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Blood of the Flayer – Richard Strachan

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Profit’s Ruin’

A Black Library Publication

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Blood of the Flayer

Richard Strachan

She came to him in the wreckage of another Muspelzharr town, a petty settlement of rough farmland where they tilled the ore and sold it on to the Freeguild furnaces in far Andar. Through the choking smoke she moved, past corpses smeared across the dusty grass. By a tent of skinned hides there was a mound of severed heads, and carved on each was an eight-pointed star. There was lament on the air, the old blade-song of widowed women and old men mourning their sundered sons. They would follow them soon enough.

The warlord stood with his back to her, staring up into the cobalt sky. High up there, like meteors, moved specks of light.

‘You waste your prisoners, Lord Huthor,’ she said boldly. ‘They can last for days in the sweetest agonies, if you know how.’

He was a large and brutal man, she saw, scarred in the face, his skin battered by decades of Chamon’s flensing winds. He pointed at the lights.

‘Do you know what those are?’ he asked.

‘Yes, lord,’ she said, coming near. ‘Duardin sky-craft, trading vessels of those who style themselves “Overlords”. They come from the Ashpeaks and make for Barak-Zon, if I am not mistaken.’

‘Barak-Zon?’

‘Their sky-port.’ She bowed. ‘As I understand these things.’

‘Overlords… I thought so. I’ve seen them often in the last few days. I thought them an omen, at first…’ His voice trailed off, and his hand was white-knuckled on the hilt of his sword.

‘I do not know if they are an omen, my lord,’ the woman said. ‘But if they are then they must be a good one. For I am Dysileesh, and I bring you great tidings.’

‘If I could but reach up,’ he said softly, ‘and pull them down from the aether, I would do so… But you have to marvel at them,’ Huthor laughed. ‘With sweat and toil, to put a crafted thing into the air and sail it like that through the mineral tides – such courage!’ He turned to the man at his side. ‘Don’t you think, Vhoss?’

Vhoss, a hard and compact warrior, his shaved head flecked with scars, gruffly agreed. ‘Aye, Lord Flayer’ he said. ‘You can’t doubt their courage.’

‘And for what?’ Huthor spat, his mood shifting. ‘Coin. Trade. Lives ordered by the numbers they scrawl in a ledger.’

Dysileesh, seizing her moment, moved forward. She stroked his forearm. ‘And wouldn’t you like to tear those lives down, my lord? Wouldn’t you like to seize those riches for yourself? Fame you shall have, as well as power. Come,’ she said, and into that one word she put all the art of her influence, her intoxicating presence. ‘Let us talk. I bring tidings of the Dark Prince, the Lord of Excess… You have drawn the eye of Slaanesh, and power untold is yours if you pledge yourself to him.’

Huthor stared down into those violet eyes, and for the first time he took her in entire – the single dark lock cascading from her crown; the chain that linked the silver hoops in her ear and eyebrow and nose; her sickening smell, more alluring than the stench of battle.

‘Sweet tears have you spilled on the altar of Ruin,’ she whispered closely, ‘but the Dark Gods are jealous, and generous to those who dedicate themselves to their service. Make obeisance to the Prince, and all things shall be yours to savour and command. Does not your eye crave more luxurious sights, your tongue crave finer tastes than cheap fare and peasant women? And does not your lust run deeper than simple murders in the dirt… Seek Slaanesh with me and I will show you the thrill of torments untold, the ecstasies to be found in the depths of gluttony and starvation…’

Her tongue, a purple, serpentine thing, flicked madly from her lips, and her eyes blazed with lilac fire.

Others to whom she had made this entreaty would have strained to possess her by now, or would have been lost in greedy dreams of power. But the Flayer only took her arm in his iron grip and pulled her close. His face was a mask, grim and unyielding, scarred by battle. He drew her towards the tent. ‘Come then,’ he said. ‘Let me hear what the Dark Prince has to offer…’

It was on a whim, he told himself later. No more than that. A woman as devastating as any he had ever seen; his soul smouldering with black fire and eager to expand into new experiences; a grasp that exceeded his reach – all these things made him take the Godseeker into his tent. He would walk her path for a while, he told himself. Why not? A gift freely given is seldom scorned. And when he was bored of it, he would kill her and cast her body to the dogs.

With blasphemous orgies and sickening violence, with ecstasies of wine and song, the Raging Tide followed Dysileesh’s teachings, scouring the plains of Gazan Zhar in a decadent whirlwind. They raided the caravanserais of the free cities, looting fine silks and precious jewels to decorate their wargear. They made cloaks from the skins of their victims and found the most intense pleasures in the limits of their endurance. A troupe of Hellstriders on their freakish reptilian mounts soon swelled Huthor’s ranks, and the warband’s savage tribal marks were slowly replaced by sinuous tattoos, kohl-rimmed eyes and mocking smears of perfumed oil. Across the plains they plundered for a while, leaving in their passing a sweet and cloying musk, the wail of grief and torment.

Dysileesh was owned by no man or woman of the warband, and although she stayed most often in Huthor’s tent she lavished her attention on Elizha too, one of Huthor’s charioteers, riding with her as the warband raided across the plains. Soon she took up with Vhoss, Huthor’s most trusted lieutenant, although when she announced that she was pregnant Huthor did not reveal his suspicions. Vhorrun, born on the plunder-path, came screaming into the Mortal Realms like a true son of Chamon. His pale skin gleamed like silver, and the thick spikes of his black hair were dusted with gold. Violet eyes looked from an unforgiving face, but Huthor couldn’t say who his father might be. No matter. Like his own father, Huthor thought, he was not made to suffer children. So the warband grew, and the further they went on this path, the deeper Huthor plunged into the worship of Slaanesh, dedicating his pains and his pleasures to the Dark Prince and yet in his pride never straying too far from the road of his own self-made fate.

No god ordered his path, he said. He made his own.

They raided on impulse, moving through the mutable land as plateaus melted and reformed around them, as valleys raised themselves into rough, saw-toothed spines that marked the plains like a godbeast’s grave.

After a season they found themselves straying towards the Beryllium Coast, where the pickings were richer. It was there, in a chill dusk, that they first came across the ruins of the Golden Fortress. As the warband marched through a desolate landscape, the sultry plains behind them and the Onoglop Swamps to the north, the walls of the shattered stronghold rose from the sea mists to meet them.

‘What is this place?’ Huthor asked Dysileesh as he swung down from his horse. The warband dismounted around him. Elizha reared back the mounts of her chariot and coiled her silver whip in her hand. ‘I don’t like it, lord,’ she said. ‘The wind smells of sickness and death.’

‘That’s just the swamps on the breeze,’ Dysileesh said. She stepped from the chariot, drawing her silken robes around her and gazing with wonder at the tarnished gold of the fortress walls. They were hazy and indistinct in the mist, like the dream of something vaster than the eye could understand. Weeds and scour-grass choked the pathways that led to the massive iron doors, which listed on their hinges. The fortress, Huthor saw as they drew nearer, had not been built, as such. No mortal hand had cast this place. Rather, the land itself had reared it into being, extruding it from the dark and granular soil like a tooth from a gum.

‘In truth, I’m not sure,’ Dysileesh admitted to him. ‘I have heard rumours, but I have never seen it for myself. A fortress made of purest Chamonite, some say, although we see now that it is not the case. Gold, my lord. The Dark Prince gives, and you shall receive! Gold and splendour beyond your wildest dreams!’

‘You cannot imagine,’ Huthor said, ‘how wild my dreams really are.’

The fortress was silent and empty, its cavernous halls looming around them as they led their steeds through. Rotting tapestries depicted scenes from the Age of Myth – Grungni forging the Nineteen Wonders, the lode-griffon uncoiling above the Godwrought Isles. Of the original inhabitants there was no other sign, and whatever race or nation had secured this impossible bastion had been lost in mists of time as dense as the mists that billowed from the Beryllium Sea.

The warband made camp, and they stayed for years. The Golden Fortress became their keep.

‘When I was a boy,’ he told her, ‘I lived alone with my father. He was a simple man, earning a meagre wage from cutting ironthorn branches in the forest and melting them down for slag – he had no more skill than that. He was a brutal man, who feared Sigmar.’

Huthor leaned over the side of the bed and spat on the ground at the God-King’s name. Dysileesh drew languidly near across the sheets. Above them, a polished gold ceiling cast back their reflections, distorted by the metal so that they both looked strangely elongated, like pale snakes basking lazily in a savage sun.

‘He beat me every day of my life,’ Huthor went on, ‘and then one day – whether from drunkenness or poverty or simple indifference – he abandoned me deep in the woods. He hoped I would die and free him of responsibility. He craved order in his life, and children are nothing if not disorder personified… I had no idea how to get home. It was cold, silent. No light came through the canopy. High above me I could hear the crackling of the mantys-birds, hopping through the branches, sharpening their copper beaks.’

‘How did you escape?’ Dysileesh asked him. She trailed her fingers over his chest, tracing the lines of the torture scars she had given him. The air stank of the young man they’d recently skinned, whose body lay cooling on the chamber’s marble floor. Three days he had lasted; it had been exquisite.

‘I didn’t. I found an ironthorn branch and armed myself, fighting off the mantys-birds whenever they came too near. I hacked my way through the forest for days, on and on. I was starving. I had never been so scared.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Seven.’

‘So young…’

‘Old enough. Eventually I came to a path I recognised, and at the end of this path was a crossroads. I stood there. I knew the choice had been laid open to me. One road led back to our hovel in the woods, the other led on towards the outer realm. One road to Order, the other to Chaos.’

‘And so, you left that miserable life behind,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You left for greater things.’

Huthor laughed, without a trace of humour. His lip curled at the memory.

‘Not at first,’ he said. He reached for a goblet, brimful of the skinned young man’s tears. He drank deep. ‘No, first I took the path back home. Armed with my iron branch, I went to say farewell to my father…’

He had often wondered what would have happened if he had taken the other path instead. What if, at the end of his journey through the woods, he had not stood in front of his blazing home, exulting in the flames while his father’s flayed body burned inside?

But he had made his choice. He had taken his first, faltering steps on the road of Ruin, and he had been walking that path with grim rejoicing ever since.

The years passed for Huthor in a blur of excess. Nightly the warband indulged its most perverted desires, breaking off to launch savage raids into the surrounding territories. Before long, frightened towns and settlements along the coast paid them desperate tribute. Warriors flocked to Huthor’s silken banner, and everything unfolded as Dysileesh had promised. He was carving out an empire, a legacy, but daily the Godseeker pressed him to commit himself totally to Slaanesh.

‘You still hold back,’ she pleaded. ‘You have seen what the Dark Prince is capable of, and now surely you must pledge yourself to him?’

‘Did your Prince give me this?’ Huthor countered. They strode to the fortress’ half-melted battlements and he swept out his hand to indicate the wild lands before them. Impaled prisoners writhed and groaned across the frontage of the fortress grounds. From the golden corridors beneath them came screams of pleasure and pain. Behind them churned the mercurial sea, lapping in quicksilver waves at the crumbling shore. ‘Or did I take it for myself?’

‘Could you have gained this without his favour? You speak blasphemies to claim otherwise, lord.’

‘Blasphemies? Then let him strike me down – if he can. He languishes in chains, does he not? Why should I follow a chained god, too weak to free himself? It serves me for now to follow your path, Godseeker, but don’t think it is a path I will follow forever. The lord of the Golden Fortress makes his own fate. He worships the hurricane of Chaos, the maelstrom. No god commands me!’

She hissed at him, but Huthor replied only with scornful laughter.

All nearby bowed to the Golden Fortress, but in the north, there was one territory that refused them tribute. In the brooding miasma of the Onoglop Swamps, Rotbringer cults met Huthor’s scouting parties with axe and blade. Huthor had dispatched a small force to quell them, but this band of Hellstriders and marauders had been swallowed by the swamp’s glistening mists and no word of them ever came back.

Mounting his steed and unsheathing his sword for the first time in what felt like years, Huthor personally led a sally from the fortress into the dark lands. For days they marched north, the sky above them whipped with glittering tendrils of teal and cyan, streaked with the corposant of harvested aether-gold as the Kharadron sky-ships plied their vertiginous trade. Huthor had watched them as he rode, straining to catch a glimpse of those impossible craft, willing each to catch fire and plummet to the ground so he could crack them open with his blade. Something about their sheer distance offended him, but his mind was soon taken off the duardin by the gloomy edgelands of the Onoglop Swamps.

Flies buzzed in the reeds. A smell so rank it almost made him sick came pouring from the stagnant waters. Strange, greasy blooms quivered in the rancid breeze. His warriors, drawn up in their battle lines, looked at each other uneasily.

‘Do we enter?’ Dysileesh asked. She snorted a pinch of emerald snuff. ‘This doesn’t feel right, lord.’

‘You’d have me turn back?’

‘The lord of the Golden Fortress turn back?’ Vhoss laughed. ‘I shouldn’t think so. The Flayer doesn’t run from a fight.’

‘The Flayer…’ Huthor said. ‘It’s been a while since you called me that.’

‘I was there when you earned that name,’ Vhoss said. He slapped Huthor’s shoulder. ‘The day we met.’

He smiled at the memory: those ancient days, two lost boys scavenging on the fringes of a warband’s camp. Slaves to darkness, brooding in their armour; tribal marauders, fleet horsemen scouting the steppes for villages to raid.

‘You stole that dagger from a chieftain’s tent, do you remember?’

‘Aye. He sent two of his best men into the hills to track us down.’

Vhoss cackled at the memory. ‘And you sent him their skins in return!’

‘Not the first men I’d flayed,’ Huthor admitted.

‘No. Nor the last.’

The Flayer. Now there had been a fate worth fighting for.

Huthor reared his steed and drew his army up in fine array. Slowly, silently, he led them into the pestilent darkness.

‘The lord is wounded!’ Vhoss screamed, bursting through the iron gates. ‘The lord of the Golden Fortress is wounded!’

They brought him on a bier of scented cushions and fine coverlets already soaked with blood. The savage wound in his chest pulsed with the beating of his heart, and as Huthor slipped into darkness he heard the frantic pattering of feet along the gilded halls. Healers rushed to attend him. Retainers, those who had not gone out to the fight, roused themselves from debauchery and ran to prepare boiling water laced with Chamonite to tend his wound. Vhoss lashed out at those who were slow to react, beating them with the pommel of his axe.

‘Prepare the lord’s bed, at once!’

Huthor felt himself being carried to his chamber. The wound tore at him like a lance, darkening his mind, drawing strange fevers into his blood. He felt someone take his hand, wetting it with eager tears – Dysileesh, delighted at this opportunity to indulge herself in the deepest griefs.

‘Elizha…’ Huthor groaned. He had seen her chariot tip over and had watched in horror as the Rotbringers tore her to pieces. Mishkhar, his luck run out at last, had thrown himself into them, his lacquered topknot spinning as wildly as his blades, but the weight of numbers had brought him down. Hharag was gone too, shouting his lord’s name as the swamp water took him, pulled to his doom by whatever infected creatures lurked in its depths. He had laughed as he died. As Huthor led the retreat, hacking through the press, an axe had swung from the gloom and struck him in the chest.

‘Vhorrun…’ Huthor tried to say. ‘My… son…’ He caught a glimpse of the boy staring at him from the shadows, his axes spattered with rancid blood, a murderous look in his eyes. Ten years old, and already a great fighter; he had lived, at least. But then the image was gone, and in its place as they lowered Huthor to his deathbed came a vision of placid decay – a hunched and horned figure in a mouldering cloak, atop a rotting steed. The figure slowly raised an armoured hand and hissed.

Your time has come, Lord Huthor. The Grandfather awaits you.

Light broke through the shuttered windows, painting pale, thick stripes across his bed. Huthor woke, drenched in sweat, his skin clammy and chill. The fortress was silent around him. He reached with a flabby hand for the goblet of water on the table at his side, but he knocked it to the ground.

‘Help!’ he shouted. Only silence greeted him. The wound in his chest, he saw, had been cleaned and raggedly stitched. It throbbed with a dull, low ache.

Wrapped in a sheet as close as a grave-shroud, Huthor trembled on the golden stairs, supporting himself on the bannister.

‘Vhoss?’ he shouted. There was no reply. ‘Dysileesh!’ Scattered goblets and spilled wine littered the ground. At the bottom of the stairs lay a twisted body, its stomach burst open, a foul slurry spattered on the marble floor. The expression on the corpse’s face was one of sheer, transported joy.

There was a smell in the air of rotting meat and mouldering fruit. As weak as he had ever felt in his life, Huthor followed the smell into the banqueting hall, the stage where his warband had performed some of its most hideous debauches. He stopped at the door and looked onto a scene of utter devastation.

The long, silver table was piled high with decaying food – haunches of meat that were boiling with maggots, platters of fruit and fine pastries now curdled and stale. Crystal decanters of emerald wine were broken on the floor. Chairs were tipped over, the luxuriant curtains pulled from the high windows. Sprawled on the table, or contorted on the ground, were dozens of Huthor’s warriors. All of them clutched brutally distended stomachs, their mouths flecked with the vomit that had choked them. They were all dead.

It was a scene replayed throughout the fortress. The mourning feasts held for their lord, who they assumed had died in his chambers upstairs, had turned, as all Slaaneshi rites must, into a crazed pursuit of excess. They had gorged on food and drink until it killed them.

He found Dysileesh lying in an antechamber off the main hall. Her face was blackened with suffocation; she had forced sweetmeats down her throat until they blocked her windpipe, and in absolute euphoria she had died. He knelt at her side and drew a sheet over her body. The Dark Prince had her at last.

‘My lord!’ came a voice, echoing across the silent hall. Huthor stood and looked back. Vhorrun gazed at him sullenly from the corridor, and in the subtle light, burnished and enhanced by the golden walls, his skin glowed with faint silver. ‘My lord, we thought you were dead.’

‘Where is Vhoss?’ he croaked. He took a step forward and stumbled, and when he looked up he saw for the briefest moment the pale horseman on his rotting steed, beckoning him forward.

The Grandfather awaits you…

It was as if the voice came from inside him, from his very blood, now thick with poisons.

You called and have been answered, and out there great bounty awaits you, life eternal, free of pain…

Huthor shook his head. When he opened his eyes, Vhorrun was leaning over him.

‘Vhoss?’

‘My father lives,’ the boy said. ‘Come, I’ll take you to him.’

Not everyone had indulged with such desperation. There were perhaps a hundred warriors left, and although Vhoss had joined the frenzy he had not stepped over that final line. The path of excess was over for them now; they all knew it.

Vhoss, dressed once more in his dracoline-hide jerkin, his silken robes cast aside, was waiting in the main hall. Huthor, still clad in his deathbed sheets, came limping to embrace him. The sickness roiled and brewed inside him, fermenting his blood.

‘What now, old friend?’ Vhoss asked him. Huthor paused, and the pale horseman rose again before his eyes, mouldering and grey.

‘We leave this place,’ he said. ‘We go back.’

‘Back where, lord?’

‘To the Onoglop Swamps.’

Vhoss stared at him in horror. ‘Huthor, we’re in no fit state to fight, we’ll be slaughtered!’

‘Not to fight, no…’ he said in a hoarse and drifting voice. ‘Don’t you see? We’re weak here, vulnerable. We’ve followed this pampered god for too long. The Grandfather calls us, and he can give us freedom from pain, freedom from weakness and death.’ He walked towards the iron doors, beyond which was the long road to the north. ‘They’re expecting us,’ he said.

They marched in a ragged train from the Golden Fortress, making the pilgrim journey to the Onoglop Swamps. Huthor staggered on with the guiding light of Nurgle’s bounty fore and centre in his mind. The Harbinger met them at the border and, plodding in the muck on his desiccated horse, led them deep into the sweating chambers of the mire. The Rotbringers stood chortling at its centre, like rotting tree-stumps glazed with filth. They welcomed their new brothers and sisters, eager to share the abundance that brewed and boiled inside them. Huthor, aching for eternal life, seized the offer with both hands.

Here, he thought, here was true power: to shrug off blows that would kill lesser men; to grow and fade and grow inside the play of constant disease; to never really die but be born anew, again and again. He laughed, and the days of the Golden Fortress fell far behind him.

Those weeks, or months, or years, or however long it was, were feverish and indistinct. Most of all, Huthor remembered the sickness flowering in him, until his skin swelled and split, the wet, bubbling voice of the disease always muttering in his head. There was jubilation and glee, such joyful certainty that they were on the right path at last. Vhoss watched his skin slowly slough away with equanimity, and cheerfully Vhorrun stroked the tentacles that were sprouting from his side. There were so few of them left from the horde that had launched their sallies from the fortress. Now, trudging from the muck, they raided small villages on the swamp’s edge, merrily bludgeoning the inhabitants with their poisoned weapons and watching as the bodies cracked and burst apart with putrefaction. Life roiled and flowed in a perfect, sinuous wave. ‘The Bringer of Sickness’, they called him, those huddled communities. He was a spirit of the swamplands, a nightmare tale to frighten children to sleep.

Who knew how many more weeks, or months, or years, Huthor and his warband would have stayed in the Onoglop Swamps, reiving and raiding, affably spreading the Grandfather’s gifts? Time had no real meaning for them any more; but then, one pallid dusk, Huthor’s path took an unexpected turn.

The borders of the swamp bristled with energy. There were flashes of sinister light, and the stagnant waters boiled and steamed. Skimming over the reeds on a gnashing disc came a spindly figure in teal armour, his robes streaming out behind him. His head was crowned with two pale horns, and in the middle of his forehead blinked a golden eye. The staff he held blazed with blue fire, and behind him flew a train of razor-beaked beasts on discs of their own.

‘I am Tyx’evor’eth,’ he said in a crackling voice. ‘Magister of Tzeentch, humble servant of the Great Conspirator, and I have come for you, Lord Huthor. The Master of Fate has turned his eye towards you, and offers majesty and power the likes of which you have never experienced.’

‘The Grandfather’s gifts are all the majesty I need,’ Huthor burbled. ‘Come to us instead, trickster, see what gifts Papa Nurgle gives to his faithful.’ He waved him away with his rusted blade.

Eight times Tyx’evor’eth came to make his offer in the stagnant edgelands, and each time Huthor sent him on his way. The magister showed him visions of plenty – mountains of gold and jewels, hordes of slaves stretching across the plains, the tribute of a thousand tyrannised cities. He demonstrated terrifying magics, spells and illusions that could be Huthor’s for the asking. But Huthor was not moved. He had decay and disease, the pleasing dankness of the swamps, and he feared no blade; what more could he need?

‘I follow this path,’ Huthor told the magister. ‘I see no end to it yet.’

On the ninth occasion he visited, Tyx’evor’eth promised nothing of riches or power. He came alone, his warband of Enlightened left behind at his camp. He didn’t dazzle Huthor with magic or try to seduce him with visions of the future.

‘All I come to offer this time, my lord,’ he said, ‘is a single word.’

‘And what word is that, trickster?’ Huthor laughed. The sound was like the stagnant swamp waters bubbling in the stench.

Tyx’evor’eth bowed low. His disc bobbed under him.

‘Legacy,’ he said. He spread his arms to indicate the swamp around them, and his third eye blinked. ‘Is this really where Huthor the Flayer will end his journey? Or will his name yet be writ large across the blazing plains of Chamon, remembered for ever more? Come with me, lord, and you shall make it so. None shall ever forget you.’

‘Aye…’ Huthor said slowly; and then the swamp around him suddenly seemed a mean and shabby place, not fit to have held him so long. He looked down at his bloated skin, his rusted blade that he had carried since he was big enough to hold it.

‘Fear not, my lord,’ the magister said. ‘Form is a malleable thing to those with the power to change it…’

And so Tyx’evor’eth wove his magics, unravelling the tendrils of disease from their bodies. Over the years he guided them far on Tzeentch’s path, teaching them his arcane knowledge – until the Ashpeaks, and a bitter duel under the sun.

The night before the duel, Huthor sat in his tent, scrying the future. In the prismatic jewel known as the Unclouded Eye, he watched tomorrow’s combat. He knew he must cast an absurd image to anyone who saw him: a born killer, bearded and uncouth, clad in soft teal robes and hunched over a crystal no bigger than a rust-apple. In its shifting light he saw the Khorne warband they had clashed with earlier that day advancing onto the lower slopes, saw the enveloping strike by his own army, the pyromantic cascade of unleashed spells. He saw glimpses of his forthcoming fight with the Khorne champion: the clash of blades; the inspired stroke that saw Huthor feign a stumble then come cutting up from right to left with incredible force, the blow shattering the champion’s face and sending his helmet spinning into the dirt; the counterstroke sweeping laterally to disembowel him. It was a move honed by years of combat, and he looked forward to performing it the next day – at dawn, early, on a hard-packed apron of land beneath the looming Ashpeaks. Tyx’evor’eth had been incredulous that Huthor was willing to risk the fight, but the Khorne champion had made the challenge and it couldn’t go unanswered.

In the old days, he thought, it wouldn’t even have been a question.

At that moment, the old days pulled back the flap of his tent and entered – Vhoss, his seamed face twinkling with amusement. Like Huthor he was wearing teal robes, but underneath was the old boiled leather of his dracoline-hide jerkin. He smelled of aether, of sorcery. The magister had been tutoring on the eve of battle, it seemed.

‘Single combat?’ Vhoss scoffed. ‘Are you sure about this?’ He pulled up a camp stool and sat down, reaching with easy familiarity into Huthor’s store-box for a bottle of zephyr-wine. He unplugged the cork with his teeth, spat it out and drank deep.

‘You think I’m not up to it?’ Huthor said.

‘Did you see that vicious-looking sod? Teeth filed to points, eyes bloodshot with rage – even his muscles had muscles. He’s going to chop you in half, lad.’

‘We’ll see,’ Huthor said. When their two forces had first skirmished, the Khorne Champion had marched fearlessly into their camp, throwing his challenge down. He did not fear death, Huthor had thought. He would die fighting, gladly.

He slipped the Unclouded Eye into his robes. He knew his old friend was half-teasing, but even without the prism’s reassurance he would have felt confident. He couldn’t say why, but he knew – he knew – the duel would go his way. His path did not end here. ‘It may be a while since I last fought man on man, but I’ve no doubt I’ve forgotten more tricks than that scum will ever know.’

‘Just make sure you haven’t forgotten all of them, that’s all I’m saying…’

Vhoss passed him the bottle. After a moment’s hesitation Huthor took it. He sipped the zephyr-wine, feeling its slow and airy burn deep in his chest.

‘Not too much, night before a fight,’ Vhoss said, winking at him. Huthor smiled and passed the bottle back.

‘Ah, it’s been a long road, has it not?’ Vhoss sighed.

‘It has indeed.’

‘When did it change, eh? What was the first step?’

‘Dysileesh,’ Huthor said quietly. Vhoss closed his eyes, luxuriating in the memory.

‘The Godseeker, of course, of course… I’ve still got the scars she gave me. And the son.’

‘Young Vhorrun’s done you proud,’ Huthor said.

‘He has. He looks at me with those violet eyes sometimes, and I see her in him still. You know, I sometimes think it was a path we should have stayed on. The Prince of Excess was a pleasurable master.’

‘He was no master of mine,’ Huthor said. ‘Just a guide for a while.’

‘No,’ Vhoss agreed sadly. He put the bottle at his feet and stared at his open hands. He looked at Huthor, his oldest friend. ‘But then you never could commit to anything for long, could you?’

The Unclouded Eye, Tyx’evor’eth had called it. The Jewel that Sees, the Prism of Foresight. ‘In this,’ the magister had told him, ‘a scholar of the arts will catch echoes of the future, but echoes are all they are. They are the shape of moments cast back from their origin, but not the moments themselves. Do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ Huthor had said.

‘The skill is in reading those echoes, understanding those shapes, and seeing where the shapes fit into the puzzle of the present. Once a scholar can do that, he will see events before they happen, before they can disarm him. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ he said, the proud tutor gazing at his pupil. And his three eyes, which missed nothing, blinked one by one.

Vhoss moved quicker than was humanly possible; he had cast an incantation of fleetness, it was clear, but he was no true scholar and the move was betrayed in advance by a faint nimbus of dark energy around his eyes. The blade came up, dripping with poison, but Huthor had already seen it in the Eye. He had woven a protective ward before Vhoss had even entered the tent, and as the blade bent and refracted against the sorcerous energy that surrounded him, Huthor brought up his own stiletto and plunged it into Vhoss’ stomach. Through the robes, through the dracoline-hide jerkin, deep into the flesh of the man who had been his lieutenant for decades; his brother in arms, his friend – his fellow slave to darkness on the road to red ruin.

Vhoss gasped with pain, dropping his own knife, his spell breaking apart in a faint smear of discordant colours. As his eyes widened in agony, Huthor saw some aspect of the old friend he had known, before any god had demanded their loyalty; when to worship on the altar of Chaos was to worship the violence of the storm, the unyielding power of the earthquake – everything that could reveal just how fragile the notion of Order really was. He had been right. It had been a long road from there to here.

Vhoss slipped to the floor. His eyes fluttered as his life left him. Before he went, Huthor resisted the urge to ask him why. The answer would have been inexplicable. Since Tyx’evor’eth had been tutoring them, such fatal feuds had become commonplace. Always at the heart of them was some twisted maze of half-understood portent and prediction. Assassinations, denunciations, stabbings and poisonings – it was a daily event. Who could untangle the web of Tzeentch? Who knew which thread led to which outcome, and which outcome disguised further eventualities unguessable to those without the insight to see them? It was futile.

He looked down at his old friend, the body cooling on the ground, and he was surprised at how little he felt. Only boredom and fatigue, and something very close to shame.

He called for his servants and they took the body away.

‘Wake me early,’ he told them. He packed the bottle of zephyr-wine in his store-box. ‘I have a fight to win, at dawn.’

The Ashpeaks, like new-forged steel still glowing from the furnace, cast their shadows on the dusty plain. Up there, beyond their distant caps, a glinting speck of light cut with patient industry through the cloud, a contrail of disturbed silver unspooling behind it. A sky-craft of the duardin, she had told him once. He remembered Dysileesh standing by his side with her musk of dead flowers and stale incense, the looped rings of oiled silver in her ear, eyebrow and nose, the thrilling stench of her. Her silk robes had hung from her body like sheets of ruby wine.

‘Those who style themselves “Overlords”,’ she had said, and he had gripped the hilt of his sword.

He held that sword high now, ready to administer the killing stroke. It had been a worthy fight. The Khornate Champion writhed in his death agonies, blood frothing on his lips. Through shattered teeth and scraps of gum he laughed, one hand scooping up the ropes of his spilled innards, the other still scrabbling in the dirt for his axe.

‘Wait,’ he gurgled, spitting blood.

‘I send you to the Brass Citadel. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘What I want means nothing,’ the dying Champion scorned. ‘It is… what you want… that matters now.’

He spewed out a stream of black blood. His face darkened with the approach of death, but the closer it came, the more fiercely blazed his remaining eye.

‘What I want?’

‘You are the one they call the Flayer, are you not, Lord Huthor?’

‘The Flayer?’ He lowered his sword. ‘I had that name once… an age ago.’

‘You have had many titles – Lord of the Golden Fortress, Bringer of Sickness, and now Aspiring Magister of Gazan Zhar… Your name is known,’ the Champion said, grimacing. ‘Across the Spiral Crux, men speak of you in awe and cower in their hovels. We have seen your face reflected in the blood we spill, heard your name whispered by the dying when we cut them down. Khorne guides us to you, Huthor the Flayer. Three paths have you walked since turning from Chaos Undivided. But I say to you the fourth has yet to feel your tread, and it is a road waist-deep in blood and fire…!’

The wind from the Ashpeaks, gritty and with a scent of stale smoke, brought with it the distant roar of the warrior’s warband. The duel of Champions was over, but Huthor had never expected the Khorne fighters to abide by the compact. No matter; already, Tyx’evor’eth’s fleet of Enlightened were skimming over the foothills to flank them, while Huthor’s warriors formed up in illusory ranks to the front. Vhorrun’s force was masked by glamours in the low ground to the east. The battle would be brief, violent, the outcome certain. He had seen it coalescing in the Eye last night, before he had killed Vhoss – the caged green flames interlocking inside the prism, forming a picture of just this moment.

Just this moment – apart from the entreaty of the dying Champion at his feet. He had not seen that at all.

Tyx’evor’eth came gliding swiftly over the rusty ground, stinking of ozone. The magister was eager for the fight.

‘Huthor, lord,’ he said. ‘The moment is near. The arc of Fate bends once more to your bidding. Let us be on our way.’ His three eyes blinked in a disjointed relay.

Huthor turned once more to the prostrate warrior. He thought of Vhoss last night, clawing at the knife in his guts, lips twitching to speak a final version of the spells he had never really mastered. None of them had, if truth be known. The weaving of magics had always left Huthor himself feeling drained and hollow, a brackish taste of metal in his mouth. Long had Tyx’evor’eth extolled the virtues of the Weaver of Fate, tutoring Huthor in sorcery and revealing the scale of power and influence that would open to him if he walked the Path of Change. He had given him the Unclouded Eye, the jewel that reveals the future. He had brought his tzaangors and his Enlightened to swell Huthor’s ranks, until what had been a powerful warband had become something more like an army, with territories and thraldoms of its own, as powerful as it had been in the days of the Golden Fortress. But for too long now had he been on this road, dabbling and learning but never fully committing to the lure. Had all the magister’s work been for nothing, in the end?

All this trickery, he thought. These treacherous plots and labyrinthine plans that curve in on themselves and lose their purpose in the twists and turns of their interminable execution. And here was this fine warrior dying in the dust, mortally wounded, who had thrown himself at Huthor like a hurricane, Chamon’s silver sunlight gleaming on his brass plate. In his snarling face had been a look of purest exultation – it had been the most exhilarating fight of Huthor’s life. Such simplicity, such purity of purpose: to kill and be killed, and to treat each outcome as a glorious vindication of his brutal god. A trophy for the throne of skulls, deep in a citadel of brass…

‘You see it,’ the warrior choked. ‘I know you do. Why do you think I sought you out if not to see that look in your eyes? You see the Lord of Skulls fuming in the reek, the piled heads, the screaming of the damned. You felt it when you opened me up and saw the blood spill from my guts.’

‘I see it,’ Huthor mumbled. ‘I… I feel it.’

‘This path shall be your last, Lord Huthor. It has been seen. Follow him, follow Khorne, and I swear you will cover the lands in blood! It has been seen! You will cover them in blood!’

‘Lord Huthor!’ Txy’evor’eth demanded. His disc slavered and moved agitatedly under his hooves. ‘Battle draws near! Kill this savage and let us be on our way.’

Black dust rose in heavy plumes beyond the foothills. The Khornate warband was advancing from their camp. Huthor could hear the screaming ululation of their war cry, the clashing of swords and axes.

‘I give you the mercy stroke,’ he said, raising his pale blade. The Khornate Champion sneered. His feet kicked at the dust. Death was near now, very near.

‘No mercy!’ he spat. ‘Only blood! Blood! And Khorne cares not from whence–’

The Flayer brought down his sword.

‘It is done!’ Tyx’evor’eth laughed. ‘Now quickly, lord, let us be away. The savages move ever closer into our trap!’

To cover the lands in blood…

‘The Flayer’, they had called him once. He recalled his camp tent back then, pitched like a flag of his conquests, every panel the skinned hide of whichever warlord, chieftain or elder had opposed him. He remembered his raiders, the Raging Tide, breaking like a thunderstorm over the Muspelzharr plains, drenching them in blood and tears. Vhoss at his side… Aye, those had been simpler days indeed.

‘When this is done, Tyx’evor’eth,’ Huthor said, ‘we will be parting ways.’

‘…My lord?’

‘I have come to the end of the path, magister.’ He cleaned his sword against his cloak. His muscles were aching; it had been so long since he had had a proper fight. ‘Fate now takes me down a different road.’

‘But, Lord Huthor, have I not fulfilled all the promises I made? Has not the Great Architect twisted the thread of your fate in ways that please you?’

‘It pleased me for a while. It pleases me no longer. The thread is broken. I shall make a new one.’

‘You return to the Undivided path?’

‘No,’ Huthor said. ‘There is one road yet for me to take.’

He had expected anger, disbelief, but instead the magister cackled on his disc and rose higher into the air. His black eyes frosted with foresight. He pointed his staff and Huthor prepared the equations of an unbinding in his mind, drawing energy from the Chamonian wind, but the sorcerer cast no magics.

‘Go now, tempter, or I will cut you down as well!’ Huthor said.

‘You will indeed cover the lands in blood, Lord Huthor… I see it now. That will be your fate, my lord!’ He screeched with laughter as he sped away, blue flame flickering from his staff. ‘It is all unfolding as the Architect has planned. You think you walk a path, a road of your own making, but you are mistaken, my lord. It is not a path. It is a maze. A labyrinth!’

The tzaangors and Enlightened would be lost to him now, he realised. Already he felt his own powers diminish, the forms of magic fading inside him. The Khorne warband would be on them in moments and he had lost near half his army.

No matter. He sheathed his sword. He dipped his hands into the dead Champion’s guts and anointed himself, marching off to join his warriors as the blood cooled on his forehead. The Khornate army was breasting the rise and clashing their swords and axes. He took the Unclouded Eye from inside his robes and cast it far off into the rusty scrub.

‘We will do this the old way!’ he roared to the sky, and up there, beyond the peaks, the last glint of the duardin ship went sailing on, far from the sun’s bold and grasping light.

The shrieking of chained beasts tore the air. Huthor felt it in his chest, the low bass rumble of the chimeras’ leonine heads, the roar of the manticores lashed to the ground by brass anchors and hard-wrought steel. The frantic hissing of the cockatrices was like a foul rainfall, and the ochre ground was scrabbled with claw marks and spattered with blood. He had lost a hundred men corralling these creatures. He did not care.

Vhorrun approached him, snarling, trembling with the urge to kill.

‘We’re almost ready, lord,’ he said. His voice was harsh and grating, an angry rasp, the consequence of a blade he’d recently taken in his throat. Huthor regarded him coolly, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword in case the boy finally made his move. Young, as taut as rendered steel, he was the most perfect warrior among them. Of all the Raging Tide, save Huthor himself, Vhorrun had embraced Khorne with the most fervour. He despised the trace of Dysileesh in him, sickened that even a shadow of her pampered god could lie on his fate. He so scorned his violet eyes that he had plucked one out, only keeping the other so he could still see for combat. His silver skin was a latticework of angry scars, and he had long since shaved off his gold-dusted hair. He was born to kill, born to die, although it puzzled Huthor that in all the long months since Vhoss’ death, Vhorrun had never made a move to avenge his father. Perhaps, the warlord thought, he realises the truth of his sire? When he stares with such hatred at me, does he know he stares at the man who gave him life?

Huthor grinned at the thought. He looked forward to killing the boy.

‘Now hear me!’ Huthor shouted to his men. From across the burnished steppe, his army began to gather: Blood Warriors in their battered crimson plate; bloodreavers in their hundreds. Kh’ezhar, his slaughterpriest, ritually slashed at his skin with his sacrificial knife. ‘Today you will gorge yourselves at the Dark Feast! You will rend flesh and tear skin, and you will feast on duardin! You will prise them from their metal ships and spill blood for the Blood God!’

To the exultant roar of the crowd, which drowned out even the screaming beasts he had gathered to serve them, Huthor raised his blade and pointed it skyward. Up there, where the Kharadron ships flew to Barak-Zon, black clouds gathered. The storm was upon them; the deafening murder-song.

You will cover the lands in blood…

He had certainly done that. Since dedicating himself to Khorne, he had done little else, and now his army dwarfed any he had led as lord of the Golden Fortress. Swathes of land had fallen under his bloody footprint. Thousands had died, and hundreds more scrambled to join his brass banners. The scum of Gazan Zhar had partaken of the Dark Feast and were his to command.

Now, madness quivered behind Huthor’s eyes. Rage made his fingers tremble always for his sword, and, if no enemy was to hand, he seized whomever was near and butchered them without a thought. He felt Khorne’s smouldering brass throne as a colossal weight on his shoulders; the citadel burning with sulphur was like a liminal presence before his eyes, ever-shifting in his maddened sight. In the wake of the fight at the Ashpeaks, won by the narrowest of margins, Huthor’s warband had become the Raging Tide once more. Casting off their Tzeentchian glamours, they had stripped the bodies of the Khorne warriors and clad themselves in their spattered armour. None doubted who had led them to victory that day, who had guided Huthor’s frenzied blade. Khorne had willed it. The path was freely taken, and the journey since had been one of uncompromising destruction. The further they went on that road, the more their days as dabblers in the other gods’ service faded, like sallow dreams dispatched by the light of day.

The central lands of Gazan Zhar receded, hurtling away from him – an ochre smear of oxide and rust. The Ashpeaks stabbed like fangs into the sky, wreathed in steam and dusted with a sooty snow. They loomed and fell back, and then the immense and mind-bending helix of the Spiral Crux seemed to spread itself out below him. The air was freezing and cut like cold steel, but Huthor the Flayer boiled with rage. The manticore beneath him growled with a sound like the mad alloys of Chamon’s sub-realms grinding together, and the carrion reek of the creature enveloped him even as the streaming aether-winds plucked his breath away. He screamed with savage joy, turning in his rawhide saddle to see his warband spread out across the sky – hundreds of them clutching to the feathered crests of swooping cockatrices, or grimly lashed to the snarling fury of the chimeras. It was an impossible fleet, murder on the cutting wind. It was the last thing the Kharadrons would see coming.

Kh’ezhar’s unholy invocations had slaved the creatures to their new purpose, but some, unleashed once more into their element, soon turned on their masters. Huthor was amused to see the draconic head of one chimera twist round and snap furiously at the bloodreavers on its back, their mangled bodies slipping off to tumble thousands of feet to the ground. A cockatrice spun round and loosed its riders, darting down to snap at their falling bodies with its vicious beak. In contrast, Huthor’s manticore seemed not only to tolerate his presence, but also to welcome it; the creature had purred as he mounted it, and only the slightest pressure on its greasy, blood-flecked mane was needed to guide it in the right direction.

‘The Enlightened would have been useful now,’ Vhorrun had said as they’d readied themselves to fly. Huthor hadn’t been sure if the boy was mocking him. But it was true, he conceded, gaining the saddle; this would all have been much easier with a Tzeentchian disc underfoot.

As they swooped onwards, breaking through the cloud, Huthor saw a dozen elongated shapes ahead. Draped in a sparkling mist from the harvested aether-gold, the Kharadron ships grew more distinct, their strange nautical hulls suspended from globular metal balloons, some of them like vast armoured behemoths and others no more than agile little escort craft. So far, none of them had seen the bestial fleet in their blindside.

‘Overlords’… Their very name was a provocation. Wherever Huthor had cast his gaze in the long years of his conquests, the Overlords had always exceeded his grasp. The lands groaned under him, but the sky was pure. Well – no longer. He would stain it with their blood.

‘Dive!’ he screamed, and the manticore beneath him roared. Even in the slicing wind he could hear the war cry of his airborne army swooping in for the kill, thrashing their mounts and straining for the fight, axes bared, spears raised.

And then the Kharadron responded.

The first wave of bloodreavers vanished in a puff of red mist. The ragged bodies of their mounts listed and fell, keening in pain and trailing ribbons of blood. Ahead, the hulls of the airships were smeared with smoke, crackling with shot from broadside cannons and carbines. Huthor saw a buzzing flock of tiny figures unlatch from the bigger ships, duardin suspended from their own individual balloons, bearing vicious-looking pikes. They sped towards the lead chimeras and engaged, slashing and stabbing and swarming with incredible agility. More of Huthor’s army was torn apart when the smaller ships came through on attack runs that peppered their flanks with shot.

‘You didn’t say it would be this hard!’ Kh’ezhar shouted as he wheeled his cockatrice beside Huthor. He laughed with manic fervour before the upper part of his body exploded in a steaming gout of blood. The cockatrice, mortally wounded, screamed and fell, a feathered rag.

This wasn’t going to work. Huthor saw his army picked apart in moments, scoured from the skies by the duardin’s incredible firepower. Fully half his men were already dead, eviscerated by gunfire or knocked from their perches by their panicked animals, cast down on the long journey back to the plains of Gazan Zhar. The beasts they had so painstakingly herded together were being destroyed.

And yet, it was not all going the Kharadrons’ way. Huthor launched his manticore at one buzzing interceptor and laughed at the pilot’s panicked reaction as he tried to haul it around. The beast severed the rigging with one sweep of its claws, the ship’s hull dropping like a meteor to the earth. He saw one bloodreaver leap boldly through the air from the back of his chimera with a maddened war cry, twin axes in hand, crashing onto the bridge of another escort craft. He hacked the crew to pieces and twisted its wheel to send it slamming into the hull of a bigger ship with a blinding explosion. The larger Kharadron ship split apart with a scream of rending metal. Trailing long streamers of superheated aether-gold, each part slowly listed and fell like a boat succumbing to the pull of deep waters, the bodies of burning duardin spinning from it like falling stars. Other beasts had gained the Kharadrons’ main line and were rampaging across the decks, vomiting flame and ripping the deck crews apart. Huthor knew the attack was doomed, but he had never run from a fight. Death was nothing; blood was all. And Khorne cared not from whence the blood flowed.

He guided his own beast towards the deck of the flagship, a vast ironclad bristling with weaponry. He saw the deck crew prepare themselves to repel boarders, scurrying to the gunwale with their carbines raised. A hail of shot enveloped him, striking the manticore in a dozen places and sparking off his shoulder guard, but the Blood God was looking on his favoured son – not a single shot had wounded him. As Huthor drew his sword he grinned to see the duardin run for cover.

The manticore, expiring at the last, hit the deck like an explosion. In its thrashing death agony, sweeping the deck with its barbed tail, it scattered some of the crew into the open air. Huthor was thrown wildly from its back, crashing into the cupola of the ship’s skycannon and knocking the gunner over the edge. Dazed, bleeding from a wound across his forehead, he still laughed to hear the duardin’s horrified scream.

A dozen duardin in red armour and dark blue fatigues came charging towards him, but before they could even arm their pistols Huthor was on them. He leapt from the cupola with a frenzied scream and barrelled into the stunted figures, hewing left and right in great scything sweeps, like a crazed artist painting the deck in streams of red. He snatched one duardin up and hurled him overboard, grunting then as a pistol shot smashed into his shoulder with a spray of blood and meat. His left arm lifeless at his side, Huthor threw his blade and skewered the duardin who had shot him, pinning him to the fo’c’sle wall.

The deck was littered with bodies. Eddies and swirls of the metallic wind threaded the rigging, and beyond the sky-ship he could see puffs of black smoke, drifts of red mist, screaming warriors and enraged beasts falling to their deaths. What little of his force had made it to the ships was being systematically exterminated, blown from the decks by the Kharadrons’ disciplined crews. As the last few airborne beasts were sniped from the sky, Huthor knew it was over. He heard the tramp of approaching boots and pulled his sword from the hull, preparing himself for death, rejoicing that so many had wetted the throne of the Brass Citadel.

‘Let them come,’ he spat. He held out his sword. ‘The path is ended, and it has been a long, strange road indeed…’

But as the duardin charged up the deck towards him, they were immolated in a blaze of fire. Some, maddened by pain, threw themselves over the edge; others kicked and screamed as the flames consumed them. Huthor turned to see Vhorrun’s chimera, bleeding from gunshot wounds, spew fire and launch itself at the remaining crew even as the buzzing gunhaulers banked and strafed it with shot. Vhorrun himself leapt to the deck, his axes drawn, but before Huthor could say a word the young warrior had launched himself at him.

It was like the duel in the sun once more, when the Khornate Champion had fought as if the world were ending. Vhorrun’s blows were both wildly savage and icily precise, a flurry of axe strikes followed by feints and parries that were then converted into devastating cross-cuts. He hooked at Huthor’s sword and drew his guard away, then blazed in with elbows and knees, hammering the warlord back against the gunwale. Huthor, the wilier fighter, who had fought and killed for more than twice Vhorrun’s lifetime, was as hard-pressed as he had ever been. He couldn’t gain the advantage, each parry and riposte easily swept aside by the whirlwind of Vhorrun’s assault. His left arm was ruined, his sword arm was weakening, and the wound on his forehead was leaking into his eyes. Huthor raised his sword to block a twin-handed strike, but Vhorrun’s axes shattered the blade and plunged into the meat of his chest. He screamed, his sight blackening, and as he dropped to his knees Vhorrun felled him with a vicious punch to the face.

Huthor coughed blood and rolled onto his back. ‘I’ve… had that sword longer than you’ve been alive, boy,’ he groaned. With superhuman effort, hooking his arm to the gunwale, he hauled himself up. He’d be damned if he’d die on his back, or on his knees. ‘Well, it came at last,’ he said. He clutched the wounds in his chest. ‘Revenge for your father’s death.’

‘Vhoss was many things to me,’ Vhorrun said, prowling the deck. He held his axes ready. ‘But I know he was not my father.’

Huthor laughed, and the pain was a torment. ‘How long have you known?’

‘I’ve always known. I’ve always known it was you.’

‘And you’d kill me still? You’re blood of the Flayer, boy.’

‘And it’s the only blood I reject! I have always hated you, Flayer. Your greed for glory has ever poisoned my fate. You sired me on some foul Slaaneshi cultist, forced me to moulder for months in those cursed swamps, and then dragged me into a labyrinth of cowardly magics!’

‘You make it sound like you had no choice, no will of your own!’

‘No,’ Vhorrun snarled. ‘Only your will mattered! When we still followed the Trickster, I tried to get Vhoss to kill you. Plans within plans, schemes within schemes in those days, but instead you killed the only man who had ever showed me kindness or respect.’

Huthor gave him a bitter, mocking laugh. ‘I brought you to Khorne though, didn’t I? You seem to have taken to his service.’

‘Yes…’ Vhorrun said. ‘Fair is fair, I follow the one true god now. And by my own hand must it be done.’

‘A family tradition,’ Huthor said. ‘I killed my own father, you know. All sons must, in the end.’

Ferried by their floating comrades, more Kharadron were boarding the vessel at the prow. Vhorrun’s chimera expired in a murderous fusillade, and of the Raging Tide only the two of them were left. All were dead. Huthor stooped for the broken hilt of his sword. He would die fighting, with a weapon in his hand.

‘I live still,’ Huthor said. He grinned. ‘The enemy approaches. Will we die together?’

Vhorrun looked at him then, smiling. His lone eye sparkled with violet.

‘Huthor the Flayer,’ he said. ‘You won’t have the honour of dying in battle.’

As the Kharadron troops opened fire, Vhorrun shoved him in the chest, pitching him backwards over the edge of the ship. Huthor saw his son break apart under the crossfire, and then the world was a spiral of light and darkness, of lustre and pitch. The wind pummelled him, the sky-ships sinking into the depths of the coruscating sky even as the ground hurtled up to meet him. He fell faster than he would ever have believed possible, the mad tangle of Chamon’s uncoiling landscape speeding towards him with its eager embrace, the wind roaring like the apocalypse in his ears. And as he fell, his mind, darkened by his wounds, fled back to that duel in the sun, the Khornate Champion dying at his feet, his muttered promise. You will cover the lands in blood… And then Tyx’evor’eth spinning away on his disc, cackling, gaze frosting with arcane foresight… That will be your fate, my lord!

He had seen it. He had seen it all happen. Every step on the path had brought him to this point.

Yes, Huthor thought as the ground came near, and as the promise of his fall came closer to its violent fulfilment. I will indeed cover these lands in blood…

But Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows!

About the Author

Richard Strachan is a writer and editor who lives with his partner and two children in Edinburgh, UK. Despite his best efforts, both children stubbornly refuse to be interested in tabletop wargaming. His first story for Black Library, ‘The Widow Tide’, appeared in the Warhammer Horror Anthology Maledictions.

An extract from Profit’s Ruin.

Brokrin Ullissonn looked about the guildhall, his eyes roving across the massive cast-iron ancestor-lords who stared back at him from the ceiling. The ornaments in each duardin’s beard were picked out in a dazzling array of gemstones. He scrutinised the rich hangings that spilled down the sides of the metal pillars which supported the domed roof. The fabric was finest cloth-of-gold and the rune-glyphs woven across them had been dyed the rich purple that could only be harvested from the ink of the harkraken. The walls of the assembly room were covered in long slabs of black granite, each a dozen feet across yet thin as a beardling’s whiskers. The stone panels created the impression of mountain halls and vaults deep beneath the hills where the ancestors of the Kharadron had once reigned. The floor, however, dispelled such illusions. Wrought from crushed lapis and shining with the glow of pearl, the tiles under Brokrin’s feet conjured the image of lofty heights far above the tallest mountains. The new domain the Kharadron had claimed for their own.

Brokrin stroked his plaited blond beard, an almost wistful look creeping into his eyes. How much he would rather be out there among the clouds, steering his ship into unexplored skies! There had always been a streak of wanderlust in his veins, something that made him impatient and restless if he tarried too long in one place. The longest he had ever spent in the sky-hold of Barak-Zilfin was the six months it had taken to repair the Iron Dragon after her fight with the monster Ghazul. Only a few days since returning to the port after their escape from Finnolf’s Fortress, and he was keen to be away again.

Though this time Brokrin had good reason to want to be away.

Except for the few custodians he had left aboard the Iron Dragon, the rest of Brokrin’s crew were with him in the assembly-room. Nearest to him was the navigator, Mortrimm, chewing on the clay stem of his pipe. The white-bearded duardin glanced over at Brokrin and frowned at the captain’s wandering attention. He gave him a nudge of his elbow and nodded to the far side of the room.

Brokrin reluctantly returned his attention to the tiered rows of seats where the merchants of the Tenguild League, the backers of the Iron Dragon’s last voyage, glowered down at him and his crew. Each of the traders seemed to vie with his neighbour in the ostentation of his garb. Richly brocaded jackets with jewelled buttons and elaborate sashes of silk were accompanied by rakish hats, sagging beneath the weight of rare feathers sewn into their brims. The gloved fingers of every merchant were a riot of rings and gilded nails, while their beards were thick with ornaments of diamond and ruby. Around the traders, liveried servants hurried to refill ivory flagons with the headiest of beers and richest of ales.

Not all the duardin who bustled around the merchants were mere attendants. There were a number of logisticators too, scrambling from one trader to another with sheets of copper. Brokrin could guess what had been etched onto those metal pages. Tallies of expenditures, a catalogue of what it had cost the Tenguild League to outfit the Iron Dragon for her last voyage. Other records would denote the profit these merchants had expected to recover from the voyage. Still others would display the gains made by other ships… and the guilds who had backed them.

‘I’d rather go another round with Ghazul than stand here and have these leeches scowl at me,’ Brokrin grumbled under his breath.

Mortrimm exhaled a mouthful of smoke. ‘So would I,’ he muttered. ‘Ghazul can’t revoke your charter. The Tenguild League can.’ He gave Brokrin a sharp look. ‘That’s why you need to pay attention and show them some respect.’

‘I’m not some cadet fresh from the Academy,’ Brokrin muttered. ‘I know the way things work. No venture can escape politics. The backers always have to feel in charge.’ He shook his head. ‘They sit behind in pampered luxury while the ships are out there braving the skies in their name.’

‘You’ve got that same stubborn streak in you as your father,’ Mortrimm observed, just a touch of exasperation in his voice. ‘When you’ve the choice between pragmatism and ideals, you always choose ideals. You know how this works. The backers have to feel in control of their investment at all times. They need to know their money is going to turn a profit. Not just to enrich their coffers but to assuage their confidence that they’re in control even when their ships are away.’

‘I’m not a cadet,’ Brokrin reminded Mortrimm again. ‘I know the way things are and how they’re done. You helped me find my footing when I was starting out, but I’ve got my sky-legs now.’

Mortrimm gave Brokrin a sombre smile, but didn’t say anything more. The old navigator had been something of a mentor to Brokrin, and there was still more than a trace of teacher and pupil in their relationship even after all these years.

Brokrin turned his attention back to the Tenguild League. Each time a logisticator brought another report to them, the scowls on the faces of the merchants deepened. They were being told that their latest venture had not only failed to bring them profit, but it had incurred a loss on their investment. The impact on their coffers would be insult enough, but the impact against their confidence was something else. They would need to do something to reaffirm their control.

‘That’s the ugliest crowd this side of an orruk mob,’ the young privateer Gotramm commented, his words just loud enough to reach Brokrin’s ears.

‘Keep quiet and look attentive,’ Horgarr, the Iron Dragon’s endrinmaster, told Gotramm. ‘We’re in for it enough already,’ he added in a low tone that Brokrin strained to hear.

Brokrin could guess what was on the mind of every duardin on his crew. The Tenguild League held his charter, and by extension they could claim both his ship and his command. There was, however, a way Brokrin could negate that threat. Within the Kharadron Code there was a stricture which detailed the subject of mutiny, and how a ship’s captain could incur no responsibility for a voyage when his command was taken away from him. Brokrin had been against the disastrous trip to Finnolf’s Fortress. Egged on by the avaricious Skaggi, the Iron Dragon’s crew had staged a mutiny against him, turning command of the ship over to Gotramm.

Yes, there was an out for Brokrin if he told his backers about the mutiny. It would mean the ruin of the crew. The mutineers would be impressed into indentured service until they made full restitution to the Tenguild League. None of them would ever sail on a ship again – even the most hard-pressed captain would not sign mutineers to his crew.

Brokrin had told his crew he would forget what had happened, but now that they were back in Barak-Zilfin and with their backers scowling down at them, he was certain there were some like Horgarr who had doubts about how much Brokrin would sacrifice for them. Doing as they feared and revealing what had happened to the backers was certainly the pragmatic thing to do. But as Mortrimm said, he was always choosing ideals over pragmatism. He clung to the romantic notion that the crew of a ship were like a family, ready to risk anything in their power for one another. He hadn’t saved these duardin from the creatures of Chaos simply to see them ruined by a bunch of balance sheet-obsessed backers.

One of the merchants stood up from his seat and smoothed the front of his jacket. His beringed fingers toyed with the ornaments laced through his beard. Zagrimm, often called the Coin-Pincher behind his back, was notorious for his sharp dealing. Somehow it didn’t surprise Brokrin that the miser would be the first to demand a reckoning.

‘The accounts present a dour picture, Captain Brokrin,’ Zagrimm said. ‘The tally of expenses is quite concerning to us. More so when you return with empty holds.’

Before Brokrin could try to respond, Zagrimm was addressed by a merchant seated several tiers above him.

‘It has been a poor season for everyone,’ the trader said. He wore a golden beard-sheath and had stains of powdered sapphire under each of his eyes. The gromril pipe that protruded from his lips had an aetherwork bowl, its chemical flame ensuring it would never go cold. The long coat he wore was of the finest cut and adorned with dragonhorn buttons, the rings on his fingers more resplendent than those of any duardin in the guildhall.

‘I know it has been a poor season, Orrik,’ Zagrimm replied, irritation struggling with deference for command of his tone. ‘But even a poor season should bring something more than debt.’ He reached to the closest logisticator and plucked the copper page from his hand. ‘You’ve looked at the accounts. There’s nothing there to show for our investment!’

Orrik nodded slowly. ‘A poor season,’ he repeated, apparently unable to add anything more to his argument. Some of the traders were looking towards him, a thoughtful if unhappy look on their faces.

Zagrimm would not be placated, however. ‘The Iron Dragon’s gained a reputation for poor seasons,’ he stated. His eyes darted back to Brokrin and he pointed at the captain. ‘Ever since you ran into the monster Ghazul your ship has been unprofitable. A sinkhole for investors.’

‘But it was you who suggested we back the Iron Dragon,’ one of the other merchants reminded the miser. ‘You suggested that her captain would be agreeable to a smaller share of the profits because of his bad luck.’

‘That was when I thought there would be some profit to be shared out,’ Zagrimm said. ‘Before I understood that all this talk of bad luck and curses was more than just idle rumour.’

‘The fact that the Iron Dragon’s the only ship to ever tangle with Ghazul and remain in the sky does not sound like bad luck,’ Gotramm objected, his voice ringing out through the assembly-room. The traders frowned at the young privateer, irritated by his outburst.

‘Aye, Captain Brokrin has brought our ship through skies no other cap’n could,’ the first mate, Vorki, added, to the annoyance of the merchants.

‘It was the cap’n’s planning that saw us vanquish a two-headed dragon,’ the one-eyed gunner Arrik stated. ‘If not for him, none of us would be here and there’d be no ship at all.’

Brokrin’s heart swelled with pride to hear his crew rushing to his defence. He knew, however, that their support would count for little with the backers.

Zagrimm made a dismissive wave of his hands. ‘None of that changes the matter at hand. The Iron Dragon’s holds are as barren as a beerhall on Brynruf. There’s nothing to share out to any of you and very little for those who backed your voyage to recover their investment.’

Brokrin bristled at the way Zagrimm looked at him. There was a sneering ugliness in his eyes. ‘To recover our expenses, we’ll take the ship,’ Zagrimm pronounced.

‘You can’t sell the Iron Dragon,’ Gotramm protested.

Zagrimm nodded in agreement. ‘You have me there. Your ship has garnered such an ill reputation nobody would buy her. So our only recourse is to break her up and sell her for scrap.’

The trader’s announcement brought snarls of outrage from the crew. Even a few of the other merchants looked uncomfortable with Zagrimm’s intentions.

Brokrin stepped forwards, turned and motioned to his crew to quiet down. Once their outrage was dulled to a few sullen grumbles, he faced Zagrimm and the other merchants.

‘There’s no fault in the Iron Dragon. She’s a good ship. It is I who have failed you, not her. If there’s no captain in Barak-Zilfin who would take her, you could easily secure a handsome bounty by selling her to another sky-hold.’

The suggestion brought new objections from the crew. The duardin of the Tenguild League whispered amongst themselves. It was Orrik who vetoed Brokrin’s suggestion.

‘To sell a ship built in the coghalls of Barak-Zilfin to another sky-hold is a serious matter,’ Orrik stated. ‘It is all but forbidden by the Code. We’d have to petition the Admirals Council for permission. Unless they could be convinced that none of our engineering advantages would be bestowed on another hold by selling the Iron Dragon, they’ll not permit it. No, the only way to regain our investment is by scrapping the ship.’

Brokrin felt as though the bottom dropped out of his belly. He was empty inside, all hollowed out by this talk of scrapping his ship. The windmasters of Barak-Zilfin revered the ships they sailed upon. He would sooner shave his beard and endure that life of disgrace and shame than see the Iron Dragon turned to scrap. The angry bellows of his crew said that they felt the same way.

Orrik banged his flagon down on the arm of his chair, demanding silence from the Iron Dragon’s crew. When he had it, he leaned forwards and peered intently into Brokrin’s eyes.

‘You’re an experienced hand, Brokrin. Even when stories started about your ship being under Ghazul’s curse, you always managed to bring something back for your investors.’

A chill crawled down Brokrin’s spine as he heard Orrik speak. He was an experienced captain and he wasn’t naïve enough to miss the inference behind the trader’s statement. He decided to feign ignorance just the same.

‘This time the wind was against me,’ he said.

Orrik tapped his beard-sheath with one of his rings. ‘But maybe there were mitigating circumstances? Things that were beyond your control… and your responsibility.’

Even the other merchants knew what Orrik was fishing for now. Zagrimm sputtered in protest, but he knew that the matter was no longer something the Tenguild League had control over. The Code was very clear on that point. If there had been a mutiny on the Iron Dragon they could not hold Brokrin responsible for the voyage.

Brokrin returned Orrik’s expectant gaze. It was almost beyond belief that the wealthiest member of the Tenguild League was offering him such a chance. If he told them about the mutiny, then he would save both his charter and the Iron Dragon. The backers would have to accept their losses and seek redress from the mutineers.

The hollow emptiness expanded to rush through his entire body. Brokrin felt as though an icy hand had closed around his heart. He could feel the eyes of his crew on him, none of them daring to draw a breath while they waited to hear what he would tell the merchants. It was their lives and freedom against his charter and the Iron Dragon.

‘I’ve told you everything that happened,’ Brokrin said, forcing the words out before he could reconsider them. ‘Our venture failed to find a profit. There’s nothing more I can add.’

Zagrimm settled down, a relieved smile on his face. Several of the other merchants had similar expressions. Not all of them were as prosperous as Orrik, or as ready to accept a loss.

Orrik sank back in his chair. ‘Thank you, Captain Brokrin,’ he said, his tone terse, his words clipped. ‘You and your crew may go. You’ll be informed of our decision.’

The bright light of the sun bore down upon Brokrin as the aethermatic lift carried him up the side of the sky-hold. Through the clouds below Barak-Zilfin he could just make out the shining waters of the Alloy Ocean and the snow-capped peaks of the Ferrium Mountains. A frigate in the blue and bronze colours of the hold was sailing away towards the north, its endrin glimmering in the sunlight. He felt a tinge of envy seeing the sky-ship soaring away on some new venture. There were few things he would not have given to trade places with the frigate’s captain.

One of those things, of course, was the Iron Dragon. She was secured in her berth far below, watched by guards from the Tenguild League. It was rare, but not unheard of, for the crew of a seized ship to cast aside both the Code and their honour and try to take their vessel back. Seldom did such a reckless and desperate ploy accomplish anything. Those few who did succeed in stealing their ship would then have to face the armadas of Barak-Zilfin. Even if they escaped, their lot would be that of renegades, shunned by all Kharadron and with grudge-marks posted on their heads by their own sky-hold.

By Grungni, though, it was tempting! If Brokrin could have done it by himself, he might have tried it. But he wouldn’t let the duardin of his crew risk themselves in such an endeavour. If it were in him to sacrifice them for his ship, he would have done so in the guildhall when there was a real chance of getting the Iron Dragon back.

The metal basket of the lift sped upwards, bearing Brokrin away from the sky-hold’s inner levels. The workshops and markets, forges and refineries were far below now. He was climbing past the clan-houses and arkanaut academies, rising above the coghalls and shipyards where Barak-Zilfin’s great vessels were designed and constructed. Higher and higher he was borne, until the basket was speeding through a layer of grey cloud. Condensation dripped down the glass walls of the basket, further obscuring Brokrin’s sight. When the lift pierced the mist, he was greeted to a sight he had only ever seen from afar before. The towering windfasts of Barak-Zilfin’s most powerful duardin.

Far above the alchemical smoke and smells of the levels below, the mighty towers stabbed up into the azure sky. Colossal sculptures hulked outwards from each facade, stern visages turned towards the heavens above. Great domed roofs bulged from the peak of each windfast, their golden tiles blazing in the sunlight. Elaborate arrays of metal shafts rose still higher, lightning rods cast into the shape of protective runes and familial sigils, clan-brands and the emblems of a hundred guilds. Scattered around the windfasts, and predominating at the edges of the sky-hold, were immense fortifications bristling with cannons and torpedoes. Brokrin could just make out squads of armed duardin patrolling along the battlements.

The lift came to a halt at the periphery of an elevated walkway of cold-forged steel. The writhing scrollwork of the railing impressed him with its intricate design. He was less impressed by the lone duardin who stood waiting for him. If not for the banner he carried, Brokrin would have found the scraggly-bearded servant utterly forgettable. But the clan-glyph on the banner made him someone of keen interest. It was the clan-glyph of Orrik Goldhand.

‘You’ll follow me, Captain Brokrin,’ the servant said as he sketched the slightest of bows. Without waiting for an answer, the duardin swung his master’s banner up over one shoulder and marched away.

Brokrin tugged his beard in annoyance at the servant’s impertinence. There were few people he would take that kind of arrogance from. His annoyance only increased when he reflected that short list would include anyone associated with Orrik. It wasn’t often that a Kharadron of his rank was called to Barak-Zilfin’s sunside. He was willing to bet it was even rarer when such a summons promised a captain a way to save his ship from the scrapyard.

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

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Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.

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