Discover more stories set in the Warhammer Chronicles from Black Library

• THE LEGEND OF SIGMAR •
Graham McNeill
BOOK ONE: Heldenhammer
BOOK TWO: Empire
BOOK THREE: God King

• THE RISE OF NAGASH •
Mike Lee
BOOK ONE: Nagash the Sorcerer
BOOK TWO: Nagash the Unbroken
BOOK THREE: Nagash Immortal

• VAMPIRE WARS: THE VON CARSTEIN TRILOGY •
Steven Savile
BOOK ONE: Inheritance
BOOK TWO: Dominion
BOOK THREE: Retribution

• THE SUNDERING •
Gav Thorpe
BOOK ONE: Malekith
BOOK TWO: Shadow King
BOOK THREE: Caledor

• CHAMPIONS OF CHAOS •
Darius Hinks, S P Cawkwell & Ben Counter
BOOK ONE: Sigvald
BOOK TWO: Valkia the Bloody
BOOK THREE: Van Horstmann

• THE WAR OF VENGEANCE •
Nick Kyme, Chris Wraight & C L Werner
BOOK ONE: The Great Betrayal
BOOK TWO: Master of Dragons
BOOK THREE: The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

• MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Witch Hunter
BOOK TWO: Witch Finder
BOOK THREE: Witch Killer

• ULRIKA THE VAMPIRE •
Nathan Long
BOOK ONE: Bloodborn
BOOK TWO: Bloodforged
BOOK THREE: Bloodsworn

• MASTERS OF STONE AND STEEL •
Gav Thorpe and Nick Kyme
BOOK ONE: The Doom of Dragonback
BOOK TWO: Grudge Bearer
BOOK THREE: Oathbreaker
BOOK FOUR: Honourkeeper

• THE TYRION & TECLIS OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Blood of Aenarion
BOOK TWO: Sword of Caldor
BOOK THREE: Bane of Malekith

• WARRIORS OF THE CHAOS WASTES •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Wulfrik
BOOK TWO: Palace of the Plague Lord
BOOK THREE: Blood for the Blood God

• KNIGHTS OF THE EMPIRE •
Various Authors
BOOK ONE: Hammers of Ulric
BOOK TWO: Reiksguard
BOOK THREE: Knight of the Blazing Sun

• WARLORDS OF KARAK EIGHT PEAKS •
Guy Haley & David Guymer
BOOK ONE: Skarsnik
BOOK TWO: Headtaker
BOOK THREE: Thorgrim

• SKAVEN WARS: THE BLACK PLAGUE TRILOGY •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Dead Winter
BOOK TWO: Blighted Empire
BOOK THREE: Wolf of Sigmar

• THE ORION TRILOGY •
Darius Hinks
BOOK ONE: The Vaults of Winter
BOOK TWO: Tears of Isha
BOOK THREE: The Council of Beasts

• BRUNNER THE BOUNTY HUNTER •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Blood Money
BOOK TWO: Blood & Steel
BOOK THREE: Blood of the Dragon

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FIRST OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Trollslayer
BOOK TWO: Skavenslayer
BOOK THREE: Daemonslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE SECOND OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Dragonslayer
BOOK TWO: Beastslayer
BOOK THREE: Vampireslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE THIRD OMNIBUS •
William King & Nathan long
BOOK ONE: Giantslayer
BOOK TWO: Orcslayer
BOOK THREE: Manslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FOURTH OMNIBUS •
Nathan Long
BOOK ONE: Elfslayer
BOOK TWO: Shamanslayer
BOOK THREE: Zombieslayer

Discover more stories set in the Age of Sigmar from Black Library

~ THE AGE OF SIGMAR ~

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

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

LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF SIGMAR
Various authors

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: PLAGUE GARDEN
Josh Reynolds

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: BLACK PYRAMID
Josh Reynolds

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS
Josh Reynolds

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON
C L Werner

RULERS OF THE DEAD
Josh Reynolds & David Annandale

SOUL WARS
Josh Reynolds

CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD
Nick Horth

THE TAINTED HEART
C L Werner

SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY
Josh Reynolds

BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK
Andy Clark

GODS & MORTALS
Various authors

MYTHS & REVENANTS
Various authors

HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS
David Guymer

GLOOMSPITE
Andy Clark

THE RED FEAST
Gav Thorpe

WARCRY
Various authors

GHOULSLAYER
Darius Hinks

BEASTGRAVE
C L Werner

To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer

SIGVALD

Cast of characters

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Epilogue

VALKIA THE BLOODY

The Schwarzvolf

Ambition

The Black Stag

Chieftain’s Daughter

The Blood God

The Gorequeen

Locephax

To the Victor the Spoils

Promises

The Breath Before the Plunge

The Edge of Oblivion

Rebirth

The Long Game

Emergence

Death or Glory

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

From Whence the Blood Flows

Bringer of Glory

Epilogue

BLOODRAVEN

BLOOD BLESSING

REAPER

HARBINGER

VAN HORSTMANN

The Light

The Grave of Ostermark

The City of Illuminators

The Jester

Dead Man’s Robe

The Gilded Forge

Upon a Throne of Lies

Shallya Wept

The Order of Death

Drufenhaag

Pestilentius

The Hand Cerulean

The Garden of Morr

Tyrant

Battle

The Key of Isha

Black Mirror Broken

Commandment

Splinterwing

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Legend of Sigmar’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

SIGVALD

Darius Hinks

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Decadent Host

Prince Sigvald the Magnificent

A champion of Slaanesh

Freydís

Sigvald’s wife; Princess of the Gilded Palace

Oddrún (Narrerback)

Chancellor of the Gilded Palace

Baron Gustav Schüler

A proud Empire knight, recently arrived at the Gilded Palace

Doctor Rusas Schliemann

Formerly an Empire scholar, now a devotee of Slaanesh

Ansgallür the Famished

Freydís’s guardian

Víga-Barói

A captain of the Decadent Host

Hazül

Víga-Barói’s chief surgeon

Brother Bürmann

Víga-Barói’s mute slave

Énka

Sigvald’s most powerful sorcerer

The Fallen

Hauk

Chieftain of a Norscan tribe called the Fallen

Sväla the Witch

A Norscan queen and prophet (wife of Hauk)

Svärd

A young Norscan tribesman (Hauk and Sväla’s son)

Valdür the Old

An elderly Norscan tribesman (Hauk’s oldest friend)

Ungaur the Blessed

A Norscan shaman and religious rival of Sväla

Rurik Iron Fist

Chieftain of the Drékar tribe

Halldórr the Black

A Kurgan chieftain

Sturll the Hewer

A Norscan chieftain

Lørden

A Norscan scout

Æstrid

A young Norscan woman

Ürsüla

An elderly Norscan witch

Völtar the Wolf

A deity worshipped by the Fallen

Others

Mord Huk

A champion of Khorne, with the head of a ferocious hound

Olandír

The lone inhabitant of a remote island off the coast of the Chaos Wastes

Belus Pül

A daemon of Slaanesh

Einvarr

Belus Pül’s envoy

Galrauch

A two-headed Tzeentchian dragon

Bargau the Soulless

An ancient immortal from prehistory

PROLOGUE

A man emerged from the shadows, his bulky frame silhouetted by the glow of a single candle. As the light danced around him it revealed other shapes: the walls of a small hut hung with animal bones, scraps of parchment scattered across the ground, and, in the centre of the room, a pale corpse, strapped to a sacrificial stone and scored with dozens of precise, angular knife wounds. The body was surrounded by a fan of sparkling crimson as its blood drained down a network of narrow channels, before pattering into a collection of hammered brass cups.

‘I’ve given you our bravest,’ grunted the man, waving at the body and staring into the darkness. His voice sounded harsh and strange, as if there was something metallic in his mouth, and as he turned towards the candlelight, it revealed a snarling wolfskin, draped over his head. ‘Now will you speak?’

There was no reply. The only sound came from the blood, splashing into the cups.

The man rose up to his full, impressive height and kicked one of them across the ground, filling the chamber with noise and splattering blood up the wall. ‘What’s the answer?’ he cried, pounding his fist on the corpse’s chest.

Still there was no reply and the man cursed, dropping a long, curved knife to the ground as he turned to leave.

Only then did he notice the wall. The blood he had kicked from the cup was forming itself into shapes as it trickled downwards, scrawling words across the ancient stone.

He gasped and stumbled to a halt. Then he grabbed the candle and held it up to the glistening characters. His eyes widened in recognition as he realised it was a fragment of an old saga.

He leant closer and began to read.

Across the ice,

through the snow,

a Geld-Prince,

swaddled in lust.

He cursed again and smeared the blood across the wall, frantically wiping his palms over the uneven stone until every trace of the words had been obscured.

For a few seconds he stood in silence, trembling and glaring at the bloody rock. Then he muttered a single word, his voice full of fear.

‘Sigvald.’

CHAPTER ONE

Far in the distance, beneath the grumbling black belly of the sky, a triangular star had appeared. It had not been visible from the other side of the valley, but now it was unmistakeable: a glittering bauble, hung low over cruel, magisterial peaks. The baron massaged his sunken cheeks and leant forward in his saddle, peering out across a vast, frozen lake, hypnotised by the flickering light. For nearly three months he had led his men north, into regions of madness and endless night, and all the time, his determination had been ebbing away – leeched out of him by the appalling visions he had endured. Now, with fewer than six hundred men left and his body ruined by starvation and cold, he wondered if his mind had finally gone. There were no stars in the Shadowlands, only eternal darkness. Yet, when he rubbed his eyes and looked again, the light was still there, taunting him.

He looked down at his wasted limbs and asked himself if, even now, he might find what he came for. ‘Could this be hope?’ he whispered.

He pointed the light out to his men and they nodded weakly in reply, steering their dying horses after him as he clattered across the ice.

The soldiers climbed the other side of the valley and after a while they realised it was not a star at all. They shook their heads in wonder as they saw that the light was a beautiful castle, hanging impossibly in the sky. The building flashed and glittered in the moonlight as immense banks of snow spiralled around it. It was made entirely of gold.

The baron urged his horse to pick up its pace, but then, with the building just half a mile away, he hesitated. He saw it quite clearly now: a vast, domed palace, drifting on the icy breeze and defying all laws of logic. He shook his head, still doubting his eyes. Even on the ground it would have seemed a miracle: a bewildering forest of turrets and towers, peopled with armies of leering grotesques. The scale of the construction was unbelievable. Every soaring pinnacle was succeeded by an even taller spire, until the eye grew utterly bewildered and returned, exhausted, to the huge front gates. A broad stair swept down from the palace in great serpentine curves, resting on the snow like the stem of a colossal gold flower.

The baron dragged his gaze from the fantastic building as one of the other riders called out to him. The snowdrifts nearby had gathered into jagged shapes, like sheets draped over a corpse. He signalled for his men to investigate and, despite their obvious fear, they dropped from their horses and struggled awkwardly through the snow. Upon reaching the mounds they began to dig, using swords drawn from within their oiled cloaks. The men gasped as they revealed a block of dented gold. Avarice gave them strength and within minutes they had uncovered a toppled statue. Like the palace hanging over them, it was cast entirely in gold, but it was not the lustre of the metal that took their breath away, it was the artist’s subject. The statue portrayed a young man, a noble, clad in plate armour and roaring with laughter as he pointed up towards the palace. The face was so handsome and full of joy that the men lowered their swords and backed away in awe. Dents and scratches covered the metal, but the statue’s eyes shone with vitality and humour. A lusty energy poured out of it. The men had never seen such a blissful, beautiful image of fulfilment. As they studied the lines of the face they found themselves grinning idiotically.

For a few moments the baron was silent, staring at the statue with the same inane expression as the others. Then he shook his head, closed his mouth and waved at the other shapes. His men rushed to obey and soon uncovered dozens of identical statues, all laughing and pointing towards the palace. They had all been toppled, like the first, and some had clearly been attacked – limbs and even heads were missing in some cases – but all of them were beautiful. Faced with these smiling, divine figures, the baron overcame his doubt and dismounted, marching through the snow towards the floating palace.

The other soldiers followed suit, tethering their horses to the foot of the stair and climbing after the baron with dazed, gleeful expressions on their faces.

As his boots clanged up the gold stairs, the baron regained a little of his former strength and dignity. He dusted the ice from his beard and turned up the ends of his wide moustache. All trace of exhaustion dropped away from him as he followed the wide curves of the stairway. He did not seem to notice that the steps were as dented as the statues; nor that many of them were slumped and buckled, without any sign of repair.

There was a screech of grinding metal. The baron looked up to see a door opening beneath a grand, latticed portico. At first it seemed as if the door had opened by its own volition, but as he and the other soldiers reached the top steps, they saw a group of figures marching out to greet them. The baron’s eyes glittered with excitement as twelve gleaming knights clattered out. They wore sculpted purple armour and each of them carried a sword and a circular, mirrored shield. They were almost as dazzling as the statues: tall, fair and perfectly poised as they formed a phalanx in front of the door.

Then the baron’s smile faltered. He dropped a hand to his longsword as a robed figure stooped beneath the doorframe and lurched out into the moonlight. The knights were all over six feet, but the hooded figure that followed them was half as tall again. Even its great height did not seem to tell the whole story: its dirty, hessian robes were stretched over long, knotted muscles and a humped, ridged back. It resembled a sack, filled with long sticks and animated by an invisible puppeteer, who steered it clumsily towards the riders, keeping its head down and its face hidden in shadow.

The baron stood proudly to attention, signalling for his men to do the same.

The giant lumbered towards them and came to a halt a few feet away. As it loomed over him, the baron noticed dozens of tiny shapes, scurrying beneath its robes. The sound of laboured breathing came from within the folds of its hood, followed by a low growling noise. It seemed as though the thing were trying to speak.

‘I’m Gustav Schüler,’ said the baron, thrusting out his stiff beard and pulling back his shoulders. He looked like a reanimated corpse. His blistered skin was stretched horribly over his protruding cheekbones and his lips were cracked and blue, but the baron carried his breeding like a badge of honour. He strode through the snowstorm, determined to appear undaunted. ‘I demand entry.’

Another stream of rasping vowels emerged from within the hood.

The baron shook his head impatiently. ‘I can’t understand.’ He turned to the stony-faced knights. ‘I can’t understand him. Is he a daemon? Are you all daemons?’

The knights gave no response. In fact, they did not even seem to see the baron, so he turned once more to the hooded giant, raising his voice even louder in an attempt to be heard over the wind. ‘Can you understand me?’ His voice was edged with fury as he stepped closer. ‘We’re dying. We have nowhere else to go.’

The hooded giant looked down at him in silence for a few seconds, swaying slightly, as though struggling to balance on its long, crooked legs. Then it spoke again. The words were still little more than a guttural snarl, but they were now in a language the baron could understand. ‘Then you have my pity,’ it said, slumping to one side and waving the baron towards the open door.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the baron as he limped down a vast hallway. The long journey north had replaced several of his toes with blackened stumps, and every step sent needles of pain into his feet, but the grandeur of the architecture drew him on. The vaulted ceilings were so high that he could barely make them out in the torchlight. If it wasn’t for the distant glitter of ribbed gold, he might have been walking through the night sky. The giant gave no reply as it led the baron onwards. This was the fourth long hallway they had passed down, and it had maintained a stony silence every step of the way. They were utterly alone and the baron burned with questions.

‘What about my men?’ he asked. The baron had allowed the knights to lead his exhausted soldiers away without a word of protest. It had seemed quite natural to entrust his men to such noble guardians, but now, as his thoughts began to clear a little, he felt a terrible rush of guilt. What had he been thinking? He looked anxiously over his shoulder but could see no sign of the entrance.

The giant still gave no reply and the baron shook his head, ashamed at how easily he had been distracted. ‘What could I have done?’ he muttered, tugging anxiously at his beard and stumbling to a halt. ‘There’s no fight left in any of them. They’re at death’s door.’ As he looked up at the faded grandeur of the palace, he realised that whatever happened now, all of their fates were in the hands of its master. He must be either saviour or executioner, for all of them.

The baron hurried on, shaking his head in disbelief as he left the first building and approached another. Rather than being just one palace, as it appeared outside, he now saw that this was a collection of palaces, each larger and grander than the one before. The further he went though, the harder it was to ignore the decay: the buildings seemed abandoned. This far in there was no trace of a breeze and a thick layer of dust had settled over the gold, painting everything a maudlin grey. Mirrors as tall as trees lined the walls, but many of the gilt frames were broken and great cracks had spread across the glass. Alongside the mirrors were huge portraits of the grinning figure whose statue the baron had seen outside. Each vast image portrayed the young noble as he overcame a series of monstrous foes, and each one was painted in the most incredible, vivid colours. Decades of dust had settled over them, however, and the noble’s face looked out from behind a curtain of cobwebs.

After an hour of marching in silence, the baron began to hear sounds. As he stumbled down another endless corridor he realised it was music. He tilted his head to one side and strained to hear more clearly. There were voices too, dozens of them, echoing around the soaring arches and columns. The hooded figure led him into another passageway. This one was markedly different: it was much smaller for a start – only wide enough to accommodate four or five men side by side – and it had clearly seen recent life. The mirrors that lined the walls were still clouded with ancient dust, but the carpet was indented with footprints. The heady scent of lilies filled the air and the baron sighed with pleasure as warmth began to seep through his furs. The music was now unmistakable and he paused to enjoy the sound of harps playing a sinuous, elusive melody. The voices were clearer too. The baron could not place the language, but the snatches of polite laughter brought a faint smile to his lips.

His hooded guide paused as it reached a final set of doors. It was obvious from the volume of the music that they had reached their destination. The giant placed a long, bandaged hand on one of the door handles and then hesitated, turning back to Schüler. After a few seconds of gasping and spluttering it spoke. ‘You may still leave,’ it growled, straining to wrap its thick accent around the words.

The baron scowled at the delay and gestured to the door.

For a long time, the figure studied the baron from within the deep folds of its hood, then, finally, it nodded and shoved the door open.

The baron stepped back with a gasp. The room beyond was a kaleidoscope of light and movement. Crowds of dancing figures were spinning back and forth through banks of scented smoke. He shook his head in astonishment. The dancers were dressed in iridescent silks and sparkling brocades, and moved with such grace that they seemed little more than smoke themselves. ‘So beautiful,’ he muttered, but he could not fully hide the tremor of fear in his voice. ‘What are they? Gods?’

The hooded figure shook its head. As it ushered him into the room there was a note of amusement in its voice. ‘No.’

As the baron’s eyes adjusted to the flickering light, he saw the room a little more clearly. It was an absurdly grand throne room. Tiered, scalloped balconies lined its walls and ranks of fluted columns divided it into a series of arcades. The walls and ceilings were made of polished white marble, crowned with elaborate, golden cornices and between each of the columns hung crystal chandeliers each the size of a stagecoach and shimmering with hundreds of candles. The flames pulsated with a multitude of different colours, washing over the ranks of spinning figures and revealing the strangeness of their costumes: towering masks of plumed feathers and wings of scarlet silk, all trailing through the smoke in perfect synchronicity. Above them, the balconies were filled with crowds of musicians, playing instruments of such strange design that they looked more like elongated limbs than pieces of brass or wood. As the baron stared at the incredible scene, he realised that not all of the lights were fixed in one place: dozens of birds were flitting around the room, swooping and diving in frenetic bursts, and trailing tiny lanterns from their tail feathers.

Beyond the dancers, there was a raised dais and a throne. The room was so long and the smoke so thick that the baron struggled to make out the throne in any detail, but as the lights ebbed and throbbed, he saw that the chair cradled a slender figure, slumped idly in its deep cushions. He felt a thrill of excitement. This must be his host. Even with their faces hidden behind their masks, it was clear the dancers’ gaudy display was intended for the amusement of this one person.

‘Whose palace is…?’ began the baron, but as he looked back, he saw that the hooded figure had disappeared. He scanned the crowds and saw its swaying shoulders a few yards away, stumbling in and out of the dancers. He moved to follow, but it vanished behind a wall of smoke and whirling silk. He shrugged and looked back at the distant throne. It was obvious whose palace this was.

Drawing himself erect, he strode confidently down the central arcade. As soon as he neared the other guests, he faltered. He felt as though he had entered a hall of mirrors. The figures’ costumes were even stranger when seen close up: bestial masks leered down at him and serpentine limbs sprouted from beneath bodices and cloaks. He began to doubt if all of the strange shapes were even costumes at all, they seemed so horribly animated. But it was the size of the figures that finally brought him to a confused halt. Some of the dancers towered over him, like willows, while others scampered beneath his legs. He clamped his eyes shut and pressed his hands over them, trying to block out the torrent of warped faces and impossible shapes. Awful realisation washed over him in a dizzy rush. ‘How can they exist?’ he groaned.

As he stood there, trembling with delayed shock, the baron felt something shift, irrevocably, in his mind. He shook his head and hurried on, trying to fix his eyes on the throne. As he rushed through the dance, delicate fingers brushed against his face and breathy, foreign voices whispered in his ears: urging him to join the writhing crush of bodies. An intoxicating mixture of terror and arousal gripped him and he broke into a sprint.

With a sigh of relief, he reached the broad dais and stepped away from the dancers. A cerise carpet led up to the tall, baroque throne and, at its feet, a group of lithe, semi-clad figures were slumped in languid adoration of their monarch. The light here was a little clearer but the baron frowned, doubting his eyes. The figures that turned towards him had eyes as black as coal and flesh the colour of virgin snow. Their beautiful, elfin faces were full of mischief as they rose to greet him, with forked tongues flickering from their pouting lips. To his shame, the baron found himself smiling coyly as they pressed around him. He could not even be sure if they were male or female, but as their long, elegant limbs entwined him, he felt a fierce rush of lust. Gentle fingers traced over his blistered skin and the baron closed his eyes with a moan of pleasure. After months of brutal war, his body yielded gratefully to their tender embrace. Soft, moist lips brushed against his ears and warm, voluptuous bodies pressed against his hands.

The baron was finally defeated.

His legs gave way and he collapsed gratefully into a forest of welcoming arms.

CHAPTER TWO

‘There will be time for introductions later,’ said a soft voice.

At the sound of his own language, the baron felt a stab of guilt. He opened his eyes to see that he was still in the grand throne room. Then, with a gasp, he saw that his pale-skinned seducers were writhing over his body and eagerly unfastening his clothes. Their black eyes were rolling with excitement as their fingers pulled open his jerkin and slid across his exposed chest. He cried out in a mixture of ecstasy and alarm, suddenly realising how unnatural their beauty was. Some of their limbs ended in long serrated claws, and several of them had tails snaking down from their gyrating hips. He sat up with a groan of fear, shoving them away and looking around to see who had spoken. He saw a face utterly different from the ones nuzzling and mewling against his skin.

‘You should meet your host before you sample his gifts,’ said the man looming over him. His eyes were as hard as flint and his face was a mask of intricately scarred flesh. He reached under the baron and wrenched him away from the writhing nymphs.

The baron coughed with embarrassment and quickly fastened his jerkin. He felt colour rushing into his cheeks as he stood before a tall, stern-faced man. ‘I… I’ve travelled far,’ he stammered, trying to ignore the pale fingers sliding up his legs. ‘I’m so tired. I just...’

The man nodded.

As he pulled himself free from the pile of bodies, the baron studied his saviour. He was dressed like a knight, or a noble of some kind. His broad, powerful chest was encased in a plum-coloured cuirass of a strange, antiquated design and he carried an ornate helmet under his arm, designed to resemble the head of a serpent. His age was hard to determine, but the baron decided he must be at least fifty: he was tall and straight-backed and he had lifted the baron as easily as a child, but his oil-slicked hair was thinning and grey. His mouth was locked in a permanent sneer, twisted up by a thick worm of scar tissue.

‘Are you from the Empire?’ asked the baron, backing away from the knight’s fierce glare.

The knight frowned, as though annoyed by the question. Then he locked the baron’s arm in a tight grip. ‘Let me introduce you,’ he said, speaking with a low, velvety voice that did not seem quite at home coming from such a cruel face.

He ushered the baron towards the throne and knelt down, indicating that the baron should do the same.

As the knight dropped to his knees, Schüler noticed that his purple cuirass was attached to his body by a collection of polished hooks, all of which were embedded deep in his flesh. As he leant forward, they tugged at his skin in a way that must have caused the man incredible pain and the baron grimaced in sympathy for his taut, mutilated skin.

‘Sigvald, Lord of the Decadent Host,’ the strange knight intoned, after briefly pressing his forehead into the deep carpet. ‘Your guest has arrived.’

The baron pressed his own forehead into the carpet and then stared at the figure slumped on the throne. It was a boy with the face of a god. He looked no more than sixteen or seventeen, and his posture was as slouched and nonchalant as that of any other teenager, but his face was divine in its perfection. The baron recognised him immediately from the statues and paintings. He had long blond hair and a handsome, strong face with piercing blue eyes and a cruel, sensual mouth. The youth’s muscular body was clad in ornately sculpted gold armour. It was filigreed and engraved with an intricate mass of whorls and arabesques and it was designed in such a cunning way that he seemed both ready for battle and barely dressed. His limbs were lithe and toned and where his skin was exposed it shone like the ivory on his throne. The baron felt both humbled and repulsed. He had never seen such a beguiling mixture of knightly perfection and vulgar, unashamed decadence.

The young prince did not seem to hear his knight’s words. His attention was fixed on an empty wine glass in his hand. He was peering intently at his own face, reflected in the faceted crystal.

‘His guest?’ whispered the baron, turning to the knight by his side. ‘You must be mistaken. I haven’t been–’

The knight silenced him with a sneer.

The baron felt a rush of indignation, assuming the knight disapproved of his earlier moment of weakness. He was about to repeat his excuse with a little more vehemence, when the prince looked up from his glass. His face crumpled into a petulant frown and he signalled for the purple-clad knight to approach. As the knight stepped to the prince’s side the young regent spoke, but to the baron’s dismay, the words were indecipherable. The prince’s voice was gentle, but his language sounded like that of the shambling giant that had led him to the throne room. The baron shook his head in confusion. Then he realised that the words were not directed at him anyway. The prince was pointing to his reflection in the glass and asking the knight to examine his face. From the rising panic in his voice, it seemed as though he had spotted something terrible.

The knight stooped down by the prince’s side and lovingly brushed the boy’s flaxen hair away from his face. Then he peered closely at Sigvald’s forehead, while the prince anxiously waited with his eyes closed. The knight laughed and plucked something from the prince’s skin. He held it before up Sigvald’s face and patted him reassuringly on the shoulder.

The prince scowled at the knight’s hand, unconvinced. Then he leant forwards and looked back at his reflection. After a few more seconds of anxious pouting, his expression softened and he slumped back in his chair with a relieved sigh. Then he seemed to forget all about the knight and continued studying himself in the glass.

‘My prince,’ said the knight, gesturing to the baron. ‘Your guest has arrived.’

Sigvald looked up at the knight with a confused frown. He shook his head and snapped something indecipherable.

The knight tried to twist his sneer into a smile and gestured again to Schüler.

Sigvald finally turned towards the baron. His frown vanished and a broad grin spread across his face, revealing a row of even, gleaming teeth. ‘The Southling?’ he said, in perfect Reikspiel. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Víga-Barói?’ His lethargy evaporated and his eyes glittered with excitement. He leapt from the throne and dragged Schüler to his feet, embracing him in a fierce hug. ‘How perfect you are!’ he exclaimed, holding the bemused baron at arm’s length to study him. Sigvald looked his guest up and down, taking in the ragged mass of his furs, the battered state of his weapons and the gaunt ferocity of his face. He let out a burst of rippling laughter and hugged him again. ‘Perfect!’ he cried.

The baron felt a swell of pride and smoothed down his thick beard in an attempt to look more worthy of Sigvald’s praise. ‘My lord,’ he said, bowing again. ‘I had no idea you were expecting me. I didn’t realise...’ his words trailed off as the beaming prince hugged him again.

‘You’re everything I hoped for,’ said Sigvald, running a hand over the baron’s weather-beaten face. ‘What a breath of fresh air,’ he waved dismissively at the figures gathered on the dance floor, ‘after an eternity with these fawning inebriates.’

The baron looked down from the dais and realised that the crowd was now motionless. The musicians on the balcony had fallen silent and the whole room was staring up at him. Even in the shifting light, he could see the jealousy on their bizarre faces. He flinched under a tide of hatred and turned back to the prince, eager to say his piece while he had the chance. ‘I came here seeking aid, my lord.’ He lowered his voice to an urgent whisper and clenched his fists. ‘I need power. The Empire is in tatters.’

Sigvald’s only reply was a bemused smile.

A note of anger entered the baron’s voice. ‘The Emperor is doing nothing. I’ve come all this way, hoping to find someone who has the guts to finally rid us…’ his words faltered as he saw the incomprehension in Sigvald’s eyes. He clamped his hands over his head, wondering if he had made a terrible mistake. Then he waved back across the throne room to the crowds of figures. ‘Are these…’ he paused again, unsure how to describe them. ‘Do you have an army, my lord?’

Sigvald’s grin broadened, as though the baron had made a great joke. ‘Armies? Really, why would you talk of such things?’ He gestured to the glittering columns that surrounded them. ‘Look at where you are.’ He leant close to the baron, his voice trembling with suppressed laughter. ‘You’ve escaped all that tedium, my friend. Don’t you see? You’re finally, utterly free. You’ve emerged from a dusty, life-crushing cocoon.’ He narrowed his eyes, and looked around suspiciously at their mute audience. ‘Think about it,’ he whispered, with a sudden urgency in his voice. ‘You’ve escaped from a cocoon.’ He looked down at his hands, grimacing as though he could see something unpleasant in his palms. ‘A cocoon.’

As Sigvald stared at his hands his look of disgust grew until he was grimacing and shaking his head. Then, as suddenly as it came, the suspicion fell from his face and he looked up with another broad grin. ‘All you need do now is spread your wings!’ He turned to the sneering knight. ‘Víga-Barói,’ he snapped, ‘this is a welcome party, not a wake!’

‘My prince,’ replied the knight with a nod of his head. Then he gestured to a distant balcony. At his signal, the musicians launched into a raucous, lurching tune and, with a rustle of taffeta and chitin, the dance was resumed.

As music filled the room once more, Sigvald continued to smile, nodding excitedly at the baron. ‘The party is in your honour, my brave friend. We receive so few visitors up here at the edge of the world. Fewer than few. Fewer than none.’ He giggled. ‘Not many have the courage to make it this far.’ He grabbed the baron’s hand again and pulled him close. ‘You must have a great fire in you. A great fire.’ He looked up as a bird glided overhead, lighting up their faces with its lantern. Sigvald watched it darting back and forth for a few moments, entranced; then he looked back at his guest with a confused laugh. ‘Who are you, friend?’

‘I’m a baron,’ Schüler replied, looking a little dazed. ‘Baron Gustav Schüler, that is. I’ve travelled north, from the Empire. I’m from a great city, called Altdorf.’ He looked down at the tattered red and blue heraldry on his armour as though it were more outlandish than anything he had seen so far. A note of disbelief entered his voice. ‘Or, at least, I was.’

‘Schüler, Schüler, Schüler of the Empire,’ sang Sigvald, ignoring the baron’s grim tone. ‘Tonight we will celebrate your escape!’ The prince leapt up onto his throne, threw back his mane of hair and raised his glass to the distant vaulted ceiling. ‘Schüler of the Empire! Born again, at the end of the world!’ Then he dropped down from the throne. His face was flushed with emotion as he grabbed a bottle of wine from the floor and filled the glass. ‘Drink, Schüler!’ he cried, thrusting the glass into the baron’s hand. ‘Drink, drink, drink!’

The baron looked hesitantly at the wine and then down at the writhing shapes at his feet. The pale figures had backed away as soon as Sigvald had spoken to him, but as he lifted the glass to his lips, they purred expectantly and edged closer – smiling lewdly and caressing each other in anticipation. For a second he considered downing the wine. How easy it would be to abandon himself and forget everything. He was so tired and hungry, just a few mouthfuls would be enough and his body ached at the memory of their skilled caresses. Then he straightened his back and shook his head, lowering the wine without tasting it.

‘Prince,’ he said, grimacing at the semi-clad shapes. ‘I came here seeking strength, not oblivion.’

The prince followed the direction of his gaze and frowned in confusion. Then he smiled and took the glass back, draining it in one thirsty gulp. ‘Forgive me, Schüler,’ he said, taking the baron’s hand again. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, I’m forgetting myself. You must be exhausted, and famished. Let me take you to your rooms and find you some food. Once you’re rested, we can discuss your needs.’ He turned to the murmuring shapes lying around them and gave them an indulgent smile. ‘But don’t be cross with my pets.’ He knelt down and held out his hand. They rushed forwards and nuzzled against him: pressing their nakedness against his polished armour and licking his outstretched fingers with black, serpentine tongues. The prince smiled at their embrace. ‘They wish only to give pleasure, Schüler,’ he said, placing a lingering kiss on the nearest one and rising back to his feet. ‘We should begin. There’s so much to see.’

He turned to the knight in plum-coloured armour. ‘Víga-Barói,’ he said, addressing him in softer tones than before. ‘Perhaps it would amuse our guest to speak to one of his own countrymen? Find Doctor Schliemann and ask him to meet us in the library.’

The taciturn knight gave a nod and marched stiffly from the dais, quickly disappearing into the crush of dancing figures.

‘Now,’ said Sigvald, leading the baron in the opposite direction, behind the throne towards the back of the chamber. ‘Where’s my chancellor?’ As he led Schüler away from the dance, he paused and looked around with a hint of anxiety. ‘Oddrún,’ he called, peering into the flashing lights. ‘Are you there?’

There was no reply, so Sigvald let out a grunt of disapproval and continued leading the baron towards a door at the back of the throne room. As they reached the door, a tall shape loomed out of the shadows and stooped down to open it for them. Moonlight rushed in and revealed the huge, teetering giant.

‘There he is!’ said Sigvald, with a grin. ‘Old Narrerback himself. This is my chancellor, baron – Oddrún is his real name. See how well he anticipates my needs.’

Even in his confused state, the baron realised how incongruous Oddrún’s appearance was. The throne room was a menagerie of outlandish creatures but they were all elegant in their strangeness. The prince’s chancellor wore filthy, shapeless rags, and even they could not disguise the clumsy nature of his anatomy.

The prince seemed blind to his chancellor’s ungainly movements and grabbed one of his elongated hands. ‘We have a guest, Narrerback,’ he said. ‘A brave knight of the Empire. He’s travelled all this way to find us.’

Oddrún nodded. ‘I’ve prepared a room.’

‘Of course you have, but I have things to show him. So, so many things.’ The prince ushered Schüler through the doorway into a small, enclosed courtyard. Stars wheeled overhead and a column of snow shimmered in the moonlight. ‘Quickly,’ said Sigvald, hurrying across the flagstones to one of the doors that led back into the palace.

They passed through a gloomy antechamber and into a room that was swathed in darkness. It was obvious from the echoes of their footfalls that it was another vast chamber, but the baron could see nothing.

‘Oddrún,’ came the prince’s voice out of the darkness. ‘Lights.’

There was snuffling, gasping sound and then, after a few minutes, a torch erupted into flames overhead, lighting up the chest of the hooded giant. ‘This room is no longer used, prince.’

‘Of course it is!’ Sigvald shook his head, snatched the torch from Oddrún’s hand and dashed away into the shadows. As he moved back and forth, light flared from rows of gas lamps that lined the walls, gradually revealing thousands of books. ‘My library!’ cried Sigvald, grinning back at the baron. ‘It’s perfect. It’s complete. Nothing like it exists anywhere.’ He lifted the torch in his hand and revealed countless gilded spines, stretching up towards the distant ceiling. ‘Even your Imperial scholars would weep to see such a collection, wouldn’t they?’ He looked eagerly to the baron for confirmation, his grinning face elongated by the torchlight.

The baron frowned in confusion. ‘Why are you showing me this, my lord? I’m not a scholar, I’m a soldier.’

Sigvald laughed. ‘I’m going to show you everything, baron.’

As the baron spun around to take in the enormity of the library, a wave of nausea washed over him and he stumbled back against the door frame. The combination of exhaustion, hunger and confusion collided in his fevered brain. He grasped his head in hands.

‘My prince,’ grunted Oddrún, gesturing to the baron’s obvious distress. ‘The palace is vast and the baron is exhausted.’

Sigvald’s face twisted into a pout. ‘Of course,’ he said, with a note of irritation in his voice. ‘We can begin in the morning.’ He ushered the baron towards Oddrún. ‘Take him to his room. Give him a sample of Prince Sigvald’s hospitality.’

As the chancellor led the baron away, Sigvald looked around at the library. His look of annoyance vanished as he studied the books. ‘Perfect,’ he muttered, running his fingers across some of the spines and tracing the shapes of the foiled letters. A small piece of foil came away in his fingers and he peered at it, spellbound by the glittering shard of gold. ‘Perfect,’ he said again, holding it up into the light.

‘My lord?’ came a voice from the doorway.

Sigvald turned to see a frail, bespectacled old man. The combination of his bony limbs and large, hooked nose gave him a distinctly avian quality as he scuttled into the room. He followed the prince’s gaze to the books. ‘Were you after a particular volume, Geld-Prince?’

Sigvald placed the piece of foil carefully on a bookshelf and strode over to the old man. ‘Doctor Schliemann,’ he cried, clasping his hand. ‘Our guest has arrived and he’s a countryman of yours.’

The doctor drew back in alarm.

‘Calm yourself,’ laughed Sigvald. ‘He’s not here for you.’ The prince led the old man back through the door and out into the snowstorm. As they crossed the courtyard, he cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled into the doctor’s ear. ‘He doesn’t realise it yet, but he wishes to join us.’

The old man nodded. ‘Ah, I see. Of course.’ He paused for a moment and turned to Sigvald, grimacing as the icy wind lashed against his face. ‘As long as you’re sure. Not everyone is so understanding as you, my lord.’ He wiped the snow from his spectacles and peered myopically at the prince. ‘Few of my kinsmen approved of my methods.’

‘Don’t worry,’ replied Sigvald patting the doctor on the shoulder. ‘He’s not here to judge us. He’s here to become one of us.’

They stepped back into the warmth of the throne room and Sigvald let out a sigh of pleasure. The rows of plumed dancers had formed a circle around a lone figure: a tall, frail woman, dressed in shimmering silver robes who was singing along with the music. Her body was horribly emaciated and she barely looked strong enough to stand, but her aria was filled with such heartbreak that every one of Sigvald’s subjects had stopped to listen.

‘How beautiful,’ said Sigvald.

Doctor Schliemann nodded his head quickly, looking even more bird-like. ‘Yes, it’s one of the elves we captured last year. In fact, I believe she’s the last.’

‘The last?’

Schliemann shrugged. ‘I did everything I could to make them comfortable, but imprisonment is hard on such a proud race. Despite the best efforts of your surgeons, most of them simply wasted away. We forced some of them to eat, but they died anyway.’

Sigvald climbed the steps towards his throne so that he could see the singer more clearly. ‘What noble creatures.’ He frowned. ‘What song is this, though? I’ve never heard any of them sing it before.’

‘I believe it’s her death song. There are certain elven melodies reserved for such occasions. They’re a strange people – an odd mixture of pride and humility. She senses death approaching, but rather than pitying herself, she sings of the tragedy of her race. The song’s title is The Sundered.’

Sigvald shook his head. ‘Incredible. Heartbreaking.’ He began to mouth the words of the song, savouring the delicate melody as it rolled around his mouth. It was a simple, three line phrase, repeated over and over. As he stared at the singer his eyes widened and the colour began to drain from his face. ‘It’s too much,’ he gasped suddenly and rushed down the steps. With the doctor hurrying after him, he threw open a pair of doors and ran out onto a balcony. The snow was falling even faster now and as Sigvald leant on the railings he had to shield his eyes from the dazzling display. Towering columns of snow were spiralling across the ink-black sky, flashing and glinting in the moonlight and billowing out beneath the drifting foundations of the palace.

‘Too much,’ repeated Sigvald looking out at the beautiful, brutal landscape. The sound of the music had followed them out and the combination of the melody and the tumbling snow filled him with passion.

‘Do you need anything?’ asked the doctor, lifting a small vial from his pocket and stepping to Sigvald’s side.

‘No, old friend,’ replied Sigvald with a high-pitched laugh. As he turned to the doctor, his mouth was trembling with emotion. He waved at the fury of the snowstorm. ‘Nothing. What more could I need? What more could anyone want? Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?’

‘No, my lord.’

Sigvald noticed a trace of sadness in the doctor’s voice and peered intently into his eyes. ‘What about you though, old friend – are you happy?’ He placed a hand on the old man’s back. ‘Have I given you everything you desire?’

The doctor leant out over the railings and gazed at the distant mountains. ‘Of course – you’ve been unbelievably kind to me. No one else would have allowed me to pursue such experimental research. Few people truly understand the necessity of sacrifice. I take no pleasure in inflicting pain, as you know, but it’s essential if one is to fully comprehend the nature of the cosmos.’

Sigvald nodded. ‘Absolutely. You’ve been utterly fearless.’

Schliemann frowned and looked down at his bony, wrinkled hands. ‘My only hindrance now is my own flesh.’ He shrugged. ‘The years have not been so kind to me, my prince.’

Sigvald saw the truth of Schliemann’s words. Liver spots and wrinkles had marred the skin of his protégé. He looked Schliemann up and down and realised that his limbs were almost as frail as the elven singer’s. The prince looked back out at the storm. Inside, the aria had reached a soaring crescendo. The supple elven words echoed out into the darkness, filled with longing and regret. The sight of the snow, the sound of the music and the undeniable fact of his friend’s mortality suddenly rushed through Sigvald like a drug. His head strained with a sadness so profound that it verged on euphoria. ‘Too much,’ he breathed as his heart began to pound. Painful as it was, he realised he wanted to savour this moment of transient, appalling beauty. Passion flooded his limbs and he began to tremble with excitement. As the dizzying emotions washed over him, Sigvald thought of a way to give them even greater potency. His hand was still resting on the doctor’s back and with a quick shove, he sent the frail old man flying over the rails of the balcony.

The doctor tumbled out into the storm and plummeted into the void.

Sigvald leant out over the balcony to watch his descent.

As the doctor hurtled towards the snowy wastes below, Sigvald’s face was gripped by a kind of mania and his mouth stretched into a horrible grin. The old man screamed as he fell beneath the floating palace. It seemed an infinity before his body finally smashed on the distant rocks below. Sigvald remained motionless for a few minutes – gripping the railings and staring down at the broken corpse. Then his smile turned into a grimace and he backed away from the edge with a groan, raising his hands to his face.

‘My lord?’

Sigvald turned to see his chancellor, stooping through the doorway.

The hooded giant looked at Sigvald’s anguished face and lurched to his side. ‘Prince?’

Sigvald kept his hands over his face and nodded at the balcony.

Oddrún rushed to the railings and looked out into the storm. At first he could see nothing and shook his head in confusion, then he looked down and gasped. ‘Who is… is that the doctor?’

Sigvald rushed to his side and looked down at the distant corpse. He was still clutching his face and his eyes were wide with grief.

Oddrún turned to face him. ‘Did he fall?’

Sigvald shook his head.

The chancellor slumped against the railings and groaned. ‘Doctor Schliemann? After all these years?’

Sigvald flinched as though he had been slapped, then stepped up to the railings.

As the last note of the elven song faded away, the giant and the prince looked down from the balcony, watching the snowflakes spiral endlessly into the abyss.

CHAPTER THREE

A flame was burning on the wind-blasted steppe. It was nearly dawn and as a line of tribesmen crossed the fields, the sky above them was slowly shifting from black to a deep indigo. There was something strangely heroic about the sight of a single fire beneath such a vast expanse of sky, and as the men formed a circle around the flickering light they were humbled into silence. The fire was housed in a brazier: a deep bronze bowl, hammered and scored to resemble the head of a giant wolf.

As the flames guttered and snapped in the brutal Norscan weather, a woman was attempting to guard them. She was dressed as simply as the tribesmen who gathered around her. A few crudely sewn animal skins were all that preserved her modesty, apart from a confusing mass of runes: hundreds of them, tattooed over her pale skin in dark, blue ink. As the wind howled around the brazier, she attempted to block it with her wiry body – dancing back and forth, silhouetted against the fire as she tried to keep it alive. Her right hand clutched an iron knife and her left was slick with blood. Every time the flames began to fail, she drew the blade across her palm and hurled her blood against the brazier, along with an oath. ‘Völtar the Wolf,’ she cried, as her blood sizzled against the hot metal, ‘will bring him home.’ Her voice was hoarse and her limbs trembled after a whole night of vigilance, but there was a grim determination in her eyes as she repeated the phrase.

‘So this is all we needed to do,’ said one of the tribesmen. He was the tallest of the group and clearly a figure of some importance – feathers and claws were wound into his long, red beard and he held an intricately carved staff in his right hand. A grey wolf’s pelt was draped over his head, so that its fangs hung down over his sneering face. ‘The Fallen are all but extinct, our hunting grounds have been stolen and our children are starving, but a bonfire will save us.’

The crowd roared with laughter, but it was forced and self-conscious and they watched the woman closely for her response.

‘Tell me, Sväla,’ continued the man in the wolf skin, ‘will your flames reach across the fields to consume our enemies, or will they leap from their flesh at your command?’ He grinned at the crowd, reminding them all of how clearly the gods had favoured him: his human teeth had long ago fallen out, to be replaced by needles of black iron.

Sväla looked up from the fire and glared at him. ‘Jokes, Ungaur the Blessed? Is that all you have left to offer?’ She looked around at the crowd. ‘He didn’t seem so merry when Hauk asked him to join the raiding party.’

‘Your husband’s a fool,’ said Ungaur, turning his black grin towards Sväla. ‘I warned him to wait for the new moon. The portents were clear. If he’s not prepared to listen to the Voice of the Wolf then he can’t expect my help.’

Sväla laughed. Unlike the laughter of the others, hers was a clear, honest sound. ‘Your help, Ungaur?’ She looked at the crowd with disbelief. ‘Has our shaman ever given us help with anything?’

The Norscans fell quiet and turned to Ungaur. Such open criticism of their shaman was unheard of, even from the chieftain’s wife.

Firelight glinted in Sväla’s eyes as she turned back to the brazier. ‘Other than butchering our finest warriors, of course. You’ve always been a great help there.’

The shaman slammed his carved staff into the ground and his face flushed with rage. ‘What would you have us offer a god, Sväla? Goats? We’re already cursed!’ He stepped closer to the flames and pointed his staff at the stars. ‘We must regain Völtar’s favour with human blood. The blood of heroes. It’s the only way!’

Some of the crowd grunted their approval, but others seemed less sure and looked back at Sväla.

‘What use have your sacrifices ever been?’ muttered Sväla, flinging another splash of blood against the brazier. ‘You kill us, the other tribes kill us…’ She turned back to the shaman. ‘Either way we die.’

‘Of course we do! We’re cursed! The Wolf has forsaken us. Sacrifice is the only way to regain his forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness for what?’ Sväla raised her voice to the crowd. ‘Do any of you feel you need forgiveness? Why should we be labelled the Fallen? We honour the gods. We face our enemies without fear. We offer up our dead to the Wolf. What have we done to deserve this curse?’

‘Do not question the judgement of Völtar,’ cried Ungaur, looking up at the night sky. ‘Your lack of faith will bring even greater suffering down on our heads.’

‘Greater than this?’ Sväla waved at the gaunt faces of the tribesmen. ‘We’re dying, Ungaur, and none of your spells have done anything to help.’ She looked out across the steppe, towards a distant line of mountains. ‘Your prayers and oaths have failed. We need something better.’ She held out her arms to shield the fire. ‘We need victory.’

Hauk loosed his axe and slipped silently through the long grass. He knew the end was only seconds away: victory or defeat, whichever awaited him. Shapes trailed after him through the darkness and he felt as though he had already entered the afterlife. His men looked pale and ghostlike as they followed him up to the summit of the hill. Their muscles gleamed in the predawn glow and as they raised a thicket of spears and axes over their heads, the pale light glinted along the rows of jagged blades. They reminded Hauk of vengeful spirits and he felt a fierce rush of pride. He mouthed a prayer to the gods. Any that would listen. Everything hinged on this moment and he no longer cared whose name fell from his lips. ‘We will be the Fallen no more,’ he whispered.

The warrior nearest to Hauk looked over and nodded. Valdür the Old had fought alongside his chieftain for three decades. He carried the same flashes of silver in his plaited topknot and the same scars on his knotted muscles. He heard the urgency in Hauk’s voice and raised the shaft of his javelin to his lips, kissing the finger bones rattling around its tip.

Even before they reached the summit, sounds of battle reached their ears. The staccato war cry of the Fallen punctured the night, accompanied by the dull crunch of axes biting into flesh.

‘Svärd,’ whispered Valdür, grinning at his chieftain.

Hauk nodded in reply and began to sprint up the hill.

A few moments later, they burst from the grass into a moonlit clearing and stumbled to a halt. Hauk lowered his axe and shook his head. They should have been charging towards the backs of their enemy. Hauk’s son, Svärd, had volunteered to lead some of the men in a feint as Hauk led the true attack, but something was wrong. A circle of armoured, burly Drékar waited for them. The Norscans’ grinning faces were smeared with their own blood and as they rushed forwards to attack they howled like starving dogs.

Hauk and his men barely had time to raise their weapons before they disappeared beneath an avalanche of flails and axes. Bones splintered and muscles tore as the two lines of men slammed into each other. War cries were replaced with curses, muttered oaths and garbled, liquid groans.

‘Where’s Svärd?’ cried Valdür as he hammered his fist into a screaming face.

Hauk roared with frustration and grasped the shoulder of the man he was facing. Rather than hewing his head from his shoulders, he slammed his foot into the man’s belly and, as he doubled over in pain, Hauk clambered onto his back to survey the battle. ‘Svärd,’ he cried, scouring the heaving mass of bodies. The clearing was filled with movement as more of the Drékar rushed to attack, but there was no sign of his son. ‘I heard the wretched child,’ gasped Hauk, swinging his axe down into the neck of the man who was supporting him. The tribesman collapsed and Hauk leapt clear, pounding the haft of his axe down into the face of another man as he landed. ‘Where is he?’ he cried, peering through the forest of limbs and spears. ‘He signalled the attack!’

Fuelled by his rage, Hauk sliced his way through the enemy ranks, spitting and cursing as he went. Behind him, Valdür and the others fought on. After the initial shock of facing the Drékar head-on, they were now battling furiously. All of them had sensed their chieftain’s mood. It was clear this was no ordinary raid.

Hauk fought his way through the scrum of bodies and emerged on the far side of the clearing. His axe had broken in two and his rippling muscles were drenched with blood, but his face was still locked in furious snarl. ‘Svärd,’ he roared, determined to discover why his son had failed him. A fist slammed into the side of his head and he rolled down the side of the hill, losing his shattered weapon as he fell. As soon as he could, he clambered back to his feet, raising his arm just in time to fend off another blow. He grabbed his attacker’s throat and squeezed. The Norscan’s windpipe crunched beneath his iron grip and Hauk tossed him aside with a grunt.

Then he paused.

Somewhere below him on the hillside, he could still hear the staccato war cry that had led him to attack. He squinted through the darkness at a group of shapes rushing through the grass. Rather than joining the fight, they were dashing back and forth beneath the boughs of a wide tree. Why had they signalled the attack without even reaching the enemy? ‘Svärd?’ he grunted, staggering towards the shadowy figures. As he approached the group, Hauk began to recognise the faces of his men. Then he finally saw Svärd. He was preparing to launch a javelin at the tree.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Hauk, dashing towards his son. Then he gasped and stumbled to a halt. His men were not surrounding a tree. The tall shape he had seen was a living creature: a towering, hulking mockery of a man, with the horned head of an ox and four arms, each of which was thicker than Hauk’s chest and covered in filthy, matted fur. As Hauk edged closer he grimaced, realising that the monster had two mouths. As well as the gaping, slavering jaws in its face, the thing had a long slit-like opening in its chest, lined with glistening fangs that had once been ribs. Two of its thick arms ended in bone blades that were smeared with the blood of Hauk’s men. As Svärd and the others struggled to fend off its thudding blows, the thing lurched back and forth, emitting a perfect imitation of their war cry.

Hauk cursed. He had been tricked. This grotesque monster had somehow been taught to mimic their attack signal. The Drékar must have bought its allegiance with the promise of human flesh. Hauk grabbed a spear from the ground and rushed to attack. ‘Bring it down!’ he roared. ‘Bring it down!’

Sväla thrust her knife towards the grinning shaman. ‘Keep back, Ungaur,’ she hissed.

‘I have no quarrel with you, Sväla,’ he replied, backing away from the brazier and speaking in a gentle whisper. ‘Hauk is to blame. He leads us to war against the will of Völtar. No wonder we suffer such bloody defeats. No wonder our lands have been stolen.’ Ungaur ran his tongue across the black spines in his mouth. ‘No vigil could atone for such sacrilege. Nothing you can do can help him now. Even if your flame survives the night, Hauk will not.’

‘The shaman’s right,’ said another tribesman, stepping into the firelight. He waved at the scars that covered his weather-beaten skin. ‘I’m not afraid to fight. Or to die.’ He nodded at the brazier. ‘But I won’t follow a chieftain against the will of Völtar. We must listen to Ungaur the Blessed. He is the Voice of the Wolf.’

‘Then tell me: when did the wolf become a sheep?’ cried Sväla, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘While we starve, the Drékar grow fat. They revel in our cowardice, along with all the other tribesmen who’ve turned their backs on us. Would you really let them pass through our lands – laden with the very food and gold we need? Your chieftain remembers his oaths, but he will not simply lie down and die when salvation is at hand.’ The anger in Sväla’s voice was answered by a sudden blast of wind that flattened the flames to the base of the bronze bowl. She gasped and raised her furs as a shield. As the gust died down, she peered into the brazier.

The crowd pressed forwards, straining to see into the bowl.

‘My husband still lives,’ said Sväla, as a single flame lit up her face. ‘Völtar the Wolf will bring him home.’

The creature lashed out with its sharpened blades of bone. Each one dripped with venom and as they hacked into the Norscans’ flesh the men screamed in agony, clutching at wounds that immediately began to fester and burn. Hauk launched his spear with a howl, but the weapon bounced uselessly off the monster’s thick hide and fell to the ground.

A young, shaven-headed warrior sprinted through the moonlit grass to Hauk’s side. He was tattooed with tribal markings and his whole face was pierced with teeth: wolves’ canines that sprouted from every inch of his skin in a fierce display of self-mutilation. ‘Völtar forgive me,’ he gasped, kneeling before the chieftain and letting his axe thud to the ground. His eyes were wide with panic. ‘That thing appeared from nowhere and began making the attack signal. There was nothing I could do.’

Hauk spat on the ground and signalled for his son to rise. ‘We cannot fail, Svärd,’ he snapped. ‘Everything rests on this.’ He grabbed the youth by his biceps and shook him like a child. ‘Don’t let me down, Svärd, fight! Then fight harder! We can’t return empty handed.’

Svärd nodded and regained a little of his composure. ‘What about the others?’ he asked, waving up the hill.

Hauk grinned through bloody teeth. ‘Valdür the Old is with us. He’s leading the attack.’

‘I knew it,’ replied Svärd. ‘I knew he would see through Ungaur’s lies.’ He lifted his axe from the ground and gripped it in both hands. ‘Then maybe Völtar is with us.’ He nodded at the scrum of figures, trying desperately to bring down the lurching creature. ‘Let’s kill this thing, so I can go and see the old man in action.’ He grinned back at Hauk, causing his chin to sprout a beard of yellow wolves’ teeth.

Hauk laughed as they ran towards the monster. ‘You may be young, Svärd, but by Völtar you’re ugly.’

‘And what will become of us now?’ cried Ungaur, baring his black needles at the crowd. ‘Sväla’s beloved has not just thrown away his own life, he has thrown away ours too.’ He waved his staff at the horizon. ‘He has taken our finest warriors to their deaths. Even Valdür the Old has fallen under his spell. So who will protect us? Who will safeguard our homes the next time we’re attacked?’ He turned back to the woman huddled over the brazier. ‘Hauk’s refusal to obey the will of Völtar has guaranteed our destruction, even you should be able to see that, Sväla.’ He stepped closer, ignoring the knife she waved in his direction. ‘Maybe you think you owe him your loyalty, whatever the outcome?’ He tried to hide his iron spines and adopt a concerned expression. ‘But I can assure you, he has not always shown such loyalty to you.’

Sväla hesitated and looked over at the shaman. ‘I don’t know what poison you’re trying to spread, Ungaur, but you might as well save your breath.’ She turned back to the fire. ‘I realised a long time ago that your heart is as black as your teeth.’

Ungaur raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘There’s no poison, Sväla. It simply hurts me to see you risking the fury of Völtar, for a man who does not even respect the sanctity of your marriage.’ As he finished speaking, Ungaur looked pointedly in the direction of a pretty young woman, standing just a few feet away.

Sväla lowered her knife and followed Ungaur’s gaze. The woman was her exact opposite: voluptuous, raven-haired and still in the first flush of youth, where Sväla’s own boyish frame was bony and scarred after a lifetime of hardship. ‘Æstrid? What are you saying? What about her?’

The girl blushed and turned away, smirking at the men stood nearest to her.

A wave of laughter rippled through the crowd.

‘Do you see?’ asked Ungaur, holding out an open hand to Sväla. ‘He’s lied to all of us, even you. Völtar has abandoned him and he’s even abandoned himself.’

Sväla was still staring at Æstrid. She shook her head and walked towards her. ‘I don’t believe it.’ She sneered and waved her knife at the girl. ‘Hauk wouldn’t lower himself to this. What would he want with such a child?’

The young girl’s face coloured even darker and she glared back at Sväla. ‘What would you know about his wants, old woman?’

Sväla strode towards the girl and punched her square in the face.

Æstrid collapsed without a sound. Then she sat up and looked around in disbelief. She wiped her hand across her mouth and hissed as she saw it was smeared with blood. ‘You’re too senile to see the truth,’ she spat.

The tribesmen gathered around, smirking and muttering lewd comments.

Æstrid climbed unsteadily to her feet and looked over at the shaman. He nodded at her and she reached down into her cleavage, drawing out an iron ring on the end of a leather strip. She squared up to Sväla. ‘If you know him so well, how do you explain this?’

Sväla drew back her fist to strike her again, then paused. ‘What is…?’ Her words trailed off as she looked closer at the ring.

Æstrid placed her hands on her hips and sniggered. ‘Recognise it? He begged me, Sväla. Begged me for a place in my bed. We did things you could never even dream of.’ She held the ring up so that it glinted in the moonlight. ‘He knew he might die tonight and he wanted me to have this, as a mark of his love.’

Sväla grabbed Æstrid by her hair and yanked her to her knees. Then she pressed her knife to the girl’s throat. ‘You lie,’ she said, but her voice trembled with doubt. ‘He would never give his wedding ring to a whore like you.’ With a flick of the knife she sliced the cord from the girl’s neck and held it up for a better look.

‘Go on,’ hissed Æstrid, scrabbling away. ‘Take a good look.’ She looked around at the crowd of leering tribesmen and laughed. ‘I don’t need a trinket to keep hold of a man.’

Sväla peered at the ring for a few seconds, still shaking her head in disbelief. Then she let out a strangled sob as she saw a small rune scratched into the metal. ‘It’s his,’ she gasped.

Hauk shuddered as one of the claws closed around his body. As it gripped his flesh, it burned into him like a firebrand. He gasped at the pain, but did not lash out in defence. As the monster lifted him towards its chest he kept his spear gripped firmly in both hands and made no attempt to fight back. Beneath him lay dozens of his men. Those who were still alive were screaming in agony and clutching at their acid-scorched flesh. Svärd and a few of the others were hurling spears at the creature but they had barely managed to scratch its skin.

‘Father!’ cried Svärd as the creature lifted the chieftain above their heads.

Hauk howled as he felt his skin blister and bubble. It was not just the pain that made him cry out. From this vantage point he could see the battle on top of the hill. Valdür the Old was still leading the attack – Hauk could clearly see his silver-streaked topknot as he hacked and lunged through the melee – but things were not going well. The Drékar had completely surrounded his men and the Fallen were hopelessly outnumbered. ‘There shouldn’t be so many,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve been tricked.’

Hauk had no more time to consider the fate of his men. A blast of warm, foetid breath washed over him and he turned to face the gaping chest mouth of the monster. As it opened wider to devour him, he saw a flaccid tongue that was bubbling with the same virulent substance that oozed from its limbs.

Still, Hauk held onto his spear.

‘Father!’ cried Svärd again, hacking uselessly at the monster’s cloven hooves. Another of the beast’s claws reached down and locked around his tattooed head, causing him to wail in agony.

As the monster thrust Hauk into its open jaws, the chieftain finally made his move. Just inches away from the creature’s teeth, he drew back his spear and thrust it into the thing’s trembling throat.

The monster loosed the men in its claws and reeled backwards with a piercing scream. Black acid poured from its chest and it lumbered back across the hillside, lifting the pitch of its scream higher and clutching desperately at the spear jammed between its yawning ribs.

Hauk dropped to the ground, rolled to a stop and climbed to his feet. His muscles were streaming with blood and acid but he remained silent as he tore off a strip from one of his furs and began wiping the poison from his body. As he removed the acid, it tore away the top layer of his skin, leaving behind an angry, raw mass of wheals and glistening sinew. ‘Use your rope,’ he gasped to his men, trying to ignore the pain. ‘It’s dying. Lasso its legs.’

The men leapt to obey and easily brought the screaming monster to its knees. Once there, they lashed more ropes around its flailing limbs and staked it to the ground. Within a few minutes they had the thing trapped and began jamming their spears into its straining, thrashing bulk. The monster’s screams grew even louder as the Norscans levered open the mouth in its chest and plunged their spears into the soft flesh inside. The men forgot about their pain as they were consumed by a vengeful bloodlust. Even after the creature’s final scream, they carried on hacking and slicing at its steaming viscera.

‘Stop,’ called Hauk, pointing at their smouldering flesh. ‘Clean its blood from your bodies.’

The men backed away from the corpse and began sloughing off their blistered flesh, but Hauk did not give them long. He lifted an acid-scarred axe from the ground and let out a staccato war cry as he sprinted up the hill. ‘We’ve wasted too much time. We’ve Drékar to kill.’

They crested the brow of the incline and Hauk saw Valdür and his men, still fighting valiantly, despite the impossible odds.

‘There are so many of them,’ gasped Svärd, staggering up to his father’s side.

Hauk nodded, not even looking at his son. ‘The scout lied,’ he muttered, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Lørden? Why would he lie?’

Hauk turned to look at his son and gasped. ‘Your face,’ he said, grabbing the boy by his shoulders and pulling him close.

Svärd shrugged. Several of his piercings had been torn from his cheeks and his shaven head was blistered and bloody from the acid. ‘What of it?’ he grinned. ‘It’s not as much of a mess as your chest.’

Hauk looked down and saw that the boy was right. In some places the acid had burned so deep that his ribs were gleaming in the moonlight. He shook his head and turned back to the battle. ‘Lørden must have lied. It’s the only explanation. Someone must have paid him to betray me. How else did they know we were going to attack? How else could they have tricked us into fighting that beast?’

Svärd frowned. ‘Who would have done that to us?’

Hauk shrugged and looked around. The survivors of Svärd’s group had all reached the top of the hill and assembled around him. ‘No matter,’ Hauk said, lifting his axe aloft once more. ‘The more men there are to kill, the more gold we’ll find.’ He levelled his axe at the struggling figure of Valdür and grinned. ‘If we’re not quick though, the old man will take it all for himself.’

With Hauk at their head, the men charged across the hilltop and tore into the backs of the unsuspecting Drékar.

The Fallen butchered several of the Drékar before they realised they were being attacked from a new direction. Valdür and his men let out a victorious roar as they saw their chieftain returning to the fight and pressed forwards with renewed determination. Attacked from both sides, the bloody-faced Drékar were soon penned in like sheep – struggling to raise their javelins and axes in the crush of bodies.

Hauk let out another staccato cry and it was answered by dozens of his men.

Just as Hauk was beginning to think victory was in reach, a tall figure shouldered his way through the carnage and slammed a fist into his face.

Hauk rolled across the ground and leapt back to his feet with a torrent of fresh blood rushing from his nose. The man who had floored him made an impressive sight. He was as broad and heavily muscled as all the other Norscans and every inch of his powerful frame was covered with bright red paint. Even his short crest of hair was dyed red. His only clothing was a loincloth and that was dyed the same colour. He carried no weapons, but his right hand was a mass of iron and scar tissue. Plates of jagged metal had melded with the Norscan’s flesh, replacing his fist with a crude, iron lump hammer. Only the man’s eyes showed a flash of white as he launched himself at Hauk.

‘Rurik,’ gasped Hauk, recognising the Drékar’s chieftain. He dodged the lump of bloody metal swinging towards his face and crouched low, punching his attacker hard in the stomach.

Rurik grunted and fell back into the crush of bodies.

Hauk strode forwards and raised his axe for the killing blow.

Sväla dropped to her knees and clutched the ring to her chest. ‘Hauk,’ she whispered.

‘He’s lied to us all,’ said Ungaur, stepping closer and placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘There can be no other explanation. Why would he insist on leading us to these endless defeats when Völtar has warned him to bide his time? He must be worshipping some other master. He’s betrayed us for his own gain, Sväla.’

Sväla shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he would lie to me.’

Ungaur shrugged. ‘But you have the evidence in your hands. We all knew about his infidelity, but to be honest, it’s the least of his crimes.’

Sväla climbed wearily to her feet. With her certainty gone, her strength had vanished too. Suddenly she felt every minute of her night-long vigil. Her muscles burned as she looked past the crowd to the distant horizon. Dawn was finally rising across the fields, rippling over the swaying grass and transforming it into an ocean of gold. Sväla’s eyes were so full of tears that it took her a few seconds to notice the thin trail of smoke snaking up from the brazier.

She rushed over to the bronze bowl and peered inside.

The fire was out.

Hauk was dead.

Sväla howled at the sky. Her string of incoherent curses was so filled with despair that the other Norscans dropped the smirking expressions from their faces. They backed away, looking to the shaman for reassurance.

He grinned back.

Sväla’s screams formed into words. As she pounded her fists against the cooling metal she called on Völtar for aid, begging him to fill her body with power, or strike her down. The crowd watched with morbid fascination as Sväla’s face grew purple with rage and shame.

As Ungaur stepped towards her, Sväla’s eyes rolled back in her head and her limbs went slack.

She toppled unconscious into his waiting arms.

As Hauk swung his axe at the prone figure of Rurik he felt all the strength leech out of him. Instead of slicing into his opponent’s head, his axe slipped uselessly from his hands and thudded to the ground. For a moment, Hauk was unsure what had happened, then agony tore through his chest. He looked down to see broken ribs sprouting from a pulp of torn skin and muscle. He tried to cry out in pain, but hot blood filled his mouth.

As he dropped to his knees, Hauk found himself facing a forest of kicking, struggling legs. He tried to rise, but the pain was unbelievable.

Hauk saw Rurik hold his bloody, metal fist up to the sky and roar victoriously at his men. Then the ground rushed towards him and he knew nothing more.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sigvald held his hands up before his eyes and smiled with satisfaction. The fingers were tapered, elegant and flawless. Or at least, almost flawless. He frowned and looked closer. It was hard to be sure in the flickering candlelight of the bedchamber, but he thought he saw a dark line running down one of his fingers. His pulse raced. Was it a vein? A dark, ugly, pulsing vein? He lifted his hand closer to his face and peered at it. The line was simply a trail of dried blood. And not even his own blood. He licked it from his finger, savouring the salty taste and sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief. Then he looked over at the bed. The baron was stirring. His frostbitten, skeletal head was rolling back and forth on the pillows and he was muttering under his breath – pleading with his god to forgive him.

‘Baron,’ whispered Sigvald, rising from his chair and moving closer. ‘Calm yourself. You’re safe now.’

Schüler opened his eyes to see Sigvald, sitting at the foot of his bed. ‘Prince,’ he tried to say, but his mouth was clumsy with sleep. He rubbed his face and looked around at the room. It was an opulent jumble of gilt and lace, draped in the warm glow of a lantern, resting on a nearby desk. He tried to sit, but his bones cracked in complaint and he dropped back with a groan.

Sigvald gave him a warm smile. ‘Don’t exert yourself on my account,’ he said, patting the baron’s leg. ‘You’ve slept for a long time. You should give yourself a few moments to compose yourself.’

Schüler grimaced as he noticed a large figure, waiting silently in a shadowy corner of the room.

Sigvald followed his gaze. ‘Don’t be alarmed, it’s only Oddrún.’ He summoned his chancellor over to the bed. ‘He thought I should let you sleep for another day, but I think you should eat something. You’re in profound need of nourishment, Schüler; more than any man I’ve ever met. And you must stretch your legs. I want you to be strong enough to enjoy tonight’s celebrations.’

Schüler dragged his aching body into a sitting position as the hooded giant shambled towards him and placed a tray on his lap. He massaged his forehead, clearly confused. Then his eyes widened in alarm and he sat bolt upright. ‘My men,’ he gasped.

Sigvald laughed and rose to his feet. ‘You needn’t concern yourself with them, Baron Schüler. They’re being made very comfortable.’

The anxious expression remained on Schüler’s face as he slumped back into his pillows, but he was clearly too weak to argue.

Sigvald stepped up to the baron’s side and gripped his hand, studying his face. It was a taut knot of angular bones and scar tissue and there was a distinct edge of mania in his gaze. ‘They’re made of strong stuff, baron,’ said Sigvald, with a kind smile. ‘As are you. And I’ve so much to show you. I hardly know where to begin.’

As Schüler looked at the prince his weariness faded a little. He wolfed down some of the food without even looking at it. Then his eyes widened and he looked down at the plate. The meal consisted of wafer-thin slices of pale, raw meat. He lowered his fork with a clatter and wiped a thin coating of blood from his lips. ‘What is this?’ he asked, looking nervously at the red smear on his hand.

‘Nourishment,’ said Sigvald, with an odd smile. Then he shoved the tray aside and took the baron’s hand. ‘And there will be plenty more of that later. But now, we should explore. And talk.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve been waiting for days to meet you and now I can’t think what to show you first.’

‘How did you know I was coming?’

Sigvald’s smile broadened into a grin. ‘That can be easily explained. Let’s begin our tour with the Empyreal Dome.’

‘Every particle in the cosmos is attracted and repelled by its companions,’ said Sigvald, spinning on his heels and raising his hands to the vast, vaulted dome above their heads. ‘From the tiny pieces of matter that make up your flesh, to the distant flaming luminaries that trail across the night sky, everything is in constant motion. Movement is the key, baron, in everything. Do you understand? Stasis is the only real danger to any of us – stasis and boredom.’

The baron was leaning heavily on a walking cane and staring up at the ceiling. His jaw was hanging open with awe. All around him, a broad circular chamber was slowly rotating. There were no torches on the walls but the room was ablaze with light. Hundreds of shafts of moonlight were refracted through lenses housed in the marble floor and, as the room slowly span, they traced a complex series of trajectories across the huge curved ceiling.

As Sigvald strode between the columns of light his excited face flashed in and out of view. ‘As the Empyreal Dome spins on its axis, it paints a perfect picture of the heavens.’ He waved at the circles of light moving over their heads. ‘See how accurately they follow their allotted paths.’

Schüler peered up at the lights and saw that they were indeed following an incredibly complex series of arcs and parabolas, all painted across the indigo plasterwork in delicate gold leaf. As he looked closer, he saw that each glinting line was surrounded by beautiful astrological images and annotated with fine gold script. ‘What language have you used?’ he asked. ‘I can’t read it.’

‘Language?’ said Sigvald, with a sudden rush of annoyance. ‘What difference does the language make? Why would you want to read it?’ He jabbed his finger at the intricate frieze. ‘Look at it! Look how beautiful it is.’

Schüler tugged his ragged beard as he limped into the centre of the room, extinguishing and reigniting stars as he stepped across the rows of lenses. ‘But what is it for? Can it be put it to any military use?’

Sigvald was so engrossed in the movement of the lights that for a moment he could not bring himself to answer.

‘Prince?’ said Schüler, raising his voice.

Sigvald turned to the baron with a forced grin. ‘I imagine you’ve never seen anything so wonderful,’ he said, pointing again at the lights. Before the baron could reply, Sigvald shook his head. ‘And yet you ask me such a boring question. Military use, you say.’ He looked down at the ornate gold armour that covered his body and frowned. ‘How facile. I dearly hope you’re not going to disappoint me, baron. I must nurture your imagination. War is not the only pleasure in life.’

Schüler drew back his shoulders and clenched his jaw. ‘I did not abandon everything in search of mere entertainment, my lord. I need power. Military power. If you had seen the horrors that assail my lands and–’

‘Very well,’ interrupted Sigvald, shaking his head. ‘I’ll humour you. You asked me how I knew about your arrival in advance.’ He looked over at the hunched mass of rags waiting by the door. ‘Oddrún,’ he said. ‘The wall.’

The gangly giant pitched and weaved across the chamber to a tall rosewood cabinet. He unclasped one of the drawers and slid out a brass mechanism. Then he crushed something in his fist, sprinkled it over the device and leant his great bulk against the machine until a sharp click echoed around the room.

One by one the lenses were shuttered, until the whole chamber was plunged into darkness. Then there was another click and a rumbling of spinning gears.

Schüler flinched as one side of the chamber lurched into movement.

Sigvald patted the baron on the back and led him towards the wall as it broke into a series of shutters and began rolling up towards the ceiling. As the shutters moved higher they revealed a large curved window, looking out onto the snowy wastes.

After a couple of minutes, the entire chamber was transformed into a glass bowl, filled with glittering moonlight. Schüler once more found himself surrounded by thick, spinning banks of snow and the jagged, towering peaks of the Chaos Wastes. He shook his head in wonder. ‘How strange to see it but not feel it.’ He looked down at his body, noticing for the first time that he was only dressed in thin purple robes. ‘To witness the ferocity of the weather and yet feel so warm.’

Sigvald’s face was flushed with pride as they approached the glass wall. ‘Quite,’ he said, peering out into the storm. ‘But surely you’re not impressed by mere entertainment.’ He smirked as he gestured to a row of brass rings at the base of the window. ‘Try one.’

Schüler stooped down and freed one of the rings with a clink. It was a few inches in diameter and fixed to the glass wall by a network of lead tracks and runners.

Sigvald gestured for the baron to lift the ring up before his face.

Schüler did as he was instructed, sliding the circle of metal up the glass dome until it was level with his eyes. Then he gasped. The ring housed a thick lens and as he looked through it, the distant mountains flew towards him, filling his vision and allowing him to see them in incredible detail. ‘Is it magic?’ he asked.

Sigvald laughed at the baron’s shocked expression. ‘Of course! A very particular kind of sorcery called optiks. I believe the grinding techniques were perfected in your own Empire, but never have they been utilised so charmingly – or usefully. We tracked your progress for days before you reached the palace. No one can approach without my knowledge. Not everyone is admitted, of course, but I had a feeling you were someone worth knowing.’

Schüler could not take his eyes away from the lens as he slid it across the curved glass. As he moved it back and forth, it revealed the forbidding landscape in amazing clarity, allowing him to see for miles in every direction. ‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed, pointing the lens to the north of the palace.

Sigvald laughed. ‘What can you see?’

‘I see beautiful lights, hanging down from the heavens. Like a curtain, shimmering and drifting.’ Schüler shook his head in amazement. ‘It’s clear and solid at the same time. Is it a reflection on the dome?’

Sigvald’s smile faded and he placed a hand on the baron’s shoulder. ‘I should look elsewhere baron. That’s not a reflection – at least not the kind you mean. You’re looking at the source of everything.’ He gently turned the baron’s face away from the lights. ‘Your eyes aren’t strong enough for such things yet. That way lies the realm of the gods, the Realm of Chaos itself. Beyond those lights, this world ends and another begins.’ He leant closer and whispered in the baron’s ear. ‘If you could draw back that veil, you would behold the wellspring of every power that drives us: fear, lust, avarice, love, envy, hate, even magic; all of them stem from the other side of those lights.’

‘You mean the afterlife?’

‘Possibly. Or perhaps something much stranger.’

‘But it looks so close. As though it were just a few days’ march from here.’

Sigvald nodded. ‘It is. Be under no illusions, baron. You’ve travelled further than you think.’ He squeezed the baron’s shoulder. ‘You’ve reached the edge of everything.’

Schüler’s face blanched and he ran a trembling hand over his beard. Then he turned away from Sigvald and looked through the lens again. Despite his curiosity he obeyed Sigvald and slid the ring in a different direction. After a few moments he gasped. ‘There they are,’ he cried, grimacing with disgust and flinching back from the lens. ‘The brutes that killed my men.’

Sigvald frowned. There was a second clink as he raised another lens from the casement and peered through it. He saw a group of soldiers riding through the snowy foothills. They were dressed in thick, crimson armour, edged with brass spikes, and their helmets resembled snarling dogs. Through the lens they looked almost close enough to touch, but he knew they must be many miles away. ‘Ah,’ he said. The smile dropped from his face and he lowered the glass, turning Schüler away from the window. ‘Let’s move on,’ he said, sounding uncharacteristically subdued. ‘There’s a lot to see before the banquet.’

‘Banquet?’

‘Yes, I have something very special to reveal this evening.’ He led the baron towards a door on the far side of the chamber. ‘You, of course, will be my guest of honour.’

As Oddrún began to lower the shutters, the baron and the prince made their way down a winding staircase. Sigvald threw some furs over the baron’s shoulders and led him out onto a slender bridge between two of the buildings. As they hurried through the snow, Schüler glimpsed down and saw the rocky foundations of the palace, hanging towards the ground like an inverted mountain. His head span at the sight of it. ‘How can such a thing be possible?’ he asked, pausing to look down over the side of the bridge. As he squinted down through the dazzling snow, a movement caught his eye.

Sigvald followed his gaze and saw the dark, crumpled shape of a man, spread-eagled across the frozen rocks, with another figure hunched over it. They were too far away to be seen clearly, but there was no disguising the fact that the kneeling figure was cutting into the other one’s neck with some kind of saw. As they watched the gruesome scene, the snow around the two men began to turn red.

Oddrún appeared and as he saw the figures below he turned his shrouded head towards the prince. Even though his face was hidden in shadow, his agitation was clear.

Sigvald shrugged and hurried to the baron’s side. He laughed at the confused expression on Schüler’s face and turned him back towards the palace. ‘We should get you inside. I imagine you’ve seen enough snow to last you a lifetime.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Sväla’s dreams were leaking from her head. The figures huddled around her litter were clearly real – the acrid tang of their sweat convinced her of that – but beyond them she saw others that simply could not be there: faces dragged from her past and huge crowds of strangers who called out to her by name. The real and the unreal merged into a bewildering whirl of people and places. Sväla looked up at the rune-carved beams of the mead hall and saw daemons, writhing and screaming as they lunged across her vision. ‘Am I mad?’ she asked, her voice little more than a husky croak.

Some of the faces loomed closer. ‘She spoke,’ said one of them, placing a hand on her arm.

Sväla felt a rush of hope. If they had heard her, she must still be alive. She tried to lift her head, but as she did so the smoke-filled hall began to spin wildly around her and she slumped back again with a groan. Someone pressed a cup to her lips and as she swallowed the water, her thoughts cleared a little. ‘The fire,’ she gasped, remembering her vigil. Her heart raced as she remembered how crucial it was that she guard the flames. Then she recalled the smirking face of Æstrid as she revealed Hauk’s wedding ring. Was that a dream too? She became aware of a dull ache in her left hand and looked down at it, unclenching her fist. The ring was embedded in her bloody palm. ‘Hauk,’ she croaked, her voice filled with despair and anger. ‘I was true to you.’

She closed her eyes against the collage of faces and allowed the fever to drag her back down into a welcoming oblivion. As the real world slipped away, the other one grew clearer. A confusing array of images filled her head. She saw herself leading a vast army against towering, inhuman foes. She saw a golden palace, hanging in the sky above a frozen landscape. She saw Norscan chieftains, their eyes filled with hate as they charged towards her. She saw a charred human head on a gilt-edged plate. She saw an impossibly beautiful young woman, begging her for aid. These and countless other, smaller scenes played out through her head, but one image kept returning. An awful reminder of failure that drove Sväla deeper into unconsciousness: the brazier, abandoned and smoking as dawn broke over the steppe.

‘Wake up,’ called a voice.

Sväla tried to ignore it. She had no desire to return to the real world. Nothing but death could ease the pain of her failure, she saw that quite clearly. Something needled at her though. As the voice repeated its summons, the spinning torrent of visions in her head began to merge into a single image: an ancient, shrew-like face, with skin like crumbling parchment and dazzling green eyes. As the face expanded to fill her vision, something about the crone’s stern features refused to let her slip any deeper into unconsciousness. ‘Wake up,’ demanded the old woman, glaring down at her. Finally, with a groan of annoyance, Sväla opened her eyes.

She looked up into a furious mask of pierced flesh.

‘Svärd,’ she said, recognising her son.

The boy sneered with disgust. ‘How could you fail your husband like that?’ His face was only inches from hers. ‘He needed you and now he’s dead.’

‘He betrayed me,’ she gasped. Then a surge of anger pulsed through her as she looked up into Svärd’s face. ‘You were with him. You could have kept him alive.’

Svärd’s eyes widened with shock, but before he could reply, hands dropped on his shoulders and pulled him away. Then another face filled Sväla’s vision. This was a much older man, with weather-beaten skin and silver-streaked hair. There was a kindness in his eyes that she found even more of a torment than her son’s rage. Guilt knifed into her as she recognised Valdür the Old – Hauk’s closest friend. She turned her face away in shame, but he placed one of his calloused hands on her face and turned it back towards him.

‘I have something for you,’ he said, holding an object up between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Hauk made me swear to bring this back to you if he couldn’t.’

Sväla managed to raise her head for a better look and saw that it was Hauk’s wedding ring. ‘It can’t be,’ she croaked, looking down at her bloody hand. ‘I already have it.’

Valdür followed her gaze and shook his head in confusion. He plucked the other ring from her hand and examined it in the torchlight. ‘This isn’t Hauk’s,’ he said, tossing it to the ground. ‘I took the real one from his dead hand.’

Anger flooded Sväla’s trembling limbs and she pulled herself into a sitting position. She snatched the real wedding ring from Valdür’s hand and clutched it to her breast. ‘It was a trick,’ she gasped, amazed at how easily she had been fooled. She looked around the mead hall through tearful eyes. The men crowded round her litter were covered in fresh scars and odd, serpentine blisters. Sväla recognised all of them. They were her husband’s most trusted warriors. The last time she saw them they had been stiff-necked and proud, but now their shoulders were hunched by defeat and their eyes were blank with grief.

Beyond them, she saw some of the tribesmen who had ridiculed her vigil. A group of them were huddled around the huge open fire on one side of the hall, locked in a fierce debate. Several of them were brandishing their axes and hurling insults at each other, and every now and then, one of them would wave in her direction. It was hard to see them clearly through the smoke, but she saw that the figure at the heart of the scrum wore a wolf skin over his head. ‘Ungaur,’ she said, guessing immediately who had told the girl to lie. Her anger grew. ‘He tricked me,’ she said, glaring at the shaman’s burly silhouette.

Valdür raised a finger to his mouth. ‘It’s not wise to accuse Ungaur the Blessed,’ he whispered, ‘unless you wish to find yourself strapped to an altar.’

‘He wouldn’t dare,’ gasped Sväla, but as she looked again she noticed a glint of metal in the shaman’s hands. As he whispered urgently to the men nearest to him, he waved it in her direction. It was a curved sacrificial knife, scored with runes. She had seen him use it many times before, to brutal effect.

Valdür leant closer and gripped her shoulders. ‘Hauk’s dead,’ he hissed. ‘You’re no longer the chieftain’s wife.’ He leant even closer and whispered in her ear. ‘Ungaur’s trying to convince the elders that he should become the next chieftain and I’m not sure they’ll argue the point for long. Then his only obstacle is you.’

‘How can a shaman become a chieftain?’ cried Sväla.

Valdür grimaced and looked back over his shoulder. ‘He’s using the curse as an excuse. He says that the Wolf has spoken to him and that we will only be forgiven if we allow him to lead the tribe.’

At the sound of Sväla’s question, the shaman had begun striding across the hall towards them, baring his mouthful of black spines. When he saw that Sväla was awake, and clutching the real wedding ring, he paused and began speaking urgently to the other tribesmen. The argument erupted once more.

‘We’ve little time,’ Valdür said, with a note of urgency in his voice. ‘Ungaur had convinced the elders that you wouldn’t recover. He told them that the best way you could serve the tribe was by offering your body in penance for your husband’s failure.’ He kept his voice to a whisper. ‘You must try and rise from your bed. Prove him wrong. There’s still a little love left for you in this tribe and not everyone is convinced by Ungaur’s blood lust.’ He waved to the small, despondent group of warriors huddled around them. ‘Hauk’s men would follow you to the ends of the earth if you asked them to.’

Sväla dropped back onto her litter. ‘What can I do? I can’t deny that we’re cursed. Without Hauk, what option is there, other than Ungaur’s useless sacrifices?’

Valdür frowned. ‘I’m not sure,’ he muttered. ‘But your husband believed there must be some other answer. If only we knew why we are cursed, maybe we could find another way to appease Völtar. I think you could lead us to the truth, Sväla.’ He peered intently at her. ‘Hauk said that Ungaur knows more than he chooses to reveal. He died believing that the Fallen could shake off this curse and rise again. Would you abandon everything he fought for?’

Sväla felt the truth of Valdür’s words, as clearly as the cool metal of the ring she was holding against her chest. ‘You’re right. I can’t fail him.’ She gripped Valdür’s arm. ‘Not again.’

She looked past him into the gloomy shadows and saw that her dreams were still painted over the top of the real world. Many of the scenes were playing themselves out over and over again, as though urging her to realise their significance. Above it all, a pair of small, green eyes stared down at her from a nest of lined skin. ‘Ürsüla,’ she gasped, remembering the old woman’s name. She dragged herself to her feet and stood swaying before the tribesmen. ‘Take me to the witch.’

CHAPTER SIX

As the baron trailed after Sigvald, his eyes rolled in their darkened sockets, unable to fathom the stream of surreal images that assailed them. After leaving the Empyreal Dome they entered a huge arched glasshouse. It ran along one whole wing of the palace – undulating like a snake and crowded with unnatural life.

They stepped inside and the baron immediately stumbled back against the steamy glass. ‘So hot,’ he gasped, looking up at a thick canopy of leaves. The creaking plants that towered above him were all bright white. There was not a trace of greenery anywhere in the whole garden. The anaemic plants seemed like an extension of the endless moonlight. ‘How can they live, without sunlight?’ he asked.

Sigvald looked up at the crush of white leaves. ‘You must stop thinking like a man,’ he said. ‘You’re more than that now.’ He waved at the pale trunks. ‘We call this the Ice Garden.’ He pulled aside a leaf as big as a horse and nodded at the shadows behind. ‘The plants here thrive on a different kind of food than those you’re used to.’

Schüler peered into the undergrowth and saw a flash of colour in the shadows. ‘Is that a flower?’ he asked, stepping closer. As he neared the colour, the baron saw that there was a pile of bodies beneath the leaves – a mound of men and women, dressed in gaudy, flamboyant robes. He edged closer, horrified. ‘Are they dead? Do the plants eat them?’

‘Nothing so vulgar as that,’ replied the prince with a disapproving smile. ‘The plants are simply the fruit of their dreams.’

The baron crouched next to the bodies and saw that the prince was telling the truth: the colourful figures weren’t dead, they were simply fast asleep. He could see their chests rising and falling slowly as they sprawled over the pale, sweaty leaves. They were completely penned in by a mass of roots and leaves, but the beatific smiles on their faces made it clear they were in no discomfort. As he edged closer, however, the baron groaned in dismay. The bodies had obviously lain undisturbed for months, if not years. Their faces were as gaunt as his and their limbs had grown as pale and thin as the tendrils that entwined them. As he got closer, the baron realised that the bodies were sighing and moaning with ecstasy – utterly oblivious to the fact that some of the tendrils had slid beneath their skin and were snaking slowly up towards their brains. The baron recoiled – rushing back out from beneath the huge leaves and onto the path.

‘Who are they?’ he cried, backing away with a look of disgust.

‘Dreamers,’ replied the prince, looking at the pile of bodies with obvious pride. ‘Artists, poets, architects. People who have spent their whole lives trying to pursue their dreams but found their ambition blocked at every turn by petty concerns. Here they are free to follow their thoughts.’ He waved up at the towering white plants. ‘And while they slumber, their ideas blossom and grow into this wonderful creation, this dazzling fecundity.’

The baron looked again at the plants and saw that they were formed into the most bizarre shapes: castles and fantastic beasts teetered over him, all sculpted from the ivory leaves. Then he grimaced again. ‘But their bodies are wasting away.’

‘What of it?’ snapped Sigvald. He waved up at the towering plants. ‘Look what they have created! How wonderful to think that such beauty could stem from such insignificance.’ He stepped closer to the baron and gripped his arm. ‘Think beyond the confines of your flesh, Schüler. Think beyond your meagre lifespan. Think of the endless pleasures your mind could devise, if it were set free.’

The baron looked up from the wasted poets to the incredible structures their dreams had painted. He gave a grudging nod of respect.

Sigvald grinned and dragged him along the winding path that led through the middle of the glasshouse. ‘This is nothing though. Nothing! Just wait. There’s so much more to see.’

They re-entered the palace and went into a long, high-ceilinged gallery that was clearly no longer in use. Hundreds of weapons lined the walls and suits of armour stood beneath them in silent readiness. Every single blade was rusted and sheathed in dust but Sigvald strode onwards, blind to the decay that was slowly destroying his home.

As soon as Oddrún closed the door on the glasshouse, the baron paused and scowled. ‘What’s that?’ he cried, reaching for his absent sword.

Dozens of voices were calling out in pain and begging for mercy. The noise was coming from behind a door at the far end of the gallery.

Sigvald strode towards the door, seemingly oblivious to the awful screams.

‘My lord,’ slurred Oddrún, nodding towards the white-faced baron. ‘Perhaps the surgeries could wait for now?’

Sigvald looked back with a confused expression on his face. ‘What do you mean? I’m sure–’

Before the prince could finish, the door flew open and a pair of men burst into the armoury.

The baron immediately recognised the sneering brute who had introduced him to Sigvald. ‘Víga-Barói,’ he whispered, looking suddenly ashamed. The knight had replaced his plum-coloured armour with a leather apron, but no one could forget a face filled with such malice. His apron was covered in stains and hung with a gruesome selection of tools: pliers, needles and sickle-shaped knives, all of them dark with dried blood. The man trailing behind him also wore a filthy apron and carried his own collection of cruel-looking implements.

Something about Víga-Barói’s follower made the baron peer at him in confusion. ‘A monk?’ he whispered in disbelief. The man’s head was tonsured and he was covered in religious icons: hammers and flaming comets adorned the hooded robe beneath his apron. There was no sign of religious conviction in his eyes though. He looked like a sleepwalker. As he shuffled after the knight, his face was slack and expressionless. When he came to a halt a few feet away, Baron Schüler noticed that the blood-splattered man had a single thin scar up one side of his throat.

‘Prince Sigvald,’ said the knight, dropping to one knee. ‘How delightful. You visit us so rarely these days.’ He rose to his feet and waved through the doorway. ‘Have you come to join in? We’re making great progress with the new subjects. Hazül has recently developed some techniques that I think you’ll find quite diverting.’

Sigvald’s reply was drowned out by a chorus of desperate screams.

‘Excuse me, your majesty,’ said the knight, closing the door to muffle the sounds.

‘It will have to wait, I’m afraid,’ said the prince, with obvious disappointment. He gestured to Baron Schüler. ‘I’m showing our guest around the palace.’

‘Ah, of course.’ Víga-Barói looked over at the baron with undisguised scorn, but when he spoke, his voice was silky and low. ‘We’re so glad to have you amongst us, baron.’ He ran a finger over one of his bloodstained tools. ‘I’m looking forward to making your acquaintance more fully.’ He let the words hang in the air for a few seconds, then turned back to Sigvald and gestured to the door. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to show the baron around our operating theatres?’

Sigvald shook his head. ‘Not today, Víga-Barói. Perhaps another time.’ He smiled. ‘Did you receive my message?’

The knight bowed again. ‘Indeed. The banquet. We’re all thrilled to learn what your surprise will be.’

Sigvald flushed with pride as he returned the bow. ‘I think you’ll be impressed.’

Víga-Barói tried to turn his frozen sneer into a smile. ‘And is it true that the princess will also be attending?’

‘Of course,’ replied Sigvald, sounding a little irritated. ‘Why not? I want everyone to see my new creation. My wife included.’

The knight looked over at Baron Schüler with an indecipherable expression on his scarred face. ‘Very good, prince.’

They moved on, but after speaking to Víga-Barói, Sigvald seemed to lose interest in the tour. They hurried through a series of other, equally wonderful chambers: vast, gloomy amphitheatres, dusty art galleries and raucous, neglected menageries, but it was clear that the prince’s mind was elsewhere. The mention of the banquet had filled him with excitement and, as the baron trailed after him, he counted off guests on his fingertips and muttered under his breath. Finally, with a hurried bow, he returned Schüler to his chambers. ‘Oddrún will supply you with anything you need,’ he said, ushering the baron back into the bedchamber. ‘It’s probably best if you remain here though, until you’re called for.’ He laughed. ‘The palace can be a little mischievous.’ He clutched the baron’s hand and kissed it, his handsome face glowing with excitement. ‘Tonight’s feast will be like nothing you have ever dreamt of, Schüler.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

The going was slow. The survivors of Hauk’s raiding party were exhausted and filled with despair. Only Valdür’s barked commands kept them on their feet as they trudged wearily through the dewy grass. Up ahead of them, Sväla clung to Valdür’s arm. Her head was still full of bewildering images and her limbs were weak with fever. As they marched though, her certainty was growing. Hauk had always insisted that there must be a reason for the tribe’s curse and she knew now that it was up to her to find it. Her gaunt face was set in a determined frown as she eyed the horizon. ‘I think Völtar answered me,’ she said, turning to the old warrior at her side.

Valdür paused and allowed her to catch her breath. They had almost reached the barren foothills the witch called home. ‘What do you mean?’

She grimaced as she looked back at a single, morose straggler, trailing behind the other men. It was Svärd, her son. They had not spoken since their harsh words when Sväla first awoke. ‘When I saw that the sacred fire was out, I called on Völtar for aid.’ She looked up at the vast Norscan sky. ‘And now my mind is full of these awful visions. I think he’s trying to guide me.’ She turned to Valdür. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were raw from crying. ‘Or do you think I’ve lost my reason?’

Valdür frowned and leant towards her. ‘Grief can do strange things to a person.’ He nodded at the approaching tribesmen. ‘Perhaps you should keep this to yourself for the time being.’

She nodded back and looked down at her left hand. She now wore two wedding rings. Hauk’s was too large for her finger, so she had knotted a piece of black cloth around the two of them, binding them together. ‘Hauk never believed in Ungaur. Sacrifice is one thing, but to give away our strongest and youngest is suicide.’ She took a deep breath and began walking again. ‘There has to be another way to lift this curse. We must have become the Fallen for a reason. It was not always this way.’

Valdür nodded. ‘I agree, but what help do you expect from Ürsüla? Völtar has reserved a special curse for her. Her reason is definitely lost. From what I’ve heard, she spends most of her time talking to the dirt.’

Sväla shook her head. ‘But it’s her face I see most of all. She hangs over everything. I know the stories, but who could lead such an existence without becoming a little mad? According to Ungaur, she has one foot in the mortal realm and another in the afterlife. Surely she must know something about our past and our curse?’ She shrugged and looked at Valdür. ‘Anyway, if she can’t help, then I suppose I’ll have my answer. I’m just as deluded as she is. Maybe I can talk to the dirt too.’

The sun was reaching its zenith as they approached the witch’s hut. The harsh sunlight made the hovel look all the more pathetic. It was a festering heap, constructed of mud, animal hides, dung and flies. As the tribesmen approached they raised their hands to their noses and groaned at the stink.

‘The witch is obviously dead,’ called Svärd as he climbed up towards them and saw the state of the hovel. He glared at his mother. ‘Who would live in that? We may as well leave. You’re wasting our time.’

Sväla flinched from her son’s glare but felt all the more determined to prove him wrong. She realised that she had already watched this scene. One of the visions swirling round her head showed her entering the hut and finding the old witch alive, surrounded by grotesque, misshapen figures. ‘She lives,’ she called back, loud enough for all the tribesmen to hear. They looked from her to her son and then to the ruined hut, and were clearly unconvinced. As she studied their faces, Sväla realised that they were all afraid.

‘Take a look,’ said Valdür, indicating that Sväla should enter the hut.

Sväla saw that even he was afraid and realised that she would have to go alone. She hesitated on the threshold for a moment, remembering all the strange stories she had heard about the woman, then she pulled aside some of the animal skins and stepped into the gloomy hut. No sunlight followed her in and for a few seconds she was utterly blind. ‘Ürsüla?’ she whispered, peering into the thick, smoky darkness. ‘Are you there?’ There was no reply, but Sväla thought she heard a noise from somewhere further inside; it sounded like a knife chopping into something soft. As she edged slowly forward, her eyes began to grow accustomed to the gloom and Sväla realised that she was not alone. She let out a small gasp as she saw dozens of figures standing silently in the dark, watching her. She remembered the hideous shapes she had seen in her premonition. ‘Hello?’ she called out, suppressing the urge to flee.

The chopping sound stopped.

‘Ürsüla?’ she repeated.

A few feet away, one of the shadows began shuffling towards her. There was a red, flickering light wavering in front of it that revealed the heavily lined face of an old woman.

Sväla grabbed her knife, preparing to defend herself.

‘I have nothing for you,’ cried the woman in a hoarse, barking voice. ‘There’s nothing here worth taking.’

Sväla lowered the knife as the old woman approached. ‘I’m no thief. I just want your help.’

There was a pause as the old woman considered this. Then she laughed. It was a raw, croaking sound that quickly turned into a hacking cough. Once she had calmed herself, she took a long drag on a pipe. Its bowl flared with light that glittered in her mischievous eyes. Then she tugged aside some animal skins and allowed a little more daylight into the hut.

As the darkness receded, Sväla recognised Ürsüla from her dreams. She was frail, incredibly ancient and covered in filth – mud, feathers, sticks and blood were all plastered over her scrawny frame – but she was also oddly beautiful. Her short-cropped hair was pure silver and her eyes were a striking, vivid green.

‘Let me look at you,’ said the old woman, stepping closer and peering at her guest. ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding slowly, ‘I see. You might be the one to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Lead us to victory, child.’

Sväla felt oddly naked under the old woman’s gaze and could not think how to reply. To hide her confusion she looked around at the other figures. To her surprise, she realised that they were not real people at all. They were crudely built life-size dolls, constructed mostly from mud, but with the addition of bones, animal furs and human hair. She grimaced as she saw that some of them even had teeth and pieces of skin pressed into their eyeless faces. ‘What are they?’ she gasped, backing away from the crooked figures.

The old woman laughed again. ‘Don’t you recognise any of them?’ she asked. ‘What about that one?’ She waved at one still mostly hidden in the darkness.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Sväla.

The old woman simply smiled and waved again at the strange sculpture.

Sväla crossed the room, being careful not to get too close to the old crone. As she neared the statue she frowned. The anatomy was as crude and misshapen as the others, but it did seem vaguely familiar. It was slender and the clumsy indication of breasts and hips was obviously meant to imply it was a woman. The mud had dried to a pale grey and was covered with blue runes. Sväla felt a chill of fear. ‘Is this meant to be me?’

‘It is you,’ replied the old woman, stepping to her side and slapping her hand on the doll’s arm.

Sväla looked closer and saw that several blonde hairs had been pressed into the thing’s scalp. She reached out and placed her hand on the cool mud. ‘Is this my hair?’

Ürsüla smiled and lifted her voice into a wavering song: ‘Hair, teeth and blood, pressed deep in the mud; followed with flesh, the memories will flood.’

She stroked Sväla’s hair and laughed at her look of revulsion. ‘It’s not important, child. They simply need such things before they can speak to me. It’s what gives them life.’

Sväla withdrew her hand from the mud and backed away. ‘They live?’ she said, with a growing sense of unease. She had heard of the old woman’s madness, but in the oily darkness of her hut, Ürsüla’s words seemed horribly believable.

‘Of course they live.’ The old woman leant close to Sväla, narrowing her eyes. ‘Why else would I spend so long talking to them?’

Sväla’s heart sank. Valdür was right. The woman was clearly too insane to be of any use. ‘Yes, of course,’ she muttered, turning to leave. ‘I should go.’

Ürsüla grabbed her arm. Her grip was surprisingly strong as she pulled Sväla closer. ‘The shaman plans to kill you,’ she said calmly.

Sväla grimaced at the heady mixture of herbs and alcohol on the woman’s breath. ‘Yes,’ she said, straining to free herself from Ürsüla’s grip. Then she froze. ‘How did you know that?’

The old woman let out another rattling burst of laughter and waved to one of the dolls. ‘He told me.’

Sväla saw that the doll was larger than the others and it had a small piece of grey wolf skin draped over its head. She stopped trying to free herself from Ürsüla’s grip and looked around at the ranks of mute figures. ‘What else has he told you?’

Ürsüla let go of Sväla’s arm and walked over to the likeness of Ungaur. ‘They tell me many things. Anything I ask them.’ She slapped the hulking statue. ‘Ungaur was taught by his father, who in turn was taught by his father before him. His memories go back through centuries of ancestors. Back even to the years before the curse. He has a lot to talk about.’

‘Then he must know the reason for the curse,’ said Sväla with a sinking feeling. ‘And his sacrifices must be the only hope.’ Her shoulders dropped and she shook her head. ‘I thought there might be a more certain way to lift the curse: a way that we could atone for whatever crime we’ve committed against Völtar. But if the shaman knows so much, he must be right. We’re doomed to be the Fallen forever.’

Ürsüla shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ She took another thoughtful drag on her pipe and gave Sväla a strange smile. ‘He may have reasons of his own for not discussing the true nature of the curse.’ The old woman grabbed Sväla’s arm again and led her over to the doll. Then she opened Sväla’s left hand and peered at the fresh scars that networked her palm. ‘They need a little blood to loosen their tongues,’ she said, nodding at Sväla’s knife.

Sväla hesitated for a few seconds, unsure whether to humour the old woman any further. Then she remembered the image of Ürsüla hanging over her as she lay dying. She held the knife over her hand and pressed the point gently into one of the scars, producing a small droplet of blood.

The old woman slammed her hand down so that the blade sliced deep into her flesh.

Sväla hissed in pain and snatched her hand away from the witch. As she did so, a fan of her blood splashed over the hulking statue of Ungaur.

‘They need quite a lot of blood,’ said the old woman with an apologetic shrug.

Sväla glared at her and clutched her hand. ‘You’re as mad as everyone said,’ she snapped, turning back towards the door. She gently drew the blade from her hand, wincing as yet more of her blood splashed onto the ground. As she reached the skins that covered the entrance, she paused. There was a low, liquid gurgling sound coming from behind her.

‘You may as well get what you came for, child,’ said the old woman, shuffling after Sväla and turning her back towards the statue.

Sväla felt a sickening rush of fear as she looked at the statue. Its whole frame was trembling slightly and the strange moaning sound was coming from somewhere in its throat. ‘What’s happening?’ she said, pointing her knife at the figure in the shadows. As she watched in horror, the crudely drawn lips on the statue’s face drew back to reveal a row of black spines and the gurgling sound turned into a torrent of droning words.

‘Kurgan,’ slurred the mud. ‘Small enough to kill. My axe in his fist. Knife. Throat. Axe. Hand. Cut. Cut. Cut. I have him by the throat. Blood. Völtar is here. In my veins. The Kurgan’s dying. I’m squeezing the life from him: squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Bones cracking. Rain on my face. It’s colder. The bones are sharp. I can feel the bones breaking beneath my fingers. Dead. Mud. Pain. Others are coming. I must be quick. Father has the chieftain’s heart. He’s lifting it up. The others can see it. Blood, blood and rain.’

‘What’s it talking about?’ gasped Sväla, turning to the old woman.

Ürsüla grinned back at her. ‘I’m mad, remember. There’s no use asking me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sväla, grabbing the old woman’s hands in hers and stooping until their faces were level. ‘I didn’t understand.’

As Sväla pleaded with the witch, the malformed shape continued talking to itself in the shadows, describing a battle with horrible, mounting urgency. ‘He’s dead. There’s blood in my belly. The other one has cut me. I’m pulling my axe from the corpse. Swinging it. Hot blood. Hot pain. My belly is split. I can’t stop the blood.’

Ürsüla shrugged and led Sväla back towards the mumbling statue. ‘This is one of Ungaur’s memories,’ she explained. ‘Or maybe even one of his ancestors’ memories.’ She pointed to the thing’s hands. There were several human fingernails embedded in the mud. ‘He lost those during one of his sacrifices. It was easy enough for me to retrieve them. Now his thoughts are mine to share. These words are flowing directly from his mind.’

Sväla looked in horror at the trembling pile of mud. As its monologue increased in urgency, the drawings of its eyelids were starting to open slightly, revealing a pair of glistening red orbs.

‘But why?’ asked Sväla, shaking her head in disgust. ‘What use is this monstrosity?’ Her eyes widened as a thought occurred to her. She lifted her knife. ‘What would happen to the real Ungaur if I cut this one?’

Ürsüla laughed. ‘Not your closest friend, eh?’ She lowered Sväla’s knife and shook her head. ‘You can’t use the statue to harm him, but his mind is yours to explore. Surely that is of interest to you?’ She leant closer to Sväla. ‘Why did you come here, child?’

Sväla clutched her head. The temperature in the hovel and the droning gibberish spilling from the statue combined to leave her head spinning. She looked around at the other statues, half expecting to see them all springing to life. The one next to Ungaur was particularly disturbing. It was more slender than the others, bleached white and was smiling oddly at her from beneath two small black horns. She took a deep breath and looked back at the witch. ‘I need to know why we’re cursed.’ She turned back to the statue of Ungaur, feeling her rage returning. ‘The shaman has done nothing to save us from the other tribes, but my husband believed there must be some simple reason for the curse, and Ungaur was hiding it from us. Just so he could maintain his place in the tribe. Hauk thought there must be something we could do other than letting Ungaur sacrifice us one by one. He said the shaman must know some secret. Something that would explain why we could no longer catch our prey or defeat our enemies.’

Ürsüla exhaled a plume of smoke into Sväla’s face. ‘Then ask him,’ she said.

Sväla waved the smoke away and turned to the gurgling lump of mud. ‘You mean…?’

The witch nodded and indicated that Sväla should step closer to the statue.

Sväla approached the thing and forced herself to look at its grotesque face. Its eyeballs were now fully revealed. They had no pupils. They were nothing more than sacks of blood, rolling wildly in their muddy sockets as the statue continued its garbled monologue. ‘Running. Rain. Bodies. Gods. The spirits are in my eyes. Everything is the Wolf. I am the Wolf.’

‘Why are we cursed?’ asked Sväla. The idea of communicating with the hideous doll terrified her and her voice was little more than a whisper.

‘Louder!’ snapped the old woman.

Sväla looked back at her and noticed that there was a gleam of excitement in her bright, green eyes.

‘Why are we cursed?’ Sväla asked again, lifting her voice into a trembling yell.

The statue’s monologue stopped dead. Its blank eyes rolled in their sockets and fixed on Sväla. To her horror, it seemed to be looking directly at her.

‘Cursed,’ groaned the statue, gargling the word around the back of its throat, as though savouring an unfamiliar flavour.

Sväla held her breath and it seemed as though the statue was doing the same. Its trembling stopped and for a few moments it made no sound. The only noise came from the witch, crouched by Sväla’s side and breathing heavily with excitement.

Then the statue began to mumble again. The monologue had been replaced with a single word, repeated over and over again. The statue began to shake violently as its voice grew louder. Finally it screamed the word so loud that mud sprayed from its crooked mouth and its chin began to crumble. ‘Sigvald!’ it screamed, shaking its head as though it were in pain. ‘Sigvald!’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Baron Schüler studied the fork in his hand. His haggard face stared back at him from the polished silver with a look of fierce hatred. ‘I must die,’ he muttered under his breath, wondering if the metal would be sharp enough to pierce his throat. He was clad from head to toe in a beautifully filigreed suit of purple armour, courtesy of his benevolent host. The prince’s servants had bathed him, doused him in scented oil, trimmed his beard and combed his hair; they had even rouged his cheeks and painted a bit of colour onto his cracked lips, but all their efforts had somehow conspired to leave him looking even more corpse-like.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the guest sat next to him. ‘Did you say something?’

Schüler shook his head and looked down the length of the dining table. His fury had driven him north without any clear plan, but he had never imagined his journey would end like this. He whispered a prayer for his men, hoping desperately that they were not enduring such awful sights. The light of a dozen candelabras had finally revealed to the baron the full horror of the Geld-Prince’s court. A host of vile, diabolical souls were sat around him, chatting quietly and waiting for their prince to arrive.

The figure sitting opposite Schüler was vaguely man-shaped, but its naked flesh was a bright, virulent pink and its whole body glistened like raw meat. A pair of spindly, paper-thin wings was folded behind its back and its face was a pouting mess of gristle and canines. It was whispering to the guests on its right: a pair of life-size, porcelain figurines, with limbs the colour of old, yellowed ivory. As the dolls leant closer to the winged creature, cracks opened up in their polished torsos, revealing a dark layer of exposed muscle and ligaments beneath. The sight of the bizarre creatures repulsed the baron more than anything he had seen so far. The dolls’ smooth, ceramic heads were decorated with painted locks and angelic, girlish features, but their glass eyes were full of animal hunger. As they listened to the winged creature, they giggled and rattled around on their seats. One of them caught the baron’s eye and lowered a porcelain eyelid in a slow, suggestive wink.

Schüler turned away in disgust but struggled to know where to look. All around the table were figures so grotesque that it pained him to look at them. It seemed as though a butcher’s block of animal parts had been combined with the contents of a mortuary, and then painted in the gaudy colours of a lunatic’s nightmare. A wonderful banquet had been laid out for them: plates of meat and quivering, fruit-filled jellies that looked almost as fantastic as the guests and, in a distant corner, a group of bizarre, misshapen musicians were playing a gentle waltz. A beautiful portrait of the prince looked down over the peculiar scene and Schüler decided to rest his eyes on the prince’s noble face for a while.

The guest to Schüler’s right had been too intent on eating to join in with the general conversation. The belching, snorting sounds coming from its mouth were so loud and bestial that for a long time the baron could not bring himself to look at it. He imagined from the slurping, tearing sounds that he must be seated next to some kind of enormous ruminant. Eventually, Schüler’s curiosity overcame him and he stole a quick look. He was next to a huge, bulbous, disembodied head, with scraps of half-eaten food hanging from its mouth. The thing’s pale, jowly face was as big as the baron’s whole body and it was sat in a nest of white serpents that trailed down from its flabby neck. The overall effect was that of a giant, fleshy squid. The baron opened his mouth to reply, but as he looked into the thing’s huge, watery eyes, his words froze in his mouth. He felt his sanity teetering on the brink of collapse.

The head gave him an encouraging smile. ‘I thought you said something,’ it said in a rumbling baritone. As it spoke, it looked hungrily at the baron’s emaciated body and leant a little closer to him.

To the baron’s horror he noticed that some of the thing’s serpentine limbs had surrounded his chair and were trailing down over his shoulders.

‘No,’ he said, leaning away from the creature’s scaly limbs. ‘Nothing.’

The head continued to watch him, panting slightly as it leant even closer. It seemed to be sniffing him.

‘I just thought – well, I wondered,’ stammered the baron, searching desperately for something to say. ‘I wondered which of the guests is the prince’s wife.’

The head flopped back and laughed, opening its mouth so wide that Schüler could see the remnants of the first course sliding around on the back of its grotesque tongue. ‘So you’ve heard about Freydís?’ As the thing laughed, its serpentine limbs patted the baron on the back. ‘You’re a man after my own heart,’ it said. ‘On any normal occasion I would have been able to introduce you.’ The creature ran its tongue over its thick, sagging lips and gave the baron a lewd grin. ‘I’m Ansgallür the Famished, you see. I’m the girl’s guardian.’

It horrified Schüler to imagine such a grotesque monster being anyone’s guardian. He felt a sudden urge to run screaming from the banqueting hall, but he dreaded to think what might happen to him if he roamed around the palace without Sigvald to protect him. He decided to hide his fear until the prince arrived, then beg him for freedom. ‘I was led to understand that she would be here,’ he replied, attempting to sound calm.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Ansgallür, letting his eyes roam around the table. ‘For once the Geld-Prince has requested her company. She should be at his side when he joins us.’ The head laughed again. ‘Sigvald rarely bothers with the poor child, but he’s particularly excited about his latest toy.’ The head slumped into a frown and was about to say something more on the subject when the conversation around the table ceased. There was a scraping of chairs as the guests all climbed to whatever they used for feet.

Schüler stood up and looked down the table. At the far end of the hall he saw the cruel, scarred face of Víga-Barói, glaring at the guests as he entered the room. He had removed the bloody apron and was once more dressed in antiquated purple armour. He was still flanked by the blank-eyed Sigmarite who was now acting as a squire, carrying Sigvald’s shield and a rapier. There was another figure at Víga-Barói’s side: long-limbed and pale, but otherwise indiscernible, due to a mass of lilac hair that drifted around it like seaweed caught in the tide. As the guests turned towards Víga-Barói and his entourage, he bowed low and gestured at the doorway. ‘The Geld-Prince, Sigvald the Magnificent,’ he said, backing away into the shadows.

The guests remained silent as three figures stepped into the candlelight. Baron Schüler gasped as he saw Sigvald. His golden armour had been polished to a blinding sheen but his handsome face was even more dazzling. The young prince glowed with inner nobility. He did not seem to belong in the mortal realm at all and the baron suddenly wondered if the prince was actually some kind of god. Schüler’s fear and doubt vanished as the prince approached the table. How could such a gallant figure allow any harm to come to him? How could such a man be anything other than divine? Then, as Sigvald stepped to one side and gestured to a chair, the baron noticed his companions. Behind him was his constant shadow, the lurching chancellor Oddrún and then, taking the seat that was offered to her, was a young woman. For a second, Schüler forgot all about the prince and began staring at his wife. Her face was hidden behind a purple veil, but the rest of her body was almost entirely naked. Six slender strips of black leather were all that preserved her modesty and, as the candlelight traced over her soft curves and long, graceful limbs, the baron found himself leaning across the table to see her more clearly.

He flinched as he felt hot breath on his ear.

‘Now you see why I have to keep her under lock and key,’ whispered Ansgallür the Famished with a lewd chuckle. ‘Sigvald butchered an entire city just to place one kiss on her hand. Imagine what he would do to anyone who touched her.’ The bulbous head shuffled closer to the baron. ‘It’s said that one glimpse of her face is enough to destroy a man.’

Schüler turned to his grotesque confidant with a question on his lips but at that moment Sigvald addressed his subjects.

‘We are all princes here, my friends,’ he cried, throwing his arms open to the motley assortment of creatures and lighting up the room with his dazzling smile. ‘The gates of the Gilded Palace do not admit anything less.’ He turned his luminous gaze on Baron Schüler. ‘And now we have a new brother. A fellow traveller on this long journey of self discovery.’

The guests all turned towards the baron with forced, brittle grins, but he was blind to their jealousy as he bathed in Sigvald’s indulgent smile.

Sigvald signalled for everyone to be seated and then he began talking quietly to Oddrún who had crouched next to him, looking like a giant, robed insect.

Servants appeared, laden with trays of food, and the guests began to eat, but the baron could not take his eyes off Sigvald and his wife. As he watched them eating, he abandoned his thoughts of escape, realising that he could do nothing better than devote his life to these resplendent beings. He pushed his plate away and rose from his chair. The other guests paused to watch him as he walked to the head of the table. They lowered their forks and whispered to each other, clearly shocked by this break with protocol.

Sigvald did not notice the baron’s approach and continued whispering urgently to Oddrún as Schüler reached his side. The prince and the chancellor were both examining something on the chancellor’s lap: a gold casket, inscribed with runes and columns of impossibly tiny text.

The baron began to feel a little ridiculous. He realised that Víga-Barói and all the other guests were glaring at him as he waited to be noticed. After a few moments, the princess looked up at him from behind her veil.

‘I believe your latest “prince” wishes to speak to you my darling,’ she said. Her voice was as soft and beguiling as the rest of her, but there was an edge of sarcasm to it that made the baron feel even more absurd.

Sigvald looked up in surprise. ‘Baron,’ he whispered, looking up and noticing that the exchange was being watched by all the other guests. ‘You should not rise from your seat before I do.’ He stood up and addressed the whole room. ‘Our guest is exhausted from his long journey. I will forgive his poor manners on this occasion.’ He waved the baron back to his chair. ‘Sit down quickly,’ he hissed. ‘Or they will expect to see some sport.’

‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ said the baron, bowing low. ‘I only wanted to thank you for your hospitality and pay my respects to your wife.’

Sigvald gave him a strained grin. ‘Of course.’ Then his grin became more genuine as an idea occurred to him. He gestured for the other guests to rise. ‘Actually, your timing is perfect, Baron Schüler.’ He raised his voice to the rest of the room again. ‘Now we’ve eaten, I think it’s time I revealed my latest work.’

The guests all leapt to their feet, eager to see what Sigvald had to show them.

He took the gold casket from Oddrún’s bandaged hands and held it over his head. ‘Youth should be timeless,’ he cried, moving away from his chair and pacing around the banqueting hall. ‘It should not be weighed down by the miserable demands of age and infirmity.’ He leapt up onto the table, scattering plates and candles as he landed on the polished marble. ‘Those who chose to join me on this wonderful journey will not be left to rot like their ancestors. We will not be abandoned to the worms for no good reason.’ He tapped the box in his hands. ‘In this palace I have gathered alchemists, warriors, artists and seers the like of which the world has never seen. I will not simply abandon them to the cruel predations of nature.’

The guests grinned ecstatically at this impassioned speech and several of them began to applaud, despite having no idea what the prince was talking about.

‘A thing of beauty must be saved for all eternity,’ cried Sigvald, twisting a catch on the side of the box and causing the front panel to drop onto the table with a clatter.

The guests all leant forward to see what was in the box.

Baron Schüler grimaced in disgust, but the other guests roared their approval.

Clamped in place by a crown of copper foils was the severed head of Doctor Rusas Schliemann. His eyes were wide with terror as he surveyed the banqueting hall and as the applause grew, the doctor’s head started to scream uncontrollably.

Sigvald waved at the stern figure of Víga-Barói and his entourage. ‘Through the blending of alchemy and surgery, we have managed to preserve one of the greatest scientific minds of the age.’ He raised his voice to be heard over the doctor’s desperate screams. ‘Doctor Rusas Schliemann was dying. Nature had abandoned his genius to decay and decrepitude, but I have preserved it. Now, his wisdom will live forever.’

As the screams cut through the applause, the baron turned away in horror. He saw that he was not the only one who lacked Sigvald’s enthusiasm for the new toy. Oddrún had his hooded head in his hands and was shaking with emotion. Is he crying, wondered the baron, confused by the chancellor’s display of compassion. Then he noticed the princess. Unlike the others, she had remained seated, and had not joined in with the applause. Her face was still hidden behind her veil, but she was drumming her fingers on the marble table with such ferocity that her anger was unmistakable.

The princess seemed to realise she was being studied and looked over in the baron’s direction. Even with her face hidden, it was obvious she was glaring at him. Her slender body was taut with rage. Then she looked away as Víga-Barói stepped up to her side and whispered in her ear. She nodded in reply, and as the purple-clad knight strolled away, her shoulders relaxed and she signalled for the baron to approach.

Baron Schüler hesitated, remembering the warning of Ansgallür the Famished. He looked over at Sigvald to see if he was watching, but the prince was now surrounded by a hysterical mob. He had summoned his subjects up onto the table and they were all pressing against him, cheering ecstatically, stroking his hair and straining to get a closer look at the severed head. The baron had no wish to displease the prince with another breach of protocol, but the princess seemed insistent.

‘Princess,’ he said, bowing low as he approached. He noticed that Oddrún looked up sharply as he spoke to the girl, but she simply patted the chair next to hers and poured the baron some wine.

‘Tell me your name,’ she said. The hint of sharpness was now totally absent from her voice. It poured like honey from behind her veil and left the baron momentarily tongue-tied.

‘I’m Baron Gustav Schüler,’ he said once he had regained his composure, and took the offered cup of wine, averting his gaze from her exposed flesh as he did so. Despite his awkwardness, the baron felt a rush of relief. It seemed like a lifetime since he had spoken to a normal human being.

‘I’m Freydís,’ she replied, with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘That most worthless chattel of Prince Sigvald.’

‘Chattel? I’m sure that’s not true, my lady. I heard that the prince laid waste to a whole city in pursuit of your love.’

The princess flinched. Then she laughed again, but this time it was edged with sadness. ‘You make it sound so romantic. Who told you about that, Gustav?’

The baron looked back at the jeering mob that was staggering across the table. He could just about make out the bloated head of Ansgallür the Famished. His enormous jowls were trembling with laughter and his limbs were attempting to snake around the jubilant prince.

‘Oh, of course,’ said the princess, following his gaze and nodding. ‘My garrulous keeper.’ She leant closer to the baron, forcing him to cough in embarrassment and avert his gaze again. ‘That was all a lifetime ago. My husband’s passion burns brightly, but briefly.’ She placed a hand on the baron’s arm. ‘Be aware of that, Gustav. It only takes one dull comment to lose his love.’

There was such sadness in the girl’s words that for a moment the baron forgot all about his terrifying surroundings and felt a rush of simple pity. ‘He’s so jealous he keeps you hidden away. What’s that, if not love?’

The princess laughed and squeezed the baron’s arm. ‘Boredom, Gustav. He keeps me locked away because I’m the last thing he wants to see. I suppose there must be some vestige of affection though, or I wouldn’t be here at all.’ She leant back in her chair with a sigh. ‘I’ve not given up hope though. I have a last card to play.’ She shook her head. ‘But anyway, I didn’t call you over so I could bore you too. What are you doing here, Gustav? You don’t look much like a libertine to me. There’s too much honesty in your eyes. I think I can still recognise such a thing.’ She waved at the banqueting hall. ‘What would bring an honest man to a carnal pit such as this?’

The baron pulled back his shoulders and stuck out his beard, trying to regain a little of his military posture. ‘It’s true, princess,’ he said, clenching his untasted wine a little tighter. ‘I did not come here seeking debauchery. I came here seeking power.’ He tapped the purple armour that covered his wasted limbs. ‘My body may look ruined, but I assure you I am one of the Empire’s greatest soldiers.’ He grimaced. ‘But I was ruled by blinkered simpletons, unable to see the truth. They could not see that we need to harness the power that flows from the north, rather than simply labelling it as witchcraft. I grew sick of it: sick of their naivety. While they debated matters of faith and doctrine, our citadels were burning to the ground. So I came north, looking for something better.’ He nodded at Sigvald. ‘And in your prince I think I’ve found it.’ He waved his cup at the writhing figures. ‘If I could just learn from him. If I could tap into the power he has, I’m sure I could finally achieve something. I need victory, princess.’

Freydís raised her eyebrows at the passion in the baron’s voice.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, noticing her amusement and lowering his voice.

‘My husband certainly has power,’ she said with a smile. ‘But I’m not sure he’s all that you imagine, Gustav.’

The baron shrugged and looked at the prince. He had managed to silence the doctor’s screams and was now forcing the head to recite poems for the amusement of the crowd. ‘He has the strength to actually change things,’ he said in hushed, awed tones.

The princess laughed softly and took his hand. ‘Would you escort me back to my chambers, Gustav? I’m no longer hungry and it seems that my guardian is a little busy.’

The baron withdrew his hand as though he had been burned. ‘Princess,’ he gasped, looking anxiously around the room. ‘I don’t think it would be appropriate. What would your husband say? Surely your guardian can…’ his words faltered. As he looked across the table he saw Ansgallür’s bloated head had rolled onto its back and his huge gaping mouth was roaring with laughter. There was dark liquid pouring down his chin that the baron hoped was wine.

‘It won’t take long,’ said the princess, sounding a little impatient as she offered him her arm and pointed at the nearest door. ‘My chambers are in the sixth tower. It’s just a few minutes away.’

The baron shook his head again. There was a playful, dangerous edge to Freydís’s voice that terrified him. He had endured too much to throw it all away now by enraging his host. Víga-Barói was stood nearby, talking to the creature surrounded by long tendrils of violet hair. The knight caught Schüler’s gaze and noticed his predicament. He leant closer to his companion and they both began to laugh.

‘I can’t,’ said the baron, rising from his chair and backing away.

The princess laughed softly. ‘It’s true, you do have a lot to learn from Sigvald. Very well,’ she said, sounding disappointed. ‘You can at least fetch my coat then. Unless you wish me to freeze to death, that is?’

‘No, of course not,’ muttered the baron, still looking nervously around the room to see who was watching the exchange.

‘Good. It’s that way,’ said the princess, waving to a distant doorway. ‘A white fur. You can’t miss it.’

The baron gave her a small bow and rushed towards the door, suddenly eager to be away from her. He found himself in a small, empty chamber and shook his head in confusion. There was no sign of a coat, so he hurried through the next door and out onto one of the slender bridges that linked the palace’s towers.

The snowstorm was still raging and the cold sliced through the gaps in his armour as he peered along the bridge. ‘This can’t be right,’ he muttered.

‘I must have been mistaken,’ came a voice from behind him.

The baron felt a rush of fear as he recognised the soft, playful tones.

‘Princess,’ he gasped, turning to face her. He flushed with embarrassment as his eyes passed over her naked curves. He quickly shifted his gaze up to her face, but then he stumbled to a halt. The storm had twisted the veil around to the back of her head, and it had caught on a piece of railing, leaving her face completely exposed.

‘Forgive me, Gustav,’ said Freydís with a coy smile, holding his gaze for a moment before drawing the veil back into place. ‘I don’t think I brought a coat, actually.’ As she pulled the veil free it tore slightly, and as she stepped closer to the baron her face was still visible.

The baron remained motionless as the princess’s slender form moved towards him through the snowstorm. One glimpse of her ivory skin was more lethal than any wound he had ever endured. He slumped back against the railings and clamped his hands over his eyes, trying to protect himself.

‘I suppose you’d better get me back to my room,’ she whispered, stepping closer and gently taking his hands. ‘You might have a point. If anyone saw us alone together, they could get completely the wrong idea.’

The baron’s face was twisted by lust and terror, but as the princess pressed her warm body against his, the fear slipped away, leaving only a hungry glint in his eyes. He noticed that he was still clutching the cup of wine. Suddenly, his abstinence seemed pathetic, childlike even. He gulped the drink down and closed his eyes, sighing with pleasure as the alcohol raced to his brain. Then he threw the cup to the ground and locked the princess in a fierce embrace, kissing her as urgently as he had drunk the wine, forgetting everything but his desire.

For a few minutes they remained there, shrouded in snow as they held each other. Then they slipped away, ghostlike through the storm.

CHAPTER NINE

A midday sun glared down across the steppe as Ungaur stood back to admire his handiwork. He had cleared a circle in the long grass and staked the victim’s limbs into the cracked, baked earth. The man was beginning to stir, but his eyes were still clouded and unseeing. It would be several hours before the effect of the herbs wore off, and he would be dead long before that. Ungaur lifted his curved knife up in front of a perfect, cobalt sky. Sunlight flashed along the serrated blade. ‘Völtar the Wolf,’ he intoned, closing his eyes and tilting his face back to allow the sun to wash over his face. ‘I have served you well. I beg you to aid me now.’ He ran the knife along his naked chest, and as the blood began to flow, he wiped it away and threw it down on to the face of his moaning victim. ‘Sväla will lead your children away from you. If I do not stop her, the sacrifices will cease and you will go hungry.’

Ungaur opened his eyes and looked out across the shimmering steppe. A sound had interrupted his train of thought. At first he saw nothing but then, shielding his eyes from the sun with the flat of his bloody knife, he saw a man striding through the grass towards him. His frame was as large and heavily muscled as Ungaur’s, but unlike the shaman, he wore no furs. His only clothing was a loincloth and his entire body was dyed a deep red. Even his short Mohican was dyed the same colour. ‘Rurik,’ muttered Ungaur. Even at this distance he could not mistake the chieftain. Other members of the Drékar tribe had been known to paint themselves red, but none of them had a mangled piece of metal for a fist. Ungaur knew the strange mutation well. He had been present on the day Rurik first returned from the north and revealed his new blessing. Powerful sorcery had allowed the chieftain’s flesh to meld with the jagged lump of iron. He had never explained exactly how he came by it, saying simply that it was a gift.

Rurik saw the glint of Ungaur’s blade and began jogging towards him. In a few minutes he reached the circle of earth and looked down at the man spread-eagled in its centre. ‘Is he strong enough?’ he growled.

Ungaur pulled back his lips to reveal the nest of black needles in his mouth. ‘Strong enough, yes,’ he replied, raising his arms to reveal an impressive selection of cuts, bruises and teeth marks. ‘He was not easy to subdue.’

Rurik sneered. ‘I’m sure he was in no fit state to defend himself.’

Ungaur shrugged. ‘Of course not. The Wolf must be fed, if I’m to guarantee you such glorious victories.’

Rurik’s sneer remained on his face. ‘There was nothing glorious about that. Hauk was a brave man. I take no pride in such a kill.’

‘And yet you were grateful for my aid.’

‘All the tribes are cursed. What else can I do? The Fallen have grown too weak to survive, so we must destroy them, but it was never Hauk’s fault.’ He flared his nostrils as though smelling something unpleasant. ‘I’m carrying a heavy debt.’

‘We’re no longer as weak as you might think,’ said Ungaur, revealing even more of his black needles.

‘So you say. What is this attack you referred to?’

‘Hauk’s wife is leading the survivors against you. She intends to unite the Fallen by slaying the chieftains of all the surrounding tribes and seizing back our old hunting grounds.’ The shaman nodded at Rurik. ‘She means to start with you.’

‘Sväla? How has she gained control of the clan? Surely the role should have fallen to Hauk’s son. The one with all the…’ he waved to his face, indicating Svärd’s piercings. ‘Or, if not him, another one of the tribesmen.’

Ungaur nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, but she has broken with all tradition. She will not even speak to her son. She’s made herself into some kind of queen.’

Rurik frowned and ran a hand through the thick bristles of his Mohican. ‘But how? How has a woman been able to do such a thing?’

Ungaur’s cheeks flushed with colour and the smile vanished from his face. He began pacing around the circle of earth. ‘She’s confused them all with some kind of petty conjuring tricks. She’s led them on various hunting expeditions and managed to predict the whereabouts of whole herds of antelope. It’s luck, nothing more, but Valdür the Old has been making the most ridiculous claims about her.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘He says she can rid us of our curse.’

‘I see.’ Rurik allowed himself a low chuckle. ‘Hauk always said she was a queen amongst women.’ He looked up at the scowling shaman. ‘And she means to kill me?’

‘Yes. To avenge her husband and to take back your tribesmen and your hunting grounds. She believes she can use her run of good luck to unite the tribes and crown herself queen of the entire steppe.’

Rurik shook his head and laughed again. ‘You’ve got to admire her balls.’ Then he looked down at the twisted mass of metal at the end of his arm. ‘It’s almost a shame to stop her.’

The shaman’s eyes bulged and he strode to Rurik’s side, grabbing his arm. ‘You’d be happy to see a woman leading us? You’d let a woman steal your tribe from you?’

‘Of course not,’ muttered Rurik, pulling his arm free and glaring at Ungaur. ‘Tell me what you know.’

‘She plans to strike tonight, as you lead your men down to the river to fill your water skins. She has somehow predicted the exact spot. They’ll be waiting to ambush you as you enter the narrowest point of the gulley. It will be a bloodbath, but she will stop the killing as soon as she has your head. She doesn’t want to kill your men; she just wants to rule them.’

‘I see. Then we will prepare a surprise of our own. It will be good to have them all in one place. Sväla must either kneel to me or die. If anyone’s going to reunite the tribes it’s me.’ He turned to leave.

‘Wait,’ cried Ungaur, pointing his knife at the man on the ground.

‘I’ll leave that to you,’ replied Rurik as he jogged off into the long grass. ‘I’ll soon have enough blood on my hands to feed a hundred gods.’

‘Idiot,’ cried Ungaur at the receding figure of the chieftain. Then he turned back to the dirt circle and leant down beside the struggling figure at its centre. He held the knife in front of the man’s face. To his satisfaction he noticed a flash of fear in his victim’s eyes. The drugs were already starting to wear off. ‘Lucky you,’ he whispered to the struggling man. ‘You’re going to enter the afterlife with your eyes wide open.’ He drew back the knife and plunged it into the man’s chest, muttering a prayer to the Wolf as hot blood rushed into the parched earth.

CHAPTER TEN

Baron Schüler thrust his sabre at the prince’s chest with a grunt.

Sigvald dodged the blow with sickening ease. He simply rocked back on his heels and arched his slender body out of harm’s way. ‘Too slow!’ he cried, spinning around and laughing as he lunged forward with his own attack.

Schüler brought his blade up just in time to prevent his face being sliced off. He staggered back, gasping for breath, but undaunted. The last few weeks had transformed him. The doubt had vanished from his eyes to be replaced with a steely determination. He had eaten whatever strange meals were presented to him, requested a new sword and even taken to sparring with the prince in an attempt to regain his strength. His skeletal frame had already regained some of its former bulk. Cords of muscle rippled along his arm as he struck again, aiming his sword straight for the prince’s face.

They were duelling across a narrow, arching buttress that swept out from one of the palace’s tallest spires. The prince had no time for training grounds. He always insisted that they spar in the most dangerous places he could think of. The glittering gold domes of the palace sprawled beneath them, glimpsed like flashes of sunlight between the banks of snow. The slightest misstep would send either of the combatants hurtling to their deaths.

Sigvald rolled back along the slender apex of the buttress, narrowly avoiding the baron’s sword. As he leapt back to his feet, he slipped on the frozen metal and almost fell. He managed to grab onto a roof tile and steady himself. Then he began to laugh hysterically. He looked back across at the baron, his eyes wide with excitement. ‘Did you see that?’ he screamed. ‘Almost! Almost!’ He scrambled to his feet and repeated the trick, almost falling again and just grabbing the tiles in time. ‘Death’s so close,’ he cried through the storm, still laughing wildly. ‘Can you feel it?’

The baron gave no reply, deciding to waste no time in pressing his advantage. He stepped carefully along the icy buttress and hacked down with his sword, aiming for the prince’s throat.

Sigvald launched himself at the baron with a whoop and slammed into his stomach, sending them both tumbling into the void.

Schüler barked in fury as he fell from the buttress. He reached out blindly through the snow and felt his hands latch onto the edge of a roof. His sword clattered away from him and he gasped in pain as his arms took the full weight of his armour. He felt his fingers sliding down the ice and his pulse raced as he realised he did not have the strength to pull himself up.

Strong fingers wrapped around the vambraces of his armour and hauled him up onto the roof. Sigvald was still crippled with laughter as he dragged the baron to safety and collapsed by his side. ‘Did you see that,’ he wailed, rolling back across the roof. ‘If you’d not reached out when you did…’ He gripped the baron’s head and placed a fierce kiss on his forehead. ‘Have you ever felt so alive?’

The baron was stunned into silence and could do nothing but gasp for breath.

The prince lurched to his feet and stepped over to the very edge of the roof, holding his arms up to the snowstorm and screaming into the endless night. ‘You can’t have me!’ he cried, leaning out into the wind. ‘I’m Sigvald! Sigvald the Magnificent!’ He carried on in this vein for a few minutes, utterly exhilarated by the danger he had put them in. Then, finally, he grew quiet. He raised a hand to his eyes and peered through the snow. ‘Who would dare come so close to my palace?’ he asked. His tone turned from elation to anger as he stepped back from the edge. ‘Can you see this, baron?’

Schüler climbed carefully to his feet. His heart was still pounding with fear and he kept a few feet between him and the prince as he climbed down to the edge of the roof. He squinted through the stormy night, unsure where to look. Then he spied a line of riders snaking through the foothills of the nearby mountains. They were the same heavily armoured knights he had seen through the optiks in the prince’s glass dome. ‘I can see them, prince,’ he gasped, trying to steady his breathing. ‘They’re the monsters who attacked me as I rode north.’ He grimaced. ‘The thing that leads them has the head of a rabid dog. He hides it inside a skull-shaped helmet, made of brass, but I got close enough to see his true nature.’

Sigvald frowned. ‘Víga-Barói is right. Each year they become more brazen. They’re riding openly across my land.’ Then he shrugged and turned back to the baron with a forced smile. ‘But what does it matter? We have more important things to discuss.’

‘But who are they?’

‘Did you say that one of them had the head of a dog? That sounds like Mord Huk.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, no one of any consequence. A wretched minor minion of the Blood God. He thinks it’s amusing to let his men traipse across my hunting grounds.’ Sigvald backed away from the edge and sat down heavily on the roof, sending a little avalanche of snow tumbling down the tiled slope. His good humour had completely vanished.

The baron looked from the soldiers to the dejected figure of Sigvald and narrowed his eyes. When he spoke again, there was a hint of excitement in his voice. ‘Before we were forced to flee, I got the distinct impression they planned to attack your palace, my prince. It was their eagerness to destroy your home that made me think this palace might be my last hope.’ The baron stepped back towards the prince. ‘If they’re riding closer every year, maybe you should lead your army out to meet them. It seems grotesque that such filth should stain the purity of your estate. What if they attacked the palace?’

Sigvald looked back at him with raised eyebrows. The snow had plastered his long hair over his face, but somehow he still looked utterly regal. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘They won’t attack me here, baron. We have an agreement.’ He lay back in the snow and closed his eyes. ‘Anyway, I’ve no interest in warfare. The world has grown so dull. War has lost its lustre. There’s no one worth fighting any more.’

Schüler pursed his lips and looked down at Sigvald, gauging the distance from the prince to the edge of the roof.

Sigvald opened his eyes and looked up at him with a laugh. ‘What are you thinking, baron? You look so serious!’

Schüler smiled awkwardly and sat next to him.

‘What is it, baron?’ asked the prince, sitting up and taking his hand. ‘Something has upset you.’ He waved at the distant line of soldiers. ‘Not those brutes, I hope. They’re not worth a minute of your thoughts.’

The baron shrugged. ‘Well, maybe. Perhaps it was the memory of… Did you call him Mord Huk?’

Sigvald nodded. ‘I don’t remember a brass skull, but he definitely has the head of a dog. The brain of one too.’

Schüler nodded and looked out into the snow. ‘I left half of my men bleeding at his feet.’ He looked up at the sky, clearly pained by the memory. ‘There was a flock of carrion crows following him. We were clearly not his first victims.’

Sigvald nodded. ‘The Blood God is not the most imaginative of deities. His witless followers must endlessly seek out fresh kills to appease his bloodlust.’

‘Then why not ride out and drive this Mord Huk from your kingdom?’ asked the baron, leaning close to the prince, his eyes full of passion. ‘Take your army to war one last time. Place his ridiculous dog head on your wall.’

Sigvald grinned back at Schüler. ‘Look at you! You’re so full of fire and vigour. You’re becoming yourself again.’ He peered into Schüler’s eyes. ‘Did something happen to you on the night of the banquet? Ever since then you’ve been like a driven man. You seem to have a hunger for something.’

The baron shuffled uncomfortably under the prince’s gaze. ‘Your speech inspired me, Prince Sigvald. Your drive to experience all that life has to offer. It’s a refreshing change from the dull-witted dogmas I’m used to.’ He waved at the falling snow. ‘That’s why I’d love to see you at the head of a great army, crushing everything with your beautiful wrath.’

Sigvald sprawled back onto the snow with a sigh and looked up at the twin moons. ‘You would seriously expect me to demean myself by fighting with those wretches?’ He waved down at his beautifully engraved armour. ‘Would you really like to see me drenched in blood and filth, for the sake of a few iron-clad morons?’

Schüler pulled at his thick beard in frustration. ‘Then will you spend the rest of eternity here? Idling away your time while the Blood God’s oafs divide up your kingdom?’

Sigvald narrowed his eyes and looked up at the baron. ‘Be careful, Baron Schüler. Remember who you’re talking to.’

The baron sucked his teeth and sat down again. His shoulders slumped and he looked at his open palms, following the lines of the old scars. Then he sat upright and a faint smile trembled at the corners of his mouth. ‘It might be for the best,’ he said quietly, as though speaking to himself.

‘What?’ asked Sigvald, looking over at him.

‘It might be for the best,’ repeated the baron, raising his voice. ‘I think it might actually be quite dangerous for you to ride out against Mord Huk.’

‘Pah!’ exclaimed Sigvald. ‘I already told you, he’s not worth dirtying my sword on.’

The baron nodded. ‘You say you haven’t seen the brass skull he wears?’

‘No,’ said the prince, beginning to sound vaguely annoyed.

‘The source of his power.’

Sigvald sat up. ‘What power? What are you talking about?’

Schüler looked up from his hands. ‘When they attacked us, we outnumbered them massively. I thought we would easily overcome them, but the warrior in the brass skull fought like a daemon. Even without his men I think he could have beaten us.’

‘Really,’ asked Sigvald, sounding unconvinced. ‘Mord Huk?’

Schüler nodded. ‘While he was wearing the brass helmet, he was like a god, filled with incredible rage and power, but for a brief moment he stumbled and the helmet fell from his shoulders. It was then that I realised the skull was channelling some kind of unnatural power. Without it, he fought like any other soldier, but as soon as he placed it back on his head he was unstoppable. He was like a living incarnation of hate. Rage poured out of him. He tore through my men as if they were sheep.’

Sigvald frowned. ‘A brass skull, you say?’ His eyes suddenly widened. ‘A brass skull? The Blood God’s brass throne sits on skulls. Maybe he has bestowed one of them on Mord Huk?’

‘Possibly,’ said the baron. ‘I believe some of his men referred to it as the Throne Skull.’

Sigvald climbed to his feet and began pacing around the rooftop. ‘Could it be?’ he whispered. ‘Surely not. A skull from the throne of a god? Imagine the power.’ He stopped and placed his hands on his golden mane of hair. ‘What would it feel like to wear such a thing?’

Baron Schüler shrugged. ‘He seemed utterly intoxicated by it. As though it were some kind of drug.’

Sigvald clutched his head tighter. ‘A drug, yes! Imagine it! All the power of a god, pouring through your mind!’

‘But how would you prise it from Mord Huk’s head? How would you even find him?’

Sigvald waved at a nearby line of mountains. ‘His citadel is just the other side of those peaks. I would simply march through the gates and hack the thing from his head.’ Sigvald’s enthusiasm grew as he paced back and forth across the roof. ‘I still have enough men to make an army.’ He pointed at the baron and grinned. ‘And we now have your men too. Víga-Barói has been treating their injuries.’ His grin froze and for a moment he looked a little embarrassed. ‘Some of them were very weak when you arrived, you must understand. But those that survived the surgery will be like new men. You’ll barely recognise them.’

‘But Prince Sigvald,’ asked the baron, suppressing a smile. ‘I thought you just said you were through with war?’

‘Who said anything about a war?’ cried Sigvald, laughing as he dragged the baron to his feet. ‘This is a completely different matter. If this brass skull is everything you say it is, I have to experience it for myself.’ He lowered his voice and gripped Schüler’s shoulders. ‘You must understand that I’m no follower of the Blood God.’ He tapped a circular device on his armour. ‘I follow another, more esoteric path.’ He closed his eyes and moaned ecstatically. ‘So I can’t imagine how it would feel to tap into such brutal power. What a sybaritic thrill! It would be like nothing I’ve ever experienced.’

The prince scoured the rooftop and spied a ledge leading down onto a narrow balcony. ‘Quickly, baron,’ he said, scrambling over the icy slates towards it. ‘You should have told me about this earlier. We’ve no time to lose.’

Schüler followed, at a more careful pace, then paused for a moment and placed a hand across his breastplate. As the prince dropped down onto the balcony below, Schüler thought ruefully of the scratches beneath his armour – angry reminders of the night he had spent with Freydís. At the height of their passion, the princess had gouged her initial deep into his chest, turning Schüler’s cries of ecstasy into a howl of pain. Even now he could feel the scar throbbing under his armour; a painful reminder of his new love. His life-long dreams of victory had evaporated. Only one thing filled his thoughts now. ‘Forgive me for this, prince,’ he whispered, as Sigvald dropped from view, ‘but I will not share her.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sväla shivered in the cool northern breeze. ‘I’m not sure,’ she muttered, looking out over the moonlit gulley. Most of the steppe was featureless and flat, but in some places rivers carved through the dry earth, creating narrow, steep-sided valleys. Birds and antelope had gathered at the water’s edge to drink in relative safety and she could easily believe that the Drékar would choose such a spot to fill their water skins, but something was wrong. Her visions were unclear.

‘Not sure about what?’ replied Valdür, looking over at her.

She looked back at his lined, weather-beaten face. The old warrior was watching her closely, hanging on her every word. She knew that he had complete confidence in her judgement, just like all the others had. She looked around and saw them crouched behind her in the long grass, waiting eagerly for her command. ‘I see several things at once,’ she said, looking back down at the fast-flowing river. ‘I see us pouncing, unexpected on the Drékar, and winning their fealty as I lift up Rurik’s severed head.’

Valdür nodded slowly, sensing there was more to come.

‘But then I see other memories, where they attack us instead.’ She hugged her skinny, tattooed chest and grimaced. ‘I see Rurik lifting my corpse over his head and hurling me into the river.’

Valdür frowned. ‘Which is the more powerful vision? Is one clearer than the other?’

Sväla shook her head. ‘It’s all so muddled, I can’t be sure.’ She clutched her head in her hands and screwed her eyes shut. ‘There’s another version, but that makes no sense at all. Rurik is standing by my side with his metal fist in the air. What can that mean?’

There was a rustling of grass as another warrior crawled towards them. It was Svärd. As his face emerged from the shadows, the moonlight glinted on the rings and teeth that hung from his face. ‘Everything’s ready,’ he whispered to no one in particular, avoiding his mother’s gaze.

She nodded to the others, indicating that they should ready their weapons and tried to control the anger that twisted in her guts at the sight of her son. The other tribesmen were so impressed with her predictions that they had taken to calling her Sväla the Witch, but her own son would no longer even speak her name. She reined in her fury and tried to focus on the task ahead. She couldn’t let her emotion show. She knew that even the slightest sign of doubt would ruin everything. ‘Good,’ she snapped. ‘And where’s the shaman?’

The boy pointed his spear to the far side of the valley and replied to the men crouched next to him. ‘He’s with the others. He did not dare to contradict the orders.’ He allowed himself a quiet chuckle. ‘But he’s calling you an idiot to anyone who’ll listen. He says your theory about this Sigvald character is ridiculous.’

Sväla nodded and raised her hand, kissing the two wedding rings on her finger. ‘They won’t take his word over mine. Not now.’ She drew her knife and waved it down the slope. ‘It’s nearly time. We should move a little closer to the water.’

The tribesmen crept slowly through the grass. They moved so quietly that even the animals gathered at the water’s edge did not notice their passing.

Sväla nodded to the near end of the valley. Shadowy figures were approaching. The Drékar made no attempt to conceal themselves, laughing and clattering their spears as they jogged towards the river. As the warriors approached the water, there was an explosion of clapping wings and thudding hooves as the animals fled further down the valley.

Sväla held up her hand, signalling that the others should wait. Something was still wrong, but she knew this was her only chance. None of the other visions showed the Drékar so clearly. She had to strike tonight. If she could subdue the Drékar, the other tribes would be sure to follow. She shook her head. There were so few of them though. Only thirty or so men were gathering at the water’s edge. This was not the whole tribe. She peered through the half-light. There was no sign of the red-skinned brute who had killed her husband. Where was Rurik? The Drékar dropped their spears and waded into the shallow water, crying out with satisfaction as they washed the filth from their bodies and quenched their thirst.

Sväla gave her men a nod and launched herself down the hill. As she ran she called out, mimicking the staccato war cry of her fallen husband. On the far side of the narrow gulley, the rest of the Fallen leapt from the grass and charged at the unsuspecting Drékar.

The trap was sprung. The second Sväla’s men reached the bottom of the gulley, several of them cried out in pain. She looked back to see hundreds of Drékar hurling their spears from the top of the incline. Sharpened wood thudded into muscle and all around her the Fallen tumbled to the ground. The ambushers were ambushed. Then, with a fierce war cry of their own, the Drékar charged down at them, led by the scowling, crimson brute that was Rurik Iron Fist.

‘Sväla!’ cried Valdür, crouching in readiness for the attack. ‘Didn’t you see this?’

She shook her head in dismay. ‘Something has changed. This was not meant to happen.’

‘Well it’s happening,’ growled Svärd, striding towards her. ‘So what do we do?’

Sväla closed her eyes and groaned. ‘I need more time.’

There was a crunch of breaking wood and bone as the Drékar slammed into them. The Fallen found themselves surrounded on all sides, with no hope of escape. They fought fiercely, swinging axes and maces at their attackers with wild abandon, but it was clearly hopeless. The Drékar were grinning and laughing as they drove them back towards the water.

Svärd and Valdür launched themselves into the fray and Sväla found herself alone, surrounded by struggling, screaming figures. A shard of metal splintered from a nearby axe and sliced through her arm. She clutched at the wound, trying to stem the rush of blood. Then she smiled. The shock of the pain suddenly brought her thoughts into focus. As she looked up at the battle she realised that the jumbled mix of visions had briefly coalesced into one clear image. As she watched the struggling tribesmen, she realised that she had seen the entire battle before, in perfect detail. She knew every move the warriors were going to make. She knew that one of the Drékar was about to plunge his spear into her back, and she stepped calmly to one side, so that the weapon pierced nothing but air. Then, as her attacker stumbled forwards, surprised by her move, she gripped her knife in both hands and hammered it down into his naked back. As he collapsed, gasping, to the ground, she stepped casually past him into the heaving throng, knowing that several of the men were about to tumble backwards and create a clear path through the carnage.

As Svärd and Valdür watched in amazement, she walked slowly through the battle, easily avoiding every blow that was aimed at her and felling towering warriors with her small iron knife. She looked like some kind of spirit: serene and untouchable as she drifted through the mortal realm. Her destination was a red Mohican, bobbing up and down on the far side of the battle.

More Drékar were charging down the gulley and the antelope that had fled earlier panicked, unsure which way to turn. As they sprang back and forth in alarm, a few of them galloped back towards the battle, blind with fear.

Sväla remembered quite clearly what was about to happen. One of the antelope was about to race past her, just a few feet away. She cried out above the clamour of the battle. ‘Völtar, give me a mount. Let me slay these traitors.’ Then, as the surrounding men looked up at her in confusion, she leapt into the air. Her vision was true, and sharper than ever before. She landed squarely on the back of the terrified creature. It galloped on through the mayhem, seemingly oblivious to its skinny passenger and Sväla clutched onto its horns as it slammed through the Drékar, heading straight for their leader.

As the antelope charged up the bank, Sväla lashed out with her knife, surrounding herself in a spray of blood. She closed her eyes for a second and recalled that a second antelope was about to change course, confused by the chaos, and plough into the Drékar. She managed to stand on her mount’s back for a few seconds, conscious that hundreds of eyes were on her. ‘Creatures of the steppe,’ she cried, balancing precariously, ‘attack these godless fools.’ At that moment, the second antelope changed course, exactly as she predicted, and charged into the tribesmen. To everyone watching, it seemed as though Sväla had ordered the animal to attack. It did no real harm as it raced through the ranks of men and charged up the bank to safety, but the effect on the Drékar was profound. Sväla grinned with satisfaction as she finally slipped from the animal’s back and fell to the ground.

‘The witch is in league with the animals!’ cried one of the tribesmen, lowering his axe for a second. A spear thudded into his chest as the nearby Fallen took advantage of his hesitation.

Sväla clambered, gasping, to her feet and stumbled up the hill, still lashing out with her knife, and several of the Drékar began to back away in fear.

‘Go, fetch us reinforcements,’ she howled, pointing her knife at a stunted tree on the far side of the gulley. Seemingly at her command, dozens of rooks burst from the branches and flew up into the night sky.

The Drékar muttered oaths as they saw the birds briefly silhouetted against the clouds, before heading noisily off across the fields.

Again, the Fallen took their chance and hacked into their distracted foe. Despite the uneven numbers, Sväla’s theatrics began to turn the tide of the battle. Her men had rallied at the sight of her strange power and began to drive the Drékar back up the hill.

Sväla saw that one of the Drékar was about to swing his axe at her neck, so she dropped to her knees and heard him howl in frustration as the weapon sliced into one of his own men, jamming in the man’s ribs and causing them both to tumble down the slope. Sväla climbed calmly to her feet, knowing that for the next few seconds she was safe.

‘You can’t win,’ she said to the Norscans who were watching her progress. ‘Völtar has appointed me as his messenger. He has granted me control over nature.’ She knew from her visions that the clouds were about to roll back from the moon, so she waved her hands, making it seem as though she had drawn them back. As the moonlight picked her out amongst the heaving mass of bodies, it seemed as if her wiry, tattooed body had been singled out by a holy light. ‘He has told me the true secret of our curse.’

‘She lies,’ cried another voice, from the far side of the small river.

Sväla looked up to see Ungaur, stumbling through the knee-deep water. She held her breath for a second, scouring her memory of the jumbled visions and squinting at the ghostly battle that drifted over the top of the real one. She grinned as she saw her next move.

‘Rurik Iron Fist,’ she cried, raising her knife to the moon. ‘You must kneel before me.’

At exactly that moment, the red-skinned brute slipped down the muddy hillside and toppled to his knees, just as Sväla had predicted he would. He and his men had all heard Sväla’s command and it seemed as though the chieftain’s limbs were now under her control.

Rurik scrambled quickly back to his feet and slammed his metal arm into the faces of the men who leapt to attack him, but his eyes were full of doubt as he looked down at his disobedient legs.

As Sväla strode towards him, he lowered his arm and backed away in fear.

Sväla drew back her clenched fist, as though she were about to hurl some kind of spell at him.

Rurik drew back his hammer hand to strike, then he hesitated. He looked down at his blood-drenched limbs and shook his head in confusion.

All around him the fighting paused, as the warriors watched to see the result of the confrontation.

Rurik lowered his fist, stepping towards Sväla. ‘This is all wrong,’ he said. ‘This can’t be the will of Völtar.’ He looked through the crowd at the distant shape of Ungaur, and then back at Sväla, whose fist was still poised to strike. ‘Forgive me, Sväla,’ he said, dropping back to his knees. ‘I thought I was fighting for the survival of our people, but I see I was wrong. Their fate is clearly in your hands, not mine. I’ve been a fool. You have the heart of the Wolf in you. My life is yours.’ He lowered his head. ‘Avenge your husband.’

An eerie silence descended over the gulley as the Norscans watched Sväla step towards the kneeling chieftain and raise her knife. Even Ungaur stumbled to a halt, baring his needles in a snarl as he watched the exchange.

Sväla’s head pounded with an intoxicating mixture of hatred and confusion as she looked down at her kneeling enemy. Her fingers squeezed the handle of her knife as she considered slicing it down into his exposed neck and avenging Hauk. Her muscles trembled as she fought to keep control of her body. She saw her husband’s face as he said goodbye on the night of his death; but she also saw quite clearly what would happen if she killed Rurik. Another one of the Drékar would leap to replace him and the battle would continue as before. She could not be sure of the outcome, beyond the fact that the hillside would soon be piled deep with corpses. There was another, more difficult route she could take though. Its outcome was just as unclear, but she somehow knew it was the right thing to do. Instead of avenging her husband, she placed a hand on his killer’s shoulder and lowered her knife.

‘You’re a brave son of the Wolf, Rurik Iron Fist,’ she said, loud enough for the others to hear. She looked over at Ungaur. ‘We have already sacrificed far too many of our finest warriors. Völtar has not sent me to kill even more.’

Rurik looked up at her in confusion.

Sväla turned her back on him, trying to ignore the torrent of images that was now pouring though her head. She heard Rurik climb to his feet behind her and waited to feel his grotesque fist slamming into her head. Nothing happened, so she began to speak. ‘Men of the steppe,’ she called out, turning to the crowd of perplexed faces that surrounded her. ‘For too long now we have butchered our own kin in an attempt to lift this ancient curse. But Völtar has shown me another way. The Wolf has spoken.’

The bulky, fur-clad shape of Ungaur barged through the circle of men surrounding Sväla. He raised his staff and pointed the gnarled wood at her face. ‘Close your ears to her lies. She means to destroy us. Only a shaman can hear the word of the Wolf.’ He grabbed one of the tribesmen and shoved him towards her. ‘Kill the witch.’ He turned his needle teeth on the men nearest to him and a few of them shuffled forwards, afraid to defy the will of the shaman.

As the warriors approached Sväla, nervously fingering their weapons, Rurik stepped around her and blocked their way. He shook his head and raised his bloody hammer hand. ‘I killed her husband. My blood is hers by right but she has let me live.’ He glared at Ungaur. ‘This can only be the work of Völtar.’

One by one, other tribesmen stepped between Sväla and the shaman, surrounding her with a circle of stern, determined faces.

‘Sväla the Witch!’ cried Rurik, raising his bloody fist and glaring at Ungaur.

There was a long pause as the Norscans considered the implications of their next move. Then hundreds of voices echoed across the hillside as they answered Rurik’s call. ‘Sväla the Witch!’ they cried, slapping their palms against their bloody chests and lifting their spears to the heavens.

Svärd burst through the circle, gasping and covered in blood. He saw his mother standing behind the man who murdered his father and drew back his spear with a groan of rage. Before he could strike, the men on either side of him gripped his arms and knocked the weapon from his grip.

‘I will repay this debt,’ grunted Rurik, ignoring the furious young boy and turning towards Sväla.

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘Ör is divided into eight distinct, defensive circles,’ said the head of Doctor Rusas Schliemann. His eyes were rolling feverishly in their sockets and a halo of clockwork mechanisms trembled around his skull as he spoke, but his voice was calm and even. ‘Each of the eight circles is higher than the last, leading up to the inner citadel, which is a tower of skulls that reaches almost half a mile into the sky. Blood pours constantly from the tower, channelled through the circular walls until it reaches the outer defences, where it forms a deep, impassable lake. The lake of blood can only be crossed by a single bridge, the entire length of which is within reach of Ör’s archers and war machines.’

‘See?’ cried Sigvald, lifting the box higher. ‘Grateful or not, he cannot refuse to answer my questions.’ He tapped the casket that contained the severed head. ‘Víga-Barói’s surgeons have implanted the machine’s pistons directly into the doctor’s skull. If he refuses to speak, or even if he lies, they immediately pass fire into his brain.’ He laughed and reined in his horse, waiting for the rest of the hunting party to catch up. Like the prince, Víga-Barói and Schüler were on horseback, but they lacked Sigvald’s skill when it came to ploughing through the snow and he had already left them behind. ‘I’m sure the doctor will soon have no need for such inducements,’ he continued, ‘but you have to admire the surgeons’ ingenuity.’

Oddrún was following a few feet behind. They had only been out of the palace for half an hour, but his ungainly, hunched frame was covered in snow. He shook his head at the prince’s words. ‘You murdered him,’ he growled, trudging through the deep drifts to reach the prince’s horse.

‘No one has been murdered, Narrerback,’ snapped Sigvald. ‘I’ve taken all his wonderful knowledge and made it immortal.’ He waved at the sky. ‘Now his wisdom will be as timeless as the stars. I’ve given him a great gift.’

‘You should let him rest in peace,’ said Oddrún. ‘This is no way to repay him. You should let the man die.’

Sigvald’s smile faltered for a moment and he looked over at the hooded giant. Then he scowled. ‘This is important to me, Oddrún,’ he said, with a sudden hunger in his voice. ‘Mord Huk is in possession of something of special value. Something I need.’

‘At any cost?’ asked the giant. ‘Think of the implications. If you lead an army against Ör, all the ancient pacts will be broken. Mord Huk would be free to strike back at the Gilded Palace.’

Sigvald shook his head violently and let out a despairing howl. ‘By the gods, Oddrún,’ he cried, ‘can’t you just let me live?’ He raised his sword. ‘Remember your–’

At that moment the other riders crested the brow of a small hill and Sigvald finished his sentence with the word ‘friends!’ He turned his scowl into a smile. ‘The doctor has just told me how easy it would be to enter Mord Huk’s citadel.’

‘You’re insane,’ muttered Oddrún under his breath. As he shook his head, his hood fell back slightly and revealed a brief glimpse of pale grey flesh. He quickly pulled the sackcloth back into place, and looked back at the ground as the others reached the top of the slope.

Baron Schüler and Víga-Barói rode up to the prince’s side.

Víga-Barói had draped a fur-lined cloak over his purple armour, but his cruel face was exposed to the elements. As he approached, he shivered and ran a hand over his sodden, grey hair. ‘Why would anybody wish to enter Mord Huk’s citadel?’ he purred, turning from Sigvald to Oddrún with a confused expression. ‘We would not be welcome in Ör.’

Sigvald slammed the casket shut and strapped it to his saddle, with the doctor’s muffled voice still audible within. Then he turned his horse to face Víga-Barói’s. He gave Baron Schüler a conspiratorial grin before continuing. ‘We would fight our way in. You, out of everyone, should see the appeal in that.’ He nodded to the sword at his side. ‘Think of the carnage if we were to storm the place. Think of the pain you could inflict on Mord Huk’s lumbering morons.’

Víga-Barói looked from Sigvald to the baron and frowned. ‘Prince, I have often warned you of Mord Huk’s growing power. His armies have taken possession of great tracts of your land. You have never seemed to consider it a matter of importance.’ He shook his head. ‘But now it would take a force of incredible strength to even reach the borders of our own kingdom, never mind attack the fortress of Ör.’ His agitation was clearly growing as he considered Sigvald’s words, but his voice stayed as silky as ever. ‘If you wished to protect your kingdom, Geld-Prince, why have we allowed the Blood God’s legions to capture all of our outlying defences? And let our own numbers become so diminished? After the various amusements we have enjoyed over the decades, I could barely raise an army of a thousand men. And on top of that, Ör’s defences are legendary. It’s impossible to reach the inner citadel if Mord Huk does not wish it.’

‘Details,’ interrupted Sigvald, waving his hand dismissively and losing interest in the conversation. ‘Look!’ he cried, pointing into the snowstorm. ‘There it is!’ He kicked his horse into a trot and rode off through the snowdrifts. ‘You were right, baron,’ he called back. ‘I’ve never seen such a thing, outside of a painting.’

Víga-Barói turned his permanent sneer on Baron Schüler for a moment, before racing after the prince.

Sigvald’s horse thundered through the snow towards a shimmering frozen lake. Flying above him was a small bird.

Baron Schüler turned his own horse towards the lake and tried to keep up with the others, while behind him, Oddrún stumbled, grunting, through the deep drifts.

‘Prince, wait!’ cried Víga-Barói as they reached the edge of the ice, but Sigvald rode on unconcerned, not even slowing down as his horse’s hooves clattered out onto the lake’s surface.

‘What have you done?’ asked Víga-Barói as the baron reached his side.

‘Done?’ replied Schüler, as he met the knight’s fierce gaze.

‘Until you arrived, none of us could even persuade him to defend his kingdom. Now he wants to launch an attack against an impregnable fortress.’

The baron shook his head as he watched Sigvald charging across the frozen lake with the bird gliding over his head. ‘How can that be? He fights like a daemon. Are you telling me he’s never even waged a war?’

Víga-Barói leant back in his saddle and sighed. ‘Of course he’s waged war. The prince is blessed in ways you cannot imagine. Before we seized the Gilded Palace, nearly two hundred years ago, I marched with him to countless victories. The Old World has never seen such a warrior. But as with everything, he is so easily bored.’ The knight paused, clearly regretting his candour. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that Oddrún had nearly caught up with them and he seemed unwilling to say any more in front of the chancellor.

Schüler was staring at the flashes of gold that described Sigvald’s movement through the snow. Then he frowned. ‘Did you say two hundred years ago?’

The knight laughed. ‘Oh yes, baron. Sigvald the Magnificent is not your average youth. He’s lived for nearly three centuries.’ His grey eyes sparkled mischievously. ‘We should follow him onto the ice…’ He waved one of his gauntleted hands at the lake. ‘In case something happens to him.’

‘It’s not safe,’ grunted Oddrún from a few feet away. ‘The ice won’t hold.’

Baron Schüler looked round at the hooded giant. His eyes flashed with an emotion that could either have been fear or excitement. ‘Then what about Sigvald?’

Oddrún gave no reply but he seemed to be watching the baron closely.

Víga-Barói nodded and waved again at the ice. ‘You’re right, baron. Come.’ He tapped his armour-clad leg against the side of his horse, urging it onto the ice. At first the animal refused to move, rolling its eyes nervously and edging back from the lake, but Víga-Barói kicked harder and forced his mount forward. As he rode, he waved at the endless expanse of whiteness that surrounded them. ‘It’s not just the ice that’s dangerous out here. The prince’s kingdom is no longer the haven he imagines.’

The baron looked around to see what the knight was referring to, but he could see nothing beyond the fierce storm. He muttered an oath under his breath and rode out onto the lake as slowly as he could, keeping a few feet between him and the knight.

The ice creaked and groaned like the deck of a ship as they edged out towards the centre of the lake. Sigvald was oblivious to their approach. He had opened the casket again and was speaking to the severed head. The bird was barely visible as it soared through the spiralling snowflakes, but every now and then it would let out a peevish caw, taunting the prince as he raced after it. As the two knights peered through the snow at him, Sigvald leant back in his saddle, swinging a net around his head. Just as he drew back the net to throw it, the horse slipped and stumbled, sending the prince flying from its back. There was a brief flash of gold armour and then the prince vanished from view.

Víga-Barói cursed and dismounted. ‘Quick,’ he snapped at the baron, before sprinting off across the ice.

The baron watched the knight vanish into the blinding glare. Then he smiled and turned his horse around, riding slowly back towards the land. ‘So easy to manipulate,’ he muttered under his breath. After just a few feet, however, the smile dropped from his face.

A tall shadow had appeared at the edge of the lake, silhouetted against the snow.

‘Who’s that?’ he muttered, wiping the ice from his face. ‘Oddrún?’

As he approached the shape, he saw that it could not be Sigvald’s hunchbacked chancellor. It was almost as tall as Oddrún, but where he was lanky and swathed in filthy rags, this man was thickset and wore plates of blood-red armour, edged with tall brass spikes and draped with dozens of bleached skulls. His face was hidden behind a brutal, horned helmet and he carried a huge, two-handed axe. The baron felt a chill of fear as he recognised him. It was one of the knights who had butchered his men during the journey north: one of the knights Sigvald had spied from the palace rooftops. As Schüler looked on in horror, more shadows appeared, spreading out along the edge of the lake and blocking his way to safety. A deep metallic laughter rang out from within their helmets.

The baron cursed and looked back over his shoulder. The others were nowhere to be seen. ‘I’m a knight of the Gilded Palace,’ he called out, conscious of how small his voice sounded in the swirling vastness of the snowstorm. ‘Prince Sigvald the Magnificent is my patron.’

The knights began to laugh harder, causing the skulls to rattle against their serrated armour. One of them stepped forward and slammed his axe down into the ice. There was a deep snapping sound as the surface of the lake began to crack and splinter, sending a jagged line straight towards the baron’s feet.

Schüler gasped and backed his horse away from the quickly spreading network of cracks. ‘Sigvald!’ he cried, rising up in his saddle and attempting to lift his voice above the howling wind. ‘We’re attacked!’

There was no response and some of the other knights hammered their axes down into the ice, causing it to fracture and split into dozens of separate plates.

Schüler drew his sword and looked around with growing desperation. He was no coward, but there were at least eight of the armour-clad brutes. He steered his horse back from the edge of the lake, with the dark lines of the cracks following after him like crooked fingers.

He felt a rush of air as a horse clattered past him. The movement was so fast he hardly had time to register it before he saw one of the horned knights stumble and reach for his throat. As Schüler tried to control his mount, he saw the knight’s head topple from his shoulders. He dropped to his knees, trying to stem the fountain of blood that erupted from his neck and then crashed to the ground, dead.

The other knights whirled around in confusion. The only sign of their attacker was a cloud of snow and a quickly disappearing line of hoof prints trailing off towards the hills. They turned their backs on Schüler and crowded together, muttering to each other in a thick, guttural language and scouring the snow for signs of another attack.

‘I tamed him,’ cried Sigvald, riding back into view. He was holding one of his hands in the air and perched on his wrist was the bird. It looked just like a raven but its feathers were as pure and white as the snow. The prince was looking straight past the group of knights and grinning excitedly over their heads at the baron. ‘The good doctor has proven his worth yet again.’

As the beheaded knight pumped his lifeblood out across the snow and ice, the other warriors turned their featureless helms in Sigvald’s direction. ‘Filthy pleasure seeker,’ growled one of them, levelling his axe at the prince.

Sigvald seemed oblivious to the danger as he rode back down the slope, admiring his new pet.

As one, the knights charged towards him, drawing back their axes as they ploughed through the deep drifts.

As the first one approached him, Sigvald looked away from the bird with an expression of mild irritation. ‘Be careful,’ he said, lashing out with the rapier he held in his other hand. The blade seemed to have a will of its own, twisting around the warrior’s axe with an undulating, serpentine grace, and plunging straight through a gap in his plate armour.

The knight stiffened as Sigvald’s sword briefly emerged from his back, then he crashed down into the snow with a grunt, dropping his axe and clutching at one of his armpits in agony. Fresh blood sprayed between the fingers of his gauntlets and he rolled back towards the lake.

Sigvald rode slowly on, calling out to the baron as he fought. ‘The doctor taught me a simple phrase. One the elves use to subdue the great eagles of their homeland.’ He frowned and rammed his sword through the visor of another knight, impaling his skull and then withdrawing his blade in a shower of blood and sparks. ‘Look how odd it is,’ he cried, lifting the bird higher, allowing the moonlight to wash over its flawless white feathers. ‘A white raven. Have you ever seen anything so strange?’ He shook his head in wonder as he planted his boot in the chest of the next knight to lunge at him. ‘Such an orphan of nature. So different and beautiful. So perfect. What a wonderful addition to my menagerie.’

As Sigvald’s horse trotted calmly through the scrum of knights, the prince seemed quite indifferent to their fierce war cries and vicious attacks. His sword arm weaved back and forth with lightning precision, skewering heads and slicing throats, but Sigvald only had eyes for the raven.

There was another loud crack and the plates of ice around Schüler began to pitch and roll, swinging up from the ink-black water and sending his horse stumbling backwards. The baron grunted and kicked his horse into action, sending it galloping over the broadening cracks. To his relief, the sound of the horse’s hooves quickly changed from a clatter to a thud, but he was far from safe. As he approached the soldiers, one of them rushed in his direction, raising his axe over his head as he charged through the snow.

Schüler raised his sword in time to block the blow, but the axe was so big his sword buckled under the impact and he toppled from his horse. He cursed as he thudded to the ground and dropped the blade. As the knight charged towards him, Schüler threw a wild punch, clanging his armoured fist against his opponent’s helmet and sending him sprawling back into the snow. Schüler leapt onto his chest, trying to wrench the axe from his hands. Even after weeks of Sigvald’s hospitality, the baron’s body was still weak from his long journey through the Chaos Wastes. As he wrestled with the knight, his arms began to tremble and he found himself being forced slowly back. Eventually, the knight threw him off with a bellicose roar and clambered to his feet, still clutching his huge axe.

Schüler scrambled backwards through the snow as the knight loomed over him, raising his axe to strike again. Then the baron groaned in relief as another, even taller figure rose up behind the knight and wrapped its filthy, bandaged arms around him.

‘Oddrún,’ gasped the baron as the chancellor hurled the knight down into the snow.

The knight rolled to one side and clambered immediately to his feet, spitting out a curse and drawing back his axe again.

Oddrún had no weapon and seemed unwilling to attack.

The knight’s axe thudded into his hunched body and he span backwards, crumpling into the snow without a sound.

‘Oddrún!’ cried Sigvald in a horrified voice, leaping down from his horse.

The knight in the horned helmet crouched low, bracing himself for the impact of Sigvald’s attack; but before the prince could even reach him, he roared in agony and toppled backwards.

Standing behind him was Víga-Barói. He had drawn two meat hooks from his belt and jammed them into the knight’s breastplate. As the horned brute screamed in pain and fury, Víga-Barói wrenched open his armour leaving behind two ragged trenches in his chest where the hooks had sliced through him. As the knight slumped backwards, coughing and clutching his bloody chest, Víga-Barói moved with lightning speed, pinning the knight in place by jamming the hooks back into his chest and stamping them into the frozen ground with his iron-clad boots. As the warrior’s screams grew even more desperate, Víga-Barói drew another two meat hooks from his belt, tore off the man’s leg armour and sliced the hooks down through his thighs. In the space of a few seconds, the knight had gone from a towering armour-clad monster to a screaming, defenceless mess of torn flesh and straining muscles.

‘Your highness,’ said Víga-Barói quietly, bowing at the approaching prince and then gesturing to the supine warrior. ‘Would you like the honour?’

Sigvald did not even acknowledge Víga-Barói as he raced to Oddrún’s side. His chancellor was lying in a motionless heap, with snow settling quickly over his sackcloth robes.

‘Oddrún?’ cried the prince, with a note of panic in his voice as he cradled the giant’s head in his arms.

A low gargling noise came from within the hood and the chancellor gently freed himself from Sigvald’s grip. Oddrún backed away and climbed to his feet, apparently unharmed by the axe that had sunk deep into his chest. The only sign of his injury was a thin tear in his robes. He shuffled away from the others and raised his hand, indicating that they should not follow.

Sigvald looked suddenly embarrassed by his display of concern and stood up, smoothing his long hair out of his face and wiping the blood from his polished armour. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, to no one in particular. He looked around at his other companions. Víga-Barói was waiting patiently next to his struggling, whining captive and Baron Schüler was still sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath and massaging his throbbing arms.

‘Who are these idiots?’ asked the prince, finally seeming to notice the piles of bodies he had left scattered across the snow. He stepped up to the one survivor: the man that Víga-Barói had staked to the ground. ‘Who are you, idiot?’ he asked, as his handsome face twisted into a childish pout. ‘Who are you to pit yourself against Sigvald the Magnificent?’ Receiving no reply, he nodded at Víga-Barói, indicating that he should remove the man’s helmet.

Without his armour, the warrior was surprisingly human. His face was white with pain and speckled with blood, but it was still the face of a normal man. He glared up at Sigvald with dark, burning eyes and spat defiantly onto his own bloody chest.

Sigvald shrugged and looked at Víga-Barói. ‘It looks like you have your next subject.’ He stooped a little closer to the struggling man and tapped the tip of his sword on his ribs. There was a symbol tattooed on his chest that looked like a cross between an X and a stylised skull. ‘The Blood God,’ he said, tracing his sword over the icon. ‘This is one of Mord Huk’s men.’ He looked up at Víga-Barói. ‘Do what you like to him, but don’t let him die. He might be useful.’ Then he frowned and looked at his arm. ‘The raven,’ he cried, spinning on the spot as he scoured the heavens for the bird. ‘There he goes,’ he gasped, pointing his sword at a distant flash of white, gliding beneath the pregnant clouds. ‘Perfect!’ he cried, letting out a burst of delighted laughter.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘You’re leaving me behind?’ cried Freydís, shaking her head in disbelief as she rose from Sigvald’s bed.

Sigvald raised his hands defensively as he backed away from her. They were both naked and as he dropped from the bed he plucked his armour from a pile of empty bottles and dirty plates. ‘Someone has to stay. Who else can I trust? You and Ansgallür must ensure the safety of the Gilded Palace, if I’m to properly defend our borders.’

Freydís let out a scream of such fury that it caused several of the prince’s courtesans to leap from beneath the bed sheets and dash from the chamber, clutching their clothes from the floor as they went. ‘You’re a liar!’ she howled, flinging a silver plate at his head. ‘You don’t care what happens to this palace. Any more than you care about what happens to me. You’ve no interest in defending anything.’

Sigvald ducked and the plate clattered harmlessly across walls, leaving a ruby-red stripe of wine sauce across his face. He wiped the sticky substance from his cheek and shook his head in disgust. ‘Look at this,’ he muttered, turning a furious glare on his wife. ‘How dare you question the will of Sigvald the Magnificent?’ He shook his head in genuine disbelief. ‘How dare you?’

The princess flicked her long black hair from her face and levelled a trembling finger at Sigvald. ‘You’re lying! Admit it! You would only start a war for your own amusement. Mord Huk must have something you want. That’s the only explanation. You wouldn’t risk a single broken fingernail for your subjects.’

Sigvald’s face blushed bright red. ‘Ansgallür!’ he howled, shaking with rage and flinging his breastplate at Freydís’s head. ‘Take this wretched woman away from me!’

The princess laughed bitterly as the armour clanged against the wall. ‘Why am I surprised at being abandoned?’ she cried, with tears welling in her eyes. ‘You’ve no love for anything. Anything other than yourself, that is.’

The smell of half-digested meat flooded the bedchamber as the gelatinous head of Ansgallür squeezed through the doorframe. His huge, watery eyes surveyed the carnage in the room and the two naked combatants at its centre. He was careful not to look directly at the princess’s face as, with a fluid, serpentine movement, one of his long limbs shot across the room and wrapped itself around her slender frame. As the princess drew breath to let out another scream, he wrapped another tentacle firmly around her head, muffling her cries with his rubbery flesh.

‘My lord,’ he said, as the mute princess struggled in his grip. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘No!’ roared Sigvald. Then he took a deep breath and repeated himself in a more controlled voice. ‘No,’ he said, as he wiped the rest of the sauce from his cheek. He stepped beneath a nearby window and lifted his chin so that the moonlight washed over his face. ‘Am I harmed in any way?’

Ansgallür’s tentacles carried him across the room in a series of strange, lurching swoops. Upon reaching Sigvald’s side he shook his head. ‘No, my prince. Your skin is as immaculate as ever.’ He looked at the food, wine and clothes that covered the floor and grinned. ‘It’s a wonderful testament to your virtuous habits.’

Sigvald’s lips curled back in a sneer. ‘Don’t try my patience, Ansgallür.’ He jabbed a finger at the huge face swaying in front of him. ‘I’ve had–’ he cut himself short with a gasp of pain and clutched his head. ‘That wine,’ he groaned. He looked down at the empty bottles. ‘Please kill whoever chose it.’

Ansgallür stretched his monstrous mouth into a smile. ‘With pleasure, my prince.’ He drew a small green vial from beneath his nest of coiled limbs and held it up to Sigvald. ‘Is there anything I can give you?’

‘No,’ snapped Sigvald, eyeing the small vial with suspicion. ‘Well,’ he muttered, snatching it from Ansgallür’s grip and emptying its contents in one swallow, ‘maybe.’ His eyes widened and he staggered back towards the bed. One of Ansgallür’s limbs reached out to steady him and for a few seconds the prince lolled weakly in the monster’s grip. Then he shook his head and laughed. ‘What was that?’ he asked, smiling as he weaved drunkenly towards the door. ‘No, on second thoughts don’t tell me.’ He laughed and ran his fingers through his hair, shaking his head again. ‘I feel much better.’

‘My prince,’ said Ansgallür, waving to the gold armour that was scattered around the bedchamber.

Sigvald looked back at him in confusion, still swaying slightly from the effects of the green vial. Then he looked down at himself, laughing as he remembered that he was naked. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, grabbing a silk sheet from the bed and wrapping it round himself like a toga. Then he stumbled off through a series of antechambers, knocking into chairs and muttering under his breath as he went.

Sigvald adjusted the silk sheet as he entered Víga-Barói’s surgeries. Whatever Ansgallür had plied him with had left him unable to walk properly. As he staggered past the mounds of half-dismembered patients he knocked into several of the tables and sent knives and limbs tumbling onto the bloodstained floor. The light in this wing of the palace came from huge, hissing oil lamps screwed to the walls and it was almost as bright as daylight. Víga-Barói’s surgeons insisted it was necessary for their more delicate operations, but as Sigvald struggled to walk in a straight line, he found such incandescence completely disorientating. Cruel-looking implements lined the walls and body parts were stacked in the doorways, blocking many of the passages. It took Sigvald nearly an hour to find the room he was looking for.

Víga-Barói’s private chambers resembled a macabre workshop: teetering instruments of torture filled every available space, each of them draped with razor-sharp wires and bloody, iron clamps. Sigvald paid the machines no attention as he weaved between them and dropped heavily into a chair. ‘What have you discovered?’ he asked, sensing movement in the far corner of the room.

‘My prince,’ gasped the knight, remaining in the shadows.

Sigvald closed his eyes and let out a sigh of pleasure. ‘I feel much better,’ he muttered. As he lolled weakly in the chair, he had the vague impression that Víga-Barói was extracting himself from one of the devices; there was a sudden patter of blood on the flagstones and a creak of rusty metal, but Sigvald was far too comfortable to lift his head and see exactly what his captain was doing.

After a few minutes, Víga-Barói stepped in front of him. He was clad in his usual purple breastplate, but it looked as though he had dressed in a hurry. Some of the small hooks were not properly attached to his flesh and his scarred face was flushed with an unusual amount of colour. There were also splashes of fresh blood on his forearms and beneath his long fingernails.

Sigvald had long ago exhausted his interest in Víga-Barói’s particular vices, but he could not help noticing the Sigmarite monk huddled at the far end of the room. Standing next to him was Víga-Barói’s chief surgeon, the strange creature called Hazül. Both of them were drenched in fresh blood.

Sigvald nodded at Hazül and it bowed in reply. As it stooped, the lilac strands of hair drifting around it parted briefly to reveal a knotted, wiry mass of razors and crudely sewn skin.

‘Are you sure there is no danger in keeping such pets?’ Sigvald asked, slurring his words slightly as he nodded at the monk.

‘Brother Bürmann?’ Víga-Barói’s sneer grew more pronounced. ‘I suppose there might be.’ He shrugged and looked across at him. The priest looked utterly dazed and seemed unaware of the bloody knife in his hand. ‘But if he’d completely lost his faith, he would cease to amuse me.’

Sigvald yawned. ‘I see.’ He rose from his chair and lurched towards the cowled figure.

As the monk watched the intoxicated, half-naked youth stumbling towards him, a faint look of disgust or fear flashed in his eyes.

‘You’re right,’ said Sigvald, grinning as he prodded him in the chest. ‘He’s judging me. He must remember something of his past.’ He laughed and pulled his silk sheet a little higher. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I haven’t had the upbringing you have.’ He turned to Hazül. ‘Does he ever speak?’

Hazül shook its head and waved at the scar on the side of the priest’s neck.

‘Ah, yes, of course.’

‘My prince,’ said Víga-Barói, sounding slightly flustered. ‘Is this merely a social call? You asked a question when you arrived.’

Sigvald turned to him with a confused frown. ‘A question?’ He dropped back in the chair and shook his head. ‘I can’t... Oh, yes,’ he said, sitting up and looking around the chamber. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

‘A drink? No. Is that why you came?’

‘No? Really?’ Sigvald shook his head. Then he climbed to his feet again. ‘Of course that’s not why I came here. I came to ask you about the warrior we captured yesterday. Mord Huk’s soldier.’

Víga-Barói raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, of course,’ he said, looking relieved. ‘Yes, he was a difficult nut to crack. The followers of the Blood God have no real fear of physical pain, you understand, so Hazül’s usual methods were not very effective.’ He waved the prince to a door behind the surgeon. ‘Let me show you.’

He led the prince past a series of locked doors and down a narrow stairwell. Sigvald had to grip the wall as he lurched down the ancient, worn steps that led to Víga-Barói’s cellars. As they descended, the harsh light of the lamps was replaced by a soft, pink glow. ‘The Blood God’s minions do, however, have a profound dislike of sorcery,’ continued the knight as they reached the bottom step and stepped into a small, unfurnished room.

At the centre of the room was hung the body of the prisoner; or rather, the various parts of his body were hanging in the centre of the room, suspended by a thick web of pink light. Each of the man’s organs and limbs were held roughly in place by the glowing strands and as the energy waxed and waned, the body parts swayed slightly, causing the disembodied head to gasp in agony. Hunched on the stone floor in a pool of the man’s blood was a small, hooded figure, no bigger than a child. At the sound of their footfalls, the robes shifted slightly and Sigvald saw a face that was more fish than man looking back at him from within the hood. Its huge, blank eyes were sat on the side of a pink, scaly head and its large pouting mouth was twisted down in a fixed grimace. The pink light was trailing up from the fish man’s crumpled robes and he was clearly the source of the power that was holding the body aloft.

‘As you can see,’ said Víga-Barói, waving at the bizarre display. ‘I had to enlist the help of Énka.’

Sigvald gave the hunched, stunted figure a brusque nod and stepped closer to the trembling body parts, being careful to avoid the steady shower of blood that was dripping to the floor. He smiled in appreciation of the sorcerer’s magic. ‘And by doing this, you have been able to find out what exactly?’

‘Everything,’ replied the knight, stepping under the shower of gore and closing his eyes as the prisoner’s blood washed over his upturned face. He patted the tiny, hooded figure on the shoulder and then stepped to the prince’s side. ‘I have learnt everything there is to know about the fortress of Ör,’ he said, wiping his face. ‘I can now say with complete confidence that it is impregnable.’ He leant close to the prince and lowered his voice. ‘I’m not sure what your friend Baron Schüler has told you, but an attack on Mord Huk would be suicide.’

Sigvald’s smile dropped from his face. He glared at the knight in silence for a few seconds, then grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall. As he did so, he noticed that the knight let out a small whimper of pleasure, but he did not loosen his grip. ‘Énka?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder at the blank-eyed creature.

‘Sigvald,’ replied the sorcerer with a liquid gurgle.

‘Let the man down.’

The sorcerer looked at the pile of twitching organs hanging over his head and opened his mouth slightly, as though he were about to speak. Then he seemed to think better of it and closed his mouth again. He lowered his webbed hands, releasing the prisoner’s remains from the dazzling mesh. The pile of gore slapped down onto the stone floor, splattering the sorcerer with blood and viscera.

There was a faint glow of vestigial light leaking from the sorcerer’s fingers, but the rest of the room was now almost totally dark.

‘Now, Énka,’ said Sigvald, tightening his grip on Víga-Barói’s throat. ‘I want you to perform another spell for me.’

‘Sire?’ gurgled the strange creature, spitting blood from its mouth.

‘I want you to strip all trace of sensation from Víga-Barói’s body.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said the sorcerer, clambering out from beneath the pile of limbs and organs and stepping over to the prince’s side.

Sigvald saw by the growing look of terror in Víga-Barói’s eyes that he did understand. ‘I mean that I want you to make his body utterly numb,’ he said, looking down at the sorcerer. ‘I want you to leave him unable to ever feel another physical sensation. So that even if he were to put his hand into a roaring fire, he would feel no pain at all.’

‘Ah, I see,’ replied the fish man. As he nodded his head, light rippled along his pink scales. ‘That can be easily done.’ He closed his eyes and after a few seconds the light around his webbed fingers began to grow brighter.

‘Wait!’ cried Víga-Barói, twisting in Sigvald’s grip and attempting to free himself. ‘What are you doing, prince?’ His usually soft tones rose into a high-pitched wail. ‘I beg you! Don’t do this to me! After all these years! After everything I’ve done for you!’

‘After everything you’ve done for me?’ snarled Sigvald, pressing his face close to Víga-Barói’s. ‘I’ve allowed you to indulge your every whim for nearly three centuries, you spineless worm. And now, when I ask you to perform one simple task in return, you can’t even give me this tiniest bit of help.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Let’s see how you enjoy a little disappointment of your own.’

‘Step aside, prince,’ said Énka, opening his bulging eyes and fixing one of them on Víga-Barói. ‘The spell is ready.’

‘Wait!’ screamed the knight. ‘There was something! He did tell me something that could help. Tell Énka to stop!’

Sigvald revealed his perfect teeth in a broad grin and held up a hand to the sorcerer. ‘In that case, you may leave, Énka,’ he said, lowering Víga-Barói to the floor and allowing him to collapse into a crumpled, whimpering heap. ‘My friend and I have private matters to discuss.’

As Sigvald strode out into his throne room, he was once more clad in his gleaming gold armour. In addition, he now had a circular, mirrored shield strapped to his arm and a dazzling white cloak trailing from his shoulders. As he stepped up onto the raised dais at the end of the long chamber, he lifted his sword to the assembled throng and nodded.

‘Sigvald the Magnificent,’ cried Víga-Barói from the foot of the steps, lifting his own sword in reply.

‘Sigvald the Magnificent,’ cried the prince’s army, with such force that the sound reverberated around the vaulted ceiling, rising to a volume that seemed too great to have come from only a thousand throats.

Baron Schüler felt a rush of panic as he looked up from his place in the front row. The prince had replaced his habitual grin with a stern, regal expression that filled the baron with awe. What am I doing, he thought? How could I send him into danger? Schüler knew that only an opponent like Mord Huk would have any chance of ending Sigvald’s reign, but suddenly the idea of a dead Sigvald horrified him. What kind of monster was he, to wish the death of such a being? What could be worth such a crime? Then another two figures followed Sigvald onto the dais and Schüler had his answer. Led by the repulsive figure of Ansgallür the Famished came Princess Freydís. She had hidden her flawless skin behind a dress of tight, purple silk and her face was veiled, but Schüler still groaned at the sight of her. He felt a sharp, physical pain in his chest as she turned her head briefly in his direction. His pulse began to thump in his ears and his muscles trembled with the effort of staying still. ‘Forgive me, Sigvald,’ he whispered, feeling the initial on his chest begin to throb.

‘The Decadent Host,’ cried Sigvald. ‘My beautiful children!’ He kept his sword aloft as he surveyed the odd assortment of creatures arrayed before him. Knights clad in baroque, purple armour stood side by side with jet-eyed women, whose alabaster limbs ended in cruel, serrated talons. Looming behind them were pink, hairless horses, whose heads were shrouded in nests of writhing tentacles and whose tails arched up into the venomous spikes of scorpions. Above this forest of insectoid limbs and pulsing flesh, another collection of creatures fluttered and swooped around the pillars of the throne room. Some were no bigger than bats, but others were the size of men, and all of them had vibrant, purple skin, black leathery wings, and the leering faces of gargoyles. At the sound of Sigvald’s praise, the creatures raised their voices again in an ecstatic, wordless scream.

The deafening cry was even louder than the first, and Sigvald finally allowed himself to smile. ‘We have idled long enough,’ he cried, rushing to the edge of the dais, as though he were about to dive amongst his adoring followers. Instead of leaping, however, he waved his sword at them in a decorous flourish and began to laugh. ‘Between us we have created an idyll the like of which the world has never seen. Whole nations of men have come and gone, never dreaming that such pleasures were possible.’ His face flushed with colour and he rushed across the dais, leaning out towards his army as he warmed to his theme. ‘No one has experienced the things we have. No one has done the things we have.’ As he grew more impassioned, his face began to turn purple and he stumbled to a halt, shaking his head violently from side to side.

The crowd fell silent as Sigvald seemed to be consumed by some kind of fit.

Baron Schüler frowned. As Sigvald shook his head faster, it looked for a moment that the prince was about to fall over.

Then, as quickly as it had started, the fit passed and Sigvald began rushing backwards and forwards again, a little less steady on his feet, but no less excited.

‘The world is peopled with witless, passionless cowards,’ he cried, sending a trail of spit out across the figures at the foot of the dais. ‘None of them have the imagination to understand what we have created here.’ He raised his hand and clutched at the air. ‘But they would take it nonetheless.’

The army let out another roar, but his time it was a cry of furious denial.

‘Yes, my children, they would take it from us. Even now, Mord Huk and his meat-headed butchers are marching brazenly across our borders, edging ever closer to the Gilded Palace. They want to crush this beautiful paradise beneath their clumsy hooves.’

The crowd roared again and several of the creatures began to thrash their claws and wings against the soldiers that surrounded them, itching to tear something apart.

From the bottom of the dais, Víga-Barói singled out Baron Schüler in the front row. His grey eyes burned with hatred as he glared at the bearded knight. As the crowd’s frenzy grew in volume and violence, Víga-Barói remained stock-still. His only movement was to fold his hands firmly across his plum-coloured armour. He clutched his chest so tightly that some of the hooks embedded in his skin punctured the palms of his hands, and thin trails of blood began to trickle around the serpentine designs of his cuirass.

Baron Schüler was as oblivious to the knight’s glare as he was to everything else. As Sigvald continued his impassioned speech, the baron kept his gaze fixed on the princess. He cursed under his breath as Freydís strained to free herself from the chain that linked her to her guardian.

‘We must put aside our games and stop this abomination,’ cried Sigvald, shaking his sword again. ‘Although it’s beneath us, we must ride out and defeat them. I will not abandon you to such joyless dullards. Not after all that we have achieved together.’ He waved to a tall figure, swaying in the shadows at the back of the hall. Oddrún was clutching the brass casket that contained Doctor Schliemann’s head. ‘My advisors have shown me a way to enter the home of these slavering dogs. I’ve learnt the secrets of Ör. Are you ready to sate your desires in the citadel of the Blood God? My children, will you join me?’

As one, Sigvald’s warriors raised their weapons aloft, screaming in ecstasy and howling in tribute to their glorious prince.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sväla waited quietly as the chieftains filed into the mead hall and joined the circle of tribesmen that surrounded her. The air was heavy with fumes, drifting up from dozens of ceremonial urns and collecting beneath the low, thatched roof in thick, rolling clouds. The whole scene had a surreal, insubstantial air that reminded Sväla of her visions. The chieftains were bitter enemies and to see them gathered together was like a strange dream. All three of them were the proud survivors of countless wars and the rulers of great Norscan tribes, but as they sat cross-legged on the dusty ground, not one of them would meet her eye. She took no pleasure in humbling such fierce warriors, but their fear was her only chance.

Rurik Iron Fist, Halldórr the Black and Sturll the Hewer had all been her childhood playmates, but as the curse worsened, the Fallen had fragmented into ever smaller and ever weaker factions. It was nearly three decades since the three men had met in peace and their discomfort was clear. Their hulking, muscled shoulders trembled with suppressed violence as they fixed their gaze on the ground in front of them.

Sväla looked around at the rest of the circle. On her left was Valdür the Old, with his crumpled leathery smile and his flash of silver hair. To her right was her scowling son, Svärd, still so young, but already twisted by bitterness and loss. Dotted around the circle she saw dozens of other familiar faces. The elders who had blessed her marriage and anointed Hauk as Chieftain of the Fallen; even the old witch, Ürsüla, hunched and smirking at the chieftains from beneath her rags and fetishes. Only one of the faces was undaunted as Sväla met his eye. Ungaur the Blessed watched her with a forced, fatherly smile that could not mask his fury. His black needle-teeth glittered slightly behind his thick beard as he stared at her from within the jaws of his wolf skin.

Once the chieftains had taken their place, she began to speak. The hall was utterly silent and she had no need to raise her voice. ‘Brothers of the Steppe,’ she said. ‘We are cursed.’

Ungaur ground his staff in the dirt and opened his mouth to speak, but a stern glance from Sväla silenced him.

‘No one here can deny it,’ she continued. ‘All of us have tried to appease Völtar in our own way. Some with blood rites, and some by turning their backs on their kin and their ancestors.’

At this, Rurik shook his red Mohican from side to side in mute denial, but he did not interrupt Sväla’s speech.

‘Whatever route we have taken, all of us have failed,’ she said. ‘The curse remains. Every year we lose more of our hunting grounds to our enemies and every year our children dwindle in number.’ She looked down at the two rings on her finger. ‘Despite all the brave sacrifices that have been made, we’re dying. After a few more winters like the last, we won’t just be fallen, we’ll be forgotten.’

Sväla paused and looked round the circle again. Still, with the exception of Ungaur, none of the tribesmen would meet her eye. She nodded as she remembered how they had been cowed. Each of the great chieftains had defied her calls to reunite the Fallen. None of them had even considered her a worthy opponent. But her visions had led her to victory after incredible victory and now they were terrified. She knew what they believed: that Völtar must have taken possession of her flesh, driving the old Sväla out and turning her body into a vessel for His immortal power. She was no longer even sure they were wrong.

She waited a moment to let her words sink in, and then continued, looking directly at the three chieftains. ‘I have brought some of you to your knees. I know you must despise me, but see beyond your pride. I didn’t fight you out of bloodlust or avarice.’ She leant forward and finally raised her voice above a whisper. ‘Völtar has spoken to me!’ she cried, causing her audience to flinch in shock. ‘The Wolf has shown me the way to salvation.’

At this, a few of the tribesmen and chieftains looked up. There was a gleam of hope in their eyes as they finally dared to study the wiry, tattooed woman who had summoned them.

‘We’re not to blame for this,’ she said, casting her gaze around the circle. ‘It was never us who earned Völtar’s wrath.’

‘Lies,’ spat Ungaur, unable to control himself any longer. ‘Völtar has judged us and found us wanting. If you carry on with this–’

‘Silence!’ cried Rurik, levelling his mutated arm at the shaman. Since Sväla had spared his life, the chieftain had worn the haunted, guilty expression of a trespasser, but he had also watched over his enemy’s wife with a fierce, unblinking determination.

Ungaur gasped, unused to being addressed in such a way. He opened his mouth to reply, but noticed that the whole circle had turned to face him. All of them were glaring with such passion that he thought they might attack him. One of the chieftains, the bear-like brute named Sturll the Hewer, had even drawn a pair of meat cleavers from behind his back, and looked as though he were about to leap across the circle and bury them in Ungaur’s face. The shaman shrugged and revealed his black spines in an unconvincing smile.

Sväla nodded at Rurik and continued. ‘I’ve communed with the Wolf and looked deep into our past. I’ve seen the true source of the curse.’ She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘Nearly twelve generations ago, when the Fallen were known by other names, a child was born to this tribe; a child by the name of Sigvald.’

Silence followed her words and the members of the circle looked at each other in confusion. Only one of them showed any sign of recognition. Ungaur’s mouth snapped shut, hiding his black fangs, and he lowered his gaze to the ground, suddenly unwilling to meet the others’ gaze.

Sväla noted his reaction before continuing. ‘Sigvald was the son of a brave chieftain, and he quickly grew in strength and wisdom, but dark rumours followed him. He fought with a skill that seemed almost unnatural, but he had a strange air about him that made the other tribesmen uncomfortable. His joy in the suffering of others was unseemly and it was not his only vice. He craved any form of experience, no matter how unnatural, and it soon became clear that his only interest was in seeking pleasure. That alone would not have been so bad, but Sigvald’s perversion did not end there: he was disloyal to Völtar the Wolf. He worshipped at the altar of forbidden gods.’ She paused and drew a symbol on the ground with her knife. It was a circle that was shielded by a half circle with a line jutting out from its centre that ended in another, smaller arc. ‘Do any of you recognise this?’

The tribesmen nodded their heads and a few of them muttered prayers under their breath. To display the mark of another god in the house of Völtar was unheard of and Ungaur’s eyes widened in horror as he looked up from the ground.

‘The mark of Slaanesh and his Decadent Host,’ continued Sväla. ‘The symbol of those who revel in perversion and forbidden worship.’ She shook her head. ‘Sigvald turned his back on Völtar the Wolf and gave his soul to the Prince of Desire.’

A chorus of muttered oaths filled the gloomy mead hall.

‘Then it was this Sigvald who doomed us?’ asked one of the elders, looking around for confirmation.

‘But if he lived all those years ago, why are we still paying for his crimes now?’ asked Sturll the Hewer, turning his head vaguely in Sväla’s direction. ‘Surely the debt was paid when he died?’

Sväla looked over at Ungaur, who was still staring at the icon. ‘Sigvald did not age,’ she said. ‘His strange desires amused his new master. The Dark Prince sent an envoy to offer him a bargain. In exchange for his complete devotion, Slaanesh’s envoy offered Sigvald an eternity in which to pursue his unspeakable lusts. As long as he dedicated himself to the seeking of pleasure, in all its forms, Sigvald would never age.’ She raised her voice. ‘Will never age. And as long as he lives, we will carry the weight of his shame.’

‘How can you know all this?’ cried Ungaur, looking up at her with an ashen face. ‘Who told you about Sigvald?’ He leapt to his feet and jabbed a finger at his own chest. ‘Only I have heard this tale. Only I know about Sigvald’s bargain.’ He spat on the ground and glared at Sväla. ‘And I would certainly never have confided in such a devious trickster as you.’

Sväla’s shoulders slumped and she looked down at the symbol she had drawn in the dirt. ‘So it’s true,’ she muttered.

‘What?’ snapped the shaman.

Sväla looked around the circle. ‘I only needed one final proof,’ she said, looking almost as afraid as the others. She waved dismissively at Ungaur’s huge, trembling frame. ‘Our shaman has led us to the very brink of extinction, but his learning is unquestionable. I suspected he knew about this ancient sacrilege, but I needed to hear it from his own lips before I could really believe it. Now there can be no doubt.’ She stood up and wiped away the icon with her foot. ‘We can never be free of the curse while Sigvald lives.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Black waves churned beneath a sky the colour of slate. Svärd pulled his furs a little tighter as he looked out at the bleak scene. This was his first voyage and, to his shame, his stomach was rolling horribly. As the deck of the longship rocked beneath him, he looked back at the square sails and curved prows of the other boats in an attempt to calm his guts, but as he watched the fleet rearing and plunging through the sea it only made him feel worse. He knew he would be being watched and cursed his weak stomach for making him look such a fool. In the weeks since his mother united the tribes, his own name had become famous: he was the son of Sväla the Witch. He was the son of the woman who had found the source of their shame and roused the whole steppe to war. The son of a prophet who had begun a crusade to match anything in the sagas. And now he couldn’t even stand up straight. ‘By Völtar,’ he said, leaning out over the gunnel and vomiting into a cloud of sea spray. He slumped against the rune-carved oak with a groan, letting the icy spray wash his face clean.

‘There’s no need to feel ashamed,’ said a kind voice from behind him.

Svärd stood up and wiped has face, jangling the rings embedded in his lips. Then he turned around, already sure who was addressing him.

Ungaur made an impressive figure. Even by the standards of a Norscan he was huge, and the sodden mass of wolf skin over his shoulders only added to the impression of bestial power. He flashed his black needles in a smile. ‘Even your father would have felt sick at a sight like this.’ He waved at the vast fleet. ‘None of us have ever seen such a gathering of the tribes. Even with my knowledge I have never heard of such a huge army.’ He placed his hands on the ledge and looked out at the forest of bulging sails. ‘Sväla’s crusade they’re calling it.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s dragged a whole nation from their homes. And for what?’

Svärd stuck out his jaw and glared at the shaman. ‘They left because they believe in her.’ He felt his nausea fading as his anger grew. ‘She betrayed my father to his death and now she consorts with his murderer, but no one even cares. I should be chieftain by now, but she’s confused everyone with her so-called visions. Everyone thinks this crusade is the only thing that can end the curse.’ He twisted his voice into a whining, sycophantic mockery of her followers. ‘Völtar the Wolf has shown her the way. Her visions will lead us to wonderful, glorious victory.’

Ungaur ran a hand over his long, red beard and nodded. ‘She has visions, it’s true, but their origin is another matter.’

Svärd shook his head in disgust. ‘You’re just jealous of her power.’ He waved at the fleet that surrounded them. ‘No one has ever heard of such a crusade. She has united the Fallen in a way you never managed to. Sagas will be sung in her name, long after you have been forgotten, despite everything she has done.’

Ungaur shrugged. ‘I hope you’re right. After all, there’s nothing we can do to stop her now. I wonder though, if it’s really Völtar’s voice she can hear. She’s not the first child of the steppe to be called north, into the Wastes, and she wouldn’t be the first to be misled. More than one god watches us from the roof of the world and not all of them have our best interests at heart. Maybe Sigvald thought he was answering a summons from the Wolf. Perhaps it was only once he had lost his mind that he realised the true nature of his master.’

‘She hears the voice of the Wolf,’ said Svärd. There was bitterness in his voice but no doubt. ‘She couldn’t have led us this far otherwise.’

‘It’s possible.’ Ungaur looked at the curved prow of the ship – a huge piece of oak, carved in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head – and then at the growing darkness ahead of them. ‘And yet we are so hopelessly lost.’ He shook his head and frowned. ‘If the Wolf really wishes to lead your mother to victory, it seems strange that he has brought us out into the middle of the sea and then fallen quiet.’

Svärd sneered in reply, but could think of nothing to say. Ungaur was right: they were utterly lost.

‘I understand your anger,’ said Ungaur, leaning closer and lowering his voice. ‘Your father never had any strange ideas like this. He wouldn’t have led us on such a fool’s errand. The Wastes are full of monsters you could never even dream of. What if her visions don’t come from Völtar? Whose call are we answering?’

Svärd shrugged. ‘You’re just afraid of what will happen once Sigvald is dead. Without the curse to bludgeon people with, you’ll lose what little power you have left.’ He gave the shaman a brusque nod and staggered off across the deck towards the prow. His head was pounding with suppressed rage. Ungaur’s motivations were all too clear, but his logic could not be denied. Why would Völtar lead them into the middle of the ocean and then abandon them? Why would he choose a lying, faithless murderess like his mother as a prophet? They had been lost for several days now and their supplies were already running low. Valdür the Old was a veteran of many voyages, but even he seemed at a loss. As they approached the Chaos Wastes, the stars had become confused, abandoning their usual constellations and forming strange new shapes, making navigation almost impossible. He looked around for the old warrior and saw him sitting next to the prow.

‘Any luck?’ he asked, crouching next to him.

Valdür turned towards him with a grimace. ‘You look awful.’

‘Thanks, old man,’ replied Svärd. ‘Coming from such a delicate flower as you that really hurts.’

Valdür grinned and wiped the sea spray from his face. ‘What do you think that is?’ he asked, waving to the horizon.

Svärd squinted through the gloom. ‘Is it land?’ he gasped, seeing a faint, grey line ahead of them.

Valdür shook his head. ‘I thought so at first, but now I’m not so sure. There’s something odd about it. It only appeared in the last few minutes, but it seems to be rushing towards us.’

The two Norscans soon had their answer. As they watched the line grow, rolling and shifting across the tumbling waves, it quickly became apparent that they were sailing towards a wall of fog.

‘This is in none of my visions,’ said Sväla, approaching the prow. She shook her head. ‘Since we set sail, everything has become confused. I see tiny glimpses, but nothing more.’

‘Tiny glimpses of what?’ growled Svärd, recalling Ungaur’s words.

Sväla frowned and hugged her wiry frame, looking through her son as though he were a ghost. ‘I see a golden city, floating in the sky, filled with long, empty halls. I think that’s our goal.’ She grimaced. ‘I see the snarling head of a fierce dog, on the shoulders of a man. I see a veiled woman, weeping in a grand palace. I see a–’

‘Do you see any fog?’ interrupted Svärd, with a sneer.

Sväla opened her eyes and shook her head. ‘No,’ she admitted, watching the thick tendrils crawling over the deck. ‘I can see nothing clearly any more, but there was never anything in my thoughts about being lost in the fog.’ She sensed Svärd’s furious expression boring into her, but did not meet his gaze. ‘We’re definitely doing the right thing. Sigvald has abjured his faith in Völtar the Wolf and now he’s hiding somewhere in the Chaos Wastes, indulging his every perverse desire while we suffer Völtar’s wrath. The only way we’ll ever be free of the curse is to hunt him down and put an end to his sacrilege.’

Svärd shook his head in disbelief. ‘We can’t even find the Chaos Wastes, never mind Sigvald’s hiding place. How can you expect us–’

‘Wait,’ interrupted Valdür. ‘There is something up ahead.’

‘Is that land?’ asked Svärd, noticing a darker mass behind the fog that was quickly surrounding them.

‘I think so,’ replied Valdür, shaking his head in confusion. ‘But it’s too small to be the Chaos Wastes. It looks like an island.’

Sväla shoved her son out of the way so she could get a better look. ‘I see tall shapes,’ she muttered, squinting through the fog. ‘Some kind of spires.’ She turned to the others. ‘Are they really there, or are they in my mind?’

Svärd clambered up onto the carved wolf’s head and peered across the waves at the slender silhouettes. ‘I see them,’ he muttered, feeling a growing sense of unease.

As the ships’ hulls scraped onto the shingle, the fog reached out in a clammy embrace, rolling over the oars and drenching the sails. The sinking sun painted the whole scene a garish golden hue and, as the daylight faded, the island became a world of shadows and gilded, clinging mist.

Sväla dropped into the icy water and waded up onto the beach. Once there, she turned to look back at the countless hundreds of Norscans leaping from the ships and hurrying after her. This was more than just an army, it was an entire community. Brutal, shaven-headed warriors strode alongside wide-eyed children and grimacing, shivering crones. Once word of the crusade had spread, not a single member of the reunited tribe would stay behind. All of them wanted to be part of the epic adventure Sväla had promised them. She felt a rush of fear as she watched the vast crowds stumbling through the surf with their eyes fixed expectantly on her. What if she was leading them all to their deaths?

‘We’ll just stay until the fog clears,’ she called out, trying to sound more confident than she felt. ‘It’s not safe to sail any further in this weather. It should be clear by the morning.’ She turned to Valdür. ‘We’ll need to find somewhere to make a camp.’

The old warrior was looking suspiciously at the slender shadows on the cliffs ahead. ‘We’d better find out what they are first,’ he said, wiping his face dry and loosing his axe from his belt. ‘Wait here with your subjects, Queen Sväla,’ he said with a gently mocking smile.

She followed his gaze to the looming shadows. ‘Be careful,’ she muttered. ‘I’m as blind as you are now.’ She closed her eyes and frowned, then shook her head. ‘Since I stepped foot on the beach, even the fragments of my visions have vanished.’ She crouched and scooped up a handful of cold, moist sand. ‘It’s as if there’s another force at work on this island; one that has come between Völtar and me. I think it’s this place that has been confusing me all day and now we’re here, everything is dark.’

Valdür nodded, dropping his smile as he saw how anxious Sväla was. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, patting the head of his axe. ‘I’ve managed to survive this long without magic visions to guide me.’

‘Svärd,’ he snapped, waving the sullen young lad over. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’

‘It looks like a city,’ said Svärd, running his hand over the crumbling remains of a wall.

Valdür studied the shadowy ruins that surrounded them. ‘They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen.’ The ancient stones had mostly vanished beneath clumps of gorse and crooked, wind-blasted trees, but there was no disguising the hand of an architect. Every few yards there was a fragment of wall or the remains of a fallen arch. ‘Look at this,’ he said, stooping to run his finger over the ground. He was standing on a beautiful mosaic of ceramic tiles, portraying a scaled, serpentine creature with a crested head.

‘It’s like some kind of water daemon,’ said Svärd, crouching next to him and clearing away sand to reveal more of the picture.

‘Look at the detail,’ said Valdür, shaking his head in awe. ‘I’ve never seen such craftsmanship.’ He scratched at part of the image and held up a glittering flake of metal. ‘Gold,’ he said, his eyes wide with shock. ‘Whoever lived here painted their floors with gold.’

Svärd looked around at the ruins in shock. ‘Could this be what we’ve been looking for, then? Could this be Sigvald’s home? He’s three hundred years old, remember, so it could be ruined by now.’

Valdür shrugged as he rose to his feet and walked away. ‘That would be an incredible stroke of luck, but Sväla did say that she felt some kind of unnatural presence here.’

Svärd uncovered another piece of the picture. It showed a group of smiths, hammering at a small chain. In the next image they were holding it aloft, smiling with satisfaction as rays of light shone from the metal. They obviously revered their creation as a source of great power. Something about the image intrigued Svärd and he stayed crouched on the floor as Valdür walked further along the path.

As the other warriors filed out of the darkness towards him, he stood up and tapped the axe in his belt. ‘Keep your weapons ready,’ he whispered. ‘We might not be alone.’

They walked another mile or so inland and came across even more impressive ruins. Norscans considered the open sky their roof and the whole steppe their home, so they never built anything to last more than a season. To see beautiful, soaring buildings that had clearly stood for many centuries filled them with wonder. The slender spires they had seen from the ship were the remains of narrow, marble towers. Most of the exteriors had crumbled away to reveal worn, spiral steps within, but they were still magnificent pieces of architecture, soaring way above the gnarled trees and glimmering faintly in the moonlight.

‘No mortal hands could have crafted such a thing,’ said Valdür, peering up at one of the towers. The whole edifice was covered with delicate reliefs. The carvings showed slender, androgynous warriors riding to war in chariots pulled by huge, white, feline beasts.

‘Whoever they were, they seem to be long gone,’ replied Svärd, stepping under a shattered archway into a wide, open space. Weeds had sprouted from beneath the broad flagstones, but it was clear that the area had once been some kind of courtyard. ‘Maybe we could camp here?’ He waved at the ruined walls that surrounded the moonlit square. ‘It’s quite well defended. We could position scouts on the walls.’

Valdür nodded as he looked around the courtyard. ‘Seems as safe as anywhere.’ He frowned. ‘It’s so quiet.’ He waved his axe at the other tribesmen as they entered the square, signalling for them to stop speaking. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘There isn’t even any birdsong.’

Svärd shrugged. ‘It’s dark.’

Valdür shook his head. ‘The sun has only just gone down. I’d expect to hear something. Even if it was only–’

He fell silent as he noticed something.

On the far side of the courtyard, another archway led into the remains of a large chamber. The ceiling of the room was long gone, allowing the moonlight to pick out the slender figure of a man, watching them from just inside the doorway.

The Norscans lifted their axes.

‘Who goes there?’ shouted Valdür, dropping into a crouch and signalling for the others to do the same.

The stranger gave no reply as he started to walk towards them.

Valdür and Svärd looked at each other in surprise as the man crossed the courtyard. He was a scrawny, bedraggled wreck, with no clothes on and a filthy mane of hair. The patchy beard that hung down over his bony chest was flecked with grey and his cheeks were hollow with age. As he stepped closer, they realised that his hair was knotted with seaweed and his atrophied limbs were speckled with barnacles and plump, shiny leeches. His feet slapped across the flagstones with a moist popping sound and his mottled, bluish skin was so slack it seemed about to slide from his bones. He looked like a corpse that had dredged itself from the seabed to greet them.

The Norscans grimaced and backed away.

‘Stop there,’ cried Valdür, raising his axe as the man came within a few feet of him.

The man did as he was ordered and looked back at them with a puzzled expression. Then he looked down at his rotten, grey flesh and frowned. He noticed the molluscs and insects that were hurrying over his skin and grimaced. ‘Who am I?’ he belched, in a thick, watery voice.

Valdür looked at Svärd in confusion and then edged a little closer to the frail old man. ‘We’re lost,’ he said, grimacing at the smell of the man’s decaying body. ‘What’s the name of this island?’

‘I can’t remember,’ he gurgled. ‘I was asleep. Then I heard your voices.’ The old man looked around at the ruins, obviously distressed. ‘What’s happened to the walls?’

Valdür raised his eyebrows at Svärd, clearly thinking the man was insane. ‘I think the walls must have fallen down a long time ago, old man. We’ve got to spend the night on the island and we thought this would be as safe a place as any.’ He paused, unsure what else to say.

The stranger frowned at Valdür for a while, then nodded and turned away. He slapped away from them, heading out through the archway and disappearing into the shadows.

‘Is it safe to just let him go?’ whispered Svärd.

Valdür shook his head and signalled for two of his men to follow the stranger. ‘Keep an eye on him,’ he said. ‘Let me know where he goes.’

Big as it was, the courtyard could not contain the hordes of Norscans who swarmed into it. They spilled out onto the sandy hillsides and muttered oaths as they spread their animal skins over the damp grass. As they dropped wearily to the ground, a few of them attempted to lift the dismal atmosphere with songs and laughter, but the tunes sounded muffled and odd in the thick fog and the laughter echoed strangely, as though the ruins were mocking them. In the centre of the courtyard, Sväla and the elders huddled around a spitting, smoky fire and discussed their next move.

‘But this island may be just off the coast,’ said Sväla looking at the flickering faces that surrounded her. ‘Even if the fog doesn’t lift tomorrow, we must head north. We’ve come too far to head back now and our supplies will only last for so long.’

Halldórr the Black, the swarthy Kurgan chieftain, leant forward. The long, jet-black hair that gave him his name fell over his face, but it could not hide his furious expression. ‘You told us Völtar would lead us to Sigvald,’ he snarled, waving at the crumbling ruins that surrounded them, ‘and we’ve ended up here.’ He spat into the flames. ‘I think we should stay put. When the fog clears we should head south, back to our homes.’ He let out a bitter laugh. ‘If we can work out which way south is.’

On the opposite side of the fire was the hulking, lupine silhouette of Ungaur. He nodded slowly at Halldórr’s words. ‘I agree. It would be madness to set sail in this fog. Who knows where we could end up.’ His black needles glittered in the firelight. ‘Your bravery is without question, Sväla, and it does great honour to the memory of your husband, but it may be time to think again.’ He nodded at the slumbering shapes that surrounded them and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘You still have the will of the people behind you, but as you said yourself, our supplies are starting to dwindle. Things may change when people’s bellies start to ache.’ He levelled one of his long nails at Sväla. ‘And make no mistake: it’s you they’ll hold responsible.’

Valdür the Old shook his head and laughed. ‘You’ve been against this from the start.’

‘Maybe he was right,’ snapped Halldórr, fixing his brooding eyes on Valdür. ‘Look where her visions have got us.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘And now she doesn’t even have them any more.’

Rurik Iron Fist shifted uncomfortably on his haunches as he listened to the conversation. His red war paint gleamed in the firelight and as he leant towards Sväla he looked more daemon than man. ‘Maybe they’re right,’ he said, with sadness in his voice. ‘I know the power of Völtar is in you, but without his eyes to lead us, how can we continue? At least here we have shelter and maybe even some food, but if we set sail again, how would we ever find our way through the fog? We could sail in circles until we starve.’

A tiny figure leant closer to the fire. It was the ancient witch, Ürsüla, and as the flames glinted in her piercing eyes, she grinned at the rest of the elders. ‘There’s something here that has blocked your visions, Sväla: something that has come between you and your spirit guide. It might be worth finding out what kind of power could block the will of Völtar.’

Sväla frowned at the old woman and was about to reply when two tribesmen loomed out of the darkness.

‘He’s coming back,’ gasped one of them, trying to catch his breath. ‘The drowned man.’

Ungaur leapt to his feet. ‘Let me see this wretched creature,’ he said, clutching his staff in both hands.

The others rose to their feet and peered into the shadows.

‘Where is he?’ snapped Valdür, stepping over to his men, but before they could reply the old warrior had his answer.

Cries erupted from the far side of the courtyard as dozens of the Norscans woke up to see what looked like a naked corpse walking by.

The cadaverous old man stumbled past them oblivious, heading straight for the fire.

Valdür and the other elders made a protective line in front of Sväla as he approached.

‘He’s a daemon,’ cried Ungaur, causing even more of the surrounding Norscans to wake up. He drew his sacrificial knife and looked around at the others. ‘We must silence him before he corrupts our minds with his magic.’

Within seconds the camp became a panicked mob as people scrambled to their feet and backed away from the willowy stranger.

‘It’s the island of Ásin,’ announced the man, in his strange, liquid gargle.

‘What did he say?’ asked Sväla, turning to her son.

Svärd grimaced, causing rows of wolves’ teeth to blossom from his cheeks. ‘We asked him the name of the island and he couldn’t remember. It’s obviously come back to him.’

‘Then he knows where we are?’

Svärd nodded, still grimacing.

‘Wait,’ cried Sväla as Ungaur strode towards the old man with his knife drawn. ‘He could help us.’

Ungaur cursed under his breath as the Norscans at his side lowered their weapons. ‘You would seek help from this?’ he asked, waving his knife at the stranger. ‘Have we sunk so low?’

Sväla ignored the shaman as the sodden old man approached. ‘We’re looking for the Chaos Wastes,’ she said, trying to hide her revulsion as the firelight revealed the man’s countless, scuttling passengers. ‘Would you be able to guide us?’

The man massaged his waterlogged face, causing a flood of tiny crustaceans to tumble from his sagging eye sockets. ‘Guide you?’ he asked, revealing his gums in a toothless smile. ‘Of course, Olandír would be delighted to help you.’ He waved at the thick fog that still surrounded them. ‘I’ve been here for a long time, alone. I would dearly love some company.’

Svärd and Valdür looked at each in surprise. The tall old man had lost his vague, distracted air and now seemed quite sure of himself. The flaccid grin remained on his face as he waited for Sväla and the other elders to respond. His eyes were the blank, blue-white orbs of a corpse, but they twitched from side to side with obvious intelligence as he surveyed the gathering.

‘Are you here alone, Olandír?’ asked Ungaur, scowling at the man and reluctantly lowering his knife.

‘May I?’ asked Olandír, ignoring the shaman’s question and indicating that he would like to sit beside the fire.

Sväla nodded her agreement and indicated that the others should sit too.

‘Please,’ she called out to the anxious sea of faces that surrounded them. ‘Do not be alarmed. The man called Olandír is here to help us. Return to your beds. Your chieftains will watch over you while you sleep.’

No one seemed entirely convinced by Sväla’s words, but most of them shuffled back into the fog, eyeing the stranger suspiciously as they left. Only a few of the young warriors remained, at Valdür’s silent request.

‘You say you live here alone?’ asked Sväla, as the other Norscans stared at the strange man.

He nodded, still wearing his grotesque grin.

Svärd felt his stomach turn. This close up, it was obvious that the man was even stranger than he had at first thought. It was not just the rotten state of his flesh that was odd: his limbs were far too long and spindly and his eyes were a strange, almond shape that reminded Svärd of the figures in the mosaics. As the others questioned the stranger, Svärd noticed something glinting on his bony ankle. He leant closer and saw that there was a silver clasp trapped amongst the weeds and shells that covered his skin. It was so fine that it was almost invisible and he marvelled at the workmanship. It seemed strange to him that a man with no clothes would wear such intricate jewellery, but before he could think any further about it, an angry voice dragged him back to the conversation.

‘How could he not remember how he got here?’ asked Ungaur, looking around the fire in disbelief. ‘He’s lying.’

‘I assure you,’ said Olandír, choking slightly on the fluid in his throat. ‘My memory is coming back to me, even as we speak.’ He looked anxiously at Sväla, obviously sensing that she was the leader of the group. ‘I’m sure that by tomorrow, I will be able to remember more.’ He closed his eyes and ran a hand through the sandy mass of weeds and hair that covered his head. ‘There are maps here somewhere,’ he said, opening his blank eyes and flashing his gums again. ‘If you let me bed down with you here tonight, I’m sure I could lead you to them in the morning.’

Ungaur threw his hands up in despair and turned to the other elders. ‘How can we sit here listening to this? He’ll slit our throats while we sleep.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ said Olandír, shaking his head in horror at the shaman’s words. He turned to Sväla with a pleading note in his voice. ‘Give me until the morning, I beg you, and I promise I’ll help. I was asleep when you arrived.’ He shook his head, scattering water and insects across the ground. ‘I think I must have been ill, but now my thoughts are getting clearer. I’m sure I can help you reach your destination.’ He looked anxiously at Sväla. ‘If you could just do me one small favour.’

Sväla’s eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s nothing really,’ said Olandír with a nervous shrug. ‘I’m just so lonely here.’ He looked around at the gloomy ruins and then back at Sväla. ‘If you agree to take me with you, as a navigator, I could show you the route north, to the Wastes, and escape this place.’

Sväla was clearly surprised by the man’s request but, despite the chorus of gasps from the other elders, she nodded. ‘Let’s see what you can remember in the morning, Olandír. If you can prove your worth, I’ll consider giving you a place on one of our longships.’

Olandír grinned and grabbed Sväla’s hand.

She tried not to grimace at his clammy touch and nodded at the shadows beyond the fire. ‘Make yourself a bed. We’ll talk more tomorrow.’

Svärd groaned as he tried to make himself comfortable on the stone floor. It was the early hours of the morning and the fire was out. It seemed that everyone but him had managed to fall asleep. ‘Why did I suggest camping here?’ he muttered, rolling onto his back and looking up at the stars. The pervasive fog left everything cold and damp and the furs under his head stank like an old dog. As he lay there, feeling sorry for himself, the events of the day filtered through his sleepy brain. He remembered the look of fear on Sväla’s face as the dawn broke over the fleet and she realised how lost they were. Then he remembered his first sight of the strange ruins that covered the island. As he recalled the delicate mosaics that covered the paths, he let out a small gasp of surprise and sat up. ‘The chain,’ he whispered.

He looked around at the mounds of damp, snoring bodies. It was all too easy to spot the stranger. No one had been keen to sleep next to such an odd creature and there was an empty space around his gangly body. From this distance, Svärd could not see his ankle but the more he thought about it, the more certain he was. The clasp he had seen on Olandír’s leg carried a design he had seen in the centuries-old mosaics. It was hard to say why, but in the still of the night, that simple fact seemed immensely important. He closed his eyes and tried to recall the faded images Valdür had found. As the illustrations filled his thoughts he saw the strange smiths quite clearly, surveying their handiwork with pride: a slender chain, emanating immense waves of power, so that as they raised it aloft it seemed like they had created a new sun.

‘It couldn’t be the same thing, could it?’ he whispered, staring at the sleeping stranger. Could the beautiful chain have lain undiscovered on the island for centuries, only to be found by such a repulsive being? He looked at the glowing embers of the fire and saw that the elders were all asleep. Even Valdür was sprawled across the flagstones, snoring merrily to himself. I’ll tell them first thing tomorrow, Svärd decided, lying down again and closing his eyes. As he lay there, unable to sleep, visions of the beautiful chain needled at his thoughts, and after a few minutes he sat up again with an annoyed sigh, more awake than ever.

He looked up at the crumbling walls that surrounded the courtyard. Valdür had posted sentries, but those he could see all had their backs to him, facing out to the surrounding hills. He considered telling one of the guards about the chain but then decided that they would think he was mad. He remembered that he had only seen a fragment of a clasp, and that it might not even be the same piece of jewellery. ‘And what if it is?’ he whispered. However he tried, though, he could not put the chain out of his mind. The more he thought about the image in the mosaic, the more he began to think the chain was some kind of powerful weapon. He looked over at his sleeping mother and felt a rush of anger. Maybe the chain would enable him to finally take his rightful place in the tribe?

Svärd decided that he would never rest until he could convince himself that it was not the same piece of jewellery. He crawled slowly though the sleeping tribesmen towards Olandír. As he reached the edge of the empty space that surrounded the stranger, he saw a glint of metal on the sleeping man’s ankle. He nodded, relieved to find that he had not imagined the thing, but it was too far away for him to make out any details. He looked around to make sure he was not being watched, conscious of how ridiculous he must look, and crept to the man’s side.

Olandír was gurgling and belching, but he seemed fast asleep, so Svärd edged closer, trying to move as quietly as possible. As he lowered his face to the old man’s ankle he saw the silver clasp, peeping out from beneath a mound of seaweed. He felt a rush of excitement. As he had suspected, the sun and moon device engraved into the metal was exactly the same as the one on the bracelet in the mosaic. His eyes widened as he reached out to trace his finger over it. Norscan metalwork consisted of crude, functional lumps of iron and Svärd had never seen such a delicate, beautiful piece as this.

As his finger brushed against the clasp, it popped open with a faint click.

Svärd flinched as the silver chain slid from Olandír’s leg and tinkled onto the stone floor. The sound echoed faintly through the dark and he looked at Olandír’s face to see if he was still asleep.

The old man’s blank eyes were fixed on Svärd and his sagging mouth was stretched in a wide grin.

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Svärd, suddenly terrified. He looked around to see if anyone was watching.

Olandír did not answer, but climbed to his feet instead and stretched out his long limbs with a satisfied yawn. As he stretched, his yawn became a moan of pleasure.

Svärd picked the bracelet up from the floor and held it up to the old man. ‘It’s not broken,’ he said. ‘I can fix it back on, if you…’ His words trailed off as realised that Olandír looked even stranger than before. As he stretched his limbs, they began to elongate and twist. His frail, grey body bulged and swelled like ripening fruit and his muscles began to ripple and spread across his widening chest.

As Svärd backed away in shock, the wet tearing sound emanating from Olandír’s flesh woke up those sleeping nearest to him. As the old man grew in stature, growing several feet in a few seconds, horrified cries echoed through the fog. The Norscans were being dragged from their dreams to find a grotesque giant leering down at them.

‘Valdür!’ yelled Svärd, with a note of panic in his voice.

Over by the remains of the fire, the elders began to stir.

In less than a minute, the old man had doubled in size and he was still growing. As his bones cracked and realigned, a huge leathery crest sprouted from his back and arched out from his spine and over his scalp, like the fin of a sea creature. Olandír’s groans of pleasure grew in volume and became an avian screech that echoed around the courtyard. As his arms stretched and undulated, his legs melted into a single, thick tail that began writhing, snake-like across the flagstones.

Svärd gasped in horror as he saw that the old man’s head was changing too. His skull had snapped itself into a long, bovine snout and his beard had become a nest of tentacles that twisted and rippled. The boy looked down at the tiny, insignificant-looking chain in his fist and shook his head.

The screams of panic grew in volume as more of the Norscans clambered to their feet.

‘We’re being attacked!’ cried someone.

As the commotion grew, an axe span out of the crowd and thudded into the monster’s burgeoning muscles.

Olandír stopped screeching and looked down at the weapon in his chest, then he turned to the crowd edging towards him, as though noticing them for the first time. He singled out the man who had hurled the weapon and lashed out at him with his tail.

The tribesman died with a strangled cough as the tail smashed his chest to a pulp and sent him tumbling across the ground.

More axes and spears flew up at the monster. Some sank into Olandír’s moist flesh, but most bounced off – deflected by the thick, silvery scales that had sprouted from his still-growing body.

‘What happened?’ cried Sväla, as she and the other elders reached Svärd’s side.

Svärd shook his head in fear and confusion and held out the chain to his mother. ‘It was an accident. I removed this and he began to change.’

Sväla took the sparkling metal and frowned at it. ‘What do you mean? Who began to change?’

‘Olandír,’ gasped the boy, pointing up at the towering monster. ‘This is the old man.’

‘Watch out!’ cried Valdür, shoving them both aside as the monster’s tail swept across the courtyard, knocking dozens of Norscans from their feet.

A blur of red muscle charged past them as Rurik Iron Fist launched himself at the monster. He let out a roar as he scrambled up Olandír’s tail and slammed his mutant fist into the creature’s belly.

Olandír was now twenty feet tall and still growing, but the force of Rurik’s hammer blow doubled him over in pain and sent him crashing down onto the flagstones.

Rurik rolled clear just in time to avoid Olandír’s tail as it pounded onto the ground, then he drew back his metal-infused fist for another punch.

The chieftain’s bravery roused some of the other Norscans to action and as the monster tried to rise, it found itself straining beneath the weight of dozens of burly, fur-clad warriors.

Svärd saw his chance to redeem himself and leapt onto the creature’s back along with the others. He landed awkwardly on its thick scales but managed to draw his knife without falling off, clutching onto a spiny fin with his other hand.

Svärd’s battle cry was drowned out by an ear-splitting screech as the monster lurched back up from the ground, flexing its multiplying muscles and shrugging its attackers off as easily as if they were children.

Svärd was hurled through the air and slammed into the nearest wall with a crunch. He slid down onto the flagstones and lay still.

As the monster’s screaming caw grew in rage and volume, it reared up over the Norscans, even larger than before.

‘Back!’ cried Valdür, waving his spear to the mist-shrouded hills. ‘We can’t kill that. Get out of the ruins.’

A few of the tribesmen refused the order, continuing to hack at the monster’s tail with their axes and hurl spears at its writhing torso, but most were all too glad to flee. As Olandír continued to grow, he let out another agonised screech, clawing at the weapons that had pierced his chest.

‘Svärd!’ cried Valdür, spotting the boy’s unconscious body, sprawled on the ground behind the monster. With Sväla racing after him, he dodged between Olandír’s blows and dropped down beside Svärd, lifting his head up from the floor.

The boy’s face was drenched with blood from a deep gash in his forehead and his eyes rolled wildly as they tried to fix on Valdür’s face.

‘Svärd,’ gasped Sväla as she dropped beside them and saw the dazed expression on the boy’s face. ‘Is he all right?’

Valdür shook his head and was about to reply, when a deafening screech sliced through the fog.

They turned to see Olandír looming over them. The other Norscans had mostly vanished into the night, but Valdür, Sväla and the boy were trapped: by the monster on one side and the wall on the other. Olandír was drunk on pain and newfound power. As he swayed back and forth, his white eyes gleamed and flashed in the moonlight and his serpentine tail lashed out at the few tribesmen who were still trying to hack chunks out of it. His huge jaws spread in a grin as he looked down at the three figures trapped by the wall. With the fog spiralling around him like a cloak, he drew back one of his scaled fists and punched it down towards them.

Valdür and Sväla shoved the boy aside as the monster’s fist vaporised the floor where he had been lying.

There was a rumbling crash as the monster drew back his fist, leaving the flagstones to collapse into a void.

Sväla and the others tumbled into the hole and disappeared from view.

They plunged through a cloud of dust and slammed onto a dirt floor. Sväla choked and spluttered as she clambered to her feet and looked around for the others. They had dropped into some kind of crypt. The shaft of moonlight that followed them through the hole revealed a series of crumbling stone arches, trailing away into the darkness. Valdür was a few feet away. He was covered in grey dust and resembled a ghost, groaning as he lurched towards her, with Svärd slumped over his broad shoulders.

There was another explosion of stone as the monster’s fist came crashing down through the hole, pounding into the floor of the crypt with such force that Sväla and Valdür were knocked back into the shadows.

‘Quick,’ gasped Valdür heading off towards a pale light in the distance and gesturing for Sväla to follow.

The light was weak and hundreds of feet away and as they ran they stubbed their toes against fallen pillars and staggered up unexpected steps. Above, they heard the sound of the monster as it threw its body furiously around the courtyard. Dust settled over them as the ceiling of the crypt cracked and bowed beneath Olandír’s immense weight.

Sväla hung on to Valdür’s furs as they stumbled though the dark. ‘There!’ she hissed, squeezing the chieftain’s arm. The glow up ahead was growing brighter and they could see clearly now that it was moonlight.

Valdür grunted in acknowledgement and hurried towards it.

‘Will he live?’ asked Sväla as they tumbled out onto the hillside, gulping down the dust-free air.

Valdür looked at Svärd and frowned. Then he nodded at the silver expanse spread out below them. The Norscans were gathering in their thousands at the edge of the sea, looking back in horror at the enormous being rising up from the ruins. ‘We need to join the others. Then we can examine his wounds.’

‘No!’ cried Sväla wrenching the boy from Valdür’s shoulders and putting him down on the grass. ‘I’ll not lose him too.’

‘I’m fine,’ groaned Svärd with a crooked sneer, swaying slightly as he tried to stand. ‘The prophet’s son will fight again.’ His face was completely drained of colour and there was a gleaming patch of bone visible in the centre of his forehead, but his pride was unshaken.

Sväla wiped the sneer from his face with a fierce slap. ‘What were you thinking, you stupid child?’ She was trembling with rage as she waved the silver chain in front of his face.

Svärd lolled back from the impact of the blow. Only his mother’s furious grip held him upright. He spat some blood on the ground and glared back at her, then he gestured weakly down to the crowd of figures on the beach. ‘Looks like Ungaur has changed his mind about sailing in the fog.’

Valdür looked back at the sea and saw that some of the tribesmen were hauling themselves onto the longships. ‘We need to get down there,’ he said, gesturing back at the frenzied monster. ‘Or stay here and keep that thing company for the rest of eternity.’

They stumbled down over the dunes, with Svärd slung between them, doing his best to run. Behind them, Olandír was still screeching and thrashing furiously around the ruins as a small group of determined Norscans continued hacking at his rippling flesh.

‘To the ships,’ cried Sväla as the crowd on the beach turned in their direction. ‘All of you!’

No one needed much encouragement and there was soon a stampede of wide-eyed people sprinting through the surf towards the drifting shadows of the longships.

Valdür dragged Sväla and her son up onto the deck of their ship, then he clamped his hands over his ears as the screams of the monster suddenly rose in pitch.

As the oarsmen rushed over to their benches, Sväla rushed aft and looked back at the island.

Olandír no longer looked as though he belonged on land at all. His writhing mass of scales and fins resembled a horror from the ocean’s darkest depths. He was snaking down the sand dunes towards the beach, reaching out to the ships as they upped anchor and sliced out through the tumbling waves.

Sväla noticed a flash of colour on its face. ‘Rurik,’ she said, her voice hoarse with shock.

The chieftain had clambered up Olandír’s neck and, as Sväla looked on in amazement, he pounded his metal fist into the monster’s blank left eye. Blood bubbled over him in great gouts as the creature staggered back in pain. It clamped a hand over the bloody mess, but Rurik had already swung across its snout and punched again, blinding the other eye.

As Olandír lurched and writhed in agony, the red-skinned figure of Rurik could still be seen, silhouetted in front of the moon as he grasped the monster’s crest in one hand and raised his bloody fist to the heavens.

Sväla raised her own fist in a silent reply, as the sails behind her unfurled and snapped full of wind, hurling her out to sea.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Víga-Barói moaned with pleasure and looked down at his chest. A fist-sized chunk of rock had punched through his cuirass and embedded itself deep between his ribs. He stumbled to a halt, ignoring the torrent of figures that barged past him as he studied the gaping wound. He smiled as though he were studying a beautiful flower. Some of his ribs had burst through his skin and as he fingered the shattered bones his nerves screamed in agony. ‘My prince,’ he muttered, his voice trembling with gratitude.

All around him the Decadent Host were disintegrating: wings tore loose from hunched backs, purple bellies exploded in showers of viscera and bestial heads span clear of their severed necks. As the garish army collapsed and died along the slender bridge, the towering fortress of Ör poured lethal light over them, belching luminous death on the mutated creatures and armour-clad knights.

‘Faster,’ roared Víga-Barói, levelling his sword at the skull-clad tower. ‘Outrun the guns.’

It seemed impossible that any of them could reach the far end of the bridge. It was half a mile long and only wide enough for four of them to march abreast. The structure was already deep with corpses and the crimson lake below was a soup of bodies and broken limbs. Despite this, the monsters rallied again at Víga-Barói’s signal and surged forward, scrambling across the carcasses of their fallen brothers.

Blood-red lights glimmered on the walls of the distant citadel as Mord Huk’s men dragged another huge gun into view. Even at this distance it was clear that the cannon was as much animal as machine. Its barrel pulsed and twitched with life and as it was wheeled into place it whined and hissed as though it were in pain. There was a loud crack and it sprayed energy in all directions, eviscerating the stunted figures huddled around it and launching another lurid blast down on the advancing army.

As the light washed over them, Sigvald’s warriors howled with delight. Rather than destroying them, this gout rippled their flesh into strange, revolting new shapes, leaving them twitching and giggling as they unfurled their new forms across the mounds of dead.

Víga-Barói leapt over the piles of tentacles and undulating flesh and bellowed a wordless war cry, rallying the army once more. The depraved hordes charged after him, undaunted by the carnage. The knight lifted the visor of his helmet and looked back over his shoulder. He nodded at a gaunt, bearded man a few feet away, stumbling through the mass of shivering limbs and liquid faces. ‘You’re a man after my own heart, Baron Schüler,’ he cried.

The baron looked back at him with a dazed expression. He was clad in the ornate purple and gold armour Sigvald had given him and, as he blundered through the chaos, he held a mirrored shield over his head that was a perfect replica of the prince’s, but every inch of him was drenched in blood and parts of his armour had rippled into strange, awkward new shapes where the blasts of light had glanced across it. ‘What?’ he croaked.

Víga-Barói waved his sword at the nightmarish abattoir that surrounded them. ‘I have to admit, I told Prince Sigvald that you were mad for suggesting this.’ He gasped as a horned creature barged past him, jolting his fractured ribs. Then he sighed with pleasure. ‘But I’m beginning to believe you might be some kind of genius.’

Schüler grimaced as a blossom of writhing intestines erupted in front of him. He lashed out with his sword, cursing his own name as he hacked the shuddering entrails to the ground and continued racing after the sneering knight. All around him were the men he had led north from the Empire. They had left their homes, at his command, only a year earlier, and now he could not bear to look at what had become of them. As he had whiled away the weeks in Sigvald’s urbane company, his men had been strapped to slabs and hacked into grotesque new shapes in Víga-Barói’s surgeries. Even with his gaze fixed firmly on the citadel he knew he would never reach, Schüler could not help catching glimpses of his men’s blanched, elongated faces or their leathery, razor-sharp appendages. He ran faster, trying to leave them behind, but they hurried dutifully after him, eager to march by his side into the mayhem ahead.

The baron’s heart pounded as he slipped and scrambled after Víga-Barói and he began to moan in despair, tormented by the fact that they were all going to die, apart from the one person he wanted to see dead.

Sigvald was crawling slowly across the side of a mountain. ‘Don’t move,’ he hissed to the row of knights waiting a few feet back down the slope. The prince held his breath as he edged carefully towards the precipice, jutting out of the snow, halfway up the slope. He looked up at the cloudy sky and then waited in silence, crouching patiently on the exposed lump of rock. After a few minutes, the clouds rolled back from the moon and a cold light washed over the mountainside, revealing a flash of green in front of the prince. Sigvald leant forward until his face was just inches from the stone. Then his handsome face lit up in a broad grin. ‘Perfect,’ he muttered, reaching out and nudging a small emerald shape onto one of his fingers and holding it up before him. It was a tiny iridescent beetle, with a human eye embedded in its back that stared defiantly at the prince. ‘Look at this!’ Sigvald hissed, turning to his men, but his breath dislodged the beetle and it fluttered away from his hand with a whirring sound.

Sigvald’s grin froze before slowly turning into a grimace. He massaged his forehead so vigorously it seemed as though he were trying to remove his own scalp. Then he stood up and turned into the icy breeze whistling across the face of the mountain. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he waved at a row of wagons behind the knights. ‘Unfasten them,’ he snapped, looking out into the storm.

Below them, at the foot of the mountain, was a huge red lake. The colour jarred horribly against the virgin white snow, but Sigvald was not interested in the broad expanse of blood, he peered instead at the slender black bridge leading to a citadel in its centre, and the crowds of figures struggling to cross it.

‘Oddrún,’ he called out. ‘Bring me the head.’

As the knights began to uncover the large, circular wagons, the teetering, hooded figure of the chancellor lurched past them, with the gold casket wedged under his arm. It took him a few minutes to reach Sigvald’s side and when he finally reached the ledge, a stream of spluttering coughs came from within his hood. Once he had caught his breath he looked down at the carnage on the bridge and shook his head. ‘You’re going to kill every last one of them,’ he muttered. ‘They love you more than anything and this is how you repay them.’

Sigvald’s eyes flashed with excitement as he gripped Oddrún’s shoulder. ‘Remember the brass skull!’ he said, with a tremble in his voice. ‘A skull from the throne of a god.’ He tipped back his head and groaned at the thought of it. ‘Can you imagine what that will feel like?’

Oddrún flinched away from Sigvald’s grip. ‘Even if it exists, which I doubt, you’ll never lay your hands on it.’ He waved at the impossibly tall citadel at the end of the bridge, and the trails of vivid light pouring down from it. ‘None of them will ever reach that tower. You’re sacrificing everything, and for what?’

‘Sacrifice?’ Sigvald shook his head, genuinely confused. ‘Where is there any sacrifice?’ He pointed down at the bizarre tide of mutated flesh and fantastical creatures. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that? Has anyone? Who could ever dream of expiring in such a beautiful carnival?’ He took the casket from Oddrún. ‘Anyway, you’re wrong. I haven’t come here just to watch them die. In a few minutes everything will look very different.’ He flicked open the casket and revealed the head of Doctor Schliemann. Several weeks in a dark box had already transformed the doctor’s head. His skin was grey and hung down from his skull in loose, clammy folds, and his eyes carried no trace of life.

‘Tell me, old friend,’ said Sigvald, stroking the doctor’s cheek as though he were a beloved pet, ‘is Víga-Barói’s theory correct? Can we attack the citadel from the air?’

The head gave no reply for a few seconds, then the doctor’s face crumpled in pain as electricity crackled into his skull. ‘Yes,’ he answered in croaky, desolate tones. ‘Mord Huk’s guns only protect him from armies that approach along the bridge, or the lake. They can’t be aimed up at the sky.’

Sigvald grinned triumphantly up at Oddrún. ‘Then we can land behind them and defeat his garrison?’

‘You can land behind them,’ replied the head.

Sigvald slammed the casket shut with a nod of satisfaction and looked back down the mountainside.

The knights had uncovered the wagons and revealed hundreds of strange chariots. Each one consisted of a circular silver frame, several feet in diameter, designed to resemble the device on Sigvald’s shield. Attached to the outer ellipse of each chariot were four huge, white eagles, with purple velvet hoods fastened securely over their heads. Fixed in the centre of each frame was an incredibly ornate cage of gossamer-fine silver, large enough to hold two men. Every inch of the vehicles was decorated with delicate spirals of filigreed silver and engraved with florid runes.

‘Come with me,’ said Sigvald, waving to Oddrún as he clambered into one of the cages. As he settled into a high-backed silver chair, he grasped a pair of reins linked to the eagles. ‘Remove the hoods,’ he cried, as Oddrún folded his long limbs into the cage beside him.

One of the knights began uncovering the eagles’ heads. As soon as the birds’ eyes were uncovered they began beating their huge wings, screeching furiously and pecking at the straps that secured them to the chariot. The knight had to work quickly to avoid being skewered by their long, curved beaks.

Sigvald let out a manic laugh as the birds launched themselves into the air with a flurry of talons and feathers. ‘Follow my lead,’ he cried as the silver chariot lurched from the snow, swinging wildly beneath the eagles as they attempted to free themselves from the reins. Oddrún cursed as he slipped and slammed his head against the metalwork.

As the eagles pounded their wings in fear, all pulling in opposite directions at once, the chariot span and tumbled beneath them, just a few feet above the jagged rocks. Sigvald’s laughter grew wilder as he and Oddrún rolled around the cage. Then, just as it looked as though the whole contraption would be smashed, the prince pulled the reins and steered the eagles up into the sky.

Sigvald’s long blond hair trailed behind him as the chariot soared up through the icy breeze. His eyes blazed with joy as he grinned at the stars. Within minutes the eagles’ pounding wings had hurled them through the clouds, enabling them to see for miles around. ‘Look, Oddrún!’ he cried, shaking the crumpled, cursing figure at his feet. ‘The Gilded Palace!’

Oddrún looked through the bars of the cage at the distant flash of gold, but his only reply was a grunt of disgust.

Sigvald yanked the eagles in the opposite direction, sending the chariot swinging across the night sky in a great arc, flashing like a comet through the clouds. ‘Follow my lead!’ he called again, looking down at the mountainside.

Way below, some of the knights had managed to launch their chariots from the ground and were now flying up towards Sigvald.

The prince steered the chariot around the frozen peaks, whooping hysterically as the eagles banked and dived. For a while he forgot all about the raging battle below as he closed his eyes and abandoned himself to the dizzying sensation of hurtling through the air. After several minutes, he realised that most of the other chariots had managed to take off and were now circling with him. Remembering his purpose, he drew his sword and thrust it through the bars of the cage, pointing it at the crimson lake below and the tower of skulls at its centre. ‘Silence the guns!’ he cried, sending his chariot hurtling down through the clouds. ‘Death to the Blood God!’

The other chariots plummeted after him, with the moonlight flashing along their silver frames, and for a brief moment it looked as though a meteor shower was falling over the Chaos Wastes.

Sigvald’s chariot crashed onto the top of the fortress’s outer wall. The metal crumpled and splintered in a shower of sparks and feathers and Sigvald was thrown clear, clattering across the battlements, losing his sword and tumbling towards the fortress’s defenders.

He rolled onto his feet and staggered unsteadily to a halt.

A group of short, stocky figures stood in front of him, guarding a cannon. They wore thick, iron armour, filthy leather tabards and had long, greasy beards, plaited with bones. Their scowling faces were covered in soot and their moustaches were singed and shrivelled from the heat of the gun. As one, they drew axes and knives and charged at the dazed-looking prince.

Sigvald’s weaving gait confused the dwarfs as they tried to land blows on his slender frame. He ran straight at them, but then lurched off to one side at the last minute, leaving them to stumble past. As they whirled around, cursing, he dealt one of them a fierce, backhanded blow to the head. As the dwarf reeled from the blow, the prince plucked the axe from his flailing hands and turned to face the others with a grin. ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ he said, with a nod of his head. Then, with shocking speed, he slammed the axe into the chest of its former owner.

Blood sprayed from the dwarf’s armour as Sigvald drew back the axe to strike again, but before he could do so the battlements exploded in a cloud of dust, feathers and granite as another chariot smashed into the wall.

The dwarfs backed away in confusion as dozens of the silver cages began crashing down along the outer wall of the fortress. Eagles screamed and flapped wildly through the chaos and purple-clad knights stumbled from the wreckage, drawing swords as they rushed to attack.

Within minutes, the cannons were left unmanned as the dwarfs rushed to defend the wall.

Víga-Barói reached up with both arms, suffocated and blind, as a thick blanket of flesh enveloped him. His hands broke free and he grunted with satisfaction as he felt cold air on his fingertips. The agony of his burning lungs was delicious, but he knew he could not betray his beloved prince; not even for such an exquisite death. He sank his fingers into the pulsing mass and hauled himself free, gasping for breath as his face burst through a layer of translucent skin. The mound of blubber he was trapped in had been a man, up until a few minutes ago, when one of the luminous cannon blasts had struck the poor wretch full-on and transformed him into a gelatinous mound of meat.

‘The guns!’ cried Hazül from a few feet away, peering up at the walls from behind its gossamer shroud of lilac tendrils.

Víga-Barói dragged the rest of his body from the quivering heap and looked down the bridge towards the fortress. The huge gates at the foot of the structure looked as impenetrable as ever, but the trails of light from above them had vanished. He wiped the blood from his armour and pulled his sword free with a moist smack. Then he dropped back down onto the bridge. ‘This is our chance!’ he cried, grabbing one of Hazül’s pale, mutilated limbs and hurling him forwards.

As the surgeon stumbled and fell, Víga-Barói lifted his sword aloft and screamed: ‘Charge!’

He looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw that half of the army was in no fit state to follow. Hundreds were dead, but even more had been mutated. The most unlikely anatomical combinations were trying to crawl after him: wings had replaced legs, heads had become featureless black orbs and spines had blossomed from backs like twisted, ivory trees. The resulting mess of limbs and animal parts brought a smile to his scarred face, but he knew it was never going to leave the bridge. Luckily, there were a few hundred knights who had avoided the cannon fire and, as the last of the guns fell silent, they wasted no time in clambering over the twitching wreckage and sprinting across the bridge towards him. At their head was Baron Schüler. His face was drenched with gore, but his eyes were fixed in a determined stare as he saw a chance to survive the nightmare he had created.

A few arrows rattled off their shields as they approached the gates, but it was obvious that Mord Huk had placed all his faith in the guns. Víga-Barói howled victoriously as he reached the fortress’s tall brass gate. As the other knights ran towards him he pressed his face to the crack between the doors, snorting and sniffing with animal hunger.

‘I can smell you in there,’ he cried, pounding the hilt of his sword against the metal. ‘The Dark Prince will have your blood.’ Then he stepped back and looked up at the glinting chariots circling overhead. ‘How could I have doubted him?’ he asked, turning to Schüler.

The baron slumped against the doors, gasping for breath. ‘What?’ he groaned, wiping the gore from his face.

‘I thought Sigvald’s genius was waning, but now I see that it’s just beginning. He’s going to bring this whole fortress to its knees.’

‘Has he joined the fighting?’ replied the baron, looking up with hope in his eyes.

Víga-Barói pulled back his shoulders, causing the barbs embedded in his sides to draw fresh streams of blood. ‘Stand tall, baron,’ he said, regaining his usual velvety tones. He waved up at the silver contraptions plummeting towards the battlements. ‘The Geld-Prince is waging war as only he knows how, and you and I will be on hand to enjoy the spoils.’ He paused as he noticed a small, hooded shape in the crowd of figures rushing towards the doors. ‘Énka,’ he called out, summoning the sorcerer to his side.

Énka hurried over and looked up at him with one of his large, glassy eyes. ‘Lord?’

‘Our prince is breaching the fortress and he needs us at his side.’ He tapped a knuckle on the brass door behind him. ‘But Mord Huk is a poor host and he seems to have forgotten to open his doors. Can you open them for him?’

Énka’s strange, piscine face lit up in a smile. He nodded and stretched his webbed hands out over the metal. His head dropped down between his shoulders and it looked as though he were going to simply shove the towering doors open, but instead of pushing he began to hum a jaunty melody. The words were indecipherable but there was something strangely lewd about Énka’s tone and as the metal around his fingers began to ripple, his stunted body shivered with pleasure. His movements became more pronounced and his words more frantic as the huge doors began to undulate and change colour.

After a few minutes, the sorcerer looked up at Víga-Barói. ‘Done,’ he gasped, already looking exhausted by his spell.

‘Wonderful,’ said the sneering knight as he looked up at Énka’s work.

Where the sorcerer had previously been leaning on a pair of thirty-foot brass doors, he was now gripping a shimmering curtain of purple silk.

Víga-Barói drew back the material and stepped through into a circular courtyard. He found himself walking on skulls – the whole courtyard was lined with them and they were all slick with blood. There was a constant flow of the stuff, rushing down from the tower at the heart of the fortress and over the eight walls that surrounded it. Víga-Barói did not have long to study his surroundings though. A row of armour-clad, axe-wielding knights rushed to greet him and he barely had time to raise his sword in time to parry the first blow.

Sigvald hacked wildly with a borrowed axe, driven into a frenzy by his lack of progress. He and his men had butchered the dwarfs and destroyed the guns, but as soon as they made it down into the courtyard they ground to a halt. Crowds of warriors blocked their way, clad in thick, serrated armour and snarling canine helmets. Sigvald slipped through them like a zephyr, easily dodging their brutal axes and slow, lumbering blows, but however quickly he sliced them apart, more rushed to replace them, trapping his knights in the corner of the courtyard. He could see Víga-Barói and the baron by the gates, surrounded by the same horde. The warriors’ armour was blood-red and edged with twisted, brass spikes and as they hacked off the heads of Sigvald’s men they roared with pleasure. It was rare that Mord Huk’s guns allowed them such sport.

‘To the next circle!’ cried Sigvald. ‘Find Mord Huk!’ He levelled his axe at a second pair of brass gates and began hacking his way towards them.

More of Sigvald’s personal honour guard were rushing down from the wall behind him and at the sight of their heroic prince they slammed into Mord Huk’s warriors with such force that they finally began to shove them back.

Over by the gates, Víga-Barói’s men saw what was happening and tried to follow. As the defenders struggled to protect themselves from Sigvald’s frenzied attack, Víga-Barói and his men charged into their backs, attempting to make some progress of their own.

Sigvald swung his axe down into the warrior below him. The blade bit deep through the man’s gorget and embedded itself in his thick neck. The brute toppled to the ground in a spray of blood, bellowing with rage as Sigvald rolled clear, leaving the axe in his shattered armour.

As the prince clambered to his feet, several of his own men finally caught up with him and formed a defensive circle.

As they raised their mirrored shields to protect him, Sigvald let out a gasp of horror. ‘Look at me,’ he cried, seeing his reflection and clutching his face in shock. The man’s blood had drenched Sigvald’s head and shoulders, staining his blond locks with thick, red gore. His usually perfect mane was clotted and matted with the stuff, giving Sigvald the look of a deranged prophet. As his men fought desperately to protect him, the prince tried to wipe himself clean, staring into the polished metal and moaning in horror at his bedraggled appearance. ‘I’m hideous,’ he cried, unable to pull the muck from his hair. ‘Someone clean me.’ He whirled around, his face purple with rage as he scanned the courtyard. ‘Oddrún? Where are you?’

The chancellor was trapped at the foot of the outer wall, looming awkwardly over the battling figures and still clutching the gold casket to his chest. The prince let out an incoherent howl as he launched himself at the dog-helmed warriors. His own guards struggled to follow him as he charged back into the melee, flooring one of the warriors with a single punch and grabbing the axe that slipped from his grip. Grasping the brutal weapon in both hands, he began hacking his way through the enemy, cursing them for making him so ugly. Mord Huk’s men were all towering brutes and clad in thick plate armour, but the slender figure of Sigvald sliced through them with incredible ease. None of them had ever faced an opponent who fought with such easy grace. A shower of heads and limbs surrounded the youth as he powered his way towards the second set of gates. It was only when he was almost halfway across the courtyard that Sigvald realised that none of his men had managed to follow him. Dozens of the crude, bestial helmets surrounded him as he saw that Víga-Barói and the others were still trapped at the foot of the outer wall, fighting for their lives as more of the red and brass warriors clattered into the courtyard.

Sigvald let out another howl of frustration as he saw that his entire army was on the brink of collapse. The press of bodies was too great for them to reach him and every minute they spent in the courtyard saw more of them dropping to the ground. ‘Where’s Mord Huk?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I will have that helmet.’ However many knights he floored though, he was unable to progress any further. The warriors’ laughter echoed harshly in the snouts of their grotesque helmets as they began to gradually wear him down.

As the prince felt his arms beginning to weaken, he finally realised the danger of his position. Even he could not survive alone for long against such determined foes and there was still no sign of the brass helmet. ‘I must have it,’ he hissed, booting one warrior in the groin and hammering his axe down into the head of another, but it was useless: the crush of bodies was too great. Sigvald found himself being forced slowly back towards his own men. He howled and threw the axe down in disgust. Then he collapsed backwards in a feint, causing his attackers to clash into each other in confusion. As the tightly packed ranks of warriors stumbled and crashed to the ground, Sigvald span away with an acrobatic roll, landing on his feet and dashing back towards the gates.

His men had banded together beneath the billowing silk curtains to make a desperate last stand. As Sigvald approached them, his blood-splattered face was furious. ‘Pathetic!’ he screamed, punching the first man he reached. ‘You can’t even kill this pack of morons.’

There was a clatter of metal as Víga-Barói and Baron Schüler shouldered their way towards him.

‘My prince,’ said Víga-Barói with a low bow. ‘We’re outnumbered. It’s impossible.’

Baron Schüler shook his head wildly, his eyes wide with shock and his sword hanging limply in his hand.

Sigvald clutched his long hair in his fists and howled again. ‘Nothing is impossible,’ he roared, yanking his own head from side to side. Then he loosed his hair and grabbed Víga-Barói by the throat, pressing their faces together. ‘We need to conquer that citadel. Do you understand? We need to.’

Víga-Barói dropped to his knees and shook his head. ‘We can’t do it, prince, not without more help.’

‘You can’t stop now, prince,’ gasped Schüler.

Sigvald dealt Víga-Barói a fierce backhanded blow that sent him sprawling across the skull-covered ground. ‘Idiot,’ he spat, looking down at him in disgust. The prince’s cheeks grew even darker as his head continued to twitch and shake. He clamped his hands over his head again, trying to hold it steady. ‘Very well,’ he said, nodding briefly at Schüler and then looking back out along the bridge. ‘More help he says. So be it.’ He stepped over the fawning knight at his feet and strode from the courtyard.

‘My prince,’ gasped Baron Schüler, racing after him. An explosion of grinding metal drew his gaze back to the battle. The full force of Mord Huk’s army was now piling into them and, as he watched in horror, Sigvald’s army buckled and collapsed in the face of the onslaught.

‘Pull back,’ cried Víga-Barói, lurching to his feet and staggering back towards the curtains.

Sigvald did not look back as he stormed across the bridge with Oddrún hurrying after him. He seemed to have lost all interest in the battle and muttered curses under his breath as he pulled at his tangled hair.

‘Énka,’ roared Víga-Barói as he fought desperately to defend himself and stumbled back out onto the bridge. ‘The gates!’

The tiny hooded figure was still clutching onto the billowing material, but he had dropped to his knees and his head was lolling weakly on his shoulders.

‘Let go!’ snapped Víga-Barói as a red and brass wave rushed towards them. Énka gave no response and seemed to be in some kind of trance.

‘Let go!’ repeated Víga-Barói, booting Énka away from the curtains and sending him sprawling across the bridge.

Barely half of Sigvald’s army made it out of the courtyard before the gates reassumed their solid, brass reality. Several knights were trapped, their organs enveloped by the metal, and even more remained on the other side, moaning with pleasure as they were hacked apart by the victorious defenders.

‘Prince, your men are being massacred,’ cried Oddrún, struggling to keep up with the gold-clad figure.

Sigvald gave no reply but after a few minutes he stumbled to a halt, noticing an arc of delicate silverwork beneath the corpses. He dropped to his knees and began flinging bodies aside, still muttering to himself as he uncovered one of the chariots he had used to assault the wall. ‘Wake up!’ he howled, lifting a broken bird from the bodies and shaking it violently in both hands, surrounding himself in a cloud of white feathers. The eagle was clearly dead and he threw it back down in disgust. Then he grabbed another one and began shaking that, screaming in frustration as its head flopped about in his grip. ‘Fly, you wretched bird,’ he howled, throwing it up in the air. It slammed back down a few feet away and the prince dropped to his knees with a groan of despair. He was covered in drying blood and as the feathers settled over him, they lodged in his matted hair and stuck to his tacky armour. ‘Look at me,’ he spat, holding up his feathered arms to Oddrún. ‘I look ridiculous.’

Oddrún stooped down and grabbed Sigvald by the shoulders, dragging him up from the bodies. ‘You have to save them,’ he said, turning the prince to face the knights clambering back across the bridge. ‘When Mord Huk learns of this he will head straight for the Gilded Palace. What’s to stop him now? You’ve broken all the old accords. He’s free to do as he pleases. You have to keep your army alive, Sigvald. How else can you prepare any kind of defence? You have to lead them home.’

Sigvald shoved Oddrún away with a sneer. ‘Have to?’ He lifted his chin disdainfully and attempted to flatten his knotted, sticky mane of hair. ‘I think not, old friend. Sigvald the Magnificent doesn’t have to do anything.’ He waved at the twitching limbs that surrounded them. ‘I’ve indulged these indolent brats for far too long. They’re too soft. Too pampered.’ He leant closer to Oddrún and lowered his voice. ‘But I will have that brass skull, Oddrún, make no mistake about it.’ He pointed north, beyond the glinting peaks of the mountains. ‘If no one else can help me, I’m sure our patron will.’

Oddrún struggled to control his disjointed limbs for a second, holding up his long arms to steady himself. Then he shook his head. ‘What are you saying? You’ve already given Belus Pül your soul. What else can you bargain with?’

Sigvald laughed bitterly. ‘Daemons are rarely lacking in imagination. I’m sure there will be something I can offer in return for such a small favour.’ His cheeks flushed purple and he jabbed a finger at the fortress. ‘I will not be denied my prize. Not by a dog-brained oaf and a bunch of witless apes.’

Oddrún shook his head again. ‘Don’t do this,’ he said, with mounting panic in his voice. ‘Think about what you’re suggesting.’

‘Pah!’ said Sigvald, nodding at Oddrún’s trembling, hunched body. ‘Look where thinking got you.’

Oddrún lowered his head.

The prince looked pained for a second, seeming to regret his words, then he waved his hand dismissively and stormed off across the bridge. ‘I’ll be back in a day or two and then I’ll level this place to the ground.’

Oddrún stood in silence for a few minutes, rubbing his hands together and shaking his head, then he lurched after the receding figure of the prince, swinging his legs in great swooping strides.

As the two figures disappeared into the whirling banks of snow, still bickering, a column of survivors trailed after them, led by Víga-Barói, wearing his perpetual sneer as he waved his men on through the drifts. Every now and then he turned to look back at one of the knights and laugh at his haunted, anguished expression. ‘Keep up, baron,’ he called, holding his sword aloft. ‘They’re headed north. Looks like the fun’s just beginning.’

Mord Huk sniffed the cool night breeze as it whipped across the crimson lake. ‘Fresh blood,’ he grunted. His head resembled that of a grotesque, feral dog, complete with scarred snout, drooling, muscular jaws and a row of thick, yellow canines. He drew his steed to a halt. It was a lumbering mass of scarred muscle, iron and brass, welded together in vague imitation of a bull.

Mord Huk tilted back his head and wrinkled his bristly snout. ‘Lots of fresh blood.’ He turned to the ranks of brass and iron behind him and waved his fist at a nearby rise.

Bursts of steam escaped from his mount’s mechanised joints as it stomped to the top of the hill. Once there, Mord Huk dropped down into the snow with a muffled crunch and peered out across the moonlit landscape. A low growl rumbled in his chest. Ahead of him was the fortress of Ör, surrounded by its broad, dark lake. Hundreds of lights were blinking along the fortress’s circular walls and, even at this distance, he could see mounds of bodies, piled across the slender bridge that led to his citadel. He had been attacked. A few broken banners were wedged in the corpses and he shook his head in disbelief as he saw the circular icon emblazoned across them. The greasy hair that covered his neck stood up in thick bristles and his hulking frame began to shake, rattling a helmet hung from his battered armour. The helmet was cast in brass and designed to resemble a leering skull. As it shook, it clanged ominously.

Mord Huk led his men down to the bridge, snorting and growling as he approached the piles of mangled limbs.

Some of the dog-helmed guards were picking their way through the mess, dragging behind them Sigvald’s surgeon, Hazül. The creature was unconscious, its wiry body a mess of open wounds, and its shroud of lilac hair in tatters.

At the sight of their lord, the soldiers dropped their prisoner and fell to their knees.

Mord Huk reined in his mount and glared down at them, long trails of drool hanging from his black muzzle. He looked at Hazül in confusion for a moment, then gestured to a nearby banner. It was torn and scorched, but the device of Slaanesh was still clearly visible. ‘Who?’ he grunted.

One of the guards clanged his fist against his cuirass. ‘Lord, it was the child with golden hair.’

Mord Huk shifted forward in his saddle, panting slightly. ‘Sigvald?’

The guard nodded.

Mord Huk leant back with a snort. ‘Sigvald,’ he repeated, beginning to shake with laughter.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

An army of frozen Sigvalds punctuated the darkness, drenching the landscape with pale blue light. Each beaming prince was nearly twenty feet tall and built of slick, pulsing ice, and each of them was a caricature of the real prince, with exaggerated features and absurdly powerful muscles. As they lifted their arms in welcome, hundreds of weary figures shuffled through the snow towards them, throwing down their weapons and collapsing gratefully at their feet.

Baron Schüler’s mind was numb as he stumbled towards the ice sculptures. Exhaustion and terror had left his thoughts as featureless as the snow. The prince had led them north for two days, deep into the frozen wastes, and the small reserves of strength Schüler had built up in the Gilded Palace were gone. If he had been asked his own name at that moment he would have struggled to recall it. As he reached one of the blazing effigies he let out a groan of pleasure. The ice prince’s limbs were radiating unnatural warmth, melting the snow at its feet into a dark, bubbling pool. The baron dropped, pilgrim-like, to his knees, shedding ice from his ragged beard and his battered armour. He was vaguely aware that some of his deformed kinsmen were settling on the ground next to him, but he focussed all his attention on the glittering statue, afraid to acknowledge the grunting, slithering shapes that were pouring out of the night and waiting expectantly for his command. As he peered into the ice he caught a glimpse of his reflection. The make-up applied by Sigvald’s servants had run down his cheeks, blurring his features and giving the odd impression that his face was melting. Schüler nodded his head. The transformation was apt. He could no longer recognise his own thoughts, so it seemed right that he could no longer recognise his own face.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ asked Víga-Barói, waving at the ice sculptures as he emerged from the shadows. His scarred face was drenched in gore and his tight ponytail was slick with blood, but his sneer seemed almost playful. There was a spark of humour in his eyes as he dropped down next to the baron and waved over the heads of the assembled crowd. ‘It’s so like our prince to create such a picturesque source of warmth.’ Several feet away, another frozen Sigvald was emerging from the snow, surrounded by gouts of steam and dwarfing the two figures at its feet. As the tiny, hooded sorcerer, Énka, summoned the thing into being, the real prince danced back and forth through the snow, gesticulating wildly and shouting instructions.

The baron looked blankly at Víga-Barói. He had not spoken to anyone for hours, and he was not sure if he could even remember how to. He turned away and finally allowed himself to look at some of the other figures moving towards the pale blue lights. He recognised the hunched, awkward shape of Oddrún, sitting alone, several feet away. ‘Who is he?’ he asked, nodding towards the chancellor. His voice sounded hoarse and unfamiliar, but he continued. ‘What’s under that hood?’

Víga-Barói followed his gaze and shrugged. ‘Sigvald’s past.’ He saw the baron’s confused expression and continued. ‘Oddrún is the prince’s last link with his old life.’ He waved at the grotesque parade milling around them. ‘He thinks that as long as he keeps Oddrún alive, he could somehow escape all this and find his way back to a normal life.’ He fixed his eyes on the baron. ‘But there’s no way back, Baron Schüler. For any of us.’

Schüler felt a chill that did not come from the snow. He looked back at his reflection and winced. His face was growing more stretched and distorted in the melting ice. He looked the same as the monsters that surrounded him.

‘What brought you north?’ asked Víga-Barói, clearly amused by the baron’s dismay. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ He gestured to Schüler’s beautifully sculpted breastplate and his keen, bloody sword. ‘You have power beyond anything your kinsmen could dream of.’

The baron shook his head, but could not deny the truth of Víga-Barói’s words. He looked down at the sword. ‘I had a family once,’ he muttered. ‘Normal people. A wife. Children. People who put their faith in me. They thought I could protect them.’ He shook his head and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘But when the time came I could not. I could no more save them than I could hold back the sea. The Empire is spent.’ He gripped his sword tighter as he tried to recall his original purpose. ‘All I could think to do was avenge them. I came here looking for the strength to…’ his voice trailed off and he frowned. He looked around at the throbbing blue lights and shook his head. ‘But what does it matter? It all seems so long ago.’

Víga-Barói opened his mouth to reply, but his words died on his lips as he studied the baron’s face. For a brief second, his sneer faltered and his glare softened. Then he shook his head and laughed. ‘We’re all reborn in Sigvald’s image now, my friend.’

On the other side of the statue a pair of slender figures dropped into the snow and held their hands up to the warmth. The baron grimaced as he recognised them. They were the porcelain-skinned manikins he had seen at the feast. Their pale, ceramic faces were even more cracked than before, revealing large patches of glistening sinew.

‘And is that our destiny?’ he whispered, nodding towards them. ‘To become skinless freaks, dressed up as porcelain dolls?’

Víga-Barói laughed again. ‘Oh no, baron, that specific fate is reserved for an elect few.’ He looked over at the dolls’ gaudy, painted smiles. ‘Those delightful girls are the former wives of Sigvald.’ He ran a finger over his scarred face. ‘The prince can’t bear to watch those he loves grow old. Every new wrinkle breaks his heart. So at the first sign of a silver hair or a crow’s foot, he removes their old skin and gives them a new one that will never crumple or sag.’

Schüler gasped and placed a hand on his chest. ‘But what about Freydís?’

Víga-Barói saw the fear in Schüler’s face and narrowed his eyes. ‘Ah, I see,’ he muttered.

Schüler blushed and looked away. ‘I simply wondered when her time would come.’

‘Hard to say,’ replied the knight, with a glint of amusement. ‘I believe she caused quite a stir when the prince decided to leave her behind, which won’t have pleased him. But, that said, she has lasted longer than the others. Something about her defiance seems to intrigue him. Passion may blind him to any imperfections in her skin – for a while at least.’ He shrugged. ‘It makes little difference either way though.’

Schüler shook his head in confusion.

‘Sigvald has doomed her along with everything else in the Gilded Palace. Once Mord Huk learns of this attack his revenge will be swift, but as you can see,’ Víga-Barói waved to the ranks of soldiers filing out of the darkness, ‘since you arrived, Sigvald is no longer interested in defending his home, or his wife. Your counsel has stoked a fire in him. He’s obsessed with seizing Mord Huk’s fortress. Until he can find a way to achieve that he will think of nothing else. So, we’re heading north, into the realm of the gods.’

Schüler squirmed beneath Víga-Barói’s intense gaze. ‘I gave him no counsel – I only mentioned that the warriors of the Blood God were roaming through his lands. It was his decision to ride out and face them.’

Víga-Barói shrugged, clearly unconvinced. ‘Whatever the reason, he’s left the Gilded Palace at the mercy of his enemies. The princess’s beauty will not protect her against the blood lust of Khorne. Sigvald has left her to die.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sväla could not survive for much longer. The cold was knifing into her head and her lungs were about to explode. She thrashed wildly, eel-like, under the water, kicking and biting in a desperate attempt to free herself, but it was no good, Halldórr’s fingers were latched firmly around her throat and, as the seconds passed, the pain in her head was slowly replaced by an ominous numbness. She could see the shifting, blurry outline of his face, glaring down at her through the water. The Kurgan was cursing her as she died, but the words were muffled and distant, drowned out by the sound of her own pulse. Finally, Sväla’s last breath exploded from her lungs, replaced by a flood of icy saltwater. Her pain began to fade as her life slipped away.

As Sväla’s hands pressed desperately against Halldórr’s chest, fingers of moonlight rippled through the water and glanced off her wedding rings. She watched the shards of light lancing away through the weeds and saw that Hauk was beside her in the water, stern and proud, as he came to welcome her into the afterlife. Then she noticed how young her husband looked. She was remembering him as he was in the earliest days of their courtship, back in the days when he taught her how to fight. ‘If your enemy is stronger, turn his strength against him,’ he said, gripping her slender frame. ‘If you’re too small to overpower him, steer him in an unexpected direction.’ As Sväla nodded her understanding, Hauk graced her with a rare smile: willing her to succeed, willing her to live.

Sväla relaxed her arms, allowing the full weight of Halldórr to topple onto her. There was an explosion of sound as he crashed into the sea. As he flailed in the water, trying to right himself, she slipped around him and jammed his face into the sharp rocks below.

Sväla burst from the sea, windmilling her arms, gasping for breath as she flopped back through the inky waves. As the sea pounded against her she felt a fierce lust for life. Nothing could stop her, she realised. Nothing could be allowed to stop her. It was her destiny to lead these people to salvation. She would see Hauk’s dream through to the end.

A second later, Halldórr exploded into view, bellowing and shaking his head. His face was red with blood and there was a long tear in his face, stretching up from the corner of his mouth and giving him a lunatic, skeletal grin. He clamped his hand over the wound and howled, staggering back through the crashing surf.

As Sväla stumbled towards him, she had to fight the urge to vomit. She knew this was her last chance and threw herself at Halldórr with a guttural cry.

She landed a punch on his severed lips and his head rocked back on his shoulders, spraying more blood as he collapsed back into the brine.

Sväla stamped her foot down on the Kurgan’s throat, pinning him beneath the waves. Then she turned towards the beach with a look of exultant defiance on her face. She pulled the ice and kelp from her head and raised her fist. ‘I’m Sväla the Witch!’ she cried, forcing her foot down on the struggling chieftain and glaring at the figures on the beach. ‘Obey me! I am the wrath of the Wolf!’

She felt Halldórr punching and clawing at her leg, but she held firm. After a few minutes his movements grew weaker and finally ceased, but she kept her foot on his throat. ‘Do I have any other challengers?’

The Fallen looked back at her with a mixture of awe and terror. As she met their eyes, they looked shamefully at their feet, not daring to reply.

Sväla nodded. She had their allegiance again, but this would not be the last challenge, she was sure of that. She had brought them to a world of lunacy and death. It would take every ounce of her courage to drive them on through the madness. She would be tested again.

Sväla lifted her foot from Halldórr’s throat and his corpse bobbed to the surface, grimacing up at her through the surf. She looked past him into the pewter depths, searching for a glimpse of another figure. There was a flicker of movement and she rushed towards it, reaching into the brine for her husband’s hand; but it was just a fish, glinting and flashing as it slipped out to sea.

The Fallen spread out across the frozen wastes in a silent black line. Thousands of them: warriors, herdsmen, crones and cripples, all staring at the moonlit coast in terror. Up ahead of them, a single, dark figure was the only interruption in the endless white. As Sväla looked across glittering drifts to the distant line of mountains, her heart raced. Nothing like this had ever been done. She had brought a nation to the roof of the world. Despite their fear and mistrust, she had led an entire people right to the very source of their curse. Soon, they would either have Sigvald’s head on a pole, or they would be no more. Either way, the nightmare would end.

Valdür the Old strode out towards her. ‘Do you see anything?’ he asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.

She bridled at the pity in his eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said, sniffing hard and raising her chin.

‘Well, I’m sure the visions will return. Maybe we’re still too close to that wretched island?’

Sväla shrugged. ‘We must do without visions.’ She waved her knife at the magnificent peaks and the gleaming vastness of the snow. ‘This place is not as empty as it looks. We won’t be alone for long. And whatever horrors are waiting out there must be harnessed to our will. Sigvald’s depravity will be like a beacon to them. It shouldn’t be hard to find someone, or something, that can lead us to him.’

‘It’s not just the monsters you’ll need to harness to your will.’ Valdür looked back at the huge crowds gathered along the coast. ‘There are others who would see you fail.’

Sväla nodded. ‘I’ll deal with Ungaur the Blessed, don’t worry about that, old friend.’

Valdür shook his head. ‘He’s not the one I meant.’

Sväla frowned and followed his gaze. She saw the wiry figure of her son, deep in conversation with the hulking priest. ‘Svärd?’ For a second, her resolve faltered, then she clenched her jaw and shook her head. ‘Nothing will stop this crusade. I will see to that.’ She pulled back her shoulders and gripped her iron knife a little tighter. ‘Make no mistake, Valdür, I will find Sigvald.’

After four days of marching, they began to die. At first there seemed nothing strange in it. Hunting was hard, many of the Fallen were old and frail and the bitter winds lashed through even the thickest furs. The weakest of them simply crumpled into the deep snow. Soon, however, it became clear that something else was at play. Strange voices drifted on the wind and the Norscans began to eye their own kin with suspicion, unsure who was pouring such scorn and derision on them. Their paranoia grew as they realised the sun was never going to rise. The heavy darkness that shrouded the landscape was no natural night. Not a single star peered down at them and many began to wonder how even a witch could navigate in such a void. As their fears grew, tempers flared and knives flashed. Some of the bodies left behind were not so old, and some were slick with blood.

The landscape grew harsher as they marched north. The frozen plains gave way to jagged rocks and foothills and, as they edged closer to the mountains, they found themselves clambering up icy, brutal slopes.

A few of the younger warriors raced ahead, eager to prove themselves to their new queen and still naïve enough to consider the crusade a great adventure. After several hours of absence, one such scout waved back at them from the edge of a distant peak. ‘Queen Sväla,’ he called, shielding his voice from the howling wind and holding his javelin aloft.

She clambered up a small rise and peered out from her fur-lined hood, trying to make him out more clearly.

‘There’s a star ahead,’ he called, his voice full of pride.

‘A star?’ said Sväla, turning to Valdür who was climbing up towards her. Her eyes glinted with excitement. Despite her façade of confidence, she had been utterly lost ever since they left the longships. With a star to guide them, she could at least be sure they were not marching in circles.

The old warrior grinned back at her, but was too exhausted to reply.

Sväla raised her knife in salute to the young scout and waved her people in his direction.

As she climbed towards the scout, Sväla tried to blank out the whining calls that echoed through the banks of snow. Dozens of voices taunted her in a language she had never heard before, but the malice needed no translation. As she hauled herself up the rocks, Sväla began to notice something else strange. As she dislodged stones with her grasping fingers, some of the smaller ones tumbled up the slope rather than down it. As she climbed further, even the larger stones began to roll uphill rather than down. She looked back at the others and saw that they had noticed it too. She realised that as her muscles trembled with the effort of clinging to the rocks, she was no longer preventing herself from falling back down the slope; she actually had to stop herself falling up it.

She turned to Valdür with a puzzled expression, intending to ask him about the strange phenomenon, but instead she said: ‘You’re holding me back, Valdür. Maybe you shouldn’t have come? You’re just too old for this kind of journey.’

Valdür’s eyes bulged with shock and hurt.

Sväla gasped, horrified by her own words. She shook her head and reached towards him. ‘You left my husband to die,’ she gasped. ‘Will you do the same to me?’

Valdür’s face twisted into a snarl and he backed away.

Sväla clamped a hand over her mouth and shook her head fiercely.

Valdür’s expression softened as he saw the confusion on her face. ‘What more can I expect from a woman?’ he asked. He frowned. ‘Even your own son is not safe from your lies. You’ve stolen his rightful throne. And now you’re leading us all to our deaths.’ He mimicked Sväla and clamped a hand over his mouth, but after a few seconds of staring at each other in mute horror, he tried to speak again. ‘Next time you sleep I’ll slit your lying throat.’

Sväla eyes widened, but she would not remove her hand from her mouth. She looked down the slope and saw arguments breaking out amongst all those nearest to the summit. As insults and curses echoed through the snow, she realised that the whole army was on the verge of turning on itself. She grabbed a horn from Valdür’s belt and let out a shrill blast. The Norscans looked out at her with rage in their eyes as she pointed to the hand pressed over her mouth. A few more cruel jibes followed until, one by one, they grasped her meaning and clamped their mouths shut.

Valdür patted Sväla’s shoulder and pointed to a narrow crevasse between two of the jagged peaks.

She nodded in reply and they led the others down between the rocks. The wind was howling down the gulley with such force that tears streamed from their eyes as they waited for the others to file down after them. Sväla crouched next to a rock and spent a few minutes scratching at it with her iron knife. Then she waved Valdür over and pointed out the runes she had left. ‘Do not speak,’ they said. ‘Our words are being twisted by the mountain spirits. Tell the others to read this.’

He nodded and signalled to those nearby that they should look at the stone. Then he followed Sväla as she scrambled off in the direction of the scout.

The young tribesman was waiting on a ledge for them as they emerged from the gulley. Sväla noted that his face was daubed in crimson war paint and realised that he must have belonged to the tribe that killed Hauk. She felt no anger towards him though; they were all one tribe now.

‘There,’ he said, pointing his javelin at the horizon.

Sväla raised her hand to silence him, then, realising his words held no malice, she lowered it again. She spoke hesitantly, unsure what would emerge from her mouth. ‘I see it,’ she said. ‘We’ve left the spirits behind,’ she said, waving Valdür up onto the ledge. Then she looked back out over the incredible spectacle of the Wastes. Mountains filled the horizon, rearing up from the frigid ground like spined monsters and dwarfing even the tortured clouds that writhed between their jagged peaks. The moons were obscured by banks of rolling thunderheads, but there was a single light twinkling in the heavens: a flash of gold amongst the black and grey that seemed to have strayed north from more cheery skies.

Sväla narrowed her eyes and peered through the storm. ‘There’s something familiar about this,’ she muttered.

Valdür threw back his fur-lined hood and smoothed his grey hair back from his face. ‘Did you see this in your visions?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’ She turned away and smiled at the young scout. ‘You’ve done well. I think that star is important somehow.’ She turned to see that some of the elders were struggling towards the ledge with their hands clamped over their mouths and their bodies shrouded in tattered, snow-covered furs. At their head, she saw the bearded face of Ungaur the Blessed, grinning at her from beneath his snarling wolf hood, using his staff to heave his muscle-clad bulk up to her side.

‘Where now, witch?’ he grunted waving his staff at the storm. ‘Where does Völtar wish us to die next?’

Sväla did not acknowledge the venom in the shaman’s voice. She simply waved her knife at the long column of figures struggling up the mountain behind him. ‘Tell the others to head for the star,’ she answered. She stared at Ungaur and Valdür until both of them nodded to show that they understood. Then she turned and began climbing down into the storm-lashed valley. ‘We’re nearing the end,’ she said, fixing her eyes on the lonely star. ‘If anyone becomes separated, leave them behind. Völtar the Wolf will watch over them.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

On the third day of marching they reached a broad plain, nestling between the blasted peaks. As they climbed down a narrow mountain path, Sigvald pointed out a patch of green directly below them. It looked like a calm lake, a tranquil haven in the heart of the brutal landscape, with a violet gemstone in its centre. Sigvald wiped his sodden hair from his face and looked up at Oddrún with a grin. ‘We’re here,’ he yelled, straining to make himself heard over the noise of the storm.

Oddrún nodded but gave no reply, pulling his filthy robes a little tighter around his lanky frame. As he followed the prince, he muttered bitterly under his breath and tried to avoid looking at their destination.

A few yards behind them trudged Víga-Barói, closely followed by the baron. Upon seeing the lake they both stumbled to a halt, baffled by the strange sight; then, noticing that the prince and the giant were already disappearing from view, hurried after them, along with the garish remnants of Sigvald’s army.

As the soldiers staggered clear of the treacherous foothills, they saw the smooth expanse more clearly. It was actually a broad, circular lawn of perfectly maintained grass, and the gemstone at its centre was a cluster of tall, violet pavilions shining in the moonlight. A wide, venerable old hedge surrounded the lawn, bejewelled with rambling roses and sculpted to resemble an undulating serpent. Undaunted by the strangeness of the place, the Geld-Prince strode calmly through a gate of knotted oak and stepped out onto the lawn.

Groans of pleasure exploded from the weary troops as they followed him into the garden. As soon as they passed through the gate, the terrible screaming of the storm was silenced and the weather changed from bitter winter to a balmy summer’s evening. The soldiers collapsed gratefully in a jumble of chitinous limbs and aching, shivering wings.

Sigvald carried on towards the pavilions with Oddrún lurching and weaving after him. As they passed the smaller, outlying structures, the prince saw figures gathered inside them. Shifting firelight distorted their silhouettes, but it was clear that their hands were pressed against the walls of the tents, as if they were monitoring his approach through their outstretched fingers. He did not pause, however, marching straight ahead towards the largest of the tents. Once there, he wrenched open a pair of canvas doors and stepped inside.

He found himself surrounded by music and leaves. The pavilion contained an orchard and the branches of the trees were crowded with hundreds of songbirds, all trilling and warbling as he stepped beneath the fruit-laden boughs. He laughed, shaking his head in disbelief at finding such a bucolic scene buried deep in the heart of the Shadowlands.

At the centre of this pretty bower was a wooden bench, dangling from the branches of a twisted old juniper tree. Swinging gently back and forth on it was a daemon.

Sigvald bowed low as Belus Pül beckoned him closer. His patron had not aged a day since their last meeting, despite the passage of two centuries. It still resembled a slim, androgynous youth and was even wearing the same clothes – a plain, white habit. Its face was such a picture of benign serenity that Sigvald could not help but smile. A pair of small black horns curved up from the daemon’s smooth, hairless head and in its left hand, it carried a single white lily. As it watched his approach, the daemon held the flower up to its face and sniffed, closing its eyes and crushing its small, pretty nose into the petals.

‘Sigvald the Magnificent, Prince of the Decadent Host,’ said the daemon, in a soft, melodic voice, turning to another figure sat a few feet away, ‘arrived as casually as if he were a daily visitor. His manner was nonchalant and self-assured, despite having neglected his celestial parent for almost two hundred years.’

Sigvald shook his head in dismay and followed the daemon’s gaze to the other side of the lawn.

At first he thought his patron was talking to a huge, pale spider. The light blazing through the lilac walls made it hard to make out anything clearly, but he could see that the thing had dozens of fine, segmented appendages that trailed out from a small plump body. It was only as he stepped nearer that Sigvald realised it was a naked, hairless man with a nest of twitching arms sprouting from his sides. Each of his needle-thin limbs ended in a sharpened, inked point and as the daemon spoke, the man wrote on a long roll of parchment. His face was devoid of features apart from a single hole at its centre, which curled inwards like the auricle of a huge ear.

‘Wait,’ gasped Sigvald, rushing towards the angelic youth. ‘I’ve never forgotten what you did for me. You’re in my thoughts constantly, Belus, but your gifts have been such a blessing, that time itself–’

‘The prince fawned pathetically, like an errant child,’ interrupted the daemon, still directing its words to the scribe, ‘vomiting treacly platitudes in an attempt to assuage Belus Pül’s grief.’ As the daemon spoke, the scratching of its scribe’s quill-like fingers continued. With so many limbs scuttling back and forth, he was able to write with incredible speed – quickly filling the roll of parchment with tightly packed rows of tiny, florid text.

‘Stop it,’ snapped Sigvald, glaring at the faceless man. ‘These aren’t platitudes, I’m simply…’ his words trailed off as he realised that as soon as he spoke, the scribe ceased scribbling and kept his forest of limbs hovering over the paper, waiting for the daemon to continue.

‘Without showing an ounce of contrition, Sigvald insulted Belus Pül’s only remaining friend and refused to even acknowledge his own neglect.’ As the daemon spoke, the scribe began transcribing its words again. It was clear from the reams of text he was producing that the strange creature must be elaborating wildly on the daemon’s words.

Sigvald’s eyes bulged with rage and he opened his mouth to hurl an insult at the pair of them.

‘My lord,’ grunted Oddrún, stepping into the orchard and placing a hand on Sigvald’s shoulder. ‘We should leave while we can. This is pointless.’

‘A grotesque, jangling sack of limbs dragged itself before the regal gaze of the deity,’ continued the daemon. ‘To Belus Pül’s horror, it realised that the wretched thing was Sigvald’s perverse childhood companion – the one who had been so vile and insulting many years earlier.’ The daemon’s face remained emotionless as it continued its gentle stream of vitriol. ‘The benevolent deity was shocked to think that Sigvald would so compound his negligence by continuing to consort with such an ugly dullard.’

Sigvald took a deep breath to calm himself and stepped closer to the daemon. As he neared the swing, he dropped to one knee and lowered his head. ‘Belus, you are my eternal guardian, my one true love. If there’s anything I can do to ease the pain I’ve caused you, I beg you to tell me.’

The daemon finally showed a sign of emotion. Its eyes glittered with tears as it held out a hand for Sigvald to kiss. As it moved its arm, a disparate collection of items jangled over its skin: bangles, chains and rings of various styles and sizes, none of which seemed in keeping with the being’s simple attire.

As the prince obeyed the command and pressed his lips to the daemon’s pale flesh, he felt his skin blistering and quickly withdrew. The heat pouring through the daemon’s pores was no surprise to him – he knew all too well the incredible power contained within its unassuming figure. This close up, it was hard for him to even look at Belus – even after a lifetime of witnessing atrocities, his eyes were unwilling to focus on such an abomination. The daemon’s attempts to appear angelic and serene only succeeded in drawing attention to its essential wrongness. It did not quite belong in the real world – almost like a figure torn from one painting and plastered over the top of another. Everything about it was too bright, too saturated or too sharply focussed.

A faint smile pursed the daemon’s lips and it took another long sniff of the lily. ‘As the proud young prince realised the terrible extent of his guardian’s hurt, he finally began to feel some remorse and, seeing this, the kindly deity relented. So great was Belus Pül’s love for all its children that it could no longer gird its heart against Sigvald’s pitiful entreaties. Belus Pül had long ago given its heart to Sigvald, and could not bear to stay angry with him for long.’

Sigvald’s jaw clenched as he heard the scribe begin to scratch at the parchment again.

The daemon withdrew its hand and patted the swing, indicating that Sigvald should sit on the knotted oak.

As the prince sat down, the daemon kept its gaze in the middle distance, as though blind to his presence. After a few seconds of silence it waved its flower at Oddrún. ‘Finally seeing the callous nature of his actions, Sigvald banished the grotesque monster from the deity’s presence.’

Sigvald sighed and looked over at his chancellor, but before he had chance to speak, the giant shuffled back towards the pavilion’s entrance, clearly glad to escape.

Once Oddrún was gone, the daemon began rocking the swing gently back and forth and took Sigvald’s hand. ‘Despite the passage of the years, the benevolent deity still felt a close bond with the prince and sensed that even with all his assumed majesty and pomp he might not be above amusing his patron with a few simple distractions.’ The daemon fluttered its long eyelashes and briefly met Sigvald’s eye. ‘After all, Belus’s kindness had been so great, all those years earlier, that it did not seem unreasonable to expect a little more entertainment.’

Sigvald loosed the daemon’s hand and stopped the swing. ‘Maybe we could come to a new agreement?’ he said. ‘I’ve done everything you wished, Belus. I’ve indulged every whim in your name. No pleasure, however slight, has been beneath my notice, and all of it has been for you.’

The daemon rose slowly from the swing and walked over towards the scribe. There was a barely discernable note of amusement in its voice as it answered. ‘Incredibly, the young prince seemed to expect some new favour – despite the fact that Belus Pül had heard nothing of his exploits for two centuries. But even as he spoke the words, Sigvald’s dreadful arrogance faltered. The ungrateful child realised that in return for any new gift, it would only be right that he offer something new. As he pondered this, and all his other treacheries, it occurred to Sigvald that maybe he should offer to complete three simple trials – nothing too strenuous for a man of his stature, but enough to amuse his dear, lonely old friend.’

Sigvald glared at one of the items glinting on the daemon’s right arm. It was a bronze torque – crudely made and far too ugly to be worn by such a regal being – but at that moment he would have given anything for it. ‘So,’ he hissed, clenching his teeth, ‘even a man’s soul isn’t enough for one such as you.’ He felt his rage boil up through his chest and let it out in a furious yell. He leapt from the swing and drew his sword, swinging it wildly at the daemon’s arm.

The blade passed through the daemon as easily as smoke. Belus Pül’s body undulated briefly, like a reflection in water, but the daemon did not acknowledge the attack, even as Sigvald slammed heavily to the ground and howled in frustration.

The enraged prince leapt back to his feet and tried another lunge. Again, the blade passed straight through the daemon without making contact and, again, Sigvald crashed to the ground. He lay still for a few seconds breathing heavily, then spoke in taut, clipped tones. ‘You’re playing me for a fool,’ he said, without looking up from the grass, ‘but so be it. If I indulge you in this, will you guarantee me success? Will you give me the strength to defeat my enemy, Mord Huk? Will you promise me his corpse, and his possessions?’

The daemon’s blank face creased into a broad smile. It turned its doe-like eyes on Sigvald. ‘Belus was touched by the prince’s kind offer. The deity was even more delighted when the prince explained the nature of his first errand. The humbled prince reminded the divine being of an ancient fable, concerning a great, two-headed drake of elven legend. Sigvald reminded Belus Pül that this fascinating creature was called Galrauch and that it had long ago fled from an elven realm – devoting its life to the service of the Great Architect, Tzeentch. Belus Pül was delighted to hear that the creature dwelled in a mountain lair not far away, and that Sigvald intended to seek out the beast and return with one of its talons – something the deity had long sought.’

Sigvald frowned. ‘Galrauch? I’ve never heard of such a thing.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Still, what harm can a dragon do me? However many heads it has?’ He climbed to his feet and dusted a few blades of grass from his gold armour. ‘Very well, Belus,’ he said, eyeing the daemon with suspicion. ‘Tell me the way.’

The daemon continued to grace Sigvald with its terrifying, benevolent smile for a few seconds longer, then it strolled over to the scribe, peering at the paper as the creature held it up for inspection. Eventually, the daemon nodded, apparently satisfied, and continued dictating. ‘So it was that as he watched the pale light filtering down through the juniper blossom and glinting in Belus Pül’s kind, tearful eyes, Sigvald felt all the shame and unworthiness of his position. He knew that even in the pursuit of pleasure, it is not enough to be a dilettante, so he resolved to complete the three trials with as much alacrity and dignity as possible. After all, what gift could be too generous for the blessed being that had ensured him an eternity of pleasure?’

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sigvald felt as though his soul might burst with happiness. As he hauled himself up onto the highest peak of the mountain his eyes were streaming with tears and his heart was pounding in his chest. ‘By the gods!’ he howled, shielding his face from the fierce, ice-laden wind and squinting down into the valley. ‘Where have we come? Where have we come?’

A scene of incredible, awful beauty was spread out before him. The whole, frozen landscape was boiling and rolling, as though dragged aloft by the fury of the storm. Great, knotted limbs of rock reached up into the sky in an orgy of heaving granite, while overhead the moons flickered from emerald to cerise, lighting up the snow and glinting along the carcasses of vast, silver-scaled leviathans, swimming lazily through the clouds, each of them bristling with tattered, lateen sails and garish turquoise fins. He realised that they were enormous airborne ships, carved from the hollowed remains of monstrous sea creatures. Other things swam in their wake: bloated fish, with dangling, insectoid limbs and cawing, avian voices swam ahead of pink, featherless birds, with ruby coloured gowns and pale, human faces. The whole surreal carnival was circling a mountain even higher than those surrounding it. This tallest peak was made of a different rock than the others. As the twin moons flickered overhead, pinks and blues were refracted in its crags and facets, rippling across slopes that seemed to be carved from a single, colossal diamond.

Sigvald laughed through his tears. ‘Look at that,’ he cried, shaking his head. As he looked around in amazement, he spotted a crowd of disembodied shadows, flitting in and out of the storm. They were tall and willowy and whirling around each other in a frenetic, giggling dance; blowing long trumpets that filled peaks and valleys with a piercing, tuneless din. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Oddrún was standing a few feet below him, clutching grimly to the shattered remains of a tree. The daemon had ordered Sigvald to leave his army behind, but had insisted he take Oddrún, so the lumbering chancellor had been forced to trail miserably after the prince for the last three days. Oddrún shook his huge cowled head, too exhausted from the climb to reply. Then he backed away from the tree with a grunt of disgust. Hundreds of tiny black shapes were scuttling across the white bark and onto his arms. To his horror, he saw that they were miniscule, whispering men, with glinting, chitinous limbs. As he staggered away, he dusted some of them from his sackcloth robes, cursing under his breath and lurching back and forth across the icy rocks in an effort to escape them.

The prince laughed even harder when saw Oddrún’s panicked dance. ‘Finally, you’re entering into the spirit of things,’ he cried, his voice edged with hysteria.

Oddrún continued whirling around for a few moments, waving his clumsy limbs and flicking the spider people from his clothes. Then he collapsed into the snow with a groan, clutching his head in his hands.

‘Ask the doctor where we are,’ Sigvald demanded, once he had managed to stifle his laughter.

Oddrún pulled the gold casket from his robes and slid back the lid.

Doctor Schliemann’s head was already beginning to rot. His gaunt features had taken on a grey-green hue and networks of black veins had spread over his face. His wire-rimmed spectacles had slid down his long, hooked nose and as he turned his eyes on the prince, they were clouded and blind.

‘Where are we, old friend?’ cried Sigvald, dropping from the ledge, grabbing the casket and holding it up in front of his face. He grimaced at the smell of putrefaction but kept the head close as he waited for an answer.

The doctor’s reply sounded flat and inhuman. ‘The edge of reason. The edge of the Shadowlands. The shifting borders of the mortal realm.’ He paused to cough up a thick clot of dried blood. ‘As we approach the immaterial kingdoms, logic will begin to fragment. It may become hard to conceive rational thoughts, or even to maintain physical form.’ He ran a bloated, black tongue over his lips. ‘Continue much further and the tides of magic will tear you apart.’

Sigvald rolled his eyes and let out a dismissive ‘Pah!’, then he loosed the casket. It bounced away over the rocks, shedding screws and springs before spinning off into a deep drift. Sigvald turned away with a look of rapt awe on his face. ‘This is the edge of everything, Oddrún,’ he whispered, looking out at the tortured mountains and the screaming, daemon-filled heavens. ‘Where life itself begins anew.’ He shook his head. ‘How can I have been so idle, with such wonders still to be seen?’

Oddrún scrambled across the slope and plucked the casket from the snow. The lid had slammed shut when it hit the rocks, so he shoved it back and peered in at the doctor’s head. There was a fresh rent in his cold skin, revealing a flash of white skull, but no blood was flowing from the wound. He studied the doctor’s scarred, tortured features for a few seconds then let out a roar of anguish. ‘You can’t treat him like this!’ he cried, grabbing Sigvald’s shoulder and shoving him back.

The prince stumbled and teetered on the edge of the precipice. His eyes widened with excitement as he leant out into the void, with only Oddrún’s long, trembling arm between him and death. He let out another burst of rippling laughter that spiralled up into the whirling snow. ‘Are you going to kill me now, Oddrún?’ he cried, making no effort to steady himself. ‘Will you murder me, after all?’

Oddrún held Sigvald there for a few seconds, trembling with rage. Then he mumbled something into the folds of his hood and heaved him back to safety.

‘Hand me that,’ snapped Sigvald, giving his chancellor a mocking sneer as he took the battered casket. ‘Now. Where exactly are we, Doctor Schliemann? You told me you could lead us to the home of the Great Drake.’

‘I have. These are Galrauch’s hunting grounds. The particular strangeness of the landscape is due to the distorting influence of its master, the sorcerer, Tzeentch’

Sigvald nodded. ‘So where do we find it? Where is our prize?’

‘The Great Drake is tormented by its past. It was once a creature of great intellect, but that intellect has become utterly warped by Chaos. When it’s not feasting on its victims, it hides its shame beneath a crystal mountain, surrounding itself with fractured reflections and torturing itself with paranoid delusions and half-remembered oaths.’

‘A crystal mountain? Of course.’ Sigvald looked back over the valley at the glinting peak on the far side. ‘So that’s its home.’ He took one last look at the monstrous beasts drifting overhead, then began to clamber down the far side of the mountain. ‘Keep up, Oddrún,’ he cried, giving the giant a playful smile as he scrambled down the slope. ‘Who knows when you might have another chance to rid yourself of me?’

The crystal mountain was even more treacherous than the previous summits. The moonlight lanced down through its jagged facets, making it almost impossible to know where to tread. Each icy step looked as if it might be a bottomless pit lined with unforgiving points and disorientating reflections. Before he had climbed halfway, Sigvald collapsed in defeat – clattering down onto the rocks with a bark of frustration. ‘Must we climb the whole thing?’ He stared back down through the billowing drapes of snow, but could see no sign of Oddrún. In desperation, he drew his sword and lashed wildly at the crystal. His blade glanced off it without leaving as much as a scratch. ‘How do we get in?’ he yelled into the storm, knowing there was no one to answer. He looked at the creatures circling above.

His awed appreciation of their appearance was already fading, being quickly replaced by irritation at the delay. Somewhere south of him, a dog-headed moron was riding to war wearing the brass skull that should rightfully be his. ‘What a waste,’ he muttered, considering the tragedy of such godlike power being funnelled through the mind of a simpleton.

As he lay back against the ice, lamenting the unfairness of his fate, Sigvald noticed that the snow had turned to hail. Large, gleaming pellets of the stuff were drumming against the mountainside and pinging off his golden armour. There was something strange about the downpour and he held out a hand to catch a piece. As he held the hail to his face, Sigvald realised it was not made of ice; it was a thick, anaemic maggot as large as his thumb. As it wriggled in his grip, he saw a dark shape suspended inside its fleshy rolls. He gave the maggot a gentle squeeze and it popped, allowing a winged, black eel to slide between his fingers and flutter off into the storm. The prince shook his head in disgust and looked up at the roiling clouds. As he did so, dozens of the maggots landed in his hair and on his face. Several of them burst as they hit him, spawning more of the black eels. ‘This is ridiculous, I can’t even–’ he began, before gagging as one of the creatures landed in his mouth and burst over his tongue. He leapt to his feet and heaved himself up onto a higher piece of crystal, coughing and spitting. ‘Oddrún,’ he howled, desperately batting away more of the grubs, ‘what does the doctor say?’

There was no reply and Sigvald’s face began to twitch as his frustration grew. ‘What am I doing here?’ he screamed, pounding his forehead with his fists. He stumbled backwards, landed badly and slid across the icy slope, hurtling down a narrow crevasse. His armour scraped and banged over the faceted crystals and when he came to a halt, several feet down the slope, he lay still, shivering with rage and pain. After a few moments he looked up and frowned in confusion. A few feet away, on the other side of a small rise, a pale, slack-jawed face watched him. He climbed to his feet, wincing at the dozens of fresh bruises that were throbbing beneath his armour. ‘Hello?’ he called, raising his hand to shield his head from the maggots which were still tumbling off the rocks. As he approached the face, it was hard to be sure exactly what he was seeing. Everywhere he looked, he saw reflections of pale jowly skin, wide, vacant eyes and drooling, toothless gums.

It was not until he was just a few feet away that Sigvald realised the grotesque scale of the face. The thing was over thirty feet tall and its gaping mouth led down into a vast, inky void. Sigvald grinned, noticing that it was exhaling huge, foetid blasts of subterranean air. ‘This must be it,’ he gasped, approaching the yawning jaws. As he neared the face, he realised that the huge eyes were looking down at him in abject terror. Sigvald stepped closer and then cursed. The maggots were still pouring down from the storm clouds and one of them had lodged in his hair. He brushed it away and lifted his circular shield over his head. ‘I’m seeking a Great Drake,’ he cried, looking up into the monstrous, rolling eyes. ‘Can you show me the way?’

A low moan was the face’s only reply.

Sigvald squinted through the hail, trying to see to the back of the huge mouth. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though there was some kind of cavern or tunnel back there. He looked nervously over his shoulder. ‘Oddrún,’ he cried. ‘Are you there?’

The only sounds came from the daemonic creatures screeching overhead and Sigvald knew he was alone. He looked back at the cavernous mouth and grimaced. Finally, the constant rattle of the maggots drumming against his shield decided the matter. He strode purposefully towards the mouth, climbed over the moist, toothless gums and stepped down onto its vast, flaccid tongue. As his feet sank into the soft muscle, he paused, looking around to see what would happen. The moaning sound grew a little louder, but other than that, nothing changed. Sigvald shrugged and took another few steps. The moonlight did not reach very far inside the mouth, but he felt even more certain he could see some kind of cavern at the back of the tongue. ‘This must be it,’ he said, striding forwards.

Oddrún cursed as he heaved the gold casket over a ledge and hauled himself up after it. The vile creatures were still pounding against his hood, but he paid them no attention as he climbed to his feet and scoured the glittering mountainside for any sign of the prince. Something strange caught his eye and he reeled off down a narrow crevasse. At the far end of the gulley he emerged into a small opening and shook his head in disbelief. A vast, thirty-foot tall face was leering down at him from the rock. Its mouth was clamped tightly shut and its enormous eyes were shining with mirth. The chancellor backed away in horror, even more desperate to find Sigvald. Then he clambered off over the crystals, looking for a way into the mountain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After a few days, Brother Bürmann started to realise something had changed. The surgery lights still glared down on him, picking out the rows of knives and the lurid vats of acid, but the chambers had grown oddly quiet. Far at the back of his tortured, broken mind, a glimmer of hope flickered into life. ‘The screaming,’ he thought, lifting his head from his chest and staring into the darkness. ‘It’s stopped.’

The other slaves gazed through him, unseeing, as he shook their shoulders and tried to rouse them. He understood. What right did he have to drag them from such merciful oblivion? What right did he have to consider escape? And anyway, after the things they had done and seen, what would be the point in leaving? There was no way back for any of them, no chance of a normal life. Even if he could somehow find his way out, how could he ever face his congregation, carrying memories of such dreadful crimes? He ran a finger up the scar on his neck. How could he preach, without a voice? He tried to settle down and wait for the return of the lilac-haired surgeon, but it was useless: his mind kept teasing him with visions of freedom until finally he pulled himself to his feet with a wordless groan and, wincing at the pain in his cramped muscles, he stepped out into the operating theatre.

The crimson-stained slabs were empty. The grotesque bodies of Hazül’s patients had all vanished. The only reminders of their presence were the bloodstained knives and a single iridescent wing, shimmering and fluttering on the floor. Brother Bürmann ran a hand over his shaved head and frowned. For as long as he could remember, these chambers had been filled with screams and pleas for mercy, but now there was only the sound of his own laboured breathing.

Or was there?

The monk held his breath for a moment to listen. Somewhere outside, he could hear the sound of breaking glass and cracking wood. His heart raced. The Gilded Palace was a labyrinth. Those who were foolish enough to enter would never find their way out again if the Geld-Prince did not wish it. But maybe the vandal he could hear might be able to lead him to freedom?

He hurried past the empty slabs and stumbled into the passageway outside. It was equally deserted. Several portraits of Sigvald had been torn from their dusty perches, and the prince’s face grinned up at Bürmann as he lurched past, heading towards the door that led onto the balconies outside. As he reached the door, the priest looked anxiously up and down the corridor, expecting to be discovered at any moment.

A memory of Hazül’s wailing voice drifted out of the darkness. ‘You must grow to love the screams. Think of it as a wonderful opera, with yourself as the conductor, teasing the music from your cast.’ Bürmann shuddered. He had to escape. Whatever horrors waited outside, they could never match Víga-Barói’s surgeon. He shoved the doors open and crept out into the night.

The Gilded Palace was spread before him – its golden spires and cupolas blazing through the snowflakes. He leant on the balcony and looked down through the endless storm, beyond the dangling foundations to the distant rocks below. The landscape was empty. Not a single sentry was patrolling the grounds of the estate. He looked up at the walls of the palace. Every window was dark. Was he really alone? No, there it was again – the sound of glass smashing and maybe even a voice, howling curses.

He stepped back inside and hurried down the hallway, rushing through a series of doors towards the sound. As he went, he abandoned all sense of caution and broke into a run. He knew it couldn’t be long before he was discovered. He would never have this chance again. He began to realise it was a woman’s voice he could hear and it was cursing Sigvald’s name. He picked up his pace. It must be another slave. Maybe together they could find a way out?

Brother Bürmann entered the cool gloom of a chapel and stumbled to a halt. The room was lined with delicate frescoes depicting Sigvald’s countless victories. Bürmann gasped at the grandiose beauty of the images. He had never been admitted to Sigvald’s private chambers before and even in the pale moonlight the effect was stunning. There was a row of circular windows along one side of the chapel filled with leaded, coloured glass that splashed a kaleidoscope of colours across the frescoes. The heroic scenes were animated by the gaudy lights, pulsing with life and passion, and even knowing all that he knew, Bürmann could not help but admire them. The frescoes reached all the way up to the distant vaulted dome of the ceiling, where they framed a row of golden bosses, each designed to resemble the laughing face of the Geld-Prince.

Bürmann flinched as he noticed a towering, marble statue gazing down at him from the far end of the aisle. The gleaming stone was carved in the likeness of a dreadful Chaos daemon: an androgynous youth, wearing a simple habit and a serene smile that seemed in direct contrast with a pair of dark horns. The daemon was holding a long-stemmed lily in one of its hands; its other hand was extended towards the pews in silent benediction.

The priest found himself drawn irresistibly towards the beautiful figure and stumbled down the aisle, mouthing silent prayers as he went. As he dropped to his knees at the statue’s feet, he noticed that the flagstones were covered with hundreds of fragments of canvas. Each piece was a fraction of a painting, showing a detail of Sigvald’s face: blue eyes, aquiline noses and golden locks were scattered around the room, as though the Geld-Prince had been torn apart by his daemonic patron.

The sound of breaking wood snapped Bürmann from his reverie and he turned away from the statue with relief, scouring the shadows for the source of the noise. He saw a movement in one of the pews and crept forwards, terrified that he might see the scarred features of Víga-Barói glaring at him from the darkness. To his relief, he saw a young woman instead, crouching on the floor between the pews and tearing a painting into long strips. She had her back to him, but something about her seemed familiar. As Bürmann edged closer, he heard a stream of muttered curses coming from her mouth. She was using the sinuous, revolting language of the Chaos Wastes, but the source of her anger was clear. She was spitting and hissing as she tore Sigvald’s face into a thousand pieces.

Bürmann paused, unsure whether to reveal his presence. Then, as he watched the woman struggling with the canvas, he felt a sudden rush of lust. He shook his head in disbelief, appalled at himself. Despite the awful danger he was in, despite the brutal visions locked in his mind, he found himself staring at the tight-fitting damask of the woman’s jade dress, leering at her like a teenager. As the woman wrenched the painting apart, the dress shifted enticingly over her curves, causing the priest to emit a wordless moan of dismay.

The woman leapt to her feet and turned to face him.

It took a few seconds for the priest to drag his gaze up from her bodice and realise that her face was hidden behind a veil. Princess Freydís, he thought, with a jolt of terror.

The princess stood in silence for a few seconds, panting slightly from her exertions. Then she drew back the veil and met the priest’s gaze with a look of furious defiance. She lifted her chin and addressed him in sharp, icy tones. ‘You’re one of Víga-Barói’s pets,’ she announced, using the priest’s own language without any trace of an accent. ‘You’ve escaped.’

The priest nodded vaguely and stepped closer, flexing his fingers as he imagined running them over her long, ivory neck.

The princess fixed him with her pale blue eyes and placed a hand on his chest. ‘Help me, priest. Sigvald has betrayed me.’ Her voice cracked as she looked up at the murals. ‘He’s forsaken me.’

The priest could not tear his eyes from the princess’s face. The idea of such an impossibly beautiful creature in pain was almost more than he could bear. Tears filled his eyes and he let out a pitiful moan, trying to tell the woman that he would never abandon her.

The hardness vanished from Freydís’s eyes and she graced him with a sad smile. ‘All I desire is to leave this cursed place and begin my life anew.’ She placed a hand on the priest’s shoulder. ‘With someone who could protect me.’

The priest dropped to his knees with a whimper and threw his arms around her legs.

Freydís gently removed herself from his grip and shook her head. ‘But my pitiless husband has forbidden me to leave.’ She waved at the tall, leaded windows and the bitter edge returned to her voice. ‘I’m trapped in here forever. Or at least, until I’m discovered by some wandering adventurer and murdered.’

Bürmann shook his head in dismay, looking back at the exit.

Freydís shook her head. ‘His foul little trout-faced sorcerer has cursed me. I can’t step beyond the confines of this palace. As soon as I approach the doors, my legs refuse to take me any further. And not one of his wretched sycophants will help.’ Her eyes widened and she gripped the priest’s shoulder. ‘But maybe you could?’

The monk nodded eagerly and climbed to his feet, mouthing a silent cry of assent.

Freydís leant closer and cradled his face with her hands, bringing her lips so close that they were almost kissing. ‘You could carry me,’ she breathed.

The monk strained forwards, closing his eyes and moaning slightly.

‘Can you do that?’ she whispered, tracing a finger over his trembling jaw.

He took a deep breath and looked around the chapel. Then he nodded again and waved at the door he entered through.

Freydís gave him a wry smile and shook her head, waving to another, smaller door, beneath the statue of the daemon. ‘I know a better way, priest.’

Bürmann’s head swam as they dashed through a series of empty halls and passageways. The rooms were full of Freydís’s handiwork: broken statues and torn canvas covered the marble floors, but the priest was blind to anything beyond the princess. As she ran ahead of him, his head filled with visions of such a depraved, lurid nature that he could not believe they had originated in his own mind. His muscles were wasted and cramped from days of inactivity, but he matched Freydís step for step, sprinting after her slender form like a hound on the trail of a fox.

After a ten-minute race through gloomy, abandoned chambers and lonely, storm-lashed gardens, they finally reached the vaulted passageway that led to the main entrance. Freydís began to applaud as she ran. ‘He did not predict this,’ she said, pausing beneath one the huge portraits that lined the walls. ‘You will not abandon me,’ she spat, glaring up at Sigvald’s beaming face. ‘I’m not one of your feeble-minded toys.’

Brother Bürmann looked around anxiously as she grabbed the gilt frame and heaved the painting from the wall, sending it crashing to the floor. He moaned and tugged the sleeve of her dress, but she ignored him and dropped onto the canvas; clawing at Sigvald’s face with her long nails and letting out a desolate, piercing scream.

Bürmann attempted to pull her to her feet, moaning and waving down the passageway, but the more she hacked at the painting the more frenzied she became. Her long, dark tresses tumbled over her face and her screams grew wilder. ‘How dare you leave me behind?’ she wailed, her body wracked by sobs. ‘How could you betray my love? I’ll find you, Sigvald! You’ll pay for this!’

The monk backed away, shaking his head, as she abandoned herself to her grief. He looked down at her, suddenly filled with doubt. Did she really wish to flee with him, or did she have something else in mind? He glanced down the passageway and wondered if he might be safest to leave her and make his way out alone, but it was no good. He knew he could never leave without her. He reached out a hand to pull her away from the painting, but then he paused, noticing that the passageway was suddenly filled with the stink of rotten food.

Warm flesh wrapped around Bürmann’s face, snapping his head back and slamming him to the floor. He tried to rise, but several powerful limbs were pinning him in place. The priest moaned in terror as his eyes followed the limbs to their source: a huge, slavering head, swaying back and forth on a nest of snake-like appendages and leering down at him. The grotesque head smiled conspiratorially and raised a tentacle up to its vast mouth, indicating that he should be silent.

Freydís was too consumed by her grief to notice the shadow that fell over the painting as the monster swung towards her.

Ansgallür the Famished watched his ward in silence for a few seconds, clearly relishing the sight of her pain. Then, as her movements became less frantic and she started to slump wearily towards the torn canvas, one of his limbs unfurled from beneath his jaw in a languorous, sinuous movement and lashed itself around her waist.

Princess Freydís howled in shock and threw herself back from the picture, but as she moved, dozens more limbs wrapped around her, raising her up from the floor as easily as a child and fixing the veil around her face. ‘Let me go!’ she screamed, as Ansgallür turned her to face him.

Ansgallür opened his mouth a little wider, allowing a treacly substance to run down his chin. ‘Haven’t we had fun, princess?’ he asked. ‘Are you really so eager to leave?’

‘How dare you handle me like this, servant,’ she wailed straining in his grip.

‘It gives me no pleasure,’ he lied, pulling her closer, ‘but you know I must keep you safe until the Geld-Prince returns.’

Freydís let out a hysterical burst of laughter. ‘He’s never coming back, you idiot. Don’t you see? He’s abandoned us both.’

Ansgallür’s watery eyes narrowed for a second and his face crumpled into a frown. ‘What a ridiculous thing to say,’ he replied, but there was a slight edge of doubt in his voice. He waved at the grand architecture that surrounded them. ‘The Gilded Palace is his home. We are his beloved family.’ His voice grew more confident and he smiled. ‘You’re trying to trick me, Freydís.’ He waved one of his limbs at the struggling priest. ‘I’m not so easily beguiled as some. I know Sigvald would never abandon us.’

Brother Bürmann watched in horror as the life seemed to go out of Freydís. After glaring furiously at Ansgallür for a few seconds, she slumped in his grip, accepting defeat with a last, mumbled curse.

Remembering his other catch, Ansgallür turned towards the priest. He moistened his lips as he studied Bürmann’s scrawny limbs. ‘Such hungry work,’ he muttered, lifting the priest from the ground.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sigvald paused and listened. A voice was muttering to itself in the darkness. When the mouth closed behind him, the walls had contracted in a violent muscle spasm and hurled him into a void. He was unsure how far he had fallen before slamming down onto moist, trembling flesh, but for the last half an hour he had seen no trace of light. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered. The voice was mumbling gibberish, but he made for it anyway, stumbling off through the warm, pulsing passageway. After a while, his feet clattered onto solid rock and he began to make out a faint glow somewhere up ahead. The prince picked up his pace. He was not afraid, but he had an awful suspicion that he might have bruised his face in the fall, and he was desperate to check his reflection in the surface of his mirrored shield.

He entered a vast chamber, filled with moonlight. The distant ceiling was made up entirely of crystals that filtered the light down onto the rocks in thousands of dazzling columns. Sigvald stumbled to a halt, breathless at the beauty of the place. Then he remembered his fall and lifted his shield in front of his face. He sighed with relief. His skin was as flawless as ever.

‘My lord,’ croaked a voice. ‘Over here.’

Sigvald drew his sword in a quick, fluid movement and levelled it in the direction of the sound. On the far side of the chamber, animated by the shifting moonlight, was a mound of corpses. He stepped closer. ‘Who’s there?’

Most of the remains were unrecognisable – a messy jumble of severed limbs and glistening innards – but there was one large body at the top of the pile that was still intact. It was a fat, ruddy-faced man, wearing a drooping felt hat and clutching a long gun. As Sigvald stepped towards him, the man held up a chubby, ring-laden hand and waved the prince closer. ‘My lord,’ he gasped, his voice trembling with excitement. ‘It’s not too late. We can flee. We can still escape. If we move quickly. Before the beast returns.’

As Sigvald reached the pile of corpses, he noticed the impressive collection of rich furs that were stretched over the man’s rotund body. They must have originated from every corner of the Old World – he could barely recognise half of them. Then he saw that the fat man’s legs were broken, folded beneath him at a hideously unnatural angle. ‘The beast?’ he asked, eyeing the stranger suspiciously.

The man’s face was ashen and pouring with sweat and he spat his words out in a high-pitched staccato, clearly in immense pain. ‘Yes, my lord. A great dragon. It haunts the mountain.’ He grimaced and rolled his eyes as he dragged himself into a sitting position. His small eyes bulged as he leant towards the prince. ‘It’s a labyrinth. It’s designed to confuse the dragon’s victims.’ He tried to grin, but without much success. ‘Take me with you. I can show you a way out.’

Sigvald laughed. ‘I’ve no desire to leave.’

The man’s grin faltered. He waved at the bodies that surrounded them. ‘The monster is insatiable,’ he said, with a note of panic in his voice. ‘If we leave now, we could survive. Let me lead you to the exit.’

Sigvald pursed his lips as he studied the man’s gun. ‘You’re some kind of huntsman,’ he announced.

The man’s eyes filled with terror. ‘That’s not the point! We need to leave.’ He looked anxiously over at an opening on the far side of the chamber.

Sigvald followed his gaze and nodded, realising that must be the way to Galrauch’s lair. He tapped the man’s gun with his foot and frowned. ‘Did you really think you could subdue the monster with this? Did you have any kind of plan?’

The man’s eyes narrowed as he saw another chance for a deal. ‘A plan? Yes. I had a plan.’ He removed his felt cap for a moment and mopped his brow. Then he gave Sigvald a coy smile. ‘There’s only one way to defeat the beast.’ He tried to control his breathing. ‘Maybe we could come to some kind of an agreement?’

Sigvald’s nostrils flared. He was clearly horrified at the suggestion. ‘An agreement?’

‘Why not? If you’re determined to fight the thing, I’ll tell you how. Just take me with you when you leave.’ He saw the disdain in Sigvald’s face. ‘You’re clearly a more noble soul than me, lord, but you need a guide. You could wander through these caverns for an eternity. Just free me from this wretched hole.’ He looked up at Sigvald with terror in his eyes. ‘Promise me.’

Sigvald did not answer for a few seconds and when he did, his voice was trembling with suppressed emotion. ‘I promise.’

The man’s face lit up in a jowly grin. ‘You don’t have much time,’ he gasped, waving at the pile of bodies that surrounded him. ‘Dig.’ He slapped the bloody mound beneath him. ‘Somewhere under here you’ll find a music box.’

‘A music box?’

‘Yes!’ The man nodded furiously, waving at the corpses. ‘Be quick. The beast will return soon.’

Sigvald gave him a quizzical look. ‘How exactly will a music box help?’

The man sighed impatiently and began reaching down into the bodies, rifling through pockets and tearing open bloodstained jackets. ‘The dragon has two heads,’ he said. ‘Both of them are mad. The left is full of malice and the right is full of shame. It’s haunted by memories of when it served the elves of Ulthuan, countless centuries ago.’ He grinned as his fingers locked around something, but his smile turned into a grimace as he lifted up a shattered piece of hip bone. He dropped it with a curse and continued rummaging. ‘For most of the time, the left head is dominant. Up here, on the borders of the Realm of Chaos, it has the upper hand. The Ruinous Powers control everything.’

‘What has this got to do with music?’

‘Occasionally, the dragon’s memories overwhelm it with guilt, and the right head attempts to destroy its treacherous body. It tries to end its own life. It tries to atone for its misdeeds. Whenever that happens there’s carnage. The two heads tear into each other.’ He gasped as one of the bodies fell on his broken legs. ‘Chaos is always victorious. The right head is always defeated by the left.’ He grinned up at Sigvald. ‘But as the dragon is busy warring with itself, you can strike. You’re a brave soul. You could seize the opportunity. You could thrust your sword into its heart.’

Sigvald shook his head, still confused. ‘And the music box?’

‘An elven relic,’ gasped the man, slapping the blood-slick limbs that surrounded him. ‘Made centuries ago. If the dragon’s right head hears the melody, its thoughts will be hurled back through time. It will be consumed by shame and fury. Even a couple of notes of true elven music will do the trick. Open the lid of the box. The heads will fight. I guarantee it.’

Sigvald looked unconvinced and waved at the mound of corpses. ‘Really? Your plan does not seem to have been very successful so far.’

The man glared at the bodies. ‘My men failed me.’ He waved at the glittering walls of the cavern. ‘There’s something strange down here. The whole place is made of mirrors, but the reflections are all wrong. And these pea-brained oafs were so easily distracted. You wouldn’t believe how much I had to pay them even to enter this place and then, when the monster pounced, they were too busy to warn me. They were all looking at their own ugly faces. I had no time to trigger the music.’ As he recalled the incident, the man began to tremble even more violently. He looked down at his ruined legs, as though noticing them for the first time, and started making a pitiful whining sound.

Sigvald stroked his jaw as he considered the man’s words. ‘Very well,’ he replied, raising a finger to his mouth. ‘Keep calm, friend. I believe you. Let’s find this elven toy.’ He grabbed the nearest corpse and shoved it aside. ‘What does it look like?’

The man forgot his pain for a second and grinned. ‘Small. Silver. Engraved with suns and moons. You can’t miss it.’

Sigvald nodded and began flinging bodies in all directions, grimacing at the blood and gore but working with a determined efficiency. Several minutes passed this way, with Sigvald digging and the hunter yelling frantic directions and jabbing his fleshy fingers every time he saw a flash of metal. Finally, Sigvald dragged himself free of the corpses and staggered away, gasping for breath.

‘Don’t stop!’ wailed the man. ‘There’s no other way. Don’t give up.’

Sigvald spent a few seconds wiping the blood from his armour and muttering curses, then he stepped back towards the pile of bodies and held out his hand to the hunter. He was holding a small box made of intricately filigreed silver.

‘That’s it!’ cried the man, leaning forward to snatch it.

Sigvald raised his eyebrows and stepped back, keeping the box out of the man’s reach. He held it up into a shaft of light and rolled it between his finger and thumb, admiring the craftsmanship. It was slightly dented on one side, but otherwise quite beautiful. ‘How does it open?’ he asked. ‘There’s no catch.’

‘Don’t trigger it,’ gasped the hunter, slumping back against the corpses. ‘Its mechanism is delicate beyond belief. It took me hours to wind it. And I don’t know how long it will play for.’

Sigvald nodded. ‘Very well, but I’ll need to know when the time comes.’

‘There’s a sun on the lid. It’s larger than the others.’

The prince turned the box around and peered at it. ‘The one with a face?’

‘Yes, the one with a face. When the dragon’s almost on you, press the sun down until it clicks. The box will pop open and play a tune.’

Sigvald nodded and turned on his heel, heading for the archway.

‘Wait!’ screamed the hunter. ‘What about me? You promised you’d free me from this wretched place!’

Sigvald laughed and shook his head. ‘Of course,’ he cried, stepping back towards the bodies.

As the hunter held out his hand, Sigvald drew his sword and shoved it straight through his heart.

‘Consider yourself free,’ he whispered, with his face only an inch from the hunter’s.

The man’s eyes bulged in shock. Then, as Sigvald withdrew the blade, he slumped back against the corpses, as lifeless as his servants.

Sigvald calmly wiped his rapier on the man’s luxurious furs and strolled back towards the archway. It led into a broad passage carved from the same glittering crystals as everything else. As he headed away from the cavern, the moonlight seemed to follow him – flashing and pulsing in the rock, even after he had turned several winding corners and climbed down a long, narrow stair. He peered up at the jagged ceiling and wondered how the light could reach so far down. ‘Mirrors,’ he muttered under his breath, remembering the hunter’s words. ‘They must be designed to bounce the light down here somehow.’

He paused and stepped closer to the wall. His face swam into view, rippling across the sparkling crystals. He frowned. ‘Is that me?’ His features were exploded over the surface of the rock – fragmented into a jumble of eyes and noses. He looked closer and saw that something else was mixed up with his reflection: black, featureless eyes and iridescent blue feathers. He opened his mouth to speak and saw it reflected as a lurid yellow beak, screaming silently back at him. Sigvald frowned. This must be what the hunter was referring to. A less developed mind would probably be terrified by such a distorted image.

His courage faltered as he edged closer to the wall. The nearer he got, the more his face splintered and changed. Then he focussed on a single facet of the rock, showing one of his clear, blue eyes. ‘Perfect,’ he sighed. His heart pounded as he recalled just how handsome he was. Even after all the incredible sights of the last few days, he could think of nothing to match his own, peerless beauty. With a contented sigh, he turned away from the rock and carried on down the passageway.

As he made his way down into the bowels of the mountain, the air grew even colder. His breath trailed after him in sparkling, dewy clouds and ice began to stiffen the joints of his armour. Progress was slow. His limbs jerked marionette-like and every few moments he would be distracted by a strange reflection of his own face. Each piece of mirrored rock revealed something even more bizarre, but each time Sigvald managed to focus on one of his own noble features and move on again with a smile.

After half a mile, he reached another set of stairs, but this time they led down into a darkness too profound to be pierced by the refracted moonlight. He paused and listened for a moment. There was a low rumbling sound drifting up from the inky depths. ‘Galrauch,’ he muttered, gripping the music box a little tighter as he began to climb down. He used his free hand to feel his way along the wall and took tiny, careful steps. He had no desire to tumble into a crevasse and give himself an ugly scar. As he descended, his feet crunched against something. He froze, listening to see if the breathing sound had changed. It carried on rumbling just as before and he sighed with relief. Then he crouched down low, trying to see what he had kicked. The darkness was complete, but as he ran his fingers over the steps, they brushed against an unmistakeable shape: a human skull. Unsurprised, he carried on.

Sigvald stumbled awkwardly and realised there were no more steps. The rumbling sound of breathing surrounded him as he drew his sword and edged slowly forwards.

A bone exploded beneath his foot with a loud crack.

The breathing stopped.

Sigvald grinned in the dark, positioning his thumb over the elven toy as a pair of eyes appeared in front of him, each the size of a dinner plate and burning with crimson fire.

‘Galrauch,’ said Sigvald, without a trace of fear. ‘I’ve brought you a gift.’

As the eyes swung slowly around, independent of each other, their baleful glow shimmered over an ancient, scaled hide, hinting at a creature of incredible size.

Sigvald waited until the monster was so close he could feel its warm breath rippling through his hair. Finally, as a row of talons settled on the ground just a few feet away from him, he pressed the button. There was a satisfying click and the lid dropped to the ground. Delicate needles of sunlight fanned out from the box, flashing over the rocks and glinting over the scales of the monstrous creature. Then, with a clicking, whirring buzz, a tiny silver wren rose serenely from the box.

Sigvald’s grin froze on his face.

As the wren emerged, he saw that it was slumped at an odd, drunken angle. With a rush of horror he recalled the dent in the side of the box.

The bird opened its beak and a thin, tuneless screech echoed through the darkness.

As the awful sound faded, Sigvald held his breath and looked up into the bloody orbs hovering over him.

Then he dived across the ground.

As Sigvald rolled away, there was a huge explosion of light and sound. A column of fire lashed over the rocks where he had been standing, billowing up over the ceiling and revealing a vast cavern piled high with bones.

The prince tumbled onto his feet and sprinted, feeling his hair shrivelling on the back of his head.

Flames rolled and mushroomed over the rocks as Sigvald dived for cover, landing heavily behind a pile of bones. ‘Idiot,’ he cursed, glaring at the crooked wren in his hand. He threw the toy on the ground and stamped on it, scattering screws, cogs and springs over the rocks.

Over on the far side of the cavern, the dragon heaved its massive bulk in his direction, raising its tattered wings over its heads.

Sigvald gasped. As flames spiralled around it, he saw that the monster was over thirty feet tall. Its ancient, crimson scales were lined with terrible wounds and its long neck was split right down the middle. He realised that rather than being two-headed, the creature had simply torn its original head into two halves. As he watched in disbelief, the two sides of the head snaked around each other, roaring furiously and drooling liquid fire.

Sigvald ducked as the creature launched another torrent of flames. His armour scorched his skin and he felt his hair shrivelling again, filling his nostrils with an acrid stink. He cursed and lifted his shield from his back. Then he rolled and charged from behind the rock with the circle of mirrored steel held up before his face.

Before the dragon had chance to draw another breath, he leapt up onto one of its legs and plunged his blade deep into its thigh.

The monster let out another deafening screech and lashed out with a huge, forked tail. Its fury was so intense that it smashed a hole through the wall, revealing another, smaller cavern.

Sigvald threw himself through the explosion of crystals and smoke and crashed to the ground in the newly revealed cave.

Galrauch whirled around, smashing even more of the wall as it rounded on the prince.

Sigvald dropped to his knees behind his shield as another column of fire rolled towards him. The force of the impact shoved him back across the polished stones and his arms trembled with the exertion of holding the shield in place, but the metal was true and the flames roared harmlessly over his head.

As the blast dropped away, Sigvald scrambled to his feet and charged again, hammering his sword into one of its long claws.

Galrauch’s roar spiralled into an ear-splitting screech and it launched itself back against the cave wall, with Sigvald still dangling from its foot. As the full weight of the monster slammed against the rocks, the whole chamber began to collapse. Great clumps of crystal began crashing to the ground and it seemed as though the mountain itself groaned in sympathy for the creature’s wound.

Sigvald loosed his sword and rolled clear, raising his shield over his head as a storm of rocks clattered over him. As he bounded to his feet he saw the dragon clawing wildly at the collapsing wall, carving great rents in the rock with its thrashing talons. The whole cavern slumped and shifted with a series of grinding moans and Sigvald span around, looking desperately for an escape route.

The dragon let out another furious screech as it tumbled back through the hole it had created and Sigvald saw that it had revealed a third cave, and this one was glowing with moonlight.

He dashed back towards the monster and scrambled up over its heaving torso. As he climbed, the creature’s heads snaked round towards him, its wide, drooling jaws dripping with fire.

Sigvald leapt over the dragon’s shoulder and landed in the cavern beyond, rolling clear just as Galrauch slammed to the ground behind him.

The ground sloped up away from him towards another archway and another stair. Sigvald dashed towards the exit, but before he was halfway across the cave he stumbled to a halt and shook his head. He turned around to face Galrauch with a furious look on his face. The dragon hauled its massive body upright and glared back at him, shrouded in fire and smoke as it rose up to its full height. Sigvald’s rapier looked like a child’s toy as it wobbled between the joints of the creature’s massive claw.

Sigvald threw his shield to the ground and strode towards the dragon with a defiant swagger. ‘You are a lizard,’ he cried, ‘and I am Sigvald the Magnificent!’ His eyes flashed as he pointed to the ground. ‘Prostrate yourself, animal! How dare you even look me in the eye!’

Galrauch hesitated, confused by the fearlessness of its tiny opponent.

‘Kneel, lizard!’ screamed Sigvald. His face was purple and corded with throbbing veins. ‘You will not deny me my prize.’

Galrauch shuffled backwards, seemingly on the verge of retreat. Then it raised its wings, filling the whole cavern with a tattered canopy of dragon hide and let out another deafening screech.

Sigvald clawed at his scorched hair and howled in frustration as he realised the monster was not going to obey him. He sprinted across the shattered stones and threw himself at the rearing dragon.

Galrauch belched another blinding gout of fire, but Sigvald was already clambering up its chest with his sword back in his hand. The monster continued screeching as it launched itself at the far wall.

The dragon exploded from the mountainside in a cloud of smoke and dust, launching itself into the night sky with a single beat of its vast wings.

Sigvald tumbled free and crashed down onto the crystal slopes, bouncing and jolting over the rocks like a broken doll. After rolling and flailing wildly for a few seconds, he finally crunched into the side of a large boulder. He lay motionless for a moment, then sat up with a hoarse whimper. He saw his reflection in the crystal and gasped. His golden locks were gone, replaced by a shrivelled mass of black spirals, and the delicate strands of filigree were hanging, twisted and broken from his cuirass. He slumped back in horror, gingerly pressing his hands against a deep gash in his cheek. ‘Belus,’ he whispered, ‘I gave you my soul. How can you abandon me to ugliness?’

As Sigvald sat there, clutching his head in hands, he thought he heard a voice, drifting on the ice-laden wind. ‘Sigvald,’ it seemed to cry. He looked up and peered through the snowstorm. He felt a flood of relief as he recognised Oddrún’s teetering, lurching gait. The chancellor was rushing up the mountain towards him, appearing and disappearing as the columns of snow whirled around him. The prince leant forward, trying to make out the words. As the wind shifted direction, he caught a brief snatch: ‘–you! Watch out!’ was all he could hear.

‘Oddrún,’ he gasped, lurching to his feet. He winced as he stood, and looked down to see a jagged hole in one of his ornate greaves. ‘Help me Oddrún!’ he cried, waving at his scorched hair and his ruined armour. ‘I’m hideous.’

‘Above you!’ came Oddrún’s reply, slicing though the storm.

Sigvald cursed as he remembered the dragon. He leapt aside just in time to avoid a column of fire that lashed across the rocks towards him. As he tumbled to a halt, he looked up to see Galrauch swooping away into the darkness, trailing flames and smoke.

Sigvald climbed awkwardly to his feet and limped towards the distant shape of Oddrún. ‘Ask the head,’ he cried. ‘How can I kill it?’

Sigvald’s words were snatched away by the bitter wind and he cursed, looking around for a sign of the dragon. The sky was still pulsing with garish colours and the same lunatic carnival was still drifting overhead, but there was no sign of Galrauch. ‘He’s fled,’ muttered Sigvald in disbelief. Rage consumed him and he clambered up onto a rock to scour the heaving, mountainous clouds. ‘The skull is mine,’ he spat, wrenching out a clump of his blackened hair. ‘I will not be denied my prize.’ He raised the fistful of hair to the heavens and howled into the storm. ‘Fight me, you spineless lizard!’

The whole mountain shuddered as Galrauch slammed into it. An explosion of ice, snow and crystals enveloped the prince as he fell from his perch and hurtled through the air. He landed with a grunt. Terrible pain knifed into the side of his chest. As the clouds whirled around him, he sensed the dragon’s huge mass rushing towards him across the rocks. Sigvald tried to scramble away but the pain in his side was incredible. He groaned in confusion as he saw a dark fountain of blood pouring from a gash in his breastplate. ‘How?’ he gasped, rolling down into a crevasse. As he crunched down onto the rocks, he began to feel an unfamiliar emotion: fear for his life. ‘Belus,’ he gasped, clutching at the wound and trying to stem the blood. ‘I gave you my soul. We made a pact. This can’t be–’

Sigvald’s words died in his mouth as the two heads of the dragon loomed into view. The separate halves of the creature’s neck snaked around each other as the heads swooped lower. ‘I’m immortal,’ Sigvald tried to explain, but his mouth was filling up with blood and the words came out as a garbled belch.

Galrauch rocked back on its haunches to study its supine victim, creating a small landslide as it settled down to enjoy its kill. Shattered crystals tumbled over the prince, leaving a web of fine cuts over his face.

As the dragon drew back its heads for a final blast of fire, Sigvald heard Oddrún, still calling to him from the distance. He looked back down the slope and reached out a desperate hand to the chancellor, but knew there was no way he could reach him in time. Oddrún had opened the gold casket and raised it over his head. He was yelling something, but the storm was still too fierce for Sigvald to be sure of his words.

Galrauch looked up at the sound of Oddrún’s cry.

‘The Sundered?’ croaked Sigvald, shaking his head as he finally made out Oddrún’s words. ‘What?’ He thought he must be mistaken. What could that mean? Before he could think any more about it, white hot pain exploded in his leg. Sigvald screamed and looked back at the dragon in horror. Rather than incinerating him, the creature had sliced one of its long talons through the hole in his leg armour. It was playing with him like a cat with a mouse.

As the prince prepared himself for a slow, painful death, he heard Oddrún’s voice again. ‘The Sundered! The Sundered!’ the chancellor was howling, as though it was the answer to everything.

Sigvald writhed in agony as Galrauch slowly tore the flesh away from his leg. Then, with his own blood raining down on him, the prince suddenly began to laugh. ‘The Sundered,’ he groaned, ‘of course.’

Ignoring the awful pain in his leg and his chest, Sigvald drew a deep, ragged breath and began to sing. The prince’s voice was no less beautiful than his flesh and it rang out through the storm with heartbreaking clarity. The death song of the elven slave had haunted him for weeks – ever since the night of Baron Schüler’s arrival – and as he sang it now he felt all the tragedy of her proud, doomed race. The words tumbled out of him in a magnificent, spiralling polyphony, as though they had a will of their own. He forgot everything: the dragon, his wounds, the storm; all of it slipped away as he lurched to his feet, closed his eyes and allowed the song to tear through him. His heart pounded as he sang and it seemed as though a whole chorus of elves were joining his lament. He climbed up onto one of the rocks and raised his chin, lifting his voice to the heavens and abandoning himself to the terrible pathos of the melody.

Sigvald felt rough hands shaking him. He opened his eyes to see Oddrún looming over him. The prince’s song faltered and he shook his head in confusion, unsure how the chancellor had suddenly reached his side. He had lost all track of time as he sang.

‘We must flee,’ said the giant.

Sigvald’s eyes were full of tears as he looked up at his chancellor. The echoes of the ancient song were still ringing in his ears. ‘What?’ he gasped.

Oddrún gestured up the mountain and Sigvald saw that the dragon was attempting to devour itself. Sigvald’s song had injured it more fatally than any weapon could have done. As it smashed its way across the glittering rocks, its two heads were lunging at each other, tearing long wounds in its winding necks and screaming in pain and anger. The huge creature was shrouded in smoke and as it rolled around, whole chunks of the mountain disintegrated, tumbling down towards them.

Sigvald attempted to climb down from his perch, but as the power of the song left him, so did his strength. He fell to the ground, gasping as he saw the extent of his injuries. ‘How can this be?’ he groaned, looking up at Oddrún and waving to the blood pouring from his ruined armour.

Oddrún nodded. ‘The dragon’s talons. They’re charged with the power of its god.’ He hauled Sigvald up from the ground. ‘We have to go.’

Sigvald nodded weakly. Then his body stiffened and he grabbed Oddrún’s tatty robes. ‘The talons!’ he gasped. ‘Belus won’t aid me unless I take one.’

Oddrún shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said, waving up at the thrashing, screeching dragon.

Sigvald narrowed his eyes. ‘I will have that brass skull.’

They both looked up at Galrauch and saw that one of the heads had locked its jaws around the throat of the other, pinning it to the ground. The dragon’s huge wings were beating wildly, covering the mountainside with rolling clouds of smoke, but its body was sprawled motionless as the two heads duelled.

‘This is my chance,’ gasped Sigvald, lurching back towards the creature. The tattered muscles in his leg immediately gave way and he fell to the ground with a curse. He looked back at Oddrún, his eyes burning with hunger. ‘Quick!’ he cried. ‘You’ll have to do it.’

The chancellor flinched and backed away, shaking his head, but as he saw the determination in Sigvald’s eyes, his narrow shoulders slumped and he looked around for a weapon. There was a long shard of crystal lying on the ground nearby, so he grabbed it and hurried up towards the struggling monster.

As he neared the jumble of thrashing limbs and trembling wings, Oddrún paused, unsure how to proceed.

‘There!’ cried Sigvald, as a bloody claw slammed down a few feet away.

Oddrún acted fast, before he could consider the insanity of the situation. He gripped the shard of crystal in both hands and hammered it down with all his strength, slicing it into one of the dragon’s long toes.

Galrauch let out an agonised shriek and withdrew its claw in a spray of blood.

Oddrún raised his arms over his head to protect himself, but the dragon was too busy destroying itself to attack. The giant looked down to see a severed toe at his feet. The thing was as big as his arm and pumping gouts of black blood over the rocks. It ended in a long, blue-grey talon.

Sigvald’s ashen, blood-splattered face lit up in a broad grin.

As Oddrún stumbled back towards him, clutching the talon under his arm, Sigvald’s laughter rang out, as clear and musical as an elven song.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sigvald limped into the pavilion. He was bleeding heavily from countless wounds, only a few blackened clumps of hair were left on his head and his handsome features were lined with scars, but, despite everything that had happened to him, there was a defiant grin on his face. ‘I have it,’ he gasped, hurling the bloody talon onto the lawn.

Belus Pül recoiled, turning its head away and pressing a trembling hand against its chest with a theatrical flourish. As Sigvald approached, the daemon hurried over to its scribe, waving at the nest of twitching limbs. ‘The deity’s tranquil garden was invaded by a wretched-looking youth, whose repugnant face was a vile mockery of its own child, Sigvald the Magnificent. The hideous changeling had brought with it some kind of filthy animal bone.’

This was not the response Sigvald had expected. The muscles in his jaw rippled as he glared back at the white-robed figure. ‘I’ve done as you asked,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve brought you a talon from the dragon, Galrauch.’ He closed his eyes and gingerly touched the blackened spirals hanging down from his scorched head. ‘You have let this happen to me. You have reneged on our deal.’ He pointed at the gory mess below his knee. ‘We’re sworn to each other. You must make me beautiful again.’

The daemon crossed the lawn and as it walked, strands of grass spiralled up from its footprints. The green blades multiplied and wrapped around each other, plaiting themselves into an ornate emerald cabinet. Belus leant wearily against the glittering piece of furniture and sighed. ‘The heavenly being reeled under the usual onslaught of abuse, but tried to remain calm. It reminded Sigvald – for, incredibly, it was he – that a talon imbued with the sorcery of the Great Schemer would doubtless have transformative qualities. Such potent magic could affect even the Prince of the Decadent Host. Only the most exhausting rites could undo such damage.’

Sigvald shook his head in disbelief. ‘You can’t leave me like this!’ he cried, levelling his finger at the severed claw lying on the grass. ‘You sent me to face that wretched lizard, now you must restore me.’

Ignoring Sigvald, Belus opened the cabinet and nodded at a shelf inside. The scribe scuttled spider-like across the lawn, picked up the claw and lifted it up on a nest of spindly limbs, then it hurried towards the cabinet and placed it on the shelf. The daemon nodded in satisfaction, closed the cabinet door, and then stepped back to watch as the cupboard disintegrated back into blades of grass that spiralled down into the lawn, leaving no trace of the talon.

‘Belus decided that Sigvald’s intentions were probably good, and resolved to allow him another chance to prove himself. The slovenly state of the prince’s attire repulsed the sensitive deity, but it knew that there would be no wisdom in rewarding its ill-mannered prodigy before the three trials had been completed.’

Sigvald let out a bitter laugh. ‘You mean to send me out into the world looking like this?’ He folded his arms across his battered cuirass and shook his head. ‘I won’t do it.’ He nodded to the miscellany of strange objects hung around the daemon’s right arm. ‘We made a deal, Belus. You owe me your allegiance.’

The daemon gave no sign it had heard Sigvald’s words. It looked down at its hand and smiled as a lily sprouted from between its fingers. As Sigvald clenched his teeth in rage, the daemon closed its eyes and sniffed the petals with a sigh of pleasure.

Sigvald clenched his fists as the daemon crossed the lawn and sat on the chair that hung from the juniper tree.

‘What do you want?’ he growled.

The sexless youth gave no reply, but it raised one of its eyebrows disapprovingly.

Sigvald limped towards the swing, grimacing with each step. ‘How can I please you, my beneficent lord?’ he said, twisting his voice into a more deferential tone.

The daemon stroked its smooth head and smiled. It indicated that the scribe should return to its pile of scrolls. Once the creature was back in place, Belus addressed it in a gentle, caring voice. ‘As Sigvald offered his services again, the deity was reminded of what had first drawn it to the prince. Sigvald’s fearlessness was intoxicating. Alone amongst his kind he was strong enough to serve such an elevated being.’

Sigvald attempted a bow, but ended up dropping to his knees with a gasp.

The daemon waved vaguely towards the east of the garden. ‘Luckily for Sigvald, the deity had no great ordeal in store for him. All it required was the death of a single witless creature, called Bargau. The treacherous oaf had long ago ceased paying tribute to its master and Belus Pül had finally run out of patience. Such betrayal could not be allowed to pass unheeded. The blessed one decided that such a simple trial would be easy enough to complete. Bargau eked out its pitiful existence in a forest just a few miles away.’ The daemon paused, using one of its small horns to scratch an itch on the back of its hand. Then it continued, waving to the wall of the tent and the shapes milling around outside. ‘The dashing prince felt the trial would be far too dull if he was escorted by his soldiers, so he offered to leave them behind once more.’

Sigvald remained crouched on the grass for a few seconds, looking up at the daemon with a pained expression on his face. Then he began to smile and hauled himself to his feet. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘that without soldiers, or even a sword, the trial will be quite interesting.’ He stretched his battered arms up over his head and let out a sigh of pleasure. ‘I too am beginning to recall our first acquaintance, my lord.’ He gave a single nod of farewell and left the tent.

As the prince made his way slowly through the gardens, the remnants of his army hurried after him. At the head of the crush was Víga-Barói, wearing his perpetual sneer. He bowed low before his regent and stopped him in his tracks. ‘My lord,’ he sighed, employing his most velvety tones. ‘The daemon is a gracious host, but your subjects long to serve you once more.’ He waved to the bizarre assortment of creatures and knights assembling behind him.

Sigvald looked up in surprise as the sea of tusks, scales and horns crowded around him. ‘Do not look at me!’ he snapped.

Víga-Barói shook his head in confusion. ‘My lord, what do you–’

‘Look away!’ howled Sigvald, turning away and trying to hide his battered armour and his lunatic spirals of hair.

The gaunt, bearded face of Baron Schüler appeared as he fought his way through the crowds. ‘My lord,’ he gasped, looking from the prince to Víga-Barói with an anxious expression on his face. ‘When will we return to the Gilded Palace?’

Sigvald’s face flushed purple at the sight of the baron. He closed his eyes and clamped his hands over his scarred face. ‘Look away, all of you! I do not look like this. I am not here.’ His subjects shuffled awkwardly and began to turn their backs on him, but Schüler rushed towards Sigvald with fear in his sunken eyes. ‘But my lord, what of those we left behind?’

As the baron knelt before him, Sigvald dealt him a fierce backhanded blow that sent him sprawling across the grass. ‘Leave me alone,’ he cried, lurching off through the pavilions, pausing only to grab a sword from one of his men. ‘Oddrún,’ he yelled, as he disappeared from view.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Lights flickered silently on the horizon, burnishing the mountains and flaming along the edges of Sigvald’s armour. No natural trees could have grown in such a place, he decided. Only a perverse whim of the Ruinous Powers could have placed life in such a blasted spot. The forest was probably no more than a few miles wide, but its dark smudge dominated the landscape, heavy with menace. The densely packed pines knifed out of the snow like a threat.

Sigvald grimaced as Oddrún carried him beneath the gloomy boughs. The terrible wound in the prince’s leg had made climbing almost impossible, so he had strapped himself across the giant’s long, twisted back. As the chancellor smashed through the branches, Sigvald swung his borrowed sword over the giant’s shoulder, surrounding them with a cloud of twigs and creepers.

The oddness of the place was immediately apparent. As the branches snapped, they made no sound. Leaves fluttered and tumbled on the icy breeze, but they moved in a dreamlike silence. The only sound was Oddrún’s heavy breathing and even that sounded oddly flat and unreal, as though muffled by an invisible blanket. Something else was strange. Despite carving a wide path through the needling branches, when they looked back there was no sign of their passing. For every branch they moved aside, ten more fell into place. As they progressed, the arboreal shadows grew deeper and all trace of the frozen wastes vanished from view. Sigvald began to feel strangely insubstantial. The long shadows seemed more solid and impenetrable than his own flesh.

‘How will we find our way back?’ muttered Oddrún, after a painful hour of struggling through the undergrowth. He stopped and looked back, but even the towering peaks of the mountains had disappeared. He could see nothing but the trees.

‘Wait,’ said the prince, pointing his sword into the forest. ‘There’s something up there.’

Oddrún shook his head and placed his hands on his bony knees, gasping for breath.

‘What are they?’ asked Sigvald, untying himself and dropping to the ground. Oddrún gave no reply, still clutching his legs and drawing quick, ragged breaths as the prince limped off through the bracken, making for a row of pale shapes hanging overhead.

After stumbling a few yards closer he raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh,’ he muttered. The white shapes were the skins of people, peeled from their bodies and hung out in the wind like morbid pennants.

‘Oddrún,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Bring me Doctor Schliemann.’

The giant stood up with a groan and crashed through the forest to Sigvald’s side. He looked up at the ghostly shapes and a thin hissing sound slipped from his hood. Then he noticed the expression on Sigvald’s face.

‘Aren’t they perfect,’ said Sigvald with a grin, waving at the fluttering skins. ‘Quite beautiful.’

Oddrún flinched and backed away. ‘They were people,’ he gasped. ‘Is there no trace of pity left in you? What have you become?’

Sigvald shook his head in disbelief. ‘What have I become? Where did that come from? Look at you, cowering under that hood.’ He began to laugh. ‘Do you think you’re normal, Narrerback? Do you think burying yourself in sackcloth makes you human?’ He snatched the gold casket from Oddrún’s hands and waved at the chancellor’s hunched, body. ‘Maybe you should think about what you’ve become, old friend.’

Oddrún shook his head fiercely. ‘I’m what you made me.’

The smile dropped from Sigvald’s face. ‘You know that’s not true. We made our own choices, you and I.’

Seeing that Oddrún had no reply, Sigvald wrenched open the golden box. Doctor Schliemann’s head had slumped to one side and several of the copper coils and pipes had been torn from his neck. ‘Doctor?’ asked Sigvald, prodding his discoloured flesh and shoving his spectacles back into position. ‘What you know about this Bargau?’

‘I will help you no more,’ croaked the head without opening its eyes.

Sigvald cursed and fiddled with the cogs on the side of the box, but there was no response. The head remained motionless with its eyes closed.

‘What’s this?’ he snapped. ‘Traitorous worm. I made you immortal and this is how you repay me?’ He grimaced at the rotten state of the head and softened his voice. ‘I admit, this is not quite what I had in mind for you, but I’m sure Énka could restore your appearance when we return to the Gilded Palace.’

The head remained silent.

Sigvald sucked his teeth for a moment and then smiled. ‘What if I offered you your heart’s desire, Doctor Schliemann?’

Still there was no response.

‘I know what you want. Oddrún’s right. It’s wrong of me to keep you here against your will.’

The doctor opened his eyes. They were almost totally white, but he seemed to be watching Sigvald with interest.

Sigvald held the head close and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘The thought of losing you breaks my heart, but if it’s really what you wish…’

‘Kill me,’ begged the doctor.

Sigvald placed a kiss on the doctor’s blue-grey flesh. ‘Of course. I promise. Just as soon as you tell me about Bargau.’

‘You heard what he said,’ cried the doctor, rolling his eyes in the direction of Oddrún. ‘He promised to kill me.’

‘I swear it on my father’s grave,’ said Sigvald with a slight hitch in his voice.

Doctor Schliemann looked from Sigvald to Oddrún and back again. ‘Very well,’ he muttered. ‘One last answer. The guardian of these woods is named Bargau the Soulless. The creature’s a relic of unimaginable antiquity. It’s dwelled here since the time of a mysterious race known as the Old Ones. All that remains of its world is this forest. Some say it’s part of a larger forest that stood here before the great cataclysm – before even the arrival of the Ruinous Powers and the Chaos Wastes. I can’t be sure of that, but it’s true that Bargau’s pact with the trees is ancient beyond understanding. I’m not sure of the details, but I know that they’re sworn to protect each other. Their faith in each other has ensured their mutual survival, through all these long centuries. The trees will have already informed Bargau of your presence. In return, the monster will drape your skins over their branches in tribute, once it has consumed your flesh.’ The doctor paused. ‘As its name suggests, Bargau has no soul, and a being without a soul can never be slain.’

Sigvald shrugged. ‘It’s not a god. There must be some way to kill it.’

‘I know of none. Many have tried.’

Sigvald revealed his teeth in a feral grin. ‘I suggest you think again, doctor. I can feel your eternal rest slipping away from you.’

Doctor Schliemann muttered a curse and closed his eyes for a few moments, scouring his thoughts for an answer. ‘Well, I know that nothing can truly be without a soul. Bargau may have sundered its flesh from its spirit, but the spark of life must still be bound to something, or contained in some kind of receptacle. Fighting the creature’s physical self will get you nowhere – it’s said that very little of its mortal body actually remains – but if you can find the object that houses its soul, maybe you could destroy it through that.’

Sigvald shook the casket from side to side, bouncing the head around inside it. ‘But where is this object?’

‘There’s no way of knowing,’ groaned the head. ‘Bargau would never be so foolish as to reveal its location. You’ll have to search for it.’

‘But it could be anywhere!’

‘No. It will be here, in this forest. Bargau is bound to the place. It’s the last sliver of the creature’s ancient world – a fragment of another time. Bargau wouldn’t take its soul beyond the borders of this forest. It would be terrified by the idea of its discovery. It would keep it close by at all times.’ The doctor looked around at the trees. ‘It will be in here somewhere.’

Sigvald nodded. ‘Very well. And this is all you can tell me?’

The doctor stared back at him, with a glimmer of hope in his opaque eyes. ‘There is nothing else to know.’

Sigvald slammed the casket shut and held it up to Oddrún. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I see what we must do.’

Oddrún recoiled from the casket. ‘You swore to kill him!’

Sigvald laughed in shock. ‘Bless you, Oddrún, I swore on my father’s grave. Have you forgotten who put my father in his grave?’

Oddrún backed away, refusing to take the casket.

‘Remember your promise!’ howled Sigvald, levelling his sword at the cowering giant. He nodded at the shifting, huddled ranks of trees behind them. ‘There’s no way out of here until Bargau is dead.’ He waved at his ruined body. ‘And I can barely stand. Carry it.’

Oddrún massaged his head with his long, paw-like hands but gave no reply.

‘Very well,’ laughed Sigvald, dropping the casket into the bracken and limping back down the slope. ‘He’s clever enough to work out his own way home.’

Oddrún shook his head in despair, grabbed the golden box and lurched after the prince.

‘If Bargau and the trees are allied in some way,’ said Sigvald, slapping one of the slender trunks, ‘the quickest way to draw the monster out is to harm the forest.’ He nodded at the knotted muscles in Oddrún’s long, clumsy arms. ‘Knock one down and let’s see what happens.’

The giant hesitated for a moment, looking up at the pale, rippling figures drifting overhead, then he slammed his shoulder against the tree.

Finally, they heard a sound. A long, mournful bark echoed through the darkness, like the howl of a wounded beast. The noise did not come from the breaking wood, but from deep in the forest.

Sigvald smiled and waved for Oddrún to continue.

Oddrún shoved again and the roots tore free from the ground, bursting through the soil in a silent explosion of soil and splinters. The towering pine trembled briefly, then began to fall, crashing through the surrounding branches without a sound.

The animal cry echoed through the trees again and Sigvald peered through the shadows. Then he clapped Oddrún on his side. ‘That noise didn’t come from a tree. That must be our prey. He was just a couple of miles north of here. I’ve marked his position.’

Oddrún shook his head. ‘What can we do when he reaches us? Doctor Schliemann said it’s impossible to kill him.’

‘Well, obviously I’m not just going to wait here for him,’ said Sigvald, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘While you shove the trees over, I’m going to search his lair. He’ll never dream that we know his secret. He won’t be expecting me to hunt for his soul.’

‘You’re going to leave me to face him alone?’

Sigvald shrugged. ‘Look at you, Oddrún.’ He waved to the giant’s colossal frame. ‘I’m sure you can hold him at bay for a few minutes while I smash whatever trinket he has bound himself to.’

‘No, I beg you!’ cried Oddrún, looking around at the sombre pines. ‘Don’t leave me here.’

Sigvald sighed. ‘Very well,’ he muttered, taking the casket from Oddrún. ‘Maybe there’s another way.’

‘The doctor won’t help you any more.’

Sigvald smiled and lobbed the casket into the trees. It flashed briefly in the dappled moonlight, bounced noiselessly off a few branches and disappeared from view.

‘If you keep your eye on that spot,’ said Sigvald, levelling his finger at the trees, ‘you should be able to find him.’ With that, he turned on his heel and limped off through the trees.

Oddrún groaned in despair and dashed off in the opposite direction, trying to keep the trajectory of the casket fixed in his mind.

Sigvald became lost almost immediately. With no stars above and no sign of his route behind, he had nothing to guide him. Undaunted, he stumbled and crawled through the dense thicket, slicing open the silence with bursts of hysterical laughter. Despite his lack of clear direction, he was sure he was nearing the heart of the forest. As he limped through the trees, the temperature was slowly rising. There was no trace of ice on the knotted trunks and the leaves beneath his feet were brittle and dry. It seemed as though the closer he got to the centre, the deeper he sank into the past. He began to notice movement in the shadows – tiny shapes that peered suspiciously at him with amber, feline eyes, but vanished before he could discern their shape.

Another desolate cry echoed through the night and Sigvald dropped to the ground. Less than a hundred yards away he saw a vast shadow hurrying through the trees, shaking the human hides as it passed. Good work, Oddrún, he thought, realising that his chancellor must have torn down another tree. He waited a few minutes until he was sure the shadow had passed, then climbed to his feet and struggled on through the trees, heading in the direction the creature had come from.

After another ten minutes of searching, Sigvald noticed a thick, cloying smell, drifting through the forest. He recognised it immediately from Víga-Barói’s surgeries. It was the sweet smell of rotting flesh. He picked up his pace as he saw glistening red mounds scattered across the bracken up ahead. ‘Bargau,’ he whispered, ‘you’re such a messy eater.’

Sigvald paid no heed to the bodies as he hurried towards what looked like a broad-backed hill, squatting ominously ahead of him in the darkness. He burst from the trees into a wide clearing and saw Bargau’s home. Rather than a hill, he realised it was a huge domed mound, like the nest of a colossal bird. Its walls had been constructed from a gruesome collection of rotten leaves, bones and human skin. The thing must have taken centuries to construct; the bones numbered in the thousands. Several round holes glared out at him from the walls and he made straight for the largest of them, drawing his sword as he entered.

Oddrún froze at the sound of another howling cry. It was much louder, much closer. The tree in his hands was about to topple, but he wrapped his long fingers around it and held it in place, peering into the darkness. Everything seemed to be in motion: branches, leaves and moonlight swam between the ancient pines. He hissed and lurched back from the tree. It fell as noiselessly as the others, rupturing and splintering in silence as it slammed down into the small, moonlit clearing he had created.

‘Sigvald?’ he breathed, trying to control his trembling limbs.

There was no reply, but as Oddrún watched in horror, the undulating shadows formed into a single, inky mass: a great hulking mound, shouldering its way through the branches towards him.

He reached down and wrapped one of his spindly hands around the casket at his feet. After a moment’s hesitation, he muttered an apology and flipped open the lid, to see the back of Doctor Schliemann’s head.

He looked up to see that the shambling figure was just a few yards away from the clearing. The rippling shadows made it hard to be sure, but he thought the thing looked massive – almost as tall as he was, and as broad as an ox.

‘Doctor,’ he gasped, reaching into the casket. His bandaged fingers slipped through rotten flesh and muscle and he withdrew his hand with a groan, seeing a piece of grey skin hanging from his grip. At that moment, a vast shadow fell over the clearing and Oddrún whirled around to face Bargau the Soulless.

Bargau did not so much have a body as a collection of body parts. Its flesh was a hotchpotch of bones, leaves and borrowed skin, all bound together by a patchy hide of moss. The thing was vaguely bird-like in shape: a long, creeper-covered neck, a chest of matted branches and trailing goatskin wings, all topped with an enormous bird skull, compete with a long beak and a crest of ragged vine leaves. As it smashed into the moonlight, it looked around at the damaged trees and let out another mournful howl, raising its tattered wings in horror and fixing its eyeless sockets on the cowering perpetrator.

Oddrún backed away, shaking his head and scouring the trees for any sign of Sigvald.

Bargau tilted its head and stepped towards him. It opened its beak and began to speak. The beak was motionless as the words tumbled out, and the voice did not seem to really belong to the creature so much as the surrounding air. ‘What,’ it asked, in a voice like a nail being drawn from a plank, ‘are you?’

As Oddrún continued to stumble back through the clearing, he felt a thick branch snap under his feet.

Bargau flinched, as though slapped, and howled again. ‘Don’t,’ it said, in its scraping, metallic voice.

Realising that no help was coming, Oddrún pulled himself to his full height and straightened his back with a crack of tired bones. Shame had caused him to hunch and cringe for countless decades, but now, alone with such a grotesque monster, he decided to tilt back his head and allow his hood to tumble from his face. He felt a grim satisfaction as Bargau stepped back, clearly unnerved by his appearance.

‘What are you?’ asked the voice again, echoing from the branches overhead and seeming even more disconnected from the skeletal beak.

Oddrún studied the skins draped over the monster’s chest and saw elongated human faces, mouthing pitiful silent pleas. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he muttered, as the monster launched itself at him.

Sigvald dropped to his knees and gasped in pain. There was no light inside the mound and every few feet he stumbled over a root and crashed to the ground, scraping a little more skin from his ragged wounds. The place was a warren of crudely carved tunnels and stinking, rotten meat. Every now and then he fell onto something wet and yielding and pulled his hands back with a grunt of disgust, glad of the darkness. The further he went, the more the soil was replaced by body parts and pools of blood, and the more hopeless his quest seemed. ‘How will I find anything in here?’ he muttered, using his sword to feel his way through the shadows.

After a while, he felt the walls drop away on either side and realised he was in some kind of open space. The atmosphere felt a little less oppressive and his footfalls echoed around him, as though he had entered a vast cave. The smell here was worse than ever and after a few steps he realised why. In the centre of the chamber was a huge circle of corpses. He felt the touch of rigid fingers and cold, slippery skin and stumbled to a halt. He pursed his lips as he reached out to examine the flesh and bones. He realised that they had been piled together with branches and leaves to create a gruesome nest.

‘Maybe the soul is at the centre of it?’ he wondered aloud, unnerved by the flat, alien sound of his own voice. He hesitated as he considered his next move; then, holding one hand over his mouth and nose, he grabbed onto a femur and hauled himself up onto the bloody mass.

Thrashing its translucent wings, Bargau jammed its beak deep into Oddrún’s neck.

The pair tumbled back, with the creature’s head lodged under Oddrún’s chin.

Bargau wrenched its beak free, shaking its leafy neck and howling at the starless sky. It was so busy celebrating the ease of its kill that it did not notice that Oddrún was neither bleeding nor in pain.

As Oddrún climbed wearily to his feet he felt another branch snap and noticed again that the creature winced. As it rounded on him, he grabbed the gold casket from the ground and lurched off into the trees, with the monster close behind.

Sigvald slid wildly down the inside of the nest, ploughing through ruptured organs and crumbling bones. He kept his hand clamped over his face as he came to a halt at the centre of the huge, reeking bowl. ‘Where is it?’ he muttered, patting the surrounding carnage with his hands. To his dismay, there was nothing but corpses, lashed together with bracken and moss. His fingers traced across dozens of leering faces and broken bones but found nothing that could be described as a receptacle. ‘Where is your soul?’ he groaned, flopping back into the rotting meat. As he lay there, feeling cold blood running over his skin, something rankled at the back of his thoughts. He had the horrible feeling he was missing something obvious. He played Doctor Schliemann’s words over in his head. ‘Bargau is bound to this place,’ he repeated, mimicking the doctor’s lifeless drone. ‘It’s the last sliver of his ancient world – a fragment of another time. He wouldn’t take his soul beyond the borders of this forest.’

At the word ‘forest’, Sigvald leapt to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he cried.

Oddrún pulled his hood back into place and ran. Every few yards his disobedient limbs sent him sprawling across the mounds of dried leaves, but each time he fell, he pitched off in a new direction, always staying a few steps ahead of Bargau’s thrusting, skeletal head.

After several minutes of wild sprinting, the giant began to find that his odd, reeling stride actually gave him an advantage. He lurched and swooped around the branches with a drunken fluidity and gradually began to leave the creature behind. Bargau howled in frustration as his prey raced away from him with no sign of tiring.

The bizarre race continued like this for nearly twenty minutes and Oddrún’s lungs began to burn horribly. Just as he felt his knees beginning to buckle beneath him, the monster halted and tilted its head on one side.

Oddrún took the chance to rest for a moment, slumping gratefully against one of the trunks and looking back at Bargau’s strange behaviour.

The monster was spinning around and jabbing its long neck through the trees, emitting a ragged snorting noise. Then it turned its head up to the canopy of leaves overhead and let out a roar that was even more tormented than anything Oddrún had heard so far.

Abandoning its prey, the monster dashed off in another direction, shrieking as it went.

‘Sigvald,’ cried Oddrún, lurching after the strange creature. ‘He’s coming for you.’ As he ran, Oddrún noticed an acrid tang in the air. ‘Fire?’ he muttered. After a few more minutes there could be no doubt – pale tendrils of smoke were fingering their way through the dark trunks and pooling in the hollows. Oddrún felt a sudden tingle of hope.

They burst out into a large clearing and Bargau dropped to its knees in horror. There was a huge, silent bonfire, blazing up ahead of them. Already the flames had spread from the mound at the centre of the clearing and ignited dozens of the surrounding trees.

As Oddrún stumbled to a halt behind the creature, he watched the flames dancing and leaping between the branches, enveloping tree after tree.

Silhouetted in front of the blaze was Sigvald, dashing back and forth with a pair of flaming branches and jamming them into the carpet of dried leaves as he ran. ‘It struck a deal with the forest,’ he cried, his face locked in a manic grin. ‘It bound its soul to the trees. The whole forest is the receptacle. That way, the trees knew Bargau would never leave – never betray them.’

At the sound of Sigvald’s voice, the creature lurched to its feet, but before it could approach him, another row of trees erupted, shaking the ground with a series of silent explosions. Bargau whirled around, unsure which way to turn as tree after tree was engulfed in flames. Finally, it made a decision and charged towards the blazing mound at the centre of the clearing, but before it could reach the opening, the whole structure began to collapse inwards, spouting a thick column of smoke as its roof slumped to the ground. Branches and bones span through the air, leaving trails of sparks in their wake and Bargau cried out, in rage and pain. As it crumpled to the ground, lumps of moss, leaves and dried skin broke away from the monster’s flesh.

‘Sigvald!’ gasped Oddrún, stumbling through a hail of golden embers. The fire was spreading with phenomenal speed. Flames could now be seen in almost all directions and the heat in the clearing was quickly becoming unbearable. ‘We have to leave!’

The prince nodded in reply and threw down his brands. But before leaving Bargau to its fate, Sigvald strode over to the fragmenting mound of skin and leaves and drew his sword. ‘Not without proof,’ he muttered, hammering the blade through Bargau’s neck and sending its skull bouncing across the ground.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Sväla turned and squinted back across the Wastes, shaking her head in confusion. For a desperate moment, she could not remember where she was. Thousands of snow-clad shapes were stumbling through the deep drifts towards her. It looked as though the whole, gleaming landscape was in motion. Above this bobbing avalanche of snow-capped heads, veins of colour threaded the sky, sculpting the clouds into vast, leering faces and painting the mountains a lunatic shade of pink.

‘You said we needed to follow the star,’ growled a voice at her side.

She turned to see the hulking shape of Ungaur the Blessed, peering down from between the jaws of his wolfskin hood.

‘But that doesn’t seem to be an option any more.’ He held his staff up towards the sky, so that the bones and fetishes rattled and fluttered in the storm. ‘Unless you see something I do not.’

Sväla looked up through the flickering moonlight, unsure what he meant; or who he even was. Then, as memories began to filter through her jumbled thoughts, she recalled the strange light they had seen. Ungaur was right; it was gone, but to her shock, she realised that she had not even thought about it for days. She had not been considering their destination at all. For as long as she could remember, she had just been plodding through the snow like a mindless automaton. Her old life seemed like a distant dream with only the endless snow as reality. She shook her head and tried to speak, but the furs wrapped around her head had frozen to her lips, and all that emerged was a muffled grunt.

Ungaur patted her on the shoulder and revealed his mouthful of black needles. ‘Don’t worry, Sväla, your suffering will soon be over.’ He waved his staff back over the heads of the advancing crowds. ‘Hunting has become impossible and the salted meat won’t last another week. Your crusade is almost finished. Then you can lay your weary head down in the snow and wait for Völtar to carry you away.’

Sväla stumbled to a halt and pulled the furs from her face. Her skin was so cold she barely noticed the top layer of her lips peeling away. ‘I know what you want,’ she croaked, ‘but you won’t get it.’ She pointed her iron knife at Ungaur’s chest. ‘A shaman can never be our chieftain, however much he craves it.’

Ungaur’s grin remained fixed on his face as he nodded at the distant shape of Svärd. ‘I would never presume to steal anyone’s throne.’

Sväla lifted her chin, revived by the poison in Ungaur’s words. ‘I have the will of the tribe behind me.’

Ungaur waved his staff at the figures shuffling past. ‘Really?’

Sväla looked around. The Fallen were stumbling on, but their shoulders were down and their eyes were blank. To her surprise, she felt no trace of regret or doubt at the sight of their suffering. This was the only course open to them. They must fight or die. While Sigvald lived, they could not. She strode away from the shaman with growing certainty in her voice. ‘There’s no way back, Ungaur; other than victory.’

As Sväla lurched off through the snow, leaving Ungaur behind, she pictured Hauk leading her on towards her prey: straight-backed and fearless as he waded through the drifts. Her body was layered with scars and wasted with hunger, but as she recalled her husband’s strength, it seemed to flood through her. Her wiry muscles throbbed with such energy that she felt almost drunk on it. She picked up her pace and hurried after the ghost she had summoned from the ice.

After a while she noticed that her imagination was playing tricks on her. The figure of Hauk suddenly veered off to the left, taking her away from the pass she had been making for. ‘Hauk?’ she tried to say, but the words just growled at the back of her throat. She found she was almost running through the snow to keep up with the figure. As it neared another narrow ravine, the ghost dropped to its knees and began to leap through the snow in dog-like bounds. In fact, she realised, it was not man-shaped at all, but more like some kind of hound. No, she thought, squinting through the eddying snowflakes, not a hound, a wolf.

She looked back and saw that she was leaving the others behind, but she could not bear to slow her pace. ‘A wolf,’ she thought, forgetting that she had conjured up the creature, ‘so far north?’

She scrambled and crawled after the wolf as it raced down the gulley towards a glittering frozen lake. ‘Hauk?’ she whispered, as she saw the animal a little clearer. Had he become a wolf? Was this the shape of her husband’s spirit? It was larger than any wolf she had ever seen and as she gained on it, she noticed that it was looking back after every few bounds to make sure she was still following, watching her with cool, intelligent eyes.

Then she began to hear a soft, slightly prim-sounding voice. It echoed around the steep-sided ravine, seeming to come from all directions at once, but she had no doubt that she was hearing the creature. ‘The Norscan queen followed the deity,’ said the wolf, ‘a servant loyal and true.’

‘Völtar?’ whispered Sväla, stumbling to a halt in confusion and awe.

The voice echoed around the rocks again, sounding close enough to be a whisper in her ears. ‘In her exhaustion, the brave warrior queen doubted her own eyes, but deep in her heart she sensed the unlimited power of the divine being. She sensed that one final act of faith would lead her to her journey’s end.’

‘Völtar,’ repeated Sväla, jabbing her iron knife at the storm clouds and breaking into a sprint.

The wolf disappeared from view, turning left at the far end of the gulley.

Sväla hurried after it but as she stepped out onto the frozen lake, there was no sign of the creature. Her disappointment was short lived as she realised why her guide had led her down the narrow pass. Glinting in the moonlight, just a few miles down the valley, she saw a vast golden palace hanging in the sky. She gasped and dropped to her knees. Tears of relief and exhaustion filled her eyes, as she recognised the building from her visions. ‘Sigvald,’ she laughed through her tears, levelling her knife at the incredible structure. ‘We’ve come for you.’

As the others began to file out of the gulley behind her, a chorus of weary cheers echoed around the rocks. Valdür and some of the other elders dragged her from the snow and embraced her in fierce hugs.

‘Sväla the Witch!’ cried Valdür, raising his javelin to the massing crowds.

‘Sväla the Witch!’ they roared back, their eyes bulging in wonder as they edged towards their queen.

Sväla allowed herself a little smile as the crowd grew and the cheering continued. Then she noticed something odd: a flash of green in the snow. She stooped down to pick it up and realised it was the stem of a flower, ending in a single white lily. For no reason she could explain, the flawless petals filled her with dread. As the crowd pressed closer, howling her name and clapping her on the back, she noticed another sound, drifting on the wind.

It sounded suspiciously like laughter.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Autumn had come to the garden, plucking the leaves from the trees and covering the lawns with a carpet of brass and bronze. Long before they stepped onto the grass, two slender shadows announced the arrival of Sigvald and Oddrún. The shadows passed unnoticed over mounds of pulsing lilac skin and trembling amethyst wings. Sigvald’s subjects had abandoned themselves to various forms of pleasure, filling the garden with a chorus of sighs and gasps. Only two figures rushed from beneath the trees to greet him.

‘My lord,’ said, Víga-Barói, in his usual, unctuous tones. Then, as he saw what had become of his once-beautiful prince, he recoiled. ‘What’s happened to you?’

Sigvald glared back at him. His beautiful mane of hair was gone and his scorched, blistered skin was littered with cuts and bruises. Even his ornate armour was twisted into odd new shapes, jutting out from his limbs like a series of glinting leaves. Without the gangly giant at his side, he doubted Víga-Barói would even have recognised him. ‘Where’s the daemon?’ he snapped, ignoring the knight’s question.

‘Lord,’ answered Baron Schüler, who was standing a few feet behind Víga-Barói. ‘The daemon has gone.’ The baron’s sunken eyes flashed with hope as he studied the prince’s wounds.

Sigvald’s frown deepened. ‘Gone?’

The baron pulled anxiously at his beard. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said, waving toward the centre of the garden, ‘but I believe its servant has something to show you.’

Sigvald grunted in surprise as he realised that the tent had vanished. Belus’s orchard was still there, but it was now surrounded by a low, stone wall and to reach his patron, Sigvald would have to step through a gate of intricately-wrought iron. As he limped towards it, the prince sighed in admiration. He ran a finger over the cool metal, tracing the outline of a naked, dancing figure. He shook his head and dropped to his knees for a better look, forgetting his pain for a moment as he followed the voluptuous curves of the design.

‘Look,’ muttered Oddrún, gesturing through the metal, to the orchard beyond. ‘The daemon’s servant.’

Sigvald reluctantly turned his gaze from the gate to the fruit trees beyond. A cobbled path snaked between the trunks, ending at the small clearing where they had previously spoken to Belus Pül. There was no sign of the daemon, but the pale, spider-like bundle of limbs was still crouched on the grass next to its scrolls of parchment, with its single ear turned in their direction.

Sigvald shoved the gate open and limped into the orchard, followed by Oddrún and the others.

As the prince approached, the scribe scuttled down the path towards him. When it was just a few feet away, the strange creature paused and, with an elaborate flourish of its needle-tipped arms, laid two scrolls out on the grass and then withdrew beneath the trees.

‘Where is my patron?’ cried Sigvald, waving at the huge bird skull in Oddrún’s arms. ‘I’ve completed the trial. Bargau is no more.’

The pale nest of limbs shivered slightly, either in fear or amusement, then scampered forwards and tapped its inky digits on the two scrolls.

Sigvald glared around the orchard with gritted teeth, then shook his head and dropped to his knees, gasping with pain as he stretched his torn muscles. He picked up the nearest parchment and squinted at the densely packed lines of text. The whole thing was beautifully illuminated, showing several images of a knight in flashing gold armour. Sigvald’s scowl vanished as he recognised his own face in the vivid, hand-painted scenes. He realised he was reading the story of his life, from the day he first encountered the daemon.

‘Bless you, Sigvald,’ he muttered, grinning as he studied the wild excesses recorded on the vellum. Then he paused and adopted a more serious expression. He had reached an illustration of two figures standing on the rooftops of the Gilded Palace. It showed the moment Baron Schüler first described the brass skull worn by Mord Huk. At the memory of the skull, Sigvald nodded eagerly and hurried past the subsequent scenes, until he reached the end of the scroll. He held the paper up to the moonlight and shook his head in horror. The text described his return to the garden and explained the absence of the daemon.

Sigvald sat in silence for a few seconds, as colour rushed into his face. Then he let out a wordless scream and lurched to his feet, tearing the parchment in half as he rose.

‘My lord,’ gasped Baron Schüler, rushing forwards. ‘What’s the matter? What does it say?’

As Sigvald rounded on the baron, his face was locked in a hideous snarl. ‘My patron is too delicate to be in my presence.’ His voice was trembling with rage as he waved at his bloody, ruined armour. ‘My appearance is too offensive.’ He continued tearing the parchment into smaller and smaller pieces, spitting curses as he staggered back and forth.

The scribe scuttled away beneath the trees.

‘Belus has gone!’ cried Sigvald, grabbing the baron’s shoulders. His eyes were filled with terror as well as rage. ‘I’ve been forsaken!’

Schüler narrowed his eyes. ‘What of it, prince? You don’t need any help to capture that fortress. Why bother with this Belus Pül? You’re invincible. No one could deny you anything. No one can come between you and that brass skull.’

Sigvald let out a shrieking laugh. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he cried, waving at the scraps of paper. ‘Without my patron, I’ll be in the ground within the year.’ He pounded his fist on his dented cuirass. ‘I’m only alive by the grace of Belus Pül. The daemon is everything.’ He clutched his face in horror and lowered his voice to a terrified whisper. ‘The parchment shows exactly what’s going to happen now. I’m going to grow old, Schüler. Old and hideous, like everyone else.’ His eyes widened in fear and he backed away from the others, speaking too low for them to hear. ‘And then I will die.’

‘Sigvald,’ muttered Oddrún, waving at the ground.

The prince stared back at him, uncomprehending. Then he shook his head, trying to remove the awful visions that were flooding his mind. ‘What?’ he said quietly, sounding utterly bereft.

‘The other parchment.’

The prince eyed the paper with suspicion and shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered. He looked at Víga-Barói. ‘Tell me what it says.’

The knight bowed decorously and picked up the scroll. ‘It describes your life to this point,’ he said, squinting at the text. Then he looked up at the prince with a shocked expression. There was a slight hitch in his voice as he spoke. ‘Your majesty never told me…’ He stumbled over his words, unsure how to continue. ‘I did not know the extent of your adventures, my lord.’

‘Carry on,’ snapped Sigvald, ‘and you’ll see how miserably my adventures end.’

The knight lingered over the passage for a few more seconds, clearly unnerved by something, then he skipped over the subsequent paragraphs until he neared the end of the roll. His eyes lit up and he leant closer to the paper. ‘My lord,’ he gasped in reverential tones.

‘What?’ sneered Sigvald.

‘You have… You will become a…’

‘What?’

‘A god,’ whispered Víga-Barói, looking up at the prince in wonder. He dropped to one knee and lowered his head. ‘Your majesty,’ he breathed, his voice trembling with emotion as he held out the paper. ‘You are to be elevated beyond the boundaries of the mortal realm. You will ascend beyond the firmament.’

‘I’m going to die, yes, I know,’ snapped Sigvald. He levelled a finger at the bird skull. ‘That wretched creature has ruined me. For the sake of some trees, I will–’

‘No, lord,’ interrupted Víga-Barói, furiously shaking his head. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ He jabbed his finger at the parchment. ‘The story clearly describes your return, in your present–’ he paused and took in Sigvald’s appearance with a grimace, ‘–condition. But then it continues to show how you will renew your beauty.’ He leapt to his feet and handed the parchment to Sigvald. ‘It shows you entering the kingdoms of the gods. My lord,’ he cried, ‘Slaanesh Himself will remake you and endow you with renewed vitality. You will return to the Old World, as a being of unimaginable power. Look!’ he cried, pointing at the parchment. ‘Your divinity will be assured, and so will your victory. You will crown yourself with the skull of the Blood God.’

Sigvald shook his head. ‘You’re talking gibberish. No mortal can travel so far and expect to return.’ Despite his dismissive tone, there was a slight tremor in the prince’s hands as he snatched the paper and looked at the final lines of text.

‘Do you see?’ asked Víga-Barói, gripping Sigvald’s shoulder.

Sigvald stared at the scroll in silence for a few seconds, then his shoulders began to shake with laughter. ‘Oh, I understand,’ he said, waving at the shreds of paper on the ground. ‘Belus has left me a choice. Either I wait for age and infirmity to overtake me, or I head even further north.’

Baron Schüler looked from the prince to Víga-Barói in confusion. ‘Further north?’

Sigvald turned towards him with a lunatic grin. ‘Remember the lights you saw from the Empyreal Dome?’

Schüler blanched. ‘The Realm of Chaos?’

Sigvald nodded and let out another burst of rippling laughter. ‘Belus is testing my nerve to see if I will abandon the world and present my naked spirit to a god.’ He gave a grudging nod of respect. ‘My patron seeks entertainment on a grand scale. Only then will the daemon give me what I seek.’

Oddrún hissed beneath his hood. ‘Belus has lost its love for you, Sigvald, that is all. You knew this time would come. Such a capricious being was bound to forsake you, eventually. All Belus wishes now is to watch you destroy yourself in the most spectacular way possible. The promise of the skull is just a trap.’

Sigvald nodded, but as he looked back at the parchment, his eyes glittered with lust. The text described his return to the mortal world as an event of world-changing importance. The final image showed him bathed in unholy light, raising a flashing rapier over his head, with winged spirits spiralling above him into the writhing heavens. ‘Tell me, Oddrún,’ he said, looking up from the paper, ‘what is the alternative?’

Oddrún lurched forward, barging the others out of the way and stooping down to peer into Sigvald’s face. ‘We could grow old,’ he hissed, his voice filled with desperate urgency. ‘We could return to our people and spend our final years in repentance. We could beg Völtar the Wolf for forgiveness.’

At the name Völtar, the colour drained from Sigvald’s face. ‘Do not mention such things,’ he replied, in hushed tones.

‘Why not?’ cried Oddrún. ‘Because it causes you pain?’ He tore the paper from Sigvald’s hands and threw it down onto the grass. ‘That’s because part of you remembers how to be human.’

Sigvald’s lips curled back from his teeth in a bitter, leering grin. ‘And you think we could just start our lives again?’ He pulled Oddrún’s hood lower until the giant’s head was just inches from his own. ‘Look at yourself,’ he whispered. ‘You’re a monster. What exactly do you think “our people” would say if they saw your revolting body lurching towards them?’

Oddrún wrenched back his head and loomed over the prince. ‘There has to be a way. Don’t you see?’ He waved at the scraps of paper. ‘Belus wants to ensnare you again. You have become boring and the daemon just wants fresh sport.’

Sigvald drew his borrowed sword and pointed it up at Oddrún’s disjointed frame. ‘I can only see one fool here, Narrerback. You’re a monster and you can’t even see it. You’re ridiculous.’

Oddrún shook his head and backed away across the lawn, but as he went, he looked down at his grotesque body and began to mutter under his breath.

Sigvald strode after him, jabbing his sword at the chancellor. ‘You’re a freak,’ he howled. ‘Don’t you see? You’re cursed! Cursed! Cursed! As much as any of us. You can’t hide sin with a piece of sackcloth. You’re evil, Oddrún, let that sink into your rotten skull. Whatever I decide to do, you can be sure of one thing: you are utterly damned.’

Oddrún flinched away from Sivgald’s words as though they were sword strikes, and at the word ‘damned’ he clamped his hands to his head.

‘Where’s the doctor?’ snapped Sigvald, as he approached him.

Oddrún gave no reply, so Sigvald reached into his robes and withdrew the battered gold casket.

‘Doctor Schliemann,’ cried Sigvald as he flipped open the box with a brittle grin. ‘One last question!’

The head was slumped on its side. The doctor’s eyes were open, but there was no sign of life in their clouded lenses. His scalp had been torn open in several places and there was a trickle of grey fluid running from the back of his skull.

Sigvald grimaced and looked back at Víga-Barói. ‘Where’s the sorcerer?’

Víga-Barói dragged his gaze from the box’s gruesome contents. ‘Énka, my lord?’

Sigvald nodded. ‘Yes – the fish thing. Fetch him here.’

Víga-Barói bowed and hurried from the orchard.

Sigvald turned back to Oddrún. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he said, softening his voice and placing a hand on the giant’s trembling shoulder. ‘Once he’s revived, the doctor will direct me to Slaanesh’s kingdom. Think about it, Oddrún: I will be imbued with power greater than anything we’ve ever seen. There will be no limits to what I can achieve. I could give you anything you wanted.’

Oddrún lowered his hands and shook his head. ‘Nothing good ever came from such a source.’

Sigvald smiled as he looked up at the gathering clouds. ‘I’m not so sure about that, Narrerback.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sväla looked up at Sigvald with tear-filled eyes. Since leading the Fallen into the Gilded Palace, her doubt had been growing. Now, as the Geld-Prince gazed down at her from an ancient, faded canvas, she felt crushed, insect-like beneath his radiance. As she compared her scrawny, bedraggled shape with his handsome face and his exquisitely embellished armour, she wondered if Völtar might have led her astray. Could such a perfect being really be responsible for their curse? Then she noticed the device on the prince’s shield. It was the same circular design she had drawn in the dust all those months earlier. Her heart sank. This must be the man.

She stepped closer to the painting, blind to the elaborate gilt frame and the billowing cobwebs as she focussed on Sigvald’s piercing blue eyes. Could it be right to seek the death of such a being? Despite the playful grin on his face, there was a proud, distant look in the prince’s eyes, as though he were gazing far beyond the confines of the mortal world.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll find him,’ said Valdür, hobbling down the vast hallway towards her. His voice was weak and hoarse, but it echoed around the vaulted ceiling, causing the old warrior to flinch, as though he had disturbed the sanctity of an ancient temple.

Sväla looked back at him and felt her resolve harden. Valdür’s body was ruined. His skin had blistered away from his face and his furs were hanging from his rounded shoulders in tatters. But he looked at her without any hint of accusation or doubt. How could she hesitate, when so many had entrusted her with their lives?

The final approach had been the worst; time had begun to play games with them. At first, the palace looked only a few hours away, but then, after what seemed like a lifetime, they had crested a ridge to find it further away than ever. Days became weeks, then years, then days again, until it was impossible to know how long they had been wading through the snow. She had watched friends grow old and die and then reappear the next day as young as when they set sail. By the time they clambered wearily up the winding, golden steps, only one thing was certain: less than half of the Fallen were alive to enter the home of their wayward son.

‘Yes,’ replied Sväla, turning away from the painting and closing her eyes for a second.

Valdür shuffled to her side and placed a hand on her cheek. ‘You must rest, child,’ he said, waving back towards the huge doorway at the far end of the passageway. ‘I’ve told Svärd to order the men to hand out the last of the meat.’ He waved at the empty hallway. ‘If the palace is empty, we may as well make use of it. We can sleep here while you wait for Völtar to send you guidance. Sleep might be all you need to bring back the visions.’

Sväla shook her head. ‘I can’t sleep in a place like this.’ She nodded to the opposite end of the passageway. It was shrouded in gloom and dust, but another door was just visible, as grand as the first one. ‘I’m going to look around.’

Valdür looked past her down the hallway and frowned. ‘I don’t think it’s wise to go any further alone. The palace might not be completely empty. Remember how huge it is.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe Sigvald is still here somewhere.’ He nodded at the knife in Sväla’s tattooed fist. ‘You might need more than that if you find him.’

Sväla gave him a rueful smile. ‘You’re right, of course, old friend. I won’t go alone.’ She gestured to the blankets of dust draped over the portraits. ‘But I think you’re wrong about Sigvald. My heart tells me he’s far from his home.’

Sväla shook her head at the enormity of the palace. They had wandered down miles of hallway without encountering a single room. There was nothing but portraits, hundreds of them, all showing the same, grinning youth, posing heroically in his gleaming gold armour.

‘We may as well head back,’ said Valdür. ‘No one’s been here for decades.’

‘We’ve come this far,’ snapped Svärd, striding forwards and waving his javelin at the next door. ‘Let’s at least see what we’re all dying for.’ The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable as he glared at his mother’s back.

Several other tribesmen nodded their heads in agreement and as Sväla turned to face the small group, she shook her head at the old man. ‘What good will it do us to go back? We’ve no food and no idea where to go next. If Sigvald isn’t here, then maybe there’s at least something to eat, or someone who knows his whereabouts.’

Svärd stepped up to his mother’s side with a sneer. ‘Tell me, witch, what would we do if Sigvald was waiting behind that very door? Bearing in mind what you said about his pact with the Lord of Delight, and him being immortal, I’m a little confused about how we’d actually kill him.’

Valdür opened his mouth to silence the boy, but then he hesitated and looked at Sväla to see how she would respond.

Sväla turned to her child with a look of such ineffable sadness that the boy’s rage faltered, and he turned away.

‘All his life,’ she said, ‘your father never doubted his people. He always believed that we could free ourselves from our curse, despite having no idea of its source.’ She looked up at one of the portraits. ‘Now we know the source and you still can’t believe.’

Valdür shook his head and answered on Svärd’s behalf. ‘But if he’s immortal?’

Sväla studied the iron knife in her fist. ‘I’ll find a way. I know it.’ She turned her gaze back on her blushing son. ‘I still have faith in Hauk.’

The emotion in Sväla’s voice silenced any further debate and they shuffled on towards the next door.

It swung open to reveal a small antechamber, leading onto a second, larger room.

The Norscans hesitated before entering and looked at each other in shock. The rooms were both hazy with smoke, drifting from a wide, inglenook fireplace in the second room. It was clear that it had been in recent use.

Sväla gave the tribesmen a triumphant glance, before edging slowly into the room. Her feet sank into a deep, lilac carpet and she felt a wonderful warmth seeping through her furs. Candelabra were mounted on the walls and several of them were still flickering, filling the rooms with soft, ebbing light and revealing the illustrations on the silk wall hangings. The images showed a beautiful, raven-haired woman, surrounded by hundreds of screaming, tormented men. Sväla grimaced at the pictures and moved on. As she crossed the antechamber into the larger room, she noticed the enticing smell of cooked meat and stepped over to the long, polished table.

She held a finger to her mouth as the men crept after her, holding their javelins aloft and peering into the smoky shadows.

There was no sign of life, but as Sväla approached the table, she saw that dozens of silver plates were set out, as though for a banquet, and some of them were still full of food.

She closed her eyes for a second to savour the smell of the meal and when she opened them again, several of the tribesmen were gorging themselves on the stuff, groaning with pleasure as they rammed fistfuls of food into their mouths.

Sväla was about to protest, but then she noticed that Valdür was grinning at her and she relented with a wave of her hand.

‘Looks like we’re not alone after all,’ whispered the old man, grabbing a handful of meat and wolfing it down. Then he nodded to a door at the far end of the table.

Sväla nodded back and waved for the men to follow her as she walked down the length of the table towards the door.

As she reached the head of the table Sväla paused, noticing a plate of food that was piled even higher than the others. She shrugged and stepped towards it. In the face of such excess, it seemed churlish to abstain. She felt sure there would be plenty to take back to the others.

As she approached the plate she gasped and looked back at the men in horror.

They followed her gaze and saw what was on the plate. The colour drained from their faces. The meat was roasted to a chestnut brown and glistening with fat, but it was unmistakably a human head.

The Norscans grimaced and wiped their mouths nervously, backing away from the table. As they looked closer at the cuts of meat, they noticed other human shapes on the plates.

One of the men groaned in disgust, but Sväla signalled for them to remain silent as they approached the door.

She pressed her ear to the wooden panels and closed her eyes. To her amazement she heard laughter and music. The sounds were distant, but there could be no doubting that some kind of celebration was going on. She held up a hand to the others and continued listening for a few seconds. The sounds were too far away to be in the next room.

‘Someone’s here,’ she whispered, turning to the others, with excitement in her eyes.

Most of the men were still looking at the meat with disgust, but Ungaur the Blessed stepped to her side and nodded, towering over her with his fur-clad bulk. He ran a hand over the animal bones in his beard and looked from Sväla to the others. ‘There are only a dozen of us here, Sväla.’

Sväla shrugged. ‘We could walk away, I suppose. Travel all the way back to the main front gates, gather up a larger group and be back here in a few hours. Maybe there would still be someone on the other side of this door.’

To Sväla’s surprise, her son stepped forward in her defence. ‘She’s right,’ he muttered, still blushing. ‘If we leave now, we might never know who was through there. This palace is enormous. We might never find another soul. And then what would we do? Wander these empty halls till we have nothing left to eat but each other?’

Valdür the Old nodded in agreement. Then he kissed the fetishes dangling from his spear and placed a hand on the door’s ivory, serpentine handle. He looked to Sväla for her signal.

She raised her weapon, gesturing for the others to do the same, then nodded at Valdür.

Valdür swung the door open to reveal a series of interconnected rooms. They were linked by dozens of archways, each of which was hung with glittering, diaphanous curtains.

As Sväla stepped into the first room she felt as though she had entered a feverish dream. She could never have imagined such depraved opulence. Gold lanterns were hung from the ceiling, revealing rows of marble pilasters and casting dramatic shadows over the dark, plum-coloured walls. The marble was carved to resemble lithe, naked couples, locked in a series of passionate embraces. She allowed her eyes to trace over the writhing figures up to the plasterwork ceiling. The plaster was moulded in incredible detail and showed even more copulating figures, all writhing in ecstasy as they reached out towards the figure sprawled at their centre. Sväla was unsurprised to notice that the source of their pleasure was Sigvald. His rapacious grin was just visible beneath a forest of groping hands. As Sväla looked closer, her disgust grew. Many of the bodies draped over Sigvald were barely human: serrated wings, vermicular tails and porcine snouts were all depicted in erotic, loving detail as they caressed the laughing prince.

Remembering the danger of their situation, Sväla dragged her gaze from the ceiling to study the rest of the room. She realised that even the furniture was oddly lewd: the voluptuous, gilded curves of the chairs were all carved to resemble carnal acts of the most unspeakable invention.

‘Sväla,’ whispered Valdür, tapping her on the shoulder and gesturing to one of the draped archways.

She saw slender figures moving back and forth on the other side of the flimsy curtains. They were silhouetted against the glow of a fire and as their outlines rippled across the silk, they seemed as dreamlike as everything else. Sväla turned to see that most of the tribesmen were staring up at the plasterwork, utterly engrossed by the writhing figures. Only Valdür and Ungaur were waiting for her next order.

She looked back at the curtain. The music and laughter was emanating from the other side and as the silhouettes slipped back and forth, she realised that they were performing an elegant dance to an odd, percussive tune. She looked down at her wiry, tattooed frame and her filthy, torn furs and felt suddenly ridiculous. What was she doing here? She took a deep breath and clutched her knife a little tighter. Then she stepped over to one of the pilasters and looked up at the tower of heaving, marble flesh. Still holding her breath, she drew the iron blade across the palm of her left hand and flicked a long line of blood across the entwined figures. As the blood ran down the stone, she let out her breath in a prayer to Völtar, begging for the strength to tear down this palace of sin. Then she turned back to her men. They all now had their eyes fixed on her. She waved six of them to one side of the archway and six to the other side. Then she stepped up to the curtain and wrenched it open.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Mord Huk bellowed with disgust at the strange figure sprawled before him in the snow. The creature’s body was a wiry patchwork of badly sewn skin and deliberate self mutilation, but it was not so much the thing’s flesh that made him howl, it was the ludicrous trails of lilac that surrounded it. The creature was strapped securely to a frozen rock at the summit of a small hill, but its hair seemed to be alive, and as Mord Huk tightened his grip on its throat the pale purple locks trailed over his muzzle, slicing through his thick skin like razors.

‘Tell me!’ he demanded, in a low, guttural belch.

The creature giggled and squirmed as Mord Huk’s slavering jaws loomed closer. ‘Such a novice,’ it wailed in a creamy falsetto. ‘You could learn so much from me, dog head. I’m the Geld-Prince’s most skilled surgeon. I could teach you how to extract information with real artistry. Instead of all this ineffective ugliness.’

Mord Huk jolted his head back with a bark of pain, as another of the tendrils sliced into his muzzle. ‘Tell me,’ he grunted, lifting his victim’s head and slamming it back down again with a moist crunch.

The creature vomited blood over its white, skeletal chest and laughed. ‘One useful technique is to tell the subject what you would like to know.’

Mord Huk raised his huge axe over the creature’s head. ‘Where is Sigvald?’ he grunted, pointing the axe at the glittering palace drifting a few miles north of them. ‘His army has not come back. Where has he gone?’

‘Ah, I see. That, I’m afraid, I cannot answer. You’re right about the palace though. He abandoned his home, and his wife even, so that he could wage war on you.’ The creature looked up at the drooling, armour-clad brute hunched over it and laughed. ‘For the life of me I can’t see why he bothered. How could he leave such a delicious morsel behind for an ugly mongrel like you?’

Mord Huk’s axe sliced through the creature’s neck with a thunk and its head rolled from the rock, sinking deep into the snow and leaving behind a small lilac shrub of hair.

The champion backed away from the corpse and wiped the blood from his armour. Then he turned to the ranks of soldiers spread out below him, panting slightly as he glared down at them with blazing red eyes. He drew a deep breath and howled with such force that he stumbled backwards across the snow. ‘Sigvald’s wife!’ he roared, jabbing his axe at the Gilded Palace. ‘Bring her!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Sigvald felt the mountain shift beneath him, as though straining to be free. Oddrún staggered to one side as the surrounding rocks began trembling and lifting from the ground, shedding clumps of snow as they rose into the air. As they moved, they picked up speed, hurtling comet-like towards the starless sky.

Sigvald was delighted by the strangeness of the scene. He had never travelled so far north before and he felt drunk on the surreal landscape. He laughed, remembering that he also felt drunk because he was drunk. He looked down at the small green bottle in his hand, unsure for a moment how it got there. Then he remembered: the pain of his wounds had made it too painful to travel, even strapped to Oddrún’s back, so he had ordered Víga-Barói to find him something to ease his discomfort. It had certainly done that. His whole body was tingling and throbbing with energy and his mind was a wonderful, jumbled mess.

Oddrún continued plodding wearily through the snow, with the laughing prince waving his bottle at the heavens. Soon, there was a whole shower of stones, springing from the ground and rocketing up towards the sky, flashing with refracted moonlight as they went. Sigvald’s head lolled back on his neck as he followed their ascent, up through the falling snow, towards the low clouds. After a while, he realised that not all of the vast shadows overhead were clouds. The flying ships had followed them north. ‘Oddrún,’ gasped the prince, pointing his bottle at the nearest one. It was huge beyond imagining and carved from the rotting carcass of a leathery, bloated amphibian. Hundreds of gaudy sails were hung from its sides and flickering, sallow lanterns shone out through its bony hull. As Sigvald gazed, bleary-eyed up at the ship, he realised that he could even make out pale faces peering down at him from the gunnels.

Oddrún glanced briefly up at the ship, before pointing down the slope. ‘Almost there,’ he muttered.

Sigvald leant forward to peer over his shoulder and saw that he was right. At the bottom of the next crag was a line of black rock, carving a straight path through the snowdrifts and disappearing into the distance. ‘The road,’ he cried, spraying wine on the back of Oddrún’s hood and starting to laugh. ‘Doctor Schliemann was right!’

Oddrún climbed carefully down the icy rocks and waded through the snow towards the road. As he reached the edge of the black rock, he hesitated. Despite the high drifts on either side, no trace of snow could be seen on the road. The giant leant out over the rock, peering into the flawless void. This close up, the road seemed more like a ribbon of ink, sunk deep into the glittering snow. There was no sign of edges or texture of any kind – not even the faintest glimmer of reflected moonlight.

‘Look,’ cried Sigvald, turning the giant’s head back the way they had come.

Oddrún turned around and they both stared in amazement. The crag they had just scaled down was rippling like a curtain in the wind. As they watched, the whole mountainside slumped and reared with the breeze, as insubstantial as smoke. As the wind picked up, even the snow-laden sky began to swell and bulge like liquid.

Sigvald took another swig of wine and threw the empty bottle at the cliff, laughing incredulously as it stretched and writhed through the air, before finally sinking into the mountain like a pebble into a lake. ‘It’s all falling apart,’ he cried, rising up from Oddrún’s shoulders and wrenching the last few strands of blackened hair from his scalp. ‘Reality is collapsing. All of it – apart from the road.’ He waved at the broad expanse of black. ‘See? Everything else is in flux, but the road stays constant.’ He slapped the giant’s shoulders. ‘Quick, Narrerback.’

The giant trod hesitantly on the black rock with one foot. The surface held and he stepped fully onto the road.

They both looked up to see that even the air above was clear of snowflakes. A straight void hung over them, like a tunnel carved through the storm.

Oddrún made no comment and loped off down the road, with Sigvald still laughing on his back.

After several hours, the horizon began to change. Shimmering curtains of light rippled in and out of view, drenching the whole landscape with emeralds and pinks and even forming briefly into recognisable scenes. As he watched from his swaying perch, Sigvald saw mountainous faces leering down at him from within the lights: everything from daemonic monsters to innocent babes, flickering in the endless night.

They had left the army in the daemon’s garden. Sigvald had told Víga-Barói and Baron Schüler that such a journey into the intangible should be for him alone, and ordered them to remain and keep watch over the Decadent Host. Now, as he watched images blossoming in the air before him, Sigvald wished he had at least brought the baron along. If anything could have convinced a doubting convert, it would have been this.

‘We must be nearly there,’ he slurred. Then he laughed in delight as his words appeared in front of his face as a row of luminous script. ‘Look at this,’ he cried, sending more letters into the air. ‘My speech is real!’ As new letters formed, they jostled with the others, forming an incandescent mess of consonants and vowels. ‘What an incredible place,’ he laughed, squeezing the giant’s shoulder.

Oddrún gave a noncommittal nod as he trudged on down the road.

The further north they went, the stranger their surroundings grew. The mountains on either side became rivers of rock, snaking through the sky and pouring to the ground in huge, granite cascades, and the sky grew crowded with ever more putrid ships, each one shrouded in clouds of winged snakes that circled and dived around them like hungry gulls. Through the heart of it all, the road remained untouched, carving through the lunacy as surely as it had carved through the snow.

Sigvald pointed at the horizon and tried to cry out, but instead of words, another torrent of radiant characters tumbled from his mouth, and this time, the words were in a language he did not recognise.

Oddrún looked up to see two thin, black pyramids of rock rearing up ahead of them, surrounded by clumps of wizened hawthorn.

Sigvald grabbed the gold casket from Oddrún’s side and popped it open.

The box was empty, but before Sigvald had a chance to emit any more of the dazzling glyphs, he noticed that a figure had appeared beside them on the road.

The prince immediately recognised the jerky, bird-like gait of Doctor Schliemann. The scholar was as young and clear-eyed as the day Sigvald first welcomed him to the Gilded Palace, decades earlier. There was a key difference, however: his flesh was as vague and insubstantial as the characters drifting around Sigvald’s face.

‘The Lucid Gate,’ said the young doctor, staring up at Sigvald from behind his wire-rimmed glasses. His words rang out quite clearly. ‘A single point of clarity between two worlds.’

‘You’re restored,’ Sigvald tried to say, but the words just poured from his mouth as glittering, diaphanous treacle.

The doctor shook his head, seemingly able to understand. ‘Not restored, prince. My soul is still tied to the casket by your sorcerer’s artifice. My spirit is eternally bound to your service. It’s just that the proximity of the Ruinous Powers is enabling you to see a different aspect of my being.’ His robes shimmered as he pointed at the gold casket. ‘As long as you live, I can never be free from that prison.’

Sigvald nodded eagerly, oblivious to the pain in the doctor’s voice. Then he pointed at the black pillars looming ahead of them.

The doctor nodded. ‘Chaos wears countless faces, prince. There are many different gates, in many different places, but if you pass between those stones, I guarantee you will leave the mortal realm.’

Sigvald tapped one of the swirling arabesques on his armour with a questioning expression. The curves were sculpted in the shape of a symbol – the mark of Slaanesh.

The doctor shrugged. ‘I can’t say what you’ll find beyond that gate, no one can, but it’s definitely possible that if you travel any further you will see the face of your god.’

Sigvald rolled his eyes ecstatically and plucked another small bottle from Oddrún’s robes. He peered at the label in confusion for a few seconds, then emptied its contents in a single gulp. As the giant plodded on beneath him, he held the empty bottle up to his eye and peered through it like a telescope, laughing hysterically as he surveyed the rippling landscape through the green glass.

After another hour of walking they reached the gate.

Sigvald freed himself from the giant’s back and dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap.

Oddrún stooped down and helped him to his feet, keeping a steadying hand on the prince’s shoulder as he stood, swaying slightly before the two black obelisks.

The surface of the stones was unmarked, but there was movement inside: a steady pulse, deep within the rock. On the other side of them, the road appeared to continue, as straight as before.

‘What do I do?’ asked Sigvald. He touched his lips in shock, surprised by the sound of his own voice. It was only then that he noticed the dazzling characters had vanished. ‘I can speak!’ he exclaimed, turning unsteadily towards the ghostly doctor.

Schliemann shrugged and nodded but gave no reply.

Sigvald lurched towards him. ‘What do I do, doctor?’ He looked back at the ominous stones. ‘Do I just step through?’

Schliemann opened his mouth to reply, but before he could, Sigvald threw himself through the gate with a bark of laughter.

Instantaneously, he reappeared, grinning and looking around himself excitedly. His face dropped as he saw Oddrún and the doctor.

‘It’s not so simple,’ explained Schliemann, shoving his glasses up his nose and nodding to the withered mass of hawthorn at the base of the rocks. ‘There is a ritual to be observed.’ There was a gleam of excitement in his eyes as he looked at the bushes. ‘First you must take a berry.’

Sigvald nodded eagerly and rushed towards the hawthorn.

‘Wait,’ grumbled Oddrún, extending one of his long arms and clasping the prince’s shoulder. ‘He’s lying to you, Sigvald.’

Doctor Schliemann narrowed his eyes but did not turn towards the giant. ‘You know the wards that bind me, prince. I am unable to tell you anything that is not true.’

‘He’s tricking you then,’ insisted Oddrún, stooping down to Sigvald’s level and gripping his other shoulder. ‘Don’t do it.’

Sigvald looked up at the giant with a tormented look in his eyes. ‘It’s just there,’ he whispered, pointing to the stones. ‘The garden of my lord.’

Oddrún simply shook his head as the prince stepped away from him and plucked one of the berries.

‘I have to know how it feels,’ said Sigvald, peering at the fruit as though it held all the mysteries of the universe within its taut, blood-red skin.

‘Stand against one of the stones and draw your sword,’ said the spectral figure.

‘Oddrún?’ said Sigvald, nodding to the berries.

The giant backed away, shaking his head. ‘You’re going to die.’

Sigvald looked back at the berry. ‘Die,’ he said quietly, rolling the word around his mouth a few times. Then his face went slack and he stood in silence for a while, seeming to forget his surroundings.

‘Prince,’ said the doctor after a few awkward minutes had passed. ‘You need to hold one of the stones and draw your sword.’

Sigvald snapped out of his reverie and looked around in confusion. ‘What? Oh, yes. Yes.’ He weaved across the road back to the stone and drew the sword he had borrowed. Then he reached out and splayed one of his hands across the black rock. ‘It’s warm,’ he said, looking back at the doctor in surprise. ‘It feels like skin.’

‘Draw the blade across your tongue,’ said Schliemann.

Sigvald pursed his lips and frowned. ‘Really?’

The doctor nodded. ‘Only by mingling the fruit with your blood can your prayer be heard.’

Doubt flashed briefly in Sigvald’s eyes and he looked over at Oddrún, who was now huddled on the road a few yards away from the gate. ‘Will you let me go alone then, Narrerback?’

The giant rocked back on his heels and clutched his knees, but did not reply.

Sigvald stared at him in disbelief and, for a second, he looked utterly sober. Then, as quickly as it came, the sobriety vanished – ¾ replaced by a dazzling grin. ‘You’ll follow me.’ Then he raised the sword to his mouth and dragged the blade across his extended tongue, sending a torrent of crimson down over his chin.

‘Swallow the fruit and speak after me,’ said the doctor, with a note of urgency in his voice.

Sigvald popped the fruit between his bloody teeth and swallowed it, then nodded at the doctor.

The doctor uttered a single, guttural word in a language that neither Sigvald nor the giant recognised.

Sigvald mimicked him as best he could, but the wound to his tongue gave the word a lisping, mumbled quality.

The doctor proceeded to utter a string of vile-sounding phrases that Sigvald attempted to imitate through a mouthful of blood.

‘You must keep your hand on the stone,’ snapped the doctor, looking anxious and edging closer.

Sigvald nodded and leant more of his weight against the rock. His eyes widened and he looked down at his stomach with a grimace.

‘Don’t move your hand!’ cried the doctor.

Sigvald nodded furiously, but it was clear from the veins bulging on his neck that he was in great pain.

Oddrún clambered to his feet with a moan and raced towards the prince.

As the giant approached, the phantom doctor stepped towards him with a curse, holding his hands up to block his way.

As the giant stumbled to a halt, unwilling to touch Schliemann’s translucent flesh, a flash of light lit up the gate.

Sigvald looked down to see that flames had burst from his stomach and were quickly enveloping his body. He looked over at the doctor, his face a mask of fear.

Schliemann looked back at him with a delighted grin.

The prince finally tried to flee, but found that his hand was now locked to the black stone.

Oddrún stepped around the doctor, but it was too late; by the time he reached the gate, the flames were too fierce for him to reach Sigvald. He reached into the fire with a desperate howl, but was forced back by the heat, collapsing to his knees a few feet away.

As Sigvald’s body blackened and collapsed in on itself, Schliemann clasped his hands together in a silent prayer and closed his eyes.

By the time Oddrún looked back at him, the doctor was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Oddrún sat for a long time, watching the smouldering remains. The giant’s shoulders were slumped and rounded by despair and every few minutes he would rise to his feet to leave, only to sit back down with a string of muttered curses. Finally, he turned his gaze towards the hawthorn at the foot of the stones. Unfolding his long, gangly limbs, he loped over to the bushes and plucked one of the berries. The fruit was a tiny, crimson dot in his bandaged palm. He peered closely at it, just as Sigvald had done. Then he stepped over to the stone and plucked the cooling sword from the prince’s ashes. Ripples of jade and cerise washed over him as he raised the sword towards his hood and stared through the Lucid Gate.

He stood like that for several minutes, as motionless as the ancient rocks.

Then, with a groan, he let the sword clatter to the ground and stepped away from the stones, dropping the berry as he went. He shook his head and looked around at the madness that surrounded him. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered, turning his back on the rocks and heading back the way he had come, leaving the empty gold casket at the foot of the gate.

Oddrún paid little attention to his route as he stumbled south, with the flickering curtains of lights at his back. He blindly followed the straight black road until, after several hours, a little normality began to reassert itself over the landscape. On either side of him, the towering peaks reared out of the storm once more and the snow-covered ground began to look a little more stable. Even the skies became clearer: the ship-like carcasses drifted up through the clouds, leaving behind them just a few of the winged serpents, circling playfully around the heavens, silhouetted by the twin moons.

After a few hours Oddrún recognised a path through the mountains and left the black road, retracing his steps in the direction of Belus Pül’s garden.

‘Where’s the prince?’ gasped Víga-Barói as Oddrún stumbled across the grass.

A crowd of expectant faces quickly gathered around the giant and he shook his head. ‘Gone,’ he muttered, in a desolate voice.

A chorus of whispers erupted from the strange assembly.

‘Gone?’ snapped Víga-Barói, raising a trembling hand to silence the others. ‘Gone where?

‘Dead.’

‘You’re mad,’ replied Víga-Barói. ‘The Geld-Prince is immortal.’

Baron Schüler barged his way through the crowd and looked up at the giant. ‘What happened?’ he demanded, his voice taut with emotion.

Oddrún shrugged. ‘The doctor tricked him.’ He looked down at the blackened bandages around his hands. ‘And I left it too late to save him. I failed him.’

‘Nonsense,’ hissed Víga-Barói, his eyes wide with fear. ‘You’ve been driven mad by whatever you saw up there. I’ll ask the prince’s patron what’s happened.’ He shoved his way through the wall of inhuman faces, heading towards the centre of the garden and the iron gate that led to Belus Pül.

Baron Schüler hurried after him and together they wrenched open the gate and rushed into the little orchard.

The white-robed figure had returned and was waiting in the centre of the lawn with the spider-like scribe crouched nearby.

Víga-Barói bowed low and adopted his most oily tones. ‘My lord, we’ve imposed far too long on your generosity. If you would be so good as to tell us the whereabouts of your servant, the Geld-Prince, we’ll depart and trouble you no more.’

Belus continued staring into the middle distance, as though it had not heard the sneering knight. Then, just as the knight was about to repeat himself, the daemon began to speak.

‘Some tales grow in the telling,’ it announced, lifting its chin so that the moonlight fell dramatically over its face, ‘but many more diminish. And so it was with Sigvald the Magnificent. The deity had long dreamt of elevating this simple mortal and creating an eternal companion but even after all the help he had been given, Sigvald proved to be unworthy of such lofty ambitions.’ Belus took one of the items of jewellery from its arm – a bronze torque – and held it at arm’s length, as though it were suddenly repulsive, before dropping it to the ground. ‘The prince’s flesh proved too weak. He was, in the end, unable to make the journey into the Intangible Realm. His demise was, perhaps, a blessing. The deity resigned itself to an eternity of solitude, and refused all offers of sympathy – asking nothing but privacy in which to nurse its wounds.’

Víga-Barói lurched to his feet and glared at the slight, horned figure. ‘You sent him to his death!’ he cried, losing all semblance of self-control. He drew his sword and levelled it at the frantically working scribe. ‘Just so you could add an interesting chapter to this pathetic, self-aggrandising myth.’

The daemon’s face remained as serene as ever.

‘Stop writing,’ howled Víga-Barói striding forwards and slicing his sword through the scribe’s twitching limbs. The blade cut through the thing’s arms and sank deep into its eyeless face. Black blood erupted from the wound and the scribe staggered back, raising a forest of ivory appendages in a useless attempt to defend itself. The knight groaned with pleasure as he hacked repeatedly into the shuddering creature, covering his purple cuirass in tar-like blood and only stopping when the thing was still. He reached down into the pulpy, black mess and grabbed the scribe’s severed, pallid ear.

‘Carry on with your story then,’ he cried, holding the dripping ear up to the daemon. ‘Tell me how you sent the Geld-Prince to his death! The most excellent knight ever to grace these shores. Tell me how you killed him on a whim.’

Belus finally fixed its cool grey eyes on Víga-Barói, and they were sparkling with mirth.

As the daemon’s gaze fell on him, Víga-Barói’s head snapped backwards as if he had been punched.

Baron Schüler rushed to catch the knight as he fell, but then he gasped in disgust and backed away, letting him fall to the ground.

As Víga-Barói’s body collapsed onto the grass, dozens of long, needle-like limbs burst through his chest. He cried out in horror, but the sound was cut short as his mouth vanished behind a layer of pale skin. Within seconds, the features of his face vanished, leaving just a single, large ear.

Schüler hurried towards the iron gate as a pale, multi-limbed creature dragged itself from Víga-Barói’s armour and scuttled across the lawn.

Belus Pül turned and stepped over to the juniper tree with the chair hanging from its low, knotted boughs. ‘The deity watched Sigvald’s servants depart with a heavy heart,’ said the daemon, looking over at the pale, faceless man that had previously been Víga-Barói.

As the daemon’s new scribe raised its twitching limbs and began to write, Schüler slammed the gate behind him and rushed back across the garden, trembling with renewed hope.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The creatures attacked with astonishing speed. Their white, lissom bodies flew across the room with such grace that it seemed more like dance than violence. There was no trace of clothing to hide their androgynous flesh and as they approached Sväla she saw that their eyes were as black as coal.

The Norscans raised their weapons to defend themselves, but the creatures sliced into them with a gleeful scream, pinioning some to the floor with their serrated claws and garrotting others with their segmented tails.

Had there been more than two of the creatures, the fight would have been over very quickly. Even with such skewed odds, Sväla and the others found themselves locked in a desperate battle for survival. The jaunty, staccato music they had heard from the other side of the curtains continued as the combatants lurched across the drawing room, crashing into plush, upholstered furniture and stumbling over intricately embroidered silk rugs.

The Norscans fought in silence – hacking and jabbing at the creatures with grim determination. Gradually, they began to break through the nymphs’ frenzied attacks and land blows on them, but the creatures gave no sign of retreating; in fact, they seemed to relish the pain – gasping lasciviously at each new scar and flicking long, black tongues across their wounds.

As the struggle continued the tempo of the music increased, keeping time with the lunges and thrusts of the warriors, giving the fight the appearance of a strange, bloodthirsty performance. To the Norscans it seemed that the harder they fought, the more pleasure it gave their foes and as the minutes passed, more of them dropped to the ground, their necks severed by snapping, crab-like claws.

Along with the music and the grunting of the warriors, another sound emerged.

Sväla pulled back from the fight for a second and allowed herself a quick glimpse back at the curtain.

Ungaur the Blessed was standing a few feet away, with his staff raised and his head jolting from side to side. His face was locked in a grimace and it was clear he was in agony. Blood was running from between his fingers and trailing down the gnarled length of wood, washing over the bones and fetishes and pooling at his feet. As he held the staff aloft, a stream of guttural words was tumbling from between the jaws of the wolf’s head, and the shaman’s massive, fur-clad frame was trembling with exertion. His words were brittle with pain and his knuckles were white from gripping the staff so tightly.

Sväla stepped towards him, but before she could speak Ungaur uttered a final, hoarse syllable and levelled his staff at the struggling figures.

Viscous crimson light poured from the staff and washed over the Norscans. As the shaman’s energy rippled through them, the warriors’ blows tripled in fury, until their weapons were rising and falling with incredible speed.

The nymphs could not survive such an onslaught and finally slumped back against the wall, drenched in blood and sobbing with ecstasy as the Norscans hacked their bodies apart.

Once they were sure the creatures were dead, the Norscans backed away from their gory handiwork, nodding at each other in satisfaction, and looking at their throbbing muscles in shock.

Then Sväla saw Ungaur topple backwards, slamming onto the polished floorboards like a felled tree.

She rushed to his side and lifted his head.

At first the shaman’s eyes were unable to focus, then he saw who was holding him and revealed his black spines in a grin. ‘I have to admit, Sväla,’ he gasped, ‘I was saving all my strength to kill you. There was something about those things, though…’ he grimaced as he looked over at the two crumpled corpses. ‘They seemed equally worthy targets.’

Sväla shook her head, stunned. ‘If you had such power in you, all this time, why have you let me live? I know you wish me dead.’

The shaman narrowed his eyes and pulled her closer, blind to the other figures crowding round them. ‘You’re not the only one who wants this tribe to survive, Sväla.’ He coughed, filling his beard with blood. ‘There’s no way back now. I don’t need your visions to see that. Our only hope is you, and your obsession with Sigvald.’ He gripped her shoulder briefly, as the colour drained from his face. ‘I only pray you’re right, witch.’

Sväla laid the shaman’s head gently back down on the floor. ‘I’m right,’ she replied, but her heart was pounding as she looked up at the others.

They were all drenched in blood and panting heavily. She realised that only Svärd, Valdür and three others were left standing. She looked past their anguished faces and saw that some of those who had fallen were still alive, clutching at ragged holes in their throats and gurgling horribly.

‘Quick,’ she snapped, rushing to the nearest one and hammering her knife into his chest. ‘End their suffering.’

The others followed suit and for a few seconds the room became a grim abattoir as the Norscans butchered their own kin.

Sväla stood up with a look of fierce determination on her face. ‘None of this will be in vain,’ she said, glaring at the survivors. Then she looked around and saw another curtain on the far side of the room. ‘We must keep looking. If the palace is still inhabited, Sigvald may yet be here.’

Valdür shook his head and waved at the groaning shaman and the mounds of corpses. ‘We’re done, Sväla,’ he muttered, his words full of bitterness. ‘If two of Sigvald’s servants can do this to us, how could we ever hope to kill the prince himself?’

‘Kill Sigvald?’ came a voice from the shadows.

Sväla whirled around with her knife raised. There was a young girl sitting at the far end of the drawing room, half hidden in shadow. She was curled up, cat-like, on a plump, damask settee, wearing nothing but a few straps of leather and a long, amethyst necklace. Sväla frowned and stepped closer. The girl was unusually beautiful, but, more than that, she was strangely familiar. ‘I know you,’ she whispered, edging closer with her knife raised.

‘Wait,’ snapped Valdür, hurrying to Sväla’s side. ‘She might be–’ As the old warrior saw the girl’s face he stumbled to a halt and left his sentence unfinished.

Sväla looked back at him and saw that he had shifted his gaze to the rug-strewn floor and seemed to be blushing.

As the others approached to look at the girl, they began to act just as strangely – lowering their weapons and covering their mouths in shock.

Sväla looked back at the girl, trying desperately to place her. Her face was freckled, fair and surrounded by a tumbling mass of dark, glossy locks; and as the Norscans approached, she pursed her lips in a sullen, blood-red pout.

‘Who are you?’ demanded Sväla, jabbing her knife in the girl’s direction.

‘Who am I? I’m Freydís, Princess of the Gilded Palace. Who are you might be a more pertinent question. Who are you to come in here and murder my only distraction?’ The girl waved to an object on the table in front of her. ‘What use is a tune without a dancer?’

Sväla saw that she was indicating a small, skeletal creature. It looked like the desiccated remains of a particularly ugly, spiny lizard, which was busily hammering away at its own ribs with a silver hammer, like some kind of rotting glockenspiel. Sväla realised that this was the source of the repetitive tune that had been rattling around her head since she had first entered the room.

She strode towards the thing and swept it onto the floor with a curse.

The creature shrieked and scampered from view, leaving a trail of spindly bones as it went.

‘We’re Sigvald’s doom,’ cried Sväla. ‘We’re the progeny of his depraved lusts, come to wash away our shame with his blood.’ Sväla’s face flushed with colour and her lips trembled with rage. ‘We are the Fallen, Freydís. The emissaries of a cursed nation, come for our errant son.’ She stepped closer to the girl and glared at her. ‘We are Sigvald’s executioners.’

The girl smirked and rose to her feet with a sinuous grace. ‘And just how do you intend to execute my husband, peasant?’

Sväla’s cheeks flushed even darker. ‘This is his wife!’ she cried, turning to the others. ‘Seize her!’

The men stared back at Sväla as though she were a stranger.

The young girl laughed as she stepped past Sväla to Valdür’s side.

The old man dropped to his knees and clasped the hand she offered him, planting a fervent kiss on her pale skin. At the sight of this, the others rushed forwards and did the same, prostrating themselves before Freydís’s beauty.

‘You might find him difficult to kill,’ whispered the girl, running her fingers across Valdür’s entranced face.

‘I’ll find a way,’ snapped Sväla, trying to hide her fear at the men’s bizarre behaviour.

‘Oh, there is a way,’ replied Freydís, walking casually across the room towards another set of curtains.

Sväla rushed after her with her knife raised. ‘Where are you–?’ she began.

Before she could finish her question, Sväla found herself being dragged back by a pair of iron-hard arms. ‘What’s this?’ she gasped, feeling a spearhead pressing under her chin.

‘Leave her be,’ muttered Valdür in her ear.

‘What are you doing?’ she howled, unable to believe that her old friend would betray her in such a way.

Valdür shoved Sväla to the floor and pointed his spear at her. ‘Don’t harm this girl,’ he growled, his whole body shaking with rage. ‘She’s innocent.’

Freydís laughed as she stepped into the next room. ‘Oh yes, quite innocent.’

‘I won’t touch her, Valdür,’ gasped Sväla, climbing carefully to her feet. She sheathed her knife and raised her hands in a placatory gesture.

Valdür watched her closely as they followed the princess into the next room.

Sväla shook her head as she faced yet another bizarre assault on her senses. The room they had entered was like the lair of some crazed taxidermist. Hissing oil lamps revealed rows of skeletal remains lining both sides of the small room. None of the corpses resembled any creature she had ever seen before. They were all vaguely reptilian, with long, lizard-like skulls and spiny, serpentine tails but all of them had been mangled into unnatural shapes, with arching, wasted wings and upright, humanoid postures. Behind the skeletons were floor-to-ceiling shelves, crammed with hundreds of spherical glass jars, each holding smaller lizards suspended in a cloudy solution.

It was not so much the sight of the rotting, waxen creatures that unnerved Sväla, it was the sound they were making. The body cavities of the standing ones had been strung with piano wire, and as they watched Sväla’s approach they jerked into motion, plucking at the strings and creating a chorus of menacing arpeggios. As the larger figures played, the ones in the jars began to twitch, opening and closing their mouths in unison and producing a gurgled, liquid refrain.

The princess noticed Sväla’s dismay and smiled, throwing her arm around one of the spindly shapes. ‘A wedding gift,’ she sighed, before hurrying on through the next pair of curtains.

As the men hurried after the princess, Sväla stumbled to a halt and looked back the way she had come. ‘Ungaur,’ she muttered, with a rush of guilt. Indecision gripped her for a second, then she rushed back into the drawing room.

The first thing she noticed was an awful smell of rotting food. She looked around in confusion but could not see where the appalling stench was coming from. The corpses of the fallen Norscans and the two nymphs could not have decayed so quickly and although there were plates of half-eaten food scattered around the room, they could not account for such a dreadful stink.

Then Sväla noticed something else strange.

Ungaur had vanished.

She scoured the room for the shaman, but could see no sign of him. She dashed over to the spot where he had fallen and noticed that there was a smear of blood across the polished floorboards, leading back towards the dining room.

‘Ungaur?’ she cried, stepping through the next set of curtains and looking down the length of the long table. The charred head was still on the plate grinning back at her, but there was no sign of the shaman. She cursed under her breath. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she cried, without much hope of being heard, then hurried back through the rooms after the princess.

Sväla clamped her hands over her ears as she raced through the taxidermy room and pulled aside the next set of curtains.

She found herself back outside the palace and gasped at the bitter cold. She shielded her face as she stumbled out into the storm, blind for a few moments as the snow lashed into her eyes. Then she saw a group of figures, huddled together by an ornate metal railing and she realised she was standing on a broad balcony, hung out over the moonlit wastes.

‘We’re over here, my angry little savage,’ called the princess, waving Sväla over to the railings.

Sväla pulled her furs over her head and struggled through the icy weather. As she reached the group of figures, she saw that one of her men was sprawled at the feet of the princess, with blood pooling from a deep gash in his throat.

She drew her knife and looked at Valdür and the others in confusion. They were standing in a semicircle next to the princess, whispering urgently to each other.

‘What happened?’ she cried, crouching in the snow to examine the fallen man. He was dead. ‘Valdür? Svärd? What happened?’

The men ignored her and kept whispering, but Sväla noticed that Valdür’s javelin was dripping with fresh blood. She looked back at the princess and saw that she had wrapped her pale skin in a long coat of glossy black sable and was watching her closely from within the deep hood.

‘They will do that for a while,’ the princess explained, nodding at the men. ‘Then one of them will kill the others,’ she shrugged, ‘so he can keep me all to himself.’

‘You said there was a way to kill Sigvald.’ growled Sväla through clenched teeth. ‘What is it?’

The princess ignored her question and pointed up at the palace. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ she asked.

Sväla turned and looked up at the tower looming over them. It was hundreds of feet tall, gilded from top to bottom and built in the semblance of a willowy, female figure. Far above, in the snow-laden clouds, Sväla could just make out the figure’s elegant hands, cradling a glittering, winged heart.

‘They just call it the Sixth Tower now,’ explained the princess, stepping to Sväla’s side, ‘but when Sigvald built it, he named it after me.’ She pointed up at the distant face that crowned the tower. ‘Do you recognise me?’

Sväla nodded vaguely, and placed a hand on her knife, deciding to waste no more time on the vile woman. But before she could even draw the blade she noticed that all the men had stopped whispering and were staring at her. She sighed and moved her hand away from the weapon. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I understand. The tower is you.’ She turned to face the princess. ‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want? I seem to remember that you blundered into my chambers, peasant. I seem to remember that you butchered my servants and hurled abuse at me.’

Sväla continued gritting her teeth but could think of nothing to say. To kill the woman was clearly impossible, at least while the men were watching, but she could not simply abandon Svärd and Valdür.

Freydís stepped closer. ‘Sigvald no longer builds towers for me, peasant, do you understand? He can barely remember my name. His love has burned itself out, just as surely as all his other passions.’ Her voice grew shrill as she pointed at the billowing curtains. ‘He’s left me here to rot, along with all his other toys.’ She grabbed Sväla’s shoulders and pulled her close. ‘Can you even understand what that means? He’s betrayed me!’ she screamed, spitting into Sväla’s face and shoving her back and forth. ‘I gave him everything. I sacrificed my own family to assuage his wretched lust. And now the devious, inconstant, lying bastard has left me to die.’

Sväla shrugged herself free of the princess’s grip and backed away, shaking her head in confusion.

‘I want you to take me with you!’ cried Freydís, rushing after Sväla. ‘That’s what I want! Do you understand? I know exactly how you can kill him and I’ll tell you everything – all his shameful little weaknesses.’ Her lips pulled back into a dreadful snarl. ‘Just take me with you, peasant, let me be by your side when you gouge his rotten heart out.’

Sväla’s head reeled. ‘You want to kill your husband?’

The princess nodded eagerly and closed her eyes for a second, savouring the idea.

Sväla looked over at the bickering men. Their voices were now raised and Svärd was jabbing his finger into the chest of one of the older men. ‘If I agreed to take you with me, can you bring them to their senses? I can’t take you anywhere without the help of my people.’

Freydís nodded again and swapped her snarl for a girlish grin. ‘Easily done,’ she said, reaching into her furs and drawing out a length of silk. She stretched the material across her face and knotted it behind her head, obscuring her delicate features. Then she stepped over to the men and spoke to each of them separately, gently stroking their faces as she whispered in their ears.

The men’s expressions softened as the veiled princess spoke to them, and as they shuffled back towards Sväla, they were all smiling enigmatically, as though in possession of a wonderful secret.

‘Are you with me now?’ said Sväla, unable to hide the disgust in her voice.

The men nodded in reply, but only Valdür spoke. ‘If we are to rescue the princess, we must find the others. We’re too few to guard her properly.’

‘Rescue?’ gasped Sväla, looking over at Freydís.

The princess laughed.

Seeing the anger welling in Valdür’s face, Sväla raised her hands and nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right. We must return to the main gate. The princess is going to lead us to Sigvald.’ She frowned at Freydís. ‘We’ll need food before we can–’

Sväla’s words were cut short as one of the Norscans howled in pain.

As the man flew back into the shadows, with a tentacle wrapped around his head, Sväla recognised the same stink of rotting food that she had noticed earlier.

Freydís cursed and backed away.

The Norscans crouched low with their weapons drawn and peered into the whirling snow.

They all heard the sound of crunching bone and a muffled, terrified scream, then there was silence.

‘What was that?’ hissed Sväla.

Freydís shook her head in disgust. ‘One of Sigvald’s lackeys. My husband wanted to be sure I–’

Another tentacle flew out of the darkness, this time from another direction. It lashed itself around Svärd’s neck and jolted him forwards.

This time, Valdür was ready. He jammed his spear into the pale, undulating flesh and pinned it to the floor.

The others followed suit, skewering the twitching limb with their weapons.

Svärd grasped the feeler with both hands and heaved it towards him.

A bellowing roar filled the night as a massive, bulbous head swung towards them through the snow.

The Norscans gasped in horror at the sight of Ansgallür the Famished. His globular, gelatinous eyes were rolling in pain as he unfurled dozens more of the tentacles from beneath his chin, and his gaping mouth blasted them with the smell of rotten meat as he continued to howl.

The Norscans cried out in disgust as cold, flabby limbs wrapped around their necks and torsos.

There was a loud crack and one of them slumped in the monster’s grip, his neck broken.

Now there were only three of the men left, each of them struggling to turn their long spears towards the limbs at their throats.

Sväla had no such problem. She rammed her iron knife down into the rubbery muscle, sending a torrent of warm blood up over her chin. The limb jerked back and, rather than holding it in place, Sväla allowed it to recoil, taking her with it, so that she hurtled towards the monstrous head. As she neared the bulbous shape, she launched herself at one of its eyes, jamming her blade straight into the saucer-sized pupil. Blood and fluid poured over her as she slapped against the ruptured eyeball.

The monster lurched back towards the railing with another furious cry, dragging its victims with it and hurling one of them from the balcony, sending him spinning down towards the snowy wastes below.

Sväla struggled desperately to free herself and see who had fallen. Only two of the men remained and it was impossible to see which. ‘Svärd?’ she screamed. ‘Valdür?’ Her stomach lurched as the howling monster lifted her up into the air and drew back its arm to throw her out into the storm.

Then the limb around her waist stiffened, before dropping her back down onto the icy flagstones.

As the storm screamed around them, the monster’s limbs thrashed wildly through the snow. It was hard to see exactly what was happening, but Sväla had the distinct impression that the head had rolled onto its side.

She wrenched herself free of the tentacle and staggered back from the railing, raising her hand to her eyes in an attempt to see more clearly.

Svärd and Valdür were still alive. The two men were still struggling desperately to free themselves from Ansgallür’s grip.

The monster had slumped back against the railing and there was blood pouring from its gaping mouth as well as its eye.

There was a third figure standing in front of the head and, with a jolt of shock, Sväla realised it was Freydís. She had grabbed a spear from the floor and thrust it into her jailer’s mouth.

As Ansgallür leant back from the princess, gargling blood, the railing buckled and screeched beneath his weight.

‘Send him off the edge!’ cried Sväla, charging forwards and slamming her shoulder into Ansgallür’s vast face.

Valdür and Svärd followed her lead and shoved the head back against the railing so that the metal shrieked and bowed out from the stone, causing the head to slump back even further.

Freydís wrenched the spear from Ansgallür’s mouth and grinned triumphantly, blowing her guardian a farewell kiss as she planted her foot in his face and shoved.

With a final grinding moan, the metal collapsed and Ansgallür tumbled from view.

Sväla let out a victorious howl as the face span away from her into the storm. Then she noticed a smaller figure, trapped in Ansgallür’s grip as he fell: Valdür the Old, still straining to free himself as he plummeted to his death.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Clouds flickered, pulsing with mercurial light as they gave birth to a single, drifting shadow. Far above the tumbling peaks hung a landscape so strange that no mortal eyes could ever have perceived it. The shadow, however, lifted its gaze to the dreamlike canopy of sounds and shapes, pausing for a moment to admire the view, then it continued on its way.

After a while, the shadow became aware that it had form and shape. Vague, ethereal legs were powering it across the clouds and a jumble of half-formed memories filled its head.

As the lights flashed and failed, they wrenched the shadow in and out of being. In the moments of pitch darkness, the shadow felt itself dissipate and die, only to be reborn in the next lurid burst of crimson or green.

The shadow travelled on for what seemed like an eternity, climbing and rippling across the surface of the clouds with an inexplicable sense of purpose. Over time, the flashes of light became more sporadic, and the shadow felt itself slipping back into mindlessness.

Just as it thought it might be consumed by oblivion, the shadow spotted something unusual on the next bank of clouds: a small, circular structure, built from mud and straw and topped with a cone-shaped thatch.

The shadow paused, haunted by a memory that cowered at the back of its thoughts, unwilling to fully reveal itself. Then it hurried towards the building, determined not to drift back into nothingness – at least not yet.

As the shadow washed over the walls of the crudely built hovel, it heard a piercing shriek. A sudden urgency gripped the silhouette as it slid beneath the gnarled, wooden door.

The tiny building was filled with noise and movement. A woman lay sprawled on a bed of furs gasping for breath, pale and trembling with exhaustion. Her sweaty hair was plastered across her face as she looked up at the tribesman standing over her.

‘A boy,’ grunted the man, peering at the bloody, struggling shape in his hands.

The shadow recoiled in shock at the sight of the man’s face.

The tribesman was shockingly familiar. His brutal, shaven head was crowned with a short Mohican and pierced with claws and bones, and his powerful, muscular body was naked, apart from a filthy loincloth and a crudely hammered piece of iron over his right shoulder. The shadow rippled over his face, tracing the harsh lines and the scarred flesh in an effort to place him.

As the shadow studied the scene, it felt a familiar emotion: an unpleasant, gnawing pain deep in its soul. The sensation grew to such an unbearable degree that the shadow hurried on, slipping through a second door at the back of the hut.

Rather than returning to empty clouds, as it expected, the shadow found itself washing across mounds of corpses. A sea of fallen tribesmen was spread out before it, covering the horizon with broken limbs, splintered shields and pale, grimacing death masks. As the shadow drifted across the ruptured flesh, it recognised some of the men’s faces, but there was movement and noise on the horizon and it did not pause to investigate.

Not all of the tribesmen were dead. As the shadow hurried on, it picked out a crowd of warriors, howling victoriously and thrusting their javelins at the shifting landscape above. At the heart of the group was the man with the Mohican. The shadow looked back towards the hut in confusion and saw that it had vanished. Turning back to the crowd of cheering men, it saw that the tribesmen had lifted their chieftain up onto their shoulders and were dancing back and forth with him.

The man laughed and lay back across their hands, closing his eyes and revelling in their praise. His body was covered with fresh wounds and bruises, but he seemed oblivious to anything other than his victory. After a few minutes he demanded they put him down and waved to a small figure, trailing after the others.

‘My son!’ he cried, eliciting a fresh cheer from his men. ‘Have you ever seen such a fighter?’

The shadow rippled over the slender youth, to examine him more closely.

The boy was only ten or eleven at most but his wiry frame was knotted with muscle, and already carried several impressive scars. His blue eyes flashed with pride as he lifted his bloody javelin in reply, laughing along with the others and shaking his long mane of blond hair, as the men lifted him up onto their shoulders and hurled him into the air.

The shadow flinched. Something about the chieftain’s praise knifed into it. As it saw the delight in the man’s face, it felt the unbearable gnawing pain again and slipped away across the clouds.

The shadow reached another battleground and then another. A whole series of bloody victories was played out, each one culminating in a victory for the chieftain and his son. Each time, the boy received more credit for the tribe’s success. As his muscles grew thicker and his shoulders broader, the tribesmen howled his name out, studying the corpses at his feet with awe. They fell to their knees in front of him and pounded their fists on their gore-splattered chests.

The shadow watched with an awful sense of foreboding as the youth’s fame grew. At the end of each battle, more of the tribe’s fervour was reserved for the youth, and less was directed at the quickly ageing chieftain. The shadow watched from beneath a pile of broken shields and saw the older warrior’s expression change from pride to concern. As the grinning youth waved his grisly trophies at the baying men, a spark flared in his father’s eyes: a spark of hard, bitter fear.

The shadow’s inexplicable pain continued to grow as it hurried on through dozens more of the victory celebrations, watching with dread as the youth grew more and more boastful – crowing over his victories and mocking their foes. As his confidence grew, so did his blood lust. The boy’s battle frenzy continued even after the enemy were defeated, causing the other tribesmen to eye each other warily as their hero sank his teeth into the flesh of the fallen and grinned back at them with blood pouring down his broad chest.

Finally, the shadow reached a battle that was far from won. Tightly packed rows of tribesmen were still crushed together, howling curses and jabbing their spears. Trapped in the heart of the enemy ranks was the golden-haired youth. Hubris had led him far ahead of the others and left him surrounded by the enemy. The pile of corpses that lay sprawled around him was testament to his incredible skill, but the odds were insurmountable. The boy lunged and kicked with growing desperation as the enemy pressed closer and, for the first time, the shadow saw fear in the youth’s eyes.

Just as it looked as though the boy was about to vanish beneath a wall of enemy spears, another figure entered the fray: a second youth, with a dark, brooding face and long, rangy limbs.

The taller boy crashed through the wall of enemy spears and sliced his axe across the necks of their wielders, flooring three men with one powerful swipe.

At the sight of his rescuer, the blue-eyed warrior cried out in recognition and relief, rushing to his side with renewed vigour and taking advantage of the confusion to down another three men.

The two boys fought back-to-back with a ferocity that astounded their foes. Death was inevitable, but they seemed beyond caring. Their faces were locked in the same maniacal grins.

After almost half an hour of brutal fighting, the crowds of enemy tribesmen had still failed to bring either of the boys to their knees.

Finally, a hulking shape approached the press of bodies and held up a long, two-handed sword, bellowing at his men to lower their weapons. The Norscans cowered at the sight of him; muttering prayers under their breath and clearing a path so that he could saunter towards the two boys. He was clearly a great champion. At nearly seven feet tall, his huge frame was clad in a suit of intricately engraved white metal. The gleaming, ribbed armour had been hammered into a mass of jagged, serrated spikes and decorated with images of intertwined lilies. His face was hidden inside a strange, tall helmet that curved up like an ivory leaf from his broad shoulders. As his voice rang out, it was as metallic and inhuman as a tolling bell.

‘Stand back,’ he boomed, signalling for his men to lower their weapons.

As a wide circle formed around them, the two exhausted boys stared up at the white knight with a mixture of defiance and awe. An unholy rune was emblazoned across the centre of his cuirass, framed by the spirals of lily petals. It was a circle enclosed by a semi circle, with a line pointing out from its centre. The sigil glowed as though it had just emerged from a blacksmith’s furnace: vivid, molten and rippling with waves of emerald heat. As the knight stepped closer, the baleful light washed over the boys’ sweat-drenched faces, revealing the terror in their eyes.

The warrior studied them in silence for a few seconds, leaning on a lustrous, alabaster greatsword. He looked quite at ease, despite the carnage that surrounded them. ‘What are your names?’ he asked eventually, with a note of humour in his voice.

‘I’m Sigvald,’ cried the blond-haired youth. He raised his chin defiantly as he spoke, but his voice was shrill with fear. ‘And this,’ – he waved at his companion – ‘is Oddrún.’

The knight gave them a small bow in reply. ‘I’m honoured to meet you.’ He waved at the mounds of corpses that surrounded them. ‘Such bravery does not go unnoticed. Your deeds have been watched from afar.’

The champion signalled for his men to head back into the main crush of battle and leave the boys behind. Then he removed his helmet to reveal a face so long and strange that it looked barely human. His smooth, hairless chin tapered to an elongated point and his small features were hidden in shadow beneath a tall expanse of forehead. The overall effect was that his head seemed to have been pinched at both ends and stretched almost beyond recognition. ‘I do not think that this is your day to die,’ he rumbled. As he studied them, the knight tapped the pulsing icon on his breastplate. ‘I’m Einvarr. Look for my sign, masters Sigvald and Oddrún.’ Then he turned on his heel and strode after the receding warriors.

As their enemies withdrew, the two boys found themselves alone with the corpses and finally collapsed to their knees. They looked at each other’s dazed, blood-splattered face and laughed in disbelief. Neither of them had expected to survive.

‘You saved me,’ said Sigvald, grasping his friend’s shoulder.

‘We saved each other,’ replied Oddrún.

After a few moments, Sigvald took a knife from his belt, ran the edge across his palm and held out his hand.

Oddrún narrowed his eyes, looking from the bloody wound to Sigvald’s face and considering what was being offered. Then he nodded and grabbed the knife. He drew a crimson line across his skin and grasped Sigvald’s hand in his own.

‘I will never desert you,’ cried Sigvald, tightening his grip until blood welled up between their fingers.

Oddrún didn’t reply for a second, as he watched the receding white figure. Then he turned back to his friend with an earnest frown. ‘Nor I you, Sigvald.’

The shadow washed over the faces of the two young Norscans, then shrank away, hiding itself in the crowds of warriors, filled with pain and confusion. As it rushed across the clouds, more images assailed it. Every billowing valley revealed another glimpse of Sigvald’s youth. Rather than battles though, he was now immersed in a world of dark rites and secret gatherings. Painful shards of memory needled the shadow as it followed his ruinous journey. In one scene, Sigvald’s father had his son by the throat and was waving furiously at a bunch of mutilated corpses. Each body had been beheaded and scarred with the same symbol as Einvarr’s armour. ‘You’re an abomination!’ the chieftain shouted, before throwing the youth to the ground in disgust and storming away.

Later, the shadow watched a slightly older Sigvald climb to the mountain fastness of the knight in the white armour. Once there, along with the lanky youth, Oddrún, he swore fealty to Einvarr, who, in time, introduced them to his patron: a placid-faced, androgynous youth with luminous pale skin and two small, black horns sprouting from beneath its white hood. The shadow flickered nervously back and forth across a tiny, candlelit chapel as the daemon ensnared its young victims. The two boys presented themselves willingly and begged for aid against the wrath of Sigvald’s father, explaining that he had banished them from the tribe. The scene played itself out in horrible, vivid detail and the shadow remembered everything as though it had happened only days ago. The young Sigvald had a ferocious hunger in his eyes as the daemon promised him a life of eternal power and ecstasy, in exchange for a small token of fealty: a crude, bronze torque that snaked around the bicep of his right arm. Sigvald agreed readily and handed over the metal band with a grin.

The shadow cried out in alarm, suddenly terrified for the fresh-faced youth. ‘Go home!’ it cried, throwing its formless arms out and trying to seize the torque. ‘Don’t give yourself away!’ But the shadow slipped, unnoticed through the darkness.

The young Sigvald carried on grinning as Belus Pül slipped the torque on its arm and triumphantly described the event to a pallid, spider-like shape, twitching in the gloom a few feet away.

Then the daemon turned to the second youth and nodded to a brooch on his fur cloak: a lump of iron, cast in the shape of a wolf’s head.

The lanky youth looked at Sigvald, who was nodding eagerly, and removed the brooch from his cloak. But then, as the candlelight revealed the huddled mass of limbs in the corner more clearly, he recoiled and snatched the trinket back, hiding it in his cloak.

‘They’re monsters,’ he cried, backing away to the exit and levelling a finger at the slender, robed figure. ‘I won’t give myself to such a thing. I won’t!’

The daemon reeled back against a stone altar, raising a hand to its mouth in shock and silently repeating the word ‘monster’.

The shadow looked around in dismay as the candles gutted and failed, plunging the chapel into darkness. A terrible screaming filled the room and stones began to clatter to the ground as the whole structure began to shake.

The shadow felt itself dissipating into the blackness as the boys scrambled past, crying to each other in fear and trying desperately to find a way out. In its last moments of sentience, it heard an unearthly voice directing a bitter, hate-filled curse at Oddrún. ‘Monster!’ it cried, as the building collapsed.

With a flash of silent lightning, the shadow rippled back into view. The chapel had vanished, along with the daemon and the two young men. All that remained was the tumbling, mountainous clouds, pulsing with unholy light as the world rushed by overhead. The shadow cursed and whined as the remaining pieces of its life fell into place. The daemon had been true to its word. Sigvald had been given countless lifetimes in which to satisfy his every craven desire. But within just a few short years, he had begun to see the cruel irony of the pact. Nothing satisfied him. As his last traces of humanity slipped away, he realised that no pleasure could satiate his hunger. He roamed the Wastes, seeking the perfect, most extreme form of everything: wine, music, pain, sex, grief, remorse, inebriation, victory; but once he attained them, they crumbled like ash in his hands. Something better was always taunting him from just beyond the horizon. The daemon’s malice had driven him ever onwards, to stranger, darker places, but always to no avail. ‘Narrerback,’ he whispered, looking down at his hand and imagining a faded scar. ‘What have I done to us?’

Sigvald’s shadow lay back across the clouds and wept, allowing its insubstantial limbs to slowly extend towards the horizon. Then, after a few minutes, it felt a strange sensation. Its hazy outline began to move of its own accord, shrinking towards a small figure that had appeared in the distance.

The shadow groaned, unwilling to endure another harrowing vision. Then it raised its head and studied the glimmer of gold it was racing towards. It was a knight, striding across the clouds, clad in flawless gilt armour. The knight was grinning in recognition.

‘It’s me,’ gasped the shadow, as it saw that its own shape was carved from the blazing sunlight, pouring around the smiling knight.

As the knight approached, the shadow shortened until its face was just a few feet away from its owner.

‘You look so sad,’ said the knight, coming to halt with a concerned expression on his face. ‘Has life really been such a disappointment?’

‘Are you me?’ asked the shadow, studying the man’s pale, handsome features.

The knight threw back his mane of blond hair and laughed. ‘I’m whatever you most want to see, Sigvald.’

The shadow felt a rush of fear and struggled to free itself. It was no use, its form was locked to the prince’s feet, however fiercely it lurched and rolled. ‘Let me go!’ it cried.

The knight frowned. ‘Is that what you desire?’ He looked up at the shapes fluxing overhead. Oceans became deserts and spiralled into vast, billowing faces before dissolving into other, unknowable forms. ‘Would you abandon the world, then, Sigvald? Could you really abjure all this fathomless beauty?’

The shadow grew still, wondering if the question might be more than hypothetical. ‘My lord,’ it moaned, ‘can you offer me such a thing? I wish it more than anything. I’ve seen my life from beginning to end. Every minute has been fruitless.’

The knight raised his eyebrows. ‘Fruitless?’ He drew a gleaming rapier and held it up into the sunlight, so that a line of silver glimmered along the blade. ‘Yes, Sigvald, I can offer you such a thing. If it’s what you truly desire, I can grant you that boon. You’ve been a loyal servant and I’m not a heartless brute.’ He stooped down until his face was a few inches away from the shadow’s. ‘But is that truly what you want?’

The shadow felt a flash of hope at the knight’s words and nodded eagerly. As the knight moved closer, though, the shadow was surprised by its own reply. ‘Perfect,’ it muttered. This close up, the knight’s flawless beauty was breathtaking. ‘I’m so perfect,’ said the shadow, unable to imagine anything more wonderful than the smiling face hanging over it – the smiling face that it knew was its own.

The prince placed the edge of his rapier where the shadow met his feet. ‘Oblivion can be yours, Sigvald. Sweet, eternal nothingness.’

‘Wait,’ gasped the shadow, tracing its fingers over the prince’s face. ‘Will I look… Well… Will I be the same?’

The prince continued smiling as he shook his head.

Sigvald’s shadow felt a pain greater than anything it had endured so far. ‘I’ll never see my face again?’

‘You will dissolve on the wind, Sigvald, like the remains of a funeral pyre.’

‘Wait,’ repeated the shadow huddling closer to the prince’s feet. ‘I’m not sure.’

The prince shook his head in confusion. ‘I thought you were weary of your life?’

‘I was confused,’ gasped the shadow, pawing at its owner. ‘I saw my family. I thought there could be a way back. I thought death might be an escape from this burden.’ The shadow shook its head fiercely. ‘But I don’t want to escape from myself, even if it’s the only way.’

‘How can you talk of burdens?’ asked the prince, replacing his smile with a confused frown. ‘Countless, wretched millions toil in obscurity and die, daily, unknown; nothing but fleas on the carcass of history, while you, Sigvald, have been allotted a place in the greatest of all games. You have a chance to burn a light through all that miserable dross. Can’t you see? All the universe’s infinite potential is contained within your tiny, blessed frame.’

As the prince spoke, his shadow felt its mind flooding with images. They were the same scenes of lustful pursuit it had recalled earlier, but now, rather than frustrating, they seemed heroic. Every base act was a gesture of defiance: an insolent fist raised against the morbid tedium of the universe, a rallying cry to every imaginative soul who would listen. The shadow began to tremble with emotion. ‘Yes,’ it whispered, awestruck by its own importance. ‘I do see. I’m an example. An emblem of hope.’

The smile returned to the prince’s face. ‘Then will you try again, Sigvald? Will you pit yourself against a mindless cosmos? Will you rejoin the Great Game?’

The shadow reared up with an exultant cry. ‘Yes! And I will never again–’

Before the shadow could finish its reply, the prince thrust his rapier into the shadow’s heart, filling it with incredible, electrifying pain.

Sigvald stepped from the Lucid Gate and looked down the long black road. He paid no attention to the hawthorn bushes or the discarded casket as he stared into the whirling storm. His armour flashed and glittered in the moonlight and his long, blond hair trailed around his face like a halo. He closed his eyes and held up his hands, delighted by the sensation of snowflakes settling on his upturned palms. Then he looked down at his perfect, unmarked armour with a sigh of pleasure. All trace of damage had vanished. The etched, golden plates gleamed as brightly as the day they were forged; brighter, even. Then he held up his mirrored, circular shield and gazed lovingly at his reflection. His skin was flawless once more.

As he marched south, he grasped the hilt of a rapier, buried deep in the centre of his ornate chest armour. He wrenched the blade from his body with a sigh of pleasure and a scrape of grinding metal. Blinding light leaked briefly from the wound, before the breastplate smoothed itself seamlessly over the hole. Then Sigvald held the weapon up to the starless sky and grinned, admiring the intricate, lacy metalwork.

His grin broadened as he looked down and saw that he was walking several inches above the ground.

As Sigvald broke into a run, the ground rippled away from him, heaving and rolling like waves before the prow of a great ship.

His grin became a long, joyous laugh.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Baron Schüler ran a scarred hand over his face, wiping some of the frozen blood from his beard and massaging his ridged brow. His skeletal body looked as though it was only kept upright by his armour but, as he led the remnants of Sigvald’s army back towards the Gilded Palace, there was a wolfish hunger in his eyes. He turned to a small figure sitting on the horse next to him. ‘What is that?’ he asked, nodding at a broad, dark expanse that was spreading across the horizon. The palace had been in sight for hours, but the dark stain beneath it had only just appeared.

Énka threw back his hood, allowing the moonlight to glitter over his long, piscine face. He stood up in his saddle, straining to see over the horse’s mane and tilted his head on one side, fixing one of his round, glassy eyes on the horizon. ‘Too far,’ he replied, sitting back down and rummaging in his robes for something. He dropped several, twitching shapes onto the snow before nodding in satisfaction and holding up a blind, featherless bird. The fidgeting creature was covered in dark, inky sigils that spiralled out from the sockets where its eyes should have been. Muttering under his breath, the sorcerer had another rummage in his robes and drew out a small jar of black paste. He unscrewed the lid and plunged in his finger. The paste sizzled and steamed on his scales as he withdrew some and smeared it across one of his eyeballs with an unpleasant squeaking sound. Then he dunked two fingers into the viscous paste and jabbed them into the bird’s eye sockets. ‘This should help,’ he said, leaning back in his saddle and hurling the bird into the air. The pink, dimpled ball span through the snowflakes and landed a few feet away with a soft plump.

Énka looked at the new hole in the snow with obvious disappointment, then turned to the baron with an apologetic shrug.

Just as Schüler was about to ask for an explanation, the tiny bird emerged in a spray of white powder and fluttered off towards the Gilded Palace, weaving through the air in a series of wild loops and lurches.

Énka applauded and then covered the eye that wasn’t smeared with black paste. He swayed from side to side in his saddle in time with the bird’s erratic movements. Then he nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, I see. It’s an army.’

The baron’s frown deepened and he raised a hand to his eyes, trying to see for himself. ‘An army? Are you sure? It looks more like some kind of lake.’

The sorcerer shook his head. ‘It’s an army. Well, if you could call it that.’ He wiped the paste from his eye and turned to face Schüler. ‘It’s vast,’ he said, still shaking his head. ‘More like a whole country. There must be tens of thousands of people.’

Schüler looked back at the ragged company of monsters and purple-clad knights behind them. Barely half of Sigvald’s army had survived to make the return journey; less than five hundred of the Decadent Host remained. ‘Then we’re doomed,’ he muttered. ‘Mord Huk will butcher us all and take the palace for himself.’ The colour drained from his gaunt face.

Oddrún was stood a few feet away, watching the exchange. He had remained silent and morose for the duration of their march south, refusing to answer any more questions, but at the sight of the army, he nodded in agreement. ‘It’s the prince who Mord Huk wants. When he finds out that Sigvald is already dead, his anger will be tenfold. Killing us will be a small consolation, I imagine, but then the Gilded Palace will–’

‘No,’ interrupted Énka, shaking his head. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not Mord Huk.’

‘What?’ exclaimed the baron. ‘Who then?’

‘They’re Northmen,’ replied the sorcerer, fingering the last of the paste from his eye. ‘Thousands upon thousands of primitive Northmen, led by a small, weedy-looking woman.’ He shrugged. ‘She’s covered in blue tattoos and is carrying a knife.’

‘Northmen?’ grumbled Oddrún, loping through the snow towards Énka’s horse. There was an unusual note of emotion in the giant’s voice as he looked down at the sorcerer. ‘Norscans?’

‘What else did you see?’ demanded Schüler, barging past Oddrún and grabbing Énka’s robes.

Énka’s face remained expressionless as he strained to free himself from the baron’s grip. ‘There was someone else with them,’ he replied, wrenching himself free and sitting upright in his saddle. He took a second to smooth down his robes before continuing. ‘Riding next to the tattooed woman was Sigvald’s wife.’

The baron gasped and looked out at the distant line of figures. ‘They have the princess?’ He leant forward in his saddle, peering through the snow, his voice filled with disgust and disbelief. ‘A tribe of stinking Northmen have Freydís?’

His weariness evaporated and he turned to the bizarre collection of creatures waiting behind him. Many of them were the soldiers he had led north, all those months earlier. Their bodies had been wrenched into vile new shapes, but their loyalty remained. As the baron turned towards them they lurched closer, eager for his command. He studied their distorted, nightmarish faces and felt a rush of excitement. The prince’s surgeons and sorcerers had made monsters of them and, for the first time, the baron felt glad. Towering, bat-like wings rose up from their backs, along with a colourful forest of claws and tentacles. Beyond them were the pale-skinned nymphs, with their oily black eyes and their crab-like claws, and scattered through the whole army were the few remaining knights, clad in their etched, lilac armour and still clutching their battered swords.

‘Norscans are only men,’ spat the baron. ‘They’re no match for us. No match for the Decadent Host.’ He rose up in his saddle and lifted his sword to the sea of expectant faces. ‘Your home awaits you!’ he cried. ‘The Gilded Palace! Where you can resume your work. Where you can explore every pleasure you can conceive of, in tribute to our fallen prince.’ He waved his sword at the advancing host. ‘But these…’ His voice trembled with rage and for a moment he seemed too furious to continue. ‘These primitive men would stop us. They would take the Gilded Palace for their own!’

A chorus of bestial cries rippled through the army.

The baron nodded eagerly at his men. He was not sure that many of them even had the capacity to understand him, but his tone of indignation seemed enough.

‘Not only that!’ he cried, pulling frantically at his beard. ‘They have enslaved the Geld-Prince’s widow!’

The monsters and knights howled even louder, lifting their segmented limbs over their heads and rattling their swords on their shields.

‘We must cleanse this filth from Sigvald’s kingdom!’ cried Schüler, with his horse rearing beneath him. ‘We must reclaim our home!’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sväla came to a halt in the knee-deep snow and surveyed the army rushing towards her. ‘Doesn’t Sigvald see that he’s being surrounded?’ she asked, turning to the armoured figure beside her.

‘Perhaps not,’ replied Princess Freydís, her face hidden behind the grille of an ornate helmet. ‘Perhaps he’s focussed all his attention on you, you lucky girl.’

Behind the two women stood the countless ranks of the Fallen and before them was the Decadent Host. Its lurid banners were unmistakable, as were the strange, manifold forms of Sigvald’s devotees: cherry-coloured bipedal mounts with elongated, tubular snouts, carrying a grotesque carnival of winged, pale-skinned nymphs and proud knights clad in baroque, lilac-coloured armour. The gaudy monsters were charging towards them through the snow, with their pennants trailing and their armour glinting in the moonlight; but they seemed utterly unaware that a third group was emerging from the storm.

A dark, crimson line was spreading across the horizon to the west, slowly encircling Sigvald’s troops from behind. It was clearly another army, but in contrast to the colour and din of the Decadent Host, these soldiers were sombre and quiet, spreading across the frozen wastes like a pool of blood.

‘Mord Huk,’ spat the princess, her voice filled with disdain.

‘What?’ asked Sväla.

‘Mord Huk. He’s the dog-brained oaf who has stolen great tracts of our land,’ explained Freydís, straightening her back and raising her chin. The princess had donned a suit of close-fitting steel, and she made an impressive sight as she levelled a rapier at the approaching army. ‘This is the moron my husband abandoned me for. He has something Sigvald wants. Some worthless toy, I imagine, but desirable enough for the Geld-Prince to abandon me to my death.’

‘They’re enemies?’ asked Sväla hopefully, studying the two approaching lines of soldiers.

‘Of course,’ laughed the princess. ‘These are the Shadowlands, my little savage. Enemies are all we have.’

Sväla glared at the princess, and gripped her knife a little tighter. ‘Savage I may be, but I’ll hold you to your word. Sigvald cannot be allowed to live.’

Freydís nodded. ‘Don’t worry yourself on that score, peasant. Just get me close to the fickle bastard. I’ll make sure you know how to kill him.’ She looked out at the approaching army. ‘Or do the job myself.’

Svärd emerged from the storm and nodded at his mother. As he addressed her, his eyes were gleaming with excitement. ‘Those with the best weapons are in the front lines, as you ordered.’ He could not refrain from smiling as he looked at the forest of javelins and axes. ‘Even now, our numbers are incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing could stand against us and win.’

As she looked at her naïve young son, Sväla felt the absence of Valdür more than ever. With the leathery old warrior at her side, she would have felt a hundred times more confident of victory. Even the menacing presence of Ungaur the Blessed would have been a comfort as she faced this final challenge. Her mind was suddenly filled with the faces of all those who had been sacrificed to reach this point. Almost all of the chieftains and elders were gone. Only the mad old witch, Ürsüla, was still alive, and Sväla had long since stopped listening to her interminable ramblings.

She drew her knife and gave her son a stern nod. There was no room for doubt. Victory was their only option. Even if it took the lives of every man, woman and child, they must kill Sigvald. The crusade could not be in vain.

‘Give the signal,’ she said.

Svärd strode out in front of the army and turned to face them. Then he took a whalebone horn from his furs and let out a long, wavering note that echoed around the valleys and peaks.

All along the line, Norscans raised their own horns and answered the call, filling the storm with droning music.

Then, as one, the Fallen advanced.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The daemon sat calmly in the centre of the road, waiting for him. Its white robes stood out in stark contrast to the black rock, as did the nest of pale limbs huddled beside it, clutching a long scroll of parchment.

Sigvald reluctantly slowed his pace to a trot and finally came to a halt a few feet away, his face flushed with exertion and elation.

Belus Pül rose to greet him with a slight bow, then turned to its scribe. ‘The divine being rejoiced in its child’s return from the unearthly realm. It was gratifying to see that its faith had not been in–’

The daemon’s words were cut short, twisted into a wordless grunt, as Sigvald strode forwards and jammed his new rapier into its stomach.

Belus looked down in horror to see a dark red stain spreading across its white habit. ‘What has happened?’ it gasped, frantically shaking its head. ‘How could–?’

‘The sword was a gift,’ Sigvald replied with a playful grin. He wrenched it free and allowed the daemon to collapse in a shower of blood. ‘Its edge is keen enough even for you, Belus.’

The daemon’s scribe scuttled back in fear, scattering parchments as it went.

‘I see you’ve released me from my bonds,’ said Sigvald, noticing that his bronze torque had vanished from the daemon’s arm.

Belus Pül curled up into a foetal position and began to wail.

Sigvald dropped to one knee and whispered in the daemon’s ear. ‘No matter. I think our friendship has reached a natural end, don’t you?’ He nodded to the shimmering, bloodstained rapier. ‘I’ve made a new allegiance, Belus.’ He chuckled. ‘You might say I move in different circles now.’

The daemon’s wailing turned into a furious screech and one of its hands shot out towards Sigvald’s throat.

The prince was too fast. He rocked back with preternatural speed and gripped the daemon’s wrist. ‘Maybe you’ll die,’ he whispered, looking at the pool of blood spreading across the road, ‘like some wretched, feckless mortal.’

Then he loosed his grip and stood up. As he stepped back from the groaning daemon, Sigvald wiped a few speckles of blood from his armour, frowning slightly until he was sure his armour was clean.

‘What a place to spend your final hours, though,’ he cried, waving at the fantastical landscape that surrounded them. Shimmering lights blurred the boundary between earth and sky and diaphanous hosts whirled above them, riding to battle across heavens. Sigvald grinned as he looked back at the bleeding daemon. ‘And the pain should be wonderful.’

As he turned to leave, the prince looked briefly at the scribe. ‘Sigvald returned from the Immaterial Realm,’ he intoned, in a mocking, singsong voice, ‘reborn and renewed. The prince repaid his former patron with the gift of a new, exquisite sensation and then headed south, eager to claim his prize.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Screams rang out. Whether in pain or ecstasy, it was impossible to tell, but Baron Schüler reined in his horse and cursed bitterly at the delay.

He was still half a mile from the Norscans, but the right flank of his army was disintegrating. The garish ranks were collapsing beneath a tide of crimson and brass and long, grinding fangs.

‘What’s this?’ he cried, rising up in his saddle and straining to see through the carnage.

The snowstorm was suddenly alive with fleet, lupine shapes, hurling themselves into battle with a chorus of barks and snarls. Schüler drew his sword as he saw that one of them was powering straight towards him, carving a path through Sigvald’s troops with astonishing speed. As it approached, he saw it more clearly. It was a hound, but unlike any he had ever seen before. The creature was almost as large as his horse and covered in red, reptilian scales. Something flashed beneath its slavering jaws and Schüler realised that the hound was wearing a thick brass collar.

‘Keep moving!’ he howled, looking around at his men and waving his sword at the Norscans up ahead.

It was useless.

The alabaster-skinned daemonettes forgot all sense of order as they turned to face the hounds. Any hope of advance was lost as they abandoned themselves to the equal pleasures of killing and dying.

The baron groaned in dismay as he looked at the distant line of Northmen. ‘Freydís,’ he whispered, extending his left arm towards Sväla’s army, as though he could pluck the princess from the distant ranks of figures.

‘Baron!’ cried Énka, grabbing the reins of Schüler’s horse and dragging the animal to one side.

Schüler just had time to raise his sword as the snarling hound launched itself at his head.

Pain exploded in his face as the creature crashed into him. Plates of sharpened metal had been grafted onto its scaly hide and as Schüler flew back from his horse he felt his nose disintegrate with a crunch of breaking bone.

The baron lurched up from the snow in a fountain of blood and curses. He still had hold of his sword and levelled it at the snarling monster as it turned and padded back towards him.

As the baron crouched in readiness, with blood pooling around him, a column of pink flames roared past his head and slammed into the hound, enveloping its crimson flesh in liquid, lurid fire.

The hound stumbled to a halt, snorting and sniffing the air, but showing no signs of pain. Then it singled out the source of the fire and bolted forwards with a furious bellow.

Énka crumpled into the snow as the beast tore into him, but within seconds the hound ceased its snarling and lifted its head in confusion.

There was no sorcerer beneath its huge paws and neither was there a single drop of blood.

The monster pawed at the snow in confusion, then stiffened and dropped to its knees as the baron rammed his blade down between its shoulder blades, pinning it to the ground.

As the monster thrashed wildly in an attempt to free itself, the baron grabbed its steel mane of spikes and began to hack at its throat with a long knife drawn from his belt.

‘Magic has no effect,’ gasped Énka reappearing from somewhere and shaking his head in dismay. ‘They must have been sent by Khorne himself. Mord Huk has called on his god to avenge the attack on his fortress.’

He grabbed the baron’s arm and wrenched him away from the thrashing monster. ‘You’ll never kill it!’ he cried.

The baron reeled away from the hound, rocking back on his heels as he tried to straighten his bleeding nose. ‘Then we must advance,’ he said in a nasal grunt.

He looked around for his horse and dragged himself up into the saddle.

‘Baron!’ cried the sorcerer, as the crimson beast hauled itself up from the ground and rounded on him.

‘Freydís,’ muttered the baron as he kicked his horse into motion, disappearing in a cloud of snow and leaving his army to its fate.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Norscans howled as they charged through the snow. Thousands of voices, raised in unison, echoed across the Wastes. The Fallen had abandoned their homes and endured horrors they would never forget, all for this one chance. Rage, grief and hope poured out of them as they raced towards the enemy.

‘He’s coming for you,’ cried Sväla as she ran, lifting her voice above the cacophony. She pointed her knife to a single figure riding out to meet them.

Freydís let out a bitter laugh. ‘He wouldn’t abandon his army for my sake.’ She strained forward, peering at the approaching knight. ‘I’m not sure that’s even him.’

Sväla was about to reply when she noticed that the deafening war cries were now mingled with a new sound: screams.

Far over on the left flank of the army the charge had already stalled. The snow was falling as thick as ever, and it was hard to be sure what was happening, but Sväla could just make out tall, crimson shapes, lurching through her men and moving with incredible speed.

As the left flank collapsed, the army lost all its momentum. Disorder and confusion spread quickly through the ranks as the Norscans abandoned their charge and swung round to defend their screaming kin. The monsters’ attack seemed utterly without logic or cohesion: the tall, red shapes leapt from one victim to another in a frenzy of bloodlust, hacking at the Norscans with no sense of tactics or control.

‘No!’ cried Sväla, her voice shrill with panic. ‘Don’t stop! Sigvald is within reach!’

It was useless. Her voice was lost beneath the din of battle as the Norscans turned their spears on the red horrors that were ploughing into them. As Sväla began to see the attacking host more clearly, her heart sank. The lurching, frenetic creatures were vaguely humanoid, but they were covered in thick, red scales and as they sprinted back and forth, they gored the Norscans with long, sweeping horns that hung down from their bestial heads.

Sväla realised that left unchecked, the hellish creatures would butcher her entire army. ‘Daemons!’ she cried, grabbing her son’s shoulder. ‘They’re daemons! Turn the army around. We can’t advance with these things at our backs.’

He nodded in reply and let out another blast on his whalebone horn, signalling for the army to round on the attackers.

The Norscan army was so vast that whole swathes of the crusaders had not even realised they were under attack. Dozens of other musicians mimicked Svärd’s horn blast though and gradually the host began to swing around in the direction of the red figures. Within a few minutes, tens of thousands of stern-faced warriors were thundering through the slushy snow to reinforce the flank.

Sväla found herself caught up in a tsunami of spears and axes as her army turned on its heel and charged west. There was nothing she could do but join the others in hurtling towards the enemy. As she neared them, she saw the monsters in more detail: their snarling, bestial jaws were lined with razor-sharp teeth and they carried long, jet-black swords that crackled with dark sorcery as they hacked into her people. Even after all she had seen since they set sail from Norsca, Sväla’s mind recoiled from the sight of the hideous beasts but her resolve was firm. She waved the men on with her iron knife.

‘Crush them!’ she cried. ‘They’re in the hundreds, we’re a whole nation!’

Few were able to hear her words, but the truth of them was quickly apparent. Despite the ferociousness of the monsters’ attack, the sheer, unstoppable weight of bodies crashing into them soon made it impossible for them to swing their long swords, or even move. As the Norscans piled on top of their attackers, they jammed spears through scales and cleaved heads from shoulders with terror-fuelled desperation. As the monsters’ movements became more restricted, the Norscans’ confidence grew. They piled into them in ever increasing numbers, pinning the creatures to the ground with the weight of their bodies and dismembering them before they had chance to rise.

The daemons showed no sign of fear, even as they were torn apart, and the few who managed to break free made no attempt at retreat, they simply bellowed with rage, lowered their horns and charged back into the fray, flinging bodies left and right until they were forced back down onto their knees.

‘We have them!’ cried Svärd, wiping a splash of blood from his face as he turned back towards Sväla and the princess.

The princess laughed and pointed over his head. There was a black line moving towards them through the storm. ‘I think that was just to get your attention. Here comes the real attack.’

Svärd’s eyes widened as the shapes emerged from the glittering banks of snow. Tall, broad-shouldered knights clad in dark, brass-edged armour were striding towards them, carrying cruel, two-handed axes. Their helmets had been designed to resemble feral, snarling hounds, but it was not so much the rank and file that terrified Svärd, it was the figure at their head. Riding out in front, on what looked like a colossal, metal-clad bull, was their captain. He was even larger than the other knights and clearly the inspiration for their helmets. He had the head of a slavering, red-eyed dog.

For a brief second, Svärd felt the crimson, canine eyes boring into him. Then the knight placed a large brass skull over his head and levelled his axe at the Norscans, letting out a long, mournful howl.

The knights howled in reply and rushed to attack.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sigvald didn’t break his stride as he reached Mord Huk’s army. Still laughing, he tore through the crimson ranks, dealing out death as he ran.

The knights looked back in confusion as the ground tilted and heaved. They saw a flash of gold and a blissful grin, before collapsing in a shower of blood, clutching at holes that had suddenly appeared in their chests.

‘Make way for a god,’ cried Sigvald, vaulting over the tumbling knights. His heart was racing and his veins felt as though they were channelling fire. Within minutes, he would have the skull, a relic from the throne of Khorne that would channel unimaginable power through his mind. His whole being was consumed with a desire more potent than any he had yet known.

As the Geld-Prince carved a path through the rear of the army, storm clouds rolled and tumbled in his wake, blocking the pale moonlight and plunging the battlefield into darkness. The only light that remained came from Sigvald himself. As he raced through the serried ranks, his armour shone like a fallen star, flickering in an ocean of lumbering shadows.

Sigvald’s laughter rang out through the darkness as Mord Huk’s knights rounded on him, lifting their great, two-handed axes and bellowing with rage as they charged. As the knights smashed into him, the Geld-Prince was finally forced to slow. He hacked and lunged wildly with his rapier and came to a gasping halt on a mound of corpses. He leapt to the top of the bloody heap and raised his sword to the heavens, just as a shaft of moonlight broke through the clouds and poured down over him.

Picked out in the spotlight, the grinning prince could be seen for miles around and the knights nearest to him stumbled in confusion. None of them had ever witnessed such a dazzling vision of unholy power. The column of light resembled the gaze of a god, shining down benevolently on its most beloved child. A glittering mantle of snowflakes surrounded Sigvald as he surveyed his brutish enemies.

‘Avert your gaze!’ he cried, his voice ringing out across the battlefield and his eyes blazing with scorn. He turned his sword towards Mord Huk’s knights. ‘Do not presume to turn such repulsive faces in my direction.’

To their amazement, whole swathes of the army looked away in shame, humbled by the prince’s words. Others roared in defiance and launched themselves at him, but before they could reach the Geld-Prince, their brother-knights clubbed them to the ground, desperate to protect the glittering prince. Within minutes, all of the dog-helmed men near Sigvald had turned on each other, hacking fiercely at their own kin and forgetting about the vast Norscan horde bearing down on them.

As the crimson knights fought, Sigvald looked up at the rolling clouds and held out his hand in a summoning gesture. Silent forks of lightning splintered across the ink-black sky at his command. He shook his head in wonder, following the brittle needles of light as they knifed towards him. Then, as the snowstorm doubled in fury, Sigvald hurled himself headlong back into the fray. He crashed into the toiling figures like a comet, scattering armour, weapons, limbs and even rock; but rather than halting, the fighting only intensified. Sigvald emerged right in the heart of the schism, drenched in gore and rolling his eyes ecstatically. His animal frenzy was infectious and the knights around him began to swing their weapons indiscriminately, not caring whose flesh they severed. The whole scene quickly descended into a sadistic orgy of bloodletting, captured in brief bursts by the flickering light and accompanied by Sigvald’s joyous, ringing laughter.

‘I’m a god,’ he cried, his voice exultant and musical.

As the knights fought, some of them began to tear at their own armour, removing helmets and breastplates until they were naked, seeming to savour every wound that tore their exposed flesh. As their movements became more erratic and frenzied, some of them even began to change physically: grinning lustily as their flesh drained of colour and their hands became hard, serrated claws.

As the confusion spread, Sigvald moved on through the chaos with a column of wide-eyed converts trailing after him. ‘Where’s your lord?’ he cried, grabbing a knight by his canine helmet. The warrior cowered and waved across the battlefield, pointing to where Mord Huk’s men were toppling beneath waves of howling Norscans. Sigvald nodded and threw him to the ground, racing on through the carnage.

Sigvald had barely taken more than a few steps before he forgot his purpose and dived into another scrum of bodies, lashing out with his rapier and whooping ecstatically as he fell on the struggling knights. He tore armour open with his bare hands and sank his teeth into straining necks, covering his face with hot, pumping blood. As he dived and hacked through the battle, even more of Mord Huk’s knights staggered to a halt and watched in awe, before following his example and turning on whoever was stood nearest to them.

‘My lord!’ cried a voice, slicing through sounds of breaking bones and grinding steel.

Sigvald rose from the battle in a fountain of blood, with a severed head in one hand and his rapier in the other. As he climbed to his feet, the gore evaporated from his armour and face, leaving him immaculate as he turned to see who had spoken.

A gaunt, bearded figure was riding towards him, his face smeared with blood.

‘Schüler!’ cried Sigvald, dropping the head and racing towards the baron.

As the ground rolled and lurched, Schüler’s horse panicked and hurled its rider from its back. The baron landed with a clatter and cried out in pain. He was still trying to climb to his feet when he found himself enveloped in a fierce embrace.

‘Proud, brave friend!’ said Sigvald clutching the baron’s shoulders and smiling at him with unalloyed delight. ‘How can I ever repay you?’

Schüler shook his head in mute confusion and frowned, blinded by the daemonic light pouring from the prince’s eyes.

Sigvald waved to the ocean of violence that surrounded them. ‘I’d forgotten how to live, baron,’ he gasped. ‘How to really live! If you hadn’t told me about the brass skull, I would have rotted in that palace. Who knows how many centuries I would have wasted? Maybe none of this would have ever come to pass, if you hadn’t inspired me to action.’

As knights fought all around them, the prince pulled the baron close and clutched his skeletal head. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen, Schüler.’ He closed his eyes for a second and moaned ecstatically. When he looked back at the baron there were tears in his eyes. ‘I’ve travelled beyond the curtains of light, baron. I’ve seen another world. I’ve been forged anew in the realm of the gods. And all because of you.’

Schüler shook his head and tried to hide his disappointment with a rictus grin. ‘And you survived.’

‘More than survived! Look at me!’ Sigvald waved a hand at the ground and it rippled away in a liquid surge, sending rows of knights to their knees. ‘I’m a god!’

Schüler gasped and reeled away from the prince. Then his eyes narrowed. ‘But what about the brass skull?’

‘It’s mine,’ giggled Sigvald. ‘Or as good as. What could stop me now?’ He waved at the mayhem that surrounded them. ‘Mord Huk is here somewhere, looking for me.’ His laughter grew hysterical. ‘He’s looking for me, baron! Do you see? And I’m a god!’ The prince staggered back from Schüler, looking down at his immaculate gold armour and shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I’m a god,’ he kept repeating, tracing his hands over the engravings on his cuirass.

Baron Schüler cursed as one of the towering knights loomed out of the shifting darkness, raising his axe to strike. ‘Sigvald!’ he cried, barely parrying the blow with his sword and collapsing to his knees.

The prince looked up with a glazed expression. Then he saw the knight, about to swing his axe again, and leapt at him with a furious howl.

A fine spray of blood erupted from the knight’s visor as Sigvald flew towards him. Before the prince had even reached him, the knight’s armour collapsed inwards with a hollow clunk and he crumpled to the ground with a horrible whining whistle.

Sigvald placed a foot on his throat and forced his head into the bloody slush.

The ground fractured and split, allowing Sigvald to stamp the man’s head beneath the surface. Then it folded back into place over his neck, leaving the man to thrash his limbs, with his head embedded in the stone.

‘Schüler,’ said Sigvald, turning away and dropping to the baron’s side. ‘Are you hurt?’

Schüler stared at him, speechless.

Sigvald dragged him to his feet, fending off another attack as they staggered back towards the horse. ‘Follow me,’ he cried, helping Schüler back into the saddle. ‘Everything is starting here, today!’ Then he sprinted off into the fighting, shouldering knights aside like blades of grass as he raced towards the front line.

At the point where the two armies met, the sound of combat was deafening. Sigvald howled in delight, seeing that, despite the horrific nature of their foes, the Norscans were gradually forcing Mord Huk’s army back. As he neared the crush of desperate faces and whirling blades, he saw a pair of women hacking and punching through the fray. They were leading the Norscan charge and making a line straight for him. One of the women was dressed in nothing but a few ragged scraps of fur, but her sinewy limbs were covered in fierce-looking tattoos and her face was locked in a determined snarl. The woman at her side was clearly not a Norscan. She was clad from head to toe in baroque, purple armour and wielding a slender, glinting scimitar. She moved through the hulking warriors with such serpentine ease that she seemed to be dancing. Sigvald gasped and stumbled to a halt, recognising her immediately.

‘Freydís,’ he said, lowering his rapier and staring at her, utterly enraptured.

The fury of the first woman and the skill of the second made them unstoppable, and they easily sliced a path through the battle. The grim-faced Norscans surrounding them were dropping in their dozens, hacked apart by the dog-helmed knights, but their advance was relentless: wave after wave of them poured over Mord Huk’s men, wedging spears under their plate armour and dragging them down to die in the snow.

Sigvald stood motionless as the women approached, the battle forgotten as he studied the lethal beauty racing towards him.

‘We have him!’ cried the tattooed woman, levelling an iron knife at Sigvald as she clambered over the toppling knights. Her voice was hoarse with emotion as she rallied her men. ‘Sigvald is here!’

The Norscan army replied with a single, deafening voice. The sound of so many people howling at once was like nothing Sigvald had ever heard. He dragged his gaze from Freydís and surveyed the ravening horde. ‘Wonderful,’ he muttered, still nodding in respect as they broke through a line of knights and sprinted towards him.

At the last minute, Sigvald dropped into a crouch, jamming his rapier through the belly of the first man to reach him; then, as more slammed into him, he rolled back across the snow under the weight of them, laughing wildly as he punched and flailed.

The Norscans’ weapons clattered uselessly against his gold armour and Sigvald rose to his feet with a grin, lifting his rapier to the swirling clouds with a man skewered on the blade.

‘Freydís!’ cried the tattooed woman as she reached the edge of the scrum. ‘What do we do?’

As the princess sauntered into view, the Norscans backed away, creating a circle around her and Sigvald.

Sigvald dropped the corpse and fell to his knees, clutching his chest as though he had been shot. ‘Freydís,’ he groaned, shaking his head, ‘look at you. What a vision.’ He seemed utterly dazed by her appearance and kept repeating her name, as though it were a prayer.

The princess stepped in front of him and stood there for a few seconds, glaring down at him.

At the edge of the clearing, Sväla edged forward, her knife held in readiness, her eyes wide with hope.

‘Liar,’ said Freydís and dealt Sigvald a ferocious backhanded blow to the face.

Sigvald sprawled on his back and looked up at her in amazement. ‘I don’t–’

Before the prince could finish, Freydís kicked him in the stomach and he rolled away, gagging. ‘You left me to die!’ she screamed, pointing her scimitar at him and trembling with rage. ‘You left me with that bloated, gluttonous…’ her words trailed off as Sigvald rose to his feet and grinned at her.

Despite all the bloodshed, Sigvald’s armour was still unmarked and his skin shone with such an unnatural, lunar glow, that it seemed as though Freydís were talking to a sliver of moonlight.

‘How could I have left you?’ asked the prince, shaking his head in genuine confusion as he studied Freydís’s flushed cheeks and flashing eyes. He tilted his head back, exposing his neck. ‘Kill me, Freydís. What an honour: to die by such an exquisite hand.’

Freydís rushed at him with a snarl, but rather than slitting his throat, she kissed it passionately; lowering her sword and crushing her body against his.

Sigvald frowned in confusion, then grabbed her head and smothered it with kisses. The couple forgot the battle raging around them as they locked in a fierce embrace.

‘Freydís!’ cried Sväla, horrified. She dashed forwards and wrenched the princess from her husband’s grip.

Sigvald’s sword flashed.

Sväla reeled back, trying to stem the fountain of blood that erupted from her throat.

Svärd broke through the front row of Norscans and caught his mother as she fell, pressing his hand over the wound as he dragged her back into the crowd.

Sigvald turned to his wife with a raised eyebrow.

‘A peasant woman,’ replied Freydís with an embarrassed shrug. ‘I needed someone’s help to reach you.’ She waved at the ranks of awed faces that surrounded them. ‘And, conveniently, she had this group of primitives with her.’

‘Kill him!’ cried Svärd, as he dragged his convulsing mother away. ‘This is our chance!’

The Norscans hesitated. They had never seen anything so resplendent as Sigvald and his princess. As they looked around at each other they saw an ungainly, slouching rabble. Months of hardship had left their faces so haggard and cadaverous that it seemed absurd to think that they could attack such majestic beings.

‘The curse!’ cried Sväla, her voice liquid and raw. She tried to rise from Svärd’s lap and levelled her knife at the prince. ‘Everything stems from him! This is it! This is what we’ve been dying for! He’s blinding you with sorcery.’

Finally, some of the Norscans lurched into action, flinging spears and knives at the prince and rushing forwards. Many more stayed their hands, and some even dragged their kinsmen to the ground, plunging knives into their backs with strange, hungry smiles on their faces.

Sigvald shoved Freydís behind his back and adopted an en garde position, still grinning as they charged towards him.

The fighting was fast and furious. The Fallen had finally laid hands on the source of their shame and they howled victoriously as they crashed into him. Sigvald’s rapier flashed back and forth, sending dozens of them spinning to the ground without any apparent effort. Despite his skill though, it looked for a moment as though the sheer volume of them might overwhelm him. Then Mord Huk’s knights surged forwards in a counter-attack and the scene descended into utter confusion. Something seemed to have driven the knights into a frenzy. Those who had stripped away their armour and begun to mutate ploughed into their brothers and the Norscans, giggling hysterically as they fought. Others let out a mournful battle cry and charged into the main body of Sväla’s army. Behind them, a huge shape was stamping through the lightning-charged storm, its vast bulk shrouded in gouts of steam and pulsing with unearthly lights.

The waves of Norscans finally overwhelmed Sigvald’s defenders and the whole tumult collapsed backwards, burying the prince beneath a mound of toiling limbs and grinding armour.

As the figures collapsed on top of each other, more and more of them seemed to be infected with Sigvald’s lunacy. Hundreds of the knights had now sprouted elongated, plum-coloured limbs and fluttering, scaled wings, and as they revelled in their new forms, their movements became increasingly frenzied.

As soldiers tumbled and rolled across the bloodstained snow, the hulking shape emerged from the storm with a rumbling, lowing sound. It was a colossal bull-like creature with a hide of riveted brass and steel. There was a single, bloody tusk mounted on its muzzle and as its gore-encrusted hooves crunched over the fallen knights, liquid fire dripped from its joints, revealing glimpses of a diabolical furnace in its chest. The same malevolent light poured from its eyes, flashing across swords and shields as it entered the clearing.

Mounted on its back was a great, armour-clad brute, wearing a blood-splattered brass skull.

Mord Huk had arrived.

‘Sigvald!’ he growled, raising a jagged, two-handed sword over his head and waving the iron-clad beast forwards. Dark currents of power coursed around the blade as he pointed it at the pile of knights, Norscans and freakish shapes. ‘Show yourself!’ he bellowed.

At the sound of Mord Huk’s voice, some of the less demented combatants backed away, cowering at the sight of the approaching figure.

Sigvald dragged himself from the thrashing bodies and staggered back against the men stood nearest to him.

Axes and spears were lowered as the soldiers paused to watch the encounter.

Sigvald reeled back and forth for a few moments, shaking his mane of golden hair and trying to clear his head. Then he stumbled to a halt, sensing the vast presence looming over him.

His eyes widened at the sight of the glinting brass skull.

Then he let his head rock back on his shoulders and emitted a long, wailing moan of pleasure. As his cry rang out across the battlefield the lightning flared brighter, drenching the soldiers in a sapphire glow. ‘Finally!’ cried Sigvald, fixing his gaze on the helmet. ‘It’s mine!’

Mord Huk gave no reply as he climbed down from his hellish mount and stomped across the corpse-strewn ground, gripping the hilt of his long blade in both hands as he prepared to attack. His blood-red armour was as thick and jagged as his soldiers’ and scored with dozens of foul, pulsing runes. Every inch of his eight-foot frame was covered in dried blood and deep within his helmet shone a pair of feral, hate-filled eyes.

Sigvald’s head began to twitch slightly as he watched Mord Huk approach. The brass skull was reflected in his eyes and his fingers flexed in anticipation as he prepared to fight.

Mord Huk let out a feral grunt, drew back his monstrous blade and swung it at Sigvald’s chest.

Sigvald parried with a fluid, casual twirl of his rapier and Mord Huk stumbled across the clearing, propelled by the force of his own attack. Sigvald made no attempt to strike back. He closed his eyes instead and turned his face up to the falling snow.

Mord Huk flew back at him with a snarling grunt, thrusting his blade at the prince’s stomach.

Just in time, Sigvald opened his eyes and swerved out of harm’s way, playfully rattling his rapier along Mord Huk’s sword as it rushed past him. ‘I can’t bear to see this end,’ he muttered, looking around at the circle of expectant faces. ‘After everything I’ve achieved to get here, I feel as though–’

His words turned into an explosion of breath as Mord Huk hammered the hilt of his sword into the prince’s back, sending him crashing to his knees.

‘There are more gods than yours,’ grunted the knight as he drew back his crackling blade to strike again.

Sigvald rolled to one side, avoiding the full force of the next blow, but the blade sliced through the pauldron of his gold armour, tearing through the metal with a nerve-jangling screech. As he tumbled away, a thin arc of blood sprayed up the side of his face.

‘What’s this?’ Sigvald gasped, touching the blood as he climbed to his feet and backed away from his opponent.

‘Punishment,’ grunted Mord Huk, holding up his serrated blade so that Sigvald could see the lines of power rippling over the filthy metal.

‘Magic?’ cried Sigvald, clutching his wound in shock, as he realised that his armour was not going to heal itself.

Mord Huk shook his head as he struck again. ‘A Blood Blessing.’

Sigvald parried again, but now there was doubt in his eyes. The pain in his shoulder was sharp and unexpected. As he deflected Mord Huk’s blow and sent his great bulk stumbling into the onlookers, Sigvald launched himself at the knight’s back. The pair of them were briefly picked out in a flash of lightning; locked in a desperate embrace, before vanishing from view.

For a few seconds the ranks of bloody soldiers stared at each other in confusion, then they poured into the void left by the two duelling champions, screaming and howling as they tore into each other.

As Sigvald and Mord Huk careered through the storm, Sigvald’s laughter rose above the sound of thunder and clashing blades. Wherever he passed, the fight descended into mayhem. At the sight of the prince’s gleeful acrobatics, the soldiers turned on whoever was nearest, giggling maniacally as their bodies began to writhe and transform.

Neither of the two champions seemed able to break the deadlock. For over an hour they crashed and lunged through the battle, and each time Sigvald was revealed, the division between the two armies became less clear, as they broke ranks and began to change. Thick crimson armour was replaced by engraved lilac steel, or torn away completely to reveal pale, naked flesh.

Finally, just as Sigvald was beginning to tire, a tall, hooded figure emerged from the writhing shadows; punching and shouldering his way through the battle and making a direct line for the pair of champions.

Neither Sigvald nor his opponent noticed the gangly figure, but as the prince collapsed to his knees, utterly exhausted, the giant raced past him and slammed into Mord Huk’s chest, sending them both toppling backwards into the snow.

Mord Huk let out a furious rumble of pain and cracked the hilt of his sword against his attacker’s head.

There was a dull crunch, and the newcomer’s hood sagged at an odd angle, but there was no trace of blood and his grip remained firm, pinning Mord Huk to the ground.

Sigvald climbed to his feet with a groan and grabbed his rapier from the corpse-strewn slush. As he recognised the shape wrestling with his opponent, a relieved smile returned to his face. ‘Oddrún,’ he said, stumbling towards him.

As Mord Huk struggled to free himself from beneath Oddrún, he landed blow after blow on the giant’s hunched, robed body. The sizzling blade sliced through the sackcloth, cutting deep into Oddrún’s back, but the chancellor showed no sign of pain and tightened his grip with every cut.

Sigvald strode forwards and sliced down with his rapier.

Still containing Mord Huk’s snorting, feral head, the brass skull span off through the storm.

Oddrún collapsed onto the headless corpse.

Sigvald sprinted after the helmet, quickly disappearing into the shifting ranks of soldiers.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

‘Which way?’ muttered Svärd, wiping the snow from his face.

Sväla looked up from the makeshift litter, her head reeling with pain and blood loss. For a minute she struggled to remember what had happened, then she saw the long trail of blood and the rows of desolate faces trudging after her.

Of course.

Everything was lost.

The battle had continued for what seemed like an eternity, but after the first few hours the slaughter had become utterly senseless. Allegiances had been abandoned, along with tactics, logic and sanity. She had tried desperately to maintain some kind of order, but as soon as she was wounded, Sväla had been powerless to stem the madness. As Svärd dragged her away from Sigvald, she had seen the Fallen transformed by the Geld-Prince’s sorcery: half of them into a raving mob, and the rest into a grotesque, gibbering menagerie. The figures stumbling after her through the snow were the few who had hung on to any semblance of reason. Of the original, vast host, there were fewer than a thousand survivors. She wondered vaguely when Sigvald’s creatures would hunt them down, but her thoughts were too shattered to question anything very deeply and she simply shook her head.

‘Just keep the mountains at your back,’ she replied in a thin, rasping voice.

Svärd grimaced and stumbled on, dragging the litter behind him.

Sväla nervously ran a hand over her throat. The old witch, Ürsüla, had smeared a foul black paste over the wound. It had slowed the bleeding but tripled the pain. She wondered if it would have any other effects. The Wolf’s blessings were not always predictable. Still, if it wasn’t for Ürsüla she would be long dead; Sväla had no doubt of that.

At the memory of the old woman she searched her out in the crowd, wondering how she was still alive. Warriors and chieftains had died in their thousands since they left Norsca, but the frail old woman was still stumping determinedly through the snow, clad in her strange mantle of sticks, bones and sealskin. Her short, silver hair was matted with blood but her vivid green eyes had lost none of their humour. Sväla noticed that the witch was watching her and chomping thoughtfully on her pipe.

‘I was betrayed,’ Sväla croaked defensively, meeting the old woman’s eye.

‘Not by me,’ replied the witch with a laugh that quickly became a wracking cough.

‘Ungaur’s statue gave me a name, but you explained the legend,’ said Sväla, attempting to sit up. ‘You must have known it would all end like this.’ She pointed her knife at the smirking woman. ‘Your mud dolls told you everything. You must have foreseen that we could never defeat Sigvald. You must have seen that we could never escape the curse.’

The witch sucked on her pipe and let the smoke pour down through her shrivelled nose. ‘Defeat Sigvald? I never said anything about that.’ She shrugged. ‘I suppose I did say something about you leading us to victory though.’

‘Yes,’ cried Sväla, her voice cracking. ‘That’s exactly what you said!’ A little colour crept back into her tattooed cheeks as she recalled their first meeting. ‘Why did you say that?’ She waved her knife at the pitiful wrecks stumbling after them. ‘Look at what you’ve done. Everyone’s dead, or worse.’

The old woman simply grinned and took another drag on her pipe. Then she turned away, her tiny frame disappearing quickly in the limping ranks of survivors.

‘Ürsüla!’ cried Sväla, rising furiously from the litter.

Pain erupted in her throat and she collapsed back with a groan.

‘Mother?’ asked Svärd, pausing to look down at her.

‘Keep going,’ she snapped. ‘Keep the mountains at your back.’

As the litter bounced along the brittle snow, Sväla’s head swam horribly, filled with visions of slaughter and perversion. Then, with a shock, she realised that she must have fallen asleep. The mountains behind them were suddenly further away and the golden castle was now little more than a large star, flickering in the snowstorm. Ignoring the pain, she rolled onto her side and looked past Svärd’s legs to see what was ahead of them.

Her heart sank.

Nothing was familiar. All she could see for miles around was jagged peaks and vast, featureless tracts of snow. How would they ever find the coast? She shivered violently. Svärd had wrapped her in furs, but the cold was persistent, leeching through her wiry limbs and spreading deep into her bones. Despair filled her and her head dropped. As she looked down, she noticed the two wedding rings, still knotted to her finger. At the sight of the battered metal, something stirred in her chest; a tiny flicker of anger. ‘Völtar,’ she croaked. ‘Look at what we’ve done in your name. Look at what we’ve sacrificed. How can you just abandon us?’

There was no reply and she collapsed with a bitter curse, clamping her eyes shut and willing the world away.

After an hour or so of silent trudging she noticed that Svärd was muttering to himself.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.

‘There’s something moving about in the snow, up ahead,’ he replied, sounding hesitant. ‘Some kind of dog.’

Sväla gasped and sat up, turning to look past him again.

‘I see it!’ she cried, slapping her hands on the litter. ‘It’s not a dog, it’s a wolf.’

He looked down at her in confusion. ‘How could it survive out here, miles from anything?’

‘Exactly,’ she said, with growing excitement in her voice. ‘No normal creature could.’

He shook his head, still confused. ‘Then what–?’

‘Move faster,’ interrupted Sväla, slapping her hands on the litter again. ‘Catch it up!’

The youth groaned and tried to drag a bit more speed from his aching limbs.

As the litter bounced across the snow, Sväla fixed her eyes on the fleeting shape and began to nod. ‘It’s him,’ she muttered. ‘It’s him.’

Svärd picked up on the excitement in Sväla’s voice and increased his pace further. Soon, they had left the others behind as they raced after the wolf.

After a few minutes, the wolf padded up a small incline and sat down, silhouetted against the storm and looking down at the approaching Norscans with a calm, regal gaze.

As Svärd dragged his mother towards the hill, the storm worsened, sending great swelling banks of snow around the creature, briefly obscuring it from view. By the time the flurry had cleared, Svärd had dragged the litter halfway up the slope, leaving them close enough to see that the wolf had been replaced by something very different.

As they reached the summit, they saw two figures waiting for them. One was tall, slender and dressed in white, but the other was hard to make out. It was crumpled on the ground in a heap of twitching limbs.

‘Finally, the deity laid eyes on its most beloved prophet,’ said the tall figure, as Svärd stumbled to a confused halt.

The two Norscans stared at the white-robed figure in horror. Even without the black horns sprouting from its head, they would have known the creature for what it was: a daemon. Such a foul, aberrant air surrounded it that Svärd backed away and raised his javelin in fear.

Sväla was equally panicked, but maintained enough composure to notice that the daemon was horribly wounded. There was a dark gash in its belly that had stained its robes with steaming, black blood. Despite its beatific smile, the thing was clearly in pain, clutching at the wound with one of its slender hands.

‘What are you?’ Sväla croaked, trying to quell the terror in her voice.

The daemon turned to its companion and said: ‘Belus Pül was filled with pity at the sight of its prophet. The poor soul could not even recognise her own master.’

Svärd let out a curse as he saw the daemon’s scribe. The naked, faceless creature was sitting in its nest of spider-like limbs, just a few feet behind Belus. Only a small black hook, sunk deep into its side, alluded to its former existence.

‘We need to leave,’ gasped Svärd, grabbing the litter.

‘Wait!’ snapped Sväla, raising her hand. She still had her eyes fixed on Belus as she sat up. ‘What do you mean, “prophet”?’

‘It seemed strange that the girl could not recognise her own god,’ replied Belus, stooping over the scribe to ensure it had correctly captured the inflections of its voice, ‘after being so carefully guided by it for several months.’

Sväla shook her head in confusion. The prim, formal tones did sound oddly familiar. To her horror, she realised that the voice reminded her of the visions that had originally driven her to action. Then she remembered a more recent incident: the wolf that had led her to Sigvald’s floating palace had sounded just the same.

‘You?’ she said, with a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. ‘You’re the one who led me north?’ She looked in disgust at the daemon’s angelic face. ‘Why?’

‘Few mortals can comprehend the workings of a divine mind,’ replied the daemon, still facing the large ear implanted in its scribe’s head, ‘but the deity endeavoured to explain to the prophet that its child, Sigvald the Magnificent, had committed the ultimate betrayal.’ The daemon paused and shook its head. ‘He had become boring. And the deity had been forced to seek a way to rouse the prince from his spiritual torpor; several ways in fact.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Sväla, shaking her head furiously. ‘I came north to rid my people of a terrible curse.’

Belus winced, clutching at its bloody robes in obvious pain, then assumed its vacuous smile once more and continued. ‘The deity explained to its earnest young seer that games and stratagems are essential to keep a celestial mind amused. Cursing the prophet’s tribe had been a simple task, and even waiting centuries for the plan to come to fruition had been no real chore.’

The colour drained from Sväla’s face. ‘You cursed us?’

The daemon maintained its innocent smile. ‘The prophet was awed by her master’s power, but the deity was as humble as ever, explaining that a curse was a simple matter for a being of such infinite power. Filling the girl’s head with visions had been even easier, and then the prophet’s wonderful determination had ensured the rest.’

Sväla let out a despairing moan and looked back at the approaching survivors. ‘It was all a lie then? Just because you wanted Sigvald to do something exciting, I’ve led my people to their doom?’

The daemon continued smiling.

As Sväla stared at the creature something strange happened to her vision. The snowstorm began to blur and fade and the daemon gradually vanished behind a crowd of spectral figures. She realised the daemon was beguiling her with another vision and shook her head fiercely, trying to escape the influx of scenes and faces. It was no use: as her nostrils filled with the scent of burning herbs she saw a vast ocean spread out before her. ‘The Sea of Chaos,’ she muttered, clamping her hands around her head.

As she watched the tumbling pewter waves, she saw a small fleet of longships slicing towards a rocky coastline. ‘Norsca,’ she said, unable to suppress her excitement. She was witnessing the homecoming of her people. The image shifted again as the burning smell grew: she saw Svärd and the others returning to their mead halls and wattle huts, exhausted but alive. The setting changed again, and she saw her son leading them to battle against the neighbouring tribes. ‘Victory,’ she breathed, as she saw Svärd presenting a severed head to his baying warriors. ‘The curse is lifted.’

The reek of smoke grew even stronger and Sväla was overcome by a fit of coughing. The pain in her throat exploded once more and the visions fell away, returning her to the hilltop.

Standing a few feet away was the source of the smell. The old witch had climbed up the slope and was drawing deep on her pipe, frowning as her eyes flicked back and forth from Sväla to the daemon.

‘Ürsüla,’ cried Sväla.

‘You’re being offered a choice,’ replied the old woman, revealing her fulvous teeth in a grin.

Belus Pül narrowed its eyes at the sight of the decrepit witch, but did not acknowledge her. ‘The brave young prophet saw a chance to ensure the survival of her people. All she needed to do was dedicate herself utterly to her master and the curse would immediately be lifted. She realised that her tribe’s destiny depended entirely on this simple act of devotion.’

Svärd blanched and looked down at his groaning mother. ‘Don’t listen,’ he cried. ‘It wants your soul.’

Sväla looked in confusion from her son to the old witch, then back at the daemon. ‘I can buy my people’s freedom with my soul?’

Belus nodded without turning to face her. ‘The prophet gradually began to grasp the enormous generosity of her god. If she submitted herself to the deity’s sweet embrace, her friends would easily find their way home, and no longer be blighted by ill luck.’

Sväla’s shoulders dropped. ‘Then I have no choice.’ Her voice was taut with disbelief. ‘I’ve brought us to the brink of ruin. Damnation is a just reward.’

Svärd rushed back to her side. ‘I don’t think you should just–’

‘Let your mother do the thinking,’ interrupted Ürsüla, glaring at him.

Sväla still had her eyes fixed on the daemon. ‘What must I do?’ she whispered.

Belus Pül raised one of its slender arms and rattled its disparate collection of bangles and rings. ‘For countless centuries, the Divine One had adopted its children with the most simple rite imaginable: the gift of jewellery. Of course, the objects must always be something of deep, personal significance. So the prophet thought very carefully about what would be her most precious belonging.’

Sväla nodded sadly and looked down at her two wedding rings. Her eyes filled with tears as the daemon stepped slowly towards her and held out an expectant hand.

‘Surely you can think of something more valuable?’ asked Ürsüla, nodding to a slender piece of silver hanging from Sväla’s belt.

She frowned and looked down at the glittering object, unsure for a moment what it was. So much had happened over the last few months that the horrific events had begun to merge into one. Then, as she studied the silver chain, she noticed the sun and moon device on the clasp and remembered the monster on the island. She suddenly understood why Ürsüla was suggesting that she offer the chain to Belus Pül. It was the chain Svärd had removed from the creature called Olandír: the chain that had kept the daemonic monster utterly powerless.

She turned to Ürsüla and saw that she was nodding almost imperceptibly.

But surely, thought Sväla, if the daemon has been my guide it will know about everything – including Olandír and his island prison. Surely it would know the power of the chain? Then she recalled something Ürsüla had said as they sat on the island, surrounded by the strange architecture: ‘There’s something here that has blocked your visions, Sväla,’ she had said. ‘Something that has come between you and your spirit guide.’ Maybe there was a chance then? Maybe the daemon would not recognise the chain? Maybe it would not see the trap? Sväla looked at Ürsüla again, finally understanding: if the daemon wore the chain it might be rendered as powerless as Olandír had been. And with such a creature bound to their will, their escape would be assured.

‘Well, there’s this,’ said Sväla, trying to keep her voice steady as she removed the chain and held it out to the daemon. ‘It belonged to one of my ancestors. I’ve guarded it with my life for as long as I can remember.’

Belus Pül plucked the chain from her fingers with a triumphant grin, dangled it in front of its nose and took a dainty sniff. Then it draped the links around its arm and prepared to click it in place.

Just as the daemon was about to clasp the chain shut, it paused and looked directly at Sväla, pursing its lips into a coy smile.

CHAPTER FORTY

The palace was aflame.

As Oddrún staggered through the smoke and the raucous crowds, he shook his head in disgust. The creatures’ frenzied movements had left portraits blazing and windows shattered. A few more days of this and the whole building would be destroyed. It was inevitable really, thought the giant, as he struggled through the screaming throng, after Sigvald had incited such passion and corruption. Once they grew bored of the directionless battle, the creatures had turned their grotesque faces towards a new source of amusement: the Gilded Palace. They had lurched and fluttered after the despondent figure of Sigvald, calling out the prince’s name as he trudged through the bloody snow towards home.

Oddrún entered the long throne room. The tiered balconies were crowded with wailing monsters. They were all locked in a series of embraces – whether amorous or aggressive it was impossible to tell, but the result was the same: great shards of stone were crashing down into the hungry flames and several of the marble pillars had toppled, smashing the beautifully tiled floor into a jagged, fractured mess. The giant maintained his usual, hunched gait, keeping his head down as he wove through the clamour.

Pale-skinned nymphs were writhing across the throne, but as he climbed to the top of the dais, Oddrún could see no sign of the prince. ‘Where’s Sigvald?’ he asked, grabbing one of the androgynous creatures.

The daemonette twisted its full, dark lips into a sneer and wrenched itself free, before dropping eagerly back onto its naked, gasping siblings.

Oddrún cursed and hurried on, making for the door that led to the prince’s library.

The atmosphere changed dramatically as he crossed the threshold. The library was almost totally empty and as Oddrún closed the thick, oak door behind him, the orgiastic chorus faded to a muffled hum. The room was no less ruined than the others though. The towering shelves had been emptied, creating a mountain of torn pages and broken spines, and crouching, cat-like at the summit was Sigvald. He was glaring at an object he was clutching in both hands: a filthy brass skull.

‘It’s nothing,’ he spat, as the giant clambered up the books towards him.

Oddrún nodded in reply.

Sigvald waved at the surrounding carnage. A great hole had been blasted in one wall of the library, filling the room with moonlight and snow. ‘I’ve scoured every text I could think of and found no mention of the thing.’ He rapped his knuckles against the bloodstained brass and it chimed like a bell. ‘It’s just metal: a thick, stupid lump of metal, moulded to protect a thick, stupid skull. It’s not a conduit, or a talisman or anything that would link one to a god. The baron’s as much of a fool as all the others.’ His jaw clenched, as though this disappointment was the most painful of all. ‘He was completely wrong, Oddrún.’

The giant still didn’t reply, so Sigvald let out a howl of frustration, lurched to his feet and hurled the skull across the library. It bounced off a bookshelf with a clang and rolled into a corner.

Oddrún watched in silence as the Geld-Prince dropped back onto the books and clutched his head in his hands.

‘What’s the point of any of it?’ groaned the prince. ‘I have all this power and it’s worth nothing. Nothing!’ He looked up at his old friend with his face locked in a grimace. ‘Tell me, Oddrún – what is the point?’ He waved at the ruins of his palace. ‘Shall I just build and destroy, over and over again, forever, until I can’t even tell the difference?’

He snatched a page from beneath his feet and crumpled it into a ball, holding it so tightly in his fist that his veins began to throb. As he crushed the paper, a thin whining sound came from the back of his throat and his head began to tremble slightly. ‘Build and destroy,’ he moaned. ‘Build and destroy.’

Oddrún climbed a little closer and sat down beside the prince. He prised apart Sigvald’s fingers and removed the paper. ‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘You’re free of the daemon’s pact. Maybe we could begin again, even now?’

Sigvald looked up at the giant with tears in his eyes, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You’re the biggest fool of all!’ he cried. ‘You’re utterly, utterly mad, can’t you see? When will you abandon these pathetic delusions? It’s like a kind of torture, listening to you. You’re pulling my mind apart. Don’t you understand? We could never become mortal again. It’s absurd. Don’t you realise what a lunatic you are?’ He waved at the giant’s awkwardly folded body and began to laugh through his tears. ‘Begin again? You make me seem positively sane!’ He clutched his head in his hands again and his laughter became a groan. Then the two of them sat side by side in silence, lost in their own thoughts as the distant sounds of destruction seeped through the door.

After a while, Sigvald stood up and began climbing down the pile of books. ‘I’m going to find Freydís and leave,’ he muttered. ‘Come with us, or don’t. Whatever you wish.’

‘She’s already gone,’ replied the giant.

Sigvald paused and looked back at him. ‘What do you mean, “gone”? She wouldn’t go anywhere without me.’ A note of hysteria entered his voice. ‘She hacked her way through a whole army just to reach my side.’

‘The baron took her. One of your captains saw him riding away from the battle. He had the princess strapped to the back of his horse and he was heading south, back to his own kingdom.’

Sigvald reeled as though he had been slapped. ‘Schüler? He’s taken Freydís?’

Oddrún nodded slowly. ‘He wasn’t a fool, Sigvald: he was a liar. He conned you into a war that he thought you could never win. He knew the skull was worthless, but he thought the quest would be the death of you.’ The giant shrugged. ‘He wanted Freydís, but you were in his way.’

Sigvald shook his head and looked down at his open palms, as though expecting to see the baron riding across his pale skin. ‘He tricked me?’

Oddrún nodded.

Sigvald’s shoulders started to shake and he began making the strange whining noise again. ‘Schüler, Schüler, Schüler,’ he wailed, still staring at his open hands.

Oddrún climbed wearily to his feet and went to Sigvald’s side, placing his hands on the prince’s trembling shoulders. ‘I know you had high hopes for him,’ he said.

Sigvald looked up at the giant with a broad grin. ‘High hopes. Yes!’ He gripped the giant’s arms. ‘But, by the gods, he’s exceeded all of them!’ He threw back his head and laughed so hard that tears flooded from his eyes. ‘He was lying to me, all that time. Lying. What wonderful, perfect genius!’

The prince dashed to the ragged hole in the wall and leant out into the raging storm. ‘Schüler,’ he screamed, his eyes blazing with passion, ‘you’re a genius!’

‘He’s stolen your wife,’ gasped Oddrún. ‘And only because he failed to kill you.’

‘Exactly!’ cried Sigvald rounding on the giant. ‘I knew it!’ He levelled a trembling finger at Oddrún. ‘From the first moment I saw his face, I knew he was special.’ He grabbed his sword and shield from the mound of books and clanged them together, filling the library with noise as he danced back and forth. ‘He was a Southling,’ cried Sigvald, rushing towards the giant. ‘Where exactly did he say he was from?’

Oddrún shook his head in disbelief. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘Where was he from?’ howled Sigvald, still grinning.

‘I believe he said the city was called Altdorf.’

‘Altdorf,’ whispered Sigvald. ‘What a place that must be.’ He looked around at his ruined palace and shook his head. ‘I’m sick of this hovel,’ he said, storming across the room, booting open the door and heading back to the throne room.

The pandemonium grew as Sigvald reached the dais, clanging his sword against his shield and surveying his new subjects. One whole side of the throne room was now consumed by fire, and hundreds more of the giggling mutants were flooding into the room, eager to join the orgy of destruction. At the sight of Sigvald’s jubilant face they howled in delight and pulled even more of the architecture to the ground: wrenching the masonry apart with their long talons and smashing chairs with their segmented tails.

Sigvald stood watching for a moment, overwhelmed; revelling in the sight of the gaudy creatures. Through the shattered doorways he glimpsed countless others, crawling and slithering towards him. By the end of the battle he had entranced anyone who could still draw breath, whether Norscan, Khornate or otherwise. He shook his head in amazement. The Decadent Host was more glorious than ever.

‘My children,’ he cried, raising his voice above the din. ‘We’ve outgrown our home.’ He waved at the blazing portraits and shattered marble. ‘These walls have become a prison. We must head south.’

The creatures exploded into a chorus of ecstatic screams, delighted that the prince was finally addressing them.

‘I’ve learned of a city called Altdorf,’ he continued, trying to steady the laughter in his voice. ‘A city ripe for the taking, where we could indulge even our most inventive desires. And with such a magnificent host at my back,’ he waved his sword at the leering creatures, ‘nothing could stand in my way.’

A shroud of embers billowed around the prince as he lifted his rapier above his head, transporting his subjects into an even greater frenzy.

‘I am Sigvald the Magnificent!’ he cried, laughing wildly as the floor buckled beneath his feet. ‘Ride with me!’

EPILOGUE

Freydís awoke with a start, unsure where she was. Her side ached horribly from lying in a deep drift of snow and her hands and feet were tightly bound. As she peered into the dark she realised her head was covered in sackcloth. She shook herself, but the coarse material remained fixed firmly in place. Panic gripped her. Had Mord Huk taken her? She thought back to the battle, but after her embrace with Sigvald, nothing was clear. She could remember the Norscans’ last charge, but then nothing.

‘Sigvald?’ she whispered, trying to stand. Her muscles were cramped and frozen and she toppled to her knees with a curse. ‘Is anybody there?’ she cried, enraged by her own fear. There was no reply but the wind, howling across the ice. As she struggled into a sitting position, the hood moved slightly and she realised that there was a slit in the cloth, through which she could see a bank of glittering, moonlit snow and a single horse, silhouetted against the whiteness.

‘Princess!’ came a voice from the darkness.

She leant forward in confusion, thinking for a moment that the horse had spoken. The voice was thin and adenoidal, as though the speaker were holding his nose.

Then, after a few seconds, she saw a figure hurrying across the snow towards her.

‘Who are you?’ she snapped, straining against her bonds. ‘How can you leave me like this?’

As he approached, she saw that her captor was one of Sigvald’s knights. He was wearing tattered shreds of purple armour and had a longsword in his bloody fist. His face was freshly shaven and daubed with makeup, but there was no disguising the fact that he was close to death. His eyes stared wildly from their dark sockets and his skin was stretched horribly over his cadaverous head. There was also a swollen, purple mess in the middle of his face. At first the princess could not make out what it was, then she realised that the man’s nose must have recently been broken.

‘It’s me,’ he laughed, as though they were sharing a friendly joke. ‘Gustav’.

‘Baron Schüler?’ gasped Freydís, staring even harder at the man.

‘Of course,’ he said, grinning wildly as he dropped down beside her.

She looked at him in shock. The baron was unrecognisable. Without his beard he looked even gaunter and also much younger. He resembled a consumptive child, delirious with fever.

‘We’re free, princess,’ he said, gripping her shoulders and revealing a mouthful of broken teeth.

As she looked into the baron’s rolling eyes, Freydís saw no trace of sanity. The martial pride that had marked him out from Sigvald’s other dupes was gone, replaced by the bright, manic stare of an addict.

‘Why have you bound me, my love?’ she replied, softening her voice.

His eyes narrowed. ‘I saw you with him,’ he said, tightening his grip and leaning closer to her. ‘I saw you with Sigvald. I know I have more to do before I can truly call you mine.’

‘What do you mean?’ she replied, in an innocent voice. ‘Have you forgotten our night together? I carved my mark into your skin, Gustav. We are one.’

The knight sighed and pressed his hand over his battered breastplate, savouring the memory. Then he laughed. ‘You’re playing games with me,’ he chuckled, rising to his feet. ‘But I know now how I can make you mine. Truly mine.’ He looked south into the howling blizzard and raised his sword aloft. ‘Once we have returned to the Empire I will win your heart.’ He looked back at her, still grinning. His head was twitching slightly with excitement as he continued. ‘Finally I will have victory, Freydís. Victory! I have seen Sigvald’s power and understood it. I understand everything.’

Freydís felt a chill of fear. As the knight’s tic grew more pronounced, it reminded her of her husband at his most delusional. Even the lunatic grin was the same.

‘Baron,’ she snapped, drawing his attention back to her. She knew she had only one hope of escape. ‘At least you could remove this sack.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t even see you properly, my love.’

The baron’s grin became a devious smirk and he shook his head. ‘Oh, no, princess. Not yet.’ He dragged a trembling hand across his face and stared wildly back at her. ‘I must stay in control. Just until we reach Altdorf; then I can allow myself to savour your beauty.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ snapped the princess. Then she lowered her voice and adopted a more demure tone. ‘Don’t be so cruel,’ she said, leaning towards him. ‘How can you doubt my love?’

The baron did not seem to hear. He continued grinning as he lifted her from the ground and threw her over his shoulder, then carried her over to the horse and strapped her to the saddle.

‘You’ll learn to love me,’ he hissed, climbing into the saddle and kicking the horse into motion.

As they raced south, Freydís struggled against her bonds and howled furiously, but the baron’s only reply was laughter: a wild, hysterical sound that echoed in the dark, long after the horse had vanished from view.

VALKIA THE BLOODY

S P Cawkwell

ONE

THE SCHWARZVOLF

Swooping whorls of colour lit the night sky with their vibrant shades. Vivid reds, deep blues and virulent greens twisted and blended into one another, producing an entirely unnatural display unlike anything anywhere else. Only the Northern Wastes could boast such stark, murderous beauty as presented by the snowy tundra. They culminated in this spectacle, the magnificent aurora that crowned the top of the world. Nowhere else was there such magical fallout.

Her eyes wide, the child stared up at the fury of the skies, stricken mute by their very majesty. By her side, the warrior clad in blood-stained furs reached down to scoop her up in his arms. With ease he lifted her onto his shoulders that she might better see. She was getting rather large for such treatment now that she was older, but she was still slender and lightly built. The warrior had no difficulty in bearing her weight. She shifted slightly to make herself comfortable.

‘They say that when the Axefather is pleased with our efforts, the tides of the sky will flow and ebb with darkest red, leached from the blood of our enemies. On the day that happens, Lille Venn, our people will rise far above all others.’

Her father smiled. He did not have to see her to imagine the look of wide-eyed wonder on his ten-year-old daughter’s face. She was a beautiful child and although he loved her dearly, her ever-growing resemblance to her dead mother brought a fresh wave of bitter loathing towards the enemies that the Schwarzvolf faced. The war between the two tribes had raged for nigh on twelve cycles of the moon and the elders of the Schwarzvolf had foreseen that the morrow would see victory or death for Merroc and his people.

The child wound a lock of dark hair around her finger and continued to stare into the skies. Words were few and far between from his daughter. She had always been an introspective and thoughtful child, intelligent and sharp beyond her years. The death of her mother at the hands of their enemy a year ago had hurt her, but with the easy pragmatism of all her people, she had borne it with stoicism. Occasionally she would speak, invariably to make an observation or to ask a question. She was inquisitive and curious and this pleased Merroc. He may have produced no sons of the union with Valkia’s mother but this girl, his first child, was his pride.

‘How does it happen?’ Her question, when it came, was demanding, as though she accused her father of arranging this spectacular show of magic purely for her benefit.

‘None of us truly know, Lille Venn.’ Lille Venn, he called her. Little Friend. ‘There can be little doubt that such a miracle is the work of the gods themselves.’

‘Where are the gods?’ She absently tugged on his scraggly beard, winding it around her little fingers.

‘Far to the north. Further than any of us have ever travelled. None who have ventured there have ever returned to tell of what lies beyond the mountains.’

‘When I grow up,’ she said with the fierce determination of children everywhere, ‘I will go there.’ When Merroc laughed, she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Why is that funny?’

‘I believe you, Lille Venn,’ said Merroc, his laugh becoming nothing more than a smile. ‘If anybody could make that journey, it would be you.’ His words mollified the little girl and the flash of anger left her eyes. She was like her mother to look at, that much was true. But her bearing, manner and attitude were Merroc’s through and through.

He loved her for that alone.

Together, the two of them watched the winds of magic and the virulent display of colour in a companionable silence for several long minutes. Eventually, the girl spoke and this time it was not the petulant voice of a child, but the self-assured tone of a young woman who knew what she wanted.

‘I want to fight with my people tomorrow,’ she said, tapping Merroc on the shoulder as an indication that she wanted to be lifted down. Within the tribe, it was not unusual for a child of her age to fight. But Valkia, despite her ferocity, was female. It was customary to refrain from allowing any female child of the tribe to enter battle without having produced at least one live offspring.

‘Lille Venn, you know that I cannot allow this thing you ask.’

‘I am not asking you, Papa. I am telling you what I want.’ He indulged her outrageously, but then he always had. He could not help himself. She was utterly charming when she wanted to be and a hard-hearted little bitch the rest of the time. But in this matter, he could not forsake hundreds of years of tradition.

‘I forbid it.’

‘I defy you.’ It was an old game of theirs, one which she could maintain far longer than he could. He would deny her something and she would taunt him until a smile would cross his face and he would give in to her piping demands. But this… was unthinkable.

‘You will not.’ There was a hard tone in her father’s voice that Valkia had never heard before and it shocked her to silence. She had rarely seen her father the chieftain. She was used to Merroc as being just her father. The thought that he would deny her what she wanted brought a pout to her lips. Merroc hunkered down until his eyes were level with hers.

‘You are my only child,’ he said. ‘If I were to take you into battle tomorrow, it would be inviting your death. You have to grow and bear a grandchild before you can take the field of battle.’ He felt briefly awkward discussing this with her; her eyes were like little emeralds, hard and green, and bored into him. ‘Your mother bore you when she had known fourteen summers. You have yet to reach eleven. Do not be so quick to wish for your death, Valkia, for it will come. It comes to us all in time.’

He stood and tucked his long, dark hair which was shot through with threads of silvery-grey, behind one ear. He looked up at the aurora. ‘I can’t give you what you want, my daughter, not this time. You cannot fight. I will not lose you to those animals. You are too precious to me and to the future of our people.’

She looked up at Merroc and considered him. He was tall and broad of shoulder, his well-muscled body made larger by the addition of the furs that he wore as proof against the northern cold. He seemed very old to her, although he was perhaps only twenty-five years of age. If you lived to see thirty summers, the people of the Schwarzvolf considered you ancient.

His face, whilst too battle-scarred to ever be called handsome, was nonetheless proud and arrogant. There was an undeniable purity in his appearance that told of his good stock. The reigning family had held the chieftain’s cape for seven generations, the mantle passed from father to son. Merroc’s marriage to her mother had produced only two living children: Valkia and her sister Anya, who had died before the first year of her life was out. Three sons had been born to Merroc and his wife and none had been born with breath in their lungs. Merroc tried to deny the whispers, but he had come to believe them over time.

He was cursed.

‘I see.’ Valkia’s two words were spoken through pursed lips and he looked down at her fierce, determined little face. He forced the smile from his lips and reached down to take her chin in his hand.

‘I cannot allow you to take up arms and fight in the battle tomorrow, my daughter,’ he said. ‘But I will speak to the Circle this night. They may permit you to take up a shield and join the ranks of the shield maidens.’ She jerked her face free and looked as though she would argue, but Merroc caught her again. ‘Listen to me, Valkia. I don’t care how much fuss you make. You will understand that this is the way it must be or I will beat it into you. I cannot buck the traditions of our people for your childish whims.’

‘I am not a child.’

‘Then stop acting like one.’ She looked crushed and he softened slightly in his attack. ‘I will do what I can, but I make no promises. Come now. The Circle meets soon and I have tarried too long here.’

‘You promise you will speak to them?’ Reluctantly, the little girl relented and slid her hand into her father’s bigger one.

‘When have I ever disappointed you, Lille Venn?’

She had no reply she could give to that, only a cold, penetrating stare which was far too old for her and which left him feeling very uncomfortable.

The Circle was a group of seven tribal elders and leaders. As the tribe’s chieftain, Merroc sat at its head but frequently felt that his words went unheeded. He had come to the mantle at a young age, barely sixteen, and they had never stopped treating him like a youth.

They met in Merroc’s semi-permanent dwelling; a yurt made from animal hides that had spent long hours tanning in the sun. They were stretched across rigid poles and treated with animal fat that acted as proof against the cold and the moisture. A small opening at the top funnelled the smoke from the fire in its centre. The remains of a deer trapped a day or two before turned on a spit over it and the Circle frequently reached up to hack a slice from the animal and gorge noisily upon it.

The conversation had largely been strangely optimistic, given the fact they knew the dawn would bring either success or eradication. None of the Schwarzvolf were given over to pessimism before battle. If they did not believe they would win through, then they would not. It was quite simple.

‘They will strike at first light.’

The words came from Ammon and all eyes swivelled towards him. The tribe’s Warspeaker, he was only a year or so younger than Merroc and the closest that the chieftain had to a true friend. He had guided them through seemingly endless battles against their most rapacious enemies. The tribe who had so hampered them for months had never been granted the honour of being recognised by a name. The warriors of the Schwarzvolf called their enemies ‘they’ or ‘them’. To give them a name was to ascribe something humane to them. And they were anything but.

The Schwarzvolf were widely considered one of the most ferocious tribes in the north lands and with good reason. Tenacious and fearless, their young warriors had been known to fight with limbs severed or their intestines held in by their shield hand. But they... they were of a different ilk. They liked to take prisoners, something which the Schwarzvolf found strange. They harboured a belief that if something was too weak to be free then it was too weak to live. Torture, sometimes followed by slavery, would follow and to Merroc and his people, the concession of freedom was not something they subscribed to.

Ammon got to his feet and moved to the flap of the animal skin tent. He gave a piercing whistle into the darkness and a lithe, slender figure slid from the shadows and entered Merroc’s tent.

‘My chieftain.’ The young man inclined his head with respect in Merroc’s direction. Radek, his name was. He was one of the most shrewd, canny warriors in the tribe and his ability to hunt and scout was so astute that there were occasionally whispers that he must have made particularly dark pacts with the gods to acquire such skill. Fleet of foot and deadly with his bow, he had risen to the position of Pathfinder with alacrity. He was, Merroc recalled, Ammon’s nephew.

‘Radek. What news from beyond the camp? What do we have on our side for tomorrow’s battle?’

‘We have the land with us, but little else. Their numbers equal ours, if not exceed them.’ The scout accepted a cup of wine, mulled and heated in a cauldron that hung over the fire. Not really strong enough to intoxicate, the wine was nonetheless welcome and he took a long sip from it, savouring the flavour. It was sweetened and given its pungent aroma by a mixture of spices, and the berries which made its base were in plentiful supply at this time of the year.

Radek set down the wooden cup and looked at Merroc. A slight smile played on his lips. There was a faint shadow of downy fluff on his chin. He was remarkably young to have come so far. The thought flickered through Merroc’s mind but he almost immediately chided himself. Just because Radek was young was no reason to judge his competencies. ‘There are two things we have that they do not, however. I got as close as I could to their camp earlier tonight.’

‘And those are...?’ Merroc left it hanging and reached forward to flense another slice of venison from the deer. He chewed on the meat, its juices dribbling down his chin and slicking his beard.

‘We have more shields than they do. We can hold our lines far longer.’

Merroc nodded. ‘The line will hold. This is a good start. The other?’

Radek’s faint smile became an impish grin. ‘Sobriety, my chieftain. They are drinking heavily, perhaps as a way to numb the cold in their bones. They are not used to being this far north. Come the dawn, they will be suffering for it.’ This generated a ripple of laughter through the yurt and Merroc nodded, wiping grease from his face.

‘This is excellent,’ he rumbled. ‘None of our warriors will be drinking this night. Tomorrow, when we have watered the earth with their blood... then we will drink.’ The ripple of laughter became a combined grunt of approval. Merroc turned his head to the right. ‘Godspeaker?’

The man sitting at the chieftain’s right hand had been called Fydor at birth, but in this council, he wore the name Godspeaker. The tribe’s shaman and doctor, his knowledge and gift of foresight were deeply revered and respected. Just as Ammon the Warspeaker sat at the chieftain’s left hand, so the Godspeaker took the trusted position on the right.

‘I am yet to read the omens,’ he replied. The Godspeaker was the oldest man currently living within the tribe. He had seen no fewer than forty summers and some whispered he had seen sixty. The hand that reached out to accept a cup of mulled wine was darkly tanned and liver spotted. ‘I will do so shortly.’ His eyes, dark and depthless in his ancient face, bored through Merroc in much the same way that Valkia’s had a few short hours before.

‘You have a question for the Circle,’ observed the Godspeaker. Merroc wound a lock of his beard around one finger and let out an exasperated sigh. There was never any doubt that Fydor was exceptionally gifted. Whether with premonition or the simple art of understanding body language and distraction didn’t matter.

‘Aye,’ replied the chieftain. ‘It is a small thing. I was waiting for a suitable time.’

‘Now is as good a time as any.’ The Godspeaker opened out his hands, palms spread. ‘Speak, chieftain.’

Merroc shifted slightly uncomfortably, uncrossing his legs and re-crossing them. The Circle sat comfortably amidst a number of cushions scattered on the floor. He took up his cup and sipped the wine. As he did so he gathered his thoughts carefully, knowing that how he phrased the next sentence could be instrumental in its success or otherwise.

‘It is not a question,’ he said in due course. ‘My daughter wishes to take her place in the battle tomorrow,’ he said and there was such challenge in his voice that, for a moment, he wondered if he had been too aggressive with it. ‘And I have agreed that she can take her mother’s place as a shield maiden.’

‘You are asking us for our approval?’

‘No, Warspeaker.’ Merroc shifted his gaze to Ammon. ‘I am telling you.’

‘It is unseemly. She is too young. Far too young. She has yet to produce an heir. If she were to fall...’

‘If she falls, then I will take another woman of the Schwarzvolf to wife.’ When Valkia’s mother had died, Merroc had been grief-stricken enough to say that he would not re-marry. The promise he made here was spontaneous and he almost immediately knew regret because it sparked the conversation he had avoided for nearly a year.

‘You know the Circle’s views on this matter, chieftain. We have told you that we feel the time is right for you to take another woman to wife anyway. You need to produce an heir. If you do not and you should die, then there will be great upheaval amid our people.’ It was no exaggeration on his part. Should the line of the chieftain fail, there would be a fight for the mantle that would potentially halve their number. ‘You do not surely wish to impart such a legacy to your people?’ The Godspeaker was calm and his voice measured. Merroc recognised the spark in the older man’s eyes and felt the defiance that had so marked his leadership of the Schwarzvolf bubble to the surface.

‘I already have an heir.’ Merroc’s voice was as fierce and proud as Valkia’s had been when she had made the suggestion in the first place. ‘She will take her place as the leader of our people when the time is right.’

‘Pretenders to your position will kill her before the day she takes up the mantle.’

‘She will likely kill them first.’ Merroc was surprised at how much he believed the words he was saying. His dark-haired daughter was barely ten years old and yet she had already demonstrated great tenacity and courage.

But she was a child still and more – she was female. There had been female leaders of the tribe over the years but every one of them had been assassinated within days, sometimes within hours, of taking their place. Equality was one thing and the Schwarzvolf would gladly fight with their women at their side. But to defer to their command was to call into question centuries of belief and structure.

The odds were not in Valkia’s favour. Not for the first time since she had torn her way into the world, Merroc felt a pang of sorrow for the hardships she must inevitably endure.

An uncomfortable silence had descended on the tent, broken eventually by the chieftain. None of those present had protested and he took that as his cue. ‘Then it is agreed. Valkia may take the field of battle tomorrow.’

A ripple of assent passed across the assemblage. The only man present whose eyes met those of the chieftain’s directly were those of Radek the young scout. Merroc was not sure whether the expression he saw there was a good thing or not, but he did not dwell upon it. He didn’t need the approval of the young. He was the tribe’s chieftain.

The Warspeaker’s prediction had been reasonably accurate bar a single detail. The enemy struck just before dawn rather than at first light. They launched their attack whilst the erratic and forbidding bale-moon was still low in the sky, taking its presence and the absence of its pale cousin as a good battle omen. Fiery gold stained the horizon, tarnishing the sickly green light and cutting shafts of grey which threaded through the velvet night. There was a biting sharpness in the air that carried the threat of more snowfall.

Their early attack earned them no advantage however. The warriors of the Schwarzvolf had been prepared for what felt to one young girl hours already.

Valkia had slept poorly the previous night. She had dozed fitfully whilst waiting for her father’s return from the Circle and when he had ducked his head to enter their yurt, she had sat bolt upright and fixed him with her disturbingly intense stare.

To learn that she was able to take the field of battle had sent a thrill through her. She had never experienced such a feeling before; a surge of adrenaline that set her stomach to churning. She would never have acknowledged that such a sensation was akin to fear because the people of the Schwarzvolf did not know fear; only recognising it as a weakness that needed to be overcome.

Across her right arm was strapped a huge, bronze-shod round shield that was almost as tall when resting against the ground as Valkia herself was. Her left hand remained free, giving her the ability to bear the shield with both hands should it be required. Although she was only a child, she was not so small that she was completely lost in the shield line. To either side of her were women of the tribe she knew by face but not name. They had merely glanced down at the small girl and shown her how to hold the shield correctly.

She wore a thick leather jerkin that was several sizes too large for her but which had been cinched in at the waist with a belt. It was long enough that it came below her knees and there was no flesh visible between the edge of the tunic and the tops of her leather boots. Her tangle of dark curls was slicked back from her face by rendered animal fat and pale woad, in the same style as all the warriors of the tribe. A warrior’s queue, or ponytail, would give an enemy a potential handhold and whilst the fat stank, even in the chill of the morning, it was better by far than having your head removed from your shoulders whilst your enemy held on tightly.

Valkia wrinkled her nose at the smell of the grease on her hair, but none of the others were showing any sort of discomfort so she tried not to let them see. She shifted position slightly, the movement earning reproachful looks from the women either side to her.

‘Keep still,’ the one on her right snapped, not unkindly. ‘Do not fidget. Remain as still and straight as you can manage. If the enemy see a weakness in the shield line, they will exploit it.’

Valkia would normally have snapped back, but instead she nodded, appreciating that the words were given as advice and not admonishment. The woman smiled briefly and reached down with her free left hand to squeeze Valkia’s shoulder. The girl looked up, made slightly bolder by the display of camaraderie.

‘What’s your name?’ The taller woman, seemingly not much older than Valkia herself, seemed surprised by the question.

‘Kata,’ she replied, returning her gaze to the fore. Although they had been prepared for a while, there was still no sign of the enemy. ‘And you are Valkia, chieftain’s daughter. It would seem that you are finally ready for your first taste of battle.’ She looked back down again and the smile was back. ‘It is my first battle, too. When we return victorious, perhaps we can regale one another with stories of our bravery.’

‘I would like that.’

‘So would I,’ Kata replied. She did not need to expand on the fact that she would also like the opportunity to present herself before the chieftain. The entire tribe had gossiped about his need for another woman since the death of his wife and Kata was unwed and of child-bearing age.

There was the sound of approaching running feet and Radek, along with several of the other scouts, emerged from the edge of the thin forest that was the natural border between the Schwarzvolf and their encroaching enemy. The young scout was in a state of dishevelment but still held himself with pride.

‘They are coming,’ was all he said.

‘Then we take the fight to them,’ cried the Warspeaker. ‘We do not stand and let our enemies break upon us!’

A roar of agreement came from the skirmish warriors and the women of the shield line and Valkia raised her own piping voice along with theirs, caught in the thrill of it all. Soon, she would taste war.

Soon, the course of history would change.

First contact came far sooner than Valkia could ever have imagined and for a few heart-racing seconds she wondered if she would live to see her father again. The fore shield line, the more experienced women and younger warriors who bore weapons as well as shields, absorbed the initial impact. Numbering at least a hundred, the enemy tribe were largely armed with the axes so favoured by the people of the north and they hacked repeatedly into wooden shields sending splinters flying in all directions.

The air was filled with the screams and shouts of more people than the little girl had ever seen gathered in one place. It was a riotous clash of sound, sight and smell and she could barely take any of it in. Her world seemed almost to shrink until there was only her and those who stood either side of her.

She tasted a moment of abject terror as she stared around what was rapidly becoming a battlefield. She took in the sights of people she knew wading into the attackers, their own weapons flailing and hacking. Her eyes sought out her father, the bloody red sigil of the Schwarzvolf on his jerkin. The other warriors wore symbols too; but none wore the red of the chieftain’s house.

Merroc was already in the thick of battle, having burst from the shield line with the others and utilised the jarring shock of impact to their advantage. His furs were splattered with blood and what little of his face could be seen behind the leather helm that covered most of his head was similarly stained. The two-handed battle-axe that he wielded with such aplomb swung slowly, decapitating and dismembering wherever it went.

There was so much blood. It ran like a bloody river, saturating the ground underfoot and she slid several times. So much blood. So much death. Everywhere there was the smell of copper as it stained the snow, dirty and slushy from the trudging of hundreds of feet. The scent of it tickled the child’s nostrils and she found herself inhaling deeply rather than trying to avoid it.

Something was fired deep inside her soul as she breathed in. This was what she had been born into, this ceaseless violence and horror. This was her birthright. If only she could take up arms and step into the breaches that were appearing in the battle line as warriors fell, dead or injured...

‘Step!’

The order came from somewhere to the left and Valkia was jarred into alertness once again. Her hold on the shield slipped a little and she groped to catch it again, her small hands tightening around the grip. She found herself moving forward with the rest of the line, her shorter legs meaning she had to half jog to keep up.

‘Step!’

Another shouted order and Valkia moved forward. She looked up at Kata and saw the grim determination on her new friend’s face. Without realising it, she automatically mimicked the expression. The shield line moved forward, closer to the fray, and Valkia felt once again that strange mix of thrill and fear. A few more feet and the line would be close enough to engage and protect the warriors.

Her attention was caught yet again by the flash of her father’s sigil and she turned her head. If she strained hard enough, she could make out broken words. Using her own intelligence and understanding, she filled in the gaps as best she could. He was bellowing at the Warspeaker. They were both shouting at the top of their voices in order to be heard over the cacophony that surrounded them. Ammon was, like her father, covered from head to foot in the blood of the enemy and his face was grim.

‘...barely making an impact on their numbers, my chieftain.’

‘We need to keep... They will fall eventually. They’re undisciplined.’ Merroc indicated around himself, pointing and shouting instructions that Valkia could not fathom. The noise was overpowering, the press of bodies claustrophobic. Daylight was in evidence; a dull, heavy light that was choked with leaden, snow-filled clouds and which would later be filled with the greasy smoke of funeral pyres. There would be no bright sunlight this day.

A sudden dip in the noise level allowed Valkia to catch the tail end of her father’s words.

‘Their leader is in the middle of the attacking warriors. He is surrounded on all sides by his strongest and best. If we chew their force from the sides, then we can get to him. And I want him brought alive.’

‘As my chieftain commands.’ Ammon inclined his head.

Valkia didn’t understand strategy, but her father’s suggestion struck her as remarkably shrewd. The enemy were definitely all facing forwards; even those at the very back – at least as far back as her reduced height would allow her to see – were intent on ploughing through the solid line of the Schwarzvolf.

‘Radek!’ The Warspeaker turned from his chieftain and sought the head scout. He bade the youth carry the message to the outlying warriors and with a sharp nod of his head, the scout set off at a run.

Valkia watched him go and turned her head to meet the gaze of her father. Merroc gave her a tight smile and she felt immediately certain that they would win this battle. There was no way her father, such a great man, could lose to a rabble like this.

She was proved, over the course of the next hour or so, to be quite right. As soon as the skirmish began to break up, as the enemy were forced to meet the new challenges from either side, the rival tribe’s already decidedly scrappy line began to completely lose cohesion. Once that happened, it became easy for the Schwarzvolf fighters to pick them off in droves. The shield line, of which Valkia was a part, was ordered to break and do what they could to aid the slaughter.

Some began to flee, many being cut down before they even made it as far as the woods through which they had marched, but most were killed and left where they fell. Nobody told Valkia that she must not take part in this massacre and as such she took up a dagger dropped by one of the fallen and threw herself into what remained of the fray. Her blade hamstrung several of the enemy and their last sight before they toppled to the ground was that of a dark-haired devil child darting away from them. In her wake came death. Always death, brought swiftly and without mercy by a warrior of the Schwarzvolf. Valkia’s passage did not go unnoticed. On the far right flank, her father watched his daughter and felt great pride in her actions. He moved with alacrity to follow her and joined her. He darted from enemy to enemy, the broad smile of his axe lopping the heads and limbs from enemies with lethal precision.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the noise began to die down as the numbers thinned to a handful. Some had surrendered and they would be judged for suitability for auxiliary warriors. The tribe may not have taken slaves, but they had no compunction when it came to offering a place within their number for those of worth. The females amongst the enemy who had been spared death would be used for breeding. Valkia knew this and although was still somewhat ignorant of the true hardships of the tribal existence, often wondered if death was not a preferable option. The Schwarzvolf would head to the camps of their fallen enemy and claim any breeding women and children for their own. In this way, the tribe expanded.

‘It is over, Valkia.’ Her father stood before her and reached out his hand to take the dagger from her. ‘There is but one thing left to do. Come with me.’

With obvious reluctance, the child handed over the dagger and slid her hand into that of the big warrior. He led her through the fallen, past the dead and the dying.

Valkia was slowly regaining her awareness of the here and now. As well as the corpses of the enemy, there were bodies of her own people. She looked around anxiously for Kata but did not see her. She found herself hoping that her new friend was not dead.

Merroc led Valkia to a group of people who were gathered in an approximate circle around a single man. As big as Merroc and knotted with rangy muscle, this other man was the leader of the enemy. Valkia knew this even before Merroc could tell her. He looked up at their approach. He was lying on his side, his armour in tatters and his body drenched in gore. Something resembling a stylised skull had been crudely branded onto his chest. It was a strange symbol and it appeared to writhe and change even as she stared at it. She looked away, realising that her eyes ached if she attempted to look at it for too long. A great gash in the man’s thigh pumped arterial blood into the ground beneath him. It was more than evident that he was not going to survive.

A string of harsh syllables grated from his lips at Merroc but Valkia could not understand him. The words he spoke were in a language she had never heard and she looked between the dying man and her father. Merroc held himself with even more pride than he usually did and didn’t even flinch when the man on the ground drew back his head, hawking a gobbet of bloody phlegm at the chieftain.

‘A barbarian of the worst kind, my daughter,’ said Merroc and he turned to Ammon, holding out his hand. Ammon put a finely carved spear into it, which Merroc angled thoughtfully at the warrior on the ground. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No. This kill belongs to you, Valkia. It was your strike to his leg that felled him and the honour of his slaughter is yours.’

Without another word, he handed her the spear. It was bigger than she was and it felt awkward to hold. She felt the weight of expectation on her shoulders and knew, without understanding how, that her actions in the next few moments would somehow define her very future.

The enemy lying at her feet swivelled his gaze from Merroc to the child and the pain and hatred on his face slowly became a sneer. It was all the incentive Valkia needed. How dare this creature treat her with anything less than the respect due to the daughter of the chieftain of the Schwarzvolf? How dare he look at her as though she was beneath his interest?

How dare he?

When the spear slid into his chest, Valkia savoured the sensation of it slipping into his heart. A gout of blood spewed forth from the barbarian’s mouth with projectile force, covering the little girl. But she did not even flinch. Instead, she put her entire weight behind the spear, driving it ever deeper into her enemy’s chest. She twisted the spearhead viciously, opening up the wound, and only released the pressure when she felt it drive through his back and into the soft earth beneath.

The warrior gave several violent spasms and choked up a last mouthful of blood before he died, his eyes staring glassily into space. Valkia returned his earlier gesture and spat on his corpse.

From his vantage point, Merroc watched with pride that could barely be contained. It didn’t matter that she was not a son. His daughter had more than proved her mettle here on the field of battle. She was a warrior at heart and she would rise to greatness. Of that he was sure.

TWO

AMBITION

The seasons turned as they always had since time began. Winter melted into spring, became the temperate summer of the north and finally, following the autumn rains, settled back into the near-constant snow and ice of the long winter.

They turned in this way for years and the child Valkia grew into foal-limbed, awkward adolescence and then through to young womanhood. She saw eight summers from the day she had driven that spear into the chest of the enemy chieftain, and in that time she had grown in ways far more than the physical.

It was the physical changes that gave her the most difficulty, however. From the age of fourteen, she had been pressed to find a suitable mate amongst her people and she had resisted with a stubborn pride that infuriated Merroc. In time, none of the men of the tribe even made the effort to court her favours.

The girl was far from unattractive; indeed she was beyond simply pretty and had stepped across the threshold into the realms of stunningly beautiful. There was a coldness to her beauty though; her skin remained alabaster pale despite the life outside and it gave her a marble chill that many men yearned to warm.

When she had turned thirteen and her budding womanhood had become apparent, her father announced that his daughter was ripe for marriage. The initial rush of interest in this was swiftly curtailed by Valkia herself. The little wildcat had soured the best intentions of her would-be suitors with her foul mouth and even more improper attitude. More than one of the young tribesmen who had fancied their chances with her had left the tent of the chieftain in tears of pain, clutching at the most delicate parts of their anatomy. She may have been barely out of childhood, but Valkia had an understanding of male physiology that was unsurpassed.

And so Merroc had let it slide. She would grow up eventually, he was advised. But still he remembered the age-old belief that his line was cursed. He feared that the line of his forefathers would end with him. After two years of her eligibility had passed and she had not borne him grandchildren, Merroc finally took the decision to remarry.

With only a little pressure from his daughter, he had considered and eventually accepted the young woman Kata into his hearth. She and Valkia had remained friends for many years, something that both of them found difficult at times. Where Valkia was feisty and masculine, Kata was quiet, subservient and as feminine as the hardships of life amongst the Schwarzvolf allowed her to be.

She had borne him two more children in the past six years, both girls and was presently heavily pregnant with a third. Merroc had grown to love Kata deeply and was relieved that Valkia was so friendly with her. But his eldest daughter gave him cause for concern. She encouraged the two little girls, her half-sisters, to run wild around the camp in much the way she had done herself.

They argued frequently over such unbecoming behaviour. Such arguments always ended the same way: Valkia would sneer at her father and stalk from their yurt to join the young warriors of the tribe in their training. More than once she had also joined them in their drinking contests and could match them drink for drink.

She was a problem child, but in time Merroc accepted her for who she was. It was difficult not to when she proved herself on the field of battle over and over again. Wherever the fighting was at its thickest, there she would be. Valkia had no fear of death and indeed was more inclined to court its dark embrace than that of any of the young men of the tribe.

The Schwarzvolf scraped out a harsh existence in the winter months, living off what little game could be hunted in the frozen forests and vast open tracts of snow and ice. They supplemented this meagre diet with dried meat taken from kills in the spring and summer months. They ate dried fruit, and the milk of their goats was the only thing that kept most of them, particularly the young, from death by malnutrition. Although a hardy people, disease still reared its head on occasion. Theirs was a hard life, but with the turning of winter to spring came the annual journey and a cause for celebration.

Every year, when the melt came, the Schwarzvolf would break camp, dismantling their yurts with great care. They would be put onto the back of handcarts ready for transportation to the Vale.

Valkia had always loved the journey to the Vale, demonstrating a surprising love of natural aesthetic and an eye for nature that had startled her father the first time he had realised it. To see his overly-masculine daughter making a sidetrack from the main road to pick flowers and herbs was surprisingly satisfying. He learned in time that Valkia had taken it upon herself to learn the ways of the tribe’s healers.

This year, the journey was different. This year, Merroc had cause for great joy. Kata had borne him his first son. Edan had been born on the night before the Schwarzvolf began the trip to the Vale and the Godspeaker had waxed lyrical about the auspicious nature of such timing.

Kata was a strong woman and there was no call to delay the journey, but Merroc insisted that she travel in one of the carts until she was strong enough to walk by herself. She had borne him three fine children and was still young enough to bear him more. He dared to believe that perhaps the Trickster had tired of his curse and given him the reward that he had worked so hard to achieve.

It was not the first foolish thought that the chieftain had entertained in his thirty-two years of life, and it would not be the last.

For her part, Valkia was indifferent to the arrival of a brother in her life. Whilst the people of the Schwarzvolf celebrated late into the night, she set herself apart from them, a brooding expression on her exquisite face. A brother meant that the line of succession was assured. It also meant that she would be passed over in favour of Edan. Conflicting emotions raged within her. He was her brother; a part of her in a way she could never hope to explain. He was Kata’s son and over the years, Valkia had come to love Kata as the mother she had never known.

He was just a baby. It would not take much to snuff out the weak, guttering flame of his existence. The thought came unbidden from nowhere and Valkia squeezed her eyes shut, deeply ashamed of it.

But yet...

‘No!’ She spoke the word aloud and pinched the skin on the back of her arm until it hurt. It had always been her preferred method of regaining her senses; a trick taught to her on the battlefield by the long-dead Ammon. The previous Warspeaker had fallen in battle five years ago during a skirmish that had come unannounced.

‘Are you speaking to yourself again?’

The voice came from behind her and she started. Radek, the gods damn him, could walk silently when he so chose. Of all the young men in the tribe who had courted her affections, Radek had been conspicuous by his absence. It had almost infuriated Valkia. Did he think her so ugly and unimportant that he would not do as the others had done? Did he not yearn to lay his heart at her feet?

‘It is none of your business, Warspeaker.’ He had taken the position with Merroc’s blessing following Ammon’s death and although Valkia had outwardly shown displeasure at the decision, she knew that Radek had been the perfect choice. More, Radek had taken it upon himself to offer her training with the bow, generally the weapon of choice for hunting. In times of war, the tribe preferred closer combat. He also gave her expert tuition in the use of the short, stabbing javelin sometimes wielded by the more experienced shield maidens. The bow had not suited her, but she had become extraordinarily proficient with the spear.

‘We are not in council, Valkia. I have a name.’

‘Then it is still none of your business, Radek.’ She pulled her long legs into her chest and turned her face away from him. Any other man would have read that as his cue to leave, but Radek remained. The hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth. He was only five years older than she was and had grown into a fine warrior. With the onset of adulthood, his wiry frame had become more muscled and his physique had developed until his days as a scout were behind him.

Valkia admired Radek, although she would never have openly said so. In the secret, put-away part of her psyche, she would even have admitted that she found him attractive, despite the fact that the Warspeaker was far from physically desirable.

He had left the fresh-faced boy behind after injuries sustained in battle had more or less removed the right-hand side of his face. A mass of scar tissue decorated his cheek and neck, drawing his face into a perpetual scowl. But he was strong and fearless and these were desirable qualities in a mate. His patience with her as she had learned the art of warfare had been seemingly endless and he encouraged her to wilder and wilder acts of daring and courage.

‘Your welfare is always my business, chieftain’s daughter,’ said the Warspeaker and he dropped down onto the grass beside her. She sniffed as haughtily as she could manage and shuffled herself further down the bank. ‘Congratulations on the birth of your little brother.’

‘I had nothing to do with it,’ she replied archly. ‘All the hard work was done by Kata. I believe my father may have had something to do with it for a few seconds several months ago.’ She shrugged one slender shoulder in indifference and turned her head to glance at Radek. Her eyes were as dark as her hair; so deep green that they were almost black and her pupils were large. Some people found Valkia’s dark eyes unsettling, but the Warspeaker found them fascinating. There was so much going on inside the head of this young woman. From time to time, there would be a crack in their mirror-like surface, allowing him the briefest of glimpses to the heart that beat beneath the cool exterior. But they were rare and if he felt compelled to act on those moments of opportunity, he never did so.

For all their savagery and barbaric methods in war, the Schwarzvolf were respectful to one another, and Radek would never have considered suggesting any sort of feelings for Valkia if he did not expect it to be returned in kind. They had an awkward kind of friendship that was remarkably one-sided on his part and for now, at least, he was content with that arrangement.

‘He will become chieftain when my father dies,’ she observed and there was a note of ice in her tone. Radek noted it and frowned.

‘Jealousy, Valkia? You know that is the way it must be.’

‘My father is old.’ She turned her head away from him again. ‘He will die soon.’ Matter of fact though it may have been, Radek had to concede that there was a certain truth in her words. Merroc was not as fit as he had used to be, and of late he had shown signs of slowing down. If age and infirmity did not take him, then he would be too slow on the battlefield. ‘Edan is just a baby. He cannot lead our people in that event. You know that it should be me, Radek.’

‘Is this what is bothering you, Valkia? Are you still clinging to this dream of leading the Schwarzvolf? I thought you gave that ambition up long ago. You are a warrior of your people now and none dispute your ability. But you are not and never will be a leader of men.’

‘Do not presume to speak to me of such things, Warspeaker. What do you know of my dreams?’ She turned around then and the full impact of her beauty struck Radek in a way it never had before. A fine-boned, almost elfin, face in which those dark eyes were the drawing feature, he had somehow missed the moment when little Valkia had become a woman. Her wild tangle of dark curls fell loosely down her back, coming to a tapered point at her narrow waist. She wore a simple tunic and leather breeches, belted in the middle; it did nothing at all to hide her all-too-feminine curves.

She was both desirable and untouchable. The two were a heady concoction that set Radek’s senses to spinning.

‘I only know of your dreams what you tell me and what I can work out for myself,’ he replied, his eyes not leaving hers. He caught his breath as she smiled slowly.

‘Tell me what you believe my dreams are, Radek. I am interested in what you think you know about me.’

If he was ever going to get an open invitation to explore more of the woman behind the warrior, this was his chance. But Radek determined then and there that he would not risk their friendship by putting his heart on the line. What he was not to know was that Valkia had already set hers at his feet. It would be the only time in her entire life that she would know what it was to truly love another person.

He considered her for a few moments, then lay back on the grass, staring up into the night sky. Winter had not yet truly fled, but the warmth of spring was in the air and he breathed it in, relishing its pure freshness. The constellations in the heavens above were simply indistinguishable patterns as the sky rearranged itself for the coming season. Everything was in flux at this moment, on this portent-laden night, and Radek felt the weight of future events on his shoulders.

‘You yearn to lead the Schwarzvolf,’ he said in time and she said nothing, merely watching him closely. ‘You know that everyone in the tribe will be set against you from the moment you formally stake your claim.’

‘Everyone? Even you, Warspeaker? And there I was thinking you were my friend and my ally.’

He turned his head sideways to consider her. ‘I am both of those things, Lille Venn,’ he said, absently using the pet name that her father had long since stopped using. It brought a bloom of red to her cheeks, a maidenly flush that was both becoming and extraordinarily out of place on a face that was usually only reddened by the visceral stains of war. ‘But you ask too much to expect me to support you in this.’

‘If Edan were to die...’ Radek opened his mouth to forestall her comment, but she ploughed on regardless. ‘If he were to be taken by illness, or captured by enemy warriors, then the line of succession would have to pass back to me.’

Radek felt a cold chill run through him. He believed that Valkia was not so cruel that she would slaughter an innocent child. At least until she had spoken of such a thing in that strangely indifferent tone, he had thought so. His eyes were held by her gaze and he could not look away. He, the Warspeaker of the Schwarzvolf, a man who had faced countless terrors, could not turn his head away from a woman.

‘Indulge me, Radek.’

‘I suppose... yes. That would be the case,’ he acknowledged. ‘But your father will stop at nothing to protect your brother.’ He hoped to inject a warning into that sentence, hoped that Valkia would not do anything foolish. ‘At nothing, Valkia. Do you understand me?’

‘Of course I understand you, I am not some simpleton.’ She sniffed haughtily. ‘Of course, I would not wish any harm on the infant, but these are things that need to be considered.’

Was she speaking the truth with those glib words? Radek could not tell. She tipped her head to one side and wound a lock of dark hair around one finger. She smiled coquettishly at Radek and in that moment he was hopelessly, irrevocably hers. When she spoke again, she did so with such charm and guile that he would have sacrificed the other side of his face just to hear her speak to him in that tone again.

‘You would be by my side if I had to fight for my rightful leadership of the tribe, wouldn’t you, Radek?’ She lowered her eyes demurely and peeked out at him from beneath long, sooty lashes. And he was lost.

Of course he would be by her side. He was a fool to have ever thought otherwise. A strange sense of wonder came over him as he allowed the young woman to manipulate him. For her part, she had no idea that she had already mastered the art of engaging her feminine charms to achieve her own ends.

‘I pledge myself to serve you heart and soul, Valkia,’ he said, drawing himself up to kneel before her. The way he had given himself over to her so wholly, just with a flutter of her eyelashes sent a thrill of power through her. She had a unique gift to bring to the potential problem of her future birthright, and she swore to herself there and then that she would never be afraid to use it. ‘When your call comes, I will be there.’

‘Yes,’ she said and absently reached over to pat his cheek. ‘Yes. I believe you will be.’

The trip to the Vale was singularly uneventful. In years gone by, the Schwarzvolf had frequently encountered other tribes; some hostile, others benign. There had even been occasions when the smaller tribes, struck down by illness or hunger, had turned themselves over to Merroc’s keeping. The Schwarzvolf was now the largest tribe in the north and growing all the time.

At times, the power this gave Merroc was a curse as well as a blessing. He was a man of action, not of administration. It was not his place to consider the allocation of provisions across the people. For the most part, the people of the Schwarzvolf were left to fend for themselves and this in itself led to scuffles and disagreements.

But this year, the land had provided well. There were barrels of pickled fish and plenty of dried meat. The spring brought forth an abundance of new life in the forests and fresh game was easy to acquire. Valkia joined with the hunters daily, enjoying the thrill of the chase and engaging in games of one-upmanship with the other warriors of the tribe to see whose haul was the greatest, or who had penned down the largest deer. Everything was good for the Schwarzvolf. Everything was too good.

Despite his joy at the birth of his first son, Merroc heeded the words carried to him by the Godspeaker, whose dour prediction ultimately bore fruit.

The gods, he had said, give with one hand and take with the other.

From time to time, infants were born with physical defects. Sometimes these were minor and barely noticeable. Perhaps one ear was slightly smaller than the other or skin bore unsightly birthmarks. The majority of these babies were accepted into the tribe without question and though they had to bear bullying as they grew up, they thrived. Some bore the mark of the gods on their flesh however, twisted, mewling things with bestial faces and thrashing limbs.

It was the way of the Schwarzvolf to abandon these children to their fate in the woodlands. They were never slaughtered, as to murder a child of the god-touched was to invite the wrath of the divine. Alone in the wilderness they would either die, exposed to the elements or attacked by wild animals, or they would live; foundlings who were raised amongst one of the lesser tribes. Whatever became of them, it was no longer the problem of the Schwarzvolf.

More and more babies were being stillborn or stricken down with crippling defects and whilst some mothers tried their hardest to conceal a club foot, or additional digits, some mutations were harder to hide. By the time they reached the Vale, ten children had been born into the tribe – including Merroc’s own son – and seven had been left behind. Two of the mothers, prime breeding stock, had died from the rigours of difficult childbirth and four more died during pregnancy. A sombre trail of funeral pyres marked the Schwarzvolf’s passage across the plains, taking with them most of their spare wood, trailing greasy smoke into the clear spring skies.

It did little to ease Merroc’s eternal conviction that he was somehow cursed and he sat and bemoaned his poor luck to his wife. Kata, an eternally practical woman who juggled the demands of two small children and a baby without so much as batting an eyelid, simply sat and let her husband pour out his heart. Her response at the end of his diatribe startled him.

‘You say all this, my husband, and yet what is it that you do to change your stars?’

‘A man cannot interfere with the path laid out before him by the gods.’

‘Of course he can!’ Kata shifted Edan who was nursing peacefully at her breast and fixed Merroc with a steady gaze. ‘When you walk through the forests and there is a fallen tree in your path, do you stop walking and turn around?’

He did not answer at first. Her words were sensible and he felt irritated at her pragmatism. Eventually he grudgingly admitted that no, he would not turn around.

‘No,’ agreed Kata. ‘You would climb over the tree, or find a path around it, or as a last resort, you would cut it out of your way. Your tone speaks of giving up, Merroc, and it does not become you. And others are starting to notice it.’

The chieftain stared at the young woman he had taken to wife and once again, he marvelled at her clarity of thought. He shook his head and smiled. ‘Between you and my wretched daughter, you are determined to change the way I view the world, aren’t you?’

‘I speak as I find,’ Kata replied simply. ‘Sometimes I open my mouth without thinking about the words that come out. Valkia, on the other hand...’ Kata shook her head. ‘She does nothing without contemplating the far-reaching consequences of her words. Her every action is calculated.’

‘She is cunning, aye. A quality which will serve her well.’ It was rare these days to hear Merroc speak of his headstrong daughter with anything but trepidation. Kata remembered a time not so very long ago when he had doted on Valkia. How things changed... but to hear Merroc speak with such pride warmed her heart.

‘Cunning, yes. And clever, too. She learns fast. I have watched her under Radek’s tutelage and she has put him flat on his back on more than one occasion.’ Kata smiled at the memory of it. When her step-daughter had started training with the Warspeaker, she had learned many humiliating lessons at Radek’s hands, most of which ended up with her lying in the mud, pitched face-first into a river and covered with bruises. But she had never once given up as her father had confidently predicted she would. She had persevered. She had more to prove than most and she did not let herself down.

Kata was wise beyond her years and she had also watched the unmistakable growing attraction between Valkia and the disfigured Radek with a certain fondness. Radek was not the kind of man who would ever force his attentions on an unwilling Valkia and it was strange to see the normally foul-mouthed girl occasionally seem lost for words when talking about the Warspeaker.

She did not claim to be gifted with the ability to understand signs and omens like the Godspeaker, but Kata was a woman who watched people. She could see the attraction between them and there was also a spark there that threatened something darker. She could not categorise it or even start to understand it, but she felt fear for not just her stepdaughter, but for all the Schwarzvolf.

Edan had fallen asleep in her arms and she cradled him protectively for a few moments before laying him down on the pile of furs that served as his bed. She kissed the top of his pink little ear and turned her attentions to her two sleeping daughters. Merroc had withdrawn once again into brooding, presumably on his poor luck.

Kata sighed and settled down to her work, stitching together boiled leather pieces to make new armour for her husband. Perhaps one day soon he might dispense with the need to dwell on all that he did not have and cherish what he did have.

Spring bloomed into full summer and an unusual spate of sunny days nourished the Schwarzvolf as they maintained their summer home in the Vale. There were a few more problematic births, but several healthy children were born to the tribe and there was much cause for celebration.

Valkia continued her training under Radek’s tutelage and her proficiency with the spear became unsurpassed, even by some of the older and more experienced warriors. Neither of them cared to act on the undeniable attraction they felt. Valkia was too careful not to sully the loyalty she had earned from the Warspeaker and Radek took her stand-offishness as a rejection. It worked heavily in her favour of course; every smile she threw him and every time she took his hand to get up off the floor – or more increasingly, to help him from the floor – he felt that old thrill all over again.

‘Why do you insist on toying with him?’

Valkia had taken the conscious decision to spend a night at her father’s hearth. She had missed quiet conversation with her stepmother since Edan’s birth and whilst she thought highly of Kata, she bore little love for the happy infant boy who she nursed.

The young woman had simply shrugged and drawn her legs into her chest. It was a familiar gesture, one that gave away the fact that she would not care to be drawn into conversation on the matter. Kata gave it one last try.

‘Radek is a fine man, Valkia. You could do far worse for yourself.’

Kata was struck into silence by the look of venom that Valkia shot at her. She physically cringed backwards. There was such anger there that Kata felt Valkia’s irritation as a tangible thing. After a moment or two, the look subsided.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, with great ambivalence in her voice. ‘But if I could do far worse for myself, by that very same argument, Kata...’ A smile snaked her lips upwards and it was not a pleasant expression. ‘By that very same argument, I could also do far better for myself.’

A silence, uncomfortable for the first time that Kata could recall, fell upon the two women. After a while, Valkia spoke again. She held up her long, dark hair and tugged at it. ‘I have a fancy to wear my hair short, Kata. Would you cut it for me?’

Kata was shocked by this. For all her tendency to masculine behaviour, Valkia’s hair had always been a rare vanity. But she did as the girl asked, partly out of a sense of awkwardness at the earlier moment that had passed between them. She took up a knife and hacked at the thick, dark curls at the length Valkia indicated. When she had finished, the hair dropped to the ground in a pile and Kata knew, somehow, that this was Valkia’s final step to womanhood.

She made an effort to neaten the resulting dark cap of hair and Valkia nodded determinedly, obviously happy with what had happened. It was a solemn moment, sad even, and after her stepdaughter was long gone, leaving the yurt to spend the night in games and carousing with her warrior friends, Kata looked at the hair on the ground, sorrow lining her face.

She had always been able to drink any of the young men under the table, but this night, Valkia was unable to hold her spirits. She felt drunk and when she was drunk, she felt angrier than usual. It left her feeling weak and vulnerable and she stalked away from the gathering early.

Unsurprisingly, Radek followed her. The Warspeaker was not drunk; he never engaged in such activities unless he was specifically ordered to stand down his vigilance over the camp.

‘What do you want, Radek?’ Valkia was tired and more than a little inebriated and she did not have the patience to play the Warspeaker’s games tonight.

‘I wanted to ensure you returned safely, Valkia. That is all.’

‘Do you not think I can take care of myself?’ Alcohol made her belligerent – more so than usual – and her tone was aggressive. Radek chuckled fondly, which served only to irritate her even more.

‘I am more than aware of your capabilities. Nonetheless, your safety is, and always has been, part of my responsibility as your father’s elected Warspeaker. So whether you like it or not, I will see you back to the chieftain’s hearth.’

‘I can make my own way. I absolve you of your duty.’ She ran her hand over her newly-shorn hair. It still felt strange to her. Radek considered his options for a moment or two and then nodded his assent. She felt strangely grateful to him for giving her the space she needed.

Radek raised his head to the night sky and inhaled deeply. ‘There are things being borne towards us on the four winds, Valkia.’ He moved closer to her and she automatically backed off. ‘The Godspeaker can read the passage of time like he reads the weather. Something is coming.’

She scowled at him. She liked Radek, was even prepared to acknowledge a fondness for him, but there were limits. She stood firmly, her feet planted on the ground. ‘My fist will be coming if you take another step closer to me, Radek. What are you talking about?’

‘The Godspeaker came to me earlier today. He has read the portents and wanted me to be ready.’ Valkia felt a cold chill run down her spine. Despite the warmth of the night, she shivered. ‘You should be ready too.’

‘Ready? For what?’

‘Change, Valkia.’ His voice had dropped to a whisper and he held her gaze for slightly longer than she found comfortable. He inhaled deeply. ‘The gaze of the Trickster turns towards us.’

Having delivered these curious words, Radek bowed deeply to Valkia and melted back into the night. She stood and watched him go, made suddenly sober.

THREE

THE BLACK STAG

The golden summer of that year would long live in the tribe’s legends. Particularly warm, which some murmured was unnatural, it nonetheless brought an abundance of food and richness to the normally hard lives of the Schwarzvolf. Nobody was surprised when Merroc made the decision to winter in the Vale.

Nobody was surprised for a number of reasons. It was foolish to move out of the Vale when everything they needed was right there. The migration of the game to the north didn’t matter when there were provisions enough for months where they were. For the first time in living memory, the Schwarzvolf broke with the traditions of their people and the cost was more than anybody could ever have anticipated.

Valkia was fully supportive of Merroc’s decision, an attitude which earned her a loss of respect amongst some of her peers. She poured scorn on their rebukes however. Why should she care about breaking with tradition? Her father was right. There was no point in risking the dangers of exposure and travelling the treacherous ice-fields when there was no need.

Merroc had other reasons for staying where he was, but these did not become apparent to his daughter for a while. She had spent less and less time at her father’s hearth, increasingly sleeping virtually where she fell, or taking part in night patrols and sleeping during the day. The months that passed added more muscle to her slender frame until she was whipcord lean. She maintained her short hair and from the back was frequently mistaken for one of the young male warriors. Her coldly beautiful face was at incongruous odds with the leather armour and furs that she wore.

She and her father were becoming increasingly estranged from one another. He remained unhappy that despite her eighteen years, she was still without a child or a husband or even – so the whispers went – a lover. In return, she despised his lectures on propriety. Whenever they were in the same vicinity for more than an hour or two, they would degenerate into sniping and name-calling. Kata did her best to buffer the animosity between father and daughter, but to no avail.

The demands of three small children, with yet another growing in her belly, meant that Valkia’s stepmother was snappish and short-tempered and when the winter set in properly, things only got worse.

Much worse.

‘You look tired.’ Kata made the observation in a soft voice, moving to the pile of furs on which she slept with her husband. She reached out a hand to stroke his damp hair back from his face and he batted it away.

‘Away with you, woman. I am fine.’

From the way he had lain awake most of the night, tossing and turning and sweating profusely, Merroc was anything but fine. For days he had been pale and listless and the weight had started to drop from him. A once strong and heavily muscled frame was becoming little more than a bone rack on which his waxy skin hung uncomfortably. The weight loss was startling and Kata knew that this was something more than just the plague.

‘Let me fetch the healer for you.’

‘Let me sleep. It will pass.’ He coughed and raised a hand to his mouth to wipe away a trickle of blood. ‘It will pass,’ he repeated with a confidence that Kata did not sense he truly felt.

Merroc, proud chieftain of the Schwarzvolf people had courted the attention of the Fly Lord. He was dying.

Despite his illness, Merroc knew that he could not afford to display weakness in front of his people, particularly not when they were already unsettled due to his decision to remain in the Vale. He had to practically drag himself from his bed each morning to sit with the rest of the Circle and over the days that followed, every last one of them saw their chieftain’s steady deterioration.

Stubborn as he had been throughout his entire life, he did not let up and pushed himself far harder than was sensible given his obvious illness. But there was nobody who dared suggest he might be unwell, save Valkia. The chieftain and his daughter finally came to blows on a chill morning when the days had grown shorter and it seemed as though light would never return to the sky. As was always the way with the young woman, there was nothing subtle in her attack.

‘You are weak.’

The statement was blunt and came without warning. They were in the heart of the woods, hunting the day’s game. They had been let alone by enemy tribes for months and the daily hunt was about the only real chance to exercise their sword and spear arms. Merroc had joined the hunt with great energy and boundless enthusiasm. He had woken that morning feeling surprisingly well. A hearty breakfast had given him more strength and he had decided that he would take to the hunt for the first time in a long while.

Kata had been somewhere between delighted to see a spark of the man she had married in this wasted stranger who shared her bed, and anxious at his ability to make it through the day without somehow shaming himself. She had watched the hunting party move out from the village with trepidation in her eyes. She caught the unmistakable sneer on Valkia’s face and withdrew into the yurt, fear of the unknown projecting images of horror into her mind.

‘You are weak.’ Valkia repeated the words. She walked through the woods with her spine held straight and her head carried high. From time to time she cast a sidelong glance at Merroc, despising the creature he was becoming. She had been growing increasingly angry with the gossip and rumour that spread throughout the whole camp.

If she had ever loved her father, she could not remember it. Everything about him now made her so angry. He appeared to have shrunk. Once such a mountain of a man, he was thin and spare, grey streaking his mane of hair and his unkempt beard. The smell of illness hung around him and that made her angrier still. A warrior of the Schwarzvolf should not fall to illness. They should fall in battle, at the hands of an enemy. They should fall when they were defending their people, not lying in a bed and unable to move.

‘I have not been well, but I am recovering,’ he responded, his tone guarded and his eyes unconsciously straying to the dagger at his daughter’s waist. ‘Age brings with it its own new set of battles, Valkia. Be grateful that I am living still and that you are not embroiled in a battle for the leadership you so desire.’

She made no reply, but snorted softly. There was the sound of a cracking twig, soft and barely audible somewhere far to her right and she ducked down, her soft leather boots making little more than a rustle on the leaves. Merroc followed her lead. He could not help but be deeply impressed with his daughter. He had neglected her for so long and she had blossomed in his absence. She was strong and lithe, her face so like her long-dead mother’s. She was confident and capable.

She was everything he would have wanted in a son. But she had been a daughter. A thousand regrets came to plague at him.

‘See! There!’ Valkia hissed and grabbed at her father’s arm, her long fingernails almost piercing the flesh there. Her breath ghosted in front of her and Merroc peered through the light mist at the direction in which she was pointing. His breath caught in his throat.

‘The black stag...’

The Schwarzvolf, whose name literally translated as ‘The Black Wolf’ carried many legends about black-skinned or furred animals. They were perceived to be good omens; signs of strength and power. They were creatures to be admired and revered. This particular specimen was a magnificent sample of his species. His hindquarters were strong and well formed; the number of branches on his antlers suggesting he was in his prime. His noble head was dipped as he cropped at what little grass he could through the rime of frost. Come the end of the winter, he would lose those antlers in preparation for new growth and another year of survival would be marked.

Although the stag seemed oblivious to the presence of father and daughter, he was not. His ears twitched occasionally and from time to time he would look up and turn his head in their direction. Merroc didn’t realise he was holding his breath until he unconsciously let it out.

‘We are honoured to witness this, my daughter,’ he whispered softly, his eyes filled with reverence. He reached out a hand to squeeze Valkia’s shoulder, hoping to build any number of bridges in the gesture, but she squirmed free from his grip and his hand fell to his side.

‘Honoured? Never mind that! There is enough meat on that stag to feed several families for a number of days.’ Valkia’s response shocked Merroc.

‘You cannot! To kill such a beast... Valkia, such an act would bring the wrath of the gods down on us.’ Merroc was genuinely shocked that his daughter would willingly sacrifice an animal that was considered such a good omen. There was a bestial hunger in her eyes. She was the hunter and the black stag was her prey. She was staring at it with intensity, her eyes roaming across its glossy skin, doubtlessly considering the best place to embed her spear.

Merroc shook his head in disbelief. ‘If you do this thing, Valkia, then I will no longer consider you to be any daughter of mine. I will disown you entirely.’ That got her attention. She took her gaze from the stag and turned with aching slowness to stare at her father, the dark pools of her eyes giving away nothing of the thoughts that churned beneath the surface. When she did finally speak, it was with such hatred that Merroc felt a cold shudder run down his spine.

‘If you choose to cast me out, father,’ she said, placing heavy sarcasm on the word. Merroc had not been a father to her for many years in any sense other than that of their blood tie. ‘Then you will make an enemy of me. Are you sure th...’

Whatever she was going to say was cut dead by the sudden flight of the stag. It bolted into the woods, sending up a shower of damp leaves in its wake. Immediately alert, Valkia shifted position, forgetting the argument with her father and crouching with one leg placed slightly behind the other. She was like a snake, coiled and ready to strike.

He may have been ill, but years of reflex and reaction forced Merroc’s aching body into a similar stance. The only sound he could hear was that of the distant clattering of the stag’s hooves as it disappeared into the forest and that of his own breathing. He was acutely aware of it rattling in his thin chest.

Valkia said nothing but her head moved imperceptibly to the right, her sharp ears picking up some movement there. A dark head of hair emerged from the woods, moving at great speed.

‘Radek,’ she murmured and relaxed her posture, but only slightly. The Warspeaker was repeating the same phrase over and over and it wasn’t until he was a little closer that Valkia and Merroc made out what he was saying.

‘Enemies coming this way!’

From all over the woods, Schwarzvolf hunters emerged from their hiding places. Some crawled out from beneath bushes whilst others dropped lightly from trees. Valkia got to her feet and jogged lightly to join Radek. Merroc also followed, although much more slowly. His heart pounded in his chest. He sensed a defining moment in his future was imminent. If an enemy attack was upon them, how he handled himself in the next few minutes could be critical.

As soon as the Schwarzvolf were assembled, Radek looked over the grouped hunters. He sent the youngest, a boy of nine, running back to the camp to sound the alarm and then elaborated on what was coming their way.

‘At least forty strong, if not more,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I was at the far edges of the woodland stalking game and I saw them moving down the hillside. I watched for a while to see where they were heading and they are coming towards the woods.’

‘Forty?’ Valkia responded and there was scorn in her voice. ‘We can take forty. They’re on open ground and the woods favour us. We can cut them down before they even set foot in here.’

‘What if they come in peace?’ The voice belonged to Merroc and it was quietly reasonable and rational. ‘Do not be so quick to cut down strangers, Valkia. They may only seek the protection of the Schwarzvolf.’ All eyes turned to the chieftain. ‘We should let them come to the edges of the woodland and demand to know their intentions.’

‘But...’ Valkia looked furious at being overridden by her father.

‘Radek?’ Merroc turned to the Warspeaker. There was a spark of his former self evident on his face, the pride and nobility that had always been etched there and which even the ravages of his illness had failed to entirely eliminate. The Warspeaker inclined his head.

‘My chieftain speaks truth. It would be better to ensure this tribe comes for blood before we join them in battle.’

Merroc didn’t need to look at his daughter to feel the stare that she levelled towards him. If looks could kill, as the saying went, he would not just have been dead. He would have been torn limb from limb and his intestines strung like banners from the nearest tree. There was such a hunger in Valkia’s eyes that eventually Merroc had no choice but to meet her stare defiantly. The pair battled silently for a few tense moments and then Merroc made a concession. The act startled everyone present.

‘We will meet them at the edge of the woods. Valkia – you are to take a group through the east side of the forest. Loop around them and remain on the right flank. Should the meeting take a turn for the worse, then you will be able to strike at them from behind and drive a wedge between their warriors.’

‘My chieftain?’ There was something faintly dangerous in Radek’s voice, but Merroc chose to carefully ignore it. ‘Are you sure this is a good course of action? If Valkia and the others are noticed, it may endanger any agreement to bring another tribe under our banner.’

‘Are you questioning my ability to lead, Warspeaker?’ Merroc, who had once towered imposingly over Radek, drew himself up to his full height. He may have seemed thin and wasted, his face pale and the eyes sunken hollows, but in that gesture, something of his lingering power remained.

‘Never, my chieftain.’ Radek bowed his head and Valkia sneered at how swiftly he had capitulated. There was no time for lengthy discourse on the matter, however. They needed to move and be swift about it if they were going to get into position before the unknown party reached the woods.

‘Take twelve warriors with you, Valkia,’ Radek said, his manner switching to that of the commander. ‘Remain in cover until either I signal otherwise or things get out of hand swiftly.’

‘As my Warspeaker commands,’ she replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm. She turned and pointed at ten of the gathered men and two women and within several seconds, they had melted into the trees as though they had never been.

‘Let us head out to meet these intruders then,’ said Merroc after they had left.

They were looking for winter sanctuary, they said. There were fifty-seven of them; all that was left of a two-hundred strong tribe who had lived in the hills for countless years. They had always kept themselves to themselves, never interfering in the politics and wars so beloved by the other tribes. They were farmers predominately, tilling the land and living from its bounty. But they were under threat from another tribe.

Their leader, a young man who had introduced himself as Eraich, had led a small deputation of five men to the edge of the woods. He was powerfully built with muscular shoulders that spoke of hours of hard toil and labour, and a ruddy complexion that he could attribute to his many hours in the sun. None of the men with him were armed other than with hunting knives worn at their waists. But there was the potential there to develop such strong men into exceptional warriors. Merroc could see it and he could tell by the appraising expression on Radek’s face that the Warspeaker thought so as well.

‘We have watched your people travel here and leave again for many years,’ Eraich said, breaking the moment of silence. His voice was thickly accented and difficult to understand, but he spoke slowly and earnestly. ‘We have never approached you before because we have never had need to. But now...’ He shook his head. ‘Now, the murder that comes in the night has taken that which we hold most dear. Our families are torn apart and our crops are destroyed. Our livestock has been stolen...’

Eraich made a sweeping gesture that took in the people behind him. From a distance, it had been impossible to know that the party was made up of men, women and children. ‘This is all that remains. We are... without a home. We come to seek refuge under your banner. You have not left the Vale this year and we took that as a sign.’

The young farmer hung his head in shame. Merroc felt a brief flare of compassion. It must be difficult for him, having to admit such a weakness in front of a complete stranger. The chieftain gazed over the gathered people of Eraich’s tribe. They were undernourished, but still robust and healthy. There were enough young people in the assemblage to produce children for the Schwarzvolf. The Vale was fruitful and bountiful. To bring experienced farmers into the fold could be a massive benefit to the war-like Schwarzvolf. Exceptional hunters, they had no idea about agriculture, or tending crops.

‘We should discuss this more, Eraich. Perhaps...’

‘May I make a suggestion?’

The voice was Valkia’s. Merroc started in surprise. He had not heard his daughter approaching. She was like a spectre that came from the night to startle you into an early grave. Her eyes were studying Eraich with unashamed interest. They roamed up and down his muscular frame.

For his part, the young leader studied Valkia back in return, not even making any sort of attempt to keep the admiration from his gaze. Merroc scowled, but then pointed to her.

‘My daughter,’ he said, with unmistakable irritation in his tone. ‘Valkia.’

Eraich inclined his head. ‘Chieftain’s daughter,’ he said, formally but she waved away the title with impatience.

‘My name,’ she said with steel in her tone, ‘is Valkia.’

‘Your suggestion?’ Merroc interrupted, not wishing this to continue. Valkia took her eyes from Eraich and looked over to her father.

‘Whilst you and the Circle meet with Eraich and his men, perhaps the Schwarzvolf could demonstrate kindness to the women and children of their tribe. We have food going spare and fires by which they could warm themselves.’ She ran her hand through her short hair and treated Eraich to a smile that could have dazzled him into death.

‘That is a most generous gesture, chi... Valkia,’ replied the young farmer and looked over at Merroc. ‘If your father agrees, that would be very welcome. It has been a hard journey to reach you.’

If Merroc was surprised by Valkia’s uncharacteristic show of kindness, he did not let it evidence itself on his face. He merely nodded. ‘As you suggest, daughter,’ he affirmed. ‘Take the women and children to our hearth.’

Eraich reached out a hand and caught Valkia’s arm tightly. The farmer’s broad hand encircled her slim forearm easily. Radek drew in a deep breath. To so lay hands upon the chieftain’s daughter was considered deeply offensive, even though he knew that Valkia was more than capable of handling the situation. For her part, Valkia simply held up her free hand to forestall what she sensed were Radek’s harsh words. This was an ignorant stranger who knew no better.

‘Promise me you will care for them,’ Eraich said. ‘They have been in my charge since my father’s death two passes of the moons since. I must know that you mean them no ill intent.’

‘You have my word,’ Valkia said, and her tone could not have been sweeter. ‘The women and children of your people will receive nothing but courteous hospitality from the Schwarzvolf.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eraich simply and released her arm. She smiled at him again. ‘I will leave you in the capable and competent hands of my dear father.’ The smile was turned upon Merroc who felt a stirring of uncertainty. Valkia was planning something and his biggest fear was that he thought he knew well what it would be.

It did not take long for the strangers to be brought to the heart of the Schwarzvolf clan, although many of them were obviously unsettled by the sheer number of armed warriors. Nobody had yet ordered them to stand down.

Neither did they.

‘Your people are fierce,’ one woman confided in Valkia. She was a matronly type, her outline soft and feminine where Valkia’s was hard and masculine. Pretty? Perhaps so, but Valkia was more interested in the brood that scurried along behind her. So many children suggested that these people were prime breeding stock.

To the young woman’s eyes, these newcomers were little more than a means to expand the Schwarzvolf. For years she and Radek had talked of the dream of being the greatest tribe in the north. They had the strength to do so, but they still lacked the numbers. That had begun to change in recent years, but one of the many things that the two of them had never agreed on was how precisely that change could be expedited.

‘Yes,’ she conceded eventually. ‘The Schwarzvolf are a proud and fierce people. You will be glad enough of that when the wars begin.’

‘The wars?’ The matronly woman’s eyes showed fear, a weakness that Valkia instantly despised. She shrugged lightly.

‘Yes. The Schwarzvolf have enemies of their own. And from what Eraich was saying, it sounds as though you have some that require dealing with. It has been some time since my people went to war. They are hungry for it.’ Her own hand ran lightly across the haft of the spear slung across her back. ‘I hunger for the glory of battle also.’

‘You fight?’ Such incredulity that it was all Valkia could do not to turn around and slap the impertinent cow across the face.

‘All the able women of the Schwarzvolf fight. It is our right and our honour to do so.’

‘Your people are not like mine at all.’ Doubt. Creeping doubt. But it was far too late. They were under the banner of the Schwarzvolf. And there they would stay.

‘We are your people now,’ retorted Valkia, dropping a low, mocking bow as she slid away from the trail of refugees back out to the woods. At little more than a crook of her finger, several of the armoured men came with her.

The discussions had been terse since Valkia had taken the refugees to camp. Merroc sensed that Eraich knew what the inevitable outcome of their ‘discussions’ must be, and he had never expected to feel ashamed of who he was and what the Schwarzvolf stood for. Perhaps the illness had spread to his brain, softened him. Whatever it was, he was left feeling no better when, several minutes into the conversation, Eraich had simply sighed. He was a man defeated.

Requesting an opportunity to speak to the chieftain privately, Eraich and Merroc retreated a reasonable distance from the gathering. Radek watched like a hawk for any signs of treachery on the part of the young farmer.

But there was no hint of such behaviour in Eraich’s voice as he finally found it. ‘You plan to kill us and keep our women and children,’ he said. It was not an accusation, merely a statement of fact. Merroc reached up to scratch at his straggly beard.

‘My daughter does,’ he acknowledged. ‘Valkia will see no place for farmers in our war band. I have a wider-reaching vision than she does, however.’

‘Do not humour me, chieftain. I have suffered more losses in this last few days than I ever thought possible. We are not cowards, but the suffering visited upon us by the mountain reavers has broken my people. There are even now plenty amongst us who would accept death as a blessing.’

‘I would welcome the knowledge of those who know how best to till the land in this part of the Vale. My people are fighters, warriors. They know very little about crops. What few things we have successfully grown have been staunchly unyielding.’

‘I asked your daughter to make me a promise,’ said Eraich. ‘And she made it. She said what I wanted to hear, but I need to hear it from you as well, chieftain. That our women and children will be cared for.’

‘On that, you have my absolute word.’ Merroc ran a hand over his eyes. He liked this young farmer in spite of his weakness. ‘No harm will befall them.’

The sound of approaching feet caused both of them to turn. Valkia walked from the woods, at the head of several Schwarzvolf warriors. Her spear was readied and in her hand. Radek rose from where he sat, caught between the gazes of father and daughter; the one unreadable, the other mutinous. Merroc spoke eventually.

‘This is not how it needs to be, Valkia.’

‘It is exactly how it needs to be, chieftain.’ She took a step closer to him. ‘The Schwarzvolf have become soft. We have been robbed of our right to battle for so long that you entertain the notion of becoming settled, of welcoming farmers into our midst. If we are to remain strong, then it cannot be.’

‘I forbid it, Valkia.’ Merroc took several steps towards his daughter and she moved towards him, her face thunderous. The chieftain was acutely aware of the proximity of Radek and to his consternation, had no idea which side the Warspeaker’s allegiance belonged to.

‘I defy you,’ she replied quietly and at a gesture, the men at her command surged forward, past both she and the chieftain, and began to slaughter the innocent refugees who had sought only succour and sanctuary within the embrace of the Schwarzvolf.

It was painfully quick and exceptionally bloody. Twenty fully armed warriors who had been deprived of warfare for months exalted in the opportunity to release their pent-up frustrations. Some of the men attempted to flee in a panic, but were brought to ground with well-aimed spear shots.

Merroc turned to Eraich who stood watching the slaughter of his men with a strange sort of resigned detachment. ‘At least spare their leader,’ he said to Valkia in an undertone. She spat at her father’s feet and pushed him out of her way. Merroc tumbled to the floor, his head glancing off a stone with a spurt of blood.

‘No, Valkia!’

With an alarming turn of speed, the chieftain made light of his illness and rose to his feet, planting himself again between Valkia and the dazed Eraich.

‘Get out of my way. Let me do what needs to be done in order to preserve the name of our people.’

‘There is no need for this! You have killed enough here today! Let the rest of them live.’ Merroc gestured to the dozen or so men who had been corralled apart from the others. Terrified and angry by the violence, and no doubt still haunted by the attacks that had already reduced their numbers, the men stood mute with short knives clutched feebly in their hands. There had been a time, once, when Merroc would have sneered at such weakness.

Age, he thought grimly. Age has robbed me of all reason.

His daughter moved up to stand before him. She had grown so tall. Somehow, the little girl who had sat on his shoulders and demanded answers to questions had become a young woman; a warrior in her own right.

‘You are weak,’ she said to him in a soft voice. He felt the anger there; could sense how much she despised him for that weakness. ‘Your time is done, old man.’

He felt his will crumble under her gaze. By the gods, but she was strong-willed. She was breaking down his resistance, tearing down the last of his fortitude like it was nothing more substantial than old hides. From somewhere, he found an inner strength that he had not known he still possessed. His death was a certainty, but then since his illness had struck, it always had been.

‘So this is how it ends?’ He studied her face. ‘There will be no victory for you to savour, Valkia. I am dying anyway. If you kill me here today, you do me a kindness, not a dishonour.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ Their eyes locked and for a fleeting moment, he saw the compassion. It was deep, deep down, but it was there nonetheless. He felt a spark of hope that she would not lead his tribe to ruin with her bloodthirsty ways. He reached out a hand to stroke her cheek. For the first time in years, she did not flinch at his touch.

‘Have a care, Lille Venn,’ he said at a volume that only she could hear. ‘After this day, after you kill me here, you will be completely on your own.’

‘No,’ came a voice from behind him. ‘She never was on her own, Merroc.’

The chieftain was not aware of the sword that had slid in between his shoulders from behind until Radek withdrew it. Blood spurted from the chieftain’s mouth and he released Valkia’s face. The blade slipped easily from the old man’s heart and he collapsed nervelessly to the ground. It was most assuredly a clean kill. The chieftain’s daughter and the Warspeaker watched impassively as Merroc gave a last rattling sigh, their expressions unreadable. Eraich, being held fast by the arms of two of the tribesmen watched the death of Merroc with horror.

When it was over, when the body ceased twitching and lay still, his eyes staring up at nothing, Valkia looked up at Radek. There was terrible indecision in her face.

‘You realise what I must do,’ she said.

‘I always knew it would come to this,’ replied the Warspeaker. He sounded calm and in a strange echo of her father’s last gesture, he reached to touch her cheek. ‘I have been ready for this since the day you asked if I would stand with you. I have given you more. I have given you the reason you need to take what rightfully should be yours.’ He dropped his sword and stared directly ahead.

‘Radek...’ Valkia stared at the Warspeaker, his scarred, ugly face more dear to her than anything else in her life. And one by one, she took the images and memories she had of him, setting fire to them in her thoughts until they were blown to ash. Any hope she might ever have had for conquering her reluctance to embark on a relationship with Radek was forever lost and she felt nothing for him.

For Valkia, detaching from her emotions had been that simple.

‘You killed my father, Warspeaker,’ she said, speaking in a voice loud enough to be heard by all those present. ‘Such treachery can only be met with one punishment. Do you understand this?’

‘I know,’ Radek replied loudly and clearly. ‘I know the punishment and I accept it gladly. It is a small price to pay to rid ourselves of the snivelling weakling he had become.’ He lowered his eyes to Valkia who had drawn her dagger from her belt. Even now there was the faintest glimmer of uncertainty there.

‘Do it, Valkia,’ he hissed. ‘Now.’

They would be the last words he uttered. Valkia sprang forward, putting all her strength into the movement and knocked Radek to the ground. As she knelt astride him, she raised the dagger high.

‘For the crime of slaughtering my father, Radek, Warspeaker of the Schwarzvolf, I condemn you to death.’

She struck downwards and dug the knife deep into his belly, drawing a clenched grunt of agony from the former scout. With a deft slice, she split open his abdomen. That was the point at which Radek finally screamed. He thrashed wildly as glistening organs and ropey guts spilled out on to the sodden earth, mixing his blood with that of the dead chieftain. Valkia let him struggle beneath her weight for a few moments before rising once again to her feet. She cast a gaze around the assembled masses. Her face gave away nothing of what was going on inside her head. Her voice, when she spoke, was leaden.

‘See this and mark it well. Such is the fate of the betrayer.’

She let the dying man squirm for a while, watching as his struggles grew weaker and then took up his sword. She turned the blade of the weapon downwards towards him. The first stroke crunched awkwardly into the bones of the traitor’s neck. The second severed his head in a welter of gore and silenced his voice forever.

‘Bring them both,’ said Valkia, stepping back. ‘My father for the rites due his position and the traitor as an example.’ She turned her attention to Eraich. ‘I made you a promise,’ she said. ‘And I keep it. But your people are no longer yours to be concerned about.’ As her blade flashed from left to right across Eraich’s neck and darkness rushed in to claim him, the faintest suggestion of a smile crossed his features. The last words he heard were Valkia’s declaration.

‘They are mine.’

FOUR

CHIEFTAIN’S DAUGHTER

She felt nothing. Standing beside the corpse of her father, Valkia felt absolutely no grief, no sorrow or even any pleasure at her father’s death. She had travelled back to the village ahead of the funeral procession to deliver the news personally to Kata. Her stepmother had nodded tersely and bitten her lip but had not shed any tears. Weakness was not an option and Valkia respected that. She held little Edan to her closely and Valkia left her alone to find her two little half-sisters.

It sickened her to hear the wail of grief that came from Kata’s tent as she left, and much of the respect she had once held for her stepmother was lost in that instant.

The two little girls were only children and they cried when she told them that their father would not be coming back. She didn’t spare them any details. To tell them a lie would be to do them a disservice. She told them that Radek had killed him and was mildly gratified that the elder of the two immediately demanded to know if retribution had been carried out.

She sent them back to their mother and they disappeared into the yurt scant seconds before the dead chieftain’s body was borne back into camp, carried on the shoulders of the Schwarzvolf warriors. In their wake, Radek was being dragged by the ankles. His body was filthy, having picked up a light coating of leaf mould. A slimy red trail marked his passage across the ground, where what was left of his blood dribbled from the ragged stump of his neck.

Throughout the camp, whispers had already started. The newcomers, the farming community that Eraich had brought to them were huddled together, staring in fear at the horror unfolding before them.

It was her moment. Valkia hated Radek for taking this course of action, but in the end, his loyalty to her had been absolute. She owed it to that gesture to grasp the opportunity fully. Edan could not take control of the people. If she didn’t stake her claim right this moment, then the entire tribe would fall to in-fighting.

She moved to stand by the central hearth in the camp. The flames were low at this hour of the day but soon the fire would be banked, to be used as a central communal cooking area. Now, though, it needed to be used for another purpose entirely.

The young woman with the close crop of dark hair took only a moment to compose herself and then she spoke in a clear voice that cut through the murmur of low, anxious whispering as cleanly as a knife.

‘People of the Schwarzvolf, we have been betrayed.’ Valkia pointed a finger at her dead father. ‘Our Chieftain, our beloved Merroc, lies dead because of the treachery of a man he trusted. A man he loved as a brother and who we all trusted as our Warspeaker.’ She turned the focus from Merroc to Radek. If anybody noticed the slight shake in her voice, they could easily put it down to the emotion of the moment rather than nerves.

‘Radek the betrayer.’ She levelled a finger at him. ‘See him there. He lies dead by my hand. Retribution was served instantly, but not before he gave me the truth.’ Now came the lie that she had carefully constructed on the journey back to the village. ‘My father was going to do what was right. He planned to cull the weak from the strong, separate the brave from the cowardly and keep those who could wield their weapons with skill. But Eraich and his men conspired with Radek. They promised him the position of chieftain if he gave his aid to assassinate my father.’ She looked around. She had their attention. There was a sharp intake of breath from the women of Eraich’s tribe, but Valkia ignored it.

‘It is no secret that Radek hungered for my father’s position. He agreed to this gutless plot.’ She lowered her finger as she realised just how loyal the men who had witnessed the events were to her. At least she presumed loyalty. It may have been that they were simply reluctant to speak against her. Whatever the reason, not one of them disputed her story. Their fealty gave her a swell of courage. ‘Such treachery could not go unpunished. As such, the people of the hills will be taken into the Schwarzvolf conditional upon their complete, unswerving loyalty. Any of those who do not wish to accept that condition, then consider the alternative.’

A slow, exceptionally cruel smile spread across her face. ‘The alternative is your own deaths. If you wish to join your menfolk as food for the animals of the woods, then my warriors will gladly aid you in meeting that desire.’ Her green eyes, flat and emotionless mirrors, ranged across the women and children who were new to the hearth. Each one of them bore the same look of grief and misery as the other, but none dared defy her. Weak, Valkia thought. Come the hard months of winter, they would be the first to die.

She let the lie slide easily from her lips, feeling great pleasure at the conviction in her own voice. Every single person in the camp was hanging on her every word and that sent a delicious thrill through her. It was time for Valkia to make her final play.

‘I mourn the passing of my father,’ she said. ‘In his time, he was a great leader. But age, sickness and a moment of weakness in trusting those traitors led to his death. I am his oldest child. As such, I take up the mantle of leadership in his place.’ She stooped and unhooked her father’s cloak, the symbolic outer representation of the tribe’s leadership. She lay it across her arms and stood defiant, a tall, willowy figure who any of the warriors could easily have broken in two.

A silence had fallen and only ambient sounds remained. The occasional spit of the fire. A faint breeze rustling through what remained of the autumn leaves still clinging tenaciously to the trees around them. Her own heartbeat pounding in her chest. She kept stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. If there was going to be any challenge to her leadership, it would have to come sooner rather than later.

‘Valkia.’

The single word came from one of the warriors who had not been present at the slaughter. Adok stepped forward and Valkia appraised him through half-lidded eyes. The man was powerfully built, a clear head and shoulders above her. His thick arms were folded across his chest and his square jaw, mostly hidden by a straggly black beard was thrust out in a pugnacious challenge. His intent was obvious to all and they held their collective breath.

Adok’s next words never saw the light of day. He opened his mouth to speak and could only manage a choked torrent of blood as the tip of Valkia’s spear punched through his throat and cracked his spine. The tribesman stood transfixed by the weapon for several long moments, his mouth opening and closing in a futile effort to gasp a few more moments from the air. Within seconds, the strength drained out of him. Adok toppled to the ground, his head half-severed and his life gushing away onto the cold earth.

‘Do any more of you have anything to say?’ She admitted a faint sense of disappointment to herself. She had been keen to prove her worth in the Circle of Blood, but she’d needed to make a swift example and Adok had amply provided. He was... he had been... a superlative warrior. But she was surrounded by those. One would not be missed. And they were all here and they were accepting her claim to leadership without question.

It did not strike her until much, much later that the reason nobody further disputed her claim was simply that many of them had all been following her command for a long time.

‘I have something to say,’ came a quiet voice from behind her. Valkia spun around, her gore-slicked spear levelled. Kata looked up at her stepdaughter, Edan in her arms. ‘Will you spare my children? Will you let them live? It was your father’s wish that Edan take the mantle when he came of age. Will you grant him life until he is old enough to challenge your leadership?’

Kata was barely recognisable from the competent shieldmaiden who had stood alongside Valkia all those years ago. Her face had aged years in barely an hour. Her eyes were red from crying and there was a dull bleakness in their dark depths. She twisted anxiously at her hair with her free hand, whilst the infant boy reached up to pull at it as well, enjoying the game.

Damn her. Damn her for asking that question in front of the entire tribe. There was only one answer to the question and Valkia felt the only stirring of guilt she had known since waking that fateful morning.

But Valkia had discovered a propensity for smooth lies that she had always known she possessed. She looked over at Kata and remembered that day, so many years ago, when the other woman had reassured her whilst standing in the shield line. She remembered the affection she bore for her. She remembered it all and she neatly compartmentalised it and put the thoughts into the back of her mind. She could almost hear Radek’s whispering suggestion.

It will do you no harm to at least appear benevolent.

‘Of course, Kata,’ she replied eventually and lowered her weapon. There was no real threat, unless the traditionalists of the Schwarzvolf turned their backs on her because of her gender. And right now, that certainly didn’t seem likely. No doubt it could be arranged for the infant boy to meet with an unfortunate accident once he was old enough to join the hunt.

The thought came so easily to Valkia that she was almost shocked at her own duplicity.

Almost.

Her stepmother nodded her thanks and stepped back with the child clutched tightly in her hands. She watched Valkia for a few moments longer and then returned to the comparative privacy of her tent.

Where she will no doubt howl like a dog over the death of that puny weakling.

Her lip curled in a slight sneer, Valkia’s eyes roamed the assembled tribe once again. Silence had fallen and when she had waited long enough, she nodded. ‘Then for my first command, I order the burning of my father’s body as he would have desired. His ashes will be cast to the four winds. He wished for the Schwarzvolf to winter here in the Vale and I will respect that.’

Valkia knelt before her father’s body and closed the staring, dead eyes that were boring into her accusingly. ‘Members of the Circle – an immediate meeting will be necessary. I will be seeking a new Warspeaker.’ She stood and cast her gaze at the mangled corpse of Radek.

‘As for that one,’ she said, and she had to work hard to keep the catch from her voice, ‘let his skin be stripped from his bones by the carrion birds. Bring the bodies of the traitors from the woods and string them all up at the edges of camp so that anybody who considers betrayal can be reminded of the cost.’

At these words, the new members of the tribe began to weep; some softly and with control, others wailing hysterically. Valkia turned the full force of her stare on them.

‘Stop it,’ she ordered in a tone that brokered no argument. ‘Stop that noise. You should be glad that I choose to show clemency at all. My own people…’ It was the first time she had said that and it had been the absolute truth. It filled her with pleasure. ‘My own people will go without this winter to ensure you and your squalling whelps are fed. Show some gratitude – or go back to the hills. Circle. The tent of the chieftain. Now.’ The wailing dropped to a level where all that could be heard were chokes and the occasional sob.

Having made her decree – and her position very clear – Valkia strode to the yurt used for the meetings of the Circle. She passed Kata’s yurt on the way and ignored the sound of sobbing from within. Without pause or respect, she pushed her way into the tent. Kata, who had been curled in a ball on the floor, looked up, deeply shamed by being found in such a manner.

No words passed between the two women but Valkia eventually spoke. ‘Give him the rites due his station as chieftain, Kata,’ she said. ‘I put you in charge of overseeing the funeral.’

Kata’s eyes were bright, but she shed no more tears. She bit her lip and nodded.

‘As my chieftain wishes.’ Her voice cracked on the word and she turned her head away. Valkia watched her with thoughtful eyes and then left her.

‘I dislike the title “chieftain”.’

If her opening statement surprised the Circle, none of them showed it. They were already in a state of wary shock from the sudden death of Merroc. She had taken her position at the head of the Circle, lounging amid the furs that until barely hours ago had belonged to her father. There was a lingering stench of him, she noticed. She would burn the furs and replace them with her own. A heavy, uncertain peace had settled over the gathering and that merely served to fan the flames of her irritation. She pointed at the Godspeaker who sat slightly behind and to the right of her.

‘We need to consider the skeins of fate,’ she said imperiously. The Godspeaker inclined his head graciously.

‘The moment you end this gathering, my ch... my... chieftainess? The moment you do that, then we shall do so.’

‘Chieftainess.’ Valkia screwed up her face in distaste. ‘I like that even less. Until something more appropriate comes to mind, I will be called “hetwoman”.’ Valkia tried the word a couple of times and nodded. ‘Yes. That will suffice, I think. Now, to more important matters. Firstly, we need to replace the Warspeaker.’

‘With respect, Valkia,’ said Hepsus, one of Merroc’s most favoured warriors. He was in his early twenties, a thick-set man with wiry red hair and a curling beard. He was a vicious man and rarely spoke unless he thought that it was necessary. Valkia turned her expressionless stare on him and was gratified to see him baulk. ‘With respect, hetwoman,’ he said, amending his tone of address with obvious distaste, ‘the chieftain is barely cold. We need to take stock of what has happened.’

‘There is no need,’ Valkia shot back. ‘Those who were present during the hunt will tell you what happened. The treacherous fool Eraich plotted and schemed the very idea of my father’s assassination with Radek.’ She leaned back slightly. ‘Is there any part of that which you do not understand? Perhaps if I were to speak more slowly?’

‘I understand perfectly,’ responded Hepsus with a faint sneer. ‘None of the Circle were present for this alleged meeting. We have only your word...’

‘Is that not good enough for you?’ Something changed in Valkia’s voice then, and the harsh snap became a thrumming purr. ‘Come, Hepsus. We have known one another all our lives. Have I ever lied to you?’

‘No, but...’

‘Then surely my word should be all you need.’ It was not a question. It was a statement and Hepsus instinctively knew that to push further would invite unpleasantness. He dropped into sullen silence and she gave him a look of approval. Her arrogance came so easily; but then it always had done.

She continued as though the interruption had not happened, drumming her long fingers against the skin of her thigh. ‘Radek was an excellent Warspeaker, whatever his ultimate failing may have been. Replacing him will not be an easy task.’ Her tongue ran across her lips as she considered. ‘I propose that those who consider themselves suitable for the position present themselves in three days time and we will open up the Circle of Blood to them. A good Warspeaker must be a tenacious Warspeaker. The one still standing at the end of the fight will be our candidate.’

The rest of the Circle stared at her. This was unheard of. In past times, the chieftain had selected his own Warspeaker based on merit. Valkia laughed, a rich, throaty sound, at their faces.

‘Oh, come now!’ She practically beamed her amusement at them. ‘I am not suggesting a fight to the death! Merely a trial to determine who is the most cunning and the most capable. Although, if you feel a battle to the death would be more appropriate…’ She cut the sentence short and bit back the desire that this be the case. She sensed the palpable air of relief at her amendment and nodded. Fights to the death for her amusement would have to wait, it seemed.

‘Secondly, the reavers mentioned by Eraich allegedly decimated their people. We should seek them out and assess whether we should consider them a threat or possible allies. Hepsus.’ She turned to the warrior. ‘Put together a scouting party and take them up into the hills. Report back as swiftly as you can. If Eraich’s smallholdings are still standing and have not been burned to the ground, take whatever of use you can find.’

‘As my hetwoman commands,’ replied the warrior. This he understood. Direct orders. He felt relieved. Valkia nodded her pleasure at his easy compliance.

‘Finally and most importantly, we need to properly inventory our supplies. We need to know what we have to see us through the winter.’ This was a subject that she and her father had often come to blows over. Merroc’s attitude had been that the gods would provide. Valkia, far more pragmatic, had argued that it would be the hunters who would provide and that every morsel of food counted. There were enough things that could kill the people of the Schwarzvolf. Starvation due to stupidity was not an option.

She looked around the group. ‘Perhaps one of the women from the newcomers can tally numbers and aid with rationing. Find out. Godspeaker, that may be a task for you. You are more inclined to patience than the rest of us.’

The elderly man nodded. His eyes had not left Valkia since they had assembled and she was slightly uncomfortable under his scrutiny. She did her best not to let it bother her though. She had to demonstrate complete control and strength of purpose to maintain her position as leader. So far the fates had been on her side but she knew, without really understanding how, that one error at this stage could result in complete chaos. It was vital that she maintained her composure. There would be time to sit quietly and assess all that had happened later. Now was not that time.

Valkia chewed on her bottom lip and looked around the assembled group. Time to deal with the main issue. There was no point in leaving it to be resolved later, or it would fester like an infected wound.

When her voice came, it was clear and confident. ‘I know that some of you have doubts in my ability because I am a woman. But ask yourselves honestly: when has that ever stopped me before?’ She was gratified that one or two of them looked faintly embarrassed and even more pleased to see nods of agreement. ‘More than anybody else amongst our people, I need your support. I can lead the Schwarzvolf to greatness. All I ask for is your trust.’

She leaned forward then, her spear across her knees. ‘So tell me, my people, do I have that?’ Her finger ran down the blade of the spear tip and a hungry look sparked in her eyes. ‘Or do we need to discuss it further?’

By the measure of the Schwarzvolf’s lifespans, Fydor the Godspeaker was an old man. Fifty summers he had lived and he was robust and healthy yet. Time had not diminished his abilities or his voracious appetite for life. He had taken three wives to his hearth, had fathered many children, and countless grandchildren bore his blood. Merroc had once affectionately said that such a virile man could have repopulated the tribe by himself. He was no great warrior; in his youth he had lost not only his right eye, but also most of the fingers of his left hand. Only the thumb and part of the forefinger remained.

He could still wield a sword when the situation demanded it, but unable to properly hold a shield he was more of a liability than an asset. At first he had struggled to cope with his loss of status but he had been young, barely an adult, and the previous Godspeaker had guided him in the ways of divination.

Nobody knew whether he was genuinely able to feel the supposed will of the gods. But whether it was reading omens in the weather, predicting battle outcomes from the guts of an eviscerated animal or divining something more personal from the pieces of bone that he carried around in a pouch round his neck, Fydor was without question able to convince his people that he was speaking for the divine. The fact that his predictions came true with almost unfailing accuracy helped considerably.

When the Circle had broken, when Valkia had sent them from the tent that had once been her father’s, she had turned her attention to him. Fydor had been there the day that Valkia had come into the world. Merroc’s first-born. His pride when his wife had gone into labour had been so great and Fydor had never forgotten the look of disappointment when he had realised his longed-for son had been a girl. But Merroc had loved Valkia regardless.

Fydor shook the pouch around his neck, the bones within clattering together slightly. Valkia’s dark eyes took in his slender form; the lined face and the bright, intelligent eyes.

‘Godspeaker, you know what I must ask of you.’

‘I do, hetwoman. You wish me to divine your future. A simple enough task.’ She nodded and he continued. ‘I will do so for you and gladly – but be warned. You must make your focus very specific.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What is the answer that you seek, Valkia?’ She did not berate the Godspeaker for the use of her given name. Within the tribe, Fydor was considered second only to their chieftain. The respect for him was immense and Valkia knew that she could not afford to make an enemy of him.

She leaned back on the furs and let her eyes close to half-lidded slits. She could hear the sounds of activity outside; people moving to carry out her orders. It was a heady thing to realise that she could command them so easily. The stringing up of the ‘perpetrators’ was a stroke of genius and she knew that it would put her mark very firmly and clearly on how she intended to rule her people.

Fydor did not hurry her. He untied the pouch from his neck and let the bones tumble to the floor. He picked through them, arranging them and generally preparing himself whilst Valkia considered the question that would shape her future.

Eventually, she sat upright again and her eyes opened. She crossed her legs beneath her and rested her chin on a hand.

‘I seek to make the Schwarzvolf the most powerful tribe the people of the north have ever known. My question to the gods is this, Fydor. Will I succeed in that venture?’

The Godspeaker smiled and took the bone fragments up in his hand. He shook them in his closed fist. Their rattle sounded to Valkia like some kind of ominous overture.

‘Let us find out, hetwoman.’

He opened his hand and cast the bones. Valkia could not bring herself to look down at them, but kept her focus firmly on the Godspeaker as he passed his misshapen hand across them and closed his remaining eye.

As was his way, he was mumbling under his breath, incomprehensible noises that she could not make out. She had long suspected that it was more for show than any mystical effect. But perhaps the effect of the day’s events had taken her into its grip, because she felt a shiver of anticipation.

In his time, Fydor had foretold events with unerring accuracy. This was less an indication of some divine connection and more a testament to his ability to extrapolate current conditions from simple observation. He was an expert in reading the mood and shift of an army of warriors and had he been put in charge of a battle would have made a considerably lethal general. He had never experienced any kind of true holy ecstasy.

What he experienced now was far from ecstatic. Red began to seep into his mind’s eye, as though a thin film of blood coated his thoughts. So real was the sensation that he actually opened his eye to be sure. He sucked in a sharp intake of breath. Valkia’s eyes widened at the noise.

She looked as though she would speak, but he held up a hand to forestall her. He reached it up to his face and to his slightly detached surprise it did not come away stained with blood. Yet everything around him still bore an unmistakable tinge of deep crimson.

‘Blood,’ he whispered in a voice so quiet that Valkia had to lean forward to hear him. ‘I see... blood in your future, Valkia.’

‘Blood that I spill, or my own?’

‘I cannot tell.’ Even the air was charged with that unmistakably coppery scent that Fydor automatically linked in his mind to the aftermath of a battlefield. He licked his lips which had gone suddenly dry as he scrutinised Valkia. He spoke honestly, saying what he was seeing. The words given volume did not help him understand this strange phenomenon one bit, but he felt it was expected of him. ‘You are falling into shadow. Darkness gathers around you. It will swallow you, consume you...’ He frowned. ‘Or envelop and protect you. I cannot tell which.’

The words set the hairs on the back of Valkia’s neck to standing and she kept her face as impassable and neutral as she could maintain. ‘Consider the question, Godspeaker. Will I succeed in my venture to bring the Schwarzvolf to greatness?’

Before Fydor could speak he experienced a terrifying vision. Something saw him, though he was not the focus of its attention. Its presence was vast, a fathomless thing of infinite rage. It burned with malevolence and radiated an air of sheer hatred and destruction. Against its enormity he was nothing but a speck, a tiny mote beside the furnace of an ageless fury. Heat, the acrid stink of burning metal and old blood assailed him. For a fleeting second he hungered for the glory of war once again. To wield a sword or an axe and cut down those who would dare to oppose them…

And then his thoughts exploded, shattering and raining down around him as the vision left him and the cold grip of reality drew him back into its grasp. His head was throbbing and he felt a powerful need to vomit.

Valkia’s voice was coming at him from somewhere far, far away and he stared muzzily up at her. ‘…speaker!’ She was standing above him, a look of genuine concern on her face. It was then and only then that Fydor realised he was lying flat on his back. He had no memory of falling, but it must have happened.

Her strong hand pulled him upright and without a word she handed him a cup of wine. He sipped at it gratefully and massaged his temple.

‘What did you see?’ Valkia pressed the matter, eager to know the outcome of his vision. She had watched the Godspeaker over the years as he had performed these rituals for her father, but she had never seen anything as convincing as what had just happened.

‘The gods favour you, Valkia,’ he said quietly. ‘Or… a god. I cannot tell which. But their celestial eye rests firmly on you. I felt no disapproval, only…’ He paused. What had he experienced? A bloodlust. Unable to accurately articulate something for which he had no frame of reference, he said what he believed she had to hear.

‘You are strong,’ he said. ‘You are not afraid to take difficult decisions. I trust you will know I speak no ill of the dead when I say that towards the end, Merroc lost that ability. It will not be easy. But yes, Valkia. Yes. I believe you will succeed.’

‘I knew I would,’ she said, triumphant in her arrogance.

Several days passed and the shock of Merroc’s death began to lessen for the tribe. In truth, the chieftain had been so removed from the tribe’s activities in the past months that most barely noticed his absence. But there was one person who felt his loss most keenly.

Valkia had graciously allowed Kata to remain in the chieftain’s yurt but she had been entirely unable to settle. Edan was grizzly all the time and the two little girls were bundles of mischief who got over the shock of their father’s death with the alacrity that only the innocent could manage. They were wearying and Kata felt exhausted. But she did not dare let herself sleep. She knew that Valkia’s strike on her children must surely come.

More days flowed by, blurring into one. And still her children lived. Kata could not bring herself to believe that Valkia had meant her words. She could not believe that the new hetwoman would willingly allow Edan to grow to manhood and stake his claim on the tribe.

Her loyalties so torn, Kata began a slow but self-destructive descent into madness.

Life went on regardless. Valkia’s promise to open up the Circle of Blood was kept, and a pleasing number of young warriors presented themselves to her. Each one stated their intention to take on the role of the tribe’s Warspeaker. It irritated the young woman that none of the shieldmaidens had chosen to present themselves, but she sensed that it was simply too much too soon.

The trial by combat commenced. From the thirty or so hopefuls, two clear potential warriors emerged. One was Hepsus, whose superior skill and years of experience gave him an edge that had seen more than one challenger carried from the circle in a daze. The other was a callow youth by the name of Pelyn, who was possessed of a considerable talent in the arena.

Valkia considered the latter thoughtfully. He was a strong-limbed young man of around her own age with hair like burnished copper and a pleasing arrogance to his stance. He would be pliable and easily manipulated to her will. Hepsus had the skill and the experience and, as Pelyn found out during the final trial, the superior cunning to lead her armies.

The two men battled for a full two hours, both sweating and panting by the end despite the bone-chilling cold. Each was covered in nicks and surface cuts from the other’s practise blade.

‘I can keep going as long as it takes, old man,’ Pelyn had sneered, his self-assurance evident. ‘You could do the honourable thing and concede defeat.’

‘Were our roles reversed, boy,’ panted Hepsus in return, ‘would you do that?’

‘I would never be in your position.’

‘And that is why you will fail.’ Hepsus straightened his back. ‘To go into war with the belief that you are invincible will mean you fail to notice the pitfalls and snares your enemy puts in the path of your success. You are blinded to all but your own brilliance.’ Hepsus grinned suddenly. ‘And so you fall victim to the oldest trick of the veteran warrior.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Letting the old man get his breath back.’

It had been a matter of moments after that before the startled Pelyn was beaten into a daze by an invigorated Hepsus. The Schwarzvolf, who had been watching the trials eagerly, roared their approval. Valkia nodded once, curtly. But there had been no ceremony, no drinking into the night at the celebration of a new Warspeaker. Hepsus would need to fully prove himself before she formally accepted him.

She noted absently that once again, Kata had not been present. No doubt shut away in her yurt, drowning herself in floods of pathetic tears. Valkia’s patience with her stepmother had worn away within days of the same reaction. She had attempted reasoning and she had resorted to shouting at Kata but neither worked. The woman was dead to the world beyond her own suffering.

‘They call themselves the Bloody Hand.’

Hepsus had returned from the scouting mission after several days without a single loss. In addition, they had brought back many sacks of grain and whole haunches of dried meat that would add to their winter stores. The hills people had accepted their fate without too much difficulty, although several of them had stolen away in the middle of the night. Valkia had not bothered to seek them out. If they preferred to take their chances with the creatures of the Vale and its environs rather than remain in the protective embrace of the tribe, that was their own problem.

‘The Bloody Hand,’ Valkia repeated. ‘Did you speak with them?’

‘Aye, that we did.’ Hepsus pushed a wad of dried herbs into the bowl of his pipe and lit it with a taper from the fire. The sweet, cloying smoke filled the tent with its smell and he offered the pipe to Valkia. She accepted it and inhaled the herbs, but not too deeply. They relaxed the body and it was easy to inhale too much and relax the mind as well. ‘Son of their leader. Deron, his name was.’

‘What led them to attack Eraich and his people?’

‘They were… not forthcoming on the matter. I pressed the point as much as I dared under the pact of truce. As far as I can tell, they were simply hungry for a fight.’

‘Possible threat or likely allies?’

Hepsus considered the question. ‘Perhaps both,’ he concluded after a while. ‘They are small in number, but witnessing first-hand the damage they wrought in the farming settlement... they are also remarkably destructive. I suggest we treat them very carefully until we get a better idea of where we stand.’ He took a long, slow draw on the pipe and the blue smoke clouded his face for a moment or two. ‘They have asked to meet with the chieftain, of course.’

Valkia bristled slightly at the hint of amusement she detected in the other warrior’s voice and shifted position until she was sitting more upright. ‘And what did you tell them?’

‘I said that I would speak to our leader and see what could be arranged.’

An uncomfortable pause followed. Valkia could feel her ire rising at Hepsus and his casual manner. She had always thought him flippant, but she had a distinct feeling that he was mocking her. He was baiting her, trying to draw a weakness out. Ordinarily, she would be damned if she would fall for it, but she had to ask the question. She had to ask the question and she had to ask it with confidence.

‘Have you told him,’ she said, her voice clear and without any hint of irritation, nervousness or indeed any emotion at all, ‘that you are led by a woman?’

‘No,’ replied Hepsus and he took the pipe from between his teeth to grin wickedly at her. ‘I thought I would let them find out for themselves.’

She could not tell from the way he spoke whether he had done this thing to weaken or strengthen her position, but a part of her was relieved. If the Bloody Hand thought that the Schwarzvolf were anything but strong, they would be attacked. She didn’t doubt the capabilities of their warriors, but they were already in a difficult place. They had to have time to settle.

‘Hetwoman?’ Hepsus prompted her for a response. ‘Do you wish to meet with them?’

She leaned back and, allowing her most imperious expression to drift idly across her face, nodded her agreement. ‘I think so, Hepsus. Make the arrangements. I will speak with this – what did you say his name was?’

‘Deron.’

‘Yes. Deron. Invite him to accept the hospitality of the Schwarzvolf. We will discuss how we can... work together.’

‘This seems... eminently sensible.’ To Valkia’s irritation, Hepsus was outwardly surprised at her competence. It did little to quench the flame of anger she felt towards the other warrior. She knew, deep down, that it was to be expected. He had not openly challenged her position when he had been given the chance, but he was certainly not missing any chances now. She would prove her worth to them all in time but Hepsus was a unique challenge.

He would make the perfect new Warspeaker as well, but Valkia would not grant him the satisfaction of acknowledging it. Not yet.

‘I will meet with him and a deputation in four days. They are to leave their weapons with a warrior of your choosing. We will give them a feast of both food and words. They will understand that we are not like Eraich and his men.’

‘As you command.’ The red-haired warrior got to his feet and moved to the entrance of the yurt. She stopped him with a quiet whisper of his name. He turned and looked at her, his eyes glittering in the firelight and giving away nothing.

‘Hepsus.’

‘Hetwoman?’

‘Do not seek to belittle me in this venture. My father may have been a forgiving, weak fool, but I am not. Play this game on my side and the rewards will be considerable. Try to push against me and the consequences will be on your own head. Do we understand one another?’

‘Clearly.’ A smile flickered across his face and it was filled with genuine humour.

She nodded in grim satisfaction and the warrior left her alone. After she was sure he had gone, she picked up one of the cushions and flung it the length of the yurt. She should have known that she would face this kind of problem before she started. Indeed, perhaps she had known and merely pushed the thought of how she would handle it to the back of her mind.

Valkia’s tantrum did not last long and she composed herself within a few short seconds. She ran her finger across her dark hair and stared into the flames. Let this Deron make whatever he would of her gender. She would show him that the Schwarzvolf were not going to submit to the will of an invading tribe. She would roll over and beg for mercy from no man.

She sat alone for several minutes and then got to her feet. There was another matter that demanded immediate attention; that of the deteriorating mental well-being of Kata. In the days since Merroc’s demise, the chieftain’s widow had become increasingly detached. Valkia had already made the arrangements to have her two half-sisters cared for by other members of the tribe, but Kata had refused to give Edan up to anybody’s care.

Valkia ducked out of the tent. Twilight had spread through the sky and the temperatures had dropped considerably. To the north, the dancing lights of the far-distant aurora could be seen as they revealed themselves to the night. A pang of long-ago memory touched Valkia momentarily as she recalled sitting atop the shoulders of a man she had once adored.

A faint flapping sound caught her attention and she turned to see what it was. The corpse of Radek, nailed to a wooden pole and placed at the edge of the camp, had already suffered badly from the unkind and merciless caress of the elements and the carrion birds that had gathered when the bodies had been mounted. What remained of his clothing fluttered in the light, chill breeze giving the body a faintly unnatural animation.

Seeing Radek there steeled Valkia’s resolve and memories of her father were banished. Moving with her shoulders pulled back and her head held high, she headed for the tent where Kata had barricaded herself against the outside world.

As she approached, she sensed that something was not quite right simply from the smell that struck her. Despite the cold, which could slow down the process of death quite considerably, there was an unmistakable stench of death in the air. Her nostrils flared slightly and her pace quickened. Yes – without doubt – there was the bitter tang of blood on the wind. An almost unbearable desire to turn her back on the camp and go out in the woods to hunt swept over her, but the young woman fought it back with considerable self-control.

The entrance to the tent had been stitched together from the inside. Kata’s stitches were tight but uneven; it had been an urgent act that her stepmother had performed. Scowling slightly, Valkia stood with her feet apart and her hands on her hips.

‘Kata.’

She began with a soft voice, but received no reply. Her voice rose in volume until tiring of her efforts, she merely took her dagger from her hip and tore a new entrance in the thick hide of the dwelling.

The interior heat of the tent washed over her in a wave of unpleasant odour and stale air. It did not surprise her one bit to see the scene that lay before her. Kata was dead and there was no way that Valkia could start to guess how long that had been the case. She didn’t know if Kata had died swiftly or had lingered for days. She was lying on the floor of the tent, her eyes open and staring upwards. Her fingers had locked around a wooden cup and Valkia prised it free. She sniffed the contents and coughed. It was one of the more potent herbs that her people used, usually to quicken the death of a warrior who had suffered a mortal wound in battle. From the number of crushed leaves still clinging to the side of the cup, Kata had taken enough to fell a mountain lion.

As if to aid the process, or perhaps simply in her madness, she had also carved gashes in each forearm and the corpse was grey. The woman was drained of all blood.

She stood up and looked around. Edan was still alive, but weak. He had no strength to cry and he lay on the ground at his dead mother’s side, his eyes flowing with silent tears. He was covered in her sticky blood.

Without emotion, Valkia stared at the corpse of a woman who had always been her friend, but who had, in the end, been too weak. She felt no sorrow at this second familial bereavement, merely a faint sense of annoyance.

A choking sob pulled her attention towards the boy. Edan was almost a year old and had not yet quite mastered the art of walking unaided. The hetwoman considered the infant without words for a time. It would be the easiest thing in the world to suffocate him now. Nobody would ever know.

In the years that followed, Valkia never truly knew what it was that caused her to spare the child’s life that night. It was not sympathy, she knew that. It was more that she was suddenly compelled by a notion that if he lived, he would surely be of use to her in time.

She stooped and plucked the starving child up and balanced him on her hip. He clung to her, his little monkey arms around her neck and buried his face in her shoulder. Casting a final, scornful look at her dead stepmother, Valkia carried Edan from the tent and ordered it burned to the ground. In the eyes of the Schwarzvolf, Kata had committed one of the most unforgivable sins. Suicide was no way for a noble tribesman or woman to die and was never condoned.

In a short period of time, the balance of power and the very dynamic of the tribe altered. The chieftain and his wife were dead; the betrayal of a Warspeaker still haunted the conversations around camp and a woman – barely more than a girl – was taking their lives into her untried hands.

Nobody said a word as Valkia walked from Kata’s tent, merely scurried to obey her commands. There was something in her manner that suggested non-compliance would not be conducive to continued good health. She pushed the traumatised Edan onto a young woman of Eraich’s tribe who took the little boy gladly. Behind her, flames licked into the darkening night as the last trace of her upbringing was rendered to ash.

FIVE

THE BLOOD GOD

The meeting with the Bloody Hand ran as Valkia had expected it to. The arrival of Deron and his companions had caused a certain ripple of terror amongst the farming folk who recognised those who had slaughtered their friends and family. They were dressed not unlike the Schwarzvolf in a mixture of treated leather and furs, but there the similarities ended. The Bloody Hand were of a different stock to Valkia’s people: bigger, stronger and, as she found out over the course of the discussions, bordering on the insane.

The deputation had refused outright to be parted with their weapons, but had actually offered a compromise that was acceptable. Their weapons were bound tightly into their scabbards making any attempts to unsheathe them difficult and time-consuming. It was a unique solution to a long-standing problem and Valkia had taken mental note of it.

Deron was a young man of around twenty-five years old, huge and powerfully muscled, with green eyes that looked to Valkia as though they flickered between sanity and madness constantly. She found him exotic and that in itself made him strangely attractive.

Kata had spoken once of the need to bear children and it was something that Valkia had always ignored or shrugged off. She was not the maternal type, but she knew that it would fall to her at some point to bear a strong heir – male or female – to follow her. Whenever she looked at this big, powerful man with his dark hair and mad eyes, she hungered for him in a way she had never felt before. Even Radek, who she had loved in her way, had never stirred her passion in the way that Deron did.

She let none of this show during the course of their discussions however, maintaining an air of cultivated indifference to the Bloody Hand. She learned that they were small in number and that they had come down from higher in the hills several years before. They had never encountered the Schwarzvolf in that time.

They addressed every single sentence to Hepsus until Valkia finally grew annoyed.

‘Speak to me,’ she said. ‘I am Valkia, hetwoman of the Schwarzvolf. You will show respect, man of the Bloody Hand, or you will answer to the tip of my spear.’

Her anger showed as two pink spots high on her cheek and Deron had studied her thoughtfully for a few moments. When he spoke, his voice was a low rumbling bass that did nothing to dispel the sense of attraction she felt for him. His accent was strange and the awkwardness of his pronunciation suggested that they either spoke very little or simply had their own language.

‘Your Warspeaker tells us a woman leads the Schwarzvolf. We do not believe this to be true.’

‘Do you think women weak?’ Deron laughed at this.

‘No,’ he said, simply. ‘Far from weak. We have all witnessed the pain of childbirth. My father says that no man could ever bear that. But until now, I had not met a tribe with a woman in such a position of great power.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you imbued with the unnatural?’ When she looked puzzled at his words, he corrected himself. ‘Do you practise magic?’

‘I am a warrior,’ she retorted, affronted at such a suggestion. She took up her spear. ‘I fight at the heart of every battle and I am afraid of no man.’ Deron tipped his head to one side and considered the spear.

‘Is that an invitation to fight?’

It was phrased as a question and Valkia instinctively understood its meaning. Deron was suggesting a challenge. Not to her position, but merely to gauge her strength. It would weaken her position considerably if she were to refuse. A smile came over her face.

‘An invitation to fight? An interesting notion.’ She laughed. ‘Yes. We shall fight, Deron of the Bloody Hand.’

She was rewarded with a smile that exposed all of Deron’s jagged, vicious-looking teeth. A handsome face? Yes, very handsome. But there was something more in that look than simple mutual attraction. There was a lust for blood. Her blood. And like everything else in her life, Valkia was not going to give it up easily.

The Circle of Blood, as it was known, was little more than a cleared area of dirt on the west side of the camp with a thick post hammered rigidly into the ground that marked its centre. The arena was a churned, pockmarked landscape of mud and slush, crusted with ice and spotted with sticky, crimson pools revealing its heavy and frequent usage. The Schwarzvolf took the training of their young warriors very seriously and did not use practise weapons. A training session with the Warspeaker rarely ended in death, but it was not completely unknown.

Flakes of snow were drifting lazily down from the grey sky and Valkia raised her eyes to the heavens as she stepped into the circle, blinking away the flakes. Within days, these light flurries would turn to the endless snows of winter.

News of this trial of arms against the representative of an unknown tribe had spread throughout the camp like wildfire and a relatively large crowd had gathered. The fighting area itself was an open space but the Schwarzvolf remained at a practised distance. A length of heavy, braided rope was threaded through a hole in the central post and lay in two ends that were equidistant. The baying audience stood a few paces back from the ends of rope.

Valkia had stripped back to nothing more protective than a leather vest and a pair of heavy deerskin trousers. Her arms were bare and exposed to the cold of the day, the flesh was dimpled and the hairs raised. She did not shiver, however, either from the temperature or from fear.

Despite the chill in the air, Deron had stripped off his heavy leathers and furs and was going to fight bare-chested. Valkia chewed on her lower lip at the sight of his physique. He was just as big beneath the clothing as he had been with it over his shoulders. His powerful arms and his broad back rippled with sinewy muscle and Valkia’s eye was drawn to the curious brand in the centre of his chest. It appeared to be a strange, angular representation of a skull, and the sight of it stirred old childhood memories of a battle long past. She set them aside with easy detachment. There would be time enough to think on the discovery later.

By mutual agreement, they had decided on a knife fight and already Valkia was sizing up her opponent, working out opportunities to bring him down. She had thought that he would be big and strong, but seeing him like this, suspected that there might be a swiftness to his movements as well. Their left hands were bound with the free ends of the marker rope, creating an unbroken bond between them that must not be severed until the battle was decided. It could also be used, if so desired, to lethal effect by a canny warrior. More than one unlucky soul had met their end choked to death by its unyielding coils.

‘To first blood, Valkia of the Schwarzvolf?’ Deron asked the question across the arena and she confirmed her acceptance of the terms in a loud, clear and strong voice.

‘To first blood. Deron of the Bloody Hand.’ She readied herself, drawing the wicked, double-edged knife from the sheath on her thigh. It was a well balanced blade and one which she had used for many years. It had been her father’s before hers and despite its age, the edge had never dulled. Some whispered that there was untamed magic deep at its heart. It was an unusually bright blade, not like the heavy iron that made up most of their weapons. It flashed in her hand.

The two combatants prowled around the arena, each weighing up the other and tugging at the rope experimentally. Valkia raked in the sight of the man opposite her and approved silently of his cat-like grace. These men were strong, fine warriors – that much she could tell – and that hint of madness she had seen in his eyes suggested that they were fierce.

For a time it was obvious that neither wanted to make the first move and then Valkia, perhaps tiring of the game, darted like a silverfish, quick and fast, feinting to Deron’s right side and coming to a halt behind him. The move was lightning quick, but the big man spun on his heel and hunkered low in a defensive stance, the knife held out before him.

Several of Valkia’s people made noises of approval as the two warriors in the arena came together. Valkia’s slim, lithe body merged into the shadow of Deron’s bigger one as they pressed against one another, assessing each other’s strength.

‘You are strong,’ grunted Deron. ‘Fast, too.’ Another of those sharp-toothed smiles and he added the sting. ‘For a woman.’ He broke away from her in a movement that made her stumble slightly as the rope snapped taut. She did not fall but regained her balance quickly and dropped, rolling head-over-heels away from the downwards slash that he aimed at her arm. She got back up to a crouch and pounced, a dark-haired wildcat, towards his leg. The blade of the silvery dagger flashed in the weak winter sunlight and Deron jerked his body forward sending up a spray of mud. She missed his calf by a fraction of an inch.

She swore loudly and leaped back to her feet, only to be caught by a blow from his fist. She felt it crack across her cheekbone and her world exploded in pain. Her head whipped to the side and she turned back to glower at him in fury. There was a mad grin on his face.

‘You wanted to fight, so we fight,’ he said, simply. ‘To first blood, yes? As we agreed? Blood for the Blood God.’

The words he spoke meant nothing to Valkia at all and yet they still stirred something deep inside her. All she knew was that this unfamiliar man who was a potential enemy of her people was taunting her and she would not let the insult go.

With a low bellow of rage, she hurled herself at the big man, not caring about form or style. She would claw out his eyes if she had to. His laughter did little to force back the anger.

‘Fight!’

He said the word again as he moved easily from her attack. Her face was growing scarlet with rage. He was embarrassing her in front of her people. The thought that they were all watching this public humiliation woke something feral in her. A ululating scream left her throat and she leaped at Deron’s back, winding the rope easily around his exposed neck. He was still laughing. And that made her even angrier.

She raised the knife, ready to plunge it into the arterial vein in his neck. She would give him blood for his Blood God, whatever that even meant. But no matter how angry she was, Deron was still bigger and stronger than she was and he threw her free quickly. She hit the ground hard and lay there for a moment, winded. The low sounds of approval from her people had swollen to cheers as she’d launched herself at Deron, but now a silence descended.

The snow was coming down more heavily and it settled on Valkia as she lay where she had fallen. Deron stretched out his shoulders in an idle way. He untangled himself from the rope and moved towards her.

‘She is strong,’ he said to the assembled watchers. ‘But not strong enough, I think. She...’

Whatever Deron’s opinion of Valkia might be was cut short as he moved within striking distance. She had been carefully waiting for him to approach, feigning injury, and the moment he was in her reach, the rope snapped taut once again, this time coiling around the big man’s ankle. He flipped onto his back with a roar of surprise just as Valkia’s blade flashed and stabbed deftly into the meat of his thigh. It cut through the leather trousers and bit into the powerful muscle there. He let out a growl that was somewhere between pain and outrage and put his hand to the wound.

It came away stained with red.

‘First blood,’ said Valkia between gritted teeth that felt slightly loosened in her jaw from his earlier blow. ‘The victory is mine. Now give me one good reason why I shouldn’t change the terms of this fight and gut you where you lay?’

He sat up and thrust his mud-spattered face close to hers. The next words he spoke were pitched so that she and only she could hear them. Any hint of a language deficiency was gone. He spoke clearly and with such clarity that she almost salivated.

‘Because the Blood God favours you. And you want to know what that means. Kill me now and you will never know. Let me live and you will learn.’

He put out a hand to her and they stood together. He raised her arm into the air. ‘Valkia of the Schwarzvolf draws first blood. Your leader, she is quite the fierce little thing.’

That awful silence that had so filled Valkia with dread was torn apart by the sound of her people – of all her people – bellowing her name at the top of their lungs. In that moment, she realised that she had won them over.

The Bloody Hand remained as the tribe’s guest for one more day and Deron kept to his word. He told her of the god his people worshipped, an entity who in the telling was much like the god the Schwarzvolf knew as the Axefather. A dark, ancient god whose thirst for blood was engendered in the ruthlessness of his followers. He told her many things, but he did not tell her everything.

‘One thing at a time, hetwoman,’ he said when she had complained that he was not giving her the full truth. ‘There is a truce between your people and mine and that will be honoured. We will speak more of an allied future after the winter. We must go back to our own people now, before the snows come and the hill passes are blocked.’ He looked up to the dark, threatening skies and Valkia realised with a pang of annoyance that she did not want this strange warrior to leave. She had too many questions.

Deron smiled down at her. ‘We will meet again in the spring,’ he said. ‘When we will form an official alliance of our people. Together, the Bloody Hand and the Schwarzvolf will be invincible. But when you kill, whatever you kill, dedicate it to the Blood God. He will reward you in kind. Of that, I am sure.’

The bounty of the spring and summer combined with the careful rationing that was imposed on the growing tribe proved to be exceptionally effective and as such, losses of life over the hardest weeks of the dark winter were minimal. There were still a number however: the elderly, the infirm and infants who were too weak to survive the earliest days of life.

For Valkia, the long months of winter were a trial unlike anything she had ever anticipated. Juggling the demands of her people with the frequent incursions from small tribes who thought they could somehow take on the might of the Schwarzvolf was tiring. She had never realised just what leading her people would mean.

Politics.

Not all the dealings with small tribes were making short work of the more aggressive ones – and the Schwarzvolf did that with increasingly brutal style. The number of heads placed on poles around the perimeter of the camp grew almost daily. Valkia encouraged competition between her warriors; offering a prize to those who could take the most skulls in a battle. It kept them keen and eager.

Under her leadership, the Schwarzvolf were gaining a reputation as a bloodthirsty, relentless band of warriors. For some that acted as a deterrent and for others, it served as a challenge. For a handful, it opened up interesting trade possibilities. It was the latter that gave Valkia the most headaches. It was the latter that brought would-be suitors to the fore.

Valkia knew in her heart that Merroc had realised early on that he would never be able to sell his daughter off to the highest bidder – or to a worthy son of a worthy ally – and that this had inadvertently made her instantly more appealing to a wide variety of young men from across the steppes where the Schwarzvolf made their home.

She attracted the interest of a few old men as well. More than one of this seemingly endless stream of would-be consorts walked out of the camp of the Schwarzvolf having had Valkia laugh in their faces. Some walked out nursing wounds from the fiery, wicked-tempered hetwoman.

Several of these suitors had to be carried out along with the headless bodies of their entourage, having tempted the wrath of the warrior woman with their rancid breath, roving eyes and eager hands. Valkia made sure these trophies in particular adorned stakes that lined the entrance of her tent.

‘You will have to form an alliance at some time, Valkia.’ She was seated in the yurt that she had made hers, a cup of hot wine in her hand and a scowl on her face. She felt nothing so much as a child being on the receiving end of a lecture.

‘Tell me why I “have” to do such a thing if you would, Godspeaker?’ Her tone was imperious and haughty. Nearly every man who had presented themselves to her and broached the subject of an alliance had begun well enough. They had discussed ways in which they could expand the power of the Schwarzvolf. Ways in which they could strengthen the might of what was rapidly becoming acknowledged as the strongest, largest and most influential tribe in the region.

Valkia was always charming and interested up to this point. But then the tone would change and the suggested reciprocal cost would be discussed. And in four out of five negotiations, her hand in marriage was the key focus.

‘You need to marry, or at least take a mate. For a start, you need to assure your line of succession.’ Valkia flung a sour look at the Godspeaker, damning him silently for speaking the words that she constantly denied as truth.

‘I am not yet in need of such reassurance,’ she said, the scowl not leaving her face. ‘I am still young.’

‘Aye, hetwoman, you are young. But you know as well as I do what the gossip is throughout the camp.’ Her eyebrows raised and for the briefest of moments, the scowl was replaced by something that most resembled cynical amusement.

‘The rumours that I am not a woman? That I have no appetite for men? Or the one that I am barren? Which particular rumour is the favoured one of the day, Godspeaker? What do my people say of me now?’ In the months since she had wrested control of the tribe, Valkia had come to treat the gossip with the contempt it deserved, but kept a very careful eye on what was said. Tongues would wag and stories would be exaggerated, but the common talk amongst the people of the camp could more effectively reflect the mood of her people.

Fydor was more than a little apologetic and as he elaborated, Valkia could see that the subject made him uncomfortable. She did nothing to interject, taking a slightly malicious pleasure from his awkwardness.

‘In honesty, the current rumours are largely a combination of the two. The women say that you make yourself unwomanly; that you challenge the gods in doing so. You defend yourself with such ferocity that nothing short of the strongest man could hope to ever break down your – ah – your defences.’

Valkia stabbed the dagger she had been playing with down into the ground in front of her. ‘Every man who has presented himself to me and claimed any sort of desire to bed me has not done so with passion,’ she said. ‘They are all weak. I am more worthy than bearing a child with nothing more aggressive than a rabbit. I want the mountain lion, Fydor.’

The Godspeaker knew who she referred to. Since Valkia had met Deron of the Bloody Hand, no other man lived up to him in her eyes. Fydor had considered suggesting to Valkia that she propose a more permanent alliance with the Bloody Hand, but the second he had mentioned Deron’s name, she had screeched at him to hold his tongue. Had she been as other women, he would have gently teased her about her obvious interest in the young man. But Valkia was most assuredly not as other women.

Today, though, she was far more amenable to discussing the matter. She was playing with the dagger, her hand held splayed out as she stabbed at the ground beneath her fingers in a listless, repetitive way. Valkia was bored. And that was dangerous.

Fydor judged the best way to proceed and hit upon the perfect way forward. ‘The darkest days of the winter are almost upon us,’ he said. ‘The Warspeaker’s scouts report that a tribe has set up a camp on the far side of the Vale. They have warriors of their own, but they have not come close to our camp that we know of.’

He had struck exactly the right chord and Valkia looked up, her dark eyes flashing. ‘My warriors have been idle for too long,’ she said. This was a little in-accurate; only two days previously they had engaged in a small but satisfying battle against a few desperate raiders. ‘Have this tribe shown any aggression towards our hunters?’

Her attention was dragged away from brooding and Fydor was grateful for that.

‘Not towards us,’ he said, ‘but Hepsus reports that they have allegedly raided one of the small camps to which your father extended our protection just before his death.’

‘Is that so?’ Valkia had always quietly approved of her father’s efforts to expand his leadership beyond the boundaries of the camp. It was the best way to maintain control of the smaller tribes who, as experience had shown, could easily be corrupted by other influences. They did not proclaim themselves to be Schwarzvolf, of course; Merroc had seen the sense in allowing them to keep their identities but they were more a part of the larger collective than they knew. ‘Then we must address this insult with due haste.’ She slid the dagger into the sheath at her waist. ‘Send Hepsus. The Warspeaker and I will discuss the best way to approach this enemy.’

A wicked glint came into her eyes and she smiled, a predator’s smile. ‘I am sure that we can find just the right way to deliver the message clearly. Nobody threatens my people or those under my protection.’ She put a finger to her chin thoughtfully. ‘It would end most tragically were they not to heed such a warning.’

She was hungry for blood. It showed in her eyes, her whole face and even the restless set of her body. The legacy of the Schwarzvolf ran strongly in her veins. Merroc would have been proud. He may not, perhaps, have approved of Valkia’s methods, but he would certainly have seen the sense in what she was doing. Fydor sensed she was still desperate for an acceptance that had she but looked, she would have seen she had already.

‘Most tragically,’ he agreed with her words and offered a rare smile of his own.

The message was delivered with typical vigour. A small party led by Valkia herself had arrived in the outlying camp at an opportune moment. The raiders had, by an uncanny chance, chosen that day to strike again. It had taken three days for the Schwarzvolf to arrive, a journey that should normally only have taken half a day. Heavy snowfall had brought down a number of trees in the forest and it had been largely impassable in places. To Valkia’s initial irritation, they had to find another route through. As such, by the time they finally arrived, she was in a mood that was most certainly not one which encouraged diplomacy.

The tiny camp that Merroc had adopted into his own people barely fielded two dozen inhabitants but that did not matter one bit. As far as Valkia was concerned, a slur against these people was a slur against her personally. When she and her group of eight warriors strode from the forest, they exuded a palpable air of competence and ferocity.

The small camp’s defenders, who were little more than farmers, were not doing a good job of holding back the raiders and several men lay dead on the ground. A handful of others kept the raiders at bay with primitive weapons: mostly sticks, rocks and burning fire brands. They may not have been well versed in warfare, but they were certainly tenacious.

The Schwarzvolf force charged with a single word from their leader. She prowled at their head, smaller and slighter than any of the burly warriors who had come with her, but there was murder writ large in her face. She brandished the spear that she favoured and her slender figure was clad in ornately tooled leather armour. She had hand-worked the design herself years ago and it was that of a wolf, its head thrown back as it howled towards a moon far above. It was clumsy work, but the effort she had put into it had given her great pride.

She had been offered better since taking leadership of the Schwarzvolf of course, but she had turned it all down. It had served her well enough, as had her spear and the supposedly enchanted silvery dagger.

The raiders were clearly as hungry for a fight as Valkia and her men because they charged immediately. Perhaps fourteen unkempt warriors turned away from the work of slaughtering the minimal livestock that the outlying tribe kept and turned their attentions instead to better sport. The inhabitants of the camp fell back swiftly, relieved and scared in equal measure.

One of Valkia’s warriors was felled swiftly, a well placed strike from the enemy slitting open his belly. His entrails steamed as the heat of his internal organs was exposed to the cold winter air. He clutched at them as though he could hold his body together through sheer force of will and snarled a colourful array of curses as he stubbornly faced his death. His tenacity was to be admired, Valkia thought. He was doomed and yet he made no complaint about the agony. Instead, he used what remained of his strength to spit at the man who had killed him.

He sank to his knees, no longer able to keep himself upright and blood poured from his opened stomach, blossoming on the snow around him. As she leaped over him on the way to engage another enemy, Valkia drove her spear through the back of his neck, tearing off his head. Better a quick death than a lingering one in agony as the belly wound festered. She owed him that much.

Pulling her spear from the broken body, she flung herself into the heart of the battle, moving with such speed that she was little more than a dark-haired blur in battered leather.

With every blow she struck, Deron’s parting words lingered in her memory. But when you kill, whatever you kill, dedicate it to the Blood God and he will reward you in return. It was hard, she thought, to dedicate anything to a god whose name she did not even know, but with each killing strike, she called out the words that Deron had given her.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

None of the other Schwarzvolf understood what she was calling out, but they were all hungry for the battle and after two bloody kills at her hand, they all picked up the battle-cry until they chorused it together. There was such lust in their words and such ferocity in their attack that the enemy were hugely intimidated. Of the fourteen who had begun the battle, eight were already dead and three more were grievously – if not fatally – wounded. Their leader had died early on in the proceedings and without his command, the rest of the raiders simply fell to pieces.

Valkia hacked and slashed her way through the enemies, each blow she struck filling her with a desire to land more. Deron’s words perhaps had merit. Perhaps this was the reward from this blood god he had sworn by. This insatiable hunger to keep fighting until every drop of blood her enemy possessed had been spilled.

Her spear served her well until only two of the raiders remained and then the shaft splintered, breaking in two. Even this inconvenience did nothing to stop her. She picked up the spear-tip and drew her dagger. Thus armed with twin blades, she continued to mutilate and maim, each time crying out in praise to the blood god.

‘Hetwoman, stop.’

She did not hear the words of her warriors for several moments. It was only when a hand closed on her shoulder and she had almost turned and butchered one of her own men that she realised that the battle had ended. Only then did she discover that she was sat astride one of the fallen enemies, carving out his heart. The raider’s severed head lay a few feet away, the ragged flesh and shattered vertebrae of its neck torn by brute force rather than parted by blade. What madness had filled her with such unholy strength?

She blinked up at the man who had disturbed her work. She could not recall his name to mind for a moment. Eilif, that was him. She knew him. She knew them all. Cold reality came crashing down around her and for a moment she felt faint. Her face and armour were smeared with blood and her beloved spear was broken. She took a deep, steadying breath.

‘Hetwoman?’ Eilif’s brow was furrowed in concern and more than a little fear. She despised the expression. She hated the fact that one of her own people would show so much trepidation before her. ‘Are you... do you need...’

‘Stop babbling like a fool.’ Valkia got to her feet and brushed herself down, not meeting Eilif’s eyes. He had glimpsed her in that moment of madness and it troubled her deeply. ‘Are they all dispatched?’

‘Almost to a man. One lives still. I am no healer, but I wouldn’t think that it will be long before he joins his brethren.’ Eilif nodded over his shoulder to where a single warrior lay groaning. ‘We lost three of our own. These bastards put up quite a fight, but they’re dealt with.’ His expression became grim. ‘They certainly won’t be raiding again.’

‘Yes,’ she said, absently. Her mind was still filled with the echoing shouts and cries of the dying and, once again, that almost unquenchable thirst, that need to snuff out the spark of life from those who dared oppose her. It was the first time she had truly allowed herself to succumb to the darkness within. It was exhilarating. It was what had been lacking in her life.

Memories of what had happened were starting to break through and she remembered the moment the haft of her spear had splintered. She recalled hurling the bottom half away. She stared down at the head of the weapon, held in her hand. The iron blade was pitted and dulled from her efforts to hack through her fallen enemy’s ribcage.

‘I need a better weapon,’ she said, more to herself than to Eilif. She shook her head to clear it of the battle haze that still permeated it and she straightened her shoulders. Looking around at the massacre that she and her men had wrought she felt a shiver of satisfaction. The raiders had been delivered a lesson, of that there was no doubt.

There was still work to be done of course and Valkia busied herself with the rest of her warriors gathering together the corpses of both the farmers who had died attempting to defend their home and those of the dead enemy. The latter were beheaded and the trophies collected. The headless bodies were then flung together in a haphazard pile. As she put the torch to them and the stench of burning flesh filled the air, the young leader of the Schwarzvolf felt the madness finally begin to recede. It was then that the timorous voice of the camp’s leader finally cut into her awareness.

‘You are Merroc’s daughter.’ It was not a question and something in the tone annoyed Valkia. She turned to consider him haughtily.

‘I am,’ she confirmed. ‘I am the hetwoman of the Schwarzvolf now.’

‘Yes,’ he said and Valkia wondered if he might be feeble-minded. He spoke slowly and carefully, each word being considered ‘Thank you for your efforts here.’ He took in the slaughter with a sweeping gesture of one hand. His eyes lingered briefly on the pile of bodies smouldering in the corner of his camp. ‘We owe you a debt, of course.’

‘Of course.’ She struggled not to roll her eyes. This was usually where the offers of marriage would be put on the table. She was not in the mood to deal with that today. Still slightly dazed from her brief brush with insanity, her temper was on a hair trigger. But for once in her life, the young woman was pleasantly surprised. The villager reached over and took the broken spear from her hand. He considered the dulled blade and then looked down at her dagger.

‘I forged many of the swords your people wield,’ he said. ‘Your father himself told me my work was excellent. That dagger you carry, that was made by my uncle who melted down weapons taken from invaders from the south long ago. The metal is an unusual one and difficult to work if you do not have the skill. I would make you a new spear if you would accept that as payment? In the same style as your blade.’

The offer actually delighted her and her response in the affirmative needed no forced enthusiasm. People spoke of her dagger as though it were an object to be feared. Imagine what they would say if she had another weapon forged in the same style.

‘Accept our hospitality for a night or two,’ said the man whose initial caution was wearing off. ‘The weather continues to worsen and you must be weary after that battle.’ Valkia would have denied the fact but she was acutely aware that the men she had brought with her were showing signs of exhaustion. The fight had been hard, as had been the trek to reach it. She became gradually aware of an ache in her own bones and with a nod, she agreed.

For two days they enjoyed the rare chance of relaxing and left with freshly sworn allegiances to the Schwarzvolf. They fell instantly for the charms of the young woman and by the time they were ready to leave, their loyalty was absolutely assured. Valkia left behind two of her party to act as a solid guard for the camp and had to practically fight off the grateful embrace of the blacksmith.

‘Return in the spring, hetwoman,’ he said. ‘I will forge you a spear fit for a champion. It will be a weapon that will catch the attention of the gods themselves.’ She had smiled perfunctorily at him, acutely and even a little uncomfortably aware that she may already have achieved that.

The winter was not as harsh as the Godspeaker had predicted and spring came early to the Vale. But despite the comparative peace that had been theirs across the dark months, there were a never-ending stream of political issues that demanded Valkia’s attention. Delegates from non-allied tribes came to speak with her. Some practically begged for the Schwarzvolf’s patronage, some were more indifferent. All of them left impressed with her forthright manner, and tales of her shrewd competence and utter ruthlessness began to spread.

Her own people meanwhile were dealing with a tragedy of their own. Of six children born across the winter, only one had survived. Two had not even lived beyond their first few days and the other three had been monstrous things, warped and twisted whilst still in their mother’s wombs. They had not survived the traumas of childbirth and had been left in the forest.

The mothers of these god-touched children were as pragmatic as any of the tribe’s warriors and returned to their chores and daily lives without any external sign of the grief they must be enduring. There had always been babies born with physical deformities to the northern tribes, but the frequency of them was rapidly increasing.

Whispers of another curse began and Valkia threatened to cut out the tongue of anybody she heard speaking such nonsense. There was some speculation that perhaps the tribe needed to continue expanding its borders. A basic understanding of the problems of in-breeding was explored and the solution the hetwoman suggested was radical and startling.

‘We have always considered the suitability of females from other tribes for breeding stock,’ she observed during one of the regular Circle meetings that she found so tedious. ‘Why do we not consider men from outside the tribe as well? Perhaps the reason for all these deficiencies in our young is down to the men of this tribe and not the women?’ She leaned forward and studied the gathered Circle intensely. ‘Perhaps it is even something in the very air we breathe?’

Centuries of tradition, a rudimentary to non-existent knowledge of bloodlines and no small level of misogynistic ignorance had left the tribe – both men and women – as to little doubt that the mothers of the deformed infants must also be in some way deficient. It was they who produced the offspring after all. Valkia’s idle observation threw them into confusion and they debated the matter for what seemed like hours.

Talk. Always talk. Valkia was glad when the full thaw came. With the recession of the snows came the chance to travel up into the hills and meet with the Bloody Hand.

SIX

THE GOREQUEEN

The hills above the Vale were a breeding ground for the dire wolves and other darker things that made life in the northern steppe so harsh. When they were not hunting the same prey that the humans used for sustenance, they were hunting the humans themselves. In the early spring, the aggression was high as the animals were entering their breeding season. Those who strayed too close to a nest or to a cave den would soon meet the wrath of nature’s most vicious creatures, desperate to protect their young. Other times, they would simply vanish, claimed by the denizens of the shadows.

As they travelled higher, where the air was noticeably thinner and colder than that in the Vale, Valkia found herself wondering just how robust the Bloody Hand must be to survive the harsh winters. If she had any real sense, she would have let them come to her, but something drove her up the steep hills. Curiosity. A desire to know more about this blood god whose blessings she appeared to have courted.

There had been a few small battles since the altercation in the outlying camp and every time Valkia waited... hoped... for another taste of that ecstatic battle-madness that had taken her in its embrace. But it had not come. Deron would certainly clarify matters for her; at least that was her reasoning. He could tell her more of the god. And if she was so inclined, she might suggest an alliance between her people and his.

Strangely, the latter idea was no longer as appealing as it might have been in the days when the two young people had first met. The first flush of attraction had worn off and whilst Valkia remembered Deron as a strong, muscular man – perhaps even an attractive one – he was more memorable as an individual who represented a tribe with whom she felt the Schwarzvolf could take a further step towards the greatness she envisioned for them.

She remembered him also as the only man who had ever dared stand up to her with any kind of courage in the arena of battle, and for that reason alone, her respect for him was high.

The cry of a distant bird of prey called her attention back to the here and now and she squinted up into the sky. Hepsus tapped her lightly on the shoulder and indicated to a point just ahead. She followed his gesture. Standing amidst a scrubby patch of green bushes was a man. He was naked from the waist up and his chest was decorated with that same strange design she had seen burned onto the flesh of Deron’s body. The strange, stylised skull device stared back at her.

‘Schwarzvolf, hold.’ His voiced was tinged with the same guttural and slightly feral edge that she remembered. He stepped forward. On first glance he looked as though he was unarmed, but Valkia was wise enough never to make assumptions. She had seen men fall to carelessness and she would not make that same mistake herself.

‘I am the hetwoman of the Schwarzvolf,’ she said, needlessly. Clearly this man knew who they were, but there were courtesies and traditions that needed to be carefully observed. ‘I come to seek an audience with your chieftain.’

‘Deron said you would come when the snows cleared.’ The man nodded. He was eyeing Valkia from head to foot, taking in her comparatively diminutive form with undisguised appreciation. She remained entirely unselfconscious under his slightly lascivious scrutiny, used to such looks. She held his gaze and adopted a faint air of boredom.

‘He said you were good breeding stock,’ he observed aloud. ‘A little skinny for my taste, but you are strong. That much is obvious. You would bear him many fine sons. Aye, and daughters, too.’

She was furious, but did not let it show. She was not some prize mare to be shown off as an asset. That Deron saw her as nothing more than this was more than a little disappointing and a core of resentment against him hardened in her heart.

‘We are here,’ she said in a voice that held a cutting edge, ‘to speak with your chieftain. Take us to him.’ She would deal with Deron later.

‘As you wish, Schwarzvolf.’ The bow was more mocking than respectful and it fanned the flames of her anger a little higher. They had no respect for the gesture she was making in travelling up here to meet with the leader of another tribe. As she and her retinue followed the bare-chested man further up the hill, she found her hand straying to the handle of the axe that she wore in place of her spear. She felt uncomfortable without her weapon of choice, but would have felt more uncomfortable still had she come up here unarmed.

The camp of the Bloody Hand, such as it was, consisted of a number of slightly sagging tents made from a patchwork of stitched hides supported by a single pole in the centre. Their escort pulled aside the entrance to one and gestured for them to enter. Ducking her head, Valkia and her ten warriors stepped inside. There was nobody else present and their guide indicated they should wait.

The flap of the tent closed behind him letting in only a sliver of light. It was more than enough to see by and Valkia studied the interior curiously. Just as with the tents of her own people, the first thing she recognised was the nearly overpowering scent of wood smoke. Strong as it was, it did little to hide the coppery tang of blood. It was then that she noticed the faces stretched among the layered skins of the tent, and that the hides were not those of beasts, but men.

A heap of skulls at the far side of the tent caught her attention and she moved across to kneel by them. She took a few of them up and studied them. Some were animal skulls, others human skulls. Every single one was pristine, cleaned until barely any stains remained on the bone. She had encountered many tribes who used bone in construction of tools, cutlery or weapons, but had never seen such a stash of them herself.

The tent flap opened wide and a huge figure filled the entrance. Valkia, a human skull in her hand looked up once again into the eyes of Deron, the man who would redirect the course of her history and with it, the shape of the warriors of the north.

It had taken a long time for Valkia to ask the question. All the necessary formalities had been tedious and she had been impatient. Her manners remained impeccable however and Deron’s father, Kalir, had been impressed with her. They had opened preliminary discussions about forging a possible alliance at which Deron had grinned widely.

Valkia’s continued annoyance at the man’s perception of her as goods and chattel was fired a little more by the look. How dare he be so arrogant to assume that she would offer herself as a brood sow to him. And yet… offspring from such a union could be fine and strong. There was some sense to it. The seeds of an idea formed in her mind, but she set it aside. There were other things that needed to be discussed.

When Kalir had left her and Deron to attend to other matters, the two young people had sat in comfortable silence for a while. When Valkia had dismissed her retinue, the look on Deron’s face suggested that he knew what she wanted from him.

‘Who is this blood god?’ She demanded the answer rather than ask the question. ‘You have my interest, Deron of the Bloody Hand. Now tell me why I have been dedicating my kills to a god I know nothing about.’

If he was disappointed that she wanted to talk rather than engage in something a little more intimate, he did not let it show. Deron leaned back against the side of his father’s tent and scratched his stubbled chin.

‘You know,’ he said, simply. ‘I see it in your eyes, Valkia of the Schwarzvolf. You have touched the ecstasy of Kharneth. Once the Blood God has caught you in his embrace, he will not let you go. And you would not wish him to.’

Kharneth.

Just hearing the name sent a shudder of delight through her and she nodded eagerly, wanting to hear more.

‘He thirsts for the blood of all those who oppose him or even those who follow him. Whose blood is shed is irrelevant so long as it is shed in his name. He demands tribute in death and skulls. His realm lies far to the north, beyond the mountains, beyond even the wild wastes. There, he sits upon a throne made from the discarded skulls of his fallen.’ Deron licked his lips. ‘Those he most favours he grants strength and power beyond imagining.’

Kharneth.

Valkia shivered although it was not even slightly cold. ‘My people have always followed the old ways,’ she said. ‘My Godspeaker divines the words of the gods through prophecy and dreams. It is the way things have always been. But the way of this Kharneth is something I can reach out and touch. It feels...’ She tailed off, trying to articulate that moment of intense ecstasy, the flood of excitement that had filled her entire being the day she had brutally massacred the enemy raiders. ‘It feels right,’ she said eventually. Deron nodded.

‘I saw the potential in you, Valkia,’ he said. ‘You have what the Blood God needs.’ He had moved a little closer to her. ‘You have what I need also.’ A hand reached up and stroked her hair away from her face. He held her gaze in his own and she gave him a dangerous smile.

He did not see the dagger until she had whipped it from her boot and had it pressed against his neck. ‘Move any closer, Deron, and you will lack the parts that make you a man. Continue to press your luck and you will lack a heart. Do you understand me?’ She gave him a supercilious sneer. ‘When – and if – I choose to ally my people to yours, then we can discuss such things. But not until.’ A pearl of red began to bead at the dagger’s point which she had held to his throat and he swallowed, very carefully. ‘Do we have an accord?’

He mouthed ‘yes’ and she nodded in satisfaction. With an oddly sweet smile, she then took the dagger away, sliding it back into her boot. ‘Excellent,’ she said. Reaching up, she wiped the blood from Deron’s throat, smearing it across his neck. Taking up the cup of wine that she had been given, she took a sip from it. ‘Now tell me more about this god of yours. Tell me more of Kharneth.’

Time moved onwards. Five years passed since the day Valkia had first demanded knowledge of the god she now devoted herself to most wholeheartedly. She found herself frequently flashing back to that conversation and particularly when she was engaged in warfare.

At times like now.

The air was filled with the sounds of battle as the two warring tribes met in combat that would determine once and for all who possessed the strongest warriors, the greatest strength. It was an intense and bloody mêlée of sweating bodies and flashing blades and the toll of life was already considerable on both sides.

Valkia fought at the head of her army as she had always done when words were no longer enough to secure the loyalty of other tribes. In the time since she had taken the mantle of the Schwarzvolf, her methods had become feared and at the same time deeply respected by the warlike northmen. It was hard not to respect a woman whose choice was simple. Pledge loyalty to the Schwarzvolf or die in a last-gasp attempt to maintain independence.

She was enforcing the second option. The tribe they fought had been given their chance. In the past year alone, the Schwarzvolf had grown to become the single largest tribe in the wastes. They moved across the steppe gathering smaller tribes into their collective as though they had simply not existed. The more their numbers grew, the larger the enemy they could approach.

Her spear held ready, Valkia turned to face the next man. Her dark hair was covered by a tight-fitting leather helmet and her once-battered armour had long since been replaced by something far more appropriate and impressive. Strong, hard leather was tooled with intricate designs by the best artificers she had found. The emblem of the Schwarzvolf, the wolf baying at the moon remained, but on the rear of the cuirass was the skull design of the Blood God.

Even the spear she held was little short of a work of art. The elderly blacksmith, true to his word, had forged her a masterpiece. She had respected his custom when he had gifted it to her and given it a name. Slaupnir. At her request, the smith had also forged the rune of the Blood God into its silvery blade, dedicating the weapon itself to the young woman’s new-found purpose.

Slaupnir. The monster from a tale her father had told when she had been but a girl. The terrifying creature before whom the world would flee.

Two warriors were bounding towards her with murder in their eyes and she spun gracefully to meet their challenge head on. She pressed all her weight behind the spear as she held off their attack. They fought with axes, as did so many of the northmen, and she had long mastered the technique of disarming them. With a move so fluid that it was almost flawless, she thrust Slaupnir beneath the crescent blades of the axes, hooking them on the reinforced haft of the spear.

With every ounce of her strength, she lifted herself from the ground and planted a booted foot in the chest of each warrior, ripping the axes from the hands of her attackers. They staggered back, glaring in disbelief at the woman before them, but all they could see of her as she rolled to her feet were her eyes. Her mad, battle-lust filled eyes.

Lunging forward with the weapon, she speared the first warrior through the throat. Slaupnir burst from the back of his neck and he fell to the ground gurgling his death cry in a fountain of blood. Without the time to tug her weapon free, Valkia drew her dagger and vaulted over the dying man, plunging the blade into his companion’s chest. He threw his arms wide as though he would embrace her in his final moments and then pitched forward.

Swiftly reclaiming her weapons, Valkia butchered her way through the enemy to the place where their leader was surrounded by a vanguard of his elite fighters. To her extreme distaste, she saw two men standing behind him with the telltale robes of magic users. If there was one thing that Valkia found truly offensive in an opponent, it was those who invoked the mysterious powers of the unknown.

No matter. They would die at her hands soon enough. She never took the hearts of such tainted men. She had tried, once. But the taste had been unwelcome and the nightmares afterwards even more so. Killing sorcerers now gave her considerable pleasure.

With a practised eye, she glanced around what remained of the enemy. The surviving force was puny in comparison to that which had been fielded at the day’s break. She must make the magic-users her first target, otherwise they would call forth the powers of the earth itself in an attempt to annihilate the Schwarzvolf. She would give them their final chance to join her. If they declined, then they would finish what they had started. Should they choose to accept, then the magic users would be executed. She could see no route to failure.

‘I feel generous this day,’ she called out in a slightly mocking tone. ‘Swear fealty to the Schwarzvolf now and you can choose those who would live.’ Her armour was streaked with gore and there were chunks of flesh and viscera hanging from the spear in bloody strings.

‘We will never swear loyalty to a follower of the mad god.’ The enemy leader spat on the ground. ‘We would sooner die.’

‘As you wish.’ Valkia shrugged as though he had merely refused her offer of a drink. She threw back her head and let a mighty shout ascend to the heavens.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

The response from her own men came instantly and with it, her heart swelled almost to bursting. For five years she had dedicated every battle, every kill and every drop of blood in the name of her adopted deity.

‘Skulls for his skull throne!’

The Schwarzvolf charged.

The leader of the tribe died quickly. Too quickly for Valkia’s taste; she had been looking forward to making his screams last for a while. But he died weeping like the snivelling coward that he was. She despised weaklings. Their hearts tasted insipid and brought no pleasure when consumed on the battlefield. The hearts of the strong however... she craved that flavour.

She lived for the moments when she tore out a heart, sometimes still beating, and its explosion of flavours in her mouth when she tore the first chunk from it. After she had taken her due – her right as the tribe’s leader – she would pass the organ to her other warriors. In such a way, the Schwarzvolf had come to believe, a measure of the strength of the enemy would be gifted to them. It was a practise that many of the northmen honoured. But since Valkia had named the Blood God as their patron, the Schwarzvolf not only honoured it, they practised it with great pleasure.

Their leader dispatched, the remaining elite guard had been granted the choice to swear their swords to her banner or die. To a man, they chose death, considering that their chance to switch allegiance had passed by the moment Valkia had taken their leader’s head. Even now she held the grisly trophy in her free hand, its eyes staring sightlessly ahead, ragged strips of meat hanging from the neck.

It always disappointed her when such fearsome warriors chose death over life, but only ever for a fraction of a second. Once the bitter resentment passed, she gloried in the slaughter. They could take great strength from the fallen, she would remind herself, and Kharneth would be pleased.

It left only the sorcerers to be dealt with. Valkia had lost a handful of her warriors in the path of their unnatural methods. They had called forth fire from nowhere and her warriors, three men and two women had died screaming in agony. The moment Valkia had successfully incapacitated them she had torn out their tongues. Let them speak their words of magic now. They would be bound, taken back to the camp of the Schwarzvolf and publicly executed as the abominations they were.

The might of the Schwarzvolf had grown exponentially in a few short years. Valkia’s ability to act diplomatically when the occasion called for it had begun to diminish proportionately. To refuse the will of the Schwarzvolf was to invite ruin. Her moods had always been mercurial but as she gained in strength and power she became ever more unpredictable. It was not unheard of for her to turn on one of her own warriors in a torrent of rage, and when she was held in the grip of such tantrums her strength was formidable.

She had installed Hepsus as her Warspeaker despite her initial dislike and distrust of the man and it had proven to be a wise move. As bloody and violent as she was, the two would always be found fighting shoulder to shoulder at the head of her army. They shared the glory of victory together and she trusted him to lead the army at times when she was otherwise unable to do so herself. He had never once let her down or tried to wrest power from her but she refused to allow complacency.

Valkia’s position as leader of the Schwarzvolf had been absolutely assured when she had taken control with such affirmation. Her confidence, sense of identity and genuine desire to build on the foundations that her father had laid down, swayed her tribe to her cause in a matter of months. Those who had been gradually assimilated into the Schwarzvolf took a little longer. Some never accepted the alliance with the Bloody Hand, but they did not live long enough to raise argument.

She and Kalir had sat together for a long time discussing the terms of their accord. It had not taken much for Deron and his father to convince her of the merits of worshipping the Blood God. She could see their strength and their might and she wanted some of that for her people. They had sheer, brute force – she had numbers. Together, she reasoned, they would be nigh on unstoppable. They had been simple, guileless words but Kalir had seen their worth. The Bloody Hand could never hope to achieve glory on the level they desired without the numbers to see it through. The Schwarzvolf could bring that.

Valkia had presented the solution to the biggest problem. If the two tribes were to unite, who would be the recognised leader? She had bitten back her pride and had fixed Kalir with a careful eye.

‘I will marry your son,’ she said. ‘Together, we will represent the best of both our peoples. Such a union in the eyes of the Four will bind our tribes together by blood. And that is a message that cannot be ignored. I am the leader of my people and Deron will one day be yours.’ Kalir had been set to argue the point. He was the leader of his people, not his son. But her reasoning was presented in a carefully moderated tone that actually made him consider the option carefully.

‘I cannot answer for Deron,’ he said eventually. ‘My son must make his own choice in this matter. He has spoken of you often over the winter.’ With those words, Valkia knew she had what she wanted. Much as she did not wish to do it, she would take Deron as a husband until it was no longer a necessity.

When he had been brought into the tent to join in the discussion, he had agreed readily. For Deron, he felt that he was getting the best of both worlds. He got to assume nominal leadership of his own people whilst at the same time marrying into the tribe that had become recognised as one of the strongest. He let his eyes linger on Valkia and her heart sank, knowing that she had been forced to give up one of her longest-standing principles. But it was for the sake of her people.

It was for the sake of her greater scheme.

She wondered, as she roamed the now-peaceful battlefield, why it was that she was letting her thoughts linger on the events of the past. She had put it all behind her and moved forward. She was no longer Valkia, hetwoman of the Schwarzvolf. She had been gifted a new name by those who opposed her and everything that she stood for. They called her the Gorequeen, an acknowledgement of her bloody, brutal methods of war. And in truth, Valkia had become a queen in the eyes of her people. She no longer simply led them. She ruled them with fairness and cruelty in equal measure.

Perhaps it was simply the fact that the fifth birthday of her twin daughters was coming up that had brought the memories forward. For all her single-minded savagery and prowess in battle, Valkia’s love for the two little girls was the one thing that kept her humanity chained to her. She had fallen pregnant quickly after the marriage to Deron and had hated every moment of it. She had detested the early sickness and the later sense of being so bulky and cumbersome. Childbirth had been difficult for her; she had always been boyish in shape with a long, slim waist and narrow hips and it had not made the process easy. The Godspeaker had told her that to be born in blood was a good omen however, that Kharneth looked favourably upon the children. This appeased Valkia and drove out what lingered of the pain.

Another memory surfaced.

‘They are girls.’

Deron’s disappointment enraged her and had she not been so weakened by the blood loss that had come with the delivery of the twins, she would have flown at her husband in a rage. But she calmed herself. The time would come. She lay there, smouldering in barely contained fury and forced herself back to a state of comparative calmness. There was no end such wrath could bring the united tribes to but a poor one. She had to bide her time.

‘But they are healthy.’ She detested how weary she sounded and swore blind that as soon as she was able, Deron would pay the price for his insult – whether it had been intentional or not. The girls were perfect in every way, although a little undersized. ‘Be grateful for that, husband.’ She put such venom into the word that he had looked up from the babies at her.

Their marriage had not been an easy one. Two such strong-willed personalities in a confined space resulted in raging arguments and any early feelings they may have had for each other were quickly lost. Outside of the privacy of their own tent, they wore a united face and until her pregnancy rendered her unable to fight, they had cut a startlingly impressive duo. As hunters, they had a natural compatibility and as fighters, their styles complemented one another perfectly. By themselves, Valkia and Deron were recognised as fine, deadly warriors. Together, they were terrifying. Together, they represented the might of the Schwarzvolf and the strength of the Bloody Hand.

And yet they came to despise one another swiftly. The fact that Valkia had birthed female offspring was a deep cut to Deron’s masculinity and she enjoyed his discomfort as she spoke of all the girls stood to inherit. How they would take the allied tribes forward to another generation of glory.

‘Our next child will be a boy,’ he said, interrupting her monologue. ‘He will become my heir and it will be he who leads our people to the feet of the Blood God.’

‘There will be no next child.’ This was both a natural resistance to the suggestion and a statement of likely fact. The birth had been difficult and the damage done had left the tribe’s midwife in doubt as to whether Valkia would survive another pregnancy. ‘The girls are our heirs now. Look at them, Deron. They are born of a union of the finest and best our generation has to offer. They will be a force unparalleled by any other.’

Deron looked at the tiny girls, sleeping peacefully. For the briefest of brief moments, his expression softened. Both had heads covered in wispy dark hair and they had the same olive complexion of their father. Their spines were straight and strong and Valkia’s main observation was that they were healthy. There were no deformities, no mutations... they were beautiful.

But they were female. Deron felt no paternal instinct towards his children. He had held out hope that he would have spent this night drinking himself comatose in celebration of the birth of his first son; the ultimate proof of his prowess. Instead, he would drink himself comatose in commiseration. The desire that Valkia would produce a male child had been the only consolation he could find in the manner in which his children had been conceived.

Valkia had propped herself up on her elbows and studied Deron wordlessly. She could see the struggle going on behind his eyes and was relishing every moment of his pain. She had got what she wanted from him. She had decided that the time to bear children was right. Deron had not agreed.

Valkia had forcibly taken from him what she needed. Enough fermented spirits and the point of a blade could be most persuasive. He had been humiliated afterwards. He had claimed theft of his masculinity, but she had simply laughed at him and barred him from her tent.

She had not cared whether the offspring she had carried for nine months had been a boy or girl. She had her heirs. That they were girls was merely a blessing as far as she was concerned.

She had what she wanted.

She always got what she wanted.

The phrase rolled itself around her mind. ‘You should go attend to your duties, husband,’ she said eventually. ‘I must care for the girls. I have named them, if you have any interest at all.’

Deron looked as though he would retort, but bit his tongue. ‘What are their names?’

‘Eris,’ she said, pointing to the slightly smaller of the two. ‘After my mother. And Bellona. After yours.’

‘They will suffice,’ Deron acknowledged after a moment or two. With that, he swept from the tent leaving his wife and their two children alone. In that moment, had he but realised it, he sealed his own doom. In that moment, he had invited the full wrath of a proud woman.

The hearts of the fallen had all been carved out. It had been a long, laborious process and the bale moon, swollen to a larger size than usual, threw its cold green light down on the carnage. The Schwarzvolf roamed the corpses of the dead, salvaging usable arms and armour and claiming anything of worth.

Valkia, her face smeared with the blood of all the flesh she had consumed stood apart from the others, her hand on the spear as she stared up at the moon. It was an omen, of that she was sure. She had not seen it so big or so bright for many years. She made a note to consult the Godspeaker on their return to camp. She recalled quite clearly the last time the moon had shone so strongly. It had been the night when she had finally given herself over to Kharneth fully.

She had been back on her feet the day after the girls had been born and although she was weaker than usual, her ferocity and ardour were not dampened at all. She had taken her place at the daily moot, arriving before the others so that there was no chance Deron could usurp her position at the Circle’s head. When he had arrived – late – she had given him a sweet smile that was laced with pure venom.

‘Where are your children, wife?’ He had the faintly sick cast of a man who had partaken of too much alcohol the night before and she took a perverse delight in his condition.

‘Our children are safe and in the care of the women. There are matters here that need my attention. I am the leader of this tribe, husband. You would do well to remember that.’ She looked around the gathered faces. ‘You would all do well to remember that.’

There were murmured sounds of assent, although one or two of the warriors cast sidelong glances at Deron. It was as Valkia had suspected. Her husband was trying to wrest control of her people from her and the very notion filled her with bile. This matter would need to be taken care of.

‘Fydor, I have need of you when this meeting is concluded,’ she said to the Godspeaker. ‘I require your presence in my tent to open the hearts of my daughters to the Four.’

‘As the hetwoman wishes.’ At least he was still fully loyal. He always would be. For a moment, Valkia felt fear for her position. It was a feeling she was entirely unaccustomed to and she disliked it. She put it down to the birth of the girls leaving her slightly addled. Forcing herself to focus, she sat through the morning’s council, although her mind was not truly engaged in the discussion. After the meeting was over and everyone, including her husband, had left her in peace, she sat and chewed her lip thoughtfully for several minutes.

Her mind made up, she ducked out of the council tent and headed back to her own.

It had been easy, in the end. Easy enough to bring Deron out to the glade where the tribe’s most fervent rituals were held. She had brought both of the girls with her and laid them naked on the grass. Eris had begun crying noisily at this treatment and Valkia had made no effort to silence her daughter. Let the Four hear how strong her voice was.

Bellona had joined in eventually, upset by her sister’s discomfort and the two girls wailed into the sky. Fydor had walked around the glade several times and then had knelt by the infants.

‘In the name of the Trickster, the god of lies, deceit and of change, we dedicate you. Time will change you from infants to young women of the Schwarzvolf. Life will change you from ignorant to knowledgeable. Embrace change.’ He smeared their bare chests with mud from the ground and continued.

‘The Fly Lord, bringer of disease, we show you these two healthy children. Their form is pleasing and it is clear that neither is god-touched. We thank you for your benevolence and ask that you leave them be.’ A second smear of mud over the first left the girls with a cross marked on their chests. Valkia and Deron crossed their arms across their breast; the recognised sign of warding away illness.

‘To the Reveller, god of lusts, we offer these two infants as proof of the virility and fertility of our leaders.’ Another smear, this time diagonally across the other two. Finally, Fydor beckoned Valkia forward, offering her a small silver dagger.

‘And the last. To the Axefather…’

‘Kharneth,’ Valkia interjected. ‘Use his name now, Godspeaker. He is our patron god after all.’ She knelt by her crying daughters and one after the other, made a small nick in the palm of their hands. She squeezed gently and the blood welled. Taking it onto her finger, she drew the final line in blood, the other diagonal that left an eight-pointed symbol on the girls’ chests.

‘To Kharneth, the Blood God, we ask that you turn your eye to these children and give them the strength and ferocity to build the might of the Schwarzvolf for generations to come.’ The Godspeaker met Valkia’s gaze and she stared back. Fydor reached out and laid his hands gently on the heads of the two babies. ‘Protect our future leaders,’ he said.

At these words, Deron stepped forward as though he would interrupt and Valkia closed her eyes, releasing a breath that she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. It was exactly as she had hoped. His impetuous nature had caused him to violate one of the tribe’s most important rituals.

‘Stand back, husband,’ she said. ‘The ritual is not complete. Would you dare risk the wrath of the Four? Does the thought of their displeasure not fill you with dread?’ They were words spoken with equal ritual severity and her voice trembled slightly. Here, in this most holy of places, he dared to defy the gods themselves.

‘I fear nothing. My own god favours me beyond all else and the others are weak in his shadow. I am greater even than they.’ His arrogance was unwavering and Valkia knew a moment’s regret and sadness. He could have been truly great had he only learned to see her as his equal. But he had sought to control her. And for that, he would pay the ultimate price.

‘As my husband says.’ She bowed her head. Then, she leaped to her feet and drove her silver dagger through his eye and into his skull. ‘Are you afraid yet, Deron?’

He did not answer, merely stared at her with a cyclopean gaze that became glassy and dead. He sank first to his knees, then forwards onto the hilt of the knife, pushing it further still into his brain.

Behind her, still lying in the grass, the girls stopped crying. The air itself stilled. No breeze rippled the grass or leaves in the trees above them. The only noise was that of Deron as he grunted out his last breaths. He sounded like a pig that had been taken to slaughter and the analogy delighted Valkia. She pushed him over with the toe of her boot so that he lay face upwards. She pulled the dagger from his head and spat on him.

‘No man is greater than the gods,’ she said. ‘For the sin of such arrogance, you will meet them in their own realm and they will show you who is the greater.’ She thrust the blade into his throat, the tip biting deeply into his spine. With a twist and a crackle of bone Deron’s head came free, a fitting trophy to adorn this sacred place.

Above them, the bale moon had shone, eerie and insipid, but swollen to a size far larger than it had been in a long while. Just as it shone now. Valkia stared into its light for a long while as though she could divine some greater meaning from it. All she knew for sure was that the Schwarzvolf had gone from strength to strength since that night she had given herself over totally to the Blood God in name and deed.

This battle may have been over, but the new day would bring another opportunity; another threat to their supremacy. Valkia turned from the moon and walked into the night.

SEVEN

LOCEPHAX

She is unnatural.

They were words that had long been whispered about Valkia but they had gathered momentum of late. The whispers, so she had heard, originated from the most unlikely of sources and whilst she was aware of them, they did nothing to shake her unwavering sense of purpose.

Let the people gossip. Let them talk about her. At almost thirty years of age, Valkia was in her prime and at the very peak of her power. She had no interest in rumour and words that could never hope to harm her.

The Schwarzvolf had grown in power and strength without stopping until they were the undisputed tribal force of the north. At their head, always at the front of the battle line, Valkia stood; mighty and resolute.

She had taken the sobriquet ‘the Gorequeen’ to heart and had elected to use ‘Queen’ as her honorific. It was an affectation rather than an indication of any kingdom she may have ruled over, but such was the power that she wielded that very few could tell the difference. ‘Queen Valkia’ became the recognised and expected form of address.

She lived, as she always had, for battle. Her advance in years had not lessened her ardour for bloodshed and she was still as lithe and nimble on the battlefield as she had ever been. All that age had brought for her had been experience and skill, and a terrifying strength which ensured she could humble any man who dared to cross her.

The majority of her people adored her. Even those who initially had reservations about being conquered by such a violent figurehead ultimately fell for her charisma and her unerring ability to lead. She could muster the entire tribe in short order and her pre-battle speeches were stirring and eloquent. Her people... yes, they loved her. There were the gossiping whispers that there had always been but their voices never found volume.

Her enemies – those that still remained – feared and hated her in equal measure. Valkia was an acknowledged champion of the Blood God, the god known variously as Kharneth or the Axefather and it was certain knowledge that nobody could defeat her all the time he favoured her.

She became known for her cold, dispassionate cruelty in dealing with anybody who challenged her and those who dared to defy her never did so for long. The impressive collection of heads that she took in a few short months alone acted as a deterrent to enough people. There were still those who tried, of course.

Politically, she was ruthless. She had arranged suitable marriages for her two half-sisters, but had given her own daughters the freedom to choose for themselves what they wished to do. Now sixteen, Bellona and Eris had grown into young women who were perhaps even more beautiful than their mother had been at that age, having inherited their father’s colouring which contrasted so well with their dark hair and eyes. They were identical down to the last detail and were the only people to whom Valkia ever showed any tenderness.

Her little brother Edan had ceased to be a threat to her position the day that Fydor had taken him on as an apprentice. Now a young man, he was small and undersized and had often fallen prey to winter sickness. It amazed Valkia that he still lived at all. In his position as the new Godspeaker he was still finding his way alone, following Fydor’s death at the startling age of seventy-five barely six months previously.

Valkia had openly wept at the old man’s funeral. The Godspeaker had been her closest ally and her dearest friend. His loyalty had been without question and his loss tore at her in a way she had not known since the day she had ended Radek’s life.

The grief passed to a hollow ache of loss in time and if Valkia regretted the display of momentary weakness at Fydor’s funeral, she did not let it show. Nobody dared bring the subject up with her and life resumed its usual pace. The Schwarzvolf had resumed their nomadic ways, moving between summer and winter camps that grew a little larger every year. They were in the Vale at the summer camp the day the stranger arrived amongst the Schwarzvolf.

The affectation of the title ‘Queen’ had brought with it a certain expectation and it amused Valkia that her people had practically insisted that she have a throne within the chieftain’s tent. It was hand built and came apart for the need to travel.

The wooden throne was adorned with a number of skulls, a choice Valkia had made to complement the practice of displaying the corpses of traitors and betrayers around the camp. Markings denoting the manner of the deaths of these unfortunate souls were carved into the bone. It loaned an entirely unpleasant and gruesome aspect to the woman who sat surrounded by them. Although she would never have openly acknowledged it, it was the most uncomfortable thing that Valkia, a woman used to sitting on the ground, had ever had to bear. Regardless of this fact, it nonetheless earned the respect of those who came to speak with her.

And many came to speak with her. The balance of power in the north had shifted and Valkia was considered one of the most powerful warlords. As such, it became ever more desirable to ally with her. She had long since stopped going to other tribes to barter for their allegiance. Let them come to her and beg.

She had dispensed with Deron when he had no longer been necessary. She had done so without remorse and she had actively taken great pleasure from the act of murder. It had led to difficulties with Deron’s father of course; Kalir had found it virtually impossible to reconcile their differences. He had openly accused her of murdering him in cold blood, but on the given witness of the Godspeaker had been forced to accept that his headstrong son had condemned himself through his heretical actions. To interrupt a ritual to the four gods was an unforgivable thing.

Still, he had openly challenged Valkia’s suitability for leadership. For the first and only time, Valkia refused to meet him in the Circle of Blood.

‘We need each other, remember? You agreed to this alliance and if we turn upon one another… now, when we need one another’s strength, we will doom ourselves. The other tribes will ally against us and strike whilst we are weak.’

Her argument had been persuasive – and accurate – and Kalir had withdrawn the challenge. The Bloody Hand and the Schwarzvolf remained allies and it did not take too long for Kalir to meet his demise. Valkia was almost disappointed that the berserker met his end on the battlefield. She had developed many plans for dealing with dissenters. In time, the berserker-warriors of the Bloody Hand were simply absorbed into the Schwarzvolf collective.

They thrived. The gods had truly granted their blessings upon Valkia and her people. Deformities in the children disappeared almost completely. Meat was plentiful and the tribe were well fed and healthy. The fervent adulation of their patron god was worn on every face and it became common practice to behead animals or prisoners, or sometimes both on a daily basis to retain his favour.

The Bloody Hand had been secretive and almost furtive in their worship of Kharneth. Valkia denied this subterfuge, preferring instead to make sure her enemies knew where the loyalties of the Schwarzvolf lay.

Such open acknowledgement brought fear and struck terror into the hearts of their enemies… and it also drew the attention of those who Valkia had not considered.

The visitor was tall and slender with hair that came down below his shoulders. He looked willowy, as though a strong wind could snap him in two, but there was a kind of iron strength about him that she found oddly alluring. The colour of his hair was unusual, too. She was used to seeing steel-grey or blond hair amongst the people of her tribe, but this man’s hair was true silver. It glinted in the sun as he moved and wherever he walked, all heads turned towards him.

As he approached Valkia, seated upon her throne, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. His eyes were of deepest amethyst, a rich, dark purple. He was one of the god-touched to be sure; one of the many deformed babies of the Wastes who were left to the hands of the gods and who had somehow survived.

The skin of his face and neck was alabaster pale with an ethereal glow about it that reminded Valkia of moonlight on the snow; one of the sights she had always found most beautiful. She stared at him as he approached. She had rarely seen such sharply defined features in a man. He was pretty, there was no other word for it. Where Deron had been blessed with ruggedly masculine good looks and even the scarred Radek had been attractive in his own solidly-built way, this stranger was beautiful.

As he took the first step up the dais towards her throne, she saw that he wore gloves made of soft leather. He peeled one off and caught her hand in his. The skin of his hand was just as luminescent as that of his face and he raised her knuckles to his perfectly-shaped lips.

‘I feared that the many tales of your beauty were grossly untrue,’ he said in a musical lilt. ‘Yet you are quite lovely, Queen Valkia.’ The bold approach took her by surprise and she stared hard into his eyes, allowing him to hold her hand a moment longer before she snatched it away and forced an imperious glower onto her face.

‘Who are you?’ The words came out tinged with wonder rather than with the usual barked impatience.

The smile he gave her was devastating. ‘My name is Locephax,’ he said. ‘And I am here to make you an offer.’

Everything about Locephax fascinated Valkia. The way he moved with such easy, fluid grace. The manner in which he held himself. There was a confidence to his stance, and his bearing was almost regal; at first, Valkia had wondered if he was some southern lordling. Over the course of the evening’s conversation, it transpired that Locephax was a northman.

She had told him to present his offer, but he had laughed gently. ‘There will be time enough later, my lovely warrior queen,’ he had said. ‘For now, why don’t we take advantage of one another’s company? I have brought you gifts.’

He had brought fine wine the like of which Valkia had never tasted. It was fermented, so Locephax explained, from fruit that grew freely in his domain. It was sweet; nothing like the bitter berries and blood that Valkia had grown accustomed to over the years and she savoured each drop. The wine was deep claret in colour and she swirled it around in the stone cup as she considered him over the top of it.

Locephax’s charm was insidious. He had won over every single person to whom he had spoken – even Valkia. And yet the warrior queen felt an uncertain hesitation about him. She considered him as he flirted shamelessly with Eris and Bellona. Her daughters were enchanted by the man and from the look on their faces as he whispered to them, he was making suggestions that were probably lewd. The tether on her patience ran out.

‘Eris, Bellona – leave us.’ Both the girls scowled their disapproval, but neither was bold enough to refuse a direct order from their mother. Perhaps when they had been younger, yes – but she considered them as grown women now. They pouted prettily at Locephax who watched them leave, devouring their shapely figures with eyes that did nothing to hide the lascivious thoughts he clearly had.

‘I would remind you that you are a guest in my presence, Locephax,’ Valkia said when they had gone. ‘You would do well to treat my daughters with the same respect you would afford me.’ Was she jealous? She was rather startled and a little embarrassed to realise that yes, she was. She was envious that her beautiful daughters were attracting the attentions of this captivating stranger.

Angrily, she tossed the stone cup away from her. The wine was affecting her judgement and she had always sworn blind that she would not succumb to such a weakness. The drinking vessel hit the ground with a dull thud, the wine spilling out in a crimson stain on the furs that were strewn on the floor of the tent. ‘Now speak of this offer you have come to make me.’

‘I mean no offence, Queen Valkia,’ he said, leaning back on the floor, his arms behind him and his head bent backwards so that his long fall of silver hair brushed the earth. Not quite understanding why, Valkia wondered how his hair might feel if he was leaning over her. Locephax was stunningly attractive. His words of flattery seemed genuine and designed to strike true and yet there was something in the way he spoke that genuinely repulsed her.

‘I have taken none,’ she said. ‘Not yet, anyway. But Eris and Bellona are my children. I have a vested interest in what happens to them. I know nothing of you. I will not have my daughters whoring themselves out to you in such a way.’

‘A pity,’ came the unexpected response. ‘I had such grand plans for them both. But since you have forced my hand in this matter…’ He sat up straight and smiled winningly over the distance that separated them. ‘I am here at the behest of my own lord and master, although the rumours of your beauty would have drawn me to you eventually anyway.’

‘Stop it,’ she said, her fingers curling briefly into a fist. ‘I am not a gullible child. Your words may be pretty, but you are not fooling me. Stop it and tell me what it is that you want.’

The smile he gave her this time was far from winning or even remotely charming. It was chilling. A faint shock of understanding ran through Valkia, but she couldn’t comprehend why or what it was. She let her fingers slowly unfurl and then gripped them tightly once again. ‘I asked you this question before. Answer me truthfully. Who are you?’

‘Beautiful and clever.’ Locephax ran a hungry tongue across his perfectly-shaped lips. ‘What an exquisitely charming combination. Very well then, Valkia of the Schwarzvolf, I will tell you precisely who I am and why you will see that what I offer you is far beyond anything you have ever known.’

Rising to his feet, Locephax stretched out his shoulders and took a contented breath of air. Valkia watched him like a hawk, her hand straying to the hilt of the dagger in her boot.

‘For most of your life you have sworn allegiance to the Four, favouring the – what is your people’s name for him again?’

‘The Axefather, we used to call him,’ she responded warily. ‘We know him as Kharneth now.’

‘Closer, admittedly,’ sneered Locephax. ‘Crude names at best, but fitting for a god whose only driving desire is that of death and bloody destruction. Now, my lord and master…’

‘You are a creature of the Reveller.’ So much was obvious. The flirtatious behaviour, the perfectly groomed appearance… everything about the man spoke of a life of debauchery. Valkia knew little of the other gods, only that Deron had once mentioned Kharneth’s abiding hatred of the followers of the frivolous Reveller. Instinctively, she went on her guard.

‘That is not the name by which I know him,’ acknowledged Locephax. ‘But he feels that a woman with your unique…’ The man’s eyes rested on Valkia’s hips, moving slowly up to drink in the swell of her breasts. ‘Talents, shall we say, is wasted in the service of a warrior-god. If you would only reconsider, give yourself over to me, then you will reap the ultimate reward.’

She felt physically sick at the suggestion and rose from her throne. ‘Get out of my camp right now,’ she said, ‘and I may spare your life – if you run fast enough.’

‘Oh come, Valkia. How long is it since you last bedded down with a lover? I can give you what you yearn for deep in your darkest, put-away heart…’ His voice was poison. Dripping blades that were coated in honey and it sickened her that she felt part of herself responding to him, the part of her that was still a woman with a woman’s needs and desires...

I belong to Kharneth.

She spoke the words over and over inside her head and it helped quash the heat of the rising desire for Locephax.

‘There is no reward your god could offer me that…’ Locephax had somehow sidled right up to her until he was virtually nose-to-nose with her. His breath was sweet and yet made slightly sour by the wine; a potent combination that made her dizzy.

She had not even seen him move.

‘Life eternal, Valkia? Come now. Even a woman of your strength and power cannot last forever. Would you not welcome the opportunity to rule over your tribe for ever?’

‘We live as long as we are meant to,’ she responded. She had learned that from Fydor, a near-mythical figure who had lived almost twice as long as most of the Schwarzvolf. ‘If I die in battle tomorrow, it is because that is what my god has set down for me. I will march at his side in the ever-after and reap skulls for his throne in the realms beyond.’

‘You deny yourself the pleasures of the flesh, Valkia.’ Locephax’s voice was the low purr of a predator. He reached out his hand and stroked her face with his long, delicate fingers. She turned her head to the side, but he caught her chin in his hand, pulling her back to look at him. ‘Why do you think it is that your own most trusted whisper against you?’

She was caught in his grip and his amethyst stare, unable to turn away and not truly wanting to turn away. ‘My people do not...’

‘They speak that you cannot be a true woman. That you have become so mired in bloodshed and death that you have forgotten how to truly live your own life.’ She wanted to shut out his words, to push him away and tear out his lying tongue but she was frozen to the spot. Whoever this Locephax was, he possessed true power. ‘You are a dead and barren husk of a woman, Valkia daughter of Merroc. But I can breathe life back into you. With the power of my master flowing through you, you will learn to experience pleasure like you have never known.’

Locephax leaned down and placed his lips on hers in a long, sensuous kiss. She shivered violently and to her horror, it was not with cold. It was with pure, unfettered lust. A thousand images raced through her mind; all of them suggestive and lewd. It took every ounce of willpower she possessed, but she somehow reconnected with her senses. Her hands came up and grabbed at his wrists, tugging him away from her. She turned her head from his kiss and he laughed lightly.

‘Relax, Valkia. You have earned a little pleasure. Let me show you how it could be. When you are in your rightful place amongst my harem, you will yearn for the nights I choose you to keep me warm.’ He crooned the words softly, hypnotically, and for a heartbeat Valkia felt her resolve waver. But then her earlier mantra pierced through the haze of glamour that Locephax had woven around her.

I belong to Kharneth.

‘You dare imply that I am destined to be nothing more than a slave girl? To cater to your lusts and whims for an eternity? Death is preferable by far.’ She stepped back, her face aflame with shame and confusion. She whipped the dagger from her boot and sprang forward, the tip aimed at his heart. He roared with laughter.

‘Kill me if you can, Valkia. This form is merely a vessel for my greater will. I could stop your heart where you stand, before your little knife even scratched me. Know that I will not give up until you succumb to my desires. My powers are beyond anything your mortal mind can start to comprehend. You will yield before me, Valkia. And do you know why? Because you are weak. Your mortality lessens you. Become mine and you will be granted something more.’

With a scream of rage, she flung herself at him. Locephax snorted and made a dismissive movement with his hand, flinging Valkia to one side without so much as touching her. She crashed down to the ground, dazed.

‘Magic,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘You have the nerve to imply that I am unnatural? You would use the tools of a coward? What kind of god must your Reveller be to resort to sorcery to win his battles?’

‘The kind of god who delights in all the pleasures the world can give,’ came the immediate response. ‘The kind of god who sees the pleasure you get from murdering and butchering your way through the Northern Wastes and who sees in you the potential for greatness.’

His words brought Valkia up short. She had been about to deny that she found battle pleasurable, but what was it if not? For the second time, her will began to waver but she forced herself to clarity.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Your words are as twisted and as meaningless as you. Your perverse lusts and desires do not compare to the purity of battle.’

‘I do not need my magic to crush you Valkia. What if I were to defeat you in your own so-called Circle of Blood?’

‘To fight to the death? What would be the point? You have told me yourself that you cannot be killed, if I am to believe such a thing.’

‘As you say. However, I can be...’ He considered for a moment, then smiled. ‘Inconvenienced. I would consider it a victory for you and in the unlikely event you defeat me, I will leave you and your people and not return. Should I win, then your soul will belong to my lord and master.’ Locephax shrugged his slender shoulders. ‘I will of course petition for you, but as you have not agreed to my terms... I cannot say what will happen.’

Valkia ground her teeth furiously. Locephax could not have struck a more vicious blow to her pride by challenging her to a duel. She was a mistress in the arena. She could destroy this prancing interloper, she was sure of it.

But she was not completely sure and it was that uncertainty that made her angry enough to agree.

‘I accept your challenge, Locephax.’

‘Tomorrow, then?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I want you out of my camp now, and if I have to cut out your heart to do it then so be it.’ She moved to the entrance of the tent. ‘Now is as good a time as any to accomplish that task.’

Locephax sneered unpleasantly and for a moment his fine-featured face became a thing of nightmares, twisted and distorted beyond humanity. ‘You would fight me now? Without your precious armour?’

She returned his sneer with a look of outright contempt. ‘I would fight you naked to prove the point, Locephax. Except that given what you have told me, I suspect you would enjoy that too much. Yes, I will fight you without armour. I have my spear and my shield and I have my god’s blessing. I need nothing else.’

She held the tent flap up.

‘Get out.’

EIGHT

TO THE VICTOR THE SPOILS

It was a chill night and Valkia felt the kiss of the cold northerly wind raise goose bumps on the exposed flesh of her arms and neck. Above her, the twin moons were hazy and indistinct, their faces veiled behind the heavy clouds. They shed very little light on the camp of the Schwarzvolf. There was no problem with visibility however; flaming torches burned brightly and the warrior queen moved with purpose towards the muddy arena.

As she exited the tent, a warrior came up and walked beside her. She didn’t need to look around to know that it was Hepsus and she felt a moment’s gratitude that he was there.

‘Our guest has not endeared himself to me, Warspeaker,’ she said, her coiled rage turning the words into a snarl. ‘He has demonstrated either courage or stupidity in throwing down a challenge. He has invoked the Circle of Blood and I have accepted. I intend to humble him.’

Behind her, Locephax snickered like a child laughing at an inappropriate comment. She ignored him staunchly and pointed at a young boy. ‘You! Fetch me my shield and my spear.’ The boy bowed his head and scurried off immediately.

‘Your armour, Valkia...’

‘I do not need it. This will be brief. When I have taken this decadent, snivelling bastard’s head, I expect you to throw his carcass to the wolves. Is that understood?’

‘I...’

‘Is that understood, Hepsus?’ The snap in her voice caused even the solid, unyielding warrior to start slightly.

‘Yes, hetwoman. I could remove him now if you prefer.’ In response to his words, he saw a raging glimmer of madness in Valkia’s eyes that he had never seen before, even during the heat of battle. It unsettled him in a way he could put no word to.

‘When my honour is called into question, Hepsus, I would rather settle the dispute swiftly and with finality. Leadership is about never being afraid to do the things you would order your own people to do.’ They had reached the arena and Valkia stepped confidently into the churned circle of bloody mud.

‘We will need more light here,’ she conceded quietly to Hepsus. ‘And I suppose in the interests of fairness, we should give him back his weapons. I presume he surrendered them on entrance into the camp.’

‘He did,’ confirmed Hepsus and raised his hand, bringing one of the gate guards across. ‘Fetch the visitor’s sword.’ The Warspeaker turned his attentions once again to Valkia, noting the determined set of her jaw and the growing fire in her eyes. He glanced over at Locephax who had also entered the arena and was strutting around on the opposite side with what could only be described as a swagger. Both of Valkia’s daughters had come out to see what the commotion was about and were watching him admiringly.

‘Keep them away from him,’ she said to Hepsus in an undertone. ‘He claims to be a chosen of the Reveller.’

Her words drew a sharp intake of breath from Hepsus and a look of hatred flashed into his eyes. Valkia knew that her people felt much the same as she did. There was a time for the Reveller: rites of spring and fertility and the celebration of birth – but a hardy people like the Schwarzvolf had little need for such decadence in their lives. They had just enough and that was adequate.

Valkia could not bear the way her daughters stood together, their eyes fixed on Locephax. She could understand it however; he had shrugged off the tunic he had worn over a light shirt with long, wide sleeves gathered at the wrist. The shirt too was removed, revealing a smooth, alabaster white and entirely hairless torso. The abdominal muscles were well defined and Valkia’s eyes narrowed. Locephax was not just slim, he was strong as well.

‘Your spear, hetwoman.’ The boy had returned with Slaupnir and the large round wooden shield that she tended to favour in battle. She did not thank him, but took up the weapons, garnering comfort from their familiar weight and feel. Her eyes had not left Locephax. She was gauging his speed and potential weaknesses. The guard brought him a rapier sword with a basket hilt; a delicate weapon that to Valkia’s eyes looked insubstantial and almost hair-thin and nothing like the sturdy weapon she herself wielded.

‘There is still time to change your mind about this, Valkia,’ Locephax called across the arena. He made a deliberate show of making a fancy display with his sword, cutting the air before him in a series of intricate movements designed to catch the eye. Valkia did not watch. She was looking straight into his face.

She slid her arm through the back of the shield. ‘The choice was made the moment you told me who you serve, Locephax,’ she said. ‘Now stop your childish mewling and let us bring an end to this.’

‘It will give me no pleasure in killing you, Valkia.’ Locephax sounded as though he actually meant those words with all his heart. ‘My master saw such potential in you. He will be greatly disappointed.’

‘You can explain it to him yourself when I send you screaming back to his realm. Now fight, Locephax.’

Valkia surged forward, the shield held up in her left hand, Slaupnir in her right. The arena was not particularly large and she moved with the killing speed of a hunting cat. Within a few seconds, she was in striking range of Locephax, who stood idly, his sword resting against his shoulder. His insolence infuriated the warrior queen and she pointed the spear towards him.

‘Fight,’ she roared in a curious echo of the alter-cation she had had with Deron all those years before. ‘Or at the very least kneel and accept your death like the coward you are.’

‘Oh, very well,’ Locephax said with a theatrical sigh. He tipped his head to one side for a moment. ‘But I should warn you. I will not hold anything back. My master has granted me powers beyond your understanding and I will use them.’

‘Try using them without a head.’ Valkia tired of the endless discussion and lunged forward, the tip of her spear flickering toward Locephax’s unprotected throat.

With a casual step, he moved slightly to the right so that her thrust missed him completely. She did not hesitate to consider the speed of his movement, and merely spun to attack him where he stood. Again, he moved idly out of the way.

‘Is that the best you have, Valkia?’ His voice took on a mocking, taunting tone and he held his sword out in front of him, closing one eye and studying her down its full length. Before she could retort, his form blurred and was behind her. In less than a heartbeat he had closed the distance between them and was bringing down the hilt of his sword on her shield arm. The pain was immediate, but passed swiftly as the muscle deadened. Her shield arm was numb for now, but she had experienced enough to know that it would recover.

With grim determination, she forced her muscles to retain their position so that she didn’t lower her guard and twisted her body around so that she was standing virtually toe-to-toe with Locephax. His smile was sardonic and superior.

‘Slow,’ he said. ‘Like an old, weary farm horse. An interesting comparison, don’t you think?’

The insult to her person was startling. She was used to being called many things – not all of them flattering – but a spiteful swipe of this nature was entirely new. A snarl of primal rage began somewhere in her chest and boiled its way past her lips, spraying Locephax with flying spittle.

‘Charming …’ He sniffed.

Control your temper as far as you are able in battle, Lille Venn. If your temper takes hold of you, it becomes your master and your sense of reason is lost. But always remember to ride the wave of fury. Let it carry you through the hardships and trials of battle, but never let it control you.

The words of her father came back to her in an unexpected rush. She had always heeded his quiet wisdom, having witnessed warriors lose themselves to the red berserker-like rages that claimed so many. Their power was undeniable, but their ferocity was wild, undirected and inevitably ended in their death as they plunged into the enemy. Consumed by her swelling hatred for her foppish foe, the furnace of her rage rose up, filling her limbs with killing strength.

Locephax finally tired of exchanging light verbal blows and actually moved in with his sword. She deflected the first three attacks with the haft of Slaupnir but the fourth caught her across the shoulder blade. It cut through the leather of her jerkin, leaving a red trail as the blood welled from the wound. Her opponent’s sword was impossibly sharp. The injury registered on some level of her awareness, but it did not seem to matter. With a cry she launched herself fully into the attack, the spear flashing in the torchlight.

The fight began in earnest after that. Valkia’s psychotic rage burst forth in a berserker fury and she lunged at Locephax over and over. Her attack was met with languid ease as the silver-haired man parried everything she had to throw at him. His amethyst eyes glowed in the blazing torchlight and taunted her, stoking her temper ever higher.

Whenever Valkia took the field of battle, she always reached a point where perception of the world around her faded into the mists of insignificance. Within the boundaries of the Circle of Blood, the same thing was happening. A red mist at the very periphery of her vision was clouding everything but the sight of her hated enemy. Locephax was in sharp focus and her every effort was concentrated on bringing him down. Thus it was that she did not notice the slow but sure effect of the man’s presence on her tribe.

Locephax’s depravity and ambient aura of decadence was seeping from him in an invisible trickle, taking root in the hearts and minds of those who were closest. It brought with it an insatiable desire to satisfy appetites for whatever excess the individual desired.

Valkia did not notice, therefore, when fights broke out around the arena as one warrior turned on another. She did not notice those of her people who were overcome with lustful desires for the person they stood beside. She noticed none of it. All she could see was his face, hateful and abhorrent and all she wanted was to end him in the most violent and bloody way she could manage. In such a way, had she but known it, his influence had taken her as well.

He was speaking to her; his voice a muffled buzz breaking through the veil. It took several moments before she could comprehend what he was saying. He was taunting her which did little to improve the rage.

‘You are weak, Valkia. Your mortality gives you only so much strength. You will tire of this battle long before I do. And when you are at your weakest, I will strike.’

She did not respond, physically unable to get words out past teeth that were clenched so very hard that her jaw was already aching. Her athletic body spun gracefully, the spear in her hand a living thing that had been known as a bringer of death and terror to the people of the north for many years. Now it was useless, nothing more than wood and metal. Her rage briefly directed away from Locephax and turned inward.

Why could she not kill this man? She had fought in countless battles and slaughtered her way without compunction across the north. She had ruined all before her with blade and spear, casting down chieftains and warriors alike. Some had claimed to bear the favour of the Four, sporting marks and tokens of the gods upon their flesh. All lies and trickery for they had died to a man, their sundered skulls added to the racks of trophies that lined the entrance to her tent.

Why could she not kill this preening fool?

Locephax danced in, his sword pliant and an extension of his own body. He sliced through the air and she felt warm wetness on her face. He had cut her across the cheek and drawn her blood. She howled in inarticulate rage and lunged after him again, her vision filling with blood and focused utterly on the retreating form of Locephax.

Time ceased to have any meaning as Valkia pursued her foe beyond the boundary of the circle and into the camp. She was oblivious to her people as they struggled with one another, overcome by their base desires. They traded blows again and again, Locephax staying just beyond her reach, but closing in to nip and cut at her, inflicting dozens of tiny wounds until her body ran red with her own blood.

Flames spread among the camp as cook-fires were trampled and kicked over, trapping heaving, sweating people in the burning confines of their tents as they gorged themselves in the pleasures of the flesh or feasted on any meat they could lay their hands on. It was an orgy of excess, but here and there a warrior of iron will held back the madness, fighting off or executing those that had given way to their own weakness of spirit.

It was only when the fiery stain of sunrise creased the horizon that Valkia became aware of her own leaden movements. She was caked in blood, soot and filth and the camp had grown eerily silent, as though the Schwarzvolf had abandoned their mad revelry and fled to the hills. She glanced around, gasping for breath and saw shadowy figures moving furtively through the detritus. Her people were there, but they were keeping their distance and in that moment the fires of her rage began to gutter and die. Valkia glared at Locephax through eyes dull with fatigue and to her disgust saw that not only was he unharmed, but that there was not a trace of dirt upon him. Her skin prickled and burned in humiliation and frustration.

Why could she not kill this man?

‘You could concede defeat to me now, girl.’ Locephax, by the light of cold day, was nowhere near the mysterious creature he had been by torchlight. The silvery hair sapped all of the colour from him and he seemed, to Valkia’s eyes, almost insipid. ‘Admit that I am your better and take your place at my side. Your days will be filled with all you desire and your nights will be spent in pleasurable ecstasy.’ His eyes narrowed to slits, the purple glow of them disappearing beneath his lids and long lashes. ‘I am offering you so much more than the snows of the north and the ingratitude of these barbarous people. If you come with me now, you will be a true queen.’

‘I will be your slave. That was what you said.’ She finally found her voice. ‘And that will not come to pass. Ever. Now still your tongue and fight me.’

‘I admire your courage and tenacity, Valkia,’ Locephax said with a cruel sneer on his face. ‘But I think you should know that I can maintain this for as long as necessary. And I can use many of my master’s gifts to help me. For instance...’

The man turned slightly and cast an expert eye around the carnage. Over the sound of her wheezing lungs, Valkia could hear that there were still struggles going on amidst the chaos as her people sought to master themselves once again. Bodies lay everywhere, some clearly unconscious from their exertions while others lay in bloody disarray, their limbs and heads hacked away by frenzied hands. The Schwarzvolf were broken. The thought sent a new shock of anger through the exhausted queen. Her people, the tribe she had lifted from the dust and forged into the mightiest power of the steppe were broken. In the space of a single night this foppish stranger had undone the work of years.

Locephax was talking again and gesturing to the figures slinking through the shadows, but Valkia could no longer hear him. A fury was filling her, stiffening her tired muscles with a strength she did not know she possessed. She blinked the blood from her eyes and stared with naked hatred at the creature that had invaded her home. The man, if he truly was a man, was beckoning to someone. He still wore that disgusting grin on his face, clearly enjoying the destruction he wrought. She needed to kill him. It felt as though there was a colossal pressure building behind her eyes. It crackled along her limbs and filled her heart to bursting.

A voice in the distance roared in defiance and a detached part of her recognised Hepsus as he bellowed in denial. Every bone, every muscle, every sinew, every part of Valkia filled with the terrible need to tear Locephax apart, to cut the head from his shoulders and bathe in his blood. Nothing could stop her. A flurry of cinders gusted past her on the breeze, the dancing motes of ash and sparks seeming to crawl past in slow motion.

‘Blood...’ Valkia growled, though it was the voice of a stranger.

Locephax’s perfect, violet eyes widened fractionally in surprise and he started to turn. He moved so slowly she wondered how she had been unable to strike him before.

‘Blood... for the Blood God.’

The tension broke and Valkia exploded into violent action, her berserker fury raining down on Locephax like a storm. She was a whirling, screaming cyclone of destruction, her spear weaving a lethal design through the air that cut and stabbed at her enemy again and again. Someone or something rushed at her from the side, but their attack seemed ridiculously slow. She knocked the blow aside with contempt and struck the assailant’s head from his shoulders before continuing her pursuit of the retreating Locephax.

Though pressed, the Reveller’s chosen defended himself with surprising skill, though he no longer wore his self-assured smile. All trace of smirking superiority had vanished in the face of Valkia’s renewed assault, but she was too consumed by her fury to take any satisfaction from his discomfort.

From the outside the battle was a blur of blades and violence. Hepsus cradled the broken, headless body of Aric, his eldest son, in his arms and groaned in anguish. The boy had stood firm throughout the long night despite the desire etched clearly on his face, yet when Locephax had called, he had answered. The man had simply beckoned and the boy had come, blade ready to strike his queen down.

Hepsus watched the raging duel through dulled eyes and saw the same madness repeated again and again as the pair fought across the camp. Loyal men and women snatching up weapons and charging to the aid of the silver-haired stranger. One after the other, they died. It was hypnotic. Valkia never so much as broke her stride as former friends and allies assailed her. They would run screaming into the mêlée, there would be a flash of silver, a gout of blood and their bodies would tumble headless to the ground.

The Warspeaker wondered if they could recover from this. Even if Valkia triumphed over this hellish interloper, the Schwarzvolf were badly wounded. Of the thousands that had filled the valley of the Vale, maybe a third lay dead or dying and another third had fallen victim to other wild vices. There would be punishment for such weakness, though the tribe could ill afford more deaths. So the Schwarzvolf waited as their queen fought. They waited and they saw to their wounded and they kept their distance from the raging battle.

For Valkia time had long since ceased to have any meaning. She was sustained by her rage which burned like liquid fire in her veins. It was a rage that could only be satisfied through violence and the death of the hated enemy before her. Locephax was sporting dozens of cuts on his naked torso, but where Valkia was drenched in a mantle of gore, he did not bleed. He gazed at the warrior woman through hate-filled amethyst eyes.

‘Was the boy a little too easy? Yes, I think so, too.’ He taunted. His silver hair streamed out behind him as he spun and parried. ‘Still, it was an amusing diversion. And your Warspeaker is most displeased.’

Valkia managed nothing more than a snarl and pressed her attack. Had she killed Aric? She did not know. She had killed so many people in the past few hours that it was impossible to tell one from the next. Lost in the purity of her rage, she also realised that she didn’t care. If he was dead it was because he had been weak, and there was no place for weakness in battle.

Almost as though he could pick up on her thoughts, Locephax grinned. ‘Do you yield to me yet, Valkia? I can carry on throwing your own people at you for days if necessary. What will it take to make you surrender to me? Another headstrong youth? Your daughters, perhaps?’ His tongue ran lasciviously across his lips. ‘Such beauties. They would be a delightful addition to my harem.’ He glanced over at the tribespeople who still lingered cautiously near the battle, but neither Eris nor Bellona were to be seen. The mention of her daughters sent a shock of recognition through Valkia’s rage-clouded mind and a scream of unfettered fury erupted from her lips. The tip of her spear smashed Locephax’s slim sword aside and impaled him through the gut.

Locephax looked down at the blade puncturing his perfect flesh and back up at Valkia. There was no gush of arterial blood or wail of agony, he simply sniffed in annoyance and grabbed the haft of the weapon.

‘As I told you, you cannot best me with your little spears and knives. You know nothing of real power. And to think you came so close...’

‘Reveal yourself, daemon.’ Valkia barked. Cords of muscle bulged from her shoulders and arms as she attempted to push the spear deeper into Locephax’s body while the creature held fast to the weapon, holding it in place.

‘You should be careful what you wish for woman, I could... ‘

‘I said reveal yourself!’ Valkia cut him off with a bellowed curse and the rune etched into the spearhead flared a terrible, fiery red.

For the first time since their battle began, Locephax screamed.

He tore the spear from his body and flung it and Valkia away with hideous strength. She tumbled across the muddy ground, managed to get her feet under her and sprang up in time to see the form of the silver-haired man bulge and split.

The fabric of his breeches stretched to bursting point and Valkia could do nothing but stare as every seam on his meticulous outfit split simultaneously. The man who was her sole focus was swelling and stretching; all dimensions filling out at the same time. He grew taller, wider and more monstrous in appearance by the second.

Those few tribesmen who still lingered, those whose hearts were not as hard or whose stomachs were not strong as others were fleeing, screaming in terror at the horrifying creature that was taking shape before them. And yet... even in his true form, there was something oddly exquisite about Locephax, Daemon Prince of Slaanesh.

He was clearly inhuman although his body had a humanoid shape to it. There was a discernible head, a face and long, powerfully muscled legs. Arms – yes, there were those too – indeed, they were one of the more obvious things about him. The creature possessed at least six of them, two of which ended in cruel-looking pincers that snapped hungrily at the air.

His skin was a uniform shade of silver – the same colour as his hair had been in human form – the only hints of colour about him were the iridescent purple scales that flowed over his back. He was reptilian. He was human. He was both and he was neither.

The warrior queen stared at the thing before her. Repulsive... attractive... how could something so freakish in appearance be so strangely beautiful? Snakes had always held a fascination for Valkia and this, she reasoned, was no different. That something which moved with such sinuous grace and ease could kill a man with a single bite... this was no different.

She took Slaupnir in hand and steadied herself on the ground, rooting herself to the spot.

‘I am Locephax,’ the creature hissed in a sibilant voice. ‘And I will be your undoing.’ His face elongated slightly; the eyes lost their amethyst shine and became completely black. Horns sprouted from his head, curling forwards and as he opened his mouth to speak, she saw the needle-pointed, razor sharp teeth that lined his jaws. Locephax might once have been human, but that day was long since past.

She raised the smouldering spear to the heavens and screamed out her god’s name. And this time, he heard her and acknowledged her cries. Unholy strength flooded her battered frame, filling her with killing rage and a singular determination to destroy the abomination that had violated the Schwarzvolf.

She was a dervish; a maelstrom of violence. Slaupnir flashed wickedly in the afternoon sunlight. The sun had passed its zenith and she had never even noticed. Valkia landed blow after blow on Locephax and the daemon returned the attack with equal ferocity. She was bloodied and wounded, but if she felt any pain from the countless lacerations on her body, she gave no sign that they impaired or inconvenienced her in any way.

The daemon was covered in similar wounds, a lattice-work of injuries that had been sketched across his body by the sharp point of the spear. Every time the blade made contact with his flesh, there was a searing flash of light and the smell of burning meat. The rune of the Blood God etched into its depth was more damaging than the weapon itself – but the two combined had the potential to bite deeply into pale, daemonic flesh.

Concentrating on the battle, the fug of glamour that he had projected cleared. All around the camp, those who could still stand were watching the battle in silence. Even Hepsus, whose grief at the death of his son was great, could do nothing but stare as the warrior queen battled the inhuman creature.

They fought on, neither seeming to gain the upper hand. Two perfectly matched opponents and neither of them could defeat the other. It didn’t seem possible; Locephax had the size and speed advantage. He had long since abandoned any pretence at keeping his form remotely human and his lower torso had warped into a snake’s body, silver and purple scales gleaming. He moved across the arena floor on the looping coils, a terrible, beautiful thing from another world.

He was superior in every respect – but Valkia had determination and the wild abandon of the Blood God on her side. She thrust Slaupnir repeatedly towards Locephax, but the scales on the daemon’s body were as hard as any armour she had ever fought against. Penetrating his hide was nigh on impossible. Her eyes roamed the creature in an effort to locate any obvious weakness, but she could see none.

Every bone in her body was aching as she pushed herself further, screaming for the chance to rest. Adrenaline kept her going but the fury that had sustained her through the gruelling battle was beginning to ebb, her mortal frame stressed beyond its limits. She knew that realistically she could not sustain this for very much longer. She needed an opportunity and she needed one to present itself soon.

‘You look tired, Valkia,’ said the Locephax-thing, smirking his inhuman smile at her. The needle points of his teeth were bared and the daemon’s forked tongue darted in and out. The eyes were filled with hunger. ‘I can help you rest... eternal rest. Wouldn’t you like that?’

His tone was hypnotic and tired as she was, Valkia almost fell under his spell. With a scream to the Blood God, she jumped back, hurling a torrent of abuse at him in the guttural language of her people. Locephax threw back his head and screeched with laughter. And it was then that she saw her moment; the golden opportunity that she had waited for.

It all happened between one heartbeat and the next, a flash of silver faster than the eye could see. With his head thrown back the way it was, the soft part of his lower jaw was exposed. If she got the strike right...

She sprinted the short distance that separated them and leaped upwards, jabbing Slaupnir up towards the daemon. The spear tip entered the unprotected flesh of his throat and passed through his neck. His six arms flailed wildly as he reached out to return the attack, the pincers snapping furiously and two of his other arms struggling to pull the spear free.

‘I cannot die, Valkia!’ His voice was a bubbling gurgle, but she could see that her strike had mortally wounded him. ‘I am a champion of my master and he will not confine me to his domain! I will return, he will grant me a new body...’

The creature slumped, its head against its torso and the arms went limp. The coils on which it sat sagged and crumpled until Locephax was no longer towering over the warrior queen. She reached up and wiped a hand across her face, smearing blood and soot over it. Leaning forward, she snatched the sword from Locephax’s hand.

‘I know nothing of the ways of the Four, creature,’ she said. Her voice was strong and powerful despite her bone-aching weariness. ‘But I am going to carry your head as a trophy to the very feet of Kharneth, and all who look upon it will know the weakness of the Reveller and his pawns.’

With those words, she spun around with deadly accuracy. Locephax’s blade was keen; she knew it well. The lacerations on her body were testament to that fact. She wielded it with enough strength and swing to cleave straight through his neck, just below the spear that still protruded from it and sever the head from the body.

Just as she had promised she would.

The head fell to the arena floor, rolling several times before coming to a stop. The body wavered a moment or two and then collapsed, blood flowing unchecked from the gaping stump of a neck and pooling on the ground.

Hoping that her shaking hand did not give away her exhaustion too much, Valkia reached down and snatched up the severed head of the daemon.

‘Thus all followers of the Reveller end,’ she said. The head in her grip writhed and twisted, taking on a life of its own. It was a grisly thing to witness, particularly when it spoke with a voice it should no longer have had.

‘You cannot kill me, warrior bitch,’ it snarled, trying its utmost to bite at Valkia. ‘All you will do is infuriate my master. He will not let this transgression go unanswered...’

Kneeling down in the dirt, Valkia dipped her finger in the blood from one of the many injuries on her body. She daubed the rune of the Blood God on the daemon’s forehead.

Locephax screamed. A terrible, shivering sound that caused more than one of the remaining tribesman to lose control of their bladder. Most turned and fled from the sound, but Valkia did not move.

‘Does that hurt, daemon prince?’ She leaned close and whispered the words to Locephax’s head. ‘Does it hurt?’

Did it hurt like Hepsus must do? Did it hurt like she did knowing that she had been duped into this position? She would make this creature pay for the damage it had done. For now, she could keep it under her control with the torment of the rune on its face, but she already had an idea what she would do. She had witnessed Locephax’s power, even as a head.

‘Burn the body,’ she ordered, still staring down at the head. ‘And fetch me some nails. I’ll keep this thing from fleeing my grasp.’

Nobody moved for several long moments, mesmerised by the sight of their blood-spattered queen and the still-screaming head.

‘I said move!’

The few warriors who had slunk close enough to hear her did as they were commanded, except Hepsus who lingered. He still cradled the broken body of his son. Valkia could not meet his gaze, but she could feel his rage and grief even as the killing frenzy that had sustained her flowed from her bones and muscles.

‘You understand what happened?’

There was a hesitation and Hepsus finally replied.

‘I understand. I do not forgive, but... yes. I understand.’

‘He will receive a warrior’s burial, Warspeaker.’

Hepsus crossed back through the rope and paused, Aric across his shoulder. He turned and looked at his leader.

‘I will bury my son as I see fit, hetwoman. I do not need your kind of intervention.’

‘See how they start to turn on you!’ The head of Locephax was still loquacious, even having been severed from its body. She shook it violently – she could no longer think of it as a he – and it sputtered its rage. She may have won this battle, but she knew she had lost something vital.

NINE

PROMISES

Within minutes Valkia had what she had asked for. A pale-faced boy presented her with eight heavy, square-headed nails. Despite her crushing weariness she drew her knife and carefully etched the symbol of the Blood God into the top of each one. She had trailed the head of the daemon across the camp, leaving a virulent scarlet trail in its wake and she stood whilst the smith finished his work.

The head of Locephax had fallen silent for the time being, its eyes closed but from time to time, the eyelids would flutter. If anything, it appeared to be in a state of deep slumber. Valkia did not pretend to even begin understanding the deep sorcery that kept it alive, but she instinctively knew what she had to do.

Taking the eight nails in hand, she lay down her shield on the ground. Kneeling, she reached a hand up for a heavy hammer. Setting the daemon’s head in the centre of her shield, she drove the first of the nails through Locephax’s forehead.

The eyes flared open and the mouth opened in a silent scream of agony. Sound rushed in eventually and the cry of anguish was heard across the camp of the Schwarzvolf. It resonated around the Vale, but Valkia did not even flinch. She hammered in the other nails, securing the head to the front of her shield. When her work was complete, she rose to her feet and held the grisly article aloft.

‘With this trophy, this demonstration of my strength, the enemy will surely flee before us. And they will clear the way for the journey I must make.’

The boy, looking decidedly uneasy at the proximity of the daemon’s remains, furrowed his brow.

‘Journey, hetwoman?’

‘To the far north,’ she replied, looking over at him. Her eyes shone as though she was feverish. ‘I must present this trophy to my lord and master. Imagine the reward.’

The young man stared at her. The warrior queen had clearly lost her senses. But he was not going to tell her that. He did not envy the person who did.

‘She has crossed the line into madness.’

Valkia had finally retired to her tent in order to rest. As soon as the adrenaline had left her system, the exhaustion of the fight with Locephax had finally caught up with her. Her injuries had been tended to; mostly superficial cuts and scrapes, but there had been one gash on her upper arm that had needed stitching closed. She had not even so much as flinched during the process, her eyes fixed hatefully on the daemon’s head. Restoring order to the devastated camp would be a much more arduous task and they were still discovering the true extent of the damage wrought by the daemon’s insidious will.

In her absence, Hepsus had called a clandestine meeting of the Circle. Every member had come at the summons, including the hetwoman’s younger brother. Edan, now Godspeaker, sat quietly to one side, his head hooded, his thoughts contained. Occasionally, his glittering eyes would pass across the assembled warriors.

‘With respect, Hepsus, you are angry…’

‘You are right I am angry. She killed my boy.’

‘He attacked her. And besides, Hepsus, you must admit that he displayed a terrible weakness.’ The Warspeaker turned a furious stare on the man who had said this, but the other warrior didn’t back down. ‘He was weak-willed. I understand your grief at his loss, but would you have been able to live with the knowledge that he was weak?’

It was strange. Had circumstances been different, Hepsus would have sneered at another man whose child had been weak. But Aric had been his son. His pride and joy. His future. And now the boy was stone cold dead. Hepsus was struggling to accept it.

The Warspeaker controlled his rising temper. He could not afford to lose the backing of the Circle in this matter.

‘You are right,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, of course I am angry. But regardless... her choice in this matter put the whole tribe at risk. She accepted the creature’s challenge. Had she lost, who knows what further havoc it would have wreaked?’

‘But she did not lose, Warspeaker.’ The voice belonged to Edan. The boy pushed back his hood. He bore a startling resemblance to his older half-sister; the same dark hair and well-chiselled features. Intelligence oozed from every pore. ‘She defeated a daemonic emissary. Her power is unmatched. We should surely be praising her name, not trying to plant the insidious suggestion that she is mad.’

Hepsus looked over at Edan. He was well aware of the relationship that existed between the Godspeaker and his warrior sister. She despised what she perceived as Edan’s weaknesses and kept him very much at arm’s length. For his part, the boy idolised her. He had been spun the tale as to how she had saved his life from a mother with murder in her heart and his loyalty was total.

It suited Valkia’s purposes to have him on her side, but she spared little time for him and rarely openly acknowledged their blood ties.

‘Did you see the thing after she had torn it from the body? It still speaks. Still has some sort of unnatural life about it. It is sorcery of the very worst kind and she has brought it amongst us.’

Edan’s dark brows feathered together. ‘There are those of the other tribes who say that my position within the tribe is one that smacks of sorcery, Warspeaker. Would you say the same of me?’

Damn the boy and his silvery tongue. Hepsus kept his temper under control and forced a polite bow of the head. ‘Of course not, Godspeaker. What you have is a gift. A talent. But were your head to part company from your shoulders, your voice would be forever stilled. It does not bode well. Surely even you must agree with that?’

‘It is an omen, granted,’ conceded Edan thoughtfully. ‘I should perhaps spend some time in meditation on the subject. But all of you know my sister as well as I do. She will entertain a notion for a while and if it does not come to pass swiftly, she will grow bored with it.’ It was an extraordinarily honest appraisal of Valkia’s behaviour. Having conquered so many of the smaller tribes and absorbed them into her own, the warrior queen frequently grew restless. Without war, she felt imprisoned. She had been building her strength and her forces to take on the other large tribes of the north. That time was approaching, they all knew it.

She had made a clear and concise statement. She planned to abandon the war on the tribes and head to the far north, to the place where they said the gods dwelt.

The Circle gradually broke up after this, with no sense of resolution. The Warspeaker stared into the fire in the centre of the tent, lost in the flames and lost in his own thoughts. He did not notice that there was another presence until the voice cut through his ponderings.

‘Would you follow her?’

Startled, Hepsus looked up. Edan had remained, still sitting in the shadows. The boy was too fond of mystery and for a moment, Hepsus was angered. ‘What?’

‘If she turned to you tomorrow and ordered you north, would you follow her?’

‘Of course I would! Are you calling my loyalty into question?’

‘The truth, Warspeaker?’ Edan stood up. He was slim, like his sister and taller. Just as she had seemed as a young woman, he looked as insubstantial as a reed. But Hepsus had seen the young man swing a great axe with ease. He knew that the wiry body hid a core of strength. ‘The truth… yes. I am calling your loyalty into question. You doubt my sister. You doubt her motives because you do not understand them.’

The easy manner in which Edan said the words made Hepsus uncomfortable. The feeling came from knowing that the Godspeaker was absolutely right.

‘I am her right hand,’ he replied eventually. ‘I can see no end to this venture north but a poor one. I would not see the prosperity of the Schwarzvolf fall in the wake of one person’s whim – be that person the youngest child in the tribe or our queen. Does that put a question against my loyalty?’

‘Not to your people, no.’ Edan tipped his head on one side. ‘You have served your tribe well for many years, Hepsus. I would suggest that you may have to endure a little longer.’ His eyes glittered dangerously. ‘Because there is a way forward, if you are prepared to listen to me.’

Sensing something he couldn’t quite articulate, Hepsus stared at the boy in an attempt to gauge something, anything from his closed expression. But Edan was outstandingly good at giving away nothing in his body language. Eventually, the Warspeaker nodded.

‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you will.’

She was running. Always running forwards; never running away. She was not fleeing from danger, but heading directly into it. There were sounds… inhuman sounds at her back, but they were not chasing her. They were running with her. A distant howl. She ran on.

The sky ran red with blood. Her father… her father had told her once that when the Blood God was pleased, the skies would run scarlet. She stared up at the sky and stumbled, falling forwards.

She put her hands out to stop herself landing on her face. Her fingernails had grown; curled like talons. They were the hands of a beast, of a daemon. Unable to rise, she stared at her unnatural talons as the army at her back continued to charge forwards. A terrible, searing pain tore through her and she arched her back in agony. She was changing. Becoming something else. Something… better? Something more?

Her agony burst forth in a terrible scream that was half feral, half terror.

She woke up.

Her dreams had long been troubled, but since the death of Locephax, Valkia had begun to suffer true nightmares. Repeated visions of her elongated nails; her clawed hands swam before her eyes constantly and she had not managed a full night’s sleep in days. When she was not having the dream in which an army flowed at her back, she was reliving the battle with the daemon. Usually those ones resolved themselves as events had played out, with her victory.

But sometimes...

Shuddering, she would wake in a cold sweat, the fading vestige of the dream and the overwhelming memory that of the daemon tearing out her liver and feasting upon it. All her life she had been exposed to grotesque acts of wanton violence and never once had she had such nightmares. They weakened her, startled her, frightened her. And that fear, like many other things in her life, made her angry.

She had thought of removing Locephax’s head from her shield, convincing herself that the unholy thing must be the source of all her sleep disturbances, but she could not. She had sworn to deliver the prize to the very foot of the Blood God’s throne and she would not go back on that promise. Over the days following the daemon’s demise, Valkia became increasingly driven and single-minded about the quest north until she lost her ability to see objectively.

But Valkia was not so foolish as to think that she could travel such a distance alone and when she finally stood before the tribe, her eyes shadowed and her cheeks hollow from lack of sleep and sustenance, there was an immediate cadre of followers who instantly moved to stand beside her.

Their loyalty filled her heart with a swell of pride. Winter was closing fast and the journey would be long and arduous. But still these men and women of her tribe showed their steadfast allegiance.

But during the darkest watches of the night, a soft voice whispered words of treachery. They think you weak. They think you insane. They would let you die, Valkia of the Schwarzvolf. You are nothing to them but a hindrance. The whispers filled her with paranoid suspicion and she began watching her closest followers very carefully whilst at the same time drawing up her great plan.

Within the week, she had promised. Within the week, they would begin their journey. She was filled with purpose unlike anything she had ever known and yet it was such a familiar sensation that she could have always felt this way.

Her people were hardy and they were robust. A number of the outlying camps had been brought into the main fold of the Vale to bolster the numbers lost during the battle with Locephax. Despite such terrible, aching loss the Schwarzvolf thrived. Despite the countless deaths, they continued to dominate the tribes of the north. It was a testament to her tenacity and superlative leadership that her tribe had grown so large. Yet as she sat staring out across the Vale, she did not see the growth and richness of her people. She did not absorb the changes.

Where once tents made from the skins of animals had stood, there were now semi-permanent wooden structures growing up in ever-increasing numbers. In the wake of the battle, an agreement had been reached that something more permanent was required and there were workers willing and able to perform the tasks necessary. As well as warriors, the Schwarzvolf had absorbed artisans into their number. Her people prospered and she resented it.

She resented the stability of it all. She was born of a proud, noble warrior race and they had become a generation of peace-time farmers and hunters. It was demeaning. The Schwarzvolf had always been nomadic. This settlement was becoming permanent.

Her fingers idly drummed on the arm of the wooden throne upon which she sat. Slaupnir rested across her lap and the daemon-headed shield was by her side. Locephax’s eyes were shut as it engaged in whatever passed for its slumber.

Valkia let her eyes narrow as she scanned the activity that went on. A faint swirl of snow was blowing in the air, huge, fluffy flakes that drifted lazily on the fitful breeze. It was still too warm for them to do much more than coat things in a white powder before melting to nothing. The flakes rested on the various structures that had been built, but where they fell on the forge, they melted immediately. From within that large building, she could hear the sound of metal ringing on metal as the smith and his apprentice followed her orders to produce as much armour and weaponry as they were able.

Warriors were seated in small groups, sharpening their blades and stitching tears in leather, or standing within the arena engaging in training exercises. Their swords clashed almost in harmony with the sounds of the forge.

Others were busy at the central cookfire, skinning and salting meat for drying, or stirring seemingly endlessly at the huge, communal iron pot that served the entire tribe on a daily basis. Their staple diet consisted of stews made from the plentiful meat that they caught, supplemented by flat-baked, dark bread and fruit. The smell of a roasting haunch of venison, spit-turning over the fire wafted across her nostrils and she inhaled deeply, feeling her mouth water.

All of these sights, sounds and smells were achingly familiar to her and, for a while, she had taken great pleasure in the ongoing prosperity of her people. But now she feared that she had tamed them. The wolf that was the symbol of her people was tamed and little more than a dog.

Her fingers curled around the arm of the throne and she chewed on her lip. When she returned from her expedition to the seat of the Blood God, when she returned bearing his favour, she would rectify this domesticity. She would tear down the buildings and her people would rise again, instilled with fresh vigour.

As if hearing her thoughts, the eyes of the head nailed to her shield fluttered open. A cruel smile touched its lips.

‘When you return, Valkia? If. My master is enraged still. He waits for you in the realm of the gods just as much as the savage you worship...’ The voice cut off as Valkia delivered a swift kick to its face.

‘Be silent, worm,’ she hissed. Locephax snorted in derision but did as she commanded. For good measure, she kicked the daemon again. It had little effect but it made her feel better.

And yet his words, designed to fan the flames of her fear, had the effect of lighting a spark of determination. She cast another glance around her camp. She would put together her war party and leave before nightfall the following day.

Before she changed her mind.

‘You sweep too low.’

She was sparring in the arena with her half-brother. He had come to her barely an hour hence and asked if she would give him some training. She had never been approached by Edan for such a reason before and had treated him to a look of suspicion.

He laughed. ‘If I am to accompany you on this venture, sister, then I should be as well prepared as I can be. Hepsus and the other warriors have given me much training, but I would consider it an honour if you would train me.’

She had agreed, pleased that Edan had pledged his allegiance so openly, and was relieved to have something to occupy her thoughts. The two had entered the arena with training swords and buckler-sized shields, as this was Edan’s preference. They had been fighting for a while and she had repeatedly put her brother onto his back, the tip of the training sword at his throat.

He got to his feet again, looking slightly ruffled at the continued humiliation he was undergoing. But he had his reasons for what he was doing. All the time he was keeping Valkia thus occupied, her attention was removed from anything else that was going on. Hepsus had listened to the young Godspeaker and had seen the wisdom in what he proposed.

‘Again?’ Valkia’s grin was surprising and also infectious. He grinned ruefully back at her, feeling one of the occasionally twinges of regret that they had not been closer over the years. Perhaps if she had let him in, she would not have taken the route of folly.

There was no time to dwell on what might have been. Edan had the best interests of his people at heart and that steeled his resolve.

‘Again,’ he acknowledged.

Still grinning at her younger brother, Valkia took up her position, the shield close to her chest, the training sword ready.

‘Begin,’ she said. ‘And this time, aim for me as though you mean it. Don’t be afraid of hurting me, Edan.’

‘I’m not,’ he said, and they began to fight. Valkia had retained every bit of speed and strength that had marked her across the years and age had not weakened her at all. Whenever she fought now, she reached for that moment of true glory she had touched when fighting the daemon. She strove for it. Hungered for it. Burned for it.

For the most part, it eluded her. But every so often, she would touch the ecstasy of the blood rage and come out desperate for more.

Edan had the advantage of youth, but he found it hard to keep pace with the older woman. He was already regretting in part his decision to occupy Valkia’s attention in this way. He would come out of this with bruises from head to toe – but he would also benefit from her training.

His sword came up to deflect an overhead blow and she thrust forward with the buckler, catching him just under the jaw. His head snapped back and he stumbled, dazed. Valkia gave him no respite, following up immediately with a blow from the flat of the practise blade that left his arm aching. He almost dropped the sword, but with grim determination, kept a grip.

‘Good,’ she approved, noting his efforts. ‘That’s good, Edan. Now give me everything you have. Come at me like you really want to kill me.’

There was a pause of barely a heartbeat and Edan found the same core of strength that had served his sister so well for her entire life. With a feral roar, he charged towards her and she thought, for an unlikely second, that she saw bloodlust in his eyes.

She moved position as he lunged and he went wide of the mark. She stepped nimbly to the right, the leather skirt that she wore flaring out with the movement. Slit either side to allow for ease of movement, it whipped back as she steadied herself. Bringing the hilt of the blade down hard between his shoulder blades, he sank to his knees, Valkia standing over him.

‘And down you go again, brother. How long is it since you stepped away from your role and actually practised in the Circle of Blood?’ It was something she had noticed for a while; the fact that there were fewer fights amongst her own people. They were growing lazy, she reasserted. It would all change soon.

He didn’t reply. He felt humiliation flushing his cheeks, despite the knowledge that he could never have beaten her. From the corner of his eye, he saw Hepsus crossing the camp and turned his head to look at the Warspeaker. The red-haired warrior had an amused smirk on his face as he watched Edan’s humiliation. It was enough of a sign that his business was concluded and for that at least, Edan was grateful.

‘Again?’ Valkia was addressing him.

‘By your leave, sister, I will take a break for now. You are correct of course. I have been lax in my training. But I promise you that when the situation arises... I will not fail you.’ Edan accepted her help up and gave her a slightly pained smile. Valkia squinted against the late afternoon sunlight. For just a moment, he had looked so much like her father as a young man that she felt a dull, long-forgotten ache of loss.

‘Very well,’ she said and clapped him on the shoulder. He winced as pain stabbed through him. ‘The journey north will be a long and difficult one, Edan. I am glad that you will be with us. You will learn a great deal.’

‘And I am glad to be coming with you,’ he lied smoothly.

She called another Circle meeting that night. Her cheeks were still flushed from the practice bout with Edan and there was such life and enthusiasm in her face, her eyes, her every gesture that every warrior who sat in her tent could not help but be swept up by the magnitude of her vision.

‘We will leave in two days from now,’ she declared. ‘Those who wish to remain here may do so. Those who wish to come with me will understand the risks. They are Schwarzvolf. They will bear such uncertainty with grace and honour.’

She had brought the shield into the meeting with her and set it down face upwards so that Locephax’s foul head was clearly on display.

‘I took this trophy by my own hand,’ she declared. ‘This... creature was a servant of the Reveller. We all know, as our Godspeaker teaches – and as his predecessors taught before him – that there is a time and place for worship of his bounty. In his aspect of fertility, we thank him for giving us babes who are not god-touched. In his aspect of lust, we thank him for providing us with the ability to bring new lives into the world. But this... Locephax... was perverse. He took the ideals we understand and distorted them beyond recognition.’

She kicked the shield, but the eyes remained firmly closed. Sneering slightly at the daemon, Valkia continued.

‘This thing’s master is the exact opposite of all we have come to believe in. We believe that power lies in strength and the conquering of others. Locephax was slovenly, lustful and lazy. Such a creature deserved death. And by presenting the head of an enemy to the Blood God...’

Her eyes shone with mania and for the first time, even those who had supported her most closely over the years wondered if she was quite sane. There was something unstoppable in that expression. Something that would not be denied.

‘By presenting this trophy, our patron god will reward me. More!’ She stood up and paced around the gathered Circle, her hands animate and her voice filled with deep, abiding passion. ‘He will reward our people! We will be stronger than ever before! Look at all we have accomplished. Think of what remains to be done.’

‘The larger tribes...’ Hepsus began to speak, but she bounded to stand behind him, her hands on his shoulder.

‘Don’t worry yourself about them any more, Hepsus! When we return from our trip north, the power we will hold will be beyond anything they can ever hope to resist! The Schwarzvolf will sweep across the steppes and take everything for themselves. And then, when our force is great beyond imagining...’

She released Hepsus and stood back from him. Every pair of eyes turned to stare at her, captivated by her words, mesmerised by her sheer beauty and passion.

‘Then we will take the south.’

An immediate ripple ran around the tent. To suggest such a thing was madness itself. Everyone knew that all who had dared venture south were thwarted by the mountain-dwelling dwarf folk. Fierce fighters who would give no ground and gave back just as violently as they received; several raiding parties had headed into the warm-lands only to never return.

Valkia stood backwards, in the shadows where she knew they could see nothing of her except her glittering eyes and the even whiteness of her teeth as she smiled. Words such as ‘preposterous’, ‘suicidal’ and ‘mad’ were flung around easily and she listened with pleasure to the arguing that broke out.

For too long, this Circle had sat like sacks of straw, dutifully nodding and agreeing with everything she had suggested. For too long they had forgotten what it was to think for themselves. She had now given them much to consider.

‘We should remember,’ Valkia said eventually, finally cutting across the squabbling with a cool, clear voice. ‘We should remember that such a thing will not happen for many years. We must take the north first. We must leave no doubt in the minds of the soft southerners that we are a force united. They will lay down their weapons and flee from us. Just uttering the name of the Schwarzvolf will send them running, piss trickling down their legs.’

The words raised a hearty laugh or two from the group. Hepsus, she noted, looked troubled, but she did not single him out. He would see. She knew that he would see. They would all see. Once they stood in the presence of Kharneth...

Khorne.

There it was again. That whispered thought; a breath of an idea that the name she had known her master by for all these years was nothing more than a lie.

Khorne. Kharneth, it matters little what you call the Blood God. The truth remains that the followers of Slaanesh will be waiting for you, Gorequeen.

It was Locephax. The daemon’s eyes remained closed and his words were felt inside her mind rather than spoken. The smile slid slowly off her face and she stared at the shield.

You will cross the ice. You will enter the Wastes and there... there, your people will be slaughtered. One after the other, they will fall. Their blood will stain the snows crimson. And then, when only you remain...

The daemon’s eyes flared open and those sitting closest leaped backwards in alarm.

‘Then I will claim you,’ he said.

Quick as lightning, without ever missing a beat, Valkia drew the dagger from her boot and hurled it across the room. It embedded itself in the wood of the shield just to the right of Locephax’s face with a loud thud. The daemon fell silent again, but not before a serene smile had played across its dead lips.

It was a look that would return to Valkia in her nightmares that night.

TEN

THE BREATH BEFORE THE PLUNGE

It was the nature of the northern weather to turn like a savage animal and this year was no exception to that rule. Within hours the occasional snow flurry had become a steady precipitation. As it had always done, the arrival of the winter brought a strange silence to the camp of the Schwarzvolf. It muffled the tread of people’s feet, killed what little birdsong filled the air and even the people lowered their voices. By the time Valkia stepped from her tent, the entire camp was covered in a blanket of white.

It was early and whilst the weak winter sun shone, it did little to alleviate the chill in the air. Valkia reached back into the tent for her furs and shrugged them on across her shoulders. She felt calm and in control despite the horrific visions that had plagued her in the night. There was something about the first true snows of winter that made her feel… comfortable. This was her heritage.

The communal fire which was always kept burning was barely more than glowing embers at the moment, but there were several children working on banking it. This was one of the many chores that were given to the young people of the tribe and she watched them with a slightly indulgent air for a few minutes. Finally, she crossed the camp and accepted a cup of a hot beverage from one of them. It was a delicious drink, made from the leaves of various herbs that grew in the area. The aromatic scent belied a preparation that was in truth, quite bitter; honey was added to sweeten it. Sipping at the beverage, Valkia welcomed the warmth it brought even as it burned down her throat.

A sound overhead caught her attention and she looked upwards. A dark shadow moved across her face and far above her, a mountain bird of prey screamed as it rode the thermals. The bird was enormous, its wings fully stretched as it glided free, revelling in the thrill of the hunt and rejoicing in its simple existence. Valkia watched it for a moment, fascinated as she always was by the efficacy of creatures who lived their lives on the wing.

With a cry of triumph, the bird dived downwards, having spied its unfortunate prey and disappeared briefly over the crest of a hill. Scant seconds later it was aloft again, a dead rodent hanging from its talons. It was quite wonderful to watch and Valkia, child of a deeply superstitious people, saw it as an omen.

Today, she and her assembled party of warriors would begin their pilgrimage. The sighting of the raptor, revered almost as much as the black wolves of the hills by her people, filled her with great confidence and there was a definite swagger in her stride as she moved back across the camp towards the tent shared by her daughters.

Their relationship had never been particularly close but as Eris and Bellona had grown, Valkia had seen herself reflected in them. The girls had always shared the same appearance, but personality-wise they were extraordinarily opposite. Eris was like a younger Valkia; fierce, angry, resistant to just about anything whilst Bellona was cool-headed and able to offer a diplomatic solution to any situation. Both had received – with their mother’s blessing – proposals of marriage. They would be well provided for and it was well known that on Valkia’s death, the throne would pass to one of the twins. It was her stated preference that they share leadership of the tribe, but whether that would happen or not she would never know.

She had denied them the opportunity to travel to the realm of the gods. Bellona had accepted her mother’s judgement without question, but Eris had raged for hours, throwing a tantrum not unlike those Valkia herself had once demonstrated. In the end, Valkia had backhanded her across the face. It had been the first time she had physically remonstrated either of her daughters and all three of them had been startled by the fading echo of the slap.

It had achieved the desired effect nonetheless. Eris had been shocked into listening to her mother’s reasoning and with Bellona’s help, had accepted the decision. Neither was surprised when Valkia ducked into their tent that morning.

There was no emotional goodbye for the three women. They came from hardy, pragmatic people who rarely expressed any sort of heartfelt feelings for one another. Valkia felt a little sorrow that they would not be with her to experience the glories of the realm of the gods, but little more than that. In part, she fully anticipated returning and so the thought she may never see them again never even crossed her mind.

‘In my absence,’ she said, accepting another cup of the aromatic drink, ‘I have arranged for Olan to oversee the activities of the tribe’s warriors. In the unlikely event you are attacked, he will ensure the safety of the Schwarzvolf.’ Olan was the tribe’s current head scout; young, but entirely capable and extremely competent. Already he had been earmarked as Hepsus’s ultimate replacement should anything happen to the Warspeaker.

Eris looked as though she would comment, but stilled her tongue at a glance from her mother.

‘In terms of the rest of the tribe’s welfare, however…’ Valkia sipped at her drink, her dark eyes going from Eris to Bellona and back again. ‘I have every faith in both of you.’

‘Your faith is well placed, mother,’ Bellona smiled. Valkia’s expression hardened slightly.

‘Don’t make me regret the decision. Either of you.’ The words were directed at both, but Eris knew they were meant for her. Both girls shook their heads.

Finishing off her drink, Valkia rose. ‘Be well,’ she said to her daughters. ‘We will speak again soon. On that you have my word.’

‘The party is almost assembled,’ reported the Warspeaker. ‘We will be ready to leave straight away when the last of them are here.’

‘Your gift for organising such matters has always impressed me, Hepsus,’ Valkia said admiringly. There were almost a thousand warriors leaving from the main Schwarzvolf camp in the Vale and Valkia had sent runners ahead to muster warriors from the outlying tribes. Word received back had been optimistic to say the very least.

‘It is my honour to serve,’ said the Warspeaker, bowing before her. ‘That, and they are all eager for a fight. You were right with that assumption. I barely had to snap my fingers and they were armoured and ready.’

Valkia cast an expert eye over the assembled group. Consisting predominately of young males, there were nonetheless several female warriors standing amongst their number. Ages ranged from her own age group right down to youths barely into their late teens. Every face she saw was filled with open enthusiasm and fierce determination. Her heart swelled.

‘I should say a few words,’ she murmured. Hepsus nodded, his face strangely closed and expressionless. Valkia did not notice; instead she moved to stand upon the dais where her throne sat.

‘My people,’ she began and was startled to realise that there was a catch in her voice. The emotion of the moment had caught her far more than bidding her own daughters farewell. She coughed to clear her throat.

‘My people,’ she repeated. This time there was no weakness in her voice. This time her words were clear and strong, filled with the honest passion of the moment. ‘We embark today on a war unlike anything any of us have ever known. I have never lied to you and I will not start now.’ Her dark eyes skimmed over the faces. Youthful or older, they were all fixed on her in rapt attention. She saw no fear in the upturned faces. These were her people and how they loved her.

‘We will not all return here,’ she continued. ‘But know this, brothers and sisters. Those of us who do will bear the blessing of the Blood God back to our people, and will ensure that your noble deeds will live forevermore in the stories of the Schwarzvolf. The dead are never forgotten when they live with courage and honour.’

She jumped down from the dais and moved amongst the warriors. ‘We face the unknown and that in itself is enough to cow the most stout-hearted. But none of you have refused this chance. Our tribe is strong. We seek to make it stronger still.’

A ripple of approval ran through the army. Valkia smiled her devastatingly charming smile.

‘I am more proud of you right now than I have ever been. In the days, weeks, maybe even months ahead I may not always have the chance to remind you of that. But never forget it. When darkness comes and enemies surround you – and they will – remember the legacy of the Schwarzvolf. Look at all we have accomplished. We will go on to great things and it will be because of you all.’

The ripple rose to a cheer and Valkia felt the thrill of power that she got from knowing her words had incited such reaction. She stood once again upon her dais.

‘We head north. We gather the rest of our army and then we will keep following the God Light until we reach the realm of the Blood God. Everything that we kill on the way, we dedicate to him.’ She raised Slaupnir high above her head and screamed at the top of her voice.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

‘Skulls for his skull throne!’

It took a good ten minutes for the roaring cheers to die down enough for Valkia to be heard again. When she spoke this time, it was softly and yet they all heard.

‘We leave. Now.’

The army marched out, the Gorequeen at their head, their voices raised in song. Most of those voices were gruff and tuneless, but it was heartening.

The initial march was accompanied by high spirits and as the ranks of the Schwarzvolf swelled, so did the mood. The warriors walked companionably, encountering nothing more threatening than a few mountain lions which were swiftly dispatched. Each such encounter was turned into a trial of bravery ,with the showdown between hunter and prey always ending in a lethally close knife fight. Valkia herself fought down one animal, a huge alpha male, and received barely a scratch.

One warrior did not fare so well. His arm was torn from his shoulder by a lioness before she was run through by Hepsus. The man was gravely wounded, but not dead; a hardy testament to the strength of those born to the Schwarzvolf. The blood loss left him weak but as soon as he regained his senses he had taken himself straight to Valkia at the head of the army. He had insisted on still coming with them.

‘I still have my axe arm,’ he had stated pragmatically. ‘I can still fight.’

‘Indeed,’ Valkia responded, narrowing her eyes and assessing the warrior. He was fine and strong and if his injuries did not get infected there was a chance he might yet survive the hardships of the journey. He could and clearly was willing to serve her for as long as he was able and that was acceptable. She had fixed the young warrior with a hard stare. ‘Understand that if you fall behind, we will not wait for you. You will be left as carrion for the predators of the mountains.’

His gratitude had been almost embarrassing, but Valkia had let the feeling slide in favour of the pleasure of the young man’s unswerving loyalty.

‘Nobody will watch your back,’ she told him. ‘If you are strong enough to survive this, the Blood God will look favourably upon you as well.’ She had smiled inwardly at the zealous glow on his face and as he had strode away to the back of the army where he walked with the other youths, she had called after him.

‘What is your name?’

‘Kormak, my lady.’

‘I will remember this bravery, Kormak. Be assured that your reward will come in time.’

The flurries soon became blizzards and in due course, the blizzards became white-outs. The snow blanketed razor-sharp rocks, pitfalls and deep fissures and its uniform surface sparkled with curious green striations. Upon closer inspection, the discoloured snow contained flecks of glowing emerald dust that warmed the flesh and hurt the eye. The difficulties of traversing the mountain passes were made even more treacherous by the sheer depth of some of the drifts. The army trudged ever onwards. They did not complain. They were men and women of war and the thought of the battles to come sustained them through the difficulties.

The mountains in the harsh of mid-winter were every bit as spectacular to look upon as they were deadly, and many of the Schwarzvolf found that the sheer majesty of the range quashed their grumbles. A rough but clear path through the peaks had once been marked out by ancestors of many different tribes, huge, crumbling black monoliths lining the route. Although the snow piled up against their obsidian faces, sometimes in drifts four or five feet high, it was easy enough to spot their jagged tips above the surface. Steep and difficult, it took them a full two weeks to reach the highest point.

They encountered no other human life in these early parts of the journey other than the warriors they collected from the outlying tribes and, keen to conserve her army’s strength, Valkia ensured that the army broke off their march from time to time to get some rest. Food was in plentiful supply; they had wisely kept much of the meat taken from the mountain lions. There were animals in the mountains too, but after they had killed several, a sense of revulsion kept the Schwarzvolf from eating them, at least at first. Misshapen and grotesque creatures that had too many eyes or in some cases, too many legs. In time hunger took over and the creatures were skinned and eaten. Most of them were covered in white fur and they blended in perfectly to their surroundings. It took a sharp eye and excellent sling arm to take one down.

Once they had been caught and killed, the hares were skinned and stewed with handfuls of edible herbs and eaten alongside flat-baked bread that cooked in the embers of the campfires. It was meagre sustenance; the animals were lean themselves, but the meals were more than adequate for the army to march on.

At some point, without any of them really noticing it, they began to eat the flesh raw. It was just the first of many such physical changes that started happening to Valkia’s army as they headed further north and as the leaking tendrils of Chaos began to wrap them in its warping embrace.

On the eighteenth day of the march, they had crested the mountains and were making their way down the other side. The contrast could not have been greater. Greenish snow still dappled the rocks and crags but thick grey dust and crushed bone lined the pass. It spilled down the jagged valleys and carpeted the shattered plains that stretched away as far as the eye could see. Heavy, tumultuous cloud churned overhead, the colour of bruised flesh, and wild lightning creased the air almost constantly. For all its savage, alien nature, the path was wider and easier on the north face of the mountain and a brief respite in the seemingly endless winter snows gave them additional energy.

It also brought with it the army’s first true skirmish of the journey.

A party of five young scouts had moved at the head of the army since they had left the Vale, reporting back regularly. Until now the news had always been the same. The way ahead was clear.

But Valkia could tell long before they reached the army that this time they had something more to tell. They were approaching at a flat run; determination in their youthful faces. And one of them was missing.

‘Hepsus.’ Valkia only had to speak the single word and the Warspeaker was already amongst the troops, readying them for potential battle. The Schwarzvolf had not survived and prevailed for as long as they had by being disorganised. The Gorequeen took her daemon-headed shield from her back, strapping it to her arm in readiness as the four scouts reached them.

‘Make it fast,’ she said, giving them a moment or two to catch their breaths. Their eyes were wide, more with shock than fear and when they spoke, they did so at the same time, their words jumbling together incoherently.

Scowling, Valkia nodded towards one of them. ‘Speak,’ she demanded.

Still desperately out of breath, the young man’s words came out in a gasp. ‘Monsters,’ was the word he used and it drew Valkia’s brows together in confused irritation. She passed Slaupnir to the warrior on her right and caught the scout up by the neck of his fur tunic, dragging him towards her.

‘What kind of monsters,’ she hissed, her eyes searching his face for some clue as to what he had seen that could have induced such levels of cowardice. ‘Answer me!’

The scout swallowed hard and made an admirable effort to compose himself. Eventually, Valkia released her grip on him and he stumbled backwards. Despite the cold of the day, there was a faint patina of sweat across his forehead.

‘Troll-kin,’ he finally managed to get out. ‘But not like I have ever seen before. Many of them. Ten. Twelve. Maybe more. And they...’

He broke off and Valkia caught him again, shaking him slightly.

‘Control yourself,’ she said. ‘Or I swear that I will cut your tongue from your head.’

‘They killed Farand.’

‘You engaged them in battle?’ Valkia was dismissive. If five untried boys had thought themselves a match for the massive trolls, then they were lucky that any of them had survived. The boy was shaking his head though and now he was speaking far more coherently.

‘We smelled them first but didn’t know what to make of it. Then we turned a bend on the mountain path and they were just... there. We kept our distance. They had not noticed us, or at least gave no sign that they had. So we watched them. As we have been taught to do.’

Hepsus had rejoined them by now and nodded at the boy’s words. ‘Keep your calm, Garvin,’ he said. Valkia glanced at her Warspeaker and knew a moment’s irritation that she had not known the scout’s name. ‘Tell us what happened.’

‘It all happened so fast.’ Garvin ran his hands through sweat-soaked hair. Accepting a sip of water from the water skin that Hepsus offered him, he stammered out the story.

The scouts had remained crouched, simply observing this new potential threat. The Schwarzvolf had encountered trolls in the past, although altercations between the two had been thin on the ground. The monstrous, scaly creatures that they had periodically fought with dwelt close to the western banks of the river that ran through the Vale. They were mostly solitary things; rarely had they had to deal with more than two or three at any time.

The creatures they watched were clearly of the same base stock; the same huge size and abnormally disproportionate bodies. The similarities ended there. The stench of rot rising from their distended bodies brutalised the senses and stung the eyes. Their skin was mottled and sickly and hung in tattered strips from their chests and bellies, exposing diseased bone and glistening, wasted organs. A morass of flies surrounded them like a veil and tiny, vestigial horns split the flesh above their milky eyes. The rugged trolls of the Vale were notoriously stupid and whilst none of the scouts had ever personally encountered one, they were aware of the implicit dangers. The story of the warrior who had disembowelled a fallen troll, only to be burned to death by the acid that had bubbled forth from the thing’s guts,was well-told around the Schwarzvolf fires.

The large group of trolls were interested in nothing but each other. They were grunting and evidently squabbling amongst themselves as they shambled around the mountain path. The scouts could not determine if they were actually planning on heading further up into the mountains or if they had a lair nearby.

For several more minutes, they had watched and then picked what they felt was the opportune moment to make their move and return to the army to report. The sudden movement of the five young men had alerted the closest troll. It had grunted its displeasure at the sight of the boys and had begun lumbering towards them, its crude club swinging. Barely more than a thick, rotten tree branch, it would nonetheless do considerable damage when introduced with force to the side of a hapless victim’s head.

Garvin had been at the head of the group as they had run at full pelt up the mountain path, but Farand had stumbled and fallen.

‘Keep going! Warn the queen!’

They had been the last words that Farand would ever speak. A few moments later, the troll was virtually on top of him. Garvin, following Farand’s desperate demand that they keep going had paused briefly and what he had seen would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his days.

‘The beast retched,’ he said to Hepsus, staring up at the Warspeaker. He switched his gaze to Valkia and the boy’s face was filled with horror. ‘It made itself vomit. And it hit Farand square in the face.’

‘Acid?’ Valkia virtually spat the word. From experience, she knew that two trolls were hard enough to kill. To fight them in such greater numbers would be... bloody.

Garvin shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Far worse.’

The acrid-smelling, foul bile that had spattered itself across Farand’s head and neck was disgusting enough and Garvin had watched as his fellow scout had done his utmost to stand and wipe the vomit from his face. But then the screaming had started.

‘There were... white things all over him,’ said Garvin. ‘Worms or something like that. They were writhing and crawling all over his face... and they were eating his flesh. Whilst he was still living.’

The troll had simply stood there, not attacking, but just watching as the carnivorous worms that it spewed forth caused the most excruciating pain to its victim. Farand had only managed to rise as far as his knees and Garvin had watched helplessly as his fellow scout had clutched at his rapidly disintegrating face. The agonised screaming had lasted right up to the moment the worms had rushed into his mouth and begun eating away at him from the inside. When the troll, finally bored with its crude entertainment, had caved in the scout’s head with its club, it had been a mercy in Garvin’s eyes.

‘And we ran,’ finished Garvin. ‘We ran back to you.’

‘Did they follow you?’ Hepsus looked up at the path down which the boys had raced towards them and Garvin shook his head.

‘No,’ he responded. ‘I think they are too big, they would have found the gaps in the rocks impassable.’

‘So they are just beyond the ridge,’ interjected Valkia. ‘Waiting for us.’

Garvin nodded, miserably. The Warspeaker put a hand out and touched the scout’s shoulder lightly. ‘Go and get some food, boy. You will need your strength back.’ The scout heeded Hepsus’s words immediately and walked away. Turning his gaze to his leader, the big Warspeaker raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘Your thoughts, Valkia?’

She pursed her lips as she considered her response. ‘Trolls are never easy to kill,’ she observed. ‘But they are standing between me and my goal.’

‘Indeed,’ he responded with a wry smile. That alone would be enough to fire her into action.

‘My concern is their numbers,’ she continued. ‘They are stubborn beasts to take down when they are alone. So many of them in a narrow valley... and with abilities like Garvin described...’ It was rare that Valkia shuddered, but the thought of carnivorous worms eating at her flesh was a far from pleasant one. She considered for a few moments longer and resolve straightened her spine.

‘I will take a hunting party and we will get them out of our way.’ She snatched her spear back from the warrior who had been holding it for her. ‘There was advice given to the hunting parties when I was a girl. The animal grease we use in battle offers some small protection against the acid of the trolls in the Vale. It may work here. Cover any exposed flesh with it. Also, it may be worthwhile tying cloth around our faces. If these enemy are as pungent as we have been told... it may reduce any need to be sick ourselves.’

Hepsus agreed. They had face coverings that they all used from time to time during the driving blizzards; thin fabric that came from one of the river traders and was virtually transparent. It was not thick, but would prevent immediate skin contact. It was a good plan and Valkia’s swiftness in thinking of it was commendable.

They were big creatures though and if Garvin’s estimate was even halfway accurate, it would be a long, arduous battle. The Warspeaker exchanged a glance with Valkia and without words even passing between them, he knew what she wanted. The strongest, fastest and best warriors that the Schwarzvolf could field. They would put on a show of force that would make these monsters regret their defiance.

In the end, they formed a party of fifty consisting largely of older, more experienced fighters. Valkia also formed a part of the group; whilst this was going to undoubtedly cost lives, both she and all those around her knew she was a superlative warrior. The shield bearing Locephax’s head was strapped to her arm. She had yet to determine how to invoke the daemon’s will; it seemed that for now at least, she had no control over whether the thing was asleep or awake. She was willing to bet that if she could bring it to awareness, it would count heavily in their favour.

She had tried a few things. Shaking it, prodding it, screaming into its face... none of these things had the desired effect. She knew it still lived. Or existed. Or whatever it was the vile thing did and she knew that its reluctance to cooperate was to be expected. But soon, she would unlock the secret of mastering Locephax. And then... she would be invincible.

Slaupnir held aloft, Valkia led the group of warriors along the mountain path until they reached the gap in the rocks that Garvin had described. Even through the crude face cloths the stench of spoiled meat and rancid guts was almost overpowering, and Valkia struggled to accept that anything that reeked so badly could possibly still be alive. They could hear the sounds of the trolls beyond; evidently closer than they must have originally been. They were grunting to one another in their thick, bubbling voices and a careful listen suggested several distinct individuals.

The gap in the rocks was going to prove difficult. Barely wide enough to allow the passage of two people at a time, it would have the effect of funnelling Valkia’s warriors so that they could not easily ambush the trolls.

‘We need to move them further way from the rocks,’ she whispered to Hepsus. ‘Drive them backwards so that we can get more of our party through to face them.’ If they tried to attack in pairs, they would be obliterated almost immediately.

‘Fire?’ Hepsus’s suggestion was simple and not too dissimilar to the thoughts that the warrior queen was having herself. They might be huge, powerful and exceptionally dangerous, but like most beasts the trolls were wary of fire, often more so since their robust flesh never healed as rapidly from its touch. In such a confined and narrow corridor as offered by the mountain path however, there were dangers to them as well.

‘We could use that to drive them further down the path,’ she conceded in the end. ‘If we can push them back to a more open area, the fight will tilt in our favour.’

She squinted through the gap in the rocks. ‘If we could drive them over the edge, that would be even better. Tough as they are, a fall from this height will kill them just as it would you or me.’ She glanced over at Hepsus. ‘It’d rob us of a fine battle, but I am in no mood to linger in these infernal mountains.’

It was difficult. They had several eager warriors ready to fight, but the narrow passageway was going to prove hard to deal with. Things the size of trolls – and these monsters were huge from what Valkia could see of them – were not easily startled and whilst they might initially retreat from the fire, they would swiftly overcome such fear.

I could help you, you know.

The tone of the cold, dry voice in her mind was sardonic and amused. All you need do is call on my power and you could deal with this problem immediately.

Valkia shook the shield and glowered down at the daemon’s head, a thing so still and without animation that she genuinely wondered if the voice she kept hearing was nothing more than her imagination. When the eyes flared open, a rush of green, malevolent light bathed her face briefly.

The expressions on the faces of her fellow warriors suggested that her mind was perfectly sound. She stared down into Locephax’s evil eyes and spoke in a strained whisper.

‘Do not think to trick me, daemon. My people are not so weak that we cannot handle this problem. I will not succumb to your fiendish whisperings. So still your tongue before I rip it from your foul mouth.’

I am merely offering assistance, Locephax retorted lazily. On the one hand, I could let you walk through that passage and die at the hands of the trolls. On the other... my master lies in wait for you in the far north. And I would hate for you to miss that meeting.

The dead lips drew upwards in a smirk. So, I can help you, Valkia. All you need do is ask.

‘It will not happen,’ she retorted. ‘Cease your prattling and leave me be.’

A pity.

The words in her mind faded and Valkia became aware that her companions were giving her strange looks. It seemed that only she could hear the voice of the daemon and that the one-sided conversation had startled them. She drew her features into a scowl and the staring stopped immediately.

‘We press on,’ she said and pushed the moment of temptation away. She would not be tricked by Locephax again.

Valkia and Hepsus pushed through the rocks first and within a few short seconds, the trolls had spied them. With heavy tread, they lumbered up the mountain path, grinning viciously with mouths filled with rancid, yellow teeth. Some dragged rotting clubs while others clutched massive, corroded blades, though it was more than obvious that the creatures could pull them limb from limb with sheer strength alone. Even Hepsus, the most stalwart of warriors, tensed slightly at the sight of the massive trolls coming their way.

‘Trust me, Hepsus,’ she said softly and shifted her arm so that the shield was in front of her. She steadied herself, her soft leather boots planted firmly on the rock. Her face was a grim picture of determination.

‘I have always trusted you, Valkia,’ came the snapped reply. ‘It’s that thing on your arm that gives me doubts.’

She glanced up at her Warspeaker. ‘I have refused its offer of help,’ she reassured him. ‘This fight is ours.’ She stepped forward to join with the other shield users who had formed as big a line as they could manage on the mountain path.

‘Step!’

They inched forward towards the enemy and had taken barely four steps before a searing flash of pain pierced through Valkia’s head. She let out a brief cry and unleashed a torrent of expletives. Driven by some compulsion she could never satisfactorily explain, she forged in front of the other warriors and held her shield up high.

One moment she was standing, the shield raised slightly aloft and pressed forward. The next, she felt a thrill of delicious power course through her veins. She threw back her head and screamed in fury; partly at the trolls, but also at the daemonic head that had taken control of her senses. The horror of being used as a conduit for the one thing she despised more than any other left her feeling as though she needed to vomit. Eventually her scream dwindled, her eyes bulging and her mouth giving silent voice to her combined feelings of disgust, agony and ecstasy.

Much better. I find that such a noise is unnecessary. Now watch and learn the meaning of true power.

The head of Locephax came to terrible animated life. The eyes flared open, the unnatural green daemon-light seeping from it like a poisonous mist. The face drew into an expression that mimicked Valkia’s own and the silent scream that the warrior woman emitted erupted from the daemon’s maw. It was amplified and distorted and Hepsus clamped his hands over his ears. The sense of absolute terror that ran through him was something unlike anything he had ever known before.

Every instinct in his body told him to turn and run. And he was standing behind the shield, which was the only protection from this dark magic. He hardly dared imagine how he would have reacted had he been on the receiving end.

The trolls stumbled to a halt, crashing together in a tangle of festering limbs, their shabby forms seemingly frozen to the spot and their eyes fixed on the daemon’s hypnotic gaze. They were simple creatures, barely more than a bundle of nerves and thoughts that worked together to create the basic need for survival. Kill, eat, and sleep when needed. Such was the cycle of a troll’s life. They had little requirement for sophisticated thought and as such, they fell prey to Locephax’s hypnotic suggestion instantly.

The scream stopped abruptly and a voice emerged from the daemon’s mouth.

‘Die,’ was all it said, but the voice curdled the air with its menace. It said the word with such implicit urgency and underlying cruelty that three of the trolls immediately flung themselves from the narrow mountain path. A fourth paused briefly. It had been behind the three who had just flung themselves to their doom and had not received the full brunt of the daemon’s will. A repeat of the one-word command, however, and the troll joined its brethren, crashing down the mountainside and slicing itself open on the snow-covered rocks on the way.

The majority of those that remained had already turned on their brethren in a furious rage and begun battling, tearing one another limb from limb. For long moments the mountain pass resounded with the noise of trolls grunting and screaming. Valkia and her army moved back as far as the daemonic shield allowed before it snapped she would go out of range. She could feel Locephax drawing power from her own body as she used his ability but she held firm.

She could not keep control of it indefinitely though and eventually she lowered the shield. The green eyes closed and the last of the power drained from Valkia. She staggered, almost falling off the cliff herself, but Hepsus caught her before she fell.

‘Valkia!’

‘Hepsus.’ Her voice sounded weak and drained. Two of the repellent creatures remained standing, their weapons readied for the attack. All around them was carnage of the kind that usually only appeared in nightmares. Limbs were ripped from bodies and more than one of the trolls had been picked to the bone by the flesh worms.

Valkia swayed slightly and then tore the shield from her arm. She dropped it as though it were on fire. Although Locephax had once more fallen silent, as inanimate and rigid as it had been before the bond to the shield had been forged, the expression on its face had altered.

It looked satisfied.

Hepsus continued to support the unsteady Valkia who bent over double, retching violently. Locephax had used her to perform the sort of sorcerous act that she had always found so abhorrent. It was a violation of her mind and spirit that made her feel desperate to bathe in a river of blood to clean off the feelings it had left her with and to prove to her beloved god that she had not betrayed him. Magic was the tool of the weak.

And the tool of the hopeless. Admit it, Valkia. Without me, the trolls would have slaughtered you and your army of fools like they were children. I would say that if nothing else, you should at least be pleased I evened the odds.

‘Do not speak to me, daemon. Never speak to me!’

A simple thank-you would be more than sufficient. Nonetheless...

Whatever it was that kept life in the head of Locephax drained from the face and it was once again nothing more than a gruesome ornament mounted on the front of Valkia’s shield. She stared at it for long moments, loathe to admit that Locephax was possibly right and even more reluctant to take it up once again. But neither would she leave such an object here.

She leaned down and took the shield back up, strapping it to her arm again. ‘Schwarzvolf,’ she said, and Hepsus noted the steel that had returned to her tone. ‘Recover anything of use from the dead.’

Valkia shifted the shield back into its comfortable position and gave it a brief glance. ‘We move on.’

ELEVEN

THE EDGE OF OBLIVION

After that, the slaughter of the remaining trolls was almost laughably simple. Not that the defeat of such massive creatures, easily seven feet tall apiece was simple, but they were outnumbered as the rest of Valkia’s warriors squeezed through the rocks. At the sound of the daemon’s scream, those who had been farthest back had moved still further, desperate to get away from the terrible noise, but not goaded into hurling themselves to their death.

Hepsus had taken the lead and Valkia brought up the rear. She was feeling slightly light-headed although not weak, as though she had downed slightly too much alcohol. The shield had fallen silent to her relief. Whilst she had relished the moment of power, it had nonetheless left her a little shaken. Ultimately, Locephax was her enemy and to allow him to channel power through her like a conduit had been a difficult decision to make.

She remembered words her father had spoken once many years back. The ends justify the means. She had a specific goal in mind and she would use any tools or weapons to achieve that goal, no matter the cost. It was something she would have to consider more carefully later. Right now, the pressing need was to slaughter the remaining monsters.

The twenty warriors who formed the advance guard had pushed the massive creatures down the mountain path, backing them up against the mountain itself and had already engaged. Glossy, black flies filled the air around the creatures, their tiny bodies creeping into clothes and nipping at exposed skin. The bites left itching, red welts that infuriated the tribesmen as they swatted at the insects.

Just as Garvin had described, one of the trolls was already making retching noises. Seconds later, a plume of bilious liquid spewed forth from its mouth, splattering against the three closest warriors. Having heeded Valkia’s suggestion, they were all saved the fate of the unfortunate scout by being covered from head to foot. The white, wriggling creatures that were borne in the troll vomit were easily brushed to the ground and crushed underfoot.

Angered that its preliminary defence was ineffective, one of the two trolls rushed forward to confront the group, its club swinging steadily. It grunted and snorted furiously at the Schwarzvolf warriors who lunged towards it. Its rotted flesh was alive with parasites and already split with running sores and open wounds. The blades of the Schwarzvolf punctured it again and again, but the beast did not seem to feel the damage as it swung ponderously at its assailants.

Whilst they were thus engaged with the first of the trolls, the second wave of warriors was battling the other. One lucky strike by a young woman armed with a short sword opened the troll across its distended midriff, evidently a weak point given the way it opened up. Milky, sizzling pus sprayed from the wound, pitting the nearby rock-face and rapidly corroding the offending weapon.

‘Flesh-eating worms and acidic ichor? This just gets better by the moment,’ said Hepsus as he ducked to avoid another blow from the swinging club. He bellowed a warning to the others, but not before one of them had discovered first-hand the effects of the pestilent fluid. A trail of the gooey substance had splattered across his shirt sleeve when the wound had been opened and already the material had been eaten away. He dropped to the ground, rolling in the dust in an effort to wash the muck away, but in so doing, brought his body into contact with the few surviving fleshworms still writhing on the floor.

His screams were agonising and Valkia chewed at her lip in an effort to block out the sound. There was nothing that could be done for him any longer and she brought her spear down between his shoulders as he twisted and contorted on the ground. It was a mercy stroke.

Her senses regained, she hefted the weight of Slaupnir in her hand. It had been wrought from the same exotic metal that her dagger had been fashioned from and she worked on it diligently, keeping the edge razor-sharp. It was likely one of the few things that could finish the trolls.

Squaring her shoulders, she lunged towards the first of the two monsters, the blade of the weapon aimed at its chest. Hepsus screamed a warning to the others to stand clear to avoid the inevitable spray of ichor. The length of the spear’s haft meant that Valkia had enough distance between herself and the creature as the spearhead pierced through the troll’s festering flesh, breaking yellow bones and rupturing organs. Its bubbling shriek of rage increased in volume until Valkia, crackling with bloodlust, heaved on the spear and lifted it from its feet. Muscles bulged like knotted ropes beneath her skin, dwarfing some of the male warriors of the tribe. With a cry of rage, she bodily picked the troll up, still impaled on the end of her spear and flung it from her. Its limp form struck a jutting rock and it crashed to the valley below.

The tip of the spear was coated with the disgusting pus of the creature and Valkia used this to her advantage as she thrust it at the other one. Its flesh parted like parchment and Slaupnir drove through its filthy guts and pinned it to the slab of black rock at its back. The troll hooted in anger, its arms flailing and its considerable bulk pressing back toward Valkia, but she held it fast.

‘Finish it,’ she said. Her voice sounded strained. ‘It is weakened. Finish it. Hepsus...’

The Warspeaker had already led the charge towards the monster which was scrabbling with the haft of the weapon fixing it in place. Nothing in its minuscule mind had prepared it for the concept of defeat against tiny humans and it fell to its knees beneath a flurry of blades. Hepsus’s own blade was the last to strike, finding a weak point just below the ear. It pierced through the troll’s skull and into its brain. It died instantly, crashing to the floor.

The echoes of battle resounded around the mountain pass until finally it silenced. Valkia was leaning heavily on Slaupnir, her eyes unfocused and her limbs shaking with the exertion of the past few minutes. She had just achieved an impossible feat. There was no way that she could have lifted that troll by herself unless she had been granted a blessing. Unconsciously, the rest of the warriors kept a distance from her.

‘Send back for the others,’ she said in a voice that sounded on the edge of exhaustion. ‘We move on.’

They travelled several more miles before nightfall. The light of the moons was hidden behind the bank of perpetual cloud that continued to churn above them, but there was a thickening of the gloom. The winter chill of the mountains had given way as they descended from the peaks, but now it returned with a vengeance, though some warriors complained of feverish heat while still more claimed to feel a pleasant noon day sun. The wind drove at them from every direction, whimsically rushing at them from the north, redolent with the scent of ashes, before billowing in from the south carrying the scent of fresh snow.

Broken obelisks dotted the plain ahead, some sharp and new, as though they had been carved mere moments before, while others were worn smooth by the passage of aeons. Many were surrounded by obscene trophies, desiccated bodies, bestial heads and bowls of foul-smelling slime scattered around their base. Those stained with blood and adorned with skulls Valkia raised her spear to in salute.

Valkia called a halt to the march, sensing that even she needed rest. Her body was still suffering the after-effects of so much adrenaline and the strange strength that had graced her felt as though it had left, taking all her reserves with it. They set up several lean-to style shelters against the wild weather and huddled together in small groups for the additional warmth. Out in the gloom, beyond the fires of the Schwarzvolf, things gibbered and screeched. Men lay with weapons held close and slept uneasily, plagued by nameless fears that woke them with a start. Those few that dared the darkness to relieve themselves did not return, and warriors took to digging holes with their bare hands, scooping fists of dry dust out with their hands for makeshift latrines.

Curled beneath the thick woollen blankets that were the only protection between her and the elements, Valkia slept fitfully. The daemon voice of Locephax whispered constantly to her, promising her everything her heart desired. She had felt, for the first time, what it truly meant to be blessed by the gods she so desperately sought. Locephax’s whispers were words of carefully constructed temptation, luring her, appealing to her innate lust for power.

What you felt today was a fraction of what you could become if you give yourself over to me and my master, Valkia. Beautiful, strong Valkia! How I would treasure you! You would be the crowning jewel in my harem. Nobody else could boast such a prize.

The daemon filled her waking hours with words such as these and projected lustful, arousing thoughts into her dreams. She would wake, sweating in spite of the freezing temperatures and fight the memory of the dream down. The voice promised her repeatedly that in time she would give in to her desires. She insisted, equally repeatedly, that she would not.

The army marched on for several more days. Each morning took longer in coming around as the nights seemed to extend forever and each feeble dawn found a few more warriors missing from the camp. Bitter cold and hardship was something that the Schwarzvolf were long used to, but it did not make it any easier when they were expected to march on meagre rations. Tempers began to fray and some among the host became sick, their bodies stippled with pustules and their flesh pale. The easy mood they had known at the beginning of the campaign was replaced by an air of hostility amongst brothers-in-arms. Squabbles and bickering broke out regularly and more than once Hepsus had to step in to stop the warriors from actually killing one another.

The further north they travelled, the more intense these feelings became. Anger, rage and in particular paranoia magnified and spread amongst the army. The formerly organised group were starting to splinter and break apart. But Valkia didn’t care. Not any more. Her heart and mind were too firmly fixed on achieving the goal she had set.

Although the crazed weather never settled into any kind of recognisable pattern, the wastes were almost uniformly flat. Drifts of grey dust would sometimes give way to unyielding black rock or thickly veined green marble. At other times they crossed fields of crushed bone littered with the remains of countless dead. Those hunting parties that returned invariably came back empty handed and supplies continued to dwindle. More than one man suggested slaughtering the sick to ease the pressure on the rations until Hepsus silenced them with a furious retort. But always... always... that underlying sense that the man walking next to you was looking for an opportunity to stick a dagger between your shoulders.

Three days came when rain drummed down from the skies in a seemingly endless flow. It dampened the spirits of the Schwarzvolf and even Valkia had to concede to the need to find shelter. They had found abandoned caves that bore no obvious signs of recent habitation and they had taken a break from their journey within their dank walls. They were small and with so many bodies inside became quickly crowded, but the army was able to manage some small reprieve from the elements.

Valkia, always curious about such things, had explored deeper into the caves, discovering an intricate network of tunnels that linked them to one another. Lighting her way with nothing more than a burning torch, she walked deep into the heart of the barrow.

At the heart, she found a huge chamber that sported a number of human skeletons and countless skulls. Aged and crumbling, they had clearly been here for a long time. Valkia’s heart had pounded to the realisation that the iconic representation of her god was drawn in faded sigils upon the cave walls. She traced a finger over the barely visible sign. Close examination had led her to discover further images and runic scrawlings upon the walls. The writings she could not even begin to understand, but one image stood out beyond all.

A winged beast of some sort, with a human shape and curling, bestial horns was depicted soaring above a straight line that symbolised the earth. It was a poorly rendered piece of artwork to be sure, but it was repeated so many times within the heart of the cave system that Valkia could not ignore its obvious importance.

It would be many years before she came to truly understand what it stood for.

After the trolls, they had seen nothing living for days, though the fearful cries and ever-growing numbers of missing men suggested that something roamed here and called the wastes home. This did little to disperse the anger that was running at a high throughout the army and it came almost as a relief when, after they had crossed a seemingly endless plain of blue ice, they were set upon by an army of wild beasts.

‘There is an army of creatures approaching from the... west!’

The report had come back from the forward scouts and despite their low mood, Valkia’s army were prepared and ready to face anything that came their way. There was a hunger; an eagerness in their eyes that filled the Gorequeen’s heart with a swell of pride. All the bitterness and jealousy, all the sneering disdain she had felt for them over the past few days melted away in the anticipation of a battle to come.

The scouts had not lingered when they had spotted the approaching force moving with some speed towards them and so had been unable to give exact numbers. The best they had to go on was that the unknown army were perhaps equal in size to that of Valkia’s.

When they finally came into sight, Valkia was unsure of what to make of them. The northlands were riddled with small tribes of beastmen, but they had never mustered in anything approaching the number that bore down upon the Schwarzvolf. From a distance, they looked human. They were wearing furs not unlike those of the Schwarzvolf, but they were not moving along in a manner she was used to seeing. Some loped on all fours, like animals as they raced eagerly towards the huge travelling army. Many sported huge, curling horns and several towered over their companions, thickly muscled, bull-headed beasts. Across their backs were slung crude weapons, clubs for the most part, but here and there Valkia spied longbows and quivers filled with arrows.

‘Ready yourselves,’ roared Hepsus. ‘Shields to the fore!’ It was unnecessary; the army had already deployed themselves into formation. As a shield bearer herself, Valkia slotted into the front line, the daemon-head of Locephax raised and locked with those either side of her. If her neighbours were made uncomfortable by the proximity of the monstrous trophy, they had the good grace not to let it show.

Now that the approaching group were close enough, Valkia was assured that they were not here to offer friendly greetings. Their faces were twisted and inhuman and some were warped beyond recognition. The one at the head of the pack was crowned with a colossal pair of twisted rams horns and covered in a thick mane of coppery hair, matted with gore. It clutched a pair of massive, notched cleavers and its bulky muscles attested all too clearly to its ability to use them. Those either side of him were similarly bestial, though not nearly as threatening.

‘Their leader,’ Valkia hypothesised aloud. She received a terse nod from the warrior next to her. The beastmen thundered toward them, their wild charge entirely committed and the one in the front barked out an unintelligible few words. They were obviously a command of some kind, because several of the smaller beasts rose up on their hind legs and reached for their bows.

‘Watch for arrows,’ shouted Hepsus who was somewhere off to the right. Valkia bit back the scathing retort about not being blind and merely focused her attention on the creatures. The arrows were loosed in a flurry, although there were only a handful of archers, and they either fell short of their target or thudded into shields.

‘They have made their intentions clear,’ Valkia called out in a commanding tone that rivalled the red-haired beastman’s own. ‘They are the enemy. Schwarzvolf, in the name of the Blood God – attack!’ Her spear arm, which had been raised, came down in a sweep and the shield line marched relentlessly towards their attackers.

Their bestial enemies crashed into the shield line with thunderous cracks of splintering wood, the ring of metal upon metal and the unfettered screams of the dying. The beastmen clearly had no concept of organisation and fought as a wild, savage mob. The Schwarzvolf fought back with equal tenacity and a grim unity that eclipsed the mistrust that had so recently blighted them. Axes, cleavers and clubs rose and fell with murderous repetition, splitting skulls and reaping bloody ruin among both sides, but after the initial shock of impact the tribesmen began to push back.

One of the beasts, small and wiry and practically naked but for a loincloth, hurled itself onto the back of one of Valkia’s warriors. With a snarl, it opened its mouth wide and tore off the unfortunate man’s ear. Valkia caught a glimpse of razor-like teeth and hands tipped with wicked-looking nails that were curled under like talons.

The warrior fell to the ground, blood gushing from his head and almost instantly, his attacker was on him, tearing chunks of flesh from his face and scratching viciously at his throat. It took four swords through the torso to put the thing down, such was its determination. Valkia’s warrior lay in screaming agony beneath its corpse, his blood pooling beneath him, but there was no time to lend assistance as the other creatures were similarly hurling themselves bodily at their prey.

It was a blur of violent activity. The careful formation of the shield line had long since fallen apart as the Schwarzvolf defended themselves desperately from the attacks of these feral monsters. Swords clashed against their heavy clubs and everywhere, men and beasts grappled with each other. Valkia was engaged with facing down the army’s obvious leader. His face was a blunt snout, leonine with amber-coloured eyes that gave little to no hint of any intelligence. But he was quick and dodged her spear-thrusts with ease.

She brought up her shield again and again to deflect him and if he was daunted by the appearance of Locephax, he gave no sign of it. He came at her relentlessly, mouth open to reveal his filed teeth as his cleavers rang against her spear and shield. She twisted Slaupnir beneath one of the weapons and deftly wrenched the blade from the creature’s grasp, the cleaver tumbling away into the raging battle. Undaunted, the beastman seized the haft of her spear and pulled it from Valkia’s hand. It cast the beloved weapon contemptuously aside and drove forward once more, its remaining cleaver hammering at her daemonic shield. On the third stroke, the snarling mouth of Locephax snapped shut around the offending blade and held it fast.

The beastman actually managed to look momentarily surprised. Valkia seized the opportunity and let the shield slip from her arm. Mustering every ounce of rage she possessed, she physically launched herself at her attacker.

He was bigger and stronger than she was, but she was more determined to survive than the creature gave her credit for. She kicked and punched, grabbing at great handfuls of his thick, red hair. Once her grip tightened around the hanks of fur, she pulled in a way she had not done since she had been a child. Saliva dripped from the beastman’s open mouth, warm and foul-smelling and she slapped out at it. Her palm met the flesh of his face in a stinging blow and he turned his head, startled by her strength.

It was enough to give her the moment’s advantage and, putting all her effort into the move, she lunged forward and grabbed the creature by the jaws. It let out a snarl of indignation, the sound more human than she would have thought possible from such a twisted throat and it thrashed in her grip. It flailed at her with its claws and hooves, gnarled knuckles pounding at her back and shoulders, but she would not relent. Fire filled her veins with a killing frenzy and she could feel unholy strength swelling within her once again.

The nearby members of his wild army, seeing their leader about to die, broke off from their own engagements and began to swarm towards Valkia. Charging after them, the rest of the Schwarzvolf defended their queen with everything they had.

Valkia was unaware of what was going on around her. Everything had narrowed to just her and the red-haired beastman struggling beneath her. She was going to tear it apart with her bare hands. Muscles like cords bulged from its neck as it attempted to snap its mouth shut and shear off Valkia’s hands, but by agonising inches it was losing the battle. Unnatural vitality pulsed through her limbs, swelling her arms and shoulders with power; allowing her to shrug off the beast’s increasingly frantic struggles. As soon as she ended the life of this foe, she would drink deeply. A hunger, a desperate need to taste the life’s blood of her enemy filled her and she could not deny it.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

With a guttural, animal cry, she redoubled her efforts, splitting the skin of the beastman’s shaggy cheeks and wrenching an agonised wail from its throat. Red welled up instantly, running down its face in thick streams and pooling on the ice. Behind her, seven of the wild-eyed creatures readied their clubs, their aim to smash the skull of this woman who was about to take their leader’s life.

Valkia remained supernaturally unaware of their presence and then of the arrival of Hepsus and the rest of her warriors as they cannoned into the enemy with violent force. All that mattered was the blood of her victim.

Beneath her, the beastman bucked and heaved as though trying to steal his final chance to escape. She stopped him immediately with a final, terrible surge of strength that tore the top of his head off. Dark blood fountained from the useless lower jaw and ragged neck and Valkia let the hot blood gush over her, drinking her fill of his rich vitae. The shorn top half of the skull lay discarded, its empty, golden eyes staring glassily past Valkia to the warriors that stood behind, watching their queen gorge herself.

Around her, the fading sounds of battle dwindled to silence. When she had finally satisfied her fury, she raised her blood-stained face to observe several other Schwarzvolf warriors copying her actions, gulping down the blood of the fallen. Others stood to the side, their faces varying from expressionless to disgust.

Valkia ran the back of her hand across her bloodied face and got to her feet. Without meeting Hepsus’s oddly accusatory stare, she picked up her spear and shield and dusted herself down. When he spoke, there was a strange straining in his voice.

‘We lost more than a hundred of our men in that battle, Valkia.’

The Warspeaker’s voice sounded as though it came from a long way away; tinny and distant. She looked up at him and blinked away the red haze of battle.

‘So many?’

‘Look around you.’ Hepsus gestured. There were warriors with their skulls caved in by clubs or hacked with blades. ‘Some were practically eaten alive before we could pull those things off them. The rest are not yet dead. But they will be soon. More than a hundred men, Valkia.’

Valkia felt nothing. No regret that her people had died, no satisfaction that the enemy was defeated... she felt nothing. Her heart was not motivated to feeling at all. All that had mattered was the kill.

‘Our army still numbers in the hundreds,’ she said eventually with casual indifference in her voice. ‘Salvage their weapons and armour. Leave the bodies. Then we move on.’

Hepsus did not bother to tell her that in the wake of the battle, whilst she had been feasting like an animal on the warrior, a large contingent had slunk away into the gloom with Edan at their head. Her army had once numbered more than a thousand and now barely a few hundred sick and wounded men and women remained.

They moved on. Ever northwards.

The plains of dust and ash and crushed stone were apparently endless. The air was tinged with that crisp, clear scent that suggested the weather was forever on the cusp of frost and ice, but laced with the copper stink of blood and the acrid smell of burning metal. What remained of the Schwarzvolf army that had not turned back in fear – earning Valkia’s venomous sworn oath that she would hunt each one down on her return and kill them – or had not died of the wasting sickness, marched in silence.

There was no camaraderie amongst brothers and sisters. No idle banter. None of the easy talk and gentle squabbling that had marked their earlier steps. Now they did not speak to one another.

Valkia had grown increasingly withdrawn and short-tempered as they travelled, her thoughts turned inward as she dealt with the constant whispers of Locephax. The daemon’s delighted anticipation grew by the day. Her head ached from dealing with his promised whispers of revenge and satisfaction.

The army had been on the march for an interminable period of time. It felt like years but could have been only months. Valkia did not know when she had stopped counting the passage of the days. Time had become meaningless, particularly when the days had grown so short that at times, the wan light that marked the arrival of morning lasted barely a few hours before the oppressive darkness closed in once again.

Further encounters had been brief and surprisingly easy. They had fought against more of the beastmen, each one more twisted and warped than the previous. Feral savages and packs of drooling god-touched with writhing limbs and sucking maws. Distorted, mutated and disfigured creatures that may once have been as human as the Schwarzvolf were hacked down like saplings if they put themselves into the dwindling army’s path.

And still they headed north.

The God Lights were strong in the skies here; illuminating the bleak and desolate wasteland with their ever-shifting yellow and green hues. Yellow and green. Occasionally tinges of blue. But never red. Valkia stared into the skies night after night willing a sign from her god. Some indication that he was waiting for her. Some sign that he was pleased with her progress.

When the red finally came, so did the end of the world for the queen of the Schwarzvolf. When the God Lights finally burned like flame with the colour of the Blood God, Valkia the Bloody stepped into darkness unending.

This was not the gloom of night to which they had become accustomed. This darkness was all-encompassing. It had shape, volume and an almost tangible feel. To step into it was to turn your face forever more from the light of day. And the Schwarzvolf stepped willingly. Such a shroud of darkness was a thing that invited fear and horror, but the remaining members of the army bore it stoically. They had little choice.

All around them could be heard whispers. The voices of the damned, Hepsus suggested in a flat, emotionless monotone. The voices of those who had stepped this way before. Warning them. Threatening them. Trying to turn them away at the last.

But they were made of stronger stuff, or at least some of them were.

In many ways, the mental hardships of battling invisible enemies were more complex and difficult than anything that the Schwarzvolf had accomplished during the course of their epic journey. For each warrior, there was a personal daemon. For each man or woman, there were torments that were designed to strike fear and doubt into their hearts. A few weaker-willed warriors succumbed to the creeping madness. They were killed without compassion or without hesitation by their stronger fellows, while the fastest vanished without a trace, their mad laughter echoing in the heads of their companions.

The further into the blackness they walked, the harder the passage became. The darkness thickened until every step was a struggle. It was like wading through a frozen river and every bit as bone-marrow chilling. A pressure was exerted on them, pressing them backwards. But heads bent low, on they marched.

Whispers became words. Words became laughter, low and sinister. Rotting, half seen cyclopean creatures plucked the sick and the weary from their number. There were sensations; eerie and terrifying. The brush of invisible feathers across the face, or the grip of strong hands clutching at ankles and legs, trying to pull their would-be victims to the ground. Some simply lay down and let the sensuous, grasping fingers pull them out of sight. But there was nothing they could physically beat off. Nothing they could actually fight. Nothing they could even see.

Until they saw the steps. Vast, uneven slabs of glossy green stone that could not have been cut by mortal hand piled atop one another, reaching toward the fractured heavens.

Valkia, walking at the front of the diminishing army saw the flight of stone stairs first and her heart leaped into her mouth at the sight of it and what waited at the top.

The portal was vast, seeming far too huge for the span of the stairs themselves. It stood out from the velvet blackness in a way that could not be expressed; it was something beyond darkness and veined with crackling streamers of arcane light. And Valkia felt its irrefutable draw. It pulled her onwards even as the things beyond her understanding attempted to push her back.

‘I come, my master,’ she screamed into the darkness. Her voice sounded dead and lifeless, swallowed by the sucking emptiness.

He does not care. He never cared.

It was the first time since she had stepped across the point of no return that Locephax had spoken. The daemon’s voice in her mind was crystal clear and somehow stronger than it had been until now.

You are in my realm, the space between worlds. And soon, Valkia, very soon there will be the exacting of my revenge. It will taste sweet, my love. Even as you draw your last breath, I will savour your doom. My master already senses my presence. Already he sends his children to avenge me. Your life is marked in minutes, Valkia. Your god, the idiot-thing that he is, does not hear you.

She would not listen to his words.

You have one final chance, Valkia. Be mine for eternity and my master will show you mercy. Prostrate yourself at his feet and swear allegiance to his banner and your reward will be eternal. Continue this search for a god who does not care for you and die.

Valkia’s entire body was shaking with a mixture of emotions that she could not describe. There was no fear, of that she was certain. But she was here at the foot of a staircase that would bring her to the realm of the gods. She had made that journey she had promised her father so long ago.

If anybody could make that journey, it would be you. That had been his reply. Would he have been proud of her, had he lived? Valkia hardened her resolve. She had long ago given up the right to wonder what could have been. She had manipulated her own destiny and she would continue to do so.

They come, Valkia. I sense them. This is your last chance. Lay one foot on those steps and your life is forfeit. Lay down your pride now and become a child of Slaanesh. There was something oddly pleading, almost regretful about the offer, but she shook her head.

‘Blood,’ she said to the shield. It hurt to speak; the darkness was pressing against her ribs, crushing her and just getting words out took an age. ‘Blood... for the... Blood God!’

So be it.

The daemon-head mounted on her shield twisted into life and let out a shrill scream that caused several of the warriors to wail in madness as their minds finally snapped. Valkia was aware that blood was running from her ears and nose as well. Her head felt as though it would explode with the pressure, but she took one further step, placing her foot on the bottom-most stair. There were eight stairs in all. Eight between Valkia and her ultimate goal.

Hepsus raised a hand to stop the handful of survivors, holding them back. This was the moment that Edan had foreseen. This was the sign that he had told Hepsus to spread around the camp. This was the boy’s proclamation. That when Valkia defied the gods themselves, then – and only then – would her reign end. Hepsus had sworn his loyalty to Edan that he would get her there. Standing here, at the edge of creation, staring into the abyss, the Warspeaker could feel himself unravelling. But in the corner of his mind’s vision he could still see the dead eyes of his son, and they anchored him to life like nothing else. They were his rock, his salvation and his deliverance. He stood there, his hollow gaze fixed on the woman who would damn them and he held the Schwarzvolf back. Edan had promised him he would live to see it done. And so he had.

Valkia’s interest in her half-brother had been so light that she had never even noticed the moment at which he had stopped following her. She had not noticed the moment at which all those men who had switched allegiance during the journey had stayed with him. Her arrogance, her need to succeed, had prevented her from turning back and now it would cost her.

Behind her, before her, around her... the entire swathe of absolute night suddenly came to grim, chilling life. She felt the press of invisible force lift suddenly, only to be replaced by an onslaught of daemonic creatures like she had never seen before. They poured from the portal at the top of the staircase like a tide. They came in their tens, their hundreds, maybe even their thousands. They came at Locephax’s call and finally she turned, to give the order to her army to attack.

Nobody stood by her side. Only one man, the one-armed Kormak who had pledged to fight at her right hand until he fell doing so remained with her. His face was lined with determination mingled with stark terror at the legion boiling toward them, but he would not relent. He was the only one of barely a hundred who had remained with her to the very end.

She knew. It was as if she had always known that they would betray her at the last. Hepsus stood, some distance away, his arm still raised. Their eyes met for a final time and she watched, unable to vocalise the pure hatred that rose within her as he fled and left her to die.

The daemon tide that had gushed out of the portal was holding back. Waiting for her to come to them as they knew she must. Her foot was upon the stair. She could not turn back now even had she wanted to. Not when she had come so far. Not when she had given up so much.

‘Kormak.’

‘My queen.’

‘Leave. Leave me now. You can do no good here. You may as well live. Go and take the heads of those traitors in my name.’ Hepsus and his followers – she could no longer think of them as hers – were gone, swallowed by the dark. She had no idea if they would live or die and she frankly did not care. This betrayal could spell the end of her people, but she was finally able to acknowledge that she had ceased caring about them years ago.

‘Go, Kormak. You can do nothing. This fight is mine alone.’ She raised her head and lifted her shield high. ‘You see this?’ The last was addressed to the daemon horde. ‘This is what became of the last creature of the Reveller who tried to stop me from reaching my goal.’

Locephax’s laughter was a terrible thing to listen to and behind her, Kormak trembled. He was not much more than a boy, she realised, and she reached out to touch him on the shoulder, once.

‘The prize will be ours, Kormak,’ was all she said. She paused, realising that here, at the end of all things, how angry she was with the lies. All those who had feigned loyalty to her and to her cause. Cowards, every last one of them. Kormak was the only truly loyal warrior and it was right and just that he should stand by her side. But there was no time to linger on the matter.

With a concerted effort, fighting valiantly against every instinct that was telling her to turn and flee, Valkia took another step upwards. Kormak stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing upwards into the depths of infinity. He was mesmerised; rooted to the spot and completely unable to move.

He never went further than the lowest step. Without Valkia’s iron will and determination, he was easy prey for the daemons. They flowed past Valkia, who struck out with her spear, viciously hacking and slashing at them, but they did not stop for her. They went straight for Kormak.

At that moment, she learned the final truth of what she had committed to. She could not turn back. She physically could not retreat down the steps. She would reach the realm of the gods or she would die. There was no third option. She had to watch, helpless and enraged as the daemons swarmed around the most loyal of all her people and hacked him down.

Blood flowed from countless wounds as Kormak fell, but she noted with some small satisfaction that he died with a curse on his lips and his axe buried in the skull of a clawed fiend.

You see how it ends, Valkia. Locephax laughed aloud, the sound echoing across the blighted nightmare landscape.

She took a third step upwards and stared up at the abyss. Five more such stairs, each one as wide as a cart track, stood between her and the gateway to her master’s side.

Five.

Behind her, Kormak’s terrible dying screams; the gurgling of his final, furious cry to the Blood God. Ahead of her, the very portal where she knew her destiny lay.

Another step.

Kormak died in agony; alone at the foot of the steps. She hardened her heart against the sounds of the daemons feasting upon his mortal flesh. He had been the bravest and the best of all her people, but she had been unable, at the last, to save him. She could not afford to feel remorse. In seconds, the daemons would be upon her as well. She had to take advantage of Kormak’s death... of the distraction it offered...

Another step.

Three to go.

Welcome to the hereafter, Valkia, said Locephax and once again, he voiced the scream that had caused her ears and nose to bleed. The daemons currently sating their hunger on Kormak’s body raised their heads at the sound and returned the cry.

She was subsumed by them. Within moments, their physical forms were on top of her. Sickening musk, cloying and sweet drifted like mist, a living thing that coiled about her with lewd tendrils. It filled her nostrils, her throat. She sank to her knees, clawing at her face as though she could tear them from her in that manner. All the while, she kept a tight hold of Slaupnir. She thrashed helplessly against the insubstantial embrace; the suffocating fog was choking her, dulling her senses, tempering her killing rage. Her eyes met those of one of the daemons, a bizarre, two-headed creature with one head that was like that of an ivory woman whilst the other was some kind of pale reptile. A forked tongue flickered from its mouth and stroked against her cheek in the parody of a kiss.

These are my brothers and sisters, Valkia. They are angry with you.

Still she struggled against her inevitable demise. Hardly able to breathe, she crawled up another step, dropping both Slaupnir and the shield so that she could better grab at the step. She tried to call out, but nothing more than a gurgle left her throat.

Her master. Her god. He had abandoned her at the last. She had come all this way. She was...

...angry.

Her god had not abandoned her. He was with her. He had always been with her. He was calling to her.

Come to me.

I come, my master!

Rage filled her to bursting point and with what would prove to be a final, inhuman surge of strength, she rose to her feet one last time and hurled the daemonic host back far enough to climb one last stair.

She felt no pain as the slithering claw pierced her back and exited through her belly. She merely stared down at it before falling once more to her knees. She threw out her arms and held her head back.

‘Khorne!’

Blood welled up in her mouth as claws and talons tore at her skin, silencing her. But she did not scream or beg for mercy. She took her death with stoic pride. As the final bubble of blood burst on her crimson-stained lips, it carried with it the final whisper to a god she had come so close to reaching.

‘Khor...’

Valkia fell forward on the steps, her left arm outstretched towards the portal. Her broken body twitched a few times and then she was motionless, her heart forever stilled in sight of her destiny.

And the world was shaken by the wrath of a god.

TWELVE

REBIRTH

The world trembled in the wake of the bellow of rage that thundered from the realm of Chaos. A catastrophic shockwave of fury erupted from the roof of the world and expanded outwards, laying waste to all in its path. Exposed to the terrible force of such rage, the daemons swarming around the body of Valkia were vaporised instantly, the stuff of their bodies dissolving into insubstantial mist and sent screaming back into the abyss. The few survivors were flung in all directions, howling and wailing in their unnatural voices.

Most of them crashed to the ground beyond the steps, stunned by the Blood God’s wrath, but the ripple of intense ire continued to spread outwards, flattening anything it encountered. It crushed the black rocks that lined the route to the portal into nothing more than fine powder, which was thrown up as a billowing cloud of grit and dust.

Already some distance from the maw of Chaos, Hepsus and the remainder of Valkia’s army were thrown off their feet as the very ground beneath them was torn asunder by the sheer force of Khorne’s anger. Cracks and fissures split the earth’s surface as the land shook. With desperate yells of panic and terror, the betrayers picked up speed, running in an effort to get ahead of the unseen wave of destruction.

A second roar of fury burst forth, this one perhaps even more terrible than the first. The few remaining daemons, which had crawled with determination back onto the steps in a concerted effort to seize the body of the fallen queen, were obliterated. The head of Locephax, still mounted on Valkia’s shield, writhed and contorted in terrible agony. It was unable to block out the awful sound of the Blood God’s fury and it was suffering.

The ruptures that had been torn in the plain split further, the ground shaking beneath the feet of the Schwarzvolf as they fled. Many fell, unable to maintain their balance and the slowest of them were swallowed by the earth, falling without hope of rescue into the bowels of the world.

Above them, the God Lights bled. A spreading corona of baleful crimson the colour of blood, the colour of anger, flooded the sky. Across the Northern Wastes, far beyond the epicentre of the furious shock wave, tribesmen stared up at the shifting lights that finally burned scarlet and spoke of omens and horrors beyond imagining.

As far away as the dwarf strongholds, the ground was felt to shake as Khorne, the Blood God, made his primal anger known. The countless daemons, both visible and invisible who had previously swarmed over Valkia’s body dared not approach.

The figures that spilled from the abyss were also moving towards the still corpse, but they did so with a curious reverence, their black blades held low in their bloody claws. Regardless of this fact, the daemon servants of Slaanesh who slunk from the darkness in the wake of Khorne’s fury dared not approach. They hissed and howled, screeching their displeasure at being denied their feast, but even the urgent promises of Locephax would not call them forth.

One of the new arrivals, a creature with the obvious physical form of a woman, but with scarlet flesh and the cloven hooves of a beast stooped to pick up the shield that had Locephax’s head nailed to it. The herald studied the nails, each one worked with the symbol of Khorne and a smile flickered onto her terrible face.

‘Do not touch me, child of Khorne!’

Had Valkia lived, she would have been forgiven for mistaking the tone in Locephax’s voice for that of fear. The daemonic head was not afraid. He was terrified.

Without speaking, the bloodletter slid the shield onto her arm and held it aloft, letting out a cry of triumph. Locephax’s voice rose in a scream of terrible anguish and then nothing but silence reigned across the Chaos Wastes. The daemons of Slaanesh watched sullenly as the legion of bloodletters took up Valkia’s body, hoisting her on their knotted shoulders with reverence.

The leader, the one bearing the shield of Locephax, nodded in satisfaction. She glanced at the bottom step where the unrecognisable, half-chewed body of Kormak lay and then bellowed a command. Without further hesitation, the line of bloodletters walked their burden up the remaining steps and moved through the portal.

The herald was the last to step through and when she had gone, the skies once again shifted to the ever-changing colours of the north. The creatures and people of the Chaos Wastes and beyond released their collective breath and the world continued to turn.

She had heard from the elders of the tribe that no single person could recall the precise moment of their birth. The shock would kill them, it was said. The sheer memory of the trauma of being brought into the world was something that the mind blanked out.

Strange then that it was this very thought that jolted her to wakefulness.

Valkia opened her eyes with a gasp, her heart hammering in her chest and terrible, agonising pain wracking her body without forgiveness. She was struggling to draw breath, as though she were drowning, or if a great weight was on top of her and she clawed desperately, trying to gain purchase on whatever it was that was crushing her.

There was nothing to hold and her fingers closed on empty air.

Awareness, such as it was, slowly began to take control of the sheer horror that she had felt on opening her eyes. Her entire body was in pain. Her head, her chest, her limbs... all ached and throbbed. She had fought a battle. An epic battle that...

...she remembered the sensation of the claw that had eviscerated her and she put a hand to her belly, half-expecting her bowels to slither out through her fingers. Sure enough, she felt the gaping wound there, the cleaving gash where her intestines threatened to spill. Blood ran freely from countless injuries and she lay still, knowing that if she moved too much, whatever life she had remaining in her would be forfeit. She was blind in one eye and she felt more of her own life running down her cheek. She had lost one eye. Her face was lacerated; her beauty rendered into a visage of horror and shredded flesh that hung in strips from her skull. With each drawing of breath, there was a single thought that ran around her mind.

I died.

She was in so much pain from her terrible injuries that she did not notice at first that she had been stripped of her armour and lay naked in the insubstantial gloom of this non-place. Some part of her insisted that she should be freezing, but the void of sensations made mockery of her instincts. Her hand rested against the bare flesh of her stomach, again feeling the slimy presence of her internal organs. She had watched countless hundreds die slowly from such injuries.

But I died.

‘I do not understand,’ she said. Her voice sounded cracked and broken, and was harsh in the silence that permeated everything. ‘I died. Is this the beyond?’

The emptiness swallowed her words and gave nothing back. She shivered involuntarily and shifted position slightly. The pain this brought extracted a cry of agony from her lips and she lay flat again, closing her eyes against it.

The moment her eyes closed, images assailed her consciousness. She saw herself, broken and bloodied on a table of green rock. Even as she threw back the monsters that assailed her, she knew that she was dying, saw the terrible wounds that laced her body, but she refused to fall. She saw the claw pierce her and her muscles clenched in sympathetic agony. She saw herself fall. Valkia’s brow furrowed. She suddenly became aware of the fact that she was not alone, but that she shared her featureless afterlife with a presence that cradled her like an infant. It was a thing of pure malevolence, but somehow she knew that it was not directed at her, that this thing, whatever it was, held her in this insubstantial prison. It was not close by. Neither was it distant. It was everywhere around her and it was nowhere but inside her mind.

She saw herself die again, the event unfolding in her mind’s eye, but this time she did not jerk at the killing blow, instead bearing witness to her demise and the events that followed. A legion of crimson-skinned daemons sported night-black blades and followed a terrible, bestial herald. She watched them take up her spear and shield and bear her body into...

In an instant, she knew who had gifted her this vision and tears sprang to her eyes. ‘My master,’ she said through sobs that threatened to rip her body apart. ‘My master.’ They were not tears of sorrow or misery, but tears of joy and devotion at the realisation. They ran down her face from beneath her closed lids, salty and very real. This was no dream. This was where she was. The pain in her belly, the dull throb of her torn face paled into insignificance and she no longer cared if she spilled her innards on the ground. She tried to drag herself up, but lacked the ability to move more than a few inches.

A shock of strength ran through her, filling her limbs with heat and power and searing away her uncertainties. There was no kindness in the action, but there was a sliver of understanding that cut through her emotions and brought equilibrium to her tangled thoughts. She opened her eyes for the second time and this time she saw. A dry wind rushed across a plain of crushed bones that stretched as far as the eye could see. Ash and cinders fell from a bloody sky stained with bands of sooty cloud. Screams, wordless cries of fury and the clash of weapons filled the air and a charnel house reek assailed her senses laced with the acrid stink of hot metal. And on the horizon, a mountain of skulls so vast it swelled until it filled her vision, an impossible monument to the glory of endless slaughter.

‘I failed at the last, my master.’ Valkia remained where she was, lying on her back with her hands clasped over her stomach. But her voice bore the strength of the woman she had been. She called the words out into the boundless, barren plains that surrounded her. She did not purport to understand anything the god was showing her, but she realised that she existed in a limbo of sorts. A place where if she moved too far forwards, she would fall into eternal sleep. Or a place, perhaps, where the potential for other things existed. ‘I failed you.’ She whispered the confession into the void, hot tears prickling at her eyes again. ‘I did not climb the steps. I did not reach you.’

A torrent of images assailed her, one after another like pages of her life being turned by an invisible hand. A girl pushing a spear into the heart of a defeated barbarian. A young woman shearing the head from a man who lay squirming in a pool of his own spilled guts. A bitter mother burying her knife in the throat of a hulking brute. A raging warrior queen screaming across a hundred battlefields, her spear falling again and again, piling stained skulls at her feet in an endless war of devotion. A blazing, bloody berserker dancing an achingly perfect duel with an obscene monster. And finally, an unholy warrior casting down beastmen and daemons on a bleak, dusty plain.

She lifted a hand from her abdomen to wipe across her face, ashamed of the womanly tears that she was still weeping. She felt a ghostly brush across her face in the darkness and courage returned to her.

‘So what happens now?’

The towering presence that she had felt flowing about her suddenly withdrew and its raw, unchained force fell upon her like a suffocating shroud. It laid the very fabric of her being bare, stripping away doubts and fears. It erased any last vestiges of pity, mercy or remorse and discarded those parts of her that did not serve its insatiable thirst for slaughter. The experience lasted no longer than the blink of an eye, but scoured her nerves like liquid fire and filled her mind with torment. When it was done, its absence felt like a soothing wellspring on seared skin.

The flesh of her torso had begun to knit together, wounds sealing themselves closed. Beneath her hands, the ends of the ragged tear that had claimed her life stretched together, sealing closed the fatal injury that had ultimately slain her. It felt peculiar to her touch; the skin itself writhed as though it were alive. Cautiously she let go of the wound and her intestines remained where they should be. She put her hands to her face in wonderment, discovering that those injuries too were sealing closed as though they had never been.

She ran her hands over her naked body, feeling the ridges of invisible scars that could not be seen on the surface. Her god had wrought a wonder. His power was phenomenal to behold.

It took everything she had to battle past the remaining pain and get to her feet. Even then, she swayed and wavered for a while, unable to keep herself steady. She felt as though the unseen presence was studying her, watching everything that she did and judging her.

Her eyes glowed like coals and she turned her burning gaze on the towering monument of skulls, its ivory flanks reaching up into the blighted clouds. Rivers of molten brass carved dark channels down the mountain of bone and howled with every dying scream that had echoed from every battlefield since the birth of time. Valkia looked up and up, feeling the pull of the colossal entity that rested at its summit.

‘What my master desires...’

She never completed the sentence. It transpired that Khorne had only just begun the task of moulding his chosen. What Valkia had thought of as pain a few moments before was suddenly replaced by the realisation of true agony. It began as a pulsating throb across her shoulders as the skin twitched and distorted under the guiding hand of the god as he reshaped her body into something that pleased him even more than her natural form. The repair to her mortal frame had been a prelude to his true intentions.

The throb dulled down to an almost manageable level and then her skin tore open. In a detached way it reminded her of the day she had given birth to her daughters, the sense of being torn apart so that Eris and Bellona could rend their way into the world. She screamed, unable to bear the anguish any longer and dropped back down onto her knees. She fell forward onto all fours and squirmed in agony as the wings tore through the skin of her shoulders. Blood flowed and her nose was filled with the coppery scent of it. Her mouth remained open in a long, silent scream as the leathery pinions grew, unfolding themselves wetly from where they sprouted, bones crackling as they grew and distended.

They opened out in full, a wingspan of several feet and slowly, she got back to her feet. She reached a hand out to them in wonder, her fingers running their length. They twitched under her touch and instinctively, she flapped them experimentally. She felt their sheer power. These were no ornamental limbs. These were instruments that she could use.

A cruel laugh burst forth from her throat. Once, she had marvelled at the swiftness of the avian raptors who hunted the stark tundra. The irony of this transformation was not lost on her.

While she writhed in the throes of transformation, creatures emerged from the ash haze, their clawed feet crunching splintered bones beneath them. A host of sinuous, crimson-skinned daemons with vile, midnight blades surrounded her, their blazing, hateful eyes fixed on the changing woman.

More pain thrummed through her body, but this time she threw out her arms and cried out in sheer ecstasy, welcoming the agony that the change brought with it. Her beloved god was rewarding her beyond anything that she could ever have dreamed. The bat-like wings that arced gracefully from her back moved imperceptibly as her thighs lengthened, changing shape and form. Her feet were contracting and reshaping into the cloven hooves of an animal. There was a bow to her legs that matched those of the monsters that surrounded her and a pair of curling horns, tiny and vestigial, crowned her pale brow.

The snarling daemons fell silent and as one they bent their knees to their new queen, pressing their bloody snouts to the ground in a gesture of servitude. They were bent to her will and would serve her in slaughter like no other. Valkia opened her clawed hands and revelled in her raw power.

‘What of my weapons? My spear, my shield?’

The twisted visage of Locephax flashed briefly in her mind, its screaming face still nailed firmly to her battered shield.

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged. ‘But the shield... fell upon the steps beyond the abyss.’

Images assailed her once again. She watched as the herald bore the severed head of Locephax into the Blood God’s realm and ascended the mountain of skulls. The creature of Slaanesh had screamed and gibbered throughout the ascent, its usually malignant gaze wild with the horror of its situation. She saw darkness close about it and heard its final wail of despair as Valkia’s long promised doom came to pass.

The shield had not been within her line of sight before and yet now it appeared, shimmering into being before her. It had been remade, trimmed in etched brass and fused with the severed neck of the creature. The head of the daemon was scowling up at her, motionless and seemingly without the animate life that it had possessed.

She took up the gift and strapped it to her arm and she could feel the cowed will of Locephax shrink at her touch. Where once the daemon had taunted her with its promises and false words, in this place it held no power.

‘By your will, my lord, it is so.’

Her spear appeared before her, its haft cast in hell-forged obsidian and its silver head etched with brass and black iron. The angular skull design throbbed with a crimson, infernal light and her mind came alive with images of slaughter that dwarfed anything that had come before. She would return to the world of men and she would reap the souls of the living.

‘In your name, my lord, it will be so.’ Her eyes were bright with zealous fury.

The vast, black will atop the mountain withdrew and the daemons parted before her, opening a path to the foot of the monument. She could feel the unquenchable fury that burned atop that bleak summit and sensed its expectation. It called to her in a visceral way that promised an eternity of death, rage and relentless carnage.

She gave a little sigh of sheer adoration. ‘I have never forgotten my promise, my lord. It matters not how the blood flows. It matters only that it does flow.’

The throne of brass and skulls beckoned and clothed in her new daemonic flesh she approached the impossible edifice. Opening wings of fathomless night, Valkia spread her pinions and was borne upward into the windblown ash. Torrential rains of blood lashed at her and screeching, fanged monstrosities tumbled about her gleefully. Past the skulls of a million dead that buried a million more she ascended until at last she passed beyond sight of the plain of bones and the eternal battlefields, until at last she hung before the throne of brass and iron. Until at last she saw.

Valkia the Bloody stepped beyond the woman she had been and became something greater. Something eternal.

Something terrible.

And the world continued to turn.

In the realm of the gods, the passage of the aeons moved differently to the time in the land of mortal man. To all intents and purposes, it stopped altogether. After all, time itself was a concept invented by the living to count down the moments until their inevitable demise.

They broke their fleeting lives down into years, months, days, hours. They came and went, rarely registering as little more in the eyes of the gods than a pattern of lights against the dark canvas of the universe. But once in a generation, one would burn with more fury than those around them.

Valkia had caught the attention of the Blood God early in her life. Had she not met Deron, the man who had brought the god’s name with him, then Khorne would have found another way to bring the remarkable young woman to his side. He had watched her over the years as she had honed and sharpened her considerable talent for slaughter. He had watched. He had waited. And in his way, he had guided.

Here in the realm of the gods, time ceased to have any sort of meaning. In the world beyond, it continued to flow. Uninterrupted, ceaseless and relenting. In the wink of an eye a year had passed. Before Valkia had even begun to understand the sheer magnitude of the power she had been gifted, three more had gone by.

Not that she cared. Not that she retained any interest at all in the world of men. Not whilst she was enjoying the pleasures of all that her immortality had to offer her.

Far beyond the mountains over which she and her army had laboured throughout the cold winter, the Schwarzvolf were learning the ways of a new master themselves. But for them, things were not quite so pleasurable.

Of the thousand or so warriors who had left at Valkia’s call, less than a few hundred returned. They struggled to the far outposts of the Schwarzvolf, bloodied and broken. Some were on the very cusp of madness itself with all they had witnessed and raved endlessly. Others retained a stoic, taciturn silence, refusing to discuss the journey at all.

One thing was abundantly clear: the army was no longer headed by Valkia. Instead, Hepsus the Warspeaker and the Godspeaker Edan walked at the army’s fore. The former looked like an old man, his hair greyer than it had been when he had left and his eyes reduced to sunken hollows that had seen too much. The younger man, the brother of the former queen of the Schwarzvolf, had grown in stature and confidence. Finally allowed to step beyond his sister’s considerable shadow, Edan’s sheer arrogance was palpable.

There was a considerable outpouring of grief in the wake of Valkia’s loss. Her lengthy rule had been sometimes difficult to bear, always controversial... but at least she had ruled them. She had never left them to fend for themselves and she had always ensured that the smaller tribes she conquered into submission were provided for.

Her daughters bore the news of her death with a calm acceptance that they knew would have made their mother proud. Edan delivered the news to them in an uncanny echo of the day, years ago, when Valkia had told her two little half-sisters that their father had died.

Bellona nodded, tight-lipped. She had never truly expected her mother to return from the journey. She also suspected Edan without reserve. Her uncle had always projected an air of self-satisfied smugness that had made her uncomfortable.

Eris on the other hand demanded full details. The entire time she questioned Edan about her mother’s death, her hand rested easily on the pommel of her sword. From time to time, Edan’s eyes flicked down at the weapon and an air of unspoken tension crackled between them. Eris trusted her uncle about as far as she could comfortably throw him. She didn’t care about his rank and status within the tribe. She had seen the way he would always sit and watch Valkia, cold, calculating shrewdness in his eyes.

‘She fell under the daemonic might on the steps leading to the great beyond,’ relayed Edan. He only had Hepsus’s word for that fact of course, having ducked out of the journey when Valkia had been too obsessed with her destination to even notice. But Edan knew his sister well enough to know what she was likely to have attempted. That she had even made it as far as she had still surprised him.

If she had taken but a few more steps, his entire plan would have come crashing down around his ears. And it had taken him so long to carefully piece the whole thing together. He had spent so long cultivating the right attitude, that air of seriousness and just a little aloofness. A tendency to speak softly so that people had to strain to hear him. It was a simple trick that gave the impression he thought carefully about everything he said. He had learned it from his predecessor and he had learned it well.

He let his eyes move from one girl to the other. They were virtually identical in appearance, although Eris was more prone to sporting bruises and cuts from her more eager forays into battle. Bellona had ever been more cautious. He let his gaze linger on the former. There was almost visible rage smouldering in her eyes.

‘She fought bravely if that is what is worrying you,’ he said. His tone was soothing, perhaps even a little condescending. Eris bit immediately.

‘And you witnessed this fall with your own eyes?’ Eris’s hand closed around the weapon at her side. Her uncle met her accusing stare without flinching and he told the lie.

‘Yes, Eris. I did. Your mother attempted to lead our people to their death, but although she fought with the strength of a mountain lion, ultimately she failed.’ Seeing the flash of anger in Eris’s expression, he gently laid a hand upon her arm. ‘Listen to me. Upon my sworn oath, her dying words were that until a decision is reached by the great Circle to determine her successor... The future of the Schwarzvolf is in the hands of the Warspeaker.’

‘Our mother said...’ Eris began to protest, but Bellona put out a hand to forestall her argument. Edan’s normally benign expression flashed into a moment of anger that gave him more than a passing resemblance to his sister. It was such a rare thing to see Edan riled that Eris took a physical step backwards, startled by his temper.

‘Your mother said a lot of things, girl. I merely suggest that if you have even a trace of lingering respect for her at all, you would do well to honour those last wishes.’

‘Don’t you ever dare say such a thing again. Or so help me, uncle, I will slay you where you stand.’

‘Did you not respect her, Eris?’ The taunt was obvious and got exactly the response the Godspeaker sought. For a girl who was usually so reticent about demonstrating any sort of affection, Edan had pushed her just one step too far.

‘Never presume to tell me whether or not I respected my mother.’ Eris drew the sword this time, but she was not fast enough for Edan. The slightly built Godspeaker had unhooked his battle-axe from the belt at his waist and stopped the killing strike.

He was imbued with a strength that Eris had never realised and as she withdrew her attack, she found herself for the first time truly frightened. She had never known fear in her life, but something in Edan’s eyes scared her.

‘And thus did your mother die,’ he sneered. ‘Filled to bursting with arrogance. Not caring whether her people lived or died. Seeking to fulfil an ambition she could never hope to realise.’

‘Enough!’ Bellona stepped forward again and this time, she put her hand forcibly on her twin’s shoulder. ‘Uncle, I implore you to forgive my sister’s impetuous nature, but similarly, beg you to consider your words. You may be travel-weary and tired, but you have brought us sad news.’ Eris shrugged herself free from Bellona’s grip and strode from the tent. Bellona watched her go and sighed inwardly.

‘Of course we will respect Mother’s wishes in this matter – on the condition that we are allowed to sit on the Circle in her place.’ It was a diplomatic question, well-posed and pitched completely without rancour. The anger drained from Edan in an instant. He hooked his axe back on his belt and bowed to his niece courteously. This was the Edan she knew. The man who demurred to everyone. But she had momentarily caught a glimpse of his other side and she was on her guard.

His voice, when he spoke, was laden with carefully pitched weariness. ‘You are correct, of course. It has not been an easy journey. I will make my apologies to Eris later. But I heartily suggest that you keep your sister under control, Bellona. She is in danger of following too closely in her mother’s footsteps. It is hard enough that we have lost Valkia.’ He looked in the direction of the tent’s exit. ‘It would be tragic to lose either of you as well, unless it is with honour and glory attached.’

‘Yes, uncle.’ Bellona lowered her eyes in respect. It was the right thing to do and she knew it; Edan nodded in satisfaction before turning and leaving. Bellona sat down and stared blankly at the tent wall. She should seek out her hot-headed sister and offer some sort of comfort but for now, she grieved alone. She grieved for the wasted time, for the lack of real love that had existed between them. She grieved for the future, for the difficulties she could predict without any skills for foresight that lay ahead of them. She knew that she and her sister faced a challenge unlike anything else they had ever known, but she was clever enough to know that caution would pay far more than any other reaction.

Bellona held her head high and stood, dusting her hands down the front of her tunic. She would go and find Eris and talk sense into her. They both had the blood of chieftains flowing through their veins and if they were to continue the line, there would need to be a lot of politicking.

With Bellona’s guiding hand and clever mind, coupled with Eris’s strength and fire, they would prevail through the hardships ahead.

THIRTEEN

THE LONG GAME

The river of time flowed ever onwards, heedless of the betrayal of a warrior queen in the northernmost reaches of the world. Time flowed onwards into weeks, months and finally years.

Edan had been unhappy with simply betraying his sister on the field of battle and within weeks of the party’s return to the Vale, had also turned the tide of favouritism against Hepsus. It had not taken much more than a carefully placed whisper and gentle re-working of the truth to ensure that everyone believed that the Warspeaker had been responsible for Valkia’s death.

Whispers grew to murmurs, which in turn became angry rumours. Hepsus, revelling in the fact that the tribe was finally under his command, was oblivious to any of it. He had already instigated a number of startling changes that did not sit well with many of Valkia’s more staunch supporters and there were obvious fractures starting to appear across the scattered tribes that had united beneath the queen’s banner.

‘War does not have to last forever,’ had been the Warspeaker’s message. ‘We are plentiful in number. Let us spend time carving out a solid, permanent existence. Let us stop the ceaseless wandering. The Schwarzvolf are acknowledged as the greatest tribe of the north. Let us revel in that for a time.’

Days after giving this speech, he dropped the title of Warspeaker, firmly stating that it did nothing to support the message of unity he wanted to promote amongst the people. It had been this act which had led to a further splintering of the tribe.

The Circle had gathered for the first time since the appropriate observance of Valkia’s death. The tribe had been in mourning – some genuine, some not – and despite their inherent ferocity, to appear as anything other than united in their grief would expose them as vulnerable.

These had been Hepsus’s words and Eris had not reacted well to them.

She stood up and faced him, her elfin-like features contorted with suppressed rage. Bellona stared up at her twin helplessly. The moment Hepsus had spoken, the final line was crossed as far as Eris had been concerned.

‘You are promoting nothing but cowardice, Hepsus. You sit there, full of your own self-importance and boast about how you will lead our people forward. But this is an act of foolishness. We are a tribe of warriors. We honour the Blood God…’

‘The Blood God? Where was the Blood God when we were fighting for our lives in the far north?’ Hepsus responded in kind, his own face furious. ‘It was because of a misplaced belief in a mad god that your mother died. Do not forget that.’ The former Warspeaker rose from his own place and stood before her. He had the advantage of height, strength and age but Eris did not move. She faced him with as much courage as her own mother had always shown.

‘Eris…’ Bellona spoke softly. She was not blinded by rage and she could see no end to this discussion but a poor one. She tried without success to appeal to her sister’s better nature.

‘No, Bellona! This needs to be said.’ Eris acknowledged her twin with nothing more than a brief glance. ‘Hepsus, give us the truth of it. You never forgave my mother for the death of your son…’ She ploughed on despite seeing how much the reminder stung the man. ‘You abandoned her to her fate at the last. I have heard many people say the same thing. Her belief in Kharneth was strong and it was pure. A misplaced trust in her own Warspeaker was the thing that cost my mother her life.’

‘I did not kill your mother.’ Hepsus’s hand strayed unconsciously to his scabbard, but he had ceased wearing his sword openly in an effort to prove he was serious about a more settled way of life. ‘Do not make such accusations unless you have proof to bring before this Circle. Your mind is addled with grief, girl. Now take your place and shut your mouth until you have something useful to bring to this meeting.’

Nobody had ever spoken to Eris in such a manner and her face went beet-red.

‘Eris, please.’ There was something commanding in Bellona’s soft voice and Hepsus sneered.

‘Listen to your sister,’ he said, moving so that his face was barely a hair’s-breadth from Eris. ‘There speaks a proper woman.’

Eris didn’t miss her stride at all.

‘Once,’ she said in a low, passionate tone, ‘you may have been a worthy successor to my mother’s throne, Hepsus. But now? Now you are a broken old man who has lost his edge for battle. I will not stand by whilst you dishonour the tribe further.’

‘And what,’ said Hepsus, ‘do you plan to do about it?’ He leaned still closer, almost as though he would kiss her. She gave him a charming, crooked smile.

‘This.’

Her hand moved alarmingly fast, and the serrated blade of her dagger cut upwards with a soft displacement of air. It entered Hepsus’s face just below his chin, exiting between his eyes. Red blood surged and covered Eris’s hand. Hepsus gagged and tried to push Eris from him, but her grip on the blade was firm. He struggled to free himself, even as the crushing inevitability of his certain death pressed him to his knees. Eris watched dispassionately as he suffered, enjoying every second of her hot-headed and impetuous revenge. Then she moved the dagger ever so subtly and pierced the meat of the Warspeaker’s brain. The light died from his eyes and she finally released her grip on the dagger. She watched with emotional detachment as Hepsus expired and then moved back as he toppled like a falling tree, his powerful bulk crashing heavily to the ground.

And not one member of the Circle moved to help him.

Hepsus bled out on the floor in front of every member of the Circle, gore soaking the ground around him. Finally, when there was no further drop left in him, he lay still. Eris bent and retrieved her dagger. She forced open the jaws, not yet stiffened through death and cut out what remained of the old warrior’s tongue. She held the grisly trophy aloft.

‘So will end all liars and traitors,’ she said. ‘My mother brought the Schwarzvolf to greatness. This man snuffed out that light and has paid the ultimate price. My sister and I are the rightful successors to her leadership and we will take our place accordingly. Is that not right, Bellona?’

Bellona’s face was set like stone, demonstrating neither disapproval nor pleasure at her sister’s unprecedented actions. She rose to her feet in an almost prim manner.

‘It was our mother’s wish that we stand together when she was gone,’ she affirmed in her quiet voice. ‘I am with Eris on this.’

Eris flushed with delight at her sister’s concurrence and, responding to a cough of attention, moved her glance to Edan. Her uncle had sat motionless, concentrating on hiding his delight that his little scheme had worked out so well.

‘Godspeaker?’

‘You speak words of wisdom for one so young, my niece,’ he said in his quiet voice. ‘I merely wish to affirm my loyalty to you and offer my services as advisor to you and your sister. If you will take me, of course.’

The last was said with such humility that all the anger Eris had felt towards him for bearing the news of her mother’s death flowed out of her in a rush.

‘Of course, Godspeaker.’ Eris gave him a tight, controlled smile. Beside her, her sister’s eyes were as cold as ice. ‘The Schwarzvolf belongs to the three of us by birth. Your guidance will be welcomed.’

‘I will not disappoint,’ said Edan with a low bow from the waist. He told the lie without any difficulty.

Change was inevitable, and in the turbulent years since Eris had taken the Warspeaker’s life, many things had altered within the tribe of the Schwarzvolf. Some of these changes had been very hotly contested by a certain contingent of the tribe, but their arguments had been quickly resolved. In the worst cases, their arguments had been silenced with the careful application of a dagger blade to the throat.

In the wake of Hepsus’s death, the tribe had looked ready to revolt. But under Bellona’s careful guidance and Eris’s impressive temper, the daughters of Queen Valkia demonstrated the ability to control the people of the Schwarzvolf.

Both girls matured into stunning replicas of their dead mother and both drew exactly the same amount of attention from neighbouring tribes. They discussed the situation with the Godspeaker and he very cleverly left the decision in their own hands. He made it clear in carefully phrased words that if they remained childless, then the line of succession would once again fall to uncertainty. This was more than enough to convince even Eris, who had long since sworn never to take a man to husband, to begin to view the situation in a different light.

They had little time to concern themselves with such things however; within six months of Valkia’s death a civil war broke out amongst the united tribes. The work of years in bringing them together under the Schwarzvolf banner slowly unravelled and the twins found themselves leading the loyal of their tribe in bloody battles of retribution against those who had once called themselves allies.

Eris proved herself to be an able front-line warrior, leading the Schwarzvolf at the head of the warriors, flashing through the line with twin battle-axes that cleaved skulls and took lives. Bellona was less skilled but no less fearless and when the twins fought together, although they still possessed but a fraction of the skill their mother had displayed, they were nonetheless formidable.

But fight though they may, they could not convince many of the rebellious tribes to come back under the yoke of the Schwarzvolf. Valkia’s death had fractured the alliance held together by the fear and respect that had initially brought them together and no amount of diplomacy or warfare could convince them otherwise.

From being the mightiest tribe in the north, the Schwarzvolf’s numbers were dwindling. It brought the matter of inter-tribe marriage to the table once again and Valkia’s daughters – forever doomed to walk in their mother’s shadow – eventually conceded that the inevitable had to happen.

‘I will find the best I can for you both,’ Edan had promised. ‘Allow me to handle this matter and I promise that you will be pleased with the results.’

Neither young woman wished to marry outside of the Schwarzvolf, but they could both see the necessity. If they did not begin the arduous task of reinforcing alliances, their tribe’s numbers would once more dwindle to nothing. They agreed that the Godspeaker should make the necessary arrangements whilst they concentrated on the more important issues of survival against constant raids from formerly allied tribes and other, opportunistic enemies who had come out of the hills once the mighty Schwarzvolf were visibly vulnerable.

War raged endlessly across the snowfields and valleys of the north. Within five years of Valkia’s death, Edan felt considerable pressure lift from his shoulders when without his intervention, Bellona coupled with another young Schwarzvolf, a warrior who had courted her vigorously from the start. Eris, who was perhaps a little bitter if not jealous of her sister, cheerfully circulated the rumour that Bellona had only given into the young man’s endless demands for a little peace and quiet. Whatever the reason, they seemed content with one another and within a short time of their joining, Bellona was pregnant.

Keen to marry off his other niece and get her removed from his long-term plans, the sly and insidious Godspeaker found a willing suitor for the other of Valkia’s daughters. He instigated the first step of his scheme for the tribe’s future during the ceremony that had joined Eris with a young warrior of a small, nameless tribe. The people of the Schwarzvolf had always had great respect for the ‘visions’ that the Godspeaker experienced and so it was easy enough to take them in.

Halfway through the ceremony, he had faked a sudden fit, followed by a trance. He spoke gibberish for several minutes, flailing and lashing out so violently that two of the tribesmen had to hold him down in case he hurt himself. Then he had feigned unconsciousness for a day.

Eris had postponed the ceremony, earning the ire of both her intended husband and his tribe, but she had not cared in the slightest. The health and well-being of her tribe’s chief adviser was far more important to her than some pointless ceremony binding her to a man she cared nothing for. Bellona had dealt with the raging leader of the tribe and had mollified him, promising that the ceremony would take place as soon as the Godspeaker had revived from his trance.

Edan had waited. There was little point in spoiling the dramatic effect of what he was trying to achieve. When he finally decided that enough was enough, he had allowed his eyes to slowly open and had arched his back on the bed, crying out as though in pain.

‘Uncle, be calm.’ It was Bellona’s voice. Edan felt her slide a hand beneath his head and lift a water skin to his lips. ‘Drink.’

He complied meekly and then turned his head to look at her. ‘How long?’ The question was soft and hesitant. ‘How long was I in the hands of the gods?’

‘Some considerable hours have passed since you fell into the trance,’ said his niece, taking back the water skin. Edan groaned softly and she lifted a damp strip of cloth to his forehead. It was easy to fool her. She was soft-hearted and it would be her downfall in time. Her belly had swollen with the child she bore and there was a maturity to her that had blossomed even more of late. She was now five months into her pregnancy and the condition suited her. Like her mother before her, she had stepped back from the battlefield until the infant was born.

‘Eris’s marriage? The ceremony?’

‘It has been stopped. Your health is our concern.’ He groaned again, and put a hand to his head.

‘I have ruined her chances... I...’ Edan was genuinely startled into silence by the snap of Bellona’s harsh tongue. It was so rare to hear her speak in such a way that he was taken aback.

‘Enough. What did you see? Is Kharneth... are the Four displeased?’ Over the years, Edan had carefully steered the beliefs of the tribe to what he called a ‘greater understanding’ of the interlocking majesty of the Four gods. Devotion to just one lessened them, he said. It weakened them. In this way, he was able to pursue his own interests without damaging external appearances. When the moment suited him, he would invoke the practise of specific worship.

‘I... I need time,’ said Edan in a trembling voice that he had spent so long practising and perfecting. ‘I need time to gather my thoughts and try to extract the meaning of the visions. All the gods are angry though, Bellona.’

Edan had seen the power of the daemon that his sister had fought so long ago. He had seen the strength in the creature and when he had learned that it was an emissary from another of the Four, he had started thinking. What power could he wield if he were to earn the favour of all the gods?

And so his plan had been born. The first part had been alarmingly simple. Removing the fanatical Valkia from the picture had been much easier than he could have anticipated. Then removing Hepsus, the one man in whom he had confided... well. When Eris had rammed her dagger through his throat, he could have laughed.

This dramatic ‘vision’ was to form the last part of his plan. Through this, he would lead the Schwarzvolf away from the endless, unrewarding devotion to bloodshed and into something greater.

Edan never once stopped to consider that Kharneth would be enraged. He didn’t consider it because he simply didn’t care. Of all the people within the tribe, the Godspeaker was the only one who could connect directly with the gods; or so the Schwarzvolf were taught. The word of the Godspeaker was the command of the Four themselves and they would obey his every whim without question.

‘How much time?’ Bellona interrupted his thoughts and he waved a hand at her irritably, briefly forgetting he was supposed to be weak after his ‘episode’.

‘It will soon be nightfall. I will bring you my thoughts to tonight’s Circle,’ he said. ‘Let me rest, girl.’

Bellona got up from his side and moved to the tent. Her condition caused her to move awkwardly, the growing baby adding a rolling gait to her movement. She paused in the entrance of the dwelling, her hand resting easily on her stomach and spoke the words that would ultimately spell her own fate. Her intelligence was outstanding and the trap she had laid for him was sprung.

‘You seem very sure of the hour of the day, Uncle,’ she said, quietly. ‘I did not share that information with you. I am very pleased to see that you are so quick to recover your senses.’

She left the tent and left Edan to dark thoughts of further treachery.

Affronted and insulted by the matter, Eris’s would-be husband had left the camp of the Schwarzvolf and not sealed the marriage. It had put the Godspeaker right back at the beginning of his plans and he silently raged at his own lack of foresight in the matter. Nonetheless, finding other suitors had not been terribly difficult. Whilst all the neighbouring tribes treated the daughters of the dead queen with tentative distrust, they were nonetheless desirable. Not only for their positions as the heirs to Valkia’s leadership, but for their physical appearance.

To Edan’s irritation, Eris had announced that clearly the postponement of her marriage had been a sign from the Four themselves that she would not marry. Angered by this, but unable to let it show, Edan turned his attentions to dealing with Bellona instead. It had been the hardest thing for him to feign grief when Bellona’s husband had died during a border skirmish with would-be invaders. By then she was nearly seven months pregnant and it seemed unlikely he would be able to deal with her without bringing attention to the matter.

He had plotted and schemed and eventually, had negotiated with one of the bigger tribes. He could not leave his poor niece to bear a child with no husband, he had said. Promises of elevated status within the tribal hierarchy were made and a variety of valuable goods exchanged hands.

It was more than a month before the seeds of his multi-layered and conniving scheme could germinate and finally come to fruition.

The man who came to seek Bellona’s hand in marriage arrived at the tent of the Godspeaker more than three months after he had set the wheels in motion. Hrafi was young and arrogant and at first both girls dismissed him as another empty-minded fool. But once he engaged the pair of them in conversation they discovered that behind his exterior lay a mind as sharp as any they had encountered.

Eris soon tired of his company, but could tell that her sister was infatuated with the man. She had taken the death of her husband well, but Eris knew that Bellona had missed the presence of a man in her bed. At first, Eris could not hide her disappointment. She had hoped that Bellona would follow her example and eschew marriage with an external tribe. But she loved her twin and would not stand in the way of her happiness.

For five days, Hrafi was entertained by the Schwarzvolf. Along with his small retinue, he was granted space to stay within the host camp, and every morning he emerged from the tent in which he had slept with a new gift for the apparent object of his desire. Once it was an exquisitely hand-tooled amulet that he told her would protect her from any evil spirits. On another day he had sat by her side and carved her a fertility statue from a piece of wood. The humour of such a gift, given Bellona’s advanced state of pregnancy, had made her laugh; the first time she had done so in an age. Hrafi was strong, thoughtful, and talented and seemed to be not in the least perturbed by taking on another man’s child as his own.

Edan watched carefully from a safe distance. He had performed the duty expected of him as both Godspeaker and relative of Bellona. For three of the five days he had been confident that his plan would play out as it was meant to. Throughout the fourth day, when he saw the looks that his niece and the young, dark-skinned warrior shared, he began to wonder.

On the fifth day, he considered staging another fit as he had done at Eris’s nuptials. Hrafi and Bellona looked entirely too happy for his liking. But he had underestimated the slyness and competence of those he had hired.

Amongst Hrafi’s retinue was a youth. A slave boy, he had been introduced as. Barely more than a child and of no consequence. He fetched and carried at Hrafi’s bidding and was seldom seen more than three feet behind his master. He was a scrawny, puling thing whose ribs could clearly be seen through the paper-thin skin of his bare chest. His head had been shorn of all hair and his dark eyes seemed huge in a drawn face that looked perpetually afraid. His tongue had been cut out long ago and he seldom made any sort of sound.

Hrafi initially offered to make a gift of the boy to Bellona, but she declined. The Schwarzvolf were not the type to enslave others. So the youth trailed along behind his master like a dejected wolfhound. Hrafi occasionally threw him a strip of meat or some other treat and he would wolf it down hungrily. Bellona requested Hrafi’s permission to ensure that the boy was given a proper meal instead of scraps and despite pouting at this idea, her suitor eventually agreed. The slave-boy had given Bellona a grateful look as he had eaten a full plate of food for what was perhaps the first time in his young life.

He frequently arrived at Bellona’s tent ahead of Hrafi, heralding his master’s arrival, so on the fifth day, nobody looked twice when the scrawny slaveboy made his way inside.

She looked up as he entered the tent and treated him to a smile. Discussions and negotiations with Hrafi were going better than she could have hoped. Unlike her sister, Bellona was not averse to the idea of marriage and children borne through union with those not of Schwarzvolf blood. Her sense of duty and loyalty to her people was strong and she knew that there were many who hoped to see the Schwarzvolf regain the strength and power they had once wielded.

‘Does your master come to see me this morning, boy?’ Bellona asked him the same question she had asked for the last few mornings and he had nodded. His eyes were huge and agitated and she felt uncomfortable looking at him. She sighed and rose from her seat, no easy task given her advanced condition. The lack of a tongue meant that she could not easily expect him to tell her what had given him cause for a look of such fear. She had little patience for attempting to extract anything from him and was preparing to send him from the tent when he gripped her arms with his bony fingers.

‘Let go of me!’ The boy gripped tighter and looked up at Bellona desperately. He made abrupt motions with his head as though indicating she should leave the tent and her brow furrowed.

‘Unhand me, slave, or your master will...’

‘He should not be here.’

The voice belonged to Hrafi who had come into the tent whilst she had been distracted with the slave boy. The youth continued to cling to Bellona and made a strange moaning sound that sounded like sheer desperation.

‘Remove your slave from my presence, Hrafi.’ Bellona’s voice contained all the haughty surety of her breeding and Hrafi’s brow arched at her tone. ‘Then explain why you allowed him to treat me this way.’

‘Of course, my lovely.’ Hrafi moved across and caught the slave by the shoulder, dragging him backwards with considerable force. He leaned in close and whispered something inaudible. The fear on the boy’s face was enough to send him running instantly from the tent. Hrafi smirked and turned to his would-be bride.

‘We would not want him to disturb us now, would we?’ He gave her a seductive smile that was almost lecherous in its intensity and he caught her in his arms, pulling her to him for a kiss. It was nothing he had not done already, but Bellona felt uncomfortable with his closeness and tried to pull herself free from his grasp.

‘Let go of me, Hrafi.’

‘You do not enjoy this?’

‘Let go of me.’ She tugged harder to free herself from him, but his strength far exceeded hers and this, coupled with her delicate condition, meant that she simply stumbled slightly. He seemed to come to his senses and released her. She sat down on the end of her sleeping pallet looking dazed and pale.

‘My love, I am sorry. I got over-eager.’ At that moment, the slave boy returned, looking timid and uncertain. ‘His timing is superb! Give me what I sent you for, brat.’ He snatched a soft bag from the slave boy and opened it. ‘Let me mix this for you.’ From the pouch he wore at his waist, he took a little pinch of herbs which he mixed with some water. ‘The healers of my tribe use this all the time for women expecting children. It helps settle an upset stomach and relaxes the mother.’

‘I don’t...’

‘Bellona, please. Let me do this thing for you.’ He smiled his charming, winning smile and the young woman stared up at him. Everything screamed out not to trust him given the way he had just treated her, but she saw in that smile the echo of his charm; the pleasant, caring young man who had won her heart. She gave him an uncertain smile back and Hrafi positively beamed. He dropped the herbs into a cup of water and stirred them around. He immediately gave the bag back to the slave boy and the child hopped from foot to foot nervously.

The smell of the concoction drifted across to her and she wrinkled her nose. It was acrid and more than a little bitter. There was an earthy undertone to it, some herb that she did not recognise.

‘I am told that it tastes better than it smells,’ he promised her, kneeling down beside her and offering her the cup. ‘Take a sip. See what you think.’

Dubiously, she raised the cup to her lips and took a tentative sip. The suspicion on her face disappeared almost immediately and she nodded. It tasted quite lovely.

‘Drink,’ he urged her and his apparently concerned expression was the last thing she ever saw in the seconds before the poison, fast-acting and lethal, began to take hold. In a few seconds she had dropped into a deep sleep. It would take perhaps half an hour before she drew her last breath, but she would not suffer.

Hrafi watched the young woman as she slept, her chest rising and falling gently. There were many barbarous ways he could have taken her life, but he had decided on the poison for reasons of his own – and it was not kindness.

He had agreed to commit this murder on the promise of greatness, but he was also no fool. He had seen through Edan’s plan quickly enough. The Godspeaker of the Schwarzvolf had never intended to honour his word and Hrafi was about to turn the tables on him.

‘Slave,’ he called aloud. He drew his dagger from his belt. ‘Come in here. I have need of you.’

He had very little time. He intended to make sure it was well-spent. She would stay alive long enough for him to carry out the rest of his plan.

An hour later, Eris found the body of her twin sister.

Suspicious at the length of time Hrafi had taken paying his respects, she had attended Bellona’s dwelling and called for her sister to come outside. There had been no response so she had leaned forward and listened very carefully. She could hear soft sobbing.

Tearing the entrance open, Eris darted inside and found the most grisly of scenes before her. Her sister, her beautiful, vivacious and courageous sister was most certainly dead. Her body was laid on the floor and her eyes were closed. There was a look of oddly peaceful contentment about her which suggested that she had not been aware of what had been done to her.

The sobbing came from the slave boy who had Bellona’s head in his lap. He was stroking her hair and weeping. He looked up at Eris in fear and made his peculiar grunting noise. Eris paid him no heed. Her eyes were fixed on her sister’s belly. Her tunic had been torn apart and the infant that she had carried almost to term had been cut from her, and she had been left to bleed out whatever of her life had remained. For a wild moment, Eris realised she had gotten so used to seeing Bellona looking so engorged with her baby that the woman lying before her seemed to have burst like an overripe fruit. Glistening strands of her intestines were visible and the contents of her abdomen and uterus had spilled everywhere.

Eris had fought on the field of battle countless times. She had seen evisceration, decapitation and any number of grisly deaths. But for the first time in her life, bile rose and she turned away from the scene, retching violently. The contents of her stomach removed, she dropped to her knees beside the scene, shoving the slave boy away violently and grasping her sister’s body in her arms.

As an adult woman, she had never cried. But she did now. She screamed at the slave boy to fetch a blanket so that she could at least cover Bellona’s dignity and the boy did as he was told. Eris’s scream of rage brought others and eventually Edan appeared as well. He took in the scene and realised instantly that Hrafi had played him for a fool.

‘We must find him,’ he said at once. Eris, almost inconsolable with grief felt wildly grateful and did not stop for a second to think that Edan wanted Hrafi for his own purposes. ‘His crime must not go unpunished.’

‘He has been gone some time judging by how much blood she has lost,’ said one of the healers who had rushed to inspect her body. ‘None of us know where he has gone.’

Many pairs of eyes turned to the slave boy who let out a wail and shook his head vigorously. Edan stared at him coldly.

‘Put him in the Pit,’ he said in a tone that was unlike his usual affable manner. ‘He will pay the price for serving a traitor. And get together a party to travel to Hrafi’s tribe. We will get answers. I promise you that.’

But Hrafi was not there.

His tribe denied all knowledge of what he had done. A prince amongst their people, Hrafi had announced his intention to marry into the Schwarzvolf and his people had disowned him. They would not have let him come back.

Despite his best efforts, Edan realised that he would not easily track down the barbarian who had betrayed him. He had planned Bellona’s death, that was true enough. But he had also planned to take the infant for himself, to raise the child in a manner fit for a future leader. Valkia’s grandchild would be a valuable commodity. As a girl, she would have been a fine prize to tout. As a boy...

But he would never even know. The humiliation was great and Edan took a spiteful revenge by having the slave boy publicly executed as a traitor. In an act of generosity, he fought down his urge to carry out the process himself and let Eris do it. She had done so gladly, needing to feel that justice had somehow been served. And unknowingly following the pattern of her mother so many years before her, she performed the ritual disembowelling on a traitor who had been party to the death of one of the ruling family.

The innocent slave boy, who had been too frightened to refuse his master’s order and unable to warn Bellona as he would have liked, welcomed death with a calm stare. No sound left his mouth when Eris tore out his guts. He dropped to his knees and stared straight ahead. Eris had thrown her dagger to one side and snatched a battleaxe up in one hand. She did not make a clean job of beheading the boy and it took four blows before his head parted company with his shoulders. Indulging her need for revenge, Eris was in no mood to care about such niceties.

From his vantage point beside the scene of execution, Edan smiled. He had all but declared war on Hrafi’s former tribe, but that was fine. The Schwarzvolf needed to keep their blades honed and their battle-senses sharp. It had been an elaborate, intricate plan and Edan had never once been outsmarted. He glowered at the dead slave boy as though it had all been his fault.

‘Hang him out with the others,’ he said, waving a casual hand at the body. ‘And bring me more wine.’

FOURTEEN

EMERGENCE

In the realm of man, time moved on. Ten years passed and yet in the place between worlds, that realm wherein dwelt the gods themselves, time had no meaning. For the consort of Khorne, a year could pass in less than an hour. She had no concept of the passage of the years beyond her realm. Neither did she care.

For a long while, Valkia had lost herself in the eternal battle, her sense of purpose having been swallowed up in the glory of Khorne’s gift. She was no longer a human warrior queen, but a creature of destruction. Her wings gave her a freedom she had never had in life and her ferocity was unsurpassed. From the moment she stood in the presence of her lord and master, she was totally lost in his service.

He had been satisfied with her new appearance, completing her new form with additional gifts: a mane of spines sprouted where once she had sported her raven black hair. They gave her a fearsome appearance, but somewhere beneath it all, somewhere beneath the new, feral creature that she had become, Valkia was still an astoundingly beautiful woman. She was clothed in a suit of baroque armour wrought from brass and black iron in the hell-forges of the infernal realm. The overlapping plates fit snugly to her lithe form and accentuated every curve of her powerful, slender body while living chains bound themselves to her collar and belt, laden with the skulls of the favoured.

The flayed hides of defeated daemons were draped over its burning, black plates. The ruddy flesh hissed and hardened, its unnatural fortitude turning aside sword and axe while it writhed with shackled power and unholy runes.

Blood oozed from the armour as soon as she was buckled into it and within moments thick ropes of gore trailed to her ankles. If she stood in one place for too long, the seeping fluid would pool beneath her, reflecting half-formed faces of the slain. The blood of the eternally tormented was a weapon in its own right, adding to the palpable aura of terror that emanated from the daemon princess.

So armoured, wielding her beloved Slaupnir and bearing the daemon-shield, Valkia looked upon herself. She gazed upon the terrible, wonderful changes that had been wrought upon her and she was pleased. She was her master’s servant, his beloved and his consort, but she was treated by the other daemonic entities that fought the eternal battle with fear and loathing in equal measure. Her will was absolute, her wrath terrible to behold and her vengeance swift.

But she had lived her life as a warrior and although she thrilled to the ultimate gift of standing at Khorne’s right hand, she soon yearned to spill the blood of the living once again.

Her daemonic form needed no sleep, no rest and no respite. But she would sometimes remember shards of what had been before, like half-remembered dreams. Those fragments unsettled her, teasing her with thoughts of tasks not yet done. She remembered a time before she had stepped into the flesh and armour she wore and had been something less, but that others had taken that from her.

The memories of the great betrayal on the riven steps at the heart of the great wastes slowly filtered back into her thoughts and Valkia the Bloody remembered.

She remembered and she burned with an unholy desire for revenge upon those who had failed her. She would stalk the lands of the north and she would visit her terrible rage upon them. She would spill rivers of blood in the name of Khorne and he would revel in the carnage. She would tear the limbs from the bodies of the treacherous cowards and feast on their lying tongues which she would pluck from their screaming mouths.

A vision unfolded in her mind’s eye as her fury grew. She saw a village surrounded by a sprawling camp alive with activity. Tokens and offerings to the Four adorned every dwelling and a shrine housing roughly carved totems stood in a square at the heart of the settlement. They were nomads no more. Warriors still prowled the lanes and sparred together in a small arena, but they were not the wild men she had once known. The sight of their complacence sickened her.

Worse, they had cast aside all that she had brought them in her long, bloody reign and had turned from the path of blood to something lesser.

Valkia threw back her head and screamed her fury to the crimson sky, and the creatures of the eternal battle responded in kind. Monstrous throats roared in wordless, primal rage and clawed hands raised ebony blades in salute to the call to arms. The daemonic horde swelled and heaved at the promise of slaughter, their burning eyes following the sinuous, winged form as she parted the veil and stepped back into the world of men.

Hell followed with her.

At first, the cold, bloodless reality of the world hurt Valkia’s senses and she turned her face from the feeble light that broke through the banks of ashen cloud which churned endlessly above the blighted wastes. She had spent so long in the twilight of Khorne’s realm that the cruel sun brought a stabbing pain to her daemonic eyes.

The host at her back hissed and spat in disdain for the world, but the promise of the bloodbath to come kept their thirst alive and their rage thrumming through their limbs. They would need to kill soon.

She forced herself to look up at the storm-wracked sky and pushed the weakness from her with a force of will. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the constant lines of reality and what had been little more than a blur of colours resolved into the monolithic steps that led down to the plain.

She sprang down three of the massive slabs and then stopped. Throwing back her head, she laughed at her own foolishness. Why should she walk? She had the power of flight now. She unfurled her wings and rejoiced at the magnificence of their sheer power. With barely an effort, she beat them gently, raising herself with ease from the cold stone of the steps. Borne aloft by the chaotic winds that poured from the abyss, Valkia descended to the plain like a fallen angel. Where her hooves settled, the grey dust parted and beads of blood welled up from the ground as if the land itself was wounded by her tread.

The air here was charged with unfettered sorcery and it coloured the winds like oil on water, sticking to the tongue like the taste of metal. The glossy steps were still stained with old blood and marked from the countless deaths that occurred upon them and Valkia could easily identify the spot where she herself had fallen.

A thought came to her. A hazy thread of memory formed in her mind and she grasped desperately for a name. A youth. A warrior who had been the only truly loyal follower. The only one who had possessed courage enough to follow her to the edge of the world.

Kormak.

At the foot of the steps a corpse lay face-down in the dust. Its flesh was shrunken and grey, mummified by the passage of years and the writhing magic that permeated everything. Tattered strips of skin hung like ribbons from the body, evidence of the dreadful wounds that had finally brought the tenacious young warrior down. For ten years it had lain on the very cusp of creation, in sight of the realms of madness but denied the promised glory.

Valkia nudged the corpse over with her foot and it rolled onto its back. Ragged wounds lined Kormak’s face where the creatures of Slaanesh had torn him down, exposing desiccated muscle and bone beneath. His furs and clothing were stained and shredded and across his body were the multiple lacerations which had ultimately killed him. She fixed her gaze on the stump where his arm had once been and it filled her with pure, murderous anger. So many great, powerful warriors at her command and in the end, just the one who had believed in her vision.

Hunkering down beside the remains of her most loyal follower, Valkia stroked a long-fingered nail across his ruined face. ‘Such a waste,’ she murmured. A low moan escaped from the ruined hollow of Kormak’s mouth and a pale wisp emerged from between its cracked lips.

The misty exhalation expanded above the body, shimmering and bloating until it formed the outline of a man. Even incorporeal as it was, one arm still clutched a spectral axe with grim determination. The wraith’s features were set in a look of abject fury, its insubstantial form unable to vent its hatred on the flesh of the living.

‘Kormak.’

Valkia marvelled at the raw tenacity of her one-armed devotee. He had been a decade dead but the heady combination of a violent death, the energies that coursed on the wind and his own thirst for vengeance had kept his spirit shackled to his sundered flesh. The spectre gave a reedy howl of impotent fury and locked its pale eyes with Valkia’s burning gaze.

‘You served me well in life, Kormak, and by extension you served Khorne. For long years you have prowled this place, denied your just reward – and your rightful vengeance. I go now to spill the blood of those that fled when they should have stood beside us.’ She reached out and caressed the ghostly cheek of the man before her. ‘Will you join me?’

The shade let out a long, mournful wail that echoed across the desolate plain and the crimson daemons hissed in agitation. The host was eager for blood and they would not long be denied. Valkia gave the daemons a baleful glare and returned her attention to the soul of Kormak.

‘You swore to me that you would not fall behind and I do not yet consider your oath fulfilled. Khorne calls to your blood and must be answered in kind. Rise now and revel in the roar of battle once again.’ Valkia sunk her claws into the old flesh of Kormak’s corpse and the shade let out another moan, its maw distending into a snarl of bestial rage.

With a crack of dry sinew and yellowed bone the cadaver’s jaw shuddered into unnatural life, matching its ethereal counterpart. Valkia moved her hands across the flesh of the corpse, cutting obscene runes that glowed with a fell inner light. As each burst into life, the wraith diminished, its spectral form shrinking back into its frame of skin and bones. Valkia completed her work by inscribing the angular rune of the Blood God on the bone of Kormak’s exposed skull. She continued to cradle his head in her hands, crooning soft words to him as though he were a baby. Barely a few minutes had passed before the half-dismembered warrior sat bolt upright, a yell of terrible anguish on his lips. His soul was once again shackled to his broken flesh. The rest was his decision.

‘Be calm, Kormak. Be calm.’ He stared straight ahead as long-dead memories cascaded uncontrollably into his mind. Visions of battle. Recollection of terrible fear and a moment of great calm. And darkness. He could remember the darkness.

He tried to speak, but his half-destroyed face was only good for allowing him to make dry, hollow sounds. His desperate words came out as barely more than a grunt. It did not matter, his congealing mind told him. If you can grunt and scream, you can give voice to your rage.

‘Be calm. I have given you life enough to make a choice.’

He could hear a voice. A female voice. It was both alluring and terrifying. He knew that voice. Another memory burst the surface of confusion.

Another grunt left his mouth. He could not form the shape to say her name and it came out as a drawn-out ‘a’. The three syllables of his one-time queen’s name were clear in that sound. He reached out his remaining hand towards her and the daemon princess nodded. She caught his hand tightly and clutched it to her armoured breast.

‘Yes, Kormak. Yes, it is your queen. You have a choice to make. You can serve me again and in so doing become a warrior without peer, a champion of slaughter and a taker of skulls. If you do not choose this destiny then you can accept the embrace of oblivion and the eternal darkness of what lies beyond.’

He shook his head and his twisted, distorted face moved imperceptibly as though he would smile. He mustered everything he had and managed to form a sound.

‘...ay, a.’

‘You wish to stay?’

He nodded and there was such devotion in his eyes that Valkia’s hatred for those who had led to their mutual downfall grew even more. ‘So be it,’ she said. She released him from her grip and got to her feet. Raising her spear and shield to the sky she cried out to Khorne.

A wind began to rise, whipping at the daemon princess’s mane and blowing up clouds of dust and debris from the plain. Kormak’s eyes widened in startlement at a gathering cyclonic vortex that moved towards him. Valkia watched the approaching phenomenon with a glitter of delight on her face.

‘Rise, my champion,’ she said. ‘Rise up from the long sleep and do the bidding of your queen and your lord.’ She watched as the broken, malformed Kormak was caught up by the twisting energies and lifted high into the air. His entire body stiffened, his limbs thrusting outwards and his head thrown back. No sound left him but that same long, low moaning that was all he could manage.

The storm grew violent and Valkia had to unfurl her wings simply in order to maintain her balance. She caught the updraft and rose gracefully into the air where she could watch the changes that were being wrought upon her first champion.

Already Kormak was unrecognisable. Molten brass and fire spewed from the stump of his severed arm and knotted itself into a new limb that throbbed with hateful life. A horned helm in deepest arterial crimson now covered his face and even as the Blood Queen watched, more armour plates were encasing his body. All the same deep, dark red hue, the suit was chased with brass edging and detailing. The stylised skull symbol of Khorne adorned his chest and the eight-pointed star of Chaos was repeated in black iron decals everywhere on the armour.

The grunting had stopped and for a few moments, the armoured champion made no sound at all. Then a bestial roar emanated from within the helmet. The wind dropped abruptly and the warrior plunged to the ground heavily with a crash of metal. He was back on his feet almost instantly. The armour loaned bulk and height to his muscled form, but even so, Valkia was certain that were she to strip the armour from his back, the man beneath would be far bigger than he had been in life.

Her eyes ranged over his impressive figure and she laughed in delight. With a warrior of this calibre at her side, the armies of the north would flee before her. She would scythe through them as though they were blades of grass and she would reap the skulls of the fallen.

‘I have gifts for you my champion, first among my warriors.’

Valkia beckoned to the slavering daemons and five of the creatures approached, lashed by her black will. With a twist of power she seized their monstrous forms and crushed the stuff of their existence into something altogether more fitting. They shrieked and howled as their unnatural flesh twisted and bent, running together into a mass of bone, horn and teeth. The daemonic matter seethed and bubbled until, at last, it resembled a barbed axe, the huge smile of its blade a jagged line of snapping daemonic maws.

‘You will slake their thirst for slaughter, even as you feed your own.’ Valkia purred as the horrific weapon settled into Kormak’s eager grasp.

Another curt gesture brought a steaming, iron-skinned beast thundering from the mob of daemonic minions. It lumbered obediently up to the waiting warrior and glared at him with hateful red eyes set deep within its massive, armoured head. The juggernaut pawed eagerly at the ground and Kormak stepped up into the broad saddle without hesitation.

‘Perfect,’ Valkia hissed.

She allowed her wings to lower her to the ground so that she was standing before the mounted Kormak. His formidable bulk towered over her and in a former life she would have felt a tremor of uncertainty faced with such a warrior. He was bound to her more profoundly now than he ever had been in life however, and she was his queen.

‘You are my champion now,’ she said in a commanding tone. ‘You will serve my lord first and you will serve me second. You will bind yourself to this oath and you will not falter. You will spill much blood in Khorne’s name, Kormak.’

The juggernaut reared up on its hind legs, a tower of burnished flesh and unstoppable killing might, and Kormak bellowed his bloodlust to the broken skies. The beast crashed to the ground and bent its knee to Valkia, presenting its rider. She laid the tip of Slaupnir against Kormak’s shoulder. ‘Rise, my brother,’ she said. ‘There is much to be done.’

The consort of Khorne and her champion did not have an easy journey across the wastes, but the challenges were nothing that the warrior queen could not handle. Once she stepped outside of her lord’s realm, the daemon princess was what could only be called fair game. Every minion in service to the other gods of Chaos prowled the blasted plains, waiting for her.

In life, nothing had frightened Valkia. She had known hesitation when facing enemies who called for a different strategy, but she had never been afraid beyond a glimmer of uncertainty. Her belief in her own ability and the devout faith in the Blood God had seen to that. Now, though, she was utterly fearless. Kormak, who was little more than an unstoppable golem marched wordlessly at her side, a loyal minion beyond a death that had come too soon.

Valkia did not engage Kormak in conversation beyond commands to attack. Neither of them needed rest and the only sustenance that was required was the spilling of blood and the desperate attacks of lesser daemons and warped creatures provided that in plentiful supply.

With a growing band of wild daemons, bloodthirsty beastmen and gibbering mutants at her back, the number of warbands choosing to oppose her slowly dwindled until only the most crazed, foolhardy or insane dared to meet her in battle. Blood and skulls marked their passing, a road of carnage that crossed and re-crossed the wastes as Valkia gathered ever more followers to her banner.

The warriors of Khorne walked with purpose and focus. Occasionally, Valkia would take flight, spreading her wings and relishing the glory of soaring in the skies. The first time she swooped to slaughter an enemy, she did so with a ululating scream. Like an eagle, she drove downwards, Slaupnir at the ready. Her victim never stood a chance. She soon adapted to this method of attack, delighting in the gore that was inevitably spilled.

She exulted in her new-found power and strength and as she and Kormak reached the mountains that bordered the plains, the trail of death that lay like scattered trees in her wake stood as testament to that.

In the dusty hills at the feet of the bleak mountains the war band found its first tribe.

They had never bothered with a collective name beyond ‘Chosen’. Worship of the Blood God was instilled in them from birth and the Blood Let, the first rites of a young warrior, happened at the age of four. They were savage and violent, given very much to fighting amongst themselves when there were no enemies to make war upon. Animalistic and vicious, they spoke few words.

Like the Schwarzvolf, they put great store in the visions of their shamanic leaders, although these shamen were as far removed from the Godspeakers of the Schwarzvolf as could be. These men – and women – foretold the future and read omens through bloody sacrifice. They would slaughter whatever unfortunate creature happened into their path first. Rats, hunting dogs, sometimes one of the tribe. The guts of the victim would be spilled and the shaman would read the signs in their entrails.

They were quite mad, driven beyond sanity by the endless killing and slaughter and the mutations that blighted any who spent too long near the dusty green stone. It thrust up from the earth like rotten teeth, great, lambent shards that the tribe claimed hailed from what they called God’s Realm. It was not uncommon for them to be born with extra eyes, twisted limbs and bestial features. Some were so warped that they bore little resemblance to anything remotely human.

This isolated tribe ran amok, slaughtering their way through the few others who settled on the north face of the mountain. But they never killed them all and they would leave many years between raids. Long enough for them to grow, even if just a little.

The tribe never abandoned any but the weakest to their fate, however. For them, the ability to hold a weapon and butcher anything that opposed them was all that was needed in order to please their master and to live well. And by this token, by this self-imposed ideology, they lived exceptionally well.

When the daemon princess descended from the heavens on wings of darkest night, her armour running with blood and with a warrior wearing the symbol-chased imagery of their god, they flung themselves to the ground at her feet, wailing and swearing allegiance to her before she even opened her mouth.

Her coming had been foretold many years before by one of their shamen. The iconic and primitive etchings of the winged warrior queen adorned the walls of the mountain caves in which they made their homes. Long before Valkia had even died and been reborn, long before she had stepped beyond the mortal realm, they had worshipped her as a goddess. For them, her arrival heralded a new dawn.

She did not recall the cave drawings that had held her fascination so many years before. The iconography of the winged creature that had appeared countless times in the poorly-drawn images.

Delighting in this unconditional devotion, Valkia accepted their service freely and without reserve. They were scrappy fighters; many of them were like wild animals who fought with their fingers and teeth. The many and varied weapons that they sometimes wielded however, were curious works of stone and iron. Their maker was a man of no words, his tongue having been cut out many years before during a particularly heated argument with one of his brethren. But he was also a man out of place among an unruly mob of savages. He had been born with an ability to work metals and stone and fashion the most magnificently balanced weapons, a fact that had undoubtedly given the mutant tribe it superiority over its neighbours.

‘My army needs weapons and armour worthy of Khorne,’ Valkia decreed to the smith after declaring his work far superior to any that she had seen since setting foot in the wastes. The tribesman glowed briefly under her praise and grunted his acknowledgement of her command.

Wordlessly, he took one look at the seething horde already snapping at each other in agitation. In that single glance, he took in the scale and needs of the army with the skill that those so highly practised in the art of weapon making possessed. He nodded in satisfaction and turned to his forge to begin work. Kormak glanced at Valkia and clanked after him.

The two warriors took a certain comfort in their mutual silent state, and whilst Valkia set the tribesmen upon one another in an orgy of bloodshed to earn her favour, the champion would stand motionless for long hours in the corner of the smith’s forge. Were it not for the occasional shift of position, he might simply have been a display of armour.

Within days, a steady stream of raw iron armour and cruel stone weapons began to stream from the forge, the beast-kin and twisted humans of her army revelling in the killing power it granted them. The clash of arms, the scream and howl of daemons and the agonised cries of the dying surrounded the growing horde and while blood flowed daily to appease their queen, word of the coming slaughter brought fresh warriors to her banner.

What the lone smith had begun soon became the work of many as arms and armour poured from the forge-fires and were spread amongst the war bands that now sprawled across the hills. Hundreds of skulls adorned lines of stakes that spread from the heart of the camp in eight-pointed stars. At the centre of it all Valkia sat on a throne of green stone, watching men and beasts butcher each other for her amusement while Kormak and his towering mount stood at her right hand.

Far, far away from the energy and rising hunger of Valkia’s growing army, what remained of the Schwarzvolf lived on in ignorant bliss. Reduced to endless in-fighting and squabbling, the once mighty barbarian tribe was a paltry shadow of its former self.

Soon, it would no longer matter.

FIFTEEN

DEATH OR GLORY

‘We are weak.’

‘What? I apologise, Eris. I was lost in thought.’

‘You were ignoring me.’

Edan had long trained his ear to tune out his niece’s continual complaints. For so many years he had worked hard to turn a friendly, kindly, even paternal face towards the twins. But since Bellona’s death, Eris had become unbearably difficult.

‘I was not ignoring you.’ Edan shifted position on the throne – Valkia’s throne – and gave her his most charming smile. Eris scowled in return. ‘You were discussing our strategic position.’

‘I said we were weak,’ she retorted, folding her arms across her chest. She despised it when Edan sat upon the throne of the Schwarzvolf in a casual, idle manner. His legs were resting over the arm of the seat and his indolence infuriated her. As far as she could tell, it was an open challenge on her unofficial position.

‘The same thing,’ replied Edan, still with that same smile on his face. ‘Only worded differently.’ He enjoyed watching the flare of anger that flickered across her eyes. For ten years he had played her like a finely tuned instrument, inciting her anger with a carefully placed word and sending her to war on a whim. Not as skilled a leader as her mother had been, Eris made bad decisions that had seen many good warriors lose their lives. When Bellona had no longer been present on the battlefield, it had gotten worse.

Eris returned from campaigns with fewer and fewer warriors at her back, but rarely took more than superficial injury herself. She continued to live and thrive.

More was the pity.

Still, Edan thought, a sigh on his lips, she was probably right this time. The last raid had been unexpected and for the first time the Schwarzvolf had faced the very real risk of total defeat. Fortune had favoured them however and an abrupt turn in the weather had given them the final advantage. Eris still bore the fresh wounds and bruises from the fight and she was evidently in no mood for word games.

‘Edan!’

It was serious this time. Eris only ever called him by name when she was ready to launch into him with one of her barbed and frequently violent temper tantrums.

‘Eris, calm yourself.’ Swinging himself round, Edan rose with unexpectedly lithe grace from the throne. He stood head and shoulders above her, but she did not even flinch at his proximity. She took in his form with a sneer on her face. In the past two years, the Godspeaker had run to fat. Inactivity and gluttony had padded him out considerably. He had not wielded a weapon in those two years, claiming that he had been visited in a vision. He had been told to step away from the battlefield by the gods themselves. He was too important to the people of the Schwarzvolf to be lost in the fires of war.

They had not dared question the words of the gods. The last person who had done that had been Bellona. Murdered by a man who had arrived at the camp claiming he sought her hand in marriage, Bellona’s life had bled out on the floor of the tent, her infant child stolen away from the tribe. Despite having delivered justice herself, Eris had never really gotten over her sister’s death and had always strongly suspected Edan’s hand in the matter.

‘I will not calm myself.’ She may have said the words, but Edan could tell by the way that her shoulders shook that she was doing her very best to do just that. ‘The next raid that comes will see the end of our people. Can’t you see it?’

‘They got lucky. There will be no next raid.’ Edan moved away from his wildcat of a niece and moved to a small wooden table on which stood a flagon of wine. He poured a generous measure and took a long drink. He recalled his manners and waved the flagon at Eris. She stormed across behind him and swept the remaining goblets off the table. They tumbled to the ground with a loud clatter.

Placing her palms down on the surface, she leaned in towards him, her eyes flashing with those same fires as before.

‘There will be another raid, you fool. And another. And another. And our forces are dwindling. Do you want to lose everything that my mother fought for all her life?’ She saw immediately by his expression that she had hit the mark with her first shot. She stood up straight, triumphant.

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Don’t be such an idiot, girl. Of course I do not want to see the Schwarzvolf fall. But... well...’ The hesitation was carefully studied; a master stroke. Whatever else he may have been, Edan was a superlative dissembler.

‘Well?’ Eris prompted the rest of his sentence and he raised his head to look at her sadly. His eyes were sunken in slightly yellowing skin, a by-product of failing organs that were accustomed to too much food and wine.

‘I do not wish our people to be defeated. But it is not me who leads the warriors, is it? You are the one who is failing your mother’s dream, Eris. Not I.’

She was incandescent at his words and as her hands clenched into fists, he wondered if perhaps he should have ensured he had a bodyguard detail whenever she came to see him. He let his moment of concern show as little more than a slight twitch under the right eye, which Eris was too angry to care about.

‘I can’t help it if the men under my command are weak and spineless. It is your feeble suggestion that we learn to till the land and harvest its bounty. It is you who is turning us into a weak tribe of wasted grass-eaters. I should lead my own army against your beloved farmers.’

That was it. That was the moment he had been waiting for. He pounced on it eagerly, his fat jowls wobbling with affected anger.

‘You speak of open rebellion, Eris. You would rise up against your own uncle? I have always been the better choice to lead this tribe and you know it. You are impetuous, like your mother before you, but you are not gifted with her quick mind. That was your sister’s gift, may the gods protect her in the hereafter.’

‘Never mention her in front of me.’ Eris clenched and unclenched her hands until they ached. ‘And in whose eyes are you the better choice, Edan?’ Eris fingered the hilt of her dagger. ‘I’ll tell you. Yours. That’s whose. There are none within this camp who would follow your call to battle and even if there were, they would be the farmers and the fools. And my warriors would slaughter them where they stood.’

‘Are you challenging me?’ He raised his voice slightly. It would not take much to alert others to any potential predicament he found himself in.

She thought about it. She thought about it seriously. If the fat old bastard would not let her take control, she could simple reach out and snatch it away from him. But before Bellona had been taken away, she had always told Eris to wait. She heard her sister’s voice in her head as clearly as though her beloved twin stood beside her once again.

A fool like Edan will eventually dig his own grave, my sister. All we have to do is wait until he stands at its edge… and then we push him in.

How easy it would be to push right now.

The two of them stood there in silence, both too stubborn to back away from the brewing argument. In the end, it was Eris who capitulated.

‘I hope when you die, Edan, that I am there to witness it. I will savour every moment of your demise.’

‘Are you threatening to murder me?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Because then, I wouldn’t be able to watch and enjoy it. You are safe from death at my hands, Godspeaker.’

With that, she spun on her heel, marching out of the tent and leaving the Godspeaker to dark thoughts.

Rumours of a gathering army in the north had already begun to cross the mountains. This pleased Valkia greatly, for she had ensured it was the case. It had been easy enough for her to fly beyond the borders of the frozen peaks, allow herself to be seen.

It was a glorious thing to ride the winds and soar with the creatures of the sky. She invariably chose night time to make her appearance, understanding with intuitive malevolence that terrifying as she may be to the soft-bellied people of the south during the day, her true terrible beauty was only enhanced by the velvet cloak of night. Those who saw her read the omens and spread the word of the monster in the north. The monster, they said, that was coming for them.

She built the effect gradually and when she allowed herself to scream that she would seek and slaughter the Schwarzvolf, the rumours became frenzied. Soon, word of Valkia’s existence would spread further to the south. Soon, her former people would be aware that the daemon princess was seeking them. She knew that there were those amongst the tribe who would have wisdom enough to fathom out who the monster might be. The thought filled her with warm, spiteful pleasure. That feeling swiftly became an all-consuming hunger to spill their blood.

It would be a wondrous thing to tear them apart, limb from limb.

She wanted the Schwarzvolf to know that they were being hunted. She wanted them to live in constant fear of the retribution that blew with untempered force from the roof of the world. She would hunt them down until the tribe was wiped from existence.

Such thoughts of revenge occupied her almost constantly and during battles with the warped marauders of the wastes, she killed more than one unfortunate she imagined wore the face of the cowards who had left her to die.

By day she sat upon her graven throne and watched as ever more followers flocked to her banner, eager to spill blood for Khorne and gather skulls in his name. It was not a harmonious existence as rival war bands drew together in the sprawling camp and came to blows, warring for supremacy amongst the horde and dragging the defeated before Valkia to offer her their heads. Grisly trophies adorned every tent and banner pole.

This woman-creature was idolised by the marauders who were harbouring her and she revelled in their adulation to the point of decadence. There was one individual who took pleasure in observing this.

Such indulgence, Valkia. What a disappointing bride you must be for the Lord of Blood. I will always maintain that you made the wrong choice of patron, no matter what you say.

The voice had come into her mind, dusty, dry and deeply sarcastic whilst she had been enjoying the battles of her new subjects.

‘Locephax!’

She spat the daemon prince’s name and snatched up her shield. Since Khorne had taken his hand to it, the crude nails that had held his head rigid had been removed. Now, Locephax was an integral feature of the shield, which had grown in size and stature. The face of the monster stared out from its eternal prison, locked in swathes of the same daemon leather that covered the plates of Valkia’s armour.

The cruel mouth turned upwards in a smile at the warrior queen’s attention and Locephax spoke aloud.

‘You look different,’ he observed. ‘Did you change your hair?’

‘Still your tongue, slave,’ she countered, her eyes blazing with red fury. ‘You are mine to command. You would do well to remember that before you speak. It would take but a stitch to close your mouth permanently.’

But I can always speak to you, Valkia. I may be enslaved by your child-god, but I am not without power of my own.

She was quiet for a long period as she gathered her thoughts together. She had all but forgotten the infuriating nature of the Slaaneshi daemon that she held in thrall, but was quietly grateful that he had spoken up. He was right. Caught up in the wave of fanatical worship, she had forgotten herself. But not any longer.

‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Speak no more. I have an army to raise.’

With a smirk, Locephax closed his eyes and was still once more. He may be forever bound to the consort of Khorne, but he had been considerably powerful in his own right. Just because he had to serve her, he did not have to do so willingly.

None could agree on a description. Some said that the airborne daemon that flew on wings of night from the realm of the gods was a faceless creature. Others swore that the monster possessed a very definite feminine shape. No single person claimed to have looked upon its visage and lived.

She – he – it – appeared only at night, a silhouette against the light of the moons and these sightings were rarely corroborated. From the whispered rumours, exaggerated stories evolved with an alacrity that defied belief.

Without solid facts, the story of the winged beast became something uncontrollable. It grew in size, picking up speed as grave tales were told around camp fires. Within days, it had spread to neighbouring tribes, growing and becoming more terrible with each retelling. Small children believed that if they were punished, the ‘crimson daemon’ would come for them and feast on their flesh or make off with their soul.

Within days, the tale had a life of its own.

Within a few more, they would stop being stories and start to become harsh, terrifying realities. After Valkia and her army surged from the north, there would be no more stories. There would only be bloody slaughter.

There had never been any doubt at all that the marauders would follow her into battle and as Valkia had watched them stream up the pass, wearing an assortment of crude armour made by their own mad smiths and that which they had scavenged over the years, she felt a swell of pride. These were warriors who may not have possessed the sense of unity of a disciplined fighting force like she had groomed the Schwarzvolf to be, but who were wild and savage in their ferocity and bloodlust.

In the course of a few short days, barely two weeks, she had wrought them from a manic force of disparate tribes and war bands into something entirely more terrible. The most formidable warriors she set as squad commanders and they embraced the role with eagerness, frequently doling out surprisingly creative punishments to their less intelligent underlings.

They fought viciously and were entirely without fear. More than one of the influx had seen fit to challenge Kormak’s position at the head of the army. All of them, man, woman or beast, had died without coming remotely close to making so much as a dent in the warrior’s armour, but their efforts had been pleasing.

Valkia found herself fascinated by her champion. Her memories of Kormak as a human were fragmented and disjointed by the inconstant passage of time. She knew that he could not have been as imposing as he was now. That she had created something so physically impressive and intimidating was testament to her sheer potency. When Kormak took his place at the head of the horde, ready to lead the march south, he struck an impressive figure.

Valkia rose into the air, her wings barely moving, and gazed down on the serpentine, irregular line. It was a formidable gathering of warriors and she knew that there would be many battles on the way. She also knew that some of the beings and creatures that called the storm-lashed mountains home would instantly give her their allegiance, recognising in her the same thing that the Chosen had done.

Many of these warriors, mutated and warped into monstrous things that could barely pass as human, would die on the journey south. The fact they not only didn’t care but were eager to do so was more than satisfactory.

It matters not whose blood is spilled. Only that it is spilled.

‘Your wish is my command, my lord and master,’ she murmured aloud before screaming the order to march. They would gather allies and numbers as they travelled. Everything else would be incidental.

The first thing they encountered was glorious battle. Within hours of breaking camp and beginning their ascent, the first of the Chosen’s rival tribes struck at them.

They came through the dry, petrified forest that clung to the mountainside above the cave system that the Chosen called home and they struck with a force that took the armoured vanguard completely by surprise.

Valkia grudgingly gave them a modicum of respect when one of the first to attack went straight for Kormak. She gave no order, preferring instead to drop into the main battle. Her champion was more than capable of dealing with his own situation.

The threat was greeted joyfully and the Chosen threw themselves at their enemy with a vigour that demonstrated their fearlessness perfectly. Engaged in a battle with a burly warrior who was naked but for the fur loincloth that covered his groin, Valkia’s attention flitted around the battlefield. This was the first time she had been in true battle since she had been reborn and everything was so different, so alive and filled with the promise of glory.

Whenever blood was spilled, her senses fired. She could scent the opening of every wound as though it had happened on her own body. The pervading odour of copper and salty vitae that swiftly dominated her olfactory senses drove her into a frenzy. She needed to spill blood in a way she had never needed before.

The very thought of it sent every part of her body into a wild frenzy. She began to salivate in anticipation and her tensed muscles sang with the sheer thrill of carrying out her grisly duty. She raised Slaupnir high above her head and screamed out his name. It rang out in the still, winter air and then the clash of weapons overrode everything.

The berserker rage took hold of not only Valkia, but many of her army as well, and they threw themselves into the fray with frenzied madness. What ensued could not be described as a clean or ordered fight in any way. The opposing sides were unbalanced from the beginning, the attackers relying on their advantage of surprise, but Valkia’s army were entirely more bloodthirsty and threw caution completely to the wind.

Kormak thundered through the throng of fighting bodies, his massive daemonic axe swinging in powerful overhead strokes that split more than one of the enemy from throat to hip, spilling their innards in a glistening pile. One blow landed with such brutal force that an entire top quarter of the unfortunate man’s body was sheared away and slid messily to the ground. The remainder of the ruined corpse stood for a second or two, gore and bile spewing forth in fountains before it was crushed to paste beneath the bulk of the rampaging juggernaut. The champion stooped in the saddle and delivered a blow to his next target that opened his ribcage in a welter of ragged flesh and shattered ribs. The frenzied daemonic jaws chewed hungrily at the meat, consuming the barbarian’s throbbing heart with a keening wail of pleasure.

Valkia noticed very little of this. For her, the entire fight passed in a semi-conscious haze of red. All that mattered was the total and utter annihilation of those who stood between her and her revenge. Perhaps it was this thought that dragged her from the maddened state of bloodlust and brought her up sharply.

Spreading her wings, the warrior queen rose into the air above the battlefield.

‘Warriors of the north!’ Her voice rang out loud and clear, audible to all. ‘Warriors of the north, I give you a choice.’ Her wings beat gently, a hypnotic rhythm and the sound of her voice was compelling. Slowly, very slowly, the battle force on the ground beneath her slowed until all, Chosen and enemy alike, were staring up at the beautiful, blood-spattered woman who gazed down on them.

‘The choice is simple. You can lay your weapons at my feet. Follow me and the host of the Blood God and know reward like you have never known.’

She gave them a smile, slow, sensuous and winning. Her beautiful, alabaster-pale face positively glowed with a feigned benevolence that was at odds with the ribbons of scarlet that marred her skin. The blood that had been spilled on her armour went unnoticed, absorbed into the plates forever. ‘I promise you this. My lord is a generous one. Those who serve him well do not go unnoticed. Join me now and you will revel in conquest and bloodshed.’

‘And if we do not?’ One voice rose above the hushed awe that had spread around the remainder of the battlefield.

‘Are you so foolish that you do not know our creed? It is a simple thing to decide, barbarian. Death... or glory. But I suggest you decide quickly.’ Gangly, crimson-skinned creatures were prowling through the throng toward the enemy tribe, their wicked blades still hungry for blood. Valkia dropped to the battlefield and walked towards the man who had spoken. Despite the hoofed feet in which her long, slender legs now ended, she walked with easy grace and with an exaggerated feminine sway to her hips which may have been intentional.

The Chosen watched her with sheer adoration evident in their eyes as she stood before the barbarian. She cupped his chin in her hand and gave him a smile.

‘Which will it be, sweet one?’ Her lips parted slightly in a pout and she closed her eyes briefly. It was an almost demure gesture. Her long lashes brushed her cheekbones. When they opened again, he saw the truth of her words. He stared into those daemonic, burning eyes and was hopelessly lost.

‘Glory,’ he whispered brokenly, and was rewarded with a dazzling smile that made him fall eternally in love with the Blood Queen. ‘Give me glory.’

‘As you wish,’ she said and drove Slaupnir through his gut. He did not cry out, but spread his arms wide, welcoming the death that had to come before he received his reward.

All around the battlefield, voices rang out in indignation at what was seen as a blatant betrayal of one of their own and for a moment or two, it looked as though the fight would recommence. As the body of the half-naked barbarian slid gracelessly to the ground, Valkia tugged Slaupnir free and drew her wings tightly around herself momentarily like a leathery cocoon. She raised one hoofed foot and placed it squarely on the dead man’s chest.

‘Thus does my master reward the loyal,’ she whispered down into his unseeing eyes. She stooped down and with one delicately clawed finger carved the angular rune of Khorne into the dead man’s forehead. Blood welled up from the cuts and spilled down his face in thick, scarlet streams. With a rush of air, her wings stretched out to their full span and she threw back her head. Her arms reached for the skies above and she felt the gift of her consort’s power thrum through her.

‘I give you glory,’ she said loudly. ‘Rise up, my loyal subject. Live once more in service of the Blood God. You see this?’ She gestured to the body, her eyes raking the warriors on the field. ‘Witness this. This is true glory. The moment you understand.’ The corpse spasmed under her foot and she stepped off him, reaching down a hand to aid him to his feet.

He staggered slightly as he retained his balance, but then took his place at Valkia’s side and brandished his sword in triumph. There was a wild, fey light in his eyes, devoid of any trace of humanity and a feral snarl of bloodlust distorted his features into something monstrous.

A silence lingered, but then across the battlefield, the former enemy fell to their knees one by one, awed at such a display of power. Their voices rose in a swell, repeating the one word over and over until it was all that could be heard.

‘Glory!’

Valkia’s lips drew back in a hungry and eager smile. ‘Deliver them to my side,’ she said to her newest subject. ‘Bring them everlasting glory.’

She had stormed from her uncle’s presence and her angry feet had taken her far from home. Eris was not alarmed to realise how long she had been walking. She often came out to the hunting grounds by herself. It had been a habit borne from years of losing her temper. Walking calmed her, she had always found.

Once, Bellona would have come after her.

Eris could still not quite articulate just how much she missed her sister. Ever since her twin’s violent death, her world had become a darker place. She had grieved for the loss of her mother in an almost detached way. Valkia had never really shown much in the way of affection towards her children. But Bellona had been her twin. Her other half. To lose that was as agonising as losing a limb.

Bereft of her twin’s calming influence, Eris had thrown herself into the skirmishes and battles that occupied the Schwarzvolf. It had not been until a number of years had passed that the young woman had realised that they were no longer fighting to conquer. Now, they were fighting simply to survive. Tribes who had once rallied to Valkia’s call had turned against them.

From being the greatest, most powerful tribe, the Schwarzvolf were little more than a pale shadow of their former selves.

Eris dropped down beneath the ancient tree that marked the very edge of the Schwarzvolf territorial boundaries. Sited halfway up a small hill, it had always afforded a superb view of not only the Vale, but of the surrounding lands. Usually, there were lookouts stationed up here. Eris noted with a sour face, that nobody was here. She would have to speak to her uncle about that.

Since Hepsus had died at her hands, there had been no long-term Warspeaker, although Eris herself had offered to take on the role. She had been humiliated in front of the Circle when Edan had said that she was too immature, too inexperienced to lead the Schwarzvolf’s armies into battle. A succession of young men had taken the position only to fall in the endless struggles for supremacy.

Staring down over the Vale, Eris’s eyes narrowed as she thought. For too long now she had put up with her uncle’s self-destructive ways. For the first few years, Bellona’s hand had stayed her from simply slotting a knife into his gut. After her sister’s death, a sense of duty to her dead sibling had held her back. But his words this morning had finally pushed Eris to a place where there was only one thing on her mind.

Edan must die. His continued existence threatened the continued survival of the tribe. His gluttony was unbearable to watch and above anything else, she detested him. Blood-related he may be, but she had never liked him. Once so softly spoken and confident, he now oozed arrogance from every pore that stank almost as much as the rest of his unwashed body.

Staring across the Vale, the sprawling settlement of the Schwarzvolf was vast and industrious. The insipid farmers were gathering in the last of the year’s crops, ready for the winter and there were children running everywhere. But there was no clash of steel. There were no shouts that had always accompanied the endless combat in the Circle of Blood that had once marked the warrior tribe.

They were soft-bellied and vulnerable. The Schwarzvolf would die if something did not happen soon. And it was up to her to salvage whatever she could of her mother’s legacy.

Leaning back, her eyes closed, Eris allowed herself to meditate quietly. She had never been very good at the practise; clearing her mind had never come easily. She could rarely concentrate on any one thing for long enough to keep her mind focused. But today was different. Today, she had something to focus on.

The faintest of smiles crept onto her lips as she envisioned how much pleasure she would glean from taking her uncle’s life.

The scout arrived back in the Vale three days later. Despite his desire to live a ‘peaceful life’ as he put it, Edan ensured that scouts were regularly dispatched to keep abreast of occurrences in the lands beyond his immediate remit, a world that was getting smaller and smaller by the day.

‘Rumours,’ said the scout when pressed for news. ‘Rumours and wild tales are circulating. An army marches from the far north, from the realm of the gods themselves. If the rumours are to be believed, this horde is heading southwards.’ He took a long drink of water. He was looking flustered and anxious.

‘We have handled would-be invaders before.’ Edan shrugged off the news with indifference. The scout reached up a tentative hand and gripped the other man’s arm.

‘I only have the stories I was told to go by,’ he said, his eyes wide and more than a little afraid. ‘But this is no rogue war band of mindless wildmen! The army is swelling in size as it travels. They are led by a winged daemon in blood-red armour.’

‘Myths, legends and campfire tales,’ sneered Edan and with that, he dismissed the threat as ridiculous.

‘How can you be so sure?’ Eris asked the question. Startled, Edan turned. He had not even heard her approach. ‘We are surrounded by enemies. From what you and Hepsus said, my mother may have angered countless others on her journey north. Perhaps they have merely been biding their time. Waiting for…’ Her eyes glittered and her top lip drew back in a sneer. ‘Waiting for just the right moment to strike.’

Edan sensed, without knowing how, that there was something more than just a warning about a potential attacking army implicit in Eris’s voice. For the first time, he suddenly saw his niece as a genuinely serious threat.

She needs to be dealt with.

The thought swept through him and he returned her sneer with a friendly smile.

‘It has been many years, child,’ he said in his most condescending tone. Eris, who had long since grown to womanhood, always found it irritating and well he knew it. ‘If some paltry tribe in the north was offended by our victories over their feeble warriors, they have had many long years to strike back. Why now?’ He waved a dismissive hand and poured himself more wine. ‘It is ridiculous to believe such talk.’

‘And the rumours of the daemon at the head of the army? You think that is something that can easily be dismissed? Surely you do not so swiftly forget the creature who challenged my mother?’ Eris spat on the ground. ‘Was that ridiculous?’

She had found a weak spot in Edan’s armour of self-confidence. Memories of the daemonic thing that had battled Valkia and laid waste to the Schwarzvolf frequently returned in his dreams. He had never been able to truly reconcile its existence. The sheer power the thing had possessed, even when decapitated and mounted on his sister’s shield, had fed his curiosity and in turn had given him a lust for power.

Eris ran her fingers through her hair, then stood firm, her hands planted squarely on her hips.

‘I suggest that we heed these rumours of coming war. I believe we should send scouts into the mountains to watch the peaks and passes. Such an army could not move unnoticed and we need to know if there is a real threat. Because perhaps it may not even be a threat at all.’

‘I do not think…’

‘That much is evident, Uncle.’

It was a swift reply that took Edan completely by surprise. His jaw dropped slightly and Eris took the immediate opportunity to assert her authority.

‘Our numbers are declining. Our ability to defend ourselves is becoming weak at best. If there is a legion of warriors travelling this way, then perhaps we could approach them. Consider an alliance.’ Eris gave the scout a winning smile. ‘We could regain some of the strength that made us the greatest, most feared tribe for so long. The Schwarzvolf will be great again.’

The scout nodded eagerly. Like many of the tribe’s younger warriors, his memories of their time under Valkia’s leadership were broken and vague. He had been little more than a child when Valkia had led her army north. His memory, when forced to recall his former leader, remembered a beautiful face, a strong soul and a leader who knew every man, woman and child under her leadership by name.

Those same memories never recalled the cruelty, the harsh punishments that she would mete out to those who disappointed her, or the screams that came from the tortured souls who dared try to take Schwarzvolf land.

How easy it was to forget.

The scout’s heart swelled with eager pride at Eris’s words and the young woman turned to her uncle with a look of vindictive triumph on her face.

‘You see, Uncle? Not all of us have lost faith in our heritage.’

Determined not to let the little witch get the better of him, Edan regained his composure swiftly. He nodded, putting what he hoped was a sincere expression on his face. ‘You speak true words, my child,’ he said in an imperious tone. ‘And you are quite, quite right. We will send out scouts as you suggest.’

‘An excellent plan, Uncle,’ Eris treated him to a rare smile of genuine pleasure. He had acted just as she had anticipated.

‘Perhaps you might want to lead them?’ It was an immediate counter. And Eris agreed readily. Just as Edan had known she would. Whatever it was she was scheming was as nothing next to the plan he was formulating himself.

Valkia sat perched on a rocky outcrop, the full moons bright behind her. Her slender form was perfectly silhouetted. To anyone looking up into the night sky, she seemed so still as to be a statue. Her head was raised slightly, the curving horns sweeping gracefully from her head. The wings that bore her aloft and gave her such mastery of the skies were partially opened as she retained her balance.

The shield bearing the head of Locephax was strapped to her arm and Slaupnir lay at rest beside her. Far beneath her, the army of men, beasts and fell creatures was gathered in near silence. There was none of the laughter and camaraderie that the tribal war parties enjoyed, but this was in part due to the nature of Valkia’s followers.

They sat in disparate groups, each eyeing the other with wary respect. Through half-lidded eyes, Valkia considered them. They were violent berserkers for the most part. Some were barely even still human. In the space of a few short days, they had killed so many and slaughtered so willingly in Khorne’s name that it took every mote of self-control to stop themselves tearing each other limb from limb.

A winged creature of the night, a bat, perhaps, flew past the daemon princess and she sniffed the air in its wake. The creature smelled of the high, pine woods. Valkia’s army had travelled far enough to reach the vast forest that hugged the southern slopes of the mountains. The next few days would take them beyond its borders and into the bleak troll country.

She knew she would not struggle to bind them to her will. Already a number of other misshapen, twisted monsters who roamed the rim of the blighted wastes stalked the shadows surrounding the horde. Chimerae, great wolves and slinking reptilian things clung to the darkness, drawn to the promise of blood. The trolls would seem almost mundane next to some of the monstrosities who loped behind the army, not wishing to get close to the warriors, but desperate to serve their queen. She tipped her head imperceptibly to peer into the gloom. She could see these malefic creatures, moving about in the hard shadows cast by the light of such bright moonlight.

The gathering force beneath her was a tool. It would break upon the Schwarzvolf with the name of Khorne raised in adulation. Both sides would die in droves, but that was all she craved; blood and skulls and endless slaughter. Her army, those who followed and served her, would receive their reward when they reached the red plains of the Blood God.

Those who had betrayed her...

Valkia’s fingers, each topped with curved talon-like nails closed tightly around the rock she was gripping. It crumbled beneath her touch and tiny fragments fell to the ground below in a shower of particulate dust.

She unfurled her wings and rose into the night sky. In a matter of days, battle would be joined. There was little time to spend planning the revenge she so sought, but there would be an eternity in which to relish it.

SIXTEEN

NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES

His dreams were getting worse with each passing day, but Edan could not let anybody see the state in which he woke. Sweat bathed his night garments, soaking into the rough blanket under which he slept. His thinning hair was plastered to his skull and his breath came in shallow gulps when he jolted awake.

At one time, Edan had entertained the company of his pick of the young women of the tribe. Ten years ago, he had been desirable. No issue ever came forth from him, despite his best efforts to produce children. It had been a constant thorn in his side. If he had been able to produce an heir, his stake on the Schwarzvolf throne would be that much stronger.

Now he was not a desirable or coveted man. His decadent lifestyle had padded out his once-slender frame grotesquely. He rarely bathed and he had a reputation for violent rages that meant the women of the tribe largely avoided him. He was still reluctantly afforded the respect due the tribe’s Godspeaker however.

Edan could not pinpoint the exact moment that his life had gone out of his immediate control. Perhaps it had been in the darkest reaches of the north, when the head of Locephax the daemon prince of Slaanesh had whispered promises of great reward...

Pushing himself up from the pallet upon which he slept, Edan crossed to the bowl of ice water and splashed it on his face, trying to shed the clinging vestiges of the nightmare. He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as though that could somehow chase away the headache that throbbed at the base of his skull.

He picked up a piece of clothing, one of the outsize tunics that were all that fit his rotund frame any more. He drew it on over his head and dragged fingers through his still-damp hair. An appalling stink of alcohol hit him and he realised with alarm that it was him. Not the tunic, although that was reasonably pungent in its own right, but Edan himself. The sweat had chased all the lingering alcohol from the previous night’s excess from his pores.

‘I should bathe,’ he mused, then immediately discounted the idea when his stomach growled in hunger. For Edan, the path to decadence had not come at the price of lust and sexual perversion. For him, it had been an entirely different route. But the touch of Locephax on his weak mind had been irreversible. The damage had been done and he was a slave of the god he knew as the Reveller.

It was, perhaps, a mercy that his corruption was entirely contained. The majority of the tribe had retained such strong warrior urges that his attempts to seduce them to what he called the finer things of life mostly fell on deaf ears. So he kept his gluttony and sloth to himself and enjoyed every moment he spent forcing food and wine down his throat. He was lazy and indifferent to the problems that the Schwarzvolf were suffering.

The nightmares were most likely a byproduct of all the rich food and alcohol that he was consuming. He told himself that on a regular basis in the hope that it might explain the sheer horror of his sleeping hours.

His head was pounding and he sat down on the hard, carved wooden seat at the end of his pallet-bed. Leaning back, he scratched at the wild, unkempt beard on his chin and closed his eyes.

The horror of the dream slammed back into his skull with an intensity that set his fat body quivering. He gripped the arms of the chair as though he were pitching into a fit and fell headlong into the terror that welled up in him.

‘Where am I’?

His voice echoed around the landscape. Everything was tinged with a hint of red as though his pupils bled. He felt a tremendous urge to reach up and rub vigorously at them to clear his vision, but he could not move anything but his head.

No answer came to his question, so he called out once again. He felt the faintest of brushes against his cheek as though something flew past him and tried to move away. Whatever was holding him rigid…

He glanced down. Ropes lashed around his body, holding him firmly against a wooden pole that was driven into the ground. The thick coils bound around him like a serpent, holding him tightly. He could not feel them, but surely they must be biting into his flesh.

‘This is not real,’ he called into the emptiness. ‘I am not really here. I am dreaming.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ came a whispering voice. It was barely a voice at all, more a low purr. Edan was immediately reminded of the mountain lions that had plagued their trip to the Northern Wastes. There had been one foolish boy who had tried fighting one and lost his arm. ‘You may be dreaming this, Edan, son of Merroc, but this is as real as I want it to be.’

He felt that same brush against his face and flinched. There was nobody here with him, unless they stood directly behind the stake, just out of his extreme peripheral vision. The thought made his bowels twist with anxiety.

The touch on his cheek ended abruptly and he heard a new sound. Wings, beating slowly. A faint breeze that lifted his thin hair from his head. His breathing came in low rasps, his chest restricted by his bonds.

‘Who are you? What is this?’ His voice was rising in pitch and urgency and it was all he could do not to scream his terror into the darkness. The reply came to him in multiple voices, from different directions, and still no sign of the speaker.

‘I am the guilt that has hunted you all these years, Edan.’

‘I am the harbinger of your demise.’

‘I am the nightmare in all mortals. I am the thing you fear the most.’

‘I am death.’

Edan began to cry like a babe. Huge tears formed in the corners of his eyes and rolled unchecked down his cheeks. ‘I am dreaming,’ he said.

‘Dreaming? Yes.’ Finally, the voice resolved into something much clearer. It was a female voice. ‘But not for much longer. Soon, this dream will become your reality, Edan.’

He said nothing in response, merely hiccupped his misery as the tears continued to fall. The unseen enemy laughed spitefully.

‘The great and powerful Edan. See him weeping like a child.’

‘What do you want?’ He wept the sentence out through his shameful tears. The silence following the question was aching in its length. Then he felt a clawed hand grab at his hair and pull his head back against the stake.

‘Revenge.’

He could clearly feel the point of the blade as it entered his throat just below the left ear.

Then a sudden, terrible pain.

Then…

‘Godspeaker? Are you well?’

Edan’s hand flew to his throat and he blinked rapidly to clear the haze of blood. He was sitting in the main council tent. The Circle were absent and try as he might, Edan could not recall at all the moment he had left his own tent and made his way there.

‘What?’ He stared around at the owner of the voice. It belonged to a young man who was vaguely familiar. He knew the boy. One of the tribe’s scouts. The name escaped him and he did nothing to recall it. ‘What do you mean? Of course I am well.’ He hesitated. ‘Why would I not be?’

‘You were just sitting, staring off into space. As though you were having some sort of vision. Are the gods trying to send you a vision of what is to come?’ The young scout was eager that this be the case. He had witnessed Edan’s incoherent babblings before and always found it a thrilling thing to be in the presence of the gods themselves. That was how Edan explained it. He was merely a conduit through which the Four could communicate with their loyal followers.

‘The gods? No. I...’ Edan slowly removed his hand from his throat and gave a short laugh. ‘I was, shame upon my soul, daydreaming. My attention drifted. I slept poorly last night and I am not as young as I used to be. Perhaps a cup of wine...’ He let the sentence trail off. The young scout stared at him in fascination for a moment before realising it was an order rather than a suggestion.

‘Of course, Godspeaker.’ Without a further word, the youth disappeared from the tent to fetch Edan’s wine, leaving the man alone. Groaning softly, Edan let his head drop into his hands.

‘I am going mad,’ he muttered to himself. He genuinely had no recall of the time spent between waking and moving to the tent of the Circle. Had there even been a meeting? Had he sat through it like some sort of fool?

Perhaps you are mad, came that female purr in the back of his mind. It was a horrible sensation, as though the inside of his skull was itching. Perhaps you are still asleep. Perhaps this is all still a part of your dream.

‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘No. This is real.’ He lifted his arm. He was not restrained or tied in any way. There was no blood on his body and he could feel the bite of the air outside the thick hide tent. ‘This is who I am. I am Edan, son of Merroc. I am the rightful chieftain of the Schwarzvolf tribe. I am...’

‘You are talking to yourself.’

Eris stood in the entrance of the tent, that infuriating sneer on her face. In her hand, she held the cup that the scout had fetched. She had intercepted him on his way back to the tent and informed him that she would deliver it herself. She had come into the tent to find Edan with his face in his hands, muttering to himself.

The Godspeaker straightened his back. The girl had caught him at a disadvantage, something she had a disturbing habit of doing. But he would not give her any satisfaction.

‘And what of it?’ His response was haughty. ‘It is the only way to be sure of a truly intelligent conversation at the best of times.’

‘Best not let the Circle hear you say that,’ she said in a conversational tone that infuriated him. ‘They already think you are on the path to madness.’ She moved across and set the cup of wine down next to him.

‘They do not,’ he replied. ‘Watch your tone, Eris.’

‘You are so sure? Very well.’ She shrugged one slender shoulder. ‘I will leave you to your ranting. I have things to be doing. She cast a brief, telling glance at the wine. ‘Enjoy that, won’t you?’

With that, she left the tent. Edan scowled after her back and leaned back in the chair. He mopped at his sweating brow and took up the cup of wine. He raised it to his lips.

Revenge comes in many forms, Edan.

The thought came unbidden and he stared at the cup. He would not have put it past Eris to poison him. Perhaps that was where these hallucinations were coming from.

With a bellow of fury, Edan threw the cup across the tent, the blood-red wine spilling as it went.

Their numbers were swollen beyond anything Valkia had anticipated. It was as though their mere passage through the hills and mountains created a vortex that drew more to their bloodthirsty cause. The recruitment of the trolls had been a remarkably easy matter. On seeing Valkia descend from the skies, they had immediately grunted their acknowledgement of her rightful leadership and begun shambling along behind the marching army.

The faintest of memories tickled the back of Valkia’s mind as she remembered the battle against them on their journey north. How the wheel turned.

Daily, they edged closer to the borders of Schwarzvolf lands. Daily, she invaded her brother’s dreams with increasingly terrifying images and thoughts. The closer they were to Edan’s location, the easier it became to torment her betrayer.

The army travelled mostly by night, when the wild and damned things of the darkness would crawl from their holes and slither in among the horde. Sometimes, Valkia would descend from the heavens and prowl among her devoted legion of killers. Her tread stained the earth with fresh blood and a hissing mob of daemons followed in her wake, butchering any that dared stray too close to their unholy queen. A pair of huge, carmine hounds stalked at her flanks, their jaws dripping fiery spittle and their broad necks adorned with tendrils of daemonic flesh that fanned out like blades.

They were her hunters, Khorne’s peerless killers of men, and each night they would range far and wide around the marching army and sniff out barbarian scouts who thought themselves hidden from prying eyes. The tribes would not know of the doom that descended upon them until the axe was at their neck and their blood already stained the thirsty earth.

Her army needed no training, for they themselves were the weapon. They needed no food, for they feasted on the flesh of the fallen, and they needed no rest as Valkia drove them on with her iron will and inflamed their own insatiable lust for battle.

Their passage through the forest was met with no resistance. Everything that dwelt there either had sense enough to go into hiding or was eager to join with the daemon princess. By the time the land was levelling out, the slopes of the mountains falling behind them and the weather becoming bitingly cold, the hunger and thirst for the spilling of blood could no longer be contained and neither did Valkia attempt to contain it.

They were legion, out for war and out for revenge. But there were also bloody appetites that needed to be sated. And once they cleared the reaches of the far north, hunger for war became the ultimate driving force.

By the light of the setting moons, Valkia’s army spilled into the settlement. Their approach had not gone undetected and the resident warriors were ready for an attack. The settlement belonged to a tribe who had once proudly flocked to the banner of the Schwarzvolf, but had long since broken away to resume their prior independence. They had been one of the many.

The Queen of Skulls was not to know that they no longer swore allegiance to her former tribe. As far as she was concerned, they had arrived at the doorstep of her enemy and she unleashed her horde upon them without compunction.

The arrival of Valkia’s army had not been anticipated for several days, but the force that surged across the steppe had become vast and the earth shook beneath their tread, heralding their approach. The tribes of the north were always prepared for battle however. Within minutes of catching sight of the foe bearing down on them, they had ensured that their young and vulnerable were already on their way to the nearby cave system where they took shelter when absolutely necessary.

When the first cries of ‘enemy approaching’ were heard, they stood ready. But for all their experience and ferocity, they were ill-equipped and totally underprepared for the reality that followed.

A preliminary wave of warriors led the charge, their feet thundering as they gained momentum in their eagerness to slaughter. They were met with fierce but entirely inadequate resistance.

Starved of battle during the trek through the mountains, Valkia’s army ripped their way through the helpless barbarians without mercy, killing every living thing that stood in their way. When the last of the people had been slain, they started on the livestock. As the last of the creatures fell beneath a battle-axe they turned upon each other.

Valkia herself did not join in until it reached the closing stages. When her own warriors fell on one another like the animals they were, she merely watched for a while, enjoying the slaughter. There was something maternal about seeing these beasts and warriors turn on one another. Each understood clearly the basic tenet of the Blood God.

‘It matters not from whence the blood flows,’ she intoned as she stalked through the battle. In her wake, the fighting gradually ceased. Those who still lived and were able to drop to their knee, or incline their heads in a respectful bow, did so. ‘So long as it flows.’ At her side rode the ever-silent Kormak, his mighty blade sheathed across his back.

The camp had been rendered into little more than a charnel house, an occasionally twitching mound of corpses that had been torn apart. Blood, gore and faecal matter loaned a foul stench to the air that, for Valkia, merely added an olfactory highlight to the sweet taste of murderous revenge.

‘Where are your women and children?’ Valkia reached down and easily hauled up a mortally wounded warrior. The man was a pitiful wreck. One eye had been burst by troll-vomit and ran in a jelly down his bloodied cheek. His tunic was soaked through with red and his life was measured in minutes.

‘Safe,’ came the croaked reply. ‘Where you will never find them.’

‘Never is a long time, mortal,’ Valkia crooned softly. ‘And unlike you, time is something I have plenty of. You may be on the verge of death, but I have ways of keeping you here for as long as I wish. Why suffer the torments of the flesh that will be visited upon you? Tell me what I want to know and you earn yourself a swift end.’

‘I will not betray...’

‘Betrayal?’ Valkia threw the man to the ground and he lay still. He was not quite yet dead, but something told him that he may stand a better chance of survival if he feigned otherwise. ‘You dare speak to me of betrayal? When I was betrayed by those I led to greatness? It is my sworn vow that the tribes of the Schwarzvolf will burn!’ Her voice rose in pitch until she was screaming her fury at the dying warrior.

‘I will tear them down one man at a time if I must. There will be no mercy.’ She had already determined not to give them the choice of death or glory. For the betrayers, there would be only the long darkness of oblivion. She put her cloven-hoofed foot on the neck of the unfortunate barbarian. ‘Now tell me what I want to know. Where are the rest of your people? Or should I have my pets hunt them down in their craven holes?’

One of the immense beasts lowered its drooling muzzle to sniff at the wounded warrior and a tectonic rumble sounded deep in its cavernous chest. Crimson lips peeled back to expose fangs as long as a man’s arm and its tiny eyes glittered with undisguised malice.

‘My attentions will be... swifter, to say the least,’ Valkia purred.

‘I will... never...’ He began to speak, and with a faintly bored expression, Valkia exerted extra weight on her foot. The villager heard the bone at the top of his spine crack loudly. The pain, which followed a split second later, was excruciating. He had so little strength that he could not even scream and a gasp of agony left his mouth. Moments later, a barely comprehensible stream of words was uttered.

‘Caves. They’re in the caves.’

‘Of course they are.’ With a nonchalant movement, Valkia stamped down on the man’s spine. His back broke in two instantly and the body arched backwards at an unnatural angle. The light in his eyes died out slowly and she savoured it. After a few moments, she stood clear of the corpse.

‘Kormak.’ She beckoned her champion close. ‘There are matters I must attend to in preparation for the slaughter that awaits us. Therefore, I leave this hunt to you. Find the caves. It should not be too difficult given the stench of weakness that seeps from these soft creatures.’ She indicated some of the more feral amongst her army. More beast than man, they were burying their snouts in the gore and viscera that was on offer. ‘Find the survivors and spill their blood in my name.’ She gave him a radiant smile. ‘Spare none.’

The champion nodded his understanding and set off to carry out his mistress’s bidding. The daemon princess looked around at the camp, its tents and layout so reminiscent of things that she had pressed far into her memory, and a sneer marred her features.

‘Burn it,’ she said. ‘Burn it all.’

The rumours became reality in a far shorter space of time than Edan could ever have feared. The initial claims that a daemonic army was moving south had been shrugged off as overreaction. But the scout currently standing before the Circle brought different news.

‘Speak.’ Edan waved a hand in an indifferent manner towards the young man who was noticeably pink in the face from his exertions. The youth inclined his head respectfully.

‘The Red Hawks are no more,’ he said. Edan sat up a little straighter at this news. The Red Hawk tribe had been one of their former allies, in times past. They had been one of the first to break their ties following Valkia’s death and had resumed their own independence. They had never been opposed to the Schwarzvolf, but there had always been a faint suspicion that they could turn at any time.

‘When you say “no more”,’ Edan asked, voicing the question with obvious care, ‘do you mean that they have been driven off their lands?’

‘No, Godspeaker.’ The scout accepted a cup of water gratefully and downed it. ‘Two of our fastest runners have been sent to check over their camp. But word is that they have been slaughtered to a man. None have been left alive.’

‘We will wait to hear from our men then,’ declared Edan. ‘This could be a trap on their part to draw us in.’ Eris, sitting beside him, nodded her agreement at this.

‘Foolish rumours can get out of hand too quickly,’ she acknowledged, reaching an accord with her uncle for once. ‘The question we should be addressing now is what we should do if these tales have any truth to them? We must track whoever carried out such an attack.’

Edan did not reply. If the Red Hawks, a fierce war band in their own right had truly been obliterated, then the Schwarzvolf faced a deadly enemy. But for now, these were unsubstantiated claims. He said nothing in response to Eris’s rhetorical question and she answered it for him.

‘I do not think that it would harm us to prepare for war. Just in case.’ Around the tent, the other members of the Circle nodded eagerly. Eris glanced at the Godspeaker, but Edan was lost in his own thoughts. His dreams had come to haunt him again, only this time it seemed that the whispered promise that his death was imminent was moving uncomfortably towards reality.

‘I… do not feel well,’ said Edan, rising from Valkia’s throne. ‘I must go and rest.’ Indeed, he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. An army was moving south, an army that showed no mercy. And if his dreams held any truth, he had a terrible suspicion that he knew who marched at their head.

It wasn’t possible, he told himself repeatedly. She was dead. Hepsus had watched her die. She was gone. She could not hurt him.

Nonetheless, Edan did not sleep that night, afraid of what dreams may come to torment his darkest hours.

But the dreams came anyway.

‘Release me, Valkia.’

She ignored the whispering voice that tickled the very edges of thought and focused instead on the way ahead. Her army travelled with speed and purpose. The slaughter of the Red Hawks had slaked their thirst for blood for a short time, but it was a desire that could never truly be satisfied.

The warrior queen flew through the air above her surging army, although to call them an army was something of a misnomer. Somewhere in the dark recesses of her memory, she recalled organisation, ranks of warriors arranged according to their skills. The mob that crossed the snowy wastes beneath her was haphazard at best. There was little cohesion but for their shared desire to kill.

Other than the human warriors, the berserkers who stood as her vanguard, none of the creatures of Chaos served her. Not truly. They served Khorne without hesitation and to Valkia it mattered little. Blood would flow and more skulls would pile at the foot of the brass throne. The god would be pleased and his power would swell still further.

‘Release me.’

The whisper came again and she glanced down at Locephax. The daemon prince was awake, his ethereal eyes glowing a virulent green.

‘You keep asking me to do that, slave. And yet I have not done it. You are mine now. And you will do my bidding.’ Her leathery wings flapped, bearing her further aloft. ‘You offered me a reward and I refused then as I refuse you now. It is time to accept that I am greater in all things, Locephax. Your eternity will be much more sanguine.’

‘Followers of the idiot-god will never be greater,’ came the retort. ‘You are creatures of reflex. Simple and thoughtless. Where is the pleasure in such mindless slaughter? To kill with a purpose, to savour the suffering of your victims, though? That is precisely what you are doing, my love.’

‘Do not speak to me.’

‘Are you afraid I tell you the truth? That your lust for revenge brings you pleasure? Ask yourself which god you truly serve, Valkia. It is not too late for you…’

‘I said be silent!’ Valkia unstrapped the shield from her arm and raised it before her so that her burning red gaze met that of the daemon prince. ‘I am my master’s consort. You may court me all you wish, Locephax, but I know my own way. Hold your tongue until I have need of your power.’

‘What will you do to me otherwise, Valkia?’ Locephax’s sneering tone angered the warrior queen beyond measure. ‘Kill me? Take my skull? I believe you have already done all you can. All I have left to torment you with is the truth. Grant me that much at least.’

She secured the shield to her back so that she could no longer see Locephax’s face and beat her wings harder, driving the pace below to something much faster. The disembodied voice continued to taunt and complain behind her, but she lashed it with her fury and it dwindled into bitter silence. She had made her choice a long time ago.

Why, then, did the daemon continue to try to tempt her? She shook her head, scowling.

‘I am Valkia,’ she said, her tone strong and her voice clear. ‘I am Valkia, known as the Bloody. The Gorequeen. I am the Bringer of Glory and I serve Khorne. Your words are meaningless, Locephax. So hold your tongue.’

As she flew onwards, leading the horde towards the Vale, she could hear the cruel laughter of the daemon prince behind her. Locephax was her gift, her reward, and she could bend the creature to her purpose when she so desired. But he was also her eternal curse.

She hated him.

So close to her goal, she channelled that hatred into a single bolt of rage that she hurled with supernatural might at her desired target.

‘I know you are not real. You do not frighten me.’

Edan was back once more against the wooden stake, held rigid and immobile by invisible bonds. He could sense rather than see the presence of his tormentor.

‘You should be terrified, Edan, son of Merroc. Why are you not afraid?’

‘I know this cannot be real. I know that you cannot be real.’

‘You seem very sure of yourself.’ The creature of darkness moved around him and he tried with every ounce of strength in his body to turn his head to look at her. Face your fears head on and they will no longer frighten you. His own sister had taught him that when, as a mewling child, he had been afraid of his own dreams. But he could not move.

‘Hepsus watched you die, Valkia.’

There was a laugh and a shifting in the darkness. The creature that shimmered into being in front of him began to take form and substance, ethereal tendrils of mist coalescing into a more tangible shape.

‘So you acknowledge who I am, at least.’

Edan swallowed although it was difficult. The rope that was lashed around his neck was drawn excruciatingly tightly. ‘I think I always knew,’ he said after a period of silence. ‘I think I always knew but did not accept the truth.’

‘But you have said yourself, you know none of this is real.’ The shape before him was now more than just air, but somehow distorted. The face was too blank, devoid of not just expression but of defining features. The shape, although clearly female, was also something he was not familiar with. It had been ten long years since Valkia’s death... or at least her alleged death... and although time lessened the memory, Edan was almost entirely certain that his sister had possessed neither horns nor wings the last time he had seen her.

As if she sensed his thoughts, the female shape emitted a low chuckle. There was no amusement in the sound. ‘Time,’ she said, ‘changes all things.’

‘Indeed.’ It was a useless response and Edan knew it was nothing more than a verbal placeholder whilst he struggled to organise his thoughts.

‘You are right, of course. None of this real.’ His captor broke the lengthy pause. ‘You are... how shall I put this delicately... a prisoner within your own mind. I have brought you here so that you understand why it is that you have to die.’

‘We all die,’ he countered, but his voice held none of the conviction of his words.

‘Indeed,’ she said sneeringly, mocking his feeble response of earlier. ‘But most of us die gloriously. Some of us die well before our allotted time. Your death, Edan, will be neither glorious nor noble. You will die on your knees, screaming for mercy. And for you, my dear brother...’

She leaned forward and he could smell her breath. It was not unpleasant; it put him in mind of autumnal leaf mould. The earthy scents of the decay that permeated the air at the end of a Vale summer.

‘For you, there will be none. Enjoy the last hours of your life, Edan, for that is what it has become measured in. Soon, it will end.’

With an effort he had not thought himself capable of, Edan pulled back his head and spat at the Valkia-thing. He awoke seconds later to the ringing sound of her derisory laughter.

She was close, of that there was no doubt. Edan had woken from the most recent dream in abject terror. Perhaps he could run. Perhaps he could gather up what mattered to him and flee from the oncoming storm of his sister’s rage.

But where would he go?

The sheer inevitability of what was going to happen filled him with a strange kind of calm acceptance. If he could not flee, then he would stand his ground. He would show courage until the moment he died. The irony of the fact that he had spent his entire life seeking the easy way out was not lost on the Godspeaker. When Eris came to his tent, alerted by the sounds emanating from within, she found her uncle barely able to stand, laughing so hard that he was vomiting. Several empty wine bottles littered the floor at his feet and his intoxication was without doubt.

‘Uncle, control yourself.’ Eris put steel into her tone and that served only to make Edan laugh harder. The man was quite deranged, broken by the terrifying visions he had been suffering.

‘Send out your warriors if you wish, Eris,’ he said between choking gales of laughter. ‘The Schwarzvolf are doomed either way. Stay here and be slaughtered. Head out to face the maelstrom and be destroyed in the effort.’ He reached over and patted Eris on the cheek in a fond way. ‘The ogre’s choice, my dear. Die quickly or die slowly. Our death is assured.’ He nodded solemnly, although the effect was somewhat spoiled by the thin trickle of drool that oozed from the corner of his mouth.

‘Then if the gods have seen our end,’ said Eris, her back straightening and defiance coming into her expression, ‘then we will make it a glorious one.’ With those words, she turned and strode to the tent’s entrance. ‘It is what my mother would have done.’

After she had said that, Edan stopped laughing.

‘Your mother,’ he whispered and then passed out in a dead faint, inebriated beyond capacity to even stand any longer. With a disdainful sniff, Eris left her uncle face-down in a puddle of his own waste and began the task of preparing the Schwarzvolf for war.

SEVENTEEN

FROM WHENCE THE BLOOD FLOWS

The army of Valkia moved south like a roiling wave of devastation. Behind them they left nothing but ruin and death. They fed well and they did so with startling regularity. Those who needed blood to survive indulged their gluttonous appetites with every kill.

Increasingly suspicious of her uncle’s erratic and unpredictable behaviour, Eris had decided to remain behind rather than accompany the scouts from the camp. It had proven to be a wise choice as not one of them had returned. That in itself had been warning enough. The warriors of the Schwarzvolf would not sit idle and wait for their enemy to invade the Vale. Eris gathered them together, delivering a rousing speech that put many of the tribe elders in mind of her mother. They would not wait to die at the hands of this unseen foe, she had cried with feeling. They would meet the threat head on.

Edan had been insensible after she had found him laughing in the tent and she had turned away from him in disgust. Her uncle’s mind was lost and she had no time to give him any kindness or sympathy. She bore such hatred for the man that she would have been hard pushed to spare him a kind word anyway. She had planned to leave him in the charge of the young and the infirm, those who could not take to the field of battle. He would be of no use to them once the fighting started. But he came anyway, spouting some incomprehensible nonsense about facing his destiny as the gods intended.

In this situation, Eris finally came into her birthright. She had always been her mother’s daughter but now she was able to move out of Valkia’s considerable shadow. It didn’t matter that her grasp of strategy was nowhere near the calibre of her mother’s. It mattered only that she could lead the Schwarzvolf into war and that she could conduct herself with due deadly force at their head.

So the army of the Schwarzvolf marched north, their remaining scouts sent ahead of them. Better by far to be prepared for what they faced, even if they had barely any concept of the horror that approached.

The horde of Valkia moved steadily south. They had no need to send runners ahead of their force. Valkia had no need to prepare for what they faced at the end of the march. Moreover, she did not care. The ultimate battle would be but a formality, its details consigned to the vagaries of history. Her victory was assured. Her success was never in question.

The Schwarzvolf would die.

‘It’s too quiet.’

Night had fallen, bringing a chill that promised the first snowfall by dawn. The army of the Schwarzvolf, not gifted with the same unnatural strength and resilience of a daemon host, had paused in their march. It was a time to gather their strength, a time for reflection and preparation.

For Eris, it was also a time to look upon the heavily diminished numbers of the warriors. With so many of the former allied tribes breaking their ties to the Schwarzvolf, the host had been decimated. A head count had put their numbers at several hundred still, so it was still a force to be reckoned with. But at Valkia’s zenith, her army had numbered well over a thousand.

The first party of runners still had not returned and Eris was beginning to wonder if their enemy had some breed of war-dog to sniff them out. Had she known the nature of the hounds stalking the darkness ahead of Valkia’s monstrous legion she would have kept every man as close as possible.

‘It’s too quiet.’

Eris made the observation again, but she was speaking to herself. She had dismissed her battle commanders and had taken a walk away from the ribald laughter and conversation of the resting army. To her mind, such high spirits were inappropriate when their doom was coming towards them with relentless certainty.

And it was quiet, even given that it was the dead of night. Usually, there would be distant sounds of howling wolves, or the flitter of bat wings. But there was nothing. No night-time insects or any other ambient noise that Eris had always associated with the evening. Even the air was still, as though the world held its breath before the bloodshed to come.

Nothing but the dark and the cold and the chill of anticipation.

Eris stroked the whetstone down the length of her blade, comforted by both the motion and the sound. The soft sching of the stone on the steel brought confidence and familiarity. Readying the blade she wielded reminded her who she was; what her purpose was.

‘I am Eris of the Schwarzvolf,’ she said, raising her head to the moonlight that shone down on the chill plains of the north. ‘I am the daughter of a warrior queen and I will lead my people to their victory or to their death. Either way...’

Sching.

‘Either way, I will lead them. In the name of the Four, I do this thing.’

The words left her mouth, but they were mechanical and without any true feeling. They were words that she had learned from an early age and which she had repeated over and over in her life. She had prayed to gods she had once truly believed in, but in whom she had ultimately lost faith. Her uncle had fallen to the lure of the Reveller, that much was clear to her. Where her mother had walked the path of blood, her uncle had stumbled down the path of excess.

Edan disgusted her. His idle manner, his weak will and his pathetic attempts to play politics. That the people of the tribe still put stock in the words of nonsense he spouted infuriated her. Out of respect for them, she kept her tongue stilled when she really wanted to shout that he was nothing more than a charlatan. But he claimed, as he always had, to be the mouth of the gods and without proof otherwise the Schwarzvolf did not dispute the matter.

She had always suspected his hand in her sister’s untimely death. Had she been able to prove it, she would have executed him publicly. His head would have made a delightful addition to the front gate of the camp.

Eris lightened her darker thoughts with this image for a while, her hand still stroking the whetstone down her sword edge. She was snapped out of her reverie, the moment broken by the shout of a single word.

‘Enemy!’

The Schwarzvolf fell easy prey to the charge. So much so that Valkia was almost embarrassed for them.

Almost. She would have been embarrassed had she cared about the fate of her former people, but their laxity and idleness fatally revealed their flaws and weaknesses. And those were all she cared about.

She had dispatched a group of the berserker war-riors to act as a herald for the arrival of the rest of her bloodthirsty horde and had taken the decision to fly at their back. A group of no less than fifty battle-hardened Chaos warriors charged at the Schwarzvolf line with screams on their lips and murder in their eyes.

The numbers were not great, but what the berserkers lacked in quantity they more than made up for with their insane ferocity. For them, all that mattered was the kill. They flung themselves at the Schwarzvolf without any care for their own safety or survival. Armed for the most part with battleaxes, some pitted and rusty with age, the berserkers fell upon the outermost group of Schwarzvolf before they could even get to their feet.

Three of Eris’s warriors were cut down immediately, the enemy’s axes buried in the soft meat of their brains. Those who were not hacked apart instantly retaliated by closing ranks around the rampaging wild men. The clash of weapons broke the eerie silence that Eris had noted and from her vantage point atop the hill, she could see the unfolding mêlée. She watched without emotion as the berserkers tore some of her people limb from limb and watched as her own people answered the call to battle in kind.

The enemy was attacking in small numbers, she noted, and knew that this was nothing more than a vanguard, a swift thrust driven in to test their defences. This mob was nowhere near the size of army she had been anticipating. This was just the tip of the blade. Behind it would come the mailed fist.

‘Eris!’ The voice calling her name was high pitched and she didn’t recognise it at first. She ran lightly down the hill to join the rest of the army and make ready for the inevitable second wave.

‘Eris!’

The call came again and she turned in irritation to see who demanded her attention at such a time. Her uncle stood a few feet away from her, practically weeping in terror as he pointed towards the fight.

‘Eris, see there. She comes for me. For you. For us!’

The young woman turned to follow the line of Edan’s finger and her eyes widened in disbelief. Descending from the skies on leathery wings of darkest night was a monster clad in red armour.

From such a distance, Eris could not make out the monster’s features, but could tell from the form-fitting armour that it was female in gender. Edan was on his knees, repeating the same words over and over.

‘She comes for me… she comes for me…’

‘Who is it? Edan! Damn you, you fat fool, answer me! Who is it? What do you know of such daemons, Godspeaker? Who is it?’

The Godspeaker, once so proud and arrogant, raised his tear-streaked face to his niece.

‘Your mother,’ he wept. ‘Valkia comes!’

The warm copper smell of fresh blood was attracting the attention of the rest of Valkia’s army, who were still perhaps half a mile away from the slaughter below. The warrior queen, from her vantage point in the skies above the battlefield, could see them creeping forward, defying her order to hold. She could not restrain them much longer, neither did she truly want to.

Her own lust for bloodshed was stoked to bursting with the scent of death that rose from below her. Holding aloft Slaupnir and her daemonic shield, she began the descent to join her warriors. She felt eyes upon her: eyes of both the Schwarzvolf and the eyes of her own army. She basked in the attention.

‘I am the Blood Queen,’ she screamed. ‘I am the Bringer of Glory! I am the avatar of my beloved on the field of battle and I am here for the prize of your skulls. I am vengeance and I am death!’ Her wings were spread wide as she plunged towards the battle. ‘Fear my presence. I strike terror into the darkest recesses of your treacherous hearts and drive you from me like vermin.’ She held up the shield of Locephax.

‘Fear me!’ The two words rang out clearly and echoed around the foothills. There was a fraction of a pause and then the eyes of the daemon flared open as Locephax awoke. Compelled by the arcane shackles of his bondage to Valkia, he responded to her bellowed command without question. The twisted mouth distorted in a scream that was so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible and the Schwarzvolf warriors who still stood turned tail and fled in all directions. Valkia’s feet touched down on the icy-cold ground and she held Locephax before her.

Green, virulent light spilled from the daemon prince’s eyes and she laughed spitefully.

‘Run, Schwarzvolf,’ she called after the terrified warriors. ‘Flee before me so that I might better hunt you down and tear your hearts from your bodies for my lord’s pleasure!’

From the scramble of feet and the shrieks of abject terror, they were heeding her words in earnest.

‘Be silent, slave.’ Valkia addressed this to the shield. Locephax’s mouth snapped shut and the wailing scream died away. He looked as though he would speak again, but Valkia cut in. ‘Say nothing. I will not listen to your words this night.’

She strode amongst the mangled bodies, a tangled mass of limbs and corpses made up from her own warriors and those of the Schwarzvolf who had already fallen. She stooped to grasp the hair of one of her own dead warriors. With no more difficulty than tearing a piece of parchment, Valkia tugged hard. The berserker’s head parted company with his body instantly and Valkia held it up, the ragged strips of flesh hanging from the still-warm neck. Blood oozed and dribbled onto her armour, where it was absorbed instantly.

‘This warrior died well, serving the will of the Blood God,’ she said, holding the grisly trophy aloft so that the remaining berserkers could see it. They were barely keeping themselves in check, obviously desperate to resume the battle. ‘His skull will adorn Khorne’s throne. Fight well… die well… and you too will earn this honour.’ She attached the berserker’s head to her belt, its eyes wide in the moment of death.

‘Will you fight and die for my master here this night?’ There was a roar of assent. Valkia’s berserkers were fired up and ready to pursue the retreating tribesmen. She spread her wings and rose once again from the battlefield. She pointed Slaupnir at the warriors who gazed up at her in adoration.

‘Will you fight and die for me here this night?’

There was a brief hesitation and then one of the warriors began repeating her name over and over like a mantra. Others picked up the rhythm of the war chant and it increased in volume until they cried out their queen’s name so loudly that, had there been any doubt in the Schwarzvolf’s mind as to the identity of their nemesis, it was resolved.

‘Valkia!’

‘What do you mean, my mother?’

Eris had crossed quickly to the quivering Godspeaker and smacked him around the face in an effort to bring sense to his babblings. It had not been a delicate slap, but a punch so hard that at least one tooth was loosened in Edan’s gums. He staggered backwards with a cry of pain, his hand going to his mouth.

‘Answer me, and make it swift!’ Eris’s temper was incandescent and his ears still ringing from the blow, Edan could do little more than just stare at her. His jaw moved as though he would speak, but no sound came out.

She went to strike him again and he shook his head. Eris scowled and drew her weapon.

‘My mother is dead, you bastard. How can she be leading this attack? Unless you lied to me. Unless you lied to me!’ She sprang at him in absolute fury, ready to take his life there and then, but Edan demonstrated a surprising show of agility, dodging her attack nimbly. He squeaked a few times and then finally found his voice.

‘She was dead,’ he said, the tears still running unchecked down his cheeks. His voice was choked with fear and emotion. ‘There was no way she could have lived through the horrors... Hepsus saw...’

What it was that Hepsus saw was lost in the distant battle-cry that reached Eris’s ears. Her blood ran cold.

‘Valkia! Valkia! Valkia!’

Every last drop of blood drained from Eris’s face and she gave Edan one last, vicious look. ‘If I somehow live through this battle,’ she said between clenched teeth, ‘then I will tear your throat out. Do you understand me? There is nowhere you can run that I will not find you!’

She did not wait for his response, but sprinted lightly towards the bulk of her own warriors in an effort to corral them and prepare them for what could only be the true horror that lay ahead.

How could she tell them that the enemy they faced were led by their former queen? How could she even hope to explain that to them? As it happened, she didn’t need to. They had heard the enthusiastic battle chant raised in adulation as the daemonic legion approached.

They stared at her as she approached and she felt shame for their obvious fear. Several of them were visibly shaking in terror at the echoing cry of Valkia’s name. Eris turned her eyes from the younger warriors to some of those who she knew had gone with the party north over ten years previously. Most of Valkia’s chosen entourage were long dead, but a few survived.

One of them met her gaze directly but could not maintain it. The challenge and accusation in Eris’s eyes was too much. The way he turned from her gave silent reply to the unspoken question.

The resounding chant of Valkia’s name was still audible as Eris raised her voice to be heard over it. She had planned to give a rousing speech, an encouraging last-minute bolster, but she could not find positive words. Eventually, she spoke from her heart.

‘The Schwarzvolf are dead,’ she said with harsh bitterness in her voice. ‘Whether or not we are victorious here today, the heart of this tribe has been torn from us. There are traitors amongst us. Liars. Cowards. Weaklings. We fight for the survival of a people who died ten years ago far to the north in Gods’ Home.’

She gave a humourless smile. ‘But for all that... for all the Schwarzvolf are ended, we fight today for the chance to be reborn. The chance to carve out our own existence and start again. We fight for glory. Above all else, we fight for victory!’

Her words were a spark in a powder keg of tension. Despite the negativity of what she was saying, the passion with which she spoke her piece ignited the energy and battle lust that had long marked the violent Schwarzvolf. They roared their defiance, brandished their weapons and bar one or two who shot looks of venomous hatred at the young woman, they all shouted her name. It created a curious counterpoint to the words being bellowed elsewhere. An unholy chorus that was a prelude to the coming slaughter.

For a fleeting, wonderful and uplifting moment, Eris truly believed that they might actually stand a chance. Thoughts of her deceitful uncle and the revenge she would take on him were pushed to the back of her mind. Right now, her only concern was the battle and surviving the next few minutes.

‘To arms! Warriors of the Vale... we attack!’

The army swarmed together and began to advance in surprisingly even formation with Eris, Valkia’s daughter, at their head.

Valkia’s army moved with a surging, unnatural life that reached for their enemy with hungry jaws. The moment the daemon princess heard her victims voices raised, she brought Slaupnir down in a sweeping stroke, indicating that the butchery should commence.

They rushed forward in their countless numbers. The second wave of crazed berserkers were bolstered by horrors of a kind that the Schwarzvolf had never before witnessed. Bloodletters, their cloven hooves thundering across the cold ground as they ran, brandished rune-encrusted swords of ebony. Flesh hounds tore along at their heels, slavering rivulets of drool and blood in equal measure.

At the rear and flanks of the army lumbered the warped and distorted creatures of the mountains: a throng of towering trolls, packs of ravening wolves and screeching monsters of every stripe.

Valkia waited until the last of the beasts had passed her and beat her wings vigorously, rising into the air and exalting her consort’s name to the night sky.

The horde was finally unleashed and Valkia’s bloody army did not hesitate.

The two sides struck one another with a force that shook the very ground beneath their feet. The strong, rigid line of Eris’s warriors was practised and tempered by countless battles, but softened by the latter years of idleness. They stood their ground with grim determination however, the shield bearers at the front bearing the brunt of the enemy’s initial charge.

Long gone were the days when only women bore the shields of the Schwarzvolf. Now men and women fought alongside one another as equals. And now they died as equals, falling beneath the serrated blades, axes and teeth of the inhuman enemy with alacrity.

At the fore of the army, the beastmen and berserkers rampaged without thought, pity or mercy. Already whipped into a frenzy by the act of battle alone, their eyes were wild and staring as they hacked and set about themselves. To step into the path of one of these killers was to die. The cover of night did not help. Eris’s army had no blessings of a god of war. Their vision had adjusted reasonably, but they still fought against ill-defined shapes. More than one Schwarzvolf turned on one of his own in the mêlée.

Each of the berserkers took countless wounds to be felled, hacking and maiming long past the point at which any mortal warrior should have fallen. Even with the loss of limbs, and wounds so deep that white bone was visible, grisly and wet with blood and caught in the paltry light cast by the torch bearers, they fought on.

Everywhere there was carnage. Death cries and howls of rage filled the air and the clash of weapons resonated throughout the night. The berserker contingent began to steadily thin as they lapped around the stubborn tribe, the Schwarzvolf line holding firm and resolute in the face of their insanity – but they too were losing their warriors at an alarming rate. Bodies began to pile up underfoot, causing men to stumble and fall easy prey to the keen blades of the encroaching enemy.

‘Drive them back!’ Eris, in the front line with the shield bearers screamed the order. ‘Drive them back over their dead!’ It would mean treading on the corpses of their fallen, but they were dead or soon would be and it no longer mattered. ‘Shields! Advance!’

On Eris’s command, the Schwarzvolf found a thread of strength and pulled it taut. Their expressions grim, their resolve set, they stepped forward one pace at a time. The remaining berserkers flung themselves bodily into the shield line but were driven back.

They threw themselves at the shieldbearers again and again, determined to break through and cause as much mayhem as they could manage. Some had already peeled away from the pack and tore around the flanks of the tribesmen, striking from the side. The Schwarzvolf shield line, however, was well-practised and whilst they were slower to react than they may have been in their prime, they bowed the line to deal with the peripheral threat.

Their casualties were not as heavy as Eris had feared, but many of those who stood beside her were already bloody and wounded. She had fought in many battles against ferocious rival tribes, but nothing like the enemy that presently swarmed about them. In mere minutes they had suffered more than any engagement over the last decade. When the last beastman was dispatched, bleating the name of his god to the last, Valkia’s daughter dared to feel a glimmer of hope, that maybe they had weathered the storm. Nothing could have prepared them for what was to come however. And what came next was a waking nightmare.

The earth shook at the tread of something vast and terrible that thundered toward the Schwarzvolf. Warriors stood pale and fearful in the moonlight as the titanic form of Kormak, astride his daemonic mount, charged the ragged line. At his back a host of unholy abominations with eyes of hellfire surged like a tide, their ruddy flesh alive with blasphemous runes and slick with mortal blood.

At first, the Schwarzvolf front line could do nothing but stare at this new, terrifying enemy in horror. More than one of them turned and tried to flee back through the press, but they could not. The tribe was encircled, their line forced around until the men at either end stood side by side against the night.

Raging at their cowardice, Eris ordered them thrown to the enemy. ‘Fight them!’ Every word came out as a scream. ‘Stand your ground and fight, or die by my blade!’

Many of her warriors were crying openly at the sight of their unnatural foe. The bloodletters were tall and wiry and their eyes glowed with insatiable hunger. They remained desperate to feed, despite having gorged their voracious appetites on the journey to this battle. Most were the same height as the men, but others were taller, slim and wiry. Crests ran the length of their spines and across their heads, and thin, serpentine tongues flickered in and out.

Kormak struck the line like the fist of a god, the blunt head of the juggernaut lowered into a killing ram that shattered shields and crushed men like frail saplings. The formation of the Schwarzvolf broke apart instantly, any sense of unity lost under the unstoppable assault of the murderous champion in their midst. His axe rose and fell with swift and terrible rhythm, cleaving heads and limbs and leaving a wake of gory ruin.

In the half-light cast by the flickering torches, the daemons cast eerie, intimidating shapes, moving with lithe grace as they bounded from enemy to enemy. Their hellblades pierced and cut, sowing injury and death wherever they struck. The blades, encrusted with runes that glowed viciously in the darkness, moved with such speed that those unfortunates who got caught in their arc were torn apart instantly.

‘Steel yourselves,’ Eris shrieked at the top of her voice. She had already dodged and weaved her way through the onslaught. The blades of the bloodletters had, thus far, not found her body which was already streaked with blood from the wounds she had taken whilst facing the berserkers. ‘Muster all the courage you have. We are the people of the Vale. We are strong!’

So many of them, she thought desperately. So many of the daemonic creatures. Just when she had resigned herself to the likelihood that they were far outnumbered, things got worse still.

The first of the flesh hounds, which was easily half a length longer again than the tallest of the Schwarzvolf warriors, sprang on one of the shield bearers to Eris’s right. Razor-sharp teeth within the snapping jaws caught a hold of the unfortunate woman’s exposed neck and within seconds, tore her throat out. The hound threw back its head and bayed its pleasure before burying its snout in the woman’s body and taking its fill. It was evidently some kind of pack alpha as the sound of its victory summoned others. Four, five, six... perhaps more. They hurtled into the maelstrom, their milk-white eyes intimidating and horrific.

The moonlight glinted off the collars they wore around their thick necks and their hides took flurries of blows without so much causing a yelp. Not a nick appeared in their unnatural flesh, but Eris turned on the closest animal with fury, her own weapons flashing.

Whether the monster’s hide had been weakened by the blows it had withstood or not, it did not matter. Seconds after she launched her attack, Eris’s blade sank in through muscle and sinew and she sliced the tendons in the animal’s rear leg. She gave the thing a cursory glance, not even sure that it was an animal at all.

It gave an unearthly howl of pain and rage and turned to face this new attacker, its jaws slavering and snapping as it tried to crouch ready to pounce on Eris. The young woman feinted with her blade and struck forward with the shield she carried. The daemon hound was thrown off balance.

‘Now!’ Her cry came and her people obeyed. They turned on the stricken daemon hound and pierced its body, running it through a dozen times. It twitched and stopped moving and then with barely a pause, simply ceased to be. It did not even leave behind a puff of smoke. It simply... was not.

‘We can’t hope to defeat this enemy, Eris.’ She didn’t know who spoke the words, but they brought forth a blaze of fury. ‘We should retreat. Now.’ Raging, she struck out with her shield again and knocked the speaker away from her.

‘Do not say such things! Where is the fire? Where is the passion? We will fight until the last breath leaves our bodies! We cannot retreat, you fool. Where would we go? Now fight!’

And despite the futility of it, they fought. There was nothing more that they could do

Valkia could not help but admire the sheer determination of the enemy she faced. They could not have a hope of defeating the daemonic host and already their warriors were dying by the score. The trolls and other beasts were lumbering into the thick of the battle and as soon as they began employing their unique methods of self-defence, the battle would be all but over.

Her original plan to simply enjoy watching the slaughter of the tribe she had once called her own had not lasted beyond the first skirmish. The sheer lust for battle drove her down from the skies. She tossed Slaupnir up into the air and caught it so that the spear was pointing from above, ready to impale its next victim.

Whilst the Schwarzvolf were dealing with the threat of the flesh hounds, Valkia indulged her own need to spill the blood from her enemies. The first warrior whose life she took screamed like a child at the sight of her.

‘You know who I am.’ It was a statement, not a question and Valkia caught the warrior by the throat, her long-taloned fingers wrapping around his neck. She pulled him up and towards her so that they were nose to nose. The warrior lost control of his bladder and warm urine ran down his leg. He squeezed his eyes closed, too afraid and too ashamed to look his former queen in the eye.

‘Say my name, Schwarzvolf.’ The words came out as a sultry purr, oddly seductive and compelling, and his eyes slowly opened again. ‘Say my name.’

‘V... Valkia.’

‘Say it properly. It will be the last word that crosses your lips. Make it strong. Make your death count for something. Who am I?’

He found strength from somewhere and his voice rose, strengthening and increasing in volume.

‘Valkia!’

‘And I am your doom.’ The last thing the warrior saw were Valkia’s eyes, suffused with a crimson glow. The last thing he felt was the sharp stab of pain as Slaupnir slid into his gut and Valkia slowly eviscerated him. She enjoyed every second of the process, savouring the look of undisguised anguish on her former comrade’s face as she twisted the spear around in his bowels, tearing them out through the gash in his abdomen.

Then she just dropped him and trod on his skull as she passed by. The man’s head caved immediately and she rejoined the battle. She took personal death to many of those who she had once called friend. Each one died in a similar way. She would single out those who had travelled with her into the north and she wreaked slow, bloody revenge upon them. Most were methodically butchered, much like the first, their guts spilled in glistening ropes on the ground. One had his tongue torn from his mouth by her bare hands. She had thrown the still-twitching organ to one of the flesh hounds and the doomed warrior had watched the animal devour it whole before Slaupnir had punctured his chest and stilled his heart forever.

She felt Locephax’s desperation, the daemon’s desire to be a part of such slaughter tied to his perverse nature and insatiable lusts, but she did not unleash his brand of terror again. She would not sully these perfect moments with the disgusting touch of the prince of pleasure. She blocked out his endless pleading and she strode through the battlefield, her eyes raking the dead and the still-standing.

But she could not find her brother.

‘Edan!’ Valkia howled his name to the moon. ‘Come and face me!’

Spreading her wings, Valkia rose above the battlefield, her daemonic eyesight perfect in the darkness. She scoured the landscape for the telltale scamper of the rodent she sought.

Her attention was torn from her task by the sound of a voice below her. A voice that stirred memories she had put away.

‘Valkia!’

Glancing down, the winged warrior’s face spread in a slow, cruel smile and she allowed herself to descend once again. The young woman she faced bore a visage that was almost the double of her own; or at least how her own had been before Khorne had so gloriously re-shaped her in his desired image.

‘This must end,’ Eris said, staring at the mother she had once known. She was at once disgusted and in awe of what Valkia had become. She knew no grief for the loss of a parent but she felt fury at the death and destruction wrought by the creature’s hand.

Valkia considered her daughter carefully. If she knew her, or recognised her, she gave no acknowledgement of the fact. She hefted Slaupnir in her right hand and steadied Locephax on her left arm.

‘And who will end it, mortal? You?’

‘If I must.’

Without pausing to speak any further, Eris threw herself at Valkia.

Edan had fled the moment battle had been joined. Too cowardly to engage with the daemonic forces that were sure to destroy his niece and her army, he had turned tail and run away. It had been the only option left to the corpulent Godspeaker.

Branches whipped pitilessly against him as he stumbled blindly through the darkness, skirting the edges of the grove of trees that led eventually to the Vale. In his tumbling, breathless panic, they were like grasping fingers trying to take hold of him and haul him backwards to the battlefield. He plunged through bramble and bracken, never once daring to pause and look behind him. The hungry, avaricious branches caught in his clothes and his hair, lacerating the skin of his face. Stinging pain came and went almost unnoticed. He felt warm blood trickle down his cheek, dribbling its unmistakable coppery tang into his mouth, but he didn’t stop to wipe it away. Stopping was not an option. He had to run.

So he ran.

His breath was ragged, his heart pounding like a battle drum against his ribs. It had been many years since he had exerted so much energy and the tight, burning pain across his chest was excruciating.

Even as he fled, his jowls and belly flapping with the exertion, he knew that it was an exercise in futility. There was nowhere he could hide from his sister. There was nowhere he could ever call safe again. Even in his dreams she tormented him. The rational side of his brain mocked him ceaselessly and as he ran, propelled by the desire to live, he clamped his hands to his ears as though he could drown out the sound of his thoughts.

He had not gone far before his sprint slowed to a brisk walk and even that petered out after another half a mile or so. Behind him, even through his hands which were still tight against his head, he could hear the sounds of death as his people were torn apart.

He cried. He cried for the murder of his people. He cried for all that had gone wrong. He even cried for the sister in whom he had once believed without question and who he had ultimately betrayed for his own selfish reasons. But mostly, he cried for himself. The thought of his imminent death brought Edan no pleasure.

Pleasure…

Years ago, he had put his faith into the Reveller. He had listened to the whispers of the decadent god and had given his soul over willingly. His gluttony had been his chosen method of showing his devotion to his chosen deity. Death would rob him of all the pleasures in life he had come to expect and revel in.

For just a moment, Edan saw himself as he must appear to others. A pathetic shadow of his former self, bloated and warped into something almost unrecognisable and he felt deep shame.

A second burst of energy suffused his limbs and he began to run again, fleeing from the seeds of his own destruction.

EIGHTEEN

BRINGER OF GLORY

As a battling pair, Eris and Valkia were poorly matched. Eris was a creature of rage and fury who attacked on impulse, hacking and slashing at her opponent blindly. She was also obviously, painfully mortal. Valkia dodged every thrust and avoided every blow her daughter attempted to bring down on her with ease. The Blood Queen knew that she could take down Eris with a single stroke if she so desired, and yet the final ember of humanity that glowed somewhere in her daemonic soul could not bear the thought of ending such sport so quickly.

So she toyed with the mortal for a while, her own movements with Slaupnir fluid and graceful. The two female warriors remained locked together in a mesmerising and deadly dance. Where Eris had to duck and weave, expending energy rapidly, Valkia’s movements were languid and lazy. She pre-empted every thrust and every attack was defended with hardly any effort.

The two warring women broke off for a moment.

‘I do not know what it was that happened to you,’ panted Eris, withdrawing from the fray briefly. Sweat trickled down her face, smearing the blood and the dirt that she had gathered during the course of the battle. In the moonlight, she was pale and her expression was one of pain. The wounds she had taken during the course of conflict were beginning to take their toll on her. ‘I do not know, nor do I care. You seek to destroy my people and I cannot let you do that.’

‘You cannot deny me,’ Valkia replied, her eyes fixed on the slender form of the warrior daughter before her. ‘The price of weakness and betrayal is death. When these cowards turned their back on me they turned their back on all they could have been. Now vengeance comes, and when I have claimed the skulls of every living Schwarzvolf warrior, I will raze the Vale.’

‘You would slaughter the infirm and our infants?’ Eris was shocked by the words. ‘You have no compassion at all?’

‘It matters not from whence the blood flows, Eris,’ Valkia said, leaning in close, her voice low so that Eris had to lean in to hear her. ‘So long as it does flow. Thus it must ever be.’

Before Eris could assimilate the words, Valkia’s skull met hers in a savage head-butt and she reeled backwards, stunned by the blow. The daemon princess spread her wings and stood straight, a truly awesome sight to behold and she lowered Slaupnir at her child.

‘Thus it will be!’

The spear lunged forward, its razor-sharp blade aimed directly at Eris’s heart. With a resounding clang, the young woman found a reserve of strength and brought her shield up to block the killing stroke. Her ability to hold her ground was fading rapidly and her breath came in ragged, pained gasps.

‘Not whilst I still live,’ she said and Valkia’s smile was one of pride.

‘You truly are my daughter,’ she said, and drew Slaupnir back for another strike. Her clawed hand slid down the weapon’s haft so that she was holding it just above the tip, as though she held a long dagger.

‘Yes,’ said Eris, struggling to draw breath. Her mouth was filled with the coppery taste of blood. Her ribs had broken against her lungs and if she continued to fight, she would not need to concern herself with her mother’s weapon. She would die anyway. ‘I am.’

‘Then in recognition of that fact, your death will be…’

The movement was so fast that Eris never even saw it coming. One of Valkia’s talons pierced her chest and drove through her heart. Pain, agonising and yet exquisite, shot through her and she dropped her sword and shield to the cold earth. She fell to her knees, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth and stared stupidly down at the hand embedded in her chest.

‘Blood,’ she managed to eke out around her final gulps of life. ‘Blood for the…’

For a few moments after the light of life left Eris’s eyes, Valkia considered her. Then she withdrew her hand and let her daughter’s body slump face-down onto the ground. She considered the girl’s corpse without emotion and eventually gave a terse nod of acknowledgement.

‘You died well, Eris,’ she said. ‘I will bring you your reward in due course. But for now…’

Once again, the Blood Queen spread her wings and soared into the skies above the waning battle, raking the horizon for her brother. Like a bird of prey, she scoured the landscape and, when she saw what she was looking for, she swooped in for the kill. She crossed the distance between the battlefield and the small copse of trees with alarming haste.

Beneath her, the massed army of daemons and the handful of berserkers who still lived pressed onwards, moving ever-closer to the Vale. Kormak charged at their head, his massive armoured bulk little more than a huge silhouette in the moonlight.

Edan had fallen to the ground, his sweating body unable to keep him running any longer. He had simply dropped to his hands and knees, panting and gasping to get breath into his heaving chest. It was never meant to have ended this way. He had always had plans... great plans... and he would eventually have gotten around to carrying them out.

The sound of Valkia’s wings was soft and almost soothing up ahead and when their rhythmic beat ceased, he knew that she plunged towards him. Edan did not even have the strength to raise his head so remained where he was, on all fours with his eyes downcast. He remained there and waited for his death.

It did not come.

Slowly, he looked up to discover that a daemon who wore his dead sister’s face stood before him. She was staring at him with a look of hateful incredulity. The last time she had seen her half-brother, he had been a lean, tautly muscled young man. Now he was barely recognisable, his once-pleasant features lost in rolls of sallow skin. The redolent stench of alcohol and stale sweat that steamed from him was noxious. She put out one hoofed foot and kicked him on to his back. Unresisting, Edan slumped over weakly.

‘Get up,’ she said.

‘Why?’ His response was weary and bitter. ‘Strike me down whilst I am kneeling or when I am standing. What difference does it make to me, Valkia? We both know that this cannot end any other way. Just take my head and end it.’

This was more like the Edan she remembered, even if only in part. The man who could play with words and turn them into weapons if he felt so inclined. In the face of death he lost none of his eloquence.

‘Get up,’ she repeated. ‘If you have any courage at all in that blubbery frame, you will face me like the warrior you once pretended to be.’

‘Why would I give you such satisfaction?’

Valkia hesitated no longer and reached down to drag the quivering mass of blubber to his feet. A soft chuckle started somewhere behind her and she realised that Locephax was laughing.

‘His mind was weak,’ said the disembodied daemon. ‘I put the seeds of suggestion into the minds of all your people, Valkia. At least one found fertile ground it seems. Congratulations, Godspeaker. My master will be pleased that you devoted yourself to him so fully.’

The heavy sarcasm that he placed on Edan’s title did not go unnoticed and Valkia scowled as her half-brother inclined his head in deep respect.

‘You have always been my enemy, Edan,’ she said eventually. ‘You wove the web of deceit that led my own people to turn from the glory that I offered them. For that alone I will have my vengeance. But you declare yourself a follower of the prince of excess and for that there can never be any mercy.’

‘I expect none,’ countered Edan. His composure in the face of his doom was boiling her blood.

‘To kill one of my master’s servants could be considered a feat of strength, Valkia.’ Locephax sounded deeply amused. ‘To kill two may draw his attention in a way you would not like.’

‘Be silent, creature. This worm is favoured by none, least of all the gods. You are nothing more than a slave to my will and you will do as I command.’ Valkia silenced Locephax with a sharp word, but the daemon continue to chortle softly. She turned her attention back to Edan whose face was oddly beatific.

‘I am ready for my death now, Valkia.’ He sounded calm and at peace with the world. He flung out his arms, exposing the vast expanse of his torso so that she could slay him.

But still she did not.

‘I am not yet ready to spill your worthless blood,’ she retorted, though the need crackled through every fibre of her being. ‘First, you will answer me one question.’ She stepped closer to him, much as it disgusted her to do so. ‘Why? Why did you lead the Schwarzvolf astray? The power our people could have had. The strength they could have wielded if they had laid themselves at the feet of Khorne. You were their Godspeaker and yet you turned them from the path with lies and poisoned words and in so doing, you damned them to this end. Why, Edan?’

He considered her, fascinated by her new form. She was still very clearly the woman he had known in life. The sister he had once clung to as an infant. The sister he had once looked up to. The sister he had watched descend slowly into madness. The sister he had betrayed.

A thousand flash images shot through his mind. So many memories. So many mixed feelings towards the woman... the thing in front of him. But he could not find the words to answer her question. Instead, he just shook his head.

‘Because it should have been me, Valkia. No more to it than that.’

She had tired of his conversation long ago and he could see that in her eyes. He did not fully understand why she had not simply killed him on sight. A wild thought struck him. Perhaps there was something of his sister still inside the daemon woman clad in bleeding armour. He put out a hand towards her.

‘Valkia...’

‘I do not wish to hear your mewling any longer, Edan.’ She stepped forward and gave her half-brother a contemptuous sneer. ‘When your blighted soul reaches the feet of the Reveller, be sure to tell the lord of pleasures who has sent you before him. Perhaps, as he slowly tortures your frail spirit, he will consider the folly of bringing his weakling creatures to my attention.’

Edan could do nothing but wait for her to run him through with her spear, but she didn’t. She planted the weapon in the earth and took hold of his head with both her hands. She pulled him closer to her as if she was going to touch her head to his in benediction.

Then with the supernatural strength with which she had been blessed, she pulled.

A series of sharp cracks sounded as the bones in his neck stretched in protest and Edan was dragged upwards onto his toes. He could not even cry out in pain as the thick flesh of his throat constricted under the mounting pressure. The last thing he ever saw was the cruel half-smile on Valkia’s face as she tore his head from his shoulders. A glistening tail of vertebrae followed, meat and gristle still attached but snapping as she pulled her trophy free.

Edan’s headless corpse stood motionless for a few seconds, hot blood spraying explosively from the ragged stump of its neck, and then it toppled with a meaty thump to the ground. Valkia held up her gruesome prize to the skies.

‘Khorne!’ Her voice rose to a scream. Somewhere in the distance she heard the sound of her own army returning the cry and she knew that they advanced on the Vale. Within minutes, what remained of the Schwarzvolf would face the daemon horde. She had her prize. She had taken her revenge on the figure that had orchestrated her demise more than a decade ago.

She stared into the dead eyes of Edan. In death, his face was locked in a rictus grin that she felt mocked her. She had done what she had come here to do. With a word, she could prevent the obliteration of an entire people.

She could.

But she would not.

Valkia had fulfilled the obligation that had tied her to life, and even as she attached the head and spine of Edan to her armour, she forgot the idea of ever having considered leniency. Taking up her shield and spear, she once again spread her wings and took to the skies.

Throwing her head back, she gave voice to the cry that would echo across countless battlefields through the ages.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

The answering roar of the army roared into the night and the Chaos horde swarmed into the Vale.

They were ruthless and they were swift. The latter was out of necessity rather than compassion. Dawn was fast approaching and, released from Valkia’s will, many of the daemonic creatures who stalked among the army would return to the eternal realm once the first rays of daylight crept through the grey skies.

Those in camp who had not taken to the battlefield were largely children and the infirm, although there were a few heavily pregnant women. Every last one of them did all they could to defend their home from the horrific invaders. They died in their droves.

The flesh hounds, weakening with the coming of day, prowled the camp, burying their muzzles in the bodies of the slain, closing powerful jaws around the heads of the fallen and feasting on the slaughter.

There were a handful of berserker warriors remaining who looted the camp for anything they considered useful; weapons for the most part, but they also indulged themselves with the wine and food they found. Now that the carnage was all but over, Valkia turned a blind eye to their antics. They had served her well. They faced a hard journey back north and there was a good chance that they would not survive the mountain crossing. The daemon princess cared nothing for their fate.

Striding through the camp, Valkia glanced this way and that, finding nothing that stirred any meaningful memories. Her life here was truly over and it held no sentimentality for her. The sight of the slaughter had only one effect on her and that was satisfaction at the appropriate sacrifice to strengthen her lord and master.

A few paces behind her, Kormak rode, his massive, gore-soaked axe resting easily across his armoured shoulder. Forever bound to his armour and the service of his mistress, he could not speak to voice his opinion. But the set of his massive shoulders and the straightness in his spine spoke of his own quiet satisfaction.

‘Kormak, first among my warriors.’ Valkia turned and beckoned her champion to her. ‘I must depart this place soon. I leave you to spread the bloody word. Carve a path of death and glory and bury the land in skulls.’ The armoured warrior inclined his head in acknowledgement. Valkia stared up at the sky. The pink tinge to the edges of the clouds suggested that dawn was minutes away. It would not cause her any bother, but she could feel her distant lord calling her, ordering her to return to his side and she would not defy him.

Around her, flesh hounds and bloodletters were dissipating into the morning mists, drawn back to the eternal battle from whence they had come. Whilst they had marched at Valkia’s side, their mistress’s inherent power had bled into them, giving them form and purpose. They had always been weakest by day, but now that their task was complete, they simply returned to their twilight existence.

Valkia was aware of the way they responded to her, the deference they showed to her, and she soaked up the glory with hungry pleasure. The slow but certain knowledge of the power she wielded had gradually eroded any doubts she may have harboured.

‘Before you leave this place,’ she ordered her champion, laying a hand on his shoulder, ‘ensure that everything is burned to the ground. Leave nothing of the Schwarzvolf but a vague and terrible memory.’

Her champion nodded again and turned to walk from her and begin the task of rounding up the warriors ready for the task ahead. As the sun’s weak winter rays began to poke through the mist, Valkia inhaled deeply. The day would be cold and fresh. The first snows of winter would settle on the ravaged Vale before nightfall.

Leave nothing of the Schwarzvolf but a vague and terrible memory. That was all she had herself. Memories that she could somehow neither fully reconcile nor care to linger on. What she had been... who she had been... all was the stuff of legend. If any still lived who remembered her, then her name and deeds she performed in life might continue to live on.

She did not bother to dwell on the thought. Instead, she closed her eyes. Taking another long, slow breath of the ice-tinged morning air, she noted with pleasure that the scent of death and blood had seeped through and permeated the morning.

There was one final task she needed to perform before she returned to her lord’s side. Valkia stalked the Vale and the battlefield where the majority of the Schwarzvolf had fallen. With care, she selected the most loyal of her own warriors, taking their heads. Kormak and his warriors would deal with taking the skulls of the enemy, but Valkia’s choices were personal. She took maybe three or four; skulls of those who had battled with particular valour.

With the exception of her personal prize, the head and spine of Edan, there was only one other Schwarzvolf head that she had taken.

‘You fought well, my daughter,’ she said to Eris’s corpse as she knelt by the dead woman’s side. ‘And your skull will be added to our lord’s throne by me personally. There is no greater reward.’

She brought Slaupnir down and severed Eris’s head, cutting through the final lingering tie to her past. Without another thought, the daemon princess vanished just as the first shafts of pale sunlight broke over the distant mountains. Thick, black pillars of smoke were already climbing into the cold air, filling the sky with ash as Valkia abandoned the Vale to its ultimate fate.

She had been here before.

Valkia stood once again at the edge of the abyss, the crackling maelstrom that would take her back to her lord and master’s side. The last time she had stood here, she had faced the horrors of the wastes alone, but for the eternally loyal Kormak. Now, she was able to command those horrors to do whatever she desired. The irony entertained her.

This time, none would stop her. This time, she would ascend the titanic steps and cross through to the realm of the gods unhindered. The daemons that prowled and waited for the unwary variously hissed and spat at the Blood Queen of Khorne as she ascended, but they dared not approach. Those who served the god bowed in respect for their rightful queen.

As she came to the step where she had fallen all those years before, she knelt and briefly raked her talons across the dark stain where her body had once lain. It was a permanent reminder of her trials, of all that she had undergone to reach the pinnacle she had reached.

Standing, her head held high with the pride and arrogance worthy of a daemon princess, she strode through the coruscating madness into the unfathomable realm of the gods.

She never could fully articulate what it was she saw when she stood before her master’s throne. A veritable sea of skulls and bone, stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions, rising upwards to support the throne of brass upon which he sat.

Blood red images of her recent butchery assailed her mind, the destruction of the tribes, the burning of the Vale and the explosion of gore as she had torn the head from Edan’s shoulders.

‘Did you doubt my fidelity, my lord?’ Valkia threw down the skulls that she had gathered and they tumbled down the mountain to rest, forgotten, at the bottom. In time, they would decay and be unrecognisable. But Valkia had already lost interest in them. The head of her traitorous half-brother with its broken spine lay on the plain of bones, the unseeing eyes staring into eternity.

A tide of murder, destruction and warfare filled her consciousness. Ceaseless carnage and a field of battle that stretched on into eternity. There would be no end to the bloodshed until the stars themselves grew dim and fell from the sky.

The vision thrilled her. This was what she had been born for. This was what she was. The right arm of slaughter personified.

‘Aye, my lord,’ she said, leaning on her spear and staring out across the eternal battle. ‘There will always be blood.’ She turned and took in the enormity of the presence that dominated the throne. ‘Blood for the Blood God.’

EPILOGUE

The fire that Kormak and his chosen warriors set razed the sprawling camp of the Schwarzvolf to the ground. The animal enclosures, the training grounds... everything that had taken so long to build up was destroyed in a comparative blink of an eye.

Fierce and unchecked, the fires raged for several days, dying out only when the snows became heavy enough to smother them. Thick, acrid clouds of black choked the skies for miles around. The snow came down thick with ash, staining the landscape in grim blackness that lingered until the second snows restored unblemished white to the world.

When the hard winter passed, when the ice receded, the true extent of the destruction wrought on the Vale was finally revealed. The earth was as dead as the carpet of stiff corpses that littered the former settlement, piled high where the battle had taken place. Fire, blight and the touch of daemons had withered the once-verdant valley and turned the soil a noxious black.

On the orders of his mistress, Kormak had spared one thing only and Valkia’s throne had escaped the purging fires unscathed. It had been returned to its rightful owner in the realm beyond and over the years became lost in the skulls she chose to decorate it with. Her brother’s skull disappeared into the countless others she brought to her consort over time, but she retrieved that of Eris, mounting it on her throne in a silent acknowledgement of her daughter’s final tribute.

The years passed, melting into one another in a blur of time. Five, ten, twenty years during which the memories of the Schwarzvolf faded gradually. Fifty, one hundred years... and more.

Nothing would grow in the Vale and the surrounding region. The unyielding earth would give no life to seeds that found their way there and over time, the poisons in the ground seeped into the trees and copses that bordered on the old Schwarzvolf lands. They twisted and contorted into mockeries of their former selves, taking on eerie, horrific shapes that conjured up images of tortured bodies.

Cursed, they called it. The name of the Vale was lost, swathed in the mists of time until the area where a long-forgotten tribe had once lived became known as Bloody Hollow.

Legends grew; stories of how the valley had become cursed by the gods. Some touched the edges of truth but for the most part, memories of the Schwarzvolf passed into history forgotten. The people of the tribe were nothing more than echoes of the past.

All but their leader.

Legends persisted of a terrible daemon scourge that scoured the lands in the guise of a woman. Legends that told of the history and deeds of the mistress of skulls. The story of the self-proclaimed warrior queen who had conquered and allied the warring tribes of the north under a single banner.

The tales told of a cold beauty that was much coveted by the living and the damned alike. How she had been cursed by her own people to die in her most triumphant hour and how the dark god of battle had raised her again to fight on in his name.

Wide-eyed children listened to the stories around campfires, searching the skies warily for a glimpse of the winged harbinger. They learned swiftly that to spy the Blood Queen was a prelude to war. Time continued to pass and then they learned that stories were sometimes cruel reality.

Wherever there were people, there was inevitably conflict. And even though warriors might claim lofty goals or noble ideals, in their secret hearts they craved the glory that could only be claimed from the taking of life. They were Khorne’s creatures whether they acknowledged it or not.

But the armies that rolled out of the Chaos Wastes carved a gory path wherever they went and raised their voices in open adulation to their thirsting god. The memory of the Schwarzvolf may have been long gone, but the memory and knowledge of Valkia the Bloody remained. Wherever there was war, she would arrive, leading an army of unnatural creatures into glorious battle.

And afterwards, when all that remained on the fields of slaughter were the dead, the dying and carrion birds, Valkia would stalk around the bodies of the fallen, marking out those who earned eternal reward and above all else, reaping skulls for her master’s skull throne.

BLOODRAVEN

S P 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.

BLOOD BLESSING

S P Cawkwell

Prepare to be judged in His name. Prepare for your reckoning in the name of the Blood God, warrior. He has deemed you worthy of this, the ultimate reward. Not all of His followers receive this honour in person. Look upon me. I am the harbinger of death. I am the herald and consort of He Who Thirsts. I am Valkia, known as the Bloody and my face is the last that your eyes will see.

You shiver.

You react.

You know me, then? This is good. It is right and proper that a warrior who declares his loyalty to my lord and master cowers in the presence of his betters. Do not fear me, beloved. You knew this day would come. You have anticipated and hoped for my presence throughout your entire life.

Perhaps it is your fanatical devotion that makes you tremble like a leaf in the wind.

Do not die. It is not yet your time, warrior. Not quite yet. There is something that remains to be done. Listen to me, disciple and prepare to make a final choice. No, do not die. I have not yet given you permission to do that.

Look at me. What do you see? A daemon-woman, clad in armour of scarlet? Perhaps you see your queen. Do you see your equal or do you see your better? So many questions, when all you want to do is die. You tremble again.

Perhaps it is the rain, bringing an aching chill to your mortal bones.

Perhaps you are shivering in fear. Perhaps you are shivering in ecstasy. Which is it, beloved disciple? No… No, do not answer. There is no need.

I am no fool. I know that whilst your tremors may be due to any of these things, you simply shiver from the mortal wound that steals your very existence. The gaping wound in your gut through which your life bleeds, dragging you inexorably and inevitably to your end. I know the truth, beloved. It is written in your dying face and written in the blood that smears the head of your weapon. You have killed countless numbers on this battlefield today. You have slaughtered your way through your enemy without fear or hesitation, but now you can fight no longer.

It is a poor end to come to. What is a warrior without war? What is a fighter without a fight? You are dying, mortal. You are a man. Nothing more, nothing less.

But with the whisper of a single word, you could be more.

You have cried my lord’s name with every stroke of your weapon and He has received the plentiful tithe of blood reaped from the bodies of your enemies. You have strived for glory and in so doing have brought yourself to His attention. You have done well and He is prepared to give you the choice.

The rain is coming down harder now, washing the blood and ooze from your flesh, cleansing your body but your soul can never be absolved from the stains and filth that cling with tenacious determination.

This is good.

I smell the blood oozing from you; I see the life force ebb between your fingers. Each laborious beat of your heart brings another surge of scarlet bubbling to the surface. There are few things more worthy than the spilling of blood in the god’s name… but the blood of the devout is greater. Would that I could describe the scent of that purity. The taste.

So what do you desire? I offer you the greatest honour my lord can give. And it is the most simple of choices, warrior.

Death or glory.

The choice is yours. While it may seem obvious, consider what it is that you really want. Your world is bloodied and broken, your eyesight failing, but what is it that you do see? Is it the path to darkness unending, or the path to life renewed?

Life brought me to death and in that death I found life. A delightful conceit, but once I threw off the chains of my mortal existence, once Khorne granted me life beyond, I saw all. Perhaps that is what your heart desires. If you choose glory, Khorne will raise you up to more than you could ever imagine you could be. You will fight the Battle Eternal in His name, the endless thirst for blood and the desire to bring skulls to His throne driving you ever onwards. You will fall countless times in those wars, banished to the eternal realm by the foul magic and enchanted blades of the living, but you will rise again and again.

Is this the warrior’s true dream? The lust for battle, the need for bloodshed and the desire to leave a trail of broken bodies in your wake? Or is it the true dream of the warrior to end their life at the appropriate time? Do not necessarily be fooled by your tribal tradition that a warrior’s legacy begins with the legend of his death. Think on this.

What child of the Blood God would ever wish to end the battle?

You see it now, my fading friend. Death is, for many, the ultimate honour. Choose death… The pain ends and the legend begins. Choose glory and the pain no longer matters… though it remains.

Either way you choose, know that you are honoured. Choose death and I will personally reap your skull for his throne. Not for you the casual tumble into the pile. For you will come the honour of being added to the throne itself.

Choose, warrior. Your life is measured now in seconds. Whisper the word before the sands of time trickle to their inevitable conclusion or you will be just one of the other dead on this battlefield, unimportant and forgotten. Death will bring you closer to the Blood God than you would ever dare imagine. Glory will grant you the chance to serve by my side.

Which will it be?

REAPER

S P Cawkwell

Red coated everything.

Red-churned mud was rendered thick and sticky from all the blood that had seeped into it during the long night of the battle’s aftermath. The corpses that lay strewn across the field were tinged scarlet in the soft glow of the morning sun that rose above the trees. It was an ugly place; a place of death and destruction, a pit of gore and viscera that should never have been. The stench of excrement and the stale, copper stink of blood permeated every breath.

And yet…

Despite everything that had taken place on what had once been a flower-filled meadow, but which was now the last sodden resting place of countless hundreds, it was going to be a beautiful day. Already there was a delicious spring warmth in the air. The world went about its business as usual, heedless of what had taken place. In a few short hours, the sun would be above the scene, playing its part in the slow decomposition of the already rotting bodies. So even though there was horror on the ground, the world turned from spring to summer without heeding or caring for the slaughter.

For more than three days the battle had raged, the two opposing lines eventually coming together for the last skirmish a day before. The armies of the Empire had held their ground against the invading forces of Chaos with valiant actions. Fearless, that was what they had been. Fearless, brave and relentless. But for all that, everything had been in vain. Noble sacrifices proved pointless.

A flock of carrion birds wheeled in the sky above the battlefield, shrieking with delight at the feast laid out on the ground beneath them. Marauder or soldier, the birds had no preference. Food was food, meat was meat – and for them at least, the pickings were rich. The flocks had turned up a day past, enticed by the sounds of war and had settled in treetops and simply waited. Some of the birds, made bold by the lack of movement, darted downwards and began the long task of gorging themselves insensible.

The cavalry had been the first to fall. The muddier the field had become, the harder it had been for the horses to keep their balance. Many had slipped and fallen, throwing their riders clear. To get a terrified horse back on its feet, with the sounds of blackpowder guns firing all around whilst Chaos marauders attempted to hack its head from its neck, was no easy task and most of the animals died in fear. Their riders had not been far behind.

The army of Captain Kale von Kessel had been the last to fall and their leader the last to admit defeat. Even now, he lived – if only barely. The man puzzled even as he waited for death to finally drop its curtain on his life. How was it that he had survived? How was it that he lived whilst his men were dead?

Von Kessel lay on his back staring up at the blue sky. It seemed almost to be mocking him with its serenity. Had it not been for the foul smell of death that was everywhere and the fact that his right leg had long since parted company with the rest of his body, he could have simply been cloud-gazing.

With a supreme effort, von Kessel lifted his head to stare down at the lump of meat that had once been his leg. Ragged flesh and severed tendons hung uselessly from the stump at the end of his thigh and he felt nothing as he looked at it; both physically and metaphorically. There was just numbness. He knew categorically that he would die soon from the blood loss. He felt no sadness in this knowledge, just quiet certainty.

Noises began to filter in through the rushing sound of his own pain that filled his head to bursting. The cawing of crows as they circled. The sound of a light breeze stirring the trees. The rasp of his own breath in his chest… and occasionally the groan or weakened cry of another dying man.

The early promise of the dawn continued to torment the dying captain; the pink slivers of sky cutting through the pale blue were truly delightful. Such regrets, von Kessel thought. Such a waste that I never truly appreciated the staggering beauty of the world. He turned his head slightly so that his eyes fixed on the body of the barbarian by his side; the man whose axe had taken his leg. In return, von Kessel had taken his life. His sword was still embedded in the other man’s gut.

Perhaps the world was not so beautiful after all.

Von Kessel had gone beyond pain. He was impervious to it now. Weak and barely able to move, he nonetheless dragged himself with considerable difficulty away from his enemy and towards a cluster of corpses wearing his troop’s colours. His death was inevitable and there was a strange, childish part of him that wanted to die surrounded by his own brethren, not with his back up against the enemy.

A movement caught his attention and with supreme difficulty, he changed the position of his head once again. Perhaps all hope was not lost, he thought wildly and without really believing it. Perhaps someone was coming to find survivors. Perhaps he might yet live; see his beloved wife once again…

But the spark of hope was snuffed out in an instant. The movement belonged to one of the barbarian horde who, like him, still lived – if only barely. In a strange mirror of von Kessel’s struggle to rejoin his fellows, the young barbarian – a boy, really – was trying to get to his own people as well.

Perhaps, a wild voice in von Kessel’s mind suggested, he is like you. Perhaps he is afraid of dying amongst those who sought to kill him.

Von Kessel, a rugged, hard-hitting man who was well into his early forties, felt a sudden flare of empathy for the youth. His impending death was providing him with a clarity of thought and understanding of the human condition that he had never possessed in life.

Above him the morning sky, blue and cloudless, was darkening and the captain rolled over with some difficulty to stare upwards. What he saw there chilled his blood to the marrow and he suddenly craved the ability to get to his feet and flee. Descending from the heavens, borne on wings of darkest night was a sight so terrifying that von Kessel cried out in fear.

The form was almost exaggerated in its femininity; the curve of the breasts and hips so obvious that nobody could be under any illusion as to the gender of the thing. But any resemblance to living women ended there. In the bright sunlight, it was hard to make out specific features but in his increasingly feverish state, von Kessel got the hint of cold, cruel beauty. Eyes that glowed with an unnatural inner fire scoured the battlefield with insatiable hunger.

A daemon. Von Kessel automatically reached for his sword, but then he recalled that it was embedded in the guts of his enemy; the crazed axe-wielding barbarian who had taken his leg. His aimless crawling had taken him far from the safety of its hilt. He kept his eyes fixed on the daemonic woman as her hooved feet touched down with grace on the battlefield. She was so close to him that he could detect her scent. It was strangely pleasant; a musky mix of decay that put him in mind of a rose arbour in its dying days. Horns curled from the side of her head and as he looked at her she turned her head from profile to meet his gaze full on.

A shock of recognition thrilled through his dying body as he looked up into the fathomless depths of her eyes. Recognition, revulsion and a strange almost compulsive attraction. She was a daemon, yes. But she was beautiful. Breathtakingly so.

Von Kessel’s ragged breath caught in his throat and a slow smile twisted the daemon woman’s lips. She took three prowling, feline steps towards him and then paused at the sound of a weak voice from the other side of the battlefield.

‘My queen!’

The tip of the daemon’s tongue flickered out, snake-like, and ran the length of her lower lip. The smile did not leave her face as she slowly turned her head to the source of the voice. The boy, the northman, had propped himself up on his elbows, one hand outstretched towards her.

‘My queen!’

The weak cry came again and von Kessel did not know whether to be grateful or disappointed that she moved away from him. He knew who she was. He had known the moment he saw her descend from the skies. Somehow, he had always known. There had been legends and stories told of the fell northern queen who had been reborn and moulded into a form more pleasing to the god of blood and death. A consort worthy of the god known to the warriors of the north as Kharneth.

Valkia the Bloody.

She prowled the battlefield towards the fallen boy and it was then and only then that von Kessel realised that every sound had stilled. There was no caw of crows, no birdsong and no sound of the wind in the trees. Only the occasional moan of a dying warrior and the clear, crystal tones of Valkia as she spoke to the youth.

‘Who are you who dare speak my name in this place?’ Von Kessel was startled at the pitch of the daemon princess’s voice. He had expected such a creature to speak with a low growl. But her voice was musical and melodic; hypnotic even. He could no longer put trust in his senses. He had seen enough death and dying to know that he was likely delirious from blood loss. A cawing raven would have seemed tuneful to him. The captain strained to hear the boy’s reply but he was too far away. He wanted to know what passed between the pair of them. It was some kind of morbid fascination.

With slow, painful effort, he dragged himself forward on his elbows, the bloodied stump of his leg trailing in the mud beneath him.

‘Why do you feel you have earned my master’s blessing?’ The warrior queen had spread her wings once again and turned with supreme indifference to run a taloned fingernail down the scaled length of one of them in a demonstration of boredom. The sight was faintly reminiscent of a preening bird.

Closer. Closer still.

Von Kessel dragged himself painfully another few inches until he could just make out the answering voice. The boy sounded on the verge of death and von Kessel had seen enough of those to recognise the sound. This close, he could see the horrendous belly wound that the youth had sustained and despite the fact that the barbarian was his enemy, the captain marvelled at the tenacity of a warrior who could survive as long as the young man obviously had.

‘I have fought in his name,’ the boy croaked, his voice straining. There was a faint gargle in his words that suggested his lungs were filled with blood. His accent was thick, but he spoke the language of the Empire, something that startled von Kessel even more than the fact the youth still lived. ‘Every time my blade struck, I dedicated the blow to him.’

‘There are others here who did that… and more.’ Valkia raised one of her cloven-hooved legs and prodded at a corpse with her foot. The body rolled over; a horrific thing with a skull cleaved almost in two. It was barely recognisable but wore the armour of the Empire. Von Kessel drew in a sharp intake of breath that made her glance up at him. Her beautiful face spread in a smile, but she returned her attention to the boy who was coughing weakly.

‘My master seeks champions, boy,’ she said eventually. She moved slightly away from him to turn over the corpses of more fallen warriors. Empire and barbarian, all had died where they had fallen and the muddy ground was a carpet of mismatched armour and furs. Strange, von Kessel thought, that death brings such unity. ‘Champions who can fight in his name. You are fit for nothing but your own funeral.’

‘I have always served…’

‘Always? You are an infant.’ She turned her attention back to the boy. ‘A mere child. A sapling like you could not possibly hope to draw the attention of my master.’

‘Give me your blessing, my queen, and I will fight beyond death.’ The boy dissolved into a coughing fit and spat up great gobbets of blood and what von Kessel thought could possibly be part of his own gullet.

‘You do not know what it is that you offer me, whelp.’ She drove the end of her spear through the chest of a dying barbarian and watched with affected disinterest as his ribcage caved in.

‘I know. I understand what it will cost, my queen. And I lived only to serve.’ He raised his head in an act of supreme defiance against his imminent death.

The daemon princess cocked her head on one side in a thoughtful gesture and then drew her wings into her back. She leaped with unerring grace between the corpses until she was before the boy again and she crouched before him.

‘Then show me what you can do,’ she said. She put out a hand and the talon of her middle finger pierced the soft skin at the boy’s temple. He screamed weakly and struggled briefly. The daemon princess closed her eyes and inhaled the glorious smell of fear with a ravenous appetite. Von Kessel could do nothing but watch as the daemon princess crouched before the barbarian, her talon piercing the boy’s brain. There was a faintly beatific expression on her face as she somehow extracted what she was looking for.

The boy shuddered one final time and his body ceased movement. Withdrawing her finger, Valkia curled her hand into a fist. The boy slumped face forward into the mud, his heart finally stilled. He had asked her for her blessing and the daemon bitch had given him his death.

‘And you, warrior of the Empire? Are you deserving of a place at my master’s side?’

The fact that she was speaking to him did not register until the moment her hand swooped towards him. He felt a brief and piercing agony, then a rush of euphoria and finally a moment of complete resignation.

And then he remembered.

Kale von Kessel had seen his first battle at the age of seventeen and no two had ever been the same. He had fought across many different terrains and in many different weather conditions. He had fought countless different enemies: beastmen, barbarians and green-skinned orcs and goblins. Each had their comparative strengths and weaknesses and he had always found the barbarian men of the north to be the most challenging. Facing orcs and other creatures not born of woman was little more than fighting animals. To face your fellow man; to stand up against strategies that could even outclass your own… that was a challenge.

Blood was spattered up his breastplate as he gripped the hilt of his sword tightly in one hand. He was defending himself whilst lashing out with the kite shield strapped to his left arm. The heavy steel gave him a second weapon which was every bit as lethal a weapon as the finely honed blade that the captain fought with and more than one of the barbarians fell beneath its onslaught, their skulls caved in or their jaws smashed by the force of impact.

The battle had started just past dawn and had raged for a full two hours. Neither side had fielded more warriors than the other, but the Empire infantry were far more structured. They had held their line for the greater part of those two hours against the constant barrage of barbarian skirmishers. Von Kessel himself had been a part of the front line; the central lynchpin of the shield wall.

Blades flashed in the morning sunlight as they were brought to bear; from the well-tended and razor-sharp swords of von Kessel’s own unit to the dulled edges of the battle-axes so favoured by the barbarians. The silence of the morning had quickly given way to the sounds of battle. The ring of steel and the shouts and cries of the warriors as they engaged. Fierce, ululating battle shouts gave way to screams of incomparable agony. The distant boom of the cannons being managed by the gunnery teams was the one thing that gave the Empire soldiers the true advantage on the field. But the miracle of the ballistic support brought with it its own problems. In a massed battle, firing on the enemy was no precision art. As a consequence, the gunnery crews were killing and maiming Empire men along with the barbarians.

Von Kessel and his loyal men held the shield wall against countless odds, fierce and tenacious. The captain’s helm had been knocked clear of his head some time ago and he shouted out orders with practised ease. Men fell either side of him, but still he held his ground, fighting against those who dared encroach into the Empire. He sang out in Sigmar’s name as he slew the enemy, his sword cutting a bloody path through them.

‘I must admit, you are very bold,’ came a whispering voice just behind his right shoulder. ‘A great killer.’ Von Kessel knew it immediately for who it was and he didn’t turn his head, but he responded regardless.

‘This is just a memory. I know how it ends and so do you. What is the point of this?’ He spoke with anger; fuelled more by the memory of battle rage than by his own fury. He knew that in the material realm he was lying on the field of a great battle. He knew that he was dying.

‘The point, my delicious morsel, is this.’ Slinking her way past him, Valkia moved to stand in the line with the enemy. None of them seemed to notice her presence and the captain lowered his sword, unwilling to resume a fight that he knew on some unconscious level was not even real.

The daemon turned to face von Kessel and smiled. The expression demonstrated her daemonic fangs perfectly and he recoiled from the sight of them. She threw out an arm with an expressive gesture. ‘You are fighting against my people. The barbarian men and women of the Northern Wastes. You kill indiscriminately and you do not even notice the faces of those you slay.’

‘They are my enemy. Of course I do not.’

‘These are, yes. But what about them?’ Valkia stepped away from the barbarians and stood face-to-face with von Kessel. She pointed downwards, all the while holding his eyes in her own. ‘In your hunger to slay, you kill any and all who present themselves to you. See?’

Horror in the pit of his stomach at what he might see if he followed her pointing finger, von Kessel slowly lowered his head. Two of his own men lay dead at his feet. He shook his head.

‘They were killed by the enemy,’ he said with certainty. Valkia bit her lower lip and resumed her predator’s smile. She shook her head slowly and dropped to a crouch, her wings folding around her like a cocoon. She took the limp, lifeless hand of one of the two soldiers.

‘This one, killed by you when he positioned himself between you and your prey. You shouted at him to get out of your way… Do you remember?’

Mannheim, move! Get out of my way before I…

Von Kessel sucked in a sharp intake of breath. He knew how that sentence was going to end but he could not believe that he was going to commit the unforgivable act… but the memory within the memory came anyway.

…run you through!

Mannheim was caught in battle, concentrating desperately on his own skirmish and could not comply. Von Kessel did not care. He threw back his head like some kind of animal, roaring in unadulterated rage. The soldier was directly between him and his victim and so he resorted to the simplest means to resolve both issues. The length of his blade pierced through first Mannheim’s body and then that of his enemy. He withdrew the sword, now slick with blood and pressed forwards…

‘No…’ Von Kessel felt sick to his stomach at the realisation. He forced himself to focus; to remember that this was all some near-death induced hallucination. His body felt real enough, but he was standing. Somewhere, he told himself, somewhere far away, he was lying on the ground. He was lying there, barely able to move and a leg forever lost…

He found a measure of courage to speak to the daemon. ’You are distorting this. Making it appear that I…’

‘You killed him.’ Valkia let go of the dead soldier’s arm and reached to push the other body over on its back. The sightless eyes of his squad sergeant looked up at him and he stared back down into them. ‘You killed him. And you bathed in the moment of his death. You drank it in like a sweet summer breeze.’

Von Kessel opened his mouth as though he would deny it, but no sound would come. Relentless in her attack, Valkia said nothing, but merely dredged other memories.

What have you done, captain?

Are you questioning me? Get out of my way.

Sir, you are unfit to command. Stand down, Captain von Kessel, before I make you.

You? Make me?

‘Enough!’ Von Kessel dropped the phantom blade that he wielded in his hand and covered his face with his arms. He had fallen to fighting his own men, unable to contain the rage and bloodlust he had felt. He had killed and killed and killed and he had reached a point where it no longer mattered who tasted his blade. He just wanted to savour that moment that their warm blood splashed over his hand, relish the extinguishing of the light in their eyes… there was such glory in the release of another’s vitality.

‘You enjoy killing for killing’s sake, Kale von Kessel,’ purred Valkia in his ear. ‘That is no bad thing. Anyone can wield a sword. Any fool can take up arms, but only a true warrior can take a life and not feel a morsel of regret. Only one whose heart pumps the blood of a champion can cut down any and all in his path for his own gratification.’

Her voice was hypnotic and he continued to cower behind his arms, refusing to look upon the sordid truth of what he was and what he had become. An animal. A beast no better or more deserving than the barbarians he had been sworn to battle against. Tears welled up in his eyes and spilled hotly down his cheeks as he was forced to face the bare, naked truth. The horror of what he was.

‘The boy,’ said Valkia in that same faintly distant tone. ‘The child from the north. He believes himself to be a worthy champion of my master because he chose to cut down others with every intention of spilling blood. You, though… once you started… once you felt the thrill of your blade slide through ribs, pierce internal organs…’

She was so close to him that he could feel the breath of her words on his neck and he shuddered involuntarily at her proximity. She was a foul creature of the Chaos Wastes and every instinct in his dying body shrieked that he must end her existence.

‘You enjoyed killing, didn’t you, my sweet?’

A sob tore from his throat and he bent to pick up the sword and strike, but she brought her hoof down with nonchalant ease and shook her head. She reached out and caught his chin in her hand, forcing him to look up at her. His face was pale and tear-streaked; his misery having worked tracks through the mud. She twisted his chin to look at him this way and that.

‘You are not remarkable,’ she said. ‘You are certainly not the first of your kind who has given themselves over to the unadulterated worship of my master without even realising it and I promise you that you will not be the last.’

‘I worship no Dark Gods,’ whispered Kale von Kessel and even as he said it, he wondered exactly who it was that he was trying to convince. ‘I am a servant of the Empire and I will die before I–’

Valkia gave a short laugh. ‘Save your grandiose words. They are hollow and meaningless.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Even if you mean them. You are dead anyway.’ She released his chin, but not before giving his face a rough shake. ‘So why attempt such pathetic denial? You could release your grip on this life – such a tentative, trembling grip – and you could be reborn. You would become my master’s child and you would be mine to command.’ She swung her head in a shake, her hair whipping outwards. Her face twisted into a sneer.

Very slowly, her wings began to unfurl. ‘But still, this staunch denial. I was clearly wrong. You are not worthy of such a blessing. My lord and master seeks those who would fight in his name for eternity.’ At full span, her wings were curiously beautiful; the membrane seeming to his failing eyesight to be more akin to the gauzy fineness of a butterfly and not the leathery monstrosities that he had first perceived. Despite his predicament, von Kessel felt once again that strange mix of attraction and repulsion. The wings flickered lazily, iridescent colours in the morning sun, and she took a step back from him ready to leave. Somewhere far beyond, somewhere in the mortal realm that was at one side of the precipice upon which he now balanced, he felt the sensation of her probing fingers being withdrawn from his head.

He realised that she must have dragged him to a standing position because he felt his remaining leg buckle beneath him and he slumped back to the ground, pitching onto his belly. It took every ounce of strength he possessed to lift his head from the ground.

‘Wait.’

Slowly, agonisingly so, von Kessel stretched out his hand to her. Crusted blood and mud hid most of the skin beneath. He reached for her, yearning for her touch again. ‘Wait. Please.’

Valkia turned her head from the skies to look down at the dying captain again. A mysterious smile touched her lips. No words left her mouth, but her head tilted quizzically, an unspoken invitation for him to speak.

Kale von Kessel could feel the fading ebb of his own heartbeat fluttering like a trapped moth in his chest. It was as though his life was measured in uneven seconds. Every thump of his weak pulse was another moment, another opportunity to say what he must. The daemon woman’s form was beginning to blur as tears of frustration, pain and some other unfamiliar emotion welled in his eyes. From a place deep in his gut, he found the last vestiges of his strength.

‘I always thought we were all this way in war,’ he said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. ‘I never thought anything of the way I acted. But… you are right. I crossed a line once, ten years ago now, and I never truly found the way back.’ Von Kessel stopped speaking and coughed weakly, blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He sucked in breath after painful breath, almost hyperventilating with the need to get air into his lungs. He had long thrown away the opportunity for redemption. Only now did he accept it.

Valkia drew her wings lazily back in and stepped forward. She crouched down so that she might better hear the unfortunate man’s final confession. He looked up at her and wondered how he could ever have found such a creature repulsive. She was beautiful. A red angel sent to reap his tortured soul, grant him ultimate release and give him the prize he had hungered for.

‘I want…’

Scrambled and broken images raced through his mind. The face of his wife, her beauty long since faded and replaced by the pinched tiredness and aching loneliness that was the lot of a soldier’s wife. The comrades he had slain in his berserker rage. And through it all came her face. That of the consort of a dark god whose existence he had always denied.

But he knew now that he could deny it no longer.

‘I will serve,’ he gasped out.

‘Why?’

It was not a question he had been anticipating, but the answer reached his lips in an instant as though he had merely been waiting for the chance to say it. ‘I want to spill blood,’ he whispered. ‘Blood… for the… Blood God.’ His eyes met hers and an unholy ecstasy sent his body into paroxysms of sheer rapture.

‘Yes, my sweet,’ she agreed. ‘Yes. You please me.’ She put her hooved foot in the small of his back, pressing him firmly against the sodden earth and stilling his convulsions. Raising her spear, which glinted in a ray of light, she brought the blade down with near-casual ease against the back of the soldier’s exposed neck. It ate through the skin and bone with a supernatural ease, separating the head from the body instantly. Rich, scarlet blood oozed from the ragged edges of the corpse’s neck and seeped into the mud. The body gave two more violent jerking spasms and then ceased to move.

Leaning down, Valkia took up von Kessel’s head by the hair. She turned it until the gruesome thing, a face frozen in ecstasy, was looking directly at her. She kissed it upon the bloodied lips.

‘Not one prize this day, but two,’ she said as she moved to take the head of the young barbarian. Two skulls for her master’s throne and two more eternally stained souls whose rebirth would grant them the champion’s opportunity to spill blood in his name forever. The Blood God got what he wanted and so did the mortals. There were always winners in this endless game.

Her prizes claimed, she spread her wings and soared from the charnel remains of the battlefield. The sun, risen now to its zenith, blazed in a cloudless sky, unmoved and uncaring of all that had transpired. The humans strewn across the meadow were nothing more than corn stalks felled by the scythes of battle. Valkia the Skull Queen had merely reaped the bountiful harvest of war.

HARBINGER

S P Cawkwell

‘Let him call for me. I won’t go.’

Everyone in our village has an opinion of the elder. Me, I know him best as a stubborn old fool who places too much value on his pride and appearance. He’s proud of what we’ve become. From the simple hunter-gatherers we were when he was but a boy, the years have seen us become farmers. Our existence isn’t easy, far from it. The ground does not invite healthy crop growth, and our meat comes mostly from what we find in the woods and the fish that come from the river flowing close by. Not easy, but the way we live is better than some of the more primitive tribes further north.

I have heard tell that a little way to the south is the edge of a great civilisation. Perhaps my children, or theirs, will find that place. It isn’t something likely to happen in my lifetime.

Whatever it is that keeps the elder stubborn, he is fully exerting it right now. He shakes his head when I repeat our visitor’s request to speak with him.

‘No! I won’t be dragged to a stranger’s deathbed. I owe him nothing.’

‘But…’

He places a finger to his lips suggesting that I stop my gentle rebuke. ‘I know. You’re going to tell me he’s dying. Well, that’s his problem. He is a barbarian. Why should I care? Where his kind go, trouble follows in their wake. I will see him when his body is ready for the fire. Not before.’

The elder leans back in the fur-backed chair and folds his arms across his chest. I am angry with him. It is irrational and I do not quite know why. His opinion is right, of course. The crude savages of the mountain tribes have no business bringing their blood thirst amongst my people. But this man is dying and he has asked for the elder again and again. To explain himself. His request is most sincere, of that I have no doubt.

The fire throws flickering shadows onto the wall of the elder’s hut, shadows that twist and writhe without form or shape. I consider him for a while longer. The firelight itself is a symbol of his status and power. None of us have hearth fires in our huts, bar him. I am allowed a cook fire for the brewing of my potions and unguents, but otherwise all food is cooked at the communal pit outside.

The man is older than I am by some fifteen years – no great age difference, but enough that he has outlived his enemies and is considered wiser than any other in the village. Moreover, he is a warrior of our people. I am an aging healer, the one they call Old Mother. Hardly flattering, but accurate enough.

The elder has been our tribe’s leader for ten summers, during which time he has led us to many victories against the endless attacks from the northern tribes. He has led us in opportunistic strikes against them, too. These attacks of retribution have rarely brought us anything but the loss of life. He is getting old now. War no longer sings to him as it once did. His arthritic legs and aching knees no longer carry him to the front of the battle line. His time is short. But it is his time to spend how he will.

Stubborn fool. I press on, driven by an old guilt that gnaws away at me. The guilt that came following the death of a stranger I turned away, many years ago. That lack of compassion brought about one of the most terrible battles between several tribes – including ours – I can ever recall. All because I was young and foolish and said ‘no’ to a man in need. For the rest of my life I have attempted to atone for this sin.

‘Please,’ I say for the fourth time. ‘I beg you. Grant a dying man a final favour.’ Then it hits me. The right way to get his compliance. ‘If we deny him this, how are we any better than he is? Yes, he is a barbarian, but death is the same for all. We should honour his death with as much respect as if he were one of our own. Would you let one of the village pass into the arms of the ancestors without telling their last tale?’

My words strike true. I see a look of guilt flicker in the elder’s eyes. A surge of triumph wells up within my breast as he chews on his lower lip. Even the elder knows better than to question the age-old traditions of our people. He fixes me with a long, thoughtful look and finally says the words I have been waiting to hear.

‘Very well. I will speak with this man. But when he is dead, he is taken to the edge of the village and burned outside our borders. Is that clear, healer?’

‘Crystal clear.’

I keep my expression solemn but the burden in my soul is lightened immeasurably by his agreement to see the barbarian. For two nights and three days the man has lain in my hut, clinging to life with the tenacity of the first flowers of spring. The gash in his chest weeps constantly and yet he has not died. I cannot close the wound. Nothing I do will stop the blood from flowing. I have tried medicinal remedies. I have even tried drawing the wound closed with catgut, but it bursts anew every time.

His skin is clammy: white and pale as a ghost. Until I encountered him, I had no idea that a man could suffer so much and yet not die. Such a tenacity in clinging to a shattered existence is a thing that lies far beyond my ken. His desperation to speak to the elder, before he is taken by whatever savage gods he worships, is curiously admirable.

I lead the elder to the hut where I work my craft. I have almost as high a standing amongst the villagers as he does and I am never ungrateful for the status it brings me. I was born with a gift – a natural understanding of the medicinal properties of herbs and plants. It has brought health and a god-blessed longevity to our people, a strong, hardy folk. We reach the hut and my hand hesitates on the door.

‘Prepare yourself,’ I warn the elder. ‘What you are about to see isn’t pleasant.’ He steels himself, though a lifetime of struggle and war has already shown him many ways a man might perish. He nods, a curt, anxious gesture. I open the door and the stench of death instantly reaches out with its acrid, coppery fingers to draw us in.

The air is tainted with the stink of putrefying flesh. I have treated the wound over and over, but infection is still taking hold. Combined with the man’s natural reek, that of a born warrior to whom bathing has always been anathema, the air within this room is a miasmic haze of vileness. The elder gags and makes no effort to hide it. I have gotten used to the smell over the past day or so. Without a word, I hand him a pungent bag, filled with a variety of herbs, strung onto a piece of cord. He places it over his head and brings the linen pouch to his nose, inhaling the clean scent deeply. It dispels the worst of the aroma.

Our ‘guest’ lies on the floor, a sheet loosely covering his body. My well-trained eyes note that the blood has seeped through the fabric again causing it to stick to his skin. He is a savage in every sense of the word. When he arrived, he was naked from the waist up so I have left him that way. The muscles of his torso are tightly knotted and the swarthy flesh that is exposed by the sheet bears primitive tattoos – symbology of some kind. His hair, blond and long, is tangled and matted, and the face, broad and brutish – at least what I can make out of it beneath the matted beard – is contorted with the terrible pain of his injury.

‘I am here,’ says the elder between sniffs of the scented pouch. ‘Speak to me.’

The warrior turns his head with agonised slowness towards the sound of the elder’s voice. A slow smile changes the aspect of his face in a remarkable way. I pick up the bowl of water that stands atop a table and move towards him. With gentle care, I peel back the sheet from the terrible rent in his torso, a blow that should have killed him outright.

‘This is our village elder,’ I say in my best soothing tone as I begin for the thousandth time to cleanse the stinking wound. ‘I promised you I would bring him to you. And here he is.’

The man says something to me in his guttural native tongue and I shake my head. ‘I cannot understand you. Speak as you did before. In the common tongue.’ The elder looks at me sharply and I know what he is thinking. Although some of the northern tribes have migrated south and become entirely more civilised, we have a shared ancestry that can never be denied. As such, there is a core of language in which every tribal dialect is firmly rooted. For people like the village elder, an old man who remembers harder times, the cant is a painful reminder of what we once were.

When he finally speaks, he does so with great difficulty. The shapes of the unfamiliar sounds do not come easily to him and what little strength remains within him is focused on keeping him breathing. But slowly, agonisingly so, the tale begins to shape. The light is seeping out of the day, what is left of the sun sinking below the trees. He captivates us with his words and I am reminded of the Skalds, preserving the history of the tribes in stories passed down from one generation to the next. He paints such a vivid picture that it is as clear to us as if we stood at his side, watching the series of catastrophic events unfold. In the grand theatre of our mind’s eye, we relive the warrior’s tale.

The warriors were weary as they trod the long road home. The campaign had been hard-fought, but they returned triumphant. They did not return without loss, either, for they bore the bodies of the victorious dead on makeshift litters that they carried through the ever-thickening forests that would lead them ultimately to their families. When they got there, there would be long and complicated rituals for the dead and the fallen. There would be shorter, but no less complex, rituals for the victorious living. There would be much feasting and celebration, and there would be stories.

Little wonder it was, then, that the war band moved with increasing spring in its step.

The trophies of battle were carried with reverence by some of the younger warriors. Those for whom this had been the first foray into the life that was the clan’s lot. The need to protect and defend what was theirs from those who tried to take it. For those trespassers, there was no quarter given.

A beast of a man walked at the head of the returning army. Powerful shoulders and a thickly muscled torso strained at the remains of a tunic that had once covered him. His face was a dark mass of whorls: tattoos that held important symbolism to his people and some that held important symbolism to him personally. Dedications to the tribe’s gods, to their elders, to their history… all of them created a mass of dark colour that left him with a threatening aspect. He was followed by those who lauded his extraordinary demonstrations of heroic bravery. Songs would do no justice to his acts of courage and bravery, but already verses were forming in the heads of those who were musically inclined.

Yes, the fight had been long and arduous, but it was over now. A great cry went up from the front of the trudging party as the first home fires were spotted curling about the tree line. The welcoming scents beckoned them forward and a certain urgency hastened their steps.

Home.

It was not much to look at. A few rickety wooden huts, accompanied by a larger number of tents and lean-to structures. A small corral off to one side housed what little livestock the villagers managed – a few goats for milk and several chickens who squawked and scattered all across the settlement. There were not many people there to greet them. Most had been present for the battle. Only the very youngest and most elderly as well as women who had been deemed too important to lose to the enemy had remained.

As they came closer, the group allowed their leader to step across the threshold of the clan’s village. He was greeted by four men whose faces were hidden behind elaborately decorated wooden masks. Each bore a unique design, and somewhere on the face of the warrior at the head of the army, the twin could be found amongst his many tattoos. One, wearing a mask that was painted to represent a stylised skull, stepped forward.

‘Step no further. Speak now to us. Speak to the Godtouched. Is the day won?’

‘The day is won,’ replied the army’s leader, the people’s champion. He dropped first to one knee and then the other before prostrating himself fully at the feet of the four, lowering his face until his nose touched the ground. When he spoke again, it was muffled by the earth at the feet of the Godtouched. ‘The day is won. Victory belongs to our people. All hail the return of Edred.’

‘You led them to this victory,’ said the man in a bird-like mask. ‘Rise up now, Edred. Rise up and receive the honours due.’ He put out a gnarled hand to the prone warrior, noting the fresh scars that his body carried, clearly visible through the hacked and mangled remnants of his leather tunic. Edred slowly raised his head and then accepted the hand of the elder, rising to his feet and being borne aloft on the soaring call of his name as the tribe demanded tales of the battle and enemies vanquished. ‘The honour of the War Leader is yours. It is well-earned.’

The warriors poured into the village with enthusiasm after the ritual of return had been observed – greeted with joy by those they had left behind and sorrow by those to who they brought the news of ultimate demise. But such sorrow could not last in the wake of tales of a great enemy vanquished by the people. Edred sought his mate in the crowd, but struggled to spot her amidst the throng. His three children, all boys, had been too young to bear blades this time. But next time…

His name was called over and over, a wave of adulation that was the sweetest sound he had ever heard. His pride swelled almost to bursting and for a fleeting moment, he allowed himself the luxury of ego.

Edred! Edred! Edred!

Two syllables repeated over and over, the sounds overlapping until his name was completely indistinguishable. He was forcibly raised onto the shoulders of the warriors, who had deposited the bodies of the fallen into the care of the women, and carried to the central ritual circle. Jostled uncomfortably, he did not object. All eyes were on him.

They worship me. The knowledge was stirring a passion within his breast: a lust for life and battle superheated his blood until he felt he could not contain the sheer exuberance any longer. Edred threw back his head, letting loose a bestial and feral roar of celebration. Let them worship him. He was divine. Thoughts of his family fled from his mind as he bathed in the adulation of his people.

They were still chanting his name over and over, and he soaked it up with the thirst of a dying man drinking a last cup of mead. He relished this moment with the same hunger that had driven him to the position of War Leader over the past years. From boy to man, Edred’s history was paved with the corpses of his many victims. Fearless on the battlefield, bold and cunning with his strategies, he had led his people to victory after victory. He glanced briefly across the head of the throng that surrounded him. Beyond their packed bodies, he saw three of the older women of the village engaged in the practice of anointing the fallen with sweet-smelling oil, painting three circles onto the faces of the dead so that they would be welcomed by the lords beyond into eternity. When the task was complete, the Godtouched who spoke for the Lord of Death would oversee the burying of their bodies at the totem in the east of the village.

Caterwauling shouts came from the press of bodies – a call for a re-telling of the story. But there were things that had yet to be attended to. The presentation of the trophy. The head of the leader of the enemy army. Edred laid a hand on the cloth sack slung over his shoulder. The bottom was soaked with dark blood, crusted from the return journey, but he opened it and reached in. He held up his other hand, trying to bring the people to silence. Gradually, the howling and cheering began to ebb, like the tide washing back from the shore until an eerie silence descended.

‘My people,’ said Edred, and he had no need to raise his voice. They hung on his every word. He welcomed it. He hungered for it. This was what it was, he thought, to be great. I am strong. I am invincible. His eyes raked across everything: the buildings, the ritual wailings of the Godtouched at the Lord’s totem, the people who gazed at him with total adoration. ‘My people. Our enemy is defeated! The foes who strove to rob us of our land are meat for the crows and we emerge as the victors! The years of suffering at their hands are ended. The future is ours!’

The silence was shattered by a fresh round of screaming delight. Edred held up his hand again and once more a shroud of peace settled gradually over their shoulders. They held onto every word he uttered, spellbound by each syllable, and he basked in their adulation. Why not drag it out just that little longer? His fingers closed around the blood-matted hair of the disembodied head within the sack.

‘With each hour, the battle grew fiercer,’ he said keeping his voice low enough that the people had to strain to hear him speak. ‘For all the hatred we bear for our enemies, they fight as well as the Headsman’s own. We lost many fine warriors to the kiss of their axes and the cowardly shots from their bows. But we would not be denied. We fought our way through their front line and when their shield wall broke, we went among them as wolves among sheep.’ A slow smile spread across his bloodstained and dirty face.

Edred was considered a handsome man amongst his people. To those outside the tribe, he was one step removed from a feral beast. The tattoos and facial hair coupled with his vast size made him seem more animal than man. His face had, over the course of the last few days of battle, picked up fresh scars, and matted gore had dried in his sandy, blond beard and long, plaited hair. His face and body became animated as he told the tale, his hands expressive, his voice low and filled with the drama of recollection.

‘The mountains have been their lands forever, but we broke them upon their slopes. We pulled them from their holes and towers and set fires in their caves. They hid like cowards behind their walls, but we would not be denied. We broke their shields. We broke their gates.’ His hands curled into fists and he beat them against his chest. Elsewhere in the crowd, the steady rhythm was picked up and accompanied the remainder of his tale.

‘We fought to get into their long-hall for hours and still the stubborn bastards refused to die. Say what you will of our enemy, they knew how to cling to life. But it did not last. We slaughtered the warriors at their door and crossed the threshold. We found their leader hiding behind more of his warriors, too fearful to join them on the front line. His death was a truly glorious thing. Much blood was spilled as he watched, impotent and useless. He was old. Past his time. We killed his men. We gathered up his treasures. When I took my sword to him…’ He patted the hilt of the vast weapon that he wore strapped to his back. ‘With a single stroke, we took his head as well!’

With those words, he dragged out the head of the enemy general, holding it aloft. The steel-grey hair was as blood-matted as his own, forked and plaited beards drooped from the square jaw. ‘As I slew him, I dedicated the kill to the lord of battle. Blood for the blood god!’ He screamed the last aloud to the heavens. ‘Blood for the blood god!’

The cry was picked up and repeated around the village, a great chorus of voices that united in purpose as they called out to their bloodthirsty deity to somehow accept the sacrifices that they had laid at the feet of his skull throne. To accept the sacrifices and grant them a measure of reward.

The reward came, but not until the feast had started.

‘Bank the fire,’ the elder says to me. A chill has settled across the hut despite the comparative warmth of the evening. Without question, I do as he says. The dying man coughs weakly and blood dribbles from the corner of his mouth. The telling of his story is taking every ounce of fading strength that he possesses. Death is close and suddenly I resent him for departing the mortal coil. Suddenly, I do not want him to expire.

I want to hear the end of his tale. I want to know what it is that reduced him to the state in which he came to us. What became of his people? I take the cooling cloth from his fevered brow and wring it out in the bowl of water. It turns salmon-pink with his blood, but I refresh it and replace it, bringing him some small amount of comfort. He gives me a look. Is that gratitude I see in his eyes? Gratitude… or pity?

‘Here.’ I raise the mug of brackish, slightly warm water to his lips. His throat must be parched. Most of the light has gone from the day and he has been talking for longer than any of us realised. He sips at the liquid and lies back for a moment or two, damply exhausted. His eyes flutter closed and a creeping certainty that he is dead comes over me. I raise my eyes to look at the elder, my frustration mirrored in his face.

The moment of silence stretches out. The rasp of his sudden intake of breath, rattling in abused lungs startles me enough to make me spill some of the water. His eyes flutter open again. In a voice edged with fading vitality, he resumes the tale.

‘The reward came,’ he said, ‘but not until the feast had started…’

They drank a potent, heady brew distilled from the juice of berries found close to the village. Eaten straight from the bush, the fruit induced hallucinations as well as good health in bizarrely equal proportions. Brewed into an alcoholic beverage, it brought about a remarkable sense of well-being and a feeling of invincibility. The villagers drank and sang. They danced and they engaged in fantasia, battling one another in an arena that was hurriedly marked out to provide a stage for the re-enactment of Edred’s victory. Six drunken warriors staggered belligerently around the arena, whilst another who took the role of the dwarfish general shuffled on his knees in a mockery of the enemy’s smaller stature. He waved a wooden sword fiercely and fell beneath the onslaught of ‘Edred’ and his warband.

From the raised dais, the hero of the battle watched the ridiculous performance with amusement in his eyes and on his lips. His mate was by his side and Edred’s arm was draped loosely across her shoulders. With her, he had fathered sons of his own, strong boys who would stand to gain from his reputation and carry on his bloodline into the next generation.

He rarely gave thought to the one daughter who had been given to him – some punishment perhaps for a slight on one of the gods. Unsure which god had been angry with him, he had taken the Godtouched’s advice. In order to appease all four, the infant had been left swaddled on the hillside for their judgment. It was the lot of farmers to bear female children, not a warrior.

He had slain a long time enemy of his people and now they all but fell at his feet. He felt strong. He felt invincible. Driven on by intoxication and arrogance, he knew without question that he was the most powerful warrior who had ever lived. The gods would reward him, he knew it.

Night time fell upon the small village, wrapping it in an ebon cloak of balmy night. Stars began to prick through the veil, engaging in their eternal vigil and watched over Edred and his people. He drew a deep breath, exalting in all that he was and all that he had.

It would be the last time he would do that.

Even as he breathed, he looked upwards. Clouds were passing over the pale moon, drenching the land in the green light of its darker twin. Edred stared for a moment and let out the breath he had been holding. The night breezes had brought something with them. Something he had thought not to scent again so soon after several days at war with the dwarves. Blood tinged the air; metallic and pungent. Sobriety forced through his alcohol-soaked thoughts and his hand reached for the hilt of the great sword. The re-enactment of the battle had all but ended although some of the more inebriated of the tribe were still gamely fighting one another. Edred willed his senses, muted and softened by the application of alcohol, to return to their former battle-sharpness.

‘Something comes,’ he said. His eyes went to the men standing on guard at the edges of the settlement. A cloud passed over the face of the moon and the world took a breath.

Seconds later, they burst forth. Dark bodies and flickering blades that seemed only half real. At first, nobody could properly see them but their presence was felt like a wave of dread breaking over the unsuspecting celebrants. Timeless evil: a power of untold aeons channelled through the daemonic forms that were taking shape. The shadow of a tree stretched upwards, becoming a long, thin creature with razor-sharp claws. Several much smaller, but stockier beings lurked at its heels.

From the edge of the village, beyond the celebratory centre, the first screams sounded and the jovial, carefree nature that had belonged to Edred and his people was shattered into forgotten fragments in an instant.

‘Allies of the mountain folk! They are here to seek their revenge!’ Edred leaped to his feet, wobbling only a little through the drunkenness that kept its grip on his reactions. He had no reason to believe his own words, but in the haze of his own sense of invincibility it was the only possible explanation. ‘To arms, my people, to arms!’

His mate hissed and dropped into a defensive stance, a habit borne of the years she had spent bearing Edred’s shield. Without a shield to hand, she instead drew the long curved knife she wore at her waist. As she did so, the first of the daemons lunged from the shadows into the firelight. A bestial form, hunched and covered in wiry, corded muscles clearly visible through a crimson skin that slithered and moved across bone and organ alike. It rushed with a lumbering gait towards the raised dais on which Edred and his woman were seated; from where they had enjoyed the spectacle of re-enactment just moments ago. As it came closer, three of Edred’s warriors stepped in to halt its progress. It took the first up in huge, spade-like hands, breaking the man’s back as easily as if snapping a twig. It raked black, dagger-like claws across the stomach of the second, spilling his guts and leaving him mewling feebly in a spreading pool of gore. The third scrabbled to get away.

He did not succeed. The pack of twisted hounds that snapped at the daemon’s heels descended on the fleeing man in a storm of talons and jaws, tearing him apart in a furious orgy of carnage.

The daemon went unhindered after that as it made its approach towards Edred. Its eyes were blood-red slits with tiny black pupils that dilated in the firelight. Its horned, protracted head tipped to one side, and it gusted air from its nostrils that reeked of cinders and old meat. It grunted once or twice and then growled the language of Edred’s people as though it were simply another visitor.

‘I herald your reward, Edred. My mistress heard your prayers and her champion comes for you.’

Edred could not reply for several long moments. Rage warred with wonder as he grappled with the urge to attack the God-touched creature. He knew from the tales of old, that legends had been born this way. He must stay focused. Around him, the celebrations of earlier had long since ceased, giving way to a silence that reeked with the deaths of his people. Some had fallen to their knees, unable to give voice to the sense of dread that oozed from the daemon. Edred’s voice found strength as his fingers closed around the hilt of his sword, its familiar touch slamming his status as a champion of his people back into his awareness.

‘Your mistress?’

‘The consort of our glorious master. Valkia hears your call for reward, Edred Dwarfslayer. She sends it for you to collect.’ Other daemons began to slide from the shadows, joining the first. They hissed and growled – creatures of darkness given corporeal form by a power far beyond Edred’s comprehension.

At the periphery of hearing, the warrior could make out the sound of the trampling of undergrowth. Something huge being ridden through the woods. No horse could make that sound. No creature that Edred was familiar with could make it sound as though it were simply uprooting trees that were in its way and carving its own passage through the forest. It was a rhythmic thunder. A heartbeat of nature and chaos that pounded in a perfect beat.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

One beat. Two beats. Three beats. The daemon threw back its head and screamed into the night sky, ‘Her harbinger comes!’ At those words, violence exploded out of the surrounding woodlands, crashing into the settlement and bringing dread chaos in its bow wave.

Something massive and brazen thundered from the darkness: a juggernaut with its head bowed, heavily armoured and simply trampling anything – or anybody – that was in its path. It stampeded with single-minded purpose towards the dais on which Edred and his family were seated and flipped the structure over. Edred lost sight of his woman and children as he tumbled through the air, and for a moment fear gripped him as the platform disintegrated into kindling, shards flying in all directions. Then, something more primal was stirred deep in his gut and he roared out his defiance. He struggled to his feet, only to see the creature and now, clearly, its rider coming for him.

The weapon that he favoured performed best when wielded with two hands, but Edred was big, strong and had defeated every enemy that had stood before him. He transferred the weapon to his right hand and, whilst it took him a moment or two to adjust to the balance, he knew from long experience that he could fight almost as well one-handed. He looked around, taking in the scene with alacrity and stooped, picking up the closest shield from one of his fallen brethren.

Shield was a loose term for what was, to a man of Edred’s size, little more than a buckler. He knew, even as he took it up that it would offer him very little protection. Nonetheless, he took a defensive stance as the monster ploughed into him. The buckler absorbed barely any of the impact and splintered. The War Leader flew backwards several feet, crashing into a tree. Other men would have been dazed, unable to move following the shock of an impact that he could feel had broken several ribs. But Edred had ever been above other men. He was back on his feet in seconds, prepared and ready.

Providence favoured him as he saw the curve of a vicious axe whistling towards his head. Had he been unable to withstand the shock of the monster’s initial charge, the weapon would undoubtedly have cleaved him in two, rendering him as broken and useless as the platform on which he had only recently enjoyed his elevation. He ducked the blow which split the trunk of the tree. There was a hideous creak and the tree toppled over with a groan.

Edred took a quick stock of his condition. His chest ached abominably where his ribs had been broken and his numb right shoulder hung lower than the left, suggesting he had dislocated it. Bracing himself against the pain he knew it would cause him, he moved to another tree and slammed his shoulder hard against the trunk. The pain was excruciating, but he bore it with the stoic growl of a man who had done this before. His timing was perfect, for the rider on the monster’s back had dismounted and was walking towards him.

There was no urgency in the stride of the rider. It walked at a leisurely pace, unhurried and determined, the huge axe held easily in one hand. The target of its attention was more than evident and Edred stared, mesmerised.

Edred was a huge man, six and a half feet, and this warrior towered over him. For a fleeting moment, Edred knew what it was to be the lesser man in battle and he did not like the feeling. Regardless, it kindled his desire to fight. His latest opponent’s arms were as thick as tree trunks and covered with plated armour of a metal Edred had never seen before, the plates seeming to shift and change before his eyes the closer he came. It was only when the colossus stopped a man’s length away that Edred could make out the screaming faces trapped beneath the ruddy armour, squirming and screaming, locked in an eternity of agony like freakish things caught in blood-amber.

The helmet that covered its face had two curved horns rising from the temples, vicious things that could impale a man if the wearer charged with his head lowered. But it was the weapon that held Edred’s attention the most. The axe’s edge was not a honed, sharp implement of cutting doom, but a jagged line of snapping jaws that twisted and bit at the very air. This weapon would do more than just cut. It would bite and tear.

As the crimson-clad behemoth strode to within arm’s length, Edred could hear the shrieks and wails of his people dying, but everything faded into complete obscurity. Scarlet eyes alight with hell-fire gazed at him and the huge warrior levelled a burning brass hand at Edred. The forefinger extended and he pointed directly at the wounded man’s chest. Edred blinked, understanding the implication even without words.

The noise that came from the warrior’s chest, muffled by the helmet, was little more than a grunt – a strange, strangled kind of noise that told Edred instantly that the man, or whatever it was, behind the mask was a mute. The stabbing forefinger curled to join its fellows in a fist of challenge. It did not matter that his enemy couldn’t speak. The gesture was plain, the intention clear.

We fight.

‘We fight.’ Edred confirmed. He transferred the weight of the two-handed broadsword back so that both hands were balanced on its hilt. He took a careful breath, assessing how badly the broken ribs and recently reset shoulder would hinder him and made the decision that he could still fight. And all the time he could fight, there was a chance that he could win. Only hours earlier, he had beaten a lifelong enemy of his people. He was – he reminded himself – invincible.

‘We fight,’ he said again, his voice ringing out with arrogance and confidence oozing from every syllable. ‘We fight and then even the Gods themselves will see my power.’

Across the village, the countless creatures that had been indulging in the massacre gradually began to glide, slither or variously stalk towards the two warriors, drawn by the lure of a champion’s battle. Slowly but surely, a loose circle formed around Edred and his opponent. Rather than find this unnerving, their presence simply filled Edred with even more determination.

Another noise rumbled in the huge warrior’s chest, but Edred could not understand him. One of the creatures in the spectator’s circle obligingly translated. ‘Kormak the Destroyer brings greetings from the Queen of Skulls,’ it said in a sibilant voice. ‘ You are honoured indeed, mortal, for he is her eternal champion. Only the mightiest souls are given the chance to challenge his position.’

The creature sidled forward remaining always on the very edge of Edred’s peripheral vision. He did not turn to look; keeping his gaze locked on the being he now knew to be Kormak the Destroyer. The daemon at his shoulder whispered softly, but at a pitch designed to set his battle senses throbbing.

‘Challenge him.’

‘Challenge him. Challenge him!’ Other voices picked up the refrain and screamed their eagerness. Edred howled, his body stirred by a cocktail of rage, drink and confidence in his own ability. His vision filled with the red mist of the berserker and he held his sword aloft. But a small part of him knew that he had to keep his wits about him. He had to control himself. He forced the fury out of his system with the practiced expertise of a man who had seen too many warriors lost to insensibility. Slowly, the blood drained from his vision and he realised that Kormak had not moved. He still stood there. Just… waiting for the challenge. If it did not come, Edred had no doubt that he would fail in the eyes of the Blood God.

If he did challenge Kormak… if he were able to subdue, or even defeat the thing, then maybe he would become the chosen of the gods. Visions of such a reward crowded his pain-fogged mind and pushed out ideas of survival. The world narrowed: a tunnel vision that encompassed just him and the monstrosity.

Challenge him!

‘Kormak the Destroyer,’ said Edred and his voice rang out above the tortured shrieks and sounds of dying that rose from the village. He held his head proud. As well as the much-coveted title of War Leader, the Godtouched had bestowed another name upon him during the celebrations. He used it now. ‘I am Edred Dwarfslayer and I challenge you.’

Silence fell, sudden and terrible. It settled across the village like the first snowfall of the winter, inducing an unnatural sort of calm. Kormak remained motionless, like a statue cast in the deepest scarlet and then he loosened his fist from his side and stretched it out once more. This time, he beckoned his challenger forward.

Edred wasted no time. He knew instinctively that he may have sealed his doom in making the choice. All that remained for him now was to make his end one fitting of a warrior of his tribe; to please his gods. To receive his ultimate reward. He charged headlong towards Kormak, his sword, the slayer of countless enemies, swinging in a perfect arc. It connected with the overlapping leaves of the Chaos Champion’s armour with a sound like the tolling of a funeral bell. For all the reaction it induced, he may as well have struck a wall. The reverberation shuddered up through the hilt of his sword and both of Edred’s arms shuddered violently. For the first time he could recall, he let go of his weapon in the midst of a fight.

The enormity of the moment was not lost on him. He had not attained his position as War Leader in the tribe by losing his grip – literally or figuratively – in the heat of battle. He clung on as hard as he could, but the shock of the impact was so great that the weapon clattered to the dirt at his feet. With a stoop that barely broke the stride of his enemy’s advance, Kormak leaned down and swept the weapon to one side.

Edred’s earlier confidence, the certainty of his victory, took a rather solid blow from the knife-edge of cold reality at that point and he looked around for something, anything else that he could use as a weapon. His eyes fell upon a mace that had fallen with one of his men, and he dropped to the ground beneath a lethal swing from Kormak’s axe. Rolling to the weapon, he took it up and was back on his feet in a heartbeat.

‘No!’ His defiant scream tore through the night. ‘I have come too far to lose now! You will not take me!’ He launched himself at Kormak, the mace a blur as he swung it with terrible force towards his opponent. The first blow glanced off the shoulder with no less a shuddering impact than before. The second blow, again to the shoulder sent Kormak staggering – a reaction that fuelled Edred’s arrogance once again. A third strike, well-aimed and well-positioned struck Kormak in the side of the neck. The champion’s head twisted sideways with an audible crack.

Turning with lumbering slowness, Kormak’s eyes glowed faintly crimson beneath the helmet. Edred met the champion’s gaze, defiant and certain. He stood firm, armed with the mace of one of his fallen warriors and held his ground. ‘You will not take me,’ he repeated quietly.

By way of response, Kormak lashed out with his huge, brass fist. It smashed into Edred’s face with a wet sound of breaking skin, bone and tissue. His fingers let go of the mace which rolled away from him. Blood sprayed from the warrior’s crushed nose and he staggered backwards, spitting out teeth that had been loosened. The other fist met Edred’s jaw in a right uppercut that took him off his feet and he flew backwards yet again to land crumpled and beaten on the cold ground. The watching circle of daemons cackled and laughed and gurgled with hunger and pleasure at the scene.

No, he would not allow this to come to pass! He was not beaten. Not yet. He lived still. He could still fight. His eyes, swimming with tears mixed of pain and blood sought another weapon and he saw a knife held tightly in the hand of a severed arm. He reached for it and recognised it. He recognised the bonding brand on the arm because it matched perfectly the one on his own arm.

His mate’s arm. Her knife.

Cold clarity struck and Edred’s arrogance drained from him leaving in its wake a fallen warrior. But he was nothing if not true to his nature. Even as the smile of Kormak’s axe raced down to strike, he snatched the knife from the dead woman’s limb. In a bizarre attempt to deflect the blow, he tried – unsurprisingly without success – to stop Kormak’s blow; a strike that bit into his flesh, tearing him open from shoulder to hip. It was a fatal wound and yet Edred did not die instantly.

Easy defeat was simply not in his nature.

I am staring at the man as he concludes his story. He is laying back on the bed, his eyes closed and his face a dreadful shade of ash-grey. The effort of telling us his tale has taken the very last of his strength. The logs on the fire have burned to embers and there is the faintest of orange glows flickering against the wooden walls.

I glance at the elder, who is looking horrified at the telling of the story, then back at the warrior. ‘You are he, aren’t you?’ The question feels redundant and even as it leaves my lips, even as he weakly nods his head, I know that it is the truth. Edred’s injuries correlate precisely with the wound he claimed a champion of the gods inflicted upon him. There is no sense that he has lied to us. There is no reason at all to believe that he has told us anything but the truth.

But for one single thing.

‘You said you received your reward,’ I say to him and my voice sounds unnaturally loud, even to me. ‘Yet you are at death’s door. Is death the reward that your people crave?’

He laughs, a weak sound that trails off pathetically into a horrible gurgle as the blood in his chest slowly fills his lungs. There is no more I can do for him and yet I still will him to cling to life. To complete his tale. He clenches his hands into fists, then claws desperately at the air, seeking one last chance to say what he so clearly yearns to say.

‘My reward,’ he says in a voice that is barely more than a whisper in a storm, ‘is to bring word of the arrival of Kormak, Champion of Valkia the Bloody. I am his herald. What greater honour than to bring word of the arrival of the blood god’s servants?’

My blood turns cold as ice and I clutch at the dying warrior’s arm, exchanging a look with the elder. He sits rigid, his gaze faraway, almost as if he has not heard Edred’s words. But he has heard them. It is written in the terror in his eyes, the abject fear on his face.

‘But we are peaceful. We have… done nothing to incur the wrath of the gods!’ My pleas sound childish and pitiful and Edred shrugs, a movement that brings more blood streaming from his chest.

‘It matters not from whence the blood flows,’ he says. ‘Only that it does.’

Amongst the last sounds Kormak’s herald makes are another laugh, threatening and horrific. He coughs up a great torrent of gore, reddens his bearded face and fills the air with the acrid scent of bile and death. Reaching up to clutch my arm in the vice-grip of the dying, Edred says his final words, barely audible over the sounding of the warning horn.

‘Her harbinger comes.’ A bubble of blood bursts on his crusted lips and the hand around my arm goes rigid. That is when I hear the sound outside the hut. A sound that I had not registered whilst I had been caught up in Edred’s tale. A rhythmic thunder. A monstrous heartbeat.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

‘This can’t be happening,’ I whisper to Edred’s cooling corpse. ‘This isn’t real. What vile sorcery is this?’ The words go unanswered and all my yearning wishes that I am simply suffering some kind of delusion explode into kindling along with the hut in which we sit. The elder lets out a brief shriek as he is thrown from his feet before breaking against the far wall. His body flops lifelessly to the floor in a tangle of limbs and broken bones pierced through with ragged splinters.

I look at him and all I can think is that it is a mercy that the elder is dead. Cherry red embers from the dying fire scatter over his corpse and onto the blankets covering Edred. In a matter of moments, the two of them are being consumed by flames. Their clothes are reduced to ashes in seconds, their flesh burning more slowly. Even though my entire being is screaming that I should run, I still try to extinguish the flames, to try to put out the fire before it can spread further, but it is a gesture of utmost futility. I am old. An old woman whose time is all but done. My efforts are useless.

It is too late, I realise. It is much too late for any of us. The dry straw and rough-hewn wooden walls of the hut are burning swiftly and as the inferno rises up around me my senses begin to fade. My eyes catch movement amongst the hungry flames and I look up to stare at the silhouette lumbering towards me.

Her harbinger comes. Just the way Edred described him, only more real and more horrific than anything I could have imagined. It is a horror made into flesh. Details that were missed from Edred’s account swim into painfully sharp focus as my eyes rest on Kormak the Destroyer.

The figure is vast, easily the size of three warriors of my people, and sits astride a huge creature the likes of which have only ever been imagined in the worst nightmares or spoken of in whispers around winter cook fires. The infernal glow of the fire glints off blood-red armour that covers both the creature and its rider. I am transfixed with fear and I cannot help but take in every single detail, even when every part of my body is screaming to run. Every tiny feature is exaggerated in the grip of my terror.

Its bulk fills my vision like a towering, living monument to slaughter but as the monster stomps closer, the full horror of its visage is revealed. The horned helm that covers the warrior’s face. The skull symbol that adorns the chest of its armour. The arm of knotted brass and liquid fire and the axe it carries in its blazing fist. Two mortal men could not have borne such a blade yet the giant holds it without obvious effort. It pushes deeper into the crumbling hut, shouldering aside burning beams with contemptuous ease and I see the serrated edges of that cruel weapon. I snap, for the briefest of moments, across the line into insanity. My mind recoils from the horror of the faces trapped within the axe. This cannot be real. It makes no sound and yet the threat is palpable.

Its mount is an iron-clad beast, the like of which I have never seen and which I cannot give name to. Its burnished flesh is highlighted in the flames, emphasising every ripple of the huge muscles that play beneath its surface. At an unspoken command, it lowers its broad head, pawing at the ground as the rider dismounts. I have never seen him. I have never even dreamed that such a thing existed. But Edred’s story is fresh in my memory and I know who he is.

‘Kormak.’

Fragments of reality force their way back into my consciousness and I hear screaming. Terrible, anguished screaming coming from beyond. Outside the ruined walls of the hut, I see that the village is ablaze. Figures run in all directions, some with far more than the usually accepted number of limbs. Animals, people, monsters. Everywhere I look there are scenes of terror as daemons tear my people limb from limb and feast on the gore. Some are trying to fight back but the futility of it all is palpable. The desperation bleeds from my people just as their life spills from them in red tides. The blood is flowing.

Kormak strides towards me, his armoured tread mirroring the painful thump of my labouring heart, and I cannot move. Naked terror freezes my limbs to immobility, unable to flee. He – for now I know his identity, I cannot think of him any longer as an ‘it’ – pauses and stares down at the half-charred body of Edred.

The axe comes down in a single, perfect stroke and separates the head from the torso. Kormak lifts the ghoulish trophy to the skies and for a moment, I see in my mind’s eye the moment that Edred must have revealed the head of the dwarf general.

Crimson eyes like forge coals smoulder with hatred deep within that full-faced helm and they turn on me. The shock of that gaze frees me from my paralysis. Despite my advanced years, my legs remember how they should work and I urge them to do just that. I fight past the pain of the years and I start to run. Tears blind me and combined with the light of the flames spreading throughout my home, disorientation threatens to consume me. I have no place to go. There is no sanctuary to be found. No escape from whatever cruel fate awaits me.

The daemon horde responsible for the destruction of Edred’s own village has spilled down from the north to consume us. It followed the scent of the barbarian’s blood to our hearth and now it is our turn to be consumed. We have done nothing to deserve this, other than simply to live. To exist. Our attempts to fight our barbaric instincts and adopt the softer living of the southern tribes has doomed us.

I pause, rubbing smoke and tears from my eyes. I have not run far. My old legs will not carry me at any great speed and I come to a halt as the vast crimson slab of horror, that is Kormak the Destroyer, strolls casually into my direct path. I spin and begin to move in a different direction. My heart pounds painfully in my chest and I ignore the pains that creep up my left arm. For months I have known this pain and it has not taken me. Defiance flares. The same defiance that refused to help an injured man so many years ago.

I will not go quietly, I vow.

I stumble to a halt as a huge canine animal – some kind of hound – pounces atop a fleeing villager, taking his head in its massive jaws and shaking it loose of the body in a welter of gore. Everywhere there are severed limbs, mangled corpses, shredded flesh and smears of blood. The screaming reaches a crescendo of terrible, raw fear and then becomes sobbing. Begging. Pleas for a mercy that is not going to come.

My eyes fix on a shaggy marauder clad in gore-spattered armour, swinging a vicious-looking blade and ending the lives of other villagers as if he is reaping a field of wheat. Even in the midst of my all-consuming terror, I remember legends I heard as a girl, of the Skull Queen, reaping the harvest of skulls for the Blood God. They were stories, designed to frighten children. Stories! They were not meant to be true!

Everywhere is on fire. The whole world, it seems, is burning before my eyes. I see, in the back of my mind, that man who I refused to help so many years before. A raw wail tears from my throat to join the chorus of sobs and screams that drown it out. I brought this on my people. I should have taken the elder’s advice and ended Edred’s suffering. By keeping him alive long enough, the harbinger of Chaos has brought this upon us. Upon my people.

The now-familiar clanking of Kormak’s armour can be heard behind me and I know that once again he has moved ready to prevent my escape. Defeat is close but like Edred, pride stiffens my spine. I could not save my people. But there is a chance remaining that I could perhaps save myself.

It is a feeling that does not last. A staccato battle cry from one of the daemons pierces my thoughts, rocking my already unstable sanity to within a point of toppling. I cling onto what tiny bit of clarity remains to me amidst this living nightmare. To reassure myself that I am still in control my hands close into fists, my long nails biting into the tender flesh of my palm and leave fresh red welts that ooze with blood. I close my eyes. I breathe. But none of it helps.

Brick by brick, my defences are torn down, madness and anguish replacing each clear thought and desperate last hope. Finally, Kormak the Destroyer, Harbinger of the Queen of Skulls stops whatever game he has been playing with me and steps to stand directly before me, the biting jaws of his daemonic axe chewing at the air, hungry for the taste of flesh and fear.

I look up. And up. And up some more into the glowing eyes of this monolithic bringer of destruction. What happens then feels as though I am watching from beyond my own body. It is as though I am simply observing the demise of another victim. It is a peculiar experience that is at one and the same time horribly real but strangely detached. My own madness holds me steady and refuses to allow me a final attempt at flight as Kormak’s axe comes down towards my shoulder.

I feel the razor-sharp daemonic teeth biting through flesh, bone, muscle and sinew. Even when my arm detaches from my body and falls to the ground, a twitching thing of meat and bone, it is not really my arm. I don’t even notice the pain. It is a mortal wound, but it is calculated and well struck. Despite my age and despite the severity of the injury, the wound will not kill me immediately. I do nothing to stem the blood that pulses from the gaping smile in my torso and look up at my slayer. I wait for the killing blow. But it does not come. Instead, Kormak slides the axe across his shoulder. Tiny, monstrous hands reach out and clasp the weapon tightly to his back. He looks down at me. He points to the south.

I know precisely what it is that he demands of me. He may be mute, this monstrous creature of another world, but his message is perfectly clear to me. Kormak reaches down with one huge, gauntleted hand and drags me to my feet. The agony in my shoulder screams at this treatment and I am violently sick from the pain. My world swims in and out of focus and my vision fills with blood and fire. There will be no easy release for me. For Kormak has chosen his new herald.

He points again, then puts his gauntleted hand into the small of my back, propelling me forward. Caught up in something I can never hope to understand, I nod, a sound somewhere between a sob and a giggle escaping my lips. I take three steps backward, my eyes fixing for the last time upon the collapsing village and then I turn and run south. The next tribe is little more than half a day’s run through the woods. My awful wound pulses weakly, the fell powers bound to Kormak’s weapon choosing to take my life only in slivers rather than mercifully ending me. A bloody trail marks my passage.

I slam through the forests, the branches reaching out to tear at my hair and clothes like grasping fingers and I can give voice to only three words.

‘Her harbinger comes!’

VAN HORSTMANN

Ben Counter

PROLOGUE

THE LIGHT

It was the cold that woke him. It penetrated right through him, like his flesh was gone and his bones were soaked in it.

His lungs contracted and he could not breathe. Without willing it, he was moving, his limbs thrashing. But he was held fast and could not escape, trapped beneath the ice by hands stronger than him. There was room in his mind for only one thought, which was that he was going to die down there in the merciless cold.

His head was dragged up above the surface. He gulped down air. Every muscle was convulsing with the effort of breathing.

‘Lord Teclis,’ said a voice. ‘Are you there? Do you hear us?’

Even his eyes felt frozen. They would not focus. He could see only a silvery blur in front of him.

Another thought reached him: he was alive.

‘I… I am here,’ he gasped. ‘How long?’

‘Three days,’ came the reply.

‘Thank you,’ said Teclis, as his sight swam back and the shapes in front of him became connected to disparate slices of his memory. ‘Thank you, Caradryath.’

Caradryath, of the elven Sword Masters of Hoeth, bent over Teclis and pulled him upright. The High Loremaster was immersed in a horse trough of freezing water, the best vessel for their loremaster that the attendant Sword Masters had found at short notice. With something close to fear on their faces, two other Sword Masters knelt behind Caradryath. They did not wear the high plumed helmets of their order, but they wore the rest of their gleaming silver scale armour as if about to march out from the gates of the White Tower.

‘Has the fever broken?’ said Caradryath.

Teclis leaned against the side of the trough. He could not keep his hands still and his voice wavered. Isha’s tears, he was cold. But the fact he could feel anything at all meant he had not died in that pavilion, somewhere in the heart of the half-savage land men called the Empire of Sigmar.

‘It is gone,’ said Teclis. ‘The last thing I remember, its grip was around me. It was a black hand with talons sinking into the back of my skull. I could hear it laughing as it dragged me under. But it is gone now. The cold has broken it. I will live.’

‘I had thought this would kill you,’ said Caradryath. ‘I feared that my loremaster would fall by my hand.’

‘The fever would have killed me most surely,’ said Teclis. ‘You did the right thing. And the magisters?’

‘They stand even now at vigil, loremaster.’

‘We cannot keep them waiting. Damn the fires of Hoeth! Three days! Our prisoner will be free before the kraken can swim a league! Help me, Bladelord.’

Caradryath had to help Teclis out of the icy water. Caradryath was one of the flower of Ulthuan’s youth, strong and proud, fair and tall. Teclis was like a child compared to him, his limbs skinny and his hair lank and black. A few hours before, he had been dying of a disease that the priests of Isha and Shallya could not cure. He looked like he still was.

The Sword Masters tried to dry off their loremaster, but he batted away their attentions. Teclis shrugged on his robe, embroidered with the sigils and marks of rank from the White Tower of Saphery, over wet skin. Caradryath helped him don the Silver Crown, a tall helm of silver and gold with a fat uncut ruby set in its brow, and Teclis tottered under the weight of it. The Bladelord of the Sword Masters let the loremaster lean on his shoulder and helped him out of the pavilion.

There were two Teclises. One was the elf – more properly the boy, for he had the stature and weakness of a boy, skinny and shivering. It was this Teclis who limped and coughed as Caradryath pulled aside the entrance flap of the pavilion and let the sun shine in. This Teclis blinked and screwed up his eyes, like a creature that had lived all its life in a cave.

The second Teclis existed far away, in the endless lands of the aethyr. The winds of magic that suffused the world blew in from the aethyr, a realm not of the senses but of the emotions and the mind, an endlessness of disconnected thoughts, concepts, ideas, wishes, love and hate, and souls lost and drifting. Everyone had another self in that realm, but only a wizard could communicate with that self, could use that self as a lens through which he could focus the winds of magic. Teclis knew his aethyr-self well. The two were close to becoming one. What one felt, the other knew. What one knew, the other perceived as rushes of emotion or plunging depths of fear. That was why Teclis was the High Loremaster. That was why the future of magic itself was in his feeble hands.

The senses of his aethyr-self could see the pulsing magic of Caradryath’s heart. That was life, which had its own magic. The celestial power that shone down on him from the sun blinded his aethyr-eyes, for he had been cut off from its prophetic power just as his real self had been cut off from sunlight. Even the arms and armour of his Sword Masters had magic bound in them through the process of their forging, from the concentration and skill of the forgemasters of Saphery, winding through them like filaments of an unseen alloy. Teclis let these senses merge with his own so the same pair of eyes saw both the sun in the sky, and the great well of potential that burned in the heavens, illuminating everything that might yet be.

He could not tell the future. Not here, not now. The paths that diverged led to outcomes too great to be chosen between. Competing futures clamoured at his aethyr-self’s mind, and there would be no prophecies made today.

Teclis’s pavilion was one of a ring of tents and temporary lodges set up around a great smouldering crater in the ground. It was a clear day and as he blinked away the sun’s glare Teclis could see the outskirts of the greatest city of men – Altdorf, the capital of Sigmar’s Empire. Already that city was choking the grand River Reik with bridges and quays, and there was no mistaking its future. It would grow, become greater, with all the good and ill that entailed. He could see that future, at least. Altdorf would be at once a jewel and a cesspit, a throne of glory and a swamp of corruption. That was why what had to be done, had to be done here. Only a city with a future that great could cope with the paths of fate that would divide under it. Only Altdorf could survive what Teclis was about to do to it.

Teclis heard the beast before he saw it. The monstrous heave of its breathing was like the sound of rocks grinding deep beneath the earth. The ground shuddered with it. The creature roared, the sound like a winter’s gale, and a plume of chill vapour billowed up into the sky.

At the crater’s edge stood a forge of heaped-up boulders, glowing as shirtless dwarf attendants worked the bellows. They were all muscular and smeared with soot, looking like they had just come from the depths of the Worlds Edge holds. They hauled great links of iron from the fires, which glowed orange as they were hammered into sections of an enormous chain. Atop the forge stood Marius, one of the first pupils Teclis had ever taken from the lands of men. Marius was close to mastering fire magic, and he called down the winds to fill the forge with an inferno that burned deeper than any mortal flame. Beside the forge worked Auroc, the Gold mage. The magic Teclis had seen in the armour of his Sword Masters was the same that coursed through Auroc then, as with a series of gestures he wove the links of the chain together and struck into them dwarf-taught runes of strength and scorn.

Teclis had tutored both men himself. Without him their talent at magic would have meandered astray into the petty corruptions of hedge wizards as they weaved what spells they could, ignorant of the dangers. Without Teclis the whole of human magic would have continued in that way, and even the mightiest of human wizards would have been nothing more than playthings for the daemons who lurked in the aethyr. The great incursions of Chaos, halted at the Empire’s northern edges, had found their ways into the lands of men through the minds of such ignorant wizards. Teclis’s task was to make sure they could never use such an invasion route again.

Teclis saw then two men. Like him, each of his students had an earthly form, and one that walked in the aethyr. The two were not on speaking terms as his were, for the human soul could not accept the understanding of magic as completely as a high elf. But he saw ghosted over his students’ simple trappings the robes and implements of great orders of magic, traditions of learning that would become great institutions guarding the world from the worst of its corruptions.

‘My lord Teclis!’ cried Marius as he saw Teclis emerging from the pavilion. ‘You yet live!’ The Bright wizard clambered down from the stones of the forge. He wore the rust-red robes of his fledgling order and to Teclis’s eye they flamed bright, surrounding Marius in an orange halo. His ruddy beard was twisted into braids and aethyr-fire lit each one like the wick of a candle, bathing his face in flickering light. He clasped Teclis’s hand in his own. ‘We feared for you, loremaster.’

‘The aethyr has plans for me yet, Marius,’ said Teclis. He waved away Caradryath and took his weight on his own feet. He stayed upright, just. His legs were as weak as a newborn’s. ‘I cannot die now. Not when we have work to do.’

‘It has been difficult,’ said Marius. ‘I do not believe we could keep it chained for much longer. Though it pains me to admit such weakness, the flames of the aethyr scorch me. They burn my soul. I will burn out before I give in, but burn out I will soon without your help.’

‘It will not be you,’ said Teclis, ‘who burns this day.’ He turned to Caradryath. ‘My armaments,’ he said. The Sword Master bowed and headed back to the pavilion.

Another of Teclis’s students came into sight over the lip of the crater. His dark-green robes were smeared with earth and soot from the crater and his straggly dark hair was twined up with twigs and leaves. In the aethyr they flowered, and around the wizard’s feet sprang new life with every step. ‘Loremaster,’ he said. ‘The life within it rages unabated. It does not even tire. Never have I felt such strength of the Jade wind contained within a single creature.’

‘Krieglan,’ said Teclis. ‘It is not life nor death that will decide the path of fate here. Let the Jade wind blow strong and look to your fellow pupils. The life within them will not be as durable when the beast flexes its muscles.’

‘Death,’ came another voice, ‘decides everything.’ Just behind Krieglan walked the Amethyst mage, Malgos, the hood of his purple robes obscuring a dark, lined face. Hourglasses hung from his waist and the backs of his bare hands were tattooed with skulls and archaic script. He was the aethyric counterpart to Krieglan, his opposite and equal, and the bleak energies of death seethed to Teclis’s eye where he walked. ‘Death will end this, just as it does all things.’

‘Life will conquer death always,’ retorted Krieglan. ‘Where death has reigned, life always blossoms.’

‘And decays again to death,’ said Malgos. ‘The end of all things.’

‘Death is an absence! It is nothing! Life is the force that knits us all together. Death exists not save for the cessation of life. Without life, there is no death!’

‘Without life there would be nothing but death.’ Malgos’s voice did not waver, staying a low monotone. ‘Life is an aberration. A detail. A speck on the face of the universe. When nothing else remains, there will always be death. And the beast will be nothing when death has taken its due.’

‘No,’ said Teclis, and in spite of his weakness there was a sternness in his voice that even gave pause to the Amethyst mage, whose skills were with the magic of death itself. ‘Not death. Not here.’

Teclis reached the crest of the crater’s ridge. The torn earth formed a deep bowl, and in the centre of that depression was chained the beast that men had come to call Baudros.

Baudros was a dragon, but somehow even the word ‘dragon’ did not do it justice. Its scaly body had none of the slenderness and grace of the dragons of Ulthuan, the land of the high elves from which Teclis hailed. Nor did it look anything like the spined ice drakes of Norsca or the ferocious fire dragons of the Worlds Edge Mountains. It was bloated and massive, folds of scaled flesh bulging over the tops of its huge legs, its crooked back ridged with plates of bone. Its thick tail lashed back and forth, the clubbing spiky mass hacking plumes of dark earth into the air. Sickly light pulsed through its veins, rippling over it like the mark of some magical sickness, and its talons were permanently crusted with jagged sheaths of dried blood.

But its heads were the worst. Its neck was split in two and supported two enormous heads. One had a brutal undershot jaw full of upwards-jutting fangs, and tiny red eyes buried in ridges of bone. The other was long and slender like a dog’s, its asymmetrical eyes rolling and mad, a curtain of silvery drool falling from its lolling mouth. Its long greenish tongue lashed like a caged snake. Its larger left eye, yellowish and veined, rolled around in its socket to focus on Teclis. Something like recognition flickered there and it strained against the chains holding it down. Two tattered wings, broad enough to cast a shadow across the whole crater, unfolded from its back and beat a gale as they fought to lift it off the ground.

Teclis himself had called down the storm that had grounded Baudros. The beast, freed by the bedlam of the recent war, had been on course to crash into Altdorf and turn the young capital into a swathe of ashen ruins. It was the effort of the storm that had allowed the fever to enter Teclis in the first place. The people of Altdorf did not know of the fate they had so narrowly avoided. The storm had been interpreted as a dire portent and the people were huddled up in their homes. Few eyes looked to the fields beyond the city outskirts where Baudros rumbled and growled, and with luck, those that did would think the strange lights and sounds just another set of warnings from the heavens.

The chains held, just. They were driven into the ground by pillars of enchanted steel, and even the two-headed dragon’s strength could not rip them out. Not yet.

The Gold magic in them would fail. The fire magic of their forging would give way and the life magic, the Jade wind that sustained the earth beneath it, would crumble away. Baudros would escape, and it would be more than the predatory monster it had been – it would have revenge on its minds, revenge against the land of men that could ill afford the destruction it would wreak.

‘You cannot kill something like that, Malgos,’ said Teclis. ‘And Krieglan, it is not life that animates this beast. It is something far worse that, thankfully, you will never understand. We must act now. There is no time.’

The mage who stood just within the crater, wrapped in blue robes, was watching the sky through an ornate instrument of lenses and brass gears. Through its largest lens could be seen the stars overhead, even through the blue sky of day. In the future, through the glimpse afforded by Teclis’s aethyr-sight, the robes were speckled with embroidered constellations and pages from prophetic volumes fluttered around the mage like falling blossom. The magical tradition that would follow him would scry the stars and tell the future.

‘The stars are right!’ he called, looking back at Teclis. ‘The witch moon turns its eye from us. The Fell Powers are blind, but they will not be for long. Some great providence shines on us.’

‘It would not do to waste it, Ceruleos,’ said Teclis. ‘Prepare the circle! Auroc! Marius! Abandon the forge and take your places! Malgos and Krieglan, if you can spare your bickering for a while, do the same.’

Caradryath had returned with the Moon Staff of Lileath, its slender golden length topped with an ivory image of the elven goddess of the moon. Teclis took it and leaned against it, like a cripple against a crutch. ‘Your sword?’ asked the Sword Master.

‘No sword will help us here,’ replied Teclis. ‘A thousand blades would not cut deep enough. Retreat from me, Sword Masters. Stay back.’

‘Loremaster, we are sworn to–’

‘Retreat!’ snapped Teclis. ‘There is nothing you can do for me here. Whatever happens, you must return to the White Tower and tell of it, whether I am with you or not. I am your loremaster. Obey me.’

Caradryath bowed and led his Sword Masters away from the crater. Teclis looked back at Baudros. All the dragon’s eyes were fixed on him now. There was no intelligence in its more bestial head, only a rage that could not be stifled, a raw hatred of everything it beheld. One head knew what Teclis was, the other did not care. Both wanted him dead. No doubt it was a rare thing for them to agree so completely.

From the sky overhead descended a flittering shadow in the shape of a man, coalescing as it landed into the form of a white-bearded mage in grey robes, the head of his wooden staff carved into the shape of a raven. ‘I can hide you,’ said the mage. ‘The shadows will conceal you.’

‘Not from this,’ replied Teclis. ‘I will need the shadow magic that flows through you, Ogmarah. You must take your place. The ritual must be observed. Any break and the winds of magic will turn from us.’

‘The Amber wind courses around this beast, not through it,’ said a seventh figure, dressed in rough-spun cloth and bear furs. ‘It is no beast at all.’

‘The circle has but seven places,’ said Ogmarah. ‘Which one of us will stand apart from it? Which one will stand alongside you? Who, if not a master of the shadow, who can surely confound the senses of this monstrosity?’

‘One who is as one with the beast!’ replied the seventh mage. ‘A monster we face, and a monster I will become!’

‘No, Ferok,’ said Teclis. ‘Nor you, Ogmarah. The Amber and the Shadow winds must flow through the circle. You will not stand apart.’ Teclis coughed, bending over as he shuddered with the awful rasping of his wounded lungs. ‘The Light,’ he sputtered. ‘It must be the Light.’

From a pavilion of white silk, on the edge of the crater, emerged a figure in robes the colour of pearl. His head was shaven and his eyes ringed with dark pigment. In one hand was a wooden half-mask and in the other hand was a metal staff wrought into the shape of a hooded desert snake. Where he stood there seemed to exist a pool of tranquility, as if a circle surrounded him into which the troubled world could not reach. In the aethyr, the mask was of gold and the snake-staff had diamonds for eyes, both materials representing the purity that fell around him in a cascade of gemstones.

The Light mage looked down at Baudros. The bestial head reacted to him, turning its beady eyes on him and staring at the newcomer with the same hate it had reserved for the loremaster.

‘Malhavar!’ called Teclis. His voice was not strong enough to carry over the grumbling of Baudros’s lungs, but the Light mage heard him. ‘It is time. It must be done now.’

‘Of course, my loremaster.’ Malhavar walked across the crater. The hem of his robe picked up no soot or dirt. He passed in front of Baudros’s bestial head and it reared back, chest swelling as it sucked in a lungful of air.

Malhavar raised a hand. A circle of white light was emblazoned on the ground around him. A blast of frozen shadow ripped from Baudros’s throat, a killing gale billowing up from the Chaos Wastes themselves, dark grey and seething with hatred.

The gale burst against the invisible barrier around Malhavar, parting and swirling around him. The gale passed, drifting up into the sky like a pall of smoke from a pyre. Baudros’s brute head saw that Malhavar still stood and roared in anger, shuddering the earth with a peal of terrible thunder.

The other head, the cunning and mad head, cackled as it saw its brother thwarted. The bestial head snapped at it, spitting bile in frustration.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Teclis as Malhavar came near.

‘I am,’ said Malhavar. ‘The paths end here. I can see that plainly, even if Ceruleos cannot. The Light shines strongest when there are none there to cast a shadow. It shines brightest when we, its servants, are gone.’ Up close, he looked less like a man of Sigmar’s Empire and more like something ancient, or perhaps ageless, from a land that was now sand and ruins. His skin was coppery and smooth, his profile as proud and angular as if it had been carved.

‘That is why it must be you,’ said Teclis.

‘The way of the Light wind is sacrifice,’ said Malhavar.

‘It will try to kill me,’ said Teclis. ‘It must not.’

‘I understand.’

Teclis looked up to the sky and planted the Moon Staff in the ground, like a general planting his standard. ‘My students! My brothers! Call forth the cage!’

From Auroc’s fingers flowed a bubbling torrent of molten gold, forming the spindly shape of a golden cage in the air over Baudros. Baudros’s bestial head howled and its mad head shrieked, spitting ropes of hissing drool. The cunning head spewed a jet of acidic bile that sheared through the bars, but the Gold mage twisted his fingers into a defiant gesture and the cage reformed, ornate curling reinforcements spiralling between its bars.

Malhavar stepped forwards and knelt on the scorched ground. ‘Shine on us,’ he murmured, his words somehow carrying over the bellowing of Baudros. ‘Shine through us. Darkness be banished.’

A circle of power shone into existence around Teclis and Malhavar. The bestial head breathed a mass of darkness again, and it swirled around the hemisphere of protective magic cast by Malhavar. The sound was terrible, like an endless roll of thunder.

Teclis raised his hands, and the winds of magic blew through him now. He took the Gold magic coursing through the gilded cage, and brought it down towards Baudros. ‘Sons of Ulthuan!’ he yelled. ‘Hear me! Princes eternal! Stir from your slumber and hear!’

A layer of crackling gold shimmered over Teclis’s right hand. His other hand had a greenish tinge now and flowering roots spiralled around it as the Jade wind blew. Krieglan’s head was bowed, his staff of living wood sprouting leaves and flowers. The ground shuddered and began to heave up, as if a great claw of stone was breaking the surface.

‘Stones of the Lost Isles, rise!’ cried Teclis. The scale of the magic forced him off-balance. The Moon Staff glowed and the War Crown of Saphery burned, flames licking around its jewel.

Standing stones from the Lost Isles of Ulthuan, held immobile there for centuries to channel wild magic away from the Chaos Wastes, rose from the ground. They were smooth with age, cut deeply with words in an archaic form of the elven tongue. Magic burst like lightning between them, forming a fence of stuttering light around the dragon.

The cage descended over Baudros. The dragon’s two heads snapped at the bars, fangs bending them out of shape. A shower of burning stone, meteors from a darkening sky, hammered against the dragon’s faces, driving it back. Ceruleos, the Celestial mage, called down another volley of them, demanding that the stars themselves send their messengers down. Those stars burned overhead, shining through the black clouds gathering in the sky.

Ogmarah cast beams of darkness across the cage, reinforcing its structure as Marius increased the heat of its joints, forging a strength into them that Gold magic alone could not provide. Ferok wrestled with the bestial magic of the Amber wind, forcing down into the ground so it rose up and fought back against the thrashing of the dragon.

The stones continued to rise, forming buttresses around the cage. They rose until their tips touched over its centre. Slabs of purplish crystal shimmered between them as Malgos forced the winds of Amethyst magic through himself. As lightning flashed overhead it seemed to illuminate a grinning skull where Malgos’s face should have been, the chiselled angles of a statue over Auroc’s features, talons of gnarled wood in place of Krieglan’s hands. The aethyr’s connections with them were opening dangerously wide, exposing them to the unpredictable fury of magic’s raw source.

Deafening peals of breaking stone boomed around the crater. Baudros was slamming its bulk against the inside of its cage. Even as the cage solidified around it, the stones shuddered and threatened to fall. Bright sigils burst against the ground, symbols of power cast by Teclis to hold the winds of magic in check as they roared through the crater.

‘The seal, Malhavar!’ yelled Teclis. ‘The seal! By Light alone will it hold!’

Malhavar stood, and the circle of protection around him died down. If Baudros broke free now, Teclis and his pupils would die.

Light dripped from Malhavar’s hands. His flesh was melting, sloughing off his bones and turning to liquid light.

It pooled on the ground and Malhavar’s skeletal fingers beckoned it up into a burning white spike, like a potter forming an object out of clay. It grew higher than Malhavar’s head even as his skin turned dull and cracked, flakes of it floating off to reveal the pure light flowing through the veins and muscle underneath.

‘You are nothing more than an insect, Baudros!’ said Malhavar through clenched teeth. ‘And like an insect, I will pin you down! What burns in you is not flesh, and it cannot be killed, but it can be banished! And so the Light banishes you!’

The lance of light was taller now than the prison. It rose off the ground, dripping undiluted power, and hovered over the prison. Malhavar screamed, light bleeding from his eyes, and drove the spike down through the prison, through Baudros, into the earth.

Baudros was a dragon in the same way that a knight was a suit of armour. The dragon was just the flesh it wore, the shell into which it had crawled to survive outside the aethyr and the Realms of Chaos. A dragon was terrible enough. A Chaos dragon, mutated by the raw magic of the Chaos Wastes, even more so. But Baudros was far worse.

The spike of power driven through it tore open the caul of power that kept its soul intact. Raw emotion, raw magic, the stuff of the aethyr, poured out in a storm that bathed the two mages standing before it. Much of it was formless insanity. But glimpses of the past played out there in that storm, visions trapped in the decaying brains of the dragon Baudros inhabited and the memories of the entity that had come to possess and meld with it.

A battlefield rolled out amid the chaos. The countryside was dotted with keeps and villages, separated by swathes of forest – a land of men, not the Empire but Bretonnia to the west. Mounted knights, banners streaming from their lances, had brought a dragon to battle. That battle was against Baudros, or at least the creature it had once been. It had but one head and was smaller and more lithe, but it was unmistakeably the same beast, with the same colour scales and spiny crests of bone.

It snatched up a knight in its jaws and threw the body aside. A claw crushed down on a riderless warhorse, talons slicing it into three. The dragon waded into the throng around it, and now the scene became clearer – the heaps of torn bodies, those of peasant bowmen and militia, pulped and shredded in gore-filled ruts in the ground.

Lances hit home. Men died swinging hammers and swords into the dragon’s flanks as they surrounded it. The dragon reared up, gulped down a mighty lungful of air and breathed out a torrent of icy vapour over its attackers.

Bodies shattered as they hit the ground. Bolting horses were caught in the roiling fog and cut down as their lungs froze.

The visions showed a chill mountain pass now, blood slicked across the jagged rocks. The dragon was hauling its bulk along. Wounds covered one side. Two legs were all but useless and its head drooped on its serpentine neck. Its torn wings would never let it take flight again. With every moment more blood pumped from the tears in its side, and it was surely dying.

Morrslieb, the witch moon, the harbinger of ill, hung framed by the mountain peaks. It shone with greenish light like a beacon, calling the dragon towards it, and the dragon obeyed as if the moon was a great hypnotising eye.

A dismal hollow among the mountains now, a pit of stone where the sun never shone, bounded by soaring cliffs. The dragon lay there among the heaps of primitive cairns, adorned with skulls and the well-gnawed bones of hundreds of skeletons. Symbols of forgotten gods were carved into the rocks by generations of fingernails, cries for salvation from those hurled down there to honour the interred. The only movement from the dragon was the tortured heaving of its lungs. It was going to die there, in this foul and miserable place, the burial ground of some forsaken and wicked people who had long ceased to befoul the world.

From the cairns issued a dark mist, and that mist coalesced into a form something like man, but far bigger, indistinct and ill-proportioned. The dragon’s blood gave it form. Three green eyes burned deep inside it, and a voice issued that was barely distinguishable from the cold hiss of the mountain winds.

Its words were obscure, but its meaning was clear. It was without a body, sustained here only by the ancient hate of those people who had worshipped it. The dragon was going to die there if some supernatural force did not intercede. And between them, they were making a pact.

Teclis drove back the storm with a torrent of arcane words. He unhooked a book from his belt and the winds ruffled through its pages, revealing spells he had inscribed there to conjure light and safety amid the darkness.

The pillar of light transfixed the prison. Baudros was screaming as it burned and the light bored through it. Teclis forced open the clearing in the storm and revealed a painful glare of light concealing Malhavar.

Teclis dropped to his knees and reached into the light. He felt Malhavar sink down to the ground and wrapped an arm around the Light mage’s waist, dragging him back from the storm. Teclis was barely strong enough to support his own weight and he half-crawled, dragging Malhavar behind him.

The light shining off Malhavar was burning and Teclis could barely see. Baudros was bellowing now, the sound like an earthquake, battering its great body against the inside of his cell. The storm raged.

Then, the light died.

Teclis slumped into the mud, what little strength he had suddenly draining out of him. He lay there, willing his limbs to carry him back to his feet, but they would not.

Marius reached him first. The Bright wizard turned Teclis over and though he was talking, Teclis could not make out his words over the ringing in his ears.

Teclis turned his head. The prison was intact, a great structure of gold, stone and crystal, now wrapped around with intricate scrolling bands of silver.

Krieglan, the Jade wizard, was kneeling over Malhavar. Teclis could see a foot protruding from the Light mage’s robes – it was skinless and scorched, like a charred skeleton. Krieglan was turning Malhavar’s head and talking to him.

Words were reaching him now. Marius was asking if he was hurt. Teclis ignored him and crawled to Malhavar’s side.

Half of Malhavar’s face was gone, flaked away revealing scorched bone. His remaining eye turned to Teclis.

‘Do you remember,’ he whispered, ‘what you taught me, loremaster? When I asked you what the Light truly was?’

‘I remember,’ replied Teclis. ‘And so did you, this day.’

‘The Light,’ said Malhavar, ‘is sacrifice.’

Malhavar’s head dropped back and his eye rolled upwards. The spark in it went out. Teclis could feel it go.

‘I can bring him back,’ said Krieglan.

‘No,’ said Teclis. ‘You cannot.’

Krieglan tried anyway. He called forth the few drops of life magic remaining in the tortured earth. Green shoots and flowers burst around Malhavar’s corpse. But the damage was too great. The force of the Light magic burning through him had seared away organs and muscles. There was simply not enough man left for the Jade wind to heal.

‘Light magic is sacrifice,’ said Teclis, putting a hand on Krieglan’s shoulder. ‘Malhavar gave himself willingly. Not even the Jade wind can counter that.’

The Sword Masters ran down from the pavilion and tended to Teclis, carrying him back to the lip of the crater, dripping medicines brewed by Isha’s priestesses onto his tongue. By the time Krieglan walked back out of the crater, Teclis was propped up against the side of his pavilion, Caradryath kneeling beside him and praying to the gods of Ulthuan.

The seven remaining pupils of Teclis stood around him. They were all exhausted. The marks of their magic were on them. Ogmarah’s shadow lagged a few seconds behind him, as if he had conjured so many shadows he did not have enough power left to fuel his own. Auroc’s hands had solidified into golden gauntlets and flecks of gold were embedded in the skin around his eyes.

‘In time,’ said Teclis, ‘you will take pupils of your own. I must return to Ulthuan with my brother, and see to the defence of my lands. Your colleges will stand in the city you see ahead of you, Altdorf, the crossroads of the Empire’s fates. I shall take new pupils and teach them each a fragment of Malhavar’s knowledge, and they will found the Light College as you will all found your own. It will be on this site, and it will be the keystone that holds fast the prison of Baudros. Thousands will walk across this place ignorant of what lies beneath them and how their presence helps keep it imprisoned. In the name of Malhavar, first wizard of the Light Order, this will be done.’

‘It will,’ said Auroc. ‘I shall see to it.’

‘And I,’ said Malgos.

The other mages nodded their assent.

‘Without you, there can be no victory,’ said Teclis. ‘Without men, and magic as they alone understand it. The risks were great. My fellow mages told me it was madness to teach you what we know. But I have seen the threads of fate, and read from them what will happen if men live on in ignorance. You safeguard the knowledge that will keep your race, and all races, alive against the darkness. You are the future. Trust me in this, my pupils, my brothers. Your orders must grow and thrive. Your lives will come to an end, but what you know can never be allowed to die.’

They buried Malhavar near the edge of the crater, a single obelisk raised over his resting place. Already men from Altdorf were filling in the crater, believing it to have been caused by a meteor falling during the strange portents of the previous day. None of them paid much attention to the ceremony happening beside the crater, for without the aethyr-sight the wizards seemed little more than a ragtag band of travellers.

Only Teclis spoke.

‘Our brother Malhavar alone understood the nature of sacrifice,’ he said, as the sun set. ‘That for an evil one to be banished, so must a good one be put beyond our world. That was why it had to be Malhavar. That was why it had to be the Light.’

CHAPTER ONE

THE GRAVE OF OSTERMARK

Writers of battle-songs always missed out the smell.

They did not shy away from the bodies, of course. A battlefield, after the battle, was scattered with knots of corpses marking the sites of the worst struggles. It was that way with Kriegsmutter Field, where the sun was starting to set on a battleground that had been fought over and held by the Grand Army of Ostermark and Nordland. The worse carnage had been on the left flank, where the Imperial cavalry had ripped into the ill-disciplined masses of farmers and labourers who made up the majority of Pretender Count Scharndorff’s army.

Bodies in rough sacking and labourers’ tabards lay draped over one another, heads split open by the swords of passing riders. A few were still pinned to the ground by broken lengths of lance. They, who had once been men, were becoming something else now, something more like the mud in which they lay. Their skin was turning grey and they were becoming soft and shapeless, merging with the earth. The ground was trampled by hundreds of hooves and into those depressions the rebel dead sank, as if they were trying to return to the earth.

The poets sometimes mentioned the dead horses, too. Soldiers who had seen endless sights of human death could still be moved to tears when they saw the proud bulk of a warhorse split open, red and raw, sinews white to the sky. Discarded helmets, shields and swords were everywhere, as if they had fallen from above. Birds flocked to pick over the dead in the crow’s feast those poets loved to write of.

The living were there too. Bands of Ostermark soldiers picked across the churned ground looking for the living. Sometimes they picked up their fallen brother, letting him lean on them as they trudged on. Other times they despatched him on the ground, seeing his wounds were too grave to let him live through the night. The uniforms of Ostermark’s soldiers were quartered purple and yellow, a relic of the great ostentatious courts of the province’s past counts, and they seemed a mockery now stained with blood and dirt. Those of Nordland were a shabby grey. That province’s soldiers, too, turned over bodies to find the wounded, pick up fallen standards and pocket what valuable trinkets they thought they could scavenge without consequence.

Surviving rebels were moving too, trying to hurry into the woodland and barrens northwards. The Pretender Count had promised them a province carved out of the Empire’s north, free from the taxes and laws of Altdorf. Quite probably he intended only to build a place he could rule, exploiting the peasants who had fought for him as surely as the worst Imperial count ever did. No one would ever know now because the Pretender Count Scharndorff was dead, his head mounted on a pike near the baggage train of the Count of Nordland. Word was Nordland had killed Scharndorff in person as the cavalry reserves had clashed, and no doubt that was how the artists and history writers would choose to depict it.

Lights speckled the hillsides to the south, where the Imperial forces had camped for the night. A slow trickle of wounded stragglers headed towards the burning campfires, where thousands of their fellow soldiers were warming themselves beside makeshift tents or seeing to the wounds of those who had not come through the battle so fortunately. Banners of Ostermark and Nordland flew as the wind picked up and the evening chill began to set in. An epic poem might mention the strange beauty of the glittering hills as seen from that place of death.

But it would leave out the smell. There was blood, but that was not the worst of it. Voided bowels were far too crude a matter to be brought up in an tale about a glorious Imperial victory, but that was what Kriegsmutter Field stank of. Some had evacuated themselves in fear as they stood huddled behind their shields, or amid the forests of pikes and spears, shuddering to see the field darkening with the advance of the enemy. Others had kept their bowels intact until the first blows were struck and the hours of waiting became short, crunching storms of breaking steel and bones.

When they died, everything inside them seeped out, and mingled with the mud, and stank like a midsummer cesspit. The scavengers wore cloth wrapped around their noses and mouths to ward off the stench. A few, the veterans, had brought pouches of herbs to hold under their noses, knowing that war was a stinking business even when you won.

At one edge of the battlefield, the Ostermark soldiers had constructed a tent from the wagon covers of the looted rebel baggage train. The dead lay around it in great numbers, not lanced or cut open but burned and broken. Some looked like they had been crushed beneath a great weight. Some had been blown apart.

A lone straggler made his way towards the tent. He did not look like he belonged there. He was not a soldier, for he wore neither the uniform of an Imperial state soldier nor the rough clothing of a peasant rebel. It was difficult to tell his age – old eyes were sunk deep into a long, serious face too young for them. He wore a travelling cloak down to his ankles and walked with a staff to help keep his footing across the swamp of mud and bodies.

The stranger reached the tent and pulled aside the opening. It was dark inside, and only a little of the day’s dying light made its way in.

‘Magister?’ said the stranger. ‘Magister Vek?’

The wounded man lying in the tent looked up feebly. Prior to that day’s battle he had cut a wondrous figure. His robes were ivory and gold, and though they were now spattered with gore and mud their gold embroidery still shone. His shaven head, with a single lock of braided black hair, lolled against one shoulder. He wore a golden jawpiece which gave him a stylised single-braided beard. Black symbols were painted on his forehead.

‘I am Vek,’ he whispered in reply.

‘Of the Light Order.’

‘Once of that order. Now I belong to nothing. Life itself has discarded me.’ Vek held up a hand, which had been clamped to his side. It was thick with blood, and more oozed from the tear between his ribs.

The stranger entered the tent and knelt down beside the dying wizard. ‘The Light never leaves you,’ he said. ‘You will join it.’

‘I see only darkness,’ said Vek. ‘Let me look at you. I cannot see your face.’

A red flame caught in the palm of the stranger’s hand. It cast strange shadows across the inside of the tent, glinting off the gold of Vek’s jawpiece and the stranger’s deep-set eyes. The flame burned without ignition or fuel, a glint of the aethyr’s winds as they blew, invisibly, across Kriegsmutter Field.

For a moment Vek studied the man’s face, then his eyes lost focus, as if looking beyond him to something only he could see ‘Are you sent from Morr?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said the stranger. ‘I was sent by the god of the dead to see you through to the next world.’

‘What… what is there?’ asked Vek. ‘I always wished to know, but every priest told a different tale, and the winds of magic never offered up the answers. When we are dead, where do we go?’

‘To where you deserve to go,’ replied the stranger. ‘Whatever fate you know you deserve, deep in your heart, that is the fate that will befall you.’

‘I think that I have lived a good life. But I have never been sure, not truly, and so I am afraid.’

‘Then look back upon your life,’ said the stranger. ‘For you must be sure, Magister Vek. Look back on how the winds of the aethyr blew through you. Then you will know, and there will be no room for fear.’

‘This day,’ said Vek, ‘I called down the banishment on my enemies. I burned them with the purity of the Light and cast them back with bolts from the heavens. It was my duty, for they raised swords against the Emperor who is my lord. But… they are dead. They were men, like me. Can I have lived a good life, having called down so much death?’

‘Good and evil cease to have meaning in battle,’ replied the stranger. ‘There are only friends and foes. Look further back, magister. Further.’

‘The Order of Light!’ gasped Vek. ‘There, I felt I was… a force for good. Banishing the dark. Holding back the things that lurk beyond. A noble cause. A great cause, with great men. The work of Sigmar, the work of Magnus. I felt like a good man there. A force for truth.’

‘Tell me of it.’

Vek smiled. ‘You cannot imagine,’ he said.

‘I have seen much,’ said the stranger. ‘I have a good imagination.’

‘It is the place where the Light wind intersects with the earth. There alone does it flow unhindered into our world, focused like a… like a lance! Like a thunderbolt! So beautiful to behold it. Wondrous to look on of course, but it is more than that. The feel of the Light College, the song it sings in your heart. To have been one of the few to see it, that was good. That made me a better man.’

‘You speak of the pyramid,’ said the stranger. ‘In Altdorf. What brought you there?’

‘I was young,’ said Vek. ‘Decades ago. Longer than most men live. Magnus was upon the throne. The Great War was dying out. I lived through its last years as a child. Dark times. We pleaded for someone to bring us out of the darkness. Magnus and the colleges sent agents to hunt us down, all the witch-children and prodigies. I learned later that in earlier times we would have been put to death. So close we are to the grave. But you know more about that than I do.’

‘Indeed,’ said the stranger. ‘It is a thin veil that had the grandeur to call itself life, one on which we lie though it might tear at any moment. Second by second we live, always the slightest move from falling through into Morr’s embrace. But you were speaking of the pyramid. Go on.’

Vek coughed, and blood flecked his lips. ‘I am dying,’ he said.

‘Then there is not much time.’

‘They took us to Altdorf. Great men, I remember them. Tall and huge, and we so young. And they tested us. Some were taken early. Of them I never heard again. Some, later, were taken away, and a few of their faces I saw again among the magisters of the other colleges. But not many. And then there was me alone. They brought me to Midday’s Mirror, in Altdorf.’

The stranger leaned forward eagerly, as if this was some signal to him. ‘The Mirror?’ he said.

‘Indeed. It was the first time I had seen the sun since they took me. A hand was on my shoulder and a voice spoke. Stand by the Mirror, it said. Give up all you know. The world is not as you perceive it with your eyes. You must perceive it with your mind. There is a world on the other side, and you must inhabit that world, or there is no place for you in that world or this.’

‘And?’ said the stranger, demand in his voice.

‘And there was!’ Vek’s eyes were light, as if reflecting a fire that only he could see. ‘I know not how many others were tried there, and how many failed. But I made it. I told my eyes to be blind and my ears to be deaf! I told my skin to be numb! I told my soul to see! And I did. I fell into that world, and I was there, and the pyramid was before me. Oh, Sigmar’s Oath, it was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It was my greatest sadness that I could see it for the first time but once, and every time after that was bittersweet to remember that wonder.’

‘You have lived,’ said the stranger, ‘well enough.’

The stranger drew a dagger from beneath his travelling cloak. It was stained and rusted. It looked like it had been taken from the ground outside, from the hand of a fallen soldier. The stranger leaned down onto the magister, pinning him to the ground, and drove the dagger into his ribs. He drew it back and stabbed again, angling the blade upwards into heart and lungs.

Vek did not have the strength left to cry out. He gasped, a dry sound like wind through leaves. The blade went in and out, not frenzied but methodical, making sure that its point went through every organ it could reach.

The stranger let the dagger fall and stood up. Vek was dead. His eyes were turned back in his head and his mouth lolled. Blood ran from his nose, staining the jawpiece. The jawpiece was probably worth a lot of money. Some other scavenger could have it, and live off it for long enough to gamble away what it bought him. The stranger did not care.

As he went to leave the tent, the stranger paused and turned back. He knelt beside the body and picked up the dagger again.

He was not quite done yet.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CITY OF ILLUMINATORS

The River Reik had not yet been caged by the city that had grown up around it. Even now, with the vastness of Altdorf established as the Empire’s most populous city, and perhaps the greatest city of men in all the world, the Reik was not smothered by the towers and heaving tenement masses that crowded on its banks.

As if to remind the inhabitants that their city was fragile, a good quarter of the city – that part which sat in the fork of the Reik’s split eastwards of the city’s heart – was still a great scar of charred buildings and waist-deep drifts of ash. The Great Fire had torn through the quarter six years before and most of it had still to be rebuilt, the great dark scar now haunted by vagabonds and thieves. Beside that reminder of desolation, the brutal majesty of the Imperial Palace and the banner-hung splendour of Königplatz seemed to lose some of their lustre. The Emperor Wilhelm had reacted to the fire by covering his capital city in bright pennants and parades, but they seemed no more majestic than a handful of colourful trinkets compared to the untamed Reik.

On the left bank of the Reik stood a bustling quarter wreathed in the greasy smoke from a thousand pigment burners and tanneries. The Buchbinder district was one of Altdorf’s densest, for it had once been wealthy, and such had been the demand for a home there that upper floors had been piled on top of each other. Every building’s upper storeys overhung the streets below, so the narrow, winding alleys were sometimes completely closed off from the sky and a man might lean from his window to light the pipe of a neighbour who lived across the street. The pennants flying from flagpoles and weathervanes hung limp and stained, and even without the haphazard canopy of tenement floors it would have been difficult to see the streets through the permanent fug. The Buchbinder district existed to feed Altdorf’s hunger for illuminated prayer books, tomes for the inscribing of rituals and magic, and crude presses for the rags and pamphlets that fed the city’s favourite pastime of agitating against a political system no one understood.

Natives of the Buchbinder district knew how the streets worked. They were born in some smoke-stained basement with innate knowledge of the tangled knots of alleyways. Those who came in from outside needed some help.

A courier stood on a street corner. She wore the tabard of a herald in the colours of one of Altdorf’s burgher families. She held a leather document satchel under one arm. She looked behind her, the way she had come, and then ahead of her, in the direction she was fairly sure she was supposed to travel.

Then she looked back again, and saw a completely different street that, after a moment of confusion and slight nausea, turned out to be at ninety degrees to the direction it should have lead.

A passing man in a tanner’s apron paused and spoke to her. He had a look of condescension on his face, as if he were talking to someone very stupid about something they should nevertheless know. The courier was too exasperated by now to care much about his attitude and listened patiently as he pointed out what she should be doing.

She frowned as, no doubt, she tried to understand how the narrow alley, little more than a shoulder-wide gap between two walls, should lead to a street that was on the other side of the building she stood beside, or how, upon turning left at its exit, she should find herself facing back the way she had come. How her destination should now lie in front of her, she had no idea. But the tanner nodded and smiled, and shook his head and tutted, He seemed to be taking the pleasure a man gets from telling someone – especially a woman – something that he knows and she does not. She thanked him and set off in the direction he had indicated, and he waved as if he was seeing off a tedious child.

Along that same street, ignored by both, was another outsider. He, however, did not wander around in confusion. He was wrapped in a travelling cloak and wore a pack that looked to be full of books. His head was shaven, which was far from uncommon among Altdorfers, but in his case it looked to have been done through choice rather than to keep away the lice. His eye sockets were too large for his eyes and they sank down in the shadow. His nose was long and straight and his pose almost exaggeratedly upright, like a judge walking to the bar in Empire House. A few Buchbinder natives glanced at him, wondering how he could so obviously be an outsider and yet not be perplexed by the district’s idiosyncrasies, but he did not return their looks.

He turned right, saw the road behind him now stretching out to the left, and ducked into an alleyway. At the end opened up a square, quite possibly the oldest place in the district. It was still paved with flagstones that had, bafflingly, not been stripped away for building materials or headstones. Equally strange was the shallow rectangular pond in the middle of the square that had gathered none of the trash or grime that caked the rest of the Buchbinder district.

Stallholders had made the square their home. One sold horse and cattle hides. Others hawked cure-alls, trinkets or spices. A pair of old men sat at the foot of a statue of a mounted Reiksguard knight, swapping occasional sentences as they watched the square’s comings and goings.

As in the rest of the district, the sky was in short supply. The buildings bounding the square loomed in, looking ready to topple, permitting a square of sky that meant only when it was directly overhead could the sun shine on the unnaturally clear waters of the pond.

The stranger walked up to the nearest stall, the one selling the hides. The stallholder was a woman made greasy and foul-smelling by the work of scraping the hides with a blunt, curved blade.

‘Is that Midday’s Mirror?’ he asked.

The woman looked at him. Smeared, bloody handprints covered her apron. ‘What did you expect?’ she said, and spat on the ground.

‘Do people often come by here?’

‘S’pose so.’

The stranger looked back across the square. He wondered how many of the people there knew what this place really was. The stallholder certainly didn’t. He doubted the man hawking pomanders and quack medicines did, either. He was crying out that his wares were hand-picked by comely maidens in the hills of Araby and could ward off the plague, rid the face of blemishes, and restore a man’s wilting virility.

A gaggle of children ran across the square, playing a game which involved chasing one another and squealing. They might well know. Their parents, of course, would tell them not to entertain childish ideas. The old men had the look of people who had outlived their prejudice against such fantasies. The stranger was certain they must know. Only during the middle of their lives did men refuse to believe what should be obvious to them. The very young and the very old had the liberty to believe.

The stranger walked to the edge of Midday’s Mirror. A few copper coins lay on the flagstones at the bottom. He stepped up on the lip of stone running around the pond’s edge and spread his arms.

Some of the people in the square, those who believed, could see him. Most could not.

He let himself fall forwards. The cold, clear water rushed up at him.

And he kept falling. The world tipped and twisted around him, tilting at angles that could not exist. He felt a sudden cold dislocation, as if falling through a place that was empty – not even space or time, a void in reality.

He swung up, momentum carrying him up from the surface of the water he should have landed in. His balance kept him from tipping forward and he was standing on the edge of Midday’s Mirror again – but this time facing away from the pond.

The square was not the same. It was bigger.

It was immense.

The stranger had to screw up his eyes against the light. He could just about make out the expanse of the square. It could not have fitted into Altdorf normally, for the city would not have permitted such an open space to exist without colonising it with slums, temples, sweatshops, marketplaces, teeming poorhouses or cramped graveyards.

His eyes adjusted. The light did not die down.

In the centre of the square, tall enough to shrink the highest peaks of Altdorf’s skyline, was the pyramid. The stranger had heard of it – what he had learned at Kriegsmutter Field had confirmed the sketchy rumours he had collected. But none of that had prepared him for seeing it with his own eyes.

The pyramid was made of white stone, and yet it shone from within. It was all but impossible to look at it directly, just like the sun itself – although the sun now seemed comparatively dim and insignificant in the sky. Smaller structures clustered around the pyramid. From this distance they looked like shrines or mausoleums, cut from white marble. They just made the pyramid itself seem vaster, big enough to fill the senses almost to the exclusion of anything else. Unlike the one around Midday’s Mirror, this square was deserted, its white flagstones an empty expanse like a desert of stone.

The stranger held up a hand to shield his eyes as he approached. The shape of a door was just visible in the lowest row of great white stone blocks. The door was enamelled in white and inlaid with gold.

The pyramid contained many light sources, not just one. They separated as he approached. They were not hung on the pyramid but shone from inside it – every light within the pyramid could be seen from outside, and the stranger knew why. Light magic suffused the square, as thick as newly fallen snow. He had tasted it in the Buchbinder district, a constant background sensation like the air just before lightning struck. Here it was unmistakeable. The most blunt-minded peasant, someone without the least sensitivity to the winds of magic, could have felt it.

Beside the door stood a pair of soldiers, the only people aside from the stranger anywhere in sight. Their armour was polished so the segments were like mirrors and they blazed with reflected light. Their faces were hidden behind visors and they each held a halberd, which they lowered to bar the door.

‘Your name,’ said one of them.

‘My name is Egrimm van Horstmann.’

‘Are you expected?’

‘I am not.’

The guard stepped forwards. ‘There is no place for you here.’

‘There is always a place,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘for one such as I.’

The guard made a sound like muffled laugh, and van Horstmann knew he was smirking. He turned around to rejoin his post.

‘I know I am older than most you take,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I was not raised to be sent here. No official of this Empire saw my talent and bade my parents prepare me for the colleges. I have wrestled with this gift and I have not lost my mind, been devoured by daemons or been tied to a witch hunter’s stake. That is recommendation enough, is it not?’

The guard turned back to him, and seemed to regard him from head to toe, though it was impossible to be sure from that side of the guard’s visor.

‘What matters most?’ the guard asked.

Van Horstmann looked at the stones of the square for a second, as if gathering up words that had lain inside him for a long time, slumbering, waiting to be spoken.

‘Purity,’ van Horstmann said. ‘And sacrifice.’

The guard took his place alongside his colleague, their halberds once more crossed.

A pause, and the halberds were raised like the bars of a blocked door.

Van Horstmann nodded his thanks, and walked into the Light College.

‘What,’ said Master Chanter Alric, ‘is magic?’

His words fell dead against the vast space of the Chanters’ Hall. The lower floor of the Light College was a single enormous chamber, pillars of white marble supporting an arched ceiling. Everywhere there was light. Lanterns, impossibly bright, hung from the pillars as close and numerous as clusters of grapes. The raised dais, like a huge altar consecrated to an ancient god of the heavens, had a burning brazier at each corner, yellow-white flames leaping up towards the ceiling.

Three hundred acolytes knelt on the floor. Their heads were shaved, although many had single locks running from the crowns of their heads. They wore simple white robes trimmed with gold. Master Chanter Alric stood on the dais above them, looking down as he spoke. He was a magnificent sight of a man: a great greying beard, eyes the blue-grey of a winter sky, faded circular patterns tattooed on his face and hands. His robes were more gold than white, the golden stitching picking out script in letters of a language that no one outside the Light College was permitted to speak.

‘Perhaps,’ Alric continued, ‘you believe you know. Through you have blown the winds of magic as they have through no one else you have ever encountered. In your home towns, be they villages or fleshpots of the Empire, there were none that you knew who could match your mastery of magic. And so you came to believe you are masters of it. It is my task to teach you that you are masters of nothing!’

Alric passed his eyes across the acolytes. They were the lowest rung of the Light College’s pyramid. Both figuratively, for there was no rank lower than that of acolyte, and literally, for they were not permitted to ascend from this lowest floor of the pyramid. They ate and slept here, learned here. Not a few of them would fail here, cast out as the pure wind of Light magic refused to dance to their tunes.

Among the novices was one who, even among the newcomers, was new. He had arrived a few days before, unannounced, one of those relative few who arrived on his own cognisance without having been handed over by witch hunters or recommended by one of the order’s magisters. The magisters had taken note of his arrival, though it would not do to have a mere acolyte thinking himself important. They were watching him, as was Alric.

‘The least magister of the unworthiest college,’ continued Alric, ‘is master of forces beyond the understanding of your untrained minds. In you may reside the potential to one day wear the robes of a magister and command the magic of the winds. But before me now kneel not Imperial wizards, but ignorant children, the faint glimmers of powers they possess more dangerous to themselves than useful to anyone else. Some of you have scoured your family homes with unbidden fire! Some have done mystical violence to the bodies of your kin through some act of unconscious brutality! Some have read portents with such accuracy you had to be sent either to the gallows or to Altdorf! Such are the perils of your power. It is my task to compel you to understand your own failures, for only then can you start to build up your strengths.’

Alric hauled a heavy book onto a lectern at the front of the dais. The acolytes snatched glances at him. Instinctively they knew they were supposed to stare down at the floor, as if the riches of the marble and scalding lights were not for their lowly eyes. Those who looked up quickly turned their eyes down as he glared down at them.

Van Horstmann was looking at Alric. Perhaps he had not yet learned the unwritten rules of humility before the Light Order’s higher ranks. He would, soon. They all did. A lifetime ago Master Chanter Alric had learned it, before he had been remade as the man who was now lord of the order’s acolytes.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What is magic?’ He opened the book. ‘The soil-stained farmers of the Jade Order will tell you that it is life. The Gold Order’s alchemists, hunched in their laboratories, will say that it is the interaction of one substance with another. The morbid masters of the Amethyst College will say, of course, that it is a negative force, the void that is left by death. In some ways, they are all true. But of all of them, what we of the Light Order believe is the truest. For we know what other men are unable to accept, a truth too cruel for them to countenance. We know that magic is sacrifice.’

This time, a stir passed through the acolytes. They did not dare say anything, of course. No one would ever speak out of turn while the Master Chanter was imparting his wisdom. But which of them had not heard the rumours about the Colleges of Magic? Every Altdorfer had. They believed that the Bright College’s wizards lusted after fire, some becoming obsessed with it and setting fires at random. They knew, or thought they knew, that the Celestial wizards gazed at the stars for so long they glimpsed the courts of the gods, and sometimes were driven mad when they looked on the faces of the Fell Powers. And, of course, the Light College performed sacrifices. Human sacrifices.

‘It is no blade through the heart that gives us power,’ said Alric. ‘Such sacrifice is crude and hateful to the purity of the Light. No, our sacrifice is of devotion, as demonstrated through ritual and vigil. Thus can an acolyte play his part in the weaving of a spell. He kneels, he fulfils his part in the ritual drawn up by the magisters of his order. He makes his own sacrifice. He chants. Ula dhaz maaru!’

The acolytes had been given the passage to memorise, along with dozens of others. It was the lot of the acolyte to learn by rote. Some colleges maintained that magic required imagination, quick-mindedness, that it could be grasped by flights of intuition. The Light Order knew better. Understanding had to be hammered home by repetition and stern admonishment. Only when that framework had been laid down could an acolyte hope to ascend from the First Circle to the Second.

‘Ula dhaz maaru!’ chanted the acolytes in unison. ‘Salheh corvun draa!’

Alric led the chant, turning the pages as the passage was recited. His own voice was deep and sonorous, reverberating around the hall. The pages of the book glowed. The letters inscribed there, written in the alphabet unique to the Light Order, were in silver ink on black-stained parchment and they turned burning white now.

The air turned hazy. The images of the kneeling acolytes distorted and the pillars seemed to bow in, forming impossible angles where they met the ceiling whose frescoes squirmed as if alive.

Magical circles, well-burned into the chamber floor, took light again, white flames licking along the complex designs.

This ritual had two purposes. The first they all knew. It was to reinforce the mystical warping of space around the Light College itself, which kept it hidden in a fold of reality, away from the eyes of the ignorant. Each college was hidden from Altdorf’s citizens by some means – this was how the Light Order’s pyramid kept itself secret. But the second purpose the acolytes were not supposed to understand, not yet.

The acolytes were not individuals. They were components in the ritual, and they meant nothing on their own. When they were broken down enough they could be rebuilt, gradually given back their sense of individuality. Those whose minds survived strong and intact could find themselves magisters when they reached the Third Circle. Those who failed either remained chanters, assisting the magisters with the sacrifice of their labour, or stayed as mundane servants: the cooks, guards, manservants and librarians of the Half-Circle. It all started here, with the breaking down.

Sometimes they would not break. Alric had no time for them. Misshapen cogs, they were, in a machine that did not need them.

Grand Magister Elrisse, the High Illuminator of the Light Order, looked like all the moisture had been drawn out of him leaving a husk as thin as a birch tree and roughly the same colour. His skin clung closely to his skull, sucked in at the cheeks and under the jaw. His eyes and scalp were painted and his face resembled the death mask of an exotic fallen civilisation. Pearls hung from his high collar and his robe was embroidered with gemstones ensorcelled to glow with a steady yellow-white light.

‘I am troubled,’ said Elrisse.

The Grand Magister sat at the hardwood map table in his chambers. Here, near the pinnacle of the pyramid, the very walls were made of light. The chamber was decked out in the manner of a palace of Araby, with geometric tapestries on the walls, exquisite carpets and the smell of strange spices in the air.

‘Then the order is troubled,’ said Alric.

‘Indeed we are. What news do you bring of our acolytes?’

‘They obey,’ said Alric. ‘Some among them are sharp. I can see them donning the robes of the Second Circle within the year. Others are chaff. They have a crude ability, but nothing that will trouble the fringes of competence. I count Heiden Kant the most intelligent and studious. Gustavus Thielen is the most prominent in terms of raw magical strength.’

‘Any that should concern us?’

Alric gave this a moment’s thought. Though he lorded over the acolytes as if he was Sigmar reborn, here he was very much of the lower rank. Elrisse had ratified every induction into the First Circle and it was dangerous to suggest the recent intake of acolytes was in any way substandard.

‘Not greatly, Grand Magister,’ he said. ‘Fausten is willful. I think he opposes us, but with childish transgressions. Misspoken syllables and so forth. I shall grind him down. A few others gather and make plans, but nothing more than stealing luxuries from the kitchens and storerooms.’

The Grand Magister smiled a little. ‘Like children,’ he said.

‘They are children,’ replied Alric.

‘Of course,’ said the Grand Magister. ‘How we forget.’

‘We were like them once.’

The smile disappeared. ‘No, Master Chanter. The man you are is not the same man who knelt as an acolyte. I am not the same man who first walked through the gates of the pyramid. Those men have been erased by the journey from circle to circle. They are as surely gone as any who pass through the hands of Morr.’

‘Of course, Grand Magister,’ said Alric with an inclination of the head.

‘But at least they give us no more trouble,’ continued Elrisse. ‘You are aware of the nature of the crisis?’

‘Crisis? I have heard rumours, but nothing that–’

‘A crisis,’ said Elrisse. ‘As grave as anything since Magnus’s passing. It is both dangerous and sensitive. Mere knowledge of it is damaging. The people say the Bright Order did great violence to the city with their recklessness, but that will be as nothing compared to the chaos that will ensue if Altdorfers come to know of our current predicament. I would not have burdened you with it, Alric, but that I fear I shall need your help.’

‘Of course, Grand Magister,’ said Alric, inclining his head.

‘Then gather half a dozen acolytes. It is more important they can keep a secret than have any exceptional skill. Tell none of your purpose and do not be seen leaving the pyramid, if you can.’

‘And where are we to go?’ asked Alric.

‘The Imperial Palace,’ said Elrisse. ‘And Grand Chanter, pray be quick.’

CHAPTER THREE

THE JESTER

The Imperial Palace’s foundations dated to before the birth of Altdorf as a city, when it was a sturdy fortress-settlement on the Reik. In those times the unending war with the greenskins had been waged since before living memory. There were no kings and no heroes, just a desperate banding together to survive. The fortress on the Reik was one of the few places in the lands of men that could stand before the besieging goblin hordes and it had done so many times, its stones stained black with the blood of man and goblin alike.

Then Sigmar had taken up the fight and scoured the greenskins from human lands. He had entered into a pact with the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains, and they had forged for him Ghal-maraz, Skullsplitter, the Hammer of Sigmar. The battered fortress became the founding stone for the city of Altdorf, first hold of the Empire and sacred city of Sigmar.

The air of those times clung to the stones. It seemed the same air trapped there in the days of Sigmar still circulated through the warren of cellars and dungeons beneath the Imperial Palace. Above was splendour, where ambassadors from across the Old World knelt before the throne of Emperor Wilhelm II. Below, in the forgotten foundations of the palace, the rats and the spiders held court.

One intersection, lit by torchlight, saw the first gathering here for hundreds of years. In one direction were the wine cellars, abandoned and left to decay. In another were the crudely-built oubliettes where enemies of an early emperor had also been left to rot, and where a few well-gnawed bones still poked out from the shadows.

Eight souls were gathered there. One of them was Grand Magister Elrisse, leaning on the snake-headed staff that was his badge of office. Another was Master Chanter Alric. Behind Alric, heads bowed, were the novices he had brought with him. Heiden Kant. Gustavus Thielen. Rudiger Vort. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben. Egrimm van Horstmann. Pieter Diess.

‘There have been none here for decades,’ said Alric. ‘Little of the Light penetrates this place.’

‘Faith, Master Chanter,’ said Elrisse. ‘The Light is everywhere, and we must prepare to call upon it the most when we are in darkness.’

From the shadows emerged another light, in the direction of the cells. It was a lantern held by a small man trussed up in a very expensive suit of breeches, jacket and slashed sleeves, with high hunting boots. He wore a pair of small spectacles and his thinning hair was scraped back. He had picked up a great deal of the dungeons’ grime already and did not look happy about it.

‘Minister,’ said Elrisse. ‘These are my brethren on the path of the Light. Master Chanter Alric and the finest of our acolytes.’

‘Can they be trusted?’ asked the man.

‘They are every bit as trustworthy as yourself, Minister Huygens,’ said the Grand Magister.

Huygens looked critically at the acolytes. ‘Have they been told?’

‘They have been told nothing.’

‘Then come,’ said Huygens, and led the way through into the cells.

The cells went further into the darkness under the palace. Here and there were remnants of other phases of the palace construction: piles of unused building materials and stone blocks, even the outlines of old tombs and burial chambers, all well-stained with age.

‘We dare not permit her above,’ Huygens was saying. ‘We have so far curtailed any wagging tongues, we believe. None but a few servants know and they are sworn to secrecy. His Imperial Majesty is not in attendance, it was thought better for him to journey to Nuln under the guise of a state visit. The more distance he keeps the better, until this matter is resolved.’

‘And the rest of the Imperial family?’ asked Elrisse as they walked.

‘Empress Mathilda would not leave,’ replied Huygens.

‘Understandable,’ said Elrisse.

‘She confines herself to the empress’s wing, at least,’ continued Huygens. ‘We could not permit her down here. This is not for her eyes.’

The party rounded a corner. Though the equipment had been taken out of it long ago, its purpose was clear enough. Manacles were still riveted to the walls, and channels were cut into the flagstones to draw off the blood.

‘Emperor Gotthold built this,’ said Huygens. ‘None have used it since, thank Shallya.’

At the far end of the room was a raised stone block forming a table, which still had shackles to restrain hands and feet. Shackled to the table was a woman in a white nightdress, a halo of blonde hair spread across the stone under her head. Over her stood a man in the long leather greatcoat and leather gauntlets of a plague doctor. He had removed the pomander-filled face mask that such doctors wore when tending to the sick, revealing a pocked and angular face. He had laid out several bottles and jars of medicine, along with various implements, on the slab beside the woman.

‘Herr Doktor,’ said Huygens. ‘How is she?’

‘She has changed little,’ replied the doctor. ‘She murmurs in her sleep, but the language I do not know.’ He turned to Huygens, his eyes blue with yellowish whites. ‘It is not, in my experience, a good sign.’

‘Leave us,’ said Huygens.

‘As you wish.’ The doctor bowed and took his leave. As he walked through the archway out of the chamber he cast an unimpressed eye over the wizards.

‘I take it,’ said Alric, ‘that the Light Order is a last resort.’

‘The Emperor insisted on science first,’ said Huygens. ‘He was educated in Nuln. He is a man of reason above all.’

‘There is no purer reason than that which can see how the winds of magic blow.’ Elrisse walked up to the slab. He shook his head. ‘Very young,’ he said. ‘No wonder she could not fight.’

Alric joined him and the acolytes lined up behind him. Up close the girl’s face was clearer – she was indeed young, still a child. She had the delicacy of her mother’s features, but with the stern jaw of the Imperial line.

‘That’s Princess Astrid,’ said Rudiger Vort.

Alric glared at the acolyte. Vort turned his eyes to the floor.

‘It comes and goes,’ said Huygens. ‘Now she sleeps.’

‘Then we must wake her,’ said Elrisse. ‘I take it a shower of priests has already been here?’

‘Of Shallya first, then Sigmar when it became clear it was no mortal sickness,’ replied Huygens. ‘We called on a priest of Morr in case of the worst, and he would not commend her soul to Morr’s embrace.’

‘Why not?’ asked Alric.

‘Because by then it was clear,’ said Huygens, ‘that her soul is not alone in there.’

‘Form the circle,’ said Elrisse. ‘I shall be the principal. Alric, lead the chant.’

‘And I?’ asked Huygens.

Elrisse looked at him much as a parent might look, with forced patience, at a child who asked many questions. ‘You will stand back,’ he said.

Astrid stirred.

‘She knows,’ said Heiden Kant.

The princess’s lips were tinged with blue and up close, purplish veins were clear beneath her translucent skin. She writhed on the slab, pulling at her restraints. A sudden chill surrounded her and mist coiled from her mouth as she exhaled a long, shuddering breath.

The acolytes formed a circle around the slab, with Alric taking his place among them to form the seventh point. Elrisse stood over Astrid’s head, and held a hand just over her face.

‘Flow through me, Light,’ said Elrisse. ‘Accept our sacrifice. Hear our words. Fall upon us the light of banishment!’

‘Ulan tahl she’halla!’ began Alric. ‘Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

‘Ulan tahl she’halla!’ echoed the acolytes, perfectly matching the Master Chanter’s cadence as they had been trained. ‘Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

Princess Astrid’s eyes snapped open. They were shot through with crimson and the irises were yellow, shining as if a fire burned behind them. The light glittered around the shadowy torture chamber. Her elbows and knees bent almost backwards as she arched off the slab and the restraints were pulled taut.

A cracking and wrenching came from her joints, gristle and bone forced to their limit.

‘I see you,’ said Elrisse. ‘Foul and deceitful thing that wears this innocent flesh. From the Light even your kind cannot hide!’

‘Ulan tahl she’halla! Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

Silver fire was playing around Elrisse’s hands. It flowed out, describing a circle in the air encompassing the chanting acolytes, with Astrid at its centre. Glowing symbols orbited the princess, each a syllable of the secret language they had learned, the tongue with which their voices could reach into the aethyr.

‘Down!’ yelled Erisse. ‘Down! I command you! Burn in the Light, hateful thing. Down!’

The shape of it writhed under Astrid’s skin, distorting her youthful features and forming lumpen shapes as it rippled across her torso. With a horrid cracking of bone one hand tore free of its manacle and the princess’s body thrashed on the slab. Elrisse was forced back a step by the fury of it, for the princess’s nails were suddenly long and tapering, like talons lashing at his face.

The acolytes chanted, but they could not keep their eyes off the princess. Her free arm was bent the wrong way at the elbow, reaching for the Grand Magister as the side of her face bulged horribly. Something inside was trying to get out.

Elrisse grabbed Astrid’s wrist with one hand. The other he placed against the slab and flame licked from his eyes as the magic of the Light channelled through him. The slab was bathed in white flame and Astrid’s spine bent almost double as the thing inside her tried to escape it.

Waves of cold were coming from the slab. Frost covered the chamber’s stones. It was cold enough to hurt, but the acolytes kept up their chant even as pain prickled up their arms and across the exposed skin of their faces.

‘What are you?’ demanded Elrisse. ‘What are you?’

The circle spun faster, the sigils burning brighter. Astrid’s breastbone seemed to force its way up towards the ceiling, warping her slender frame until it seemed certain her ribcage would crack open.

‘Ulan tahl she’halla! Tan sechuldar il gaal!’

The Light was hearing them. It was accepting the sacrifice of their devotion. The chill enveloped them and the whole chamber seemed to shudder with the force of it.

Kryzstof Schwartzgelben dropped to his knees. He was still gasping the sacred syllables as he pitched onto his front, arms drawn tight around him, blood running from his nose and staining the white robes of the Light Order. Pieter Diess bent to help him up but a glare from Master Chanter Alric stopped him. The ritual was all that mattered. No acolyte was worth more than that.

Astrid’s body was distorted beyond all human limits. The writhing shape of the thing inside her was bulging out through her chest, her nightclothes pulled taut. Elrisse moulded the flame around his hand into a sphere, his face lit at unnatural angles in its hard white light. With a shout he cast the fireball up into Astrid’s body and she was bathed in the fire, spasming with more violence than a human form could take.

It tore itself free of her. It shed her like a lizard sheds its skin, and she flopped motionless onto the slab. It leapt up onto the ceiling, away from the flame, spreading its inhuman limbs around it to cling on.

It was mostly reptilian. Its skin was a scaly dark green-brown, glistening with secretions. Its eight limbs, neither arms nor legs, but both, splayed around it and its talons anchored it to the ceiling. Its head was located in the centre of its body and it had a wide, lipless mouth lined with teeth, leading to a gullet that disappeared into darkness surely too great to be contained within its pulsating body.

It was asymmetrical. Each limb had a different number of joints and digits. Its mouth was lopsided, fangs spilling out one side with a three-forked tongue flickering between them. It moved in jerking fits, shifting from one posture to another without any visible motion between them.

It stank of ancient decay, like something soured and buried, strong enough to bear down as if the air itself were suddenly heavy. It was accompanied by the sound of twisting gristle and blades through flesh, and a drizzle of transparent gore showered off it as it scuttled across the ceiling.

‘Burn, daemon!’ yelled Elrisse. ‘Burn in the Light!’

Eyes opened up in the daemon’s torso and rolled in their oozing sockets as they focused on the Grand Magister. Elrisse shot both hands forward and a ray of silver light leapt from his fingers, scouring along the stone blocks of the ceiling.

The daemon leapt away from the fire, scuttling away faster than anything of its size should have been able to move. An arm lashed down and yanked Pieter Diess from his feet, hauling the acolyte up towards the ceiling. Diess’s legs kicked as he struggled. The daemon dashed him against the ceiling and threw him down again, and Diess crumpled against the base of the chamber wall.

The circle was broken. The patterns of light around the acolytes shattered and a shockwave battered through the chamber. The acolytes were thrown to the floor, only Master Chanter Alric keeping his feet.

The daemon leaped down onto Diess. Muscles pumped under its skin as its mouth closed on Diess’s head and upper torso, the crunch of bone audible through the crackling of the silver flame still immolating the slab. The daemon shook its head and threw what remained of Pieter Diess across the chamber. The ruined torso, lacking a head and one arm, sprayed blood in a red fountain.

The stones of the chamber warped, a ripple running through them as if they were suddenly turned to liquid. Blocks were dislodged from the floor and ceiling as the ripple hit Grand Magister Elrisse and threw him against the wall. The old man tumbled to the floor, and the high-pitched broken shriek was the sound of the daemon laughing.

Egrimm van Horstmann wiped a hand across his face, getting the worst of Diess’s blood out of his eyes.

The other four acolytes were struggling to regain their feet. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben was bleeding heavily from his nose and ears. Heiden Kant and Gustavus Thielen were down beside the slab, supporting each other as they got up. Rudiger Vort was curled up in the corner like a child waiting for a nightmare to end.

The room was on fire. The Light magic was uncontrolled now and it was catching on the walls and floor. Van Horstmann placed a palm against the floor in front of him and murmured the rote spell that was the first Light incantation he had learned. The circle of protection shone against the flagstones – a flimsy barrier, but better then nothing.

Princess Astrid lay in a heap on the slab where she had fallen. She had reverted to her human shape, but there was no sign of life in her pale, skinny form. She might have been unconscious or dead; there would be no way of telling while the daemon was loose.

Pieter Diess’s body was a pathetic thing, the torn stump of a torso spilling organs from a ripped-open ribcage. Diess’s chewed-up head hit the floor as the daemon regurgitated it.

‘Thielen!’ shouted van Horstmann. ‘Kant!’ But he couldn’t hear his own voice.

The sound of the unbound magic was so great that it hadn’t registered as a sound at all. It was a wall of noise that shut down that sense entirely.

In front of van Horstmann lay the doctor’s implements, which had been scattered when Astrid rose off the slab. Among the shattered unguent bottles lay a long, thin knife, very sharp, perhaps used for cutting out growths and tumours. Van Horstmann grabbed the knife’s handle and held it up in front of him.

He turned to Rudiger Vort. Vort was shivering like a bullied dog.

The daemon ran across one wall, past Grand Magister Elrisse and off down a side passage. Master Chanter Alric chased it and, though he could not hear Alric’s words, van Horstmann knew the Master Chanter was cursing it with all the ferocity the tongue of the Light could muster.

Van Horstmann ran to Vort and grabbed the collar of his robes, dragging him to his feet. He maintained the circle as he did so. Every wizard felt the wind of magic differently. To van Horstmann, the Light was as cold as a winter stream. It coursed from the core of his body, behind his heart, and swirled around the inside of his chest. The chill ran down his arms and poured from his fingers, it crept up his neck and bathed the back of his brain. It was difficult enough to focus when that power flowed, even sitting alone beside a book of the Light Order’s lore. It was more difficult now, but Pieter Diess had not been quick enough to focus and van Horstmann, if he had to die, would not die that way.

No. That was not good enough. He was not going to die here at all. There was no way, because then his work would remain undone, and that could not happen.

Rudiger Vort stumbled after van Horstmann as they followed Alric down the side passage. Cells lined the walls and others were beneath the floor, accessible only by single barred openings. Oubliettes, where past emperors had dumped those they intended to forget about, the prisoners they could not kill but could not permit to live free. Even the Light wind was tinged here with the shudder of despair, the metallic taste of fear.

Ahead was a sinkhole, a circle of darkness that plunged through the floor. Perhaps it had been the site of a foundation since dug up for building stone, or there was a subterranean cavern beneath the dungeons into which a chunk of the structure had collapsed. Its ragged earth sides were illuminated by the bolt of silver fire streaking across it, bursting in a shower of sparks against one wall, a few feet from where the daemon was clinging to the ceiling.

The bolt had come from the hands of Master Chanter Alric, standing on the edge of the hole and shouting magically-charged syllables that van Horstmann could still barely hear.

The daemon glowed with sudden power. A ripple ran out from behind it, deforming the stone as it moved, as if the walls and ceiling were water and a stone had been dropped into it sending ripples in Alric’s direction. Alric held up both hands and threw a blue-white sphere of energy about him. The ripples converged on Alric and the floor erupted around him.

Stone burst into flesh. Tendons whipped and tendrils of muscle lashed out, an explosion of living matter growing too fast to see. Blood and torn meat flailed from the impact. Alric was cast off the edge of the pit and into it, followed by a waterfall of pulsing, oozing flesh, thick tentacles and spraying veins, ill-formed false limbs with joints of knobbed and bloodstained bone and spurts of red-black gore.

The daemon turned what passed for its head in van Horstmann’s direction.

There was an ocean beyond human sight. The aethyr. It was one thing to speak of it, but to understand it was another. Quite possibly no man, no high elf even, had ever fully understood what it was. It was not a physical place, yet it could only be spoken of as if it were so because no tongue of man could describe the concepts of the aethyr truly. It was spoken of in metaphor. It was an ocean, with each drop enough to power the working of a mage’s wonders. It was a city teeming with inhabitants, but they were not people or creatures – they were ideas, concepts, emotions, given a real form in the aethyr. It was a mirror that reflected every mind in the Old World, so that every thought, every fleeting sensation, left its mark on the aethyr like tracks in the snow.

It was a single living being so immense and complex that its consciousness encompassed everything a man knew or ever could know. It was nothing at all and existed only as potential to be tapped, a void to be filled by the act of observing it. It was a puzzle box. It was a map to everywhere. It was a book in which was written every possibility that might ever come to pass. It was a mighty mountain range, down from whose peaks the winds of magic blew. It was the opposite of the physical world, a twin composed of energy and thought. It was every dream ever dreamed. It was an infinite and perfect heaven. It was a hell inimical to sane existence.

No man’s concept of the aethyr could be perfect, and so every wizard had his own. It was dangerous to develop such an idea too early, for if the understanding was flawed the interaction with the aethyr might similarly be flawed, and the raw magic could harm or corrupt, or the wizard could find himself prey to the predators that lived there – if the aethyr was an ocean, it had sharks. The training of a wizard therefore involved the laborious study of countless versions of the aethyr, each one laboured at for a mighty wizard’s lifetime, each one inevitably flawed. Gradually he was to develop his own, so that by the time he wore the robes of a magister the vision of the aethyr was fully formed in his mind and through that vision he could draw on the winds of magic.

To van Horstmann, the aethyr was a great plain, such as he envisioned might be found in the distant Southlands. This was the image he conjured in his head even as he realised the daemon had seen him and would go for him next.

Upon this plain stood a fortress. It was alone and inviolate. Though the plains were hot and inhospitable, the fortress always stood. It was made of iron, a dull metallic tower rooted deep into the earth. It had enormous doors of studded oak and when van Horstmann willed it – only when he willed it – they would swing open to reveal the cool, dark interior, shielded from the deadly sun.

Inside were a million glowing gemstones in every colour. They had been quarried from beneath the plain, refined instances of the aethyr’s power, gusts of the winds of magic frozen and crystallised.

Van Horstmann could walk into this fortress. He did this in his mind’s eye as he dragged Rudiger Vort behind a crumbling wall, forcing one half of his mind to focus on the vision as the other commanded his body to do whatever it had to in order to stay alive.

The bolt of change burrowed through the stones of the dungeon and detonated against the wall. Stone shattered and flesh billowed, heavy lengths of bloody tentacle thumping into van Horstmann’s back. Vort almost disappeared beneath the mass and van Horstmann pulled so hard on the acolyte’s arm he thought he felt it pop from its socket. Vort appeared, slathered in gore, finally shocked out of his stupor and gasping for breath.

‘With me, Rudiger,’ said van Horstmann.

‘What is it?’ asked Vort. Van Horstmann did not know him very well – none of the acolytes did, for conversation between them was not encouraged and their waking minutes were dedicated to study and ritual. Perhaps Vort was tough, and would shake off the terror. Perhaps he was not.

In his mind, van Horstmann studied the gemstones arrayed before him. They hung in the air, and above them soared the circular walls of the tower. The upper floors were distant, and the great majority of the fortress was taken up with this chamber in which each sphere of frozen power was held in position like the stars in the sky.

Van Horstmann selected one. This process could not be rushed, no matter how urgent. It was far worse to make the wrong selection than to make a decision too late.

One of the gemstones shone with destruction, but also with hope, a little anger, some fear, and a halo of determination. A dark vein of agony ran through it and normally this would have caused van Horstmann to reject it as flawed. Not now. Now, it was just what he needed.

In the real world, van Horstmann glanced down into the pit. He could just see Alric down in the darkness, lying insensible for the moment. The daemon was gathering itself for another bolt of change. Van Horstmann had seconds, at most.

He drew back a hand. Black fire coalesced around it, thrumming deeply enough to shudder the stones under his feet. Lines of fire crazed up his forearm, and he clenched his fist as the pain hit.

Pain was a part of magic, just as it was a part of everything else. Van Horstmann welcomed it, focused it, forced it into a point and threw it forward.

The bolt of flame arced across the pit like the trail of a dark comet. It slammed into the daemon and it lost its grip, tumbling into the pit.

Van Horstmann gasped. Hot and cold were flashing through him, the touch of the aethyr.

The edge of the pit crumbled. Blocks of stone shifted beneath van Horstmann and he fell, trying in vain to grab a handhold before he slid into the pit.

Everything was darkness, noise and confusion. Pain battered at van Horstmann from every angle. Beneath him something crunched as he tried to get his bearings.

Bones. The pit was full of bones. Dozens of skulls, hundreds of ribs, gnawed by rats and brown with age. Sigmar knew when this place had been filled, or which emperor had ordered the bodies hidden here. Perhaps they were agitators disappeared from the streets of Altdorf, perhaps prisoners of war no longer valuable as hostages or sources of intelligence. Perhaps they were plague dead from the palace staff.

Van Horstmann clutched dumbly at the bones. His head spun and he had to think to work out which way was up. A short distance away lay Rudiger Vort, his leg pinned beneath a block of fallen stone.

The daemon was on its back, legs curled like a spider. But it was not dead. It shuddered and hawked up a mass of gore and broken teeth. Talons clacked among the bones as it scrabbled to right itself.

Van Horstmann crawled next to Vort.

‘What is magic?’ said van Horstmann.

Vort looked at him without recognition in his eyes.

‘Vort, listen! What is magic? Think! Think!’

Vort could do nothing more than shake his head. The writhing form of the daemon was reflected in his idiot eyes – even the fear had been shocked out of him.

The daemon rolled over. It dug its talons into the dirt and bones beneath it and its mouth yawned open. Van Horstmann could see the churning power in there, a conduit to whatever hellish realm constituted the aethyr for such a monster, a purple-black vortex of decay and destruction.

‘Sacrifice,’ said van Horstmann.

He forced the point of the doctor’s knife up under Rudiger Vort’s jaw, feeling the point slide past the jawbone and up under the tongue. Vort finally felt something, eyes widening in shock. His mouth opened and he let out a gurgle as the arteries and veins in his neck were sliced through, blood gushing out. It seemed that it would never end, pouring from the acolyte’s mouth even as van Horstmann twisted the blade.

The Light Order preached sacrifice as a concept, not a literal reality. An acolyte learned that the sacrifice written of in the order’s most precious tomes was a metaphor for the devotion and labour of the chanting ranks. That was what an acolyte had to believe, because the truth was fit only for one who was ready to ascend to the Second Circle and beyond. But the truth was different.

There was power in sacrifice. There could be great power in the sacrifice of devotion, it was true, if there were both the time and the numbers to make it happen. When they were lacking, the sacrifice had to be immediate and literal.

Van Horstmann jammed the point of the knife further in and it punched through the base of Vort’s skull, piercing the lower region of his brain. The acolyte died with a rattling sputter, spraying flecks of blood from his lips.

The life escaped him. Van Horstmann could feel it. The fortress in the aethyr stood now beneath a red sky, battered by a shrieking wind. The power was a flood and van Horstmann fought to contain it – it felt like he would burst, the force building from the centre of his chest and blazing down his limbs.

It could knock him out. It could tear him apart. But it would not.

Van Horstmann was off his feet, lifted above the base of the pit by the force of the magic flowing through him. Pillars of white light fell from above. Skulls crumbled and fallen stone blocks were thrown up towards the ceiling. Van Horstmann was yelling, fists clenched, and the pressure was burning behind his eyes now.

He let the power go, and the circle he projected around him was a blazing cylinder of white light. Pulses of power like bolts of lightning shot across the circle, grounding through everything caught in it. It was banishment and forbiddance, a zone of enforced purity.

The daemon was caught entirely within the circle. Its corrupted flesh was anathema to the purity of the light. Muscle and skin were blasted from its skeleton, leaving green-black bones, twisted and withered. Its cry of despair and abandonment was lost in the sound of a hurricane.

Van Horstmann dropped to the floor of the pit, scattering bones beneath him. He gasped down a superheated breath that scorched his throat. The circle pulsed, once, and van Horstmann’s vision greyed out. The world tilted around him as the grey became white and he felt his stomach contracting. He put out a hand to break his fall and felt it plunge into dust and shattered bone.

The white fire flickered out. Where the daemon had been was a scorched crater, the sigils of the Light Order’s magic imprinted on the stones. On one side of the charnel pit Master Chanter Alric was stirring, fumbling for his staff in the debris. On the other lay the body of Rudiger Vort, the ground beneath him black with blood.

Every part of van Horstmann ached. Every joint felt wrenched out of place. His eyes were stinging and his throat burned. Breathing hurt in half a dozen places at once.

The noise ringing in his ears was perforated by voices. The face of Grand Magister Elrisse appeared at the lip of the pit. He was pale and blood flecked his face. His eyes passed from Alric to Vort’s corpse.

‘Attend to the Master Chanter,’ said Elrisse. ‘Meet me by the slab.’

‘She lives,’ said the doctor. He carefully turned Princess Astrid’s face to one side. It was discoloured from ear to jawline by a livid red mark, as if the skin had been whipped. ‘Her breathing and heart rate are steady. I should wish to take account of her humours before I can say anything more.’

Minister Huygens replied with a nod and a grunt. He was pale, sweaty and shaking, and kept mopping his face with a handkerchief. He was leaning against the wall of the chamber, and seemed uncertain if it was acceptable to excuse himself so he could vomit.

‘She must be watched,’ said Grand Magister Elrisse. He stood be the slab watching intently as the doctor examined Astrid. ‘Notes must be taken when she wakes of everything she says. And keep her isolated. None must speak to her save those who can be most trusted.’

‘I shall… I shall send word to the Emperor,’ said Huygens. ‘He will wish to see her.’

‘No,’ said Elrisse. ‘A possession is a disease, minister. It is a contagion. Though the daemon is gone, yet the moral condition in which the victim is left can be as communicable as the plague. Restrict access to her only to those who are essential.’

‘I concur,’ said the doctor. ‘If I may, I suggest I remain in attendance so the princess might be regularly bled.’

‘Of course,’ said Huygens. ‘I should…’

‘You may go,’ said Elrisse.

Huygens crept out of the chamber, hunched and unsteady as if he had aged thirty years in the last hour.

Elrisse turned to the acolytes who stood, their heads bowed deferentially. Heiden Kant, Egrimm van Horstmann and Gustavus Thielen still lived. Diess had died in the chamber and Vort in the pit, both to the daemon. Kryzstof Schwartzgelben was also dead. When the Light Order’s wizards had gathered back at the side of Princess Astrid, they had found Schwartzgelben lying on the floor, eyes locked open and blood still running from his nose. A cursory examination by the doctor suggested that his heart had simply stopped.

All three bodies would be burned.

‘Forget what you have seen,’ said Elrisse to the acolytes. ‘If you cannot, you will be made to. Accompany the Master Chanter to the pyramid. Your work here is done.’

CHAPTER FOUR

DEAD MAN’S ROBE

Every night, the fortress changed. Tonight it seemed older, more like the skeleton of a building. The wind that whipped across the plains was shrill through the gaps in the stones, and the battlements were tumbledown and blunted like a mouth full of broken teeth. The banners were tattered.

Often it had a moat and it had one now, filled mostly with mud and choked with weeds. The drawbridge was down, slimy with moss as if no one had bothered to raise it for decades. The plains around it were different, too. A forest was encroaching from one side, turning half the horizon dark and chaotic where the dense growth reached up towards the lower slopes of distant mountains. Once, it seemed, there had been a great civilisation, for it had left the scars of metalled roads and a few crumbling stumps of buildings worn down almost to the foundations. Burial mounds dotted a hillside. Even the sky was old, grey and streaked as if by erosion.

Van Horstmann stood before the doors. They hung on their hinges and would need just a touch to push them open.

He took a long breath. It had taken a long time, longer than usual, to build this place in his mind. It was unusual for the fortress to be in such poor repair. Sometimes it was half-built and shored up by timbers, and on a few very rare occasions it had seemed inhabited, with smoke coiling from chimneys and lights in the windows of the upper floors. Each incarnation meant something, but the pattern was elusive, and perhaps it was something he would never understand.

Van Horstmann approached the gates. The drawbridge sagged under his weight, but even if it gave way there was just mud and tangled undergrowth beneath. The gate swung open.

The darkness inside was familiar. A flapping of wings broke the usual silence – birds had found a way in and roosted. A hundred turned pillars spiralled around each other up into the shadows of the upper levels, studded with dull and scratched gemstones that looked like they had just been dug out of the ground. Van Horstmann ignored them for the time being. He was not here to work magic.

Van Horstmann ascended the stairway that circled the inside of the tower. It shuddered under his weight and threatened to come away from the wall entirely. It was flimsy and wooden. Sometimes it was a flight of grand marble steps, other times a tight, winding stone stairway designed to funnel attackers onto the swords of defenders in ones and twos. Now birds fluttered away from van Horstmann as he reached the planks laid across the rafters, forming a precarious upper floor.

Here, the fortress was unfinished. Perhaps it would never be complete, because van Horstmann’s understanding of magic would never be complete either.

Maybe it would one day be a place of reflection and meditation. A library of knowledge that van Horstmann had learned by rote and could recall as clearly as if he were reading it from the page. A sawbones’ surgery where he could repair the mental wounds inflicted by the trials of a magister’s life. He would not know until it was built.

There was a door in one wall. It had always been here, though it could logically lead to nothing for it was in the fortress’s outer wall and beyond it could be only empty space and a fatal drop to the ground. Van Horstmann walked to the door and put a hand against it.

It wasn’t locked. It never was. There was a wish, always flickering in the back of his mind, that it wouldn’t open. He pushed, and the door swung in.

He walked in. One day it would change. That day might be today. What lay beyond might be different, at last.

But today, it was not.

He sank in up to his waist the instant his foot passed the threshold. The room could not exist except in the geometry of his mind where the rules of reality did not apply. He had tried to excise it from the fortress, spent hours meditating in his acolyte’s cell on purging this place of the hidden room, but it was always there.

Scaly bodies coiled around him, thick and smothering. The smell was awful, a mixture of all earthly filth and decay. He tried to draw breath but he couldn’t, for his chest was gripped tight and his ribs could not give his lungs room to fill.

He kicked out, but there was no floor beneath him, just the heaving masses of rubbery muscle. He sank in further even as he fought.

He could not help his hands from trying to find purchase. He could not keep the panic from rising. The mass closed over his head and then over the hand that reached up. He could not move at all now, kept tightly swaddled in place, and the darkness was total.

The mass started to crush around him. Though it had felt the same every time he had come here, it felt like he was experiencing it for the first time, as if he had never before felt his lungs burning and his body shivering with what would have been convulsions if he had been free.

He could not even open his mouth, because if he could, he would have begun to scream.

The darkness shattered into a billion fragments.

Air rushed back into his lungs and he was awake. As if falling into place from above, the walls and floor of his cell slotted into his perception. Even in the small room there were no shadows, everything lit by the candles that never went out and which were arranged around the edges of the floor or burned in the candelabra fixed to the walls. Van Horstmann had got used to the constant light – not every acolyte managed the feat quickly enough and were rendered insensible by the inability to sleep.

A bedroll lay at one end of the room. Robes and underclothes were neatly folded and laid out along one side. A shield was fixed to one wall, polished to the sheen of a mirror, upon which was displayed the arms of the Light Order: a candle with a flame in front of a crescent moon. The moon represented the high elf mages, led by Loremaster Teclis, who had taught the first of the Empire’s magisters and who oversaw the founding of the colleges, Light College included. The rest of the furniture consisted of bookshelves on which van Horstmann kept his books, most of them volumes of the ceremonies an acolyte had to learn by heart.

These books and clothes comprised everything that van Horstmann owned. They were arranged with geometric neatness, not because the acolytes were required to maintain their cells so, but because that was how van Horstmann preferred to live. Some acolytes were from wealthy families and had suits of fine clothes, jewellery and quantities of money. Others had trinkets given to them by their families, like a painted icon or a father’s sword. Van Horstmann did not.

Van Horstmann’s meditation had been broken by the shape of a man standing at the doorway to the cell. Though his robes were silver and white he was still fractionally darker than the blazing light of the chanters’ cloisters behind him, which in the Light College counted as a shadow. The change had registered in the part of van Horstmann’s mind which remained dully sensible, like a sentry dog, while the rest of his perception was turned inwards.

The man was one of the Half-Circle, the stewards, guards, librarians and other staff who served the Light Order. Going by his robe and his great age, he served one of the magisters as a major-domo, valet and secretary.

‘Acolyte van Horstmann,’ the steward said.

‘That is I.’

‘Follow me.’

Van Horstmann stood and did as the steward suggested. Outside the cells was the open area where the acolytes learned the patterns and movements of the Light Order’s rituals. Several acolytes were doing so at that moment, reciting the ceremonial chants. A couple glanced at van Horstmann as he followed the steward for the rest of the Light Order, even the Half-Circle staff who were no longer permitted to practice magic, rarely associated with the acolytes.

The lowest floor was one huge room, with low internal walls dividing parts of it into cells. In defiance of logic, the higher up one went, the more rooms the pyramid’s floors were divided into. The first floor was split into the Light Order’s library and the halls where the magisters developed the skills of exorcism for which the Light Order was famed. Van Horstmann followed the steward up the staircase that bisected the two, where the glowing walls were hung with portraits of past Grand Magisters and notable wizards. Each picture was rendered in lacquer and gilt, shining in the light that blazed from lanterns hanging everywhere.

Above that, the floors were divided into dozens of chambers, arranged without any apparent plan or consistency. Some were small study rooms with lecterns and cases groaning with ancient books. Others were armouries with racks of gleaming weapons, or were workshops for illuminating manuscripts or weaving tapestries; some seemed to have no purpose at all. Everything was drenched in light. Some even had pools or fountains filled with glowing liquid. There were, as ever, no shadows.

There, among the labyrinthine interior of the pyramid’s upper levels, the magisters themselves lived. The acolytes and the magisters lived separate lives but some acolytes spoke of how the magisters reigned in obscene luxury in the upper levels, commanding hosts of devoted slaves. Van Horstmann saw that the tales were false, but only just. The living quarters he glimpsed were hung with silks or tapestries, some decked out in exotic décor reflecting some far-flung corner of the world – lands like Cathay or the Southlands, which were just words to all but the most learned of the Empire’s citizens.

The steward reached a set of polished bronze doors and stopped. He bowed to van Horstmann and left without a word.

This part of the pyramid had trophies on the walls, taken from battles in which the Light Order’s battle magisters had fought. Some wizards were academics, spending their lives increasing mankind’s understanding of the aethyr and the many winds of magic. Others served as advisors to the Imperial Court or the elector counts, or served as soothsayers, healers and in all manner of capacities to the cities and nobles of the Empire. The battle magisters, however, fought the Empire’s enemies in open war. Every wind of magic could be turned to destruction, and Light magic was no exception. The order’s magisters had brought back standards and captured weapons from battle – jagged swords, their runes to the Fell Gods obliterated before they were polished and hung on the walls, the bleached skulls of greenskin savages, a tattered banner which had once been a masterpiece of embroidery, perhaps taken from the hands of a dead elf of the Loren forest.

The bronze doors swung inwards. Van Horstmann blinked at the glare from inside, which after a second resolved itself into a chamber dominated by a great globe of silver inlaid with golden land masses and with ocean currents picked out in lapis and agate. The chamber itself was spherical, echoing the contours of the globe. A curved hardwood desk, covered in navigational implements of silver and gold, stood against the wall. Silver crystals hung in bunches from the ceiling, shedding a painfully bright light that blazed off the polished globe.

The light was reflected in every direction, so the figure standing at the desk seemed to shine. He turned and van Horstmann was looking at Grand Magister Elrisse, the old wizard’s head surrounded by a halo of silver light.

‘Acolyte,’ said Elrisse. ‘Enter.’

Van Horstmann approached the globe, and his eyes passed across the shorelines picked out across it.

‘The world,’ said Elrisse. ‘As far as our scholars can reckon it. None know what lies beyond the cape of the Southlands, or what might be found far north of Troll Country. And no man, they say, has ventured to the continent of Naggaroth and returned.’

Large areas of the globe, van Horstmann now saw, were featureless. The shape of the Empire was familiar, along with the bordering nations of Kislev, Bretonnia and Tilea, and the gilded caps of the Worlds Edge Mountains and the Mountains of Mourn. He had never before seen a depiction of the Southlands all the way to the dagger-like point at the southernmost tip. But much of the rest was blank.

‘I would wish,’ he said, ‘to see it completed.’

‘How so?’ asked Elrisse.

‘Incompletion is abhorrent to the mind,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Like a ritual unfinished or a circle broken.’

‘Well, rest assured that men are dying as we speak to map the world’s furthest corners.’

‘Good,’ said van Horstmann.

Elrisse opened a fat ledger with yellowing pages on the desk. ‘It has been four years since you walked through our doors,’ he said. ‘In that time there has been scarce cause for me to hear your name.’

‘An acolyte is best known for nothing,’ said van Horstmann, ‘either good or ill.’

‘Quite,’ said Elrisse. ‘Tell me. What do you imagine Master Chanter Alric has to say about you?’

Van Horstmann did not answer for a moment. ‘It is difficult to know how we appear in the eyes of another.’

‘It is difficult to call down the Light wind and let it course through us,’ said Elrisse smoothly. ‘Yet we do it.’

‘Studious and deliberate,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Little trouble. Accurate in his memory of the First Circle rituals.’

‘Such are the prerequisites for becoming an acolyte in the first place. Hardly remarkable.’

‘I have no ambition to appear remarkable.’

Elrisee smiled, not looking up from the ledger. ‘Some would say that we cannot enter into the study of magic at all if we are content to be unremarkable. Is it not rather extraordinary to simply walk through the doors of this pyramid? To enter into the secret coven of Teclis? We work wonders, van Horstmann, do we not?’

‘What we do,’ said van Horstmann, ‘is essential. Without the wizards of the colleges of Altdorf, the Empire is lost. Perhaps the world itself. The agents of the Fell Powers can be met only by the combination of the sword and the spell. Our work is as necessary as the maintenance of soldiers or the rule of the emperors. There can be little room for wonders when we must devote every moment to the survival of our people.’

‘Well put, acolyte,’ said Elrisse. ‘How long have you been working on that for?’ He closed the ledger. ‘There is one thing for which I and Master Chanter Alric remember you. I know you have not been spoken to about it since it happened. And I know there have been rumours, for Kant and Thielen were unable to hold their tongues completely. But you have said nothing. The exorcism of Princess Astrid is what I speak of, van Horstmann. The deaths of Schwartzgelben, Diess and Vort. Vort, I understand, died in your arms. Is that not so?’

‘It is so.’

‘Have you revisited that day, acolyte?’

‘I have.’

‘And what do you see?’

Van Horstmann looked at the chamber’s curving floor. ‘I see Vort’s eyes,’ he said. ‘I saw when the life went out of him. One moment they were the eyes of a man. The next they were dull. Vort was not a man any more. He was a corpse. I saw that moment come and go. That is what I remember. I see it when I close my eyes.’

‘And the daemon? You banished it, van Horstmann. You cast it back into the aethyr. It rages there as we speak, defeated. You have not even spoken of that. There are magisters in this very college who would take every opportunity to crow that they defeated such a creature. But you have said nothing.’

‘I called on the Light. I offered it my devotion, and it flowed through me. I remembered the words of Teclis and the founding Grand Magisters. There is not much else to say.’

Elrisse closed the ledger. He pointed up at the globe again. ‘Some of us never leave Altdorf. Some of us rarely even leave this pyramid. But there are those among us, of all the orders of magic, who have seen more of this world than most men imagine exists. Do your eyes turn to the horizon, acolyte?’

‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I wish to see it. That is where the wonders lie. Not in the works of wizards, but in the places where the winds of magic have carved their secrets into the world.’

‘You can,’ said Elrisse. ‘If you so wish it.’

‘My studies monopolise my time and the energies of my mind. It is fruitless to lust for such things now, when I have so far to go before I can even step outside this college as a wizard.’

‘Really? I disagree, acolyte. I disagree most firmly. Many of your fellow acolytes will never advance beyond the First Circle. Perhaps they will serve in the Half-Circle, perhaps the Light College will become closed to them. But you are not among them. Whether you are willing to admit it or not, or whether you merely conceal your true thoughts, you are very remarkable. You saw your fellow acolyte die and yet kept your head enough to match wills with a daemon of the aethyr. You have shown devotion in your studies and a discipline of mind. On their own any of these would give us confidence that you can rise above your current station. Together they leave us little doubt. Tell me, have you heard the name Obadiah Vek?’

‘I have,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I understand that he was a magister of this order, and that he was lost.’

‘He died here,’ said Elrisse. He raised a hand and a glowing spot appeared on the globe, in the vicinity of the Empire’s northern provinces. ‘He served as a battle magister in the army of Nordland, against the Pretender Count Scharndorff. A battle was fought at Kriegsmutter Field and in that battle Magister Vek lost his life. It diminishes us all, acolyte, when one of us is lost. In times of war we find ourselves much diminished. This order stood proud alongside Emperor Magnus in the Great War’s culmination, and we lost many. Times are scarcely less perilous now. It is an onerous task to replace such men as Magister Vek, for they prove themselves bulwarks against the Empire’s enemies and islands of sanity in the ocean of the aethyr. But replace them we must. Vek died six years ago and his place has not been taken. There were none who could take it. I have decided that now, there is.’

Van Horstmann did not reply.

‘You may, if you wish, celebrate. Or perhaps thank me. They are empty emotions but would not be inappropriate. You cannot deny those petty moments of humanity forever, van Horstmann. You are permitted them. As of this moment you are a magister of the Second Circle. A Light wizard. One of us, van Horstmann, a wizard of the pyramid.’

Van Horstmann bowed his head. ‘Thank you, Grand Magister. I shall do everything in my power to prove your decision was the right one.’

‘It was not a decision,’ replied Elrisse without pause. ‘It was fate.’

Magister Vek had expected to return to the College of Light. It had not occurred to him that his life might end in the mud and filth of Kriegsmutter Field. His quarters were still fully appointed and stood just as Vek had left them. It was only the withered state of the Lustrian orchids and mandrake root on the alchemy table that suggested Vek had been away at all.

Each magister decorated his quarters in their own way, echoing some far-flung part of the world that a non-wizard might never even hear about. Vek had made use of the arts of the lands beyond the Worlds Edge Mountains, a bleak and hazardous bowl of rocky desert which had once maintained a handsome and far-reaching civilisation. A pair of monumental figures, with the bodies of lions and the heads of men with carved beards hanging in elaborate braids, bracketed the room. The furniture was of carved red-black stone taken from some volcanic quarry: a grand writing desk covered in implements for drawing out the exacting proportions of ritual circles, ceiling-high cabinets and bookshelves, the round alchemy table with its circular slab supported on a tripod, and four polished bronze sculptures of birds and animals that watched from each corner of the main chamber. The bedchamber had a huge four-poster bed with its pillars taken from some long-fallen temple, and cabinets and chests for the vestments of a magister’s rank.

Van Horstmann stood in the centre of this room and took note of its contents. The cabinets were piled with books and trinkets, small objects of art or ritual purpose from across the world. It must have taken years, and a near-obsessive eye for the arcane and obscure, to have collected them all. Vek also had a weakness for skulls, especially carved from strange materials: pitted iron, volcanic glass, chunks of jade and marble.

‘I trust everything is to your liking, magister,’ said the steward who had showed van Horstmann to the chambers. ‘Do not hesitate to express your displeasure if it is not.’

Van Horstmann looked back at the steward standing in the doorway. It was impossible to place them – their attitude was permanently locked between haughtiness, servitude, and the feeling they knew something they were not telling. The stewards of the Light College were presumably recruited from acolytes who did not make the grade, but there was no similarity between this inscrutable man and the studious youths of the Chanter’s Hall.

‘This will do for now,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Very good,’ said the steward. ‘Magister Vek’s staff is located alongside his robes. All of Magister Vek’s belongings were accounted for save for a small hardwood puzzle box he kept on his person. It was not found on his body when it was recovered.’

‘I see. Where was Magister Vek buried?’

‘He was interred in a field south of Kriegsmutter Field,’ replied the steward, ‘alongside the other notable dead of the battle. As a battle magister it was thought fitting to leave him so buried.’

‘Of course. Wait a moment.’

The steward stood dutifully by the door as van Horstmann went into the bedchamber. Like the rest of the Light College the chambers were drenched in light, flooding down from a dozen braziers that hung from the ceiling. It would take a great deal of effort to make a hiding place when there were no shadows, but no doubt Magister Vek had possessed sufficient ingenuity. Van Horstmann would have to thoroughly search the chambers to see if Vek had left any secrets behind when he left to join the war in Ostermark.

Van Horstmann opened a chest by the foot of the extravagant bed. It contained several sets of ivory-coloured robes with gold embroidery. One of the robes wrapped something and van Horstmann bent to pick it up.

It was a staff. Vek’s staff. It was gilded and sturdy, shoulder-high and very finely made. Its head was that of a hooded snake with emerald eyes. The snake was one of the most persistent symbols of the Light Order. In the earliest mythologies of the world it was a symbol of purity and banishment – its venom could drive out spirits, provided the bitten host survived, and the marks of its winding through the sand were once thought to be the passage of ghosts who followed the snake away from the dwellings of men and back to the netherworld. The snake swallowing its tail was said to be the origin of the ritual circle. A scattering of snake venom over such a circle marked the culmination of many of the Light Order’s rituals.

Van Horstmann returned to the main chamber holding the staff. ‘Take this from me,’ he said.

‘Magister?’

‘I have a dislike of snakes,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I shall require a staff made for me. Kruger and Granitebrow of Altdorf shall be commissioned to make it. I understand they are among the finest goldsmiths in the city. It shall be of this height, a staff of gold banded with silver. The top shall take the form of a mask of a young woman, as a death mask but with the eyes open. One eye will be a diamond. I trust this will not be beyond the resources of my order.’

‘Of course,’ said the steward, taking the offending staff from van Horstmann’s hands. ‘Masters Kruger and Granitebrow have long been trusted suppliers of the Light Order. You shall have it within the fortnight.’

‘That is all.’

The steward nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

Once he was alone, van Horstmann placed the puzzle box on the writing desk.

He had carried this object from Kriegsmutter Field, where he had taken it from a pouch tied to Magister Vek’s waist. He had kept it on his person, not trusting the Light Order not to search his acolyte’s cell, and its hard wooden corners against his skin were so familiar a set of sensations that when he took it from beneath his robes he felt like a part of himself had been removed.

It had been difficult to keep it hidden at first. It wanted to be revealed, to be admired and toyed with, like a needy pet. But Egrimm van Horstmann had learned to keep secrets and eventually it seemed to have given up, to relinquish its ticklish grasp on the back of his mind.

It was beautiful. He had not ascertained where the box had been made. Elven, perhaps, carved from the living trees of Averlorn in Ulthuan or from the heartroot of some ancient oak of Loren. Magic winked off it, like light off a gemstone.

Van Horstmann had spent a lot of time trying to open the box. There had been enough long nights on the way from Ostermark to Reikland to test out the give in its various panels and carvings. A seashell-shaped panel on one side slid in the width of a fingernail, and another panel could be levered aside to reveal the tightly-wound nests of bark and beaten gold inside, like the innards of a timepiece.

A stud was pressed and a lever pulled halfway. The puzzle box opened up with a series of descending tones.

Van Horstmann paused. He reached into the well of power at the back of his mind, that stemmed from the foundations of the fortress, and imagined a stony depth of silence. He took that idea and let the magic fill it, and it spread out from him in an invisible hemisphere – a magical zone of silence. It was difficult to hide anything for long in the Light College, but it was possible, at least, to keep it silent.

He opened up a pane of polished crystal in the heart of the puzzle box’s bloom.

The air above the desk shimmered, as if something beyond a veil of reality was struggling. Then that veil tore and glistening limbs could just be glimpsed, pumping and writhing like organs in a still-living chest. An eye glared out madly, a gnashing maw made wet chomping noises. Its breath could be heard now, a grinding, panting sound that would surely have brought alarmed stewards in from outside if not for the magical silence.

The puzzle box was more than a toy, although it could have been mistaken for one. It was a magical artefact designed to keep objects safe and screened from outside eyes. Van Horstmann had wondered, at first, what use Vek had made of it. Perhaps the magister had not even known what it could do. Van Horstmann had known as soon as he took it from the dead wizard’s robe. He had seen its like before, illustrated in the pages of books. Books that according to every law of the land neither he, nor anyone else, should ever read.

The daemon burst from its invisible cage. It looked the same as van Horstmann had seen it last, below the Imperial Palace. It was scorched and battered, some of its eye sockets red and raw where the eyes had been put out, teeth in its lolling maw broken, muscle and ill-formed bone poking through the skin.

It propelled itself onto the ceiling, rattling the braziers hanging there and sending embers fluttering down.

‘You,’ it hissed, drawing out the syllable into a rattling grind.

Van Horstmann threw out his hands and bands of white fire appeared around the daemon, like the bars of a spherical cage. ‘I let you live,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I could have destroyed you but I did not.’

‘Destroy me? Ha! You flatter yourself, you filth-dripper, you walking afterbirth! You less-than-nothing!’

Van Horstmann let the image in his mind contract and the bars closed in. The daemon writhed and hissed as its limbs touched the flame. ‘And I still can,’ he said. ‘I invoke the pact that binds all your kind.’

‘Lick the rump of Sigmar’s corpse!’ slurred the daemon back. ‘Speak your drivel to his holy fundament!’

‘I let you live!’ continued van Horstmann. ‘That means I saved your existence. That means I own you.’

‘Leprous ordure-heap! Well of bubbling pus!’

‘Tell me it is not so!’ demanded van Horstmann. ‘I own you. You are mine. Tell me you are not!’

The daemon drew itself against the ceiling and hissed, flicking specks of drool across the desktop.

‘I thought as much,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I shall not be a disagreeable master. No doubt more tolerable than whatever power put you in that girl’s body.’

‘By the mountains of the aethyr, she stank,’ said the daemon. ‘Her flesh begged me for corruption. Her mind, too. That voice in the back of her head that lusted to be violated and depraved. She mourned me when I left her. She begged me to return.’

‘Now you are rid of her, daemon. Now you are mine. Speak your name.’

The daemon roiled and hissed. A limb touched the cage of white flame and it recoiled, burning.

‘Speak it!’

‘Hiskernaath!’ yelled the daemon. The syllables seemed to burn its mouth as it spat them out. ‘I was the Red Stag of Chalons. I was the Beast of Kolnendorf. But in the tongue of the aethyr my true name is Hiskernaath!’ The daemon gasped, the effort of speaking the truth, something so alien to it, exhausting. ‘Are you pleased, fleshling? Does your heart swell with pride? Do you think you have won?’

‘There is no winning or losing,’ replied van Horstman. He had not raised his voice, no matter how the daemon railed against him. ‘Above us is the same master. Far above, so far that his eye might never fall upon us, but under his mantle we both fall. I know what you are, Hiskernaath. You were torn from his flesh like a seed from the pod. You are a fragment of his will.’

‘You speak,’ said Hiskernaath, ‘of the God of Lies.’

‘I walked,’ said van Horstmann, ‘on the Red Road that leads to the Well of Malice. I drank of its waters. I have stood before the gates of the Eternal City, and heard the song that bade me enter. I tore a tower from its battlements and installed it in my own soul. I looked upon the Isle of Mists and returned with my life. I have travelled, daemon, and I have learned. My mind unshackled, it flew through the coils of the aethyr and returned to my body with these truths intact. My studies are a long way from completion, but I know enough to commune with the Liar Prince. I knew enough to defeat you, and bind you, in the name of he whom we both serve.’

‘Tzeentch,’ hissed Hiskernaath.

‘Tzeentch,’ said van Horstmann.

‘You are a daemonologist.’

‘Not so,’ replied the wizard. ‘I am a seeker of knowledge. I followed the daemon-binder’s path and I walk on the path of Light. Both are my calling. Perhaps I will walk other paths. As it is I have the means to both enslave you, and destroy you if it suits me. Remember that, daemon. I am a magister of the Light Order and we are not known for our mercy to daemonkind.’

‘Then,’ said Hiskernaath, ‘how may this one serve you?’

Van Horstmann regarded the daemon for a moment. It was an inhuman, disgusting thing, a combination of all the worst parts of spiders, vermin, maggots and the ill-formed things that lived beneath the sea – but it was also a sentient thing and its body language could be read after a fashion. It was in submission now, like a slave prostrate before its owner. Gills fanned open and its talons were laid flat against the ceiling, like tools at van Horstmann’s disposal.

‘I know enough,’ said van Horstmann, ‘to be certain that as a daemon, you lie. The most mindless of you has within it the capacity for deceit. It is in your nature to lie to me now. You have no intention of serving. You will tie me up in one of the riddles of which Tzeentch is so fond, and at the culmination of my plans you will reveal the loophole you have exploited to turn on me. And I will be destroyed, like so many others before me. Not this time, daemon. Not this master.’

Van Horstmann unfastened his robe, which was still that of an acolyte. Onto his upper chest were tattooed long streams of archaic characters.

‘I walked the Valley of Centuries,’ he said, ‘and found there the pedestal on which rests the Obsidian Codex, carved by madmen into panels of stone. These are the words I read there, the pact which bound Kyrinex the Maw to the Heresiarch Coven. They were written before Sigmar was born, before these lands of men existed, and they have been read by no man since save I.’ Van Horstmann pulled his robe open to reveal his whole torso was covered with the words. ‘It is a contract, daemon. Unbreakable. And you will sign.’

‘Come, master, you insult me!’ said Hiskernaath. ‘We follow the same dark star, you and I. You are my master. You own me. One such as I can never betray one such as you. No contract is needed, master. Not when Lord Tzeentch himself blesses my servitude!’

The daemon did a good job of forcing genuine hurt and obsequiousness into its voice. Someone who had not walked the roads that van Horstmann had, someone who had not studied the most ancient works of daemonology, might have been convinced.

‘Sign, daemon,’ said van Horstmann. He indicated the space on his abdomen, left bare for a signature. ‘Make your mark.’

One of the flame-cage’s bars vanished. Hiskernaath paused then, as if invisible hands were forcing him, and uncoiled a limb towards van Horstmann. Pores opened on the end of its tentacle-like tip and oozed greenish acid that hissed and spat where it dripped on the chamber floor.

For a moment the daemon seemed about to protest one final time. Then it touched the limb to the bare spot on van Horstmann’s torso.

Van Horstmann winced. The unsavoury smell of burned skin mixed with the daemon’s own stench. When the daemon withdrew its limb, its mark, a letter of that same ancient alphabet, was scorched onto van Horstmann.

He took in a long breath. The contract was signed. Though every such contract was fallible, for a daemon could weasel its way out of any obligation, it would take centuries for Hiskernaath to find the flaws that would release it from servitude. That was more than enough time for van Horstmann to do what he had come to the Light College to do.

The Light Pyramid was one of the great secrets of Altdorf, but there were greater.

True, the general population did not know it was there. The inhabitants of the Buchbinder district ascribed the strange geography of their home to some wild magic resulting from ley lines or a rogue spell in ages past, and the Light Order did nothing to discourage such beliefs. But there were plenty of people who knew of the pyramid, not least the magisters of the other seven orders along with those who had to deal with the Colleges of Magic as political entities: the Imperial Court, the churches of the Empire’s major faiths, the orders of witch hunters and others.

A greater secret was that there was more than one pyramid. The second pyramid was a mirror of the first, built underground and inverted, its point as far beneath the ground as the Light College’s pinnacle was above it. These were the vaults of the Light Order, a repository for everything they did not want seen by anyone outside the order. It was here, rather than the first pyramid’s library, that they kept safe the most valuable and dangerous books, either those penned by the order’s earliest and greatest magisters or tomes of blasphemy captured intact and read, under the strictest supervision, to provide an insight into supernatural threats like daemonkind and the undead. In these vaults were kept magical artefacts too valuable and too powerful to entrust to the pyramid above ground – the staves of the great magisters, ritual knives and blood chalices for the most direct of sacrifices, enchanted objects and armaments of every kind.

The magisters of the Fourth Circle, who answered directly to the Grand Magister and who numbered only half a dozen at any one time, were masters of these vaults. They were kept in strict order and perfectly maintained, in keeping with the mindset of the Light Order. The Fourth Circle did not mix with the rest of the order and they guarded their domain with such fervour that all save the Grand Magister were fortunate to even enter the upper vaults with any regularity.

It was therefore Elrisse himself who led the newly-appointed magisters into the vaults to witness what an acolyte could not – some of the greatest secrets that existed in Altdorf, in the whole of the Empire, painstakingly catalogued and studied by the jealous Fourth Circle.

Van Horstmann stood before a pedestal on which sat one such secret. It was one of over two dozen displayed in this vault, one of the uppermost vaults, a long room of cut marble and false pillars. Here were displayed magical swords and talismans created by the Light Order: an amulet of cold-forged iron in the form of two intertwined snakes, a chunk of crystal filled with dancing lights, a golden torc that slowly wept drops of blood. Van Horstmann had ignored most of them, given a few of them a glance, and moved to this pedestal at the far end of the chamber.

‘The Skull of Katam,’ said Magister Pendorf. Pendorf was of the Fourth Circle and was the oldest man van Horstmann had ever seen, his face little more than a sheaf of wrinkled skin behind a straggly grey beard. His voice was so dry and strained that it almost hurt to listen to it. He had shadowed van Horstmann the moment he entered, like the owner of a confectioner’s following a quick-fingered child.

‘From the barrows of the Mourkain,’ said van Horstmann.

‘You are learned,’ said Pendorf.

‘We seek knowledge,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘It is our weapon. We all seek it, you guard it.’

‘Quite so.’

The Skull of Katam had, presumably, once been a human skull. Perhaps it had looked like a mundane skull when it was dug up from the burial mound that had once been a part of the prehistoric Mourkain empire. Now it was plated in silver and covered in jewels. Its teeth were diamonds and its eyes two fat rubies. Sigils were cut into the silver, each a variation of a star with eight points.

‘Sigmund Haal died a week after he found it,’ said van Horstmann. ‘They say it spoke to him of his death, and his heart froze solid the next night. And that whoever owns it will eventually be warned of their death, though there is nothing they can do to avoid it. Whenever it speaks, someone dies.’

‘Then I give thanks,’ said Pendorf, ‘that I have never heard it.’

Van Horstmann looked at the old man. His robes were trimmed with black and he wore around his neck a heavy amulet in the shape of a padlock. The image of a key was tattooed on his forehead. The magisters of the Fourth Circle were said to have a little madness in them, perhaps a prerequisite for the job of tending the vaults, perhaps the result of isolation from the rest of the their order and exposure to the strange magics of so many artefacts. ‘I understand that one magister of the Fourth Circle must die before another can take his place,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Nowhere is it written, but in practice, yes, that is so.’

‘Then maybe it is the Skull of Katam that decides when one of your circle is to be replaced. Perhaps it speaks, one of you hears it and is struck dead, and another takes his place. Could that not be the case?’

Pendorf did not reply. It was impossible to read any emotion from his face. It was barely any more expressive than the jewelled skull.

Van Horstmann reached for the skull.

‘No,’ said Pendorf. ‘The Skull of Katam is ill-starred. It cannot leave these vaults.’

Van Horstmann ignored him and picked up the skull. It was heavy, far heavier than mere bone. He realised it was solid right through.

Power crackled through his fingers where they touched the skull. Sparks of white magic arced from his palms. The rubies glowed brighter, a pink-red light bathing van Horstmann’s face. He heard a click as the jaw unlocked.

‘Do you know,’ said van Horstmann, ‘who Katam was?’

‘You show no respect to this place!’ rattled Pendorf. ‘Our secrets are not to be toyed with as your fancy takes it! You… you are not welcome here, magister! You must leave!’

Two more magisters ran in. Both were ancient, though not quite as wizened as Pendorf. One struck the butt of his staff against the ground and flames leaped up around his other hand, boiling in place. The impression given was of a bowman drawing the string, ready to shoot. The other opened the tome he carried and read aloud.

‘By the Pact of Teclis,’ he said, ‘to the sole custody of the Fourth Circle shall be given the vaults of the Light College, and entrusted to them will such artefacts as the Grand Magister deems necessary to be kept secure. No magister save the Grand Magister and those of his choosing may venture there and make use of such artefacts. All are bound to this law and all is forfeit in disobedience!’

‘Him,’ said a voice from nearby. For a moment, van Horstmann could not place it. ‘Him. This one. He will carry me.’

Pendorf looked on dumbfounded. The other Fourth Circle mages were similarly stunned. Van Horstmann realised that it was the skull that had spoken.

He looked down into the ruby eyes of the skull.

‘I have not spoken for three centuries,’ it said. ‘For none have been worthy to hear me. None have been worthy to hear my wisdom. But this one. This one is worthy.’

‘I am a seeker of knowledge,’ said van Horstmann to the skull.

‘And I am a receptacle of knowledge,’ replied the Skull of Katam. Its voice had a multi-layered quality, as if it was made up of several voices heard at a distance, or was almost swamped by its own echoes.

‘They say that when you speak, people die.’

‘They lie. They do so through jealousy, for I will not speak at all to those whose minds cannot contain what I must impart.’

‘You… you cannot remove the skull from the vaults!’ said Pendorf, his voice shaking.

‘Who speaks?’ asked the skull.

‘One of the Fourth Circle magisters tasked with looking after you.’

‘I suffered them with great pain. Now I have found someone to whom I can speak, they will not keep me within these walls if I desire to leave.’

‘Then you will leave now,’ said van Horstmann. He turned to the three magisters. ‘Unless you wish to stop me, magisters.’

The magisters did not reply. They didn’t even move. The fire that one had been holding, ready to strike, sputtered and died out.

With the Skull of Katam in one hand, van Horstmann walked past the magisters and out of the chamber. The other chambers of the upper vaults radiated out from the spiral staircase leading up to the above-ground pyramid. They contained a fortune’s worth of artefacts – books written in ink distilled from unicorn blood and meteoric iron, swords that could sever a soul from the body, runestones that, when cast, could foretell the outcome of a battle still to be fought. But none of them were the Skull of Katam, and so van Horstmann ignored them as he returned to the pyramid.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE GILDED FORGE

It was on a bright and clear night that Emperor Wilhelm II died. His physicians ascribed his death to a surfeit of rich foods and wine that lead to a fatal ulceration of his innards.

There was no great grief when the news was called out that dawn from street corners across Altdorf. Wilhelm II had always been a distant man to the people, little interested in the masses of the Empire’s citizenry and more concerned with putting down the petty rebellions that had become a national pastime of the aristocracy. And, of course, he could not compare as a man to Magnus the Pious, who had won such a titanic victory in what had, generations later, earned the name of the Great War against Chaos.

Wilhelm was given a state funeral, his body displayed on a carriage that wound in a procession from the Imperial Palace to Altdorf’s Temple of Morr, but those who turned out to see it were drawn more by curiosity than by a wish to pay their respects. When Magnus had died, people had seen portents in the sky, a comet rushing from the earth to the stars as if it were the release of a great soul, showers of light like the tears of the heavens. The night sky did not seem overly concerned by Wilhelm II’s passing and neither did anyone else. Even his family, including Princess Astrid who had just recovered from a long illness, looked more bored than grief-stricken as they rode in the black-draped carriage behind the Emperor’s body.

An Empire without an emperor was a dangerous thing. Sigmar had not founded a hereditary monarchy, and instead had created the tradition that an emperor should be the one man most uniquely suited to the task, as Sigmar himself was. Lacking the presence of any god-kings who might fit the role, the Empire had, after various civil wars and lesser squabbles, instituted the twelve hereditary posts of elector count who would choose the next emperor. In times of great strife their decision would mean nothing but, without any warring claimants to the throne, they decided who should succeed Wilhelm II.

It was without bloodshed or threats that the elector counts decided the least offensive choice was Count Vitek of Stirland, a middle-aged, middle-browed man who had achieved the feat of not making any mortal enemies outside his immediate family. The Church of Sigmar had no objections, and neither was the choice likely to create a major rift with a neighbouring power. Within the week Vitek was Emperor pending his coronation at Altdorf.

It was the second time van Horstmann had entered the Imperial Palace and this time he entered through the main gates instead of a hidden entrance to the dungeons. The palace was much more handsome from this angle, with the great frowning gateway proportioned to intimidate anyone crossing the Imperial threshold. For all it might serve as a palace it was still a fortress, the walls still thick and sheer and studded with firing slits behind the banners of the elector counts.

The representatives from the Colleges of Magic included magisters from every college, resplendent in the dress robes that best represented them to the Altdorfers gathered to watch the occasion. Their numbers had been limited by Imperial decree, since at coronations past the colleges had competed to have the most spectacular sight, with Gold wizards firing off alchemical fireworks and the Amber College summoning a menagerie of decorative beasts. Now they were a little more sombre, although the crowds still gasped and murmured at the sight as they were held back by the men of the Reiksguard.

It was the first time van Horstmann had encountered the wizards of the other orders. The Bright wizards smelt of ash and wore red and yellow – even their hair tended towards red, and faint wisps of smoke issued from them as they passed. The Amber wizards, who studied the Lore of Beasts, were perhaps the opposite of the ordered and monastic Light wizards – they wore a patchwork of neutral colours, their staffs were styled like scythes or carved with images of birds and animals, and wildflowers sprung up where they stepped.

Van Horstmann wondered for a moment what the other colleges’ magisters must think of the Light Order. He himself carried his new staff, made to his specifications with the female mask and single diamond eye. He wore the Skull of Katam at his waist, and was sure it got some odd glances from the other magisters as they entered the palace. But even so he was not out of place and many other Light magisters surpassed him in their stern, monastic airs, the richness of their gold-embroidered robes and the diamonds studding their staffs. Among any other company van Horstmann stood out – studious, intense, quiet but with the authority of intelligence. Among fellow magisters, he was one among many.

The audience chamber was already almost full when the wizards filed in. Burghers from Altdorf’s mercantile classes, priests from the various faiths, notable members of the aristocracy, ambassadors from distant realms and countless more important people were already standing awaiting the entrance of the new Emperor. Van Horstmann took his place and noticed that among the acolytes the Light magisters had brought with them was Kant, the acolyte who was among the survivors of his last visit. Kant looked nervous – perhaps it was the occasion, perhaps it was the memory of what had happened in a spot right beneath his feet.

The Supreme Patriarch was the last to enter – Maximilian van der Kalibos, Grand Magister of the Amethyst College, the train of his purple-black robes carried by a host of trained ravens, his staff a column of skulls.

Van Horstmann found he was standing alongside Master Chanter Alric. ‘It has been some time since last we spoke, van Horstmann,’ said Alric.

‘Much to my regret,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘The first lesson I learned is that no magister can be immersed in every aspect of his order, however he might wish it. Sadly, the education of the acolytes is not my calling, and so our paths have not crossed since I left the Chanting Hall.’

‘And what path do you walk?’ asked Alric.

‘Study,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The words of our past greats require interpretation if our lesser minds are to comprehend them. And there are secrets hidden there awaiting the time we have learned enough to decipher them.’

‘A life of dusty introversion, then?’ said Alric. ‘We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, van Horstmann. Your strength is a certain orderliness of mind, a factor which makes it resistant to the chaotic world beyond the colleges. The way of the wanderer, of the battle wizard even, would suit you best.’

‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And I desire to see all the world’s corners inked on some explorer’s parchment. But I see no need to venture there in person when the choicest of knowledge from those places flows instead to us. The secrets just need to be unravelled.’

A babble of conversation near the front of the assembled notables rose up. Perhaps the Emperor was near.

‘You spoke,’ continued van Horstmann, ‘of my strengths. What did you perceive as my weaknesses?’

Alric smiled. ‘That same orderly mind,’ he said. ‘Not everything fits neatly into its nook. I fear for the day when you try to force something into the plan in your head, and it refuses to be so constrained.’

‘Perhaps, Master Chanter,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘you would be surprised.’

The Emperor was ushered onto the throne podium by an honour guard of Reiksguard knights. He was an unspectacular man, with a doughy and indistinct face, and at this distance seemed swamped by his ceremonial golden armour and ermine-trimmed cloak. His guard was led by the Imperial Champion, Reinhardt Blutaugen, a giant who was easily a head taller than any man there and who carried a two-handed blade broad and heavy enough to cut down a tree. His armour, they said, had been ill-made when it was first delivered, because the smiths of Nuln had assumed the measurements they had been given must be wrong. He carried along with his own blade the Runefang of Stirland, the emblem of the new Emperor’s rulership over his home province, in a scabbard on his back. It was one of a dozen trappings of power – the Silver Seal that clasped the Emperor’s purple cloak, the ceremonial Chain of Justice about his neck that made him the Lord Judge of Altdorf’s courts, the griffons and comets on his regalia.

One such emblem of authority was missing. A band of ambassadors from the dwarfn holds stood at the back of the podium, flanked by a regiment of scribes and ministers. The dwarfs were powerful, squat, brutal-looking creatures, their own trappings the pragmatic gear of war. They wore armour of bronze and iron and wore their voluminous beards in elaborate braids hung with talismans. Everything about them spoke of strength, not least the traditional war-axes each one carried. One of them, with a beard that would have dragged along the floor had it not been tied in a dramatic loop of braids, stepped forwards and bowed his head. It was about as submissive a gesture as a dwarf could be expected to make.

‘The dwarfs of the Worlds Edge bid you all honour, inheritor of Sigmar,’ said the longbeard. ‘In the name of the pacts and debts between our peoples, wield this our finest work wherever the Empire of men does war.’

Two more dwarfs joined the longbeard, bearing between them a long-hafted warhammer with a head of glowing bronze. Power radiated off the weapon, and even without the experience and sharpened senses of a wizard, van Horstmann could have identified it as a magical weapon. It was more than that, of course. It was the Hammer of Sigmar, wound about with the most powerful magics of the dwarf runesmiths and presented to Sigmar himself when the two races first went to war against the greenskins. It would have been a magnificent enough badge of Sigmar’s authority had it been a mundane weapon, so fine was its workmanship and the balance which allowed the new Emperor to take it easily with one hand. Its magic was such that it had smashed aside daemons and princes of undeath, dragons and champions of the Dark Gods alike.

‘May your grudges go unforgotten,’ said the longbeard, and retreated with another bow.

Reinhardt Blutaugen stood over the Emperor and placed the Imperial crown on his head. The crown was styled like a hoop of laurels wrought in gold and silver, and sat perfectly on the new monarch’s brow.

‘All hail,’ shouted a cryer from the podium, ‘His Imperial Majesty Eckhardt III!’

The dignitaries knelt. Van Horstmann joined them, looking up towards the man styling himself Eckhardt III as he did so. The mind that lurked behind that uninteresting face might decide the fate of the Empire. He might be a religious bigot, a crusading warrior, a poet and aesthete, or a madman. The Imperial crown had been worn by examples of every one in the past. He might be a great man. He might be an incompetent whose rule was marked by catastrophe and whose death was celebrated in the streets. He might leave no mark on history at all, save the record of his name.

It was entirely up to chance. That was how the world worked, if it was permitted. Chance.

‘I will not permit it,’ whispered van Horstmann to himself. ‘Chance will not rule me.’

If Master Chanter Alric heard him, he made no indication of it.

‘I swear to obey the Imperial throne,’ began the cryer.

‘I swear to obey the Imperial throne,’ said the assembled dignitaries in unison.

‘I will heed its call to arms.’

‘I will heed its call to arms.’

‘I will adhere to its laws.’

‘I will adhere to its laws.’

The words reverberated around the cross-vaulted beams of the ceiling. They seemed as inconsequential as the handful of pigeons roosting up there. Van Horstmann barely heard the words as they escaped his own lips. His mind was twisting them into a vow of his own.

I swear to take what I can from the Throne of Change. I swear to adhere to my own laws.

After the oath of allegiance was made, Emperor Eckhardt III stood and made a speech. His voice was not strong enough so the cryer took up his words. He spoke of a new era of peace and shared prosperity, of an end to petty wars through strong leadership and a greater voice for the Empire’s people.

Quite probably the last Emperor had said much the same thing at his coronation. This one was eloquent and diplomatic enough. True to form, he sent no one home overly offended.

Van Horstmann felt neither offence nor admiration. His mind was elsewhere.

The Gold College was a great steam-powered laboratory, half of it built by dwarfen master smiths, the other half grown from living metal by the wizards of the Gold Order. At their command, beaten iron coiled into springs or curled into the pipes that funnelled alchemical materials around the college’s many experimental chambers. It looked like nothing so much as an enormous pipe organ turned inside out, spurting columns of steam and smoke, hissing and gurgling and crowned by galleries of clockwork automata locked in an endless dance.

‘Our politics,’ said Grand Magister Elrisse as he led the Light Order delegation up the Gold College’s main steps, ‘are every bit as complicated as those of the Imperial Court.’

‘Politics is not what I joined the Light Order to pursue,’ said van Horstmann. He had found himself more and more often at Elrisse’s side, whether it be researching new rituals from the encoded journals of past magisters or, as now, making the rounds of Altdorf’s other colleges to cement relations in the light of the new Imperial reign.

‘Nor I,’ said Elrisse. ‘But we must remember, the life of a magister is not one of leisure. We must sometimes partake in that which we find distasteful, so we might fulfil our calling. This will be an education for you, so pay close attention. In magic you are as learned as a man many decades your senior already, but in politics, you are a newborn.’

‘Of course,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I see already the Gold Order does things very differently.’

While the Light College was a monastery, the Gold College was a workshop. The grand doors swung open revealing an enormous hemispherical hall hung with mobiles and musical automata, playing an endless loop of intermeshing tunes. Gold and brass plated everything, bathing the entire college in an orange-yellow glow. The Gold magisters had sent a delegation to meet the Light magisters, led by their Grand Magister, a man with a ruddy mane of hair, powerful blacksmith’s forearms and bronze-coloured skin. Not just tanned but bronze, metallic and reflective, and his eyes had pupils of gold.

Elrisse spread his arms and gave his best beaming smile, which still had a little too much of a cold rictus in it. ‘Zhaan!’ he exclaimed.

Grand Magister Zhaan embraced Elrisse in his great muscular arms. ‘Brother Elrisse! What an honour! For too many years one of yours has not set foot in our home. There is much to discuss, for times are fast. And we have prepared a feast, of course! Any excuse!’

‘Such indeed are the times,’ said Elrisse as he emerged from Zhaan’s grasp. ‘All the colleges have had to turn inwards. Still we have not rebuilt to the strength of Magnus’s time, and we only just replaced one of ours who fell in the northern rebellion.’

‘I hear your sadness, Grand Magister,’ replied Zhaan, his brow furrowing, or rather buckling, the bronze creaking as it folded up. ‘A fleet of elven pirates plagued the Sea of Claws and two of our mage-wrights were despatched to assist the Tsar’s fleets off Kislev. Alas, they did not return. Will we never see an age untarnished by woe?’

‘It is our duty to suffer such woes, and yet fight on regardless,’ said Elrisse. ‘These magisters who accompany me you will remember, of course, save for van Horstmann. He is the latest to ascend to the Second Circle.’

‘A protégé, no doubt,’ said Zhaan, and grabbed van Horstmann’s hand. He had the strongest handshake van Horstmann had ever felt. ‘Elrisse is wise. Too stuffy! Too hidebound! But he is wise, indeed. Listen close to him, van Horstmann!’

‘I see already there is more than one way to study the winds of magic,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Just being here opens my eyes.’

‘Ah, of course. The Gold Order revels in innovation and experimentation. Your order values learning by rote and the slavish repetition of ritual. Is one better than the other? It is not for any of us to say. We create, yes, but your way is safer. We have vaults of mighty magical weapons and artefacts crafted in our smithies, but you have tomes of banishment and exorcism. Without either commodity, many crises would have befallen the Empire that were instead averted.’

As the Gold and Light wizards made their way further into the Gold College, van Horstmann saw rows of furnaces and forges at which Gold wizards worked like blacksmiths. Many of them looked more like skilled labourers than wizards – stripped to the waist and bent over anvils, they hammered at swords or segments of armour, or worked leather and metal with tools of glowing silver. A couple of dwarfs worked among them, probably sent from the Worlds Edge holds as part of some long-standing agreement with the Gold Order to lend their smithing expertise. The air smelled of burning fuel and smoke, and here and there something more exotic from the alchemical labs which bubbled with benches full of tangled glassware.

The feasting hall was something new. The Light Order did not have one. Perhaps the Light wizards placed less value on hospitality than their Gold brothers. Three long tables, heaped high with plates of food, were attended by a small fleet of waist-high automata that scuttled about busying themselves with setting places and filling wine glasses. They were marvels created by Gold wizards past, filled with dwarfen-made clockwork and enchanted with secrets of animation that were already forgotten.

‘Sit!’ exclaimed Grand Magister Zhaan. ‘Eat! Celebrate!’

The Light wizards took their places. The Gold wizards clinked glasses and looked eager to start. Van Horstmann found himself a place near the head of the table, beside Zhaan.

‘A toast!’ said Zhaan, standing with a glass in his hand. ‘To magic! To us sons of the aethyr! And to the Emperor!’

The magisters echoed the toast and drank. Van Horstmann, who was not one for drink, limited himself to a sip. An automaton was loading slices of meat and piles of roast vegetables onto his plate.

‘So,’ said Zhaal. ‘What manner of studies does the Light Order force on its newest magisters?’

‘The lost ceremonies of Egelbert Vries,’ replied van Horstmann.

‘Not much point,’ said another Gold magister sat across from van Horstmann, ‘if they are lost.’

‘Forgive Daegal here,’ said Zhaan. ‘He is a practical sort, and does not sympathise with the more academically minded of us.’

‘I seek through the work of my own hands,’ said Daegal, ‘rather than the words of another.’ He was probably young for a magister but hid the fact with a beard. His eyes were small and blue and he had a charred, smoky look, no doubt cultivated to give the impression he was always kneeling by a forge.

‘They are only lost in so much as we have yet to find them,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘We know very certainly they are there. Specifically, they are in a long description of the herbs and flora of the Troll Country, hidden in a multi-part cipher. They key is woven into the illustrations, you see. Vries was a wayward soul. He thought that knowledge had to be earned, and so would only pass it on to those who could solve the riddles he used to hide it.’

‘Knowledge is a tool,’ said Daegal, ‘to be used.’

‘Interesting,’ said van Horstmann. He turned to Zhaal. ‘Is that true?’

Zhaal winked. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘So we believe. That is why the first of us took up the hammer and the tongs, just as we took up the staff and tome. They are all symbols of what magic is to us.’

‘And to us,’ said van Horstmann, ‘it is different. Magic is a force, a realm above us, and only through achieving a higher state of mind can we perceive it. Only through ritual can we connect with it, in a pure form.’

‘Pure?’ said Daegal. ‘So ours is impure? A lower form?’

Van Horstmann smiled his thinnest smile, not letting it reach his eyes. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Our dealings with magic occupy merely a different place on the hierarchy.’

‘A place higher or lower than ours?’ demanded Daegal.

An automaton, as if sensing tension in the Gold wizard’s voice, hastily topped up Daegal’s wine glass.

‘It is only logic that I employ,’ said van Horstmann, in a smooth and supercilious voice that even Zhaan would find objectionable. ‘A smith might make an item of great use. Great power, even, as you do in your forges. But he relies on knowledge to do so, knowledge that is collected and written down, and studied and comprehended, by those who need not ever set foot in a smithy to have their own part in such creations. The Light Order occupies a step in that process above that of the mage-wright. This is the simple truth, as all must surely see it.’

‘Our ways of magic,’ said Zhaan a little too quickly, ‘stand upon an equal pedestal to all the other orders, and always have.’

‘Teclis never wrote,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘that all the orders were to be equal.’

Daegal stood suddenly, his chair scraping back. ‘How dare you?’ he demanded. ‘The Grand Magister of our order will be spoken to with respect!’

Van Horstmann held out his hands, a gesture of reconciliation. ‘Respect is not an issue between us, Magister Daegal. Does not the good Emperor respect the smiths of his domain, and the peasants in the field? For without them, his authority and the wisdom of his scribes mean nothing.’

‘And then we are peasants,’ snapped Daegal, ‘to your Emperors?’

‘Perhaps the analogy was unfortunate,’ replied van Horstmann slickly.

‘Magister Daegal,’ said Zhaal. ‘I hear the music of our college is out of tune. Communicate my concerns to the masters of the Chord.’

Daegal shot a look back at van Horstmann, bowed to the Grand Magister, and briskly left the feasting hall.

‘The music,’ said Zhaal, ‘is what keeps us concealed. Its combination of notes confuses the mind of the uninitiated and turns their senses away from our college. Its song is subtle but those who spend enough time here can make it out.’

‘Fascinating,’ said van Horstmann.

Zhaal pointed a fork at van Horstmann’s plate. ‘Eat, Magister van Horstmann,’ he said. ‘You magisters of the Light are all far too skinny.’

CHAPTER SIX

UPON A THRONE OF LIES

The dances of the Old World’s moons were such that only the wizards of the Celestial College really understood them. Only they knew when the witch moon Morrslieb would grow fat and sickly green in the night sky, or when the stars would be in alignment to pick out one of the constellations inscribed on the most ancient monoliths, constructed when all known civilisations were yet to be born.

When the Ninth Alignment occurred, when the stars overhead took on the aspect of a serpent winding around the heavens, the Light Order marked the occasion with a series of ceremonies that required the attention of all the acolytes and most of the magisters. The hidden square around the pyramid, concealed in a fold of space around Midday’s Mirror, became a parade ground where the acolytes were assembled in seven circles and Master Chanter Alric led them in the ritual sanctification of implements of sacrifice.

Van Horstmann watched the acolytes taking on the sacred configurations, shifting from place to place in the circles as lines of white fire traced ever more complicated patterns between them.

The square outside was visible through the translucent wall in the Grand Magister’s quarters. Van Horstmann saw Alric walk into the centre of the largest circle, a heavy snake, its body as thick as a strong man’s thigh, draped around his neck.

‘I understand,’ said Elrisse, ‘that you dislike snakes.’

‘This is true,’ said van Horstmann.

‘And for this reason you seek to be excused from the Ceremonies of the Serpent.’

‘Not at all, Grand Magister,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I would find the ceremonies… trying, certainly, but I would have no quarrel with being assigned to them. But my work on Egelbert Vries’s cipher is at a crucial turn. I can feel the answer hovering just beyond me. I must grasp it and the work will be complete. It is maddening, but enticing, and I fear that if my concentration is broken for an hour then I will lose it again. I ask that I be permitted to continue my work.’

‘And at what stage is that work?’ asked Elrisse. The Grand Magister sat at his hardwood desk, silks from Araby draped behind him and stacks of correspondence before him. He was signing documents with a quill plucked from some exotic bird, and his signature was a long list of honorary titles.

‘It’s not in the text,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It’s in the illustrations.’

Elrisse sat back in his chair, the throne of a deposed sultan brought back by Imperial explorers. ‘The illustrations,’ he repeated.

‘Vries inserted invented words and strange phrasing to make it seem the text was hiding something,’ said van Horstmann. ‘There was something of a pattern to it, but not enough to permit deciphering. And some of the supposed cipher fragments were far too obvious for one of Vries’s intelligence. It is in the illustrations that they lie. I had a city botanist source a fresh witherbane flower. Vries had drawn the stamens incorrectly. Again, too grave an error for him. That is where the cipher lies. I am so close, Grand Magister. I need just a little while, as mages reckon things, and I will decipher it.’

‘I need no magical sense to tell you will shortly ask me for something, magister,’ said Elrisse.

‘More samples of Vries’s work,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I need the Codex Aethyrica.’

Elrisse sucked in his breath sharply. ‘The Fourth Circle will scarcely forgive me,’ he said. ‘Such a tome is guarded more vigorously than the fattest jewel in our vaults.’

‘Vries wanted his code broken. Everything needed to do so will be contained in what he has written. If I can study the Codex Aethyrica at my leisure then they will soon add Herbs and Poultices of Troll Country to the vaults, because it will contain the newly-deciphered lost ceremony of Egelbert Vries.’

‘Then it will be done,’ said Elrisse. ‘Results, van Horstmann. That is what I must demand of you. A mind like yours can be excused the rote learning of our order only if in its place, the total of our order’s knowledge grows.’

‘It will.’

Elrisse looked at van Horstmann with an expression that he could not read. Many people cultivated inscrutability, but with Elrisse it seemed effortless, as if he had been born with his emotions already hidden. ‘It intrigues me what you will come up with, van Horstmann. In the five years you have been here you have greatly refined the rituals for aethyric perception and elemental protection. You learn quickly and you perceive the world not through the cold and dead matter of which it is composed, but in terms of its potential, its capacity for change. My indulgences have their limits, but this one is acceptable. The Fourth Circle will release the Codex Aethyrica. I will suffer their complaints. In return I shall preside over the lost rituals of Egelbert Vries.’

‘My thanks,’ said van Horstmann.

‘And if I may say so, magister, you will find yourself much more at home if you can bring yourself to suffer snakes. They have been a symbol of this order since its inception.’

‘I will see what I can do in that regard. For now, though, I must to my quarters. The answer to the cipher taps at the front of my skull. I fear it slipping away.’

‘Then go,’ said Elrisse. ‘I shall send word to the vaults. You will have your codex. See to it that the order has its secrets in return.’

When van Horstmann reached his quarters, a steward of the Half-Circle was already standing at his door, the Codex Aethyrica in his hands. Van Horstmann had stopped by the ablution chamber to wash his sweating face, for seeing the snake being used in the ritual had filled his mind with images of fleshy coils and fangs, and it had taken some minutes to banish them again. He took the book from the steward, acknowledged the man’s bow, and retreated into his chambers.

Van Horstmann placed the Skull of Katam on the desk beside the book. The skull rolled its emeralds in its sockets and shuddered as the spirit inside it came to the fore.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ said the skull.

It was right. The Codex Aethyrica was old and threadbare. Its cover was of wood covered in thin and tattered fabric, with faded letters stamped on its cover. It had been fitted, some time after being written, with a lock that had fixed bands of steel in place around it to keep it closed. The key to this lock was tied to the book’s spine by a short cord.

‘There is no more valuable book,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘in the upper vaults. Certainly, none more valuable that I could get hold of.’

‘If it is not enough,’ said the skull, ‘there will be consequences.’

‘And you would know of consequences,’ said van Horstmann.

If the skull could have scowled, it would have then. Van Horstmann knew what the Skull of Katam was – who it was. That was knowledge no one else in the Light Order had. The Fourth Circle had been ignorant of the skull’s true origin for centuries, which begged the question of how many other artefacts in the vaults had power that no one understood.

‘I shattered the Nine Blades of Burning Dusk,’ said the skull. ‘I crushed them beneath the weight of a thousand corpses. I flung the shards from the pinnacle of Cripple Peak! That was enough.’

Van Horstmann unlocked the cover of the Codex Aethyrica. The book was in the hand of Egelbert Vries, making it akin to a sacred relic. Vries was one of the first magisters of the Light Order, tutored by Loremaster Teclis himself.

Flickers of light rose from the pages, as if the syllables were taking flight. Vries’s hand was swirling and dense, almost a cipher in itself, and in reddish ink he had filled the margins with annotations and diagrams. Many pages were covered in representations of ritual circles, the first examples of the patterns being created outside the pyramid at that moment.

‘Can you feel that?’ said van Horstmann.

‘I have not felt anything for six hundred years,’ said the Skull of Katam.

‘Yes, you can.’ Van Horstmann took a bronze tray of alchemical instruments from a shelf beside the desk. Magister Vek had loved to collect such things, the trinkets of other, lesser orders of magic. The instruments had been made for a magister of the Gold Order, and van Horstmann recalled his discussion with the wizard Daegal.

They thought that magic was a tool, like a knife or an anvil, to be wielded as the user wished. No imagination. No respect.

Van Horstmann knew what magic really was.

He took two slender silver tubes from the tray and popped off the stoppers that held them closed. He poured the contents of the cylinders onto the open Codex Aethyrica. Each tube contained a small quantity of silver-white dust, which burst into orange sparks where they met on the book’s page.

The Codex Aethyrica caught fire. Grey smoke swirled up towards the ceiling. Van Horstmann waved a hand and cast a circle spell, one he had used many times before to seal off Magister Vek’s quarters from outside scrutiny. If anyone passing smelt smoke, they might become suspicious. Light magic made preventing that scrutiny simple enough for van Horstmann.

He could hear Vries’s words screaming. It was like the sound of squealing animals, trapped and terrified as their warren burned. They tried to escape, peeling themselves off the parchment, the scraps of ink waving like spiders’ legs. But they could not get away.

The Codex Aethyrica was as valuable as a substantial Altdorf estate, as the financing for the raising of an army. To the Light Order it was more valuable still, like the bones of a saint or a relic of Sigmar himself. And it burned away to the spine, scraps of paper flittering upwards on the heat of the flames.

Van Horstmann passed a hand over the burning book. Deep cold enveloped it and the flames were instantly snuffed, replaced with a spray of ash and charred fragments that spilled out across the desk. Some spilled across the Skull of Katam.

‘And now?’ said van Horstmann.

‘Hope he hears,’ replied the skull.

Van Horstmann looked at the skull. Did its expression ever change? Sometimes he was certain it did. There had been times when that fixed smile had been perhaps a little turned down, as when he wore it among gatherings of other magisters. Maybe it had been offended to be flaunted as a decoration. Perhaps now it looked a little sly, its grin more of a smirk.

‘I wait on no one,’ said van Horstmann.

He took the puzzle box from his pocket and opened it halfway. Hiskernaath, the caged daemon snickered and cursed inside.

‘I need blood,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Begone,’ replied the daemon in the puzzle box. ‘I’m busy swyving your ancestors in hell.’

‘I command blood from you,’ snapped van Horstmann.

One of Hiskernaath’s less important limbs unfurled from the box. Van Horstmann grabbed a ritual dagger from a shelf, one of the many such implements that Vek had collected. It had an oddly-shaped blade that curved sharply to one side and became broader at the end, with a hilt of bound horn or ivory. Van Horstmann drove it through the daemon’s limb and into the desk.

Thick blood, hissing as if acidic, spread around the knife’s point and mixed with the ash from the burned book.

The limb withdrew back into the puzzle box, and the box’s intricate panels snickered closed. Van Horstmann forced the point of the dagger into the wood of the desk and scribed a symbol into it. He used all his strength, carving as deep as he could.

The symbol was something like a comet with a pair of tails, and an ignorant man might think it was a debasement of the twin comet of Sigmar. The comet was a portent said to signal Sigmar’s arrival and, after his death and passage into godhood, the presence of Sigmar’s spirit on the battlefield. But this symbol was a lot older than Sigmar’s Empire. Perhaps it was older than the race of men itself.

Van Horstmann put the dagger aside.

‘Hear me,’ he hissed, teeth gritted. ‘Hear me!’

The desk shuddered. The room followed. The braziers swung and dropped burning embers, and Vek’s collection of trinkets spilled off the shelves. The two bearded statues swayed and threatened to topple over. Van Horstmann thrust his hands wide and syllables of power flickered across the walls as he held the bubble of silence around the chamber. If he was discovered now, it would be over. In spite of all the precautions, of all the second and third backup plans, there were times like this when a single stroke of bad luck could bring it all down.

The air split open. A purple-black gulf yawned over his head, spilling shadows into the chamber. This place had not seen a shadow since the day the pyramid was built, and now it recoiled from the alien darkness pooling on the floors and in the corners.

Van Horstmann knelt to keep his footing. Alternately scalding and freezing gales battered at him. He forced himself to look up into the chasm, at the boiling mass of energy that seethed there like something that festered.

‘I will not be ignored!’ he shouted over the wind shrieking in his ears. ‘I will be heard!’

The Skull of Katam was laughing. The sound was lost but its expression was clear, eye sockets narrowed in cruel glee.

The black gulf yawned wider and enveloped van Horstmann like a great dark mouth.

Van Horstmann had spent time in his head, navigating places that did not exist as a literal reality. He knew what such a place felt like – which parts of it slid off the senses as if refusing to be perceived, which parts were blown up in impossible clarity. The dirt beneath his fingers felt sharp and prickly, while the sky around him was so indistinct his mind did not register its colour.

Chunks of shattered stone floated like islands. Lengths of spiked and gory chain held them down, criss-crossing between them like the web of an iron spider. Worms as long and wide as the Empire’s great rivers looped and plunged through the void, round maws billowing open to scoop down the burning rocks that fell in a bright rain. Trees clung to the islands, bodies twisted and torn up in their gnarled and leafless limbs. Here and there a body fell, marks of torment on its shredded skin, face locked open in an endless scream.

Behind van Horstmann, a staircase rose from the island on which he lay. It was built from blocks of white stone. Fingers and scraps of skin stuck from between the stone blocks, for it had been mortared into place with the bodies of the slaves who had built it.

Van Horstmann drew a breath. The air was infernally hot, almost impossible to inhale. He got to one knee and his mind was aware that he had to ascend. He did not know where the mental command had come from – it made more sense by far to curl up into a mewling ball until this place was gone. But the command was there. He had to climb.

Van Horstmann dragged himself to one knee. He went forwards one step. The sharp rock and dirt scraped the skin from his palms and knees. The pain shot up his limbs, prickling the inside of every limb and organ. Pain, in this place, was magnified, or it was different, a living thing that once released would carouse around the body to take as much as it could until spent.

Another step. Van Horstmann tasted blood in his mouth.

He had gone through worse. He had mentally travelled to some of the most gods-forsaken places of the Old World, the chill corners rightfully forgotten to all but madmen. He had climbed ice-capped mountains and almost died in Araby’s northern desert, buried alive by a sandstorm in a robber’s cave, all within the confines of a fevered trance. He had survived those. He would survive this.

But even if this place was not real, in the same way that Altdorf and the chambers of the Light Order’s pyramid were real, it was still real enough for him to die there. This much, at least, van Horstmann had learned.

His hand touched the lowest step. His fingers left tracks of blood on the stone as he dragged himself onto it. He saw the folds of skin poking from between the stones, and could just make out the loops of crushed eye sockets, tongues and ears. Were these indeed the builders of the staircase, or the remains of those who had tried to climb it?

Van Horstmann pulled himself up step by step, every inch drawing blood from his fingers. The stones seemed to shift and tip, trying to throw him off or send him tumbling to the foot of the staircase, but he forced them in his mind back into shape and he carried on. It was in his head, this place – that did not mean it was not real, but it did give him a presence that he did not have in the physical world. It depended on him to exist. As he changed, so it changed. As he became rigid and unyielding, so it was forced to keep its shape around him.

It was all in his head, but it was also in the aethyr. In the aethyr, these things were real. It was called by some the Realm of Chaos, a domain where all things might become real when sculpted by the right thought. There were parts of the world where the land merged with this realm, where the two worlds touched, and from there marched the armies of the Dark Gods.

If van Horstmann let go of his thoughts, this world would turn into madness beyond description, a boiling pit of impossibility that would scour his mind of everything that made it human. He had read the memoirs of those whose minds had been so touched, and been afraid that the madness would infect him. He had been to this place before in the recollections of the few who had gone there and come out capable of putting quill to parchment.

At the top of the staircase was the throne room. Where below had been an endless but imperceptible sky, here there was an enormous vault with ribs of stone, hung with enough billowing silk and embroidered banners to cover a continent. There, in its gargantuan throne, a heap of burning books the size of a mountain, was the Prince of Lies. The prince was an enormous fleshy mass, somewhat humanoid in shape but lacking a head. Its body was instead covered in faces: a thousand, a million of them, writhing in the pinkish skin in such clarity that van Horstmann could see the exact expression in every one. Every single manner of emotion was contained within it. On that throne sat the sum total of anything a human mind could feel.

Around the Prince of Lies gambolled a legion of a million daemons, all of them glistening knots of flesh and bone that reformed a hundred times a second. All forms of beauty and monstrous horror were there, any given second a dizzying gallery of shapes that did not fit properly into van Horstmann’s mind. They were madness incarnate, the Court of Lies that danced a performance of the play in which all things that might come to pass were depicted.

Van Horstmann crushed down the incredulity that rose inside him. It wanted to blind and deafen him, to shut down the feel and smell and taste of the Prince of Lies. He did not let it. He had prepared for a long time for this moment. If ever he were to finish the road he had started to walk, he had to pass through here.

‘So,’ said the Prince of Lies, ‘you kneel before us at last. It has been a long time a-coming, Egrimm van Horstmann.’

The prince’s voice was not a voice at all, but van Horstmann’s own thoughts, coalescing in his mind like invaders from another realm violating his consciousness. The effect of it made him want to recoil and reel his soul back into the Pyramid of Light, but he had mastered that cowardly part of him a long time ago.

‘You are not Tzeentch,’ said van Horstmann. ‘If you were Tzeentch, I would be struck mad to look at you.’

‘And how do you know you are not mad?’ said the prince from a thousand mouths.

‘You are His servant,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Perhaps an aspect of Him. It does not matter. I know that He hears. And I have done as He asked.’

‘I asked of you nothing,’ replied the prince.

‘I have destroyed sacred knowledge on His altar,’ continued van Horstmann. ‘I have given Him that sacrifice. That is what He asked of a hundred sorcerers who came before me. I have read their words. I know what they did, and what they sought. I seek it too.’

‘And you are different from all of them,’ said the Prince of Lies. ‘You will not fail me. You understand what I ask. You can deliver my demands. You will not break in will or fall in battle. You are different from all the sorcerers who have knelt as you did, and died with their promises to me unfulfilled.’

‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I am different.’

‘Well, well,’ said the prince, and his voice was so heavy with sarcasm that van Horstmann was pushed face down to the floor. ‘What a treat. A Light wizard by day, enemy of the daemon. And a daemonologist by night, fawning before the God of Change for His favours. How can this be contained in one man?’

‘It was forged in hate,’ said van Horstmann through gritted teeth. His blood was spattering from his lips onto the marble floor. Perhaps, back in Magister Vek’s chamber, he really was spitting blood. ‘Those two can exist together, devote themselves to Lord Tzeentch, if the hatred that binds them is strong enough. And it is. It is as strong as anything a man’s mind has ever known.’

‘And yet it is a mind too afraid to perceive the god it has chosen,’ said the Prince of Lies. It rose from its throne, and whole kingdoms would have been swallowed in the stride it took. Landslides of burning books slid from its throne as it rose to its full height, catching on the silks and sending them smouldering into the air.

‘You are… you are as Berthold Wormiaus depicted you,’ gasped van Horstmann, even as his senses were assailed by the sight of the god striding towards him, ‘in the Norscan Fragments. And as Lady Eiger wrote in her poetry. This is how my mind expected Tzeentch, so that is how this fragment of His will appears.’

‘And will you see Tzeentch as He is?’

Van Horstmann, with an effort he felt would break his back, pushed himself up to his knees and looked the Prince of Lies in a pair of eyes on its chest. The expression of that face was smirking, despising, showing pity.

‘I will,’ said van Horstmann.

Van Horstmann had known it would come to this – that he would have to face the Prince of Lies on the Prince’s terms, in a realm where he could control everything van Horstmann’s senses perceived. And of course, once given access to everything in van Horstmann’s head, there was only one form it could take.

The Court of Lies dissolved into a vast writhing pit. The God of Lies transformed into a mass of snakes, each one fouler than the last around which it knotted itself more obscenely.

Van Horstmann plunged into the pit, and though he had always known this moment would come, it did not keep the horror from overcoming his mind.

Down there in the constricting darkness was a place he had revisited countless times. There had been period of his life when every time he slept, he went back there. Now he would find himself there when he was pushed towards the edges of mental endurance, or when some shock dragged him back there as if, in fleeing whatever trauma was present, he blundered through the door into the last place he ever wanted to be.

It was more real now than the memories had ever been – as real as the time that inspired them. The scales against his skin. The nothing beneath his feet, the awful certainty that below there was nothing but an eternity of snakes running down to the centre of the world.

The sound of them. The smell – they stank. The way he could barely draw breath. It was the same. It was not a memory. He was back there, for real, by every definition of reality that counted.

He reached out like a boy who could not swim groping through the water. His hands found only slabs of scaly muscle sliding past one another, trying to ensnare him in their loops to drag down and crush. Then a finger brushed against something else, something soft and shuddering.

It was another hand. It was slender as he caught it in his own. He felt the ring on its finger and he knew it was her.

The hand was warm. She was still alive.

He fought harder now, pistoning his legs up and down through the mass of snakes to power himself upwards. He thought he felt slightly cooler air on his face, as if he were near the surface. His hand was clamped around hers and he gasped down a foul breath, lungs screaming, as his head broke the surface.

‘Lizbeta!’ he gasped, the only sound he could make before he was under again.

The coils closed and he could not breath. A new and profound darkness fell.

When van Horstmann woke he was alone. He could not see anything, and he felt only the sharp ground under his back where he lay. The shallow breaths he took were raw and painful in his throat. It was cold and quiet.

Lizbeta. He had said her name. It rarely got that bad. Usually he tore his mind out of the pit before she was there. But this time, he had not been in control.

A glimmer of light caught his eye overhead, like a single distant star reaching through a cloudy night sky. A faint pool of it gathered nearby, slow as treacle dripping from above. The polished scales that glinted in that light picked out the body of a thick and muscular snake, sidewinding its way towards van Horstmann.

The fear was not there in the same way. Van Horstmann could understand it was not real now, that this was not one of the snakes that had once wrapped its length around him and crushed out all his hope. The fear, this time, stemmed from the fact that the Prince of Lies had delved into his mind and pulled from it that moment, the time van Horstmann had protected so devoutly.

The snake arched up over van Horstmann. It spoke with the voice of the Prince of Lies.

‘That,’ it said, ‘is how I truly am. Not a god that resides beyond, but one that lives inside you, and in the mind of all those who have given themselves to me. Do you understand now what I am?’

‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann, unable to muster anything more than a whisper.

‘And you will still serve?’

‘I will.’ There was no hesitation. ‘I will serve.’

‘In return for what?’

‘There is only one thing I want,’ said van Horstmann. ‘You know what it is.’

‘I do. And I can give it to you.’

Van Horstmann swallowed, painfully. ‘You can have whatever you want from the Light Order. Its vaults, its magisters, anything.’

‘I know,’ said the snake. ‘But I am a god. I can take whatever I want from any ensorcelled vault in the world, and destroy it with a whim. What do I care if you offer up a pyre of books to me?’

‘Because the one thing you cannot take is willing obedience,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘That must be given freely. And so it is the only thing that a god can crave, for it is the only thing that is beyond Him.’

‘True,’ said the snake, its forked tongue flickering. ‘And indeed, I desire it. But you know full well what I really want.’

‘You cannot have it,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I will no more pledge my soul to you than I would pledge it to Sigmar. That is my one rule. Anything else you want, you will have. But not my soul. And it is not much that I ask of you. Just a little information. Most of the path I have to take I have pieced together myself. I just need a few more points on the map and I will never require anything more of you.’

‘I will have your soul, Egrimm van Horstmann.’

‘No, Lord Tzeentch. You will not. That is the deal I will make. That is the contract I will sign. Everything short of my soul, for the knowledge I need to get what I want.’

The snake seemed to consider this. It was hooded, like a venomous snake from the deserts of Araby or the Southlands, and its eyes were like flecks of amber. Its tail flicked idly from side to side as it thought about the offer.

‘That is satisfactory,’ said the Prince of Lies, known to some as Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, or by any one of a thousand names. ‘It will be signed.’

Van Horstmann closed his eyes and let out the breath he realised now he had been holding. ‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘Everything I must know. Tell me.’

‘I impart this knowledge only because it suits me that you shall have your revenge,’ said the Prince of Lies. ‘All that happens will be because I will it. You must never forget that, Egrimm van Horstmann.’

‘I know the terms of a deal made with you,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Then listen.’

Van Horstmann would never be able to say afterwards just how long he lay there, listening to the snake’s words. It was quite possible they were imparted in an instant but that the effort needed to process them in his mind meant it felt like hours. Or perhaps it really was hours, in the way that time can stretch and be manipulated inside the mind.

Some of what he learned van Horstmann thought he knew already, but he was now free of doubts that might have turned his hand away from what needed to be done. Some of it was completely unknown. Some helped van Horstmann make the choice between two paths which had previously seemed equally profitable or perilous. And a great deal of it seemed irrelevant, but was filed away by van Horstmann in the fastidious library of his memory, knowing that it would be important one day.

There was always more, the Prince of Lies promised. Everything van Horstmann would ever need to know to destroy his enemies. He could have anything he wanted. He could rule. He could create his own kingdom out of the aethyr, a place founded on magic in which his will would become manifest and he could reign as a god. But the price was too high. It was always the same – van Horstmann’s soul, the means by which he could determine his own future. And he would not give that up.

Plenty had, of course. Every other tome that van Horstmann had discovered, hidden in a remote cairn or in the forbidden library of some debauched noble, was the record of some poor fool who had sold his soul to the Dark Gods. They always regretted it. The same parable was written a thousand times, of those who thought there existed in the world something that was worth their freedom over themselves. But there never was. Van Horstmann would not be like them. He might not finish on his path. He might die, be destroyed, be found out and dismembered before a baying crowd on an executioner’s platform. But he would take his soul with him when he died.

Finally, the Prince of Lies was finished. The pact had been struck and its parties had agreed the terms. The means for revenge, in return for anything van Horstmann could tear from the heart of the Light Order. The snake vanished, the darkness shattered, and van Horstmann came to lying on the floor of his quarters in the pyramid.

Bitter smoke still hung in the air. Van Horstmann must have thrashed around a little on the floor, because some of Magister Vek’s trinkets were scattered around him and he had battered his elbows and knees raw.

The Skull of Katam seemed to look down at him from the desk with an expression of amusement.

‘It was like watching a child with nightmares,’ said the skull. ‘Like a kittling-cat yowling for its mother.’

Van Horstmann stood up, dizzy for a moment as the blood drained from his head. He steadied himself against the desk, which was now inscribed deeply with the symbol of Tzeentch. He would have to find a way to hide it, he thought. He would have to hide a great many things.

He felt a burning pain on the back of his right hand, reaching up over his wrist and forearm. He pulled back the sleeve of his robe to see the words burning into his skin. Unlike the contract on his torso, this one was burned from the inside out, scorched onto the inside of his skin by tendrils of power reaching through from the aethyr.

The words were in one of the tongues of the aethyr, a lyrical language with meanings that shifted with the moods of the reader, and one that van Horstmann had learned early in his pursuit of the daemonology. The last line had the mark of Tzeentch, similar to the one van Horstmann had carved into the desk, while another had the signature of van Horstmann himself. The finished contract covered the back of his hand and wound halfway to his elbow.

Van Horstmann gingerly flexed his fingers. They stung, but the pain was bearable. He went to the bedchamber and found one of Vek’s robes which had a black trim, perhaps for wearing at the funeral rites of fellow magister. He tore off the strip of black hem and wound it around his afflicted hand, covering the contract and binding it tight.

‘Then it is done,’ said the Skull of Katam.

‘It is done,’ said van Horstmann.

‘It is as I said,’ continued the skull. ‘He will listen, if what you have to offer is valuable enough. The Light Order’s treasures, they got His attention, did they not?’

‘They did.’

‘Then what next?’

‘I must think on it,’ said van Horstmann. ‘You have done for me all I asked.’

‘But of course.’ The skull’s grin seemed to widen. ‘We are on the same side.’

Van Horstmann sat on the chair beside the desk. He was aware now of how weary he was. Though the gruelling ascent and the pit had been in his mind, his body had echoed his movements to the extent that his robes were damp with sweat and every joint ached. He ran a hand over his face and felt his scalp beaded with sweat. His throat was raw too, and he wondered if he had shouted while unconscious.

‘It seems,’ the skull was saying, ‘that you should have results from Vries’s cipher to dangle before the Grand Magister if he is not to become suspicious.’

‘I broke the cipher half a season ago,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The vocabulary is in the number of petals, the grammar in the number of leaves. Vries didn’t even use a sub-cipher, the text is written there plain.’

‘Then the path continues?’

‘It continues.’ Van Horstmann looked at the jewelled skull. Of course he could not trust the thing. If there was one certainty he had learned from his research, that was it. But it had its uses. It had known how to contact the Prince of Lies – an actual audience, not just a dream-message or strange portent but an actual conversation with the god. Or an aspect of the god, or a servant, or a part of his own mind infected by the god’s will. An audience, nonetheless, and without the skull that would not have happened. But trust?

Van Horstmann wondered whether he was even capable of trust any more. But then, what was trust? If he had lost it forever, he doubted that he would miss it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHALLYA WEPT

When Katam was young, he saw death.

His home town, a place of isolated and fearful people before Sigmar’s conquest, was visited by a terrible plague that ripped through everyone Katam loved. That is, the majority of the stories have it so. A plague, perhaps, is useful shorthand for all the many varieties of death that might have afflicted the young Katam. In other variations, goblins attack his home, or roving bandits, or a natural disaster like a flood or a storm. Sometimes, everyone simply dies.

Katam is typically a child during these events. Perhaps he really was. Priests and parablists who told the story certainly saw the impact of that image – a child, alone and afraid, wandering through his home which was now scattered with the corpses of his loved ones.

Katam had seen death. He had escaped it in a physical sense only. He knew now that everything he had been told was a lie. There were no benevolent spirits or gods who helped determine his future. Being good, avoiding sin and helping the needy did nothing to stave off death. There was no moral currency that could buy extra days of life. There was not even a predetermined date of death, no lot of time which everyone was given at birth to fill as best they could. Death was cold and random, and cruel. In the face of death, everyone was infinitely helpless.

Katam decided that he would not die.

While every story differed, they all came to this point. The young Katam renounced the human vulnerability to death. He refused to obey it, to die when it decided. Most versions simply state that he made this decision. Some have him howl his promise over the bodies of his parents or from a storm-lashed mountaintop or other suitably dramatic location. Many record his exact words, which are of course different in every iteration. But they all agree he made his decision. Katam would not die. He would discover how to foil death, and he would become immortal.

The rest of the story is very short in essence but that did not stop the chroniclers from adding as much as they could about Katam’s adventures. In the pursuit of his goal this young nobody bloomed into a practitioner of magic, an explorer, adventurer and warrior. He also became irredeemably tainted by his drive for immortality. He did terrible things. He killed, and tortured. He destroyed. Some chroniclers glossed over this, putting his deeds vaguely so as to avoid sensationalising the tale which was, after all, a moral parable. Others described every foul thing attributed to Katam and added some of their own, treating the canon of Katam’s sins like a cultural repository of broken taboos and gruesome legends looking for a home.

It was these tales that had attracted van Horstmann to the legend of Katam, for at the time he discovered Katam’s story he was himself on a similar search. He too had travelled much of the breadth of the Empire and its surrounding lands. Katam was said to have travelled the Dark Lands, to the fringes of Cathay and across the oceans to Naggaroth and the jungles of Lustria, but van Horstmann did not believe that. It was unnecessary. There were plenty of evil little corners to be unearthed in the mundane lands of men. One did not need to circumnavigate the globe to find them.

Van Horstmann had, however, done things that echoed Katam’s adventures. He had not been so bloodthirsty or wanton as Katam, mainly because doing so served no purpose and carried the risk of being caught, but it was a man very like van Horstmann who is said to have descended a staircase of six thousand steps into a lightless cavern, where great pale things lived below the surface of a lake and told fortunes in exchange for pairs of lovers thrown into the deep.

Katam’s failures were left out but surely he had some. Van Horstmann’s own experiences were proof enough of that. He had once bargained for a priceless dragonhide tome in the basement of a gambling den in Couronne, only to find it was gibberish written on horse leather. Surely Katam had swindled his way into possessing some fake prayer tablets, or had his time wasted by a prophecy-spouting charlatan.

Eventually Katam had found what he wanted. He learned how to speak with the Dark Gods. Such gods were not to be spoken of by name and were referred to by euphemism or metaphor: the Throne of Skulls, the Prince of Lies, Grandfather, the Gentle One, the Warlord, the Smiling King. No one knew how many they were or who had first started to worship them. They had no church, just isolated obsessives who sometimes infected others with their fervour to start a cult. The only things anyone could agree on was that they were real, that they were evil, and that they either needed or loved to have mortals do their will in this world.

Katam wanted to live forever. He told the Prince of Lies this. The Prince of Lies replied that he wanted Katam’s soul. Katam would exist forever, but the Prince of Lies could call upon him at any time to serve in whatever way the god wished. It was a terrible price, but immortality was a wondrous prize.

Katam was without fear, and cunning beyond measure as a result of his search for eternal life. He agreed to the deal, knowing that the Dark Gods are fickle and capricious, and even slavery to the will of the Prince of Lies would last only as long as it amused the Prince to give him orders. It was far from perfect, but Katam had finally found what he was seeking and the conditions of the pact did not dissuade him.

The words of the contract appeared on the side of a mountain – or a mighty reef below the sea, or written in the stars, or scorched into Katam’s skin – and Katam put his name to it beside the symbol of the Prince of Lies.

The Prince of Lies, for once, had not lied. Every detail of the contract was honoured. The contract failed to mention, however, just how much of Katam would be alive. To be alive, one only needed one’s mind. The rest of his flesh and bone could perish and crumble, and the conditions of life, as the contract encompassed it, would still be fulfilled.

So Katam went about the world, using his knowledge to seek out greater magical power. He developed the idea that if he learned enough – as he surely would with an infinite lifespan – he could find some loophole or magical spell that would free him from the contract with the Prince of Lies and let him keep eternal life. He gave little attention at first to the fact that he still aged, and even as his skin wrinkled and his hair thinned he reasoned it would take little magical learning to reverse the physical symptoms of age. He could become a young man when it suited him.

Then his heart stopped and he ceased breathing. His body did not respond any more. One of his minions assumed him dead and had him buried in the place he had first sworn never to die. But Katam was alive, and awake.

A flood opened up his grave. His bones were gnawed upon by animals. A child found his skull and sold it for a handful of copper coins to a travelling hawker of fake medicines, who in turn sold it on to a student of anatomy. It was lost and found, purchased and stolen, Katam all the while seeking a way to take control of his fate again. He tried speaking to those into whose hands he fell. Some threw him away in terror, some thought him a symptom of madness. One covered him in gemstones and set him on an altar. He was evidence in witchcraft trials and a collector’s item for the idle rich who loved to shock one another with their transgressions.

He told his owners how to speak with the Dark Gods. Some of them did, and were consumed or driven insane. Some did not listen. Katam could not get the attention of the god he had sworn his soul to.

He did not die, at least. Sealed in his skull, spending years in meditation on the pact he had entered, he would have gone mad if he had not abandoned sanity some time before.

Tales spread of a magical skull that knew the secrets of the Dark Gods. People killed one another over its ownership. They bargained away everything they had for a lead on its location. A heretic bought the skull at enormous cost to serve as the centrepiece of the cult he would use to acquire wealth, power and unearthly pleasures. His estate in Altdorf was raided by witch hunters under Imperial orders. The heretic’s entrails were scattered across the grounds and the estate burned to the ground. From the ashes the Skull of Katam was found and handed over to the Light College, who could be trusted to keep safe this object that seemed immune to all efforts to destroy it.

The wizards of the Light Order knew only the name of the artefact, and the hazy rumours about how it spoke and knew the future. Everyone who knew what it really was had been quartered or burned alive by the Emperor’s witch hunters. But the traces of the truth were left behind in the journals and treatises of madmen, the notes of heretic summoners and the dark philosophies of those who had thought too deeply about the Dark Gods and their realm. In fragments, they told the whole story of the Skull of Katam and the man who still lived inside it.

It took someone like van Horstmann to discover the story of Katam. Zeal, and the willingness to delve into forbidden places to find the fragments of the tale, was not enough on its own. It required an organised mind to extract each piece of the story and assemble it into one, to pare away the lies and guesswork. It took van Horstmann to realise that he needed to speak with the Prince of Lies, and that to do so, he needed the Skull of Katam.

There were so many pieces that had to fall into place. Van Horstmann could only carry on through the certainty that none of them were up to chance. He had control of them all. He had never written it all down, because then he might be discovered – it was arranged in his mind, the building blocks of his fortress, all his plans and certainties spanning between them.

This was his revenge. He had built it in every detail. The greater part of his task was done. His pact with the Prince of Lies had been the final part of the groundwork to be laid, the final strings of theory tied into place. Everything that followed would happen of its own course, with just a tending hand from van Horstmann to see it through.

He already had what he wanted. It would fall into his hands like the Skull of Katam had.

It was just a matter of time.

Van Horstmann could usually be found in the pyramid’s grand reading room.

That afternoon was a quiet one. Many of the Light Order were at a conclave of magisters from across the Colleges of Magic, part of the Teclian Pact which demanded each college send representatives every five years. It kept the colleges, if not of united purpose, at least aware of one another and of their diplomatic obligations, and without such clauses in the pact the magisters would, as was their nature, become insular and obsessive without giving magisters of another order a passing thought.

Van Horstmann was insular and obsessive. He sat, as he did on so many days, on a throne brought by some past explorer from the Southlands, carved from black stone in the likeness of antelope horns. With a wave of his hand he took books from the towering bookcases surrounding the circular chamber, and added them to the twenty-high stacks that surrounded him. Most had covers inked in silver and gold, which winked in the light that drenched the reading room as it did every other corner of the pyramid. Here it shone from waterfalls of glowing water that fell from the dome high above, plunging down into the fountain surrounding a statue of Loremaster Teclis himself. Van Horstmann only had to glance up and he would be looking into the face of the high elf who had taught his people’s way of magic to men, and founded the Colleges of Magic to help them learn.

Van Horstmann made a gesture and one of the books hovered in front of him, cover opening. The sound of pages flipping by merged with the gurgle from the waterfall of light.

‘Light of lore, aethyr’s heart, give my eyes the speed of my thoughts.’

The phrase focused his mind, and let him unravel the spell contained there. It was a spell he had researched and created himself, and under its effects van Horstmann could read as quickly as the words could pass his eyes. A minor thing, below the notice of many magister researchers, but van Horstmann had made much of its usefulness.

Then pages flipped past. This book was one of a series of several dozen documenting the legends of the northern Empire. Every other tale was about crazed Norsemen sailing across the Sea of Claws to pillage and despoil. But there were fragments. A name here, a stock phrase there.

Someone else had entered the reading room. Van Horstmann focused one part of his mind on the book, the other on the newcomer, because a faint recognition had fired off in his mind.

‘Heiden Kant,’ said van Horstmann as the other figure drew close. Framed in the waterfall, Kant looked just as young as van Horstmann remembered. Which was odd, because the last time van Horstmann had seen Kant was at the investiture of Eckhardt III, and that had been twelve years ago. Kant had an unruly mess of dark, curly hair, a long nose and bowed mouth like some fanciful portrait of a well-born boy. As an acolyte he had looked at home. On the battlefield, or in a debate on magical dogma with a dozen magisters, he would look like a lost choirboy.

‘My greetings, Comprehender van Horstmann,’ replied Kant. ‘I trust that I do not disturb your studies too gravely.’

Van Horstmann had only recently been granted the title of comprehender. It was one rarely used, and had first been given to a member of the Fourth Circle who had specific responsibility for written works not in traditional form: tapestries, inscribed tablets, preserved tattoos and other apocrypha. It had been given to recognise van Horstmann’s completion of the Cryptothaumaturgia, the total of Egelbert Vries’s hidden writings. It was also an unofficial recognition of the fact that he was of a senior rank to the other magisters, without giving him a specific role within the order such as Master Chanter or Lord of Ceremonies.

‘Children have studies,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I have a calling.’

‘Of course, comprehender,’ said Kant. Van Horstmann found himself thinking of Kant as a boy, even though Kant had joined as an acolyte at around the same time as van Horstmann himself. Kant might even have been the older of the two.

‘But no, I am not disturbed.’ Van Horstmann let the book drift back down, like a falling leaf, to the top of its pile. ‘I seek fragments, as ever. There was a story written long ago and then shattered into a million pieces, and if we are ever to read it again we must find every piece. They came to rest here, in these poems and fairy tales. Perhaps it is a compulsion that I pursue.’ He smiled, because he had filed away, along with so much other information, the necessary expressions and platitudes to be employed when having a conversation.

‘We all have our callings,’ said Kant. ‘I seek the path of the exorcist. They tell me it is the longest of all. That many of us, maybe most, never reach the stage where we can trust ourselves to cast out the daemon. And that it is the most dangerous. Even the strongest can lose his soul. But I walk it anyway. I think it must have been compulsion that made us walk into this pyramid in the first place.’

Van Horstmann indicated the books piled around him. ‘Thousands of years ago,’ he said, ‘something happened in the far north of the Empire, near the shore of the Sea of Claws. Perhaps on the edge of the Kislevite steppe. It left its scars in folk songs and legends, but nowhere is it attested in its entirety. Something fell from the sky, perhaps, or a great magic was wrought. I do not know yet, but I can feel it building up, piece by piece in my mind. Perhaps eventually there will be enough to sponsor an expedition to find what traces of it remain in the earth. Or perhaps it will never be found, and it will always be that maddeningly final step away. It would not be the first. Knowledge degrades such that without diligent custodians it will corrode until it is useless. A sad state. A tragedy. When I think of what has been lost, I feel the need to claw back what I can. Compulsion, as you say, without a doubt.’

‘I came here,’ said Kant, ‘to speak of you about the Codex.’

‘The Codex?’

‘The Codex Aethyrica,’ said Kant. ‘I understand it discourses at length about the link between the mind and the aethyr, through which it can be vulnerable. I have spoken with my fellow magisters and they agree that it would be most profitable for me to study it. The last one to do so, I understand, was you, comprehender, and the Fourth Circle would be much more likely to release it for study with your endorsement.’

The Codex Aethyrica currently held in the upper vault was just the cover, which had been undamaged by the sacrifice of its pages. That cover held a collection of samples, errors and unclaimed manuscripts purchased from the illuminators of the Buchbinder District and carefully trimmed to give the Codex the appearance of being complete. The book had remained locked and undisturbed on its podium in the vault since van Horstmann had returned it to the magisters of the Fourth Circle and it suited him very much for it to stay that way.

‘I have studied the Codex, it is true,’ said van Horstmann, ‘and it would have no application to the study of exorcism. Exorcism is a practical art, and the Codex is theoretical to the point of wilful obscurity on matters pertaining to the interaction of the aethyric world with ours.’

‘Nevertheless…’ began Kant.

‘Any magister must curry good will with the Fourth Circle,’ continued van Horstmann. ‘It would earn me no good will to insist on their releasing the Codex for such an inappropriate area of study, even if I alone had the power to sway them. I suggest you locate the ninth volume of the Historiae Prodigium instead. It lies in this very reading room, though it may take some time to find it.’

‘I am familiar with that volume,’ said Kant. ‘If the Codex really is out of my reach for now, perhaps…’

Kant’s sentence broke off as the whole pyramid shuddered. Books fell from the shelves, smacking into the floor around the two magisters. The waterfall splashed liquid light across the statue of Teclis and the whole structure groaned as if under a great weight. Both magisters looked around them in shock at the interruption. The pile of books beside van Horstmann toppled and scattered its volumes across the floor.

‘Was that an earthquake?’ said Kant.

‘Sigmar’s oath!’ swore van Horstmann. ‘No, not an earthquake. The fold in space would keep us safe from such. It was something else, heavens know what.’

Magisters were running through the passageway outside the reading room. One leaned in through the doorway.

‘An attack!’ he said. ‘It must be an attack!’

It was rare that the whole body of the Light Order’s magisters were moved to act as one. It was easy to forget, with so many of them meditating or studying alone at any one time, the number of them that lived and worked in the pyramid. White-robed figures streamed down the main staircase that lead into the Chanter’s Hall, where the acolytes stood in confusion. They joined the general motion out of the pyramid, for whatever had happened its full effects could probably only be appreciated from outside.

Van Horstmann saw Elrisse and Alric among the magisters, fending off questions about what had just happened. The chatter indicated that the magisters engaged in divination magic at the time had felt a great surge of magic, something malevolent and powerful, and had barely had time to wonder what it was when the tremor occurred. A few said the upper floors were damaged, and stewards were heading upwards to prevent what further damage they could.

Outside, on the square surrounding the pyramid, the magisters and acolytes gathered to stare up at the pyramid’s pinnacle. Every neck was craned to see it. Even seasoned magisters pointed up in confusion. Van Horstmann joined them, peering up towards the pyramid’s upper floors.

‘By Manann’s bones,’ said Kant. ‘What is it?’

It was a lightning bolt. Not an actual bolt from the heavens, but a jagged symbol that could only represent lightning. It was gold, and perhaps fifty feet long. It speared the pyramid through its pinnacle, and the smouldering rubble that had spilled down the pyramid’s sides showed the force with which it must have hit.

Van Horstmann moved through the crowd to find Elrisse. The Grand Magister was surrounded by the senior wizards of the order, as if they were seeking protection from the aura of his authority.

‘Grand Magister,’ said van Horstmann. ‘What can this mean?’

‘I fear to say it,’ said Elrisse.

‘Can it be anyone else?’ said van Horstmann. ‘Who else would do this, and in this way? Who else wants the Light Order humiliated?’

‘It is too early to say that, comprehender,’ said Elrisse.

‘Out loud, perhaps. But you are as certain as I. The Gold Order–’

‘The Gold Order are no more suspects than anyone else,’ said Elrisse. ‘I will not have our diplomatic status jeopardised by jumping to conclusions. We are not children. We must investigate.’

‘Word will get out.’

‘Then it will get out via us, the senior magisters of this order.’ said Elrisse.

Burning ash floated down to the square. The crowd was buzzing now, each voice murmuring suspicions about who could have brought the enormous metal lightning bolt down from the heavens in such a spectacular insult. A fire had started in the pinnacle somewhere. There could be found the chambers of the most esteemed magisters, including those of Elrisse himself. Perhaps that, too, had been a deliberate consequence of the attack, another barb to the insult.

‘We must move quickly,’ continued Elrisse. ‘Van Horstmann, Kardiggian, Vranas. When it is safe, examine that… that thing and find out what you can. Assume nothing. Alric and I will answer the questions of our fellow colleges, for they will surely come. They will have felt this happen.’

‘It must be an enemy from within the colleges,’ said another of the senior magisters. Van Horstmann knew the man, Horst, by reputation, as a fastidious leader of the most complicated Light Order ceremonies. ‘It has to be. There are few enough who even know we are here.’

‘Then that,’ said Elrisse, raising a cautioning hand, ‘is what you will find, if it is the truth. If it is not, then you cannot let your prejudices determine your conclusions. Unfounded speculation is ill-fitting for magisters of our order. Let the shadowmages chatter and the Bright wizards fly to anger, we do not.’

Van Horstmann looked up again at the lightning bolt. It could scarcely have been a more carefully calculated insult: striking from above, a position of superiority, penetrating the pyramid in a show of symbolic violation, bringing confusion and chaos to the serenity the Light Order cultivated.

‘You have my word,’ said van Horstmann. ‘You will know the truth.’

The qualities of Elrisse as Grand Magister had been the subject of some debate at his first appointment, almost thirty years before, and in truth the debate had never died. He was not a mighty battle magister who could hurl bolts of fiery death down at the Emperor’s enemies, as had at one time been a prerequisite for heading a college of Altdorf. Few denied, however, that he was a more than competent diplomat, and at times like these there were few more precious skills than the ability to speak with those who did not want to speak with him.

A mission was arranged. Grand Magister Zhaan agreed that the whole distasteful business should be put aside and brotherhood between the Light and Gold Orders should blossom again. Zhaan maintained that the lightning bolt could not have been sent by a Gold wizard, and was surely the result of some accident in the experiments and studies of the Light Order, but it was clear he said this solely to be seen backing up his own order. Van Horstmann lead the investigation into the attack itself and concluded that the bolt showed every sign of having been created in the forges of the Gold College, animated with the Lore of Metal and cast down in such a way as to present the maximum injury to the pride of the Light Order and the maximum glee of the Gold.

The two colleges were isolated from one another. At informal gatherings of wizards in Altdorf, such as those to present advice and soothsaying to the Imperial Court, either Light or Gold, or both, were absent. Groups of newly-appointed magisters in both colleges spoke of retribution or escalation, to protect the honour and reputation of their order. The more experienced wizards spoke darkly of the Great Fire of Altdorf, widely blamed on the Bright Order’s fire magic, which might equally have been a ploy by some enemy in another college to blacken the Bright Order’s reputation. If it was not stopped, the conflict could grow to just such a scale where Altdorf itself was at peril.

And then there was the Emperor. If the Imperial Court had to step in to quell a dispute between the colleges, which always presented themselves as unified, then Altdorf’s wizards would lose all the trust they had so far built up with Eckhardt III. And Eckhardt III was proving a petty and capricious ruler. If he decided the Colleges of Magic could not be trusted, he might cast them out, strip them of their properties and prohibit their studies entirely. Eckhardt III might just be stupid enough to make such a decision. The conflict had to end.

And so Grand Magister Elrisse led a delegation of his most trusted magisters to the Temple of Shallya, nestled near the northern edge of Altdorf. Once it had stood apart from the city, a building of pale marble and slender columns, imparted with a feminine grace to match that of the goddess herself. She was the patron of healers, childbirth, mercy and grief, and always argued for peace and harmony. She had been perhaps the god most worshipped in the lands of men before Sigmar’s deification, and even now there were plenty of places in the Empire where her temples and shrines saw more traffic than those of Sigmar.

Van Horstmann had never seen the place before. It was clear the temple had once been beautiful. Even when the cramped streets and haphazard buildings of Altdorf had crowded around the temple, it had stayed beautiful. But it had suffered greatly since then. Columns were toppled and a good third of the roof was still missing, patched up with wood where it had fallen in. Parts of it were scorched, including the pediment sculpture of Shallya herself. She was a matronly figure with long hair, her face turned away, children and the sorrowful kneeling around her.

‘I do not believe,’ Elrisse was saying as the delegation turned onto the street on which the temple stood, ‘that the temple will ever be fully repaired. It is a testament, I think, to intolerance and its dangers. That message would be lost if it were to be pristine again.’

‘Grand Theogonist Thoss certainly left his mark,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Not the one he would have desired,’ said Elrisse. ‘He wanted all gods but Sigmar obliterated. For some magisters that was in living memory. A terrible time, by what they say of it. But now the temple affects those who see her more than it ever did when it was pristine. Shallya has received many more feet through the doors of her temple now it echoes the sorrows she heals.’

‘So when we act in anger, we are as likely to help those we hate as destroy them.’

‘Quite so,’ said Elrisse.

The delegation was a dozen strong. Elrisse, van Horstmann, Alric and a handful of others had been selected to represent the Light Order. A similar number of Gold wizards would be waiting for them in the temple, which had been chosen as both neutral ground and a holy place where peace was supposed to reign. The Light wizards passed through the grand silver doors, depicting the goddess with her head in her hands, weeping over a host of graves and battlefields.

Altdorf’s priestess of Shallya was named Mother Heloise, and van Horstmann knew of her reputation. She ministered to the mad, using the blessings of Shallya to cure their minds, and was thought to be the most successful priestess at such ministrations in all the Empire. She echoed the image of Shallya herself, well-built and stout, with the long hair her priestesses all wore. She wore the white and green of her church, was ritually blindfolded and stood at the altar at one end of the temple.

The Gold wizards were already in place, sitting in the pews along one side of the nave. Grand Magister Zhaan sat at the front, his mane of bronze-coloured hair catching the shafts of light that fell through the temple’s damaged roof. Van Horstmann recognised another among their number – Daegal, the young Gold wizard he had held a heated discussion with at the Gold College. That was the moment van Horstmann had learned of the philosophical differences between the colleges, which had led, one way or another, to this meeting.

The Light wizards filed in and took their pews. Van Horstmann sat a couple of rows behind Elrisse, who naturally took the frontmost pew.

‘Brothers in sorrow,’ began Mother Heloise, ‘our hearts have been cleft by the cruelty that is anger. Peace has fled, driven away by hate. It is the wish of Shallya that peace should return, and the wish of her church that I assist you in ending your quarrel. Though there may be differences between you, let them be celebrated, and not used as the foundation of anger. For anger has no foundation, it will crumble and bring us down with it as it falls, and all will be ruin and misery. Only on peace can we build. Grand Magister Elrisse, Shallya bids you speak.’

Elrisse stood before the altar. He looked at home in this place, for both he and the church had a similar air of age and respectability. He steadied himself on his staff and cleared his throat.

‘This is not the first time,’ he said, ‘that two Colleges of Magic have come into conflict. Loremaster Teclis himself knew that such things would come to pass, and he left instructions that we arbitrate our differences not as men, nor even as high citizens of the Empire, but as beings of learning. We are scholars, and if wealth is our knowledge we are wealthy indeed. Every line of that knowledge teaches us that no good will come of our current conflict, only destruction. We both have much to lose and nothing to gain. The Light Order extends its hand to the Gold. Let hostilities end.’

Zhaal stood now. Compared to Elrisse he was a mighty figure of a man. If anything he looked more powerful and muscular than when van Horstmann had encountered him in the halls of the Gold College. ‘The Gold Order, too, desires peace,’ he said. ‘But it cannot merely be spoken into existence. To take the extended hand, without condition or question, would be to deny that there is any source of quarrel between us. And there is, Grand Magister Elrisse. You and everyone here know well there is legitimate cause.’

‘A cause?’ said Elrisse. ‘That can be put behind us, can it not?’

‘No, it cannot,’ replied Zhaal. ‘Not when accusations fly between all the colleges. We are the subject of foul and unfounded rumours. They say that we orchestrated an attack on the Light Pyramid. That we are petty and scornful enough to place our mark on it through violence! If we simply cease hostilities then that accusation will always hang over us. We must have confirmation in the firmest terms that the Gold Order did no ill, before this can end.’

‘And yes,’ said Elrisse, ‘some ill was done, by someone. And we know not by whom. Nor can we rule anyone out as guilty, including the Gold Order. We are willing to let all of this flow by like the waters of the Reik, into and beyond memory.’

‘On your terms,’ said Zhaal. ‘With the Light Order having painted themselves as forgiving and pure, and the Gold Order as the villains with their crime unpunished. No, Grand Master Elrisse. The Gold Order did not commit the outrage that you say began this feud. Our innocence will be acknowledged. Anything less and we will not leave this place with any agreement.’

His words were underscored with murmurs of agreement from the Gold magisters. Grand Master Elrisse did not show any concern outwardly, but van Horstmann knew he was good at hiding it. This was supposed to be a mere formality, with both sides in agreement.

The Gold Order were insulted too. Because they were accused, and yet they were innocent. They felt themselves as wronged as any of the Light magisters who had witnessed the golden lightning bolt spearing the pyramid.

‘We come here with arms open!’ said Magister Kardiggian, standing up from his pew. ‘We were insulted – no, I say we were attacked! You should be begging us for forgiveness, Zhaal!’

‘Forgiveness for what?’ demanded Zhaal.

‘For the act of shameless aggression of which everyone here knows you are guilty!’

Voices were raised and magisters on both sides stood in anger. Daegal was among them, pointing a finger at Kardiggian. ‘You would not say that,’ he barked, ‘were you not with a dozen of your fellows!’

‘Brethren!’ called out Mother Heloise. ‘Anger corrodes and destroys. This is a place sacred to the goddess of peace. She weeps to hear your sorrow.’

‘And Sigmar weeps to hear the men of His Empire acting like whipped curs, when we are innocent!’ came the reply from a Gold wizard.

Van Horstmann carried with him, as he usually did outside the pyramid, his mask-topped staff and the Skull of Katam. These were both powerful symbols of a magister’s rank, artefacts entrusted to him by his order. But he carried one artefact which he did not display so openly – Magister Vek’s puzzle box, nestled safely in the sleeve of his robe. He had practised opening and closing it swiftly and invisibly, earning much vitriol from Hiskernaath in the process.

His fingers danced across its mechanisms now. He felt the box opening up in his hand.

‘You have your orders,’ said van Horstmann softly, knowing his words would not be heard over the shouting match gaining momentum around him. ‘Remember who rules you. Remember who owns you. Do not let me down.’

Hiskernaath slithered out of its prison. Its rippled along the floor, unseen, feeling like a chill draught at shin level.

Van Horstmann knew the path that Hiskernaath would take. He had prepared exhaustively for this moment, formulating his orders to the daemon to ensure there were no loopholes it could exploit. He knew that it would scuttle unseen along the floor of the Temple of Shallya, straight towards Magister Daegal.

Van Horstmann had chosen Daegal for a number of reasons. Possession was most potent when it amplified the natural tendencies of the subject, and Daegal’s aggression and quickness to anger would serve van Horstmann well. Given his character, he would be a logical culprit to spark what followed. And then there was the fact that van Horstmann simply did not like Magister Daegal.

Daegal’s expression changed when the daemon forced its way into his soul. Hiskernaath craved the wearing of flesh, denied to it for years since he had been driven out of Princess Astrid. It hungrily shredded Daegal’s defences, already lowered by anger and frustration. The daemon’s pent-up strength blasted a channel through Daegal’s soul and opened up the vulnerable heartlands of his mind for invasion.

Daegal raised a hand. Molten gold dripped off it, as if Daegal’s hand was melting in one of the Gold Order’s forges. It hissed and spat where it hit the stone floor, and only a few of the magisters around him realised what he was about to do. They were too slow to stop him.

Bolts of molten gold spat from Daegal’s fingers, as swift and deadly as bullets from a musket. They slammed into one of the Light magisters – van Horstmann knew him as Magister Parsifal, an elderly wizard who had once sought training as a battle magister but ended up a researcher and ritualist.

The bolts punched into his chest and out through his back. Gobbets of molten metal spiralled through him and tore his chest open. Sizzling blood spattered the magisters beside him. Parsifal cried out, a long, rattling wail, and fell backwards over the pew.

‘Murder! Murder!’ someone yelled.

Daegal swung both hands in an arc. Gobbets of molten metal sprayed in every direction, burning and boring into flesh. Mother Heloise screamed as a bolt burned through her shoulder, and she fell back against Shallya’s altar.

Confusion was everywhere. ‘Protect Elrisse!’ yelled van Horstmann, jumping the pew in front of him.

Already lances of white fire were spitting across the temple nave, met by burning sprays of molten gold. Grand Magister Zhaal conjured a golden shield in front of him and Magister Kardiggian, hands raised, was bathed in a column of white light as pale flames wreathed his arms.

Van Horstmann’s words forced the Light magisters into action. Gold magisters rallied around Daegal, assuming he had began casting in response to an aggressive move from the Light wizards. Some yelled for peace, but they were drowned out.

A circle of white fire burst up from the floor. Golden bolts shattered against it. Zhaal turned a white fireball aside with his shield and in response, drew the outline of a golden scimitar in the air with his free hand. The weapon solidified and he grabbed its hilt, blue-hot flame rippling up and down its blade.

Kardiggian hurled balls of fire in every direction. Gold wizards were thrown to the floor or sent stumbling, their robes on fire. A spike of gold shot up from the floor, impaling a Light wizard through the thigh. One of the Gold wizards bundled Mother Heloise to the floor, trying to drag her to safety behind the altar. Another stood screaming, alight from head to toe, his beard coiling up into black ash.

Van Horstmann broke from the safety of the cirlcle. The Gold wizards were splitting up, sending bolts of gold or magical light as they ran. A shower of razor-sharp icy crystals hammered into the pews around him and van Horstmann felt slashes of pain along one arm and leg. He jumped a pew and ran.

In the midst of the chaos stood Daegal. Van Horstmann could see the greenish fire around his eyes that signalled Hiskernaath was inside him. Daegal’s own mind would be fighting back, crushed into imprisonment within his own skull, forced to watch through his eyes as he continued the slaughter he had begun. Daegal, being a magister and one whose mind had been well trained, would probably win out eventually. That would make Daegal a witness.

Van Horstmann’s hands described a sphere of white light. He had meditated much in the last few days to ensure the fortress in his mind was well stocked. A simple thought plucked a shining gem from its stores and shattered it, sending a torrent straight from the aethyr through his hands. He unleashed the flame and it shot in a jet into Daegal’s chest, throwing the Gold wizard clean off his feet and through the screen that separated the nave off from one of the temple’s side chapels.

Van Horstmann gasped in a breath. It was ice cold. Channelling too much power had its own dangers. But he could take it. He had to.

He ran after Daegal. Jumping through the wreckage of the screen, he saw the side chapel was dark, a place for contemplation. Prayer cushions were scattered around a statue of an old woman, bent and wrinkled – van Horstmann knew this was Shallya in her role as the Crone, who at the end of every autumn watched over the withering of crops after the harvest to make room for the spring’s new growth.

Daegal was sprawled at the base of the statue. Blood ran from his head. Beneath him were the remains of the screen’s tapestry. A stray bolt of power sailed over the interior wall that separated the nave from the side chapel and impacted against the rafters of the shored-up ceiling.

Van Horstmann drove the butt end of his staff into the ground. Its length glowed white, except for the single eye of the mask that topped it. The diamond glowed with a purple-black flame. Light magic was perfect for purification, banishment and protection, but only with great force and effort could it be turned to destruction. Van Horstmann had learned that Dark magic was far more efficient at turning the living into the dead, and it was Dark magic that seared from the diamond in his staff.

Van Horstmann held the staff with both hands, like a sword ready to swing. Black power dripped off it, scorching the floor.

Daegal moaned and rolled over. Van Horstmann made ready to strike. He could take the Gold magister’s head clean off if he hit it just right, the dark power hungry to shrivel and tear Daegal’s flesh.

‘No!’ yelled Daegal. With a burst of golden light a form was hurled out through the Gold magister’s chest and smacked into the wall. Van Horstmann recognised the shadowy tangle of limbs and talons as Hiskernaath, forced into the real world.

Daegal was stronger than he had expected.

Van Horstmann swung his staff but Daegal was just sensible enough to see it coming and rolled out of the way. He spat a syllable of power and a burning sword shuddered into life in his hands. Van Horstmann struck again but the sword turned the staff away in a shower of black sparks.

‘You,’ said Daegal. ‘You did this. They will see your magic! There are a score of magisters in this chapel who will run here and see you doing evil.’

‘They will see nothing,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I have made pacts. I have worked wonders. The Dark is hidden within me, and not even Elrisse has seen it. No one will know how you died and if there are any traces of Dark magic left in this place, it will be assumed they came from you.’

‘Why tell me?’ gasped Daegal.

‘So that you will know you are defeated and will choose a quick and painless death.’

‘Stick a painless death up your fundament,’ spat Daegal.

Van Horstmann pointed the staff at Daegal and unleashed the Dark magic held there. It burst from the staff like a gout of black flame. Daegal was caught full in the flame but the image of golden armour appeared, ghosting over him, and though he stumbled back against the statue of the Crone his magical defences held.

‘Daemon-summoner!’ spat Daegal. ‘Heretic! Murderer!’

‘You,’ said van Horstmann, ‘are the murderer. Blood is on your hands. You saw it through your own eyes.’

‘No, van Horstmann. You will not open my mind to your daemon pet again. I will die before I let it in.’

‘Then you will die.’

Van Horstmann grabbed a handful of reality with his mind and wrenched at it. The Crone statue toppled forwards and Daegal had to dive out of the way before it crashed onto him and crushed him.

Van Horstmann drove the head of his staff into the ground. The stone slabs of the floor fractured and from the mouth of the mask issued a burning serpent of purple flame. It shot along the floor and arrowed into Daegal.

Daegal cried out and rolled away. The chest of his robes was torn and burned. The skin of his chest was burned away, too, revealing charred muscle clinging to his ribs. He thrashed on the floor to extinguish the dark flames that clung to him.

Van Horstmann stood over the Gold wizard and raised his staff to strike. Daegal coughed out a syllable of power and a shield of golden light appeared above him. Van Horstmann’s staff rang off the shield and Daegal dragged himself away.

The shield shimmered and faded. Van Horstmann struck again, this time swinging the staff down like a miner’s pickaxe into a coal seam. The shield appeared again, but weaker, translucent and blurred. It shattered under the blow.

Van Horstmann bent down and grabbed Daegal by the throat. He hauled the Gold wizard to his feet and slammed him against the wall of the side chapel.

Blood was running from Daegal’s mouth. One eye was rolled back and bloodshot. He took in a single, gurgling breath, misting blood down the front of his charred robes.

‘All this,’ he said. ‘What for? Why did you do it?’

Van Horstmann dropped his staff. He placed the palm of his hand over Daegal’s face.

Learning the ways of Dark magic had not been easy. It was chaotic and insane, and did not fit well into van Horstmann’s fastidious mind. The Light was marshalled through order and ritual. Dark magic was an emotional thing, its conduit to the aethyr punched through by force of hatred alone. It had been a tough lesson to learn, allowing his emotions to the fore, channelling them instead of suppressing them.

But in the end, it had almost been pleasurable the first time it had worked. To finally give his feelings free rein had felt forbidden and exhilarating. He felt that savage joy now as his hatred bored through the wall between his mind and the aethyr.

At the pinnacle of the fortress was a hole in the sky, a black chasm from which fell a rain of blasphemous power. Van Horstmann, fortunately, had hatred to spare.

The power rippled through his body and into Daegal. It was uncontained, uncontrolled. The results of this magic could not be predicted, but in that moment van Horstmann did not care.

Instantly, Daegal began to change. His robes billowed as tumorous growths bloomed beneath his skin. The pain on his face was swamped as the structure of his skull warped, one eye bulging wide, one sinking into a growing mass of pulpy muscle. Van Horstmann stood back as Daegal screamed, until even that was lost to him as his throat swelled up and one shoulder burst into dozens of pallid white bulbs like the egg sacs of a giant spider.

It could not be contained. Daegal swelled up to an obscene size, his shape no longer human, skin and flesh mutating at random. Bones cracked. Daegal’s ribcage split open and organs spilled out, swelling up and squirming.

The thing that had once been a Gold wizard screamed again, as it gained a moment’s control over its lungs. Then it burst, exploding in a shower of blood and shattered bone.

Van Horstmann had ducked behind the statue of the Crone just before Daegal exploded. He felt a warm rain of blood and gore, and though he avoided the worst of the debris shower he could hear the wet smacks as chunks of Daegal thudded against the walls and the statue.

He glanced around the statue. Just a heap of shredded muscle and a pool of gore remained. Daegal’s robes had been shredded and soaked in blood, and there was nothing left to suggest he had ever been human, let alone a wizard.

Van Horstmann took a breath. He was shaking with fatigue and adrenaline. He put a hand against the outer wall of the temple and willed raw power through him again, forcing one of the stone blocks out of position. It slid from its place in the wall, crumbling mortar and stone dust showering down as it moved. A fresh draught reached him and he saw he had opened enough of a hole to let himself squeeze out.

Outside, Altdorfers were gathering to see what the commotion was. They shied away when they saw van Horstmann, perhaps because they recalled the Great Fire and other catastrophes blamed on the Colleges of Magic, or perhaps simply because van Horstmann was spattered with blood and probably still smouldering from the barrages of destructive magic.

Overhead, smoke was issuing from the holes in the temple ceiling. The Light wizard delegation were moving as a mass away from the temple into one of the many streets leading away. As van Horstmann ran towards them he saw that they were gathered around Elrisse, and that Kardiggian was carrying the wounded Mother Heloise.

A few were casting bolts of white fire towards the temple doors, answered by sprays of molten gold. But the main battle was done. The Gold wizards remained in the temple while the Light wizards were retreating. Van Horstmann reached the Light delegation and saw he was not the only one who looked fresh from the battlefield. Many were bloodied or scorched. Robes were torn and burned, and some men limped or nursed obvious wounds.

‘Van Horstmann!’ shouted Elrisse. ‘I thought we had lost you, magister!’

‘Alas, Morr did not take kindly to my knocking,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I live yet.’

‘Then stay close and see to it that you continue. We must get to the pyramid.’

‘The Gold Order struck the first blow,’ said Kardiggian. ‘We all saw it. There will be consequences, Grand Magister, grave ones for the Gold Order. There must be.’

‘There will, magister,’ replied Elrisse. ‘I swear it. The Gold Order might have started hostilities, but it will be the magisters of the Light who will end them.’

Van Horstmann could just see the faces of the Gold wizards sheltering behind the temple doors. They looked as confused and panicked as the Light magisters did. They were probably making the same promises Elrisse just had – consequences, justice, vengeance. There was no sign among the Light wizards that any of them had glimpsed the use of Dark magic in the chapel. The wards that van Horstmann had cast about him had done their job. Part of the reason for all this, though not the greatest part, was to see if he could cast the magic he needed without its true nature being detected. The test had been a success. As for the rest of it – time would tell.

There were tears in Mother Heloise’s eyes, and not just from the pain. Once again the Temple of Shallya, a place sacred to peace, was the site of bloodshed.

It had been relatively simple to send the lightning bolt down.

Procuring the bolt had been the most difficult part. Any smith in Altdorf would have been very curious to know why they had been asked to forge such a thing, and rumours in Altdorf moved quicker than a new breed of plague. If such a smith learned of the golden lightning bolt sent to impale the Light Order’s pyramid, he would be able to tell the authorities about the shaven-headed, sunken-eyed magister who had commissioned it.

Instead, he had used a number of intermediaries to have it made, in sections, by smiths in Nuln, Talabheim and Marienburg, then assembled them himself over several long nights in Altdorf’s slaughterhouse district where empty properties were common enough for van Horstmann to appropriate one. It had been tedious and physical labour, but compared to learning the principles of Dark magic between his Light Order studies it had been simple to teach himself the basic smithing needed.

The magic was easier for van Horstmann. Light magic put the bolt in the sky, and Dark magic sent it hurtling down. When Elrisse had commanded van Horstmann be one of the magisters investigating the origin of the attack, van Horstmann had taken the opportunity to stop just short of outright accusing the Gold Order, knowing that most magisters had come to that conclusion of their own accord.

Van Horstmann had never sat down and written out the stages that he hoped would follow, but they were etched into his mind, into the stones of the fortress, and they had all followed one another just as he had imagined. The Gold and Light Orders, already natural adversaries, were pushed into outright conflict. Sooner or later it would explode into open warfare, and the Grand Magisters, of course, would move to head off such an eventuality with a grand diplomatic gesture. A gesture they would both have to partake in, along with a good representative number of their magisters. All those wizards would have to be in the same room at the same time, their guards down, because that was the only way that such a diplomatic solution could be reached.

Add Hiskernaath, and a likely instrument like Daegal, and the bloodshed at the Temple of Shallya had become a logical inevitability.

Hiskernaath had returned after three nights. Van Horstmann had found him in his quarters, as he had known he would. The daemon was squatting against the ceiling, sulking as if van Horstmann had just had the creature whipped. The daemon wanted to gallop back into the warp, away from its servitude, but the contract inked into van Horstmann’s skin had held and the daemon had been forced to return to its master. Van Horstmann had put it back in Vek’s puzzle box, ignoring the daemon’s ever-creative cursing as it was compelled to obey him once again.

The Light Order lost two magisters. One was Parsifal, whose body had remained in the temple and was returned by the priestesses of Shallya the next morning, left beside Midday’s Mirror wrapped in funeral vestments. The other had been Magister Olasonn, a young man of Kislevite stock. He had been caught in the scrum for the doors, knocked to the ground and despatched by a conjured blade of gold that fell from the ceiling and impaled him through the throat. Van Horstmann had helped carry Olasonn’s body on the way back from the temple to the Buchbinder District.

He had looked into Olasonn’s face. The magister was young by the standards of wizards, not long out of the Chanters’ Hall. He was handsome and blond, and the rigours of magic had yet to drain him into one of the chill husks who inhabited the Light Order’s upper echelons. Everything he could have been, could have done, had been stolen from him in the Temple of Shallya, in a bloodbath that was van Horstmann’s responsibility.

Perhaps there had once been a van Horstmann who would have been haunted by that face. Certainly it was a face worthy of haunting a killer. But it troubled van Horstmann no more than the face of Magister Vek, and van Horstmann had not thought of that old magister for years except as the collector of the trinkets that now cluttered up his quarters. He could barely even remember Vek’s features. Van Horstmann did spare a few thoughts to wonder just what kind of a person he must be not to care about those he killed. Most people would be unable to sleep at night knowing they had committed just one of van Horstmann’s crimes. Vek, Rudiger Vort, the dead at the temple – any one would be enough to drive a man mad with guilt. But any guilt ran off van Horstmann like rain.

Guilt, he concluded, would only get in the way. It would be an obstacle in his path. If he had felt it, he would have to have conquered it before it stopped him from getting what he wanted. Perhaps his subconscious had decided to save him the effort and ignore the guilt entirely. Or perhaps he had never been able to feel it at all. Perhaps he had been born that way.

In the end, van Horstmann concluded it mattered little either way, and returned to his studies while he waited for fate’s pendulum to take its next swing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ORDER OF DEATH

Maximilian van der Kalibos of the Amethyst Order went everywhere accompanied by ravens. Quite probably he could not have gone without them if he had wanted to. Kalibos carried a staff of skulls and wore robes of purple trimmed with black. He did not cast a shadow or a reflection because he was so attuned with death that he existed, some said, partly in the next world. Silence seemed to go with him, and a zone of chill. Plants died when he went near. If he walked on grass he left a blackened trail.

The Pyramid of Light did not like Maximilian van der Kalibos. The pyramid wanted everything drenched in light, lit up from every angle. Maximilian van der Kalibos, and the Amethyst magic that suffused him, wanted him always wrapped in darkness, only his face, bone-white with black hair and goatee, lit as if from a guttering torch held in front of him. The result was a feeling of unease, a shuddering hint of powers locked in opposition. When he entered the pyramid, divinations all turned towards uncertainty and chaos, and acolytes seemed to lose concentration as ceremonies went awry.

Grand Magister Elrisse met van der Kalibos and accompanied him and the chattering ravens up to one of the conference chambers near the pinnacle. A pair of Amethyst wizards flanked van der Kalibos, shadowing the Grand Magister of the Amethyst as if they were two more ravens.

The chamber chosen for the occasion was circular and ringed with pillars of white marble. A great circular table held a feast of wine and fine dishes from the better markets and cooks of Altdorf, not because anyone had any intention of eating anything, but because that was simply the way one played host to the Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic.

‘The situation,’ said van der Kalibos, ‘is intolerable.’ They were the first words he spoke when he sat down at the table opposite Grand Magister Elrisse.

‘We agree,’ said Elrisse. He sat surrounded by Light wizards, with Master Chanter Alric at his right hand. ‘And we anticipated that the Supreme Patriarch would have to intervene. It is with great regret that we accept the matter cannot be handled solely by the orders concerned, but accept it we do.’

‘Then that is the first hurdle overcome,’ said van der Kalibos. ‘But not the greatest. While the Light and the Gold Orders confine themselves to their colleges, it is I as Supreme Patriarch who have spoken with the priestesses of Shallya. Their temple must be repaired and reconsecrated. Bloodshed pollutes the very stones. It will take months, and great expense. That comes out of all our coffers. Mother Heloise, though she lives, was so polluted by the violence done against her that she had to abandon her post and take up a hermit’s life. On the colleges of Altdorf falls that sin. It will be years before we can make it right in the eyes of Shallya’s church. On the Supreme Patriarch weighs the burden of such diplomatic failures. We have all suffered, Grand Magister. Not just the Light. Not just the Gold. All of us.’

‘I understand,’ said Elrisse.

‘Do you?’ said van der Kalibos. ‘And how do you understand the feud between the Light and Gold Orders will be made right? Because it will be made right. How do you suppose it is to be done?’

‘By dialogue,’ said Elrisse. ‘Small steps, to be sure, for another grand gesture such as the conclave at the Temple of Shallya must be years away. But it will be–’

‘No,’ said van der Kalibos. No one but a Supreme Patriarch had the right to interrupt a Grand Magister without inflicting a grave breach of etiquette. ‘The Imperial Court must never know that wizards can enter into bloody conflict. Eckhardt III is not a brilliant man but even he will learn of it soon enough if it continues.’

‘The colleges of Altdorf have clashed with the Imperial Court before,’ said Elrisse. ‘Surely we can weather that storm if it comes. It is better to ensure the Gold and the Light heal their rift gradually, as prudence demands.’

‘Surely?’ said van der Kalibos dangerously. ‘You sound very certain. And yet it is only to the Celestial Order that I ascribe the ability to divine the future with such accuracy. Let me tell you what I see for your future, Grand Master Elrisse. The Emperor learns that the colleges of Altdorf were behind the slaughter in the Temple of Shallya. Altdorf at large learns of it. Those to whom the old faiths are dear will demand our expulsion. The priestesses of Shallya will point to the orders of magic as a corruptive and divisive force. The witch hunters of Sigmar will seek to capitalise by seeing heresy and the marks of mutation in every wizard they come across. And every time a Gold or Light wizard sheds the blood of another, every time the aethyr is plumbed to do violence amongst ourselves, we will be proving our enemies right. And we do have enemies, Elrisse. I most know this better than you. The Colleges of Magic will be besieged by those who wish us ill. They might not even survive. Everything will be undone. I know death, and I see it here. Our death. Desolation and ignorance returning to the Empire of Sigmar.’

‘It will not go that far.’

‘Such was said about the Great War,’ said van der Kalibos. ‘And all of mankind was almost lost. All of human magic will be lost if the colleges fall.’

‘The Empire relies too much on her magisters for such a dire future to come about,’ said Elrisse. ‘The Light and the Gold can heal our rift. Though the Amethyst Order must see death in everything, we see life and reconciliation.’

‘When?’ replied the Supreme Patriarch. ‘Will the rift be stitched up in a year? In ten years?’

‘You know full well that none can say,’ retorted Elrisse. ‘And there is no other way. For all your doomsaying, there is no solution other than rebuilding the bridges that were torn down, with patience and temperance.’

‘There is another way,’ said van der Kalibos darkly.

‘Then what is it, Supreme Patriarch?’ The moment Elrisse spoke, perhaps a little to sharply, a little too challengingly, the tension in the chamber wound tighter. The Supreme Patriarch leaned forwards and the Light magisters present seemed to shrink down in their seats.

‘You were there last time it happened,’ said van der Kalibos. ‘All the Grand Magisters were. You were there when I took on the mantle of the Supreme Patriarch.’

There was silence in response, not because what van der Kalibos had said was shocking, but because they all remembered. Many had seen the event first hand, and those who had not had heard enough about it to build up a vivid picture of their own.

The role of Supreme Patriarch was coveted, but it was one not to be sought lightly. Since the inception of the orders of magic, when at the instruction of Teclis one Grand Magister had to head all the orders, the title had been decided by violence. Only a Grand Magister could challenge for the position, and he had to depose the incumbent Supreme Patriarch by force.

A wizard’s combat, to death or incapacitation.

Such was the risk of leaving an order without a Grand Magister, few Grand Magisters challenged for the position unless they were certain of victory or considered the risk less than the potential gain for the orders of magic as a whole. It was a system that kept the Supreme Patriarch’s position strong, while at the same time providing for the deposition of tyrants and incompetents. That was why Loremaster Teclis had instituted it.

And that was why Maximilian van der Kalibos was the current Supreme Patriarch. He had appeared one day at the gates of the Jade College and challenged the then Supreme Patriarch, Lord Janeak Ghul of the Jade Order. The two had fought, in the manner decreed by the founding wizards. Kalibos had won. Ghul had died. Though the Empire’s citizens were kept ignorant of it, though it was not acknowledged openly even to the Imperial Court, the ultimate conflicts between wizards were settled in violence.

‘You speak of a duel,’ said Grand Magister Elrisse.

‘A wizard’s duel,’ said van der Kalibos. ‘To the death. He who is victorious, his order claims victory in the conflict and the conflict is ended. He who dies, his order pays for its wrongdoing in instigating the rift with the death of its Grand Magister. The conflict will be solved in a single blow. The wizards of both orders will know the place they hold in the rift’s conclusion and no further examples of open conflict will occur. The rift will end and Emperor Eckhardt can live on in happy ignorance. The Light and the Gold will be in harmony again, for there will no longer be an argument over who was right and who was wrong.’

‘Supreme Patriarch,’ said Elrisse. ‘I do not believe that–’

‘You labour,’ said van der Kalibos, interrupting again, ‘under the belief that we are engaged in a debate. That you have a say in the matter. You have forgotten, perhaps, that I am your Supreme Patriarch and that I have the power to make this decision. Allow me to disabuse you of such unfortunate notions. I did not come to the Light College today to harvest opinions and seek a solution to which no one would object. I came here to give you your orders. I have already done so to Grand Magister Zhaal. You will fight and one of you will probably die. That is the will of the Supreme Patriarch.’

‘And if I challenge that will?’ said Elrisse.

‘Then you challenge the Supreme Patriarch,’ said van der Kalibos. ‘And you will fight me for my post. Either way, you fight.’

‘Then it is decided,’ said Elrisse. He did not let any dismay or fear show through, but it was impossible to imagine they were not there in some form. ‘I will fight Grand Magister Zhaal, as you command. The rift between our orders will be healed. For the good of the orders of magic, I do this.’

‘I have headed this order,’ said Grand Magister Elrisse, ‘for the majority of my life. And I am not a young man.’

Elrisse was not behind his desk, as he usually was when receiving lower ranked wizards in his quarters. He sat on a couch of velvet and gilt, probably imported from Araby like most of the décor. He did not wear his elaborate robes he had worn to receive the Supreme Patriarch – instead they were plain linen, and wearing them Elrisse had never looked older.

‘And in that time,’ he continued, ‘I have never killed anyone. Does that surprise you, van Horstmann?’

‘We are not all warriors,’ said van Horstmann. ‘If we were, there would not be much of an Empire left.’

‘True,’ said Elrisse. ‘Grand Magister Zhaal is a warrior. He served as a battle magister to Wilhelm II. He conjured the golden spear that killed the greenskin warlord of Splitstone Crag. Under his watch the artillery train of Duke Calimar was routed and his insurrection put down. He was much younger then, of course, and I did not meet him in those days, but I doubt he has forgotten everything he once knew about inflicting his will on an enemy’s flesh.’

‘The Light has ways,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Very politically put.’ Elrisse unfurled a roll of embroidered cloth that lay at his feet. The roll contained several implements of silver and gold, studded with jewels. ‘The Dagger of Lady Erkeneth,’ he said, pointing to one. ‘Enchanted to seek the heart. Intended for daemons, but it works just as well against a mundane organ. And these,’ he said, picking up a pair of silver blades so sharp the light bled through them. ‘Created by the priests of Myrmidia to excise the mind and cut out a soldier’s cowardice. Struck from silver mined at the lowest depths of the sea and sharpened on a stone that fell from the sky. I have a few others. Gifts, or items I have come to acquire during my research. Marvels, all of them, but nothing that can compare to whatever armoury Zhaal has amassed. What weapon he does not have to hand he can conjure from the air.’

‘I must speak bluntly,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It does your order small honour to have its Grand Magister speak so defeatistly.’

‘You are right, of course,’ said Elrisse. ‘Though a duel is not where my art excels, I must approach it with certainty of purpose and vision of victory. That is why I asked you here. Plenty of Light wizards can talk to me of battle magic and no doubt they will school me as best they can in the next four days. That is how long van der Kalibos has given myself and Zhaal to prepare.’

‘I am afraid I can help you little in that regard,’ said van Horstmann. It was a lie, of course. Van Horstmann had proven to himself at the Temple of Shallya that he could kill as effectively as any in the Light Order. But to the rest of that order he was the comprehender, a wizard of bookish wisdom and nothing else.

‘You are on good terms with the Fourth Circle,’ said Elrisse. ‘Especially as we now count you among the Third Circle, the order’s most senior minds. That the Skull of Katam spoke with you made no little impact on the guardians of the vaults, though they are not the type to admit it. Your work on Vries confirmed your reputation. I need you to fetch something for me, van Horstmann, from the vaults. The inner vaults.’

‘The inner vaults.’

‘That is correct. Even I am loathe to enter them. It is… not a privilege that should be given to one who has temporal power. There are dangerous things in there. I need one of them. The Scimitar of the Thirteenth Dynasty.’

Van Horstmann’s eyes were drawn to one of the tapestries hung on the walls of the Grand Magister’s chambers. It depicted red-skinned, muscular beings fighting with an army in golden armour, on the slopes of a mountain before an ash-blackened sky. It was depicted with the stylisation typical of Araby’s arts, and yet told its story with the vividness that only a master could achieve. The mightiest of the red warriors wielded a curved sword with an eye embedded in its hilt. Light bled off it, and around his feet were heaps of charred corpses.

‘Cut from a single diamond,’ said Elrisse. ‘Forged in the fires of a volcano and quenched in the blood of a dune dragon. It was made for the king of the dynasty’s djinns. Would that I could tell you how the Light Order came to acquire it, but no one truly knows. All that is certain is that it lies in the inner vault, and that it might just be the equal of whatever Zhaal brings to our duel. Speak with the Fourth Circle. Convince them to open the inner vault and bring me the Scimitar.’

‘I am only glad that I can help,’ said van Horstmann.

‘My thanks, comprehender,’ said Elrisse, leaning forwards and clasping one of van Horstmann’s hands. ‘I knew it when you first walked the Chanter’s Halls. When Alric chose to bring you to that dark time beneath the Imperial Palace. I knew you might just be the best of us.’

The Fourth Circle, as was their way, engaged van Horstmann in a lengthy debate on matters of philosophy and arcane theory before he even broached the subject of the inner vaults.

Van Horstmann had never sought to enter the inner vaults before. He had not even seen the entrance, nor knew where it was or what form it took. He had entered the upper vault only twice before, once to retrieve the Skull of Katam and once to return the Codex Aethyrica – or at least what remained of it. He was surprised to see that Magister Pendorf was still alive, but not that it was Pendorf who ensnared him in a discussion of the human mind and how it related to the physical material of the body.

Van Horstmann was firm but gracious in maintaining that the mind and body were mixed, or rather that neither could exist without the other, while Pendorf maintained doggedly that the mind was part of the spiritual aspect of the human and that it could exist separately of the body were the means to be discovered to create a vessel to contain and sustain it, and that the body itself was mere gross matter not intrinsic to an individual’s existence or identity. The matter took them into the night to discuss, and they did not resolve it because the question was not intended to have an answer.

The conversation turned to history, and to the culpability of rulers for the actions of their people when the means by which they exercised their power was so flawed and fractured, and dependent on others as intermediaries whose collective power far outstripped any single ruler. Pendorf argued on the side of blaming kings, but van Horstmann was more inclined to ascribe the weight of history’s responsibilities to the ruling class who interpreted and often ignored the will of their sovereigns. Pendorf was delighted to speak with someone who disagreed with him so completely on everything, and allowed himself a good shot of well-aged brandy to celebrate not being able to reach any kind of compromise.

Van Horstmann asked to be allowed into the inner vault. Grand Magister Elrisse’s life depended on it, and on the Grand Magister’s life depended the stability of the Light Order. Anyone else might have been sent from the vaults with a lesson on the dangers of even knowing about the inner vault. Pendorf laughed at van Horstmann, and when he realised he was serious, bade him follow.

Van Horstmann had expected to find the entrance to the inner vaults disguised as something mundane, a place no one would look to find it. Of course, that was exactly what someone trying to enter the inner vault would expect, and so the door was a magnificent set of platinum-plated double doors set into a wall of the outer vault’s largest chamber, which van Horstmann had always assumed to be a set of temple doors taken from a distant shrine to a deity of wealth and excess. Pendorf opened it with a set of tiny keys apparently carved from human teeth.

The first thing van Horstmann saw were the shadows. They clung to the floor, revealed as the doors swung open. They slithered along the ceiling. They seemed to slink towards the door, not shy away, though the ever-present light of the pyramid should have banished them.

It was the only place in the pyramid where a shadow could take form. The inner vault seemed to hide all the shadows that would have been cast were it not for the fierce light of the pyramid.

‘Stay close,’ said Pendorf. ‘Do not stray.’

He led the way in. The air was chill. Van Horstmann could just make out the shape of the inner vault – a warren of niches and side rooms, criss-crossed by staircases at haphazard angles, a jumble of rooms and architecture that might ensue if the pyramid was shaken up and its parts rearranged like a child’s building blocks. Here was a cornice like one from a corridor in the upper chambers, there a pillar like those in the Chanter’s Hall, but none of it married up or made sense.

‘This was built to echo the pyramid above,’ said Pendorf. ‘But it changes. We cannot map it. Takes this old man’s intuition to know the way. What is it you seek?’

‘The Scimitar of the Thirteenth Dynasty.’

Pendorf sucked at his teeth like a craftsman sizing up a fee. ‘That will not be easy. Some of the artefacts are better at hiding than others. The Scimitar thinks itself a noble among commoners, and it disdains their company. As I said, stay close.’

Van Horstmann did as he was bid, but his eyes strayed. The door boomed shut behind the two magisters and only a light that Pendorf cast into the air in front of them cut through the darkness. Van Horstmann added light of his own, shining a beam of it from his outstretched palm, peering into the deepest corners as they passed them.

A standard of red silk stitched with the image of a headless skeleton, holding its skull in its hands. A gigantic hunting horn cut from the tusk of some gigantic monster. The shell of a similarly huge sea creature, carved into an intricate throne. Books. Swords and shields, suits of armour. Cases holding amulets, necklaces, crystals in settings of silver. Flies and spiders clustered against the glass of one case containing a wand of twisted white wood. A ceiling-high mirror showed fragmented reflections of people who were not there.

A key. Van Horstmann looked as closely as he could as he passed, not wanting to raise the suspicions of Pendorf. It was cut from red gold and hung on a golden chain. It was carved into the shape of a dragon’s head, the key’s teeth the dragon’s fangs, an emerald for an eye. It hung around the neck of a marble torso without a head.

‘Here,’ said Pendorf. He was pointing at a steel arch across which was stretched a web of golden threads. ‘Lady Malbelagia’s Web. The Scimitar seems to desire its company.’

‘Not many dreams down here for it to catch,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Ah, you know of the Web?’

‘I have read of it, in passing.’

‘So few appreciate such an artefact. When it was stored in the vault above we would find dreams caught up in it from time to time, wrapped in gold and silver. Quivering little things that turned to dust when looked upon. And every time an acolyte from the floor above would wake with his hair turned grey. No such trouble, as you say, since we moved it down here.’

The Web had an odd beauty to it, the way the light caught it and the shadows spiralled around its threads when the light was withdrawn. But it was not what van Horstmann was looking for.

‘There!’ hissed Pendorf. He indicated a staircase leading down into a room that looked like it should have had windows and balconies on three sides, but instead looked out on only panes of blank stone. A dark-red cushion lay on the floor, and on that was the Scimitar.

Van Horstmann knelt beside the sword and went to pick it up.

‘Careful,’ said Pendorf. ‘That blade saw the fall of the Thirteenth Dynasty and the three that followed it. The djinns of Araby used it on their banners and sacrificed in its name.’

Van Horstmann picked the Scimitar up. It hummed in his hands and the grip seemed to change to fit his hand. Its balance changed, too. It felt suddenly so light that he could have been holding nothing. On the curved blade was momentarily reflected a host of spears, the silhouette of an army, rising and falling with the tide of battle. Then the light shifted and the image was gone.

‘How many lives must this have taken?’ asked van Horstmann, more to himself than to Pendorf.

‘More than anything else in these vaults,’ said Pendorf. ‘But I would wager the Gold Order have in their hands a weapon that has taken more. Such artefacts are their speciality. What any mage of the Fourth Circle would give for an hour in their armouries! Surely there is none like it in all the world.’

‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But no blade of theirs will have a Light wizard behind it.’

‘True. Very true.’ Pendorf looked around him. ‘The shadows sound hungry,’ he said, though there was no sound except the two men’s voices.

‘There is one thing,’ said van Horstmann, ‘that I have long wished to ask of you.’

‘We should leave, comprehender. We take great care not to disturb the inner vaults unduly.’

‘In a moment,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘I have wished to know what lies beneath the inner vault.’

Pendorf did not answer.

‘You know,’ said van Horstmann, ‘that I have the authority and the confidence of Grand Magister Elrisse, and that it would be a grave breach of duty to lie to me or to withhold what I seek to know? I understand your desire to maintain secrecy, Magister Pendorf, but the wizards of the Fourth Circle have no cause to keep such secrets from the senior members of their own order.’

‘Why would you wish to know?’ asked Pendorf.

‘Because there is a very good chance, whether we wish to speak it aloud or not, that Grand Magister Elrisse will die in four days,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The Light Order will have to be restructured should such a thing come to pass. A complete understanding of all its workings will be essential.’

Magister Pendorf bowed his head. ‘Out of deference to the comprehender,’ he said, ‘I shall not make any quarrel with you. The Pinnacle Vault lies in direct opposition to the uppermost chambers of the pyramid above. We do not visit it, save to induct a new inhabitant.’

‘Because it is dangerous?’

‘Out of respect. The artefacts kept there are not interred so because they are dangerous, or because they are at greatest risk of being stolen, for the inner vault is secure enough. The Pinnacle Vault is the pride of place, the seat of honour. Artefacts of historical worth and great power, those most deserving of respect, are kept there. We speak of it little, again, out of respect.’

Van Horstmann nodded. ‘It is as I believed,’ he said. ‘My thanks, Magister Pendorf. I will take confidence from the certainty of such knowledge. Let us return.’

The citizens of Altdorf, if they ever heard of the tradition of wizardly combat, would not be particularly concerned with the morality of the practice or of the waste a dead wizard represented. Instead, they would have been horrified to know that such a destructive event might take place in their city, near their homes and businesses. And so the earliest Grand Magisters had in their wisdom selected a site outside the city, a short way down the river where an island breached a wide length of the River Reik. Rapids broke around its upstream banks, and deep pools sunken around the downstream shore. In ages past the place had been sacred, as evidenced by the standing stones that ringed the island and, beyond the dense black trees that grew between them, in the ancient amphitheatre in the island’s centre.

Those ancients had dragged huge blocks of stone from quarries the other side of the Empire to build the arena. An age later the Colleges of Magic had redressed the stones and rebuilt the parts that had fallen. The colours of the eight colleges hung, proofed by spells against the elements, flying bright from the lintels raised thousands of years ago.

Wizards from every college took their seats as dusk approached, the sky streaked with pink and the shadows long. Amber wizards sat beside the bears and big cats they often took as their companions, communicating with them through the Lore of Beasts the Amber Order taught. They sat awkwardly beside the elegant Celestial wizards, whose blue and silver robes and delicate stargazing lenses did not mix well with wildlife. The air above the Bright wizards shimmered with heat. The Amethyst Order was represented by Supreme Patriarch van der Kalibos and a flock of ravens that inhabited every available perch. The Gold and the Light Orders were there in the greatest numbers, acting as seconds for the men who prepared for the setting of the sun in chambers beneath the arena floor.

Once, those chambers had held gladiators or arena beasts, who were herded onto the arena floor to fight and die before the sight of gods long forgotten by the time of Sigmar. Now Elrisse and Zhaal emerged from them, at opposite ends of the arena. Elrisse wore pure white robes, looking as much like a body wrapped in a white funeral shroud as anything else. Zhaal’s robes were deep bronze, and around his neck and shoulders he wore a metallic collar as broad as a piece of armour, inscribed with enchantments of protection and strength. He carried a two-handed hammer, dwarfen perhaps in origin, with the twin-tailed comet of Sigmar gilded on the head. Elrisse carried his staff in one hand and the Scimitar of the Thirteenth Dynasty in the other.

It was a solemn business. Quite possibly, one of the combatants would die. All present had to be prepared to witness a death. It was traditional for the Amethyst wizards to attend to the dead if neither combatant was from their order, and in the upper rows sat a pair of Amethyst wizards in black, ready to administer the due solemnities. Similarly, two Jade wizards were set aside to act as healers in the event the duel was concluded with one party incapacitated but not dead, or the victor himself sustained threatening wounds. Grass and moss crept along the stones where they sat, the magic of life escaping them even at rest.

‘When the Supreme Patriarch told me we would fight,’ said Zhaal, ‘I felt joy. I had not countenanced it before, but the chance to meet you face to face in combat is one I then realised I craved. Did you feel the same, Elrisse? Or was it some other emotion that found a purchase in you?’

‘I felt only sorrow,’ said Elrisse, ‘that one of our number should die.’

‘If you had admitted you were afraid,’ said Zhaal, a mocking note unmistakeable in his voice, ‘at least I could have respected your honesty. But now there is nothing in you that I admire.’ He swung the hammer, and it made a deep thrumming sound as it passed through the air. ‘No obstacle to doing you ill. No barrier to our anger. And the anger of the Gold is legendary. Fear the Fire, and flinch at Death, but there is no anger shines as bright as Gold!’

Four Gold wizards had died at the Temple of Shallya. One had been Daegal, of course. Two more had fallen in the nave, and another of his injuries before he could be delivered to the gates of the Jade College. And when such blood was shed, was there any way of washing it away save with more blood?

The two Grand Magisters circled, the whole breadth of the arena floor between them. The sand turned to gold dust beneath Zhaal’s feet. Slivers of light fluttered down around Elrisse like blossom falling from a tree. Such was the power built up in each man that it bled out into the physical world.

The first move was Zhaal’s. He reversed his grip on his hammer and slammed its head into the floor. Torrents of gold shot up from the ground like water spraying from a geyser, arcing over the arena floor in rippling fingers towards Elrisse. Elrisse’s response was to swing his sword around him, inscribing a circle of protection into the air. Sigils of white flame flashed into existence, describing a dome around Elrisse, and the gobbets of molten metal that rained down burst against the shield.

Elrisse gathered the power in the circle of protection and channelled it through his staff, unleashing it in a furious gout of white flame aimed straight at Zhaal. The hammer in Zhaal’s hands was suddenly a shield of bronze and silver, held in front of him as he charged right into the flame. The flame was divided into two tongues by the shield’s protective magic, coursing around Zhaal and leaving him unharmed, as he sprinted at Elrisse.

Zhaal was in striking range of Elrisse. The shield shifted in a blur and reformed as the hammer swung at waist height towards Elrisse. Elrisse brought up the Scimitar to parry and the weapons clashed in a shower of white sparks. Zhaal stumbled, thrown aside by the force of the scimitar’s magic, but his balance was regained and he backhanded Elrisse across the side of the head.

The Grand Magister of the Light Order fell back a couple of steps and almost fell. Zhaal was bigger than him, both taller and much broader, with muscles that now showed shifting beneath his robe. Elrisse was in good health for his age but that was all that could be said about him physically. He was an old man, and he looked it as Zhaal hefted the hammer back up to strike a killing blow.

Elrisse fired darts of silver power from his staff. They shattered against Zhaal, most of them turned aside by the enchantments of his magical armoured collar but enough finding their way through to his flesh. They dug deep into his chest and leading arm and Zhaal gasped in pain, falling to one knee.

‘I am not a conjurer,’ said Elrisse, his breathing heavy. ‘I play no tricks of smoke. Our power is pure. Ours is the magic of creation and its ending. Yours is the magic of mud and stone and dull, dead things. Teclis knew the Light would one day rule supreme. Our reign begins with your death, Zhaal of the Gold.’

Zhaal bellowed like a bull. His hands were encased in gold now, the sheen of it running up his arms.

Elrisse brought the Scimitar of the Thirteenth Dynasty over his head and brought it down sharply – not into Zhaal, but into the stone surround of the arena, a shoulder-height wall that stood to protect the front rows from errant blades and spears.

The blade shattered. Shards of it flew into the air like silver birds, riding up towards the darkened sky.

For a moment there was silence, heavy and pregnant with the power that every magister there knew had been released.

That power first took form in a distant rumble. Many were not sure what it could be – an earthquake, perhaps, the sound of some great swell in the nearby waters of the Reik. But the battle magisters knew, as did every wizard who had stood on the battlefield. It was the sound of distant hooves hammering the ground.

A spectral mass of cavalry rode through the walls of the arena, onto the arena floor. They seemed without number, a torrent of them, their steeds rushing with such speed and fury that they blurred into a single surging mass. They wore scaled armour and turbaned helmets of an ancient type last seen on the battlefields of what was now called Araby, in an age that now consisted of a handful of ruins and inscriptions half-buried in the desert. Banners with runes of fire and destruction flowed over them. Mighty djinns, muscular red-skinned beings of glowing magic, surged among them, bellowing and seething through boiling clouds of flame.

The charge of the Thirteenth Dynasty hit Grand Magister Zhaal with all its force. Ghostly lances splintered. Horses reared. Blades hacked down and as the charge surged past, through the opposite side of the arena, it seemed every ghost of that fallen civilisation swung his blade at the place in the scrum where Zhaal was kneeling.

The sound was terrible, like a storm of fiery winds shrieking down from the barren mountains. Waves of desert heat pounded against the arena seats and magisters sitting nearby scattered for cover. The whole island shuddered with the thunder of horses’ hooves and war cries in ancient tongues.

The charge passed. The last of the ghosts galloped through the arena wall.

Elrisse stood holding the hilt of the scimitar. Its blade was gone, shattered completely when its magic was released. He dropped it and leaned against his staff, seeming to sag suddenly as if all the energy had drained out of him with the effort of unleashing the Thirteenth Dynasty.

In front of Elrisse was Grand Magister Zhaal.

In any other situation, he might have been mistaken for a statue, a fanciful work of art. He was made entirely of gold, still in the kneeling pose he had been in when the ghostly cavalry charged. His beard looked like a mass of golden thread and his face, perfectly rendered, had its mouth locked open in a yell of defiance.

He was completely undamaged.

The gold surface receded away from Zhaal’s hands, turning them back to flesh. His robes followed, then his neck and face. He gasped and slumped forwards, one hand supporting him, the other keeping a grip on his hammer.

‘Is that it?’ he growled. ‘Is that all you bring? By the comet’s twin tails, I had thought at least you would give me some sport!’

Elrisse whispered words of power and a silver lance appeared in his free hand. He hurled it and it burst into a dozen screaming bolts of white fire. Zhaal thrust out a hand and a circular golden shield appeared in front of him, hovering there long enough to deflect each missile as it streaked home.

Elrisse ran back towards the arena’s centre. Each time he tapped his staff on the ground, a snake with silver scales rose from the sand, tongue flickering and eyes burning bright blue-white with intelligence. They coiled towards Zhaal but he threw both hands to the sky, hammer held over his head, and bellowed powerful syllables of his own. Golden swords fell from the sky, each one impaling one of Elrisse’s snakes, and where they died they boiled away into wisps of silvery flame and smoke.

Transparent domes of protective magic sprung up around Elrisse, who was gesturing with his staff as fast as he could while still making the ritual signs legible to the aethyr’s power. Zhaal walked up to the first and swung his hammer into it, shattering it into shards of light. He broke through the second, and the third, this one needing two swings of the weapon.

The hammer looked like a cousin to Ghal-maraz, the Hammer of Sigmar itself, gifted by the dwarfen lords to Sigmar as a symbol of friendship between dwarfs and men. It was covered with dwarf-struck runes and though it was sized for a man to swing, it had its origin in some dwarfen runesmith’s forge, below one of the Worlds Edge holds, fuelled by volcanic fire. When Zhaal swung it chanting could be heard, deep and distant, as if the spirits of dwarfen ancestors were singing a funeral dirge.

Elrisse was chanting rapidly, and with every word white fire flared around him, coils of it like burning serpents writhing through the air. The gemstones on his staff shone like caged stars as he drove it into the ground. Ripples of earth were forced up as magic bubbled up from below, forming ramparts and parapets around Elrisse, almost hiding him from the sight of the spectators.

Zhaal cast a golden comet into the air. It split into a dozen shards and rained down, piercing the protective shells and impacting against the battlements. They fell, crumbling into sand, as if collapsing before the onslaught of an army and its siege engines. Zhaal strode forwards another pace and shattered another dome of magic.

The two magisters were almost face to face now. When Zhaal reached Elrisse, Elrisse would die. There was nothing in all of magic so stark and pure as that. The Amethyst magisters watching, those master of Death magic, would perhaps admire how all the equations of life and death were brought down to such a simple matter.

Elrisse dropped his staff and held his hands apart. Between them grew a ball of white flame, growing with every moment. Its harsh light flared out from the Grand Magister and cast long, stark shadows among the magisters seated in the arena. It seemed even to reach the night sky overhead, which flashed as if the stars were drawing closer hungrily.

Zhaal hammered through the last dome of magic. Elrisse squared his footing and thrust out his hands, hurling the ball of flame at the Gold magister.

For a moment Zhaal was gone, rendered invisible by the strength of the glare that erupted from the detonation of magic. The arena shuddered. The very earth seemed to recoil.

The magisters’ eyes struggled to adjust. They peered through the afterglare, trying to make out something in the centre of the arena floor.

Zhaal stood, hammer dropped at his feet. One hand was pressed to the side of his face, the back of the hand scorched and smouldering, as were the parts of his face he had not been able to shield. The armoured collar he wore glowed dull red with the heat it had absorbed to protect him.

Elrisse was down on one knee. Smoke rolled off him. The force of channelling such a pure blast of Light magic had drained him.

Zhaal took a faltering, painful step forwards. His less-wounded hand closed around Elrisse’s throat.

Everyone present had known it would come to this. They had all hoped it would end differently, of course. None of them gained anything from the loss of a powerful wizard – all the orders of magic would be weakened by it. But as soon as van der Kalibos had made his pronouncement that the matter would be settled by duel, it had been clear he was invoking the right of death to end all debates. Van der Kalibos was an Amethyst magister, and he understood death, he respected it and held it above all things in its authority. Of course one of them had to die. Of course.

Zhaal was a strong man. His hands, leathered by hours at the forge, were strong. He squeezed and Elrisse’s life flickered for barely a minute before he was gone.

Zhaal dropped the Grand Magister of the Light Order to the ground. Elrisse was dead. Even an unconscious man could not adopt that leadenness of limbs. There was no Elrisse now, just a corpse.

Zhaal stumbled away from the body. His breathing was laboured. The burns on his face and hands were livid and red. He bent to pick up his fallen hammer, and headed back towards the door through which he had entered the arena floor.

A couple of Gold wizards were running towards him. The duel was over and their duties as seconds took over. One of them took the hammer from Zhaal and the other supported him as he walked.

The spectators watched in silence as the Light wizards walked towards their dead Grand Magister. Magisters Kant and Kardiggian reached him and Kant closed Elrisse’s eyes, turning the corpse’s head gentle away from the spectators. One of the Amethyst wizards joined them, kneeling beside the body and reading prayers to Morr.

No one spoke. Order by order the magisters filed out of the arena, until only the Light wizards were left.

At the top of the stands, van Horstmann had watched the entire duel play out. There was not one move he had not anticipated, not one spell he had not expected to be cast. The Lore of Gold was not a subtle way of doing magic but it was powerful, especially when wielded in anger face to face. The least surprising aspect of the whole affair had been its outcome.

CHAPTER NINE

DRUFENHAAG

‘I have seen the way!’ cried a voice. It was thin and hoarse, for it did little other than scream. ‘His eyes! His eyes look on you! He sees you!’

From the next cell came a low rhythmic moaning which, when listened to closely enough, resembled words in a cruel dark language that had not been created for the human tongue.

The inmate of the cell immediately opposite appeared to be dead. He – at least, Kant assumed it was a he, it could have just as easily been a woman – resembled a pile of rags in the centre of the cell. But the body would not be removed for a long time, until it was absolutely certain that it was indeed dead. The curators of this place had been fooled before by one of their charges playing dead, but only once.

Heiden Kant supposed there was a reason that to get to the shrine, one had to pass through this dank stone corridor lined with cells. He guessed this had once been a wine cellar, situated as it was beneath one of the finer houses in this district. Though the house was outwardly handsome it had seen no refurbishment or new furnishings for decades, because its real purpose was not to act as the seat of some rich burgher family but as a place for similarly driven people to gather.

‘One day you will wake up to blackness!’ cried the man in the first cell. The glimpse Kant had got of him suggested the kinds of sores and buboes that accompanied a concoction of diseases. He would be dead soon, like his fellow inmate across the corridor, unless he was animated by some force other than wholesome human life.

It was a strange combination of rooms that lay beyond the door at the end of the cell corridor. On the one hand it was lavish, with a deep rug taken from elsewhere in the house, wood-panelled walls and a chandelier that cast the equivalent of daylight into the windowless underground room. Fine cabinets and bookshelves stood against the walls, along with a fanciful circular map of the world hung on one wall. Its imaginary continents butted up against the known states of the Old World.

But it was also a grimly practical place. Where a feasting table or study desk might have been, there was a stone slab on four sturdy legs, its surface scored with knife marks and darkened by layers of bloodstains, still visible as dim ghosts across the pale surface in spite of diligent scrubbing. One of the glass-fronted cabinets held not curios or a set of finest tableware, but dozens of medical implements, scalpels and forceps, and other strange devices of metal with uncertain purpose. Among them was a trepanning drill with leather straps to keep it fixed to the skull of the subject. Beside the map on the wall was a medical chart, not Imperial in origin but florid and colourful with annotations in an unfamiliar language, its charting of the body’s innards as fanciful as the made-up lands on the map. Another cabinet held dozens of skulls, their craniums marked up with precise measurements as if they served as a library of criminal types and the corresponding dimensions of their heads. It was a favourite subject of doctors in the Empire, Kant knew – the way a man’s criminal or lunatic tendencies could be judged by examination of some physical characteristic.

Such beliefs would not be beyond the man who stood reading beside the dissection slab. He was a tall and broad-shouldered man whose heavy dark-brown robes did not quite conceal a layer of chainmail. A golden pendant of Sigmar’s twin-tailed comet hung around his neck. His head was shaven and his eyes bright blue, set in a face that could have been cut from a block of stone. Strips of parchment, with prayers written in a cramped and obsessive hand, were pinned to his robes, and wrapped around the haft of the hammer that hung from a loop on his belt. It was a warhammer, and though it was as brightly polished as a family heirloom, Kant knew that it had seen more use than most.

‘Witch hunter,’ said Kant with a bow of his head. ‘I am expected, I believe.’

The man held up a silencing finger, not taking his eyes off his book. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘If you were to walk back up the stairs and out through the front door of this house, and into the streets of Altdorf, what would you see?’

Kant swallowed. He had met this man before, though on a few occasions and never on his own, and he knew of the strange ways in which he conducted himself. He was as likely to bury the head of that warhammer in Kant’s chest as to break a smile at him. And he had heard how much the witch hunter liked to test people.

‘The people of the Empire,’ replied Kant, ‘whom we are sworn to protect.’

‘Sworn?’ replied the Witch Hunter. ‘I made no such oath. Oh, I have sworn many. So have you. But not one made specific mention of protecting the people of this land from… from what? From harm?’

‘From corruption.’

The witch hunter closed the book and placed it on the slab. ‘Corruption,’ he said, ‘is the answer. On any street. In any home. In the bunks of any poor house and debtor’s gaol, in the pinnacles of palaces. Corruption. That is the answer, Heiden Kant. My apologies – Magister Heiden Kant, is that not so?’

‘It is so, Lord Argenos,’ said Kant.

‘The last time we spoke you were an acolyte of the Light Order,’ said Argenos. ‘How the time passes. It marches on towards the End Times, and at every step we bleed to claw back a little of the pure from the darkness.’

‘I know,’ said Kant. ‘I have seen it. Beneath the Imperial Palace I saw it manifest. That was when I knew I had to join the Silver Hammer.’

‘No, Kant, you have not seen it. You do not see what I do. What you saw was the ultimate distillation of evil. One of the rare occasions when its symptoms wax foul enough to be seen with an ignorant eye. No, when I speak of corruption, I speak of what ignorant men call normality. Do you understand, Magister Kant? If you do not strive for purity, if you do not fight for it with every breath, then you are not an innocent or a citizen or anything else that we should be protecting. You are the enemy. Those people you think to protect are nothing more than beds of ordure in which the seeds of heresy can take root. Were you to protect them then you would be aiding the enemy and you would deserve to meet your end on this slab, just like the sorcerers who conjured the thing you saw beneath the palace. Not a comforting thought, is it, magister?’

Kant said nothing.

‘But you are on the right path.’ Witch Hunter Argenos crossed the room and laid a heavy mailed hand on Kant’s shoulder. ‘So few are. That is why we band together as the order of the Silver Hammer. And you will reach the end of that path, and see the world for what it is. And I imagine congratulations are in order for the advancement of your rank.’

‘Not at all,’ said Kant. ‘It was some time ago now.’

‘A wizard of the Light is a valuable ally,’ said Argenos. ‘We have counted many among our ranks before. The banishment of the unrighteous and the casting of protective magic are boons that no hunter of witches would ever undervalue. I test you sternly, Heiden Kant, precisely because you may become so valuable to us. I will not let a resource such as you fall by the wayside and be lost to the corruption of the ignorant world. Sit.’

Argenos indicated a chair uncomfortably close to the cabinet with the skulls. Kant took it anyway. Argenos himself sat and let his hammer rest against the stone floor. Kant guessed the chamber had once been a servant’s quarters, repurposed along with the rest of the house. The Order of the Silver Hammer, though Kant had met very few of its members, had resources to command. This was just one of many places throughout the Empire the order owned for the use of its members, and Argenos, though a senior figure in the order, was not the highest and was but one of many. Kant understood him to be the order’s member in charge of affairs in Altdorf. Perhaps there was a shadowy circle of pure masters above him, meeting somewhere in deepest secret to plan the salvation of mankind. Perhaps one day Kant himself would join them, though he banished that conceited thought from his mind.

‘You know that Grand Magister Elrisse is dead,’ said Kant.

‘I do,’ said Argenos.

‘It bodes us ill.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Not just for the Light Order,’ continued Kant. ‘For all the Colleges of Magic. He died in a duel with Grand Master Zhaal of the Gold Order.’

‘Then the troubles between the two orders are ended?’ said Argenos.

‘We hope,’ said Kant.

‘We must have the Light. I have performed many exorcisms and witnessed many more, and the Lore of Light is one of the most powerful instruments we can bring to bear against the daemon. Shame on us all if these children’s rivalries deny us that instrument.’

‘That is why I came to see you, Lord Argenos.’ Kant leaned forward, ignoring the stares from the skulls on the shelves beside him. ‘It may not have been a rivalry as petty as it seems.’

Argenos nodded, as if this was no surprise to him. ‘You smell corruption,’ he said.

‘The hand of the enemy,’ agreed Kant. ‘What do you know of the incident at the Temple of Shallya?’

‘That the church of that noble goddess denies all suggestions of violence in her temple and that Mother Heloise is suddenly no longer the Matron of Altdorf,’ said Argenos. ‘And that blood was shed, and that magic was the means of bloodletting. And that this and the doom of Grand Magister Elrisse are not entirely unconnected.’

‘It was a summit, supposed to quell the feud between the Light and the Gold. Instead it became bloodshed. A great shame for both orders, and one in which magisters of both lost their lives.’

Argenos thought about this for a long moment. ‘The arrogance of wizards?’ he said at length. ‘Or the hand of another?’

‘That is why I am here. There was another hand stirring that pot. I have contacted through the Silver Hammer’s means the lodgings of Mother Heloise, and ascertained that she and I both agree to what we felt there, the moment before the first spells flew.’

‘What?’ said Argenos.

‘The daemon.’

Argenos breathed out a long, considered breath, and nodded his head as if he had expected to hear those words from the moment Kant walked into his sanctum. ‘What do you know of it?’

‘That before I joined the Light Order I served as an apprentice to the exorcist Helmut Vanhagel of Nuln, and that I felt the touch of the daemon as a clammy hand at the back of my mind whenever we were called to a victim who was genuinely possessed. That I felt it again under the Imperial Palace, at the exorcism of Princess Astrid. And that I felt it once more in the Temple of Shallya. Mother Heloise has also seen many cases of possession and corruption caused by contact with the agents of the enemy. She felt it, too. To her it is a stench, the stink of the otherworld. It was disguised, but it was there, in her temple.’

‘What evidence do you have that the daemonic was present?’

‘Aside from the testimony of two who have encountered it before? None, Lord Argenos. Unless you count the fact that one of the magisters present did murder against his fellow wizards, and in doing so precipitated a slaughter on holy ground.’

‘Then what would you have the Silver Hammer do, Magister Kant?’ said Argenos. ‘It is no small matter to interrogate a member of the colleges of Altdorf. It is not so mean a matter as entering the house of a private citizen and dragging him off to the cells. There will be consequences. Emperor Eckhardt is mostly ignorant of our activities but storming into the Pyramid of Light would bring us to his attention, and not for praise.’

‘Watch them,’ said Kant. ‘It may not be within the Order of Light that the corruption lies. The Gold Order, perhaps. Maybe even the Church of Shallya, though I can vouch for the purity of Mother Heloise herself. Watch them, and countenance moving against the Light Order if it is necessary.’

‘You think it will be necessary, magister?’

Kant did not answer right away. He turned to the cabinet with the skulls, and saw now the lower shelves had other bones: femurs, clavicles, pelvises. ‘You said the enemy are everywhere,’ he said.

‘Everywhere,’ said Argenos.

‘These are the bones of some of them?’

‘From the gallows of Talabheim and Nuln,’ said Argenos. ‘One of our number collected them and bequeathed them to the Silver Hammer. He wanted to understand what physical characteristics were most common to those in thrall to the daemon.’

‘What did he find?’

‘That there are none,’ said Argenos. ‘That the enemy will use the comely and symmetrical vessel just as readily as the lumpen brow and the murderer’s thumb. But he kept collecting them, to serve as instruction that the enemy will use anyone, anyone at all, who is not protected by the shield of purity and suspicion.’

‘If I were of the enemy,’ said Kant, ‘and I wished to engage in a grand conspiracy, a work to do great malice to the people of the Empire, I would seek to find a place where many brilliant and powerful people could make common cause away from outsiders’ eyes. Where knowledge and items of power could be found and acquired. Where anything at all could be hidden, any outsider could be blinded to all that happens inside, a place which was itself invisible to all but those I permitted within. And do you know what place I would choose?’

‘Enlighten me, magister,’ said Argenos.

‘I would choose one of the colleges of Altdorf. And among them, I would choose the Order of Light.’

‘And you believe,’ said Witch Hunter Argenos, ‘that such a conspiracy exists?’

‘I believe nothing yet,’ said Kant. ‘But the slaughter at the Temple was sparked by something, and within the Light Order is the most likely source for its origin. I will do what I can to watch from within, and I will seek others to help in my vigilance, but no matter what I find I cannot fight it on my own.’

‘You will not be on your own,’ said Argenos. ‘We are many. More than you realise, for our numbers must be hidden. And you can trust in our order. We will be watching.’

Kant bowed his head. ‘My thanks, Lord Argenos.’

‘No thanks is needed, Magister Kant. We are at war.’

‘And we will win.’

‘Yes, magister,’ agreed Argenos. ‘Though it take till the end of time. Though all of us will be long be dead when the final trumpet is blown. We will win.’

They were just beastmen.

They had lived in the forests and forgotten valleys of the Empire since before history. Along with the greenskins, there had always been beastmen. They roamed in packs, founded filthy warrens in the densest woods, killed and pillaged at random when they were moved to pause in battling for supremacy among themselves. Walking like men but with goatish, bestial features, a beastman was a symbol of everything that opposed civilisation. Children were terrified by tales of how beastmen would snatch them away at night if they didn’t say their prayers. Pilgrims swapped tales of red eyes winking in the forested night, waiting for a dawdling traveller to lag behind his fellows.

Sometimes, a leader emerged among the beastmen, or a population of them was driven out of their stomping grounds. Then an army of them might march, a giant herd moving as one to raze and murder as they went. In those times the aristocrats of the Empire raised their troops and took to the field, to drive the hordes of beastmen back into whatever holes they had crawled out of.

Such it was in that season, where inhuman creatures swarmed in the darkness and left whole towns devoid of inhabitants. A host of beastmen was abroad, and it was heading for Reikland. Armies marched out to engage them but these beastmen were cunning in the extreme, not content to simply charge forwards and meet whatever enemy stood in their way, but instead to stalk and vanish, outflank and refuse battle, as if they were led by some instinct not of a savage beast but a feral survivor, something that knew the ways of men and had no intention of dying to them. They were still just beastmen, just animals, but of a strange and cunning demeanour.

It was clear what they were not. They were not rats that walked like men, as some dangerous rumours held it. The learned men and the leaders of the Empire were very stern in that respect, and quashed all such talk where they could. There were no ratmen, much less an organised and intelligent species that laired in their thousands beneath the streets of Imperial cities. That was the kind of talk that sparked panic and chaos. No, they were nothing more than beastmen.

It was among the hills of eastern Reikland that the army of the Emperor Eckhardt III finally brought the invaders to battle. In the wake of Sigmar’s conquests the area had been cleared for farmland and was dotted with villages and farmhouses. The open countryside and plentiful pillaging made it a prime invasion route for an army hoping to reach the walls of Reikland’s capital. The beastmen seemed to be playing their hand now, gathering in thousands to drive on to Reikland and win whatever victory their gods had promised. It would be the only chance to face them in the field before they struck Altdorf, and perhaps there would never be another chance to pin their army down.

The wizards joined the Imperial army as it gathered in the three towns of Pfiefendorff, Holn and Drufenhaag. Battle magisters from the Colleges of Magic had joined the call from the Imperial Court that had brought knights from the Order of the Blazing Sun to march side by side with the Emperor’s own Reiksguard, and drawn militia and state units from across the Imperial heartland. The beastmen had moved swiftly, as they were wont to do, using every hidden and underground path to seep their way from whatever pits they inhabited to the large and prosperous town of Dunkelsteiff. It was unlikely that anyone had escaped Dunkelsteiff alive, for not even tales of swift death and glinting red eyes had escaped the place. From a distance, scouts had reported the town and the fields around it smouldering and barren.

The beastmen had needed time to gather their force together. Quite probably they were coming from across the Empire and maybe beyond, welded into a single force by the will of some prophet among them. The men of the Empire had needed time, too, for gathering an army was no small undertaking. It had needed the presence of the Emperor himself to get it done, and thousands of troops had choked the country lanes as they slogged their way towards the mustering points.

Sorteliger Maarten Scarfinkrae of the Celestial Order had led the magisters who joined the Emperor’s army at Holn. Scarfinkrae was a battle magister, a wartime diviner who sought out portents of victory or defeat in the stars, or in the daytime by any one of a dozen means of divination with which he was proficient. He had selected the magisters who were to join him, bringing the battle magisters the colleges of Altdorf could spare in the short time permitted. Kardiggian of the Order of Light. Grunhelder of the Order of Amber, a master of the Lore of Beasts who, it was said, spent more time in the form of a monstrous black bear than as a man. Rootwarder Wseric of the Jade Order. Scarfinkrae had also suggested that a magister be given the task of gathering what understanding could be gleaned about the beastmen, to ascertain what about them had made them so difficult to bring to battle on the Empire’s terms.

For this task Kardiggian had suggested his order’s pre-eminent mind in the area of research – Comprehender Egrimm van Horstmann, whose work on the hidden writings of Vries had gained him no small acclaim across the colleges of Altdorf.

And so it was that van Horstmann was in Holn the night the beastmen made their move.

The stink of the decaying was familiar. Already men were dying. The men stationed at Pfiefendorff had been struck almost as one by a virulent and debilitating disease that left them lying in moaning heaps in the houses they had taken as billets, unable to be roused to battle even when the scouts galloped back in panic and the regimental trumpets began to sound. The smell of disease wafted through the night to Holn, and van Horstmann knew that the battle was near. It smelled like Kriegsmutter Field. Soon it would look like Kriegsmutter Field too.

Van Horstmann left the simple farmhouse on the town’s outskirts. Outside already, the men of a Reiklander militia, who had slept in the rooms above him, were gathering in the yard. Chickens ran around clucking as the militia leader, apparently self-appointed, read a prayer to Shallaya for preservation and to Taal for the swiftness and aim of the huntsman. These were simple men who carried bows their fathers had probably shot before them, with the well-built shoulders and tough hands of those who had practised with their weapons since they were old enough to hold a bow. For a uniform they wore a red scarf around one arm. Otherwise they were dressed much as they might be if they were working the fields of whatever town they had come from.

It was a patchwork army, thought van Horstmann as he made his way towards the town square. Everywhere they were emerging from their billets and forming up. The wealthier or better trained, those who served as standing state troops or were drawn from the sons of the nobility, were helping one another strap on their armour. Others were swapping dark tales of what these beastmen did when they captured you. Many glanced nervously at van Horstmann as he passed. Few men, even natives of Altdorf, were used to seeing a wizard among them who openly wore the robes of a college of Altdorf and carried a staff with which to do unpredictable things to the fabric of reality. Perhaps they were afraid of him, perhaps they were glad to have him on their side, regarding him with the respect one might reserve for a particularly sharp blade. Perhaps the two balanced themselves out.

Ahead, the sky flashed. The stars seemed to be pulsing down at the centre of Holn like signal lanterns. Van Horstmann could see Sorteliger Scarfinkrae standing on the plinth that held the statue of Holn’s mayor, examining the stars with a hand-held lensed device of great complexity. He muttered his findings to a trio of scribes who wrote down what he saw there. Scarfinkrae wore the deep-blue robes of the Celestial Order, embroidered with stars and planets, and a pair of spectacles with multiple lenses that could be folded into place. He had a long and mournful face with a turned-down mouth and long, straggly grey beard.

‘What news from tomorrow?’ called van Horstmann.

‘Clouds and smoke,’ replied Scarfinkrae. ‘The future is clouded. I cannot see. There is bloodshed, yes, but beyond that I see nothing. The portents turn their faces away. But that in itself is an omen. They are afraid, Comprehender van Horstmann. They shy away from this time and this place.’

Scarfinkrae stepped down from the statue’s podium. ‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘Fates converge on you. I can say no more than that.’

The sound of hooves approached. A trio of scouts were trotting along the town’s main road, as fast as the wagon ruts would allow them.

‘They’re moving on the town!’ cried the lead scout. He was probably a huntsman, pressed into service because of his horsemanship and knowledge of the area. ‘The hillside’s bloody thick with them!’

The buzz of alarm that already ran through the town rose to a panicked babble. Soldiers were running from their billets and taking up position at the barricades they had hastily set up between the buildings on Holn’s eastern edge. Into the square rode a dozen or so knights in the yellow and black livery of the Blazing Suns, their horses armoured and caparisoned with the heraldry of some of the Empire’s finest families. Handgunners in the yellow and blue of Reikland’s state troops were sharing out ammunition and powder for their firearms, the latest matchlocks from the armouries of Nuln. Hundreds of men, thousands, had garrisoned Holn through the night, arriving in columns marching the country lanes, and now before they had forced a decent night’s sleep out of the town’s paltry bunks and farmhouse floors they had to make ready for war.

Van Horstmann entered one of the buildings, a three-storey inn with guest rooms on the upper floors. He found a window on the top floor and leaned against the sill, looking out onto the darkness.

By Sigmar, he could see them. The hillside was dark against a moonlit sky, but against that blackness he could just make out a deeper darkness. It seethed, as if alive. Because it was alive.

Thousands of creatures, indistinct but moving as if scurrying rapidly down the hillside towards the town, a black tide of them.

‘To the barricades!’ a sergeant was yelling, accompanied by perhaps fifty men as they massed at the crossroads at the end of the street. One of them set up a standard with the crest of some Reikland noble family and the others formed up with bows ready to shoot, sticking handfuls of arrows in the dirt beside them so they could nock and fire them more quickly.

Van Horstmann could hear the chittering of the horde now. The smell of them was mingling with the miasma from the plague billets. Raised voices echoed across Holn as the men stationed there took up their positions.

It would have been better, perhaps, if the Imperial army could have waited until dawn and gone on the offensive, marching on the beastmen positions before they could launch their own assault. But the enemy had played their hand first, and the Imperial force had no choice but to dig in and let the tide of the enemy hit them.

Some of these soldiers were nothing more than boys. Among them were fathers and sons, brothers, bands of old friends from tiny villages along the Reik. Van Horstmann could tell the ones who had fought in the Empire’s plentiful wars before – they wore dented and blood-tarnished armour, the greying remnants of their campaign uniforms, the scars of the battles they had survived.

Skarfinkrae was in the street below, on the front line. He was casting handfuls of bones on the ground, and from the glowing patterns they scribbled in the dirt he was reading the tides of battle. He sketched symbols in the air with a finger and they hung there in front of him. Van Horstmann recognised runes of fate, fire and destruction. The Celestial Order specialised in reading the future, but when it came to war, they called down anger from the heavens above. Skarfinkrae was asking the stars for their aid, and some of them seemed to grow in brightness as if they were leaning down towards the earth to watch.

‘Here they come!’ someone yelled. The chittering became a scream, closer and closer, and now van Horstmann could make out what they were.

Rats. A swarm of them, thousands upon thousands. Each one was the size of a dog, a filthy thing of matted fur, yellow teeth and pink wormlike tails.

So, thought van Horstmann, not beastmen after all. Something else. Perhaps something worse.

‘Volley fire!’ cried the sergeant in the street below. Fifty arrows thrummed into the air, falling in an arc towards the approaching rats. It would have been difficult for any arrow to miss if the archers had tried, but there was no dent visible in the approaching swarm where they fell. There were too many rats to see if any had been skewered – surely they had, but they would have been few among the swarm. All along the Imperial line volleys of arrows were arcing across the darkness into the mass of the enemy, wave after wave of them.

A preacher was praying loudly, recalling the strength of Sigmar when he cast the greenskins out of Reikland and imploring the Empire’s god to lend that strength to the soldiers who fought in his name. A banner with the initials of Emperor Eckhardt III unfurled on the top of Holn’s mayoral residence, the grandest building in town, and archers were setting up on the roof around it.

The rats swarmed into the opening to the street ahead, surging down it towards the knot of archers. Another volley streaked almost horizontally into the swarm, and this time van Horstmann could see their bodies thrown down, the rats behind surging around them. Fifty arrows must have found fifty black-furred bodies, but there were hundreds more.

‘Down your bows!’ cried the sergant. ‘Take up your blades! Here they come!’

Van Horstmann ran down the stairs and into the street. The soldiers were terrified. The sergeant was doing well to keep his own voice steady. He was a veteran, van Horstmann guessed, a deeply lined and scarred face with a grizzled beard and a grimy uniform of black and grey with slashed sleeves. He turned to look at van Horstmann as he approached, and van Horstmann knew what he must be thinking.

Here was a wizard. A worker of wonders. Perhaps he and his men would be saved by some grand miracle called down from the aethyr.

‘Give me room,’ said van Horstmann. The men before him scrambled away, leaving a gap behind the barricade into which van Horstmann stepped.

The eyes of the vermin were red, and they winked brightly in the starlight. Van Horstmann leaned on his staff.

‘It will not end here,’ he whispered to the golden mask at the top of his staff. ‘Not here and not now, Lizbeta. I promise.’

The rats were halfway down the street, pouring through the windows and doors of the houses that lined it. In a moment they would be on van Horstmann, dragging him down with a thousand tiny, sharp teeth, stripping his body of its flesh and leaving him a gory pile of gnawed bones in their wake.

Time slowed, and as well as the vermin-choked street in front of him, van Horstmann stood before the fortress. It was glowering and ornate now, the sky overhead red and shot through with lightning. The ground was torn and barren, broken by clusters of bleached bones. The doors ground open, revealing a host of gargoyles and grotesques carved into the walls and ceiling of the chamber inside. In their mouths and eyesockets were the gemstones of crystallised power.

Snakes slithered along the floor. Van Horstmann forced his lurching stomach down and they receded. He turned his thoughts to three motes of power: protection, fire and the purity of the Light.

The fortress did not like it. The fortress wanted the black jewels of Dark magic to rain down, the magic of ruin and corruption. But van Horstmann denied its wish. The aethyr was conducive to Dark magic here, perhaps because the enemy shamans used it with such abandon. But there were witnesses here. He could only use the Dark away from the eyes of those who might recognise it for what it was.

The fortress was gone. Foul yellow teeth filled a hundred squealing mouths. Van Horstmann drove his staff into the ground and let the power he had dredged up from his soul flow through him, earthing into the dirt of the street, radiating out of him.

The tide of rats broke against the barricades. They surged up like a wave, leaping towards him.

They were met by the wall of white flame that rushed out from van Horstmann. As they passed through it they were incinerated, their bodies stripped of fur and muscle. Charred bones rained against him – tiny curved ribs, malformed skulls, pattering onto the ground.

The force of the rats’ charge meant they could not turn away. They surged into the zone of flame around van Horstmann, burning in their scores. Van Horstmann gritted his teeth as he felt the force of raw magic pulsing through his veins and organs, burning as if his blood had been replaced with boiling water. He yelled, forcing the pain down, and the wall of flame flared outwards and died.

He dropped to one knee. He willed himself not to relent and magic rippled down the skin of his free hand, gathering at his fingertips. More vermin leapt at him and he sprayed a gout of white flame at them. They were incinerated so thoroughly that not even bones remained.

Silence fell. The soldiers crouched by the barricade, shuddering with shock at the conflagration that had just filled the street, blinking its glare out of their eyes. The white flame had not harmed them though it had raged around them, and the street was now full of smouldering bones.

Van Horstmann stood in a clearing in the remains, where there had fallen only ash.

‘Take… Take up your posts!’ ordered the sergeant. ‘There will be more!’

A yellow ball of flame rushed overhead, impacting against the hillside – a chained comet, conjured and thrown by Scarfinkrae. In its fire was illuminated the approaching army. The giant rats had been their vanguard and now the beastmen themselves were marching, ill-disciplined mobs of ragged slave-creatures alongside regiments of armoured beastmen carrying halberds and standards. Their exact details were impossible to make out in their hoods and helms, their bodies hidden by patchwork armour and swathes of rags.

Were there goat’s legs under there? Or vermin covered in matted fur?

They were only beastmen. That was what every regular soldier had to think as he stood there waiting for the order to attack. A wizard had more freedom of thought, and a wizard had read more of the Empire’s history, of the battles that were not fairy tales but attested events, where the ratmen had been not imaginary but a direct threat to every man and woman in the Empire. When their generations-long plans came to fruition they emerged to claim the surface world for themselves, and when they were put down a pall of unbelief came down to obscure the truth from the collective memory of men. It took a man like van Horstmann to put the pieces together and see the truth for what it was. And it took a man like him to realise that the truth had to stay hidden, or the knowledge of the ratmen – the skaven, as scholars had once called them, when they were free to write about them – would destabilise every city in every province.

And there, among the throng, was a single skaven with pale grey fur. It was carried on a platform of lashed bones by a horde of skaven slaves. It carried a staff topped with a metal sphere, off which electricity was arcing, earthing into the bodies of the slaves. It had one eye, the other replaced with a chunk of glowing green rock, and a twisted pair of horns grew from its brow.

Overhead, Skarfinkrae flew over the inn and alighted on its roof. ‘Comprehender!’ he called down. ‘The enemy approaches! Can we hold?’

‘I think not,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘But then, you are the one who can read the future.’

‘And I agree,’ said Scarfinkrae. ‘We are many, but our lines were unprepared. Already they bend and break. The Emperor’s standard has risen and the Reiksguard are massing in Drufenhaag. They will sally forth and bring the fight to the enemy.’

‘Then we must join them!’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Sergeant! Can you send out the word? The Emperor advances and so shall we. We will not wait in these streets to die. We will bring death to the beastmen.’

‘I can,’ said the sergeant. ‘Bugler! Sound the advance! Send the word down the line!’

And so the deciding move of the battle was made, the Imperial army advancing in the wake of its Emperor.

Eckhardt III was not the most martial of emperors. Some before him had belonged on the battlefield, eschewing statesmanship and the responsibilities of rule to charge across the Old World leading campaign after conquest. In this they echoed Sigmar, the first of them, who had won the Empire by war. Eckhardt was an administrator and a diplomat, a stabilising influence chosen because he was unlikely to make too many enemies among the nobility. His role was to help the stability the Empire still craved after the Great War of Magnus the Pious, not to put enemies to the sword in person.

And yet, at what would later be called the Battle of Drufenhaag, the Emperor rode at the head of his Reiksguard Knights. They were the strongest sons of Reikland, and their mightiest and best-bred war steed was reserved for the Emperor. The jet-black charger, the size of a shire horse and armoured in black and gold, led the thunderous charge. The Emperor’s lance was tipped with a starmetal blade gifted by an ambassador from the elves of Ulthuan and his red plume was cut from the tail of a cockatrice.

More than a hundred knights rode with him. Along with them were double that number of mounted militia, armed with whatever armour their fathers had handed down to them and riding horses trained for hunting. Many horses shied or bolted in the wrong direction, others threw their riders or fell. But the charge did not wait for them, and the Emperor was the first man to hit the host of ratmen in the skaven army’s centre.

Thousands of beastmen had advanced in a great mob. Those leading them had probably expected to fight in the towns, storming the Imperial defences. Instead they were not ready for the Imperial counter-attack that slammed into them. Eckhardt vanished in a mass of squirming, panicking bodies and shattered spears as the Reiksguard hammered home beside him. It looked like nothing so much as a meteor hitting the enemy army or a volcanic eruption beneath it. Bodies were thrown into the air by the impact. Beastmen turned to run and were trampled by those around them. Hundreds fled at the first impact, the enemy rear lines emptying in seconds, their leaders shrieking in disgust as their clanmates dropped their spears and scampered away on all fours.

Those knights must have seen the ratmen’s faces and their squirming tails. They must have realised they were facing the shadowy antagonists of those childhood tales, the ones their parents forbade them to tell, of rats that walked like men and wanted to rule the world. But they were not children any more. They were men, who had sworn to defend the Empire and their Emperor, and they showed no sign of that realisation as they fought on and ground the enemy beneath the hooves of their warhorses.

And suddenly, everywhere was death. Militia marauded forwards into the fire of enemy war machines, chunks of evilly glowing rock falling among them and the bullets from crude iron rifles sniping them down. A horrifying creation, like a great rolling wheel that fired bolts of green-blue lightning in every direction, was loosed from the beastmen lines and carved a bloody, charred path through several scores of men from a state regiment from Averland.

The Celestial wizard Scarfinkrae flew over the battlefield and rained down bolts of orange flame. He cast runes into the sky which shattered and sent shards of starfire down among the clanrats. As the Empire infantry and the enemy hordes met, the front line disappeared in a mass of bodies. There Rootwarder Wseric stood, waves of deep-green Jade magic pulsing off him, the grass growing thick and deep as he knitted the wounds of fallen soldiers together. Magister Kardiggian of the Light Order was there too, and around him blazed circles of protection that beastman spears and war machines could not penetrate.

Somewhere in the bedlam, the Amber wizard Grunhelder died. He had shifted into his bestial form and charged at a towering horror of flesh, like a hundred giant rats melded into one foul monster, and when he lost his battle against the thing his death-scream sent waves of raw magic surging across the battlefield.

Bursts of white flame flashed as the Imperial infantry charge arrowed deep into the hordes of slave-warriors the enemy sent forwards. The slaves were wretched and frenzied creatures, frothing at their boil-encrusted lips, dressed in rags and armed with nothing more than sticks. claws and teeth. But there were thousands of them and with every step the Imperial advance slowed, bogged down by the enemy, whose commanders were content to weigh the human attackers down with a sheer mass of bodies.

The white fire was coming from the hands of a Light magister who strode forwards blasting bodies apart. He left the soldiers around him behind as he pushed on, even as he stumbled with fatigue from the excess of magic coursing through him.

They had wizards, these ratmen.

The ratman that van Horstmann had spotted in the flashing of its lightning was one of the skaven wizards. He had read a treatise on the skaven from a period of Imperial history in which it had been acceptable to believe in them, and it speculated that the role of wizard, priest, and king might be contained within one such skaven, born albino and horned, the marks of whatever thing the ratmen worshipped. This was what van Horstmann had seen. This was what he fought his way towards, throwing skaven out of his path with blasts of purifying flame that seared his muscles and veins to force out into reality.

On its bone platform, held aloft by a gaggle of scarred and tail-docked slaves, the grey skaven wizard screeched. Its incisors were long and yellow, drooling with pallid slime, and the stone in its eye socket flared bright green as if with anger. It pointed its staff right at van Horstmann. It recognised in the Light wizard an enemy, an adversary beyond a normal man, no doubt because van Horstmann had carved a smouldering path already through dozens of lesser skaven.

The slaves chittered and fled, sensing that their master would think nothing of immolating them with a spell aimed at van Horstmann. The platform sank to the ground and the grey skaven did not even bother to admonish the slaves who abandoned him. Perhaps when the battle was done and van Horstmann was dead it would string them up, or quarter them, or sacrifice them on an altar, or whatever these creatures did to sate their anger.

It spat a string of high-pitched noises at van Horstmann. Though van Horstmann did not understand the skaven tongue – no man ever had as far as he knew – the challenge was clear.

‘Men see you in their nightmares,’ replied van Horstmann, knowing the skaven would know the sense behind his words, too. ‘But your kind have nightmares too, and when I am done with you, skaven nightmares will be about me.’

The skaven laughed to see this hairless, tailless creature who wanted to match magic with a grey seer. Black lightning flickered around its staff and it drew a chunk of stone from a pouch on the belt of its filthy once-purple robes – the same stone with which it had replaced one of its eyes. It crumbled the stone and inhaled the dust, its eye growing wide.

The lightning flared black and red. With a gesture of its whole body the skaven hurled the black lightning bolt at van Horstmann.

The aethyr was not the real world. Lightning did not travel in an instant if it was aimed at one who could manipulate the energies of the aethyr like the caster could. The lightning slowed and coiled like a snake as the skaven tried to force it through van Horstmann’s magical defences. He had meditated for days at a time on the rituals that cast permanent enchantments of counter-spelling and mystical defences around him. It bought him the time to cast a circle in the air in front of him against which the lightning crashed.

It kept hammering against the magical shield. Van Horstmann felt himself pushed back, his own efforts matched by the skaven.

The albino ratman was strong. This was Dark magic, dredged up from a place in the aethyr that a preacher or a poet might equate to one of the hells of the Empire’s faith. The skaven’s mastery of it had been enough to win him lordship over a mighty army, and to make it follow him to win conquests among the lands of men.

Van Horstmann responded with a torrent of white flame that fell down from above, bathing him in it and shattering the magical link along which the lightning was flying. The grey skaven stumbled back, dazed for a moment by the force of van Horstmann’s mastery of Light magic.

The two were separated again. They circled for a couple of seconds, having tested each other out and not found one another wanting.

The grey skaven made the next move, but van Horstmann did not know it right away. He felt pain in his joints first, the wrenching in his belly. It was indistinguishable from the fatigue of battle magic until it grew, flaring up and down his limbs.

His hands were crusted suddenly with boils that welled up from beneath his skin. He could feel them on his torso too, and his throat. His mouth was suddenly dry, his tongue feeling like it was big enough to fill his whole mouth and his fingers now bent into claws.

The staff dropped from his hand. Van Horstmann coughed and black phlegm spattered his sleeve.

Dark magic. Plague magic, the lores of death and decay. Such things were written of only by madmen, and a Light wizard would not know anything more than that they existed and that to know them would be to invite corruption and death. A Light wizard would have no defence at all.

Van Horstmann was not just a Light wizard. By day he was, and he had absorbed as much knowledge from the order’s library as anyone ever had in its history, But by night, he studied what Tzeentch had willed him to know – the ways of Dark magic and the daemon, of things forbidden, and he was all the more powerful for it.

Van Horstmann caught the strand of magic that the grey skaven was working. He reeled it up with his mind like a fisherman drawing in a net. He could grasp the slippery, deceitful weavings of Dark magic because he knew them too. Perhaps he knew them, in an academic sense at least, as well as the grey skaven. Certainly the ratman did not expect van Horstmann to grasp that working of magic, turn it around and cast that net back at the skaven.

It did not take to the grey skaven’s body as it had to van Horstmann’s. He had not expected it to. Probably the thing was host to enough diseases to wipe out an Imperial town anyway, and the skaven repelled the plague before it could erode its joints or blister its flesh. It did not matter for the time being.

Light magic was the magic of, among other things, purity. Van Horstmann opened his mind to the aethyr and let the magic flow through him unfocused and unworked. It flushed out his veins of the plague and the boils vanished. Light bled from his mouth and eyes, and all his senses were filled for the moment by the force of it. It was a risk – he was blind and deaf, and the skaven could have just scampered up to him and stabbed him if it had been quick enough. But the plague could not survive the force of such purity, and in another few seconds it would have killed him. He imagined it as black smoke blowing away on a white gale, dispersed and destroyed.

The next thing he saw was the grey skaven’s horned form silhouetted against a purple fire. It had rammed its staff into the ground and was clutching onto it as if to keep itself from being blown away. The fire raged up higher, tinting the whole battlefield with its darkness. The eyes of cowering skavenslaves glinted purple in it and they shivered with dread, mesmerised. They had seen it before. They feared it.

Bolts of purple flame shot into the sky and arced back down at van Horstmann, a shower of black comets aimed down at him. He thrust his hands into the air and felt the Light magic still burning through him spray out, describing a dome above his head. The purple-black fire slammed into the impromptu magical shield and battered him down to his knees, but it held, just.

A swarm of rats composed of chittering shadow flooded across the torn earth towards van Horstmann’s feet. He dropped the shield and let it erupt outwards, bursting the rat-shapes as the swarmed forwards.

The grey skaven was shrieking now and van Horstmann thought it was at itself, admonishing itself for not finishing off this creature, for being matched in magical strength in front of the slaves in whose eyes it should have been invincible.

Van Horstmann trawled through the sump of his mind where all the dark things were, all the sour memories and foetid emotions he had banished there for just such a time as this.

This part of his mind was infested with snakes.

Snakes of Light magic sprayed from his fingertips. They wound across the soil and snared around the ratman’s ankles, lashing up at its hands and throat. They tore the staff from its hands and one got a purchase around its neck. The skaven tore one hand free to grab the snake around its throat but it could not dislodge it.

The skaven was burning. The opposing forces of magic, the Light of van Horstmann’s spell and the Dark within the skaven, could not exist together and their instability ruptured everything around them.

Van Horstmann took his staff in both hands. A glowing point emerged from the end of the staff, a shard of Light magic concentrated and honed by a force of concentration that whitened van Horstmann’s knuckles. Ripples of power rolled up and down the staff as van Horstmann took deliberate steps towards the struggling skaven.

Its one natural eye rolled up at van Horstmann. Flecks of blood were in the foam around its limps. Its robes and fur were scorched away in patches showing red, burned skin beneath. Its tail was coiling and uncoiling in spasm. The magical snakes were dissipating, but the skaven only had to stay stricken for a few seconds more.

Van Horstmann was in striking distance. A wizard was not a fighting man. Not even the battle magisters could say that. It was magic they killed with, not blades or bows. But van Horstmann was not yet old, or obese, or crippled, as many magisters were. He could fight, if he had to.

He raised the staff, like a spear, with the point aiming down at the grey skaven. He drove it down, impaling the creature through the gut. He leaned on the staff, forcing the point deeper through its innards.

It screamed and squirmed, limbs thrashing. It looked nothing like a lord of its species any more, but like an animal killed by an incompetent slaughterman who had missed the killing blow. It was messy and loud. Blackish blood sprayed and the skaven convulsed now, eye rolled back, as van Horstmann twisted the staff and felt the point pass through the creature’s back and into the bloodsoaked earth.

Van Horstmann put a foot on the skaven’s throat and pinned it down. It was still drawing ragged, bloody breaths, but it could not move. Perhaps he had severed its spine, or perhaps the pain and shock had paralysed it.

The blade that van Horstmann drew from his robes had been cleaned dozens of time since he had used it last, but somehow it still kept the sheen of Magister Vek’s blood on its wavy sacrificial blade.

‘Your nightmares,’ said van Horstmann.

The point of the blade reached the place where the skaven’s one eye met the socket.

Again, van Horstmann went to work.

By dawn, the battle was already being called the Battle of Drufenhaag, and the Imperial scribes had begun writing down the story of the battle and the rolls of its notable dead. Van Horstmann had seen the aftermath of battle before at Kriegsmutter Field and had no wish to watch it unfold again, especially when the too-familiar smell began to waft down from the corpse-strewn hillside.

The beastmen – that was what they were to be called, by an unspoken agreement by everyone who had fought there – had fled as the Reiksguard shattered the heart of their line, the Imperial lines held fast and their leader had died somewhere in the heart of the slaughter. The battle had been won. Thousands of Imperial souls lay dead though, and so the celebration of victory would have to wait until the human bodies were safely out of sight in their mass graves.

Such was the scale of the ruination, the shock of the battle that still rang around the Imperial army after the break of dawn, that no one noticed the lone Light wizard making his way back towards the walls of Altdorf.

CHAPTER TEN

PESTILENTIUS

The Emperor Eckhardt III, being a Stirlander, was as common and coarse a man as might ever be found among the Imperial nobility. He wore the garb of an Emperor and carried, in a scabbard embroidered in red and gold, the runefang which was his badge of rank as the Elector Count of Stirland. His robe was lined with purple and trimmed with ermine and his armour was lacquered black and gold, custom-made for his frame in the armouries of Nuln. But he seemed to want to shrug it all off at the first opportunity, as if it were a skin for him to shed and reveal the rough, windburned Stirland son he had been born.

‘So,’ he said in the provincial accent that Altdorfers mocked behind his back, ‘there is no one in charge?’

‘That is true, your majesty,’ said Master Chanter Alric. He and the Emperor were walking up the main staircase that led from the Chanter’s Hall to the level of the pyramid on which the library was found. ‘In a sense.’

‘What sense is that?’ asked the Emperor. He was shorter than Alric, with a square jowly face that made him look like a much taller man who had been compressed. ‘The sense where there is a Grand Magister’s position but no one in it, or some other sense? Tell me, Master Chanter. You’re a man of learning.’

The palace staff who accompanied the Emperor had got used to him by now. One of them was Huygens, the minister who had met Alric and the late Grand Magister during the unfortunate incident with the previous Emperor’s daughter. Alric, however, had not acknowledged any recognition of the man. Another was a scribe whose task was to note down anything noteworthy to be discussed later – he was a young man, thin and grey of skin and eyes, in a simple brown robe. The last was a knight of the Reiksguard, the knightly brotherhood native to Reikland and traditional household troops of the Emperor. His armour was brightly polished and his visor was down, as if he anticipated some assassin to leap from the nonexistent shadows of the pyramid at any second.

‘The Light Order is not an army,’ said Alric. ‘It does not need a general to function.’

‘I care nothing about a general,’ said the Emperor grumpily, as if Alric was a functionary who had failed to lay out the appropriate garments of state in the morning. ‘I care about who I will call to account if there is another Great Fire, or some other catastrophe you bloody wizards call down. What if one of you burns down the whole Buchbinder District? What then? Am I supposed to haul the whole lot of you before my ministers at the palace? No, it must be one man to take responsibility. You’re not politicians. You don’t understand.’

The party reached the doorway to the Diviner’s Hall. There the senior magisters of the Light Order had gathered to receive the guest. The Diviner’s Hall was one of the most magnificent in a wholly magnificent building. When it was built the students of Teclis had sought out the finest fresco artists in the Old World to decorate it, and the walls and ceiling glowed blue with a sky filled with clouds on which sat sacred figures of Imperial history. Sigmar himself was one of them though only those who understood the symbolism would recognise the shirtless, wild-haired man with the scar in the shape of the double comet on his chest.

It was the first time van Horstmann had lain eyes on Emperor Eckhardt III since he had seen him sworn in. The Emperor wore the look of someone who was not necessarily particularly intelligent and could be manipulated by cunning people, and whose personal motivations did not run much beyond those of the domestic dog. But van Horstmann suspected that at least some of this was a cover, and that Eckhardt III was a more shrewd man than those around him gave him credit for. Most men of his station would have at least tried to affect a demeanour other than the provincial coarseness of a Stirlander. They would have employed people specifically to have them speaking and moving like a man born to the Imperial throne. But it suited Eckhardt III to have those surrounding him think him something of an idiot. That suggested that while he might be many disagreeable things, an idiot was not among them.

And, of course, he had got himself elected Emperor. Van Horstmann suspected that such a feat, as much as a cynic might put it down to luck, required a certain agility of mind.

The Emperor did not take one of the seats offered to him, which were arranged in a circle around an image of a complicated divinatory diagram rendered in mosaic on the chamber floor. He stood instead, one hand on the pommel of his runefang in the attitude of a habitual soldier. The Light Order’s magisters were compelled to stand as well, since one did not sit in the presence of a standing Emperor.

‘I am not a man given to a surfeit of words,’ began the Emperor. ‘It is the wish of the Imperial Court that the Light Order select a Grand Magister without delay.’

Facing the Emperor, along with van Horstmann, were Master Chanter Alric, Magisters Kardiggian, Vranas and Arcinhal, and even Magister Pendorf of the Fourth Circle who had been dredged up from the vaults for the occasion. Kardiggian was the Light Order’s most pre-eminent battle magister, a battlefield veteran. Vranas was one of its most powerful practitioners of exorcism while Arcinhal had perfected the protective rituals recently discovered in the works of Vries.

‘This is not so simple a matter, your Imperial majesty,’ said Vranas, who was probably the most diplomatically able of the senior magisters. ‘Each order has its own traditions for the selection of a Grand Magister, many of which were laid down under the auspices of Loremaster Teclis himself.’

‘I do not care, magister,’ replied the Emperor, ‘what that wretched elf decreed. Teclis isn’t here. He’s back in his fairy-tale land with all the other pointed-ears. I rule this empire, and that includes the orders of magic, whether you like to admit it or not.’

‘There are reasons for this other than the weight of tradition, your majesty,’ said Vranas. Van Horstmann was impressed at how unflustered Vranas was by the presence of the Emperor. ‘The position is one of great responsibility. There are only a few examples of the wrong choice being made in the appointment of a Grand Magister, but it has been disastrous in all cases. The matter is further complicated when the change is necessitated by the death of the previous Grand Magister. Most choose their own successors, ensure the choice is agreed upon by the rest of their order, and retire from the post before ill health or other circumstance determines it. If, as here, a Grand Magister dies in office without an agreed-upon successor, he must be properly mourned and his own wishes researched before the order can seek to replace him.’

‘I see,’ said Emperor Eckhardt III. ‘Do any of these order traditions outweigh the force of Imperial authority?’

Vranas glanced from side to side, almost imperceptibly, as if hoping for a signal from his fellow magisters. Van Horstmann gave him none and neither did anyone else.

‘They do not,’ said Vranas.

‘Then if there is no Grand Magister before the turning of the winter solstice,’ said Eckhardt, ‘I will appoint one from within your ranks. I will sign it into law if such is necessary.’

‘It will not be,’ said Vranas hurriedly.

‘If I may,’ said van Horstmann.

‘To whom am I speaking?’ said Eckhardt. ‘I know Alric and Vranas here, but I don’t know you.’

‘Comprehender van Horstmann,’ came the reply. ‘The Light Order’s own methods are arcane and time-consuming. They involve a combination of divinatory sessions, philosophical and practical debates and a ballot weighted by seniority among the magisters. It has been known to take the better part of a year and a half. And as Magister Vranas says, these are not merely traditional matters. If divination is ignored, the responsibilities of a Grand Magister will fall upon one whom the aethyr rejects. Our ritual magic will thus be disrupted and weakened. Moreover the Grand Magister’s own philosophies on magic colour the outlook of the whole order. He is a spiritual leader, not merely a temporal one. The whole order must understand them if they are not to have their work jarred into inconsequence by an unexpected shift in the theory of magic. These are questions of the greatest import, your majesty.’

Eckhardt regarded van Horstmann with a slight squint, as if he was sighting at him down a hunting rifle. ‘Do you know what is of great import to me, van… Hartmann?’

Van Horstmann, who did not think it politic to correct the Emperor, inclined his head in acknowledgement.

‘Blame!’ The Emperor banged a fist on the back of the chair beside him. ‘I see in this place great power, and men who wield that power without anyone outside having so much as a clue about what they are doing. What if one of you burns down a chunk of the city, like what happened in Wilhelm’s reign?’

‘The Bright Order’s magic is volatile in such a way,’ said Kardiggian hurriedly. ‘We have no such–’

‘That’s not the point!’ snapped the Emperor. ‘Whatever it is you do, what if it goes wrong and Altdorf wakes up to find a few dozen buildings gone? Or you exorcise something and it gets loose? Or whatever it is that you do that is dangerous, I’ll wager there’s something. What am I to tell the people? That you huddle in your pyramid without anyone being responsible to the outside world? What if there’s another duel, and innocents suffer because of it? Yes, I know about your duel. Sigmar’s rump, we saw the light show above the island, Altdorfers aren’t all blind and stupid. Am I to tell the people of the Empire that it is no one’s fault? That responsibility is shared across a whole secret order of mumbling wizards none of whom will be punished? No, there must be someone to blame. One man. A man in charge, like I am, on whom all the sins committed under his rule will fall. By the winter solstice, magisters. That gives you five months. You might never have done it faster than eighteen but with the right motivation I imagine you can do wonders. If I and my Reiksguard marching in and installing a Grand Magister myself doesn’t count as such a motivation then there really is no hope for you.’

Van Horstmann was not a political creature. He preferred to have things unravel around him while he watched, rather than being the one unpicking the stitches. Eckhard III, he had decided, was not a good man to treat as an adversary because he knew more about the workings of an empire than van Horstmann ever could. That was how and why Eckhardt conducted himself like such an irascible oaf – he knew what he could get away with, and got away with everything he could. Nevertheless, van Horstmann thought he had done quite well. He had made his plea to the traditions and sensitivities of the Light Order sound just feeble and complaining enough, enough like the wheedling of an intellectually privileged elite, that the Emperor had been subtly enraged by it. If Eckhardt III had ever contemplated leaving the Light Order to sort out their own affairs, van Horstmann had probably seen to it that he would not.

It was an uncomfortable time. The order was uncertain. Divinations all gave results of obscurity and confusion. The daily rituals to conceal the pyramid and aid the Light Order’s magic were faltering – the uncertainty infected the acolytes in the Chanter’s Hall in subtle ways, leaving their ceremonies ragged and substandard. The senior magisters formed an ad hoc ruling council, but without any rules for their decision-making, without any clear responsibility, they would be unable to respond very effectively to a crisis.

Before he had joined the Light Order, van Horstmann would have been surprised to learn a college of Altdorf was so ill-prepared to cope with the death of a Grand Magister. He would have assumed they had volumes of procedure and precedent to deal with just such an eventuality. But he had come to understand that the orders were too slow to move, too obsessive and introverted, to adopt such a sensible practice. There was not one man in the whole order, excepting perhaps Elrisse himself while he lived, who could administer such an organisation. They were scholars and philosophers. Some of them were warriors, and more than a few were wild-eyed madmen. None of them were men who, like Minister Huygens of the Imperial Court, cared only that everything around them ran smoothly.

Van Horstmann thought on this as he reached his quarters. Since the Battle of Drufenhaag he had been here rarely, more frequently attending the gatherings of senior magisters who attempted to steer the order through the mire of collegiate politics. Skaven agents had sewn disorder and disease both before and after the invasion from below, and the mages of Altdorf were battling – metaphorically this time – over how best to deal with this new threat. Even worse than the ratmen themselves was the fear of them and the paranoia that had seen supposed traitors lynched and strung up in the streets of Altdorf. It was not a good time to be in charge of anything, much less to have no one in charge at all.

The Skull of Katam lay on its side on van Horstmann’s writing desk. Van Horstmann took from beneath his robes a large book, bound apparently in soiled bandages and kept closed with a tied length of leather. He placed it on the desk beside the skull, untied it, and opened it on a random page. The page was badly stained and all but ruined by damp. Only the crudeness of the symbols scrawled there rendered them legible at all.

‘What do you know of this?’ asked van Horstmann.

The Skull of Katam rocked and set itself upright again. ‘Where did this come from?’

Van Horstmann examined the sacrificial knife he kept on a shelf beside a few of Magister Vek’s knick-knacks. Blood still crusted the place where the blade met the hilt. He had given up trying to clean it – the blood always remained. ‘From the dead claws of the skaven warlord at Drufenhaag,’ he said.

‘And what else did you take from it?’ asked the skull.

‘Just the book,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Liar,’ replied the skull. ‘It is a version of the Liber Pestilentius. Dictated to the monks of La Misercordias abbey. This is a severely debased version, in the tongue of the ratmen. I can scarcely read a word of it, but this much I can tell you.’

‘You have come across this book before?’

‘I have heard of it. There are not many such things I have not heard of. It is for this reason that you sought me out, is it not?’

Van Horstmann closed the book again. ‘What does it contain?’

‘Diseases,’ said the skull. ‘A thousand of them in the original, though no complete copy of it now exists to my knowledge. This version will no doubt have hundreds. Perhaps the ratmen added their own, I do not know. I doubt anyone can read it.’

‘Do they need to?’

‘There is magic in its words,’ said the skull. ‘Old and deadly magic. Plague magic, much coveted by the skaven. To understand the manner in which each plague kills, how it spreads? Then, you would have to read it. But as a focus for the working of such magic, no. It is enough to possess it.’

‘Good,’ said van Horstmann.

He walked to one of the huge bull-bodied statues that Vek had, for reasons best known to himself, had transported up to decorate his chambers. It must have been a daemon’s own job to get them in here. Van Horstmann had wondered from time to time just where they had come from, and why Vek had wanted such ugly things glowering down over him whenever he sat down to work on his alchemical formulae. Van Horstmann was glad, now, that he had.

Van Horstmann ran a hand along the flank of the statue, and whispered a many-syllabled word he had concocted for the purpose. Sigils glowed as the hand passed over them and the side of the statue ground open, hinging out and then sliding aside.

Inside was not the hollow interior of the statue, as might have been expected. Instead the opening led to another room, as large as the chamber’s main room. It would have to project into the adjoining room for its whole size to be contained within the pyramid, but that space was taken up with the chambers of another magister and a small reading room tucked within the unusual architecture of the pyramid. There was no room for this new chamber, which meant that it did not exist here at all, but somewhere else.

This new room was flooded with light, as was the rest of the pyramid. Panes of polished crystal hung on the walls, splitting the light into shafts of colour. Cushions of crimson and dark-blue fabric were piled on the floor to permit meditation, and several glass-fronted cases held implements of van Horstmann’s study of Dark magic.

Here he kept the horned skull, taken not from a bull or a ram but a human mutant executed in an Imperial backwater village. Three shelves of forbidden books were chained shut. A wand of twisted black wood and a tablet of ivory inscribed with images of human sacrifice took pride of place. If anyone were to find this room, which existed in its own pocket of space much like the Light Order’s pyramid itself, then van Horstmann’s pursuit of Dark magic would be revealed. That was why it had to be secret. That was why he had diverted much of his intellect to building it since ascending to the rank of comprehender, researching and modifying the space-folding rituals of the order to make a place that existed and yet did not.

Van Horstmann added the Liber Pestilentius to the bookshelf. The volume next to it, a transcription of possession victims’ rantings bound in the scaly skin of some dark-blue reptilian creature, growled darkly at the newcomer. Van Horstmann cast the book a stern glance and it quietened down.

‘They will find it,’ said the Skull of Katam. ‘They can hardly fail to do so. This path will lead you to ruin, van Horstmann.’

‘I know,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And if you continue to bother me with what I already know, I will seal you in here and leave you to stare at the walls, just as you did in the vaults.’ Van Horstmann left his sanctum and closed the statue again, the join rendered seamless by subtle magics. ‘The book,’ he said, ‘will make things easier. But nothing will be simple. It is time to move on, Katam. To take another step on the road you think leads to ruin.’

‘Then it is time once again to wake up Hiskernaath,’ said the skull.

‘Yes,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It is.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE HAND CERULEAN

On the fifteenth day of the ninth month, the stars converged such that the Bale Orb that hung hidden among the constellations shone down on the Old World. Power, visible only to the enlightened, poured down from that blinded eye and the Hand Cerulean gathered to bask in the light that only they could see.

They did this in a rotting bank of warehouses, damp and sagging, poised to topple into the sluggish water of the Reik. Here, in a half-abandoned wharf district, the river’s water backed up against a quay caked in filth and detritus washed from upriver. The only boats that docked here were those captained by men whose reputations were so dire in the legitimate ports of Altdorf that they could moor nowhere else. Most of the other visitors were the corpses dumped in the river by accident, murder or suicide, who could often be seen bobbing amongst the weeds and trash before some hidden current or predator dragged them from view. The corpses, and the Hand Cerulean.

Van Horstmann saw this sorry place for the first time as the sun went down. From across the rickety Pauper’s Bridge it seemed a precarious collection of buildings, only the mould on the walls keeping it from collapsing entirely.

‘Not much of a place for planning the apocalypse,’ he said.

Beside him stood the witch hunter, introduced to him as Lord Argenos. Alongside them were Heiden Kant, the magister who had recently made such promising strides in the arts of exorcism, and half a dozen grim-faced men armoured like a ragtag militia. Van Horstmann could tell from their scars and their musculature that they were more than thugs – they were killers, and they killed in the employ of the Emperor’s witch hunters. Each carried a selection of butcher’s knives, wooden stakes and torches, along with whatever signature weapon they had learned to love. All their swords and cudgels had tally marks cut into the handles.

‘The enemy waxes great not in our sight,’ replied Argenos. ‘He is everywhere. It should surprise us not to find him in the unlikeliest of places.’

‘Can you tell us more about them?’ asked Kant. He had matured greatly ever since van Horstmann had last encountered him before the affair of Elrisse’s death, but even so he saw in the magister the pale youth who had shivered beneath the Imperial Palace at the exorcism of Princess Astrid. ‘The word was only that the Light Order must attend, and that the enemy calls themselves the Hand Cerulean. We had no time to look into them further.’

‘You would have found nothing,’ replied Argenos. ‘The Silver Hammer does not let just anyone peruse the intelligence it gathers. The Hand Cerulean are living proof of the corruptibility of the human condition. They seek enlightenment, which is the excuse so commonly used by the followers of the Dark Gods. In their case, they seek it by giving their souls to the daemon.’

‘You mean possession?’ asked Kant.

‘Indeed. That fate which all sane men abhor, these cultists crave. It is a sign of the greatest favour for them to be possessed by the daemon. What we have heard of them suggests that only those who have been so violated are permitted to recieve their mysteries. You see why the attendance of the Light Order, and of their expertise in exorcism, was much desired.’

‘More and more of them crop up in this city,’ mused van Horstmann as he watched the red sky darkening behind the ragged skyline of Altdorf. ‘Ever since we threw back the ratmen. Fear and madness have been sewn among its people, and cults like this are the result.’

‘No,’ said Argenos. ‘We are the result. Retribution and redemption. The story ends not with the Hand Cerulean, but with their destruction.’

The sun dipped below the horizon, and the district was swathed in shadow.

‘Then let’s get to it,’ said van Horstmann.

The witch hunting party moved with grim swiftness across the bridge and into the stinking alleyways of the wharf. It had been hurriedly assembled, Lord Argenos recieving intelligence of the cult’s whereabouts and gathering his muscle even as a message was sent to the Light Order indicating the need for exorcists. It was the first time van Horstmann had crossed paths with the Silver Hammer, which he knew to be an order of witch hunters, priests of Sigmar and other pious men devoted to rooting out evil among the Empire’s people. In their zeal they had been responsible for countless false accusations and mass executions. Quite possibly, for every true devotee of Chaos they executed, more than one innocent man or woman was tried and killed. Van Horstmann also knew that the Silver Hammer themselves would not have a problem with such a statistic at all.

‘It is the stars that bring them out,’ said Argenos as the thugs lined up beside a doorway, recently rebuilt and sturdy in contrast to the rest of the area. ‘These ones watch the skies. A dangerous field of study. Only madness lies there.’

‘What is your plan?’ asked Kant.

‘Fire,’ said Argenos. ‘Then the sword. Then, for what remains, the ministrations of the exorcist.’

‘How many know we are here?’ asked van Horstmann. The speed with which the operation had been mounted had left him too many unanswered questions. Van Horstmann did not like those.

‘As many as need to know,’ said Argenos. ‘The enemy has spies everywhere, even among our most trusted. The fewer know of our deeds, the fewer traitorous tongues can take news of it to our quarry.’

Two of Argenos’s men had crowbars at the hinges of the door. Two more knelt to light their torches with flints, and the last two took glass vessels from their packs. Each vessel was spherical, stoppered with a rag in a plug of wax.

‘Magister Kant,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It is rare that wizards of the colleges and the witch hunters work so closely together. There are some hunters who would rather see us all burned at the stake than fight alongside us.’

‘These are desperate times,’ replied Kant, once out of Argenos’s earshot. ‘The enemy we faced at Drufenhaag has resorted to other means to get at us. And while some of us are battle magisters and others are exorcists, I have perhaps walked furthest of all on the path of the diplomat. It is true, though, that a man like Argenos would not leap to let us in on the Silver Hammer’s operations. He needs us, I think, and he knows it.’

The doors were levered open a crack. Witch Hunter Argenos drew his weapons. In one hand he had a warhammer, its bright silver head shining in the starlight, and in the other was a flintlock pistol. Van Horstmann had rarely seen such a weapon, for they were crafted only by the best gunsmiths of Nuln. Argenos kissed the pistol and whispered a prayer, and the ball loaded into its muzzle shone with a blue-white light that bled from the end of the barrel.

The witch hunter nodded. The two men swung the door open. In the same moment the other four lit the rags stuffed into the glass vessels, and hurled them into the open doorway.

In that moment, van Horstmann got his first look at the Hand Cerulean. He had no idea how the Silver Hammer had learned of them, but it had done so with no time to spare. Twelve figures knelt in a circle, wearing nothing more than loincloths, their skin painted blue and covered in silver stars. Three more stood in the centre of the circle and while they had started out dressed and marked the same as the other worshippers, they were something else entirely now. One had, in place of a head, a mass of flesh roughly the shape of a flattened worm fringed with wriggling limbs like those of a centipede. The mass pulsed and flapped, pink veins writhing beneath its taut, shiny surface. The mouth of the second had grown wider and wider until it formed a maw reaching from its chest to the middle of its face, and in that black pit seethed a mass of worms or perhaps stubby, slimy feelers. The left side of the third figure’s body had blistered up into an enormous membranous sac that sloshed as if filled with water, its left arm and leg lost in the folds of heaving flesh.

One of the kneeling worshippers turned at the sound of the splintering door. In the light of the flame that tumbled past it, van Horstmann saw its eye sockets, empty and black, as if drilled through to a place of utter darkness.

The two firebombs landed and shattered. One smashed against the side of a worshipper’s face, not giving him time to even turn around. The other hit a joist holding up the warehouse’s upper level and broke there. Flame billowed and a rush of superheated air slammed into van Horstmann, almost knocking him back from the doorway.

Instantly, the worshippers’ reverie was broken. They screamed. Van Horstmann could just see two of them running through the fire, aflame from head to toe, careening senselessly at random. Others were running into the further reaches of the warehouse to find the relative safety of its furthest corners.

The three deformed creatures – possessed, van Horstmann had no doubt – did not run. They turned to one another as if in silent conference, even as the flame caught on the straw and detritus of the floor and wreathed around their feet. It caught on their clothes and skin, and began to consume them even as they turned calmly towards the intruders.

Argenos was first in. ‘By my proclamation, be execution upon thee!’ he cried. He levelled his pistol and shot the nearest one, the flesh sac, through the head. The blessed bullet tore a channel through its face and sent showers of blue sparks exploding from the ruin of its skull. A pulse of power spread from the impact and the other possessed darted away, lost in the flame and smoke. The body that hauled the flesh sac toppled over and the sac burst, a cloud of foul orange steam sizzling from the corpse.

‘Surround it!’ shouted Argenos. ‘Let none escape! Wizards, you are with me!’

Van Horstmann followed Argenos in. He whispered the syllables of a protective spell, one he had mastered and memorised so it was cast with barely a thought. A shimmering dome of energy sprung into life over him, encompassing himself, Kant and Argenos. Flame rushed towards them and swarmed over the dome. The heat was appalling, barely breathable, but the fire did not reach them.

A worshipper stumbled into their path. Her teeth were bared – van Horstmann saw it was a woman, her long hair cut into a single lock at the back of her neck. Her teeth were filed and pointed, and blood ran down her chin. Argenos knocked her down with a boot to the chest, and shattered her forehead with a downward swing of his hammer. The woman hissed out her last breath and lolled over, dead.

‘Thus are your wages,’ shouted Argenos over the rush and thunder of the fire. ‘Thus does Sigmar repay your service!’

Van Horstmann saw silvery bolts of light springing from Kant’s fingertips, scoring deep furrows along the warehouse walls where more worshippers scurried for cover. One fell, but van Horstmann could not tell if Kant had struck him. Van Horstmann himself concentrated on the spell that was keeping them alive, calling down a column of Light magic from the sky to pour over them and douse the infernal heat that threatened to scorch his throat with every breath.

The creature with the worm-like head came charging through the fire. It was aflame itself, the skin of the lower half of its body black and charred. It headed straight for Argenos who was a split second too late with the swing of his hammer. He was bowled to the ground and the possessee rolled over him, thrown off-balance by its momentum.

The thing rolled to its feet in front of van Horstmann. Van Horstmann’s mind raced and time seemed to slow down. In front of him was the monster, mutated beyond any semblance of humanity by the daemon that he could almost taste writhing inside the once-human soul. But in front of him also hung a thousand jewels, each a spell he had researched, reconstructed and committed to memory, filed away in the fastidious library of his mind. He chose one that gleamed with deadliness and purity, plucked it from its shelf and let it dissolve through his mind until it hummed with power at the ends of his fingers.

Darts of it shot out and punctured the flesh of the possessed cultist’s chest. Silver strands whipped around the supports that held up the roof. The darts held fast and the cultist was pinned in place, straining against the silver bonds that suddenly held it. One arm was twisted almost behind its back and the mass of its head was constrained, even as it tried to strike forward like a scorpion’s tail.

It had eyes, van Horstmann saw now, tiny and faceted like those of an insect, and between each pair of centipede limbs a set of mandibles surrounded by bristly black hair.

He knew this daemon. He had read of it in the forbidden books first described to him by the Skull of Katam. It was an offshoot of the Plague God, the one debased men called Nurgle. He had read of what it did to those it possessed – they first turned into a wormlike creature of which this mutation was the first stage, then pupated, and emerged as a gigantic fly with a distended belly full of plague agents. Such knowledge, of course, would mark van Horstmann out as one who delved into the works of the enemy, so he would have to feign ignorance.

Argenos was on his feet. His hammer came down against the cultist’s knee, still a human and vulnerable limb. Van Horstmann heard the bone crack and the leg folded the wrong away. The cultist hung in the silver threads, arms flailing uselessly towards van Horstmann.

Kant drove his staff, a long, slender shaft of gold tipped with a shard of crystal, into the chest of the ensnared cultist. Light crackled around the crystal as it punched out through the cultist’s back and earthed through its convulsing body.

From the flames leapt the third mutant cultist, whose body had warped into a portal into another extra-real space crammed with writhing worms. It barrelled into van Horstmann, who lost his footing and fell under its weight.

His staff flew from his fingers, and Lizbeta’s golden death mask was lost in the fire that crackled along the filthy straw that covered the floor.

The mass of the cultist seemed to grow, its body filling more with the seething mass that pressed forwards through its mouth. The cultist’s eyes were pale and dry, like those of a day-old fish at market – the cultist had long gone, his body given over entirely to the daemon that possessed it. That daemon took the form of a mass of worms, and it was reaching out now with its hundreds of limbs to grasp at van Horstmann’s hands and face.

The stench of it was awful. Even the smoke and heat took second place to the breath that reeked from its mouth. Each worm had a tubular mouth of its own, tiny teeth gnashing, ringed with black bead-like eyes.

Bile rose in van Horstmann’s throat. His heart thudded. He felt himself detached from his body suddenly, as if he was fleeing from the horror of it, and with a lurch of shame and nausea realised that he was losing control.

Some of him recognised it. That relentless, organised, unfeeling part of him, on which he relied so much, could see what was happening. But the rest of him would not obey. The fortress did not stand before him, anchoring him in the winds of the aethyr.

Instead, there was only the pit.

Though van Horstmann knew, with every rational faculty he had, that this was not a real place, it seemed as completely real as the burning warehouse and the possessed cultist that pinned him to the floor. That world now seemed far away and only the pit registered on his most immediate senses.

The clammy, cold scales of the snakes writhed against his skin. The press of them crushed his chest and made every breath a fight. The stench of them was worse, somehow, than the otherworldly stink of the worm daemon.

Only Lizbeta’s hand in his told him there was any good in this world. He held on as tight as he could and she held on too, and the pain of her grip around his fingers was something he could cherish. He kicked out to force himself upwards towards the open air and bring her with him, pull her from the coils of the snakes and deliver her to safety. But the snakes would not let go and Lizbeta did not budge.

He could hear her. She was sobbing, or perhaps screaming, her voice smothered. He fought all the harder and wrenched his joints with the effort, but he was little more than a boy and he had never been strong. Not in body, at least. For all his intelligence and cunning, he could not think or talk his way out of this.

‘Lizbeta!’ he cried. ‘Don’t let go! Don’t… don’t be afraid. I’ll save you. I promise!’

Even as he said it, he knew it was a lie.

Lizbeta’s hand was gone. Van Horstmann’s stomach turned over as he felt for her slender fingers again, sure that if he found her he would grab her with renewed strength and pull her up from the pit. But she was nowhere. Van Horstmann risked sinking too low to escape as he groped among the slithering coils for his sister. She was gone. He couldn’t hear her any more.

Van Horstmann fought to drag himself up. He would clamber from the pit and… do what? Empty it? Wrestle every snake, break its spine, and cast it aside until the pit was empty save for Lizbeta? Would she somehow be alive down there, waiting patiently for him to rescue her?

It didn’t matter. He could not organise those thoughts into anything coherent. He kicked and fought, thrashing out a few inches of space at a time. A hand broke the surface into air and he could draw breath now, thick and foul as the air was.

The pit was dug into the floor of a cave, lit by a few smoky torches on the walls. It was a cold and wet place, silty water dripping from the stalactites overhead. Van Horstmann could see the entrance to the cave, the slick rock walls edged in the light that crept down from the surface above.

There stood the woman, watching. From a distance she was achingly beautiful. Up close, she had the look of something that waited for its prey beneath the mud. She dressed well but practically as if for riding, wrapped in a black travelling cloak lined with crimson against the cold. Her skin was very pale and her hair a blonde as light as buttermilk. She had green eyes and thin red lips that, when she smiled to see van Horstmann struggling to reach the edge of the pit, curled up like a wound cut with a curved knife.

Van Horstmann had seen her fleetingly before. He and his sister had needed help – a ride in the woman’s coach, for the night before had been stormy and dangerous. Beastmen were abroad and he feared for Lizbeta’s safety. He had to protect her, after all. All they had was each other.

He had woken in this pit, and as the serpents tried to drag them down he had told his sister that she was safe, that he would get her out of this just like he had every dangerous place they had wandered. She had promised the same. She would save him. But she was younger, and weaker, and had always relied on her brother Egrimm’s quick mind to keep her safe.

‘You do not understand this now,’ the woman said in a cut-glass accent that spoke of the finest city breeding. ‘But your gift to us is the knowledge we glean from your death. Thank you, young man. You and your companion have given your Empire in death more than you ever could in life.’

Van Horstmann tried to pull himself onto the surface of the snake pit and drag himself for the edge, to reach the cave floor and run for the way out. But he was tired, and every part of him hurt.

And Lizbeta was gone. She was all he had. What did anything mean now? What did living mean?

The woman vanished from his memory, leaving the echo of her smile behind. Darkness fell.

‘Lord comprehender!’ shouted a voice in his ear. ‘We must get out! The whole place is going to come down!’

The voice belonged to Magister Kant, who was bent over van Horstmann shouting at the top of his voice. The roar of the fire almost drowned out his words.

Beside him, Witch Hunter Argenos aimed his pistol again at a cultist who had clambered to an upper level of the warehouse for shelter. The pistol barked and the cultist’s head disappeared in a mist of silver and crimson.

Van Horstmann forced himself back into the moment. His protective spell had faltered and the flames rushed closer. He got to his feet, unable to stifle the sense of disdain as he realised Kant had helped him up.

Kant handed van Horstmann his staff. It was hot to the touch, having lain down in the flames, but Lizbeta’s face was undamaged. He gasped out the syllables of the spell again, this time tingeing it with a thread of chill magic that fended off the worst of the scalding air. He could breathe again now and he followed Kant towards the nearest way out – a set of double doors, probably for livestock, that the cultists must have thrown open to escape.

He reached the open air to see two of the cultists lying in a broken heap being beaten by three of Argenos’s thugs. The cultists looked dead, but the Silver Hammer’s men were making sure. Argenos ran out, reloading his pistol with a shot that glowed in his fingers. A wayward part of van Horstmann’s mind wondered how many hours a priest must have prayed over the sacred bullets to imbue them with such power.

‘What news?’ yelled Argenos. ‘How many have fled us?’

‘But none, Lord Argenos,’ replied one of the thugs. ‘We caught them all, the few that survived.’

‘And alive?’

The thug smiled. From around the side of the warehouse came the remainder of the thugs, dragging the senseless bodies of two of the possessed cultists. One was the flesh-sac creature that Argenos had shot. Though its head was gone, presumably whatever animated it did not need the host body’s brain to survive, because its mass still heaved with uneven breaths. The other was the one that had so nearly done for van Horstmann, its enormous maw now a half-closed drooling slit, the worm-daemon retreated deep inside it.

Argenos indicated a building a couple of streets away. ‘The fire will spread,’ he said, ‘but we cannot move them far and so our work must be done here, and quickly. Take them to that building. Magister Kant, prepare a circle. Comprehender van Horstmann, we will need your new rituals now.’

‘Not new,’ said van Horstmann. His throat was raw and smoky as he spoke. ‘Very old.’

‘Even better,’ said Argenos. ‘Let us begin.’

They moved quickly. Twenty acolytes waited on the other side of the river and Magister Kant sent up a magical flare, in the shape of a white-plumed bird soaring from his hand into the sky, to summon them. They were untrained and without reliable offensive or protective magic of their own, and so had not been trusted to fend for themselves in the assault on the cult’s hideout, but now Argenos and the Light wizards needed obedient and reliable ritualists to complete the destruction of the Hand Cerulean.

It was a second warehouse they used, this one untouched for what looked like years. Crates of abandoned cargo – bolts of cheap cloth, furniture, heaps of uncured leather – mouldered in the damp. The Silver Hammer thugs kept watch, peering into the corners with torches in hand as they sought out the enemies the Silver Hammer was convinced lay everywhere.

The acolytes stood in a circle and chanted the passages they had memorised, a new set of ritual exultations that van Horstmann had handed to Master Chanter Alric just a couple of weeks before. Van Horstmann formed a link in the circle and Lord Argenos looked on, his hand never far from the grip of his ensorcelled pistol.

He was watching for any sign of danger from the subjects of this ritual. The two possessed cultists lay tied up in the middle of the circle. The one with the enormous worm-filled mouth lay on its side, heaving with ragged breaths in a puddle of drool. The one with the fleshy sac seemed to have replaced the fluid inside somewhat, the mass of oily flesh hanging from its left side now deformed with shifting, bulbous shapes, as if whatever it was incubating was fighting to be born. This cultist, of course, had no head, and its human portions had bled white from the ragged stump of its neck.

Magister Kant, who specialised in the arts of exorcism, led the ritual. He had brought with him his own implements – a selection of knives, tongs and searing irons – in case the daemons inside the cultists required a physical effort as well as a spiritual one to be extracted from their hosts.

With possessees this far gone, this far corrupted by the daemons inside them, the survival of the host could never be considered a priority.

‘Light that bathes the aethyr, accept the sacrifice of our devotion!’ called out Kant. He, too, had memorised his part in the ritual. ‘Heralds of the enemy, out! From this flesh, we cast thee out!’

The language the acolytes chanted had no equal in the tongues of human lands. It existed only in one place, in the writings that van Horstmann had presented to the Light Order’s exorcists as the greatest work of Egelbert Vries. Time and space seemed to warp as the acolytes spoke it. The shadows bowed in, as if the warehouse structure had become malleable and was deforming under the force of the Light magic coursing around the circle. The light of the torches crept up and down the walls in smouldering fingers. Straight lines curved and angles did not add up, and the rules of reality slowly ceased to apply.

The rules of the will would supersede them. And even the daemon would be subject to those rules.

The possessed cultists were changing, too. The flesh-sac became evermore agitated, exposing more of the dead cultist’s original form as it tried to pull away. The shape of a hunched figure appeared against the walls of the sac, a broken and monstrous face with one eye and one horn, gnarled hands, a distended belly that itself writhed with life. The mouth of the other cultist yawed wide and the wormy mass was forced out, inch by inch, as if retched up, the tiny ring-shaped mouth of each worm leeching wide as if trying to scream.

‘Your gods have no authority here!’ shouted Kant. The chanting grew louder and the daemons mewled and growled, like animals cornered and in pain. ‘I am in command, and I command you to depart these vessels of flesh!’

The worm-daemon was the first out, vomited from the cultist’s enlarged mouth. It was a heaving pile the size of a horse, far larger than should have been able to fit inside the cultist. Its hundreds of worms were rooted in heavy glistening lumps of whitish muscle, like knots of broken and skinless limbs. They unfolded revealing asymmetrical, atrophied fingers that tried to drag the daemon’s bulk along the warehouse floor. Large wet eyes blinked in the folds of muscle and a pair of mandibles chattered. It shed dead worms as it did so, and they curled up and shrivelled when shorn of their master and exposed to the reality that abhorred the daemon.

A hand tore from the flesh-sac of the second cultist. The thing that emerged dripped with pale-red birthing fluid but its flesh was a dank, warty green. It was roughly humanoid in shape but its head was thrust forwards on a neck that emerged from its chest. Its face was thuggish and slack-jawed. It had one yellow eye and a single horn in its forehead. Its arms were overlong and its hands dragged on the floor as it forced its way upright, and its belly sagged down, full of its own young of seething insects that spilled from rents in the flesh.

‘Back!’ shouted van Horstmann. He thrust out his staff, not leaving his place in the circle, and cast a wall of shimmering light around the emerging daemon. The daemon battered its fists against the wall of its magical prison but it held fast. ‘A lesser daemon,’ said van Horstmann to Kant. ‘A bearer of the plague. I can hold it. The other, I am not so sure. It must not leave the circle. Banish them now.’

‘I have a destination of my own,’ said Lord Argenos, drawing his pistol. ‘And I will banish them both there if you cannot.’

‘No!’ snapped van Horstmann. ‘The daemon does not die. It will return. Properly exorcised, it will not escape its bonds in the aethyr for a thousand years. They must be banished by the Light.’

‘Begone!’ yelled Kant, as the chanting rose in volume. ‘Wither and burn in the Light!’

The daemons mewled and moaned. A blue-white glow shone down from above and their skin blistered in it.

Van Horstmann turned his head to look at one of Argenos’s thugs. ‘Bring him in,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’

The thug nodded and went to one corner of the warehouse. From among the trash he brought a cultist – the last surviving member of the Hand Cerulean, mouth gagged and hands and ankles tied. He had painted himself to resemble the night sky but much of the paint had rubbed off, revealing the bruises and cuts administered by the Silver Hammer during his capture.

The thug threw the cultist into the circle. The cultist, unable to keep his balance, fell face-first to the floor and fresh blood flowed from his nose. The cultist was trying to speak, to yell, but the gag thankfully muffled his words.

Van Horstmann took the familiar wavy-bladed knife from his robes. He stepped into the centre, the acolytes swiftly taking his place to keep the circle intact. He knelt beside the cultist and pulled the man’s head back. The air was thick with power and van Horstmann could feel crackles of it earthing from his fingers and toes into the floor. His mouth was suddenly dry, a metallic taste in his mouth.

The cultist’s eyes were wide. The religious ecstasy that had fuelled the Hand Cerulean was gone, and now there was little more than fear there. There wasn’t even much hatred. In spite of the oaths he had sworn to his god – the Plague God, van Horstmann guessed, the one they called Nurgle – this man had never truly examined the fact that one day he would die. The day had come, and he was not ready.

‘This life,’ called Magister Kant, ‘in exchange for the strength to cast you from this realm! This life, for your eternal banishment! As the blood flows, so shall you begone!’

Van Horstmann thrust the knife through the cultist’s neck. The blade might have been ornamental but it was also sharp. It passed clean through. Van Horstmann twisted it and tore it out through the cultist’s throat, the edge cutting clean through the windpipe and voice box. The blood sprayed almost up to the ceiling, the cultist’s hammering, terrified heart propelling an arc of it high into the air.

Van Horstmann let the cultist flop back onto his face. The blood pooled in a spreading red-black pool.

Flitting sparks of white fire flew, like insects. They spiralled and looped around the circle, and where they struck the foreheads of the chanting acolytes the young wizards’ eyes lit up with pulses of magical power. Their chanting was echoed by cascading notes, like a great but distant choir singing. Fragments of skin lifted off the cultist’s body, turning to ash and lifted towards the ceiling on an unfelt current of energy.

The daemons were suffering a similar fate. The plaguebearer’s skin was a crackled black carapace, as if it had been charred in a fire, and was lifting away to reveal pale white-veined muscle underneath. It lifted its head and brayed. The worm-daemon was shedding the creatures of which it was composed, each one wriggling as it was carried aloft.

Van Horstmann hurried back to his place in the circle of acolytes, wiping the bloody blade on the sleeve of his robe.

Even Lord Argenos looked impressed by the sight, as the dead cultist and the daemons were all, morsel by morsel, picked apart and winnowed to ash. The plaguebearer was reduced to a skeleton, its mouth locked open as its yellow eye rotted away leaving a filth-caked open socket staring at the ceiling. Its ribs were exposed, and the purple-black masses of maggoty viscera spilled from where its stomach had been.

The worm-daemon was reduced to a quivering lump of muscle. It tried to grow new limbs to drag itself out of the circle but they, too, were reduced to corroded bone by the force of the purity that Light magic forced onto everything in the circle.

The last remnants of them were handfuls of bone. A broken pelvis, a pair of snickering mandibles. A spine. And then they, too, were gone.

Magister Kant held up a hand and the chanting ceased. The acolytes bowed their heads.

‘It is done?’ asked Lord Argenos.

‘It is done,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Vries’s ritual is everything we hoped. They were stripped down to their component magics and cast to the winds of the aethyr.’

‘Good,’ said Argenos. ‘And if what you say is true, they will be the first of many.’ He looked at Magister Kant, who still held his place in the circle. ‘Kant,’ he said. ‘You do not agree with the means.’

‘With the sacrifice?’ said Kant. ‘No, I do not. I would have preferred another way.’

‘There is none so quick,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Or so strong.’

‘I know,’ said Kant. ‘But I would have preferred another way.’

‘Then you, Magister Kant, will never understand what it means to take up the hammer and the stake, the thumbscrew and the holy book, in the name of Sigmar.’ Lord Argenos addressed his men. ‘Leave this place. The flames will consume what little we have left.’

The acolytes and the thugs hurried out, pausing to collect what little they had brought with them. In the alleyway outside were piled the bodies of the Hand Cerulean’s cultists, and they would soon be turned to ash by the fire that was threatening to leap across the alley from one rooftop to the other.

‘Vries hid these rituals of exorcism for a reason,’ said Kant. ‘Is that not so? That was how he thought.’

‘It was,’ said van Horstmann, as the two followed the Silver Hammer’s men towards the nearest bridge across the Reik.

‘Then he hid them so that they would be found when they were needed,’ continued Kant.

‘Indeed. And whatever he saw coming, it will be upon us soon.’

‘Dark days.’

‘Darker even than these, Magister Kant.’

Hiskernaath was waiting when van Horstmann returned to his sanctum. The daemon, though released from his puzzle box, had been shut up in the extra-spatial room van Horstmann had created within the statue. It was crouching on one wall, drooling ropes of thick green-black spittle when van Horstmann opened the statue’s flank again.

‘A shame,’ hissed the daemon. ‘I was just starting to enjoy your taste in cushions.’

Van Horstmann knew better than to answer the daemon. He took the puzzle box from his robe and sat cross-legged on the cushions piled on the floor, avoiding what he hoped were patches of Hiskernaath’s drool.

‘And now I’m going back in,’ it said. ‘I look forward to it, you know. I have a hundred maidens in there, trussed up ready for rumplefyking. It’s like the Cloisters of Saint Ludmilla on a feast day. You should see it.’

‘Quiet,’ said van Horstmann. With a well-practiced motion he operated the complex panels of the puzzle box. It sprang open in his hand.

The stench was terrible. The creature that emerged carried with it a stink so foul it was visible as a faint greasy haze. It materialised in the middle of the sanctum – the plaguebearer, the humanoid, one-eyed, one-horned servant of the Plague God.

‘So, the ritual did not banish them,’ said Hiskernaath. ‘It captured them. It worked.’

Van Horstmann shot the daemon a look. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I created it.’

‘But this is a plaguebearer, van Horstmann,’ said Hiskernaath. It reached a limb towards the plaguebearer, which snapped back at it like a cornered dog. ‘One of the lowest of its kind. A foot soldier in Grandfather Nurgle’s army. Surely you know this?’

‘It is the first of many,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And it is not alone.’

Now, from the puzzle box issued a tide of worms, overflowing onto the floor. The torrent did not stop until a great heap of them lay there. From the centre of the pile emerged the mandibles and eyes of the daemon’s core, swelling impossibly until it was even bigger than the creature that had forced its way from the deformed cultist’s mouth.

‘This is Morkulae,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The Key to the Nineteenth Gate. The Beautiful and the Pure. The patron saint of torturers and grave robbers. Nurgle’s Cup-Bearer.’

The plaguebearer was on its front, grovelling and moaning, as if pleading.

‘You will void your bowels with fear when I hold you over Nurgle’s cauldron,’ growled Morkulae, its mandibles making for a strange, many-voiced sound as if each worm was lending its own voice. ‘And from your own leavings I shall concoct the plague that will devour you. Your own guts will eat their way out of you. Your eyes will crawl from their sockets. Your spine will slither from your back and you shall be alive, and aware, for every moment. Do you know how long such a disease can take to claim you? I infected souls at the beginning of the time who have not yet perished, and they cry out still from pustuled throats. Grandfather Nurgle keeps them at his side, for he loves the music they make.’

Van Horstmann pulled open the front of his robe, revealing a fresh tattoo just below his collarbone. There had only been just enough room to cram in the many lines of arcane wording, and seal it with the three-globed symbol of Nurgle.

‘You will do no such thing,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Your Grandfather commands it.’

Morkulae recoiled and hissed, the worms standing up like the hairs on an angry cat’s back. ‘You dare cage Nurgle’s Cup-Bearer with words?’

‘I was tutored by the best,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Before the throne of Lord Tzeentch.’

‘He isn’t lying,’ said Hiskernaath from his perch on the wall.

Morkulae could not reply for a long while. It was by now at its full size, significantly larger than the height of a man, shedding worms as it constantly grew new ones. ‘Then,’ it said. ‘Then…’

‘“Master” is an acceptable term of address,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Then what is your wish… master?’

Van Horstmann turned to one of the sanctum’s shelves and took from it the Liber Pestilentius. He handed it to Morkulae, who took it in a pair of mandibles it extruded for the purpose.

‘Inflict this on the city,’ said van Horstmann. ‘There will be others of your kind sent to aid you, for all who are banished by the Light Order’s exorcisms are in truth sent here, to this prison, and in doing so are bound to contracts I have made with their gods. These are my commands, Morkulae of Nurgle: infect Altdorf. Let the plague spread as quickly as fear.’

Perhaps, if it had possessed the features of a human, Morkulae would have smiled.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE GARDEN OF MORR

Through the night, the fear spread.

These beastmen were cowards. They had been defeated in open battle but instead of being slaughtered in the rout, they had vanished into the countryside of Reikland and seeded Altdorf with hundreds of spies and assassins to take the city by subterfuge.

Such was the gist of the rumours speeding through the city, and there were few who had any interest in quelling them. Enterprising Altdorfers had long sent out criers to street corners armed with scribbled notes of the latest news, to bark them to passers-by and be paid for their trouble in spare coins. The more shocking the news, the more grave the peril it implied, the more Altdorfers would reward it, as if they wanted to be afraid. And so rumours of the beastmen filled the streets.

If the barkers were to be believed, every murder and vanishing in Altdorf was the work of cloven-hoofed assassins rendered invisible by their mastery of strange stealth techniques. Every mutant child and two-headed animal was created by one of the beastman shamans, or was the detritus of some dark experiment they conducted beneath the streets. Even as learned men shook their heads at the ridiculousness of it all, some new horror was speculated to exist on the streets, and Altdorf’s masses found such tales only too easy to believe.

One fearsome matron from the city’s mercantile district, citing the safety of the city’s children from monstrous baby-snatchers, raised a rabble of concerned city folk. They went into the catacombs, old fortifications and sewers beneath the city, hunting for the enemy they were certain lurked there. Although they found many strange things, skulking beastmen were not among them, but of course that was just proof of how good they were at hiding.

It was a curious feature of Altdorf, this quickness to panic. When Magnus the Pious had agreed with Teclis to the founding of the Colleges of Magic, the people had rioted and seen portents of destruction in everything. The wizards, they were certain, would be the doom of them all. They had evacuated the city en masse as the high elves and the students of Teclis created the magical defences that concealed the eight colleges, and when they returned to find their city subtly stranger they never lost their suspicions of the wizards in their midst. A child born fifty years before with the body of a snake was the catalyst for a rash of witch-burnings and lynching, in which hundreds of innocents lost their lives, along with, perhaps, a few genuine witches who should have learned to lay low. Grand Theogonist Thoss had taken advantage of Altdorfer paranoia to launch his crusade against all faiths bar that of Sigmar. It was how Altdorfers functioned. They were boisterous and outspoken, they were bold and cunning, and when they decided to fear something they feared it with a passion that tore out the foundations of their city.

It therefore came as no surprise when the first plague victims emerged. Coughing blood and moaning in pain, they stumbled from the hovels around the Bright College’s location and the grim districts adjoining the wharves, begging for cure or release. And the people of Altdorf dug mass graves outside the walls, hoarded wood for funeral pyres, and proclaimed impending destruction as only they could.

The Chanter’s Hall was never quiet, but it was not the voices of acolytes that broke the calm now. The hammers of a crew of workmen echoed among the pillars as they scrabbled across the scaffolding stretched across one end of the chamber. Behind the podium that Master Chanter Alric used to address the acolytes was growing a structure of brass and wood, with a bank of great pipes visible through the planking holding it all in place. The brass was inscribed with elegant scrollwork and the hardwood, brought to the Empire in ships from distant lands, was a deep brown-black and lacquered in designs of gold.

Master Chanter Alric watched the men working. The crews had been sworn to secrecy, with a little help from some subtle magics of the mind, to protect the location of the Light College, and they had needed time to adjust from the extraordinary architecture and unbroken light of the pyramid. But now they were working quickly. Within the month, they would be finished.

‘Master Chanter!’ said van Horstmann brightly as he approached. ‘I see our latest project has not stood idle.’

‘It is beautiful,’ said Alric. He had become an old man in the time van Horstmann had known him, the wrinkles around his eyes seeming deeper than ever. There were tears brimming behind those eyes, though Alric would never let himself show them before the acolytes. ‘For decades I have wished for an organ to lend music to the voices of our order. I petitioned Elrisse for it more times than I can remember.’ He looked at van Horstmann now, and the emotion on his face was clear even though he tried to keep it down. ‘I could never say so to the acolytes, for they must believe the magisters above them are all of one mind. But he and I were opposed. I thought the organ would make our rituals stronger and improve the morale of the acolytes, but he thought it was a needless expense. Morr cherish his soul, our Grand Magister’s death granted us this, at least.’

‘I believed this project would raise our spirits in these grim times.’

‘You spoke for it?’ asked Alric.

‘I did,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Though we have no one leader, yet still one voice can accomplish something. I and the other senior magisters debated the matter and I swayed them.’

‘Then this is your doing,’ said Alric. ‘I do not know what I thought of you when you were an acolyte, comprehender. There was such promise in you, such an organised mind, but I did not see the passion that a magister needs. I know now that you kept it hidden. I should have known better, I should have seen it. I underestimated you then, but now, we all see that you can take our order through this and out into a better future.’

One of the workers hauled a canvas cover away, revealing a triple tier of keyboards with keys cut from ivory. It might take three organists working in concert to use the organ’s entire range.

‘You flatter me, Master Chanter,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I am a researcher, that is where my passions lie. No wonder you did not see them.’

‘The Emperor was right,’ said Alric. His voice dropped, as if he was worried someone might be listening in. ‘He said we need a leader. We do. Without it, we cannot react quickly enough to threats. The conflict with the Gold Order showed us those threats can come from anywhere. The other colleges might sense weakness and try to bring us down. It is a dark thing to countenance but plots have existed in the past, between other orders. And you hear what they say about the skaven. If they strike at us, they will try to strike at the colleges first. We must defend ourselves.’

‘You are right,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But there is none who has emerged from among us to take control. Choosing a leader is not a simple business. Without a clear front runner, the process of selection will drag on and on.’

‘There is you,’ said Alric.

‘Me?’

‘Grand Magister van Horstmann. You think it strange? I think it is the perfect solution. You have respect among us. Some say you were conspicuous in your actions at Drufenhaag, the Emperor will admire that. And Elrisse trusted you.’

Van Horstmann took a sighing breath. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘How many others have voiced this?’

‘Few in the open,’ said Alric. ‘But I know I am not the only one who thinks it.’

‘The Light Order fears a leader who is chosen quickly and for the moment,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It fears a tyrant. The orders always have.’

‘That is a risk many are willing to take.’

‘And how would I go about becoming the Grand Magister?’ said Alric. ‘What if Kardiggian stands against me and demands a wizard’s duel to settle the matter? I am not a battle magister, as he is. He would incinerate me. And Vranas has made allies outside the Light Order, no doubt hoping to become Grand Magister himself. He could outmanoeuvre me, for he is a politician and I am not.’

‘And if the magisters want you, they will get you. That is what matters.’

‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But aside from you, I hear no great clamour for me to become Grand Magister. Certainly nothing to shout down another candidate should he make himself known. And it is not as if this is a great ambition of mine. For other senior magisters it is. Vranas, to name only the obvious. Perhaps Kardiggian.’

‘Nevertheless, comprehender,’ said Alric, ‘do not discount yourself.’ He waved a hand at the grand pipe organ, now definitely taking shape behind the scaffolding. ‘This need not be the only mark you leave on your order.’

‘This is your legacy, Master Chanter,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not mine. The pipe organ will play when we are all gone. You have left your mark here. Do not deny yourself that.’

‘My thanks,’ said Alric. ‘And do not deny yourself leadership of our order. We need a leader. Altdorf needs us to have one, too. The whole Empire does. Think of it, comprehender.’

‘I shall,’ said van Horstmann.

Amid the hammering, footsteps on the marble floor caught van Horstmann’s attention. An acolyte was hurrying towards them, flustered and sweating.

‘Acolyte?’ demanded Alric. His demeanour had changed back to the stern, unflappable face a Master Chanter presented to his acolytes.

‘News from the Imperial Palace,’ said the acolyte. ‘Representatives of every order have been summoned at the behest of the Emperor. It is the plague, magisters. The priestesses of Shallya have proclaimed it the work of Dark magic. The city is quarantined.’

The plague doctors of Altdorf were a strange breed, in their own way as arcane and secretive as the orders of magic. They trained by apprenticeship, each one picking a successor to train, and parcelling out their secrets one cure at a time. They guarded those secrets carefully, refusing to reveal the laboratories and hidden wards where they perfected their arts, and were paid collectively by the Imperial Court to watch over the health of the city. The priestesses of Shallya hated them, for they used bleedings, humours and strange concoctions to do what Shallya taught should be done with faith and prayer, but when disease ravaged the city no one could say to whom the citizens turned the fastest.

One plague doctor led van Horstmann through the narrow passageways towards the hospital. It was a makeshift place, hardly fit for taking care of the sick. It looked like a length of sewer that had been half-completed and then abandoned, leaving a section of dressed stone tunnels and junctions beneath the ground connected to nothing. Masons had decorated the place with grotesque gargoyles and scratched their names into the stone blocks, their etchings still visible beneath the mould and damp.

‘Every day, perhaps three dozen more cases are found in this district alone,’ the doctor was saying. His voice was muffled by the conical mask he wore, the beak of it stuffed with herbs to keep infectious fumes out of his lungs. Van Horstmann was reminded of the doctor he had encountered beneath the Imperial Palace, the one who had tended to the possessed Princess Astrid. For all he knew it was the same man. ‘If the relatives permit, we bring them down here, where they cannot infect anyone save us and each other. But many refuse. They fear us, it seems, though I cannot fathom why.’

Van Horstmann could fathom perfectly well, given that the plague doctors hid their faces behind goggles and masks, and were only seen in the streets of Altdorf when disease stalked the city. ‘How many survive?’ he asked.

‘It is difficult to say,’ said the doctor, ‘given that the outbreak began only recently and has moved with impressive swiftness. We do not know if we have seen the disease run its full course in any one victim yet. Some seem to be recovering, but it might be that this is just the space between two stages of the plague, as with Wharf Rot or the Fingerbone Ague.’

‘And can you tell how it moves from one person to another?’

‘I believe it is a miasma of the air,’ said the doctor. ‘But some insist it is transmitted by vermin, others body fluids. With so many theories it is impossible to mobilise our resources to test any one. We are all fools, magister. Such ignorance is the means by which all disease is propagated.’

‘Then ignorance is what we will fight,’ said van Horstmann. He had brought with him a leather case, similar in size to the case of implements the plague doctor himself carried. He held it up. ‘A device of my own design. Like everything in this world, a disease can be seen as a problem of logic. With this, I will discover the root principles of logic that lie behind it and thereby solve the problem.’

‘A novel approach,’ said the doctor. ‘Personally, I fear the maladies of the human body are immune to logic. A place like this I cite as evidence.’

The two reached the ward itself, a junction of two sewers with a great vault overhead and deep channels lined with decorative stone. Sigmar knew how much money and man-hours had been sunk into these unfinished sewers, which had never seen a drop of excrement until now. Dozens of wooden beds had been set up and on almost all of them were what resembled heaps of rags. From time to time one of the piles would moan or turn over, or was spoken to by one of the men and women who had evidently volunteered to tend the suffering. Some were washing the sores and boils of the victims, others were reapplying bandages to their limbs. The smell was awful, and the volunteers wore scarves around their noses and mouths.

‘Most of our volunteers have relatives down here,’ said the plague doctor. ‘They have already been exposed in their homes so they assume there is no harm in further exposure.’

‘I need to see a victim in the advanced stages,’ said van Horstmann, ‘but not on his last legs. A strong one. One who is fighting.’

‘I see,’ said the plague doctor. ‘Here. I have just the man.’

At the end of one sewer section was a large man lying on a bed, his shirt removed revealing the spiralling red-black marks typical of the disease on his barrel chest. Van Horstmann saw right away the broken nose and cauliflower ears of a man who fought for a living. His hands were big and gnarled, and his skin was covered in old scars.

‘Helmut,’ said the doctor. ‘Someone is here to see you.’

‘I wish,’ said Helmut, ‘it would hurry up and bloody kill me. Stuff this for living. If I wasn’t so bloody-minded I’d have given it up but damn me every way there is, I just can’t let it all go.’

‘Do not fear, Helmut,’ said the doctor. ‘You will be dead very soon. I can promise you that.’

‘Not often you can make us promises, eh?’ replied Helmut with a smile. There was blood on his teeth. He forced his head up to look at van Horstmann. ‘Who’s the ghost?’

‘A magister,’ said the doctor.

‘Gonna magic me better?’

‘No,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But perhaps if I learn enough from those such as you, I can do so in the future.’

Helmut made a low gurgling sound that might have been a laugh.

Van Horstmann placed his case on the floor beside the bed. He unfolded it, revealing several pockets in which were held brass fittings and several lenses. He assembled the device swiftly, and a tripod holding up a contraption of half a dozen lenses and mirrors held in sequence took shape.

‘This is my speculum,’ he said. ‘Designed to focus the wind of Light magic and allow examination of the hidden knowledge revealed thereby.’

‘Van Horstmann’s Speculum,’ said the doctor. ‘Most interesting.’

The device was adjusted so it stood beside the bed and aimed at Helmut’s chest. ‘The symptoms, if you will,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Rumours name everything from blindness to swelling of the extremities as indicators of this plague.’

‘Well, the first signs share much in common with any number of maladies,’ replied the doctor. ‘This makes it difficult to distinguish if it is this new plague or one of the other diseases that we have been quite happy to die from throughout all human history. Nausea, pain in the joints and belly, difficulties in digestive matters. Various others; it differs. Then the marks appear.’

‘It’s the worms,’ said Helmut. ‘Hungry little devils. Got plenty of meat on me so they must have thought they were in maggot-heaven.’

‘Indeed’ said the doctor. ‘The worms are either the cause of the disease or one of its other symptoms. Perhaps they are introduced in a larval form to the body and thereby give rise to the plague, or the plague creates conditions within the body conducive to their development. I personally believe they rise from the flesh as creatures of the river are birthed from the mud, but again, opinions differ.’

‘And then?’ asked van Horstmann, continuing to tinker with the speculum.

‘The organs are stressed to the point they overheat. They burn, often. They cook within the body. The skin might itself be burned from the inside. There is great pain. Sometimes several non-essential organs can fail in such a manner before the victim dies. If they are lucky, it starts with the heart. If they are unlucky, it can begin with the entrails and not stop for several days.’

‘And this is not a natural disease,’ said van Horstmann.

‘No,’ replied the doctor. ‘It is not. Whether from a beastman’s cauldron or some wayward alchemy, it is not on the natural world we can lay the blame.’

Van Horstmann made the final adjustment, and the lenses clicked into place. The mirrors and lenses took what dim light there was in the hospital and focused it in a patch of yellow in the centre of Helmut’s chest. ‘And what do they call it?’

‘Many things,’ said the doctor.

‘It needs a name,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The first part of any solution is to label all the parts.’

‘It’s the Gods’ Rot,’ said Helmut. ‘We pissed them off, the gods, and this is what we get. Can’t remember who I heard it from. But I crossed them often enough so I suppose I deserve it.’

‘Do not speak,’ said the doctor.

‘Gods’ Rot,’ said van Horstmann. ‘That will do. Helmut, what did you do before you were stricken?’

Helmut ignored the doctor’s admonition for silence. ‘Fought. For money. For gamblers.’

‘I see,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Then you are strong?’

‘Very.’

‘Good.’

Van Horstmann whispered the ritual phrase and made the required gesture. As was the way of the Light Order, the spell that infused the speculum with magic was made up of rote words and motions. They were the mechanism through which the Light wind could be tapped, brought from the aethyr into the real world. The gears and levers of the speculum clicked and whirred and the lenses shifted, focusing the light and tinting it different colours as it played across Helmut’s chest.

It found a point and focused. Helmut arched his back and gritted his teeth as a hot beam of yellow-white light burned against him. The skin was translucent now and the shapes of his ribs could be seen ghosted underneath, the shifting slabs of muscle in his pectorals and abdomen, the squirming shapes of his organs.

In the yellow glare, shapes were appearing in the air above him. Snakes coiled. Jaws clamped home. In the swirls of light were shapes half-glimpsed, tantalisingly vanishing just as they seemed to take on a definite form. One lens folded out from the device and cast a shaft of yellow light up to the ceiling, and the shifting forms were forced to become more distinct.

Snakes. They formed symmetrical patterns, as if following an infinitely complex dance. Faces – no, masks, death masks perhaps, features echoing the idealised art of long-dead civilisations with high cheekbones, stern eyes, elongated jaw pieces, all golden. Hands with long fingers, that spun and coiled in on themselves in endless swirling patterns.

Helmut gasped out in pain. His upper body was almost completely transparent now. His ribs were clear, lifting and closing as he drew painful breaths that filled the quivering bags of his lungs. Several of the organs crammed into his torso were like shrivelled fruit, withered away by the heat. His guts were a mass of pale tubes like dead snakes. The fat bulge of his tongue was just visible as the transparency crept up his throat towards his jaw.

The volunteers had all stopped their work and were watching the spectacle. Several of the plague victims sat up in their beds, their red-rimmed eyes wide to see such strangeness. Perhaps they thought it was a hallucination, one more cruel symptom of the Gods’ Rot. Perhaps they thought that this was how it killed – it lit you up and projected its final mocking message into the air above you.

A new shape was emerging in the show of lights. This one was darkness, a void in the light. It was the shape of a great head, like that of a bull or a horse, on muscular shoulders. Four eyes burned in its face and its jaw opened to show that it was, in shape, nothing that resembled anything that had ever lived in the natural world. Horns appeared, twisting together above its head, spreading behind its cranium like the spires of a crown. A long forked tongue lolled from its mouth, bright red.

The eyes turned to van Horstmann. The speculum shuddered and emitted sparks.

The mouth was wide now, and it roared. The sound reached all the way from the aethyr. The stones of the unfinished sewer shook. Chunks of mortar fell on the patients and the volunteers.

‘It sees us!’ cried the plague doctor. Someone in the hospital screamed. Another voice was raised in wordless panic.

Van Horstmann stood and yelled a word of power. The speculum shut down and folded up. The light show diminished just as the daemon’s head rushed forwards to fill it. The device clattered to the floor, spilling brass gears.

The transparency of Helmut’s body faded. His ribs disappeared, replaced with skin, newly scorched and blemished. The man’s eyes were closed and his mouth hung open. Smoke coiled from his chest and mouth.

The doctor bent over Helmut, feeling his wrist and throat. He put his ear to Helmut’s chest. Van Horstmann could feel the heat coming off the man.

‘He is dead,’ said the doctor. ‘His heart has stopped.’

‘Then he got what he wanted,’ said van Horstmann.

‘And did you?’ asked the doctor.

‘Perhaps. I know now more than I did when I arrived.’

‘Where is this disease from?’ said the doctor. ‘Magister, if you know, if there is hope, then you must tell us.’

‘A cure I cannot give you,’ replied van Horstmann. He began to scoop up the components of the speculum and dismantle the device, patiently placing each piece back in its assigned compartment in the case. ‘But as to what caused it? I can make some suggestions about that.’

‘Such as?’

‘You saw it as well as I did, doctor. The daemon. The plague is the work of the daemon. The leader of some cult hidden in our city, or a lone daemonologist possessing great learning and malice, has concocted it and unleashed it on us. Perhaps they are in league with the beastmen, but it is not shamanic magic itself that we are facing.’

‘And that makes it easier to fight?’ asked the doctor.

‘Perhaps,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It makes it easier for me to understand. And if we are ever to find a cure, that is the first stage.’

In the Light Order’s pyramid, the exorcisms were continuing.

‘Fear breeds them,’ said Magister Kant. He was watching another ritual. A man, in his later middle age he guessed, was lying on his back in the middle of the exorcism chamber surrounded by chanting acolytes.

‘How many have there been?’ asked van Horstmann. He rarely came by this chamber, its proportions and materials carefully chosen to create greater magical resonance. The Light Order’s exorcists had gone one way, the battle magisters another, pure researchers like himself yet another.

‘Today?’ said Kant. ‘Three. This week, a dozen.’

‘I see. Strange times.’

‘Strange indeed. Some of them are just hysterical. Nothing daemonic at all. But most are real enough.’

The man in the circle howled and convulsed. Van Horstmann could hear his bones cracking. Hands were pushing up against the skin of his belly from the inside, forcing his abdomen out of shape.

‘No!’ yelled Kant. ‘The seventh declaration! Make the seventh declaration or you will lose that thing! It will run to the aethyr and we will never see it banished!’

The lead acolyte scrabbled in the pile of parchment and implements beside him. He found a scroll, unrolled it and began a new chant, gabbling through the syllables as the man’s screaming grew louder.

‘Vries’s declaration,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It is of use, then?’

‘Just like everything you brought in,’ said Kant. ‘That isn’t the problem. There aren’t enough of us. There are few enough priestesses of Shallya in the city now, so the burden lies on us.’

‘What of the Silver Hammer and their warrior priests?’ asked van Horstmann.

Kant looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t know, comprehender,’ he said. ‘Who does? It’s the Silver Hammer.’

‘Of course.’

Van Horstmann left the chamber behind. Fear bred the possessed. Minds became obsessive, or inflamed with a passion of madness. They became desperate. They begged for someone, for something, to make sense of the chaos in their minds. Sometimes, something answered. And the result was a man like the one lying in that chamber, probably about to die, a daemon being dragged out of him.

It was a short walk through the glare of the pyramid’s incessant light, through the many corridors and sub-chambers towards van Horstmann’s quarters. Many of the walls were translucent, allowing light sources to shine through, or were plated with polished gold or mirrors to send the light cascading in an infinity of reflections. Perhaps someone who was not a wizard would have been driven mad by the strangeness of the place, and ended up himself a gateway for daemons. Van Horstmann had accepted the place as he had accepted the warping of reality that occurred within himself every time he focused the winds of magic.

The Skull of Katam was quiet when he entered. Several books and heaps of parchment lay on the floor where he had been researching notes from various expeditions sponsored by the order. Men had ventured across the Sea of Claws, to the Southlands, into places thought to be cursed, or not to exist at all, and had written down what they saw. It was fascinating – not what they had actually encountered, but the strange things their minds conjured out of nothing. They saw sea monsters in the wave-tops and vast flying beasts in the clouds. Sometimes they were real, but it was the illusion of them that van Horstmann found more interesting. When a mind was not organised and aware of its own workings, it filled in those gaps of ignorance with whatever it feared or desired the most.

Van Horstmann opened up the side of the statue, revealing the extra-spatial sanctum. It was quiet there, too, which was good. If any of his guests learned to escape the puzzle box it would be a severe problem. He would deal with it, but not without compromising much of the rest of what he had to do. As it was the puzzle box sat undisturbed on its shelf beside the Liber Pestilentius.

Van Horstmann turned to one of the panes of crystal that hung on the walls. They were finely polished and without flaws, and had cost as much as van Horstmann could appropriate from the coffers of the order without creating suspicion. The same craftsmen who had made the lenses of the speculum had also, after overcoming their bafflement at such strange instructions, cut and polished these panes to van Horstmann’s specifications.

He raised a hand and let the winds of the aethyr flow through him, just a breath of it. The pane illuminated in a jumble of colours, and through the light a shape coagulated.

It was a familiar one. Ugly as a violent death, part insect, part lizard, and just enough human to make it capable of an expression of annoyance. The face of Hiskernaath.

‘What do you want?’ hissed the daemon. ‘You’re too good now to speak face to face? You’re finally afraid of what I’ll do to you when I get the chance?’

‘Our contract will never be broken, Hiskernaath,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And I keep the box closed for now because it will be a swine of a task to cram you all back in.’

‘How much longer must I endure?’ demanded the daemon. ‘A hundred are in here. The stench! The lies! Hatred such as men will never know exists a thousand times over, and it is the hatred one daemon feels for another.’ It was an exaggeration. There were a couple of dozen in the puzzle box with Hiskernaath, at most.

‘You were created to serve,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not to be friends.’

‘Not to serve you!’

‘And yet,’ said van Horstmann, ‘I have further instructions, and they will be obeyed. Is that not right?’

Hiskernaath spat and grumbled in some arcane tongue.

‘Is that not right, daemon? I am your master. You will answer.’

‘Yes,’ said Hiskernaath. ‘Your will is my will.’

‘Master.’

‘Master.’

‘Good. The plague is well-advanced. The daemons captured by the new rituals have done their job well. It is rampant throughout the city. Morkulae and his cohorts probably enjoy their task rather too much.’

‘Good for them.’

‘There is another stage to this plan. That is where you come in. I need someone possessed.’

‘Then I will…’

‘You will be free, yes. For a time. I know that is what you crave, Hiskernaath. But this is not another case of making one angry soul lash out at the right time. This requires more complexity and subtlety. And a lot more power.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I need all of you,’ said van Horstmann.

Other panes were swimming with light and shapes now, more faces forming. Some were knots of broken fingers, or bunches of angry muscle. Some were all fangs and horn, or drooping handfuls of sagging, flabby flesh. None of them looked remotely human. Dozens of them crammed into the panes, like faces trying to look in through a window.

‘What?’ asked Hiskernaath, now drooling with anticipation. ‘What do you desire?’

Van Horstmann explained what he was going to do, and what he needed the daemons to do to make it possible. He explained how they were all bound to him by the same contracts inked and burned onto his skin, and how their few moments outside the confines of his puzzle-box prison would only be earned through performing this task for van Horstmann.

Halfway through, Hiskernaath began to laugh.

The procession wound its way from Königplatz to the river, and had already gathered more than three thousand Altdorfers. Drummers at its head beat out a slow gait and behind them were the widows, dressed in what had once been their finest dresses, now torn and smeared with mud and ashes. They tore at their hair and sang long, old funeral dirges.

Then came the main mass of the procession. They were from every segment of Altdorf’s society. Nobles in fine purples. Skinny urchins, as filthy as the widows. Burghers holding pomades against their noses to ward off the stink of the masses. Bakers, smiths, paupers, the rough-handed men who punted boats across the river, wan maidens apprenticed to the city’s temples, builders, gamblers, fighters and farmers who had only come into the city to visit the markets and found themselves trapped by the quarantine.

‘What do they want?’ asked Kardiggian. He was a large man for a Light wizard – the order did not much value physical strength or presence, and Kardiggian’s height and broad shoulders made him stand apart. If any of the Light Order looked the part of a battle magister, it was Kardiggian, whose full, black beard and equally black eyes gave him the look of a warrior taken from an ancient battlefield and wrapped in the robes of a wizard.

‘I don’t think they want anything,’ said van Horstmann. ‘They have to do something. For many the worst part of the Gods’ Rot is that it leaves them helpless. They can’t do anything to help those who have it, and there is precious little they can do to avoid it now they are forbidden to leave the city. So all they have left is to take to the streets.’

Altdorfers loved protesting and rioting if the object of their anger was egregious enough. But this wasn’t a protest. It was more like a funeral march, where every member was marking the death of someone they cared for – someone who had died, or was going to die, or was at great risk of dying. Judging from the obvious weakness and sickliness of many, some of them marched to mark their own deaths.

‘It is pitiable,’ said Kardiggian.

‘You surprise me,’ said van Horstmann.

‘How so? You do not feel pity?’

‘To see so many people, moved to action not because there is any practical purpose but because there is a compulsion built deep into them, all the same? I find it fascinating. When I am afforded the opportunity to witness such an example of the mind’s frailties, there is never much room left for pity.’

‘Will it be a problem?’

Van Horstmann shook his head. ‘They will be gone from the Garden’s vicinity soon. I do not think we need pay it any more mind.’

Kardiggian was there as, for want of a better word, muscle. His skills lay with destruction, and he might be called upon to use them. Van Horstmann’s role was to operate the speculum – van Horstmann’s Speculum – and because it was right that he be there. He had, after all, been the one to set the Light Order’s investigations on this path. Vranas was an expert exorcist and also had the political savvy to cope with any fallout from their mission. Arcinhal, meanwhile, was an expert at protective magics, which would most definitely prove useful. Vranas was, by unspoken consent, their leader.

The four magisters had gathered in a side street, looking onto the road choked with the marchers. Arcinhal had cast a protective circle around them – one that, as long as the magisters did not leave it, turned onlookers’ eyes away. It was not true invisibility, for that was much more difficult to achieve and was a specialism of the Grey Order. Instead it simply implied to any potential witnesses that this group of men was not worth looking at, so ordinary must they appear. It was impossible for the wizards to look like normal Altdorfers without magical aid. Even if they had not worn their Light Order robes or carried their staffs and wands, they would have looked like trouble of some kind. Arcinhal’s spell was the only way they could go about their business without attracting a crowd of onlookers.

‘I would rather we had requested the assistance of the priests of Morr,’ Vranas was saying.

‘They would not countenance us doing what we must,’ said van Horstmann. ‘They would call it grave robbing. They are protective of their patch, are they not?’

‘The Amethyst Order, then,’ continued Vranas. ‘This is more their–’

‘The less people know, the better,’ said van Horstmann.

‘I agree,’ said Kardiggian. ‘There are many… perhaps you might say, exalted guests in the Garden. One of them might be involved. I can trust us to be discreet, but I do not extend that trust very far.’

Vranas raised an eyebrow. He was a tall and pale man with a shaven head and a long, sharp nose. He had a cultured accent and a slickness of speech that made him the ideal magister to step forward when the order had to converse with people on the outside. Van Horstmann had developed an instant dislike of Vranas that had no logical base, save perhaps that he represented a breach in the isolation of the Light Order. Van Horstmann appreciated that isolation. Vranas, if he tried to make the Light Order more open to the scrutiny of outsiders, would have to be discouraged.

‘Night will fall soon,’ said Arcinhal. ‘That is when it must happen. I can’t keep us hidden if I need to protect us from harm, too.’

Van Horstmann had no quarrel with Arcinhal. Arcinhal was a brilliant man, quiet and organised, one who drove the acolytes beneath him to distraction with his exacting routines. His acolytes copied out reams of protective enchantments, over and over again, or pored over fragments of old magics recovered by adventurers and explorers. Van Horstmann conducted his research in isolation, but most other magisters worked in some way with Arcinhal as they delved into the Light Order’s collection of magical texts.

‘This will not be as neat and organised as you are used to, comprehender,’ said Vranas. ‘It may well tend towards the ugly.’

‘You forget, exorcist,’ replied van Horstmann, ‘I was there at the banishment of the creature that had taken Princess Astrid.’

‘You were there?’ asked Arcinhal. ‘At the Imperial Palace? I did not know that.’

‘I understand van Horstmann here likes his secrets,’ said Vranas with a smirk. ‘The wharf district fires destroyed evidence of some such secrets, is that not right, van Horstmann?’

‘You would have to ask the Silver Hammer,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Best of luck with that.’

Van Horstmann regarded Vranas again, this time from the point of view of an enemy. Vranas had no way of knowing the worst of what van Horstmann had done, that was certain, but no doubt the magister kept tabs on every prominent member of the Light Order. Even the Half-Circle’s stewards and cooks would not be beneath his notice. There was nothing unusual about the fact Vranas had collected rumours and secrets about van Horstmann too. The only difference was, of course, that there was a lot more to find about van Horstmann than any other magister in the Light Order.

And as an enemy, Vranas had his weaknesses. Vranas considered himself an inviolable, indispensable part of the Light Order, as essential to its existence as the foundations of the pyramid. Elrisse’s death had, though Vranas would never articulate it as such, been a great boon to the exorcist. He no doubt imagined himself the natural choice as the next Grand Magister, and assumed – rightly, van Horstmann thought – that if the Emperor was compelled to appoint a new Grand Magister he would choose Vranas. But the assumption of indestructibility did not make for a position of strength. It meant that Vranas was ignorant of the threats that might be gathering beneath him – the opposite of the Silver Hammer’s paranoia, an inability to jump at shadows. If someone moved against him, Vranas would – perhaps literally – never see it coming.

‘If you are wrong, van Horstmann,’ said Arcinhal. ‘If this… this device of yours–’

‘The speculum,’ said van Horstmann.

‘Yes, this speculum, if it is wrong–’

‘It is not.’

‘If it is wrong and we dig up some… I don’t know, some saint, some ancestor of who knows what family, then we might never hear the end of it.’

‘I am not wrong,’ said van Horstmann with gravity. ‘I have seen what this plague does. I have seen where it comes from and what it leaves of those it infects. And I am not wrong.’

Kardiggian looked up at the sky, squinting at the horizon still aglow with the dying sun. ‘Sun goes down in seven minutes,’ the battle magister said. ‘Let us begin.’

The four magisters, still cloaked in Arcinhal’s mantle of disinterest, headed across the street, down which the last few stragglers of the funeral march were hobbling. They were the old and sick without family to help them along, and a couple of young urchins who trotted along to keep up. No one looked at the magisters as they moved towards the gates.

The side street that ended with the gate was, uniquely for Altdorf, scrupulously clean. No ordure ran down the channels cut into the middle of the street, and no wheel ruts had been worn into the stones. Trash did not gather in the corners, to be picked over by the vagrants who haunted the dusk and pre-dawn streets of the city. At the end of the street rose the intricate wrought iron gates of the Garden of Morr.

‘For a place that serves as this city’s symbol of death,’ said Kardiggian, ‘have you imagined how many of Altdorf’s people are actually buried here? One in ten, perhaps?’

‘Less than that,’ said Arcinhal. ‘Perhaps once it was more, but not now. A grave in the garden is beyond almost everyone. Even money isn’t enough any more. Most burghers won’t get in, no matter how much they might pour into Morr’s coffers. You need power and status. Good breeding, too.’

A figure emerged from the shadows that, until then, had not seemed deep enough to hide him. He wore a long black habit and his head was tonsured, the exposed scalp white and newly-stubbled. His habit was held closed by a rope belt fastened through the eyes of a large bird’s skull and around his neck hung a small book on a length of twine.

‘Father,’ said Vranas. ‘We seek passage to the Garden.’

‘I have been told to expect you,’ said the priest of Morr. ‘Do no dishonour to the interred. Mark the nobility of those within. And, good sirs, pray be careful where you tread.’

‘We will,’ said Vranas.

‘I shall be without. Though you may not see us, none of us will be very far away.’ The priest unhooked the chain that held the gates closed. The gates themselves were of black-painted iron and depicted two skeletons holding up a slab on which lay a body as if in state. The gates squealed as they opened, and the magisters moved into the garden.

Arcinhal let the concealing spell fade. There was no one in here that would be alarmed at the sight of them, and he had to be ready to put up any other form of protection they needed. Everywhere there were grave monuments – statues, full tombs like miniature mansions, grave slabs with the images of the interred carved onto their lids. Some were new, with the metal fittings of statues untarnished and the mottling of mould yet to gather on the stone. Others had been worn smooth by the ages – they had been here since before Altdorf itself, when the lords of the keep on the Reik had buried the dead from wars with the greenskins.

‘What might a Light wizard have to do to be buried here?’ asked van Horstmann.

‘Save the city,’ said Arcinhal. ‘Or become Emperor.’

‘They would never let one of us in here,’ said Kardiggian. ‘Altdorf hates the wizards. No matter how many times we might save them all, they will never trust us. It is part of what it means to be a wizard.’

‘Focus,’ said Vranas. ‘Remember why we are here. Van Horstmann?’

Van Horstmann placed the case for his speculum on the ground and began to assemble it. The other magisters watched with some interest, for none of them had ever used such a device. Van Horstmann had designed it himself and had the pieces crafted by the Altdorfer craftsmen who usually made stargazing implements for the Celestial Order or navigational devices for sailors. It was not the kind of thing that was ever seen among Light wizards, who relied on the magical labour of their acolytes rather than complex tools.

‘Quite the contraption,’ said Vranas.

‘We must have more than one way of looking at the world,’ said van Horstmann as he worked. ‘That is the weakness of the colleges. Each order only sees through one eye. Through the concept of the world created by the way of their own wind of magic. The Bright Order sees everything as creation and destruction, always in violence. The Amethyst wizards as decay and dissolution. We see it in terms of purity and corruption, everything in those terms. It is how a wizard becomes blind to the reality of the world, for he rejects whatever does not fit into his view of it. I see through the eyes both of a Light wizard and of a man curious about the world. That is how I stave off stagnation.’

Van Horstmann’s Speculum was assembled, a waist-high collection of lenses and mirrors. The sun was down now and night had fallen, yet still the speculum gathered enough light from the stars to send fractured reflections glimmering across the headstones and monuments.

The light formed into a single beam, playing across the garden. This place was not just a graveyard – it was a monument to the most exalted dead of Altdorf. The Emperors had their own burial places in the crypts of the Imperial Palace but other leaders of the city, the noble-born and rich, had their resting places here. The priests of Morr kept the place flawlessly tended, including the elegant beds of flowers they planted between the monuments. The light caught the names of famous families from Altdorf’s past, some of them still among the leading households of the city, a few others forgotten save for the graves.

‘There,’ said van Horstmann. The beam had settled on one part of the Garden of Morr, a side-plot centred on a grand tomb with three wings. SALZENHAAR, read the name inscribed on the lintel.

‘Damnation on high,’ hissed Arcinhal. ‘It’s the Salzenhaars. They built half this city. One of them’s the Burgomeister.’

‘Opening the tomb may be difficult to explain,’ added Vranas.

‘I am not wrong,’ said van Horstmann. He stood up and walked towards the tomb. He had his staff held across his chest, as if ready to fend off an attacker with it.

‘You say you can find the source of the plague,’ said Kardiggian, ‘but what does that mean? An infected body buried here? The ratmen?’

‘No,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Not the skaven.’ He reached the door. It was of greenish bronze, with no apparent means of opening it. He pushed at it, then put his shoulder against it and shoved. It did not move.

‘If this device of yours works,’ Vranas said, ‘then it should at least–’

The rest of the sentence never got out. The door boomed open, throwing van Horstmann back across the flowers planted outside the Salzenhaar tomb. A foul, hot gale blew from the tomb, with the sound of a hundred voices howling.

‘Arcinhal!’ yelled Kardiggian.

Arcinhal swept his staff in a circle and the circle sprang up around himself, Vranas and Kardiggian. It took the form of the images of several hooded acolytes, blue-white, translucent and ghostly, standing heads bowed at guard around the wizards.

A hand gripped the door frame from the inside. The fingers were long and bony, held together by greyish, ropy muscles. The hand of a corpse.

Kardiggian yelled the words of a spell and bars of white light sprung up in front of the open door. Van Horstmann rolled away from the doorway and got back to his feet, pushing himself up with his staff. He held up a hand and conjured a circular shield of white fire around it.

‘Black heart and unwelcome stranger!’ yelled Vranas. ‘By the light of the aethyr be blinded! By its fires be constrained! Slaves to darkness, there is no darkness here!’

Above Vranas swelled a globe of light, a miniature sun that cast its harsh light against the statues and tombs of Morr’s Garden. Beams of light seared the moss encrusting the oldest headstones and withered the flowers to dust.

The skeleton of a son of the Salzenhaar family reached through the bars of light. The light burned the scraps of muscle and skin from his arms and set fire to the stained remnants of his funeral vestments. He had been wrapped in dark purple and gold-threaded ivory silk, and buried in the red-lacquered armour he had been wearing when struck down on the battlefield.

A bony hand grabbed van Horstmann’s ankle. Van Horstmann rammed the butt-end of his spear into the leering skull’s eye socket, forcing it into the mulch that filled the cranium. He let the wind of Light magic flow through him, from the core of his body through his arms to his fingers. White heat filled the staff and the skeleton’s skull burst, sending hot bone shrapnel flying.

More bodies were clambering over each other to get out. Some were fresher than the first, still with half-recognisable faces clinging to their skulls. Others were just bones.

Van Horstmann rolled onto his front and ran to Arcinhal’s circle. Behind him the bars of light shattered and the dead spilled out.

Darts of light impaled one, a woman, going by the long burgundy dress she had been buried in. The darts had spat from Kardiggian’s hand and the battle magister’s eyes were glowing now, the Light magic forced through his body in such quantities that it threatened to immolate him from the inside. Kardiggian had to condition his body to keep it intact when he wielded the raw force of battle magic.

Another corpse lurched through the edge of the protective circle. The parchment skin was scorched off it as it fell through the ring of glowing images. Vranas’s sphere of light descended and bathed the undead creature in fire. Smouldering bones fell off its frame until its spine and pelvis came apart.

‘Vranas! Banish them!’ cried Arcinhal.

Vranas knelt on the grass and aimed his staff at the tomb. Half a dozen more were struggling out, burning in the fire raining down. A spray of silver blades sheared from the staff and broke like glass against the undead.

‘This is fell magic,’ gasped Vranas. ‘Dark things animate them.’

Another stumbled close. Its fingers were like nails of bone, raking at van Horstmann’s face. Van Horstmann swiped his staff at its skull and a burst of yellow-white flame erupted from the impact, the charge held in the staff released in violence.

‘Hold them!’ yelled Vranas. Arcinhal was sweating now, shoulders drooping. The circle was flickering, the images of the acolytes close to fading out.

The tower drifted from the back of van Horstmann’s mind. It took form against the backdrop of the burning graveyard and time slowed down, the old channels of discipline giving shape to his thoughts.

This time the fortress was black stone and pitted iron, lashed by acidic winds and bounded by a moat of stagnant, corpse-choked water. Heads and hands were nailed to the battlements. Bodies were splayed across spiked barricades. A flaming beacon on the roof flickered against the dense, dark clouds.

The gates opened. Van Horstmann imagined himself drifting across the foetid moat and into the tower.

Chains hung from the rafters overhead. From each chain hung a dozen bodies, stripped and bloody, swinging bloated with decay like grapes left on the vine to rot. The eye sockets of each one had been hollowed out and in every socket was a gemstone.

Every time van Horstmann had meditated on magic, he had crystallised a single instance of it into one of these gemstones. There were hundreds of them here – some of them purely mundane, enabling him to conjure a light or a flame quickly. But many were more powerful, the result of months of hunting down the most dangerous and complicated spells and committing them, syllable by syllable, symbol by symbol, to memory.

Devonion’s Seventh Circle, a spell that, when cast around a bound and subdued subject, compelled the subject to answer any question truthfully. The Conjunction of Martyrs, which caused the energy channels of the target’s body to align and tear his organs apart with a burst of unfettered power. And the Argent Storm.

Van Horstmann had placed the Argent Storm in the tower years before. He had known he would need it one day. As time had gone on, as the pattern of events had unfurled, he had known exactly when he would have to call on such spells. Each one had taken months of study before van Horstmann had been able to hide them away here. But when the time came, he knew he would have to let them shatter and be destroyed.

Van Horstmann plucked the Argent Storm from an eye socket. It was deep blue and glistening with silver sparks. In his hand – though it was not really his hand, just a part of the mental image he had made of himself – it vibrated coldly, as if angry and impatient to be released.

Outside, in the real world, the dead had broken through Arcinhal’s circle. Van Horstmann had known they would. There were not just the walking dead, such as might be summoned by any petty necromancer. Vranas had been right – there was something darker animating them.

Van Horstmann let the tower recede. He felt the coils of snakes around his feet, their clammy flesh pressing against him, but he banished the sensation and forced himself to ignore them.

Not now. He would not fall apart now, as he almost had when facing the Hand Cerulean.

The Garden of Morr shifted back into place. The nearest skeleton emitted a loud hiss as it dragged itself on its sternum towards van Horstmann. Its legs had been blasted away by a volley of darts from Kardiggian’s hands, and as he watched another was impaled by a spear of light that fell from above and transfixed it through a shoulder blade. The other magisters had bought van Horstmann the few seconds he needed.

The gemstone shattered in his mind. The patterns of the Argent Storm burned against his skin, spiralling through his mind like tunnels of light. Van Horstmann dropped to his knees, the force of the power bearing down on him almost enough to knock him unconscious.

Bolts of silver lightning hammered down, each accompanied by a crack of thunder that shook the ground. The bolts earthed in searing light, separated by curtains of darkness.

Where it struck, the lightning shattered animated bone. The long-dead sons and daughters of the Salzenhaar family were destroyed in rapid succession, fragments of burning bone falling like hail. One bolt struck the family’s tomb and shattered the pediment, a deep crack splitting the miniature mansion in two. Another blew a crater in the middle of the magisters, throwing them off their feet.

The sound left van Horstmann’s ears ringing, and fingers of glowing light were burned against his retina. He tried to blink them away and clear his head from the cacophony.

The Garden of Morr drifted back into focus. The starlight had returned as the storm clouds dissipated, and it illuminated the shattered stones of the Salzenhaar tomb, the smouldering tears in the grass and flowerbeds, and chunks of smoking pelvis and skull littering the Garden. A haze of metallic-tasting smoke hung in the air.

Vranas coughed and got to his feet. Van Horstmann was still kneeling, leaning on his staff.

‘Holy stars,’ said Vranas. ‘Comprehender, what was that?’

Arcinhal was in the worst way, almost exhausted. Kardiggian had to help him to his feet – there was ice on Arcinhal’s breath and crystals of it clinging to his eyes.

‘Are they gone?’ said Kardiggian.

‘Van Horstmann?’ asked Vranas.

‘Maybe,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The Argent Storm leaves little in its wake.’

‘Powerful magic,’ said Kardiggian. ‘Battle magic. I tried to master it.’

‘You were working from a transcript that was flawed,’ said van Horstmann. ‘It took me months to find a complete example.’

‘Arcinhal?’ asked Vranas.

‘I can walk,’ said Arcinhal. ‘But no more. They were almost on us. I am sorry, magisters. We could all have died here.’

‘The tomb,’ said Vranas. ‘Some might remain.’

Van Horstmann followed Vranas to the shattered tomb. The crack down the middle of it looked like it ran right down to the foundations. Vranas held up a hand and a light appeared in his palm, illuminating the inside of the tomb like a torch. Van Horstmann could see the stone slabs with their coffins, each one with its lid torn off. This place had been more lavish than the houses of most living Altdorfers, gilded sculpture running across the walls depicting the generosity or prowess in war of the Salzenhaar family.

‘There,’ said Vranas, pointing to a flight of stairs that led beneath the upper chamber. Van Horstmann followed him to the staircase and saw that here, too, the coffins had been ripped open from the inside. This was where the older dead were buried, the matriarchs and patriarchs who had founded the bloodline.

In one corner was the stone sarcophagus of a knight. Its lid had been forced aside. It was filled now with nothing more than dust, the remains of whatever this body had been buried with. HEINRICH GRUNHALD-SALZENHAAR, read the name inscribed on the side.

The place smelt of mould and great age. A few loose bones were scattered around the floor along with the leavings of rats and insects.

‘If this is the source of the plague,’ said Vranas, ‘perhaps the evidence of it was lost with the bodies of the dead.’ He stood now beside the sarcophagus of Heinrich Grunhald-Salzenhaar and bent over it.

He ran a hand through the fine dust in the sarcophagus. He paused and reached in further. When he stood again he had a book in his hand.

The book was bound with bloody bandages that van Horstmann knew, from experience, never dried out. Vranas was holding the Liber Pestilentius.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

TYRANT

Rumours grew stale. Even the tales of the newest district to fall to the Gods’ Rot, of the red crosses daubed on the doors of yet another street, grew old. The criers on the corners, whose lists of newly-infected streets had been a staple of every Altdorfer’s morning just a week before, had to pad the daily news of the plague with accounts of hapless souls cut down by the Imperial Palace guards who were stationed at the gates to prevent anyone breaking the city’s quarantine.

Spouses, parents, children and friends wailed at the gates for their loved ones to be allowed out, or for themselves to be allowed in to wait out the horror of the plague with their families. The usual crowd of self-appointed oracles described the juicy categories of sin for which the plague was a punishment, or described ever more bizarre cures dictated to them by an angel of Shallya, or the spirit of a long-dead king.

It was as if there existed a script to be followed. The well-worn ruts of Altdorf’s superstition were brimming with the word that immersion in chicken hearts would cure the plague, or that archers on the rooftops were shooting anyone who made a rush for the walls. They still invented stories about beastmen in the city, only now they were brewing cauldrons of infectious bile and pouring it into the Reik.

And then, that morning, there was a new word on the criers’ lips. A name.

Salzenhaar.

One of the Salzenhaars lay there now, tied down with a stick clenched in his teeth. He had been taken in the night and he still wore his nightshirt, now wet with perspiration though the house’s cellars were cold.

Witch Hunter Argenos stood over the man and looked at his prisoner. Salzenhaar looked like any other man. Perhaps mid-thirties in age, a little weighty around the middle, as was fashionable for those wealthy enough to eat more than they had to. In good shape otherwise. Thick dark-brown hair. The heavy lower lip that was typical of the Salzenhaars and the various branches of their family tree.

Mikhael Salzenhaar didn’t need to speak to express a mix of fear and anger. Argenos was intimately familiar with that particular mix. Salzenhaar’s eyes stared, lids pared back as if he was trying to bore twin holes on Argenos’s face with a look. He wasn’t quite panicking yet. He did not despair. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. You could never tell before they were dragged down here and introduced to the way the Silver Hammer conducted its affairs.

Argenos took the stick from between Salzenhaar’s teeth. Salzenhaar spat out the taste in his mouth, spittle clinging to his goatee beard. ‘I know what you’re going to do,’ said the nobleman. ‘I’ve heard of it. I have friends who know about this sort of thing.’ He spat the words out, trying make them sarcastic, but his throat was dry and there was a crack in his voice.

‘Then you also know that everything you fear will not come to pass,’ said Argenos, ‘if you just tell me what I want to know.’

Salzenhaar closed his eyes and seemed to deflate. Argenos had seen the look on men hundreds of times before. Either Mikhael Salzenhaar did not know anything in which Argenos might have an interest, or he was exceptionally good at pretending he didn’t, which in Argenos’s experience was not a skill men like Salzenhaar had.

‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. It was the first time he had said it, but already it sounded like a weary refrain he had trotted out more times than he could remember. Argenos knew he would say it again, many times more.

‘I see,’ said Argenos. ‘Then we are going to perform that dance, are we? I know the steps well. I know them a lot better than you, Salzenhaar, and believe me, you will tell me something.’ The witch hunter turned from the table on which Salzenhaar was restrained and took a large metal jug from the bench behind him. ‘Just what you tell me is not important to you, though it might be to me. What matters is that you will tell me, sooner or later. Sooner.’ Argenos lifted the jug so Salzenhaar could see it. ‘Or later.’

Salzenhaar swallowed, with obvious difficulty. ‘I have money,’ he said.

‘Ah, yes. That particular step. Done with haste but very little grace. I know that one, too. But do you know this one?’ He nodded at the jug. ‘Holy water, Herr Salzenhaar. Blessed by priests of every pious faith in Altdorf. Good, sacred stuff. And drawn from the purest well in the city. Pure enough even for one of your high birth to drink. But can you drink it all? At once, and without a single drop escaping your lips? If you tell me lies, the holy water will recoil and you will gag. If not, you will imbibe it cleanly and you will be proven innocent and honest. Will you drink, Herr Salzenhaal?’

Salzenhaal looked more confused than afraid. ‘That’s insane,’ he said. ‘That’s… that’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘I have burned witches that were exposed by the trial of water,’ said Argenos. ‘And they were most definitely witches.’

‘And who else? How many who weren’t?’

‘Few enough that the trial has proven its worth,’ replied Argenos without a pause. ‘So, will you drink?’

‘Of course I won’t drink! I can’t down that whole thing without bringing it back up! No one could!’

‘Then you will talk?’

‘And say what?’

Argenos bent low over Salzenhaar. He could smell the sweat on the man, stale already. ‘Tell me the secrets you have sworn never to tell a man like me,’ he said. ‘Tell me where you got the book.’

Salzenhaar’s expression now hovered between disbelief and resolve. He made a decision, somewhere down there among the dread.

‘I bought it,’ he said.

‘From whom?’

‘From an Estalian,’ said Salzenhaar, his words rapid. ‘I heard tell he was in the city with something to sell. I learned it from a monk of Taal who spreads such news in the guise of advising our households. I met him one night and bought it.’

‘For how much?’

‘For a chest of… silver. A bottle of innocents’ tears. A statue that I bought five years ago from a wandering pedlar, who told me it was an idol of the beastmen who lived in the Forest of Chalons. It had amber for eyes. And he gave me the book in return. I did not learn his name, nor he mine, so far as I know.’

‘Good,’ said Argenos. ‘Good. That saves us a great deal of time and anguish. Good. Now tell me.’ Argenos stood at the end of the table behind Salzenhaar’s head, so the man could not see him, and leaned down close to speak in his ear. ‘Now, what is the book called?’

Salzenhaar took two or three rapid breaths. ‘The Forbidden Codex,’ he said.

‘Wrong.’

Salzenhaar gave a strangled noise, like cry of anger forced down into the back of his throat. ‘What do you want me to say?’ he shouted.

‘Tell me what I want to hear.’

‘I tried! You know more about it than me! I know nothing! Shallya’s teats, you should be asking yourself!’ Salzenhaar was hyperventilating now, his face red.

Argenos leaned down over his prisoner. ‘You know nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ gasped Salzenhaar, his breathing shallower and shallower.

‘What a shame,’ said Argenos. ‘Then what follows will be wasted effort.’

Salzenhaar’s eyes rolled back in his head. He strained against his bonds in spasm, and fell still. Argenos turned his head one way then the other, and opened the man’s eye. He was unconscious.

The door to the chamber opened. Argenos could not quite hide his annoyance at the intrusion.

Magister Heiden Kant stood in the doorway. He had a handful of loose parchment in his hand. ‘Lord Argenos,’ he said. ‘A moment.’

Argenos indicated Mikhael Salzenhaar, contorted around in his restraints. ‘I have all my moments spoken for, magister. There are none to spare. Once my guest wakes again I must go to work.’

‘The Salzenhaars won’t know anything, no matter how many of them you put against the grindstone.’

‘I shall ascertain that for myself.’

‘There’s no need. It’s not them.’

‘The book was found in their tomb.’

‘And I know who put it there.’

Argenos cocked his head to one side. ‘You do, Magister Kant?’

‘I suspect.’

‘Ah, you suspect. I suspect things, too. I suspect them about Mikhael here.’

‘Just listen, Argenos! Just for once, listen!’ Kant had never spoken to Argenos with such bluntness before. Very few ever had. Even people who did not know what the Silver Hammer did had instincts enough to know that Argenos was a man who assumed he would be respected and had the capacity to create unpleasantness when he was not. Kant threw his papers onto the table, beside Salzenhaar. ‘The memoirs of Mholik.’

‘And who, pray, is Mholik?’ Argenos’s voice had a note of danger in it that Kant did not seem to notice.

‘A one-time Grand Magister of the Celestial Order,’ replied Kant. ‘That is why the connection was not made. The colleges do not speak to one another, witch hunter. We keep what we know to ourselves, as if there never was a Teclis and we all sprang into existence of our own accord. Mholik was a scholar above all and everything he wrote survives, but no one outside the Celestial College ever set eyes on it before now. It was only the form of the ritual that gave me the connection. I had heard of something similar among Mholik’s ceremonies for observing the conjunctions of the stars.’

Argenos looked through the papers. They were covered in diagrams and cramped writing that had faded to light-brown on the ivory-coloured parchment. ‘I fail to…’

‘You fail to see any relevance. Yes, Argenos, I know. The relevance is that these are the root ceremonies on which the protective rituals attributed to Vries are based. But Egelbert Vries is supposed to have invented them. That was the whole reason the Light Order put such effort into rediscovering them in his writings. The writings that van Horstmann earned his spurs deciphering.’

Van Horstmann?’ said Argenos. ‘You have ever had an evil eye for Magister van Horstmann, Kant.’

‘And now I understand why,’ continued Kant. If he recognised the impatience in Argenos’s manner, in the dangerous way his eyes narrowed and his voice dropped, it did not dissuade him. ‘Vries did not invent what he hid in his works. He copied them from Mholik, who broke the same ground a generation earlier. Vries was a plagiarist. He took advantage of the fact that the evidence was hidden away in the library of the Celestial Order to leave a legacy that wasn’t even his. It was lies. All of it. He was a barely competent wizard at best. Nothing he wrote was ever worth a damn.’

‘And you went to the Celestial College to find this out?’

‘And I will never be owed another favour by a wizard in this city because of it,’ said Kant. ‘I didn’t think I’d get through the gates. But I did, and when I told them I could prove one of the Light Order’s favourites was a fraud they gave me free run of their library. But that isn’t the point.’

‘Indeed not,’ said Argenos, ‘otherwise I would have to dig up Egelbert Vries and tie him to this table.’

Kant looked down again at Salzenhaar, almost seeming to see the prisoner for the first time. ‘What is more important to you, witch hunter,’ he said, his tone now more measured. ‘Finding the truth, or being the object of fear?’

‘The truth, of course,’ said Argenos.

‘Then let Salzenhaar go. I know the truth. The absolute reality of it, this I swear. But it only means anything if you will act on it. Otherwise you might as well believe in whatever this poor idiot makes up to keep you from cutting his fingers off. Will you believe the truth, Argenos? Will you show that much faith?’

Argenos folded his arms. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Egrimm van Horstmann researched a new cycle of exorcism rituals. You saw them used against the Hand Cerulean. He said they were more works he had deciphered from Vries’s books. But I know that cannot be the case. Vries couldn’t write a limerick, let alone a ritual that could do what you witnessed. So it came from somewhere else.’

‘Where?’

‘Van Horstmann himself. He created it. Using this.’ Kant picked up one of the parchment sheets. This one had on it a single shape, a twisted figure that might have been a letter or a numeral but in no alphabet that either man had seen before that day. ‘The key sigil of van Horstmann’s exorcism. It is supposed to represent destruction. The component that severs the daemon’s presence in the real world and sends it back to the aethyr. But it doesn’t mean destruction at all, witch hunter. I found this in the Temple of Sigmar, and I had a daemon’s own job getting them to let me into the section where they held it.’

‘I have been to the Temple many times,’ said Argenos.

‘Then you know what I mean. It was transcribed from a menhir in Norsca, a place heaped with corpses and skulls.’

Argenos looked at the sigil. It was easy to imagine it cut into the weathered stone on a chill Norscan mountain, glowering down over a heap of sacrificial victims rotting away as a feast for the birds. ‘And it does not mean destruction?’

‘No,’ said Kant. ‘It means enslavement.’

Argenos looked up at the magister. ‘Then the daemons were not destroyed, they were enslaved?’

‘All of them,’ said Kant. ‘Every possession since the Battle of Drufenhaag. Enslaved and bound to Egrimm van Horstmann.’

‘The same van Horstmann,’ said Argenos, ‘who brought in the Liber Pestilentius and claimed it to be the source of the plague. Meaning–’

‘Meaning,’ interjected Kant, ‘that there is every chance that he was lying, that the Liber Pestilentius was planted by him and that he has an interest in the plague continuing. Perhaps even that he is its source. Given the magnitude of the damage he has done with his corruption of our rituals, that would certainly not be beyond him.’

Lord Argenos thought about this for a long moment. ‘And I take it you bring me this revelation because I am the one who must bring Comprehender van Horstmann to justice?’

Kant held up his hands. ‘I am here because I am a member of the Order of the Silver Hammer, and the Silver Hammer must know. If it is you who acts upon it, if it is another, if it is I alone, my duty must be done.’

‘And you would attempt to bring down van Horstmann alone, Magister Kant? If there was none other?’

‘I would.’

Argenos nodded, as if he had just heard an elegant solution to a complicated problem. ‘Yes, I think you would. The Silver Hammer has before countenanced moving against a target within the Colleges of Magic. There is no little suspicion of wizards among my kind, and Sigmar knows it has been proven justified. I have seen many chill evenings made bearable by a rogue magister burning at the stake. But we have never staged an assault on one of the colleges. The Pyramid of Light is as secure a location as exists in the Empire. The Imperial Palace would be easier to storm. The entire strength of Altdorf’s Silver Hammer could descend upon it and even with our own wizard in the shape of yourself, Magister Kant, we would stand little chance of getting through the gates.’

‘Van Horstmann must be stopped,’ said Kant. ‘If I die in the attempt then it is not a bad death.’

‘For you, perhaps,’ said Argenos. ‘For those who are lost in the attempt. A fine epitaph that would make. But for those of us left behind, such an attempt would leave a crippled Silver Hammer. Our enemies would wax great in the wake of such a catastrophe. As we are, there is no way the Order of the Silver Hammer will attack the Pyramid of Light directly.’

‘I can get you more magisters,’ said Kant earnestly. ‘I am not alone in my suspicion of van Horstmann. We can get inside, perhaps even bring a sizeable force to van Horstmann’s location. It will be us against him then.’

‘What if van Horstmann has been as busy as you, though? If he has won his own faction to his side, primed to believe that the Silver Hammer wants him ousted on trumped-up charges for some reason of our own? Make no mistake, Magister Kant, I want van Horstmann brought down. If what you say is true he is a daemonologist doing his work at the very heart of what should be our most stalwart institution for the destruction of the daemon. But I cannot make war. Not with Altdorf’s gates closed, not with what we have.’

‘You have us,’ said a third voice.

Kant and Argenos looked down at the slab as if they had both forgotten Mikhael Salzenhaar was there. Salzenhaar had woken up, though he still looked worse for wear.

‘Why be so surprised?’ said Salzenhaar, his voice weak. ‘Is this van Horstmann the swine-dog who planted that damn book?’

‘Quite probably,’ said Argenos.

‘More than probably,’ added Kant.

‘Then he despoiled the tomb of my father,’ said Salzenhaar. ‘I saw it torn and broken. I saw the bones scattered around the Garden of Morr. The bones of generations of my families. My father… and my cousin, dead at nineteen. I swore I would look after her when she was alive but thanks to this wretched witch I couldn’t even keep her body safe in her coffin. And my family’s name has become a thing of hate in the mouth of every Altdorfer. Isn’t that why I’m here? Because everyone across the city thinks they know the Salzenhaars are black magicians who brought down the plague? If this man is half of what you say he is then everything the Salzenhaars have in this city is yours to kill him with. We have men. Our own troops, and those of a dozen other houses bound to us by patronage. Probably the greatest armed force that could be summoned from the population of Altdorf. I will carry a blade myself, witch hunter, if you will have it.’

Argenos bent down over the table and removed the pin that held the restraints around Salzenhaar’s wrists. The prisoner tried to sit up, winced and lay down again, gingerly testing his shoulders and arms for twisted joints and pulled muscles.

‘You can get me more wizards?’ asked the witch hunter.

‘I can,’ said Kant.

‘Men are not enough. An army is not enough. We must have allies in the pyramid.’

‘And I swear we will have them.’ Kant turned to Salzenhaar. ‘I need your men by next sundown, armed and ready to march.’

‘Why such haste?’ asked Argenos. ‘We will strike the harder the more we can gather our strength.

Kant swallowed, took a breath, and explained in as calm a manner as he could what he believed van Horstmann was about to do.

This time, he went in stripped to the waist, displaying the cramped writing of the contracts etched into his skin. It had been a tedious and painful job having them all tattooed onto him – he had probably gone to every needle artist in Altdorf, having a line here, a paragraph there, to make sure none of them ever read enough to recognise the nature of what they were creating. The words of contracts sealing the services of a daemon to Egrimm van Horstmann for eternity. Woven among them were the older tattoos, the spiralling wards that concealed the Dark magic clinging to him from the aethyr-sight of his fellow magisters.

The crystal panes of the sanctum looked again onto the interior of the puzzle box in which van Horstmann had trapped the daemons. Obscene, inhuman faces of every description, of appearances beyond the capacity for the most deranged artist to draw, loomed from each window onto the world inside the puzzle box. Behind them, dark and indistinct, was a landscape that hinted at barren wastes, dense leafless forests, the churning blackness of an endless ocean. Van Horstmann had never given any thought to what that world must feel like to Hiskernaath and the other daemons he had trapped there. He had not cared. He still didn’t. He cared only that they listened.

Hiskernaath was there, not exactly a leader among them but perhaps an ambassador to van Horstmann, a spokesman for his kind. Others, more powerful, were less inclined to engage in diplomacy with their captor. Morkulae, Cup-Bearer of Nurgle, never spoke save to curse. The plaguebearer who accompanied it was probably incapable of speaking at all, just staring out with its single filmy yellow eye. A thing like a serpent of bone, another like a mountain of seething vermin, humanoid foot soldiers and endlessly changing creatures of glowing flesh, all were gathered there to see what van Horstmann would command of them next.

They had done much for him already. They had spread the plague, those that were creatures of the Plague God Nurgle. Others had possessed the corpses of the Salzenhaar family, and been thrown back into their prison when those corpses had been shattered by van Horstmann’s magic. It had been a painful experience for them, and they barked and slavered with anger.

Van Horstmann had brought with him into his magical sanctum a brazier, normally used for burning ingredients for alchemical experiments, and an iron brand. He did not speak as he heated the brand until its tip glowed a dull orange in the coals. Sitting cross-legged, he brought the tip to a point on his chest were his signature was inked at the end of one of the contracts.

The sizzle of flesh was pleasing to the daemons, who for all their anger at being imprisoned still took delight in violence done to mortal bodies. Van Horstmann did not cry out, but his eyes were screwed up, his jaw clenched, and he shivered and sweated as the brand scorched his skin. The smell of burned meat filled the small room.

Van Horstmann took the brand away, gasping out the breath he had been holding. Where his signature had been was now a bubbling red scar on his chest.

He placed the brand against his skin again, this time to his abdomen. He growled out the pain and flesh sizzled.

Next, his shoulder blade, using his reflection in one of the panes of crystal to guide his hand.

One by one, he erased his signature from the contracts on his skin, until there was just one left – in the centre of his torso, just below his sternum.

‘You will be free,’ he said. His voice was hoarse and sweat ran down his face. ‘The contracts that bind you to me are void. Your allegiance lies with your gods, and with me no more.’

‘Then open the box,’ said Hiskernaath. ‘Let us run free.’

‘I will,’ said van Horstmann. ‘But there is one contract still in force.’ he pointed to the passage written in the centre of his chest. ‘A condition of your freedom. A single task to be completed before you have the run of this world.’

Hiskernaath spat and slavered. ‘Then this is no freedom at all! What is your plan, van Horstmann? To set us a task that can never end? A task that, were it ever completed, would lead to our destruction? Others have tried such ploys before and the will of the gods always puts paid to their little games in the end.’

‘Not this task,’ said van Horstmann. ‘This one, I think you will like.’

Van Horstmann stood and, taking a length of cloth he had brought with him, wiped away the worst of the blood from his burns. He opened the doorway to the sanctum and walked into his chambers in the Pyramid of Light, leaving the daemons behind to contemplate the final task he had set them.

‘You are insane,’ said the Skull of Katam from its place on Vek’s alchemy table. ‘You do know that, van Horstmann.’

‘There was a man once named Katam,’ replied van Horstmann as he went into the bedchamber and opened one of the trunks there, ‘who thought he knew everything. He can surely appreciate the power that revenge has. Mere sanity is nothing compared to revenge. Men have built empires for it, and ended them. Men have killed, died and come back from the dead for it.’

‘This is more than revenge,’ said the skull. ‘I don’t think there is a word for what this is. Can you honestly say that all you have done is just to get at the one you hate?’

‘You sound awfully concerned for me, Katam,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I didn’t know you have such kindness in you.’

‘I care only that I don’t spend another century in the vault!’ snapped the skull. ‘Which is exactly what will happen when you are ended by whichever magister gets the killing spell on you. And you know full well, comprehender, that they will be falling over themselves to say they cast it.’

‘You will not be cast into the vault again, Katam.’

‘You are insane.’

‘So are you.’

Van Horstmann had the feeling that if the skull could smile wryly, it would have done. ‘I was insane,’ it said. ‘I have had a lot of time to reflect.’

Van Horstmann did not reply to that. Instead, from the trunk he took a robe he had not worn before – it was Magister Vek’s full dress robe, so lavish there was more gold than ivory. It weighed easily twice as much as the magister’s robe he normally wore. It had been packed with bundles of fragrant spices to keep it from going musty and had been made, perhaps decades ago, by one of Altdorf’s finest outfitters. It was a garment fit for the occasion.

Van Horstmann pulled on the robe. He checked to see if the blood from his burns would seep through, but the fabric was dense enough to hide any sign of the injuries. He picked up his staff, and glanced for a moment into its diamond eye.

‘Come,’ he said, and picked up the skull. He had previously fixed a loop to the back of the skull so he could hang it from a belt and he did so now, so the skull dangled from his waist as he walked out of the chambers of Magister Vek.

It would be for the last time he left these chambers. He would not miss them.

The corridor outside was lined with acolytes, and they cast their eyes down in deference to him as he passed. The floor ahead of him was scattered with leaves and petals. Banners bearing the heraldry of great magisters of the past had been hung up on the walls, their rich colours brought out by the relentless light that poured down through the pyramid.

Van Horstmann had requested that this occasion be held in the pyramid’s library. It had been the place where he had spent the most time, and it was the most closely associated with his position of comprehender and his reputation for eking out the secrets of the order’s long-dead geniuses. When he reached the doors to the library, a pair of wardens of the Half-Circle, their armour polished mirror-bright, held them open for him.

The senior magisters of the order applauded as he entered. He saw among them Kardiggian, the battle magister, Vranas and Arcinhal, and Master Chanter Alric. Towards the back hovered Magister Pendorf, again given leave to cease haunting the vaults for an hour.

In the centre stood the Emperor Eckhardt III, flanked by the pair of palace guards who went everywhere with him. The Emperor wore the Imperial robes of state, rich and purple, that van Horstmann had last seen at Eckhardt’s investiture. He wore the Stirland Runefang and the Silver Seal, marks of his rank as elector count and honorary commander of the Reiksguard respectively. As ever there was little emotion to read on his wide, rough face, but perhaps there was some approval to be found there.

‘Magisters. Wizards all, it is a glorious occasion that we here observe.’ It was Vranas who spoke, the natural master of ceremonies. Van Horstmann recalled him exhausted, propping up the almost insensible Arcinhal at the Garden of Morr. He looked as grand as possible now, like everyone else in his finest robes and carrying the many golden implements of magic with which a Light wizard liked to adorn himself. ‘Let our sorrow at the passing of Elrisse turn to joy that we now heal the wound his loss left in our order. That we have found among us one with the wisdom and prowess to take upon his shoulders the responsibility for the College of Light. That we are gathered to acknowledge a new Grand Magister.’

Vranas extended a hand towards van Horstmann, indicating the new Grand Magister. The magisters applauded, and even the Emperor clapped along. Someone patted van Horstmann on the back as he walked up to Vranas and shook his hand, and then found himself doing the same with the Emperor.

‘It is good that the order has done what it must,’ said the Emperor. ‘The Colleges of Magic will all be the stronger for this. It benefits us all.’

‘I agree, your majesty,’ said van Horstmann. ‘In these times above all others, we must be strong.’

The applause was dying down, replaced with expectancy. Van Horstmann turned to the assembled wizards. These were the men who, if they knew what he really was, what he had done and what he was going to do, would kill him. Not arrest and imprison him, not challenge him to a duel. They would kill him.

He smiled, and bowed in deference to their applause. ‘Brothers of the Order of Light,’ he said. ‘I need not say how honoured I am to be taking on this role. But there is more to this occasion than honour. The gravity of the situation in which Altdorf finds itself, and with which our order must deal, has curtailed the traditional ceremony and procedure of the selection of a new Grand Magister. So it is that I will be brief, too.

‘Altdorf needs us now. Above all others, it is the wizards of the Light that will guide her through these long nights and sorrowful days. We are beset on all sides by the deadliest of threats. The plague rages, the beastmen lurk, the witches and heretics plot to take advantage of the chaos. It is my hope that by serving as your figurehead and guide, I can lead us with decisiveness to do what must be done. We must assume a position of leadership among the other colleges. I will bring us there. Not because I want to, or because it is the stepping stone to something greater, but because I have a duty to the people of the Empire and the orders of magic and it is as Grand Magister that I can best discharge it. My thanks, brother wizards. Let this be the beginning of a new age of the Light.’

More hands shook van Horstmann’s. Voices were raised in oaths of praise. Van Horstmann was officially invested with the authority that had belonged to Elrisse before him, which only a handful of men had borne since Teclis and Magnus had decreed the establishment of the eight colleges.

‘A fine speech,’ said the Emperor. ‘Strength in dire times. Most appropriate.’

‘And on that subject, your majesty, I would speak with you,’ said van Horstmann. ‘In private, if possible.’

‘Taking to your duties right away, then?’

‘There is no time, as I have heard it said, like the present.’

The Emperor indicated that his guards were to follow him and van Horstmann, and the two of them left the library. Van Horstmann led them to a small reading room, its ceiling painted with a star map of the summer sky over the Empire. The guards stood at the door, their halberds crossed to indicate that Emperor Eckhardt III was not to be interrupted.

‘I have received an envoy of House Salzenhaar,’ said the Emperor, pulling up a chair. ‘My ministers suggest hanging every last son of them, lest the people riot for lack of justice. I have friends among that family and I gave assurances that if the plague was to be curtailed, there would still be a House Salzenhaar. Could that happen?’

‘I can only speculate how the Liber Pestilentius came into their possession,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Perhaps its owner merely used their tomb as a lair, although he could scarcely have chosen a less ostentatious place to hide. But you raise the exact point I intend to address head on. The end of the plague.’

‘It can be done?’

‘I believe that it can.’ Van Horstmann sat down opposite the Emperor, the reading table between them. ‘As Grand Magister I have the authority to access our most precious relics. They are held in a place I should not speak of, a place that few know exists, that I should not name, even to your Imperial Majesty. There have been Emperors since Magnus who have not been informed that the vault is there, but it does exist, and there are held the artefacts of the Light Order that not only must be protected, but from which Altdorf must be protected.’

Eckhardt III absorbed this, nodding slowly. ‘I see. And there is something in this vault, this secret hidden vault that I am privileged to have heard of, which can cure the plague? If that is so then I can save my city and can forgo the destruction of House Salzenhaar.’

‘There are other issues,’ said van Horstmann. ‘Its use could create complications for your reign. That is why I would speak to you on the matter before opening this vault.’

‘How so?’

‘The artefact in question is the Mantle of Thoss.’

Eckhardt III was not a man given to wearing his emotions on his face, but he could not hide his alarm. ‘It exists?’ he said. Leaning forwards on the table.

‘It does,’ replied van Horstmann levelly. ‘And we have it.’

‘Gods above,’ hissed Eckhardt III. ‘When you said it would create complications, you did not speak in jest. Your kind exist in isolation, Grand Magister. Do you truly understand what the Mantle of Thoss could do to this city? To the whole Empire?’

‘I am not so ignorant, your majesty. Grand Theogonist Thoss is the most divisive figure in the Empire’s history since the Great War. Even before him, there are few who could claim to split opinion so fervently. I am well aware of what Thoss did and the scale of emotions that still flare up whenever his name is mentioned. But the Mantle of Thoss is the only answer if Altdorf is to be spared the Gods’ Rot.’

The Emperor shook his head, as if reliving a bad memory. ‘Thoss waged open war against the old faiths. All priests save those of Sigmar were clubbed to death in the streets. There were execution pyres all along the road from here to Talabheim. There are adherents to those faiths who treat his crusade as if it were within living memory, as if the man did them a personal injury. And there are Sigmarites who secretly wish there would come another just like him. If the Mantle of Thoss was to be used, if it became known that the Imperial Court permitted the use of such a relic… it could be civil war, Grand Magister. Worse, a religious war. Brother against brother, father against son, and fought under my reign.’

‘The alternative, your majesty, is to see Altdorf made a ghost town under your reign.’

‘Can you even be certain it will work?’

Van Horstmann nodded. ‘Thoss himself swore it on his deathbed. It was the Grand Theogonist’s final miracle. Take his Mantle, cast it into the Reik upstream of the river, and the waters will cure any malady. Whatever else might be thought of Thoss, when he promised a miracle it came to pass, and his final miracle was sworn on the altar in the Temple of Sigmar itself. I am as certain as a man can be of anything. The Mantle of Thoss will cure Altdorf.’

The Emperor seemed to study the surface of the table for a while. ‘Can you do it in secret?’ he said.

‘Every day there is a new cure announced on the streets,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘It will be no great task to make a draught of the Reik’s waters another one of them. When it works, everyone in the city will be drinking it. Not one mention need be made of Grand Theogonist Thoss at all. Thus far, you and I are the only ones who know the Mantle would be involved at all. If needs be, one of us could throw the Mantle into the river. Aside from a magister of the Fourth Circle, who administer the vaults and are most adept at keeping secrets, no one need ever know.’

‘Do it,’ said the Emperor. ‘But on your head fall the consequences if word gets out. That is the price of power.’

‘It is a price I know well,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And I will pay it, if I fail.’

The Emperor stood. The guards at the door lowered their halberds. ‘Congratulations, Grand Magister van Horstmann,’ he said, and left the chamber with his guards in tow.

Van Horstmann waited in the chamber for a moment, thinking. The sequence of events that would follow had its complexities, its vulnerabilities even, but van Horstmann had gone through every permutation and filed them and their solutions way in the labyrinthine library of his mind. It was a lot to think of at once. He had meditated on it for hours, and still he found himself checking and rechecking every eventuality.

No. It was perfect. He had thought of everything.

Outside the reading room, waiting for him, was Master Chanter Alric. Van Horstmann was used to seeing Alric in a position of authority, for much of the time he had spent in the presence of the man had been when van Horstmann was an acolyte and Alric had been the lord of his domain. Now Alric looked like a subject, his eyes looking down and only for a moment flickering up to meet van Horstmann’s.

‘Grand Magister, I must speak with you,’ he said.

‘Of course, Master Chanter,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Though I have yet to adjust to answering to that title.’

‘I spoke with Elrisse on this matter before you,’ said Alric. ‘It is… sensitive. I am reluctant to speak of it to anyone at all, but… well, the Grand Magister must know these things. It is personal, and perhaps not worth your time, but it is a duty of every magister to speak up on any matter that might compromise his duty to the order.’

‘This manner does not become you, Alric,’ said van Horstmann. ‘The man I see here is not the same one I feared and obeyed as an acolyte. Speak, Master Chanter, and do not fear it.’

Alric nodded. ‘I shall keep it short. I have a wife.’

‘I see,’ said van Horstmann.

It was not unknown at all for wizards to have families outside their order. There was no prohibition against it, not in Teclis’s decrees and not in the present. In some Orders of magic, however, it was more common than others, and the Order of Light was not among them. The isolation it forced on its acolytes, who were not permitted to leave the pyramid save with the word of the Master Chanter, meant they rarely formed outside bonds. Wives and children were rarer still. But, again, not unknown.

‘There is no law against it,’ continued van Horstmann. ‘But it is good that you told me. The Grand Magister must know these things. Does she live here in Altdorf?’

‘She does,’ replied Alric. ‘Near the Königplatz.’

‘Then the plague must concern you greatly.’

‘Yes, most certainly. Every time I hear of another district falling, I imagine the white cross painted on her door and her in her sickbed. I have received word in this past week that she is well, but one can never know what the next day might bring.’

‘What is her name?’

‘Albreda,’ said Alric.

‘Then fear not for Albreda, even on account of the plague.’ Van Horstmann placed a hand on Alric’s shoulder, and it seemed for all the world like Alric had been reduced in age to that of a child who needed comforting and reassurance, and that van Horstmann was his elder. ‘Master Chanter, I swear that it will be over soon.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BATTLE

Upon the border of the Buchbinder District, where the homes of Altdorf’s middle-class burghers adjoined the cramped, teetering tenements that surrounded Midday’s Mirror, Witch Hunter Lord Argenos drew together his army.

He had a hundred and fifty men. Most of them were of House Salzenhaar. Among them were the younger sons of client families, youths who, without the likelihood of inheritance and the accompanying responsibility, fell to brawling in the streets. They were useful men to have in a tight spot, such as was sure to occur at the Pyramid of Light. Even now they spat, swore and gambled, as if looking for excuses to start a fight already.

Others were household troops, men armed and armoured by House Salzenhaar to guard their estates, chaperone their ladies and accompany the family’s patriarchs to lend them the gravity of presence that came with an armed escort. They wore yellow and blue plumes, their mark of family allegiance, and were led by Mikhael Salzenhaar himself. Mikhael had recovered sufficiently from his interrogation by Argenos to carry a sword, but he was pale and shivering in the moonlight, sweating in spite of the chill.

The rest of Argenos’s men were the thugs who occasionally lent their weight to the Silver Hammer, such as the ones he had taken into the wharves to destroy the Hand Cerulean. And then there was Argenos himself. Argenos could handle himself in a fight. It was a necessity of his role as a hunter of witches. He always kept himself prepared for the possibility that the witch would fight back, and he had a plentiful supply of blessed shot for his pistol.

Two figures were approaching the gardens where Argenos had gathered his strength. These gardens had been the pride of the burgher family who had built it, but the flowers were now trampled beneath the feet of Argenos’s thugs. No doubt the family in the adjoining house were watching from the windows, but they knew better than to confront Argenos. The two men approaching wore hooded travelling cloaks but Argenos knew well who they were.

Magister Heiden Kant threw back his hood. ‘Lord Argenos. Are we ready?’

‘It is never a question of being ready,’ said the witch hunter. ‘Are you?’

The second figure pulled down his hood. Argenos peered at the man’s features, trying to read them in the moonlight.

‘I take it,’ said Argenos, ‘that Magister Kant has explained to you our purpose?’

‘He has,’ replied the man who wore the robes of a Light wizard under his cloak.

‘I am Witch Hunter Lord Argenos.’

‘Magister Kardiggian.’

‘Ah, the battle magister. A man who wields magic as a weapon of war. Kant, you have done well.’

‘Well enough?’ asked Kant.

‘To storm the Pyramid of Light?’ asked Argenos. ‘That remains to be seen.’

‘Magister Kant told me of his suspicions,’ said Kardiggian. ‘More than suspicions. He had pieced together a compelling argument. And I have had suspicions myself of late about our new Grand Magister.’

‘So, van Horstmann is wearing dead Elrisse’s boots?’ said Argenos. ‘I had imagined it was only a matter of time. On what did you base your own suspicions, battle magister?’

‘At the Gardens of Morr,’ said Kardiggian, ‘I fought alongside van Horstmann. It seemed to me that he knew full well what he would have to fight, and had prepared for it very specifically. He had mastered the Argent Storm, I believe, because he knew that he would need it to defeat what came out of the Salzenhaar tomb. That suggests he had foreknowledge of what lay there, and that can only mean his hand in the events of the plague. I can prove nothing, of course, but then I believe the Order of the Silver Hammer rarely holds out for the luxury of proof.’

‘Can you get us into the pyramid?’ asked Argenos.

‘I can,’ said Kardiggian. ‘I hold great seniority among the magisters. Once we are inside, some will side with me. More than that, I cannot promise.’

‘Then that will be enough,’ said Argenos. He turned to his men. ‘Brothers! Men of House Salzenhaar and of the Silver Hammer! The time has come to move out. Our destination is Midday’s Mirror. Move swiftly and quietly. Pray that Morr casts on you a kindly eye, for some of you will meet him soon. Come, place your souls under the guardianship of Sigmar and your bodies under the protection of your blades.’

Argenos led the force out. Above them Morrslieb, the ill-omened witch moon, glimmered near the horizon, as if peering over the edge of the night to see what bloodshed might unfold.

The Pyramid of Light was reflected beneath the grounds in the basement levels that made up the vaults. The outer vault was haunted by the magisters of the Fourth Circle, who catalogued and guarded dozens of relics relating to the Order of Light and the deeds of its wizards. Below that, as van Horstmann had learned, was the inner vault, where alone in the pyramid shadows were permitted to gather and artefacts with wills of their own roamed in a constant, bloodless struggle with one another, a microcosm of some world where the sole inhabitants were items of power forged an aeon ago and infused with the most potent of magics.

Beneath that, corresponding to the middle levels of the pyramid above, was nothing. A great endless light, like an ocean of it, without substance or, to the naked eye, an end. The shore of this ocean was reached through a doorway in the inner vault that looked like an empty pedestal where some relic had once stood, only to have fled or perhaps been consumed by a magic artefact turned predator. The pedestal lifted up to reveal a short flight of steps down, onto a shore of crumbled masonry.

Overhead was a ceiling of stone, the floor of the inner vaults stretching off into a distance made hazy by the glare. In front and below was nothing but light.

Van Horstmann knelt on the shore and dipped a hand into the light. It was not liquid, but a tingling warmth. His eyes, well used to the constant glare in the pyramid, still smarted at the brightness.

‘A reservoir of magic,’ explained Magister Pendorf. Pendorf, when told to allow the Grand Magister into the Pinnacle Vault, had not seemed perplexed or concerned by the demand. Perhaps he had always known that van Horstmann would reach the lowest point of the Light College, just as he had reached the top. ‘It bleeds down here from above. In their wisdom, Teclis and the founding wizards made sure there was a place for it to gather, or the tide of it might have destroyed the pyramid.’

‘They were wise men,’ said van Horstmann. ‘And a wise elf. How do I get across it?’

‘Elrisse never sought the Pinnacle Vault,’ said Pendorf. ‘We were blessed, perhaps, that events were never so dire that he needed to.’

‘And today, Altdorf’s future depends on what lies down there. Yes, we were blessed, Magister Pendorf. But now we are cursed, unless we make use of the vault’s secrets.’

‘I must ask, Grand Magister,’ said Pendorf, ‘how you came to learn of what lies there. I have never been within, nor have any of the current Fourth Circle so far as I know.’

‘A Grand Magister must know everything about his order,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘A body of knowledge is passed on from one to the next. Among that knowledge was the contents of the vault. Now, Magister Pendorf, if you please?’

‘Of course.’ Pendorf pointed down into the light ocean. ‘You are a worker of wonders. You are a master of Light magic. Master it.’

Van Horstmann nodded. ‘And so none but a magister can cross it.’

‘But of course.’

Van Horstmann felt the channels in his body open up, just as they had done when he had first sought to marshal the winds of magic. His veins and arteries, the invisible lines of power that connected every point to every other, opened wide and the wind of light blew through them. They connected into the spider’s web of power that lay as potential within every human body, but was realised only by the few with the capacity to feel it.

He felt it now. He directed everything through his mind, focusing the wind that blew with the lens of his will and imagination. Like light through the lenses of the speculum, the wind of magic took on new shapes as it passed through his mind.

Van Horstmann imagined great blocks of matter coalescing from raw magic, rising up like islands. His will was echoed in the ocean below, and glowing slabs like rock with veins of light rose up to meet him. He stepped off the shore onto the first and imagined now a whole spiral of them, winding down towards the lowest point that corresponded to the pinnacle of the pyramid above.

Pendorf followed as the steps rose up to meet them. Below the surface, van Horstmann’s whole body felt suffused with the light. He felt it leaching in through his pores, pouring in through his eyes, and it became easier to create the staircase down.

He could see the far shore now, still some distance below. A rocky island, where a portion of the pyramid’s ornate masonry held a wall with a single doorway. On the door was raised in silver the image of an elven woman over a crescent moon – Lileath, the high elf goddess, and a seal of Loremaster Teclis himself.

Van Horstmann continued down until he reached the shore, conjuring the last block of solid ground with a thought. He placed a hand against the door, and felt that it was warm.

The door slid open at his touch, and beyond, too, there was light. It shone through stained glass windows high overhead, which ringed the domed ceiling of a chamber that could not exist beyond the door. Here the space-folding magic of the pyramid was in effect, creating the bubble of existence in which was held the Pinnacle Vault.

The walls were not walls at all, but cascades of glittering silver light that poured down over the windows and over the edge. The light through the windows was in every colour, a choir of light that almost dazzled even a Light wizard like van Horstmann. White flame rippled without heat along channels cut into the floor, as if this place were so suffused with magic that it could not stay pent up in the aethyr and was compelled to flow free.

In the centre was a cylindrical structure of polished marble, veined with grey and pink. Around this structure were built a dozen shrine-like enclosures, each with a pedestal like an altar on which stood a single artefact.

Van Horstmann had spent years, and a goodly portion of his soul, to learn of what treasures the Order of Light had stored in the vaults beneath the pyramid. Even he, however, knew that he would be ignorant of most of the relics down here. The knowledge of their existence had simply never escaped. No doubt they were vastly powerful and even more dangerous. The sword he looked at now might be enough to slay an army on its own – the mask he glanced at next might grant him some mind-expanding magical sense or let him see into men’s souls. It did not matter. There was only one thing here that van Horstmann needed.

Well, two. But the second could wait.

Pendorf hobbled across the spectacular chamber, the thrum of contained energy the only sound save for his shuffling footsteps on marble. He led the way to one of the shrines where the pedestal held a wooden mannequin, on which was hung a splendid cape of grey fur. The cloak was trimmed with ermine and lined with crimson silk, and the clasp was a heavy golden brooch in the shape of Sigmar’s twin-tailed comet.

‘The Mantle of Thoss,’ said Pendorf.

Van Horstmann saw the hem of the cloak was stained pink with blood. It looked fresh. Perhaps it was – the Pinnacle Vault might have strange magics about it that trapped the artefacts inside in time so they did not decay or tarnish. ‘He wore this at the scourging of the Taalite monks,’ he said as he walked up to the cloak. He reached out a hand and touched the ermine, felt its power fizz and hum through his fingers. ‘And the burning of Huntsmistress Evraya.’

Pendorf swallowed. ‘I saw the book,’ he said. There was a reluctance in his voice, as if he had forced the words out unwillingly.

‘The book?’

‘The Codex Aethyrica.’

‘I see.’ Van Horstmann let his hand drop from the Mantle of Thoss.

‘It was gutted,’ said Pendorf. ‘Its pages scattered to the fates, replaced with trash and scraps. Oh, it was a beautiful book. I wept just to look on its cover when I thought of the sacred things written inside. The learning therein. I had opened it once, when I was young, newly descended to the vaults. That memory came back when you took it out and when it was returned, I felt the need to open it again. It was so beautiful. It was everything I studied with the Fourth Circle to be near. And so one night I was weak. I opened it again. And I saw.’

Van Horstmann did not answer. He just looked at the wizard, the way the old man’s skin had sunk into his face and his shoulders hunched, the way he looked less like a man and more like a mannequin, much like that which held the Mantle, on which someone had haphazardly draped a wrinkled and faded wizard’s robe.

‘Why did you do it, van Horstmann?’ asked Pendorf. His eyes were wet. ‘I do not know why you are truly here and I do not expect to learn. And my life has been a long one, and I have no complaints. I just want to know why you had to destroy something so beautiful.’

‘I cannot tell you, Magister Pendorf,’ said van Horstmann levelly.

‘I am not going to leave this place. Not now there is nothing else you could possibly want, not that you could need my help with, at least. Please, tell me. It was so beautiful. I just want to know why.’

Van Horstmann held up a hand, palm towards Pendorf as if to silence him. Black flame flickered around his fingers, their chill running down his arm. The flame leapt up around his hand, forming hypnotic shapes as it flared higher.

It had been a long time since van Horstmann had been able to wield Dark magic to its full potential. There had never been a time when he could not be certain he was unobserved. Even when he had fought the ratman general, he had taken a huge risk. Another magister might have seen him, even in the thick of the battle. It had been a necessity, and there had been no time to enjoy it. Now, there was no one who could witness it. And even if there was, at this point it did not matter.

‘I see,’ said Pendorf sadly.

Van Horstmann imagined the beam of black energy leaping from his palm, and it did. The beam lanced through the centre of Pendorf’s face, boring right through to hiss against the falling light behind him.

Van Horstmann let the beam play around, burning a path through the old man’s scalp, until it sliced up through the top of his skull. Pendorf’s head flopped into two scorched halves and he toppled over into one of the flame channels on the floor. The fire flowed over his body like water, not burning him but suffusing him, his flesh glowing as it began to slowly disintegrate.

Van Horstmann watched Pendorf’s corpse for a few moments. He marvelled that anyone had ever thought killing another man was difficult. He had accomplished far more troublesome tasks on that day alone.

He looked again at the Mantle of Thoss. Perhaps it really could have cured the plague – perhaps old butcher Thoss’s bloodstained garment would have somehow, against every turn of history and fate, released something other than raw hatred into the waters of the Reik. Stranger things had happened, although not very many.

Van Horstmann turned away from the Mantle of Thoss. It did not interest him now. He was inside the Pinnacle Vault, and the mantle could burn like Pendorf’s body for all he cared.

What he sought was in another of the shrines. He passed by the magical sword, and for a moment his eye was drawn, unwillingly, to the glow on the edge of its blade where it was so finely honed that the metal was transparent. He looked away. A standard stitched of red cord bore the image of a golden boar and, from the look of it, was of antique enough design to have flown over Sigmar’s own battlefields. A hunting horn was held up by an ornate stand carved from animal skulls. A mirror-polished shield reflected not only van Horstmann’s face but Elrisse’s, Vek’s, even the ratman sorcerer’s, with Pendorf’s looking confused in one corner. Van Horstmann passed them all by.

Finally he reached the relic he was looking for. It was perhaps the least assuming object in the innermost vault. He had first read of it when he was little more than a child, his limbs still recovering from the broken bones and torn muscles inflicted by the coils of a hundred snakes. His plan for it had been confirmed in the communion with Tzeentch, where all the possible paths of fate were laid out before him like the veins through the marble of the vault.

At last, van Horstmann had found the key.

The Half-Circle stewards did not stand in Kardiggian’s way, even though he was not alone. A battle magister had both the authority and the raw strength to go where he pleased. The guards stood aside as Kant, then Argenos and the men of House Salzenhaar, filed through the doorway into the pyramid.

Salzenhaar’s men were afraid. They had been afraid even before they had plunged through the waters of Midday’s Mirror into the folded space around the pyramid. They knew Argenos to be a hunter of witches by the implements of burning and torture he carried, as much as badges of office as for practical use, and many an eye fell on the ornate pistol with its glowing barrel he had tucked into his belt. And they knew that anything involving not one wizard, but two, must be serious business indeed.

‘Kardiggian!’ demanded Master Chanter Alric, running across the Chanter’s Hall as the Silver Hammer force walked blinking into his domain. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ He pointed at Argenos. ‘Who have you brought into our midst?’

Acolytes watched as Kardiggian threw back his hood and stood up to Alric. Though the acolytes had obeyed Alric as if he were a god, they had also heard of the battle magister and the way he could incinerate whole regiments of men from afar.

‘We are here for van Horstmann,’ said Kardiggian.

‘And you expect me to give him to you, Kardiggian?’

‘We will go through you to get to him, if you compel us to.’

‘And I ask again, who are these men?’

‘We are the Order of the Silver Hammer,’ said Lord Argenos, striding forwards with his hand on the hilt of his ensorcelled pistol. ‘Grand Magister van Horstmann is accused of foul and degenerate crimes, for which he will be tried. You can try to stop us, or you can stand aside, or you can join us. It matters not to me, for Sigmar’s will shall be done regardless. But it matters to you, because as Magister Kardiggian says, it troubles me not to lay waste to anyone who stands in my way.’

‘What has the Grand Magister done?’ demanded Alric.

‘Decide,’ said Argenos. ‘Stand before us or with us. What do you choose?’

‘Master Chanter!’ cried one of the acolytes. All eyes turned to follow the acolyte’s finger as he pointed towards the ceiling of the Chanter’s Hall.

Something scuttled there, between the tops of the pillars. It was something like a spider, but enormous and asymmetrical, shimmering as if only half-real.

From near the Master Chanter’s dais lumbered another intruder, this one a bent and shambling shape, taller than a man even though its head hung low between its shoulders. It had a sagging belly and a single eye, and behind it shambled many more. Alongside them was a greater horror still, a mass of writhing worms belching out a trail of slime that hissed as it dissolved a furrow in the marble behind it.

The smell hit the acolytes and the men of the Silver Hammer. It was beyond foul, something that defied description, a stench beyond the worst of the charnel pits or the dankest of Altdorf’s sewers. Acolytes retched and fell to their knees. Several of the House Salzenhaar soldiers tore their helmets off so their visors would not hinder them from vomiting up their disgust on the floor of the Chanter’s Hall. Others pulled off a gauntlet to wipe their eyes, which were suddenly streaming.

‘Daemons,’ growled Witch Hunter Argenos. He drew his hammer with one hand and his pistol with the other, and the weapon’s harnessed magic glowed bright as if hungry for the fight. ‘This is what he has done, Master Chanter! He had communed with daemons and brought them forth! He has opened the doors of this very place to their foulness! And to the heart of your order, he has brought war!’

Between the plaguebearers swarmed tinier versions of the daemons, scurrying, pudgy things, little more than mobile bags of filth with wide grins full of needle teeth and glowing yellow eyes. Clouds of flies burst from bulging cysts in the plaguebearers’ sagging bellies and rose up, so dense they cast the first shadows the Chanter’s Hall had ever seen.

The first plaguebearer bellowed, a sound halfway between a roar and a thunderous belch. It raised a weapon shaped more like an enormous rusting butcher’s knife than a sword. It was a signal for the charge, and the mass of daemons loped forwards to kill.

‘Form up!’ yelled Mikhael Salzenhaar, his throat raw and his eyes and nose streaming. ‘Form up! Hold! Hold!’

The daemons charged across the Chanter’s Hall and slammed into the men of House Salzenhaar. The men had been thrown into disarray by the appearance of the daemons and in those first few seconds men died, hacked down by the swinging blades of the plaguebearers. Mikhael leaped into the front row, thrusting with his thin, basket-hilted blade with the family crest on the pommel, turning aside a sword that scythed down at him with all the strength he had.

‘To me, acolytes!’ cried Alric. He brought up his hands in a rapid sequence of gestures, conjuring a circle on the ground from which sprung a wall of rippling white flame. Acolytes dived into it as the worm-daemon slithered towards them and the spider-daemon scuttled down and leaped into their midst.

‘You!’ yelled Alric as he saw the spider-daemon up close. ‘I know you! You were at the Imperial Palace! You took Princess Astrid!’

‘Took her I did,’ hissed the spider. It looked less and less like a spider the closer it got, and more and more like nothing that should ever be permitted to exist in the mortal world. Eyeballs rolled in the central mass of its body and every moment a new clawed limb unfolded from beneath it. ‘I taught her what pleasure there is in pain.’

Magister Kardiggian rose over the battlefield on wings of gold and silver light. He aimed an outstretched hand towards the daemons butchering Mikhael’s men and three bolts of white fire punched into the daemons, incinerating two down to their misshapen skeletons. The third bolt blew the arm off another – Mikhael darted forwards and thrust his blade through the wounded daemon’s eye. The creature howled, a noise cut short as its body discorporated and its flesh fell away.

The worm-daemon slithered towards Witch Hunter Argenos. Argenos took aim and fired, the pistol barking out a shot as bright as a falling star. It speared right through the daemon, scattering charred worms as it left a black smoking hole right through it.

The daemon reared up, revealing the mouthparts on its underside. It seemed to grow as it unfolded. Limbs uncoiled and claws bit into the marble underfoot. Its shape shifted with every half-second – what had been a pulsing mound of worms was now a bipedal creature with a muscular body, a low-held head like that of an insect or a crab, and from each shoulder a fan of bladed limbs. The worms whipped and coiled on its back and the daemon screeched, the whole Chanter’s Hall shuddering with the sound.

‘Morkulae,’ said Argenos. ‘Herald of rot. Cup-bearer of the Plaguelord. I have read of you. I hoped I would kill you one day. Thus does Sigmar reward His servant.’

Morkulae, its transformation complete, screeched again and darted forwards, unnaturally light on its feet. Argenos ducked and slammed his hammer into one of Morkulae’s arms, splintering the chitin that encased it and sending shreds of torn muscle spattering to the floor.

‘Battle is joined!’ cried Argenos, as more bolts of light sliced down from Kardiggian overhead and Magister Kant was surrounded by a halo of silver flame. ‘Give thanks! Cry joy! Battle with the daemon is joined!’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE KEY OF ISHA

One day, the elves of Ulthuan knew, there would rise an enemy who could not be killed. They knew this even before the Sundering, when the elven nation split in two through treachery and the meddling of its aristocrats in Dark magic. Their sages foresaw a foe who could not be slain by blade or bow or spell, only incarcerated. So they prepared a means to create a prison that would serve to house this enemy.

The tears of the goddess Isha were collected where they had fallen and crystallised into flawless gemstones the colour of the sky. The early scholars of High magic took them to the workshop of Vaul, the smith god of the elven pantheon, and it was said that the god himself cut the shape from those infinitely precious stones. He carved from them a single key, inlaid with gold melted down from glittering dragons’ scales and hung from a chain of silver links.

For an age, the enemy did not appear. The Key of Isha remained in the temple of the goddess on the island nation of Ulthuan, guarded by the goddess’s templars. But in the turmoil of the Sundering, when the temple and much of Ulthuan was ravaged by civil war and plundered, the Key of Isha was lost. The high elves, as was their wont, thought the dwarfs were responsible.

Whoever was responsible, the Key of Isha vanished and reappeared centuries later in the hoard of the dragon Ashenspine, slain by an expedition of dwarfs and men into the peaks of Norsca. It was handed down as an heirloom among the early nobles of Sigmar, until once again it was lost – or stolen, or bargained away – and disappeared.

During the Great War against Chaos, when Magnus led the Empire’s armies against the Dark-worshipping hordes marching down from the north, the Key was found hanging around the neck of a Chaos champion slain by the Warrior Priest Lothar Sunderhelm. He gave it to the Colleges of Magic, who, uncertain of its purpose and origin, placed it in the most secure place they had – the Pinnacle Vault of the Pyramid of Light.

Van Horstmann did know what it was for. He had been told during his communions with Tzeentch, in return for which he had sacrificed several artefacts looted from the outer vaults of the Order of Light. It had been surprising that the Fourth Circle had taken so long to notice any of the artefacts were missing or despoiled. They treated the artefacts in the vaults with such deference that to open a book or examine a magic chalice was an operation on a par with a major religious observance. Had they been more thorough, Pendorf and his fellow magisters would have found several other books gutted and replaced with offcuts from the Buchbinder District’s workshops, enchanted blades replaced with mundane, if finely-wrought, replicas and other artefacts simply missing. The originals had been consumed as offerings to Tzeentch, just like the Codex Aethyrica, and van Horstmann had been furnished with the knowledge that had led him here.

He took the Key of Isha from its velvet cushion. In spite of its long history, it was still flawless and gleamed like a shard of lightning in his hand, reflecting in its hundreds of facets the light that made up the walls of the Pinnacle Vault.

Van Horstmann now took from a pocket of his Grand Magister’s robes a pane of crystal, similar to those he had mounted on the walls of his sanctum but much smaller. It reflected a view of the sanctum, with its own crystal panes blank.

He could hear the ripples of magic shuddering down from above, where the battle was being fought. Van Horstmann could trust Morkulae to put up a decent fight, and Hiskernaath to sow confusion among whatever ranks his opponents had brought to capture him. There would be no doubt now that van Horstmann had practiced the arts of daemonology. The Order of the Silver Hammer would be certain they had their man.

Witch Hunter Argenos wrenched his hammer from the body of the plaguebearer, wiping his gauntlets across his face to get the worst of its foetid blood out of his eyes.

The Chanter’s Hall was awash with the blood of daemons and of men. Mikhael Salzenhaar still stood, but he was wounded. He had a deep cut in one thigh and Argenos knew that it would be infected by the fatal diseases that dribbled from Nurgle’s cauldron. The nobleman would die. Many of his men, and many of the Light Order’s acolytes, already had.

The plaguebearers were gone, destroyed or driven away by the cascades of light that spilled from the hands of Magister Kardiggian. One such barrage had immolated Morkulae, which Argenos had finished off with a swing of his hammer. Kardiggian drifted back down to the floor beside Argenos.

‘We are free of them for the time being,’ said the battle magister. ‘We must press on.’

‘Where is van Horstmann quartered?’ asked Magister Kant. Kant had fought too, and well. He leaned on his staff as he walked up to Argenos. He had surrounded himself with a halo of flame that had driven off the disgusting little daemons swarming around him, but it had taken a grave toll.

‘In Magister Vek’s old chambers, above us,’ said Kardiggian.

Argenos was in the process of reloading his pistol as he spoke. ‘I would be surprised if he is there,’ he said. ‘At the first sign of our ingress he would seek to hide. Perhaps there is somewhere in this pyramid he has prepared in case his perfidy was discovered. A bolthole or a way out.’

‘Unlikely,’ said Kant, wiping the sweat from his eyes with a sleeve. ‘The whole pyramid is held in a fold of space. A significant alteration to it would have been felt here, in the rituals to keep it hidden.’

‘The cunning of the daemon-led is infinite,’ replied Argenos. ‘We must be swift and hunt him down before he is…’ Argenos’s words trailed off as he looked up to the ceiling, following a movement he had caught in the corner of his eye.

Before any of the battle’s survivors had picked out what he had seen among the columns, Argenos had taken aim with his pistol and fired. The flailing shape of the daemon Hiskernaath hit the floor before the chanter’s dais with a wet thump.

‘There is no hiding from the eyes of the righteous!’ shouted Argenos as he advanced on the stricken daemon. His bullet had ripped through its body and thick purple-black blood was oozing from it. The smell of it was awful enough to be distinct among the appalling stench left behind by the plague daemons.

Hiskernaath tried to flip over onto its front, but darts of light spat from Kardiggian’s fingers and impaled it through the limbs, pinning it to the floor. Argenos took from the inside of his cloak a small vial of clear liquid – holy water – with a blessed silver icon of the twin-tailed comet immersed in it.

‘Where is Egrimm van Horstmann?’ demanded Argenos of the daemon.

‘Ask your sister,’ spat the daemon.

Argenos removed the stopper of the vial and poured a few drops onto the daemon. Hiskernaath screamed, flinging gobbets of gore and drool as it convulsed.

‘I lack time and patience. Where is Egrimm van Horstmann?’

‘You will beg like Astrid did,’ hissed Hiskernaath. ‘When I have taken you over you will watch everything I make you do… I will find everyone you love and with your own hands I will…’

Argenos poured a trickle of the holy water onto the open, smoking wound he had blasted into the daemon’s body. Hiskernaath screamed again, and chitin cracked as it thrashed against the magical darts that transfixed it.

‘When this is used up,’ said Argenos, ‘I can always bless more.’

‘The Pinnacle Vault!’ gasped Hiskernaath. ‘I hope your life pours out through your bowels! That infested become your nethers! He has gone to the Pinnacle Vault to seek the Mantle of Thoss!’

‘Sigmar on high,’ said Kardiggian. ‘He’s going for the Mantle.’

‘You have it here?’ demanded Argenos.

‘We have,’ said Kardiggian. ‘None save for the senior magisters know of it. He could start a religious war with it. He must have learned it was here when he became Grand Magister.’

‘And lost no time in getting his hands on it,’ said Kant.

‘There we must go,’ said Argenos. ‘And also to his chambers. There may be the means by which these daemons infiltrated the pyramid. It must be sealed.’

‘I will go,’ said Kant.

‘Not on your own,’ said Argenos. ‘You are all but spent, Magister Kant.’

‘Then I will, too,’ said Master Chanter Alric. Alric was kneeling beside one of his wounded acolytes, trying to stem the blood pouring from a deep tear in the youth’s abdomen. ‘I know the magic that keeps the pyramid hidden. If van Horstmann has altered its form, I am best placed to discover it.’

‘Then take Magister Kant to Vek’s chambers, and be quick,’ said Argenos. ‘Kardiggian, can you get to the Pinnacle Vault?’

‘If the Fourth Circle magisters are still alive, and if they know there is a crisis, then yes,’ said Kardiggian.

‘Then you and Master Salzenhaar are with me,’ said Argenos. ‘We will confront the heretic before he can steal the Mantle and be gone.’

‘What do we do about that?’ asked Alric, pointing towards the stricken Hiskernaath.

‘Something quick,’ replied Argenos.

Kardiggian aimed his staff at the daemon. A spear of fire leapt from it, bathing the daemon in flame. It shrivelled up, its limbs curling around it like those of a dead spider, and its last scream was a pathetic withered sound that ended in the crackling of its burning flesh.

‘Sigmar be with you, magisters,’ said Argenos as he followed Kardiggian towards the entrance to the outer vaults.

‘And with you, witch hunter,’ said Alric, as he hurried past the bodies towards the stairs that lead up to van Horstmann’s chambers.

Their feet left prints in the swathes of blood starting to congeal on the floor of the Chanter’s Hall.

Kant and Alric approached their destination first. Magisters were everywhere, demanding answers and swapping rumours about the stench and sounds of battle reaching them from the floors below. Kant drew looks for his exhaustion and the smoke that still coiled off him – Alric drew looks for the blood soaking the hem of his robes.

The two of them reached Magister Vek’s old chambers. Alric tried the door , which was bolted, as he had expected. Alric put his hands against the door and shuddered as heat flooded out of them, white flame licking around the door. The bolt came away as the wood charred and crumbled, and the door swung open.

‘Stay alert,’ said Alric to Kant. ‘He could have prepared this place for us. Left a trap, perhaps.’

‘Let us hope,’ said Kant, ‘he is in too great a hurry.’

The chamber was largely as Vek had kept it. The two statues, with their bull-like bodies and muscular human foreparts, were still there, along with Vek’s alchemy desk and the shelves full of items he had collected from the magical traditions of a dozen different cultures.

‘I can smell sulphur,’ said Kant. ‘Crushed mandrake. No trappings of Light magic.’

Alric moved warily through the chamber, stepping carefully. ‘There,’ he said, pointing towards the various alchemical devices and implements on the table. ‘Vek’s puzzle box.’ The small wooden box indeed stood on the table.

‘I thought it was lost?’ said Kant.

‘Van Horstmann found it,’ said Alric.

‘Van Horstmann was able to join the order partly because we had just lost Vek,’ said Kant. ‘Did van Horstmann kill him, and take the box?’

Alric ran his hands over the walls, kneeling down and laying them against the floor. ‘The space here is altered,’ he said. ‘Folded again. There is more in these chambers than can be seen at first glance.’ Alric touched the side of one of the huge statues and held them there, as if some hidden knowledge were being transmitted through his palms.

‘Here,’ he said.

‘Take care, Master Chanter,’ said Kant.

Alric breathed a few syllables of a spell and the statue shuddered, dust spilling from its ancient stone. The side of the taurian flank split apart and swung open, revealing a space beyond it.

It was not just the inside of the statue. That would have been substantial enough, easily large enough to fit a hiding man. But the door hidden in the statue revealed a whole room beyond.

‘This is false space,’ said Alric. ‘Van Horstmann has created a room where none can fit. I had not thought him capable of such magic.’ He looked around at Kant. ‘I could not do this.’

Alric walked into the room, the light reflected from the crystal panels on the walls illuminating his face. The floor was covered in cushions, as if set out for meditation. More than a dozen crystal panes of various sizes were mounted on the walls and there stood a bookcase loaded with volumes. Alric examined the bookcase, pulling out one book after another.

‘The Worms of Saakinhand,’ read Alric. ‘Lost for more than seventy years. And the Second Moon of Lamentations. I remember when this was banned, back when I was an acolyte. All the copies were burned. Well, not all.’

Alric put the book back on the shelf. Something had caught his notice on top of the bookcase.

Kant, standing by the doorway in the statue, strained to see it. It was small, and glinted wetly in the glittering light.

It was an eyeball. It looked fresh and bloody, sitting watching Alric as he peered at it in puzzlement.

Van Horstmann looked back, through the pane of crystal in his hand. It was linked magically to the eyeball in the sanctum. On the pane was the image of Master Chanter Alric, confusion on his face.

A noise caused van Horstmann to look away from the sight. It was the sound of a door opening. The door to the Pinnacle Vault.

‘Egrimm van Horstmann!’ called a voice well-used to laying down accusations at a witch’s trial. The man who walked into the vault wore the battered leather cloak and wealth of weapons and torture implements that marked him out as a witch hunter. Behind him, shielding their eyes from the glare of the light, was a gaggle of noble household troops carrying swords and halberds, who looked as afraid of the man who led them as of anything they might find in the vault. The battle magister, Kardiggian, was with them. Kardiggian must have led them down through the sea of light to the vault’s door, and the expression on his face made it clear he looked on van Horstmann as an enemy and not a fellow magister.

‘You stand accused of daemoncraft and the practice of forbidden magic,’ continued the witch hunter. ‘The vows I have made compel me to demand of you a plea to these charges, lest I be moved to believe you innocent. I must inform you that I have never been moved so.’

‘You would be Lord Argenos,’ replied van Horstmann. From across the floor of the Pinnacle Vault, he could read nothing from Argenos’s face. The witch hunter wore a mask, a face he had crafted through the years to show nothing but sternness and disdain. ‘I knew one of you would come to take me in. Either you, or a magister from one of the other colleges. Mother Heloise was a possibility. But no, you were always the most likely.’

‘That you have prepared yourself for this moment displays only a further depth to your guilt,’ said Argenos. ‘I know that you seek to do violence to the Empire by the use of the Mantle of Thoss. Clearly you intend no contrition with the revelation of your crimes. I hereby pronounce you guilty of all charges. In the name of Sigmar, kneel and receive your punishment.’

‘There is no action you have taken,’ said van Horstmann, ‘or that you will take from now on, that I have not foreseen. Think on the path that led you here. What manner of daemonologist would I be to show my hand so early, by casting a host of daemons at you the moment you walked in through the door? And what manner of a witch hunter would you be, if you did not storm down here yourself, to lay down Sigmar’s law in person? Every step of that path, I have set out for you. You are here because I have brought you here.’

‘Then you have prepared the battlefield for us to fight,’ said Argenos. ‘So be it. I have faced a dozen champions of the Dark Gods, and bested them all. I have broken their bodies and torn out their souls. I have–’

‘Do you think,’ snapped van Horstmann, ‘that any of this is about you?’ He held up the Key of Isha in one hand. ‘Or about the Mantle of Thoss? Do you honestly believe, hunter of witches, that you understand but a fraction of what I have wrought?’ Van Horstmann’s hand was wreathed now in black flame, the same flame he had used to kill Magister Pendorf minutes before.

Argenos drew his pistol. Even as he aimed it at van Horstmann, the flame flared up around the Grand Magister’s hand, and a terrible chill radiated from it so profound it snatched the breath from the throats of House Salzenhaar’s men.

With a sound like a distant scream, the crying out of the goddess herself, the Key of Isha shattered in van Horstmann’s hand.

The door to the sanctum slammed shut. Master Chanter Alric whirled around at the sound of it banging shut behind him. He ran up to the door, which from this side was a slab of stone, and pushed against it. It did not yield.

‘Master Chanter!’ cried Magister Kant from outside. ‘Master Chanter, can you hear me?’ Kant, exhausted as he was, tried frenetically to find a means of opening the door, or a crack into which a lever might be inserted to pry the door away. But there was none, not even the slightest mark to show a doorway had ever been there.

Kant could not hear Alric as he pounded against the door, nor could Alric hear Kant’s voice. It was as if the sanctum had always been sealed, always formed its own tiny world separate from the rest of reality.

Magisters from outside van Horstmann’s chambers were rushing to heed Kant’s cries. They joined him trying to find a way into the statue, but none of them succeeded.

‘Back!’ cried one of them and Kant realised it was Magister Vranas. Vranas stood with both hands against the side of the statue as the other wizards backed away from him. The chamber rumbled as sparks of white power, like fragments of lightning, flickered around Vranas’s hands and over the surface of the statue.

The statue shifted. Vranas stepped back a pace and the statue went with him, the effort of moving it making the veins stand out on Vranas’s face. As the statue came away from the wall the magisters saw, not an opened passageway into the room that Kant had seen, but just the blank wall of the chamber.

‘There is nothing there,’ said someone. ‘Magister Kant, where is Alric?’

‘Kant, did you him enter the statue?’ demanded Vranas.

‘I did. There was a room in there, with windows of crystal. Alric went inside and now…’

‘Then where is he?’ asked Vranas.

Kant could not look at his fellow magister. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BLACK MIRROR BROKEN

The Pinnacle Vault echoed with the shattering force of the shot. The cascade of light shuddered and the troops of House Salzenhaar scattered at the sound.

Argenos’s shot was well-aimed. Anyone else would have been drilled between the eyes. Even as the bullet was in flight, van Horstmann conjured up a shield of light that deflected the blessed shot.

‘Forward!’ cried the leader of the household troops. ‘For the kill!’

Van Horstmann recognised them now as the men of House Salzenhaar, their leader a son of that family. Mikhael Salzenhaar ran past Argenos with his blade out, his men running with him.

Van Horstmann had his staff to hand before Mikhael reached him. He struck it against the ground and silvery ripples went out across the floor, and in the zone they encompassed time seemed to run thick as treacle. Salzenhaar’s movements were laboured and painful, each step seeming to stretch out forever.

Van Horstmann batted away Salzenhaar’s sword with his staff and stepped aside, letting the nobleman’s momentum carry him past. He drove the head of the staff, with its death mask, into Mikhael’s back and sent him sprawling to the floor.

Time snapped back into reality. Van Horstmann turned to the men now bearing down on him, ready to chop him up with their halberd blades or run him through with their swords. He swept a hand, hissed words of power, and threw them away from him on a pulse of white flame. They were thrown from him, their livery catching light. They screamed as they burned.

Van Horstmann put a foot on Mikhael Salzenhaar’s neck.

‘It is amusing to me,’ he said, ‘that having spent so many hours elbow-deep in Salzenhaar dead, I am about to be surrounded by dozens more.’

Mikhael tried to cry out, either in despair or defiance. Before any sound could escape him, the white fire had turned black, now moulded by van Horstmann’s will into a spike that projected from his palm. He drove it through the back of Mikhael Salzenhaar’s head, and Mikhael’s head became a vessel for the black flame. It rushed from his eye sockets and between his teeth as the flesh was stripped away, leaving a blackened skull that rolled away as van Horstmann took his foot off the corpse’s neck.

Witch Hunter Argenos slid into the cover of the pedestal that held the Mantle of Thoss. ‘This way there are no answers, van Horstmann!’ he yelled. ‘Only in the extirpation of your corruption can you ever find peace.’

Van Horstmann let the black flame turn in on itself, surrounding his fist like a bouquet of black roses. He stalked across the vault, backing up against the structure in its centre. ‘I do not want peace,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I could have found peace decades ago.’

‘Then what do you want?’ demanded Argenos. With a well-practiced motion he filled the chamber of his pistol with powder from the horn that hung from his jerkin, and rammed home another bullet into the barrel.

‘It benefits me nothing for you to know,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘So you will die in ignorance. Rather, I think, as you lived.’

This time, the tower in van Horstmann’s mind, the anchor that kept him connected to the realm of the aethyr, was a bizarre creation of lapis and gold. Shimmering blue walls supported arches and battlements of gold, glimmering in the strangest of colours under a sky so loaded with stars that it seemed a smeared mass of mottled light. In the real world Witch Hunter Argenos was rolling out from behind the pedestal with the agility of a far younger man, gambling everything on one magical shot that would end everything. But in the aethyr – realer, perhaps than the ‘real’ world – van Horstmann was walking under the tower’s raised portcullis, a moat of blue and pink fire roiling beneath his feet in which gambolled daemons with iridescent flesh. Inside everything was bulbous and asymmetrical, columns of twisted, blue stone running up the height of the tower festooned with chains of silver and gold. The floor was studded with swirls of diamonds and amethyst. The deep-blue light fizzed and shuddered with pent-up power.

Van Horstmann had been saving one gemstone for this occasion. He had known it would come, and he had studied and meditated accordingly to inscribe this spell in his mind. He had found it when still an acolyte, split up and hidden in the appendices and footnotes of a dozen books of otherwise tedious lore. Maybe the Changer of Ways had whispered to an early sage of the Light Order to plant it where van Horstmann would one day find it. More likely it was another example of a wizard’s pride, to share his teachings only with those willing to piece them together. Van Horstmann didn’t care, as long as he had it ready.

He took the gemstone from its place in the tower wall, where it had formed one of the many eyes of a bestial face seemingly frozen in the blue stone. The gemstone was jet-black, the size of van Horstmann’s fist, with flashes of light in its heart as if a bolt of lightning had been imprisoned there.

Outside van Horstmann’s body, Argenos was bringing his pistol up to shoot. Van Horstmann was not familiar with the latest contraptions emerging from the workshops of Nuln, but he knew that a well-placed shot could blow a man’s head clean off even without the blessed ammunition Argenos doubtless used. The eventualities of the next couple of seconds spiralled out in van Horstmann’s mind, each possibility forking the path of fate. Some of the paths ended in van Horstmann’s death. Others did not. Van Horstmann aimed himself towards the latter.

A spell learned by rote, unleashed by instinct, flashed blackly in van Horstmann’s palm. It formed a vortex, an ice-cold hole in space which sought to draw all energy into itself. The cold flooded through van Horstmann as the heat was leached out of him but he held his shaking arm up even as the flint sparked and Argenos’s pistol roared.

The speed of van Horstmann’s thoughts outstripped the bullet. The vortex caught the bullet and drew it in, robbing it of heat and speed. The lead ball orbited the vortex in van Horstmann’s palm, slowing until it fell and plinked harmlessly to the floor.

Argenos did not break stride. He drew his hammer, which glowed an angry orange. Van Horstmann dropped to one knee as Argenos charged, and the hammer blow passed an inch over his head.

The heat seared van Horstmann’s face.

‘We have magic of our own,’ growled Argenos, drawing the hammer back for a killing blow.

A lance of glass speared down from the ceiling and impaled Argenos through the thigh. Van Horstmann whispered, made a chopping gesture with one hand and another followed it, piercing Argenos’s shoulder and pinning him in place.

Argenos fought and shattered the two spikes that held him. Broken shards still sticking from his chest and leg, he loped another step closer to van Horstmann. The head of his hammer was aflame now, trailing twin fiery tails like the comet of Sigmar.

Van Horstmann slammed his staff into the ground. A hundred spikes erupted now, from every direction, criss-crossing the vault with Argenos at their nexus. The spell was the Chain of Purity, an early and powerful working of Light magic which was used to pin a violent and physically strong daemon or possessee in place while rituals of banishment were enacted. Now Argenos was caught in it, blood trickling down the glass shafts as he struggled to break out.

He was speared through the body and all limbs. One punched through from his collarbone to the middle of his back, another went through the back of his hand.

The witch hunter roared. Glass shattered. Argenos fell forward to one knee, some lances breaking while others slid further through his body.

‘Now!’ cried Argenos. ‘Now, by Sigmar!’

The roar of heat behind van Horstmann was just enough warning for him to throw himself to one side as the gout of white fire roared past him. His robes caught fire and he rolled on the floor to put them out, scrambling behind the nearest pedestal.

Magister Kardiggian shot past, flying high enough to brush the vault ceiling. He scattered a hail of white bolts from his hands, and they seared through the floor where they hit. Most thudded into the pedestal, but one raked across van Horstmann’s back and he felt the heat of its purity blistering his skin. He gasped and yelled out, not in pain but in anger.

‘You know full well I am better than you, Kardiggian!’ he shouted. ‘You saw it at the Garden of Morr! You were never anything more than a conjurer of tricks!’

‘And I have tricks enough to kill you, van Horstmann,’ replied Kardiggian. He halted, hovering in the air, and gathered a great ball of white flame between his outstretched arms. ‘What you sought in Dark magic, I found in the purity of my soul! Let us see which is the stronger!’

Van Horstmann had taken shelter behind the same pedestal Argenos had used moments earlier – the one on which stood the mannequin wearing the Mantle of Thoss. Van Horstmann tore the grey fur cloak down and threw it over himself as the fireball erupted from Kardiggian’s hands and the storm of flame broke against him.

The Mantle of Thoss was described, by those who knew it had ever existed, with all manner of miraculous powers. It could be lain on the floor, said some, and when removed would reveal a portal to one of the hells of the Sigmarite faith into which the Grand Theogonist had hurled those he judged guilty. Others maintained that it was the fur of the greatest wolf ever killed in the Empire, and that while wearing it a man took on an aspect so terrible that all who saw him fell down in awe and terror. It was rumoured to heal, of course, a belief that van Horstmann had exploited to gain entrance to the innermost vault. But most commonly, the Mantle of Thoss was said to protect the wearer from harm.

Thoss had been shot with an arrow, stabbed twice, thrown off the balcony of the Temple of Sigmar and set alight. None of the attempts on his life had succeeded. He had died of old age, and many blamed the Mantle of Thoss for keeping the hateful old man alive for so long.

As van Horstmann learned in that moment, the Mantle of Thoss did indeed possess that particular property. The fireball battered against him like a gang of men with clubs, and the heat snatched the air from his lungs, but the flames did not burn him. The air rushed back in, van Horstmann gasped down a scalding breath, and threw the Mantle back off.

In the aethyr, the black gemstone shattered in van Horstmann’s hand.

The ceiling of the vault seemed suddenly gone, replaced by a sky heavy with lead-coloured clouds. The light that drenched the vault dimmed as during an eclipse, and freezing rain drove against van Horstmann’s face.

Black lightning crashed down from the sky, earthing through the hovering form of Magister Kardiggian. Kardiggian was bent almost double backwards as his muscles spasmed and the raw Dark magic tore through him. It burst from his eyes and mouth, it forked off his fingers. His staff shattered into shards of gold.

When Kardiggian hit the ground, his white robes were scorched black and tattered. His skin was the same. He coughed out a mouthful of blood and ash, broken teeth spilling from his lips.

Another bolt hit him in the back and slammed him to the floor. Another cut through his shoulder and sheared his arm off. There was no blood, for the flesh was seared closed. Kardiggian dragged himself a pace or two as van Horstmann stepped out from behind the pedestal, leaving the Mantle of Thoss on the floor.

He watched Kardiggian die. It took only a few seconds, during which the clouds dissolved away and the light returned, illuminating now the burned and broken mass of ashes and scorched meat that had been Magister Kardiggian.

Van Horstmann turned to Argenos. He had made a little progress in escaping the glass spikes that impaled him, but not much. His blood was now a sizeable pool on the floor beneath him.

‘I had been saving that for you,’ said van Horstmann. He drew from his robes the sacrificial dagger with the wavy blade, the one which was never clean of the blood no matter how many times it was washed. ‘But as it is, your death will have to be much more prosaic. I apologise.’

Van Horstmann grabbed the back of Argenos’s head with one hand and yanked it back. Argenos tried to speak, blood flecking his lips. Van Horstmann had no interest in what the witch hunter had to say. He stabbed the blade into Argenos’s chest, twisted it, and withdrew it when he felt Argenos go limp.

Van Horstmann let go of the witch hunter’s head. Argenos’s head flopped down so his chin touched his chest and the blood spread more rapidly now as what remained of Argenos’s life pumped out of him. His hand, which had still been clutching his hammer, finally fell lifeless and the hammer hit the floor with a ringing like a bell. It was as good a sign as any that Argenos was dead.

Van Horstmann was suddenly aware of how exhausted he was. The Black Mirror Broken, the Dark magic spell with which he had killed Kardiggian, was one of the most powerful he had ever encountered. It had pushed back the limit of what he was capable of. The flowing of Dark magic through him had robbed him of his energy and his legs were heavy. Even picking up his staff from the floor was an effort. He wiped a sleeve across his brow and when he removed it the light was not as bright and the smouldering corpse of Kardiggian seemed to lie very distant.

He could hear scales on scales, the coils of them.

The tower in the aethyr was half-buried in a sea of snakes. That third place, where van Horstmann’s mind fled when it was under mortal strain, was vivid and close now. This was the place where his memory dwelt, the one he had not been able to master. So much of himself had been sliced into manageable pieces and filed away, like volumes on the shelves of the Light Order’s library, but that one memory had never been tamed. It had a life of its own, making itself remembered when it chose, sinking away into obscurity when it suited.

It was the memory of his sister’s death, of the pit of snakes. Van Horstmann saw himself, felt and smelt it, as he dragged himself to the pit’s edge.

The woman had watched him. That same woman had watched his sister sink below the surface and die – Lizbeta, who had never so much as let a cruel thought enter her head. That woman had thrown both the youths in, and stood by the pit to watch them die.

Van Horstmann saw her now with the smirk on her face. It amused her to see van Horstmann, little more than a boy, still struggling for life. That smile was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. A painter would have made the woman beautiful, but that smile was a red slash in her face like the mouth of a fish, the amusement in her eyes as disfiguring as a facial scar.

Behind her was another figure. A man. He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair.

‘Do you see, dearest?’ he said. ‘The serpent is the icon of purity. It separates the corrupt from the pure. You were right.’

‘Of course I was,’ replied the woman in a smooth, dark voice. ‘They must let me in. No one understands the principles better than I.’

‘They would never permit a woman to join,’ said the man. He had no beard and his was many years younger, but nevertheless it was unmistakeably the same face. Van Horstmann had never been more certain of anything than that. ‘Not the Light Order. They take a mountain’s age to change. We will not see a woman magister of the Light in our lifetimes.’

The woman turned to her lover. She touched her hand to his cheek. ‘Then it will have to be you,’ she said.

‘It will be your learning that takes me to their ranks,’ said the man. ‘Your brilliance that causes me to shine.’

‘I love you,’ said Albreda.

‘I love you too,’ said Alric.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

COMMANDMENT

Van Horstmann was on his knees, coughing and gasping down breaths. He composed himself and stood again. From his robe he took the small pane of crystal that looked on to his sanctum.

Master Chanter Alric was pounding on the sanctum door. Van Horstmann’s face was reflected in every pane in the sanctum.

‘Alric,’ said van Horstmann. Alric heard the voice and turned to see dozens of reflections of van Horstmann’s face looking at him. ‘Tell me. Did you ever recognise me?’

Alric looked around, confused. ‘Grand Magister, whatever you have done, there are men who will kill you for it. Whoever you have bargained with, whatever contracts you have–’

‘I asked you a question,’ said van Horstmann, keeping his voice level. ‘Did you ever recognise me? When I was an acolyte, when I first walked in through Midday’s Mirror, did you recognise me?’

‘Of course not,’ said Alric. ‘I had never met you before. What are you saying?’

‘You forget so easily the ones who had to suffer,’ said van Horstmann. ‘How many were there? How many experiments did she conduct before the snake pit?’

Alric seemed to deflate. He sank to the floor of the sanctum. ‘The pit? How did you–’

‘Because I went in,’ snapped van Horstmann. ‘My sister and I. But only I came out. What did you two hope to achieve, Alric? What did she think it would tell you?’

‘That the serpent would sort the corrupt from the pure,’ said Alric. His face had blanched and his eyes were wide. Sweat was starting to sheen on his forehead. ‘She was brilliant…’

‘Your wife.’

‘My wife.’

There was a part of van Horstmann, tiny and all but silent, that had never truly believed he would ever make it here. He had shut it away with all the rest of his doubts, all the fears that might have stood in his way. He could feel that memory flaming up and burning away now. The warmth of it flowed through him, a tingling that started at the back of his head and wound its way down his neck, down his chest, around his limbs. ‘I joined the Light Order. I studied the magic of Light and Dark. I sacrificed wonders to the God of Lies, and I contracted with daemons. All for revenge. All to make you both pay for what you did to Lizbeta, and to me. Have you heard of the Key of Isha? The key to forge a prison. The key that when it was broken, would seal any door, forever, never to be opened. To create a prison for all time.’

Van Horstmann held up a hand to the crystal pane, so Alric could see it. In his hand were the broken shards of the Key of Isha.

Alric realised what van Horstmann had done. His eyes welled up and he began to cry. ‘It was her!’ he cried out. ‘All her idea! I would never have even studied the Light at all, were it not for her! She did all this!’

‘You mean her?’ said van Horstmann.

One of the panes in the sanctum changed. It was now showing the image of a room in a well-furnished Altdorfer town house, with curtains of burgundy velvet and a four-poster bed. Standing in front of a mirror was a woman, middle-aged but, from a distance at least, still beautiful. She was peering worriedly at a buboe growing on her neck, examining it as if she was seeing it for the first time.

‘I gouged out the eye of Magister Vek at Kriegsmutter Field,’ said van Horstmann. ‘I placed on it the enchantment that causes everything it sees to appear here, in your cell. And then I placed it on the wardrobe in your wife’s chamber, so you can watch her. She has just discovered the first symptoms of Gods’ Rot. But it is not the strain that kills quickly. Morkulae the Cup-Bearer of Nurgle created a strain for me that kills very, very slowly, and with great suffering. She will live even beyond her natural lifespan, as bit by bit she decays. She will soon be bedridden. After that she will never leave that room. And you will watch it all.’

Another pane changed. This one showed the Chanter’s Hall, looking towards the Master Chanter’s dais and the huge musical organ. ‘I cut out the eye of the ratman seer at the battle of Drufenhaag, and put the same enchantment on it. Without you there, no one will take on the responsibility for maintaining the organ you worked so hard to have built. It will tarnish and fall apart until it is forgotten, like the legacy you wanted to build with your wife’s knowledge in the Light Order. And you will watch it all.’

Van Horstmann cast a third subtle spell, and another pane changed. This time it showed a view of Altdorf, from the very topmost tower of the Imperial Palace. Through the haze of smoke from a thousand chimney stacks, it was possible to make out the charred area beyond the fork of the Reik, all the way to the outskirts of the city where the walls gave way to the fields and forests of Reikland.

‘And I plucked out the eye of Heinrich Grunhald-Salzenhaar, from his tomb in the Garden of Morr. It was remarkably well-preserved, for in life he was a patron of the priests of Morr and they rewarded him with an incorruptible corpse. Through it you can watch the fate of Altdorf. At first it will trouble you not. But time will seem to speed up. The hours will flit by. Your wife’s body will decay, your legacy will become dust, but then the worst will come. Altdorf will change. It will wax and wane. It will burn and be rebuilt. All without you. And you will understand just how little your life meant. Watching it, you will go mad. And you will stay mad, tormented, in my sanctum forever. Time does not flow there. You will not want for thirst or hunger. You will watch forever as the world leaves you far, far behind. And mine is the last voice you will hear, ever, until the end of time.’

‘Van Horstmann!’ yelled Alric. ‘It was not me! It was her!’

‘She was insane,’ said van Horstmann. ‘She was compelled. But you went along because you wanted her. You made a choice.’

‘Damn your eyes, van Horstmann!’ screamed Alric. ‘Rot you in hell, you mad–’

Van Horstmann snapped the pane of crystal in his hands. Alric’s face vanished and his voice cut off.

In all of this, in all the intricate planning, the consideration of every possible thread of fate, he had not given any thought to this moment – to how he should feel. He had done it. He had his revenge. Alric would watch everything he loved die, then the world he knew change, and he would watch it trapped forever in a room created to drive him mad.

He did not know how he was supposed to feel. Triumphant? Elated?

He could give it some proper thought later. Van Horstmann turned now to the structure in the centre of the innermost vault, letting the broken pieces of the key fall to the vault floor. He took up his staff again and let the spiral of Dark magic begin working its way through him, opening the energy channels of body and soul up to the darkest impulses of the aethyr.

He had finished what he had come to the Light Order to do. Now all that remained was to escape.

Broken and mutilated, every muscle and chitin section torn, Hiskernaath the daemon dragged its form down the last few steps. Surrounded there by the pulses of raw Light magic, it was agony. But Hiskernaath was sustained by a force more fundamental even than the magical flesh of the daemon. The very hand of its god was moving it on.

Morkulae and the plaguebearers were things of Nurgle, budded off from the Plague God’s unholy flesh. They were despicable things deserving of no more respect than the lowest of animals. No imagination. Hiskernaath was a creature of Tzeentch, and it took pride as, in those final moments of its existence, it was moved directly by the will of the Changing Lord.

Hiskernaath reached the shore and the doorway. It had rendered itself invisible, but even so a glistening smear of blood and torn flesh was left behind it like the trail left by a slug. It crawled through the doorway and into the innermost vault.

It saw van Horstmann standing at the lock which was concealed among the scrollwork in the central structure. Hiskernaath did not care – it was not there for van Horstmann. The daemon’s destruction had signalled the end of its contractual obligations to van Horstmann, but Tzeentch had saved it from annihilation and restored it anew, free to follow its god’s will instead of the wizard’s.

Hiskernaath headed instead for the blood-soaked form of Witch Hunter Argenos. Argenos was also still alive, but not because his god had intervened on his behalf. Sigmar rarely played his hand so directly. Unlike the gods of Chaos, Sigmar did not answer prayers to him in person. No, it was bloody-mindedness that kept the witch hunter alive, as if each stuttering beat of his heart was compelled by another hateful thought of revenge.

Hiskernaath reached Argenos. Even if Argenos had been fully conscious, he would not have seen the daemon there. He would not have known it was a daemon that spoke to him then. Perhaps, with the last few trickles of his blood oozing from his chest wound, he thought it was Sigmar speaking to him.

‘Splinterwing,’ whispered the daemon Hiskernaath into the witch hunter’s ear.

Then, his final task completed, Tzeentch permitted Hiskernaath to dissolve away, his substance rejoining the winds of the aethyr in blessed oblivion.

Van Horstmann had learned that the key to unlocking the Light was using the Dark. A shard of black lightning formed in his hand, and he had to fight to keep it from breaking out and streaking across the vault. But he held it firm, aimed it at the swirl of dense sculpture that was the vault’s hidden lock, and hurled the lightning with all his force of will.

The marble shattered, leaving a smouldering hole through the wall. In the darkness beyond, something stirred. Something huge.

There was no way van Horstmann could get out of the Pinnacle Vault the way he had entered. All the magisters in the Order of Light would be gathering at that moment around the entrance to the vaults, descending through the sea of light ready to ambush van Horstmann with every destructive spell they knew. If they had to, the magisters could seal the pyramid’s space-folding magic, cutting off the way out via the Midday’s Mirror and trapping van Horstmann as surely as he had trapped Alric. But van Horstmann had never intended to get out on foot.

Two great shapes loomed through the darkness, crowned with spines and set with bright burning eyes. One shape was as brutal as a slab of stone, fangs gleaming in an undershot jaw. The other was slim and wicked, an emaciated snout topped with narrow eyes as cunning and sharp as steel.

‘Baudros!’ called van Horstmann. ‘I offer you freedom from your prison. In return, I ask only passage to the lands of Norsca, far away from here. After that you will be free to do as you will. How do you answer? Will you accept my offer?’

The reply was a terrible twin roar. For the first time in its existence the Pinnacle Vault turned dark as the cascades of light were blasted away. The structure at the heart of the vault shattered, chunks of marble falling away. An icy gale blew, catching the Mantle of Thoss and throwing it away into oblivion. Magical swords and chalices clattered on the floor. A tapestry followed the Mantle into nothingness. Flying debris smashed an urn full of goddess’s tears.

Baudros emerged from its prison. Its scales were grey-black, its horns and fangs white bone. Its tattered wings spread out above it as its two necks stretched out to their full extent, each head opening its jaws wide and howling out a gale. Its imprisonment had caused its flabby bulk to waste away and now it was slender and powerful, nothing but muscle and scale coiled up to strike.

It was like standing before a natural disaster incarnate. As if every earthquake and storm had coalesced into one form and was now standing before van Horstmann roaring its anger at being imprisoned for so long.

‘Teclis imprisoned you, but Teclis failed,’ shouted van Horstmann over the din. ‘Take me to safety and you will be free to avenge yourself on him!’

Four burning eyes fixed on van Horstmann. The wizard did not take a backwards step, even as the dragon’s claws dug into the marble as it stepped towards him.

One of its heads, the cunning one, lowered to the floor. Van Horstmann found a foothold in the gnarled scales behind its head and vaulted up onto its neck, like a rider mounting a horse. The scales were as sharp as broken flint but he held on tight, his hands cut deep.

‘Fly, Baudros!’ yelled van Horstmann. ‘For Tzeentch! For vengeance! Fly!’

Witch Hunter Argenos knew that the dragon was the last thing he would ever see. His vision wavered and he could not be sure if the monster had one head but two. It did not matter. He knew only one thing now – that he had a single task to complete. Because Sigmar had told him to. His whole life he had longed to hear the voice of his god in person. He had followed every scripture, abandoned everything in his life, given everything he had ever earned to Sigmar. He had sacrificed his body and done things that had made him abandon even the simple morality of every man. And he had not heard his god reply.

Until now.

Argenos forced his head up, to look the dragon in the eye. This head was brutal and animalistic, and its eyes fell on the witch hunter.

‘Splinterwing,’ said Argenos, with the last gasp of his last breath.

The dragon inhaled, and breathed out a fatal black wind. Witch Hunter Argenos was stripped to the bone, his skin and flesh sloughing away as a handful of ash. The glass spears holding him in place shattered and his very bones were carried away, leaving nothing to suggest Witch Hunter Argenos had ever existed.

But it did not matter.

Because his final commandment had been fulfilled.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SPLINTERWING

Baudros, the two-headed dragon of Chaos, flapped his wings once and took flight. Another beat of his wings and he hurtled upwards, and from his twin throats roared a blast of black fire that tore through the vault ceiling. The dragon burst through into the ocean of light and kept going, streaking up towards the floor of the vault above.

Again its fire bored through the floors of the pyramid. Generations of artefacts were shattered and thrown aside as the dragon crashed through the vaults. It burst up into the Chanter’s Hall, throwing aside the bodies of acolytes still carrying away their dead from the battle against van Horstmann’s daemons. Pillars toppled as its enormous serpentine body tore through the chamber.

Its path took it through the exorcists’ chambers, ripping apart protective circles and obliterating the frescoed ceiling beneath which the senior magisters had met Emperor Eckhardt III. It blasted through Magister Vek’s old chambers, and many of the magisters gathered there were ground to pulp by the dragon’s scales as it rushed by.

The top of the pyramid erupted as the dragon’s flame punched out through its pinnacle. Great blocks of stone tumbled down the pyramid’s side, smashing into the square below. Beyond the fold in space, the whole Buchbinder district shuddered, and ever after the inhabitants would speak of the earthquake that had struck without warning, toppling buildings and setting fires that claimed dozens of houses before the flames were doused with the waters of the Reik.

The force of the dragon’s escape ripped through the folded space and it emerged high above Altdorf, its shadow passing over the Reik, the burned district around the Bright College and the city walls. Then it was past the city, soaring over the hills of Reikland, every beat of its mighty wings taking it further from Altdorf. The Empire rushed by, forests and farmlands, province by province, towards the north of Sigmar’s land.

The cold and speed almost robbed van Horstmann’s throat of breath and he had to fight to stay conscious, such was the din and the battering of the freezing air.

He crawled, handhold by handhold, towards the dragon’s ear. He could not be certain where he was, but with the incredible speed of the dragon he must have left Reikland far behind.

‘To Norsca,’ he yelled as loudly as he could, although he could not hear his own words. ‘To Norsca, and you will have your freedom!’

The dragon’s other head, the bestial one, turned to face van Horstmann.

With a fury and speed impossible for its size, Baudros’s bestial head darted forwards, jaws bared. Van Horstmann let go of his handhold and slid down the dragon’s neck, finally grabbing another scale before he was thrown completely clear of the dragon.

Where he had clung a moment before, the bestial head’s fangs sank into the neck of its second head. Baudros yawed to one side and the dragon began to tumble, wings flailing, as it plummeted from the sky towards the lands of the northern Empire.

Van Horstmann was in the pit of snakes again. This time he was not a child, and Lizbeta was not with him – he was a man, and she had died long ago.

He knew that this was not real. He was not really in that pit. The snakes were not snakes at all, but what his mind made of the unconsciousness that had fallen on him. He could fight it if he chose to. That was what he had done all his life – he had chosen to fight what other men would accept as inevitable. He had not accepted that revenge against a wizard, against a magister of the Light College, was impossible, nor that he could not master the magic of Light and Dark as was needed for his vengeance to come to pass. He would not accept that he should fall insensible now, not when he was so close to escaping and starting his life anew.

He fought. He kicked and struggled. And finally he dragged himself over the edge of that pit, left the snakes behind, and returned to the real world.

He was lying in a barren stretch of the Empire, sparsely scattered with clumps of trees. Perhaps he was in Troll Country, where the Empire’s people had struggled to forge their northern frontier. It depended on how fast Baudros had flown. Certainly van Horstmann had not yet reached the Sea of Claws or the lands of Norsca beyond, a place far removed from the eyes of the Silver Hammer or the orders of magic.

The sound of crashing and flesh against flesh was coming from beyond a low, forested hill. As van Horstmann watched, Baudros crashed through the trees, rolling down the hill and coming to rest in the scrub nearby. The two heads were battling, thick purple-red blood spattering down from the wounds down both its necks.

The bestial head gained the upper hand for a moment, battering the skinnier head down to the ground. It looked up at van Horstmann, and again its eyes focused on the wizard.

‘We had a deal!’ yelled van Horstmann.

The dragon’s lips peeled back, revealing its rows of titanic fangs. When it spoke, it was an earthquake, channelled and turned into sound that rumbled up through the ground into van Horstmann’s soul.

‘You made a deal with Baudros,’ snarled the dragon. ‘But I am Splinterwing. I am that which Baudros once was. I walked in darkness, but I heard my name again and now I remember. Your gods made me into this abomination. I will make them pay. I will begin with you.’

Van Horstmann yelled out, a wordless sound of desperation and abandonment. It was drowned out by the gale of black fire that erupted over him.

The flames charred van Horstmann’s skin. His hands blackened before his eyes. He toppled over into the layer of ash that remained of the ground beneath him.

Somehow, his heart still beat. Somehow his mind still thought. But that was all he had. The black flame seared his skin, then his muscles and organs, then his bones, leaving him a blackened husk to which life could barely cling. One eye socket was scooped clean by the fire – the other remained open, watching.

The cunning head took the moment’s distraction as an opening. It struck as fast as a snake, sinking its fangs into the back of the other head. The other head bellowed and was driven down into the ground, shuddering as the cunning head bit down deeper.

The cunning head now looked at van Horstmann. Its voice was a slithering whisper, like a sharp, cold wind knifing through the mountains.

‘Tzeentch is my master,’ it said. ‘And has been since I was pledged to it. What remained of Splinterwing is dead. And so will you be. In a few moments your heart will stop and there will be nothing more. But there is hope. Tzeentch brings hope even to you.’

Van Horstmann wanted to answer, but he could not. It was not just that he could not speak. He did not know what to say. Somewhere, beneath the panic and the pain, there sparked the feeling that he had not been the only one planning, manoeuvring in the shadows, making sure all things were to rights.

‘Serve Tzeentch, give yourself to him, and you will live. Or, you will die, and only oblivion waits for you.’

Van Horstmann tried to raise a hand, but the bone cracked and the flesh flaked away.

‘I will take you to a forge in the mountains of Norsca, where the forge masters of our god will create a suit of armour to sustain you,’ continued Baudros. Van Horstmann knew by some instinct that it was not the dragon itself that spoke, but a power far more distant and powerful, one that rarely moved its hand directly, preferring always to move through proxies and pawns. Pawns like Egrimm van Horstmann. ‘In return Tzeentch will have your soul. You will not refuse, for you will not suffer your genius to be snuffed out. And you always knew, van Horstmann, that one day you would pay Tzeentch his due.’

Van Horstmann’s neck and tongue firmed up, the flesh restored just enough to let him speak. He croaked out the only two words that his mind could form in that moment.

‘I obey,’ he gasped.

For the tenth day, or the hundredth, or the millionth, Master Chanter Alric stared at the wall.

He could see his wife, decaying. Sometimes it was slow and cruel. Sometimes it was so rapid the horror barely had time to develop in her eyes before she was gone. Maybe he had only seen it once, and it echoed again and again in his mind, rattling around like a pebble in a bucket until it became all mixed up into one terrible vision of her, in pain.

He could see the organ in the Chanter’s Hall. It was broken and crumbling after the destruction wrought by the dragon that thundered through the hall. Then it was patched up half-heartedly, hardly a priority. Some cared for it and tried to have it restored, others neglected it. Everyone forgot why it was there. Eras of history hurtled by, and days seemed to last forever, each speck of dust settling on the pipes another hammer blow. Those pipes were Alric’s own guts, rotting away, and he kept forgetting who he was each time the organ was torn down or put back up again, unfinished.

He saw Altdorf. The city was alive. And it hated him, for why else would it mock him by growing, changing, suffering sieges and hosting triumphs, without him? Had he never existed? Had there never been a man named… named what?

In the sanctum, which by now he was certain was the only world he had ever known, the man without a name continued to weep.

From the far north, at the head of an army, came a champion of Chaos who wielded magic as deftly as a duellist wielded a sword. Whose armour was impervious to harm, and who rode to battle on a mighty two-headed dragon that could devour whole armies in its maws. Of all the warlords who had taken the Chaos Gods as their patron, it was said that he was perhaps the greatest. He ruled the Silver Cabal of corrupted wizards who had promised their souls to Tzeentch in return for forbidden knowledge. His was the God of Change, the Liar Prince, and he was that god’s hand in the world when trickery and deceit were not enough.

Some said he could not die, for Tzeentch owned his soul and would not give it up to anything so mundane as death. Others said he had already died, many times, and was not permitted to rest. No one knew the whole truth, for wherever Tzeentch’s shadow was cast, there could be no such thing as the truth.

And so this champion embarked on a dozen wars, a hundred battles, untiring in the name of his god.

So began the story of Egrimm van Horstmann.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darius Hinks’s first novel, Warrior Priest, won the David Gemmell Morningstar award for best newcomer. Since then he has carved a bloody swathe through the Warhammer World in works such as Island of Blood, Sigvald, Razumov’s Tomb and the Orion trilogy. He has also ventured into the Warhammer 40,000 universe with the Space Marine Battles novella Sanctus.

S P Cawkwell is a freelance writer based in north-east England. Her work for Black Library includes the Silver Skulls novels The Gildar Rift and Portents, and the Architect of Fate novella, Accursed Eternity. For Warhammer, she is best known for her stories featuring the daemon princess of Khorne, Valkia the Bloody.

Ben Counter has two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles, he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris as well as a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit that has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

An extract from The Legend of Sigmar.

The faint sound of songs and proud boasts guided the two boys as they scampered across the hard earth of the darkened settlement towards the longhouse at its centre. Their movements were furtive and cautious as they negotiated their way between high, timber walled buildings, and past the fish drying racks and the warm walls of the smithy. Neither boy wanted to be discovered, especially now that guards had been set on the walls and night had fallen.

Despite the threat of a beating at this trespass, the excitement of their intrepid raid into the heart of Reikdorf threatened to give both of them away.

‘Be quiet!’ hissed Cuthwin as Wenyld clattered against a previously unseen pile of planed timber, stacked against the woodworking store.

‘Quiet yourself,’ returned his friend, catching the timber before it could fall as both boys pressed their bodies flat against the wall. ‘There’s no stars or moon. I can’t see a thing.’

That at least was true, allowed Cuthwin. The night was utterly dark, the hooded braziers on the settlement’s walls casting a crackling orange light out into the forests beyond Reikdorf. Sentries circled the settlement within the ring of light, their bows and spears trained on the thick forests and darkened shoreline of the Reik.

‘Hey,’ said Wenyld, ‘did you hear what I said?’

‘I heard,’ said Cuthwin. ‘It’s dark, yes. So use your ears. Warriors aren’t quiet the night before riding to war.’

Both boys stood as still as the statue of Ulric above Reikdorf’s gate, and let the sounds and smells of the night wash over them, each one telling a story of the village they lived in: the groan of settling iron as Beorthyn’s forge cooled and creaked from a day’s work, producing iron swords and axe blades; the sounds of wives speaking with low, worried voices as they wove new cloaks for their sons, who rode to battle at daybreak; the whinny of stabled horses; the sweet smell of burning peat, and the mouth-watering aroma of cooking meat.

Over it all, Cuthwin could hear the open wash of the river as a constant rustle of water against the mud flats, the creak of wooden fishing boats as they moved with the tide, and the low moan of wind through the hung nets. It sounded sad to him, but night in the land west of the mountains was often a time of sadness, a time when the monsters came from the forests to kill and devour.

Cuthwin’s parents had been killed last summer by the greenskins, cut down as they fought to defend their farmstead from the blood-hungry raiders. The thought made him pause, and he felt his hands curl into fists as he pictured the vengeance he would one day take on the savage race that had taken his father from him, and had seen him eventually brought to Reikdorf to live with his uncle.

As though feelings of anger concentrated his hearing, he heard a muted sound of laughter and song from behind thick timbers and heavy, fortified doors. Firelight reflected on the walls of the grain store at the settlement’s heart as though a door or shutter had been opened, and from which spilled raucous sounds of merriment.

For a brief moment, the market-place at the centre of Reikdorf was illuminated, but no sooner had the light come than it was gone. Both boys shared a look of excitement at the thought of spying on King Björn’s warriors before they rode out to do battle with the greenskins. Only those who had reached the age of manhood were permitted within the walls of the king’s longhouse before battle, and the mystery of such a thing simply had to be explored.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Wenyld, pointing towards the centre of the village.

‘Of course I did,’ replied Cuthwin, pulling Wenyld’s arm down. ‘I’m not blind.’

Though Cuthwin had lived in Reikdorf for less than a week, he knew the secrets of the town as well as any young child did, but in such complete darkness, without any visual landmarks beyond knowing where they stood, the village was suddenly unfamiliar and strange, all its geography unknown.

He fixed the brief image the light had given him, and took Wenyld’s hand.

‘I’ll follow the sounds of the warriors,’ he said. ‘Hold on to me and I’ll get us there.’

‘But it’s so dark,’ said Wenyld.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Cuthwin. ‘I’ll find a way around in the dark. Just don’t let go.’

‘I won’t,’ promised Wenyld, but Cuthwin could hear the fear that crept into his friend’s voice. He felt a little of it too, for his uncle was no slouch with the birch when punishment was to be meted out. He pushed the fear aside, for he was an Unberogen, the fiercest tribe of warriors north of the Grey Mountains, and his heart was strong and true.

He took a deep breath, and set off at a jog towards where the light had reflected on the walls of the grain store, following a remembered path where there was nothing to trip him or make a noise. Cuthwin’s heart was in his mouth as he crossed the open market-place, avoiding spots where the light had shown him pitfalls or broken pottery that might crunch underfoot. Though he had only the briefest glimpse of the route he had to take, the image was imprinted on his memory as firmly as the wolves on one of King Björn’s war banners.

His father’s teachings in the dark of the woods returned to him, and he moved like a ghost, silently weaving through the market square, counting his strides and pulling Wenyld after him. Cuthwin pulled up and slowed his steps as he closed his eyes and let his ears gather information on his surroundings. The sound of merrymaking was louder, and the echoes of it on the walls were forming a map in his head.

Cuthwin reached out, and he smiled as he felt his fingers brush the stone wall of the longhouse. The stones were square-cut and carved, hewn by dwarf miners from the rock of the Worlds Edge Mountains, and brought to Reikdorf as a gift to King Björn when spring had broken.

He remembered watching the dwarfs with a mixture of awe and trepidation, for they had been frightening, squat figures in gleaming armour, who paid little heed to the people around them, speaking to one another in gruff voices as they built the longhouse for the king in less than a day. The dwarfs had stayed no longer than necessary, and had refused all offers of help in their labours, all but one marching into the east as soon as the work was complete.

‘Are we here?’ whispered Wenyld.

Cuthwin nodded before remembering that Wenyld wouldn’t be able to see him.

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice low, ‘but be quiet. It’ll be a week emptying the privies if we’re caught.’

Cuthwin paused to let his breathing even out, and then began edging along the length of the wall, feeling ahead of him for the corner. When it came, it was as smooth and as sharp as an axe blade, and he eased himself around it, glancing up as the clouds parted and a bright glitter of stars sparkled in the heavens above him.

The extra light glistened on the walls of the dwarf-cut stone as though they were filled with stars, and he took a moment to admire the incredible craftsmanship that had gone into their making.

Along the length of the wall of the longhouse, Cuthwin could see a wide doorway fashioned from thick beams of timber, and embellished with angular bands of dark iron and carvings of hammers and lightning bolts. Shutters above them were fastened tightly to their frames, not so much as a gap wide enough for a knife blade between the timber and the stone.

Through the shutters, Cuthwin could hear the muted sounds of carousing warriors, the clatter of ale pots, the sound of rousing war songs and the banging of swords upon shield bosses.

‘Here,’ he said, pointing to the shutter above him. ‘We’ll see if we can get a look in here.’

Wenyld nodded and said, ‘Me first.’

‘Why should you go first?’ asked Cuthwin. ‘I got us here.’

‘Because I’m the oldest,’ said Wenyld, and Cuthwin couldn’t fault his logic, so, he laced his fingers together to form a stirrup like those used by the horsemen of the Taleuten.

He braced his back against the stone wall and said, ‘Very well, climb up and see if you can work the shutter open far enough to see something.’

Wenyld nodded eagerly and set his foot in Cuthwin’s hands, placing his hands on his friend’s shoulders. With a grunt, Cuthwin boosted Wenyld up, turning his head to avoid a knee in the face.

He opened his stance a little to spread Wenyld’s weight, and craned his neck to see what his friend was doing. The shutter was wedged firmly within its frame, and Wenyld had his face pressed against the wood as he squinted along the joints.

‘Well?’ asked Cuthwin, closing his eyes as he strained to hold Wenyld. ‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing,’ replied Wenyld. ‘I can’t see anything, the wood’s fitted too closely together.’

‘That’s dwarf craft for you,’ said a strong voice beside them, and both boys froze.

Cuthwin turned his head slowly, and opened his eyes to see a powerful warrior, outlined by starlight, and as solid as if he was carved from the same stone as the longhouse.

The sheer physical presence of the warrior took Cuthwin’s breath away, and he released his grip on Wenyld’s foot. His friend scrabbled for a handhold at the edge of the shutter, but there was none to be had, and he fell, knocking the pair of them to the ground in a pile of acute embarrassment. Cuthwin shook free of his cursing friend, knowing that he was to be punished, but determined to face the warrior without fear.

He rolled quickly to his feet, and stood before their discoverer, his defiance turning to awe as he stared into the open, handsome face. Blond hair shone like silver in the starlight, kept from the warrior’s face by a headband of twisted copper wire, and his thick arms were bound by iron torques. A long bearskin cloak flowed from his shoulders, and Cuthwin saw that beneath it the warrior was clad in shimmering mail, bound at the waist by a great belt of thick leather.

A long-bladed hunting knife was sheathed at his belt, but it was the weapon hanging beside it that captured Cuthwin’s full attention.

The warrior bore a mighty warhammer, and Cuthwin’s eyes were drawn to the wide, flat head of the weapon, its surface etched with strange carvings that shimmered in the starlight.

The warhammer was a magnificent weapon, its haft forged from some unknown metal and worked by hands older than imagining. No man had ever forged such a perfect weapon of destruction, nor had any smith ever borne such a fearsome tool of creation.

Wenyld sprang to his feet, ready to flee from their discovery, but he too was held rooted to the spot at the sight of the awesome warrior.

The warrior leaned down, and Cuthwin saw that he was still young, perhaps around fifteen summers, and had a look of wry amusement glittering in the depths of his cold eyes, one of which was a pale blue, the other a deep green.

‘You did well getting across that market square in the dark, boy,’ said the warrior.

‘My name is Cuthwin,’ he said. ‘I’m nearly twelve, almost a man.’

‘Almost,’ said the warrior, ‘but not yet, Cuthwin. This place is for warriors who may soon face death in battle. This night is for them and them alone. Do not be in too much of a rush to be part of such things. Enjoy your childhood while you can. Now go, be off with you.’

‘You’re not going to punish us?’ asked Wenyld, and Cuthwin dug an elbow into his ribs.

The warrior smiled and said, ‘I should, but it took great skill to get this far without being seen, and I like that.’

Despite himself, Cuthwin felt inordinately pleased to have earned the warrior’s praise and said, ‘My father taught me how to move without being seen.’

‘Then he taught you well. What is his name?’

‘He was called Gethwer,’ said Cuthwin. ‘The greenskins killed him.’

‘I am sorry for that, Cuthwin,’ said the warrior. ‘We ride to do battle with the greenskins, and many of them will die by our hand. Now, do not tarry, or others with less mercy than I will discover you, and you’ll be in for a beating.’

Cuthwin needed no second telling and turned from the warrior, sprinting back across the market square with his arms pumping at his side. The stars were out, and he followed a direct route from the longhouse towards the storehouse at the edge of the market square. He heard running steps behind him and risked a glance over his shoulder to see Wenyld swiftly following. The older boy quickly overtook him, a look of frantic relief plastered across his face as they rounded the corner of a timber-framed storehouse.

The boys pressed their bodies against the building, lungs heaving, and wild laughter bursting from their throats as they relived the thrill of capture and the relief of escape.

Cuthwin darted his head around the storehouse, remembering the fierce strength of the warrior who had sent them on their way. There was a man who feared nothing, a man who would stand up to any threat and meet it with his warhammer held high.

‘When I am a man I want to be like him,’ said Cuthwin when he had got his breath back.

Wenyld doubled up, the breath heaving in his chest. ‘Don’t you know who that was?’

‘No,’ said Cuthwin, ‘who was it?’

Wenyld said, ‘That was the king’s son. That was Sigmar.’

Sigmar watched the boys run off as though the Ölfhednar themselves were at their heels, smiling as he remembered attempting to sneak up to the old longhouse the night before his father had led the Unberogen warriors into battle against the Thuringians. He had not been as stealthy as the young lad he had just sent on his way, and vividly remembered the thrashing the king had administered.

He heard unsteady footfalls behind him. Without turning, he knew that Wolfgart, his closest friend and sword-brother, approached.

‘You were too soft on them, Sigmar,’ said Wolfgart. ‘I remember the beating we got. Why should they not learn the hard way that you don’t try to spy on a warriors’ Blood Night?’

‘We were caught because you couldn’t hold me up for long enough,’ Sigmar pointed out, turning to see a heavily muscled young man clad in mail and swathed in a great wolfskin cloak. A long-handled sword was sheathed over his shoulders, and unkempt braids of dark hair spilled around his face. Wolfgart was three years older than Sigmar, his features handsome and his skin flushed with heat, rich food and plentiful drink.

‘Only because you broke my arm the year before with a smelting hammer.’

Sigmar’s gaze fell upon Wolfgart’s elbow, where five years previously, his rage had overcome him after the older boy had bested him in a practice bout and he had swung his weapon at the unsuspecting Wolfgart. Though long forgiven, Sigmar had never forgotten the unworthy deed, nor had he quickly forgotten the lesson of control his father had taught him in the aftermath of the bout.

‘True enough,’ admitted Sigmar, slapping a hand on his friend’s shoulder and turning him back towards the longhouse. ‘You have never let me forget it.’

‘Damn right!’ roared Wolfgart, his cheeks red with ale flavoured with hops and bog myrtle. ‘I won fair and square, and you hit me from behind!’

‘I know, I know,’ said Sigmar, leading him back towards the door.

‘What are you doing outside anyway? There’s more drinking to be done!’

‘I just wanted some fresh air,’ said Sigmar, ‘and haven’t you had enough to drink?’

‘Fresh air?’ slurred Wolfgart, ignoring the latter part of Sigmar’s comment. ‘Plenty of fresh air to be had on the morn. Tonight is a night for feasting, drinking and giving praise to Ulric. It’s bad luck not to sacrifice to the gods before battle.’

‘I know that, Wolfgart. My father taught me that.’

‘Then come back in,’ said Wolfgart. ‘He’ll be wondering where you are. It’s bad luck to be apart from your sword-brothers on a Blood Night.’

‘Everything is bad luck to you,’ said Sigmar.

‘It’s true. Look at the world we live in,’ said Wolfgart, leaning against the side of the longhouse to vomit down the dwarf stonework. Glistening ropes of matter drooled from his chin, and he wiped them clear with the back of his hand. ‘I mean, think about it. Everywhere a man looks there’s something trying to kill him: greenskins from the mountains, the beast-kin in the forests, or the other tribes: Asoborns, Thuringians or Teutogens. Plagues, starvation and sorcery: you name it, it’s bad luck. Proves that everything is bad luck, doesn’t it?’

‘Someone had too much to drink again?’ said an amused voice from the doorway to the longhouse.

‘Ranald shrivel your staff, Pendrag!’ roared Wolfgart, sinking to his haunches, and resting his forehead against the cool stone of the longhouse.

Sigmar looked up from Wolfgart to see two warriors emerge from the warmth and light of the longhouse. Both were of ages with him, and clad in fine hauberks and tunics of dark red. The taller of the pair had hair the colour of the setting sun, and wore a thick cloak of shimmering green scales that threw back the starlight with an iridescent sheen. His companion wore a long wolfskin cloak wrapped tightly around his thin frame, and bore a worried expression upon his face.

The tall warrior with the flame-red hair, addressed by Wolfgart, ignored the insult to his manhood, and said, ‘Is he going to be well enough to ride tomorrow?’

Sigmar nodded and said, ‘Aye, Pendrag, it’s nothing a brew of valerian root won’t cure.’

Pendrag looked doubtful, but shrugged, and turned to his companion in the wolfskin cloak. ‘Trinovantes here thinks you should come inside, Sigmar.’

‘Afraid I’ll catch cold, my friend?’ asked Sigmar.

‘He claims he’s seen an omen,’ said Pendrag.

‘An omen?’ asked Sigmar. ‘What kind of omen?’

‘A bad one,’ spat Wolfgart. ‘What other kind is there? No one speaks of good omens now.’

‘They did of Sigmar’s coming,’ said Trinovantes.

‘Aye, and look how well that went,’ groaned Wolfgart. ‘Born into blood, and his mother dead at the hands of orcs. Good omens, my arse.’

Sigmar felt a stab of anger and sadness at the mention of his mother’s death, but he had never known her and had nothing but his father’s words to connect her to him. Wolfgart was right. Whatever omens had been spoken of his birth had come to naught but blood and death.

He leaned down, hooked an arm under Wolfgart’s shoulders, and hauled him to his feet. Wolfgart was heavy and his limbs loose, and Sigmar grunted under the weight. Trinovantes took Wolfgart’s other arm, and between them they half carried, half dragged their drunken friend towards the warmth of the longhouse.

Sigmar looked over at Trinovantes, the young man’s face earnest and aged before its time.

‘Tell me,’ said Sigmar, ‘what omen did you see?’

Trinovantes shook his head. ‘It was nothing, Sigmar.’

‘Go on, tell him,’ said Pendrag. ‘You can’t see an omen and then not tell him.’

‘Very well,’ said Trinovantes, taking a deep breath. ‘I saw a raven land on the roof of the king’s longhouse this morning.’

‘And?’ asked Sigmar, when Trinovantes did not go on.

‘And nothing,’ said Trinovantes. ‘That was it. A single raven is an omen of sorrow. Remember when one landed on Beithar’s home last year? He was dead within the week.’

‘Beithar was nearly forty,’ said Sigmar. ‘He was an old man.’

‘You see,’ laughed Pendrag. ‘Aren’t you glad we warned you, Sigmar? You must stay home and let us do the fighting. It’s clearly too dangerous for you to venture beyond the confines of Reikdorf.’

‘You can laugh,’ said Trinovantes, ‘but don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’ve an orc arrow through your heart!’

‘An orc couldn’t skewer my heart if I stood right in front of it and let it take a free pull on its bow,’ cried Pendrag. ‘In any case, if it’s the gods’ will that I die at the hands of an orc then it will be with its axe buried in my chest and a ring of its dead friends around me. I won’t be slain by some poxy arrow!’

‘Enough talk of death!’ roared Wolfgart, finding new strength, and throwing off the supporting arms of his friends. ‘It’s bad luck to talk of death before a battle! I need a drink.’

Sigmar smiled as Wolfgart ran his hands through his unruly hair, and spat a glistening mouthful to the earth. No one could go from drunken stupor to demanding more ale as quickly as Wolfgart, and despite Pendrag’s worries, Sigmar knew that Wolfgart would ride as hard and skilfully as ever on the morrow.

‘What are we all doing out here?’ demanded Wolfgart. ‘Come on, there’s drinking yet to be done.’

Before any of them could answer, the howling of wolves split the night, a soaring chorus from the depths of the darkened forest that carried the primal joy of wild and ancient days as it echoed through Reikdorf. Yet more howls rose in answer as though every pack of wolves within the Great Forest had united in one great cry of challenge.

‘You want an omen, my brothers,’ said Wolfgart. ‘There’s your omen. Ulric is with us. Now, let’s get inside. This is our Blood Night after all and we’ve blood yet to offer him.’

Sparks flew from the cooking fire like a thousand fireflies as another hunk of wood was hurled into the deep pit at the centre of the great longhouse of the Unberogen tribe. Heat from the fire and the hundreds of warriors gathered in the great hall filled the longhouse, and laughter and song rose to the heavy beams that laced together overhead in complex patterns of support and dependency.

Dwarfs had built this longhouse for the king of the Unberogens in recognition of his son’s courage and the great service he had done their own king, Kurgan Ironbeard, by rescuing him from orcs. Sturdy stone walls that would endure beyond the lives of many kings enclosed the warriors as they gathered to offer praise and blood to Ulric and carouse on what, for many, would be their last night alive in Reikdorf.

Sigmar threaded his way through the crowded hall towards the raised podium at the far end of the longhouse, where his father sat on a carved, oak throne, two men standing at his sides. To his father’s right was Alfgeir, the Marshal of the Reik and king’s champion, while on his left was Eoforth, his trusted counsellor and oldest friend.

The sights, sounds and smells of the great hall overwhelmed Sigmar’s every sense: sweat, songs, blood, meat, ale and smoke. Three enormous boars turned on spits before a tall wooden statue of Taal, the hunter god, their flesh crackling and spitting fat into the fire. Though he had eaten enough to fill his belly for a week, the scent of roasting meat made his mouth water, and he smiled as a mug of beer was thrust into his hand.

Wolfgart immediately found more drink, and began an arm wrestling contest amongst his fellow warriors. Trinovantes fetched a plate of food and some water, watching Wolfgart with studied worry, while Pendrag sought out the squat, bearded dwarf sitting in the corner of the hall, who watched the revelries with unabashed relish.

The dwarf was known as Alaric, and had come down from the mountains with Kurgan Ironbeard in early spring with the cartloads of hewn stone for the new longhouse. When the construction work was complete, the dwarfs had left, but Alaric had remained, teaching the Unberogen smiths secrets of metalworking that had provided them with the finest weapons and armour of the western tribes.

Sigmar left his friends to their diversions, knowing that every man must face his Blood Night in his own way. Hands clapped him on his shoulders as he passed, and roaring warriors wished him well on the journey into battle, or boasted of how many orcs they would slay in his name.

He joined with their boasts, but his heart was heavy as he wondered how many would live to see another day like today. These were hard, sinewy warriors with the hunger of wolves, men who had fought beneath his father’s banner for years, but would now ride beneath his. He looked into their faces as he passed, hearing their words, but not the sense of them.

He knew and loved these warriors as men, as husbands and as fathers, and every one of them would ride into battle by his command.

To lead such men was an honour, an honour he did not know if he was worthy to bear.

Sigmar put aside such melancholy thoughts as he emerged from the throng of armoured warriors to stand before his father. Raised up on his throne, King Björn of the Unberogen tribe sat between two carved statues of snarling wolves, and was as intimidating a figure as ever, despite his advancing years.

A crown of bronze sat upon his brow, and hair the colour of iron was bound in numerous braids that hung about his face and neck. Eyes of flint that had resolutely faced the many horrors of the world stared out with paternal affection at the warriors gathered before him as they offered praise to Ulric that he might grant them courage in the coming battles.

Though his father would not be riding to war with them, he wore a mail shirt fashioned by Alaric. The quality of the shirt was beyond the skill of any human smith, but had taken the dwarf less than a day to make. Across the king’s lap was his feared axe, Soultaker, its twin blades red in the firelight.

As Sigmar approached the throne, Alfgeir gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement, his bronze armour gleaming gold, and his unsmiling face apparently carved from granite. Eoforth bowed to Sigmar, and took a step back, his long robes singular in a room full of armoured warriors, his sharp intellect making him one of the king’s most trusted advisors. His counsel was both noble and fair, and the Unberogens had many times benefited from his foresight and wisdom.

‘My son,’ said Björn, waving Sigmar to stand beside him. ‘Is everything well? You look troubled.’

‘I am well,’ said Sigmar, taking his place at his father’s right hand. ‘I’m simply impatient for dawn. I hunger to put the Bonecrusher to the sword and drive his army back into the mountains.’

‘Curse his name,’ said Björn. ‘That damn greenskin warlord has been the scourge of our people for years. The sooner his head is mounted above this throne the better.’

Sigmar followed his father’s gaze, feeling the weight of expectation upon him as he saw the many trophies mounted on the wall above the throne. Orcs, beasts and foul horrors with great fangs, curling horns and loathsome scaled skin were rammed onto iron spikes, the wall below stained with the blood of their deaths.

Here was the head of Skarskan Bloodhelm, the orc that had threatened to drive the Endals from their homelands, until Björn had ridden to the aid of King Marbad. There was the flayed hide of the great, nameless beast of the Howling Hills that had terrorised the Cherusens for years, until the king of the Unberogen had tracked it to its hideous lair and taken its head with one mighty blow of Soultaker.

A score of other trophies surrounded them, each one with an accompanying tale of heroism that had thrilled Sigmar as a youth, crouched at his father’s feet, and which had stirred mighty, heroic longings in his breast.

‘Any word from the riders you sent south?’ asked his father, and Sigmar put aside the thought of trying to equal his father’s deeds.

‘Some,’ said Sigmar, ‘and none of it good. The orcs have come down from the mountains in great numbers, but it seems they are not going back. Normally they come and they raid and kill, and then they go back to the highlands, but this Bonecrusher keeps them together, and with every slaughter more flock to his banner every day.’

‘Then there is no time to waste,’ said his father. ‘You will do the land a great service as you earn your shield. It is no small thing to reach manhood, boy, and as far as tests of courage go, this is a big one. It is only right that you should feel fear.’

Sigmar squared his shoulders before his father’s stern gaze, and said, ‘I am not afraid, father. I have killed greenskins before, and death holds no fear for me.’

King Björn leaned close and lowered his voice so that only Sigmar could hear him. ‘It is not fear of death that I speak. I already know that you have faced great peril and lived to tell of it. Any fool can swing a sword, but to lead men in battle, to hold their lives in your hands, to put yourself in a position to be judged by your fellow warriors and your king: it is right you should fear these things.

‘The serpent of fear gnaws at your belly, my son. I know this, for it twisted in my gut when Redmane Dregor, your grandfather, sent me out to earn my shield.’

Sigmar looked into his father’s eyes, both a misty grey, and saw true understanding there and an empathy with what he felt. The knowledge that a warrior king as mighty as Björn of the Unberogen had once felt the same thing made him smile in relief.

‘You always did know what I was thinking,’ said Sigmar.

‘You are my son,’ said Björn simply.

‘I am your only son. What if I should fail?’

‘You will not, for the blood of your ancestors is strong. You will go on to do great things as chieftain of the Unberogen when the grass grows tall on my tomb. Fear is not something to turn away from, my son. Understand that its power over a man comes from his willingness to take the easy course of action, to run away, to hide, and you will defeat it. A true hero never runs when he can fight, never takes the easy course over what he knows is right. Remember that, and you will not falter.’

Sigmar nodded at his father’s words, staring out over the warriors, who filled the longhouse with song and raucous merrymaking.

As if sensing his scrutiny, Wolfgart leapt onto a trestle table groaning with mugs of beer and heaped with plates of meat and fruit. The table bent dangerously under his weight as he swept his mighty sword from its sheath and raised it high in one hand. The sword was aimed straight and unwavering towards the roof, an incredible feat of strength, for the weight of his weapon was enormous.

‘Sigmar! Sigmar! Sigmar!’ roared Wolfgart, and the chant was taken up by every warrior in the longhouse. The walls seemed to shake with the power of their voices, and Sigmar knew he would not let them down. Pendrag joined Wolfgart on the table, and even the normally quiet Trinovantes was caught up in the mood of adulation that swept the hall.

‘You see,’ said his father, ‘these men will be your battle-thanes on the morrow, and they are ready to fight and die by your command. They believe in you, so draw strength from that belief, and recognise your own worth.’

As the chant of his name continued around the hall, Sigmar watched as Wolfgart lowered his sword and drew the blade across his palm. Blood welled from the cut, and Wolfgart smeared it upon his cheeks.

‘Ulric, god of battle, on this Blood Night, give me the strength to fight in your name!’ he shouted.

Every warrior in the hall followed Wolfgart’s example, drawing blades across their skin, and offering blood to the harsh, unforgiving god of the winter wolves. Sigmar stepped forward to honour the blood of his warriors, drawing the long-bladed hunting knife from his belt, and slicing the blade across his bare forearm.

His warriors roared in approval, banging the handles of their swords and axes upon their chests. As the cheering continued, the table Wolfgart and Pendrag stood upon finally collapsed under their combined weight, and they were buried in splintered timbers and plates of boar meat, and drenched in beer. Roars of laughter pealed from the walls, and yet more mugs of beer were emptied over the fallen warriors, who took Trinovantes’s outstretched hands and struggled to their feet with bellows of mirth.

Sigmar laughed along with his warriors as his father said, ‘With such stout-hearted men beside you, how can you fail?’

‘Wolfgart is a scoundrel,’ said Sigmar, ‘but he has the strength of Ulric in his blood, and Pendrag has a scholar’s brain in that thick skull of his.’

‘I know both men’s virtues and vices,’ said his father, ‘just as you must learn the hearts of those who will seek to counsel you. Draw worthy men to you, and learn their strengths and their weaknesses. Keep only those who make you stronger, and cut away those who weaken you, for they will drag you down with them. When you find good men, honour them, value them and love them as your dearest brothers, for they will stand shoulder to shoulder with you and hear the cry of the wolf in battle.’

‘I will,’ promised Sigmar.

‘Together, men are strong, but divided we are weak. Draw your sword-brothers close and stand together in all things. Swear this to me, Sigmar.’

‘I swear it, father.’

‘Now go and join them,’ said his father, ‘and come back to me after the fighting is done, either with your shield or upon it.’

A Black Library Publication

Valkia the Bloody first published in 2009.
Sigvald first published in 2011.
‘Bloodraven’ first published in 2011.
‘Blood Blessing’ first published in 2012.
‘Reaper’ first published in 2012.
Van Horstmann first published in 2013.
‘Harbinger’ first published in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.
Maps by Nuala Kinrade.

Champions of Chaos © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Champions of Chaos, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-899-0

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