Table of Contents

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Title Page

Time of Legends

A Small Victory - Paul S. Kemp

Bloodraven - Sarah Cawkwell

City of Dead Jewels - Nick Kyme

The Last Charge - Andy Hoare

The Ninth Book - Gav Thorpe

The Gods Demand - Josh Reynolds

Plague Doktor - C.L. Werner

The City Is Theirs - Phillip Athans

The Second Sun - Ben Counter

Aenarion - Gav Thorpe

About The Authors

Legal

eBook license

It is an age of legend.

It is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of unspeakable pacts and powerful magic. It is an age of war and of death, and of apocalyptic terror. But amidst all of the flames and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage...

At the heart of the Old World lie the lands of men. The brave warriors of the Empire and the noble knights of Bretonnia battle to defend their homes from marauding hordes of savage orcs and the horrifying beastmen that lurk in the sinister forests. Beneath their feet lie the warrens of the verminous skaven, mutant ratmen who plot and scheme to claim the great human cities for their own. In the shadows lurk the vampires – once men, now evil beasts – whose thirst for blood is matched only by their thirst for power. Far to the south, the Tomb Kings of Nehekhara and their skeletal legions march to war, determined that all men join them in death.

But the humans are not alone in their struggle. To the east, the dwarfs valiantly attempt to hold together their crumbling empire under the mountains, now infested with goblins and other foul creatures. To the west lies Ulthuan, the realm of the elves, and it is by their mystical arts that the lands of men and dwarfs are kept safe from the roiling tide of magic that suffuses the world. But ever at their throats are their twisted cousins, the dark elves of Naggaroth, determined to take back the lands
that were once theirs.

The greatest threat to all comes from the north, from the Realm of Chaos where daemons rule over a twisted and unnatural reality. Legions of armoured warriors march upon the civilised realms, the very substance of the world warping at their passage. Should man, elf or dwarf fail in their eternal vigil against this darkness, the world will be doomed.

Within these pages are tales of the mighty heroes of this age, and the great events that have shaped their destinies. Tales from their history, tales of their epic battles and grand adventures – tales from the Time of Legends.

A SMALL VICTORY

Paul S. Kemp

THE PRESENT

Masud was exhausted, but he kept running, throwing one leaden leg in front of the other. The desert sucked at his sandals and small, desperate sounds slipped past his lips with every stride. He tried to keep them in – he knew the dead would hear them – but his fear demanded expression. He gulped sand-dusted air, gagging on the grit, his heartbeat an unrelenting drum in his ears.

His memory flashed on Naemah, her face in ruins, her eyes dark, empty pools. Vomit threatened, but he swallowed it down.

Clouds smeared the already feeble moonlight across the night sky, coating the desert in ink. He could only see ten paces in any direction. He was running blind, surrounded by the living dead. Shadows loomed out of the darkness, shambling forms, arms outstretched. The stink of rot suffused the air, a reeking fog surrounding him. He staggered, lost his balance entirely, and went head over heels, his breath escaping in a groan. He came instantly up on all fours, panicked, unable to breathe, sand clinging to his sweaty flesh. The vomit came, and he lost his supper to the sands.

All around, he heard the slow scrape of rotting flesh moving over sand, the grotesque click-clack of ruined teeth, fleshless jaws masticating air in anticipation of live flesh. And the moans, the awful hungry moans, that sounded somehow like the echo of words, loss and pain.

He wiped his mouth, glancing around frantically like a trapped animal, his sweaty hand clenched around the hilt of his gory khopesh.

More moans, getting closer.

Get up. Get up. Get up.

His mind summoned an image of Naemah. Tears welled in his eyes.

A form lurched out of the darkness to his right, bruise-coloured flesh hanging loose from its bones, rotted teeth bared in a snarl. The wrap it wore hung in scraps from its ruined body. It uttered a moan and staggered toward him. He jumped to his feet and ran.

Another form appeared to his left, preceded by the stink of death, the terrible clack of the teeth and more moans.

He veered right and sprinted on, slipping in the sand, fear and instinct the only things propelling him forwards. He glanced around, still running, still reliving his encounter with Naemah. The distraction cost him and he slammed hard into the back of a zombie. Its flesh exploded like a rotted fruit, painting him in stinking gore. They went down in a tangle of limbs, and the zombie’s cold, clammy flesh brought bile to the back of his throat. It tried to turn over, pawing at him, moaning, teeth clacking, cold fingers closing on his arm. He put his knee in its back, split its head with a downwards slash from his khopesh and scrambled to his feet.

They were all around him, forms in the darkness, closing, moaning, teeth chattering. He spun in a circle, breathing hard, his vision blurred. He was dead. He knew he was dead, and silence no longer mattered. He picked a direction and ran, shouting in fear and despair.

‘I’m sorry, Naemah!’

He should have done it. He should have done it.

Howls erupted behind him: not zombies, but ghouls, flesh eaters. In his mind’s eye he saw them – emaciated once-men, skin like leather drawn tight over sinew and muscle, their thin faces all bloodshot eyes and sharpened teeth. They loped over the sand like a pack of jackals.

He answered their howl with another shout. Movement to his right caught his eye and he ran toward it, hysterical, enraged and terrified. The zombie turned, raising its arms, and Masud hacked them off, grinning while blood sprayed, then continued his wild sprint.

He careered over the sand another ten paces before he tripped and staggered, arms flailing. Everything slowed and he seemed to stumble for an eternity. A fall of only moments stretched into a lifetime of terrified anticipation. He hit the ground awkwardly and his head struck something hard. Pain shot through him, sparks flashing before his eyes. Thoughts floated free in his head and rose into the air around him. He was drifting among them, falling, his vision going dark.

He tried to murmur Naemah’s name, the last sound he wanted to utter before he died, but he couldn’t make his mouth work.

He was vaguely aware of snarls, of hands, or something worse, on his body, or maybe he was just imagining it.

Probably some kind of animal, he thought nonsensically. Maybe he’d tripped over a plank of wood. He wondered why that last thought struck him as funny. He wondered, too, how he’d got there to begin with.

A DAY EARLIER

Masud paced the top of Bhagar’s towering stone walls, as restless as one of the priest-king’s caged lions. A desiccating wind pulled sweat from his skin. Pennons raised over the walls snapped in the breeze, the sound like whip cracks. The sun crept over the horizon and painted the sky and sand in crimson and gold.

Behind and below, the city awakened from another night of disquieted, pensive slumber.

A few carts rattled down the packed earth streets. Shutters and shades opened to face another day, as coughs and the murmur of low conversation carried through the quiet. After a time, hammer blows from the direction of the Merchants’ Quarter announced the beginning of the workday for the slaves who toiled from dawn to sunset on the city’s defences. As the full circle of the sun crested the horizon, the huge gong of the Temple of Ptra sounded the morning toll. Throughout the city, the smoke of sacrifice rose from temples and carried off into the morning air, bearing the hopes and prayers of the populace.

Masud looked beyond the walls, to the barren sandscape of the desert. A lone cart lay askew in the area before the walls, half buried by the windblown sand. The area would normally have been bustling, dotted with colourful tents, camels and horses, travellers and the chatter of commerce, but everyone had retreated within the city walls, or fled.

War was coming. The Usurper and his unliving horde were sweeping across the desert like a sandstorm, burying all before them, or so some said. But the army, however powerful would break on Bhagar’s walls. It had to.

The wind gusted, sending a series of tiny whirlwinds eddying across the sand. Perhaps they were fleeing from the advancing army, too.

‘Masud.’

His brother’s voice startled him, pulled him around.

Fadil wore the linen kilt and boiled leather vest typical of a professional soldier. Sweat beaded his bald pate. Gold bands bound his narrow, pointed beard. A heavy tulwar and ceremonial whip hung from his wide leather girdle. He wore the headband of a cavalry officer in the priest-king’s army.

Seeing his brother brought Masud hope. They embraced.

‘It’s good to see you, Fadil. It’s been too long.’

‘I tried to find you last night when I heard…’ He ran a hand over his head, words failing him.

Masud felt his cheeks warm. ‘When you heard that Naemah had left?’

Fadil nodded. ‘I thought you might…’

‘I’m going after her,’ Masud said.

‘…be thinking of doing something rash.’ Fadil sighed and shook his head. ‘You can’t, Masud.’

‘I must.’

Fadil stared into Masud’s face, as if judging his resolve. He leaned forward and spoke in a low tone. ‘You shouldn’t. She’s been gone half a day and it’s… dangerous beyond the walls.’

‘The more reason I should go after her!’

‘You don’t know what’s out there! It’s–’

‘Her father forced her to go,’ Masud said, pacing anew. ‘She would not have gone otherwise. She loves me, Fadil.’

Masud turned and stared into his older brother’s face, daring him to disagree. Fadil surprised him with a smile and a nod.

‘I know she does. And you love her. I can see it in your face. Hasani has not been dead so long that I’ve forgotten that look. I wore it once, too.’

Hearing his brother mention the wife he’d lost to plague four years earlier put a pit in Masud’s stomach. He took a step towards him, a hand raised in apology.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to open old wounds. I–’

‘You can’t reopen what has never closed. I know what it is to miss someone. I would not wish it on you, but I do not wish you to risk your life, either. You are my brother.’

Masud said softly, ‘I must, Fadil. I have to find her.’

Fadil’s expression softened as resistance crumbled. He rubbed his beard. ‘How will you get out of the city? As of this morning, the priest-king has forbidden anyone from leaving, for fear that all would flee if they could.’

‘I… I hoped that you could help. You are–’

‘An officer of the Priest-King’s army?’

‘Yes. And I know it is much to ask–’

‘If it were known that I defied an edict, I would be sent to the salt mines to work and die.’

‘They wouldn’t dare!’ Masud protested. ‘You command a regiment of horse. At worst, you would be flogged.’

Fadil stared at Masud, eyebrows raised.

Masud felt himself colour. ‘I didn’t mean–’

‘You didn’t mean to be a spendthrift with the coin of my pain?’

Masud looked away, fists clenched with frustration and embarrassment.

‘I shouldn’t have involved you.’ He turned and stared out over the desert, looking in the direction that Naemah would have taken towards the mountains and Quatar. He wished he could leap from the walls and fly. ‘Forgive me, Fadil. I should have–’

His brother’s hand on his shoulder gave him a gentle shake.

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I would be punished if it were known that I did. So, let us take care that it is never known.’

He pulled Masud close and embraced him.

Relief caused Masud’s eyes to well. ‘Thank you. Thank you, Fadil.’

‘You’re my brother, Masud. Naemah is your love. And love makes its own demands.’

Masud hugged his brother the way he had when they were boys, when their parents still lived and the world seemed wondrous and new, when the Usurper was nothing more than ancient legend.

‘How will I escape the city?’

The smell of incense wafted up to them from the street below. They looked down to see half a dozen priests of Usirian, the god of the underworld, walk by, their bodies covered head to toe in a sheer veil of gossamer-green linen. Hoods covered their downcast heads and each carried a small censer that leaked aromatic smoke. Pedestrians near them spat in their path and shouted at them. The priests did not respond.

Fadil stroked his beard and nodded at the priests.

‘That’s how. The priest-king has ordered them from the city by nightfall.’

Masud could not believe it. ‘Ordered the priests away? Why?’

‘They were to ensure the eternal sleep of the dead. If what we’ve heard of the Usurper’s army is true, then they’ve failed. But their failure is your opportunity.’

Masud held up his hands and shook his head. ‘I can’t pass as a priest, Fadil. If anyone questions me…’

‘No one will. The priests have vowed to stay silent until the priest-king’s edict is lifted. You’ll hide among them and out you’ll go. No one will expect you to speak.’

Masud warmed to the idea. He rubbed his chin.

‘But you’ll have to travel on foot,’ Fadil continued. ‘The exiled priests will not be given horses.’

‘Naemah is travelling by wagon. I will catch her easily.’

‘Then it is settled.’

Masud could scarcely believe his good fortune. He’d need to make offerings to Basth in thanks.

‘Come on,’ Fadil said. ‘We need to get you vestments and get you out as soon as possible. Most of Usirian’s priests have already left the city.’

As they descended one of the many stairways that led down from the walls, Masud said, ‘Fadil, do you think they… feel anything? The Usurper’s creatures? Do you think they know anything?’

‘I think they’re no more alive than a plank of wood.’

‘I’ve… heard that their final thoughts stay with them and drive them mad.’

Fadil, never one for fanciful thoughts, shook his head. ‘They’re dead and nothing is left of them. Put these things from your mind. Dark arts animate dead flesh, nothing more. In any event, they are still far from here, so you will see none. But you must hurry. War will be upon us soon enough.’

‘What about you and your men, Fadil? You are horsemen. A siege is–’

‘When the dead start to appear, I’ll lead my companies out to meet them. We will destroy as many as we can out in the desert, then fight our way back to the city. The priest-king wants us to do as much damage as we can before the siege begins.’

‘That seems a small victory.’

Fadil nodded. ‘It does. But large victories are made of many smaller ones. Besides, sometimes small victories are all the gods allow.’

‘True.’

‘We have duties, you and I,’ Fadil said. ‘Mine is to the city. Yours is to your heart. Time to perform them. Now, let’s get you those vestments.

The crowded streets smelled of sweat and emptied chamber pots. Masud eyed the throng of pedestrians, camels, horses, and wagons through the veil of the priestly vestments.

‘Here is one more,’ Fadil shouted from atop his mount. He pulled Masud along by the robes and shoved him into a trio of Usirian’s priests. ‘Fall in, dog!’

The priests, likewise robed and veiled in green, barely glanced at Masud. They bore staffs, waterskins, and little else. Masud had secreted his khopesh under his robes.

The crowd lining the street shook fists and screamed curses, brandishing their anger like a weapon. Masud bent under the onslaught. A shirtless child with a mop of unkempt hair darted into the street and spat at him and the crowd cheered. The contents of chamber pots rained down upon them them from balconies.

‘If you can’t keep them dead, then the gods send you to join them!’ shouted a hugely fat woman. She threw a stone that hit the head of the priest in front of Masud. The priest staggered and the crowd roared, surging forwards as if the thrown stone had broken some invisible barrier that had held them back. Masud bounded forward and took the priest under the armpits to keep him from falling and getting trampled.

‘Get away!’ Masud shouted, realising his mistake too late.

The priest he was aiding whirled to face him. Masud could well imagine the look of shock behind his veil.

‘He spoke,’ someone shouted, pointing at Masud. ‘Oathbreaker, oathbreaker!’

‘Back,’ shouted Fadil, from behind them, and his mount danced a circle around the four priests. ‘Everyone back. They are banished by order of the priest-king. Back!’

Fadil reared his horse and the crowd retreated, still shouting.

‘Move!’ Fadil shouted to the priests, hustling them towards the west gate. The crowd closed in behind them, a tide of frightened, angry flesh held at bay only by the implied threat in Fadil’s words.

Fadil darted ahead of the priests, swung out of the saddle and handed his reins to one of his men.

‘Keep the crowd back,’ he ordered, and they formed up on the road, spears crossed.

Fadil walked behind the priests as they passed through the tunnel of the gatehouse. Masud welcomed its hollow quiet. Ahead, the light of the midday sun beckoned and the desert spread out before them. Fadil’s hand closed on his shoulder and his brother’s mouth was beside his ear.

‘Stick to the road and make for Quatar. It’s the only place Naemah could have gone. Be careful, and Ptra keep you.’

Masud dared not speak, so he simply put his hand over Fadil’s. Then his brother was gone. Masud and the priests stepped out of the gatehouse tunnel and into the sun. The shouts of the crowd faded away as the enormous gates ratcheted closed behind them. The four of them stood outside the city, the eyes of the wall guards upon them, as if unsure what to do next.

The wind stirred the sand. Masud was already sweating under his robes. He felt the eyes of one of the priests on him, the one who’d heard him shout at the crowd. The priest seemed as if he wanted to speak, but his own vow sealed his lips. Masud glanced back at the walls, at the guards looking down on them.

He took the priest by the shoulder and started walking west. The others followed. Before them, the desert stretched on forever.

The priests walked slowly, their heads bowed. They moved like beaten men, their elevated status stripped from them by the priest-king in a fit of pique. Masud considered leaving them behind, but could not quite bring himself to do so. Instead, he moved among them, silently urging them to move more quickly. The priest who’d heard him speak eyed him continuously. When Bhagar could no longer be seen behind them, Masud decided to confess.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, and they gasped. He removed his veil and showed his face. ‘As you see, I’m not one of you. I needed to leave Bhagar and this was the only way. Forgive me for the sacrilege.’

They looked from one to another, obviously uncomfortable. Masud plowed onwards.

‘My beloved travelled this road yesterday in a wagon. I want to catch up with her, to see her to safety in Quatar. We can all be safe there.’

The priests looked at one another. He could read nothing of their expressions behind the veils.

‘Come on,’ he said, and started walking.

The priests followed him. They had nowhere else to go.

Masud set a brisk pace, his eyes staring into the distance ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of Naemah’s wagon. The priests huffed and sometimes stumbled but kept up. They ate dried dates and smoked meat on the move. The hours drained away. Throughout the day, they saw flocks of birds in the distance, flying towards Bhagar. Twice they saw desert foxes fleeing in the same direction, tails down and drawn between their legs. Masud had seen animals behave so only when a sandstorm impended, but he saw no sign of one approaching.

‘Plainly, they’re fleeing something,’ he said, and the priests nodded.

Night swallowed day and with the darkness came a sense of dread. The priests’ silence seemed not a religious observance but an expression of fear. Masud wished at least one of them would break his vow and speak. None did.

The wind picked up, spitting the desert at them in coarse granules. Above them, clouds thickened, devouring the stars and darkening the sky.

‘We travel through the night,’ Masud said, his voice small in the vast emptiness.

The priests nodded, plodding along behind him in the sand.

Neru rose but the clouds ate her light. Sakhmet followed, and her foul glow leaked through the clouds and cast the world in a pale, unholy green. Masud’s heart was racing. He could not say why.

Forms rushed out of the darkness before them, a pack of jackals, tongues lolling, running in silence back the way Masud and the priests had come. The pack paid the humans no heed. Masud could have reached out and touched two of the creatures as they passed. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. He shared a look with the priests, but their veils masked their expressions.

‘Keep moving,’ Masud said.

The wind soon grew chill, whispering over the dunes. Over its rush, Masud thought he heard a distant moan.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked the nearest priest.

Lost in his hopelessness, the man merely shook his head.

Masud swallowed, eyes and ears alert to all around him. A hiss sounded from the darkness to his right. More animals?

He held up a hand to stop the priests, stepped a few strides off the road and stared out into the desert. The clouds obscured the moon’s green light and it was too dark to see far. He saw nothing but the roll of the dunes, the wind shaving off their tops in sprays of sand.

Another hiss sounded from somewhere out in the darkness, a low, prolonged moan that weakened his legs. No animal, surely.

‘You must have heard that,’ he whispered over his shoulder.

The priests shifted on their feet, staring at one another and back at him.

‘Speak, damn you,’ he said. ‘Did you hear it or not?’

Another moan from behind the priests spun them all around.

A form lurched over the sand, staggering towards them, arms outstretched. The priests backed off, fumbling for their staffs. One fell on his backside.

‘Stand and name yourself!’ Masud said, running towards the figure, khopesh in hand.

Only a moan answered his demand.

A knife slit in the clouds let some of Neru’s light through, painting the desert in a flash of silver. In it, Masud could see the stranger: flesh the color of a bruise, skull half staved-in beneath his turban, face crusted with brains and blood, teeth bared like a beast and empty, dead eyes. He wore the robes of a desert raider.

Masud sprinted past the priests, towards the creature. It moaned at his approach, hands opening and closing. Its jaw moved as if chewing the air, teeth chattering.

Masud sidestepped its slow, awkward lunge and brought his khopesh down on the zombie’s neck, nearly severing its head. Blood splattered him as the corpse fell to the ground, twitching. He struck it again, then a third time before it stopped moving.

He looked up to see the three priests standing in a huddle in the road, their staffs held before them as if to ward off the creature. He listened, and through the wind heard more moans. He could not tell if they came from behind or in front of them.

‘The Usurper’s army must be closing on Bhagar faster than the scouts reported.’

He considered turning around, heading back to warn the city, but he had to find Naemah. Besides, the priest-king had scouts. They would warn him.

‘Do any of you wish to turn back?’

The priests looked at one another, shook their heads. Quatar was their only hope.

‘Come then,’ he said.

The priests fell in behind him, trailing him like ghosts. From time to time he stopped and listened to the desert. In time, he perceived the deep slow beat of war drums carrying from somewhere, the artificial heartbeat of an army that had no beating hearts among it.

Distant hisses sounded from out in the darkness: more moans and howls. The wind carried the suggestive stink of rot. The priests crowded closely around him, staffs in hand. He walked with his khopesh ready, his body tensed.

Shadows moved at the edge of their vision. Once, they heard the horrible clacking of teeth from the far side of a dune. He and the priests crouched low in the road until the wind ate the sound.

Fear crept up on Masud, gripped him in chill fingers. He sweated so badly, breathing so heavily, that he feared he might soon pass out. The chill wind raised the hairs on his clammy flesh.

He stared up at the sky, wondering at the hour.

‘Day is not far off,’ he whispered, but it was a lie. They had many hours of darkness left, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what the day would reveal.

Still, he pressed on, his desire to find Naemah consuming him. He imagined her, her family and their servants plodding along the road in a wagon as the dead stalked out of the darkness. He told himself that they had moved faster than he had expected, that they were far, far ahead, well away from the danger. The hope salved his concern and kept him moving.

An hour later they found Naemah’s caravan, and hope died.

The spare moonlight cast the wagon in lurid silver. It lay half toppled in a dune near the road. The horses, still harnessed to the yoke, lay on their sides in the sand, the carcasses stripped nearly to the bone. Broken pots, two rolls of fabric, and other household goods lay scattered in the sand, the flotsam of murder.

He ran forwards, his legs failing him. He fell, rose and fell again. There was blood all over the sand, browned by the hours. But no bodies. No bodies. Gods.

He put his face in his hands, fear forgotten, fatigue forgotten, all of it drained away into the yawning black hole of his despair. Naemah had been caught by the dead, his beloved, his flower. Her pale flesh had been… he forced himself to think it: eaten. She had died in terror, in pain. In his mind’s eye, an image of her death played itself over and over: her screams, her agony, her blood.

He felt gutted, turned inside out. He floated outside himself, his flesh a shell that held only pain and grief and despair.

‘Naemah!’ he shouted, heedless of who might hear. ‘Naemah!’

Two of the priests ran to his side, one signalling for silence with a finger held to his lips, the other shaking Masud by the shoulders. Masud did not care. He threw them off.

‘Begone!’ he said, spit flying. ‘There is nothing left for me now. Go! Go and die in your silence, if you will. I will die speaking her name. Begone!’

Howls sounded from the darkness. He heard the ominous clicking of teeth, and perceived movement at the edge of his vision.

The dead had heard his shouts. They clambered over the dunes and the priests backed away, looking for an escape.

‘Run if you will,’ Masud said to them, standing and grinning madly. ‘Run.’

Rage, and the desire for revenge, replaced grief. He took his khopesh in both hands and charged. The first zombie, once a man, limped on a ruined knee. Half of his face was gone, revealing his skull and an empty eye socket. Masud easily avoided the zombie’s lurching grasp and swung his blade in a crosscut that split the zombie’s head. Splinters of bone and flesh spattered him. He spun and crouched, his teeth bared in a grimace. He saw another zombie staggering towards him, a woman in filthy, bloodstained robes, great chunks of her hair pulled out by the roots to reveal an oozing scalp. He ducked under her grasping hands and chopped through her knee. The blade cut through the joint and she fell in a moaning heap, her mouth opening and closing, teeth clacking. Roaring, he brought his blade down between her eyes.

Motion behind him pulled him around. He whirled, snarling.

And froze.

Naemah stood a few paces from him, lurching across the sand. Her long, dark hair, caked with dirt and blood, was over her face. Her head hung from her neck at a grotesque angle, her spine obviously snapped. Her lower lip and the skin of her jaw had been ripped almost clear, revealing her gums and teeth. It looked as if she was grinning.

A priest screamed behind him, a terrible, pained shriek, but he barely heard it.

His lips moved as if to say Naemah’s name, but he could not bring himself to utter it, not while looking at the thing before him. All at once, the rage went from him, draining away into the sand. He was in ruins. Everything was in ruins.

She approached, her gait wobbly, and he raised his blade, the motion unthinking, reflexive, like that of an automaton, like that of a dead man. He was dimly aware of tears leaking down his face.

Another step closer, another. She moaned, her fingers opened and closed, her mouth working, teeth making that terrible clack, as if in anticipation of feasting on his flesh.

He thought of all the moments they’d shared, the soft words, the warm embraces. His hand tightened on the hilt of his blade. Howls sounded nearby – carrion eaters. More moans, more shuffling corpses. Another screaming priest.

He should destroy her, he knew. Cut her down and then put his blade to himself.

But he couldn’t. He lowered the khopesh, steeled himself and raised it again. But he couldn’t. He could not harm his Naemah.

She took another step towards him, her face still fixed in a bloody rictus, and something in him broke, snapping like a bowstring. Fear returned, bringing despair for company.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, then he turned and ran, chased by memories and the dead.

Behind him, he heard Naemah moan. He slowed and almost turned, once more resolved to destroy her, to put her out of her misery. But he knew he couldn’t.

He wept freely as he ran.

THE PRESENT

Masud awoke face down in the sand. His head throbbed. His vision was blurry and his eyes ached. His joints screamed with agony. He did not know how long he had lain there alone in the sand. Hours, maybe. It was still dark. Sakhmet leered green from a gap in the clouds.

Groaning, he lifted himself to all fours, then stood. He was covered in stinking blood. There were moans all around him, movement in the dark. They must not have seen him. He heard the howl of flesh-eaters but they sounded far off. His heartbeat hammered in his ears, or was that the war drums of the Usurper’s army? He could not be sure. He was not thinking clearly. His mouth was as arid as the desert, and tasted foul.

One thought alone penetrated his clouded thinking. He needed to get home. He needed to get to Bhagar and his brother.

Moaning at the pain that wracked his body, he staggered back the way he had come. Two of the priests he had journeyed with stepped from the darkness and fell in behind him. Of course they said nothing. Neither did he.

Sand and gore coated Fadil’s arms and armoured vest. He rode at the head of his company, scanning the breaking darkness for any more of the straggling lead elements of the Usurper’s forces. Fadil and his men had left Bhagar two hours after Sakhmet’s rise, when scouts had returned and reported that the unliving horde was closer than anyone had suspected. His first thoughts had been for Masud and Naemah. He made an offering to Ptra, praying for their safety. Then, duty had overtaken concern.

Not long after thundering out of the city, he and his men had encountered zombies and flesh-eaters in groups numbering anywhere from a dozen to a few score. Throughout the night they had chopped, stabbed, and trampled the dead into a bloody pulp that stained the sand red. He would keep fighting until daybreak, take stock of the size of the horde, then ride back for Bhagar as if Usirian himself was at his heels.

‘Ahead, my lord!’ shouted Alfun, one of his sharpest-eyed outriders.

Alfun pointed with his spear to a sea of dunes. There, undead monstrosities staggered out of the darkness in groups of two and three, their shambling gait unmistakable in Sakhmet’s viridian glow.

‘Follow me,’ he said. Tulwar in hand, he put his heels into the flanks of his mount. The mare flew over the sand and his riders thundered behind, roaring a battle cry.

Masud heard the clamour of battle ahead. He could scarcely see anything, just cloudy darkness and the haunting green glow of Sakhmet. He was aware of others around him, but they seemed mere shadows, somehow unreal. He just wanted to get home and see Fadil. Nothing more. His mind fixated on it, holding on to it as if that single task were the only thing that mattered in the world.

Riders exploded over the dunes, tulwars and spears raised, horses thundering and warriors shouting. One of them flew a banner, the heraldry of Bhagar, of home. He stumbled towards it, the two priests flanking him. He tried to call out, to speak, but his dry mouth allowed nothing to escape but a moan.

Fadil split the head of zombie and the corpse fell to the ground, twitched for a moment, and lay still.

‘Shore up the left,’ he shouted at Alfun. All around him, his men cut down the walking dead.

‘By the gods!’ one of his riders shouted, the words dripping with despair. Other riders took up the call, fear spreading like a contagion.

‘What is it?’ Fadil called, scything down another zombie and looking up the rise, where several of his men had gathered. ‘What?’

Dawn lightened the sky. In its newborn light Fadil could see a dust cloud far in the distance. His men were looking in the direction of the dust. Fadil heeled his mare and she galloped to the rise.

‘What is it? A sandstorm?’

He could not make sense of what he saw, a black blanket that stretched for leagues, carpeting the desert. Its undulating motion over the sand threw up the dust.

The Usurper’s army.

He could make out few details other than its size. It looked like a single organism, a seething, roiling mass marching forward, covering the sand in rot.

He and his men stared at the enormity of the army and what it implied. Bhagar could not hold. Nothing could hold. And yet…

And yet, he had a duty to perform. He could not – would not – surrender to hopelessness.

‘Back to it!’ he shouted. ‘Kill what we can!’

He and his men wheeled their mounts and charged at the nearest zombies. Fadil cut one down and wheeled his mount as another shambled toward him, arms outstretched, a moan escaping its lips.

At first he had trouble believing his eyes. His breath caught and his tulwar fell slack at his side.

‘Masud?’

His brother stumbled towards him, blood and sand encrusting his face, his skin purpling with death, the vestments he wore as a disguise little more than rags. His swollen tongue lolled from his mouth as he moaned.

‘No, no, no!’

Masud’s hands opened and closed reflexively, as if imagining a grip on Fadil’s horse. His teeth chattered grotesquely.

Words poured through Fadil’s mind in a rush. He heard his brother’s voice.

Do you think they feel anything?

Do you think they know anything?

I’ve… heard that their final thoughts stay with them, drive them mad.

Fadil wept as he swung out of his saddle. Masud lurched for him, his eyes black, empty, dead. He moaned again and Fadil could hardly bear it. He thought of the size of the Usurper’s army, knew that in coming days his body, too, would probably shamble mindlessly in service to the necromancer. But he could at least give his brother peace.

A vicious cut separated Masud’s head from his neck. The body fell to the ground, blood gushing, and Fadil fell to the sand beside it. He took his brother’s cold hand in his own.

‘I’m sorry, Masud.’

After a moment, he stood and remounted his horse.

Sometimes small victories were all the gods allowed.

BLOODRAVEN

Sarah Cawkwell

Another messenger came. This one made it to the stronghold alive, though he did not remain so for long. His wounds could not be dressed enough and the bleeding could not be stemmed. There was never any real hope of saving him. Far too much of his life had been spilled through the countless lacerations that criss-crossed his body. The messenger was almost a husk by the time he half-fell across the threshold.

The young dwarf was no fool. He knew that his life was forfeit but his dedication and devotion to his king gave him strength enough to bring his message. Fate, whether for good or evil, kept him alive long enough to bring word of the outposts to his sworn lord.

The messenger’s final five words were gasped with difficulty, every syllable tearing fresh agony from the gaping slashes in his body. And at the last, he knew no comfort in death. As the light left his eyes and the last breath dribbled from his broken lungs he saw the impact his words had upon his beloved thane.

‘The last outpost has fallen.’

The invaders had not struck at the stronghold for several days but this was no cause for celebration. Karak Ghulg had stood resolute under the onslaught of the marauders without giving quarter at all. Fading crimson stained the snow that piled high against the gates of the dwarf hold. In the face of the almost constant wave of attacks, there had been no time to clear the dead and for now, the corpses of the human madmen, kept fresh and held rigid by the ice and cold, lay where they had fallen. Their eyes stared sightlessly up at the tempestuous, stormy skies that hung leadenly over the northernmost tip of the Worlds Edge Mountains.

The cold served an additional purpose: that of keeping the stink of the dead at bay. But even stifled as it was the stench was there. Faint and unpleasant, the acrid smell of rotting flesh carried on the wind.

So far north, the near-constant snow was an inevitability that the dwarfs of Karak Ghulg had long accepted. It was the price they paid for inhabiting a place so remote. But the rewards of mining the mineral-rich seams far beneath its surface more than compensated for the hardships of the terrain.

Breath ghosting before him, a sentry raised his head to the deepening night air and inhaled a lungful of air so sharp that it caught in his chest. There would be fresh snowfall before morning. It told in the crispness of the air, in the ice wind that chilled the weathered cheeks beneath the dwarf’s whiskers. He let out a soft grunt of grim satisfaction as the first snowflake drifted down, catching in the dark hair of his beard. Without speaking, he waved a dismissive hand at the sky.

‘Nothing clever about predicting snow in the northern mountains,’ said his companion, shifting the weight of his axe to the other shoulder. ‘Don’t be expecting me to be impressed. Predict the next time those bloody maniacs try to attack and I’ll give you good money. Not before.’ The dwarf watched his breath crystallise. It was another clear night and with only the few paltry snow clouds that scudded overhead, temperatures had plummeted to painful levels.

‘Easier to predict the king’s moods these days than the pattern of those bastards.’ Those words earned a gruff, grim chuckle. The King of Karak Ghulg was renowned for his big heart, his big personality and his big temper. It was said by those old enough to remember that Skaldi Ironjaw had fought down a minotaur with his bare hands when he had been younger. He always laughed it off as an exaggeration, but there were still those who swore blind – while sober – that it was true.

Ironjaw lived his life to the absolute full, whether it was leading his men from the front line of a battle or drinking the whole stronghold under the table. His rule over the dwarfs of the north was greatly respected and entire families had moved to this most remote part of the world just to work and live under him.

‘Aye, right enough. The whole place has been on edge over the actions of these madmen from the wastes.’ The sentry waved a hand in a northerly direction. ‘Think everyone’s wondering just how this is going to end.’

‘In their deaths.’ The other guard pointed the tip of his axe down towards the piled corpses. ‘You doubt that?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ In the distance, there was the sound of bestial howling. Eyes turned in its direction and feet shuffled uncomfortably. Since the arrival of the fur- and skin-wearing barbarians, there had been more horrors in the forest. Carrion birds, dire wolves and other things the dwarfs could not name. Creatures of the night and of the infinite dark swarmed the petrified forest beyond the stronghold’s gates.

‘Does no good to doubt our ultimate victory,’ chanced the guard as he shook himself free of the creeping discomfort that followed in the wake of the howling. ‘Sure way to lose, that is.’ This elicited a grunt of agreement and he continued, his own hopes buoyed by the words. ‘I tell you this. While Skaldi Ironjaw still believes there is hope, then we will triumph.’

‘Hope fades swiftly, my son.’

Eldgrim, the eldest Prince of Karak Ghulg, knelt at the foot of his father’s throne, his head lowered in deference to his father. He had looked up sharply at these words and his eyes narrowed in surprised concern. He had never once heard his father sound so utterly defeated as he did right now. The council had been dismissed and they had left the throne room, taking the body of the unfortunate messenger from the outpost with them.

Skaldi’s rage had been near incandescent at the discovery their last outpost had fallen into the hands of the invaders. The loss of life cut him to the core and as well as the anger that pervaded every fibre of his being came the terrible grief, the sense of responsibility for deaths that could perhaps have been prevented.

Sensing his father’s mood, Eldgrim sought to find the right words. His younger brother had always been far more diplomatic than he was. Not for the first time he wished that Felbjorn stood at his side. But it was not to be; the younger of the king’s two sons was engaged on a task of his own. As such, Eldgrim had to handle his father’s volcanic explosions of anger as best he could.

‘Do not give up hope just yet, my lord. Our warriors are still fierce and strong. Their hearts beat true. The stronghold will not fall.’ When he finally spoke the words came tinged with the faintest air of uncertainty. He rocked back onto his heels before getting slowly to his feet. The silver hoops that he wore in his right ear caught the flickering firelight of the Hall of Audience and as was his way, he reached up to toy with them as he spoke. ‘These wild creatures who attack us from the north continue to fall beneath our superior weaponry and skill. Eventually they will either concede defeat or pass us by. Either suits.’

Skaldi snorted. ‘You are yet young, Eldgrim. It is that which makes you foolish in this matter. Foolish and ignorant. Something drives these barbarians on beyond any tenacity I have ever witnessed.’

He leaned back. The Seat of Ironjaw was an ornate, hand-carved throne depicting scenes from the long and illustrious history of his family’s line. Many of Skaldi’s own victories were painstakingly carved into the stone. Eyes of Ironjaws past were picked out in minute gemstones of the darkest sapphire while ruby blood drops fell from the slain enemies of the dwarfs.

Skaldi had sat upon the throne of Karak Ghulg for a long time. His fortress was wealthy, prosperous and extremely productive. The foundries and mining operations were run with a firm but even hand that got the best out of his workers. His warriors were brave, strong and loyal. The stronghold flourished and had fought down attempted invasions many times. But these marauders seemed to be driven by something other than simple lust for wealth. They yearned to kill for killing’s sake.

Skirmishes between the dwarfs and the barbarians of the North had always been inevitable. They were too different; too detached from one another to find any sort of common ground or bargaining room. But now Skaldi could taste the bitter tang of corruption on the wind that blew these madmen to his gates. Never had he witnessed such ferocity from the humans who threw themselves willingly into death’s path. He had watched as one attacker after another had been rent asunder by a dwarf axe, or been struck down by black powder from a handgun. And still they came. Nothing seemed to stop them.

‘Something drives them from within,’ he finally said, not voicing what he truly felt. These marauders from the far North were as touched by Chaos as any he had ever seen. They were so far beyond insane that there was a cool, clinical detachment to their onslaught. He had put down several of them himself during the last skirmish and he still recalled the look of cold hatred in the dying eyes. ‘They fight like men possessed.’

‘You suspect the hand of daemons in this?’ Eldgrim spat on the stone floor of the hall and made a sign to ward off evil as Skaldi nodded his head slowly. The king ran a hand down the full length of his beard, his hand briefly clenching around the gold fetishes that were braided into it.

‘The whispers that carry to my ears,’ said Skaldi quietly. ‘There are things beyond the Northern Wastes that the likes of you and I should never even comprehend. Yet it encroaches upon Karak Ghulg like an approaching storm. We must do all we can to break this wave here so that it does not proceed further into the Empire.’ His sharp blue eyes fixed on those of his oldest son.

‘I give thanks that Felbjorn has taken so many south.’ The refugees had been led by the young prince and had departed several days ago. Skaldi had determined that there was little point in risking the lives of those who were not equipped to defend Karak Ghulg. Wives and children, and those whose age rendered them incapable of wielding a weapon in defence of their home, were sent southwards for refuge at the next stronghold. Felbjorn had eagerly offered to lead them, ensuring that he would guarantee their safety. Once they were delivered, he would return and fight at his father’s side.

It had been a much harder job than anticipated to get people to leave. Many of the womenfolk had wanted to stay and fight and there were a goodly number of females within his remaining battle force. Grim and stalwart, they fought with at least as much ferocity as their husbands, fathers or brothers. For a time it had seemed as though none of the others would depart, reluctant as they were to leave their home. But Felbjorn had courted them with his silver tongue and convinced them of the importance of survival.

The prince’s own wife, heavily pregnant with their first child, had been amongst the hardest to persuade. It had only been when Felbjorn had stepped forward and made the offer to lead the evacuation that she had capitulated. The thane had not wanted to dispatch his son off on the task but Felbjorn had reassured him. And Skaldi had never been able to deny his wily youngest anything.

Skaldi let out a great sigh and ran a hand over his eyes. Never had the weight of leadership burdened him as heavily as it did now. ‘I promise you one thing, my son,’ he said to Eldgrim, who was watching his father like a hawk. ‘Chaos will never consume our people. The humans may have fallen in its path, but we will not.’

The night passed without incident: slowly for those on watch, swiftly for those who slumbered uneasily deep in the heart of the great fortress. The light snowfall that had left a dusting of powdery white on the corpses of the last attackers had become something more insistent, until a great blizzard had rendered visibility almost to nothing. Periodically, swirls of snow were picked up by the howling wind and blown into tiny funnels of white fury that danced with effortless grace across the rocky terrain. Somewhere there was a soft thump as one of the trees in the nearby forest gave up its load of snow, made heavy and unwieldy by its weight.

Night ticked over into the cold light of the pre-dawn morning but the blizzard was so thick that it may as well not have bothered.

Starkad had taken his position amidst the dawn watch and it was he who had first spied the figures moving towards the stronghold, black silhouettes standing out amidst the grey and white backdrop.

Letting out a shout of warning that was swiftly carried the line of the stronghold’s perimeter, Starkad swung his great war axe around so that the weapon rested easily across his shoulder. His stocky body adopted a defensive stance and he squinted into the snow.

They had learned over time that the madmen spoke very little that was comprehensible in terms of language. The only times that the dwarfs had treated with the humans outside of battle had been early attempts at forging trade relationships and they had found the communication process difficult. The human barbarians spoke in a series of guttural grunts and hard syllables that the dwarfs could not fully understand. There was a smattering of words that they could mutually recognise, but beyond that the humans only understood the language of war.

‘Hold. Approach no further.’ Starkad knew that the chances were high that the fur-clad men walking towards him would not comprehend but he also knew his duty.

There were three of them, each as big and shaggy as the other. The one in the middle raised his head against the wind and gave a toothy grin. The gale caught his mane of light red hair and blew it in a cloud around his dirty face. Each man wore similar clothing: furs and leathers that gave them an even greater bulk. From the stench that Starkad could detect even at this distance, the furs had been taken from recently slaughtered animals. The barbarian smiled again; not a pleasant sight.

‘We come,’ he said in a deep voice that was thickly accented. ‘We speak.’

‘Hold there.’ Starkad brandished his axe warningly and was surprised when the three men did as he ordered. This was something new. In all the months the barbarians had laid siege to the stronghold, none had ever approached without murder in their eyes. And certainly none had ever approached at a walking pace. Now they obeyed Starkad, coming to a halt, snow blowing around them.

‘We speak,’ repeated the man, the words obviously coming with difficulty. ‘Your king. We talk…’ He turned to his companions and they conferred in low voices. He spun his head again and raised both hands above his head in a universally recognised gesture of surrender.

‘We talk terms. Bring… gift. We talk. Yes?’

Messages had already been swiftly run down to the Hall of Audience and even as Starkad maintained his position on the gate, the king’s word was being passed back up through the subterranean network back to him. The command was brief and succinct and its content startled the soldier on the gates.

‘It seems that the king will meet with you, barbarian,’ Starkad said between teeth that ground together at the thought of allowing these creatures inside the glory of Karak Ghulg. ‘On condition that you leave your weapons here.’ He gestured them to move closer and they did. The three of them towered over Starkad but he scowled up at them with determination.

‘Your weapons,’ he said in a loud voice, speaking slowly in case they were idiots. ‘Leave them here.’ He pointed at the vicious-looking two-handed sword strapped to the back of the leader. ‘Drop it here, laddie, or you go no further.’

The three men exchanged a communication in their own language. One of them laughed and unstrapped the axe he wore in a loop at his waist. With a contemptuous smirk, he made a point of dropping the axe just short of embedding itself in the dwarf’s feet.

Starkad did not so much as flinch, which drew an unexpected look of approval from the barbarian leader. The other barbarian did the same with his two smaller axes. Further gesturing turned up several daggers and throwing knives as well.

This close up, the overpowering stench of death that accompanied the furs was redolent of blood which still dripped from the freshly flensed furs. The humans stank of dankness and decay, excrement and urine, and Starkad was eager to get them out of his sight, or more specifically, out of his scent. He pointed to the leader and the sword he still wore at his back.

‘You too,’ he said. The leader shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I go, sword goes.’ He seemed to consider, digging deep into his limited vocabulary. ‘No deal. We leave.’ He gestured to the weapons on the floor and his companions knelt to reclaim them.

‘The king wants to speak with them, Starkad,’ hissed the runner in his ear. ‘You mustn’t let them leave.’

Starkad frowned, sensing that there was far more to this than he could comprehend. ‘Very well,’ he said and he tapped the barbarian leader on the arm. ‘If you take the sword, you let me bind the scabbard so you cannot draw it.’

It took a few more moments to communicate the idea, but in the end the barbarian permitted Starkad to loop cord around the scabbard, pulling it tightly so that the sword could not be drawn – or at least, it could not be drawn swiftly. Another difficult exchange of words meant that the others put their weapons down again and with this done, Starkad stood back with a grunt of satisfaction. He ran his fingers through his beard to clear it of the snow that had settled in it during the process and gestured to the doorway that led to the main tunnel thoroughfare through to the Hall of Audience.

‘Get these sons of dogs out of my sight,’ he said, confident that they could not possibly understand him. As they passed, following the runner and flanked by several armed militia, the look the barbarian leader shot Starkad suggested that his assumption may not have been entirely accurate.

When word had been brought down to the Hall that barbarians were here to treat with him, Skaldi Ironjaw had immediately demanded that they be brought before the throne. He had taken his warhammer up from where it rested against his seat of office and laid it across his lap. The weapon was a perfect example of exquisite dwarf craftsmanship, as ornate as it was functional, and had been handed down through the years from father to son.

As he had done for the duration of the siege laid upon Karak Ghulg by the invaders, he wore his full suit of steel battle plate. It was pitted and scarred from years of protecting him but in excellent condition nonetheless. The incumbent master runesmith had not long since finished embedding a number of warding runes into the breastplate and they glowed softly with latent power.

At his right side stood Eldgrim, leaning on the haft of his own axe, his sapphire eyes fixed on the entrance to the Hall of Audience. His father’s insistence on meeting the humans had irritated his sensibilities and he had not been backwards in coming forward with his opinion. He had been reminded, quite emphatically, that Karak Ghulg was his father’s to command, not his. He did not doubt that there would be words exchanged later and they were unlikely to be complimentary. As such, his blood was already up and fired by the time the three humans were led into the Hall of Audience.

Vast and cavernous as the hall was, there was no need for the barbarians to duck or stoop. They entered ahead of their suspicious, scowling escort and at the sight of them, Ironjaw sat upright. He may have been several centuries old, but it did not mean that his insight and military acumen had dulled any with the passage of the years.

‘Dwarf king.’ The flame-haired leader of the barbarians spoke with a grin that was almost a snarl. Skaldi stared at the man and it was like gazing into an abyss of madness. There was no sanity left in him. Everything this pitiful creature had ever been had been lost through years of bloodletting. The oozing animal skins around his shoulders and neck suggested that they had been stripped from their dead owners barely hours ago. Pools of sticky blood gathered on the floor at their feet as they stood there, an affront to the purity of his Hall of Audience.

‘Aye,’ Skaldi replied in time. His eyes darted briefly to his eldest son. The prince was rigid with self-control as he eyed the sword the barbarian wore at his back. Starkad’s quick thinking was noted. The scabbard was bound tightly enough that should the human wrench his sword free, he would be set upon before he drew another breath. ‘Speak your piece, warrior, and make it swift.’

‘Peace?’ The barbarian frowned, misunderstanding the connotations of the word. Skaldi shook his head. He suspected that the human was far cannier than he was appearing to be. Behind the mask of madness he could see the lingering glint of intelligence. They might be feral, bestial animals, but they could still communicate.

‘No peace. Not yet. Say what you will. Why have you come here, to the heart of your enemy’s force?’

The warrior watched the dwarf king intently and his lips moved as he worked out the gist of the thane’s question. He smiled and bobbed his head in a curious gesture of deference.

‘Our leader. He sends us to you. We bring demand.’

‘A demand? My thane, this insult cannot go without retribution. Let me…’

‘Peace, Eldgrim.’ Taking up his hammer, Ironjaw rose to his feet, stepping down cautiously from the dais upon which his throne rested. ‘Rein in your temper, boy. It could be that they are finally prepared to deal with us.’ Eldgrim’s eyebrows raised. The king had been swift to enter the barbarians in the hold’s Book of Grudges and it surprised him to hear his father speak so. After a moment’s thought, he realised that in preparing to deal with savages, his father was proving he was by far and away the better man. Or as it happened in this case, the better dwarf.

A stern stare on his face, Skaldi considered the barbarian. ‘What demand would you make of us?’

The redhead translated the king’s words to his companions and the three of them burst into wild laughter that reverberated around the acoustically perfect chamber. The laughs came back threefold, echoed by the dwarf hall, and Ironjaw knew at that moment precisely what their demand would be.

Eldgrim kept his eye very closely on the leader of the small band. The man had a twitch starting to tell beneath his right eye. It was barely noticeable, but Eldgrim noted the manner in which the man’s filthy hand clenched and unclenched, reaching for the place where the hilt of a dagger might otherwise have been. His eyes flicked to the guards behind the deputation and he gave the briefest nod of his head. The barbarian wiped a trail of spittle from his chin and turned to fully face the dwarf king. He was at least twice as tall again as Ironjaw and the breadth of his shoulders was impressive. Even without the furs which bulked him out substantially, it was easy to spot a solid slab of muscle.

‘Surrender, dwarf king. Only demand we ever make. Is very simple, no?’

‘You do not know the dwarfs so well, human.’

‘Dwarf king surrenders to Bothvar now, Bothvar will not destroy dwarf king’s…’ The barbarian waved his hand around the Hall of Audience. ‘Home.’

‘Bothvar… is that you? Or it it your master?’ The human shook his head suggesting that he did not understand. ‘Is Bothvar your king?’

‘My king. Yes.’

Skaldi’s lips drew into a tight line. ‘What is your name, human?’

The question threw the barbarian and for a fleeting moment, the madness left his eyes. He put a hand to his chest. ‘Von,’ he said. ‘I am Von.’

‘Well, Von, you take this message back to Bothvar. Listen, human, for I know that you can fully understand my words.’ The flash of intelligence in Von’s eyes had betrayed the truth. Ironjaw hefted his hammer in an obviously defiant manner. When he spoke, it was not just to the three humans, but to all those dwarfs gathered in the Hall of Audience.

‘The dwarfs of Karak Ghulg will not surrender to the likes of you. We will die defending our home and our way of life if it means preventing you and your so-called king from crossing further into the Empire. Leave now and you might yet live.’

‘And if we do not take message to Bothvar?’

‘I am sure he will understand the point when his messengers do not return. A simple choice, Von.’ Ironjaw’s stare was steel. ‘A simple choice that even you cannot fail to understand. Leave now and live or do not… and die.’

There was more raucous laughter at this and the three barbarians moved into a tight knot in the centre of the dwarf hall as the king’s personal guard moved in a little closer.

‘You kill us anyway,’ Von suggested, waving a hand at the encroaching armed dwarfs. ‘Treachery, no?’

‘You still have the choice, Von.’

The big warrior sneered. ‘I think not, dwarf king. Bothvar expects this. So Bothvar sends you gift.’ He gestured to one of his companions who reached under the furs around his body, extracting an object so vile and hideous that even the steel-bellied Ironjaw had to turn his head away.

The barbarian threw the head to the ground and it rolled a short distance, rocking on tendons and dangling strings of sinew before it finally came to a rest, the unseeing eyes staring up at Eldgrim.

‘Felbjorn…’ Eldgrim gazed down at the severed head of his dead brother and bilious fury spat from his mouth in the form of a string of curses. Ironjaw tore his eyes from the head and without even giving the word to attack, took up his hammer and prepared to deliver immediate retribution.

With an answering bellow, Von and his companions bared their teeth and put up their fists. They were insane, that much was obvious. Whilst they had left their weapons, they would fight tooth and nail until they could fight no longer. There were but three of them, unarmed – although Von was tugging with extraordinary strength at his bound scabbard – and there were more than twice that number in dwarfs. They had the upper hand.

‘Dwarf begged for mercy,’ Von taunted as he wrenched at the sword. ‘King should be ashamed of his cowardice.’ By his side, one of his companions could no longer contain himself and, with a ululating cry, dived at three of the dwarf soldiers, his fists flying. Almost simultaneously, several axes bit through the padding of the furs around his body. It was enough to stop them from properly taking hold in his flesh, but the furs ripped, exposing a lean, well-muscled torso that was covered with a filigree of battle scars. Fresh blood dribbled from wounds made by the first slice of the axes.

‘My son was no coward,’ Ironjaw retorted. He heaved the mighty warhammer around in a crushing blow. Von moved deftly out of its path, but not quickly enough. The hammerhead caught him on the hip and he winced as he felt the crack of bone. He pitched forwards at the same time as his sword tore free from the scabbard’s bindings.

Von’s two companions were tearing into the dwarfs with the bloodied frenzy of the berserker. Weapons bit into their flesh and tore open great gaping wounds. Bright scarlet blood fountained, spraying from arteries and coating the stone floor of the Hall. One dwarf was picked up bodily and thrown across the room. He struck the wall and slid lifelessly to the floor, his neck broken and his head at an unnatural angle.

Yet still they fought, nothing breaking their stride. One of the soldiers had aimed a particularly vicious low blow that had hamstrung one of the barbarians and he was now barely able to walk. He screamed a death cry and with the last of his strength, launched himself at Eldgrim. The prince swung his own weapon around without flinching. The axe was lethal in his hand and he cut many times with deadly accuracy before the barbarian fell to the ground, viscera spilling from the rent across his abdomen.

Eldgrim stood over the barbarian and drove the axe deep into the dying man’s chest before tugging it free and turning to engage the other. He left Von to his father. He knew that Skaldi Ironjaw would not thank him for interrupting his fight.

The red-haired human was giggling maniacally as he swung the heavy broadsword about his head. Ironjaw had the measure of him though. He might have been in the throes of a berserker rage, but his hip was broken and his balance was off. That he was even still standing was testament to his tenacity. But he was unable to shift his weight to compromise for the lack of balance. It was an easy thing therefore to sweep Von’s legs from beneath him with the hammer. Von tumbled with a crash, his broadsword clattering to the floor.

Ironjaw waited no longer. With a powerful overhead blow, his hammer struck Von in the chest. The man’s sternum and ribcage shattered easily under the onslaught and the hammer pressed further into tissue and muscle, crushing Von’s internal organs with ease.

Even in his dying moments, the barbarian tried to reach for Ironjaw, his hands clenching into claws as though he would tear the dwarf king’s heart from his body. He tried to speak, but his mouth merely filled up with blood. As he died, his final words were exhaled with an ominous, precognitive sigh.

‘He will come for you.’

Ironjaw swung the hammer again, this time crushing Von’s head. Grey matter dribbled from the cracks in the man’s skull to mix with the red stain that had already begun to spread from the countless wounds on his body.

From over his shoulder, Ironjaw heard the final scream of the remaining human as he too was felled, but he took no pleasure in the sound. His eyes were fixed on the head of Felbjorn, his beloved youngest son. The boy who had been so like him. The boy he had perhaps treated with unfair preference over the older, more cautious Eldgrim.

Skaldi Ironjaw had always loved both his sons equally and had always made it clear that when the time came, his throne would pass to Eldgrim and it would pass gladly. But he was guilty, he knew now with the terrible clarity that came with such a heavy loss, of indulging Felbjorn’s rebellious streak. Throughout the boy’s childhood he had not enforced the same kind of restrictions upon his younger son’s activities as had been necessary with Eldgrim and, as a result, the young Felbjorn had run almost wild amongst the mines and latterly, in the petrified forests.

Such a free spirit should never be contained, Ironjaw had always said with great affection whenever his late wife or his oldest son came to detail Felbjorn’s latest misadventure.

And now his heart was stilled. Never again would he sit up until dawn with his youngest son, engaging in the ancient rite of drinking one another comatose. Felbjorn would never see his unborn child. So lost was he in his own moment of grief, tears running down his face unashamedly and soaking his beard, that when Eldgrim’s hand lay upon his shoulder he barely noticed.

‘We must hope,’ Eldgrim said, his voice shaking to conceal his own anguish, ‘that Felbjorn was returning to us when those bastards waylaid him. We must hope that the refugees made it safely south.’

The king did not look up at his son for a moment or two, grateful that the prince did not push him to pull himself together until he was ready. He reached up and wiped away the tears and spatters of Von’s blood from his face, closed his hand tightly over that of his son and straightened his shoulders.

‘Get these bodies out of my throne room,’ he said, without turning to his militia. ‘And ensure that the entire stronghold is awake and prepared for war.’

He turned to survey the devastation of his throne room and his face was grim with a set to his expression that had long since given his family line their name. The barbarians deserved the entry in the stronghold’s Book.

‘They will come now. And they will come soon.’

At the moment his messengers were dying bloodily and messily on the floor of Karak Ghulg, Bothvar, Chaos champion of his people, was engaged in a battle of his own. In his case he was battling as a means of both teaching and reprimanding. The young men who flocked to his call never seemed to learn that challenging him to a fight would end only one way.

In this instance it took him less than four minutes to dole out the required lesson to the young pup who had demanded to prove his worth in combat. It had only taken that long because Bothvar had been enjoying the chance to show off.

Nobody knew how old the champion was. Some whispered that he had served Kharneth, the bloody lord, for decades, maybe even longer. Others claimed that he was not born of woman at all but was a creature of the Chaos Wastes who had been wrought into human form to deliver the god’s will across the lands. Whatever he was, he attracted vast numbers into his flock. The barbarian horde tore their way through villages, looting and destroying wherever they went. There was no such thing as too much blood when you lived your life in service to the Blood God.

The champion, chosen by the Skull King many years before, stood six-and-a-half feet tall with dirty blond hair that grew far below his shoulders. It was matted with dirt and old, dried blood and clumped in unmanageable tangles that merely added to his ferocity. His skin was darkened by spending his life in the rays of the weak, northern sun and like the rest of his warriors, he chose to wear furs and leathers over his powerful torso. Tattoos, the marks of his god’s favour, were worn proudly on every visible inch of skin. He also decorated himself with a grotesque variety of fetishes made from various parts taken from the corpses of his victims. A necklace made of human teeth adorned his neck and was added to regularly.

He had been raised up as champion following a series of challenges which had marked him out as the stand-alone winner. He had fought his way through enemies and by the end of the trials had also turned upon the fellows with whom he had started the process. He had killed in the name of Kharneth and he had been rewarded beyond measure. The precious armour that made him a nigh-on unstoppable force in battle even now sat upon its simple wooden stand within the semi-permanent yurt that served as the champion’s lodging.

He stared down at the youth who had dared challenge him. The boy who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old was unconscious, his jaw swelling from where Bothvar had struck him. There were a number of lacerations visible on his body and his breathing sounded ragged; probably a broken rib or two.

He might live, he might not. Bothvar did not particularly care one way or the other. He took little notice of those who followed him, seeing them only as a means to further his own status, not only in the eyes of the Blood God, but also those of she who brought the word of the god to them. Sometimes she brought the god’s pleasure. Other times, she brought Kharneth’s wrath. After those times, Bothvar’s numbers would be considerably less than they had been at the start.

Bothvar sheathed the pair of axes that he wore crossed over his broad, powerful back and turned to the already dispersing crowd. Leaving the boy face-down in the snow, he strode to the warmth of the fires that burned brightly in the centre of the encampment. They were hardy enough to weather the worst of the blizzard. Many of Bothvar’s followers – including the champion himself – were so far beyond normal level of sanity that they did not even feel the cold. More than one of them had died of hypothermia in the punishing temperatures. They were acknowledged and acceptable losses.

There were ways to counter the harsh weather. Furs were the obvious one; many of the wiser barbarians also smeared their bodies with a fat rendered down from the carcasses of the bears who roamed the forests of their homelands. It was foul stuff to handle and smelled even worse, but it added a layer of insulation that was second to none.

There was also the imbibing of alcohol. Where the ordered and organised armies of the Empire would have frowned upon such behaviour, Bothvar encouraged it. The men and women who plundered the lands at his side were plied regularly with a potent concoction made from fermented ewe’s milk mixed with the blood from other sacrificial animals. Anybody not born of the Northern Wastes could not stomach it and there were plenty of those who were born of the Northern Wastes who could barely consume it without retching.

Bothvar dropped down by the fire and almost immediately a cup was thrust into his hand along with a slab of meat. He ate the messy offering raw, blood running down his chin. At his feet, one of the many wolf hounds that went to war with his people gazed up, a low moan of longing coming from it. Bothvar threw a chunk of the meat to it and the animal loped off to tear at its prize.

Bothvar took a long drink and leaned back to watch the activity around his camp with affected disinterest. Everywhere he looked there were signs of the impatience that was inevitable the night before a big raid. Fights and scuffles were breaking out. A few warriors were actually ensuring that their blades and weapons were in as good a condition as they could manage. Some were even attempting sleep; difficult given the level of noise that permeated throughout.

The camp was temporary; Bothvar had ordered that they put down for now until they were fully massed and ready to strike at the dwarf stronghold. He may have been more than half-mad, but even the champion knew that his army would fare much better if they had an inkling of rest. They had a long march in the morning and if his scouts and his own reckoning were right, they would fall upon the dwarfs by the time the winter sun was at its zenith.

He watched through lidded eyes as one barbarian settled his disagreement with another in a most creative way. The two had been engaged in fisticuffs for a while, neither backing down and both well-matched. The odds turned in the one’s favour when he reached out and grabbed one of the wolf hounds by the haunches. The animal yelped in confused pain as it was suddenly ripped from the ground and swung with full force at one of the humans. It howled, then growled as it was dropped. Incited to rage, the hunting dog bared its teeth and flung itself at the unfortunate barbarian.

Bothvar laughed without humour as he watched the dog – more of a wolf, really – tear out the man’s throat. Within moments of the man’s death the rest of the pack had descended to tear at the fresh meat. The half-feral hounds were a useful addition to his warhost and so he tolerated their presence.

As the night stretched on, there was more fighting and Bothvar revelled in it. This was what he and his people lived for.

Within the halls of Karak Ghulg, things were far removed from the drunken levity of Bothvar’s camp. The thane’s grief at the passing of his beloved son was absolute and his misery permeated the stronghold with a seeping sorrow that was felt by all who lived within.

The dwarfs were also preparing themselves for war, although compared to the barbarians they were precise and military in nature. Weapons were being sharpened, the runesmith worked late into the night embedding sigils of warding and protection into axes and armour and through it all, the sense of despair lingered. They were fierce and they were superlative fighters but their scouts had returned – if only barely – with reports that Bothvar’s warhost was immense.

Had Ironjaw not been so caught up in his own misfortune, he would have been walking amongst his men, speaking words of courage and reassuring each and every one of them that they would succeed in this venture. Instead, the thane withdrew to his private quarters, ostensibly to ‘prepare himself’ for war, leaving his heir to pick up the pieces.

If Eldgrim knew any anger at his father’s selfishness he did not show it. Wearing his own armour, pitted and marked with the legacy of several battles of his own, the prince of Karak Ghulg prowled the sconce-lit halls of the stronghold. He murmured words of encouragement to all those he encountered and in every case, the stern dwarfish faces would light with renewed hope.

Without speaking to his father, Eldgrim made the decision to send out a further scout party; this one southwards. He needed to know, as much for his own piece of mind as any other reason, whether Felbjorn’s death was the only one or if the entire caravan had been ambushed. He was agonising every bit as much as his father at Felbjorn’s death, but unlike Skaldi, the prince could see the vital importance of ascertaining that their people still lived.

When the news came that there was no sign of the caravan and that the chances were good that Felbjorn had been travelling back alone, Eldgrim spread the word amongst his people. By the time the longest night had ended, their collective hope was replenished. Now the dwarfs of Karak Ghulg had something worth fighting for.

For the barbarians, the night did not pass as slowly. Drunken and belligerent, the majority of Bothvar’s warriors made no obvious preparation for war. Instead they engaged in fighting and games of chance. Dawn crept almost unnoticed, marking the beginning of the day, but so engrossed were they in their drunken and petty disputes that when the clouds above them darkened still more, they did not immediately notice it. Ultimately it was the champion who first became aware of her presence. Over the years, he had become so attuned to his mistress that he could sense her proximity without looking. A delicious thrill of anticipation shook through his bloodied body.

‘She is come!’ He roared the words at the top of his voice and almost instantly the entire throng stopped what they were doing, caught by the passion in their leader’s voice. All of them, every man and every woman, dropped immediately to the ground in obeisance. All except Bothvar who remained upright, although he swayed slightly. The champion looked over the kneeling masses with approval and then turned around to look into the eyes of his beloved mistress.

As tall as he was, she was a sight at one and the same time fearsome and beautiful. When she had walked amongst mortal man, legend had told that her cold beauty and lithe, athletic body were much coveted amongst the warrior tribes of the north. In her immortal life, she was a vision of rapture; her consort’s desire made flesh.

There were vast, leathery wings currently folded against her back and snow dusted them lightly as it fell. With a grace that seemed unusual given the ungainly nature of her hooved legs, she moved slowly towards Bothvar. She was as regal as she was deadly. Despite the sheer adoration he felt, the champion watched her every move like a hawk, sobriety tugging at him. She was beautiful and she was his queen, but she could turn in an instant. He had seen it many times.

Her eyes were like fire, burning and as red as the armour that continually dripped blood onto the snow. Each drop burst in a crimson flower where she walked. In her right hand, she carried a mighty, ornate spear. All of her warriors knew this weapon. Slaupnir. It had slain countless numbers, reaping many lives in her consort’s name.

But it was the shield that truly drew attention. The never-still head of Locephax, Prince of Slaanesh, turned as much as its bindings allowed, its eyes burning with hatred for both those who opposed it and she who carried it. Valkia had fought and defeated the daemon prince while still walking the realm of mortal man. It had been this act, so the tale went, that had brought the warrior queen to the attention of Kharneth. Her actions were legendary and the outcomes manifest before them. Elevated to walk the realms of the immortal, Kharneth had taken her to consort.

That she had come, that she was here to walk amongst her chosen was a great omen and Bothvar’s heart soared. All thoughts of treachery fled and an unholy ecstasy thrilled through him. With Valkia’s personal blessing, his army would fight with a ferocity that would not be equalled.

She considered him for a moment, her face unreadable and then her lips eventually twisted upwards in a cruel smile. Her tongue snaked out and ran across her lips slowly and suggestively. She took another step forward so that she was virtually nose-to-nose with him.

‘My champion,’ Valkia said, reaching out a hand to caress Bothvar’s cheek. Her taloned fingernails drew a line of red as they passed.

‘My queen,’ he replied, his voice hoarse and filled with adoration. Slowly he sank to his knees before her, gazing upwards with a delicious, devoted insanity that she approved of most wholeheartedly.

‘Rise up, Bothvar, and we will talk of my Lord’s plans for the dwarfs of Karak Ghulg.’

‘Is he not pleased?’

‘You misunderstand me, Bothvar,’ she said. Her voice was low and musical, still tinged with a hint of the accent of her long-ago life in the Northern Wastes. ‘My lord Khorne is more than pleased with your efforts so far, but he has merely suggested that you could be doing… more.’

The pause made him anxious. The dwarfs had held out against their incursion for some considerable time already and he was acutely aware that the blood spilled in the name of his god was substantially less than it could have been.

As Valkia led her champion through the camp, fights broke out in her wake. She heard the sound of scuffling behind her and her smile grew broader. Her presence radiated bloodlust and for an assembly such as Bothvar’s warhost, it was all they needed. She occasionally let her burning eyes pass over a young would-be champion. All those with a mind to be noticed by the consort of their god did their best to attract her attention: puffing out their chests and adopting their most ferocious stance.

If the daemon princess noticed them, she said nothing. Her eyes flicked occasionally in their direction and a glimmer of amusement showed in them. Several of the wolf hounds prowled behind the pair of them, driven into a frenzy by all the blood they could scent.

One of Valkia’s long, slender fingers came up and pointed in the direction of the unmoving young warrior who had challenged Bothvar. He still remained where he lay; whether he was alive or dead was a mystery that the champion was not overly concerned with solving.

‘Him,’ she said in her captivating voice. ‘He is expendable.’ It was not a question.

‘For your purposes, my queen, every one of us is expendable.’ Bothvar’s statement was rewarded with a curl of the lip that was somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

‘Well spoken, my champion.’

With a barked command, Bothvar ordered the motionless youth be brought to him. The boy lived, if only barely. The crimson stain on the ground combined with his pallor told of a great blood loss. He was unceremoniously dumped on the ground at Bothvar’s feet.

‘Young,’ Valkia observed as Bothvar turned the boy over with the toe of his boot. ‘But more than adequate for the demonstration.’ To Bothvar’s mixed delight and horror, she thrust her spear and shield at him with an imperious gesture. She knelt down, her legs straddling the unconscious warrior’s hips and tipped her head slightly to one side. There was complete silence within the camp as all eyes turned to see what their queen was doing.

She smiled and spoke without looking up. ‘My Lord and Master, your god Kharneth, has decreed that we make an example of these dwarfs. We leave a strong message for those who would fight against the forces of the Blood God.’ As she spoke, the wings at her back slowly unfurled until they were out to their full span. One hand reached to the belt at her waist and withdrew a wicked-looking dagger, its blade curved and glinting in the weak rays of the winter sun. Every pair of eyes was on it.

‘My lord bids that we perform the ancient rite of the Bloodraven.’ Her voice rose in volume enough to be heard throughout the camp. ‘Watch. Learn.’

She leaned forward, and with her other hand, stroked a nail down the boy’s cheek. He moaned softly and opened his eyes. As he looked into the face of the daemon princess, ecstasy and adoration filled his expression. He mouthed a question that nobody but Valkia could hear and she drew her nail back across his face. A thin line of scarlet welled in its wake and her smile broadened. She leaned in and her head nodded. Her lips brushed against the boy’s own in a strange sort of benediction.

Seconds later, he was dead. With the supernatural strength and daemonic power she possessed, she plunged the dagger directly into his heart, taking the last of his life with her. She turned her head to look at Bothvar.

‘What follows is the Rite of the Bloodraven. You will all perform this on the fallen of the dwarf stronghold. Alive or dead, it matters little.’

Having so spoken, she dragged the dagger’s blade downwards, cutting through the furs the youth wore with ease. The dagger stroke drew back upwards again, slicing through skin. Blood pooled on the snow beneath the boy’s body and Valkia threw back her head and laughed. She dropped the dagger to the ground and with her bare hands, peeled back the skin of the young man’s chest to reveal his ribcage, slick with blood and mucous.

‘It requires strength of purpose to do this,’ she said by way of commentary. ‘But keep your loyalty true and my lord’s hand will guide you correctly.’

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

The scream reverberated around the mountains and carried far, even to the ears of the sentries on the walls of Karak Ghulg.

Valkia’s blade flashed briefly as she brought it down in a true blow that cracked the sternum. Bone chips flew and the daemoness raised the dagger again. Three more blows and the hairline fracture had spread from top to bottom. She turned the dagger in her hand and struck downwards with the hilt. The breastbone splintered easily beneath her and she took hold of the two ends of the ribcage in either hand. With immeasurable strength, she wrenched the ribcage apart until it was splayed outwards. It eerily resembled the unfurled wings at her back and those on the ravens that circled above.

Her task complete, Valkia sprang upwards and backwards from the boy, her wings fluttering to stabilise her and she stepped back to admire her grisly handiwork.

‘Glorious, don’t you think, champion?’

Bothvar stared at the boy. He had not been a part of the warhost for long and now he was nothing but meat, his internal organs displayed for all to see.

The shocking sight of one of his own men rendered down to such an ending in this way both delighted him and fired his insane lust to kill and maim.

‘Quite glorious, my queen,’ he replied, shifting his gaze from the dead boy to Valkia. ‘And this is what you wish us to do to the dwarfs?’

She nodded, absently flicking gore from the end of her fingers as she took back her spear and shield. ‘All those you slay,’ she affirmed. ‘Apart from their king. Save him for me.’ Her smile broadened. ‘Yes, my beloved champion, I will walk with you this day.’

She turned and walked into the heart of the camp, speaking softly to Bothvar. There was such cheering from his men that nobody noticed, heard or even cared when the wolf hounds buried their muzzles in the feast that had been provided.

The snow had finally stopped falling by the time the dwarfs were ready to take their places. Skaldi Ironjaw had emerged from his room, his face and eyes ravaged with the terrible ache of his loss. He did not acknowledge Eldgrim’s tireless efforts but his son was not expecting it anyway. He loved his father and he knew that his father loved him in kind. Such affection had always belonged to Felbjorn. He did not expect an instant transference of love just because the heart of his younger brother had been stilled.

It had been Eldgrim who had readied the dwarfs of Karak Ghulg for battle. It had been Eldgrim who had spent all night speaking with the runesmiths and the Master at Arms. Yet it would be Skaldi who led them into battle with the human barbarians.

If the prince knew any irritation or anger at this, he did not let it show. His father was the thane. It was right and proper for him to maintain a stern demeanour in the face of the enemy. Usually there would be time for the thane to deliver a rousing speech, but the sound of howling on the wind suggested that there would be no such luxury afforded them on this day. The enemy approached and they approached rapidly.

It was the thane’s place to defend the interior of the stronghold and he gave over command of the exterior troops to his son. His command constituted the first words he gave to his son since he had emerged and for a brief moment, their eyes met. Skaldi reached out a hand and closed it around Eldgrim’s forearm.

‘Karak Ghulg must not fall to these invaders, my son.’

‘I will do everything within my power to prevent it, my thane.’

‘Later, when this is over… we will sit. Talk.’ A semblance of a smile flickered across the dwarf-king’s lips. ‘We will drink together and will enter these bastards into the Book.’ His hand squeezed tighter and Eldgrim returned the smile warmly. To sit and drink with his father would be the ultimate recognition and he would do everything in his power to make it happen. For his part, Skaldi’s strength seemed to return and he spoke increasingly loudly with more power in his voice. It gladdened the hearts of the dwarfs on the ramparts of the stronghold to hear it.

‘Fight well, my son. Honour and glory will be ours this day.’ With those words, he shouldered his hammer and strode into the depths of Karak Ghulg.

Eldgrim raised his head and sniffed the air. He could scent filth and blood, and the faint smell of rot that came from the dead barbarians who had already tried their hand at taking Karak Ghulg. They had fought against everything that had been thrown at them and they had survived. They would survive here today.

He turned his back on the approach down to the stronghold and raised one of his swords high in a salute to it. All those with him followed suit and one by one, they faced forwards, prepared for anything that came their way.

What came their way was a blood tide. The barbarians broke over the crest of the hill in a wave of berserker fury, falling on the stronghold in an incredibly short space of time. It was only due to the hard work and efforts of Eldgrim and the army’s commanders that they were more than prepared for the initial onslaught.

The moment Bothvar’s men were sighted, the dwarfs armed with black powder handguns fired rounds that had been stoked for hours. It had been the tactic they had employed ever since the barbarians had begun plaguing the stronghold and had proved enough to put down most of the skirmishes. But this was no skirmish. This was a full attack by a disturbingly well organised force.

The first volley of fire roared out, echoing around the amphitheatre provided by the mountains that encircled Karak Ghulg. Its noise was drowned out by the dying screams of the barbarians who found themselves in the path of the deadly projectiles. But the dwarf marksmen, despite their prodigious skill, could not reload as quickly as the human warriors could swarm upon their walls with tenacious determination.

‘Loose the cannons on them!’ The voice was Eldgrim’s and it carried above the cacophony of encroaching battle. The enemy were already at the base of the curtain wall that wrapped the outer bailey of the stronghold. The wall was solid enough, but the heavy wooden gate that barred their entrance would not withstand their barrage for long. The wall was too high by far for them to easily scale, although several of them, deranged in their battle madness, were trying.

There was a resonant boom as the first of the four cannons mounted on the walls spat its load towards the approaching warriors. There were so many of them. Eldgrim felt the pinprick of doubt pierce his armour of self-assurance but shook himself back to attention. The cannonball, fired at a deadly speed, struck true, scattering a pocket of the invaders as it hit. The other two cannons roared as well but the last one misfired. It was a risk that all the dwarfs who handled the machines took, and took willingly. But hearing their agonised screams of pain as they were burned in the backdraft of flame that was disgorged from the cannon was not something Eldgrim had ever wanted to hear.

The stench of singed hair and burning flesh filled the morning air and as much as he wanted to race to the aid of those who were dying, Eldgrim knew he could not. He had fought many wars in his time and had long been hardened to the sights and sounds of warfare. He had defended Karak Ghulg from many invaders without even thinking twice about spearing them through the eye with his sword. But he had never felt so uncertain about his victory as he did right now.

The hand-gunners were training their weapons on the enemy again and more were being blown apart, joining the other dead and dying. With a sinking heart, Eldgrim realised that effective though the black powder was against the more primitive humans, it was still little more than a delaying tactic and not one that was going to buy them a lot of time. Already several of them had brought a crude battering ram to bear; a bulky chunk of tree trunk that was being hefted between several of the larger men. With guttural cries in a language that Eldgrim never wanted to understand, they threw themselves at the gate in their first onslaught.

The ram struck the wood of the gate with a thud that could be felt as much as heard. It was a good door, solid and well made, as was everything that the dwarfs turned their hands to. But it would not last long in the face of such adversity.

With another barked command, Eldgrim withdrew from the walls, taking with him the dwarfs whose job it was to hold the courtyard within the walls. When they were defeated, the invaders would face further difficulties once they hit the tunnels of Karak Ghulg. Flame cannons waited for them there and in the narrow confines of tunnels that dwarfs could traverse easily, this would present a major obstacle.

If they were defeated. Eldgrim had to keep focused on the word. If. Not when.

The air was filled with trails of black smoke from the guns and the hounds who travelled with the barbaric horde were howling their pleasure at the stink of blood and offal that pervaded. They had no loyalty to the humans with whom they travelled and they fell upon the dead, tearing through skin and internal organs to bury their snouts hungrily.

The ram struck the gate again. And again. The wood was beginning to show the strain as chips flew in all directions. Then, with three more powerful blows of their battering ram, the barbarians achieved their goal. The door groaned briefly in a last display of solidity and then it was nothing more than a memory. The ancient wood buckled and tore as easily as parchment and the men who had rammed it open tumbled through into the open courtyard. They had no chance to celebrate however as they were immediately trampled under the onslaught of the rest of the warhost. They would not live to partake in the bloodbath that would ensue but they were so insane, they died laughing.

Without any hesitation, Eldgrim and the heavily armoured, stocky forms of the bulwark defence met the challenge of the barbarians head on. They fought with precision and as a unit while the men and women of the north flailed in a bloodied frenzy. There was no grace and no élan to their method of fighting and many were cut down without ever so much as grazing a weapon from armour. Those who did manage to get a blow in did so more by luck than chance.

But their sheer numbers were inconceivable. The word of the scouts had suggested that the barbarian horde was massive but seeing it like this, a never-ending flow of fur-clad bodies covered in blood and tattoos… a blur of faces that never resolved into anything solid for long enough to get a truly good look… Eldgrim could not devote any time to thinking about such things as more of the warriors flooded in through the splintered gates. In the rush to get through the gate, two or three of them had impaled themselves on the vast splinters that jagged outwards from the remains of the wood. They half stood, half lay; the timbers of the gate piercing their bodies. Their eyes were open and there were delighted, mad smiles on their faces. Blood oozed down the wood, reddening it and indelibly staining it.

A flaxen-haired northwoman with a double-headed axe let loose with a banshee screech of death and ran at full pelt towards Eldgrim’s unit. She was cut down in such a pitifully short time that it was almost shameful. Eldgrim took a moment to consider the woman’s face. She looked young. Now she was dead, the axe of one of his brethren having split her skull down the centre until the two halves had practically peeled away from one another.

She had toppled and fallen into the snow and yet, in her very last moments, she had managed somehow to flip herself onto her back and lay on the ground, her arms flung outwards from her chest and a look of bestial ecstasy on her face. It was a disconcerting sight.

‘Eldgrim!’

The cry came from atop the wall and the prince tore his attention away from the dead enemy. There was something in the tone of the shout that chilled him to the very marrow and he raced as fast as his stubby legs would allow him, half jumping and half clambering across fallen bodies of his enemy and his own people towards the sound.

He scrambled back up the wall, only a little out of breath, and followed the trembling finger that Starkad was pointing in the direction of the approach to Karak Ghulg.

A man Eldgrim deduced must be Bothvar, the nominal leader of the forces that had been hitting them so hard and for so long, was heading towards them at an idle, almost leisurely pace. Even more of a giant than his brethren, the marauder’s bulky shoulders were draped in furs. Even from this distance, he radiated menace. He paused and seemed to be looking down at something on the ground before him.

‘Fire on him, damn you!’ Eldgrim grabbed a hand gun from the closest dwarf and aimed it with inexpert skill at Bothvar. His finger squeezed the trigger and the projectile flew towards the warrior. Eldgrim was unprepared for the recoil and staggered backwards. It was only through Starkad’s swift reactions that he did not plunge off the curtain wall to the broiling mass of bodies fighting in the courtyard below.

He caught his balance and watched in dismay as the bullet was deflected by the armour the champion wore.

‘Eldgrim. Look at what he just did.’ Starkad’s voice was actually fearful and it was this that made the prince pause and realise just how desperate things must be. His eyes tracked downwards with dreadful certainty that what he was going to see would be horrific.

Two of his kinsmen lay dead, their ribcages spread and the seeping scarlet flowers blossoming beneath them standing out in stark contrast to the all-pervading white. From here, he could see that Bothvar’s hands were sticky and wet, stained as much as the ground on which he stood. Eldgrim felt bile rise in his throat and turned his head away. It was the inalienable right of every dwarf warrior to die a noble death and what Bothvar had done here was anything but. There was nothing more ignoble than the desecration before him. And in five more words, his companion changed that knowledge.

‘They weren’t dead, my lord,’ Starkad managed to get out in a whisper. No more words left his lips as he pointed from the dead dwarf to others who had suffered that same terrible, grisly fate.

Something irrevocably tragic happened to Eldgrim Ironjaw in the wake of that terrible pronouncement. In a heartbeat, he became blinded by his own fury. For a warrior whose past glories and much-lauded triumphs had largely been born from his impeccable self-control and intrinsically brilliant strategic mind, this proved to be the first step on the path to his ultimate downfall.

Far below them, deep in the heart of the stronghold itself, Thane Skaldi Ironjaw was standing his ground. Despite the solidity of the heavy doors that barred entrance from the world beyond, the dwarfs within Karak Ghulg could hear the sounds of battle outside. It stirred the thane’s blood and with the practice of a lifetime, he quashed the urge to demand the doors be open so that he might better be able to join battle.

He had known that there was every possibility that his remaining son would die in defence of their ancestral home and the knowledge pained him to the very core. But it was the way things must be. The very thought of the barbarian marauders running rampant through the vaulting, high ceilinged chambers and taking the wealth of the Karak Ghulg dwarfs for themselves made his blood run cold.

The desperate, burning need to avenge his younger son’s untimely death had not lessened at all and he kept that fire raging within his heart. Were he to lose both sons then his wrath would be immeasurable. And despite the love he bore for the noble warriors he had sired, if their death was the conduit to giving him the strength to defeat the marauders then he would accept it with blind faith.

He bowed his head in a moment of silent prayer, listening to the sounds of battle above him. Between him and the warriors who threatened were a series of corridors lined with flame cannons. Should Eldgrim fall, should the men holding the gates be defeated, then there would be a wall of flame that would claim the lives of many.

Skaldi raised his head, staring determinedly ahead at the tunnel mouth that led up to the main entrance of his beloved home. Let them come.

Bothvar could taste the blood of the dwarfs in his mouth and he revelled in it. He had split the ribs of a dozen already and they lay, splayed to the elements behind him, as he moved ever closer to the objective.

His queen had reassured him that she would be with him and even now, despite the fact that he could not see her, her very presence travelled with him. He could feel her delicious joy every time he lunged upon another fallen dwarf and he could hear her laughter of approval as he tore them apart. Blood stained his hands, his furs, his hair and the scent of it was inciting him to a bloodlust unlike anything he had ever known. It was driving him to further acts of unnatural strength. The time it was taking him to rip the dwarfs apart lessened with each victim.

‘Your tenacity is admirable, my champion,’ came a honeyed voice from above him and the ecstasy of Valkia’s nearness filled his heart to bursting. He raised his head to the sullen, snow-cloud laden skies of the north and roared a greeting, words no longer able to find their way to his lips through the fug of his battle rage.

Descending from the winter sky, her wings at full span, Valkia the Bloody touched her cloven-hooved feet to the snow. She raised her spear above her head, letting out a ululating scream of war that incited those around her into a frenzy. They renewed their efforts, continuing to pour through the comparatively narrow gates to the courtyard where they met with fierce resistance.

Valkia looked up at the walls where the dwarfs were firing their blackpowder weapons. Her burning eyes narrowed and a smile spread slowly across her daemonic face. ‘My champion,’ she purred, moving next to him and wrapping an arm around his bloodied furs. ‘The prey up there moves against us. I believe it is time for them to cease impeding our progress.’

It took an enormous focus of will to get the words past the animal instinct that had taken him, but in a barking voice, Bothvar sounded words of agreement. ‘Yes, my queen,’ he said, his voice thick with drool. Valkia leaned in closer and pressed her lips to those of the human in a lascivious kiss. Bothvar’s body shook as she granted him a blessing of the Blood God. He closed his eyes briefly as he knew with absolute certainty that he was invincible for as long as his god willed it.

Then she stepped behind him and wrapped her long arms around his bulk and screamed in a voice that shook snow from the trees.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

The cry sounded in echo as she unfurled her wings again, rising into the sky with the champion in her grasp. The leader of the barbarians was lifted from the ground and reached down to unhook his axes. He was wielding them with sure confidence from the moment she delivered him to the battlements. Valkia touched down as well, shaking back her long dark hair. Her arrival caused a ripple of panic to radiate outwards and, riding the wave of that terror, she held up the shield she wore strapped to her left arm.

It was a simple shield, a wood and metal construct that served the same function as any other, but the horror mounted upon it caused several of the dwarfs to scream in abject dismay. One after the other, they flung themselves bodily from the walls.

The sight of a head mounted upon a shield was not an unusual one for the dwarfs, who had fought against many marauders who elected to display their trophies in this way. But none of the disembodied heads they had ever faced was as terrible as the animated head of Locephax. Whatever foul magic had kept the head of the daemon prince alive continued to animate it still and its cruel features constantly twisted and writhed, wracked by eternal agony. Unleashed in this way, thrust forwards by its bearer, the shield’s innate magic activated. The head of Locephax twisted as though it could somehow wrench itself free and as always, upon realising it could not, emitted a scream of fury and rage that was the most terrifying sound the dwarfs had ever heard.

Valkia laughed in the face of the cowardice of the dwarfs and raised the shield above her head. The mouth of the shield opened and spoke words in a long-dead language that only she could understand.

Release me.

‘It will never come to pass, Prince of Slaanesh,’ she replied. ‘You are mine and together, we are invincible.’

Release me.

Valkia’s laughter grew. Every time she used the magic of the shield, the daemon prince who had once coveted her to be his slave begged for his release in the way that only a true weakling could. She spoke a single word and the eyes closed.

‘No,’ she said. Then she slung the shield across her back and raised her spear above her head. Her very presence was commanding. ‘Dwarfs of Karak Ghulg, hear me!’ Her voice carried easily above the sounds of battle in the courtyard below. ‘My lord and master gives you a choice. Heed well these words, because this is not something he does often. He is…’ The daemoness tipped her head on one side almost coyly. ‘He is impressed with you. Impressed with the manner in which your warriors conduct themselves in the face of adversity.’

Eldgrim had half-climbed, half-fallen down the ladder that led to the battlements when he had first seen the desecration of his brethren and his twin blades were a whirl of activity. When he heard the voice of the creature above however, he backed off his attack and listened to the words that slid like poison from its lips.

‘I will not treat you like fools for I know you are not. You know the choice. Make it.’

The creature sounded female and from what he could see from where he stood in the courtyard, it certainly had a female outline. But the voice was horrible to the dwarf. Where Bothvar heard honey, Eldgrim heard blades. It was a voice tainted by evil and a creature that did not deserve the right to live. He gripped the hilt of his sword more tightly and his own voice rose in grim defiance.

‘There is no choice. Now fight us.’

Many of the dwarfs who still stood roared their approval at Eldgrim’s words.

Valkia laughed her throaty chuckle and spread her wings once again. She dropped lightly from the battlements, her wings flickering slightly so that her descent was regal and dramatic. She touched down on the snow-covered courtyard and Eldgrim beheld Valkia the Bloody in her full horrific glory.

‘As you wish for death, hero, you shall receive it and it will not be noble or merciful.’ Her tone taunted him outrageously.

He was already caught in the grip of battle but even through the blood haze Eldgrim was startled when the female creature dropped a low, almost knightly bow. Incensed by what he took to be a mockery, he launched himself at Valkia. She roared her own defiance and levelled her spear, ready to do battle with the diminutive prince of Karak Ghulg.

The marauders resumed their battle, the thronging mass of bodies pressing through the gates and murdering wherever they went. Several warriors dropped to their knees and began the messy business of splitting open the bodies. Some were felled by surviving dwarfs, but all around the dead dwarfs of the stronghold were being opened up like grisly blossoms.

Bothvar made his way across the stronghold walls with consummate ease. Any humanity he might have retained had long since fled in the grip of rage and the creature that battled with the unnatural strength of a dozen warriors was more beast than man. His great-axe flashed and bit into the flesh of the unfortunates in his way and for a brief moment, the walls wept dwarfs into the courtyard.

Eldgrim’s warriors were diminishing rapidly. The guns had long since stopped barking out their futile resistance and the hand-gunners themselves were dead or dying amidst a mass of bodies. But the prince did not notice. His own battle was not going well. Valkia was bigger, stronger, faster and by far the superior warrior. Her ability with the spear was outstanding. They remained locked together in battle for long minutes and the look of sheer ecstatic pleasure on Valkia’s terrible, beautiful face as she opened cut after cut on her opponent was written for all to see.

She spun and fought with the grace of a dancer, her lithe body a near-impossible target and as his blood began to drain from his body through the many injuries he had sustained, Eldgrim’s efforts lessened and lessened until a well placed crack with the shaft of the spear caught him in the back of the legs, dropping him to his knees.

She had the tip of Slaupnir at his throat and looked down at him through daemonic eyes that showed nothing but respect for a valiant foe. The expression confused Eldgrim even as he waited for his death.

‘You have shed much blood here today,’ she said to him. ‘For that, I thank you. But you have made your choice quite clear to me. A shame.’

The eyes of the daemon princess and those of the dwarf prince locked for a fleeting second. Hers was the last face that Eldgrim saw as she plunged her spear down through his throat. It exited the back of his neck and blood geysered from the gaping wound.

Putting a foot on the dwarf’s chest, Valkia withdrew her spear and kicked his body over backwards. With a bloodthirsty snarl, she dropped to her knees and broke his corpse open as if she was exposing the kernel of a nut.

The pitiful handful of dwarfs who still lived cried out at the terrible desecration of their beloved prince and renewed their efforts. But they were hopelessly outnumbered and Eldgrim’s violent death destroyed what little morale they had remaining. They struck out with their weapons, one valiant warrior even resorting to using his teeth, but the marauders soon dispensed with them.

Bothvar had made his way down from the walls of the courtyard. He had shed the furs across his back some time ago and now fought bare-chested, despite the biting cold. His sun-tanned, heavily muscled torso was dripping with the blood of all those he had killed. Without waiting any further, he hurled himself at the ornately and elaborately carved doors that barred their way deeper into the heart of the stronghold.

He threw himself against it several more times without them moving. Two or three others joined him and they recovered the battering ram from the outside of the compound. The ram barged against the door again and again, but the dwarfs well knew how to batten down their hatches when it became necessary.

Valkia pointed the tip of her spear at the ornately decorated gates that barred passage into the heart of the stronghold.

‘You would let a door stop your victory? Where is your passion, champion?’ Her voice took on a faintly mocking tone and she leaned on the haft of the spear, pointing a long, slender finger at him. Her voice raised in a penetrating laugh that cut Bothvar to the quick. The laughter rose in pitch and carried through the door of the stronghold to the dwarfs who stood within. With every pulse of her cruel laughter, the battering ram struck that bit harder until Bothvar was screaming so loudly as he led the assault that blood vessels burst in his face, adding to the plastering of scarlet that already coated his body.

Slam. Slam. Slam.

And still the doors of Karak Ghulg would not open for him.

Eldgrim was dead.

The way the sounds of battle had so suddenly ceased meant that Skaldi was only able to reach the one conclusion. His eldest son, the heir to Karak Ghulg lay dead, just like his brother. Both his sons lost within a day. The old dwarf’s heart was swollen with grief and misery and it was as much as he could do to remain upright. He could hear the sound of the marauders as they tried to break through and every time the doors shook they heralded an encroaching horror.

The tunnel defenders were already primed and ready to unleash the bitter fury of their flame cannons and there was a good chance that the ferocious bellow of their fires would reduce the numbers of the invaders significantly. Whether it would be enough remained to be seen.

Clutching his warhammer tightly, the king of the dwarfs held his head high. Bright tears shone in his eyes, but his aura was one of ferocity. His warriors moved in closer to him, ready to defend both their home and their king.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ the king roared in a voice that belied his stature. ‘Today we stand for all that we are, everything that we have worked over the centuries to achieve. Today, we repel an attack that threatens to wipe Karak Ghulg from the face of this mountain and I for one say that it will not happen.’

He raised the warhammer above his head. ‘What say you?’

The dwarfs were never hesitant about cheering their support for their king and today was no exception. Their voices rose in a crescendo of fervent defiance, loud enough to carry up through the tunnels in a battle song.

In the courtyard, Bothvar led his warriors in another attack on the door and in a rain of wood and iron, the main gate of the dwarfish stronghold shattered apart.

Almost instantly the first of the flame cannons was loosed and a long tongue of flame snaked up the corridor. Concentrated and intense, sticky and tar-like, it took hold of the furs of the first dozen or so barbarians through the entrance. They flung themselves backwards into the snow, rolling desperately in an attempt to put out the flames licking at them but the fuel was as tenacious as the dwarfs themselves. Their furs, although damp from sweat and snow, burned rapidly and soon at least eight of the marauders were screaming in terrible agony as their skin began to catch and burn as well.

Tanned flesh became blackened blisters and the screams stopped as one after the other, the unfortunates died.

Their fellows did nothing to stop them, stepping over the charred corpses and taking advantage of the pause in the spew of the flame cannon’s deadly load to hurtle as far down the corridor as they could. They reached a two-way junction, where straight ahead was a single cannon, already belching raging fire. The other corridor was clear. At the new belt of heat, the warriors staggered back. The moment they did so, the second part of the king’s plan came into effect.

Skaldi Ironjaw had long maintained a system of defence against the taking of his stronghold. It had been designed and implemented years before the king had even been born but he had added to it in his own way. For long hours he had looked over the blueprints of the stronghold along with the clan’s engineers and as the barbarians screamed relentlessly through the tunnels, the ingenious ideas finally came to fruition.

Barrels of black powder were placed at strategic points along the tunnels and bold souls – some may have said foolish – were charging towards them with lit tapers. There was the tiniest of windows in which they could get themselves clear of the resulting explosion and of the five barrels which were lit, two of the runners did not move fast enough. With a heart-stopping explosion, the barrels detonated and the ancient tunnels began to crumble and collapse.

Exclaiming in their incomprehensible language, the barbarians all backed up instantly to the small aperture where they had entered the stronghold. The dwarfs were forcing them down the flame-lit tunnel. From somewhere at the back, a bellow came. They were not words that the dwarfs manning the flame cannons could understand, but they could understand the tone. The barbarians pressed forward despite everything.

It was not surprising, therefore, that many more of them died in terrible, horrible pain before the first warrior managed to reach the cannon and bring his club to bear on the cannon crew. He knocked them back from the weapon and they scrambled as swiftly as they possibly could to their feet. The brief lull was enough to allow for another pouring of warriors down the corridor, but they continued to be hemmed in. Now, not only was the tunnel narrow, but the roof was gradually sloping downwards to dwarf height and many of the barbarians had to hunch their backs into unnatural positions. The dwarf halls may have been vast, cavernous chambers, but their inhabitants were nothing if not intelligent.

At the next splitting of the tunnel mouths, they were forced once again down towards another flame cannon when the second tunnel was similarly collapsed. There was another huge billow of flame and more barbarians were destroyed. The sacking of Karak Ghulg was not proving to be the easy task that they had anticipated.

A huge ball of fire raged down the tunnel and the dwarfs manning the flame cannon let out cries of defiance that echoed and rebounded off the walls. The roar of the attacking marauders lessened, almost dropping to silence. The three dwarfs manning the cannon exchanged looks. Had they driven the barbarians to retreat already?

Their question was answered seconds later when two figures stepped forwards through the blossoming plume of smoke of fire. Both were stooped as the tunnel sloped, but they still held themselves with the kind of arrogance that dwarfs had come to expect of the Northmen. The one standing to the right was huge, even beneath the shifting plates of armour that he wore. As he strode through the flames, the metal of his breastplate grew from steel-grey to white-hot and the dwarfs could hear the sound of it as it cooled. His hands were curled around a pair of axes that rivalled any they had ever forged and the dwarfs would normally have admired them. But they were not even looking. Their eyes were drawn inexorably to the female figure.

It was a horror, an abomination that represented the very worst of everything they had faced over the years and they were frozen, rooted to the spot and incapable of doing anything but standing with looks of horrified incredulity on their faces.

Valkia moved through the fire without so much as a singe, although the stench of burning blood from her oozing armour was strong. The shield was still strapped across her back and Slaupnir was held easily at her side. Moving together in an almost idle stroll, the two warriors of Chaos approached the flame cannon.

Two of the dwarfs died on the twin blades of Bothvar’s axes, frozen to the spot and rendered insensible by the aura of fear engendered by Valkia’s presence, but the third turned and fled as fast as his short legs would carry him. He would bring news of these terrifying intruders to his king.

With another swing of his arms, the flame cannon was destroyed. Roaring in his mad rage, Bothvar held his right-hand axe above his head as high as the ceiling would allow him. Valkia smiled cruelly at the resounding cheers and took a few steps forwards, over the bodies of the dead dwarfs. Her glowing eyes narrowed as she took in the sight ahead of her.

The tunnel broadened out into a larger chamber and within that chamber stood the next challenge.

Karak Ghulg had not fallen yet.

‘My king! The invaders have breached the tunnels!’

Breathless and determined, the young dwarf who had fled to the throne room skidded to a halt in front of Skaldi. He looked up at his king in trepidation, not keen to impart the next bit of knowledge.

‘They have a daemon with them, my king. She is driving them to feats of strength and fortitude the like of which I have never seen before.’

‘She?’

The young warrior nodded urgently and Skaldi’s weathered face paled beneath his beard. It was impossible to live this far north and not become aware of local legends and tales. To Skaldi’s knowledge, there was only one possible candidate who could fit that bill. It fit perfectly with the profile of the berserkers who had entered his throne room the previous day. Those who pledged themselves to the so-named ‘Blood God’.

Followers of Valkia the Bloody.

An involuntary shudder ran through him as murmurs began to run around the throne room. Skaldi raised a hand for silence. Still some way away, the sounds of battle had temporarily ceased, but he knew that would not last. They still had some time and he had to think swiftly.

‘Varin, I need you to do something for me,’ he said. The king’s voice was clear and strong, without a hint of the grief that had plagued him since the death of his sons. It was almost certain that Eldgrim too was now stilled forever. ‘You must take the Book of Grudges south. If this is to be our last stand, it is the one thing that must be taken clear.’

‘But, my lord…’ Varin’s face was a twisted knot of emotion. ‘I want to stay and fight.’

‘Of course you do, lad, and that’s right and proper.’ Skaldi reached out a gauntleted hand and squeezed Varin’s shoulder. ‘But this is a direct order. Take the Book, take the rear tunnel and go. Now. Travel south and pray that Felbjorn brought our people to safety. If the gods are with us, then my grandchild will be born within a few short months. Be sure he – or she – knows what happened here.’

Skaldi’s face took on a stern expression. ‘If Karak Ghulg is to fall, it will become your burden to ensure that we are not forgotten.’

Varin stared at his king miserably, tweaking his beard. Then finally he nodded. Skaldi flashed him a brief smile and took a chain from around his neck. On the end was a key.

‘I charge the Book to your keeping, Varin. Now go.’

Varin hesitated briefly, then took the king’s key and slid the chain around his own neck. The Book of Grudges sat on a pedestal at the far end of the throne room and he raced over to take it up in his arms. Skaldi moved to the rear of his throne and pressed the haft of his hammer against a stone that protruded slightly. With a rumble, a hidden door lifted high enough to admit a dwarf. The book in his arms, Varin gave his king a last pleading look, but Skaldi’s expression did not change.

Then he was gone, through the tunnel mouth, and the king activated the door once again. The line of the wall smoothed as though it had never been parted. He stood for a few seconds, the palm of his hand against the wall.

‘The gods go with you,’ he murmured. ‘Carry our memory for as long as you live.’ Then he took up his position with the rest of his soldiers and prepared for whatever would come.

There were six of them, all armed with axes. Hair, dyed an unnatural shade of virulent orange, was greased into the most peculiar shapes. The moment that Bothvar and Valkia stepped clear of the tunnel into the chamber where they had been waiting, the Slayers launched themselves with near-insanity at their enemy. At first it looked as though it would be a clear and immediate victory for the Chaos champion and his queen, but with the arrogance of their kind, they had not bargained for the fact that the dwarfs were now prepared to throw everything they had in order to defend their birthright.

Each of the axes glowed with a glaring intensity the closer they came to the daemon princess. The runesmiths of Karak Ghulg had worked long into the night to enhance the weapons and they flashed with lethal finesse in the hands of the bloodiest that the stronghold had at their command.

The Slayers gave no quarter. Each one of them had cut their own personal deal with death and as a direct result, every one of them was fearless and bold in their attack. They wanted a noble death, an atonement for deeds committed in the past, and they would give all they had to attain it. Two of the enraged dwarfish warriors made a beeline for Valkia whose spear came up instantly in response. She took her shield from across her back and thrust it forwards at them. The action woke Locephax again and the daemon prince of Slaanesh unleashed his terrible scream.

Not one of the dwarfs attacking reacted; indeed, one of them cut short his axe swing and began to hammer away at the disembodied head on the shield. With each blow he struck, the daemon screamed again and again. As part of the curse that had seen Locephax forever bound to Valkia’s shield, release could not possibly have come so swiftly.

The consort of Khorne leaped backwards on her cloven hooves and threw her spear lightly into the air. With a graceful motion, she snatched it from above her, its tip pointed directly at one of the Slayers. With a powerful thrust, she embedded it in his chest. Its ornately worked tip pierced through the Slayer’s war-painted skin and passed through flesh, sinew, muscle and bone to eventually emerge from his back. Gurgling his last, the Slayer died at the end of Valkia’s spear, his last moments haunted by the fact that his prey was within his grasp. So close and yet so far.

She withdrew her weapon with an audible shlick. The second Slayer was already hacking at her, the runic-enhanced blade making little impact on the oozing armour that protected her. Its continually weeping plates merely shifted slightly under the striking of his axe.

With a resounding bellow, the Slayer swung the axe again, this time chanting the words that would activate the magical rune that had been forged at its heart. Valkia saw the flare of magical light in the metal of the axe blade as it connected with her armour.

The red plates splashed blood at the moment the axe struck. It chewed through the daemon’s armour and bit into the flesh beneath. For long years, Valkia had not been struck by such a mortal weapon and it told in the screech of pain and surprise that was torn from her throat.

The rune spent, the Slayer spun lightly on his feet, ready to bring another attack. The rune that had allowed him to cleave through armour may only have been good for the one shot, but it had created a chink in Valkia’s defences. She twisted the spear, ready to strike back but the Slayer’s eyes suddenly opened wide. Blood poured from his mouth and he pitched forwards, one of Bothvar’s axes embedded in the back of his skull. The champion was drooling as he fought, spittle flying, and together he and Valkia took on the four remaining Slayers. Individually, the two of them were forces to be reckoned with. Fighting together, they were almost invincible.

The sounds of battle were coming closer and still the dwarfs holding ground in the throne room did not move to meet it. They were here as the stronghold’s key defence and they would not be drawn from their position. The hold was massive, although many of its occupants had left with the refugees. But each and every one of the warriors here knew that should this hall fall, then all was lost.

The battle would come to them; they knew that. Skaldi’s jaw was set in determination and already he had adopted a battle stance.

The not-so-distant screams of the dying Slayers had raised hackles on the back of every dwarf’s neck. Skaldi’s peripheral vision showed him the discomfort of his Longbeards, his most valiant and veteran warriors. They detested standing here, but would never leave the side of their king until he ordered them to do so.

Skaldi quietly offered up a prayer that Varin had made it safely out of the stronghold. He was young and fleet of foot and the secret tunnels would lead him clear of the mountains. It had been the route that Felbjorn had taken with the refugees. Varin would live. Skaldi had to believe in that. He had to believe that their deeds would live on and their grudges would remain.

His eyes cast one more time around the room. All those here now were his brethren and although none of them would have even thought of voicing the thought aloud, this would likely be their final battle. It would be a truly glorious end, Skaldi knew. An exit worthy of Grimnir himself. The simple act of anticipating his god’s pleasure when he arrived in the halls of the hereafter buoyed Skaldi’s spirits and his voice rose – a deep, tuneful baritone that carried a song of death and glory.

One by one, the other warriors in the throne room joined him, their voices soaring to the vaulting roof far above them. Skaldi raised his eyes to the ceiling and tightened his hold on the warhammer as the doors to the throne room smashed open and barbarians poured through. With nothing now to stop them, the entire remaining horde was now free to cause death and wanton destruction.

At their rear walked Valkia the Bloody, her champion ahead of her, and on the end of her spear was the corpse of the final Slayer. She swung the spear downwards and the dwarf slid free to land at the feet of his king. The challenge was laid down and Skaldi met it in kind. The singing increased in volume, each of the dwarfs of Karak Ghulg giving voice to his own personal funeral dirge and the melodies intertwined in an impossibly complex way as they engaged in a final, bloody battle to the death with the savage barbarians of the north.

The dwarfs lasted far longer than any of the northerners could have anticipated and more than one of them was felled by an accurate strike to the knees and groin that split skin and bone, leaving the humans with mortal or serious wounds. Others they butchered with ease. The humans were half-mad and foolish, making them easy prey. Many simply died where they fell and Bothvar and Valkia were rapidly having to step over growing piles of their own dead.

Skaldi fought with tenacity, drawing strength from the battle cries of those around him. The ancient relic that he wielded granted him power beyond the norm and he imparted his own iron will to battle. Many of the humans were felled in the path of his mighty hammer.

Bothvar and Valkia were cutting swathes of their own through the dwarfs, who fought valiantly but ultimately fell beneath the oppressive and relentless tide of enemies.

Skaldi was lost in his own rage, his hammer swinging, and was too caught up in the battle to realise that he was the last dwarf standing. He only became dimly aware of it when the barbarians began to break off their attack one at a time, backing away from him and opening up a channel to allow the passage of the daemon princess of Khorne to move towards him, her eyes glowing with insatiable hunger.

The dwarf king swung his warhammer and it struck against the shield. The face of Locephax leered horribly up at him, laughing and taunting. Enraged, Skaldi attacked again and again, hammering against the daemonic shield for what felt like an eternity. Other than causing Locephax a few bruises that faded and disappeared even as more appeared, he achieved nothing.

Eventually, a more violent upwards swing made the hammer connect with Valkia’s breastplate with a resonant clang. It was ineffective, but the resulting jolt shook up the dwarf king’s arm and he let go of the warhammer. Valkia raised one long, slender leg and kicked Skaldi in the sternum. He staggered backwards but did not fall. She repeated the act and with her strength and her cloven hooves, it was like being kicked by an angry warhorse. The comparison was ludicrous and even as Skaldi finally fell at the foot of his throne dais, he could not understand why he was even thinking it.

His head resounded off the stone and his vision blurred as the daemon woman came closer. She leaned down until her face was level with his. Her breath was warm and carried with it countless memories of old battles. The coppery tang of fresh and old blood was all around her and in his final moments, Skaldi was almost drawn to her. One hand came up as though he would gently touch the daemon princess on the face. To be that close to pure battle glory… One touch and he could ride the wave of triumph for ever more.

Valkia brought the unspoken offer of a never-ending life of bloodshed and glory and it was tempting. So very tempting…

The faces of his dead sons flashed before his eyes and the dwarf king’s hand slowly closed in a fist of defiance. Something like disappointment shone in the Blood Queen’s eyes and she drew her head back from the dwarf. Her eyes held his and he stared into their unfathomable depths.

He did not notice the pain as she tore him apart. It was only when he became acutely aware of a sudden warmth running around his torso that he even realised that she had sliced through the meat of his chest and was even now snapping into his breastbone. Death was coming now. He would not close his eyes, though. He would die staring his last defiance into the face of his hated enemy.

‘Good,’ she whispered. ‘I do so hate cowardice.’

With a superhuman wrench, she broke apart Skaldi’s ribcage, then plunged her hand into his chest and tore out his heart. Raising the slimy, still-pulsing organ above her head, she let out a cry of triumph. Then she tore a chunk out of the heart and chewed it before tossing the rest of it to Bothvar who similarly buried his face in it.

‘This stronghold is now yours, my champion.’ She considered him, her head cocked on one side. He had fought well and much blood had been spilled for her beloved consort. The choice of Bothvar as a champion was proving well-founded and despite her earlier taunting of his weakness, there was no denying that he would continue to spill blood and gather skulls in her name and that of their shared deity. ‘Do with it as you please. But keep your promise to me. Every dwarf corpse in this place will be opened out. We will leave the Bloodraven as the mark of our passing and it will serve as a warning to those who would dare venture any further north.’

Bothvar, still in the grip of his battle fury did not answer, but nodded his head, great gobbets of Skaldi’s heart hanging from his mouth. He raised his arm above his head and roared in triumph.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

‘Skulls for His throne!’ The reply came in kind and the barbarians set about the task of ransacking the stronghold and fulfilling their promise to their queen. There were other areas of the hold that would need to be cleansed, but they had removed the king. The lynch pin was dead and in the wake of that triumph, the taking of the hold was merely a question of time.

And in the chaos, the delicious, wonderful chaos, nobody noticed when Valkia nodded in satisfaction. Her duty here was served and she spun on her heel and walked away, leaving in her wake the final desecration of the noble dwarfs of Karak Ghulg.

City of Dead Jewels

Nick Kyme

Prince Darin was dead. He lay on his back upon a bier of shields, cold and clammy to the touch. In the prince’s absence, Hegendour, his former hearthguard and protector, had taken the lead. The words from his cut lips were as bleak and dark as the tunnel the dwarfs lingered in.

‘The beast is hunting us now,’ he said. ‘Its spoor litters the way ahead but was left deliberately.’ Hegendour’s voice was as cold as his demeanour. He turned to the others, showing them a muscled, barrel chest, riddled with self-inflicted wounds. ‘It wants us to follow.’

‘Only a fool would willingly chase a monster into its lair,’ declared one of the dwarfs. He was a lode warden and carried the hunting party’s lantern. There was no flame within the fetters; its light came from rune magic wrought into the metal. A pair of boots was slung over one shoulder, a sigil engraved in the dark leather.

‘Only a fool or an honourless Slayer,’ muttered another, as he eyed Hegendour’s shorn beard and naked torso with disdain. This one was lightly armoured in the manner of a hill dwarf, but festooned with weapons, mainly throwing axes and a crossbow that was also rune-inscribed.

‘Afraid of a troll are you, Cravenhelm?’ asked a third thane.

The hill dwarf answered belligerently. ‘It is no troll, this thing,’ he snapped at the armoured mountain of a warrior alongside him. He was shorter than the gatekeeper, and his iron pot helmet only came up to the other dwarf’s chest. ‘And my clan name is Ravenhelm.’

‘Cravenhelm suits you better, elf-friend.’

‘At least I am no kinslayer, Magnin, son of Thord!’ Raglan Ravenhelm pulled out a bearded axe that glowed dully in the half-light in empathy with its bearer’s anger.

Magnin, the gatekeeper, hefted a two-handed mattock with a hammerhead twice as big as the hill dwarf’s skull.

‘And so the moment of grudgement has finally arrived, eh grumbaki?’ Despite his outward belligerence, the gatekeeper couldn’t hide the shame in his eyes. He glanced at the bier of shields where Prince Darin laid in repose.

‘Leave it!’ hissed Vorgil. The miner was shining the lantern up ahead, coaxing more light from its confines with soothing imprecations to the runes. ‘Enough have died to foolishness already,’ he added bleakly, whispering, ‘I see something…’

Vorgil had better eyes than any dwarf of Karak Azgal. As a lode warden, he had spent most of his life in the darkest, light-forgotten hollows of the earth. Even without brazier or lantern, his dark-sight was almost faultless. ‘Here,’ he said, pouring on a little more light with a muttered invocation so the others could see it too. Dour ancestor faces glowered down on the dwarfs, stern and disapproving. They were hewn from the rock, massive, magnificent but denuded of the gemstones that once adorned their beards, torques and circlets. Only hollows remained, empty and forlorn. The gargantuan statues had been picked clean. The entire hold was now little more than a hoard of scattered, lost treasures fought over like carrion.

A shadow loomed in the tunnel ahead of the dwarfs, reminding them all of the creatures that coveted their gold and jewels.

Here in the undervaults, the darkest catacombs of the Ungdrin Ankor, shadows were everywhere. They often chittered or snarled; some growled or shuffled, trying to be silent on padded feet or paws. This one was massive and it exuded almost palpable menace.

‘It is no troll,’ Raglan asserted again in a breathy whisper. He’d sheathed his axe in favour of a crossbow, whose bolt tips shone like pellucid silver despite the gloom.

He and Magnin had been charged with dragging the bier of shields, but dropped the tethers wound around their fists in favour of facing the monster in their midst. Prince Darin seemed not to mind.

‘I say we return to the hold gate and get more warriors,’ said Raglan, backing off a step.

‘There are none to get,’ snapped Vorgil, ‘save for those bloody barbarians. Unberogen or not, I trust dwarfs over men and would see the treasures of Izril go to its heirs. Not umgi, not grobi.’

‘Nor elgi,’ muttered Magnin with a scowl.

It had been over two thousand years since the Great War between the dwarfs and the elves, but memories amongst the sons of Grungni were long: clan heritage and ancestral debt made it that way. The War of Vengeance, when it was declared by High King Gotrek Starbreaker, was not universal amongst the clans. Some, those who had forged friendships with the elves, between whom trade flourished with the eldritch race, sought a peaceful outcome and had no desire to fight. The hill dwarfs, those that lived over ground instead of under the mountains, were the staunchest of those objectors.

Raglan ignored Magnin and gestured to the dilapidated hall crumbling around them.

‘Look around you. This is the City of Jewels no longer.’ He used his arm to take in the broken statuary and tumbledown pillars. ‘It is the lair of beasts and monsters, the dark denizens of the deep earth…’ He trailed off as if expecting these creatures to claw their way from the darkness at any moment, drooling saliva and baying for dwarf-flesh to sate their bestial appetites.

Once, when Karak Azgal was known as Karak Izril, the passageway where the dwarfs waited would have been lined with gemstones and chased gold. It treasures had long since been stolen by rat-kin, greenskins and even fouler beasts.

‘We will all die in this place,’ said Vorgil, though he showed no sign of wishing to flee. ‘All of us, doomed.’

Raglan glanced at the lode warden; between him and Hegendour the mood was becoming increasingly fatalistic. His upper hold on Krag Tor was still prosperous. He had only agreed to this venture because of the excessive gold in prospect, that and fealty to a king of a sundered realm he had once called hold. ‘We should go back,’ he said, ‘gather more warriors from the northern holds. Perhaps we can find dwarfs from the Vaults or Black Mountains. I have heard clans are settling there.’

Magnin sneered. The gatekeeper was cut from much older cloth. He could trace his clan legacy all the way back to the Blackbeards. ‘Rinns and ufdis. Barely a proper dawi amongst the lot of them.’

Raglan insisted, ‘We need more axes.’

‘Aye,’ scoffed Magnin, ‘and cannon too, and mules to pull them, but we four are thanes enough to kill this beast.’ He looked down his nose at Raglan. ‘Well, at least three of us are. I expect a clan of turncoats like the Cravenhelms to choose cowardice over honour.’

Raglan ground his teeth but resisted the urge to bite. Despite his anger, the gatekeeper was his better in a fight.

‘What about Prince Darin?’ asked Vorgil, glancing at the corpse.

The smirk on Magnin’s face vanished at mention of the prince’s name.

‘We should leave him behind,’ said Raglan.

‘He is the king’s son!’ hissed Vorgil.

‘Not in the open, kruti,’ Raglan snapped behind his hand. He was watching Hegendour. The hearthguard looked as if he was about to do something rash. ‘We leave him in one of the old tombs. Least he’ll be with his ancestors that way. Once we’re done with the beast, we come back and get him.’

‘Quiet, you fools!’ Magnin was gesturing down the tunnel with his hammer. ‘Smell that?’ he asked, once the other two were silent.

The waft of something deeply unpleasant pricked the dwarfs’ nostrils. It carried the reek of sulphur.

‘Trollish bile-acid,’ said Hegendour, scowling. He had two axes, one in each hand, and bared his teeth in a challenge.

‘What say you, lad?’ asked Magnin, suddenly uncertain of his own convictions but unwilling to trust an elf-friend or a grief-mad hearthguard. He glanced over his spiked shoulder plate at the dwarf behind him.

The last of the hunting party was no thane, nor was he even a warrior, at least to Magnin’s mind. He was brown-bearded with youthful grey eyes, a beardling. He wore a helm like the others: it had a studded nose guard and iron-banded crown. He also wore robes but interwoven with mail and a pair of runic vambraces.

His trappings were that of a runesmith, though the lad did not feel worthy of the mantle foisted upon him.

‘My dead master’s body carried the same stench,’ Skalf said quietly, and held aloft a runic talisman that hung around his neck on a chain. It gave off a pale, green aura that coloured the darkness around it.

‘Well, smith,’ demanded the gatekeeper after an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, ‘What say you?’

Vorgil muttered behind his black, soot-thickened beard to Raglan.

‘We should not have brought a beardling to this place. I don’t care who his master was.’

The hill dwarf glanced at the runesmith too, and nodded in agreement with the lode warden.

Skalf ignored them. He was watching the light around the talisman as it changed from green to visceral red.

‘Very close.’

Hegendour was at the edge of the lantern’s light, just within its penumbra.

‘It is the beast,’ he decided, and ploughed into the tunnel. ‘Sing my lament to Grimnir and all the Ancestor Gods. Tell them Hegendour, son of Hegengrim, approaches their hold halls in the underdeep. My doom awaits… Uzkul!’ he cried, forging into a run as the darkness claimed him.

‘Hegendour, wait!’ the runesmith’s warning came too late. As soon as the hearthguard stepped beyond the glow of the lantern, there was the sudden shriek of displaced air, followed by the crunch of bone.

Vorgil was next in line, and got spattered with blood. His face and beard were crimson with it, and he swore aloud, unsheathing a shimmering pickaxe.

A host of rune weapons glowed between them. They were weapons of the great age, before the war with the elves, but they seemed like daggers against whatever was in that tunnel.

A tense moment of silence fell before something flew out of the darkness at them.

Raglan threw a hand axe, unwilling to waste a silver-bolt until he knew it was worth loosing.

Half of Hegendour’s body, a hand axe embedded in its chest, landed in front of them. Steam billowed off the bloody, chewed end of his torso. From the waist down there was nothing. The grimacing hearthguard still clung tenaciously to his axes. They weren’t even notched or bloodied.

‘I think he was already dead, brother,’ said Vorgil.

Magnin chuckled despite the hideousness of Hegendour’s remains.

A low, reverberating growl that shook grit and dust- motes from the broken ceiling of the tunnel prevented an immediate riposte from the hill dwarf.

‘That was big,’ he uttered when it was over.

The sulphurous air grew thicker by the second. It scalded the dwarfs’ leathern skin.

Skalf grimaced. ‘Sound is made louder in these corridors.’ Even so, he had pulled out his warhammer. A master rune of his own forging glowed dully in the stone head and down the haft. ‘There will be no going back now. It has our scent, whatever this creature is.’

A vast tremor shook the ground beneath them, sending statues toppling. Cracks split the carven faces of the ancestors, souring their stony demeanour further still. Sundered rock rained from the subterranean ceiling of the tunnel, bringing cascades of dirt with it.

Magnin raised his great shield to ward off the worst of it.

‘We stand and fight.’

None amongst the small throng gainsaid him.

‘Doom…’ Vorgil muttered. He was barely a step away from taking the Slayer Oath himself.

The shadow of the beast grew closer, snorting and growling.

‘It is no troll,’ whispered Raglan as a massive crack jagged along the ceiling and the tunnel collapsed in on the dwarfs, bringing darkness and death.

‘It is a troll, nothing more.’

The king’s declaration echoed loudly around the abandoned gate hall. In times gone by, the liege-lord of Karak Izril would have held forth in a richly appointed throne room, a king’s chamber worthy of the name. Fabled brynduraz would have lit the scene and made the clusters of gemstones sparkle like stars refulgent. Such days were confined to dust and memory. Azgal, the Hoard Peak as it was now known, was a ruin.

Instead, the lord of Azgal sat upon a wooden throne with a handful of his armoured retainers, his hammerers, arrayed behind him in silent, grim-faced ranks. That King Durik had managed to give audience in one of its upper hold halls was remarkable, but the old dwarf was a cantankerous and stubborn bastard.

Skalf knew the king, he was his liege-lord, and he knew the strain that leaving his ancestral hold to grobi and rat-kin had cost him. Once, Durik had been strong and vital; now he was grey and wraith-like with skin too thin and a patchwork beard. Still, the lord was proud.

‘My cousin Fendril claims to have found the beast’s lair,’ ventured one of the thanes kneeling before the old king. He wore gromril mail and carried a pick and lantern, marking him out as a lode warden, one of the miner clans. ‘He said he saw the trappings of a drakk.’

King Durik was shaking his head, his wrinkled leather face screwed up into a venomous scowl. ‘There are no dragons in Karak Azgal,’ he said. ‘See there!’ He slapped his shoulder hard where a scaled mane unfurled down his back. The magnificent cloak ended in a dragon’s head, still attached to its flesh, glassy-eyed and very dead.

‘Graug the Terrible!’ he declared to his audience. In his rage, he began to cough, spitting bloody phlegm into his hand. A pair of the hammerers, one whom Skalf recognised as the champion Belgrad, were about to intervene when Durik gave them such a baleful glare as to freeze the warriors to the spot.

‘It was the last of the drakk,’ he said once recovered, and became solemn. ‘And though it killed Daled Stormbreaker, I have avenged him with its foul blood. There are no more dragons in Karak Azgal. Few in all of the Worlds Edge,’ he added. ‘Elves,’ he spat, ‘tried to rouse ’em during the Great War. They’ll not flock again.’

At the mention of elves, another of the thanes bowed his head. He was lighter armoured than the rest, but carried a raft of weapons in his belts. Skalf counted half a dozen hand axes, a double-bladed axe and a crossbow, not to mention various daggers and other small blades. On his pot helmet there was a crest of a black bird.

The lode warden was insistent. ‘Fendril was very specific, thane-king.’

King Durik rounded on him. ‘No more dragons!’ he bellowed, and every other dwarf present looked to the darkened corridors beyond the gate hall, fearing the grobi would have heard and come running.

None did, but the king’s ire was slow to fade to embers. He was coughing again, more blood on his hand and tunic. When he continued, his voice was low and wearier than before.

‘It is a troll, a wyvern perhaps. Nothing more.’

‘We shall slay it, my king,’ said a dwarf lord with a regal bearing. He was Darin, the king’s son and prince of Karak Azgal, and knelt with deference before his liege and father.

King Durik hobbled down from the wooden throne upon which he was giving audience to speak to his son directly. The hand upon Prince Darin’s shoulder was neither firm nor steady any more but it conveyed the king’s heartfelt emotion.

‘You are the last,’ he breathed in a voice fit for the tomb, like old parchment cracking. ‘If you die, the lineage of Karak Azgal dies with you,’ he said, vehemence and fear warring in his old, rheumy eyes. His hand shook with it but Prince Darin was quick to still these emotions with his own gauntleted hand upon his father’s.

‘I will kill it for you, father, and Azgal shall be restored.’

It was a flawed pledge, but one the son believed.

The last of the hunting party beat his chest in approval of such bold oath-making.

‘Whatever this creature is, be it troll or wyvern or some other horror of the deep world, it will trouble the bowels of Azgal no longer once we find it,’ he said, ‘so declares Magnin, son of Thord. We of the Stonehaft clan have ever been protectors of the gate. Be it Azgal or Azul, south or north along the Worlds Edge, our dawi blood is thick and unpolluted.’ He glanced at the hill dwarf, he who had been shamed at the king’s mention of elves.

King Durik was nodding, pleased and approving of the warrior-thanes before him.

‘Find it,’ he hissed, appraising them all with his gimlet gaze. ‘Kill it.’

The dank air of the inner gate hall was heavy with the stink of vermin.

Vorgil prodded one of the furred corpses with his boot, scowling.

‘Rat-kin,’ he announced unnecessarily. ‘Dead.’

Magnin snorted derisively. ‘Thank Grungni you are our scout and guide,’ he said, swinging his mattock to rest against his bulky shoulder guard.

Vorgil gave him a dirty look but continued.

‘Blade and cudgel wounds by the looks of it,’ he added, pulling the entwined bodies of the skaven away from one another with his pickaxe.

It was hard to tell how many, so badly battered were the corpses. The furred creatures were diminutive and had the aspect of men but one horribly conjoined with rats. Their stooped backs, pink tails and fang-filled muzzles looked particularly sinister in death. The clustering of the rank bodies suggested an ambush, but there was no sign of the ones who had perpetrated it. If any had died in the attack, they’d been dragged away into the darkness.

‘Grobi?’ asked Raglan. He was standing sentry at the arched entrance to the cavern. Here, like elsewhere in Hoard Peak, the gate was stripped of its gems and gilding. Even the hall itself, which would once have shimmered in the lode warden’s lantern light, was cold and bleak. Its hearth was empty, barring the skaven’s droppings and the bones of lesser creatures picked clean by the hungry ratmen. Several of the columns supporting the vaulted ceiling were broken and sat in untidy heaps of rubble, strewn across the shattered mosaic floor.

The dwarfs were barely an hour from the upper gate hall and the king when they’d discovered the slaughter. Soon, even the upper levels of Azgal would be overrun. Then where would King Durik hold forth?

‘Or some other interloping creature,’ declared Prince Darin. He was standing atop a fallen statue, loftier than the others in every way. A second arched doorway sat opposite the first. The thane-prince stared ahead into its darkling depths. In the lambent glow cast by Vorgil’s lantern, a set of broad stone steps could be discerned. ‘It is down there, waiting for us.’

There was something tainting the prince’s voice. Not fear, his sense of utter conviction eclipsed that. Rather it was uncertainty, or so Skalf thought, that he would not be up to the task of vanquishing the beast and restoring Karak Azgal to former glories. Skalf knew the weight of expectation like that; it was the mantle of his master’s death.

‘You will honour your father,’ said the runesmith from below the prince. Despite Skalf’s best efforts, the words sounded hollow.

Hegendour, the hearthguard, was stoic and silent on the other side of the statue but clearly believed in his regal charge and nodded slowly.

Prince Darin turned to the runesmith and the same fatalism that affected the king’s demeanour was visible in his eyes. It was echoed too in the chamber’s desolation.

‘I must,’ he said, ‘I am all that’s left.’

Vorgil had stopped examining the dead skaven to consult a map that he’d unrolled from one of his many pouches.

It caught Magnin’s interest. ‘I didn’t think there were any maps left of Azgal, leastways, not useful ones. Perished during the Time of Woe, so I heard.’

‘This was Fendril’s,’ said Vorgil, without looking up. ‘My cousin drew it before he last ventured into the deeps.’

‘And left it to you?’ Magnin looked confused. ‘Wouldn’t he need it to get back?’

Now, Vorgil looked up. ‘He drew a great many maps. No lode warden worth his pickaxe needs a map to a place he’s already been. This was left to me so I could find him, if…’ he trailed off.

‘If?’ Magnin was about as subtle as the mattock slung over his shoulder.

‘If he didn’t come back, ufdi,’ snapped Raglan.

Magnin rounded on the hill dwarf, who was still peering the way they’d already come.

‘And is that what concerns you, elf-friend? Are you worried that this hunt is beyond the skill of your silk-swaddled, pointy-ear loving clan?’

Raglan snarled. ‘I am every inch the dawi that–’

‘Enough!’ The prince’s voice wasn’t loud, but it was commanding as he leapt down off the column. ‘We press on.’ He looked to Vorgil, ‘Lode warden, do you have our bearing?’

‘Down, my liege,’ he said, and the words echoed around the musky cavern, ‘down until we reach a fork.’

‘And then?’

‘We delve deeper.’

Even in the fuliginous atmosphere of the forge, Skalf could tell the master was glowering at him. He heard the banded torques on his arms clank together as the rune lord folded them across a barrel-like chest, the clink of ingots woven into his beard as it bristled with displeasure. Smoke already filled the heady chamber but it intensified with every frustrated puff of his master’s pipe.

‘Again, beardling.’

Skalf looked at the chunk of rock, limned by the ruddy orange glow of the forge fire, and frowned. The young dwarf was wearing a leather apron over a simple cloth shirt and breeches. Sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his thick forearms pulsed with muscle and exertion. He’d lost count of the hours.

‘But it is unbreakable.’

The master exhaled a long and perturbed breath. A gout of smoke came with it, prickling at the beardling’s nostrils. With a jewelled dagger he picked at a piece of roast boar still trapped between his teeth from the great feast. Skalf had been forbidden admittance. His stomach growled in sympathetic exasperation with his face.

‘Again,’ said the master, sternly.

Wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his soot-stained hand, Skalf did as asked. Placing all of his considerable strength into the blow, he struck. It was only when he opened his eyes that he realised the chunk of rock was untouched. It wasn’t even chipped.

‘How is this possible?’ he breathed.

The master grunted, and used his bulk to muscle Skalf aside. His mailed armour was hot and stung the beardling’s unprotected skin.

‘Move your weakling arse!’ he snapped, and like lightning his hammer was in his hand, the old words upon his lips, and he struck.

The rock split evenly and within was a shimmering rune blade of purest gromril.

‘See?’ he said to his apprentice. ‘It can be done.’ The master gestured to the two sides of the sundered rock with his hammer, ‘Karadurak, the ever-stone, drawn from the heart of the world. Only a runesmith can break it, with but a single blow. Use the words as they were taught you, beardling. You can engrave the rune of stone without assistance, and have even wrought master runes under my watchful eye, but you have yet to split the karadurak. Only here, in the deep rock, is where you’ll find the veins of old magic. It is powerful, but to wield it you must break the ever-stone. Until you do, you will never leave this forge!’

He gestured to another piece of karadurak, sitting upon a second anvil. It was fathomless black, flecked with silver like iridescent star-fires and more unyielding than hardest obsidian.

‘This one is yours alone,’ the master promised, turning his back.

A plume of smoke spilled in his wake as he left the chamber.

Skalf balled his fists impotently.

‘How will you know I have broken it with a single stroke if you’re not here to witness it?’ he called to his master’s departing shadow.

‘I will know,’ a voice echoed from the darkness. ‘You will not be able to break it any other way. I will know,’ he repeated. ‘Speak the words,’ he said, voice fading, ‘as they were taught to you. Again!’

Skalf obeyed and struck again. But the karadurak would not yield.

Vorgil had the map in his hands again. After the first hour, he’d removed his gloves. His soot-stained fingers, black beneath the nails, worried at the edges. Scratching at his head, he muttered, ‘But Fendril is an excellent mapwrought…’

Raglan had made a small fire and was keeping the flame low within a ring of stones. The dwarfs were deep, much deeper than before. A few skirmishes with a band of greenskins had whetted the dwarfs’ weapons, but little more. A chill pervaded in the gloom, worsened by the desolation of the hold around them.

‘Worse than the damn grobi, this cold.’ Raglan rubbed his arms to nurse some heat back into them.

‘Just like a Cravenhelm,’ chuntered Magnin. ‘Too long spent above the earth.’ For now, he was tired of openly mocking the hill dwarf. His sturm had been robbed by the hollowness of this low place. They’d seen other bodies on their route into the darkness of the world. Dwarf corpses. Hundreds of them. It was a bitter reminder of their faded glories and robbed the warmth from their hearts faster than any chill ever could.

‘Can you decipher your cousin’s script?’ asked the prince.

They were at the bottom of a very long and wide stairwell. It was broken in places, gaping pitfalls leading to certain doom in the blackened crags below, and made for treacherous footing. No light penetrated this deep and the only illumination came from Raglan’s fire. Its cast was weak and flickering, barely painting the flagstone basin where the dwarfs waited in greyish monochrome.

‘This is a bleak place,’ said Hegendour to no one in particular. ‘A hold hall should have blazing hearths filled with the smell of meat and beer-scent, not shadows and dust. Where is the sound of the clans, the ale songs and revelry? Where is the drone of the mines felt through the rock, in time with my beating heart-blood? Where are the dawi?’

‘Dead, brother,’ said Prince Darin softly, though Hegendour already had his answer.

Vorgil was scratching his head. He was standing between three forks. Two went off to the left and right, a third disappeared into abyssal darkness as the way ahead ended at the broken lip of the plateau.

‘Left, I think…’

The prince was firm, ‘You think or you know?’

Vorgil rolled up the map again. ‘Definitely left. I’d stake my silverlode on it.’

‘There’s a wager I’d take,’ muttered Magnin, still belligerent but glad to be on the move again.

The dwarfs were gathering up their gear and dousing the fire when Skalf gestured for stillness. The slow scrape of blades and hammers slipping from their sheaths sounded. The taut string of Raglan’s crossbow creaked as he loaded a quarrel.

‘What is it, lad?’ asked Prince Darin.

‘Can’t you hear that?’

He was standing at the left fork, stooped with his ear pressed towards the darkness.

‘Hear wha–’

The stink arrived before the din. It was noisome and thick, like tar.

Magnin sneered. ‘Grobi…’

A high-pitched chittering overwhelmed the greenskin grunts and whooping.

‘And something else,’ said Prince Darin.

‘How many?’ asked Raglan as he tried to target something in the blackness. His breath was coming quickly and fogged the cold, subterranean air in white gusts.

The opening was wide enough for all of the dwarfs to stand abreast of one another. They did so, shoulders together and shields uplifted.

‘Scared of a few rat-kin, elf-friend?’ said Magnin.

‘Bring the lantern forwards.’ Ignoring the bickering thanes, Prince Darin waved Vorgil up.

The shrieking and grunting in the blackness was almost deafening. The stink made the dwarfs want to retch but all held their nerve as the runic flame drew back the veil of darkness.

‘Grimnir’s hairy arse…’ Vorgil spoke for them all.

There were hordes.

It was difficult to discern greenskin from skaven they were clustered so close together. Red-eyed, swathed in dirty black robes and cowls, the goblins were in the vanguard. No, that wasn’t right… The greenskins were panicked, shrieking in agitation and fear. They were running from the ratmen who were almost on top of them. Whickering arrows, loosed blindly from bent short bows, met slung stones and hurled daggers. The efforts of the goblin archers were in vain as the teeming skaven hordes overwhelmed them in a bloody instant of hacking blades. Some of the greenskins, the better armoured or simply more desperate, resisted. Together, the creatures almost boiled towards the archway with teeth champing and weapons flashing. Green, leathery flesh, hook-nosed and cruel; black-furred, mange-ridden and cunning, the goblins and skaven were almost intertwined, kicking, biting and cutting at each with crude blades and spears.

Creatures were dying in the frantic charge, mostly goblins but the greenskins were killing skaven in their frantic fervour to escape too. Gore and blood spattered both warring parties as bodies were opened up and left to spill loose in the carnage. The vermin rolled towards the dwarfs in a wave. No thin line of shields was going to break it up. It would wash from the left archway and spill over onto the plateau. Anything caught in that swell would be smashed aside, possibly over the edge and into the waiting abyss.

Prince Darin saw the danger.

‘Retreat, into the other chamber!’

‘The gatekeepers flee from nothing,’ snapped Magnin, ramming his massive shield into the earth and bracing himself behind it.

Hegendour seized him firmly by the shoulder. ‘You’ll flee for this. Obey the Prince of Azgal.’

The others were already withdrawing across the plateau and making for the portal behind them.

Magnin looked as if he was about to resist but then grunted and tramped noisily after the rest.

The dwarfs had barely breached the second chamber, a dilapidated hold hall much like everywhere else in Karak Azgal, when the first of the goblins burst through the cracked entranceway.

Magnin crushed the skull of one that made the mistake of getting close enough to his mattock. He rolled a second up the front of his shield and slammed it into a broken half column jutting from the flagstone floor. Its pulped body peeled away and was lost amongst the tramp of booted feet.

Falling back on instinct, the other dwarfs rallied around him, creating a circular wall of shields and weapons that faced in every direction. Only Raglan, who didn’t carry a shield, stood apart from the wall of iron. He scaled a shattered statue that provided a high vantage point over the chamber and used his crossbow to pick off stragglers. He sent an iron-bolt into the eye of a skaven thrall-leader, punching most of the creature’s brain out of the back of its skull in a welter of gore. He pinioned a goblin through the neck, spinning the greenskin with the impact and cutting off its straggled death cry.

At the core of the ring of dwarfs, Vorgil’s lantern shone out like a beacon. He’d attached it by a length of chain to a spare axe he had sheathed on his back and it swung wildly, creating bizarre and monstrous shadows, as he fought with his rune pick.

It was the only luminescence in the lightless chamber, that and the magical glow from the dwarfs’ ancestor weapons. Red pinpricks shimmered like living, malicious rubies in the blackness outside the lantern’s influence… hundreds and hundreds of them. The dwarfs were surrounded and would soon be overrun.

‘Lock shields!’ Prince Darin had to bellow above the frantic chatter of the warring skaven and greenskins. He cut a burly skaven from groin to neck, loosing its guts across the flagstones.

‘Defilers!’ Magnin bellowed, incensed at the creatures’ sacrilege and trespass. He slammed a goblin in the face with his shield, shattering its cheekbone and pushing its crooked nose into its brain, before slamming his hammer into a skaven behind it. The ratman crumpled under the blow as its clavicle was reduced to splinters and much of its chest cavity crushed by the fearsome dwarf.

In his eagerness to kill everything rushing into the hold hall, Magnin had stepped out of the circle. His mattock was smashing bloody arcs through the creatures and his almost inviolable bulk could take the meagre blade cuts of the goblins and skaven, but it left a crucial gap in the dwarfs’ defences. As a gatekeeper he was well used to tackling innumerable odds but that was usually in a tunnel with a small aperture, a bottleneck that could easily be protected.

‘Back into the circle, ufdi!’ shouted Hegendour, hewing a goblin in half through the torso before decapitating a skaven with the reverse swing.

Vorgil scowled in the vainglorious gatekeeper’s direction, but said nothing. He was concentrating on fighting, and living. He wrenched his pickaxe from the top of a skaven’s skull, releasing a jet of dark fluid, and roared to vent some tension.

Trapped within the confines of the circle, Skalf could see the creatures’ numbers were waning.

‘They are thinning out,’ he shouted, pummelling the kneecap of a skaven and finishing it with a blow to the temple as it collapsed, squeaking in pain. Its brawny neck jagged sideways, Skalf’s forge-born strength enough to push bone through skin. More were coming, surrounding them in an ever churning, ever chittering morass. There was a strange flow to the fight, though, as if the creatures were billowing past the dwarfs rather than pitching in to fight and kill them. It allowed a small moment of respite, which the runesmith exploited.

Skalf muttered a word of a power and a flash of lightning arced from his vambraces. It cut a ragged cleft in the hordes still spilling through the archway and the air was immediately filled with the stench of burning meat and fur.

As the fire-bright runes on his vambraces were fading again, he realised something.

‘They’re not attacking us.’

Prince Darin half-turned as he bifurcated a goblin’s skull. His armour and tunic were wretched with gore.

‘What?’

Skalf smacked a skaven with his shield. The ratman couldn’t slow his momentum and ran into it. He stomped on the fallen creature’s neck to kill it.

‘We are just in their way. They are more concerned with fighting each other.’

Aside from the odd opportunistic blade thrust or cudgel swipe, the goblins and skaven weren’t making a concerted effort to kill the dwarfs. Prince Darin drew his shield back.

‘Hold. Shields high and together,’ he said. ‘Weather the storm.’

Magnin was still outside the ring of dwarfs, still fighting his own battle.

Prince Darin fixed him with an imperious glare.

‘Gatekeeper!’ His tone brooked no argument.

Magnin swore but began his slow retreat to the others.

Something moved in the horde. It was revealed as the skaven ranks thinned. Shadow-swathed and sinuous, it was no ordinary ratman.

Skalf cried out. ‘Brother!’

Magnin was turning, lifting his weighty shield as the ring of dwarfs parted to accept him. The assassin creature had already bypassed his defences when a silver-bolt lodged in its throat, ending it. The skaven crumpled, its green-tinged dagger mere inches from the gatekeeper’s unprotected flank.

The arrogant self-assurance on Magnin’s face faded when he saw his saviour’s ironic salute. Raglan looked pleased with his kill as he loaded another quarrel and brought a fresh target into his iron-sight.

The dwarfish ring of iron was still breached as a second black-clad assassin slipped into the gap, obscured by the first. Prince Darin grunted and Skalf caught the grimace on his face beneath his helmet before Hegendour decapitated the skaven. Its headless body fell back as the head caromed off into the dark. It was festooned with sharp-bladed stars, daggers and other jagged knives. Every piece of its serrated arsenal glowed with an unhealthy lustre.

‘My lord…’ Hegendour reached for his liege.

‘Hold together,’ snapped the prince, though his voice was ragged and breathy. A greyish pallor was affecting his skin already. ‘It’s a scratch, nothing more.’

Magnin reached the other dwarfs a few seconds later and the circle of iron closed again. Heads down, the dwarfs huddled together and became as one. Each of the warriors crouched down and put their shoulders behind the insides of their shields, weathering the barrage of goblin and skaven slamming against them.

Peering through a crack in his shield, Skalf caught glimpses of the creatures partly illuminated by Vorgil’s lantern. It was frenetic, bodies blurring by in a cacophony of screaming and clashing iron. A jet of blood and saliva lashed against his peep hole and he turned his cheek at the stink.

One thing was certain, the greenskins and ratmen had no interest in the party of dwarfs. They were almost beneath their notice. This was a war for territory, and it was one in which the sons of Grungni had no stake.

Behind the wall of locked shields, Skalf met face-to-face with Prince Darin.

His eyes told the runesmith everything he needed to know about the prince’s inevitable fate. The heir of Azgal knew it too and slowly shook his head at Skalf. He was faltering, a crucial link in the dwarfs’ collective armour about to buckle. Prince Darin’s skin had turned from grey to alabaster white and was veneered in feverish, lustrous sweat.

‘Keep me… on my feet, lad.’

Skalf shored up the prince’s failing body with his shoulder, supporting him. With some difficulty, he took a stoppered flask from within the confines of his robes and pressed the uncorked lip to the prince’s mouth.

‘Drink, my liege,’ said Skalf, as he muttered an incantation. The rune engraved on the side of the flask, hidden until that moment, blazed for a few seconds and was lost again. The short flare of power indicated the salve’s lack of healing potency. It would keep the prince on his feet, but not for much longer.

‘Hold!’ he croaked, and there was some defiance in the heir of Azgal’s voice.

Gradually, the battering against the dwarfs’ locked shields lessened and the chittering diminished. Magnin was first to stick his head up and found a few stragglers left to kill that Raglan hadn’t already shot with his crossbow. The hill dwarf had come down from his perch and was commencing the grisly work of retrieving his bolts, finishing off any creatures that still lived with his hand axe. He was ripping the blade from a goblin’s skull when he caught Skalf’s gaze.

‘We’ll need every one before this is done,’ he said. ‘We should have gone back, brought more warriors.’

For once Magnin didn’t chide him.

He cast around at the corpses of ratmen and greenskins, frozen in death, their blades jutting out of one another.

‘Barely knew we were here,’ he muttered in a half-whisper. ‘Since when did we dawi become the vermin?’

He grew quiet and sullen, taking no pleasure in dispatching the injured creatures that were left in the hold hall. The hill dwarf had saved his life, and that was one thing – to be rescued from death by an elf-friend was cause for dismay enough – but he knew he had also allowed the prince to be injured, possibly gravely. It was plain on the gatekeeper’s grizzled face that he was ashamed.

Hegendour was tending to his lord when Skalf approached them.

‘Can anything be done?’ asked the hearthguard, without looking up from the pallid, gaunt visage of Prince Darin.

There was a lump in Skalf’s throat as he replied, ‘I’ve done it, brother. There’s no greater craft I possess that can heal him,’ and in a quieter voice added, ‘the legacy of Azgal has ended.’

‘Dreng tromm…’ Hegendour’s lament was heartfelt. ‘I did not protect you well enough, lord.’

Prince Darin smiled, though it was more of a grimace by the end. He slipped, fell to one armoured knee. The metal clang was doleful and echoing. Skalf and Hegendour reached out to catch him before he collapsed.

‘Lay me down,’ said the prince. Green-black veins ran across his almost skeletal face and neck as the skaven’s poison taint entered its final stages of virulence.

The dwarfs did as ordered, slowly setting the heir of Azgal on the cold ground even as Raglan and Magnin gathered around to witness his passing.

Prince Darin clasped Hegendour’s hand in a firm but desperate grip. It was the last of his strength. The hearthguard placed the prince’s axe in the other hand, bent his fingers around the haft for him. He then leaned down as the prince motioned to speak but all that escaped his lips was an agonised rasp.

‘And on this day so passes Prince Darin, son of Durik, last heir of Karak Azgal,’ uttered Skalf, standing and bowing his head. ‘Let it be known that this deed was wrought by the rat-kin and a heavy toll shall be exacted upon their race in grudgement of it.’

‘There are not enough tails and snouts in all of the Hoard Hold,’ snapped Hegendour, rising. ‘Not enough to atone for my shame…’ He removed the straps holding his cuirass together then the greaves and vambraces, the chainmail vest beneath and his tunic. The others watched in silence as the hearthguard divested his body of its armour and stood before them naked from the waist up. He cast down his helmet and though he had no lime to fashion a crest, cut a wound across his arm and used the blood to paint a rune of Grimnir upon his torso. Then he walked into the dark to make his Slayer’s Oath.

‘What do we do now?’ Raglan kept his voice down and one eye on the distraught Hegendour just a few feet away.

Even Magnin, ordinarily so pugnacious, was uncertain.

In the end, Skalf answered. ‘We go on, find the beast and kill it as the king bade us.’

‘His son is dead, the prince…’ Magnin’s guilt was obvious as his voice faded to silence.

‘We should go back,’ Raglan said again, ‘and return with more warriors.’

Magnin bristled, finding his resolve. ‘There is no back! There is only forwards into the deeps or there is death here, in this place.’

‘But–’

‘A beardling shames you, elf-friend!’ the gatekeeper snapped, though Skalf suspected some of his anger was directed inwards.

Realisation crept onto Raglan’s face. His shoulders sagged. There was no other choice. They were, all of them, bound to this fate now. They would find the beast, be it troll or wyvern or whatever dark monster had taken up in the ruins of Azgal, and kill it or die in the attempt. Suddenly, his prosperous mine holdings seemed very far away and the gold he had come here to claim cheap and sullied by comparison.

‘Into the darkness then,’ he said. ‘At least we have our guide.’

Magnin frowned, looking around. ‘Where is that chuff-eater?’

Skalf found him. Vorgil was kneeling just outside the hold hall in a long, wide gallery that had seen much better days. Tattered strips of cloth that might once have been banners draped the walls, fluttering like ghostly fingers as a draft from the upper levels disturbed them. Of the skaven and goblins that must have passed through it there was no sign. There was some natural light here. It came from the small chips of brynduraz, or brightstone, that the verminous creatures had had either missed or were unable to prise loose, and flickered weakly in the gloom.

Vorgil’s face was bathed in its pearlescent glow. It made him appear cold and desolate, his humours melancholic. The lantern, now sat beside him, had faded to a dulled ember much like the lode warden’s mood.

‘I was wrong,’ he said, turning something over in his hands that Skalf couldn’t see with the miner’s back to him.

‘About what, brother?’

Skalf reached the miner’s side and saw that Vorgil was cradling a pair of battered, slightly scorched boots. A small chain of runes was engraved in the leather and the gromril toecaps still shone when they caught the gleam of brightstone.

‘It was the right fork,’ he said, holding out the boots so that Skalf could see them. ‘Fendril’s zharr-klod, his fire-boots…’ Vorgil tipped them and ash poured from within to make a pile in front of him. ‘My cousin is dead.’

The heat of the fire hadn’t lessened. It had intensified. Skalf’s arms were burning too, but from exertion and not the heady atmosphere of the forge. He had pumped the bellows, fuelling the heart flame with as much fury as he dare. Sweat lathered his body, coiling off his skin in upwardly rising motes of steam. His fingers were grimed with soot, his hammer scorched black. He struck the ever-stone again.

It didn’t yield. There was no visible mark against it at all. Nothing.

The hammer head was broken, split down the middle with a gaping fissure that exposed the weakness of his craft rather than the fuller’s construction. Wiping his bone-sore hands on his apron, he went to the rack to grab another.

‘Kruti-eating, wazzock pissing…’ he swore, seizing a particularly large and broad-headed mattock. ‘Grungni’s hairy arse…’ he went on muttering, gauging the heft of the heavier hammer.

At a chink of metal touching metal, Skalf looked up from the blacksmith’s rack and saw the master was watching, brooding. A thick plume of pipe smoke gusted from his mouth, occluding his disapproving face from view for a moment before he spoke through clenched teeth.

‘It is not the tools, lad,’ he rumbled, chewing at the end of his pipe. ‘It’s you.’

‘We shall see,’ muttered Skalf, tightening his belt and fixing his enemy, the defiant chunk of ever-stone in his sights.

‘Speak the words… strike… split the karadurak if you are worthy.’

Skalf ignored the master’s gibes directed at his back. He was breathing hard, trying to channel his wrath into a pure blow, one that would shatter the ever-stone.

The incantation tumbled over his lips like the first fledging rocks presaging a landslide and, taking the forging mattock in a two-handed grip, slammed into the chunk of ever-stone with every ounce of strength he could muster.

A flash of fat sparks spilled from the hammer’s head, followed by a loud crack that foreshadowed the haft splitting in half. As the mattock hung broken and useless in Skalf’s clenched fist, he looked on at the inviolable ever-stone, still untouched, taunting, mocking him…

Skalf roared.

He ripped a stout mallet from the rack and smacked it into the rock, then another and another. By the end of his rampage, two heavy mallets, one sledge hammer and a mattock lay ruined and shattered around the anvil where the seemingly indestructible ever-stone still sat.

Heaving breath back into his body, near choking on the smoke and heat, his eyes watering with the effort and his muscles ablaze, he glared at the master.

‘It… will not… break.’

The master glowered, his old eyes like chips of napped flint.

‘Either it will or you will, lad.’ He unfolded his arms, revealing the brawn in his muscles and the clanking panoply of his torques and bronze knot-bands. A gromril breastplate encased his barrel chest and there was a weapons belt attached to his waist. The scabbard of the master’s rune axe was strapped to his back, the leather-bound haft and dragon’s head pommel jutting above his armoured shoulder. ‘I am summoned to battle, beardling.’

Skalf’s face brightened but the master’s dour expression quickly dashed his nascent hopes.

‘Urk and grobi amass at our southern gate, doubtless come from Azgal’s ruins. The Hoard Hold overflows with their stink,’ he spat. ‘You will remain here, but upon my return I expect the karadurak to be broken.’

Skalf’s protests were cut off before he could voice them.

‘You are no use to me as an apprentice if you cannot do this. You are no use to your hold as a runesmith if you fail.’ The master paused, appraising the young dwarf with a hard, unforgiving expression. It was not so dissimilar from the ever-stone, that look. ‘Wrath leads to ruin, lad.’ He gestured to the broken tools that Skalf had sundered in his rage. ‘You cannot break it that way.’

‘It is unbreakable, lord.’

The master’s eyes were pitiless as he turned. He had a heavy cloak upon his shoulders, attached to his pauldrons and furs beneath his chainmail undershirt. It must be winter. Skalf had been a prisoner in the forge for months, sustained on stonebread and dregs-ale. It was a foul, brackish brew, more tar than beer, but it was fortifying.

‘Hammer the rock, use your craft. Split the rock,’ said the master as he was leaving. ‘You have until I return from the southern gate, Blackhammer.’ He sneered the last word, using the honorific derogatorily. It was Skalf’s namesake. He looked down at his blackened hands, the scorched and broken hammers strewn around the anvil and recognised it for what it was – a slur.

He would restore its honour. Determined not to be found wanting, he picked up a mallet and struck again.

It had once been a feast hall. The smell of roasting boar and cured meats, the tangy aroma of slow-cooking mountain goat and the redolence of ale should have filled this place. Only the stink of death, the slow decay of flesh and the reek of mouldering cloth lingered now. It had become a tomb, populated by revenants and the rancorous whispers of the long dead.

A vast hearth dominated one wall, still discernible through the dust and grime. Murky shadows lurked in the ancestor faces carved in its sweeping arches and stout buttresses. Voids in the dirt in the shape of weapons suggested where ancestral heirlooms had once lived above the mantle. Stripped in the name of desperate defence, of a final stand against impossible odds, these blades and hammers were lost to vagaries of fate and the capriciousness of nature.

Rubble lay about where parts of the ceiling had caved in or at the site of a collapsed column or statue. Underfoot, the mosaic slabs were chipped and cracked. A great fissure ran across the ground, cutting the dwarf helm icon that had been painstakingly rendered in the stone in two, like a jagged axe wound.

The dwarfs kept to the fire. They encircled the small flame, muttering quietly, lost in their thoughts. It was a vast chamber but they kept to one side; the other sloped downwards badly, the foundation stones having given way and the floor sunken.

Vorgil had said it must be on account of undermining, for no dwarf foundations would ever capitulate due to age. Such things were made to last, to outlast. Except Azgal hadn’t outlasted them: it was a ruin and one overrun with the creatures dwarfs once thought of as vermin.

‘No troll could have done this,’ said the miner, moribund and forlorn. He had Fendril’s boots in his hands and was turning them over and over as if trying to find some meaning in the pattern of the leather. ‘Fendril was nought but ash. Nought but ash…’

‘I have heard some trolls can spit fire, others that are made of stone,’ offered Raglan, unhelpfully.

‘It’s likely a wyvern we are hunting,’ said Magnin, scowling at the hill dwarf. ‘No troll I ever fought could breathe fire,’ he scoffed.

Raglan got to his feet, weapons clanking together as he rose. ‘And you have fought all the trolls of the underdeeps have you, Magnin, son of Thord, bloody thane-king of all the wazzocking gatekeepers, eh?’

‘Down, elf-friend,’ the other dwarf replied, paying him no mind. ‘Seems imminent and certain death suits you. At least you are bolder.’

‘Nought but ash…’ muttered Vorgil.

‘Daled Stormbreaker ventured into these deeps to kill a drakk,’ said Skalf, shivering despite his furs and cloak. All eyes turned to regard him, glittering like dead jewels in the lambent firelight.

‘Speak up then, lad,’ said Raglan, sitting down again. ‘Tell us of this hero. What became of him?’

Magnin nodded, eager to have his mind occupied by something other than guilt and fatalism. He gestured for Skalf to go on.

The runesmith cleared his throat. ‘My master told me of him once. He was a great warrior-thane and treasure hunter, an orphan of sundered Karak Drazh, the Black Crag. He wore a gilded helm of griffon feathers. His axe carried runes of sharpness and beast-slaying from before the War of Vengeance, when our race was at its peak. His shield, fashioned from drake scale and banded gromril, could turn aside any flame and endure any blow. It was Daled that slew the urk chief, Gargut, and mounted its head on the spiked wall of the greenskin’s fastness; he who banished the blood-fiend of Hel’s Talon and destroyed the Crooked Tooth grobi tribe of Death Pass; he who vanquished the serpent-wyrm of Black Water.’

Skalf’s face darkened as he recounted the next part of the saga. ‘But these deeds did not prepare him for what he faced in the cold dark of Karak Azgal. When the southern holds fell, Daled led an expedition into the mountains. He hoped to make his fortune and restore some of the lost heirlooms of the hold but he did not return from the journey. There are… rumours of the beast he encountered in the long blackness, of the drakk that finally ended his legacy.’

‘I had hoped for something cheerier, beardling,’ said Magnin. ‘Perhaps with a song or bawdy ditty.’

‘Graug…’ whispered Raglan, daring not to speak the name aloud, as if doing so would somehow summon the creature from the depths.

‘A wyvern or troll could not do this,’ said Vorgil, offering up the boots as evidence of his words, ‘they could not burn my cousin down to his boots like kindling!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ hissed the hill dwarf, his nervous gaze alighting on Hegendour. The hearthguard was sat apart from the rest, eschewing the warmth of the fire on self-punitive grounds. Skalf noticed that despite his lack of cloak or armour he did not tremble in the cold, not even slightly. He was as still and unfeeling as the dead rock surrounding them. Poor, dead Prince Darin was laid next to him in repose atop a bier of shields the dwarfs were using to carry him with.

Despite the impracticality, Hegendour had insisted upon it.

Vorgil would not be silenced. He got to his feet, brandishing the last of Fendril’s trappings like an accusation.

‘Burned,’ he cried, ‘to his boots!’ Spit and phlegm speckled his quivering beard. ‘It was a drakk, it could be nothing other.’

A deep, echoing voice came from the darkness outside of the fire’s glow.

‘It is no drakk,’ said Hegendour. ‘It cannot be.’ The thick muscles in his back bunched as he got up. He rotated his shoulder blades, stretched the stiffness from his neck and arms. ‘We’ve rested enough. It’s time to move on and find this monster.’

‘Why cannot it be a drakk, brother?’ asked Vorgil, unafraid of the slayer’s distemper.

Hegendour turned and his granite face was creased with repressed anger.

‘Because our king told us it was not! Are you saying he’s a liar? Graug is slain. Its pelt adorns my liege-lord’s back. It is a troll or wyvern, and we shall kill it.’

‘What if it was spawn?’ asked Skalf. He was the last of the dwarfs to stand, and maintained eye contact with Hegendour as he did so. The former hearthguard had changed over the last few hours, become mercurial and unpredictable. Many who took the Slayer Oath were affected in the same way. It made them dangerous.

Skalf took a moment to slow his racing heart.

‘The king is no liar,’ he said carefully, ‘he did indeed kill a drakk but what if it was not Graug? What if the hide he had fashioned into his cloak was actually kin to the beast, its young?’

The chamber was filled with a sudden, tense silence as Hegendour considered the runesmith’s proposal.

‘It would explain much of what we’ve seen,’ Skalf added.

Hegendour’s face was almost unmoving.

‘It is a troll, nothing more.’

Hefting his axes, the Slayer kneeled to speak a few words to Prince Darin and then moved on.

Spirits low, the dwarfs followed him, Magnin and Raglan taking up the bier of shields and their regal burden strapped to it.

‘Nought but ash,’ muttered Vorgil. There were tears in his eyes for Fendril as he stoked up the lantern. Its wan glow described the gauntness in his features.

‘I know, brother,’ said Skalf, patting the distraught miner’s arm. He hoped that Hegendour was right, that it was just a troll grown large and terrible over the years spent in the darkness, but he doubted it.

As the dwarfs picked their way down the slope, careful to avoid the deepest pitfalls, a sense of doom settled upon them. It was one they could not shake.

The master was still, his broken breastplate unmoving, his beard matted with blood. Even in death he wore a scowl. Now lying upon the anvil, he had been brought down to the forge in order for Skalf to see him and make any final peace or oath he needed to.

A pair of hefty looking anvil guards stood to either side, ready to bear the rune lord to his final rest in the tombs of the hold.

Though no one had told him one way or the other, Skalf assumed the battle at the southern gate had gone badly. From what little he had heard, the urk and grobi were much more numerous than the dwarfs had thought. What had begun as a fight to cleanse the outer slopes of greenskins had turned into a desperate retreat and the sealing of the southern gate indefinitely. As the thane’s own clan warriors, the Stonefists, had kept the armoured urk at bay, Skalf’s master had wrought the runic locks upon the gate. Alas, he had failed to close them before an urk chieftain stove in his chest with an axe blade.

The wound was mortal, and the priests of Valaya were summoned shortly after the master shut the gate with the last of his strength and collapsed.

‘You are Skalf?’ asked a hammerer, one of the king’s retainers. He and four other warriors had arrived shortly after the dead master. All were thickly armoured with full-faced ancestor helms and double-headed mattocks. ‘Of the Blackhammer?’

Skalf looked down at his soot-stained hands and the blackened head of the forging mallet he was still dumbly carrying. He nodded mutely, one eye still on his master’s recumbent body.

‘The king has summoned you, or rather he had summoned your master but since he has passed to Grungni’s halls…’

‘It falls to me to honour his oaths,’ Skalf said for him.

The hammerer nodded, approving of the beardling’s outward courage and sense of duty. ‘Are you skilled, young Skalf?’ He appraised the thickness of the runesmith’s arms and the length of his beard. ‘Did your master impart enough of his knowledge before he was slain by urk and grobi filth?’

Skalf’s ire rose at the mention of the greenskins, but he kept his anger checked.

‘He taught me the craft and I have forged a master rune under his tutelage.’

‘Good, you will have need of such arcane knowledge in the deeps of Azgal.’

With a clanking refrain from his armour, the hammerer was turning and beckoning the runesmith to follow when Skalf spoke up.

‘Are we to venture beyond the upper halls then?’

‘You are leaving this settlement behind, lad, and the upper halls of the hold proper too.’

Skalf quickly gathered his trappings and knelt to make a final imprecation to his dead master, nodding to the anvil guards that he was finished, before hurrying after the retinue of hammerers.

‘To what purpose… er…’

‘Belgrad,’ said the hammerer, giving his name, ‘and your purpose is with the Prince of Karak Azgal no less. A beast, lad, the king has a mind that it should be vanquished.’

Skalf swallowed, trying to mask the sound of his fear behind a faked cough.

Belgrad looked over his shoulder, not fooled. ‘Don’t worry, beardling, it’s only a troll I am sure. Nothing to a seasoned runesmith like yourself.’

Nodding, hoping, Skalf gave one last look to the forge and his master before it was lost to sight. The anvil guards were lifting him reverently. In his wake, Skalf could see the other anvil and the ever-stone gleaming dully. It was untouched, unbroken.

‘Yes, nothing,’ Skalf answered, leaving the forge and his master behind.

There was dirt and grit in his mouth. It clogged his beard, made him want to choke. Darkness engulfed him and there was blood on his forehead, a long, warm trail of it that ran down his cheek and welled around his eye. He’d lost a boot and felt the scrape of rock against his stockinged foot like knife blades.

‘Here!’ The shout came from overhead. It sounded muffled, indistinct, but he could hear the words well enough. ‘It’s the beardling… he’s alive.’

A pinprick of light resolved somewhere above him. The aperture grew larger and Skalf realised he was partially buried alive under a mound of fallen earth and rock. He also remembered what had happened and the tunnel collapsing in on them.

Magnin’s smiling face regarded him as he hauled Skalf to his feet again. The gatekeeper had lost his helmet and his armour was battered, but otherwise he looked little the worse for wear. Raglan was nearby and cast one of the rocks he’d been heaving loose to one side as he went over to them. Unlike the gatekeeper, the hill dwarf was solemn.

‘Vorgil is dead,’ he told them, ‘crushed, along with Prince Darin’s body. At least it is interment of a sort.’ Raglan held up the zharr-klod, Fendril’s boots, in one hand and the runic lantern in the other. ‘I found these flung just beyond the rubble.’

‘He was trying to save them,’ said Skalf, taking the boots as Raglan offered them. The runesmith’s own, at least the one that remained, was battered. ‘By Valaya’s golden cups, they fit,’ he added as he changed out of the old pair and into the new. There were warm and made him feel lighter, bolder.

‘Looks like the lode warden’s lantern did not escape as intact,’ said Raglan. It flickered and faded in his other hand, its magical embers weakening. After each stuttering flare the surrounding darkness closed a little tighter, like a noose. ‘Can you reinvigorate it, lad?’

Skalf examined the artefact carefully. His skull was thumping and he gingerly touched a bulbous contusion just above his brow, wincing. After a few moments, he shook his head.

‘Without the specific Khazalid used to invoke its light, there’s little I can do.’ He muttered a few words of power he did know, tracing the runes with his dirt-encrusted fingers and igniting them with a dimming flame. The embers grew brighter but not by much.

Raglan nodded and went to find a way out of the half-collapsed chamber. Even with the lantern light it was hard to see much of anything. The air was choked with dust, slow to disperse in the close confines of the underdeep. Collapsed stone made footing treacherous and there were a great many cracks and crags.

‘Be wary,’ Magnin called after him, ‘there is a chasm not far. I almost fell into it.’

‘Is it deep?’ asked Raglan.

‘Deep enough. I couldn’t see the bottom but there was a stench emanating from its bowels, sulphurous and acerbic.’

They exchanged a dark glance between them but said nothing further.

The mood between the two grudge-holding dwarfs had improved as their overall situation worsened. It was the dwarf way, to find solidarity through adversity. Skalf was heartened by it but he was also acutely aware their party was now down to three and they had yet to find the beast. He wondered about the chasm.

‘It is a drakk then?’ asked Magnin as Skalf was dusting off his tunic and adjusting his belts.

‘Yes,’ Skalf replied. ‘It is Graug, I am certain of that now. It meant to kill us in that cave-in. Perhaps it even thinks we are dead and will return later for its feed.’

‘Then we can use that to our advantage, sneak up on the monster in its lair. It cannot be far, such beasts do not often roam.’

Skalf was rebinding the leather strap around the haft of his hammer, about to agree with the gatekeeper when an awful hollering resolved on the dust-thick air.

‘Grobi,’ hissed Magnin, his mattock in hand. ‘Elf-friend, you’re needed.’

Raglan returned swiftly as the hollering grew to a shrieking roar.

‘Urk, too, by the sounds of it.’

The hill dwarf had lost his crossbow when climbing out of the rubble; the wooden stock, even though it was fashioned from stoutest wutroth, had broken. It was part of the reason he still lived. On Raglan’s back, it had acted as a brace when the rocks fell. He made do with his hand axes instead, one gripped in each fist as he eyed the dark.

The lantern’s light was waning.

Fissures and crevices, unseen by the dwarfs at first, came alive with those same malignant rubies as before. Glittering and blinking in anticipation of the kill, the blood-red gems grew larger until they finally became eyes and the greenskins emerged into the half-light cast by Vorgil’s lantern.

Diminutive but cruel-faced goblins presaged a horde of much larger orcs, draped in skaven pelts. Many had fangs strung around their brawny necks on threads of sinew. One particularly massive and thickly armoured brute wore a skaven thrall-leader’s head on either hulking shoulder. Despite their earlier gains, it looked as though the ratmen had lost the war for territory.

‘Get behind us, lad,’ said Magnin, backing off.

Skalf had never seen the gatekeeper retreat, it was almost anathema to one of his conviction, but the greenskins were many.

A hand axe buried in the wretch’s face arrested the charge of the first goblin. It was smacked off its rag-swaddled feet by the force of the blow and trampled into the dirt as others followed.

They swarmed, spilling over the crags and upon the dwarfs in cackling droves.

Mattock swinging, Magnin carved a swathe into the creatures and sent broken bodies tumbling. Down to his last axe, Raglan chopped at skulls and necks with the perfunctory ease of a woodcutter. Lopping heads, he growled at the runesmith.

‘Find the beast, lad. Into the chasm. There’s nothing left here but death.’

Skalf’s reply was cut short by a grunt from Magnin. The gatekeeper snapped the end off the spear lodged between his greave plates and pummelled its wielder with a gauntleted fist.

‘Back!’ he snarled, biting back the pain through clenched teeth.

Raglan hacked down another goblin, cleaving open its torso and exposing bone.

‘There is no back,’ he replied, cutting into another.

Greenskin corpses encircled them, noisome and rank, in an ever-increasing mire.

‘Then hold,’ said Magnin, ‘back-to-back and make your stand with me.’ He turned and spat at Skalf. ‘Go now, lad, into the chasm.’

Skalf nodded, and stumbled towards the back of the benighted corridor, feeling his way in the gloom so far from the lantern. The end of the tunnel was sealed shut by fallen debris but he found the jag of split stone Magnin had urged him towards. It was wide enough for a dwarf, but barely. And it was abyssal deep, almost bottomless.

As he delved into the darkling chasm Skalf’s last image was of Magnin and Raglan, their backs together, cutting down goblins as the orcs came on. The lantern’s light was dying, soon it would be black. Skalf descended below the lip of the crevice, finding hand and footholds through touch and blind experimentation.

He didn’t hear the screams, or at least he chose not to acknowledge them.

It was hot in the narrow darkness of that cleft, jagged too. He swore as a jutting crag cut open his tunic and drew blood. And the stench. It was potent, enough to make his eyes water. Reaching for a fresh stub of rock, he slipped. Blood-red stars flashed before his eyes and he felt a deeper blackness claim him, all sound slipping into its endless, well-like depths, as he fell.

Pain brought him back around briefly, a stab like a dagger thrust in his back then one in his arm as his formless attacker turned frenzied. Then all was silence again and feeling fled from Skalf’s body…

He heard dwarf song, the deep lament of the brewmasters, the sound of pipes and the beating of drums. He smelled rock and earth, roasting meat and the waft of ale. Warmth spread across his body and he felt the presence of others nearby. A place was made for him at the table, though it was not yet earned. The aromas changed just as the slowly resolving impression of the feast hall faded. They became acerbic, biting and unpleasant but there was something else too, something that had awakened him, something that was calling…

Skalf opened one eye and realised he was alive. He was lying on his side, his head wet but not from blood. Water dropped from a stalactite overhead, drumming onto his skull with the insistence of a thudding mace.

Rolling over, he patted his empty weapons belt. His rune hammer was gone, lost somewhere in the fathomless dark. A gloom surrounded him but it lessened farther up the narrow tunnel he was lying in. There were grooves in the ceiling where the rock had been worn away over time. Several of the stalactites were broken nubs of stone, ground almost flat by the passage of something large and unyielding.

Groaning with the pain in his back and arm, Skalf got to his feet and headed for the source of the light.

Within thirty paces of the refulgent glow at the end of the tunnel he smelled it. Like an intoxicating liquor on his tongue, like the scent of hops and fermenting yeast, like the comforting odour of soot and iron. It was better than all of these and sent a fire raging through the runesmith despite the danger he knew he was in.

‘Gorl…’ The word barely escaped his lips, groggy with half-drunken gold lust. This shining metal had been the undoing of many a dwarf. They had many names for it: bryn, that which shines lustrously; galaz, decorative or ornamental gold; ril, gold ore or that which has been recently mined. Each incarnation was as intoxicating as the last. It had driven prospectors mad with fever, causing them to kill their own kin in the worst cases, and here it was; an entire cavern of gleaming, shimmering gold.

‘Gorl…’ he said again and could not keep the glee from his voice.

Crowns piled atop ingots that rose atop sovereigns that surmounted doubloons. Gems of every facet, every hue, some the size of Skalf’s brawny fist, littered the massive cave in abundance. Mounds of coins, minted in ages long dead, stretched almost to the vaulted ceiling and spread in vast swathes across the floor.

It took all of Skalf’s willpower not to sink down into the glittering morass and bask. The urge to rub it all over his body, to drink in its heady scent was strong. He wanted to gather up as much as he could, fill his tunic, his knapsack, even his helm.

It would be folly, and yet…

In the end, it was the presence of something mired in the gilded sea before him that brought Skalf around.

It was not merely a treasure vault, this place; it was also a tomb.

At first he noticed an armoured hand, jutting from a tor of scattered coins, aureate bracelets, torques and gilded diadems. Two of the gauntleted fingers had rusted away revealing the skeletal wearer beneath.

Elsewhere, like a drowning man reaching for his final breath, a warrior’s head peeked just above a lagoon of treasure. His corpse was not alone. There were several others, all dead, some with armour of the Empire; others wearing the heraldry and trappings of the haughty Bretonnians. They were knights, would-be dragon slayers, and they had all been found wanting.

Delving further, unable to shake the nagging sense of being watched, Skalf came across the bodies of dwarfs too. He recognised Slayers, and the brotherhood of ironbreakers and hammerers. In their hollowed-out eye sockets, their grinning rictus skulls, he saw the death of his comrades and his eventual fate should he linger in this place.

But he had sworn an oath. Not only to his king but to his master, albeit in death.

‘Kill the beast…’ he whispered, and began to search for a weapon.

Skalf was prising an axe – its edge glittered coldly in the lustrous glow of the chamber – from the dead fingers of a warrior-thane when he felt the coins beneath him begin to tremble. It was a trickle at first, a few crowns scattering like the disturbed scree from a golden mountainside. It swiftly became a landslide.

Abandoning the blade for easier pickings, Skalf half-ran, half-fell down the mound of coins. He was picking himself up when he caught the stink of sulphur, carried on a subterranean breeze wafting down from the upper world. It mingled with the reek of flesh, the foul odour of putrefaction. Soot and embers clouded above him like a pyroclastic thunderhead vented from some unseen caldera.

The eruption announced the arrival of a monster, a thing whose mere presence shook the very earth and made it quake.

Skalf had no shield, no weapon of any kind that could slay a magical creature as the dragon crested the largest of the gilded mounds. It was magnificent and terrifying, fear and wonder warring in the runesmith’s mind as he beheld the ancient creature. Wings enfolded, it scaled the cliffs of treasure with its talons and sat upon the summit in resplendent glory, slightly awkward despite its size and obvious majesty.

Scales of incarnadine red encased its muscular torso. The ribbed belly was softer and paler, like curdled milk, but still leathern and the match of any common blade or lance. A serpentine neck was punctuated by arching spines twice the length of an elven spear and twice as thick again. Its snout was long, ringed by jagged fangs and drooled smoke and sulphurous ichor.

But even as it unfurled its mighty wings, the membrane spanning the pinions as thick as mail and many times more resilient, it was the eyes that Skalf fixated on. They were jade green slivers of coldest ice, pitiless and malignant. As it emitted a reverberant bellow of challenge, Skalf realised it wanted to feed and he would be its morsel.

Skalf regarded the small forging hammer still tucked in his belt. Its head was blackened from his efforts in the forge. Such petty concerns seemed like a lifetime ago.

Fighting would be unwise. To stand was to die, so Skalf ran.

Presaged by the sharp intake of bestial breath, a plume of flame roared in front of the runesmith and he turned. Spuming fire cut him off again and he came up short. Molten metal surrounded him like a gilded lagoon in which he was the only island. Tendrils of flame flickered in the gleaming magma-gold, licking at the toecaps of his boots.

Graug bellowed again, a high-pitched sound that might have been mirth. Its shadow loomed, eclipsing the dwarf utterly. The dragon had him trapped.

Skalf turned to face it, defiance not fear written on his face.

‘Grimnir!’ he raged at the beast, which reciprocated with a roar of its own that swamped the air and thickened it with the stink of sulphur.

Rearing back a serpentine head, Graug snapped its jaws once in threat and then lathed the air with a long, leathery tongue.

Then it dived.

Despite being surrounded by a river of burning, molten gold, Skalf fled. The runes on the zharr-klod blazed bright as he ran, muttered oaths from the runesmith to Grungni and Valaya punctuating ever miraculous step.

Graug was unprepared. It thought its prey pinned by the mire it had fashioned. Too late it tried to pull out of its attack, but the dragon’s massive momentum drove it into the patch of gold where the dwarf had been standing. It wings and much of its scaled body were suddenly awash with molten gold. It thrashed as searing, gilt liquid rose up around it, embracing, burning. A bleat of panic escaped its lips, deep and ululating… and rage, rage that it had been duped.

It was hurt, and as he found a place to hide, Skalf smiled.

‘A little sting to remember me by,’ he said, crouching down on his haunches.

At the edge of the cavern, the gloom swallowed him. Skalf had run as far as he dared to put some distance between himself and the dragon. Self-preservation, the desire to make the beast hunt for its prey, burned within him. Though he couldn’t see it, he heard the dragon’s belligerent mewling. Tiny shrieks of pain were interleaved with longer, deeper roars of promise. It would rend him, this beast of the ancient world; it would prove its dominance over his weakling flesh.

Once the dragon had escaped, clawed its way to solid ground scarred and enraged, Skalf would be dead. It had played with him at first; now it knew the folly of that. Graug would not err again. Surrounded by the dead in this cavern of lost treasures, the runesmith would become just another failed hero amongst those interred within.

‘Just as Daled Stormbreaker was…’ he uttered mournfully then stopped.

In the dragon’s rampage, pillars of coins and gemstones had been toppled, dense banks of gold had levelled out; the landscape had changed. Things long buried in the gilded depths had re-emerged like bodies bloated with putrescence or old bones arisen to the surface in a sudden swell.

Skalf caught sight of an axe handle. Discerning the icon upon its pommel, he crawled over to it on his belly. Graug had freed itself of the molten mire and was stalking him, trying to heave in the dwarf’s scent through its flaring nostrils. A glimpse through the collapsed hoard just as he reached the weapon revealed the beast was partially blinded, one jade sliver turned milky white and ringed by burned, swollen dragon flesh.

It was drawing closer.

Gripping the axe haft, Skalf pulled. The broken lightning bolt icon on the pommel quivered but did not yield. A few more coins trickled away, tinkling as they rolled and settled.

They revealed a blade of purest gromril seized in a fist of black, glittering stone.

It had been almost a thousand years since Daled Stormbreaker had ventured into the mountains. Some say he met his end in Graug’s lair. Skalf now knew that to be true. He also knew the nature of the thing that held the fabled dwarf hero’s weapon fast.

‘Karadurak…’ Skalf’s heart sank.

Brushing away more of the coins, heedless of the clamour they created, Skalf realised what he must do.

A skeletal face loomed out of the spilled gold. It wore a helm with a chainmail coif around the head and neck. Upon its ruined chest was a talisman with a broken fork of lightning as its sigil.

Graug’s heavy tread sent tremors through the treasure mounds, scattering coins like rain. Its rasping breath was near enough to taste. The blow, if failed, would bring the dragon to him. There would be no more escapes after that.

Skalf met the empty, hollow gaze of Daled Stormbreaker.

‘I beseech you…’ he whispered.

Unhitching the forge hammer from his belt, he raised the weapon above his shoulder and spoke the words of invocation his master had taught him.

‘Let me strike truly.’

A thunderclap announced the blow and a sudden, raucous crack of stone split the air moments later as the fabled rune axe came loose. Skalf wrenched it aloft in triumph, releasing a jagged fork of lightning from the blade.

The beast was almost upon him. A resonant screech escaped its lips, a death-promise for the dwarf-thing that had scalded and half-blinded it.

Skalf couldn’t see it yet, but was about to show himself when he felt something brush against his open hand. A shield clad in a patina of dust but fortified by potent runes of protection sat within his grasp. This was Daled’s shield. His icon was described upon the boss. Skalf hadn’t seen it before but when he looked to the fallen hero, he hadn’t moved; there was no response in his dead eyes.

‘Thank you, brother,’ he whispered, taking up the shield, hefting the axe and stepping out into the light.

‘Beast!’ he hollered, and saw the dragon. It was near, Skalf almost felt the malice shimmering off its scaled hide, but had to turn its massive frame to bring its baleful gaze upon him.

‘Graug the Terrible,’ Skalf declared. Swiftness and resolve were everything now. As the dragon came at him, Skalf knew he would be afforded just one chance. He turned his shoulder, shield to the front, the axe brandished behind him like a crackling talisman.

‘Come forth and be reckoned!’

A burst of flame surged from the dragon’s mouth and Skalf raised the shield, sinking behind it and praying that the engraved runes were still potent. Incredible heat crashed over him in a vast wave. He felt the edges of his beard smouldering with it, his skin prickling, but he endured.

When the firestorm abated, Skalf lowered the shield and saw that Graug was bearing down on him. It was immense, almost paralysing in its ferocity. Jaws extended, still drooling the fiery aftermath of its breath, the dragon meant to chew the runesmith in half.

Trusting Daled’s blade, in the teachings of his master and the legacy of those brave dwarfs he had seen slain in this place, Skalf swung. As the axe’s runic edge cleaved through inviolable scale, chewed into skin and then flesh, he roared. A great fissure opened up in Graug’s neck and bathed him in its jettisoning blood. He cut again as the beast stumbled, a panicked bleat escaping from its lolling maw.

‘Grimnir!’ Skalf dug a rent into its shoulder. The return stroke hacked a wedge into the jugular. Anointed by ancient lifeblood, the gold turned wet and crimson. A final blow split open the monster’s belly, releasing shining ropes of intestine.

Graug’s final death cry was a shriek that reverberated around the vast cavern, shaking it to its core. As it rolled onto its flank, heaving a last tortured breath, Skalf sagged and nearly fell.

It was not the battle he had envisaged. It was not the glorious moment of dragon slaying he had thought it would be. It was brutal and messy; it was almost honourless in its savagery. But Graug was dead and he had reclaimed the trappings of Daled Stormbreaker into the bargain.

It would suffice.

Sagas would be written of this moment, of that he was certain. They would not recount all that had transpired, they would glorify and aggrandise because all great deeds need a great tale to go with them. Skalf just wanted to return to the surface, to be reunited with what was left of his clan. The way back was denied to him, but ahead there was a small oval of light leading to an upper chamber. Like any dwarf, he could find a way marker and reach the upper hold halls again.

But he still had one more duty to perform before he could leave.

Strapping the shield to his back, Skalf took the rune axe in a two-handed grip and eyed the cleft he’d made in the dragon’s neck.

‘Still a little flesh to hew,’ he muttered and lifted the blade.

The sound of steps echoing up the stairway to the upper hold hall had Belgrad reaching for his warhammer.

Behind him, his hammerer brethren rushed to a make a line of dwarf iron between the slumped King Durik and the gaping portal to the lower deeps.

‘Give your name!’ he challenged when the steps were so close that the stranger’s arrival was imminent.

The footsteps continued unabated but no answer was forthcoming.

‘Give your name or face reckoning,’ said Belgrad, casting an anxious glance back to the still king.

Revealed in the flickering brazier light at the edge of the portal, a diminutive shadow fell into the upper hold hall.

‘Grobi?’ asked Uthgar, the hammerer at Belgrad’s left shoulder. He would be his champion’s shield should the stranger be hostile and the dwarfs forced to fight.

‘Nay…’

‘Stay your weapons,’ uttered a weary voice from the darkness, his tread slowing as he reached the summit of the lonely stairwell.

Skalf stomped into the chamber. Upon his back was a glittering rune axe and shield. Clutched in his hands was a rope tied to a massive dragon head.

‘It is Graug,’ he said without pride. His eyebrows raised when he saw King Durik and then immediately formed a frown. ‘He is dead then.’

Belgrad had lowered his arms, as did his brethren, and was looking at the severed head before him.

‘Aye,’ he muttered, meeting the runesmith’s gaze at last. ‘He did not last long beyond you venturing into the depths. Your companions?’

‘Are feasting in Grungni’s halls as they have earned.’

‘And Prince Darin?’

‘Him too.’

‘When did he fall?’ Belgrad had gone back to surveying the dragon’s head, glass-eyed and with its tongue unfurled between its broken fangs.

Skalf bowed his head and muttered an oath to Valaya for the dead king. ‘Not long beyond us venturing into the depths.’

Belgrad nodded, as he’d already guessed as much.

When he looked up again, a fierce intensity blazed in his eyes as bright and fervent as any brynduraz.

‘Graug is dead, so too our liege.’ He kneeled, laying his hammer in front of him. The other hammerers followed their champion and soon all of the king’s retainers were bowing.

‘Long live Skalf Dragonslayer,’ said Belgrad, his strident tones echoed. ‘Long live the King of Karak Azgal.’

Skalf nodded. The clans were few but they were proud. They needed leadership, and deeds forged leaders.

‘Rise,’ he said, his thoughts with his master and all the lessons he had imparted. ‘Rise, and find again the courage of Azgal.’

Hoard Hold was lost. It could never be recovered, but like a forge flame, the spirit of the dwarfs still burned.

The Last Charge

Andy Hoare

At the close of the first millennium after the unification of fair Bretonnia, in the year the men of the Empire measure 1974, the coastal regions of the Old World and far beyond were laid waste by a fell scion of Naggaroth, the beastlord named Rakarth. How many thousands were slain by his monstrous hosts is not written, for few who witnessed his attacks lived to tell the tale. Port after port, city after city, was crushed beneath the clawed feet of the vile abominations the beastlord herded into battle, those not devoured by his war hydras and black dragons enslaved and dragged screaming back to the Land of Chill. Rakarth’s age of destruction culminated in an unprecedented attack upon the fair land of Bretonnia, beloved by the Lady and defended by the stoutest of hearts. Heed the tale of the city of Brionne, beloved of Duke Corentin…

The city of Brionne slumbered fitfully beneath a night sky that seethed with ghostly luminescence. On nights such as these, so the Daughters of the Grail warned, the wastes far to the north of Bretonnia howled with the raw power of forbidden sorceries. The lights, so they said, meant that killers were abroad, men and other, darker creatures, roaming far and wide in search of slaughter.

The people of Brionne knew not to look upwards at the boiling energies, nor to meet the gaze of the eyes that glowered from the actinic depths. They knew from the stories told to them as children not to heed the lies uttered by the unreal lips that formed in the roiling, lambent clouds of balefire. Far better, the people of Brionne knew, to lock the bedchamber doors, shutter the windows, snuff out the candles and take what mortal comfort they could beneath the sheets. And well they might, for none could know for sure if the world would still be standing when dawn came.

But one man refused to take to his bed. Corentin, celebrated, among other titles, as the Paladin of Maelys, the Marcher-Lord of the Silver Plain, Defender of Fort Adeline, Champion of Gaelle’s Virtue and Duke of Brionne, refused to be cowed by what he regarded as nothing more than an unusual storm. Even as violet-hued illumination flickered and pulsed outside his castle walls, Corentin stalked the dusty, candle-lit passages, long past the hour when any servant or courtier would be about to attend him. Wearing but his breeches and his sword belt, Corentin approached the inner sanctum of his castle, the grail shrine deep within its stone heart. Pausing to appreciate the solidity of the centuries-old oak doors, he set a hand upon each handle, bowed his head, and entered.

The shrine was filled with golden light, cast by filigreed lanterns that had never been allowed to burn out since the city of Brionne had been founded. In the lantern light, Corentin saw the familiar scenes carved in stone across every surface. Miniature architecture, impossible to render in true scale, reared overhead, populating the shrine with fantastically intricate tabernacle palaces. Tomb chests lined the walls, topped by stone effigies of long-dead knights in saintly repose, every one of them kin to the duke.

Corentin drew to a halt before the altar, upon which was mounted a golden cup with deep, twinkling rubies mounted on its flanks. The vessel glowed with a light that was nothing to do with the lanterns all about, for it shone from within the very metal of this holy relic of times long gone. Even after so many years in service to Bretonnia, Duke Corentin was humbled before the symbol of all that he and his fellow knights fought for. It was not the grail, of course, but a grail, one of many sacred embodiments of the land and the people who dwelled within its borders.

The duke drew his gleaming sword and grunted as he went down upon one knee before the altar, the sword set before him point down. He was a powerfully built man, but he was far from young. In his youth he had been lithe and agile, in his maturity as solid as an ox. Now, his muscle was softening and his former vigour deserting him a little more each day. But still he refused to cower like lesser men, regardless of what powers might be abroad this strange night.

When finally he was down, his good knee pressed hard into the cold flagstone of the chapel floor, Corentin looked upwards towards the grail. How many times had he done so, he pondered? How many battles had he begun by entreating the Lady of the Lake for victory? Dozens, he mused. Scores. Perhaps even hundreds. Truth be told, the battles Corentin had fought had started to blur into one another, as if his whole life had been but one long, bloody war against the innumerable enemies of Bretonnia. He supposed it had been, but he knew it must soon come to an end.

‘Not yet,’ Corentin said, his voice low and gruff, and somehow out of place in the sanctity of the grail shrine. The lanterns cast dancing light across the intricate architecture, the stone effigy of one of his ancestors seeming almost to stir as brilliance and shadow shifted across its surface. ‘Let not the glory of service be done yet…’

The lanterns flickered once more, and the duke felt the air stir about him. It was as if a gust from the chill night had found its way through the winding passages, through the heavy oak doors, and into this most holy sanctum at the heart of his castle.

A heavy sense of foreboding settled over Corentin’s heart. The duke feared no enemy, whether man, beast or abomination, for he had faced all in battle and cut them down with equal contempt. Rather, he knew dread, the notion that soon he might be forced by the advance of years to put up his lance once and for all, and to surrender himself to infirmity or senility. Anger waxed inside him as that thought took hold, and he grit his teeth in denial.

‘No,’ he growled, his voice too loud for his surroundings. ‘I implore you…’

The light upon the altar redoubled, and through eyes misted with tears, Duke Corentin watched in stunned awe as the grail flared into pure, white illumination. Faith and adoration swelled within his chest as he knew that the Lady heeded his words and that, in some manner, she was here with him now, inside the chapel.

Knowing that the Lady of the Lake would hear him, Duke Corentin spoke aloud his heart’s most secret desire.

‘Lady,’ he implored, his head filling with visions of past battles. ‘Grant me one last, glorious moment. One last foe to banish in your name. One last battle to fight before the night draws in and claims me.’

The lanterns flickered once again, and the chapel grew chill. The cold seeped through the very stones, and into Corentin’s body.

‘Grant me an enemy to face,’ he pleaded, the clamour of battle audible, if faint, over the crackle of the candles burning in the lanterns.

Screwing his eyes shut as he bowed his head in abject supplication to the Lady, Duke Corentin felt the air stir at his back and he knew without doubt that another had entered the shrine. A scent met his nostrils, a rich and intoxicating mix of heady perfume and untouched skin.

‘My lord,’ a sweet, lyrical voice sounded from behind him. ‘Do not ask this.’

A stab of anger flared in the duke’s heart, but it was dulled by the presence at his back. He lifted his head and opened his eyes, immediately averting his face from the blazing white light streaming from the altar.

‘Who…?’ he stammered, scarcely daring to dream that he might be in the presence of…

‘I am not her, my lord,’ the voice said, and Corentin detected a familiar accent, if one made lilting by an alien manner. ‘Please,’ she insisted. ‘Face me, my lord.’

The duke did as he was bid, rising on legs made unsteady by more than just age. Before him stood a woman, or a girl, he could not tell which for her features were truly ageless. Quite beyond that, her face was all but impossible to fully perceive, as if its details would be forgotten seconds after looking away, and so he dared not risk doing so. He recognised her as a damsel, a Daughter of the Grail, one of the blessed handmaidens of the Lady of the Lake, and as such a prophetess, miracle wielder and holy woman beyond compare. To the people of Bretonnia, such women – for no male ever returned having been called to serve the Lady – were but a step away from their patron deity, and their words were those of the Lady herself.

‘Then who?’ the duke stammered, unable to comprehend how this stranger had walked into the shrine at the heart of his castle. ‘Who are…’

‘I come in answer to your prayer,’ the damsel said, starting towards the altar. As she walked, the long, girded white shift that was all she wore ghosted behind her as a gossamer mist evaporating in the morning sun. He averted his eyes as her soft form was silhouetted through material made transparent by the silver glare. At the altar, she turned to look back upon him.

But the gaze that shone from her ageless eyes was ill-matched with the gentleness of her body. Of a sudden, those eyes were fathomless and dreadful, regarding Duke Corentin as a god standing in judgement over a mortal soul.

‘You would answer my prayer?’ he said, scarcely able to believe that it could be true. ‘You would grant me one last glory before I die?’

The damsel did not answer straight away, but turned her face towards the shining grail, her long, dark hair stirring as if caught in a gentle breeze. Her eyes stared unblinking at the shining grail, before she turned to regard him once more.

‘I come not to grant your heart’s desire,’ she stated. ‘But I would warn you of the consequences of what you crave so.’

‘Consequences, my lady?’ the duke replied. ‘I care not for consequences. I have fought every foe this cruel world has set before me,’ he continued. ‘I have defeated them all. What warning have you for me?’

The ghost of a smile touched the damsel’s delicate lips, and she regarded the proud duke as if he were some boastful, callow youth bragging of the glory he would win upon the field of battle. Her eyes softened, and in an instant the dreadful power that had shone from them was gone, replaced by mortal, and very human, sorrow.

‘I can offer you no counsel, my lord,’ she said. ‘For the Lady knows that you, above all others, are truly wise in matters of war and state. But any man would be wiser still to know what not to ask.’

Frustrated, the duke replied, ‘Mock me not, my lady, for I am not one for riddles like those who treat with the fey. Am I to have that which I so desire?’

The damsel sighed, and replied, ‘Would you have your prayer answered, my lord, even if it spelled your doom?’

‘I would.’

‘Then you shall have it. You shall have that which you most desire.’

That night, Duke Corentin dreamed such dreams as no man could imagine. He relived every one of the battles he had fought over a lifetime of war. For a while, he was back at the Deliverance of Quenelles, following Master Joffre on that first, mad charge into the greenskin horde. Then he was bearing the standard at the Siege of Trantio, then cutting down the traitors as they turned against the River Tarano, the crossing suddenly impossible thanks to the blessings of the Lady. Then it was Castle Darkheart, the sight of the dead rising before the King’s lines striking dread into his old heart just as it had three decades earlier. Deep in the Irrana Mountains, Duke Corentin had saved Carcassonne from the largest skaven swarm witnessed in living memory, though the lord of that dukedom had uttered scarcely a word of thanks.

For what seemed like hours, the battles flashed and boiled through feverish dreams, most blurring together, others standing out above the rest. The Battle of the Lagoon of Tears; the Siege of the ruined fortress of Vorag; the ill-fated Errantry War that scoured the Plain of Bones but in the process lost the king’s war banner. Battles against every foe known to man, and some of which man had no knowledge, came to him. Barbarous greenskins, cruel dark elves, the savage and blasphemous men of the north, the pernicious mercenary-princes of Tilea and the petty barons of the Border Princes. All of these foes and more he had faced upon the field of battle, and whatever foul magics or cunning stratagems they had employed, Corentin knew that every one of them could bleed, and therefore die. And all the while, the blessed presence of the Lady of the Lake stood by, just beyond perception, watching over the bold deeds performed in her name and that of her land and all its people.

The duke awoke with a start, the silken sheets damp and cold with sweat. His bedchamber was dark, the candles long burned down, but the wan light of dawn edged the heavy shutters on the lancet windows. The clamour of war still echoing in his ears as the dreams receded, Corentin rose from his bed and crossed to the windows. Opening the shutters, he looked out across the city of Brionne, his heart filled with the foreshadowing of something dreadful.

The morning sun was barely over the horizon, and its golden rays turned the pale sandstone of the city’s soaring spires into shining needles made of glowing precious metal. From his window, the duke looked down upon the densely clustered rooftops, punctuated by dozens upon dozens of the impossibly delicate spires, the sharp conical roof of each one adorned with long pennants that fluttered in the morning breeze blowing in from the Great Ocean. Corentin’s gaze followed the towers as they marched towards the distant city walls, a sea mist making the most distant ghostly pale in the morning air. Beyond the high walls, the sea was barely visible at all, and the horizon all but invisible.

A flash of nightmare strobed across the duke’s mind, a spectre from the dreams that had haunted him throughout the night. He heard once more the distant roar of some mighty wyrm-lord from the dawn of time, and pictured its writhing form skewered upon his blessed lance. The roar grew louder, resounding not from the mists of time and nightmare, he realised, but from those creeping in from the Great Ocean. His breath catching in his throat and his blood freezing in his veins, the duke realised that the fog was not the remnants of the night-time sea mist, yet to burn off in the morning sun. It was, in fact, a fresh mist, its tendrils creeping in from the ocean, writhing and questing like the tentacles of some vast, sea-spawned kraken…

‘To arms!’ Duke Corentin bellowed from his bedchamber window as he leaned outwards over his castle. ‘Muster the household!’ he shouted into the marshalling yard below as the low droning of some ancient horror blared from the creeping fog. ‘Call out the militia!’

‘War is come!’ he bellowed, his blood pumping with a heady cocktail of battle lust and horror. Let them come, he prayed as he turned at the sound of his attendants entering the bedchamber. Whoever they may be, let them come, and know the cold taste of Bretonnian steel.

‘The elves of Naggaroth,’ said Duke Corentin’s chancellor as the two men stood atop the walls of Brionne, the city’s army mustered at the ramparts. The duke was resplendent in his ornate battle armour, its every plate burnished to a silvered finish and adorned with golden grail and fleur-de-lys icons. Nearby attendants bore his helm, his lance and his shield, while a groom in the yard below struggled to control his mighty steed.

The duke did not need telling just who this foe was or where they had come from. He had faced them many times and knew well their cruel ways. Indeed, the fine lattice of scars etched into the flesh of his belly told of the cruelties the dark elves, as they were known, were wont to inflict upon those they captured in battle. Those who had tortured Corentin in the aftermath of the Battle of the Deeping Moon had paid gravely for their sins, the duke turning the tables upon them after escaping captivity and returning with a vengeful army.

The enemy had come from the sea, stalking from the creeping ocean mists to surround the walled city of Brionne. That mist lingered still, and the dark form of a Black Ark loomed in the distance like an iceberg made of solid rock or a mountainous island thrown up by the sea overnight. From the cavernous sea-docks of the vast city-ship, hundreds of landing vessels had delivered thousands upon thousands of dark elves to the shore, the black-clad warriors forming into regiments and taking position on the plains surrounding the city. For miles all about, the lands were covered with the serrated forms of the dark elf cohorts, vile banners snapping in the breeze and shrill horns blaring.

But the ranks of warriors were just one part of the host and, though the most numerous, far from the most terrible. Corsairs, kraken-skin cloaks lending them the aspect of devils from the deep, marched beside grim executioners, their faces covered and their cruel glaives poised to enact the most wanton of mutilations. Witch elves capered, their bare flesh smeared with the blood of the victims sacrificed to their blasphemous gods, that victory might be theirs. Formations of riders moved in around the flanks to cut off any hope that the city might get a messenger out, some upon night-coloured steeds, others riding the reptilian cold ones, their vile stink carried on the wind for miles.

Yet still, it was not even these terrible foes that the duke looked to as he regarded the army that had voyaged from the Land of Chill to lay siege to his fair city. Rather, it was the mighty beasts that towered over the ranks that drew his eye and filled his old, warrior’s heart with awe. Never before had Duke Corentin seen such a number or range of abominations, even when facing the twisted hordes of the northmen. War hydras stamped and snorted as bold handlers struggled to keep each of the many-headed beasts’ fanged maws from attacking nearby warriors or one another. A constant plume of black smoke boiled upwards from the beasts, each of their heads belching great gouts of flame as their necks twisted and darted to and fro. The beasts’ hide was as grey as stone, and the duke knew from bitter experience that it was every bit as hard and cold. Scanning the horde grimly, he attempted to estimate the numbers of such beasts the dark elves were herding into battle against his city. He lost count after three dozen, the ranks of the beasts swelled by fresh arrivals before he could gain their measure.

A shrill cry, akin to the call of some vile carrion bird, split the air, and the duke’s lip curled in disgust as he located its source. The smoke-wreathed sky overhead was slowly filling with darting shapes which might at first be easily mistaken for vultures, drawn to the plain by the promise of freshly-slain carcasses to pick clean in the aftermath of battle. But as they dived and wheeled, it became clear that these were no natural creatures, nor even birds or any other beast. They were harpies, creatures of which the cautionary tales of the Bretonnian knighthood had much to say. Though curved and comely from a distance, the harpies were far removed from the feminine form they wore. Each was a creature as debased as vermin, incapable of any thoughts or deeds other than the most animalistic. They cared only for the tearing of raw flesh between needle-sharp teeth, and were said to be the servants of some vile dark elf god no virtuous knight would demean himself to name.

With a motion like a shoal of darting fish spooked by the approach of a far larger predator, the harpies scattered across the sky and were gone. From banks of mist, made grey by the smoke belching from the gullets of the hydras, came a sinuous black form upon pinions as dark as night. Duke Corentin’s heart thundered as he took in a sight he had not seen in decades. It was a dragon, one of the ebon-scaled wyrms which it was said that the most cruel-hearted and despicable of dark elf lords could command to bear them into battle. Clearly such a tale held something of the truth, for a figure was visible mounted upon the black dragon’s back, a banner snapping in the cold wind behind.

A ripple of fear swept up and down the defenders manning the mighty walls of Brionne, and Duke Corentin tore his eyes from the sight of the ebon beast wheeling through the clouds and looked down upon his men. The ramparts of the rearing curtain walls curved about the extent of the city, towers topped with mighty war machines punctuating them at regular intervals. The ramparts were manned by hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, the squires of the household and the men of the city militia. The former were semi-professional soldiers, trained and drilled to defend their fair nation against foes such as these and equipped with padded armour, shields and a variety of weapons from longbows to billhooks. The latter were only called to fight when dire circumstances allowed no alternative, for they were in the main peasants and villains who would only fight when cornered by the enemy or forced to do so by the sergeants. The peasants bore what weapons they themselves could muster; those from the fields about Brionne armed with scythes and staffs, those from the city with iron or wooden tools and cudgels.

‘Hold,’ Duke Corentin ordered, his powerful voice clearly audible to hundreds of his troops. Men turned their faces from the limitless horde of malice sweeping steadily across the plains and the nightmare creatures swooping high overhead to regard their lord and master. The duke looked at the faces of those nearest to him, and it struck him then that he knew not one of the men looking back at him. In years long gone, he had taken pride in knowing the sergeants and captains under his command. The faces of the best of those men flashed through his memory before, sadness welling inside, he recalled how each had fallen in battle. So many brave, virtuous warriors had died at his command, he reflected, and here were more on the cusp of doing so. Forcing the ghosts of long-lost companions-in-arms from his mind, Duke Corentin addressed his army from his vantage point high atop the wall tower.

‘Men of Bretonnia!’ he shouted, the assembled ranks falling to respectful silence as he spoke. ‘Our fair city of Brionne is this day threatened by the most despicable of enemies. But shall we submit?’

Turning his head towards the enemy, Duke Corentin hawked, and spat a great gobbet of spittle over the ramparts towards the enemy. The nearest ranks erupted in approbation, cheering their liege’s gesture of defiance. Soon, the rallying cry was taken up by those too far along the wall to have witnessed the gesture, and then by every warrior upon the ramparts of Brionne.

None saw that the cold breeze blowing in off the sea had whipped up moments after the duke had spat into it, and blown the gobbet straight back into his face.

The dark elf army continued to deploy upon the plains surrounding Brionne, and by early evening the noose was fully tightened. Numerous messengers had been dispatched to carry word of the invasion, but none who remained had any way of knowing if they had broken through the enemy lines. Duke Corentin had seen, many years ago, dark elf scouts and assassins, and so he doubted that any man could have stolen through if such creatures were abroad. Nonetheless, he offered pious entreaties to the Lady of the Lake that word might somehow reach the dukedom’s outlying towns and castles, and an army might be gathered to drive the vile dark elves back into the sea.

As the sky darkened, with the approach of night as much as the smoke of numerous burned offerings sent up by the enemy’s sorceresses, a dread silence descended upon attacker and defender alike. All throughout the afternoon, the duke’s knights had marshalled behind the city’s main gates, ready to sally forth against the foe when Corentin judged the moment right. These brave men had barely been able to contain their eagerness to charge through the gates and smite the enemy to ruin. Yet now, even they fell quiet and sullen. Standing upon his tower, looking down at the vast army spread out across the plain between the city and the sea, Duke Corentin felt it too.

The skies darkened still further as clouds the colour of livid bruises boiled in from the horizon. The black dragon appeared once more, diving from the heart of those clouds to swoop in towards the walls, the multitude of war hydras far below roaring as it passed over them. Where before, the appearance of the dragon had caused a murmur of fear to spread along the walls, now Duke Corentin heard terrified outbursts, even sobbing from the ranks. Though the sergeants bellowed for silence and order, the fact was unmistakable. The winged, stygian fiend was death and doom embodied, and men withered before it.

Yet, the duke knew differently. Decades of experience had taught him that such beasts were only tamed, or dominated, by some manner of being an order of magnitude stronger, in will if not in muscle. He knew that, as fearful as the ebon wyrm undoubtedly was, the figure upon its back must be far more terrible to command such a creature.

As if to confirm his thoughts, the dragon swept in closer still, until it was close enough for the defenders to see its rider clearly. Mounted in a saddle lined with human skin, the duke and his men saw a warrior-lord clad from head to toe in jet-black armour worked into the most cruelly delicate forms by the hand of a master far superior to any mortal artificer. The dark elf lord’s tall helm covered his features, but none could miss the light shining from the eyes like coals in the night. In one hand, the lord bore a long, coiling whip, which snaked and writhed as if possessed of some terrible inner vitality, while in his other hand he bore a shield adorned with the fell runes of forbidden magics.

In an instant, the dragon was soaring over the city’s walls, though it made no assault upon the defenders. The peasants of the militia cried out in terror, and many dropped to their knees and covered their heads, as if doing so would save them from the beast’s scrutiny. A handful threw themselves from the ramparts in terror, the fortunate tumbling down flights of stone steps to the landings below, the unfortunate meeting the ground in the courtyard with a sickening crunch.

Duke Corentin refused to show even the slightest degree of fear as the huge beast soared overhead, the lung-searing, eye-watering reek of venomous gasses thick in its wake. Instead, he stood tall, meeting the coal-eyed lord’s gaze, an example to every man who looked on.

Within seconds, the dragon had passed overhead and was banking over the city, turning high above the rooftops and spires with a dreadful, stately elegance upon wings that spanned fifty feet or more. With a burst of black gas from flaring nostrils, the beast completed its turn and the air was filled with the sharp crack of the rider’s long whip.

Extending its powerful hind legs and spreading wicked talons as long as a man’s arm, the dragon swooped down upon one of the nearest of the spires rearing high above the city’s rooftops. The spire was needle-thin and over two hundred feet tall. Its pinnacle was a tiled roof, and numerous small turrets extended from its flanks, pennants bearing the black axe on white field heraldry of the duke’s line waving proudly. The beast descended upon the roof, hind legs first, its frontal claws closing around the finial in an impact that sent roof tiles plummeting to the ground below and the turrets to quake as if they too would fall away. A second great moan of despair went up from the assembled defenders, and townspeople in the streets below could be seen fleeing as shattered slate and detached masonry rained down upon them.

Lowering its glowering head upon its sinuous neck, the black dragon shifted its weight and settled onto its perch. The dark elf lord seated upon his saddle regarded the defenders of Brionne with palpable disdain, his balefire gaze sweeping the ranks before settling upon the duke.

For long moments, the only sound was that of the sergeants bullying their men to order, and then that too faded. To the duke, it was as if he and this vile intruder into his realm were the only two warriors present, his vision narrowing as he met the smouldering eyes of the dark elf lord. The Bretonnians followed a particular form in matters of conducting a siege, a form that Corentin had never strayed from, and never would. That form required that the invader name his terms and that the defender heard them before hostilities were joined. For a moment, the duke wondered if the dark elf would observe such traditions, if he had even heard of them, before the enemy lord spoke.

‘Heed my words, human,’ the dark elf lord spoke, his voice like burning coals stirred in a grate. ‘For you are not worthy to hear them twice.’

The duke bit back an angry rejoinder, determined to observe the proper form despite his foe’s girding. His only response was a grinding of his teeth and a narrowing of his eyes.

‘I am Rakarth,’ the dark elf announced, his hateful voice boastful and haughty, ‘called Beastlord.’

Though tempted to quash his enemy’s pride by claiming never to have heard the name, Duke Corentin bit his tongue. Quite aside from the dishonourable nature of such a reply, it would have been a lie. He knew the name of the Beastlord Rakarth well, as did all of those who dwelled along the coasts of the Old World. How could they not, for this fell being was said to have laid waste to countless towns and ports, from Norsca in the far north to the Bay of Corsairs in the south. Not for nothing was he called ‘Beastlord’, as the horde of roaring, smoke-spouting abominations below testified. It was said of Rakarth that in his dungeons he held at least one example of every predatory beast that ever lived, and his ceaseless crossbreeding had led to some of the very worst crimes against nature ever seen.

And it seemed that Duke Corentin was not the only man present to recognise the name of this foe. A wave of despair swept through the defenders, countless men dropping to their knees even as the sergeants set about such cowards with cudgels and whips in an effort to get them back on their feet. Through the corner of his eye, the duke detected movement in the courtyard far below, and knew that the warhorses of his knights, the best trained mounts in all the land, if not the world, were barely holding at bay. Such was the terror this being and his fell mount radiated in palpable waves.

‘You shall render unto me one in five of your people,’ the Beastlord continued. ‘In equal number male and female, and of fighting age and fitness. This you shall do by sunrise tomorrow, or face the wrath of the host of Naggaroth! What say you, human?’

Duke Corentin folded his arms across his broad chest, and angled his head to fix the enemy lord with a gaze of utter disgust. His armour rang as he moved, and he longed to draw his mighty sword and engage this arrogant monster in honourable combat. Yet he could not, at least not yet. His gorge rose as he considered the insult implicit in such a demand, but he fought to control himself, keeping his voice level when he eventually answered.

‘I say,’ he replied, projecting his voice with such force that hundreds, perhaps thousands of his warriors would hear it and take heart. ‘Leave my lands now, elf, while you are still able.’

The black dragon shifted its weight upon the spire’s pinnacle as if it perceived the insult to its master, displacing yet more roof tiles and stones. The defenders upon the walls remained silent, thousands of them steeling their hearts and daring to look upon the enemy lord to hear his reply.

That reply was many moments in coming, the silence stretching out for what felt like ten times as long. Duke Corentin fought the ever-growing urge to draw his blade and to order every war machine in the city to open fire upon the beast, yet he fought it down with a nigh-superhuman effort.

Finally, the dark elf lord spoke. ‘Then all shall die.’

With that, the lord cracked his long, steel whip against the flanks of his mount, drawing a roar from the dragon, which vented roiling clouds of noxious gas into the air through its flaring nostrils. The beast spread its wings to their fullest stretch and flexed its hind legs, bracing to propel itself high into the air. Almost as if in slow motion, the ebon wyrm beat its wings while pushing back and up with its hugely muscled legs. The two hundred foot tower upon which the beast had perched finally gave way, the peaked conical roof shattering into a thousand roof tiles. The entire top half of the spire seemed to bend as a branch in the wind. As the dragon lifted off, the destruction worked its way down the spire, sandstone blocks working their way loose in a rapidly growing cascade. Moments later, the tower collapsed, slowly at first but with mounting speed as gravity asserted itself. At the last, the tower fell across three streets far below, obliterating a score of townhouses in a single instant and sending up a dense cloud of billowing grey dust.

One last battle, Duke Corentin said to himself. One last foe to defeat…

As the sun set on what many feared would be the first day of a months-long siege of the fair city of Brionne, the duke began planning the defence. The manning of the walls was the first priority, and Corentin ensured that the most experienced companies of his household’s squires were stationed at vital points, bolstering positions manned by the less experienced, poorly disciplined, peasant militias. There were a thousand details of logistics to attend to, for the numerous war machines mounted upon the wall towers required constant manning, maintenance and supply. The thousands of archers upon the ramparts would have to be rotated in their duty, and the braziers from which they would light their flaming arrows kept burning. All of this the duke oversaw despite the cold bitterness threatening to consume him, for, ultimately, there was little glory in any of it. Ultimately, it was not the work of a knight of Bretonnia.

‘My lord,’ said Corentin’s chancellor from behind him as he stood upon the highest tower on the wall, looking west across the night-shrouded enemy camp. ‘Will you not take wine?’

Corentin lingered a moment, the plains before him seething with enemy activity. Numerous sounds of unspecified and unidentifiable cruelty drifted up from the enemy camp, mingled with the ever present baying of all manner of monstrous beasts. Hundreds of campfires dotted the land as the far as the eye could see, forming a nigh-continuous ring of fire all about the city, orange cinders drifting upwards on the riotous thermals. At least, the duke hoped they were campfires. He knew from first hand experience that many were likely to be braziers, the searing coals within used to heat the very cruellest implements of torture.

‘No, Erwen,’ the duke replied. ‘I must offer prayer to the Lady. Leave me.’

When Erwen did not leave as he was bid, Duke Corentin turned to regard his chief counsellor. For an instant, he failed to recognise the individual stood before him, a part of him expecting to see old Winoc. Then he shook his head as memory reasserted itself. Winoc had fallen at the height of the War of the Giant’s Skull, an ogre’s cleaver having taken both of his legs in a single swing.

‘My lord?’ said Erwin, concern writ large across his patrician features.

‘Speak your mind plainly, man,’ Duke Corentin demanded, reaching out a hand to steady himself against the crenellated rampart. By the Lady, he was tired.

‘My lord,’ the chancellor began uncertainly, before ploughing on. ‘You must rest, we feel–’

‘Who?’ Corentin demanded, drawing himself to his full height despite the weight of the full plate armour he had worn all day. ‘Who says what of me? Speak!’

‘Your knights, sir,’ Erwin continued, ‘Your companions, your guardians and your peers. All feel that–’

‘My peers?’ the duke raged, one hand gripping the pommel of his sword. ‘I have no peers! All of them have fallen, all of them have given their lives in service to the land and to the Lady!’

‘Yes, my lord,’ the chancellor said, his arms held out in placation. ‘But you must rest, for tomorrow…’ He let the sentence trail away.

‘Tomorrow?’ said Duke Corentin, knowing now what he must do. Pushing the chancellor away, he spun to face the west and the enemy encamped on the plain before his beloved city. With a ringing of steel, he drew his sword and brandished it before him, before turning it point down with a single motion, and setting it to rest tip-first upon the stone floor. Bracing himself upon his weapon, the duke went down upon one knee as he had the night before in the grail shrine, and he bowed his head in prayer.

‘Go,’ the duke ordered through gritted teeth. ‘I order you… go.’

Six hours later, the sun was rising and Duke Corentin’s armour glistened with dew. Slowly, he became aware that he had been locked in prayer throughout the long, cold hours of the night, and that the city was stirring all about him. Opening gummy eyes, he realised that so too was the camp before the city walls, thousands of cruel invaders busying themselves with preparations for the inevitable battle.

Grunting, the duke braced himself against his sword, and pulled himself upright. Pain shot through his every joint and he staggered to bring himself to his full height. Attendants, who had been lurking out of his field of vision, rushed to him. He thrust out his free arm to push them away.

‘Back!’ he barked, consumed with anger and frustration. ‘I have a battle to win… Erwen?’

‘My lord?’ his chancellor said as he appeared nearby, bent almost double in genuflection.

‘Order my war steed made ready!’ the duke bellowed, flashes of long gone battles strobing across his mind’s eye once again. ‘Gather the knights and prepare to open the gates!’

‘My lord, I cannot…’ Erwen started, before stuttering to a halt, his eyes impossibly wide in his hawkish face. The duke regarded his chancellor with confusion for a moment, before turning as he followed the man’s gaze. High above the invaders’ camp, the black dragon soared directly towards the tower on which the duke and his attendants stood.

With an incoherent roar of denial and pain, the duke drew his mighty sword, its blade flashing in the morning sun. Bracing his legs wide, he raised the sword that had served him so well over so many campaigns, and waited as the dark elf lord approached.

The sound of the oncoming black dragon was as a storm descending from an otherwise clear sky, the beating of its wings a savage, deafening roar. Erwen and the other attendants were buffeted to the stone floor as the huge beast passed directly overhead, but Duke Corentin strained every sinew in his body to remain upright. He yielded to no man, and especially not to an elf.

‘Then this is your answer, old man?’ the dark elf called out as his mount banked over the wall and began a majestic return to the invaders’ lines. ‘This is the fate you choose?’

‘Aye, vile one!’ Duke Corentin bellowed in answer. ‘This is my answer!’

With a final expulsion of reeking, poisonous gases from its nostrils, the black dragon was away, and every war machine in range opened fire upon it. The chances of even the best-crewed trebuchet striking a flying target, least of all one moving rapidly in the opposite direction, was remote at best, but one huge stone projectile did sail dangerously close to the dragon, causing a roar of approval to sound from the massed ranks of defenders upon the city walls. But the cheer was short lived, for even as the black dragon receded into the distance, the countless war hydras upon the plain started forwards, the ground actually trembling so heavy and concentrated was their tread.

‘Get every company to the walls,’ the duke barked to an attendant, and the man departed at speed to pass the order on. In moments, the thousands of warriors defending the ramparts were being reinforced by streams of additional defenders pouring up the stone steps. ‘Attendants,’ he shouted. ‘Where is my steed?’

Now the walls themselves trembled to the approach of the massed hydras, yet the duke cared more for the readiness of his own mount. Losing patience, he made for the top of the flight of steps that led down the tower and into the courtyard far below where his knights had marshalled, but was interrupted as Sir Peirrick, the greatest knight of his household, emerged.

‘My lord,’ the knight greeted the duke as he bowed his head and struck a mailed fist across his armoured chest in respectful greeting. ‘I am told–’

‘Peirrick,’ said Corentin. ‘Good. Is my steed ready? Are the knights marshalled?’

‘No, my duke,’ the knight set his bearded face in a grim mask, his intense eyes betraying his concern.

‘Then see to it, man!’ the duke bellowed, flinging an arm wide in a gesture that took in the vast monstrous horde stampeding across the plain towards the wall. ‘We have but minutes, and I would sally forth before it is too late!’

His face betraying his utter horror, Sir Peirrick stood resolute as his liege made to push past him towards the stairs. ‘No, my lord,’ he said with conviction. ‘Your knights shall do as you bid, but you shall not lead them.’

The duke recoiled as if the knight had struck him across the face. Draining of colour, he fought for words to express his outrage.

‘Let others shoulder this burden,’ the knight pleaded, though his mind was clearly decided. ‘Your place is here, my lord, commanding the defence of your city.’

‘My place is leading the charge against the horde of filth even now bearing down upon my realm!’ Duke Corentin thundered. ‘And yours is upon one knee, or else following my banner!’

‘No, my duke,’ Sir Peirrick said coldly, barring the way. ‘We shall not allow you to take to the field this day, nor any other henceforth, though every one of us would willingly give his life upon your word.’

The duke bit back a cry of anguish, and looked past the knight to his chief advisor who waited off to one side. Erwen nodded sadly, and it was clear that he felt compelled to agree with Peirrick. The thunder of the approaching host of hydras grew ever louder, so that the duke barely heard his own reply.

‘Then go,’ he bellowed over the roaring of dozens of monsters. ‘Lady deliver us all.’

The charge of the knights of Brionne was a feat of epic glory. Hundreds of mounted warriors formed up into squadrons and streamed through the gates and sally ports of the city walls, fluttering pennants and proud banners boldly displaying the heraldry of countless knightly households. Their armour gleamed in the rising sun and their lances were as densely formed as an impenetrable forest. Those lances lowered as the squadrons spread out, forming a thunderous wave of steel and colour as it raced headlong towards the onrushing dark elf beasts.

Seeing this new enemy, the beast handlers cracked their whips and drove their charges forwards in a frenzy of bestial savagery. Locking eyes upon their foe, the countless beasts roared in challenge, the air filled with deafening screeches and cries. The hydras vented thick clouds of noxious fumes and the morning light was tainted with a creeping, stinking fog that threatened to strike man and horse down before battle was even joined.

Yet still, the two waves came on. The knights drove through the billowing clouds of poison, and truly the blessing of the Lady was upon them for not one fell to its effects. The hydras redoubled their charge in response, and seconds later, the two forces slammed into one another.

At the very point of impact, steel-tipped lances drove into stone-hard flesh, even the hides of the monstrous creatures unable to withstand weapons anointed in the holy waters of the font of the Lady. Black blood arced into the air and spattered across shields and armour as beasts fell. Moments later, the true battle began.

Those beasts not slain outright fought back with snapping maws atop writhing, serpentine necks. Each creature bore five such necks and five sets of ferocious jaws, and only upon the decapitation of the fifth were they finally slain. Bold knights were cut in two by heads that darted in from all quarters, or torn apart as rival heads affixed to the same body fought jealously over the kill. Lances cast aside, the knights hacked and stabbed with blessed swords, and soon the fight was a desperate struggle for life and death.

From his vantage point atop his tower, Duke Corentin raged. His heart ached to be down there, upon the field of battle, leading his brave knights against the countless beasts that assailed his city. Yet, he could see what most down there could not, and he knew deep within his soul that Sir Peirrick had been correct. The knights were being slaughtered, their numbers simply too few to repel the monstrous host. With a pang of sadness, he saw that Peirrick had known this all along, and in his love for his duke had saved him from a fate he was simply too aged and too tired to repel.

Yet, Duke Corentin fumed, what right had the young knight to determine the fate of his master? Why should he not meet his end in one final, hopeless charge against such a foe?

Because he had a city to defend, he knew. Thousands of warriors and many times more defenceless innocents relied upon him, for no other would deliver them from the invading host that was even now charging en masse towards the city walls.

The air filled with the blaring horns and shrill, cruel war cries of the foe as the war hydras cut down the last of the bravest knights Duke Corentin had ever had the honour to see in battle. The beasts surged onwards, crushing the remains of the knights into the churned plain, the bright colours of their banners and shields smeared with mud and gore, and the once gleaming steel of their armour and swords dulled with filth. Roaring their foul victory cries, the beasts came on, closing on the walls even as the hosts of dark elves behind them began their march.

Nothing would stop the beasts, Duke Corentin knew as they reached the walls. Claws and teeth ground into the fair masonry, hauling down brickwork set there centuries before. The tower upon which the duke and his attendants stood shook violently, and the defenders upon the walls fought to keep their footing as more and more of the huge creatures clawed their way upwards, great chunks of stone discarded in their wake. Flaming arrows arced downwards like screaming comets, burying themselves in beast flesh and causing the hydras to screech in deafening pain, yet still the enemy came on.

A wave of panic passed up and down the wall as a sickening impact caused great cracks to spread throughout its fabric. A beast so large that it carried a howdah bristling with spears upon its back had joined the fray, stampeding its way through the press of monstrous bodies to slam headlong into the walls. Even as the defenders concentrated their flaming arrows upon this new, terrible enemy, the hydra dug its claws into the crumbling wall and began to haul itself upwards.

Only the insane could stand in the face of such a monster. Even as it climbed, it gouted great clouds of black gas up towards the ramparts. Men fell, their skin blistered and their eyes bulging, as five heads reared above the ramparts upon writhing necks. Each darted and snapped, and with every attack a man was snatched from his place at the wall, tossed into the air and swallowed whole by a gaping maw. That was all the remaining defenders could take, and those on the neighbouring sections broke in terror, fleeing from the inevitable.

In an instant, the defending army broke. Men flooded from the walls down flights of steps so choked with bodies that dozens fell screaming to their deaths below. With a sound like a mountain collapsing, an entire section of the walls crumbled, the towers on either side toppling downwards and slaying hundreds in the process. Through the billowing mushroom cloud over the huge breach, the black dragon of the Beastlord Rakarth soared, the beat of the massive wings parting the rising dust so that Duke Corentin could see his foe clearly. As the first of the war hydras pressed in through what the duke knew was only the first breach in his fair city’s walls, the host of dark elves pressed in behind, and soon the cruel enemy was spilling forth into the rubble-strewn courtyard and streets beyond.

‘Attendants,’ the duke ordered, his voice grim and resolute. ‘Arm me.’

None could argue, for there was clearly nothing to be gained from doing so. With silent reverence, the duke’s attendants presented him with his lance, set his shield upon one arm and his helmet upon his head. Though the panoply of war had never felt so heavy, Duke Corentin bore the weight as he bore his duty to the land and the Lady. He descended the stairwell of the tower and emerged into the courtyard before the city’s main gates. The area was strewn with rubble cast from the walls above, and cowards were fleeing in all directions, except towards the foe. Screams rent the air, those of the monsters now rampaging through his city, and those of the first of his people to be overtaken by the cruel dark elves. Even now, as he pulled himself up into the saddle of his warhorse, his beloved subjects were being dragged screaming back to the Black Ark waiting out in the sea. He cast the tragedy from his mind as he set his steed in motion, the gates parting before him though he could not see who did so.

As the portal yawned open, blinding light spilled through, so white and so pure that the duke knew it was natural. Time slowed to a leaden crawl as his steed passed through the gate, its speed building as it bore him onwards. There beyond the gate was the enemy, the dark elf host laying siege to Brionne, the greenskin horde at Quenelles, the heretics at Trantio, the unquiet dead at Castle Darkheart, the stinking swarm of kaven spewing through the pass in the Irrana Mountains…

One last enemy, the duke’s heart sang. One last battle. One last, glorious charge before death finally claimed him.

The Ninth Book

Gav Thorpe

Like drowning men floundering through a heavy surf, the column of leather- and fur-clad warriors used their arms as much as their legs to forge a path through the blizzard. The snow was waist-deep at times, the fresh fall as incessant as it had ever been for the last two days.

Only the darkest glimmer of shadow in the distance promised shelter to Kurya Slavonich and his company; a forest that offered the possibility of brief sanctuary from the snows. The men did not talk, every effort bent towards taking the next step, every frosted breath expelled to propel the mercenaries onwards, step by gruelling step. Many of them dragged sleds behind them, laden with oilskin-covered stores and spare weapons. It had been tempting to discard such baggage after the full ferocity of the storm had become evident, but to these hardened warriors their bows and axes and shields were a way of life, not a burden. Ponies were expensive and their feed a further weight to be carried, so the mercenaries pulled their own stores and daydreamed of the riches that had brought them into such fearsome weather.

They had been heading south through Kislev, towards the troubled lands of the Empire where rival claimants to the crown of the Emperor had renewed their sporadic warring and were offering huge payments to those who plied swordcraft as their trade. Slavonich had known that a winter trek was not without risk, but the lure of gold was such that he had put together a company of two hundred souls willing to barter their lives for mercenary gold. They were drawn from all over the north; men of Ungol and Ropsmenn descent, and even a few Norsii. All had lived hard lives, fighting each other and their cruel land to eke a living. Now the civil wars of the Empire offered a chance to be free of such labours; one good campaign would see them all rich for life.

The storm had forced them east, into the foothills of the mountains. The forest ahead, a great swathe of pine that ran for leagues to the south, was known to Slavonich and it was to this shelter he led his men.

It was almost impossible to say what time of day it was, the dark clouds obscuring the light of the sun, but the greybeards reckoned that nightfall was close at hand when they reached the eaves of the forest. Almost immediately the company’s pace quickened, heading into the deeper parts of the woods where the trees’ branches overlapped and the curtain of snow was reduced to a steady but gentler fall.

They turned southwards again, as near as Slavonich reckoned it, determined to press onwards until night made walking impossible. Every hour spent resting was another hour postponing that fabled payday on the fields of Reikland or Wissenland or Stirland.

With the wind broken by the trees, the men were able to light torches and braziers, which were fixed to the sleds to pierce the gloom beneath the unending canopy. In the sputtering ruddy glow, the forest took on a fresh appearance, the flickering shadows doing little to ease the frayed nerves of the men. But it was better than the darkness.

A few of the youngest and nimblest mercenaries were sent ahead to scout for a suitable campsite. They returned soon with astounding news.

‘A castle,’ said Ilya, a young black-haired man with pinched features and a drooping moustache, ‘not so far from here. Dazh be praised, we’ll have a hot fire and a roof tonight.’

‘There’s no castles in these parts,’ replied Slavonich. He stroked a gloved hand through his immense beard, dislodging water and ice. ‘Unless you mean the boyar’s tower.’

‘Aye, sounds right,’ said another of the scouts, a half-Norse by the name of Ulfgad. His braids slapped against his leather breastplate as he turned to point westwards, into the forest. ‘A large tower, stone-made and dome-topped like the city buildings. A few outhouses too, of heavy logs. Easily enough for five hundred men.’

‘It was a hunting lodge,’ said Slavonich. ‘Some Gospodar noble built it centuries ago so he could go out into the woods.’

‘That’s a big tower for a hunting party,’ said Ilya.

‘There’s more than wolves, bears and deer in these trees,’ said Slavonich. ‘A man needs a good wall to keep some of the beasts at bay in these parts. Last I heard it’s been abandoned for over a hundred years.’

‘I didn’t like the look of it,’ said Lushka, the youngest of the company at only sixteen winters old. He shook his head inside his fur hood. He had never revealed his origins, but his cultured accent and sharp features showed he had Gospodar blood in him; a bastard of some noble, Slavonich suspected. ‘It had a bad aspect to it. No plants growing near. Those empty windows were staring at us as we looked, I swear.’

‘Bad aspect or not, it’s better than camping in the snow,’ said Slavonich. ‘Show us the way.’

Their blood is thin, chilled by cold, but it calls to me all the same; like orange blurs amongst the blackness of the trees, lines of ruddy life against the glow of their torches. I smell the sweat of their exertions, hear the pant of their breath as it carves clouds in the air, sense their exhaustion and their relief.

The crunch of the snow is loud in my ears. Their guttural chatter is tired and muted, but still it carries far on the wind. I move closer, staying out of the light of their pitiful fires and look upon these vagabonds trespassing in domains that do not belong to them. Each is both ugly and beautiful. Ugly in their mortality, their flesh weak and haggard, their skin marked by the sun, their eyes clouded by the chill. Beautiful also, each of them an intricate tracery of veins and arteries flowing with life. I see the pulse from their hearts surging from chest to toes, quivering along blood vessels to every part of their body, sustaining them against the winter’s grip.

I feel its lure; the beast inside urging me to feed. It would be easy to pick off one of them right now, to drag him into the darkness and open his throat to drink deep of the luscious fluid that courses through his scrawny body. I will not. I am not hungry. I am not an animal. There is no point.

They are fools. They wander these woods, thinking that their numbers keep them safe. The old one, the leader, thinks he is wise, but he is as blind as the rest of them. Their stench follows them leaving a spoor easily tracked; the beating of their hearts is like a drum sounding through the forest. They think they have found shelter, but all they have discovered is a tomb.

They are being stalked. They are prey.

The boyar’s tower was as described: octagonal, five storeys high and topped with an onion-shaped dome of green and red, the paint on the mouldering wood scoured by decades of wind but still visible. A roofed wing ran away to the north, a single storey high, its tiles broken, the beams sagging. The arched windows were dark and no smoke rose from the chimneys that ran up the tower. The wooden frames were devoid of glass, the painted sills cracked and rotten. The outbuildings showed similar dilapidation, their logs ill-fitted, wooden rivets broken away, doors hanging loose on rusted hinges.

‘You see what I mean,’ said Lushka. ‘No moss or climbing plants, not a burrow or nest to be seen. That is unnatural.’

‘Animals remember long,’ said Slavonich, leading the troop across the wide clearing surrounding the building. ‘They still avoid this place.’

‘And the plants?’ Lushka said, insistent. ‘Are they still afraid?’

‘Hush,’ said Slavonich.

There were no tracks in the fresh snow save for those left by the scouts, which were rapidly being obscured by the continuing snowfall. Slavonich and half of the men headed to the main door, a great portal almost twice the height of a man at the top of a flight of worn stone steps. The brass bolts holding the timbers in place were still sound, the door as solid as the stone that held it. The rest of the company spread out to investigate the other buildings and shouted back that they were stables, coach house and kennels.

Slavonich looked around and saw a gap in the trees that had once been the old road leading here. Everything was swathed in snow, and it was impossible to tell if the ancient flags were still in place or had been swallowed by the wilds.

‘It’s open,’ reported Ilya, heaving his shoulder against the door to push it a fraction. ‘No lock or bolt.’

‘Let’s get inside,’ Slavonich called out to his men, waving them towards the tower. ‘Get a fire in the grates and thank Dazh for delivering us from the storm.’

Taking the torches from the sleds, the mercenaries filed in. The hallway just beyond the door was small, threadbare carpet covering the floor and similarly forlorn tapestries hanging over the stones of the walls. A candelabrum hung from the ceiling, its candles nothing but misshapen stubs that had melted over the scrolled ironwork. Slavonich’s first thought was that with a bit of spit and polish, that fitting would fetch a few coins in Erengrad or Kislev. There were two doors from the hall. Slavonich took a few men to the right and sent another party to the left.

Beyond the door was a larger space, a reception area with bulging armchairs and settees. Low tables, varnish cracked and stained, were placed in the middle. There were sconces around the walls, set between life-size portraits of stern-looking men and demure ladies dressed in old fashions with high collars and elaborate ruffs. The floor was set with interlocking wooden tiles, heavily scuffed and marked, ill-fitting in places where glue had worn away.

‘No cobwebs,’ said Lushka.

Slavonich ignored the boy as more light was brought in. Some of the mercenaries slumped into the couches and chairs, grateful for rest, but Slavonich was not yet ready to settle in. There was another door opposite, surrounded by empty shelves coated with a thick layer of dust.

A call from behind attracted the captain’s attention.

‘Stairwell!’ He recognised the voice of his second-in-command, Piotr; a friend since they had been children.

‘Wait for me!’ he shouted back, opening the other door.

It led into what had been a library, or so he guessed from the lamps on the tables and the ring of shelves around the walls. There was a writing desk, a drinks cabinet – sadly empty he quickly discovered – and a small fireplace. There were no logs set in the grate.

‘Heathens,’ muttered Slavonich. Even if the tower had been abandoned decades ago, the old inhabitants should have honoured Dazh by leaving tinder and fuel for future visitors.

There was nothing to see here, so while more of the men made themselves comfortable, some of them lying down on the thick rug that covered the library floor in their exhaustion, he turned back and headed after Piotr.

He found his friend in a larger hallway on the opposite side of the entrance chamber. There was a large fireplace to one side and an ornate wooden staircase to the other. Piotr and about a dozen mercenaries sat on the bottom steps, waiting for their captain. Others were bringing in stores from the sleds, piling the supplies along the wall between fire and steps.

‘Biggest bedroom is mine,’ Piotr said with a grin, pretending to yawn elaborately.

‘I thought I was captain,’ said Slavonich. ‘I should get the biggest room.’

‘There’s plenty of space out back,’ said Piotr, jabbing a thumb towards a barely noticeable door beneath the stairway. ‘Scullery, kitchens, servants quarters. Must’ve had twenty, thirty men and women working here. I’ve sent some boys to get the stove lit. There’s a small courtyard and well too, we’ll have a pot on soon enough. Hot tea for everyone!’

‘Good work,’ said Slavonich, patting Piotr on the shoulder as he took the first few steps. ‘Coming?’

‘Lead on.’

The tramp of boots was muffled by the thick carpet on the stairs, and the blackness above was forbidding. The flicker of the torches glinted on something at the head of the stairs, causing Slavonich to start and take a step back. He thought he had seen a figure there.

Drawing his sword, he advanced, Piotr holding a torch beside him.

The figure revealed itself: a suit of empty armour on a stand, in ancient Gospodar style with a high plumed helm, scaled undershirt and ring-pierced leather breastplate. The workmanship was sound, though many of the straps and fittings were worn. A few dents and scratches showed that its use had not been purely ornamental.

‘We’ll have that,’ said Slavonich, running a hand over the gilded beading that edged the helm’s visor. ‘Worth a bit to some Gospodar runt trying to prove he has the warrior blood of Mishka in his veins.’

Turning to their right, they found themselves at the end of a passageway, lined by empty pedestals that might once have contained statues, busts or perhaps vases. Everything was in order; there was no sign of looting. As expected, they found several bedrooms, modest in size, comfortably furnished but without linen; another flight of stairs led further up the tower at the far end.

The bedrooms grew larger on the next floor, and on the third storey there were only two rooms: a massive ballroom and an equally large dining chamber. All were furnished, but all small objects – candlesticks, plates and cups, goblets and curtains – had been taken away. The tower had not been abandoned in a panic, but Slavonich wondered why the heavier tables, beds, chairs, benches and cabinets, and the portraits downstairs, had been left behind.

The last set of stairs was a spiral of ironwork that led into a single large area beneath the dome. Snows drifted through cracks in the roof where the timbers had warped over a long succession of summers and winters, and a window banged against its frame in the wind.

Slavonich noticed none of this, astounded by the rest of the room’s contents.

Eight work benches lined the walls, each beneath a narrow window. On them was all manner of strange items: alembics and pipes, contorted glasswork, saws and knives, pincers and clamps, oil burners and crucibles, talismans and fetishes, dishes and cups. In the dim light, the mercenary leader could see that many were bloodstained or smeared with oily residue.

There were eight other tables, biers of woven leather, placed in the centre of the room like a star. On each was a corpse, of increasing disassembly. The first had its skin removed to reveal muscles and ligaments; the next was pared down to blood vessels and nerves; more showed bones and organs exposed; another was dismembered, the constituent parts laid out in proper place, limbs and head neatly severed; the last was nothing but a skeleton with its brain placed in a silver bowl beside its opened skull.

Piotr hissed and there was a babble of alarm from the other mercenaries. Slavonich silenced them with a snarl. While the others slunk back towards the door, Slavonich took the torch from Piotr and approached the tables. In the dancing light, half-faces seemed to grin and leer, eyes glinted menacingly and limbs appeared to twitch. Swallowing his fear, Slavonich inspected the least-mutilated body.

It was a man of middle years, his skin dark from the sun. The hands were calloused from labours, the joints gnarled and prominent. His head had been shaved – Slavonich had thought he had glimpsed a bag stuffed with hair a moment earlier – and the skin peeled away from the rest of his body.

There was no sign of injury or disease, and no markings made by man that he could see, on the bodies or around them. It was a macabre laboratory, but nothing more sinister. Perhaps the boyar had sponsored these investigations.

‘A physician,’ he said, moving to a workbench. He picked up an amulet, revealing it to be the sigil of the Guild of Medicine in Kislev. ‘Nothing worse.’

‘A bad one,’ joked Baldimir. ‘Judging by their health.’

‘Why are they like that?’ asked Lushka, who was peering over the older soldiers’ shoulders at the doorway.

‘Research, most like,’ said Slavonich. ‘Studying how everything fits together.’

‘No, I mean why have they not decayed? Even a corpse a few days old has some corruption.’

‘Preserved, no doubt,’ said the mercenary captain, walking back to the corpses to sniff loudly. He smelled nothing at all, not rot nor embalming fluid, but that didn’t mean they had not been treated with something else. ‘Why does everything have to be unnatural to you?’

‘This place is cursed, I know it,’ said Lushka.

‘Feel free to leave any time you like, little one,’ said Piotr, heartened by his leader’s proclamation. ‘There’s enough beds downstairs, we don’t have to disturb these fellows.’

Most of the mercenaries turned back down the stairs, but Lushka was not satisfied. He prowled around the room, looking for evidence of dark magic or unholy rite.

‘Not every old tower is the abode of a wizard,’ said Slavonich, stepping towards the door. ‘Your mother should have told you different stories as a child.’

Lushka said nothing, but his face was pale and his eyes wide. He was the last to leave and shut the door behind him. Taking a knife from his belt, he wedged it into the jamb of the door to stop it from opening. It was best not to take anything for granted.

How sad it must be to spend one’s short span entirely ignorant of the doom that awaits you. These mortals stumble through their lives, spouting pieties to false gods and throwing themselves upon the mercy of uncaring deities. They know nothing of the life after; nothing of what death entails.

Their fear and superstition drives them, yet it is those same crude emotions that fuel their nightmares and give life to the force that will consume them. Their anger, their pettiness, their fear and their greed nurture the beings that will devour their souls and none of them realise it. Perhaps it is better that they do not know, for such knowledge would most probably drive them insane.

From the tree-line I can sense them, spreading through the tower like a cancer growing in a lung or liver. They seek to understand their place, to know what surrounds them, but they cannot see it.

I can see it. I can see the shapes moving between the trees. I can smell the flax of their sheepskin cloaks and hear the panting of their hounds. The chink of mail rings and the slap of scabbards are as clear to me as the clarion of the herald announcing the arrival of a king.

And beneath, it stirs. It draws like to like, the corrupt to corruption. I feel its malignancy seeping through the woods, a beacon of darkness that must be answered. The enemy is gathering, drawing ever closer. The prize below was not meant for the eyes of mortals to look upon, nor intended for the followers of the darkest powers to possess.

My time is short. If I act too late, others will take what I seek.

Somewhat disconcerted by their discovery in the higher reaches of the tower, Slavonich and his men returned to the lower levels, staking out claims to beds and floorspace in the bedchambers. Slavonich turfed Piotr out of the master bedroom after winning a round of ice-water-fire and called for his pack to be brought up to him. He laid out on the bed and shut his eyes, enjoying the softness of the mattress. He let his mind wander; he would have a bed like this in the lodge he would build when they returned from the Empire. Before his belongings arrived there was another shout from below, rousing him from the doze that had been creeping over him.

With a grunt, he hauled himself off the bed, yawned widely and made his way back downstairs. He found many of his company crowding into the hall at the foot of the stairs, all looking towards the grand fireplace.

‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Can a man get no rest?’

‘I was lighting a fire in the grate,’ said Boian as the mercenaries parted to allow Slavonich to approach. The veteran was standing beside the huge fireplace, wagging his head in disbelief. ‘I reached up to pull myself to my feet, and that brick moved.’

He stood aside to reveal a small doorway had opened in the wall beside the chimney. It was dark beyond, but in the light of the torches, Boian could see smooth stone steps leading down.

‘Probably a wine cellar,’ said Piotr.

‘A secret wine cellar?’ said Lushka. ‘This boyar must have distrusted his servants considerably.’

There were mutterings amongst the men, and a few made signs to ward away evil spirits. Slavonich heard curses mentioned more than once.

‘Take a look,’ said the captain.

‘Not I,’ said Lushka. ‘I said there was something ill about this tower. The forest canopy will be shelter enough for me tonight.’

The young man pushed through the throng towards the entrance chamber, picking up his pack and weapons from the pile beside the door.

‘If you survive, I’ll see you in the morning,’ he said as he left.

A few others grumbled complaints and followed, casting nervous glances back towards the cellar doorway, touching fingers to talismans hanging over their furs and armour.

‘Idiots,’ snapped Slavonich. ‘We’ll find their frost-bitten corpses tomorrow.’

‘I’ll take a look,’ said Piotr. He lit a lamp and glared at the others. ‘Florjan, Dimitri, Ilya, Drago, Lew… Let’s go and find some hidden boyar gold. If Dazh has favoured us, we won’t need to trek to the Empire to be rich!’

Some more reluctantly than others, the named mercenaries grabbed their axes and swords and fell in behind Piotr as he ducked through the small opening. As the last of them passed out of sight, the slamming of the main door thundered through the tower, signalling the departure of Lushka and the others who had decided to leave.

A handful of them have trusted their crude senses, the itch at their necks and the twitch of their thumbs that tells them that something is wrong with the tower. In other circumstances they would have made the right decision, but tonight there is no sanctuary; they simply flee the wolf to fall from the cliff. Against the dark cold of the forest they are bright maps of heat, their hot breath leaving trails behind them in the chill night air. The torches they bear are like blazing beacons to my eyes.

And not only to my eyes. I smell the hounds on the breeze and glimpse the slink of canine bodies through the trees. The northmen have trained their dogs well. They do not yelp or bark or snarl, but stalk in silence, circling around their ignorant prey. Three dozen hounds at least, each a huge beast capable of bringing down a man. Not all have fur. I see creatures with horns and scales, touched by the magic of the North. Some have two heads, others great spines jutting from their flesh. All have fangs like daggers and eyes like coals.

The men see nothing in the darkness; see nothing of the monstrous shapes skulking through the shadows beyond the touch of their lamps and torches. Their footfalls are like the slamming of coffin lids, though to their ears they crunch softly across the snow.

The dogs wait patiently as the men flounder further under the trees, seeking a fallen trunk or arching root to make their camp beneath. Barbed tails swishing, the Hounds of Chaos await the command of their master before they strike.

I cannot see him yet, but I sense that he is close. He is a pit of darkness that moves through the winds of magic like a snow-devil, creating a vortex of power around himself. It is his servant that tried to claim the book and it is this man who would see me robbed of my prize.

After a half-dozen steps, the stairwell doubled back on itself at a small landing, taking the men directly under the tower’s foundations. Another ten steps later, Piotr stopped at an archway and held up his lantern. There were letters etched deeply into the stone lintel.

‘I do not have the reading,’ said Piotr, slightly shame-faced. ‘What does it say?’

Ilya had been taught a little by his uncle, who was a merchant, and so he joined Piotr and looked up at the inscription.

‘It says “Here lies the family Von Carstein.” That’s all.’

‘A family crypt?’ said Dimitri. ‘Why have it out here?’

‘Disgraced, probably,’ said Drago. ‘Cast out of the city, perhaps?’

‘Or maybe nothing more than brigand-boyars,’ said Florjan. ‘Casting themselves as nobility when their fathers were nothing more than bandits.’

‘Let’s hope that they had some of their loot buried with them,’ said Piotr, stepping under the arch.

‘I’m not a grave robber,’ said Drago.

‘Hush, man!’ said Piotr. ‘I’ve seen you prise the gold teeth out of a fallen Norse chieftain’s mouth, and chop the head from a boy no more than twelve winters to get his necklace.’

‘That’s different,’ said Drago. ‘That was spoils of war.’

‘So’s this,’ said Piotr, turning back, his craggy face highlighted in the gleam of the lantern. ‘This tower belongs to us now, by right of conquest, right?’

‘The priests, they lay charms upon the dead,’ said Drago. He shook his head, but followed when Piotr pressed on.

The catacomb formed a ring of tombs, following the outer wall of the tower above. The dead were laid out in upright lidless caskets; a circle of skeletons dressed in mouldering finery, swords and shields laid at their feet and Gospodar-style helms upon their heads. Piotr stopped at one and crouched down. He picked up something from the bottom of the casket and held it up in the light: a silver ring.

‘Too big for such skinny fingers,’ he said, pocketing the find. ‘Search the others.’

The mercenaries did as they were told, though without the enthusiasm of Piotr. From the first dozen graves they amassed a small pile of brooches, rings, bracelets, belt buckles and neck chains.

‘These are just for us,’ Piotr said with a wink. ‘If Slavonich wanted the spoils, he should have come down himself, right?’

‘Right,’ said Ilya, slipping a jewelled brooch in the form of a butterfly into a pouch at his waist.

‘There’s more back here,’ said Lew, waving his torch towards another opening, just about high enough for a man to duck under. ‘Must be thirty or more coffins in here. Women and children by the looks of it.’

‘Dazh shines bright upon us,’ Piotr said gleefully, peering into the side chamber.

‘He does indeed,’ said Ilya, his voice quiet. They turned to see him standing at an archway a little further around the ring, his eyes wide. There was something about the way the light gleamed from the doorway that excited the mercenaries and they hurried to join Ilya, thoughts alight with possibilities.

An octagonal chamber lay within the circle of tombs. Tall gilded candlesticks lined the chamber, and between them low tables were set with silver chalices and golden goblets that reflected the fires of the torches.

At the centre of the chamber was a stone slab, waist-high and carved with hunting scenes. Upon the slab lay a figure garbed in armour similar to the suit they had found in the tower. A long sword was clasped in bony hands and a shield bearing a gilded wolf’s head was propped up at the corpses feet.

‘Wait!’ snarled Drago, grabbing Piotr as he was about to step into the mausoleum. The mercenary pointed at the ground.

Around the slab was painted an eight-pointed star, composed of two squares overlapping. Sigils marked each point and intersection, and small dishes were laid out in the areas between, filled with different powders, liquids and other identifiable compounds. There was blood splashed against one wall, and a trail of the same smeared across the octagram behind the slab.

I can sense them more clearly now, the riders and warriors of the North. They will be here soon and…

It stirs again, sending out a pulse of dark magic, reacting to intrusion. The sorcerer perhaps? No, he is all but spent, destroyed by his curiosity and greed. It is someone new. The Kislevites have found the catacombs. It has been woken by their life essence, the hated power close at hand. It hungers too, as I have hungered, and in its waking it sends shivers across the winds of magic; pulses of darkness and despair.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy for those cursed fools who are even now sealing their fate. Caught between powers that they barely recognise and have no ability to comprehend, they are still oblivious.

Those that fled have found a place to shelter, beneath the overhang of a rocky cliff. Their fire is a beacon and the hounds have stopped circling. The Northmen know that there are others close by and quicken their pace. There is anger in them, and anticipation. Strange omens and the prophecies of their shamans have brought them to this place, and now they think their prize is being stolen.

The situation is rapidly becoming more complicated than I had hoped. It is time to act. It is not their prize, it is mine. They have spent their lives looking for this place; I have spent five of their lifetimes to seize what lies beneath the tower.

Slavonich broke from his sleep in an instant, heart pounding. He couldn’t be sure what had woken him, but he thought it had been a scream.

He had been right. Another drawn-out shriek sounded dimly in the distance, from outside the tower. Throwing aside his blanket, Slavonich grabbed his axe from the bedside table and headed to the window. Snow was thick on the sill and the cold wind swept through the empty frame. His face prickled with the chill as he leaned out.

There were howls now; bestial howls that the wind and snow could not mute. He could not tell from which direction, but it did not matter. He did not turn as there came a rapping on the chamber door.

‘I heard it!’ he called out.

The door opened and he glanced back to see Ivan, bow in hand.

‘What should we do?’ said the mercenary.

‘Do?’ laughed Slavonich. ‘We bloody well stay here, that’s what we do. Those fools wanted to leave, I didn’t make them. Never seen a wolf that will attack a stone tower.’

At that moment, a movement outside caught Slavonich’s attention. It was a flicker by the tree-line, barely glimpsed through the falling snow. He squinted, straining his eyes to see through the drifting flakes, but the light from the tower barely reached the trees.

He stood up in shock as a thunderous bang on the door below startled him, cracking his head on the top of the window. Snarling with pain, Slavonich rubbed his head and leaned out again as another loud knock hammered on the timbers of the door. Beneath him stood a man in armour, his helmetless head surrounded by long black hair flowing in the wind. The stranger’s features were narrow and foreign, with the prideful air of the aristocracy about them.

Eyes as dark as the night looked up at Slavonich.

‘Would you grant sanctuary to a stranger on this fell night?’ the man called up. His accent was strange, tinged with the tone of northern Kislev but certainly not originating from there. ‘It would be in your best interest.’

Looking into those dark eyes, Slavonich could see that the stranger was an honourable man. A thought came to the mercenary captain: Dazh demanded that hospitality be extended to those in need. On a night like this, it would be a crime to make his visitor stay out in the cold, what with the wolves in the forest growing bold.

‘Will you let me in?’ the stranger asked.

‘Of course,’ said Slavonich. The stranger’s voice had a haunting quality that reassured Slavonich at the same time as it exuded authority. ‘You will be our guest for the night.’

He turned to Ivan and waved the man away.

‘Go on!’ said Slavonich. ‘Go and let him in. He’ll be half-frozen by now. I will be there in a moment.’

Ivan nodded hesitantly and disappeared out of the door. Slavonich hurriedly pulled on his boots, feeling the weariness of a long trek and the late hour weighing heavily on his bones. He pushed several bronze and iron rings onto pudgy fingers and ran those fingers through his beard to straighten out a few tangles.

Slavonich stopped, unsure why he was preening himself in such a way. His guest was certainly a noble, but he had never been one to put on airs and graces for their benefit. Come to think of it, he wasn’t quite sure why he had let the man enter in the first place.

Confused, Slavonich hurried down the stairs to the ground floor. He found the stranger standing at the doorway between the main hall and the entrance chamber, a ring of mercenaries around him with bared weapons. The nobleman’s sword was still in its sheath; Slavonich saw an ornate grip, hilt and guard gilded, a ruby inset into the crosspiece.

‘Your men are dead,’ said the stranger, looking past the wary mercenaries.

‘I heard,’ said Slavonich. ‘Wolves got them.’

‘Not wolves,’ said the stranger. ‘Hounds. Hounds of the Northmen. Hounds of Chaos.’

This caused some disconcert amongst the soldiers, and Slavonich hushed them with a growl.

‘How do you know this?’

‘You have to leave here,’ said the noble, eyes unblinking. ‘The hounds are not the only creatures of the Dark Gods that approach. Warriors and knights are in the woods, seeking this place. You must leave before they arrive.’

The man spoke sense. He could see the earnestness in the stranger’s eyes, hear the sincerity in his tone. Yet there was a part of Slavonich that was not so sure, a nagging voice in the back of his mind.

‘Better to have a place to defend,’ he said, surprised that he had uttered the words. Disappointment crossed the noble’s face.

‘You will be trapped here,’ the stranger said, every word insistent. ‘Better to leave now and move south. They are not interested in you, they just want to enter the tower.’

Slavonich had fought enough Chaos warbands to know the truth of the noble’s words. He had left the North to get away from such enemies; the soldiers of the Empire were easier foes.

‘There’s no profit to be made by staying here,’ said the stranger. Now he turned his gaze to the rest of the men. ‘Only death lingers here.’

Slavonich was about to comply with the man’s suggestion, but the order to his men stuck in his throat. Stubbornness born out of a hard life surged rebelliously through the captain.

‘They are coming,’ said the stranger, his voice calm and measured.

Just then, they heard another scream.

It came not from outside, but echoed up from the open doorway beside the fireplace; a drawn-out shriek of pure terror.

Ilya stumbled back across the tomb, feet scuffing through the markings around the central slab. The corpse behind the slab – or what had appeared to be a corpse – dragged itself after him, one clawed hand outstretched towards the mercenary. In its other hand, it clasped a heavy book, the volume bound in pale material. The silver sigils upon the tome gnawed at Ilya’s thoughts, as if the book was whispering to him. Visions of death, of skulls and walking corpses, crossed his mind, against a backdrop of a mighty black pyramid around which dark energies writhed.

The thing crawling across the floor should not have been alive. From a tattered robe protruded arms skeletally thin, the wasted flesh pocked with sores and welts. The thing’s hood had fallen back, revealing a face that was all but fleshless, the eye sockets empty but for flickers of fire that burned into Ilya’s mind. On its brow was carved a rune that shifted and moved – a mark of Chaos.

He screamed again as he fell back, tripping over Piotr’s foot.

Piotr stepped forwards, sword in hand, and ran his blade through the creature’s chest. The thing gurgled and hissed, grasping Piotr’s boot with its free hand. A fanged mouth opened wide, revealing a forked tongue that flickered quickly in and out.

He chopped off the hand that clasped his leg, sword ringing against the flags of the tomb, the noise echoing loudly around the chamber. The thing did not flinch, but stared up at him with those orbless sockets, thin lips curling back to reveal black gums.

Snarling, Piotr took his sword in both hands and swung, slashing through the creature’s throat. Its head lolled to one side, still attached by bone and sinew. Another hacking blow severed the skull, sending it rolling across the floor.

‘Grab the plates and cups and anything else of value,’ said the burly mercenary, ripping the book from the dead thing’s grasp. ‘Let’s get back to the others.’

There was a shout from the floors above, echoing down the stairs, followed by several others, all warning of the approach of armoured warriors and riders. Slavonich felt the stranger at his shoulder as he moved to the main door and looked out.

Sure enough, it was a Chaos warband.

Bearing torches that spat with multicoloured flame, the warriors of the North moved across the clearing. They were clad in heavy plates of armour, and cloaks of furs and mantles of scaled skin hung from their shoulders. Their tall shields were embossed with screaming faces, human skin drawn taut across them splashed with crude designs in blood. Their helms covered their faces, some bearing one, two or three horns, others with crests of coloured hair. They held axes and maces and jagged swords, which glowed with magical power.

Behind the men on foot came six riders, five of them clad the same but mounted on wide-shouldered steeds with flaming eyes and metallic flesh. Their spears were hung with fetishes and trophies – bones and skulls that clattered in the winter wind. Hounds trotted at the side of the Chaos Knights, monstrous things that were far more than hunting dogs.

The sixth was unlike the others. He was the champion, a Northern warrior elevated by the Dark Gods, possessed of powers beyond mortals. He was plain to pick out, a T-shaped banner pole attached to his back, a disc of bronze depicting a leering daemonic face emblazoned upon it. His armour was like smoked glass, a greyish-white that moved constantly, almost lost amongst the falling snow. One gauntleted fist held an axe with a head of fire, the other a sword whose blade was of the same shining material as the champion’s armour.

The champion wore no helmet. His flesh was a dark red, cracked and flaking like rust. Bright yellow eyes like those of a cat stared unblinking at Slavonich as he stood transfixed in the door. Slavonich felt terror freezing him; catching hold of his heart and stopping it.

The moment passed as the nobleman laid his hand on Slavonich’s shoulder.

‘Do not fear,’ said the stranger, and Slavonich’s panic passed.

The mercenary slammed the door and turned back to the mob of soldiers who had piled into the entrance hall after him.

‘It’s too late,’ declared the captain. ‘We’re trapped here.’

The woe of the mercenaries vocally increased. Slavonich felt a hand soft on his arm and looked round to see the stranger staring at him earnestly.

‘I can help you,’ he said. ‘I ask only one thing in return for my services.’

Slavonich eyed the man from toe to scalp and could tell from his poise and size that he would most certainly be handy in a fight. More than that, the nobleman exuded assurance; Slavonich was sure that with him on their side they could defeat the Chaos warband.

‘What is your price?’ he asked, as a moment of scepticism freed him from his admiration of the stranger.

‘A book,’ said the nobleman. ‘Your men have found it in the catacombs. Keep the gold and jewels. I just want the book.’

‘Some old book?’ laughed Slavonich. ‘Sure, why not? If you get us out of here alive, you can have your book. Sure.’

‘Thank you,’ said the stranger. ‘Now, follow my instructions precisely.’

It is a craving that drives them, just as the hunger drives me. Their fear rules them and they crave leadership. The old one, the one called Slavonich, has already deferred to me, and the others are even easier to sway to my will. Some would call it magic, others charisma. It is neither of these things. It is simply the natural order of humanity to follow when led.

There is panic in them. Their hearts flutter as they peer out of the windows and see the armoured figures advancing through the snow. They have given no thought to the defence of the tower and are woefully unprepared. Where there was inaction, I give them action. I order the door to be barred, the benches and tables to be put across the windows of the lower floors. Those with bow and arrows I send to the upper floors, though I fear in the blizzard their aim will be poor.

The rest I split between the main tower and the servants’ wing. The tower is sturdy, the main attack will come through the other hall. Slavonich is quick to agree when I dispense my orders, taking two-thirds of the fighters with him to defend the kitchens and other rooms attached to the tower.

A shout of triumph rings loudly through the noise of the bustling mercenaries; a marksman above has found his target. It will be a distraction, little more. Under my direction, the men with me ready their weapons, bank up the fires and stand at the door and windows.

Then it comes, the first bite of blade into wood, from a window in the library. There are shouts from the soldiers. I reassure them with meaningless words of honour and courage. Like thirsty dogs, they lap up the platitudes, though I can see inside them and still their hearts race and the sweat trickles down their backs.

One of them thrusts a spear through the gap between two benches across the window. The strike is rewarded with a howl of pain. The magic churns, flung into fresh motion by the spilling of blood. The red fluid decorates the speartip as it is withdrawn. It glitters, full of life force, every drop holding the key to existence. Its smell is intoxicating. Even the thin smear on the iron blade is enough to make my throat itch, to rouse the thing inside me that desires the essence.

Outside, the champion roars a challenge in words the men cannot understand. I know the language though; it is a promise to slaughter everyone inside the tower. Though the mercenaries do not understand the tongue spoken, they recognise the intent and the power behind the tone. Their brief moment of victory flickers and fades.

I glimpse nervous glances, dry lips licked, the stroke of talismans and the making of signs. They mutter prayers to their gods.

Those gods are not listening. Other gods, even darker gods, are our audience tonight.

The hall was filled by a clatter as Ilya dropped his armfuls of grave ornaments in surprise. His comrades were armed, the windows barred by furniture, and war shouts sounded from outside.

‘What?’ Coming up the steps, Piotr’s single word summed up everything Ilya felt.

‘Northmen,’ came the reply from Stanislav. ‘They have us surrounded.’

The men who had explored the crypt put aside their loot and searched through the baggage for their weapons.

‘Who is that?’ asked Ilya, eyeing a tall stranger clad in ornate armour stood at the doorway to the entrance hall.

‘Not sure,’ grunted Stanislav. ‘Turned up just before the Northmen. Slavonich let him in.’

Ilya absorbed this information without comment, still confused. He found his sword and shield amongst the piles of boxes and sacks and armed himself. Novak came running into the chamber from the servants’ entrance, blood streaming from a cut across his left arm.

‘They’re breaking in,’ he said, breathless and afraid. ‘Slavonich needs more men to hold them back.’

A thunderous thud resounded through the tower, silencing any answer. The men turned their gazes to the stranger, who was calm amongst the tumult.

‘They have chopped down a tree for a battering ram,’ he said slowly. ‘We cannot spare any more men.’

‘They’ll be through soon,’ warned Novak. ‘They are too strong for us.’

‘Hold them as long as you can,’ said the nobleman. ‘Send Slavonich to me.’

Novak disappeared back into the servants’ quarters.

‘Find something to brace the main door,’ said the stranger. He pointed to the banister of the stairs. ‘Those timbers should work.’

The men with axes set to hacking at the thick wood, their blows drowned out by the pounding on the door. Splinters and wood chips spread across the floor as the men laboured, and dust filled the air, coating furs, hair and beards.

An ominous crack echoed from the entrance chamber.

‘Quickly now,’ said the stranger, still showing no signs of fear.

Slavonich emerged as the men hacked through the last part of the banister. He said nothing as he watched his men carrying the carved timber towards the doorway, as if in a daze. With a shake of the head, he turned his attention to the nobleman.

‘Do you remember our agreement?’ said the stranger, before Slavonich could speak.

‘I remember,’ replied the mercenary captain, nodding. ‘I’m afraid I’m not sure I can deliver my end of the bargain.’

‘You have no need to be afraid,’ said the stranger. ‘I can help. Whatever happens next, remember that we have a common foe tonight. We are allies, yes?’

‘I guess so,’ said Slavonich, uncertain of the man’s intent.

‘Good. You can trust me.’

This is a terrible place, surrounded by the darkest magic. As I open up my mind to the winds of magic, I feel the horrific memories etched into the fabric of the tower. Norsii kings once gutted and beheaded their enemies here, dedicating the souls of the slain to the gods of Chaos. Over that stone, they raised a temple, before being driven north by Sigmar and his warriors.

The temple was cast down and the stones were scattered, but the histories of humans are short while the memories of the stones is long indeed. Over the age of the Empire, this place has drawn all manner of men, its origins forgotten but its location remembered in folk tales and legends. A few seek treasures, lured to this place by their greed. Most came with a more sinister purpose, as do I. All of them lost their lives, consumed by the power they sought to embrace.

The boyar was no different. A weak man, driven by his fear of death, seeking the ultimate solution; immortality. He obscured the truth with tales of hunting, but the stones remember. The blood of the sacrifices, the chants of the necromancers, the swirl of dark magic; all of them continue to echo down through the centuries.

The boyar did not succeed; not wholly. He is still here though, three hundred years after he died. His legacy continued, his fortune expended after death to finish what had been started in life. My thoughts touch upon the boyar’s spirit, caged within the mouldering bones in the crypt beneath my feet. The dark magic stopped the soul from fleeing the corpse, but it is dormant, waiting for the energy to be set free again.

I have that power. I do not have all of the knowledge of the First, the Great Necromancer, the Lord of Nagashizzar, but I have learned much in my long existence and my unnatural state brings with it many benefits.

The dark magic is mine to control. It is part of me, in a way it will never be a part of a mortal form. Its curses and temptations mean nothing to me; I am already immortal. I was reborn with that innate power, the ability to see the souls that have departed, to reach into the other realm where they swirl and rest, to give back that spark of life that has departed.

I am considered a monster by most, but I am a lifebringer. It is this understanding, this revelation, that drives mortals insane when they come to understand it. To be undead and yet alive, standing between two realms of mortal and immortal, is to be the balance between the scales of oblivion and existence. No sane mind, no human mind, can look upon both of those worlds and remain intact, but it is my natural sphere; the place to which I was brought so many, many years ago.

The boyar responds to my presence, the magic I guide with my mind seeping into frail bones and ancient armour. His soul flickers, grows, draws strength for the power that I am feeding him. His will is strong, as it must be for any that attempt to cheat death and succeed with any degree of self remaining. He was a fighter, a leader of armies, and it is those memories that I stir, instilling the boyar’s skeleton with a semblance of purpose.

The rest is up to the spirit of the man. His bones tremble, quivering with dark magic. I sense the twitch of a finger and feel animation returning, tendrils of magic replacing sinew and muscle that rotted away a long time ago.

One warrior will not turn the battle in my favour. The magic courses, the stones releasing their power, the screams of the dead offered up to this benighted place writhing and clawing at the barrier between life and death. I push the magic, letting it flow through my body out of the stones before it throbs down into the catacombs, earthing into the skeletons of the boyar’s retainers like lightning onto a temple spire.

Unlife floods through the crypt, empty sockets gleaming with unnatural vigour.

I issue a silent command and the dead rise, ready to do my bidding.

The clatter of armoured feet on the steps behind him caused Ilya some consternation, thinking for a moment that there had been some other entrance into the crypt from outside. His consternation became horror at the sight of the figure that emerged from the opening beside the fireplace.

The dead lord had returned to finish what the mutated wizard had not managed!

Ilya’s scream drew the attention of all the others, who turned in wide-eyed dread at the column of skeletons marching in step from the crypt.

‘The touch of Chaos is on them,’ snarled Piotr, stepping towards the apparitions.

‘Hold your men,’ the stranger said, his voice low, laying a hand on the shoulder of Slavonich. ‘These are not your enemies. They are the guardians of the tower, brought forth to defeat your foes.’

Slavonich looked with narrowed eyes at the nobleman, but also raised his hand, waving Piotr and the others to stand back.

‘What ally have you made?’ hissed Ilya.

In answer, the main door cracked heavily again and the shouts of the Northmen could be heard more clearly. There came warning shouts from the entrance chamber.

‘Better on our side than theirs,’ Slavonich said with a grimace, taking a pace back to let the wight and its entourage pass him by. ‘Let them through. They’ve died once already, at least they can do it again for us.’

The captain flinched as the wight stopped beside him and turned glowing red eyes upon the mercenary leader, as if understanding his words. A gauntleted hand raised a rune-etched blade in salute to the stranger, magic glittering along its edges.

‘Kill them all,’ said the nobleman, pointing towards the door.

Such mercenaries as stood between the undead and the portal scurried from their path as the beam bracing the door shook violently and splintered. The planks of the door were split asunder by hammer blows and axe blades, the ancient timber finally failing against the inhuman assault from the warriors of Chaos.

The wight met the first of the Northmen to come through, its shining sword catching him high across the helm, slicing the top from his head. In eerie silence, the armoured figure raised his shield and charged the next, the other skeletons following behind.

Those warriors at the door who saw the undead fell back with panicked shouts, allowing the unliving cohort to stream into the open. Ilya and several others followed behind, their terror outmatched by a macabre curiosity to see the dead slay the living. The stranger followed them, his eyes lit by the same ruddy glow that emanated from the sockets of the fleshless fighters.

It was Ilya’s first proper look at their foes – hulking warriors in heavy armour and fur cloaks. Their bulk dwarfed the skeletal warriors, their weapons heavy-bladed and capable of chopping through armour, flesh and bone. Several were cut down, overcome while still reeling from their shock at the appearance of the dead attackers. The animated corpse of the boyar struck out to the left and right, dismembering and beheading with every blow.

From around the tower, the leader of the warband appeared, bellowing orders in his harsh language. Pulling back from their attack on the tower, the Chaos warriors formed around their champion, hacking and chopping at the skeletons and their immortal commander. Blades bit into bare bone, cracking skulls and smashing limbs and ribcages. To Ilya it looked as if salvation had been short-lived as half a dozen skeletons were smashed to the ground in quick succession.

Tearing his eyes from the brutal scene, the mercenary glanced at the stranger. The fire in his eyes burned brighter, his pale flesh gleaming from within, veins pulsing strangely beneath alabaster skin. A half-seen aura surrounded the nobleman, a shadow that had nothing to do with the torches of the Northmen or the light spilling from inside the tower.

Those skeletons that had fallen shuddered and flailed. Broken bone knitted to broken bone and the unliving warriors pushed themselves to their feet once more, picking up notched and rusted weapons to attack again. Three were struck down immediately by the Northmen, but not before the undead had stabbed and sliced through the armour of another warrior of Chaos.

Where the eight fought, the Northmen died; where the champion of Chaos swung his weapons, the skeletons were hurled back, smashed to pieces. Man-by-man, the Chaos warband was being whittled down, unable to match the necromancy sustaining their foes, returning them to the melee.

After some time, the wight and the champion came together, the latter swatting aside a handful of skeletons with the flaming head of his axe. The ice-shard of Chaos crashed against the diresword of the wight with a deafening ring and a blast of magical power. The boyar turned aside the next axe blow with its shield and lunged, the tip of its enchanted blade carving a furrow across the champion’s helm.

Ilya breathed out explosively, realising that he had been holding his breath as the two unnatural warriors had clashed. He sucked in again with an ill-feeling as the Chaos champion’s sword screamed through the wight’s breastplate, erupting from the dead warrior’s back. The boyar stumbled, lashing out, the tip of its deathly sword slicing through the champion’s leg. The flaming axe descended, smashing the head from the wight, burying deep inside the animated carcass.

Groans and shouts of fear surged from the watching mercenaries as the champion erupted from the fight, sending skulls and limbs flying around him.

The champion has bested the boyar and I do not have enough warriors to stop him, no matter how many times I bring them back. I had hoped to avoid this, but I must take a personal hand in the battle.

I stop the flow of dark magic, letting it build up inside my body. It twists and writhes inside me, but it is my slave not my master. My flesh is as dead as the bones of the skeletons; a simple vessel to be animated to my will.

The magic surges, flowing down every limb, filling me with its power.

Thinking that he had perhaps seen the worst imaginable, Ilya nearly fainted as he caught sight of the stranger. The flickering aura around him was more visible now, coursing through veins that stood out like cords, and to the mercenaries’ ears came a faint shrieking and wailing.

The shadows deepened, becoming a tangible, visible cloak of power enveloping the nobleman. Dead faces leered and moaned in that horrifying mantle, but the worst was to come.

The stranger was transforming. Dark hair had turned to snow-white, and pallid flesh was now almost translucent, the tracery of arteries and veins beneath a spasming web that moved unnaturally. Two fangs, each as long as Ilya’s fingers, extruded from the stranger’s upper jaw, their tips glinting in the firelight. Even the nobleman’s armour was contorting and changing, bone-like spines and spikes erupting from the black metal. A clawed hand ripped free the sword in the stranger’s sheath, the blade blazing like a full moon.

Almost faster than Ilya could follow, the stranger raced forwards, sword held high. The chill-shining blade slashed through the closest Chaos warrior, parting arm from body in one blow. Another fell, chest cut open from ribs to shoulder.

The wailing, slashing apparition streaked through the Northmen, leaving blood and limbs scattered across the snow, heading directly for the Chaos champion. The Northmen’s leader swung his axe high, aiming for the stranger’s throat. The transformed nobleman caught the haft of the axe in his free hand, tearing it from the champion’s grip. The moon-lit sword struck down thrice, each blow cutting deeper into the skull of the Northman; the fourth sliced through neck and shoulder in a fountain of freezing blood.

The blood flows around me, but I cannot feed. It is tainted, polluted by the essence of the Dark Gods. With the last of my strength, I draw again on the winds of power and raise up my small force to support me as the warriors of Chaos close around me, seeking vengeance for the fallen champion. The lure of Chaos means nothing to me; it has nothing to offer an immortal lord such as myself.

Swords and hammers and axes strike my armour and bite my flesh, but to no purpose. I am not alive, so I cannot be killed. Hardened by dark magic, my armour turns aside their blows and my body feels no pain.

It is tiring though, animating my warriors and sustaining this immortal form. Every dreg of dark magic that passes through eats away at my will, until there finally does come pain; the pain of hunger. The magic is poor sustenance, fleeting and fickle.

When a dozen more of their number lie dead, the Chaos warriors retreat; the mercenaries are sallying forth from the tower to aid me.

There is no point chasing them, I have no interest in protecting my allies any longer than necessary. If the Northmen return, it is not my concern. Power waning swiftly, I let the magic disperse, stopping any further damage to spirit and body.

I become frail again and allow my skeletal followers to fall to the ground. My energies spent, I sheath my sword and seek out the one called Slavonich. I have delivered my part of the bargain we struck.

The mercenaries shuffled back as the stranger approached, armour and thin face stained with blood. He had returned to a semblance of his former appearance, though now he looked more gaunt and haggard than before. Only Slavonich stood his ground, but his nervousness was plain for all to see as his sword shook in his hand.

‘What are you?’ the captain asked.

‘You know the answer to that,’ said the stranger.

‘Vampyr,’ said Ilya, immediately regretting the outburst as the stranger’s dark eyes bore into him.

‘So I am called by your people.’ The vampire looked at Slavonich and pointed to Piotr. ‘He has what I desire.’

Slavonich glanced at his second, who shrugged and shook his head.

‘This book?’ said Piotr, pulling the tome from under his cloak. ‘If this fellow is willing to give up all the gold and silver we found for it, it must be worth a lot.’

‘It is priceless,’ said the stranger.

Conflicting emotions warred across Slavonich’s face as he considered the alternatives. The stranger’s eyes became slits and his fangs slid into view again.

‘Honour your word,’ said the vampire. ‘It is not wise to cross me.’

‘Give it to him,’ said Slavonich, waving to Piotr. When the other man shook his head again, Slavonich snatched the book from his grasp and flung it at the stranger. ‘Take it and be gone!’

The mercenaries are nothing to me, and leave my thoughts as I disappear into the blizzard; but for the fate that brought the Chaos warriors here on the same night they would have all been slain by my hand.

Their survival does not matter. They have played their part and I have what I came for.

I can feel it pulsing in my hands, beating with its own unlife, imbued with the power of its creator. It is the final thing I need; the ultimate prize in a quest that has lasted centuries. I will study its contents and learn the final secrets of the Great Necromancer. With its power my plans will come to fruition. The weak Empire of men cannot stand against the great enemy of the North. Their greed and fear will eventually doom this world, and with damnation will come the end of my kind.

We need the blood of these fragile mortals just as much as the Dark Powers crave their souls. I will not let the frailties of men condemn me to destruction; I am immortal and intend to live forever. I will be their undying lord, their protector against the evils of Chaos. Under my command they will be safe from corruption, protected from possession and though they will never thank me for it, I will save their souls from the most terrifying destiny.

Lovingly, I stroke a hand across the human skin-bound book beneath my arm. It is mine now; the last part of a masterpiece written by the greatest lord of the undead.

The ninth book of Nagash.

The Gods Demand

Josh Reynolds

The gates burst open with a thunderous groan and Hergig’s doom was sealed. For twenty-two days the capital of Hochland had stood firm against its besiegers, but no more. The gates fell, ripped from their dwarf-forged hinges by the mutated strength of the immense porcine nightmares that had crashed into them. Squealing and snorting, the barn-sized monsters charged into the city, their claws striking sparks from cobbled streets which shuddered beneath their heavy tread, and behind them came the warherd of Gorthor the Beastlord.

Braying and howling, the beastmen poured into the city like a living tide of filth. Of shapes and hues that only a madman could imagine, they hefted rust-riddled weapons and slammed them against crude shields daubed in the blood and fluids of defeated foes. The heads of orcs and men hung from their savage standards and they hurled themselves forwards like a force of nature, hard and wild and unstoppable. As they entered the foregate square, however, the men of Hochland were waiting for them with lowered spears.

The first rank of beasts impaled themselves on the spears, weighing the weapons down enough for the ranks behind to pounce with undiminished vigour upon the spearmen. Soldiers died as the creatures fell upon them and the survivors were slowly pushed back along the square.

‘Hold! Hold position!’ Mikael Ludendorf, elector count of Hochland, bellowed as he brained a beastman with his runefang, Goblin-Bane. Wrenching the strangely humming weapon loose of the pulped bovine skull, he grabbed the nearest soldier and shook the bloody sword beneath the man’s nose. ‘I said stay where you are, damn you!’

The spearman blanched and scrambled backwards, joining the rest of his unit as they retreated in ragged order in defiance of Ludendorf’s order. Ludendorf turned even as another gor bounded towards him on swift hooves, a crude polearm clutched in its claws. Shrieking like a dying horse, it sprang at him. The elector count bent out of the path of the weapon and chopped the creature near in half, dropping it to the blood-soaked ground, where it twitched pitifully for a moment before going stiff.

‘This is my city,’ he said, spitting on the body. ‘Mine!’ Then he turned to face the rest of the horde as it closed in. He shook his sword. ‘Mine!’ he bellowed.

Fully armoured and covered in the blood of his enemies, as well as some of his own, Ludendorf stood between his retreating troops and the invaders and pointed at the closest of the approaching beastmen with his brain-encrusted sword. Like all runefangs, it was not an elegant weapon, being instead the truest essence of a sword, and in that it suited its wielder well. ‘Who’s first?’ he roared.

The beastmen hesitated. Snarls ripped across the bare metres between them, and spears jabbed the oppressive air. Red eyes glared at him as hooves pawed at the ground. The closest beast danced awkwardly, coming closer then sidling back. For a moment, just a moment, the elector held them at bay with only his own stubborn refusal to give ground.

He locked eyes with one of the larger gors. It had antlers a stag would have been proud of and teeth that were the envy of panthers everywhere. ‘You, you look like a likely brute. You first,’ he said eagerly.

The big beast charged towards him with a snort. It had an old sword, the tip long since sheared off, and it swung it with more enthusiasm than skill. Ludendorf’s battered shield came up, deflecting the blow, and he jabbed his sword into the creature’s protruding belly hard enough to pierce a kidney. It screamed and reared back, leaving itself open for his follow-through. His blow caught it in the throat and it toppled backwards, gagging.

Standing over his dying opponent, Ludendorf slammed his sword into the face of his shield, fighting to hide a wince. His arm had gone numb from the force of his opponent’s blow. At the sound, the beastmen shrank back. At the rear of the crowd, he heard the snaps and snarls of the chieftains as they tried to restore the wild momentum of moments before.

‘Hergig is mine!’ he roared. ‘This city – this province – is mine!’

‘No,’ a deep voice snarled. ‘It is Gorthor’s.’

A heavy shape shoved through the ranks of beasts, sending them sprawling as it moved to face Ludendorf. The elector count took an unconscious step back as the being known as the Beastlord stepped into view.

The creature made for an impressive sight. As big as any three of the largest members of his warherd, he was a creature of slab-like muscle and bloated girth, with hands like spades and hooves like anvils. Tattoos and intricate brands covered his hairy flesh, creating a pattern that seemed to shift with every movement. In one huge hand was the daemon-weapon known as Impaler – a spear with a head of black iron wrought with screaming sigils.

‘It is all Gorthor’s,’ the Beastlord said, eyes alight with un-beastlike intelligence. ‘Every scrap of ground, every chunk of stone, it is all mine. The gods have sworn it.’

‘Your gods, not mine, animal,’ Ludendorf spat. He motioned with his sword. ‘Come on then. Dance with me, you overgrown mooncalf.’

Gorthor chuckled wetly, the sound echoing oddly from the creature’s malformed throat. ‘Why? You are dead, and Gorthor does not fight the dead.’

Ludendorf grimaced, his face twisting with hate. ‘I’m not dead. Not by a long shot.’ He cast a hot-eyed glare at the rabble behind Gorthor. ‘I’ll kill all of you. I’ll choke you with your own blood. I’ll take your heads and mount them on my ramparts!’ Flecks of foam gathered at the corners of his mouth as he cursed them. Some of the creatures cringed at the raw fury in the man’s voice. Gorthor, however, was unimpressed.

The Beastlord struck the street with the butt of his spear. ‘What ramparts, man-chief? Do you mean these ramparts here?’ He swung his brawny arms out to indicate the walls behind him. ‘These ramparts are Gorthor’s!’ As if to emphasise his point, flocks of shrieking harpies landed on the walls and more spun lazily through the smoke-filled air, drawn by the scent of blood and slaughter. ‘This city belongs to the gods now, man-chief. We will raze it stone by stone and crush your skulls beneath our hooves as we dance in celebration.’ Gorthor made a fist. ‘Bow to the will of the gods, man-chief. Gorthor has no mercy, but they might.’

Ludendorf made an animal sound in his throat and he started forwards, murder in his eyes. Gorthor bared sharp fangs and raised Impaler. Before either warrior could do much more, however, a rifle shot rang out, shattering the stillness of the square. Gorthor stumbled back, roaring in consternation as a bullet from a long-rifle kissed the skin on his snout, drawing a bead of blood to mark its wake. His warriors set up an enraged cacophony and stormed forwards, swirling around Ludendorf as harpies sought out the hidden marksman and pulled him from his perch. The unfortunate man’s screams turned shrill as the winged beasts tore him apart and showered the square with his blood and the broken remains of his weapon. Below, the elector count hewed about him with Goblin-Bane, and after a few tense seconds, managed to cut his way free and stumble away from the beasts that had sought to pull him down.

Blood in his eyes, ears ringing with the sounds of steel on steel and the stamping and shrieking of his enemies, Ludendorf raised his sword. Beneath his feet, the street trembled as something heavy approached. ‘Rally to me! Up Hochland!’ he shouted. ‘Count’s Own, to me!’

‘Here, my count,’ shouted a welcome voice. Ludendorf swiped at his eyes and saw the familiar figure of Aric Krumholtz, the Elector’s Hound and Ludendorf’s cousin. He was a lean, lupine shape swathed in red and green livery and intricately engraved armour of the best manufacture. One gauntleted hand was clasped around the hilt of the Butcher’s Blade, the weapon that came with the title. It was a brutal thing, a sword forged in Sigmar’s time, or just before. There was no subtlety to the blade; it was meant to chop and tear flesh and little else. Behind him came the Count’s Own; the heavily armoured swordsmen, clad in half-plate and perfumed clothing, with the hard eyes of veteran soldiers. Each carried a two-handed sword that was worth more than the entirety of a common militia-man’s wage. The phalanx of Greatswords trotted forwards and surrounded their count even as the street began to dance beneath the hooves of the oncoming beastmen.

‘You took your time,’ Ludendorf said, chuckling harshly as Krumholtz stepped around him and blocked a blow that would have brought the count to his knees. The Butcher’s Blade sang out, its saw-edged length gutting the bulge-bellied beastman and hurling it back into its fellows.

‘Couldn’t let you have all the fun, now could I, Mikael?’ Krumholtz said. ‘Besides, if you hadn’t decided to take them all on yourself, I wouldn’t have had to come pull your fat out of the fire.’

‘Rank impertinence,’ Ludendorf said, using Krumholtz’s half-cape to wipe the blood out of his face. ‘Remind me to execute you after this is over.’

‘You mean if we win?’ Krumholtz said, taking off a gor’s head with a looping cut. Even as it fell, more pressed forwards, driven into the narrow street by their chieftains’ exhortations.

‘There’s no “if”. I’ll not be driven from my city by a band of animals. Not after all this,’ Ludendorf snarled. ‘Form up, you lazy bastards!’ he continued, glaring at the Greatswords, who were pressed close and finding it hard to wield their weapons in the packed confines of the melee. ‘Prepare to scythe this city clean of those cloven-footed barbarians–’

‘You should fall back, Mikael,’ Krumholtz said. ‘Get to safety. We’ll handle this.’

‘Fall back? You mean retreat?’ Ludendorf grimaced. ‘No. Ludendorfs don’t retreat.’

‘Then make a strategic advance to the rear,’ Krumholtz said tersely. He grunted as a crude axe shaved a ribbon of merit from his cuirass. Ludendorf grabbed his cousin’s sleeve and yanked him back, impaling his attacker on Goblin-Bane.

‘Maybe you should be the one to go, eh?’ Ludendorf said, yanking his weapon free. ‘Not me though. I want that beast’s head on my wall!’ he growled, gesturing towards where he’d last seen Gorthor. ‘I want his horns for drinking cups and his teeth to adorn my daughter’s necklace! And Sigmar curse me if I won’t have them!’ He started forwards, but stopped dead as the street’s trembling became a shudder. ‘What in the name of–’

The minotaurs tore through the ranks of beastmen, scattering their smaller cousins or trampling them underfoot entirely as they hacked at friends, foes and even the city itself with their great axes. They were massive brutes; each one was a veritable ambulatory hill of muscle, hair, fangs and horns.

Ludendorf’s heart went cold. ‘Minotaurs,’ he hissed.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ Krumholtz grunted. ‘And Myrmidia defend us. We need to fall back. Get to the guns!’

The Greatswords began to retreat.

‘Stay where you are!’ Ludendorf barked, glaring around him, holding the men in place. ‘We hold them here. Form up!’

‘Mikael–!’ Krumholtz began, but there was no time to argue. The minotaurs drew closer and their snorts seemed to rattle the teeth in every soldier’s head as the Count’s Own stepped forward to meet the stampede, led by their elector.

A stone-headed maul thudded down, showering the count with chips of cobble and he stumbled aside, slicing his sword into a titan elbow. Malformed bone snapped and the minotaur bellowed as it turned. It reached for him with its good hand, leaving itself open for the swords of his men. The creature staggered and swatted at its attackers as Ludendorf swept his sword across the backs of its jointed ankles. His arms shuddered in their sockets, but more bones snapped and popped and the creature fell face down as the runefang chewed through its twisted flesh. Greatswords rose and fell and the monster’s groans ceased. Ludendorf spun away and slammed his shield into the clacking beak of a bird-headed beastman, knocking it head over heels.

‘That’s one down,’ he said to Krumholtz. The Elector’s Hound, his face painted with blood, shook his head and pointed.

‘And there are far too many to go, Mikael!’ Krumholtz said. Two more of the minotaurs waded through the greatswords, slapping the life out of any man who got in their path. One lowered its head and charged. Krumholtz shouldered Ludendorf aside and brought the Butcher’s Blade down between the curling horns, dropping the beast in its tracks. But even as he hauled at the weapon, trying to yank it loose, the second minotaur was on him.

Ludendorf’s sword interposed itself between his advisor’s neck and the axe. The elector grunted as his arms shivered in their sockets and went numb. The minotaur roared and forced him down to his knees. Hot drool dripped from its maw and spilled across his face, burning him. Ludendorf whipped his sword aside and skidded between the creature’s legs as it bent forwards, off-balance. Rising to his feet, he opened its back to the spine and the monster slumped with a strangled shriek. Ludendorf grabbed one of its thrashing horns and twisted, forcing the wounded beast to expose its hairy throat. Arms screaming with strain, he cut the minotaur’s throat and stepped over it, shivering with fatigue. ‘Aric?’

‘I’m fine. Fall back,’ Krumholtz snarled, lunging past the body of the monster and shoving Ludendorf back. ‘Fall back now!’

‘How dare you–?’ Ludendorf began, until he caught sight of what lay beyond his cousin. The Count’s Own were down and dead to a man, and the warherd was advancing over them. Rage thrummed through him and he made to face the beasts, but Krumholtz slapped him.

‘No! Move, Mikael. They died because you didn’t know when to run! Go!’ Hurrying him along, Krumholtz forced the elector to turn and stagger away, out of the blood-soaked court. Behind them came the hunting cries of Chaos hounds and the louder, more terrible cries of the monsters who had cracked the gate. The air above the city was filled with greasy smoke and shrieking harpies.

Stones hurtled from the rooftops as the citizens of Hergig joined the fray and more than one beast dropped to the street, skull cracked open. But not enough. A grotesque hound sprang at the elector as he stumbled and landed on his back. ‘Mikael!’ Krumholtz shouted, grabbing the animal’s greasy fur.

‘Get off me!’ Ludendorf howled, shrugging the growling beast off and grabbing its throat. Face going red with effort, he strangled the Chaos hound as it kicked and thrashed, whining. More hounds closed in and Krumholtz killed two, putting the rest of the pack to flight. Ludendorf hurled the body of the dog at a wall and screamed in frustration as the scent of smoke reached him. ‘They’re burning my city! Damn it, Aric, let me–’

‘Get yourself killed? No! Go, you bloody-minded fool!’ Krumholtz snapped. ‘Just up this street. Let’s… Look out!’

The street groaned as one of the barn-sized monsters charged towards them, its horns and spikes cutting vast trenches in the walls and buildings that rose to either side of the street. Krumholtz grabbed Ludendorf and threw him to the ground as artillery pieces – field cannon and organ guns – entrenched in the surrounding townhouses, coaching houses and stables at the other end of the street opened up. Men in Hochland livery reached out to grab the stumbling count and pulled him and his cousin out of the line of fire. The bounding monster fell, its brains turned to sludge by a cannon ball. Its massive body slid down the street, blocking it and preventing the beastmen that had followed it from reaching their prey.

Ludendorf turned and pulled himself free of his men’s hands. ‘Fire again! Pulverise them!’ he spat. ‘We can’t let them remain within our walls!’ He turned, wild-eyed. ‘Form up! Spearmen to the van! We–’

As the elector roared out orders, Krumholtz caught him by his fancy gorget and drove a knee up into his groin. Ludendorf sagged, wheezing. ‘Stop it,’ Krumholtz said. He turned. ‘Bosche! Heinreich! Muller! We need to pull back towards the palace… Begin fortifying this street. We’ll block the streets where they’re the most narrow and form a choke point. Organise a spear-wall and bowmen to defend the builders… I want a proper Tilean hedgehog by Myrmidia’s brass bits and I want it now! Bors! Commandeer some wagons from the palace walls! They’ll work well enough to begin ferrying survivors to safety!’

‘You… you hit me,’ Ludendorf wheezed, getting to his feet.

Krumholtz looked at him. ‘For your own good. We’re falling back.’

‘No, we can beat them,’ Ludendorf said. ‘We can drive them out!’

‘They outnumber us fifteen to one, cousin,’ Krumholtz said tiredly. ‘They’ve taken the walls and they don’t care about losses. Look around you,’ he continued. Ludendorf did, albeit reluctantly. The battle-madness that had clouded his eyes faded and he saw the exhaustion and fear that was on every face, and the loose way that weapons were clutched. Hochland had fought hard, but his army was on its last legs. He looked down at the runefang in his hand and felt the trembling weakness in his own limbs.

Ludendorf’s mouth writhed as a single bitter word escaped his lips. ‘Retreat,’ he said hoarsely.

Gorthor the Beastlord stood in his chariot and watched as his warriors streamed back towards the walls and away from the inner city, battered and bloodied. He snorted in satisfaction. They had taken the outer defences of the town as well as a number of prisoners, as he’d hoped, despite a surprising amount of continued resistance. Even better, he had divested himself of his more fractious followers in the process.

In one stroke he had weakened both the enemy to the front and the enemy within. He knew that he was not alone in recognising that fact. Surly chieftains glared at him from their own chariots. He had insisted that they stay behind, not wanting to waste their lives, merely those of their warriors. He grinned, black lips peeling back from yellow fangs. The expression caused a brief spurt of pain to cross his snout where the bullet had touched him. Annoyed, he rubbed the still drizzling wound. His spear quivered in sympathy and he glanced at it.

The blade of Impaler was sunken haft-deep into a bucket of blood that sat beside him on his chariot. It was crafted out of a giant’s skull and every so often it trembled like a sleeping predator, twitching in its dreams of savagery and mutilation. The blade craved blood and it was whispered by many among the herd that if that craving was not quenched, that Impaler would squirm through the dirt like a horrible serpent, seeking what prey it could find among the warherd. He drew the spear from its rest and ran a thumb along the blade. It pulsed in his grip, eager to taste the blood of the man called Ludendorf, even as was Gorthor himself.

Ludendorf. He sounded out the confusing syllables in his head, relishing their taste. A worthy enough foe, as men went. The man would have made a good beast, had he been born under different stars. Gorthor shook the thought aside. ‘The city is ours,’ he grunted, looking at Wormwhite, where the albino shaman was crouched with the other wonder-workers. They huddled and muttered and hissed. Wormwhite, as their spokesman, was shoved forward and he hopped towards Gorthor. Like all the rest, he was more a prisoner than an advisor, kept close at hand to interpret the dark dreams which sometimes blistered Gorthor’s consciousness with painful visions of the future.

‘No! Walls still stand,’ Wormwhite whined. ‘Gods say attack again!’ He gestured towards the sloping walls that surrounded the inner keep of the city, where the elector’s palace sat.

‘Do they?’ Gorthor rumbled, leaning on Impaler. The spear squirmed in his grip, hungry for death. ‘Why do they want me to do this?’ he said, fixing a baleful gaze on the shaman. Wormwhite cringed. ‘What is there that is not here? Death? Gorthor has built cairns of skulls along the length of the man-track!’ He leaned over the edge of his chariot, his teeth clicking together in a frustrated snap at the air. His nostrils flared at the scent of blood and fear. ‘They are trapped! Why waste warriors?’

‘Gods demand!’ Wormwhite said, slinking back. The others murmured encouragement. So too did the chieftains. Gorthor snorted in frustration.

‘Gods demand,’ he grunted, and shook his head. Black claws scratched at his wounded snout as he considered his options. The gods demanded much… at times, too much.

Visions wracked him suddenly, causing his body to shudder and his jaws to snap convulsively. When the warp was upon him, it was all he could do to keep his body from ripping itself apart. Every hair tingled and stood out from his body like a razor-spike as Wormwhite and the others gathered close, their nostrils quivering as they scented the strange magics spilling from him. He longed to drive them back, scavengers that they were, but he could only hunch forward and growl in agony as the images ripped across his mind’s eye. Ghost-memories of the future, where blighted trees of copper and meat burst through undulating, moaning soil and pale things danced continuously to the mad piping of Chaotic minstrels. That was the future that Gorthor was charged with bringing to fruition, and though he saw no sign of his people there, he was determined to fulfil that destiny all the same.

Breathing heavily as the warp-spasm passed, he leaned on his spear. Amidst the screaming cacophony of the vision he had seen flashes of beasts wandering the ruins of Hergig drunk and careless, and of an avalanche of brass and steel horses falling upon them. He snarled. Was that what the gods wanted? For his mighty herd-of-herds to be cut to pieces as it squatted drunk in the ruins?

His scouts had reported that forces were mobilising to the north and south. The Drakwald was being razed and while his army yet swelled, it was a tenuous thing holding it together. His people had no taste for prolonged conflict of this kind, and more and more of them would give in to the urge to attack the so-far so-solid walls of the elector’s palace, or, even worse, they would slink away, glutted on the loot of the city.

Wolfenburg had been easy compared to this. Taken by surprise, the defenders had fallen back from the main gate and from there they’d slowly lost the town. With nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, they’d been easy prey. But this was more difficult. The battle with the humans on the forest road had blunted his momentum and given them time to fortify and make ready. The lands around Hergig had been turned into a killing ground, full of traps and obstacles. Speed had been his primary weapon, and now it was lost. He glanced to the side at his chieftains – they traded looks among each other, grumbling and gripping weapons that might, at any minute, be turned against him. Even the blessings of the Dark Gods could only protect him from so much.

Idly he stroked the tattoos and brands that criss-crossed his hairy flesh, tracing them with one blunt finger. Each mark had been earned in battle with one enemy or another… there, the memory of his battle with a Chaos-giant as a youngling. Now he had a half-dozen of the beasts serving him. There, where the razor-fingers of one of the brides of the Goat with a Thousand Lovers had caressed him before she’d tried to devour him. Her sisters danced now at his beck and call. And had he not slain a mighty black orc warlord only weeks before, and set an army of the creatures to flight? In each battle, one common factor – he’d known the gods were watching over him. But now, now he wasn’t so sure.

Every rudimentary strategic instinct the Beastlord possessed had screamed at him to ignore the walled city of Hergig and continue on, even as they now pleaded that he ignore the palace. But the gods he served demanded that the sack of this town be complete. Thus, it must be done… but it would be done well. Experience had taught Gorthor there was always a weak point in any defence… a crumbling wall, a fire-weakened gate, loose stones, something. Anything. Like the bared throat of a defeated enemy, the weak point could be torn out and the battle won in one swift blow. He just had to find it. ‘Prisoners?’ he grunted.

‘Many-many,’ Wormwhite said, holding up his claws. ‘Not good though. Not many live long.’

‘Show me,’ Gorthor snarled, slamming the butt of his spear against the chariot base.

A few minutes later a captive screamed shrilly as he was dragged before Gorthor, blood staining his red and green livery. Arms stretched to the point of dislocation between the fists of a minotaur, he hung awkwardly. His legs were shredded masses of meat and malformed hounds pulled at them hard enough to cause the minotaur to stumble. With a snarl, a goat-headed gor chieftain slapped the dogs aside with the flat of his axe and kicked the stubborn ones into submission with his hooves. Then he grabbed the dying man’s chin and jerked his head up.

‘Whrrr?’ the gor rumbled, placing the notched edge of the axe against a hairless cheek. ‘Whrrr?’

The man sucked in a breath as if to answer and then, with a shudder that wracked his ruined frame, he went limp, his eyes rolling to the white. The gor shook him, puzzled. Then, with a roar, he swept the corpse’s head from its broken shoulders. The head bounced along the filth-covered ground, pursued by the snapping, snarling hounds. The gor spun and shook his axe at Gorthor’s chariot.

Gorthor stroked Impaler like a beloved pet as he eyed the body with something that might have been consternation. Another captive dead was one less who could tell Gorthor what he needed to know. He made a disgusted noise and turned to Wormwhite, crouching nearby. ‘Weak, Wormwhite,’ he grunted.

‘Men are weak,’ the shaman replied, bovine lips curling back from the stumps of black, broken teeth. Wormwhite’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘I talk, yes?’

‘Dd!’ the gor trumpeted, stomping a hoof onto a cobble, splintering it. He waved his axe at the shaman, spattering the latter’s ratty cloak with blood. ‘No tlk!’

‘Talk,’ the shaman said. He looked at Gorthor.

‘Yes,’ Gorthor snorted. ‘Talk.’

Nodding, the shaman hopped towards the body. Grabbing a hound by the scruff of its neck he yanked it up and pried the gnawed skull out of its jaws and flung the beast aside. ‘Make talk easy. Not dead long.’

With that, he drove two stiffened talons into the ragged neck stump and swung the head around to face the herdstone Gorthor had commanded be raised two weeks previous, on their first night encamped before Hergig’s walls. Muttering, the shaman raised the head and held it as a chill mist seeped from the surface of the herdstone and crept towards him. The tendrils of mist found the stump of the head and began to fill it. Wormwhite jerked his fingers free and let the head drop. Only it didn’t. Instead, it hung supported by the clammy mist, and slowly it rose, turning the head around. Mist seeped from the punctured eyes and dripped from the slack lips as Wormwhite howled and capered.

‘Ask it,’ Gorthor grunted.

‘Where is weakness?’ Wormwhite shrilled, dancing around the column of mist and the bobbing head.

The mouth moved loosely, as if it were being manipulated by stiff fingers. ‘N-nor-north wuh-wall… s… stones… luh-loose…’ it said in a voice like a whisper of air. Wormwhite cackled and jerked his hand. The mist abruptly retreated and the head fell with a thump. The hounds leapt on it in a snarling pile as the shaman turned back to his chieftain.

‘North wall,’ Wormwhite said, stamping a hoof. ‘Lead attack, crush the hairless,’ he continued, his eyes blazing. The gathered warriors of the herd rumbled in assent, and weapons clattered.

Gorthor’s lips twitched. ‘Attack when I say, Wormwhite. Not before,’ the Beastlord rumbled with false laziness. His dark eyes fixed on the shaman and then passed across the snarling muzzles of the half-dozen wargors who made up his inner circle. The gor who had been questioning the dead human was one of their number – a brute named Crushhoof, who shook his axe at Gorthor in a vaguely threatening manner. ‘Ttack now!’ he snarled. ‘Gds wnt t’ttack!’

‘I speak for gods,’ Gorthor said, shifting on his throne. ‘Not you, Crushhoof.’

Crushhoof reared back and brayed loudly, foam flying from his jaws. He pawed the ground and his warriors howled and rattled their spears. ‘Ttack! Ttack! Ttack!’ they shrieked in unison. Other herds picked up the chant and Gorthor suddenly thrust himself up out of his seat. Silence fell.

Crushhoof glared up at him, his gaze challenging. It had been coming for a long time now, and Gorthor wasn’t surprised. Crushhoof swung his axe through the air and grunted ‘Dfy gds?’

‘Said before, gods speak through me,’ Gorthor said slowly. ‘Challenge, Crushhoof?’

‘Chlnge!’ Crushhoof cried and bounded up onto the dais, his axe swinging. Gorthor stepped aside with an ease that was surprising for one of his size. As he moved, he grabbed Impaler. Crushhoof reacted quickly, twisting around and slicing at Gorthor. The axe scratched across the surface of Gorthor’s patchwork armour, leaving a trail of sparks.

Impaler slid across his palm smoothly and, almost of its own volition, the blade shot into Crushhoof’s belly. He brayed in shock as Gorthor jerked him into the air. Impaler wriggled deeper into the wound and the tip exploded out through the dying gor’s back.

Blood sloshed down onto Gorthor and he opened his jaws to accept the offering. Then, with a grunt, he tossed the twitching body to the ground, jerking Impaler free in the process. The butt of the spear thudded into the dais and Gorthor glared at his army. One big fist thumped his chest. ‘I lord here! Gorthor! Not Crushhoof! Not Benthorn or Splaypaw or Doombite! By this spear, Gorthor rules!’ he roared and hefted Impaler over his head. The gathered beasts howled in reply.

Krumholtz watched as the first volley of fire-arrows were loosed from the walls of the palace. His soul cringed at the thought of what would happen to any of the city’s citizens who were left out there, crouching in cellars or attics. But he said nothing. Mikael had moved beyond wanting to save the city into wanting to deny it to his enemies in the two days since they’d fallen back to the palace. He shared looks with the other counsellors, all of whom had similar looks on their faces. Worry, mingled with apprehension.

Ludendorf had many virtues, among them a savage zeal that made even battle-hardened priests of Sigmar give way. But his flaws were just as fierce at times, and zeal could become blind stubbornness as easily as courage. It had ever been such with the Ludendorfs; Hochland’s nobility were fiercer than almost any in the Empire. Such was the reason that the position of Elector’s Hound had been created. A second head, one to remain level when the elector inevitably gave vent to the rages of the blood. Of course, the position’s authority rested on the holder’s ability to get the elector in question to listen.

‘We’ll burn them out like rats,’ Ludendorf growled, glaring at the city as new smoke clouds began to billow up to join those created by the fires that the beasts had already started. Nearby, men poured water drawn from the palace’s cistern onto the walls, to ward against the fire. ‘I’ll not let him have it. Not after all we did to make this place impregnable,’ he continued, gesturing to the stout walls that surrounded the inner town of Hergig. ‘We can take back the city from here, Aric, after they’ve been driven out by the fire. We can take back the province. Drive the beasts into the Talabec, even!’ He looked down at the cramped courtyard at the huddled groups of civilians and soldiers without really seeing them. Krumholtz watched him rant. None of the other counsellors met his eyes, and he knew it was up to him.

‘We can’t hold the city, Mikael,’ he began evenly. ‘The north wall is unstable and the rest of the keep isn’t much better. We have to retreat, and pull that monster and his herd after us. We can give our people – the people of Hergig – time to flee.’ Seeing the look on the elector’s face, he said, ‘We would not be abandoning Hergig, Mikael… we are preserving Hochland.’

‘Preserving yourself, you mean!’ someone yelled from one of the surrounding buildings. Rotten fruit, broken bricks and the contents of bedpans flew at the men on the wall from the surrounding rooftops. At a barked command from Krumholtz, several men peeled off from a group below and hurried into the cramped buildings, kicking in doors and shattering windows along the way. Krumholtz watched as screaming people, starving and frightened, were dragged out of their homes and tossed into the street. Six in all, five of them labourers by their clothing. The sixth was a boy, thin and fragile-looking. He knew that they likely weren’t the hecklers. It didn’t matter. Krumholtz followed the elector down into the courtyard towards the prisoners.

‘Cousin?’ Ludendorf said, in the sudden silence.

Krumholtz swallowed and laid a hand on the hilt of the Butcher’s Blade. ‘My lord elector?’

‘Do your duty,’ Ludenhof said.

The Butcher’s Blade sprang from its sheath with startling speed and five heads rolled into the gutter. The blade halted above the neck of the sixth, the stroke pulled inches from the boy’s neck. Krumholtz stepped back, his face stony. ‘Five is an adequate example, I think.’

‘Do you?’ Ludendorf said, teeth bared. His fingers twitched on the hilt of his runefang and for a moment, Krumholtz feared he would complete the execution himself. Then his hand flopped limply, draped over the pommel. Ludendorf looked around the courtyard, meeting the hollow stares of his people. ‘Where would you go, Aric?’ he said mildly.

‘Talabheim,’ someone said. The other counsellors murmured agreement.

Ludendorf smiled. ‘Say you make it to Talabheim. And then? There’s little chance of the beasts breaching those walls, no, but they can swarm the land unopposed, which is likely what they want. The Drakwald is cancerous as it stands… imagine it in a season, when the beasts have a province to feed on; it will be a bleeding tumour in the gut of our Empire, Aric. One that will take us years to burn clean, if it’s even possible. Civilisation will be reduced to a few mighty cities, isolated and cut off from one another. Is that what you want?’

‘No, but–’

‘Only the preservation of the Empire matters. And that means breaking them here,’ Ludendorf said.

‘And what about preserving the people of Hochland?’

‘There’s an old hunter’s saying… when you and a friend are being chased by a bear, don’t try and outrun it; instead, trip your friend,’ Ludendorf said, looking up at the smoke. The shapes of harpies soared out of it, wailing and shrieking. Bows and long-rifles spoke, knocking several of the grotesque shapes out of the air. ‘While the bear is busy with us, we can gut it and render it impotent.’ He looked at Krumholtz. ‘There is a method to my madness, Aric. It’s not just stubbornness.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Krumholtz said, his voice pitched low. ‘Be honest with me Mikael. Is this pride talking?’

‘Don’t presume too much on our kinship, Aric,’ Ludendorf said, not looking at him.

‘Mikael, Ostland has already fallen. Even if reinforcements were coming, it’s unlikely they’ll reach us in time. Especially not with you burning the city out from under us!’ Krumholtz said, his voice growing louder. ‘But we can save our people now. All we have to do is–’

‘What? Abandon the capital? Flee into the wilderness?’ Ludendorf said. ‘And just how would you go about that, cousin?’

‘We parley,’ Krumholtz said. Ludendorf’s face flushed.

‘What did you say?’

Krumholtz took a breath. ‘We parley. That monster out there is many things, but he is not dumb. The more time he takes on us, the greater the likelihood his army will be diminished by desertion, infighting and attack. But if we offer him the city, we could escape! We can escort the survivors out, let them scatter into hiding and then march towards Talabheim to join up with their forces!’

‘Just give him the city? My city?’ Ludendorf said.

‘Better the city than the lives of our people!’

‘Their lives are mine to spend as I see fit!’ Ludendorf shouted. He gestured to the clumps of huddled survivors. ‘I would spill every drop of blood in the province to destroy that animal! That beast dares think to challenge us! And you want to surrender?’

‘For Hochland–’ Krumholtz began.

‘I am Hochland!’ Ludendorf roared. His voice echoed through the courtyard.

‘No! You are a prideful lunatic!’ Krumholtz shouted back, the words leaving his mouth before he realised it.

Ludendorf froze. Then, he pointed a shaking hand at Krumholtz. ‘Give me your sword.’

‘What?’ Krumholtz blinked. He was suddenly aware of the others pulling away from him, and he felt a sinking sensation deep in his gut.

‘Your sword. Give it to me. I’ll not have a coward as my Hound.’

Krumholtz’s face went stiff. ‘I’m no coward.’

‘No? Retreat this, fall back that. Always running, Aric, never holding. Never standing,’ Ludendorf hissed. His hands curled into fists. ‘Run then, Aric. Run right out those gates. Let’s see how far you make it, eh?’

‘Mikael…’

The runefang slid out of its sheath with a menacing hiss and Krumholtz stumbled back, reaching unconsciously for his own blade. He stopped himself from drawing it and let his hands fall. ‘Go,’ Ludendorf said. ‘Go and be damned.’

Krumholtz straightened and unbuckled his sword-belt. ‘As you wish, my count.’ Without looking at his cousin, he dropped the Butcher’s Blade in the dust and turned away. As he made for the gates, he was aware of the world closing in around him, narrowing his vision to a pinpoint. Outside the gates, damnation waited and capered. At the back of his mind, a tiny voice wondered which was worse, what awaited him outside, or what he’d seen inside.

No one tried to stop him.

No one called him back.

And when he died, no one was watching.

Ludendorf sat in his palace, the Butcher’s Blade resting over his knees, the runefang sunk into the polished wood of the floor. He heard a distant roar, and knew his cousin was dead. His fury had abated, and there was a bitter taste in his mouth. ‘You have to understand, Aric,’ he said to the empty room. ‘It’s not pride keeping me here. It’s not.’

He waited for a reply. When none was forthcoming, he closed his eyes. ‘It’s not,’ he said again.

The giant was a malformed thing, with jagged curls of bone bursting through its tortured flesh. It moaned as it uprooted another roof and tossed it aside with a crash. Four of the mammoth beasts worked steadily, pulling down buildings and slamming them into pieces even as hundreds of gors crawled across the shattered timbers, lashing them together. It had taken them three days, and the fire hadn’t helped matters. But Gorthor watched, and was pleased. He had enslaved the giants personally, his crude magics binding their weak minds to his own. Their thoughts fluttered at the edge of his consciousness like moths caught in a storm.

‘Waste of time, waste of time,’ Wormwhite muttered.

Gorthor tossed a lazy glance at the shaman. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We will take the town, as the gods want. But we will do it my way. Gorthor’s way.’

‘Stupid,’ one of the chieftains said. It wasn’t the first time that one of his sub-chieftains had commented on Gorthor’s insistence on building siege towers and battering rams, as opposed to simply forcing the gates in the traditional fashion.

Gorthor grunted and reached out. He grabbed the scruff of the chieftain’s neck and jerked the startled gor into the air. Muscles bulging, Gorthor shook the critic the way a hound shakes a rat and then tossed him into the dirt. ‘One gate,’ Gorthor growled. ‘One!’ He glared at them and gestured at the platforms being built. ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Cannot crush with only one finger.’ He made a fist. ‘Must use all at once.’ His lips quirked and he laughed. ‘One herd cannot destroy them, but many – all at once?’ He looked at them, wondering if the lesson had sunk in. He caught Wormwhite looking at him strangely, and Gorthor glared at the shaman. ‘Speak, shaman.’

‘This is not the way of the gods,’ the albino said. He spread his talons and witch-light curled around their tips. ‘We break, we do not build,’ he continued. ‘The gate is there! We should attack!’

‘The gods want the town, Gorthor will give them the town,’ Gorthor said matter-of-factly. ‘But I will not waste warriors to do so!’ He thumped a fist on his chariot. ‘One hole no good. Need many.’

‘Bld fr th’ bldgd,’ another chieftain growled. He slapped his brass-sheathed horn with his axe and set sparks to drifting down. Behind him, the red-stained hair of his followers bristled in eagerness.

‘The Blood God wants man-blood, not beast-blood!’ Gorthor countered, showing them his teeth. After Crushhoof, Brasshorn was one of the loudest grumblers. And Brasshorn’s Khorngors with him. Eager for blood and skulls and souls, and not very particular about where they came from.

‘Blood God wants all blood,’ Wormwhite said pointedly, eliciting snarls of agreement from Brasshorn and his followers. ‘Gods demand our blood, Beastlord. Demand man-blood! Demand we dance on the cities of men and crush skulls beneath our hooves! Crush, not create! Burn, not build! Smash, not speak!’ Wormwhite’s voice grew ever shriller and Gorthor’s hackles rose. The other shamans joined in, uttering warbling denunciations of his procrastination.

Gorthor had never feared the ire of the wonder-workers. As a blessed child of the gods, he had known that their magic was as nothing to his. But now, now he could feel the warp dancing along the edge of each prickled hair and he made his decision a moment later.

Wormwhite’s skull made a wet sound as Impaler passed through it and nailed the slop of his brains to a wall. Silence fell, as it had earlier with Crushhoof’s demise. Gorthor could feel the rage of the gods in his nerve-endings, but he ignored it and jerked Impaler free, brandishing it at his advisors. ‘Gods will have blood… seas and messes of it! But Gorthor will deliver that blood! Gorthor will deliver it his way! In his time!’

He looked around, noting with satisfaction that none dared meet his gaze. He stamped a hoof and bounded aboard his chariot. ‘And Gorthor says that time is now!’ he roared, waving his spear over his head. A spasm threatened him, but he forced it aside. He would listen to the gods after. After! Now was only for doing what they demanded.

His chariot rumbled forwards, picking up speed as the tuskagors pulling it snorted and snarled and chewed the ground with their hooves. The giants stomped past, easily outdistancing the chariots as they slammed the crude bridges down across the wall. And waiting there below were eager gors, carrying improvised scaling ladders and battering rams. They streamed like ants through the streets, some of them surrounding the gates of the inner palace even as one of the giants, peppered with hundreds of arrows, slumped against the weakened wall that Wormwhite’s necromancy had indicated and sent it tottering.

Something flashed behind Gorthor’s eyes as he squatted in the back of his chariot, waving Impaler. Visions of brass horsemen, cutting through his ranks. He shook it off. No. No, it wouldn’t be that way! The gods were watching him. He was doing as they asked! They would protect him as they had always done! He roared and clutched Impaler in both hands, shaking it high as his chariot thundered towards the gates of the palace. A giant was already there, tearing at the door even as oil burned its skin and belching guns found its eyes. It screamed piteously as it fell, taking the great wooden doors with it and only stopped when the iron-bound wheels of Gorthor’s chariot pulped its skull.

The last defenders of Hergig were waiting there for Gorthor and he bellowed his laughter to the sky as his chariot crashed into them. Impaler flashed out, lopping off limbs and piercing bodies, staining the stones red. Men fell beneath his wheels and were gored by his tuskagors. More chariots followed him, filling the wide avenue with a rolling wall of spiked death.

And then, in one moment, it all went terribly wrong.

When the horns sounded, Gorthor knew at once what his visions had been trying to tell him, and he felt a brittle sensation that might have been the laughter of the Dark Gods. Beneath his feet, the ground trembled. There were new smells on the wind and he looked up, peering back along the trail of destruction he had left in his wake. Over the heads of struggling combatants, he saw a gleam of something that might have been brass and he heard the blare of coronets. His visions returned, blasting over and through him, and a chill coursed down his spine.

Horsemen clad in burnished plate charged towards him, their steeds grinding his warriors into the street as they rode on. Gorthor speared the first to reach him, hauling the man off his horse. He swung the body of the brass man into the air and tossed it aside in a burst of furious strength. The fear that had seized him upon sighting the warrior faded into confusion. Was this what the gods had been trying to tell him? Was this what they had wanted? He snorted and turned away from the crumpled body. His warriors were locked in combat with the men and the city was burning. His nostrils flared and another spasm passed through him. He thought of Wormwhite’s dead eyes and bit back a snarl.

No, he was blessed. Blessed! Hergig would be his, gods or no. More trumpets blared out. He spun and watched as the defenders of Hergig fell upon his forces through the holes he’d made in their defences. The new arrivals crashed into the packed ranks of beastmen, carving through them with ease as the children of Chaos panicked, caught between the hammer and the anvil. Gorthor snarled in rage. He had to rally his troops. He had to re-order them, to pull them back and prepare to meet this new threat. He leapt from his chariot and clambered up a nearby statue with simian agility. Holding Impaler aloft, he bellowed out desperate commands. The armoured shapes of his chieftains and bestigors responded, cutting a path to him, but too late.

Even as the cream of his warherd assembled, the rest of it began to melt away, caught as they were in the pincers of the two forces. He could hear laughter in his head and knew at once that an ending was here.

The gods had demanded a sacrifice. He had thought it was this town, but he had been mistaken. Or perhaps blind. Those beloved of the gods were often the ones they called home soonest, and the thought filled him with berserk rage. Frothing at the mouth, his mind filled with the mocking laughter of the Dark Gods, Gorthor lifted Impaler and looked towards the palace. His fangs ground together and he dropped off the statue. Stones buckled beneath his feet and he straightened. Impaler raised, he began to run and his herd followed suit.

The gods demanded blood. And though they had turned from him, Gorthor would deliver it nonetheless.

Ludendorf drew the Butcher’s Blade with one hand and Goblin-Bane with the other. Today, at the last, he would be his own Hound. He hadn’t bothered to find another, and no one had volunteered.

He didn’t blame them. On some level, Ludendorf wondered if he were truly ruthless, or simply mad. Had he sent his cousin to death and doom for causing dissension where none could be tolerated, or for simply speaking the truth?

‘Aric,’ he said softly, examining the Butcher’s Blade in the weak light of day. ‘Why couldn’t you for once have just listened?’ His gaze slid to Goblin-Bane and he sighed. The runefang of Hochland seemed to purr as he made a tentative pass through the air with it. A weapon passed down from father to son, it lusted for battle with a passion that matched his own. It craved death, and spells of murder had been beaten into its substance during its forging. It longed to split the Beastlord’s skull, and he longed to let it. ‘Soon enough,’ he murmured.

He smiled grimly as he heard the strident ululation of the coronets of the Order of the Blazing Sun. When his men had reported that the knights had arrived, smashing into the rear of the army intent on breaching his gates, he’d scarcely credited it. Now he could hear battle being joined all around him as beast met man in the tangled streets before the palace, even as the walls crumbled beneath the onslaught of the giants.

The arrival of the knights was a sign that he’d been right. That Sigmar had wanted him to hold this place, to keep it from the claws of Chaos. His god had tasked him, and he fulfilled that task, though he’d been opposed at every turn. And now… now came the reward. He grinned and rotated his wrist, loosening up his sword-arm. He’d have the beast’s head on a pike, and toast to it every year on the anniversary of Aric’s death. His cousin would appreciate that, he was sure.

‘Of course you would. Least you could do for betraying me,’ he said, looking at the Butcher’s Blade again. It felt wrong to hold it in his hand, but he was determined that it should shed some blood. He needed his cousin’s sword at his side now more than ever. Aric had always been there for him in life, and it was only fitting he be there in death as well.

‘Plus, you’d hate to miss out on a fight like this, eh?’ he said out loud. If he noticed the looks some of his men gave him, he gave no sign. They hated him now, if they hadn’t before. But they loved him too. Better a ruthless man than a weak one, in times like these. Better a madman than a coward, that’s what they whispered in the ranks when they thought he wasn’t listening.

Beasts bounded through the shattered North Wall, roaring cries of challenge. He’d known they’d get in one way or another, and had fortified the inner keep with whatever had been available. Spearmen and hand-gunners crouched behind overturned wagons and at a shouted command men rolled uncorked barrels of black powder towards the shattered walls. Trails of fire followed them. Explosions rocked the courtyard, filling the air with smoke, rock and bloody body parts. A giant howled in agony as its legs disintegrated in an explosion and it toppled into the courtyard. It squirmed, trying to push itself upright, until a dozen spears pierced its skull.

Ludendorf laughed as the stink of roasting beast-flesh reached him. He would take back his city, or wipe it off the map in the attempt, no matter the cost. His laughter faded as he looked down at the Butcher’s Blade. Frowning, he tightened his grip on the hilt. ‘No pity. No remorse,’ he grunted. He clashed his swords together. ‘Kill them all!’ he roared, and his men hastened to do the deed.

Handguns barked and arrows hissed, thudding into hairy flesh. Creatures howled and screamed as they slipped on their own blood in their haste to close with their foes. His remaining soldiers attacked with renewed courage, yelling out praises to the Emperor and Sigmar. And if no one shouted his name, Ludendorf didn’t care. So long as they fought, he was satisfied.

Beastmen, having managed to avoid his troops, charged up the stairs of the palace towards him. The Butcher’s Blade caught one on the side of the head, killing it instantly. He blocked a spear-point with Goblin-Bane and buried his cousin’s sword in the beastman’s belly, pinning it to one of the ornamental pillars that lined the doors to the palace. Pulling it loose, he met the next, blocking its axe with both swords.

With a grunt he swept his blades apart, cutting the head off the axe. As the beastman reeled back in shock, Ludendorf kicked it down the stairs where several spearmen were waiting. ‘Finish it off and join the others,’ he said, shaking blood from his sword. The spears rose and fell, cutting off the creature’s squalls.

He stepped down the stairs and strode through the smoke after his troops, eager to get to grips with the beasts. A moment later, his eagerness was swept aside by surprise as a spear took the man nearest him, pinning the unfortunate soldier to a wall in a shower of brick dust and blood. Ludendorf turned and saw a familiar shape and his lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce snarl.

Gorthor jerked his spear loose from the brick and swung it over his head like an axe. ‘Ludendorf!’ Gorthor bellowed.

‘Gorthor!’ Ludendorf barked, gesturing with his swords. ‘We were interrupted earlier, animal! Decided to fight the dead after all?’

Gorthor shrieked like a wildcat and the Beastlord began to shake, his whole body rippling with spasms. The Butcher’s Blade looped out, only to be caught with a wet slap in the Beastlord’s palm. Gorthor jerked the weapon out of Ludendorf’s grip and backhanded him, sending him skidding across the cobbles. Ludendorf coughed as he rolled to a stop. He knew his ribs were likely broken and he felt like a punctured water-skin.

‘The gods demand your heart, man-chief!’ Gorthor said, stamping forwards. His warriors made to surge towards the downed count, and the Beastlord twisted, gutting the closest. ‘No! Gorthor’s prey!’ he snorted, glaring at his men. The beasts drew back, their weapons clattering against their shields in a dull rhythm. Gorthor shook himself, satisfied that none would interfere.

Ludendorf coughed and pushed himself to his feet. He was the only man in the courtyard, surrounded by a ring of beasts. There were soldiers on the walls, but they were too far away to save him, if he had even wanted such. He braced himself on his runefang and waited, grinning madly. ‘Gorthor’s prey, eh? Bit off more than you could chew this time, didn’t you?’ he spat, laughing. ‘You’re caught in a trap of your own making, you stupid animal. And now, like every other animal, you’re wasting time fighting instead of fleeing.’

‘Like you,’ Gorthor rumbled, eyes blazing. Ludendorf’s laughter choked off and the elector raised his sword, stung.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Shut up and fight, filth. Let the gods decide who’s the fool here.’

Gorthor gave a howl and Impaler glided forward. Ludendorf spun around it, Goblin-Bane chopping through one of his opponent’s horns. Gorthor turned, roaring, and Impaler shot out, nearly taking the head of his attacker. Ludendorf dodged to the side and his blade flickered out again, eliciting another agonised shriek from Gorthor.

‘This is my city! My territory! And it’s your death-ground, cur,’ Ludendorf said, lunging smoothly despite the ache in his chest. The tip of his blade burned like fire as it slid over Gorthor’s leg and the Beastlord stepped back instinctively. He backpedalled, weaving a wall between himself and that cursed sword. It dived at him like a snake, biting and ripping faster than he could see and its every touch caused him torment. ‘Hergig is mine! Hochland is mine! And I’ll kill any who try and take it from me!’ cried Ludendorf.

Frenziedly, Gorthor lashed out, flailing at his opponent with Impaler, battering the warrior from his feet. The man slipped on the bloody cobbles and lost his balance completely. Desperately, he tried to haul himself away from Gorthor, who drove one wide hoof into his chest, denting his cuirass and pinning him to the ground. Impaler’s blade swept to the side, cutting armour and flesh with a sizzle. Ludendorf screamed in agony as his belly split open like an overripe melon.

‘Gorthor’s now,’ the Beastlord grunted, kicking him and sending the dying man rolling across the courtyard. The beastmen set up a cacophony of triumphant screeches and barks and Gorthor, breathing heavily, raised his weapon in triumph.

His eyes filled with blood, and his ears filled with the sound of his own heart stuttering, Ludendorf clambered to his feet. His intestines draped loose over the restraining arm he had clamped across his belly and his fingers tangled in the clasps of his armour. He barely had the strength to grip his sword as he stumbled towards the broad beast shape raising its hell-weapon over its head.

With all his remaining strength, he swept his sword out across the beastman’s broad back. Bone blistered at the touch of the runefang and Gorthor shrieked like a wounded goat. A hairy fist caught the elector on the side of the head and the ground raced up to meet him. The beastman rose up over him, favouring his side, blood mingling with the foam dripping from his jaws. His body shuddered, as if gripped by fever.

‘Die!’ Gorthor snarled. Impaler lived up to its name, nailing Ludendorf to the ground. Muscles bulging, Gorthor jerked spear and man up and raised them up towards the sky. ‘Die for the gods!’ Gorthor howled.

Ludendorf, his teeth stained red, grabbed the haft of the daemon-weapon even as it squirmed in his guts. ‘You first,’ he rasped, jerking himself down the weapon’s length. Agony clouded his vision and his sword-arm felt like lead as it dropped down.

A moment later, Gorthor’s head flew free of his thick neck. Ludendorf fell, his sword sliding from his grip.

The great form of the Beastlord staggered four steps and sank to its knees, neck-stump spraying blood even as it toppled. The spear clattered away, the ugly runes decorating its surface dimming. Mikael Ludendorf crawled towards the head of the Beastlord and clutched it as somewhere, triumphant notes were blown from a hundred horns. The beasts ran then, leaving the two chieftains alone in the courtyard.

Ludendorf, dying, stared into the glassy eyes of Gorthor. His lips moved, shaping one word, but no sound came out. Beneath his body, he felt the stones of Hergig tremble as the knights of the Blazing Sun drove the beasts from his city. He heard the cheers as his people celebrated.

When he died, no one was watching.

Plague Doktor

C.L. Werner

‘Is he dead?’

The question was expressed with curiosity, but no real emotion. Ernst Kahlenberg always hated the cold, acid way Manfred Grau spoke, making his words less an observation than an audible sneer. Grau had a manner of making even the darkest of life’s moments just that little bit more unpleasant by injecting a tone of bitterness and contempt.

The body strewn beside the road didn’t care. It was past all caring, death rendering it immune even to Grau’s morbid humour. Kahlenberg turned the corpse onto its side, rolling it over so that his companion could see the long, vicious slashes. The body’s back resembled something from a butcher’s shop, many of the wounds so deep that bits of bone stood exposed.

‘Yes, I imagine that would be enough to kill somebody,’ Grau quipped, turning his eyes away from the gruesome sight. ‘What do you think, Ernst? Was our friend here killed by wolves, or maybe a panther?’

Kahlenberg shook his head. ‘He doesn’t look to have been gnawed on,’ he reported. As he spoke, Kahlenberg’s body stiffened, his legs clicking together with studied military precision. The gesture brought a wry smile to Grau’s face. Kahlenberg quickly relaxed, chiding himself for slipping into old habits. There was no reason for such formality, not with Grau. Not with anybody.

‘I’d say the wounds were made by a blade,’ Kahlenberg continued.

‘Nonsense!’ Grau protested. ‘The man’s been cut up like mutton.’ Seated in the box of a ramshackle wagon, Grau made an expansive gesture with his arm, indicating the rest of the roadway. The road was littered with a motley collection of oddments – coils of rope, bolts of cheap cloth, bits and pieces of battered tinware. A small oxcart leaned against the bole of an oak, its yoke cracked but otherwise looking quite serviceable. ‘There isn’t a bandit or goblin in this corner of Talabecland that would leave all this loot lying around!’

Kahlenberg walked towards the wagon. He was a tall, powerfully built man, tall enough to stare Grau in the eye, even with the older man seated atop the wagon. ‘I think I know a thing or two about sword wounds. I should know one when I see it.’ He pointed a finger back at the body. ‘You should know a few things too, unless you’ve managed to drink that away too. Go have a look at him yourself if you don’t trust me.’

Grau scowled, his sharp features displaying the disgust Kahlenberg’s suggestion provoked. He cast a wary glance at the corpse, then turned away. ‘I’ve put that sort of thing behind me, Ernst,’ he said. Grau reached beneath the wooden seat and retrieved a clay bottle. With practised ease, he removed the stopper with his thumb and pressed the vessel to his lips. ‘I’ve no more stomach for that kind of work. His Most Beneficent Excellency Emperor Boris saw to that.’

‘So now you hide in a bottle,’ Kahlenberg challenged.

Arching his eyebrow, Grau directed a withering stare at the big man. ‘And you? Is your hiding place any purer than mine? Don’t moralise with me, Ernst! I know you too well for that.’

Kahlenberg glared at Grau, the last shreds of dignity and self-respect struggling to assert themselves. It was a battle he knew was lost even as he started. He didn’t have enough honour left in him to argue, not least because the viper-tongued Grau was right. Kahlenberg was hiding, hiding from his past, from the things he had done and the things he should have done. Hindsight was the most terrible curse the gods could lay upon a man’s mind.

‘When you are through deciding if you want to wring my neck,’ Grau said, ‘you might go and have a look at the bric-a-brac our friend has left all over the road. Perhaps some of it might be worth selling.’

‘Don’t we have enough already?’ Kahlenberg asked, waving his hand at the bed of the wagon. The platform was piled high with dented helms and rusty bits of armour, notched swords and splintered shields. The pile represented the pickings of numerous battlefields and graveyards. Grau was a scavenger as cunning as any vulture, seemingly able to smell out a fresh corpse a league away.

Or perhaps that was giving the old villain too much credit. With plague rife throughout the land, it didn’t take any exceptional skill to find death. Morr’s scythe had reaped a grim harvest from Sudenland to Sylvania, depopulating entire towns and turning the cities into diseased charnel houses. Kahlenberg felt his gorge rise at the obscenities which were part and parcel of the scavenger’s trade. Ostensibly, Grau was a wandering peddler, selling second-hand weapons and armour. Exactly how second-hand his wares were was something his patrons were better off not knowing.

‘Emperor Boris has the fattest purse in the land and he shows no sign of being content,’ Grau said. ‘Are you suggesting that we poor vagabonds are more altruistic than our beloved Emperor?’

‘Save the speeches,’ Kahlenberg said, his voice bitter with shame. He started gathering up the rubbish littering the road.

‘Don’t forget his pockets,’ Grau called down from the wagon, pointing at the body beside the road.

Kahlenberg threw down the ratty sheet of linen he was holding. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ he snapped.

Grau stared at the corpse, his face twisting with revulsion. He took a swallow from his bottle. Wiping beads of alcohol from his moustache, he turned his gaze on Kahlenberg. ‘We’re going to have to discuss our working arrangement. I think you’ve forgotten who’s in charge.’

‘You need me more than I need you,’ Kahlenberg retorted. ‘How long do you think you’d last travelling from town to town by yourself?’

The suggestion caused some of the flush to drain from Grau’s cheeks. He tried to brush aside his companion’s threat. ‘I can find another sellsword anytime I like.’ Suddenly he forgot his argument with Kahlenberg. Standing up, he gestured excitedly at an object lying under the oxcart.

Kahlenberg responded with calculated slowness, knowing every moment of delay would infuriate Grau. The old scavenger hopped up and down, hock spilling from the clay bottle as he entreated his bodyguard to hurry.

Eventually, Kahlenberg reached the cart. Stooping, he crawled behind the cart wheel and dragged a heavy box out from under the wreck. His calloused hand stroked the fine leather covering, his eyes lingered over the gilt lettering and the little steel clasp locking the box. The lettering meant nothing to him, but he could appreciate the finery of the workmanship. He’d been playing the role of looter and scavenger too long not to have gained a thief’s eye for valuables.

‘Bring it here!’ Grau ordered.

This time Kahlenberg acted without reluctance, as eager as his employer to see what they had found. He handed the box up to Grau. The older man gave it a cursory glance, then brought a dagger scratching against the steel clasp. It was the work of a few minutes to get the box open, the blade scratching and slashing the expensive leather.

When the box was open, Grau uttered a snarl of outrage.

‘Cut yourself?’ Kahlenberg wondered.

‘No,’ Grau hissed back. His lean hand dipped into the box, removing a black leather hat. Kahlenberg recognised the style as that employed solely by the Physicians’ Guild, though he’d never seen one of them in black before. Grau had worn such clothes once.

‘Any gold?’ Kahlenberg asked.

‘No,’ Grau repeated. ‘No silver either, just a bunch of crude medical instruments, waxed cloak and gloves.’ The old man laughed bitterly, reaching down into the bag again and removing a strange leather mask that resembled the beaked visage of a raven. ‘Our late friend appears to have been a plague doktor.’

‘Plague doktor?’

Grau stuffed the ugly mask back into the box. ‘I don’t suppose you saw their sort at the Reiksguard barracks. You had the services of the Temple of Shallya and real physicians to hold back the plague. Well, for all those villeins and peasants who don’t have the privilege of nobility and wealth, they try to stave off the plague with plague doktors. A rabble of quacks and charlatans who fleece the desperate and the dying.’

‘Sounds profitable,’ Kahlenberg observed.

Grau fixed him with a withering stare. ‘The people we injure are already dead,’ he snapped, closing the box and dropping it into the bed of the wagon. Angrily he cracked the reins and the wagon jolted off down the road.

The wagon sloshed its way along the muddy mire that passed itself off as the main street of Amorbach. Chickens scattered before the hooves of Grau’s horse, cackling in protest as they darted through the gaps in wattle fences or fluttered up onto the earthen roofs of half-buried grubhuts. A fat old sow waddled indolently across their path, pausing to nose about in the mud until the wagon was almost upon her. A splotchy cat, lazing in the brick doorway of a storehouse, twitched its tail and watched as the two strangers rode deeper into the town.

Of any human inhabitants, however, there was no sign.

‘This place looks abandoned,’ Kahlenberg said, his fingers drumming against the sword sheathed at his side.

Grau simply uttered one of his grim chuckles. ‘You need to get out more,’ he berated his companion. ‘See a bit of the world.’ The scavenger’s voice dropped to a venomous pitch. ‘Spend some time in Sylvania where the Death has been at work. You’ll see plenty of deserted villages there. You’d know what desolation looks like. The houses smashed in and ransacked, the streets strewn with garbage, wolves prowling about. There’s a feeling to such places that can’t be forgotten and can’t be mistaken.’

‘Then where are all the people?’ Kahlenberg persisted. ‘We can’t exactly sell swords to chickens and pigs.’ He looked across the buildings on either side of the road. Most of them were grubhuts, crude shelters sunk into pits with a simple gabled roof rising above it. There were only a few real buildings, most of them built from wattle and daub. Interspersed among the buildings was a crazed confusion of pig sties, chicken coops, turnip patches and cabbage fields. A handful of sheep were even in evidence, grazing in a little field bordered by hedges.

Grau raised his hand, motioning Kahlenberg to keep quiet. The old man turned his head to one side and closed his eyes. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked, a smug smile on his face.

With Grau’s prompting, Kahlenberg found that he did hear a faint noise, a murmur of voices coming to them from some distance away.

‘They sound angry,’ Kahlenberg offered.

‘Good,’ Grau said, cracking the reins. ‘Angry people will be interested in swords and armour.’ He cast a despairing look over the sprawl of grubhuts and gardens. ‘Though whether any of them can afford to patronise us looks to be questionable.’

The wagon rattled off down the muddy lane. Neither of the men noticed the cat in the doorway suddenly spring to its feet, arching its back and spitting at something in the shadows beside the storehouse. The cat’s fright sent it yowling off across a cabbage patch.

Beady red eyes watched the animal flee, then returned their interest to the wagon. Only when it disappeared around the corner did the eyes withdraw, slipping back into the darkness.

The wagon came to a stop when it reached the sprawling mire which served Amorbach as its town square. A big old oak tree, its trunk discoloured by fungus and rot, loomed above the muddy morass, a wooden gibbet swinging from its thickest branch. The crumbling remains of a skeleton grinned from inside the cage, its eyeless sockets staring down at the people gathered below.

No question now where the denizens of Amorbach had gone. The growling mob scattered about the square numbered in the hundreds. Kahlenberg saw husky farmers brandishing pitchforks and wizened weavers waving bludgeons over their heads. A tangle of shepherds dressed in woollen breeks and sheepskin boots had begun fashioning torches from strips of cloth and slats torn from the roof of a grubhut bordering the square. A handful of men in armour were visible, their simple suits of brigandine sporting the heraldry of Baron von Greitz, but these worthies didn’t seem inclined to stop the unrest. Far from it, their voices were among the loudest in the mob.

The focus of the violence was a lone man dressed in a black cassock trimmed in scarlet. A heavy chain circled his waist and from one of the links a large copper hammer hung. The brand of a twin-tailed comet was burned into the man’s shaven pate, the mark made all the more visible as blood from his bruised scalp trickled into the old scar. Rocks, heads of cabbage, even live chickens pelted the man as he tried to face the mob. Each time he raised his voice, he tried to read from the book clenched in his hand, but a fresh barrage of rubbish forced him to retreat.

‘Take Sigmar back to Altdorf!’ a snaggle-toothed cotter roared. ‘Or has Boris taxed all the gods from the capital?’

‘Sigmar is the light and the shield,’ the beleaguered man declared. ‘He is the protector–’

‘Tell that to my Hilda!’ raged a wart-nosed woman, her face contorted with pain and fury. ‘Tell that to all the children who’ve died!’

‘Where’s your god’s mercy?’ mocked one of the shepherds. ‘Where’s Sigmar’s protection when we need it? Why can’t he stop the plague?’

A hulking virgater, his beefy hands wrapped about the heft of a double-headed wood axe swaggered from the crowd. ‘Things are worse than ever because of you! You and all your talk about Sigmar! What have we to do with Sigmar? Taal and Rhya are our gods, not some mouldering old Emperor none of us has seen!’

‘You brought the plague upon us!’ snapped a wiry little sokeman. ‘You stirred up the spirits of the night and caused them to set a miasma upon the town!’

The Sigmarite shielded himself with his arms as a rain of rocks clattered around him. He tried to shout down his accusers, but even as he moved to defend himself, the mob closed upon him. The hulking virgater drove the peen of his axe into the Sigmarite’s belly, doubling him over. A pair of shepherds moved to seize their helpless prey.

Grau cursed under his breath as the wagon suddenly lurched. Kahlenberg leapt to the ground, his sword in his hand almost before his boots sank into the mud. ‘Let it be, man!’ Grau called out. ‘This isn’t Reikland, and by the gods this isn’t our business!’

Kahlenberg ignored his comrade. Boldly he shoved his way through the mob. Surprised villeins and cotters scrambled out of his way, the sight of a sword, not to mention the grim air of authority which the tall man exuded, making them give ground. He was beside the oak in only a moment, his powerful hand closing about the wool hood of one of the shepherds moving to seize the embattled Sigmarite. Savagely, Kahlenberg pulled the peasant away, flinging him to tumble across the muddy square.

The other shepherd forgot about the Sigmarite and rushed at Kahlenberg, swinging his heavy crook at the interloper. It was the sort of manoeuvre that had crippled wolves and warded off panthers, but this was a different kind of foe. Kahlenberg’s blade licked out, slashing through the crook and splitting it in half. The shepherd staggered back, eyes wide with shock. Kahlenberg watched him carefully, waiting for any sign that the peasant still wanted to fight.

‘Who be ye?’ growled the husky virgater. Though the man still held his axe, he had taken a good number of steps back, putting himself closer to the rest of the mob.

‘Someone who doesn’t like seeing priests abused by a superstitious rabble,’ Kahlenberg growled back. It was the wrong thing to say. The insult struck fire in the still smouldering embers. Angry murmurs spread through the crowd. The bodyguard was, after all, only one man.

‘Stay behind me, father,’ Kahlenberg told the Sigmarite. Slowly the two men began backing away from the advancing mob. They could hear Grau cursing lividly as some of the peasants converged upon his wagon. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t keep them from rifling his wares.

‘Your bravery will not go unnoticed,’ the Sigmarite told Kahlenberg. ‘We shall both sit at Sigmar’s right hand this night and shine in the glory of the divine personage.’

‘I’d prefer if Sigmar would do something to extend my time in this life,’ Kahlenberg said.

Suddenly, a cry went up from the peasants around the wagon. They scurried away from Grau like a pack of whipped curs. One of them ran over to the hulking virgater and held a quick conference with him and the wiry sokeman. Both men raised their voices in angry shouts, calling the mob to keep its peace. Kahlenberg and the priest could only watch dumbfounded as the ringleaders of the mob marched over to Grau’s wagon. The sokeman knelt in the mud, recovering the leather box from where the rummaging peasants had dropped it. He glanced inside, then hurriedly closed the case. Deferentially, he strode over and handed the box up to Grau.

‘Forgive us, herr doktor,’ the sokeman said. ‘But how could we know it was you!’

Kahlenberg stared in confusion at the peasant’s words, but if Grau was surprised, the old scavenger gave no sign. A scowl on his face, he reached down and took the box from the sokeman. ‘Did you expect me to come riding into this town dressed in black?’ he challenged. ‘That would help the reputation of Amorbach! Let every village and hamlet in the province know there’s a beak doctor in the town and see how quick they find a new market for their crops!’

The words had their desired effect. A new fear worked its way onto the faces of the mob. They hadn’t considered that the presence of the plague in their community would make their neighbours shun them. With so many of the townsmen stricken, Amorbach was more dependent than ever upon trade with the outside world. The wisdom and foresight of Grau’s discretion impressed them almost beyond words.

‘Forgive us, Herr Doktor Tanz,’ the big virgater pleaded. ‘We didn’t think.’ He waved his huge hands, gesturing at the crowd. ‘Fifteen have already fallen to the Death and another thirty are sick. We didn’t know what to do! We were afraid you weren’t coming! That you took our retainer and decided to stay in Morburg…’

‘I am here now,’ Grau announced. He reached into the box, removing the black physician’s hat and setting it on his head. ‘Who is in charge here?’ he asked.

‘The bailiff’s dead,’ the little sokeman said. ‘And the beadle is sick.’ A nervous twitch pulled at his face. ‘I… I guess that means… I’m in charge.’

‘And you are?’ Grau demanded, arching one of his eyebrows in an expectant glower.

‘Fechner,’ the little man answered. ‘I’m the cart-reeve.’

‘He’s the only able-bodied man left in the town who was appointed by Baron von Greitz,’ the virgater explained. ‘But if you need anything done, just ask me.’ He tapped a hand against his brawny chest. ‘Gottlob Boltzmann.’

Grau favoured the self-important Boltzmann with a thin smile. ‘Very well, friend Boltzmann. I will need suitable accommodation for my assistant and myself. I take it you have initiated steps to sequester the infected? Good. You will see that my quarters are established away from the area where the sick are housed. I will need chambers large enough to conduct my examinations and a place to secure my… instruments,’ he said, gesturing to the scavenged weapons and armour in the wagon behind him.

‘Everything will be done, herr doktor,’ Fechner said, bowing low before the wagon. ‘You will have the finest Amorbach has to offer.’

‘I am accustomed to nothing less,’ Grau told the cart-reeve.

‘When will you begin your work?’ Boltzmann asked.

Grau shot the virgater an annoyed look. ‘In the morning,’ he stated. ‘The road has been long and I am weary. Moreover, the reception we received did not agree with my assistant. He will need time to compose himself before he can aid me in my examinations.’

The attention of the mob drifted back towards the centre of the square where Kahlenberg and the priest stood with their backs to the oak. Slowly, the bodyguard sheathed his sword.

‘I think you’ll be safe now,’ he told the Sigmarite, clapping his hand on the cleric’s shoulder. The priest pulled away, glaring at his former protector.

‘Keep your unclean foulness off me!’ the man spat. ‘Plague doktors! Vultures! Graveyard rats!’ He clenched his hands into fists, shaking them at the sky. ‘Is it not enough that misery has set its talons upon this community, must you compound their misfortune!’

The crowd stared icily at the raging priest. ‘What do you want us to do about that fool, herr doktor?’ Boltzmann asked Grau.

Grau smiled and rubbed his chin, a malicious twinkle in his eye. ‘It is bad form to strike priests and madmen,’ he said. ‘Even when they are one and the same. Let him talk. It doesn’t mean any of you have to listen. After all, his god hasn’t stopped the plague.’

‘That is why I am here.’

Grau stretched out in the enormous bed, sighing contentedly. He reached over to the taboret set beside the bed and wrapped his hands around a flagon of wine. A shaky hand brought the vessel to his lips and managed to pour more of the red liquid into his mouth than onto the fur blankets. Grau smacked his lips when the flagon was empty, hurling the depleted vessel away with exuberant gusto.

‘By Ranald!’ he roared. ‘Did you ever see such a spectacle! The whole town eating out of my hand like I was the Emperor himself!’ He leaned up from the bed, focusing his stare on Kahlenberg seated in a chair near the window. Grau wagged his finger at the warrior. ‘Do you know I could have asked any one of those superstitious wretches to send his daughter up here tonight and they would have called it a great honour! By Ranald, if I could have been sure they weren’t sick, I’d have tried it!’

Grau sat up straighter, a frown forming. Through the veil of alcohol, he was slow to appreciate the sullen disapproval exuding from his comrade. ‘Oh cheer up, you idiot!’ he snarled. ‘Too much marching and discipline has ruined you! I knew you’d been in the Reiksguard a damn sight too long!’

Kahlenberg rose from the chair, his fists clenched at his side. ‘You go too far, “herr doktor”. I’d mind my tongue.’

A caustic chuckle answered the threat. ‘If not for me, you’d be lying in the Kaiserplatz with your belly split open. Just another victim of the Bread March.’

‘Bread Massacre,’ Kahlenberg growled. ‘Emperor Boris turned out his Kaiserjaeger on the petitioners. Rode them down.’ He smashed his fist against the wall. ‘Gave them steel instead of rye.’

‘It was the Reiksguard’s duty to stand beside the Kaiserjaeger,’ Grau declared, his tone like a lash. ‘Not to support the rioters. Can you blame the Emperor for treating you like a traitor?’ The sardonic levity drained from Grau’s voice. ‘Of course I’m a traitor too. Helping a dying knight when I should have left his carcass in the street for the muckrakers to haul away. But for that failing of conscience, I might be attending the capital’s great and good, a respected chiurgeon…’

‘So instead you decide to play at being a plague doktor,’ Kahlenberg said. ‘What was it you told me about looting the dead? That we can’t injure them any further?’

‘These people are already dead,’ Grau rose from the bed, swaying unsteadily on his feet. ‘They just don’t know it yet.’ He kicked the leather box which bore the name of Doctor Tanz. ‘There’s no curative for the Black Death, even the Sisters of Shallya can’t stop it. If the gods can’t put an end to the plague, what can mere men do?’

Grau opened the box and removed the leather mask, his hand caressing the grotesque beak. ‘What can men do? We can help the doomed by giving them hope, making them believe they can be saved.’

‘And for that, you will charge them handsomely.’

‘Everything,’ Grau said. ‘Everything this town has to offer. I’m not some vagabond scavenger now, Ernst! I’m Herr Doktor Tanz, master of life and death!’

Kahlenberg stalked from the room, feeling sickness growing in the pit of his stomach. ‘How does it feel, Manfred? How does it feel to be so damned important?’

Grau removed another bottle from the taboret. Unable to manipulate the stopper, he smashed the neck across the bedstead. ‘Good, Ernst,’ he chuckled, taking a swig from the bottle. ‘It feels damned good!’

The plague doktor sank back onto the fur-strewn bed, laughing as the outraged knight left the room. However much Kahlenberg detested him, Grau knew the knight would stay by his side. There was a debt of honour between them, an obligation that Kahlenberg couldn’t cast aside. No, his comrade would help him carry out this charade. And when Amorbach had given Grau all it had to offer, Kahlenberg would accompany him to the next town, and the one after that. And the one after that. That was one good thing about the plague – there was no shortage of desperate people willing to do anything and believe anything to escape its toils.

As he drifted into an inebriated slumber, Grau fancied he heard the shutters over the window creak open. He had the impression of scratchy voices whispering from somewhere inside the room. He tried to make out what they were saying, but couldn’t make sense of the sounds. The effort only fatigued him all the more and soon he was asleep.

The people of Amorbach kept their distance the next day as Grau and Kahlenberg marched down the muddy street. Grau had donned the regalia of the late Tanz, his lean body cloaked in the black raiment of the plague doktor. A long black coat swathed his body, covering him from shoulders to ankles. Thick black leggings, heavy boots and long gloves covered what parts of his body the coat left exposed. A hood covered his head, over which Grau wore a physician’s wide-brimmed hat. Coat, hood, leggings, boots and gloves were all fashioned from waxed leather, glistening with a watery sheen as the sunlight struck the plague doktor’s costume.

Over his face, Grau wore the raven-like mask, its long beak stuffed with roses, camphor and orange blossoms, their pleasant aroma intended to counteract the infectious reek of pestilence and decay. Tiny glass lenses set to either side of the beak provided the plague doktor his view of the world.

As Grau marched through the streets, vinegar-soaked sponges jounced from straps fastened to the shoulders of his coat and tiny copper bells jangled from the fringe of his hood. Waxed parchment seals, some bearing the symbols of Shallya the goddess of healing and mercy, others invoking grim Morr, god of death and dream, fluttered from the belt circling Grau’s waist. In his hand, the plague doktor carried a slender wooden cane carved into the shape of a cormorant, one end taking the shape of the bird’s curled beak, the other formed into a spread talon.

Kahlenberg followed close behind Grau, carrying the plague doktor’s leather box. Reticent about aiding his companion in this cruel deception, the knight couldn’t quite keep his distaste for the task ahead from his face.

‘Cheer up,’ Grau advised, his voice muffled by the mask. ‘We’ll visit a few sickhouses, mutter a bit of impressive doggerel, play up to a few peasant superstitions and then be on our way. Just remember, don’t touch anything when we get where we’re going.’

‘Shallya have mercy on us,’ Kahlenberg groaned.

Grau stopped, turning to stare at his comrade. Though his face was obscured by the mask, Kahlenberg knew there was a sneer on the plague doktor’s face. ‘Why won’t she? Isn’t that her job?’

The men proceeded down the street. Turning down a narrow lane, they noticed a change in the atmosphere, an air not simply of squalor and poverty, but one of decay. The sunken grubhuts now bore white chalkmarks upon their doors. As they walked along, they saw a pair of men hauling a body from one of the huts, employing meathooks to speed their labour. Unceremoniously the men dumped the body onto a cart, then stripped off their gloves and threw them after the corpse.

‘They’ll be off to soak themselves in vinegar next,’ Grau said, tapping one of the sponges hanging from his coat. ‘It’s supposed to fend off miasma, though I imagine some vinegar merchant was the first to make such a claim.’

Kahlenberg watched the corpse-cart slowly creep down the lane. ‘Monstrous,’ was the only word he could use to describe the scene. He’d seen much brutality over his life, but there was something chilling about the callous way the peasants had treated their dead neighbour.

‘I dare say before the local priest of Morr died, they treated corpses with a bit more formality,’ Grau observed. ‘Of course, when that worthy himself died of the plague it may have diminished the appeal of pomp and ceremony.’ The beaked face turned suddenly, focusing on one of the few half-timber structures rising above the grubhuts. ‘Ah, here we are!’ Grau announced. ‘Let’s see if we can’t do something to help Amorbach’s beadle. I dare say it would be amusing to get somebody more competent than Fechner running things here.’

Using the beaked head of his cane, Grau rapped on the door, knocking chalk dust from the mark scrawled across the portal. After a few moments, the door was opened by a young girl, her face retaining an element of beauty despite the paleness of her skin and the leanness of her features. By the quality of her dress, it was obvious that she was no mere domestic but someone of standing within the household.

She drew back in alarm when she found Grau’s ghoulish figure standing beyond the doorway, but the girl quickly recovered. Everyone in the town knew the plague doktor had come to help them. However frightening his appearance, she recognised Grau as a messenger of hope, not menace.

‘Forgive me, herr doktor,’ the girl said, curtseying before him. ‘Please, come inside. I cannot thank you enough for coming.’

Grau slipped across the threshold, motioning for Kahlenberg to follow. ‘I am given to understand that Otto Sandauer is an important man in Amorbach. Where better to begin than with the town’s most important inhabitant?’

The girl lowered her eyes in a demure fashion. ‘You are kind to say so, but my father was only the beadle. He wasn’t very important at all… until… until…’

‘We understand,’ Grau said. He stopped himself before reaching out to comfort the upset girl. ‘The plague has spared neither great nor small. But perhaps we can prevent Death from claiming your father.’ He gestured with his cane, pointing down the narrow hallway. ‘If you would take me to your father.’

The flash of hope that stirred in the girl’s eyes stabbed at Kahlenberg’s heart like a dagger. He grabbed Grau by the shoulder, hissing a warning into his ear.

‘Leave?’ the plague doktor scoffed. ‘And disappoint this poor waif? Now which of us is being cruel?’

Grau let his bodyguard digest that question while he turned and followed the young woman down a clay-walled hallway and into a small chamber at the rear of the house. The room was dark, heavy curtains blocking the only window, but at Grau’s suggestion, the girl quickly produced a candle.

By the flickering light, Grau saw his patient. He was thankful for the aromatic smells rising from the beak of his mask, because he certainly didn’t think he’d like the smell of his patient. What sort of man Otto Sandauer might have been before he took sick it was impossible for Grau to say, but what lay sprawled among the soiled bedclothes was a withered scarecrow with wasted features, toothless gums and only a few thin strands of hair clinging to his scalp. His limbs were almost as thin around as the plague doktor’s cane and Grau could almost count the wretch’s ribs through the grimy material of his nightshirt.

‘Can you help him?’ the girl pleaded, tears welling up in her eyes.

Grau gestured with his cane, motioning for her to pull the sheet away from her father. ‘I must first determine what is wrong with him,’ he said. ‘The effects of miasma can take many forms.’

The plague doktor stepped over to the bed. The man lying there barely seemed to register Grau’s presence, simply staring up at the ceiling. His breathing was laboured, each ragged gasp appearing to come with only the greatest exertion.

Grau reversed his grip on the cane, using the clawed foot to tilt Sandauer’s head, allowing him to see the swollen throat. A loud scrambling noise from overhead distracted the plague doktor. He stared intently at the ceiling, listening as the raucous sounds continued. It was as if a gaggle of children were scurrying across the roof. Remembering he was in a proper house, not a sunken grubhut, Grau dismissed the image.

‘Rats,’ the girl apologised. ‘They are all over Amorbach these days. Bigger and bolder than they have ever been.’

Grau nodded and returned his attentions to his patient. Using the cane, he pulled back Sandauer’s nightshirt, exposing his chest. Prodding the sick man’s body, he was soon afforded a good view of the swollen black buboes clustered about the armpits. A dark liquid was oozing from the sores. Grau had seen enough of the plague over the last year to be surprised the man had lasted this long in such a condition.

‘It is the Death,’ the plague doktor pronounced. His statement brought a moan of horror from the girl. Grau shifted his gaze to Kahlenberg, who was standing just outside the doorway of the squalid little room. Annoyed by his companion’s glowering disapproval, Grau made a quick decision.

‘All hope is not lost,’ Grau assured the girl. ‘There are measures which we can take to combat the miasma.’ He snapped his gloved fingers, waving Kahlenberg into the room. Approaching his reluctant assistant, Grau opened the leather box, removing a small wooden case. From this, he removed a bloated toad. Setting the noxious creature on the floor, he gestured with his cane for the girl to take it. ‘We must try to rebalance your father’s humours. Tie this reptile to your father’s sores. It will draw out the pernicious effects of the miasma.’ The plague doktor nodded his beaked head. ‘You must also take steps to prevent more malignant vapours from entering this house.’ He raised his finger, emphasising the importance of this point. ‘Soak cloth in vinegar and place it beneath every door and across every windowsill. The purifying scent of the vinegar will stave off the miasma.’

A stream of gratitude exploded from the girl as tears welled up in her eyes. She moved to take Grau’s hand and kiss it, but the plague doktor held her back with a jab of his cane. The eyes behind the glass lenses of the mask were wide with terror.

‘Open your bodice,’ Grau ordered. He heard the sullen growl of protest Kahlenberg uttered but gave his guard no notice. This wasn’t some lascivious abuse of his authority. There was a much more important reason for voicing such a command.

Timidly, the girl pulled at the drawstring and opened the front of her dress. Irritated by the slowness of her compliance, Grau reached out with the beaked head of his cane and pulled the garment away. He didn’t give any regard to the milk-pale curves and contours that stood exposed, his eyes instead fixed upon the swollen black bumps beneath her arms.

‘Please, don’t… don’t tell anyone,’ the girl pleaded. ‘There is an old cotter-wife who brings us food. If she knew I was sick too, she would stop coming.’

‘Don’t worry, we won’t say anything,’ Kahlenberg told her.

Grau reached into the wood case and removed a second toad, setting the creature down on the floor. ‘Follow my prescription and in a few days you will be out of harm,’ he told her. Again, he noted the scratching noises from overhead. ‘Once you are both back on your feet, you should do something about your rat problem.’ Grau tapped the end of his cane against the floor, and waved his hand in the age-old sign of good fortune.

‘My associate will collect our fee,’ Grau said.

Kahlenberg maintained a sullen silence as the two men withdrew from the doomed household and returned to the muddy streets of Amorbach. Grau walked ahead of the glowering knight, growing more irritated with his companion with each step. Pangs of conscience were something Grau couldn’t afford, not since his exile from Altdorf. If a man was going to survive in the world, then he had to be just as ruthless as it was.

‘They’re both going to die anyway,’ Grau stated. ‘At least I gave them a little hope to cling to in their final hours.’

Kahlenberg didn’t say anything, simply glaring daggers at the plague doktor.

‘You’re upset about the money, aren’t you?’ Grau asked. ‘If I hadn’t charged her a fee, she wouldn’t have believed a word I said. There’s a certain propriety about these things.’ The plague doktor swatted a stone from the street with his cane. ‘You would prefer I left everything for Boltzmann and Fechner to squabble over? If you want a pair of vultures, there’s a matched set for you!’

‘It isn’t right,’ Kahlenberg growled. ‘You took advantage of them in the most cruel way…’

‘Right?’ Grau shouted. ‘Who are you to decide what is right! You rode out to help starving people stand up against a grasping tyrant and for that you were left to die in the gutter! Is that right? Learn one thing if nothing else, Ernst. The gods care little for men and even less for the suffering we endure. To survive, you have to take every opportunity that comes your…’

Grau left his cynical wisdom unspoken, his words trailing off into a scream of pain that even the heavy beak mask couldn’t muffle. The plague doktor collapsed to the muddy street, his gloved hands clutching at the jagged wound in his side, his eyes staring in disbelief at the blood coating his fingers.

Kahlenberg threw down the heavy leather box, the apparatus of the late Doktor Tanz spilling across the ground. The knight ripped his sword from its scabbard, a motion that was driven more by instinct than by thought. For as he gazed upon the monstrous apparition standing over Grau, terror welled up inside the warrior’s breast and fear thundered through his veins.

They had been passing down a dingy lane that coiled its way through a cluster of grubhuts. Except for a few wandering chickens, the street had been devoid of any sign of life. Here, nearly every door bore the chalkmark sign of infection and if there were any still living in this part of town, they kept themselves behind closed doors.

One denizen, however, had not stuck to this rule. As Grau walked near to a particularly ramshackle and decayed grubhut, a shape had burst from the structure’s rotten roof. A blur of motion and it was upon the plague doktor, steel flashing from a long hairy hand.

No, not a hand. A paw, a filthy, verminous paw covered in greasy brown fur, each finger tipped with a long dirty claw. Grau’s attacker wasn’t human, or indeed any sort of creature endowed with life by any god of sanity. It was a rat, a huge chittering rodent that compounded its obscenity by affecting the posture of a man and clothing its furry body in tattered rags and bits of armour. The curved sword in the monster’s paw was rusty with neglect, its edge notched and pitted with corrosion. Blood dripped from the blade, the blood of Manfred Grau.

Kahlenberg had fought orcs and goblins and the foul beastkin of the wilds, but never had he imagined so repugnant a nightmare could walk the earth. The ratman bared its sharp fangs at him, its beady eyes gleaming with unbridled malignance. A long, hairless tail lashed through the mud, writhing with loathsome exuberance.

A pained moan from Grau snapped Kahlenberg from the spell of terror that gripped him. He owed his life to the physician, whatever crimes and misdeeds stained the plague doktor’s soul. Roaring the name of Ulric, god of warriors, Kahlenberg charged the leering monstrosity.

The ratman snarled at him, whipping its sword at Kahlenberg’s face with a speed that was nothing short of incredible. Ironically, it was the very speed with which the creature made its assault that caused the blow to miss its victim, the bloodied edge of the sword flashing inches before the charging knight’s eyes. The warrior drove on, sweeping in before the ratman could recover from its mistake. Kahlenberg brought his heavy steel chopping down at the monster’s skull.

Again, the amazing speed of the ratman was displayed. Uttering a squeal of fright, the hideous creature dropped to all fours and darted to one side. Kahlenberg’s sword cleaved through nothing more substantial than thin air, the fury of his attack almost causing the knight to flounder and topple into the mud.

His foe was instantly rushing him, trying to exploit the advantage of an off-balance and vulnerable adversary. Kahlenberg kicked out with his boot, smashing the monster’s fanged muzzle. The ratman was hurled backwards, whining and squealing as it spit out broken teeth.

Kahlenberg raised his sword, prepared to deal final justice to the cringing ratman. As he turned towards the creature, however, he felt a flash of pain in his back. The warrior spun about, his blade slicing through the air. A second ratman ducked and scurried, a chitter of laughter hissing through its fangs. It held a ripple-bladed dagger in its paw, a dagger that was dark with blood. Kahlenberg’s blood.

The warrior could feel strength and vitality draining out of his body. The slinking attacker had struck a mortal blow. But while there was still life in his bones, the knight would fight on his feet. Honour would demand nothing less.

‘We are even now,’ Kahlenberg told Grau. He made a weak wave of his hand, motioning the plague doktor to hurry down the street. Feebly, Grau regained his feet. He gripped the slender cane in his hands, holding it as though to brain one of the creeping ratmen. Kahlenberg noted the gesture and shook his head. ‘Run,’ he ordered. ‘I won’t be able to keep them back long.’ A bitter laugh bubbled past his lips. ‘I’m already dead.’

Hearing his own words thrown back at him was enough to break the heroic resolve that had so briefly risen inside Grau’s breast. The plague doktor knew Kahlenberg was right. Standing beside his friend would only see them both die needlessly. Pragmatism drove Grau into headlong flight. Behind him he could hear the clash of steel as battle was rejoined.

The plague doktor didn’t look back.

Every step sent fresh agony searing through Grau’s body. He cast aside his cane, clapping both hands to the wound in his side. He could feel fresh blood spurting between his fingers, defying his efforts to pinch the jagged tear closed. Without help, Grau knew he couldn’t last long.

However long the plague doktor thought he had, he found himself cheated. As he limped down the muddy lane, a scraggly shape draped in ratty rags scurried from its hiding place inside a haystack. There was a sword gripped in the thing’s paws, the edge serrated like the blade of a saw.

Grau recoiled from the ratman, terror pounding in his heart. The creature raised its muzzle, its nose twitching as it drank the smell of his fear. A peal of merciless laughter shook the hunched vermin.

‘Leave me alone!’ Grau pleaded as the ratman crept towards him. ‘I’ve done nothing to you!’

The monster paused and again its body shook with laughter. To Grau’s mounting horror, the thing spoke to him in a debased Reikspiel. ‘Doctor-thing,’ the ratman accused, pointing a claw at the man. ‘No-not forget smell-scent! Kill-slay one doctor-meat! Now-now kill-kill two doctor-meat!’

‘Why!’ Grau persisted. ‘Why kill me? I haven’t hurt you!’

Cocking its head to one side, the ratman fixed Grau with beady red eyes. ‘Listen-hear much-much!’ the creature spat. ‘Know-learn doctor-thing help-heal man-things. Stop-stop pretty plague!’

Furry lips pulled back, exposing sharp fangs in a savage grin. ‘Doctor-meat no-not stop-stop plague!’

The ratman retreated a few steps as Grau began to laugh. Its bestial mind wouldn’t have appreciated the irony the way Grau did. He was going to die because of a lie, because when he told the people of Amorbach he could save their town, they weren’t the only ones who had believed him.

The ratman quickly recovered from his confusion. Whatever sounds Grau made, they didn’t change the fact that the man was wounded and alone. Those were odds to spark the ferocity of any murderer.

It wasn’t long before the plague doktor was nothing more than a heap of bloodied flesh lying in the mud. The townsmen would blame the murders of Grau and Kahlenberg on the Sigmarite missionary, remembering the priest’s antagonism towards the plague doktor. Under the instigation of Boltzmann and Fechner, they would mob the priest and burn him on a pyre.

No one in Amorbach considered that the plague doktor had fallen victim to a different enemy.

None of them would have believed that Grau and Kahlenberg had died under the swords of the skaven.

The City Is Theirs

Philip Athans

It was the sound of it that he hated the most. The grunts and roars, rough green skin against leather and stone, heavy footfalls and creaking wagon wheels, all came together to create a horrific tumult.

‘Beasts,’ his daughter’s voice quavered from behind him.

Count Brutus Leitdorf turned to look at the girl, and his heart sank at the terror writ plain on her delicate, once-innocent features. ‘Gisele,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ Leitdorf tipped his chin at the young knight behind her, and the man suffered under his gaze, not sure how to respond.

‘He’s taking me away,’ Gisele said, before the knight could fully gather himself.

‘She will be well guarded, my lord,’ the young man finally said, but Leitdorf ignored him and crossed the few steps to gently turn his daughter away from the orc horde massing at the eastern gates.

‘She should have been away from Nuln days ago,’ Baron Leberecht grumbled from the back of the room.

‘They’re beasts,’ the girl said, ignoring the gruff baron, unable to pry her eyes from the doom massing outside the city. ‘From a distance, they look like one giant monster.’

‘They are one giant monster,’ Leitdorf said. He took her chin gently in his hand and tipped her face up to his. The scattering of freckles on her cheeks made him sigh. So like her mother’s… He was sure he could have traced the same little constellations on both their faces. Then fear in her eyes made him say, ‘I have some experience fighting giant monsters.’

His heart sank again when he could see that she didn’t believe him. But still she said, ‘Yes, father.’

Leitdorf kissed her on the forehead, trying not to wonder if it would be for the last time. He looked at the young knight with cold, intractable eyes, and said, ‘Take my daughter to safety, Sir Lehrer. You’ll have a platoon under your command to assist.’

Leitdorf didn’t respond to the hushed, choked-off gasp from Baron Leberecht that followed the order. ‘A whole platoon – sixteen men – to protect a single girl,’ the baron stated with a flat, dull voice, ‘when the orc Gorbad comes at us with millions.’

Could it be millions, Leitdorf asked himself even as he scowled at the baron? It looked – it sounded – like millions.

‘Sixteen men will hardly make a difference against millions, will it?’ the count asked the baron. ‘And though I owe you no explanations while you’re a guest in my city, baron, I’ll have you know that since the death of my wife, Gisele is the only family–’

‘Father…’ Gisele started.

‘She is the sole heir of the Leitdorfs.’ He kissed her forehead once more and whispered, ‘See, it wasn’t the last time.’

‘Father…’ Gisele started again. ‘I…’

‘You will go,’ he said, his voice louder, stern, fatherly and commanding – everything he knew she had to hear in it. ‘Sir Nedry and his men will protect you, and we will see each other again.’

‘When?’ she asked, even as she let him move her back to the waiting knight.

‘When my duty to the Empire is discharged,’ he told her. All he had left for her, after all, were a platoon of bodyguards and the truth.

‘Father…’ Gisele whimpered, but Sir Nedry turned her away, and she let him.

Leitdorf shifted his attention back to the enemy so he wouldn’t see his daughter ushered down the tall, winding spiral stairs from the Lord Astronomer’s tower, down through the bridge houses of the University, and into the tide of refugees reluctantly abandoning the eastern districts of the city in the face of a rampaging horde of greenskins.

‘My apologies, Count Leitdorf,’ Baron Leberecht said, with just enough sincerity in his voice that Leitdorf let his shoulders relax. ‘If I could have saved my own children…’

Leitdorf nodded and the two men stood for a while without speaking, looking down at the chaos.

Another young knight, this one smelling of sweat and mud, saluted and announced himself. Leitdorf couldn’t place his name, but he nodded and listened to the man’s report. There was precious little good news in it, save that, for the time being at least, the eastern wall was holding.

‘The gates are burning,’ the knight reported, and from high atop the needle-like tower Leitdorf could see the smoke. ‘They’re being reinforced by our own engineers and a few hearty volunteers from among the city’s skilled labourers, but–’

‘They won’t hold forever,’ the baron finished for him.

‘They won’t have to,’ the count replied. ‘If we can get the people out before they breach the walls…’

‘The people?’ Baron Leberecht asked. ‘Which people? Civilian refugees from fallen Averheim? Or perhaps a hundred ragged halfling survivors of the Moot? The few handfuls of starved, still-bleeding wretches from the villages closer to the mountains?’

‘And the people of Nuln, yes,’ Leitdorf replied. ‘If we can get them west across the bridges, it’s conceivable we might contain then dilute the orcs in the city’s narrow, winding streets.’

‘And you’ll send these people out there?’ asked the baron, eyebrows raised over red eyes ringed in bruises.

‘No,’ Leitdorf said as he glanced back over the baron’s shoulder to the window opposite and the citadel that rose high on a commanding tor at the far western edge of the city. Leberecht followed his gaze and nodded. The wide river, with its single choke-point bridge, then the western districts of the city, would provide two more buffers from the rampaging savages.

‘The people of Nuln will be guests in my bailey,’ the count said.

‘For how long?’ asked the baron.

‘For as long as it takes.’

‘Or you could arm them,’ the baron said, stepping forwards then stumbling when his wounded leg nearly gave way.

‘Baron Leberecht,’ Leitdorf said, concerned at the knight’s deteriorating condition.

‘A scattering more refugees have made it known they’re willing to take up arms,’ the young knight said, his own red, tired eyes darting from count to baron and back again.

‘Any able-bodied peasant will be welcome,’ Leitdorf said, ‘but I will not conscript–’

‘You have no choice but to…’ Baron Leberecht started, then trailed to a stop at the count’s disapproving glare.

So far Nuln had absorbed the sum total of four survivors – the Baron Leberecht included – of the Count of Averland’s army, which fell to Gorbad on the Aver Down. Nuln herself provided some tough, city-bound men willing to defend their homes, but not entirely certain how to go about it.

‘The peasant militia will fight,’ Leitdorf replied, ‘but might not be much better organised than their enemy – and certainly not their match.’

‘Again, count, I apologise,’ said the baron. ‘I have a … Gorbad owes me a debt.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Everything.’

Leitdorf held back a snort, and only nodded instead. After a moment he added, ‘All told, I command fewer men-at-arms than Averland threw onto the battlefield, and by all accounts the greenskin army has only grown bigger between the Moot and Nuln. We’re beyond pitchforks and rusty old blades.’

Baron Leberecht looked away and stumbled back half a step to slump on a high stool that creaked under his armoured weight.

Leitdorf glanced back at the young knight and said, ‘Thank you, Sir…’

‘Sir,’ the knight answered. ‘Pieter Hahn. At your service, count.’

‘Is that all?’ Leitdorf grumbled.

‘We’re still having some difficulty with the citizenry, sir.’

Leitdorf turned to regard the man. Blood stained his tabard, his face and his hands, all mixed with mud.

‘I gave strict instructions that the civilian population of the city was not to be harmed,’ the count said.

‘It’s not like that, sir,’ the knight replied. ‘Someone threw a pig carcass at me. The people are arguing – fighting, even – amongst themselves. Some are trying to get out faster, some are dragging their heels. There’s been looting, too, sir, and more than a few of the older folk are refusing to leave at all. In the wealthier districts, families are making… difficult requests. Communication is slow and uncertain. We have so few men–’

‘Shall I produce more men for you, then, Sir…?’

‘Hahn.’

‘Shall I produce more men for you, then, Sir Hahn?’

Hahn’s face drained of colour, and Leitdorf actually felt a brief pang of guilt.

‘You’ll do with what you have, then,’ the count said.

The young knight blushed, and his eyes shifted to take in the Lord Astronomer, who it seemed he’d only just then noticed in the room with them. The tall and scrawny old man smiled at the knight through a thick white beard, revealing a full mouth of unusually healthy white teeth. The young knight swallowed hard.

‘May I present the Lord Astronomer,’ Count Leitdorf said with a wry grin. ‘Lord Astronomer, Sir Hahn.’

The two men nodded to each other, then at a slight wave of Leitdorf’s hand, the exhausted young knight clicked his heels and strode off down the narrow stairs. The count spun the long brass tube of the Lord Astronomer’s telescope once more to bear on the orcs.

‘I’ve used a spyglass or two in my time, but this is remarkable,’ he said, turning a rough-edged spindle in minute motions to bring the image in the telescope into focus.

‘It is my honour to serve, my count,’ said the Lord Astronomer. The old man stood against the rough stone wall of his own observatory like a squire awaiting his master’s pleasure. ‘But I apologise that the instrument was not intended to be… pointed downwards.’

Leitdorf sighed when a mass of green coalesced into the raging face of a single orc among the roiling horde. It appeared upside down, and the Lord Astronomer explained that the image was reversed, too, as though reflected in a mirror. The orc’s brutish features were partially obscured by rough runes painted across its flat cheeks – some kind of totemistic nonsense already fading under the onslaught of rudely guzzled beer and wet mud flung up by the stomping tread of its comrades-in-arms.

Unconcerned with one orc among hundreds of thousands, the count refocused the telescope with a slow, even motion. The exercise helped steady his hand, and in so doing, his nerves.

The count trained the telescope on the rooftops. Few of the chimneys showed any smoke – uncommon for a chill autumn day. He panned down to the streets and was greeted with the upside down and backward image of a throng of peasants. From this distance he couldn’t hear their rough shouts, the occasional woman’s scream, or the crying of babies. Though the crowds were of similar size, the din of the orcs overwhelmed the sounds of the human throng.

A cart had become wedged in a narrow alley and people shouted at the driver to free up the way. The crowd surged around it like water flowing through a hole in a dam. People shoved each other, manners forgotten. A boy of perhaps twelve, no older than Gisele, hopped up onto the cart, making his way over the uneven, lumpy canvas tarpaulin. Two other boys joined him, the driver reaching out to grab them. The boys laughed. Grown men in the crowd cheered them on.

Then the tarpaulin came loose, spilling a pile of apples, then the boys, onto the heads of the crowd. Some stopped to gather up the fruit, some tossed them back at the driver in anger. The boys disappeared into the tide of the crowd as though they’d been swept into a slow-moving river and dragged under water.

Leitdorf took his eye away from the telescope and looked out over his city.

He’d set trebuchets and ballistae on the walls, which fired over and over again to no avail. Archers drawn from his own fighting force, the city’s watch, and whatever local hunters were willing to lend a hand, continuously rained arrows down on the seemingly oblivious horde.

The orcs occasionally fired missiles of their own over the walls: arrows sent out to kill at random, or boulders lofted high by their crude catapults. They’d begun launching goblins, too – living missiles that rarely survived the trip, but served their purpose of terrifying the people of the city.

‘They have bodies to spare,’ Leitdorf whispered to himself.

‘Count…?’ the Lord Astronomer queried, but Leitdorf only shook his head and called down the stairs for his seneschal.

‘Yes, count?’ Otho asked even as he rounded the corner of the stairs and stepped out onto the observatory floor, his ever-present leather-bound notebook and a charcoal stylus in his hand.

‘If there are men waiting to see me, just send them all up,’ he said. ‘I tire of these one-at-a-time bits of bad news.’

‘Yes, count,’ Earvin replied, ‘but then there are so many men, sir, and the observatory is–’

‘Go back down there,’ Leitdorf interrupted, ‘and explain to the gathered throng, then, that I understand perfectly well that we have too few men, too little time, and too many enemies. Then ask if anyone has come to bring me the slightest sliver of hope upon which to cling.’

The seneschal nodded, bowed deeply, and went back down the stairs.

The count, the baron, and the Lord Astronomer stood in silence for a very long time before a slow, shuffling step echoed up the stairwell.

‘Who are you, then?’ Leitdorf asked the tiny little man who emerged from around the corner.

Bald, dressed in a butcher’s smock stained with blotches from every colour of the rainbow, the man put a hand against the wall and wheezed so loudly that for a moment, the rumble of the greenskins was finally overwhelmed. He held a small steel box under his other arm, which trembled under its weight.

‘Count Leitdorf,’ the Lord Astronomer said, ‘may I present to you one of my colleagues, Doctor Isaak Meitler. He is an esteemed member of the University faculty, sir, an alchemist of some renown.’

Leitdorf raised an eyebrow at the man and said, ‘An alchemist, eh? Greetings, then, doctor, but I’m not in the habit of employing–’

‘Just shut up for a second,’ the old man wheezed, ‘and let me catch my breath, will you?’

‘I do beg your pardon, sir,’ Count Leitdorf said, doing his best to impart the deadly consequences underlying his mood.

Baron Leberecht stood from his teetering stool and stared daggers at the man.

‘Isaak, please,’ said the Lord Astronomer. ‘Surely you recognise our noble Count Leitdorf, and this is the Baron Leberecht, recently of Averland.’

The old alchemist took a deep, shuddering breath and waved them off. Leitdorf raised an eyebrow to the blushing Lord Astronomer, who replied with, ‘Doctor Meitler rarely leaves his laboratory, my count. But please accept that he is a serious and learned man, a highly regarded practitioner of his–’

‘Oh, leave it out, stargazer,’ the alchemist interrupted. ‘I’ve brought something our noble Count Leitdorf needs to see.’

‘And what is that?’ Leitdorf asked, gesturing to the steel box under the old man’s arm.

‘This?’ the alchemist responded, following the count’s eyes to the box. ‘This is the means to kill every last one of those green-skinned savages, and with barely lifting a finger.’

The baron laughed, and it was not a pleasant sound. Leitdorf didn’t bother trying to suppress a chuckle of his own, but then he faltered a little under the stern gaze of the Lord Astronomer.

‘May I see this treasure, then, doctor?’ the count asked.

The alchemist’s knees popped loudly when he attempted to kneel on the hardwood floor. With a wince he gave up, holding the box out in both hands, his whole body shaking.

‘A table?’ he spat at the Lord Astronomer.

Leberecht and the Lord Astronomer quickly cleared a small writing desk of a sheaf of papers upon which were drawn various concentric circles – Leitdorf had no idea what either of these learned men were up to, locked up in the ancient halls of the University.

The alchemist set the box down on the desk as though he were putting a newborn infant down to sleep, then took a deep breath and began fiddling with a series of brass tumblers.

‘A combination lock,’ the Lord Astronomer said in response to the baron’s quizzical look. ‘Very new…’

‘Dwarfish work,’ the alchemist chimed in.

‘Indeed?’ asked the Lord Astronomer. ‘I have a dwarf working on a–’

‘Gentlemen, if you please,’ Leitdorf interrupted. ‘We are in a state of emergency, after all.’

The Lord Astronomer bowed and made his apologies, but the alchemist didn’t seem to hear him. Something in the case clicked, and the old man lifted the hinged cover to reveal a soft red velvet insert that nestled two glass spheres. They were of identical design, roughly two inches in diameter, with no apparent cork or opening of any kind. Each contained a blue-grey liquid. The stuff exhibited a cloudy consistency, roiling, Leitdorf assumed, from the jostling at the hands of the alchemist.

‘This is it?’ Leberecht asked, fairly dripping in impatient disbelief. ‘These little glass balls filled with whatever that is… This will kill Gorbad?’

‘Gorbad?’ the alchemist replied. ‘Is that the leader of the orc horde that’s trying to get in through the eastern gate?’

The baron turned away and clenched his gauntleted hands into fists, while Leitdorf responded with a nod and a sigh.

‘Then yes.’

Count Leitdorf raised both eyebrows and he and Baron Leberecht stared the little man down.

‘I’ve had these for years,’ the alchemist said finally. ‘Keep them hidden away where no one’ll fool with them. Tried for a long time – longer than you’ve been alive, I’d guess, to sort out their composition.’

‘Glass,’ the count said, ‘and–?’

‘Glass…’ the old man scoffed. ‘Not the vessels, but the compound they contain.’

‘A poison?’ the Lord Astronomer guessed.

The alchemist heaved a great sigh and said, ‘An explosive.’

All three of the men raised an eyebrow, waiting to hear what that word meant.

‘Really?’ the alchemist asked. ‘I thought you two at least were supposed to be soldiers.’

‘I beg your–’ Leitdorf started.

‘You never saw anything explode before?’ the alchemist pressed. ‘Burst into flame and cause all sorts of death and destruction?’

‘Ah,’ the Lord Astronomer sighed. ‘Explosion… explosive… a substance that causes an explosion.’

The alchemist rolled his eyes but went on, ‘And a bigger explosion than anyone alive today except me and maybe twelve… no… thirteen… maybe fourteen or fifteen other people have ever seen. These are the last two – the only two – left in the wide world, and if they explode, well, that’ll be the last the world will ever see of them.’

‘Do we have this time to waste, count?’ Leberecht asked.

‘A rhetorical question, sir?’ the alchemist said, drawing a deadly glare from the baron.

‘Isaak,’ the Lord Astronomer said, ‘are you quite sure–?’

A sadness descended over the gruff little man when he said, ‘I’ve tried everything I know to make more of them. Not that I think we’re meant to wield power like this. Could be it wasn’t a human first mixed it, and mixing more is simply beyond us, and beyond us for good reason. Might as well let these last two do what they were meant to do, and save this city in the process.

‘So yes, I’m quite sure,’ he went on. ‘I’m quite sure they’ll do what I say they’ll do, and quite sure it’s time the world was through with them. Now, the trick is getting them from here to there’ – the alchemist gestured to the east and the orcs – ‘without having to be anywhere near – and I mean a couple hundred yards or more – from where it explodes.’

‘Earvin,’ Leitdorf called. Before the seneschal could reply, the count said, ‘Summon the Lord Artillerist.’

Kätzchen pulled her hand out of the woman’s grip so hard she elbowed someone in the crowd behind her.

‘Careful, brat,’ the man behind her complained. ‘Another inch and it would’ve been my balls!’

‘How dare you talk to a little girl like that, you old drunk,’ the woman who’d taken Kätzchen’s arm roared back. ‘I’m tryin’ to–’

‘I’m not a little girl, you fat old pig,’ Kätzchen shot back. The fact that the woman looked at her with anger instead of hurt made Kätzchen feel a little less guilty for snapping at her like that. ‘I’m a halfling, and a grown woman,’ Kätzchen explained. ‘And you’re the third spinster who’s tried to adopt me this morning.’

‘A halfling?’ the man behind her exclaimed.

‘Well,’ the pudgy woman huffed, turning her back on Kätzchen, ‘I never.’

‘Forget my balls,’ the man behind her said, lifting his voice over the general noise of the jammed street. ‘Let me check my purse is still here.’

Despite a sudden, burning desire to elbow the old drunk in the crotch after all, Kätzchen left him to his prejudices and slipped between the people crowding the street.

She was lost, and had been since she’d entered the city with a mass of exhausted refugees less than a week ago. She’d run – as fast as she could, as far as she could, for as long as she could – from her village in the Moot. What Kätzchen left behind would never be described as a village again. Her language didn’t have a word for what it had become.

Kätzchen shivered. It was cold and she had no coat. The street was wet and she had no shoes. But then she was used to going barefoot, and it was better to be cold than–

‘No,’ she said aloud.

People in the crowd ignored her. They were too busy trying to get to the bridges, as they’d been ordered. But she wasn’t talking to them anyway. She was talking to herself, to her own memories – to the sight of boiling water in great cauldrons, and her family being–

‘No,’ she whispered, and wiped away a tear.

A woman screamed and Kätzchen’s blood went cold. Then the argument started. Someone had tried to make off with another refugee’s bundle. The humans were stealing scraps of cloth from each other even as some of them tried to protect what they saw as a young girl on her own.

Kätzchen wondered if the woman who’d tried to help her would survive, or go into the pot. Would she escape, and if she did would she have any idea of the fate that would have befallen her at the hands of the horde? Would her house burn? Or would it be home to a clan of orcs? Would it be made into a slaughterhouse, a torture chamber, or a brothel?

Music came from a building Kätzchen passed. Men stood in the doorway with great pewter flagons, swilling beer and laughing at the press of the escaping citizenry. Would that building burn, too, once the orcs had finished all the beer? Would those men fall fighting, or be trampled, passed out drunk on the streets and pulverised under the weight of a million savage brutes?

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Kätzchen asked the crowd around her.

No one answered, and though it was possible they didn’t hear her, she was beginning to think they didn’t know.

‘How far do you say we have to be from where it hits?’ the Lord Artillerist asked, rubbing his chin and staring down at the open case and the two tiny glass globes.

‘As far as humanly possible,’ the alchemist replied.

‘Be precise, Isaak,’ the Lord Astronomer said.

The bent old alchemist sighed and shrugged. ‘A couple of hundred yards at least – twice that to be sure.’

‘On the outside of a longbow’s shot,’ Count Leitdorf said to his Lord Artillerist, who nodded in response.

‘You can’t be seriously considering–’ Baron Leberecht began.

But the alchemist grumbled, ‘What’re you thinking? Tie one of these onto an arrow, hope it’s properly balanced and isn’t jostled about or – may every god forbid – dropped by the archer?’

‘A catapult then?’ Leitdorf asked. ‘That was my first thought.’

‘Too small,’ the Lord Artillerist stated with a frown. ‘And they’re too light. Best to make arrowheads out of them. Besides, even our bigger trebuchets are only good for maybe three hundred yards.’

‘Ah,’ the Lord Astronomer piped in. ‘But if the missile is lighter?’

The Lord Artillerist shrugged, and Leitdorf urged the Lord Astronomer to continue.

‘In my studies of the celestial spheres I’ve observed that the mass of an object has some bearing on its motion through space.’

‘Well, I’ll be…’ said the alchemist with a frown. ‘All that looking up at the sky might have some use after all.’

‘Still,’ the Lord Artillerist said, ‘these are too small to launch in a trebuchet. The action of the engine itself will break the sphere.’

‘And kill everyone within three hundred yards,’ the alchemist said, rubbing his chin along with the count’s catapult man.

Leitdorf considered the possibility for a moment then asked, ‘What if we encase it in something? Wrap it in some kind of material – cloth or whatnot – to make a bigger sphere on the outside, one that will cushion it enough to clear the trebuchet but not enough on the other end that it won’t break the glass when it hits. That is all it needs to… what was that word, doctor?’

‘Detonate.’

‘All it needs to detonate,’ Leitdorf continued, ‘is for the glass to break. Yes?’

The Lord Artillerist was already smiling. ‘I could rig that. A cage of sorts, made of wire to hold it together.’

‘I can mix a glue,’ the alchemist offered. ‘Nothing fancy, but with a little paper we could surround your wire cage… make a bigger sphere around it.’

‘But if the cage is strong enough to hold it in place, will it be strong enough to keep the glass from breaking?’ asked Baron Leberecht.

‘I’m sure we can rig something,’ Leitdorf said, and he too started to rub his chin. ‘Pins, maybe… some kind of pin inside with the outside end tied to a string, with the other end tied to the basket of the trebuchet so that it’s released when the glue-and-paper globe is fired, and will pierce the glass globe on impact.’

‘Damn it all,’ the Lord Artillerist whispered. ‘It could work. But you’re sure this stuff will have an effect at the other end?’

Hands shaking from lack of food and water, eyes blurred from days of weeping, Kätzchen still managed to climb the brick wall of the three-storey building. When a half-naked woman shrieked from one of the windows, Kätzchen almost lost her grip. But she held firm, her thin fingers pressed tightly into the almost-too-small gap between poorly mortared bricks. Before the orcs had destroyed her life, Kätzchen would have offered the woman a wink, and some kind of witty quip, but instead she just grunted and pulled herself another arms-length from the woman’s window and continued up. Even as she threw a leg over the bargeboard, Kätzchen surveyed the besieged city.

The high curtain walls of the city of Nuln encompassed an area roughly four miles long and two miles at its widest. Only two gates, one protected by an imposing citadel and the other – the one the orcs were besieging – by an elaborate barbican, emptied out onto land. The only other way in was through the river gates – great steel portcullises that dropped all the way to the riverbed. The wide river bisected the city, spanned by only a single wide bridge covered in buildings and topped with a delicate, tall tower that scraped the bottom of the sinister grey clouds. The enemy had approached the city from the east, massed at the eastern gate, and just sat there. Nuln was hard under siege, but the western gate, at the citadel, was still clear of orcs.

The dense overcast sky made it difficult for Kätzchen to tell how late in the day it was – not quite noon yet, anyway – but there was no mistaking east. Gorbad’s horde was an ever-shifting mass, devouring the fields and dismantling the farms. Human soldiers scurried along the wall walks, occasionally stopping to fire a volley of arrows down into the orcs. Kätzchen watched the mass of greenskins part in spots, as though the arrows were the wind, and the orcs the prairie grass. Kätzchen didn’t doubt that with each volley a few orcs were wounded, maybe one or two were killed.

Then bigger holes formed.

Kätzchen’s people didn’t have any of the strange things the humans had built atop their towers. Spindly constructs of wood and rope rose from the flat-topped guard posts. Two of them burned, sending columns of smoke into the already grey sky. The others whipped forwards while other parts rotated backwards – and they threw boulders, or sometimes a kind of flaming wicker ball – into the mass of orcs laying siege to the city.

They might have killed half a dozen with each volley, and a louder roar echoed up from the horde when they hit. Kätzchen’s blood ran cold at the sound of it. The orcs laughed.

Kätzchen put her face in her hands, smelled the dirt ground into her palms, and the dry stink of her own breath.

‘No,’ she told herself when her shoulders started to shake.

The fine hair on the back of Kätzchen’s neck stood on end, and something told her to look up.

One of the rock-throwers whistled and whirred, and whipped its missile towards the horde. Kätzchen cringed, though she wasn’t sure what was wrong. The rock flew at the wrong angle – it was too light. There was something wrong with it, but the halfling couldn’t explain what it was that made her think that.

‘No,’ she whispered again when the horde answered with a siege engine of their own. They sent a rock arcing up and towards the walls, followed by a great cheer, from the massed greenskins.

But it wasn’t a rock.

As it arced closer, Kätzchen could see it move – arms and legs pinwheeling through the dense grey sky.

‘A goblin,’ she whispered to herself.

The strange rock thrown by the humans passed over the wall, and Kätzchen marvelled at the precision – or the luck – brought to bear by the savage greenskins. The goblin and the humans’ rock made right for each other.

The little goblin screamed. The horde cheered, and they hit.

There was a burst of red and green mist in the sky, then it was as though the air rippled. Beneath the point of impact, the horde shimmered along with the ripples of air. Orcs, goblins, their siege engines and towers, their tents, and the few trees they hadn’t had a chance to cut down yet splayed outwards from that centre point in an ever-increasing circle. They fell, then they left the ground and flew.

From a distance Kätzchen couldn’t make out individuals, just waves of alternating green and brown and red and black.

A sudden wind hit her hard enough to knock her back three steps then down to the slate roof. The sound was impossible for her to describe. It was every bell from every bell tower everywhere in the world ringing just once, at precisely the same time. Kätzchen screamed, and could feel it in her throat, but couldn’t hear it.

She rolled to her knees then scrambled to her feet, reeling when she saw how close she’d come to being blown off the roof.

A cloud of grey-white she couldn’t identify – not smoke, dust perhaps – expanded up and out from the place where the strange missile had hit the goblin. The cloud seemed to have a life all its own. As it spilled into the city it turned corners, filling the streets, moving at a slow, terrifyingly deliberate pace, swallowing everything in its path.

Then Kätzchen’s ears began to recover, and register the screams that tore from the throats of orc and human alike.

‘I told you it would work,’ the alchemist said.

Leitdorf spun and the old man took a step away from him, fetching up against the wall of the Lord Astronomer’s observatory. The count staggered, almost falling, and had to put a hand to a wall himself. He shook his head to clear it.

‘What is that?’ the Lord Astronomer asked. He had fallen to his knees when the shockwave set the tower swaying like a sapling in a hurricane. The tower still moved, but Leitdorf stayed on his feet. His knees shook in time with the tower.

Baron Leberecht grunted and winced in pain as he struggled to sit up where he lay prone on the floor. The stool had shattered under him. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ he said.

‘I told you it would work,’ the alchemist repeated, his voice rough and quiet.

‘There was no fire,’ Leitdorf said. He turned and watched a grey cloud fall slowly across the eastern districts of Nuln, covering buildings like freshly fallen snow. ‘What is that?’

‘Dust,’ the Lord Astronomer replied, slowly climbing to his feet.

‘Dust?’ the alchemist asked from the back of the room. ‘What kind of dust – what colour?’

‘White,’ Leitdorf said. ‘By the gods, the screaming…’

‘What colour?’ the alchemist insisted. Leitdorf heard him struggle to his feet, the Lord Astronomer lending a hand.

‘White,’ Leitdorf repeated. ‘Grey. A pale grey.’

The alchemist staggered over to stand at Leitdorf’s right shoulder.

‘Oh, no,’ the old man said.

Leberecht shook his head and asked, ‘What was that?’

‘The wall,’ the alchemist said. ‘I told you that trebuchet wouldn’t throw it far enough.’

‘The wall?’ Leberecht asked. ‘What about the wall?’

‘We should go, I think,’ the Lord Astronomer said, his voice suddenly thin, almost shrill.

‘That cloud,’ said the alchemist, ‘is all that’s left of a good portion of the eastern curtain wall.’

The tone of the screams had already begun to change. Mixed in, there were roars.

‘The wall…?’ Count Leitdorf whispered.

Something heavy and wet hit the roof next to Kätzchen, and some thick, hot liquid splashed all over her.

Blood.

Kätzchen took a breath in to scream when another piece of dead orc hit the roof, and another splash of red coloured the slate tiles.

Something soft and wet bounced off her shoulder, and Kätzchen flinched away from part of a goblin’s bare foot. People on the street below her screamed. Kätzchen let out her breath, but didn’t bother adding to the cacophony.

The strange cloud had settled, and she had barely enough time to thank her lucky stars that it had fallen short of devouring her. ‘And now it’s raining orcs,’ she whispered.

Her shoulders quivered, then a shudder passed all the way down her body to her toes.

Covering her head with her hands she crouched on the flat slate roof for what seemed like a very long time until the pieces of dead orcs stopped falling.

When she felt it was safe to stand she looked first to the east. The dust began to clear in the thick, humid air, and there was no wall behind it any more. That’s when Kätzchen decided to scream – a wild, piercing, incoherent shriek.

After two more of those, she cast about for anything resembling hope, and her eyes fell on the tower that rose above the Great Bridge and its cluster of bridge houses. The impressive structure was the highest point in the city.

‘That’s where I’d go,’ Kätzchen whispered to herself. ‘If I were in charge, that’s where I’d go.’

The humans had a weapon that could do that – that could make the air tear the world apart – and they might have killed a few thousand of Gorbad’s horde, but opened their city to the rest of them in the process. They had a weapon that could do that, but they didn’t know how to use it.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Kätzchen asked the mute sky.

The crowd below streamed west towards the bridge much faster – panic settling in. Kätzchen wiped as much of the orc blood off herself as she could, then swung a leg over the bargeboard at the edge of the roof and started to climb back down to join the ragged tide of humanity.

Count Leitdorf stepped out onto the street at the west end of the Great Bridge with only the smallest entourage, but still the throng of citizens parted for him.

‘Count Leitdorf, please, sir,’ Earvin practically begged. ‘It will only take a few minutes to call for the–’

‘Carriage?’ Leitdorf interjected. ‘In this crowd?’

‘It will get to the citadel fa–’

‘Much more slowly than we can on foot,’ Baron Leberecht interrupted.

‘But count, are you sure you need to carry that–?’

‘Telescope?’ Leitdorf replied. ‘Yes, I’m quite certain. We will bring everything out of the University that we can carry.’

If the seneschal was the slightest bit annoyed at not being able to finish a sentence, he didn’t show it. That was left to the baron.

‘Those savages wouldn’t know which end of that thing to piss into, let alone look through,’ he said. ‘If you want to save telescopes and books, stop running west.’

Count Leitdorf stopped in mid-stride, and a pikeman they’d picked up on the bridge span proper bumped into him hard enough that both his and the count’s helmet visors crashed down. The pikeman scrambled back, bowing, and fouling his long weapon in a laundry line above.

Leitdorf raised his visor and waved at the pikeman to calm the man down. He reserved his irritation for the refugee baron.

‘Accuse me of cowardice in the face the enemy, Baron Leber–’

‘No!’ the baron practically barked.

A peasant woman passing by gasped, then shrank back into the press of bodies when she realised the noblemen had noticed her. Most of the people who passed were more concerned with keeping up, not being trampled, and pushing through with their overlarge bundles or string of dirty, exhausted, and protesting children. They didn’t register their leader at all.

The baron held up a placating hand and said, ‘I know full well you are no coward, sir, and I trust you know full well that I make no such accusation. But I have some experience with these brutes, count, and I ask to be heard.’

Leitdorf sighed, and shifted the long brass telescope in his grip. The instrument clanged on his polished breastplate. ‘Speak,’ he said, ‘while we walk.’

With a nod and a shaky first step forwards, Baron Leberecht said, ‘These are orcs, Count Leitdorf. They’re fierce and ruthless, and when they mob up like this they act as one – one mind, one weapon, one seething mass of incoherent rage.’

‘And?’ Leitdorf prompted. He hadn’t heard anything from the limping baron he didn’t know full well already.

‘And that’s both strength and weakness,’ the baron went on. ‘Count Leitdorf… Brutus,’ – Leitdorf raised an eyebrow at that – ‘you don’t fight orcs army to army, that was Averland’s mistake.’

‘Count Averland,’ the seneschal corrected, then blushed at a stern glare from Leitdorf.

‘Why are we stopping?’ the old alchemist asked, the locked box with the last of the pair of alchemical bombs tucked securely under his arm.

‘Count Averland fought the mass of orcs with the mass of his army,’ Leberecht continued. ‘And that was on open ground. Here, in the tight streets of the city, they can be carved into smaller gangs. They can be fought not horde-to-horde, but man-to-man.’

The Lord Astronomer took the alchemist by the shoulders and gently turned him away.

‘A million of their men to a few thousand of ours?’ asked the count.

‘I’ll wager on one decent fighting man against half a dozen greenskins at least.’

Leitdorf paused in the midst of the slow-moving crowd and considered the baron’s advice for a moment.

Knowing he had the count’s ear, Leberecht went on in earnest, ‘If an orc slaps you, count, you punch back. If it cuts you, you stab it. If it hurts you, you kill it. They understand two things and two things only, sir: blood and death. And if you don’t show them both, they’ll show you.’

From the corner of his eye, Leitdorf saw the pikeman nod his agreement, and tighten his grip on his weapon.

‘But all these people…’ Leitdorf offered with a sweep of a hand.

‘The women and children, sir, of course,’ Leberecht acquiesced. ‘The old and infirm, certainly. Hide them in your citadel. But any man with two hands. Anyone who can swing a club – or swing a gods-be-damned fist – must go east, sir. Because the enemy is to the e–’

‘They’re through, count,’ the blood- and mud-spattered Sir Hahn shouted as he clawed his way through the crowd to the count. ‘The orcs are through the wall.’

A woman screamed when she heard that, then another and another, and people started running. Though the knight had shouted, only a few people into the crowd could hear him, but when a few people started to run, everyone else followed.

‘Oh,’ Leitdorf breathed even as the hands of his retainers closed around him to keep him safe from the stampeding refugees, ‘bloody hell…’

Especially being as short as she was, it wasn’t easy for Kätzchen to make her way from the middle of the flood of refugees to the side, but with some luck, some persistence, and a little bit of rudeness, she managed.

She fetched up against the back of a short flight of stone stairs, and immediately climbed up to the landing, maybe eight feet above the bridge deck. With about twenty square feet of her own in which to breathe, Kätzchen paused and shivered. Rubbing her own arms with dry, scratchy hands, she looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the enclosed bridge. She’d never seen a ceiling so tall before – had never been in a room so big, even if it was opened at both ends.

The Great Bridge, as wide as four city blocks, supported a small city all its own. Kätzchen could tell just at a glance that there were more rooms, more enclosed space, in the bridge buildings than in all of the houses in the village of her birth.

‘No,’ she whispered to herself to fend off images of that glorious bridge falling under the weight of the seething green mass of orcs.

Kätzchen told herself she was almost there, that she’d made it to the bridge, to what the townsfolk called the ‘Universe-city’ – Kätzchen didn’t know that word – and the tower rose somewhere above her.

The stairs led to a stout oaken door, reinforced with black wrought iron bands. Knowing the humans’ love of locked doors, Kätzchen didn’t hold out much hope, but tried it anyway, and was as delighted as she was surprised when it opened with a loud grinding of rusted hinges.

She slipped into the dark space beyond and closed the door behind her.

The corridor in which Kätzchen found herself had the second tallest ceiling she’d ever seen in her life, and was dimly lit by a few candles burning down to nubs in ornate wall sconces. She knew she needed to find stairs – anything leading up – so she picked a direction and pressed on.

Only minutes later the corridor spilled out into a huge vaulted chamber. She heard an animal snort and blinked against the oil lamps set on the four corners of a crude cart. A donkey turned to look at her, bored, and it seemed to sigh.

‘Oi, you there!’ a man called out. A soldier approached her, his arms filled with a heavy stack of leather-bound books. ‘You can’t be in here, girlie. Count’s ordered everyone west to the citadel. And that means everyone.’

The soldier was one of about a dozen, pulling books from tall stacks of shelves, an armload at a time. They loaded the tomes into the cart as though they had all the time in the world.

‘You’re taking all these books?’ she asked the soldier.

The man grunted as he hefted the stack of books up onto the cart then he shrugged and said, ‘We have our orders – everything in the University, including all eight of the libraries, goes into the citadel before them orcs can loot them.’

‘Loot them?’ Kätzchen asked, shaking her head.

She looked to her right and saw a dozen spears leaning against a wall. On the floor beneath them, the men had arranged their helmets and other gear.

‘Your mum know you’re here?’ the human asked her, leaning in and blinking at her in the dim light.

‘My mum…’ she started, but just shook her head and began walking again, to a door on the other end of the big room. She stopped all at once, turned back to the soldier, and asked, ‘Do you know how I get up to the top of that tall tower in the middle of the bridge?’

The soldier looked up at the ceiling as though he could see it through the roof – but it was so dark Kätzchen doubted he could even see the ceiling.

He looked back at her and shook his head.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Kätzchen felt obligated to say. ‘They won’t steal your books.’

‘Won’t they?’ the man asked, plastering a silly grin on his face. He still thought he was talking to a child.

Kätzchen opened her mouth to speak, but closed it without a word, turned, and ran at speed to the door.

She could hear voices beyond it even before her hand touched the ring and she flung it open.

‘–other choice but to bring down this bridge,’ a tall and handsome man in shining silver armour said. He wore a tabard elaborately embroidered with a red shield topped with a delicate helmet, which itself was topped with a gold crown. Black vines poured down each side of the shield from the helmet. The vines were tipped with red things that might have been either thorns or flowers. Kätzchen hoped they were flowers.

‘Wait,’ she said, not realising to whom she was speaking. ‘Bring this bridge where?’

‘The eastern districts of the city will be all but cut off, save for boats, I suppose, but…’ another tall, armoured man responded. His tabard was stained with dirt and blood, and was black already. Kätzchen didn’t like this man’s rough, unshaven and grim face at all.

‘But the orcs have no boats,’ another, shorter man carrying a book said.

‘Who is that there?’ asked a fourth man – taller than the rest and older, by the grey-white cast of his long beard. He was dressed in a robe coated with mud along the bottom four inches or so, and he had a kindly gleam in his eyes.

The last of them was a grumpy-looking old human clutching a metal box under one arm. Kätzchen winced at the look on his face – though she couldn’t describe why he gave her such an unsettled feeling.

‘Little girl!’ the man in the gleaming silver armour called out to her. He stepped a little closer and squinted at her, then his face fell, and he almost dropped the long brass tube he cradled in his arms like a babe. ‘Gisele?’

‘Mistress Gisele?’ the man with the book said, too, also squinting to see her face.

‘By the gods, Gisele, what are you–?’ the silver-armoured man said, but finally realised she wasn’t this Gisele person.

‘My name isn’t Gisele,’ Kätzchen called out, sure to keep both of her empty hands out at her sides. ‘And I’m not a child. I came from the Moot.’

‘A halfling,’ one of the men whispered.

‘You’re going to destroy this bridge to keep the orcs on the other side of the river?’ she asked.

The men all looked at each other as though they’d never seen a halfling before.

‘Is one of you in charge here?’ she asked, not challenging them, but hopeful.

‘I am,’ the silver-armoured man replied. ‘Count Brutus Leitdorf, at your service, ma’am.’

Kätzchen felt her whole body sag. She almost poured out onto the floor. The count set down his long brass tube and rushed to her side. When his warm, strong hands wrapped around her arms, she did sink to the floor. Kätzchen let him hold her for a moment before she asked. ‘Do you have another of whatever that was that made the sky bite the earth?’

The count looked surprised and horrified all at once, and he glanced back at the little man with the box under his arm.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ the little man said. ‘What of it?’

Though he certainly had more than enough to occupy his mind, Leitdorf couldn’t help but be distracted by the halfling. The freckles that dotted her cheeks made his heart feel heavy in his chest. Her eyes were Gisele’s, too.

‘You could have been sisters,’ he said to her, then blushed and looked away.

She put a hand on his shoulder and when he looked at it he had to sigh. That was where the resemblance ended. Her hands were rough, dirt packed into every crease and wrinkle. Her nails were dirty and broken.

‘Your people…’ he said, ‘your family were farmers?’

She nodded but looked away.

‘They’re all dead, aren’t they?’ he had to ask.

That’s when she looked at him, looked him deep in the eyes, and she didn’t look anything like Gisele then. She looked like Gisele’s mother.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the count.

‘Me too,’ Kätzchen replied.

‘The men have the roof off,’ Sir Hahn reported, before adding, ‘Excuse me, count.’

Leitdorf, happy for the distraction, stepped away from Kätzchen and turned his attention back to the task at hand.

‘The Lord Artillerist and his men are already on their way up,’ the knight went on.

Nodding his approval, Leitdorf sent the knight on his way, and stepped closer to the three men bent over another of the special missiles – perhaps their last hope. He’d ordered another trebuchet hastily assembled at the city’s highest point, the Lord Astronomer’s tower, now divested of its domed roof. They all hoped it would give them the range necessary to kill enough of the Waaagh! that they’d give up and withdraw. Or at least it might be a fairer fight.

‘You have enough glue there, astronomer?’ Baron Leberecht asked.

‘Yes, baron, thank you.’ The Lord Astronomer tore a long strip of paper from a book.

‘What are you doing?’ Leitdorf exclaimed.

The three men sat back, revealing half a dozen faded old tomes, already relieved of half their pages. A stack of half a dozen more sat next to them on the floor of the dimly-lit and abandoned University mess hall.

‘We’re… um,’ the Lord Astronomer began.

‘Those books…’ the count said. ‘What are you destroying? Can those be replaced?’

‘Yes,’ the old alchemist said, without the slightest sincerity.

Baron Leberecht gave the alchemist a disapproving glare.

‘I ordered those books to be evacuated to the citadel,’ Leitdorf went on. ‘Are we looting our own city then?’

‘Count Leitdorf, I…’ Leberecht began, but ended with a shrug.

‘The orcs don’t want your books,’ Kätzchen spoke up, and all heads turned to her. ‘They might burn them when they run out of wood, but do you really think that horde knows how to read? They’ll take gold, anything that might be food, and weapons to be sure, but books? Whatever that brass tube is, if it isn’t a weapon of some kind? Do you think they’ve come for your glassware and your satin doublets?’

‘I think I know–’ Leberecht growled at her.

Unfazed, Kätzchen interrupted, ‘If you’re suffering over a few books – any books when there are still people on the wrong side of the river, Mister, I don’t think you know scat from scrolls.’

With some difficulty from his wounded leg, Baron Leberecht stood to glare down at Kätzchen and sneered, ‘Maybe we’ll take a cue from your friends out there, give you the bottle, and put you in that trebuchet with–’

Kätzchen yelped when Count Leitdorf’s fist smashed the baron in the jaw and dropped the armoured man to one knee. The count’s seneschal stepped forwards to grab his master’s arm, but Leitdorf shook him off. Leberecht put a hand to his face and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He made to stand, but when Leitdorf advanced a step, he stayed on one knee.

‘She’s no goblin, Baron Leberecht,’ the count said. ‘And I will hear your apology.’

‘Count Leitdorf,’ the baron said, his voice tight with rage, his face flushed with embarrassment, ‘please accept–’

‘Not to me,’ Leitdorf cut in, and he held a hand out to indicate the halfling.

The two men glared at each other in silence for a while before Kätzchen spoke up. ‘No apologies necessary, baron.’

Leitdorf looked back at her, and she shook her head. When he turned back to Leberecht, he held out a hand and helped the armoured man to his feet.

‘Tense moments, baron,’ the count said.

The two men looked each other in the eye again, but before either could say anything more there was a terrible roaring sound of shattered stone, falling bricks and splintering wood from above.

The floor shook and they all dived to the planks with their arms over their heads as screams and shouts echoed in from the mass of people still crossing the bridge outside.

‘Can anyone here tell me what that was?’ Count Leitdorf asked, his head still pressed to the floor.

‘I think…’ the Lord Astronomer said, pausing to cough. ‘I think that was my tower.’

Leitdorf rolled to a seated position and took stock of the room: dust in the air, plaster trickling down from the roof. A loud creak made his blood run cold, but it stopped quickly enough. The sounds of panic from the bridge outside began to subside.

‘Baron?’ Kätzchen said. ‘What was that about giving me a bottle and sending me out?’

‘As a rule,’ Count Leitdorf said to Kätzchen when the last of the plans had been made, ‘I don’t send men out on suicide missions.’

‘Well,’ the halfling responded with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I’m neither a man nor particularly suicidal, count, so your rule remains unbroken.’

‘Kätzchen…’ he began.

But he was interrupted by Earvin with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Count,’ the seneschal reported, ‘it’s as we expected, sir. The orcs are well into the eastern districts, but advancing slowly. They’re burning, sir, and looting along the way. Some of the fires seem to have got away from them, and block their advance at points, but they’re clear to here, sir, to the Great Bridge.’

‘The only way across…’ Baron Leberecht said, though they all knew that.

‘The bridge itself is clear, sir,’ Earvin went on. ‘All the citizens and refugees… all who’ve survived thus far, count, are across and making for the citadel.’

‘Keep them going,’ Leitdorf commanded.

‘Sir?’

‘Baron Leberecht,’ Leitdorf went on, ‘would you be so kind as to take command of the full evacuation of the city of Nuln?’

‘I beg your–?’ Leberecht exclaimed.

‘We won’t stop them,’ Leitdorf said. ‘We can’t stop them. They’re moving up catapults now, aren’t they, into the city?’

‘It was how they destroyed the Lord Astronomer’s tower, yes, count,’ Earvin replied.

‘Then we’re lucky they’re stopping to loot and eat,’ Leitdorf said. ‘And it’ll be dark soon.’

‘Such a long day…’ Kätzchen whispered.

Leitdorf smiled and nodded. ‘We might have tonight – one night – to cut off their advance by bringing down this bridge. Still, that will only slow them. The western districts of the city, where the streets are wider, will slow them only a little, too.’

‘The citadel?’ Baron Leberecht asked.

Count Leitdorf shook his head.

Baron Leberecht took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and steadied himself. ‘It will be my honour to escort your people to Altdorf.’

‘I’ll see you have the best my stable has to offer, Baron,’ said Leitdorf. ‘That leg of yours…’

The two knights clasped hands, but were once more interrupted by Earvin.

‘And sad news, count,’ said the seneschal. ‘The body of the Lord Artillerist has been recovered from the rubble of the tower.’

‘Gorbad will pay for that loss with his own black blood,’ Leitdorf vowed.

‘Who?’ asked Kätzchen. When Leitdorf looked at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses, she continued, ‘You know, I don’t think there even is such an orc as Gorbad? I mean, does this look like something that someone’s leading?’

Leitdorf took in a breath to argue, but stopped when he saw the earnest expression on the halfling’s freckled face.

‘All those orcs care about is… stuff,’ she said. ‘They don’t need a leader to help them steal food and kill and rob. They laugh when you kill their so-called comrades, and then put their own people in… what do you call those things?’

‘Catapults,’ Baron Leberecht answered.

Count Leitdorf shook his head and said to Earvin, ‘No more of that. No more recovering bodies. I want every last man back across this bridge. Leave the bodies where they lie, leave the books and–’ he gave Kätzchen a smile – ‘the glassware behind, and rally at the citadel. And that means us as well, my friends.’

‘All but me,’ said the halfling.

‘Kätzchen,’ Count Leitdorf started again, ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

‘Yes, count.’

Leitdorf nodded and asked, ‘You have the map?’

The halfling held up the hastily drawn map of the University provided to her by the Lord Astronomer.

‘Then all you need is this,’ said the alchemist, and he stepped forwards holding in the upturned palms of both hands the last of the little glass spheres.

Kätzchen wanted to close her eyes, but she kept them open. She wanted to scream, but remained silent. She wanted to run, but didn’t move a muscle as the orc scout passed within an arm’s-length of her.

Most of its flat face was mouth. Fat, flabby lips failed to contain yellowed things more like broken tusks than teeth. Its beady eyes glared red under a dense, deep brow. Little ears that came to points, like a dog’s, were set high on its head, even with its eyes. Its tree-trunk neck was attached to its chest rather than its broad shoulders, which hunched into veiny, heavy-muscled arms. Fingers like sausages gripped an axe handle so wide that Kätzchen didn’t think she’d be able to hold it in both hands. Little black hairs like a wire brush bristled in patches from skin the colour of fresh peas. Its black leather tunic had been sewn together from mismatched pieces from half a dozen different animals, as were its rough trousers and boots. The brute smelled of scorched meat and faeces, and the sound of its breathing was one part snore, one part wheeze, and one part gasp.

Kätzchen had found a place where the falling tower had broken open a hole in the wall. Making her way inside the walls of the University was physically easy. Kätzchen was small enough. But being closed up, not being able always to see if there were orcs and goblins an inch from her face, worked at what little nerve she had left.

Every time she caught a whiff of an orc scout, or heard a rough footfall or grunt, the sight of her family going into the cauldrons, screaming, flashed through her mind’s eye. She’d already stopped once to fight back body-wracking sobs.

There was no way for her to tell how much time had passed, or even how high she’d climbed up through the University walls, or how far across the bridge she’d passed.

Kätzchen wanted to climb back down – she should have climbed back down – but the higher up she went the fewer orcs she encountered. The scattered greenskins scared her more than the mass of them. The army itself was too big, too overwhelming even to understand except as a force of nature.

But that’s how the orcs had first come to the fields around her village, in ones and twos, in scouting parties that probed at their stockades, ran off with sheep, stole supplies. They came first as an annoyance, as thieves in the night.

Then they came as an avalanche.

A deafening crash broke her from her reverie, then the sight of a scratched green forearm protruding into the space between the walls beneath her almost made her scream. But in order to save her own life, Kätzchen held her tongue.

The orc barked out something in its crude tongue and at least one more voice responded.

They were probing the walls. Had it heard her? Smelled her? She couldn’t go back down.

Painfully aware of the fragile glass globe in the pouch at her belt, Kätzchen hung there until the orc began to make the hole bigger. She had to be up and away before it stuck its head in.

Kätzchen climbed, because she had nowhere else to go but up.

Count Leitdorf didn’t want to, but he had to pause a moment and lean against the strong battlements of the tower to catch his breath. It was starting to rain, and the sun was maybe two hours from the western horizon. The air up there felt good, and he drew in big, almost gasping breaths. He’d spent considerable time on the roof of that tower, the tallest in the citadel, but when he finally stood and looked down on the city, that once-lofty perspective paled in comparison to the Lord Astronomer’s towering observatory.

As his breathing settled, Leitdorf made a silent promise that he would rebuild that tower – taller even – if it was the last thing he did.

With one more deep breath, Leitdorf set up the long telescope in the space between battlements. The lenses, miraculously, were intact, and after a quick inspection, he found the little wheels that brought distant points into focus.

First, he turned the telescope back to the south-west, to the citadel gate. It took some time, some trial and error, but he finally picked Baron Leberecht out of the crowd. The man who wanted to stand toe-to-toe, man-to-orc, with Gorbad sat astride Leitdorf’s finest horse. Upside down and backwards, Leberecht still looked regal and confident on his mount. Leitdorf couldn’t read his lips, but the baron’s body language was plain – the refugees would have to move a whole lot faster before he would be entirely satisfied.

‘Now, young lady…’ Leitdorf whispered to himself and swung the telescope back east, to the Great Bridge. The wreckage of the Lord Astronomer’s tower had broken gaping holes in the slate-tiled roofs of the University, and bricks and broken lumber littered the rooftops. More wreckage, and bodies – even without the telescope Leitdorf could make those out – floated in the dirty brown water of the slow-moving river, fetched up against the bridge’s three dozen arches.

Something moved at the corner of one of the buildings and at first Leitdorf hoped it was Kätzchen, though climbing onto the roof wasn’t part of their plan.

He brought the telescope to bear and when he finally focused in on the source of the movement his blood went cold, and drained from his head so fast and so thoroughly he was afraid he’d faint.

‘Count,’ Earvin gasped from behind him. ‘What… is it?’

Leitdorf had managed to outrun his seneschal, but not by much. The count found his assistant’s voice soothing enough that he didn’t faint after all.

‘It’s…’ Leitdorf replied. ‘It’s a spider.’

The creature climbed around the eaves of one of the bridge buildings, legs twitching forwards, tips like spearheads digging into the masonry and woodwork. Leitdorf wanted to scream at the sight of the unclean horror.

‘They’re on the bridge?’ Sir Hahn asked – Leitdorf hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.

Leitdorf scanned the Great Bridge from west to east. Orcs in threes then twelves, then a hundred in a cluster, were revealed in the holes in the roof of the Great Bridge. The bulk of them had made it halfway across.

‘Kätzchen,’ the count whispered. ‘Tell me you’ve set the trap. Set that trap, damn it. Set that–’

‘Count?’ Hahn and Earvin asked at the same time.

‘Oh,’ Leitdorf whispered, ‘no.’

‘It’s raining,’ Kätzchen whispered to herself as she clawed her way up out of the hole in the roof, elbows digging into broken wood. The sharp-edged slate cut her, and she’d lost track of the number of splinters in her hands, face, and neck.

She swore when she felt something tickle her side and saw the map slip from her belt and flutter through a hole in the floor behind her. A little gust of wind took it away.

With an uncharacteristically deep grunt, the halfling hefted herself up the rest of the way and rolled out onto the shallow-sloped roof. She paused to take a deep breath, and let the light rain patter her hot, dirty face.

Kätzchen had never felt so exhausted in her entire life, and she’d recently spent days on end running.

She had very little time or energy left, and she knew the orcs were well across the bridge. Still, she might make it if she stayed to the roofs and ran west as fast as she could. She was reasonably sure she could climb back down to the street on the west end before the bulk of them made it across, and certainly she could move faster and more stealthily through the western districts to Leitdorf’s citadel and safety – however temporary.

That word stopped her.

Temporary.

They could hold the western half of the city, but not for long. Hold the citadel, maybe a little longer. Count Leitdorf had told her that himself.

And what then?

Maybe escape to… what did he call it? Alt-something. Another human city. Another target for Gorbad.

Another few hundred miles from home.

Another few hundred miles from anything Kätzchen recognised – from her own kind, from everything worth staying and fighting for.

The roof trembled and she stopped breathing but kept her eyes closed.

When it trembled again she shot to her feet.

A sickly blue-black, the monster had the spiky, segmented legs of a crab, the head of a spider, and on its back, its shell torn open and bent upwards, rode a mass of squalling goblins. A shrill whistle sounded from the giant spider, a beast as big as four horses. Black eyes rimmed in blood-red shell gleamed even in the dull light. Something Kätzchen hoped was spittle, but feared was venom, dripped from a cluster of ebony-black fangs, each as long as her arm.

The goblins riding it squealed when they saw her laying on the roof. If Kätzchen looked like a human child, the goblins might have been the malformed offspring of their orc masters – shorter even than Kätzchen, naked save for the odd loincloth or feathered token, they would have appeared comical if they weren’t so murderously ill-tempered.

Kätzchen turned to run, facing west.

And saw three curved, blue-black legs twitch up and over the eaves of the west end of the roof. She heard orc voices in the attic below, and spared them a glance through the hole from which she’d climbed – and made eye contact with the orc scout.

It smiled at her.

It had her map in its hand, and it looked… hungry.

Kätzchen put a hand down to her belt pouch and looked up at the citadel rising into the distance.

‘Oh, no,’ Count Leitdorf whispered, ignoring the men behind him clamouring for news. ‘No, Kätzchen.’

She was surrounded. The hideous spider-mounts clawed their way up the sides of the building. He watched her – upside down and backwards – step back away from a hole in the roof as a pair of orc hands scratched for purchase from below.

‘Kätzchen,’ he pleaded. ‘Gisele… no.’

She looked up, right at him – Leitdorf would swear for the rest of his life that she looked right at him. But how could she see him from atop the tower in the citadel, what… nearly two miles away in the rain, in the failing light?

But she looked him in the eye when she took the little glass globe from her pouch.

‘No,’ Leitdorf pleaded again, but he knew she had to do it. It was their only hope – their only hope, but not hers. ‘Kätzchen, no.’

She winked at him through the telescope and Leitdorf couldn’t help but cough out a sob at the sight of the smile that split her face.

As though it was nothing, a cast-off bit of food, a worm-eaten apple, she tossed the little glass globe off the side of the roof. One of the orcs clambered up and grabbed at her ankle.

Leitdorf didn’t see where the glass globe fell, where it hit.

He turned from the telescope, pulling it back off the battlements with him, and he sat down, his hands held over his head.

Leitdorf cried as the Great Bridge exploded in a burst of pulverised stone and splintered wood. The river’s surface parted to form a bowl and the bottom part of the Great Bridge fell down into that bowl and drove itself into the riverbed. The bridge buildings, the irreplaceable University and its centuries of learning and tradition went up into the sky in the form of a roiling cloud of grey and black and green and red.

It rained pieces of orcs for half a mile in every direction and when the shockwave hit the citadel it was like a storm. The cold rain drove into them so hard, some of the men on the tower roof screamed at the pain of its impact.

Then the water filled back into the bowl all at once and swallowed anything that might have been left of the Great Bridge.

And anything that might have been left of maybe a quarter of the orcs of Gorbad Ironclaw’s army.

And anything that might have been of the bravest woman Count Brutus Leitdorf had ever had the honour of knowing.

‘Count,’ Earvin said, all but yelling into Leitdorf’s ear. ‘The bridge is gone!’

Leitdorf could only nod.

‘Count Leitdorf, sir…’ the young knight Pieter Hahn said, leaning down and holding out a hand to help him up.

Leitdorf wanted to slap the young knight’s hand away, and he almost did, but he stopped and looked up at the men around him.

‘What now, sir?’ Hahn asked.

Leitdorf sighed and took the young knight’s hand. When he’d climbed to his feet and straightened his armour and tabard, Count Leitdorf said, ‘We hold them, Sir Hahn.’

‘For how long, sir?’

Leitdorf looked down at the flood of refugees. They’d cleared the western gates and already streamed across the rolling fields to the west of the city.

‘As long as it takes to protect their retreat,’ Leitdorf answered.

‘But what of Gorbad?’ another young knight asked. Leitdorf couldn’t place his name, but was sure that by the time the night was done, he would never forget it.

‘A young lady of overwhelming courage once told me she thought there was no Gorbad,’ Leitdorf said, ‘not really, anyway.’

‘Then what of Nuln, sir?’ the same knight asked.

‘We have innocents in our charge,’ Count Leitdorf said, ‘and we’ll see them safely away or die trying.

‘As for Nuln?’

Leitdorf turned and looked out over the burning ruin his city had already become. The orcs were beginning to regroup.

Wiping a tear from his eye with the back of a hand, Count Brutus Leitdorf said, ‘The city is theirs.’

The Second Sun

Ben Counter

Upon the murderous Norscan peaks, Sigtaal Whitehand let his horse die. It had been lame since the icebound pass, where Sigtaal was sure he had glimpsed fur-clad figures watching him from the crest of the ridge. This particular mountain had no name, for he was perhaps the first man of Sigmar’s land ever to leave his footprints in its snow. Perhaps it would be his grave.

But he did not think so. He was here for a reason. He would continue on foot, he would drag himself on raw and bleeding elbows and knees if he had to. He might die, but not because he gave up and let the cold claim him.

He cut as much meat as he could carry from the carcass of his horse, hurrying before the meat began to freeze, wreathed in the steam from its cooling blood. He looked around him, sure that he was being watched. The dark red stain around the dead horse would have been a beacon to them, whoever they were, a bright blossom against the endless snows.

He took out the tattered book from beneath his furs and wrote down the date, as well as he could reckon it. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty years after the birth of the man-god Sigmar. Perhaps one of the final days of Sigtaal Whitehand’s life. But it would be worth it. The secrets of Norsca were worth dying for. If there was anything he had learned, it was that.

He had seen the titanic obsidian spire around which a host of black, winged horrors flocked. The caverns which moaned with the voice of the mourning, where the hardy tribes of Norsca left their young to learn of sorrow. The eyries cut into the highest peaks where giants once held court, and heaps of enormous bones lay in the valleys below. He had seen the lights in colours that his eyes had never beheld, hovering over the northernmost reaches of the world. There were such wonders here, for those willing to stare at death long enough to witness them.

The mountains ahead levelled into a plateau, perhaps the top of a glacier that wound its way through the valleys and ground down the peaks as it went. Sigtaal thought he could see a darkness there, perhaps a trick of the waning daylight or of his own mind, trying to find some landmark in the unending whiteness.

But no, it was there, definitely. A long crack in the snow he was sure had not been there a few moments ago. Sigtaal closed the book and stood, trying to get a better view.

It was widening. A great crevasse, so inky dark it looked like it led to the centre of the world. He could hear it now, a thunderous cracking like the sound of the spring thaw. Slabs of ice were shearing off the glacier and tumbling away. He even felt it through his feet as the peak he clung to shuddered.

The crevasse had enormous fangs of stone up and down its length. It was a mouth, the maw of the mountains themselves, something vast and alive that was stirring as Sigtaal watched. And he felt from it a hunger, for it was the portal to an immense emptiness.

It was no impulse of logic or desire that compelled Sigtaal to begin walking along the knife-like ridge of flint that would take him to the glacier, closer to the opening mouth of the mountains. It was a pull, an impulse he did not control. It was the same force that had brought him to Norsca from the lands of the Empire, the same that had turned him to the study of witchcraft and hedge magic as a youth. Everything he had ever done, every step he had taken on that forbidding path, had been to bring him here, to witness this appalling, fascinating sight.

Sigtaal saw the Norscans as he set foot on the glacier, and felt its ice shifting beneath his feet. They were indeed the same folk who had been watching and following him for some time. In their dozens they gathered, clad in heavy furs, their women with their hair bound up with bones and their men carrying axes and shields. They were so weathered they looked as though they had been carved from oak.

Three of their menfolk approached Sigtaal. He must have looked like a stooped, sickly child to them, for they were born to the mountains and Sigtaal had never known such hardship in the Empire as he had come across in these mountains of Norsca.

‘I am Sigtaal of the White Hand,’ he said, using the Norscan tongue he had learned early in his journey in the ports upon the Sea of Claws. ‘I have come to learn your ways. The ways of the far north, where the realms of magic meet the realms of man.’

He did not know if they understood him. They might have spoken a dialect far different from those in the south. Or perhaps they simply did not care for what he had to say. One of the warriors spat on the ice – the spittle was frozen before it landed. Then they turned away and, ignoring Sigtaal, went about their business on the glacier.

Their business involved the sledges they had dragged up here, piled high with hide-wrapped bundles. They dragged them close to the great maw, which had now yawed open to its full width. Sigtaal had a good idea of what the bundles contained by their size and shape. It was no surprise when he saw the pallid skin and gnarled limbs, wrapped up in the limp attitudes of death.

The handling of corpses was usually work for slaves and prisoners of war. These warriors and their womenfolk were at some business to which the low-born would not be permitted, even to perform such menial and distasteful tasks. A few stringy, hardy carrion birds circled overhead and alighted on the surrounding peaks, but they did not approach. Even the few creatures that lived here seemed to have a reverence for the occasion.

The bundles were unwrapped, and the women painted sigils on the corpses’ chests in a mix of blood and powdered herbs. The men hauled the bodies to the edge of the mouth and hurled them in, and as they fell, Sigtaal saw there was still a little movement left in their limbs. They flailed hopelessly as they fell, tumbling end over end into the darkness.

Some of them were alive. A few even had the strength to cry out as they fell. Sigtaal could not tear his eyes away as he watched the spectacle.

One of the women, a crone with skin like cracked leather and eyes like flecks of onyx, trudged through the snow towards him. She beckoned him, as if he was a wayward child who had wandered off the path. Sigtaal followed her step by step to the edge of the maw, until he could feel it quivering with a vast subterranean heartbeat.

He looked into the abyss. From the edge of the vast throat had sprouted shards half of bone, half of ice, and the falling bodies had been impaled on them like insects on thorns. Some were alive even now, writhing feebly as they slid further down, what little lifeblood they still had dripping down into the darkness.

Something murmured there, in the depths. A dim flare of light illuminated a hide of rocky scales, a hint of fang and claw. It was so far below that Sigtaal could not gauge its size accurately, only that it was huge. Sigtaal’s stomach lurched as a red eye swivelled in its deep socket, and as the light died out he was sure it focused on him.

Sigtaal stumbled back from the edge.

‘Are you feeding it?’ he said to the Norscans. He could not make out which one of them was the crone, for flurries of snow were blowing up and they all resembled the same fur-clad shadow. ‘Is that what you are showing me? What am I to do here?’

But the Norscans’ work was done. Their sledges were empty of the dead and the dying. They turned and left, seeming to melt away into the snow. Sigtaal made to follow them, but they were lost in the growing snowstorm and their tracks were blown away as soon as they were made.

Sigtaal was left alone by the edge of the great maw, and even over the heightening wind he could feel the heartbeat of whatever lay below the glacier.

And he understood.

It had all been to bring him here, to this moment, alone on this fathomless glacier, alone with the beast. The paths of magic had led him here. It was not by accident he had learned the secrets he had, or that he had come here, to this place, where he could finally see their true purpose.

Sigtaal Whitehand rummaged through the papers bundled under his clothes, beneath his furs. He pulled out his journal and turned it to a page covered with diagrams and incantations. Collecting that information had taken up much of his life before he had dedicated it to the journey northwards. It had seen a price put on his head, for he had torn parts of it from the tombs of long-dead chieftains or from the rantings of condemned witch-prophets.

The Second Sun would shine upon this glacier, and Sigtaal would know everything.

Upon the seventeenth stroke of the great bronze clock, Associate Comprehender Henning Mohr descended the basalt stair into the archive levels of the Bright College in Altdorf. Fireflies flitted around him as he inserted the seven keys, each carved from a different node of volcanic rock, into the seven locks on the iron-banded door in front of him. The hinges complained as the door opened.

On the obsidian walls hung swords, shields, maces and other weapons and pieces of armour, almost all of them wrapped in a flame that never burned out. Aqshy, the colour of magic that found expression in the fire spells of Bright Magic, flowed strong here, and runnels of liquid fire dripped down the walls. Mohr nodded at the apprentices who sat poring over tomes written by Grand Magisters past, each volume chiselled onto panels of beaten metal, for parchment rarely lasted for very long here without bursting into flame.

One of the knee-high, hooded creatures, a keeper of antiquities, hurried up to Mohr and bowed its head. No one had ever been able to discern the origin, nature or even gender of the keepers of antiquities, and it was assumed among the apprentices of the Order that they had been bound into service some generations ago by powerful Magisters. Mohr wondered what the creature looked like under its hood, and what he himself must look like to this odd inhabitant of his college. He had cultivated the forked beard emblematic of his Order, and was a spindly, lanky man whose hair had tended towards red even before the flow of Aqshy had turned it virulent orange

‘Associate Comprehender!’ said the keeper with typical enthusiasm. ‘For what reason have you graced this place of ancient knowledge?’

‘I seek access to the artefacts of the Verlorenheimer expedition,’ said Mohr.

‘Nothing could give me greater pleasure than to assist you in this!’ replied the keeper, clapping its tiny hands. ‘Follow me!’

The keeper led Mohr through the many irregularly shaped chambers beneath the Bright College. A fellow apprentice was too busy picking apart an intricate brass puzzle box to notice them, while another was in the act of putting out the fire that had started on his well-scorched robe as he slaved over a table full of alchemical apparatus. Finally the keeper came to a room in which the relics of the expedition were still boxed up in a heptagonal study room.

‘It is most regrettable, would you not say, that Verlorenheimer himself did not live to see the fruits of his expedition reach the Empire?’ said the keeper.

‘Yes, very much so,’ said Mohr, wary of getting into a lengthy conversation with the keeper.

‘A wasting disease, they say, that claimed him before he reached our shores. But Norsca is a place of many and unknown dangers!’

‘It is,’ said Mohr. ‘I shall begin my work.’

‘Should you need anything…’

‘I shall come and find you.’

‘Very good, Associate Comprehender!’ The keeper of antiquities bowed as elaborately as its tiny stature allowed, and backed out of the room.

The smell of Norsca’s shores still clung to the two boxes the expedition had brought back. The Bright College often sponsored hardy explorers like Verlorenheimer on expeditions to such perilous places. For whatever reason, the gods had seen to it that the most powerful secrets and artefacts lay in the most inhospitable and dangerous places.

Mohr snapped his fingers and conjured a ball of flame into the air to give him light to work with. He discarded the detritus first. The bones of malformed humans and animals had curiosity value but they were nothing unusual from Norsca, a place whose people suffered a notably high rate of mutation and other strange maladies. Tablets with carved runes were more interesting, and might reward translation.

At the bottom of one box was a mask. It lay face down so Mohr saw only the back of it as he bent down to pick it up. It tingled when he touched it, and he thought he heard a rush of wind nearby. There was even a chill to it, as if it had locked up some of the cold of the Norscan peaks and somehow kept it even in the depths of the Bright College, which anyone not of the Order always felt were infernally hot and oppressive.

He turned the mask over in his hands. The mask consisted of the upper half of the face, such as one that might be worn at a midnight revel, but it did not resemble anything that might be worn for pleasure. The eyeholes were carved in the black wood of the mask to resemble two mouths with serrated fangs. The nose was long and pointed, like the mask of a plague doctor.

The wood was porous, covered in thousands of tiny holes. As Mohr examined it, tiny grub-like worms wriggled from the pores, so the mask seemed covered in patches of seething whiteness. Mohr felt his stomach turning over and dropped the mask back into the box.

A native parasite, perhaps, or the grubs of some weevil picked up on the voyage across the Sea of Claws. Mohr moved on.

A book of great antiquity lay among the carved stones and arrowheads that made up most of the relics. Mohr knew instantly that it was not Norscan, for those people rarely used parchment and their alphabet was all straight lines and angles, as befitted text usually carved instead of written. Mohr knew that the parchment used was of high quality and might be even centuries old, and that many of the Colleges (although not the Bright College, given the difficulty of keeping anything flammable intact for long periods of time) possessed tomes that dated since the days of Sigmar, or even older works by high elf mages from eras long past.

On the leather cover was branded the symbol of Aqshy, the colour of magic the Bright Order studied. Its form was antique and a little distorted, but it was definitely the rune that could be found at the heart of all a Bright Wizard’s spells. Verlorenheimer, then, had been telling the truth when he said he had calculated the intersection of powerful lines of Aqshy in those distant Norscan mountains – and, as he had hoped, someone had been there before, someone seeking to understand that power for themselves.

Mohr carefully opened the book, bringing the miniature fireball closer while taking care to keep its flames from licking the pages. He recognised the Imperial tongue’s alphabet but not the language on the first page, and realised that it was written in a code. This was common among practitioners of magic, both for reasons of secrecy and because magic was not always content to be described in a mundane tongue.

Mohr had studied magical ciphers since he had first been brought to the Bright College. There was no arcane code he could not crack. And the author of this one was far from the most cunning codemaker Mohr had ever encountered.

This is the work of Sigtaal Whitehand, he read. And please it you, reader, that you read perhaps my final thoughts…

‘The tongues of men might name me Sigtaal Whitehand! But the aether knows me as Malofex, and I will know the secrets of the dawn of time!’

Sigtaal raised his hands high, and the cold was banished around him as he forced the fire of his soul out into the world. The ice under his feet hissed and steamed. The sky itself seemed to darken, and the whole glacier shuddered.

Once, when he was very young, Sigtaal had learned that he was not a mere man. He was a worker of magic, a being with a parallel soul in the magical world of the aether where the winds of magic had their origin. That being, his magical twin soul, was Malofex, and Sigtaal had listened to the whispers that reached him from that magical dimension that bade him unite the two.

He was Sigtaal, the man. And he was Malofex, the wizard.

The ice was melting under him. He forced the heat up into the air, moulding it as a sculptor moulded wax, and a ruddy light shone down on him. The sky was now completely dark, retreated behind the clouds that gathered as if to watch.

‘From the lost books of Alakan I tore thee!’ he shouted above the groaning of the ice. ‘A magical work that the gods bade me seek! Upon the Plains of Uradesh I cut the contract into my flesh that gave me the power to wield thee! In the dungeons of Klarond Kar I bargained for the truth of thy conjuration! And now I call thee forth!’

The ice cracked around Sigtaal as the glow overhead became the seed of a fireball, twisting and boiling in the air. Chunks of melting ice slid into the crevasse ahead of him. The ice under his feet tilted as it came apart.

Sigtaal focused. He took the wooden mask he always carried, and put it over his face. This was the face of Malofex, and when he wore it, he gave himself over to the magical half of his soul. In another world, a parallel realm, Malofex was echoing his effort, and together they were focusing the raw tide of Aqshy that now swirled overhead as a wind of ash and sulphur. The ice sank around Sigtaal, leaving him standing on a precarious column surrounded by growing chasms that roared out steam as water boiled.

The fireball in the sky grew, and its light was painful. Against the dark sky it shone too bright to look at.

‘I conjure thee, the Second Sun!’

Sigtaal’s robes caught fire. Hair smouldered. His very life force was draining out of him to augment the spell. Illuminated in the harsh light, his fingers thinned and shrivelled into the near-skeletal claws of an old man. His skin became grey and sunken, and fragments of burning ash pitted it like the surface of the moon Morrslieb. His eyes retreated into their sockets, bright sparking flints in their black pits.

The burning wind screamed. The glacier now resembled more the surface of a churning ocean, with islands of ice overturning in the boiling waters. Great clouds of steam billowed up. Sigtaal teetered on his column of ice, buffeted by the scalding winds, wrestling with the power channelled through him.

‘I am Malofex! I am the lord of fire! I conjure thee, the Second Sun!’

The Second Sun erupted above him. It was a great sphere of flame, as if a tear had been opened up in the fabric of the world and the raw, boiling fury of magic had forced its way through.

The glacier disintegrated. Sigtaal now stood alone on a column of ice lashed by a scalding sea, bathed in the furious light of the Second Sun.

The water itself was dissolving away into torrents of steam. It swirled around in a great whirlpool, reaching down to the bare rock of the mountain beneath. The mountain, which had not seen any sun since the dawn of the world. The mountain, which would soon tell Sigtaal everything he had ever desired to know.

Sigtaal fell to his knees. The Second Sun was made real, and he had no control over it now. He gasped for breath, barely able to find air in the lungfuls of steam.

His hand, in front of his face, was ancient and gnarled. He had given up so much. Never again would he be able to conjure a spell such as this. But once was enough.

Down in the pit of the whirlpool, something stirred. It was the same colour as the rock itself, a vast shape just stirring, covered in pebbly hide. It was immense in size. Sigtaal had not imagined anything could be so huge. Like a fossilised limb of the earth itself it unfolded, its broad back like an island, its head, as it rose, like a battered mountain crag.

Sigtaal saw its eyes, like enormous rubies buried in folds of volcanic rock, look up at him. It rose to its full height and its head was level with Sigtaal. Its enormous undershot jaw was surmounted with a clutch of crystal-studded teeth, and the rest of its face was an unyielding cliff face. A ridge rolled over the top of its head, down its back, and along the island of its hindquarters, breaking into rocky spines. It was like a centaur in shape, a vastly powerful humanoid torso rising from a lower body like that of an enormous dragon hewn from stone.

Its vastness and power did not fit into Sigtaal’s mind. Even lit by the Second Sun, and by the crackles of lightning that flared among the peaks and valleys of its shape, it did not seem that anything like it could be real.

Sigtaal forced himself to look at it, into those ruby eyes.

The thunder of the mountains was its voice as it spoke.

‘Who calls on Kholek Suneater?’ it bellowed. ‘Who dares?’

‘I am Sigtaal Whitehand!’ yelled Sigtaal in reply, his voice almost lost in the rushing of the water and the wind. ‘Called Malofex! In the name of the Dark Gods, I have sought you out, most ancient of beings! You, who were old when the gods walked this world! You, who have seen sights at the dawn of time that none else have seen! Kholek Suneater, father of the dragon ogre race, it is I who call on you!’

The Observatory of Flame was a brass orb topping one of the Bright College’s twenty-one towers. Its lower half was filled with boiling fire, magically robbed of its sound and the worst of its heat, over which was suspended a circular platform. It was on this platform that Grand Magister Ulzheimer was accustomed to spend his time in the College, when he was not serving as a battle wizard to the armies of the Emperor Karl.

‘One moment,’ said Ulzheimer, as he heard the doorway in the upper surface of the observatory opening.

Associate Comprehender Mohr paused his descent down the spiral staircase leading to the platform.

Ulzheimer knelt down and peered into the flames below them. They formed endless landscapes, peaks and valleys, sometimes the images of cities or fanciful maps, sometimes faces, all dissolving back into the fire before they were fully formed. Sheets of beaten metal, along with pointed styluses for inscribing notes on them, were scattered around the platform, already covered in the Grand Magister’s scrawled observations.

Mohr waited for several minutes as Ulzheimer muttered under his breath, occasionally scratching a few words onto the metal pages.

‘Come here,’ said Ulzheimer eventually.

Mohr walked down the steps to the platform. The Grand Magister’s presence was such that Mohr did not need to know the complicated rules of wizardly etiquette to kneel in deference. Ulzheimer was old in a way that made him seem stronger and more powerful than a mere aged man. His own beard was white and waist-length, with silver flame flickering at the tips of his elaborately curled moustache. His robes were black, like volcanic rock, shot through with scintillating red as if lava was forcing its way to the surface. Heavy brass rings encrusted his fingers, and fat rubies hung from the obsidian links of the chain around his neck. His staff, a length of scorched and petrified wood, was propped against the staircase.

Ulzheimer ignored Mohr’s prostration. ‘What do you see?’ he said, gesturing towards the fire.

Mohr looked over the edge. ‘Mountains and rivers,’ he said. ‘An eye, weeping. A herd of horses galloping.’ He looked up at the Grand Magister. ‘The future?’

‘The correct answer,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘is everything. The flame of Aqshy flows through everything. The energy that animates. It is life itself. Thus, it can create and destroy alike. Everything is within the flame, Comprehender. Only when you can see it can you ascend to take upon you the mantle of Magister.’

‘Grand Magister,’ said Mohr. ‘My studies have yielded fruit. I wish for leave to pursue them further.’

‘I see,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Explain.’

‘The expedition uncovered the remnants of a journey by a hedge wizard named Sigtaal Whitehand,’ said Mohr. ‘I have yet to complete my translation, for he used a code. But he was clearly a wielder of Bright Magic, so much as any man could be before the foundation of the Colleges of Magic.’

‘Then it is true,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘that the paths of magic were walked more thoroughly than we previously acknowledged.’

‘He was seeking some great secret,’ continued Mohr. ‘I do not know yet just what he was seeking, or whether he found it, but certainly his capacity with Aqshy was formidable.’ Mohr handed the diary to the Magister, along with a wedge of notes Mohr had taken on his translation. Ulzheimer scanned their contents rapidly, blueish flames licking around the tips of his fingers.

‘You have my leave,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘to continue. But ensure that your findings are passed on to me immediately, and not to anyone else in the College. For there are Magisters, shamed though I am to say it, who would seize your findings and use them to further their own careers and not to pursue greater understanding of magic.’

‘I understand,’ said Mohr. ‘I cannot pretend to understand the politics of our College, for I have not yet ascended far. But I know that some matters are more… complicated than we are informed as novices.’

‘Perhaps that is the first step on a path to true wisdom,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘You will learn much, Mohr, if you keep your eyes and ears open and are always wary of the agendas of those around you. Your endeavours will see you rise like ash upon the winds of Aqshy, Associate Comprehender, if you continue to show shrewdness as well as determination.’

‘Then I shall go to my studies,’ said Mohr. ‘I shall bring you my findings soon. I feel there is much more that Sigtaal’s writings have to tell me.’

‘As do I,’ said Ulzheimer. He pointed down at the boiling flame. ‘I can read it in the fire. There, you stand enrobed in the garb of a Grand Magister, under the ruby crown of Teclis. The flame sees it. It is only one future, but it is the one into which the Bright winds flow most readily. Our path of magic favours you, Mohr.’

‘Then I bid you farewell,’ said Mohr. ‘We will speak soon, if it pleases you.’

‘Go,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘And bathe your soul in the flame.’

Mohr bowed again, and as he ascended the staircase out of the Observatory, Ulzheimer was still staring into the prophetic fire, his unblinking eyes reflecting the orange spark of Aqshy’s will.

It was not Sigtaal who stood before Kholek Mountaineater, the father of the dragon ogres. Sigtaal was a man, and no man could look on the appalling wrongness, the sheer scale and unbounded horror of that monster, without collapsing into a ball of terror and madness. It was Malofex who stood his ground, Malofex who saw the culmination of a lifetime’s journey in the cliff face of Kholek’s vastness. Malofex was a soul of the aether, magic made into the echo of a man’s soul, granted its form by the Dark Gods.

‘Tell me,’ said Malofex, ‘The truth of the world. Before it was perverted by liars. Before it was forgotten.’

‘For I am old,’ said Kholek.

‘Older than these mountains,’ said Malofex.

‘For I am mighty.’

‘As mighty as the storms above us.’

‘For I am terrible.’

‘As terrible as the dark of night.’

Kholek leaned over Malofex, the red orbs of his eyes settling on the human. Compared to the dragon ogre, Malofex was the size of an insect. ‘And what are you?’ he said, his voice like a landside.

‘I have walked the path of magic since I could understand that there was more in the world than this base flesh and earth,’ said Malofex. ‘I am he who opened the Bone Gate of Morr. In the land beyond, I learned of the Mountain God. I drank from the Pools of the Trackless Wood and saw a vision of a world before man, and of the first civilisation of sons born from the rock. And in the library of the Porphyry Tomb I read the name of their progenitor, Kholek Suneater. So I sought him out and now I stand before him. And I bid you, tell me! Tell me what the world knew when it was young, what has been forgotten!’

‘Ah,’ said Kholek. ‘And so I, who am a god, am to you no more than the scratchings of a madman. You honour Kholek Suneater no more than the half-lies of your own race, than the ramblings of your own dreams!’

‘No!’ cried Malofex. ‘I dedicated my life to finding you! What greater honour can a man give?’

‘Exactly,’ said Kholek, and if that vast rocky face could sneer, it did then. ‘A man. What is a man? A thimbleful of blood and bone! I have heard the sound of your cities as they spread like mould. The sound is the cawing of a nest of birds! The yowling of wild dogs! The history of your kind, everything any soft-fleshed insect has ever achieved, amounts to nothing more than the itching of a parasite suckling on the earth.’

Malofex dropped to his knees, holding his hands up as if begging. ‘And so I am here!’ he cried. ‘To rise above the mediocrity of my kind! To become more than a man could ever be! When our time has gone, when we wither away and the vermin take our cities, Malofex will remain! For I will armour my soul with such knowledge that the passage of time will not wither it. Knowledge that only one as great as Kholek Suneater can speak! Such truth that only one who slept at the heart of the world, who is as awesome as death itself, can recall from the dawn of time!’

‘So you summoned me,’ said Kholek, ‘to become more than a man?’

‘Yes!’ replied Malofex. ‘Yes, god of the mountains!’

Kholek’s eyes narrowed into red specks, dancing in the light of the second sun. ‘Kholek Suneater is summoned by no one,’ he growled.

There was still enough of Sigtaal Whitehand in Malofex’s soul to feel fear. He took a step back, and the icy column teetered below him. ‘But Lord Kholek,’ he said, silently praying to his gods to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘Think on what you can reap from an end to your slumber! My kind think themselves secure in Sigmar’s Empire. Not one among them could comprehend one such as Kholek Suneater. And those are just the lands of my birth! The elves of Ulthuan are womanish and weak. Their brethren in Naggaroth care only for maiming one another. The dwarfs huddle in mountain holds. Not one of them could survive against an army of the north, blessed by the Dark Gods, with the mountain god at its head! You could rule this world! You could sit upon a throne cut from these mountains, all the people of the world battling to pay you fealty!’

‘And so the mighty Malofex will prove to the world that he is more than a man,’ said Kholek, a mocking note in his voice. ‘The mighty Malofex, who conjured this.’ Kholek pointed a granite claw at the second sun burning overhead.

‘The greatest magic,’ said Malofex. ‘Beyond the means of any mere man.’

Kholek reached up and plunged his claw into the Second Sun. He grimaced, revealing teeth like broken white tombstones. The sun shuddered, its light reddening, and as every muscle in Kholek’s enormous body ground together beneath his hide the sun shrunk towards his hand.

Malofex stood again, and tried to grasp at the winds of Aqshy, his mind reaching out to snatch at the slippery magic. But it evaded him. It seemed drawn to Kholek, as if the mountain god commanded its respect now.

The Sun shrunk until it was contained in Kholek’s enormous claw. The heat melted the hide of his palm and fat drops of molten rock dripped off him, bursting into steam as they hit the water. Kholek looked down at Malofex, smiled, and crushed the Sun in his hand.

The Second Sun was snuffed out. Instantly, a dark as profound as night fell. Kholek was a deeper darkness looming over Malofex.

Lightning crackled across the black clouds overhead, edging Kholek’s form in blue-white light. Thunder cracked, shaking the slender ice column under Malofex.

‘I feel the heartbeat of your world even as I slumber!’ bellowed Kholek, his voice louder even than the thunder. ‘I feel the scum of your kind spreading! I hear their cities fall and their graveyards spill over! And I have heard the same happen to the elves of Ulthuan, and the sorcerer-lords of Nehekhara; the dwarfish holds and the god kings of the lizardfolk. All grow, all wane, all die. And there has not yet been an empire that is anything more to Kholek than the scrabbling of vermin underfoot!’

‘Lord Kholek!’ cried Malofex, his voice lost amid the thunder even to his own ears. ‘I grant to you my world! I grant to you an eternity of godhood! It is yours to take! This is my gift to you, to honour the mountain god in return for the truth only you know!’

‘Your world?’ roared Kholek, and the gale of his voice nearly threw Malofex off the column. ‘This rotten fruit, riddled with maggots? This cesspit of cowards? This cartload of ignorant dregs? For whom should Kholek Suneater stoop so low, that he would spend his waking days as a lord of the squabbling filth? Should he abase himself so for Malofex, the conjurer of tricks? The people of the northlands threw me their dead and their captured because they feared me. Malofex demanded I wake so he could bleed me of my knowledge. He will know why the men of these lands forsook their dead in their dread of me. He will know why this world still shudders when I stir in my sleep!’

Malofex dissolved away. He fled to the aether, to join the winds of magic. Sigtaal Whitehand was left behind, cowering before the mountain god.

Lightning lashed down, bright bolts falling into the boiling ocean. They earthed onto Kholek and power rippled across him. He glowed from the inside, the light bleeding from his mouth and eyes, picking out crazed patterns across his cracked hide.

Sigtaal was yelling, his throat raw, but the sounds had no meaning. His strength was gone, his Second Sun extinguished, and all that remained in him was terror. He lost control of his body and crouched down, head buried in his arms, unable to move. Malofex’s mask fell from him, and the only face he wore now was his own.

Kholek Suneater picked up Sigtaal between two claw-tips. Sigtaal writhed like a worm on a hook. He flailed uselessly, eyes wide and streaming tears. Kholek held Sigtaal above his head and opened the great ravine of his mouth.

Even through the terror, Sigtaal understood what was happening. He shrieked a wordless prayer to the aether, for Malofex to return to him, for his gods to impale Kholek on a bolt of glittering fire or send a legion of daemons to rescue him. But there was no answer.

No, there was an answer. From far off across the reaches of the aether, carried on the winds of magic from the other side of the world.

Laughter. Faint and distant, but unmistakeable. The laughter of those who have kept a pet to perform for them, and grown tired with it, and now mocked it as they abandoned it to its fate.

Kholek dropped Sigtaal into his mouth. Sigtaal tumbled down the hot rocky tunnel of his throat. Darkness closed around him, smothering, and he was still alive as he went down.

Kholek waded through the ocean, knocking aside the flimsy pillar of ice with an idle swipe of his claw. He hauled his vast form out onto a rocky peak, and bathed in the lightning that ripped down from the wounded sky.

On the churning waters, even now freezing back over, floated a book of bound parchment. On its cover was the rune of Aqshy. It washed up against the rock shore, becoming encased in ice even as Kholek absorbed the storm’s fury and contemplated the world into which he had awoken.

Beneath the courtyard of the Bright College, beneath the furnaces that drew the torrent of fire magic from the winds of the aether, even beneath the steel catacombs of its past Magisters, lay the basalt warren of the College’s depths. An ancient volcanic eruption had created a seam of glittering black stone, riddled with natural tunnels and vents, far beneath an unsuspecting Altdorf. The Bright College was founded on the spot where that volcanic fury had once erupted and far below the rock was still hot enough to remain fluid, its slow, angry churning filling the tunnels with the growling of a beast waiting out the next million years until it could erupt again.

Here, in the heat and darkness, lay the places where the Bright College kept its secrets.

Mohr had rarely glimpsed these tunnels, and then it had only been in the company of senior Magisters. Those visits had been cautionary, to illustrate what happened to Magisters who strayed off the path. Among these secrets were the natural oubliettes, barred with meteoric iron, where Black Magisters were imprisoned. The criminals of their kind, transgressors against the Order that had trained them, left to rot in the dark.

Mohr passed across a grate in the floor, and tried to ignore garbled screaming from beneath. A side chamber was half-filled with lava, in which was suspended by chains a naked man with a long black beard shot through with red. Mohr tried not to let his eyes linger on the sight, but he could not help seeing that the chest rose and fell with breathing, for this was not an execution – it was a prisoner, still alive. Mighty doors of obsidian and bronze shuddered as the madmen inside battered against their confinement. Sometimes one would find a way out of his cell and the Grand Magisters would order the flaming beast beneath the ground to rise up and flood these chambers with magma. It had happened before, none knew how many times, and here and there were footprints or handprints seared into the rock, or the shallow impressions of contorted bodies in the hard black stone.

Mohr lit his way with the miniature fireball as he walked. It orbited around his head, staying close, as if afraid. He came to an arch of smouldering wood, its embers permanently glowing. Mohr swallowed, muttered a few words of prayer, and walked through it.

Burning hands held him. He could not see them, but every flaming finger was etched in pain on his skin. He grimaced and forced himself to remain calm.

The bronze face in front of him was an image of one of the most ancient Magisters of his Order. He had consented to forsake death and remain in spirit here, as the steward of the Bright College’s secrets.

‘What do you seek?’ demanded the face. It was as tall as a man, and it was wrought with the deep lines and stern expression that it had possessed in life.

‘I seek the Apocrypha Incandescent,’ said Mohr.

‘The Apocrypha? And what does an Associate Comprehender want with that? You are little more than a freshly scorched adolescent! Do you still soil your britches at the sight of a naked flame, boy?’

‘I have been given leave by Grand Magister Ulzheimer,’ said Mohr. ‘It is essential to my studies into the history of the Bright Wind.’

‘Ulzheimer?’ said the face. ‘Year by year they change more and more. A burning intellect? A relentless determination to master the flame? So many pass through these halls! But yes, I think I recall him. Stares into the fire. Seeks the future.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mohr. ‘I must learn of the Apocrypha. Everything depends on it.’

‘Ha! It has been many years since one as inexperienced as you dared to make his way down here, and I have few enough opportunities for mirth. It should be amusing enough to watch you grapple with the Apocrypha.’

The burning hands let go. Mohr dropped to one knee and gulped down his pain as he forced himself to remain calm.

‘My gratitude,’ he said.

The face grunted in response and solidified against the wall.

The chamber beyond was a great natural fissure. Its sides soared up into blackness. Mohr could not help imagining the lava flowing through here, incinerating everything, stripping the flesh from his bones and then charring those bones away to nothing.

From chains that reached up out of sight hung iron cages, and in each was a relic of the Bright Order. Too dangerous or powerful to be kept in the college proper, they waited down here for the time someone would have to wield or consult them. An executioner’s axe with a blade of red crystal. A breastplate wrought from the flayed face of a red dragon. A dwarf-made gauntlet that still glowed with the fires of its forging.

In one cage was the book, bound in red leather, that Mohr knew to be the Apocrypha Incandescent. Once, a Magister had gone mad and barricaded himself in a wing of the Bright College, melting all the locks shut and conjuring daemons to fend off intruders. When the Bright Wizards finally broke in they found nothing of him save a pile of bone ash and this book, in which he had recorded all the madness that coursed through his mind. Some of it was prophetic. Some was gibberish. And some referred to spells that had otherwise been lost to the College.

Mohr opened the cage with a key of black crystal. He took out the book and laid it on the floor. Its pages were tough hide, slick with whatever treatment had rendered them fireproof. Mohr leafed through the pages, words of fevered madness catching at his mind, until he found the reference he had been looking for.

He placed the journal of Sigtaal Whitehand on the floor next to it, at a page displaying the same symbol he could see in the Apocrypha Incandescent.

It was an orb surrounded by rays of flame, variations of Aqshy’s rune forming a halo around it.

It was the Second Sun of Malofex.

Mohr let his miniature fireball settle on one shoulder, like an obedient bird, and began to read.

Mohr did not see Ulzheimer approach.

He felt the tap of the staff on his shoulder and broke from his thoughts. He realised his mouth was dry and he ached. He could not say for how long he had been sitting on the floor, bent over the two books.

‘Associate Comprehender,’ said Ulzheimer, a faint smile on his lips. ‘It does us no good to see our young wizards worked to death. Your fellows wonder where you are. I knew you would come to consult the Apocrypha, and so I came here to find you.’

‘I appreciate your concern, Grand Magister,’ said Mohr. ‘I have… I have lost track of time, it seems.’

‘Then the Apocrypha holds something that fascinates you?’

‘Yes, Grand Magister!’ Mohr jumped to his feet, the Apocrypha in his hand. ‘Here. The Second Sun of Malofex. In all the history of the Order, we had thought it existed only in the Apocrypha. There have been but a handful of wizards who have ever attempted to cast it, let alone succeeded. The last was four hundred years ago. And yet… here, look!’

Mohr picked up the journal and held it up for Ulzheimer to see.

‘The Second Sun,’ said Ulzheimer, quiet wonder in his voice.

‘Sigtaal Whitehand was practising this magic before Teclis laid down the foundations of the Colleges,’ said Mohr. ‘Do you see, Grand Magister? He had moulded from the wind of Aqshy a conjuration that even with the accumulated learning of centuries, the Bright Order can no longer replicate.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Ulzheimer.

‘But that is not all. What if this signifies a tradition of Bright Magic that has been forgotten entirely? One which existed before the Colleges of Magic, and later became incorporated into the Bright Order when it was founded? The spells we study now might have been wrought first not by wizards under Teclis’s tuition, but by men like Sigtaal Whitehand, hundreds of years before! In fact, the Malofex that the Apocrypha claims first created the Second Sun may be Whitehand himself! He uses the name to refer to himself in his journal. It seems a secret name, perhaps a ritual identity under which he practises his magic.’

Ulzheimer shook his head. ‘The flames did not lie, Mohr. You will rise high. You will one day look out upon Altdorf from your own tower here in the College, I have no doubt about that. Might we, young Mohr, master the Second Sun once more?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mohr. ‘I have not yet finished the decoding of Whitehand’s journal. He took extensive notes on the Second Sun, and other spells besides. Added to the Apocrypha, it might make the spell possible again.’

‘So, there is yet more to find in this journal?’ said Ulzheimer. He took the book from Mohr and turned a few of its pages himself.

‘There is. Whitehand created the Second Sun for a specific reason. I believe he was trying to contact something.’

Ulzheimer raised an eyebrow. ‘A summoning?’

‘An awakening,’ replied Mohr. ‘But I do not know what he meant to awake. Certainly Whitehand believed it was the key to a great revelation for him. Those references are untranslated, but I will crack them soon.’

‘I have no doubt you will,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘but not this night. You would not be the first young wizard to become lost down here, endlessly pursuing his studies, until he wastes away. I will not have that happen to you. Return to the surface, rest and eat, and return tomorrow.’

‘I…’ Mohr paused. ‘If you believe it would be wise, Grand Magister.’

‘I do.’

‘Then if you would accompany me,’ said Mohr, ‘I would be most grateful. I do not think the keeper of this chamber took a liking to me.’

‘It is not something to be taken personally,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Let us go.’

Ulzheimer fell into step behind Mohr as they made their way towards the chamber’s entrance. Mohr did not see the dagger that Ulzheimer drew from his robes.

It was rare that a gathering of such Magisters was found, even in the Bright College. Their duties tended to keep them apart, and there was always the danger that so much magic in one place would cause spontaneous combustion. This time, it was worth the risk.

Ulzheimer was joined in the relic chamber by half a dozen other Magisters, each one more ancient and powerful than the last. The greatest of their kind, those through whom the Bright Wind coursed more fiercely than any other. Even among the Bright Order, they were a secret society. Even their fellow Magisters did not know their minds. The secrets they held had been passed down for thousands of years, and never had they left that circle.

‘So,’ said one. ‘It is true. It was Malofex’s journal they found.’

‘We know his human name,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Sigtaal Whitehand. And moreover, the means he used to wake the mountain god.’

‘And it was?’ said another Magister.

‘The Second Sun,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘As we suspected.’

‘Not all of us,’ said yet another. ‘Some of us were adamant it was the Ninth Sigil of Katam, or that the secret lay with the shattering of the Fulmination Stone. I myself favoured the Blinding Wind of the Burning Heavens as the spell required. This revelation moves us much closer to his goal.’

‘It is hard to believe,’ said Ulzheimer, ‘that Malofex really awakened Kholek Suneater. The Second Sun must have been gifted to him by the Blessed Gods.’

‘It certainly was no great skill of his own,’ said the first Magister bluntly. ‘Malofex was a fool. Or Sigtaal, I should say. An idiot. He awakened the mountain god and had no means to appease him. He deserved his devouring. We shall not make the same mistakes.’

‘And it will be us,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Not those who come after. Not a generation distant in time. Us. We gathered here. Now we know how, we can do it again. We can wake him. We can find out what he knows.’

‘And that?’ said the first Magister, pointing at the body.

The corpse of Associate Comprehender Mohr lay on the floor of the chamber. The dagger blow had killed him so quickly that surprise had barely registered on his face. He had been dead before he hit the ground. The blood that had pooled around him had already been baked to a hard crust by the heat of the tunnels.

‘He will not be missed,’ said Ulzheimer.

Another Magister spoke up. ‘It was a risk to let him research the journal,’ he said. ‘It should have been kept within the circle. You should have done it yourself, Ulzheimer.’

‘No,’ replied Ulzheimer. ‘Malofex left traps in his writings before, and it has cost us some of our finest minds. This way was far safer.’ Ulzheimer snapped his fingers and from the shadows waddled the diminutive form of a keeper of antiquities.

‘It gives me such delight to serve you!’ it squealed. ‘How might your desires be sated by the labour of this servant?’

Ulzheimer formed a complex symbol in the air with the fingers of his left hand and muttered an incantation. The cages rattled as if alarmed by what they heard.

A patch of blackness on one wall opened up into a portal the height of a man. Through it could be seen multicoloured flame, through which leapt bounding, gibbering, inhuman figures.

‘I desire not to touch this corpse,’ said Ulzheimer. ‘Deliver it to our masters.’

‘Of course!’ said the keeper. It hefted Mohr’s body and hauled it through the portal. Glowing hands seized the body and dragged it through.

Ulzheimer took the journal of Malofex from his robes and held it before the Magisters. ‘We have everything we need,’ he said. ‘We will awaken Kholek, and we will do it right. This I promise you, my brothers.’

‘When?’ asked the first Magister, as the portal closed and Mohr’s body vanished from sight.

Ulzheimer smiled. Fire glittered in his eyes.

‘Soon,’ he said.

Aenarion

Gav Thorpe

The world had been torn asunder. Across the isle of Ulthuan the elves quailed in their towers as the skies burned with purple and blue fire and the fields and mountains heaved. Nightmare voices howled and bellowed while leering faces tortured the dark clouds that swirled around the mountain peaks and snarled in the waves of the Inner Sea.

The daemons came in their thousands – a horde of baying, shrieking slaughter. Against such ferocity and spite the elves had no defence. They fell to infernal blade and savage claw: elder and babe, lords and ladies, dragged screaming to their deaths by the minions of the Chaos Gods.

The world seemed fated to an eternity of torment.

Out of the madness arose Aenarion. He would not see his people destroyed and so called upon the gods to deliver the elves from destruction; but the gods were silent. Aenarion could see nothing but doom for the world and so he offered himself to Asuryan, lord of the gods. He strode into the Eternal Flame with oaths of sacrifice upon his lips. The flames burned bright and Aenarion was consumed. Yet the elven lord was spared the wrath of Asuryan and received the blessing of the gods. He emerged from the fire filled with a fey light and took up spear and bow to fight the daemons.

The elves proclaimed Aenarion the Defender, the blessed Phoenix King of Asuryan, and where he led others followed; where he fought, the daemons were thrown back. Great were his victories and many are the tales told elsewhere of the Phoenix King’s battles. Mighty heroes rallied to Aenarion’s banner; elves such as Caledor the Dragontamer, greatest of the elven mages, and Eoloran Anar who first raised the Phoenix King’s standard; names forever entwined with the legend of the first Phoenix King.

After much war, peace settled upon Ulthuan again. Aenarion came to the court of the Everqueen, Astarielle, ruler of the elves from the time before Chaos. The two were wed and lived in happiness, bringing into the world their son Morelion and their daughter Yvraine.

Yet legends are not born in times of prosperity and contentment, but are created in ages of woe and strife. The peace for which Aenarion had fought so hard did not last forever, and so it was that the daemons returned to ravage the land. This time there was no surcease from the bloodshed. For a hundred years the daemons assailed the isle of the elves. Aenarion and his armies were ever hard-pressed, fighting many battles across Ulthuan. It was at Caethrin Gorge that the future of the elves would be changed forever.

Laughter cackled on the unnatural wind that swept down between the slopes of Tir Alinith and Anul Caethrin. The sky was heavy with clouds of purple and green, blazes of black and red flashing across the Chaotic storm. The stench of sulphur and decay carried along the gorge, heralding the daemonic host boiling up from the plains towards the mountains in the south of Ulthuan.

On the dark volcanic slopes stood Aenarion. Gold shone from his armour, his tapered shield and the tip of his long spear. Around him were arranged the lords of elves, swathed in scales of silver, adorned with sapphire and emerald. No less shimmering were the scales of the dragons that circled overhead, watching for the approaching Chaotic horde; red and blue, bronze and ebon.

Aenarion gazed down the long valley, lifting a long-fingered hand to shield his dark eyes against the magical glare above. Black hair trailed from beneath the Phoenix King’s gilded helm and whipped across his scarlet cloak. Behind him stood Eoloran, a golden stave in hand from which flew the banner of Aenarion; the white of death embroidered with a phoenix rising from multi-coloured flames. The lord of the Anars watched in silence as Aenarion turned to his left, where stood Caledor the Dragontamer, mage-lord of Ulthuan. It was by Caledor’s hand that the Phoenix King’s armour and weapons had been forged, in the temple of the Smith-God Vaul, hidden amongst the fires of the volcanoes behind the elven army.

The Phoenix King spoke calmly, showing no sign of apprehension.

‘The time has come for you to unleash such enchantments as you possess, Caledor.’

The Dragontamer turned his gaze upon his king, eyes alight with mystical energy.

‘’Tis a dangerous path to tread; to turn the powers of the foe upon them. That power that keeps your speartip keen and your armour sure is the same that brings forth these abominations. I fear that the more we delve into that well, the greater the horrors we bring forth. This is not the gentle magic that our ancestors learned, but a dangerous sorcery that it would be wise to diminish.’

The Phoenix King replied quickly.

‘It is not the time to speak again of this plan of yours. Battle is at hand and I would no more ask you to keep your incantations unsaid than I would lay down my spear. All that matters this day is that we are victorious. Should we fail, the Anvil of Vaul would fall to our foes. How then will your mages and priests arm us for this war?’

Caledor shook his head and took a deep breath. His blue robes fluttered in the wind as he stretched wide his arms. At the foot of the valley the daemons could be seen; a mass of riotous colour in many sizes and forms.

Creatures with blood-red skin advanced bearing swords of gleaming bronze, their commanders riding upon the back of brazen-horned beasts with bodies of metal and crimson flesh. Hounds the size of horses, with hides of red scales, bounded to the fore, baying and howling from mouths filled with fangs of iron. Loathsome slugs with frond-ringed faces slithered and lurched across the ground, leaving burning trails of acidic slime. Cyclopean daemons brandishing rusted blades advanced in long columns, leaking fluids from suppurating spores, innards bulging from rents in their bloated stomachs, the air seething thick with black flies. In contrast to the mournful carnival of decay, lithe daemonettes with lobster-claw hands and bird-like feet sprang sprightly across the rocks. Others of their kind rode upon sinuous bipedal mounts with long flicking tongues while six-limbed beasts raced alongside, sharp claws clattering and clicking. Buzzing with magical power, smaller creatures cavorted and cartwheeled, pink bodies constantly writhing and changing, sparks of energy flying from splayed fingers. Above them swooped and swerved menacing shapes with barbed lashes for tails, flat bodies edged with teeth and hooks, cutting the thick air with piercing screams.

Against the Chaotic mass, the elves seemed pitifully few; a knot of a few hundred warriors whose gleaming weapons were as a candle in an eternal night, pinpricks of light across the black slope. The light grew in strength, swimming around the warriors, forming in tendrils of energy that streamed from Caledor’s outstretched fingertips. The light turned to a white flame that formed a flickering ring around the elven host, the fires reaching higher and higher into a column that pierced the dark clouds above.

Where the light struck, the storm clouds spun, whirling faster and faster, mixing with the swirling light to form a vortex of energy. Battle raged within the whirlwind, white clashed with colour, light with darkness, sparks and forks of power coruscating across the surface as the maelstrom drew tighter and tighter, speeding until it was a blaze of power.

With a thunderous detonation, the vortex collapsed, earthing itself through the body of Caledor. The mage trembled, light shining through skin, burning from wide eyes, coils of shimmering magic steaming through gritted teeth, his mane of white hair wild in the aetheric gale. All became still for a moment and the mage’s trembling ceased, the air pregnant with expectation.

With a piercing cry, Caledor thrust forward his hands, the magic blazing from his palms. Spears of white fire screamed down the valley, turning and twisting about each other, spreading out into a sheet of blazing flame.

The spell struck the foremost daemons like a hurricane, hurling them through the air, their bodies disintegrating into shards of crystal and streamers of multicoloured particles. Plaintive wails were torn from vanishing throats and then silence fell.

For a moment the daemons halted. Aenarion and his followers glowered down at them, fists tight around their weapons, eyes narrowed.

With a howl the horde surge on again.

‘To me, princes of Ulthuan!’ cried Aenarion, spear aloft piercing the fume-filled air.

In silvered line, the elven lords stood resolute against the encroaching darkness of the daemon host. Smoke and mist was set awhirl by the thunderous flap of wings as the dragons descended from the thermals above. The largest, of silver and blue hide, landed in front of the Phoenix King, black claws sending splinters of rock cascading down the mountainside. The monstrous creature’s long neck bent around and its azure eyes fell upon Aenarion. Indraugnir was his name, older even than the elves, the greatest creature to have ever flown the skies of Ulthuan. Its voice came as a rumble that stirred the hearts of the elves even as it shook the ground.

‘As we have fought to protect your lands, now we fight to protect mine. Take up your spear, king of the elves, and test its sharpness against my claws and fangs. We shall see who claims the greater tally.’

Aenarion laughed and he raced forward to pull himself up to the throne-saddle upon the dragon’s back.

‘Never could I best your ferocity, Indraugnir. If I could wield a dozen spears I would not match your might!’

The two circled into the heavy skies to join other princes of the mountains riding upon the backs of dragons that dwelt in the caves beneath the volcanoes. Beneath them spread the daemonic army, stretching along the Caethrin Gorge as far as the plains, thousands-strong and advancing swiftly. Behind, the fumaroles and craters of the mountains steamed; the lands of Caledor, named after the Dragontamer who ruled here. Far below, the mage unleashed another spell, bolts of blue lightning springing from his staff, crackling through the ranks of the enemy.

Many princes brought forth bows forged beneath the mountains, and set upon their strings shafts that glittered with mystical light. They loosed their arrows upon the daemons, the missiles arcing far into the valley to descend as thunderbolts that struck down a handful of daemons with every shot.

On came the daemons still, filling the air with lewd threats and snarls of hatred.

Indaugnir circled slowly, wing dipped as he took the Phoenix King down towards the gorge. The daemons were no more than fifty paces from the thin line of elves. At the heart of the nobles of Ulthuan, Eoloran Anar stepped up, the banner of Aenarion held in both hands. With a shout of Asuryan’s consecration that was lost on the wind, he planted the standard at his feet, the rock cracking under the golden haft. A dome of white light sprang forth from the flagbearer, enclosing the elven line. Where it touched the daemons, they were hurled back, their unholy flesh set afire by its touch. Like rabid animals, the creatures of the Chaos Gods launched themselves at the barrier, driving themselves and each other into the wall of magic, crumbling to ashes and dust as they did so.

Aenarion raised his spear to attract the attention of the other dragon-riders. He plunged its point towards the rear of the daemon army. The others waved lance and sword and spear in acknowledgement.

‘Dive, my friend!’ cried the Phoenix King. ‘Into their heart like a dagger!’

Indraugnir gave a bellow and folded his wings tight, swooping down towards the rocks. Around the pair the princes of Caledor and their reptilian mounts descended with fierce battlecries and fearsome growls. The crest of Aenarion’s helm whistled in the wind, his hair and cloak streaming behind him. The Phoenix King gritted his teeth and gripped his spear tight as he felt the reverberations of Indraugnir’s massive heart thumping in the dragon’s chest.

Down and down they dived, wind screaming, the ground racing towards them. From out of the mass the Phoenix King now spied individuals, many with faces upturned, glaring and snarling at their fast-approaching foe.

Just as it seemed that monster and rider might be dashed against the black mountainside, Indraugnir opened his wings. The two of them shot across the daemon army, Indraugnir’s claws raking huge welts through their numbers, leaving dismembered and beheaded remains in his wake.

Flipping a wing, the dragon turned sharply as Aenarion dipped his spearhead towards the daemons. Trailing a blaze of white, the weapon carved a furrow across the chests of a dozen foes, slicing them in twain. Dark red fire erupted from Indraugnir’s mouth, engulfing the daemons in their hundreds. Aenarion thrust and slashed without respite, every blow of his spear cutting down many foes.

Indraugnir landed, crushing more daemons beneath his bulk. Aenarion leapt from his saddle-throne, pinning another daemon beneath his speartip as he landed on the floor of the rocky valley. Dragon and king fought side-by-side; Aenarion’s spear a white blur of destruction, Indraugnir’s fangs and claws rending and tearing all that came within reach, tail snapping and cracking behind.

Around and about them the dragon princes struck, every pass heralded by a rush of wind from beneath a dragon’s wings and completed with a clutch of bodies cast into the air. Higher up the slope, Caledor and Eoloran led the elven lords down into the melee, swords and spears flickering. As a fire burns across a piece of parchment, the line of elves surely advanced, leaving naught but the ruin of the daemons behind.

From noon ’til the sun was low in the skies the slaughter went on; slaughter, for it could not be truly called battle. Outnumbered by hundreds of foes, the elves were relentless and unstoppable, not a single one amongst their number fell to their enemies. As their numbers lessened, the daemons’ power waned and the Chaotic storm above abated, the clouds driven away even as the army was driven back. As the final rays of dusk cut across the dark mountains, the last of the daemons crumbled and perished, their spirits banished back to the immaterial realm from which they had sprung.

At the centre of the gorge, surrounded by piles of daemonic corpses that bubbled and hissed and dissipated into fog, Aenarion stood proud. Eoloran came up to him bearing the white banner. He handed the standard to his lord, who waved it high overhead to signal the victory. Songs of celebration rang down the valley, the clear voices of the elves giving word to the joy and relief in their hearts.

That night, Aenarion made his camp upon the mountainside, not far from the winding pathway that led up to the ruddily-lit cave that housed the Anvil of Vaul. The happiness of victory had passed and the camp was quiet as the elves remembered that many had been the triumphs over the daemons, and yet still the foe was not vanquished. In the still night, the ring of hammers and the chime of metal sounded as the priests of the Smith-God continued their labours; a timely reminder to all that the war was not over.

Eoloran and Caledor attended to their Phoenix King in his white pavilion. Still clad in his golden armour, Aenarion sat upon a simple throne of dark wood, his cloak tossed thoughtlessly across its back. The favoured lord of Asuryan smiled as they entered, but the Dragontamer did not share Aenarion’s pleasure.

‘None fell today, and for that I am grateful,’ said Caledor. ‘Yet it has not always been the case. The power of Asuryan’s blessing protects you, Aenarion, but it does not make our people invulnerable. Our foe is without number, and they are truly eternal. I have looked upon this devastated world and see that Ulthuan is not just an isle upon the sea, but an island of light in darkness. Our foes cannot be defeated by sword or spear.’

Aenarion gave a weary sigh.

‘You would speak again of your plan to rid the world of magic,’ said the Phoenix King. ‘How many times must I tell you that it is folly to do away with that power which gives us the most strength to fight?’

‘While the gales of magic that sweep our realm may be harnessed to our benefit, without them the daemons could not exist. You saw today what my vortex could do if writ on a larger scale. Without the sustaining properties of this magical wind, the daemons would no longer be able to venture here in numbers. It would take only a little preparation, a number of lodestones carefully arranged around the isle, to ready Ulthuan for the enchantment.’

The Phoenix King said nothing, for the two of them had spent many years arguing the case for Caledor’s plan. It was Eoloran that broke the silence.

‘The risks are too great, Caledor. Should you be wrong, your plan would leave us defenceless. It is only by the touch of magic that these apparitions can be destroyed. Without the magic our swords would be useless, our spears and arrows no more weapons than the branches of a tree.’

‘We cannot prevail,’ argued the Dragontamer. ‘For a hundred turns of the world we have fought, and we are no step closer to victory now than on that first day. For every daemon we destroy, another springs up in its place. You stand in the flooding pool bailing as quickly as you can, while you should dam the spring that feeds it.’

Aenarion said nothing but his look was troubled, brow creased in thought. Eoloran addressed his king, breaking Aenarion from his contemplation.

‘What concerns sit so heavily upon your shoulders, my lord?’

‘I am troubled by the ease of our victory this day. Our enemies are not only great in number, there are those daemons amongst the host that can match the best of us by themselves. Yet where were these greater daemons today? Only chaff and fodder were sent against us. I have an ill feeling about this.’

Caledor pondered this for a moment, stroking his bottom lip with a slender finger.

‘You think that perhaps the greatest daemon warriors are elsewhere?’

‘Perhaps,’ replied the Phoenix King.

Eoloran glanced between his two companions with an expression of worry.

‘If this attack was a diversion, we have fallen for the ploy,’ said the lord of the Anars. ‘If the Anvil of Vaul was not the object of our foes’ desire, then where would the real blow land?’

Aenarion growled and clasped his hands tightly in his lap.

‘I do not know what our enemies seek to achieve; it is that which vexes me.’

The night was bitterly chill. Frost crusted the black rocks of the mountainside, a glittering reflection of the stars in the clear skies above. Upon the slopes dragons basked in the pale moonlight, wings outstretched, bodies steaming in the cold air. The wind sighed over the stones, broken by the rasping exhalations of the beasts.

Indraugnir lifted his silver-scaled head, nostrils flaring. The other dragons responded to the movement, rising from their slumber with a scrape of claws and explosive breaths misting the air. All turned their eyes northwards, where a dark shape flitted across the starry sky. It sped closer, resolving into the silhouette of a large eagle, a young elf clasping tightly to its back. The eagle circled once, followed by the predatory stares of the dragons, and descended in a flapping of wings. The rider’s black hair tossed behind him like a veil, his narrow face pinched, eyes tight against the cold

‘I must speak with the Phoenix King!’ declared the new arrival as he leapt from the back of the enormous bird.

Brought forth by the call, other elves came out of their tents, weary from the day’s fighting. The stranger was garbed in smooth black leathers, his shoulders and back hidden beneath a long cloak of black feathers. All recognised him as a raven herald, one of the order of scouts that followed the movements of the daemons across Ulthuan.

The herald was directed to the Phoenix King’s pavilion without delay, and a crowd of elves followed him into the marquee to hear what news he brought. Eoloran and Caledor were first amongst them. The Phoenix King sat brooding upon his throne and looked up at the disturbance.

‘What news brings Telrianir so far south on such a bitter night?’ asked Aenarion.

‘’Tis a bitter night indeed, my king, and not for the weather alone,’ replied the raven herald. His gaze was fixed upon the Phoenix King; his lip trembled as he spoke and a tear formed in his eye. ‘The daemons have fallen upon Avelorn, my king, in a great army beyond counting.’

A disquieted whispering spread through the elves. Aenarion’s fingers tightened upon the arms of his chair at the mention of the Everqueen’s realm. He leaned forwards, piercing Telrianir with his stare. The raven herald continued hesitantly, his voice breaking with grief.

‘The sacred groves have been despoiled and many were slain.’

The whispering became cries of dismay. Aenarion rose to his feet, fear flashing across his face.

‘What of the Everqueen?’ he snarled. ‘What of my children?’

At this, Telrianir fell to his knees, a sob wrenched from his lips.

‘Slain, my king.’

The silence was a deep as the ocean’s depths, swallowing all sound so that it was not broken by the slightest clink of armour nor scuff of foot. Not even a sigh broke the stillness.

Aenarion slumped back into his throne, head bowed. The wood of the seat splintered between his fingers and the light of Asuryan that forever glowed faintly through his skin grew in brightness. The elves were forced to look away, such was the glare from their king. Then, like a lantern snuffed out, the light disappeared.

Blinking, the elves looked at Aenarion. He straightened and all save Caledor flinched from the king’s gaze. A fire burned in his eyes, each a red ember fringed with darkness, drawing gasps from many that saw it.

‘Slain?’

Aenarion’s voice was hollow as it filled the pavilion. The elven princes, whose lives had been filled with battle and terror, clasped each other in their fright; that one word echoed with grief and rage through the core of their spirits. None dared speak.

Aenarion rose up to his full height, seeming taller than ever before. His fingers curled into fists at his side as he turned his gaze upwards, not seeing the roof of the tent but staring into the heavens beyond. When he spoke next, the Phoenix King’s tone was calm in manner, but carried with it a sharp edge of anger.

‘What a cruel fate it is that Morai-heg has spun for me. When our people were beset, I called upon the gods to harken to our cries of woe, but they did not listen. I called upon Asuryan, lord of the lords, greatest of the divine, and I offered myself to him for his aid. He laid his blessing upon me, and with his light I have battled the darkness that would engulf our world.’

Aenarion’s eyes fell upon the elves and they cowered further, retreating across the rugs strewn over the floor of the pavilion.

‘I did as I was bid. I took up my spear and my shield, and I stood against the daemons. For a hundred years we have shed our blood in defence of our homes, suffered torture of the spirit and bleak nightmares so that we might one day look upon the summer skies again. Many have been taken from us, the innocent beside the warrior, the babe beside the mother. Each was a sacrifice harder to bear than my own pain within the flames, but I bore each and every without complaint. If the gods demand that some must pay for the lives of others, it was a price we had to pay.’

Aenarion snatched up his throne and heaved it over his head. With a wordless shout, he dashed it to the ground, smashing it into pieces.

‘No more!’ he roared. ‘This is a price too heavy for me to pay!’

Aenarion’s gaze next fell upon his banner, hanging limply in its stand beside him. He snapped the pole across his armoured knee and tore the cloth from the gilded wood. Opening the flag, he looked at the emblazoned phoenix for a long time, limbs trembling, lips twisted in a sneer.

The ripping of the cloth made every elf shudder, as if each had been torn apart by their king’s hands. Aenarion let the two ragged pieces of cloth flutter to the ground. He fell to his knees and tore the pieces into ribbons, casting them about himself like streamers. Tears of yellow flame rolled down his cheeks.

‘Asuryan has no love for me,’ he sobbed. ‘He does not care for us. He cannot protect us from the evil that will swallow us whole if we do not fight. I cannot be the Defender, there is nothing left for me to defend. We are lost, destroyed.’

All of a sudden, Aenarion stopped. His eyes narrowed and he tilted his head to one side as if listening to a distant voice. His voice became a feral growl.

‘There is only one course left to me that can ease this pain. I will destroy every creature of Chaos. I will annihilate every daemon, slay every mortal thing that crawls and slithers under the gaze of the Chaos Gods. I will become Death; I will become the Destroyer. The gods have denied us peace, and so I will give them a war that will end all wars or see the world itself annihilated.’

Caledor stepped out of the cowering crowd, one hand held out in appeasement.

‘Be careful, my lord, my friend. Harsh oaths are not soon forgotten.’

Aenarion rounded on the mage and seized him by the shoulders, staring deep into Caledor’s eyes with orbs of fire.

‘Tell me, friend, what is it that you see?’

Caledor could not break from Aenarion’s fierce grip, and could not turn aside his gaze from that unnatural stare. The mage-lord took a shuddering, involuntary breath and his eyes turned to gold, reflecting the flames of his king’s stare. The two were locked together; the king dark and dangerous with his smouldering eyes and black hair; Caledor like the light of the moon, hair white and skin pale. The Dragontamer’s voice came as a distant whisper, lips barely moving as he spoke.

‘The Elven-king wrapped hard in woes,
A gifted curse to break his grief,
To slay unnumbered his wicked foes,
A brightening flame that burns too brief.

To Gods he turned and to Gods he fell,
Save One alone of dark divine,
In blackest heart rings murderous knell,
In deepest shadow where no light shines.

His slaying shall be as the flood,
Lets loose the Godslayer’s ire,
Drowns the world in seas of blood,
Burns it all with waves of fire.

In the North this Doom awaits,
Luring like flame to moth,
Promising life of endless hate,
Bloodshed eternal, uncaring wrath.

And kindled in the fire of rage
Born from blood of anger’s womb,
Child of slaughter cursed for an age,
Bearer of the elf-king’s doom.’

Caledor gave a rattling hiss and fell from Aenarion’s grip. He crumpled like an empty robe, lifelessly sprawled across the floor. Elf lords rushed forward to attend to the fallen mage, but the Phoenix King did not spare his friend a glance. A fey expression crossed his face even as they pronounced Caledor still living. Aenarion stormed towards the pavilion door, scattering those elves before him. He stood outside on the frost-gripped stone and pointed to the stars of the North.

‘Yonder lies the Blighted Isle, where sits the dark altar of bloody Khaine! There I shall find his gift wrapped in that black shrine; Godslayer, Widowmaker, Doom of Worlds. No weapon forged by mortal hands, not by the greatest priests of Vaul if they laboured for a thousand years, can bring my revenge. So I will take up that blade made by Vaul Himself for the Bloody-Handed One and with it I shall destroy the daemons.’

All were too horror-struck to speak out against Aenarion, save for Eoloran Anar,he who had once born the standard now lying in tatters dared to lay a hand upon the Phoenix King’s arm.

‘Did you not hear the words of Caledor? No mortal may wield the Sword of Khaine. It is no gift, but a curse, sent to tempt us to the path of hate and war. No peace can come of such a thing. You doom not only yourself, but all future generations. Do nothing rash, my king, I plead of you! Temper your anger with the wise judgement you have shown before. Do not throw away our future in a moment of rage!’

Aenarion would not listen and threw off Eoloran’s hold, casting his friend to the hard ground.

‘And you do not listen to my words! There can be no future whilst daemons roam free. Yours is counsel of surrender. Peace must be won through war, and if peace be won, that war must be fought by those that wish to fight it. I am your king, not a tyrant, and I release you all from such oaths as you have sworn to me. When I return I shall still be your king, and whether you wish to follow me or your own path I leave to your conscience.’

At this speech, the dragons had gathered, looming over the heads of the elves. Aenarion now turned to Indraugnir.

‘I ask that you bear me North; to the Blighted Isle, that I might take up the Sword of Khaine and forever free both my people and yours from the threat of the daemon. Feel no injunction that you must carry me, for if you do not wish to do so, I shall walk.’

Indraugnir wasted no time in replying.

‘So you seek a fang to match my own, my friend? The Blighted Isle is a long enough journey for one with wings; I would not wish such a lonely trek upon a friend. The Dark Gods that now covet our world are not blind and I fear there will be those that will seek to bar your journey. When I resolved to be your ally, I swore to fight alongside you for good or ill, and my desire has not changed.’

All watched aghast as Aenarion drew himself into the throne-saddle of Indraugnir. Some cried out in fear, believing Aenarion would not return from his dire quest. They wept as Indraugnir soared into the sky with three mighty beats of his wings. Dragon and king circled once about the camp and then turned northwards and disappeared into the night.

For a night and a day and a night they flew, under star and sun, through clear and cloud. The mountains and volcanoes passed behind and the clear plains and fields of western Ulthuan spread beneath them. To the West glittered the ocean; to the East sparkled the Inner Seas, and between rose the ring of mountains that gird the central lands of the isle. Snow covered their summits and through the mists that blanketed the peaks they flew. Aenarion felt no chill, though ice crackled upon his amour. His fury warmed him from within, cold sorrow turned to ashes by the fire of his vengeful desires.

Across the mountains they soared for day after day, until to the East the clouds broke and Aenarion looked down upon the ruins of Avelorn. The foothills of the mountains were still swathed with forest, but the trees were sickly, leaves fallen to the ground in rotted heaps, their branches and trunks twisted and contorted by the passage of the daemons. The stench of death hung about that lifeless realm, and all seemed lost. Yet there remained the heart of the wildwoods, the Gaen Vale surrounded by the Inner Sea save for a sliver of land that joined it to the rest of Ulthuan. Here there still grew the lush woods, green canopy stretching from shore to shore.

The sight of life in the dead did not stir Aenarion’s heart to anything save to punish those that had wrought such destruction. Astarielle, his wife, the life of the Avelorn forest, was dead; so too was Yvraine, their daughter, the future Everqueen. So had ended the long line of the elves’ rulers from the birth of their kind. In peace and harmony had the strength of the Everqueen been found and that strength had faltered. Aenarion knew that where peace failed war would prevail. Sickened by what he saw, he bid Indraugnir to turn westwards and put the mountains between them, turning his back on the dismal sight of Avelorn desecrated.

Weary with grief, Aenarion flew on. That night a strange flame burned in the air, of green and purple and pink and silver. Birds with wings of fire circled about the Phoenix King, their voices a chorus of screeches and mournful cawing. The flock of firebirds surrounded Indraugnir, their harsh cries surrounding the Phoenix King, deafening and incessant.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

Amongst the cacophony Aenarion discerned a voice, wrought from a thousand avian throats. The words were carried on the wind itself, swirling around him as the flock swooped and soared.

‘Turn back!’ the firebirds cried. ‘We are All-seeing and you fly to your doom.’

‘Begone!’ Aenarion called again. ‘I know you for what you are. Daemons given the form of birds, sent to dissuade me from my quest.’

‘You guess right, but judge us wrong,’ the bird chorus replied. ‘Not elf nor daemon nor god wishes you to draw that which you seek. No mortal hand can wield this weapon, for it was made for Khaine’s grip and Khaine alone controls it. No bloodshed can satiate its hunger; no war can quench its thirst. When every daemon is destroyed, and even the gods themselves have fallen to your rage, what then for you? You shall be kinslayer, the doom of your own people; for in them you will see weakness and cowardice and you will strike them down without thought.’

‘Never!’ said Aenarion. ‘My bloodlust is for daemon and Chaos God alone, and no force in this world or the heavens would raise my hand against another elf. Begone with your lies.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the flock called, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir on and the two burst into the starry sky while the firebirds fell to smoke behind them.

Dawn broke in full glory, the sun banishing winter chill, casting golden rays upon the land of the elves. Aenarion looked to the east and for a moment his heart was stirred by the beauty of the sunrise. But gladness could take no hold, for he knew that such sights would be forever banished if the daemons were spared. As the sun’s light reflected from his armour, Aenarion could see lithe figures dancing in the glare. Insubstantial, like distant reflections, they leapt and twirled about the king and his dragon, shimmering with the dawn haze.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

His command was greeted by lilting laughter that poured into his mind like a gentle waterfall.

‘So harsh, so stern!’ the daemonlights giggled. ‘Why so grim, King of the Elves? For one who seeks to end all wars, your mood is sour. Exalt your noble quest and rejoice in the pleasure that will come from destroying your foes.’

‘Save your guile for one that is not deaf and blind to your charms,’ replied Aenarion. ‘Your kind will fall with the others.’

‘And even as you strike us down and relish your victories, you will become forever ours,’ sang the sun-voices. ‘The joy of slaying is still joy, and in that you will be trapped, your life no more than one moment of rapturous slaughter after the other.’

‘Never!’ cried Aenarion. ‘There is no joy left in me; not in head nor heart nor any other part. I shall with a frown upon my brow take no pleasure from it, as the beekeeper drives wasps from the hives or the tree-herd disposes of the mites in his charges’ bark. Your slaying is an unwanted evil that I bear, and I will do it without happiness.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the sun-daemons called, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir on and the two banked into the shadows of the mountains to leave behind the light of the sun.

At dusk a soupy smog smothered the Phoenix King, its tendrils slipping across Indraugnir’s scales, pawing at Aenarion’s face with wet, slimy fingers. A stench of eternal decay, of charnel morass and rotting swamp, burned Aenarion’s throat and eyes. Through stinging tears with cracked voice, he cried out.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

Lugubrious voices swallowed him up, words sliding into his ears like moist mud, seeping and slipping through his mind in most disgusting fashion.

‘When all is dead, who shall you slay?’ they asked. ‘When the corpses are as mountain ranges and foetid blood fills oceans, what then? Think you to destroy Death itself? Think that you are eternal, never to be touched by the flies and the worms? Fodder you are, flesh and bones and blood and skin, and nothing more. When the daemons are gone, would you raise this weapon against disease, and strike down old age, and slice through hunger? Nothing is forever, save us, for in all life there is death.’

‘All things follow their natural course, and I would no more fight nature than try to cut apart the sky,’ snarled Aenarion. ‘But your kind wantonly spread plague and famine in most unnatural cause, and you too shall feel the pain of destruction. You are not Death, nor its servants; merely vassal messengers of putridity and decomposition. Death comes to all mortals, and with the Godslayer in my hand it will come to the immortal also.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ burbled the noxious fog, but Aenarion urged Indraugnir higher and higher, until they breached the rank cloud and flew on through the starlit sky.

The following dawn the crimson sky was filled with rain, so that it seemed as the air itself cried blood. Each drop falling upon dragon scale and link of armour rang as if blade against blade. Every sliding droplet screeched like metal torn or throat slit. As the shower became a downpour, Aenarion and Indraugnir were surrounded by the din of battle, the arrhythmic clashing and wailing overlapping to form words bellowed so fiercely that Aenarion feared for his hearing.

‘Begone!’ he shouted.

‘Foolish mortal!’ the voice roared in return. ‘Think you to turn war against its makers? We will feed upon every blow you land, every drop of blood shed, every bone broken and every skull severed. In battle we were born and for battle we exist. The ringing of your sword shall be a clarion to us, and in hosts uncountable we will fight you. For each of us you fell, another shall be born, into war unending, battle without cease to the end of the world and the universe beyond.’

‘The dead do not feed,’ laughed Aenarion. ‘When you are slain you shall feast no more upon violence and rage. Cold shall be your deaths, for I will be heartless and pitiless, though my rage shall outmatch yours.’

‘The beasts of war cannot be vanquished! Great may be your fury, yet the harder you fight, the stronger we shall become. There is not a blade forged by man or god that does not belong to us. Every life you take shall be a life dedicated to us and your victories will be as hollow as your defiance.’

‘Why would you discourage me from such?’ asked Aenarion. ‘It is fear, I contend! No might of mortal or immortal can stand against Vaul’s darkest creation. No stronghold in the world or in the realms beyond can hold against its power. Bring on your unending war and I will end it. I shall throw down your brazen gates and topple your iron towers.’

‘Heed our warning, turn back!’ the voices growled, but the rainfall grew lighter as Indraugnir flew on, ’til the Phoenix King flew in clear skies again.

On and on, northwards flew Indraugnir, the Phoenix King silent and resolute upon the dragon’s back. They glided over barren lands, bounded to the East by sheer-sided peaks, bordered to the West by crashing sea. Withered heaths and wide marshes broke the rocky landscape, the foothills covered with desolate moorlands, the rivers cold and rimmed with ice.

Neither rider nor mount had known rest for many days, but Indraugnir flew on with steady beats of his wings. Aenarion dared not close his eyes lest some new obstacle assail him. The cold air became harsher still, Indraugnir’s great breaths each a billowing cloud that swirled in the wake of his wings. Aenarion’s bones ached and his eyes were rimed with frost, but he kept his grip firm on the saddle even as he shook icicles from his long hair.

The Phoenix King heard whispers. Faint and distant, and thought himself in a waking dream. Male and female, high and low, the voices urged him to turn back, seeking to turn him from his quest. With each new entreaty or threat his resolve hardened further, until his heart was as an icy stone. Coldness without and coldness within, the Phoenix King fixed his eyes upon the north and urged Indraugnir to stay strong.

As they neared the northern coast of Ulthuan, all ahead of them was swathed with dark rumbling clouds. From East to West the storm obscured all. Beneath the crashes and flashes the seas were stirred to tremendous violence, smashing and flailing against the rocky shore. The clouds towered upwards to the edge of the sky, and there was no path except through them. Lightning crackled, dancing brilliantly across the high waves. The air reverberated with thunder, shaking Aenarion in his armour. The wind became a fierce gale that whipped the breath from the Phoenix King’s lips.

Aenarion leaned low and slapped an encouraging hand to Indraugnir’s thick neck. He raised his voice above the howl of the wind.

‘The elements themselves would see us fail, my friend. This is the last, I am sure of it. I have no doubts for your courage and tenacity, but have you the strength for this final obstacle?’

Indraugnir snorted with offence and backed up his wings so that the two stayed in place, barely buffeted by the strength of the wind. The dragon twisted his neck to look upon Aenarion, eyes slitted against the gale.

‘You know better than to ask such questions, old ally. I would bear you to the moon and back if you wished it. It is a great storm, I grant you, but I have flown these skies for an age. Upon the fires of volcanoes I have soared, and into the icy vastness of the North I ventured when I was young. I have crossed mountains and oceans and deserts, and you ask if I have the strength to contest with a simple storm?’

‘Well said, my friend, and proudly put!’ replied the Phoenix King. ‘I doubt not that we could fly round the world and back again if needed. Storm or no storm, the Blighted Isle is near at hand, somewhere beneath that scowling sky. When we have dared its wrath and found our prize, we shall be afforded our much-earned rest.’

‘Say not!’ said Indraugnir. ‘If we succeed, there shall be no rest nor respite. I know of this thing that you seek. It is a shard of death, a splinter of the freezing void between stars, fang from the world serpent. You ask if I have the strength to bear you to its resting place, but I must ask if you have the strength to bear what you will find there. I heard the words of Caledor. This wicked thing you seek was not meant for the mortal realm. Its touch is a curse, to its victims and its wielder. Its taint shall be in you forever, even past death. Is this truly what you seek?’

Aenarion did not reply for some time. He felt the thudding of his heart and the race of blood through his veins. All the whispering had gone save for one sharp voice; a quiet siren song that called to him through the tumult of the storm. He thought of what he had to leave behind and saw that there was nothing. His land, his people, all would suffer for eternity if he did not do this thing.

‘My heart is hardened to it and my mind set upon this course. If this weapon is to be the doom all claim, it shall be my doom alone, for my wife and children are dead and with my passing its curse will carry on no more. Let us doubt each other no more. Whatever fate awaits me, it cannot be delayed.’

So Indraugnir stiffened his wings, set his long neck and dived down towards the boiling storm.

Wind howled, lightning flared, thunder growled. All was enveloping darkness split by blinding brightness as Indraugnir and Aenarion plunged through the tempest. Despite the dragon’s straining pinions they were tossed about like a leaf on a breeze. Aenarion leaned forwards and clasped his hands around Indraugnir’s neck, laying his cheek against his scaly hide as the wind threatened to tear the Phoenix King from his perch. A swell of air or rasp of lightning would set the pair to tumbling, until Indraugnir righted himself with stentorian growls, his heart pounding so hard it shuddered through Aenarion’s body.

As one they dived down, a silver and gold streak in the blackness. The sea beneath foamed wildly and Indraugnir’s wingtips skimmed the waves as he pulled out of the stoop, battered left and right by the swirling hurricane. Fiercer and fiercer grew the storm as they flew on, ’til Aenarion’s limbs shivered with the effort of his clinging. A mountainous wave surged out of the gloom, forcing Indraugnir to climb swiftly.

Lightning cracked, striking Aenarion. For a moment his whole body contorted. His fingers lost their grip and he fell, tumbling from Indraugnir’s back towards the stormy seas below. With a cry of dismay, Indraugnir folded a wing and turned sharply. He plummeted after the falling Phoenix King, fighting against the torrent of the storm that threatened to sweep both away.

Aenarion plunged into the steep waves, what little breath he had exploding from his body. Surf crashed over him and his armour pulled him down. With a final effort, he splashed to the surface once more, filling his lungs with freezing air before sinking again, dragged down by the current.

Indraugnir hit the water like a meteor, wings furled, raising a great eruption of water. Eyes wide in the bubbling depths, he spied the glint of gold and turned and lunged awkwardly, a clawed foot closing around Aenarion’s spinning body. Legs pumping, churning a froth behind him, the dragon burst clear of the sea’s clawing grip, wings snapping out to carry them back into the clouds.

Turned around and about, the dragon knew not whether he flew north or south or east or west, but carried on as swiftly as he could, Aenarion’s limp form hanging in his grasp. Feeling no movement from his friend, he cast his gaze about, looking for some rock or promontory where he could set down for a moment.

He spied an outcrop of black rock and turned towards it, skimming above the waves, every muscle and sinew in his enormous body a knot of agony. His breath coming in gasps, Indraugnir crashed against the hard shore, shielding Aenarion with his body, the sharp rocks shedding scales, tearing through the skin of his wings. Bloodied and limping, Indraugnir righted himself and gently set Aenarion down on a water dappled rock shelf.

Bending his head low, the dragon let out a breath across the elven king. Stirred by the heat, Aenarion heaved water from his lungs, body shuddering. Bleeding from dozens of wounds, Indraugnir lay down beside the motionless elf and draped a wing across him, shielding the Phoenix King against the surf that sprayed from the wild sea.

So it was that Aenarion and Indraugnir came to the Blighted Isle.

When Aenarion awoke he was sore in limb and numb in mind. Crawling from beneath the protective canopy of Indraugnir’s wing, he looked up to see a dark sky. The storm had abated and the clouds gone, but not a single star could be seen. The cold waters lapped against the rock beside him; in the other direction he could see nothing but blackness. He looked to Indraugnir but the dragon did not stir. His body heaved and fell with massive breaths and his eyes were closed. The Phoenix King saw gouges in the flesh of the beast, and noted the tattered edges of Indraugnir’s wings. He patted his companion gently upon the shoulder and sat down with his back to the dragon’s foreleg.

Here he sat, alert for any danger, and kept watch.

As the first fingers of dawn touched upon the sea to the east, Indraugnir stirred. Blinking his eyes, the dragon yawned wide, puffs of smoke drifting from his open maw. Indraugnir turned towards Aenarion and saw that the king was awake. Aenarion stood as the dragon shifted his bulk and tentatively flexed a wing. Indraugnir’s thick lips rippled with pain, exposing sword-long teeth.

‘I fear my boast has come back to haunt me,’ the dragon said gently. ‘I am undone by the storm and can carry you no further.’

‘No other could have seen me through the tempest, there is no shame in such a feat. We are here upon the Blighted Isle and I can find my way alone here. Rest up, for it will not be long ere we must go south again, and even I cannot walk on water.’

Indraugnir laughed with a deep rumble.

‘With the Sword of Khaine in hand, perhaps you could carve apart the seas and cross the dry wound to Ulthuan.’

‘I would rather be carried by a friend,’ replied the Phoenix King. ‘Fare well, and I shall return soon with my prize.’

The Blighted Isle was lifeless, a barren rock broken by stone spires; home to no plant nor animal nor bird nor the smallest insect. Aenarion set off away from the dawn, picking his way through the scattered rocks. Soon he spied higher ground to the west and set off with purpose. Pulling himself up a steep ridge, the king saw that the morning had all but passed and the sun was not far from noon. Yet the circle of light hung in a dark sky, its light weak, a pale disc that seemed more like the moon.

Crossing the ridge, Aenarion felt a pull to the south, and the sharp, luring whisper returned to his ear. Yet even as he turned in its direction, a mist rose from the naked rock, surrounding him until the sunlight was no more than a faint sheen in the air. Shadows stirred in the fog and Aenarion thought that the daemons had returned. He circled slowly on his heel as the shapes resolved into vague silhouettes, tall and slim, robed with cloud like gowns. They crowded closer, just out of reach, grey figures that stretched towards him with pleading hands, their insubstantial bodies evaporating and reforming.

Dark mouths opened and the fog swirled with hoarse whispers. ‘He walks among us.’

‘The Doom of the Elves hath come’

‘Spare us!’

‘Mercy!’

‘Not the blade!’

‘Free us!’

‘Give us peace!’

‘Justice!’

‘Show us pity!’

Aenarion swiped at the apparitions with his hand and stumbled back from their advance, only to find more behind him. There were thousands, a great mass of wraiths that grew in number with every passing heartbeat.

‘Leave me be, foul spirits!’ he snarled. ‘The dead have no business with the living. Torment your slayers, not I!’

A quiet female voice beside Aenarion quelled all the others.

‘They are the spirits of the Dead Yet To Be, Aenarion.’

The Phoenix King spun around, recognising the voice.

‘Astarielle?’ he cried.

It was she; a shimmering ghost of white and palest green among the melancholy grey. The Phoenix King looked upon her beauty again and wept. He stepped forwards to embrace her slender body, but his arms passed through air without substance, leaving only a cold sensation that prickled his skin. As the spirit of Astarielle reformed, he saw now that there were rents upon her flesh and silver blood spilled from a wound in her breast. Aenarion gave a wordless moan and fell to one knee.

‘My beautiful wife! What horrors have been inflicted upon you? Is there to be no peace for your spirit?’

‘In peace I lived, but in violence I died. To peace I will return, but not before I have spoken. Give up this quest for vengeance, Aenarion. Shun the lure of war and find it in your heart to treasure the memory of my life, not the haunting of my death.’

‘Look what they have done to you, my beautiful wife. Look at the destruction they have wrought upon your realm.’

‘All things die and then grow again. Even Averlorn has its seasons, though they last longer than the lifetimes of elves. What seems permanent now is but fleeting in the eyes of the world. The future cannot be born out of grief and anger, but is created anew with hope and love.’ ‘My love died with you, Astarielle,’ said Aenarion, regaining his feet. ‘This is your shade, fleetingly here, but soon it will be gone. Only in death will we join each other again, but I cannot needlessly throw aside my life and abandon our people. When the daemons are destroyed and Ulthuan is safe, I will return the Widowmaker to its black altar and let loose my grip on the world. Then we shall be united.’

‘There are things that you are not to know, but you must believe that all is not as bleak as it seems. You sought sacrifice to end the woes of the elves, but there is greater sacrifice to come. Though in times to come we shall spread our gaze across the world and rule the seas, it will be but a brief respite in the dwindling of our people. You now must make that choice. Look to your heart! We must forego that power that makes us strong, that the daemons might be caged again within their terrible prison, and with their passing so too will our glory fade.’

‘Never!’ snarled Aenarion. ‘We will rise anew from this war, greater than ever. Though your entreaty would break the heart of an ice fiend, my mind is set.’

Silver tears rolled down Astarielle’s cheeks as Aenarion turned from her. The Phoenix King stalked away with a whisper.

‘We will be together again, my love, but not yet. There is something yet that I must do.’

It was not long before Aenarion came to a wide expanse near the centre of the Blighted Isle. Here, jagged black rocks marked with lines of red thrust up into the ruddy skies like a circle of columns. The ground within was as flat as glass and black as midnight. At the centre there stood a block of red-veined rock and something only partly visible shimmered above it.

Even as his thoughts touched upon the Godslayer, there came to Aenarion’s ears a distant noise; a faint screaming. The ring of metal on metal, of fighting, echoed around the shrine. Aenarion heard a thunderous heart beating, and thought he saw knives carving wounds upon flesh, and limbs torn from bodies on the edge of his vision. The red veins of the altar were not rock at all, but pulsed like arteries, blood flowing from the stone in spurting rivers of gore. He realised that the beating heart was his own, and it hammered in his chest like a swordsmith working at an anvil.

Aenarion stood transfixed before that bloody shrine. The thing embedded in the rock danced and wavered before the Phoenix King’s eyes, a blur of axe and sword and spear and bow and knife and strange weapons not known to the elves. Finally a single image emerged, of a long-bladed sword, cross-guard curled into the rune of Khaine, its black blade etched with red symbols of death and blood.

Aenarion reached out… and stopped, his fingers a hair’s-breadth from the hilt of the sword. All became silent; not a movement stirred the air as the world and the gods held their breath.

Aenarion knew this would be his doom. All of the warnings came back to him, the words of Caledor merged with dire predictions of the daemons and the pleading of his dead wife. It all mattered nothing to him, for his sprit was empty and only the Sword of Khaine could fill the void within him.

The ground shook and rock crumbled as Aenarion’s fist closed upon the hilt. He pulled the sword free from its stone prison and held it aloft. Blood seeped from the runes etched into the blade and poured in thick rivulets across his hand and down his arm, trailing crimson across his armour.

Godslayer, Widowmaker, Doom of Worlds, Spear of Vengeance, Deathshard, Icefang and Heavenblight. By many names it was called, by mortal and daemons and gods. But one name alone it truly held: Sword of Khaine, the Lord of Murder.

Now it was the Sword of Aenarion.

The doom of the elves was sealed.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

PAUL S. KEMP

Paul S. Kemp describes himself as a fictioneer. He has written both swords & sorcery and space opera, such as the ‘Chronicles of Erevis Cale’ and ‘War of the Spider Queen’ sagas. He has also written novels set in the Star Wars universe, including the New York Times bestselling Crosscurrent. He lives the life of an outlaw in Grosse Pointe, Michigan with his wife and children, and a steady supply of scotch.

SARAH CAWKWELL

Sarah Cawkwell is a north-east England based freelance writer. Married, with a son (who is the grown up in the house) and two intellectually challenged cats, she’s been a determined and prolific writer for many years. Her first novel, The Gildar Rift, was published in 2011. When not slaving away over a hot keyboard, Sarah’s hobbies include reading everything and anything, running around in fields with swords screaming incomprehensibly and having her soul slowly sucked dry by online games.

NICK KYME

Nick Kyme is a writer and editor. He lives in Nottingham where he began a career at Games Workshop on White Dwarf magazine. Now Black Library’s Senior Range Editor, Nick’s writing credits include the Warhammer 40,000 Tome of Fire trilogy featuring the Salamanders, the Space Marine Battles novel Fall of Damnos and his Warhammer Fantasy-based dwarf novels and several short stories.

Read his blog at www.nickkyme.com

ANDY HOARE

Andy Hoare worked for eight years in Games Workshop’s design studio, producing and developing new game rules and background material. Now working freelance writing novels, roleplaying game material and gaming-related magazine articles, Andy lives in Nottingham with his partner Sarah.

GAV THORPE

Gav Thorpe has been rampaging across the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 for many years as both an author and games developer. He hails from the den of scurvy outlaws called Nottingham and makes regular sorties to unleash bloodshed and mayhem. He shares his hideout with Dennis, a mechanical hamster sworn to enslave mankind. Dennis is currently trying to develop an iPhone app that will hypnotise his victims. Gav’s previous novels include fan-favourite Angels of Darkness, the Time of Legends trilogy, The Sundering, and the Eldar Path series amongst many others.

You can find his website at mechanicalhamster.wordpress.com

JOSH REYNOLDS

Formerly a roadie for the Hong Kong Cavaliers, Josh Reynolds now writes full time and his work has appeared previously in anthologies such as Specters and Coal Dust, Historical Lovecraft and How The West Was Weird as well as in magazines such as Innsmouth Free Press and Hammer and Bolter. Feel free to stop by his blog (http://joshuamreynolds.blogspot.com/).

C.L. Werner

C. L. Werner was a diseased servant of the Horned Rat long before his first story in Inferno! magazine. His Black Library credits include the Chaos Wastes books Palace of the Plague Lord and Blood for the Blood God, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer World. Visit the author’s website at www.vermintime.com

PHILLIP ATHANS

Philip Athans is the New York Times best-selling author of Annihilation and ten other fantasy and horror books including The Guide to Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction and the recently-released Completely Broken. His blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook, (http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com) is updated every Tuesday, and you can follow him on Twitter @PhilAthans. Born in Rochester, New York he grew up in suburban Chicago, where he published the literary magazine Alternative Fiction & Poetry. He now makes his home in the foothills of the Washington Cascades, east of Seattle.

BEN COUNTER

Author of the Soul Drinkers and Grey Knights series, freelance writer Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, and has written RPG supplements and comic books as well as novels. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England, where he can sometimes be seen indulging his enthusiasm for amateur dramatics on the local stage.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

© Games Workshop Limited, 2011. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-85787-531-0

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