spear of dark magic leaping out to strike the abomination’s head. Tusks crumbled into dust as the Mortarch’s hideous necromancy ravaged the Khorgorath.

As the monster languished in the grip of Neferata’s sorcery, Makvar sprang at the Khorgorath. His runeblade crunched through the beast’s wrist, leaving one of its claws dangling by a strip of meat and skin. He followed the attack with a lunge that brought him flying at the skull-like head. Makvar’s sword flashed with holy energies as he brought its edge cleaving through the blackened pate, not relenting until the crackling sigmarite edge had ripped through not only the skull but the enlarged jaw beneath it. When he dropped back to the ground, he could see the Khorgorath stumble backwards, its head split in half by his attack. Crashing to its side, the monster made one futile effort to rise again, then was still.

Makvar turned away from his fallen foe to aid the other Anvils with their own adversary, but found that they too had prevailed, though with the loss of the last Liberator. Satisfied that Huld and Vogun at least were unharmed, he turned towards Neferata. ‘My thanks for your intervention, my lady. We can only pray that there are no more like these between ourselves and our objective.’

Neferata had a distant look in her eyes as Makvar spoke to her. A cold smile finally spread across her face. ‘I think the Bloodking’s armies will have other concerns to occupy them now.’ While she spoke, the sounds of conflict took on a new tone of agitation. The discordant strife sounded at its loudest at the back of the cavern, away from where the Bloodbound struggled against the skaven of Clan Septik.

It took Makvar only a moment to pick out the crack of thunder and the shouts of Stormcasts in these new sounds of combat. He wondered for an instant if this was some spell or illusion conjured by Neferata or Nagash, but the longer he listened, the more convinced he was that the noise was real. He could hear the war cries of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer. Somehow, his warriors had been brought to Nachstreik.

‘I can sense Kreimnar and your knights,’ Neferata told Makvar, verifying his thoughts. ‘With them marches an undead legion commanded by Arkhan. They close against the Bloodking’s horde from the rear, trapping them between the ratkin and themselves.’ A frown tugged at her mouth. ‘This is Nagash’s doing,’ she said, ‘but I fear that our forces are still too few to prevail.’

Makvar looked past the dead hulk of the Khorgorath, watching as the nearby tribes of Bloodbound reacted to this new threat. Chieftains and bloodstokers strove to control their crazed warriors, alternately trying to push them ahead to continue the fight with the skaven or else trying to turn them around to engage the Stormcasts and undead. For all their numbers, it was confusion that reigned over the Chaos horde. Fratricidal attacks between bloodreavers and wrathmongers unfolded before him as the Khornate host struggled against itself to reach its enemies. How much greater would that in-fighting and confusion become with Thagmok’s death?

‘They can gain us the time we need,’ Makvar declared. ‘We can yet reach the Bloodking.’

Lightning crashed down upon the battlefield, blasting great chunks of buildings from the ceiling as the thunderbolts speared through the roof. The debris smashed down upon the Chaos hordes below, crushing scores of barbarians beneath tons of stone. The thunderstrikes themselves immolated dozens more, hurling their smouldering remains across the cavern.

The greater impact was the turmoil the elemental assault wrought upon the Bloodbound. The minions of Chaos were stunned by the devastation, their senses reeling from the thunderous impacts. All but the most deranged among them was shaken, their rush to attack lost for several precious moments. Into that void of indecision, the legions of Arkhan charged.

Necromantic vitality pulsated from the Mortarch of Sacrament, infusing his skeletal warriors with increased speed and agility. When they struck the mobs of barbarians that had hurried to confront the menace to their rear, the undead attacked with the supernormal vigour, stabbing and hacking their enemies with a ferocity that nearly equalled that of the Chaos warriors.

From above, the hulking shape of a terrorgheist swooped down upon the Bloodbound, its deafening shriek rupturing organs and deafening entire tribes of bloodreavers. Still bearing the scars from its battle with the Anvils, the terrorgheist now flew alongside its former foes. Black-armoured Prosecutors dived down in the wake of the mammoth bat-beast’s assault, hurling their stormcall javelins into the disordered Khornate ranks. The explosive missiles sent limbs and bodies tumbling through the air.

More Anvils of the Heldenhammer came marching forth, a solid wall of shields and hammers that wheeled alongside the fleshless regiments of Arkhan’s army. Volleys of lightning arced up from behind the advancing Liberators as the Judicator retinues rained death upon the enemies who thought to rush the Stormcasts. A pack of wrathmongers, swinging their brutal flails overhead, managed to withstand the punishing archery, but before they could reach the shield wall they were beset by the Paladins who emerged from behind their comrades. Thunderaxes sheared through wrath-flails, lightning hammers melted armour and flesh, stormstrike glaives impaled snarling bodies and slashed through blood-gorged bellies. The infernal aura of madness and murder that emanated from the wrathmongers enflamed the zealous disdain with which the Paladins held their foes, goading them to the most savage violence.

Lord-Relictor Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon and drew down another bolt of divine lightning from the unseen heavens. Again, the holy storm lanced through the roof, sending a cascade of broken streets and toppled buildings slamming down upon the enemies below. One of the massive slaughterpriests saw the havoc and recognised its source. The shaven-pated berserker rallied a great company of blood warriors to him, leading them straight towards the skull-helmed Stormcast. Blood dripped from the enormous axe the madman bore, steaming as the hot liquid fell upon the cold earth. His scarred body devoid of armour, trusting to the savage beneficence of Khorne to guard him, the slaughterpriest charged Kreimnar.

The berserker never reached his prey. Lumbering out from behind the Liberators, Gojin swung his reptilian head towards the fanatic. A bolt of lightning shot from the dracoth’s jaws, searing through the slaughterpriest’s torso, evaporating his guts in a flash of electrical violence. Blinking in disbelief, the crazed champion slumped to the ground, horrified that no blood flowed from the charred mutilation he had suffered, that in death he had nothing to offer his god. The blood warriors who followed the slaughterpriest hesitated, stunned by the abrupt dissolution of their hero. Before they could recover their momentum, a retinue of Judicators levelled their boltstorm crossbows at the barbarians, unleashing a fusillade that annihilated them in a matter of heartbeats.

Arkhan himself led the advance on the opposite wing of his army. Troops of malignants galloped on their skeletal steeds while sinister morghasts flew overhead. A gruesome mortis engine glided forwards on a tide of phantoms, their ethereal essence supporting the exhumed reliquary of the cadaverous corpsemaster who guided the swirling ghosts with the gnarled staff he bore. Rank upon rank of skeletons marched behind the cavalry and mortis engine, the clatter of bones and corroded armour rolling from them like the rumble of an angry sea.

The Mortarch of Sacrament had called to him once more the grisly abyssal steed Razarak, the Doom of Traitors. Spurring the skeletal monster onwards, Arkhan loosed bolts of withering magic from his staff, draining the vigour from the Bloodbound before his undead warriors struck them. Weakened by the necromantic spells, the slaves of Chaos fell as easy prey to the charging malignants.

The combined forces of Arkhan’s undead and Kreimnar’s Anvils were cutting a path through the Bloodking’s horde, but despite the impetus of their attack, they had done little more than to seize hold of the Chaos host. Their advance was certain to falter as more and more of the crazed barbarians rushed to confront them. The fatal sting would have to come from another quarter.

Even from deep within Mannfred’s sanctum, Nagash watched the ebb and flow of the battle raging outside the walls of Nachtsreik. Whatever his Mortarchs saw, whatever they heard, was communicated back to the Great Necromancer.

The onset of Arkhan’s attack combined with the continued resistance of the skaven had broken the cohesion of the Bloodking’s horde, creating an opening through which Neferata and Makvar were pressing their advance. Nagash concentrated his focus upon the Mortarch of Blood and the Lord-Celestant, watching with grim evaluation as they stole towards the tribe of skullreapers who surrounded Thagmok.

The concealing illusion Neferata had woven around herself and the Stormcasts was shattered when they closed upon the mutated barbarians. Howling in alarm at the abrupt appearance of foes so near to them, the skullreapers hefted their massive weapons and rushed to the attack. Neferata’s sorcery slaughtered the first dozen before they had taken even a few steps, the fangs and jaws of Nagadron settled for half a dozen more. Makvar’s runeblade crackled as he brought his sword sweeping across the vicious steel of a spinecleaver, severing the head of the axe from its haft and rending the scarred hide of the mutant carrying it. Vogun’s halberd raked through the horned helm of another snarling barbarian, a twist of his blade sending the man sprawling into the arms of the tribesmen behind him. Huld, rising above the press of bodies, shone his celestial beacon down upon the crazed horde, seeking to burn the ferocity from their brains with the divine light of Sigmar.

The swirling phantoms that billowed around Neferata swept forwards to strike at the Chaos horde, but before they drew near the Bloodbound, they were dissipated by a crimson light. The Mortarch herself tried to conjure them once more, only to lurch back in Nagadron’s saddle, a stream of blood rushing from her nose. She felt the brutalising reverberation of a force inimical to magic, a blast of blood-soaked violence that streamed from the very realm of Khorne.

Through his Mortarch, Nagash could sense the source of this vibration that deadened her spells. The power pulsated from the bloodsecrator and the immense icon he bore. Hostile to all sorcery and magic, the Blood God had bestowed upon his disciples ways to oppose such powers when they were brought against them. The Great Necromancer hissed a warning to the vampire queen. Channelling energies straight from the domain of Khorne, there was no knowing the limits of the ward the bloodsecrator had created. It might even be enough to withstand the Lord of Death’s own necromancy.

‘Makvar!’ Neferata cried out. ‘The icon-bearer! He stifles my magic!’

The Lord-Celestant realised that without the arcane support of Neferata they would quickly be overcome. Calling to his fellow Stormcasts, he plunged into the mass of barbarians, leaving a litter of mangled bodies in his wake. Vogun followed at his side, guarding his commander as they ploughed a path through the skullreapers.

Before they could reach the bloodsecrator, a crimson glow appeared in their path. The skullreapers fell back, even the most crazed among them unwilling to fight Makvar and Vogun now. The two Anvils had drawn the attention of Thagmok, and now they were the Bloodking’s prey.

As the barbarians parted, their gorelord was revealed. He was an enormous man, prodigious in his brawny proportions. Plates of red steel edged in bronze guarded his body, each piece of armour pulsing and flowing with a grisly light. The red patina that covered each piece of mail dripped and flowed, bubbling like molten blood. Lashed to his back was a crest, the skull-rune cast in gleaming bronze and adorned with the withered heads of fallen enemies. A cape that looked as though it might have been cut from the wing of a terrorgheist fell from his shoulders. The helm that encased his face had been crafted from a bleached skull, grisly sigils cut into its forehead. Thagmok’s eyes stared out from the pits of his mask, red-rimmed pools of homicidal ferocity.

In Thagmok’s hand he carried an immense double-headed axe that pulsated with the murderous power of Khorne. His other hand gripped the steel chain that restrained a gigantic creature that appeared to mix the worst qualities of lizard and hound. A frill of leathery skin unfolded around the daemonic beast’s neck as it strained to reach the Stormcasts.

‘A poor offering for the Skull Throne,’ Thagmok growled, each word spat with a fury of contempt. In a single motion, he loosed his flesh hound, leaving the daemon to rush at Vogun while he hurled himself upon Makvar.

Makvar tried to parry Thagmok’s axe, but for once, he found a weapon that was the equal of his runeblade. The lightning of his sword sparked and fizzled, unable to penetrate the bloodthirsty essence bound into the axe. The gorelord brought his fist cracking around, smashing into Makvar’s mask. The Anvil staggered from the blow, narrowly blocking the savage sweep of the Bloodking’s weapon.

Through Neferata, Nagash could see the deadly energies rippling across the Bloodking’s axe. Like the icon carried by the bloodsecrator, the axe could cleave a rift between the Realm of Death and the brazen hell of Khorne. Only the axe wouldn’t extract energy from the brass hells – it would send something through. Let so much as a drop of Makvar’s blood touch the blade and he would be rent from the reality of Shyish and descend into the Blood God’s domain.

The loss of Makvar would inconvenience Nagash’s own plans, yet he wouldn’t expose himself while the icon of Khorne yet had the power to deflect his necromancy. At his urging, Neferata cried out to Huld as the Knight-Azyros started to dive down at the Bloodking. ‘The icon! You must break its power!’ The vampire queen herself was beset by a vengeful crush of skullreapers. Without her magic, it was all she could do to fend off the barbarians. Huld was their only hope of striking down the bloodsecrator.

Huld angled away from Makvar and Thagmok, instead soaring towards the icon bearer. Soon he was out of Neferata’s sight, and likewise beyond Nagash’s vision. Through his Mortarch, the Great Necromancer again focussed upon the contest between the Lord-Celestant and the gorelord.

Makvar was a study in discipline and tactics, resisting the bloodthirsty rage the mere presence of Thagmok aroused in his mind. The Bloodking was a savage contrast, hurling himself against his foe in frenzied bursts of violence, hacking away at him in a brutal expression of insanity. The double-headed axe pounded against Makvar’s armour, crumpling the sigmarite plates, smashing them out of shape. Only the swiftness of his parries denied Thagmok the force to rip through his armour, but Makvar knew the gorelord had stolen the momentum from him. He was on the defensive, simply trying to hold the enemy back.

While the skullreapers dared not intervene in the fray, the same restraint had no claim upon Vogun. The Lord-Castellant was able to blunt the ferocity of the flesh hound with his warding lantern, providing him with all the advantage he needed to vanquish his foe and send the daemonic dog howling back into the domain of Khorne. The contest hadn’t left him unmarked, however, and a stream of blood flowed from the grisly bite the hound had delivered to his shoulder. The injury left his arm sagging at his side, but Vogun wouldn’t desert Makvar.

The Lord-Castellant’s halberd came whipping around, crunching down into Thagmok’s arm. The weird crimson plates ruptured under the sigmarite blade, molten blood gushing from the gouged metal. Vogun was momentarily blinded by the escaping steam. As he shielded his eyes, the Bloodking turned on him, driving his hideous axe into the Anvil’s side. There was a rending, shrieking sound like the shredding of metal, and a jagged fissure rimmed in scarlet opened around Vogun. A kick of Thagmok’s boot sent the wounded Stormcast plunging through the rift.

Makvar howled in outrage and rushed at Thagmok. The gorelord turned to meet him, laughing as he gloated over the Lord-Celestant’s abandonment of discipline. He caught the descending runeblade between the blades of his axe, turning the weapon around so that he could draw the Anvil closer to him. ‘I have sent your friend to Hungry Khorne,’ he snarled. ‘Let my axe taste your blood, and I will do the same to you.’

Thagmok kicked out with his boot, smashing his foot into Makvar’s knee. The Stormcast staggered but refused to fall, even when the Bloodking repeated the assault. The continued defiance of his opponent seemed to both amuse and infuriate the gorelord. He was confident of the outcome of their struggle, yet irritated that he should squander so much time on a single foe.

A dying scream rang out, crisp and sharp above the din of battle. Huld climbed into the air, the immense icon of Khorne clenched in his hands, the lifeblood of its owner splashed across his armour. With a gesture of contempt, he swung the icon downwards, sending it to crash among the skullreapers.

The warding effect was broken. The protection Khorne had bestowed upon Thagmok’s entourage was gone.

From the walls of Nachtsreik, a black storm billowed outwards. A spectral tempest, a hurricane of phantoms and ghosts that roared across all in its path. Congregations of skaven vanished in the consuming darkness, their squeals of terror lost in the wailing surge. Tribes of bloodreapers were torn to ribbons as ethereal claws slashed their flesh. Spilling across the cavern, rolling in like a tide of death, the hurricane swept onwards, driving towards the heart of the Bloodbound horde.

There was no fear in Thagmok as he turned to face the oncoming storm. While his skullreapers broke and fled, he stood his ground. Raising his axe high, he shouted his resolve at the Lord of Death. ‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows!’

Out from the raging fury of spectres, the skeletal figure of Nagash emerged. The Great Necromancer gripped the Mortis Blade in his bony claw, one of the black stones pressed close against its hilt. The fleshless face loomed over Thagmok, the pitiless depths of eye sockets piercing the skull-helm the Bloodking wore. With a howl of fury, the gorelord charged at Nagash. The Mortis Blade crashed against the Chaos lord’s axe, ripping it from his fingers.

‘There will be no blood,’ Nagash hissed at his foe. Viciously, he drove his black sword into Thagmok’s breast, tearing through ribs, heart and lungs. Into the dying gorelord’s mind, he projected a final thought. You are no longer Khorne’s. Now you belong to me. The Great Necromancer felt the tremor of Thagmok’s spirit coursing through his sword, drawn down into the glassy stone.

‘Such is the fate of all who oppose Nagash,’ the Lord of Death declared, his words booming like thunder across the cavern.

The skaven needed no further prompting to hasten their flight, but some of the Bloodbound were too lost to their frenzied bloodlust to quit the field. Nagash sent his spirit hosts roaring about the battlefield to crush them. Dead, they would be of use to him. Alive, they were simply an obstacle.

Nagash turned away from Thagmok’s corpse. There would be time enough to claim it later. For now, he was more concerned with the Stormcasts. He found both Makvar and Huld kneeling beside a ravaged carcass, the remains of Torn the gryph-hound. It seemed Vogun had cut the carcass loose before he was drawn down into Khorne’s hells.

Makvar looked up at the Great Necromancer. ‘It was our comrade’s desire that we take Torn away with us.’

‘Do as you like,’ Nagash pronounced. He gestured at the carnage-strewn cavern around them. ‘There is carrion enough here to build the legions we need to retake Gothizzar.’ He nodded to Makvar, acknowledging the unspoken question that was on his lips. ‘Yes, the Realm of Death will fight beside you for the Allpoints. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer have proven their quality. I am satisfied that together we may make Archaon Evercursed suffer for his manifold atrocities.’

The surviving Stormcasts followed their skeletal guide through the black vaults beneath Nachtsreik. Though they had lost many brothers in the struggle, Makvar felt they could all take pride that their perseverance had brought them at length to victory. They had secured the alliance with the Realm of Death. The undead legions of Nagash himself would now rally to Sigmar’s cause. To the already mighty array of forces the God-King had mustered to attack the Allpoints, now could be added the terrifying creations of the Great Necromancer.

Yes, they had cause to take pride in their accomplishment, but as he led his warriors through the labyrinth, hastening towards the realmgate buried deep beneath Mannfred’s fortress, Makvar couldn’t quiet his own misgivings. He felt they had made a true ally of Neferata, or at least as close as the vampire queen could come to friendship. At the same time, Mannfred had proven himself a dire enemy, filled with thoughts of revenge for the Hallowed Knights expelling him from the Realm of Beasts. Though the vampire had fled from his master, Makvar worried the Mortarch would find a way to crawl back into Nagash’s confidence. From all they had seen, the Lord of Death set great store in the power and council of his Mortarchs.

Then there were their missing comrades. Brannok hadn’t returned from chasing Mannfred. Kreimnar echoed the sentiment that either the Knight-Heraldor would succeed in his hunt or else his spirit would return to Sigmaron, but for some reason, Makvar couldn’t shake a feeling of unease regarding Brannok.

Vogun’s fate was even more disturbing. Makvar patted the carcass of Torn tied to Gojin’s saddle. The Lord-Castellant had been hurled into the realm of Khorne itself. The thought of him wounded and alone in such a hellish domain…

Makvar chided himself for these worries. There was enough to occupy his mind. He had to focus on the battle ahead, the titanic conflict that would be fought for control of the Allpoints. Worries about his missing companions were secondary to the greater needs of the war. Just as their reservations about the dark powers and fell deeds of Nagash and his undead had to be set aside, so too did his concerns for Brannok and Vogun.

Now, there was only the call to battle. A call every Stormcast Eternal was bound to answer.

EPILOGUE

Thunder boomed as Lord-Celestant Makvar brought his hammer smashing down into the bird-like helm of a Chaos champion. Lightning flashed as his sword hacked through the furred shoulder of a goat-headed gor. His dracoth’s jaws fell open, spewing a crackling bolt of electricity into the advancing mob of howling barbarians that turned a half dozen of them into steaming corpses. ‘For Sigmar God-King! We are the Anvil upon which the foe shall break!’

All around him, the black-armoured Anvils of the Heldenhammer took up Makvar’s cry. Stolid ranks of Liberators tightened their shield wall, filling in the gaps left by comrades cut down by the press of foes that surged all around them. Volleys from Judicator bows rained down on the charging masses of monsters, mutants and madmen. Fusillades from boltstorm crossbows slaughtered entire warbands, strewing the ground with misshapen bodies. Overhead, winged Prosecutors dived down into armoured Chaos knights, hurling their stormcall javelins at the cavalry with explosive effect. Knight-Azyros Huld swooped around the Prosecutors, using his celestial beacon to fend off the grotesque, manta-like daemons that slithered through the eldritch half-night that yawned above the All-gate of Gothizzar.

‘The filth of Archaon will drown us in their blood,’ Lord-Relictor Kreimnar called to Makvar. He thrust his relic-weapon to the sky for what seemed the thousandth time, calling down still another shower of divine retribution that came searing down into a herd of capering pink-skinned daemons. The undulating pack of horrors exploded into vivid flashes of swirling energy, some vanquished entirely by the fury of the lightning, others tearing themselves apart to reform into smaller, blue-skinned abominations. Pink and blue, the surviving horrors raised a discordant ululation of gibbering fury, rushing still faster towards the embattled Stormcasts.

‘We will hold,’ Makvar shouted back to Kreimnar. Gojin reared back, the dracoth’s claws stamping down on the body of a mutated Chaos champion, crushing the man’s armour beneath his reptilian bulk. The stink of the treacle that oozed from the smashed body was too sweet to bear any kinship to human blood.

Makvar looked across what was a vast ocean of conflict. Everywhere his gaze fell, he saw the horned helms and bestial heads of enemy warriors. The diseased hulks of gigantic maggoths, their heads reduced to masses of wormy growths, their limbs swollen with rotten gasses and putrid bile, lumbered through tribes of plague-ridden marauders as they gleefully sought to close upon the Stormcasts. Raging slaughterbrutes hurled their monstrous mass against shield walls, ripping and tearing with their savage claws and lashing tails. Armoured chosen of Chaos hacked at Paladins with their corrupt swords and arcane axes. Towering gargants cast immense boulders across the field, pulverising entire retinues of Judicators. Daemonic chariots drawn by insect-headed steeds ploughed into ranks of Liberators, the lascivious charioteers slashing at them with snapping claws and stinging whips. In the coruscating skies, daemonic flies and slavering chimeras fought against radiant-winged Prosecutors.

Makvar’s runeblade hacked through the arm of a howling chosen, hurling the warrior’s body back onto the weapons of his comrades. Not for the first time, the Lord-Celestant cast an anxious look at the dark portal that glowered behind the Anvils. The gateway back to Nagash’s underworld. It was from here that the armies of the Great Necromancer were meant to inject themselves into the battle. With every passing moment, Makvar felt doubt swell within him that they even would.

The legions of the undead could turn the tide against Archaon’s forces. The deathly magics of Nagash and his Mortarchs would overwhelm the wearied Chaos sorcerers and their daemonic masters. The horrible beasts that soared over the battlefield would be slaughtered by the terrorgheists and zombie dragons reanimated by the black arts of the Realm of Death.

The Lord-Celestant was reluctant to accept that they had been betrayed, that the Great Necromancer’s armies weren’t coming. As though guessing his commander’s mind, Kreimnar cried back to him his own words. ‘We will hold.’

Makvar turned his face from Gothizzar for the last time. He glared at the enormity of Archaon’s horde. The outrage blazing inside him transformed itself into a steely defiance. ‘We will do more than hold!’ he shouted. ‘We will win!’

Spurring Gojin forwards, Makvar led his Stormcasts into the teeming hosts of Chaos. It would take much enemy blood to blot out his failure to bring Nagash to the battlefield. He vowed he would make good the debt before he fell.

Cyclopean in its enormity, the gargantuan cavern was so immense that it could have swallowed both Nulahmia and Mephitt and still felt like an empty wasteland. In all Nagash’s underworlds, there was no vault so vast as that of Nekroheim. The dead of entire civilizations had surrendered their bones to form the walls and ceiling of the sprawling expanse. Legions of ghost-wisps glowed from the sockets of the skulls that stared from the skeletal surroundings, filling the cavern with an eerie green luminescence that magnified rather than dispelled the shadows that stretched across the black, rocky floor.

Nagash enjoyed the awed silence that held Neferata as she gazed upon his endeavour for the first time. Her astonishment would swell beyond proportion when she discovered the purpose of it all. He had crafted his Mortarchs to be the mightiest of his undead, demigods to serve as extensions of his own power, yet they had their limitations. Despite the countless lifetimes of existence their deathless state had given them, they still thought with a mortal-taint dulling their minds. Even the ever-loyal Arkhan the Black suffered from this handicap, though he at least had the wisdom to recognise it and seek to overcome it through unwavering fealty.

The Lord of Death walked beside Neferata as they advanced deeper into the cavern towards the megalithic structure being raised by an army of skeletons. It was nearly complete now, its outlines unmistakable. A gigantic pyramid, half a mile wide at its base and almost a quarter mile tall once its capstone was set into place. The moment for that event had yet to arrive, however. But it would be soon. Very soon.

‘A Black Pyramid,’ Neferata said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. The Black Pyramids had been the centres of Nagash’s power, wellsprings from which he could draw the energies of Shyish and the death-force exuding from all the Mortal Realms. By and large, they had been razed by Archaon’s forces in the War of Bones, only fragments of them rescued. The Obelisk of Black had been one such sliver. So too had been the black stones with which Mannfred surrounded his sepulchre and the monoliths that had been revered by the pharaohs of Mephitt. Across the Realm of Death, deathmages and necromancers, corpsemasters and vampires, kings and priests had secreted the sorcerous rubble from the Black Pyramids, unknowingly preserving and protecting them until the Lord of Death had need of them once more.

‘Not a Black Pyramid,’ Nagash corrected the vampire queen. ‘The Black Pyramid. This is the crowning glory of my long seclusion, the result of centuries of study and experiment. It is grander in scale than any that has come before it. As its size has been magnified, so too have its arcane affinities.’ He raised his claw and waved it across the expanse of the towering structure. ‘This will do more than simply feed and replenish my power. It will extend it. Expand it. Allow my magic to reach into places previously denied to it.’

Nagash reached within his robe and drew forth a sliver of translucent black stone. It was one of the shards from Mannfred’s tomb, but Neferata could at once see that it was changed. There was a strange energy bound within it. It took her a moment to understand. When he saw that she did, the Great Necromancer nodded. ‘Yes, the spirit of the sorceress Molchinte. One who bore the brand of Tzeentch upon flesh and soul. Something that should have been beyond my power to claim.’

‘But no longer, my Master?’ Neferata asked.

‘Anything that holds or held the essence of death within it is again mine to claim,’ Nagash declared. A ghoulish laugh rattled through the fleshless god. ‘Yes, even Sigmar’s storm-knights,’ he answered the question Neferata dared not ask. He turned from her, pointing his staff at a trio of figures walking towards them from the shadows. The presence of Arkhan came as no surprise to Neferata, but the liche-king’s companion did. Mannfred von Carstein.

As he approached, Mannfred bowed in contrition to the Lord of Death. Like Nagash, he produced a sliver of black, glassy stone. ‘The storm-knight’s spirit couldn’t be held,’ he said.

Neferata turned back towards Nagash. ‘You set him against the Stormcasts? You permitted it? What if his comrades should learn what has befallen their companion? What will become of our alliance with Sigmar?’

‘There will be no alliance,’ Arkhan stated. ‘The legions promised to Makvar are needed here to speed the construction of the pyramid.’

‘But if Archaon retains his hold upon the Allpoints–’ Neferata started to object. Nagash silenced her with a wave of his hand.

‘A victory for the hordes of Chaos would serve against me,’ Nagash said. ‘But I would gain nothing if Sigmar were to be triumphant. A stalemate serves me best. To prolong the war. To draw out the struggle.’

Neferata shook her head. ‘I don’t understand. The Realm of Death would be liberated. The hordes of Chaos would be expelled from your domain.’

A fell light blazed in the pits of Nagash’s skull. ‘Your ambitions are still those of flesh, my lovely Neferata.’ He turned and stared at Mannfred. ‘Even your scheming and plotting is limited. You do not aspire to the desires of a god!’

Nagash raised the sliver of stone in his hand, pointing it at the growing pyramid. ‘The whole structure will be given a facing of these stones. The debris of its predecessors will become its skin, feeding into a grand reservoir of dark magic. I will use that power to claim the spirits of all who perish in the Realm of Death – whatever god thinks to keep them from me.’

‘You will provoke the wrath of Sigmar,’ Neferata said, fear in her eyes. Mannfred’s sneering expression turned sour at her words, for he was only too aware what daunting foes the Stormcasts could be.

The Great Necromancer shook his crowned head. ‘Sigmar busies himself with the war against Chaos. Even should he turn his attentions towards me, I have sown the seeds of uncertainty in his mind.’ He extended his arms towards his Mortarchs. ‘The Stormcasts know Mannfred as an enemy, rife with treachery. If I have turned against Sigmar, perhaps it is Mannfred’s poisoned council that has made it so. Through Neferata’s attempts to forge her own alliance with them, the Stormcasts see her as their friend. Perhaps she will be able to sway me and make me favour the God-King’s war.’ Nagash clenched his hand into a skeletal fist. ‘Hope is a delusion that may cloud even the judgement of a god. So long as he is uncertain, Sigmar will entertain his hopes. It may yet come to pass that an alliance with Azyr will serve my purposes. But that day is not today.’

Mannfred’s visage took on an aspect of haughtiness, a sly gleam in his eyes. ‘Are you certain it is you who intends to betray the God-King?’ the vampire asked. He held out the black shard which Brannok’s soul had touched. ‘There was something familiar about the storm-knight’s spirit when I drew it from his body. Something so tantalisingly familiar. Perhaps you might tell me what it is, Master?’

Nagash glowered at the arrogant Mortarch. He would have punished Mannfred for his mockery, but he too had felt that unaccountable sensation about Makvar and his Anvils of the Heldenhammer. They had been different from the Stormcasts he had encountered before. Until now, he had been unable to discover why. As he wrenched the vampire’s discovery from his mind, the Lord of Death suddenly understood what it was that rendered the Anvils so familiar, so dissimilar from their comrades.

The soul that had touched Mannfred’s shard was from Shyish. It was the spirit of a mortal that should have passed into Nagash’s keeping. Instead, it had been poached by Sigmar, reforged into one of his Stormcast Eternals. While the Great Necromancer fought alone against the hordes of Archaon, Sigmar had been stealing the spirits of his realm’s mortal warriors.

The Great Necromancer looked up at his Black Pyramid. ‘Do not concern yourself with matters beyond your position,’ he warned Mannfred. ‘I will decide when it is time to reclaim what belongs to me. What are a few dead souls when balanced against the fate of all the Mortal Realms?’

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas including the bestselling Raven’s Flight. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah, Rise of the Ynnari: Ghost Warrior, Jain Zar: The Storm of Silence and Asurmen: Hand of Asuryan. He also wrote the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and much more besides. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Rob Sanders is the author of the Horus Heresy novellas Cybernetica and The Serpent Beneath, the latter of which appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the The Beast Arises novels Predator, Prey and Shadow of Ullanor, the Warhammer 40,000 titles Sons of the Hydra, Skitarius, Tech-Priest, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken. He has also written the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos, along with many short stories for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novel Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

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.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy Primarchs novel Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix, and the audio dramas Blackshields: The False War and Blackshields: The Red Fief. His Warhammer 40,000 work includes Lukas the Trickster, Fabius Bile: Primogenitor, Fabius Bile: Clonelord and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt. He has written many stories set in the Age of Sigmar, including the novels Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Nagash: The Undying King, Soul Wars and Shadespire: The Mirrored City. His tales of the Warhammer Old World include The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, and two Gotrek & Felix novels. He lives and works in Sheffield.

Matt Westbrook has written The Realmgate Wars: Bladestorm for Age of Sigmar, and the novel Medusan Wings for Warhammer 40,000. He lives and works in Nottingham.

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammer of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

An extract from Neferata: Mortarch of Blood.

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.

A Black Library Publication

The Prisoner of the Black Sun, Sands of Blood, The Lords of Helstone and The Bridge of Seven Sorrows first published as audio dramas in 2015.
‘Beneath the Black Thumb’, ‘Eye of the Storm’, ‘The Solace of Rage’, ‘Knight of Corruption’, ‘The Trial of the Chosen’, ‘In the Lands of the Blind’, ‘Blood and Plague’ and ‘See No Evil’ first published in Call of Archaon in 2015.
Warbeast, Fury of Gork, Bladestorm and Lord of Undeath first published in 2016.
The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful first published as audio dramas in 2016.
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 Alex Boyd.

The Realmgate Wars: Volume 2 © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. The Realmgate Wars: Volume 2, 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: 978-1-78030-964-4

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.

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