Discover more about 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

Map

WULFRIK

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

Epilogue

PALACE OF THE PLAGUE LORD

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

Epilogue

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

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

Epilogue

Appendix

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Tyrion & Teclis Omnibus’

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.

WULFRIK

PROLOGUE

The wintry sky was blemished by black stains that whirled and circled high overhead, their ugly squawks raining down upon the ears of the men below. The crows had gathered quickly, drawn by the smell of death in the air. A great murder of the scavenger birds had risen into the sky, betraying what the northmen had done to every eye within a hundred leagues.

Wulfrik glared at the croaking birds and spat against the rocky earth. It was a small betrayal beside what had come before it. The Norscan ground his fangs together, imagining the many ways his revenge would unfold. There would be a reckoning, and not all the daemons of the Wastes would deny him.

The northman turned his eyes from the heavens and stared back at the bleak terrain over which his enemies were even now stalking him. Tall, powerfully built even for the muscular breeds of Norsca, the skulls of his conquests dangling from the chains fastened to his armour, Wulfrik knew the mere sight of him was enough to strike terror into the hearts of lesser men. His bearded face pulled back in a grim smile that displayed his sharp fangs. He had taken his name from those fangs, teeth he had been born with and which belonged in the jaws of a wolf, not the mouth of a man.

His instincts were those of a wolf, the savage unthinking rage of a cornered beast. Wulfrik’s foes were many and they had hunted him far across their bleak and sinister land. Warned by the circling crows or perhaps by treacherous magic, the elves had emerged from their watchtower to strike down the humans who had invaded their shores and defiled their sacred grove. The coastal fog that had cloaked the Seafang’s crew from observation during their landing was gone, banished by some caprice of the gods.

The longship was his only hope for escape, anchored at the base of the towering cliffs that formed the shore of this eldritch land. The Seafang had borne Wulfrik and his warriors through the spectral sea between worlds to reach the strange land of the elves. It was the only chance he had to return to the realms of men.

Wulfrik’s fist clenched tighter about the hilt of his sword. A Norscan did not fear death in the same way the weak southlings did. To die in battle was the greatest triumph most Norscans aspired to, a glorious death with blade in hand and his wounds to the fore. An end to make both gods and ancestors proud.

It was that promise which drew men to his banner, which made warriors from across Norsca and beyond flock to his side. Wulfrik felt no guilt when such men fell, for he knew that in their deaths they found the glory they desired. This time, however, there was guilt in his breast, the sharp stab of shame in his heart. The men he had left behind, strewn across the landscape like so much carrion, they had not died the glorious death of warriors. They had been felled like dumb beasts, struck down by elven arrows, killed before they could even see the enemy.

He had watched men die before in such cruel fashion, but always there had been reason for their deaths. This time, that reason was a lie – a lie that Wulfrik had insisted on believing. He had led them to this slaughter. The shame of their deaths was his. It was his punishment for trying to defy the will of the gods.

Wulfrik reached a hand to his thigh, ripping from his flesh the barbed arrow that had struck his leg. He threw back his shaggy head, roaring in pain as the missile was torn free. Contemptuously he snapped the shaft and threw the pieces to the ground. Again he threw back his head and roared, but this time it was a cry of challenge, not pain. Let the filthy elves come! He would face them and show them a finish even their cold hearts would remember!

A strong hand closed upon his shoulder. Like his namesake, Wulfrik spun about, snapping his fangs and striking out with his sword. A tall blond Norscan dodged back as the other warrior blindly lashed out at him, falling into a fighting crouch as he fell back. There was hate in the blond giant’s eyes as he met the furious gaze of Wulfrik, but it was tempered by the man’s own sense of shame.

‘We can’t make a stand here,’ the huscarl said. ‘They will cut us down as they did the others.’

Wulfrik sneered at the cowardly words of his comrade. Alone of his crew, the treacherous Broendulf had survived. ‘If it is a choice between arrows in my belly or a knife in my back, I charge the bowmen and damn their sires with my dying breath!’

Broendulf’s face flushed crimson as the champion spoke. For an instant, he considered answering Wulfrik’s challenge. Among the Sarls, Broendulf had always been known for his sharp wits. They did not desert him now.

‘If we die here, who is left to avenge your crew?’ Broendulf asked. He saw doubt flash through Wulfrik’s eyes. Emboldened, he pressed the point with words that were hateful to him even as they left his tongue. ‘If you die here, who is there to protect Hjordis from her father?’

Wulfrik continued to glare at Broendulf. ‘After the traitor is dead, we will finish this thing between us,’ he growled. ‘Hjordis is mine!’

Broendulf answered the champion with a cold smile. ‘As you say, we will finish this thing between us. But not here.’

An arrow sizzled through the chill morning air, passing so near to Wulfrik’s head that it disturbed his mane of crimson hair. The champion paused only long enough to spit in the direction of the unseen archer, then turned and began running across the barren ground, weaving from side to side in an effort to foil the aim of his enemies. Other arrows followed the first, rattling against the stones, striking sparks from the iron heels of the Norscans’ boots.

Even with a half-dozen wounds peppering the champion’s body, it was an effort for Broendulf to match Wulfrik’s pace. However much he hated the man, Broendulf could not control the awe he felt in his presence. Wulfrik was truly a warrior who had been chosen by the gods; no simple mortal could match his endurance. He was like one of the bronze machine-beasts of the dawi zharr, untiring, indefatigable. Broendulf counted himself among the strongest warriors of all the Sarls, but beside Wulfrik, he felt as puny as a southling priest.

The cries of their pursuers grew nearer now. It was difficult to tell from the strange, almost melodious tones of elven speech, but there seemed a trace of panic in their voices. Wulfrik allowed himself a grim smile. The elves were afraid the men were going to escape. He allowed himself to concentrate on the cries. Even the curse of the gods had its blessings. For Wulfrik, that blessing was the Gift of Tongues. By focussing his mind, he could understand the speech of any creature, no matter how strange. Often he would use this eerie talent only to challenge his foes in words they could understand, but it had its other uses.

As he listened to the cries of the elves, Wulfrik’s smile dropped. They were not afraid the men would escape. The elves were only afraid they would not be able to catch them alive. During the chase it seemed they had decided that the rest of the Norscans had died too swiftly. With Wulfrik and Broendulf, the elves intended to take their time.

Humans were not the only creatures who had a concept of revenge.

The cause for the elves’ concern thrust itself upon Wulfrik with such suddenness that he nearly pitched over the edge. The northman charged across the rocky grade, unheeding of its gradual rise, unaware of the jagged cut that had sheared away its side as cleanly as though by the Blood God’s axe. His feet teetering upon the crumbling lip of the cliff, he watched pebbles kicked up by his approach sail out into empty air. For an instant he stared into the dark waters of the sea, watching its waves smash against the breakers far below. Then Wulfrik regained his balance and steadied himself at the edge of the cliff.

The craggy shoreline stretched away in either direction as far as Wulfrik’s keen gaze could see, rising from the blue sea like a great white wall. Mammoth rocks, curled and twisted by the ravages of brine and wind, leered from the depths, huddling about the feet of the cliffs like a mob of mongrel half-kin. Faintly, the northman could see the distant shores of barrier islands, their bleak stone shores little more than a black smear upon the horizon. Wulfrik scowled at the forbidding islands. If half the tales told in the sagas were true, there would be no respite from his enemies even if he could reach the forsaken spits of rock.

Broendulf was beside him a moment later, gasping for breath and staring with horror at the angry sea below. ‘Where’s the ship?’ he moaned, gesturing at the breakers with his axe.

Wulfrik pointed to a jumble of shattered wreckage being pounded against the rocks. ‘It seems our anchorage wasn’t as secure as I thought,’ he growled. Suddenly the champion’s eyes went wide with shock. ‘Mermedus’s rutting eel!’ he exclaimed as he spotted the thing slithering across the ship’s broken hull.

A long, lean coil of scaly flesh slowly crushed the planks of the longship beneath its bulk. Azure above and with a white belly below, the monstrous serpent blended almost perfectly with the waves that crashed against it, only the contrast between itself and the wreck in its grasp allowing the men on the cliff above to see it. Here, both Norscans knew, was the killer of their ship, the monster whose thoughtless act of destruction had obliterated the greatest longship ever built by mortal hands.

More pointedly, the merwyrm had left them stranded, denied their only hope of escape from the trap they had been led into.

‘What do we do now?’ Broendulf raged, smashing his fist against his side in impotent fury. Another arrow clattered off the stones near his feet.

Wulfrik smiled coldly at the blond Sarl. ‘The dragon or the elves,’ he told Broendulf. ‘The gods leave us small choice, but at least the serpent won’t make a game of killing us.’

Wulfrik did not wait to see what effect, if any, his logic had upon the other Norscan. Clenching the blade of his sword between his fangs, the warrior flung himself over the side of the cliff.

CHAPTER ONE

Enormous, man-like, the huge tracks gouged the barren face of the snowfield, a black line fading into the howling gale. Pressed so deeply into the ice that bare rock shaded their depths, the prints made a clear trail even in the driving snow. It would take hours for the tracks to be covered. Long before then, Jokull would lead his captain to his prey.

The Norscan hunter whipped the scaly, lash-like appendage that grew from his left shoulder against his beard, knocking frost from the thick black hair. Jokull shivered beneath the heavy furs he wore, casting anxious eyes at the land around him. For days they had climbed the jagged slopes until Jokull thought they must be at the roof of the world, and still he could see the grey shapes of even higher peaks looming behind the falling snow. Much higher and surely they would be crushed beneath the feet of the sun when the Blood God’s hunt chased it across the morning sky! The vision made the hunter tremble and place the little bone icon of the Skull Lord between his teeth. He could feel the iron staples fastened to the talisman stab into his gums, could taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth. The gods of the north were angered when prayers did not come with offerings.

Wailing like the frozen wraith of a Kislevite witch, the winds swirled and crashed around Jokull. Spitting the bone icon from his mouth, he could see the blood covering it freeze into icy mush as the talisman dangled around his neck. The men of Norsca were used to the brutality of winter and the savagery of the elements, but even an experienced woodsman like Jokull felt oppressed by the harshness of these snow-swept mountains. It was as sinister and hostile a place as anything the skalds sang of in the sagas.

Jokull lifted his bow, the fingers of his right hand – the one that hadn’t been changed by the gods – rubbing the feathers fitted to the arrow nocked against the string. Black feathers, crow feathers, feathers hungry for the taste of meat. The hunter placed great faith in such feathers, trusting them to speed the arrow to its target. With such arrows he had brought down snow bears and ice tigers and more than a few men when the hunting season faded into the time of war. Now, however, the hunter’s faith in his weapon wavered.

Surely no clean beast would dwell in such a blighted place. The cold was like a gnawing thing that chewed through fur and cloth and skin to seep down into the bones of a man. The wind was a howling torment more furious than the gales upon the Sea of Claws, driving the snow like a thousand daggers into the face of any bold enough to stand against its fury. The air was thin and poor, like the breath of a frozen grave. A man’s lungs gasped for it, gulping it down in desperate shudders but never drawing in enough to satisfy his body.

No clean beast would live in such a place, Jokull decided. He cocked his head as he fancied he heard a deeper howl sound behind the wind. His skin crawled as he heard the sound repeated, even more distinctly, from the higher peaks. Again the cry came, this time from further ahead, a low, growling sound that slowly rose into a piercing shriek. There was an unmistakable note of threat in the cries, a threat that made Jokull glance back the way he had come. How far was it to the ship, he wondered, and could he reach it before the crying things decided he had ignored their warning?

The hunter shook his head and spat a blob of blood into the snow. He could not deny the fear he felt but he did curse his foolishness. There was no going back. The way back was closed to him. It had been ever since he signed on to the crew of the Seafang and swore a life-oath to her captain. There was no retreat for the men of the Seafang, only victory or death. Their captain made sure of that.

The thought made Jokull smile. However terrible the creatures of the mountains were, he would bet his beard that his captain was worse. Jokull had only believed half of the stories told about the captain of the Seafang when he joined her crew. Now he knew better. He had seen trolls butchered like sheep by his captain, watched as daemons cringed before him and begged for mercy. He had been there when the fleshless wight of Jarl Unfir rose from its cairn only to have its bony back broken across the captain’s knee.

Wulfrik the Wanderer was a name spoken of in awed whispers, and with good reason.

He looked back, willing his gaze through the falling snow. Beyond the flurry, he could see the grey figures of the crew marching in his steps. Even as a shadow veiled by snowfall, Jokull had no trouble picking out Wulfrik. There was an aura of almost palpable menace that exuded from the man, a sense of wrongness about him that compelled even as it horrified.

The master of the Seafang stomped through the snow, emerging from the flurry to glower at Jokull. The hunter was a big man, but Wulfrik towered a full head above him. Heavy furs cloaked his ogrish frame, while a hairy cape cut from the scalp of a giant billowed about his shoulders. With every step, Jokull could hear the rattle of bones and chains rise from the champion as Wulfrik’s gruesome trophies clattered against the armour he wore beneath his furs.

Jokull lowered his bow, a cold more piercing than the snowstorm running through him as he considered that Wulfrik might decide a readied weapon meant a challenge. The champion had a brutal way of answering challenges. Jokull would rather face Jarl Unfir again than cross blades with Wulfrik.

The champion chuckled at Jokull’s unease, his laughter sounding more like a wolf worrying at a bone than the sort of sound a man should make. Wulfrik’s thick crimson beard parted, exposing his fearsome smile. Until he smiled, an observer might think Wulfrik’s body untouched by the gods, what the weak men of the south would call ‘uncorrupted’. But the instant he bared his teeth, the change was there for all to see. Wulfrik’s teeth weren’t teeth, but long sharp fangs, fangs of a beast, not a man. When he was drunk, Jokull had seen Wulfrik bite through iron with those fangs. One day, the champion swore, he would be strong enough to do the same to steel.

‘Why have we stopped, weasel-slayer?’ The question, when it came, did not rise from the hulking Wulfrik, but from a tall blond Sarl standing just behind the champion. The Sarl was a contrast to Wulfrik, his chiselled features presenting a face that was more becoming than the champion’s fearsome countenance, yet still possessing formidable strength: Broendulf the Fair, one of the most renowned warriors in all the holdings of the Sarls.

‘I don’t like these tracks,’ Jokull said, making a point to address his words to Wulfrik and not the surly Broendulf.

‘I don’t like anything that keeps me out in these Tchar-cursed mountains, but you don’t hear me complaining,’ Broendulf snapped at the hunter.

‘Worried all this snow is going to scar those girly cheeks of yours!’ laughed an ashen-haired reaver, his leathery skin darkened to the colour of ale and his right leg a mass of ivory-hued bones bound together with steel chain. A fleshless skull grinned where the reaver’s knee should have been. Bitten off by a kraken during a misadventure on the northern seas, Arngeirr’s leg had been replaced with the bones of the man who had caused the accident. Even without any skin on it, some said they could see the family resemblance when they looked at the skull of his father.

‘You should grow out your beard!’ cackled another warrior, running a hand banded in steel through the wiry black hair that covered his face from chin to eyelash. The hairy Norscan’s eye vanished behind a lewd wink. ‘Gives the wenches something to keep hold of!’

‘The only wench you ever kept hold of said “oink”, Njarvord!’ another of the warriors snarled. The man, his shaven head covered in tattoos, drew a curved sea-axe from his belt and brandished it as the hairy Njarvord rounded on him. ‘You know the rule, Baerson! First spills blood tastes the captain’s sword!’

What little flesh showed past Njarvord’s thick beard flushed crimson. His armoured hands clenched tight at his sides, the muscles in his arms bulging with frustrated violence. ‘One day, I’ll make you eat your words, Haukr,’ the warrior promised with a menacing growl. ‘One tooth at a time.’

Wulfrik noticed the squabbling of his men. He was not so detached that he was not aware of the tension and anger growing inside them. Even for men as accustomed to hardship and cold as the hardy stock bred in Norsca, the mountains were an ordeal. But that ordeal was nearing its end.

‘Why don’t you like these tracks?’ Wulfrik suddenly asked.

It took a moment for Jokull to realise the question was directed at him. The hunter waved his tentacle at the steady line of tracks in the snow. ‘They’re too straight, too direct,’ he said. ‘Not like something just minding its own self. Not like something knowing it was being hunted and trying to get away. These feel slow and careful, like something that knows where it is going and why.’

Wulfrik nodded his head in agreement. ‘Indeed they should,’ he told the hunter, his voice rising in a soft roar so that the rest of his crew could hear him. ‘The offering we stalk knows we are here and has for some time.’ He gestured with one of his gnarled, hairy hands to the snowy ground all about them. ‘There are rocks here to either side of this trail, rocks sturdy enough to hide the passing of many large beasts.’

One of the Norscans came forwards, staring hard into Wulfrik’s savage face. Alone among the crew this grizzled old warrior would dare to look at their captain in such a fashion. Alone among men, would Wulfrik allow him to do so.

The old warrior was of the Sarls, a veteran marauder named Sigvatr. In his time, Sigvatr had been many things: war-chief, mercenary, bear-hunter, pirate and slave. Of all the things he had been, Sigvatr took the most pride in being the mentor of Wulfrik Worldwalker.

Sigvatr had been there, that night after the Battle of a Thousand Skulls when Wulfrik had made his drunken boast. He had been with Wulfrik long before and often warned the champion against his hubris. Now, the champion did not forget the man whose advice he had once spurned.

‘The beast leads us into a trap,’ Sigvatr said. It was not a question.

Wulfrik’s fierce smile showed beneath his beard. ‘The offering will not escape,’ he said. ‘Nothing chosen by the gods can escape,’ he added in a bitter growl.

The cries grew louder and more frequent the deeper into the mountains the small band of men pressed. Echoing strangely off the icy rocks, twisted by the howling wind, there was no way to determine distance or direction when the screams sounded. Only the uncomfortable fact that the calls came not from one creature but from many could be learned from the cries. It was a fact that fed the fear growing in each of the Norscans. Ferocious in battle, unafraid of death when it stared at them from across a sword, the warriors now felt dread. The eerie sensation of being stalked by an unseen, unknown enemy was new to them. In their own lands, in the mountains and fjords of Norsca, they would at least have known the ground they fought upon and taken strength from that knowledge. Here they felt as far from their homeland as if they had been drawn up into one of the moons.

Only Wulfrik gave no sign of fear. What terror could the world hold for a man who had been cursed by the gods themselves?

But caution was not the same as fear. Wulfrik was wary as he pushed his body through snow that now came up to his knees. He did not turn his eyes away from the shadowy slopes of the high peaks; his ears remained trained upon the wailing cries that echoed behind the wind. Like his teeth, his senses had been sharpened by the gods. No eyes untouched by the gods could have seen the grey shadow plummeting down the side of the mountain or heard the soft rumble that rolled behind the howling wind and shrieking beasts.

‘Run, dogs!’ Wulfrik roared at his men. ‘Run or sleep in the Crow God’s larder!’ The champion pitted deeds against words, turning and sprinting back down the trail with the ferocious speed of a charging bull. The other Norscans blinked at him in surprise then hurried to follow their overlord. Anything that could make Wulfrik turn tail was no such thing that any of them wanted to risk meeting.

The soft rumble was no longer masked by the wind. It grew into a groaning clamour, taking strength with each passing breath. The ground shuddered as though from the steps of a titan. Ice cracked and crumbled from the rocks, snow shivered upon the ground. One of the Norscan warriors dared lift his eyes to the high peaks. He screamed in terror as he saw a great shadow, like the hand of a malignant god, reaching down for them, blotting out the night sky.

The scream spurred the warriors on, urging their pounding hearts to greater effort. The heavy snow about their feet seemed to drag on them, sucking them down like a swampy morass. Men struggled desperately to press on, knowing that each passing instant brought a terrible doom rushing down upon them.

As the last of the starlight was darkened by the growing shadow a colossal bellow resounded through the mountains. To the Norscans it sounded like the mightiest wave ever dredged up from the Sea of Chaos had come smashing against the earth. They could feel the impact quivering through their bones, knocking many from their feet. The air was filled with frost, an icy cloud that danced and swirled like flames rising from a fire. Some of the men choked as the frozen mist was sucked into their panting lungs.

Wulfrik turned as the echoes of the avalanche died away. Grimly he pushed his way back through his exhausted warriors, turning his eyes again to the high peaks. His fangs gleamed in the returning starlight. The valley had been obliterated in the slide, great mounds of snow rising amid broken boulders and the splintered trunks of trees snapped like twigs before the avalanche. An icy pall, like frozen smoke, drifted slowly across the devastation. The champion studied the havoc, appreciating the unbelievable force his enemy had loosed against him. He did not look aside when he heard steps behind him.

‘How many?’

Sigvatr’s face was twisted into a grimace. ‘At least six, and Bjornn’s leg is broken.’

‘Then say seven,’ Wulfrik told the old warrior. A calculating fire blazed in the champion’s eyes. ‘That will leave enough.’

‘Enough for what!’ raged a furious Njarvord. ‘All of us were nearly killed in that avalanche!’ The hairy Baersonling clenched his fist tight about the huge double-axe he carried. ‘You seem like you were expecting this!’

Fangs shone in Wulfrik’s smile. ‘Have a care, Njarvord. I can afford to lose seven. I may decide I can lose eight.’ The champion’s smile became a full snarl. In an instant, his sword leapt from its orc-skin sheath. Njarvord backed away timidly from the dull black blade, his nervous eyes locked on the skull dangling from the sword’s hilt.

Wulfrik had already dismissed the outraged warrior from his thoughts. He was listening instead to the sounds of the mountain. The wailing cries were silent now. In their place there was only the occasional clatter of stone or the crash of falling ice.

‘Dogs of Norsca!’ Wulfrik bellowed at the scattered marauders. The warriors forgot their hurts and fatigue, compelled by the force in Wulfrik’s voice to heed his words. ‘The bones of your brothers lie buried in the snow, far from the halls of their ancestors! The beasts that visited such craven death upon your comrades come now to feast upon their still-warm flesh! You run when I tell you to run,’ Wulfrik snarled. ‘Now fight when I tell you to fight!’ The champion raised his sword high above his head, starlight shining across the murderous edge of the blade. The skull tied to its hilt seemed to direct a mocking grin at the ragged warriors.

There was no time for the minds of the marauders to think about Wulfrik’s words. A hulking shape rose from the snow bank beyond the Norscan champion, a great white figure of claws and fangs twice as tall as the champion. With a fearful roar, the hairy beast leapt for Wulfrik, its talons spread to rake the man’s flesh from his bones.

In a single motion, Wulfrik spun, ducking beneath the sweep of the monster’s claws. He thrust his sword into its hurtling bulk, letting its own momentum help to skewer it upon his blade. The leathery, ape-like face of the creature grew flush with pain, its amber eyes becoming wide with agony. The beast tried to pull itself off the champion’s sword, but Wulfrik wrapped his hand in the creature’s shaggy white fur, dragging it back down the blood-slick blade.

The monster shrieked again, slashing at Wulfrik with its claws. The heavy talons shredded the outer layer of furs the champion wore but scraped uselessly against the armour beneath. Its own blood bubbling from its jaws, the white beast leaned down, trying to bite the human’s sneering face. Wulfrik twisted away from the desperate attack, in the same motion ripping his sword from the beast’s body. The monster collapsed with an earth-shivering impact, flopping obscenely in a pile of its own entrails.

The Seafang’s crew gave voice to a fierce cheer as they witnessed the fearsome prowess of their captain. Doubts about the leadership of their master were forgotten as the spirit of battle overwhelmed them. With the example of Wulfrik before their eyes, with his vengeful words still in their ears, the warriors did not hesitate when they saw more hairy monsters charging down the slopes. Shouting the black names of their gods and ancestors, the Norscans took up their weapons and rushed to meet the oncoming monsters.

For a moment, Wulfrik felt pride swell in his chest, the pride of a leader who exults in the valour of those he leads. Then the darkness inside him rose up to smother the sensation. The champion’s face became stern, callous. He did not care anything for these men. He could not. He had to wield them as he wielded his sword, without thought or compassion. It was the only way he could ever hope to appease the gods.

Cold fury swelled within Wulfrik as the pain of all that he had lost filled him. The gods didn’t do anything in half-measures. When they claimed a man, they claimed everything he had – or hoped to have.

The champion brought his boot smashing into the face of the beast writhing on the ground. The impact snapped its head back, breaking its neck like a stick despite the thick layers of muscle and fat that surrounded it. Wulfrik stalked away from the quivering corpse, his steps as unhurried as those of death itself.

Yhetee. Wulfrik could not say how he knew that was the name for the beast, any more than he could say how he knew that these were the Mountains of Mourn. Thoughts seemed to simply place themselves in his brain, bestowing upon him such knowledge as he needed. He knew it was the work of the gods, this strange knowledge, for the thoughts only came when he was hunting the offerings they demanded of him. A shaman of the Kurgan tribes had called Wulfrik blessed, saying he had been granted the ‘Gift of Tongues’ by the gods. The shaman hadn’t been able to explain more, even when Wulfrik began burning the toes from his feet. He hadn’t been able to say where the thoughts came from, or how to make them stop.

Wulfrik wiped the icy blood of the yhetee from his sword and glared at the snowfield where his warriors made their stand against the shaggy white monsters. The avalanche had filled the valley with snow, making it difficult for the men to move. With every step they sank to their hips in the soft slush, fighting to keep their balance. The yhetee, despite being nearly twice the height of a man and many times as massive, manoeuvred over the snow with contemptuous ease, their great bulks capably supported by their huge feet and widely splayed toes. Wulfrik was reminded of Varg seal-hunters and the snow-shoes they wore when plying their trade.

The yhetee did not quite outnumber his men, but they did not need strength of numbers in their favour. Each of the beasts was many times as powerful as a man, and as if their fangs and claws were not enough, many of them bore crude axes fashioned from tree limbs and ice. When one of the howling monsters charged a marauder, the icy edge of its axe cut as cleanly through the man’s neck as any steel blade. Another Norscan had his axe and the arm that held it chopped in two by the sweep of a yhetee’s crude weapon.

At the same time, Wulfrik’s warriors managed to fell some of their foes. A screaming yhetee, four of Jokull’s arrows sprouting from its hairy hide, fell to Broendulf’s blade. Njarvord threw himself into the fight with the vicious madness of a berserker, hacking at the foe he had chosen with such ferocity that when it at last stumbled and fell it was little more than a dripping mass of bloody meat. Arngeirr, the sinister reaver from the sea, slashed his way through the yhetee with murderous skill, his kraken-tooth sword carving through the beasts with the same horrible efficiency as their own icy axes. Only the reaver’s infirmity held him back, his bone leg slowing him as he hobbled through the snow.

Wulfrik savoured the fray, enjoying the smell of battle. Almost, he was tempted to throw himself into the melee, to lose himself in the joy of fighting as he once had. No, he decided, he was past such things now. Before, if he fell, he would only lose his life. Now there was much more to lose and much more to risk. Kings and warlords could only punish a man to the point of death. Gods could visit damnation upon even those safely in the halls of their ancestors.

Ignoring the sounds of battle raging all around him, Wulfrik cupped his hand to his mouth. The Gift of Tongues, the tortured shaman had called that part of Wulfrik’s curse. It was his uncanny ability to instantly know and speak the language of any enemy. It had allowed him to curse and threaten the Kurgan in the shaman’s own dialect, it had allowed him to do the same to an orc warboss and a Bretonnian earl and even a thane of the dwarfs. Even the voices of beasts were not unknown to him when the gods desired such things as an offering.

Wulfrik raised his voice in a sharp, ululating howl, a piercing shriek that clawed at the winds and boomed off the mountains. Many of the yhetee paused in the fighting to stare at him in bewilderment and wonder, their primitive brains recoiling at the sight of a man who could shout such abuse in the shriek-scream that served them as a language.

A furious wailing roar thundered from the snow-swept night. It was a sound to freeze the blood, like the snarl of winter itself. There was savagery and hate in the sound, the pure hate of the primitive, unburdened by thought or reason. It threatened agony and promised horror, that cry. The force behind the howl would offer no clean death. It would rip the belly and devour the guts of its prey while life yet pulsed through its foe’s veins.

Wulfrik’s challenge had been answered.

The other yhetee retreated as a great grey shape ploughed across the snowfield, abandoning their melee with the Norscans to avoid drawing the wrath of their own leader. One marauder, too slow to follow the example of the monsters, found himself in the path of the charging beast. He had time to scream once before the grey creature’s slashing claw opened him from neck to groin.

Wulfrik steadied himself as the monstrous thing came rushing at him. A cold, fatalistic calmness quelled the stirrings of fear that churned his belly. It was the deadly courage of a man who knows there is no retreat, only triumph or destruction. Of such men, the sagas are made, though they are seldom alive to hear their tales sung.

The monster hesitated as it drew near Wulfrik. It was a massive yhetee, twice again as tall as any of its kin, its hair darkened by age to a dull silvery grey. Its claws were sheathed in the same steely ice as the axes of the younger yhetee and its fangs were like ivory sabres jutting from its jaws. There was wisdom and intelligence in its black eyes, enough reason to know when it was being hunted and to draw its hunters into its own trap. Enough imagination to be suspicious of this little man who stood so boldly before its fearsome charge.

Wulfrik lifted his face and stared into the greyback’s eyes. From his lips came a feral grunt, the most base insult the language of the yhetee could offer.

The greyback shrieked in rage, its bestial temper overcoming its reason. The monster lunged at Wulfrik, the murderous claws lashing out. The champion did not trust his armour against the frozen talons of the greyback. Instead of standing against the monster’s attack, he threw himself forwards and rolled beneath the yhetee’s powerful arms. The black sword licked out, slashing across the monster’s belly.

The greyback howled. Its powerful foot lashed out, kicking Wulfrik in the chest. He was thrown back, tossed across the snowfield like a boulder flung from a catapult. The champion crashed into the snow, sinking several feet into the soft icy ground. Snow collapsed in upon him, crashing down around him in a frozen mantle.

Wulfrik clawed at the snow, trying to find purchase, trying to gain a solid enough grip to free himself from an icy grave. Every effort brought more snow collapsing into the hole.

Suddenly a great paw smashed down through the roof of Wulfrik’s prison. Talons of ice closed about his chest, coating his armour in hoarfrost. The Norscan could feel his blood turning to slush, could feel the breath freezing in his lungs. He struggled to free himself of the withering clutch, but the talons would not relent.

Slowly, Wulfrik was lifted from the snow. The greyback glared at him as it held him clenched in its claws. The yhetee swayed on its feet, its other paw pressed against the wound Wulfrik had slashed across its belly. Dark blood bubbled between its talons, staining the snow about its feet.

The greyback’s ape-like face pulled back in a fierce grin. There was enough resemblance to something human about the yhetee’s face that Wulfrik could tell it was gloating over its victory.

Fires of rage burned away the ice in his veins. Roaring, Wulfrik twisted his body, ignoring the sharp pain as his own armour tore his flesh. Sword gripped in both hands, the champion turned himself enough to bring the blade chopping down into the greyback’s wrist.

Wulfrik crashed into the snow as the yhetee dropped him. This time his impact was only enough to sink him to his waist. Quickly the champion rose, ready to fend off the monster’s next attack. His sword licked out as the greyback’s claw slashed at his head. Sparks danced from his sword as ice and steel scraped against each other. Wulfrik could feel the shock of the impact rumble through the bones of his arms but he managed to retain hold of his weapon.

The greyback staggered away, snarling threats at the man who had crippled it. Wulfrik could see now that the cut across its belly was not deep, though the wound continued to bleed. The real injury the monster had suffered was where he had hacked into its wrist. The greyback’s claw dangled from only a few tendons, looking as though it must fall off each time the monster moved.

Wulfrik waved his sword at the monster, daring it to attack. The mocking challenge did not need to be shrieked in the howling speech of the yhetee. Slapping its chest with its good claw, the goaded greyback rushed the Norscan.

Again, the beast proved itself more than a simple animal. Only a few feet from Wulfrik, it paused in its charge to dig its foot into the snow. This time when the monster kicked out at the man, a white sheet of snow flew into his face, blinding him!

The instincts of a hundred battles made Wulfrik dive away rather than try to wipe the ice from his eyes as another man might. The marauder hurled himself from the path of the onrushing greyback, throwing himself into the snow. Even so, the yhetee’s claw slashed near enough to him to catch the heavy cape he wore. The icy claws of the greyback cut through the giant-scalp as though it were cheesecloth, the tangled tatters dangling from its talons like a knight’s pennant.

Wulfrik rose to meet the yhetee’s next charge. Shielding his eyes from another shower of snow, he was able to dodge the claw as it came whistling at his head. Rolling low, he brought his blade raking across the greyback’s ankle, cleaving its foot from its leg.

Shrieking, the greyback crashed into the snow. Wulfrik did not give it a chance to rise. Screaming a war cry only a little less savage than the howls of the yhetee, he leapt upon the struggling beast. Steel crunched through bone, stabbing through the yhetee’s horned skull to impale the primitive brain within. The greyback made one furious effort to fling the champion off its back. Then it uttered a mewing whimper and its body collapsed back into the snow.

Wulfrik wrenched his sword free from the greyback’s head. One foot planted upon the gory mess, he raised his bloodied weapon high and shouted into the night.

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

The death of their leader put the remaining yhetee into a full rout. The beasts fled back into the high peaks, their wailing cries piteous and mournful as they withdrew into their icy refuges.

For the men who stood victorious, it was enough that the monsters were gone. In the aftermath of battle, they gathered about their master and watched him perform a sombre ritual.

The head of the greyback was cut from its body and cleaned of flesh. Once prepared, Wulfrik took possession of it. The champion was silent as death as he carried the trophy towards a raging fire Sigvatr had coaxed into life with whale oil and cloth stripped from the dead. Bowing to each of the eight points of the flame, Wulfrik held the inhuman skull above the fire.

‘Glory and horror to the Blood God, whose Rage shall devour the world! An offering to honour my debt!’

Wulfrik dropped the skull into the fire. Instead of smouldering like a normal bone, the skull cracked and crumbled, disintegrating into a fine red mist. The stench of boiling blood rose from the crimson smoke. Wulfrik turned away from the flames, wiping his hand in the snow.

‘It is done?’ Sigvatr asked the champion when he returned from making his offering.

‘It is done,’ Wulfrik told the grizzled warrior. ‘The hunger of the Blood God is appeased. At least for a time.’

‘The gods have mighty hungers,’ Sigvatr said.

‘They are gluttons,’ Wulfrik corrected him, casting a spiteful look at the flames. ‘Will they ever have enough?’

Sigvatr shook his head in sympathy. It was an old sorrow Wulfrik expressed, a sorrow that had been with him ever since that terrible night after the Battle of a Thousand Skulls. ‘Many men would envy the favour the gods have shown you,’ he said. Wulfrik followed the old man’s gaze to where his warriors were encamped.

‘Most men are fools,’ Wulfrik snarled, storming away from his friend. The thought that any man would look at what the gods had done to him as some kind of blessing was one that made his blood boil. He knew it was what made men so eager to join his crew. He couldn’t understand how anyone could be so blind.

Jokull came running from the camp, a great mass of fur held in his arms. The hunter bowed as he approached Wulfrik. Smiling, he held out the heavy mass of fur to the champion. ‘I saw the beast ruin your cape, war-chief,’ Jokull said. ‘I thought it only fitting that it should provide you with another.’

Wulfrik took the heavy fur from the hunter. It must have taken some nerve for the man to steal back to the battlefield and skin the greyback. The champion could admire that kind of valour, but he felt only contempt for anyone who thought he could bribe his favour with presents. Wulfrik’s boot kicked into Jokull’s knee, spilling the hunter into the snow.

‘When I desire new raiment, I’ll ask for it,’ the champion growled. He didn’t look down as he marched past the fallen hunter. The man would either learn his place or he would over-reach himself. Wulfrik hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He could tell just from the feel of it that the cloak Jokull had made was a good one.

Conversation faded as Wulfrik stalked back into camp. The champion let his steely gaze sweep across the gathered marauders. They had spent a day resting and recovering from the battle. They should be grateful for their captain’s indulgence.

‘Kill the wounded, gather the names of the dead,’ Wulfrik told his crew. ‘We march to the Seafang. It is time we put these mountains behind us.’

The champion turned away, marching back down the mountain, following the path they had climbed when they had made their ascent. The meaning was not lost upon the Norscans. Without Wulfrik, none of them would ever leave these mountains, and Wulfrik would brook neither argument nor delay.

The screams of the Norscan wounded did not linger long.

CHAPTER TWO

The survivors of Wulfrik’s crew stood in silence upon the icy deck of the Seafang. Men of Norsca were not like the weak southlings. They did not cower in fear at the thought of magic or scream in terror when a sorcerer cast a spell. To them, such things were as natural as the turning of the seasons and the passing of the moons. Magic was but another creation of the gods.

Even these hardened men of the northlands felt a chill slither down their spines as they considered the magic they would soon behold. Many of them had experienced it several times, but never did they lose their awe of it.

Great, snow-capped peaks rose all around the longship, vanishing into the cloud-swept sky. The lake upon which the Seafang rested was more a thing of ice than water. No river or stream fed into the lake, no passage by which mortal hands could have rowed the vessel to its mooring. She might have been plucked from the sea by the hand of a capricious god and set down again in the glacial lake.

To the men who stood in silence upon the Seafang, that was precisely what had happened. Only the power of the gods could have brought the ship into the mountains. Only the power of the gods could bring her back again.

Wulfrik stood at the prow of the ship, his powerful arms folded across his chest, the grey fur of the yhetee cloak snapping about his shoulders as the wind rolled across the ship. Sternly, the champion watched as Sigvatr ushered the men of the crew forwards. With undisguised malice, Wulfrik studied each man as he brought the sharp edge of his knife slashing across their palm.

Each man pressed his bleeding hand against the carved dragon head rising from the prow. Under Wulfrik’s wary gaze, each man waited, watching as the wood absorbed his blood. Then the warrior would step back, allowing another to take his place and repeat the ceremony.

After all his crew had pressed their bleeding hands to the figurehead, Wulfrik’s expression softened, a triumphant gleam in his eye. He unfolded his arms and stared at the ranks of his gathered warriors.

‘Your blood is weak,’ Wulfrik told his men, his voice booming like thunder across the Seafang’s deck. ‘The gods have no taste for it.’ The champion smiled, displaying his fangs. It was as well for the warriors that none of them was favoured by the gods. If one of them ever showed he was able to evoke the ship’s magic, the next instant would find Wulfrik’s sword buried in the man’s belly.

‘The wolf lets the dogs hunt with him,’ Wulfrik laughed. ‘But only until they think they too are wolves.’

The champion brought his knife raking across the palm of his hand. He clenched his fist, letting blood trickle from his cut hand. ‘This is the blood the gods have chosen,’ he told his warriors. ‘This is the strength they honour!’

Wulfrik spun around, slapping his hand upon the horned forehead of the dragon. Immediately a tremor ran through the ship. Shields rattled against the hull, masts creaked overhead, links of armour jangled upon the hauberks of the crew. A smell like bubbling pitch swept across the deck, bringing tears to the eyes of every man. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, thick grey mist began to stream from the mouth of the wooden dragon. Smoke or fog, the grey mist spread swiftly across the lake. In a matter of minutes, a wall of smoke engulfed the Seafang, cutting her off entirely from all sight of the lake and the mountains beyond.

‘To oars!’ Sigvatr roared at the awestruck Norscans. The warriors scrambled onto the benches that lined the deck. Quickly they gripped the thick oaken oars and set the blades slashing into the icy water of the mountain lake.

Sigvatr glanced back to the prow of the ship. Wulfrik still stood beside the figurehead, but now he held a sword in each hand. Fiercely, the champion watched the billowing wall of smoke. Sigvatr shuddered to think what might be staring back at the hero.

‘Row, dogs!’ Sigvatr snarled at the crew. ‘Row or rot in the belly of the gods!’ He raised a heavy iron rattle, shaking it viciously, hoping the sound would ward away the evil spirits he knew were closing in upon the ship.

Gradually the Seafang began to move as the efforts of the crew tore her free from the ice that had closed about her. The grinding shriek of cracking ice drowned out the grunts of the straining Norscans. The ship began to move forwards, piercing the smoke that surrounded her.

New sounds replaced the crack of ice and the howl of mountain winds. A dull rasp, like the sizzle of a new-forged sword, rumbled through the fog, crashing about the hull of the Seafang like an avalanche of sound. Dark shapes flittered through the smoke, hazy apparitions that pawed at the fog like moths beating against a lantern. Screams and wails could be heard rising from the smoke, growling cries that each man knew he heard not with his ears but with his soul. Bestial and malignant, the Norscans knew that it was death to answer those cries, yet a perverse temptation clawed at each warrior’s heart, urging him to self-destruction.

‘Father!’ one burly Norscan shouted, throwing down his oar. Before Sigvatr could stop him, the warrior rose up onto his bench and threw himself over the side of the ship. In an instant, he was lost to the fog. A piteous scream exploded from the fog, and in its echoes was heard the giggle of hungry things.

‘Keep those scum at the oars!’ Wulfrik growled. The champion stabbed one of his blades into a black shape that pressed in upon the ship, nearly piercing the veil of smoke which surrounded her. The apparition was splattered by the piercing steel, flying apart in little blobs of darkness that quickly merged into a new shadow before sinking back into the fog.

The death of the lost warrior brought more and more of the shadows converging upon the ship. Soon the grey smoke was turned black by their pressing shapes. As the veil grew thinner, burning eyes began to gleam from the darkness, staring hungrily at the Seafang’s crew.

‘Row!’ Sigvatr shrieked, banging his sword against the ship’s mast, waving the iron rattle over his head as though it were the standard of a king. ‘Row until your hearts shrivel and your bellies burst! Row! Row! Row!’

The crew strained to keep time to the frantic banging of Sigvatr’s sword. They fought to keep their eyes focussed upon the deck, upon the back of the man before them or upon their own feet. Anything to keep from gazing at the veil beyond the ship. It was more than eyes that could be seen there now. Things were taking form as they started to penetrate the fog, things with wings and claws and dripping fangs. Eagerly the slavering daemons fought their way towards the ship.

No longer did Wulfrik stand at the prow of the ship. The champion raced across the deck of the Seafang, slashing his swords at the furies hungry for the souls of his crew. Wherever his blades lashed out the daemons relented, slinking back beyond the veil. But as soon as he turned to fend back another clutch of inhuman spirits, the furies would return, gnawing at the fog.

Suddenly, the darkness was gone, banished by a cold, wintry light. The sharp smell of brine replaced the mephitic stink of daemon ichor. A stiff sea breeze wafted across the deck, invigorating the gasping men who crouched over the oars.

Wulfrik laughed and sheathed his swords. Boldly, the champion rushed back to the prow of his ship and set his boot upon the dragon’s wooden neck. He pointed his bleeding hand at the rolling waves which now embraced the Seafang. As the wisps of fog parted, there could be seen an expanse of dark water, wind-whipped waves splashing against the longship as the sea rebelled against the Seafang’s sudden intrusion into her domain. A distant shore with towering peaks loomed in the distance, rising from the clammy ocean and splitting the stormy sky with snow-swept summits.

‘Today we cheat the daemons of their supper!’ Wulfrik roared in triumph. His keen eyes detected the sharp cliffs of Norsca’s jagged shore. To the rest of his crew, their homeland was nothing but a purple smudge on the horizon.

‘Do you know where we are?’ Njarvord asked his captain between gasps for breath.

Wulfrik closed his eyes, threw back his head and sniffed the air. For the champion, the smell was as familiar to him as the back of his own hand. A jubilant expression filled his face. ‘No more than a day’s sailing from Ormskaro,’ he told the hairy Baersonling. He glared sternly across the deck at his warriors.

‘But you’ll make it there in half that time.’

Ormskaro was nestled within one of the fjords cut into the coast of Norsca. Like some beached leviathan, the town sprawled upon the shore, stretching up into the cliffs and the flatlands beyond. The deep waters of the fjord made Ormskaro a perfect harbour for the fleet of sleek dragonships anchored off her beach. A flotilla of fishing scows timidly picked their way between the warships, bound for the open sea.

The town itself was a confusion of earthen longhouses and timber mead halls. The wattle huts of thralls squatted beside the stone keeps of jarls without pattern or reason. Animal pens spilled out into the muddy streets, their denizens roaming at will through the settlement, their owners trusting to the brands burned into their hides to secure their property. The tents of traders and craftsmen were nestled in little clumps wherever space permitted, gaudy banners proclaiming the nature of their wares and services. Close to the shore, upon a great timber platform, whalers busied themselves sectioning meat from an immense black whale while others drained oil from the carcass.

High upon the slopes that overlooked the fjord, a palisade of enormous logs formed a wall, sectioning off the entire summit of the hill. Behind the palisade, a second wall rose, this of cut stone, all but obscuring the great tower of granite it surrounded.

Wulfrik smiled as he saw the wall and the tower. The tower was ancient beyond the memory of men. Some whispered that it had been built by that race of giants who ruled Norsca before the birth of the gods. Others said it had been raised by the gods themselves to mark the land. The oldest skalds claimed it was not a tower at all but rather the backbone of the father of all dragons, cut down by the Blood God’s own axe.

Whatever its beginnings, the tower had become the seat of Ormnir, the great king of the Sarls. He had made it his fortress and founded the town of Ormskaro to provide a home for his warriors. From Ormskaro, the Sarls became a mighty people, among the strongest of the northmen. When the great army of Asavar Kul marched against the weak kingdoms of the southlings, it was Ormnir’s grandson Ulgra Troll-eater who led the Sarls into battle. From the burning husk of Erengrad his warriors brought back enough stone to raise the wall around the tower – an enduring testament to their victory over the Kislevites.

The smile turned to a sneer as Wulfrik thought of the current master of the tower of Ormfell. King Viglundr was a pathetic shadow of his illustrious predecessors. Generations of kings like Viglundr had squandered the might of the Sarls, allowing other Norscan tribes to grow strong. The soft kings of Ormskaro had grown content with their riches and thought no more of conquest and the joy of battle. They used their wealth to bribe their enemies where once they would have used their swords to bring them low.

Viglundr was such a king, a schemer and plotter with no taste for war. Well did Wulfrik know the Sarl king’s mind. Had he not fought a war while Viglundr sat safe behind his walls?

‘Is that a king’s throat you crush?’ Sigvatr asked Wulfrik in a low voice.

The hero tore his eyes away from the distant tower. He stared down at his hands. So fiercely had they been gripping the neck of the figurehead that splinters of wood had pierced his flesh. Wulfrik scowled at the old warrior, uneasy that Sigvatr had read his mind so well.

‘Have the men make port,’ Wulfrik told his friend. ‘We will take on provisions, refit the Seafang and gather crew to replace those we lost in the mountains.’

‘And what will you take from Ormskaro?’ Sigvatr pressed, a note of caution behind his words.

Wulfrik turned his eyes back to the tower. This time it was sadness, not hate, that coloured his vision. ‘So long as the curse of the gods is upon me,’ the champion said in a sullen whisper, ‘there is nothing I dare take from Ormskaro.’

Wulfrik turned and marched away, climbing down into the hold of the ship. Sigvatr watched his friend go, sympathy in his eyes.

‘But you’ll still go see her,’ the old warrior said in a quiet voice. ‘However much pain it causes you.’

The muddy streets of Ormskaro were teeming with people as Wulfrik made the long climb up to the king’s hill. Fur-clad trappers from the high mountains, the skins of beaver and fox dangling from the poles they carried; armoured bondsmen, their shields bearing the device of their lords; weathered fishermen, their skin burned to the consistency of leather; doe-eyed dairy maids, their arms grown strong from the milk jugs they carried; all of these and more passed the champion as he marched through the settlement. From the lowest house thrall to the richest huscarl, they were careful to step aside as the famed hero walked past. Even the sheep and swine that prowled the streets scurried from Wulfrik’s path, squealing with fright as the champion’s scent reached them.

Wulfrik gave no notice to the town around him. It was more unreal to him than the fog-wraiths that had tried to devour his crew. Since the gods had touched him and laid upon him their terrible curse, he had no part in the ways of men. Once he had marvelled at the delights Ormskaro had to offer and had thought it the greatest town in the land. Now those same delights mocked him and filled his heart with bitterness.

There was only one thing that could give him solace, if only for a few precious hours. He could leave the provisioning of the ship to Sigvatr and Arngeirr. Both had the wit and experience to know what would be needed before they set upon their next voyage. It would take time for those who would join his crew to gather; he could see to their trials on the morrow. For tonight, Wulfrik would try to forget voyages and battles, gods and curses.

For tonight, Wulfrik would try to remember what it was to be a man and not a hero.

Entry to the great hall of Ormfell was a privilege Wulfrik had earned after the Battle of a Thousand Skulls. As his fame spread, even the boldest huscarls would be loath to confront the terrible champion. Even so, Wulfrik noted a hesitancy on the part of the warriors as they opened the gates to him and conducted him into the tower. There was an uneasiness about the men that went beyond their awe of the hero. Stalking through the stone corridors of the tower, he found that even the king’s servants averted their eyes and hurried from his approach.

As he neared the great hall, Wulfrik found one man who did not turn away at his advance. Alone among his crew, the blond reaver Broendulf enjoyed the hospitality of the king. Before joining the Seafang’s crew, Broendulf had been captain of Viglundr’s household guard, a mighty huscarl in his own right. Wulfrik was not surprised to find that Broendulf had come to speak with his sovereign. What was surprising to him was the look of anxiety on the reaver’s face. Broendulf glanced about the corridor, looking to see that there was no one else present. Cautiously, he met with his captain.

‘Be wary,’ Broendulf warned in a low voice. ‘Viglundr is plotting something.’

Wulfrik favoured the fair-faced warrior with an amused look. ‘He knows better than to scheme against me,’ he said. ‘Viglundr knows I saved his crown.’ Wulfrik patted the skull tied to the hilt of his sword. ‘He won’t forget that.’

‘It is not his memory but his ambition that should worry you,’ Broendulf cautioned. ‘The tower is filled with Aeslings this night.’

‘Aeslings?’ Wulfrik repeated, only half believing what he’d heard. ‘Since when do the Sarls play host to their enemies?’

Broendulf’s face was twisted with contempt. ‘Few of us may question the mind of a king, whatever madness may grip it.’

Wulfrik bared his fangs as he stared down the corridor at the oaken doors of the great hall. He clapped his hand upon Broendulf’s shoulder. ‘That explains the cold looks of Viglundr’s huscarls. It must be an embarrassment for Viglundr to play host to both the Aeslings and the man who took their king’s head. I am indebted for your warning.’

‘Perhaps it would be best to wait for Viglundr’s guests to leave,’ Broendulf suggested.

Wulfrik snorted at the thought. ‘Perhaps Viglundr needs to be reminded who he owes his crown to. If I disturb his other guests, they are welcome to ask me to leave.’ The gleam in the hero’s eyes made it clear how easy his removal from the tower would be.

‘Someday you will seek a fight you will not walk away from,’ Broendulf said, shaking his head.

‘The Aesling isn’t born who could cross swords with me,’ Wulfrik laughed. ‘My saga won’t end on some Aes axe. The gods aren’t so merciful.’

Hearing the melancholy in Wulfrik’s voice, Broendulf knew it was best if he left the champion to ponder his troubles alone. Wulfrik did not like others to see him when his sorrow came upon him.

Broendulf had only taken a few steps before he found himself restrained by Wulfrik’s clutching hand.

‘Have you seen her?’ Wulfrik said, eagerness in his voice.

The reaver was quiet, considering how he should answer his captain. Broendulf did not know if it was more cruel to let Wulfrik torture himself with his impossible hope. He knew too well the pain of a love that could never be. It was the reason he had joined the crew of the Seafang and the bond that joined his doom to that of the Wanderer.

Broendulf felt Wulfrik’s fingers tighten about his arm. He stared at the champion, then turned his eyes to the doors of the great hall. Wulfrik released his grip and marched quickly down the corridor.

Broendulf turned and walked away before Wulfrik reached the doors. However desperate the hero was, there was no chance for his cherished hope. The gods had seen to that. Even Viglundr understood that fact. But Broendulf knew it would take more than cold reason to make Wulfrik understand. He wasn’t sure if Wulfrik’s tenacity made him pity the man or envy him.

What he did know was if he had the champion’s strength, he wouldn’t let anything hold him back. Not the cruelty of the gods and not the schemes of King Viglundr.

The great hall of Ormfell was a vast chamber at the very centre of the fortress. Its stone walls were lost beneath the trophies which adorned them. The hides of strange beasts, the shields of fallen champions, the bloodied banners of vanquished armies, all of these surrounded the great hall, making of it a gallery of the Sarl people’s triumphs over their foes. The bones of a great behemoth, the monster named Morrgawr in the sagas and more commonly called Shipcracker, hung suspended from the timber ceiling fifty feet above the floor. The slaying of Shipcracker had been the deed which earned Ormnir the title of king and which had allowed Ormskaro to thrive and prosper. Many heroes had tried to end the behemoth’s rampage, but it had been Ormnir’s spear which had brought the beast to ruin.

In the middle of the hall, surrounded by bearskin rugs and rich carpets plundered from the cities of Araby, the throne of Ormfell dominated the room. Twelve feet high, carved from the jawbone of Shipcracker, the throne was inlaid from crest to foot with plates of gold and studs of sapphire and jade. The luxurious furs of ermine and ice tiger were heaped upon the royal seat and at its feet rested a stool of silver and silk.

Almost lost amid the finery of his throne was King Viglundr himself. The king was a tall man, his long hair faded by age into a steely grey, his plaited beard adorned with golden combs and ruby beads. Though humbled by time, there was yet a powerful body beneath Viglundr’s royal robes. In his youth, he had earned his father’s favour by breaking the necks of his seven brothers with his bare hands. Years later, he had sent the old king to his barrow in the same way.

No coward, King Viglundr. His dislike for battle was a practical one, for he preferred to win by subtlety what others sought to take by the sword. It was said he bore the mark of the Raven God upon his heart, and few who became trapped within the coils of his plots doubted the Trickster’s touch.

Wulfrik had learned long ago to be careful in his dealings with Viglundr. It took a keen eye to pierce the mantle of deception he wore and discover the truth behind the mask.

As he boldly entered the great hall, Wulfrik noted the slight narrowing of the king’s eyes. No other sign of displeasure did Viglundr show, for his expression at once became amiable and excited. Wulfrik was reminded of a vulture waiting for a tiger to leave its kill so it could swoop down and glut itself.

‘The mighty Wulfrik returns to us!’ Viglundr announced, rising from his throne and extending his arms in welcome. ‘Word reached us that the Seafang was spotted in our waters. Happy is the news that your hunt was successful and you come back to us unharmed!’

Wulfrik could feel Viglundr studying him as the king spoke, as though checking to be certain the champion was indeed unharmed. Any sign of wound or weakness, and the king would be quick to exploit it.

‘The Blood God has been given his prize,’ Wulfrik announced. ‘The hunger of the gods has been sated.’

‘At least for a time,’ Viglundr added, a thin smile on his face as he sank back into his throne.

Wulfrik ignored the subtle reminder of his curse. He cast his eyes across the hall. It was more crowded than usual, and not because Viglundr had expanded the circle of bodyguards and sycophants that made up his court. There were a number of Aeslings present as well, pale-skinned marauders from the northern reaches of Norsca. Wulfrik found his gaze drawn momentarily to a black-haired Aes with gaunt features and jewelled rings about his fingers. There was no mistaking the hate in the dark Aesling’s eyes.

Quickly Wulfrik forgot all about the Aeslings. Looking past the dark-haired marauder, he saw a cluster of women conversing in hushed tones. They turned coy looks his way, then shyly whispered to one another. In the midst of the maids there was one who did not look away, a tall, lissom woman dressed in a flowing gown of wolfskin, her golden hair twisted into long coils that hung to her waist. Her youthful face flushed with colour as she caught Wulfrik’s attention, a twinkle shining in her lustrous azure eyes.

‘Hjordis,’ Wulfrik called to her, his voice almost catching in his throat. He started to walk towards her when the commanding voice of Viglundr made him turn back towards the throne.

‘We have not dismissed you, Worldwalker,’ the king said, disapproval in his tone. ‘We might believe you more interested in our daughter than your king.’

Rounding on the ruler of Ormskaro, Wulfrik let his hands drop to the hilts of his swords. ‘I call no man my king,’ he told Viglundr. ‘Such was the reward of victory,’ he reminded the rest of the court, his fingers tapping against the skull tied to one of the swords. He turned his eyes back to the princess. ‘Among other promises that were made.’

Viglundr at first turned pale at this brash reminder of his debts, then quickly composed himself. He waved aside the bodyguards who had started to close upon Wulfrik. Perhaps if the champion had been injured in his last voyage…

‘We do not forget our debts,’ Viglundr told Wulfrik. ‘Ormskaro, indeed all the tribes of the Sarls owe you much. But there is a limit to our indulgence.’

‘Maybe I should have made war in the name of Torgald instead of Viglundr,’ Wulfrik snarled, his fingers still tapping the skull dangling from his sword.

‘Do all the Sarls speak such impertinence to their king?’ shouted a voice from the crowd. Wulfrik turned his head, unsurprised to find it was the dark-haired Aesling who had spoken. ‘Among the Aeslings, we know the respect due a king!’

Fangs bared, Wulfrik grinned back at the marauder. His fingers closed around the tether binding the skull to his sword. Maliciously, he pulled it taut, holding the skull out for the Aesling to see. ‘I also know how to respect an Aesling king!’ he taunted.

The words stabbed home like a dagger. Shrieking in rage, the dark-haired Aesling drew the sword from his belt. Before he could fling himself upon Wulfrik, his retainers grabbed hold of him and pulled him back.

‘No, Prince Sveinbjorn!’ they cried out, fear in their voices.

Sveinbjorn fought to free himself of their grasp. ‘I have heard the stories of your voyages, Wulfrik Whore-son!’ the prince raged. ‘I call them what they are: lies! Draw your blade and meet your ancestors, sea-worm!’

Slowly, Wulfrik drew his sword from his belt. He glanced at the men holding Sveinbjorn back and laughed. ‘Whenever your nurse-maids will let you play.’

The last barb was too much for the retainers. One of them released the prince. Drawing his own axe, the warrior rushed at Wulfrik, a war cry howling from his lips. With the fury of a berserker, the marauder brought his weapon flashing at Wulfrik’s head.

Wulfrik twisted aside as the axe came hurtling down. Moving with the grace and speed of a panther, the champion swung his body around, side-stepping the Aesling’s charge. A blur of steel, a splash of crimson, and the Aesling toppled to the floor, his body folding back upon its spine where Wulfrik’s sword had slashed across his belly.

Sveinbjorn relented in his efforts to escape his retainers. His pale features turned a sickly colour and his tongue licked across suddenly dry lips. There was terror in his eyes as he saw Wulfrik stalk towards him.

‘Enough!’ Viglundr’s outraged roar thundered across the hall. He pointed a trembling finger at Wulfrik. ‘Whatever services you have performed for me in the past, barbarian, they will not excuse the murder of my guests!’

Wulfrik sneered at Sveinbjorn. ‘The Aeslings are welcome to collect their wergild anytime they have the stomach for it.’

The humiliated prince glared at Wulfrik, then ripped free of his retainers. Sheathing his sword, he marched from the hall. The other Aeslings quickly followed their prince in retreat.

‘It seems I won’t have a chance to kill any more of your guests,’ Wulfrik said, turning back to the throne.

Viglundr quivered with rage. ‘You forget your duty to me.’

‘You forget yours to me,’ Wulfrik answered, casting a sideways glance at Hjordis. ‘I was promised riches, rank, the privileges of a king…’

‘All these you were given,’ Viglundr snarled.

‘And I was promised the hand of your daughter,’ Wulfrik finished. ‘King Torgald is dead,’ he announced, his fingers tapping on the skull. ‘But I have not been paid for the killing.’

Cruelty filled Viglundr’s expression as he leaned forwards from his throne. ‘It was not our boasting tongue that brought the curse of the gods upon you,’ he reminded Wulfrik. His face softened into an expression of regret and pity, though there was still malignance in his eyes. ‘How can we give our daughter to a man such as you? Marked by the gods, cursed by them to wander the world to slay in their name? What manner of life would that be for a princess?’ Viglundr smiled to see that his words brought the champion pain.

‘You speak of our duty to you,’ the king persisted. ‘But what of your duty to Hjordis? Should she stay here forever waiting for you, waiting for a man despised by the gods? Must she grow old and wither, husbandless, childless, because you were too proud to free her from an impossible promise?’

Wulfrik felt his chest tighten, a coldness that was worse than the ravages of the yhetee. ‘It is not pride that binds me to Hjordis,’ he said.

Viglundr kept the triumph he felt from his face as he heard the champion’s confession. ‘You cannot keep her,’ he said. ‘If you do love our daughter, you must release her.

‘Why would you force her to share your curse?’

The king’s last words echoed through Wulfrik’s brain like thunder. Viglundr was right, he had no reason to force Hjordis to share his curse. Doomed to wander the world, killing men and monsters in the name of the gods. That was not the life he would have Hjordis share. She was better here, in her father’s castle, surrounded by the riches of Ormskaro.

The image made Wulfrik sicken. However much he tried, he couldn’t let her go. He wouldn’t let her go.

The sound of footsteps in the hall behind him brought Wulfrik spinning around. His sword was already half from its sheath before he saw that his stealthy assailant was a shapely young princess with long blonde hair.

‘I might have killed you,’ Wulfrik growled, slamming the blade back into his belt.

Hjordis placed her soft hand on Wulfrik’s scarred, leathery fingers. ‘Am I so ghastly that I frighten the great Wulfrik?’

‘You might have been an Aesling assassin,’ Wulfrik told her.

The princess cocked her head and smiled at him. ‘Who says I’m not?’ Her expression became serious, contemplative. ‘Prince Sveinbjorn is a handsome man and noble in his manners. A woman might do much worse than take such a man for a husband.’

Wulfrik snorted in amusement. ‘That sounds like your father talking.’

‘Oh yes, most certainly,’ Hjordis sighed. ‘He’s been urging me to marry that reptile for the last fortnight. Fear of you is the only thing that’s kept him from forcing me into it. Somehow he thinks you won’t burn down Ormskaro if the whole thing is my decision instead of his.’

Hjordis cried out as Wulfrik’s hands clamped around her arms. ‘I’d make all Norsca a smoking crater if you were taken away from me! I’d kill every damn Aesling that ever crawled out of its mother if they–’

‘Be careful of your boasting,’ Hjordis warned. She regretted her words when she saw the pain that sprang into Wulfrik’s eyes. She quickly diverted his thoughts, squirming in his grip.

‘You’re going to leave marks,’ she scolded Wulfrik. Rubbing her arms as he released her, she fretted over the stains his fingers had left on her gown. ‘You might have stopped to wash before coming here. I don’t even want to know what kind of things you’ve been touching while you were gone.’

‘Only some ice-giants,’ Wulfrik told her. ‘I killed their king. Cut all five of his heads clean off.’ A sharp look from Hjordis made Wulfrik think better of continuing the tale.

The princess rubbed at the stain Wulfrik’s fingers had left. ‘This is never going to come off. I’ll have to get a new one before my father sees and asks indelicate questions.’ A sly smile spread across her face as she glanced at the hero. ‘You should help me pick one out,’ she suggested.

‘And what about Viglundr?’ Wulfrik asked.

‘He’ll be busy all night trying to apologise to the Aeslings,’ Hjordis said. ‘I think we could pick out a dress by then.’

‘Maybe not,’ Wulfrik warned her. ‘I’ve been at sea for two months.’

Hjordis laughed and led the champion by the hand down the corridor. ‘Where is your caution now? This could all be a trick to leave you so weak and tired that Sveinbjorn will only need a dozen warriors to overcome you.’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ Wulfrik assured her, kissing the back of her neck.

CHAPTER THREE

The feeble light of the Norscan sun was just starting to peek beneath the heavy furs shrouding the tower windows. Hjordis awoke slowly, stretching her body and sighing contentedly. She smiled as the warmth of the bed tried to lull her back to sleep. She rolled onto her side, half-tempted to submit to the enticing lure. As she moved, her arm fell into the warm emptiness beside her.

Hjordis blinked her eyes in confusion, then heard once more the sound which had awakened her. She sat upright, letting the bearskin blanket tumble from her body. Her eyes stared into the darkness. Only faintly could she pick out the figure standing at the foot of the bed, buckling armour about his brawny frame.

‘You rise early,’ the princess said, her words not quite spoken before a terrific yawn overcame her.

‘There’s much to be done,’ was Wulfrik’s gruff response.

The content smile she was wearing faded. Hjordis crawled across the length of the bed, pressing herself against the hero’s armoured back. The cold mail sent a shiver through her naked flesh, but it wasn’t so cold as the fear that trembled in her heart.

‘Another of your dreams?’ she forced herself to ask.

Wulfrik abandoned the vambrace he had been tying about his arm, tossing the piece of armour across the room. He sank back into the embrace of the princess. ‘Always the dreams,’ he told her. ‘Always the dreams. When will the gods stop sending me these visions? When will they relent? How much do they expect a man to suffer before it is enough to appease them?’

Hjordis leaned over Wulfrik, pressing his head against her bosom. She ran her fingers through the wild tangle of his hair. ‘You must have hope.’

‘I saw a town,’ Wulfrik continued. ‘Some southling place. The walls were of stone and a river ran through its gates. Buildings were burning, the dead strewn like seed in the streets. The wailing of children filled the air and there was an ugly light in the sky. A great voice spoke, crying out: “For the Lord of the Winds, the last breath is given!” Then the earth shook with the laughter of vultures and I saw myself among the dead.’

A shiver of absolute terror ran through Hjordis as she heard Wulfrik relate the apocalyptic dream. It was easier for them to discuss the things as though they were only dreams, of no more substance than any other nightmare. But they both knew better. Wulfrik’s dreams were not his own. They were visions sent by the gods, a portent of things that would come to pass. They were a part of his curse, guiding him to the offerings the gods demanded of him.

Never before, though, had Wulfrik seen himself in one of these visions, much less seen his own corpse. It sent a wave of horror pulsing through Hjordis’s veins. In their cruelty, perhaps the gods had answered all of the hero’s questions.

‘What will you do?’ Hjordis asked, her voice little more than a feeble croak.

Wulfrik pulled away from her so he could stare into her eyes. ‘I’ll see Agnarr and ask him to interpret the dream,’ he said, making it sound almost inconsequential. ‘Then I’ll supervise the choosing of new men for the crew. If Sigvatr hasn’t finished outfitting the ship, I’ll have to help him rumble some of the traders. Then it’ll just be the small matter of dragging my men out of the mead halls and whore-huts. I hope I don’t have to kill any of them this time.’

The champion looked hard at Hjordis. His forced joviality hadn’t fooled her; there was still a troubled expression in her eyes. He ran his thumb against her cheek, trying to tug her face into a smile. After a few tries, the smile became genuine.

‘Tchar take all of them!’ Wulfrik exclaimed, pushing Hjordis onto her back. ‘They can do without me for a few hours yet!’

The seer Agnarr lived in a strange little shack crouched between a smithy and a storehouse for salted fish. Unlike its neighbours, the shack hadn’t been built from timber and stone, but was made entirely from whale bone, the splintered ribs of a dozen beasts lashed together with stout cords to form a weird, ramshackle shelter. For the entirety of their length, each bone was richly carved with scenes drawn from the sagas. Wulfrik had heard that if a man studied the carvings for too long they would change, and that some of the carvings depicted things not yet chronicled in the sagas. He wasn’t sure he believed such stories. There were always tales being told about the strangeness of seers. Even so, he made it a point never to look too closely at the engravings.

The interior of the seer’s home never failed to evoke a sense of uneasiness in Wulfrik. The air was always colder than outside, whatever the season. There was a crude sort of ceiling stretched overhead to keep out the rain, but even in all his travels, Wulfrik could put no name to whatever scaly beast had once worn such a craggy skin. Oddments of every shape hung from hooks set into the scaly hide so that moving anywhere inside the shack required an effort not unlike that of an explorer forcing his way through a jungle. Dried bats, the desiccated shells of mammoth spiders, stagnant weeds that smelled like blood and looked not unlike severed fingers, the mummified husks of crocodiles, such were the arcane bric-a-brac of the seer.

Wulfrik pushed his way past a string of goblin bones and a rope made from the intestine of a manticore, manoeuvring into the heart of the dwelling. An eerie blue flame smouldered in a circle of skulls, beckoning the warrior forwards. He found it unsettling that the flame should burn so brightly yet do nothing to ease the chill of the place. He glanced at the floor around the fire, then sat down upon a pile of wolf pelts some distance from the flame. As he sat down, an insane gibberish accosted his ears, the idiot babble of a tiny batrachian daemon locked inside a silver cage. The thing eyed him with malicious, multi-faceted eyes and licked its long talons with too many tongues.

The hero threw a stone at the noxious creature, smiling when he heard it growl its displeasure. Wulfrik hoped Agnarr wouldn’t keep him waiting long. From past experience, he knew the daemon’s gibberish would start to make his head swim after a time. If he had to suffer from a headache, he’d prefer to induce it on his own with a few barrels of mead.

The idea turned sour almost as soon as it occurred to him. A few barrels of mead had been the cause of all his troubles. After the Battle of a Thousand Skulls, with King Torgald’s head tucked under his arm, Wulfrik had celebrated the victory. Along with the arms and armour of the Aeslings and their allies, Wulfrik’s army had captured their supplies. Whatever his other vices, Torgald had not scrimped in maintaining his troops and Wulfrik’s warriors enjoyed a victory feast worthy of the sagas.

How hollow that celebration felt now, for it had brought doom upon Wulfrik and tainted his glory. The hero had feasted with his men. No man had fought more fiercely than he in the battle, now he vowed no man would outdrink him in victory. Using the skull of King Torgald for his cup, Wulfrik had matched his words with deeds. It had taken four entire barrels of mead to put him under the table, a feat that impressed even the ogres.

Before the mead overwhelmed him entirely, however, the drunken Wulfrik had started to boast of his exploits. Before he was done, he’d killed every monster in the Wastes twice and personally boxed the ears of three southling emperors. It was his final proud boast that had doomed him. He claimed that he was the equal of any warrior in the mortal world or in the realm beyond flesh.

The gods enjoy punishing hubris.

That night he’d had the first of his visions. A dark shape stole upon him in his dreams, a shadow blacker than night. It was an emissary of the gods, it told him. The gods were displeased with his proud words. However, it amused them to allow Wulfrik the opportunity to prove his arrogant boast. In his dream, he saw fantastic worlds, places he could recognise only from the dimmest legends. He saw cities built from bones and the soaring towers of the elf-folk. He saw the vast underground warrens of the ratkin and the jungle temples of the dragon-folk, the ramshackle fortresses of orc kings and the gilded halls of the dwarf lords. The putrid palace of the Plague Lord rose from the muck of his nightmare, its walls crafted from the wailing bodies of the damned. The dead halls of Nagashizzar, silent with the dust of centuries, made his soul cringe in terror.

Such would be Wulfrik’s hunting grounds. He would wander the world, seeking battle to prove himself the equal of any warrior, mortal or spirit, living or undead. He would make offerings to the gods he had offended, offerings the gods themselves would choose. When he failed – and the dark emissary left no question he would fail – the gods would take great delight in torturing his soul through eternity.

Wulfrik might have believed the vision nothing but a drunken nightmare had it not been for the changes that had been visited upon his body. He bore the brand of the gods in his flesh, marked not by one, but by all the Great Powers. His tongue had become an inhuman thing, sharp and fluted like that of a bird and he found he could speak any language, however strange to him. The Gift of Tongues, the Kurgan shaman had called this strange power.

The first offering he was to make came to him in a dream. He was to kill the tomb lord Khareops and sacrifice its shrivelled entrails to Wormking Nurgle. The dream even told him where he would find Khareops. The creature’s tomb was far to the south, in the wastes beyond Araby: a voyage only the boldest northmen ever attempted. It was a voyage that would take even a fast ship many months to make.

And this was only the first of the tasks the gods would have of him.

Wulfrik would have despaired then but for his old friend Sigvatr. The grizzled warrior remembered hearing about a ‘sky-ship’ crafted by the Skaeling witch Baga Yar, a ship that could sail anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye. It was the kind of extravagant legend Wulfrik had always discredited, but it was the only hope he had of beating the curse.

It took all of the treasure he’d won from Torgald and all the gold Viglundr paid him for defeating the Aeslings to bribe the warriors he’d needed to assail the fortress of Baga Yar. In the end, the witch had been consumed in her own cauldron after Wulfrik’s sword removed her arms. Two hundred warriors had died fighting the crone and her daemons, but victory had been his. The other treasures in the witch’s fortress he left to his followers; the only thing Wulfrik wanted was her magic ship.

Seafang he had named the vessel and quickly he learned how easily fables can lie. It was not flight that allowed the ship to speed its way across the seas. Instead the Seafang would fade from the mortal world to sail upon phantom tides in that realm known only to gods and daemons. Such was the horror of the ship he had taken for his own.

‘A man may forge his own doom.’

The voice was like the croak of a raven, at once thin and guttural. Wulfrik turned around to find the seer Agnarr limping through the menagerie of oddments. He was old, so old that even the elders of Ormskaro could not remember him as ever being young. His head was hairless and wrinkled, like a turtle’s egg, his face like dried parchment across the bones of his skull. Eyes frosty with blindness stared vacantly from Agnarr’s colourless face. The seer wore a heavy sealskin robe, the bisected head of one of the creatures framing his shoulders. He leaned heavily upon a staff carved from troll bone and behind him he dragged the twisted abortion of his left foot. It was more a shapeless mass of flesh than anything else, though there was some affinity to the webbed foot of an albatross about it.

‘I have tried,’ Wulfrik answered the seer gruffly. There was no need to introduce himself. Agnarr did not need sight to know things. Whenever he visited the seer, he had the impression that Agnarr knew everything he was going to say before he said it.

‘Perhaps you have already succeeded,’ Agnarr said. The seer turned and shook his staff at the imprisoned daemon until it was quiet. Then he unerringly picked his way to a mouldy pillow with tattered bits of lace clinging to it – some gift he’d received from another seafaring reaver long ago.

‘Who could have called upon you the eye of the gods, if it was not you yourself?’ the seer continued.

‘That isn’t the life I want!’ Wulfrik snarled.

Agnarr fixed his sightless eyes upon Wulfrik. ‘It is the life you have made for yourself. Few men would be resourceful enough to outwit the gods. Few would have been strong enough to survive their challenges. The name of Wulfrik has spread to all the steads of Norsca, his fame has been recorded in the sagas.’

‘To hell with fame and glory!’ Wulfrik smashed his fist against the floor. ‘I want my life back!’

‘Why?’ Agnarr asked, genuine bewilderment in his voice. ‘You have achieved what mighty lords squander armies and slaughter nations to win for themselves. The gods gaze down upon you! Your flesh bears the mark of their favour! You have been gifted to serve them as few mortals may ever hope!’

Wulfrik bared his fangs at the blind man. ‘The last prophet who told me this curse was a gift spent a long time dying,’ he warned.

‘And how long will you take to die?’ Agnarr’s question lashed out at the hero. ‘How long will you fight against the will of the gods, and to what end? To marry some wench, sire a clutch of offspring.’ The seer chuckled darkly. ‘Perhaps steal her father’s throne? Bah! What are women and offspring and thrones? Dust and less than dust!’ He wagged one of his withered fingers at Wulfrik. ‘The gifts of the gods, these are the rewards a man keeps forever. The rewards of love and greed and ambition, these rot with a man in his grave.’

‘I want them just the same,’ Wulfrik growled. ‘I did not seek this curse…’

Agnarr nodded his head. ‘Yet it found you just the same. Sometimes the feet walk a path the head does not know.’

Wulfrik rose from the pile of wolf-skins. ‘I did not come here to be told to accept my doom.’

Agnarr waved his hands at the champion, motioning for him to sit down. ‘You came so that I might interpret your vision.’

‘Seldom has one come upon me so soon after a voyage,’ Wulfrik said. He made no effort to hide the anxiety he felt. ‘Is… is this… how they are… to be… now?’ The thought was horrible to him, that he would sail the world for the rest of his days, moving from one hunt to another, without rest or respite.

‘I cannot say,’ the seer admitted with a shake of his head. ‘I can only try to discern the will of the gods from your vision.’

‘I saw myself among the dead,’ Wulfrik shuddered. It was not the idea of death that frightened him, but the awful fate that would await him in the world beyond.

‘Through our lives, we are all of us many men,’ Agnarr told him. ‘Sometimes the gods conspire to destroy one of these selves without killing the body. When that happens, a new self arises to command the flesh.’ The seer tapped his bony chest. ‘Sometimes it is in a man’s power to destroy his self on his own.

‘For the rest of your vision, I can say little,’ the seer said. ‘The signs are clear enough. The offering the gods have chosen is to be offered to Great Tchar, the Raven God. That you will find the sacrifice in the lands of the southlings is obvious too.’

‘But who?’ Wulfrik demanded. ‘Where? The Empire of the southlings is a vast land to stalk nameless prey.’

Agnarr lifted his hands to his eyes, rubbing at the corners of their sockets. ‘I do not know. There is something wrong. Before your visions have been as clear to me as if I had had them myself. This time is different. It is like trying to peer through a thick fog. Shapes and shadows are there, but more I cannot see. But a place once seen, why must it have a name to be found?’

Wulfrik scowled at the seer’s inability to tell him more. Irritably, he snapped a gold band from around his arm and tossed it onto the floor beside Agnarr’s feet. ‘I always come here looking for answers, but I always leave with more questions than I came with.’

‘That is because you do not like the answers you are given,’ Agnarr scolded him. ‘The gods answer every prayer, but few are wise enough to understand when the answer is “no”. You might ponder that.’

‘I’d rather find a barrel of mead and a plateful of roast horse,’ the champion confessed.

‘Then I wish you good appetite,’ Agnarr said. ‘Remember your dream, and listen to it. Otherwise I fear we shall not speak again.’

Wulfrik had been shoving aside the tangles of dried eels and withered herbs on his way from the seer’s hut. Now he froze, a chill running down his spine. He spun about, tearing his way through the maze of oddments. ‘What did you say, ghost-caller? What do you mean?’

‘More questions when you’ve been given answers,’ Agnarr’s croaking voice laughed.

Wulfrik fought his way towards the voice, anger swelling up inside him. Savagely he tore strings of sea shells and eagle eyes from the ceiling. Then the hair rose on his arms as his hand connected with the bony curve of the shack’s outer wall. He was certain he had retraced his path exactly, yet he’d reached the far side of the shack without passing through the opening at the centre. He turned about, still able to see the blue light of the fire.

Again Wulfrik bulled his way across the shack. He would find Agnarr and get straight answers from him if he had to choke them out of the seer!

This time when he crossed the hovel, Wulfrik found himself blinking in the sunlight, the sounds of the smithy and the smells of the warehouse welcoming him back into the mortal world.

A great crowd was already gathered when Wulfrik made his way to the Bloodfield. A training ground for Ormskaro’s warriors and a place where Sarl youths would prove their manhood in fierce contests, the large plateau overlooking the sea was no stranger to the sounds of combat and the smell of blood. One corner of the plateau, however, was different. It was not devoted to the warriors of Ormskaro or the Sarl tribe. It was a place of death and slaughter that went far beyond the trials of youths and the training of warriors.

It was called the Wolf Forest, and it served one man. That man was Wulfrik and it was in this place he would choose the warriors fit to join his crew.

Whenever Wulfrik returned to Ormskaro it would mark the beginning of a festival for the Sarls. There would be grand feasts and much dancing and singing. But the highlight of the festival would not be in the mead halls but in the Wolf Forest. Here, every freeholder, bondsman and huscarl in the town would gather to watch as the fiercest warriors in Norsca did battle that they might join the crew of the Seafang and earn the glory of following Wulfrik on his voyages.

For months the warriors would come. Great hairy Baersonlings and crafty Skaelings, twisted Vargs and dour Graelings, all would make their way to Ormskaro to test their strength and prove themselves mightier than their foes. They would gather and they would wait, waiting for this day, the day when they would enter the Wolf Forest.

Wulfrik took his seat at a long table set a few yards from the forest. He set down the platter of grilled walrus he had carried with him onto the plateau, then slid the barrel of mead tucked under his arm next to it. He smiled at Sigvatr as the old warrior nodded, clearly impressed by the combined display of balance and strength.

‘I’d like to see you do that again after you empty the barrel,’ Sigvatr quipped.

‘Only if you watch to see I don’t walk off the cliff,’ Wulfrik said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the sheer drop that marked the seaward side of the plateau. He glanced across the crowd that had gathered to watch the testing. It seemed to him that most of Ormskaro had surrounded the Wolf Forest. Even Viglundr was in attendance, surrounded by his huscarls and Aesling guests. Wulfrik made a point of waving at Sveinbjorn. The Aesling prince grew pale and sank into his heavy bearskin cloak.

‘A good turnout,’ Sigvatr commented. ‘A lot of the crew even showed up to watch. Though Haukr probably did so just to make wagers on who will win.’

Wulfrik slammed his fist into the barrel of mead, smashing open its top. ‘Don’t be glum, grey-beard. If they’re all here then it will be easier getting them back on the ship when we leave.’

The remark made Sigvatr look twice at his captain. ‘So soon? We only made port yesterday.’

Wulfrik took his silver drinking horn and dunked it into the mead. ‘Maybe I should tell the gods to wait then,’ he grumbled, taking a long drink.

‘You’ve had another dream?’

The champion grimaced, spitting the liquid from his mouth. ‘It tastes bad enough without your chirping,’ he complained. ‘Of course I’ve had another dream!’ Wulfrik stared back at King Viglundr’s table, this time locking eyes with Hjordis instead of Sveinbjorn. He gave the princess a lewd wink and chuckled when he saw colour rush into her cheeks. ‘I’ve as much longing to stay here a few weeks as any of the crew.’

‘They won’t like it,’ Sigvatr said. ‘Kaetill’s holed up in a longhouse with all five of Jarl Svanir’s daughters and Njarvord is down in one of the mead halls trying to outdrink three steelmongers from Kraka Drang.’

‘Kaetill better hope we find him before Svanir,’ Wulfrik said. ‘As for Njarvord, the sea air will help clear his head after those dwarfs put him under the table.’ He looked back to Viglundr’s table. Anger flashed through him as he saw Sveinbjorn leaning across the table to speak to Hjordis. Wulfrik’s hand clenched into a fist, crumpling his drinking horn.

‘How many jackals have come this time?’ Wulfrik growled at Sigvatr.

‘Almost a hundred,’ Sigvatr told his captain. ‘We only need twenty-three.’

Wulfrik wiped up the mead that had splashed onto him when he ruined his silver horn. ‘We’ll take thirty,’ he decided, sucking the mead from his fingers. ‘But we’ll go through them all today.’

Once again there was surprise in Sigvatr’s expression. ‘We usually give them a day to recover before matching them again.’

Wulfrik directed a black look in the direction of the king’s table. ‘If they want to share my glory, then they don’t need a rest.’ The champion tore a strip of meat from his platter and gestured at the Wolf Forest. ‘Send the first set in,’ he ordered.

Sigvatr stood and unrolled the vellum scroll he carried. He glanced down the list of names, selecting two at random. ‘Tjorvi Tjorvisson of the Graelings and Garek Spearbreaker of the Sarls!’ he shouted.

As soon as Sigvatr spoke, the noise of the crowd faded to a quiet murmur. The two warriors whose names had been called stepped forwards, their friends banging swords against shields in applause as they stalked towards the Wolf Forest. Gamblers scurried about making last-minute wagers and giving new odds now that the opponents were known.

Both warriors hesitated as they approached the Wolf Forest, their minds turning to the stories they had heard about the death and carnage the place had seen. They were bold men, however, and quickly overcame their misgivings. One of them would be victorious, one of them would not. Such was the way it should be. Drawing their axes from their belts, slipping their arms through the loops of their shields, the two northmen grabbed the ladders set at either end of the arena. They climbed to the narrow platforms set twenty feet above the plateau and gazed across at their foe.

Between them stretched the Wolf Forest, a maze of round wooden posts sunk into the plateau. The top of each post was just wide enough to accommodate a man’s foot and spaced far enough apart that a man could step from one to another. The process wasn’t an easy one, however, for the posts weren’t sunk to a uniform depth, each varying slightly from the others. Beneath the posts, stretching all along the length of the Wolf Forest, the ground was littered with sharp wooden stakes. The Crow God’s Teeth, the stakes had been called, for they were smeared with dung and offal to ensure a lingering death to any who felt their bite. A man who fell from the posts would have nowhere to go except onto the stakes.

The warriors stared at each other, then took their first trembling steps out onto the posts. As soon as their feet left the platforms, a raucous roar erupted from the crowd. Instantly the warriors raised their shields, trying to protect themselves from the barrage of stones, vegetables, fish bones and broken pottery that flew at them. The friends of each warrior attacked his opponent with concentrated volleys of rubbish while the gamblers directed their ire against whomever they had wagered against.

Under the assault, the two northmen struggled to keep their footing. At the same time, each tried to move forwards, to come to blows with his enemy. The roar of the crowd grew more intense as the men closed the distance, and the barrage became limited only to the odd stone and crab shell as the warriors came within reach of one another. Bracing their feet as best they could, the two fighters chopped at each other with their axes, now turning their shields to the effort of warding off the attack of their opponent.

Tjorvi, a scarred youth with tattoos covering his bald head, drove his axe at Garek’s knee only to have the iron rim of the Sarl’s shield intercept. The Graeling was almost overbalanced as his axe was driven down, teetering for a terrible moment as he leaned out over the stakes.

Garek was a brawny whaler with metal rings studding his arms and a bronze crescent piercing his nose. He tried to exploit his enemy, slashing the edge of his heavy axe across Tjorvi’s back, trying to drag him off the posts.

Tjorvi cried out in pain as the axe tore through his armour and bit into his flesh. The Graeling stumbled to his left, only narrowly catching his footing. Garek pursued his enemy, chopping at him even as he tried to regain his balance. Tjorvi blocked the blow with his shield. There was a violent crunch as Garek’s axe hacked into Tjorvi’s shield, splintering it.

Tjorvi snarled at his attacker, flinging his arm wide. Garek’s trapped axe shifted with the shield and the Sarl’s eyes went wide with alarm as he realised his predicament. Hastily, he brought his own shield down to intercept Tjorvi’s attack.

Instead of lashing out with his axe, however, Tjorvi threw all of his weight into his shield. Garek, instinctively maintaining his grip on his axe, shifted to the right. It was a delicate matter of balance and momentum that allowed Tjorvi to overcome his foe. With a practised move, the young Graeling slipped his arm out from the loops of his shield. The sudden loss of Tjorvi’s weight arresting the shield’s motion caused Garek’s shifting body to overbalance.

The Sarl shrieked as he realised his mistake. He released his trapped axe an instant too late to save himself. Like a clam dropped from the beak of a gull, Garek fell from the posts and slammed into the waiting stakes below.

‘A nasty trick,’ Sigvatr observed as the triumphant Tjorvi descended from the Wolf Forest. ‘I think he deliberately used a weak shield to trap his enemy’s axe.’

Wulfrik picked a strip of meat from between his teeth and shrugged. ‘A feeble trick if his enemy had had a flail. We’ll see how he fares the next time out.’ The champion returned his attention to his mead, trying to capture what he could with his crumpled drinking horn. So fixated was he on his labour that he didn’t hear Sigvatr call out the next two combatants.

He also failed to notice the approach of the Kurgan until he was standing right beside him.

The Kurgan was a short, sparsely built man, his skin possessing the dusky hue common among those who dwell in the northern Wastes. His stringy hair was frosty white and his beard was braided into a long coil that made it seem some tenacious serpent had bitten his chin and refused to let go. He wore a simple leather hauberk and mammoth-fur leggings, and about his body he wore a heavy horsehair cape.

All of this Wulfrik noticed in a glance, for as soon as he began to study the stranger, his eyes were transfixed by those of the Kurgan. The man’s eyes were a deep, piercing blue and glowed like foxfire with an inner light. Looking into those eyes was like staring into an ocean abyss or gazing upon the limitless expanse of the night sky. Wulfrik felt a wave of vertigo grip him and quickly closed his eyes.

‘You are Wulfrik Worldwalker,’ the Kurgan said, inclining his head towards the champion.

‘It doesn’t take a sorcerer to know that,’ Wulfrik said, rubbing his eyes. ‘The lowest thrall in Ormskaro could have pointed me out for you.’

The stranger laughed, the sound somehow reminding Wulfrik of breaking glass. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘The fame of Wulfrik is known to us even in the far north.’ The Kurgan stepped closer to the champion, leaning on a tall staff fashioned from silver and studded with polished agates. At the head of the staff was a fist-sized orb of sapphire, an exact match for the eerie eyes of its owner.

‘I am Zarnath of the Tokmars,’ the stranger introduced himself, slapping his chest with his hand. ‘I have come to offer a service to the great Wulfrik.’

‘Then you may add your name to my list.’ There was more than annoyance in Sigvatr’s tone as he regarded Zarnath. ‘Though I think few will risk their silver on your chances of success.’

Zarnath stared up at the combat raging atop the Wolf Forest. His thin features became twisted with repugnance. ‘I am a shaman, the voice of the gods. You would subject me to such indignity?’

‘A shaman worthy of joining my crew would have little to fear from the Wolf Forest,’ Wulfrik said.

The shaman smiled at Wulfrik. ‘I do not wish to join your crew,’ he corrected the hero. ‘I said I have come to offer a service to you.’

‘What manner of service?’ Sigvatr demanded, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

Zarnath did not even favour the old warrior with a glance but kept his attention fixed upon Wulfrik. ‘I can break the curse that binds you,’ the shaman said.

At once Wulfrik leapt to his feet, his powerful hands closing upon the Kurgan’s shoulders in a fierce grip. ‘You dare mock me?’ he roared.

The shaman’s expression remained placid. ‘I did not journey across the Wastes simply for a jest,’ he said. He waited until Wulfrik removed his hands before continuing.

‘As I said, your fame has spread even to the campfires of the Tokmars. We have heard of the feats of the mighty Wulfrik, doomed to wander the world forever, fighting to prove himself to the gods.’

‘You said you could break the curse,’ Wulfrik reminded the shaman in a threatening growl.

Zarnath smiled at him. ‘Indeed, such knowledge is known to me. It is within my power to break the doom the gods have placed upon you.’

‘Then do so,’ Wulfrik snarled impatiently. He did not believe the Kurgan’s claims, but he could not quell the stirrings of hope rising within him.

The shaman spread his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘It is not so easy. There are things I must have to perform the ritual that will free you. Things, I fear, only you can provide me.’

‘He’s trying to play you for a fool,’ Sigvatr warned Wulfrik. ‘He wants you to steal some treasure for him and then he’ll be gone like a lamb in a wolf’s den.’

‘I could have found thieves among my own people,’ Zarnath said, fixing his eerie gaze on Sigvatr. Despite his stubborn effort, the old warrior could not help but turn away. A slight smile pulled at Zarnath’s face as he won the contest of wills. ‘But to seize the artefacts I must have to free Wulfrik from his doom will require a great hero.’

‘And if you do not mean to run off with these artefacts, what price is it you expect to earn?’ Sigvatr persisted.

Zarnath stood straight, his eyes hooded as he announced the reward he would have from Wulfrik for ending the curse. ‘I want the Seafang,’ he told the warriors.

Sigvatr sputtered in outrage, his hand closing about the Tilean poniard thrust beneath his belt. He would have lunged at the Kurgan for making such an outrageous claim but for the hand Wulfrik pressed against him.

‘You demand a high price,’ Wulfrik growled at the shaman. ‘There is no ship in the world as fine as the Seafang. The magic bound into her is the mightiest I have ever seen. It would cause me great pain to part with her.’

‘Would your curse cause you any less pain?’ Zarnath objected. ‘Free from the curse of the gods, you would not need the Seafang’s magic as you do now. There would be no more hunts to the hinterlands of the world whenever the gods demanded it. You would be released from that claim upon you.’

‘Very well,’ Wulfrik told the Kurgan. The very immensity of the price Zarnath demanded gave the champion cause to believe he could do what he claimed to do. ‘You end my curse and the Seafang is yours.’

Sigvatr gasped in shock. ‘Wulfrik! Do not provoke the gods further by trying to cheat them!’

Wulfrik rounded on his friend, fury burning in his eyes. ‘I will do what I must to free myself from this curse!’ he growled. ‘If that means cheating the gods, then that is what I will do!’

‘The Kurgan is playing you for a fool,’ insisted Sigvatr. ‘At least confer with Agnarr about this. See what one of our own seers has to say about it. Don’t blindly accept the word of an outlander shaman!’

Still fuming, Wulfrik settled back into his seat. He had to admit that Sigvatr was right. It wasn’t smart to provoke the gods without good reason. He would speak with Agnarr about Zarnath’s claim.

‘My condolences,’ Zarnath said, his voice humble. The shaman bowed to the two warriors. ‘Gathered here to watch your contest, you have not heard. The seer Agnarr is dead. The imp he kept broke free of its cage and turned upon him. When his neighbours found him, the daemon had chewed his face right down to the bone.

‘All it left of him were his eyes.’

Three days after the trials of the Wolf Forest, the Seafang sailed. A great crowd gathered to watch the longship leave. But no eyes watched her departure more keenly than those studying her from atop the now-deserted plateau of the Bloodfield.

King Viglundr smiled as the ship sailed down the fjord and at last was lost to sight. Still smiling, he turned to the Aesling prince standing at his side.

‘I will begin preparations for the wedding,’ Viglundr told the prince.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Seafang had just slipped out of sight of Ormskaro when Wulfrik called Zarnath to him. The hero didn’t care to exhibit the manner in which his ship made its unnatural voyages lest such powerful magic frighten the Sarls and deny him a safe port on his return. Or lest such a display would excite the desire of some watching sorcerer to claim the Seafang for his own. Such an ambition had drawn a Kurgan shaman across half the northern Wastes. Wulfrik knew there would be others much nearer to home who would be no less interested in his ship.

The secret of the Seafang was his alone. No one else knew how to bind it to his will and bring it safely through the realm of the gods. Wulfrik intended to keep it that way.

‘Hold out your hand, Kurgan,’ Wulfrik told Zarnath as he joined the champion at the prow of the ship. ‘I need a bit of your blood.’ The hero drew a steel dagger from his belt.

Zarnath stared hard at Wulfrik, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. He started to back away, but found his retreat cut off by the brawny figures of Broendulf and Kaetill. The shaman’s hands clenched tight about his staff, his head turning from side to side like a trapped beast.

‘You wanted to know how Wulfrik controls the ship,’ Sigvatr said from where he stood beside the champion. ‘First he must see the quality of your blood. It’s that, or we throw you over the side right now.’

His face pulled into a sour expression, his hands still clutched tightly about his staff, Zarnath relented and approached the champion. Sigvatr grabbed the Kurgan’s left hand, pulling it free from the staff. Before the shaman could pull back, Wulfrik brought the edge of the knife slashing across his palm. Zarnath gasped in alarm, wrenching his injured hand from the champion.

‘Now let the ship taste your blood,’ Wulfrik said, pointing at the carved figurehead. ‘Let the Seafang know what kind of man sails upon her.’

For a moment, Zarnath hesitated, his eyes burning like cobalt fires. He glared at Wulfrik and Sigvatr, searching their faces for any hint of duplicity. The sound of steel being drawn behind him alerted him to the uneasiness of the crew. A normal man displaying fear wouldn’t have disturbed them, but they were uneasy when that man was a shaman with magical powers they didn’t understand. They would react quickly and brutally if Zarnath made a wrong move now.

‘You can still choose the sea,’ said Wulfrik. ‘It is a long swim back to Ormskaro, but even a Kurgan should be able to manage it.’

Zarnath scowled at the jest, but Wulfrik’s taunt eased his mind somewhat. Timidly the shaman strode to the wooden dragon. A last suspicious look at Wulfrik, and he slapped his bleeding hand down upon the dragon’s snout. He let his palm rest there for only an instant, then hurriedly backed away. Wulfrik and the older members of his crew watched the figurehead carefully as it absorbed the shaman’s blood.

‘Bind your hand, outlander,’ Wulfrik said. ‘I won’t need any more of your blood. At least not today.’

Wulfrik nodded his head to Sigvatr. The old warrior began barking orders at the crew, repeating the ritual Zarnath had just undergone. Zarnath watched the process as he bound a strip of leather across his bleeding palm. It did not take the shaman long to deduce the sort of rite he had undergone.

‘Blood magic,’ Zarnath hissed under his breath, a shudder passing through him. He glowered at Wulfrik. ‘It is a blood ritual,’ he repeated.

Wulfrik kept his eyes on the crewmen as they slowly stepped to the figurehead and clapped their hands onto its snarling face. ‘I know that it is magic that can only be evoked through blood,’ he answered. ‘You wanted the secret of the Seafang’s power, there it is.’

Zarnath studied the warriors as they marched to the wooden dragon and came away again. ‘But nothing is happening. It is doing nothing with their blood. I would be able to sense it if the ship was drawing power from them.’

‘It is well for them that it is so,’ Wulfrik said. ‘If the ship showed interest in any man’s blood, I would gut him like a dog. No ship can serve two captains. That is even more true for the Seafang than any other.’

The shaman nodded in understanding. ‘That is how you evoke the Seafang’s power. The ship responds to your blood, but only your blood. Perhaps because you are the one who killed Baga Yar.’

‘Maybe,’ agreed Wulfrik with a shrug. ‘I only know that I can send the ship through the veil between worlds and bring her out again wherever I command her to go. I do not know it is only my blood the ship wants. Hence this test at the start of each voyage.’

‘But it might be tied to your blood alone,’ Zarnath mused.

Wulfrik bared his fangs at the Kurgan. ‘You think you have made a poor bargain, sorcerer? Agreed to help me only so you can win a ship you can never use?’

Zarnath backed away from the champion’s threat, his hands closing reflexively about his jewelled staff. ‘No, no!’ protested the shaman. ‘Our compact remains. I will help you break your curse. After the Seafang is mine, there will be time enough to unlock the secrets of her enchantments.’

‘My men will be watching you, Zarnath,’ Wulfrik growled, unmoved by the Kurgan’s assurances of loyalty. He nodded his head to the longship’s mast. Perched in the rigging, his bow resting in his lap, his eyes fixed on the shaman, was the hunter Jokull. ‘The first sign of treachery, and they will kill you. Whatever magic you call, one of them will kill you. Unless I do it first.’

Wulfrik let the threat linger in the air, holding Zarnath’s eerie gaze this time. The shaman needed no further proof of the conviction behind his murderous oath.

‘Where are we sailing to?’ Wulfrik asked the shaman.

Zarnath smiled nervously, grateful for the change in subject. ‘The relic I require is a torc crafted from ruby. It is called the Smile of Sardiss, an ancient artefact of the Hung warlock-kings. For centuries it has fallen through the fingers of many owners, but for the last hundred years it has been worn by the dwarf lord Khorakk.’

Wulfrik lifted his hand, silencing the shaman. ‘I need to know only one thing, Kurgan: where this ship must sail.’

Zarnath bit his lip at the brash interruption, colour rising to his face. ‘Khorakk rules in a place called Dronangkul, a stronghold of the dwarf folk…’

The champion waited to hear no more. He brought his dagger slicing across his raised hand, then clenched his fist until beads of blood dripped through his fingers. With firm steps, he marched to the figurehead, slapping his hand upon the dragon’s snout. Grey smoke began to billow from the wooden jaws, quickly expanding into a thick fog which completely engulfed the ship.

‘This relic had better be where you say it is, sorcerer,’ Wulfrik warned as he bound his hand with a strip of cloth. ‘As you will soon see, there are worse seas where a man can be thrown overboard.’

The river upon which the Seafang found herself when she emerged from the fog was a stagnant, lifeless thing. Red water sloshed against the hull like warm syrup, clinging to the wood with tar-like streamers of muck. A filthy smell, like hot copper mixed with burning skin, assailed the noses of the northmen. The banks of the sluggish river were littered with jagged piles of slag, slimy bones and puddles of yellow filth.

Wulfrik pinched his nose against the stench and gazed out across the shores of the river. To the south as far as the eye could see was a vast marshland, its brambles and weeds twisted by the polluted waters of the river. To the north was a barren land of sand and rock. He turned about, seizing Zarnath by the front of his robe.

‘What trickery is this?’ the champion snarled. ‘I have seen the halls of the dwarf lords, made war against their thanes and taken from them both glory and gold! This stinking wasteland!’ He glared at the tainted river dirtying his ship with its loathsome touch. ‘No dwarf would live in such a place!’

‘But they do,’ insisted Zarnath, trying to free himself of Wulfrik’s choking hands. ‘This is the River Ruin. To the north is the Desolation of Azgorh, where dwell the dawi zharr.’

‘The fire dwarfs?’ The question came from Stefnir, a hulking axeman who had lost one eye and half of his face to a troll’s acid. Stefnir was one of the few Aeslings among the Seafang’s crew. ‘My people have had dealings with them. We trade skins and slaves to them in exchange for armour and weapons. They are a hard, cruel people and devious in their ways.’

Wulfrik laughed at the implied warning. ‘We were hardly going to ask them for the torc,’ he said as he released Zarnath. The hero nodded thoughtfully as the shaman massaged his bruised neck. ‘This dwarf who has the torc…’

‘Khorakk,’ the shaman said.

‘Khorakk. This place he lives in…’

‘Dronangkul,’ Zarnath supplied the name. ‘It means something like “fortress of iron” in the dwarf tongue.’

Wulfrik let his fangs show as he glared at the shaman. ‘I don’t want to know what it means, just where it is.’

The shaman studied the bleak landscape to the north. He could see some stunted hills in the distance. After a moment of consideration, he pointed his staff at the nearest of the hills. ‘There,’ he said.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Wulfrik told him.

‘Their fortress will be behind the hills,’ Zarnath assured the champion. ‘Even the dwarfs would have little stomach for the river’s stink. The hills would provide them shelter from any wind bearing the smell to them.’

‘That I can believe,’ Wulfrik said, clenching his nose tight again. He turned and bellowed at Sigvatr. ‘Half the men stay with the ship. The rest go with me inland.’

‘I’ll leave ten of the new men on the ship,’ Sigvatr said. ‘Kaetill can be in command until we get back.’

‘We?’ Wulfrik asked, raising an eyebrow.

Sigvatr smiled at his captain. ‘I’ve killed a lot of things in my time, but never a fire dwarf. I don’t want you bragging about how tough they are without seeing them for myself.’ The old warrior’s smile darkened and he darted a glance at Zarnath. ‘You should take him along too.’

The shaman glared daggers at Sigvatr. ‘I brought you here,’ Zarnath argued. ‘Getting the torc is your business.’

Wulfrik growled at the short Kurgan. ‘I’m hardly going to leave my ship in the hands of a sorcerer who has already told me he wants it for himself. No, Zarnath, you brought me here and now you’re going to stay right by my side. That way anything that happens to me, happens to you first.’

The Desolation of Azgorh lived up to its grisly name: a barren landscape of bleached sand and windswept rock, even the few patches of cactus which sprouted from the blasted earth were withered and sickly. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky, a fiery tyrant that was impossible to reconcile with the feeble light of the northern day. After the cold of Norsca and the freezing ravages they were subjected to in the Mountains of Mourn, the crew of the Seafang was ill-prepared for the infernal heat. Their skin burned, their faces darkening to a blistered red. This was no such land as any of them had seen before. It was a place damned by mortal and god alike, a blighted hell with neither mercy nor pity for those foolish enough to enter it.

Several times, Wulfrik considered slitting Zarnath’s throat and heading back for the ship. Only the hope the shaman had given him held him back. He had come this far. There would be time enough to settle with Zarnath after the curse was broken.

Jokull came dashing back through the ranks of Norscan warriors. The hunter, as usual, had been scouting ahead of the main group, studying the lay of the land. His excited manner made it clear he’d found something. Any hopes that he’d spotted the dwarf stronghold were dashed by his first words. ‘We’re not alone,’ Jokull said. ‘I found a few tracks in the dirt. Paw prints. Big ones,’ he added for emphasis.

‘Even the Hound of Khorne would find poor feeding here,’ Broendulf argued, overhearing the hunter’s report.

‘Look for yourself, then,’ Jokull snarled back. ‘Unless years of being pampered in Ormskaro have addled your eyes as well as your wits.’

Other warriors joined the argument, siding with Jokull or Broendulf as the mood took them. The speed and vehemence with which they entered the fight was evidence of how much the barren desert was preying upon their nerves. Wulfrik let them vent their anxiety. If it looked like someone might get killed, he’d put a stop to it.

Turning away from the arguing warriors, Wulfrik gazed across the windswept, rocky cliffs. They were weird, barren things, formed into towering hoodoos, soaring archways and flattened mesas. The dark shadows playing across the sides of the eccentric rock formations indicated unseen gullies and ravines cutting between them. Wulfrik could imagine the rat’s nest of dry canyons and caves worming their way between the eroded hills. It occurred to him that they might use the gullies to cross the wasteland unseen. If he had any definite idea where the dwarf stronghold was, he might risk getting lost among the rock pillars and barren hills in order to maintain the element of surprise.

As he looked across the weird cliffs, Wulfrik saw that the element of surprise was already lost. He saw the source of the tracks Jokull had found. Spread out across the span of one of the arches were three dark shapes. Eyes less sharp than those of the champion might have missed them, unable to tell them apart from the rock. To Wulfrik, however, they were clear enough: three great wolves, beasts the size of a pony. Each wolf had a rider upon its back. At such distance it was impossible to tell what sort of creatures they were, but Wulfrik knew goblins would often use huge wolves as steeds. If not for the stench of the river, he might have been able to pick their scent from the wind, though it was just as possible the goblins, or the animals they rode, were canny enough to keep downwind of their prey.

‘Jokull is right,’ Wulfrik’s stern growl silenced his arguing men. ‘We’re not alone.’ The hero indicated the distant shapes observing them from the cliff. It was only when the riders moved, perhaps made uneasy by the attention they were getting, that any of the Norscans spotted the watchers.

‘Who are they?’ Sigvatr wondered aloud.

‘Scavenging goblins,’ Njarvord spat. ‘Only their slinking kind go around riding on the backs of curs!’

‘Then we’d best make sure they don’t get a whiff of you,’ Haukr snickered. ‘They might smell that dog you were spending your gold on in Ormskaro.’

Njarvord balled his fist and made for the tattooed seaman. ‘Ilga’s twice the wench your mother is, you ship-rat!’

Haukr drew a curved fishing knife from his sleeve, arresting the big Baersonling’s advance. ‘I said she was,’ he chuckled. ‘My mother would have settled for silver to warm your bed.’

Sigvatr pressed between the two warriors, pushing them apart. ‘Enough!’ he snarled at them. ‘The smell of blood might be just the thing they need to bring them down on us.’

‘I doubt it,’ Arngeirr said. The one-legged reaver took a swallow of kvas from the Estalian brandy flask he carried. Wiping his stinging lips, he elaborated on his thought. ‘Any tribe of goblins living here can’t be doing too well. Goblins have little stomach for a fight unless they have numbers on their side. These lice might follow us, but only to see if we drop anything. They won’t attack.’

Wulfrik considered the one-legged reaver’s words, then shook his head. ‘We won’t count on that,’ he told his men. ‘Keep your shields ready and a hand near your blades. If they do decide to attack us, they’ll try to weaken us with arrows first. Form a shield wall if they do. Force the little rats to come in close.’

‘We should also watch for them to come from behind.’ The suggestion came from Tjorvi, the sneaky Graeling who had proven his cunning during the trials of the Wolf Forest. ‘There’s no place better to stab a man than where he isn’t looking,’ he explained when he felt the eyes of the other Norscans on him.

The attack came during the night. Wulfrik had seen their watchers a few times throughout the day, observing the Norscans from the high cliffs. He suspected there was an even bigger company of riders sticking to the gullies between the rocks. The lack of overt aggression might have eased another man into a sense of security. He could imagine some foolish southling being lulled into believing the riders were content simply to watch, that they offered no real menace.

Wulfrik knew better. He had fought the horse-nomads of the Hung and knew the treacherous fighting style of that faithless folk. The riders following them were only waiting for that moment when they would be at their most vulnerable. The attack would come during the night, when the Norscans made camp.

There was nothing he could do to curb the rise of the moons, but Wulfrik did his best to upset the plans of their enemies by ordering a forced march through the night. If the riders were timid, this unexpected change might be enough to send them slinking back to their lair.

In a way, the champion was pleased to find his enemies weren’t complete cowards.

With the moon of Mannslieb only half-full and its companion just an ugly splotch of sickly light upon the horizon, darkness held the Norscans in its black grip. Wulfrik snarled down any effort to light torches. He was more concerned about the light ruining the night vision of his men than the extra speed they could muster if they could see where they were going. He kept Jokull ahead of the column, hoping that the wily hunter could find some sign of their foes.

Even with such precautions, when the attack came, it came without warning. The silence of the night was suddenly broken by the thunderous howling of wolves from the darkness before them. It was the concentrated roar of an entire pack, a sound almost deafening in its fury. The cries of the beasts completely masked whatever noise the iron-headed arrows made as they came shooting out of the night. The first the Norscans were aware of the assault was when several men in the front ranks cried out in alarm.

Heavy armour and the poor archery of their foes protected Wulfrik’s men from the first volley. The poorly crafted arrows failed to pierce the chain hauberks and heavy hide armour of his warriors; only two were injured in the barrage. The Norscans left them where they fell, closing together and linking their shields to defend against a second volley.

Arrows clattered against the shield wall for several minutes. As the howling of the wolves faded, thin voices could be heard arguing in the darkness. They were strange, whispery voices, their words more like a nail scratching against a piece of pig iron than any human speech. Wulfrik could understand them, one benefit of the curse he’d brought upon himself.

The ambushers were arguing about what to do now that their volley of arrows had failed to terrify the humans and send them running. One gruff-voiced attacker was demanding that his comrades mount their wolves and break the shield wall with a concentrated charge. Wulfrik smiled as the chieftain tried to evade the accusation he wouldn’t be leading the charge by claiming he had to stay behind and make sure everything went according to plan. The argument persisted until there was a sharp cry and the most vocal voice raised against the chieftain was silenced.

‘Whatever they do,’ Wulfrik warned his warriors, ‘we hold our ground. Tjorvi! Jokull! Keep your eyes on the rear! This scum wants to push us back. I have a feeling that means they have friends waiting for us back there!’

The Norscans shifted position so the scouts Wulfrik had appointed could shift to the back of their formation. The two men had barely reached their posts when the wolves started howling again. A tremor ran through the ground as the ambushers charged the northmen.

Once again, arrows clattered against the heavy shields of the Norscans. This time, however, the missiles flew at them sporadically rather than in a concentrated volley. One of the warriors cried out as an arrow grazed his face, but otherwise the arrows failed to inflict any damage. Wulfrik called out to his men, warning them not to let the random fire distract them.

His warning had just been given when the first wave of their enemies rushed out of the darkness into the feeble moonlight. Wulfrik considered he had underestimated the size of the wolves when he judged them to be like ponies. The beasts were more on the order of full horses, their shaggy grey pelts clinging to lean, hungry frames. Foam dripped from their fangs, bloodlust blazing in their eyes, as they lunged at the humans. There was the crash of heavy bodies smashing against the shield wall, the growling fury of wild beasts as fangs bit into wood and steel, as claws scrabbled against armour.

Claws and fangs were not enough to break the Norscans’ defence. Even the impact of the huge wolves was rebuffed by the support of the men behind the front line of warriors, pushing their comrades back when they would have faltered.

No, claws and fangs were not enough to break the shield wall. But it was not claws and fangs alone that assaulted the men. A motley array of iron cudgels, axes and swords struck at the men while iron-tipped spears stabbed at them from above their shields.

Upon the backs of each great wolf was a grotesque rider. Wulfrik had underestimated the size of the wolves, now he found he had made the same mistake with their riders. They were the size of a man, though with a lean and snaky sort of build, far larger than the goblins he had thought them to be. There was an undeniable kinship to the small monsters though as these creatures shared the same green, leathery skin as the goblins Wulfrik had faced in the past. He might have taken them for orcs, but for the overall thinness of their limbs and the sharpness of their features.

Wulfrik brought his sword slashing down at the snarling face of one of the creatures. The blade bit through the leather cap it wore, crunching deep into the skull beneath. The monster’s face pulled into a rictus, exposing the sharp little fangs which filled its oversized mouth. The dying creature slumped against the back of its lupine mount as Wulfrik ripped his sword free. The wolf beneath the greenskin struggled to shrug the creature’s dead weight off its back, snapping at the dangling arms. It was only for an instant that the wolf was distracted, but it was enough for Wulfrik to stab the point of his weapon into the animal’s chest. The wolf yelped, leaping straight up, then crashed onto its side and flopped in the dust.

Almost immediately another rider rushed in to take the slain greenskin’s place. This time Wulfrik attacked the wolf first, dropping low and slashing at its hind legs as it pounced at the shield wall. His sword chopped clean through the beast’s leg, spilling both it and its rider to the earth. Wulfrik kicked the snapping jaws of the beast, then drove his sword across the neck of the greenskin struggling to climb out from under the wolf.

Hobgoblins! That was what these greenskins were. Wulfrik realised he had heard of these monsters from Kurgan traders. There were supposed to be a great many of them in the lands surrounding Cathay. Not as large or fierce as orcs, they were supposed to be cunning and sneaky, with a gift for dirty tricks and sneak attacks.

‘Jokull!’ Wulfrik roared. ‘Start loosing arrows to our rear!’

‘But I can’t see anything!’ the hunter objected.

‘Just do it!’ the champion shouted. He didn’t have time to waste explaining his reasoning. With two dying wolves and two dead hobgoblins at his feet, Wulfrik had drawn the attention of his attackers. Slinking cowards at heart, the hobgoblins made no effort to close with him. They would spur their wolves straight towards him, then loose arrows from their bows. The concentrated fire forced the champion to shelter behind his shield, ducking low as the iron-tipped missiles clattered against it.

Sharp, inhuman shrieks sounded from the rear of the Norscan column. They were ghastly, grating sounds, but Wulfrik could understand them. A second group of hobgoblins had been sneaking up on them in the darkness, using the charge of the wolf riders as a distraction to cover them. Clearly the chieftain’s plan had been to push the men back into whatever ambush the other group of hobgoblins had prepared. With the Norscans stubbornly holding their ground, however, the greenskins had abandoned their plan. They were too greedy for loot to abandon the attack though, and had left their places of concealment to steal upon the men unobserved. Jokull’s blind shots made them believe they had been seen.

As Tjorvi had said, stabbing unsuspecting men in the back was appealing to the greenskins. A straight fight wasn’t. Arguing and cursing, the second mob of hobgoblins retreated back into the darkness.

The cowardice of their comrades at first enraged the wolf riders. They redoubled their attack against the shield wall with such fury that two northmen were dragged down by the wolves and another was cut down by a hobgoblin axe. A horrible moment passed when it looked as though the greenskins might penetrate the wall.

Shouting a fierce war cry, Njarvord threw himself into the gap, laying about him with his blade. Broendulf rushed to the berserker’s side, guarding him with his shield as the hairy Baersonling hacked down his enemies. The craven hobgoblins, horrified by the bloodthirsty madness of the berserker, quailed before the assault. Savagely they kicked and slapped their bestial steeds, cursing and pleading with them to break off the attack.

Suddenly the night was banished by a brilliant, flaming light. Wolves yelped in pain and hobgoblins screamed in terror as a ball of glowing blue fire smashed down upon them from the darkened sky. Three wolves fled across the desert, their fur smouldering as they ran. Their burning riders writhed on the ground, wailing in agony.

Wulfrik risked a glance over his shoulder. The same blue light was blazing at the very centre of the Norscan formation. Zarnath held his jewelled staff high over his head, as though trying to thrust it through the sky. The stone set into its head was glowing with magical energies as the shaman invoked his sorcery. A second blazing ball of light hurtled down from the night sky, smashing into the faltering hobgoblin attack.

Hurling epithets on the heads of the northmen, the hobgoblins broke away. Their wolves whining in fear, the monsters vanished back into the night as suddenly as they had come. Behind them they left their dead and dying.

‘A fine trick,’ Wulfrik told Zarnath as he turned away from the shield wall.

The shaman slowly lowered his staff. There was sweat dripping from his forehead, blood dripping from his nose, but the Kurgan managed to smile in acknowledgement of the compliment.

‘You might have worked your magic sooner,’ snarled Sigvatr. The old warrior was tying a rag about a cut along his forearm. ‘These devils killed six of our men before they were driven off!’

‘He raises a point,’ Wulfrik said, fangs gleaming. ‘The hobgoblins were already beaten. A poor time to decide to enter the fray.’

There was challenge and suspicion in Wulfrik’s tone.

‘I could not be sure the monsters didn’t have a wizard of their own,’ Zarnath said. ‘I had to be ready in case they did. Only when their attack faltered was it clear to me they had no such help to draw upon.’

Wulfrik nodded, his anger appeased by the shaman’s reasoning. Sigvatr’s anger, however, was far from spent.

‘The attack ruins our chance of catching the dwarfs by surprise,’ the old reaver said. ‘Stefnir tells me the fire dwarfs use these creatures as soldiers. The ones that attacked us may have been a patrol from Dronangkul. Even now they’ll be riding back to tell their masters about us!’

Zarnath smiled and shook his head in disagreement. ‘Hobgoblins are sneaks and cowards by nature. The only things they respect are strength and fear. They serve the dwarfs because they fear them, not from any bonds of loyalty or blood. If they had defeated us, they would have crowed about their victory to their masters. But they lost here. The dawi zharr are famed for their cruelty, and their temper. No, these hobgoblins won’t report their failure. They’ll slink back to their holes and try to pretend this never happened.’

‘If you’re wrong, we’ll be walking into a trap,’ Sigvatr snarled.

‘Then we walk into a trap!’ Wulfrik told his friend. ‘And we’ll walk out again! If these dwarfs think they can keep me from what I want then they are bigger fools than the hobgoblins! I’ll spill every drop of their blood before I leave this place empty-handed!’

‘And what of our blood?’ Sigvatr demanded.

Wulfrik fixed him with a cold gaze. ‘To break this curse, I’d spill every drop of that as well.’

CHAPTER FIVE

A great gaping pit marked the site of Dronangkul, looking as though it had been gouged from the earth by a titan’s axe and then left to fester. The place could be smelled long before it could be seen, a fiery, metallic reek almost as bad as the stench of the River Ruin. Great towers of blackened basalt and walls of stone surrounded the approaches to the pit. A wide road, its course flanked by gibbets, marched down from the wastes beyond the stronghold to end at the huge iron gates which guarded the entrance to the site.

From their vantage point in the rocky hills overlooking Dronangkul, the northmen could see the layout of the dwarf outpost. The entire northern wall of the pit was given over to a vast open mine. An army of slaves attacked the wall, pounding away at it with hammers while sneering hobgoblins whipped them with lengths of chain. There didn’t seem to be any humans among the slaves, but rather a motley collection of goblins and orcs of every size and shape. Even Wulfrik had to grudgingly respect anyone tough enough to beat obedience into an orc.

Some small distance from the open mine squatted a huge stone building. Fluted towers rose from the roof of the structure, great chimneys that belched black smoke into the sky. Lines of slaves pushed heavy carts laden with ore into the building. Wulfrik decided it must be some kind of foundry, an observation reinforced by the copper flumes which emptied from one of the outer walls to flush out waste. The flumes disgorged their contents into a vast sump-pond. The slurry of industrial muck in the sump looked every bit as foul as the polluted river, with great blocks of slag jutting up from the morass and a green fog of noxious gas drifting just above the surface.

The dwarfs, at some point, had built dams to restrain the sump, but clearly had lost interest as the mine workings had expanded. A steady stream of pollution was sloshing over the lowest side of the pond, pouring down into the excavations below. A great, mucky pool of the slush was growing in the deepest part of the pit, a system of crude catwalks and wooden bridges criss-crossing the toxic lake. The hobgoblins who whipped slaves across these pathways had heavy rags tied across their faces and thick goggles over their eyes. Their charges, however, had to protect themselves as best they could by holding their breath and keeping only one eye open.

Wulfrik soon saw why the dwarfs had allowed the polluted lake to grow. Watching the lines of slaves being herded across the bridges, he saw the pit where they were held. Situated on the other side of the lake, any escape or revolt would have to use the bridges to have any chance of success. These points could be easily controlled from a few key positions and at each of these chokepoints a wooden tower had been raised. Hobgoblins stood guard in each tower, manning the ramshackle bolt-throwers mounted upon the roofs.

Turning away from the mine and slave pen, Wulfrik studied the upper tiers of the pit. A large area was given over to colourfully painted hide tents, looking like nothing so much as the bivouac of a Kurgan tribe. The bone-strewn kennels of giant wolves made it obvious the encampment belonged to nothing human. Still, the size of the camp surprised Wulfrik. He would have expected many more hobgoblins given the number of slaves down in the mine.

Above the hobgoblin camp, looming over it like the castle of a southling lord, were the homes of the dwarfs themselves. Guard towers of basalt flanked the causeway leading up from the foundry and the mine. The sentries Wulfrik could see patrolling the battlements were shorter than the hobgoblins but far broader and more powerfully built. They wore heavy armour crafted from scales of steel and heavy plates of bronze, their faces locked beneath metal helms. Even from a distance, Wulfrik could see the long black beards of the dwarfs, the hair curled into heavy ringlets. The hook-headed axes the dwarfs carried looked especially vicious, capable of lopping off a man’s arm as neatly as a dandelion-head.

Past the towers was a cramped cluster of stone buildings, crushed together as though their presence in the outpost had been an afterthought. Each of the buildings bore a bronze glyph above its entrance, each different from the next. The Gift of Tongues gave Wulfrik no facility to decipher writing; he was unable to decide if the bronze runes denoted the trade of the inhabitants, their clan allegiance or perhaps the mark of some guild affiliation. Between the clustered buildings there rose covered storehouses, their floors piled with iron ingots. Small groups of slaves with dwarf overseers worked in the storehouses, sometimes removing new ingots from carts drawn up from the foundry to pile onto the floor, at other times loading ingots into big wagons drawn by teams of black oxen. Once full, the wagons would slowly head for the outer gates of the stronghold, heading out along the road through the desert.

Towering over everything else in the outpost was the ziggurat: a huge structure masterfully crafted from immense blocks of basalt, adorned with runes cast in gold, its summit capped in spiked turrets of steel. For many minutes, Wulfrik watched the ziggurat, studying the squads of dwarf warriors marching from its bronze doors.

There was a great deal of activity in the stronghold, activity that boded ill for the Norscan’s quest. He turned his head and again considered the main gates of Dronangkul. Here the activity was even more distinct. Mobs of wolf riders were leaving the outpost, prowling back across the desert. Near the gates, he could see several dwarfs crucifying an especially large hobgoblin. As they finished their grisly labour, they lifted the pole to which the greenskin had been nailed and set it upright in a hole to one side of the road. A gang of hobgoblins pointed at the crucified prisoner and laughed at his fate. One of them ripped the leather cap from his head and threw it into the prisoner’s face. Then, with a flourish, he put on an extravagant iron helmet adorned with horns to replace the discarded cap.

‘So much for them not saying anything about us,’ Sigvatr observed, scowling at Zarnath.

‘Looks like one of them decided ratting out his chief was a good way to advance his own position,’ Broendulf said, gesturing at the scene playing out at the gates. He looked over at Wulfrik. ‘What do we do now?’

‘We go in,’ Wulfrik answered, eyes never leaving the dwarf citadel.

Sigvatr blinked in disbelief. ‘There’s no glory in suicide,’ he told Wulfrik. ‘They’re on the alert, waiting for us!’

Wulfrik shook his head. ‘I did not come this far to turn back,’ he warned his friend. ‘I’m going in there. I’m going to find this Khorakk and I’m going to take the torc from his corpse.’

‘They’re waiting for us!’ Sigvatr insisted.

‘No,’ Wulfrik corrected him. ‘They’re looking for us.’ He pointed at the large company of wolf riders loping off into the desert. ‘That lot is riding back to where we fought their friends. They’ll try to pick up our trail there. That gives us a day at least before they get there and then follow us back. While the wolf riders are gone so is the better part of their garrison.’

Stefnir frowned at the champion’s reasoning. ‘The dwarfs won’t fall as easily as their hobgoblins. I’ve seen them. They’re tough, nasty bastards who don’t run from a fight.’

Wulfrik grinned at the Aesling. ‘Then we’ll give them something else to fight.’ He turned and faced Broendulf. ‘You always said you were the best climber in Ormskaro,’ he told the huscarl. ‘Now you’ll have the chance to prove it. Take Jokull and a few others who think they can make the climb. There’s a crevice at the lip of the pit right over the slave pens.’

‘You want us to climb down and free the slaves?’ Broendulf asked. The Sarl looked doubtful of the idea. ‘What makes you think they’d help us? You can’t trust an orc.’

‘You can,’ Wulfrik told the fair-faced warrior. ‘You can trust an orc to charge right at his enemy and try to kill it.’

Sigvatr disapproved of the idea. ‘They’ll never make it past those watchtowers. And if they did, the dwarfs could just cut the bridges.’

Wulfrik patted his old friend’s shoulder. ‘Exactly!’ he boomed. ‘The dwarfs will have to cut the bridges! They’ve sent most of their hobgoblins off to look for us, so they’ll have to deal with the slaves themselves. Every dwarf that goes down to stop the orcs is one less standing in my way.’

‘Even if your plan works, we’d need to find Khorakk in a hurry,’ Sigvatr pointed out. ‘We have no idea where he is.’

‘But we do,’ Wulfrik assured Sigvatr. ‘He’ll be holed up in his citadel. I’ve been watching the dwarfs. The ziggurat is where they are all going to get their orders. If Khorakk’s the one running things here, then that’s where he is.’

‘Okay,’ persisted Sigvatr, ‘but how do you know he won’t head down into the mines when we free the slaves?’

‘What glory is there in killing slaves?’ Wulfrik asked. ‘Dwarfs are not so different from men in that regard. They thrive upon glory in battle. Khorakk will leave putting down the slaves to his underlings.’ He looked at Stefnir. ‘Does that sound right to you?’ The Aesling nodded his head in agreement.

‘That still leaves getting into the ziggurat,’ Arngeirr said. The reaver gestured with his false leg at the thick bronze doors guarding the outpost’s main gate. ‘We’d need a battering ram the size of the Seafang to break those down.’

‘I have something better than a battering ram,’ Wulfrik told him. He waved his hand in the direction of Zarnath.

The shaman had been sitting in silence since the discovery that his prediction about the hobgoblins had been wrong. Now he gave a sudden start as he felt all eyes fix upon him. His hands tightened about his staff as he rose to his feet. An azure glow burned in his widened eyes.

‘Time to make amends for your mistake, sorcerer,’ Wulfrik said.

Zarnath backed away, holding his staff in front of him as though to ward off a blow. Wulfrik laughed at his fright.

‘I need you to bring down yon gates,’ the champion told him, nodding at Dronangkul.

A look of horror swept over the shaman’s face. For an instant, his body trembled. After a moment, however, he composed himself. ‘You want me to use my magic to throw open the gates?’

‘If it is strong enough,’ Wulfrik growled. The shaman’s display of fear had diminished his confidence in Zarnath’s powers.

The Kurgan’s head bobbed excitedly. ‘Oh, yes! Yes!’ he assured Wulfrik. ‘I can bring down the gates! I can turn them into vapour and scatter them to the winds! I can melt them into the earth! I can–’

‘Just open them,’ Wulfrik said, turning away to explain the rest of his plan to his warriors.

He didn’t notice the smile that flickered across Zarnath’s face as he walked away.

Broendulf looked down on the slave pens from the edge of the pit and decided he’d never brag about his climbing skills again. The walls of the pit were jagged enough to offer plenty in the way of handholds, but they were weak and prone to crumbling as soon as any weight was put upon them. The pit hadn’t been eroded by any natural process but had been excavated by generations of slaves. The walls still bore the marks of their picks and were pock-marked with deep craters. Some sections had tiny holes drilled into them, scars left from where the dwarfs had been ready to blast instead of dig.

The fissure Wulfrik had selected from the hill proved to be an excellent choice. For much of its length it was curled in upon itself, hollowed out like a rotten log. If the bottom was as thin as the upper reaches of the tube, Broendulf thought they would be able to easily smash their way through the side once they reached the ground. The most important thing was the concealment the fissure offered. One of the watchtowers was uncomfortably close to where the men needed to go.

They had waited for night before sneaking to the pit, though Broendulf wasn’t certain how much help the dark was to them. The wolves would be able to smell them if they got far enough away from the chemical reek of the sump, and the hobgoblins seemed more than capable of seeing in the dark. The dwarfs might have been a bit less used to the darkness though, although the evidence of this made Broendulf’s skin crawl. From the towers guarding the causeway and the main gates of the stronghold, thick rays of light emanated, bursting from huge eyes of frosted glass. He could see the dwarfs working the weird devices. The eyes were fastened to steel posts which the dwarfs would pivot to bring the glaring beam of light swinging around. Whatever the rays struck was illuminated as though caught beneath the sun. Throughout the long march across the desert, Stefnir had regaled them with stories about the devilish machines the dwarfs built. Now Broendulf was prepared to believe the Aesling’s tales.

‘Jokull, the rope,’ Broendulf whispered to the hunter. They’d managed to avoid the few hobgoblins they’d seen patrolling the edge of the pit, but there was no reason to think there weren’t more they hadn’t spotted. The huscarl took the rope from Jokull and began tying it fast about his own waist. Grimly he checked the tightness of his knots, then tossed the end of the rope back to Jokull. ‘Loop it about yourselves,’ he told the other warriors. ‘Measure out five feet of slack. As we climb down, each man goes one at a time and only as far as the slack allows. If one man loses his grip, the others will be able to stop his fall.’

Arngeirr quietly pounded a steel stake into the ground, winding the tail of the rope about it and making it fast with a complicated seaman’s knot. The one-legged reaver hobbled over to the edge of the pit. ‘A fair way down,’ he said, spitting over the side.

‘Too late to turn back now,’ Broendulf chastised him. He’d argued with Arngeirr to stay with Wulfrik’s men, but the reaver had insisted climbing down a cliff wouldn’t be half as hard as shimmying up a mainmast in a storm. Moreover, he objected to Broendulf’s insistence that his sword accompany the huscarl into the pit unless he went with it. Arngeirr’s kraken-tooth blade was the keenest among the crew, capable of shearing through solid rock. Broendulf wanted that blade with him in case the hobgoblins weren’t obliging enough to give him the keys to the slave chains.

Broendulf tugged at the rope again, testing how securely the stake held. Nodding in approval, he turned to lead the descent into the fissure.

A sudden crimson flash filled the sky, freezing Broendulf where he was. For a terrible moment, he thought Zarnath had set his magic against the gates too soon. Looking in the direction of the dwarf settlement, however, he discovered his mistake. Cold dread drained all of the colour from his face.

Above the ziggurat, blazing in the night sky, a monstrous flaming head hung suspended. Broendulf could pick out gigantic horns and a long beard and eyes that burned like dragonfire. A terrible voice boomed across the sky, its words crashing like thunder against their ears. He couldn’t understand what the voice said, but he didn’t need to to know fear.

‘Hashut,’ Jokull whispered, recalling the name Stefnir had given for the god of the dawi zharr.

The hunter’s terror firmed Broendulf’s resolve. He glared back at the fiery head. ‘Our gods are stronger,’ he said, curling his fingers into the sign of Tchar the Trickster. As he did, the giant, ghostly head vanished, disappearing as suddenly as it had sprung into existence.

Below, the pit echoed with the terrified wails of goblins and orcs. The clamour boded ill for the success of their mission. They might free the slaves only to find them too frightened to fight their masters. Broendulf shook his head in disgust. Such was a problem he could worry about later. For now, the wailing provided a perfect cover for any noise they might make in their descent.

The climb down into the pit was a tense struggle to maintain both stealth and speed. Throughout the first part of the climb, Broendulf kept expecting the weird light-casters on the towers to shift in their direction, catching them helpless in the open. If that happened, there would be no place to hide. They would be left with the grisly choice of trying to climb back and no doubt being shot down by the arrows of the hobgoblins, or dropping into the pit and breaking their necks.

Broendulf gave thanks to his ancestors that the eerie beams of light never shifted in their direction. The dwarfs were more interested in illuminating the slave pens and the mine itself than searching the walls of the pit. The huscarl was struck by the idea that the dwarfs were so used to the idea of slaves trying to break out of the stronghold that the concept of someone trying to break in was alien to them. He wondered if perhaps the thought had occurred to Wulfrik and if the hero hadn’t based his entire strategy upon it. He knew the sudden, impulsive way the champion’s mind worked, but there was usually a foundation of strategy involved in his decisions.

The northmen felt marginally safer once they had descended to that part of the fissure protected by the outward-curving side of the wall. At least the threat of being caught by one of the beams was removed. In its place, however, they found the increased danger posed by the walls themselves. The rock here was even worse than that above, flaking and crumbling at the slightest touch. Several times one of the Norscans lost his hold as the wall disintegrated beneath his fingers, only the rope binding him to his fellows preventing a headlong plummet to the floor of the pit.

Each time they knocked loose a few stones and sent them clattering down into the pit, the northmen froze. Almost timidly they waited to hear the whispery voices of hobgoblins raised in alarm. No cries answered the cascade of rocks, however. Either the wailing of the slaves was enough to drown out the noise or the walls were in such bad shape that loose stones rattling down into the pit were a common enough occurrence that the hobgoblins took no interest.

It was with a sense of relief that Broendulf reached the bottom and untied himself from the line. Soon the rest of the warriors joined him at the base of the fissure, cramping the narrow cavity. There was a small opening at the base of the hollow tube, just big enough that the Norscans could crawl through. Jokull took the lead, worming his way under the lip of rock and out into the pit. A long moment passed before the hunter tugged on the rope, giving his comrades the all-clear.

Broendulf and the other warriors hurried to join Jokull, Arngeirr awkwardly bringing up the rear, his bone leg held out stiffly as he crawled. The men knew how long it had taken them to climb down the fissure. Wulfrik was depending on the cover of night to sneak up to the outpost’s walls and the distraction of the freed slaves to cover his own attack. Over an hour had already been spent making the descent, time the warriors could ill afford. Broendulf was almost thankful he couldn’t see the horizon from the bottom of the pit, fearful that even now the first glow of dawn might be rising in the east.

The men quickly took stock of their surroundings. The fissure was situated in a particularly dilapidated section of the pit, the ground strewn with rocks and boulders that had fallen from the walls, confirming Broendulf’s suspicion that falling rocks were no novelty to the denizens of the pit. Bleached bones protruding from beneath some of the bigger rocks told why slaves were no longer kept in this area.

Creeping among the rocks, the Norscans studied the slave pen. Broendulf couldn’t decide if the slaves numbered in the hundreds or the thousands, so tightly were they herded together. The area in which they were kept was so restricted the slaves didn’t have room to sit, but were forced to remain standing at all times, leaning upon each other when sleep overcame them. They were mostly orcs, huge ape-like greenskins with ugly, fanged faces and massive knots of muscle, though a not inconsiderable number of goblins were also scattered amongst the herd. These small monsters, similar to the hobgoblins but about half their size, tried their best to keep from being trampled by the big orcs.

Iron chains circled the left ankle of each slave. A hundred slaves might be shackled to a single chain, the long coffle doubling back upon itself so that the chain formed a long loop. Both ends of the chain were secured to a steel plate bolted to an enormous block of basalt. Looking at the black block of stone, Broendulf judged there must be a dozen such chains fastened to it.

Only a few hobgoblins monitored the slaves, keeping close to the block of basalt. Perched atop the rock, sprawled upon a high-backed chair, was the master of the slave pens. Broendulf had fought dwarfs before, but never had he seen one as ugly and vicious-looking as the villainous creature sitting in the chair. He was dusky-skinned, with his black beard pulled into long coils and festooned with the severed ears of goblins and orcs. His face was stamped with the marks of cruelty and avarice, his mouth distorted by the bestial tusks jutting from his lower jaw. He wore a suit of scale armour, a mesh of interlinked bronze that resembled the skin of a fish. Across the dwarf’s lap rested a murderous-looking device with a wide, bowl-like mouth attached to a slender wooden stock. Broendulf had seen the guns of other dwarfs and recognised the object as being some sort of kindred weapon.

‘If anyone has the keys, it’ll be Ear-taker there,’ Arngeirr said.

Broendulf nodded in agreement. ‘Then we’ll just have to make sure he’s the first to die.’ He looked over at Jokull, nodding at the hunter’s bow. ‘Think you can hit him from here?’

Jokull stared intently at the dwarf slave master, gauging the distance. ‘I think so,’ he decided.

Broendulf looked anxiously at the dark sky overhead. How much time did they have left, he wondered? Grimly he shook his head. He didn’t know. That meant he had to assume the worst.

‘Send him to his inbred ancestors,’ Broendulf growled.

Jokull lifted his bow, aimed and loosed in one smooth motion. The arrow sped straight and true, but even as it streaked for the dwarf’s head, the slave master was leaning forwards to bark an order to one of the hobgoblins. Instead of piercing the dwarf’s skull, the arrow glanced off the steel skullcap he wore.

Instantly the dwarf was dropping down from his seat, crashing to the ground beside the boulder. Frantically he glanced in every direction, trying to discover from where the attack had come. His eyes narrowed with fury when he saw the Norscans hiding among the rocks. Spitting some curse in his own guttural language, the dwarf raised his weapon, pointing the wide mouth at the men.

There was a loud crack followed by a thunderous roar and a brilliant flash of light. Broendulf winced in pain as he felt his arms and face torn by what felt like a fistful of gravel. He could see that Jokull and the others were likewise scratched by the blast. The huscarl snickered at the sorry results of the dwarf’s attack. He didn’t understand how the force of the shot had spread out over the distance or the havoc the blunderbuss could cause at close quarters.

Boldly, Broendulf emerged from the rocks and charged at the dwarf. The other Norscans followed his example, shouting a fierce war cry.

The slave master smiled at the rushing humans. Savagely he snapped orders to his hobgoblins, punctuating the command with a particularly violent threat. Reluctantly, the hobgoblins drew their weapons and ran forwards to intercept the northmen.

His face still twisted with sadistic anticipation, the dwarf hurriedly began pouring powder and shot down the muzzle of his blunderbuss. The hobgoblins would buy him the time he needed to recharge the weapon.

This time the humans would be in a better position to appreciate its performance.

Wulfrik glared up at the black walls of Dronangkul. If he could have burned a hole through the thick basalt with his eyes, the entire stronghold would have come crashing down. Locked away inside the fortress was something he thought he’d never have again.

Hope.

The champion watched the sentries patrolling behind the spiked battlements with a murderous eye. Up close he could appreciate the degeneracy of these dwarfs. They were twisted, vile caricatures of the dwarfs he had fought against in the Worlds Edge Mountains. Where the other dwarfs had displayed a martial pride the Norscan could respect, these dark kindred had a sneaky, duplicitous air about them. Observing the dwarf warriors on the walls, Wulfrik could see that they handled their weapons capably enough, allowing their heavy axes to rest against their shoulders in a fashion which was a perfect balance between comfort and readiness, but there was an emotionless precision to their motions, like a clockwork toy from Kraka Drak. Theirs was a skill at arms born from years of drill and training, not from a life on the battlefield.

At the same time, Wulfrik would not make the mistake of thinking these creatures to be timid and untried after the fashion of southling soldiers. Their scaly armour was festooned with all manner of grisly trophies, from severed ears to mummified hands. Many of the dwarfs wore helms that appeared to be bronzed skulls. No, these were no strangers to death. Far from it. The fiends appeared to revel in death with sadistic enthusiasm. But there was a difference between facing a worthy enemy in a fray and slaughtering vanquished foes. Wulfrik judged these dwarfs had little experience with the former.

Certainly they were arrogant in their might. After dark, the Norscans had crept through the desert to within a few hundred yards of the stronghold. In all that time, they had encountered only a few easily dispatched hobgoblins patrolling outside the gates. The dwarfs themselves did not stir from their fortress, so secure in their minds that they left such chores to their lazy minions. Even the weird daemon-lights mounted on the towers never strayed beyond the stronghold, the dwarfs directing their rays instead down into the mine and slave pit.

The dwarfs could not conceive an enemy attacking them, and that was the great weakness Wulfrik intended to exploit. By the time the dwarfs were fully aware of their mistake, Khorakk would be dead and his torc well on its way back to the Seafang.

‘Your sorcery had better be strong enough, Kurgan,’ Wulfrik growled at Zarnath. He pointed at the immense gates. The northmen were stretched out across the desert, their bellies in the sand. Zarnath was forced to lift his head to follow Wulfrik’s gesture.

‘My power is equal to the task,’ the shaman hissed back. ‘After that, it is your sword that will be tested.’

‘You think we will leave you out here while we do all the fighting?’ Sigvatr scoffed. ‘No, witch-father, you’ll be right there with us.’ The old warrior emphasised his point by letting his hand close about the hilt of his blade.

The shaman’s eyes crackled with blue light, glowing in the darkness as anger flared up inside him. ‘Then we had better pray your friends have released the slaves. We will have no chance at all if the dwarfs are not busy elsewhere.’

‘Broendulf will not fail me,’ Wulfrik said. ‘He knows I will feed his spleen to the vultures if he does.’

The champion’s menacing words seemed to provoke a response from the denizens of Dronangkul. The northmen turned their faces from the stronghold as a fiery light blazed into life above the black ziggurat. When they looked back, a ghostly head, gigantic and formed of swirling flame, glowered from the night sky. A thunderous voice boomed down from the heavens, sending icy fingers of fear coursing through the hearts of the warriors.

Wulfrik felt his stomach clench in terror. He had heard Stefnir’s stories about Hashut, the Dark Father of the dawi zharr. Alone among his men, he could understand the harsh words the thundering voice spoke: I watch what you do.

No wonder the dwarfs were so confident behind their walls! They were protected by their dark god! Against mortals and monsters, daemons and wraiths, Wulfrik had proven his valour and his courage, but what hope did he have against a god?

Anger roared through Wulfrik’s body. What hope did he have? The only hope, the hope of breaking the curse that kept from him all that he desired! Other gods had inflicted the curse upon him; he would not let another deny him his only chance of escaping his doom.

‘Dark Father of the fire dwarfs!’ Wulfrik bellowed at the fiery phantom. ‘I am Wulfrik, and I will cut your burning eyes from your face! Your children are greedy maggots and your lands are not fit for an ox to shit in! I defy you, you burned-out gargoyle! Here stands a man, and he dares you to stand in his way if you have the–’

Sigvatr pulled at Wulfrik’s leg, trying to drag his friend back to the ground. He could not understand the words the champion was shouting, for they were uttered in the same harsh speech as that which the voice of thunder had spoken, but he could tell from the tone the sort of things the hero was saying. Nothing, beast or man, could fail to rise to Wulfrik’s challenges when they were made. Now, his friend’s despair and pride had caused him to challenge a god!

The other northmen were equally aware of what their leader was doing and their horror was no less than that of Sigvatr. Two men rose to their feet and sprinted across the desert in pure terror. Njarvord bowed his head and commended his spirit to his ancestors. Haukr pulled a knife from his boot and began to crawl towards Wulfrik, murderous determination in his eyes.

After the apparition spoke, a great wailing sound rose from Dronangkul, the sound of thousands of voices moaning in fear. It was a frightening sound in its own right. The Norscans knew the voices came from the slaves of the dwarfs. Anything that could make an orc cry out in terror was something a man would do well to fear.

Wulfrik relented in his blasphemous calls. At first, his warriors thought that even the champion had been struck dumb with fear. Then they thought that the Dark Father had answered his challenge, striking the hero’s mind with madness.

Wulfrik threw back his head and laughed, laughed until it seemed his voice must crack. The champion spat into the dust as he watched the fiery head fade from the night sky. More frightened for his friend than before, Sigvatr tugged at Wulfrik’s leg. The hero kicked at him, forcing him to let go.

‘Sheep,’ Wulfrik growled, staring angrily at his men. ‘You should all go back to your mothers and leave the fighting to those worthy of calling themselves warriors!’ He gestured angrily at the ziggurat and the empty sky above it. ‘Do you think that was their god? Are you all such fools? It was a trick! Some foolishness these devils have concocted to frighten orcs and goblins! And you vermin are no better,’ he added with a snarl.

The champion’s insults made the northmen feel ashamed, as he knew the hard words would. Shame would make them forget fear. From shame would grow anger, anger against those who had tricked them. Wulfrik wanted that anger, for he would use it to slaughter his way to Khorakk’s throat.

He did not bother to tell his warriors why he knew the vision was a lie. Wulfrik did not think they would be reassured if he told them he knew the head was some kind of trick only because the god did not answer his challenge.

Zarnath lifted himself off the ground, brushing the dirt from his clothes. ‘Yes, it was a trick,’ he said, tapping his forehead with a long finger. ‘I would know if it was a real sending from the gods. The vision was false, a trick and a lie! The dwarfs have devil-lamps upon the ziggurat they point into the sky to create the semblance of their god and a great bronze horn through which they create his voice.’

‘That information might have been nice to know before I soiled myself,’ Stefnir snarled. For a moment, the Aesling looked ready to attack the shaman, but the Kurgan’s eyes were glowing again and such an overt reminder of his sorcery made the warrior think twice.

‘What if Broendulf doesn’t know it’s a trick?’ Sigvatr wondered aloud. ‘If they don’t free the slaves, we won’t have our diversion.’

Wulfrik continued to glare at the ziggurat. ‘Then we won’t have our diversion,’ he hissed through clenched fangs.

CHAPTER SIX

Broendulf drove his sword through the chest of a snarling hobgoblin, then pushed the squirming carcass off the blade with his foot. As soon as the corpse was free, he spun around and blocked the hooked dagger of another hobgoblin. The slinking cowards had an almost preternatural ability to creep up on a man from behind, as the huscarl’s scarred armour could attest. The would-be backstabber bared its yellowed teeth at the warrior and tried to sink a second dagger into Broendulf’s belly.

The Norscan grabbed the hobgoblin’s wrist before the blade could reach him. He strained with his enemy for a moment, then caught a sudden motion from the corner of his eye. Snarling at the knife-wielding greenskin, Broendulf twisted his body to the side. Without warning, he released the hobgoblin’s wrist. The creature yelped in surprise as it suddenly lurched forwards. The dagger sank up to the hilt in the gut of a second hobgoblin, the monster Broendulf had spotted trying to circle around and brain him from behind with an iron club. While the fratricidal hobgoblin stared in surprise at its dying comrade, the northman smashed his knee into its back. The hobgoblin spilled to the ground, cracking its jaw against the helm of the greenskin it had killed. Before the stunned creature could rise, Broendulf split its skull.

Around him, the fight was starting to peter out. The hobgoblins, used to bullying half-starved slaves restrained by chains, didn’t have the stomach for a real fight. They would swarm over the northmen, then desert their comrades when the fighting went bad. A half-dozen of the monsters were on the ground already, with several more sneaking off into the rocks to lick their wounds. The rest wouldn’t last much longer.

Vargr, a stout Sarl axeman, lopped the arm off one of the hobgoblins fighting him, laughing like a madman as dark blood sprayed across his face. The grim sight was too much for the other two hobgoblins opposing him. Almost falling over each other, the greenskins fled. Vargr shook his axe at them and charged in pursuit.

Broendulf started to run after the northman, but some premonition of danger made him delay. The hobgoblins were running back towards the basalt block. He could see the dwarf slave master standing at the base of the rock, the wide-mouthed gun raised to his shoulder. The huscarl shouted a warning to Vargr.

The warning came too late. Again there sounded the crack and boom of the dwarf’s weapon. This time, however, the burst of shrapnel found a much closer target. The two hobgoblins and the man chasing them were knocked off their feet, hurled back as though smashed by a giant’s fist. Their bodies crashed to the ground in tatters, their flesh shredded by the mass of shot fired by the blunderbuss.

The dwarf laughed heartily at the gory spectacle, then pulled the powder horn from his belt. His eyes narrowed with disgust when he saw how few of his hobgoblins were still in the fight. Cursing, he threw down his blunderbuss and turned to flee before the vengeful Norscans could catch him.

An arrow whistled out from the rocks and stabbed through the slave master’s knee as he turned. The dwarf crashed to the ground, grabbing his leg in pain. He shouted for his hobgoblins to help him, but most of the wretches had already fled.

Ripping a curved scimitar from his belt, the dwarf lunged at the first northman he saw. The slave master’s crippled knee gave out as he put weight on it and he fell, the outflung scimitar scraping against his enemy’s leg.

Arngeirr chuckled gruesomely, tapping the morbid length of carved bone attached to his hip. ‘You’re too late,’ he told the dwarf. ‘There’s nothing there.’ Still chuckling, he brought the razored edge of his blade shearing through the dwarf’s back. The kraken-tooth sword bit clean through armour, flesh and bone.

The sight of the slave master’s body being cut in half was too much for the few hobgoblins still lurking about. Throwing down their weapons, the craven creatures dashed for the bridges, shrieking an alarm to the watchtowers.

‘We don’t have much time,’ Broendulf warned Arngeirr as he ran to the reaver’s side. The huscarl dropped down beside the slave master, searching the dwarf’s body for anything that looked like a key.

‘Even if you find one, there’s no place to put it,’ Arngeirr said. He gestured at the basalt block with his sword. The heavy chains were bolted into a weird, box-like mechanism with a complicated arrangement of levers. On his voyages, Arngeirr had once seen a puzzle box a Hung raider had stolen from a Cathayan trader. The device fastened to the chains looked even more complex.

Broendulf smashed his fist into the dead slave master’s face. ‘Crow God rot all these damn dwarfs!’ he snarled in frustration. ‘We don’t have time to play games!’ His eyes narrowed as he looked at the chains. ‘Think you can cut through those?’

Arngeirr thrust the point of his sword into the ground. He spat into his palm and rubbed his hands together, moistening them before taking up his blade again. ‘Just watch me.’

The kraken-tooth blade struck the heavy chains just above the devilish puzzle lock. Two of them snapped under the blow. Broendulf cried out in triumph. Arngeirr braced his feet and aimed another blow at the chains.

Across the slave pit, the orcs and goblins watched the northmen in silence. Terror of the fiery god of the dwarfs was still stamped upon their brutish faces. Many of them glanced anxiously up at the ziggurat, as though expecting the head of Hashut to blaze up into life again and smite the little men attacking the chains.

‘They don’t exactly seem grateful,’ Jokull commented, joining the other northmen. The hunter held his bow at the ready, but it was towards the bridges that he kept the weapon aimed. The thin, whispery voices of hobgoblins could be faintly heard. It would only be a matter of time before the creatures gathered enough reinforcements to dare a return to the pit.

‘Aye,’ Broendulf cursed. ‘The dwarfs have whipped all the fight out of them.’

More chains snapped as Arngeirr continued to chop at them. The men could hear them rattle as they fell slack. In the more distant parts of the slave pit, they could hear thick, guttural voices shouting. The packed mob of greenskins shifted, moving with the mindless surge of a herd of sheep. Through the press of goblins and orcs, several huge brutes swaggered.

‘Looks like a few of them don’t think so,’ Jokull said as the monsters approached the basalt block. They were not unlike the orcs, big apish creatures with muscular builds, short legs and long arms. Only a stump of a neck supported their thick-skulled heads, massive jaws jutting out from their inhuman faces. There was a gleam of murderous intelligence in the beady eyes of the huge brutes, something that set them apart from the frightened herd of slaves as much as their leathery black skin.

The black orcs stared at the men who had freed them. For a tense moment, the Norscans thought the monsters would attack. As Jokull had said, gratitude wasn’t exactly something greenskins were known for. The dark-skinned beasts grunted to each other in their savage tongue. Broendulf wished Wulfrik had come with them, if only to understand what the orcs were saying.

One of the black orcs stomped towards Arngeirr. Before the one-legged northman could react, the orc planted a huge hand against his chest and shoved him away from the basalt block. The reaver half-raised his sword to defend himself as he staggered back. The black orc grinned back at him, almost daring him to attack. A sharp bark from one of the other black orcs made the brute desist. Sullenly, the monster turned to the block. Its powerful hands closed upon those chains Arngeirr had not broken.

Broendulf watched in amazement as the black orc snapped the iron chain with its bare hands. The brute didn’t even pause to draw in breath after it broke the chain, but instead leaned over a second and repeated the process.

A shadow loomed over Broendulf. The huscarl turned his head to find the biggest of the black orcs standing over him. The monster’s eyes stared into his own, an unmistakable challenge in the orc’s gaze. Broendulf swallowed his pride and backed away from the brute. It wasn’t fear but practicality that made the northman retreat. They were in the pit to free these beasts, not fight them.

The black orc snorted in amusement as it watched Broendulf retreat. Then the brute turned away, staring out over the mass of huddled slaves. The orc’s brutal voice rose in a furious bellow as it hurled abuse at the cowed greenskins. Other black orcs moved among the mob, cracking skulls and kicking shins, providing physical reinforcement for the words of the new warboss.

‘He’ll have them worked up into a frenzy in no time,’ Arngeirr said, taking a swallow of kvas from his flask. The reaver glanced towards the bridges. There was no mistaking the sound of armed bodies rushing down the wooden platforms. ‘And none too soon.’

Broendulf nodded. ‘We’d better get back to the fissure,’ he told the other northmen. ‘It’s a long climb and this isn’t our fight.’ He observed the way the slaves were quickly forgetting their fear and roaring their war cries as the black orcs encouraged their thirst for carnage and vengeance. The dwarfs would have a hard time putting down this uprising, even with their toxic lakes and watchtowers.

As the thought came to him, Broendulf winced as a bright light shone down into the pit. The first beam was quickly followed by others. The dwarfs had turned their daemon-eyes upon the slave pit. Fully illuminated by the beams, the huscarl was staggered by the sheer numbers of greenskins packed into the slave pens. So were the dwarfs in the stronghold. Only a moment after the lights shone down into the pit, a metallic shriek wailed throughout Dronangkul as the dwarfs sounded the alarm.

‘Come on,’ Broendulf ordered, ducking behind the basalt block to avoid the searching beams of the daemon-eyes. ‘We’ve done what we came to do.

‘The rest is up to Wulfrik.’

The shrieking alarm was what Wulfrik had been waiting for. Waiting outside the walls, the northmen had seen the lights on the towers concentrate down into the pit, and they had heard the savage war cry of the slaves. But it was the alarm the champion had wanted to hear. Now he could see dwarf sentries rushing along the battlements, leaving their posts to reinforce the lower gates along the causeway. If they were still upon the heights overlooking Dronangkul, he was certain they would see ranks of dwarf warriors marching from the ziggurat to put down the revolt. Even if they would have preferred to leave the chore to the hobgoblins, the dwarfs had sent too many of their minions out into the desert looking for Wulfrik and his warriors. The dwarfs would be compelled to do their own fighting this time. And in so doing they would leave their outpost ripe for an assault.

Wulfrik counted out the minutes, judging how long it would take the dwarfs to mobilise and march down into the pit. He would allow for their short legs and heavy armour, give them extra time to open the causeway gates and close them again behind the warriors. The longer he gave the dwarfs to descend into the pit, the longer he would have to reach the ziggurat before they could react to his attack.

A sword in each hand, Wulfrik turned to his men. ‘Die well,’ he told them, ‘because the gods are watching.’ He shifted his gaze to Zarnath, his fangs bared. ‘Your magic had better be all you claim it is, Kurgan,’ he growled.

Wulfrik ignored the shaman’s reassurances. Facing the stronghold once more, the champion threw himself forwards, sprinting towards the walls. Not all of the dwarfs would be gone from the walls, and even if they were, once the gates came down the entire stronghold would know it was under attack. The champion intended to be inside the ziggurat by the time the dwarfs could organise their defences.

Two hundred yards, then a hundred, then fifty. The black walls of Dronangkul drew closer and closer with every heartbeat. Wulfrik could hear his men panting as they ran beside him. There were no war cries, no shouts of battle and fury. That would come later.

The dwarfs noticed the men rushing at them from the black of night when the Norscans were only twenty yards from the walls. Wulfrik saw the sentries above the gates reel back in shock as they spotted them. One of the dwarfs lifted a bronze horn to his lips, blowing a solemn note to alert the rest of the stronghold. The others hefted blunderbusses and aimed at the men converging on their position.

Before the dwarfs could fire, the gate was rocked by a tremendous blast of blue fire the size of an ox-cart. Hurtling down from the night sky, the burning sphere smashed into the metal gates with the force of a rockslide. The entire wall seemed to rise up from its foundations then slam back down against the earth. The dwarfs were knocked off their feet, several screaming as they fell from the battlements to smash their skulls upon the ground below.

Smoke billowed from the gates, metal bubbling where Zarnath’s spell had smashed into them. The basalt walls were cracked, great chips crumbling from the ravaged stone. Yet the sturdy architecture of the fire dwarfs was as robust as that of their western kin. The barrier held, defying Wulfrik to breach them.

From the heavens, a second ball of fire coalesced, even bigger than the first. It left a trail of shimmering blue flame as it shrieked out of the darkness. This time when the fire slammed into the walls, they did not simply jump, they buckled. Immense blocks of stone were thrown high into the sky, and screaming dwarfs were tossed through the air like autumn leaves. The great gates of Dronangkul collapsed, slamming against the ground as they were ripped from their foundations, crushing the dwarfs who had rushed to reinforce them with iron beams.

Now Wulfrik did raise his voice in an exultant war cry, a roar of primal, savage abandon that was taken up by each of his warriors. For the moment, the desperate odds he challenged were forgotten, and even the hope of breaking his curse was absent from the hero’s thoughts. There was only the thrill of battle, the lust for blood and triumph. Wulfrik leapt through the shattered gateway, smashing his boot into the face of a trapped dwarf trying to crawl out from under the fallen gates, thrusting his sword through the chest of a stunned guard who stumbled into his path.

‘Khorakk!’ Wulfrik howled, his voice echoing through the cramped alleyways of the dwarf settlement. A bearded guard wielding a great axe charged at him, then sank to the earth as Wulfrik’s sword removed his arm at the shoulder. ‘Khorakk!’ the champion roared again.

Wulfrik was thrown from his feet as something slammed into him from the side. Air rushed from his lungs as he crashed against the stone steps leading up into the gatehouse, sparks flaring before his eyes as his head cracked against the hard basalt. He could feel the earth quiver as whatever had struck him came charging after him. The champion recovered his wits as a wickedly sharp axe came flashing down towards his face.

The northman kicked up with his legs, locking his boots about the descending blade, arresting its downward sweep. Powerful even by the standards of the Norscans, Wulfrik felt his entire body shudder at the effort of holding back the axe. He ground his fangs together, bracing his back against the steps as he threw his entire body into the effort.

‘I’ll make your skull a chamber pot for Thegn Khorakk!’ a gruff voice snarled in the debased Khazalid of the fire dwarfs.

Wulfrik felt the axe start to move, forcing his legs to bend. Slowly, inexorably, his foe was proving the stronger. In a matter of seconds, the axe would come slashing down and split his head in two.

Growling like his namesake, Wulfrik twisted his legs, trying to wrench the axe from his enemy’s hand. His foe laughed at the feeble effort. Certain his enemy was concentrated fully upon driving the axe through his face, Wulfrik released his hold.

The axe came chopping down, but before it could strike, Wulfrik’s own sword was flashing across one of the hands behind the axe. Fingers flew in the wake of Wulfrik’s blade, dwarf blood fountaining from the mangled hand. Gripped only in one hand now, the axe’s momentum was diverted. Instead of cleaving through the northman’s head, the blade scraped against the step six inches next to him.

Wulfrik sprang at his stricken foe, lashing out at him with the swords gripped in either hand. The crippled enemy retreated before the fury of the champion’s attack. Wulfrik saw now that his adversary wasn’t a dwarf at all, at least not completely a dwarf. From the waist upwards, he resembled the guards he had butchered on entering Dronangkul, even sharing the same scale armour and thick black beard curled into long coils. From the waist down, however, the creature was more like a bull, standing upon four muscular legs that each ended in an iron-shod hoof. The courtyard beyond the gate was filled with more of the dwarfs, many of them already locked in combat with Wulfrik’s men, but this creature was the only one of his kind the hero could see.

The champion took a step away from the centaur and laughed. ‘Was it your father or your mother who was a drunk?’ he mocked in the beast’s own debased Khazalid.

The centaur blinked in surprise to hear his language spoken by a human. Then the nature of what Wulfrik had said contorted the creature’s face into a mask of pure rage. ‘Barbarian pig! I’ll braid my beard with your entrails! I am blessed by the Father of Darkness!’

‘Then it was your mother who couldn’t hold her ale.’

Fury overwhelmed the bull centaur. He forgot the axe in his hand, forgot the warriors he had brought with him from the ziggurat to protect the gate. The centaur’s nostrils flared, his hooves stamped the ground. Like a blood-mad bull, he threw himself at the jeering man who had dared to insult both his ancestry and his god.

Wulfrik dived from the path of the charging centaur. The champion’s laugh stabbed into the monster more keenly than any blade. Shaking his head in rage, the centaur turned around and made a second charge.

The northman was ready for the centaur this time, however. His dive from the onrushing brute became a sideways roll along the centaur’s path. Wulfrik’s swords slashed into the monster’s legs, hewing through muscle and tendon. The centaur crashed onto his side, sliding across the ground, bowling over dwarfs and Norscans before skidding to a stop against the ruined wall.

Wulfrik rushed after the crippled monster, caving in the face of a dwarf who got in his way, disembowelling another who thought to stop him with a fang-edged axe. The champion reached the centaur as he was struggling to stand, trying to use the wall to support his ruined body. Wulfrik brought the edge of his sword biting through the centaur’s arm, shearing it off at the elbow. The monster shrieked in pain and crumpled to the ground.

A loud explosion made Wulfrik spring away from the dying centaur. The champion spun about, swords at the ready. He smiled grimly when he saw Sigvatr standing over the corpse of a dwarf, a smoking blunderbuss lying beneath the guard.

‘I wanted to keep the fight fair,’ Sigvatr said, nodding towards the bull centaur.

‘Then you should have let that backshooter bring a few of his friends to help,’ Wulfrik growled. He glanced across the courtyard. Several of his warriors were down; whether they were dead or wounded he didn’t much care. The dwarfs themselves were in full retreat.

The reason for their flight revealed itself quickly. From the towers on the causeway, lights were turned upon the courtyard. Immediately, there was a frantic burst of activity on the tower roofs. Dwarfs scrambled around a pair of artillery pieces. At first Wulfrik thought they might be like the cannons used by dwarfs in other lands. However, there was something incredibly sinister about these machines. They seemed to glow with some infernal power of their own, thick iron chains lashing them to great turnstiles sunk into the towers. He recalled Stefnir’s claims that the fire dwarfs had a way to bind daemons into metal.

The dwarfs on the towers removed heavy tubular devices from racks and stuffed them down the yawning mouths of their artillery. Shielding their eyes by lowering the visors of their helms, the dwarfs touched flame to their weapons. A burst of blazing light, a snarl like the belly-growl of a bear, and the weird cylinders flew from the artillery. They streaked towards the courtyard, sparks streaming from their hollow ends. One of the rockets smashed into the outer wall of the stronghold, punching almost clean through before becoming stuck. It sizzled there for a moment, then exploded in a burst of fire and poisonous gas.

The second rocket smashed down into the courtyard itself, glancing off the basalt flagstones and spinning crazily about. Northmen fled before the runaway missile, leaping up stairs and clinging to walls to avoid its crazed movement. At last, the sparks leaping from the rocket’s end sputtered out and it became still.

Wulfrik glared at the weird weapon, then at the towers above the causeway. He could see the dwarfs feeding more of the strange rockets into their artillery. ‘Kurgan!’ Wulfrik shouted. He raged across the courtyard, looking for the shaman. He smiled grimly when he saw Tjorvi leading Zarnath through the shattered gates.

‘I need your magic again!’ Wulfrik snarled at the shaman. He pointed his bloody sword at the distant towers. ‘Stop them before they shoot at us again.’

Zarnath leaned weakly against his jewelled staff. ‘Breaching the gates has sapped my powers. I must rest.’

‘Rest when you’re in hell!’ Wulfrik snapped. ‘Stop those vermin or I’ll cut you down right here!’

Zarnath’s eyes blazed with blue fire, his face twisting with hate. His expression softened when he felt steel against his ribs.

‘You heard the captain,’ Sigvatr hissed in his ear. The old warrior put enough pressure on his blade to break the shaman’s skin. Zarnath shuddered as he felt his own blood trickling down his side. Reluctantly, he bowed his head.

Throwing wide his arms, Zarnath raised his staff. Arcane words even Wulfrik could not decipher rasped across the shaman’s lips. The fire in his eyes slowly faded, gathering instead within the gemstone at the head of his staff.

Streams of lightning crackled from the head of the staff, sizzling into the rack of rockets upon the roof of the left tower. Several of the dwarfs were caught in the lightning storm, screaming in terror as their bodies were scorched by the electricity. Others, seeing the target of the malevolent magic, flung themselves from the turret, more willing to risk the fall to the causeway far below than remain upon the roof.

Zarnath’s spell did its work quickly. The entire roof of the turret vanished in a pillar of fire and poisonous gas as the violence of the lightning caused the battery of rockets to explode. The dwarfs in the other tower abandoned their posts, scrambling with indecent haste down the trapdoor leading into the structure’s interior. The northmen laughed at the frantic terror of the dwarfs.

‘Sigvatr!’ Wulfrik barked. ‘Take half the men and secure the lower gate! Keep the dwarfs penned up down below as long as you can. If you strike out now while they’re hiding from the Kurgan’s sorcery, you may have a chance!’

The old warrior shook his head. ‘My place is with you,’ he told Wulfrik.

‘Your place is where I damn well tell you it is!’ Wulfrik yelled. ‘Get your arse down there and hold the gate!’

Sigvatr held his ground, staring into his friend’s eyes. At last he relented, calling out the names of the warriors he would take with him. The last man he called was the shaman. Wulfrik shook his head.

‘I want the Kurgan with me,’ he told Sigvatr. ‘I might need him if I have to knock down any more doors.’

Sigvatr scowled at Zarnath. ‘Just don’t take your eyes off him,’ he advised.

Wulfrik turned a fanged grin on the shaman. ‘I don’t intend to,’ he warned Zarnath.

Seeing further argument would get him nowhere, Sigvatr and his warriors dashed down the broad road leading to the lower gate. There was no telling how quickly the dwarfs would rally from the violent destruction of the rocket battery. The northmen knew better than to squander the opportunity their confusion presented.

‘To the ziggurat!’ Wulfrik called to his men. He cast a last glance at Sigvatr leading the warriors in the other direction. If things went wrong, at least there was a chance his old friend would be able to get out and make his way back to the Seafang.

Wulfrik turned away and led the way down the road to the ziggurat. He didn’t see Zarnath gazing at the men rushing to the causeway, or the hate in his eyes as he stared at Sigvatr. He didn’t see the small, toad-like creature that dropped from the sleeve of the shaman’s tunic and grovelled at the Kurgan’s feet.

Zarnath pointed his finger at Sigvatr’s back. ‘That one,’ he hissed.

The fanged imp muttered a peal of insane gibberish and loped after the old warrior.

The shaman wiped the slime from his arm where the imp had lain. Quickly he followed after the northmen. It wouldn’t do for one of them to double back looking for him and discover what he had done.

Besides, Wulfrik might need Zarnath’s magic when he reached the ziggurat, and the last thing the shaman wanted was the champion to fall for want of a few spells.

Chuckling at his own jest, Zarnath hastened his steps as the sounds of battle reached his ears.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wulfrik charged down the wide roadway leading to the base of the ziggurat. His skin crawled as he passed the morbid ranks of statues lining the path, stone effigies of dwarf warriors with axes raised. As he glanced at them, Wulfrik noted that the silent sentinels were not wholly the work of chisel and hammer: real bones were plastered into hollowed sections of the guardians, a skull grinning from beneath the stony helm of each statue. The bones were those of dwarfs, but whether the dawi zharr intended the gruesome display to honour their own dead or defile those of their enemies, he could not say. It was enough for him to be reminded of the black hearts of his foes and the cruelty he could expect from them if he failed.

The champion half-expected the statues to leap into life as he passed them. Running down the road, he kept glancing back at them, watching them for some sign of motion. He could see his warriors doing the same, clearly victim to the same unsettling premonition of lurking menace. Njarvord succumbed to the sensation, attacking one of the statues with his axe, hacking slivers of rock and bone from one of the sentinels before throwing himself full against it and pitching it to the roadway. The statue cracked as it struck the road, collapsing into a heap of rubble.

Njarvord’s attack encouraged the other northmen to lash out at the grim statues. Even Wulfrik felt the impulse to fling himself upon the closest of the guardians and smash it into dust. He was raising his sword to chop at stone ankles before he realised what he was doing.

Angrily, Wulfrik lifted his sword high and shouted at his men. There was some subtle sorcery woven into the statues, some insidious magic that antagonised any who trespassed within their influence. The statues protected the ziggurat by provoking fear in the minds of their enemies. Lesser men would have fled screaming from the stronghold. Norscans were made of sterner stuff. Instead of running, they fought back. But in doing so, they allowed the statues to fulfil their purpose. Attacking unfeeling stone, spending their strength, dulling their blades upon rock and bone, the warriors were weakening themselves. Worse, they were giving the defenders of the ziggurat the time they needed to muster their own troops.

‘The Crow God’s pox on all your manhoods!’ Wulfrik cursed his men. ‘Forget the gargoyles! There are foes of flesh to be slain!’

The champion’s furious words fell upon deaf ears. Goaded by the baleful emanations of the guardians, his men were enthralled by their own violence. Their attacks became a frenzied assault, axes and swords smashing over and over into each statue as it was cast down from its pedestal. The urge for destruction consumed the northmen as they pulverised the sentinels with mindless abandon.

If there had been any doubt that some fell magic was sealed within the statues, Wulfrik settled the question when he drove his sword through the first of his warriors he encountered. Pierced through the breast, the Sarl axeman crumpled to his knees, coughing blood into his beard. The man’s eyes didn’t even focus upon the face of his killer. Instead, he crawled back to the statue he had been attacking, pounding his fists against the unyielding stone.

Wulfrik kicked the dying wretch and glared at the rest of his men. They were oblivious to the killing of their comrade, fixated upon their maddened assault on the statues. This was how the dwarfs protected their temple, with trickery and magic! Wulfrik could well imagine the effect the sinister statues would have upon any orc slaves thinking to storm the ziggurat.

But slaves did not have magic of their own.

‘Zarnath!’ Wulfrik called, storming back along the roadway. He hesitated when he saw a dark figure emerge from one of the alleyways connecting to the road. For a moment, his eyes locked with the murderous black orbs of an armoured dwarf. The dwarf’s beard pulled up in a scowl when he saw that Wulfrik had resisted the magic of the statues. Raising a crooked scimitar, he shouted at the Norscan.

The dwarf did not get a chance to repeat his cry. Snarling his fury, Wulfrik lunged at the sneaking murderer. Scimitar and sword crashed together in a shriek of bladed steel. The dwarf spat obscenities as the northman forced him back into the alley. He made a great show of giving ground before Wulfrik’s attack.

Wulfrik didn’t fall for the dwarf’s ruse. He’d been able to understand the little killer’s shout. It had been a call to arms, a warning to other lurkers that they would have to strike the men on the road quickly before any more of them broke free of the spell. He knew that the dwarf had friends close by, probably waiting in the darkness of the alleyway.

Leaning in close to the dwarf, Wulfrik locked his fingers in the coils of his enemy’s beard. Pulling savagely, he ripped a fistful of beard out by its roots. The dwarf cried out in pain, staggering back in shock, one hand instinctively flying to his injured face. His eyes went wide with horror as he felt the damage he’d suffered.

‘You look better as a beardling,’ Wulfrik mocked the dwarf in his own language. The northman gestured at the fuming dwarf with the clump of black hair he held in his fist. ‘But I wouldn’t wipe a goblin’s arse with this oily trash,’ he grinned, tossing the torn beard back into the dwarf’s face.

It was an inarticulate scream of rage that propelled the dwarf towards Wulfrik. It was an inarticulate groan of agony that ended his charge. Side-stepping the dwarf’s flashing scimitar, Wulfrik brought his sword slashing through the ambusher’s midsection. Designed to withstand the crushing impact of picks, hammers and orcish fists, the dwarf’s scale armour did little to dull the cleaving stroke of the blade. Dark blood streamed from the dwarf’s belly as he pitched face-first onto the ground.

Wulfrik leapt away from the dead dwarf, retreating from the alleyway where he could now see other soldiers emerging. Turning his head, he could see other dwarfs stalking from the shadows of the buildings, converging upon the road and the ensorcelled men oblivious to the danger.

‘Zarnath!’ Wulfrik roared again. He ducked behind one of the statues as a dwarf pointed a blunderbuss in his direction. Whatever magic had gone into its construction, the guardian was solid enough to protect him from the blast of shot. The same could not be said for the warrior who had been dulling the blade of his axe against the unyielding stone. The man was thrown by the impact of the blast, his body ripped apart by the iron shrapnel. For a pathetic moment, the ragged remains tried to rise and assault the statue once more, then the dying man fell and was still.

Wulfrik sprang from behind the statue, lunging at the dwarf with the blunderbuss before he could reload his weapon. A second dwarf, this one armed with a hooked axe, tried to intercept the enraged champion. For his effort, the soldier was rewarded with a cleft shoulder and a smashed face. The gunner looked up from his arming of the blunderbuss in time to see Wulfrik’s sword chopping down at him. He squealed in terror, then collapsed as his face was split by the descending blade.

‘Zarnath, you Kurgan cur!’ Wulfrik howled. ‘Break the spell on my men! Break it or I’ll strew your guts from here to Araby!’

He could see the shaman further down the road, standing just beyond the first rank of stone sentinels. There was, about the way the Kurgan’s head whipped from side to side, the air of a cornered animal to Zarnath. Wulfrik could see the indecision on the man’s face as he wrestled with the urge to flee. The Norscan cursed once more the cowardice of all sorcerers. He reached down, ripping the blunderbuss from the dead fingers of the dwarf at his feet. Angrily, he threw the empty weapon at Stefnir, nearly striking the Aesling in the head. The close call was enough to snap him from his attack against one of the statues.

‘Get the shaman!’ Wulfrik ordered when Stefnir turned his way. The champion had no time to see if Stefnir would be able to carry out his command. Another pair of dwarfs were rushing at him from the darkness, gleaming axes in their hands and revenge in their eyes. Wulfrik snarled at them and braced himself to meet their attack.

Across the road, a large group of dwarfs were systematically cutting down the bewitched Norscans, laughing wickedly as their axes dismembered the defenceless men.

The slaughter ended in a burst of crackling energy, a sphere of white-hot light that engulfed the murder squad. The harsh voices of the dwarfs rose in screams of agony as the ball of lightning sizzled through their bodies. Sparks exploded from the dwarfs’ armour; cinders fell from their burning beards. Flesh melted into the hafts of axes and eyes boiled in their skulls. Those few dwarfs outside the discharge of the spell fled back into the safety of the alleyways, wailing in horror.

Wulfrik kicked the severed head of his last foe, sending it rolling after the retreating dwarfs. ‘Don’t forget your friend!’ he mocked the routed guards. He watched the dwarfs to ensure himself their fright was genuine and not some further deceit. Satisfied, he marched down the middle of the road. The surviving Norscans had abandoned their mad attack on the statues, instead leaning against their bases, breathing heavily as they tried to recover from their frenzied exertions. Wulfrik kicked and scolded the warriors he passed, demanding they get back on their feet. However far the dwarfs ran, he knew they would not go far. Besides, there were the dwarfs who had marched into the pit to consider. If those soldiers returned from the causeway there was little chance of fighting their way through them.

Wulfrik’s hand tightened about his sword as he approached Zarnath. The shaman was trembling, blood dripping from ears and nose. The glow in his eyes was only a dim flicker. The hero didn’t think it was possible, but Zarnath looked even more exhausted than the men he had passed on the road.

‘The shaman let loose seven kinds of hell on them,’ Stefnir boasted. The blackened bruise on the Kurgan’s cheek showed the method he had used to convince Zarnath to fight.

Wulfrik glowered at Stefnir and sneered at the panting Zarnath. ‘It would have been helpful if he’d helped sooner. Many dead men wouldn’t be if he’d done his job.’

Zarnath was too tired to fit any emotion into his voice. ‘I have told you. I must conserve my powers. No man may wield the winds of magic with impunity. Each spell takes a toll upon the body. I must have time to replenish my strength, to compose my mind.’

The shaman’s plea made no impact upon Wulfrik. ‘You can rest after the torc is in my hands,’ he told Zarnath. The champion’s face was twisted with contempt. ‘It was you who led me here,’ he reminded him. ‘Without the torc, all this has been for nothing.’

Zarnath shook his head vigorously. ‘I can’t!’ he pleaded. ‘I must have time to rest and recover my powers!’

Wulfrik’s hand clamped tight upon the Kurgan’s shoulder. ‘You are worthless to me without the torc,’ he growled. ‘But perhaps the torc can help me without you. What one sorcerer knows, another sorcerer can learn.’ He turned and snarled at Stefnir. ‘Bring the shaman. If he blinks wrong, tickle his spleen with your axe.’

The northmen hurried down the road, warily watching the path for any more traps. The stone sentinels they passed stared at them in silence, their magic now only an uneasy whisper in the back of their minds. The dwarf soldiers, if they had lingered, kept out of sight, making no effort to stop the men. The warehouses and workshops of the outpost dwindled as the ground around the road narrowed. On one side the black wall of the stronghold pressed close against the road. At the other, the ground vanished entirely, leaving that side of the path open to the mine below: a sheer drop of half a mile into the darkness of the pit.

Ahead, Wulfrik could see the ziggurat. The base of the tower was immense, large enough to accommodate all of Ormskaro and its harbour. From the heights overlooking Dronangkul, he had failed to appreciate just how large the structure was. The walls of black basalt looked thick enough to withstand the rage of a shaggoth, the engraved bronze doors which fronted the ziggurat big enough that the Seafang might have easily sailed between them at full sail with her mast raised.

Strangely, the turrets set upon each tier of the ziggurat were empty. Wulfrik had ordered his men to form a shield wall as they advanced, expecting that the dwarfs would have gunners or bowmen stationed above the gates. That they did not set the champion’s mind whirring. Had they really sent so many of their troops into the mines to quell the riot, or was this merely evidence that they had some new devilry planned?

Wulfrik studied the bronze gates, feeling his skin crawl as he stared at the grisly depictions of captives being fed into the fiery mouth of a gigantic bull. Stefnir said the dawi zharr worshipped their god by pushing sacrifices into bronze ovens cast in the shape of bulls. To find the motif repeated on the doors of their temple was a symbolism even Wulfrik did not fail to recognise.

The champion turned away from the doors and stared at Zarnath. The shaman’s eyes went wide with horror and he shook his head in protest.

‘I still don’t have a battering ram,’ Wulfrik told the shaman. He nodded to Stefnir and the Aesling pushed Zarnath forwards. ‘I’ll have these gates down,’ he promised the shaman.

Before he could threaten the Kurgan further, Wulfrik’s words were drowned out by the thunderous blast of horns. The entire road shook as a deep rumble shivered through it. The men could almost feel giant gears turning beneath their feet. Wulfrik spun about, watching in amazement as the great doors slowly opened.

From beyond the doors marched a column of grim figures. From head to foot they were encased in heavy armour of blackened steel, their horned helms cast in the image of fanged bulls. Plates of black marble veined with gold reinforced the armour on their arms and legs. Over their beards, sheaths of bronze gleamed in the starlight. The long axes they carried were curled like crescents with a long spike set at the tip of the axe-head and a barbed hook protruding from the back of the weapon.

The dwarfs did not hesitate when they saw the men standing before their gates, but continued to advance in a silent, forbidding column. At their flanks, small knots of lightly armoured dwarfs followed the heavy infantry, fingering a vicious assortment of whips and mancatchers. Their intentions were clear to every man who saw them.

Wulfrik was about to order his warriors to fall back, then engage the dwarfs in the comparative security of the settlement where the narrow alleyways would force the heavy infantry to break formation and engage the northmen as individual fighters rather than as a unit. Even as the command was on his lips, Wulfrik saw that the way back had been closed to them. The rumbling the men had felt in the ground had been caused by machinery buried under the road. Under the power of these hidden mechanisms, the road behind them had been raised, swinging upwards like a Bretonnian drawbridge, forming a sheer wall behind them and cutting off any chance of escape.

The grim dwarf warriors halted just a few feet from the northmen, standing at attention with such solidity that they might have been carved from the same stone as the sentinels. Their eyes glared at the men from behind the masks of their helms, but not a sound rose from any of the armoured dwarfs. In stark contrast, the small groups of slavers began hooting and jeering at the northmen, promising all sorts of grisly tortures once ‘the immortals’ pounded them into submission.

Even the slavers fell silent, however, as a rider emerged from the depths of the ziggurat. He was an especially loathsome example of dwarf, his black beard dyed with streaks of crimson, his hands encased in a dazzling array of rings. His squat body was swathed in purple robes upon which flickering flames had been woven. The dwarf’s eyes were hidden behind a veil of silver thread which depended from the brim of a tall helm of gold adorned with bloodstones. The face beneath the veil was burned, grey scar-tissue covering most of the bulbous nose and making one cheek resemble lumpy porridge.

More imposing than the hideous dwarf was the beast he rode out from the gates. It was a creature the likes of which Wulfrik had never seen in all his travels. In shape it was not unlike some great black bull, but from its back immense leathery wings were spread, fanned out like the pinions of a dragon. The tail was long and thick, more like that of some giant reptile than a beast of the field, and at its tip was a mallet-like knob of bone. The monster’s hind legs ended in steel-shod hooves, but its forelegs were tipped by hand-like paws, each finger ending in a long claw sheathed in steel. The head of the beast was an even more ghastly mixture of dwarf and bovine than the centaur Wulfrik had killed, immense horns curling away from a black, leathery face with a curly red beard. With every breath, the creature exhaled a cloud of greasy smoke that sparkled weirdly as it swirled about the beast and its rider.

The dwarf brought his strange beast to rest and stared at the tiny band of northmen. A kick to the lammasu’s side and the dragon-like wings retracted, folding upon themselves and curling against the monster’s ribs. ‘You powerful for have survive overlong,’ the dwarf called out. He used a strange patois of goblin languages. Wulfrik felt his blood boil when he realised it was the same tongue the dwarfs used when they deigned to address their many slaves. ‘Lay down weapon and live.’

‘You are Khorakk?’ Wulfrik demanded, spitting the words in the speech of the dawi zharr. He felt Zarnath’s terrified fingers clutching his arm.

‘Do not make light of this dwarf,’ the shaman said. ‘He is a sorcerer.’

Wulfrik frowned as he heard Zarnath’s words. ‘I’ve been told you are not Khorakk,’ he growled.

‘Thegn Khorakk is lord of Dronangkul,’ the sorcerer sneered. ‘He does not waste his time with slaves.’ The dwarf raised a heavy hammer and pointed it at the northmen. ‘Do you surrender?’

Wulfrik glared back at the sorcerer. ‘Do you always ride out on your mother’s back to greet visitors?’

The sorcerer’s face turned crimson. For a moment, he was physically stunned by the temerity of Wulfrik’s insult. In that moment, the immortals were likewise caught unawares. The champion pounced upon the dwarf warriors, stabbing the tip of his sword through the mask of the first immortal he reached. The dwarf crumpled in a screaming heap, blood spraying from his ruptured eye.

The other northmen threw themselves at the dwarfs with a viciousness that would have impressed the orcs down in the slave pit. Few things were more guaranteed to steel the soul of a Norscan than the threat of being another man’s thrall. It was a fate only lesser breeds of men would resign themselves to, men who cared nothing for the judgement of gods or ancestors. Death upon the axes of the immortals was at least an end that might make their ancestors proud.

Three immortals crowded Wulfrik, fending off the champion’s attacks with their heavy axes. Disciplined warriors, the dwarfs worked in unison to overwhelm the champion, two of the immortals using their axes to block Wulfrik’s blows while the third moved in for the kill. The tactic might have worked had their sorcerer been less enraged.

The ground at Wulfrik’s feet began to glow with a crimson light. It was the only warning the northman had, but it was enough. Flinging himself at the immortals with a reckless disregard, Wulfrik escaped his peril an instant before the ground exploded in a gout of steaming magma. The unexpectedness of his leap caught the dwarfs unprepared, the fiery explosion shaking them from their feet.

Wulfrik landed atop the armoured dwarfs, snarling like an animal as he hacked at their prone bodies with his swords. The heavy armour resisted his blades but at the same time hindered the dwarfs as they tried to defend themselves and regain their feet. At last the champion gave up trying to cut his way through their armour. Reversing his hold on his swords, he brought the spiked pommels smashing down into the masks of their helms. Ruthlessly, Wulfrik smashed the steel masks, pounding them out of all semblance of shape. Blood erupted from the grilled vents in the mouths of the masks. The dwarfs thrashed in agony, trying to knock the Norscan off them.

A sheet of black fire licked across the northman and his foes. Safe within their heavy armour, the black fire worked no harm upon the immortals. Wulfrik, however, was flung back by the blast, his skin steaming, his hair falling in singed clumps from his scalp. One of the protective talismans the champion wore about his neck fell to the ground in a molten lump, its magic consumed as it absorbed the force of the malignant spell.

Upon his lammasu, the dwarf sorcerer chuckled. His hand burned like an ember as he pointed his crooked finger in Wulfrik’s direction. The three immortals painfully regained their feet and groped about for their axes. ‘Leave enough of him to feed the belly of Hashut,’ the sorcerer commanded.

If the sorcerer said anything else, the words were drowned out by the tremendous wind that suddenly shrieked down across the road. Even upon the Sea of Claws, Wulfrik had never felt such a furious wind. The tempest tore at him with malevolent determination, as though a thing of emotion as well as force. He could hear men and dwarfs crying out in fear as the gale smashed into them.

The fury of the wind only grew more terrible. Wulfrik felt himself being ripped from the earth by invisible talons. Shrieks tore at the air as struggling bodies were pushed inexorably to the lip of the pit. A dwarf slaver tore at the road, scrabbling desperately for a handhold to arrest his motion. His efforts were futile. Screaming, the bearded slaver was the first to pitch over the side and hurtle into the blackness of the mine.

He wasn’t alone for long. Other slavers and their human foes were blown over the edge. The immortals, weighed down by their heavy armour, made an effort to hold their ground, but they too were unable to resist the power of the tempest. Their steel-shod boots scraping deep scratches into the stone, the immortals slowly slid towards the pit.

Wulfrik concentrated his strength into a single effort. Tossing aside one of his swords, he gripped the other in both hands. Lifting it high, he stabbed the blade deep into the road. He wrapped his arms around the embedded sword, bracing his feet against the burning edge of the magma pool conjured by the dwarf sorcerer. Groaning with effort, Wulfrik struggled to resist the tempest’s pull.

Through the gale stalked the dwarf sorcerer. The villain seemed impervious to the tempest, the winds rolling harmlessly about the flanks of his monstrous steed. The lammasu growled, a roar that sounded uncomfortably like the speech of the dwarfs themselves. Grinning, the sorcerer kicked the beast’s sides. In response, the lammasu’s great wings snapped open. Like some giant vulture taking wing, the lammasu rose into the air.

The sorcerer didn’t seem aware of Wulfrik now. Both the dwarf and his steed were focussed upon something pressed against the pivoting wall opposite the ziggurat’s gates. Wulfrik could see Zarnath standing beside the wall, wind whipping about him, his eyes blazing with power. The jewel at the head of his staff was burning with such intensity that sparks flew from it. He could see streams of blood rolling down the shaman’s cheeks like crimson tears. It didn’t take a seer to know that Zarnath had conjured the windstorm, or to appreciate the toll such mighty magic was taking on him.

That his tempest had struck friend as well as foe was something that, perhaps, the Kurgan had not intended. Accident or intention, Zarnath’s magic had betrayed him. The windstorm was having no effect upon the dwarf sorcerer and his steed. At the same time, the spell had sent most of those who might have defended the shaman plummeting to their destruction in the pit.

Laughing spitefully, the dwarf sorcerer raised his hand, curling his fingers into a strange pattern. ‘I bring you death, human dog!’ the sorcerer cackled. From his hand, a flare of black flame shot down at Zarnath.

The windstorm died as the flames wrapped around the shaman’s body. For an instant, the Kurgan was lost to sight. In the next moment, a stream of lightning shot out from the midst of the flame, narrowly missing the hovering lammasu. Zarnath strode through the fire, his clothes dropping from him in burning tatters. He glared up at the dwarf. In one hand, Zarnath held a glass vial. Wulfrik could smell the tang of star-stone as the Kurgan crushed the vial in his hand. There was a cruel smile on the shaman’s face as he licked the oily green liquid from his palm. The fires in his eyes, having faded to a flicker, now exploded with blinding violence.

Wulfrik knew what Zarnath had done. He had seen such a thing before, deep within the swamps of Tilea when the gods had sent him to kill a chief of the ratkin. There had been a horned ratman who had chewed upon a piece of star-stone. Immediately he had been consumed with sorcerous power, unleashing such devastating spells as to bring the entire cavern crashing down upon them all.

From the shaman’s splayed fingers, a shower of fiery stones shot towards the sorcerer. Zarnath’s magic seemed to curl around the weird exhalations of the lammasu, but several stones sped past the edges of the shimmering cloud. The burning stones punched through the membranes of the beast’s leathery wings. Roaring, the lammasu dropped from the sky, crashing heavily against the road. Wulfrik could tell from its howls that it was in pain, but far from dead. The quaking of the ground and the violent appearance of another geyser of magma made it clear the sorcerer had survived as well.

The jewel atop Zarnath’s staff shattered as he wove a barrier of magic to protect himself from the molten rock the sorcerer had called up from the earth. The loss of his focus didn’t seem to diminish the shaman’s hideous vitality. Instead he seemed to swell with even more power. Lightning exploded all around the Kurgan, whipping about him like the flaming tongues of a hydra. The lammasu snorted in fear, limping away from the crazed Kurgan. The sorcerer upon its back kicked and cursed at the beast, ordering it back into the fight.

Wulfrik didn’t know how long Zarnath could hold out against the sorcerer and his beast. To try and help the shaman was out of the question. Anyone trying would be incinerated by the wild energies billowing about the Kurgan’s body. Only the lammasu’s strange exhalations allowed its rider to withstand that stream of death.

Zarnath would fend for himself or he would die. Wulfrik had more important things to do. He gazed across the roadway, watching injured dwarfs hobbling back towards the gates. He saw a few survivors among his own men as well. Tjorvi was dashing among the sprawled bodies of the immortals, thrusting a dagger beneath their bronze beard-sheathes and slitting their throats with sadistic glee. Haukr was sawing rings from the fingers of a dead slaver while Stefnir pursued some of the injured dwarfs, chopping at them with an axe he had lifted from one of the immortals. Njarvord, lost in one of his rages, was beating the crushed skull of a dwarf against the ground, oblivious to the mash of blood and brain it left every time it smacked against the road.

Wulfrik planted his feet to either side of his sword. Straining every muscle in his body, he wrenched the blade free. ‘To me, heroes of Norsca!’ he bellowed. The few survivors of his warband turned and stared at him. Wulfrik gestured at the ziggurat where the great gates stood open and unguarded.

‘In there we will find our doom,’ Wulfrik told his men. ‘If it is to be our end, then let us make it one that even the gods will envy!’

His men lifted their voices in a fierce war cry. Mustering their strength, the warriors followed their leader into the yawning mouth of the ziggurat. Only Wulfrik hesitated, casting a last look back at Zarnath and the dwarf sorcerer.

The shaman knew the secret of the torc. If he abandoned Zarnath, he might never find another man who knew the secret. The Kurgan might be his only hope of breaking the curse.

Wulfrik snarled and shook his head. The torc was the key to breaking the curse. If he had the shaman and not the relic, then he had nothing. He would gain only a useless death and an eternity of shame if he tried to help Zarnath. All he could do was find Khorakk and take the torc from him. That was the hope he had to cling to now.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Njarvord bore the fleeing slaver to the floor, the dwarf’s tusks snapping as his jaw cracked against the black stone. The dwarf struggled to push the northman’s heavy bulk off him. Hurling curses on the slaver, the Baersonling grabbed the sides of the dwarf’s head. The powerful warrior pulled the slaver’s head back savagely, snapping his neck like a rotten stick.

‘I thought the idea was to catch one alive and make it show us where the boss dwarf is hiding?’ Haukr muttered. His annoyance at Njarvord’s unthinking bloodlust wasn’t quite enough to keep him from going through the slaver’s pockets when the Baersonling stepped away from the corpse.

Haukr’s bitter words sobered Njarvord. The bearded marauder turned an uneasy eye towards his captain.

Wulfrik didn’t even glance in Njarvord’s direction. ‘I already have a trail to follow,’ the champion growled. ‘So long as none of you kill the dwarf I need you can wash this place in their blood for all I care.’

There was an eerie intensity in Wulfrik’s eyes as he stalked past his men. Some of the Norse tribes spoke of the ‘weirdsight’, a premonition granted to those who have stared too long into the realm of the gods. Seers and witches were said to possess the ability to see into the future and allow that knowledge to reshape the present. It was a power that had toppled kings from their thrones and brought victory in war. Mighty as they knew Wulfrik to be, endowed with strength and endurance beyond most men, his warriors had never before suspected he might be possessed of the weirdsight.

The thing which guided Wulfrik was much simpler than the spectral powers of warlocks and sorcerers, though equally intangible. A wounded dwarf, a survivor of Zarnath’s amok magic, had retreated back into the ziggurat. Several had done so, as Njarvord’s last victim could attest, but this particular dwarf had left some of his blood behind him at the gate. Since fleeing, the dwarf had bound his wound, staunching the loss of blood. But he could not eliminate the scent he left behind so easily.

Like a wolf in the forest, the champion was following that scent now, focussed upon it with such fixation that the rest of the world had faded from his perception into a half-real place of shadows and whispers. Wounded, frightened, with his enemies at his heels, the dwarf would flee to a place of safety. Where would be more logical for him to go than to seek protection from his overlord? Follow the scent and find Khorakk, such was the wisdom Wulfrik had chosen to guide him.

The halls within the ziggurat were built from heavy basalt blocks, ground and sanded to an almost mirror-like sheen. No torches lit the black passages; instead light came from polished plates of obsidian set into the walls. Like black mirrors, the plates stared from their settings, an infernal crimson glow emanating from their depths.

Haukr and Tjorvi tried to pry one of the plates free when they had first discovered them, but quickly lost the appetite for such plunder. There were things behind the obsidian mirrors, things trapped inside the dark gleam, things that scratched at the glistening surface. It was the endless hate of the trapped daemons which produced the hellish light within the ziggurat. The two looters didn’t need Stefnir to tell them the dwarfs were mad to create the obsidian mirrors, much less adorn the halls of their citadel with them.

The architecture itself was built in a ponderous, overwhelming fashion. Perhaps to compensate for their small bodies, the dwarfs had built their temple at titanic scale. The main corridor proved every bit as wide as Wulfrik had judged it to be when the great gates had opened. A fleet of longships might easily have sailed through the ziggurat’s main hall were it somehow flooded. The archways which stretched overhead were like the stone ribs of a vanquished god, their weight pressing down upon the men even when the ceiling climbed from fifty to a hundred feet. The side passages which opened off from the main corridor at regular intervals were big enough to herd oxen down, and each was guarded by a massive door of bronze and iron. The faces of bulls were engraved into each door, the mouth of each face an open cavity through which a dwarf gunner might thrust the deadly barrel of a blunderbuss.

The northmen braced themselves each time they passed one of the doors, taking shelter behind their shields until they were beyond the menacing portals. Wulfrik snorted in contempt. This Khorakk was both soft and arrogant. He’d sent all of his troops down into the mines to subdue the slaves, keeping only his elite soldiers behind. Then, so sure of the strength of his immortals and the magic of his sorcerer, he’d committed all of his warriors to crushing the invaders at his gate. A Norscan king might do the same, but he would glory in the fight. He would march with his warriors, not dispatch them like thralls upon an errand while remaining behind in his palace.

Wulfrik would enjoy showing Khorakk the price of his hubris.

Deeper into the ziggurat the men crept. The trail of the wounded dwarf never wavered, keeping to the main corridor. Soon, the warriors could see an angry, fiery glow at the far end of the hall, a smouldering brilliance more sinister than the crimson light of the daemon-mirrors. A stench of sulphur and boiling pitch slithered through the air, stifling the breath of even the hardy Njarvord. It was like the molten breath of a mountain, a vapour of brooding malignance older than blood or memory.

The marauders hesitated, feeling the oppressive menace rising the closer they came to that diabolic glow. The tiny voice of their fear whispered to them, warning them to go no farther. Alone, the warriors would have obeyed their fear. But they were not alone. Even as they hesitated, Wulfrik strode onwards. There was no fear in his eyes, only the pitiless determination that had brought all of them so far. It was the fearlessness that had made Wulfrik a hero, a warrior whose sagas were sung across all the freeholds and steadings of Norsca. It was the unfaltering courage that made men risk their lives to sail with him, for the men who followed Wulfrik were lauded as heroes in their own right. By following Wulfrik, these men laid claim to a glory they would never win by themselves, a glory their ancestors could envy.

Some things are more powerful than fear. When Wulfrik marched towards the heart of the ziggurat, his men were at his side.

At the end of the massive hall was a room that could only be described as colossal. Only the craft of a people like the dwarfs could have shaped stone in such a fashion. Immense walls converged upon one another, like a reversed image of the tiered steps of the ziggurat’s exterior. No beams or buttresses supported the mammoth construction; no archways interrupted the staggering vastness from floor to ceiling. Like a hollow hill, the great temple yawned between the basalt walls, a thousand feet across, nearly again the distance between its floor and ceiling.

Huge columns flanked the hall, forming the backs of gigantic statues which combined the worst aspects of dwarf and bull, gargantuan brethren to the creature Wulfrik had killed at the gates of Dronangkul. The walls were everywhere adorned with obsidian mirrors before which were piled the skulls of goblins and orcs and other creatures, the crimson glow of the plates casting weird shadows upon the crumbling bones.

The whole scene was lit by volcanic fires, canals of molten rock that flowed across the floor to converge in a great pool of magma at the very centre of the hall. Suspended a few inches above the pool was a huge stone platform upon which stood a giant bronze statue cast in the image of a dwarf-faced bull. The belly of the idol was open and beneath its ribs dangled a nest of steel shackles. Barrel-like machines rested to either side of the idol, squatting like noxious toads in its shadow. Fore and aft, the machines ended in ugly nozzles, each nozzle fitted to a short hose of dragonhide.

The purpose of the machines was beyond the ability of the northmen to guess, but the function of the crystal lamps sitting at each corner of the platform was obvious to Wulfrik. These were the lights the dwarfs had used to create the ghostly face of their god in the sky above the outpost. A monstrous curling tube of brass gave evidence whence the god’s voice had sounded.

Directly above the platform, far overhead, the ceiling of the temple was open, the first flicker of day washing out the stars. Immense chains extended from each corner of the platform to connect with enormous gears set into the roof of the ziggurat. Again, it was not hard for Wulfrik to discern their purpose. The platform was the altar of their god. Through their machines, the dwarfs could bring that altar down inside their temple or raise it up to the top of the ziggurat. Why they should do such a thing, whether it was some strange ritual Hashut demanded of the dwarfs, Wulfrik neither knew nor cared.

As he cast his gaze across the temple, studying its environs, Wulfrik noted the cluster of dwarfs standing upon the platform. Some were the ragged slavers who had survived the battle at the gate, others were bald dwarfs with scarred faces who wore red robes and bronze breastplates. Wulfrik decided they were monks or priests of some sort, servants of the dwarfs’ Father of Darkness. It was the other dwarf upon the platform who interested him.

Wulfrik decided he had been hasty naming the sorcerer at the gate as the most loathsome dwarf in creation. The specimen upon the platform was hideous enough to sicken a jackal. His head was squashed and flat, his ears large and mismatched. His nose was a bulbous knot of hairy pimples and his eyebrows were thick enough to be braided. His black beard hung from a sharply pointed chin in oily locks, gaudy combs of diamond and ruby strung through them in the most haphazard way. Behind the rings of his beard, Wulfrik could see the blood-red hue of Khorakk’s torc reflecting in the fiery light of the temple.

The dwarf thegn hadn’t been so idle as Wulfrik had supposed. Instead of the rich robes of a pampered king, Khorakk was encased in a heavy suit of plate armour which drastically increased both his height and his bulk. There was no fright in the thegn’s eyes when he saw Wulfrik enter the temple, not even surprise, only an amused sort of disgust.

‘You led them here,’ Khorakk’s slithery voice rasped as he turned towards one of the slavers. Before the slaver could react, Khorakk’s armoured hand reached out and closed about his head. Steam puffed from vents in the armour’s elbow and shoulder as Khorakk crushed the slaver’s head into paste. ‘How inconvenient,’ the thegn said. With a flick of his hand, he sent the slaver’s body pitching into the molten fire beneath the platform.

The abrupt violence of the slaver’s death was quickly followed by more bloodshed. The bald dwarfs turned on the other slavers, piling on them, dragging them to the floor of the platform. Some of their number seized heavy steel hammers, raising the mattocks and pulverising the faces of the struggling captives.

‘The ugly one is mine,’ Wulfrik snarled at his men, baring his fangs. ‘I suggest you remember that.’

The northmen raced across the mammoth hall, leaping over the shallow canals of fire. The dwarfs stared back at them, seemingly unconcerned by the nearness of their enemies. Khorakk’s hideous face pulled back in a smug look of arrogant victory. He nodded to one of the bald dwarfs.

‘My immortals will be back soon enough,’ Khorakk said. ‘They will attend to this rabble.’

At Khorakk’s gesture, the bald dwarf pulled a lever jutting from a box-like contrivance standing at one corner of the platform. In response, the chains began to withdraw, pulling the platform and its occupants towards the roof of the ziggurat.

Wulfrik glared up at the retreating dwarfs and shook his sword. ‘Khorakk! Fatherless mongrel of a vulture!’ The violence in the champion’s voice sent his words thundering through the cavernous temple. ‘Your ancestors were oathbreakers and kinslayers! Small surprise their descendant doesn’t have the guts of a jackal, much less a man!’

Uttered in the harsh tones of the dwarf tongue, Wulfrik’s scathing challenge cut at Khorakk’s pride. The dwarf would have liked to reach the roof of the ziggurat, then have the floor of the temple flooded with magma. He’d risen far by being petty, vicious and above all careful. The human’s words, however, stung him in a way that went beyond reason, touching the primal essence of his being. He did not know about the Gift of Tongues, but he felt its power when he turned towards the bald dwarfs and ordered the platform to descend.

‘Manling,’ Khorakk snarled at Wulfrik. ‘I will feed your spine to Hashut – if I can find it!’ The dwarf thegn clenched his fist and a curved blade shot outwards from the heavy vambrace on his arm. He gestured menacingly at the Norscan with the sword-like weapon. ‘You’ll cry to your gods before I’m done!’

‘I’ll cry now,’ Wulfrik called back at him. ‘I asked my gods to send me a worthy foe, not the village idiot!’

Khorakk’s face turned red as anger swelled up inside him. For a moment, it seemed the dwarf would hurl himself from the platform, so great was his wrath at Wulfrik’s mocking tone. He was used to respect and fear, demanded it from all who stood in his presence. He would not suffer temerity from this barbarian!

While the platform was still a few feet from the floor of the temple, Khorakk lunged at Wulfrik. Jets of steam hissed from pistons fastened to the thegn’s armoured legs, the machinery endowing his leap with force far beyond that of mere flesh. The Norscan scrambled as Khorakk’s body came crashing down at him, clearing the dozen yards between himself and his prey in the blink of an eye. The dwarf smashed into the floor with such force that the basalt block cracked beneath the impact. Coiled wires fitted into the steel legs absorbed the shock of his violent descent, allowing Khorakk to recover immediately from his leap. The dwarf’s crooked blade flashed out at Wulfrik, glancing across the champion’s scalp as he ducked beneath the sudden assault.

The dwarf’s armour made him taller than Wulfrik and about as massive as a troll. When the hero’s sword stabbed at him, Khorakk laughed, the blade scarcely scratching the thick marble breastplate.

‘Where is your bragging now?’ Khorakk growled, pursuing his attack on the northman. The steam-powered arms of his armour gave the dwarf incredible speed, his blade slashing at Wulfrik as though it were crafted from lightning. Only the rage-ridden clumsiness of Khorakk’s attack allowed the hero to defend himself, dodging and weaving his body as the crescent blade sliced at his body.

In dodging the blade, however, Wulfrik exposed himself to the dwarf’s other hand, the steel gauntlet that had crushed the slaver’s skull. The metal fingers ripped at him, cutting through his armour as though it were Cathayan silk. Shreds of mail dangled from Khorakk’s hand when Wulfrik squirmed out of the dwarf’s tightening grip. Blood rose to fill the deep gouges the thegn’s talons left across the northman’s chest.

Wulfrik snarled in pain, staggering back as Khorakk flung the tatters of his armour into one of the fiery canals. The dwarf’s legs spewed jets of steam as he pressed his attack and forced the hero to give ground before him. Khorakk glanced about him to ensure himself that he would not be flanked by the barbarian’s comrades.

The other humans were busy fighting the robed acolytes. Each of the bald dwarfs had seized a heavy hammer and followed their thegn into battle. The northmen were shocked to find that their foes were women. Dwarf mothers too old to produce children, their only purpose now was to defend the temple of their unforgiving god. They wielded their hammers with the maddened zeal of fanatics, the burned stumps of their tongues wriggling in silent cries of hate. Seldom had the veteran marauders ever battled foes who fought with such crazed disregard for their own lives as these viragos.

Khorakk’s hideous face grinned as he saw the dwarf harridans take down one of the humans, bringing him low with a bone-crushing blow to his leg. The thegn wasn’t overly concerned that two of the acolytes had died on the northman’s blade to get that close to him. To his thinking, the barren viragos were almost as worthless as a hobgoblin in the grand scheme of things.

The dwarf’s momentary distraction as he watched Stefnir fall before the acolytes gave Wulfrik the opportunity he had been watching for. Clenching his fangs, Wulfrik suddenly sprang at the gloating thegn. His blade scraped across the steel gorget the dwarf wore, failing to find the weak join between neck and breastplate. As his sword turned, Wulfrik twisted his hand, slamming the crosspiece into Khorakk’s face. The dwarf howled in pain as his ugly visage was smashed into bruised wreckage.

‘Swine! Dog!’ the thegn swore, raising a hand to shield his face while swiping blindly at Wulfrik with his blade. Khorakk cursed again as the hero ducked beneath his sweeping steel to slash at the cables and pistons fitted to his legs. Screaming steam exploded from ruptured lines, venting across the floor in a boiling cloud. Wulfrik retreated from the steam, his flesh scalded by the burning vapour.

Khorakk stumbled back, the injured leg of his armour sluggish and jerky in its movements. As the cloud of steam jetting from the pipes dwindled, the dwarf’s leg lost all of its remaining flexibility, at last becoming completely immobile.

‘You’ll suffer for that!’ the thegn promised. He pressed his hand against a stud affixed to his breastplate. Puffs of smoke vented from the armour around his neck as two steel hinges sprang into motion, raising a horned helm from where it had rested against the dwarf’s back and lowering it over his head. Khorakk’s hate-ridden eyes glared from behind the grilled visor set into the helm’s golden mask.

Wulfrik ran his hand across his bleeding scalp, flicking scarlet beads onto the dwarf’s mask. ‘Too late to spare your looks,’ the northman said. ‘They looked like troll vomit before I touched them!’

The dwarf thegn rushed at Wulfrik, chopping at the champion with his curved blade. The crippled leg of Khorakk’s armour made the attack clumsy, almost unbalancing him as he struck. The northman rolled with the blow, letting the edge of the blade pass inches from his heart. As he rolled, he turned, driving his sword full-force against Khorakk’s helm. The sturdy helm resisted the blow, but the gilded mask, its strength compromised by extravagance and hubris, crumpled. Khorakk cried out in shock as the dented slats of his visor were thrust inwards, almost crushing his eye.

Half-blinded, Khorakk slapped at a second stud fitted to his breastplate. From his right forearm, a steel plug suddenly popped free from the end of a pipe. Wulfrik had assumed the pipe was another piston designed to give the dwarf extra strength in his arm. Now he learned its real purpose. The dwarf clenched his fist. In response, a jet of fire exploded from the mouth of the pipe, billowing out at his foe in a sheet of flame.

Wulfrik leapt from the path of the fire, sliding across the floor. His momentum carried him to the very brink of one of the canals, the miasma of the bubbling magma singeing his beard. The hero didn’t have time to consider how close he had come to destruction. As he arrested his slide, he threw himself to one side. Fire from Khorakk’s armour blasted the floor where he had lain, the stones glowing red with heat as the flame played across them.

Awkwardly, Khorakk turned, trying to catch the agile barbarian in his sights. Unable to see through the left side of his helm and unable to bend his right leg, the hunt became an exercise in frustration for the thegn. A stream of curses echoed from his helm as he alternately cut at Wulfrik with his blade and shot at him with his fire-thrower. The curses faded into a gloating chuckle when the slow chase caused Khorakk to turn towards the ziggurat’s main hall.

‘You are doomed, barbarian!’ the thegn laughed. ‘My immortals are coming back, and against them you have no hope!’

Wulfrik did not need Khorakk’s words to tell him more dwarfs were coming. He could smell the immortals as they rushed down the hall, feel their rage in their scent. Not many of them had survived Zarnath’s spell and the attentions of Tjorvi and the others afterwards, but enough of them had endured to overwhelm the remaining Norscans.

Wulfrik ducked beneath another blind sweep of Khorakk’s blade. Before the dwarf could turn his fire-thrower in his direction, the northman brought his sword sweeping down in a double-handed stroke that had all of his strength behind it. The blackened sword did not strike at Khorakk’s blade, but at the metal housing behind it. The housing crumpled beneath the impact, springs snapping as the metal around them was crushed. Khorakk’s blade wobbled against his arm, loosened from its fittings. When the dwarf struck back at the hero, Wulfrik’s sword crashed against it, knocking it free and sending it bouncing into one of the molten canals.

‘You’re right, dwarf,’ Wulfrik snarled at Khorakk. ‘I don’t have time to play with you any more!’ Howling like an animal, the champion lunged at Khorakk’s legs. His sword crashed against the pistons set into the thegn’s still-functioning leg. The blade failed to work the same kind of havoc it had before, only a small spray of steam rewarding his effort.

The real impact of his attack was upon the dwarf inside the armour. Half-blind, his blade gone and with one leg already crippled, Khorakk appreciated how vulnerable he would be if he lost full control of the other. Fear gripped the overlord’s dark heart. He turned away from Wulfrik, stiffly dragging his injured leg after him. As he retreated, he cried out to the dwarf acolytes for aid. Wulfrik was forced to ignore his quarry as a pair of hammer-wielding viragos rushed him. A low sweep of his sword slashed across the knees of one of the acolytes, spilling her to the ground in a bleeding heap. The second nearly caught him with an overhanded strike of her hammer, but when the blow failed to connect, the wizened old virago found herself staring at her own body as her head rolled across the temple.

‘Stop the thegn!’ Wulfrik roared at his surviving men. The marauders were scattered across the temple, defending themselves as best they could against the remaining viragos. Even so, they answered their captain’s call, extricating themselves from their enemies to charge the retreating Khorakk.

Wulfrik could see Khorakk’s goal. The thegn was making for the platform. Once there, he would be able to raise it to the roof of the ziggurat and escape. Even if he was able to fight his way clear of the immortals, Wulfrik knew his chances of catching the fleeing thegn would be poor. Those chances became worse when a stream of black fire erupted across the temple, narrowly missing Wulfrik’s head.

The immortals were not the only ones who had survived the battle with Zarnath. Stalking down the hall was the dwarf sorcerer and his lammasu. The sorcerer and his beast looked the worse for their experience, the lammasu’s wings tattered, one of its hind legs painfully curled against its side. But without a warlock of his own to fight them, Wulfrik knew even a weakened sorcerer was enough to finish his warband.

The only hope lay in using Khorakk’s own escape route. Wulfrik wasn’t going to die when he was so close to victory.

‘Make for the platform!’ he howled to his warriors. Wulfrik matched deeds to words, rushing towards the heart of the temple. He could see Khorakk limping onwards. The thegn stopped a dozen yards from the platform, his armour groaning and creaking as the pistons in its legs shuddered into action. Like some steel locust, Khorakk sprang from the floor of the temple, flinging himself up onto the dais. The dwarf landed badly, his damaged leg buckling under him and throwing him onto his side.

Wulfrik could see Khorakk was still moving, however, lifting himself with his arms. There would be only a matter of moments before the thegn reached the mechanism which controlled the platform. The northman’s heart was hammering against his chest, his breath burning in his lungs by the time he reached the platform. Already in motion, he flung himself at the rising dais, his hands catching the edge. Below him, Wulfrik could feel the blistering heat of the molten pool. Had his hands missed the platform, the pool of fire would have been his tomb.

As the dais continued to rise, Wulfrik lifted himself onto the platform. He could see Njarvord and Haukr running towards him to help him up. Angrily he waved them away, pointing a fist at Khorakk. ‘Just make sure he doesn’t get away,’ he told them. He retrieved his sword from its sheath, glaring murder at the thegn.

Khorakk glanced up at the roof of the ziggurat, then glared at the approaching northman. ‘Hashut damn your bones, barbarian!’ the dwarf growled. His armoured hand tore one of the crystal eyes from the side of the platform. There was a ghastly shriek, something like purple smoke flashing from the ruptured mechanism. Khorakk ignored the freed daemon. Lifting the heavy mass of bronze and crystal over his head, the dwarf hurled it at Wulfrik.

Wulfrik threw himself forwards as the cumbersome missile crashed against the platform, causing the entire dais to sway. His leap carried him just beyond the crystal eye as it rolled past him and over the edge of the platform. He could hear the sizzle as it splashed into the magma below.

More curses streamed from Khorakk’s mouth. The dwarf took a lumbering step towards his foe, raising the arm equipped with the fire-spitter. Suddenly the thegn took a cautious step back.

‘Watch out for the beast!’

The alarm came from Tjorvi, who like Wulfrik had only just managed to catch the edge of the dais as it rose above the temple. Slower to climb onto the platform, the Graeling had seen the frustrated immortals shaking their fists at them from the floor below. He had also watched a monstrous shape lift into the air in pursuit of the retreating dais.

Wulfrik dropped to the floor of the platform as he heard the warning. Claws swept through the empty air above him, the stench of brimstone and sulphur filling his nose, shimmering smoke clouding his eyes. Instinctively, Wulfrik rolled onto his back, slashing with his sword at the lammasu looming over him.

The monster reeled back, roaring in pain, one of its paws savaged by the champion’s keen blade. The beast snarled down at him. Over its shoulder, Wulfrik could see the sorcerer’s bloodthirsty grin.

Before either monster or sorcerer could strike, each found himself engaged from a different quarter. The pair had fixated too fully upon slaughtering Wulfrik, forgetting for the moment their other foes. They soon had cause to remember Njarvord and Haukr as the two warriors drove their axes into the lammasu’s black hide. Haukr’s blade cleaved deeply into the monster’s leathery wing, smashing through the finger-like bones and ripping the membrane. Njarvord’s hacked through the monster’s flank, biting deep into its side. The beast reared back, forcing the sorcerer to forget about casting hexes as he struggled to stay mounted. The massive, club-like tail whipped around, smashing into Njarvord, flinging him like a ragdoll across the platform to crash into the side of the idol. The hollow statue rang like a bell from the impact of the marauder’s body.

Haukr backed away from the raging lammasu, using the weird machines mounted beside the idol to duck behind as the beast swept its claws at him. Tjorvi jabbed at the monster with his own axe, trying to keep it distracted and divide its efforts between the two men.

Wulfrik left his warriors to keep the lammasu occupied. He had not forgotten Khorakk and knew that the thegn still posed a formidable threat in his own right. Backed into a corner, the dwarf might not care overmuch if he caught his own minions in a blast from his fire-thrower.

The thought gave Wulfrik another idea. There was a cruel smile on his face as he scrambled away from the lammasu and hurled himself towards Khorakk. The thegn was waiting for him, clenching his fist and sending a sheet of flame shooting from his armour at the charging hero. Khorakk imagined Wulfrik had made the last mistake he would ever make. The dwarf’s fire would either immolate him or force him off the side of the platform. Either way the barbarian would burn.

The fire did drive Wulfrik off the side of the platform, but that was as the champion had planned. The northman sheathed his sword and lunged forwards, hurtling out over the side of the dais. As he leapt, his arms reached out, catching the chain fastened to the corner of the platform. Wulfrik felt his entire body shudder, felt the hot steel of the chain bite into his palms, but his grip held. The moving chain lifted him up and above the dais. Using the momentum of his leap, Wulfrik spun his body around and launched himself at Khorakk.

Like a bolt cast from a ballista, Wulfrik smashed down into Khorakk’s chest. Striking from the dwarf’s blind side, he caught the thegn completely by surprise. Believing Wulfrik had fallen down into the temple, a vindictive chuckle had been bubbling behind the dwarf’s golden mask. Now the chuckle collapsed into a grunt of pain as Khorakk’s heavy armour crashed onto his back.

Sprawled across Khorakk’s chest, Wulfrik drove a dagger into the join between the armoured shoulder and his left arm. The Norscan sawed the edge across the tangle of pipes and cables until something broke and a jet of steam spurted out into the gloom. He wasn’t sure if he’d cut the dwarf inside the armour. At the moment, he didn’t care.

Wulfrik set his legs against the dwarf’s left arm, hoping he’d damaged it enough that he would be able to pin it in place. Viciously, he seized Khorakk’s right arm with both hands, straining to raise it. He could feel the dwarf struggling to pull free, pistons throbbing as they drove the armour’s mechanisms. It took every ounce of his strength to hold the arm.

And aim it in the direction he wanted.

The lammasu had ripped apart one of the machines flanking the idol. Oily chemicals spilled from the ruptured machine, spilling across the beast. Wulfrik could see the dwarf sorcerer crawling through the mess. Thrown at last from the raging monster’s back, the sorcerer was frantically trying to get to safety, dragging his legs behind him as though they were lumps of granite. Wulfrik grinned to see the dwarf’s panic.

Snarling, Wulfrik seized Khorakk’s hand and forced the gauntlet to close into a fist. He could feel the thegn’s fingers break as one by one he made them close. When the hand tightened into a fist, a stream of fire would shoot from the pipe fitted to the dwarf’s forearm.

‘Get clear of the idol!’ Wulfrik shouted to his men. Haukr and Tjorvi saw the reason for their captain’s warning. Hastily they pulled the stunned Njarvord back with them. On the ground, the sorcerer uttered a desperate wail of fright, pawing at the platform in a frantic effort to clear the pool of chemicals.

At his shout, the lammasu swung around towards him. Its face was similar enough to that of a dwarf for Wulfrik to enjoy the expression of horror it wore. The dragon-like wings snapped open, but Haukr’s axe had ended any hope the lammasu had of flying away.

‘Burn!’ Wulfrik growled as he made Khorakk’s broken hand tighten into a fist.

The flame shot across the platform, washing over the lammasu and igniting the pool of chemicals it was standing in. The monster shrieked, the entire dais shaking as its huge body writhed in agony. Its legs were columns of fire, patches of its black hide burning like hot coals where the chemicals had splashed across it. The beast’s sorcerous breath did nothing to quench the fires consuming it. Screaming in pain, the lammasu bolted across the platform, making one last pathetic effort to take wing as it hurtled over the side.

The lammasu’s screams were soon echoed by its master. The dwarf sorcerer had crawled through the chemicals, and as he retreated he’d left a trail behind him like some giant slug. The same fire that consumed the monster raced along the trail of chemicals to find the crawling sorcerer. He flailed like a living torch as the flames licked at his robes and scorched his flesh. He was still screaming when Njarvord walked over to him and crushed the dwarf’s throat with his boot.

Dawn was glowing in the east, illuminating the desolation around Dronangkul. From the roof of the ziggurat, Wulfrik could see across the desert for hundreds of leagues. He fancied he could even see the black ribbon of the River Ruin somewhere to the south, though it was impossible to see the Seafang from such a distance.

The champion fingered the ruby torc he had ripped from Khorakk’s neck. It felt like no other treasure he had even stolen. Was that because he sensed its power, or was it because he knew what it could do?

Zarnath was dead, the dwarf sorcerer and his beast would have seen to that. But there had to be others who knew what the shaman had known! Among all the witches and sorcerers of the north, there had to be one who could unlock the power within the Smile of Sardiss.

Wulfrik would find the warlock who knew that secret. Then he would be free to wed Hjordis and become king of all the Sarls. His sons would be greater still, lords of all Norsca! So mighty even the gods would tremble at their deeds!

A black splotch upon the grey strip that marked the road to Dronangkul snapped Wulfrik from his dreams of the future. Somehow the plight of the dwarf outpost had become known. At such a distance, the splotch looked like so many swarming ants, but the northman knew it for what it was: an army. Even if they could keep the dwarfs trapped down below the causeway and track down those still lurking inside the ziggurat, they could never hold against such a force.

Nor did Wulfrik have any desire to. His men might have liked time to plunder the outpost, but he had what he’d come for. All that was left was to climb down and collect Sigvatr and his men from the lower gate.

That, and one other thing.

Wulfrik turned back to the platform. Khorakk’s armour lay strewn across the roof of the ziggurat. It had taken some effort to pry the ugly dwarf from his shell. His curses had been such that Wulfrik had finally gagged the venomous overlord. Now he dangled from the shackles fitted into the belly of the idol.

Wulfrik didn’t know how the remaining machine worked. Somehow the dwarf priests must have used it to heat the idol and roast the offerings trapped in its belly. He had, however, seen how readily the pungent chemical took to fire. Walking over to the machine, the hero nodded to his men. As one, the surviving warriors brought their axes chopping down into the nozzles. The released chemical sprayed across the idol. Khorakk struggled frantically in his bindings as the liquid splashed across him, his screams muffled by his gag.

Fangs gleamed in the growing dawn as Wulfrik smiled at the thegn. Grimly, he planted the point of his sword against the stone base of the dais.

‘I wonder if you’ll give Hashut indigestion,’ Wulfrik said, scraping his sword across the stone, sending sparks flying into the puddles of chemical splashed about the idol.

CHAPTER NINE

Wulfrik and his warriors hurried down from the ziggurat’s roof. From their vantage point, they could see that the gate at the causeway had been breached. Sigvatr and his men had held the dwarfs back for some hours, but now the vengeful creatures and their hobgoblin minions marched back into the upper reaches of the outpost, scouring every shadow for some sign of the invaders.

The champion watched the progress of the monsters with a sickened heart. He hoped that Sigvatr had abandoned the gate before his retreat was cut off. Wulfrik felt a stab of pain as he thought about the old reaver. Sigvatr was his closest friend and confidant, a sword-brother who had fought by his side long before the Battle of a Thousand Skulls. After all they had been through, he had come to think of the elder warrior as being indestructible, a man who could not be killed. Watching the dwarfs reclaim their outpost, for the first time Wulfrik felt fear for his friend.

‘They’ve cut us off,’ Haukr spat, glaring at the armoured dwarfs forming into ranks before the stronghold’s shattered main gate.

‘No need to go so far for a fight,’ Tjorvi snarled. He pointed the blade of his axe at the dark figures closing around the bridge below. The immortals looked battered after being on the receiving end of Zarnath’s sorcery, but none of the men staring down at them could doubt the dwarfs were still ready for a fight.

Wulfrik grunted as he considered the dwarf warriors. ‘They’re hungry for revenge, not battle,’ he decided. ‘Otherwise they’d be climbing up here to get us right now. They’ll wait for the other dwarfs to join them, then swarm over us in numbers.’ The champion’s teeth gleamed in a cunning smile. ‘We have some time yet.’

‘Time for what?’ objected Tjorvi. ‘To let our ancestors know we’re coming?’

The champion glowered at the Graeling, his intense gaze bringing fear onto Tjorvi’s face. Wulfrik waited until he saw the last flicker of challenge wither inside the warrior. Tjorvi was new, his first voyage with the Seafang. Wulfrik did not begrudge a man his mistakes, so long as he learned from them. Next time Tjorvi tried to panic his crew, Wulfrik would gut him like a fish.

Wulfrik turned away from his cowed follower. He circled around the roof of the ziggurat, walking past the smouldering idol. He paused beside one of the winches. Without hesitation, he brought the edge of his sword crashing down into the heavy chain. A second blow and the dais began to sag in one corner. A third strike of his sword and the chain was broken. Wulfrik sheathed his blade and grabbed the severed end of the chain. Bracing his feet, he tugged violently at it, studying how securely it was fastened to the roof. A wide grin was on his face when he turned back to his men.

‘Let the dwarfs wait for us at the gate,’ he told the marauders. ‘Let their beards go grey and their axes turn to rust.’ Wulfrik wrapped a length of chain around his arm and stalked towards the edge of the ziggurat. Understanding dawned on the faces of his warriors when he threw the heavy chain over the side. Instantly the chain still fixed to the winch began to unspool, following the line as it fell. Faster and faster the chain unwound, hurtling to the ground far below.

Ground on the outside of Dronangkul’s walls.

When the chain grew taut, Wulfrik again tested the strength of its moorings. The dwarfs of the Dark Lands built just as sturdily as their kin in Norsca and the Worlds Edge Mountains. The chain held, resisting Wulfrik’s savage efforts to pull it free. The northman nodded in satisfaction.

‘While they watch the front, we slip out the back,’ Wulfrik told his men. He laughed when he noted the disappointment on Njarvord’s face. ‘It is a long hike back to the Seafang,’ he warned. ‘You may yet get your chance for a fight. But at least it will be a fight on our terms, not the dwarfs’.’

Grimly, Wulfrik seized the chain and began to rappel down the sheer side of the ziggurat. For men accustomed to climbing the craggy sides of Norscan mountains with their bare hands, the descent was absurdly easy. Having observed the outpost from afar, they knew the impossibility of anyone within the stronghold being able to observe what transpired atop the ziggurat. The dwarfs would learn of their escape only when they climbed to the top of their temple to look for themselves.

By that time, Wulfrik hoped, they would be far away. There was something greater than a glorious death in battle driving him now. With Khorakk’s torc in his possession, he felt for the first time there was a real chance to escape the curse the gods had laid upon him. Even without Zarnath’s knowledge, he was certain the torc was the key to his release.

Then he would claim Hjordis’s hand and her father’s place as king of the Sarls.

The marauders quickly left Dronangkul behind them, making for the base of the cliffs overlooking the outpost. It had been agreed before the assault on the stronghold that those who survived the attack would regroup beneath the cliffs before making the long trek back to the River Ruin. Flush with their escape from the ziggurat, the spirits of the northmen fell when they did not see any of their comrades waiting for them. Again, Wulfrik’s mind turned to the dark possibility that Sigvatr had fallen trying to hold the causeway. The champion regretted not leaving his old friend behind to guard the Seafang. A bitter smile flashed across his face as he imagined how violently Sigvatr would have protested being left behind.

‘We had almost given you up for dead,’ Broendulf’s voice suddenly called out. Wulfrik and his men looked up to see the Sarl emerge from hiding, his blade at the ready. Arngeirr limped out from behind another boulder, his kraken-sword dark with greenskin blood. Standing atop one of the rocks, Jokull had his bow at the ready.

Wulfrik nodded respectfully to the warriors he had sent into the pit to free the slaves. ‘The ancestors will drink to your valour,’ he told them. ‘The diversion worked. You drew most of the dwarfs down into the mines to subdue their slaves.’

Broendulf chuckled and ran a thumb along his cheek. ‘I’d rather drink to our valour myself! My ancestors can find their own ale!’ The huscarl’s expression grew serious, his eyes studying his captain before continuing. ‘Your quest was successful?’ he asked at last.

Wulfrik drew the ruby torc from his belt, holding it up high for his men to see. The marauders licked their lips like hungry dogs, sight of the necklace exciting their natural greed. Such a necklace would bring a small fortune to the man who brought it back to Ormskaro’s traders. Thoughts of wealth quickly faded as the northmen remembered who it was that had laid claim upon the torc, and why.

Jokull was the first to recover from the fascinating gleam of the necklace. ‘Now Zarnath can break your curse?’

Angrily, Wulfrik shoved the torc back beneath his belt. ‘The Kurgan fell,’ he said. ‘His magic wasn’t equal to that of the dwarfs.’

‘Then this has all been for nothing?’ Arngeirr snarled, swaying uneasily on his bone leg.

‘I’ll find another warlock!’ Wulfrik snapped. ‘Kharnath’s blood! Witches are thick as lice in the Wastes! One of them will know what Zarnath knew!’ He slapped a fist against the pouch containing the torc. ‘Getting this is the key. Somebody will know the door it fits.’

The marauders were silent, waiting while their captain’s anger abated. They had their own ideas about how easy it would be to replace Zarnath, but each valued his own life too much to express those doubts to Wulfrik. Like a wolf with a bone, the hero was clinging to the hope the shaman had given him. None of the northmen wanted to lose a hand trying to take that hope away from him.

Wulfrik suddenly stared intently at the rocks behind Broendulf. The champion’s hand fell to his sword, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. ‘Who’s back there?’ he growled at Broendulf.

The huscarl stepped aside, allowing Wulfrik a better view of the cliff. ‘Sigvatr and some of the men,’ he said with a shrug. He caught Wulfrik’s arm as the champion rushed forwards. ‘Sigvatr was wounded,’ Broendulf warned. ‘Badly.’

Wulfrik pulled away from the huscarl. Rounding the pile of boulders he found two of the warriors he had left at the causeway kneeling beside Sigvatr. The old war-chief was sprawled on the ground, a rock under his head. His armour had been stripped away, one side of his neck swaddled in a crude compress of wool and leather. Sigvatr’s breath came in ragged gasps, a crimson trickle oozing from beneath the bandage.

Quickly, Wulfrik was beside his old friend. He winced in sympathy as he saw Sigvatr’s pained eyes, the grimace of agony that twisted his face. ‘How did this happen?’ the hero demanded.

The two marauders tending Sigvatr looked nervously at each other. ‘We don’t know,’ the braver of them answered. ‘One moment we were all holding the dwarfs at the gate, with Sigvatr bellowing orders at us. Then we heard him cry out. When we turned away from the gate, we found him lying slumped against the wall.’

‘We… we brought… him out… as quick…’ the other marauder stammered, fear filling his eyes.

Wulfrik turned in disgust before the warrior could finish explaining. Leaning over Sigvatr, he reached for the bandage over his friend’s neck. He would see for himself what had brought down his war-chief.

Sigvatr’s hand closed about Wulfrik’s own, trying to pull his reaching fingers away. His clutch was as feeble as a newborn’s, trembling with effort. There was a desperate, pleading quality in the dying man’s eyes.

Gingerly, with such softness as he could manage, Wulfrik pulled Sigvatr’s hand away. Again he reached for the compress, pulling it back by the corner. The champion’s face became pale as he gazed upon the hideous wound beneath the bandage. He had expected the gory work of axe or blunderbuss; what he had not been ready for was the gruesome sight he had actually found. Sigvatr’s neck had been bitten through by some fanged fiend, a great gouge torn from his body by vicious teeth. He could see vertebrae poking from the wet, dripping meat, a filthy blue venom mingling with the dark arterial blood gushing from the savaged veins. Horrified, Wulfrik pressed the bandage tight again.

Tears fought their way into his eyes as Wulfrik regarded his dying friend. He struggled to keep them from falling. He didn’t want Sigvatr’s last memory of him to be one of weakness.

‘Wulf,’ Sigvatr whispered, his voice a moist croak. ‘Did… did…’

‘Yes,’ Wulfrik answered, displaying the torc for his friend. ‘I took it from the dwarf and burned him in his own oven! They’ll not soon forget us here!’

Sigvatr tried to shake his head. His eyes pinched closed in pain. ‘No… No… Don’t… forget! Mustn’t!’

‘They won’t,’ Wulfrik promised. ‘Wherever they sing the saga of Wulfrik, the name of Sigvatr will also be known!’

Gritting his teeth, blood streaming across his shoulder, Sigvatr struggled to rise. ‘Traitor!’ he croaked. ‘Mustn’t… Agnarr… knew. Can’t… cheat…’ The old warrior’s body stiffened and he slumped against the ground again. Wulfrik leaned close as words bubbled up from Sigvatr’s lips. ‘Beware… traitor…’

Wulfrik laid his hand on Sigvatr’s dead face, shutting the pained eyes gazing blindly at him. In death, there was still an air of agony about his friend’s expression. Wulfrik felt a fury such as he had never known blaze up inside him. When he rose from Sigvatr’s side, his face was pulled back in a snarl, fangs gleaming.

‘He spoke of traitors,’ Wulfrik growled, glaring at the warriors who had brought Sigvatr from the stronghold. ‘How can it be that my friend lies here dead while you two live? How can it be that he was struck down and you did nothing to defend him?’ The champion paced after the marauders as they retreated before him. ‘He was standing near enough for you to hear his cry, yet you did not see what did that to him?’

The two marauders retreated before the menacing approach of their captain. Around them, Broendulf and the others drew their weapons, cutting off any chance of escape.

The warriors’ protests of innocence fell on unheeding ears. A sword was in each of Wulfrik’s hands when he closed upon them. ‘I will not consign Sigvatr’s body to the flame without dogs to lay at his feet,’ the champion hissed. ‘Even if they be cowards and curs!’

One of the marauders rounded upon Wulfrik, charging madly at him with a heavy flail. In a single fluid motion, Wulfrik caught the steel chains of the marauder’s weapon upon his left sword. As the warrior reflexively tried to pull his weapon free, Wulfrik plunged his other sword into the man’s side, burying the blade to the hilt in his ribs. The stricken northman collapsed, his body quivering as life fled through his wound.

The surviving marauder screamed in terror, throwing down his axe, making a display of his empty hands. There was no mercy in the gaze Wulfrik fixed upon him. Sobbing in fear, the man turned, tried to break through the cordon established by the other Norscans. Pitilessly, Njarvord kicked the marauder in the stomach. Haukr grabbed the man by the hair, throwing him back towards Wulfrik.

‘Pick up a weapon,’ the champion snarled at the marauder. The man stared at his axe lying on the bloodied ground, then shook his head in protest, trying again to retreat from the enraged Wulfrik.

‘Coward,’ Wulfrik spat in disgust. He tossed his swords away, disarming himself. He waved at the retreating marauder, beckoning him to attack. Again the warrior eyed his axe lying on the ground, then at his captain’s empty hands.

Shouting a ragged war cry, the marauder sprang forwards, ripping his axe from the earth. Furiously he brought the blade chopping down, seeking to bury it in Wulfrik’s chest. Contemptuously, Wulfrik side-stepped the attack, his powerful hands locking about the marauder’s arm. The champion’s grip tightened, then he wrenched the marauder’s arm around, breaking it at the elbow.

The surge of pain stunned the marauder. He tried to pull himself free of Wulfrik’s clutch, but the vengeful champion would not be denied. Baring his fangs, the fierce hero grappled with the crippled warrior. Clawing fingers sought the marauder’s face, gouging deep into his eye sockets, blood streaming down the man’s tortured visage. Wulfrik shifted his grip, seizing the sides of the man’s head. A single brutal twist and the marauder’s neck snapped. Wulfrik pushed the coward’s corpse away with revulsion.

‘Put those curs at Sigvatr’s feet and find something to burn,’ Wulfrik told his men.

‘Is that smart?’ Broendulf asked. ‘The dwarfs will see the smoke.’

Wulfrik glared at the huscarl. ‘Sigvatr will be paid the honours due to him if it brings every dwarf and goblin in this damned land upon our heads!’ The champion clenched his fist beneath the fair-faced Sarl’s chin. ‘I’m sure he won’t mind three dogs at his feet.’

Broendulf blanched at the hero’s threat. He had seen his captain take reckless chances before, but always from pride or ambition. He had never seen Wulfrik acting from grief before, never seen such blind fury take hold of the champion. It was something that chilled the huscarl’s bones.

Keeping their misgivings to themselves, the Norscans began gathering dead brush from the base of the cliff to fashion a bier for Sigvatr’s pyre.

The polluted banks of the River Ruin stretched before the weary eyes of the northmen. It had taken them days to recross the desert, hiding from the biggest of the hobgoblin patrols, fighting the smaller ones in order to steal the water and provisions they carried. Not a man among them did not bear some scar from their ordeal. They had dared the Dark Land to destroy them and it very nearly had.

Now, as they saw the foul river and the lonely ship anchored in its filthy morass, a thrill of triumph swept through the men. They had braved a deadly and hostile land, fought horrific foes, overcome overwhelming odds and emerged victorious. Great battles and worthy deeds to thrill the hearts of their kinsmen, to fill the songs of the skalds. Glory to honour their ancestors and earn the esteem of the gods themselves. The men who sailed upon the Seafang paid in blood and suffering for the right to be called heroes, but they knew nothing of worth came easy. As they marched towards the river, their minds turned to the welcome they would receive when they returned to Ormskaro, the feasts that would be held in their honour, the gifts King Viglundr and his jarls would bestow upon them, the lithe maidens eager to invite them into their bowers.

Around him, Wulfrik’s warriors laughed and boasted about what they would do when they returned to Norsca. Their captain did not share in their talk, his mind turned to a scorched patch of desert just beyond the walls of Dronangkul and the blackened bones he had left behind. The dwarfs, it turned out, had not investigated the smoke from Sigvatr’s pyre. Crafty and underhand, the dwarfs had stayed behind their walls, suspecting some subterfuge. They were content to wait for the reinforcements marching towards the stronghold before investigating the fire. Wulfrik had bet the dwarfs would display such caution when he ordered Sigvatr’s pyre lit.

Though gamble or not, Wulfrik would not have done differently. He would not have left Sigvatr’s body behind to be picked over by the hobgoblins and scavenged by their wolves. Death and damnation would have claimed him before he allowed such a miserable end for his friend’s bones.

Bitterly, Wulfrik swatted the skull of King Torgald tied to the hilt of his sword. If he had never made his drunken boasts after killing the king none of this would have come to pass. He would already be wed to Hjordis. He would be a great chief of the Sarls, ready to claim Viglundr’s throne when the king passed. And Sigvatr would still be alive.

Shouts of greeting sounded from the ship as Wulfrik and his surviving warriors drew near. Kaetill leapt down from the deck of the ship, sloshing through the polluted shallows to greet his captain.

‘Gods be praised!’ Kaetill yelled as he drew near the warriors. ‘We thought you were all dead!’

‘Others have made that mistake before,’ Wulfrik growled, stalking past Kaetill. He nodded towards the ship. ‘Is she ready to sail?’

Kaetill hurried after his captain. ‘Yes, we’ve kept her ready since you left. After the tales Stefnir told about the fire dwarfs, we wanted to be ready to leave in a hurry.’ He turned his eyes away and hung his head in shame. ‘We were going to follow the river south. It’s supposed to empty into some sort of sea down there.’

‘It is well for you that you had spine enough to stay,’ Wulfrik said. ‘No man steals my ship and brags about it later.’

‘We thought you were dead,’ Kaetill insisted, his voice turning defensive. He glanced about at the haggard warriors marching behind Wulfrik. ‘Aren’t we going to wait for the rest?’

‘There’s no one else coming,’ Broendulf told him. ‘Victory doesn’t come cheap,’ he added when he saw the shock on Kaetill’s face.

Wulfrik suddenly stopped on the bank of the river, staring up at the Seafang. Spinning around, he seized Kaetill by the throat. ‘Who told you we were dead?’ he demanded.

Kaetill’s trembling hand pointed back at the ship, his finger indicating the same figure Wulfrik had focussed on. ‘The… the shaman…’

Snarling, Wulfrik pushed Kaetill away. Lunging into the water, he trudged through the filth until he reached the Seafang. His fist tightened around the rim of a shield fastened to the hull, using it to lift himself out of the polluted river and onto the deck of his ship. Like his namesake, Wulfrik pounced upon the deck, fangs bared. Steel rasped against leather as he drew his swords. The Norscan crew backed away from their furious captain. Wulfrik didn’t even glance at them, his burning gaze fixed upon the short, white-bearded Kurgan standing beneath the mast.

‘Make peace with your gods, kin-eater,’ Wulfrik snarled at Zarnath.

The shaman raised his hand in a placating gesture, his face betraying no sign of alarm. ‘You survived,’ he said, surprise in his voice. ‘Few men could have.’

‘Few men did,’ Wulfrik spat, stalking towards the Kurgan. ‘Now you’ll join the others.’

Zarnath took a step back. The shaman pulled back his horsehair cape, displaying the charred wreck of his arm. ‘There was nothing to be gained by my staying. The dwarf sorcerer and his beast were too powerful for me. Tell me, would my death have helped you in any way?’

‘It will make me feel a lot better,’ Wulfrik said.

Worry appeared for the first time in the shaman’s eyes, spoiling the affected serenity of his face. He continued to back away from the vengeful champion. ‘You have captured the Smile of Sardiss,’ he said. ‘I can sense that the torc is in your possession. Now I can begin the ritual that will free you of your curse.’

‘No thanks. I can find another warlock to help me.’

A cold smile stretched across Zarnath’s face. The shaman stopped retreating from Wulfrik’s approach. ‘How long do you think that will take, great slayer? Five years? Ten? Will the gods wait while you try to cheat them, or will they demand further offerings? Perhaps so many that you will never have a chance to hunt for a sorcerer with the wisdom to help you.’

Doubt wormed through Wulfrik’s mind. The champion lowered his swords as indecision took hold of him. His thirst for revenge withered before the possibility that Zarnath was right. The shaman’s next words crushed the last embers of Wulfrik’s fury.

‘How long will Hjordis wait for you?’

Angrily, Wulfrik slammed his swords back into their sheaths. His fists clenched in impotent rage. ‘I’ll give you another chance, horse-cutter,’ Wulfrik hissed through clenched teeth. ‘But if you abandon me in battle again, I’ll feed your flesh to the eels.’

Zarnath’s expression was again serene, a mocking gleam in the blue fires of his eyes. ‘Of course,’ the shaman said. ‘I would be a fool to play false with the great Wulfrik.’ He extended one of his withered hands towards the fuming hero.

Wulfrik shook his head, a cruel laugh whispering past his fangs. ‘I’ll keep the torc with me, Kurgan,’ he said. ‘It’ll make me feel better that way.’

Zarnath shrugged, backing away from the champion. He shifted his attention to the side of the ship, watching as Broendulf and the others clambered over the side. ‘I imagine we will be returning to Ormskaro,’ he said. ‘Preferably before the dwarfs come down on us for their own revenge.’ The shaman nodded at the desert sky. Far in the distance a great shape could be seen hovering, circling over the trail Wulfrik and his men had left behind. To his men, it was just an indistinct blur, but to Wulfrik’s keen gaze, the shape resembled a monstrous winged bull, a metallic gleam shining from its back. It didn’t take Zarnath to tell him the gleam was from the armour of a rider, nor that the winged bull was another of the dwarf’s sinister creatures.

‘To oars!’ Wulfrik bellowed at his men. He drew a knife from his belt, sliding the blade across his palm. ‘We sail for home!’ he shouted as he strode towards the figurehead, blood dripping from his clenched fist.

CHAPTER TEN

The realm between worlds slowly faded away, the ethereal fog surrounding the Seafang vanishing as the longship returned to the world of men. The grey, overcast skies of Norsca were a reassuring sight to the northmen after the fiery skies of the Dark Lands. Many of the men rushed to the sides of the ship, dipping their helms into the cold waters of the fjord, cleansing the muck from the River Ruin from their bodies.

Wulfrik stood at the prow of his ship, his hand resting upon the scaly forehead of the wooden dragon, the jewelled torc clenched in his other fist. He had risked much and lost much to secure the relic. The pain of losing Sigvatr was a scar that would be a long time in healing. He was determined that his friend’s sacrifice would not be in vain.

Gazing out across the icy waters of the fjord, Wulfrik could see the streets of Ormskaro climbing up the slope. He noted with perplexity the snow covering the roofs, the boats pulled up along the shore. He had experienced the hazards of voyaging into the border-realm before, never certain where or when the Seafang would return to the world of mortals.

The only constant was Ormskaro. Always he could lead the ship back to the one place he might call home. Sigvatr had once told him that the heart was a better compass to a man’s needs than his mind. Wulfrik felt the old warrior had been right. His love for Hjordis was stronger than the malicious trickery of the border-realm. It was a beacon that guided the Seafang unerringly through the daemon seas, bringing her safely home again.

Hjordis! How long had he been away? How much time had the border-realm stolen from him on this voyage? Was it only weeks they had been gone? Months? Years?

Wulfrik shuddered at the possibility. Viglundr would not have been idle in his absence. The king sought alliance with the Aeslings. Without the threat of Wulfrik’s fury to restrain him, Viglundr would have already married Hjordis off to the Aesling prince Sveinbjorn. Every day he was away from Norsca would have emboldened Viglundr, made the king wonder if the troublesome hero would ever return.

His fist tightened about the relic he held, the rubies digging into his fingers. He would not be cheated by the scheming old king! It was for Hjordis he had led the Sarls into battle against Torgald and brought down upon himself the curse of the gods! It was for Hjordis he had followed Zarnath’s lead and made the journey into the Dark Lands! It was for Hjordis he had led Sigvatr to his death! King or no, Viglundr would suffer if he tried to cheat him now!

Wulfrik’s nostrils flared as a rich, savoury smell was blown across the Seafang’s decks. It was the smell of roasting steer, the scent of boiling seal, the aroma of cooked mutton. There was a sound borne upon the wind, the distant bellow of horns, the clamour of drums.

‘There are banners flying from the tower!’ Jokull called down from his perch atop the Seafang’s mast. ‘I see the standards of Aeslings!’

The news brought a murmur of alarm among the crew. Their thoughts were of invasion and conquest. Wulfrik, however, knew better. ‘Do they fly alone, or with the banners of the Sarls?’ He felt pain flare through his heart when Jokull told him the flags of the Sarls were displayed beside those of the Aeslings. He glared at the distant slopes of the fjord, cursing Viglundr under his breath. Turning his back on Ormskaro, he marched along the ship’s deck, barking orders to his crew, commanding them to make ready the storm sails.

Wulfrik strode to where Zarnath sat with his back against the oaken kerling supporting the ship’s mast. The shaman looked up when he sensed the champion staring down at him. As soon as he did so, Wulfrik grabbed him by the front of his tunic, lifting him to his feet.

‘Whistle me up a wind with your magic, Kurgan,’ the champion growled. Zarnath tried to pull free of his clutch but Wulfrik only tightened his grip. ‘Wind, witch-man!’ he snarled. ‘Speed this ship back to Ormskaro or the eels feed well this night!’

Submissively, Zarnath nodded his head. He could feel the rage in Wulfrik’s grip, hear the fury in his voice, see the barely restrained violence in his eyes. No words would be enough to reason with the man. To even try would be to risk a sudden and brutal death.

The shaman walked to the stern of the ship, facing towards the mast where the northmen made fast the sturdy woollen storm sail. He could feel Wulfrik’s impatient eyes upon him. Zarnath shuddered under his horsehair cape. It was an effort to focus his thoughts upon his magic, even more of an effort to wait until the crew had secured the sail.

Zarnath’s arms spread wide, blue fire flaring from his eyes. Thunder rumbled through the darkened clouds, lightning flashed about the distant mountains. An icy shower rained down upon the Seafang’s decks. The shaman drew a deep breath, sucking the frigid air into his lungs. Those watching him thought his body must burst from the air being drawn into it, yet still the shaman persisted.

At last, Zarnath released the breath he had taken, expelling it in a gagging cough. As he did so, a great gale rushed down upon the longship. The storm sail snapped in the sudden wind, propelling the Seafang across the fjord like a loosened arrow. Some of the marauders clung to their benches, hiding their faces in fear. Others shouted and laughed, revelling in the speed of their vessel.

Wulfrik neither hid nor laughed. Standing again in the bow of the ship, his hand upon the dragon’s brow, the hero’s eyes fixed upon the stone tower rising above Ormskaro.

The great hall of Ormfell was filled with the laughter of a celebratory throng. Skalds played upon their whale-bone harps, singing of the great deeds of Ormnir and the kings of the Aeslings. Freeholders feasted upon platters of steaming meat borne through the hall by southling thralls. Drunken jarls shouted bold boasts about their great deeds, testing their strength against one another by splintering wooden shields with their fists.

Seated within the carved jaws of Shipcracker, King Viglundr nuzzled the neck of a semi-clad Graeling thrall, his body shaking with a lewd chuckle as he spilled Bretonnian wine across her breast. The Sarl king glanced aside at the ivory seat set beside his throne, scowling as he noted the miserable face his daughter wore. ‘This feast is to celebrate your betrothal,’ Viglundr told her. ‘Try to enjoy yourself.’

Hjordis glared back at her father. ‘I enjoyed myself the last time I was betrothed. You remember, Father, when you promised me to Wulfrik. He brought you the head of that animal Torgald…’

Viglundr dashed his drinking horn to the floor, kicking the slave-girl from his knee. ‘You’ll not speak of that again!’ the king warned, wagging his finger at the princess. ‘We have more to gain with the Aeslings as our friends than we ever could with them as enemies.’

‘You have more to gain,’ Hjordis said acidly. ‘What do I gain? A husband I do not love, a scheming coward who lets others do his fighting for him?’ Her pretty face pulled back in a sneer. She turned her head and looked across the hall to where Sveinbjorn and his retainers were huddled around a wicker cage, wagering on the outcome of a fight between weasel and fox. The groom’s arm was wrapped about the waist of a buxom thrall, ignorant of the mead spilling from his drinking horn. ‘I can see why you favour him. You have so much in common.’

The king’s fingers seized Hjordis’s chin, digging cruelly into her soft skin, bending her neck back. Viglundr’s mouth curled in a sneer. ‘It is enough that I do favour Sveinbjorn!’ he hissed. ‘I am your king and you will obey me! I’ve indulged your insolence long enough. You will marry Sveinbjorn and cement my alliance with the Aeslings.’

Hjordis struggled free of her father’s clutch. ‘You would not dare this if Wulfrik were here,’ she hissed, fury in her eyes.

Viglundr leaned back and smiled condescendingly at his daughter. ‘He’s dead,’ the king declared, his voice devoid of sympathy. ‘Dead and rotting in whatever hell that Kurgan led him into.’ He snapped his fingers, waving a thrall to bring him more wine. ‘For six turns of the moons there has been no sign of him or his ship.’ Viglundr’s smile grew more genuine as he took a silver-capped horn from the slave. Tilting his head, he took a long swallow of wine. ‘Dead,’ he repeated, wiping the spillage from around his mouth with the sleeve of his tunic. ‘Like all those who try to defy their gods and their kings!’

Beside him, Hjordis bowed her head, hiding her face as tears welled up in her eyes. For an instant, the king smiled, feeling a sense of satisfaction that he had finally broken the headstrong will of an unruly subject. The smile quickly faded as the concerned father stepped down from his throne and placed his arms around his sobbing daughter.

‘I want what is best for you and our people,’ Viglundr told her. ‘You must forget him. He isn’t coming back. In time you will warm to Sveinbjorn. He is a great chief among the Aeslings and will give you many fine sons.’ The king’s rough hands wiped away the tears on Hjordis’s cheeks. ‘In time you will forget about that vagabond reaver Wulfrik,’ he said, his voice soft with compassion.

Loud shouts sounded from the entrance of the hall. Viglundr turned to see what the commotion was, promising dire punishments for whichever drunken oafs had started the row. He began to shout for his bondsmen to break up the fight, then noticed that it was his guards at the heart of the disturbance. The king stared in shock as one of his warriors staggered back, his forehead split open. A second crashed to the floor, bleeding from a deep gash in his side.

Colour drained from Viglundr’s face when he saw a furious figure stride past the battered guards. The armoured apparition’s eyes scoured the hall with an ire that would have frightened a dragon. Laughter and song died as the revellers became aware of the invader. Horrified gasps rippled around the room as the people of Ormskaro recognised a man their king told them was dead.

The man returned his bloodied sword to its sheath. Angrily he reached over his head, seizing the garland of holly fastened to the archway above the door. With a savage jerk he ripped the garland and the iron nail fastening it from the stone. Contemptuously he threw it to the floor and crushed it beneath his feet as he marched past the stunned celebrants.

‘Wulfrik!’ Hjordis cried. Springing to her feet, she pulled away from her father and raced across the now-silent hall. She flung herself into the arms of the returned hero, pressing her lips against his.

The champion forgot his anger for the moment, crushing his love against his chest, returning her kisses with unrestrained passion.

‘That is my bride you hold,’ a voice snarled.

Wulfrik released Hjordis, turning towards the speaker. His lips pulled back in a feral snarl as for the first time he noticed Sveinbjorn. ‘Your bride?’ the champion growled. He pushed Hjordis behind him and raised his blood-stained sword. His eyes shifted from the Aesling prince, watching as Sveinbjorn’s hersirs began to draw axes from their belts, fanning out across the hall to surround Wulfrik. ‘You are a fool if you think to steal from me, born-of-pigs!’ the champion spat. He fixed each of the prowling hersirs with his smouldering gaze. ‘And I’ll send these other fools to attend you in hell if they are idiot enough to stand beside you!’

The Aesling hersirs snarled in anger as they heard Wulfrik’s mocking contempt for them. Glaring at the hero, the lordlings spread across the hall, their attention riveted on the defiant hero. Sveinbjorn smirked as he watched his men surround Wulfrik.

‘The princess is mine, god-cursed vagabond!’ Sveinbjorn shouted. Slowly he drew his own axe from his belt. ‘You will beg me for mercy before I finish with you.’

A loud clamour at the entrance of the great hall made Sveinbjorn glance away from Wulfrik. A nervous twinge came to the Aesling’s lip when he saw Broendulf standing in the entrance, banging his sword against the boss of a shield. Behind the huscarl was the rest of the Seafang’s crew, weapons clenched in their fists. Sveinbjorn’s hersirs were taken by surprise, muttering anxiously among themselves as they moved away from Wulfrik and slunk back to their prince’s side.

‘No stomach for a fair fight?’ Wulfrik scoffed, watching as the Aeslings retreated from the advance of his own men. Sveinbjorn’s bravado faltered as Wulfrik took a step towards him. ‘Let’s see how much stomach you have,’ the hero said, pointing his blade at the prince.

‘Enough!’ Viglundr’s outraged roar echoed through the hall. ‘Sveinbjorn is a guest of this court! You will answer if any hurt is done him!’

‘Calm yourself, old man,’ Wulfrik advised the fuming king. ‘I’ve won one war for you. I can win another just as easily.’

Sveinbjorn backed away as the champion continued to advance. ‘I will not cross steel with a common scoundrel,’ the prince declared.

‘Then I’ll butcher you like the swine you are,’ Wulfrik grinned. ‘It makes no difference to me.’

Viglundr stormed down from his throne, his face crimson with rage. The king shook his fists at Wulfrik. ‘I said Sveinbjorn is my guest! You will not touch him!’

Wulfrik snarled at the king. ‘Do not think I’ll forgive your part in this treachery, dog-licker,’ the champion hissed. ‘When I am finished with Sveinbjorn…’ The hero’s words died on his lips as he felt soft fingers close over his own. When he looked into Hjordis’s eyes, he could see the entreaty written there. Whatever else he was, whatever he had tried to do, Viglundr was still her father.

Slamming his sword back into its sheath, Wulfrik took Hjordis by the hand and led her from the hall. ‘Thank your daughter you still breathe, old man,’ he told Viglundr as he stalked away. ‘I suggest you bid your guests farewell. If I see an Aesling on the morrow, I’ll strike him down, be he swineherd or swine-born.’

Caring nothing for the displeasure of the king or his court, Wulfrik carried Hjordis back to her chambers. His blood afire from the treachery of Viglundr, it was long into the night before fatigue quieted his passion and he sank down upon the bearskin blanket. Weariness gripped his body, but sleep refused to come to him. His mind dwelled upon the way Viglundr had tried to cheat him. Despite Hjordis, Wulfrik knew the king must pay for his trickery. Once the curse was lifted from him, once Hjordis was his, he would give the king a choice: renounce the crown or try to keep it. He hoped the old man would be stupid enough to try.

Wulfrik flinched as fingers brushed against his cheek, running through his thick beard. He rolled onto his side, staring into the bright eyes of his beloved. His callused hand smoothed her tousled hair away from her face.

‘You’ve been gone a long time,’ Hjordis whispered.

The man beside her laughed. ‘Peace, woman. I need my strength. I may yet have to kill your betrothed tomorrow.’

The comment brought worry creeping onto the princess’s face. Her hand fell against Wulfrik’s chest, pressing against his heart. ‘You… you wouldn’t really have…’

The hero’s eyes grew hard. ‘Viglundr tried to keep you from me,’ he said. ‘I’d kill anyone who dared try to come between us, be they king or devil.’ His fingers stroked the lobe of Hjordis’s tiny ear. ‘I have fame and glory enough for a hundred heroes, riches that would make a dragon content, but there’s only one thing in this world I want.’

Hjordis drew away, leaning back among the pillows. ‘You were gone so very long,’ she repeated. ‘Every day when you were away, my father pressed me to marry Sveinbjorn. At first he tried to reason with me, then he tried to bribe me, then he pleaded. Finally he threatened. Every day he told me you would never be back, that the gods had taken their revenge. I tried to dismiss his words, tried to keep hope alive. But every day it died a little more inside me. Every day my father’s words crept a little closer to my heart…’

‘He’ll pay,’ Wulfrik promised.

‘He is still my father,’ Hjordis reminded him, fear in her voice.

‘And that is the only reason he is still alive,’ Wulfrik said. The warrior shook his head. ‘I know too well what it is to cling to hope when all others tell you there is none. It is a pain that cuts deeper than any sword, a wound that never heals.’ He smiled reassuringly at Hjordis. ‘Until that day when all the naysayers are proven wrong, when the hope you have held so long finally bears fruit.’

The northman rolled across the bed, rummaging through the pile of cast-off armour lying heaped upon the floor. From the heap he lifted the jewelled torc, holding it out so that Hjordis could see the shimmer of the chained rubies.

‘This is what I was gone so long to win,’ Wulfrik told her. ‘Not the head of some southling baron or the heart of some beastkin warlord. This isn’t for the gods. This is for me. For us. The Kurgan knows a way to lift my curse. This necklace is the key he needs to work his magic.’

Eyes wide with wonder, her face glowing with excitement, Hjordis reached for Wulfrik’s hand. Her fingers closed tight around the torc, as though to assure herself it was real. ‘Can this really set us free?’ she gasped, almost frightened to even think about such a thing.

‘The Kurgan says it will,’ Wulfrik assured her. ‘He knows what will happen to him if he is wrong.’

Hjordis hugged the warrior, resting her head against his chest. ‘Then it is all over,’ she said. ‘At last, it is really all over.’

‘As soon as the shaman performs the ritual,’ Wulfrik nodded. ‘Then let Viglundr try to keep us apart.’

The woman drew back in alarm. ‘He will try,’ she said. ‘His mind has set itself upon alliance with the Aeslings. It has become an obsession for him.’

Wulfrik bared his fangs as he heard her warning. ‘I’ll let no man take you away from me,’ he said again. ‘If your father thinks I will stand aside and watch another man lay his hands on you…’ The warrior’s voice quivered with rage. ‘I am the only one who will have you.’

‘You must be careful,’ Hjordis advised, pressing her fingers against his lips. ‘There is nothing my father would not try to get his way.’

‘I’ve already killed one king,’ Wulfrik muttered. ‘Viglundr would be wise to remember that.’

‘For the Lord of the Winds, the last breath is given!’

Wulfrik awoke with a start, the voice of his dream thundering through his mind. Again he had seen the apocalyptic vision of a southling town wreathed in fire, its streets littered with the dead. Again he had seen his own body, his chest rent open, his heart lying trampled in the gutter.

Cautiously, he rose from the bed, careful not to disturb Hjordis. Quietly, Wulfrik drew on his armour and stole across the chamber. He did not look back, did not see the princess watching him, her eyes filled with concern.

The hero slipped past the iron-banded door, out into the corridor. Alarm flashed across his face as he observed an armoured figure leaning against the wall, his hand closing about his sword. Recognition made him hesitate, his brow wrinkling in confusion as he found himself staring at Broendulf.

‘I thought it best if someone kept watch outside,’ Broendulf explained. ‘You seemed a bit too preoccupied to notice, but you made a few people angry at the feast.’

‘Did any of them try to pay a call while I was asleep?’ Wulfrik asked.

‘A few,’ Broendulf answered. ‘I told them you weren’t receiving.’

For the first time Wulfrik noticed the red stains on Broendulf’s sword and armour. He nodded appreciatively. ‘Anyone I should know about?’

‘Zarnath, for one,’ Broendulf told him. ‘The Kurgan wants us to get a new crew together. He says he can’t perform the ritual here and needs the Seafang to take him to “a place of power”, whatever that means.’

‘Have Arngeirr begin recruiting men,’ Wulfrik said, cursing under his breath. ‘No time to bother about the Wolf Forest. Any warrior with a stout heart and a strong back will do – provided they aren’t Aeslings,’ he added. There was more he would have liked to say, but he would save it for when he saw the shaman. This close to being free from his curse he wouldn’t stand for any more of Zarnath’s surprises.

‘About the Wolf Forest,’ Broendulf said. ‘There was a messenger from Sveinbjorn. He says the prince will await you there, to settle for once who has the stronger claim on Hjordis.’

Wulfrik smiled when Broendulf gave him the message. ‘Sveinbjorn is a bigger fool than I thought. Who does he think built the Wolf Forest? All he’s done is make certain I’ll kill him!’ The champion yawned and stretched his powerful arms. ‘First to see what’s left over from the feast,’ he said, clapping Broendulf on the shoulder. ‘Then off to settle with Sveinbjorn. Then to talk with Zarnath about this voyage he’s decided we need to make.’ He shook his head, cursing again. ‘A full morning all round.’

Broendulf watched Wulfrik stalk off down the corridor, his very steps seeming to shake with anger. The huscarl considered that he would not have traded places with Sveinbjorn for all the sand in Araby.

The door beside him suddenly creaked open, startling Broendulf. He spun around to find Hjordis, staring down the hall, watching until Wulfrik disappeared around the corner. Only then did she become aware of the fair-faced huscarl standing beside her. Colour rose to her cheeks and her hands tightened about the bearskin blanket she had wrapped around her body.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I was standing guard at your door,’ Broendulf answered. ‘I wanted to be sure you were protected.’

‘I assure you I was,’ Hjordis said.

‘I wanted to be sure, just the same,’ the huscarl explained. ‘Wulfrik is a mighty warrior, but he forgets himself in battle. He’s reckless with the lives of others.’

‘I don’t need you to tell me about his prowess,’ the princess said, her voice sharp as a lash.

‘No good will come to you from him,’ Broendulf told her. ‘There’s a terrible doom hanging over his head. One he can’t escape.’

‘He will escape it,’ Hjordis said. ‘He will escape it because he is Wulfrik and neither men nor gods will stand in his way. Who are you to question what he can or can’t do? Some snippet of a bondsman cast out from my father’s service?’ Understanding suddenly came into the woman’s eyes and she retreated across the threshold of her room, keeping the half-open door between herself and Broendulf. ‘Is that it? Did he send you here to try and twist my mind against Wulfrik? What did he promise you for betraying your captain?’

‘There’s only one thing he could offer me,’ Broendulf said. ‘And he’s already promised that to someone else.’ The huscarl reached towards Hjordis. The princess drew back, slamming the door in his face.

‘Go away, Broendulf,’ Hjordis’s voice scolded him from behind the door. ‘If I told Wulfrik about this, he would kill you.’

Broendulf put his hand against the closed door. ‘It might be better that way,’ he said, sadness in his voice.

‘Go away, Broendulf,’ Hjordis repeated. ‘I’ll forget what you’ve said, only go.’

The dejected huscarl turned away from the door. He was under no illusion that he could ever claim Hjordis for his own. The pain of his unspoken love was what had driven him to abandon his post as captain of Viglundr’s guard. He had hoped he would find a worthy death joining the crew of the Seafang, that by helping to protect the man Hjordis loved he could somehow, in some strange way, earn her affection.

Now he saw how foolish he had been. He had seen how Wulfrik’s curse had hurt Hjordis, but now he saw that even without his strange doom, the man could only bring her suffering. Her father would never allow them to know peace and Wulfrik was too proud to ever compromise. He was a warrior and would never be anything else.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Bloodfield was lost beneath a thick layer of snow when Wulfrik made his way to the training ground. How different it looked from the last time he had been here. The tables where the people of Ormskaro had feasted were all but buried beneath the snow. He could just see the carved headrest of King Viglundr’s seat poking through the crust. Somewhere under that white veil was where he had first been approached by Zarnath and heard the shaman’s claim that he could lift the curse.

Sigvatr had been beside him then, counselling him against listening to the Kurgan. Had he known his old friend would die in capturing the treasure Zarnath needed, Wulfrik wondered if even his love for Hjordis would have been enough to drive him on. The hero nodded grimly to himself.

Yes, he would have. There was nothing he would not give to free himself from his curse, to end the endless voyages that kept him from his love. Since the gods had visited their punishment upon him, he had been like a dead thing, existing but not truly alive, his heart yearning for the things his curse denied him. A chance to live again, that was worth any risk, any sacrifice.

Wulfrik stared across the snow-covered plateau. He saw the raised platforms and the nest of poles that formed the Wolf Forest poking up through the snow. The deadly spikes were hidden, buried under the crust, but Wulfrik knew they would bite just as keenly unseen. The hero grimaced, a thrill of fear running down his spine. One last battle before Zarnath lifted the curse from him. It would suit the malignant humour of the gods to let him die now when he was so close to escape. His spirit would be damned, a plaything for daemons to torment until the world’s ending when all was devoured by the Blood God’s hunger.

The hero forced himself to forget such thoughts. Fear would give Sveinbjorn an advantage, perhaps the only one the Aesling needed. He had to concentrate on the fight before him, not the release he would soon obtain.

Sveinbjorn and his hersirs were gathered at the far side of the Wolf Forest, almost twenty in number. The Aeslings had donned heavy cloaks against the cold, but Wulfrik knew they would be wearing armour beneath their furs. Sveinbjorn’s men had come dressed for battle this time. Wulfrik grinned fiercely. If it was battle the Aeslings wanted, battle they would have. He turned his head and glanced at the weathered warriors following behind him. He had brought nearly his entire crew with him to the Bloodfield. No more fearsome a body of men existed in Norsca than the bold reavers who sailed upon the Seafang; each of his warriors was worth two of Sveinbjorn’s. If the prince planned treachery, then he had brought too few to succeed.

Of course, the Aesling had other resources available to him. Standing only a little distance from Sveinbjorn and his hersirs was Viglundr and a dozen of his jarls and bondsmen. Like the Aeslings, they had put on their armour, axes and swords hanging loose beneath their belts. More disturbing to Wulfrik was the sight of a wizened old Sarl clad in sharkskin vestments. His face framed by the open jaws of the shark-head hood, the elder stared at Wulfrik with the single amber eye that gleamed at the centre of his forehead. This was Rundulfr, Ormfell’s seer. Wulfrik felt his skin crawl as the mystic’s cyclopean eye studied him. Had he come to ensure the fight would be fought fairly and according to tradition, or had Viglundr brought the seer so that his magic might sway the outcome? Wulfrik found himself wishing he had brought Zarnath with him to counter whatever spells Rundulfr might evoke. The hero bared his fangs in a grim smile.

Of course that was assuming the shaman would stay on his side. It occurred to Wulfrik that just as he believed another warlock could discover the secret of the torc, so too Zarnath might take the chance that he could master the Seafang without Wulfrik’s help.

Wulfrik shook his head. He had to trust the Kurgan a little longer. But he would keep one eye on the shaman just the same.

‘So the wife-stealer comes!’ Sveinbjorn’s voice called out as Wulfrik approached the gathered Aeslings. ‘I had thought you might,’ the prince waved his hand through the air, ‘get back on your boat and just sail away again.’

‘There are men who still need killing here in Ormskaro,’ Wulfrik said. ‘And Hjordis isn’t your wife yet, Aes. Nor will she ever be.’ The hero drew his sword from its sheath, laughing when he saw the way Sveinbjorn’s eyes were drawn to the skull tied to the hilt. King Torgald had been reckoned a great warrior among the Aeslings. Seeing his skull among Wulfrik’s trophies was a reminder to Sveinbjorn of the champion’s skill in battle.

‘You’ve agreed to settle this in the Wolf Forest,’ Viglundr warned. As the king spoke, his warriors took a step forwards, their axes ready in their hands. ‘I will hear no more of this bickering.’

Wulfrik shrugged and turned cold eyes upon the Sarl king. ‘It matters not where I kill this vermin,’ he said. ‘Only that his stink is gone from Ormskaro!’ Contemptuously, he turned away from the bristling Aeslings and walked towards the icy ladder leading up to the Wolf Forest.

Haukr hurried after his captain, a heavy southling shield in his hand. He started to hand it to Wulfrik, but the champion brushed him aside. Mockery in his voice, Wulfrik turned from the base of the ladder and addressed Sveinbjorn. ‘Give the shield to the prince,’ he said. ‘I won’t need it. I doubt I’ll even need my sword. The clumsy worm will probably fall onto the stakes before he takes his second step off the ladder.’

Laughing at the fuming prince, Wulfrik scrambled up the icy ladder with the nimbleness of a monkey. He was soon upon the narrow platform, staring out across the snow-covered posts. For a man used to climbing into the rigging of a rolling ship upon a stormy sea, the Wolf Forest held no terror. He wondered if Sveinbjorn could boast the same resolve.

Wulfrik turned his head and stared down at the Aesling prince. ‘Come along, killer of mice, or has the blood in your veins already turned to water?’

Sveinbjorn glared up at the jeering hero, but made no move towards the other side of the battleground. A sneer curled the prince’s lip. ‘Me, a prince, lower myself to brawl with some simple sea raider?’ he scoffed. ‘You really are as stupid as you look!’

Wulfrik bared his fangs, glowering down at the prince. ‘What cowardly trickery is this?’

‘No trickery,’ Viglundr answered. ‘Sveinbjorn has challenged you, but has chosen a champion to represent him in battle.’

Wulfrik’s eyes narrowed with hate as he realised the deception which had been worked against him. He shifted his gaze from the smirking prince to the far side of the Wolf Forest. The platform shuddered as a huge figure mounted the ladder.

‘I would have sent a dog,’ Sveinbjorn laughed, ‘but I could find none mangy enough to face you.’

Wulfrik’s hand tightened about the hilt of his sword. He would make the duplicitous prince eat those words when he crammed the skull of his champion down his throat!

Across the battleground, the Aesling champion finished his climb. Even Wulfrik had seldom seen a more formidable man. His stature was enormous, almost troll-like. His bare arms were so swollen with muscle that they couldn’t even hang cleanly against his sides but instead bulged out from his body. A breastplate of blackened steel stretched across his broad chest, its surface pitted and scarred from past battles. A skirt of chainmail hung from his waist, dried human ears fastened to it by hooks. Strips of scaly hide were wrapped about his legs, the tough blue hides of butchered dragon-folk. Iron boots fitted with curved claws encased his feet, sides and soles adorned with sharp spikes so that the warrior could maintain his footing even upon the most treacherous ground. About his head, the fighter wore an ornate helm of bronze, its curled horns twisting upwards from its crown. From the visor of the helm, Wulfrik could see two glowing green eyes watching him hungrily.

Feeling an unaccountable sense of dread, Wulfrik drew the other sword sheathed at his hip and stepped out upon the snow-covered posts. A blade in either hand, he cautiously walked out into the Wolf Forest.

He had only taken a few steps when the eyes of Sveinbjorn’s champion changed from green to red. A metallic howl rasped through the steel mask of the Aesling’s helm as the huge fighter threw back his head and roared at the winter sky. Then the warrior was dashing across the posts, charging towards Wulfrik with reckless disregard for balance and footing. All that seemed to matter to the fearless champion was closing with his enemy.

Wulfrik braced himself for his enemy’s assault. Watching the Aesling leap from post to post, he felt his fear swell. There was something wrong, something hideously unnatural about the warrior, an abnormality that made even a Norscan’s skin crawl. As the Aesling closed with him, Wulfrik could see runes burning along the blackened steel of the massive double-headed axe the warrior bore, letters carved in the slithery letters of the Dark Tongue, the language of daemons and sorcerers.

The hulking berserker did not hesitate when he reached Wulfrik, but with an animal snarl he brought his axe chopping down. Wulfrik blocked the murderous blow, catching the descending blade between his crossed swords. The Aesling’s strength was that of a titan; Wulfrik could feel the impact of the axe crashing against his blades like a tremor coursing down his arms. His knees were bent by the force of the blow, his entire body straining under the berserker’s brawn.

The Aesling’s glowing eyes burned in the shadows of his helmet, insane mutterings crawling from behind the steel mask. Flickers of fire danced from the runes set into the berserker’s axe, the air turning to steam around the weapon. A chorus of voices clawed at Wulfrik’s brain, whispers of madness that fanned the fires of fear growing in his gut. He could feel himself falling into a black abyss, a realm of terror from which there would be no escape.

The Aesling’s great strength continued to bear down on Wulfrik. The hero’s legs began to buckle; his body began to tremble with the strain of keeping the butchering edge of the axe from cleaving into his chest. He could feel the berserker’s daemon-axe chewing into the edge of his sword, biting into the tempered steel. Inch by inch, second by second, Wulfrik knew he was being overwhelmed by Sveinbjorn’s champion.

Through Wulfrik’s mind flashed the image of a triumphant Sveinbjorn bearing Hjordis to his chambers, lust etched upon the prince’s smirking features. He could see old Viglundr rubbing his hands together, chortling greedily over the union of Aesling and Sarl. He could hear the gods laughing at him, mocking his failure as they claimed his damned spirit.

Wulfrik’s lips curled back in a snarl. Crimson fury flared through his mind, burning away the whispering daemon-voices. Strength born from rage thundered through his limbs. With a roar, he pressed up against the berserker’s axe, his entire body lunging upwards, throwing every ounce of strength in his flesh against the Aesling’s steel.

The effort sent the berserker stumbling back, his arms flailing as he struggled to keep hold of his axe. Wulfrik staggered after him, each wobbling step threatening to send him toppling into the snow-covered stakes below. Before the Aesling could recover, Wulfrik’s sword flashed out, cleaving through bone and sinew in a scarlet blur. A pained shriek rippled across the Wolf Forest as Wulfrik cut the berserker’s hand from his wrist, the severed appendage still locked about the heft of his daemon-axe.

Far from being overcome with pain, the berserker seemed to take strength from his injury. One-handed he brought the massive axe swinging around, slashing it like some monstrous scythe at Wulfrik’s head. The hero ducked beneath the murderous sweep of the blade. Before the crouching fighter could draw a breath, the huge axe was swinging back, much lower on its return than it had been before.

Daringly, Wulfrik leapt over the bladed steel. His body trembled as his feet came slamming back down upon the tops of the posts. For a hideous moment, he teetered at the brink of destruction, fighting to recover his balance.

The berserker brought his axe chopping down once more, trying to take advantage of his compromised foe. At the last instant, Wulfrik spun away from the double-axe, shifting his weight towards the left and forcing both of his feet onto the same post.

The axe slammed into the post Wulfrik had been standing on, cleaving deep into the wood. The Aesling struggled to rip the axe free, forgetting for the moment the foe who had so narrowly escaped him.

Wulfrik did not give the berserker time to realise his mistake. Shifting his footing, the hero brought both of his swords slashing into the Aesling’s outstretched arm. He felt bone split beneath the blow, saw blood fountain from the hideous wounds. The half-freed axe tumbled from the berserker’s weakened grip, burying itself in the snow below.

The Aesling reeled back, blood gushing from his arm. Maddened sounds shuddered from the berserker’s helm, his spiked boots clawing at the posts as he staggered away.

Wulfrik surged after the wounded berserker. With the loss of the daemon-axe, the dread that had gripped him was evaporating, the gibbering voices in his mind falling silent. ‘After I kill you, I’m going to geld your prince,’ Wulfrik hissed at the Aesling.

It was the tone of arrogant confidence in the hero’s voice rather than his words that made the berserker cock his armoured head and stare at him with something approaching curiosity. A garbled voice rumbled from beneath the Aesling’s helm.

‘Fraener… kill… cut… tear… slaughter,’ the Aesling’s slobbering words hissed.

Wulfrik hung back as he heard the berserker’s voice. Fraener had been a great war-chief of the Aeslings, a man who had borne the favour of the gods upon his flesh. He had led his raiders deep into the Wastes, preying upon the Kurgan tribes and looting the ancient dolmens of the beastkin. Surely this crazed mongrel could not be the same man?

The Aesling glared at Wulfrik. He slapped his bleeding arm across his chest. ‘Fraener… Fraener…’ he repeated. Each time he recited his name, the berserker’s voice grew more distinct, more violent. At the same time, his bleeding arm pulsed, swelling and bubbling like boiled porridge.

‘Fraener!’ the Aesling shrieked in a final scream of primal fury. His bubbling arm split open, the flesh peeling back to expose a wet, dripping claw like the leg of a mammoth spider. Bony spikes rippled along the length of the bloody limb, twitching and throbbing in tandem with the Aesling’s breath.

Wulfrik stared in horror at the cackling mutant. If this was Fraener, then the gods had abandoned him somewhere along the way, casting him aside like a broken toy. From a mighty Chosen, marked by the gods with their favour, his mind and body had degenerated into a creature of madness, a debased Forsaken. What trickery had Sveinbjorn used to bring this creature from whatever lonely cave he had hidden himself in, what promises had he made that could stir the mind of a savage maniac?

The Forsaken loped towards Wulfrik, slashing the glistening claw at the hero’s neck. Wulfrik dodged aside, growling in pain as he felt the spikes along the dripping limb slash across his cheek. Vengefully, he brought one of his swords slashing across the mutated arm. A filthy brown vapour jetted from the resulting wound, spraying across his face, blinding his eyes.

Unable to see, Wulfrik swung blindly at his foe, trying to direct his attacks at the Forsaken’s foul smell. He grinned as he felt one of his blades drive home, sinking into the Aesling’s body with a meaty crunch. The next instant, the hero’s body was flung through the air, thrown by the powerful impact of the mutant’s claw against his chest.

Wulfrik clenched his teeth, expecting any moment to feel the lethal touch of stakes being driven through his flesh. When his body landed, it was with such force that the breath was driven from his lungs. Despite the crushing impact against his chest, he could feel his limbs dangling in the air. Against all odds, he had slammed into one of the posts. Before he could slip off, Wulfrik wrapped his arms and legs about the narrow pole.

There was a red tint to his vision now, but at least some measure of sight had returned to his eyes. Wulfrik struggled to pull himself up onto the post. One of his swords had been knocked from his grip by the violent landing. The other he held so tightly that he could feel his fingers stabbing into his palm. However much it hindered his climb, he would not let the sword go. Unlike the Forsaken, he could not grow a new weapon when he lost his.

Insane muttering and the gory stink of a butchered dog warned Wulfrik of his enemy’s approach. Leaping nimbly from post to post, the Forsaken stalked towards him, the spider-like claw quivering eagerly at the mutant’s every step. Wulfrik could hear Sveinbjorn and the Aesling hersirs shouting encouragement to the monster, goading him to destroy their enemy.

Despite the cold fear dripping from his brow, Wulfrik forced himself to wait, to bide his time as the Forsaken drew ever closer. From the corner of his eye, he could see the mutant rear back, raising his ghastly arm to deliver the killing blow. The insane mutterings bubbling from the Aesling’s helm took on a giggling quality, the imbecilic glee of an idiot child.

Roaring, Wulfrik twisted his body around the post he clung to, spinning so that he faced the Forsaken head-on. The hero’s sword licked out like the tongue of a dragon, slashing through the mutant’s leg, shearing through the Aesling’s ankle. Wulfrik’s enemy bleated in alarm, the bleeding stump of his leg waving wildly in the air. Then the mutant toppled, his unbalanced body hurtling down into the stakes beneath the posts. A sickening crunch shuddered through Wulfrik’s ears as the Forsaken’s bulk impaled itself.

Wulfrik smiled as he started to pull himself up from where he dangled over the side of the post, revelling in the dejected curses he heard rising from Sveinbjorn’s men. The prince had arranged a cunning trap for his hated rival. Now he would suffer the price for its failure.

The tone of the Aeslings abruptly changed, curses rising into robust cheers. Instantly, Wulfrik forced his tired arms into a frantic effort, using them to anchor his body against the top of the post. At the same time he kicked out with his legs, swinging them upwards, trying to reach the top of the post closest to him. His boots scraped across the icy wood, then his momentum brought him falling back again. Bending his knees, Wulfrik pressed his feet against the pole and kicked out again. Something strong lashed at his boots as he dangled above the stakes, something that tried to coil around his ankle.

Wulfrik’s feet caught on the second pass. His body hanging between the two posts, he risked a glance at the ground below. A sickening sight greeted him. The body of the Forsaken was transfixed upon a half-dozen stakes, the force of his impact driving them through his armour. A green stain was spreading into the snow all around the Aesling, the heat of the ichor causing the snow to sizzle. From the mutant’s wounds, long ropey tendrils waved, whipping about in an idiot frenzy. A jagged rent in the Forsaken’s armour exposed a toothy maw slobbering and snapping beneath where the man’s ribs should have been. A barbed tongue shot out from the ghastly mouth, slicing across the pole supporting Wulfrik’s hands, scouring the wood with a deep scar.

The hero turned away from the horrible creature beneath him. Bracing his legs, locking his feet about the sides of the pole they rested on, Wulfrik summoned every scrap of vigour in his powerful arms. He flung his body away from the post, using his legs to help pull himself upright. The Forsaken’s barbed tongue flashed out at him again. This time it sheared completely through the post, cutting it clean through and knocking it to the ground. Wulfrik grimaced as he realised how near he had come to following his refuge into destruction.

Crouching upon the top of the pole, feeling it sway and shiver beneath his weight, Wulfrik gazed out across the Wolf Forest. He was almost at the middle of the battlefield, equally distant from either platform. If he made for the platform the Aesling had used to enter the field, he would be able to avoid coming within striking range of the mutant’s tongue and the flailing tendrils spilling from his torn flesh. He could escape the monster without any danger.

The hero glared over at the jeering Sveinbjorn and bared his fangs. He wouldn’t give the prince the satisfaction of seeing him run.

Wulfrik stared back down at the monstrosity impaled upon the stakes. The Forsaken was struggling to pull himself free, his tendrils coiling around the poles around him, using them as leverage to lift his bulk off the spikes. In a few minutes, the mutant would be free.

Wulfrik had no intention of allowing the Aesling the time he needed. Howling a fierce war cry, closing both hands about the hilt of his sword, the hero leapt from his precarious perch in a savage leap. His boots slammed into the Forsaken’s struggling body, thrusting the mutant back upon the stakes, causing more blood and filth to spill across the snow. The Aesling lifted his head, angry croaking echoing from his helm as his glowing eyes gazed upon the man standing upon his chest.

Raising his sword high, Wulfrik brought the blade flashing down, cleaving through the Forsaken’s horned helm, hewing through the skull beneath. The twisted body under his feet trembled and thrashed, then fell still.

Wulfrik wiped the Forsaken’s filthy blood from his face. Carefully he stepped away from the dead mutant, picking a path through the stakes under the Wolf Forest. Grimly he tore a strip of fur from his cape and began to wipe the monster’s gore from the edge of his blade. He wanted his sword keen when he drove it through Sveinbjorn’s belly.

The Aesling prince was not gloating now. Fear was in his eyes as he retreated behind the armoured ranks of his hersirs. Their axes rested uneasily in the lordlings’ hands. Not a man among them had not seen Fraener’s monstrous ability in battle many times before. They regarded the prospect of facing a man powerful enough to kill the Forsaken in single combat as nothing short of suicide. Bonded to fight for the Aesling prince, none of them was eager to die for him.

Viglundr’s Sarls marched between the Aeslings and the advancing Wulfrik. The old king stepped out from between his guards, making placating gestures to the infuriated hero.

‘You have proven the worth of your claim upon my daughter,’ Viglundr said. ‘Sveinbjorn’s champion is vanquished. There is no need for more bloodshed.’

Wulfrik spat into the snow at Viglundr’s feet. ‘The hell there isn’t,’ he snarled, his eyes locked upon Sveinbjorn’s pale features.

‘You’ve won, Wulfrik!’ Viglundr told him. ‘Hjordis is yours!’

‘She already was,’ Wulfrik corrected him. ‘Given to me by your promise. Out of my way, snake-tongue!’ he barked at the king. ‘I already have half a mind to kill you alongside this Aesling scum. Don’t tempt me more!’

‘It will mean war,’ Viglundr said. ‘The Aeslings will avenge their prince!’

‘They will try,’ Wulfrik said. The hero strode past Viglundr, a terrible light shining in his eyes. The king’s warriors stepped nervously from his path. The crew of the Seafang watched their captain prowl across the snow, uncertain if he would welcome their help against the Aeslings or curse them for interfering.

Viglundr hastened after the hero. ‘Ormskaro cannot stand against the Aeslings,’ he hissed in a frightened whisper. ‘Even without Torgald and his warriors, they are too strong.’

‘For you,’ Wulfrik sneered, his eyes never leaving Sveinbjorn. ‘Not for me. I’ve fought one war with these mongrels. I’ll fight another just as happily.’

‘There’s no need,’ Viglundr persisted. ‘No reason to force them to battle.’

Wulfrik turned his head and stared into the king’s face, snorting with contempt at the fear and desperation he saw written across Viglundr’s features. ‘A wolf without teeth shouldn’t lead a pack,’ he said. ‘Maybe I will kill you when I finish with Sveinbjorn after all.’

‘And who would protect my daughter then?’ Viglundr asked, his voice dripping with spite.

Wulfrik brandished his sword in the king’s face. ‘You dare–’

‘I am told you must sail away,’ Viglundr interrupted him. ‘One last voyage before the Kurgan’s magic sets you free. How long will you be gone? How long will the gods keep you from Ormskaro after you cheat them? A day? A week? More? And who will keep the Aeslings from tearing down this place when you are gone?’

Slowly, reluctantly, Wulfrik lowered his sword. He smiled coldly at Viglundr. ‘Your words are as poisonous as ever,’ he said.

‘They are only the truth, and you know it.’

The hero gnashed his fangs together, his entire body trembling with rage. Viglundr was right. There was no way to be certain when he would return, no way to protect Hjordis while he was gone. He did not know what strange land Zarnath would need them to sail for in order to work his magic, but he would wager it was no such place as he would take his bride.

He had to be free of his curse. Only then could he defend Hjordis and the kingdom he would wrest from Viglundr’s cheating fingers. Until then, he had to set aside his hate. Set it aside, but not forget it.

‘Thank the king of the Sarls for your life,’ Wulfrik growled to Sveinbjorn behind his guard of hersirs. The hero thrust his sword back into its scabbard and turned his back on the Aeslings. ‘Don’t be here when I set sail,’ he advised as he walked away. ‘Or I may decide Torgald’s head is lonely.’

Wulfrik marched towards his crew, his voice lifting into a bellow. ‘Find Zarnath!’ he ordered. ‘Bring that Kurgan toad-licker to me!’ There were questions he would ask the shaman, questions the mystic would answer, or Wulfrik would flay every inch of skin from the man’s hide.

‘I’ll stick that sea-rat’s head on a spike and leave it for the Crow God!’ Sveinbjorn’s furious voice echoed from the bare stone walls. ‘No man treats me like that and lives!’

Viglundr shook his head as he watched the Aesling prince pace back and forth across the king’s council chamber. ‘That rug came from an Estalian castle. I’d thank you not to wear it out.’

Sveinbjorn stopped pacing. He stared down at his feet, noting the blue cloth stretched across the floor. A scowl on his face, the prince advanced towards Viglundr’s throne. ‘Don’t think I have forgiven your part in this!’ the Aesling shouted.

‘What part would that be?’ Viglundr said, his voice thin and edged with menace. ‘Finding a man who could kill Torgald for you?’

‘Torgald’s dead,’ Sveinbjorn snapped. ‘Wulfrik’s done what we needed him to do. Now it’s time to be rid of the dog!’ The prince waved his arms, indicating the small chamber and its sparse adornments. ‘Look at you! Hiding away here while he prowls at will through your own palace! You’d think he was already king of the Sarls!’

Anger flared in the icy depths of Viglundr’s eyes. ‘Wulfrik will never wear my crown,’ the king stated.

Sveinbjorn set his hand upon the arm of Viglundr’s throne, leaning close to the king. ‘Then stop him!’ the prince demanded. ‘There will be no alliance between our tribes while that man draws breath!’

‘Have a care, Sveinbjorn,’ Viglundr warned his guest. The king brushed the Aesling’s hand from his throne as though swatting a troublesome insect. ‘I’ve removed one Aesling who threatened my plans.’

Sveinbjorn walked away, shaking his finger at the king. ‘It’s not me who threatens this alliance. It’s Wulfrik.’

‘I will deal with him,’ Viglundr assured the prince.

‘How?’ Sveinbjorn demanded.

‘Not by picking a fight with him and then sending a Forsaken to cut him down,’ Viglundr said. ‘That man has killed giants and daemons. Do you really think any champion you could set against him would be his equal?’

‘Then what? Magic?’

Viglundr shook his head. ‘I’ve tried to order my sorcerers to use their magic against him already. No matter what tortures I threatened them with, they refused. Rundulfr says that because of his curse, Wulfrik is inviolate. Any sorcerer who uses his magic to kill Wulfrik will inherit his curse. Even a seer doesn’t look forward to having his spirit ripped apart by the gods.’

The king laughed as he saw Sveinbjorn slam his fist against the wall in frustration. ‘You aren’t half as clever as you imagine yourself,’ Viglundr chuckled. ‘We can’t challenge him openly and we can’t use magic.’ The king’s face spread in a cruel grin. ‘That still leaves murder.’

Sveinbjorn sneered at the suggestion. ‘Even if we found one of our men brave enough, he’d never manage it. That Wulfrik is a daemon with eyes in the back of his head. He’d never let our killer get close enough.’

Viglundr’s smile grew. ‘One of my men is ready to do the job and Wulfrik will let him close enough to do it. When one plots murder, one should choose an assassin the victim already trusts.’ He pointed at an iron-banded door set into the chamber’s outer wall. ‘Be good enough to admit our friend.’

Sveinbjorn’s steps were uncertain as he moved across the room. He kept one hand on his axe when he reached forwards and unlatched the heavy door. The prince cursed and backed away from the doorway after he opened it, drawing his weapon from his belt.

‘You!’ the prince snarled, glaring at the man who strode into the room.

‘Control yourself!’ Viglundr ordered the Aesling. ‘This man is here by my command.’ The king rose from his throne and stepped forwards to greet the fair-faced huscarl.

‘Forgive Sveinbjorn,’ Viglundr said. ‘His pride is still stung by the slight dealt him by your captain. Come inside, Broendulf. We have much to discuss.’

Broendulf bowed and entered the council chamber, closing the heavy door behind him. The huscarl kept his hand closed about the hilt of his own sword and a suspicious eye on the Aesling prince. ‘You wished to see me, sire?’

‘Indeed,’ Viglundr said, motioning for Broendulf to follow him across the room. The king set his arm across the warrior’s broad shoulder, at the same time directing a warning glance at Sveinbjorn, a gesture that went unnoticed by the huscarl. ‘There is much I would talk over with you.

‘Let us start by discussing my daughter…’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wulfrik’s lip curled back in distaste as he stared out across the deck of the Seafang. He could smell the fear rising from the men watching him. Many of them were little more than pups, their faces as smooth as an infant’s arse, their axes still carrying the stink of the forge upon them.

‘Was this the best you could find?’ Wulfrik grumbled.

Beside him, Arngeirr winced and fingered the Estalian flask under his belt. ‘The gods were with me to find even these,’ he explained. ‘Viglundr spread word that you were dead. Most of the men who would have killed to join your crew went back to their homes. The king’s huscarls expelled the rest from Ormskaro so that they wouldn’t cause any trouble for him. I had to take whoever was left just to get enough men for the oars.’

‘These aren’t men,’ Wulfrik growled. ‘These are children.’

‘You have yourself to blame,’ Broendulf told his captain. He licked his lips nervously as he saw Wulfrik turn a scowl on him. After a moment, the huscarl decided to speak his mind despite the hero’s distemper. ‘After the way you treated Sveinbjorn, everyone in Ormskaro is afraid the Aeslings are going to attack. Every man with a family is staying behind to protect them.’

Instead of shouting down Broendulf for his warning, Wulfrik just nodded his head. Sigvatr would have reprimanded him in similar fashion for causing his own troubles. Pride and temper were failings the old warrior had always warned him against, often telling him they were his worst enemies. His mind already sombre after his parting with Hjordis, the hero was more ready to admit his faults than at other times.

‘We’ll have to make do,’ he sighed, stroking his beard as he studied the keen, eager expressions his new crew wore. They might be afraid, but they were also excited. Wulfrik wondered how many of them had never been to sea before, how many of those young eyes had never gazed upon a strange shore.

‘There’s another way,’ Haukr said. ‘I’ve spent some time among the southlings. My father would trade furs in Erengrad when he grew too old for raiding. When a southling captain finds himself in need of a crew, he sends a few of his men to wait outside the taverns with stout clubs and big gunnysacks. A quick crack to the head of a lout already staggering from too much mead and the ship has a new crewman.’

‘I’ll not sail with any man too much a coward to do so willingly,’ snarled Njarvord.

Haukr shot the hairy Baersonling a withering look. ‘You’re lucky you’ve never been bashed and stashed, the way you drink.’

The huge warrior’s hand curled into a fist and he took a menacing step towards the tattooed reaver. Haukr drew a fat-bladed knife from his boot and backed away from Njarvord. ‘Come along, you stupid oaf,’ he snarled. ‘I’ll geld you like a sick mule.’

Broendulf came between the two antagonists, separating them before they could fall upon each other. ‘Save it for the voyage back,’ he warned them. ‘We’ll need every man where we’re going.’

The huscarl’s words had their desired effect. Still glaring at each other, the two warriors stalked off to bark orders at the new crew, setting them to re-arranging the supplies piled upon the deck, a chore that had more to do with the surliness of the men snapping orders than any practical purpose.

Wulfrik listened to Broendulf’s words, feeling them twist in his gut like Haukr’s knife. His men trusted him to lead them into glory. It was why they left their homes and families behind, why they risked their lives fighting alongside him. They knew that he would lead them to victory, that by following him into battle they would find their own path to fame and a heroic death, earn their own places in the sagas.

For the first time, Wulfrik questioned his right to exploit these brave warriors. It was one thing to ask them to die when he fought in the name of the gods. It was another to expect them to die to serve his own ends. True, he intended to reward every man who sailed with him when the curse was broken and he came into his own as king of the Sarls, but it still rested ill with him just the same. Many good men had been lost in the Dark Lands against the dwarfs. The new voyage promised to be no less dangerous.

The hero closed his eyes, picturing again his meeting with Zarnath. His armour still covered in Fraener’s blood, Wulfrik had confronted the Kurgan shaman. Surprisingly, the warlock had been forthcoming about the ritual he intended to perform for Wulfrik. The Smile of Sardiss would need to be taken to a site of power. Zarnath would then use his power to draw powerful magics into the torc, giving it a certain polarity that would mask the champion from the sight of the gods. No more would he suffer the visions they sent to him in the night. No longer would he be doomed to wander the world, endlessly killing to appease their capricious whims. He would be free, and when he died the torc’s magic would continue to protect his spirit, allowing him to safely enter the halls of his ancestors.

The shaman’s words had stirred the hope burning inside Wulfrik’s heart. Zarnath was confident his magic would do what he said it would do, showing no fear when the hero threatened a slow death if another nightmare came upon him after the ritual to empower the torc. Perhaps that was because the Kurgan expected even Wulfrik’s bold courage to falter when he was told where the torc needed to be taken. The site of power of which Zarnath spoke stood upon the haunted shores of Alfheim, though the shaman had called that sinister land by the strange name of Ulthuan.

Alfheim. The very name was enough to turn a northman’s bones to butter. Generations past, the great Erik Redaxe led a fleet of dragonships to the misty shores of that ghostly land. Only a handful of warriors ever returned to tell the tale of that fleet’s destruction, of the terrible elf-folk and their powerful magic, of the mighty wyrms that swam the seas around Alfheim and the horrible dragons who flew through its skies. Erik Redaxe’s saga did not speak of glory and plunder, but death and ruin.

Wulfrik had been a young boy when Erik Redaxe had led his fleet to destruction, and had listened to the skalds singing the king’s tale around the winter fire. The saga the king had made for himself was not one of heroic glory but a testament of tragedy and loss. All his other deeds, all the foes he had vanquished, all the battles he had won, these were forgotten in the reckoning of his life. All that was remembered now was the way he had died, crushed and broken by the sorcery of the elf-folk and their haunted island.

Was that how he would be remembered? Broken by the magic of the elves, all of his victories forgotten, drowned beneath a final ignoble defeat?

It was a thought to quail the stoutest heart. Better to end his days a twisted, mindless creature like Fraener.

Still, Wulfrik refused to abandon the hope that had risen within him. His experience with Sveinbjorn had shown him he was running out of time. He couldn’t stave off Viglundr’s ambition forever. If he would make Hjordis his own, he had to be free of the curse, and quickly.

A last chance for life. For that, Wulfrik was willing to risk anything, sacrifice anything, challenge anything. If his doom was to die upon the forbidden shores of Alfheim, then he would meet his fate with sword in hand.

The hero turned and regarded the huddled shape of Zarnath sitting at the stern of the ship. The shaman had drawn a heavy seal-fur cape about his lean body, strange symbols stained into the soft fur, runes like none Wulfrik had seen before. The warlock sat with his legs folded beneath him, his hands resting palm-upwards upon his knees. His eyes were open, but there was a dull film over them, blocking out the blue light which normally glowed within them.

Wulfrik repressed a shudder. Sorcerers were eerie enough at the best of times, but Zarnath had become even more so since his return to the Seafang. There was an aura of power about him that even Wulfrik could feel. Drawing too close to the shaman made his hair prickle along his arms and rise from the back of his neck. There was an icy chill surrounding the Kurgan and a smell like that of an electrical storm.

Zarnath had warned he would need to prepare himself for the ritual, drawing tremendous powers within himself to ready his spirit for when they reached their destination. There was a practical purpose too, the shaman had said. The magic he was calling upon would shield them from the notice of the elves and their creatures, hiding the Seafang and all who sailed upon her from even the mightiest of elf magic.

At least for a time.

The shaman had cautioned that he must not be touched by anyone until after the ritual was completed. Even the briefest nudge would disrupt the power coursing through his body and undo all his preparations. If that happened, Zarnath warned, it would be years before he would be able to attempt the ritual again. Wulfrik had grimly promised the Kurgan that he would not be disturbed, telling his crew that the man who defiled the shaman would die in such a manner that it would sicken even the plague god, Nurgle.

Wulfrik left Zarnath to his meditations. Let the shaman prepare himself in whatever way he needed. His life, as much as Wulfrik’s, depended upon the outcome of his ritual.

The hero gazed back over the Seafang’s deck, then turned his eyes towards Ormskaro. A great crowd had gathered in the snowy streets to watch the famous ship set sail, but Wulfrik paid them scant notice, lifting his gaze instead to the tower of Ormfell. He could just make out the tiny shape waving at him from the roof of the tower, her golden hair rippling around her as the winter wind swept across the fortress.

Wulfrik waved back, his doubts and fears crushed by the resurgence of hope. He would return to her in triumph this time. And not all the monstrous gods of the north would stop him.

The little hut on the hill overlooking Ormskaro was silent as the Seafang slid into the icy fjord and made her way towards the sea. The steading of an old freeholder whose fortunes were so small that only a single thrall tilled his fields and a single wife warmed his bed, the small dwelling was seldom disturbed by the people in the town below. Isolated and accessible only by a narrow, treacherous cliffside path, the lonely farm was mostly forgotten by the outside world.

It would be many weeks before anyone wondered about the old freeholder and his household, weeks more before anyone became curious enough to investigate. When they did, they would find the mangled bodies of the old man and his wife lying in their bed. The corpse of the thrall would be under a bench in the hut’s cellar, his neck torn through by a single monstrous bite.

There would be no trace of the grisly little creature that had killed the hut’s inhabitants. As the Seafang sailed from Ormskaro, the gibbering imp was the only thing stirring within the hut, loping through the rooms, blood dripping from its fangs. Around and around it circled the building, snapping at rats and pouncing on mice when they dared to stir from their holes. The imp was tireless in its patrol of the hovel, never relenting in its vigilance.

Only one thing caused it to pause in its routine. As it made the circuit of the hut, the imp would linger near the hearth, staring at a figure seated there in a wicker chair. The endless train of gibberish would fall silent and the imp would tilt its hideous, toad-like head, listening for any sound from the seated man. Eventually, it would decide there was no new command. Mad giggles and lunatic sounds would again spill from the daemon’s mouth as it resumed its march.

Upon the chair, the man continued to stare into the cold hearth, his eyes open but unseeing. Except for the concentration gripping his face, he might have passed for one of the corpses scattered about the hut, but no dead thing had ever worn such a mask of malignant purpose.

The mists parted. Once more, the Seafang returned to mortal seas. Her new crew had borne the hideous ordeal of entering the border-realm with the fierce stoicism of the Norscan tribes, only three of their number succumbing to the whispering wails of the daemons lurking in the fog. Their screams as they leapt into the fog and were devoured had done much to steel the courage of those they left behind. Nothing bolstered a man’s valour so much as the prospect of a hideous death should he show weakness.

Wulfrik stared out over the prow of his ship. The shimmering mists girding the dragonship were soon replaced by a grey fog almost as thick. He felt ice tingle along his spine as his eyes struggled to pierce the veil. He recalled stories told about these shores, about tiny islands the elf-folk had cast upon the sea to confound those who would raid their shores. The Shifting Isles, they were called, immense magical rocks that were not anchored in position after the fashion of proper islands but moved about the northern shores of Alfheim with a will of their own. Many a Norscan raider, thinking himself a better warrior than Erik Redaxe, had tried to navigate the Shifting Isles, only to lose his ship when a barren rock suddenly reared up out of the fog where charts insisted there should be only open sea.

Wulfrik dreaded a similar fate for the Seafang. To have braved so much and come so far only to wreck his ship upon some elf mage’s sorcerous trap would be a pathetic end to his hopes and dreams.

‘Sound the bottom,’ Wulfrik growled at Arngeirr. The one-legged reaver limped to the side of the longship, dropping a weighted line into the sea. ‘The rest of you be ready to push clear from any rocks.’ At Wulfrik’s command, the crew took up their oars, bracing them to thrust against any obstruction that rose up from the fog to threaten them.

Wulfrik watched the fog swirl about his ship, almost wishing it would drag them back into the spectral border-realm. At least there he would have some idea of what he faced. The hero’s mind turned to other stories he had heard about Alfheim. The water around the forbidden island of the elf-folk was said to be infested with terrible monsters. Sailors claimed the spawning waters of the kraken were somewhere off the coast of Alfheim. Others spoke of the pale-skinned merwyrms, the great sea serpents whose coils had crushed the dragonships of Erik Redaxe. There were those who spoke of the megalodon, a shark so huge that it preyed upon whales. Still others whispered of the Black Leviathan, a sea beast so enormous it could swallow a longship with a single snap of its jaws.

‘Jokull!’ Wulfrik called up to the hunter perched atop the Seafang’s mast. ‘Keep your eyes on the sea! Shout if you see anything in the water!’

‘That will not be necessary,’ Zarnath assured the hero. The cloaked shaman made his way effortlessly across the ship’s rolling deck, northmen scattering at his approach. Wulfrik’s awful threat was still fresh in every man’s mind.

‘Do you think the sea monsters will shun the flesh of a Kurgan any less than that of a Norscan?’ Wulfrik snarled, irritated by the placid, unworried expression on Zarnath’s face.

‘My magic will hide us from them,’ Zarnath stated. ‘You need not fear any beast of the Great Western Ocean. Nor need you fear the Shifting Isles.’ The shaman lifted one of his arms, waving his hand through the air. In response to his gesture, the fog rolled back, parting as though cut by a blade. As the veil drifted back, the men aboard the ship muttered in awe. Beyond the fog were mighty cliffs, white-capped waves crashing about their rocky base. For hundreds of feet, like a grey wall, the cliffs towered above the sea.

‘Behold! The cliffs of Cothique!’ Zarnath exclaimed proudly. He smiled as he turned to Wulfrik. ‘Atop that wall lies the land of Ulthuan and the site of power that will set you free.’

Wulfrik studied the menacing cliffs. ‘You will have earned your price, warlock,’ he told Zarnath. ‘No coward could call himself master of the Seafang. No coward would venture to a place such as this.’

‘But first we must break the curse,’ Zarnath reminded the hero.

Wulfrik’s hand tightened about the jewelled torc, reassuring himself that it was still safe. ‘Indeed, Kurgan,’ Wulfrik said. ‘Let us finish this.’ Turning away from the prow, the Seafang’s captain bellowed at her crew. ‘Set oars, men! Before another sun rises, I will feel the soil of Alfheim beneath my boots or I will hear the cries of the valkyries in my ears as they bear my crew to their ancestors!’

The Seafang sat at anchor beside the sheer face of the grey cliffs. Arngeirr had suggested trying to find a less imposing spot to make their ascent, a sentiment echoed by others of the crew. Zarnath, however, had cautioned against roving too far. The elves had many settlements along the coast of Cothique and each sported its own complement of sleek warships. The shaman’s magic could hide them from the notice of the elves, but there was no sense in tempting fate recklessly.

Staring up at the fearsome cliff, Wulfrik was sorely tempted to give in to his grumbling crew. It was only Zarnath’s insistence that the site of power they needed to reach was near the top of the cliff which hardened the champion’s resolve. More than the risk of elven warships, it was the threat of delay that set his mind to making the dangerous climb. How much time they had already lost travelling into the border-realm, how much more they would lose on the voyage back were questions that tormented him; he would not add to his lost days any more than he could help.

‘Jokull.’ Wulfrik beckoned the wiry hunter down from his perch atop the mast. The northman hastily scrambled down to the deck, joining his captain at the prow. Wulfrik turned his eyes from the cliff, then stared at Jokull. His jaw set, his decision made, the champion handed a thick coil of rope to the hunter.

Jokull studied the cliff, his eyes roving across the jagged stone. He glanced over at Arngeirr, gesturing for the reaver to hand him his flask of kvas. Gasping from the fiery liquor, the hunter thrust the flask back into Arngeirr’s hands, his face flushed with the warm rush of alcohol through his body. Slipping the coil of rope over his shoulder, Jokull climbed onto the Seafang’s gunwale. Bracing his feet, the hunter leapt at the cliff beside the ship. The tentacle which served him for an arm whipped about, slithering into a gap in the stone, catching fast in the crevice.

Supported by the hold his tentacle-arm had secured, Jokull began to scale the cliff face, inching his way towards the plateau above. The men on the deck of the Seafang watched his gradual progress with admiration. Even for the mountain-climbing Norscans, Jokull’s feat was impressive.

Hours passed before Jokull reached the top of the cliff. The hunter waved down to his comrades on the ship far below. Soon the rope was cascading over the side, dropping down like some immense vine. Njarvord leaned over the Seafang’s gunwale to fish the end of the line from the sea. Savagely he pulled at the rope, testing its strength. Whatever Jokull had found to anchor it to above held firm. Satisfied, the hairy Baersonling handed the rope over to Wulfrik.

‘Twenty men with the ship,’ Wulfrik told his crew. ‘The rest with me. Kaetill is in charge until I return.’ The hero tightened his grip on the rope and moved towards the Seafang’s gunwale. A sudden thought made him turn around, his eyes fixing on Zarnath’s robed figure. Grimly, Wulfrik held the rope towards the shaman. ‘You first, sorcerer,’ he said. ‘I’d hate to leave you behind.’

Zarnath’s lip curled back in sardonic amusement. The Kurgan made no move to take the rope from Wulfrik. Instead, he strode to the side of the longship. With surprising agility, he leapt onto the gunwale, and from there he flung himself at the cliff. The northmen watched in amazement as the shaman latched onto the sheer cliff face. Like some immense lizard, he scurried up the rocks, seeming to glide over them with only the briefest contact of his hands against the stone.

‘We should have had him take the rope up,’ observed Haukr, his voice low with awed respect. If any of the men had forgotten the shaman’s magic, they were witnessing a stark reminder of it now.

‘I don’t think I’d trust him to tie it,’ Wulfrik said. Fangs gleamed as his face twisted into a snarl. ‘And I damn well think I don’t want him up there while I’m climbing.’

Without another word, Wulfrik jumped over the side of his ship, his armoured body splashing through the sea until his momentum brought him swinging against the face of the cliff. Setting his boots against the rock, wrapping the heavy rope through his arms, the northman began the arduous climb to the top.

Broendulf used a bill-hook to retrieve the end of the rope from the sea. He watched Wulfrik scaling up the cliff for a moment, then turned to the rest of the crew. ‘Come along, you dogs!’ he barked. ‘We need to beat the Kurgan before he decides to cut the rope!’

Cursing all sorcerers and outlanders, the northmen followed their captain. They couldn’t keep the fear from their eyes as they glanced at Zarnath’s lizard-crawl, watching the shaman draw steadily closer to the top. It was a hopeless race, but the stoic Norscans were determined to run it anyway. Dying because of treachery was better than living because of cowardice.

With all eyes upon the cliff and the men struggling up its face, no one was left to watch the sea, or to observe something stirring beneath the waves.

It was a good land, Wulfrik decided as he cast his gaze across the rolling plains of Alfheim. Everything was green and vibrant, even when winter gripped Norsca in its icy claws. The hero wasn’t sure if it was some caprice of latitude that made the island flourish or the powerful magics of the elf-folk that kept the ravages of snow and frost from their shores. It didn’t matter. It was enough to see with his own eyes this enchanted realm. For a moment, he could even forget the grim purpose that had brought him here.

The plains stretched away in a great prairie of swaying grass, the green sea broken only by occasional islands of darker hue, isolated stands of trees, great ashes and oaks taller and mightier than any tree Wulfrik had ever seen. Wild flowers of every colour and description added to the beauty of the plains. The northmen could see a stream cutting through the landscape, its waters so clear and pure that they might have been made of glass.

Crowding close upon the prairie were a range of mountains equalled only by those upon which the Norscans had hunted the dread yhetee. The mighty Annulii Mountains, their slopes lush with thick forests of pine, their peaks shrouded in cloud. A nimbus of light, pulsating and crackling with aethyric energies, shimmered about the heights of the mountains. Wulfrik was reminded of the aurora which could be seen glowing in the northern skies of his homeland, an eerie manifestation of the raw power of his gods.

Wulfrik turned his face from the mountains and the eerie display of magical energies coruscating about their peaks. The sudden reminder of his gods made him question what he was trying to do. He could almost hear Sigvatr’s voice cautioning him against defying his curse and in doing so challenging the gods. Seeing the northern aurora repeated here in the land of the elf-folk made him think of something Agnarr had once told him. The eyes of the gods were everywhere, always watching. It was never a question of if the gods could see a man’s deeds, but whether they would choose to see.

Would the gods choose to see him now, stealing through the plains of Alfheim, searching for the place that would allow him to escape his curse? Was it nothing but some cruel game with which the gods were amusing themselves? In the moment of triumph, as he reached his hand out to seize his destiny, would the gods snatch it from him like a cruel father wresting a toy from a child’s hand? Had he come so far only to fail?

The hero looked aside, hiding the doubt he felt within as he stared into the faces of his warriors. He could see the fear there, the anxiety running through their hearts. All of them had heard the saga of Erik Redaxe and the terrible doom that had claimed his fleet. They knew how terrible the elf-folk were to invaders and that from their wrath there could be little chance of escape.

Yet still they followed him, these sons of Norsca. Sarls and Baersonlings, Vargs and Graelings, Aeslings and Bjornlings, whatever their tribe, they followed him. They trusted Wulfrik to lead them to glory, to victories that would be worthy of the sagas. Even here, in the supernatural realm of the elf-folk, pride and courage would not make them hide their faces. They would face their doom and spit in the eye of death even as it reached out its bony claws to claim them. Wulfrik admired their acceptance of fate, but he would not share it. He would cheat his own doom and if he had to use these men to do so, then so it would be.

‘Where is this place you must cast your spell?’ Wulfrik asked Zarnath as he turned his back to the mountains.

The shaman didn’t appear to hear Wulfrik at first, his eyes instead roving across the landscape, seemingly overwhelmed by the peaceful beauty of the prairie. When the hulking champion took a step towards him, however, Zarnath was instantly alert, springing back, his hands clutching the seal-fur cloak tight about him.

‘Your touch will profane me!’ the shaman warned, his voice raised into a shriek. ‘The ritual won’t work if you defile me!’

‘The ritual will work,’ Wulfrik said. ‘Or you’ll never be master of the Seafang. Indeed, your bones will probably remain here for the elf-folk to bury.’

Zarnath scowled at the threat, but held his peace. He knew how dangerously thin Wulfrik’s temper had grown the nearer they came to the end of his quest. The hero was becoming more suspicious and paranoid with each passing breath. There had been a moment, atop the cliff, when he had thought Wulfrik would try to seize him and throw him into the sea, convinced the shaman had intended to cut the rope when he reached the top.

The shaman turned his scowl into a smile, trying to reassure Wulfrik. He pointed a thin hand towards one of the clusters of trees dotting the plains. ‘There,’ Zarnath said. ‘I can sense the power I need to draw upon coming from among that copse.’

Wulfrik glanced at the stand of trees, then back at the shaman. The copse looked like any other bunch of trees scattered across the landscape. ‘You are certain?’ he asked, his voice a low growl.

Before the Kurgan could answer, Jokull’s voice was raised in alarm. The hunter gestured with his hand at something off to the left of Wulfrik and his men. Every warrior turned his eye towards whatever Jokull had spotted. It took only a moment to recognise riders galloping across the meadows. Even from such a distance, the northmen could see the lean, powerful build of the horses and the knights who rode upon them. Sunlight glimmered off the sharp points of their lances, reflected from the polished plates of silvered helms and armour. Following their progress, the men could see a structure towards which the knights were advancing. It was a tall, slender building crafted from some strange yellow-hued marble. It didn’t seem to rise from the ground so much as flow from it, every contour of its delicate architecture crafted to blend into the aesthetics of the plains.

‘Elf-folk,’ Njarvord grumbled, fingering his axe. The other warriors muttered fearfully and drew their own weapons.

‘They go to report to their kings,’ Broendulf said. ‘We must return to the Seafang before they can bring an army against us.’

Wulfrik turned on the frightened huscarl. ‘Any man who tries to go back to the sea will get a taste of my steel.’ Sheepishly, the fair-faced huscarl lowered his head.

‘There is no need for fear,’ Zarnath insisted. ‘My magic hides us from their eyes. If it were not so, they would have caught us upon the cliffs and shot us full of arrows before we ever set foot in Ulthuan.’

‘The warlock’s spells protect us,’ muttered Tjorvi. ‘I feel safer already.’

‘Safe or not,’ Wulfrik snarled, ‘no man leaves here until we have done what we came here to do.’ The hero drew both swords from his belt, brandishing them over his head to emphasise his point.

‘Lead the way, sorcerer,’ Wulfrik told Zarnath.

Bowing his head, the shaman led the warriors across the plains towards the dark copse and their captain’s doom.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Raised voices greeted the northmen as they crept into the shadows of the copse. Standing among the trees, Wulfrik could not decide if they were natural growth or had been planted in some complex pattern by the elf-folk long ago. There was something unnatural about the trees, a deformity about them that made his flesh crawl. Not the sort of corruption as had afflicted Fraener, but a more subtle kind of change, a sorcerous enhancement that had altered the trees from root to branch. It wasn’t the change that upset Wulfrik’s sensibilities, but the way the magic had been so seamlessly blended into the trees. A man could feel the alteration, but he could not see it.

The voices were no less strange to the ears of the Norscans. They were sombre and piercing, with a musical quality to them that made the men recall tales of sirens and harpies who could lure a longship to wreck itself with only the power of their song. Nothing human ever spoke in such melodious tones, even the little songbirds the Arabyans kept never sang with such beauty.

Wulfrik grew tense, certain that for all the melody within them, the voices were some kind of alarm, that whatever power lurked within the copse was aware of the invaders and was warning the elf-folk of their presence.

Zarnath tried to calm the hero and his warriors. ‘Those are the voices of the elves,’ the shaman told them. ‘It is they who are singing, thanking the land for keeping them safe from their enemies – both element and man.’

‘They should sing louder,’ Njarvord growled, a bloodthirsty gleam in his eye. It had been far too long since the Baersonling had killed something.

The shaman chuckled at the remark. ‘Even if they did, my magic would hide us from them.’ For an instant, a troubled expression flickered across the Kurgan’s face, a look which was equal parts doubt and guilt. Zarnath quickly composed himself. ‘We must press on,’ he told Wulfrik. ‘The very heart of the grove. The magic will be at its most powerful there. Strong enough to break even a curse from the gods.’

Wulfrik smiled. ‘If this works, warlock, I shall give you a dozen ships like the Seafang and a thousand men to crew them! You shall be acclaimed the mightiest sorcerer in all Norsca!’

Zarnath bowed his head in acknowledgement of the honour Wulfrik paid him. ‘We must hurry then, to claim our due.’

The marauders marched through the glade. There was no question now that the trees grew in a pattern, forming a great spiral that wound itself tighter and tighter as it drew towards the centre. The voices grew louder as the men pressed deeper into the copse, the sense of magic becoming so strong that the breath of the warriors turned to frost. Closer and closer the Norscans approached the centre, Zarnath’s voice snapping at them like a whip when the oppressive feeling of the glade caused them to hesitate. Wulfrik echoed the shaman’s orders, urging his men on.

Soon there will be an end to it, Wulfrik thought, and the curse will be behind me. Then I will take my place as king of the Sarls with Hjordis beside me and after me my son will become High King of all Norsca.

Jokull hissed a warning from his place at the head of the column, motioning for the northmen to halt their march. Scurrying back through the ranks of warriors, the hunter made his report to Wulfrik. ‘The path opens into a clearing ahead. A great stone stands at its centre, not unlike the dolmens reared by the Kurgan tribes,’ he added, casting a suspicious glance at Zarnath.

‘A menhir,’ explained the shaman. ‘Erected by the elves to mark the lines of magic flowing through Ulthuan and help channel their energies back into the vortex.’

The hunter shrugged at Zarnath’s explanation. ‘Whatever it is, you can see it glowing with light wherever the shadow of a tree falls upon it. The entire surface of the thing is etched with strange runes…’

Wulfrik seized the hunter by his tunic, lifting him from the ground. ‘You try to frighten us with stories of glowing rocks!’ he snarled, his fangs bared.

‘No! No!’ Jokull protested. ‘There are people surrounding the stone! Elf-folk!’

Wulfrik released the hunter. ‘How many? How are they armed?’

‘Thirty or forty,’ the hunter answered after a moment of consideration. ‘I saw no armour and no weapons. They seemed to me to be women, she-elves.’

A greedy laugh rumbled up from Haukr’s tattooed face and he clapped his hands together. ‘Elf wenches! Those should be worth twice their weight in silver if we get them back to Ormskaro alive!’

‘They’d swallow their own tongues before sailing with you, Haukr,’ said Arngeirr.

Haukr scowled at the one-legged reaver’s advice. ‘Some sort of bit would be in order then,’ he said, rubbing his chin as he considered the idea.

Zarnath saw the way Haukr’s avaricious proposal was taking hold of the northmen. They sailed with Wulfrik to share in his glory, but none of them was an altruist. A bit of plunder, even living plunder, was a welcome bonus.

The shaman’s eyes narrowed with contempt. He turned to Wulfrik, but when he spoke his voice was loud enough for all the marauders to hear. ‘You must take no chances with these elves! They are witches, harnessing their magic through the menhir! Allow them a moment’s breath and they will cast a spell on you!’

Wulfrik rounded on his men, glaring at them like a rabid troll. ‘You heard the sorcerer!’ he snapped. ‘No prisoners. No mercy. We fall upon the elf-folk and kill them all. If any man allows one to escape, he pays for his mistake with his heart.’ The hero motioned with his sword, gesturing at his warriors. ‘Spread through the trees, Jokull will show you where. Every man chooses his own prey. When I begin the attack, find your elf and kill her.’

The northmen scattered along the path, forming a perimeter around the clearing. Fists tightened about axes and swords as each warrior took his place. They positioned themselves in the narrow gaps between the trees, their eyes fixing upon the kneeling elves they saw gathered around the menhir.

Wulfrik took his place at the forefront of the ambush, pressing close against the trunk of a towering oak growing near the spot where the spiral path opened into the clearing. The melodious sound of the elven voices filled his ears, tugging at his heart. There was sorrow and anguish in that song, a desperate pleading in the cadence of the strange lyrics. He thought there was hope there too, a hope nourished long after it should have been allowed to die, a pathetic entreaty to uncaring gods for succour and solace. The Norscan gazed into the clearing, observing the elf women as they knelt before the ancient menhir. They were thin, delicate creatures, as fine and fragile as the porcelain dolls crafted by the southlings. Their lean bodies were wrapped in shifts of silver thread, the flowing locks of their golden hair bound in caskets of diamond wire. Sandals of ivory and ruby clung to their tiny feet and rings of sapphire and jade shone upon their fingers. Somehow, the northman did not find the display of jewels and wealth ostentatious or gaudy, every diamond and every ruby combined to complement the intrinsic grace of the she-elves. Wulfrik felt his determination waver as he contemplated the beauty of these creatures. Panic seized him as he remembered Zarnath’s warning about witchcraft and magic.

Roaring, Wulfrik exploded into the clearing, leaping over an earthen mound to pounce upon the elf he had marked as the first to feel his sword. Strangely, the elves did not react to his savage charge or his fierce war cry. Only when his raised sword came slashing down, cleaving through the dainty neck of a kneeling elf, did the elves awaken to their danger. As the blood of Wulfrik’s first victim sprayed across the menhir, the others leapt to their feet, screaming in shock and horror as the other marauders came rushing at them from the trees. The warriors surged over the low earthen mounds surrounding the clearing, leaping over them as easily as their captain had. Naked steel gleamed in the sun as the northmen fell upon the elves.

The massacre was as swift as it was brutal. None of the she-elves escaped the clearing, but died in their dozens around the menhir. The last to fall did not even try to flee, but bowed their heads and waited for the axes of the northmen with what dignity they could still command.

Wulfrik gazed across the slaughter, wiping elven blood from his blades. His men prowled among the bodies, killing the wounded, ripping jewels from the bodies of the dead. The echoes of the elf song continued to sound in Wulfrik’s mind, a mournful dirge that whispered to him of dreams denied and dead. The hero shook his head, trying to drive the sounds away. The elf-folk were a fading people, doomed to oblivion. Men would not share their fate. He would not share their fate.

The champion pulled the Smile of Sardiss from his belt, watching it gleam in the glow of the menhir. Soon he would be free. Then he would return to this ghostly land and give the elf-folk reason to cry in the twilight of their kingdom.

Harsh laughter boomed like thunder through the clearing. The northmen turned to find Zarnath glaring at them, his eyes burning like pits of azure flame. ‘Blood-crazed barbarians!’ the shaman howled. ‘You have sown the seeds of your own destruction!’ He gestured with a claw-like hand at the butchered she-elves. ‘These were no witches, but elf-wives come to pray to their gods for fertility! Such wrath as the warriors of Ulthuan will visit upon you for this outrage will make the very heavens cringe in horror!’

Zarnath’s words faded into another peal of caustic laughter. The marauders stared fearfully at him, wondering if the magic of this place had overwhelmed his mind and driven him mad. Sane or otherwise, Wulfrik would not be mocked by the shaman, not after all that had been promised to him.

‘You share our doom then, sorcerer,’ Wulfrik snarled, stalking towards Zarnath. In one hand he still held the torc, in the other he gripped his sword. ‘Without me you will never master the Seafang and without the ship you will never leave Alfheim!’ He raised his fist, shaking the torc at the shaman. ‘Keep your promise, Kurgan! Free me of my curse!’

Zarnath’s face twisted into a sneer of loathing and contempt. ‘Be damned to your Dark Gods and their thousand hells!’ he spat. ‘It is you who are trapped here, doomed and damned by your own deeds! Rot, barbarian! Fester in the soil of Ulthuan until your bones are dust and your name forgotten!’

Fury seized the hero. Like a panther, he sprang at the mocking shaman. His sword slashed at Zarnath’s head, the heavy blade cleaving through the Kurgan’s face. Wulfrik stumbled and crashed to the ground as his body lost balance. Instead of striking flesh and bone, his sword encountered only empty air.

‘Keep your devil-ship, barbarian,’ Zarnath hissed. ‘I do not need it to leave this place, because I was never here!’

Wulfrik lifted his face from the dust, his eyes glaring murder at the Kurgan. Angrily he shook the Smile of Sardiss at Zarnath. ‘All a lie!’ the hero raged. ‘From the first!’

Zarnath lifted his hand, pointing at the sky overhead. A flare of light exploded from his fingers, rocketing through the air. High above the trees, the light blew apart in a great starburst, burning like a second sun over the copse. ‘Every elf in Cothique will see that,’ the shaman laughed. ‘You will not escape the armies of Ulthuan as you did those of the fire dwarfs!’

From the ground, Wulfrik leapt at the mocking sorcerer, lunging at him like an enraged tiger. Zarnath’s body seemed to fold around the hero’s outstretched arms, collapsing as Wulfrik’s drive bowled him to the ground. But when the Norscan stared at the mass beneath him, he found he had caught nothing more than the shaman’s seal-fur cloak. Of the man who had worn it, there wasn’t any trace.

‘A wraith,’ gasped Haukr, eyes bulging with fright. ‘All this time, he was nothing but a ghost!’

‘He was real enough before,’ Njarvord growled. ‘Real enough to turn tail and run when that dwarf sorcerer was after him.’

‘It was a sending,’ Broendulf told them. ‘Zarnath kept his body back in Norsca and only sent his spirit along with us, wrapped in that magic cloak. That was why he insisted no one touch him. There wasn’t anything there to touch.’ The huscarl stared intently at his captain, watching as Wulfrik slowly rose to his feet. The hero made no move to address his crew, simply glaring down at the empty cloak on the ground.

Carefully, Broendulf approached Wulfrik. The huscarl knew he could easily strike down his chief while his mind was lost to the immensity of the betrayal that had robbed him of his dreams. Broendulf, however, wasn’t willing to forsake his own life to eliminate that of his captain. Zarnath might not need the Seafang to escape from Alfheim, but the rest of them did.

‘Wulfrik,’ Broendulf carefully addressed his captain. ‘That cur told the truth about one thing. The elf-folk will be coming here and they will avenge what we’ve done this day. We have to get back to the Seafang.’

The hero turned his head, staring into Broendulf’s face. The fair-faced Sarl had never seen a more piteous look of despair than that which clouded the eyes of Wulfrik at that moment. It was like looking into the eyes of something already dead.

‘All a lie!’ the champion moaned.

The northman’s cry seemed to ripple across the clearing, echoing strangely from the trees and the glowing menhir. Broendulf turned away from his dazed chieftain to find the source of the weird echoes. His blood turned to ice as he saw strange misty shapes rising from the earthen mounds. His horror was echoed in the frightened howls of the other warriors. As a man, they backed away from the weird mist, their skin prickling from a spectral chill.

From each of the mounds, a column of mist slowly drifted towards the Norscans. There was something hideously suggestive about the shapeless masses, something elusive yet familiar. Each of the six foot pillars of grey fog lingered above the pools of blood splashed throughout the clearing. As each patch of mist hovered over the blood, it became less translucent, more a thing of substance than shadow. Form began to replace shapelessness, cloudy wisps of fog becoming lean arms and thin faces. Before the stunned eyes of the northmen, the mists became phantom figures, deathly elves draped in shrouds, ancient armour clinging to their emaciated bodies.

The face of each ghost was a mask of silent, inhuman rage, its dead eyes burning with the fury of the grave. The earthen mounds surrounding the clearing were barrows, the tombs of fallen elves. When the northmen had spilled blood so near the menhir, they had drawn the spirits of the elves from their biers. Now they closed upon the murderers to wreak vengeance for their slaughtered descendants. Zarnath’s projection had fled back to Norsca too quickly to appreciate the immediacy of the trap he had set for Wulfrik and his crew.

One of the new crewmen, a brawny whaler from Ormskaro, mustered his courage, determined to prove his valour to his comrades and his gods. Raising his axe on high, bellowing like a rampaging ogre, the marauder charged the ghost nearest to him. In the blink of an eye, a phantom sword appeared in the apparition’s bony claw. The marauder’s axe passed harmlessly through the ghost, but when the spirit stabbed its blade into his breast, the northman screamed in agony. His flesh blackened where the sword struck him, rotting from his bones even as he tried to back away. He was dead before he could raise his axe for a second blow.

‘Kharnath’s blood!’ Haukr swore, retreating from the advancing ghosts. ‘How can we fight what we can’t even touch!’

‘Like the drowned legions of Mermedus,’ Tjorvi shuddered. The slippery Graeling had his back to the menhir, his eyes darting about, looking for any gap between the ghosts he could exploit to reach the shelter of the trees.

Another of the new recruits from Ormskaro shrieked as a ghost cut him down. The man’s destruction seemed to energise the other ghosts. Like an onrushing tide, they swept towards the men, their swords stabbing through bodies, leaving withered husks lying on the ground.

‘Hopeless or no, they don’t take me without a fight!’ Njarvord cursed. The hairy Baersonling gnashed his teeth, glaring at the nearest of the phantoms. Before he could rush into the midst of the ghosts, he felt Jokull’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. The hunter gestured towards Arngeirr. Like the rest of them, the one-legged reaver was beset by the apparitions. However, his kraken-tooth sword was proving more effective than steel. When he struck the ghosts, their misty bodies flew apart, drifting away across the clearing. The hope that he was doing the ghosts any lasting damage was quickly banished. The scattered mists soon reformed into spectral elves. Arngeirr could fend off the ghosts, but he couldn’t destroy them.

Relentlessly, the ghosts pushed the northmen back. Broendulf grabbed Wulfrik’s arm, intending to pull him from the path of the advancing spirits. The hero angrily wrested free from his grip. For an instant, the huscarl thought Wulfrik was going to split his skull with his sword.

‘All a lie!’ the champion growled at Broendulf.

‘Are you going to die here then, and let the dog get away with cheating you?’ Broendulf growled back.

Wulfrik’s face became livid, the rage boiling within his eyes burning away the despair that had filled them. ‘All a lie!’ the hero roared, hurling the Smile of Sardiss at the glowing menhir. The torc struck the standing stone, shattering into a hundred pieces, the shards scattering across the clearing.

A stagnant, mephitic stench rose from the shards of the shattered torc. The power contained within Khorakk’s talisman was freed by its impact against the enchanted menhir. Like crimson smoke, it slithered across the clearing, lingering over the bodies of the slain as the elven spectres had done. The ghosts withdrew from the red smoke much as the northmen had recoiled from the approach of the phantoms. Their retreat, however, was not quick enough.

From the midst of the smoke a great hairy arm struck out, the black talons on its hand lancing through one of the ghosts. The spectre uttered an anguished wail as the claw shredded its essence, scattering its ghostly form. A barking, snorting sound rumbled from the cloud, the hungry grumble of something bestial and monstrous.

The ghosts forgot about the northmen, converging upon the red smoke and the thing lurking within it. Their phantom swords lashed out, cleaving through the smoke, evoking pained howls from the lurker. The smoke rippled away from the spectres, smashing into one of the men from Ormskaro. The Sarl shrieked as three hairy arms, lanky and segmented like the limbs of a spider, shot out of the smoke and tore his body into bloody sections. Ugly, slobbering sounds came from the midst of the smoke as the thing inside greedily devoured the man it had slaughtered. The cloud of smoke swelled, growing larger as the beast gorged itself. The ghosts pursuing it hesitated, something like fright passing across their dead faces.

Masters of a sinister magic, there was no saying what sort of daemon the dwarfs of Zharr Naggrund had bound into the Smile of Sardiss, but it was such a thing as to make even a phantom know fear.

Wulfrik did not care what the thing hiding in the red smoke was. It was enough that it would keep the ghosts busy while his men escaped. Roused from his despair by Broendulf’s words, a new purpose filled the hero’s heart in place of the hope that had so cruelly been crushed. Revenge. He would find Zarnath and he would make of the treacherous shaman an end that would make even the gods tremble.

‘Away, you dogs!’ Wulfrik called to his crew. ‘Stop gawking and take to your heels! The daemon will kill you just as quick as the ghosts!’ As if to prove the hero’s words, the red smoke slammed into another of the Sarls clustered about the menhir, tearing him apart in the same grisly fashion as his comrade.

‘Away!’ Wulfrik barked again. He grinned fiercely as his warriors rushed past him, racing into the forest. The hero lingered a moment, soaking in the spectacle of the butchered elf-wives and his slaughtered men, of the wailing ghosts and the raging daemon. Of the crimson shards of the torc strewn about the clearing.

‘We’ve a ship to sail,’ Wulfrik growled through clenched fangs, ‘and a Kurgan to kill.’

The marauders raced through the forest, eager to put as much distance between themselves and the haunted clearing as possible. More than before, the trees seemed to regard them with some awful awareness of their own, hostile and malignant. Unconsciously, the northmen kept to the path winding through the grove, unwilling to chance pushing their way through the trees. At every turn, they expected to see the ghosts barring their way or encounter the crimson daemon still eager to glut its hunger.

When trouble came, it came from neither phantom nor fiend.

A Sarl suddenly cried out, toppling to the ground, an arrow through his neck. From the shadows, more arrows came whistling down, lodging into the bodies of men with chilling accuracy. Warriors crumpled to the ground before they could even draw their axes, their bodies looking like pin-cushions as arrow after arrow stabbed into their flesh.

Had their attackers been less wrathful, they could have slaughtered Wulfrik’s entire warband. Instead, the ambushers vented their fury, loosing arrows into the same target over and over.

‘In the trees!’ Jokull shouted. The hunter loosed one of his own arrows into the darkness overhead. A thin wail greeted his shot, and a lean body hurtled down from the branches to slam into the ground. It was the body of an elf, that of a warrior wearing breastplate and helm over his green tunic and robes. A yew bow fell from the elf’s dead fingers.

Zarnath’s flare had alerted the elves in the tower. With incredible speed they had dispatched scouts to investigate and defend the elf-wives praying in the grove. Hearing the sounds of men running through the woods, the elves had hidden themselves in the trees. It was easy enough for them to guess they were too late to save their wives: every one of Wulfrik’s warriors was carrying loot ripped from the dead she-elves. Now they would wreak a terrible revenge upon the barbarian invaders.

Jokull had only a second to revel in the accuracy of his archery. A dozen arrows thumped into his body, striking him with such speed that they might have been loosed from a single bow. The hunter’s bloody body slumped against the trunk of a tree, his tentacle writhing against his chest as life drained out of him.

Wulfrik snarled in impotent wrath. The elves were picking his men off one by one and there was nothing the northmen could do to fight back. The trees offered some cover, his marauders forgetting their repugnance in their eagerness to avoid the arrows of their foes. But there was no real shelter to be had in the wood. He could hear the branches overhead creaking as the elves nimbly sprang from one perch to another, circling around the warriors to strike them from behind.

Staying in the copse was death. The prairie would be worse: the grass and wildflowers would offer absolutely no protection from the elven bowmen, but at least it offered a chance to reach the Seafang and escape.

‘Dogs of Norsca!’ Wulfrik shouted to his men. ‘Follow me and live, stay here and die!’

The hero didn’t wait to see how many of his men abandoned their cover to follow him. He was too busy sprinting down the path, weaving from side to side as he ran, trying to thwart the marksmanship of the elves. Arrows whistled past his ear, stabbing into the earth around him. Pain flared through his body as one of the missiles cut across his arm, leaving a bloody gash along his shoulder. Behind him, he could hear northmen crying out in agony as other arrows found their mark.

Bright sunlight welcomed Wulfrik when he emerged from the copse. The men following him cheered as they felt the warmth of day shining down on them, banishing the supernatural chill of the sacred grove from their bones. From the depths of the forest, the screams of the men who had clung to the cover of the trees rang out as the elves continued to whittle away at them.

Wulfrik dismissed the wretches from his mind. They had made their choice, now they would suffer for it. The gods favoured the bold. The best of his crew were still with him. They would be enough to sail the Seafang and voyage back to Norsca and vengeance.

The hero studied the winded, panting warriors behind him. Almost every man had at least one elven arrow stuck in his flesh; only a half-dozen of the score who had managed to escape the forest looked unscathed. Every man cast frightened glances back into the trees.

‘They won’t stay in there long,’ he snarled at his warriors. ‘As soon as they finish off the men we left behind, they’ll be howling at our heels!’ Wulfrik turned and pointed his sword across the plains, towards the distant cliff on the horizon. ‘We won’t be safe until the Seafang is under our feet again and we are gone from this accursed land!’

Tired, wounded, the northmen nevertheless jogged after Wulfrik as he set out over the prairie. At every step, each man expected to feel an arrow slam into his back. With nowhere to hide and only open ground between them and the sea, there was no question of eluding the elves when they emerged from the forest and began their pursuit. The only uncertainty was how long it would take their enemies to catch them.

Resigned to their doom, the northmen loped through the grassy meadows. The landscape that had filled them with admiration only hours ago now seemed to them as bleak and unforgiving as the wastes of the Dark Lands, as pitiless as the Mountains of Mourn. There seemed no end to the rolling plains, the cliffs drawing no nearer no matter how strenuously they strived to reach them. The worst of the crew’s wounded fell as they ran, slumping wearily to the ground. No thought was given to helping them; each man had to save his strength for himself. The abandoned men did not curse their comrades, but instead turned their faces back to the copse and drew their axes. At least they would have steel in their fists when they entered the halls of their ancestors.

Wulfrik ignored the pulsing pain in his arm as he ran, was deaf to the sound of injured men collapsing behind him. Only the cliff and the sea mattered now, reaching the Seafang and showing Zarnath that his trap had failed.

The hero held up his arm, motioning his warriors to halt. Wulfrik glared across the meadows, watching as seven riders galloped towards the northmen, the sun glistening from their tall silvery helms and long lances. Elf knights, waiting to cut off the retreat of the men who had escaped from the grove! Wulfrik cursed. Caught in the open, the armoured cavalry would cut the marauders down as easily as the bowmen.

‘What do we do?’ Tjorvi demanded, panic in his voice.

Wulfrik gave the Graeling a contemptuous glance. ‘We hold our ground, unless you want to go back to the grove.’

Before the northmen, the galloping knights lowered their lances. The ground shuddered as they spurred their powerful warhorses into a charge. The marauders could see the stern, merciless expressions on the faces of the elves. No quarter would be given. The knights would ride them down like animals.

Wulfrik bared his fangs and braced himself for the attack. ‘Any man who fails to slay three knights is a mongrel unfit to lick the arse of a maggot!’ he growled at his men.

‘Kill these bastards and prove to the gods your fathers weren’t southling thralls!’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The elf knights gave voice to a weird exultation, a cry as melodious as a harp and biting as a whip. There was neither doubt nor hesitance in the riders as they bore down upon the northmen. Masters of saddle and blade, hardened by centuries of warfare, the knights had only contempt for the barbarians who stood before them. Many of the elves had been there when Erik Redaxe’s army had been slaughtered by the hosts of Cothique and Chrace. They remembered that battle now as they charged Wulfrik’s men, confident that these wounded, weary marauders would be easy prey.

Several of the Sarl warriors were indeed trampled by the knights, their bodies torn and mangled by their lances. But the elves did not strike with impunity. The horde of Erik Redaxe had looked to their king for leadership and in that moment of need, he had failed them. Wulfrik was made of sterner stuff than the vanquished king.

As the knights rode down his crew, Wulfrik sprang from the ground, his sword lashing out, the blade hacking into the arm of an elven rider. The bright, silvery ithilmar mail withstood the sharp edge of the hero’s sword, but the bone within was not so unyielding. The crushing impact of Wulfrik’s blow snapped the rider’s arm like a twig. The elf cried out in shock, his lance falling from a suddenly nerveless hand. Before the elf could recover from his surprise, Wulfrik’s other sword came flashing out at him. The left-hand blade glanced across the horn of the elf’s saddle, stabbing deep into the neck of the horse he rode.

Wulfrik jumped back as the injured warhorse reared up, its hooves pawing the air, blood spurting from where the northman’s sword was buried in its neck. The knight struggled to recover control of his wounded steed. Almost he succeeded, such was his mastery over the beast, but before he could wheel the warhorse around, Njarvord rushed at him from the other side, smashing into the horse’s flank with his shoulder. The Baersonling’s berserk charge and the fury of his impact against the horse caused the animal to lose its footing.

Whinnying in terror, beast and elf fell. The knight struggled to pull himself from beneath his thrashing steed, but before he could, Njarvord was upon him, driving his axe into the knight’s face. The sharp, patrician features of the knight lost their ethereal beauty as the axe’s spike stabbed over and again into his face.

A second knight, seeing the destruction of his comrade, charged Njarvord. The Baersonling had only just turned away from his victim to face the sound of pounding hooves when the knight’s lance crunched through his ribs, exploding from his back in a welter of gore. Impaled upon the knight’s lance, the northman howled in pain, blood and froth bubbling from his mouth.

The elf’s horse reared back, the man impaled upon the knight’s lance lifted into the air by the motion. The knight kicked out with his armoured boot to push Njarvord’s body from his weapon. The smack of a boot in his belly roused the Norscan, giving his mind something more than pain to consider. Njarvord glared at the elf, spitting blood at the haughty knight as he moved to kick the marauder a second time. Clenching his teeth, Njarvord closed one hand around the shaft of the lance. Screaming his agony, the warrior pulled his body down the lance, feeling his bones crack as he pressed the shaft deeper into his flesh. Angrily, Njarvord shook his head, struggling to defy the pain. Trembling with the effort, he raised his other arm, the cleaving edge of his axe gleaming in the sun.

Horror crawled onto the elf’s face. In a thousand years, the elf knight had never seen such mindless, murderous determination. Panicked, he kicked his boot into Njarvord’s body, raking his thighs with his spurs. The warhorse reared again, its legs flailing at the impaled northman. Njarvord defied every effort to knock him loose. Shrieking a war cry that would have deafened the grim gods of the north, he forced his body another foot down the lance and brought his axe swinging around to cleave the elf asunder.

Belatedly, the knight abandoned his lance, casting it and the man impaled upon it from his grasp. The move caused Njarvord’s axe to miss its target. Within reach of the elf, the marauder’s blow would have torn even an ithilmar breastplate. Instead, the strike crunched into the skull of the warhorse, splitting it down to the jaw. The beast dropped as though smashed flat by the fist of a giant, crashing to the ground, crushing the dying mass of its killer beneath its own bulk.

The elf knight tried to squirm out of the saddle as his steed died beneath him. With an inhuman display of grace and agility, he lifted himself from the back of his warhorse and sprang to the ground. Instantly, his battle-hardened reflexes were in motion, an ithilmar blade flashing from its scabbard to parry the strike of a Norscan sword. However, even the elf’s reflexes were not enough to fend off Wulfrik’s second blade. The hero’s sword smashed into the knight’s back, just above the join between cuirass and mail skirt. The elf flopped to the earth, his spine severed. He tried to slash his blade across the champion’s belly as Wulfrik loomed over the wounded knight. The northman’s boot smashed down upon the elf’s hand, breaking every finger as he ground his heel savagely against the prisoned flesh. The elf’s cry of pain was silenced in a bloody gargle as Wulfrik stabbed the point of his sword into the knight’s neck.

Wulfrik turned away from the dead elf, shaking the knight’s blood from his sword, his eyes hungry for enemies to slay. He found four knights galloping across the plains, heading away towards the grove. Behind them they left three of their number. Arngeirr had cut the legs out from under a warhorse, the kraken-tooth sword shearing clean through flesh and bone. The dismounted knight had been finished off by a blow from Broendulf’s sword.

However, the knights had wreaked havoc with their charge just the same. In addition to Njarvord, seven northmen were lying dead in the grass. Only ten of the marauders were still standing with Wulfrik. He could almost read the thoughts of the elf riders. They had lost almost half their number, but they had destroyed half of the invaders with that charge. The price was high, but with their blood roused by the massacre of their wives, the elves might not care how many of their own fell to prevent the invaders from escaping.

Wulfrik turned his head and snarled at his surviving crew. ‘Gather the bodies,’ he snapped. ‘Build a barricade against their next charge.’ He watched his men only long enough to make sure they were following his orders, then returned his attention to the knights. As he had predicted, they were wheeling about, making ready for another charge. Then, suddenly, they stopped. Wulfrik saw one of the knights turn and look behind him. Faintly he could hear the rider shout something. The hero’s keen eyes could see movement in the grass. It could be one of the wounded men the marauders had left behind trying to crawl his way to the cliff, but somehow he doubted it. When he saw the knights lean back in their saddles, adopting an almost relaxed posture, he was certain of it. There would be no charge now. The knights were afraid of trampling their own people as they crept through the tall grass.

‘Down!’ Wulfrik snarled, diving behind the gory wreck of the horse that had crushed Njarvord. Not all of the other northmen were quick to understand the immediacy of their captain’s howl. Two Sarls struggling to move the corpse of Arngeirr’s horse, and a third Sarl trying to shift the body of an elf knight; these were caught in the open when the reason for Wulfrik’s warning manifested itself.

Several hundred yards from where the northmen made their stand, bowmen suddenly rose from the grass. With lethal precision, the elves loosed a volley of arrows at the warriors, dozens of shafts falling upon the men in a murderous rain. The Sarls caught without cover shrieked as the arrows slammed into them, crumpling to the earth like broken toys.

Wulfrik pressed his shoulder against the horse carcass he hid behind, forcing it up onto its side, using it like a shield against the incoming arrows. The morbid bulwark shuddered as it was struck again and again, but none of the missiles stabbed deep enough to strike the man himself. He risked a quick look past the rump of the warhorse, watching as the elves dropped back down into the grass.

‘More to starboard!’ Arngeirr shouted. Frantically, the northmen shifted their grisly shields as a second band of archers rose from the tall grass and sent a volley at them. More screams sounded as one of the Sarls was hit, a shaft lodged in his hip. He flopped out from behind the pile of Norscan dead he had used for shelter, rolling across the ground in agony. A second arrow silenced him, smashing clean through his forehead.

‘Scum! Curseling swine!’

Wulfrik felt steel press into his collar, felt blood gushing down his shoulder. He rolled onto his back, kicking out with his boot. A blade flashed before his eyes. He heard the sound of metal sinking into flesh as the blade hacked into the horse carcass. It had missed his neck by a hairsbreadth, but for the impact of his boot against the body of his assailant, it would have struck true.

Tjorvi ripped his axe from the dead horse, at the same time slashing his knife at Wulfrik, the hero’s blood dripping from its steel. The Graeling’s face was livid with rage, the merciless fury of a man overwhelmed by fear. ‘We trusted you to lead us to glory!’ Tjorvi hissed. ‘Instead you bring us only death!’

The furious warrior lunged at Wulfrik. Wulfrik swatted aside Tjorvi’s axe, prepared to do the same with the man’s knife when his keen ears caught the whistle of arrows in the air. He tried to throw himself flat, but was too late to avoid all of the missiles hurtling down upon the northmen. Pain flashed through his body as an arrow slashed across the side of his head, gouging a deep furrow in his scalp. A second crunched into the meat of his leg, a third punched through his forearm.

Shielded from the arrows by his foe, Tjorvi sprang at the stricken champion. His knife bit across Wulfrik’s hand, forcing him to drop one of his swords. His axe smacked against the hero’s chest, shattering one of the trophy skulls he wore, denting the steel of his breastplate.

Snarling like a cornered wolf, the chieftain brought the pommel of his sword smashing into Tjorvi’s face. The raging warrior staggered back, spitting teeth from the pulped mash of a broken jaw. Wulfrik lunged after him, but fell as his injured leg collapsed beneath his weight. Tjorvi grinned through the ruin of his mouth as he saw his enemy’s weakness.

Broendulf watched the crazed Graeling close upon Wulfrik once more. It would be easy to leave the hero to the killer. Viglundr and Sveinbjorn would not care who killed Wulfrik, just so long as he was no longer an obstacle to their plans. Broendulf would be able to return to Norsca and claim Hjordis for himself. There was no way to evoke the Seafang’s magic without Wulfrik, but a new thought entered the huscarl’s mind. Even without magic, the Seafang was still a ship, a ship that could still make the voyage across the Great Western Ocean.

Broendulf had half-risen from his cover, intending to stop Tjorvi. Now he hesitated. He could have Hjordis and without any risk to himself. It was the sort of cruel scheme that would have made Viglundr proud. To Broendulf, however, it smacked too greatly of treachery. The example of Zarnath showed him the kind of man who practised such deceit. He loved Hjordis too much to win her through such craven ways. He would earn her love, not steal it.

The huscarl began to leave his shelter for the second time when he found that Wulfrik didn’t need his help. Tjorvi had rushed the fallen hero, chopping his axe at his foe’s head. In the same instant, Wulfrik’s sword flashed out, cutting into Tjorvi’s calf. The sneaky Graeling reeled back, shrieking in pain. Before he could get away, Wulfrik reared up from the ground, pouncing on the murderous marauder.

Wulfrik’s injured arm coiled about Tjorvi’s torso, spinning him around. The arm holding Tjorvi’s axe was pinned against the warrior’s side, but the hand with the knife slashed at the champion, slicing across his cheek. Wulfrik roared at the wiry betrayer, using his own anger to fight the pain throbbing through his ravaged body. Tjorvi refused to relent, frantic to free himself from the hero’s crushing grip. He clenched his legs together, pinning Wulfrik’s sword between them before the champion could wrench it free from his calf. Tjorvi’s knife slashed again at Wulfrik’s head, cutting his ear, all but sawing it from the side of his skull.

Wulfrik’s eyes blazed hatefully at the back of Tjorvi’s head. He smiled cruelly as he crushed the Graeling closer to his body. ‘This time I use you as my shield,’ he growled at the man.

Tjorvi screamed as another volley of elf arrows came raining down upon the northmen. His body twisted and writhed in Wulfrik’s clutch as missile after missile slammed into it. When no more arrows struck the Graeling, Wulfrik tossed the arrow-riddled corpse aside and collapsed to the ground.

‘They’re moving!’ Haukr shouted to his comrades when a new volley failed to manifest. ‘Trying to get in close!’

‘They mean to get prisoners,’ Arngeirr cursed. The reaver clenched his fist about his sword. ‘Khorne grant the cowards come close enough to cut!’

Broendulf carefully raised his head, staring out over the grassy plains. He couldn’t see any sign of the elves beyond the four knights who were still sitting atop their horses far back towards the copse. It didn’t mean they weren’t there, though. The huscarl had heard it said an elf could hide himself in an empty room with only dust and sunbeams for company.

‘We could make a break for it now,’ Haukr suggested. The tattooed warrior grimaced when he made a quick count of his remaining comrades. Except for Arngeirr and Broendulf, he was alone. He had hoped for a few more bodies to stay between himself and the elf arrows.

‘Maybe the chief has some ideas,’ Broendulf countered. Like Haukr, he had small appetite for an arrow in his back.

The surviving marauders scrambled to the side of their fallen chief. Wulfrik bared his fangs at them, swinging his bloody sword as they approached. ‘Back, jackals!’ the hero snarled, his eyes passing over each of them, lingering upon Broendulf. The huscarl felt a sense of guilt rush through him. Had Wulfrik seen him hesitate against Tjorvi?

‘We’ve sailed with you longer than that cur!’ Arngeirr snapped, spitting on Tjorvi’s body. ‘Do we look eager to pick your bones?’

Wulfrik glowered at his men. Again, Broendulf had the feeling the hero’s eyes lingered on him longer than the others. ‘No man knows another. Not that well.’ He laid his sword across his lap. Turning to his injured arm, he seized the arrow lodged in his flesh, breaking the shaft with one twist of his hand.

‘Even if we did,’ Haukr groaned, ‘we’d never be able to sail the Seafang without you.’

Broendulf grinned despite himself. Haukr was making the same mistake he had, fixating upon the ship’s magic and forgetting that it was still a ship. He shook his head in disgust at himself. What did it matter if they could sail the ship? They would never make it back to the Seafang. Not with the elves waiting to stick them full of arrows!

Gingerly, Wulfrik felt the wreckage of the ear Tjorvi had tried to saw away. He lowered his hand, sniffing the blood coating his fingers. ‘Arngeirr,’ he said, ‘give me that southling flask you carry.’ Puzzled, but obedient, the reaver pulled the dented tin bottle from his belt and offered it to the chieftain. Wulfrik held it beside his head, shifting his arm when he remembered one of his ears was gone. He shook the flask, listening as its contents sloshed against the sides. ‘Mead?’ the hero asked.

‘Kvas,’ Arngeirr answered.

Wulfrik grinned and turned his attention to Haukr and Broendulf. ‘Rummage among our dead,’ he told them. ‘Get anything that looks like it will burn good.’ He cast a wary glance at the tall grass around them. ‘Don’t touch any of the elf-folk,’ he advised. While the warriors hurried to follow the hero’s orders, Wulfrik drew two jagged pieces of flint from a bag tied to his boot. He set them on the ground, waiting for his men to bring him the strange plunder he had requested.

As he tried to remove Njarvord’s bloodied shirt, Haukr passed near one of the dead knights. His eyes settled upon the rings decorating the elf’s lean fingers. He cast a glance back at Wulfrik. Seeing his chieftain was occupied with the litter Arngeirr and Broendulf had already brought him, a sly smile crept onto his face.

Like a striking weasel, Haukr reached for the dead elf’s hands. Before he could touch the cold, dead flesh, pain flared through his chest. He stared in confusion at the arrow piercing his breast, skewering his lung like a salmon upon a fisherman’s spear. Groaning, he slumped to his knees, then crashed headfirst across the feet of the dead knight.

‘I said don’t touch the elf-folk,’ Wulfrik muttered, glancing up from his labour. The unseen bowmen were content to leave the Norscans alone while they crept closer, but they would not suffer their dead to be defiled. In their position, any Norscan worthy of the name would do the same.

Wulfrik grinned admiringly at his handiwork. Arrayed about him were ten little bundles, each a knot of cloth bound around a few arrows. The arrows would give the bundles weight and rigidity, allowing them to be thrown farther. As for the cloth, the hero upended Arngeirr’s flask over the bundles, dousing them in the pungent kvas, trying to ration it between them. In the end, the small flask had only enough alcohol in it to treat six of the improvised missiles.

Wulfrik scowled and ran his hand through the grass around him. Ideally, it should be much drier. He could only hope it would burn the way he needed it to. Otherwise his plan would never work.

Behind the cover of the dead horses, Wulfrik set to work with his flints, sending sparks flying from the jagged stones as he slid them against each other. Soon, a knot of kvas-soaked rag tied round a single arrow caught fire. Wulfrik held the tiny torch in his hand and gestured with it at the tall grass around them.

‘Now we give the elf-folk something to think about,’ Wulfrik told his men. Touching the torch to one of the bundles, Wulfrik rose to his feet and hurled the fiery missile far out into the grass. Immediately, arrows came shooting towards the northmen in response, but the warriors were already back against the side of the slaughtered horse.

‘The Hung kill mammoths this way,’ Wulfrik said. ‘I’m not sure it will work so well upon elf-folk, but I only need to keep them busy while we get back to the Seafang.’ The hero lit another bundle and threw it out into the grass opposite where he had thrown the other one. A few arrows shot at him in response, once again slamming into the carcass of the warhorse.

The three men watched with satisfaction as smoke began to fill the air. The fire wasn’t spreading very quickly through the grass; it wasn’t dry like that upon the steppes where the Hung hunted mammoths. There was little chance of surrounding the elves in a ring of fire and burning them to death, in any event. Wulfrik had hoped only to drive the elves back with his fires. However, the strange grass of Ulthuan had a quality about it that served his purposes almost as well. Slow to take fire, the grass gave off an inordinate amount of smoke. Perhaps elves could see through smoke, but Wulfrik doubted it.

Wulfrik started to light a third bundle when Arngeirr reached to take the torch from him. ‘Leave it to me,’ the reaver said. ‘I’ll keep them busy while you get back to the ship.’ He tapped his bone leg. ‘I wouldn’t make it in any event. Even with an arrow in yours, I’d slow you down.’

Wulfrik nodded slowly and released the torch to Arngeirr. ‘Hold them back as long as you can,’ he told the warrior. He glanced at Broendulf. ‘Are you staying with him, or me?’

Broendulf smiled sadly at the one-legged whaler. ‘I want to see Norsca again,’ he apologised.

Arngeirr simply shrugged, accepting the lonely doom he had chosen. ‘Just find that crook-tongued Kurgan rat,’ he said. ‘That way I can hold my head proudly in Valhal.’

‘Aye,’ Wulfrik promised. ‘That is one oath even the gods won’t stop me from keeping.’ His eyes narrowed as he regarded Broendulf. ‘Keep before me, Sarl,’ he warned. ‘I saw you when Tjorvi was trying to cut my throat. It seems to me you were thinking about helping him. Why didn’t you?’

Broendulf glared back at the chieftain, all of the jealousy in his heart rising to fill his eyes with the coldest hate. ‘I want to get back to Norsca,’ he said.

Wulfrik snorted his contempt for the huscarl’s words. ‘Then you are a coward and a traitor,’ he spat.

‘When we get back to Ormskaro, I will show you who is a coward,’ Broendulf growled.

The hero laughed at Broendulf’s words. ‘If the daemons of the border-realm are hungry, you will never see Ormskaro.’ Wulfrik waved his hand, impatiently motioning for the huscarl to precede him across the plains. He half-expected the Sarl’s body to sprout a dozen arrows as he loped through the grass, his body bent in a half-crouch. When nothing happened, Wulfrik hurried after Broendulf.

For some time, the two warriors had the benefit of the smoke to hide them from the elves. Eventually, however, Arngeirr could set no new fires. The elves were a sharp-witted people. They would figure out what was happening. When they did, they would be on Wulfrik’s trail again.

He only hoped to be close enough to the sea by that time to have a real chance of escape. Broendulf wanted to see Ormskaro again. Wulfrik’s hopes were even more modest. He only wanted to see the Seafang one last time.

‘What do we do now!’ Broendulf raged, smashing his fist against his side in impotent fury. Another arrow clattered off the stones near his feet.

Wulfrik smiled coldly at the blond Sarl. ‘The dragon or the elves,’ he told Broendulf. ‘The gods leave us small choice, but at least the serpent won’t make a game of killing us.’

Wulfrik did not wait to see what effect, if any, his logic had upon the other Norscan. Clenching the blade of his sword between his fangs, the warrior flung himself over the side of the cliff.

The waters of the Great Western Ocean closed about Wulfrik like a grave shroud. He felt his body plunge deep into the briny depths, the weight of his armour dragging him down. The chill of the sea numbed his flesh, seeping into his bones, enticing him to abandon himself to the oblivion of the lightless deep. He could hear the pressure around him pounding against his skull, becoming more intense with each passing instant.

No! He would not die this way! If he was fated to die, he would perish in battle, not smothered like some sickly infant by the sea. Clenching his fangs, exerting his prodigious strength, Wulfrik clawed his way upwards, fighting the drag of his own body as he strived to escape the embrace of the deep.

Gasping, the northman’s head broke the waves. His flailing arms caught hold of a shattered length of beam bobbing upon the surface. Wulfrik clutched it to him, clinging to it like a babe to its mother’s teat.

All around Wulfrik, the shattered wreckage of the Seafang floated, pounding against the cliffs of Cothique with each surge of the tide. A few ragged bodies, all that remained of the crew he had left behind, sagged across the splintered husk of his ship, their blood clouding the water around them. As he watched, one of the bodies was dragged under by some scavenger of the sea, vanishing into the black depths that had so nearly claimed him.

A seething hiss, like the steaming breath of a volcano, shuddered through the air. Wulfrik lifted his eyes, watching as the source of the sound reared up from the sea. A tremendous scaly neck split the waves, rising like some mighty pillar from the deep. More massive than even the giant trees of the elf-folk’s sacred grove, the huge neck was coated in an armour of blue scales as big and thick as shields, the pale throat covered in a leathery skin crusted with barnacles and parasitic fish. Atop the monstrous neck was a gigantic wedge-shaped head with tremendous jaws filled with sword-like fangs. Spray jetted from the nostrils above the jaws, reeking of the brine and the bottom. Huge eyes, big as cartwheels and lustrous as amber stared from the scaly face, pupils narrowed to angry slits in the uncomfortable light of the surface world. A reptilian stink rose from the immense beast, filling Wulfrik’s nose with a draconic reek.

Many were the sailors’ stories of sea serpents and their predations. They were the terrors of the sea, monsters to evoke horror in even the most hardened corsair and most jaded pirate. As Wulfrik gazed up at the merwyrm, however, only one emotion burned in his heart. This mindless reptile had destroyed the greatest ship in the world. His ship. For that, the beast would pay.

‘Down here, you eel-rutting crab-stain!’ Wulfrik roared at the serpent. He grinned fiercely as the merwyrm’s eyes focussed on him. Another steaming hiss rippled from the monster’s jaws. It swung its head aside as something crashed into the water beside it. Wulfrik cursed the dumb beast. He didn’t care if Broendulf survived his jump or drowned; all that bothered him was the distraction the huscarl had caused. Wulfrik tore one of the trophies hanging from his chest off its chain. Fingers curled in the sockets of the skull, he hurled the macabre missile at the merwyrm.

The sea serpent snapped around, one eye dripping tears from where the skull had struck it. The merwyrm’s hiss had a definitive note of anger to it now. Wulfrik glared back at the monster.

‘Go ahead, fish-faced dung-sucker,’ he snarled at it as the merwyrm clashed its jaws together. ‘From inside or out, I’m going to cut that ship-cracking gizzard!’

Like a thunderbolt hurled by an angry god, the merwyrm struck at Wulfrik. Its vision impaired by the tears clouding its bruised eye, the serpent’s jaws plunged into the water beside the Norscan. The impact of the huge monster’s body slamming into the sea hurled Wulfrik and his refuge high into the air, borne upon a violent wave. As the beam swung away from the merwyrm, Wulfrik threw himself from his refuge, diving for the gigantic neck only a few feet from him.

The chieftain’s sword bit deep into the scaly flesh, treacle-like blood spurting from the wound. Wulfrik wrapped his injured arm about the hilt of his blade, using it to anchor him to the serpent’s side. With his good hand, he drew a saw-toothed dagger and plunged it into the merwyrm’s neck, slashing through the leathery skin to gouge the flesh within.

The merwyrm’s body undulated through the waves, continuing the downward plunge initiated by its foiled strike. Again, Wulfrik felt the cold waters of the sea close above his head. Panic thundered through his mind, but the hero refused to release his hold on the serpent. The water became black with blood as the northman’s dagger sank repeatedly into its body.

The reptile’s body suddenly shuddered, its lethargic nervous system at last registering the wounds Wulfrik was inflicting upon it. The serpent thrashed about, lashing its body like a great whip. The man clinging to its scaly hide tightened his grip, holding fast as the beast’s wild undulations threatened to rip him loose. Crazed with pain now, the merwyrm sought to sink back into the black depths. Wulfrik’s lungs burned for want of air, his head pounding with the mounting pressure as the merwyrm bore him with it into the deep.

Resolutely, with the vicious fatalism of his race, Wulfrik continued to stab his knife into the merwyrm’s flesh. Death could crush him in its bony fist and choke the last breath from his body, but he would leave his mark upon the monster that destroyed his ship.

Bubbles exploded from the merwyrm’s mouth as a pained roar rumbled from its throat. Maddened by the violence of Wulfrik’s attack, the confused serpent rolled its body through the water, churning through the sea like a mammoth corkscrew. Disorientated, even its instincts overcome with anguish, the merwyrm swam for the surface again, unable to understand it had changed direction.

As the merwyrm’s head broke the surface, Wulfrik expelled the foul air from his lungs and drew a fresh breath into his body. His head was spinning from the wild movement of the serpent, the world rotating crazily before his dazed eyes. Even the most potent beer brewed by the dwarfs of Kraka Drak had never stricken his senses so brutally. Yet it took no great skill to strike a scaly neck the size of a longship. The hero continued to hack away at the reptile, determined to avenge the Seafang.

The merwyrm’s agonised howl dislodged stones from the cliff above. The reptile lashed out at the falling rocks, its dull intelligence connecting the motion with the pain it suffered. The wedge-like head struck, smashing its snout against the unyielding face of the cliff, its scales scraping against the jagged stone.

This time even Wulfrik’s strength could not maintain his grip. The pained thrashings of the merwyrm as it whipped its body across the waves dislodged both marauder and sword from its neck, flinging them across the waves like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond. Bleeding from the dozens of cuts the hero had inflicted, fangs cracked by its crazed assault on the cliff, its side gouged by the jagged rocks, the merwyrm hissed its fury to the hated sun. It dived back beneath the waves, its serpentine coils plunging after it, retreating back into the darkness of the bottom to lick its wounds.

Bruised and battered by his battle, half-dead from the pressure and cold of the ocean deeps, Wulfrik flailed through the churning water. Desperately, he wrapped his arms around a chunk of floating debris, struggling to keep himself afloat. The hero coughed, vomiting the mouthfuls of water he had inhaled. In his travels, he had come close to death many times, but rarely closer than in his efforts to kill a merwyrm single-handed.

Wulfrik, face dark with reptilian blood, looked towards the spot where the merwyrm had disappeared beneath the waves.

‘Coward!’ Wulfrik spat between coughs. ‘Come back and fight like a snake!’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Wulfrik clung to the floating spar, his eyes still glaring at the spot where the merwyrm had submerged. The hero knew it was madness, but he wished the monster would return to finish their battle. Better death in the belly of a serpent than by drowning. The spirits of drowned men never entered the halls of their ancestors but were instead cast into chains by Mermedus, the grisly Lord of the Deeps. Wulfrik smiled grimly to himself. He wondered if Mermedus would contest ownership of Wulfrik’s spirit with the Dark Gods who had cast their curse upon him, or would the bottom-feeder quietly withdraw his claim?

The hero cast his gaze upwards, scowling at the cliff looming overhead. He could see armoured heads peering over the side, staring at him with vengeful eyes. That was another option, of course. He could climb back up to the cliff and face the elves. The prospect of battle and sending a last few enemies into the afterworld appealed to Wulfrik, but the possibility of falling into the hands of the elf-folk alive didn’t. A prisoner could count upon no mercy from the elves, not after what Wulfrik’s marauders had done. Even a hero might turn coward under the torturer’s knife. Wulfrik would not shame his ancestors by spending his last hours screaming and begging for death.

A splash to the chieftain’s left brought his attention away from the elves. He almost expected to see the merwyrm’s scaly head rising from the sea. Wulfrik was disappointed to find that the source of the sound was nothing more than a man.

‘Tzeentch watches over traitors,’ Wulfrik growled as Broendulf came swimming towards him. Lacking the hero’s prodigious strength, the huscarl had divested himself of his armour, letting it sink into the depths while he remained afloat. Even so, Broendulf hadn’t fought a merwyrm only minutes before. He was in a more fit condition than the battered, weary Wulfrik. That would count for more in a fight than the armour bound about the hero’s body.

Broendulf’s eyes studied Wulfrik, seeming to reach the same conclusion about the hero’s condition. A thin smile worked onto the Sarl’s face. ‘Where’s the serpent?’ he asked.

Wulfrik coughed as he tried to laugh. ‘I let it go,’ he said. ‘Too big to take back as a trophy anyway.’ The hero’s eyes hardened as the huscarl swam over to the floating spar, his hand tightening about the hilt of his sword.

Broendulf did not try to hide the hate in his own eyes. With everything brought to ruin by the destruction of the Seafang, there was no sense in trying to deceive Wulfrik that he was anything but the hero’s enemy. ‘What do we do now?’ He glanced away from Wulfrik, back up the cliff at the elf warriors. ‘We might climb back up and give an accounting of ourselves before the end.’

‘Those of us with swords might,’ Wulfrik said.

Broendulf grimaced at the chieftain’s words. Along with his armour, he had lost his blade. A Norscan feared one kind of death, a death that took him without steel in his hand. ‘There must be another way,’ the Sarl said, his words sounding empty even to himself.

‘We could swim around here until the elf-folk get tired of waiting and decide to sink us with arrows,’ Wulfrik growled. ‘Or else maybe they’ll send for one of their sorcerers and have him call back the merwyrm.’ The hero chuckled grimly at his own morbid jest. Then his eyes grew hard again. ‘Why?’ he demanded, his voice low and full of menace.

‘Why what?’ Broendulf asked, returning Wulfrik’s tone in kind.

‘It wasn’t fear that made you turn on me,’ Wulfrik said. ‘I can see that in your eyes just as cleanly as I can see your hate. What made you turn on me?’

Broendulf shook his head, scowling at the hero. ‘What does it matter now? You have a sword. Cut me down and let the gods judge my reasons.’

‘Were you in league with the Kurgan?’ Wulfrik growled. Broendulf could see the champion’s knuckles turning white as they closed still tighter about the grip of his sword.

‘Crow God rot your nethers!’ Broendulf snapped. The huscarl half-lifted himself from the water as he lunged for the champion. Wulfrik lifted his arm, smashing the flat of his blade across the Sarl’s face. Before Broendulf could recover from the stunning blow, Wulfrik’s other arm was wrapped around his throat, holding him fast against the hero’s chest. Savagely, Wulfrik held the huscarl’s head under water, allowing him to rise only when he was on the very brink of drowning.

Sputtering, gasping for breath, the huscarl flailed about in Wulfrik’s mighty grip. The champion snarled into Broendulf’s ear. ‘Where’s Zarnath? Where’s that bastard gone?’

Broendulf shook his head, trying to cough an answer. Wulfrik didn’t wait that long, dunking his head back under the waves. This time, the huscarl was certain the hero intended to drown him. Spots swirled through his vision, his lungs turned to fire, and still Wulfrik held him under.

‘Tell me where the Kurgan has gone or by all your back-stabbing ancestors you’ll wear the chains of Mermedus!’

Wulfrik started to dunk Broendulf down. The huscarl slapped desperately at the champion, gasping out hurried words. ‘Hjordis! Hjordis!’ he cried.

Wulfrik pulled his captive up by his hair, spinning him around and glowering into Broendulf’s bleeding face. ‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘It was for Hjordis,’ Broendulf sputtered, feeling more weak and ashamed with every word. ‘I wanted to kill you for Hjordis. I had no part in Zarnath’s trickery.’

The champion grinned at the pathetic confession. He raised his sword, pressing the point against Broendulf’s throat, bringing a bead of blood from the Sarl’s pale flesh. ‘She would have nothing to do with a half-man like you,’ Wulfrik scoffed. ‘You die not only as a traitor, but an idiot as well!’

Broendulf glared defiantly at Wulfrik. ‘She would have been mine,’ he hissed. ‘King Viglundr promised her to me.’

Mention of the king’s name made Wulfrik hesitate. His eyes narrowed with renewed suspicion. ‘Viglundr?’

‘Yes, Viglundr,’ Broendulf snarled. ‘He promised Hjordis would be mine if I killed you.’

Wulfrik laughed at the firmness with which Broendulf spoke. ‘You are twice an idiot then. Viglundr wants Hjordis for Sveinbjorn, not some wastrel huscarl.’

‘Sveinbjorn would marry her,’ Broendulf said, ‘but it would be marriage in name only. In everything else, I would be husband to Hjordis.’ The Sarl bristled at the mocking disbelief he saw on Wulfrik’s face. ‘Sveinbjorn needed a man for his wife because he cannot sire heirs for himself.’

Harsh laughter rolled from Wulfrik’s fanged mouth, startling even the glowering elves on the cliff above. ‘Three times an idiot!’ he barked. ‘No heirs? Sveinbjorn of the Aeslings? That cur has so many bastards and half-kin to his credit half of his tribe can call him uncle and the other half knows him as father!’

If Wulfrik had smashed the flat of his sword across the huscarl’s face again, Broendulf could have been no more stunned than he was by what he heard. He felt as though the bottom had dropped out from his stomach and a hand of ice closed across his chest. Viglundr had tricked him! He’d exploited Broendulf’s love for his own underhanded purposes. No doubt Sveinbjorn had killers ready and waiting for him when he returned to Ormskaro to ‘reward’ him for the service he had done the Aesling prince.

‘I’ll see them both dead!’ Broendulf growled through clenched teeth.

‘That seems unlikely,’ Wulfrik said. He released Broendulf from his grasp, pushing him away.

Broendulf glared at the fanged champion. ‘And how likely is it you’ll get revenge on Zarnath? We’ve both been deceived and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ The huscarl shook his fist at the elf warriors watching them from the cliff. ‘Finish it, you spineless she-whelps!’

‘They still have a mind to take us alive,’ Wulfrik told Broendulf. The hero nodded his head towards the north. Faintly, a long, sleek ship with a swan-like prow was gliding across the sea, sailing in their direction. An elf warship, and neither man needed to be told what foes she sailed against.

Hopeless, yet Wulfrik’s face bore a fierce smile as he turned his head from the approaching warship. Savagely, he raked his palm across the bare edge of his sword. ‘Stay and amuse the elf-folk,’ the hero growled at Broendulf, ‘but I mean to cheat them if I can.’

Broendulf watched in confusion as Wulfrik pushed off from the spar, swimming with broad strokes towards a bit of the Seafang’s wreckage. Understanding dawned on him when he noticed the dragon face carved upon the floating debris: the longship’s broken prow, and upon it the enchanted figurehead which was the focus of the Seafang’s magic! Cold horror surged through the huscarl’s body. Frantic, he threw himself into the waves, desperately trying to catch up to Wulfrik before it was too late.

Ahead of the two men, the elf warship drew steadily closer, armoured warriors standing upon the decks, silver nets at the ready, pikes and bludgeons close at hand. Broendulf could almost smell the hate rolling off the elves, a fury colder and more intense than anything merely human. The elf-folk would indulge that hate for a very long time if they took any captives. In the matter of vengeance, they were not so far removed from their corsair kin. Khaine was yet among the gods of Ulthuan.

Wulfrik barked in triumph as he gained the broken figurehead. Victoriously he raised his hand over his head, clenching his fist so that blood bubbled between his fingers. Defiantly he glared at the bewildered elves upon the decks of the warship. Some of them, perhaps sensing the mighty magic Wulfrik would soon evoke, began to nock arrows to their bows. But it was too late to stop what the hero had begun.

The Norscan’s bloody hand smacked against the forehead of the wooden dragon. Greedily the carved reptile drank the hero’s offering. Wulfrik threw back his head and laughed as mist began to swirl about him, blotting out the cliffs of Cothique and the elven warship. The half-world of the border-realm stretched out its phantom fingers, drawing Wulfrik and the broken figurehead beyond the world of mortals.

Broendulf screamed in terror, throwing his failing strength in one last tremendous effort. The huscarl’s body surged through the waves, lunging into the mist and the fading Wulfrik.

Darkness engulfed the wooden dragon, a grey shadow that seemed to devour the entire world with jaws of mist and fangs of nightmare. Gibbering things shrieked and howled, clawing at the boundary between flesh and nothingness – the tatters of Old Night coalescing into daemon spirits, struggling to emerge from their realm of oblivion. The chill of the void and timeless evil seeped through the veil, slithering across mortal flesh like the coils of a deathly serpent. A stench, cloying, redolent with sin and slaughter, saturated the air, drowning the senses at every breath.

Broendulf found each hideous sensation more comforting than the last. It meant he had won his desperate race. He had reached the figurehead before Wulfrik’s blood could send it back into the border-realm. He had escaped the fury of the elf-folk and left the horrors of Alfheim behind. They were going home now, back to Ormskaro.

Back to Hjordis.

‘The gods decided to spare you,’ Wulfrik said, watching Broendulf from where he clutched the broken figurehead. ‘I wonder if the daemons of the void will be so timid.’

Broendulf glared back at the menacing chieftain. ‘The daemons are drawn to violence,’ he told Wulfrik. ‘Attack and they will destroy us both. Then how will you stop Sveinbjorn?’

‘I will kill the Aesling,’ Wulfrik said. ‘But Hjordis will be mine, not yours.’

‘She will be Sveinbjorn’s if we die here,’ Broendulf warned. ‘And Viglundr will be rewarded for all of his treachery.’

Wulfrik gnashed his fangs together, his eyes blazing with such fury that some of the daemons pawing at the fog drew back in fear. ‘There is another traitor who will pay!’ he growled. ‘And not even the wergild of the gods will keep my hand from his throat!’

Broendulf nodded in grim agreement. Zarnath had lured all of them to Alfheim to die. The huscarl was not about to forgive the shaman such trickery. Perhaps his reasons were not as great as the betrayal Wulfrik felt, but he would see the Kurgan dead for his murderous deceit.

‘A truce then?’ Wulfrik suggested. ‘Until Zarnath and the other enemies we share are dead?’

Broendulf scowled. ‘This thing between us can only end in blood,’ he said.

‘Who says different? When the Kurgan is dead, we will meet in the Wolf Forest.’ Wulfrik spat into his hand, pressing it over his heart. ‘May I forsake the love of my woman if I break this oath,’ he told Broendulf.

The huscarl repeated Wulfrik’s solemn gesture. ‘I make the same vow, before the eyes of the gods. When we return to Ormskaro, I will help you seek the shaman and protect Hjordis from her father’s deceptions.’

‘Zarnath first,’ Wulfrik growled. ‘I’ll have no peace until he has paid for toying with me. Whichever nameless hell he has hidden himself in, I will find him! Not all the daemons of the pit will keep me from vengeance!’

The arrogant oath caused a chorus of angry shrieks and yowls to emanate from the darkness beyond the mist. The two warriors watched in alarm as a tide of clawing, snarling blackness tore at the thin barrier separating them from the nothingness between worlds. In shreds and tatters, the mist began to break apart. Immense, long-fingered hands thrust themselves through the veil, stretching towards the mortal flickers who dared to mock the hunger of daemons.

Wulfrik slashed his sword across the knuckle of one hairy hand, boiling ichor spilling from the wound. The daemon yelped in pain, its arm shooting back into the blackness of the void. Other hands quickly took its place, pawing and scratching at the men, slowly ripping the rents in the veil wider.

Before the daemons could fully penetrate the barrier, a great thunder boomed through the blackness, a sound like the raucous screech of a vulture or the cry of a monstrous hawk. The frenzied daemons froze at the tumult of that shivering cry, their claws only inches from the ashen faces of the northmen.

The shriek echoed across the void once more. This time sparks of light blazed through the darkness, brilliant swirls of fire that scintillated like gemstones of every colour and hue. Like angry stars, the lights swarmed about the shattered veil, driving off the hungry daemons, sending them skulking back into the shadows of the void. A third time the deafening screech roared through the border-realm. In response, the chromatic spheres of light began to lose their lustre, fading until they merged with the darkness.

‘The feathers of the Raven God,’ Broendulf gasped in awe as he watched the last of the lights burn away. ‘The gods themselves guard our way back to Ormskaro.’

‘If the Raven God wants to help, let him guide me to Zarnath,’ Wulfrik snarled, unmoved by the miracle he had witnessed. ‘Otherwise let him stay out of my way!’

From the darkness, it seemed the raucous shriek sounded one last time, faint and distant.

Broendulf could not shake the impression there was now a note of mocking amusement in the screeching cry.

The mists parted, the darkness faded, replaced by a dim star-swept sky. It was not the sky Broendulf had expected to see, the stars positioned at angles never seen from the streets of Ormskaro and the fjords of Norsca. The constellations rose in places which could be seen only from seas far to the south and lands far from Norsca’s icy shores.

Panic seized the huscarl and his hand fell to his belt, reaching for the sword he had let sink into the cold waters of Alfheim. He calmed slightly when he became aware that his surroundings were no longer those of Ulthuan’s haunted seas. The water flowing about him lacked the briny tang of the ocean, and the breeze sighing through the air did not smell of the sea. Wherever the Seafang’s broken figurehead had brought them, it was far inland. Gazing about him, Broendulf could make out the lights of a settlement burning above the black bulk of the shore. He could see the tops of towers and temples outlined against the sky.

‘Where are we?’ the fair-faced Sarl growled at Wulfrik. ‘This isn’t Ormskaro!’

The hero was silent for a moment, just as confused as his companion. When he had placed his bleeding hand upon the figurehead, the fjord of Ormskaro was the only destination in his mind. By all rights, it should be the jagged peaks of Norsca’s mountains and the bonfires of Sarl fishermen greeting them. Instead, his keen eyes saw the stone walls of a strange city rising from the shore, his nose filled with the reek of cabbage and manure which he always associated with the communities of the southlings. They weren’t in Norsca. The power of the Seafang had brought them to the Empire instead!

Wulfrik thought about that for a time, wondering why the magic had only brought them halfway home. Then a boisterous peal of laughter rumbled from his throat as he realised the answer. Broendulf stared at his captain, wondering if the cursed hero’s mind had finally snapped.

‘Who goes there?’ a hard voice called from the darkness, the words spoken in the guttural Reikspiel of the Empire. The two northmen could hear a small boat sliding through the water near them.

Broendulf’s eyes could not pierce the night so well that the boat and its occupants were anything more than a dark shape looming over the water. With their wolf-keen sharpness, Wulfrik could see the boat quite well. It was too big for a fisherman’s keel, too wide for a ship’s longboat and too small for a trading vessel. The smell of steel and oil which rose from the occupants told him they were well equipped for such a small boat, and equipped for trouble bigger than a struggling marlin. He could hear the rattle of mail armour as the boat rowed towards them.

‘Play dead, or you will be,’ Wulfrik whispered to Broendulf. He matched deeds to words, resting his head across his arm and letting his body sag in the water. Broendulf followed his example.

‘Over here!’ one of the men in the boat shouted. His vision wasn’t quite as sharp as that of Wulfrik but years of prowling the rivers of the Empire by night had made them more sensitive than those of common men. He saw the floating hulk of the figurehead and the two bodies draped across it.

The other men in the boat weren’t so blessed with night vision as their comrade, however. A lantern soon blazed into life, casting its light over the river, surrounding the little boat in a halo of illumination. The riverwardens preferred to hunt their prey – smugglers and pirates – in the dark, using their ears to detect their quarry. Only when certain of a catch did they light their lamps.

‘Manann’s beard!’ one of the riverwardens exclaimed when he saw the two bodies. Almost unconsciously he pulled the lantern back, recoiling from the grisly sight. His sergeant, a man hardened by both more years and experience, took hold of the arm gripping the lantern and pulled it straight once more.

‘Hrmph,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘Looks like these ones had a falling out with their mates. No honour among thieves, even when they sail the Reik.’ He nodded as he considered the two bodies. ‘Fish them in, Hans,’ he told one of the riverwardens. ‘Even dead, someone might recognise them and give us an idea who their mates were.’

The boat pulled alongside the carved dragon and the two bodies draped over it. The riverwardens muttered among themselves when they saw the strange carving, but a few sharp words from their sergeant had them moving. The river pirates had many strange rituals peculiar to themselves. Tossing a few unwanted comrades into the Reik tied to a wooden dragon was a new one to him, but not one that he found terribly surprising.

‘Look at him!’ exclaimed one of the riverwardens as his boathook gripped Broendulf’s shirt and he started to raise the Sarl from the water. ‘He’s big as an ogre! Someone help me get him into the boat!’

‘Not seen his like before,’ one of the men helping pull Broendulf into the boat said. ‘Think he’s a Middenlander?’

‘Kislevite, more like,’ spat a third riverwarden, straining to lift the huscarl’s leg into the boat. ‘Even in Middenheim they don’t wear rags like this. Smells like they didn’t even finish scraping the meat off the hide when they made this fellow’s trousers!’

While most of the boat’s crew helped lift Broendulf from the water, a lone riverwarden investigated the second body clinging to the figurehead. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw that the other man wore armour, an unusual affectation for a river pirate. He wondered if perhaps the man had been a marine hired to protect some merchantman who had ended up on the wrong side of a pirate sword. The riverwarden reached down to raise the body’s head from the water, curious to see if the face belonged to anyone he might recognise.

As soon as the riverwarden’s hand closed about Wulfrik’s scalplock, the northman sprang into life. His armoured hand closed about the southling’s wrist, jerking him into the river before he had time to scream.

The loud splash of the riverwarden sinking into the Reik startled the other men in the boat. They swung around, their attention diverted for the moment from the hulking body they had just lowered over the gunwale. It was a mistake they would not live long enough to regret. Instantly their backs were to him, the ‘dead’ bulk of Broendulf thrashed into life. Powerful legs kicked out, smashing into the riverwardens with all the bone-crushing fury of a wild mule. The huscarl’s enormous arms shot up, wrapping about the neck of the man with the boathook. A savage twist snapped the southling’s neck. Broendulf let the twitching carcass topple into the river.

In the meantime, Wulfrik was lunging up from the river, seizing the side of the boat in one powerful fist. One of the riverwardens, the man who held the lantern, jabbed at the northman’s hand with a short sword. Wulfrik shifted his grasp, sliding his hand along the edge of the gunwale a second before the short sword crunched into the damp imprint of his previous handhold. The young riverwarden was screaming in terror, staring with gaping eyes at the fanged northman glaring back at him. To the youth, Wulfrik looked like nothing less than some malevolent daemon of the Reik come to steal his soul.

Wulfrik settled for the southling’s life, stabbing him in the neck as he frantically tried to free his short sword from the boat’s side. The hero tossed his own sword into the bottom of the boat and planted both hands upon the gunwale. It took a superhuman effort for the northman to lift his armoured body from the river, the wood beneath his hands starting to splinter as his massive weight pressed upon them. Only a man whose flesh had been warped by the Dark Gods and whose spirit burned with bloodlust could have managed such a feat. Wulfrik the Worldwalker was such a man.

The hero dropped into the bottom of the boat, the planks creaking beneath his boots. He caught up his sword just as the sergeant of the riverwardens came rushing towards him, thrusting at him with a barbed pike. Accustomed to fending off smugglers and pirates whose only drive was escape, the riverwarden underestimated the nature of his foe. As the pike grated across Wulfrik’s breastplate, the northman struck back at the sergeant, his sword flashing so near the man’s face he could feel air sweep against his nose.

The sergeant recoiled in horror, eyes going wide as he noticed the skull dangling from the hilt of Wulfrik’s sword, the other skulls fastened to his belt and armour. Realisation that he fought something more than a river pirate struck the soldier as solidly as one of Broendulf’s kicks. His flesh turned clammy and his stomach went sour as the idea formed in the riverwarden’s mind that his foe was something far darker. This stretch of the River Reik was far from the great seas, but not so far that stories of Norscan raiders and their savage brutality had not reached the ears of even the lowest peasant.

Calling upon Sigmar, patron god of all men of the Empire, the sergeant thrust his pike at Wulfrik. The barbed point stabbed into the northman’s leg, almost in the exact spot where the elf arrow had struck him. Wulfrik howled in pain, his sword smashing down, crunching through the wooden shaft of the pike. The sergeant staggered back, trying to recover his balance.

Maddened with pain, Wulfrik pounced on the retreating riverwarden. He crushed the sergeant beneath his armoured bulk, smashing him across the bottom of the boat. The soldier screamed and flailed under the furious northman, battering at him with the broken length of the pike. Wulfrik ripped the crude club from the sergeant’s hand as though he were a child, then broke the man’s wrist when he grabbed for the knife in his belt.

Snarling the name of Khorne, lord of blood and slaughter, Wulfrik pressed the edge of his sword against the riverwarden’s face, slowly sawing through the screaming man’s flesh. It was some time before the screaming stopped.

Wulfrik rose from the dead riverwarden, brushing blood and teeth from his armour. He cast his gaze across the patrol boat. Only one other man still stood amidst the gory charnel house. One of Broendulf’s hands clutched a wound in his side. The other clenched a southling sword in its fist.

‘Put that away before I forget our agreement,’ Wulfrik warned the injured huscarl. He smiled at Broendulf. ‘You didn’t stab me in the back when I was killing the master of this scow. I don’t think you’ll do so now.’

Broendulf nodded, lowering the captured sword. ‘These are southlings,’ he said. ‘Why did the magic bring us into southling waters instead of Ormskaro?’

Wulfrik thrust his own sword back into its sheath. Coldly he reached down and grabbed the bloodied tunic of the sergeant, lifting the mutilated man from the belly of the boat. ‘We are here because I wanted to be here,’ he told Broendulf. Callously, he tossed the body of the sergeant into the river.

‘What?’ Broendulf demanded, anger rising in his voice. ‘Why not Ormskaro? Why here? Where is this place?’

‘I don’t know,’ Wulfrik shrugged, reaching down to grab the body of another riverwarden. ‘That is, I don’t know the name of this place.’

‘Then where are we?’ Broendulf persisted.

Fangs gleamed from Wulfrik’s savage smile. ‘This is where Zarnath has fled to,’ he answered, his voice never more like the hungry growl of a wolf.

Broendulf shook his head in disbelief. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he protested. ‘How can the magic bring us somewhere without a name?’

Wulfrik tossed the body of the riverwarden into the Reik. ‘I didn’t want to find a place. I wanted to find a man.’ He pressed a finger to his head. ‘In here I wanted to find Zarnath more than return to Ormskaro like a whipped dog. The Seafang took me where I wanted to be most. To the place where Zarnath has hidden himself. I can smell his stink in the wind,’ the hero added, closing his eyes.

‘This is madness!’ Broendulf said. ‘Why would a Kurgan hide among southlings?’

‘Because he isn’t a Kurgan!’ Wulfrik snapped, his eyes burning with hate. ‘Everything he told us was just another of his lies! An illusion to cover his tracks! A trick to save himself.’

‘Who is he then?’ Broendulf asked.

Wulfrik clenched his fist, glowering at the distant lights of the settlement stretching across the bank of the river. ‘A southling wizard who thinks he can cheat the gods by playing with my dreams,’ he hissed. ‘Now he will share my nightmares!’ He turned his gaze on Broendulf. ‘Help me lift the dragon into this scow,’ he ordered the huscarl.

Broendulf limped to Wulfrik’s side, straining with the hero to raise the wooden figurehead from the river. Gasping, panting for breath, he sank down on one of the boat’s benches when the labour was finished. ‘Now what will you do?’ the Sarl wondered, gesturing at the Seafang’s figurehead.

Seemingly oblivious to injury or fatigue, Wulfrik prowled across the little boat, hoisting the bodies of the other riverwardens over the side, wiping the blood from the vessel with strips torn from its sail. ‘I will return to Ormskaro,’ he said. ‘I will make that scoundrel Viglundr raise up such a fleet as Norsca has never seen. Then I will come back here and burn this city to cinders and offer every living thing within its walls to the gods!’

Broendulf could hear the fanatical determination in the hero’s voice. Despite everything, he found himself believing Wulfrik could do just what he promised. He would force the treacherous king of the Sarls to raise the men and ships he needed. He would sail across the Sea of Claws and batter his way through the fortresses of Marienburg. He would sweep past the fleets of the Empire and bring his army here, to this place, this refuge where Zarnath had fled.

The huscarl stirred from his thoughts as he noticed Wulfrik turn towards him. The hero had finished his morbid cleansing of the patrol boat, removing the bodies and most of the blood, eliminating the fodder that would draw daemons from the border-realm even more swiftly than the presence of living men. Blood dripped from Wulfrik’s palm where he had reopened the cut across his hand.

‘Out,’ the hero snarled at Broendulf. The huscarl started to reach for the stolen southling sword in his belt, but Wulfrik’s bloody hand closed about his wrist, pinning it in place. ‘You’re staying here.’ Wulfrik exerted pressure, forcing Broendulf to stop struggling and listen to him. ‘You’ve seen Zarnath. You know what he looks like. Whatever disguise he wore as a Kurgan, he won’t be able to hide those eyes of his. Find him! Watch him! Don’t let him run! The gods shrivel your bones if you do!’

Wulfrik gripped Broendulf’s shoulder, lifting him and pitching him into the river with a single fluid motion. The huscarl struggled up from the cold embrace of the Reik, his head breaking the surface just in time to see Wulfrik press his bloody hand against the wooden dragon and watch as spectral mists gathered to engulf the little boat.

Broendulf waited until the mists had cleared and Wulfrik was gone. Turning from the vanished boat, the huscarl began swimming towards shore. He would do as Wulfrik had ordered. He would find the shaman and see that he did not escape. But when the hero returned, there would be a reckoning between them.

By all his ancestors and the gods, Broendulf would settle with Wulfrik.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Death came to the huscarl without warning or preamble. One moment he stood upon the weathered battlements of Ormfell, staring out across the sprawl of Ormskaro, watching the light of the moons shimmering across the cold waters of the fjord. In the next breath, he was lying upon his back, gasping out his life while blood gushed from a gash that split him from belly to groin. Fiercely, the dying warrior tried to pull the axe from his belt, his last impulse even in death a savage urge to strike back at his killer.

Wulfrik waited until the huscarl was still, then returned his gory knife to its sheath and climbed over the worn battlement to drop onto the roof of Ormfell. It had taken the wounded hero two hours to make the climb up the side of the tower, a climb even the boldest Norscans would have baulked at. The ancient walls of the tower were almost sheer, the stone crumbling and treacherous. Not for a chest of gold would even a brave man consider such a reckless climb. Wulfrik, however, was after something more precious to him than gold. And he would not be denied.

None had seen the little boat emerge from the fog, nor watched as Wulfrik rowed the tiny craft onto the beach of Ormskaro. A fisherman had seen him as he hid the Seafang’s figurehead beneath a pile of worn wool sails, but Wulfrik had ensured the old man would never tell anyone what he had seen. A drunken warrior fumbling about in the pathway behind a mead hall had been the only other man to stumble onto Wulfrik. Like the old man, the warrior would not spread word that the hero had returned.

The hero took the axe from the dead huscarl’s fingers, lifted the iron helm from the Sarl’s head and made his way across the roof. He paused at the trapdoor, his nose flaring as he drank in the smells rising from the tower below. Fangs gleamed in the moonlight as the marauder smiled. Sinking the toe of his boot under the trap, he kicked the door open with a savage thrust. Before the opened door could smash down upon the roof, Wulfrik was already leaping down the hole.

One hand hooked about the side of the wooden ladder, the wild chieftain hurtled the fifteen feet between the roof and the corridor below. He landed with a bone-jarring crash at the bottom of the ladder, his injured leg threatening to buckle beneath him. Wulfrik gasped in pain as he landed, putting a note of fear into his voice.

There were two men in the corridor. They spun about, axes at the ready when they heard Wulfrik make his violent descent. By the gloom of torchlight, however, all they took notice of were the familiar axe in the hero’s hands and the iron helmet which enclosed his head. Like the rest of Ormskaro, they thought it impossible to climb the walls of Ormfell. Suspecting nothing, the two warriors laughed and approached the northman huddled at the base of the ladder.

‘Seeing ghosts, Orfi?’ joked one of the Sarl warriors. ‘I told you you couldn’t hold your mead!’

The banter fell silent when the warrior came close enough to see the eyes burning from the iron mask of the helm and the full red beard beneath. He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but his voice collapsed in a liquid gurgle as Wulfrik brought the stolen axe hewing into the man’s side. Mail links snapped and ribs splintered beneath the hero’s mighty blow. The Sarl crashed to the floor, thrashing as blood filled his lungs.

Wulfrik snarled and turned away from his first victim. The other guard was overcome by fear, perhaps aware of who it was he faced. The Sarl turned, running down the hall. Before he could shout an alarm, Wulfrik threw the heavy battleaxe at the fleeing man. The weapon smashed into the warrior’s back, crunching through armour and flesh. The man stumbled, groping futilely at the axe, trying to pull it free. He took a few staggering steps, then sagged weakly against the wall.

Wulfrik stalked past the two men he had killed. A new scent was in his nose now, a smell imprinted upon the deepest recesses of his heart. Long, lonely nights he had spent with only that scent to offer him solace. There was a lock of golden hair even now in a bag around his neck that bore that scent. For a moment, violence and vengeance were forgotten. Dead hope flamed into terrible life within his heart. The most desperate dreams are those which die hardest.

Another smell struck Wulfrik’s senses and his lips curled back in a feral growl. The hero knew that smell too. Sveinbjorn. The Aesling prince was still in the tower.

The hero quickened his pace, sprinting down the silent halls of Ormfell like a wolf on the prowl. He hesitated when he heard voices coming from behind closed doors, and lingered to listen to some of the muffled conversations. What he heard sent slivers of fire racing through his veins. Wulfrik’s death had again become accepted fact in Ormskaro, announced by the sole survivor of the hero’s last expedition: the Kurgan shaman Zarnath. He had related the death of Wulfrik and his crew before announcing his own departure from Norsca. The shaman had taken pains to make it clear he was returning to his own people far to the north in the Wastes.

A last ploy in case Wulfrik should make it back from Alfheim. The hero clenched his fists in silent fury. Zarnath hoped he would go racing off looking for him among the Kurgans. Without the Seafang, it would be a quest that would consume a man’s lifetime. But the supposed shaman had made a mistake when he reckoned upon the destruction of Wulfrik’s ship and its magic. He also hadn’t considered that Wulfrik’s hate would lead him to the traitor’s true homeland, the Empire.

Vengeance! It was a truer dream to cling to than the hope Zarnath had betrayed. When Wulfrik caught the filthy sorcerer, he would cut out the liar’s heart and make a present of it to Hjordis. As much as himself, Zarnath’s crooked promises had betrayed her. She deserved to taste the bitter fruit of revenge. It was all they had left now.

Wulfrik suddenly froze in his steps. Quickly he pressed himself against the stone wall, peering around the corner to watch the hallway. Almost he had walked straight into a guard, so distracted was he by his thoughts of revenge. Now he studied the man lurking in the corridor, and with each observation, the hero felt his anger swell. The guard was no Sarl huscarl, but an Aesling hersir. His axe was leaning against the wall beside him. The guard was turned away from Wulfrik, with his ear pressed against the panel of a door.

For a moment, Wulfrik watched the spying hersir. So content was the guard upon his snooping that he didn’t hear the marauder step away from the wall and creep down the corridor towards him. The first the spy was aware of Wulfrik was when the hero’s powerful arms coiled about his neck and crushed his windpipe. Wulfrik waited until the choking hersir was dead before tossing the guard aside like a sack of meal.

Curiosity made Wulfrik press his ear to the door. He listened and a cold light grew in his eyes. The sounds coming from beyond the door were not unfamiliar to him. At least one of the voices wasn’t.

If a blood-crazed troll had struck the door it might not have been propelled with such violence. The heavy oak panel crashed inwards, torn from its hinges, the twisted debris of its lock clattering across the floor. Gasps of shock and alarm rose from the huge bed sitting in the middle of the room. A brawny figure leapt from the nest of blankets and furs, lunging for a sword lying upon a chest against the wall.

He never reached the weapon. Before he had taken more than a few steps, Wulfrik was upon him. The hero’s fist smashed into the naked man’s face, knocking teeth from his jaw. The man shrieked in outrage, lashing out with his own fist. Wulfrik caught Sveinbjorn’s hand in his own. Exerting all of his ferocious strength, the hero broke Sveinbjorn’s fingers, driving the wailing prince to his knees.

‘Wulfrik!’ a shrill voice cried. The hero looked away from the whimpering prince, his eyes locking on the comely shape that rose from the bed. For a moment, he almost forgot Sveinbjorn and Zarnath, almost forgot the cruel curse laid upon him by the gods. He drank in the bare, curvaceous body descending to the floor like an Arabyan lost in the desert setting upon the cool embrace of an oasis. The scent he knew so well, the golden hair he kept about his neck, the smooth ivory skin…

Savagely, Wulfrik brought his knee smashing into Sveinbjorn’s face. The prince’s nose cracked under the impact and he flopped to the floor. Wulfrik kicked him in the ribs, glaring at the faint red marks left by his hands upon Hjordis’s pale flesh.

Hjordis stood a little away from the furious hero, shock and wonder written across her face. She fumbled at the bed behind her, dragging a bearskin away to wrap about her nude frame. ‘Wulfrik?’ she said again, a note of doubt in her voice.

‘Wulfrik,’ the hero told her. ‘Not a ghost,’ he added, delivering another savage kick to Sveinbjorn’s ribs.

The stunned princess rushed to him, oblivious as she dropped the bearskin and trampled it beneath her feet. ‘The Kurgan said you were dead!’ she cried, tears streaming down her face. She caught at Wulfrik, trying to press herself against him. ‘Oh, he said you were dead!’

Wulfrik’s face twisted with revulsion. Sternly he gripped the woman’s arm, pulling her from him. ‘You stink of Aesling,’ he growled, kicking Sveinbjorn once more.

Hjordis retreated from the glowering hero, her face going almost white with horror. ‘They said you were dead…’

‘You didn’t take long to replace me,’ Wulfrik snarled. ‘And with scum like this,’ he snapped, burying his boot in Sveinbjorn’s gut. The prince rolled over onto his back, gagging as vomit spilled from his bloody mouth.

Hjordis’s lips trembled as she stared at Wulfrik. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘My father… when he heard you were dead…’

‘All this time,’ Wulfrik said, his voice quaking with emotion, ‘through all the battles and suffering, one thing kept me going. That was knowing you were waiting for me here! Knowing that however far I fell, however many friends I led to their deaths, I could count upon your love!’ He pounded his fist against his chest. ‘That long, I had something! That long I was still a man, whatever hell the gods cursed me to!’

‘Do you really think I love that!’ Hjordis sobbed, pointing a finger at Sveinbjorn. ‘It was you, is you! Only you! When I thought you were dead, I went out of my mind with grief. I wept for you from dawn until the dying of the night.’

Wulfrik’s face curled back in a sneer. ‘Yes, I’m sure. Just lying in here with Sveinbjorn weeping and rutting and weeping, sniffing about his legs like a bitch in heat!’

‘No!’ shrieked the princess, colour rising into her cheeks. ‘It wasn’t like that! When they thought you were gone, when the Kurgan swore you were dead, my father demanded I marry Sveinbjorn! I wanted no part of him! I wanted only you!’

‘Seems you’ve had more than a part of him,’ Wulfrik snarled.

‘My father forced me into it!’ Hjordis cried. She turned her back to Wulfrik, displaying the scarred flesh across her shoulders and sides, the marks of a whip.

In an instant, Wulfrik felt a surge of compassion rise within him. Almost he went to take her in his arms. The smell of Sveinbjorn’s scent on her held him back. The memory of Sigvatr lying dead in the Dark Lands flashed through his mind. ‘Men have died in shame for a lie,’ Wulfrik told her. ‘You don’t know the meaning of suffering.’

Wulfrik swung around, the sword flashing from its sheath. He pounced on Sveinbjorn as the prince made a scramble for the door, crushing the Aesling to the floor. Wulfrik buried his knee in the man’s back, wrapped his fingers in the prince’s hair and savagely pulled his head back. The steel of Wulfrik’s sword rested against Sveinbjorn’s neck. The skull of King Torgald seemed to grin at its son’s predicament.

‘Don’t kill him!’

The shout came from King Viglundr. The old Sarl led a score of warriors, an equal mix of huscarls and hersirs, across the shattered threshold. Wulfrik simply smiled back at the king and his entourage, baring his fangs in a vicious snarl.

‘I was going to pay a call on you,’ Wulfrik said. He pulled back on Sveinbjorn’s hair, forcing a cry from the prince. ‘Once I was finished here.’

Viglundr’s face was white with terror. ‘Don’t kill him, Wulfrik!’ the king pleaded. ‘It will mean war with the Aeslings! You can name your price! Your weight in gold! The best warriors in my house! I’ll even give you Hjordis!’

Wulfrik cast a sideways glance at the princess, his eyes like chips of ice as he gazed on her. ‘Damaged goods,’ the marauder said. ‘I didn’t come here to bargain like a beggar.’ Angrily, Wulfrik released Sveinbjorn, kicking the prince away from him. While Sveinbjorn scrambled across the floor to the safety of Viglundr’s bodyguard, Wulfrik dipped his hand into his belt, removing a small leather pouch.

‘I came here to make a proposition,’ he told Viglundr. Haughtily, Wulfrik dashed the pouch to the floor, spilling its contents across the room. The men around the king gasped in amazement as they saw a fortune in sparkling gemstones dancing before their eyes. Wulfrik had taken it from Tjorvi after killing the murderous Graeling. The gems had been plucked from the dresses of the massacred elf-wives, but there was no way for the men scrambling to gather them up to know that.

‘Treasure from the southlings,’ Wulfrik boasted. ‘Rubies, sapphires and diamonds! A fortune for any man willing to reach out his hand and take it!’

Viglundr stared in awe as one of his huscarls poured gems into the king’s outstretched hand. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The southlings have no such wealth,’ Viglundr said. ‘Many times have I raided their towns and cities. Never have I seen stones such as these!’

‘You call me liar, Viglundr?’ Wulfrik growled, menace in his voice. ‘Of course you never saw wealth such as this! Where have you raided? Along the coast, sacking places plundered dry by generations of Norscans. The real treasure lies far from the sea, deep in the heart of the Empire!’

‘And the great Wulfrik has sailed to such places,’ scoffed Sveinbjorn. ‘He has fought his way past the fortresses of Marienburg and the fleets of the southlings with only a single longship!’

‘No, Aesling,’ Wulfrik said. ‘There is no need to squander the strength of my warriors so far from the treasure. Not with a ship such as the Seafang, which can sail upon the seas of the gods and come out again where I will.’

The statement brought excited murmurs from the assembled warriors. They had all heard of the Seafang’s magic from the longship’s crew, though the ship’s captain had been careful to keep the exact manner of the magic a secret. They knew Wulfrik spoke true about sailing seas beyond the mortal world.

‘What do you propose?’ Viglundr asked.

‘I need a bigger ship to haul away the plunder I intend to capture,’ Wulfrik said. ‘You will build me a new hull, a new Seafang. It will be the greatest ship in all Norsca, forty benches and no less.’

‘You would need to cut down the Trolltree to find timber to lay down such a keel,’ Viglundr grumbled.

‘Then set men to hunting the Trolltree,’ Wulfrik ordered. ‘Surely there are some among the Sarls with spine enough for such a quest. If not, lend me the men and I will hunt down the beast.’

‘It would take fifty warriors to kill the Trolltree,’ sneered Sveinbjorn. ‘And you’d have to set fire to it, making its timber worthless for building a ship.’

Viglundr rubbed his fingers across the gems in his hand. ‘I’ll send a hundred warriors then, and they’ll not set fire to the monster or I’ll feed their children to the eels.’

The king’s eyes narrowed, fairly glowing with avarice. ‘It will take more than a handful of gems to pay for the risk I put my warriors in. You must agree to the wergild for those the Trolltree slays.’

‘Any ship and any man who wishes may sail with the Seafang,’ Wulfrik told the king. ‘I will lead them to the richest southling settlements and they may plunder them until their holds are filled with such wealth as to make even the gods envious!’

Sveinbjorn could see from Viglundr’s expression that Wulfrik’s words had won the king over. Seething with hate, the prince tore a sword from the clutch of a hersir and rounded on the hero. ‘This is a trick!’ the Aesling shouted. ‘He is playing us for fools! What does a man cursed by the gods care for gold?’

Viglundr stared from the gems in his hand back to Wulfrik. ‘Sveinbjorn raises a point,’ the king said. ‘What does a man cursed by the gods need wealth for?’

Wulfrik’s voice became a low hiss, dripping with a hate far deeper than Sveinbjorn’s. ‘I was betrayed by Zarnath. The Kurgan left me to die in Alfheim after using lies and trickery to lead me there. He has returned to his people. I will need warriors and ships to find him. To get them, I need gold.’

Viglundr nodded. There was no fakery in the hate he heard in Wulfrik’s voice or the murder burning in his eyes. However much reason he had to feel betrayed by Viglundr and Sveinbjorn, he wanted Zarnath’s blood even more. ‘I will help you,’ the king decided. ‘I will send my warriors to fell the Trolltree. I will set my shipwrights to building this new Seafang. I will send out word and gather the best ships and crews among the Sarls and the Aeslings.’ The king smiled and gestured at Wulfrik’s many wounds. ‘I will send the best vitki in Ormskaro to tend your injuries.’ A crafty look came across Viglundr’s face. ‘In return, I want the dragon’s share of the treasure and your oath that you will renounce your claim upon Hjordis and never again darken Ormskaro with your presence.’

‘By the Axe of Kharnath and the wings of Tchar,’ Wulfrik said, spitting on the floor to cement his oath. He heard the woman standing behind him gasp in disbelief as he spoke the words. ‘Remember, Viglundr, I am the only one who can command the Seafang’s magic. I wouldn’t suggest any treachery. At least not until the treasure is safely back in Ormskaro.’

‘Of course not,’ Viglundr agreed. ‘You will be as safe as my own daughter until your return.’ The king motioned for his warriors to withdraw from the room. Sveinbjorn advanced towards Hjordis but halted when he found Wulfrik standing in his way.

‘Where are you going, Aesling?’

Sveinbjorn’s face went crimson with fury. ‘I go to fetch my wife!’ he roared. Before the prince could raise his sword, Wulfrik’s blade smashed across his fingers, striking with the flat of the weapon. Sveinbjorn barked out in pain, the sword clattering to the floor.

‘Now you have a matching pair,’ Wulfrik told the prince, gesturing at the broken fingers of his other hand. ‘I’ll send the vitki to visit you after he looks after my hurts.’

‘My wife, damn you!’ Sveinbjorn snarled.

Wulfrik glanced back at Hjordis. He could see the anxious appeal in her eyes. ‘Find some she-goat to warm your sleep,’ Wulfrik told the prince. ‘I keep Hjordis with me. Viglundr said I would be as safe as his own daughter. If she is with me, then whatever misfortune might overtake me will happen to her first.’

Sveinbjorn did not mistake the threat in Wulfrik’s voice. Scowling, but subdued, the Aesling prince stalked from the room. The hero watched him go, laughing at the man’s back.

‘I’ve watched ratkin retreat with more dignity,’ he laughed. Wulfrik turned as he heard Hjordis come up behind him. He felt a sting of pain as he saw the anguish on the woman’s face, the fright in her eyes.

‘He will try to kill you, whatever my father says,’ Hjordis warned. She could feel Wulfrik wince as she laid her hands on his shoulders. ‘Don’t trust them. Either of them.’

‘I am not such a fool,’ Wulfrik said. He shrugged from beneath Hjordis’s hands.

‘Is my touch so unpleasant?’ the princess asked, her voice quivering with despair.

Wulfrik stared at her, part of him wanting to seize her in his arms. The smell of Sveinbjorn on her skin drew him away. ‘There is a time for love,’ the marauder said. ‘In the midst of my enemies, under their own roof, I can’t afford any distraction. No matter how pleasant.’

Tears streamed down Hjordis’s face. ‘You don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘You don’t want me. You think I’m some kind of unclean thing.’

Frowning, Wulfrik turned to the bed, piling some of the furs on the floor. ‘You need your sleep,’ he advised. ‘I’ll stay on the floor and wait for the vitki. Or Sveinbjorn’s killers, if they come first,’ he added, patting the bare steel of his sword.

‘Tell me you still love me,’ Hjordis demanded, her jaw set, her eyes imploring. ‘Tell me there is still hope for us.’

Wulfrik took her hands in his and stared hard into her eyes. ‘I will tell you this. Those who have betrayed us will pay for it.’ He bared his fangs, his eyes looking not upon Hjordis or the room around them, but focussed instead upon a distant town deep within the Empire. ‘All of them will pay,’ Wulfrik snarled.

From a high cliff, Wulfrik and Viglundr watched as the Sarl woodsmen made ready their trap. It had taken many weeks for hunters to find the tracks of the Trolltree and a week more to find an ideal place to confront the monster. Once, the sagas said, there were many creatures like the Trolltree lurking in the deep forests of Norsca. They made war against the first men, slaughtering them without mercy when they sought timber to build their homes and their ships. In despair, the men cried out to the gods and mighty Tchar brought to them the gift of fire with which to make war against the treeblood. With fire and axe the Norscans scoured the treeblood from the land and claimed the forests for their own. The few treeblood who survived had retreated into the oldest, most impenetrable of the forests, there to brood upon the victory of man and allow the memory to turn them mad with the thirst of revenge.

Some of the greatest heroes of the sagas had earned their names felling these monstrous survivors, using their wooden bones to build their mead halls. Over time, tales of the treeblood dwindled. Now, it was said, the Trolltree was the last. Last because it was the mightiest and most monstrous of its kind. Many bold warriors had dared enter the Trolltree’s forest only to be discovered months later, their innards strewn through the branches. Any man who trespassed into the Trolltree’s domain courted death; any man who took timber from the haunted wood threatened to bring doom to his entire village, for the Trolltree would stir from its forest to avenge a fallen tree.

Wulfrik grinned as he watched the Sarls at work. There was a deeper purpose moving them than simple obedience to their king. They had lived their lives in fear of the Trolltree, and some of them had seen their villages devastated by the monster. There was a feeling of retribution that burned in each woodsman’s breast as he laboured, a thirst for vengeance that Wulfrik could empathise with. It was only right that the seeds of his own revenge should grow from that of other men.

The plan was Wulfrik’s, adapted from the tactics used by the Hung nomads when they hunted mammoths. The game Wulfrik intended to bring down was bigger than any mammoth, but so too was the scale of the trap. No, the hero was confident they would be able to bring down their quarry. The question was, could they make it stay down?

Sveinbjorn claimed it was a fool’s errand, doomed to fail. He’d kept his Aeslings with him in Ormskaro. It was a mistake on the prince’s part. Whether motivated from genuine fear or resentment of Wulfrik, Sveinbjorn had upset the Sarls by taking no hand in the hunt. They would remember the arrogant disdain with which Sveinbjorn had dismissed their vendetta. When the Trolltree fell, they would remember it was Wulfrik, not Sveinbjorn who brought them their triumph.

The Sarls would never accept Sveinbjorn as their king now. Wulfrik knew that, even if the Aesling prince was too proud and bitter to see it for himself. Since Wulfrik’s return, Hjordis had been quite vocal in decrying Sveinbjorn as a weakling who had won her unfairly. The very legitimacy of the prince’s claim on her had come into question, and opinion already favoured the hero Wulfrik over the usurper Sveinbjorn.

Viglundr was the real enigma. Wulfrik was certain the cunning old king knew what was going on, yet he made no move to stop it. Thoughts of rich treasures had clouded the king’s judgement. Or perhaps he felt secure enough in his own position to undo whatever damage Hjordis and Wulfrik caused Sveinbjorn. After all, Sveinbjorn had stayed behind while the Sarls hunted the Trolltree. Viglundr had not.

A cold smile worked onto Wulfrik’s face as he glanced at Viglundr. The old king would bide his time. He would wait until the riches Wulfrik had promised him were safely in Ormskaro before he made his move. When that time came, Viglundr would learn he was too late. And then Wulfrik would take from the treacherous old king everything he possessed.

The cry of a shrike echoed from the clearing below. Wulfrik waved down to the hunter who had made the cry. The trap was complete. Now it was time to set the bait. The hero raised both fists over his head. In answer to the gesture, dozens of Sarls drew axes and rushed a stand of saplings growing along the southern edge of the clearing. Ruthlessly, they hacked away at the trees, sending slivers of wood dancing in every direction. Other northmen gathered the chunks of wood, dropping them into cauldrons of boiling water. Soon the pungent aroma of sap was thick about the clearing.

For hours the woodsmen attacked the saplings, laying into the trees with as much violence and noise as they could. The smell of sap continued to thicken, hugging the ground as a faint breeze sent it crawling into the forest. From the cliff, Wulfrik and Viglundr listened to the northmen work, their eyes never leaving the deep woods.

Wulfrik saw the first sign that their trap had worked. A faint movement of the distant treetops was the first warning. Only the hero’s animal-keen eyes saw the motion, but soon other scouts became aware that something gigantic was making its way through the forest. The sound of ponderous footfalls and snapping branches increased, becoming audible to the woodsmen in the clearing. Fear was in their faces as they scrambled for cover, but not a man among them cried out. Afraid though they were, none of them wanted to be remembered as the man who warned the Trolltree.

Branches continued to snap and creak until it seemed the entire forest was in motion. There was no mistaking the wild, frantic motion of the trees now, as though a mighty gale swept through them. The ground rumbled from the impact of tremendous feet, booming like a titan’s drum.

It was no imagination but an eerie reality that the trees at the edge of the clearing parted, leaning away to allow the monster to emerge from the forest. The beast crawled forwards on all fours like some great and terrible hound. Its immense body was covered in bark, split and cracked and hoary with age. When it was clear of the trees, the beast lurched upwards, standing upon its hind legs in crude semblance of a man, though a man built of wood rather than flesh. A gash-like mouth, with jagged splinters for teeth and yellow moss for gums, yawned from the middle of the thing’s torso. Great pits which burned with something like marsh-fire served it as eyes. Immense arms studded with thorn-like branches dangled from what passed for its shoulders, each hand ending in a crooked finger of timber and a hooked talon of gnarled wood.

There was no need for Wulfrik to stare down at the Trolltree. The wooden monster stood one hundred and fifty feet, even without anything that might be called a head rising from its broad shoulders. Even the tallest tree in its forest was a dwarf compared to the giant treeblood. Only by crawling through the forest had the ancient monster managed to hide itself.

Now it had no interest in hiding. Wulfrik felt the hair rise on his neck as the Trolltree’s glowing eyes passed across him, as he felt the creature’s primordial hate sear into him. There was wisdom in that gaze, timeless and inhuman, but it was a wisdom that had become rotten with loneliness and hate.

The Trolltree swung away from its silent contemplation of Wulfrik, glaring down at the fallen saplings and the boiling cauldrons. Though the monster’s gash-like mouth did not move, a great groan sighed up from the treeman, an anguished cry of pain and mourning.

Wulfrik expected the Trolltree to be drawn to the fallen trees. Instead the monster swung back towards him, its fiery eyes narrowed to smouldering embers. Slowly, clumsily, it raised one of its immense arms.

‘Look out!’ Wulfrik roared, pushing Viglundr away. The king scrambled through the rocks as the Trolltree’s clawed hand came crashing down. The talons dug deep into the cliff, shearing several feet from its face as the treeman pulled its arm back.

Coughing from the dust the impact had stirred, his face bleeding from shards of rock thrown up by the Trolltree’s fist, Wulfrik struck at the monster. His sword cracked against the Trolltree’s hand, chewing into the wood, causing bright red sap to bubble into the gash.

‘Now! Now!’ Wulfrik howled.

In the clearing below, northmen erupted from the bushes, hurling axes at the Trolltree. The monster turned towards them as the blades bit home, chips of wood flying from its legs and back. The warriors whooped war cries and jeers at the treeman, fleeing as it took a shuddering step after them. One man, slower than the others, screamed as the Trolltree caught him in its claws. The timber fingers closed in a brutal vice about the struggling warrior, crushing him to pulp before letting the mutilated remains drip back to earth.

‘That’s it!’ Wulfrik grinned as he watched the monster pursue the Sarls. ‘A little more, you dumb damn brute!’

The Trolltree’s steps became faster as it lurched after the fleeing warriors, building momentum like some living avalanche with each yard it travelled. The cries of the men became screams of terror as the treeman closed upon them.

Then the monster’s foot crashed through the thin skin of sticks and leaves covering the pit Wulfrik’s men had spent most of the day digging. The marshfires in the Trolltree’s face widened with surprise as it found itself toppling forwards. A cloud of dust exploded from the pit as the treeman crashed.

Instantly, other warriors were in action, leaping from the bushes, each man carrying a heavy chain. They charged at the fallen monster, thrusting axes and jagged spears into its wooden skin, the heft of each weapon attached to one of the chains. In a short time, the treeman’s body was pitted by dozens of blades, burdened with yards of heavy chain. As the Trolltree struggled to rise from the pit, its powerful exertions pulled on the chains. Massive boulders to which the chains had been anchored were dragged from the bushes. Some of the Sarls wailed in horror at this display of the Trolltree’s awful strength; others cursed and rushed to burden the monster with still more chain.

Eventually, the weight of steel and stone binding it was too great even for the Trolltree’s strength. The monster’s thrashings became little more than a frenzied rocking back and forth in its pit. A few warriors, too near the feet of the beast, were ripped apart when thick roots whipped out from the treeblood, but the northmen quickly learned to stay clear of the beast’s feet. Instead they clambered atop the prone monster’s chest, chopping away at it with axes, cracking its bark with hammer and spike.

Wulfrik marched across the clearing and stared into the Trolltree’s burning eyes. He felt a sense of regret that he could not have faced this beast on more equal terms. It would have been a battle unequalled in the sagas. He could pity this creature, ancient beyond its time, lurking forgotten and abandoned in a world that had passed it by. Better to die with purpose than to linger lost and alone with nothing to love and nothing to love it in return.

The hero watched the Trolltree’s eyes flicker and wink out. The great beast’s body shivered and was still. There was an unaccountable sense of sadness in the air as the treeblood died, the sorrow that marks the passing of something which shall never be seen again. It was some time before the Sarls rallied from their melancholy and the immensity of their accomplishment dawned upon them. Cheers thundered through the wood. Some cheered Viglundr. Most cheered Wulfrik.

‘Be careful with the beast’s carcass!’ Wulfrik ordered when the cheering had faded to a low roar. ‘This timber is mine and I’ll crack the skull of any man who abuses it!’

Wulfrik smiled as men clambered over the Trolltree’s body, this time not to kill but to cut. Like butchers at a hunt, carpenters and shipwrights scrambled over the body, using saws and axes to section the mighty carcass. The Trolltree’s wooden flesh would form the ribs of a new Seafang; its backbone would be the keel of Wulfrik’s ship.

‘You have your monster,’ Viglundr said when he joined Wulfrik beside the dead Trolltree. ‘When do I get my treasure?’

Wulfrik did not look at the king when he answered, seeing instead the image of an Empire town and a man who pretended to be a Kurgan.

‘Soon,’ Wulfrik promised. ‘I am as eager to strike against the southlings as any man in Ormskaro.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ludwig Stossel stared for the thousandth time into the cold ball of crystal, trying to force it to show him what he desired to learn. But the artefact that had served him so faithfully for twenty years persisted in remaining stubbornly silent. It was a silence that the wizard found profoundly disturbing.

He turned away from the mahogany table, casting a black silk cloth over the frustrating crystal sphere. At first he had been willing to accept the sphere’s silence as evidence that he had succeeded, that the threat to his life and soul was gone. Even the wisest prognosticator of the Celestial College could not see into the realm of death itself. Morr guarded his gardens too fiercely for any wizard to pierce that veil, though the wizards of the Amethyst Order had some skill at evoking spirits from the otherworld.

Stossel stared gloomily about his laboratory, gazing at the shelves of arcane tomes and the tables littered with magical paraphernalia. He had wrested many secrets from his studies, secrets unknown even to the masters of his order. He had learned how to send his spirit striding across the land while leaving his body safely behind. He had discovered the art of assuming another countenance so perfectly that he could fool even another wizard. He had learned to disguise his spells so that they drew faintly upon all the winds of magic, and in so doing did not leave the telltale aura of Azyr, the blue wind. He had learned the ritual to summon Grylikh, his powerful familiar.

The astromancer regarded Grylikh on his golden perch. No longer needing the fearsome aspect it had adopted in Norsca, the familiar wore the less frightening shape of a marble-hued shrike. The bird cocked its head and returned Stossel’s scrutiny with an air of expectancy. It would obey whatever orders he gave it. The problem was, Stossel had no idea what to do.

Many years ago he had discovered the death that awaited him. He would die by the hand of a barbarian named Wulfrik, his soul to be fed to Tzeentch, the ghastly Dark God of Sorcery. It was the kind of fate that would chill the blood of Sigmar himself. But an astromancer knew how easily the threads of fate could be altered. There was not one future, but many. And by acting at the right time, a man who had foreseen that future could change it.

Stossel had acted first by sending Grylikh to watch Ormskaro. Through the crystal, he had seen Wulfrik return to the settlement again and again to rest and refit his ship. He had seen the barbarian take counsel with the seer Agnarr. It was here that Stossel caused his familiar to keep watch. The seer had never suspected the gibbering imp he captured and set in a cage was actually a spy and, when the time came, an assassin.

When Grylikh heard Wulfrik describe a dream to the seer which meant Stossel was the barbarian’s next victim, the knowledge was instantly conveyed to its master. It had taken powerful spells to speed the astromancer to Ormskaro, to strike at Wulfrik before it was too late.

It was unthinkable to strike Wulfrik directly. To do so would shift the barbarian’s curse onto himself and place his own life in thrall to the Ruinous Powers. If he would escape the marauder’s sword, he had to be cunning. He had to lead Wulfrik to his death but take no direct hand in it.

Stossel used his magic to become Zarnath the Kurgan, and in this guise he had played upon Wulfrik’s deepest desires. He’d led the barbarian and his crew to the deadliest places the wizard could think of. Somehow, he had survived the Dark Lands and the degenerate dwarfs of that fell place. Leading Wulfrik to Ulthuan, Stossel had hoped to destroy both the man and his devil-ship.

Somehow, both Wulfrik and his ship had survived. Where they were, what they were doing, Stossel did not know. His crystal refused to show him either Wulfrik or the Seafang. Even Ormskaro was blocked from his sight. He had seen other signs, though. He had seen an exodus of Norse warriors and raiders journeying into the lands of the Sarls. He had seen the gathering of a great fleet written upon the stars. War was brewing in the icy north.

The astromancer knew where the battle would be fought. Only circumstance had caused him to make the discovery, to learn both that Wulfrik was alive and that the barbarian was after him. He had been called to attend Baron Kruger, Lord Protector of the town of Wisborg – another of the baron’s attempts to prevent his wife’s infidelities. So convinced was Baron Kruger of the baroness’s indiscretions that it always came as a shock to him when Stossel couldn’t give him any forewarning. One look at his wife, however, was enough to convince a rational man that the baron’s fears were groundless.

Upon entering the castle, however, it was Stossel who received a shock. A prisoner was locked in stocks in the courtyard. A prisoner the astromancer was horrified to recognise. The man was Broendulf, a member of the Seafang’s crew!

Stossel overcame his shock long enough to discover that Broendulf had been in Wisborg for at least a week, posing as a sailor from Middenland. He’d been arrested for starting a brawl in one of the taverns and sending no less than five men to the healers and two others to the priests of Morr. The fact that their prisoner was a Norscan barbarian came as a surprise to Baron Kruger and the reeve of Wisborg, one it took a great amount of persuasion to get them to accept.

Stossel felt like ripping his beard out by its roots every time he thought about Baron Kruger’s disbelief. The baron’s response to his warning had been lethargic at best. It was harvest season. Bringing all the farmers into the walls of the town would mean losing the better part of the crop. Moreover, there were the traders to think about, buying up supplies of wheat and barley to sustain Altdorf through the winter. Kruger needed something more than a Norscan vagabond and a wizard’s unfounded fears to warrant sealing up Wisborg. Grudgingly, he had sent messages out to neighbouring towns and even a man to Altdorf to advise that there might be trouble threatening Wisborg, but he’d couched it in such vague terms that the peril might be as minor as weevils or as nebulous as underfolk sightings.

Wulfrik was coming. Stossel knew it as firmly as he knew anything. The question wasn’t if, but when. The wizard stepped to the narrow window of his laboratory. Rising above the town, the astromancer’s tower gave him a good view of Wisborg. He frowned as he stared out across the tile roofs and watched the little plumes of smoke rising from chimneypots. He could see children playing in the streets, drovers moving their stock to the docks, farmers bringing their crops to market. The smell of baking bread rose to fill his nose.

Stossel wondered if he would ever see Wisborg like this again. His presence had caused a terrible doom to hang over the heads of every inhabitant of the town. It was too late now to run, to try to lead the menace away. The astromancer might save himself that way, at least for a time, but Wisborg’s danger would remain.

‘No,’ the astromancer said, turning away from the window. ‘The only thing to do is stay and fight. Even if the baron refuses to listen, I know what is coming and will be ready for it.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Perhaps that is what I should have done from the start instead of trying to trick fate.’

On its perch, Grylikh hopped from one foot to the other, sharing the wizard’s agitation. But the bird’s eyes were not on Stossel. They stared instead past him, past the window, at the black waters of the River Reik.

The mists parted slowly as the Seafang emerged once more from the border-realm. Wulfrik ran an admiring hand along the gunwale of his new ship. It was the finest he’d ever set foot upon, sleek as a merwyrm and powerful as a behemoth. The spine of the Trolltree made for an impressive keel, and a ship that boasted forty-three benches. The tall mast was fitted into a kerling fashioned from the treeblood’s foot, the woollen sail sewn with runes to speed the wind and draw the favour of the gods.

Wulfrik looked out across his crew, hungry warriors drawn from across the length and breadth of Norsca by the promise of plunder and the prospect of battle. Eighty-six men sat upon their sea chests, rowing the Seafang against the slow current of the river. There were another hundred and forty standing at the ready, shields slung across their arms. These men had proven their courage during the frightening passage through the border-realm, prepared to defend the rowers from the daemons of the void. The eight who had been found to be cowards were strangled during the passage – even now some of the crew were pitching their stripped bodies into the river. Wulfrik would suffer no cowards on this voyage.

Ahead, through the darkness, Wulfrik could see the familiar towers of Zarnath’s refuge. The gods had shown favour to him by letting the Seafang return under cover of night. The hero only hoped they would continue to favour him. Man for man, the southlings were weak, as weak as their simpering gods. But the southlings had a strength the northmen lacked: numbers. Given a chance, the Empire could muster armies even the greatest High King had never imagined.

Wulfrik didn’t want to give them that chance. At least not until he was ready.

The hero turned away from the prow of his ship, glancing back at the darkness sternwards. He could see the last shreds of fog dissipating. He waited until he was certain the mists were completely gone, then turned to his helmsman.

‘Cut the chains,’ Wulfrik told him.

The helmsman, a snaggletoothed Varg named Skafhogg, barked orders to the warriors nearest him. Great axes snapped into the staples binding dozens of thick chains to the Seafang’s hull. The chains flew into the river with a splash. In response, lights flickered all along the river. Wulfrik counted each light as it blazed into life, knowing them to be torches wielded by the captains of the other longships, letting him know their position and their safe passage through the border-realm. The hero’s fierce grin grew with each light. Attached to the Seafang by the chains, the entire fleet had entered the fog. Twenty ships had passed safely through the mists, leaving only three behind with the daemons. The gods continued to favour Wulfrik.

He only hoped Sveinbjorn hadn’t been on one of the ships lost in the mists. He didn’t want the Aesling prince to die just yet. Wulfrik needed him alive just a little longer.

Wulfrik watched as the longships dropped oars and began to knife their way across the river. They could see the prize Wulfrik had promised them, the lights of the southling town burning even at this late hour.

When the ships were only a league from the town, their decks suddenly blazed into life, hundreds of torches lit almost in unison. Great horns bellowed out across the waves, rolling like thunder against the stone walls of the town. The warriors onboard the ships crashed axes against shields, lifting their voices in a fierce cry that became a deafening tumult.

‘Khorne!’ they roared, invoking the sacred battle-name of Kharnath the Blood God, Lord of Battles. ‘Khorne!’ they howled until it seemed the walls must fall from the violence in their voices alone. ‘Khorne!’ they shrieked as they gnashed their teeth and bit their shields.

The Norscan fleet landed upon the riverbank, grinding small fishing skiffs beneath their hulls, splintering ramshackle piers into kindling before their prows. The ships had barely stopped moving before northmen were hurling themselves over the sides, charging through the river and onto the shore.

Bells rang through the walled town. Light now blazed from every quarter of Wisborg as the alarm was sounded. Archers scrambled onto the walls, hastily pulling armour over their shoulders as they climbed into the watchtowers and gatehouse. The screams of women and children echoed from the streets as panic set in.

The northmen formed themselves into a series of wedges, a serrated phalanx known as the swine-array. Thick shields interlaced with each other, protecting the warriors from the marksmen on the walls. Like the fangs of some great beast, the northmen advanced towards Wisborg. Behind them, other warriors removed timber from the holds of their ships, hurriedly constructing a palisade to guard their vessels from attack.

Arrows clattered against the shields as the marauders stalked towards the walls. A few hunters among the northmen returned the fire, popping up from the midst of the shield wall to loose their own arrows at the archers.

When the shield wall was only fifty yards from the walls, the northmen came to a halt. With the crash of blades against shields, the shouts and war cries fell silent. The front ranks of warriors parted, allowing their hulking leader to emerge.

Wulfrik glared up at the walls, fairly daring any bowman to shoot him. None of the southlings rose to the challenge of his threatening stare, nervously watching him from behind their stone ramparts, each man promising himself he would wait until the hero took another step before loosing an arrow at him.

‘Men of the Empire!’ Wulfrik called out, his voice like the roar of a lion. ‘I would have words with your leader!’ He waved his sword through the air, Torgald’s head bouncing upon its tether. ‘Fetch him, that I may speak with him!’

‘I am Baron Udo Kruger!’ a sharp voice rose from behind the fortified face of the gatehouse. ‘Wisborg is under my protection and I have no words to waste with heretic scum!’

Wulfrik laughed at the baron’s rebuke. ‘Protect your town then! I only came here to see your wife and my children!’

There was an inarticulate screech of outrage from within the gatehouse. Wulfrik retreated back to the safety of the shield wall as dozens of arrows came shooting down at him. A few of the northmen cried out as handguns were discharged and shot punched through their shields.

‘Let me in, Kruger!’ Wulfrik yelled. ‘It’s not right to keep the baroness waiting!’

Wulfrik smiled as he heard the baron shrieking in fury, calling for armour, demanding his knights saddle their warhorses. From his tone, it seemed he wouldn’t be swayed by his advisors or his officers. He was determined to answer the challenge Wulfrik had hurled upon him, the insult the Gift of Tongues had torn from Kruger’s mind and placed on the hero’s lips.

The northmen beat their shields and called upon the name of Khorne, working their blood up into a fury of battlelust while they waited for Baron Kruger to sally forth from the walls. A punishing fusillade of arrows, bolts and bullets had come shooting down from the walls, but the heavy shields of the marauders prevented many casualties. More devastating had been the cannon the southlings had wheeled up onto the battlements and fired into the swine-array, blasting a score of northmen into heaps of mangled flesh in an instant. Before the cannon crew could fire again, one of the seers Wulfrik had brought from Ormskaro unleashed a nimbus of black cloud about their heads, causing their flesh to melt off their bones like hot wax and detonating the supply of gunpowder beside the cannon. The resulting explosion removed thirty feet of battlement and set fire to some of the buildings close to the wall. Since then, the southlings had shown no interest in bringing more cannon onto the walls.

The clarion call of trumpets gave the northmen warning before the gates of the city were flung open. But there was no warning when a shower of burning stone plummeted down upon their heads. Sections of the phalanx shattered as warriors were set afire by the flaming stones, as the tiny meteors ripped through shields and armour. As the formation shattered around him, Wulfrik glared up at the gatehouse. He remembered seeing similar magic worked by Zarnath against the dwarfs. Now he found himself staring at a bearded southling dressed in elaborate robes of midnight-blue. There was only one thing that harkened back to the Kurgan shaman: the wizard’s glowing eyes.

Wulfrik bared his fangs and would have charged the walls despite the shower of fiery magic and the hail of arrows. Only the thunder of hooves clattering across the lowered gate snapped him from his thoughts of revenge. He watched as Baron Kruger and forty horsemen came galloping out from behind the walls, lances lowered.

‘Loose the hounds!’ Wulfrik roared. The command brought some semblance of order to his reeling warriors. The northmen formed up ranks again, locking their shields together in a fortified barrier against the tide of snapping, snarling fury which came loping from the direction of the longships. Dozens of warhounds, bred by the northmen for size and ferocity, twisted by the powers of the gods into ghastly monstrosities, charged full into Baron Kruger and his knights. The smell of the great hounds excited the horses, causing them to falter at the worst moment. The momentum of their charge lost, the baron and his men were forced to defend themselves from the mutant hounds, stabbing at them with lances, kicking at them with the hooves of their steeds.

The northmen quickly followed the charge of the warhounds, pouncing upon the embattled knights, dragging them down from their saddles, braining them with axes and flails.

A sharp cry of fury drew Wulfrik’s attention. The hero watched as Baron Kruger fought free from the hounds, skewering one on his lance, crushing the head of a second with the iron-shod hooves of his warhorse. Mouthing a stream of obscenities, the baron came charging at his enemy, tossing aside his lance and drawing his sword.

The hero stood his ground before the massive destrier and the enraged knight upon its back. At the last instant he ducked aside, rolling away from the deadly sweep of the baron’s sword and ending the manoeuvre at the opposite side of his foe. Wulfrik slashed his blade into the breast of Baron Kruger’s horse just behind its steel barding, dropping the beast like a stone and trapping the armoured nobleman beneath its weight. He kicked the sword from the baron’s hand as the noble tried to stab him in the gut. Scowling at the pinned baron, Wulfrik shook his shaggy head.

‘Don’t make my dogs sick,’ the marauder growled, ripping the helmet from the baron’s head. He turned his back to the screaming man, rushing to join the tide of northmen streaming through the open gates of Wisborg.

Stossel watched with mounting horror as the warhounds were set loose, their crazed rush spoiling the charge of Baron Kruger and his knights. Loudest among the voices advising the baron against such a reckless sally, warning him that it was the witchery of Wulfrik’s voice that goaded him to such madness, the astromancer could now only watch in frustration as his fears were realised. What use was foresight if no one would listen?

The wizard prepared to send another shower of meteors streaming down into the marauders. Kruger and his knights were finished, but it was still possible to keep the northmen from entering Wisborg. Behind him, he could hear the commander of the gatehouse ordering the gate drawn up. Like Stossel, he realised the baron and his men were lost.

Suddenly the commander’s words disintegrated into a wail of pain and a wet, slurping noise like a toothless ogre licking its lips. The interior of the gatehouse became as cold as ice and Stossel could smell the reek of dark magic in the air. He turned to find the commander wreathed in fire, but the purple flames were not burning him. The havoc the witchfire was working upon the man’s body was far more ghastly. Before Stossel’s eyes, the soldier’s flesh was curdling, running off his bones and reshaping itself into flopping tentacles and snapping pincers. New eyes sprouted from the stricken man’s knees and a slobbering mouth tore open across his spine, a cluster of snake-like tongues flapping obscenely along his dislocated shoulders.

The commander’s body swelled with the raw magical power being siphoned into it, his very substance being corrupted by the essence of Chaos. One of the archers in the gatehouse shrieked in horror, the sound drawing the mutated commander’s attention. An arm with too many joints in it reached for the soldier, impaling him upon a finger that was like a bony spear.

Stossel’s eyes glowed with power as he unleashed a stream of starfire into the abomination’s face. Skin blistered and peeled beneath the fury of the spell, eyes bursting from the cosmic heat the wizard had evoked, but the thing refused to die. Spawned from Chaos, the mindless, wretched horror howled through the wreckage of its head and undulated towards the nearest soldier.

The wizard sent another blast of cosmic fire into the beast, but with as little effect as before. Soldiers charged it as the thing that had been their commander lashed out with clawed tentacles and spiked flippers. One man cried out as his head was crushed in a pincer-like appendage, and another laughed madly as he stabbed the abomination’s flank over and over again with a halberd.

A creeping trickle of fear rolled down the astromancer’s spine as he realised the commander hadn’t closed the gates before the foul magic of the northmen struck him down.

‘Forget the monster!’ Stossel shouted. ‘Close the gate!’

The wizard threw open one of the steel shutters, staring down at the gateway. Already it was choked with ravening marauders. Stossel closed his eyes, focussing upon the scene with his wizard’s sight. He pointed his hand at the gateway and made a sweeping gesture. A tremendous wind crashed down upon the northmen, driving them to their knees, hurling them back across the shoreline.

Stossel coughed, wiping perspiration from his brow. Blood trickled from his nose, his body shivering with the tremendous toll the spell had taken from him. He would not be able to loose another such storm upon the barbarians. Even as the thought occurred to him, he could see enraged northmen rising to their feet, charging once more for the entrance to Wisborg.

‘Close the gates!’ Stossel cried out again.

The soldiers had the slobbering hulk that had been their commander pinned in one corner of the gatehouse. At the wizard’s shout, two men left the cordon around the monster and scrambled to the windlass that controlled the gates.

The soldiers never reached their goal. Once more, the stink of sorcery filled the air and a man’s body was enveloped in twisting, mutating fire. The soldier beside him ran his sword through the changing abomination, intending to end its hideous new life before it began. Instead, the spell that had enveloped his comrade spread to engulf him as well. The bodies of the two soldiers seemed to flow together, merging into an almost shapeless mass of bubbling skin and blinking eyes.

Stossel peered from the window again, this time gazing away from the gate. He found what he expected to see, one of the Norscan seers leaning over a pile of animal bones, working his obscene magic against the men in the gatehouse. The astromancer felt his blood boil at the sight of the heretic sorcerer gleefully inflicting such atrocities.

The wizard’s anger took the shape of a spear of lightning, crackling down from the night sky. The Norscan seer looked up, his clawed hands waving wildly in a desperate effort to ward himself against Stossel’s magic. The effort failed and the seer’s body leapt ten feet in the air as the lightning sizzled through him, vaporising his innards and leaving his blackened husk smoking on the ground.

Inside the gatehouse, the second abomination was lurching across the room towards the first. Some of the soldiers broke off from their efforts to contain the first spawn, fleeing down the stairs to the street below. A few stubbornly tried to hold back both beasts.

Even if he had the strength, there was nothing Stossel could have done to save the embattled soldiers. Any spell powerful enough to affect the Chaos spawn would incinerate the men he was trying to help. The wizard turned his back on the ghastly scene, trying to block the screams of the doomed men from his mind. He needed every bit of concentration now. There was no room for guilt and pity in his thoughts.

With the spawn between himself and the stairs, Stossel’s only avenue of escape was the window. A bigger man could never have squeezed himself through the narrow opening, but the astromancer had the lean, scrawny build common to scholars and ascetics, men who took pains to feed their minds but often forgot their bodies. Holding his breath, he squirmed out onto the narrow ledge.

Shouts from the northman horde told that his exodus had not gone unnoticed. Arrows and throwing axes flashed through the air as the marauders trained their fury upon the fleeing wizard. The brooch of star-stone Stossel wore upon his cloak blazed with energy as the missiles provoked its lambent magic into life. A spectral wind whipped around the wizard, scattering the arrows and axes like chaff.

The wizard ignored the thwarted attack. The talisman would only defend him for a limited time and he had to focus his thoughts if he would be away before one of the Norse sorcerers took an interest in him. His magical powers already taxed, he doubted if he would be a match for even one of the savage warlocks.

Stossel spread his arms, his cloak and robes fanning out around him like the wings of a great bat. The wizard stepped away from the window, out into empty air. Instead of falling, the astromancer’s body lifted into the sky, twinkling lights flickering all around him as the Wind of Azyr bore him aloft. More arrows and axes rose from the horde as the wizard soared above them. The ring on Stossel’s left hand glowed as its energies were evoked, warding the wizard against the hostile magic being directed against him. He smiled coldly as a cluster of northmen exploded into a cloud of crackling ashes, victims of the spell his ring had caused to ricochet back upon the barbarians.

It was tempting fate to linger any longer over the battlefield. Stossel pictured his tower in his mind and his body flew out over the besieged town. If he would do his people any good, he had to replenish his power. There were things in his laboratory, ghastly secret things any sane wizard shunned. He had discovered the method of their creation in one of the old books Grylikh had found for him. There was a price to be paid for evoking such forces, a price of blood.

If it would stop Wulfrik, then Stossel knew he had to pay that price. Wisborg was doomed unless the northmen could be vanquished.

Stossel had brought this doom upon the town. Whatever it cost him, he knew he had to save whatever was left to be saved.

The northmen rushed into the narrow passageway between the outer and inner gates. Both portals were still open, Wulfrik’s challenge to Baron Kruger and the magic of his seers had seen to that. The passageway was only a dozen yards long, and roughly as wide, but the southlings had made it a killing field. Murder holes bored into the roof above them, arrow slits cut into the walls to either side, and before them a barricade of broken wagons and piled furniture from which riflemen fired into the very faces of the attackers.

Against the assault of weaker foes, the brutal defence would have thrown the enemy back. The northmen, however, would not be denied. Like beasts scenting blood, they would not relent until they fed the hunger burning within them. They knew the eyes of their gods were upon them, judging their strength, testing their courage. The northmen did not court death, but they accepted it when it came. To fall with sword in hand was their destiny, either here in Wisborg or on some other battlefield. They feared the shame of defeat more than the kiss of the valkyries.

Molten lead poured down upon the northmen from the holes in the ceiling, so they used their shields to deflect the boiling metal. Arrows whistled from the slits in the walls, so they piled the bodies of their dead against the holes so that the hidden archers couldn’t strike at them. The bullets of the gunners tore through shields and ripped through armour, so they propped their shrieking wounded before them and used their flesh as a living barrier against the defenders of the barricade.

Foot by foot, the northmen closed upon the barricade. When they heard the gunners retreat from their positions, the marauders flung aside the bodies of their mangled comrades. In a great wave of armour and muscle, the northmen crashed against the mass of piled furniture and broken wagons. The barricade shuddered under their assault, grinding against the flagstones of the street as it lurched outwards from beneath the gate.

Soldiers rushed at the barricade, hurling flasks of oil at the piled debris. Other soldiers raced to fling torches into the oil. Flames soon licked about the barricade as the wood began to burn.

Still the northmen would not be denied. The warriors pushing against the barricade tried to retreat from the flames, but the press of bodies behind them left them nowhere to flee. If they did not want to burn, they had to bull their way through the fiery barrier.

In failing to drive back the marauders, the fires set by the soldiers actually helped their enemies. Weakened by the flames, the charred wagons and smouldering wreckage splintered apart under the furious assault of the Norscans. After three mighty efforts, the barricade crumbled. Hulking northmen, their beards singed, their hide leggings and fur cloaks smoking, came leaping through the flames, axes gleaming red in the flickering light. To the defenders of Wisborg, the scene was like watching the mouth of hell spit out a legion of blood-mad daemons.

‘You are men of the Empire!’ a fierce voice shouted. ‘You are the children of Sigmar! Do not fear the heathen beast! Drive it back into the abyss with its black masters!’

Wulfrik charged through the flames, his eyes glaring at the town around him. The gateway opened into a market square, a wide plaza fronted by several tall buildings and with a half-dozen streets snaking away from it in every direction. Stalls and carts had been tipped over to form improvised defences for archers and gunners. More marksmen were perched upon rooftops, raining death down upon the northmen. Across the centre of the square was a wall of spears and shields barring the marauders from gaining the side-streets and running amok through the town.

‘Formation!’ Wulfrik bellowed, watching with disgust as blood-crazed warriors rushed pell-mell at the southling spearmen only to be cut down by bullets and arrows. ‘Shields!’ he roared, ripping a massive panel of wood and steel from the burning body of a marauder at his feet. ‘The gods spit on any man who dies without the blood of ten southlings on his blade!’

A horn sounded. The northmen emerging from the gateway no longer raced across the square in berserk fury but instead closed ranks, forming once more the fang-like wedges of their broken phalanx. The arrows of the archers clattered harmlessly against the thick shields, only the bullets of the gunners capable of striking the men sheltering behind them. And the gunners were too few, their weapons to slow to re-arm, to turn back the horde.

The northmen surged forwards in a great body, their boots causing the flagstones to shiver beneath them. Again axes clattered against shields, again the marauders shouted the name of the Blood God. ‘Khorne!’ they yelled, flecks of blood flying from their lips, froth and foam trickling down their beards.

The wedges of the Norscans smashed into the defensive line of the southlings like a typhoon pounding against a crumbling shore. From the first impact the soldiers of the Empire were staggered, struggling to retain their cohesion. Militiamen, unaccustomed to a pitched battle against anything more serious than scraggly herds of beastmen raiding farms or bandits preying upon travellers, they were forced to rely upon their training rather than experience.

Spears stabbed at the northmen in the automatic, precise fashion of the drillyard, only to be deflected by the shields of the marauders or caught by the hooked beaks of their axes. Some of the soldiers staggered forwards as their weapons were ripped from their hands, breaking the defensive line. Others quickly stepped into their place from the rear ranks, holding desperately to the hope that they could hold their ground and keep back the Norscans.

Training and discipline were not enough, however. Each northman had the experience of a life spent hunting and fighting in the icy wilds of Norsca behind him. Each of the marauders towered over the militiamen, bodies hardened by lives of ceaseless toil and endless war. When they brought their shields smashing against those of the southlings, it was the soldiers who were pushed back. When the soldiers tried to press back, the northmen remained as fixed as a mountain.

There was another difference between the enemies. The southlings had been taught to shun and despise the wicked gods of the north, but they had also been taught to fear them. As the soldiers heard the marauders invoke the dread name of the Blood God, that fear returned to them. The northmen did not share the same feeling when they heard the southlings call upon their own god. To the Norscans, Sigmar and all the gods of the south weren’t even things to be shunned, simply mocked and jeered. They felt no fear when they heard the name of Sigmar.

That changed when a half-dozen Norscans were suddenly flung through the air. An instant later, four others were sent flying, scattered like leaves before a storm. A mighty voice, the same voice that had rallied the southlings before, shouted down the howls of the marauders, drowning their fierce war cries.

‘I am his hammer!’ the voice thundered. ‘I am his fist! I am the eye that judges and the wrath that punishes!’

The northmen backed away, recoiling from the imposing figure who strode from the ranks of the soldiers. He was a tall man, garbed in heavy armour and white robes. In his steel gauntlets he held an immense warhammer gilt in gold and wreathed in a nimbus of blinding light. The man’s face was hard and severe, his bald pate branded with the symbol of a twin-tailed comet. Fires seemed to burn beneath the man’s flesh, and with every step he appeared to swell with power. One marauder, slower than the rest in retreating, was thrown through the air by a sweep of the warhammer. He landed in a battered mess, his shield dented into a concave disk that was embedded in his ribs.

‘By the might of Sigmar!’ the warrior priest bellowed. ‘I shall scour this place of the heathen, the heretic and the witch-folk!’

The marauders fell silent at the priest’s fury, cringing back like whipped dogs. From their cowed ranks, Wulfrik emerged.

The hero stared at the priest with an air of unconcern, as though he had not just watched the Sigmarite swat a dozen of his warriors like flies. The priest glared coldly at Wulfrik as the champion took his measure, pacing slowly back and forth in the gap that had been created between the lines.

Finally, Wulfrik stopped. He bared his fangs in a sardonic grin and gestured with his sword at the warrior priest’s forehead.

‘In Norsca,’ Wulfrik said, his words spoken in precise Reikspiel, ‘we call that sign the Serpent’s Tongue.’ He spat on the ground and stared hard into the priest’s eyes. ‘Those who wear that symbol are the lowest perverts in the cult of Slaanesh.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Wulfrik was flung through the air as the warrior priest’s hammer came crashing down into the flagstones beside him, missing the hero by a hairsbreadth. Shards of rock tore the northman’s face sending blood trickling into his beard. He landed with a brutal impact against the shields of his own warriors, knocking several men to their backs as he smashed against them. He could feel the spikes on one hersir’s shield bite into his back, gouging his armour and pricking the flesh beneath. Angrily, Wulfrik leapt back to his feet, stalking towards the grim armoured priest.

‘My father had a hammer like that,’ Wulfrik sneered at the priest. ‘Maybe he took it from your father after he got tired of listening to him beg for mercy…’

The priest lunged at Wulfrik, an inarticulate snarl of rage flying from his lips. The massive warhammer, its head smouldering with wisps of orange flame, came hurtling down with the fury of a thunderclap. Wulfrik sprang away from the mighty blow, rolling across the ground as the hammer pulverised the flagstones.

Better prepared for the might of the priest’s hammer this time, Wulfrik was able to arrest his momentum before smashing into his own men. The hero glared at the southling priest from above the rim of his shield. Every eye was now upon their fight, those of the invading northmen and those of the southling soldiers. To the victor of this contest would go Wisborg and all within its walls.

‘We used that hammer to club swine,’ Wulfrik said. ‘It wasn’t fit for killing men…’

‘Heathen filth! Still your blasphemies!’ the warrior priest roared. Again, the hammer came swinging towards Wulfrik, its head now glowing like iron in a forge. This time the hammer struck Wulfrik’s shield, crumpling it like a sheet of tin. The marauder was tossed through the air, smashing into the abandoned carts and stands of the marketplace. Glass shattered and wood splintered as the armoured warrior ploughed through the stall.

‘So are the proudest of the ungodly smote down by the wrath of Sigmar!’ the warrior priest’s voice thundered across the ranks of the awed northmen. The marauders began to back away from this fearsome southling with the divine fury of his god burning in his eyes and blazing from his hammer. The soldiers defending the square cheered, marching forwards to aid the priest in driving the invaders back to their ships.

Suddenly, the retreat of the northmen stopped. Marauders pointed with their axes, muttering excitedly as they watched something rise from the wreckage of the stalls. The warrior priest turned his head, his jaw clenching in anger as he saw his enemy regain his feet.

Wulfrik wiped blood from his mouth and spat a broken fang into the street. ‘My mother spanks harder than that,’ the hero growled, kicking aside a splintered cart and marching towards the priest. With every step he took, more of the northmen began to beat their shields. By the time he was close enough to engage his foe, the tumult had risen to an almost deafening din.

Wulfrik cast the dented shield at the priest’s feet, then drew the second sword from his belt. A blade in either hand, he closed upon his enemy.

The enraged priest sprang to the attack first. Gripping his hammer in both hands, he brought the heavy weapon hurtling downwards in an overhead strike, intending to drive Wulfrik’s head into the ground like a nail. The burning hammer looked like a bolt of sun-fire as it came crashing down.

Again, the agile hero avoided the Sigmarite’s furious assault. Goaded into a zealous fury, the warrior priest had forsaken craft and cunning, relying upon strength, power and conviction to maul his enemy.

The hammer smashed into the ground, once more gouging a crater in the flagstones. Wulfrik was thrown from his feet by the tremulous impact, but this time he was not batted about the square by the resultant shock wave. The instant the priest’s hammer was in motion, Wulfrik struck out with one of his swords. He did not strike for his enemy, however, but drove the point of his blade deep between the cobblestones. Maintaining a fierce grip about the weapon, Wulfrik held his ground.

As the warrior priest rose from his vicious attack, Wulfrik was in motion. Using the sword as a fulcrum, the hero brought his entire body swinging around. His heavy boots smashed into the Sigmarite’s belly, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him to the ground. Immediately, Wulfrik sprang atop his foe, releasing his hold on the sword embedded in the flagstones and bringing the other smashing down.

The priest cried out in agony as Wulfrik’s sword slashed his hand, forcing the hammer from his grip. The warhammer rolled away from the stunned priest, the divine glow winking out the instant it struck the ground. A wild cheer rose from the massed ranks of the northmen. Stunned silence was the only sound among the despairing line of soldiers.

Roaring and beating their shields, the marauders lunged across the square to face the soldiers once more. What missile fire continued to assail them was sporadic and hurried, causing few injuries. The fangs of the Norscan phalanx crashed against the shields of the southling line. At first, the line held, but soon it began to buckle as the axes of the exultant marauders cut down the frantic soldiers. Once the first wedge was driven into the line, it quickly fell, the routed soldiers fleeing down side-streets and alleys, trying to find any hole in which to hide from the rage of the northmen.

In the market square, Wulfrik brought the hilt of his sword smashing down into the side of the priest’s head, driving consciousness from him. The hero rose from his vanquished foe and grinned triumphantly as he watched his warriors pursuing the retreating soldiers. The wails of southling townsfolk, the screams of southling women, rose from the streets as the marauders began to sack Wisborg.

‘Strike me with your daemon’s hammer?’ a sharp voice snarled. Wulfrik caught a jagged harpoon as it was being thrust at the unconscious priest. With a twist of his powerful hand, the hero snapped the heft of the weapon.

The harpoon wielder staggered back. Blood streaked his face, but not enough to hide the features of Sveinbjorn, prince of the Aeslings. He glared at Wulfrik, his entire body trembling with outrage. ‘No man strikes an Aesling in battle and lives!’ the prince spat.

Wulfrik returned the prince’s furious stare with a cold look. ‘This one does,’ the hero said, pointing his blade at the prostrate priest.

Sveinbjorn smiled as he heard Wulfrik’s words. He glanced from side to side as a group of Aesling hersirs slowly closed around the hero. The prince straightened up, puffing out his chest in an arrogant display of authority. ‘I say he dies.’

‘This one is mine,’ Wulfrik snarled back. ‘Take him from me… if you can.’

Sveinbjorn’s grin grew wider. He motioned for his warriors to finish encircling Wulfrik. More than he wanted the priest’s blood, he wanted the hero’s head.

The prince’s smile died when he felt a blade against his throat. He looked nervously aside and saw the imposing figure of Jarl Tostig of the Graelings beside him. The sword against his throat was that of the jarl. Other Graelings and warriors from several other tribes were closing upon Sveinbjorn’s hersirs.

‘Wulfrik is the only one who can command the Seafang,’ Tostig told Sveinbjorn. ‘Kill him and you strand us here, far from the sea and deep in enemy lands.’

‘I will not be denied!’ Sveinbjorn growled. ‘If he will not give me the southling, then I demand wergild!’

‘You may have the finest steed in this town,’ Wulfrik laughed. ‘Then you will just need someone to teach you how to ride.’

Sveinbjorn glared at the champion, but knew Tostig and the others would kill him if he didn’t accept the jibe. Besides, the jarl was right. Wulfrik was their only sure way back to Norsca. Once they were safely back in the fjord of Ormskaro, then would be the time to settle with the hero and make him answer for all of his insults.

‘I’ll go look for my horse,’ Sveinbjorn said, his voice like a whip. He motioned for his hersirs to back down. Pausing only to glower at Wulfrik, the prince led his men down one of the darkened streets of Wisborg.

Wulfrik watched the prince slink away. Sveinbjorn was at a disadvantage. Wulfrik knew when the prince would strike at him. The prince could not say the same.

The hero turned to watch the stream of northmen pouring through the broken gates to ravage the town. He held up his fist, calling out as he recognised men from the Seafang’s crew among the warriors. ‘Helreginn!’ he barked out, drawing the attention of a huge warrior encased in black armour. The hulking Norscan approached his captain, the eyes behind the sockets of his skull-faced helm glancing down at the priest’s body.

‘A rare prize,’ Wulfrik told the warrior. ‘I’m trusting you to keep it for me.’

Helreginn nodded his head, his armoured hands running across the heft of his axe. ‘Alive?’ the warrior’s metallic voice rattled from behind the steel teeth of his mask.

‘So long as he is fit to ride a horse, make what sport you will with him,’ Wulfrik said.

Helreginn nodded again. He removed a strip of dried eelskin from his belt and knelt beside the fallen priest, binding his hands together.

Wulfrik turned away from Helreginn and his prisoner. The hero’s eyes drank in the sight of his conquest, watching the blood pooling about the dead soldiers, seeing flames lick up into the night as the northmen put Wisborg to the torch. Screams echoed from every quarter, the shrieks of the vanquished and the war cries of the conquerors. Above the stench of fire and flame, Wulfrik could pick out the bitter tang of blood and death. But it was another scent that caused the hero to leave the square, sprinting down one of the narrow side-streets.

He passed marauders looting shops and plundering homes, warriors cutting down ragged knots of militiamen, warhounds worrying mangled bodies with savage fangs. He saw a raven-haired southling woman flailing in the clutch of a brawny Aesling, helpless to stop him swinging her babe by its ankle and spattering its brains against the cobblestone street. He watched as a feral Baersonling, his body twisted into a shaggy thing more bear than man, gorged himself upon the gutted husk of an ox in the shattered window of a clothier’s shop. He observed a pair of Sarl reavers lumbering down the street, burdened by the still-smoking bulk of an iron stove.

There was no fight left in Wisborg. The town was broken. Those who could would flee.

Wulfrik hastened his pace, following the faint scent that drew him after it. He had to find Zarnath before the wizard could escape. He knew that after coming so close, he might never get another chance at his betrayer.

The wizard’s scent led Wulfrik to the very heart of Wisborg. Organised resistance in the town to the northmen had collapsed, and those southlings the hero encountered as he made his way through the chaotic streets were either too frightened to pose any danger to him or too dead to pose a threat to anyone ever again. The greater hazards were the fires his jubilant men were setting. The flames spread quickly through the town, entire blocks becoming raging infernos in a matter of minutes. There was small chance of restraining the marauders, however. Their blood afire from the thrill of battle, their brains swimming in the beer and wine they found in the shops and homes they ransacked, little short of a personal appearance by the Skulltaker would bring discipline back to the raiders.

Wulfrik found that the wizard’s smell was thickest about the castle rising from the centre of the town. Ancient seat of the Krugers, the town had been built around the fortification until at last growing large and prosperous enough to warrant its own walls. What few defenders Wisborg had left were clustered inside the castle, firing guns and loosing arrows from its battlements. A large force of northmen howled outside the walls, making efforts to assail it with ladders and grapples. So far, the efforts of the soldiers had been enough to drive off these attacks.

A more formidable assault was being planned, however. Wulfrik found Skafhogg and several men from the Seafang’s crew stealing to the castle gates, employing a shield wall to protect them from missile fire. The hideous helmsman had a devious mind as crooked as his body. Clearly Skafhogg remembered the destruction on the town walls when the seers used their magic to ignite the cannon and its ammunition. The northmen had captured another battery somewhere in the town. Unfamiliar with the weapon itself, they had an idea about how to use the gunpowder to bring down the gate.

The southlings on the walls cried out in horror when they realised what Skafhogg was doing. They began to hurl stones down upon the Norscans, trying to drive them away from the gate. The northmen threw lewd remarks back at the soldiers, refusing to be driven from their labour.

When the last barrel was placed, the northmen scrambled away from the gate, taking refuge in the shattered windows of the townhouses facing the keep. One of the crewmen, a one-eyed Skaeling named Lopt, strode boldly towards the brick causeway before the gate. Bullets and arrows glanced from Lopt’s steel armour, each piece marked in blood with the skull-rune. The Skaeling ignored the soldiers firing at him. Coldly he raised his leathery hand to his breast, tapping it against his heart. Then he stretched his hand towards the barrels. A ghastly mouth opened in his palm and from between its fangs jetted a stream of molten fire. The liquid flame crashed about the barrels, igniting the blackpowder. An instant later, all of Wisborg was rocked by a tremendous explosion.

The castle was lost in a cloud of dust and smoke. Even before the echoes of the explosion subsided, Wulfrik was charging at the place where the gate had stood, leaping across the great crater the explosion had ripped from the ground when it blew the gatehouse to smithereens. All around him he could hear the war whoops and bloodthirsty howls of his warriors as they rushed to invade this last bastion of defiance. A stunned soldier, banging his hand against his helm in an effort to clear his ringing ears, staggered out of the smoke towards Wulfrik. The hero cut him down before he was even aware of the northman’s presence. A second soldier, vainly trying to arm a crossbow broken in the explosion, at least had time to scream before the hero’s blade took his life.

Marauders streamed through the broken wall, springing to stairways and ladders to reach the stunned defenders on the ramparts. Those northmen more concerned with loot than battle raced for the keep itself and whatever wealth Baron Kruger had bled from his township. Wulfrik saw a grotesquely obese woman dressed in a rich purple gown and with her breast covered in glittering necklaces come stumbling from the keep. She was screaming at the marauders, begging them to take her jewels and spare her life. A Sarl axeman silenced her wails, making it clear the northmen would have both.

‘Should have known you’d join us here, Wulfrik,’ Skafhogg said as he came loping through the smoke and saw his captain. ‘Where do you think the southlings have hidden their treasure?’

Wulfrik smiled at his helmsman and gestured with his bloody sword at the keep. ‘Be sure to tap the walls and rip open anything that sounds hollow,’ he advised. He caught the snaggletoothed warrior’s arm before he could move. ‘Make sure the best gets aboard the Seafang.’

‘Wulfrik?’ a haggard voice coughed. The hero turned from his helmsman, looking about the courtyard until his eyes settled upon a ragged figure imprisoned in a set of wooden stocks. The prisoner had been a large, powerful man once, but hot irons had torn his muscles, pincers had removed his eyes and hammers had broken his teeth. Still, there was something familiar about the prisoner.

Wulfrik approached the prisoner, studying his tortured frame. No one would think Broendulf fair again.

‘Wulfrik?’ the captive called, seeming to sense the hero’s nearness despite the hollow pits where his eyes should be.

The hero kept his silence, thinking instead upon the pact he had made with Broendulf. Like all his other dreams, it was a hollow mockery of what it should be. Something that was not worth the winning.

‘By the blood of Kharnath!’ Broendulf cried. ‘Let me die with a blade in my hand!’

Wulfrik glanced over at Skafhogg, then back at Broendulf. Savagely, he drove the point of his sword into the captive’s brain. ‘Call to your own gods, southling,’ Wulfrik spat. ‘Those of the north will not hear you.’

Skafhogg grunted in amusement at the callous execution. Wulfrik wiped Broendulf’s blood from his sword and pointed to the keep. ‘Take whatever we can carry. I want the Seafang’s holds filled to bursting. We wouldn’t want to disappoint Sveinbjorn.’ The comment brought a cruel smile onto Skafhogg’s face. Wulfrik turned away, facing the tall narrow tower at the western corner of the courtyard. It was about the tower that Zarnath’s scent was strongest.

‘I’ll be in here if you need me,’ Wulfrik told his helmsman, a tone of such malignance in his voice that Skafhogg wouldn’t have dared disturb the hero if the Emperor and all his armies appeared outside the walls of Wisborg.

There was the promise of death in Wulfrik’s voice. Death that would be slow and horrible for the man who had been marked for destruction.

Stossel crouched upon the floor of his laboratory, a circle drawn in his own blood marking the floor all around him. Seven candles, black as midnight and crafted from the fat of murderers, smouldered at the tips of the star the wizard had scribed in the middle of the circle. He stared at the hideous symbol, feeling its dark energies saturating the air. Even if he survived this night, there would be no hiding this transgression into the black arts. If the witch hunters did not come for him, then the astromancers would dispatch a magister vigilant to make him answer for his crimes.

The wizard was resigned to his fate. He had seen the tragedy that resulted from trying to run from the future. All his efforts to escape from his hunter had led to destruction. He felt no remorse for the Norscans who had perished upon the voyages he had tricked Wulfrik into making, even less for the degenerate dwarfs who had been slaughtered by the northmen. He regretted the elves who had died because of his trickery, but in his desperation he had seen no other way to destroy Wulfrik. Now it was the innocents of his own lands who died because of his failures, their screams which filled the air.

No, Ludwig Stossel had earned death many times over. But if he could obliterate the monstrous champion of the Dark Gods, if he could strike down Wulfrik before he died, then perhaps he might redeem some small measure of worth for his blackened soul.

His breath haggard with the effort of the profane ritual, Stossel lifted his eyes to his familiar. Grylikh was hopping excitedly about its perch, its keen eyes watching the wizard’s every motion. He wondered for a moment at his familiar’s energy, puzzling over the reason it did not share the fatigue which taxed his own spirit.

Stossel dismissed the imp’s erratic behaviour, concentrating instead upon the complex hieroglyphs he now summoned from memory. Far below him, he could hear the door to his tower being smashed open. He knew who it was that came to violate his sanctum. The wizard had gambled his soul on this last effort to destroy his enemy and atone for the evil he had brought upon Wisborg. Now he would see if his gamble had paid off.

Eerie figures shimmered in the air before Stossel as the astromancer spoke the ancient syllables of each name-picture which formed in his mind. The spectral hieroglyphs fractured into wisps of energy as the next was spoken. The strands of power slithered about the laboratory, flitting around the legs of tables, crawling up the sides of chairs before finally draining into a fist-sized diamond locked within a setting of obsidian.

At first the diamond glowed only slightly, but as more and more magical energy flowed into it, the pallid gem began to give off an amber pulse of light. Faster and faster the pulses came and with them there sounded a dull pounding, like the beat of a hammer against stone.

The obsidian shape in which the diamond was set had stood in shadow when the astromancer began his ritual. Now, by the amber pulses of light, it stood revealed, a monstrous, man-like shape ten feet tall. The statue’s physique was that of a powerfully athletic youth, its only raiment a loincloth of obsidian. However its head was a grisly mockery of life, a jackal’s skull crowned with a golden headdress.

Stossel had created the ghastly statue in mimicry of the ushabti crafted by the ancient liche-priests of Khemri. Grylikh had led him to the ritual to construct the guardian statue, hidden deep within an old treatise on the vanished kingdoms of Nehekhara. The imp had also found for him the scroll which related the spell to give the statue motion and motivation.

Despite the horror of what he had done, Stossel felt a sense of pride as the throb of the ushabti’s diamond heart pulsed through the tower. He spoke the name-sign which would give his creation motion, awed when the obsidian statue took a quaking step across the laboratory. Quickly he berated himself for such arrogance. It was the same ignorant thrill of power he’d felt as a youth receiving his first portents, the jubilation of an apprentice evoking his first rainstorm, never appreciating the power he wielded.

This was evil magic, black sorcery of the foulest stripe. It belonged to the world of necromancy and daemonology, not the refined schools of wizardry. The seductive power of what he had done only added to Stossel’s repugnance. He understood now why the witch hunters were ever distrustful of wizards. It was so easy for them to be overwhelmed by the power they could command.

Stossel wondered if even destroying Wulfrik could justify this being he had created. Could the destruction of one evil ever condone the birth of another? The wizard turned a questioning glance at Grylikh, but the shrike simply continued to hop about on its perch, offering neither approval nor condemnation.

Then the door of the laboratory came crashing inwards. Stossel looked at the crazed warrior standing in the doorway, his armour soaked in the blood of innocent men. All moral qualms vanished from his mind as the wizard stared at Wulfrik.

‘Kiiiillll,’ the astromancer hissed. ‘Kiiiilll hiiiimmm.’

Wulfrik bashed in the oak door, the last barrier between himself and Zarnath’s stink. He stood at the top of the spiral staircase that coiled its way through the wizard’s tower and glared across the dark laboratory, lips curling from his fangs as he saw the sorcerer sitting upon the floor. Eagerly, the hero’s fingers tightened about his sword.

Before the Norscan could charge across the room and deal death to his betrayer, a huge shape lurched out from the shadows. Wulfrik’s body grew tense as he watched the mighty ushabti step into the centre of the chamber, barring his path to Zarnath. There was no life in the empty sockets of the carved skull that served it for a face, no mind locked within its stone body. There was nothing at all within this hulking automaton which the Gift of Tongues could goad into reckless fury; he might as soon curse the sea as cast insult upon the golem-beast.

Wulfrik heard Zarnath’s hissed command. In response, the ushabti slowly turned, reaching to one of the walls, its stone hands tearing a massive greatsword and an equally enormous siege shield from where they were bolted to the wall. In the monster’s hands, the huge two-handed sword looked as slim as the silver-steel blades of the elf-folk, the massive siege shield little bigger than a buckler in the statue’s grip.

Armed now, the ushabti lumbered forwards to carry out the command of its master. Wulfrik did not wait for the monstrous statue to attack. Howling like a maddened beast, the northman leapt across one of the wooden tables scattered throughout the wizard’s laboratory. A sword in either hand, he lashed out at the automaton, eager to remove this last obstacle between him and his revenge.

With surprising quickness, the ushabti met Wulfrik’s attack. It raised its sword in a quick parry, nearly ripping the sword from the hero’s right hand. Wulfrik’s other blade clanged against the bronze plate of the siege shield, inflicting no more hurt to it than a scratch across its painted face. The ushabti stomped forwards, flinging the northman away as it exerted its stony strength.

Reeling away from the statue, Wulfrik felt his back slam against one of the tables. Quickly he rolled aside as the ushabti brought its sword swinging around, shearing through the bottles and alembics standing upon the table, sending shards of glass and strangely coloured vapours flying about the chamber. He drove at the statue’s side, trying to strike it before the monster could recover, but again found the heavy siege shield raised against his blades.

Wulfrik dodged away as the ushabti swung towards him, its massive sword slashing down in a cleaving arc. This time when he swatted it aside, he did lose one of his own weapons, the impact of the ushabti’s blow pulsing through his left arm, stunning the nerves into numbness. His sword clattered across the floor as it fell from his deadened grip.

The ushabti gave no sign of satisfaction at partially disarming its enemy, but continued to press Wulfrik with the same slavish obedience. Its shield warded off a strike from his remaining sword, its own blade coming flashing down in a brutal arc that passed close enough to the hero that he could feel air swish across his throat.

The hero kicked a stool at the ushabti, then flipped across a table as the monster stormed after him. Its stone legs crunched through the wooden stool, obliterating the obstruction, but at the cost of some of the statue’s coordination. When the ushabti brought its sword slashing down at the man slipping around the table, the edge slammed instead into the oak surface, gouging a deep rent in the wood.

For an instant, the automaton’s weapon was trapped. Before it could rip the blade free, Wulfrik brought his own sword slashing across its hand. The volcanic glass of its fingers was shattered by the ferocious impact. The ushabti reeled away, holding its broken hand in the air.

Wulfrik leapt atop the table, intending to force his advantage. Before he could swing his blade at the ushabti’s skull, the marauder dived to the floor, the heavy siege shield slicing through the air as the statue flung it at him. The shield slammed into the shelves against the wall, shattering bottles, flinging books and jars across the floor and sending the mummified husk of a swamp lizard plummeting down the stairway.

Before Wulfrik could scramble from cover, the statue was ripping its sword free from the table with its good hand. The jackal-skull grinned at the northman as the ushabti swatted the obstacle aside and closed upon him. The hero tried to parry the downward thrust of its blade, but the impact of the blow brought him to his knees. The statue struck at him with the stone club of its injured hand, the jagged obsidian edges shearing through his armour. Wulfrik cried out in pain as twisted links of mail bit into his flesh.

Dodging another sweep of the automaton’s sword, Wulfrik stumbled upon the debris littering the floor. The ushabti rushed him, its sword striking sparks from the wall as Wulfrik ducked beneath its murderous edge.

Wulfrik staggered away from the remorseless statue, driven back to the doorway from which he had started. He glared into the dead visage of the ushabti, enraged that his death should be brought at the hands of a thing unable to recognise its accomplishment.

A croaking caw diverted his attention for an instant from the monster. Wulfrik’s eyes darted to the floor, shocked to see a black bird hopping about the debris. His shock turned to a grim smile when he saw the object the bird was so interested in. It was a metal flask with a gromril stopper. The Gift of Tongues didn’t allow Wulfrik to read the archaic letters scrawled across its surface, but he didn’t need to read the flask to know what was inside it. The smell of its contents was too strong even for metal to hold captive. It was a smell no warrior of Norsca could ever forget.

The ushabti lunged at him once more, sword slashing at his darting body. This time Wulfrik did not retreat from the monster, but instead sprang past it, rolling along the floor. The black bird hastily retreated as the northman’s violent slide brought him within reach of the metal flask. The sizzling trickle streaming from the dislodged stopper and burning little pits in the floor told Wulfrik the arcane symbols had not lied about its contents. Few things were more caustic than troll bile.

The jackal-headed statue swung towards Wulfrik, raising its heavy sword to cut the northman in half. He snarled back at the ushabti, knocking the stopper free with the edge of his sword and splashing the flask’s contents across the monster’s chest.

Smoke rose from the obsidian statue as the troll bile ate into it. The ushabti staggered back, shaking its head from side to side in an almost human gesture of disorientation. The massive diamond continued to pulse in the centre of its chest – even troll bile could work no more harm than an ugly discolouration upon diamond – but the obsidian around it grew brittle and cracked apart.

The monster took a few more stumbling steps, then flailed its arms as it reached the top of the stairway. The ushabti fought to retain its balance, a fight it seemed about to win until the diamond suddenly dropped from its chest. Instantly, the statue became a lifeless hulk of stone. Without motion or motivation, it toppled backwards, pitching headlong down the stairway, its body cracking apart as it plummeted from the tower.

Wulfrik rose to his feet, kicking the glowing diamond across the floor. Sparing only a single wary glance at the stairway to assure himself that the automaton showed no sign of returning, he turned his eyes on the wizard squatting in his circle of candles and blood.

The wizard looked far different from when he had appeared to Wulfrik as the Kurgan shaman Zarnath, but the astromancer had neglected to mask his scent as thoroughly as he had his face. Wulfrik would not be deceived. This was the man he had led an army halfway around the world to kill.

Stossel recoiled from Wulfrik’s approach. Gone was the might of his magic, drained from him by the hurried spells unleashed by him during the battle, his vitality further sapped by the desperate animation of the ushabti. Barely a hint of blue light glowed in his hollow eyes now, his body withered into an almost fleshless skeleton, the colour drained from his skin. Strands of hair fell from his beard as he raised his terrified eyes to the advancing northman.

Wulfrik glared at the pathetic wretch, his gaze as merciless as a winter storm.

The wizard turned frantic eyes to the perch of his familiar. Grylikh was still there, hopping excitedly from one foot to the other, but the imp was anything but diminished by its master’s distress. If anything, it had grown in size, swelling with power. Stossel sensed something terrible in the creature and for the first time wondered exactly what it was he had conjured up from the old grimoire to serve him.

Grylikh cawed at Stossel, and the familiar’s shape shifted from that of a shrike into the sleek shadowy form of a raven, a single multi-faceted eye burning at the centre of its face. The black beak seemed to smile at him, the sardonic grin of a patient trickster.

An armoured fist smashed into the wizard’s face, sprawling him across the floor. Too weak to even lift a hand to defend himself, Stossel could only whimper as Wulfrik loomed over him. The northman’s face was so twisted with hate that it seemed scarcely human. It did not take a prognosticator to read death in the marauder’s blazing eyes.

‘You favour birds, Zarnath?’ Wulfrik snarled as he seized the wizard’s robe and lifted him from the floor. The astromancer pawed feebly at his assailant, trying to hold him back. The pommel of Wulfrik’s sword buried itself in Stossel’s gut, sending him crashing back to the floor again.

Wulfrik glared down at the prone wizard. Slowly he sheathed his sword and drew a dagger from his belt. He marched towards Stossel, driving his boot into the astromancer’s side, flipping him onto his belly.

‘Since you like birds so much, traitor,’ Wulfrik hissed, ‘I will make you one.’

Stossel cried out as Wulfrik stomped a boot into the small of his back. It was the first of the wizard’s screams.

It was not the last.

An hour later, Wulfrik crouched beside the gasping, simpering ruin that had once been Ludwig Stossel, renowned astromancer of Wisborg, magister of the Celestial Order. A man who had learned the secret ways of magic and bound them to his service. A man who had peered into the future and tried to shape it to fit his needs. Prophet and mystic, Stossel had long trespassed in the domains of the gods, believing his foresight placed him beyond their power.

Wulfrik wiped the dying man’s blood from his hands, using the torn tatters of the wizard’s own robes to cleanse himself. He nodded with satisfaction as he studied his work. It had taken every ounce of his will to restrain himself from killing Stossel outright. Now he savoured the obscene spectacle he had created.

The tribes of Norsca called it the blood eagle, a torture reserved for their most hated enemies. It was a gruesome tradition that stretched back into the mists of legend. Wulfrik could think of no better doom to bestow upon the man who had lied so cruelly to him, who had held everything he dreamed of before his eyes and then snatched it away even as he reached for it. The traitor could be thankful the northman could only kill him once.

First Wulfrik had flayed the skin from Stossel’s back, exposing the meat and muscle beneath. He cut the ribs from the wizard’s spine, bending them outwards until they broke. Then, with the most delicate care, he reached into the traitor’s body, lifting out the pulsing lungs and laying them upon the shoulders. Like the gory wings of a hellsent fury, Stossel’s lungs shivered against his shoulders as his mutilated body struggled to draw breath.

The hero watched his betrayer die inch by inch, his eyes locked on Stossel’s mangled flesh with the intensity of a basilisk’s stare. Wulfrik savoured each agonised breath the wizard took, delighted in every tortured sob that choked past his lips, relished every pained shiver of his limbs. Like all delights, Wulfrik knew the wizard’s torment must end, but he would glut his soul upon it while he could.

The cyclopean raven, the only other spectator to Stossel’s suffering, flitted excitedly through the room, sometimes landing to hop in the pools of blood leaking from the wizard. Wulfrik let the morbid creature be. Ravens were the messengers of Tzeentch and to see one so visibly bearing the mark of the Great Mutator was a doubly noble blessing. Indeed, the wizard’s renegade pet seemed to take as much glee from its master’s suffering as the northman did.

Eventually, Stossel’s ruined body began to fail. Wulfrik frowned when he heard the first ragged shudder from the wizard’s throat. Grylikh croaked angrily, ruffling its feathers and flying onto its perch. The raven’s grisly eye stared hatefully at the expiring wizard.

Wulfrik, however, knew there was one thing more he had to do. Standing over Stossel, the hero brought his brawny hands slapping down upon the wizard’s exposed lungs. While the tortured body beneath him thrashed wildly as it at last suffocated, the northman lifted his head, staring past the ceiling, staring at the invisible thrones of his gods.

‘To Tzeentch, Lord of Fate, Changer of the Ways, I give the last breath of this offering.’

As Wulfrik spoke, the death rattle sounded from Stossel’s throat. The wizard’s last exhalation became a shimmering streak of light as it left his body, rising in pulsating strands of luminescence from the mutilated corpse. The northman could see tiny figures moving within the lights, a thousand scenes playing out within the wizard’s breath. Flashes of another life, Stossel’s life, captured within the traitor’s final breath.

Wulfrik looked away from the dizzying spectacle of events, feeling his brain ache from the bombardment of stimulation. Grylikh, however, was not so timid, its multi-faceted eye riveted upon the strands of light. Cawing happily, the raven flew down amid the lights, snapping them from the air as though they were locusts, crushing each in its beak before eagerly devouring them.

The hero left the daemon to gorge itself upon Stossel’s soul. Sombrely, he made his way through the wreckage of the laboratory. There was much he still had to do. Zarnath had been at the top of his list of traitors he would see dead, but he was not the only one. With the shaman and Broendulf gone, it would be Sveinbjorn’s turn next.

The Aesling prince would wait until they were back in Norscan waters before trying to destroy Wulfrik.

Wulfrik would not be so patient.

EPILOGUE

Silver, slaves and gold. Wulfrik cast his gaze across the shore as the Norscans loaded the wealth of Wisborg into the holds of their longships. There were many sour looks directed at the Seafang by the marauders. The riches they had plundered from the town were respectable, but a far cry from the dazzling fortune they had been led to expect after Wulfrik’s display with the elven jewels back in Ormskaro.

Jarl Tostig and Than Canute, two of the most powerful chieftains who had set out upon the voyage, were especially bitter in their scrutiny of Wulfrik and his ship. Theirs had been the loudest voices urging a return to Norsca to divide such loot as they had taken in Wisborg. It would not be much, parted among so many, but it would at least pay for the warriors they had lost taking the town.

Wulfrik had proposed a different strategy. He would lead the fleet further down the Reik, to still greater and more wealthy cities, ripe for the plunderer’s sword. The hero’s offer had been met with enthusiasm by most of the marauders, if not their chieftains. In order to appease their own men, Tostig and Canute and the other leaders agreed to follow Wulfrik to another town and see if its coffers were more rewarding than those of Wisborg.

It was Jarl Tostig, full of venomous suspicion, who demanded that Wulfrik allow one of the other chiefs aboard the Seafang to ensure the veracity of the hero’s promise. Not willing to put his own neck at risk, Tostig suggested the one man among all the leaders who could be counted upon to be no friend of the Wanderer’s. Surprisingly, Sveinbjorn had made only a feeble effort to back out of the hole Tostig had put him in.

There was only one reason Sveinbjorn would be willing to sail on Wulfrik’s ship. Tostig was right to worry about treachery, but he should have spared some of his suspicions for Sveinbjorn while he was trying to guard against trickery.

The hero grinned at the level of callous ambition and greed the Aesling prince possessed. He knew Sveinbjorn had bribed men from his crew to sneak treasure from the other longships into the Seafang’s hold. He knew the prince had conspired to smuggle extra passengers aboard, hidden among the southling captives. Two dozen of Sveinbjorn’s most loyal hersirs could cause a great deal of trouble, given the chance.

As the last longship was loaded and the fleet took sail, Wulfrik was not surprised when he saw Skafhogg and Helreginn leading Sveinbjorn across the deck. There was a look of smug triumph on the prince’s face as he approached, the expression of the cat who has gobbled up the songbird.

‘You have a fine ship,’ Sveinbjorn said, running an appreciative hand along the Seafang’s rail. ‘I have never seen a vessel with such a splendid shape, such rugged beauty.’

‘I have already noted your eye for beauty,’ Wulfrik growled. ‘A foolish man might say we share the same tastes. I’d have to nail his tongue to the mast.’

Sveinbjorn chuckled at the thinly veiled threat. The way he moved his hand along the rail took on a languid, suggestive flair, as though tracing its way up a supple leg of ivory skin to squeeze the smooth thigh above. Sveinbjorn laughed again when he saw by the smouldering anger in Wulfrik’s eyes that the hero appreciated the gesture.

‘I would like to have a ship such as this,’ Sveinbjorn said. Other men from the Seafang’s crew now began to rise from their benches to approach the prow and their captain. Wulfrik could see the five hersirs Sveinbjorn had openly brought aboard with him as a bodyguard among the men closing upon him.

Wulfrik curled his lip and sneered at the Aesling prince. ‘You wouldn’t know how to handle a ship like this. I am told you don’t perform well with things of quality, be they ships or women.’

Outrage flared across Sveinbjorn’s face as the barb struck his ears. His hand fell to the hilt of his sword and started to draw it from his belt. Then the oily smile was back on his face. ‘I know you don’t like to share,’ Sveinbjorn told him. ‘So I’m not going to ask you to. Hjordis is mine, and so is this ship.’

‘You can’t command her magic,’ Wulfrik said, his tone as friendly as an open grave.

‘But you can!’ Sveinbjorn snarled, pointing his fist at the hero. He glanced aside, nodding his head, motioning for the crew to tighten the circle around their captain. ‘You can, and you will! By Shornaal’s teat, you’ll guide this ship where I tell you or I’ll geld you and stake your manhood on a briar thorn. A small briar thorn.’

Wulfrik eyed the warriors surrounding him, making no move towards his weapons. ‘You’ve planned this quite well,’ he said. ‘But in a rather predictable fashion. Tell me, how much of my treasure did you promise my crew if they betrayed me?’

Skafhogg pulled an ugly, crook-bladed knife from his boot, letting sunlight dance across its menacing edge. ‘A quarter of the plunder is ours when we deliver this ship to Prince Sveinbjorn.’

Sveinbjorn giggled vindictively as he listened to the Seafang’s helmsman pronounce Wulfrik’s defeat. The hero was nothing without his ship. He would be lost to the terrible doom the gods had set upon him. His only hope now was to grovel before his enemy and beg Sveinbjorn for mercy.

Wulfrik’s next words caused the Aesling to almost choke upon his laughter.

‘Tell the prince what I promised you when we return to Norsca,’ the chieftain said.

‘You offered us everything in the hold,’ Skafhogg declared. ‘Every coin, every keg, every thrall. All of it when we deliver Sveinbjorn to you.’

Before the prince could react, Skafhogg’s knife was pressed against his throat. Helreginn drove his spiked mace full into the skull of the closest hersir. Other crewmen swiftly dragged down the remaining Aeslings on deck.

Wulfrik smiled coldly at the shocked Sveinbjorn. ‘You’re a poor haggler,’ he said, baring his fangs. He noticed the colour drain from the prince’s face as the crew began throwing the bodies of his guards into the river. ‘Don’t fret after your men in the hold. They’ve already been dealt with.’

Sweat streamed down Sveinbjorn’s face, his lips turning almost colourless. ‘You don’t dare kill me!’ he yelled. ‘It will mean war! Ormskaro will burn!’

The hero rounded on Sveinbjorn, smashing his fist into the nose he had broken in Hjordis’s bedchamber. Except for Skafhogg’s support, the prince would have collapsed from the vicious strike.

‘It’ll be war,’ Wulfrik agreed. He turned his eyes from Sveinbjorn and snapped commands to his crew. ‘Remove this pig’s armour and helm! Lopt! You look slippery enough to pass for this scum at a distance! Put his armour on and strut about the decks like you own this ship! Olav! Remove my standard from the stern and put up Sveinbjorn’s banner!’

Wulfrik turned his eyes back on the bewildered Sveinbjorn. ‘The Seafang’s hold is filled to bursting, and with more treasure than either you or I could have acquired fairly. I’m guessing a fair amount of that plunder belongs to Tostig and Canute and the others. What was your plan, Sveinbjorn? Have me send the Seafang into the mists and cut the chains? We safely sail back to Norsca while everyone else gets eaten by the daemons? Or maybe the ships loyal to you and Viglundr make it back too?’

The shocked expression on Sveinbjorn’s face told Wulfrik his guess had hit very near the mark. ‘A good plan,’ the hero grunted. ‘But I’ve made a few changes to it.’ He looked away again to bark further orders to his crew. ‘Bring my priest and the prince’s prize horse up from the hold!’

‘I’ll call the fog and enter the border-realm,’ Wulfrik told Sveinbjorn. ‘But I have an errand to deal with first.’

The bound Sigmarite priest was hauled onto deck, battered by his ordeal but with his spirit unbroken. He glared at his captors and when his eyes fell upon Wulfrik, there was a gleam of raw hate in them. The chieftain was pleased to see his prisoner so defiant and filled with rage. He intended to use those qualities.

Wulfrik stalked across the deck until he stood before the warrior priest. He met the southling’s hate with an arrogant sneer. ‘I have decided to let you live, false-father,’ he told the Sigmarite.

‘Then you are stupid as well as obscene,’ the priest snarled back, making a powerful effort to raise his bound arms.

Wulfrik laughed at the priest’s malignance. He reached up and took the bridle of the sleek riding horse his crew had brought up from the hold. ‘I do not fear your Sigmar and I do not fear your Emperor. I am sending you to tell him to bring all his armies here and face me, if the dog has the stomach for battle. If he doesn’t, tell him I will take ten thousand pounds of silver as payment not to put his villages to the sword. Next time I will ask for more. Do you think you can remember all that?’

The warrior priest was smiling now. ‘I will happily take your message to Altdorf, barbarian. You will wait here for the Emperor’s answer?’

‘We will be near, upriver or down,’ Wulfrik answered. ‘If your Emperor looks, he will find us.’

‘Yes, he will,’ the priest promised as a pair of marauders lifted him onto the back of Sveinbjorn’s horse and tied him to the saddle.

The hero smiled at the southling’s remark. ‘Row to the other bank!’ he told his crew. ‘We have a messenger to set ashore.’

Wulfrik marched back across the deck to the bow of the ship where Skafhogg continued to hold Sveinbjorn prisoner. He passed Lopt, the pretend-prince cutting a prideful figure as he swaggered about the ship. There was small chance anyone watching from the other longships would think they were watching anyone but the Aesling prince.

There was confusion on the real Sveinbjorn’s face when Wulfrik returned to the Seafang’s bow.

‘I told you I made some changes to your plan,’ Wulfrik explained. ‘I won’t abandon good fighting men to daemons. The chains will be cut, but they will be cut before we enter the fog. The fleet will be stranded here, in the land of the southlings. My messenger will see that the wrath of the Empire is focussed here. He will send his ships and his armies looking for me. The men I leave behind will have to fight if they will ever see Norsca again. But the gods favour the strong. Some of them may make it back. But they won’t do it soon.’

Sveinbjorn gasped as he understood the horrible consequences of what Wulfrik had done. If any of those men returned to Norsca, they would say that it was Sveinbjorn, not Wulfrik, who had abandoned them. Even worse, they would think he had betrayed them to the southlings! The sagas would brand him the blackest traitor since Dletch Ogrefeeder!

‘No! Wulfrik!’ Sveinbjorn pleaded. ‘Kill me! Torture me! But leave me my name! I can give you gold!’

‘I want no gold,’ Wulfrik said. ‘I meant what I said when I told my crew everything in the hold was theirs.’ The hero waved his hand, motioning for a few of his crew to come near. Each of the three men carried an object in his hands. One held a metal pipe, a second bore a torch. The third carried a small wooden box. ‘Not everything,’ Wulfrik corrected himself. ‘I saved a little something for you.’

Sveinbjorn thrashed about in Skafhogg’s grip, trying to break free. The snaggletoothed warrior kept him pinned against the deck, helping the crew hold him down as Wulfrik took hold of the box. He opened the lid and quickly jabbed his armoured hand inside. When his hand emerged from the box, a slender, sinuous shape dangled from it, whipping coils about his wrist.

The prince looked with renewed terror at the metal pipe and burning torch. He knew what was coming. The most insulting death a Norscan could offer an enemy, a shameful death that even the Crow God would shun.

‘You can have Hjordis!’ Sveinbjorn cried.

Wulfrik took the pipe from one of the warriors with his free hand. He cast a cold gaze upon the pleading Aesling. ‘She’s not yours to give!’ he hissed. Skafhogg shifted his hold, forcing Sveinbjorn’s jaw open so that Wulfrik could insert the end of the pipe in the prince’s mouth. When the pipe was in place, Wulfrik sent the snake he held in his other hand slithering down the open end. To encourage its progress, the torch was used to heat the metal and drive the viper down Sveinbjorn’s throat.

‘So passes the next king of Ormskaro,’ Wulfrik said. ‘We will take his body back to the halls of his fathers and let them know of the passing of Sveinbjorn Snakebelly.

‘And then there will be war.’

Silence reigned in the darkened halls of Ormfell. Whispers of war were on the wind, rumours of rebellion among the jarls and thanes. No more did the walls of the tower echo with the laughter of midnight feasts, the song of harper and skald. A pall had descended upon Ormskaro, the darkest it had known since the death of King Torgald.

Viglundr sat alone in his empty council chamber, sullenly drinking a goblet of Bretonnian wine. With his most trusted jarls breaking faith with him, forming alliances among themselves to crown a new king, Viglundr was suspicious of his own huscarls. He would not end his days because of a twilight visitation and a cup of molten lead poured down his ear. If the Sarls wanted a new king, then they would fight the old one to do it.

Viglundr sloshed the wine around in his cup, staring sourly at the rich red liquid. Jackals! Vultures! The upstart chieftains thought Ormskaro was weak, thought this was their chance to slake their own ambitions. They knew many of Viglundr’s warriors had sailed away with Sveinbjorn and Wulfrik.

They would learn! When the fleet returned, its holds stuffed with treasure, Viglundr would be the wealthiest king in Norsca. He would hire armies to put down the rebellious chiefs, he would have sorcerers wither their lands and trolls devour their herds! Their children would be cast in chains and sold to the Kurgans! He would make of them an example that would horrify…

A shadow fell upon Viglundr’s throne, stirring the king from his thoughts. He looked up in fright, his hand reaching for the sword at his side. All thought of fight vanished when he saw something fall to the floor at his feet. Viglundr gazed in open-mouthed horror at the decapitated head of Sveinbjorn, the features battered and swollen by poison.

‘I brought your son-in-law back to you,’ Wulfrik told the king as he stepped out from the shadows. ‘Somebody put a snake in his belly.’

Viglundr continued to stare into Sveinbjorn’s cold features. ‘What have you done?’ the king gasped.

Wulfrik took another step towards the throne, an icy smile on his scarred face. ‘He had some idea of stealing my ship as well as my woman. I had some ideas of my own about that. I left the rest of the ships in the Empire to fare as they will. If the gods are kind, a few of them might make it back to Ormskaro in a year.’

The king reeled at Wulfrik’s words, staggering back, collapsing against the foot of his throne, his sword clattering to the floor. Sveinbjorn dead meant war with the Aeslings, and just when his own chieftains were giving him trouble. Loss of the fleet would bring those tribes that had sent ships on the voyage seeking wergild for them, at a time when Viglundr would need every ounce of silver to hire mercenaries.

‘They’re saying Sveinbjorn took control of the Seafang and it was he who cut the chains and abandoned the fleet. They say he even betrayed them to the southlings,’ Wulfrik said. ‘Of course, they say that only after my crew had told them that was what happened. The Aeslings will, of course, insist the treachery was your idea.’

Viglundr raised a trembling hand to his forehead. ‘You have brought ruin to Ormskaro,’ he croaked. ‘The tribes will descend upon my city like vengeful wolves.’

‘It will be amusing to see who comes for your blood first,’ agreed Wulfrik.

Viglundr lifted himself to his feet, supporting his shivering body by leaning against the side of his throne. ‘You have made your point,’ he told the hero. ‘Everything I hold I owe to your sword. You defeated King Torgald. You made everything possible. I accept that. I was wrong to try to cheat you.’

‘I fought one war for you,’ Wulfrik said, turning to walk away. ‘That was when I didn’t know better.’

‘Wait!’ pleaded the king. ‘You can’t forget Hjordis! If my city suffers, then she will suffer! Help me, and she is yours!’

Wulfrik’s eyes were empty, like those of a dead thing, when he turned and stared back at Viglundr. ‘Pray to the gods, king,’ the hero said. ‘You have nothing left to offer me.’

The marauder didn’t tarry to listen to Viglundr’s increasingly desperate cries. The king was already a dead man, but before he went slinking into the halls of his ancestors, he would see everything he had built, that his fathers had built, come crashing down. Ormskaro would burn. It would make such a bonfire as to blind the gods themselves.

A one-eyed raven circled the Seafang as Wulfrik’s longship slipped through the fjord of Ormskaro for the last time. The crew sat with sombre faces upon their benches, not a man among them daring to make a sound.

In the bow of the ship, Wulfrik stood, his hair whipping about him in the wind. He held a bundle of bloodied silk in his hands, his face raised to the sky, his keen eyes peering at the dark clouds, trying to see the visages of his gods. The champion’s eyes were devoid of warmth, as icy as when he had last gazed upon Viglundr.

Slowly, he reached into the makeshift bundle, lifting from within a gory strip of flesh.

‘To Khorne, the face I would have kissed,’ Wulfrik called out, his solemn words rolling across the waves. He flung the tatter of soft pale skin into the sea and reached into the bundle for another offering.

‘To Slaanesh, the heart I would have cherished. To Nurgle the belly I would have filled with sons and daughters.’

As he made each offering, Wulfrik cast another ghastly prize into the sea. Finally the bag was empty. Slowly, reluctantly, the chieftain removed a lock of golden hair from his belt. He stared sadly at it for a time, then cast it into the sea to join the other offerings.

‘To Tzeentch, the last hope of love,’ he said, feeling the bitter pain of his loss pulsing through his body.

Wulfrik stared out across the sea, watching the horizon where dark clouds met darker waters. He could feel the might of his gods. Everything he had suffered would have come to him even without the curse. Viglundr would still have stolen Hjordis from him, gifting her to that Aesling pig Sveinbjorn. His love would still have been betrayed and defiled, the stink of another man on her flesh, the taste of another man on her lips.

What he had thought a curse had in fact been a blessing. Because of the curse, he had been given the tools to destroy his betrayers. Without the power of the Seafang he would never have been able to tempt and trap wily schemers like Viglundr and Sveinbjorn. Without the fame and glory of being the Worldwalker, he would never have gained the loyalty of men like Njarvord and Arngeirr, Jokull and Skafhogg. Without the lies of Zarnath, the pieces would never have come together.

The gods had helped him, now Wulfrik would serve them. There would be no more attempts to escape his doom. He would sail the Great Western Ocean and the fog between worlds and he would strike down the sacrifices demanded of him by the gods.

Overhead, the raven cawed, gradually turning in its flight, soaring back towards the icy mountains of Norsca.

Its work was done.

The gods had their champion now and for all eternity.

PALACE OF THE PLAGUE LORD

CHAPTER ONE

Pain. It was more than a word, more than a sensation. It was existence itself, the entirety of Einarr’s world: day upon day, night upon night of red, searing pain. There were moments of brief respite, when even the Norscan’s formidable endurance would break beneath the unremitting torment. At such times, his awareness faded into black, merciful nothingness, fleeing before the kiss of flame and lash. But there was no lasting retreat from his tormentors.

Whether his stupor lasted an hour or a day, Einarr could not tell, but always they were there to drag him back into his agonised flesh, to begin his torture anew. A weaker man might have cried out to the gods, begging them for deliverance or death. Einarr was not such a man. Pain was the price of failure and weakness; the terrible gods of the north had no pity for that which was weak. Better to die with the pride and honour befitting a warrior of the Baersonlings and deny his tormentors the victory of seeing him crawl.

Einarr should have died in the ambush, found a death worthy of a Norscan on the battlefield, his axe red and his enemies scattered about his feet, but such an end had not been the capricious whim of the gods. Instead he had been rendered insensible by a strike against his skull and fallen alive into the hands of his foe. It was as ignoble a doom as any son of Vinnskor could dread. To fall into the hands of the Aeslings was more terrible still.

Through the red fog of his misery, memory came flooding back into the reaver’s troubled mind…

The chill half-light of the afternoon cast long shadows across the forest path. The long days of summer were gone and the icy lands of Norsca were now falling under the frozen darkness of winter. The sun was nothing more than a fiery glow smouldering just beneath the horizon. Even in midday, the stars stood bright in the darkling sky, lending their distant brilliance to the half-hearted struggle against the unyielding twilight.

The sighing wind and the drip of melting snow surrounded the winding hunters’ trail. Only in the hours of midday were the sun’s rays powerful enough to warm the land even slightly above freezing. The morning frost and the evening snow splashed from the white-shrouded branches of the tall pines while the trees themselves groaned and cracked as the frozen sap within them started to thaw.

All but the hardiest, most savage of birds and beasts abandoned the forests and mountains of Norsca when winter unsheathed its frozen claws, hiding within their burrows and lairs or retreating into the warmer environs of Kislev and the south. The pine forests were all but stripped of life, only the hungry wolf and the stubborn musk ox still braving the snow-swept terrain.

But it was neither wolf nor ox that prowled along the forest path. Tall, hulking shapes, their powerful frames wrapped in furs and encased in armour of leather and bronze, marched beneath the frozen trees. The flash of steel gleamed from the axes clenched in their brawny fists and upon the weather-beaten face beneath each iron helm was chiselled a scowl of ferocious hate and livid rage. The pale eyes of the Norscans only partially focused upon their snowy surroundings, the minds behind them filled with visions of blood and slaughter and revenge.

Clad in a white wolfskin coat, the foremost of the grizzled reavers was a wiry greybeard, his years written in the scars that pitted his leathery face. The old hunter carried a heavy iron-tipped boar spear in his gloved hands, the weapon following his gaze as he studied the tree line. He paused his cautious steps and held up a fist. Behind him, the Norscan warriors also came to a halt, sullenly staring into the trees, trying to see for themselves whatever sign their guide had discovered.

The old hunter turned slowly and jogged back toward the warriors. One of the hulking reavers strode forward to meet him. He was an immense, bear-like man, a giant, standing a full head above the warriors around him, massive shoulders and deep barrel chest straining against the heavy leather hauberk that covered his torso. Thick ropes of muscle bulged beneath the furs wrapped about his powerful limbs, a broad-bladed sword gripped in one of his paw-like hands. From his massively corded neck rose a head almost lost within the shaggy pale hair that covered it. Bone charms and talismans were braided into the warrior’s blond mane, swaying with his every motion. The warrior’s face was almost as leathery as that of the hunter, the grey scar of an old wound running across the broad, low brow. Pale eyes shone from the recesses of the reaver’s face, colder than the frozen world around them.

‘What is it, Svanr? What shadows make you jump this time?’ the warrior demanded.

‘Shadows indeed!’ spat Svanr. ‘How many winters have your eyes seen, Einarr son of Sigdan? Can they tell you how long the frost has lain unbroken or when the wolf last walked this path?’

Einarr nodded, understanding the wisdom in the hunter’s words. A good war leader was marked not simply by his own strengths but by his ability to recognise the strengths of those he led. If Svanr felt that caution was more important than speed, then Einarr was wise enough to bow to the old hunter’s greater experience. It still frustrated him, however, and he could not keep his emotions from his tongue. ‘The men are impatient to sink their steel into Aesling flesh,’ Einarr said. ‘We must make the scum pay a dear price for stealing our cattle and butchering our freeholders and thralls! There will be no rest until we have collected our wergild from the Aeslings – one way or another!’

Svanr shook his head. ‘We are in Aesling territory now,’ the hunter said. He stabbed a fur-covered finger in a vaguely north-east direction. ‘Skraevold lies only a half day from this forest. For all the strength and courage of our warriors, against the entire village it will be the victory of the Aeslings not the Baersonlings that the skalds will sing.’

Einarr nodded, clapping his massive hand against the hunter’s shoulder. ‘Then we shall need to trust your knowledge of these passes to catch these raiders before they can reach Skraevold. Lead us to them, Svanr. Our steel hungers!’

The war leader’s oath had barely been spoken when a sharp cry echoed through the forest. One of Einarr’s warriors had dropped to his knees, a heavy spear stuck in his chest. None of the reavers moved to help their stricken comrade, instead turning to face the tree line from which the spear had been thrown. A roaring, howling mob of savage figures erupted from the foliage.

‘The Aes!’ Einarr hissed as he turned towards the attackers. The vanguard of the marauders had already crashed against the Baersonling warriors, slashing at them with double-headed axes and battering them with massive iron flails. The Aeslings bore the same imposing Norscan physique as their foes, but where the hair and beards of the Baersonlings was pale and gold, that of the Aeslings was dark and crimson. The faces of the snarling attackers were hideously scarred, the runes of the Blood Lord carved into each man’s cheek and forehead. The marauders wore heavier armour than the Baersonlings and their arms were covered in bands of steel and bronze. From the belts of many swung the severed heads of those the raiders had slain, offerings they would take back to Skraevold and their gruesome god-beast.

The sight of the heads incensed the Baersonlings, and their momentary surprise was forgotten as a fresh surge of rage energised them. The warriors met the frenzied assault of the raiders with their own brutal fury. War howls echoed across the frozen landscape, punctuated by the shrieks of the maimed and the dying. As Einarr sprinted into the fray, he saw one Aesling pitch into the snow, his neck slashed open by the edge of a warrior’s sword. The stricken marauder’s blood sprayed across the snow, painting it bright red for a dozen feet and more. Even so, the mortally wounded Aesling tried to regain his feet, tried to return to the battle even as his life jetted from his cleft neck.

One Aesling, his teeth as wicked and sharp as those of any wolf, brought the ball of his flail smashing into the skull of a warrior, striking with such awful violence that his blow cracked the man’s skull and his iron helm. Einarr focused on the fanged marauder, sprinting towards him. The marauder turned from his dying victim and locked eyes with the onrushing war leader, swinging his gory weapon in anticipation.

As Einarr approached, the raider swung his flail at the warrior, trying to smash his weapon against the warrior’s head. Einarr’s sword intercepted the flail, swatting it aside, the heavy chain wrapping around the blade. Before the Aesling could react, Einarr twisted his sword arm, pulling the marauder forward and almost tearing the weapon from his powerful grip. Without breaking his charge, Einarr drove his shoulder full force into the raider, staggering him. The flail was torn free of the marauder’s grip as he was driven back and Einarr was swift in pressing his advantage. With the flail’s chain still wrapped around it, he brought the edge of his sword smashing into his foe’s face, cleaving his nose and severing his jaw.

Bloody froth erupted from the raider’s face as he spat broken teeth and torn tissue into the snow. With a second slash of his sword, Einarr tore a jagged line across the Aesling’s armour, twisted bronze scales clattering onto the ground. Before Einarr could try again, the raider’s massive fist cracked against the side of his head, almost knocking him to his knees. Einarr responded by smashing his forehead into the marauder’s already ruined face. He could feel the broken bones cutting into his own skin, but was rewarded by the raider’s agonised howl.

Einarr’s head was still ringing from the marauder’s blow, yet beyond the clamour pounding inside his skull, above even the clamour of the battle raging all around him, he thought he could hear the mournful report of a horn. As the marauder he was fighting wiped blood from his eyes and drew a small hand axe from his belt, Einarr risked a look at the battlefield around him. Of the twenty who had left Vinnskor, only three had fallen to the Aeslings, taking six of the foe with them. Einarr felt his chest swell with triumph, but as he looked beyond the swirling melee, he saw something that put the lie to his hopes for vengeance and victory. One of the marauders had broken away from the combat and was blowing into the long, curved ram’s horn he carried. And the note was answered, unless the blow he had taken had left his senses completely shaken. For the first time, cold dread began to tug at the corners of Einarr’s mind.

The Aesling charged back towards Einarr and there was no more time to turn his fears into thought. Einarr slashed low as the raider chopped at him with his axe, this time his strike cracking against the armour the man wore over his knee. The reinforced leather prevented the strike from cutting the raider’s flesh, but did not completely lessen the force of the blow. The marauder pitched into the earth as his knee popped out of joint and his leg gave way beneath him. Einarr was on the Aesling in an instant, pouncing on him with the ferocity of a sabretusk. The warrior pounded the hilt of his sword into the Aesling’s head even as the warrior lifted his axe to defend himself. The marauder slumped beneath the first strike, but struggled to rise once more. Einarr brought the hilt crashing down a second time, then a third. When he struck for the fourth time, there was a sickening crunch and the Aesling became still, the fires of rage fading from his now unfocused eyes.

Einarr rose from the dead Aesling, pausing only to free his sword from the flail still wrapped around it. He looked around him for the next who would fall by his sword, but as he did so, the dread he had felt returned. There were shapes rushing down the path from the direction in which he had imagined the horn had been answered.

The blood-dyed hair and facial scars marked the men as Aeslings from Skraevold. Einarr felt the sickness of shame and fear well up within his stomach. It was not the fear of death that gripped him, for no true Norscan feared escaping the illusion of flesh, but the fear that he had led his men into a trap, the shame that he had failed to exact revenge for his kinfolk. As he watched the Aeslings charge down the path, Einarr realised the mistake they had made. The men of Vinnskor had not been the hunters, but the hunted. The small group of men they had been tracking was nothing more than bait and now twice their number was coming to close the trap. Einarr yelled into the twilight sky, shouting his defiance to the oncoming marauders. If he had made mistakes, he would atone for them now and the Aeslings would pay a dear price for their deceit.

The half-dozen Aesling warriors who had survived the battle with the Baersonlings now began to fight defensively, no longer trying to butcher their way through their foes, merely trying to keep them occupied so that the main body of marauders could smash into the undefended enemy flank. Einarr saw the danger, as did his men. Two, young reavers just growing their beards, turned and fled, throwing their axes into the snow in their haste to flee. Einarr watched them run with contempt. If there were not Aeslings to kill, he’d have cut down the two cowards for shaming the honour of Vinnskor. Instead, Einarr tried to gather as many of his men as he could to prepare for the second group of Aeslings. Einarr knew the odds were long; against the weak men of the south, eight Baersonlings might stand against thirty, but, despise them as he did, he knew an Aesling was a worthier foe. The gods were said to look favourably upon those who fought a hopeless fight. Einarr hoped they were paying attention now.

‘Look to the man beside you,’ Einarr growled. ‘Watch his back and guard it well. Don’t let yourself become too eager. There are plenty of Aes to go around.’ The comment brought a grim chuckle from his men. They knew as well as he that they would all be sitting in the halls of their ancestors before the twilight faded. But they would take many of their foes with them. That much victory they could still hope to wrest from the fists of the gods.

The Aeslings came, roaring like beasts, their scarred faces twisted with bloodlust. Einarr roared back at them and his warriors took up his cry. The marauders smashed into their line and Einarr’s sword slashed out, cutting the arm from a bearded Aesling with iron studs through his nose. The raider dropped and the warrior beside Einarr chopped into the man’s back with his axe. The mangled Aesling tried to crawl away, but was trampled beneath the iron-shod boots of the raiders rushing to take his place.

Einarr gave the man’s death no further thought as his sword batted aside the axes of the man’s replacements, snarling brutes with horned helms. One of the marauders recovered from Einarr’s parry, turning his axe and chopping at the war leader’s shoulder. Einarr sidestepped the blow, slashing his own blade beneath the axeman’s guard and slicing into the meat of his leg. The axeman stumbled but did not fall, the bloodlust in his eyes burning still brighter as he brought his weapon up for another strike.

Before Einarr could thrust his blade at the axeman, the other marauder was swinging his own weapon at the reaver. The edge of the axe slammed into Einarr’s side, digging into the reinforced leather. Einarr could feel several of the bronze plates woven into the armour pinching against his flesh. Knowing it would expose him to the man’s comrade, he twisted around with the marauder as he drew back for another blow, sinking his sword into the Aesling’s armpit. Bright blood spurted from the wound and the marauder’s arm fell limp as Einarr turned the blade upwards and sliced through muscle and bone. Then he was turning again, ready to face the first axeman, the raider who had amazingly hesitated long enough for Einarr to mutilate his comrade. Einarr found the man already fallen to his knees, his hands clenched around the ragged hole in his throat. Svanr nodded respectfully to Einarr, then thrust his bloodied spear into the midsection of another charging Aesling. There was no time to be thankful for the hunter’s timely assistance, and Einarr turned to finish off the marauder he had wounded.

The roar of battle faded gradually, as the Aeslings overwhelmed the Baersonlings, their greater numbers prevailing. One by one, the men of his village were cut down. Chief among those who had killed his men was an immense raider with a skull-shaped helm, his arms covered in golden bands almost from wrist to shoulder. Touched by the gods this mighty butcher was, stomping across the battlefield on hoofed feet, spitting sizzling death from his fanged mouth to melt the faces of his foes after he had carved them to shreds with his twin swords. Einarr had struggled to face the imposing marauder, to pit his sword against the Aesling champion’s blade, but always the press of marauders around him thwarted him.

The murderous attentions of the champion were enough to turn the tide on their own, but there was another fighter among the Aeslings every bit as deadly. Thin and lean, his body cloaked in bearskin, a tall helmet framing his wrinkled face, this was one whom even the Aesling marauders seemed to fear, parting before him as hawks before an eagle. The Baersonling warriors who saw him cringed away in terror, making no move to protect themselves as the scrawny marauder slashed at them with his bladed staff. Every man of the north knew one of the mighty seers when he saw them, the chosen prophet-priests of the Dark Gods. Every man of the north knew that to raise a hand against a seer was to invite the wrath of the gods. A seer might strike down a warrior, but a warrior did not dare strike down a seer. Not that any mortal could hope to defend against the terrible powers of a seer. The heavy oak staff the shaman carried was tipped with a metal blade, but it was a bright, silvery metal Einarr had seldom seen – the fabulous steel only elves could forge. With his blade, the seer carved through armour as easily as butter, cleaving men from hip to rib when he slashed at them. In his wake, the seer left piles of screaming human debris.

Einarr was thankful for his determination to face the Aesling champion, for the champion and the seer were at opposite ends of the battlefield. The closer he drew to the champion, the further away from the seer he was. Finally, his perseverance told out and Einarr could see the skull-helmed champion looming just beyond the flail-wielding marauder he was currently fighting. Even as he battled the marauder, trying to keep the raider from bashing his brains in, Einarr found his eyes straying again and again to the monstrous champion.

The marauder chief was fighting two Baersonlings; the last of his men Einarr could see anywhere. One was old Svanr, the other a young axeman named Tjorvi. As Einarr swatted back the attack of the marauder fighting him, he saw the champion doing the same with his own enemies. Then, with a speed that belied his armoured bulk, the champion brought his double swords slashing across the body of Tjorvi. The axeman stumbled back, blood streaming down his sides and the champion lunged forward, raking both swords before him in a cross pattern. Tjorvi’s head leapt into the air, his face locked in a silent scream as it crashed into the snow.

While Tjorvi was being killed, Svanr charged at the champion’s back, his spear aimed at the marauder’s spine. Almost as part of the same motion that had decapitated Tjorvi, the champion spun around and brought his blades slashing at Svanr. One sword chopped the hunter’s spear in half, the other crunched into the old man’s body, nearly severing his leg at the hip.

Einarr shouted in fury, driving his knee into the groin of his own foe. The Aesling crumpled and Einarr did not give him time to recover, bringing the edge of his own weapon cutting across the man’s neck. He left the marauder to bleed out and before any of his comrades could close upon him, Einarr was charging towards the champion and the embattled Svanr.

It was too late. Even as Einarr drew near the champion and shouted his challenge to the chieftain, the skull-helmed marauder was dropping Svanr’s lifeless body to the ground. The hunter’s face was a steaming mess of dripping tissue, burned down almost to the bone by the champion’s acidic spittle. Einarr roared again, lunging at the champion. The twin swords were there to block his attack, one swatting aside the warrior’s sword, the other slashing toward his neck. Reflexes born from years raiding the northern coasts of the Empire served Einarr well as he recoiled from the champion’s deadly blade. It was the first step in a deadly dance as the champion set his impossible speed and strength against Einarr’s reflexes and agility. It did not take Einarr long to realise that he was hopelessly on the defensive, pushed back with every attack the champion made. He cringed every time his eyes strayed to the chieftain’s skull-helm, wondering when a spray of burning venom would come searing into his own face.

The marauders began to form a wide ring around the combat, watching as their leader dealt with the last of the Aesling warriors. Einarr only dimly heard their jeers and hoots, his every thought fixated upon reacting to the champion’s deadly blades. He felt his muscles beginning to burn under the strain of meeting the chieftain’s attacks, felt his heart thundering within his chest. It would not be long, he knew, but the gods despised a man who did not fight to his last breath.

The champion drew back as Einarr narrowly avoided a slash that would have cut his arm from its socket. The Aesling laughed deeply, a sound that silenced the marauders watching the combat. ‘You fight well, for a Baerson,’ the champion laughed, his voice deep and booming. ‘What is your name? I shall carve it upon your skull when I offer it to great Kharnath!’

‘I am Einarr, son of Sigdan,’ this between deep gasps as he tried to recover his breath. ‘And it is your skull that shall grace the Skull Throne!’

The champion chuckled again as he heard Einarr’s empty bravado.

‘It is Kolsveinn, Jarl of Skraevold who sends you to the gods,’ he said. ‘When you see Kharnath, you will tell him what hand ended your days!’

Einarr braced himself for what he knew would be Kolsveinn’s final attack. He could not hope to defend against the jarl much longer and knew he would get no other respite. Yet even as he prepared to meet his ancestors, Einarr felt something crack against the back of his skull. He fell to his knees, then the blow was repeated and he collapsed to the ground. He could hear the voice of Kolsveinn roaring furiously, could almost feel the jarl’s armoured feet stomping the ground around him. In answer to the jarl’s outrage, a low, wispy voice, like steam rising from a forge, spoke.

‘This one has been marked for Kharnath,’ the voice said. ‘By your own words you have made it so.’ Through the swimming stars that sparkled across his vision, Einarr could see the seer standing over him, fresh blood dripping from the blunt butt of his staff.

‘He is mine, Alfkaell! Be you bloodfather or no, this one is mine!’

The seer merely smiled at his jarl’s fury. ‘By your own words, you have offered this one to Kharnath, the great Skull Lord. Would you think it wise to cheat him, especially with your own sword? Enjoy the victory you have won this day, Kolsveinn, for if you cheat the Blood God, it will be your last!’

The champion glared at Alfkaell for a moment, then sheathed his swords and turned away. Even a jarl knew there were powers he did not dare oppose. Alfkaell gestured with his gnarled hands and marauders came forward to lift Einarr from the ground.

‘This one comes back with us to Skraevold,’ Alfkaell said. ‘He will make a fine offering for the god-beast.’

Einarr was dragged unceremoniously through the muddy lanes of Skraevold, blood dripping from his wounds. Through his bruised face, Einarr could see the women of the village going about their daily chores, gathering water from the well, and tossing feed to mobs of black-feathered chickens. Children were everywhere, laughing and jeering at the Baersonling, hurling stones at the captive until their aim strayed and the two burly warriors dragging him through the street turned on the whelps and ran them off with threats and curses.

It was a familiar scene for Einarr. Every day he was taken to the squat, cold building that the Aeslings used to butcher meat when they were not using it to torture captives. Long hours under the tender mercies of his tormentors, then his agonised body would be taken back to his cage. Unlike most of the clans of Norsca, the Aeslings of Skraevold did not keep slaves, seeing the practice as a sign of weakness and decadence, taking pride in working their own fields, mining their own stone and felling their own timber. Where another clan might have a stockade to hold its captives, Skraevold had no such structure. Instead, Einarr found himself entombed within the village kennels, a narrow, thick-walled timber building on the outskirts of the settlement. The building was dark and dank, the thick animal smell of the dozens of warhounds and hunting dogs kept by the Aeslings making the air stagnant.

The warriors carrying Einarr forced the Baersonling to his feet as they entered the kennels. Their arrival was greeted by the snarls of the hounds, a din that pounded against Einarr’s skull as brutally as the fists and bludgeons of his torturers. The barrel-chested Aesling pushed Einarr forward. After hours of torture, the strength in Einarr’s body was all but spent. As he tried to maintain his balance, he stumbled and crashed against the dog cages. Instantly the savage hounds were pressed against the wooden bars, snapping at the prisoner’s flesh. Einarr felt sharp teeth dig into his back, felt a fresh stream of blood trickling down his back. Powerful hands closed about Einarr’s head, pulling him away from the cage. The treatment was only slightly less brutal than the fangs of the hounds.

‘You’ll not cheat the gods that way, Baerson!’ one of the barrel-chested warriors growled. Behind him, Einarr could see the dogs snapping and snarling; their bloodlust aroused by the scent of his blood. The Aesling warrior turned towards the slavering mongrels, smashing the heft of his flail against the wooden bars, driving the beasts back. ‘This one is not for you!’ he hissed. The warrior turned back toward Einarr as his comrade pulled the prisoner back to his feet. He leaned into the face of his captive, his ale-ridden breath stinging Einarr’s nose.

‘Make no mistake, Baerson,’ the warrior sneered. ‘You will wish we had let the dogs finish you before we are finished.’ Einarr smiled at the threat, spitting a bloody froth into the bearded visage of the Aesling. The warrior staggered back, howling as he wiped the filth from his face. His comrade shifted his hold on Einarr, closing his immense arm around the captive’s neck. Einarr felt what little energy he still had drain from him beneath the strangler’s embrace.

The kennels echoed with the agitated howls of the dogs, excited by the savage emotions of the men outside the cages. The marauder stormed back towards Einarr, glaring murder at the prisoner. The strangler relaxed his hold as his comrade returned, before his grip crushed Einarr’s life as well as his defiance. The bearded warrior tightened his grip on his flail as he stared at Einarr, the prisoner’s bloody spittle still dripping from his face. For a long moment, the Aesling was silent. Then he smiled and shook his head.

‘No, Baerson,’ the warrior said, motioning for his comrade to march Einarr to his cage. ‘You’ll not trick me into cheating Bloodfather Alfkaell from offering you to the god.’ Einarr found himself brutally shoved into the timber cage that acted as his cell, the heavy door smashing close behind him as the strangler slammed it shut. The captive struggled to remain standing, but at last gave up the effort, sinking to the icy earthen floor. The bearded warrior grinned at him from beyond the bars. He threw a badly gnawed bone that looked as though it had been stolen from one of the hounds into Einarr’s cell.

‘Better eat up while you can,’ the Aesling laughed. ‘The god likes a little meat on its offerings.’ The harsh laughter of his captor was all but drowned out by the barking dogs as the warrior withdrew. Einarr waited until the two torturers were gone before reaching for the bone they had thrown him. There was still a faint scrap of meat clinging to the joint and he set about it with ravenous ferocity. He did not trouble himself over what had previously been gnawing at his meal, nor at what kind of meat had once surrounded the bone. All that mattered was the energy and strength his miserable meal could give him, strength that would allow Einarr to live for another day. Strength that might preserve him long enough to make the Aeslings pay for all that they had done.

Einarr gathered the filthy straw littered about his cage in a hopeless attempt to fend off the cold. He felt sharp stabs of pain run up his arms as he reached out to sweep the straw towards him. Einarr pulled back, trying to knead the suffering from his arm with his callused hand. The scabby crust of dried blood cracked beneath his ministrations, a crimson treacle running down his forearms. The renewed scent of blood urged the hounds to renew their excited barking.

‘The ymir take your mangy hides!’ Einarr cursed, calling on the hoary ice devils of the mountains. He settled back against the cold timber wall of his cage. For all of the injuries he had suffered, he could be thankful for one thing. Despite the agonies they had visited upon him, his torturers were loath to go too far. They intended him as a sacrifice to the gods, and as such he had to be kept relatively intact, for the gods would look poorly upon an offering that was too badly damaged. They had stopped short of breaking bones and tearing muscles.

It was something for which Einarr could be thankful. The backhanded restraint shown by his captors meant that for all his privation and torment, he was still physically intact. If the opportunity presented itself, he might yet wrest from Skraevold a death worthy of a Norscan.

CHAPTER TWO

The sudden silence that filled the kennels snapped Einarr from the restless sleep that had stolen upon him. The incessant barking and yapping of the dogs had been broken, replaced by an imposing stillness. Einarr rolled onto his back, letting his eyes adjust to the icy gloom that filled the kennels. Two sapphire orbs gleamed at him from the shadows beyond his cage, staring at him with sinister curiosity. Einarr glared back at the shadowy figure, even as his body cringed from the supernatural chill emanating from the apparition. The eyes and the cold were things Einarr knew only too well. The time had come then. Bloodfather Alfkaell had come to offer him up to the gods of Skraevold.

‘They tell me it takes much to make you scream, Baerson,’ the shaman rasped, his voice like a cold northern wind. ‘That is good. Very good. The gods are pleased with those who are strong. It is good to offer them such souls.’

From the darkness, Einarr could see the shaman more distinctly now – the withered, emaciated frame, the heavy bearskin cloak festooned with runestones and bone talismans, the tall elven helm that framed the man’s sharp features. The heavy staff Alfkaell carried seemed to glow in the darkness with a strange, smouldering light. Einarr found his eyes straying from the unnatural light to the glistening metal blade that tipped the shaman’s staff. He had seen for himself the lethal edge the blade possessed; the impossible keenness only the witch-metal of the elves could keep. With such a blade, the timber poles of his cage would not confine him long.

‘That must be why the Aeslings raid and maraud against their neighbours,’ Einarr said. ‘Because there is none in this maggot nest that the gods would take.’

‘Do you know how you will die?’ Alfkaell asked, ignoring Einarr’s insults. ‘Skraevold has been blessed by the gods. In my grandfather’s time, the skald was touched by the Skull Lord and changed into a thing of the gods, a living sacrament of their power and might. It is with us still, a temple of flesh to the Skull Lord. We shall offer you to it, that through the beast your soul may be given to mighty Kharnath and feed his mighty hunger. You will scream then, as the great beast strips the flesh from you, as it licks the hot blood from your bones. The beast takes a long time to kill a man – you will think yourself dead a thousand times over before the end finally comes. Suffering pleases great Kharnath, and the beast will see that the Skull Lord is satisfied with our offering.’

Einarr rose to his feet, grinding his teeth against the pulse of agony that throbbed through him as he did so. Bracing himself against the bars of his cage, he forced his way to the front of his cell, glaring into the smirking features of Alfkaell. ‘If this beast of yours grew from an Aesling, it is no thing of the gods. I will crush its skull with my hands and spit on its carcass when I am done. You offer it no child this day, crow-caller, but a warrior, a son of Vinnskor!’

The shaman took a step back from the bars of Einarr’s cage, but the smile remained on his face. ‘It is good that you are defiant, that you shout your idle boasts so proudly. It will make the sacrifice all the more amusing for the Skull Lord. You will shout louder still when the beast’s paws flay your flesh, when its jaws chew upon your soul.’

Einarr glared into Alfkaell’s luminous eyes. ‘When I have strangled the life from your beast, you will be next, carrion-eater. How loudly will you scream when I carve that smirk from your withered face? Tell me what amusement your cries will give the gods as you beg me to let you die.’ Einarr could see some of the amusement fall away from Alfkaell’s expression, watched as the shaman’s features hardened.

‘I will take extreme pleasure offering you to the Skull Lord,’ Alfkaell hissed.

‘Do you not mean offering me up to your beast?’ Einarr retorted. ‘What is wrong, scavenger-rat, do you need a beast to bring the favour of the gods to Skraevold?’ The venomous words were falling from Einarr’s tongue faster than his mind could form them, smashing against the shaman’s pride. Einarr could see the man’s flesh turning crimson, could almost feel Alfkaell’s enraged gaze burning into him. A part of him suddenly realised what he was doing, what sort of man he was insulting. This was a shaman, a man touched by the gods, wielder of strange and terrible powers. It was madness to incite such a man, to tempt the awful vengeance a seer could inflict upon a mere mortal. Yet another part of him swelled up within him, filling Einarr with rage. He was already destined to die, what more hurt could befall him by stoking the ire of the shaman. Again, words poured from Einarr’s lips, stabbing into Alfkaell’s ego. ‘Will the gods not listen to the words of the great and terrible Alfkaell? Will even ravenous Kharnath not accept a sacrifice from your own hand?’

‘Enough, wretch!’ Alfkaell snarled. He gestured with his staff towards the cage, the ithilmar blade fixed to its head gleaming in the meagre light. ‘Be silent or I shall cut that wagging tongue from you!’

‘How will mighty Kharnath hear my screams then?’ Einarr replied, laughing as he saw the shaman become still more incensed. ‘The Aeslings are indeed a stupid people not to understand it takes more than a bit of elven steel to make a seer.’

‘Fall silent, cur!’

Einarr laughed at the shaman’s command. ‘Tell me, Alfkaell, what lies did you tell your people about your talismans? Did you tell them stories about some mighty battle in the elf havens, or some great lie about sacking a terrible elven ship?’

‘When the god-beast has finished with you, I shall feed your manhood to the crows!’ Alfkaell threatened, shaking his staff at Einarr. The shaman’s knuckles were white where he held the weapon. Einarr knew he stared at death when he looked into the seer’s eyes, but the prospect held no great terror for him and the baiting words continued to roll off his tongue. Nothing Alfkaell could do to him would be any worse than what the shaman already intended.

‘Tell me, Alfkaell, did you scavenge your trophies from a wreck or did you earn it as wergild when your woman did not give you a son?’ Einarr could see the fury boiling over in the seer’s face. Even as far away as Vinnskor the story of Alfkaell’s wife had been heard, how she had thrown herself from the cliffs rather than endure the seer’s embrace. ‘Or was it the woman’s fault? Perhaps a thrall such as you is more accustomed to being a consort than taking one!’

Einarr braced himself for the stabbing thrust of Alfkaell’s staff. One swift strike and it would all be over, one lethal cut from the ithilmar blade and he would escape the waking dream of the mortal coil and walk among the gods. Yet even as he gritted his teeth against the coming blow, something inside told him to lunge forward, towards the wooden bars of his cage. Einarr stared at Alfkaell, saw the raw hate burning in his eyes. Yet somehow the emotion was muted, indeed there was a sense of dullness about the shaman’s cold gaze, a brute quality that reminded Einarr of an ox or goat. Instead of using the great reach of his staff to stab at Einarr from beyond the bars, Alfkaell stepped towards the cage, so close that Einarr could smell the mangy bearskin draped about the seer’s shoulders, could smash his fist into the seer’s furious face.

The warrior did not hesitate to question the foolishness that had set upon the seer. Instantly, Einarr’s massive frame crashed against the bars of his cage, his powerful arm shooting between the timbers to close about Alfkaell’s windpipe. The dull quality still filled the shaman’s eyes as the captive squeezed and tightened his hold about the man’s neck. Alfkaell brought the shaft of his staff smacking against Einarr’s arm, but the effort was feeble and painless compared to the days of torture Einarr had endured. His grip tightened and the seer’s eyes began to bulge, the dullness beginning to fade as Alfkaell’s lungs filled with hot, spoiled breath. The familiar, evil cunning reasserted itself and from the corner of his eye, Einarr could see the shaman adjust his hold on his staff, grabbing it just beneath the bladed tip and pointing it towards the warrior’s belly.

With a savage roar, Einarr twisted his arm, snapping the shaman’s neck with a grotesque crunch that echoed through the still silent kennels. He heard Alfkaell’s staff clatter to the floor, watched as the smouldering life in the seer’s eyes began to fade. Einarr let the limp form slip from his hand, watching with apprehension as the shaman’s corpse flopped to the floor. It was taboo amongst the tribes of Norsca to strike down one of the god-touched seers, an act certain to bring the vengeance of those same gods upon any who dared such blasphemy. A man might kill a jarl or even a king, but he did not dare raise his hand against one who served the gods.

Einarr shuddered as he considered what he had done. He had thought to goad the seer into attacking him, into giving him a quick and clean death. Instead, it was Alfkaell who had died. The Baersonling stared at the timber roof above him, imagining the angry eyes of the gods glaring down upon him. He held his breath as he waited for their terrible fury to be visited upon him. But long moments passed and slowly his breath grew normal. The fear trickled from his veins, reason subduing the superstition that had paralysed him with terror. Alfkaell was dead, and if the gods had cared so much for the Aesling seer, they had done nothing to stay Einarr’s hand. The warrior looked again at the cold, still shape of the seer, crumpled on the filthy floor of the kennel like a pile of discarded rags. Then Einarr’s eye was caught by the bright shine of metal. He laughed as he saw it, the sound causing the still cowed hounds in the cages around him to cringe still further into the shadows.

Alfkaell’s staff, with its wicked elf-steel blade, had fallen within easy reach of Einarr’s cage. The warrior did not even need to stretch to grasp it and pull it through the bars. He lifted the weapon over his head and cracked it against his knee, Einarr’s immense musculature allowing him to snap the heavy staff like a twig. He tossed the longer section aside, interested only in the shorter length and the deadly ithilmar edge affixed to its top. Einarr laughed again as he tested the feel of his improvised sword. He had seen for himself the incredible keenness of the elven metal. A weapon that had split iron and cleft steel with such ease would make short work of the timber bars of his cage, and speed was what he needed now. He did not know how long it would be before the Aeslings came for him and discovered what he had done.

The elf steel did its work faster than Einarr could have believed, the wooden bars parting like butter beneath its touch. Soon the only thing that stood between him and his freedom was Alfkaell’s crumpled form. Einarr stared down at the seer’s corpse and drew a deep breath into his body. Carefully, the reaver stepped from his cage and over the body.

Einarr, son of Sigdan was prisoner of the Aeslings no longer!

The fugitive maintained an easy, loping trot as he made his way through the snow swept terrain. Einarr knew there was no sense in tiring himself with a more hurried pace. Though his newly won freedom had done much to strengthen his abused body, he knew he had many leagues to go before he would reach Vinnskor. He also knew that his escape would not go unnoticed for long. The Aeslings would find their seer’s body in the kennels or else they would find the body of the warrior Einarr had ambushed and whose clothes he now wore. Once they did, Einarr knew they would come after him, come after him with the very fury of the gods.

Let them come, he thought, throwing his shaggy head back and inhaling the icy night air. They would not find him so easy to capture a second time. Armed with the elf-steel from Alfkaell’s staff, even their god-touched jarl might find Einarr a match for him. Einarr’s face split in a savage grin as he imagined that contest, as his mind’s eye visualised the ithilmar blade slicing through Kolsveinn’s swords and ripping through his armour. If he escaped the wilds, if he managed to return to Vinnskor without the Aeslings catching him, Einarr would speak with his own jarl, Tulkir, and encourage him to prepare an all-out attack on Skraevold. The Aeslings would regret taking him captive, carrying him back to their village like some prize beast. For Einarr had seen their village, had seen where it was strong and where it was weak. It would be the women and children of Skraevold who would wail and lament when next their peoples met on the field of battle.

Einarr snapped from his dreams of glory and carnage, freezing as he saw something long and lean slowly steal from the black shadows cast by the trees. Yellow eyes shone from the black shape that began to pace languidly in his direction, gleaming from the darkness like tiny witch-lights. As it paced, the pungent musk of its fur struck Einarr’s senses. How long it had been tracking him, the warrior could not say, for it had the sense to stay upwind of him, keeping to the darkness of the trees, far from the light of star and moon. Even now, as he watched it stalking towards him, it made no noise, its paws making no sound as they pressed against the snow. Though its face remained hidden in the shadows, Einarr could see the sharp dagger-like fangs jutting from its lower jaw gleaming in the starlight.

It was an ice-tiger, smallest of the sabretusk breed and the only one of the great cats that did not hibernate during the black Norscan winter. At least Einarr hoped the thing stealing towards him was an ice-tiger. The breath of the gods was strong in the north, its power changing both man and beast. If the predator stalking him had been god-touched, what man could say what strength the Dark Gods might have given it? No, better to think it an ice-tiger, a thing a man could understand, a thing a man could kill.

The creature continued to circle Einarr, and now he could hear its low, threatening hiss. He’d heard the sound before, when hunting as a youth with his father and old Svanr. There had been times when the elk and deer felled by their arrows had been stolen from beneath their very noses by a hungry sabretusk. Some of the hunters told brave stories about savage fights with the massive cats when they took it in mind to hunt the hunter. Even as a child, Einarr had known most of the stories to be nothing but lies, bold tales told to cheer men too old or too infirm to claim real glory by raiding. Yet he’d never been more certain of it than he was the cold winter morning that his father had died, his head crushed between the powerful jaws of a sabretusk. Only a boy of twelve, Einarr had watched the great cat carry off his father, using its claws to scramble up a tall tree where the Baersonling hunters could not follow. Hunting down that cat, by himself and with only a spear and a dagger, had been his rite of manhood.

Einarr brandished the dagger he had fashioned from Alfkaell’s staff. He stared into the ice-tiger’s hungry eyes. ‘Hold, old thief!’ the Norscan called. ‘I’ve no spear this day, but you’ll find I’m not a stripling anymore. I am Einarr Sigdansson, and you should let me pass.’

The ice-tiger stopped pacing, its body tensing as Einarr’s voice split the silence of the night. The great cat scowled at him, baring its fangs. Einarr scowled back at it with an expression equally savage. ‘Steal back to your shadows,’ he told the beast. ‘I’ve no time for your games.’ The ice-tiger almost seemed to understand his words, quickly turning its head in the direction of the trees. But the hunting had been poor and the hunger in its belly great and its head turned back with equal swiftness to snarl at Einarr once more.

‘Then one of us meets his ancestors this day, old thief,’ Einarr swore. Sabretusk and man lunged at one another in almost the same instant, crashing together beneath the frosty night. The tiger’s massive paws scraped against Einarr’s body, their sharp claws trying to dig through the heavy furs he wore. The cat’s fanged jaws snapped at Einarr’s throat, but the warrior’s blade was there to meet it. As the keen edge of the dagger slashed against the ice-tiger’s muzzle, one of the massive incisors was cut free from its face. The sabretusk yowled in pain, pushing against Einarr’s body with all four of its legs. The combined strength of all of the cat’s limbs was too great to resist and the cat tore itself free, falling back into the snow.

Before Einarr could react, however, the beast had recovered. Almost as soon as it landed, the ice-tiger was pouncing at him again. Einarr tried to brace himself for the cat’s lunge, but its three hundred pound body smashed into him with the might of a thunderbolt. Einarr locked his arms around the sabretusk’s body as he felt himself knocked off his feet. He dragged the cat to the ground with him, trying to smash its skull against the frozen ground. The ice-tiger struggled too, scratching at him with its long claws; its frantic efforts to rip itself free shredding the flesh on Einarr’s legs. Despite the pain, Einarr held fast to the animal, knowing if he relaxed his grip, it would try for his throat again. He tried to work the edge of the ithilmar blade against the animal’s neck, but could only succeed in stabbing the point into its shoulder.

The pain incensed the tiger, causing its efforts to free itself to become even more frantic. Man and beast rolled across the snow, locked in a struggle that could only end in death. Einarr felt small bushes crumple beneath their weight, felt sharp stones and fallen branches dig into his body as they rolled across them. Then, suddenly, the ground gave way and they began to tumble down a sharp incline. The tiger’s yowling thundered in Einarr’s ears as they rolled down the snowy cliff, the stars and the trees seeming to tumble along with them. Faster and faster they fell, rolling over the frozen hillside. Then came the sudden stop, as the land turned level once more. Dizzy from the fall, Einarr found the tiger springing away from him before he could remember to hold onto it. He could see its lean, pantherine shape staggering in the snow as it too tried to recover its senses.

Einarr tried to clear his head, then realised that both of his hands were empty. The dagger! The seer’s blade, he had lost it in the fall! Einarr looked again in the direction of the tiger. The sabretusk was snarling, working its sandpaper tongue against the damaged corner of its jaw. Would it run, retreat to its lair to lick its wounds? No, Einarr could tell there was a malevolence about the beast, a malicious spite that was almost human. As soon as it remembered who had injured it, the cat would be lunging at him again. Without Alfkaell’s blade, Einarr did not favour his chances. Sigdan would spit upon him if Einarr allowed a sabretusk to take him. No Norscan could respect a son who did not find a more noble death than his father.

The warrior turned away from the growling beast, keeping one eye on it as he stared desperately at the snow. They had landed in some sort of clearing, almost barren of foliage. Except for where their fall had marred it, the snow stood unbroken all around them. A massive black stone was the only feature of the clearing and as Einarr looked at it he saw its sides were far too smooth to offer him a handhold. He dismissed the idea anyway – anywhere he could climb, the ice-tiger could much better. No, his only hope was to find some sort of weapon.

From the corner of his eye, Einarr saw the sabretusk swing its head back in his direction. It hiss-snarled at him, coiling its body as it gathered its strength. Einarr turned back towards the cat. If he would die, he would die like his father, with his wounds to the fore. At least he could spare that much disgrace from settling upon his ancestors. The ice-tiger growled as it read Einarr’s challenge. Something glittering in the snow caught Einarr’s eye. Still watching as the sabretusk prepared to charge, Einarr crouched and pulled it from the pristine ground. How it had fallen so far into the clearing, Einarr did not know. All he did know was that with the blade in his hands once more, he again had a chance.

The cat did not wait for Einarr to rise from his crouch. With a teeth-rattling roar, it bounded towards him, its lean muscular frame hurtling through the air. From his crouch, Einarr lashed out at the hurtling cat, the thin edge of his blade raised to ward off the immense mass of the predator. Einarr was knocked onto his back as the ice-tiger crashed against him, every bone in his body quivering from the force of the impact. Yet as he rolled onto his side, Einarr saw that his own strike had been more telling than that of the sabretusk.

The brute shivered in the midst of a patch of scarlet snow, its forepaw severed by Einarr’s blade. The warrior stared respectfully at the wounded predator, knowing how near it had come to finishing him. Despite the pain wracking his body, Einarr forced himself to his feet. A lingering death of sickness and injury was no fitting end for such a formidable beast. It was Einarr’s obligation to give the ice-tiger a death befitting its ancestor-spirits. The cat scowled at him as he stalked toward it, but when it tried to swipe at him, it merely spilled itself onto the ground. The ice-tiger had lost its balance and with it, its defence. Einarr was careful to strike true as he thrust his weapon into the beast’s neck.

Einarr stepped away from the dead sabretusk, slumping into the snow. He was not certain how much time he had lost fighting the cat, but it was time he could ill afford. The Aeslings would be looking for him now, setting their hounds on his trail. He had even less time to indulge in the luxury of rest. He had seen men fall into the snow after a battle and never rise again, their bodies unmarked by any weapon save the icy clutch of the land itself. He would not be one of those men, his spirit condemned to slumber in the ice until the cracking of the world. Against the protests of his battered, bleeding body, Einarr forced himself back up. There was a long way yet to go before he could rest in the warm halls of Vinnskor.

Standing, Einarr found his eyes draw to the massive black stone that rose from the midst of the clearing. He wondered for a moment what it was. It seemed to have letters carved into it, though the wind and ice had all but obliterated them. Was it the marker of some tomb? Had it been placed here to commemorate some long forgotten battle? Einarr considered that it might even be one of the enormous monoliths the Kurgan people raised to honour the gods. Whatever it was, Einarr had no time for its riddles. He turned to leave its enigma behind him, but as he did so he noticed the big black bird perched on its top, its beaked head staring down at the slain sabretusk. Einarr felt a surge of disgust rise within him as he regarded the scavenger.

‘Find other bones to pick!’ the warrior roared, hurling a snowball at the bird. The missile smacked against the side of the rock just beneath its talons. The bird fluttered its wings in protest, glaring down at him. ‘I did not kill that beast just to fill your greedy belly!’ Einarr threw another snowball, this time hitting the black bird. It screeched angrily at him. ‘Get you gone and earn your own way!’ The third snowball exploded against the bird’s breast, coating it in white. It was the final straw for the animal and it lifted into the air, screeching its wrath as it flapped slowly into the night.

Einarr scowled at the scavenger bird until it was lost to sight, then made his way toward the trees. He still had a long distance to cover before the feeble light of day again smouldered on the horizon.

The orange ember of the sun again glowed beneath the horizon, starting the day in the Aesling village of Skraevold. The warriors of the tribe had been assembled many hours before, since the discovery of Alfkaell and the escape of the Baersonling captive. Many of the marauders fumed at the inactivity their jarl had forced upon them, eager to begin the hunt and cut down this blasphemer who dared murder their seer. But Kolsveinn would not be swayed. He had risen to be leader of his people not only by his great strength and the favour of the Blood God, but also by knowing his people, by understanding what moved their hearts. Yes, he could have unleashed his tribe, sent the dogs to track down this man, and for a time that would have satisfied them. But soon some minor misfortune would plague the village. A child might get lost in the woods or an ox might be taken by wolves. When that happened, the people would remember that Kolsveinn had promised the Baerson to Kharnath and that they had killed him before he could be sacrificed, for Kolsveinn knew none of his warriors had the discipline to take the man alive, not after he had slain the seer. Then Kolsveinn would be blamed for bringing the curse of the Blood God upon the village and it would be his blood they would think to give to Kharnath to appease his anger.

No, it was better to do it this way.

Kolsveinn turned his tattooed head towards the hulking Aeslings standing beside the gate that led into the pit. He nodded and the men threw back the iron-banded timbers. A dozen marauders rushed forward, pushing a long log down into the pit, then scrambled away, retreating to where their kinsmen were. Only Kolsveinn stood his ground, holding a long bronze spear, upon the tip of which had been tied the clothing they had stripped from Einarr. The jarl stared into the pit, watching the darkness for any sign of motion. The first he was aware of it was when the sound of claws and fangs splintering the sides of the log reached his ears. Long moments later, a huge shape pulled itself from the pit, bringing with it such a stench of blood and death that even Kolsveinn felt the urge to gag. The hulk heaved itself forward, sliding across the ground on its riot of limbs. Some of the watching Aeslings screamed, wailing like children, forgetting that they were veteran reavers, the victors of countless battles.

Kolsveinn looked into what he thought were the thing’s eyes and thrust the spear towards it. A limb slimy with blood coiled itself around the weapon, tearing it free from his grasp. The snake-like member pulled the weapon back towards the heaving bulk. A snuffling sound slobbered its way from the creature’s body as it inspected the clothing.

‘We would offer that one to Khorne!’ Kolsveinn shouted, using the Kurgan name for the Blood God. It was the only name that could control the god-beast of the pit, and as the abomination heard it, a whining chorus howled from its hideous shape. ‘He has fled from us, thinking to cheat the Skull Lord! You must find him! You must offer him to Khorne!’

The abomination heaved itself forward, then threw back what Kolsveinn thought might once have been its head. The howl that erupted from it caused blood to trickle from the ears of all who heard it. The echoes of that howl were still rattling the timbers of Skraevold when the oozing horror slobbered across the muddy streets, following the scent of its prey.

Kolsveinn watched it go, almost pitying the foolish Baerson the doom he had brought upon himself. The rest of the village had already hidden themselves, for it took strength to gaze upon the god-beast of Skraevold, a strength that only the mightiest possessed.

The jarl prided himself that he was the only one who watched the god-beast leave. He did not see the large black eagle perched above the kennels, its feathers still stained with snow.

CHAPTER THREE

The dim flicker of dawn cast its light over the village of Vinnskor. The stone-edged lanes of the village began to fill with people – farmers and herdsmen trudging their way into the fields to tend the tough, shaggy cattle the Aeslings had failed to slaughter or stampede during their brutal raid; women slogging their way through the snow towards the mountain stream that wound its way past the village, heavy hammers to crack the ice held in their arms, ox-hide skins to steal water from the stream slung over their backs; scrawny thralls, their wasted frames barely covered by mangy scraps of cloth and fur, dejectedly marching towards the forest to fell timber for the fires of their masters. Above all the activity prowled the massive warriors of the village, their axes held at the ready, their intense gaze watching the horizon for any warning of the marauders’ return. With the destruction of the revenge party that the Baersonlings had sent into the north, the people of Vinnskor knew the Aeslings would be back.

Asta climbed the short earthen steps and emerged from the gloom of her longhouse into the greater gloom of the morning. She sighed as she watched Emla’s children racing about the small garth outside her neighbour’s home, watching with a tinge of envy as Thorwald, Emla’s husband, supervised a pair of thralls as they tended the thatching of their home’s roof. She had been so proud to wed a mighty warrior like Einarr, a man who had raided the southlands many times, who had brought the names of many fallen enemies to honour the gods of the Baersonlings. She and Einarr had planned to have children soon, sons who would become even greater than their father.

But Einarr was gone, lost with the others who had gone to avenge the Aesling raids on their pastures and farms. The two who had escaped the Aesling ambush claimed that all the others who had been with them had been slain. Jarl Tulkir had believed the wretches on that matter, but found their stories of their own prowess in the doomed battle insulting and infuriating. He’d ordered the men stripped and when no wounds could be found upon them, not even the faintest scratch to attest to the veracity of their lies, Tulkir had the naked men tied to a gallows and doused with water. Left wet and bare to the elements, by the next day the two were frozen so solid that even the ravens could not make a meal of them. That had been almost two weeks ago and Asta felt the weight of her loss grow with each day. She should have been content with a man like Thorwald, one who did not seek glory and fortune but was simply satisfied with merely providing for his own.

Asta turned away from her consideration of Emla’s home. She smoothed the front of her woollen hanggerrok, and adjusted the balance of the water skins resting over her shoulder. Einarr was gone and she had to accept it. She had to force herself to live on without him, to rebuild the rest of her life. She was still a striking woman, her figure shapely, her long pale hair possessing an exotic quality she knew many of the men in Vinnskor found fascinating. She would need to think about finding a new husband, a new warrior to watch over her and give her strong children. Yes, she would need to think about it, but she would not think about it today.

As the woman passed from the narrow lanes of the village and into the snowy fields beyond, she saw the armoured figure of Rafn standing watch over the women getting water from the stream. He smiled as he saw her, an excited twinkle shining in his eyes. Rafn had always admired her, and now that Einarr was gone the warrior saw an opportunity to expound his unfulfilled affection. The blond-headed sentinel strode towards Asta as she approached, meeting her well before the stream. Asta tried not to meet Rafn’s eager gaze and continued to walk towards the stream. She might need to take another husband, but she was in no mind to have the issue pressed upon her so soon after Einarr’s death.

Unfortunately, Rafn was no more mind reader than he was mannered. The big warrior kept pace with her, idly swinging his axe as he walked, a juvenile habit that Asta found irritating.

‘I asked the gods if they would send you to get water today,’ Rafn said, his timid tone at odds with his scarred, bearded face. ‘They must be pleased with me, for here you are.’

‘You shouldn’t bother the gods with such petty things,’ Asta warned him, not breaking stride, keeping her eyes fixed on the stream ahead. ‘They may become angry.’ She shivered as she said the words, for the anger of the gods was not something to be considered lightly. The legends of the Baersonlings were filled with horrible tales of that which befell those who had aroused the ire of the Dark Gods.

Rafn caught her by the arm, turning Asta around and forcing her to look at him. ‘I never bother the gods about things that are not important,’ he said, tightening his grip on her shoulder. ‘But you are right, Asta, a man should not trouble the gods over something he can take for himself.’ Rafn’s bearded face leaned down towards Asta’s. She tried to pull away, but the warrior’s grip on her was too strong.

A scream suddenly rose into the dark morning sky from behind them. Soon other women were joining the first voice, shrieking as they fled away from the stream. Rafn pushed Asta behind him, holding his axe at the ready. The other women of Vinnskor were already rushing past them, racing back to the village. Several pointed behind them as they ran. Rafn looked in the direction they pointed. Emerging from the trees he could see a large man, his hulking form covered in furs. He moved with a halting, weary step, shuffling towards the now deserted stream.

‘Go back and rouse the bondsmen!’ Rafn snarled. ‘Tell them the Aeslings are here!’ Rafn clenched his fists tight around the heft of his axe and moved to sprint toward the strange figure. Asta grabbed Rafn, restraining him as he started to run off. The warrior pulled away, glaring at her in disbelief.

‘Let me be, wench, or that Aesling scum will have both our skulls!’ Rafn shouted. Asta didn’t even seem to notice his words, watching instead the fur-covered man stagger towards the stream. There was something familiar about him, something that seemed to call out to her. As the man dropped beside the stream a sharp cry rose from Asta’s throat and she ran past Rafn towards the fallen man. Rafn cursed and tried to intercept her, but the bulky warrior found himself unable to match her speed.

Asta stopped at the bank of the stream, looking across its icy surface at the stranger. He raised his head weakly and Asta felt her heart tremble with shock as she saw the familiar face. Instantly she was dashing across the frozen stream, ignoring Rafn’s desperate shouts. Asta knelt beside the man, turning him onto his back and cradling his shaggy head in her lap.

‘Blood of the dragons, woman!’ Rafn roared, raising his axe. ‘Get out of there and let me finish that Aesling bastard!’

Asta glared defiantly at Rafn. ‘Get you gone, Rafn son of Oflati!’ she ordered, an imperious tone in her voice. ‘Fetch the vitki and tell the people of Vinnskor!’ She stared back into the face of the exhausted, scruffy man beside her. Pride filled her voice as she spoke again, the pride born of the devotion and love that bound her to this man.

‘Tell them, Rafn! Tell them that Einarr Sigdansson has returned to them!’

‘He is too stubborn to die,’ Spjall, the silver-bearded vitki of Vinnskor pronounced as he rose from administering the pungent poultice to Einarr’s wounds. The warrior smiled at the medicine man from the nest of thick furs that covered his bed.

‘Too stubborn to die before I see Skraevold burning,’ Einarr replied. He looked around the small inner room of his long house, making certain that all within saw he meant what he said.

Spjall chuckled and patted the warrior’s shoulder. ‘For now think about rest and sleep. You’ve endured much, it would be a terrible jest to survive what you have and then die in your own bed. Rest, plunder and revenge can wait for another day.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Einarr, but his words were not intended for Spjall. ‘Revenge can wait for another day. So long as it does not wait too long.’

The other men in the room bristled at the obvious challenge in Einarr’s words. Bondsmen all, to have a mere warrior and reaver speak to them in such a fashion would have had them reaching for their blades were it not for the presence of their jarl in the room. Even so, Dreng and Oflati, two of the oldest of the bondsmen, looked like they might do so anyway. Only a stern look from Tulkir stayed their hands.

‘We have heard your words about the ways of Skraevold,’ Tulkir said. ‘We have heard you tell us how their village stands…’

‘Particularly the kennels,’ scoffed Oflati, stroking his be-ringed beard, ‘where their people dwell and work.

We have heard you say where the village is strong and where it is weak.’ Tulkir nodded his crowned head as he spoke. There was a stern expression on his face as he looked at Einarr. ‘What you say makes my sword eager to taste Aesling blood, for it would be an easy thing to strike the dogs down. But what you say also fills me with great fear. I, who have raided the southlands on twenty and ten voyages, who have walked the lands of the Vargs and the Graelings, who have seen the jungles of the dragonfolk, I know fear because of your words.’

Einarr glowered at his jarl, the colour rising in his face. After all he had suffered, after all of the comrades he had seen butchered by the Aeslings, after his miraculous escape from right beneath the noses of his captors, now it would all come to nothing because his jarl was afraid. ‘Then let one of your bondsmen lead your people to triumph and glory, Tulkir, or step aside and let a man more worthy of the name bear the title of jarl.’

The insolent words brought snarls of outrage to the faces of the assembled bondsmen and even Asta gave a gasp of horror that her husband had spoken so. Tulkir merely continued to stare at the wounded Einarr.

‘It is you who make me afraid, Einarr, son of Sigdan,’ the jarl said, stabbing his finger at the man. ‘You have dared the wrath of the gods by striking down a seer! No man may defy the gods and live! Ever has it been so. You are cursed, Einarr, by your own hand you are cursed.’

Einarr rose from his bed, ignoring the trembling in his arms as he did so. ‘If the gods look so unfavourably upon me, then why am I here? Many times did they have the chance to strike me down when I was captive in Skraevold. Many times I should have died before I ever saw my home again.’

‘Only a seer can guess the ways of the gods,’ Tulkir said. ‘Old-father Ulfarr is casting the runes even now, to find what must be done to appease them. What he says must be done, we shall do. The two curs who returned here with their swords sheathed I had killed for being timid. You, Einarr, I fear I will kill for being too bold.’

The jarl and his bondsmen turned and filed from the longhouse, their visit to Einarr finished. The wounded man watched them leave his home, a great weight pressing upon his chest. He tried to push his doubts aside with visions of hate and revenge, but knew he could not. He knew only too well the unpardonable crime he had committed by killing Alfkaell. A man who killed a seer, even one from an enemy village, rendered his own life forfeit. Tulkir could have had him killed the moment Einarr had admitted his deed. Instead he chose to wait until Vinnskor’s own seer had made his divinations. Einarr repented calling Tulkir a coward. It had been wrong to call him such.

‘This is a strange thing.’ Einarr turned his head to find Spjall looking through the pile of clothing he had taken from the dead Aesling in Skraevold. The vitki held the dagger Einarr had fashioned from Alfkaell’s staff, turning the blade in his hand, watching as the light from the hearth danced across the pale elf-steel.

‘I took that from the bloodfather,’ Einarr said. The words caused Spjall to drop the weapon as though it had suddenly changed into a viper. ‘It is an ugly thing,’ the warrior admitted. ‘I should get rid of it now, but I do not want people saying I did so to try and hide my crime.’

Spjall continued to study the sinister blade. He was an old friend of Sigdan, who had voyaged far with Einarr’s father in their younger days. The vitki looked upon the son of his old friend almost as his own kinsman, always trying to help Einarr with whatever wisdom his grey years could remember. The bold warrior was often in need of calmer, more measured advice, but never so much as he did now.

‘The people of Vinnskor know you better than that,’ Spjall rejoined. He gathered the ox-hide bag that held his herbs and ointments and hobbled towards the exit of the longhouse. ‘Einarr Sigdansson would rather die than admit fear, even fear of the gods. It is your strength and your doom.’ The old healer paused as he started to leave. He lifted his gnarled hands to his neck, rummaging about in the throat of the heavy fur cloak he wore. When his hands emerged, they lifted a neck ring of silver thread over his head. A motley assortment of bone charms and talismans dangled from the ring, along with stone amulets depicting the sacred runes of the four great gods.

‘I will give you this neck ring, in the hopes that it may spare you the ire of the gods,’ Spjall said. ‘It came from the hoard of a Kurgan prince whose tomb I found in the Troll Lands beyond Kislev when I was still a young warrior.’

‘And you think this trinket will make the gods show mercy?’ Einarr tried to keep his incredulity from his voice.

‘Look well on me, Einarr,’ Spjall said. ‘I am the oldest man in this village; I have lived beyond the years of my sons and their sons. The gods have looked with favour upon me. The Kurgan prince had many great and wonderful treasures in his tomb, the gods looked favourably on him too.’ Einarr and Asta watched as Spjall drew his own dagger and cut the thread. The old vitki began removing the charms and talismans from the thread, stuffing each bit of bone or trinket of metal into his ox-hide bag until at last he was left with only a thread of silver.

‘How is this? Not even a wolf-fang to grace my necklace?’ Spjall ignored Einarr’s humour and twisted the ends of the neck ring together. He stepped towards the warrior’s bed.

‘It will be up to you to find your own talismans,’ the vitki told him, ‘just as I had to find my own. You will know them when you find them. The gods will tell you.’ Before Spjall placed the neck ring around Einarr’s head, he showed the warrior the ends he had twisted together. They were now smooth and unbroken, as perfect as though the vitki had never cut it.

‘Why give this to me?’ Einarr asked, awed by the magic he had just seen. The gifts of the gods were never less than impressive.

‘Because I am old and will walk with my ancestors soon,’ Spjall told him, turning back towards the door. ‘Because now I feel the same feeling I did when I added my talismans to the ring. It moves me to pass it on to you, Einarr. May its magic see you to glory and doom.’

Amidst the heavy furs of his bed, Einarr crushed Asta’s warm, lithe body against his. His hand caressed the scaly skin that covered the back of her neck and shoulders, the coppery plates feeling smooth beneath his touch. Asta bore the mark of the gods in her flesh, had been marked that way when she had been born. It had been another of the things about her that made her the most pursued woman in Vinnskor. But in the end, it had been Einarr who had caught her.

‘You are supposed to be resting,’ Asta scolded him, her face turned towards the fire.

‘You forget that I have been away for two weeks,’ Einarr reminded her, moving his hand to stroke her long pale hair. ‘It is a long time to go without a wench.’

Asta tried to stifle the sob of fear that rose within her, but Einarr heard her fright just the same. He turned her towards him, looking into her frightened face. ‘Have I learned such harsh manners that you cry so?’ he asked, concern in his voice. Asta pressed her cheek against his chest.

‘I thought you dead,’ she sobbed. ‘Slain by the Aeslings, your skull resting on their altar to Kharnath.’

Einarr brushed the tears rolling down his wife’s face, trying to soothe her. ‘But I’m not dead. I’ve come back to you. Not even the Aeslings could keep me from coming back. Not even the gods could keep me from coming back.’

Asta recoiled from him, crawling to the other side of the bed, staring at him in horror. ‘Don’t say such things!’ she begged. ‘Not now, not when Ulfarr casts the runes and asks the gods what is to be done with you! I can’t lose you again, Einarr! I won’t lose you again.’

‘The runes will show Ulfarr what they will,’ Einarr sighed, leaning back amongst the furs. ‘Worrying about it will help nothing.’ Einarr’s calm, resigned words only intensified his wife’s terror. She scrambled back across the bed to him, grabbing his hand, pulling at him.

‘Then let’s be away, Einarr,’ she pleaded. ‘Take what we can and leave. We can go to the lands of the Sarls or even the southlands. I don’t care, so long as we are together.’

Einarr pulled his hand free from her grasp. ‘What sort of life would we have among the Sarls? Would you have our children raised among another tribe, or worse reared to be decadent Empire folk? If you fear the gods, do you think you can simply run from their wrath?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I will not run, Asta. If I am to find my doom here, then here is where I will stand.’ He could see the terror in his wife’s eyes as he spoke his words. He smiled and tried to calm her. Carefully he removed the silver neck ring Spjall had given him and placed it over Asta’s head.

‘There, Spjall said this would keep me safe,’ Einarr said. ‘Now it will keep you safe.’ Asta started to protest but Einarr pressed a finger against her lips to silence her words. ‘I am the bravest man in Vinnskor,’ he said, ‘and knowing that you are protected by the gods will make me braver still.’

Einarr started to pull Asta back towards him when both of them suddenly spun around and stared at the door. Outside, in the village, they could hear a great tumult, voices screaming and crying out in alarm. Einarr cursed and pushed himself from the bed, reaching for his wool tunic. He looked around for his axe.

Tulkir had waited too long. The Aeslings were attacking Vinnskor!

Shrieks of agony and terror filled the air as Einarr rushed from his long house. The ragged, torn remains of the bondsman Dreng were splashed across the narrow lane. Dismembered limbs and broken skulls were strewn in every direction and the ground itself seemed to have been transformed into a gore-hued slime. The magnitude of the carnage stunned Einarr. How could the Aeslings have visited such violence upon the village in the few short moments it had taken him to fetch his axe?

The answer to his question wallowed amidst the ruin of Emla’s home, its shifting bulk caving out the walls as it heaved and oozed its way through the gaping hole it had ripped from the roof. Einarr felt his stomach churn as he looked upon the thing, as its stench of old blood slammed into his senses. Einarr had travelled the mountains and seas of Norsca for many years and seen many strange and terrible monsters, things that had been kissed by the power of the gods. But never had he seen such a thing, a thing that made him want to claw his eyes out so that he might see it no more. A thing that even he, a son of the north, could only call ‘abomination’.

The monster was bigger than an ox, bigger than the largest troll or ogre he had ever seen. As it slobbered through the wreckage of the long house, its form seemed to expand outward, pressing against the very walls as though in defiance of the timbers that contrived to contain it. Shape, it seemed to have none, flesh and limbs growing and contracting with the thing’s every motion. Tentacles flailed at the air, only to twist into enormous claw-tipped paws and then wilt away into nothing.

Massive legs, thick as a dragonboat’s prow and tipped with enormous talons, pushed the monster across the rubble only to collapse into undulating tendrils of formless meat then reform into the scrabbling limbs of a spider. Across its entire body, there was only one constant, the blood-deep hue that saturated its flesh, gore dripping from the multitude of wound-like welts that peppered its hide. As the blood oozed across the abomination’s skin, the hide itself seemed to suck it back inside, like a sponge drinking the sea.

The bloodbeast howled as it crushed the building to splinters, the hideous sound shuddering through the village. The sound staggered Einarr, felling him to his knees as blood spilled from his ears.

A great body of warriors had surrounded the monster, threatening it with swords, spears and any other weapon they could find. But even these bold, veterans of numberless battles feared to close upon the thing. The ground was wet with the ruin of those who had tried. A few hardier souls jabbed at it with torches, while a handful of huntsmen tried to pepper it with arrows. The shafts struck the monster’s gory hide, shaking as they sank deep into its changeling flesh. Then, to the horror of the bowmen, the monster’s flesh seemed to clutch at the arrows imbedded in it and drag them deeper into its body until no sign of them remained.

As Einarr and those warriors who had been closest to the beast’s howl recovered from the crippling sound, the monster was in motion once more, pressing its bulk against the front of the house and spilling its twisted mass into the small garth outside. A half-dozen warriors shouted in terror as the thing flopped across the ground towards them, yet for all their fear, they charged it, lashing at it with sword, axe and flail. Einarr could see Oflati and his son among the attackers, their axes biting deep into the monster’s shapeless mass. The monster stumbled or reared onto what might have been its haunches and from what should have been its chest, a monstrous face seemed to be pushing its way free. The gory hide burst in a shower of steaming blood as a naked skull, hound-like and a dozen times larger than that of a man, gibbered and shrieked at the stunned warriors. The body of the monster shuddered and collapsed upon itself, reforming behind its new head while the ragged scraps of meat hanging from where the skull had pushed itself free lashed wildly through the air and wrapped themselves around the canine head, swiftly clothing it in blood-hued flesh.

Oflati was on the ground, screaming in agony, half of his own face burned away by the sizzling blood the monster had sprayed across the garth. The thing glared down at him with its eight enormous black eyes, then opened its gigantic jaws and snapped the bondsman in half.

Arrows and torches rained about the beast as Oflati’s death cry echoed into the darkness. Einarr ran through the barrage, chopping at the abomination’s flank with his axe. The weapon sank deep into its body and Einarr could not shake the impression that the beast’s body was built from something more like boiled meat than living flesh. He pulled his axe free, cringing as a spray of steaming blood gushed from the wound. Gallons of the sizzling fluid erupted into the air, yet the beast seemed to take no notice of its hurt, concentrating instead on snapping up the rest of Oflati’s men. Einarr chopped again into the beast, howling with frustration as he watched the original wound close upon itself even as his second blow struck home. This time, as blood spurted from the wound, Einarr saw what seemed to be faces shrieking at him from within the gore. He drew back in horror when he saw the face of Thorwald among those trapped inside the crimson sludge.

‘The head! Strike at the head!’

Einarr turned to see Tulkir a few feet behind him. The jarl’s helmet was dented, one of his arms purple and broken as it dangled useless beside him. Blood was splattered across his armour and his sword, the magnificent blade he had named Fangwyrm and which had seen him through thirty years of battle, had snapped and left him with less than half a foot of weapon.

‘Steel and fire don’t hurt this thing!’ Einarr roared. ‘It is touched by the gods. It needs magic to turn it back. Where is Ulfarr?’

‘Dead,’ wheezed Rafn. The warrior was bleeding in a dozen places where the beast’s steaming blood had struck him, one of his legs slashed so deep by the horror’s flailing tentacles that Einarr could see the bone. ‘The old-father’s hut was the first place the thing struck. For all it seems mindless, there is cunning and purpose in the beast.’

Rafn’s words struck Einarr like a hammer. It had come here with a purpose, and he was that purpose. Kharnath had sent it to claim him for his blood-drenched realm. All those the beast had killed, all those it would kill, it was because he had thought he could cheat the Blood God.

‘It is here for me,’ Einarr swore. ‘Call off our men! I will lead it from the village!’

Tulkir watched as the monster crushed another Baersonling warrior beneath its talons and licked the man’s blood from its paws. While he watched, a screaming youth drove an iron-tipped spear straight into one of the thing’s eyes. It did not seem to notice the injury at all and continued to nibble at the man clutched in its paws.

‘Get it out of here!’ Tulkir snarled. ‘And may the gods damn you to the blackest hells for bringing it here!’ The jarl looked as though he might take the ruin of Fangwyrm and drive it into Einarr’s chest, so great was the wrath in his eyes. Einarr simply nodded and turned to face the beast again. He had brought doom and slaughter to Vinnskor and for that he deserved whatever fate the gods demanded.

Einarr strode towards the beast, then stopped as he became aware he was not alone. Rafn, limping on his mangled leg, was trying to keep pace with him, his axe clenched tight against his chest. Einarr waved him back.

‘I must do this on my own!’ Einarr growled at him.

‘That thing ate my father! The crows take what you must do!’ Rafn roared back. The sound of the warrior’s rage attracted the attention of the beast. Its long, serpent-like neck arched above its back and its wolfish face drooled hungrily as it glowered down at Rafn. Before Einarr could even move, the beast’s jaws shot out from its skull, snapping close in front of Rafn. As the jaws retracted into the beast’s head, Rafn toppled forward, the white bone of his skull exposed where the beast’s fangs had pulled his face free.

A savage war cry exploded from Einarr as he hurled himself at the beast. His axe chopped into one of the abomination’s flailing tentacles, severing it from its body. The mast-like column of flesh crashed to the ground, narrowly missing the enraged axeman. Before his very eyes, it corroded into a stagnant heap of scarlet mush. The beast coughed and croaked with what Einarr hoped was pain and took a swipe at him with one of its enormous paws. Einarr dodged the blow, striking out at the malformed limb as it passed him, the edge of his axe chewing into the back of its foremost talon. The beast coughed again and lashed out once more, this time with a pair of tentacles. Only by dragging every ounce of speed from his body was the warrior able to dance between the flailing limbs. The beast reared back once more, blood dripping from its fanged muzzle.

‘Follow me you blood-worm filth!’ Einarr screamed at the thing. ‘I am what you came for!’ Einarr jumped back as the monster struck at him with one of its panther-like paws. He waited for the thing to surge towards him. For a moment, the monster’s multitude of eyes stared at him. Then the moment passed. It swung its trunk-like neck around, closing its jaws around the shrieking body of a mangled reaver. Einarr stood in stunned horror as the beast shuddered back across the garth, towards the warriors assembled on the other side of the village.

If it had come for him, it certainly didn’t seem to remember. Now its only concern was to feed and to slaughter, to mutilate and kill. Somehow, that thought was even more horrible. With a cry of despair, Einarr raced back across the garth and flung himself at the beast. He crashed against its slimy back, chopping frenziedly into its gore-drenched skin. Sizzling gore splattered across him, but still he hacked and tore into the thing. The burning blood seared his hands, his skin coming off in scabby strips as he tried to maintain his hold upon his axe. He saw the screaming, accusing faces of his kinsmen and his neighbours as the beast’s blood spurted into the black sky. But still he tore and chopped and ripped and cut.

Only when the blood-slick axe slipped from his hands did Einarr relent. Gasping, he reached down to recover his weapon. As he rose once more, he saw the beast’s hound-like head. It was turned back towards him once more, a hideous suggestion of amusement about its ghastly features. Einarr looked at the monster’s back, watched in despair as the countless wounds he had dealt it oozed shut before his eyes. Then a massive pillar of flesh erupted from the side of the monster, a great tree-like tail tipped with an immense knob of bone. Before Einarr could react, the tail smacked into him, swatting him aside like a bull swatting flies.

The warrior felt himself hurtling through the empty air. Something smashed against his arm, splintering as he struck it, then his head and shoulder were crashing against unforgiving stone.

Then there was only darkness.

CHAPTER FOUR

A sharp, stabbing pain pulled Einarr from the darkness to which his mind had withdrawn. The Norscan likened the sensation to someone jabbing his chest with a dull dagger. He could taste blood in his mouth, feel his bruised ribs and battered shoulder throbbing. His nose was filled with the stink of blood and death, his skin felt oily and unclean. The only sound he could hear was the steady dull thump against his chest and the occasional flutter of feathered wings.

Like a coiled viper, Einarr’s hand lunged upwards, closing around the throat of the monstrous black bird he saw perched there through his clouded eyes. It was large enough to be an eagle, though Einarr had never seen one with so thin and crooked a beak. The ugly raptor squawked in alarm as his hand closed around it, beating its massive wings against his face, digging at him with its sharp talons. Einarr was blinded by the flailing wings, crying out as the bird’s claws tore into his flesh. But the warrior maintained his grip, closing his hand tighter and tighter, digging his fingers into the eagle’s neck. The eagle continued to struggle, and Einarr could feel his blood soaking through his wool tunic. The wings smashed against his head, almost as though trying to smother him with their rancid feathers. Einarr drew his grip still tighter, wincing as he felt the bird’s blood dripping down his arm. It was cold, with an almost syrup-like feel to it as it slowly oozed down his hand. Beneath the eagle’s blood, his flesh went numb, as though drained of its very life.

Still he maintained his death-grip on the eagle, enduring the agony as its claws dug into his body, as its wings continued to batter his face. He tried to move his other arm, succeeding only in sending a blast of red-hot pain flooding into his brain. It would not move, disjointed in his battle with the god-beast. This realisation forced new strength into his other arm and Einarr willed his fingers still tighter about the eagle’s throat. Finally, there came a dull, snap and the bird croaked a final liquid groan. Einarr tossed the filthy scavenger aside, letting its miserable carcass slide onto the floor.

The warrior opened his eyes again, thankful that the eagle had decided to peck at his chest rather than start with his head.

With a grunt that barely voiced the incredible pain that surged through him, Einarr sat up. While his hand felt the tattered mess the eagle’s claws had made of his chest, the warrior’s eyes scanned his surroundings. He was in a hut of some kind, though it seemed too fine for the thralls and too large for any of the unmarried warriors. The roof had caved in and one of the walls had been collapsed outward in exactly the same way that he had seen Emla’s home destroyed. The grisly, half-gnawed skeleton pushed into the remaining timber wall was recognisable as that of Ulfarr only because of the stubby crown of horns that grew from the skull – the same mark of mutation that the seer had borne. The hut then, was the seer’s. Somehow, despite the devastation around him and the hideous abomination he had seen tearing apart the village, he felt all his old superstitions about the seer and his home take hold of him. Einarr reached for a half-collapsed timber and used it to pull himself to his feet. He did not know where he would go, he only knew he was not going to linger in the shaman’s dwelling.

As Einarr tried to stumble his way free from the wreckage, his eyes fell to the earthen floor of the hut. The seer’s runestones were still scattered within a crude circle, lying where Ulfarr had cast them in his divination. Though Einarr could not read the meaning of the runes, there was no mistaking the pattern they had made when they fell. As he stared at the scattered runestones, Einarr saw himself looking at the skull-sign of Khorne, the great Lord of Battles, the ravenous Harvester of Blood.

Einarr loped through the rubble of Vinnskor. Blood was spattered across every stone; the lanes were a sucking morass of crimson sludge. Bodies and bits of bodies were strewn wherever he turned his eyes. Not a man, woman or child, not so much as a dog or a rat, stirred within the silent desolation. Except for himself, there was not even the dimmest flicker of life in the village.

Everywhere the torn remains of once familiar faces, the faces of those he had lived among all his life, stared at him from the muck. Cold dead eyes glared at him with accusation, demanding to know why he had brought such doom upon them. He found Spjall, his body crushed into a little knot of flesh, limbs protruding brokenly in an insane tangle of blood and bone. He found Jarl Tulkir, his skull crushed flat by some enormous weight, the impression of one of the monster’s taloned foot-tendrils marring the ground all around his flattened head. Emla, his neighbour for years, whose children his own Asta had helped nurse and raise, was almost unmarred, only the monstrous bite that had pulled her rib cage from her chest spoiling the effect of a weary mother lying at rest.

With every step, Einarr’s fear grew. Not terror of where the monster was now, but rather where it had been. He, a crimson-handed reaver who had stormed the walls of Erengrad and ransacked its domed temples and fortified palaces, felt his knees shake as he neared the smoking ruin that had been his home. He did not want to know, above anything, he did not want to know. But he had never given into his fear before, never allowed it to shame him, to give his ancestors cause to curse his name. He could not do so now, not even when every fibre of his soul urged him to flee.

Einarr stepped into the shambles that had been his home, trying not to notice the roof that had been pushed down into the structure, nor the walls that had been collapsed outward. He shambled like a thing without mind or purpose, vanishing into the gloom.

How long he sat there, in the grave of his life, Einarr did not know. When he rose, however, there was no longer room for pain or sorrow or loss in him. In the warrior’s eyes there burned a new fire, a flame that only death could quench. He moved towards the splintered timbers that marked where the beast had pushed its way free of his home. He considered the arm lying limp and numb at his side. He positioned it between two jagged logs and pressed his body against the wall. Grinding his teeth together, he pulled his entire body back. With a pop, his arm snapped back into position. Einarr clenched his jaws tight against the shock that stormed through his body as feeling returned to his arm. He would not cry out again. There was no pain greater than what he had already found and it would shame her if he ever gave voice to any lesser hurt.

The warrior scoured the rubble of his home, retrieving what armour he could scavenge. What he could not find in his own home, he took from those of others until he had what he needed. He did not fear the spirits of his kin as he collected the gear. They would understand. He was not looting the dead. He was avenging them.

When Einarr left the sorry, butchered carcass of Vinnskor behind, he embodied the avenging spirit of his people. Tulkir’s great breastplate of steel, torn from the corpse of a southland prince, encased Einarr’s chest. Over his legs he wore the heavy fur leggings that had been the speciality of Hilga the tanner, a layer of small river stones sewn between the layers of leather beneath the fur to thwart fang and blade. Across his back he wore the monstrous bearskin cloak Raskulf had claimed in a raid against the Vargs, its fur even paler than the snow, the horned skull of the bear covering Einarr’s head like a helm. About his hands were the iron gloves of Valbrandr, upon his feet the iron-shod boots of Sorkvir. From his belt hung the axe of Rafn, its haft pitted where the sizzling blood of the beast had struck it. Beside it rested the splintered length of Fangwyrm, the renowned blade of Tulkir. Across his shoulder he carried the ox-hide bag with Spjall’s herbs and potions. Around his neck he wore the silver band he had given Asta, the metal stained almost black by her blood, the image of the torn jumble of meat scattered through his home burned forever in Einarr’s mind.

One last thing did Einarr take with him as he left Vinnskor, the crude dagger he had fashioned from Alfkaell’s staff. There was no reluctance now to touch it; indeed, it seemed almost to slide into his grasp as he reached for it. The warrior tucked the elven blade into his left boot, the metal feeling hot against his skin. He would return it to the people of Skraevold, those who had marked him for the Blood God and who had set Kharnath’s vengeance upon his village. He would see if the Aeslings had the strength to take it from him and he would build a mound of skulls from those who failed.

Their bloodbeast had made a mistake, thinking him dead, and Einarr was determined that Skraevold would suffer for that mistake.

Blackened timbers reached into the dark Norscan sky like jagged teeth in a rotten skull. The wattle walls of garths and pastures were broken and torn, fields trampled into desolation. Even in the murk of the twilight gloom, Einarr could see that there was little of Skraevold still standing. He was under no illusion what had happened here. The tracks of the monster that had destroyed Vinnskor were easy enough to follow, a deep bloodstained furrow that drove straight as an arrow back to the place from which it had come. The bloodbeast had returned to the Aeslings.

Einarr thought of the old admonition his father had always given him about calling upon Kharnath: ‘Do not call upon the Blood God, for he cares not from whence the blood flows’. The Aesling had paid the price for not heeding that wisdom. Without their seer, they had no way to control the force they had unleashed.

The warrior continued on into the slaughterhouse that was Skraevold, oblivious to the mangled bodies and splintered bones strewn around him. He prowled among the wreckage like a hungry wolf, eyes watching every shadow for the merest sign of motion. The need to kill was like a fiery fist closed upon his heart, burning inside him every bit as keenly as it had in the monster. The anguish of his frustrated vengeance crashed down upon him the deeper his steps took him into Skraevold. They were dead, all of them. He was too late, too late to claim retribution for his kin, for Asta.

Like a great beast himself, Einarr howled his frustration into the black sky. Long minutes passed while the reaver roared at the stars, the moon and the cruel gods of the north. Vengeance, every drop of blood in him called out for it! Einarr swung Rafn’s axe, cleaving the skull of a slaughtered Aesling in half.

‘That is my kinsman you butcher.’ The cracked, broken voice boomed like thunder in the silent oblivion of the village. Einarr swung around. For the first time he saw movement among the shadows. A hulking shape pulled itself into the light. Kolsveinn, jarl of Skraevold, was as ruined as his domain. The elaborate armour that girded him was pitted and holed with the caustic burns caused by the beast’s blood. His face was a mass of scars; the old ritual signs of Kharnath obliterated beneath the claws marks that now split his visage. One eye was a milky mass, cleft in two down the middle. Half his nose was gone, and a deep gash in his brow gleamed white with the bone beneath. ‘You have come too late to find glory here, brigand,’ Kolsveinn hissed. ‘The Blood God has taken it for himself.’

‘I did not come here for glory,’ Einarr growled. He pulled back his bear-skull helm, baring his face to the crippled champion. Kolsveinn’s remaining eye went wide with shock. Einarr pointed his axe at the mangled jarl. ‘I came here for blood and for death.’

‘Spoken like a son of Skraevold,’ Kolsveinn spat. The jarl staggered forward, his fist closed around one of his deadly swords. But as he moved further from the shadows, Einarr saw the most hideous of the injuries Kolsveinn had suffered. The champion’s right arm had been torn from its socket, only a ragged mess of twisted flesh now attached to his shoulder. Einarr did not exult in his enemy’s injury; he did not give thought that without his arm and second sword Kolsveinn would be an easier man to defeat. None of that mattered to him. Victory or defeat, survival or death, these were secondary to vengeance.

And now he had something to visit his wrath upon.

There were no more words between them, these last survivors of their people. Einarr rushed at Kolsveinn, slashing at him with his axe. The jarl swatted his blow aside with a parry of his sword, then tried to follow it with a thrust to Einarr’s belly. Kolsveinn’s attack was slow, awkward; his mind still thinking it should be using the blade held in his missing arm. Einarr grinned savagely at his foe. The fight was already over; the jarl just didn’t know it yet.

Kolsveinn slashed his sword at Einarr’s face, dropping the sword into a guarding position as Einarr retaliated. But again, the once mighty jarl sank back into habit, expecting a second blade that was not there. Einarr struck at the man’s right, just past the guard of his sword. The axe chewed through the rotten, pitted armour, carving a deep gash in Kolsveinn’s side.

The champion roared in pain, but even through his pain, he attacked, driving his sword at Einarr’s chest. The Baersonling brought his axe up, catching the edge of the sword on its heft. With a grunt, he forced the jarl’s weapon aside. He followed up on his block by cracking the end of the axe handle into Kolsveinn’s jaw. Teeth flew from the jarl’s face and he staggered back beneath the blow.

Einarr firmed his grip upon his weapon and came at the reeling Aesling. Kolsveinn desperately tried to ward off the attack, this time over compensating for his missing arm, leaving his left exposed. Einarr brought his axe chopping down into Kolsveinn’s leg. The corroded armour gave way beneath the blow, ripping apart as the axe tore away Kolsveinn’s knee. The wounded jarl struck back, slashing at Einarr before the warrior could recover from his strike. The steel scraped along the reinforced fur leggings, a few stones spilling into the mire as the edge tore the leather.

The axe licked out again, barely missing Kolsveinn’s head. The red-bearded Aesling dragged his body back, creeping into the shadows, trying to use the gloom to defend him. But there would be no respite, and the Aesling knew it. Einarr slashed at him again, catching the edge of the jarl’s sword. Already weakened by the bloodbeast’s caustic ichor, notched from its contact with Einarr’s axe, the blade broke upon impact, shattering like ice.

Kolsveinn looked in disbelief at his broken sword, then stared into Einarr’s face. The Aesling did not ask for quarter for he knew none would be given. Instead, with a howl of rage, he flung himself at the Baersonling, seeking to drive his ruined blade into Einarr’s belly. The axe flashed through the twilight one last time, sending the jarl’s battered head rolling into the darkness.

After finishing the Aesling champion, Einarr pressed deeper into the wreckage of Skraevold, following the stench of old blood and rotting bones. He had done what he had set out to do; he had visited what vengeance a man might take from his foe. Now he was ready to stand before the grotesque god-beast the Aeslings had called down from Kharnath. He knew it was impossible for one man to prevail where two entire villages had found only death and slaughter. But he was not afraid of death. It was better to die with an axe in his hand and a war cry on his tongue than to wither away, some sulking coward hiding in the wilds. He would make the god-beast understand fear before he would let it take him. He would find a doom that would not bring shame on his ancestors.

It was an easy thing, finding the lair of the god-beast. All he had to do was follow his nose. The stink of rancid blood and the spoil of butchery steadily increased as he neared the great pit that the Aeslings had gouged from the earth. Heaps of offal were splashed across the ground, mounds of glistening skulls grinned at him from every side. The gore-soaked mire he walked upon was so drenched in blood that his boots sank into it with his every step. It was as though the god-beast had tried to recreate a part of the Blood God’s realm in the middle of Skraevold.

The walls of the pit were marked with runes and a log palisade, the sharpened ends of the timbers facing inward and pointing down. The one place where the palisade stood open, a massive log had been pushed into the pit, forming a crude bridge into the darkness. Only a small distance from the palisade, the Aeslings had constructed a bier, Alfkaell’s robed body lying atop it, the seer’s elven helm laid upon his chest.

Einarr strode toward the pit, Rafn’s axe at the ready. His eyes tried to pierce the black darkness, but could see nothing. The warrior stopped. The beast already had enough things in its favour; it did not need one more. He drew the broken shard of Fangwyrm, filling his free hand with its comforting weight. Then with a roar he raised his arms above him, smacking axe and sword together. The metal crash thundered through the silence. Einarr thought he could hear something moving in the pit, imagined that the stench of blood grew. He raised his arms again, cracking his weapons together. The third time he did so, he could make no mistake. Something was crawling up from the hole.

Like a gigantic serpent or a vast worm, the bloodbeast oozed its way up the log, tendrils coiling around it as the monster pulled itself upward. Its hide was brighter than it had been in Vinnskor, glutted on all the blood it had spilled. It rose, eager for still more, drawn by what its slobbering mind interpreted as the sounds of battle.

This time, the bloodbeast held no horror for Einarr. He stood his ground as it surged toward him, a gore-soaked hill of hungry flesh and lashing tentacles. He watched as the thing’s back split open in a burst of crimson, as a long trunk oozed its way into being, as the monstrous hound-like head grew from the stump of the neck. The head swung slowly in his direction, the riot of black eyes staring down at him. The massive maw with its sword-like fangs dropped open and from the beast came an ear-splitting howl that shook Einarr’s bones.

The warrior glared at the thing and roared back at it. The beast surged forward, a great paw growing from its chest and slashing at him. Einarr dodged the clumsy swipe, stabbing into the monster’s corrupt flesh with the ragged edge of Fangwyrm. The monster absorbed the stricken limb back into itself and stumbled forward once more. Einarr backed away as a pair of crab-like claws shot from the thing on root-like stalks. The ghastly limbs clacked shut only a hand-span from Einarr’s leg. He spun and chopped down at the things before the beast could pull them back, the axe slashing through the meat of the stalks. The dismembered claws writhed in the mire even as they began to crumble into a blood-black crust.

The beast lurched forward again, growing a gaggle of mismatched legs to stumble after its prey. A mammoth limb that resembled a flail smashed into the ground with a sickening squelch, narrowly missing Einarr. The warrior slashed at the huge knot of bone and skin, gouging a hole in its side. Even as the monster withdrew it for another strike, Einarr could see the injury closing upon itself. Even glutted after devouring two villages, the monstrosity had lost none of its power. Einarr threw himself across the ground as a second giant paw swiped at his head. He rolled across the mire as the paw twisted with a boneless motion and ploughed into the ground.

Einarr glared at the horror as it reared back, clattering in what could have seemed an insane mix of agitation, hunger and amusement. Touched by the gods or no, there had to be a way to hurt it, a way to make it know fear, a way to leave his mark upon it.

A loathsome second head grew from the beast’s body, its mouthless lizard-like face spurting a spray of steaming blood from its empty sockets. The filth splashed across Einarr, catching his hand in its lethal wash. Warmth and pain suddenly replaced the numb cold that had claimed his left hand. Fangwyrm fell from his throbbing fingers as he doubled over in agony. The metal glove he had worn was pitted and melted, searing into his flesh. Einarr roared at the god-beast, hurling Rafn’s axe at the wretched face. The blade tumbled end over end, then sank into the scaly head. The tiny face tried to shriek without a mouth as its own blood began to consume it. The neck shrivelled and wilted, like a dying flower, leaving a black crust against the beast’s breast.

The monster itself seemed oblivious to the fate of the second head it had grown, instead scuttling forward on its mismatched legs. Einarr dashed aside as the thing charged at him, cursing the impulse that had caused him to leap without recovering Fangwyrm from the mire. Now the monster stood between him and the blade. Its body shifted, its neck and head oozing into a new position on its formless mass. Einarr dove behind the only cover he could find, Alfkaell’s bier, as the immense bulk hurtled at him.

The bloodbeast crashed into the stack of logs with the force of an avalanche. Einarr was thrown back amidst a cloud of splinters and blood-ridden mud, crashing against the timbers of the palisade. He tried to suck breath into his winded lungs, even as his eyes searched the charnel ruins around him for anything resembling a weapon. Above him, the beast was slithering over the top of the bier, crushing the logs and the body of Alfkaell beneath its enormity.

Suddenly, the god-beast shuddered, retreating from the bier. Its jaws opened in a shriek of agony, smaller mouths rippling across its hide and joining its chorus of pain. Einarr could see a section of its body smoking, the flesh darkening into a black scab-like crust. The outline of the wound at once struck Einarr. It resembled a helm, tall and narrow and straight. He looked away from the monster, spotting the crushed body of Alfkaell and the equally flattened elf helm that had been resting on his breast.

That was the secret, how the seer had maintained control over Skraevold’s god. Einarr pulled himself to the top of the smashed bier, dragging the ithilmar dagger from his belt. The bloodbeast gibbered and whined to itself, tongues emerging from its mass to lick its wound. As Einarr stood atop the bier, however, the thing’s hound-like face stared up at him. The warrior snarled back at it, shrieking his clan’s war cry as he dove down upon it.

Einarr landed atop the hound-skull head, his feet sinking into the quagmire of its substance. He could feel his boots being consumed by the filth of the monster’s body, could feel its molten blood dissolving his skin. He put such pains from his mind, driving the ithilmar blade down into one of the black, shimmering eyes of the beast. It shrieked again, the organ exploding beneath his strike. The head reared back, almost throwing Einarr to the ground. He clutched at the side of its face with one hand, then stabbed a second eye, sinking his hand up to the wrist as he drove it deep into the skull.

The beast was screaming from a hundred mouths now. Einarr could see its blood spurting everywhere as he destroyed a third and then a fourth eye. He tried not to look at the screaming faces that shifted and writhed in the thing’s blood, concentrating only in working his blade across the monster’s obscene bulk. Lashing tentacles whipped around him, flailing idiotically in their desperation to rip him free. As he struck a fifth eye, the head began to ooze back into the body, taking Einarr with it. Einarr braced himself to leap clear, but as he did so, he stared into one of the faces screaming within the beast’s blood. A new hate boiled over within him as he saw Asta’s tortured features. The warrior held firm, slashing a sixth eye as he disappeared into the oozing hulk.

The bloodbeast quivered and shook, its faceless mass trying to crawl back towards the pit. Legs collapsed into puddles of filth as it moved, organs grew and withered with its every motion. Its immensity began to dwindle as portions of it dropped away and did not reform. The vibrant crimson of its substance darkened, the pulpy structure of its skin hardened and cracked. With a shudder, it slopped down against the ground, the impact causing great chunks of its body to slough away. The thing struggled to rise again, but what strength was in it was no more. It grew a wolf-like paw, raising it imploringly toward the sky. The limb crashed to the earth, crumbling into scabby clay even as the bulk that had spawned it grew still.

The silence and stillness did not linger long. The beast’s body shuddered again, great clumps of it falling away, cracking against the earth. From within the gory innards of the horror, Einarr forced his way clear. From head to toe, his battered body was caked in the crusty residue of the bloodbeast, looking himself like some daemonic sending of the Blood God. Einarr lifted his hand into the sky, not in entreaty but in triumph. He shouted his victory to the heavens, to the cold thrones of the gods and the hallowed halls of his ancestors.

Einarr stepped away from the quickly crumbling carcass of the god-beast, every muscle in his body feeling on fire. The warrior prowled among the carnage of his battle until he saw the hilt of Fangwyrm shining amid the crimson mire. He bent down to recover it, feeling naked with only the slim length of the ithilmar dagger in his hand. As he recovered the weapon, he saw that he was not alone.

Just beyond the perimeter of the pit and its surroundings, a horseman stood, his shaggy war pony digging restlessly at the crimson earth. The rider atop the animal was clothed in skins and armoured plates of bluish steel. The helm that protected his head was wide and crowned with spikes of bone. Feather talismans dripped from the rider’s coal-black hair. The horseman’s skin was pale, almost white, his features broad and cruel. He met Einarr’s gaze, making no motion to draw the crook-bladed sword at his side.

‘For to glory-honour the Tchar-hand!’ the horseman called out, his Norse crude and twisted by foreign tones. Einarr made no move to lower his weapon. The accent and hair told him this was no Aesling, nor even a Norscan, but one from the Kurgan tribes. Kurgans in Norsca tended to be raiders and slavers, taking thralls to their own wind swept wastes and steel for their smithies. Keeping one eye on the horseman, Einarr tried to watch the ruined long houses of Skraevold for more Kurgans.

‘Make peace with the gods, man of the steppes,’ Einarr called back. He had learned the tongue of the Kurgan during the siege of Erengrad. ‘I have slain the god-beast of Skraevold. If you think your sword will kill what it could not, the ravens will pick your bones.’

The Kurgan raised his hands, showing that he meant no harm. ‘I would not challenge he I have come so far to seek,’ the horseman said, returning to his native tongue. ‘Many days have I ridden the black wastes and the barren steppes to find you, Hand of Tchar.’

‘I am Einarr, of the Baersonlings,’ the Norscan told the Kurgan. He continued to watch the buildings for more Kurgans, certain that the horseman’s words were a trick.

The Kurgan shook his head. ‘You are the Hand of Tchar, the one I have come to seek.’ He pointed at Einarr, gesturing to his left hand. Einarr looked down at it, seeing it as though for the first time. The metal glove he had worn was gone, consumed by the searing blood of the beast, but the skin of his hand was largely untouched. Only in places was it marred, coated in molten metal from the ruined gauntlet. There was a pattern to the patches where the metal had adhered, covering only those places where the icy blood of the black eagle had numbed his flesh. Now, as he looked upon the weird metallic skin, Einarr could see the pattern it formed, the rippling moon-shape that was the sign of Tchar, the Lord of Change.

‘Who are you?’ Einarr demanded. Though his words were directed at the Kurgan, he could not pull his eyes from the change that had seized his hand.

‘Vallac, of the Khazags,’ the horseman said. ‘I heard Tchar whisper your name in the wind, saw your face written in the clouds.’ Vallac pulled his helmet from his head. A great patch of his scalp had been shaved and upon it, Einarr could see a tattoo, the tattoo of a rippling moon. As Einarr looked at it, it seemed to him that the tattoo’s hue shifted and changed. ‘I am a servant of Tchar. I know to read the signs he casts into the wind, and I know to follow the wisdom that is hidden in those signs. That is how I was led here, Einarr Steelfist. How I came to stand here, to witness you smite the mighty beast of Khorne.’

Einarr turned from Vallac, stalking through the crusted remains of the beast, seeing if he could find Rafn’s axe. ‘The Changer is a trickster, Vallac of the Khazags. He has deceived you. There is no one here called Einarr Steelfist! I am Einarr Sigdansson! I am no champion of Tchar, or any of the gods.’ Once the prospect of becoming such would have filled Einarr’s mind with wondrous ambitions and mighty visions. Now, with his village gone, his kin slaughtered, the favour of the gods held nothing for him. He had no time for this Kurgan and his delusions.

‘But you are marked,’ Vallac persisted. ‘You are chosen. How else explain your victory over the beast? How else could you emerge unscathed from its fiery belly, your cloak and your armour and your flesh unmarked? Only where the sign of Tchar is written on you did the Changer allow the beast’s essence to sear you, so that he might mark you as one of his own.’

The Kurgan’s words gave Einarr pause. He looked with new wonder at his unmarked hand, at the leather boots and fur cloak that stood whole on his body. He had seen the monster’s blood melt through steel, yet the simple hide of a bear had withstood it. The hairs on the back of Einarr’s neck rose. Vallac was right, a great force had guarded him in his fight, preserved him from the bloodbeast. He looked again at his hand, with its metal stigma. He could not doubt what force it was that had watched over him and allowed him to destroy the beast.

Raw, naked hate flared up within Einarr. If such power could protect him against the beast, why had it not done so sooner? Why had it not preserved him in Vinnskor, where such protection might have saved his village? No, there was nothing here worth giving thanks to Tchar.

Einarr found Rafn’s axe, stuffing the weapon through a loop on his belt. Without looking back at the Kurgan, he began to stride out of the village, heading north.

‘Where do you go?’ Vallac asked as Einarr walked away.

‘I head north,’ Einarr answered without turning. ‘There are many Aeslings there, and my axe still hungers.’

Vallac kicked his steed’s flank, trotting after Einarr. ‘Tchar has guided me here,’ he said. ‘I do not know why. Until I have solved that riddle, I would follow you.’

‘Then follow, Kurgan,’ Einarr said. ‘There will be enough Aeslings for both our blades.’

CHAPTER FIVE

With a gasp, Einarr tore himself from the dreams. Haunting visions of dripping, foul corridors and walls of rotting flesh lingered at the edge of his awareness, refusing to return to the domain of nightmare. A face, at once withered and bloated, glared at him from the edge of sleep before at last slipping back into the shadows. Despite the perpetual chill of the Norscan twilight, a thin sheen of sweat peppered his face. As full awareness returned to him, the bitter wind slammed into his damp features like the frozen breath of a snow giant.

‘It is the mark of a mighty warrior that the enemies he has slain stalk him beyond the wall of sleep.’

Einarr took his leathery hand and wiped the frosty residue of sweat from his face, then turned to look at Vallac. The Kurgan sat close to the small fire he had made, roasting a plump rabbit he had killed. The Kurgan’s horse pawed anxiously at the snow behind Vallac, throwing its head from side to side in its agitation. As Vallac cooked his meal his sword stood beside him, thrust point first into the snow.

‘I know the face of every man, brute and monster that has bled its last upon my steel,’ Einarr replied. The Norscan pushed his way free of the heavy bearskin cloak he’d been using for a blanket. Groaning, Einarr stretched his half-frozen limbs, trying to force feeling back into them. ‘The spectres I saw in my sleep resembled none I have sent to see the gods.’

Vallac leaned back from the fire, sucking at his teeth as he considered Einarr’s words. His dark features took on a thoughtful cast. ‘Perhaps your dreams are not dreams, but the voices of the gods.’

Einarr’s harsh laughter greeted Vallac’s sagely suggestion. ‘The only men the gods speak to are the seers!’ he scoffed. ‘And they pay a dire price for such a gift. Their minds go strange, the strength passes from their bodies and their seed withers unspent inside them.’ The Baersonling shook his shaggy blond mane. ‘There are many women in the south who would tell you that Einarr Sigdansson is no seer!’

The Kurgan shrugged his shoulders, reaching to tear some meat from the rabbit over the fire. ‘Norsca is a poor land then,’ Vallac said, ‘that the gods speak to so few. In the lands of the Kurgan, the gods are more free with their power. One has only to open one’s eyes to see their might, one only has to listen to hear their words. None among the Kurgan does not feel the will of the gods all around him.’

Einarr crouched down beside the fire, ripping a leg from the rabbit. He tore at the meat with savage hunger, wiping the grease from his beard with the back of his hand. ‘Perhaps the gods understand that the Norse are a strong people,’ Einarr said between bites. ‘They do not need to watch after us like a shepherd watching his herd, for we are mighty enough to survive without them.’ Einarr stared into Vallac’s dark eyes. ‘I pity the Kurgan that the gods must watch them with such vigilance.’ He finished stripping meat from the rabbit leg and threw the bone away. ‘Perhaps one day your people will be as strong as the Norse.’

Vallac smiled back at the Baersonling. ‘Perhaps one day your people will be important enough to interest the gods,’ he said. There was no malice in the Kurgan’s words. Like Einarr, his belief in the strength of his people was firm enough to endure the other’s challenge.

Einarr reached towards the fire again, intending to rip a bit of meat from the rabbit. The symbol branded into his hand reflected the firelight as he did so. Vallac understood it was a deliberate gesture, a reminder to the Kurgan that at least one of the gods was interested in at least one of the Norse. Einarr sank back into a crouch, tearing at the scrap of meat.

‘Is it still out there?’ he asked, his voice lower with a note of caution in it. Vallac nodded.

‘I have heard it prowling among the trees,’ the Kurgan said. ‘It never comes near enough to the fire to be seen, but sometimes I can catch its eyes shining back at me from the forest.’

Einarr digested his companion’s report. Since striking out into the land of the Aeslings three days ago, they had been followed, stalked by something that dogged their every move. Sometimes it would be ahead of them, other times behind them, but always it was there. They could hear it smashing its way through the brush. When the wind changed, its gut-churning stench would smash into them, a rancid combination of rotten meat and a midden heap. Three times Einarr had tired of being hunted, lunging into the forest to confront whatever was stalking them, but always the thing retreated deeper into the forest, trying to draw Einarr into its world. Even with his temper up, the Baersonling knew better than to fight any beast on its own ground. As he returned to the winding trail, he could hear the creature smacking branches against the trunks of trees, almost as if it were daring him to come back.

‘You think it to be a troll?’ Vallac asked, and there was a note of fear in his question. Einarr did not think any less of the Kurgan’s courage, no warrior relished the prospect of fighting a troll. With its immense strength, incredible stupidity and supernatural ability to regenerate, a troll would fight on long after any normal creature would lie down and die. Einarr had seen many men ripped to shreds by a troll with half its head chopped away, its slimy brain dripping onto the ground. No, it did not shame a man to respect the terrible power of a troll.

‘No,’ Einarr replied. ‘I have seen many trolls and none that I have seen have had the discipline for such a hunt. Their minds wander easily, a troll would not stalk prey for days on end.’ The Norscan turned and looked into the trees. He thought he could catch the slightest suggestion of movement, but could not be certain.

‘The beast-kin might hunt a man,’ Vallac said. ‘But those of my land lack the patience to stalk what they cannot overwhelm and kill.’

Einarr nodded. ‘It is the same here in Norsca. The gors rarely follow prey for any great time. As you say, they either overwhelm their quarry as soon as they are able, or they find easier prey.’

‘Whatever it is,’ Vallac answered, ‘I cannot shake the feeling that it will soon tire of this game. When that happens, our steel had best be sharp.’

The attack came when the dim twilight at last faded into true night. Einarr had broken camp, trudging on into the north, bound for the villages of the Aeslings, to reap such bloody harvest from his ancestral enemies as he might before his spirit went to walk with its ancestors. Vallac followed close beside him, his shaggy Kurgan horse keeping easy pace with Einarr’s long strides. The old game trail they travelled followed the contour of the land, rising and falling with each slope and valley, winding around each outcrop of twisted grey rock. It was as the trail circled one of these outcroppings that the nameless thing that had been stalking them for days decided to strike.

There was no warning, just the crash of an enormous boulder as it was flung at the men. The huge stone smashed into the frozen ground, pulverising the ice and earth as it struck. So close had it come, that Einarr’s cheek bled from the shreds of pebble and hoarfrost cast up by the stone’s impact. The Baersonling was stunned for the moment, awestruck by how near he had escaped being crushed. Had his hand not begun to vex him, had he not paused to soothe it with snow, a far less heroic doom than the one he thought to seize would have been his.

Even Vallac was stunned by the sudden and brutal attack, the Kurgan staring in open fascination at the sheer size of the boulder. It was as big around as a man and the crater it had dug for itself betrayed a weight that was almost inconceivable.

The tremor from the boulder’s impact was still resounding in the bones of the warriors when a vile stench overwhelmed them, a reek of dog vomit and festering carrion. There was a great crash among the trees and then a massive shape exploded from the forest. Before Vallac could even draw his sword, before he could register more than an impression of filthy white fur and powerful long arms, the creature was upon him. Towering over the mounted Kurgan, the monster bowled man and steed over with the impact of its charge. Vallac’s horse whinnied in fright as it was pushed down on its rump. Vallac found his arm and weapon pinned beneath his animal as the monster turned it onto its side. The horse shrieked in terror, trying to rip free of the creature’s powerful grip and regain its feet. The monster growled in annoyance, bringing its fist cracking down on the animal’s skull. Vallac’s horse wilted under the impact, its head shattered by the beast’s blow. As his horse crashed back into the snow, Vallac was pulled down with it, pinned beneath its weight.

Einarr rushed towards his besieged comrade, smacking his axe into the shaggy white back that rose above the Kurgan and his mount. Icy blood streamed down his axe as the monster howled in pain. It spun, glaring at Einarr with ancient, animal hate. It was bigger than a bear, covered not in fur but locks of stringy white hair. The shape was roughly that of a man, twisted by the mass of muscle clinging to its bones. The long arms, longer by far than any man’s, ended not in paws but huge hands, each finger tipped with a wicked claw. The face that glowered down at him from behind its fringe of ratty hair was bestial, the nose pushed in against its face, its mouth a great fanged gash. But there was intelligence in the monster’s yellow eyes, a cruel cunning and wickedness far greater than any mere beast.

‘I’ve never seen one so big as you, dung-chewer,’ Einarr growled at the monster. ‘You must be the grandfather of all the ymir.’

The monster threw back its ape-like head. From its mouth there sounded a hideous shriek-scream that made Vallac’s blood curdle. Even in the depths of the Wastes, where all was at the whim of the Dark Gods, the Kurgan had seldom heard a sound so terrifying. Einarr seemed unfazed by the high-pitched cry, simply swiping his axe through the empty air, spattering the ymir’s mangy hair with its own blood. The brute lowered its head, snapping its jaws at Einarr. The Norscan gestured at it again with his axe, daring it to test his steel. There was more than simple bravado in Einarr’s actions. Any man in the north came to know ymir well from the sagas told during the long winter nights. He knew they were cowardly creatures with little taste for battle. If he could intimidate the ymir with a show of force, it might abandon the fight.

The ymir roared, lunging at Einarr, its hands curled into deadly claws. The warrior reacted to its charge, chopping down at it with his axe. The beast turned with the blow, letting the edge of Einarr’s blade catch it in the shoulder rather than the skull. The ape-beast’s warm blood steamed as it splattered across the snow, but the ymir hurtled onward, its immense weight smashing into Einarr like a living avalanche. The warrior was thrown from his feet, hurtling backward as though kicked by a horse. The ymir loomed above him, snarling. It dabbed fingers into its wound, sniffing the gore that coated its fingers, then shriek-screamed at the man who had injured it.

Einarr heaved himself from the ground with a grunt, hands still clenched tight around the haft of his axe. The Norscan had barely regained his feet when the ymir was lunging at him again. This time he struck low, looking to end the monster’s charge rather than its life. The axe chewed into the beast’s thigh, scraping against the thick bone of its leg. The ymir collapsed beneath the blow, screaming in pain. Einarr hurried toward the crippled monster while it was still down on its knee, hoping to end the battle with one last strike. But the beast was far from finished. As Einarr closed upon it, the ymir swatted him with its massive arm, tossing him back with such force that the Norscan was certain he’d heard ribs crack beneath the blow.

The Baersonling spat blood from his mouth, pressing one hand against his side where the beast had struck him. He could not tell through the armour just how extensive his injuries were, but the sharp pain that shot through him as he pressed his side told him that they were there. Einarr shifted his grip on the axe, standing his ground as the ymir rose from its own wounds. The beast limped forward, favouring its maimed leg. It snarled at Einarr, baring its enormous fangs. Watching it hobble towards him, Einarr considered that the sagas had seriously overstated the cowardice of these creatures.

Einarr did not wait for the ymir to come at him again, but charged the creature. The ymir slashed at him with its clawed hand, receiving a taste of the axe for its efforts, severed fingers scattering across the snow. The warrior followed upon his attack by chopping the blade into the monster’s chest. The ymir howled in pain, rearing back and pulling the axe from Einarr’s hand. Instinctively, Einarr lunged forward to recover the weapon stuck fast amid the ymir’s ribs. It was a costly mistake. The claws of the ymir’s uninjured hand closed around Einarr’s arm. The warrior could feel the awesome strength of the ymir as it tossed him through the air like a rag doll, leaving him to crash hard against the icy ground.

Einarr tried to suck air back into his body, even as he reassured himself that he still had an arm. The way the ymir had grabbed him, he had thought the beast had torn his arm from the socket. Certain he was still whole, he drew the jagged length of Fangwyrm from his belt and prepared to face the monster again. He looked aside to see what had become of Vallac. The Kurgan was frantically digging at the frozen ground with his dagger, trying to slide his leg out from beneath his dead horse. There would be no help from that quarter, the earth might as well be solid granite for all the good Vallac’s efforts were doing him. No, it would be Baersonling strength and Baersonling steel that would need to deal with the ymir.

Watching the beast hobbling toward him, Einarr began to doubt his faith in either strength or steel. Even with the ghastly wounds it had suffered, with blood fairly exploding from the mangled ruin of its hand, with Rafn’s axe still buried in its chest, the ymir still had not lost its murderous hunger.

‘I’ll split your belly before I fill it,’ Einarr cursed as the ymir drew closer. The ape-beast snarled, bloody drool falling from its fangs. If it was intimidated by the battered Norscan with the broken sword, it was certainly not showing any sign.

Suddenly, a grey shape crashed into the monster’s side, knocking it flat. Einarr caught an impression of fur and steel as the strange figure straddled the toppled beast, sending its blood flying as his frenzied assault tore into the ymir’s body. Again and again, Einarr saw the fur-covered man’s axe slash into the ymir, ripping its body into shreds. The beast did little to defend itself – after bowling the crippled giant over, the man’s first blow had severed the arteries in its neck.

When the ymir and its slayer grew still, Einarr cautiously approached. The man was shorter than Einarr, but seemed to be even more massively built beneath the patchwork of ragged wolfpelts and animal hides that covered him. Breathing heavily, the man rose from his gory labour, licking the bloody edge of his axe clean. He turned his hairy visage toward Einarr as he approached. Einarr saw that the man’s face was thin and sharp, his brow almost as hairy as his chin. Although the man’s hair was nearly as grey as the furs he wore, there was nothing about his features that suggested great age; certainly nothing about his sudden and savage attack did.

‘You took my kill,’ Einarr told the man. The stranger’s eyes narrowed at the challenge.

‘Five days I tracked it,’ the man snarled. ‘The kill is mine. Be thankful you’re no Aesling, or Orgrim would have let the ymir finish you first.’

‘How do you know I am no Aesling?’ Einarr asked. If the weird hunter was truly a foe of the Aeslings, he might be useful to Einarr’s plans for revenge. He would certainly know better than Einarr where their villages were situated. Besides, there was something compelling about the man, a haunting feeling that Einarr knew him, had seen him before.

The hunter laughed. ‘You don’t stink like an Aesling,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. The hunter turned back toward the dead ymir. He set his axe down, burying its blade in the snow, and reached towards the weapon still embedded in the beast’s chest.

‘The kill may be yours, friend, but the axe is mine.’ Einarr locked eyes with Orgrim. The hunter had strange pale eyes, like chips of frost. It was not an easy thing to match his gaze, but Einarr forced himself to do so. He had braved the belly of Skraevold’s god, he would be damned if he would look away from some scruffy woodsman. Orgrim seemed to appreciate the display of will. The hunter ripped the axe free, offering it to the Baersonling. Einarr reclaimed his weapon, wiping the ymir’s gore from the steel. The hunter watched him clean the axe with a suggestion of amusement in his savage face.

‘You helped with the kill,’ Orgrim said. ‘I will share the beast’s meat.’ For the first time, Einarr noticed the nature of some of the injuries on the ymir’s body. The hunter hadn’t simply been trying to kill it. After delivering the deathblow to the ymir’s neck, he had started butchering it, cutting it into sections even before it was fully dead. The warrior winced at the image of eating any part of the ymir. The hunter shrugged and returned to his labours. ‘Suit yourself, more meat for my fire.’ Orgrim rose and pointed towards the mountains looming in the east. ‘My home is no great distance. If you won’t share my food, perhaps you would share my fire?’

‘I would be lying if I said a warm fire would be unwelcome,’ Einarr smiled and offered the hunter his hand. ‘Einarr Sigdansson of the Baersonlings,’ the warrior said. The hunter nodded as he heard the introduction.

‘My nose never lies,’ Orgrim said. ‘I knew you were no Aesling. I know their stink too well to be fooled. The one with you, he is no son of the Aes either.’

Einarr and Orgrim both turned their heads. Vallac glared back at them, flopped against the side of his horse, no closer to freeing himself than when he had started. Horse and Kurgan alike were coated in blood, having failed to dig into the ground, Vallac had started to free himself by carving through his horse.

‘Show some care, that is our supper you abuse!’ Einarr called back to his companion. They would have fresh meat, and without accepting the abominable fodder Orgrim had proposed.

Orgrim’s home turned out to be a bleak little cave pitting the side of a rocky slope. The hunter had made little effort in the way of comfort, eking out an existence almost as primitive as that of any beast. The only concession to civilization Einarr could find was a clay pot filled with salt.

The hunter had made his fire easily enough with flint and tinder, but Einarr noted that their host barely let the fat start to sizzle before he withdrew the ymir meat from the flame and began ripping into it. Vallac seemed to find the hunter’s penchant for raw, salted meat alternately revolting and amusing. He made a point of blackening the flesh of his own meal before starting in on it. The horse had been much too robust and muscular for its meat to be tender, but Einarr considered that he had eaten far worse and that it was certainly preferable to the meal Orgrim was wolfing down. To eat something so similar to a man was one of the few things that turned even a Norscan’s stomach, though Vallac claimed cannibalism was not particularly taboo among his own people.

As they ate, they talked. Orgrim was keenly interested in what had drawn Einarr so far from the lands of the Baersonlings. When he learned of the warrior’s mission of vengeance, the hunter laughed with approval. It transpired that Orgrim was an Aesling himself, though an outcast from his tribe who bore his people only the most bitter of hate. He knew quite well the locations of every Aesling village within a hundred leagues and would be more than happy to help turn Einarr loose upon them.

‘I knew there was something important about you,’ Orgrim said. He tapped the side of his nose. ‘I caught your smell on the wind, before even the ymir. There was something special about it, almost as though the wind wanted to lead me to you.’

‘The voice of Tchar,’ Vallac nodded, touching the mark of his god branded on his flesh. To the Kurgan, it seemed every stray snowflake was the work of Tzeentch. Einarr was beginning to find the man’s rampant superstition trying.

‘And what does the wind say to do now that you have found me?’ Einarr asked. Orgrim shrugged.

‘Lead you to kill Aeslings,’ he said without conviction. ‘Perhaps we can carve our wergild from them together. My own debt with my people has been unsettled for much too…’ The hunter froze in mid-thought, his body becoming rigid, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed at the air. In a blur of speed, he drew his axe and leapt toward the mouth of the cave. Einarr and Vallac drew their own weapons and hurriedly followed their host. They found themselves glaring down at a thin, spindly figure bundled in a heavy blue cloak, its collar fringed in bright feathers and glass beads. The figure had been climbing the slope, up towards the cave, but it froze as the men emerged.

Orgrim glared down at the cloaked intruder. The hunter sniffed noisily at the air, his expression growing even more incensed. ‘You’ll find no shelter from the cold here, Aesling bitch, only pain and a slow death!’ As the outcast’s anger built, his voice thickened and his features darkened. Einarr found himself backing away from his new ally, an instinctive reaction for anyone who had seen the fury of a berserk. Vallac hesitated, ignorant of the battle-fury that the Norse warriors who walked the path of the berserker could hurl themselves into. Einarr gripped the Kurgan’s arm, motioning for him to distance himself from Orgrim. When the hunter slipped into his frenzy, he would be a menace to friend as well as foe.

The traveller pulled back the heavy hood of her cloak, revealing a head of stringy white hair and a face withered by age and the elements. At the centre of the crone’s forehead, the skin was puckered and scarred, grey with dead flesh. Into this wound had been placed, or perhaps had grown, a large black stone. Into the rock had been carved an eye-like symbol, one of the signs by which the Windlord Tchar was known. Einarr felt the same haunting feeling that had come upon him when he had faced Orgrim, the eerie sensation that this complete stranger was somehow familiar to him. The crone sensed his scrutiny and he almost felt compelled to look away when he saw the stone shift its position to face towards him, as though it were staring back at him.

The crone tapped the staff she carried against the ground, causing the collection of bone charms and bronze trinkets dangling from it to jangle. Her normal eyes studied Orgrim, watching him with the same caution a man might regard a growling dog. ‘When the bloom of youth was mine, you should have eaten out of my hand,’ the crone said, her voice thin and scratchy. ‘Now I shall be content to have you lie at my feet.’

Orgrim was already in motion, pouncing towards the old woman as though he were a sabretusk. Einarr was struck by the awesome speed and strength in the hunter’s lunge and considered that Orgrim’s boast about not needing his help to soften the ymir had not been an idle one.

As fast as the hunter was, the crone was faster still. She did not try to flee from Orgrim’s attack, did not try to dodge aside from his lunge. Instead, the woman simply struck her staff against the icy ground again. This time the charms did not jangle together, instead the strings of gut and wire seemed to rise as though pulled by the wind, each of the small trinkets reaching out towards Orgrim’s hurtling shape. A foot from the woman, Orgrim’s body stopped, crashing against some unseen force. The hunter staggered back, his nose bloody from the impact against the invisible barrier. He howled with rage, coiling his body for another charge. There was an expression almost of pity as the crone watched him. She waved her withered hand and Einarr could feel the power erupt as she made the gesture. Orgrim’s eyes rolled back in his head and with a whimper, the hunter wilted into the snow.

‘I did not come all this way to see my bones gnawed by the wolves,’ the crone hissed. She looked up, watching as Vallac and Einarr prepared to face her. The Kurgan too had felt the power that the old woman had used to fell Orgrim, and like Einarr, he did not relish the prospect of fighting a witch.

‘Be at peace,’ the witch called out to them. ‘I mean you no ill. Even that cur lying in the snow is unharmed. He will sleep, for a time, but that is all.’

‘He said you were an Aesling,’ Einarr replied. He looked aside at Vallac and could see the Kurgan was thinking the same thought as himself. If they both charged the witch at the same moment, perhaps one of them would strike her down before her spells could work their ruin. ‘An Aesling is never at peace with a Baersonling!’

The witch pointed at Einarr’s hand. ‘The mark upon your flesh is more important than the blood in your veins, reaver.’ With a flourish, she shrugged back the cuff of her cloak. Upon the thin, wasted arm Einarr could see a patch of skin that had sprouted a growth of brilliant blue and yellow feathers. Somehow, it did not strike the Norscan strange that the growth should be in the same shape as the symbol on his own hand.

Einarr lowered his axe and stepped forward. ‘What can you tell me of this mark?’ he asked, extending his hand toward the witch. ‘I have never given the Windlord cause to mark me as his own. Why should he place his sign upon my flesh?’

The witch’s laughter wheezed through the few teeth left in her face. ‘The gods do not ask, they take!’ she sneered. ‘Tchar wants you, warrior. Therefore you are his!’

It was Einarr’s turn to sneer. ‘I have asked nothing of the gods and they have given me nothing. They have little cause to demand my service now.’

The crone shook her head. ‘Tchar guided me to you for a purpose. In the entrails of a pig, I saw this place. I saw a man with the mark of Tchar forged into his hand. My divinations told me that the man would not understand what was demanded of him. It would be Urda’s task to tell him, and to tell him what Tchar would be willing to give in return for his service.’ Urda looked past Einarr, staring at Vallac.

‘Let the Kurgan see to the renegade,’ she said, turning from the cave. ‘There are things I would say that only the ears of Tchar’s champion should hear.’

‘Am I some cowering thrall to take orders from an Aesling crone?’ Einarr growled back. ‘Do not think I will balk at cutting the head from a presumptuous old hag who has outlived her days.’ He brandished his axe menacingly at Urda. The witch simply smiled at him and turned away. Einarr felt a tremor of rage rush through him at the old woman’s haughty airs. Not even the bondsmen of Vinnskor had treated him with such disrespect! Yet even as the urge to strike her down for her arrogance swelled within him, Einarr knew that he would not touch her. He watched the old witch walk back down the slope for a moment, then tucked his axe back in his belt.

‘You don’t mean to follow that hag,’ Vallac said, disbelief in his voice. Einarr nodded his head.

‘I have little wit for riddles,’ he said. ‘If the witch can truly tell me why Tchar has chosen me, then I would hear her words. See to Orgrim, I will not be long.’

CHAPTER SIX

The old witch took Einarr a small distance from Orgrim’s cave, into a small stand of gnarled, twisted trees. Einarr found the writhing, tortured trunks unsettling, the resemblance of their thin limbs and scrawny branches far too close to skeletal talons to escape the Norscan’s superstitious attention. His skin crawled as the unnatural aura reaching out from the grotesque trees impressed itself upon him. It was the sensation of cold unearthly expanses, the aroma of sorcery and magic. Einarr felt foolish, allowing mere trees to unsettle him so. He tried to tear his gaze from them, but found them morbidly fascinating. Then, in his inspection of them, Einarr found a pale blue eye staring back at him from amid the bark of one trunk. There was anguished madness in that eye and while Einarr watched, pallid sap-like tears oozed from its corners.

‘Blood of the old-fathers!’ Einarr swore, drawing back from the stand of hideous trees. Beside him, Urda began to cackle.

‘Perhaps they were, once,’ Urda laughed. Einarr felt sick as he watched the old woman caress one of the branches with her own wasted hand, stroking it as a child might pet a cat. ‘Many lifetimes have they stood here, reaver. They came into these lands from the south, to loot and to plunder and to kill. But they offended Tchar the Changer and he brought them low, changing flesh into wood and blood into sap. And here they stand, living testaments to Tchar’s wrath.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’ Einarr demanded. The warrior did not look at the witch as he spoke, his eyes watching the tortured trees, half expecting the abominations to spring into unholy life, to avenge their ancient misery with Baersonling blood.

Urda shook her head, giggling under her breath. ‘You don’t trust me, Einarr Steelfist?’ She laughed louder as Einarr momentarily shifted his suspicious gaze to the witch. ‘Good! Good! Trust is the first illusion. None who would navigate the web of Tchar’s wisdom should be so easily deceived.’ The crone began rummaging through an ox-hide bag, removing small black stones from it. She began pacing through the snow, kneeling and placing the stones upon the ground in a complex pattern.

‘Do not fear, reaver,’ Urda said. ‘I do not think it is Tchar’s will to add a new sapling to his grove of the cursed. I brought you here because this is a place strong with the power of Tchar. Places where the gods have left their marks forever draw strength from them. Those who serve can tap into that strength. We are drawn to such places, can feel their call in our bones. It is why that renegade makes his lair in the cave beyond the hill, because the power of this place beckons him.’

Einarr clenched his hand, feeling the metallic flesh groan as he willed it close. ‘And what of the men upon whom the gods leave their mark?’

‘They beckon too,’ Urda said. She set the last stone in place upon the snow and reached into her bag once more. Something sleek and slimy coiled about her forearm as she withdrew it, something that looked to Einarr midway between slug and eel. The witch smiled with her empty mouth as she ripped the thing’s throat with her overgrown nails, splashing the snow between the stones with its treacle-like blood. A sharp, bitter smell struck against Einarr’s senses as the crone bled the loathsome mollusc dry. Urda tossed the carcass into the woods and turned toward Einarr again.

‘You can feel Tchar’s strength in you,’ she said. ‘Others can feel it too and they will be drawn to it, like moths to the flame. Why else do you think the Kurgan and the renegade sought you out? Why else do you think Tchar guided my steps to find you?’

‘You promised me answers, witch!’ Einarr snarled. ‘Not more questions! Tell me why Tchar has done this to me! Tell me what it is the gods expect of me!’ Urda stared long into Einarr’s furious eyes, then nodded and crouched down, her shrivelled hand reaching into the soiled snow. She approached Einarr, her fist closed around a handful of snow slimy with the life of the mollusc.

Einarr stared at the pungent, soupy mess running between the crone’s fingers as the snow melted. It seemed to sizzle as it struck the ground, burning its way into the soil beneath the snow. He shifted his gaze back to Urda’s gleaming eyes.

‘Eat this, and all your questions will be answered,’ the crone said. She opened her fingers, displaying the melting filth that had been crushed into a ball by her grip.

The warrior pulled away, swallowing against his revulsion. ‘Was it not you who said that trust is the first deception?’

‘So I did,’ the witch grinned back, still holding the repugnant mush beneath Einarr’s face. ‘Perhaps you are not so eager to find wisdom as you profess.’ Urda’s hollow laughter hissed from her face as she watched Einarr’s features twist with disgust as he continued to watch the icy filth melt in the witch’s hand. Einarr ignored her gloating, his mind flying as he tried to decide what kind of game Urda was playing with him. Did she mean to poison him, cast some baleful spell upon him? He found his eyes wandering again to the twisted, tortured trees. Perhaps that was what she intended, despite her assurances that such was not the will of Tchar. Sigdan had once told him that the most dangerous lies were those the liar did not bother to hide.

The crone continued to cackle and into her laughter was mixed a menagerie of sounds, human and animal. Einarr felt his head spinning as the noise seeped down his ears. His skull felt on fire, a throbbing agony that echoed Alfkaell’s attack upon him. Sweat beaded upon Einarr’s brow as he fought to focus his thoughts. The eyes in the trees were wider now, watching him with an air of loathsome expectancy.

Suddenly, amid the babble of the witch’s sounds, a set of syllables stabbed into Einarr’s mind like a burning blade. The fog of confusion vanished and Einarr lunged forward, his tainted hand closing around Urda’s scrawny throat, his other hand holding his axe high.

‘What did you say?’ Einarr’s voice thundered. ‘How do you know that name?’ Even with Einarr’s hand locked about her neck, there was a gloating quality in Urda’s toothless smile.

‘You know what you must do to find wisdom,’ the witch wheezed. Despite the violence of Einarr’s fury, her hand still held the ball of filthy snow and she once more extended it toward the warrior’s face.

‘You said “Asta”!’ Einarr growled. ‘How do you know that name!’ His grip tightened about the witch’s throat, her shining eyes bulging in her withered face. Even with death reaching out for her, the smile remained locked on Urda’s countenance.

‘Daring breeds wisdom,’ Urda hissed. ‘Death brings only ignorance.’

Einarr roared with frustration, releasing the witch, hurling his axe across the grove. The warrior raised his fists, shaking them at the black sky, hurling curses at the heavens. When he turned, he found Urda standing beside him again, holding the melting filth out to him once more, as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t come within an inch of snapping her scrawny neck. The rage in Einarr’s eyes collapsed into a miasma of defeat. The warrior’s shoulders slumped and he nodded his head weakly. Whatever trap the witch had set for him, he did not have the will to escape it.

Urda pressed her hand against Einarr’s face. He could feel her paper-thin flesh against his lips as the slimy slush was pushed into his mouth. He could feel the filth burn as it slithered down his throat, could feel its abominable substance racing through his body. Einarr wilted to the ground, hacking as his body tried to vomit the corruption back into the snow. Urda watched his misery for a moment, then slowly made her way back to the ring of stones she had made. She lifted her staff from where she had laid it upon the ground. She stabbed its point into the tainted snow still remaining within the pattern marked out by the stones and began churning the filth like a house-thrall stirring a cauldron.

‘Asta…’ Einarr gasped as his body continued to heave and convulse.

Urda looked back at the stricken warrior. ‘In time, reaver. But there are much greater things we must learn first. You are the chosen, it is upon your flesh that Tchar has forged his mark in steel. It is to you that the will of Tchar has been revealed, even if you are not wise enough to understand. The voice of the gods is spoken in the language of dreams. Tell me what visions have filled your sleep and their shapes will manifest in the blood of the changeling. Tell them to me, that we may both learn how we will serve mighty Tzeentch!’

An icy tingle worked its way along Einarr’s spine as he looked down upon the images that had been captured in the tainted snow. It was not the loathsomeness of the medium, or the fact that Einarr could still taste the filth in his mouth. It was not any level of horrifying detail, for the images were more like the stylistic runes of the seers than pictures torn from life. No, it was the sense of familiarity they evoked as he looked upon them, the certainty that the repugnant ritual had done exactly what Urda claimed it had done. She said the tainted snow had drawn the images straight from Einarr’s mind, pulling them from that hidden place where the brain locked away unremembered dreams. Looking upon them, Einarr knew he had seen them before, knew that each figure and each scene had played its part in the long hours of slumber.

Einarr studied each figure, trying to find some meaning, some understanding from them. There was a squat, daemon-like figure, its bearded face split in a wicked grin, its hands extended as though to make an offering of the sword laid between them, heavy chains drooping from its arms. Near the little daemon were two massive figures, their outlines suggesting immense strength, one of them leaning against a gigantic maul. Another figure was that of an armoured warrior, horns curling from his helm, the skull-rune of Khorne emblazoned across his chest.

There were animals too, wild beasts each marked with peculiar signs. There was a griffon, its mighty frame enclosed in armour, great horns framing its visor face. There was a sinister-looking owl, its face sporting three eyes. There was a great falcon with arrows flying from its beak. A loping wolf, an axe clenched tight in its jaws. A shaggy horse, feathers braided into its mane and the mark of Tchar upon its brow. A mighty winged dragon, its wings tattered and torn, its jaws open in a great roar. Above everything, there was a monstrous eagle, its beak crooked, its wings unfurled. Einarr felt his eyes straying again and again to the avian figure, unable to shake the sense of belonging it provoked.

There were scenes as well, places and things that were strange and sinister to Einarr’s eyes. He saw a great pillar, its surface covered in writhing figures, a gigantic worm coiled around it. The worm’s mouth was open, and strange things danced upon its tongue. He saw an enormous ship, far different from the longships of the Norse, listing badly to one side and with great fingers pulling at it from below. There was a tall cliff, its sides jagged and crumbling, seeming to twist and change even as Einarr looked at it.

Einarr stared at the pictures for a long time, trying to make sense of them. But they were too many, too strange in their shape and form. Einarr was a warrior, not a seer or skald. Interpreting the meaning of the signs was beyond him, for all the emotion they evoked in him.

Urda stood beside Einarr. The old crone jabbed at the snow images with her staff, pointing to the three-eyed owl. ‘This, I think, must be me.’ There was a note of pride in her voice as she made the observation. Einarr considered that for all the witch’s gloating, all her talk of conversing with Tchar, there had been doubt in her mind that she had really been guided to him by the gods. Seeing what could be a symbol for herself within the dreamscape of Einarr’s nightmares had reaffirmed her convictions.

‘If the owl is you, then the stallion is surely Vallac,’ Einarr said. He found himself looking once again at the symbol of the eagle. It had been such a creature that had found him in the ruins of Vinnskor that had set him upon this path. He could not deny the sense of kinship it evoked. ‘This one,’ he said, pointing at the eagle, ‘I feel is meant to be me.’

The old crone’s face betrayed a moment of shock, her brow lifted in surprise. ‘The eagle is the symbol of Tchar,’ she pronounced with even more certainty than she had in her own representation among the symbols. As she spoke her words, Einarr felt a twinge of terror as a fragment of his dream seemed to return to him. Running, trying to hide upon a vast, empty plain while above him, its cruel eyes watching his every move, there circled the great black eagle. The horror of the memory caused Einarr’s pulse to quicken. Tchar, the Changer of the Ways. Einarr could almost feel the god’s eye upon him as he stared down at his symbol. Yet he still could not escape the sense of belonging the symbol made him feel. Somehow he was even more certain than Urda that the witch was wrong, that the eagle was meant to represent himself, not Tchar.

‘What of these others, then?’ Einarr wondered, trying to change the subject. ‘What might they mean?’

‘Beware, Steelfist,’ Urda cautioned. ‘There is both guidance and warning among these signs. Some you are to seek out, others you should avoid.’

‘But which are which?’

Urda shook her head. ‘The gods are seldom so forthcoming. They leave it for men to find such wisdom for themselves.’ Einarr turned away from her and began staring at the symbols again. ‘Lock these signs in your mind’s eye, Einarr Steelfist. Keep them safe, do not forget them. They are the words of Tchar. When the time is right, you will understand their meaning.’

Einarr digested Urda’s speech. Slowly the warrior turned back toward the witch. ‘This is how you answer the riddle of my dreams, crone. With more riddles! You promised me answers! You promised me wisdom! Where are my answers, old woman? Why has Tchar cast his mark upon me? What is it he would have me do?’ Einarr’s voice dropped into a deep snarl. ‘And how does the name of my wife come to be on an Aesling’s forked tongue?’

The witch gestured at the symbols in the snow again. She indicated a particular cluster on the very edge of the ring marked out by the stones. There was what seemed to Einarr a vast and bleak swamp, from the centre of which rose an immense and crumbling tower. ‘Not all of these symbols are unknown to me, reaver. I told you that I understood why Tchar had chosen you and what he wanted from you. I do, but I had to be certain that you were indeed the one Tchar had chosen, that the same visions I had seen in my dreams were also in yours.’

The crone gestured to the figure of a man set beside that of the crumbling tower. The figure was corpulent and bloated, seated upon a lavish throne. ‘The Plague Lord Skoroth, favoured apostle of Neiglen the Corrupter, the god of pestilence and decay. This,’ she gestured at the tower itself, ‘is Skoroth’s fortress, the Palace of the Plague Lord. It lies deep within the Wastes, far beyond the lands of the Norse, beyond even the lands of the Kurgan, at the very doorstep of the realm of the gods. Skoroth’s palace is a temple to his god, a sacrament to the filth of his master. It is where the great treasures of Neiglen are kept, locked away behind walls of corruption and disease.

‘One of those treasures is a sacred relic, an artefact that Neiglen stole long ago from Mighty Tchar. The Windlord has waited many centuries for the time to be right to reclaim what was stolen from him. That time is now. Just as the Corrupter’s power waxes, so too does it wane. Neiglen is weaker now than he was when he dared steal from Tchar’s holy vaults.’

‘Why does Tchar not take his relic back himself?’ the blasphemous words were fuelled by Einarr’s smouldering anger. The witch was taking the long way around to answering anything.

‘Skoroth’s palace lies beyond the realm of the gods, existing within the world of mortals. A mortal may enter it and not draw the notice of Neiglen, a god could never do so.’ It was the sort of mysterious response Einarr had come to expect from the crone. The witch pointed at the symbols again, this time indicating a large, sickle-shaped claw. ‘This is the treasure that was taken from Tchar, the talon of his favoured servant, that which bears the title of “Dark Master”. It is a thing sacred to Tchar and filled with his might and power. For it to lie within the fastness of another god is a thing abhorrent and unclean.’

Einarr shook his head. ‘Such a small thing for Tchar to ask of me, to storm the stronghold of Neiglen himself and steal one of the plague god’s treasures!’

‘Not in a thousand years could you gather an army mighty enough to seize the palace of Skoroth,’ sneered Urda. ‘You must use cunning and deception if you would do this thing. Where an army must fail, a few might succeed.’

‘What I must do is cast aside all this talk of gods and relics,’ Einarr snarled. ‘Let Tchar burn his mark into some other fool! I did not ask for his favour, nor do I want it! All I ask is that I spill the blood of many Aeslings and take vengeance for my slaughtered people.’

Urda’s scrawny hand closed around Einarr’s arm as he started to leave. ‘Wait, Steelfist! I have told you what Tchar asks of you, but you have not heard what he offers in return! Far more than simple vengeance, far more I assure you.’

Einarr glared at the old witch, his temper roused by the desperation in her voice. Was there nothing more behind her talk of gods and palaces than a cheap trick to keep him from cutting his way through the villages of the Aeslings?

‘What is there left to me except my vengeance?’ he demanded.

‘Step within the circle and you shall see for yourself,’ Urda replied. The witch motioned for Einarr to cross into the patch of befouled snow. His boots stomped across the images and he waited while Urda pulled a scroll of vellum from beneath her robe. She held the letters close to her face, her eyes squinting as she studied the symbols.

‘More sorcery, witch?’ Einarr growled. ‘I grow weary of your tricks! What would you have me do this time? Milk a maggot, or perhaps drink the piss of a weasel?’

Urda looked up from her scroll. Her eyes glowed with etheric energies. When she spoke, her voice was a subdued whisper. ‘The gods do not need such ceremony to impose their will upon the world. The power of a god is but a single word.’

Einarr saw Urda’s mouth open again, but such sound as she might have given voice, he did not hear. For when the witch spoke, Einarr’s world vanished in a blinding burst of colour and light. Einarr felt every fibre of his being stripped and torn as existence itself collapsed around him.

Amidst the heavy furs of his bed, Einarr crushed Asta’s warm, lithe body against his. His hand caressed the scaly skin that covered the back of her neck and shoulders, the coppery plates feeling smooth beneath his touch. Suddenly his entire body shook, trembling like a sapling beneath the fury of the winter wind. The swordsman sat bolt upright, nearly spilling his wife onto the earthen floor of their home. He stared wide-eyed at the little room, stunned by every unbroken timber. He looked into Asta’s pretty face. His massive arms circled her, pulling her against him in a desperate embrace.

‘You are supposed to be resting,’ Asta scolded him, but her efforts to free herself from his grip were far from genuine.

Einarr tried to stifle the emotion that flooded through his body, but Asta sensed his anxiety just the same. She looked down into his confused eyes. Einarr’s breath came in rapid, uneven gulps betraying a fatigue of spirit rather than body. Asta smiled at him, brushing the hair from his brow with her hand.

‘I thought you dead,’ Einarr finally managed to find his voice. The image of Asta, torn and ruined, her body littered across the shambles of their home… But, no, she was here, in his arms, her breath washing across his face, her scent in his nose. Where had the horrible images, the phantom memories that filled his mind, where had they come from? Visions? Dreams? Nothing more than the ill-sendings of his fever and his wounds?

‘It was I who thought you dead,’ Asta said, swatting his shoulder with her palm. ‘Or have you forgotten your time at Skraevold so soon?’

Einarr felt a cold chill run up his spine. Skraevold at least had been no dream. What of the rest? A warning? A premonition? The chill running up his spine turned to ice as he looked down and saw his hand. He withdrew it quickly, hiding it beneath the blankets before Asta could see.

‘Oh! Did I hurt your hand, husband?’ Asta reached for Einarr’s hand, but the warrior held her back. He didn’t want her to see it. If she saw it, then he would know it was real. And if it was real…

‘Then let’s be away from this place, wife,’ Einarr said, forcing his voice to be gruff and steady, to keep the panic that he felt from tainting his words. ‘Take what we can and leave. We can go to the lands of the Sarls or even the southlands.’

Asta pulled her hand free from his grasp. ‘You are afraid what the runes will tell Ulfarr, aren’t you? What Tulkir will decide must be your punishment for killing the seer of Skraevold?’

‘No, not Ulfarr, or even Tulkir,’ Einarr told her. He pushed her from the bed. ‘Don’t ask questions. Just move! We have little time! Death is coming to this village!’ Einarr surged from the bed and began stuffing supplies into a leather bag. Much to his annoyance, Asta stood beside the bed, staring at him with a perplexed look.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What do you mean, death is coming to the village?’

Einarr let the length of salted venison he was holding drop to the floor, shuddering as he noted that he had been holding it with his marked hand. His face was a mix of agony and guilt as he looked into his wife’s eyes. ‘Death is coming to Vinnskor,’ he repeated. ‘I know because I have brought it here! Now hurry! While there is still time!’ The desperation in his voice caused Asta to spring into motion. She raced towards the heavy wooden chests where they kept their furs and clothes, swiftly sorting through them to find the most rugged and durable. Einarr watched her for a moment, then noted the pile on the floor, the cloak and gear he had stolen when making his escape from Skraevold.

The warrior lunged for the pile, startling Asta, causing her to drop the clothes she was stuffing into an old ox-hide sack. Einarr tore through the pile of mangy furs, groping among them for the slender length of silvery metal he now knew could save Asta and his entire village.

Asta watched her husband’s strange actions, wondering what sinister spirit had come upon him when both of them suddenly spun around and stared at the door. Outside, in the village, they could hear a great tumult, voices screaming and crying out in alarm.

Einarr bit down on a curse as his fingers closed about the elven dagger, the sharp edge of the metal slicing his hand. Blood spilled down his arm, but he ignored the pain, raising the weapon in triumph above his head. Now he had a chance! Now they all had a chance! He looked into Asta’s eyes, feeling his chest swell with hope and determination. The god-beast of Skraevold would not touch her this time!

The cold, stinking snow pressed upon Einarr’s face. He recoiled from the muck, straightening himself. He stared all around him, the same shock throbbing through his body. Surrounding him, the ghastly trees seemed to laugh at him, their eyes narrowed as they savoured his despair. A cruel trick! A filthy trap! But the witch had failed in whatever mischief she had thought to work upon him. He knew now what had been illusion and what was reality. Urda would pay for her Aesling treachery with her life!

Einarr could hear the witch croaking with laughter. No, not laughter, she was choking, her breath rattling against her collapsed throat. The Norscan looked in the direction of the noise and found Vallac standing over the witch, his powerful fingers wrapped around her neck.

‘Where is he?’ the Kurgan was shouting. ‘By all the black horrors of Ruin, what have you done with the Hand of Tchar?’ Urda beat weakly against Vallac’s wrists in a feeble attempt to free herself. Einarr grinned. Good, Vallac was making certain the witch didn’t die too quickly. There would be time for Einarr to take his own retribution out of the deceitful bitch’s hide. He reached for the shattered length of Fangwyrm.

The warrior stared in amazement at his hand as he moved it. It was cut, the fresh blood on his fingers and in his palm only now beginning to freeze under the harsh Norscan night. He lifted it toward his face, disbelieving his own eyes. As he did so, a familiar smell filled his nose, a smell he never thought to smell again. Asta’s scent still clung to his hand. Then it had been more than a dream!

Horror filled Einarr’s mind as he looked back towards Vallac and Urda. The old witch’s movements had grown even more feeble, her pale features turning purple as Vallac continued to strangle her. The Norscan shouted, racing toward the combatants. He pushed a startled Vallac away from Urda, almost knocking the Kurgan flat in the snow. Einarr caught Urda in his arms as the witch collapsed. He massaged the crone’s neck, trying to will air back into her body.

‘Steelfist!’ Vallac shouted. ‘Where were you? I thought this hag had worked some black sorcery upon you and made you into one of these vile trees!’

‘I told you to leave me alone with the witch and see to Orgrim,’ Einarr snarled back, desperately trying to minister to Urda. Her breathing continued to be shallow and ragged.

‘He is fine,’ Vallac said. ‘Still sleeping from the hag’s spell. It is you I feared for. I should find little glory if you were to find so ignoble an end.’

‘A man finds his own glory,’ Einarr growled back. ‘He does not wait for others to give it to him!’ He felt a little easier as Urda suddenly gasped and gulped a great breath into her body.

‘Tzeentch guided me here,’ Vallac reminded him, a scowl on his tattooed face. ‘You play an important part in my own doom, Einarr Steelfist. Until I have seen otherwise, I will go where you go, do what you do.’ Vallac’s gaze strayed from Einarr as he spoke, looking instead at what remained of the picture-signs Urda had drawn in the snow.

‘Then next time you will also do what I say,’ Einarr warned him. ‘It would sit ill with me if you had travelled so far only to find your doom on the end of my axe.’ The Norscan subdued some of the anger he felt. He had no cause to be angry with Vallac, the Kurgan had tried to help, tried to avenge a friend he thought slain by foul treachery. He forced a smile onto his visage. ‘If I were forced to kill you, Vallac, who would lead me to all these hot-blooded Kurgan slatterns I’ve been hearing about ever since we left Skraevold?’

Vallac nodded, accepting the sentiment of both jest and threat. He understood well the strange ways of magic, the many forms and shapes it could take. He also understood that the reason for Einarr’s anger was not wholly directed at him, but mainly directed at whatever spell Vallac’s attack had broken. The Kurgan turned his head and slowly walked away, his mind wondering what manner of spell Urda had cast over the Norscan and where it had sent him. Einarr seemed unwilling to talk about it, but wherever he had been, it had been no place near the grove and the clearing. Perhaps he would get the truth out of the witch when Einarr wasn’t around.

Einarr watched his comrade walk away, heading back towards Orgrim’s cave. When he was lost to sight, he looked down into Urda’s face. The old woman’s eyes were open now, she seemed at least mostly recovered from Vallac’s attack. A wry smile puckered the crone’s features.

‘Now you see,’ she said. ‘Now you understand. For a moment, Mighty Tzeentch allowed the deceit of time to be cast aside.’ Her hissing cackle caused her withered body to shake in Einarr’s arms. ‘What he has done once, he can do again, any time he wills it. Now you see the reward that Tzeentch offers you, Steelfist!’

CHAPTER SEVEN

The snow drifting down through the Norscan night shimmered as it fell upon the ground, glowing with the colours of the rainbow, casting an eerie flickering light across the pines. The tainted snow felt hot as it fell against Einarr’s skin, causing him to brush it from his exposed arms in irritation every few yards. For days they had marched through the hinterlands of Norsca, their steps slowly but relentlessly drawing them from the lands known to men.

‘The winds blow down from the north,’ Urda observed. The old witch hobbled alongside Einarr, only too aware that she needed the Norscan’s protection. Vallac’s distrustful gaze was like a dagger poised at her back, the Kurgan’s eyes always fixed upon her every time she looked in his direction. Ahead of them, the renegade Orgrim trudged through the shimmering snow. When he looked back at Urda, there was no mistaking the savage, bloody fire that smouldered behind his gaze. Even more than Vallac, Einarr had been hard pressed to keep Orgrim from killing the witch. Several times, he had thought their disagreement would be settled in blood, but Einarr was too cunning to settle for so short-sighted a solution. He needed a guide to pass through the lands of the Aeslings, to reach the Frozen Sea and the Wastes beyond.

‘The breath of the gods is in that wind,’ Vallac said. ‘You can see their fire burning in the snow.’ The Kurgan was silent for a moment, as though contemplating his own words. ‘It is a good omen’, he finally pronounced.

‘Not to the herdsmen who tend their cattle, or the shepherds with their flocks,’ Einarr said. ‘Animals sicken when the power of the gods falls upon them. Many will die when this snow falls into their pastures.’ The warrior stopped, lifting his head and staring at the cloudy sky and the shimmering snowfall. ‘The herds of the Aeslings will be culled by this snowfall. Perhaps this winter they will starve.’ He lowered his head, turning to stare at Vallac. ‘It is a good omen,’ he agreed, a grim smile set on his face.

Urda felt her blood chill as she heard the hate in the Baersonling’s voice. She knew that Einarr would have killed her as soon as any other Aesling if he were not terrified that to do so would also kill his only hope of claiming the prize Tchar had promised him. She hoped that the warrior would not take it into his head to force her to try and repeat the ritual. The power had come from Tchar, not her own abilities. It was not something she dare invoke again. When the time was right, the Lord of Change himself would reward Einarr, and when he did, he wouldn’t need a tired old Aesling witch to work his magic. She had explained as much to Einarr, but how much he had believed, Urda did not know. The fact that he had forced her to come with him certainly boded poorly for the faith he put in her words.

Ahead of them, the renegade Orgrim suddenly stopped, his head turning from side to side, looking into the trees around them. He dropped to all fours, pressing his face against the snow. Urda could hear him snuffling like a beast as he thrashed upon the ground. Einarr hurried forward to discover what had happened, his axe at the ready. Vallac came up behind the crone, his sword pressing against her side.

‘If this is more of your witchery, hag, I’ll skewer your heart,’ he hissed into her ear, all the menace and malice of his people lurking within the Kurgan’s threat.

Einarr stood above Orgrim while he grovelled on the ground. He could hear the man sniffing, his nose pressed into the snow, breathing deeply. The warrior reached down to shake Orgrim from whatever fit had crossed him. The berserker recoiled from his touch like a frightened dog, curling into a knot of tensed muscle and bared teeth. After a moment, reason restored itself to Orgrim’s eyes and he relaxed, straightening himself and rising to his feet.

‘A woman passed this way,’ Orgrim told Einarr. ‘Not long ago. Her scent is strange, not the stink of an Aesling.’

Einarr digested the berserker’s words. He had already come to trust Orgrim’s uncanny sense of smell. But what would a woman, a foreign woman at that, be doing wandering in the wilderness alone and in the middle of black winter? Einarr felt a shudder course through him as he remembered tales of ghosts and spectres that had echoed in his father’s longhouse on cold winter nights.

Orgrim pointed his hairy hand to the south. ‘She came from there,’ he said. His nose twitched as he sniffed at the air. ‘But she did not remain alone. They came from the west and took her back with them.’

‘Who took her?’

Orgrim’s expression was dark as he answered, his face betraying the revulsion he felt as he made his answer. ‘The forest folk, the beast-kin.’

‘Then your mysterious woman is lost.’ Einarr turned to find that Vallac and Urda had joined them. He raised an eyebrow as he saw the Kurgan’s sword pressing into Urda’s side. Reluctantly, Vallac withdrew his blade and slammed it into its horse-hide sheath.

‘Which way did they take her?’ Einarr demanded. Orgrim pointed once more towards the west. Einarr nodded his head and began marching toward the trees. Vallac’s hand closed around his arm, pulling him back.

‘The gors have her, let the matter rest,’ Vallac told him. ‘While they feast, we may slip through their wood unseen.’ Einarr shook his head and pulled away.

‘Perhaps a Kurgan might leave his women to warm the bellies of beast-kin, but a Norscan does not,’ Einarr said. He could see shame darken Vallac’s features as he spoke. ‘Even if this slattern were an Aesling slut, I would not leave her to the paws of the beastmen.’

Vallac nodded his head slowly. It was clear that the Kurgan still did not agree with Einarr’s decision, but at least now he understood it. Among his own people, there was no dishonour in accepting the harsh whims of the gods, but the Norse were still fool enough to believe they could challenge the strands of fate.

Sharp and acrid, the smell of the cook-fires reached them even before the mangy reek that characterised the beast-kin encampment. Orgrim led the way, gliding noiselessly through the frozen forest, not so much as a branch stirring in his wake. Einarr felt himself as ungainly as a drunken giant trying to match the woodsman’s stealth, every twig that snapped beneath his boot seeming to thunder across the silence of the forest, every bush he disturbed seeming to sway with the violence of a war flag on the prow of a longship. Sometimes Orgrim would pause to give him a reproachful glance, but more often the scout ignored his clumsiness, understanding that it could not be helped.

Soon, the sounds of the beastmen broke the silence of the forest, deep-throated roars and high-pitched brays, a mongrel din that grated across Einarr’s ears like a knife across bone. The monsters had established their camp in a small clearing nuzzled between two great piles of rock. Einarr could see the filthy bone and gut totems of the gors jutting up from the rocks, boldly proclaiming the presence of the beastmen to anything that had somehow failed to take notice of their stench and sound. One ragged totem, its standard formed by the flayed hide of a man, bore the arrow symbol of the realm of the gods upon it, the scarlet sign still moist with its morbid ink. In the trees above, crows had gathered, draw by the stench of blood and decay, the carrion birds croaking and squawking to one another as they waited for the leavings of the beastmen.

Einarr tested the feel of the axe in his hand, ignoring the flicker of nervousness that raced through his mind. His father had spoken much of the dwellers in the forest and their savage ways, how it was better for a man to fall on his own blade than be taken alive by such monsters. He laughed at his own disquiet. Many years and much blood separated him from the child he had been. His eyes had seen much, his body had suffered much, his spirit had endured much. He would not let his manhood falter before half-remembered terrors.

‘Ten,’ Orgrim growled, the sound low and brutal as it hissed between his clenched teeth. Einarr nodded as he heard the woodsman speak. Orgrim continued to count the monsters prowling the camp, making a mark in the snow with his finger each time he spied a new set of horns or his nose caught an unfamiliar scent. Soon, there were more marks than could be easily counted. They were odds that would set the soft men of the south quaking in their boots, praying to their feeble gods for salvation. The Norse were not so weak. The foe was what it was, the odds already set, the will of the gods already made. If a man would prevail, then he must prove to the gods that he was worthy of victory.

‘The beast-kin are simple of mind,’ Einarr said. ‘If they think we are many, they may lose the stomach for battle and flee.’ He stabbed a finger at Vallac, pointing to the east. ‘Circle among the trees, position yourself on the right and attack when I attack. Take care to make no sound, and beware that your scent does not drift towards their camp.’ The Kurgan smiled grimly, drawing his crooked sword in a slashing motion through the air. He cast one last suspicious look at Urda, then crept into the snowy veil of the pines.

‘You will take the left,’ Einarr continued, pointing at Orgrim. The Aesling renegade shook his shaggy head.

‘The strongest of the beast-kin will be near the fire,’ Orgrim protested. ‘The fighting will be the hardest at the centre of the camp.’

‘That is why I have saved the centre for myself,’ Einarr said. Orgrim cocked his head in puzzlement. Einarr turned his hand to display the metal sign forged to his flesh. ‘I bear the mark of Tchar. Let us find, here and now, if the god is truly watching over me or if his favour is simply an empty promise.’

‘Do not think the beast-kin will show you honour,’ the hunter said. ‘They will think to draw the god’s favour into themselves by devouring your flesh.’

‘Then I will teach them fear before I send them to grovel before their ancestors,’ Einarr swore.

Orgrim looked anything but convinced by the warrior’s words, but still turned and slowly stalked through the trees towards the west of the encampment. Einarr watched him go and breathed deep. It would be a battle worthy of the sagas, if any survived to tell the tale.

‘You should not bait the gods.’ Einarr turned as he heard Urda’s scratchy voice reprimand him. ‘It is a terrible vengeance they visit upon those who test their power.’ The old witch placed her thin hand on his arm. ‘Be careful, Steelfist, lest you tempt the wrath of Tchar.’

Einarr pulled away, turning his head. ‘There is nothing worse the gods can do to me that has not already been done.’

Urda’s cackling laughter wheezed from her scrawny frame. ‘There is always something worse,’ she said. ‘Even in your misery, respect the might of the gods lest their power bring you so low that even your misery becomes a thing of envy.’ Einarr was silent, staring down into the snow as he considered the witch’s warning. When he spoke again, his voice was soft.

‘You know what has been promised me. If Tchar will not let me save one woman, how can I have faith he will allow me to save my village?’ Einarr clenched his hand into a fist, the knuckles cracking under the pressure. He felt the hot rush of anger burn through his body. ‘I would have that answer now, not when I stand over Skoroth’s broken corpse!’

Rage coursing through him, Einarr launched himself through the trees, his axe at the ready. The corrupt blood of the beastmen would do little to quench his fury, but that would not stop him from trying.

Urda watched the warrior charge through the trees, an enigmatic smile slowly spreading across her features.

With a roar, Einarr burst through the trees and into the clearing. His eyes swept the squalor of the beast-kin encampment, the piles of excrement festering at the edges of the camp, the bundles of mangy hides and furs scattered about the clearing, the heaps of broken bones, cracked and split where the gors had shattered them to suck out the marrow. At the centre of the clearing, ringed by several large stones, the beasts had piled old branches and bits of dead brush to form their fire. At either end of the fire ring, the monsters had built stands from wood and the antlers of elk, and across the pit a large, blackened pole rested. To this a lithe, pale shape had been tied with tethers of sinew and gut. The captive moaned through the mess of fur scraps that had been shoved down her mouth to gag her and struggled feebly at her bonds. Beneath her, the orange flames of the fire licked up at her flesh.

The beastmen turned away from their cooking meal, staring at the warrior with dull eyes that were cloudy with confusion and surprise. The beast-kin were a mongrel display of animal loathsomeness and human corruption. Their bodies were, for the most part, not unlike that of a man in shape and build, powerful muscles rippling beneath their furred flesh. But these things were no men. Their heads suggested the savage and the inhuman, the faces of many pulled into the long snouts of beasts, their skulls sprouting the horns and antlers of animals. Feet ended in hooves more often than toes and hands might end in claws as easily as fingers. Some of the brutes sported tails and tentacles, others exhibited almost human features made all the more ghastly for their setting amid furred flesh and beneath jagged horns.

The Norscan did not allow the monsters time to gather their wits, but charged straight at the nearest of his foes. The creature, a hulking monster with a goat-like head and elk-like antlers, was cut down almost before it could bleat out a cry of alarm, black blood spraying from the beast-kin’s chest as the axe clove it apart. Einarr chopped again into the creature as it crumbled into the snow, breaking its back with the blow.

The death of their pack-mate settled the confusion that had struck the monsters. With brutal roars and high-pitched wails, the grotesque mob lunged into action, some diving for the rusty axes and crude spears scattered about the encampment, others rushing towards Einarr with only their bared fangs and sharp claws. Einarr roared his own defiance at the monsters and charged to meet them.

Before the first of the beastmen could close with Einarr, shouts of alarm and despair sounded from the edges of the encampment. Orgrim and Vallac charged from the trees, their weapons slashing through furred bodies and spraying black blood across the snow. True to the woodsman’s statement, the beast-kin on the edges of the camp were small, wiry creatures, their horns mere stubs on their brows. They were a far cry from the massive brutes clustered about the fire. Runts or no, Orgrim tore into them with the same mindless ferocity that had characterised his battle with the ymir, the woodsman’s axe crushing bone and cleaving flesh with maniacal abandon. Vallac displayed more restraint, challenging his foes from the edge of the camp, the Kurgan maintaining a position close to the trees and making his enemies come to him. Vallac’s curved blade was soon slick with the stinking blood of the beastmen.

While some of the brutes turned to answer the new threats on their flanks, the majority of them still rushed toward Einarr, their bloodlust aroused by the warrior’s challenge. A huge beast with the face of an ox and the jaws of a bear closed with Einarr, slashing at him with its long claws. Einarr’s axe caught one of the monster’s hands, slicing the fingers off. The other claw raked ineffectively across the Norscan’s armour, unable to penetrate the tough leather and mail. Einarr answered the creature’s attack by chopping into its shoulder, nearly severing its arm. The ruined limb flopped limply at the monster’s side as it continued to batter Einarr with the bloody stump of its other hand, an anguished howl that was equal parts pain and hunger bleating from the gor’s throat. Einarr silenced the beastman’s howls with a slash of his axe, sending its head dancing across the clearing.

Others followed close behind the decapitated brute, their attacks no less feral. One creature with a grinning face and a mass of horns running down the back of its head jabbed at Einarr with a spear of oak and flint while another, bigger beastman snapped at him with its powerful jaws and tried to wrap the slimy rope-like tentacle that served it as an arm around his neck. The warrior found himself pressed to answer the challenge of both creatures when a third howling thing leapt towards him, a crude club of bone clutched in its paws. The howling thing never landed its blow, however. Screaming in agony, the thing dropped into the snow, its body cracking and twisting as its bones and organs shifted and stirred beneath its skin. Before he looked away, Einarr saw the thing’s rib cage collapse, then turn in upon itself, pushing one of its lungs through the brute’s furry hide.

The tentacled beastman wrapped its noxious limb around Einarr’s arm as the warrior turned from eviscerating the spear-wielding bray. Einarr felt the entire arm instantly turn numb as the poisonous member slithered against his flesh. Only by force of will did he maintain his hold upon his axe, refusing to let it slip from his unfeeling fingers. He drew the jagged length of Fangwyrm from his belt. The beastman twisted its body, tightening its hold upon Einarr’s arm, almost popping it from his shoulder. Einarr ground his teeth against the pain and surged toward the beastman. The brute tried to protect its tentacle, twisting still further. But Einarr had no intention of cutting the tentacle away, driving Fangwyrm instead deep into the gor’s chest, skewering its putrid heart. A great blob of black blood slobbered free of the beast’s mouth as it fell to its knees, the tentacle releasing Einarr’s arm as the strength left it.

Einarr had no time to watch the beastman spit its life into the snow, already another of the growling monsters was closing on him. Einarr forced his still tingling arm up, catching the rusty weapon of his new foe against the haft of his own axe. The warrior twisted his body around, tearing the rusted flail free from the grip of the goat-faced gor that held it. As he turned, he drove the peen of the axe against the side of the beastman’s skull, stunning it and causing it to stagger. Before the brute could recover its wits, Einarr’s axe chopped down into its leg, cleaving its knee and spilling the beast into the snow. A kick to its face shattered the beastman’s snout, driving bone into its brutish brain.

For the moment, Einarr was not beset by foes. He could see a few beastmen harassing Vallac, but as he watched, the larger of Vallac’s foes reeled back as the Kurgan spat into its face. Einarr was struck by the thing’s anguished wails and the black smoke running between its paws as it clutched at its features. Yellow grease oozed between the monster’s paws as the melted residue of its eyes drooled down its charred face. Vallac did not bother to finish his blinded foe, but focused his attention on his unmarred adversary. Across the clearing, Orgrim continued to slash and rip into the wiry ungors and hulking gors that threatened him, splashing their reeking blood across the snow and howling like a beast himself whenever he sent another foe to find the gods. While Einarr watched, he saw a hornless bray swat at Orgrim with a club only to have the berserker lunge at the creature and tear its throat out with his teeth, seeming to relish the sensation as the filthy blood spilled down his chin.

With the remaining beastmen focused on Orgrim and Vallac, Einarr rushed towards the fire and the captive strung over it. The woman continued to struggle feebly at her bonds, straining to turn her head and observe the battle she could hear unfolding all around her. Her dark eyes went wide with astonishment as Einarr suddenly appeared over her, kicking kindling from the circle and sawing away at the sinew ropes that bound her to the pole. For an instant, Einarr found himself lost in the woman’s deep, lustrous eyes, drawn into the enigmatic depths of her gaze. But reason and instinct quickly reasserted themselves, and Einarr attacked the ropes with renewed ferocity. A battlefield was no place to dally over a pair of pretty eyes.

Einarr had barely cut the first hand free when he felt himself struck from behind. The warrior was cast down by the force of the blow, tossed across the snow like a child’s toy. He tensed his body and sprang back to his feet, heedless of the pain throbbing from the wound in his back. To let the backstabber slink away without repaying it for its craven assault would hurt him more than torn flesh and bruised bone.

Einarr’s attacker had no intention of slinking off, however, but stood boldly beside the fire circle, its gory sword clutched in its massive paw. It stood a head taller than even the largest of the creatures Einarr had killed, its body swollen with its brawn. The monster’s head was like that of a goat, a pair of huge fangs not unlike those of a sabretusk jutting from its jaw. Two massive antlers sprouted from the sides of its skull and at the centre of its forehead a great knotted horn curled upwards. The brute already bled from wounds in its arm and belly, but if its injuries pained it, the monster gave no sign. Einarr could tell that the thing was the leader of this pack, that it was determined to defend the prize morsel Einarr had sought to free.

The beastlord snarled and shook its head, its massive hooves stomping against the frozen ground. Einarr cocked his arm back, poising his axe for a mighty strike and gestured for the monster to charge him if it dared. The beastlord bellowed its anger into the darkened sky and ploughed across the ground towards Einarr, its horns lowered. His body shuddered as the monster’s immense weight slammed into him and the Norscan was pushed back across the frozen earth, his boots skidding through the snow. He heard the brute’s right horn scrape against the side of his helmet, felt the sharp edge of its sword dig into the meat of his shoulder, saw the monster’s fangs snap close only inches from his face. But the creature did not assault him with impunity. Einarr’s axe raked down the side of its head, obliterating its eye and shearing one of its antlers from its head.

The beastman recoiled from its attack, wailing in shock as it pawed at the dripping nub of its antler. Einarr slashed at the reeling creature, but the wound in his shoulder made the strike sloppy and slow. The beastman reacted with a quick swipe of its sword and batted Einarr’s blade aside as easily as it might have swatted a fly. Reminded of his presence, the beastlord roared its fury and made to lunge at the warrior once more.

Suddenly, a sharp, trilling sound echoed across the clearing. Einarr watched in amazement as a black storm of feathers and talons engulfed the beastlord’s head. The murder of crows gathered in the trees had descended in a cawing, clawing mob, attacking the monster with an amok ferocity. The beastman staggered back, trying to shield its face from the enraged birds. Einarr forced himself to overcome his wonder. Taking his axe in both hands, a war cry shrieking past his lips, he charged through the swirling swarm of birds to bury his blade in the monster’s skull. A look of almost human horror filled the beastlord’s face as it suddenly saw Einarr’s steel slashing down at it through the blinding veil of black feathers. The edge of the axe bit deep as it crunched through bone, splitting the beastman’s face like a wormy log.

Einarr turned away as the crows swarmed over the beastman’s twitching carcass. He clutched at the dripping wound in his shoulder, feeling the blood already beginning to crystallise in the frigid Norscan night. He tried to probe the wound with his fingers to see how deep he had been cut, gritting his teeth against the pain. A hissed reprimand pulled him away from his investigation, Urda’s scrawny hands pushing his own aside as she examined his hurt.

‘Fool of a Baersonling!’ she spat. ‘I hope this will be a lesson to you that it is madness to test the gods!’ The witch fumbled about in her bag, producing an evil-smelling paste, which she pressed into the wound. Einarr looked away as she ministered to him, his gaze canvassing the battlefield. It seemed the beastlord had been the last of its pack, the others of its kind having fled or fallen. He could see Orgrim sitting atop a heap of mangled beast-kin, the berserker’s body caked in blood. Vallac was kneeling amid the snow, studiously cleaning his blade with a scrap of fur while elaborate Kurgan prayers dripped from his tongue.

‘I should have fared worse had you not worked your sorcery when you did,’ Einarr told her between grunts of pain. ‘The beast-kin was a worthy foe. If you had not sent the birds when you did…’

Urda paused in her ministrations. ‘I did not call the crows,’ she said. ‘I should not have had the strength to work such a spell after invoking the power of Tzeentch to destroy the one that thought to smack your stubborn brains from your thick skull.’

Einarr felt a thrill of dread race down his spine. If the witch had not summoned the birds…

‘Then who did?’ The warrior’s question lingered in the air for a moment. When it found an answer, it was not in the scratchy tones of the witch.

‘I called them.’ The words were spoken in a thick, rich voice. Einarr felt his pulse quicken as he set his eyes on the woman who had spoken them. He had found her striking enough even lashed across the cook-fire of the beastmen. Now standing before him, her pale bare body gleaming in the starlight, the wind pulling at her long platinum hair, Einarr found even the dripping wound in his shoulder slipping from his mind. Her lean, feminine shape was the supple, sinuous figure that drove men mad on long sea voyages, filling their minds with vices too long denied. Yet there was strength in her body as well as lure, this was no simple freeholder or farm wench. Even as he admired the curve of her shape, the slope of her thighs and the fullness of her breasts, Einarr noted the grey slashes of old scars and the puckered residue of old wounds. No, this was no meek village wench content to bask in the glory of whatever champion warmed her bed, but a shield maiden of the old sagas, a woman who seized her own glories with her own hand.

Einarr stared into the woman’s sharp, comely face, finding himself drawn once more into her dark, alluring gaze. ‘You are a witch then?’

The woman laughed and shook her head. ‘I am no seer,’ she said, and Einarr imagined there was a suggestive note about her tone. ‘But I called to them just the same.’ She turned her head toward the murder of crows still pecking and scratching at the cooling body of the beastlord. She pursed her lips and again Einarr heard the strange, trilling note echo across the clearing. He could see the woman’s tongue as it trembled between her lips. It was long and thin, fluted like that of a bird, as black as the feathers of the crows. When they heard her call to them, the birds rose from their gruesome meal, cawing and croaking as they withdrew back into the trees.

‘She is touched by the gods,’ Urda whispered, though Einarr could see as much for himself. The woman nodded her head, but when she spoke, her words were again directed to Einarr.

‘Since the cradle, I have been able to speak with the creatures of the sky,’ she said. ‘I can talk with them as easily as I talk to you. They tell me where to hunt and where to shun. There is much wisdom they can give, if only one can listen to them.’

‘They did not seem to give you very good advice this day,’ Urda observed. ‘If Einarr had followed my advice, you’d be warming the bellies of the beast-kin.’

‘I was guided by a tale told to me by a falcon,’ the woman told Urda. She turned her eyes back on Einarr, stepping toward the warrior. ‘He told me that a great jarl with a steel hand had risen in the north, that great glory would fall upon me if I sought him out and pledged my oath to him. I travelled far from the lands of the Sarls to seek this champion, the one with the mark of Tchar written upon his flesh.’ The woman reached out, closing her slender hand around Einarr’s, her fingers caressing the metal symbol branded into his skin.

‘I have spent many weeks trying to find you,’ the huntress said. She smiled as she looked away from Einarr’s hand and into the warrior’s eyes. ‘Instead, it is you who have found me.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

For long weeks, the small warband navigated the cold, desolate forests of the north, slowly making their way through the narrow ravines that wound between the craggy slopes of the mountains. Bleak and inhospitable, they saw few traces of either man or beast upon the land. Even in the ever strengthening clutch of winter, it was an unsettling sensation, to be the only things moving beneath the sunless sky.

Only twice, in all those weeks, had they seen any sign of habitation. Once, the berserker Orgrim, ranging far ahead of the group as was his habit, had caught the scent of several men drifting back to him on the wind. With his keen senses, the renegade claimed the smell was that of Aeslings, probably a party of trappers or hunters braving the icy forests in hopes of putting meat on their tribe’s tables. Orgrim had described with bloodthirsty enthusiasm the ease with which they could track down the Aeslings and spill their lives onto the snow. Einarr felt the same urge for action, to sink his sword into Aesling flesh and reclaim some of the wergild the northerners owed his vanquished people. He was dissuaded only by the council of Urda. The old witch warned Einarr that, though they saw little trace of them, the settlements of the Aeslings were all around them. If even a single warrior escaped the slaughter that Einarr contemplated, he might bring the entire Aesling nation down upon them. Was Einarr truly willing to risk the reward Tchar had promised him simply to glut his lust for revenge?

The other evidence that they were still very much in the lands of the Aeslings had been discovered by Birna, the pale-haired Sarl huntress they had rescued from the beastmen. Like Orgrim, there was a heavy dose of wanderlust in her heart and she would often range ahead of Einarr and the others, prowling among the trees to find the easiest path. Einarr found himself admiring the skill with which she vanished into the woods, her steps so soft and careful they scarcely marred the snow beneath her feet. After she was freed and had recovered her armour and gear from the paws of her dead captors, Birna had presented a much different figure. Gone was the alabaster-skinned snow goddess that had stood over the dripping corpse of the beastlord calling the crows away from their feast. Instead, Birna’s shapely form disappeared into leather tunic and breeches, over which she wore a skirt of chain and a heavy cloak of sabretusk hide. A fat-bladed sword with a whale tooth hilt and an ivory-bound bow completed her lethal appearance, the multitude of feathers she strung through her hair adding a savage, feral quality to the effect. Despite the pain the loss of Asta had caused him, Einarr could not help the quickening of his pulse whenever the striking Birna came near him.

Late one evening, as Einarr and the others prepared to make camp, Birna had stalked back from one of her forays into the forest. Ahead, she reported, was an entire Aesling village. The track they had been following for the past two days would take them right into the settlement. It was a small village, little more than a hamlet and when Vallac pressed her about what she thought their chances might be, Birna had simply shrugged her shoulders, claiming that every victory was at the whim of the gods. Einarr had felt again the drive towards revenge, to stain the earth with Aesling blood and raze the little village the way Vinnskor had been razed. Animal-like growls of agreement came from Orgrim, a bestial light glowing in his eyes as he contemplated the slaughter he would visit upon his hated kinsmen. Even Vallac seemed eager, reverting to the calculating Kurgan raider, having decided that the small village would make easy pickings for the warband. Again, it was the council of the old witch Urda that stayed Einarr’s hand. There were many days between them and the Frozen Sea, the borderland of Aesling territory and Norsca itself. Would they throw that away now, simply to indulge in a massacre unworthy of mighty warriors?

‘It is the blessing and favour of mighty Tchar that awaits us beyond the Frozen Sea,’ Urda said. ‘What glory can exceed the praise of a god?’

Still farther into the icy north they travelled, entering lands that were naught but myth in the sagas of the Baersonlings. Einarr could almost feel the breath of the gods washing against his skin with his every step. The trees they journeyed under became increasingly twisted and gnarled, their branches scrabbling at the sky like reedy arms. Einarr saw what looked like a white-furred fox peek at them from behind a clump of snowy rocks, its eyes dangling from thick fleshy stalks, its mane a nest of wiry quills. Even the black veil of night was changing, the eerie light of the aurora shimmering and dancing against the northern horizon.

There was more, something less tangible than foxes and trees, something nebulous and unseen. Einarr could feel it, like cobwebs rubbing against his soul, like a cold flame slithering through his blood. He knew it was the power of the gods, the power that tested everything it touched and destroyed all that was not strong enough to endure it. Even for a mighty Norse warrior, it was an unsettling thing to know that such forces were touching him with invisible fingers, probing his body and testing his worth. He could see that his companions shared his uneasiness, pausing frequently in their steps to scratch at the eerie sensation crawling across their skin, watching the twisted trees and flickering sky with a wide-eyed stare that was more fear than caution. Only the Kurgan, Vallac, seemed unaffected by the strange atmosphere of these hinterlands. If anything, Vallac seemed more casual and steady than Einarr had ever seen him. He was reminded again that the Kurgans came from a land much different than Norsca, but Einarr could not comprehend a people who found basking in the power of the gods a thing of comfort.

At last, the twisted forests gave way to jagged slopes of grey rock where only the hardiest shrubs managed to eke out a miserable existence. The slopes shot rapidly downward until at last they terminated in a sheer drop of several hundred feet, the cliffs so sharp that Einarr could easily credit Urda’s muttered words that they had been cut from the mountains by the axe of Kharnath himself. Below the cliffs and stretching out to the northern horizon, its icy expanse shining blue beneath the flickering witch-light of the aurora was a sight that chilled the marrow in Einarr’s bones: the Frozen Sea, a dread fable to those reavers and sea dogs that prowled the Sea of Claws and the warmer waters of the south. It was exactly as it had been named, a vast ocean frozen into a world of ice. To a seaman like Einarr, there was something almost unholy about the sight, the rolling waves of the sea turned into a thing as lifeless and still as solid stone. He felt incredibly small and feeble as he looked down at the unmoving waves of ice, appreciating in a way that he never had the awesome power of the gods. They had done this to the mightiest force Einarr had ever known – the sea itself. They had crushed and killed it and left its frozen body for all to see.

What was a man beside such raw, limitless power? How could any man hope to prevail before the omnipotent might of such a force? A man was nothing! A man was less than nothing and all his dreams and thoughts less than the babble of an infant! A man was a fool to think he was anything more, to have the audacity to think his deeds, his hopes, were things of consequence!

Einarr shook his head, trying to clear the sombre thoughts from his mind. He felt Birna’s hand fall upon his shoulder and found himself staring into her compelling eyes. Einarr could feel himself being drawn once more into the depths of her eyes, pulled down into whatever secret world existed behind the pretty features of the huntress.

‘If that is where you will lead us,’ Birna said. ‘That is where we shall follow, Einarr Steelfist.’ The words were spoken in a voice that seemed wary, almost timid, the tone almost feeling betrayed by what had been said. Einarr drew himself out from Birna’s compelling gaze, looking across at his other companions. Urda was staring at the Frozen Sea, her old body shivering beneath its heavy cloak, the talismans fastened to her staff rattling as her arm trembled.

Orgrim was crouched down upon the ground, his head hung low, looking for all the world like a hound chastised by its master. Einarr watched the berserker turning his head from side to side, staring up and down the sides of the jagged slope, staring in any direction except that which would lead his gaze across the Frozen Sea. Even Vallac appeared intimidated, the Kurgan scratching at his chin as he cast a worried look past the side of the cliff. Einarr could appreciate the thoughts he was certain were rolling through the minds of his comrades. It was one thing to consider a place and call it the Frozen Sea, it was another to stand before such an awesome sight and know that it stood in your path.

Somehow seeing the doubt and fear in the faces of his followers strengthened Einarr’s own resolve. There would be no turning back. They would find the stronghold of Skoroth and reclaim the treasure that had been stolen from Tchar. Einarr would earn the reward Tchar had promised him. He would save Asta and his people. Not even the Frozen Sea would stop him.

Einarr turned his back to the vast expanse of ice, staring hard at his companions. ‘We will need to find a way down the cliffs,’ he said, refusing to acknowledge the fear he saw in his comrades. He did not allow the others time to consider or question his decision, instead striding off along the cliffs, following them eastward. He did not look back as he heard first one, then all of his companions following after him. Somehow he knew they would follow. Of all the fears that might be plaguing their minds, he knew none was greater than the shame of being left behind.

‘Aeslings,’ Orgrim’s throaty growl rumbled in Einarr’s ear. The warrior nodded as Orgrim spoke. They had followed the curve of the cliffs for days before at last finding a break in the natural wall, a spot where it would perhaps be possible to climb down to the surface of the ice sea. However, as they grew closer, Orgrim had grown ever more anxious, warning that the smell of men was in the wind. Not long after, Birna had spotted the encampment.

Crouched behind a snow bank, Einarr and the others observed the strange camp. Nuzzled in a deep fissure cut from the side of the slope, it was almost invisible until the observer was almost on top of it. The builders of the camp had clearly appreciated their concealed location, choosing to forego any sort of perimeter wall in the interest of maintaining that concealment. Instead, the builders had situated a pair of watchtowers, ramshackle structures of timber and ox-hide, to either side of the fissure’s mouth. Beyond these, Einarr could see a pair of long, low buildings, their thatch roofs covered in snow. Beyond these was what appeared to be a smithy, its massive stone forge belching black smoke into the night. Beyond the smithy was the wall of the cliff, pitted and scarred, its face bisected by wooden scaffolds and stone ramp ways. Einarr could see tiny figures pounding away at the cliff, what looked to be chains dangling from their limbs. While he watched, a small cluster of the workers pushed an ox-cart filled to the brim with ore down one of the ramps and toward the smithy. A short, dark figure detached itself from the forge and stomped forward to shout orders and abuse at the men pushing the cart. Einarr could not tell if the sinister apparition were man or daemon, but there was no mistaking the armoured warriors who stood to either side of the imp. Orgrim was right again, the strange quarry was being operated by Aeslings.

‘We should go around.’ Einarr turned his head as Urda hissed her advice to him. The old witch shook her clawed hand to the west, away from the quarry and the jagged tear in the cliff face that snaked its way to the surface of the Frozen Sea.

‘For once I agree with the witch,’ Vallac said, though the Kurgan took no pride in his words. ‘I have counted at least a dozen warriors in that camp, if they drive their slaves into our swords, then they have four times that number. Too much sword work for the five of us, I fear.’

‘They are weaklings!’ Orgrim snapped, and it seemed to Einarr that the berserker’s teeth were longer and sharper than he remembered them. If the touch of the gods was affecting him, however, the renegade’s bloodlust remained. ‘Let these cringing vermin hang behind if they will, it will only mean more heads for Einarr and Orgrim to claim!’

Einarr clapped the woodsman on the back. Orgrim was an enigma to him in many ways, but in one aspect he was as firm as though carved from stone. Einarr could always count on Orgrim’s eager support if there was killing to be done, no matter the odds. He looked away from the feral eyes of the berserker and turned to face Birna.

‘What is your opinion?’ Einarr asked. The huntress was quiet a moment, then pulled her bow from the quiver on her back.

‘We have marched along these cliffs for three days and seen no other way down to the sea,’ she said. ‘It would be foolish to think we would find another passage any sooner.’ She stared hard at Urda, her stern expression causing the witch to scowl. ‘Even if they were my kinfolk, I would say they stand in our way.’ She fixed her attention back on Einarr. ‘You have asked me, and I say we fight.’

Einarr nodded, drawing his axe from the loop on his belt. ‘Then it is decided,’ he said. ‘If Tchar is truly guiding me, then he has led us here. I cannot believe he did so merely so that we might slink away from it in fear.

‘We fight!’

The glow from the forge and the flickering torches fastened to the scaffolding made the encampment stand out in vivid contrast to the black night all around it. It gave Einarr an increased sense of security as he crept through the gloom towards the watchtowers. The night vision of anyone within the camp would be compromised by the light from their fires, greatly reducing any chance that the Aeslings would sound an alarm. At least, not before it was already too late.

Einarr kept his body low as he crawled across the snow, his white cloak masking his movements. Only the sentries in the towers presented a real threat of discovery; in their wisdom the Aeslings had ensured no torches burned atop the towers to ruin the night sight of their guards. The sentinels would need to be eliminated before Orgrim and Vallac could work their way to the structure Einarr had decided must be the barracks for the Aesling warriors. Birna would see to the sentries, using her keen sight and skill with the bow to cut down the Aeslings before they even knew they were under attack.

The greatest danger Einarr had taken upon himself. He would work his way to the smithy and confront the dark forgemaster they had seen and those Aeslings he kept near him. While observing the camp and making their plans, they had discovered another obstacle lurking in the smithy. As the slaves unloaded the ore from their cart, an immense shape had risen from behind the forge, gathering the rocks and loading them into a massive wheel-driven grinder. The creature had then used its own mammoth size and strength to pulverise the stone and separate it from the ore. The bulk of the thing had given all of Einarr’s companions pause. It was far beyond that of even the largest man Einarr had ever seen. It could only be an ogre, such were its colossal proportions. Although Einarr did not relish the task, he knew defeating such a beast was something he would need to do himself if he were to maintain the respect and obedience of his companions.

Einarr crawled into position and froze, keeping his eyes locked upon the left tower. He could just make out the black silhouette of the sentry, bundled in his heavy furs in a futile attempt to ward off the chill of the winter night. He watched and waited as the sentinel silently paced the small perimeter of the elevated platform, his movements regular and precise. Einarr smiled. It was a common trap for a sentry to slip into, the drudgery of his duties. The mind and senses were dulled by the tedium of a long watch, rendering the guard ever less wary. The Aesling would enter the halls of his ancestors without ever knowing what had sent him there.

Einarr did not hear the arrow as it sped through the night. The first he was aware of it was when the shaft suddenly sprouted from the sentry’s throat. The Aesling gasped a gurgling cry as he choked on his own blood, trying to shout a cry of warning to the camp. The effort was beyond his fading strength, and the Aesling toppled as he stumbled towards the ladder, which descended from the platform. The dying marauder hurtled down the steps, crashing to the ground with a dull thud, his head crooked in an unnatural pose. Einarr waited a few breaths longer to assure himself that the guard was well and truly dead. Even a broken neck was nothing but an inconvenience to some that had been touched by the gods. The sentry did not rise, however, and Einarr shifted his attention to the encampment itself. There was no sign that any of the Aeslings had noticed the demise of their guard and while he watched, he could see Orgrim and Vallac creeping their way toward the barracks. For them to be advancing meant Birna had eliminated the other sentry without incident. The Kurgan and the renegade were to watch for Einarr’s signal once he was near the smithy, but Einarr wondered if Orgrim would be able to control his feral rage long enough. He reasoned it was best not to depend on the berserker’s self control. Einarr rose from the ground and sprinted into the encampment, using the shadows when he could but above all trying to move at speed. If he could catch the Aeslings at the smithy unawares, he might be able to strike down their giant before the beast had a chance to defend itself.

The sound of hammers and picks cracking against the wall of the cliff echoed across the camp as Einarr jogged into the narrow opening of the fissure, the strange acoustics of the defile acting to imprison the noise as securely as the chains imprisoned the thralls. Einarr was pleased by the clamour, it would muffle the sound of his boots crunching across the snow. He swept his gaze across the compound.

He saw no sign of activity around the long structure he had judged to be the Aesling barracks, though a light shone beneath its heavy iron-bound door. A few scrawny slaves clustered around the other building, which Einarr now observed was some manner of kitchen. Under the watchful supervision of a huge pot-bellied Aesling, the slaves were butchering cuts of meat and tossing the flesh into a pair of massive cauldrons. Into one cauldron, Einarr saw the slaves depositing cuts of venison and rabbit, into the other they dropped scraps of pale, pink meat they butchered from the carcasses of thin, wasted things. He could guess that the first cauldron was intended for the supper of the Aeslings themselves, and the second was fodder for their thralls. Einarr felt disgust boil within his gut. To work slaves was no rare thing among the Norse, but to feed thralls flesh from their own dead was something even a Baersonling found abhorrent.

Einarr changed direction, stalking across the camp towards the kitchens. Even if the sight of the kitchens had not evoked his loathing, Einarr knew he would need to kill the Aesling cook. The kitchens afforded a clear view of the quarry and the smithy, and Einarr could not take the chance that the bloated Aesling would see him and sound the alarm. Vallac and Orgrim should have made their way to the barracks by now and were probably waiting for him to reach his own objective before springing into action. He hoped that Orgrim would be able to maintain his calm just a little longer.

The stink of roasting man-flesh overwhelmed the more succulent aroma of the venison. Einarr wrinkled his nose at the smell even as he pressed his body against the supporting wall of the long, lean-to structure that served the camp as its kitchen. The warrior took several deep breaths. Speed would be of the essence, he would need to strike down the Aesling before the scum could even think about reacting. Anything less would bring the entire camp down around their heads.

Craning his head around the corner of the wall, Einarr watched as the Aesling cook swaggered among his slaves, kicking those who were too slow to shuffle out of his way. The obese marauder paused beside the cauldron the slaves were preparing for their masters. He removed a long bronze spoon from where it dangled on his belt and dipped it into the bubbling broth. The cook noisily slurped the efforts of his thralls, greasy brown broth spilling down his face and staining his scarlet beard. The Aesling belched appreciatively, then bent down to fish a cut of venison from the cauldron.

While the marauder was occupied, Einarr lunged into the kitchen, bowling aside those slaves who were not fast enough to leap out of his way. The cook turned as the sound of the commotion reached him. Einarr’s axe licked out at the fat Aesling, whistling through the pungent air. The cook’s head splashed as it fell into the cauldron, a look of shock frozen on its stiffening features as it sank into the brown soup.

Einarr turned from the cook’s mangled body, facing the mob of scrawny thralls. There was no sign of cheer or gratitude among the men, they regarded both Einarr and the bleeding husk of their overlord with the same dull, witless gaze. So long had they been slaves that now, with freedom in their grasp, not one of them recognised it. Whatever they had once been, Norse, Kossar, Kurgan or southlander, now they were all the same – cattle. Einarr spat his contempt onto the floor of the kitchen and pushed his way through the gawking mob. Better to run laughing into the arms of death than to cling to such a sorry excuse for life.

Einarr continued across the camp. He could see Aesling warriors prowling along the scaffolding and at the base of the cliff, whipping and haranguing those slaves who tarried in their labours. These were giants of men, their powerful build apparent even from such distance, their bodies covered in bands of blackened iron, heads hidden within horned helms. Their belts were festooned with axes and swords and every man of them had a thick shield strapped across his back. He felt a spark of dread flicker through him. There were more Aeslings abroad than he had hoped for. At least five were moving along the scaffolding, and another four were monitoring the slaves at the base of the cliff. Even if he struck quickly and killed all of the Aeslings at the smithy, the guards at the quarry would soon be after him. Against such numbers the best Einarr could hope for was a death that would not shame his ancestors. Perhaps the old witch had been right, perhaps they should have searched for another way down.

The moment of doubt passed, burned away by the overwhelming conviction that he was right, that Tchar had indeed guided him here. This was where he needed to be. However mighty the Aeslings were, the might of Tchar was greater. And if the god’s power failed him, of what consequence was that to him? Had he not intended to simply slaughter his way through the Aesling nation until one of them at last struck him down? What would it change if he died here or in some forest village, so long as he died with the blood of Aeslings dripping from his axe?

Resolution filled Einarr as he crept closer to the bowl-shaped depression in the ground that contained the Aesling smithy. He would show his strength to Tchar, show the depth of his courage and his conviction. Show to Tchar that nothing would stand between him and what the god had promised.

As Einarr prepared to move around the smithy, to make his way to the forge and the immense shape that slumbered beside it, a sharp, beast-like howl shrieked across the camp. It was soon followed by the clash of steel and the cries of men. Orgrim had grown weary of waiting.

The smithy exploded into life. Two burly Aesling warriors rushed from their burrow-like shelter, wicked axes gripped in their hairy hands. From another hole emerged a squat, broad-shouldered figure, its body encased in blackened steel and scaly strips of leather. A massive double-handed weapon that was at once axe, maul and pick was gripped in the black-garbed imp’s hands and as it turned its skull-faced helmet in Einarr’s direction, a hateful hiss wheezed from its mouth.

From behind the forge, a great roar sounded and Einarr felt his determination shudder as he saw the immense slumbering shape rise on its trunk-like legs. Easily twice as tall as a man, with arms as thick around as Einarr’s entire body, the thing was the largest ogre he had ever seen. The breath of the gods had fallen heavily upon the ogre; upon its shoulders a pair of hideous heads glowered at the world, great tusks twisting their massive jaws. From the centre of the brute’s torso, a third arm jutted, its thick fingers clawing at the night as the ogre roared its wrath. Tattered furs and strips of rag clothed the creature’s malformed bulk, barely containing the hairy twisted body.

Einarr did not have time to consider the monster further – already the Aesling guards were charging towards him, their mouths open in savage war cries. Behind them marched the sinister forgemaster, its hybrid weapon clutched firmly in its armoured hands. The smith seemed content to allow its guards to close with Einarr first, waiting until they had reached Einarr before putting any great haste in its steps.

The first Aesling swung his axe at Einarr’s gut, seeking to disembowel the Baersonling. Einarr blocked the strike with the heft of his own axe, but before he could retaliate, he found himself dodging the sweep of the other guard’s weapon as it flashed towards his neck. The Aeslings laughed and came at him again, pressing Einarr back along the perimeter of the bowl, the coordinated attacks of the two marauders keeping him on the defensive, allowing him no respite in which to mount his own attack. Einarr could hear shouts coming from the quarry and knew that the other Aeslings would soon reach the smithy. The guards did not need to press their attack, they had only to keep Einarr busy until their kinsmen arrived.

Sharp, stabbing pain seared its way up Einarr’s side. The warrior gasped, flinching away from the attack and almost into the waiting axe of an Aesling. He saw the sinister armoured forgemaster pulling back his strange hybrid weapon, the spike-like point set at the tip of its shaft glistening with blood. The smith laughed behind his mask of steel and Einarr could almost feel the man’s sadistic enjoyment of his work. The Aeslings joined the forgemaster in his laughter and came at Einarr again, their axes flashing through the night. Again, Einarr was hard-pressed to match the speed and coordination of his attackers. Once more, as he beat back the weapons of his foes, he felt the forgemaster’s spike stabbing into his flesh, digging into his thigh. Einarr forced himself to remain standing even as his leg throbbed with agony and blood began to fill his boot. He knew his foes would finish him in an instant if he showed them any hint of weakness.

The Aeslings made ready to come at him again. They were filled with an even greater confidence than before, and the sound of war cries coming from the quarry told Einarr that the other guards must be very near now. He could see the Aeslings smile behind their crimson beards as they prepared to chop him down with their axes. Then an immense shadow fell across the marauders and the smiles withered on their faces. The look of horror that filled the visage of one Aesling vanished as a huge hand closed over his head, crushing it into a dripping pulp. The ogre reached for the other Aesling with one of his other arms, causing the guard to jump back. The manoeuvre brought the man within easy reach of Einarr’s weapon and he chopped through the marauder’s back as though cutting down a sapling. The man screamed and collapsed into the sooty snow, only to have his screams silenced when the ogre’s enormous foot came crashing down.

In avoiding the attacks of the guards, Einarr had been slowly circling the bowl of the depression, drawing ever nearer the forge until at last the immense stone oven smouldered right beside him. The ogre had waited patiently for the fighting men to draw near, then when they were within reach, it had acted. Now the ogre stared intently at Einarr with his four leprous eyes, an expectant expression spread across the ogre’s hideous faces. Einarr could see now the chains that dripped from the ogre’s limbs, binding him to the forge. A savage smile spread across Einarr’s features and he nodded to the creature.

The forgemaster read Einarr’s intention, rushing at the warrior with his axe-maul, shouting at the top of his voice as he did so. Einarr spun as the smith attacked, his axe glancing off the skull-like helmet. The smith staggered back, blinking blood from his eyes, and shouted again. This time his roars were answered by thick Aesling voices and Einarr could see red-bearded faces appear at the lip of the depression. With no more time to lose, Einarr kicked the smith in his knee, spilling the forgemaster into the snow and lunged for the massive bronze ring that secured the ogre’s chains to the forge. His arms seemed filled with an inhuman strength as he drove the edge of Rafn’s axe against the ring. The blade shattered beneath the impact, shards of steel flying into the night. The sharp, angular runes gouged into the ring flared with unholy fire as he struck it, burning as bright as the heart of a furnace. Then the light died and the bronze ring became a thing of mortal metal once more.

A bellow of monstrous rage sounded in Einarr’s ears and he crumpled to the ground as he felt a powerful force crack against his back. He rolled as he struck the snow, sparing himself the savage axe-blade that gouged deep into the ground where he had fallen. The forgemaster turned hate-ridden eyes on Einarr as he struggled to free his weapon. Einarr could see tiny skulls woven into the braids of the smith’s long black beard, each marked with one of the same dark runes that had briefly flared into life upon the bronze ring. Einarr pulled the shattered length of Fangwyrm from its sheath. He risked a glance away from the forgemaster to see where the Aeslings were. Five guards were rushing down the lip of the depression, axes and swords gleaming in the fitful light of the forge. As Einarr watched, one of the men fell, an arrow sticking from his neck. The others continued to rush towards him.

With an ear-splitting shriek, the bronze ring snapped apart under the renewed efforts of the mutant ogre. Whatever spells had been forged into its substance had been broken by Einarr’s axe and the power to restrain the monster had been lost. The charging Aeslings faltered in their steps as they saw the ogre rear upward, his twin heads bellowing with furious jubilation. Then the monster turned his eyes on his former captors and a deep, rumbling hate snarled past his twisted lips. The stunned Aeslings took a nervous step back, none of the marauders eager to confront the vengeful ogre.

The forgemaster, intent upon freeing his axe, did not pay notice to what was unfolding all around him. With a howl of triumph, he succeeded in ripping his weapon free from the icy ground. The sound degenerated into a squeal of shock and horror as the smith found the ogre looming above him. Before the forgemaster could act, the ogre’s enormous hand smashed into him, swatting him like an insect and flinging him across the depression to land in a clattering mess of steel and flesh against the far side of the bowl.

Einarr glared at the stunned Aeslings and tightened his hold upon the sword. If they thought the ogre was the only thing that could visit death upon them, then he would show the scum the error of their ways. With a howl, Einarr charged towards the cowed marauders. He heard his cry taken up by the twin voices of the ogre and felt the ground shudder as the huge creature followed after him.

The pale, greasy grey that passed for the arctic dawn stained the eastern sky as Einarr tended his wounds. The blows the forgemaster had visited upon his body were painful, but it seemed the smith had been more interested in agony than injury when he had inflicted them. The villain’s overconfidence had cost him dearly. The only enemy it was safe to play games with was a dead one.

The battle against the Aeslings had raged for the better part of an hour, the timely support of the ogre deciding the tide. Even faced with the enraged brute, however, the Aeslings had persisted, fighting to the last against their foes. As much as he despised them, Einarr had to admit they had died deaths worthy of their ancestors.

‘You should stay off the leg for a few days,’ Urda advised him, her tone petulant. The witch was still sulking from Einarr’s decision to have her bound before the attack on the Aesling camp. It had not been an easy decision for Einarr to make, the witch’s magic would have been a great boon overcoming the Aeslings. But Einarr had been unable to trust Urda to use her powers against her kinsmen. Every step of the way she had guided them away from confrontation with the Aeslings. In a battle with them, Einarr had simply been unable to trust on which side she would fight.

‘You know as well as I that won’t be happening,’ Einarr grunted as he rose from the ground. ‘Now that the way is clear for us to descend to the Frozen Sea, we need to do so before any Aeslings show up to see what has become of their quarry.’ They had made camp in the Aesling smithy, a position Einarr trusted more than the confines of the timber structures scattered about the camp.

‘At its worst, you could always have your new friend just carry you,’ Urda added, a caustic quality still in her voice. Einarr shifted his gaze to the towering ogre. The brute was busy pulling legs from the corpses of the Aeslings and picking them clean of meat. Einarr shook his head at the gruesome sight.

‘I think I’ll stand on my own feet,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how much faith I can put in Thognathog’s ability to remember that I’m not for eating.’

‘Then why not leave that monstrosity behind?’ Urda asked. Einarr admitted that it was a valid question. The ogre was certainly a formidable asset in battle, but he was an equally terrible menace if he were to turn on them. The wisest course was indeed to leave Thognathog to his own devices, but Einarr could not shake the feeling that somehow the ogre was a part of his quest, that he had been meant to free him and thereby earn the monster’s service.

‘I think the ogre was a part of your vision, that he is the flesh behind the picture of the twin giants you scrawled upon the snow,’ Einarr told her. Urda pondered his words, but retained her scowl.

‘Remember, Einarr Steelfist,’ she cautioned, ‘what was shown to you was warning as well as guidance…’

‘And wisdom lies in knowing one from the other.’ The cryptic games of the gods were a thing Einarr had little patience for. If they would speak to mortals, if they would have them perform services for them, then why could they not speak in ways a simple warrior could understand? ‘I confess I do not know. Until I do, the ogre will come with us.’

Einarr looked across the smithy. With its high profile, the smithy had presented the best place to shelter from the chill wind that blew across the cliffs from the Frozen Sea. After the charnel house Orgrim and Vallac had made of the barracks, it was the only shelter that would allow them to keep an eye on the immense Thognathog. Besides, Einarr wanted to have a ready view of the slopes leading down into the fissure. He had no desire to be surprised by more Aeslings. Suddenly he noticed movement near the pile of corpses the ogre had gathered beside him. A black shape gradually wormed its way from beneath the heap of bodies, creeping like a great beetle away from the feasting Thognathog.

Einarr drew Fangwyrm and prowled across the bowl. The abrupt action of their leader drew the attention of Vallac and Birna. They rose from where they had been tending to their armour and weapons and followed Einarr. The forgemaster’s attention was fixed on the feeding ogre and the first he was aware of Einarr’s approach was when the warrior kicked him in the side, flipping him onto his armoured back. Before the little man could right himself, Einarr planted his boot on his chest and pointed the jagged edge of Fangwyrm at the man’s throat.

‘Trying to cheat Thognathog of his supper?’ Einarr asked. The forgemaster groaned in horror and tried to slither out from beneath Einarr’s boot. Einarr pressed his full weight down against the smith’s chest, pinning him in place.

‘Let me go or you’ll suffer for it!’ the forgemaster snarled. Einarr smirked at the man’s bravado, reaching down and pulling the skull-faced helmet from his head. He immediately wished he hadn’t, the smith’s face was one of the ugliest he had ever seen. The man’s hair was black and greasy, coiled into elaborate rings and festooned with tiny, shrunken skulls, his beard was coarse and wiry, and likewise coiled into rings with little skulls woven into his beard locks. Hoops of gold pierced the thick, hairy brow that shaded the villain’s beady orange eyes and gold nails studded his big bulbous nose. Sharp fangs gleamed in the smith’s mouth as he spoke, giving his words a hissing, weasel-like tone.

Overall, the man’s features were too thick and broad to be human. Einarr was reminded of the dwarfs who sometimes came down from the mountains to trade in the largest Baersonling villages, but the resemblance was as different as that between a falcon and a raven.

‘Interesting, little worm,’ Einarr laughed. ‘Near as I can tell, I am the one holding the sword!’ The comment caused Vallac and Birna to join in Einarr’s laughter.

‘The curse of Hashut will fall on any who dare bring harm to the Dawi Zharr!’ the forgemaster snarled, trying to squirm out from beneath Einarr’s boot. Einarr’s brow wrinkled at the unfamiliar names. He looked aside to Birna, but she was just as ignorant of their import as he.

‘He’s a follower of the Dark Father,’ Vallac explained. ‘One of the Fire Dwarfs of the Great Skull Land. My people sometimes trade slaves with his kind for the armour and weapons they make. Strange that one of them should be so far from home.’

Einarr pushed the jagged edge of Fangwyrm against the tip of the dwarf’s bulbous nose. ‘Well, burrow-rat, what are you doing here? What strange road brings you to the black north and a life among the Aeslings?’ The dwarf simply glared at Einarr, his fiery eyes smouldering with hate. Einarr pushed the sword deeper, drawing a bead of blood from the forgemaster’s nose.

‘The star-metal,’ the forgemaster snarled, nodding his head toward the quarry and the pitted cliff. ‘But it is useless to you!’ he added with venom dripping from his tongue. ‘Only the Dawi Zharr have the craft to work it. To barbarian animals like you it is nothing but worthless rock!’

Einarr grinned down at the dwarf, pulling his sword away from the forgemaster’s face. ‘I have no interest in your black rocks, maggot-breath,’ he said. ‘And less interest in the curses of your gods.’ The warrior turned his head, whistling sharply. The sound caused Thognathog to raise one of his heads away from his gruesome meal. The ogre’s other head soon followed, both faces filling with a wrathful loathing as they saw the figure pinned beneath Einarr’s boot. The dwarf’s eyes went wide with terror as Thognathog stood and began to stomp toward him.

‘No!’ the dwarf wailed. ‘Keep that thing away from me!’ Einarr just smiled down at his captive. After the cowardly way the dwarf had fought him, he was of no mind to be merciful. The forgemaster began to shake with horror as the dark shadow of Thognathog fell across him.

‘I’ll do anything,’ the dwarf hissed. ‘I have treasure! Kurgan gold, hidden in the mountains! I can show you where the Aeslings have been sending the weapons I have made for them! I’ll teach you the secret of the star-stones!’ The dwarf’s words trailed into a shriek of absolute fear as the ogre reached down for him with a hand almost as big as the dwarf’s entire body. He could see the vengeance burning in Thognathog’s eyes and he knew that his death would not be a quick one.

Before the ogre could take hold of the dwarf, Einarr pushed against the monster’s hand. Thognathog turned one of his heads to look at Einarr, a questioning look on his monstrous face. ‘Just a moment,’ Einarr told the ogre. ‘Perhaps this scum can be of use to us.’ A sudden thought had occurred to him, echoes from the dream-signs Urda had drawn in the snow outside Orgrim’s cave.

‘You say you make weapons?’ Einarr asked the dwarf. He held the broken length of Fangwyrm up for the captive to see more fully. ‘Think you could remake this?’

The dwarf nodded his head enthusiastically, his eyes still locked on Thognathog’s towering frame. ‘Spare Zhardrach’s life, and I’ll make you whatever you want!’ The ogre sneered down at the forgemaster, shaking his enormous heads.

‘No!’ the brute’s voice rumbled. ‘Little man makes many screams before he fill Thognathog’s belly! Thognathog give little man’s liver to Great Maw and let worms eat little man’s eyes!’ The violence in the ogre’s voices made Vallac step back and Birna draw her blade. Einarr smiled indulgently at the immense brute, tapping Fangwyrm against the great steel shackle that still circled the brute’s massive wrist. He could see the ogre’s leathery flesh was chaffed and scarred by the tight metal band, that the weight of the chains dangling from it caused the ogre no end of discomfort.

‘Thognathog,’ Einarr said, his tone like that of a parent speaking to a stubborn child. ‘If you don’t eat the dwarf, he’ll take those chains off of you.’ Thognathog scowled as his mind slowly turned over Einarr’s words. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice? Make you feel better?’ The ogre scratched one of his foreheads, trying to weigh the value of having his chains removed against the pleasure that slowly dismembering Zhardrach would bring him. ‘You will remove my friend’s chains, won’t you?’ Einarr added, turning his attention to the dwarf beneath his boot.

‘Of course! Of course!’ Zhardrach exclaimed. ‘It was all the Aeslings’ idea anyway! I’d never want to bring any kind of hurt to the big fellow!’

Einarr turned back to face Thognathog again. ‘See? He’ll take your chains off, make them stop hurting you. Then you can watch him make nice new chains to go around his own wrists.’ A sinister look came across Einarr’s face. ‘Besides, if he decides to try and trick us, you can always eat him later.’

CHAPTER NINE

Night settled over the Aesling quarry, darkening the already brooding shadows. Einarr stood upon the cliff overlooking the grey, lifeless world that was the Frozen Sea. Beneath the gibbous light of the swollen moons, it seemed to dance and sway as he gazed upon it, slithering across his vision with sinuous grace. The impression caused his blood to chill. He was reminded of the stories an old reaver had told him while they sailed across the Sea of Claws to sack the city of Erengrad. In his youth, the veteran sea wolf had been part of a voyage to the dark shores of Naggaroth, the land of the elflings. Among the horrors he had related was that which they had encountered as they neared the beaches of Alfland. Great black rocks rose from the sea just beyond the shore, making the approach to the coast perilous. But worse than the rocks themselves had been the things which made their rookeries within the wave-beaten stone. Hideous witch-wraiths with the bodies and faces of nubile young elf wenches, but with the wings of great bats and the clawed talons of enormous vultures. The crew saw the horrible witch-birds as they drew near to the rocks, and the creatures saw them. The reaver had told Einarr how the things had swayed and crooned, how their bodies had gyrated and twisted with lascivious abandon. He related how many of the crew had been powerless to resist the sensuous dance of the fiends, how they had leapt into the sea and swum to the rocks all the while screaming their terror. For even as they surrendered to the call of the sirens, every man of them knew he swam to his death.

The Frozen Sea reminded Einarr of the old reaver’s harpies. It beckoned to him, mesmerised him with a serpent’s stare and a lover’s kiss. Yet even as he felt it working its spell over him, the Frozen Sea could not hide its menace from him. He knew it for what it was – a place of icy oblivion and doom, a place from which no names returned to fill the sagas, where no deeds escaped to grace the songs of the skalds. But even knowing, he could not break free from its call.

They would cross the Frozen Sea.

Einarr turned from his contemplation of the lifeless waste when he heard heavy footfalls crunching through the snow. He smiled as he saw Birna’s striking figure stalking up the slope to join him. After contemplating something as forbidding as the Frozen Sea, the sight of the Sarl huntress was a most welcome one indeed. Behind her loomed the immense hulk of Thognathog, his body now freed of its chains, all save the one he now held clenched in one of his mighty fists. The other end of the chain circled the chest of the black-garbed, cursing creature the ogre dragged behind him. Einarr felt a twinge of alarm. If there were any more Aeslings about, they would be able to hear the dwarf’s invective from leagues away.

Einarr glared down at Zhardrach as the small procession approached him. If the dwarf noticed the warrior’s annoyance, the observation did nothing to stem the tide of abuse and spite spewing from his mouth. Einarr was not the only one who seemed tired of the dwarf’s voice. As they came to a halt, Thognathog gave a swift jerk on the chain he held, causing Zhardrach to stumble and crash face first into the slope. The dwarf rose, even more colourful obscenities screeching from his bruised features.

‘Still that tongue, burrow-rat!’ Einarr snapped. ‘Or I’ll let Thognathog pull it from that filthy mouth of yours!’ The dwarf bit down on the stream of venom he was hurling at the ogre and turned his hate-ridden eyes on the Baersonling.

‘We had a deal!’ the dwarf spat. He turned his hostile gaze on Birna. The woman shook her head contemptuously at Zhardrach, then stepped towards Einarr, a fur-wrapped bundle clutched in her hands.

‘The slaver,’ she said, the word heavy with spite, ‘says that he has finished what you told him to make. He insisted he be freed as soon as it was done, but I reasoned that you had best inspect his work for yourself.’

‘Norsling bitch!’ Zhardrach snarled, his fangs gleaming in the moonlight. ‘You dare insult the craft of the Dawi Zharr!’ The fresh stream of threats and abuse was cut short when Thognathog pulled on the dwarf’s chain again, spilling him onto his backside.

Einarr paid little notice to Zhardrach’s antics, his attention riveted to the bundle Birna held. Gently, almost reverently, he took it from her. Slowly, with the care a mother might show with her newborn child, he unwrapped the furs from that which they covered. The cool, elegant shine of steel winked at him as it caught the moonlight.

After the first teasing glance, Einarr ripped the remaining furs away, exposing the full length of the weapon. The blade of Vinnskor had been reborn, restored from the jagged stump it had been. Einarr held Fangwyrm above his head, as though to show it to the gods themselves. He laughed as he swung it through the empty air, testing its balance, letting his hand become accustomed to the feel of the weapon. It felt purer than any weapon he had ever held, more like a part of his own body than a thing of metal and fire. He knew he was meant to bear this sword, that he had always been meant to carry it into battle. Like the lure of the Frozen Sea, it was a sensation that was beyond the mind, something baser and more primal, something too compelling to doubt.

As Einarr turned the blade through the frosty air, he was impressed by the lightness of the sword, by the ease with which it slashed through the night. He was struck too, by the eerie, silvery sheen that flickered through the metal and was reminded that the sword was Fangwyrm no longer. There had not been enough of the sword left to reforge on its own, Zhardrach had needed something more. Einarr was still uncertain what had moved him to give the dwarf the elf knife he had taken from Alfkaell. It had been a compulsion that had seemed to ignite his brain, almost as though it came from somewhere beyond himself. Once the idea had come upon him, it had been impossible to deny. All of Zhardrach’s protestations, his reluctance to have anything to do with the ‘devil steel’, had fallen on deaf ears. Whatever the difficulties, he knew that joining the elf dagger and Fangwyrm was meant to be. Now he understood. Fangwyrm had been a formidable weapon, but it was like a bread knife beside the sword he now held. He would call it Alfwyrm, he decided, in recognition of the two weapons that had joined to become something still greater.

Zhardrach was silent as he watched Einarr test the blade the dwarf had forged. He scratched at his hairy chin and a sly smile crawled onto his grotesque face. He knew the warrior would be suitably impressed. ‘I see my work pleases you,’ he said. ‘In all the lands of your people, none make finer blades than Zhardrach of the Skull.’ The dwarf’s face filled with an imperious pride and he held his chains towards Einarr. ‘Now, if you are satisfied, as I see you are, I will be on my way.’

Einarr shook his head, sheathing his new sword. ‘You do good work, dwarf. So good in fact, I am changing the terms of our agreement.’

Zhardrach lunged for the Baersonling, his fanged face twisted into a savage snarl. ‘You back cheating grobi cur!’ he roared, hands splayed into claws. Before he could reach Einarr, he was pulled short on his chain by Thognathog, causing the dwarf to nearly strangle himself.

Einarr glared down at the snarling dwarf, staring into the forgemaster’s fiery eyes. ‘I had intended to make a present of you to Thognathog once you were finished,’ he hissed, meaning every word. ‘Now, however, I have taken it in mind to keep you around. Whatever gods you honour in the land of the Skull, I suggest you thank them.’ Einarr looked away from the cursing dwarf, directing his gaze to Thognathog. ‘Tell everyone to make ready, we have tarried here too long already.’ The ogre nodded his heads, lumbering back down the slope, dragging the fuming Zhardrach after him. ‘And see that his chains are tight,’ Einarr called after the hulking brute, knowing that he could trust him to be very attentive about that particular detail.

Birna watched Thognathog go, then stepped closer to Einarr. When she spoke, it was in a tremulous voice. The tone surprised Einarr, until he found that her eyes were not on him, but the vast wastes of the Frozen Sea.

‘You still mean to cross it?’ she asked.

Einarr was quiet a moment, letting the question dissipate into the frosty air. ‘I have seen it in my dreams,’ he said. ‘This is where they have shown me that I must come if I would do what they would have me do.’

Birna seemed to consider his answer, but the words brought no reassurance to her. ‘The Aesling witch says that what the gods show us in our dreams are not only to guide us, but also to warn us. How do you know they did not mean to warn you to stay far from here?’

‘How did you know the falcon that spoke to you, that told you to find me, was to be trusted?’ Einarr countered. ‘We must trust what is inside us, must trust that what our hearts tell us is true, is true. It is all we have, in the end. All the seers and witches in Norsca with all their sorcery and wisdom cannot fathom the riddles of the gods. We must simply accept what we feel to be true or be lost to our own doubts and fears.’

The Sarl huntress nodded. ‘I have come this far, I will trust your wisdom, Steelfist,’ she said. ‘And I will remember what you have said, about placing faith in what our feelings say is true.’

Einarr saw a familiar gleam in Birna’s eye as she spoke, an inviting look that had never failed to send a thrill through his blood. But now, somehow, it repulsed him. Perhaps it was the pain of losing Asta, or nothing more than the nearness of something as forbidding as the Frozen Sea. Or perhaps it was the suspicion that it was not he himself that drew Birna’s ardour, but what the huntress imagined him to be – the chosen champion of Tchar. Whatever the source, Einarr found himself ignoring the favour of the huntress.

‘Check that the provisions are gathered,’ he told her. ‘I doubt there will be anything to hunt once we walk that wasteland so what we would eat we must carry with us. Be certain there is extra for the ogre to carry. I doubt his appetite is small.’

‘What the ogre would eat, none of us would touch in any event,’ Birna answered, a ring of petulance in her voice. ‘Except perhaps Orgrim.’

‘See to it just the same,’ Einarr said. Birna nodded again and turned to make her way back down the slope. She had gone only a few steps before she turned back towards him.

‘What about the other slaves?’ she asked. Einarr barely gave his answer any thought. For days the Aesling slaves had clustered about the quarry and the kitchens, lurking in the shadows like whipped curs, watching Einarr and his companions rummage through the possessions of their former masters with dull, disinterested gazes. Not once had one of them made any move to seize any of the Aesling weapons littered about the snow, nor made any move to approach the forge where Einarr had set his camp.

‘Leave them,’ he declared. ‘They did nothing to remove their chains, why should I do it for them? Let them stay here and rot, they are already dead. They have been since the moment they accepted their chains.’

The chill of the Norscan winter was even more pronounced upon the bleak, undulating expanse of the Frozen Sea. Einarr had never felt such cold before, not in all his years at sea or on land. It was almost as though unseen phantoms were stabbing him with blades of ice every time he took a step, trying to drag him down into their chill world of frozen death with every numbing touch. The blasts of icy wind that smashed into their faces caused their flesh to become as rigid as stone, the spit to freeze inside their mouths and their hair to turn brittle with frost. They found themselves using the rolling landscape to shield them from the northern wind, sheltering within the frozen overhand of the unmoving waves that marked the surface of the plain.

All of them felt the hideous touch of winter slashing through them, but it was Vallac, the Kurgan, who seemed least susceptible to the icy claws raking across his flesh. Indeed, steam seemed to be rising from the man’s exposed face whenever Einarr looked at him and Vallac alone did not have clumps of ice clinging to his brow. Einarr was reminded of the burning sludge the Kurgan had spat into the face of the gor and wondered if perhaps this was further evidence of the fires the gods had stoked inside Vallac when they had touched him and transformed his flesh.

At the head of the small procession, his small body dripping with chains, Zhardrach reluctantly tested the ice as they made their passage across the wastes. Close behind the dwarf stalked Thognathog, the end of the dwarf’s chain wrapped around the ogre’s waist like a belt. Early in their crossing of the Frozen Sea, Zhardrach had tried to eliminate the ogre by finding a soft patch in the ice. Thognathog had broken through the weak surface, nearly drowning and losing much of his supplies before managing to climb out from the frigid waters. Now Zhardrach would need to be more careful – if it happened again he would be dragged down with Thognathog to a watery grave. Einarr noted that the dwarf was much more careful since the new arrangement had been implemented.

The loss of Thognathog’s provisions had been a serious setback. A hungry ogre wasn’t something even the bravest Norse warrior wanted marching alongside him, ogres had a curious way of placing food before fellowship in even the best of circumstances. Even plundering the provisions of the rest of his warband did little to solve the problem. Einarr was forced to relent and agree to Orgrim’s suggestion that the renegade be allowed to break off from the group and hunt whatever game might be found scratching an existence from the ice. The woodsman would stalk off alone, brushing aside Birna’s offers to help him. They would watch him vanish into the mists, hunched over and sniffing at the ground as he faded into the icy night. The Aesling would never fail to return the next morning, his beard often matted with blood, his arms filled with the mangled carcass of seals and snow rats. How any man could track game across the windswept ice, Einarr did not know. He might have asked Orgrim, but the renegade was always irritable after his hunts, quick to snap at anyone trying to pry into his habits.

Through it all, the old witch Urda somehow managed to keep pace with the others. Einarr was impressed by the crone’s determination and willpower, refusing to allow herself to linger behind, refusing to be far from Einarr’s side. He could understand the thinking that gave the old woman such strength. Of all the members of their small warband, only Einarr himself had any reason to keep her around. Orgrim, he knew, would just as soon kill the hag as look at her and Thognathog had little reason to look kindly on any Aesling. Zhardrach blamed the Aeslings as a people for his current predicament, and no dwarf forgave any betrayal easily. Vallac and Birna both distrusted the witch intensely and warned Einarr about the dangers of keeping her around at every opportunity. No, Einarr alone had a vested interest in keeping Urda alive, and the witch knew it well. He only hoped that she did not take it into mind to test just how much control she had over him.

Four days after setting out from the Aesling quarry, the undulating, unearthly landscape was broken by the first artificial feature the warband had yet seen upon the Frozen Sea. It was a great smooth furrow, a patch of level ice that cut its way through the unmoving waves. There was no question but that some intelligence had carved the furrow through the ice, it was too regular to be a caprice of either storm or sea. Einarr was at once struck by the immensity of such a feat, of hacking such a road across the Frozen Sea. It wound across the ice as far as the eye could follow in either direction and was wider across than the entire village of Vinnskor. None among them could say who had made such a road, nor why. Einarr did not trouble himself over such questions. It was enough that the path was there.

They made better time, travelling along the path instead of climbing the jagged curves of the frozen waves. The depth of the furrow sheltered them from the worst of the wind, giving them all a much needed respite from the malice of the elements. Yet almost from the first, a nameless dread began to prey upon Einarr’s mind as they marched along the ice road, a nebulous terror that set the hairs on his arms shivering yet which refused all effort to quantify and recognise it. Einarr could see that his companions felt it too. Orgrim no longer ranged ahead of the group, the renegade slinking close by his comrades for the first time since they had left his forest cave. Even Zhardrach did not shun them as he had, keeping close to Thognathog despite the rumbling of the ogre’s belly. Whatever preyed upon their senses, it was something more than an imagined fear.

On their fifth day travelling along the path, Einarr called Vallac to him. The Kurgan was a seasoned warrior and had seen much in his wanderings. Of all those in his warband, Einarr respected Vallac enough to listen to his council. He needed the advice of another warrior. His question to Vallac was a simple one, one that did not require the cryptic wisdom of witches and seers. Should they abandon the path or should they continue to follow it?

The Kurgan rubbed his fingers against the gold loops piercing his brow as he considered Einarr’s question. ‘My instincts say to me that we should flee,’ Vallac said at last, his voice low, his words for Einarr’s ears alone. Even so, he saw Orgrim’s head snap around as Vallac whispered, the renegade picking up the hushed conversation even across the dozen yards that separated them. Vallac ignored the berserker’s unnatural eavesdropping and continued. ‘My mind tells me that we make good time by using the trail. But even I tire of sheltering from the wind beneath the curl of the waves. I weary of huddling together, sucking the warmth from one another’s bodies like great leeches. Not a one of us has been spared being cut by the knife-edges of the waves, our blood freezing with every new wound. We have little food and cannot depend upon Orgrim’s hunts to get more. There will be game beyond this frozen hell. The sooner we are free of it, the sooner we eat.’ The Kurgan shifted his gaze, watching as Thognathog tore a strip of leather from the patch-work jerkin the ogre had stitched for himself and shoved it into one of his mouths. ‘I worry that your ogre grows weary of an empty belly.’

Einarr nodded in agreement. ‘We might be able to do without for some time yet, but Thognathog is quickly reaching his limit.’ The warrior sighed, shaking his head. ‘The ogre’s strength would be a great boon in overcoming whatever guardians infest the Plague Lord’s palace.’

‘How many of us will even set eyes upon Skoroth’s tower if the ogre decides he wants meat while we are still crawling across this oblivion?’ Vallac cautioned. It was a concern that had weighed heavily upon Einarr’s mind every time he heard the ogre’s belly growl. Even so, he did not want to act until he was certain there was no other way.

‘This path leads somewhere,’ Einarr said. ‘Someone built it. If we follow it, we may find them. If they are people of flesh, then they must eat and if they eat, they will have food.’

The Kurgan nodded in agreement. ‘Then we stick to the trail, whatever daemons haunt it.’ Vallac smiled, clapping his hand against Einarr’s shoulder. ‘That is the choice I should have made had Tzeentch’s mark been burned into my flesh instead of yours.’

Einarr opened his mouth to reply, but as he did so, he was suddenly struck by an intensification of the crawling dread that had plagued them for so long. It seemed to pass through his body like a tremor, causing his stomach to churn like a storm swept sea. The air around him seemed to take on a malignant, stagnant quality, almost as though all the life had drained out of it. He could see that the others felt it too. Vallac had fallen to his knees, trying to spit his sickness onto the ice. Urda was crumpled into a trembling pile of rags and fur, Birna standing over the witch with her bow drawn and an arrow nocked, her eyes wide and haunted. Thognathog was on his feet again, his heads scanning the trench, trying to find whatever had aroused his fear. Zhardrach cringed in the ogre’s shadow, quite willing to put the brute between himself and whatever lurked within the trench.

It was Orgrim’s reaction that set Einarr most on edge. The berserker was not scanning the horizon for any sign of a foe, nor crouched against the ground trying to vomit an already empty belly. Instead the renegade stood as still as a statue, his eyes staring intently at the ice some distance from his feet. Every hair on Orgrim’s body seemed to be standing erect, from the ratty locks that covered his head to the wiry mass that Einarr observed covering his hands. The woodsman’s nostrils were flared wide, like those of some great hound, trying to pick up the scent of what he sensed was near.

While Einarr watched Orgrim, he suddenly noticed something more. The ice was darker where the berserker’s eyes were fixed, as though there were some great shadow beneath the ice. As Einarr watched, the shadow grew, blackening the ground as it became larger and more distinct. Something huge was moving beneath the ice, speeding up from the depths towards the surface!

Einarr shouted a warning to his comrades an instant before the ground shook and they were all thrown from their feet. The grinding shriek of splintering ice clawed through the air as great slabs of the trench were tossed into the sky. A putrid stink slammed into Einarr’s senses as he recovered from his fall, the stink of rotten fish and the black deeps of the ocean. He wiped at his face as his eyes started to water, concerned that the tears would freeze in the winter wind. Through his frosty gaze, he could see an enormous shape, like a barren tree, lashing against the night sky. It writhed and flailed, crashing against the ice with tremendous fury and nearly knocking Einarr down again. It was grey and scaly, somehow reminding him of a colossal rat’s tail. Great green welts marked the back and sides of the thing, but as it rose again into the air, Einarr saw that its underside was puckered with hundreds of plate-sized beaks that snapped and slobbered with an idiot fury.

The ice shuddered again and a second grey tendril exploded from the blackness beneath their feet. It scraped against the wall of the furrow, narrowly missing Birna’s head as she crouched low against the ground. The drooling beaks clacked and cracked above her as the hideous limb groped blindly for the prey it could sense was nearby. Einarr did not wait for it to find its quarry. With a roar, he sprinted across the trench, Alfwyrm clutched in his fist. Savagely, the warrior hacked into the side of the immense stalk, sinking the edge of his steel several inches into the blubbery flesh. Translucent treacle exploded from the wound, bathing Einarr’s body in stinging filth. The tendril whipped away from Einarr’s sword, crashing against the side of the trench with such violence that part of the wall crumbled and crashed down into the furrow. Birna leapt from the frozen debris, narrowly missing the flailing tentacle as she tried to avoid being crushed.

Einarr braced himself as the ice groaned and shrieked once more. A third, then a fourth tentacle exploded up through the ice, lashing madly against the sky. Thognathog charged one of the new tentacles, dragging a protesting Zhardrach after him. The ogre’s huge arms wrapped around the stalk-like limb, striving to crush it in his powerful grip. The grey colour of the tentacles darkened into a vivid red as the ogre attacked. But mighty as the ogre’s strength was, the thing beneath the ice was mightier still. The tentacle whipped itself ferociously through the air, pulling Thognathog with it, the violence of its movements growing more and more frenzied until at last it shook itself free of the ogre’s hold, flinging both ogre and dwarf across the trench.

The ogre had barely crashed into the wall of the trench before the ice splintered again and three more tentacles breached the surface. The floor of the furrow was now pitted with holes and Einarr could see the thing’s scaly blubber pressing close against the ice it had not yet destroyed. He could see Vallac and Orgrim hacking away at the tentacles, splattering the ice with its greasy ichor. Birna sank arrow after arrow into its blubbery flesh, provoking agitated swipes from the limbs but giving no evidence of any lasting hurt.

‘We must flee,’ Urda’s crackling whisper hissed at Einarr’s side. ‘You cannot hope to best such a beast with sword and axe.’ Einarr shook off the witch’s clutching hands, glaring at the flailing pillars of crimson flesh sprouting from the ice. He moved to join Vallac and Orgrim as they chopped and slashed at the noxious things.

‘If you would fight the kraken, you will die,’ the witch pronounced. ‘Your quest will end here and your village will rot in its grave. Tchar will spit your spirit from the halls of your ancestors and you will walk the wastes forever.’ The witch’s words and the panic with which she said them broke through the battle lust that filled Einarr’s mind. He sheathed his sword and shouted to his comrades.

‘Warriors of the Steelfist!’ he roared. ‘We do not fight the beast here! Like sparrows before a hawk, we must flee or die! If we would fight it we must find solid ground to face it on!’ His comrades did not think about their leader’s words, the wisdom in them was too obvious for thought. Vallac and Birna hurried after him as Einarr led the retreat across the trench. Even Orgrim displayed no great eagerness to linger behind, loping after them as soon as he found himself alone among the forest of flailing tendrils. As they ran, Einarr looked over his shoulder. The tentacles continued to whip across the ice for some time before whatever intelligence guided them decided they had gone. With eerie unison, the hideous limbs shot back beneath the ice, only the great holes they had torn in the surface betraying that they had ever been there.

Einarr should have felt some measure of relief when they withdrew, but instead his impression of dread intensified. He shouted a warning as he saw the immense shadow of the kraken shooting towards them beneath the ice. The warband braced themselves as the trench shook once more and the kraken’s hideous limbs erupted through the ice. The monster’s blubbery flesh changed from scarlet to purple as its frustrated tendrils clawed at the ice. One of the tentacles whipped across Vallac’s back, shearing through his armour and nearly flaying the flesh from his body. The Kurgan roared in pain, trying to avenge his agony by skewering the offending limb with his sword. As he made to strike the tentacle, a second tendril snaked around his waist, lifting him from the ice. Vallac stabbed at the limb that had caught him, trying to force it to release him.

‘While it is busy with the Kurgan, we can flee.’ The witch’s voice had lost some of its panic, a cunning calm entering her tone.

Einarr spun on Urda, repulsed by the hag’s cowardice. ‘Use your sorcery, crone!’ he snarled. ‘Or by the Dark Gods, he will not be the only one to feed the kraken.’ Urda sneered at Einarr’s hostile words.

‘You are lost without me,’ she said. Einarr grabbed the witch’s throat, pulling her close.

‘If you would betray him, why shouldn’t you betray me?’ The question caused fear to return to Urda’s eyes. The witch nodded her head in submission, cringing back as Einarr released her.

Birna and Orgrim tried to attack the tentacle that held Vallac, slashing it with their blades. Einarr appreciated the infernal cunning that governed the kraken, as it continued to stretch its captive higher and higher, beyond the reach of his rescuers. At the same time, other tentacles swiped at Birna and Orgrim, trying to catch them within coils of scaly blubber. The kraken was using Vallac as bait to draw more prey within its reach. Einarr glared back at Urda.

The witch had poured her runestones into her hand. While Einarr watched, the stone eye set into her forehead began to glow. He could feel heat drifting from her rune-eye, a sensation so profound that he likened it to Zhardrach’s forge. The glow soon transferred from the stone in Urda’s forehead to one of those she held in her hand. The witch’s face contorted in agony as the blazing stone singed her flesh. Ghastly words slobbered from her withered lips as she clenched her fist. With a final shriek of unholy power, the hag hurled the blazing rock at the kraken.

The stone struck the tentacle holding Vallac, roaring as it exploded into a nimbus of flame. The ice shook as the behemoth beneath it shuddered. The tentacles lashing against the surface recoiled, whipping back down into their holes. The limb that had held Vallac shivered against the ice, its vitality slowly ebbing. Where Urda’s runestone had struck it there was now only a twisted mess of charred blubber. Vallac struggled to free himself from the dead weight that was coiled around him, calling out to Birna and Orgrim to help him.

‘Collect your Kurgan,’ Urda wheezed as she collapsed against the ice, pressing her charred hand against the soothing cold. ‘It will not take the kraken long to forget its pain and remember its hunger. If we have not found sanctuary from it by then, its fury will kill us all.’

CHAPTER TEN

The warband scrambled across the ice, only too aware of the menacing shadow that followed them beneath the surface. For the better part of a day the kraken had pursued them. At first, Einarr had thought they could lose it by abandoning the ice road, emerging from the trench and scrambling across the frozen waves. But they were in the monster’s element and it would not be denied. The thicker ice of the Frozen Sea’s surface broke before the kraken’s tentacles as easily as the floor of the furrow had, the only difference being the inability of its intended prey to see its black bulk haunting them beneath the ice. Not without misgivings, Einarr ordered a return to the trench. He was under no delusion that they could lose the beast, but at least they would have better warning before it attacked. Besides, he was still convinced that the ice road led somewhere, somewhere with solid ground beneath it where they could take sanctuary from the kraken’s single-minded pursuit.

They were in sad shape. Vallac, battered and bleeding from his encounter with the kraken, kept an only slightly better pace than the aged and feeble Urda. Thognathog had to carry Zhardrach draped over his massive shoulder, the dwarf still insensible after being flung through the air by the monster’s assault. The ogre himself had fallen into a brooding silence, punctuated by the fitful rumbling of his gut. Einarr imagined that the ogre carried the dwarf for no reason beyond a quick snack as soon as the kraken lost interest in them. Orgrim was a jumble of nerves, leaping at shadows, his already feral mind further disordered from being hunted by something he could neither see nor smell. Einarr feared that the time might not be long in coming before the berserker’s thin grip on sanity snapped completely and he turned on his comrades. Whenever he locked eyes with Orgrim, they were yellow and bestial with little reason shining behind them. There was no mistaking the unnatural sharpness of his teeth now, nor the lengthening of his fingers into savage claws.

Einarr confided his fears to Birna, the only one of his companions he judged both fit and rational. The huntress accepted his concerns with a grim pragmatism. If either Orgrim or Thognathog snapped, they would most likely fall on Urda or Vallac first. Like any wild beast, they would instinctively strike the weak ones first. That would give herself and Einarr time to slip away. Einarr saw the reason in Birna’s words even as they churned his stomach. It would sit ill with him to run from such a battle.

‘The path of Kharnath is one that teaches to fight, even when there is no hope of victory,’ Birna cautioned. ‘But you bear the mark of Tchar and his is the wiser path. Tchar encourages his servants to choose their battles more wisely, to know when to fight and when to hide. It is not sacrifice that pleases Tchar, it is accomplishment.’

They trudged on along the ice road, feeling the numbing north wind howl past them. For hours now, they had eluded the kraken, but none of them doubted that the aquatic horror would find them again. A feeling of despair smashed down upon them as they saw the cliffs of ice looming at the far end of the furrow. There was no bastion at the end of the road, no fortress in which they might take refuge. Indeed, the road, they now saw, was not a road at all.

Its timbers caked in ice, the frozen remnants of its black sails hanging in great tattered sheets from the cracked stumps of its masts, the ship leaned against the wall of the fissure, as dead as the frozen hell all around it. It was huge, a sea-going juggernaut, its hull banded in steel, its sides covered in great scales of bronze. Einarr had never beheld such a vessel, nor dared to imagine that such a brute could ever be put to sea. Its shape struck him as wrong for a ship, wide and bloated compared to the thin sleek longships of the Norse. Yet there was no denying the awesome power the ship’s size and majesty, even in death, conveyed. The ‘road’ they had been following for so many days had been naught more than the trail left behind by this behemoth as it chewed its way through the Frozen Sea.

Vallac stared at the death ship, shaking his head. Like the others, he felt despair that this was the refuge they had thought to find at the end of the furrow. The Kurgan was the first to give voice to his feelings.

‘You have led us to our death, Steelfist,’ he swore. ‘There is nothing here, and nowhere to escape.’

Einarr turned on the Kurgan, glaring down at the smaller warrior from behind his bear-skull mask. ‘Has the great Tchar marked your flesh, cur of the Steppes?’ He clenched his hand into a fist, the metal fused to his skin shining in the starlight. ‘The god has led me here, just as he sent you yapping after my heels!’ Vallac scowled at Einarr’s words, but he could not hold the Baersonling’s menacing gaze. The challenge began to falter in his gaze. Unexpectedly, it was Urda who rose to take up the Kurgan’s defiance.

‘I warned you, Steelfist!’ the witch hissed. ‘I warned you that the signs were both guidance and warning, that you must choose wisely which to follow and which to shun!’ She spat into the ice at Einarr’s feet. ‘Baersonling filth! You have chosen wrongly and now we shall be cheated of the glory that should have been ours!’

Einarr stared at the witch, watching as the veil slipped away and the ancient hate between her tribe and his filled her wrinkled features. The rune-eye seemed to glow with a wrathful light of its own, casting her face in an orange light. The urge to run the crone through filled him, to hack her spiteful countenance apart and leave her withered body for the kraken. Just as quickly he fought the urge down. Killing one seer had set him upon the strange path he now travelled, killing another could only make things worse.

‘We shall make for the ship,’ Einarr declared, stabbing his finger at the distant vessel. The others followed his gesture, but doubt remained on their faces.

‘Why should we?’ growled Orgrim, the words disfigured by the oversized fangs that now filled his mouth. Einarr turned on the berserker. Without thinking, without willing the motion, his metallic hand smashed into the renegade, knocking him to the ground. The force of the blow caused Orgrim’s head to bounce against the ice, almost cracking his skull. The Aesling groaned in pain, clutching at his head.

‘Because I say you will!’ Einarr roared, the words welling up from within him. Even he was shocked by the force and power within his voice. The others backed away from him, all defiance and doubt gone as their faces filled with something that was more fear than respect. It did not matter to Einarr; all that mattered was that they obeyed.

The spell of authority that seemed to surround Einarr was broken when the ice beneath him suddenly heaved upward, cracking and splintering as an immense shape pressed upon it from below. Almost as colourless as the ice around them, the massive tentacles of the kraken scratched at the sky once more, the beak-like mouths on their undersides snapping and slobbering as they tried to find prey. Einarr was thrown back, crashing against the ice and rolling toward the wall of the fissure. Orgrim leapt back to his feet as another tentacle exploded right beneath him, only the woodsman’s inhuman reflexes preventing him from plunging into the hole the creature had made.

Birna drew her sword, watching as a third and still a fourth tentacle burst through the ice. She could see the crusty scars marking where these same limbs had been injured by them during the creature’s previous attacks. Whatever pain they inflicted upon the kraken, it simply was not enough to make it give up.

‘The witch was right!’ Vallac snarled. ‘He has led us to our death!’ The Kurgan dodged aside as one of the tentacles came crashing down beside him. The kraken had learned a new trick, dragging its flopping arm across the ice, trying to sweep anyone standing upon it into the frigid holes it had made. Vallac winced in pain as he threw himself from the path of the oncoming limb, smashing his already injured body against the unforgiving ice as he landed. The Kurgan did not have time to consider his pain, however, as another tentacle whipped down towards him. Vallac’s vision was filled with the tremendous limb’s shadow before he rolled aside, so near did it come to crushing him.

‘Head for the ship!’ Birna shouted as she hacked at a tentacle slithering across the ice trying to find her. The order brought a fresh scowl to Vallac’s face. ‘Do you see any other cover?’ Birna demanded in answer to his unspoken question. Vallac nodded, turning and sprinting across the ice towards the looming bulk of the ship. Birna could see that Urda was already making for the ship with a speed she would have thought beyond the ragged crone.

‘Wench-sword listen to what she say,’ Thognathog’s voices rumbled from beside her. The ogre had a gaping wound in his arm where one of the kraken’s tentacles had lashed him but otherwise the ogre looked intact, in better shape at least than the dwarf slung across his shoulder. ‘Die stay here!’ There was no arguing with the ogre’s logic, but Birna found herself hesitating. She looked across the field of flailing tentacles to where Einarr’s body lay unmoving against the wall of the fissure. An impulse greater than her urge to reach safety came upon her.

‘We need to get Einarr!’ she shouted up at the ogre. Thognathog’s misshapen faces smiled as he shook his heads.

‘Steelfist give Thognathog new life,’ the ogre said. ‘Thognathog not throw that life away so soon.’

‘You have to help me!’ Birna roared. ‘He might not be dead!’ The ogre shrugged and turned away.

‘Not dead now, then he dead soon,’ Thognathog stated. ‘Maybe kraken not hungry after eat Steelfist.’ Birna spat in contempt as the ogre began to lumber after the retreating Vallac and Urda. She turned, watching as the kraken’s tentacles continued to whip and slash the ice. The bed of the fissure was alive with the kraken’s throbbing limbs now, pulsating with its slobbering, unclean life. She gasped as one of the tentacles slithered along the side of the fissure, groping for Einarr’s lifeless form.

Every instinct told Birna to leave him, to run and save herself. But what had made her linger, now goaded her on. She had come far to find this man, she would not lose him now.

The kraken’s tentacles flailed across the surface of the ice as Birna ran into the midst of the forest of profane flesh. Ice cracked as the tendrils smashed down against the ice. The kraken could sense how near she was and it redoubled its efforts. Birna dove across the ice as one tentacle crashed against the surface where she had been, the violent contact with the ice scraping the flesh from her hands. She did not have time to think about the pain as a second tentacle slithered up from the jagged ice and tried to lash itself around her body. She struck at it with her sword, shattering several of the snapping beaks that puckered its underside. The tendril recoiled in pain, but already a third was whipping across the surface towards her, trying to drive her into the freezing water. Birna waited for the limb to draw close, mustering her strength. Just before it could reach her, she leapt from the ground, clearing the oozing tendril as it swept past her. As she landed, the tentacle shifted, swinging back. Birna noticed its approach and braced herself. Now she was appreciating the madness behind her impulsive decision. Before the kraken had been confused by the variety of potential prey, unable to fix its primitive mind and focus on securing any single victim. Now, there was only Birna and the kraken was without confusion.

Birna jumped again as the tentacle swept towards her. She felt her feet land against something at once scaly and slick with slime. The huntress fought to maintain her balance as the tentacle’s momentum caused it to swipe across the ice. The Sarls were great shipbuilders, and few were the villages that did not provide timber for the longships of their tribe. Every able-bodied Sarl in Birna’s village had been expected to help herd the timbers down the icy rivers of their land to the shipyards on the coast. Maintaining her footing on the kraken’s tentacle was almost child’s play in comparison. Birna bided her time, bracing herself to leap off when the tendril changed direction.

A second tentacle whipped toward Birna, seeking to pluck her off the first. The huntress crouched then sprang, feeling a sense of satisfaction as the tentacle smashed against her former position, the sharp beaks snapping into the flesh of the other tentacle. The ice heaved and shuddered as a thrill of pain surged through the kraken. The pale tentacles pulsed livid red, then shot back down into the freezing depths. Birna exhaled her relief. The monster might not be gone long, but any respite was a welcome one.

Einarr stirred weakly as Birna crouched down beside him. She could see that the side of his head was caked in blood, one of the horns snapped off from the mutated bear skull he wore. With one eye on the shattered ice and the frigid pools of water, Birna crooked her arm around the warrior’s midsection, trying to lift him from the ice. She stopped as she saw a tattered, bleeding figure staring down at her. Orgrim had survived the kraken’s attack, but his chest was a torn mess, the armour stripped away by the snapping beaks of the monster.

Birna shuddered as she saw the feral, bestial state of Orgrim’s eyes. The man’s entire body seemed twisted, his hands crooked into clawed paws, his face somehow both narrower and broader. The berserker’s nostrils flared as he drank in their scent. She could see the jagged scar on Orgrim’s brow where Einarr had struck him. Birna looked aside to where her sword lay on the ice, wondering if she could reach it before Orgrim sprang.

‘Steelfist is hurt,’ Orgrim growled as his nostrils sniffed at the air. The berserker’s tongue pushed its way from behind his fangs as he spoke and Birna recoiled as she saw that it was long and sharp, more like that of a dog than a man.

‘I won’t let you finish him,’ she snarled back. Faster than her eyes could follow, Orgrim was in front of her, his clawed hand around her throat. She felt tiny beads of blood trickle down her neck.

‘Stupid bitch,’ Orgrim’s guttural voice rasped. He tightened his grip, almost choking her and threw Birna back. The huntress rolled as she crashed back against the ice, taking most of the impact on her shoulder. She pulled the small dagger from her boot, clenching it in her fist as she lunged back for Orgrim, but came up short when she saw what he was doing. The berserker had picked up Einarr, bracing his body against his shoulders. Orgrim twisted his head around as he smelled Birna approach. ‘You’re too weak to carry him,’ he snapped. ‘Follow me and keep a watch for the beast. It is beneath the ice and I cannot follow its scent.’

Birna nodded, retrieving her sword as she wiped the blood from her neck. Orgrim began to lope across the ice. Even laden down with Einarr’s bulk, Birna found it difficult to keep up with the woodsman. She wondered at Orgrim’s abrupt display of loyalty, unable to trust it, but also unable to question it. There would be time enough for that once they were safely on the ship.

Slowly, painfully, Vallac pulled himself up the side of the strange dreadnought, the icy bronze plates stinging his flesh as he brushed against them. Closer to the ship, he could see that it had been a vessel dedicated to the gods, bearing their images carved into the wood and branded into the bronze, the runes of the Dark Tongue scratched across the hull. But he could also see that such dedication had not saved it from the ice. The wood was splintered and cracked, great chunks torn away from the sides, exposing the decks within. The massive bolt thrower fastened to the prow of the ship was caked in frost and ice. It was obvious even to a Kurgan from the landlocked steppes that the ship would never sail again, the only thing keeping her afloat was the very ice that had killed her.

Vallac half expected the raised voices he heard coming from the deck of the ship. Both Urda and Thognathog had outdistanced him on the ice, beating him to whatever dubious refuge the ship offered. Perhaps the old hag was trying to talk the ogre out of eating her. But as he came closer and the voices became more distinct, he was surprised to find that the voice arguing with Urda was not the rumbling echo of Thognathog, but the harshly accented spit-growl of Zhardrach. The Kurgan paused as he climbed up the frozen rigging draped across the side of the ship, pulling his knife from his belt and clenching it in his teeth. Whatever devilry the pair was trying to plan, they would not find him an easy victim.

‘Help me with these chains, old hag!’ Zhardrach was snarling as Vallac pulled himself over the side. ‘I’ll give you gold! Gems from the Skull Land! Whatever you desire!’

The dwarf was standing near the far side of the deck, Thognathog’s body strewn behind him. The ogre’s head was bleeding and the stain on the chains in Zhardrach’s fists gave mute evidence of what had struck him down. Now he had Urda trapped against the gunwale, unable to get past him. Vallac idly wondered how long the dwarf had been playing dead, letting the ogre lug him across the Frozen Sea, waiting for just such an opportunity.

‘Even if I believed your lies, I wouldn’t lift a finger for you,’ Urda spit at the dwarf. Zhardrach snarled again, jabbing at her with a long boat hook. Vallac could see now that the dwarf couldn’t reach Urda, not unless he found some way to drag Thognathog’s gigantic body with him. At the same time, the witch couldn’t escape her sanctuary without either throwing herself over the side or coming within the dwarf’s reach. The red slashes on her arms and face told Vallac that if Zhardrach couldn’t reach her, his weapon could. While he watched, Zhardrach ripped a fresh tear in Urda’s tattered cloak. ‘Perhaps I might lift one finger for you,’ Urda hissed at him.

‘Try any of your witchery and I’ll stab you again,’ Zhardrach swore. ‘Now be sensible and help me get free.’

‘So you can kill me?’ Urda scoffed. ‘You can’t bargain with someone when you have nothing to offer them. I have only to lean over the side of this ship and then all your threats are beyond me. It will be a quick death beside what waits you. Tell me, how long do you think you’ll be able to live off ogre meat?’

Zhardrach roared, lunging at her with the boathook. As he made to stab at her, Vallac grabbed the boat hook from him, at the same time pressing his knife against the dwarf’s hairy throat. The dwarf’s rage sputtered into a stream of curses as he froze.

‘It took you long enough to get here,’ Urda complained. Vallac glared back at her.

‘I wanted to hear what kind of offer he was making,’ Vallac explained. ‘See if it was anything worth listening to.’

‘Gold, gems,’ Zhardrach wheezed. Vallac pressed the knife more firmly against the dwarf’s leathery flesh.

‘Yes, I heard all that,’ Vallac said. ‘If you had anything like that, you certainly wouldn’t be working a forge for a bunch of Aeslings.’ The pain in his side made him clutch at his ribs. Urda moved towards him.

‘I could heal your injuries, Kurgan,’ she offered. Vallac smiled at the offer.

‘I trust that offer as much as his,’ he said. Suddenly another spasm of pain throbbed through his body. Zhardrach acted on the instant, ducking his head and biting Vallac’s wrist while grabbing the Kurgan’s arm. Vallac tried to pull away while still holding onto the knife, but was unable to do either. The dwarf’s strength was easily underestimated and Vallac found himself straining just to tear free from his teeth. Zhardrach let him go, dropping and scrambling for both knife and boat hook at the same time. Vallac kicked at the villain, buckling his leg beneath him and spilling the dwarf against Thognathog’s body. The dwarf crashed against the ogre’s chest in a tangle of chains and flailing limbs. He lifted his head from the tangle, glaring murder at Vallac. Then the dwarf’s eyes went wide with terror and a squeak of fright escaped his lungs.

Thognathog sucked at his jagged teeth as he focused his four eyes on the dwarf spilled across his chest.

‘Hashut be praised!’ Zhardrach exclaimed. ‘You live! I was worried that you had hurt yourself!’

‘What happen?’ Thognathog growled. The ogre rose to his feet, knocking Zhardrach to the deck. His massive hand reached back to his bloodied head, tenderly testing the knot growing there.

‘You slipped,’ Zhardrach explained. The ogre favoured the dwarf with an unamused look. Without warning he picked up the dwarf’s chains, jerking him into the air and lumbered towards the side of the ship. Soon, Zhardrach found himself dangling over the ice some thirty feet below.

‘When see Dark Father, say you slip,’ the ogre growled. Zhardrach thrashed about in his chains, eyes screwed shut as he howled in protest, waiting for the inevitable plunge down to the ice. When several seconds passed and he was still alive, the dwarf opened his eyes again. He was surprised to find that Thognathog was not looking at him. The ogre was staring down into the furrow, as were Vallac and Urda. Zhardrach followed the direction of their gaze. He could see Birna and Orgrim running toward the ship across the ice. The berserker was bent nearly double carrying Einarr’s armoured frame across his shoulders.

‘Steelfist live!’ Thognathog exclaimed.

‘Not for long,’ Vallac said as a black shadow appeared beneath the ice, rushing after the fugitives. ‘They’ll never reach the ship ahead of that thing.’

Thognathog turned towards the Kurgan, inadvertently dragging Zhardrach back on deck. The ogre’s look was pensive, almost as though he were ashamed of something. ‘We help Steelfist,’ he said. It was not a question.

‘Of course we will!’ Zhardrach was quick to agree. ‘I saw a harpoon thrower in the forecastle of this wreck. Cut me loose and I can have it working like that.’ Zhardrach snapped his thick fingers. Thognathog looked over at the frozen wreckage of the bolt thrower, then back at the dwarf’s fanged grin.

‘Thognathog has better idea,’ the ogre growled.

Birna could make out Vallac and Thognathog prowling the decks of the ice-bound ship. They were near enough that she fancied she could even smell the ogre’s rancid stench, but even that was not close enough. A quick glance over her shoulder showed the shadow of the kraken speeding after them under the ice. She shouted to Orgrim to run faster, as though the berserker hadn’t been putting in his full effort already. There was no chance of outdistancing the kraken. She braced herself for the by now familiar sensation of the ice buckling beneath her feet as the kraken forced its tentacles through the ice.

The ice did shudder, but the sensation was less intense than Birna had expected. It also seemed to be some distance away. When the ice shook again, she saw something large crash against the surface a hundred yards away. It looked like a huge spear of all things, as thick around as a man’s leg and chased in bronze. The harpoon rolled across the ice where it was soon joined by a second. Birna looked back at the ship. This time she saw Thognathog hurl one of the immense projectiles into the ice.

For an instant, Birna did not understand what the ogre was trying to do. Had the brute’s wits deserted him entirely? Then the ice was jolted, not from above but from below. She saw the kraken’s crimson arms bursting up through the ice, scratching across the surface. But the kraken had not exploded beneath their feet, it had instead been drawn to the area Thognathog had been hurling his spears. Birna watched for a moment as the kraken’s tentacles coiled around a spear and pulled it beneath the ice. She turned and sprinted for the ship. She didn’t want to be around when the monster decided it couldn’t digest wood.

Orgrim was already at the side of the ship, getting Zhardrach and Vallac’s help lifting Einarr over the side. Birna raced to join them, lending her strength to the effort while keeping one eye on the kraken. After what seemed an eternity, Einarr’s unconscious body was over the side. Birna lost no time scrambling up after him. The kraken’s tentacles had already withdrawn, no longer interested in the junk Thognathog was throwing onto the ice.

The huntress slumped onto the deck, trying to catch her breath after her exertions. She looked across to where Urda was crouched above Einarr’s prostrate body. The old witch examined his wounds, shaking her head gravely.

‘You might as well have left him on the ice,’ she said, turning to face Birna. ‘He’ll never wake from such a wound. If only he had heeded Tchar’s warning, but such is the way the gods rid themselves of those unfit to bear their mark.’

The remark brought a growl of frustration ripping up from Orgrim’s jaws, the sound more savage than the howl of a wolf. Birna shook her head in disbelief. After all the signs, all the portents, to have them add up to nothing…

‘The beast not like toys now,’ Thognathog observed, letting the harpoon he had been preparing to fling overboard crash down onto the deck. ‘Maybe it tired.’

Zhardrach spat over the side of the ship, watching his spittle splatter on the ice. ‘I can think of a lot of things to call that lurker, but tired isn’t one of them!’

‘The slaver is right,’ Birna sighed. ‘It will be back, and probably very soon.’

Vallac nodded his head in agreement. ‘We’ll just have to make sure Thog has plenty of junk to throw down there for it to play with.’

‘I don’t think the kraken will be so easily deceived next time,’ Urda said. ‘Even now, it is down there mulling over how it was tricked. When it resolves its confusion, it will be back.’

‘Good thing we aren’t on the ice then,’ Zhardrach said. ‘At least the ship is safe from it.’

‘No, it’s not.’

All eyes turned to find Einarr standing on the deck, defying the dire pronouncement of the witch. Urda looked at him with a mixture of horror and awe, backing away as though from a raging fire. It was an apt comparison, for the warrior’s body seemed to blaze with power, the metal on his hand shining with a molten light. Einarr looked into the face of each of his followers, fixing them with his commanding gaze. Birna wondered if the others felt the same thrill of both hope and dread as Einarr’s gaze swept past her.

‘The kraken will return, but this ship is no refuge from its hunger,’ Einarr said. ‘To get us, it will drag this entire vessel down into its black domain. In so doing, it will seal its own doom.’ The warrior stabbed his finger at Zhardrach. ‘I want you to build a ladder from the prow of this ship to the top of the ice wall, have Thognathog help you. Make it sturdy, dwarf. If the ogre falls, you fall with him.’

Einarr did not wait to hear Zhardrach’s protests, but fixed his attention on Urda. ‘I need your magic again, crone. A spell to change water to ice. Tell me Tchar has seen fit to teach you such magic.’

Urda nodded her head. ‘I know such a ritual, but it is no simple thing to command the powers of the gods! There is much to prepare before such magic can be safely cast.’ As proof of her words, she displayed her charred hand to Einarr. The warrior was unimpressed.

‘You will climb the ladder first then,’ he told her. ‘Begin your preparations as soon as you are on the ice. Orgrim will watch over you, to ensure you do not lose your way.’ The witch scowled at him, but nodded her head again.

‘Birna,’ Einarr called to the huntress. She smiled as he said her name, but there was no tenderness in his tone when he spoke, no softness in his eyes as he looked on her. ‘Watch for the kraken and sound the alarm as soon as you see it.’ Birna’s face slipped back into severity and she nodded her understanding of the warrior’s orders.

‘What of me?’ Vallac asked. Einarr’s features darkened as he looked at the Kurgan.

‘Come with me,’ the warrior said, turning and stalking towards the decayed door of the ship’s cabin and withdrawing into the gloom within.

The hold of the ship was a ghastly sight. Bodies were piled together in a great heap at the centre of the hold. Bundled in thick furs, the crew of the ship had at last huddled together, trying to use their combined body heat to stay warm. As they suffered together, so they had died together, frozen into one immense mass of blue flesh and frosty fur. Einarr was surprised to find that many of the men appeared to be Norse, though just as many sported features from lands he could not even begin to name. The only constant were the tattoos and scars, the medallions and talismans that marked these men as worshippers of the Dark Gods in the divine unity of ultimate Chaos.

Even Vallac, an old hand at slaughter and carnage, who had seen his first battlefield while still a babe sucking his mother’s teat, even he was struck by the morbid vision. The Kurgan hung back as Einarr circled the heap of frozen men, studying it as a horse trader might study a new foal. Vallac found the sight even more disturbing, recalling the profane bone-callers who sometimes practised their abominable sorcery among the cairns and barrows of his people, instilling unclean life into the husks of fallen warlords.

‘You doubt my dreams,’ Einarr said as he paced around the pile of bodies. ‘You doubt the mark upon my flesh. You doubt the promise that Tchar has made to me.’

‘I doubt nothing,’ Vallac replied. ‘I only questioned if you had interpreted the signs correctly.’

Einarr turned and faced his comrade. ‘Do not question me. Do not doubt me. Just follow where I would lead you, Vallac, and you shall have the glory you desire.’ He began circling the corpses again, seeming to lose interest in his companion. He touched the wooden support beam that rose amid the bodies, closing his eyes as his fingers traced the runes carved into its surface.

‘This ship was mighty once,’ Einarr said, his every word booming with force and command. ‘The terror of the seas. Many were the nights when the citadels of the elf-lands shivered in fear when the black sails appeared on the horizon. But nothing can resist the Winds of Change. Prey becomes predator and hunter becomes hunted. Chased from the seas, weakened by battle, defeated and wretched, the captain thought he could hide himself in the very lap of the gods. But the gods have no use for the weak. They let him come near enough to think himself safe, then they abandoned him to the ice and snow.’

Einarr stared at the bodies, a strange smile on his face. ‘There is a lesson there for mortals, I think. If we are wise enough to heed it.’

Vallac felt the colour rush into his face. ‘Einarr, I thought the kraken had killed you, otherwise I should never have left you behind.’ The Norscan ignored Vallac’s protest, continuing to pace around the bodies. Suddenly he gave a bark of excitement, springing to the pile and attacking it with his sword. Vallac lingered at the edge of the ice-bound hold, wondering what strange mania had seeped into Einarr’s skull from his wound.

Einarr struggled at the frozen carcasses, chopping arms and heads free as he ploughed through the pile. At last he forced a huge armoured body free from the corpses clustered around it. He cut away the frozen cape of fur that covered the body’s arm. Despite his concerns, Vallac drew close, watching as Einarr dragged the elaborately armoured carcass away from the pile. He could see the intricate runes carved into the blue-black plate that girded the corpse’s torso and legs. The powerful arms were bare, however, bound only by thick bands of gold and silver. Einarr had no eyes for these, though, staring intently at the incongruous iron ring that circled the body’s wrist.

‘Here, as I knew it would be,’ Einarr said. He brought his sword cracking down into the corpse’s wrist, sending its frozen hand skipping across the hold. Einarr reached down and pried the band from the stump of the arm, holding it reverently in his palm. Vallac could see the eye-like symbols inscribed all along its surface, one of the sacred symbols of Tzeentch.

‘What is that, and how did you know it was here?’ he asked. Einarr seemed to diminish somehow as Vallac asked the question. When he spoke, the tone was uncertain, almost confused.

‘I had a vision of this place, of the frozen captain and the band fastened about his dead arm,’ he confessed, staring at the iron band as though seeing it for the first time.

‘But what is it?’ Vallac repeated.

‘Mine,’ the Norscan replied, bending the iron band around his own arm. Before Vallac could question him further, both men looked up at the roof of the hold. Birna’s voice drifted down to them.

The kraken had returned.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The ancient ship shuddered as it was struck from below, the old timbers cracking and exploding under the strain. Einarr and Vallac fought their way through the rolling passageways as the ship began to disintegrate around them. Fang-like icicles plummeted around them, shaken loose by the ship’s violent throes. Slivers of ice slashed at the men as the icicles shattered against the frozen floors, spraying them with debris. Neither man gave thought to the bleeding cuts – far worse waited them if they tarried.

As the timber beneath them began to buckle and crack, the warriors reached the deck. Only a few feet away, the frozen face of the cliff loomed over them, Zhardrach’s ramshackle ladder leaning against it, just reaching the top some thirty feet above. The others had already retreated up the ladder, staring down at them from the icy cliff above the furrow. The ship shuddered again, her tortured substance shrieking as the hull began to snap. Almost like a living thing, the deck beneath them heaved and rolled. Einarr pushed Vallac towards the ladder, roaring at him to climb. Nothing more than the toppled mainmast with crude steps pounded into its sides, Vallac struggled to lift himself up the ungainly structure.

‘Climb, you damn Kurgan whoreson!’ Einarr bellowed, lunging for the ladder himself as the violent convulsions of the ship intensified. He could see the kraken’s tentacles, mottled scarlet and black, chewing into the hull of the ship, wrapping about it in a crushing embrace. He turned back towards the faltering Kurgan. ‘Climb!’ he ordered again.

Vallac continued to struggle to maintain his footing. Einarr snarled, scurrying with a spider-like agility to help his comrade. Long years at sea had left their mark in Einarr, crawling about 672the rigging of the longships had lent him an unerring sense of agility and balance. The horse-born Kurgan was without such instinct, clinging to the ladder with a desperate grip. Einarr struck Vallac, again extolling him to climb. Beneath them, the ship shuddered again. There was a terrible cracking sound and Einarr looked down to observe the stern crumbling into debris and sinking beneath the freezing water. The ladder trembled and began to slide.

Suddenly, the ladder became stable again, then, impossibly, began to rise. Einarr stared back down at the deck, watching as the destruction that had started with the stern swiftly overcame the rest of the ship. A gaping hole in the ice sucked the wreckage down even as the kraken’s vibrant tentacles continued to pull the ship apart. Einarr looked back up at the cliff, smiling as he saw Thognathog’s immense hands closed around the top of the ladder, lifting both it and the two men clinging to it to the safety of the ice.

Einarr sprang from the ladder as soon as it cleared the lip of the furrow, turning to stare back at the jagged hole where the ship had been. As he watched, the kraken dragged the prow of the ship down into its watery domain. The tentacles vanished along with its ancient victim, only the jumble of floating debris giving evidence that it had ever been there at all.

‘Next time we go around,’ Vallac cursed, wilting to the ice as he released his death grip on the ladder. Thognathog stepped away from the recuperating Kurgan. Carrying the ladder with him, the ogre approached the edge of the trench. With a savage grunt, he lifted the massive mast over his head and hurled it like a javelin down into the pool of freezing water that marked the kraken’s retreat.

‘We should flee before it comes back,’ Birna advised, pressing her fur cloak against the worst of Einarr’s wounds. Einarr shook his head.

‘Crone!’ he called. Urda was sitting slouched over her rune stones, a crude circle of symbols and sigils carved into the ice around her. She looked up as the warrior called her, her rune-eye white with frost, her breath a mist of ice. ‘Is your spell ready? I want the hole that thing pulled the ship down frozen over again.’

‘I waited only for yourself and the Kurgan to get clear,’ Urda said.

‘Then wait some more,’ Einarr told her. ‘But be ready. I will tell you when it is time.’

They waited for nearly an hour, feeling the chill Norse wind whip against their bodies, freezing their noses and eyes. Vallac and Birna urged Einarr to move on while they could, but the Norscan would not be moved. The kraken had hunted them for days across the ice, there was no reason to believe it would relent now. No, they would settle with it here.

Orgrim was the first to see the beast’s return. The water that had sucked down the doomed ship began to bubble and froth as an immense body surged upward from the depths. Einarr called out to the others to be ready in case Urda’s magic was less than she promised.

The water exploded upward in a frigid geyser as the kraken’s tentacles flailed against the ice, scratching against the sides of the trench. Einarr stared down into the turbulent pool, watching as the water slowly filled with the kraken’s scaly mass. An eye, hideously human and the size of an ox, stared back at him. The kraken rolled its body over, exposing the other eye, fixing both on Einarr and his comrades. The beast’s drooling, bird-like mouth cleared the water, hissing and slobbering in its tremendous hunger. For a moment, Einarr was struck by the enormity of the kraken, it was larger than the whales of the Sea of Claws and the hideous prometheans that sometimes ransacked the fishing villages of the Baersonlings. His mind rebelled at the thought that such a giant could live and breathe.

The moment passed and Einarr glared back at the monster with new eyes. This thing stood between him and what he had been promised. No matter how enormous, he would not allow that to be.

‘Now, old witch,’ Einarr snarled. At his command, Urda stood, baring arms that were blue from the chill. The hag circled her hands through the air, as though weaving the very wind. Sibilant tones wheezed through her shivering lips and she cast a fine white powder of snow into the air. A greater cold clutched at Einarr as the witch worked her magic, a chill of sorcery rather than winter. Einarr pulled his cloak closer and stared back at the kraken.

The monster seemed to sense that something was wrong, stretching its tentacles still higher in an effort to reach the lip of the fissure. The snapping beaks on the undersides of the tendrils dug at the ice, almost as though the beast were trying to pull itself up after them. The kraken’s body erupted into a display of livid yellow and black stripes as it angrily tried to pull itself from the water. But if such was its intention, then it was too late.

Ice started to re-form at the very edges of the hole, rapidly expanding to consume all of the water that remained. The liquid froze solid all around the kraken, even as it struggled to free itself. The great beak snapped and slobbered at the ice, trying to crush it within its powerful jaws, but the enchantment would not be so easily overcome. Every sliver of ice the kraken broke free clung to its body, freezing against its scaly flesh. The water that rushed up from the depths to replace the ice froze in turn. Soon the kraken was encased in a solid field far stronger than that which had claimed the ship. The monster’s tentacles continued to flail at the ice, but with every passing moment, the beast’s exertions became weaker. The vibrant colours on its hide faded into a wretched grey and its eyes clouded over with a film of frost.

A booming war cry bellowed from Thognathog’s mighty frame. The huge ogre leaped down from the cliff, his massive hands closed around one of the bronze harpoons from the ship. Like a boulder smashing down the side of a mountain, the immense ogre crashed into the trapped kraken, digging the harpoon deep into its clammy flesh. Thognathog howled again, ripping the spear free and slamming it once more into the imprisoned beast. Purple ichor exploded from the wounds, coating the ogre in greasy ink, but still he stabbed at the beast.

Again and again, Thognathog plunged his weapon into the kraken, rupturing organs with each strike. From the cliff above, his comrades cheered him on, even Zhardrach enjoying the destruction the ogre was visiting upon their terrible foe. Only when there was no life left in the behemoth did Thognathog relent, stabbing the harpoon one last time into the kraken’s bulk. He lifted his heads, grinning back at the cheering humans.

‘Before you climb back up here,’ Einarr called down to him, ‘see about cutting some meat off that brute. After trying so hard to make a meal of us, it is only fair we fatten ourselves on it.’

‘Are you sure kraken meat is safe?’ Vallac asked, a nervous timbre in his voice. Einarr considered the question for a moment.

‘Make certain the dwarf gets the first taste,’ he answered. ‘If he doesn’t dry up and die, then we’ll know its safe to eat.’ Vallac chuckled at the Norscan’s response. Einarr shared the Kurgan’s humour, fuelling his laughter with the relief that overcoming the kraken had brought. He turned, seeing the others sharing in the joy of simply being alive after such an ordeal. Then his eyes settled on Urda, crouched in the shadow of a frozen wave, her cloak drawn tight around her. As he saw the witch, his own merriment died. Grimly, he marched to where the hag was huddled.

‘Well done, hag,’ Einarr told Urda. Whatever reply the witch might have made was lost to her chattering teeth. Einarr smiled at the old woman’s discomfort. ‘Perhaps next time you will have sense enough not to doubt me. Or at least make sure I am dead before you leave me behind.’ He did not wait for her to make a response, directing his attention instead to his other companions.

‘The beast is dead, but we still have a long way to go before this frozen hell is behind us,’ he told them. ‘The sooner we start moving, the sooner we shall put solid earth beneath our toes again.’

After their experience with the kraken, the promise of standing on real ground again was all Einarr’s warband needed to motivate them.

The battle with the kraken was many days behind them before the craggy cliffs on the eastern boundary of the Frozen Sea loomed upon the horizon. There was little cheer as Einarr’s warband laid eyes upon the imposing landscape. It towered hundreds of feet above the surface of the sea, every inch of it looking jagged and lethal. There was no sign of any break in the immense wall of rock and ice, it looked as regular as the wall of a titan’s castle, and as imposing. After weeks of hardship and privation on the ice, with nothing but seal meat and ice crabs to sustain them, nothing but snow to drink and little more than good intentions to shelter them from the biting cold, the mere sight of the cliffs was like a physical blow to them.

Einarr paced among them, growling orders, forcing them to move on. It was not that he did not appreciate their despair, he felt the enormity of what lay before them as keenly as anyone, but he knew that if they stopped, if they let the cliffs overcome them, then they would all die upon the ice.

‘Orgrim, you have the sharpest eyes, see if you can’t find the best approach.’ Einarr could see that the renegade wasn’t particularly hopeful as he loped off across the frozen waves, but he didn’t much care. Lifted by hope or crushed by despair, they would conquer the cliffs.

‘I’m not climbing that,’ Urda stated, slumping down in the snow. ‘And you are mad to even try.’

Einarr stared down at the crone. To be truthful, he was surprised the hag had lasted this far, he was amazed she was still breathing, much less able to walk on her own feet. Whatever force drove her on, it was powerful.

‘Mad or no, we will climb them,’ Einarr said, clenching his fist. The witch shook her head.

‘Not if the gods gave me back forty of my winters could I climb that,’ she swore. ‘Besides, there is my hand to consider.’ Urda held the hand that had been charred in the fight with the kraken out to Einarr, reminding him of the change that had come over it. The breath of the gods had washed over them constantly as they crawled across the Frozen Sea. All of them sported some degree of change to their bodies, from tufts of hair where no hair had been to patches of feathers and fur. Zhardrach had developed a set of tiny fingers sprouting from his neck while Birna’s nails had lengthened and hardened until they resembled the talons of a bird. In Urda’s case, her injured hand had calcified, changing into something that was more stone than flesh. The fingers of her hand had fused into a crab-like claw of stone. Looking at it, he agreed that it was useless for climbing the cliff’s craggy face.

‘Thognathog will carry you then,’ Einarr told her. ‘I’ll not leave you behind.’

‘Your concern touches me,’ Urda said. Einarr laughed.

‘It is not you that concerns me, it is your magic,’ he said. ‘A witch will be most useful dealing with the sorcerer Skoroth.’

It was Urda’s turn to laugh, her wheezing cackle knifing its way through Einarr’s ears. ‘Skoroth is the Plague Lord, the scion of Neiglen,’ she said. ‘One of the mightiest vassals of the Plague God. You vastly overestimate my abilities. Setting me against him would be like setting a rat against a tiger.’

‘The tiger may have the power, old woman,’ Einarr said, ‘but that rat has deceit on her side.’

Urda looked past the warrior, staring at the imposing heights of the cliffs. ‘Just now, the rat would be content to have a pair of wings.’

The climb was every bit as difficult as they had expected. Einarr had Thognathog undo Zhardrach’s chains, using the dwarf’s manacles to tether himself and his companions. If one of them lost their grip, the chain would bind him to the others, arresting his fall. It was an old Norse trick used when climbing their own inhospitable mountains. Einarr had seen the tactic save many an unfortunate climber from plummeting down the side of a mountain. He hoped the trick would serve him well here. Orgrim and Birna were Norse, like himself, and no strangers to climbing up the ragged side of a cliff. He was less certain about Zhardrach and Vallac, especially since the Kurgan seemed to have taken sick after they left the ship, his body wracked by a cough and his throat swollen to a grotesque degree.

Thognathog carried Urda, lashing the witch’s protesting frame to his shoulder. The immense ogre had to climb without the security of the chain – his huge body would pull everyone attached to him into the abyss if he lost his grip. Einarr felt that Tchar had guided his steps so far, but he wasn’t about to blindly trust the trickster god.

Long hours they climbed, their hands torn by the icy rocks, their bodies nearly frozen by the wind that howled down upon them from the heights. Twice Zhardrach lost his grip, the dwarf tumbling down the cliff face until the length of the chain arrested his fall. Despite his concerns, Vallac proved an apt, if slow climber. With something more solid than a broken mainmast beneath him, the Kurgan seemed less timid in his movements. With his three arms, Thognathog easily outdistanced even the Norse, crawling up the rocks like some mammoth spider. If the ogre found the passage an easy one, his passenger did not. Urda’s thin shrieks of fright drifted down to them every time the wind slackened. The sound would interrupt the string of curses dripping from Zhardrach’s mouth as the dwarf chuckled at her discomfort.

Only a few hundred yards from the top, the wind finally died away. Just as they were beginning to appreciated the respite, Thognathog’s rumbling voices shouted down to Einarr. He could not make out the ogre’s words, but there was no mistaking the alarm in his tone. Einarr craned his head upward, shocked to see Thognathog clinging with one arm to the cliff, his other arms swatting at something with sapphire feathers and scarlet wings. Whatever it was squawked and hissed at the ogre even as it dove at him with splayed talons. While Einarr watched, a second bird crawled free from a little burrow gouged in the face of the cliff. He could see its beaked face stare up at Thognathog, then twist downward and fix its beady eyes on him. The bird dove from its hole, spreading two sets of wings as it plummeted down towards him. Behind it, other birds were emerging from their own holes.

Einarr called out to his comrades and wrapped some of the slack in the chain around a small outcropping, hoping that it would help anchor him a bit more firmly. He could see Birna trying to brace her body against the sides of a small fissure while unslinging her bow. Zhardrach hurled a few particularly colourful oaths into the wind and tried to crush himself behind a jagged fang of rock. Vallac simply pressed himself even closer to the cliff face, trying to tighten his grip on the rock. Above him, Einarr could see Orgrim planting his feet on a small ledge and dragging his axe from his belt.

Then the burrow-hawks were among them, a shrieking mass of sapphire feathers and razor talons. The first closed upon Orgrim, swirling about him in a scratching, clawing riot of lashing wings and snapping beaks. The berserker swung his axe through the swarm, cracking the wing of one hawk and sending it crashing down the side of the cliff. More than this, Einarr did not have time to see, for another pair of hawks dove towards him.

The first of the hawks buried its talons in Einarr’s cloak, scrabbling at the heavy bear pelt to gain its footing. The other dove for his face, smacking its sharp beak against his helm. Sparks danced through Einarr’s vision as the bird pounded against his head, trying to penetrate it and puncture his skull. The warrior stabbed up at the bird with his sword, sending it squawking back into the air. The second hawk, its talons buried in his cloak, stabbed its beak into his shoulder. Einarr rolled with the blow, twisting his body and crushing the bird against the side of the cliff. The broken, tattered hawk flopped against him, its bleeding wreckage trembling as life oozed from it, its talons locked within the fur of his cloak.

Einarr had no time to free himself of the dying bird’s weight. Already the first hawk returned, shrieking its rage as it hurtled down at him. This time it brought three of its fellows to help it overcome the Norscan. Einarr roared up at the hawk, daring it to do its worst.

The air was suddenly filled with a sharp, stringent cry, the shriek of some bird of prey. Yet there was something more about the sound than the cry of a mere beast. Somehow, Einarr thought he could detect Birna’s voice within the sound and he thought again of the ravens and the beastman camp.

The burrow-hawks hesitated, beating their blue wings against the air. Einarr could see now that they were hideously twisted in shape and form, beyond their extra sets of wings. None of the birds were alike, each displaying the touch of the gods upon its abhorrent form. One had a grotesque wattle beneath its throat, another had the long, sinuous head of a serpent and a third had sharp thorns growing from its legs. The sight of the severe mutations gave Einarr pause. Against a natural beast, he did not question his courage and his strength, but against things that had been so thoroughly reshaped by the gods he doubted his own abilities.

The hawks did not hesitate long, but gave voice to an ear-shattering clamour of squawking and shrieking. It seemed to Einarr almost as if the things were laughing. The din was silenced when a black-feathered arrow sprouted from the breast of one hawk and the misshapen animal plummeted from the sky. Einarr shifted his gaze, observing Birna nocking another arrow. Then the hawks were on him once more.

Einarr slashed and hacked at the flying predators as they pecked and clawed at him, but was unable to strike the vile birds, successful only in warding off the worst of their attentions. Clinging to the side of the cliff, he was barely able to move while the hawks had complete freedom. It was hardly a fair struggle.

Blood rained down on Einarr’s head and he saw another burrow-hawk fall from the sky, this one with Orgrim’s axe buried in it. A moment later a savage howl split the air. Einarr saw Orgrim hurtle past him, the berserker’s hairy hands locked around the torn mass of a hawk. Einarr braced himself as the chain was pulled tight by Orgrim’s weight. With the chain taut, it was all Einarr could do to breathe, much less fend off the hawks. Once again, he felt sharp claws sink into the fur cloak covering his back.

Beneath him, other burrow-hawks dove for Vallac, deciding that the prey higher up was proving deadlier than they liked. One of the birds tore into the Kurgan’s back, sending bright rivulets of blood flashing through the air. Vallac howled in pain, tightening his hold on the cliff as he felt the hawk try to pull him away. He twisted his head around, locking eyes with the burrow-hawk’s. He opened his mouth and breathed full into the bird’s face. His bloated throat collapsed as a fiery cloud engulfed the hawk. The thing shrieked as it pulled away, but already its feathers were alight. Like a firebrand, the burning bird toppled down the side of the cliff.

The attack faltered as the stench of burning hawk drifted upwards. Birna called out again with her bird voice, and this time the hawks found no amusement in her call. Squawking in fright, they shot upwards, scrambling back into their burrows. Einarr wiped the blood from his face as he saw the last of them vanish into their holes. Then he looked down to where Orgrim dangled from his chain. Straining, Einarr began to pull the berserker back up the cliff. From the side of his eye, he could see Vallac climbing up to help him.

‘It seems you have learned new tricks,’ Einarr called out to him.

‘Flesh is but the clay of Tchar,’ the Kurgan called back.

‘Be thankful Tchar decided to bless you,’ Birna shouted from her refuge. Einarr could see that she too had not avoided the attentions of the hawks. Her raiment was tattered from their claws and her frosty hair was dark with blood from a gash in her scalp. ‘The filthy things were too wilful to obey me. But like any beast, they fear flame.’

‘What did you say to them before they flew off?’ Einarr asked.

‘I told them we would burn them all, bring fire to their nests and smash their eggs.’

Einarr smiled grimly and shook his head. ‘I wish we had time to do that. Remind me on the way back.’

The short climb after the attack of the burrow-hawks was harder than the drudgery that had preceded it. Torn and bleeding from the talons of the birds, Einarr could feel his strength draining away every time he stretched his hand and pulled his body upward. But he knew that there would be no rest until he reached the top. If he hesitated now, he would be lost and with him Asta and all of Vinnskor. He would not allow that.

Straining, drawing on reserves of strength he didn’t know he had, Einarr finally reached the top. He collapsed on the jagged edge of the cliff, unable even to help his comrades as they finished their own tortuous climbs. Birna crashed down into the snow beside him, too exhausted even to roll onto her back. Einarr mustered the strength to roll her onto her side so that her face wasn’t buried in the snow, then collapsed again. He was dimly aware of Orgrim and Vallac slumping against the rocks somewhere to his left. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as Zhardrach pulled himself over the edge. The dwarf was flushed, his features crimson behind his coiled beard, but Einarr could tell from the way he was breathing that he was in much better shape than the rest of them. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The endurance of the dwarfs was renowned, and there was no reason to think the fire dwarfs were any different.

A murderous gleam flickered in Zhardrach’s cruel eyes and he began to wrap the chain around his hands and creep towards Einarr. He tried to move but every muscle in his body tensed in protest. Zhardrach smiled as he took note of Einarr’s infirmity. Helpless was a condition he preferred his enemies to be in.

The dwarf roared in protest as he was suddenly plucked from the ground. Thognathog’s enormous hands crushed the dwarf’s arms to his sides. The ogre’s hideous faces glared at the squirming captive, ignoring the furious curses streaming from his mouth.

‘Thognathog, stop that racket,’ Einarr swore. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep.’ The ogre nodded his left head while grinning maliciously at Zhardrach. With his third hand he smacked the dwarf’s head. A fresh stream of obscenities exploded from his mouth as he recoiled from the blow. Thognathog scowled and struck him again. With the third blow, Zhardrach’s eyes rolled back in his head and the dwarf slumped unconscious in the ogre’s fist.

‘Thank you,’ Einarr said. ‘Make sure he’s wearing his bracelets again before he wakes up,’ he added. The ogre nodded his understanding and began gathering the chains from the humans sprawled across the snow.

‘Wake us up before we freeze to death,’ Einarr told Thognathog, every word an effort for his weary mind to conceive, ‘and not a moment sooner.’

Einarr awoke to Thognathog’s none-too-gentle shoving. His body protested this fresh abuse, but any reprimand he might have made was silenced by the warm glow of the fire the ogre had built. Einarr leaned into the warmth, every cut and bruise in his body forgotten in the simple pleasure of feeling the chill driven from his flesh. As Thognathog stirred the others, they did likewise, Vallac drawing so near to the flames that Einarr thought the Kurgan himself would catch fire.

‘The fire was my idea,’ Urda said, the witch warming her scrawny frame on the other side of the flames. ‘Though I should have just let you freeze. It would be no more than you deserve.’

‘Thanks for the kind thought, crone,’ Einarr remarked. ‘I figured you’d be safe from the hawks. Even a bird knows when something is simply too tough to eat.’

The witch shook her head and tossed another branch into the blaze. Einarr could see that she had quite a collection piled beside her. He wondered how long she had been tending the blaze, how long they had been asleep. Birna’s keen eyes found a different question.

‘Where did you find this wood?’ the huntress asked. She reached forward, taking one of the branches from Urda’s collection of kindling. She stared at it in disbelief. Einarr could not understand her anxiety. It was enough to simply be thankful for the fire. Birna made the source of her discomfort clear to him, showing him the tiny green leaf clinging to the side of the branch.

‘Noticed that, did you?’ the witch cackled. ‘I guess there is a brain in that sweet little head of yours after all.’ She turned her head and looked across the fire at Einarr. ‘It came from down there,’ she said, pointing into the distance. Across the flat, featureless expanse of snow-swept plain, Einarr could see a dark, indistinct mass. ‘You can’t really appreciate it from here,’ Urda elaborated. ‘But that’s a forest… of sorts.’

Einarr stared at the distant mass, trying to pick details from the gloom. ‘What is in there?’ he wondered aloud.

‘That, I decided, was something I would let you find out,’ Urda said. ‘I have a feeling there is more wrong with the place than green leaves in the dead of winter. Even your ogre felt it, wouldn’t go more than a few feet into the trees to collect wood. There is a power there, something older than my magic. Something much more powerful.’

Einarr nodded. ‘I’ll face your daemons, old hag,’ he said. ‘But if this is one of your tricks, then pray to the gods I do not return.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Einarr could feel his skin crawl as he entered the forest, the primordial core of his being sickened with every step he took. Beneath his feet, the soft white snow shimmered with the eerie light of the aurora, yet above him stood mighty oaks, their branches as green and vibrant as the heart of spring. Flowers and wild grass pushed up from beneath the snow, displaying an impossible vitality. Einarr saw tysbast shrubs, luxuriant and ripe, frost dangling from their stems. He saw gigantic marisko orchids, their lush leaves heavy with snow, their roots stabbing deep into the icy ground. So far north of the shores of his own land, even in the depths of summer it should not be warm enough for such flowers to bloom, yet here they thrived with ice dripping from their petals.

A rustling among the shrubs brought Einarr spinning around, Alfwyrm gripped tight in his hand. He had told the others to stay behind at the camp, that he would face whatever secret the forest held alone. It was something he felt he had to do, to show to them that he was without fear. To show them that he was truly the chosen of Tchar. To show them why they should be led by him.

He half expected to see Birna emerge from the undergrowth, defying his command in her eagerness to serve him. He knew the affection she held for him, knew also that much of the emotion stemmed from her own lust for glory and power. By attaching herself to a mighty champion of the gods, she would be able to share in his deeds and his glory. Einarr did not blame her for her ambitions, every relationship grew from the seed of selfish desire. He could not deny that he was tempted by her. She was all a Norscan could want, beautiful and strong, blessed by the kiss of the gods. But she was more, she was strong and fierce, a valiant warrior in her own right. Just being near her, he could almost forget the gruesome memory of Asta’s torn remains.

As he thought on Birna’s deep, mysterious eyes, Einarr was snapped back to reality when something emerged from the shrubs. It wasn’t the lovely huntress he had been half expecting. Instead he found himself looking upon further evidence of the grotesque unnaturalness of his surroundings. The thing crawled along the ground, pushing the snow with its fins, its scaly body caked in tiny crystals of ice. The gills on its neck fluttered rapidly as it sucked air into its abnormal shape. Einarr’s mind rebelled at the sight as the beast crawled towards one of the oaks, using its fins to claw its way up the trunk. Only when it had vanished into the verdant branches was Einarr able to tear his eyes away. He had heard tales of the maddening sights the lands of the gods held, now he knew they were more than mere stories. He almost wished he had never left Norsca, where fish understood they were creatures of the water, not of the land.

After his encounter with the tree-fish, Einarr pressed deeper into the lush forest. The deeper he walked, the stranger and more otherworldly the sights that assailed his eyes became. Stones that scuttled from his path, flowers that devoured the tiny bats that came to drink their nectar, feathered frogs that sang his name as he passed them in their frozen ponds. And always the nameless, crawling evil hovering about the place grew, souring the very air, smothering him with its malignity. Einarr could feel the power of his gods all around him.

He fought down the urge to run, the shrieking fear that slithered through his veins. He was dead and damned already, Einarr reminded himself, nothing in this world held any terror for him now. He bulled his way through the impossibly green shrubs, crushing the lush flowers beneath his boots. Whatever force lurked within this forest, he would not run from it.

The forest finally opened into a clearing and Einarr’s breath caught in his chest, his eyes widening with awe. Twice the size of a man, floating a few feet above the ground, was a wondrous prism of crystal. The countless facets of the stone swirled with every colour in creation, bathing the clearing with magnificence. Einarr felt himself overcome, staring with lust and wonder at the incredible manifestation. For a moment he felt the desire to throw himself to the ground, to make obeisance to the apparition. Gods and quests, women and ancestors, all were forgotten as the swirling colours washed over him. All that existed was the prism. All that he wanted to exist was the prism.

Einarr felt his hand growing warm, but he ignored the sensation, dismissing it beside the mystery of the prism. The sensation grew, his flesh throbbing with agony as the heat intensified. He struggled to ignore the pain even as part of him struggled to embrace it. His hand felt as though the mark of Tchar were searing its way down to the bone. His nose filled with the stink of his own burning flesh. With a scream of pain, Einarr tore his eyes from the prism, plunging his hand into the soothing cold of the snow. The snow steamed as the white-hot steel sank into it.

As Einarr tended his hurt, he became aware for the first time of what lay scattered all around him in the clearing. Bones and armour littered the ground all around the prism. He could see the horned helms of Kurgans and the scale vests of Norsemen. He saw the rude, savage weapons of orcs and the fanged skulls of goblins, the twisted remains of beastmen and the carcasses of at least a few Hung. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of bodies scattered across the clearing, all curled down against the ground as though in worship.

Einarr’s eyes were drawn away from the corpses, pulled back to the prism. He felt its power pulling once again at his mind, but the pain in his hand kept it from taking hold. He sensed now that it was alive, alive in some way he could never truly understand. Perhaps it had been a god once, or something that had wanted to become a god. The thought gave Einarr pause. If the thing was a god, even a forgotten one, then how could any man oppose it?

With his eyes still drawn to the prism, Einarr began to back out from the clearing. As he did so, he suddenly noticed a dark figure watching him from the trees on the other side of the clearing. It was little more than a silhouette, a massive shape of darkness when he first saw it, two fires burning where its eyes should be. Slowly it came forward, emerging from the gloom and into the starlight.

It was a man, or at least something masquerading as a man. Taller than Einarr, encased in a suit of armour so dark that it seemed to devour the light that fell upon it. Einarr could see the intricate runes carved into the pauldrons, the jewelled gauntlets that encased his hands, the skull-shaped poleyns that encased his knees. Upon the cuirass Einarr was surprised to find the eye-rune of Tchar staring back at him, the symbol picked out in bronze and azure. The warrior’s head was hidden within the helm he wore, its crown marked with a set of curling horns, its mask forged in the crude image of a bird’s beak. From behind the mask, the eyes of the guardian continued to glow red in the darkness. As he stalked into the clearing, the armoured knight threw back the heavy black cloak he wore, exposing the enormous mace swaying at his side. Cruel as death, studded with a riot of spikes and blades, the weapon was as thick around as Einarr’s leg, yet the knight hefted it with effortless ease.

Einarr waited for the dark guardian to come to him. There was no thought of flight in the Norscan’s mind. He would rather face this foe here than try to elude him in his own forest. A Baersonling died with his wounds to the fore, not in the back.

As the knight advanced, his pace increased, pushing his steel-encased mass forward in a thundering charge. Einarr braced himself for the attack, rushing in just as the knight swung his gigantic mace at his head. Alfwyrm scraped along the elaborate fauld that covered the knight’s waist and hips. The armour screamed as Alfwyrm dug a deep groove through its steel skin, molten blood flying from the edge of the warrior’s sword.

If the armour that encased the knight knew pain, the man within did not. The huge mace came crashing down toward Einarr, whistling past his face as it narrowly missed him. In mid strike, the knight corrected, driving the tip of his weapon into Einarr’s chest. One of the bladed, claw-like flanges on the mace tore into Einarr’s armour, gouging the flesh beneath. Einarr was thrown back by the blow, skidding across the snow and nearly falling over the frozen husk of a Kurgan.

The knight rushed after him, swinging the mace once more for the Norscan’s head. Einarr caught the blow with his sword, but strained to hold the force of it. The knight used his greater height and armoured weight to press his advantage, slowly, relentlessly driving the spiked head of the mace downward. Einarr roared his defiance, lashing out with his boot. The kick smacked against the knight’s knee, causing him to stagger and nearly toppling him into the snow.

Einarr was quick to capitalise on the knight’s momentary weakness, lunging at him with a savage thrust that bore through the join between breastplate and fauld. Again, the sorcerous armour cried out as Alfwyrm chewed through its skin. Blood exploded from the wound as Einarr’s sword ploughed through the man inside. He pressed the weight of his entire body behind the thrust, seeking to skewer the guardian’s vitals.

Red pain cracked against the side of Einarr’s face, knocking him back as the knight’s mailed fist cracked against his jaw. The knight swung his mace after the reeling warrior, the weapon smashing against his side and hurling him like a rag doll. Einarr crashed into the snow, feeling skeletons crumble beneath his impact and jagged shards of bone stab at his flesh. His entire side was damp with his own blood where the steel thorns of the mace had stabbed him.

Einarr rolled onto his side, spitting teeth into the snow. He could see the knight stalking towards him once more, the wound in his side steaming as the molten ichor from his armour cauterised his injury. The glowing eyes of the knight regarded Einarr with a cold malevolence as he marched forward. Einarr groped in the snow, his fingers closing around the desiccated skull of a goblin. He twisted his body around, hurling the morbid missile at his foe. The knight didn’t pause, merely lifting his left hand. In mid air, the skull exploded into a thousand fragments, a weird blue flame accompanying its destruction.

Grunting with effort, Einarr rose from the ground, hand locked around the hilt of his sword. He quietly prayed to his ancestors, asking them to prepare a place for him in their sacred halls. He spit the blood from his mouth and glared at the approaching knight. ‘Mortal, sorcerer or daemon,’ Einarr snarled, ‘if you want my head, you’ll have to earn it!’

The knight rushed forward again, swinging his mace at Einarr’s skull. Einarr spun away from the strike, hacking at his enemy’s arm as he turned. Alfwyrm slashed deep into the vambrace, chewing into the meat within. Again, the enchanted armour screamed its metallic wail, molten ichor spurting from the torn steel. Einarr followed up his strike by cracking the pommel against the mask of the knight’s helm. His foe staggered back before spinning around, a ronard now gripped in his left hand. He punched the round dagger into Einarr’s bicep, the searing agony paralyzing his right arm. Alfwyrm tumbled from his now nerveless hand.

Even as he screamed in pain, Einarr drove his helm into the knight’s mask, the bear’s horns scraping against the steel. The knight recoiled from the head-butt, then locked his hand around Einarr’s shoulder, his steel fingers digging into Einarr’s flesh. The knight brought the mace smashing into Einarr’s back as he held him, the spikes stabbing through the heavy cloak. Einarr felt the electric shock of his agony jolt through him, his vision blurring as black dots circled through his gaze.

Choking back his suffering, Einarr pressed his finger into the wound in the knight’s side, sinking it past the knuckle in his enemy’s dripping flesh. The knight recoiled, flinging Einarr from him. The Norscan smacked into the frozen ground, the skeletons doing little to lessen the impact. Einarr snarled in rage, forcing his tortured body to obey him. He groped among the bodies, his numb arm twitching with spasms of pain even as he willed his hand to close around the rusty axe of some long-dead Hung.

The knight glared at Einarr as the Norscan struggled to find a weapon. He swung his mace through the air in a gesture of menace, then began to stalk towards his fallen adversary. Einarr felt a slight sense of satisfaction that as he moved, the knight’s other hand clutched at the wound in his belly. Perhaps he was mortal after all.

With a howl of pain, Einarr lifted himself to his feet once more and waited for the knight to attack. For his part, the knight seemed to have learned some caution. Instead of bulling his way through, he began to circle Einarr, his glowing eyes giving no hint of the thoughts boiling within his mind. Einarr decided to take the initiative away from him.

Roaring a death cry, Einarr lunged at the knight, chopping at him with the axe. The knight blocked the attack with his mace, the rusted axe head shattering as it smacked against the metal. The force of the impact threw Einarr back and he crashed down into the snow once more. The knight rushed after him, driving his mace down towards the prone man. Einarr’s hand slid across the ground, hurling snow into the face of his attacker. The knight flinched, instinctively raising his arms to protect his face. Einarr scrambled back across the snow, kicking old weapons and bones as he went, anything that might impede the knight’s advance. The guardian wiped the snow from his steel mask and slowly stalked after his foe.

Dimly, Einarr became aware of something above his head. He reached up with his hand, thinking to use the branches of the tree to pull himself back to his feet. But what loomed above him was no tree, but rather the floating prism. As Einarr’s hand connected with it, the mark of Tchar exploded with a pallid light. Einarr screamed as searing suffering shot down his arm, more intense and piercing even than the pain that had broken the prism’s spell. He tried to pull his hand back, but it refused to obey, stuck to the scintillating surface of the prism. The colours flooding the clearing strobed with maniacal intensity, ebbing and flowing with every breath. Einarr screwed his eyes shut against the flickering madness, but the insane whirl of colours continued to flash through his mind.

Just when he thought he must go mad, when he thought the colours could not flicker any faster, the world faded into darkness. Einarr felt the prism shatter beneath his hand, soundlessly crumbling away beneath his fingers. He opened his eyes, finding the clearing littered with shimmering fragments of crystal. The fiery glow on his hand began to slowly fade. For the first time since entering the forest, Einarr felt the crawling sense of evil abandon him.

A dark shadow loomed above Einarr and the Norscan sighed. The knight stared down at him with his burning eyes and his steel mask. The spiked mace gleamed wickedly in the starlight and Einarr noted the knight held Alfwyrm in his other hand. He decided he was too exhausted even to rebel against the indignity of being slain with his own sword. He muttered another prayer to his ancestors and waited for the final blow.

Instead, Einarr felt something cold and metal being pushed into his hand. Almost automatically his fingers assumed their familiar grip around the hilt of Alfwyrm. The knight reached down and pulled Einarr from the snow. The Norscan fought to keep standing as he found his feet. The knight watched him, making no move to attack.

‘You have my gratitude,’ the knight said at length.

‘You have a strange way of showing it,’ Einarr replied, gritting his teeth as he ripped the knight’s dagger from his shoulder. The exertion almost sent him back into the snow.

‘I did what the Soul-eater demanded of me,’ the knight said. ‘Only those strong in the favour of Tzeentch can oppose its will. Only the mightiest of his champions could bring about its ruin.’

‘It was luck,’ Einarr said, staring at his hand. The glow had faded completely from the metal sigil, taking with it the burning pain it had evoked. Even so, it felt warm to his touch.

‘There is no luck,’ the knight’s steely voice intoned. ‘Only fate and the will of the gods. I am Ernst von Kammler, Acolyte of the Purple Talon and Warlord of the Khaigs, if there are any left.’ He pointed at Einarr’s hand, then slapped the symbol engraved upon his breastplate. ‘We are brothers in faith, Norscan, champions of the Change Lord.’

‘Einarr of the Baersonlings,’ the warrior hissed, taking the knight’s hand.

Von Kammler nodded as he heard Einarr’s name. ‘I warn you, Einarr of the Baersonlings, the tales they tell of the Soul-eater are lies. There is no great reward awaiting the one who would destroy it. Whether you were promised treasure or knowledge, the Soul-eater has none to give. Linger here at your peril.’ The knight pointed to the ground. Einarr was shocked to see the shattered pieces of crystal slowly crawling back to the centre of the clearing.

‘I lingered too long trying to find its treasure,’ von Kammler continued. ‘When the Soul-eater was reborn, it bound me to its will. It is a cruel thing, to be commanded to slay the only ones who might set you free.’

Einarr nodded, appreciating the horror of such an existence and wanting no part of it. ‘I may have no choice,’ he said. ‘I doubt I have the strength to crawl, much less walk, back to my camp and I do not think any of my comrades would brave the forest to look for me.’

Von Kammler fastened his mace to his belt once more, moving towards Einarr and helping to support the flagging Norscan. ‘Your comrades are both wise and craven,’ he said. ‘But I will see that you are safely free from this place. I have not so completely put the lands of my birth behind me that I would abandon one who has done me good.’

Too weary to protest even if he wanted to, Einarr let von Kammler guide him out of the forest, grateful to be leaving it as the crawling dread of the Soul-eater began to slowly reconstruct itself within his mind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Einarr lay on his belly near the roaring fire that Thognathog had built, his armour strewn around him, his sword close at hand. He grunted sharply as Urda’s thin fingers probed his wounds, working a foul-smelling poultice into his injuries. The witch’s touch was far from delicate, her finger worming beneath his skin as she clawed damaged tissue and foreign matter free. He endured the torment the witch inflicted on him, he knew Urda was wise in the ways of healing. He smiled as he glanced past Urda, finding the worried gaze of Birna watching him from behind the trickle of falling snow. The huntress stood behind the witch, her scowl darkening every time he winced in pain, her knuckles white where she gripped the hilt of her own sword. If Urda did plan any mischief, at least Einarr could be certain he would not be the only one meeting their ancestors.

The rest of his small warband was also clustered around the fire, gorging themselves on a pair of burrow-hawks Thognathog had plucked from their holes and an oversized rabbit with six legs that Orgrim had discovered on one of his lonesome ramblings. A plate of meat rested beside Einarr’s prone frame, slowly freezing in the cold winter night as snow drifted down onto it, but the Norscan had more vital concerns on his mind than the base placation of his animal needs. He turned his eyes away from the fire, staring at von Kammler’s immense steel form.

‘Now you have heard where it is we go and what it is we face,’ Einarr told him. The knight stared into the flames, his glowing eyes seeming to absorb the light. When he spoke, his voice was a deep rumble.

‘You have no imagining of where you go or what awaits you there,’ von Kammler said, his voice filled with scorn. ‘Children and dogs playing at the games of men! Blind, idiot things pretending they can think and see!’

The knight’s derision brought a bestial snarl rolling from Orgrim’s hairy throat. Birna paced towards him, her hand still gripped on her blade. Vallac stood, glowering at the sinister armoured apparition, his bloated neck pulsing in time with his anger. Thognathog stared at von Kammler, snapping a log in half with his powerful hands. Zhardrach simply chuckled and shovelled another fistful of burrow-hawk into his mouth.

‘And you know better?’ Einarr asked, his voice low, filled with menace. He would not allow the knight to stop him now, not after they had come so far. Not after he had been promised so much. If that meant finishing their battle, then Einarr would answer that challenge.

Von Kammler nodded his armoured head. ‘I do, Norscan,’ he said. ‘These eyes have seen the place you seek. These feet have stood within its corrupt halls. This mace has tasted the maggot-ridden blood of the tower’s master. Yes, I do know better, Einarr Steelfist.’

The statement brought jeering laughter from Vallac. The Kurgan sneered at the knight’s words, shaking his head. ‘The southlander lies!’ he boldly proclaimed. ‘I have seen the maps the shamans keep, I have seen the Palace of Plagues marked upon them. It lies thousands of leagues from here, deep in the lands of the Hung! Are we to believe now that a weak southlander could make such a journey, much less return to boast…’

The Kurgan’s words died as rings of blazing light suddenly flared into existence around him, swirling and pulsating as they circled him. Vallac fell to his knees, his body throbbing with agony. Einarr could see his flesh peeling away as bony growths erupted from his skin, watched in amazement as his left eye socket began to slide down his face. Across the fire, von Kammler stood with his hand outstretched, his gauntlet pulsing with light. Orgrim pounced at the knight, but a sweep of von Kammler’s mace sent the woodsman rolling across the snow. Birna lunged at him before he could recover from the attack. Her blade cracked against the knight’s gauntlet, causing the metal to shriek and spraying her with molten ichor. She recoiled from the stinging liquid. The glow faded from von Kammler’s gauntlet and the knight turned to face his new antagonist.

‘Enough!’ Einarr roared, springing to his feet, Alfwyrm in his hand. ‘Is this the gratitude you show one who has done you a service? Is this von Kammler’s concept of honour?’ The knight glared at Einarr, then at Birna. Slowly, he backed away from the woman, fastening his mace to his belt. Warily, the huntress circled around him, moving to help the still reeling Orgrim.

‘Your Kurgan doubted my strength,’ the knight said. Einarr looked across the camp to where Vallac writhed on the ground. His arms were a mass of bony knobs, his face distorted by the mutating power of von Kammler’s spell. Urda stood some distance from the stricken marauder, watching him intently. Einarr knew what she was watching for, to see if the changes would continue even without the spell, to see if Vallac’s entire body would collapse into a mindless, reeking thing of madness and carnage. Beside such a doom, even death was a blessing.

‘Vallac knows better now,’ Einarr said. ‘I do not think any here will challenge you so lightly again.’

‘What do you barbarians know of the powers you call gods?’ von Kammler growled. ‘You understand nothing and imagine much! I sometimes wonder who is more pathetic, the men of the north with their superstitions and legends or the men of the south with their miserable Sigmar!’

‘Now you claim to know the gods themselves!’ Urda spat, her tone incredulous.

‘I know much, wrinkled sister,’ von Kammler retorted. He turned towards Einarr again. ‘If you would prevail, Norscan, leave behind superstition, it will avail you nothing. Seek wisdom, that alone shall earn you the blessing of Tzeentch. You will need the blessing of the god if you would vanquish Skoroth.’ The knight reached to his left hand, pulling away the armoured gauntlet. The hand he exposed was pale and colourless, the veins standing stark beneath the skin. Yet it was the pattern those veins formed that arrested Einarr’s attention. There was no denying the shape they formed, the same shape that was seared into his own hand. Von Kammler too bore the mark of Tchar. ‘Trust me when I tell you I know of what I speak.’

Emotion swelled within Einarr’s bruised frame. Fascination, excitement and something that Einarr almost refused to let himself feel: hope. The Norscan lowered himself back to the ground, eyes fixed to von Kammler’s hideous mask and glowing eyes.

‘If you have been inside Skoroth’s palace,’ he asked, ‘where is it? How far away? How many days must we travel?’

The knight shook his head. ‘Leagues? Days? Such words are without meaning in the lands closest to the gods. Time and distance are deceits the gods place no value upon. If I told you the palace was a thousand, thousand leagues away, it might be a falsehood. If I told you that you should see it before the moons’ next rising, it might be truth. There are no “maps” of the Wastes, whatever the Kurgan’s shamans might think. Nothing remains where it once was, it finds each traveller in its own measure and its own way.’

Einarr felt the flicker of hope crumbling beneath the knight’s words.

‘Then how does one find the place?’ he demanded, frustrated fury in his voice. ‘Can you guide us there?’

‘You must guide yourself,’ von Kammler replied. ‘Distance, direction, navigation, the lands of the gods care nothing for these.’ Kammler pointed to his breast, thumping his hand against the gothic platemail. ‘It is what is here that the Wastes respect. It is the will and determination that the land measures. If you want something badly enough, if the lust to find it burns brightly enough, it will find you.’

Einarr listened to the knight’s words, not understanding them but believing them. The forest of the Soul-eater and the mythic sagas of the Baersonlings had shown him that in the land of the gods anything was possible. He understood that it was the only answer von Kammler would give him, perhaps the only answer the knight could give him. Yet still he had questions.

‘What will we find there, within the palace?’ he demanded.

‘Death,’ the knight’s heavy voice intoned. Von Kammler’s burning eyes grew dim, as though his very spirit retreated before the memories his mind conjured. ‘How is it that Kaanzar the Defiled described it in his tome of abomination? “The lands around the tower are rife with disease and corruption. It is a place where the very ground drips with pestilence and where the rocks spew filth across the earth and the trees weep decay. The very air is abomination, a reeking burning thing that chokes you with its loathsomeness. The plague clans of the Hung make their encampments around the tower and the land is vile with them. They stalk the Wastes like human jackals, eager to infect any clean thing they see with their poxes. The creatures of the Plague God haunt the land in all their bilious shapes, lusting for healthy flesh to rend and defile. About the palace itself festers a great swamp, a place of muck and ruin where the ground is nothing more than oozing corruption that tries to suck you into its embrace. At its centre there lies a great lake of putrescence and rising from the lake, like a sliver of steel in a rotting wound, the Tower of Skoroth stabs up into the leprous sky.”’

‘Death lurks within that lake,’ von Kammler continued, pulling himself from the slithering narrative of the long dead warlock Kaanzar. ‘Bubos, the men of the Khaigs called her, a dragon ancient and vile, her body oozing with the power of Skoroth and his god.’

Einarr’s companions muttered fearfully among themselves as they heard von Kammler speak of the tower’s dread guardian. Einarr refused to let the same fear overcome him.

‘What awaits us once we are past the dragon?’ he boldly demanded. Von Kammler laughed, the sound like that of scraping steel.

‘There is no “after”, barbarian,’ the knight scoffed. ‘Bubos will kill you all. I, with nine thousand Khaig warriors, was unable to prevail against the dragon. We marched on the palace, to cast down Nurgle’s loathsome temple, to seize its treasures for mighty Tzeentch. Nine thousand, we marched, neither man nor daemon daring to stand against us. Then we saw that stagnant lake, saw the abomination that dwelt within rise from its putrid depths. I was forced to abandon my army, leave them to the dragon and slink into the fortress like a sneaking thief. Nor did such sacrifice avail me much, for Skoroth was awaiting me. Only a champion of my might could have survived the spells of ruin and corruption the sorcerer cast upon me. Only by the will of Tzeentch did I escape that place at all.’

‘We will prevail where you failed, southlander,’ Einarr declared. ‘We will use cunning and subtlety, the tools of Tchar, not the brute force of an army. We will get past your dragon because she will never know we were there. We will get past the swamp and the Hung and all the other horrors. We will overcome it all. I will not fail as you did, von Kammler.’

‘What makes you so certain you will prevail where I was defeated? I, a warlord of the Kurgan, a magister of the Purple Claw! What makes you better than me, barbarian?’

Einarr clenched his fist and as he did so, the mark of Tchar burned with a hellish light. Snow steamed as it struck the blazing fist. ‘Because I am the chosen of Tchar!’ he roared. ‘I will not fail because I will not allow it! What has been promised me will be mine and nothing, not even the Plague God himself, will stand in my way!’ Einarr glowered at the knight, staring into the glowing embers beneath his helmet. ‘Who broke the spell of the Soul-eater, southlander? Who penetrated the forest only to find the one man who has escaped the place his quest must take him? There is no chance, southlander, only the will of the gods!’

Von Kammler leaned back, seeming to consider Einarr’s words. At length, the knight nodded his agreement. ‘What you say may indeed be true, Steelfist,’ he said. ‘You are right to say that nothing is ever merely chance. Perhaps it was the will of Tzeentch that you find me, that I accompany you to the palace. Perhaps in helping your quest, I will reclaim the glory that was stripped from me. Yes, Einarr Steelfist, I will go back there with you.’ The knight turned his head, scanning the camp. ‘But we are too few,’ he lifted his hand to forestall Einarr’s objection. ‘I do not speak of armies, I speak of numbers. Nine is the sacred number of Tzeentch, the number through which he works his mightiest magic, the number by which his covens and his champions gather. We are seven, eight if your Kurgan lives.’

‘Do not worry about numbers, Kammler,’ Einarr said. ‘If we are too few, then I shall simply have to do twice my share of the work.’

The remark caused von Kammler to shake his head. ‘You understand nothing about the ways of the gods. The symbol is the power. It is through symbols that the gods manifest their power, exercise their strength. This prize you seek, why do you think it is of such value to Tzeentch? It is a symbol, a physical incarnation of his power. The Dark Claw, the talon of Be’lakor, the Shadowlord. First among mortals, he was during his life, gathering together all the followers of the true gods to march against the heathen elves and the scaly vermin of the jungles. For his might and valour, the gods raised Be’lakor above all other mortals, sharing some of their own power with him. He became the first mortal to escape the curse of death, became the first man to replace his carcass of flesh for the eternal essence of the daemon. But the gifts the gods bestowed upon him made Be’lakor proud and arrogant in his ways. No longer did he imagine himself as a servant, but as an equal. For his audacity, mighty Tzeentch struck Be’lakor down, stripping him of his power, flaying his mind with such torment that the daemon was driven mad. A shape without form, a wraith without substance, Be’lakor was cast into the winds, to wander the world forever cursed and reviled, an abomination to both man and god.’

Von Kammler turned his head, looking at each of Einarr’s followers in turn. ‘What you seek is the only remnant of Be’lakor’s physical form, the only part of him that Tzeentch allowed to linger in the mortal world. It is the chain that binds Be’lakor’s spirit to his curse. Who holds the Dark Claw holds power over the spirit, can use it to command Be’lakor’s tortured soul.

‘Think of it,’ von Kammler hissed. ‘The power to command a being even daemons fear and dread!’

Einarr’s eyes narrowed as he heard the excitement in the knight’s metallic voice. ‘Is that why you attacked the palace before?’

The knight turned to face Einarr. ‘And what noble purpose drives you to seek the Claw?’ he sneered. ‘What selfless dreams bring Einarr Steelfist and his rabble so far from their homes? I can see your desires written on your faces. The savage woodsman hopes to find a cure for the curse that flows through his veins, to appease the wrath of Tchar. The old witch sees one last chance to prove her worth to Tzeentch, one last chance to earn her god’s favour. The Kurgan seeks prestige and glory, to return to his tribe as a mighty champion of the gods in his own right. The huntress looks for something better than her miserable life among the Sarls and marriage to men she thinks unworthy of her. The ogre, he is much simpler in his needs, looking only to repay the man who cast off his chains. The dwarf is simpler still, he’d see every throat in this camp slit.

‘But you, Einarr Steelfist, what do you want?’ von Kammler asked. ‘What purpose drives you into the lands of the gods? I see guilt and loss, desperate hope that you can earn a god’s promise…’

‘What of you, southlander?’ Einarr snapped, colour rushing to his face as he heard the knight mock him.

‘I have already said, Norscan,’ he replied. ‘I seek power.’

In the dead of night, Einarr awoke with a start. He felt something warm press against his side, rubbing against him beneath the heavy bear cloak he had wrapped himself in. The Norscan scrambled out from beneath his blanket, hand flying to where his sword lay. As the crust of sleep crumbled from his vision, he saw Birna smiling at him. The huntress held the thick fur close to her, wrapped around her lithe frame. Enough of her ivory shoulders and bare arms was left exposed, however, that he found himself wondering how much she was wearing beneath his cloak.

‘You’ll catch a cold strutting around like that,’ Birna chided him. Einarr scowled at her, but relaxed his grip on Alfwyrm.

‘I could say the same thing,’ he grumbled, stalking back towards the pile of furs he had been sleeping on. He sat down on the hides, looking up at Birna. ‘My cloak,’ he said, reaching toward her. Birna pouted and snuggled deeper into the folds of fur.

‘I don’t want to catch cold either,’ she said. ‘That’s why I came over here, to get warm.’ Her suggestive smile set Einarr’s blood pounding through his veins. The warrior grinned back at her. Eyes still locked to hers, he made a quick lunge, hand closing around a fistful of his cloak. With one swift tug he ripped it away. As he had guessed, the huntress was as bare as a skinned seal beneath his cloak. He chuckled as she gasped in surprise. Einarr let his eyes linger on her a moment, then wrapped the cloak around his body and buried himself in the furs.

Birna stared at him in disbelief for a second, shivering as the night clawed at her skin. Einarr looked up from his feigned sleep and smiled.

‘You’d better decide what you’re doing before you freeze,’ Einarr warned her. ‘I’m already one man short according to the southlander.’

Birna seized the invitation, darting under the cloak and squirming close to Einarr’s warm bulk. She crooked her head to stare again into his eyes. After a moment, she wrinkled her nose in distaste.

‘These furs stink like ogre,’ she complained. Einarr pulled her closer his breath hot against her neck.

‘Thognathog was the only one I could talk into lugging them across the Frozen Sea,’ he said. His calloused hand stroked her smooth shoulder. ‘Besides, you have more important things to think about.’

Impossibly, a blood red sun glared down at them from the black sky, tingeing the land crimson with its gory rays. Einarr decided that it was the most horrible sight his eyes had seen in the weeks since they had emerged from the Frozen Sea. They had seen rivers of brown soup that slobbered their way across the land only to vanish into nothingness. They had seen trees that crawled across the ground like mighty serpents and which called to one another in the mewing voices of tiny kittens. There had been mountains that seemed to tremble at their approach, slinking fearfully towards the horizon so that every step forward put them two steps further away. They had watched snow lift itself from the ground and fly back into the clouds. There had been colours and sounds and smells without end, coming from nowhere and nothing and vanishing as swiftly as they manifested.

The touch of the gods was on and in everything they saw. The game Orgrim brought back for their fire became stranger every day. Boars without legs, birds with fur instead of feathers, huge mice with fangs the size of daggers and a frill of flesh around their necks. Once, the woodsman returned with something that might have been a flower save for its size and the scrabbling claws that had replaced its roots.

The change had come upon them as well. Orgrim’s ribs had sprouted new extensions, puncturing his sides with spiny fingers of bone. Vallac’s misplaced eye had swollen and faded into that of some cave fish. Thognathog’s centre arm had withered into a twisted stump while great horns sprouted from his left head. Urda’s face had become pinched into something that almost looked like a bird’s beak. Zhardrach’s skin had darkened into the colour of pitch.

Most unsettling to Einarr had been the changes that had manifested in Birna’s body. Every night, the huntress came to him to warm away the chill and worm her way deeper into his affections. At first he did not notice it, trying to dismiss the sensation as some caprice of memory, but after a time there was no denying it. Birna’s body was changing, becoming more and more like that of Asta beneath his hands. Even the patch of scaly skin was there, that piece of Asta the gods had touched. Einarr knew it could not be mere chance, that it had to be some mocking gesture of the gods. However much her body changed, Birna would never be Asta.

Did he even want her to be? Birna was a strong, fierce woman, gripped with a determination and force of will that Asta had never possessed. She was a woman that would not be content to linger behind in the safety of some village while her man roamed abroad searching for gold and glory. She was a fighter, a warrior in her own right, one who desired to stand beside him in battle as keenly as lie beside him in the night. Einarr had felt his passion for her overwhelm him, filling his heart almost before he was aware it was even there. The memory of Asta faded from his mind more and more each day, her face only a dim flicker, her voice a distant echo.

Einarr wondered if this too, was naught more than the mockery of the gods. The closer he drew to the Palace of the Plague Lord, the less he cared about the reward he had been promised. He continued because he had sworn an oath and because he knew the others would see the breaking of that oath as a sign of weakness. Birna clung to him because he was strong, because she wanted to share in the glory that could be his. He could not take the risk that she would still care as much for mere Einarr Sigdansson as she did Einarr Steelfist.

They crossed the barren tundra of snow and rock, the bloody sun beating down on them fiercely, the snow rejecting its efforts and stubbornly refusing to melt beneath its attentions. Sometimes they saw the bones and weapons of those who had tried to cross these lands before them. Rarely were such remains identifiably human, yet Einarr could not say that perhaps they had not been men before entering the Wastes. Dark shapes sometimes appeared on the horizon, black riders galloping into the distance yet vanishing well before they reached the horizon. Once they saw something that towered above them as it lumbered across the land, its twisted face curled into a feral snarl, its gigantic hands closed around a stone club that looked to have been torn from the side of a mountain. Yet the giant did not see them, walking right through them, its body as insubstantial as mist, its flesh nothing more than thin air. Einarr did not think the thing to be some ghost or spirit, for the vibrancy of life was within it. Von Kammler claimed that it was just as real as any of them, but that it had become out of sequence with the deceit of time and so prowled within its own empty, lonely world.

The incident stayed with Einarr and he considered again the reward he had so proudly demanded from Tchar.

That night, as they made their camp, Einarr held council with von Kammler. He had done so many times since the knight had joined his warband, but now the Norscan was less willing to accept the cryptic and evasive answers the southlander had given him before. The sight of the ghostly giant had impressed upon Einarr that there were things much worse than death that the gods could visit upon those who displeased them. He was willing to risk much to claim the reward Tchar had promised him, but now he wondered if he had risked more than he had known.

When the fires burned low and even Orgrim settled into a fitful sleep, Einarr joined the knight on the edge of the encampment. Von Kammler stared out at the empty tundra, his fiery eyes scanning the limitless horizon. As they had seen many times since entering the Wastes, the land was never as empty as it appeared.

‘What troubles you this night, Steelfist?’ the knight asked, not bothering to turn as he heard Einarr approaching. Einarr ignored the challenge in the knight’s voice, the tinge of superiority in his words. Such tricks might cow the weak men of the south, but a Norscan respected deeds, not haughty airs and arrogance. He had seen for himself that von Kammler was far from the infallible champion of the gods he thought himself to be. If not for him, von Kammler would still be a slave in the Soul-eater’s forest.

Einarr marched up to the knight, seating himself on the frozen ground, following von Kammler’s ever-vigilant gaze.

‘The Dark Claw,’ Einarr said. ‘You really think we can steal it from Skoroth?’

Von Kammler chuckled darkly. ‘If I did not think so, I would hardly return there with you.’ Einarr nodded as he digested the sound reasoning behind the knight’s words.

‘There is something you are keeping from me,’ Einarr said. ‘Something that has been bothering me for some time. You spoke of the lake and the dragon. You also spoke of getting past both. I want to know how.’ He raised his hand, motioning for the knight to keep silent. ‘None of your riddles and half-wisdoms, I want an answer even Thognathog could understand.’

Von Kammler turned his eyes from the horizon, staring down at Einarr. ‘You will not like what I tell you. I have seen how you lead this rabble. I do not think you have the stomach for what it will cost you to get into the tower.’

‘Tell me anyway,’ Einarr growled. Von Kammler turned away, eyes scanning the horizon once more.

‘You will need to make sacrifices to get across the lake,’ the knight told him. ‘There are powers I can call upon that will get us past the lake, but they will demand a price. They will demand blood.’

Einarr digested von Kammler’s words, feeling himself grow sick as he considered them. There were few things he would not do to save Asta and his people, but betrayal was one of them. Birna, Orgrim, Vallac and the others, they were trusting him, trusting him to lead them to glory and triumph. Not to feed them to whatever unspeakable power von Kammler decided to invoke. The knight saw the distaste in Einarr’s expression.

‘It is a talent I have always had,’ he said. ‘The ability to read a man’s soul. The skill to know his limits. It will have to be done.’ The knight chuckled again, the sound as malevolent as the growl of a troll. ‘If it sits so ill with your conscience, we can always use the dwarf.’

Einarr shook his head. The thought still made him sick. The realisation that using Zhardrach made the prospect almost agreeable made him sicker still. It was not any affection he had for the dwarf, rather the tribal repugnance he felt for anything that smacked of treason.

‘There has to be another way,’ Einarr said.

‘I wish you fortune in finding it,’ von Kammler retorted. ‘And know this, every moment you tarry beside the lake you risk drawing the notice of the dragon. If that happens, you will have even worse considerations to choke down.’

‘What do you mean?’ Einarr demanded.

‘After my army drew Bubos up from the depths, there was only one way for me to get past her. While she slaughtered my men, I and my closest followers broke away. There was a cave, a tunnel, deep in the swamp. It ran beneath much of Skoroth’s domain, eventually opening on the other side of the lake. We dared the dark of the cave, travelling under the swamp to elude the dragon. But the cost was high. A terrible beast, a foul daemon of Nurgle, dwelled within the cave. To get past it cost me many men, their bones stripped clean of meat as the daemon devoured them.’ The knight looked at Einarr again. ‘Wake the dragon and we must brave the cave.’

Einarr looked away, staring at the ground. The knight had been right, he didn’t like what he had been told. He wondered if he should tell the others, give them the chance to turn back. Then he realised he didn’t dare. He needed them, all of them, if he was to stand any chance of stealing the Dark Claw and saving his village.

‘We will find another way,’ Einarr said. Von Kammler did not reply, simply returning to his scrutiny of the horizon.

Einarr judged their travel across the tundra to be measured in weeks, perhaps as many as three or four, when the Miasma struck. They saw it first as a swirling, pulsating vibrancy against the horizon. Von Kammler shouted a warning to them all, but could offer no advice to defend against what was coming. Like frightened children, they clustered together on the empty plain, clutching to one another as they braced themselves for the terrible power the knight told them was coming.

Einarr watched as the thing skipped across the land. He thought it not unlike a waterspout or cyclone when he first observed it, but no storm he had seen displayed such unnatural character. The thing grew and shrank every instant, sometimes collapsing into almost nothing then swelling so that it stretched across the entire horizon. The light within the storm glowed with putrescence, swirling and dancing in mesmerizing patterns that seemed to decay the soul of those who looked upon it. He could see snow rising from the earth, dancing in the storm’s swirling eddies. As the snow spiralled up into the clouds it began to change, transforming into a dripping slime that infected the very sky with its corruption.

The storm danced across the tundra in a maddening display of directionless uncertainty. Sometimes it would be leagues away, then suddenly skip forward thousands of yards in the blink of an eye. Once, it hopped so far that it was behind them. Before anyone could breathe a sigh of relief, the miasma skipped again, roaring and raging only a few hundred yards from where they cowered before its power. Now Einarr could hear voices in the wind, voices that called and whispered and cursed. If he concentrated, he could hear the words of a particular voice, but every time he did, another voice would shout over the one he attended, trying to drown out the other voices with its own desperate cries.

Then the storm was all around them, its winds tearing and ripping at them, its power pulsating through their bodies. Einarr felt as though his flesh were on fire, as though every scrap of his essence was being stripped away, rotting from his very bones. His mind filled with a hissing cacophony of voices, all clamouring for room within him. He screamed against the maddening din, against the agony pulsing through his body.

All at once, the world was silent again. Einarr’s flesh was his own once more, his mind was clear of any voice save his own. For an instant, he had imagined the babble assailing his mind to coalesce into a single shriek, then swiftly explode back into the ether like so many rats smoked from a ship’s hold. As he opened his eyes, he saw the fading glow of the symbol branded into his hand, the eye-like rune almost seeming to wink at him as it became dull once more.

He looked around him as his comrades likewise rose from the ground, shaking their heads to try and drive the last echoes of the miasma from their skulls. The snow they brushed from their bodies had turned a stagnant green, dripping from their fingers like oozing scum. Einarr turned his eyes to the landscape around them. It had been transformed from a bleak barren desolation of ice and wind to rolling hills and black canyons. Pools of putrid water steamed up from the ground, spurting their corrupt essence into the air. Even the sky had changed, no longer the black veil of night but a leprous yellow, like a great tapestry of pus and urine. Amid the filth, even the blood-red sun seemed to fade, its rays struggling to pierce the sickness that threatened to consume it.

Flocks of vultures circled in the heavens and Einarr’s ears filled with the buzzing of flies. The stench of rot wafted over him. The warrior was overwhelmed by the assault on his senses and he fought to keep his belly from disgorging its contents into the green snow-scum that blanketed the earth. He had just succeeded in his struggle when he felt von Kammler’s armoured hand close on his shoulder. He spun on the knight, his hand on his sword, but there was no malice in von Kammler’s gesture.

‘You must indeed be great in the favour of Tzeentch,’ von Kammler told him. ‘We have survived the Miasma of Pestilence without our flesh being twisted by the daemons of the withering wind, without our souls being consumed by the poxes of the storm.’

‘Where are we?’ was all Einarr could find the words to say. Von Kammler laughed, the sound corrupted into a metallic rumble by his helmet.

‘Where you wanted to be,’ the knight said. ‘The Miasma has brought us where you wanted us to be, or perhaps the storm brought it to us.’ The knight stretched his arms, gesturing to the filth all around them. ‘Behold the domain of Skoroth, the festering realm of Nurgle the Obscene!’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The putrescence of the land sucked at their feet as they tried to march across it. For days now they had trudged through a diseased maze of low, mound-like hills. Great fat flies buzzed about their faces, crawling across their lips and scratching at their eyes. The stench intensified, growing from the reek of spoiled fruit to the stink of a sewer. Einarr’s eyes teared at the smell, the greedy flies sucking at his suffering as the fluid ran down his face. Orgrim, with his keen senses, was reduced to a whimpering, slinking thing, one hand constantly crushing his nose close.

Disease constantly clawed at their bodies. They could feel it seeping into their flesh. For a time, Urda struggled to combat the plagues, casting her own spells to combat the malevolent power all around them. Her efforts seemed to anger something, rather than keeping the diseases at bay, her magic drew them closer, intensifying their unseen assault. The constant attack wore down the witch’s strength, subverting her efforts to keep them healthy.

Urda was the first to develop the cough, the illness settling into her lungs and filling her breath with phlegm and misery. The filth she spat into the snow-scum was green with sickness and red with blood. The corruption spread to Vallac and then Birna and Orgrim before finally claiming Thognathog as its final victim. Strangely, Einarr and von Kammler were almost immune to the pestilence, a fact that did little to comfort their allies. Their march through the mire slowed to a diseased crawl of coughing and spitting as fever ravaged the warband.

Tiny things plopped and slobbered across the ground, cackling and giggling as they savoured the sickness of Einarr’s followers. Like living excrement, the grinning daemons slopped along the earth, their bubbling cries tormenting them as much as their fever. Several times, Orgrim broke away to savage the capering daemons with his axe, but for every creature he splashed across the ground a dozen more were drawn by the sound of battle. Eventually even the berserker tired of wasting his energy on the vile things, resigning himself to their ceaseless mockery.

Still they pressed on. Eventually the dung-like hills were behind them, most of the creeping daemons reluctant to leave the mounds and enter the stagnant plain that now stretched before Einarr. It was littered with ruined piles of stone and timber, the outlines of walls and roofs nearly obliterated by the mould and slime that clung to them. Great twisted weeds, taller than trees, peppered the land and everywhere Einarr could see tendrils of smoke rising into the mouldering sky and the glow from cook-fires amid the rubble.

‘The camps of the plague clans,’ von Kammler told him. ‘Like lice, they infest these lands. We will need to tread carefully if we would escape their notice.’

‘How far is the tower?’ Einarr asked. Von Kammler fixed him with his fiery eyes.

‘As near as death,’ the knight said grimly, ‘and as distant as hope.’

Crawling through the ruins, Einarr was impressed by the scope of the desolation. From the edge of the plain, he had thought it vast enough but he had not appreciated the scale of the architecture buried beneath the moss and mould. No men had reared such structures, men were ants beside whatever had built the primordial ruins. Cyclopean blocks of stone bigger than longships rose from the muck, piled one atop the other in massive walls that sagged sickly from their own ponderous weight. Great pillars wide enough that all of Vinnskor might have fitted comfortably upon their tops stabbed up from the slime, their marble surfaces pitted with decay and corrosion. Ceramic plates, the debris from collapsed roofs of the city were strewn throughout the scum-snow on the ground, every tile larger than a man.

Einarr considered the oldest of the sagas, the tales of the great giants who in the time before man had made war against the gods. Surely this could be nothing if not one of their mighty cities, brought low by the Plague God, its ancient power and glory sucked relentlessly down into the morass of his corruption.

It was this same power that Einarr now dared to oppose. He felt doubt again tug at his mind. Who was he to challenge the Plague God? Von Kammler was a mighty champion of Tchar, a warlord who had led an entire army to this blighted place and seen that same army scattered to the winds. Then he remembered his oath and what he had been promised. His mind turned to Birna and Asta and Vinnskor. A fresh wave of determination coursed through him. The Plague God was mighty, but the Plague Lord Skoroth was only a man.

They pressed on through the ruins, vile life slithering through the slime all around them. Flies the size of hawks crawled along the walls, sunning their wings in the crimson sun. Maggots bigger than serpents oozed across their path, blindly crawling across the land in search of carrion. A bloated, slobbering thing the size of an ox but resembling a melted toad regarded them with gem-like eyes from the shadow of a fallen archway but made no move to molest them.

The droning of insects, the scurry of unclean life and the omnipresent cackling of the daemons created such a din that they were unaware of the Hung warriors until they were almost on top of the vermin. It was Orgrim who detected them first, his long-suffering sense of scent picking the smell of men out from the reek that punished him so terribly. The Aesling snarled a warning, lifting his hand and motioning for them all to drop low.

Einarr crawled through the filth to join Orgrim. The woodsman was perched behind a jumble of slime-coated masonry, eyes fixed on what he had discovered. As he drew close to the scout, Einarr could hear the bubbling, slobbering voices of the Hung. Past Orgrim, he could see that a wide expanse of ground had been cleared of rubble and debris, forming an open plaza around the base of an enormous pillar, its sides dripping with yellow treacle. Around the circle was a large group of men and women, their bodies bloated with corruption, their jaundiced flesh split and oozing with pus and disease, their armour rotting on their bodies, their weapons rusting at their sides. They shared a rough semblance in the cast of their features, their faces broad with slender eyes and wiry hair.

‘The Hung,’ von Kammler said. Even encased within his armour, the massive knight had managed to appear beside Einarr without making a sound. ‘They sing their prayers to the Plague God, asking him to perpetuate their suffering, to strengthen the sickness that flows through them so that it might stave off the hand of death.’ The knight shook his head in loathing. ‘The wretches will grovel and whine for hours. We can go around them and they will never hear our passing.’

Einarr only partially heard von Kammler speak, his attention riveted to the obscene rites of the Hung. He saw a corpulent thing with the head of a slavering insect dressed in tattered green robes moving within the circle, spraying the ground with its filth, making symbols in the slime with the water from its body. Then the vile shaman turned, facing a wooden stake that had been pounded into the earth. Lashed to the stake was a hulking man, his crimson armour standing stark against the pestilential hues of the Hung and the rotting landscape.

‘We will go through this rabble,’ Einarr decided as he watched the scene unfold.

‘Do not be fooled by their rotten bodies,’ von Kammler warned. ‘They can endure wounds that would kill most men.’

‘Nothing should be too easy,’ Einarr said. He pointed to the stake and the captive lashed to it. ‘He does not look to be any friend of the Hung.’

Von Kammler stared at the prisoner for a moment. ‘He’s not. A Kurgan, I think. One of Khorne’s warriors, whatever his race.’

‘We will free him,’ Einarr said. Although it was impossible to see emotion in the glowing embers burning behind von Kammler’s mask, Einarr felt the bewilderment his words evoked. ‘Finding this cannot have been mere chance,’ he explained. ‘Was it not you who said the sacred number of Tchar is nine? That we are short one sword?’ Einarr clapped the knight’s shoulder, pushing him back towards where the others were gathered. ‘Tell them to ready for battle. We strike…’

His intentions were silenced by the blood-curdling howl from Orgrim. Throughout Einarr’s exchange with the knight, Orgrim had remained silent, eyes still trained on the ritual of the Hung. Einarr had put the berserker from his mind, thinking little of his rapt watchfulness. Now he had reason to curse his lack of caution. Orgrim was on his feet, axe raised above his head and roaring his animal hate at the men below. A thick, brute smell seemed to exude from Orgrim’s body and before Einarr’s stunned eyes, he saw the hair on the man’s face and hands begin to thicken and spread. With another howl, Orgrim hurled his axe at the Hung and leapt down into the court, his hands curled into savage claws.

Einarr cursed again, then rushed after the frenzied Aesling. Near the stake, the bug-headed shaman struggled to tear Orgrim’s axe free from his breast. He never had the chance. Like a predatory beast, Orgrim pounced on the stricken shaman, ripping and tearing at him with his claws. Ropes of brown entrails and shreds of green flesh littered the air as Orgrim tore the shaman apart. Einarr watched in horrified fascination as Orgrim lowered his head and savaged the shaman’s throat. When he lifted his head again, it was no longer that of the Aesling, but the lean, stretched muzzle of a wolf, its fur caked in the unclean filth from the shaman’s veins.

‘Ulfwerenar,’ Einarr gasped, recalling the stories of the were-kin, the men who bore the flesh of the beast within them. The Norscan fought to control his shock; there would be time enough to worry about Orgrim’s condition once the Hung were dead.

Fortunately, the Hung were as stunned by the sudden appearance of the werewolf as much as Einarr. The sudden, savage violence that had erupted from nowhere to claim their shaman had frozen them with confusion. But their inaction did not linger long. A huge warrior, his rusty armour struggling to contain the bulk of his bloated body, surged forward from the ranks of the stunned plague worshippers. He turned his pitted helmet in Orgrim’s direction, snarling a bubbling cry and pointing his corroded sword at the were-kin. Orgrim reacted to the champion’s challenge with a low snarl and launched himself at the armoured warrior.

The plague champion met Orgrim’s lunge with a slash of his polluted sword, digging a gory furrow through Orgrim’s chest. The werewolf howled in rage at the injury and his claws scrabbled against the champion’s armour, tearing into the corrupt metal. The Hung pushed him back with a thrust of his armoured gut, raising his sword for another strike. He froze as the eyes hidden behind his rusting helm watched the wound he had dealt the werewolf closing upon itself. It would take more than diseased steel to overcome the terrible powers that pulsed through the cursed flesh of an ulfwerenar. The champion seemed to realise his mistake, taking a cautious step back.

The other Hung did not seem to notice their champion’s distress, however. As the champion had charged, so too had they. Dozens of men and women, their bodies swollen with disease, their flesh leprous and pitted with oozing boils, charged into the plaza and rushed towards Einarr, intent on stopping him before he could reach the stake.

The foremost of the Hung disappeared in a burst of blue flame, their bodies collapsing as the eerie fire consumed them. The head of another burst like an over ripe melon as a shimmering fog appeared around it and then streamed up his nose and ears until the pressure within his skull became too great to contain. By comparison, the few who fell with black-feathered arrows in their diseased bodies were the fortunate ones. Whether they fell from Birna’s arrows or the spells of Urda and von Kammler, there were many more to take the place of the fallen.

The survivors kept coming, chanting the obscene name of their god. The sound caused Einarr’s stomach to churn, but he kept his grip on Alfwyrm steady. Just as the first of the Hung closed on him, he became aware of Vallac at his side, the Kurgan’s mangled face curled into a bloodthirsty snarl. Beside Vallac loomed Thognathog, the ogre’s bulk anchoring their flank. Still fastened to the ogre by his chains, Zhardrach cursed and threatened the oncoming Hung with a cruel-looking knife the dwarf had acquired.

Roaring a Baersonling war cry, Einarr met the charge of the Hung, his sword slashing through the belly of the first foolish enough to close with him. The marauder flopped obscenely against the ground, struggling to lift himself on his severed spine. Zhardrach was soon looming over him, plunging his knife again and again into the back of the tribesman’s neck.

‘Keep putting them down and I’ll see they don’t get up!’ the dwarf croaked, sadistic glee in his deep voice. Einarr and Vallac nodded grimly to the grinning fiend, then put him from their minds as they concentrated on the press of diseased humanity before them.

How long the killing continued, Einarr could not say. His body was caked in blood from his foes. Limbs and heads littered the ground around him, the air was heavy with the stink of death. Flies swarmed all around the carnage, a living curtain of blinding filth.

Somehow, Einarr managed to force his way through the throng, step-by-step cutting his way through the Hung until he had reached the stake. None of the plague worshippers had thought to slaughter their captive, or perhaps like the Aeslings of Skraevold, none of them dared kill one marked for sacrifice. Either way, Einarr found the captive still alive, lashing furiously at his bonds, almost berserk in his impotent rage. The prisoner roared curses on his foes, spitting dark promises of what he would do to them, of the black offerings he would make to the Skull Lord when he was free.

Einarr hesitated for a moment, staring at the raging captive. He was a huge man, bigger even than von Kammler, his armour chased in bronze and stained a bloody red. What looked like bones were somehow fixed to the heavy metal plates, looking almost as though they had melted into the steel, giving his mail an almost skeletal appearance. The face that looked at Einarr was cruel and savage, hideous runes scarred into his flesh, his wild hair matted with dried blood. Through his beard, the warrior smiled at Einarr, his teeth filed into points and capped with bronze. More disconcerting were the man’s eyes. There was no white in them, only the blood red of the battlefield and the shrines of Khorne.

Einarr regarded the bound champion for only a moment, then his sword was swinging through the clouds of buzzing flies. Alfwyrm struck the thick cords of dried entrails that bound the Kurgan, snapping them beneath its keen edge. The captive pulled his arms forward, rubbing at his chaffed wrists and then let loose with a roar of terrible jubilation. He nodded to Einarr, then flung himself at the press of the Hung. His hands gouged eyes and tore throats, his armoured feet smashed knees and shattered legs. Still shrieking his savage war cry, the Kurgan was soon lost amid the mob of his foes. Einarr grimly wondered what sort of madman he had unleashed. Even the bestial fury of Orgrim had seemed tame beside the wanton blood-thirst that the unarmed Kurgan displayed.

Then Einarr had no more time for thoughts of berserkers and beasts. The ground shuddered beneath him as something monstrous forced its way across the plaza. Even the clouds of flies seemed to part before it. It towered above the Hung, even the tallest of the tribesmen failing to rise to its breast. Its bloated body was coated in scabs and lesions, its bestial head little more than a fleshless skull. Mangy patches of fur dripped off its body and from the sides of its head great horns, cracked and filthy, jutted menacingly. In its massive paws, the beast carried an enormous hammer, the stone-head caked in slime and sludge. The minotaur fixed Einarr with its beady gaze, the lone eye staring out from its left socket looking like a tiny ball of pus. The plaguebull snorted, smashing its hoof against the ground, and charged.

Einarr leapt aside as the plaguebull brought its mattock hurtling downward, pulverizing the ground and sending shards of earth and stone flying in all directions. The minotaur did not hesitate to even consider its missed strike but with astounding speed swept the hammer up from the crater it had smashed into the ground, trying to catch Einarr with the side of the weapon. The Norscan threw himself flat, ducking under the blow. The hammer crashed against the sacrificial stake, smashing it into splinters. Einarr lashed out at the beast, his sword slashing deep into its side. Putrid water slopped from the wound in the brute’s belly, but if the plaguebull felt pain, it gave no sign. Instead it swung around, bringing the hammer about in a deadly arc of ruin. A pair of Hung were crushed as Einarr dove away from the strike, thrown through the air by the impact of the great hammer.

Landing badly, Einarr clutched at his stinging leg. He looked up in time to roll away from the hammer as the minotaur brought it crashing down once more. Splinters of rock tore into his side as the ground shattered beneath the blow. The plaguebull glared down at Einarr, snorting its frustration. A black-fletched arrow suddenly struck the brute’s face, quickly followed by a second. The minotaur shook its head, as though trying to shoo an annoying insect, then turned its murderous rage back towards Einarr. The hammer rose again.

Before the plaguebull could bring the hammer down, a hulking shape appeared behind it. Powerful hands closed around the head of the hammer, preventing the mattock from descending. The minotaur spun around, fury in its pustule eye. Thognathog glared back at it and drove his left head into the brute’s face. The thick skull of the ogre shattered the minotaur’s snout, sending a spray of brown blood and green snot into the air. The beast reeled backward, its hands slipping from the grip of its hammer. Thognathog’s faces split into a savage grin as the ogre hefted the stolen weapon and brought it smashing into the minotaur’s side.

Thognathog and the plaguebull slowly drifted away from Einarr, the battle of the hulks crushing any Hung too slow to give ground before them. The Norscan drove his sword across the neck of a marauder who lunged at him with a morning star then disembowelled a second who came at him with an axe. For the moment, he was free from the press of his foes. He could see his comrades all around him, slashing and smashing their enemies. Orgrim, his shape now almost completely that of a great grey wolf, savaged the Hung with claw and fang, littering the plaza with torn bodies. Vallac plied his curved sword in a murderous arc, hewing limbs from his diseased foes.

Across the plaza, Einarr could see von Kammler. Weary of working his sorcery, the knight now waded through the marauders, crushing bone and rupturing organs with every sweep of his mace. Urda continued to ply her magic, however, sending streams of crackling energy searing into the Hung horde. Beside her, Birna sent black arrows streaking into any of the plague worshippers who took it in their worm-eaten minds to close upon the witch.

Einarr looked away from his comrades, trying to find the Kurgan berserker he had freed. He found the man, his body caked in the blood and filth of his foes, relentlessly slaughtering his way towards the pillar. Einarr could hear the howl of triumph erupt from the warrior’s throat as he won his way clear. He pounced towards an altar of green stone that stood beneath the pillar, crushing the skull of one last Hung between his powerful hands. The Kurgan reached the altar, lifting from it a great horned helmet. Even from such a distance, Einarr could see the skull rune of Khorne glowing evilly upon the brow of the skeletal helm. The Kurgan lowered the armour over his head, his scarred visage vanishing behind the beast-skull mask of the helm. With another roar of triumph and fury, he grabbed the enormous axe that also rested upon the altar and turned to face the Hung once more.

The Hung withdrew from the berserker, their ruined faces pale with fear. But it was not the Kurgan that drew their frightened eyes. Einarr could see something descending the column, slowly dripping down the pitted stone pillar. The berserker sensed it too, turning and craning his head upward. Unlike the Hung, the Khorne worshipper seemed to welcome the descent of the abomination.

It was like a worm, Einarr decided as he watched it slither down the pillar, its obscenely fat bulk exuding a purple slime to ease its passage. As thick around as a tree, its head split by a great gash of a mouth, its body pitted with dozens of leprous eyes. The giant worm oozed its way down the column, an aura of pestilence preceding it. The Hung cringed before it and from their rotting mouths came a wailing chant of supplication and subservience.

The enormous green maggot slithered its way to the base of the pillar, its nether regions still coiled about the structure. The purple sludge drooling from its belly singed the ground as it reared up and surveyed the plaza with its slobbering head. None of the Hung dared meet its gaze, more afraid of setting eyes on their terrible god than the stabbing blades of their foes. Zhardrach found easy prey among their prone, trembling shapes. The worm lurched forward, its mouth spitting obscenities into the unclean air. The daemon’s voice seemed to defile every ear that heard it, gnawing at the mind like a jackal’s fang or a vulture’s beak. Scabrous blood leaked from the ears of those closest to the worm. The daemon slithered to the closest of the Hung, licking the crusty gore from his head with a mottled, whip-like tongue. Like a rotten fruit, the man’s head crumbled beneath the daemon’s touch, his flesh corrupting faster than he could scream. The Hung wailed in horror and devotion as the stench of their decaying tribesman exploded across the plaza.

The berserker had seen enough. The Kurgan leapt at the worm, a savage cry booming from his skeletal helm. The great axe held in his hands seemed to burn with a crimson light as it swept down towards the worm’s back. The burning edge seared through the worm’s blubbery flesh, spilling stinking brown ichor across the slimy ground. As the berserker drew back, the steel on his gauntlets smoked, the filth of the daemon gnawing at the metal. The wound stood raw and ragged for a moment, then was obliterated by a oozing stream of pus that flooded into the injury. The berserker roared again and flung himself back at the daemon. Even as his axe bit into it again, the first wound assumed the sickly green of the worm’s scabrous hide, showing no sign of the hurt that had been done to it.

Einarr was reminded of the bloodbeast of Skraevold and how it had resisted the violence of sword and axe. Even as the thought came to him, he saw some of his comrades rushing to help the Kurgan oppose the daemon. Vallac appeared at the back of the worm, slashing at it with his curved sword, the edge biting through some of its eyes. For every orb his sword ruptured, three more sprouted across the beast’s hide, glaring at him angrily.

Von Kammler approached the thing, the syllables of the Dark Tongue hissing through the mask of his helm. The daemon’s flesh quivered and twisted as the sorcery pawed at its substance, but defiantly retained its hideous shape. Thognathog stomped towards the horror, the minotaur’s mattock in one hand, the other encased within the plaguebull’s horned skull. With a bellow of fury, the ogre punched the skull into the daemon’s side, excrement exploding across him as the thing’s unclean hide was punctured. Beside the ogre, Zhardrach stabbed at the daemon with a long spear he had stolen from one of the Hung, the dwarf trying to keep Thognathog between himself and the monster.

The daemon barely reacted to the assault of the warriors, its unnatural substance reforming in a burst of pus and filth behind every attack. The drool slobbering from its mouth increased, sending a plume of smoke steaming from the ground. A burst of noxious gas erupted from the skin of the worm, a yellow cloud engulfing its attackers. They staggered back, coughing and retching, their flesh darkening beneath a swiftly spreading rash. Bubbling laughter oozed from the maggot-thing and it swung its head around towards von Kammler.

The worm’s body shuddered and convulsed as it spit something from its mouth. Coated in mucous and phlegm, it was only when the thing stood that it resembled a man. A thick, greasy rope of flesh attached the man to the worm, the slimy umbilical vanishing down the maggot’s throat. In the thing’s hand, the fleshy simulacra of an axe dripped as the plague-zombie lifted its arm and strode towards von Kammler. The knight met the thing’s slow, slopping advance, swinging his mace into the thing’s head. The weapon struck with a meaty thunk, collapsing the man’s head. Von Kammler tried to pull his weapon back, but found it embedded in the ruptured ruin of the thing’s skull. The zombie withered to the ground, dragging von Kammler’s weapon down with it. The worm’s body undulated again as it heaved a second zombie from its gullet. The worm’s convulsions continued until it had vomited a dozen of the half-digested warriors onto the ground, each still attached to it by a greasy umbilical.

Einarr watched as the plague-zombies marched relentlessly toward von Kammler, then lunged at the abominations, roaring a battle cry. Alfwyrm slashed down at the things, cutting through one of the umbilicals. The zombie attached to the coil of flesh flopped to the ground, quivering as it corroded into a pool of greasy sludge. Einarr shouted to his comrades and darted from the groping claws and flailing meat-bludgeon of a second zombie, slicing through its umbilical as easily as he had the first. His tactic was taken up by his allies, Thognathog wading in and forcibly ripping one of the zombies from its tether, the Kurgan berserker flinging himself at the horrors with his burning axe.

The worm seethed with anger, its rheumy eyes fixing upon Einarr. With a great gulping motion, it retracted the umbilicals and swallowed the remaining zombies. Another burst of corrosive gas sprayed from the daemon’s hide as its regurgitated sacrifices slid back into its gullet. Einarr’s comrades fled from the pestilential cloud, but the war leader stood his ground. He could feel the band he had taken from the frozen ship throb and pulse as the cloud washed over him. When it had passed, he could see little fingers of rust marring the metal, but on his flesh there was no sign of blemish. He sneered at the perplexed worm.

The daemon hissed again and surged forward, its enormity causing the ground to tremble. Black arrows slammed into its bulk as Birna saw her lover’s danger. Thognathog drove his hammer into the thing’s side, collapsing its substance like an old bladder. But such wounds were fleeting, the daemon’s unholy vitality causing its oozing form to reshape itself around its injuries. Like a relentless juggernaut, the horror drove on towards Einarr.

The Norscan stood his ground, an arrogant contempt filling him. He watched the plague daemon surge towards him, ignoring the frightened shouts of his comrades. He did not even lift Alfwyrm to repel the creature as it reared above him. Instead, almost without any awareness on his part, he opened his mouth and shouted at the daemon, roaring the words that seemed to burn through his brain at the vile abomination. Upon his hand, the steel symbol of Tchar glowed dimly.

‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros!’ Einarr roared at the worm, the sound of the slobbering name causing the thing to recoil in terror. ‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros, be flesh!’

The worm’s body shuddered as it heard the command, as its daemonic substance congealed into blood and bone. The purple acid that oozed from its underside sizzled as it burned through the thing’s belly. The worm slithered away from Einarr, its body trembling and convulsing as its own excretions consumed it. The Kurgan lunged at it again, this time the huge chunk of flesh that came away with his axe did not knit itself whole behind his blade, but bled freely and darkly. Thognathog followed the warrior’s example, smashing the tail of the worm almost flat beneath his hammer.

The daemon’s piteous wail shrieked through all who heard it as the retreating horror gained the base of the pillar. Like a mighty serpent, it coiled around the column and began to drag itself upward, struggling on despite the ropes of entrail and organ that dripped from its melting underside. The worm’s body shuddered again, becoming almost translucent, wisps of stagnant energies swirling about it as the daemon tried to revert to its etheric substance. Einarr glared up at the fleeing obscenity.

‘Euooul’th’bueb’ros, be flesh!’ he shouted at it again. The worm wailed piteously as the power of its True Name forced it back into a shape of mortality. The sizzling slime eating away at its body caused the daemon to lose its hold on the pillar. With a last bubbling wail, the worm toppled from the column, smacking into the ground in a great puddle of misery and corruption, its essence splashed across the plaza. For a moment, the wretched sludge tried to cling to life, but the ruin was too great even for the daemon’s essence to maintain and it settled into an oozing morass of filth.

Einarr looked down upon what he had done, stunned by the power he had commanded, shocked by his inability to account for it. As quickly as it had taken shape within his mind, the True Name of the daemon had been driven from his brain. He lifted his eyes to find the others staring at him in wonder. Even von Kammler seemed awestruck. The Hung, those that remained, screamed and scattered into the slime-coated ruins.

The Kurgan berserker turned towards Einarr, the dripping axe clenched in his armoured fist. Einarr watched him warily, waiting for the forbidding axeman to make the first move. Vallac cautiously joined the Norscan, careful to keep his eyes on the berserker.

‘You should not have freed him,’ Vallac warned. ‘He is Veig. My people have fought many wars with the Veigs. They are murderers and cannibals, thinking only of blood and skulls for their gods. The Hung should have killed him. Now we will have to kill him ourselves.’

Einarr shook his head. ‘He hasn’t tried to kill us yet,’ he told Vallac. ‘Perhaps he understands that we share a common enemy. He would be of use to us if he joins us against Skoroth.’

The berserker took a step forward, his head rising as he picked the name of the Plague Lord from Einarr’s unfamiliar words. He shouted at the Norscan, rage making his Kurgan dialect hard for Einarr to follow.

‘Kill worm, much good,’ the Kurgan roared. ‘Worm no eat Veigs now. Die with fighting, not in worm-gut.’ The berserker lifted his axe, his bloody eyes glaring into Einarr’s. ‘Kill Skoroth better.’

‘The path we walk is the same,’ Einarr said. ‘We seek the head of Skoroth.’

The bloodthirsty Kurgan lowered his head as he heard Einarr’s words, taking some time to consider what he had heard. When he looked at the Norscan again, his eyes shone from behind his skeletal helm with a feral gleam. ‘That be fine death, please mighty Khorne! Better than take Norseman skull, take Plague Lord skull!’ The Kurgan stared hard at Einarr, then reached forward and took his hand. ‘Berus of Veigs.’

‘Einarr Steelfist, Chosen of Tchar,’ the Norscan said, his tone as imperious as that of any jarl, as firm as stone. He turned towards von Kammler.

‘Now we are nine,’ he told the knight.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In defiance of the sludge of frost that coated the ground, the air became humid and lush as the warband emerged from the cyclopean ruins. Beyond the jumbled heaps of slime-coated stone stretched a vast, seething swamp. The reek of rot grew stifling, every breath scratching the lungs with its taint. Immense weeds rose into the sky on spindly stalks. Vines dripped across the land, choking the ground beneath their decaying foulness. Streams of stagnant water festered and flowed like sewage beneath the scabrous foliage, vermin flitting above its stench. Everywhere, the unclean life of a land remade into the pestilential image of Nurgle flourished. The swamp embodied the diseased whims of the Plague God, his mantra of decay without death, corruption without destruction.

There was no time to pause upon the threshold of the swamp, to allow their abhorrence for the foulness to be subdued by their resolve. The Hung that had scattered after the destruction of the daemon had spread word of Einarr’s sacrilege to their kin. It had not taken long for the ruins to resound with the sound of pursuers, to throb to the pulse of Hung war drums. Einarr knew they could not oppose such numbers and live, even Berus understood that if they stayed to face their enemies they would never reach the palace of the Plague Lord alive.

So they had fled, racing through the ruins, trusting more to luck than design to keep ahead of their foes. The slobbering, bubbling voices of the Hung sounded from all around them.

As they scrambled into the stinking morass of the swamp, Einarr looked back to see how near their enemies were. Impossibly, the ruins had vanished behind them, replaced by more swampland, the bog stretching as far as his eyes could follow. Yet he could still hear the sounds of the Hung as they shouted and pounded their drums, ghostly noises that came from nothingness. Einarr did not breathe any easier; whatever force had plucked them from the ruins and into the swamp could just as easily do the same for the Hung. He roared at his retching comrades, extolling them to hasten their pace. There would be time enough to rest when they were dead.

Like a living morass, the swamp tried to suck them down into its liquid embrace. The ground gave beneath their feet like porridge, defying their every effort to make speed. Tiny daemons harassed them again, hurling filth at them whenever they stopped, giggling and grinning when the warriors hurled curses back at them. The little nurglings danced across the bog, the ground refusing to drag their filthy forms into its own foulness. The daemons mocked Einarr’s suffering comrades, laughing each time a boot became trapped in the mud.

Among the fens and weeds they could hear their pursuers following them, sloshing through the diseased quagmire, eager to avenge their daemon king. Far too soon, filthy spears and arrows began to fall around them as the Hung closed in. Between her hacking coughs, Urda managed to recite words of power as she cast powdered bone across the bog behind them. When the last word hissed through her toothless face, the crone waved the feathered claw that had been one of her hands. The powder burst into flame, licking greedily at the first of the Hung as the plague worshippers charged the warband. The shrieks of the burning warriors echoed across the swamp, silencing for a moment the constant susurrus of insects.

‘That will not hold them back long,’ Vallac snarled. Even as he spoke the words, two huge marauders forced their way through the flames. Their rusting armour smoking from the fire, the massive warriors stomped towards the warband. Birna sent a black arrow shooting into the visor of one Hung’s helmet. The brute fell to his knees as blood exploded from his helm. His comrade did not pause to consider the fate of his kinsman, but rushed at the huntress. Birna tried to dodge back, but not quickly enough to avoid the attack. The Hung’s bamboo spear stabbed into the woman’s leg, the filthy muck coating it turning her blood black as it bubbled from the wound. Roaring, Birna smashed her bow into the Hung’s face, breaking his nose.

Stunned, the marauder staggered back. Before he could recover, Berus swept his axe at the warrior’s face, cleaving his skull in half. The berserker roared in triumph as brains and teeth splattered across his armour. Einarr rushed to help the reeling huntress, ripping the bamboo shaft free. He rummaged in Spjall’s medicine bag, trying to find a poultice to press against the injury.

Urda turned to von Kammler. ‘You have walked this road before,’ she said. The knight shook his steel head.

‘That is meaningless here,’ von Kammler replied. ‘Between the pulses of your heart, the entire swamp might change. All is at the whim of the Plague God.’

Einarr cursed the perfidy of the unnatural domain that obeyed no laws and followed no order. Trying to understand it was a thing hopeless and mad, the mere attempt to make sense of the rules that governed this land made his brain burn. This was the essence of the gods, a thing no man could hold within his mind, a thing that was nothing more than madness.

‘Sssmelll… ssstrooong,’ Orgrim growled. His body was covered in grey fur now, his bestial shape struggling to make words. His axe was gone, lost in the ruins, his armour reduced to a few tatters that stubbornly clung to his lupine form. The werewolf raised something that was more paw than hand and tapped the side of his muzzle, an unsettling reminder of the gesture the Aesling had made so many times before. Watching the grey beast make it caused a sliver of ice to crawl up Einarr’s spine. Einarr nodded at Orgrim and the werewolf began to lope into the weeds. Hurriedly, Einarr lifted Birna back to her feet, shouting for the others to follow the ulfwerenar. Vallac laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

‘If eyes and ears fail, why trust a were-kin’s nose?’

‘Do you have a better plan?’ The sounds of the Hung moving through the swamp, circling around the barrier Urda had made punctuated Einarr’s words. Vallac shook his head. One by one, the small warband stole through the weeds, following in Orgrim’s path.

Einarr stared in disbelief at the stagnant swampland that surrounded them. For hours they had followed Orgrim’s lead, trusting to the werewolf’s keen senses to guide them through the mire. Now, even he seemed confused, pawing at the muddy earth in dismay, turning his head in every direction, trying to pick up some scent that would guide him onward.

‘I am really coming to hate this place,’ Vallac snarled, kicking at a rotten log. It exploded beneath his boot, hordes of termites scrambling from their broken sanctuary. Zhardrach cursed in shock, straining on the chain that bound him to Thognathog. Einarr could easily see why the dwarf was so agitated. Like everything else, the shattered log was repeated in every direction, right down to the crawling insects. Wherever they turned, it was the same. The same weeds, the same ghastly sky, the same slimy mud, like a mirror reflection of the entire swamp. Even their footprints repeated, giving them the eerie sight of watching marks appear in the mud ahead of them without any visible cause. Only they themselves were not reflected in the etheric mirrors, something that seemed to heighten the horror rather than lessen it.

It was maddening. Einarr could not tell if they were walking in circles, gaining ground or, in a very real sense, moving at all. Even von Kammler seemed agitated, unpleasantly surprised by this new trick the Plague Lord’s domain had learned.

Einarr turned to the knight. ‘It has to be some kind of illusion. It can’t all be the same.’

Von Kammler’s steel face scanned the reflected swamp. He reached to the left side of the path, ripping a small bush from the muddy ground. Instantly the same bush was torn from the earth to their right, behind and before them. The knight stormed forward, crushing one of the towering weeds in his mailed fist. Again, the destruction was repeated in the other three directions, an invisible hand snapping the stalk. He roared in frustration, attacking the foliage with his mace. However much he raged, the effects of his violence were dutifully mirrored.

‘It seems the great southlander has finally met his match,’ Urda hissed, satisfaction in her wrinkled face. ‘Good, I hope he rots here.’

‘If he rots here, old witch,’ Vallac snarled, ‘we rot with him.’ The hag shook her head.

‘Some of us, perhaps, but not all.’ She reached into her leather bag, pulling a set of ivory teeth from its depths. The hag closed her eyes, strange words crawling across her lips. The rune eye set in her face began to glow with power. Einarr watched in fascination as the teeth began to slither across her palm, guided by some unnatural life of their own. After a time, they settled and the light faded from Urda’s stone eye. The witch opened her mortal eyes and stared at the pattern the teeth had arranged themselves in. She looked up, staring into the swamp.

‘It is this way,’ she cackled.

‘How do you know that, witch?’ von Kammler demanded, scorn in his voice. Urda sneered at him.

‘Find your own way out, if the swamp lets you,’ she chided him.

The knight took a menacing step towards her, the mace still clutched in his hand. Thognathog stepped in front of Urda, placing himself between the knight and the hag.

‘Follow witch, leave bad stinky place,’ the ogre growled.

Einarr nodded his head in agreement. ‘Wandering in this madness will get us nowhere. Following Urda can get us no more lost than we already are.’

The witch scowled at him. ‘Your faith in my powers overwhelms me. Perhaps you spend too much time with the southlander.’

‘I have not forgotten the hag who abandoned me on the ice,’ Einarr retorted. Urda glared at him for a moment.

‘We all make mistakes, Steelfist,’ she said. ‘I can guide you out of the deceit Skoroth has infected this part of the swamp with, but the power to do so is taxing. The ogre will have to carry me.’ Einarr gestured at Thognathog and the huge brute reached down, cradling Urda in his enormous arm.

‘Walk where I tell you to walk, step where I tell you to step,’ the witch cautioned. ‘Your eyes will betray you, they will tell you that nothing has changed, that you are still locked within the trap. Do not believe them. Do as I say and you will emerge from this deception.

‘Disobey me, and your bones will rot here until the end of eternity.’

The thick undergrowth of the swamp eventually broke, just as the witch had told them it would, the sickly weeds and grasping vines finally yielding before ground too foul even for their fecundity. As Einarr and his followers emerged from the swamp they were struck by the diseased waste that sprawled before them. A great depression in the marshy land, stretching for what looked to Einarr to be a hundred leagues across, filled almost to the brim with filth that could only mockingly be described as water.

A thick green skin of scum floated upon the dead, still lake, like a scab over a festering wound. Rising from the middle of the lake, its foundations lost beneath the stagnant waters, rose a monstrously twisted tower. What stone had been used to build it, Einarr could not say, so thick was the slime that dripped from its walls and battlements. It reared impossibly high from the lake, clutching at the sky like the crooked claw of a corpse, seeming to rise miles into the leprous sky, its topmost summit hidden behind the gibbous moons that hung overhead. As he gazed upon it, Einarr felt his eyes itch and his belly sicken. A tangible aura of despair and decay exuded from the structure, sickening an already sickened land.

Vallac looked out across the vast lake and its rancid water, his face twisted in revulsion. ‘Just how in the name of the Changer are we supposed to get across that?’ he growled. He looked over at von Kammler, the hate inside him searing into the knight’s expressionless steel mask. ‘If you say “swim”, I’ll kill you and I don’t care what sorcerer’s tricks you have hiding up your sleeve.’

The knight merely nodded his head. ‘Swimming is an ill thought,’ he growled back. ‘Something might notice.’

Einarr set Birna down, taking a moment to check that the old witch was still breathing before turning toward their guide. ‘There has to be a way across,’ he said, defiance in his voice.

‘Yes,’ von Kammler agreed, arrogance in his tone. ‘There are powers that can be called.’

‘Then call on them, southlander!’ Vallac snarled back. The knight glowered at the misshapen Kurgan.

‘Some things are easier to summon than dismiss,’ he said.

‘Make boat?’ Thognathog suggested. The ogre wore a sheepish look as he voiced the suggestion. Zhardrach spun on his captor, kicking him in the shin.

‘From what, you idiot? Mud and weeds?’ The ogre stared down at the snarling dwarf, glowering at him. Realising what he had done, Zhardrach backed away as far as his chain would allow. Thognathog lowered Urda to the ground and reached for the dwarf.

‘Maybe Thognathog try throw you across?’ the ogre said, his immense hand closing around Zhardrach. ‘Can you fly, shortling?’ Thognathog lifted the squealing dwarf into the air, snapping the thick chain that bound him to the ogre’s waist. Zhardrach kicked and struggled to free himself from the ogre’s powerful grip.

Von Kammler stepped in front of Thognathog, his spiked mace held at the ready. The knight glared up at the ogre. ‘Disturbing the water would be unhealthy,’ he warned. Thognathog glared back at him. Einarr hurried to put himself between the two.

‘He is right, Thog,’ Einarr told the ogre. ‘Put Zhardrach down. He might still be useful to us.’ The look that Einarr shared with von Kammler did not go unnoticed by the dwarf. Suddenly he wondered if getting thrown into the lake by the ogre was the worst that could happen to him.

Reluctantly, Thognathog lowered the dwarf, a sullen look on his faces.

Berus walked to the edge of the swamp, hacking down one of the immense weeds. He stripped the stalk, flexing and bending the pole-like flesh of the weed. ‘Norscan,’ he called out. ‘This not exactly wood. You think something built of this filth will float?’ Einarr stared down von Kammler and Thognathog. Satisfied the two would not come to blows, he stalked over to Berus, taking the stalk from his hand. His brow knitted in thought as he examined the rancid-smelling limb.

‘I can’t say,’ Einarr confessed at last. ‘It certainly isn’t wood. We put this in water it’s likely to lap it up like a thirsty dog.’

Berus took the stalk back. ‘One way to find out,’ he growled, striding towards the slimy shore of the lake. Von Kammler stepped into the Kurgan’s path.

‘No one touches the water,’ the knight hissed. Berus snorted derisively, moving to step around von Kammler. Before he could go more than a few steps, von Kammler’s mace was swinging towards his back. The berserker’s incredible reflexes saved him the worst of the blow, the deadly weapon glancing against his armour.

‘Swine of Tzeentch, I’ll feed your spine to the vultures!’ Berus flung the stalk at von Kammler, the crude spear snapping as it struck the knight’s breastplate. The force of the blow caused von Kammler to stagger back, long enough for Berus to get a better grip on his axe. With a roar, the berserker threw himself at the knight.

Einarr shouted for Vallac and Thognathog to help him separate the two battlers. This close to the palace, the last thing they needed were their already slim numbers further reduced by infighting. Vallac seemed to take a great deal of delight cracking the flat of his sword against von Kammler’s head, though he was less pleased to find the knight not even fazed by the blow. Berus rounded on Thognathog as the ogre reached for him, his axe slashing through the ogre’s thigh, causing him to crumple to the ground. Berus lifted his axe again, the fury of animal bloodlust in his eyes. Orgrim sprang to the ogre’s defence, leaping onto the berserker’s back and smashing him to the ground.

Einarr cursed as the melee quickly slipped past the point of no return.

Birna watched in disgust as her erstwhile comrades fell into conflict. Were they so blind? With glory and the favour of the gods almost within their grasp, they decided to let their own hubris overcome them! It was madness! She drew her sword and tried to help Einarr knock some sense into the fools, but as she did her leg crumpled beneath her. The wound the Hung had dealt her was sticky with blood, the flesh around it putrid with infection. Birna ground her teeth against the pain that threatened to overwhelm her as she looked at the wound. As a huntress, she had learned something of the skill of the vitki. It was a vital skill, alone in the wilds, to heal one’s own hurts. She knew a mortal wound when she saw one. The gangrene that had set into the ruptured flesh with impossible speed was even now sending its poison pulsing through her veins. A pleasant little gift from Old Father Nurgle.

The huntress accepted the death coursing through her with the grim pragmatism of the cold northlands. Glory, it seemed, was not to be hers. Yet, as she watched Einarr struggling with von Kammler, she realised that she could still help her man claim the power that was rightfully his. Agony flared through her body as she forced herself from the ground, red misery pounding through her bones. She firmed her grasp on her sword. She would not be weak. She would not shame her ancestors, not now when she could hear them calling her. She would be strong for Einarr, right to the end. Somehow, that was even more important to her now than the lost glory she might have claimed.

Even as Birna gained her feet, the scummy waters of the lake began to boil, the scab of pestilence lying across it rippling and writhing as the water beneath it churned into life. Birna saw Urda standing beside the waters, the old witch backing away from the lake with haste. The crone’s eyes met Birna’s for a moment and a traitor’s grin split the hag’s countenance. Then Birna had no more room for the witch in her thoughts. The disturbance in the lake grew, foul-smelling bubbles bursting across the surface. The seething waters slopped upwards in a geyser of filth as an immense form exploded from the putrid depths.

Birna gazed up at the immense shape that reared up from the lake, its decaying hide coated in the clinging scum of the lake. Despite the nearness of her own death, she felt the wormy hand of despair crush her in its terrible might.

A seething hiss, like the snarl of a volcano, boomed across the lake, deafening even the bloodthirsty roars of the men who fought upon the shore. As one, they turned their eyes to the lake, their petty hates forgotten in a moment of awe and horror. They could feel their souls wither as their gaze fell upon the thing, cringing into the black corners of their flesh, desperate to hide from the abhorrence spat up from Nurgle’s stagnant hell.

It was like a mountain made flesh, towering above the lake and the swamp, immense despite the great part of it that yet remained beneath the rancid water. Huge legs, immense pillars of bone and scale, rose from the waters, dripping with slime. An armoured body stretched above the megalithic limbs, gradually dwindling into a thick, spiny tail. A massive neck, thicker than a longship, stretched from the front of the monster, terminating in a long, reptilian head.

There was something unspeakable about the neck, as though it was not one but three, all bound together like a pile of logs by the sinews of rotten flesh that coiled around them. The head of the thing was no less repulsive. Withered, almost skeletal, it looked as though the skulls of three monsters had melted and fused into one. Six great horns stabbed from the roof of its skull at irregular and insane angles, and the enormous jaws sported four rows of teeth, as though an extra set had been fused to either side of its proper mouth. Most despicable of all, however, was the thing’s eye – a single great, gibbous pool of jaundiced yellow set in the middle of its skull. From behind the milky substance of the orb, six black pupils floated, like beetles floundering in vomit. As the dragon roared, some of her pupils struggled to the fore of her eye, glaring down at Einarr and his comrades.

‘I told you not to disturb the lake,’ von Kammler growled, shaking free from the suddenly slackened grip of Einarr and Vallac.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The dragon’s putrescent eye scanned the shore, her black pupils rotating madly within the leprous jelly as she focused upon Einarr and his warriors. The reptile took a step towards the shore and the ground trembled beneath her weight. Einarr could see the thing’s rotten hide shudder as she moved, the festering flesh alive with crawling maggots and gnawing vermin. The Norscan backed away, his body heaving with revulsion. He was not alone, even von Kammler sickened by the loathsome sight.

‘Bubos,’ the knight spat, giving a name to the beast.

The dragon seemed to sense their disgust, the pupils swimming within her mammoth eye narrowing with spite. The great sheets of leathery flesh folded against her sides cracked open in a sudden, violent gesture, tattered pinions fanning the stagnant air. The rotten reek of the dragon smashed into them, the warband’s eyes watering and noses drooling beneath the stench. Bubos threw her head back, her bubbling roar crawling through the sky. Then she threw herself toward the shore, her bloated bulk surging forward like some gargantuan seal.

The advance of Bubos broke the paralysing grip of terror that had set upon them. Einarr roared at his comrades, thrusting his sword into the air. However big the beast was, whatever horrors von Kammler bestowed upon her, she was still a thing of flesh… and flesh could be slain.

Not surprisingly, it was Berus who took up the call for battle first, lunging at the dragon as she emerged from the dripping muck of the lake. The berserker threw himself at Bubos, his axe smacking into her leg with a meaty crunch. A spray of stinking brown sludge erupted from the wound, bathing him in the syrupy filth that flowed through the dragon’s veins. The Kurgan staggered back from the dragon, trying to wipe the slime from his helm. The reptile’s paw rose, swatting him like an insect, hurling the man across the shore to crash into the mud.

Bubos turned her head towards Berus, jaws dripping with poisonous slime, but before she could send her massive neck darting downward to snatch him up in her monstrous jaws, the dragon snarled in pain. While distracted by Berus, Orgrim had circled the reptile, waiting until he saw a weak spot. With the speed of the beast he had become, the werewolf pounced at the dragon, leaping onto her left shoulder. Orgrim’s claws tore at the beast, shredding her already rotten hide. His fangs sank deep into the throbbing vein he found beneath, the werewolf ripping at it as though worrying an old bone. Bubos’s body shook and writhed, trying to dislodge the painful parasite.

Thognathog limped towards the dragon, his leg still bleeding from the wound Berus had dealt him. The ogre glared up at the dragon and with a savage effort he sent his mattock smashing into her neck. Bones crunched beneath the blow and the leprous hide darkened as blood vessels burst beneath her flesh. Bubos recoiled from the blow, all six of her black pupils focusing on the ogre. The beast roared down at its attacker. Thognathog roared back, smashing his weapon into her jaw, cracking teeth beneath the blow.

With another roar of fury, Bubos lifted her immense paw and drove the clawed foot down into Thognathog, stomping him into the mud. She twisted her head around, trying to catch hold of the werewolf still clinging to her back. Sorcerous lightning crashed against her face, searing the skin and incinerating the legion of maggots crawling across her brow. The dragon paid no notice to von Kammler’s attack, fixated on removing Orgrim.

Einarr shared a grim look with Vallac. The Kurgan slowly nodded. They had both seen the terrible way in which Thognathog had been crushed. If the ogre’s immense brawn was unable to faze the dragon, there was little chance their own efforts could. Even so, both of them were determined that if they were to die this day, they would die as men, with their wounds to the fore and defiance in their hearts. The gods would expect no less from the worthy.

Einarr struck at the leg Berus had already injured, slashing deep into it with Alfwyrm. Vallac stabbed at the dragon with his own curved sabre, targeting the patch of neck discoloured by Thognathog’s assault. More of the dragon’s corrupt blood rained down around them as both blows found their mark. Einarr dove aside as Bubos lifted her injured leg and tried to smash him into the ground as she had the ogre. Forgetting Orgrim for the moment, she lowered her head, her jaws snapping at Vallac. The Kurgan leaped back, the immense maw snapping close only a few inches from him. Vallac could feel the dragon’s pestilent breath washing over him, so near was her face. The Kurgan glared at the beast and exhaled his own breath, his mutated throat pulsating as he sent a great burst of flame spewing into Bubos’s reptilian visage. The pestilent breath of the dragon exploded as the flame contacted it, engulfing her head in fire. Vallac was thrown back a dozen yards, crashing into the mud with a liquid squelch, his armour and hair smoking.

Bubos thrashed across the shore in pain, lashing out madly at everything around her as the flames seared her rotten hide, bursting boils and melting scabs. The dragon’s claws ripped apart the muddy shore, her tail thrashing against the lake. In a blind rage, she spun her head around, mouth agape, and sent a blast of her own pestilent fire burning into the swamp. Like mucous, the fire clung to everything it touched, withering and corrupting the already vile landscape. Rocks crumbled into powder, weeds yellowed and wilted, water became naught more than a festering vapour.

Orgrim sprang from the incensed dragon, unable to hold his grip on the furious reptile. The werewolf struck the ground and rolled, narrowly missing the stomping feet of the behemoth. He loped towards Einarr, crouching down beside the Baersonling like an old hunting hound, waiting for the war leader to make the next move.

Einarr glared at the dragon, trying to decide where they could attack that festering bulk where they could have any real chance of bringing her down. There had to be a way past her, and he would find it.

Von Kammler’s armoured hand closed on Einarr’s shoulder. ‘There is no hope here,’ the knight warned. ‘If you would gain the palace, we must find another way.’

Einarr pulled away from the knight’s grip, savage fury filling him. Everything in his culture, everything he’d ever been taught to believe decried fleeing from battle like some whipped cur. His very flesh railed against the idea, but his mind understood the reality within von Kammler’s words. This was no different than the kraken, an enemy that could not be fought on its own terms and on its own ground. The only difference was his stubborn perception that there was a difference.

Einarr’s choice was made when he looked away from von Kammler and saw the pathetic sight of Birna limping through the mud, desperate to join him, to spend her last moments fighting at his side. The woman’s determination and loyalty decided him. He didn’t know what had become of Urda and the Kurgans, but he could still try to save the rest of his retinue.

‘We’ll try and lose her in the swamp,’ he told von Kammler. ‘If the orm follows us, maybe the bog will suck her down. Even if it doesn’t, we’ll fare better than we would here.’

‘First decent idea you’ve had since I met you,’ Zhardrach griped, the dwarf already sprinting for the swamp. Von Kammler nodded to Einarr and followed after Zhardrach. Einarr watched them go, then looked back at Bubos. The fire licking about the dragon’s head had largely burnt itself out, the flesh beneath blackened and cracked. Awareness rather than blind fury seemed to be returning to the beast. It would be a matter of heartbeats before she was after them once more. Einarr shook his head. It was too soon, much too soon. They needed more time to retreat into the swamp, to hide their trail in the tangle of weeds and filth.

Einarr kicked the werewolf crouched beside him. He pointed over to Birna. ‘Grab her and follow von Kammler,’ he told Orgrim. The werewolf turned and loped over to Birna. The huntress tried to shake him off, but he easily caught her and threw her across his furred shoulder. Birna’s accusing stare followed Einarr as Orgrim ran towards the swamp. Einarr felt a weight lift from him. He was under no delusion as to the woman’s safety, but at least he would not have to watch her die. Somehow, that had become more important to him than palaces and promises. The realisation made the blood sour in his veins. Why was he here then, if not to save Asta and his village?

Einarr turned to face the dragon. The last flickers of flame dancing across Bubos’s festering immensity sputtered and died as they were smothered by oozing pus. She snapped angrily at the empty air, then swung her head downward, glaring at Einarr with reptilian malice. The Norscan fingered his sword, the names of his ancestors a whisper on his tongue. He would see them all soon. The dragon lurched forward, the ground trembling as she moved. Her diseased breath washed across Einarr, causing his eyes to burn and his lungs to crawl. She was near enough that he could see the wiry little worms crawling between her teeth, could smell the reek of charred flesh beneath the dragon’s overwhelming stench.

The chill calm of one who knows he is already dead settled over Einarr. The battle was hopeless, but before he died, he would do everything possible to give Birna and the others their chance to escape. Like a watch dog, perhaps the guardian of the lake would not pursue the others if they retreated far enough into the fens.

Bubos almost seemed to laugh at the Norscan’s bravery, the air hissing down into her mammoth bulk as she sucked it into her obscene frame. There was no mistaking the malicious intelligence that shimmered in the dragon’s pupils. The ground shuddered again as the dragon slithered back across the mud. He had underestimated the dragon’s cunning. She wasn’t so foolish as to risk Einarr springing an unpleasant surprise on her the way Vallac had.

Einarr’s resolve faltered as fragile hope crumbled in his heart. The dragon wouldn’t waste more than a heartbeat on him, then she would plunge into the swamps and catch the others. There was no mistaking the satisfaction in Bubos’s reptilian smile as Einarr’s shoulders sagged and despair flooded through him.

Suddenly, the mud beneath Bubos exploded upward, a bellowing roar booming along the shore. Bloodied, bruised, his armour in tatters, his chest almost crushed flat, Thognathog stubbornly clung to his savage life. The ogre launched himself at the dragon, stabbing the hand still encased in the skull of the minotaur through the reptile’s lower jaw, using the plague bull’s horned head like some grotesque fist spike. Bubos reared back, bellowing in pain. The ogre roared again, throwing his other arm over the dragon’s snout and pulling the monster’s jaw closed. Bubos thrashed her head about, struggling to dislodge the ogre clamped around her face. Massive claws flailed feebly as they tried to reach around the bloated, putrid enormity of her flesh, trying to pull the ogre free.

Einarr moved to help Thognathog, but the ogre’s heads turned back towards him, fixing him with a sombre stare. ‘Thognathog die,’ his twin voices rumbled. ‘Steelfist live! Find much glory! Remember Thognathog!’

The Norscan hesitated, the idea of abandoning a comrade locked in battle repugnant to everything he believed. As though to decide him, foul green vapour hissed from the dragon’s clenched jaws, spilling around Thognathog’s powerful frame. As the foul vapours touched him, his skin withered and rotted, the ogre’s immense muscles decaying before Einarr’s very eyes. Something the size of a man’s head dropped away from the shrivelling ogre and it was with disgust that Einarr recognised the blackened husk of the ogre’s hand.

Reason demanded that he run, flee while the ogre was still able to distract Bubos. But an overwhelming urge caused Einarr to run towards the hand that had fallen into the mud. He crouched above the desiccated paw, ripping one of the fingers free from the rotting mess. He looked back up at Thognathog, the ogre’s left head wasted to little more than a skull by the dragon’s fumes. He saluted his friend’s sacrifice and reaching to his neck, fixed the ogre’s finger to the necklace Spjall the vitki had given him in what now seemed a lifetime ago.

Then he was gone, running into the swamp, the bestial roars of Thognathog and his doom thundering behind him.

Urda paused against the jagged clump of rock, her body shuddering as wracking coughs again ravaged her withered frame. She spat blood and phlegm into the mire, idly wondering how much she had left to spare. In the distance, she could hear the dragon still bellowing in rage. She nodded her head sagely. Perhaps he really would do it, overcome Bubos. Maybe she had been a bit too hasty in her judgement. The ways of Tchar were many, and even the wisest witch could not hope to see every path that the Changer of Fate laid down before her.

She coughed again, bile spilling down her chin. It had been a bold thing, to carry the carcass of the nurgling hidden beneath her robes, so close to her body. Its diseased essence had oozed into her body, polluting it with a vileness even her magic could not overcome. She knew this, had known it the moment she had killed the thing, but she also knew that the gods did not reward those who wavered in their devotion to them. Flesh was but a prison, it was what reward her devotion would bring to her soul that drove her on.

Urda knew the nurgling’s carcass would draw the dragon from the lake. It had been a part of her vision, the same vision that had coloured her dreams since they had emerged from the Frozen Sea and the disgraced champion von Kammler had started to exert his corrosive influence over Einarr. The knight cared nothing for any of them. He cared only about reclaiming the honour and glory that he had failed to claim the last time he had tried to assault Skoroth’s lair. He would cheat Einarr of his glory, cheat them all, so that he might reclaim his own lost power. Einarr would never listen to her, he was too deeply under von Kammler’s spell, too obsessed with his own promised reward. The others would never listen. There was just enough bitterness in the old witch to rail against the injustice of the deceit Tchar had played on her. To spend her last days travelling across half the world, to bring her chosen champion to the very gates of triumph only to have it all taken from them by a disgraced southlander maggot!

The witch smiled, a raspy cackle wheezing from her body. Well, if her champion could not claim the prize, then no one would. The dragon would make sure of that. There was a grim satisfaction in knowing that if she could not be a part in victory, she could at least be the instrument of defeat.

A sound among the weeds forced Urda to control the spiteful laughter shuddering through her frame. She glanced at the swamp around her, trying to penetrate the veil of diseased filth. Whatever had made the sound, it refused to reveal itself. Even so, the witch decided that she had lingered long enough out in the open. She turned towards a muddy cave just beyond the rocks. It would provide decent enough refuge from whatever was prowling among the weeds and would protect her from the dragon’s terrible eye should the great beast take wing in search of stragglers from Einarr’s doomed company.

With such speed as she could muster, Urda hobbled towards the cave. The stinking darkness loomed before her and the witch froze, her every sense afire with alarm. She reached into her bag, pulling a pinch of silver dust from a pouch within it. An incantation slithered past her lips as she cast the dust into her eyes. At once they began to glow, piercing the blackness as easily as if she’d called the sun down from the sky to illuminate it for her. A long tunnel stretched through the dripping scum of mud and ooze, human bones beyond number protruding from the slime. The crone shifted her gaze to the slobbering, drooling thing that squatted just inside the cave. Caked in the same muck that made its home, the thing looked like some insane cross between slug and frog. Eyestalks oozed up from the shapeless trunk that formed the thing’s head. Flabby webbed paws scrabbling lazily at the mud as the thing shifted its monstrous bulk.

Urda backed away from the plague beast, not eager to join its collection of bones. The daemon seemed to lose interest in her when it became apparent she would not be courteous enough to walk right into its mouth, the eyestalks sinking back into its slimy head.

The Aesling hag turned away from the cave. She would have to find another refuge to hide from the dragon, and quickly if the fading sounds of battle were any judge. The crone had not gone more than a few steps before she found her path blocked by a familiar, if grotesque, face. Covered in his own blood, his scalp torn, his arm slashed, Vallac nevertheless grinned as he stared at the witch.

‘You didn’t stay to see the dragon, hag,’ the Kurgan said. ‘One might almost think you saw it coming.’ Urda stepped back. The warrior was wounded, that much was obvious. How seriously, that was something it would take her time to decide. There were a fair number of spells she could call upon to rid herself of the Kurgan annoyance, but to cast them she would need to reach into her bag.

‘I have the second sight,’ Urda reminded him. She lifted a bony finger to indicate her rune eye. Her other hand slowly crawled towards her bag. Vallac took a step towards her and she froze.

‘Strange you did not see fit to warn the rest of us,’ he observed. ‘A suspicious man might even think you planned the whole thing.’

The remark forced Urda into action. She snapped her fingers, the slight residue of silver powder on them igniting into a brilliant flash of powder. Vallac cried out in surprise, throwing his arms to his face as he was momentarily blinded. Urda threw her other hand into the bag, reaching for the powder that would still Vallac’s stubborn life. Yet, even as her bony fingers closed around the pouch, her arm was seized from behind. A powerful strength pulled her arm back, snapping it like an old twig. Urda shrieked in pain, but her attacker held fast to her broken limb. Another powerful arm closed around her neck. Urda could feel the clammy touch of muddy steel as the cold armour brushed her papery skin.

Vallac rubbed at his eyes, then stalked towards the witch, a sneer on his twisted face. ‘You remember Berus?’ he asked. The berserker tightened his hold until Urda yelped once more in pain. ‘I found him in the swamp after he crawled out of the hole the dragon put him in. I told him we should find you. If there is one thing Berus despises more than the plague worshippers, it’s a traitor!’

Urda spat into Vallac’s gloating face. ‘This will avail you nothing! The southlander will take all the glory for himself! There will be nothing for Steelfist!’

Vallac’s calloused hand closed around the crone’s chin, forcing her head upward. He looked over her shoulder at Berus’s skeletal visage. When Vallac spoke again, it was not in the tongue of the Kurgans or even the trade patois common between the Norse. It was the brutal, braying notes of the Dark Tongue itself, the language of monsters and sorcerers. ‘Your sight does not fail you there, witch!’ Berus fixed his eyes on Vallac, trying to discern the meaning of the unfamiliar words by studying the other Kurgan’s face. ‘There will be nothing for Einarr, but the southlander will not claim the prize either! The glory will be Vallac’s and Vallac’s alone!’ He pushed the hag’s chin back still further until her neck snapped with a dull pop. Urda’s eyes rolled back in her skull as her head drooped lifelessly against her spine.

‘Too bad, hag,’ Vallac scoffed at the corpse. ‘When you played your games of treachery you didn’t realise I was playing too.’

Berus let the broken body fall from his grip.’ The witch is dead,’ he growled, suspicion in his voice, menace rumbling through the skeletal jaws of his helm. ‘Now you will show me the way into the palace, as you promised.’

‘In time,’ Vallac said. ‘We have to wait for von Kammler. He is the one who can get us inside, remember?’

The berserker nodded his horned head. ‘You are certain about what you heard the southlander and Steelfist say?’

Vallac nodded his head. The stupid southlander had never imagined that the sorcery he had unleashed upon him had changed more than just his flesh. His hearing had grown to such levels that he heard noises even Orgrim had failed to detect. That had served him well, listening in the dead hours of the night while Einarr and von Kammler made their plans. Now that knowledge would serve them well.

He looked down at Urda’s broken body. Had the witch learned something of their plans as well, or was it merely fate that caused her to be here? Either way, her presence was fortuitous and something Vallac was not going to waste.

‘Pick up the hag,’ he told Berus. ‘The crone can keep the thing in the cave occupied while we pass.’

‘Down!’

For the fifth time, they threw themselves into the muck, sinking into the filthy water as the black shadow crawled across the swamp. Every time, Einarr waited for the earth to shake, for water to explode all around him as the dragon dove down from the sky and descended upon them. Every time, the gods granted them a reprieve, the dragon’s hovering bulk sweeping across the pustulent sky to scour some other corner of the desolation for her enemies.

The Norscan rose from the dripping mess as the dragon flew off once more, her tattered wings fanning the noxious air. Convinced that things were as safe as they could be, he lifted Birna from the morass, the huntress leaning on him for support. Growling, Orgrim threw himself to the shore, shaking the filth from his fur.

‘One good thing to say for the dragon, she’s keeping all the vermin in their burrows,’ Zhardrach observed, wringing swamp water from his beard.

Einarr glanced at the dwarf, then at von Kammler. The armoured knight turned his head, scanning the terrain.

‘The cave will be near now,’ the knight said.

‘You are sure it is the best way?’ Einarr asked, again looking at the dwarf. Zhardrach smiled back at him.

‘Think I’ll knife you in the dark?’ the dwarf groused. ‘Not with that dragon flittering about! Need as much meat to throw between her and me as possible!’

Von Kammler turned back. ‘It is the only way.’

Einarr shook his head. ‘We can’t,’ he said. ‘We have to think about later.’

‘If we don’t get past Bubos, there will be no later,’ von Kammler reminded him. Grimly, Einarr nodded his head. Von Kammler turned again and forced his way through the rushes.

Zhardrach watched them go, Birna supported by Einarr as he pushed into the weeds. The dwarf sucked at his needle-sharp teeth. There was something he was missing here, something he was certain he didn’t like. His hand slipped down to the Hung knife he had hidden within the matted coils of his beard. Maybe the Norscan would be getting that stab in the dark after all.

A low growl snapped Zhardrach from his murderous thoughts. Hackles raised, Orgrim snarled at him, the werewolf’s sharp fangs gleaming wetly.

‘Allright,’ the dwarf sighed. ‘I’m moving. See, this is me moving. No need to bite.’

Einarr set Birna down beside a lumpy green stone and joined von Kammler near the opening of the cave. The knight stared grimly into the darkness.

‘You are certain this will work?’ Einarr asked him in a lowered voice, still uncomfortable with the price they would have to pay to travel this road. Even less comfortable with what it would mean later.

Von Kammler bowed his armoured head. ‘There is little mind left in the guardian. Give it prey and it may be too occupied to pay any notice of us.’

Einarr glared at the darkness, his mouth vile with the taste of betrayal. He fingered the edge of Alfwyrm. ‘We could fight our way past.’ The hollow hiss of von Kammler’s laughter echoed from behind his helm.

‘Forty of my champions thought the same,’ he said. ‘A wise man understands when he gains from losing.’

‘What about the lake?’ Einarr demanded.

‘We will burn that village when we come to it,’ the knight said. It seemed to Einarr that von Kammler’s head turned ever so slightly, as though the knight had started to glance toward Birna before he corrected himself. Disgust pulsed through Einarr’s veins, but he bit down on his rage. After they were across the lake would be the time to dissuade the southlander of his unsavoury notions.

Spitting swamp water, his body coated in muck and slime, the curses dripping from Zhardrach’s mouth were especially obscene as the dwarf crawled onto the slightly more solid ground around the cave. His eyes narrowed as he spied the dank gloom of the cave, a sinister twinkle in the smile that briefly flashed across his face. To the men, the darkness was forbidding and menacing, but to him it was friendly and inviting. He’d have the advantage now, the humans would be all but blind in that murk while he, with his sharp dwarf eyes, would barely notice the difference. A bit of knife work and it would all be over. The werewolf was the only thing that really bothered him. He wasn’t sure how well the beast’s other senses would compensate his impaired vision. He’d have to strike the werewolf first then. The southlander next, then the barbarian slut. He’d save Einarr for last. He didn’t want to rush when it came to disposing of him. He had many weeks of trial and ordeal to pay the Baersonling back for.

Zhardrach emerged from his dark ruminations, blinking in confusion as he found everyone looking at him. Even von Kammler’s steel mask seemed to have an expectant quality about it.

‘What? What did I do now?’ Zhardrach demanded. Einarr simply gestured towards the cave. Tiny alarms began to clang in the back of the dwarf’s mind. He took a step back, nearly sliding back into the mire.

‘You expect me to go first?’ Zhardrach said, shaking his head.

‘You are the dwarf,’ Einarr told him. ‘Your people riddle the mountains with this kind of burrow. Navigating places like this comes as easily to you as sailing the Sea of Claws comes to me. Lead the way.’

Zhardrach took another step back, this time slipping onto one knee as the muddy bank gave beneath his boot. The unexpected motion drew a deep snarl from Orgrim, but the dwarf kept his eyes focused on Einarr, the alarms banging away as he studied the man’s stern visage.

‘Not my people,’ Zhardrach protested. ‘Maybe you are thinking of goblins.’ Orgrim’s growl deepened and the dwarf could see the werewolf starting to circle him. Einarr took a few steps towards him, one hand closed about the hilt of his sword.

‘Do you think me fool enough to have you at my back in the dark?’ Einarr said.

Zhardrach clenched one hand into a fist and pressed it against his heart. ‘On my father’s bones, Steelfist, I wouldn’t think of causing you harm.’ The dwarf knew enough about the Norscans to know they found such oaths impressive. One of his own kind would recognise it for the worthless drivel it was. Unfortunately, it seemed that Einarr did too. The warrior took another step towards Zhardrach, a few inches of steel shining as he started to draw his sword.

Suddenly, the sky darkened and a fell reek came crushing down upon them. None of them needed to look skyward to know that their game of cat and mouse was over. Bubos had found them. The dragon’s seething cry of victory hissed across the swamp.

Zhardrach sprang forward, pushing Einarr aside, almost spilling himself across the ground in his haste to scramble into the cave. Orgrim hurriedly loped after the fleeing dwarf, von Kammler only a few steps behind him. Einarr turned and hurried to the rock, helping Birna to her feet. The ground shook as he carried her toward the cave, the impact of the dragon’s descent causing the earth to shudder. He glanced over his shoulder to find the beast lunging up from the mire, throwing her bloated bulk towards the cave. The hot filth of the dragon’s breath washed over him as he gained the foetid gloom of the tunnel. Bubos’s jaws filled the mouth of the cave, snapping in frustration as she tried to catch her fleeing prey.

Whatever relief Einarr might have felt at escaping the dragon vanished as he turned his head back around, the loathsome thing crouched against the wall of the tunnel turning his stomach. The bloated slug-toad wallowed in a slop of its own filth, hand-like tentacles wrapped around greasy bones it slavered over with a wet, bubbling orifice. As the bubbling mucus touched the bones, Einarr could see fragments of sinew and marrow dissolve and be sucked back into the abomination’s ghastly mouth. Putrid eyes on a crown of fleshy stalks spread from the top of the thing’s head to watch its mouth feed.

‘Tzeentch smiles on us, Steelfist,’ von Kammler said. ‘The thing has already found prey.’

They began to circle around the feeding daemon, all eyes locked on the loathsome sight, every breath held for fear it might disturb the beast. For some reason, Einarr felt his gaze drawn away from the daemon, drawn to the pile of bones it slobbered over. Shock gripped him as he saw the wet, gleaming skull, the stone rune eye set into its forehead.

‘Urda,’ he gasped. As he recognised the skull, a mad impulse pounded through his mind, an obsession to take the rune eye from the feeding daemon. Einarr tried to fight the insane urge, but it was all he could do to resist it long enough to hand Birna over to von Kammler.

‘Have you gone crazy, barbarian?’ the knight hissed.

Einarr shook him off, stalking towards the bloated plague beast. He could see the piled tatters of Urda’s clothes and possessions lying beside the bones.

‘The witch’s bag,’ he whispered. ‘There may be something in it we can use.’ The words sounded hollow even to him. He crept closer to the feeding daemon. Its moist, glistening hide oozed and bubbled only inches from him as he reached for Urda’s bag. He held his breath as he lifted it from the pile of bloodied rags. One of the thing’s eye stalks twisted slightly at the sound, but it remained content to drool on Urda’s femur.

Sweat beaded Einarr’s brow as he reached for the skull, unable to deny the urge that had now overwhelmed him. The mark of Tchar glowed faintly as his fingers pressed against the slimy skull, crushing the brittle bone and pulling the rune eye from its socket.

With his prize clenched in his fist, Einarr pulled back, recoiling from the daemon’s repugnant presence. But it was already too late. In reaching for the skull, he’d drawn the plague beast’s notice, its dozens of eye stalks twisting around to consider him with hungry idiocy. For a moment, man and daemon stared at one another, then a foam of mucus bubbled from the excited beast’s gash-like mouth.

Einarr backed away from the daemon, stomach churning as it slithered across the muck of the tunnel towards him. He realised now the terrible position his mad impulse had put him in. At his back was the mouth of the cave and the dragon. Before him, blocking his path, was the gibbering toad-worm. Beyond the daemon he could see von Kammler carrying Birna down the tunnel, herding Zhardrach before him. Orgrim lingered behind, his instinct to flee warring with his loyalty to the warrior.

Einarr slashed Alfwyrm against the plague beast’s slimy hide, but the rubbery flesh was thicker than whale blubber, the keen blade unable even to scratch it. For its part, the daemon took no offence at the attack, simply continuing to crawl and drool. Einarr backed away still further, giving ground before the bloated thing.

A whining howl from Orgrim was the only warning Einarr had. How he understood the import of that mournful, bestial cry, he could not say, but the werewolf’s howl created an image in his mind as vivid as that of any words. He threw himself to the left as a great scaly claw smashed through the mouth of the cave. Unable to force her head down the tunnel, Bubos had relented and was now trying to paw her prey back into the open, like a bear picking grubs from a rotten log.

The scaly member smashed into the muddy floor of the tunnel, the talons leaving deep furrows behind as the dragon pulled her leg back. Without Orgrim’s warning, more than mud would have been crushed beneath her paw. Einarr did not have time to consider the morbid thought. The daemon continued to ooze towards him, its eyes fixed on the inviting lure of his warm flesh. Between the dragon’s claws and the daemon’s corrosive maw, there was little to choose.

An idea came to him as he turned to face the dragon. Perhaps this was another unpleasant choice he didn’t have to make. Keeping one eye on the daemon’s slithering approach, Einarr waved his arms, shouting at the reptilian behemoth crouched beyond the cave. He saw the dragon’s eye glare at him from outside. Behind him, the slobbering plague beast drew closer.

Throwing himself violently against the wall of the tunnel, Einarr flattened his body as the dragon’s immense claw shot past him into the cave. The gigantic talons smashed down into the daemon’s quivering bulk. Bubos hissed with anger as her scales sizzled where the plague beast’s corrosive drool touched them. She drew her claw back, dragging the daemon with it, pulling the slobbering idiot thing into the unclean light of the swamp.

Einarr did not linger to listen to the sounds of battle as Bubos discovered just what she had dragged from the cave and it discovered her. Whichever won, dragon or daemon, he did not want to stay around to welcome the victor’s attentions. Sprinting down the tunnel, he joined Orgrim and together they hurried after von Kammler and the others.

As he ran, Einarr’s hands played with the necklace around his throat, his fingers deftly working a new talisman onto it, Urda’s rune eye joining Thognathog’s decayed finger.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Not far from the scum-covered waters of the lake, amid a tangle of reeds and weeds, a small pile of boulders rose up from the muddy earth. Almost completely covered in slime and moss, the stones were all but invisible to an observer until he was nearly standing right on top of them. The gaping hole that wormed its way through the rocks was even more hidden, a black fissure that stabbed down into the dank earth beneath the swamp. Roots and brambles covered the opening, concealing it from even the most careful scrutiny. Yet the path had been found once before, and it had been found again. Hairy grey paws clawed at the curtain of roots, tearing them aside and exposing the mouth of the hole. Wolfish eyes blinked at the harsh light of the sickly sun, trying to adjust after the darkness of the tunnel.

His canine muzzle sniffing at the noxious air, Orgrim crept from the black pit. The werewolf’s feral eyes scanned the putrescent sky, watching for any sign of the dragon. After a few tense moments he turned and snarled at the pit. In response, a muck covered hand closed about the lip of the defile. Einarr strained against the slippery sides of the hole as he lifted Birna from the pit. Beside him, von Kammler had a much easier time extracting himself from the hole, despite his armour and the weight of Zhardrach thrown across his shoulder. The knight’s display of strength and vitality was not lost on Einarr.

All through the slimy tunnels of the plague beast, Einarr had watched von Kammler with a wary caution. Of them all, it was the southlander who was in the best shape. Einarr knew the knight had his own reasons for coming to this place. If the knight was contemplating treachery, he would do so soon.

The knight dropped Zhardrach into the mud, snapping his fingers and motioning for Orgrim to keep an eye on the dwarf. Then the southlander bent back towards the pit. His steel mask glowered down at Einarr for a moment, then his armoured hands were reaching down and helping him lift Birna from the hole. The huntress groaned as she collapsed into the mud, unable to stand without von Kammler’s support. He pulled at her leg, twisting it around to study the ragged wound that ran through it. Black worms squirmed through the meat, pus dripping from the crimson boils that surrounded it. The knight shook his head.

‘She belongs to the plague god now,’ von Kammler’s chilly voice declared. ‘It will not be long before he claims her.’

With a surge of strength, Einarr sprang from the pit, fighting his own feelings of fatigue and despair to stay on his own feet as he gained the surface. The Norscan knelt beside the stricken huntress, putting himself between von Kammler and Birna. He reached his hand to brush the damp hair from her forehead. He felt a wave of rage and disgust flood through him. Even now the gods were still changing her, making her into a cruel mockery. Birna’s face had become an almost perfect mirror of Asta’s, even the expression that suffered beneath her fever was Asta’s. Red hate routed the despair that gnawed at his strength. Einarr felt his hand close around the hilt of Alfwyrm. He suddenly realised that his back was to von Kammler. Let the knight make his move now, he thought. I need something to kill.

‘Your woman will die soon, Steelfist,’ von Kammler said. ‘But she may still be of use to us.’

Einarr looked away from Birna to glare at the southlander. ‘There is no need for that,’ he growled. Whatever expression the knight wore behind his mask, there was no mistaking the menace and assumed authority when he spoke.

‘The dwarf can fight, she cannot,’ von Kammler said. ‘She is useless to us and will only slow us down. My way, she will still help us.’ The expression on Einarr’s face darkened. He could feel the grip of Alfwyrm pressing into his palm as his hand tightened around it. Von Kammler’s stance remained casual, as though the knight were unaware or unconcerned that the Norscan was a heartbeat from driving his blade into the southlander’s chest.

Einarr’s hold on Alfwyrm relaxed as he suddenly realised von Kammler was right to be unafraid. Without the knight, they would never be able to cross the lake and reach the palace. Without the knight, he would never seize the treasure Tchar demanded, never claim the reward he had been promised. He looked down at the sick woman lying beside him, Asta’s face looking back up at him. If he failed now, everything would be lost. All their struggles, all their ordeals would mean nothing. He could still prevail, still set everything right. That was the only glory he was interested in – to undo everything he had done.

Von Kammler nodded his armoured head. ‘We are agreed then, Norscan?’ the knight’s grim voice hissed.

Before Einarr could force an answer to his lips, Orgrim spun about, glaring at the wall of dead weeds and twisted trees that rose behind them. The werewolf’s hair bristled as an angry growl rumbled from his throat. The weeds parted and two familiar figures strode into the soggy clearing. Vallac made a placating gesture with his hand, trying to appease Orgrim’s agitation. Beside him, the hulking Berus glared at von Kammler.

‘Lord Tzeentch be praised!’ Vallac shouted. ‘We are not the only ones to escape the dragon!’

Einarr shifted his gaze from the sinister knight to the pair of Kurgan warriors. He knew he should feel relief to see them, that their strength would be a great asset assaulting the halls of the Plague Lord. Instead, a black dread coursed through his body, a fell premonition of doom. ‘We have eluded the dragon, for now,’ Einarr told Vallac, every word fighting past the wary caution that filled him. He raised his hand to the band around his neck, his finger brushing against the stone eye fastened there. ‘Urda was not so fortunate,’ he said. The smile that teased the corners of Vallac’s twisted face told Einarr that however the witch had died, it had not been without the Kurgan’s help.

‘There are others who should not be fortunate,’ Berus snarled. The berserker hefted his axe, glaring straight into von Kammler’s smouldering eyes. Einarr leapt to his feet, ripping Alfwyrm from its sheath. Orgrim began to prowl around the two Kurgans, his hackles raised. Vallac placed a restraining hand against the berserker’s chest. Berus turned his head, glowering at the other Kurgan. For a moment, it seemed he would bury his axe in Vallac before confronting von Kammler.

‘The southlander is still important to us,’ Vallac reminded Berus. ‘After Skoroth has been dealt with, after the prize is ours, then you can take his skull for Khorne.’ Berus looked unconvinced, but slowly he lowered his axe.

‘After the Plague Lord is dead,’ he warned von Kammler. The knight simply nodded.

‘I would not stand between a fool and his folly,’ he said.

Vallac strode across the clearing, leaving the brooding Berus to his own bloody thoughts. He stepped towards Einarr, hesitating when he saw that the Norscan had not lowered his sword. The Kurgan shifted his attention away from Einarr, looking down at Birna. He shook his head.

‘The southlander is right,’ Vallac said. ‘Your woman is already gone. She will only slow us down.’ He tapped the curved sword at his side. ‘I can do it, if you like.’ There was no malice in Vallac’s offer, rather it was spoken in a humble, conciliatory tone. To the practical view of the Kurgan, there was no appreciation of repugnance in a deed that had to be done.

‘She will live,’ Einarr growled back. He lowered his sword. With his other hand, he pulled the torn remains of Urda’s bag from his belt.

‘There is no help in there,’ Vallac said. ‘The witch used it all to keep herself going.’

Einarr crushed the ripped bag in his hands and dropped it into the mud.

‘She has to die now, Steelfist,’ Vallac persisted. ‘Otherwise her spirit will belong to the plague god.’

‘No,’ Einarr said, the word dripping from his tongue like venom. He reached beneath his bear-skin cloak, removing Spjall’s medicine bag. They’d used almost everything to fend off the sickness of the Plague Lord’s realm, but there was still something left. Einarr’s hand closed around a small bundle of wet, stick-like roots wrapped in sealskin. Vallac’s brow knitted as he watched Einarr remove the sticks, grinding them between his hands until they were reduced to a dripping pulp that looked more like blood than anything else.

‘An old Norse remedy,’ Einarr told Vallac. The Kurgan’s expression remained dubious, but he watched with intense interest as Einarr lifted Birna’s head and poured the pulp into her mouth. With effort, the huntress swallowed the paste. ‘She will not die.’

Einarr heard the words of his lie dance through the swamp, the hollow echoes mocking him as they faded into nothing. He’d done nothing to help Birna, she would thrive or fade at the whim of the plague god. What he had given her was bloodroot, a terrible herb known to the vitkis of the Norse. There was strength in bloodroot, but there was no healing within it. Under its effects, a man would feel strength flood back through his body even as life faded from it. Einarr had seen warriors fighting with missing arms and collapsed chests under the effect of bloodroot. He’d seen reavers rowing longships back from a raid with their innards spilling from their split bellies. Bloodroot was a thing of death, not of life. It was also the last thing he had to offer Birna.

Von Kammler watched Einarr minister to the huntress, then turned and looked up into the sky. The knight raised his arms to the leprous heavens, sibilant notes rasping from behind his mask as he called out to the Realm of Chaos and the forces beyond. The air grew colder, the weeds about the knight’s feet shivering as they sprouted new and ghastly growths. A keening wail throbbed above them and even Einarr’s eyes were drawn skyward as the leprous tapestry was torn by a pulsating glow of violet and azure. Lightning flashed behind the tear in the sky, lavender clouds spilling through the rupture. The ground shuddered, quivering violently as an undulating earthquake rocked the festering domain. A fierce, silent wind tore through the realm, snapping trees and uprooting weeds as the stagnant air swirled madly across the land. Splotches of pallid putrescence sprouted throughout the leprous sky, like voracious growths of mould.

Einarr held Birna close to him, fighting to rise as the ground quivered beneath them. Orgrim pressed his belly into the mud, howling wildly as his animal instincts were overcome by the awful sorcery pulsing all around them. Berus threw himself from the path of a tree as it crashed into the clearing, its withered bark splitting as organ-like growths of shimmering fungus erupted from it. Vallac abased himself, wailing in his savage language, shrieking the glories of Tzeentch to the heavens.

Then von Kammler lowered his arms and fell silent. As quickly as it had formed, the tear in the sky collapsed upon itself. The silent wind died away, the stagnant air as heavy and humid as ever. The ground, however, continued to tremble, but not with the rolling undulations of an earthquake. The earth pulsed and heaved, bubbling like boiling soup. The ground burst in muddy explosions, showering the warband in filth. Sink-holes opened and closed all around them, sucking trees and rocks down into the blackness beneath the domain. Narrowly, Einarr avoided being sucked down into one of the holes, some sixth sense urging him to leap the instant before the ground beneath him collapsed.

‘What have you done, southlander?’ Einarr roared as he recovered from his near escape, checking to see that the violent motion had not further harmed the woman he held in his arms.

Von Kammler thrust his steel arm skyward once more. ‘I have unlocked the gates of Skoroth’s palace!’ he bellowed, triumph booming in his voice. ‘Behold! They come!’

Descending from the rotting sky were things of nightmare and madness. At first they looked like flickering lights, falling stars that changed colour with each passing breath. As they fell towards the quivering ground, substance could be seen within the shimmering light. What was within the light had mass, but was without shape or form. Einarr could see the rippling substance within the lights twisting and writhing, as though consumed by some inner flame. He had the impression of eyes and fangs, horns and spines, lashing tails and drooling mouths.

Von Kammler strode boldly towards the first of the daemon-lights, stretching his hand towards it. A susurrus of slobbering noises emanated from the thing and it fell still closer to the slimy earth, hovering just above the mud and mire. ‘The stallions of Tzeentch!’ the knight said, his voice quivering with both excitement and fear. Von Kammler lifted his armoured bulk onto the flattened platform that formed the daemon’s back. The thing made wet, hungry noises as it felt the knight’s weight pressing down upon it, but made no move to unseat its rider.

‘This is how you plan to get into the palace!’ The outburst came from Zhardrach, the dwarf perched atop a large stone, unable to decide which he should fear more – the hungry earth or the glowing daemons von Kammler had summoned.

‘They will carry us across the lake,’ von Kammler said. He looked into Einarr’s eyes. ‘There is no other way.’

Biting down on his own fear, Einarr carried Birna to another of the slavering, hellish daemons. The feathered skin that covered its shivering form crumbled into ash as he stepped onto its back, a smell of incense rising from the daemon’s unclean essence. It gibbered at Einarr. Loathing filled him as he realised that mixed into the thing’s lunatic mutterings were mortal words and mortal voices. Thousands of tiny eyes opened up along the daemon’s body, each staring up at him with vile hunger.

The earth continued to quiver, the number of sink-holes increasing along with the speed of their onset. Vallac hurriedly mounted another of the floating discs. Snarling his own distaste, Orgrim pounced onto the back of one of the daemons, his claws sinking deep into its flesh in his attempt to secure a firm hold. Berus glared at the things, making no move to mount one of them.

‘Stay here and die,’ Einarr told him, ‘or be a man and conquer your fear.’ The Kurgan turned his skeletal helm towards Einarr and the Norscan could feel the Kurgan’s hate burning into him. Slowly, heedless of the boiling ground all around him, the berserker strode to one of the daemons.

‘You’d better get moving too,’ Einarr warned Zhardrach. The dwarf stared at the closest of the daemons and shook his head. Then he felt the rock he was on shudder. With a curse, the dwarf scrambled off his refuge. He had barely cleared the boulder before it was sucked down into the slimy earth. With another curse, Zhardrach flung himself at the daemon, hastily climbing onto its scaly back.

No sooner had Zhardrach mounted his ghastly steed than the entire flock of daemons was in motion, shooting up into the sky like flaming arrows. Before Einarr could even begin to consider their dizzying ascent, the daemons changed direction, speeding out across the swamps. The festering morass passed away beneath them faster than the eye could follow. Then they were flying above the banks of the lake, the scum-covered waters slithering against the shore.

As the daemons flew above those foul waters, however, they began to shudder. Einarr could feel them losing speed, feel the strength draining from them. The foul magics of the Plague Lord were weakening their daemon steeds. He risked a look back, watching as one of the riderless discs lost its glow. The daemon’s substance became black with disease and it fell from the sky, sucked down into the noxious embrace of the lake.

The Norscan clutched Birna closer to him, trying not to think what would happen if their own steed were to lose its strength. He turned away from the doom that had claimed the daemon, fixing his eyes on the jagged spire of the palace, watching as it slowly drew nearer. His entire being urged the daemon to fly faster, to close the gap before its own strength failed. Instead, their approach slowed with every heartbeat.

A hideous wail of agony tore Einarr’s eyes from the tower. Behind him, another disc plummeted from the sky, diving into the festering sludge of the lake. As it struck the scummy water, a black cloud rose up from the slime. The cloud flew upwards, driving straight towards them. As the speed of the daemons faltered, that of the cloud increased. Soon Einarr’s ears were filled with a deafening drone, the buzz of a million flies. The hairy, biting things swirled all around as the swarm-cloud engulfed them. Einarr swatted at the abominable vermin, crushing them beneath his fingers, grinding them into paste. But for every one he killed, a hundred more settled upon him, their jaws chewing at his flesh. His shut his eyes against the biting mass of filthy life, struggling to breathe through the carpet of insect life that crawled into his nose and mouth.

Suddenly, a shrill cry rose above even the buzz of the flies. The sound was repeated from nearby, shrieked into the leprous haze by a hundred voices. A few moments later, the crawling mass that coated Einarr was gone, flying from him as quickly as it had come. He dared to open his eyes. Nearby he could see a great flock of pallid vultures tearing at the flies with their beaks and talons even as the gnawing insects threatened to swarm over them. It was a hopeless struggle, but at least they would be free of Nurgle’s flies for a time. He looked at Birna. The huntress smiled weakly back at him, oblivious to the tiny bites that peppered her entire body.

‘I saw the vultures and knew they could help,’ she told him, pointing a shaking finger towards the palace. The structure had drawn much closer now, near enough that he could make out its grotesque details, the polished bone that seemed to form its walls, the iron spikes that peppered its battlements. The rotting meat that shuddered on those spikes, even the most wasted tatters seeming to still cling to some kind of obscene life.

The daemon steeds descended once more, diving towards a great balcony that looked out over the diseased lake. The red, glistening mass looked more like raw muscle than stone or wood. It throbbed with excitement as the daemons flew across it, for a moment it seemed that it would sprout arms and rip them from the sky.

The balcony opened into a great hall, a chamber more colossal even than the ruins they had seen in the swamp. Einarr was struck by tales of sky-titans and their mighty strongholds. Surely no other race could have built with such enormity. Then he noted the leathery floor, the walls that wailed and moaned, the ceiling of dripping foulness, and he knew that no mortals had built this place. Only daemons used living flesh to construct their castles.

The daemon steeds finally stopped in the middle of the hall, hovering above the obscene floor. Einarr forced himself to step down from the daemon’s back, he would be the first of them to set foot in Skoroth’s palace. His boots scuffed against the leathery floor, drawing blood from the bruised flesh.

Slowly, the others dismounted their own steeds, dropping to the rotting, oozing floor. Zhardrach cursed and kicked at the ground as he stumbled away from his steed, sending what looked like the festering stumps of fingers flying across the hall.

Berus glowered at the vile hall, staring at the moaning walls. Scrawny bodies, fused by some vile magic, struggled to free themselves from the walls, begging the berserker to kill them in a hundred tongues. Even Berus looked disgusted, turning away and staring instead at the hovering discs of Tzeentch. There was a fearsome, expectant quality about the ghastly daemons, their hungry eyes burning even more fiercely than before.

Einarr set Birna against the floor, turning to face the others. He set himself for what was coming, reminding himself that it had to be done. There was no other way.

‘They wait for what was promised to them,’ von Kammler said. He turned his head towards Zhardrach. Then Einarr saw the knight’s gaze shift, his eyes fixed upon Birna.

‘Then they will be cheated!’ Berus roared. The berserker leapt towards von Kammler, his axe crashing against the knight’s arm. The southlander was thrown back, his armour shrieking as its molten blood erupted into the air. Von Kammler drew his mace, moving to block Berus’s next attack, but as he turned to attack the berserker, he was struck again from the side. Vallac’s face sneered at him from above a dripping sword.

Einarr drew Alfwyrm, but wondered if he should help the beleaguered knight. The decision was taken from him as Birna’s hand tugged at his leg. ‘The dwarf,’ she warned. It was already too late, Zhardrach crashed into Einarr, spilling him onto the floor. The dwarf’s powerful arms closed around Einarr’s own, pulling them back. The dwarf planted his boot against Einarr’s neck, crushing his face against the rotting floor, breaking his nose. The floor tore open under the assault, a lattice of dismembered and decayed arms pressing against him.

‘Feed me to daemons!’ the dwarf roared. ‘They tried that in Uzkulak! But Zhardrach is still here!’ Einarr could feel his strength straining against the dwarf’s rage, fighting to keep him from breaking the Norscan’s arms. He felt the dwarf’s spittle slap against his face. The pressure on his neck vanished as Zhardrach lifted his foot. The dwarf glared down at him, boot raised above his head. ‘Been a long time since I went grobi-culling,’ he laughed. ‘Lets see if I can’t cave in that traitorous skull of yours with one stomp!’

Before the murderous kick could smash down into his head, a feral growl rumbled across Einarr. The powerful grip on his arms vanished. Einarr rolled away from the diseased hole in the floor, spitting his revulsion from his mouth. He could see Orgrim, a frenzy of claws and fangs, tearing at Zhardrach, the dwarf’s armour shredding beneath the werewolf’s fury. The jagged knife the dwarf held was wet with Orgrim’s life, but the Aesling renegade did not slacken his assault.

Einarr recovered Alfwyrm from the floor. He looked away from Orgrim’s frenzied attack on Zhardrach, wondering if the werewolf would even be able to tell friend from foe in the grip of such fury. Across the hall, he could see von Kammler still struggling against the two Kurgans. The combined attacks of Vallac and Berus had worn the southlander down, it was not his armour alone that now bled onto the rotten floor.

The knight noticed Einarr watching him. The sight infuriated him and he smashed Vallac to the floor with a brutal blow of his mace. He tried to do the same with Berus, but the berserker leapt from the path of his blow. The burning axe Berus wielded flashed through the gloom, cracking down against von Kammler’s hand. Steel, flesh, and bone parted beneath the blow and von Kammler’s hand fell to the floor, his mace frozen in the now dead hand.

Einarr felt his own hand burn as von Kammler’s was cut from his body. The rune seared into his flesh glowed faintly and Einarr recalled the similar sigil that had marked the knight’s hand. He was not alone in appreciating what the fallen champion had lost. Berus sprang away from the stricken knight as the hovering daemons converged upon him, enveloping von Kammler. With the mark of Tzeentch cut from him, there was nothing to keep the daemons from attacking the man who had dared call them from the Realm of the Gods.

Von Kammler struggled beneath the biting, ripping mass of the daemons, trying to tear himself free. The air grew chill once more, the entire palace shuddering as once again a hole was cleft between the spheres. The lavender clouds billowed around von Kammler and his destroyers as man and daemon were sucked from the world of mortals. Only the knight’s last echoing shriek and his severed hand remained.

Vallac rose from the floor, cradling the wound that dripped from the side of his head. He looked across the hall at Einarr. The two locked eyes for a moment, each man staring into the other’s soul, seeing the indomitable force within the other. From the first, Vallac had never intended to share anything with the Norscan, any more than Einarr would allow the Kurgan to stand between him and what he had been promised.

‘Berus,’ Vallac called to the berserker. ‘Now we deal with the other traitor.’ Berus nodded, turning his skeletal helm toward Einarr. The berserker gestured at him with his axe.

‘Tonight your skull will lie before the Skull Throne,’ Berus promised.

Einarr wiped blood from his face, flinging the droplets at Berus. ‘For one of Kharnath’s butchers, you talk too much.’ The Norscan hefted Alfwyrm in his hand and stalked towards the Kurgan. ‘Let’s make this quick. There are other people I have to kill.’

The berserker roared, hurling himself at Einarr. Before the Kurgan could reach him, however, the entire hall shook, spilling both men to the fleshy floor. For a moment, Einarr thought the hideous daemon steeds had returned, then a sickeningly familiar reek assaulted him.

Turning his head towards the balcony, Einarr saw the opening filled by an enormous shape of festering scales and oozing sores. Bubos’s loathsome eye glared down at him and the dragon threw back her head in a hissing roar of satisfaction.

The huntress had found her prey.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The dragon’s bloated bulk filled the front of the great hall, her rotting skin peeling where the plague beast’s venom had corroded it, her mouth dripping pus where Thognathog’s fist had punched through it. Yet for all her wounds, there was no mistaking the awesome power that still pulsed through her enormous frame. As she moved, her claws ripped through the skin of the floor, bones snapping beneath her tremendous weight.

Every eye focused on the monstrosity. Orgrim looked up from the savaged remains of Zhardrach, snarling at the reptilian behemoth. From the floor, Birna weakly raised her head, eyes wide with terror. Vallac stepped back, his misshapen face turning pale as he met the dragon’s gaze. In the centre of the hall, even the two combatants were compelled to shift their attention from their foe to the even deadlier enemy that now tore her way into the gallery.

Einarr glanced away from the advancing dragon, locking eyes with Berus. The berserker nodded his helmed head.

‘I will see you in the next world, Norscan,’ Berus growled. Without further pause, he tightened his hold on his axe and charged the reptile. Einarr watched the Kurgan for a moment, then turned and rushed at the dragon from the other side. He hoped the tactic would divert the monster’s attention, force her to choose between her foes, allow at least one of them to sink his steel in her diseased bulk. Even as he ran towards Bubos, he knew how desperate such a hope was.

The dragon hesitated, her baleful eye fixing on the blood-mad Kurgan, her lips pulling back from her fangs. Air sizzled against her teeth as she sucked a deep breath into her mighty lungs. She drew her head back, her chest expanding as the malignancy inside her grew. Einarr could almost see the air turning foul with corruption. Like a striking serpent, Bubos’s head shot forward, her jaws gaping wide as she sent a cloud of burning pestilence rushing toward Berus. The berserker dove through the cloud, sparing himself the brunt of its terrible power. The floor behind him bubbled as the fume consumed it, skin dripping away as it was reduced to a greasy slime. The wall behind Berus shrieked in agony as the dragon’s breath struck it, the wasted bodies that formed it shrivelling before Bubos’s pestilence.

The berserker, his armour steaming as it fell from him in molten strips, smashed the edge of his axe into the dragon’s snout, crunching through scale and bone. Bubos’s squirming blood vomited from the wound, bathing Berus in her rancid gore. The Kurgan screamed, his cry a hideous mix of agony and exultation. He clung to his axe, his hands locked in a death-grip around the haft of the weapon. Roaring in her own pain, the dragon reared back, shaking her head, trying to rip Berus free.

Einarr seized the dragon’s distraction, lunging at the reptile, stabbing Alfwyrm into the wound in her neck. Maggots the size of his fist erupted from the newly opened cut, slithering with loathsome life down his blade. Before the Norscan could recover from his shock and disgust, Bubos’s claw slammed into him, hurling him back. The warrior crashed into the wailing wall of flesh, feeling bones crack under the impact. He barely paused to allow the sparks to fade from his vision before lurching back to his feet. The gods continued to smile on him – none of the bones he had heard snap had been his own.

Looking up, he saw the dragon looming above him. Einarr dove toward the beast’s belly as she brought her clawed foot smashing down. The lattice of arms snapped beneath her brutal attempt to crush the Norscan and Bubos’s enormous body shuddered as she sagged into the hole. Einarr exploited her momentary distress, thrusting upward, exulting as the dragon’s putrid ichor slopped from her veins. Bubos reared back from the attack, the palace shuddering as her bloated immensity surged towards the balcony. Something grey and feral sprang over Einarr, pouncing on the recoiling dragon. Orgrim’s savage claws tore into the reptile’s neck, the spines jutting from his ribs fastening onto her like the spiny legs of a tick.

The dragon’s rage built, her tail lashing about, smashing into walls, cleaving them apart like a butcher’s blade. Her folded wings slapped against her body, the foreclaws trying to pick Orgrim from her neck, to swipe Berus from her snout. The berserker stubbornly defied her attempts to tear him away, but one of the talons struck Orgrim, ripping into the werewolf and throwing him down onto the floor. Einarr saw the Aesling’s leg snap as he struck, bending like a twig beneath the strength of Bubos.

Berus continued to cling to his weapon, striving to rip it free so he could drive it once more into the dragon. The ghastly eye glared at him, the eerie pupils fixed on his defiant frame. The wing talons swiped again and again at him, striving to knock him free, but she could not properly focus her unnatural vision on him, her strikes always aimed too high to connect. The Kurgan snarled at her handicap, spitting at the massive organ even as his armour continued to drip from his limbs. The rage of the Blood God was in him now. If the dragon thought he would simply wilt and die then she knew nothing of Khorne’s power. A crimson light of hate and slaughter began to surround his withering body.

With a roar of such fury that even the dragon’s eye blinked shut, Berus ripped his axe from the dragon’s snout. The blood that steamed against his body, that dissolved his flesh and ate his bones only served to fuel his frenzy. Lifting the axe high over his head, he charged the dragon’s eye.

Bubos’s head pulled back, instinctively reacting to the madman driving towards her eye. No longer anchored by his axe, Berus lost his footing, tumbling from the dragon’s snout. Bubos’s head shot forward again, her triple jaws snapping shut on the falling berserker. Legs vanished down the dragon’s gullet as Berus was bitten in half. His torso slammed against the pitted floor, guts spilling from the horrendous wound. For a moment, he struggled to lift himself, then even the rage of Khorne deserted him and Berus fell back into the widening pool of his own blood.

Einarr looked away from the berserker’s destruction, glaring back at the monster. The dragon continued to paw at her bleeding snout, trying to ease the pain that pulsed through her. For the moment she seemed oblivious to her other foes. Einarr started to approach her again, pausing as his boot struck something lying on the ground. The same unspeakable compulsion he had felt before gripped him, forcing him to lean down and retrieve it, a sliver of metal from von Kammler’s gauntlet, the living steel feeling warm against his skin. Einarr hastily stuffed the scrap of armour in his meal bag.

As he rose to face the dragon once more, his world exploded into a sheet of crimson. Sharp, stinging pain flared through the back of his skull. Einarr turned, spinning with the speed a lifetime spent hunting and raiding had given him. He saw the crooked sword slash at him again, twisting so that the blade caught only the edge of his cloak. Vallac’s twisted face glared at him, the Kurgan’s eyes narrowed with spite and treachery. No, there was something more lurking there, behind Vallac’s eyes. Something that had been there from the start, but which Einarr had failed to recognise until now. Envy, jealousy that it had been the Norscan and not himself who had been marked by Tchar, who had been chosen to recover the Dark Claw for the Windlord. Now, with Einarr so near to his goal, Vallac had given in to his wounded pride, striking out at the man who had been given the honours Vallac felt were rightfully his.

The ground trembled as the dragon’s foot stamped against the floor. Instinctively, Einarr started to turn back towards the monster. Vallac smiled as he saw the mistake, slashing his sword at the Norscan’s belly. Again, the arrogance of the Kurgan caused him to underestimate Einarr’s reflexes and agility. From the corner of his eye, he saw Vallac’s arm start to move, driving the crooked sword at him once more. He spun with the blow, thrusting Alfwyrm into the arm of his attacker. Vallac backed away, clutching at his injury. Einarr stared at the traitor, death in his gaze. A cruel smile twisted Vallac’s mutated features. The swollen sack beneath his chin swelled and Einarr knew the dragon’s fire wasn’t the only flame he had to fear.

An arrow stabbed into the floor beside Vallac, drawing a wail of pain from the living flesh. The Kurgan spun, scowling as a second arrow narrowly missed him. Einarr lunged at the distracted marauder, driving Alfwyrm towards his enemy’s skull. But the Kurgan had not survived so long upon the cold, brutal steppes without his own balance of fortune and fate. Ignoring the archery, Vallac caught Alfwyrm with his crooked blade, blocking the Norscan’s blow. A savage kick to Einarr’s knee brought the northman low. Vallac started to move in for the kill, but the assassin’s face grew pale with horror. Instantly he was on his heels, fleeing down the hall.

Einarr did not have to look to know what had frightened the Kurgan. The warrior dove across the floor, rolling as the dragon’s claw came smashing down once more. Like an angry child trying to crush an ant, Bubos’s talon pursued him, gouging deep craters in the ground, sending bone and skin spraying through the hall. Some of the gruesome debris struck Einarr, cutting him where cloak and armour failed to protect him.

Bubos’s festering eye focused on the Norscan and she lifted her paw once more, determined this time to smash the annoyance into pulp. Einarr heard the reptile’s hiss of satisfaction as her claw came hurtling towards him.

Suddenly, the hall shuddered with an ear-splitting cacophony, a keening scream that vibrated through the very bones of everything it struck. Einarr crushed his hands to his head, trying to block out the noise. The dragon reared back, her claw crashing down a few feet from Einarr’s body. Bubos raged from side to side, her tail lashing the walls mercilessly, scattering scraps of screaming, festering humanity in every direction. Her talons dug into the floor, digging great pits to swallow her suffering. Her wings snapped open, smashing against the ceiling, causing chunks of flesh and coils of tendon to rain down into the hall. From the dragon’s jaws, noxious fumes scorched everything she turned upon.

There was no system or strategy to the dragon’s fury, only wretched madness and anguish, the unthinking rage of the maimed and ruined. As her head turned to blast one of the walls, Einarr saw the black arrow sticking from Bubos’s eye, the dripping paste that drizzled from the ruptured organ. Blind, the dragon had gone berserk, lashing out at everything around her. Einarr rose to his feet, retreating before she recovered enough of her wits to remember the little man she had been trying to smash.

He found Birna leaning against one of the walls, her bow still in her hands. The huntress smiled weakly as he ran to her. ‘I felt I should do my part,’ she said. ‘I only wish I hadn’t missed that Kurgan scum.’ She pointed a shaking hand to one of the corridors that opened into the hall. ‘He ran into there. I had to choose between stopping him and helping you.’

Einarr pulled her to him, supporting her weakening frame. ‘At least you put out the orm’s eye.’

‘It was too big to miss,’ Birna quipped, trying to hide the pain in her voice. Einarr pushed her towards another of the passageways that opened into the hall. He could not say how, but he knew it was the way they needed to take. It was the same impulse that had made him plunge into the forest to find Birna so long ago, that had made him set out across the Frozen Sea. Somehow, he felt he could trust it. Somehow he knew he couldn’t disobey the urge even if he tried.

Orgrim’s broken body limped over to join them, the werewolf’s muzzle singed by the dragon’s blood. Einarr looked past Orgrim, into the hall where Bubos still raged. He could see figures running down the far end of the macabre hall, drawn no doubt by the dragon’s fury. Let the denizens of the palace try to contain the wyrm’s rage, Einarr decided, they had done their best. As he turned to urge his remaining comrades deeper into the passage, his eyes glanced across Zhardrach’s torn and mangled form. Another urge swelled up inside him, and like the instinct that drove him on, Einarr knew it was too powerful to resist.

‘Stay here,’ he growled and before huntress or ulfwerenar could protest, he ran back into the great hall. The dragon’s immense claws slashed the floor, digging deep gouges in the lattice, exposing the stagnant depths beneath the hall. Einarr lunged over the crevices, feeling the floor sag beneath him as he crashed against the other side. He pressed himself flat as Bubos’s paw swiped the air above him before raking across the shrieking walls, spilling loops of entrail into the air. He was on his feet again in a heartbeat, racing toward the dwarf’s carcass. The foremost of the guards rushing into the hall saw him, shouting excitedly in their bubbling voices. Razor-edged javelins slammed into the floor around him as the Hung warriors hurled their weapons at the intruder. The Norscan pressed on through the hail of spears, not slacking his steps even when a bamboo shaft slammed into his arm, shuddering as it glanced from his armour. He kept his eyes fixed on the dwarf, drawn by the urge that burned inside him.

The werewolf had done his gruesome work well, Zhardrach’s organs lay strewn around his ripped and mutilated body. Something wet and swollen squelched beneath his boot as Einarr quickly leaned over the dwarf, his hand reaching to Zhardrach’s beard. As his fingers closed around one of the coiled beard locks, Zhardrach’s eyes snapped open. Einarr hastily drew back as the dwarf’s fist came sweeping up, his knife still clutched in his hand. The beard lock tore free as Einarr recoiled from the slaver’s last effort, but whatever pain Zhardrach was still able to feel did not diminish the spiteful smile he wore.

An instant later, the dwarf’s hate was obliterated as a scaly leg smashed down into the floor. Einarr was thrown back by the impact, watching in awe as the power of the dragon caused Zhardrach’s head to pop from his neck and go spinning across the hall like a cork shooting from a bottle. The Norscan froze as the dragon’s immense head leaned down, her ruined eye spilling down her snout. The reptile’s tongue flickered from her mouth, trying to pick Einarr’s scent from the filth of the palace. He held his breath, trying to will the heart hammering away within his chest to grow quiet. For a tense moment, the blind dragon loomed before him, her flickering tongue only inches from his face.

Then the howls of the Hung crashed around them. Bubos reared back, spitting fiery death into the charging warriors. Men shrivelled into ash and cinder beneath the dragon’s diseased fire, their bodies immolated by her corruption. Shocked, horrified that the monster had turned on them, most of the survivors fell back, screaming in dismay, or abasing themselves before her in some mad attempt to appease her wrath.

Einarr used the distraction presented by the Hung to make his escape. With the dragon raging above him, he made a reckless charge back across the hall, to the passageway where he had left Birna and Orgrim.

By force of will, Einarr leapt to his feet and ran for the passageway. The Norscan ignored the pain that pulsed through his body, the image of Zhardrach and the Hung warriors giving him more than enough incentive to keep moving. Only the thought of Berus’s mutilated torso gave him pause. He turned, looking across the hall to where the berserker’s remains lay crumpled against the wall.

He lingered for an instant, watching as the Kurgan’s body bled out, waiting for the same mad impulse that had forced him to Zhardrach’s side to drive him toward the berserker. When it did not come, he understood why. Von Kammler had made a mistake, they weren’t intended to be nine, and that mistake had caused Einarr to make another. Berus had never been intended to be one of them, the proof was in Einarr’s own mind, that lack of a fiery urge to rush to the dead berserker and claim from him some manner of talisman, as he had with his other fallen comrades. Einarr cursed his error as he ran back towards the corridor. How very different things might have turned out without the berserker in their midst.

Birna’s arms flew around him as he gained the relative safety of the tunnel, her lips crushing against his. Then her fist cracked into the side of his jaw.

‘Have the gods made you mad?’ she demanded. From where he crouched against the floor, Orgrim gave voice to a low growl, seemingly in agreement with the huntress. ‘Why by Tchar’s shadow would you go back in there?’

Einarr reached to his neck, fastening the scrap of von Kammler’s gauntlet and the beard-lock from Zhardrach to his necklace. ‘Collecting keepsakes,’ he replied, pushing Birna deeper into the passage. ‘But there is nothing more to keep us here. For now what guards this place can muster will be busy with the dragon. It would be unwise to depend on her to keep them so.’

With his grim warning hovering over them, Einarr led his remaining comrades deeper into the palace and whatever nightmares called it home.

Bubos continued to rage through the great hall, her talons and tail ripping into walls and floor, her boiling breath searing the roof and causing it to shred in wet, dripping tatters. The Hung warriors kept their distance, watching the dragon’s blind tantrum in silent, mortal terror. There was no thought of trying to contain her fury, they knew only too well what the beast was capable of.

The black terror that filled them was routed by an even greater fear. A crawling, scuttling horror that stole upon them, a foulness that repulsed not merely flesh, but soul as well. The Hung prostrated themselves upon the floor, shivering in dread. The floor shuddered with them and from the wretches entombed in the walls came sobbing wails even more agonised than the ones Bubos had caused.

Into the great hall came a shambling enormity, a stumbling, slithering loathsomeness. Where its shadow fell, blisters sprouted; where its legion of rotting feet stepped, mould sprang into vile life; where its heaving exhalations touched, disease flourished. Those Hung who dared lift their eyes to gaze upon it felt them water, tears of pus running down their faces. Instantly, warriors encased in rusted armour fell upon the heretics, cutting them down where they grovelled upon the floor. The butchered remains they threw before the shuffling feet that marched through the great hall.

It had a body. Thousands of them, naked and writhing, fused into one abhorrent mass by the foulest of sorceries. Every slave’s mouth moved in silent agony, displaying the jagged stump where a tongue had been torn from mouth. There was a time to indulge in the sounds of misery, and there was a time to appreciate the silent contemplation of agony. He who was borne into the great hall upon the living palanquin prided himself on understanding that delicate balance.

‘Bubos, be still!’ the festering voice dripped through the hall from beneath the living canopy of the palanquin. The dragon recoiled at the sound of that voice, even in the grip of her maddened rage, fear had its place. Even in the terror of her blindness, in the madness of her corruption, there were things that still made her know dread. Like a scolded dog, the dragon cringed back, her reptilian head sliding to the floor, seeking refuge behind one of her immense claws.

Skoroth, Plague Lord of Nurgle, Scourge of the Wo and Aghols, emerged from the noxious fume of shadow that filled his palanquin. His bloated body stomped across the backs of the naked carriage, tearing flesh with every step. Atop his obese body, a shrunken, skeletal head surveyed the carnage that had raged through the hall. Cold fury smouldered in the pits of Skoroth’s blighted eyes. The rolls of fat engulfing his neck undulated and heaved. From the corners of his mouth, furry black flies crawled free. The insects took flight, swarming about his head. Skoroth stared at them, the rage building inside him.

‘The infidels who escaped, the ones who continue to profane this sacred place,’ his decayed voice croaked. ‘They will be found and made to know despair. Glory to the one who brings me their heads, those who fail will rebuild my great hall.’ The Plague Lord surged back into the shadows of his palanquin. The swarming flies sped away, scattering through his fortress, carrying his words in their buzzing drone.

The intruders would be found and when they were, they would curse the mothers who bore them, the fathers who sired them, and the gods who gave them breath.

For a start…

The three invaders plunged into the festering depths of the palace. Rotten arms groped at them from the walls, phlegm-filled voices begging for succour and mercy. Even the hardened Norscans found the wretched pleas infecting them, draining their strength and resolve. Unlike the feeble arms that clutched at them, the voices were not so easily brushed aside.

Einarr found their progress further impeded by the infirmity of his companions. Orgrim dragged his broken leg behind him, his agility and animal speed crushed with the limb. Birna’s own pace was little better, only the noxious influence of the bloodroot preventing her from collapsing in a puddle of her own sickness. Einarr knew he should abandon them, press on to the shrine by himself and leave them to their fate. But such a thing smacked too much of treason and cowardice to sit well in his gut. He would leave the running to Kurgan swine like Vallac.

Orgrim suddenly stopped, the werewolf’s muzzle curling back in a low snarl. Einarr tightened the grip on his sword and slowly made his way forward. The corridor ahead was filled with a mass of heaving, crawling flesh. With revulsion, Einarr recognised the horror as a gigantic grub, its verminous body coated in glistening slime. Beyond the ox-sized insect he saw two others. One sported gigantic, crab-like claws, which it was using to nip and tear at the living wall. While he watched, the grub cut one of the bodies free from the wall, shuffling aside so that the shrivelled husk could crumple to the floor. Unlike the bodies that still wailed and moaned from their fastenings on the wall, the body on the floor was quite dead.

Morbid fascination gripped Einarr and he watched as the second grub shuffled forward to take the place of its clawed companion. This one was a fat swollen creature. It lifted its massive tail over its slimy back. The tail began to undulate, as though pushing something through its bloated length. From a dripping orifice at the tip of the tail, a scrawny little man appeared, expelled from the grub’s body. Before the little wretch could even begin to wipe away the mucous that coated him, the first grub Einarr had seen was scurrying forward. Dozens of arms latched onto the man, pulling him off the second worm’s back and pressing him into the hole in the wall. Even as the man screamed, the grub began to cement him into the wall of writhing bodies, coating his arms and legs with a paste-like drool that slobbered from its mouth.

Einarr turned away from the gruesome scene. This, then, was how Skoroth maintained his palace. The hideous grubs were repairing damage in the halls, cutting dead flesh from the walls and replacing it with living bodies. The horror of it made Einarr want to charge the filthy brutes, end their vile existence with clean steel. He also knew that such behemoths would be a long time dying, time he didn’t think they had.

But there was another way they might get past the mammoth insects. Einarr looked back the way they had come. There was a side passage connecting into the main corridor. He looked back at the grubs, watching as they continued to attach the screaming man to the wall. His idea was risky, there was a chance he would draw more grubs instead of distracting the three ahead. Einarr pulled Birna from the floor and motioned for Orgrim to follow him. They retreated back down the hall, past the side passage.

‘Stay here,’ he warned them, then dashed back down the corridor and into the side passage. He looked at the wailing, wretched husks of humanity fused into the walls. Even a Norscan could not help but pity such miserable beings. It was just as well. It made what he had to do easier. It made it mercy instead of murder. Einarr stabbed Alfwyrm into the chest of one man, then plunged the sword into the breast of a woman. Again and again he thrust his steel into the wall, bringing blessed death to the tortured husks. The wailing around him changed into desperate cries, plaintive shrieks for the mercy of the blade. Einarr tried to bring release to as many of them as he could, but he knew he could not linger long. He kept his ears peeled, trying to catch the sound of the grubs shambling towards the passage to repair the carnage he had visited upon the walls. It was difficult to hear with all the moaning voices surrounding him. Instead he felt the insects’ advance, their massive bodies causing the floor to shake. Einarr turned away from his grisly work, running down the passageway and back into the corridor.

He froze as he reached the main hallway. One of the mammoth grubs loomed before him, only inches from his face. He could see the thing’s beady black eyes, the chitinous parts of its mouth rubbing together. Man and insect stared at one another, neither moving. Finally, Einarr jumped back, bringing his sword up to the ready, prepared to lash out at the grotesque grub. The insect paid him no notice, turning and proceeding into the side passage. Its immense companions followed after it, scuttling away to repair the damage the Norscan had caused.

Einarr breathed a sigh of relief. The grubs didn’t have any concern for intruders, only for their own tedious task. He looked down the corridor, smiling when he saw it free of bloated insects. His trick had worked, he had drawn the right grubs. He turned and grabbed Birna’s arm.

‘We should hurry,’ he told her. ‘Who can say how many of those things are prowling these halls?’

Birna shuddered at the thought, staring with new horror at the walls around them. ‘Promise me a clean death, Einarr,’ she said. ‘Don’t let me wind up like these.’

Einarr looked into her eyes, her words slicing into him like a knife. ‘I promise, Birna. If it comes to that…’ He didn’t need to finish, Birna understood that he would do what had to be done.

Scouting ahead, Einarr found their advance through the palace was interrupted when the corridor was suddenly split by a great trough that curled between its walls. The channel bisected the passage, sinking a few feet below the level of the floor. He could see the passage continue on the other side some twenty feet beyond, the walls beyond lined with grimy nodules of stone rather than the whimpering bodies of plague-thralls.

It was what filled the trough that caused Einarr to cringe. What filled it was not water or pitch, but a bubbling porridge of what he could only describe as rancid meat. Grey chunks of indescribable filth bobbed about the churning filth, while thick clouds of flies buzzed about it. The warrior muttered an oath to his ancestors as he saw one of the flies touch the surface of the stew and be pulled down into its molten depths. He turned from the trench, to tell his comrades what he had found, and advise that they find some other way around. He was startled to find Birna already behind him. She looked past Einarr, eyes wide with loathing as she gazed upon the pestilential soup.

‘Orgrim is growing agitated,’ she told the warrior, forcing her eyes away from the pit. ‘I think we are being followed.’ As if to emphasise her words, a terrible howl echoed down the corridor. It was not the wolfish cry of the ulfwerenar, but a lower, cackling snicker, at once malevolent and wretched.

‘We’ll have to cross it,’ Einarr decided, but there was no conviction in his voice. He doubted the chances for healthy men to cross that filth, much less the injured and the infirm. He reached out across the pit, feeling the surface of the walls. They were warm, moist to the touch. The revolting impression came to him that somehow, against reason and nature, what was beneath his hand was living meat. Birna removed a small steel spike from a pouch on her belt, handing it to the warrior. It was a climbing piton, a tool not uncommon to the hunters among the Sarls, who knew how easily the role of hunter and prey could change and appreciated the value of keeping a safe distance above snapping fangs and flashing claws.

Einarr nodded and pressed the spike against the quivering wall. ‘This is neither stone nor timber,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how well it will hold.’ The cackling howl again came to them from up the corridor. This time it was not one voice, but an entire chorus of bestial whines.

‘Either way we die,’ Birna told him. Einarr gave her a grim smile and turned back to the wall. He pressed the spike once again into the meat, then drove the hilt of Alfwyrm against it. The walls shuddered with pain, syrupy blood drooling around the spike. Einarr froze, almost expecting the entire palace to reach out and crush him for injuring it. When nothing happened, he grabbed the spike and tested its hold. Despite the ghastly substance that encased it, the piton held firm.

‘At least something in this hole favours us,’ Einarr said. He took another spike from Birna. One hand clenched around the first spike, he swung himself over the bubbling filth. Refusing to consider the abominable death that lurked just inches beneath his dangling feet, Einarr stretched his other arm out, stabbing a second spike into the wall. He swung back then drove forward once more, pounding the spike in with the palm of his hand. Once again the wall quivered and shuddered, threatening to spill him from his precarious perch. Sap-like gore dribbled from around the piton, sizzling as it flowed down into the trench. Einarr took a deep breath and swung his body out over the pit once more. This time he closed his hand around the second spike. Closing his eyes, he braced himself, half expecting the piton to tear free. Against his fears it held.

‘Give me the rest!’ he called to Birna, his momentary exhilaration fading as he considered the distance that still separated him from the far edge. He’d need at least five spikes to cover the entire distance, finding the thought of repeating the daring manoeuvre far from appealing. Yet he knew it was the only way.

He had just driven the third spike home when the sound of snarling animals and ripping flesh echoed from up the corridor. Einarr looked back to Birna and hastily swung back across the moat of disease. Their foes had reached Orgrim.

The warrior drew Alfwyrm as soon as his feet touched the floor. Birna already had her blade drawn, bracing herself for the onset of their foes. Einarr shook his head. ‘Stay here and guard the way out,’ he told her. The huntress started to argue, but her protest was lost in a fit of coughing. Einarr turned away and ran back up the passage to join Orgrim.

The werewolf was at the centre of a snarling maelstrom of violence and savagery. His pelt was torn in a dozen places, bloody strips of fur hanging from his wounds. Around him, a mob of cackling things that looked to be some loathsome mixture of swine and hound snapped at him. Every time the ulfwerenar turned to claw at one of the snivelling mongrels, one from the other side would dart in and sink its fangs into him. Einarr could almost see Orgrim’s strength being leeched out of him with each cowardly assault.

‘Laugh at this, cur!’ Einarr roared, bringing Alfwyrm slashing through the back of one of the carrion-hounds. The crippled beast flopped against the floor, its back smashed by the attack. Einarr did not pause, but swept his sword in a murderous arc that sliced the leg from another hound and opened the muzzle of a third. Plunged into confusion by the Norscan’s sudden arrival, the hyenas forgot their old foe. Orgrim lunged at them, sinking his fangs in the throat of the pack leader. The werewolf shook his head from side to side, worrying the wound. The hound struggled in his grip, trying desperately to pull away. Finally, with a wet ripping sound, the hound’s throat was torn open, blood cascading from the wound. The maimed beast cringed away, then fell. The remainder of the pack turned, tails between their legs, and galloped back up the passage.

Orgrim shook shreds of meat from his jaws, spitting the taste of polluted blood from his mouth. Something white and sharp clattered across the floor to land beside Einarr’s foot. The Norscan was alarmed to find it was a fang, torn from Orgrim’s mouth during the battle.

The werewolf sagged against the wall, snapping at the wasted arms as they reached down for him, then started to lick his wounds. Cautiously, Einarr walked toward Orgrim, but the deep growl that rumbled from the werewolf’s throat warned him back. He could see the animal fury glowing in the ulfwerenar’s eyes, the barely restrained urge to rend and kill. He didn’t want to consider what tremendous effort of will allowed Orgrim to restrain himself and keep from attacking the Baersonling.

Orgrim raised his head, sniffing at the air. Far up the corridor, Einarr could hear the cackling howls of the plague-hounds. The craven creatures had recovered from their surprise and were already loping back to glut their bellies and sate their lust for revenge. Einarr started to move down the corridor to meet them. Orgrim pounced ahead of him, snarling at the Norscan.

‘Gggooo,’ the werewolf rasped through his fangs. Without waiting to see if Einarr would obey, Orgrim turned to meet the charge of the hounds. Einarr hesitated, then stooped and retrieved Orgrim’s broken tooth from the floor.

‘Die well, Aesling,’ Einarr told the werewolf as he turned and ran back to join Birna. He did not know how long Orgrim could hold the plague-dogs back, he could only hope it would be long enough for them to cross the pit.

Einarr rounded the corner and once more found himself gazing upon the putrid quagmire of boiling meat and frothing pestilence. At first he did not see Birna, then his eyes focused on her, hands clutched around the last of the pitons. He watched as the huntress tried to swing herself forward, trying to emulate Einarr’s feat and drive the fourth spike into the wall. The warrior cursed aloud. The woman was having trouble standing, the fever must have seeped into her mind for her to think she could muster the coordination to sink pitons into the wall.

He yelled at Birna, ordering her to stay still. Einarr slammed his sword into its sheathe and leapt at the wall, his hands closing around the first two spikes. He shifted his weight, letting one hand go free and swung himself around. His hand closed on Birna’s, then slipped around them to fasten onto the spike.

‘Grab onto me,’ he ordered. Birna nodded weakly. Einarr did not need to tell her she was too sick to set the piton, she had discovered that for herself. The warrior grunted as Birna’s arms snaked around his neck and his body felt her weight dragging on it. He ignored his protesting muscles. Gripping a stake in his hand, he moved to drive the piton home, to get them a few feet closer to safety. The sound of battle in the passage behind them told him there was not much time.

How little time was borne home when a spindly figure crept from the corridor on the far side of the pit. Yellow robes that smelled as though they’d been soaked in urine dripped from the scrawny apparition. The thing was a man, though the scabs that covered almost every exposed inch of his frame made it impossible for Einarr to decide if the man was Hung, Kurgan or even Norse. Upon the chest of the robe, he could see the fly-rune of Nurgle drawn in excrement, upon the man’s bald scalp a similar rune had been branded. The miserable thing turned eyes black with disease in their direction and a sharp-toothed grin split his scabby face. The man lifted his fleshless hand and sickened words slobbered from the sorcerer’s mouth as he began his incantation.

Einarr could feel the air around him growing hot and heavy, sticking to him like dampened rags. Birna coughed loudly, her bile dripping down his chest. He could feel her hands growing slick with sweat as the spell strengthened the disease gnawing at her. The wall of meat behind them began to turn green and panic flared through the Norscan as he felt the piton shift slightly. Everything seemed to be withering under the sorcerer’s malign magic, everything except Einarr himself. He felt a flash of heat against his arm, watching as the band he had taken from the ship began to grow a bit more corroded with rust and decay. The observation did little to reassure him. The wall would decay and pitch him into the quagmire long before the armband’s power was consumed, and long before then, Birna’s strength would fail completely.

The sorcerer saw the hopelessness in Einarr’s eyes and his grin grew. Filled with unending despair, the last joy for the slaves of the plague god was to see another overcome with the same misery. The warrior felt outrage swell within him, fury that this gloating wretch thought he could overcome the last son of Vinnskor. With one hand, he firmed his hold on the stake, struggling to maintain his grip. The other hand fell to his belt, drawing Alfwyrm in one fluid motion. The plague-wizard’s eyes narrowed with dismay and his incantation took on a more rapid, hurried quality.

Einarr glared at the sorcerer, even as he felt the spike shift under his hand. He hefted his sword, tossing it so that he could grip it at the centre of the blade. Then, with a swift pull he crooked his arm forward and hurled Alfwyrm at his foe. Like a spear, the blade plunged through the wizard’s chest. A look of disbelief filled the man’s features, then with a groan he toppled to the floor, his hand dangling over the edge and into the stinking stew that filled the pit. Smoke rose from the corpse as the volatile filth devoured its flesh.

Birna gave a gasp and Einarr could feel her slipping away. His arm circled her, crushing her against him. Bellowing like a blood-mad troll, Einarr braced his legs against the sickening wall and launched himself across the pit. Huntress and warrior crashed against the floor of the corridor, the diseased bones of the sorcerer cracking beneath their weight. Einarr recovered quickly, glancing down the passage to ensure they were alone. Satisfied, he turned to Birna, doing what he could to comfort her, then stooped above the sorcerer’s broken corpse.

‘This belongs to me,’ he spat, ripping Alfwyrm free and kicking the rest of the sorcerer into the bubbling mire. He looked back across the pit, to the passageway where the sounds of ferocious battle continued to rage. Briefly he considered crossing back and helping Orgrim, but before he could act, the werewolf himself appeared. Not a patch of fur on the Aesling was grey. Every hair on his body was stained with blood. A mob of the plague-dogs continued to vex him, the curs swarming about him like terriers baiting a bear.

The werewolf was pressed to the very edge of the pit. Unable to back away further, he slashed at his adversaries, his claws ripping open the flank of one too slow in making its escape. Orgrim turned, looking over at Einarr, then faced the cackling pack once more. Throwing back his head in one final, defiant howl, Orgrim met their charge, dragging two of them with him as he plunged into the caustic filth. Werewolf and carrion-hounds vanished beneath the boiling soup, steam rising from where they had fallen. The remainder of the pack, torn and mangled by Orgrim’s claws and fangs, stared into the pit, even their cackling growls silenced by the spectacle.

Einarr reached into his belt and removed the fang he had lifted from the floor. While he watched the smoke slowly rise, he threaded Orgrim’s tooth onto the neckband. Aesling or were-kin, Einarr hoped Orgrim’s ancestors received him well when he entered their halls.

Einarr and Birna hurried away from the gruesome moat, the sound of Skoroth’s baying carrion-hounds bellowing behind them. The huntress struggled to keep pace with Einarr, the corrupt energies unleashed upon her by the warlock sapping her endurance. As they rounded the corner of the slobbering passageway and the sound of the hyenas faded into the distance, Birna sagged against the wall, coughing blood against the squirming meat. Einarr watched her, the woman’s suffering cutting through him as though it were his own. As the wracking attack continued, he looked down at his arm, at the band of pitted steel that had guarded him against the diseased sorcery. He stepped towards Birna, reaching to his arm to remove the band. The huntress laid a restraining hand against his wrist.

‘No,’ she told him. ‘It is too late.’

The Norscan shook his head, struggling to deny the truth in her words. ‘It will protect you,’ he said. Birna turned her face as another wracking cough seized her. Black fluid dribbled from the corners of her mouth as she looked back at him.

‘It is you it must protect,’ she said. ‘If you fall, then we have all failed.’ Her grip grew firm around Einarr’s wrist. ‘You must win your way through to the shrine, seize the Claw from the Plague Lord! Earn the glory that is your right! Only then can I hold my head high in the halls of my ancestors. I will look in the eyes of my forefathers when they ask me what right I have to sit among the Sarls. I will tell them “I was there when Einarr Steelfist conquered the Palace of the Plague Lord and claimed the favour of Mighty Tchar!”’

Einarr saw the admiration, the fervour in Birna’s eyes, undimmed even by the sickness that gnawed at her vitality. He crushed the huntress against him, kissing her fevered face. He held her close, trying to will his own strength into her flagging body, trying to drive the clammy chill from her with his passion. Only when the sound of rushing bodies echoed down the corridor did he allow his hold to weaken. He tightened his grip on Alfwyrm and turned to face whatever new foes Skoroth had sent to die upon his blade.

‘Even Einarr Steelfist cannot kill all the plague god’s thralls,’ Birna warned him. Despite her words, her own sword was in her trembling hand. Einarr looked over at her and nodded.

‘We must keep ahead of them,’ he told her. He helped her pull away from the wall, then set her running down the corridor. Birna did her best to match the Baersonling’s long strides, but Einarr was forced to slow his pace and help her along. Behind them, something howled and the sound of their pursuit grew still louder as whatever beast guided the plague-thralls picked up their scent.

The dripping corridors of meat gave way to halls of bone, diseased-wracked skeletons clinging to one another in a riotous defiance of gravity and architecture. Insects peeked from the pits of skulls, rats chewed splinters of bone within decaying rib cages. The floor was a carpet of loam-like marrow that squelched beneath their feet, bleeding a milky treacle as their boots bruised it. Ahead, two great yawning pits opened in the floor, stagnant vapours rising from their depths.

‘Which way?’ Birna asked him.

‘The left hand path is ours,’ Einarr told her without hesitation. The huntress looked at him, her face filled with confusion and doubt. ‘Do not ask how I know, woman! Somehow this vile place is more vivid in my mind than the streets of my village! Something guides me, some instinct I can feel in my bones.’

‘More of Skoroth’s trickery,’ Birna spat.

‘It does not feel like the Plague Lord’s filth,’ Einarr said. ‘I have felt it for a long time now, since I left the ruin of Skraevold and entered the lands of the Aeslings.’

‘Then it has led you far to betray you now,’ Birna observed. She limped through the loamy floor, towards the gaping pit. It descended at an angle, a fleshy, tongue-like slope slithering from its lip into the gloom below.

The sound of shouting voices and baying beasts sounded from the passageway, their pursuers rapidly closing the gap. Einarr glanced down the corridor, seeing the shadowy shapes of the plague-thralls rushing toward them. He looked back at Birna.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘We’ll make our stand at the bottom.’ Birna nodded and lowered herself into the pit. Einarr turned, watching the passage as the huntress dropped from view. The howling pack increased its speed as they saw the hulking Norscan waiting them. A scrawny jackal-like hound rushed for Einarr’s throat, its jaws filled with stinger-like growths. Einarr brought the edge of his sword smashing through its skull, spilling the diseased animal across the floor. Behind it came another, and still another, each more hideous than the last. Einarr broke each in turn, his prodigious strength overwhelming their savage fury. After the first three hounds were littered about his feet, the rest of the pack cringed away in fear, unwilling to confront something that had overcome their leaders. But beyond the cowering curs there were others who did not share such timidity, horned pestigors and sallow-skinned Hung warriors, their mouths shrieking war cries and wrath.

Einarr knew it would be his turn to be overwhelmed if he stayed to wait for the plague worshippers. Numbers alone would drag him down. He might kill a dozen, a score, even a hundred, and his valour would mean nothing. No one would carry his name into the sagas, not even the gods would note his passing. He would simply be another sacrifice before the plague god’s festering altar, another speck of sand upon the shores of his corruption.

Tightening his hold on Alfwyrm, Einarr turned his back to the oncoming horde and ran to the pit, diving headlong into its hot, cloying depths. Stagnant air washed over him as the slimy, leathery slope bore him downward. He felt a twinge of panic as he noted the ribbed symmetry of the red, raw walls, unable to rid himself of the image of a gigantic throat sucking him down into its gullet.

The Norscan’s slide through the dank blackness ended in a wet, dripping collision with a reeking sheet of velvety flesh. Einarr’s body slammed into the loathsome substance, its flexibility cushioning his impact. He scrambled for purchase on the hairy meat, but his fingers slipped from the decaying muck. His flailing hands scraped against the rotting sheet as he hurtled downward. Einarr yelled in protest as he fell to the floor twenty feet below, splashing into a pool of sewage and offal.

Einarr spat filth from his mouth and rose from the obscene water, rancid sludge dripping from his frame. He glared up at the opening through which he had fallen, waiting for any sign of pursuit. For long, tense moments he waited for sallow-faced Hung marauders to drop down after him. It was only when the seconds passed into minutes and still he saw no sign of his foes that Einarr turned away from the opening. Through fortune or fate, it seemed their enemies had lost their trail for the time being.

Einarr stalked off through the slush of scum and detritus that swirled about his feet, eyes struggling to penetrate the gloom. He did not worry that there was no escape from the reeking hole, as he had told Birna, whatever strange instinct had possessed him had led him far only to abandon him in the Plague Lord’s oubliette. It was the huntress who was foremost in his thoughts. He worried about her welfare, concerned how well she had weathered the violent descent. He worried too about what else might be sharing the rancid pool with them and despite his concerns for her, he did not call out to his companion lest other ears hear him and be made aware of his presence.

The warrior sloshed through the filth, able to see only a few feet before him in the shadowy stink that dominated the hole. The grainy bed beneath the sludge seemed to crawl under his boots, threatening to spill him face first into the muck with every step. Einarr forced the urgency that filled him to give way to caution and make certain of his footing.

No sooner had he slowed his pace than something black exploded from the waters inches before Einarr’s face. Instantly his sword was flashing through the darkness, hacking through the shadowy apparition. Alfwyrm struck the side of the thing with a chopping report, fragments of his adversary spraying across the water. Einarr pulled his sword from the shape, straining to free it from the gash he had drove into the thing’s side. No sooner was the sword free than the shape shot back down into the water.

Cautiously, Einarr pressed his foot forward again. Once more, the black shape stabbed up from the water, coils of offal draped down its length. Now Einarr could see what manner of menace he had so narrowly avoided. It was a great black thorn, thicker than a spear and cruelly sharp. Barbs projected from its sides, dripping slime and excrement, and Einarr could see luminous venom dripping from the tip of each spur. He shuddered at how nearly he had given himself to such a hideous and ignoble death.

While he watched, the thorn shot back down beneath the surface, hidden once more beneath the sewage and filth. A gnawing dread quickly grew within Einarr’s mind as he watched the water become still once more. No longer concerned with what lurking ears might hear him, he began to call out to Birna. He circled around the sunken thorn, pressing on through the pool, haste once more moving his steps. A second thorn stabbed up, missing him by a hair’s breadth. As the slimy spike sank again, Einarr’s shouts became a frantic roar, urging Birna to keep still, warning her of the gruesome menace that lurked in the water.

He strained his ears for the faintest hint of a whisper, but only the dripping slime answered him. Einarr pressed on, turning back towards the opening through which he had dropped. Again, a ghastly spike burst from the water, diseased sludge crusted about its deadly frame. Einarr chopped at it with his sword and the thorn retreated once more. Panic churned in his stomach and the Norscan roared Birna’s name, until his throat was raw. The warrior slogged through the filth, hacking at the thorns as they erupted around him.

A black spine shot up beside him as he raged through the mire. Einarr swung Alfwyrm at the lethal spike, but his arm froze in mid stroke. Strength drained from Einarr’s body and he slumped down before the thorn, scarcely able to retain his grip on his sword. The world faded into a bleary smudge as tears spilled from the Norscan’s eyes.

The outline of the thorn was all but lost, only the gory spike at its tip visible. The rest of it was embedded in a lean, lithe body, driven through thigh and belly and breast before ending its murderous passage by punching through the side of the neck. The ruin of the woman’s head sagged against the edge of the thorn, eyes frozen in a moment of shock and agony. There was an abominable irony in that face as Einarr gazed into it. The last vestiges of Birna had been driven from it. Looking upon her he saw again the maimed debris of Asta lying strewn about their home. The loss of one lover was magnified with the loss of the other. Einarr felt himself being crushed beneath the pitiless sorrow that ground him beneath its heel.

How long he sat beside the lethal trap, Einarr did not know. What words dropped from his tongue, he could not say. Whether he mourned Birna or Asta, even this refused to burn through the icy numbness that closed around him. He was aware, dimly, of regaining his feet, of trying to pull Birna from the thorn. Every effort only succeeded in maiming her further as the spurs tore deeper. At length, he relented, drawing back, resigned that he would have to leave his companion behind amid the squalor and filth of the pit.

There was a cold distance between mind and action as Einarr reached to Birna’s mangled head. He cupped her face in one hand and raised the edge of Alfwyrm toward her mouth. For an instant, he tried to resist the impulse, but he could no more fight against it than he could when he had taken talismans from the other comrades he had lost. Instead, his mind retreated into some black corner of his being, watching with cold detachment as his fingers pried the woman’s mouth open and the sharp edge of Alfwyrm did its gruesome work.

He felt his hand fumbling at his neck, opening Spjall’s band and added the new charm to the others. He could feel Birna’s sharp, bird-like tongue dripping against his neck, but refused to admit the horror the sensation evoked. He crushed his revulsion into a knot of hate, husbanding the emotion with all the care of a wet nurse. He would use it, use it against Skoroth, against the fell Plague Lord. The sorcerer would feel that hate, when Einarr clove open his skull and ground his brains beneath his boot.

The Norscan turned away, vengeance glowing in his eyes as, alone, he stalked off into the shadows. Behind him, the impaled remains of his last comrade faded back into the stagnant pool as the thorn withdrew once more.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Einarr stalked through the festering halls of the palace, a thing of pain and regret. Birna’s death pulsed through his mind, a crimson phantom of anguish, her lifeless eyes staring at him, her dead lips set in silent accusation. She had trusted him to lead her to glory, had followed him here from Norsca only to find death, to have her soul devoured by the gluttonous plague god. He felt guilt rip through him like the edge of a sword, bile churning in his belly. Within his mind, other faces appeared, glowering at him with accusing stares. Thognathog, his double heads rotted to the bone by Bubos’s pestilence. Orgrim, his flesh melted and torn. Even old Urda, her skull crushed and broken. All glared at him, demanding recompense for their deaths. Black despair flooded through Einarr and he crumpled to his knees, the fleshy floor quivering as he sank against it.

What was the purpose? What was the use? He had dared everything in this mad adventure, this vain attempt to seize an impossible promise. Those who had followed him were dead now, those who had trusted him to lead them to glory and triumph. Asta, Spjall, his entire people would remain as they were – butchered offerings to ravenous Kharnath. There would be no redeeming them from the Skull Lord’s realm, no righting the terrible doom Einarr himself had brought down upon his village. All was carrion and the laughter of the cruel gods.

In his hand, Einarr could feel the cold grip of Alfwyrm pressing against his flesh. It would be so easy to end this hopeless farce, to cheat the gods of their sadistic entertainment. What was death, after all, but an escape from suffering, release from the horrors of a wicked world?

Einarr turned the sword he held, pointing its blade at his own belly. One quick thrust, and his misery could be over. He closed his eyes, seeing the approval in the mangled visages that filled his mind. This was what Birna and the others wanted. This was what would satisfy them.

The mark of Tchar forged into his flesh blazed with fiery brilliance and Einarr’s hand felt as though he had thrust it into the mouth of a furnace. Alfwyrm dropped from his smouldering grip, flopping against the floor. The faces swirling within his mind shrieked as a blinding light exploded through his consciousness, the visages collapsing into one another until only a single face remained – the rotting skull of the Plague Lord. It scowled at him in cold hate as the light burned even his true face from Einarr’s brain.

The Norscan doubled over in sickness, spitting his stomach against the throbbing wall. As the Plague Lord’s fell influence was purged from his mind, Einarr’s flesh crawled with revulsion at the sorcerer’s obscene violation of his soul. The black despair that Skoroth had evoked within him withered, overwhelmed by his rage at the sorcerer’s deception.

Strangely, the Plague Lord’s mental attack emboldened Einarr, firming his resolve to bring about Skoroth’s ruin. If the sorcerer was trying to use such tricks, trying to force him to kill himself, then Skoroth did so because he was afraid. He did not trust the palace’s gruesome defences to stop Einarr. The Norscan smiled at the thought. Nothing would stop him now. He would carve his wergild from Skoroth’s withered carcass and hear him wail for mercy before he allowed the sorcerer to die.

The glistening, meat-like wall shuddered and Einarr watched with disgust as a drooling mouth formed within it. It slopped open and, from its putrid depths, shambling, wailing things that could only mockingly be called human emerged. They turned desiccated, disease ravaged faces towards him, their corroded axes and swords as pitted with decay as the skeletal hands that clutched them. The moaning, wretched horde advanced on him, the slime of their own excretions dripping from their feet.

Einarr glared back at the zombie-like horrors. He stooped and retrieved Alfwyrm from the quivering floor. His other hand closed about the necklace he wore, feeling the talismans against his skin. One man against such a horde, even a horde of such miserable things, could never hope to prevail. But Einarr was more than one man. He could feel the strength of his dead comrades filling him, surging through his body. They were with him still, they could still share his triumph and his glory. That was how he would satisfy their spirits, by giving to them their victory.

With a roar of feral savagery that might have torn itself from the canine jaws of Orgrim, Einarr charged the plague-thralls. The first he decapitated, the second he disembowelled. The third he cut in half with Alfwyrm’s shining blade and crushed its mangled bones beneath his boots as he began the slaughter in earnest.

From the slaughter of the plague-thralls, Einarr pressed onward. The rotting halls of the palace oozed and throbbed all around him. Walls of raw meat alive with maggots, floors of oozing mucous that clung to his body and tried to suck him down into their filth. He saw pillars of fused bone, alive with gnawing vermin. He heard the shrieks and howls of the damned as he passed. His nose was assailed at every turn by the mephitic vapours he could feel blackening his lungs as he drew them in. Through his very bones he could feel the throbbing vibrations that pulsed through the palace, the abominable life that infested every corner of the hideous structure.

Einarr endured it all, the thirst for revenge, the lust for triumph, steeling him against the worst the palace could inflict upon him. He could feel Skoroth’s pestilential sorcery trying again to thrust diseased fingers into his mind. But he was aware of the Plague Lord’s trickery, steeling himself against his magics. He mocked Skoroth’s efforts, daring the decayed sorcerer to face him with steel instead of tricks. The fury of the Plague Lord thundered across Einarr, boils and oozing sores erupting from his flesh when the sorcerer found he could no longer infect his mind. The armband Einarr had taken from the Frozen Sea grew still more decayed as it drew the worst of the pestilential sorcery into it.

As Einarr jeered at Skoroth’s efforts to bewitch him, the ceiling overhead began to pulse and throb. The glistening meat that formed the roof peeled back with a wet, sucking sound, exposing thick ropes of coiled intestine so large Einarr doubted if even a mammoth’s gut could contain such enormity. The leprous organs quivered and swelled, expanding until they flopped from the ceiling, dangling disgustingly into the corridor. Einarr felt dread gnaw at his mind as the organs continued to swell. He looked back the way he had travelled but found that it too had been overtaken by the bloated loops of intestine.

‘Is this all you have?’ Einarr growled to the unseen sorcerer. At that instant, the nearest of the organs reached the point at which it could expand no more, its swollen skin splitting as the intestine burst. Green, stinking juice sprayed across the hall, steaming as it struck the fleshy walls and the shivering floor. Einarr howled in pain as the acid sizzled against his skin, his cloak and armour smoking where the intestinal filth struck them.

Einarr bit down on the pain and set his eyes on the corridor ahead. Already more of the intestines were reaching the bursting point, the acid from the first seeming to speed the process. He started to turn his head around, then stopped himself. Whatever happened, he would not take one step back. The heart of the palace lay ahead of him, the prize Tchar demanded from him would be there, triumph would be there. Behind him was nothing but shame and death. Before him was vindication.

Howling like a thing spit from the blackest hells, Einarr lunged down the corridor, charging past the drooping sacks of acid. Some burst before he reached them, showering him with a burning spray, others exploded behind him, singing his cloak and gnawing into his armour. His body railed against the pain, against the abuse, but Einarr would not heed it.

Blood seeped from his ravaged flesh, his armour hung in tatters, his bearskin cloak was reduced to smoking rags, and still the Norscan refused to falter in his purpose. For what seemed an eternity he rushed down the corridor, roaring as the acid rained down upon him. He felt his strength ebb, his limbs grow cold and heavy, yet still he forced his body onward. When endurance failed him, Einarr’s indomitable will sustained him. When even this reached its limit, spite alone kept him moving.

At last, Einarr won his way clear of the deadly hall, crashing to his knees as he emerged into a chamber of fused bone and reeking moss. The warrior sucked deep breaths into his starved lungs, even the stinging stench of the palace a welcome respite after the burning mist that had assailed him. The Norscan reached his hands to his head, removing the bear skull helm. It was pitted from the acid, even its unnatural strength overcome by the burning filth. Einarr hurled it from him, then began peeling away the shreds of cloak plastered to his back by his own blood. The tattered ruin of his armour was next, dregs of acid still eating through the toughened leather and steel.

Fatigue tugged at Einarr’s body, trying to crush him to the floor. He raged against it, lurching to his feet. With the weight of his ruined armour gone, he felt light, almost wisp-like. He shrugged aside the sensation of vulnerability that came with it. After the punishment dealt it by the acid, his armour would not have protected him from the claws of a weasel, much less anything that lurked within these diseased halls. It would only have slowed him down, taxed his already waning strength with its bulk. Einarr cast aside the rest of his gear, the meagre remains of his rations, the last dregs of his waterskin, the empty hollow of Spjall’s medicine bag. Only the necklace of talismans, the corroded armband and the deadly edge of Alfwyrm did he retain.

Einarr turned away from his cast-offs, studying the chamber in which he found himself. Grotesque mouth-like doorways littered the room, rotten teeth forming the frame of each opening. The Norscan studied them for a moment, then shook his head. Some unnatural instinct had guided him this far, leading him by the nose when reason should have left him hopelessly lost. He would continue to let it guide him.

Without further pause, Einarr sprinted towards one of the openings, darting past the jagged teeth, half expecting the immense jaws to snap close as he passed beneath them. Beyond the doorway he found a hall of rippling muscle, red and raw in the stagnant light that filled the palace. As he approached, the muscles heaved and pulsed, the walls smashing together with wet, meaty slaps, the ceiling and floor rushing together in a crushing embrace. After a moment, the muscle-walls withdrew, quivering with anticipation. Another step, and they crashed together once more, the force of their impact shaking the entire corridor. Einarr had no illusions as to the fate of anything trapped by such an impact. He also knew it was beyond the strength of a mere mortal to summon the speed and agility to surge past the walls before they reacted and smacked together.

The mark of Tchar smouldered against his hand, its glow barely seen by Einarr’s eyes. Thoughts rushed through his mind and he felt the impulse to close his hand around Orgrim’s fang. Einarr seized the talisman and with a fluid motion, he tore it from the neckband. The warrior stared at the sharp, savage tooth, imagining again the feral shape of the werewolf. He saw the ferocious spirit that had lurked within Orgrim’s flesh, the terrible power that had coiled within his body. Throwing his head back, Einarr shouted the werewolf’s name and plunged the fang into his arm.

The sharp tooth bit through his flesh, ripping deep into his body. Einarr collapsed as he felt a force pulse through him, racing through his veins like wyvern venom. He howled in anguish as his bones ground against one another, twisting and stretching beneath his flesh. His skin darkened, throbbing in pain as hair erupted all across his body. His screams thickened into a bestial growl as his face was pulled into a muzzle, as his teeth lengthened into knife-like fangs. His entire being was stripped away, twisting into the feral form of the ulfwerenar, only the hand bearing the mark of Tchar stubbornly resisting the change that thundered through him.

Einarr slowly rose from the floor, feeling the savage power of his new form pulsing through him. Fatigue was forgotten, injury was forgotten. All that he felt was a terrible strength, a strength that made his old body feel like a weak, simpering thing. It was a wolf’s howl that rumbled through Einarr as he revelled in his power. The lust for blood, the urge to feel flesh tearing beneath his fangs burned in his veins. Einarr turned his head, sniffing at the stagnant air, overwhelmed by the riot of sensation that flooded his nose. He could smell them, the festering slaves of Nurgle, crawling through the halls of the palace like so many maggots. With his new strength, he could kill them all, leave the corridors littered with their chewed bones and make the halls echo with their screams.

Before the beast could overwhelm his mind, Einarr recovered himself. He fought back the bloodlust that pounded through him, clinging to his retreating intellect as the wolf threatened to consume him. He stretched his still human hand, closing his fist around Alfwyrm’s cold steel. The touch of the sword seemed to lessen the grip of the beast, its savagery slinking into the black shadows of his mind.

Einarr turned back towards the quivering corridor, at the moving walls of muscle and slime. He had seen Orgrim, he knew what one of the ulfwerenar could do. But would it be enough, would even the werewolf’s animal strength and speed be enough?

The Norscan choked back his doubts and flung himself down the hall. The walls crashed together behind him, clapping together in a crushing embrace. Einarr did not pause, continuing to lope down the hallway as ceiling smacked into floor, wall drove against wall. He could feel the air being sucked back around him, so near did the writhing structure come to crushing him. It was as if the palace itself were trying to destroy him, possessed of a hideous, malevolent intelligence all its own. Einarr growled, sensing the sorcerous hand of Skoroth. But if the villain thought he would grind him into paste, he had not reckoned upon the Norscan’s determination.

The quivering maze of moving walls at last emptied into a gargantuan hall, a jagged fissure that cut its way through the palace. As Einarr gained the canyon of rotting flesh and dripping ooze, he could see the leprous sky festering overhead. The mangled, pathetic bodies that formed the walls of the canyon groped blindly for him, moaning in despair as they sensed his approach. The faces that gibbered from the walls were little more than shrivelled skulls, great wounds marking where eyes had been ripped from their sockets. Yet there was life, foul and vile, within each of them, the misery of men who discover too late the true nature of the god they served.

The stink of carrion wafted down from the heights of the canyon, and Einarr’s ears rang with the croaking of crows. His sharp eyes could see them, bloated and black, swirling about the upper reaches of the fissure, a great murder of carrion-eaters prowling the sky in search of more eyes to ease their abominable hunger. Warily, Einarr watched the crows circle as he stalked into the canyon, his every sense tuned to the rapacious birds and their croaking cries.

But the danger that set Einarr’s nerves on edge, the threat that tugged at his animal senses, did not lie with the greedy crows. Distracted by the murder swirling above him, the first Einarr became aware of his true foe was when a musky, rotten reek filled his nose. Einarr spun around as the familiar stench threatened to overcome him with terror. He felt the palace shake as something tremendous surged toward the canyon. The wall of fused, moaning bodies to his left exploded outward in a shower of ruptured meat and rancid blood as the reptilian behemoth ripped her way through the wall. Einarr cringed away from her, his hubris withering, his pride in his new strength crumbling as he again saw the awful shape of Bubos.

The dragon’s body surged through the rupture in the wall, heedless of the stinking blood that washed across her, oblivious to the broken, shrieking things she pulverised beneath her mass. The dragon swung her head about, her rotten tongue flicking from her jaws as she tasted the air. Einarr drew back as she lowered that frightful visage. He could see the dripping ruin of her eye, but seated within the filth was a ghastly figure. Robes of leprous flesh clothed his obese bulk, his withered, almost skeletal face looking impossibly small atop the bloated mass. Pockmark scars littered the man’s flesh, forming hundreds of fly-runes, the sign of Nurgle. Worms sprouted from the man’s arms, like a growth of squirming hair, while fat ticks clung to his chest. From the sides of the man’s head, ropy tentacles dripped, stabbing down into the jelly of the dragon’s broken eye.

Here, Einarr sensed, was the master of this obscene place, the Plague Lord himself, the loathsome horror that hid behind the name Skoroth.

The sorcerer turned his gaze to Einarr, and as he did so, Bubos’s head turned with him. His cracked, pallid lips pulled back from a mouth black with disease and decay. His rotten smile spread as other, smaller mouths opened along his cheeks and neck.

‘The stink of your hope offends my master,’ Skoroth told him. ‘There is no place for it here. Despair is the only salvation, to embrace misery and corruption, to praise the defiled and the decayed. From the moment you profaned my lord’s domain, your every breath was but futile pride. Bow to the inevitable, barbarian, for it has come to claim your soul.’

The dragon took a thundering step towards him, her claws shredding the carpet of bone that formed the floor of the canyon. A scathing hiss seeped past Bubos’s fangs, staining the air with her putrid hate. Einarr glared back at the dragon, at the sorcerer nested within her broken eye. The sneering, condescending smiles that pitted Skoroth’s face cut into him, fanning the embers of despair that still festered inside him.

Einarr railed against the sorcerer’s malignant spell. Tightening his grip on Alfwyrm he charged toward the dragon. Bubos pulled back in surprise, her immense bulk grinding against the screaming walls. Einarr struck at her, slashing her foreclaw with his sword’s keen edge. The dragon’s sludge-like blood bubbled from the wound as her rotting scales split beneath the blow.

The Norscan darted back as Bubos’s jaws snapped at him. The air grew cold and vile around him, taking on a green luminance. Beneath the fur of the wolf, he could feel his skin crawling. Atop the dragon, Skoroth’s hand was stretched towards him, blazing with a sorcerous light. Einarr ground his teeth as the malevolent magic washed over him, the armband growing a bit more blackened with each passing breath. Skoroth’s face twisted with frustration as he saw Einarr withstanding his sorcery. Scowling, he snarled at the dragon. Bubos surged forward, swiping at Einarr with her claw. The attack slammed into the wall of the canyon, ploughing through the moaning bodies like blood-filled twigs.

Bubos roared, sharing Skoroth’s frustration as Einarr slashed her leg again. With a mighty heave, the dragon launched herself at him, her entire ponderous bulk undulating forward in a great mass of scales and teeth. Einarr sprang at the wall, his bestial paws sinking into the tortured flesh that shrieked beneath him. He dug his claws into the rotting flesh and propelled himself upward, scrambling over the wailing bodies nimbly and rapidly. The dragon smashed into the floor below him, her enormity tearing through the layers of bones and flesh. The ground collapsed beneath her, sucking her down into a shallow pit of her own creation. The jagged bones that lined the crater stabbed into the dragon’s sides, digging deeper as she struggled to free herself.

Skoroth glared at Einarr as he scrambled up the wall of the canyon. He roared again at Bubos and the dragon lifted her head. Her jaws parted and she sent a sheet of cloying, sizzling pestilence shooting upward. The dragon’s aim was off, her deadly breath consuming the wall a dozen feet to Einarr’s right. Skoroth fixed Einarr with his gaze, concentrating even more fully than before, willing the blind dragon to see through his own eyes. Again Bubos spat death at Einarr, the fused bodies only a few feet below him withering into smoking husks that crumbled into decayed ash. Einarr dug his claws deeper into the canyon wall as the entire structure shuddered. The dragon opened her jaws a third time, horrible fires of disease and ruin gathering in her throat.

Einarr reached his hand to his necklace and tore the blackened stump of Thognathog’s finger free. Howling the ogre’s name, he flung the desiccated thing down at the dragon. Skoroth covered his head as the withered finger bounced off Bubos’s snout, rolling across the splintered floor. The sorcerer sneered and pointed a fat finger at Einarr, urging Bubos to finish him.

Neither dragon nor sorcerer noticed Thognathog’s finger smouldering on the floor. They did not see the glowing liquid that spread from the blackened stump, the viscous oil that shimmered with fell energies. The bones that littered the floor began to pulse with their own eerie glow, matching the rhythm of the luminous oil. Shards of bone tore from the ground, scuttling across the floor to sink into the shining muck. Soon entire skeletons were sucked into the pool, the glowing liquid darkening as more and more bone sank into it. As it darkened, the pool grew in size. Then, when it had lost almost all of its brilliance, the black pool began to bubble and foam. Einarr watched in amazement and disbelief as from the froth a huge skeletal hand emerged. A second soon followed, grabbing at the bony floor as it strained to pull free from the sludge.

It was then that Skoroth noted the taint of sorcery exuding from the pool. With alarm in his rheumy eyes, the plague worshipper bellowed commands to Bubos. The dragon gave one last blast of diseased fire, annihilating the wall beside Einarr, and swung her head towards the pool. From the blackened sludge, an enormous figure was rising, its skeletal limbs dripping shimmering slime, the sockets of its massive skull staring emptily at the reptile. Bubos roared at the undead thing, her hissing shriek echoing through the canyon. The immense skeleton simply stared back, taking a lumbering step towards her. Skoroth gestured at the abomination, a swirling stream of burning vomit exploding from his dozens of mouths, crashing against the skeleton in a wave of searing corruption. The dripping slime that coated the skeleton evaporated into smoke under the sorcerer’s attack, but still the horror lumbered onward. A second skull slowly pushed its way up from the undead thing’s collarbone, joining the first in its pitiless consideration of the dragon and her lord.

Einarr had no time to spare for dragons and undead ogres. As the skeletal monster closed upon Bubos, the Norscan struggled to keep his hold on the swaying, ruptured walls. The bodies beneath his hands crumbled and rotted, dripping down in liquid foulness to splash the floor below. The dragon’s pestilential flame continued to eat away at the living walls of the canyon, devouring them with insatiable hunger. The crows, agitated by their quaking rookeries descended in a black cloud of mangy feathers and rusted beaks to peck and claw at him. Einarr felt their talons ripping into his flesh, felt their stabbing beaks pounding against his bones. He howled and raged, striving to both maintain his grip and fight off the furious flock. Then his hand closed around his necklace once more and he knew that he was not alone. He knew what he had to do.

There was no time to consider the horror as he ripped Birna’s tongue from the necklace. He screamed the huntress’s name, tearing the sound from the depths of his heart. His canine jaws snapped closed around it, devouring it with the raging hunger of a true wolf. Einarr sucked the abominable meat down, struggling against the revulsion that shuddered through him. When the taste of flesh was gone from his mouth, he opened his jaws once more. It was not the howl of a wolf that thundered from his muzzle, but the sharp, keening cry of a bird. The frenzied murder that swarmed around him flew away, obeying without question the shrill cry he had uttered.

Einarr turned his head, glaring downward at Bubos and Skoroth. The skeletal ogre was straining against the dragon, its thin arms wrapped about the reptile’s snout, its bony fingers tearing into her flesh. From her head, Skoroth continued to send bursts of fell magic slamming into the monster, but spells alone did not seem enough to stop it.

The Norscan watched the struggle for a moment, then glanced back at the enraged crows still filling the sky above the canyon. He threw back his head once more and an avian shriek wailed through the fissure. A storm of black feathers shot downward, descending upon the dragon in a tempest of animal fury and rage. The dragon vanished beneath the croaking, cawing mass. Einarr could hear her painful cries as she writhed beneath the assault. Her noxious flame flicked through the swarm, hundreds of crows burned from the sky. Skoroth’s diseased sorcery flashed from the thick of the flock, splattering feathers and bones across the canyon. Yet for every hundred that fell, a thousand more dove down upon them, squawking and slashing.

The wall shuddered beneath Einarr once more. He looked upward, feeling his hope wilt as he saw the great distance that yet lay between himself and the top. He looked back down at the floor of the canyon. The mark of Tchar glistened on his hand and Einarr reached to the band around his neck once more. His fingers closed around Urda’s rune eye. Again, some instinct beyond himself told him what to do. Howling like a beast, Einarr leapt down from the wall, plummeting toward the dragon fifty feet below.

Einarr crashed through the swarming cloud of crows, slamming into the top of the dragon’s head. He drove Alfwyrm into Bubos’s skull before his impact caused him to roll away. The reptile shrieked in agony as his sword punctured her festering brain. Einarr saw Skoroth turn away from his assault on the crows, watched as he struggled to control the dragon’s agony. The tentacles dripping from the sides of his head throbbed as he tried to force his will into her mind.

With a roar of rage, Einarr lunged at the sorcerer, smashing into his bloated bulk. Still trying to control the dragon, Skoroth feebly raised his hands to ward off the Norscan. Einarr drove his claw into Skoroth’s belly, ripping strings of rotting organs from his gut. Skoroth shrieked in agony, green energy spilling from his ghastly wound. His eyes snapped open as he abandoned his efforts to control Bubos, fixing his hideous gaze fully on Einarr. For an instant, the warrior felt again the noxious touch of Skoroth’s sorcery against his skin. The arm band crumbled beneath his power, fading into a crust of decay as it drew the awful power into it. Einarr snarled in pain as the magic ward snapped and he was left exposed to the sorcerer’s power. He grabbed Skoroth’s arms, feeling the putrid skin slough away beneath his touch. Another roar of fury exploded from his jaws as, with inhuman strength, Einarr ripped the sorcerer from the cloying goo of Bubos’s eye socket. Skoroth flailed madly in his grip as Einarr lifted him overhead and hurled him to the shattered floor below.

Purple sludge gushed from the torn tentacles and the dragon thrashed wildly as she was plunged fully into a world of blindness. She lashed her head from side to side, striving to dislodge the warrior clinging to the edge of her eye socket. Einarr felt his arm almost pulled from his shoulder, such was the dragon’s desperate panic. He felt the rune eye burning against his palm. Shouting Urda’s name, he pushed the stone into the rotting jelly of the dragon’s eye. Then his hold on the dragon’s skull failed him and he was sent flying through the air. He slammed into the moaning, shuddering wall of flesh and withered to the floor.

Bubos lashed furiously against everything around her as molten agony coursed through her body. Her claw smashed down into the skeletal ogre, pulverizing the undead thing. Her fiery breath sprayed through the air, incinerating thousands of crows. Her powerful limbs ripped and tore at the ground, pulling her free from her pit, ignoring the stabbing fingers of bone that gouged her sides. Her forked tongue flickered from between her jaws, struggling to taste Einarr’s scent on the air. The dragon heaved upward, grinding the last remains of the ogre beneath her armoured belly. Einarr spat the blood from his mouth and watched the gigantic reptile begin crawling towards him.

Then light began to shine from the dragon’s ruined eye, a searing, blinding light that was at once all colours and no colour. The brilliance exploded from the dragon’s skull, her veins glowing within her body, shining through her scaly flesh as burning agony coursed through her entire bulk. The dragon flailed against the pain, her claws ripping into the walls, her immense tail crashing against the floor, smashing bones into powder. Smoke began rising from Bubos as she burned from the inside out. Steaming blood erupted from her maw, dissolving her fangs as her jaws decayed into brown slush.

Einarr saw Skoroth lifting himself from the splintered floor. The sorcerer looked up at the dying dragon, then glared at the Norscan. In the same instant, the behemoth reared back, crashing onto her side and rolling miserably across the canyon as pain assaulted every shred of her being. The sorcerer’s body exploded into a mist of flies and maggots as the dragon’s enormity crushed him. Einarr grinned at the justice of it, the mighty plague master slain by his own creature.

Bubos slammed back into the pit she had gouged, more broken bones stabbing into her ravaged frame. The dragon tried to rise once more, but greasy froth spilled down her crumbling face and the last of her lower jaw pulled free of her wasted skull. For a time, the dragon’s body continued to shudder and writhe, but whether there was still intelligence behind such agonies, or merely the last suffering of tortured muscles and nerves, Einarr could not say. Even so, he watched until the frightful force ravaging the dragon had consumed her utterly, leaving behind only a puddle of reeking filth.

Despite the pain that filled his own battered body, Einarr forced himself to rise and stride to the site of the dragon’s dissolution.

‘This time I think you don’t come back,’ he growled, spitting into the brown slush.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Einarr stalked onward through the reeking gloom of the palace, through the diseased corridors and chambers. There was a terrible quiet about the infernal structure now, as though the entire palace was holding its breath, shuddering in fear. Accustomed to the rustle of vermin, the gibbering cackle of nurglings and the squealing of rats, Einarr found the silence somehow even more horrible. Even the wailing things that had been fused into the walls were still, their decaying faces set into moribund masks. The Norscan could feel their eyes staring at him, could feel the ruin of their minds scrutinizing his every move. For good or ill, he could not say. Perhaps the poor mad things weren’t even capable of such a distinction after squandering their miserable lives for the plague god’s diseased whims.

He had not travelled far from the canyon where he had wrought the destruction of Skoroth and Bubos when the strength Orgrim’s fang had endowed him with began to fade. Einarr screamed in pain as his bones shrivelled back into their proper shape, as the fur that covered his limbs shrank back into his skin. He fell to his knees, writhing in pain as his face collapsed back into a human visage. He felt diminished as the power of the wolf left him, a great emptiness inside him. The dulling of his senses made him feel almost blind and deaf, such had been the keenness of the wolf’s awareness. He understood now the terrible lure the bestial spirit had, the grim power that had made Orgrim embrace the feral life of the ulfwerenar and shun that of his kin.

Eventually the warrior rose once more, prowling through the silent, brooding corridors, guided by the uncanny instinct that had led him so far for so long. When the corridor branched, there was no delay, he knew which path to take. When the halls degenerated into a labyrinth of narrow passages and shivering walkways, he unerringly sensed which steps to take. Einarr wondered if even Urda, with her witch-sight, could have guided him as well as the urges that tugged at his mind.

At length, he sensed he was drawing close to the very heart of the palace, the place where the Claw had been locked away by Nurgle’s thralls. It was so close now, he could almost taste it, almost feel its black power vibrating through the passages. A dull throb pulsed through the meat-like walls, almost like the pounding of a drum. The sound boomed through Einarr’s ears, thunderous after the silence of the halls. His pace quickened and he rushed onward, desperate now to seize the Claw in his hands, to secure the prize Tchar had demanded from him. To claim that which the Lord of Change had promised him.

It was an old story, among the Baersonlings, the struggle between Tchar the Eagle and the Worm Nurgle. The cunning schemes of Tchar constantly threatened by the rapacious appetite and mindless hunger of Nurgle. Sometimes the Worm would be too powerful, too swollen with plague-infested meat, for the Eagle’s talons to carry off. At such times, terrible diseases ravaged the land, felling mighty and meek with the indifference of a blind axeman. The careful plans of Tchar would be upset by Nurgle’s gluttonous feast, his mortal servants struck down along with the rest, his unwitting puppets cut from their strings. Of all the gods, it was Nurgle that Tchar reviled, for the Plague God was too unpredictable even for the Great Manipulator to coerce.

The Norscan’s hurried pace faltered as he neared the end of the corridor. The passage was blocked by a gate. Not a thing of bone and flesh, not a portcullis of quivering daemonic pestilence. After all the horrors he had endured, all the terrors he had overcome, a simple fence of steel bars separated him from that which he had struggled so long to win. Einarr shook his head in disbelief, unable to accept that this was the last obstacle that stood in his way.

Einarr strode towards the gate, seizing its bars in his hands. Instantly pain flooded through him, blazing agony that coursed up his arms in red misery. Beneath his touch, the steel bars were white-hot. Flesh melted from his fingers, fusing to the gate. But he refused to release his hold, the promise of what lay beyond greater than all the agony his body could endure. Black specks flared through his vision, the stink of his own cooking flesh filled his nose, and still he kept hold of the bars, straining to force the gate open. His teeth ground together, his muscles burned in protest as he strained them beyond their limits.

Finally even Einarr’s tremendous endurance crumbled beneath the strain. Screaming he pulled away from the gate. The warrior clenched his bloody fists, raging against the cruel caprices of the gods. He would not be denied, not now. Not when he had come so close.

The symbol of Tchar on his hand began to glow once more. He raised his gory fist to his neck, pulling free the scrap of armour he had taken from von Kammler’s gauntlet. He glared at the defiant gate. Bellowing the knight’s name, he flung the metal shard at the barrier. The missile blazed with chromatic energy as it struck the steel bars. The blinding light spread through the steel, rushing all across the portal. Before Einarr’s eyes, the bars began to twist and change, their skins of steel warping into scaly flesh, their pointed tips changing into serpentine heads. The hissing of vipers wheezed across the corridor as the snakes dripped away from the portal, slithering across the floor in a squirming carpet.

Carefully Einarr made his way past the hissing snakes, the reptiles still glistening with the energy that had transformed them. Gingerly he picked a path between the serpents, his bare toes curling as cold reptilian flesh brushed against them. By degrees, he won his way clear of the vipers’ nest, the pulsating hall beyond the gate standing unguarded and unbarred before him.

The throbbing rhythm that pounded through the walls and floor grew still more distinct as Einarr approached the shrine. Unerringly, his instincts had led him here, but now the unnatural guidance had nothing more to offer him. They had failed him because there was nowhere left to lead him.

He had arrived.

The meat-like walls vibrated with the pulse that ran through them, quivering and shaking as Einarr strode past them. A framework of rotting bodies rose before him, decayed hands clutching at him weakly, faint moans sighing from the wasted corpses. Einarr brushed the feeble grip of the wretches from him, sparing no thought for the damned slaves of Nurgle. There were others he would save, others who were worthy of life.

Past the archway of festering corpses, Einarr found himself standing within the shrine, the very heart of the palace. The room was lit by a golden light, a diseased magnificence that made his eyes water. Here the walls were a lattice of veins and arteries, the fleshy tubes quaking as black filth shot through them in chaotic spurts. The floor was an expanse of stretched sinew, a quilt of flayed human flesh. Faces stared up at Einarr from the floor, watching him with insane, maddened eyes. Upon the ceiling, glowing with its malevolent power, was the fly-rune of the plague god, branded into the quivering flesh of the palace, dripping with luminous pus, alive with squirming maggots.

By force of will alone did Einarr tear his eyes away from the sign of Nurgle, retching as the after-image of the diseased rune continued to infect his vision. When he recovered, he tightened his hold on Alfwyrm, the sword’s grip chewing into his mangled hands. He glanced about the noxious shrine, looking for the prize he had been told would be here.

Against the far wall, he could see a curtain of slimy gossamer, looking for all the world like a great sheet of mucous. Around the alcove were littered the bodies of dozens of Hung and pestigors, their corrupt bodies cut and burned. Blood still seeped from their grievous wounds, pooling in a stagnant mess upon the blinking floor.

Einarr strode towards the butchered guards, watching the black shadows that crawled at the corners of the shrine for any trace of what had killed them. Every nerve in his body on edge, Einarr stalked towards the alcove and the prize he had come so far to claim.

A dark, twisted shape emerged from the side of the alcove, its torn arm dripping against the curtain. A misshapen face grinned wickedly at Einarr as mismatched eyes struggled to focus upon him.

‘So, Steelfist continues to enjoy the favour of Lord Tzeentch,’ Vallac spat as he strode into the light. ‘By steel and strength and the lives of those foolish enough to follow him, he at last reaches out to claim his destiny!’

Whatever shock Einarr felt when he saw Vallac standing in the shrine was quickly smothered by the hate that swelled up inside him. He could well guess how the Kurgan had been able to reach this, the inner sanctum of the palace. Skoroth had been frightened of Einarr, obsessed with destroying the one who bore the mark of Tchar upon his flesh. He’d been so driven to destroy Einarr that the Plague Lord had ignored the other rat scurrying through the walls. Every ordeal he had endured, every foe he had slain had made Vallac’s passage through the palace that much easier, drawn that much more attention away from the Kurgan and focused it upon Einarr.

Einarr glared at the Kurgan, studying the wounds that marked Vallac’s body, trying to determine how much strength was left in the man, how much fight he could still muster. ‘And the brave Vallac, like a thief in the shadows, comes to steal what is not his to take!’

The Norscan’s words were intended to provoke Vallac, but the Kurgan’s reaction was not what Einarr expected. Instead of some reckless fury, bitter laughter took hold of him, wracking his mangled body like an ague. He raised his hand, closing his bloodied fingers around the rotten curtain. With a savage pull, he tore the gauze-like decay from its fixture, letting it wilt against the floor.

‘What is there to steal, Norscan! Where is the great treasure Lord Tzeentch told you to reclaim!’

Einarr stared in horrified fascination as Vallac exposed the depths of the alcove. Instead of chests of treasure, instead of altars of gold and silver, instead of piled gems and hoarded wealth, there was only a mass of greasy, dripping muscle. For one final time, disbelief seized Einarr’s heart, crushing it in an icy fist. The warrior became oblivious to everything, the pestilential light, the crying floor, the glowing fly-rune, even the Kurgan who glared at him and fingered his bloodied sword. All that existed for him in that black moment was the alcove, what it contained, and what it did not.

The Norscan stepped towards the mass of quivering muscle. He could see the slime dripping from it, the black sludge that flowed through it. Bones poked from its surface, decayed limbs and splintered ribs, the ruin of a skull locked in one final scream. At the very centre of the mass, a brown, putrid thing pulsed and throbbed, its rhythm racing away into the walls. But of the Claw, the treasure he had come so far to find, there was no trace.

Pain flared through Einarr’s body as he felt steel slash against his back. Only the weakness of the strike prevented the attack from severing his spine, even so there was enough strength behind it to make Einarr reel from the blow. He staggered back, lifting Alfwyrm in time to swat aside the crooked blade clenched in Vallac’s grimy fist.

‘You have cheated me!’ the Kurgan roared. ‘Cheated me of everything!’ He brought his blade crashing down, the edge biting into the floor as Einarr parried his strike. Before Einarr could press his own assault, the Kurgan’s sword was flashing towards his belly once more. Strength might have withered within Vallac’s arms, but the marauder had lost none of his speed.

‘The favour of Tzeentch is lost to me!’ Vallac raged, bringing his sword slashing down into Einarr’s leg, tearing deep into the calf. ‘Glory is lost to me!’ he screamed, and Einarr felt the edge of Vallac’s sword cut into his arm. ‘Life is lost to me!’ he howled and his sword swept towards Einarr’s head. The Norscan ducked beneath the furious attack, bringing Alfwyrm slashing through Vallac’s forearm. The Kurgan’s arm flopped to the floor, the sword still clutched in its dead fingers.

‘At last, something we agree on,’ Einarr snarled, plunging his sword into Vallac’s chest. He felt ribs crack beneath his strike, organs rupture beneath his steel. The Kurgan’s hot blood drenched his hand and Einarr sneered into Vallac’s stunned countenance. The marauder scowled back at him, his face splitting in a spiteful smile. Einarr flung himself to the floor as Vallac spat fire from his mouth an instant too late to consume the Norscan. Einarr scrambled across the ground, rolling away from the fiery exhalations that Vallac sent shooting after him. The skin coating the floor shrivelled and blackened beneath the Kurgan’s fire, but his opponent remained stubbornly just beyond his reach. Finally, even Vallac’s hate could not keep him standing. The fires sputtered and died, the Kurgan’s knees folded and he fell, the blade still thrust through his chest driving even deeper as it struck the floor.

Einarr stared at the Kurgan’s twitching body, watching his life drain from his ruined carcass. He felt a sense of triumph swell within him. After all he had endured, he could still find some satisfaction in life’s smaller pleasures.

The sound of buzzing flies tore Einarr’s attention from the dying Kurgan. From the tiny spaces between the pulsing veins that formed the walls, great blue flies crawled into the light, hairy legs rubbing together in an almost human expression of glee. The insects took to the air, gathering in a cloud of flittering vermin. Einarr watched in horror as the tiny bodies slowly melted together, coalescing into a terrible new form. Skoroth’s skull-like face grinned at him as the melting flies gave him shape once more.

‘Thank you for removing the Kurgan,’ the sorcerer said, the tones still tainted by the hum of insects. ‘I did not care for his fire. It was most troublesome.’

‘You’ll find me more troublesome,’ Einarr growled. He stooped to the floor and lifted a rusty axe from a dead Hung. ‘I do not know how you cheated death before, maggot-kin, I only know this time I will do better!’ Snarling, Einarr charged towards the bloated plague master.

Skoroth lifted his pudgy hand, filthy sounds belching from his throat. Einarr felt himself hurled back, as though some slimy fist had smashed into him, throwing him to the floor. The sorcerer stared down at him, eyes smouldering with a fanatic’s intensity.

‘Somehow, I fail to be impressed,’ he hissed. He stretched his hand again and the axe in Einarr’s fist began to rot, metal and wood dissolving into a paste that oozed through his fingers. Einarr’s flesh smouldered beneath the sludge. The sorcerer strode towards him, the floor wailing in revulsion beneath his loathsome tread. From the tips of Skoroth’s fingers, whip-like tentacles shot across the room, lashing Einarr’s body, tearing into his skin. Gangrenous sores spread from the welts as diseased venom pumped through Einarr’s body. Screaming, the warrior struggled to control the spasms that wracked him, striving against his rebelling body to lift himself from the floor.

‘Yes, Norscan. Scream. Shriek. Feel the suffering and sorrow flow through you!’ Skoroth’s skeletal grin spread to the dozens of tiny mouths that drooled open across his withered head. ‘Know despair, know agony, know desolation! Beg, grovel, bow your head as it rots from your body! Quail before the power of Nurgle!’

A scum of blood trickled from Einarr’s eyes, his lungs filling with stinging filth. His flesh crawled with pestilence, maggots sprouting from his wounds, burrowing still deeper into his flesh. By inches and degrees, he could feel himself dying, feel his life being drained away by the sorcerer’s fell magic. A wheezing cough wracked his body and torn scraps of lung erupted from his mouth.

Through the agony, through the slow death, Einarr forced his arm upward, his hand to close around the last charm dangling from his neckband. Blood and tissue dripped from his mouth as he forced his head off the floor and glared into Skoroth’s smirking visage.

‘Zhardrach,’ the warrior growled, hurling the dwarf’s beard-lock at Skoroth. The sorcerer lifted his arms instinctively to ward off the missile. The hairy coil bounced harmlessly from Skoroth’s hands, but as it struck the floor, it exploded in a burst of scintillating colour. From the beard-lock, great chains of iron shot upward, swirling around the sorcerer’s body, engulfing him in a cocoon of crushing, clinging metal. Soon, where the sorcerer had stood, there was only a pillar of twisted links that swayed and shuddered as the thing trapped within struggled against its prison.

Given a respite from the sorcerer’s stinging tendrils, Einarr plumbed the depths of his being to summon whatever vitality remained within him. He felt the now empty neckband, the last charm now used. All of his comrades had left him now. Now there was only Einarr of the Baersonlings, and somehow he doubted that would be enough. He turned his head to where Vallac’s body lay upon the floor, the cold blade of Alfwyrm still buried in the Kurgan’s chest. Painfully, Einarr dragged himself toward Vallac. The Norscan’s ravaged body screamed in protest, urging him to lie still and accept death. He fought back the weakness of his flesh. A Norscan fought until his last breath, and beyond if need be. He did not sit back and quietly let death claim him like some miserable southlander. To do so was insult both to the gods and his ancestors. Now, so close to the grim halls of the afterworld, now was the time when it was most important to be strong.

Like a worm, Einarr slithered across the staring floor, fingers gouging eyes as he gripped their sockets to pull his body forward. Vallac’s body slowly came nearer, inch by agonising inch the carcass of his treacherous comrade came closer. Einarr risked a look back at the pillar of chains that had encased Skoroth. The sorcerer’s struggles no longer caused the pillar to sway. Instead, Einarr could see a green mist rising from the column, the links rusting and corroding within the cloud. Desperation swelled the flagging strength in the Norscan’s body. If he did not reach Vallac’s body before the chains encasing Skoroth rotted away, he knew that he never would.

Einarr refused to look back at Skoroth, forcing himself to keep his eyes on his goal. Slowly, ever so slowly, the body of the Kurgan drew nearer. Vallac’s caustic blood stung Einarr’s maimed body as he crawled through the pool of gore trickling from the carcass. The burned floor crumbled beneath his fingers as he dragged himself onward. Finally, his hand closed around the Kurgan’s leg. His muscles aflame with pain, Einarr pulled himself up Vallac’s body.

For a moment he stared down into the mutated face of the traitor. Einarr lurched back in alarm as Vallac’s eyes flashed open. The Kurgan croaked and gagged, trying to summon a gout of fire to incinerate his killer. All that came was a dry, hacking gargle. Acidic phlegm slobbered over the Kurgan’s lips, searing his skin.

‘Come… to… take back… your… sword,’ Vallac hissed. His eyes closed on the neckband around Einarr’s throat. His broken face contorted into a sneer. ‘What… what trophy… do… you steal… from Vallac…?’

Einarr glared down at the Kurgan. He heard the first rusty links of chain clatter to the floor as Skoroth’s prison began to collapse. The Norscan’s features darkened into a mask of stone. The symbol of Tchar on his hand glowed with power. ‘From you, Vallac of the Khazags…’ Einarr slammed his glowing fist into the Kurgan’s chest, feeling ribs crack beneath his hand, flesh split before his fingers. ‘From you, I take everything!’

The Kurgan’s shriek echoed through the chamber as Einarr ripped his fiery soul from Vallac’s body. The marauder’s eyes collapsed into cinders, his flesh blackened and crumbled into ash. Einarr tore his hand from the smoking corpse, his fist wrapped in Vallac’s inner fire. He watched the ghostly flames swirling about his hand for a moment, then spun about, staring at the corroded pillar of chains.

With a final, mournful crack, the chains shattered, spraying across the room in an explosion of rusted iron and putrid mist. Skoroth’s bloated body emerged from the shambles of his prison, his skeletal face hideous in his rage. Then his eyes fastened onto Einarr. The rheumy orbs grew wide with fear as Skoroth saw the wraith-fire pulsing around the Norscan’s fist.

‘Burn, sorcerer!’ Einarr spat. ‘Burn with all your filth and horror!’ He threw his hand forward, the ghastly fire leaping from him to streak across the room. The flames slammed into Skoroth’s obese bulk, engulfing him in a spectral inferno. The sorcerer’s shrieks thundered through the shrine, causing veins to burst and rotten slabs of flesh to fall from the ceiling. Einarr glared at Skoroth’s blazing figure as he writhed in torment. He stooped once more to Vallac’s mangled body and pulled Alfwyrm free from the ashes. In his mind’s eye, he saw Thognathog, consumed by the pestilential fumes of Skoroth’s dragon. He saw Orgrim, dissolving in the bowels of Skoroth’s palace. He saw Birna’s bloodied face, her body pierced by Skoroth’s trap. He saw Asta and Spjall and Sigdan, all awaiting him in the halls of their ancestors.

Even with his body enveloped in flame, Skoroth tried to summon his magic to protect him as the Norscan stalked grimly back across the shrine, murder in his eyes. The fleshy floor snapped and snarled beneath Einarr, struggling to bite his feet as he strode across the faces. Maggots rained from the ceiling, burrowing into his flesh as he passed beneath the oozing fly-rune of Nurgle. Tiny daemons, like a stream of living excrement, slithered from the walls and wrapped slimy arms about the Norscan’s legs. From Skoroth’s fingers, black tentacles lashed at him, searing his flesh where they struck, sending disease sizzling through his body.

Like a juggernaut, Einarr strode through everything the sorcerer cast upon him. Pain was banished from his mind, fatigue and injury vanquished by the adamantine will that thundered within his soul. Hope and despair, fear and courage, these were things that had lost all meaning for him. The only thing left in him was the determination that he would see his quest through to the bitter end. If he could not offer the Claw to Tchar, then he would offer the skull of Skoroth to his ancestors.

Skoroth watched Einarr advance upon him, disbelief in the sorcerer’s eyes. He opened his mouths, spewing a stream of worm-infested bile from his bloated innards. The corruption sizzled against Einarr’s skin, gnawing through flesh and muscle. The gleam of bone shone from the festering wounds, yet still the Norscan came. No scream sounded from him; no cries of agony and pain. Only a quiet, whispered litany as the names of his forefathers found purchase one last time upon his lips. Soon, the name of Einarr Sigdansson would be among them.

Panic seized the sorcerer as Einarr forced his tortured body towards him. The warrior pulled his arm back, Alfwyrm’s blade reflecting the dancing flames that swirled about Skoroth. With his concentration fully broken, the magics that kept the worst of the fire’s fury at bay vanished and the greedy flames began to consume his obscene bulk. Einarr sent his sword driving down into Skoroth’s withered head.

The sorcerer exploded beneath the blow, his body disintegrating into thousands of flies. The fire continued to engulf the noxious insects as they flew through the air, darting back into the nest of veins that formed the wall of the shrine. Einarr roared in fury, slashing his sword through the retreating flies, refusing to let the stricken sorcerer escape.

As the flies burrowed back into the gaps between the pulsing veins, the rune upon Einarr’s hand glowed once more. Something beyond his own will compelled him to stagger to the wall, to stretch his hand and seize the last of the flies before it could vanish.

Words formed on his tongue, but the voice was not his. Sounds rumbled from his throat, but they were not those of a man. The syllables that left his mouth scorched the air, blazing with power as they transformed from idea into purpose. Somehow, without understanding the ghastly sounds, Einarr knew their meaning. Be flesh, the shrieking notes said. Be flesh.

Beyond all the other horrors he had experienced, the wailing scream that sounded from within the nest of veins stabbed into Einarr’s mind, offending his very soul with its unearthly depths of agony. A gory paste of meat and bone oozed from the gaps in the wall, dripping down the lattice of veins in a runny slime. Putrid blood fell from his hand and opening it he found that where once had been a fly, now he held a decayed human finger. Disgusted, he let the digit drop to the floor. Even for one of the plague god’s slaves, Einarr could not help but be sickened by the horror of such a death.

The Norscan turned from the loathsome ruin that had claimed Skoroth and sagged to the floor. His last foe vanquished, now he felt the weight of his wounds, the enormity of his suffering. He let Alfwyrm fall from nerveless fingers. His vision became a fog of weariness, the shrine and everything within it fading into grey shadows. Only the sound of the throbbing heart and the diseased sludge pulsing through the vein-walls remained clear and distinct to him.

His hand burned with energy once more, and Einarr forced his tired eyes to focus on the now numbed member. The metallic symbol that had been seared into his flesh was moving, slithering across his skin with a life of its own. He watched it drip from his arm, pool on the floor and continue to crawl away. Gradually he became aware that it was growing larger, the metal sheen darkening to the black of pitch. He blinked away the shadows as feathers sprouted from the sludge, as the oily tendrils formed into wings. Rising from the slime, he saw a great black eagle, its beak crooked like a sickle. He had seen such a bird before, the carrion eater that had perched upon his chest after the destruction of his village, the scavenger who sat atop the boulder and thought to feast upon the sabretusk he had slain .

Even as the memory came to him, the black bird was changing again. Its beak opened in a savage cry, its shape swelling like a gathering storm. The eagle’s scaly legs grew, rippling with energy as they expanded. Tiny gemstones twinkled from the pillar-like limbs, a scintillating skin of sapphire and diamond. The eagle’s body stretched and twisted, the feathers folding in upon themselves until they vanished back into the creature’s leathery skin. Hundreds of eyes blinked from the mottled chest, no two sharing a kindred colour. Flames of white fire flashed through the raptor’s wings and its thin bones thickened into the clawed arms of a giant. New wings, translucent, almost glass-like, spread from the eagle’s back, tinkling like tiny bells as they snapped open. Einarr could almost see landscapes and creatures moving within the smoky depths of the wings, and turned his eyes away, lest he discover his impression to be true.

Only the eagle’s head resisted the change that consumed the rest of it. Throughout the metamorphosis, it retained its cruel avian shape. Though he could not say he had seen it grow, somehow the bird’s head remained in proportion to its body. Its eyes, changing size and shape with each passing breath, stared down at Einarr, an air of amusement in the daemon’s pitiless gaze.

Einarr looked again at his hand, the hand that no longer bore the curled sign of Tchar upon it. Now he understood, now he knew why he had been chosen. This was why he had not claimed a talisman from Berus’s torn body. The berserker was not a part of them, they had already been nine when Einarr had freed Berus from the Hung. The ninth warrior, the one who completed the sacred number of Tzeentch, that one he had carried within himself. From the moment the foul thing’s blood had seeped into his skin, it had been there inside him. Guiding him. Manipulating him. Protecting him. All the foes he had faced, the trials he had overcome, he had conquered only with the daemon’s unseen help. The comrades he had gathered, the enchanted talismans he had claimed from their mangled bodies, these had been nothing but tools in the daemon’s game, puppets dancing upon its strings.

Einarr felt his soul crack as the enormity of the deceit crashed around him. Everything had been a lie, everything he had been told had been a trick. The rune he had seen in the snow, the image plucked from his own dreams – the black eagle had not represented the man, but the thing the man carried inside him. The quest had never been about recovering the Claw, it had been about bringing the daemon into the shrine. He was not the champion, not the hero who would claim glory from the gods themselves! He was nothing more than a horse to carry his master whither he willed.

Did you really think you could come so far alone, little mouse? The daemon’s words scraped against Einarr’s consciousness like a knife across bone. Did you think flesh and steel were enough to challenge the gods themselves?

Einarr’s head swam as the daemon’s voice crawled through his skull. The abomination seemed to still be growing, its impossible enormity filling the entire shrine. Or perhaps it was the room itself that was expanding, growing to accommodate the daemon’s power. His senses rebelled against the violation of perception that the daemon embodied and he ground his hands against his eyes, trying to block out the awful sight.

One more thing you will do for me, little mouse. The thing I brought you so very far to do. Einarr’s body trembled in revulsion as the daemon’s gigantic claw closed around him and he was lifted from the floor. He could feel his flesh running between the daemon’s talons, his blood curdling as its ghastly essence seeped down into his veins. You refused to leave an offering before my monolith. Now you shall make amends.

‘But the Claw is not here!’ Einarr protested through trembling lips. The daemon laughed.

Of course not, little mouse! It is safe with my master as it has been for thousands of your years. It is a different prize that brings me here, little mouse, one I did not see fit to trust to the weak mind of a mortal, lest some other daemon tease the knowledge from your fragile flesh.

The daemon set him down in the little alcove. Einarr fell to his knees, his body twisted and mangled by exposure to the daemon’s aura. His arms were curled like the horns of a ram, his legs buckled and bent, the bones melted beneath his dripping skin. Einarr struggled to move, but his muscles refused to work in the ways he knew.

The heart, little mouse. Give it to me and then I will let you die.

Einarr felt the daemon’s malice lash through him, a sensation a thousand times more terrible than even the sorcery of Skoroth. He tried to force his body to move, sliding across the alcove like some dripping snail. Tears wept from his eyes as he willed his crippled arms to lift, only succeeding in making the hands flop uselessly against his chest. He screamed as he felt the daemon’s talon stab into his back, as he felt flesh and bone erupt from his wound, flowing together in some new and abominable growth.

Reach with your paws, little mouse. Do not make me ask again.

The Norscan wailed with impotent fury, crying in agony as he tried to force his maimed body to obey him. Despair flooded through him, the despair of the damned. Before him, the knot of muscle quivered, pulsating in tune with the tiny heart that pounded within it. Einarr stumbled forward on his useless limbs, flopping against the side of the alcove. He watched as the heart faltered, skipping a beat before resuming its pulsations. Even in the pits of desolation that filled him, Einarr noted the change in the rhythm, a change that vibrated throughout the shrine and the palace beyond. The disembodied heart now beat in time with his own!

Now, little mouse, take it now.

Einarr’s crooked arm slapped uselessly against the knot of flesh. Straining, he lurched closer to the heart, craning his head against the quivering, throbbing obscenity. Its oozing skin slapped against his face, its dull pounding throbbing in his ears. Weeping from the effort, Einarr brought his mangled arm up, pinning the heart between it and his head.

Good little mouse. A mortal placed it there, it needs a mortal to take it away. Take it now, little mouse, and your suffering will be at an end.

Einarr screamed as he pulled his twisted body away from the greasy mass of muscle. For an instant, the heart held fast, clinging stubbornly to its fastenings of sinew and artery. Then, with a wet tearing sound, it ripped free. Einarr crumbled upon the floor of the alcove, the still beating organ gripped in his teeth. Black filth cascaded from the ruptured veins, showering the Norscan in diseased sewage. All around the shrine, the throbbing, quivering life faded, the walls grew still as the sludge no longer shot through the vein-like coils.

You have done well, little mouse. Now bring it to me.

Einarr lifted his head, forcing his eyes to fasten onto the daemon’s grotesque presence. His disfigured face curled into a snarl of defiance.

‘No,’ he spat through clenched teeth.

The daemon’s wings opened wide, the images struggling for substance within their smoky depths turning into tongues of flame. The eyes that glared at Einarr from its mottled chest turned red with inhuman fury. The floor beneath the daemon’s clawed feet screamed in horror as its unholy rage thundered across the shrine.

The little mouse dares to defy me, Yth’nitzzilik the Maleficent! Yth’nitzzilik the Enduring! Yth’nitzzilik the Great Abomination!

‘You made a promise to me, daemon,’ Einarr snarled, teeth falling from his mangled jaw. ‘Black claw or festering heart, you will keep your oath to me.’

The daemon’s eyes glowered down at the tiny, broken mortal.

You cannot begin to imagine the paths that have led to this moment, little mouse. The many centuries that have faded away waiting to bring me here. From the instant when the plague god crowned the first Plague Lord and built from his mortal shell this palace, the strands of fate have conspired to give shape to this moment. My master waits to feel the Festerheart in his hand. The gods plan their great war, little mouse. They need only the Festerheart to bind the plague god to their cause. All existence waits upon this moment, and one heartsick mortal thinks to stand in the way?

‘You promised to turn back the hours, to open the gate between days! You swore to send me back, back to Vinnskor, back to the time when the bloodbeast attacked my village! I can save my people this time! I can save Asta and Spjall and all the others! I can save my people! I can stop Birna and the others from ever coming to this pit of death and horror! I can change it all!’

Yth’nitzzilik stepped closer to Einarr, its enormous shadow falling over him, making his skin crawl with unclean changes. Despite the burning torment in his eyes, Einarr continued to glare at the daemon. The crooked beak twisted, impossibly forming itself into a smile.

So like a mortal, obsessed with such petty dreams. There is a jest here even the eternal can appreciate. The daemon’s mocking laughter shuddered all around Einarr’s broken body. Very well, Einarr Sigdansson, I shall keep my promise.

The daemon’s clawed hand stretched down towards Einarr, shimmering light growing from the centre of its palm…

EPILOGUE

A savage war cry exploded from Einarr as he hurled himself at the beast. His axe chopped into one of the abomination’s flailing tentacles, severing it from its body. The mast-like column of flesh crashed to the ground, narrowly missing the enraged axeman. Before his very eyes, it corroded into a stagnant heap of scarlet mush. The beast coughed and croaked with what Einarr hoped was pain and took a swipe at him with one of its enormous paws. Einarr dodged the blow, striking out at the malformed limb as it passed him, the edge of his axe chewing into the back of its foremost talon. The beast coughed again and lashed out once more, this time with a pair of tentacles. Only by dragging every ounce of speed from his body was the warrior able to dance between the flailing limbs. The beast reared back once more, blood dripping from its fanged muzzle.

‘Follow me, you blood-worm filth!’ Einarr screamed at the thing. ‘I am what you came for!’ Einarr jumped back as the monster struck at him with one of its panther-like paws. He waited for the thing to surge towards him. For a moment, the monster’s multitude of eyes stared at him. Then the moment passed. It swung its trunk-like neck around, closing its jaws around the shrieking body of a mangled reaver. Einarr stood in stunned horror as the beast shuddered back across the garth, towards the warriors assembled on the other side of the village.

With a cry of despair, Einarr raced back across the garth and flung himself at the beast. He crashed against its slimy back, chopping frenziedly into its gore-drenched skin. Sizzling gore splattered across him, but still he hacked and tore into the thing. The burning blood seared his hands, his skin coming off in scabby strips as he tried to maintain his hold upon his axe. He saw the screaming, accusing faces of his kinsmen and his neighbours locked within the beast’s blood.

Through eyes clouded with blood, through a haze of madness and fury, Einarr watched his past self chop and slash at the bloodbeast. He tried to hold the monster back, tried to stay its murderous claws, but his efforts were as futile as his attempts to turn the beast back as it slithered toward the village. His was but one soul among many trapped within the bloodbeast’s body, one voice among the screaming throng that tried to command the brute’s formless mass. The spite and hate and psychopathic rage of the others was too much for him to overcome, the legion arrayed against him too vast to conquer. He could only watch as events unfolded, following the pattern he had struggled so vainly to break. He pressed against the flesh of the bloodbeast, struggling to warn his past self, to warn the man that had been Einarr about the treachery of hope and the lying tongues of daemons.

Einarr felt the flesh of the bloodbeast bubble and change as he strove against it, the gory hide transforming into the rude semblance of his own features. Tears of blood bubbled from his eyes, his mouth moving in silent cries of warning to his past self, desperately striving to make the man he was turn back before it was too late.

The axeman slashed the blade of his weapon deep into the bloodbeast’s blubbery hide. Steaming blood cascaded from the wound, showering Einarr in scalding liquid. The warrior ground his teeth against the pain and raised his axe for another blow.

For an instant he froze, mesmerised by the image of one of the shrieking faces that bubbled up from the monster’s wounds. The face seemed almost to be his own, locked in some nameless, unspeakable torment, screaming in limitless agony.

Einarr tore his eyes from the shrieking soul, forcing himself to plunge his axe once again into the bloodbeast’s vile flesh. He did not see the crimson tears spilling from the eyes of the tiny face as damnation consumed its last, fragile hope.

In the sky above, a gaunt black eagle circled and croaked with amusement as it watched slaughter consume Vinnskor. The eagle’s talons were wet with blood and clutched in its claws was a throbbing, pulsing heart. Its laughter drifted down to the carnage, its mocking notes dripping from the sky like burning rain. The bloodbeast raised its misshapen trunk, trying to find the source of such caustic notes. The eagle laughed again and gradually flew away into the darkening gloom, abandoning the village and its would-be saviour to their fate. Slowly the daemon faded from the star-swept sky, vanishing back into its own terrible realm to bear its prize to its master.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

PROLOGUE

The stink of blood and death was thick upon the plain. A crimson light tainted the sky, turning the midday sun into a smouldering ember behind the unnatural haze. Overhead, the croaking of vultures drifted down, like the impatient muttering of daemons. Again and again the carrion birds circled, never descending, never departing. The reek of death had drawn them from their gruesome rookeries, to linger until they had filled their scrawny frames with their hideous repast.

A man stood upon a small hill, little more than a jagged pile of rocks cast down by the craggy mountains beyond the plain. Like the vultures, he waited, waited for the sounds to fade: the warriors’ din of crashing steel and the screams of dying men. Unlike the vultures, he did not listen to the clamour with a mind greedy with hunger. He was no scavenger, no slinking jackal preying upon the leavings of true predators. The man stood with a pride alien to scavengers and ghouls. His frame was straight and tall, his limbs corded with iron-knots of muscle, his chest swollen with strength. Armour of lacquered bone and boiled leather was fastened around his powerful body, blackened with soot to match the braided scalp-locks that dripped from beneath his gold-masked helm.

A nest of spikes protruded from the rim of the helm, stabbing up at the crimson sky. Crafted from ruby, adorned in jade and obsidian, the crown that circled the daemon-masked helm was more than the affectation of a primitive savage, the boast of a barbarous warlord. It was a talisman of power, a display of authority and might. It was the heraldry of a king, and each of the spikes that jutted from its band betokened one who had stood against its wearer and been cut down by his sword.

It was whispered that no mortal had crafted that crown, that it had come from the Realm of the Gods, that each time another fell to its wearer it was no artisan who placed a new spike of ruby upon the king’s brow, but rather that the crown grew a new blood-thorn to commemorate the deed.

Terror of the Blood-Crown had spread through the Shadowlands, passing in frightened mutterings between the horse-clans of the Hung, the nomad tribes of the Kurgan and the warherds of the beastkin. The name of he who wore it had become a curse on the tongues of a dozen races: Teiyogtei Khagan, the ‘glorious king’ of the Tsavag. Unlike the khagans, who had led the warhosts of the Tong in the past, exploding into the Shadowlands in a storm of slaughter and pillage, Teiyogtei had not led his people back into the forbidden vastness of the Chaos Wastes. The king had remained, and with him the Tsavag, the most vicious tribe to ever emerge from the forsaken realm of the Tong.

Teiyogtei’s eyes closed in thought behind the snarling mask of his helm. He saw again the bloody dream that had drawn him out of the Wastes, into a land where the breath of the gods was a calm breeze rather than a raging tempest. Here, the bloody dream had been cast aside, old oaths and pacts forgotten. Here, a new dream had been forged, cast in the iron of Teiyogtei’s indomitable will, not the dream of endless slaughter but the vision of timeless empire. By his might, by his power, Teiyogtei had conquered the plains and bound the steppes to him with chains of terror. Now it was not only the Tong who swore allegiance to him, but tribes of Kurgan, Hung and beastkin.

Other warlords had forged such warhosts, great hordes as vast as the horizon. They had squandered their power in campaigns of carnage, spending their strength in the vainglorious effort to appease the ever hungry gods. Teiyogtei had a different vision. He saw a land crushed in his iron fist. He saw castles and fortresses rising from the dust of the steppes, mines stabbing into the deeps of the mountains, fields exploding across the forsaken plains. He saw a land reforged in his own image, a domain that would become stronger than the steel that built it. This would be his glory, his legacy, not the empty quest to please the capricious gods, his name forgotten in the murk of time. The domain he built would endure long after he was gone, and through it his legacy would outlast the gods. He had forged powerful alliances with the strongest tribes, gifting their chieftains with mighty daemon weapons in exchange for their oaths of blood and loyalty. His was an army such as the Shadowlands had never seen, the horde of a conqueror, the horde of a king.

The roar of battle drew nearer. Teiyogtei’s eyes snapped open, his armoured hand closing around the sword at his side. With a shrill hiss, he drew the blade from its scabbard of flesh, the flayed husk of Teiyogtei’s first victim. The sword burned like scarlet fire in his hand, fat and crooked, a ripple of lightning captured in crimson steel. Teiyogtei felt himself being drawn into the flickering embers that burned within the blade. The khagan pulled his eyes away, sneering at the greedy malice of the Bloodeater. The blade had feasted upon many souls since the hour it had been forged, but it would never taste that of Teiyogtei.

The warlord stroked the sharp edge, letting it scrape against the iron of his gloves, teasing the weapon’s malignancy with the nearness of his blood. Angered, the Bloodeater would be even deadlier in battle, eager to feed its frustration with death and ruin. Teiyogtei wanted the weapon at its most malevolent. He feared that the battle to come would test its hostility to the full.

A choking death rattle rose sharply from the crimson mist. A hulking shape, little more than a shadow through the curtain of gory fog, pitched and fell, its head rolling free from its shoulders. Dimly, through the veil of mist, Teiyogtei could see mangled heaps of flesh strewn across the ground, scarcely human in their butchered ruin, piled in heaps of broken bones and severed limbs. Amid the wreckage, he could see a handful of warriors still standing, stubbornly refusing to abandon the fight. Two scarred Kurgan warriors lunged deeper into the crimson murk, monstrous axes clenched firmly in their fists. A breath later, Teiyogtei heard their screams, heard the sound of sizzling flesh and the liquid splash of blood upon earth. The khagan dared to glance down at the Bloodeater, reassured to find that its fires burned steadily, a visible token of its smouldering fury.

‘What has come for you can be vanquished, but never destroyed.’ Those had been the words the old Tsavag shaman had muttered as he looked up from the puddled entrails of his sacrifice. A warning from the gods? A threat? No, Teiyogtei had taken it as a challenge. He knew which of the dark gods had sent this creature to ravage his domain. He knew that it would not relent until he had faced it in combat.

‘Vanquished, but never destroyed.’ Teiyogtei sneered at the prophecy. The shaman had paid for his cryptic words, his skull smashed beneath the foot of a Tsavag war mammoth. A man made his own destiny. He did not need the riddles of the gods to lead him astray. Man, monster or daemon, Teiyogtei had yet to encounter anything that could survive the Bloodeater’s ravenous bite.

The clamour of battle faded into a metal echo, only the moans of the dying and the croaking vultures disturbing the silence. The crimson mist swelled, billowing as though moved by an unfelt wind. The rolling curtain stretched towards the hill where Teiyogtei stood alone.

The khagan had forbidden any of his followers to stand with him. Whatever creature had crawled down into his domain from the Wastes, he would face it alone. If he was victorious, it would reaffirm his might in the eyes of his chieftains, bind them all the more to his will. If he fell, it would not matter if a thousand fell with him. Teiyogtei allowed only the four hundred Kurgan who stood beneath the hill to stand against the beast. If four hundred could not stop the monster, no number of mortal warriors and mortal blades would. Teiyogtei would not squander the strength of his horde in useless conflict. It would matter little if he destroyed the monster at the expense of his army. No, if the horde was broken, death upon the creature’s blade would be only too welcome.

The Skulltaker, that was the name the thing had been given, the title it wore in the nightmares of sorcerers and seers: a harbinger of Khorne, the Blood God’s chosen executioner. It had left a trail of destruction across Teiyogtei’s realm, empty villages and broken castles. The khagan’s realm was threatened, not by the Skulltaker, but by the terror that he brought with him. If Teiyogtei were to maintain his rule, he could allow his people to fear nothing more than they feared their king.

At the base of the hill, the crimson mist rolled back, retreating as though pulled away by spectral steeds. As the mist retreated, a lone figure stood revealed beneath the baleful sky. Teiyogtei was surprised to see that his adversary was no daemon, no misshapen monster from the pits of the Wastes. The figure that stood below was that of a man, but such a man as even the khagan had never faced before. Tall, bulky, his body was covered in plates of steel, stained the hue of old blood, a tattered cloak of daemon fur spilling down his back, his head unseen behind a skull-faced helm of iron. Great antlers rose from either side of the helm, jagged horns of bronze, each forming one part of the skull-rune of Khorne. Beside the malice Teiyogtei could feel emanating from the lone warrior, even the fury of the Bloodeater seemed a feeble thing.

The king tried to stare into the skull-faced mask, to see the man behind the iron, but only shadow returned his gaze. A twinge of fear worked through the warlord’s body. This, he knew, was the Skulltaker, and for the first time he truly wondered if his foe could be destroyed. Could anything overcome such pure, raw hatred?

The Skulltaker was still for a moment, letting his enemy take his measure. Then, slowly, his head lifted, staring back at Teiyogtei. The warrior’s voice growled from behind his mask, a sound like steel scraping against bone.

‘Doom,’ the Skulltaker proclaimed. ‘Doom has come to the betrayers.’ The warrior raised his weapon, a thick blade with jagged, cruel edges, as black as a shard of midnight. Teiyogtei could see faces screaming beneath the black skin of the weapon, writhing in torment within the blade that had consumed their souls. The khagan looked down at his own sword, a new doubt working into his mind. There was a kinship between these weapons, but that could not be. Neither man nor daemon could have forged another such blade.

Teiyogtei bit down on his fears. He was Teiyogtei Khagan, the greatest warlord to rise from the Tong, the mightiest people the world would ever know. No foe had ever bested him in battle, no foe ever would. Men could break their promises, but the word of a god was eternal. Whatever he was, whatever had sent him, the Skulltaker would fall before the Bloodeater and become another thorn upon the Blood-Crown.

‘Doom?’ Teiyogtei sneered. ‘I fear no doom. You think to bring me death? Know that Teiyogtei Khagan cannot fall in battle! The Blood God’s oath protects me, and he will not revoke his word when it is given! Doom?’ The king laughed at his silent foe. ‘It is your doom that is come, wretch! The terror of the Skulltaker ends here upon my Bloodeater!’

The khagan’s words had scarcely been uttered when his enemy sprang into motion. With a speed that Teiyogtei would have believed impossible, the armoured warrior charged up the side of the hill, the Skulltaker’s boots gouging into the rock like claws of steel. Teiyogtei sprang to meet the warrior’s attack, the Bloodeater flashing out in a fiery arc only to crash against the blackened edge of the Skulltaker’s weapon. The king’s arm shuddered from the impact, his bones trembling. He recoiled instinctively and the Skulltaker was swift to seize upon his weakness. An iron shoulder crashed against Teiyogtei’s chest, throwing him back, only the king’s amazing reflexes preventing him from collapsing to the ground.

The black sword slashed out at the reeling king, and as it swept through the air the wailing voices of those trapped within clawed at Teiyogtei’s mind. More by instinct than thought, he parried the strike, his bones again shuddering as red blade met black. The two swords were frozen, locked against one another as the two fighters struggled to break each other’s hold. At length, Teiyogtei felt his strength begin to ebb, felt the Skulltaker’s incredible power start to prevail. The king brought his boot cracking into the Skulltaker’s knee, trying to spill his foe to the ground. The warrior’s leg barely registered the brutal impact that would have snapped the bone of a lesser man.

Teiyogtei’s tactic did serve its purpose, however. For an instant, the Skulltaker’s attention was distracted, and in that instant, the king freed the Bloodeater, leaping back before the Skulltaker could retaliate. The iron-helmed warrior lashed out at the khagan, the point of his black sword scraping against the lacquer armour. Red smoke rose from the cut, and Teiyogtei’s nose filled with the sickening stink of the vapour. He did not like to think what havoc even a small cut from the weapon might work should it sink into flesh. Again, the unfamiliar spectre of fear screamed through his mind.

As though smelling his foe’s fear, the Skulltaker struck again, driving his black blade at Teiyogtei from the side. The king hurried to block the attack, but the Bloodeater was caught at an awkward angle, trapped between the Skulltaker’s black blade and his own body. He struggled to fend off the warrior’s immense strength, but the angle of his weapon conspired against him, threatening to snap his arm with the effort. Teiyogtei roared in pain as the lacquer plates began to split beneath the Bloodeater, as his own blade began to gouge into his flesh.

Fuelled by the intense agony, Teiyogtei drew upon the last of his strength. Howling like a beast, the khagan ripped the Bloodeater from his own body, beating back the Skulltaker’s sword. Ropes of gore drooled from the gouge in his side, but the king had not the breath to spare to consider his grisly wound. The Skulltaker was already moving to attack the weakened king, slashing at the khagan’s neck. Teiyogtei ducked under the wound, driving the Bloodeater into the Skulltaker’s belly.

He pressed the sword home, deep and hard, only relenting when he felt it erupt from the warrior’s back. Only then did Teiyogtei give thought to the quivering pain that wracked his body.

He backed away from the stricken warrior, leaving the Bloodeater thrust through the monster’s gut. The Skulltaker watched him retreat, his malevolence seeming to flicker as the Bloodeater drained his soul. Blood bubbled from Teiyogtei’s mouth, spilling from the face of his gilded mask.

It became an effort for him to keep the Skulltaker in focus as his vision began to swim with pain. The king growled against such weakness. He would see the monster dead before he allowed himself to fade into the Hunting Halls.

The Skulltaker reached his hand to his belly, gripping the hilt of Teiyogtei’s sword. With savage, twisting tugs, he pulled the sword free, stagnant blood exploding from the wound. The Bloodeater’s fire was extinguished, smothered by the malignity of that which it had tried to devour. The Skulltaker tossed it aside with an almost arrogant contempt. The Bloodeater shattered against the rocky ground, and the Skulltaker’s boots crushed its shards as he advanced once more upon the king.

Teiyogtei stared at the executioner. Even had he been able, he would not flee. Despite his best efforts, his hour had passed. No man could hope to cheat the gods.

Yet, as the Skulltaker came towards him, Teiyogtei noted that the imposing warrior seemed somehow diminished. It was as though he were draining away with the blood that continued to vomit from his gut.

The khagan had the impression of ice dissolving in water. By the time he drew close to the king, the Skulltaker was a shrivelled echo of the warrior who had fought against him. It was only with a shuddering effort that the Skulltaker lifted his black blade, struggling to strike Teiyogtei.

The black sword slashed at the king’s face, shattering the Blood-Crown and splitting the gilded mask in two, but the edge failed to taste the man within, and Teiyogtei smiled as he saw the Skulltaker crash to the ground, his last effort wasted.

The impression of dissolution was undeniable. The Skulltaker’s body was visibly corroding, melting into a mass of stagnant blood. The sword he had carried crumbled into cinders, fleeing into the sudden wind. The blood seeped into the earth, as though sucked down into the ground. Soon, only the Skulltaker’s carnage bore witness to his existence. Teiyogtei’s laugh of triumph ended upon a hollow note as he recalled the words of his shaman.

Vanquished, but never destroyed.

The haunting words were still echoing in Teiyogtei’s mind as he collapsed to the ground, overcome by his wound. He dimly heard his chieftains rushing up the hill to attend their king, dimly he heard them calling for their healers and witch doctors.

Teiyogtei Khagan could hear the voice of the Skulltaker more clearly.

Doom. Doom has come to the betrayers.

CHAPTER ONE

Rock shattered to dust beneath the immense weight of the mammoth, sending fragments spraying into the scraggly brush. Ninety hands high, its enormity cloaked in matted black fur nearly two feet thick, the mammoth towered over the land, seeming to dwarf even the distant mountains and their claw-like peaks. When the behemoth moved, the world trembled, each plodding step causing stones to topple from the hills around it. The boulders rattled and crashed down step-like terraces to smack against the brute’s legs as they rolled into the plain below.

The mammoth ignored the impacts with godlike disdain, the flesh beneath its leathery hide scarcely scratched. The gigantic head swung from side to side, enormous black eyes studying the slopes around it, curled ivory tusks reflecting the summer sun. The massive trunk, like a bloated jungle python, reared back, coiling against the mammoth’s scaly face. The maw beneath the trunk gaped wide and a deafening bellow boomed from the beast’s body, the roar of a hunting titan.

Men covered their heads as the mammoth’s bellow thundered across the sky, their skulls throbbing from the nearness of the sound. A walled platform had been lashed to the beast’s back, a small fort of ivory and bone covered in hides of fur and skin. Within this fort, men clung to leather straps and watched the land pass beneath them as their colossal steed lumbered through the dusty hills.

Even as they guarded their ears against the trumpeting bellow, the men kept wary eyes trained upon the hills and ready hands upon the short throwing spears that rested in leather baskets beside them.

Each of the men was stocky in build, with powerful thews and bulging muscles. Their dusky skin bore the scars of sun and wind, their broad faces the lean hunger of hardship and travail.

Upon some, strange lesions and bizarre growths marred the uniformity of limb and visage; others carried still more outrageous displays of what was called ‘the gift of the gods’. For these men were of the Tsavag tribe, descended from the mighty Tong, who dwelled deep within the Wastes, on the very threshold of the Realm of the Gods. They wore their armour of bone and fur with pride, and adorned their dark topknots with talismans of ivory and bronze.

There was no arrogance in their adornment, for the Tsavag were too secure in their superiority to feel the need to boast.

A lone Tsavag stood in the cage of ivory chained around the mammoth’s neck. Like his kinsmen, he was dark of skin, with a broad, hungry face. A trick of the gods had made his eyes the colour of gold, shining like coins from their dark setting. Blotches of discoloured skin ran across the tribesman’s body, marking his flesh like the belly of a toad, but there was no aberration in the cords of muscle that swelled his arms, nor the sharp intelligence that peered from the golden eyes.

Dorgo Foecrusher was among the greatest of his tribe’s warriors, son of their khagan, Hutga Steelskin. In his twenty-five summers he had killed a hundred foes in battle. Kurgan, Hung, even the despicable beastkin from the Grey had shed their lives on his blade.

Dorgo had earned the respect of his tribesmen with each victory, but still he yearned for more. There was one Tsavag he had never been able to impress, the only one of his tribe who mattered so far as he was concerned. If he was to succeed Hutga as khagan, he would need to prove himself worthy to the grizzled warlord.

He wondered if it would ever be possible to meet his father’s high demands.

The warrior shook his head, forgetting for a time his mired ambitions. He needed to keep his mind on the hunt.

He lifted his gaze to the rocky hills that peppered the plain. They rose in crumbling mounds, worn down into cracked stumps by wind and rain.

Dorgo could still see the broken fragments of stone towers rising from their summits, could still make out the step-like plateaux that marched up the sides of the hills. Once those steps would have been terraced gardens, overflowing with rice and wheat, and green things of every description. The towers would have been filled with warriors, warily watching over the gardens at their feet. This place had been the granary of Teiyogtei, when that great warlord had carved his kingdom from the desolation of the steppes. The towers, the gardens, even the hills had been built with the sorcery of his shamans and the sweat of his slaves. With his gardens, Teiyogtei would feed his horde and expand his domain across all the Shadowlands.

The whispers of the shining dream still lingered in places like this, calling out to men like Dorgo, who possessed the imagination to hear them. The ruins of Teiyogtei’s dream were scattered across his kingdom like old bones slowly wearing away beneath the unforgiving sun.

In his ambition, the king had not reckoned upon the wrath of the gods and he had been brought low. The Shadowlands never fell beneath the banners of the Tsavag and today only eight tribes remained of what had once been Teiyogtei’s numberless horde.

Dorgo shook his head again, scolding himself for allowing his thoughts to wander once more. It was a failing his father never ceased to observe, scolding Dorgo that there was too much of the dreamer around him to ever make a good khagan. Dorgo’s fist tightened as he recalled the scornful words. Perhaps he was a dreamer, but so too had Teiyogtei been.

The mammoth’s trunk reared back again and the beast’s bellow rolled across the land. Dorgo studied the hills, watching every sign of movement among the rocks.

Despite the years since they had been irrigated, plants still erupted from the dusty soil upon the terraces. This drew goats and elk into the hills where the uneven ground would protect them from wolves. Even men had a difficult time stalking the animals through the old gardens where the treacherous ground forever threatened a murderous fall to the plain below. The other tribes only even attempted the feat in times of famine, but the Tsavag were better, their minds sharper than the dull wit of Kurgan and Hung. They did not climb into the crumbling hills. They made their prey come to them.

The mammoth’s trumpet was a sound to strike terror into any man, and beasts were not immune to such fear. When the mammoth bellowed, more than just rocks were knocked loose from the hills. Deer and elk, goats and sheep, even the sickle-clawed hill tiger would leap from their refuges, scattering through the rocks to escape the angry giant.

In their panic, even sure-footed goats and nimble deer would stumble, to pitch headlong to the plain below. The throwing spears of the Tsavag standing in the howdah made short work of any animals not killed by the fall. It was a method of hunting that had been developed by generations of tribesmen until it had been refined to a precise art.

Dorgo’s people never lacked for meat, even in the hardest winter or the driest summer, simply because they had mastered the Crumbling Hills.

This day, however, only rocks clattered down from the hills. The Tsavag hunters and even the war mammoth beneath them began to sense an eerie wrongness around the hills around them, an unseen menace lurking somewhere nearby. Tsavag hands left the ivory shafts of throwing spears to clutch at the grips of axe, sword and flail. A new urgency crept into the eyes watching the hills, no longer looking for the fleeing shapes of goat and elk.

Every man remembered tales and legends about the strange creatures that sometimes crept down into the hills from the forbidden Wastes. They wondered if such a monster would be bold enough to attack a war mammoth. They wondered if they would be bold enough to meet it, in turn.

Dorgo watched the rocks, waiting for the lurking menace to show itself, waiting for the attack to crash down upon them in an avalanche of violence. The brooding hills defied his vigilance, remaining silent and empty, mocking him with whatever secret they held.

When the attack came, it erupted from below not above. The silence was broken by savage war cries as the slopes of the hills exploded into brutality and violence. Warriors lunged into the sunlight from concealed burrows, like a mass of angered ground vipers. Taller than the Tsavag, their skins pale, their bodies twisted by grotesque knots of muscle, the warriors rushed at the startled war mammoth with panther-like speed.

Dorgo cursed as he saw the ragged armour of hide and bronze lashed around their disfigured frames, as he saw the ghastly masks of flesh that were tied across their faces. The warriors were of the Muhak, one of the Kurgan tribes and the most pitiless rivals of the Tsavag. Each Muhak carried a long spear with a jagged iron head, the edges of the point barbed and cruel. Dorgo saw at once that the Kurgan were sprinting towards the mammoth’s legs, fearlessly charging at the behemoth to reach its soft underbelly. He roared commands to the hunters in the howdah behind him, cursing at them to hurl their javelins and stop the rushing Muhak.

Several of the warriors fell as javelins sank into their brutish bodies, but for each that crumpled to the ground, three darted beneath the mammoth’s pillar-like legs, jabbing up at its belly with their cruel pikes. Dorgo struggled to turn the beast, to bring it around to confront the foe, but the stabbing pain in its vitals broke the Tsavag’s tenuous control of the mammoth.

Maddened by the pain, the brute refused to move, simply bellowing and wailing in anguish. The Muhak beneath it continued to savage its belly, relenting only when oily ropes of entrails spilled from the wounds.

The mammoth reared back on its hind legs, crashing down in a bone-jarring impact. One Muhak, lingering to press his attack against the stricken beast, was smashed beneath the brute’s leg, crushed into a pasty red smear.

The hunters in the howdah forgot their javelins as the platform lurched upward, pointing them at the sun. Hands tightened around the leather straps in desperate, white-knuckled grips as gravity jerked at the men upon the tilting platform.

One Tsavag, slow to seize the strap, pitched in screaming despair to the ground thirty feet below, his head splattering against the rocky ground.

Dorgo whipped the mammoth with the ivory goad he held, trying to force it to obey the runes carved upon the ancient talisman. The gnawing fire of its wounds overwhelmed both training and spell, the mammoth’s painful trumpets tearing at the sky. The Muhak retreated to the safety of the slopes, jeering at the Tsavag, throwing stones at their steed to encourage its frenzy.

The reeling mammoth fell back to earth with a mighty crash. The impact tore leather straps from their fastenings and three Tsavag plummeted from the behemoth’s back to lie broken upon the ground below.

As the mammoth continued to stomp and bellow, the other hunters threw chains down from the howdah. Hand-over-hand they rappelled down the beast’s flanks, desperate to escape its crazed agony. The boldest of the Muhak charged down from the slopes to confront the fleeing men.

Screams added to the clamour of the mammoth’s pain as the Kurgan drove their long spears into the descending men, pinning them to the mammoth’s thick hide as they pierced their bodies.

The few hunters who reached the ground tried to fend off the opportunistic Muhak, chopping at them with axe and sword. Two Muhak fell, too slow in reacting to the threat of foes who could strike back. The others cast aside their long spears, useless at close quarters, and drew cruel, bone cudgels from belts of dried sinew.

The Tsavag rushed the Kurgan, determined to avenge their butchered kin. Bone cracked against iron as the two sides converged, Tong curses mixing with Muhak war cries.

Against the overwhelming numbers of the Muhak, the handful of hunters had little real chance, but the reckoning was to be decided from another quarter. Through the well of pain that raced through its body, the rage of the stricken mammoth fought its way to overwhelm the beast’s mind. Trumpeting its fury, the huge beast spun around, the sudden motion throwing a last Tsavag from the howdah.

The black eyes of the mammoth glared in berserk fury at the little men fighting around it. Lost in a red madness that did not differentiate between Tsavag and Muhak, the mammoth struck, smashing men beneath its ponderous feet, and goring them with its blunted tusks. Dorgo watched the serpent-like trunk lurch upwards, a struggling Tsavag trapped in its coils.

The mammoth tightened its hold, breaking the man’s body in a spray of blood and ruptured organs. The tattered wreckage dripped back to earth and the brute reared back, bellowing as it plunged deeper into its rampage.

Dorgo grabbed the great iron spike resting beside him in his ivory cage. It was the tool of every mammoth master, as vital as the rune-covered goad, but it was one that no Tsavag ever wanted to use. Dorgo hesitated, but then saw the broken remains of a hunter ground into paste beneath the mammoth’s pounding feet.

Snarling, he set the spike against the back of the mammoth’s skull. With a roar as feral as that of the raging beast, he forced the spike through the scaly plates and the thick skull beneath. The mammoth reared one final time as the spike impaled its brain. Strength deserted the beast’s body in an instant.

Dorgo clutched the bars of his cage, bracing himself as the mammoth toppled to the earth. The impact snapped the leather straps that bound cage to neck and Dorgo was thrown across the plain to crash against the rocky slope of the hill. The ivory cage crumpled under the impact, sending painful slivers scything into the Tsavag’s body. He felt one ivory talon rip into his thigh and another punch through his forearm.

Wracking pain shot through his body, every nerve on fire. He tried to move, ignoring the desperate plea of his body to lie still. His arm was caught, transfixed upon the broken ivory bar. Biting down on the pain, Dorgo drew his iron knife and began to saw away at the wreckage.

As he worked, Dorgo could see the Muhak descending the slopes in force. They capered around the fallen mammoth, swatting at it with their clubs, stabbing it with their spears. Gleefully, the Kurgan warriors brained the injured Tsavag hunters, smashing their skulls with their clubs.

Among the celebrating Muhak was a hulking brute, his body so swollen with muscle that he more resembled an ogre than a man. The head that rose up from his thick, tree-stump neck bore the same flesh-mask as the other Muhak, but it had been cut away to allow the man’s jaw to protrude forward and his dagger-like teeth to jut from his shrivelled lip. A latticework of scars and cuts adorned the warrior’s body where it stood exposed by his crude hide armour. In his paw-like hands, he carried an immense mattock, the head of the hammer displaying a riot of blood-crusted spikes.

This, Dorgo knew, was no mere champion of the Muhak, but no less than Zar Lok, chieftain of the entire tribe.

Lok prowled among the dead Tsavag, lifting them from the bloodied ground to stare into the face of each corpse. One and all, he tossed them aside with callous contempt, stomping on to the next body with ever increasing ire. A particularly mangled Tsavag, the face reduced to pulp, provoked the zar’s already fragile temper. He turned upon the nearest of his warriors with a howl of fury, smashing the Muhak with his deadly hammer. The Kurgan’s chest cracked like an eggshell, pitching him to the earth in a shrieking heap.

Lok gave the murdered warrior no further thought, stalking ahead to the bulk of the mammoth and the ruined howdah on its back.

A grim realisation came upon Dorgo. Lok was looking for someone among the dead and there was only one person that could be. The Muhak seldom ventured into the Crumbling Hills, their own hunting grounds far to the west. It had not been chance that had caused them to ambush the Tsavag, the Kurgan had carefully planned their attack.

The way Lok picked his way among the dead, Dorgo was sure he knew who had led the hunting party. Killing Hutga’s son would avenge the death of the zar’s son, who had been slain in a raid against the Tsavag some months before. Dorgo redoubled his efforts to saw through the cage. To fall into the zar’s hands dead would be wretched enough, to do so alive…

The hulking zar moved away from the ruined howdah, roaring in disgusted frustration. Then his eyes caught the gleam of ivory against the slope and the shudder of frantic motion from within. A cruel smile spread across Lok’s face, a smile of long-denied vengeance. He barked orders to his warriors and they began to converge on the wreckage.

Dorgo could hear the hide boots of the Muhak scraping against the rocky slope as they climbed to reach him. The iron knife continued to chew away at the ivory bar that pinned him to the cage. Grinding his teeth against the agony, the Tsavag looked around the wreckage for his sword, but the weapon had been thrown clear when the cage slammed into the slope.

He stared at the small knife, with no illusions about its potency against the clubs of the Muhak or Lok’s mattock. The hammer was a gruesome relic from the time of Teiyogtei, a daemon weapon forged by the king and gifted to the ancient zar of the Muhak. One blow from the weapon was enough to fold iron as though it were cloth. Dorgo had already seen a graphic display of its power against flesh and bone.

Suddenly, the Muhak advance faltered. A sharp cry went up from the plain below, silenced in a liquid gurgle. The stalking warriors spun around in alarm, their powerful bodies coiling for action. Even Lok turned away, the zar’s fists tightening around the heft of his daemonic hammer.

Below, Dorgo could see a lone warrior striding towards the Muhak, his body encased in crimson armour, chased with bronze, his head enclosed within a skull-like helm.

A blade of darkness filled the stranger’s hand, smoke rising from its hungry edge. At his feet sprawled the cleft debris of a Muhak, who had lingered near the mammoth, more eager for loot than helping Lok to claim his revenge.

The armoured warrior marched heedlessly through the spreading pool of gore, his skull-faced visage fixed upon the slope of the hill. Other Muhak scavengers backed away from the apparition, dropping their plunder of ivory and bronze. Their frightened mutters drifted up to Dorgo and the Kurgan around him.

It was the fear displayed by his warriors more than the sight of his butchered man that enraged Lok. Spitting with fury, he roared at the Muhak below, ordering them to kill the stranger. He punctuated his command with a menacing slap of his mattock against the ground, overcoming the trepidation of his warriors with their greater fear of him.

Five Muhak took up their clubs and axes stolen from the slain Tsavag. They began to circle the stranger, like a pack of slinking wolves stalking a lion. The skull-faced helm never turned, the attention of the man within focused upon the slope. There was a sense of disdain in his manner as he marched steadily onwards, ignoring the menacing men who had surrounded him.

The Muhak sprang at the armoured warrior with a savage cry. In a blur of motion, the stranger spun to face them. The strange black sword bit through the arm of the first Muhak, snapping it like a twig and throwing him back in a spray of blood and screams. A second Muhak, leaping at him from the left, caught the point of the sword in his chest.

Still in motion, the stranger ripped his weapon free, chewing through rib and lung as the edge erupted from the man’s side. The third Muhak came at him from behind. He flopped to the ground as the black sword chopped through both legs as though they were brittle desert brambles.

The fourth, striking from the right, caught the tip of the blade slashing through his face. He fell, clutching at the broth of blood and brain drooling from his ruptured eyes.

The brutal assault was over almost before it had begun. The Muhak were accomplished ambushers, skilled as jackals at the art of coordinated attack, but their prey had been faster still, killing four of their number while the echo of their war cry still wailed across the plain.

The last scavenger faltered in his attack, staring with open-mouthed horror at the havoc the stranger had visited in the blink of an eye. Blood exploded from the man’s mouth as the black sword slammed through his gut. The stranger ignored the scarlet that splattered against his armour and the dying hands that clutched at the heavy fur cloak he wore. Callously, he ripped his trapped blade upwards, crunching through bone and flesh until the black sword tore free.

Slashed from stomach to shoulder, the Muhak slumped to the ground.

Something like terror crawled into Lok’s beady eyes behind their mask of flayed flesh. The zar shouted at his warriors, fear lending a new note of rage to his voice. The Muhak hesitated, staring uncertainly at one another, no man eager to be the first to confront this strange and terrible foe.

Lok’s mattock lashed out, pulverising the skull of the Kurgan closest to him, dropping him in a burst of blood and bone. The example was enough, the zar’s tyranny reasserted. Twenty Muhak marauders, swollen bulks of muscle and rage, charged down the slope, their murderous cudgels lifted overhead in savage display.

To Dorgo’s eyes, what followed was slaughter, not battle. Twenty warriors converged on one. When the carnage abated, when the screams had faded into death rattles, when the sound of flesh and bone being torn asunder ebbed, it was the one who stood triumphant.

The havoc of his black blade lay strewn and dying around the armoured killer. Gore dripped from the stranger, coating his crimson armour in a sanguine cloak, but none of it was his. Twenty men had faced him, but not one had landed a blow against their foe. The killer turned his head, studying the butchery. Then he turned his skull-helm once more to the slope where the ashen-faced Lok waited.

The Muhak zar watched the warrior march through the wreckage of his warband, every step causing his eyes to bulge wider with fear. Lok cast his gaze from side to side, but the strength of his followers had been spent. There were no fresh Kurgan to throw at the gore-drenched spectre. The zar spat into the dust, trying to let his fury overwhelm his fear.

‘You still tempt the gods, eh pig!’ Lok snarled, brandishing his mattock. ‘You kill those dogs so you think you can fight Lok?’ He brought the hammer crashing down, exploding a rock into pebbly splinters.

The armoured killer’s approach did not falter, the man within the crimson plates unimpressed by the zar’s bravado.

The air of arrogance goaded Lok’s fury as surely as the ivory hook Dorgo had used on the mammoth. The Muhak chieftain’s jutting jaw dropped open in a howl of rage, his immense bulk hurtling down the slope at his adversary. The armoured killer paused, waiting to meet the zar’s charge. The black sword licked out like the tongue of a dragon, flashing through the chieftain’s belly, spilling it onto the ground. At the same time, the mattock crashed into the nameless warrior, smashing into him like a titan’s fist. The daemonic weapon kicked him back, throwing him through the air. The armoured warrior smashed into the stiffening hulk of the slain mammoth, falling headfirst into the stream of filth oozing from its wound.

Lok wilted onto his knees, the mattock sliding from hands that were desperately fumbling at his ghastly wound. The zar struggled to press the wound closed, to staunch the seepage of blood and bile. In the fashion of a dying wolf, he refused to accept the gravity of his wound, refused to concede the approach of death, but even in his agony, a smile split the Muhak’s brutal face. At least his enemy would follow him into the Hunting Halls.

Even this small joy fled from Lok, draining away with his lifeblood. The figure sprawled amid the muck and gore of the mammoth was rising, picking itself from its own ruin. Despite the ferocity of the blow Lok had struck, fuelled by the zar’s immense strength and the mattock’s obscene power, the warrior yet lived. The armoured killer stood for a moment, wiping filth from his skull-like mask. Then, slowly, remorselessly, he began to retrace his path up the slope.

The Muhak zar took one hand away from his wound, trying to reach his hammer on the ground beside him. The effort brought a fresh stream of pain shuddering through him, but the sight of the approaching destroyer was more terrible to him than any mere physical suffering. Lok felt the warrior’s malignancy grow with each step, coiling around him in a stifling shroud of hate. There was more than death in the killer’s black blade, more than shame. Lok could feel the jaws of hell closing around him, and hear the snarling laughter of daemons in his ears.

The warrior loomed above the zar, kicking the mattock away from his clutching hand. An armoured gauntlet reached down, pulling Lok’s head by its mass of oily black hair. The zar struggled feebly in the iron grip, but could not prevent his head from being pulled back, exposing his throat to the sky. Then the black sword came chopping down, hewing through the thick, stumpy neck.

The chieftain’s body slapped against the earth, his head staring down at the corpse as it dangled from the warrior’s fist. The killer lifted his trophy high, presenting it to the darkening sky.

‘A skull for the Skull Throne!’ the iron voice of the warrior rasped. Lightning cracked across the cloudless heavens, as though in answer to his cry.

Dorgo freed himself from his prison, leaving a spike of ivory thrust through the meat of his arm. It would need the healing arts of a shaman before the shard could be removed, otherwise the wound would bleed and he would not have the strength to make the long march back to his people. It was not mere survival that moved him to caution, nor bearing witness to the fate that had befallen his fellow hunters.

There was a still graver purpose that urged him on, something greater than his fear.

Zar Lok, chief of the Muhak, was dead, butchered by a nameless, tribeless warrior. In all the years since the fall of Teiyogtei, such a fate had never claimed a chieftain of one of the eight tribes. Word of this had to be brought to his father, brought to him before the other tribes discovered that Lok was dead. A delicate balance existed between the eight tribes, and someone had destroyed that balance, setting into motion events that would resound throughout the domain. The sooner Hutga learned of this, the better he would be able to prepare the Tsavag for what was coming.

Dorgo shuddered again, the image of the outlander burned into his mind. He could not shake the impression that Lok had somehow recognised his slayer. Even before he struck the first blow, the Kurgan seemed to know that his doom was at hand. More than the brutality of the Muhak’s death, it was this terrible air of resignation and hopelessness that chilled his marrow.

Dorgo crept cautiously away from the wreckage of the ivory cage. He did not waste time looking for his lost sword, nor linger to claim a weapon from the butchered Muhak. Instead, he mounted the rocky slope, climbing the crumbling mound as the first step on his long journey back to the lands of the Tsavag.

Dorgo left the crimson warrior behind him, crouched beside Lok’s mangled carcass, the zar’s head resting on the ground before him. With slow, careful strokes, the warrior drew his black blade against the chieftain’s head, carving away the flesh, layer by layer, exposing the gleaming skull beneath, cleaning the trophy he had offered to mighty Khorne.

CHAPTER TWO

It took Dorgo three days to hike out of the vastness of the Crumbling Hills. He survived off the small vermin that lived beneath the rocks, slaking his thirst with the juice of the thorny bushes that had replaced the ancient gardens. He fashioned a crude spear from a shard of flint and the leg bone from a partially eaten elk carcass, the abandoned kill of a hill tiger. At night he wedged himself between the decaying walls of the old forts, trying to hide from the predators that prowled the desolation. He awoke many times to hear the scuttling of stalk spiders crawling across the rocks, but the immense arachnids passed him by without investigating the lone Tsavag who intruded upon their domain.

More inquisitive was the beady-eyed rock wolf that watched him for the better part of a day before deciding that the man was still too hale to make easy prey.

Most of the injuries he had suffered when he had been thrown from the mammoth had started to heal, even the pain in his leg had ceased to vex him as it had on the first day of his escape. The wound in his arm, however, continued to pulse with pain. Dorgo had gathered maggots from the elk carcass, setting them on his arm to clean away the dead flesh and stave off infection. The Tsavag had long since come to ignore the crawling sensation against his skin, the oily feel of the worms against his flesh. He had seen too many warriors with swollen, noxious wounds, green with disease and corruption. Most of them became cripples if they survived at all. It was a sorry fate for any warrior. Better to feed the tiny children of Onogal than entice one of the Grandfather’s more grisly gifts.

Beyond the Crumbling Hills, Dorgo would need to cross the Prowling Lands, a great expanse of flatland where, in winter, the hardy snowgrass would defy the elements and the feeble sun to carpet the plain in pallid stalks and leafy blades. The Tsavag would descend upon the Prowling Lands when the first snows came, letting their mammoths glut themselves upon the winter grass, but the gods had not yet unleashed that season upon the domain. For now, the Prowling Lands were deserted, populated only by sickly clumps of thin-trunked trees and yellowed stands of fungus.

The Prowling Lands took their name from the treacherous landscape, where the land shuddered frequently, splitting apart to form deep gullies and jagged ravines. The threat of sink holes was constant. Too small to threaten a mammoth, the holes could easily swallow a man, closing over him and leaving no hint of his doom. Predators too lurked in the Prowling Lands. In the summer, the gullies were home to zhagas, giant lizards covered in a carapace of thorns and capable of swallowing a child in a single bite. In the winter, ice lions called the Prowling Lands home, enormous beasts capable of taking down a small mammoth and possessed of a cruel intelligence that was more than natural for a simple beast.

It was neither sink hole nor lizard nor lion that made Dorgo cautious as he crossed the Prowling Lands. He was wary of a different kind of threat. The Prowling Lands bordered upon the Grey, the twisted, fog-shrouded forest where the Warherd of Kug made their lair. Driven into the Grey by the human tribes of the domain, the beastmen waged perpetual war against Hung, Kurgan and Tong alike. Years of dwelling within the perpetual darkness of the Grey had made the beastmen almost blind, but the monsters had developed other powers to compensate for their lost sight. In the dark of night, they would raid the encampments of men, taking only one kind of plunder back with them into the darkness of the Grey: man-flesh for their cooking pots.

There was little risk of encountering them by day, but Dorgo knew the beastkin sometimes foraged in the darkness of the gullies. They would not chance an encounter with a strong group of men, but a lone warrior, a wounded one at that, would excite their bloodlust if they caught his scent.

Dorgo stared forlornly at his feeble spear of bone and flint. It would be poor protection against any but the smallest beastkin, much less some of the hulking brutes the warherd sometimes produced. He would need to brave the gullies, only in the deep shadows of the fissures was any water to be found in the Prowling Lands. It was a five day march to cross the flatlands, to reach the valleys where the Tsavag made their summer encampment. He might be able to endure without food, but not water. Despite the danger of reptiles and half-men, he couldn’t keep entirely to the high ground. Thirst must eventually drive him down into the darkness.

For the best part of two days, Dorgo managed to press on, chewing on the pulp from a thorn bush to deceive the clawing thirst that tormented him. Several times, the ground had shuddered around him. Twice he had nearly fallen into sink holes that yawned open at his approach. The deep fissures and gullies were almost invisible until the warrior was right on top of them, forcing Dorgo to adopt a slow, cautious pace.

When his thirst at last refused to be put off by the badly gnawed pulp, Dorgo selected a winding gully that sported a thick clump of ugly green toadstools along its edge. It seemed a likely enough prospect to conceal a small spring.

The Tsavag crept to the edge of the depression, peering down into its gloom. Before he could react, the lip of the gully broke away beneath him. Dorgo flailed his arms to catch himself, but the searing jolt of pain that shot through him as his wounded arm caught at the crumbling ground caused his entire body to grow numb. With the grace of a boulder, he crashed to the bottom of the gully, the clatter of his violent descent echoing all around him.

Dorgo was still, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom, not wishing to betray his presence by making more noise. The beastkin were almost blind, relying upon sound to stalk their prey. Dorgo was determined to see them before they heard him. At least the clammy chill that filled the gloom of the gully boded well. There had to be water nearby to imbue the air with such dankness. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Dorgo saw something sparkling in the fitful light. He had found not merely a spring, but a pool.

The hunter took a scrambling lunge towards the water, and then froze. A gruesome shape was reflected in the surface of the water. Slowly, Dorgo lifted his eyes to stare at the creature that cast its image over the water. Sprawled across a big rock, knifelike scales running across its back and sides, was a huge zhaga. The lizard regarded him coldly with an amber-hued eye, its forked tongue licking at the air. Dorgo locked his fist around the crude spear he had fashioned, bracing himself for the reptile’s attack.

The zhaga seemed wary rather than aggressive, more interested in savouring the patch of sunlight it had found than lunging for the warrior. Dorgo could see its long, thick tail, bloated with stored fat. A quick glance showed him that bones were strewn all around the pool. Clearly, the lizard had fed well off those who thought to visit its pool, perhaps well enough that it was no longer hungry?

Keeping his eyes locked on the sunning lizard, Dorgo scooped water from the pool into his mouth. It was bitter, foul with minerals, but to the hunter it was like a gift from the gods. Soon, he forgot the menace of the zhaga, his body revelling in the long-denied succour of water. It was with an effort that he finally pulled himself away from the pool, leaving it to the indolent zhaga. He had few delusions about his good fortune as he struggled out of the shadows of the gully and back onto the plain. When thirst next drove him down into the gullies, he could hardly expect to be so lucky again.

On his third day in the Prowling Lands, Dorgo found himself again driven to brave the fissures. He took greater care lowering himself into the depression this time. Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he found he was in a shallow ravine, scraggly clumps of weed poking out of its earthern walls. No pool of free-standing water greeted him this time. He only hoped he would be spared the presence of another zhaga, one without a fattened tail. The hunter walked to the nearest clutch of weeds. He knew that the vegetation was his best guide to the presence of water.

Working his spear, he began to dig at the weeds, cutting through the earth to expose the pasty roots. He smiled when he felt the moisture clinging to the weeds. Abandoning the spear, he pawed at the wall with his hands. Soon his efforts were rewarded with a thin trickle of water, the boon of some underground spring. Dorgo scooped out a patch of wall, using his hands to strain the liquid as he drank, trying to force more water than mud into his mouth.

So lost was he in his labours, that the Tsavag almost failed to hear the distant crash of some large creature moving across the plain above. The ponderous boom was repeated, the walls of the gully shaking as the thing stalked closer. Dorgo gathered his spear, ready to scurry down the gully before whatever was tromping across the plain should find him. There were tales of giants living in the Grey, stories that they did not keep to the forest like the beastkin, but roved abroad to meet their ferocious appetites. The thought chilled the warrior. Fear of the giants had kept the tribes from exterminating the beastkin long ago, for no man dared match himself against creatures that were said to be almost godlike.

Still, the hunter’s curiosity had been awakened. Moreover, he knew he should learn in which direction the hulk was travelling so that he might avoid it. Dorgo lifted his head above the rim of the gully, peering across the flatlands even as the ground shook once more. Distant, but distinct, he saw the immense creature that made the earth tremble so. The hunter laughed, springing from the trench with a strength he had not felt in days. His spear raised above his head, he yelled and shouted at the distant colossus. Slowly, the beast turned, moving towards him in long, plodding steps.

By the merest chance, Dorgo had found another of the Tsavags’ war mammoths returning from its hunt. There was no need to brave another night exposed upon the Prowling Lands. Tonight he would sleep in the mammoth-hide yurts of his tribe.

The encampment of the Tong tribe was situated across the muddy floor of a wide valley. Jagged mountains loomed over the expanse, great spires of rock like the broken teeth of a fallen god. Great mouths dotted the jumbled confusion of the mountains, constantly gurgling with hot volcanic mud that would ooze down the slopes to add to the mire of the valley.

A vast array of grasses and shrubs thrived upon the mineral-rich mud, though trees found it impossible to drive roots into the porous mush. It was not the most hospitable environment for men either and the Tsavag yurts were built on stilts of mammoth bone to keep them well-above the quagmire. The mammoths gorged upon the abundant grasses and their muscles were improved by the daily exertion of lumbering through the morass.

The only predators that menaced the valley were the black condors that nested in the mountains, but, while large enough to carry off a full-grown man in their talons, they were too small to threaten the mammoths.

The encampment was alive with smells and noises when Dorgo at last emerged from the hide-walled yurt of Unegen, the tribe’s witch doctor. The scarred old healer had tended the hunter’s arm, rubbing a pasty unguent into the wound after cutting away the stump of the ivory shard with a rune knife. Dorgo’s arm was wrapped tightly in a binding of zhaga skin soaked in mammoth urine.

The witch doctor had warned him to make prayers to Onogal to placate the pestilential god lest his injury become infected despite the healer’s precautions. He also advised making an offering to great Chen, that the Lord of Fate might oppose any ill-sending from the King of Flies.

Dorgo climbed down from the witch-doctor’s dwelling, sloshing into the muddy ground. His wound tended, he had to see another of his tribesmen before he could rest. He had been summoned to a meeting with his father, to explain to the khagan what had befallen his fellow hunters and their mammoth. A feeling of shame rose within him as he recalled the ease with which the Muhak had ambushed them, tinged with guilt as he considered the reason Lok had ordered the attack. More than that, he was afraid as he recalled the strange warrior who had butchered his way through the Muhak and cut the head from their zar’s shoulders.

That memory brought a quickness into Dorgo’s step. He was not sure why, but he felt a terrible foreboding as he recalled the sinister warrior, a sense of lurking menace that would not relent. A new danger had entered the domain, something clothed in the shape of a man, something that was powerful enough to butcher its way through a score of Muhak killers and still have strength to slaughter Lok as though the chieftain were a feeble old greybeard.

If the stranger stayed in the Crumbling Hills or contented itself with killing Muhak, that would be one thing, but Dorgo could not shake the feeling that it would not remain in the Crumbling Hills for long.

As he walked down the path, which writhed its way between the raised yurts, Dorgo felt his mood darken. He watched the young boys practising with their throwing spears, the blunted weapons springing back from targets of mammoth-skin stretched tight across ivory frames. He saw little girls weaving baskets from marsh reeds, or carefully mending fur vestments with bone needles and sinewy thread. The grown women, their cheeks scarred with the marks of their households, were gathered together on the massive wooden platform where the old mammoths were slaughtered after their time was past. A great old cow mammoth, her tusks curled back upon themselves until they resembled the horns of a ram, had finally been killed by Qotagir, the wiry mammoth master who tended the beasts upon which the tribe depended so greatly. The women were busy carving steaks from the cow’s flanks while others carefully cleaned the animal’s thick skin, readying it for tanning in one of the sweltering smoke huts that stood at either end of the encampment.

Qotagir, with several of his burly assistants, was carrying the carcasses of several antelope to the rocky ground where the mammoths had their pen. The animals would be butchered, ground into miniscule portions and then mixed into the pebbly feed the Tsavag used to supplement the mammoths’ diet of grass and roots.

The beasts would not touch feed that had been mixed with the flesh of their own, but they accepted the meat of antelope and elk readily enough. The meat helped to sharpen the minds of the brutes and increase their aggression in battle, or at least so Qotagir’s forefathers had taught him. Next to the khagan and Yorool, the high shaman, Qotagir was the most important man in the tribe and even the brashest warrior was careful to show him respect.

Beyond the pens, in the place of honour closest to the great mammoths, stood the khagan’s yurt, its walls of hide daubed with the marks of the Tsavag households he commanded, its ivory supports festooned with dangling trophies taken by the tribe in the hunt and in battle. Dorgo saw the iron helms of Vaan warriors, the sharp horns of beastkin, the ragged tatters of Hung banners, even the immense clubs of Muhak marauders and, in a place of honour, the petrified head of a basilisk. The trophies were a display for the benefit of the warriors who waited upon their chief, a reminder that there had always been great warriors among the Tsavag, a humbling lesson for men grown arrogant in their own accomplishments.

The humbling display was not lost upon Dorgo as he climbed the ladder up to the platform of his father’s hut. He looked at the prayer flags waving in the wind above the ivory crown of the yurt, one for each of the hunters who had been killed by the Muhak. Normally, the bodies would have been left for the condors, the great messengers of Chen, to bear up into the afterworld, but they still lay far away in the Crumbling Hills. Instead, Yorool would paint their names upon large prayer flags, that the birds might see them as they flew above the valley and inform Mighty Chen of the lost souls that would seek entrance into the Realm of the Gods.

His rescuers in the Prowling Lands had questioned Dorgo carefully, making certain that he had indeed seen his comrades killed. It was no small thing to paint the mark of a living man upon a prayer flag. Chen might seek out his soul and tear it from his body while he still lived if the god felt that he had been deceived.

The floor of the yurt was covered with furs, the hides of bear and sabretusk warring with those of yhetee and tiger for space. The walls were clothed in murals painted upon the skins of zhagas, each painting representing some great event from the time of their ancestors. Dorgo felt his eyes drawn to the ancient mural that showed Teiyogtei, the king, uniting the tribes of the domain into his mighty horde.

A little pride found its way into the warrior’s heart, despite his fears and shame. The eight tribes of the domain all claimed to be the heirs of Teiyogtei’s power, but only the Tsavag were his true sons. They were of the Tong, the same great people that had unleashed Teiyogtei upon the world, the same blood as that of the king flowed through their veins. Theirs was the true legacy, beside which the claims of Hung, Kurgan and gor were nothing more than envious jests.

‘Approach, shamed one,’ a voice called from the gloom of the chamber, crushing the small ember of pride that had started to show upon Dorgo’s face.

The warrior turned at the sound of the voice, turned to face the throne of Hutga Khagan, chief of all the Tsavag, lord of the war mammoths, wielder of the iron moon: Hutga Khagan, his father.

The Tsavag chieftain was a massive, powerfully built man, despite his many years. Streaks of iron stained the black sprawl of his beard and wrinkles burrowed across his face from the corners of his frost-coloured eyes. The khagan’s hair was shaved into a trio of woven braids that fell well past his broad shoulders. Nodules of steel peppered Hutga’s skin, like metal fungi pushing up from within his flesh.

Some among the tribe said the growth was the curse of a Sul sorcerer whose wicked knife had injured Hutga in his youth, others held that it was a mark of favour from the gods. There was a lesson in the whispered stories, Dorgo felt. With the Dark Gods, it was difficult to tell blessing from curse.

Hutga gestured with a steel hand, motioning for his son to approach. Dorgo stepped towards the throne-like seat of ivory and fur, bowing before the chieftain. Hutga stirred within the mass of mammoth hide that swaddled him, shifting from a slumped, comfortable posture to one of dominance and command. The warrior felt a twinge of sympathy for his father. Because of the metal growths, Hutga found it hard to keep warm, the heat of his body draining out of him into the steel nodules. Indeed, he was surprised not to find several of the chieftain’s wives squirming around him, trying to warm his clammy flesh.

Instead of the nimble Tsavag girls, Dorgo found his father’s throne flanked by grim-faced men. Togmol, the khagan’s champion and the greatest warrior of the tribe stood on Hutga’s left, his crescent-bladed ji cradled in his brawny arms. The champion stood a head taller than Dorgo, his beard plaited into elaborate rings, his cheeks deeply scarred with the tally of his deeds. Togmol’s forehead was pitted with bony stubble, like a crazed field of fledgling horns. Another of the capricious marks of the gods.

Beside Togmol stood Ulagan, the wiry hunter who had led the party that found Dorgo in the Prowling Lands. He was dwarfed by the hulking warrior, like a fox beside a wolf.

Ulagan’s scalp was shaved bare, even his topknot cut away. He was in mourning for his wife, who had been claimed by the gods while giving him a son the previous spring. The hunter had been deeply devoted to the woman, one of Togmol’s daughters, and showed no hint of growing out of his sorrow. The flabby, worm-like tentacle that served Ulagan for an arm was coiled tightly around an amulet he wore around his neck, a lock of his dead woman’s hair. The hunter’s other arm, its normalcy jarring after the spectacle of its opposite, gripped the ivory length of an iron-tipped spear.

To the right of the throne, crouched against the arm of the khagan’s seat, was the withered shape of Yorool, the shaman’s scrawny body nearly hidden beneath his leathery robe and cowl of mammoth hide. A pinched face with sharp, fang-like teeth, grinned from the shadow of the hood, grey whiskers sprouting in unsightly patches from the wrinkled folds that had consumed the left half of the shaman’s face. A little ivory rod was pressed between the folds, struggling to keep them from flopping over Yorool’s left eye.

The eyes of the shaman were mismatched, one the colour of amber, the other a little pit of jade fire. Yorool’s expression, such as the right half of his face could muster, was grave and solemn.

‘This one,’ Hutga’s booming voice growled, his thick hand pointing at Ulagan, ‘tells me that only you returned from the Crumbling Hills.’ The chief’s statement brought colour into Ulagan’s face and the hunter could not meet Dorgo’s gaze. ‘You were attacked by Muhak, he says. You were attacked by Zar Lok. This dog says that all the hunters with you, even the war mammoth, were killed by Lok and his cringing jackals.’

Dorgo felt each word like a lash against his skin, the scorn in his father’s voice a fiery welt against his dignity. As each word cut him, he felt his anger grow. Hands clenched into fists, he glared back into Hutga’s contemptuous eyes. ‘I cannot help what Ulagan has told you, any more than I can help it if you will not listen to truth when you hear it!’ he spat. The warrior’s tone brought venom into the khagan’s eyes. Hutga’s muscles tensed, his face quivering with restrained rage. A moment passed and the thin veneer of control was swept away. Hutga lunged to his feet, spilling the heavy hides onto the floor. He thrust his finger at Dorgo as though it were a blade.

‘It is enough that my son shows himself as coward!’ the khagan roared. ‘That he is a liar as well is more shame than I will accept!’

Dorgo bristled at the accusation, scowling at Ulagan, before returning his attention to the furious chieftain. ‘If you have been told the story as it was told to the men who found me in the Prowling Lands, then there is no lie in it!’

Hutga snorted in disgust at the remark, sinking back into his chair. ‘There is spine in you after all, to dare insist upon lies while you stand in your khagan’s hall! Too bad your courage did not show itself when your kinsmen were being butchered by the Muhak!’

Dorgo took a step towards the throne, shaking with rage. ‘They were already dead when I made my escape,’ he snarled. ‘There was nothing more I could do for them. I was cheated of even the chance to avenge them.’

‘Yes!’ roared Hutga, ‘by a nameless warrior who came from nowhere to strike down the Muhak!’ The khagan’s stare bored into Dorgo’s eyes. ‘You dare to repeat this nonsense to me? One man against a score of Muhak! You dare to tell me this is what you saw?’

‘I can only tell you what happened,’ Dorgo snapped back.

Hutga shook his head in disgust. ‘Your lies are overbold, pup! You have the audacity to claim this stranger, this warrior in crimson armour, fought Lok and killed him! Not even another of the eight warlords of the domain could have killed Lok in battle, and you have the belly to tell me some lone stranger killed him and took his head?’

Dorgo was silent in his rage, feeling his father’s ire feeding his anger. He felt the wound in his arm start to bleed as the tension in his muscles tore at the witch doctor’s dressing.

‘Take this dog from my sight,’ Hutga hissed at Togmol. ‘Bind him in the smoke lodge until he feels like telling me what really happened!’ He turned his face from Dorgo, glaring instead at Ulagan. ‘Gather the best scouts among the Tsavag,’ he told the hunter. ‘Take them to the territory of the Muhak and bring one of them back with you. If the truth will not shape itself to fit this dog’s crooked tongue, then perhaps a Kurgan will speak it for him!’

Dorgo shook Togmol’s arm from his shoulder as the warrior started to lead him away. He cast one last, hateful look at his father, but Hutga had already turned away from him. The khagan was in conference with Yorool, his head leaning close to the shaman’s hooded face. Whatever emotion might have been on Yorool’s grisly countenance, Dorgo could not see, but there was no mistaking the expression that had supplanted rage on the powerful face of Hutga.

For the first time he could remember, Dorgo saw fear in his father’s eyes.

CHAPTER THREE

The desert shone like a great ball of silver fire, casting the light of moons and stars in fantastic reflection across the horizon. Great spires of crystal, tall as mountains and sharp as knives, scratched at the sky, their smooth skins of glass shining in the dark. No product of a sane world, the spires were things more akin to trees than rocks, growing with the seasons, sprouting jagged offspring that would ooze from their sides until gravity broke them free. The spires rose from the floor of a great bowl-like depression. The basin was littered with shimmering dust left behind by fallen crystals, saturating the ground with a layer of shard-like ash.

No tree or bush, not even the most desperate of weed or rugged cactus grew in the desolation beneath the spires. No plant could thrive in the glassy ground, and nothing could endure the hideous heat that infested the basin as sunlight was magnified and twisted by the reflective crystal peaks.

Yet there was life in the Desert of Mirrors, a corrupt and abominable breed of life. In caverns deep beneath the blazing shard-sand, things crept and slithered, hiding from the hateful day. In the warmth of night, as the crystals surrendered the heat they had absorbed from the sun, these creatures abandoned their troglodyte existence, emerging upon the desert floor to prowl and hunt and kill. The nocturnal creatures were strange and abhorrent, grisly in form and mien, but there were none so vile as those that clung to the shape of man.

Their burrows beneath the shard-sand were little better than those of beasts, earthen tunnels chewed into the earth by the rudest of tools. Bones and debris marked the entrances, the loathsome stink of those who dwelled below wafting upwards in a noxious fume.

No animal was too base for the cave dwellers to feast upon, the husks of centipedes mingling with the skeletons of rats and the carapaces of stalk spiders. The bodies of men and all his kindred creatures were scattered upon the offal heaps, though these bore the marks of a more abominable appetite.

Flesh was cut, burned and scarred and organs ripped from still living-breasts in diseased rite and ritual, the debased worship of Neiglen, the abhorred Crow God of the Hung. However great the famine, none but the bloated daemon flies fed upon the wreckage of the sacrifices, even the hungriest of scavengers shunning bodies marked with the puckered pox-rune of the Plague God.

As the night engulfed the eerie silence of the desert, the tunnels spewed their wretched inhabitants. Scrawny with privation or bloated with disease, they scrabbled from their holes, scraps of black cloth striving to cover their leprous frames. Most wore masks of bone held together with strips of sinew and leather, each crude helm a rough representation of a crow skull.

Even those without masks bore the image of their god upon them, their flesh cut and torn to display the pox-rune. As they emerged from their holes, the sickly throng was faced with their image reflected a thousand times from the facets of the crystal spires and the shimmering wreck of the shard-sand.

Every night of their lives, the tribesmen emerged from the festering darkness to be confronted by their own diseased images, reminded by the silent mockery of the mountains what they were, how far from the shape of man they had fallen.

Anguish stabbed into their hearts, the bitter misery of something lost and forsaken. Their pain filled them, turning to envious hate. Nothing deserved to live whole and pure; whatever walked or crawled upon the land must be as vile as they were. They would bring the cursed touch of Neiglen to anything that strayed too near the Desert of Mirrors, destroying its blasphemous health with the taint of corruption.

Hate was the only thing left to them, the only thing to nourish them in their misery. It was the gift of Neiglen to his children, the gift of life where all should be death. In return, the Crow God asked only for their flesh, flesh to decay and infest with his noxious blessings.

The Veh-Kung had been horsemen once, like all the tribes of the Hung, but no longer. They had been drawn to the beauty of the Desert of Mirrors, had thought to dwell within its fabulous valleys. None had known the plague that was hidden behind the beauty, the corruption that lurked within the crystal spires and the shard-sand. Their horses had died, struck down by the taint.

The Veh-Kung had not been so lucky, for men have souls to amuse the gods while beasts have none. In their dreams, the shamans of the Veh-Kung had seen the Crow God, had heard his bubbling voice promise them life and sanctuary if only they would bow to him and accept his blessings. In their despair, the tribe had accepted the god’s terrible offer.

Generations later, the once proud horse warriors had become diseased troglodytes, cowering from the sun in their holes, their lives consumed by the endless struggle for sustenance upon the desert and the endless struggle to feed the spectral hunger of their god.

The tribesmen stared up at the moon, letting their eyes adjust to the bright silvery disk. After the gloom of their burrows, even the moon was dazzlingly bright, for few among the Veh-Kung could still endure the full sun for all but the briefest span.

Sickle-bladed swords and brutal axes of bone and copper filled the Veh-Kung’s hands as they turned away from the moon. The hours of darkness were few and there were many to feed in the tunnels. Such game as the desert offered was scant, but the tribesmen knew it would have to be stalked and found. There was never enough to lay stores against famine. When hunger came to the Veh-Kung, it was solved in the manner it had always been solved, by sacrificing those the tribe could no longer feed to Neiglen. The warriors whispered their fawning prayers to the Crow God so that they would find game this night. Each man knew that when the Starving Times came upon the tribe, those first to feed Neiglen were the hunters who returned empty-handed.

The ragged throng of the Veh-Kung slowly spread out across the desert, wading through the piled dunes of shard-sand, their eyes watching the glass for any sign of disturbance. Sometimes they would stop, digging into the sand with gloved hands to root out a centipede or scorpion. The stings of such creatures stabbed ineffectually against the leprous flesh of the hunters.

There was little pain one touched by Neiglen could still feel. Beside the cancerous blessings of the Crow God, the venom of a scorpion was as docile as a soft caress.

As the pestilential warriors spread through the Desert of Mirrors, they spied a strange thing. A lone rider was heading into the shimmering landscape, a solitary warrior mounted upon some fantastic beast. The stink of blood was on the stranger, so powerful that even at such a distance it was able to overcome the reek of the Veh-Kung’s bodies and imprint itself upon their senses.

The warriors hissed and gibbered, excited by the prospect of such easy prey. The beast they would carve for their fires, the man would be carved upon the altar of Neiglen.

Excitement passed in a silent pulse through the desert, drawing dozens of warriors to the ambush being laid by those who had first spotted the rider.

They quickly lent their efforts to the attack. Masters of the desert, the Veh-Kung knew how to find concealment even in the mirrored expanse, using the spires to cast deceptive reflections to misdirect their prey.

Many times, overly bold scouts of the Kurgan and other Hung tribes had fallen victim to the deceit of the desert and those who knew how to exploit it. The tactics that had consumed entire warbands would make short work of a solitary horseman.

Spiteful smiles twisted the broken faces of the Veh-Kung behind their bone masks. Surely the horseman was a gift from the Crow God, a blessing from their beneficent patron.

The first misgivings began to spread when the strange, loping trot of the rider’s steed became evident. The beast he rode was no horse, nor any kind of creature the Veh-Kung knew from experience or legend. In shape it was something like a wolf, but it moved like a reptile. Its hide was shaggy and black beneath the moon, its belly scaly and bright. A long, barbed tail lashed the ground behind it as it ran and monstrous dewclaws gouged the ground beneath its feet. Sword-like horns protruded from its wolfish head, stabbing back over its neck.

The stink of blood and slaughter was upon it, the carrion-scent of battle and its leavings.

Upon the beast’s back, his armoured bulk filling a bronze saddle, sat a huge warrior in dark armour. The man’s head was hidden behind a grotesque skull-faced helm, antlers rising from its sides forming the war-rune of Khorne.

In one hand, the warrior held a massive chain, which was fastened around the neck of his steed. In the other he gripped a fang of solid darkness that smoked and fumed, a sword that looked to have been torn from the heart of a moonless night. An aura of menace joined the blood-stink of the beast as the Veh-Kung saw the sword, the innate fear of prey when it hears the tread of the predator.

Anxiously, the Veh-Kung kept to their hiding places, waiting for the sinister stranger to enter their domain and fall into their trap. Fearsome as he seemed, the Veh-Kung feared their chieftain Bleda more, and the kahn would not be pleased if they allowed the intruder to invade their lands. Better to stand their ground and face the enemy where they had numbers and terrain to their advantage.

However favoured he might be by Khorne, whatever strength the Blood God might have invested him with, there was no escape for the stranger.

Dozens of tribesmen were already waiting for him, every moment bringing more drifting into position from deeper in the desert. By the time the paws of his steed touched shard-sand, a hundred Veh-Kung would be waiting for him.

Even if he was a powerful war-chief, the stranger could hardly hope to kill them all.

Enek Zjarr turned away from the pillar of blue fire, tearing his eyes away from the scene revealed by the heatless flame only with the greatest effort. His hand was trembling as he cast salt into the witch-flame. With a whoosh, the fire vanished, leaving behind only a wisp of foul-smelling smoke and the charred bones of the sacrifice from which it had flared into life. The blackened skull of the victim grinned at the sorcerer from the ashes.

The Hung mystic felt a tremor of fear run through him, reminded of the deathly helm of the warrior he had seen revealed in the fire. Despising the sensation, Enek Zjarr flicked his tattooed fingers at the skull, a burst of invisible force shattering it into dust.

The sorcerer paced slowly away from the circle of ash, disturbed by what his scrying had shown him. The stone walls of his sanctum threw back the echoes of his steps as he walked. Imps watched him from the wooden shelves that lined the hall, cowering behind alembics and piles of musty scrolls as their master passed. Suckled upon the sorcerer’s blood, they felt the anxiety and doubt that plagued his mind.

Enek Zjarr ignored the cringing daemons and stepped towards a stone altar. His painted hand waved through the air once more. The iron braziers set to either side of the dais smouldered into life, surrounding the altar in an orange glow.

Enek Zjarr stalked into the light. Tall and thin, his body swaddled in a heavy robe of spider silk, the sorcerer moved behind the ancient altar. A massive iron-banded book rested upon the stone surface, fixed to the rock by thick chains.

The sorcerer turned his dark eyes towards the tome, an expression almost of reverence pulling at his broad, cruel features. He stroked his long, drooping moustache with a lean, talon-nailed hand, closing his eyes in thought.

Finally, a decision reached, Enek Zjarr removed one of the barbaric talismans that dripped from his salmon-hued robe, snapping its cord in his impatience. He gripped the talisman, the skeletal finger of a man, tightly. A preternatural chill oozed into his bones as he held it, feeling its lingering antipathy seep into him. The sorcerer smiled, an expression colder than the feel of the morbid relic. The owner of that finger had been his greatest rival in life, but he had not been able to stop Enek Zjarr from overcoming him and assuming his position as kahn of all the Sul. As a warning to others, Enek Zjarr had ensured that his father’s death was not an easy one. In the end, only a single finger had remained as token of the Sul chieftain’s passing. It was all of his father that Enek Zjarr needed.

The sorcerer pressed the decayed finger against the leather cover of the tome, stabbing it into the brass lock that crouched above the binding. Tiny metal jaws snapped closed around the bone, gnawing at it with daemonic rapacity.

As the metal teeth tore into the bone, the lock slithered off the book, crawling across the altar and into the shadows. Enek Zjarr gave the eerie device no further consideration. His hand pulled back the heavy cover, chains rattling as it slapped against the stone altar. Thin, wisp-like pages stood exposed to his gaze, their surfaces covered in painted Cathayan characters.

Enek Zjarr leaned down, letting the blunted bulb of his nose almost touch the thin fragility of the book. Carefully, he exhaled against the book, letting his breath turn the pages. Leaning back, he watched as the pages flipped past, turned by their own energies.

Slowly at first, then faster and ever faster, the pages whipped by, searching for the knowledge the sorcerer desired. After a time, and with an abrupt suddenness, the book fell still once more. Enek Zjarr stared at the page, reading the elaborate Cathayan glyphs. Colour drained from his face and stunned dread entered his eyes. He turned away, wondering if he dared believe what the tome had told him.

Enek Zjarr looked again at the pile of ash from which the blue fire had risen. A haunted light crept into the black pools of his eyes.

He wondered if he dared not believe.

With a bubbling wail, the Veh-Kung warrior lunged at the intruder, falling down upon the rider from above. A dozen of his tribesmen took up his war cry, leaping down from the sides of the crystal spires. The iron fingers of their gloves shimmered weirdly in the moonlight, crystalline dust coating the metal talons. Like diseased lizards, the Veh-Kung had crawled up the crystal spires, gouging handholds in the living mineral with their claws. They watched from the heights as the stranger penetrated deeper into their lands, as his strange wolf-like beast loped through the shard-sand of the desert.

The first attack had been butchery, the hunters slaughtered nearly to the man by this eerie invader. Their carcasses where strewn through the silent canyons, mangled and torn by blade and fang. The stranger’s black sword had been as remorseless as the elements, carving a swathe of blood across the desert. The jaws and claws of his ghastly steed had been no less deadly, spilling entrails and snapping spines with every swipe of its immense paws, crushing bodies with every flick of its powerful tail.

The hunters’ weapons had broken against the armour of the warrior, splintering like rotten sticks against the dark plates. Wherever they attacked, however carefully they laid their ambush, the stranger was ready for them, almost seeming to welcome the chance to kill. From mazes of mirror that would have confused even a daemon’s twisted mind, the Veh-Kung struck again and again only to have their attacks falter and fail, waves crashing around the uncaring shore.

At last, the few hunters remaining had broken, fleeing back to their burrows to warn the rest of their tribe. Their cowardice earned them death beneath the sacred talons of the Crow God, only the warning they carried allowing them any trace of honour as the shamans’ chain-whips flayed the flesh from their bones. They had found a foe too deadly to overcome, but if the invader thought the men he had slaughtered represented the strength of the Veh-Kung, he was sorely mistaken.

Scores of warriors, each a hand-and-a-half taller than the degenerate hunters, each armoured in plates of reptilian hide boiled to the toughness of bronze, each bearing blades of iron, emerged from the darkness of the tunnels to answer the intruder’s challenge.

The first of the Hung warriors came crashing down against the rider, knocking him from his bronze saddle. The two men struck the ground in a cloud of shimmering dust. Other warriors hurtled earthward, their iron weapons slashing at the wolfish steed. The brute spun and howled as they hit it, gouging deep wounds in its shaggy hide. Warriors were sent reeling as the beast’s massive paws struck at them, slashing through their scaly armour as though it wasn’t there. The barbed tail cracked like a whip behind the creature, knocking men into the shard-sand with each lash of its brutal length. One Veh-Kung, bolder than the rest, landed upon the brute’s back, trying to stab its skull with the rusty curve of his sword. The blade cracked against the monster’s horns, notching as it struck the impossibly thick bones.

Before the warrior could recover, the beast twisted its head around, sinking its jaws into his leg. With a savage jerk, the wolf-beast ripped the man from its back, pitching him into the sand. Even as he started to rise, the beast pounced on him, collapsing his chest beneath its tremendous weight. Teeth bared at the warriors still prowling around its flanks, the monster brought one paw smashing down into the squirming thing pinned beneath it, flattening its victim’s head into a mash of brain and bone.

The shimmering dust that had claimed the Veh-Kung champion and his prey slowly settled. One figure stood, his dark armour dripping with shining sand and putrid gore, his black blade drenched in the blood of his foe, his clawed gauntlet locked around the slimy wetness of his enemy’s throat. At his feet, the rest of the Hung’s body shivered in a mire of its own filth. The intruder’s eyes glared at the other Veh-Kung warriors from behind the steel mask of his helm.

There was contempt in his silence, contempt in the way he tossed the torn flesh of their hero aside. A hungry wail pulsed through the night as the smouldering malignancy of the killer’s sword shuddered in his hand. A tremor of fear ran through the ranks of the Veh-Kung warriors. The invader seemed to savour their terror as he marched towards them, murderous blade at the ready.

Fear fired the Veh-Kung warriors, filling their brutal hearts with such bitter shame that even thoughts of death and butchery could not hold them back. The diseased fighters roared from behind the beaked visages of their bone helms, their voices loathsome and foul. A dozen stalked away from the circle of iron that had grown around the embattled wolf-beast, leaving only a handful of their fellows to keep the brute at bay.

The stranger did not wait for his enemies to charge, but lunged into their midst even as they approached him. The black sword swept down, crunching through rotten armour and putrid flesh, carving its gruesome path through tainted flesh and corrupted blood. One Veh-Kung fell back screaming, clutching at the spurting stump of his arm. A second fell, his body cleft from crown to collar.

A third, trying to strike at the rushing killer, was caught in the steely grip of his foe’s free hand. With a wrenching twist, the killer broke the Hung’s arm, driving his own pitted blade back into the warrior’s chest.

From above, a pair of Veh-Kung sprang at the invader, dropping from their handholds in the crystal spires. The strange killer spun as he heard them utter their bubbling war cries. The black sword swept through the moonlight, its mephitic smoke streaming behind it.

Cries turned to liquid groans as the daemon steel chopped through the hurtling figures, splashing their wreckage across the shard-sand. The intruder turned away from the dissected human debris, lashing out at the warriors who had thought to exploit the distraction. Screams pierced the night as a leg was cut from its body, as a head was shorn from its shoulders and an arm ripped from its socket. Corroded swords crashed against darkened armour, buckling and snapping as they futilely sought weakness in the unyielding mail. Weaponless, stunned warriors backed away, broken swords dropping from slackened fingers. Now they were at the stranger’s mercy.

He showed them none. The death rattles of the Hung warriors rose in a strangled chorus, pawing at the shimmering spires as they faded into the night wind. The armoured killer waded through the slaughter, an engine of butchery, sparing none in his path. The great wolf-beast entered the battle alongside its master, adding its primitive savagery to the massacre.

When the last Veh-Kung fell, the monstrous creature threw its head back, its massive frame shaking as a thunderous howl of triumph echoed across the desert.

The lone killer did not savour the massacre as he stalked among the dead, pacing through the mire of the battlefield. There was an expectant, brooding quality to his movements, like a panther waiting for its prey.

Again and again, he circled the carnage, giving no notice to the dying things that littered the ground, waiting, waiting for what would come, waiting for what he had come here to kill.

The stranger froze suddenly as he circled the dead. He turned his face from the battlefield, his eyes boring into the shadows between the crystal spires. Long he watched the black valley as sound slowly crawled from the gloom, the heavy tread of marching feet crunching through the shard-sand. A rancid, green glow began to banish the darkness, a sickly light that caused the facets of the spires to smoke as it fell upon them. A shape slowly manifested within the green light, a great palanquin of bone and sinew borne upon the shoulders of dozens of scrawny, stumbling figures.

By degrees, the stranger could see that they were youths, their leprous flesh pitted by the marks of plague and decay. They watched him with cold, feverish eyes set far into the pits of their near-fleshless skulls. Above the labouring wretches, upon the sides of the palanquin, braziers of corroded metal smouldered and smoked, giving off the pestilential glow. Basking in that glow, sprawled upon the cushioned seat of the carriage, was an oozing bulk, more toad than man.

The thing’s pallid flesh stood naked beneath the stars, covered only in welts, boils and lesions, its entire mass marked with thousands of tiny pox-runes that wept slime and filth across the thing’s enormity. Hairless and swollen, the thing’s flabby head grinned down at the stranger.

Almost absently, it raised a chubby hand to the great antlers that jutted from its face, pulling at strips of decayed meat impaled upon the horns. A tongue the colour of scum and stagnation flickered from the thing’s ghastly maw, snatching maggots from the rotting flesh with a tiny mouth of its own.

‘You kill my hunters,’ the bloated creature said, the sound wheezing from its obesity like the gargle of a drowning whale. ‘You kill my warriors,’ it said, brushing a worm from its cheek. ‘You invade my lands, a place sacred to the great Crow God.’ There was no hint of anger in the jovial croak, only a subdued amusement. The palanquin creaked and the litter bearers struggled as the thing leaned forwards, letting the brown pits of its eyes focus more closely upon the lone warrior. The haughty smile spread impossibly wide across its flabby visage. ‘All by yourself. I applaud the audacity of such madness.’

The thing’s stumpy hands clapped together like sides of raw beef. ‘How are you called, madman? The Crow God will be pleased when I offer up your flesh to him.’

The stranger stood silent, a grim shadow among the carnage of the battleground. The face of the fat warlord twitched in annoyance. More than the slaughter of his minions, more than the invasion of his lands, more even than blasphemy against his god, he found the stranger’s discourtesy upsetting. He licked at a second strip of meat, oozing back into his throne.

‘I am Bleda Carrion-crown,’ the bulk announced with a slimy burp. ‘Kahn of the Veh-Kung, Master of the Desert of Mirrors, Chosen of the Crow God, Tabernacle of the Divine Rot.’

The grotesque warlord shifted his tremendous mass, his flabby hands closing around a strange weapon dangling from the arm of his throne. It was sections of metal rod connected by rusty links of chain. Seven in number, each rod was pitted and foul with decay, dripping with some internal corruption.

‘This is my Chain of Seventy Plagues,’ Bleda said, caressing the weapon with obscene fervour. ‘No man has ever stood against it. I ask again, who you are and where you have come from. Is it the Vaan who have dared such foolishness? The Sul? Surely not the Tsavag? What people spurred you to this madness, for I would favour them in my prayers to Mighty Neiglen!’

The skull-masked stranger shook his head, staring at the swollen hulk of Bleda. ‘A steel rain has come to cleanse with blood and terror,’ his voice rasped, the slither of sword against sheath.

For an instant, fear flared within Bleda’s rancid eyes as he heard the stranger’s spectral voice, as he saw the warrior stalk forward. His hands shivered against his oily flesh, clutching at his throat in alarm. Beneath his fingers, he could feel the pox-runes of Neiglen. The touch of his own afflictions reassured him. Was he not the chosen of his god? Did not the power of Neiglen course through him?

Bleda’s laughter bubbled up from deep within his corrupt bulk.

‘Die nameless then, fool,’ the kahn croaked. Like a sea beast floundering upon the shore, he surged up from his throne, waddling down the seven steps that fronted his palanquin. The ground seemed to cringe beneath him as his feet sank into the shard-sand. Behind him, Bleda’s slaves set down the heavy palanquin and formed a leprous mass around their warlord.

‘You speak of rain and blood and terror? You wear the skull rune of Khorne? Fool! This is the desert, where it has not rained since before the days of Teiyogtei! Blood and terror? Here they belong to one man, one man alone, Bleda of the Veh-Kung! This is the sacred land of Neiglen, where the Blood God has no part.’

Bleda’s voice wheezed with fury as he spat his words onto the sand. He flicked his chain-staff through the air, the rods and links buzzing like a swarm of flies as the wind fled before it. ‘I am the Tabernacle of the Divine Rot,’ the kahn croaked. ‘Behold the power of the Crow God!’

With a flick of his hand, the kahn slapped a flabby finger against the leprous flesh of a slave. Instantly the man collapsed in a groaning, twitching mass. Skin sloughed from his bones and flesh darkened beneath a sheen of filth. A great horn of twisted bone erupted from the slave’s forehead even as his eyes slithered across his face to merge into a single putrid orb at the centre of his head. Hands lengthened into talons and organs swollen with rot burst through his skin. Great fangs dripped from a suddenly gaping maw. A sword-like growth oozed from the slave’s side until at last its weight tore it loose from his body.

The stricken slave moaned, retching as it stooped to retrieve the blade his body had grown. When it stood again, its claws were wrapped tightly around a length of twisted corrosion, a crust of decay flaking down its blade.

Bleda laughed as his slave was consumed by the Divine Rot of Neiglen, his mortal being devoured by the daemonic essence his kahn had infected him with. The plague bearer moaned again, and then started to stumble towards the defiant stranger. Bleda’s corrupt laughter bubbled forth again as he pressed his hand against a second slave.

Hutga sat in the silence of his yurt, staring at the ancient weapon cradled in his lap. The ji had been handed down from the khagans of the Tsavag for centuries. It was a sign of their authority, a testament to their fitness to rule over the Tsavag. He could feel the weight of years as he ran his hand along the moon-shaped blade and its ivory heft. He could almost hear the echoes of his fathers and their fathers, back to the beginning of his people. The mighty weapon was more a part of the khagan than his own skin, more a part of him than his own blood.

The chieftain sighed as the thought came to him, as doubt and disappointment stabbed into him. He had driven his son hard, had done everything he could to make him strong and proud, a true Tong warrior, a man fit to rule when Hutga’s time at last came, but however hard he drove Dorgo, however much he tried to test the boy’s limits, Hutga always felt that his people needed more.

He wondered if perhaps he had driven Dorgo too hard, had set unfair expectations for him. Did he drive the boy so hard because he worried about his fitness to lead, or because he was afraid his love for his son would temper his judgement, would place a man unfit to rule upon the throne of the Tsavags? Did he test Togmol and others who were not of his blood half so severely?

Hutga shook his head. It didn’t matter now. Dorgo had been proven unworthy with his cowardice and his lies. If he had fallen in battle with Lok, his father would have mourned him. For him to return, disgraced and vile, cowering in his falsehoods like some faithless Hung, was more than Hutga could endure.

When Ulagan and his scouts returned with the truth, there would be an end of the matter. Dorgo’s tongue would be cut out for daring to tell such lies and the boy would be cast out from the tribe. The khagan was under no illusion what exile meant: a lingering lonely death in the wilds, if Dorgo did not fall victim to one of the other tribes first. It was debatable which was a worse way to die.

Still, the boy’s cowardice and lies had earned him no less a fate, even if he was the khagan’s son.

What if he had told the truth, though? What if he had seen someone, some stranger from beyond the domain, kill Lok?

Hutga stared hard at the blade of his ji, looking past its keen edge into the dim days of legend when it had been forged by Teiyogtei. None of the other chieftains could have killed Lok.

There was a balance in the domain, some capricious force that prevented the tribes from ever annihilating one another. Each of the eight chieftains was a powerful warlord in his own right, but none was mightier than any other, and none could prevail against one of his rivals. Their strengths and weaknesses were too evenly matched, the balance too close for any one warlord to overcome another.

Dorgo had said the man who killed Lok was not another chieftain, however. That gave Hutga pause. Never in the history of the domain had an intruder been the equal of a chieftain.

Only once in the ancient sagas was such a being recorded. Hutga felt a chill course through him as he pondered the possibility.

The flap of the khagan’s tent was pushed aside and Yorool’s disfigured frame hobbled into sight. The shaman bowed, making obeisance before his lord.

‘The scouts have returned,’ Yorool said. ‘They have captured one of the Muhak.’

Hutga noted the same haunted look in the shaman’s mismatched eyes as he made his report. The khagan forced his own doubts from his face. It was not wise to show weakness, even before the old shaman.

‘He has been taken to the place of questions?’

Yorool nodded, a grim smile spreading on his lip. ‘The Muhak will speak when you ask him to speak. He is only flesh and bone, after all.’

Hutga rose from his throne, smoothing his moustache. ‘Then let us talk with him,’ he told the shaman. For the life of his son, Hutga hoped that the prisoner would bear out Dorgo’s story. For the sake of his people, he prayed that everything Dorgo had told him was a lie.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lashed across the wooden platform, limbs stretched and spread away from his body, chained to small, rounded protrusions, there was little the Muhak captive could do but scream. The Kurgan were noted for their toughness, and the Muhak were rugged even by the grim standards of their savage race, but everything mortal had its breaking point, that stage where mind and soul were at last overwhelmed by pain and the fear of pain. When that point was reached, there was no secret that could not be given voice.

Hutga could see the Muhak’s flesh writhing beneath his skin as the blood-grubs Yorool had set into the Kurgan’s wounds burrowed into the exposed muscle. The insects would gnaw and tear their way deep, never relenting until they found the moist darkness where they could lay their eggs.

The khagan’s face was stern as he watched the Muhak shudder and struggle. The chains would hold even one of his brawny breed. They were the sort of fetters used to hold juvenile mammoths and keep them close to their mothers when the tribe was on the march. Beside that power, the strength of the mightiest Kurgan was nothing.

Hutga looked away from the captive’s screaming face, watching as Qotagir circled the platform. The old Tsavag held an ivory goad in his weathered hand, motioning with it to guide the enormous creature that moved with him, following his every step as though it were his shadow.

Baru’s bulk blotted out the light as it lumbered around the platform, the wood quivering with the mammoth’s every step. The oldest and wisest of the herd, Baru was almost human in its understanding of the commands Qotagir shouted to it. The mammoth was covered in glossy grey hairs, its pillar-like legs coated in old scabs and bruises, its long trunk split into four separate, mouth-like noses. There was a cruel intelligence in Baru’s bulging, crust-rimmed eyes.

Looking into them, Hutga knew that the beast fully appreciated the havoc its master asked of it.

The Muhak’s screams grew louder, more desperate as Qotagir and Baru circled him. His body thrashed against its bonds, at least what was left of it did. His left leg was little more than a mash of pulp pressed deep into the log it had been chained to. He stared at the mangled limb, tears flowing from his eyes. Then his head turned back to Qotagir and the mammoth.

The leathery Tsavag lifted the ivory goad as Baru moved into position. In response, the gigantic animal raised its foreleg. The captive struggled, striving desperately to pull his arm back towards his body. The chains were too secure and his arm didn’t budge. Qotagir’s wizened face split in an ugly grin. With a quick gesture, he brought the goad hurtling downwards. At the same time, Baru brought his huge leg pounding down into the top of the log.

The Muhak’s shrieks intensified as his arm was crushed beneath Baru’s immense weight.

Hutga waved Qotagir away, walking towards the weeping, pleading captive. The last of the warrior was gone and all that was left was tortured flesh and screaming pain. It was time to ask the questions. Now he would hear nothing but truth from this man, and if not... The khagan looked aside to see Qotagir already moving Baru towards the prisoner’s other arm.

‘You will enter the Hunting Halls broken and ruined,’ the khagan told his captive, pointing at the bleeding paste where the Kurgan’s shield-arm had been.

‘The dogs of the Blood God will make sport with one so wretched,’ Hutga spat. ‘Tell me what happened in the Crumbling Hills!’

The Muhak glared at Hutga, despair rising above pain in his gaze. ‘What more can I say that your fat Tsavag ears have not already heard, Hutga Iron-belly! How many times must I tell you what I saw with my own eyes!’ The Kurgan’s voice dropped into a snarl of ferocity. ‘Kill me and be done!’

Hutga gestured at Qotagir. The Muhak followed the motion, watching with horror as Baru lifted his leg into the air. ‘Your sword-arm is next,’ the khagan warned. ‘There will be no place in the Hunting Halls for you.’

‘The plagues of Nurgle wither your manhood, dung-eating swine!’ the Muhak roared. ‘I can say it no differently! We fell upon the long-nose as your kin intruded upon our hunting grounds. Zar Lok bade us wait in ambush for the long-nose, to pierce its belly with our spears. Then we killed the dogs who rode upon the beast. They died like women beneath our clubs!’

The khagan smashed his fist into the Muhak’s bloodied face, splitting his lip and cracking his teeth. This much of the story he knew to be the truth, though the Muhak refused to admit that his zar had been hunting Dorgo, not protecting some imagined claim upon the Crumbling Hills.

It was what followed that Hutga did not believe, what he desperately did not want to believe.

‘The Muhak are accustomed to killing women,’ Hutga growled. ‘They find it challenge enough to test their courage.’ He raised his fist again, satisfied to see the captive cringe in anticipation of the blow. ‘Spare me the boasting of murderers, it is what happened after that I would hear.’

A shudder swept through the Kurgan, a trembling that had nothing to do with the pain that ravaged his body. A deeper fear crept back into his eyes, a terror beside which even the threat of Baru was made small. ‘What I have told you before,’ the captive said, his voice a broken whisper.

‘You dare insist that a lone outlander killed your zar and twenty of his warriors!’

‘A thing of darkness and blood, he was,’ the Muhak gasped, ‘his face hidden behind a skull of steel, his body locked within armour of blood. The sword in his hand was black as death, shrieking and smoking as it hacked down our men.’

‘Lies!’ Hutga roared, smashing his fist against the platform beside the captive’s head. The Muhak flinched at the impact. ‘Your soul will belong to Chen the Deceiver if you die with lies upon your tongue!’

The Muhak sneered up into Hutga’s rage. ‘Look for yourself. Seek the outlander, Hutga Iron-belly, and your head will hang beside Lok’s!’

Hutga backed away, trembling as the threat struck him. The Muhak spoke from ignorance and spite. He did not suspect the horror of what he said, the hideous power he courted with his words. He did not even guess what it was he had seen, what had driven him to abandon his zar and hide in the hills like a frightened rabbit until Ulagan’s scouts found him.

No, the Muhak did not know, but Hutga Khagan did.

The chieftain turned away from the captive, walking to where Yorool waited for him at the edge of the platform. The shaman’s face was as dark as Hutga’s. Hutga shook his head as he saw the fright on Yorool’s mutated face. ‘Lies,’ he insisted again.

‘Then we will question him more?’ Yorool asked. The inquiry stabbed at Hutga like the thrust of a lance. The Muhak’s threat continued to send shivers through his powerful body.

‘No,’ the chieftain said. He lifted his hand in a tightened fist. Qotagir turned Baru around, marching the huge animal from the platform, leading it back to the pens. ‘The pig would only tell us the same lies.’ Hutga opened his hand.

The crowd that had been watching from the periphery of the platform set up a savage, bestial howl of fury, rushing forward in a hate-maddened mob: wives, daughters and mothers of the men who had died in the Crumbling Hills, each woman’s hand clenched tightly around a dull stone knife.

Hutga descended from the platform as the women took their vengeance. There were some things that turned even a warlord’s stomach.

‘What if he was telling the truth?’ Yorool asked, struggling to keep up with Hutga as the two men walked back to the chieftain’s yurt. ‘What he described, what your son described… there is only one thing it could be.’

‘Summon the war chiefs of the tribe,’ Hutga said, cutting him off. ‘I would confer with them. Send for Ulagan and his scouts. I will need them as well.’

‘And your son?’

Hutga did not look at Yorool as he asked the question. He did not want the shaman to see the doubt that wracked him as he thought of Dorgo. The Muhak’s tale supported what Dorgo had told him. Hutga knew the tortured warrior had told him the truth, however much the chieftain tried to deny it. His son was restored to him, redeemed from the shame that had fallen upon him.

The relief he felt was bitter and he felt like a traitor to his people for feeling it. Yes, his son was his again, but at what cost? What cost would his people pay?

‘Bring him to the council,’ Hutga told Yorool. ‘He is neither a liar nor a coward. The Muhak dog confirmed that much.’

‘Then you do believe.’ Yorool’s voice shuddered as he heard his khagan confess his acceptance of the story, and what it implied. It was the shaman’s turn to look away. ‘Long has it been prophesied this day would come, but I had hoped it would not happen in my time. What will you tell your men?’

‘We will tell them only what they need to know,’ Hutga said, struggling to keep his voice strong. ‘Tell them what it is that menaces our people, our land and the whole of the domain.’

Yorool closed his hands in the sign of Khorne, crushing his fists against his chest, bowing his head as he muttered a quiet prayer to the brutal god of battle and slaughter.

‘He has come,’ the shaman hissed, his desperate effort to deny the truth overwhelmed by the fear that pulsed in his heart. The air grew cold as he named his terror.

‘The Skulltaker.’

The Skulltaker.

The blood froze in Bleda’s putrid heart as he realised just what it was he had so boldly challenged. The bloated Veh-Kung chieftain stumbled back, eyes bulging with horror, prayers to his debased Crow God slobbering from suddenly numb lips. The seven-section chain hung limp from fingers grown flaccid.

Bleda continued to watch the strange warrior before him in the dark armour. No mortal man, this warrior. Nothing mortal could move the way he did, striking and slashing in a relentless cascade of violence: tireless, remorseless, unstoppable. The black blade rose and fell in a butcher’s dance, hewing and hacking, ripping and tearing. Bleda had spread the Divine Rot to his entire entourage, sending wave after wave of possessed slaves to attack the warrior.

The daemons charged at him, chopping at him with their corrupt plagueblades. The daemonic steel simply recoiled from its impacts against the man’s unholy armour, sending even the daemons reeling. The warrior gave his foes no quarter, no mercy.

His smoking blade was everywhere, stabbing into rotten lungs, splitting open decayed bellies, lopping off limbs and heads.

The plaguebearers did not falter even in the midst of massacre, but their numbers, the foul vapours that surrounded them, the poisonous touch of their swords, none of these were enough to prevail against their foe.

The slow, sickly movements of the daemons were unequal to the swift, murderous attacks of the warrior. The plaguebearers fought with a hellish vitality beyond that of anything merely mortal, enduring wounds that would have brought the strongest man low.

They did not know pain. They did not fear death. They only knew what their master demanded of them, and so they fought on, oblivious to the carnage slowly consuming them all.

A lion among jackals, the warrior carved a gory swathe through the festering, moaning daemons. Again and again, his blade cut through their diseased flesh, spilling their foul ichor across the shimmering sand until there was too little of the mortal shell left to contain their noxious essence.

Plaguebearers fell beneath his sword, hacked to pieces, collapsing into pools of putrescence as their daemonic essences fled back to the realm of the gods.

It was while the warrior was fighting a crook-backed, fly-faced daemon that his heavy cloak was slashed by a plaguebearer’s sword. The stranger’s side was exposed and for the first time, Bleda could see the chain that crossed the man’s chest from right shoulder to left hip. A grisly trophy grinned at him from the chain: the skull of a man, the chain looped through its sockets, its forehead branded with the rune of Khorne. That was the moment, the moment when Bleda recognised his enemy for who and what he was.

The Skulltaker brought his sword smashing down into the fanged visage of a plaguebearer, rupturing its cyclopean eye and collapsing the bone beneath. The thing staggered away, swiping blindly at him with its claws.

The warrior pursued the maimed daemon, pausing only for the instant it took to chop the hand from a daemon closing upon him from the other side. Returning to his first foe, the Skulltaker stabbed his blade into the thing’s chest, impaling it upon his sword. With brutal savagery, he ripped his weapon free, sending a spray of stagnant black ichor and splintered ribs across the faceted side of a crystal spire.

The warrior did not pause, pivoting as he won his sword free, bringing the blade around in a shrieking arc that slashed through the leg of another daemon. The thing bleated and pitched forwards. Before it could rise, the Skulltaker brought the edge of his weapon down upon its head.

Only five of the daemons remained. They circled the Skulltaker, ropes of filth dripping from their wounds, drool slopping down their faces. The pus-hued eyes of the plaguebearers burned into those behind the skull-mask of the warrior’s helm, blazing with a corrupt inner fire. The Skulltaker glared back, his black blade screaming hungrily in his hand. Shard-sand crunched beneath his boots as he pivoted to watch the daemons as they shuffled around him, tightening their circle.

As one, the fiends rushed at him, hooves and peeling feet slapping against the sand. The first daemon flung its body at the man, exulting as his sword smashed into it, erupting from its back with volcanic fury. The dying daemon’s arms twisted impossibly backwards, grabbing the smoking metal piercing its body.

With all the strength left in its mortal shell, the daemon held the Skulltaker’s sword, keeping it sheathed in the monster’s corrupt flesh. The other daemons rushed the Skulltaker, crushing him beneath their diseased mass, smashing him to the earth beneath their oozing weight.

A nervous laugh wheezed through Bleda’s swollen lips while he watched the plaguebearers tear at the man pinned beneath them with their claws and stab awkwardly at him with their corroded swords. Not a monster from the pits of legend after all, only a man. One who would soon offer up his soul to Neiglen when the daemons ripped it from his body.

The chieftain marched forwards, his flabby face twisting in a sneer of triumph made bitter by the memory of his moment of terror.

Bleda’s step faltered abruptly and his sneer fell from his face. The heap of plaguebearers shifted upwards, exploding in a burst of primal strength and savagery. Daemons were hurled to the ground as the Skulltaker rose once more. The warrior’s hand was locked around the neck of a daemon, the steel fingers digging into its throat, filth gushing from the wound. The man’s armour was pitted and gouged, his cloak torn and ragged. Bleda could see something, something hot and black dripping from the Skulltaker’s wounds.

Even as he watched, the flow became a trickle and the rents in the armour closed, oozing shut as though they had never been.

One of the fallen daemons lunged at the Skulltaker as he strangled its fellow. The warrior spun around, whipping the body of the daemon he held, smashing the one with the other. The rising daemon crumpled under the impact, its collarbone shattered. The daemon he held slipped from his hands as the force of the impact tore its head from its shoulders.

The thing slopped against the ground, shuddering as the diseased spirit abandoned its desiccated husk, fleeing back into the void.

Bleda saw the other two plaguebearers charging at the Skulltaker, but he no longer had any illusions who would prevail. The Veh-Kung started to back away again, wondering if he had time to flee back into his tunnels, wondering if the Skulltaker would be able to find him even in that dank, noxious gloom. Then his eyes closed upon the plaguebearer impaled upon the Skulltaker’s sword.

The daemon’s body had largely disintegrated into a pile of sludge, but the sword was still there, mired in the filth. He looked again at the warrior, facing off against the daemons. A desperate hope came to the Hung chieftain. He scrambled across the shard-sand, his huge frame moving with a speed that belied his obscene bulk. He hurried towards the black sword. If he could use the weapon against the Skulltaker, kill the monster with his own sword…

The Skulltaker turned from the mangled ruin of the last plaguebearer, his skull-mask turning towards Bleda as the fat chieftain rushed for the sword. The warrior moved to intercept his foe, Lok’s skull slapping against his hip as he stalked after the Hung.

Bleda stopped, raising his seven-section chain. His chubby arms whipped the weapon through the air, lashing out at the Skulltaker with the flailing lengths of rod and chain. The warrior staggered as the corrupt bronze segments smacked into him, sizzling against his armour as they struck. A filthy green smog rose from the wounds, steaming into the air.

Bleda snarled, inching closer to the black sword even as he continued to whip the chain through the air. A droning buzz sounded from the chain, the sound of vermin on the wing, as its wielder swung it faster and faster, creating a blinding curtain of crushing metal and poisonous fumes.

As Bleda edged towards the sword, the Skulltaker fought his way through the crashing bronze rods. His breastplate smouldered where the rods had struck him, the left horn of his helm partially melted by the corrosive touch of the weapon.

Blood, dark and steaming, bubbled from new rents in his armour, sizzling as it dripped onto the shimmering sand. Bleda’s satisfaction at the damage his enchanted weapon visited upon the monstrous warrior was tempered by the fact that its touch had not broken the man.

Another foe would be reduced to a quivering mess, retching and shivering as the vile influence of the chain’s power polluted his body. The Skulltaker kept coming, daring the tempest of Bleda’s chain. Foot by foot, he was closing upon the puddle of ruin and his terrible sword.

The Hung kahn gave a bubbling shout, jerking the chain savagely in his hand. The rods whipped around the Skulltaker’s body, coiling around his left arm. Bleda grunted in satisfaction, putting his entire weight into one savage pull on the chain. The Skulltaker staggered as the trapped arm popped from its socket, hanging limp and useless beside his body.

Bleda shuddered to find that even such an injury had drawn no cry of pain from the warrior. His horror at the observation was diminished as he found the nearness of the pool and the black sword.

Still keeping his hand firmly around the seventh of his chain-weapon’s bronze rods, Bleda lunged for the gruesome blade.

Bleda’s fat face twisted back into its triumphant sneer as his chubby fingers closed around the hilt of the sword. Bubbling laughter oozed from the warlord’s mouth as he tore the weapon free from the filth of the plaguebearer.

Laughter decayed into a drawn-out scream. The sword fell from Bleda’s mutilated hand, fat and flesh dripping from the charred extremity in greasy ropes. The black sword fell to the ground, its edge smoking, its eerie voice raised in a ravenous howl.

Bleda pitched to the ground as the chain in his other hand was ripped from his grasp. The chieftain coughed in terror as he saw the Skulltaker free himself from the coils of the chain, casting the magic weapon aside as though it were so much rubbish. Then the killer was advancing on him once more, the grisly scars in his armour healing more with every step.

Croaking wheezes and wracking coughs slopped from Bleda’s swollen face as the chieftain tried to summon the hideous power of his god. Curses and poxes, spells to wither and ruin, hexes and blights, were all known to the lord of the Veh-Kung, for Neiglen was indulgent with his servants, but none could ooze their way onto his tongue, while the searing agony of his mangled hand pulsed through his thoughts and thundered through his blood.

Bleda fought to calm his spirit, to draw upon the powers he had been taught, but the pain would not relent.

The Skulltaker loomed over the reeling kahn. He reached to his shoulder, wrenching his left arm back into place with a dull crack. The warrior’s skull-mask glared down at the quivering chieftain.

Reaching down, he retrieved the black blade, metal gauntlets tightening around the smoking weapon. The scene lingered, the silent warrior towering over the broken, obese hulk of the gasping chieftain.

The molten touch of the black blade had spread up Bleda’s arm, reducing muscle to strips of fried meat, exposing bones that were burnt black.

When Bleda looked up, when the kahn stared into the murderous embers behind the warrior’s helm, when the Skulltaker saw the terror and defeat in the chieftain’s eyes, only then did he strike. In one fluid motion, the black blade was drawn back, and then flashed forwards in a brutal sweep of smoke and sound.

Bleda’s swollen head, with its grotesque antlers and bulging eyes leapt from the kahn’s shoulders, dropping into the shard-sand with a wet plop. The headless trunk of the chieftain crumpled in upon itself, sagging to the ground like a ruptured boil.

The Skulltaker kicked Bleda’s lifeless bulk aside. Stalking across the shard-sand, he knelt beside the chieftain’s staring head. He lifted it from the ground, brushing the clinging slivers of glass from the bloated flesh. Then he brought the keen edge of his sword against his new trophy, stripping the warlord’s features from his head.

Only when the rune of Khorne, branded upon the bone beneath Bleda’s flesh stood exposed beneath the blazing stars, did the warrior relent. He lifted the flayed skull to the sky. Thunder roared in the cloudless night, causing the crystal spires to shiver: the growl of a hungry god.

The atmosphere in Hutga’s yurt was tense, a subdued silence filling the hide-walled hut. The gathered war chiefs and leaders of the tribe stood in a circle around the throne of their khagan, the eyes of every man focused upon their brooding chieftain.

His thoughts were dark, frightened: the troubled mind of a leader who knows his people face crisis and destruction. He glanced across the Tsavag champions, his gaze piercing, haunted.

Only when he saw Dorgo standing beside Togmol did the khagan’s eyes soften. The corroboration of his son’s story, the restoration of his honour was the only blessing hidden within the black words of the dead Muhak and the awful horror which they portended.

‘You have heard the words of my son,’ Hutga said, his voice like gravel grinding beneath a mammoth’s foot. ‘You have heard the words of the Muhak. Zar Lok is dead.’ That statement brought gleams of satisfaction onto the faces of the warriors and smiles onto their scarred visages. Hutga raised his hand, cautioning his war chiefs. ‘Do not be quick to rejoice in his death. The same doom that came upon the Muhak threatens the Tsavag.’

Hutga’s voice dropped to a fearful whisper. ‘The outlander, the warrior who killed Lok, he is doom long threatened in the old prophecies. The Skulltaker has returned.’

The revelation brought a frightened murmur rippling through the room. Powerful warriors, men who had not faltered in battle with the most hideous of beasts and monsters knew fear as they heard Hutga speak the terrible name: the Skulltaker, a figure from the most ancient of the Tsavag legends, the crimson spectre whose menace had hovered above the domain since its very beginning. Even the youngest of the Tsavag was taught about the bloody-handed executioner of Khorne.

‘The Skulltaker,’ Yorool repeated.

The shaman shuffled forwards, his twisted body moving to the centre of the circle. ‘You have all heard the traveller’s tales about him. You have heard of the hungry daemon, the Blooded Wanderer who tests the pride of those who would call themselves warriors. You have heard how he stalks the land, cloaked in a mantle of skulls, his fiery touch searing the flesh from his prey. You have heard how he rides the plains upon a great daemon-beast, killing all who have offended Great Khorne.

The stories of the Skulltaker are many: how he killed the dragon Shaneeth and placed its bleeding heads at the foot of the Skull Throne; how he rode against the ogres of the Marrowchewer, and alone scoured them from the land; how he dared face the Sin Stealer of the decadent Ulvags and vanquished the daemon from the realm of mortals for a thousand years; how he visited destruction upon the blasphemous city of Po and left not one of Lashor’s children alive within its accursed walls.

‘Before any of these things,’ Yorool continued, ‘he was known as the Slayer of Kings. The Skulltaker appeared in the lands of Teiyogtei, to bring low the mightiest of khagans. He stalked across the domain, slaying what he would, leaving a trail of slaughter in his wake. None could stand against him, not the craftiest Hung, the strongest Kurgan or most monstrous gor. All who did battle with him were cut down, their bodies left heaped in great carrion mounds. No tribe or nation had been able to defy the armies of Teiyogtei, but the Skulltaker cut a path through them as though they were feeble children.

‘Teiyogtei could not let the horde he had forged, the land he had carved from the desolation, be destroyed by this champion of havoc. He ordered his armies to stand aside, to make no more battle against the Skulltaker. The great khagan alone would face the monster and decide the fate of the land. Teiyogtei fought the Skulltaker upon a barren hill. For seven days, the mighty lord struggled against the terrible killer.

‘Each wound Teiyogtei suffered was returned against the Skulltaker, but neither could deliver the killing blow. As the seventh day faded into the eighth, Teiyogtei called out to the grim Blood God, asking him to guide his hand, to bring him victory against his awful foe. Khorne answered Teiyogtei’s prayer, and the Bloodeater burned like fire in Teiyogtei’s hand as he drove it into the Skulltaker’s body. Even as the death blow was struck, however, the Skulltaker’s black blade smashed into Teiyogtei, shattering the Blood Crown. The great khagan fell, stricken unto death by the hand of the Skulltaker. Our great lord was taken into his tent, where the sorcerers and healers laboured over him long into the night, but before the eighth day perished and the ninth dawn broke, Teiyogtei’s spirit had gone to the Hunting Halls. His chieftains quarrelled after their lord’s death and divided the domain between them, denying the right of the Tsavags as the true heirs of the king.’

Yorool lifted his misshapen hand, pointing his finger meaningfully at the men around him. ‘This is the tale every child knows,’ the shaman said. ‘There is more to the legend, a secret passed down among shaman and khagan. You were led to believe that Teiyogtei killed the Skulltaker, that all the other tales about him were some other mortal champion whom Khorne had made his executioner. This is wrong. There has only ever been one Skulltaker.

‘The destroyer of cities, the killer of dragons and daemons, is the same warrior who fought against the great king. Teiyogtei knew the terrible prophecy, that the Skulltaker could never be destroyed. He prayed to the gods for victory, but he could only vanquish the Skulltaker, not kill him. Like a daemon, his defeat banished him from the domain of Teiyogtei, but the king knew that the Skulltaker would return when ill stars burned in the heavens and the curse of years was broken.’

‘Ill stars glow in the night,’ Hutga’s solemn voice declared. ‘The Skulltaker returns, returns to destroy the domain of Teiyogtei and all within it.’ He shook his head, feeling the weight of his words, the hopelessness in them. ‘Teiyogtei’s united horde could not stand against him. Now the tribes war against one another, the hand of each turned against the other. Where the horde was broken, the Tsavag must stand alone.’

Grim silence stretched across the room, seeping into the murals and trophies, reaching into every corner. The Tsavag warriors stared at the floor, none of them willing to face his fellow, none of them able to accept the dread that filled their hearts.

Dorgo broke the silence. Brandishing his sword, he lifted his voice in a defiant snarl. ‘If these be the last days of the Tsavag, let us give praise to the gods that they have sent a foe worthy to oppose us! When he comes, we will give him a battle that will shame the wrath of dragon and ogre!’

Hutga rose from his throne, casting aside the heavy blankets that shrouded his massive frame. He strode through the circle, laying his hand against his son’s shoulder. For once, all doubt was gone.

Here was a warrior fit to lead the Tsavag. ‘The jackals take legend and prophecy!’ he roared, turning to face his war chiefs. ‘Here stands one who has seen the Skulltaker! He has seen the monster, and he would fight against it! Does he fight alone! Are there still men among the Tsavag!’

His answer was another roar. The fists of Tsavag warriors struck the air and swords clattered in their sheaths. Dorgo’s boldness and the words of their khagan goaded their courage, fanned the flames of their pride. Where dread had held them only a moment before, now they snarled their defiance. Hutga felt pride flooding through him: pride in his people, that they could still rear such warriors, and pride in his son, that he should be the first to lift his sword and raise his voice.

The khagan’s attention was pulled away from the shouting warriors, drawn to a young Tsavag boy, his cheeks unscarred, who crept timidly into the yurt. The boy dropped to his knees as he saw Hutga look in his direction, grovelling in obeisance before his chieftain. Hutga recognised him as one of Qotagir’s helpers. The boy was pale beneath the layer of dirt that covered his limbs, beads of sweat dripping from his brow.

‘Mighty khagan,’ the boy said. ‘A… a stranger… in the encampment. A sorcerer,’ he added with a shiver.

Hutga marched to the youth, lifting him from the floor by his arm. ‘What is this?’ he demanded of the frightened boy. ‘Who is this sorcerer and how did he pass unchallenged into the camp?’

He had to shake the child to force words from his stammering lips.

‘He… he came from… the sky,’ the boy stuttered. ‘He is one of the Hung. Says he bears a message for our khagan from the Sul.’

Hutga released his hold on the youth. The shouts of the war chiefs faded away as they heard the boy’s words.

A Sul sorcerer in their camp! Every man’s thoughts turned to his family and his home. They knew well the carnage a sorcerer could wreck. Their blood already up, the warriors began to rush from the tent. Hutga moved to impose his metal-studded bulk in the path of his men.

‘Relent, my wolves,’ he told them. ‘I would hear what this Sul rat would say.’ Hutga’s face darkened, twisting into a snarl. ‘Then the sorcerer can die,’ he promised.

Warriors gathered around the wooden platform, spears and swords held in clenched fists. The wreckage of the Muhak captive had been cleared away, only the dark stains in the wood giving silent evidence of his fate. In the pens nearby, the mammoths trumpeted their displeasure and unease, their handlers hard-pressed to pacify the brutes.

There was a foulness in the air, a spectral taint that tortured the animals’ sharp senses. Even the men could feel it, crawling up their spines like icy worms.

At the centre of the platform, impossibly suspended above it, was the thing that evoked such disquiet. It was a great oval of glowing light, the suggestion of shape and form just barely perceptible within the glare. There was the impression of a flattened, disc-like body and a gaping, fang-ridden maw.

The light around the thing faded from one colour to the next, like a prism turning in the sunlight.

Hutga and his war chiefs approached the platform. The khagan’s eyes did not linger on the levitating daemon, but rose to stare at the man who stood upon its back. He was short and stooped, his limbs long and wiry. A black robe was draped around his body, a collection of charms and amulets hanging around his neck. A great helm of gold enclosed his head, its face smooth and without openings, its crown sporting a plume of feathers that changed hue in tandem with the daemon beneath the man’s boots.

‘Hutga Steelskin,’ the faceless man said, his voice a rasping hiss as it escaped from behind his helm. ‘I bring you tidings from the great Enek Zjarr, Kahn of all the Sul, Prophet of Mighty Chenzch.’ The messenger bowed his head ever so slightly, making the briefest of obeisance to the Tsavag chieftain.

The khagan stared back at the sorcerer, unimpressed by the titles of his dark master. Even among the Hung, the Sul had a foul history of betrayal and subterfuge, their every word as crooked as an adder’s tongue. Only the terrible potency of their sorcery and the impossibility of attacking their fortress had prevented the other tribes from wiping them out long ago.

Hatred of the Sul was often the only thing that the different peoples of the domain had in common.

‘You are overbold, Thaulan Scabtongue,’ Hutga said, spitting after he spoke the sorcerer’s name. ‘Do you think I have such fondness to hear the deceits of your master that I would not see your head upon a spear?’ As their khagan spoke, the warriors around him bristled. Dorgo took a step forwards, edging to his father’s side.

Yorool’s eyes darkened and the chill in the air grew colder as he began to evoke his familiar spirits.

‘Hold, khagan,’ Thaulan said, raising his slender, feathered hand. ‘I come here under a truce.’

‘We honour no truce with the Sul,’ growled Togmol, his voice shaking with anger. He had nearly died in battle with the Vaan four summers past, part of a costly war between the two tribes, a war that had been fuelled by Sul lies and Sul manipulation.

The sorcerer turned his faceless helm to the enraged warrior, hate exuding from the polished golden veil. Slowly, Thaulan looked back at Hutga. ‘Even the Tong honour the Call,’ the sorcerer told him. ‘None of the tribes of Teiyogtei has ever forsaken the Call.’

Hutga nodded his head slowly, his thoughts darkening with the sorcerer’s every word. ‘Who summons the chieftains?’ he demanded.

‘Enek Zjarr would confer with his,’ the sorcerer paused, his voice dripping with arrogant contempt, ‘brethren. His divinations have uncovered a threat, something that imperils not only the Sul, but all of the domain.’

The men who had stood with Hutga in his yurt and listened to Yorool relate the grisly tales of the Skulltaker turned anxious glances towards one another. Hutga knew their minds. If there had been any last chance for doubt, the Sul messenger had broken it.

With their sorcerer’s tricks, the Sul had learned of the menace that stalked their lands, the monster that had stepped out of the mists of legend to reap a harvest of death.

‘Tell your dog of a master that Hutga Khagan will answer the Call,’ the chieftain told Thaulan. He looked aside at Dorgo, meeting his son’s troubled gaze. ‘There is much the Tsavag can tell Enek Zjarr about this “threat” he has seen, things we have learned without daemons and scrying stones. Return to him and tell him the Tsavag will meet with the other chieftains to decide how to fight this menace to our peoples.’

If it is not already too late to stop, Hutga thought.

CHAPTER FIVE

The isolated hill stood in a narrow pass, surrounded by craggy towers of jagged rock. The slopes of the rise were barren, devoid of even the merest weed, the stink of death exuding from the very rocks. A great monolith, a huge dolman of black stone, rose from the top of the hill, its surface pitted with angular runes. The monolith had been worn down by time and the elements, its once sharp edges smoothed by wind and rain. An aura of antiquity clung to it, discernible even through the murk of death that hovered around the hill.

The weight of centuries imposed itself upon Hutga Khagan as he marched towards the hill. It had all started here, where Teiyogtei had fought his battle against the Skulltaker so long ago. The king was entombed within the hill, beneath the monolith his horde had raised to honour their fallen warlord. The place was sacred to all the tribes of the domain. Even the brutish warherd of the gors paid honour to the king. It was the one place where no tribe could take up arms against another, a taboo that had never been broken.

Hutga took only one warrior with him as he marched to the hill. Each chieftain was allowed only one companion when he attended the gathering. More might tempt an ambitious man to break the ancient taboo. Hutga allowed his son the prestige of accompanying him.

One day, if the gods willed it, Dorgo would become the leader of the Tsavags. Attending the gathering would allow him the rare opportunity to observe the men who would be his most dangerous foes, to take the measure of his rival chieftains and prepare his people in the struggle against them.

The khagan smiled at the thought. If the Skulltaker was not stopped, there would be no one for Dorgo to lead, no other tribes for him to oppose.

The Skulltaker would scour the domain of life as surely as one of the firestorms that swept through the Barrens of Char when the moons waxed full and the solstice drew near. There would be nothing left behind, only mounds of heads to the glory of Khorne. No man would be shown mercy and neither woman nor child would know pity. Only death had a place in the Skulltaker’s march.

As he approached the hill, Hutga could see a company of warriors in black armour emerge from one of the passes. The coal-black iron plates, the horned helms and crimson banners marked the warriors as belonging to the Vaan. Most powerful of the Kurgan tribes, the Vaan were more dangerous in their way than the Muhak.

Lacking the mutant strength of the Muhak, the Vaan used discipline and cunning to win their battles. Legions of goblin slaves toiled in the mines beneath Blood Rock, the ancient fortress of the tribe, feeding the forges and smithies of the Vaan, helping them build their terrible war machine, to equip their legions of iron-skinned axemen, to craft the cruel missiles of their spear-throwers and the spiked bludgeons of their berserkers.

Despised and reviled as they were, Hutga knew that but for the sorcery of the Sul, the Vaan would have swept aside the other tribes long ago.

The procession of armoured warriors stopped at the mouth of the pass, forming a wall of grim iron across the opening. A huge man emerged from their ranks, towering over the others. The plates of iron that covered him were edged in gold, his gauntlets set with gemstones. A broad, boar-faced helm covered his head, tusks curling up from its sides to form a pair of forward-jutting spikes.

In his hands, the man carried a grisly weapon, a long thick-bladed axe of bronze, scalps dangling from silver rings set into its haft. Runes of slaughter and carnage were etched into the blade and its edge glowed with a scarlet sheen. The inward surface of the hoop was lined with sharp metal teeth and great bladed prongs slanted outwards where the circle of steel lay open.

The weapon was infamous among the tribes: the holy weapon of the Vaan, which they called ‘Crippler’, handed down to their first chieftain by Teiyogtei when the Kurgans were absorbed into his horde. The warrior who carried it could only be their zar, Ratha, a brute upon the battlefield, as arrogant and terrible as his god. Like the Skulltaker, the Vaan were devoted to Khorne alone of the great powers. That fact wouldn’t spare them the attentions of the Skulltaker, however. Khorne’s minions, more so than the followers of other gods, were notoriously unconcerned about what manner of blood they spilled and who died upon their blades.

Like Hutga, Zar Ratha left his procession behind, taking with him only a single warrior bearing the crimson standard of his tribe: a field of blood upon which two blackened axes were crossed. The Kurgan left behind by the zar set up a shout as Ratha walked away, crashing their axes against their shields, a din that echoed from the craggy slopes. Hutga felt a moment of anxiety. He’d left his retinue far behind in the pass, a few score warriors and a pair of mammoths.

Ratha’s force was larger, and much closer. Even the Vaan would not violate the taboo, but there was nothing to prevent them from slinking through the passes and murdering him as he left the gathering. Hutga shook his head. Such untoward tactics were the province of the Hung tribes. Ratha had too much arrogance, too much contempt for his rivals to resort to underhanded strategies. If the Vaan were to attack, it would be in the open where their gory god could look down upon their deeds.

‘Keep your eyes open, your wits sharp and your hand on your blade,’ Hutga whispered to Dorgo just the same.

Even if the Vaan had no penchant for ambush and assassination, the other tribes had few qualms about taking every advantage of their enemies. The Hung tribes, the Sul, Veh-Kung and Seifan, in particular took a cruel delight in treachery and deceit. Killing enemies after the gathering would appeal to their wicked nature.

Dorgo nodded his understanding, and Hutga could tell that the only way his enemies would claim him was over the corpse of his son. In normal times, there would be little danger. The tribes knew the prophecy that guarded their chieftains, that they could not fall by the blade of even another chieftain, but if word of Lok’s death had spread, it might have caused strange thoughts to spread through the domain.

Hutga reached the hill at almost the same time as the two Vaan began to mount the barren slope of brittle red stone. Up close, he could see that what had appeared to be armour from across the plain was in fact a variety of iron plates grafted onto the bare flesh of the warriors. The gold edging was the bronzed skin of the Kurgans showing between the metal plates. Ratha’s boar-faced helm stared silently at the two Tong emissaries, and then his iron-covered hands rose, lifting it from his head.

The countenance beneath was rugged, the nose splintered by an old wound, the chin square and heavy beneath its hairy black beard. Eyes like chips of ice regarded the Tsavags with frigid disdain.

‘Ironbelly and his pup,’ the Vaan zar sneered. ‘Any other time, in any other place, I would praise Khorne for such an opportunity.’ His fingers tightened around the bronze heft of his axe until his knuckles cracked. ‘Thank your ancestors that the Vaan honour the truce of the barrow.’

‘One day our herds will trample Blood Rock flat,’ Dorgo snarled. ‘The Tsavag are not belly-licking goblins to crawl beneath the boots of mongrel-scum like the Vaan.’

Ratha smiled at the young warrior, his expression as cold and cheerless as a viper’s. ‘Your pup has a tongue, Ironbelly. Teach him to curb it or I’ll pluck it out and make him eat it.’

Hutga pushed his son back, scolding him for his emotion. The chieftains played a twisted game among themselves at the gatherings, trying to goad each other into flying into a rage and breaking the truce. Such a chieftain could expect the full fury of all the other tribes.

Several times, to stave off disaster, a chieftain had been compelled to kill his own tribesman who had broken the truce. It was the only appeasement tradition allowed for one who shamed himself at the council. Hutga did not want to consider the possibility of being forced to kill Dorgo under the gloating eyes of Ratha and his ilk.

The Kurgan laughed as Hutga restrained his son. Turning on his heel, Ratha began to climb the hill. He froze after a few steps, dropping into a wary crouch, his weapon held defensively before him. A shape loomed up among the rocks, a form at once massive and twisted. The clatter of hooves on stone trickled down from above and the stink of filthy fur washed down on them from the heights.

An inhuman, braying peel of laughter took up Ratha’s broken mirth. The Vaan chief cursed and straightened as he saw the creature creep into the light.

In form, it was not unlike a man, though the legs were bent upon themselves, impossibly lean beneath the knee and ending in a hoof rather than a proper foot. Mangy brown fur clung to the muscular chest, hanging in knotted clumps from broad shoulders and bulging biceps. The furry arms ended in short-fingered hands upon which a set of wicked-looking bronze fighting claws had been fastened with barbed iron nails.

Like Hutga’s ji and Ratha’s axe, the fighting claws were the ancient heirloom of the creature’s tribe, gifted to its predecessor long ago by Teiyogtei. The head that rose from the brute’s shoulders on a thick stump of neck had nothing in it of the human. The face was pulled into a broad muzzle, fangs jutting from its powerful jaws. Great spiral horns curled up from its scalp, doubling in upon themselves to form thick knobs of bone.

The beastman’s eyes were enormous and pale, like bowls of milk bulging blindly from the pits of its face.

Hutga knew this to be Nhaa, beastlord of the Warherd of Kug. Ratha was wise to show caution before the brute. Of all the chieftains, Nhaa was dangerously unpredictable, savage beyond anything a man could comprehend. The warherd had been driven into the Grey long ago, forced to survive in that grim forest of nightmare and shadow.

The centuries had done nothing to lessen their hatred for the tribes who had banded together to hunt them down. Revenge was one of the purely human drives the beastmen could still claim, and one they never tired of trying to satisfy. It was a testament to the cautious respect even the beastmen afforded their sorcery that the Sul had been able to summon even the beastlord to the gathering.

Nhaa regarded Ratha’s combative pose, snorting loudly as it smelled the surprise that tainted his scent. The gor uttered another braying snicker and began to pick its way back up the hillside, moving with an eerie jerkiness to its gait. Hutga was reminded again that the inhabitants of the Grey were all but blind, relying upon other, less natural senses to navigate their surroundings.

Ratha cursed again and followed after the beastman, his standard bearer behind him. Hutga motioned to Dorgo, warning him again to be wary, but also not to allow himself to be goaded into anything by the other chieftains. Now, above any other time, they could not afford to antagonise the other tribes or allow themselves to be antagonised in turn. The Skulltaker was enemy enough for any of them... for all of them.

The top of the hill was as barren as its slopes, only a few heaps of broken stone and the towering mass of the monolith rising above the crusty red soil. Closer to the monolith, the heavy weight of age was almost overpowering, a sinister air of lost ages and vanished empires. Hutga could almost imagine Teiyogtei’s ghost glaring down at the assembled chieftains, furious at the petty squabbling warlords who had broken his horde between them. Even after so many centuries, the thought of the king’s fury sent a chill shivering through Hutga’s body, and he clutched his heavy mammoth-skin cloak tighter around his shoulders.

The Tong emissaries were among the last to arrive. Nhaa and Ratha had preceded them up the hill. Two of the other chieftains were already there, resting upon jumbles of red-veined granite. They sat far apart, their companions glaring at one another, waiting for an excuse to strike.

The first to catch Hutga’s gaze was Csaba, the zar of the Gahhuks, one of the Kurgan tribes. Csaba was lighter of build than Ratha, though his skin bore the same bronze hue and his hair the same dark cast. Csaba’s armour was simple, strips of leather studded with spikes of iron, his helm open at the face and bereft of adornment save for the horns stabbing outward from its sides.

The Gahhuks were horsemen, priding themselves on their speed and craft. Moreover, armour would hide the chief conceit of the tribe. From crown to foot, the Gahhuks tattooed their bodies, each swirling pattern of lines and circles denoting some great deed the warrior had accomplished.

Csaba, as chieftain, had skin that was nearly black from all the boasts inked into his flesh. Upon their backs, both Csaba and his companion wore bamboo frames across which were stretched flayed skins, each sporting the distinctive Gahhuk tattoos. These were the boldest of their displays, grisly back-banners that incorporated the flayed skin of an enemy defeated in single combat.

No Gahhuk youth was allowed to become a full warrior until he had slain another Gahhuk and stretched his skin upon a bamboo frame.

The other chieftain was Tulka of the Seifan, a tribe of the Hung. Tulka was shorter than the Kurgans around him, but stoutly built and with a panther-like toughness in his wiry limbs. The kahn’s skull was misshapen, lacking the symmetry of a healthy man, with a cluster of eyes peppering his forehead and cheeks. Unlike the dusky hues common to the Seifan, his hair was like spun frost, cascading around his shoulders in glacial streams. The lengthy moustache that fell from his otherwise shaven face was likewise a shocking blue, the tips trapped inside little beads of jade.

The man with Tulka was not unknown to Hutga. Taller than his kahn, with an almost reptilian broadness around his features, Shen was Tulka’s war chief and lieutenant. In the treacherous ways of the Hung, Shen was at once his most trusted underling and his most despised rival. Unlike Csaba and his guard, the Seifan wore elaborate suits of lamellar armour, the scales of copper and iron woven together with thick strips of leather. Round helmets with skirts of copper chain rested on their heads, snakeskin plumes draping down from their peaked crowns.

Beyond the two chiefs, Hutga could see Nhaa, the beastlord perched atop a rock, looking as though it might pounce onto the men around it at any moment. Unlike the others, it appeared that Nhaa had come alone, perhaps as a display of its contempt for its human enemies. For all Hutga knew, the vile creature might have eaten any comrade it had planned to bring with it!

Ratha assumed a place as near to the monolith as possible, defiantly planting his standard in the red earth. Hutga shook his head at the Vaan’s bravado. The crypt of Teiyogtei lie beneath the monolith, and the sounds that rose up from the subterranean tomb could not be explained away by the presence of the priest who tended it. Someday, Ratha’s arrogance would be his downfall. Hutga hoped he was there when something reached up from underground and dragged the Kurgan below.

The last men upon the hill were two Muhaks, their faces hidden beneath masks of tanned flesh, their muscle-ridden bodies a network of scars, naked save for the leather breech-clouts and fur capes they wore.

Hutga was puzzled by the presence of the Muhak, wondering if perhaps one of them was the successor to Lok. Neither bore the fallen zar’s mattock, nor was there the same sense of power that was discernible even in a debased creature like Nhaa. Moreover, the Muhaks were visibly ill-at-ease.

The clatter of rocks and a sharp curse from Ratha pulled Hutga’s attention away from the Muhak emissaries. He saw the Vaan chieftain backing away from the monolith, scowling as something emerged from the pit below. Any hope that the spirits of the tomb were at last reaching out to claim the Vaan were quickly dashed.

It was no spectre of the grave that emerged into the light, but the tall, thin figure of the war-priest who tended the shrine. There had always been a war-priest watching over Teiyogtei’s bones, always an outlander, always entering the domain alone.

The war-priests never left the hill. How they found food or took water was a mystery to the tribes. Even more of a mystery was how a new priest knew to make the pilgrimage to the monolith, to take up the lonely vigil when his predecessor died. Many whispered that Khorne spoke to them in their dreams and guided their steps through these bloody visions.

The war-priest was garbed in a long, tattered cloak of bearskin, its surface painted with gory runes and sigils. A tall, narrow helm of silvery metal framed his thin face. The beard that fell across his neck was a vivid red, the colour of rubies and blood. In his slender hands he carried a long staff of gnarled wood, a slim blade of the same silvery alloy as his helm lashed around its tip.

The outlander was of a people neither Hung nor Kurgan nor Tong; a Norscan from a land far beyond the boundaries of the domain, beyond even the Shadowlands. Alfkaell the Aesling had come far to answer the call of Khorne, lurking within the solitude of Teiyogtei’s tomb through the long years, waiting with a fanatic’s patience to hear the voice of his god again.

The Norscan simply scowled at the men gathered around the hilltop. He removed an object from beneath his cloak, the yellowing brainpan of a skull. Alfkaell stalked towards Ratha, waiting expectantly for the Kurgan to remove the talisman he wore around his neck. A finger-length spike of ruby, a shard from the Blood-Crown of Teiyogtei, the gem rattled as it fell into the macabre bowl.

The war-priest sneered at the zar, and then turned and marched to the other chieftains. By turns, Tulka and Csaba both presented their talismans to the war-priest. When he reached the Muhak emissaries, however, the new zar hesitated before dropping his talisman into the skull, holding it in such a way that it was hidden from view by his hand.

Alfkaell backed away, a murderous grin splitting his face. With one hand, he reached into the skull, lifting from it a finger-sized piece of painted stone. His other hand swept forwards, driving the tip of his spear-staff into the breast of the Muhak who had tried to pass the false talisman. Dark heart’s blood spurted down the length of the staff as Alfkaell pierced the Kurgan, wrenching his blade savagely in the wound.

‘Blasphemer,’ the Norscan snarled, the dying Muhak hanging from his spear like a piece of spitted meat.

At the cry, the other Muhak turned to flee. Instantly, Nhaa leapt down from its stone, scrambling after the man with bestial glee. The two Seifan added their own part to the savage scene, tripping the Muhak with their long axes. They laughed as Nhaa’s weight smashed down into the prone, screaming man. The beastman’s bronze claws slashed through the Kurgan’s powerful shoulders, crunching into the bones beneath.

With frenzied slashes, the gor dug deep into its victim’s body, relenting only when it pulled something wet and glistening from the quivering wretch. Nhaa’s fangs tore into the stringy mess of tissue and it turned away, leaving the man to bleed out.

‘What trick does that scum Lok think to try?’ Csaba observed, stabbing a finger at the dead Muhaks. ‘Why did he not come himself? What was he thinking, trying to pass those fools off on us?’

‘Lok thinks nothing, brothers.’ Every man upon the hill spun as the voice seemed to materialise from nowhere. Where a moment before had been only broken rock and barren hill, stood two figures. One was the tall, robed shape of Enek Zjarr, kahn of the Sul. Behind him stood a smaller, slighter figure, a woman with the dark hair and sallow features of the Sul. Like Enek Zjarr, her robes were covered in mystical symbols, and a riot of amulets and charms hung around her neck.

‘Lok did not come, because Lok is dead,’ Enek Zjarr continued. He strode forwards, boldly marching into the centre of the hilltop. Almost contemptuously, he dropped his talisman into the skull held by Alfkaell. The war-priest glared back at him, annoyed by this man, who refused to be intimidated by his strange powers. It was a dangerous thing to tempt the ire of Alfkaell. Unlike the chieftains, he was not bound by any taboo to honour the truce of the gathering.

The sorcerer’s statement brought exclamations of disbelief from the other chieftains, each alarmed by Enek Zjarr’s words. Hutga could guess their thoughts: Enek Zjarr had managed to tip the balance, had found a way to defy prophecy and kill another chieftain. He’d gathered them here to boast of his accomplishment and to threaten the other tribes with his new power.

Hutga’s shock was of a different nature. Already aware of the Muhak zar’s death, his surprise lay in Enek Zjarr’s awareness of the event. It was eerie proof of the efficacy of the sorcerer’s arcane powers.

Ratha was the quickest to compose himself. Hands locked around the haft of his mancatcher, the Vaan snarled at the sorcerer. ‘What trickery is this, warlock? What lies are these on your crooked tongue?’

Csaba lifted his broad-axe, the moon-like blade glistening in the sunlight. His voice joined that of his fellow zar. ‘Dare your spells against me, wizard, and you’ll find a Gahhuk tougher to kill than a miserable Muhak!’

Nhaa loped towards the sorcerer, its fighting claws bared, its fangs exposed in a feral grin. Tulka leaned back, his eyes hooded as he watched the situation unfold, the immense dadao still sheathed at his side. The treacherous Hung was waiting to see which way the wind would blow before committing himself. Similarly, Alfkaell kept his distance, brutal amusement on his face, clearly enjoying the spectacle of watching the chieftains slaughter one another.

‘It is no trick!’ Hutga roared. The chieftains glanced his way, trying to keep one eye on the Sul emissaries. While he had their attention, Hutga hurried to speak. ‘My son saw Lok die,’ he said, gesturing to Dorgo. ‘It was not Enek Zjarr who killed him, but an outlander.’ The khagan’s voice dropped into an awed hiss. ‘It was the Skulltaker.’

Silence once again hovered over the hill for a moment, as the chieftains worked their minds around Hutga’s statement. Again, it was Ratha who was first to speak.

‘The Skulltaker is a myth,’ the zar sneered, ‘a bogey man to frighten children.’ He gestured with his mancatcher at Enek Zjarr. ‘If Lok is dead, it was this dog’s black sorcery that killed him.’

Dorgo drew his sword, stepping around his father to brandish the weapon at Ratha. ‘Call me a liar again, Kurgan, and the Muhak won’t be the only tribe without a leader!’

‘They aren’t,’ Enek Zjarr said. ‘The Veh-Kung no longer have a kahn.’

‘Bleda?’ Tulka asked, suspicion in his tones. ‘You are telling us Bleda is dead?’

‘Even for a wizard, bearding that fat maggot in his damnable desert would be a fine trick!’ Ratha scoffed. A dangerous thought came to him. ‘Unless he was killed away from the desert, lured by the words of the Sul!’

Rage flickered across Enek Zjarr’s face. The sorcerer’s hand twisted into a claw, gripping something unseen. Light flickered around the Sul’s fingers and a blackened shaft of metal with a bronze, bladed head suddenly manifested in the sorcerer’s grip.

He leaned on the naginta, the dreaded spear-axe that was Teiyogtei’s gift to the Sul. ‘Do not bait me, Kurgan, or the Skulltaker will not need to seek your head!’

The sorcerer’s threat did not faze Ratha, but the menacing words did give Csaba and Tulka pause. Nhaa backed away from the display of sorcery, the fur on its back bristling as it retreated. Hutga shook his head, disgusted. The tribes had warred for so long against one another, so long had they plotted and schemed that even faced by a common foe, they couldn’t set aside their animosity.

Still, for the good of his people, for the good of all their people, he had to try.

Hutga stepped forwards, putting himself between the sorcerer and the zar. He glared at Ratha, and then at Enek Zjarr. ‘You have seen the doom that threatens all of us,’ Hutga scolded the sorcerer. ‘By your words, I gather he has taken the head of Bleda to hang beside that of Lok.’ Enek Zjarr nodded, confirming Hutga’s supposition. ‘Then there can be no doubt that the Skulltaker means to kill us all. If we are to stop him, we must work together, not spend ourselves on petty squabbles!’

‘Ally with the Sul?’ Ratha spat. ‘I’d sooner trust Nhaa with my children and a cooking pot!’ The oath brought a snide laugh from Tulka and a warning growl from the beastlord.

‘If the Skulltaker has come back, he won’t stop with the Veh-Kung and Muhak!’ Csaba shouted, an element of fear in his voice. ‘Hutga is right, he’ll be after all our heads!’

Tulka laughed at the Gahhuk. ‘Because the Tong has been deceived by the sorcerer doesn’t mean I have to play the fool! If I’d known you were such an idiot, Csaba, I would have invaded your lands long ago!’

Csaba bristled at the Seifan’s taunt, the guard behind him stalking towards Tulka and Shen. The two Hung simply grinned back, sharing a sly look, fingers tightening around their swords.

Harsh laughter rolled across the hilltop. The furious chieftains turned to scowl at Alfkaell. The Norscan priest stood in the shadow of the monolith, a cruel smile behind his beard. Without ceremony, he dumped the ruby talismans onto the ground.

‘Such brotherhood and trust among the blood of Teiyogtei,’ the war-priest hissed. ‘Such unity of purpose! Such lofty vision! Even when the wolf prowls inside the tent, still you argue over who gets the warmest blanket: the heirs of Teiyogtei, the men chosen by the great king to inherit his domain and guard it against the gods!’

Alfkaell shook his head. ‘Better he had bent his knee to the Blood God and begged his mercy than leave his legacy in the hands of such fools! Even united, do you think you could stand against the Skulltaker? He will kill you all and set your heads before the Skull Throne! Khorne will consume the land Teiyogtei promised to him, the domain he tried to cheat from a god!

‘Scatter or stand,’ Alfkaell laughed, turning and stalking back into the crypt beneath the monolith. ‘It will not matter. You are all going to die.’

The chieftains were silent, watching until the war-priest had vanished from sight. The Norscan’s malevolent laughter continued to drift back to them. Ratha scowled, spitting at the war-priest’s footprints.

‘Outland scum! We’ll see who will run and hide!’ he raged. ‘No man, no daemon, has ever been able to face the Vaan on the field of battle! This Skulltaker will be ground beneath our axes and it will be his head, not mine that will sit before the Skull Throne!’

Ratha’s oath brought similar boasts from the other chieftains, each declaring their defiance of the Skulltaker, but any illusion of consensus was quickly shattered when they started to discuss plans for joining their forces. The council degenerated quickly into threats and curses, old suspicions and old hates rising again to the fore.

Hutga turned away, motioning for Dorgo to follow him. There was nothing more to discuss. Alliance between the tribes was impossible, the leaders too petty to set aside their differences for the common good. As he made his way back down the hillside, Hutga remembered Alfkaell’s daemonic mirth, the war-priest’s words about the land passing into the Blood God’s realm. The ancient legends claimed that the domain Teiyogtei conquered had been vibrant and fertile. The ruins of that prosperity littered the landscape. After the Skulltaker killed him, the land had been scourged, hellish places like the Desert of Mirrors and the Grey springing into existence as the fell power of the Wastes washed over the domain.

If the Skulltaker were to kill the men who were Teiyogtei’s heirs, those who bore the blood of the khagan within them, what greater perversion might be visited upon the land? Could the domain truly be consumed by the Blood God?

CHAPTER SIX

There was a cruel smile on Zar Csaba Daemontamer’s face as he rode away from Teiyogtei’s hill. A plan had occurred to the Kurgan chieftain as he listened to the other chieftains squabble. He had lost no time abandoning the bickering council, hurrying back to where his riders waited for him to return. With indecent haste, they lashed their tall, powerful stallions to their best effort, hurrying through the narrow passes between the mountains.

It was not fear of attack that filled Csaba with such urgency, but the opportunity that fired his mind. He did not believe Enek Zjarr’s outlandish claims that the Skulltaker had killed Lok for an instant, even if the Tong fool Hutga had been taken in by the sorcerer. Something had clearly happened to the Muhak zar, however. He would never have sent minions to the gathering. Whatever devilry Enek Zjarr had worked with his black magic, Csaba was certain of one thing: the Muhak were weak, weaker perhaps than they had ever been. Without their chieftain they were vulnerable and ripe for conquest: sheep waiting for the wolves.

Csaba licked his lips as he imagined his riders sweeping down on the Muhak villages, enslaving the muscle-bound oafs before they even knew they were under attack. With the strength of the Muhak his to command, with their lands added to his own, the Gahhuk would become a major force in the domain, equal to the mighty Vaan and the mammoth-riding Tsavags.

He would use that strength, use it to annihilate the filthy Seifan. No more would the Hung raid his lands, stealing women and cattle. They would be broken upon the blades of the Gahhuk host.

The bloody visions that filled Csaba’s mind turned sour when he reflected that others at the council could not have failed to see the same opportunities that he had seen. The Vaan were too far away to act quickly, for there were few horsemen among the great army that Ratha commanded.

Nhaa and his warherd were bound to the Grey, twisted by the ghastly power of their dark home until only the strongest of them could endure the light of the sun for any considerable time. Hutga was convinced that the Skulltaker had killed Lok and he would be preparing his people to ward off the legendary wraith.

Thinking of the Sul gave Csaba pause. Who could say what sinister plot the damnable sorcerers were unfolding?

The mind of a Hung was crooked enough, but when it was further twisted by the dark arts it became a maze that no one could travel. Perhaps Enek Zjarr had somehow orchestrated Lok’s death, perhaps his bold claim that Bleda was dead was also truth rather than deception.

Whatever the Sul were planning, Csaba had no intention of hiding behind the metal walls of his stronghold, Iron Keep, and cowering while he let them work their craft throughout the domain. No, he would strike! The Gahhuks would reap the spoils of the Muhak.

If the Sul had indeed killed Bleda, let them take possession of the Desert of Mirrors and its cursed poxes!

The Seifan were a more tangible threat to the Gahhuk. Their territories bordered the lands of the Muhak, just as Csaba’s did. The Seifan were horsemen like the Gahhuk, boasting scythe-wheeled chariots and fang-toothed steeds that were superior to the rugged stallions bred by the Gahhuks.

Tulka could not fail to see the possibilities presented by the weakness of the Muhak, nor fail to appreciate the consequences of not exploiting them. Yes, Csaba concluded, the real threat lay with Tulka. The Hung kahn would rally his armies to ride against the Muhak as quickly as he could, but Tulka had lingered longer at the council and had farther to travel when he left.

If Csaba was quick, his army would already be in the saddle before Tulka was even within sight of Seifan territory.

Soon, the black horses of the Gahhuks left the mountains behind, racing through the foreboding Vulturewood. A forest with a reputation nearly as fearful as that of the Grey, Vulturewood formed the frontier between the lands of the Muhaks and Gahhuks. The gaunt, scraggly-limbed trees rose like skeletal talons from the spongy, fungus-infested earth, forming an imposing fence between the rival Kurgan tribes. The reedy branches of the trees sagged brokenly towards the ground, bent by the weight of their grisly burdens.

For generations, the two tribes had hung the bodies of their victims in the forest, both to boast of their killings and to frighten their neighbours. The stench of death and decay had sickened the forest, turning it ever fouler and more wretched. The streams had become poisonous trickles of filth that reeked of rotten flesh. The trees had become sick and withered, the smaller plant life perishing altogether.

Only the most vile animals continued to haunt the forest: ravens and jackals, rats and shrikes, and the ever-present vultures with their scabby heads and crooked beaks. Darker things also prowled beneath the corpse-ridden boughs, trolls and worse horrors, things that took abominable sustenance from the carrion fruit dangling from the trees.

Men were lost to the Vulturewood, never to be seen again, but those claimed by the forest had been stupid enough to brave it alone or in small numbers. Csaba did not feel any great menace for his company of riders, twenty strong, armed and wary, mounted upon their rugged warmblood steeds. Beasts and even trolls usually had sense enough to leave such a dangerous band of men alone, finding less dangerous meals to stalk.

Yet, as they penetrated deeper into the forest, Csaba could not shake the uneasy feeling that came over him. It was not sound that caused the tingling of his blood, for he could hear nothing above the croaking cackles of the vultures overhead; it was nothing his eyes had seen, for the thick stands of thin trees blocked vision beyond a few dozen yards; it was nothing he smelled, the decaying reek of the forest overwhelming even a Kurgan’s sense of scent, but there was something, something beyond his senses, something beyond his reason that tugged at him, warning him to flee.

As the horses continued to gallop, the Gahhuks no longer had to urge them to greater speed, but had to fight to maintain control of the animals as they lunged recklessly through the trees. Csaba could see the nervous anxiety on the faces of the men around him, could see the outright fear in the eyes of their steeds. Whatever nameless evil he felt, those around him felt it too. So, it must be more than imagination.

Csaba’s hand dropped to the hilt of his dadao, the huge, fat-bladed bronze sword that was his tribe’s gift from the great khagan Teiyogtei. The daemon-forged weapon felt icy beneath his hand, as though it too felt the threat in the air.

Suddenly, the calls of the vultures were silenced. Csaba looked upwards to see the birds scattering into the sky, abandoning their grisly rookeries for the safety of the heavens. He did not ponder their retreat long, however, for in the ensuing quiet he became aware of a new sound. It was the sound of something large and heavy crashing through the forest.

The noise was loud, but too subdued for the clatter of hooves. Csaba was minded of unshod feet or the padding of immense paws. He wondered if perhaps a troll had decided to try them after all, but knew it was something more dire. A lurking band of Muhak, or riders of the Seifan? The shiver of fear that raced through his body told him otherwise. It was a primal sort of fear, something baser and more primitive than thought, something that struck horror into his soul.

The reek of blood washed over Csaba as he clung to the neck of his plunging horse, overpowering even the carrion stink of Vulturewood. Through the trees, he could see something converging on their path. In shape it was like a wolf, but far larger and with bright crimson-hued fur. A long, barbed tail streamed behind the loping beast and upon its back sat…

Csaba shouted to his men, shouted to his horse. His studded riding whip crashed against the flank of his steed, encouraging it to still greater effort without thought of control and no care if the brute’s heart should burst from the strain. Only speed, only flight had room in the zar’s frantic thoughts.

Csaba did not dare to glance back at what he had seen. One look had been enough to tell him what manner of foe hunted him through the forest. It was enough that his ears told him of the monster’s progress as he pursued the chieftain.

He could hear the screams of horses and the cries of his men as the enemy closed upon them, as the smouldering black sword he had seen gripped in the rider’s hand struck and cut them down.

He could smell the blood-stink strengthening as the foe drew ever nearer. The gaunt, twisted trees of the forest flashed past, corpses favouring the Gahhuks with rotten grins as the riders raced onward. The sense of cold, ancient evil clawed at Csaba’s heart, filling his brain with one terrible thought, one ghastly name from the mists of legend: the Skulltaker!

At last, Csaba saw light ahead, a break in the withered forest of Vulturewood. His horse shared his sense of frenzied desperation, plunging through the clawing branches to reach the open plain beyond. The zar gave a savage bark of triumph as relief surged through his body.

Certain that the grim forest would be his doom, feeling the bright sun against his skin struck him as almost miraculous, like the blessing of his savage gods. Around him, other riders broke from the grisly net of the forest, their banners tattered and torn by the jagged, low-hanging branches. Csaba’s dread flared back into life when he saw how few of his men remained. He had drawn his bodyguard from the toughest of his warriors, veterans of countless battles. Twenty had entered the forest with him. Only ten remained.

The chieftain shouted an order to his men, commanding them to rest their flagging steeds. Like their zar, the Gahhuks watched the edge of the forest, eyes trained on the shadowy mass of trees. They tried to tell themselves they watched for any sign of their missing tribesmen, but in truth it was the sinister, armoured rider they looked for.

As seconds stretched into minutes, Csaba began to believe the impossible, that somehow they had lost the Skulltaker in the woods, that perhaps the gruesome warrior was bound to the forest and could not stray from its haunted environs. These desperate hopes were just beginning to secure themselves in Csaba’s mind when a scream, sharp and piercing, rose from the trees.

A horse came galloping from the forest, racing wildly past the resting Gahhuks, its eyes mad with terror. A torn and mangled thing flopped obscenely in its saddle, hacked asunder by a single brutal slash. Csaba and his men were no strangers to violence and savagery, yet they were stunned by the inhuman strength required to render such a blow. A troll might work such carnage upon a body, but certainly not anything human!

One of the Gahhuk warriors gave voice to a piercing cry of alarm, snapping the others from their shock. From the forest, fast on the track of the dead man’s horse came the loping red beast and its ghastly rider. Csaba’s eyes went wide with terror as he felt the Skulltaker’s gaze settle upon him. The zar roared at his men, ordering five of them to ride down the oncoming foe. As they hesitated, Csaba ripped his dadao from its sheath, plunging the fat-blade into the gut of the nearest man. The rider fell from his horse, groaning pitifully as he rolled upon the ground.

The other men needed no further encouragement. Voices raised in trilling war cries, four Gahhuk’s charged the Skulltaker. Csaba lingered long enough to see the foremost close upon the monster, to see the black sword flash at the man, hewing arm and shoulder from the Gahhuk rider in a single savage stroke. The zar did not wait to see how the other three fared. Turning his horse around, he smashed his whip into its flank, spurring it away from the combat, spurring it away from the Skulltaker. The remains of his entourage raced after their fleeing chieftain.

The Iron Keep, Csaba thought, if I can only reach the safety of its walls. This time he risked a look over his shoulder, screaming as he saw the Skulltaker cut down the last of the men he had left to confront his enemy. Already, the wolf-like beast was racing after the Gahhuk riders, eating the dusty plain in long, loping bounds. Ahead, the fastness of the keep was only a small black splotch against the distant hills. The zar despaired as he considered the distance, knowing how far the race must run.

A second look back reassured him. He had seen the chain lashed across the Skulltaker’s chest and the two trophies jangling against his armour as he pursued the chieftain. There was no mistaking the mutated skull of Bleda with its twisted antlers. Csaba knew his fate should the Skulltaker catch him.

Panic cracked the zar’s voice as he ordered two of his guards to break off, to fall back and delay the Skulltaker. A flourish of his fat-bladed sword convinced them, and the two warriors turned their horses. Csaba had no delusions about their chances. He was playing for time, time and distance. If he could hinder the Skulltaker enough, perhaps he might win through.

Once he was behind the walls of his fortress, even the Skulltaker would not be able to reach him. Once behind the walls of his fortress, Csaba would be free to unleash a force no foe could stand against, even if he was the mythic Skulltaker!

The howdah swayed beneath Hutga’s feet as the immense war mammoth made its slow, ponderous way back to the lands of the Tsavag. The khagan’s ivory throne had been removed from his yurt and lashed to the floor of the platform after the custom of his people. Hutga sat there, nestled in his blankets and furs, his metal-studded flesh chilled by the darkening night. His mood was dark and the warriors who had made the long journey to the monolith with him kept their distance, fearing their chieftain’s anger. Only Dorgo and Yorool lingered near the throne, fully aware who it was had provoked Hutga’s temper.

‘Fools!’ the khagan cursed in a spiteful mutter. ‘Blind yapping rats! How can they not see past their jealousies and hates? The whole domain could burn and they wouldn’t lift a finger if it meant helping another’s tribe!’

Dorgo could feel his father’s frustration. His fear had been that he would be unable to make the other tribes believe the Skulltaker had been responsible for Lok’s death. He had hoped that if he could make them understand the dire threat they faced, they would band together against the common foe.

United, perhaps, they would stand a chance against the remorseless killer. Dorgo had dared to share his father’s hope. Now, he knew better. The chieftains were too arrogant, too obsessed with their ambitions to set aside their differences. Making them believe the Skulltaker had returned wasn’t the problem. Making them understand that they could not defeat him on their own was.

‘Csaba is probably already moving on the lands of the Muhak,’ Yorool observed. ‘Now that he knows Lok is gone, the Muhak will be easy prey for his riders. That is, if the Seifan haven’t already invaded the Muhak.’

‘Nhaa will slink back into his forest,’ Hutga considered. ‘That brute will stay there, bide his time and wait for the stink of weakness to reach him. The real threat will be from the Vaan. Ratha won’t worry over Csaba or Tulka, he’ll let them weaken themselves picking over the Muhaks. He knows Nhaa will stay in the Grey for now. No, he’ll see us as the only threat to his ambitions.’

‘What about the Sul?’ Dorgo asked.

Hutga thought around the question for some time. ‘I can’t say what plan moves the Sul. The mind of a Tong is not twisted enough to follow their schemes, but I cannot forget that Enek Zjarr called the council, that he was aware not only of the Skulltaker’s return, but that Lok and Bleda have fallen to him. I think, of them all, the Sul understand the danger that threatens the domain.’

‘So, what will they do about it?’ wondered Yorool. ‘I do not think Enek Zjarr is so foolish as to think the likes of Ratha would ever forgive the past intrigues of the Sul, even when faced by a menace such as the Skulltaker. There is some greater craft behind his gathering the chieftains together.’

‘Aye,’ Hutga agreed. ‘That is one thing upon which I can agree with Ratha. I’d sooner trust the mercy of the Skulltaker than the word of a Sul.’

‘Even if it means the destruction of our people?’ Yorool pressed.

The question gave Hutga pause. Suddenly, he seemed frail and weak in Dorgo’s eyes, weighted down by the burden of his leadership. The khagan shook his head, not liking the paths the question asked him to consider.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hutga said at last. ‘Whatever plot Enek Zjarr had to unite the tribes has failed. We are all left to fend for ourselves. As I see it, we have two choices. We can run, flee the domain and try to escape into the Shadowlands.’

‘That would be a hard journey,’ Dorgo cautioned. ‘The perils of the domain are at least known. Those of the Shadowlands are forever changing. There would be no guarantee of grazing lands for the mammoths, no certainty of shelter when the snows come. The old and the very young would not survive such an ordeal.’

‘And we do not know that the Skulltaker would not follow,’ Hutga added. ‘That leaves one other choice, the same choice that stood before us before Thaulik Scabtongue’s visit.

‘We ready our warriors, we sharpen our blades, and we wait for the Skulltaker. Let the last stand of the Tsavags be such that it will be the stuff of legend even in the Hunting Halls.’

The Skulltaker’s sword crunched through the breast of the last of Csaba’s riders. With fatalistic abandon, the warriors had ridden back to confront their enemy, throwing themselves upon his sword to give their chieftain time to escape. The Skulltaker watched the last wretch slip from his saddle, his dying body landing in a heap of broken bone and spurting blood. The killer might have found the futility of the warrior’s fearless death amusing.

There was no escape for the men who bore the brand of Khorne beneath their flesh, not in the mortal realm, not in the world of the gods. Death was their doom, death in the name of the Skull Lord, death to honour the Skull Throne. The soul so long denied the Blood God would be his. Nothing would stop the slaughter this time.

The grey, dark walls of Iron Keep loomed ahead, over the scraggly plains, perched upon a broad hillock of weathered pumice.

Ancient and forbidding, its walls had been raised by the magic of Teiyogtei’s sorcerers and strengthened by their dark arts. When the king died and the power of the gods swept across his domain, the taint had infected rock and stone, tree and stream, sand and sky.

Some places bore the marks of the gods more heavily than others. The fortress had been reared by Teiyogtei to protect the long desolate orchards of which only the twisted Vulturewood was a reminder. Now it was the stronghold of the Gahhuks, an impregnable vastness that had defied both siege and sorcery countless times during its long history.

The Skulltaker could see his prey cast a frantic look over his shoulder, the flesh beneath his tattoos pallid with fright, but a smile slowly gripped the man’s features, and the zar uttered once more his shrill bark of triumph. The sacrifice of his guards had not been in vain! The enemy was too far away, his loping beast too slow to cover the distance between chieftain and sanctuary. Csaba’s laughter drifted back to the Skulltaker as the chieftain revelled in his escape.

Neither door nor gate marred the smooth, unbroken walls of Iron Keep. Indeed, it was as if the structure had been built from a single piece of metal. Towers and battlements flowed seamlessly into the massive walls, never betraying rivet or nail. Fifty feet above the floor of the plain, sentries watched from the battlements as their zar galloped towards the sanctuary of his fortress. At Csaba’s shouted commands, the men cast spears at the sinister apparition pursuing him. Several spears struck home in the shaggy wolf-beast, evoking irritated snarls from the horned brute. Others glanced from the Skulltaker’s thick armour, scattering into the dust.

Cries of alarm sounded from the Gahhuk guards as they saw the Skulltaker charge through the barrage. Csaba risked another look back, horrified to see the silent killer closing upon him, gaining ground with every bound of his savage steed. The zar’s whip smashed ruthlessly against the flanks of his horse, driving it to one last, supreme effort. The blank face of Iron Keep reared up before him, but he did not relent. Behind him, the Skulltaker lifted the smoking blade in his hand, ready to strike down the fleeing chieftain.

As Csaba’s horse lunged towards the unbroken wall, the dark metal surface oozed open before it, forming a tunnel through which the zar and his steed plunged. Immediately, the living iron of the fortress wall shut once more, flowing back together like quicksilver.

The Skulltaker brought his monstrous mount rearing back, the brute’s claws pawing at the air. He brought his sword slashing against the metal wall, the daemon steel cutting deep into the strange iron. Molten metal dripped from the grisly scars as the Skulltaker attacked the vanished portal, but just as quickly the wounds closed, restoring the smooth surface of the wall.

‘Batter the walls ’til the crack of doom!’ snarled Csaba. He leered down at the frustrated killer. ‘Armies have broken against these walls! Giants and daemons have failed to breech this fortress! The Iron Keep knows its own and will suffer no intruder! Stay out there and rot, Skulltaker, you won’t take this head for one of your trophies!’

The Skulltaker’s lupine steed dropped back onto its feet, its black eyes glaring up at the jeering chieftain. The Skulltaker leaned back in his bronze saddle, the mask of his helm turning towards the battlements overhead. Csaba flinched as he saw the monster stare at him, the security of his stronghold’s iron walls suddenly seeming fragile and weak. His cringing reaction, his instinctive retreat before the Skulltaker’s gaze was all that preserved the zar’s life.

With a single motion, the killer hurled his smouldering blade at the chieftain. The black sword flashed before Csaba’s face as he recoiled, crashing to the flagstones of the courtyard beyond. Csaba could see the weapon trembling, shrieking where it had stabbed deep into the flagstones. As he watched, the fires within the sword blazed into hellish life. Gahhuks fled from the flaming blade, retreating before the weapon’s sorcery as quickly as their chief had from the monster who had thrown it. The fires consumed the weapon, crumbling it into a mass of ash and cinder.

A spectral gale burst across the courtyard, gathering up the ashes and sweeping them through the air. The stream of cinders billowed upwards, flying over the walls. Csaba dared to look over the battlements once more, watching in terror as the Skulltaker stretched forth his armoured hand. The stream of ashes swirled around the killer’s gauntlet, spiralling faster and faster around his hand. A shape began to form, a long thick shape, bearing a cruel edge. Csaba cringed away from the wall as he saw the ashes re-form into the Skulltaker’s shrieking blade.

The Skulltaker could hear Csaba’s voice shouting at his tribesmen behind the walls of the fortress. More spears rained down upon him as he urged his mount to circle the castle, looking for any break in its unnatural metal walls. As before, they dealt no lasting harm, the wounds on his monstrous steed too shallow to penetrate its heavy hide. Csaba’s voice became more desperate and more outraged with the passing of each breath.

New voices rose in answer to Csaba’s terror. Sharp and clear, the new voices lifted above the walls of Iron Keep in a deep, murderous chant. The Skulltaker paused in his prowl around the stronghold, listening to the brutal prayers. He urged his canine mount to withdraw from the base of the walls. The brute backed away, both beast and rider keeping their eyes trained on the walls. The Skulltaker kept his black sword at the ready, an expectant hiss escaping from behind his mask.

The chanting voices continued to rise, growing louder and harsher, like knives stabbing at the sky. Csaba’s gloating laughter rang out from behind the walls, mixing with the chants of his shamans. Once again, the iron walls oozed open, this time not to allow something in, but to let something out.

Two immense shapes thundered out from the two tunnels in the iron wall. As big as a bull rhinox, built like gigantic oxen, the creatures were things of bronze and brass rather than flesh and bone. Gigantic, hound-like heads jutted from their thick, armoured shoulders, sporting fangs the size of daggers and eyes that burned like fire. Steam sizzled from their jaws, rising into the air in puffs of scarlet mist. The stench of blood and death was upon the creatures, an aura of dread echoing that of the Skulltaker. Upon each of the bronze dog-heads, etched across muzzle and forehead, was the skull-rune of Khorne, the mark of the Blood God upon his fearsome daemons.

The juggernauts pawed at the ground, their clawed hooves slashing the earth into bloody grooves. The skull-rune blazed with the fiery rage of the daemons as they drew the scent of their foe into their huge bodies. The Skulltaker’s steed growled at the daemons, its rider silently awaiting the coming attack.

There would be no quarter given between these creatures of Khorne, no sense of kinship or shared purpose that would subdue their wrath. Destruction of the foe was the only outcome that would appease man or daemon.

The Blood God would settle for nothing less.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The first juggernaut charged the Skulltaker like an avalanche, its heavy hoof-claws churning the earth as it thundered towards him. The warrior waited, watching in silence as the huge bulk rumbled over the ground, its steaming breath hissing between its fanged jaws of brass. The juggernaut roared, a sound like grinding steel, and lowered its head as it made ready to smash into its enemy.

The instant the daemon’s head lowered, the wolf-beast was in motion, leaping from the juggernaut’s path. The Skulltaker’s sword lashed out, hacking at the brute as it barrelled past. Molten blood burst from the daemon’s bronze hide as the sword bit home, crimson steam spurting from the grisly wound carved into its side. The juggernaut’s body ploughed through the earth as its foreleg buckled beneath its weight, severed nearly in half by the Skulltaker. Its enormous mass gouged a deep trench as its momentum drove it onwards until at last it vanished behind a cloud of dust and steam.

The second juggernaut lingered behind, letting its fellow daemon initiate the attack. As the Skulltaker struck the kindred horror, the other daemon stamped its clawed hooves and charged. Again, the warrior’s lupine steed tried to leap from the daemon’s hurtling path, but there was more than a brute’s cunning locked within the bronze shell of the juggernaut. It anticipated the wolf-beast’s leap and was prepared for it. Even as the Skulltaker’s mount leapt, the juggernaut changed its path, smashing into the creature as it landed upon its broad paws.

Bones cracked under the jarring impact as the juggernaut’s thick metal skull rammed into the Skulltaker’s steed, hurling it a hundred yards through the air. The steed landed in a broken pile, snarling and snapping as it tried to force its splintered body to rise.

The juggernaut did not give the wolf-beast any chance. It sprinted across the ground with another burst of frenzied speed, roaring its metallic shriek. Its clawed hooves trampled the wolf-beast beneath them in a ferociously savage display, shattering bones beneath its colossal weight and shredding flesh with its razor claws. Brass fangs tore chunks of meat from the mangled mass, blood sizzling as the heat of the daemon’s inner fires consumed it.

An armoured shape reared up behind the raging juggernaut. With powerful strides, the Skulltaker sprinted towards the bronze daemon, fury shining behind the sockets of his skeletal mask. Thrown when the brute struck his steed, the warrior had swiftly recovered from his violent descent, the unholy power bound within his body sustaining him where a mortal should lie smashed and broken. He rushed at his terrible foe, the smoking darkness of his sword clenched tightly in his fist.

The juggernaut sensed its peril, turning reluctantly from the mash of bones and blood that its hooves had made of the Skulltaker’s steed. Its burning eyes glared balefully at the charging warrior, its maw opening in a steaming roar. The daemon’s fierce display did not cause the Skulltaker to falter. He lunged at the metal monster, and with a single tremendous leap he landed upon its broad bronze back. Powerful legs locked around the daemon’s midsection as the juggernaut strove to unseat the sudden burden, its savage bellows searing the air.

The Skulltaker was oblivious to the daemon’s wrath. Both hands locked around the hilt of his blade, he lifted the black sword high above his head. In a single, brutal thrust, he brought the weapon flashing down. Bronze shrieked as the blade bit through the metal hide of the juggernaut, molten blood exploding from the wound in a burst of steam.

The Skulltaker ignored the burning molten ichor that spattered across his armoured frame, but kept his hands locked around his sword, working it savagely across the wound he had struck. The tear he had gouged in the back of the juggernaut’s head ripped wider as the black sword worried at the cut. Fiery blood cascaded from the wound, the raging daemon frantically trying to buck its tormentor from its back.

The Skulltaker held fast, wrenching his blade back and forth. Crimson steam filled his vision, burning ichor dripped from his arms, his ears rang with the tortured metal shrieks of the daemon, and still he would not relent. Mercilessly, he hacked away at the juggernaut’s neck, ripping wide the wound he had carved. The daemon reared back, trying to press its head against its shoulder and protect its neck.

The motion caused the wound to tear wider, and with a searing wail of rage, the juggernaut lurched forwards. The weight of its massive bronze head was too much for its mangled neck and it tore free, thudding to the earth in a shower of steaming ichor that burned like molten fire upon the ground, a hollow bell-like ring following it as it rolled away.

The headless body staggered, struggled, and then sagged to the earth liked a weary child. The Skulltaker leapt from the bronze hulk as it started to shift, jumping clear before the heavy mass crashed onto its side.

A seething roar singed the air as the Skulltaker paced away from the bronze husk of the juggernaut. The warrior spun around, ready to confront his enemy. The first juggernaut stomped forward, its movements awkward and clumsy. He could see the great dripping wound that had been gouged in its side, one of the daemon’s forelegs held away from the ground, the limb nearly cut through by the Skulltaker’s sword. Even crippled, the smouldering rage of the Blood God still filled the daemon, still drove it to attack and to kill.

The Skulltaker gestured at the bronze monster, waving it forwards with a contemptuous curl of his fingers. The daemon threw its head back, brass jaws chewing the sky as it bellowed its fury.

With berserk frenzy, the juggernaut thundered towards the warrior, crushing rocks beneath its pounding hooves. The warrior’s body grew tense as he lowered into a crouch. The earth trembled beneath his feet as the daemon’s heavy limbs struck the ground. The Skulltaker held the monster’s fiery gaze, eyes locked upon the hellish flames flaring from the juggernaut’s hound-like face. Closer and still closer the bronze titan sped towards him, like the descending hammer of death.

Just before the juggernaut reached him, the Skulltaker pounced, throwing himself at the charging daemon. Smoking steel stabbed into the broad, dog-like head, puncturing the bronze snout just beneath the skull-rune etched across it. The Skulltaker held fast to the embedded sword as the juggernaut reared back, lifting him from the ground. The daemon lashed its head from side to side, trying to throw the man clinging to the sword. Steam sizzled from its jaws and fire flared from its nostrils as the daemon’s fury swelled.

Molten ichor bubbled up around the sword as the monster’s efforts caused the blade’s edge to saw into the bronze skin, widening the wound. At last, as the juggernaut whipped its head around, the sword was torn free, hurling man and weapon into the dirt. The Skulltaker slid across the ground in a tumble of armoured limbs, the black sword rolling free of his fingers. Like the juggernaut before him, he was lost in a cloud of billowing dust.

The juggernaut spun around, its rage a volcanic flame roaring through its bronze body. The brute’s head swung from side to side until it spotted the cloud of dust and the dark figure slowly rising within it. The daemon bellowed its bloodlust, stamping its hooves as it prepared to charge again.

In its wrath, the daemon forgot its mangled limb. It lowered the injured leg, letting too much of its weight rest upon it. The hollow bronze shell snapped like a rotten tree limb, spilling the juggernaut onto the ground. The daemon’s hooves pawed at the ground, trying to secure a grip, trying to right its immense body. Seething grunts of enraged frustration hissed from the juggernaut’s bronze jaws while burning ichor spurted from its severed leg.

Before the daemon could recover, the dark figure of the Skulltaker loomed over it. The juggernaut turned its head, trying to snap at the man, to crush him in its brass jaws. As it tried to bite him, the Skulltaker brought the point of his sword stabbing forwards, thrusting the smoking blade into its fiery eye. The bronze hulk shuddered as the screaming steel stabbed at its very essence. A dull, grinding moan wheezed from the gigantic daemon.

With a final, wracking shiver, the juggernaut was still, its infernal essence cast from the mortal world by the Skulltaker’s sword. Crimson steam seeped into the air as the daemon’s unnatural life fled from its metal shell.

Screams of disbelief and horror echoed from the walls of Iron Keep. The Skulltaker rose from the husk of the juggernaut and turned to face the stronghold of the Gahhuks. He could see Csaba’s face, pale and sweating, among the frightened ranks of the Gahhuks. He gestured at the man with his sword, the man the Blood God had marked for death. Csaba’s voice rose in a stream of frantic commands, a litany of snarled curses and dire threats. Spears clattered around the Skulltaker as the Gahhuks cast them at him.

The Skulltaker turned his back on the Gahhuks. It was not their spears or their numbers that concerned him, it was the unnatural walls of their stronghold that kept him from his prey. Csaba, however, had been too crafty in his attempt to kill the Skulltaker. By unleashing his caged daemons against his enemy, Csaba had given him the tools he needed to breech the unassailable walls of Iron Keep.

For long hours, the Skulltaker laboured over the carcasses of the juggernauts. When he turned again to the walls of the fortress, the black sword was sheathed. In its place he held an immense weapon, a gigantic maul that made Lok’s mattock look like a cobbler’s hammer. The bronze skull of one juggernaut formed the head, the iron spine of the other served as the haft. With his new weapon, the Skulltaker stalked towards the walls. Frightened cries and desperate shouts sounded from the stronghold, the screams of women and children rising above the voices of the warriors on the battlements. Spears and stones rained down around him as he strode to the smooth, unbroken iron barrier.

Iron Keep shuddered as the Skulltaker brought his daemon hammer cracking against it. The malevolence and destructive power of two juggernauts of Khorne had been bound into the grisly maul, the fury of two vanquished daemons eager for revenge. The concentrated malice caused the walls to shiver as the Skulltaker smashed the maul against them. On the third hit, cracks appeared in the unmarred surface, cracks that the living iron did not ooze up to repair. On the fifth strike, flakes of quicksilver exploded across the length of the stronghold’s perimeter as the walls began to fracture. On the seventh blow, the structure rocked as though the entire rise had been shaken by an earthquake.

When the maul cracked against the walls for the eighth time, Iron Keep broke beneath it. Towers shattered like broken glass. Like a crashing glacier, the walls toppled. Gahhuks wailed in horror as their fortress collapsed around them, burying them in mounds of twisted iron, crushing them beneath the weight of their fortress.

As the walls tumbled down, the Skulltaker cast aside the maul and drew his sword. The blade flared into life, screaming hungrily as it smelled the blood of the vanquished Gahhuks, as it heard the moans of the maimed and the dying. The Skulltaker ignored the broken wretches crawling from the rubble as he stalked into what had been the courtyard. Only one Gahhuk concerned him this day.

Wherever he was, Zar Csaba Daemontamer would not escape the Skulltaker.

The tension within Hutga’s yurt was scarcely less intense than that of the disastrous council at the monolith. A dozen of the Tsavag’s best warriors stood at the ready, weapons bared, each face filled with hate and suspicion. They had good reason to be anxious. The Sul had sent no lesser sorcerer than Enek Zjarr to meet with their khagan this time.

The sorcerer-kahn of the Sul stood before Hutga’s ivory throne, a sinister figure cloaked in black, the dreaded naginta of his tribe clutched in his bony hand. ‘Soulchewer’ the weapon had been named by those who had faced it in battle, for its cruel edge was said to strike not merely a man’s flesh, but his spirit as well. More forbidding even than the sacred weapon were the unseen powers that lurked within the sorcerer, the ghastly spells and magics only a sorcerer could master. The Tsavag warriors had reason to be tense, each of them wondering if his blade could strike faster than Enek Zjarr’s sorcery.

Alone among the Tsavag warriors, Dorgo kept his attention not upon Enek Zjarr, but on the woman who had accompanied him to the encampment. She was the same raven-haired companion who had been with the sorcerer at the council. Now he had time to look at her closer, he was struck by the beauty of her slender features, her narrow emerald eyes and full red lips.

Enek Zjarr had introduced her as Sanya and she was both apprentice and consort to the sorcerer. Like her master, she wore a long robe of black silk, a riot of talismans and amulets draped around her neck and across her rounded chest. Her hands, when they emerged from the confines of her robe’s embroidered sleeves, were slim and almost childishly smooth, sporting an array of jewelled rings and bracelets of silver and gold. Around her waist, a heavy chain of silver circled her body, pouches and flasks of strangely hued liquid dangling from its links.

If Enek Zjarr’s face was one of serene indifference, that of his apprentice was even more inscrutable, her smile as empty as it was enigmatic. Dorgo could not shake an impression of lurking danger around the woman and knew that his tribesmen were wrong to restrict their wariness to the sorcerer. The witch could just as easily work magic as her master could and probably with no less dire consequences. Indeed, with everyone focused upon the kahn, Dorgo regarded Sanya as the more immediate threat.

‘Prosperity and security be yours, most beneficent khagan,’ Enek Zjarr said, his words slithering through the tent. For all the humility of his speech, there was an undercurrent of withering scorn in the sorcerer’s voice, a note of mocking contempt that caused Dorgo’s hair to bristle. The temerity of the Sul was second only to their perfidy. ‘I am pleased you have allowed an audience to this most unworthy one.’

Hutga scowled at the sorcerer’s feigned deference. ‘Speak your words, magus,’ the khagan said. ‘You did not come here to play lickspittle and I weary of listening to a jackal play at courtesy. What causes you to bring your foul magics to the land of the Tsavags? Surely you do not intend another council?’

A sad look came over Enek Zjarr’s countenance. ‘No, I fear that would avail us nothing. The other chieftains will not acknowledge the menace, which threatens us all, until it is too late. Their heads will hang from the Skulltaker’s belt before they will listen.’

‘And you think I will?’ Hutga challenged.

‘You, at least, are aware of what it is that stalks these lands,’ Enek Zjarr said. ‘You know it is the Skulltaker, returned to claim the flesh of Teiyogtei, to cut the legacy of the king from the bellies of his warlords. You know that the Skulltaker is a foe that no man, not even a chieftain, may face in battle. Tell me, Hutga Khagan, did you plan to flee the domain with your tribe or withdraw to the burial grounds of your race and make a final hopeless stand against an unbeatable enemy?’

Hutga clenched his fist, growling at the sneering sorcerer. ‘It is better to die fighting than die running!’

Enek Zjarr bowed by way of apology. ‘What if I told you there was a third path you could take, a path that could save your people and destroy the Skulltaker?’

‘I would call such claims the crooked lies of a Hung,’ Hutga replied, his voice as cold as the iron nodules beneath his skin.

‘One does not need to tell lies to a dead man,’ Enek Zjarr said plainly. ‘Only united could the tribes have met our enemy in battle with any hope of success. Before we were even aware of the threat, two of our number were already dead. Six, perhaps, might have been enough, for that number is sacred to Lashor, Khorne’s most dire adversary among the gods, but the others would not lay aside their quarrels long enough to confront our foe.’

‘And you have found a way to destroy the Skulltaker without the others?’ Hutga scoffed.

‘Indeed,’ Enek Zjarr replied. ‘After the council dispersed, I returned to my palace and consulted my familiar spirits. My imps and daemons searched the forbidden places of the ethereal world, long into the night, hunting for the knowledge I required. Shall I tell you what I discovered?’ Hutga made a surly motion with his hand, impatient for the sorcerer to speak his piece. ‘They told me there is a way, dangerous, perhaps as deadly as the Skulltaker himself, but a way nonetheless.’

‘Teiyogtei Khagan could not kill the Skulltaker,’ observed Yorool. The shaman had been crouching before Hutga’s throne, muttering prayers of protection against any sorcery Enek Zjarr thought to visit upon his chieftain. Now, the sorcerer’s presumption broke Yorool’s concentration. He pointed an indignant finger at the Hung wizard. ‘If the great king could not kill him, nothing mortal can!’

‘Ah,’ cooed the sorcerer, ‘but our vanquished king did kill the Skulltaker. It was the will of Khorne that the monster did not stay dead. Perhaps Khorne will be less indulgent if his champion falls a second time.’

Enek Zjarr paused, letting his words sink in. ‘The Bloodeater was born in the Black Altar, created from the raw hate of a fallen daemon. Before he descended upon the Shadowlands, Teiyogtei Khagan created the Black Altar from the corpse of a daemon and used its raging spirit to craft the weapons of power he would later use to bind the loyalty of his warlords and build his mighty horde. He kept the most powerful magic for himself, however, binding it into his own Bloodeater. Alone, the weapon was powerful enough to vanquish the Skulltaker, to destroy his mortal shell and banish him from the lands of the domain for five hundred and twelve generations of men!’

Hutga shook his head. The sorcerer was mad. ‘The Black Altar lies deep within the Wastes, if it still exists at all. It is daring the wrath of the gods for a man to challenge the Wastes, worse than suicide for any who would try.’

‘Are the chances for life so very good with the threat of the Skulltaker looming overhead?’ observed Sanya. ‘He serves the Blood God, seeking to deliver the domain to Khorne’s hunger. But for the strength of Teiyogtei, this land and all within it would have been devoured by the Skull Lord long ago, sucked down into his world of blood and slaughter. Now, Khorne again stretches his hand to claim what the king tried to keep from him!’

‘Even if the Black Altar could be found,’ protested Yorool, ‘the Bloodeater was broken by the Skulltaker in his battle with Teiyogtei.’

‘What has been broken can be reforged,’ said Enek Zjarr. ‘The shards of Teiyogtei’s sword lie within his barrow. If they were gathered, if they were taken to the Black Altar, the blade could be remade.’

Hutga considered the sorcerer’s claims, scratching his chin as he mulled over the Hung’s words. He concentrated not only on what Enek Zjarr said, but what he left unsaid. ‘Why do you need me?’ the chieftain asked. ‘For that matter, how do I know it is Enek Zjarr I meet with and not a sorcerer’s simulacrum?’

Enek Zjarr’s face twisted into a withering scowl. ‘Do you think I would trust a doppelganger with Soulchewer?’ he snarled, letting the butt of his weapon smack against the floor of the yurt. ‘If I had a choice, do you think I would come here, begging the aid of a filthy Tong warlord and his brood of mammoth-suckling whelps! I come to you because I need you, because to get the shards of the Bloodeater I must go to the one place in the domain where my powers are useless! The mark of Khorne is upon the tomb of Teiyogtei Khagan and no magic can overcome the Blood God’s curse. It is men of swords, not sorcery, that are needed to prevail against the guardian of the tomb. Strong in magic, alas the Sul have no affinity for base weapons of blade and bludgeon.’

That at least sounded like the truth to Hutga’s ears. Whatever schemes the Sul might be plotting, there was one fact even the sorcerers could not escape: the Skulltaker was after them as much as he was the other tribes. If Enek Zjarr had truly divined a way to fight the Skulltaker, Hutga owed it to his people to investigate the claim. He motioned to one of his attendants, pointing to a heavy flagon hanging from the hide wall.

‘We will drink the venom of alliance,’ the khagan decided, locking eyes with Enek Zjarr, looking for any last sign of deception. He grunted derisively. The Sul were such masters of treachery that they wore their faces like the mask of a Muhak when they wanted to hide something.

There was no hesitancy in Enek Zjarr as he accepted the flagon, drawing a deep draught of syrupy amber liquid from the leather jug. The venom of alliance was an old tradition among the tribes, a powerful poison that each tribe brewed from the venom of stalk-spiders and the spores of fungi. The combination was unique to each tribe, requiring its own antidote known only to the shamans.

If the chieftain seeking alliance broke his word, the offended tribe would withhold the antidote, condemning him to months of excruciating agony as the poison ravaged his body. It was not potent enough to kill, no poison was strong enough to kill one who bore the daemon weapons of Teiyogtei, but the pain was enough to make even a chieftain wish for death.

‘You are satisfied?’ Enek Zjarr asked, wiping amber poison from his lips.

‘I will be when we have journeyed to the monolith and I see for myself the shards of Teiyogtei’s sword,’ Hutga answered. ‘Twenty of my best warriors will go with us… for protection.’

‘Forty would be better,’ interrupted Sanya.

Hutga laughed at the woman. ‘Forty men just to deal with that Norscan swine Alfkaell? We are warriors, wench, not feeble Sul mystics!’

Enek Zjarr simply smiled at the khagan’s boast. ‘Who said the Norscan is the only guardian of the tomb?’

The sorcerer’s warning echoed in the silence that suddenly filled the yurt.

Blood bubbled from Zar Csaba’s mouth as he slowly, painfully crawled across the courtyard. Cast down with the walls of his fortress, the chieftain had been smashed beneath the rubble, his back broken by the heavy iron debris. All around him, he could hear the moans and cries of his people still buried in the ruins, calling out for help that would never come. Those still whole were scattering across the plains, fleeing before the ghastly being who had brought destruction upon their fortress.

Csaba stabbed his fingers into the dirt, dragging his battered body across the ground. He ground his teeth against the pain. He was one of the eight warlords of Teiyogtei, flesh of the great king. The legacy he had drawn into himself when he became zar of the Gahhuks would sustain him, would heal even a broken back over time. He could rise from his ruin as strong as before, if he could escape. It was not the Skulltaker alone who menaced him now. Weak and crippled, Csaba had to fear his own tribesmen. Any one of them might seize the opportunity to kill their zar and become chief of all the Gahhuks.

Thinking about his many enemies, Csaba slumped against the ground. He reached to his belt, dragging his fat-bladed sword from its horsehair scabbard. The hilt of the weapon felt cold and strong against his palm, reassuring the Kurgan’s flagging spirits.

An armoured boot crunched down upon Csaba’s hand, grinding its heel against his fingers. The dadao slipped from his grip, clattering against the ground. The zar looked up, finding himself looking into the pitiless death-mask of his executioner. Blood flew from Csaba’s mouth as he spat his defiance at the grim apparition.

The Skulltaker’s black blade came sweeping down, ending the reign of Zar Csaba Daemontamer.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The crimson hill and its sinister monolith were no less forbidding than the last time Dorgo had seen them. The air of menace and antiquity still impressed itself upon his senses, the feeling that something unseen was watching his every move, watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike. He could see the same unease on the faces of the other Tsavag warriors as they climbed the red slopes of the hill.

Bold against any mortal foe, this place of the dead king oppressed their spirits. Boasts of past battles, rude curses against the enemies of the tribe, these went unsaid as the men trudged up the silent slopes beneath the black mantle of the night sky.

The Sul sorcerer-kahn and his apprentice marched among the Tsavags. The silence that surrounded the Hung was different from that of the warriors around them, expectant rather than fearful. There was no deciphering the enigmatic expressions the two wore, serene as clay effigies. If Enek Zjarr thought to put his reluctant allies at ease with his placid indifference, the sorcerer had miscalculated. Togmol followed close behind the two Sul, an axe at the ready. Hutga had given the warrior the strictest of commands. Any sign of treachery was to be dealt with swiftly.

At the top of the hill, the giant stone monolith still towered over the men, seeming to have grown over the course of their ascent. The black entrance of Teiyogtei’s tomb yawned beneath its base, a gaping wound in the blood-hued hill. The smell of death rose from the hole, a carrion reek that had even the Tsavags clapping hands to their noses as they approached.

‘Beware the Norscan!’ hissed Sanya.

Both of the Sul had drawn back, placing the mass of Hutga’s warriors between them and the tomb. Dorgo remembered Enek Zjarr’s claim that their sorcery would not work within the tomb, that it was a place sacred to Khorne and as such was anathema to all magics. He remembered too the warning Yorool had impressed upon all the Tsavags. The war-priests of Khorne were not like shamans who served other gods. Their power was not that of spells, but the strength of steel and battle. Few men could hope to match a war-priest in combat for there was no trick of sword or axe that had not been revealed to them by the Blood God.

‘Why should such a formidable warband fear a lone outlander?’

The mocking voice rose from the darkness of the pit, its tones clipped by the heavy Norscan accent. Alfkaell emerged from his subterranean burrow, his elfin helm gleaming in the starlight. If the faces of the Sul sorcerers had been enigmatic there was no mistaking the amused contempt written across that of the Aesling.

‘Forty Tsavag warriors and their chieftain,’ the war-priest continued. The nearest of those warriors backed away at his approach. ‘With the magics of the mighty Sul to make a mockery of honest battle,’ he added, jabbing the point of his spear in the direction of Enek Zjarr and his apprentice. ‘Surely such a union of strength and treachery has nothing to fear from a single man, whoever he might be.’

Alfkaell’s sneering voice reminded the warriors surrounding him of their doubts and fears. Distrust of the Sul brought more than one face turning towards the sorcerers. Fear of the Skulltaker made the skin crawl on the necks of others. Where was the monster Alfkaell so casually evoked? What people did he stalk on his grim hunt?

‘We have come here for Teiyogtei’s sword,’ Hutga said, brandishing his ji. The khagan knew he had to take command of the situation before Alfkaell’s caustic mockery undermined the courage of his already anxious warriors. He was pleased to see men stand their ground as the war-priest came still nearer, emboldened by their chieftain’s voice. ‘Do not stand in our way, outlander,’ he warned.

The Norscan laughed, a sound like wolves tearing flesh. ‘Who moves you to such folly, Hutga Khagan? Do the Tsavag listen to the lies of the Sul?’ Alfkaell gestured at Enek Zjarr with the blade of his spear once more. ‘Ask your new friend if he knows what awaits you in the tomb of the king. See if he dares share the danger he would ask you to brave.’

Hutga rounded on the Sul kahn. The mask of placid serenity had dropped away from Enek Zjarr’s face, replaced by an expression of rage. The sorcerer’s hand tightened around the shaft of the naginta he carried, the sacred weapon of his people. Almost, it seemed, the kahn was going to rise to the Norscan’s baiting tones.

‘What of it, sorcerer?’ Hutga demanded. ‘Is there something that threatens us?’

‘No tomb is without its guardians,’ Enek Zjarr replied acidly. ‘What man can say what manner of abominations have been called up by this outlander and his predecessors down through the years?’

The protest was too quick and too hollow to be convincing. The attitudes of the Tsavag warriors darkened. Men turned away from Alfkaell, re-evaluating which was the greater threat: Sul or Norscan.

‘Suppose we find out together, wizard?’ Hutga growled.

Enek Zjarr recoiled at the suggestion. ‘I have told you, my spells will not work within the tomb. Why else do you think I need your help?’

‘Share in the rewards and not the risks?’ scoffed Hutga. ‘You strike a poor bargain with your allies.’

Dorgo could feel the atmosphere of distrust and menace swelling around him, reaching a point of no return. Most of the warriors had turned on the two Sul, blades that had moments before menaced Alfkaell now pointed at the Hung. He glanced at the war-priest, marking the gloating amusement with which the Norscan watched the disagreement escalate. As much a creature of Khorne as the Skulltaker, it no doubt pleased Alfkaell to see this chance to stop the monster’s rampage, killed before it could even begin.

‘Wait,’ Dorgo told his father as Hutga started to sling further accusations of treachery against Enek Zjarr. ‘If the sorcerer will not enter the tomb, then let him send a surrogate in his stead.’ He stared into the kahn’s cold eyes. ‘A symbol of his trust and faith in his allies.’

‘Of course,’ Enek Zjarr smiled. ‘Such is only to be expected.’ His hand closed around Sanya’s shoulder, pushing the woman towards Hutga. ‘My apprentice will go in my stead, a measure of my faith in your abilities to bring the Bloodeater… and my dear little flower… back safely from the crypt.’

Sanya glared at the sorcerer, looking for the moment as though she would fling herself at her master. Dorgo laid a restraining hand on the woman’s arm, flinching as her withering stare focused upon him. He found himself hoping that whatever power blocked Enek Zjarr’s sorcery applied to his consort as well.

‘I am afraid, sorcerer, that it was not your woman I spoke of,’ Dorgo said. ‘A more substantial measure of your trust is needed to satisfy the Tsavag.’

The eyes of both of the Sul smouldered like embers of hate as they fixed upon Dorgo. Sanya’s hand came up, scratching at his face. Dorgo caught the slender arm, pinning it to her side. He laughed openly as the witch struggled in his grip, making a show of his contempt for her magic, trusting that the display would not be lost on his tribesmen. Fears of sorcerous retribution could wait.

‘What my son means,’ Hutga’s stern voice intoned as the khagan caught the intention behind Dorgo’s words, ‘is that we need something you cannot replace. Give me Soulchewer to take down into the pit and I’ll trust you to remain above.’ Hutga watched Enek Zjarr’s face contort with outrage. ‘Otherwise our pact concludes here. The Bloodeater remains with Teiyogtei’s bones and our tribes must face the Skulltaker alone.’

Sanya accompanied the Tsavag warriors down into the mouldering tomb. She had been compelled to by her master. It was with great reluctance that Enek Zjarr had given over his naginta. Even then, he had not trusted the weapon to Hutga or any of the Tong, but had insisted that Sanya carry it. The look of hate and betrayal the woman gave him caused Dorgo to wonder at the sorcerer’s foolishness in entrusting the weapon to her. It also impressed upon the warrior something else, something his father had suspected: Enek Zjarr knew what kind of menace lurked in the tomb. That it could cause even a sorcerer such fear did not reassure him.

The sorcerer had remained behind, along with a pair of Tsavags who understood what was expected of them should the others not return. Alfkaell had stayed above as well, sitting upon one of the rocks, chuckling evilly as the expedition descended into the barrow.

Candles of mammoth fat carried by every third warrior illuminated the blackness of the tomb. The stink of death was overwhelming, bringing tears to the eyes of the men. They were forced to linger in the barren antechamber of the tomb, letting their senses become accustomed enough to the reek to allow them to proceed. Dorgo thought he heard something, a curious shuffling sound just audible beneath the gagging, retching disorder of the other warriors. Ulagan appeared to hear it as well, his brow knitting in concentration.

‘When we enter the tomb,’ cautioned Sanya, her voice a fearful whisper, ‘be careful of the walls. Touch nothing unless it be the Bloodeater itself.’ The witch swayed weakly, using the bronze haft of the naginta for support. Some false show of weakness on her part, or was it evidence of the magic-negating influence within the tomb?

Togmol snorted derisively at Sanya’s warning. The tall warrior strode to the huge stone door of the tomb, pressing his back against the portal. He waved aside other warriors who came forwards to help him. Slowly, by inches and degrees, the massive door swung inwards. A carrion reek even worse than what had afflicted the Tsavags before hissed out from behind the stone door. Dorgo felt his gorge rise. Sanya blanched and vomited against the wall. Hutga wiped tears from his face.

‘Nameless children of the Horned One!’ the chieftain cursed. ‘Have the bones of Teiyogtei been rotting these thousand years?’

Several candle-bearing warriors rushed forwards, fighting their way through the stench to show their bravery and be the first to enter the tomb. One of the Tsavags uttered a moan of horror, another took several steps back, prayers to gods and ancestors mumbling from his lips. Dorgo took the candle from the man and pushed his way past him.

Dorgo was not sure what he had expected to find in the tomb of the almost legendary king. Certainly there was treasure, heaped gold and piled gems, suits of armour and stacks of weapons.

A huge, fang-faced idol crouched over the wealth, the skull-rune etched into its horned brow, gigantic bloodstones shining from its eye sockets. A black slab of obsidian stood before the idol, upon which shreds of armour and bits of bone continued to linger. Something shone red from the top of the slab, like a puddle of scarlet tears.

It was not the idol, nor the wealth nor the bones of their ancient king that struck Dorgo and his fellows with disgust. The walls of the tomb were carpeted in decaying meat and long strings of gore dripped from the ceiling. The crypt was more charnel house than grave and carried with it the filthy stench of an abattoir. As he took a step across the threshold, Dorgo found his legs sinking up to the knee in a mire of rancid blood and chewed flesh.

‘When the great king was buried, all the tribes mourned his loss.’ Sanya said. She had appeared at the doorway, staring in horror at the room. ‘To show their grief, the eighth part of each tribe was chosen to be entombed with their lord.’

Dorgo could see the revolting details of the hideous chamber, the shape of some of the things dripping from the walls. He considered the fell power of this place, a power that maintained carrion against the ravages of time and decay, that allowed such a grotesque reminder of ancient horror to linger on through the centuries. He imagined the hundreds who had been buried with Teiyogtei, condemned to die in the dark of the crypt. He imagined the long days in the eternal blackness, without food or air or water. He could see that moment in his mind, that terrible moment when they turned upon one another, to feast upon the only flesh to be had.

‘Blood of all the gods!’ exclaimed Togmol as he waded into the crypt. His knuckles were white against the haft of his axe. Other warriors followed him into the tomb, sloshing through the ghastly filth.

‘Let us get the sword and be gone,’ ordered Hutga as he descended into the mire. ‘The sorcerer was right to shun this place.’

Dorgo followed his father as they waded towards the obsidian slab and the bones of Teiyogtei Khagan. The other warriors spread out, watching the shadows for any sign of the lurking danger that Enek Zjarr had feared.

‘The filthy Norscan has been living here!’ cried out one warrior in shock and revulsion. He gestured with his sword at a crude pallet of wood floating upon the bloody pond. Animal skins were draped across it forming a rough sort of bed. A small waterskin and an assortment of dried meats completed the humble possessions of the war-priest.

‘Living like an animal among all this wealth!’ coughed another warrior. ‘The scum must be mad!’ He reached a calloused hand out to pull a jewelled necklace from one of the piles of treasure. Instantly, Sanya’s voice screamed through the crypt.

‘Touch nothing!’ the sorceress shouted, but the reminder was too late. The warrior had already pulled his prize from the heap, turning it around in his hand as he held it up to the flickering light of his candle. If he heard the woman’s warning, he gave no sign, captivated by the play of light against the sapphires and emeralds. He could see the crypt around him reflected in the stones, somehow less gruesome when viewed in the blue mirror of a sapphire.

Then something appeared that even the facet of a gemstone could not soften. It did not swim like a fish or a man or any living creature, it rose, bobbing up from beneath the surface of the pond like a rotting log rushing up from the depths of a lake.

At first, it was nothing more than a bulbous hump of flesh, bereft of anything that suggested life or menace. Then it opened some of its eyes, opened some of its mouths, opened some of its hands. The warrior who had seized the necklace screamed and the sound was echoed in an idiot chorus from the distorted faces scattered across the hump’s surface.

Before the Tsavag could scream again, a coil of flesh thicker than his leg flickered out from the undulating hump. It wrapped around his neck with such brutal force that it snapped like a twig. Before any of the other warriors could react, the tentacle was retreating back to the loathsome, shrieking body, dragging the corpse of their tribesman with it. The men could only watch in horror as the dozens of faces littered around the thing’s body began to chew the Tsavag’s flesh.

‘Kill it!’ Togmol roared, his voice more sturdy than his trembling hands. The warrior launched himself at the feeding fleshbeast, chopping at it with his axe. Puny, withered arms swatted ineffectually at him from the abomination’s bulk, like so many sickly children trying to fend off a lion. Then another of the massive, ropy tentacles erupted from the thing, smashing into Togmol’s chest like a ram. The Tsavag was thrown back, crashing against a pile of armour. The faces tearing at the body of the warrior the beast had killed became frantic in their efforts to strip the meat from his bones as the hulk surged towards the stunned Togmol.

Before the fleshbeast could move far, other warriors were upon it. Spears stabbed into the quivering hulk and swords slashed at its gibbering faces. Eyes ruptured beneath the blows of maces, while spindly arms were hacked away by the keen edges of axes.

The abomination was oblivious to its injuries, lashing out at the men around it with its flailing tentacles. Faces and gnashing teeth lined the horrific limbs as they whipped and tore at the Tsavags. Warriors retreated as comrades fell, huge chunks bitten from their bodies. Each Tsavag who fell was dragged back to the ox-sized bulk of the thing, to be devoured by its ravenous maws.

‘Get the sword!’ Hutga yelled at Dorgo. The chieftain did not wait to see if his son followed his command. Holding his spear before him, he charged through the knee-deep slush, a war cry ripping from his lungs. The fleshbeast shifted its slobbering, shrieking mass in his direction. A thick, slimy tentacle struck at him, lashing through the air like solid lightning. The chieftain was knocked from his feet, flailing face-first into the muck.

Breath wheezed from Hutga’s body as the tentacle smashed down against him, pressing his body deeper into the mire. He could feel the filth of the tomb slopping down his nose and ears, even as his lungs started to burn from lack of air. Mouths, loathsomely human in their feel, gnawed at his armour and worried at his iron-studded skin. The powerful khagan tried to free himself from the fleshbeast’s vile clutches, but the mass crushing down on him was heavier than a tree and the slimy floor of the tomb offered him no purchase. Drowned or chewed by the fleshbeast, either way he realised that his bones would be joining those of Teiyogtei.

The pressure against his back relented, abruptly and the biting mouths withdrew. Hutga broke the surface of the blood pond, sucking down great gasps of the unclean air. Tsavag warriors worked all around him, savaging the ghastly monster from every quarter. Berserk fury gripped the men, enraged that their khagan should fall before such filth. Togmol led the attack, chopping at the fiend with a double-bladed axe that he had looted from the treasures of the tomb.

Hutga looked around him, sickened by the mangled bodies floating in the ancient gore. At least a dozen of his men had been claimed by the monster, its sucking tentacles still slithering blindly through the soup to drag corpses back to its drooling mouths.

The khagan ground his teeth together. Hefting his spear, he rushed once more at the thing. The ji bit into the monster’s side, blazing like sunfire against its dripping flesh. The thing’s idiot faces did not change their vacuous expressions, but their shrieks became shriller, more agonised than before.

The fleshbeast surged towards Hutga, forcing the chieftain back. The tentacle that whipped out from its body never reached the khagan, however. It was slashed in mid-strike, nearly cleft in half by the blow of a sword. Hutga stabbed at the injured limb with his ji, completing the job. Part of the tentacle shot back into the oozing bulk of the monster, the rest flopping and writhing in the filth of the floor.

While the thing reeled in pain, Togmol and six other warriors converged upon it, cutting and slashing it mercilessly. Greasy black putrescence bubbled up from its wounds and even its maddened mind began to lose the taste for battle.

It tried to sink back into the mire, but the raging Tsavags would not be denied. Togmol’s axe slashed through the hump of flesh, splitting faces as it dug through the leathery shell and into the sludge-like foulness within. The fleshbeast shuddered as pulpy brown paste erupted from this new wound. Laughing vengefully, the other warriors tore and ripped at the quivering abomination, widening the gouges made by Hutga’s spear and Togmol’s axe.

Hutga turned away from the dying monster. It was on his tongue to thank the man who had come to his aid, but in turning he found that he owed his life to Dorgo. Gratitude warred with his concern that Dorgo could so easily have become another of the monster’s many victims. Such an end was ignoble enough for Hutga to have exposed himself to, the thought of his son dying in such a manner was too abhorrent for the khagan to entertain.

‘I told you to get the Bloodeater,’ Hutga scolded his son, finding a different excuse for his distemper.

‘It is not fitting for any but the khagan to bear Teiyogtei’s sword,’ Dorgo protested, bowing in deference to his father.

Hutga nodded by way of accepting his son’s excuse. He gestured for Dorgo to lead the way. More than ever, he was eager to secure the sword and be gone. There was no telling whether the tomb harboured any more monsters. He scowled as he saw a figure standing over the obsidian slab, her dark robes stained by the bloody slush that filled the crypt.

Dorgo reached the slab before his father, before Sanya could make off with her prize. The bones of Teiyogtei were mostly dust, his armour little more than tatters and strips of gilding, but the Bloodeater remained, a clutch of crimson shards each the size of a finger. Sanya had gathered them together on a black cloth, rapidly folding the silk to secure the fragments. Before she could hide the bundle, Dorgo was upon her. He had already noted how sorely the baleful influence of the tomb had affected the witch. Her struggle to retain the bundle of fragments was almost pitiful. Dorgo presented the treasure to his father as Hutga advanced upon the sepulchre.

‘That belongs to the Sul!’ Sanya snapped as Hutga accepted the bundle from his son.

The khagan smiled at her outburst. ‘Tsavag blood was spilled to claim these,’ he said, jostling the bundle in his hand. ‘That makes my people’s investment the greater.’ He looked across the crypt to where his warriors were finishing off the fleshbeast. ‘We’ve fought Enek Zjarr’s monsters, but if he thinks the Tsavag are fools, he has much to learn.’

‘The sword is useless to you!’ protested Sanya.

‘Yes, but I’ll feel better holding onto it,’ said Hutga. ‘Enek Zjarr has some scheme to get the sword to the Black Altar. If he still intends to remake the Bloodeater, then he will share that plan with me. Then I’ll decide if the Sul are still worthy of my friendship.’

‘Traitor,’ Sanya hissed. Coming from a Hung, it was almost a compliment.

‘Not at all,’ Hutga laughed, ‘simply prudent. Come, let us tell Enek Zjarr how things stand now that the Bloodeater is mine.’

The khagan laughed again as Dorgo herded the sorceress away from the king’s tomb. ‘As a measure of my good faith,’ Hutga said, ‘I’m even going to let you give him back Soulchewer.’

Alfkaell watched the Tsavags descend the slope of the hill, returning to their waiting mammoths. He did not have to be told what they had taken from the tomb of Teiyogtei, he could sense its taint on the Tong warriors as they emerged from the barrow. He did not need to be told what they hoped to do with the fragments of the Bloodeater. The thought brought a sinister smile to the Norscan’s face. The fools clung to hope like jackals to an old bone.

The war-priest knelt, grabbing a clutch of dirt from the ground, letting the grains sift through his fingers as he held it. The once red, vibrant earth was changing, becoming dead and grey even as he watched. Alfkaell lifted his head, staring at the towering monolith above the barrow. The once imposing standing stone showed cracks, deep fissures spreading through it like wrinkles across the face of a withering man. The smell of battle and carnage that had lingered around the hill down through the centuries was dissipating, scattering to the winds. Khorne’s power, once so heavy upon the site, was being withdrawn. When the Tsavags took the Bloodeater from the tomb, they had performed an irrevocable desecration. The tomb, a sacred testament to the Blood God’s power, was sacred no longer.

Alfkaell turned his eyes to the west. There was nothing to keep him here any longer. He would return to his own lands, his own people. The Aeslings would welcome him back as a Bloodfather, a seer of Khorne. Such would be his reward for obeying the command of his god.

The Norscan looked again to the south, where the war mammoths were slowly lumbering away, plodding back into the narrow valleys.

The Tsavags and the Sul thought to defy the command of the Blood God. They thought they could live when Khorne had ordered that they should die. It was the folly of mortals that they thought they could trick the gods. Teiyogtei thought he could defy the will of Khorne, but his soul would enter the Molten Pit and endure the tortures of the damned. Hutga and Enek Zjarr thought they could destroy the champion that Khorne had sent to claim their heads. They thought they could remake the Bloodeater by taking it to the Black Altar. They thought they could use the legendary blade of the king to destroy the Skulltaker.

Alfkaell smiled as he started to descend the western slope of the greying hill. It was a malevolent smile, the knowing wickedness of one who has seen danger and held his tongue.

The sorcerers had planned well, but they had not reckoned upon one thing. Sleeping in the tomb, Alfkaell’s dreams touched upon the sanguine realm of Khorne, brushing against the power of his god. Sometimes, images and impressions lingered to affect his waking mind. Scarlet tomorrows and crimson yesterdays filled Alfkaell’s thoughts, more vivid than his own memories. The Norscan laughed as he considered how feeble the divinations of the Sul were beside the visions granted by a god.

By their very deceit, by their bold and reckless scheme, perhaps it was not their plan that the Sul followed, but that of the Blood God.

The Skulltaker sat upon the bronze husk of a juggernaut, carefully stripping the flesh from Csaba’s skull. The rune of Khorne stood livid upon the dead zar’s forehead. Soon, it would join the other trophies hanging from the chain lashed across the warrior’s chest, another skull to lay before the Skull Throne.

Nearby, the carcass of the Skulltaker’s steed had disintegrated into a mash of gore, corroding until it was nothing more than bloody pulp strewn across the soil. Movement from the puddle drew the warrior’s attention. A broad paw with savage, scythe-like claws emerged from the filth. It was quickly followed by a second, both of the feet gripping the ground fiercely with their talons. A lupine shape pulled itself from the mire, shaking gore from its shaggy crimson pelt. Like the mythic phoenix of distant Khemri, the Skulltaker’s steed had arisen from its destruction, reborn from its ruin. The wolf-beast was smaller than it had been, just a pup compared to the murderous brute that had been trampled by the juggernaut. It turned its hungry gaze on its master, watching him for long minutes while he resumed his gruesome work.

A low, ravenous growl rumbled from the creature, a sound too large for its small size. Turning from its master, the wolf-beast loped towards the devastation that had been Iron Keep. It paused before the mangled body of a Gahhuk, who had tried to drag himself from the ruins only to expire from his injuries. Powerful fangs ripped at the corpse, stripping gobbets of flesh from its bones. With each morsel of flesh, the wolf-beast seemed to swell a little more, its body expanding to contain the carrion meat.

The Skulltaker watched the monster devour the dead Kurgan, flesh and bone vanishing down its gullet with almost unbelievable haste. When it had finished, the beast was twice the size it had been. It lowered its head, snuffling at the ground. A quick yap of satisfaction escaped its jaws as it caught the scent it was searching for. Quick bounding steps soon carried the creature into the ruins, its claws digging at the heaps of shattered iron to ravage the meat buried beneath.

The Skulltaker nodded. Soon his mount would be restored to its old size and strength. The flesh of the Gahhuks would make certain of that. Then it would be time to resume the hunt, to collect the fourth skull for his infernal master.

CHAPTER NINE

The immense trees of the Grey rose up from the thick, clinging mist like veiled giants, dampness dripping from their pine needles, greasy black mushrooms sprouting from their trunks. The trees were huge beyond the reckoning of those that flourished in wholly mortal lands, for the power of the gods lurked within the spongy loam of the forest.

The king had been the soul of his land, the spirit binding it together and keeping at bay the powers of hungry gods. The vitality of the land and the life of the king had been inseparable, the pulse of Teiyogtei’s heart a shield against the forces that would devour the realm he had built. When Teiyogtei died, the dread energies of the Wastes swept through his former domain. Every rock, every tree, every grain of sand and blade of grass had been twisted by the radiant winds of the north. The corrupting aethyr had struck some places heavier than others. The Desert of Mirrors had been one such place. The forest known simply as the Grey was another.

The name was misleading, for the mists that swirled beneath the thick trunks of the pines were of no single colour. Like wisps of rainbow, they shifted and changed, at once all colours and none at all. No freak of wind or weather spawned the mists, for it was from the polluted soil that the corrupting fog was born, rising from the ground in snakelike tendrils.

Nothing endured the touch of the mists without being changed by them. The pines were twisted into tortuous shapes, their limbs deformed, their wood pitted and scarred. The grass upon the ground was thick and abnormal, each blade sharp as a knife and black as pitch. The birds that still lingered within the mist-shrouded forest were wizened and scabby, with crooked backs and misshapen beaks.

Once the Grey had sported all manner of strange beasts: deer the size of bears with molten fire for blood and horns made of stone; rabbits with scales instead of fur and the ravenous diet of wolves; legless elk that slithered across the earth like giant hairy worms, and fouler things that stalked the land in search of human prey.

The monsters of the Grey, as much as its poisonous mists, had caused the tribes to shun the place. When the Warherd of Kug was driven into the Grey by the human tribes, it had been assumed by all that the beastmen would perish in the ghastly forest, devoured by the strange creatures that called it home.

Instead, the beastmen had become masters of the Grey, hunting the monsters into extinction within only a few generations. Now, they were forced to range out from their forest in search of food, stalking places such as the Prowling Lands, caring little if their prey should walk upon four legs or two. But however far they wandered, they always returned to the safety of the Grey.

Within its misty expanse, they were the lords. Men, with their feeble senses, their dependence upon their eyes to find their enemies, were no threat to the gors when they strayed into the Grey. By scent and sound the gors soon found any man so foolish as to invade their territory, and where scent and sound were not enough, the gors could rely upon their eerie, piercing wails to find their enemies, seeing more with their shrieks than men did with their eyes.

A pack of beastmen stalked through the gloom of the Grey. A motley band of hairy, corrupt figures, the brutes showed every caprice of anatomy. Some hulked larger than true men, their heads shaped like those of goat, ox and elk, their feet hardened into bony hooves, their hands displaying long claws. Some were still more twisted with extra limbs sprouting from shoulder and rib and thigh, misplaced organs staring and slobbering from chest and back.

Where one possessed an arm, another had a barbed, chitinous member, like the oversized leg of a spider or crab. Where one had great curling horns, another might have a frilly crest of quills or a comb of ruffled feathers. Only in their swollen, milky eyes did the gors display any unity of form, the blind organs inflicted upon them by lives spent within the preternatural murk of the Grey.

Other things roamed with the hulking gors, smaller, wretched things with leathery skin and manlike faces, their pelts thinner and scattered haphazardly around their bodies; brutish things that loped upon all fours, their backs crooked, their fur shaggy and matted, their tails ending in club-like nodules of bone and sharp, knifelike spines.

They were the least of the warherd, those beastmen born weak in body or mind, the brays and beasthounds, the runts and atavisms of their corrupt blood.

The beastmen hunted with purpose, their nostrils flaring as they sucked the scent of their prey from the air. Hairy hands clutched stone axes and spears of sharpened bone, clubs of wood and the odd blade of rusted iron. The gors were silent as they loped through the forest, each step unerringly falling upon the soft, loamy earth, never upon a lying stick or lurking stone.

The Grey was their world and the beastmen were its masters, able to navigate it perfectly even in their blindness, animal instincts guiding a thinking brain. It was what set them apart from true beasts, however mutated in shape and habit. The gors had an awareness of their world not unlike that of men, fully capable of appreciating their existence and able to harbour feelings alien to the animal mind like hate and revenge.

The leader of the pack was a huge brute with a goat-like face and the gnarled horns of an ox. Its powerful, human torso was married to a massive, horselike body, almost as though it had been moulded in the womb as a parody of a mounted rider. The brute’s chest was covered in strips of lacquered armour stolen from previous invaders of the Grey, and the weapon it held in its clawed hands was a broad-bladed axe of bronze. Savage talismans of feather and bone were strung through the piebald mane that ran down its back from neck to tail. The centaur creature craned its head around to yip a warning to its followers. The other beastmen scattered at their leader’s command, vanishing into the murk of the forest. Only a handful of the largest gors remained behind. They studied the gloom with flared nostrils and canted ears, waiting for the approach of the prey that the centigor had scented.

The intruder came boldly, making no effort to hide his mount’s advance. To the keen ears of the beastmen, the steed’s progress through the forest was like the crack of thunder. They did not need their useless, milky eyes to watch the stranger pass through the trees; sound was enough.

Chirps and clicks echoed through the gloom of the forest. Where another might dismiss the noises as the squeal of a rodent or the call of a bird, they carried a different story to the ears of the gors. They told of lurking hunters slithering into position. They told of a noose being drawn tight.

The centigor yipped again, the sound rumbling from its misshapen bulk. There was a surly, challenging quality to the brute’s growl. Some of the calls that had sounded from the forest had betrayed a note of fear, the pack leader reminding its followers to do their part. Those who betrayed the hunt were nothing more than prey themselves.

There was reason for the fear, and even the centigor felt an uneasiness in its bestial heart. That reason was the peculiar scent that was carried to them, the stink of battle and blood, death and carnage.

The smell was intimidating, menacing. It spoke of strength and power, brutality and slaughter. The beastmen learned early to distinguish the smell of another predator, to discern its formidable nature by scent alone. Their instincts railed against this scent, sounding a warning in their savage minds. Primitive hate fought against primal instinct to quell their fear.

The Grey was the warherd’s territory and none had ever trespassed upon its lands with impunity.

A bleating scream rang out in the murk of the forest, calling the centigor’s creatures to the attack. From behind thorny bushes, from beneath scraggly shrubs and clumps of overgrown knife-grass, the pack sprang into action. Feral grunts and bellows ripped through the air as the beastmen charged the lone rider who had entered their land. Crude weapons, gleaming fangs and wicked claws flashed through the darkness, driven by the blind bloodlust of the half-men.

The Skulltaker met their attack with the cold detachment of a machine. A gor was hacked in half by the warrior’s smoking sword as it rushed at him with a stone axe. A snarling bray collapsed as a blow from the Skulltaker’s armoured hand crushed its face. The canine steed slashed and tore with its deadly paws, spilling its foes to the ground with each sweep of its claws and slap of its barbed tail.

The hooting, growling cacophony of roars rising from the beastmen was gradually replaced with groans and shrieks.

As the Skulltaker ripped his blade free from the horned skull of an attacker, one of the baser creatures among the throng launched itself at him. The beasthound crashed into the man, pitching him from the saddle, twisting around so that it might conspire to land atop him as he crashed to the earth.

The Skulltaker’s hands locked around its hairy throat, digging into its leathery flesh, preventing the brute’s powerful jaws from tearing into his neck. The beasthound’s plated tail whipped around, stabbing at the man pinned beneath it. Leprous yellow, tipped with a jagged stinger and bloated venom sack, the extremity was more like that of an enormous scorpion than a shaggy, dog-like brute.

Driven by the superhuman strength of the hound’s muscles, the stinger punched its way through the crimson armour of the Skulltaker, the venom sack pulsating as it expended its poison into the man’s body.

The beasthound was surprised when, instead of slackening, the fingers locked around its throat tightened, ripping through the flesh. Corrupt black blood gushed from the creature’s mangled neck. It tried desperately to pull free from the killing grip.

The hound’s strength was beyond that of any normal creature, brute or man. So was that of its foe. With a sickening tearing sound, like soggy leather slapping against stone, the hound lurched upwards, exposing the dripping mess of muscle and bone left by the Skulltaker’s fingers. It struggled for an instant, and then flopped gamely against the Skulltaker’s side, its life draining out through the gaping wound in its neck.

The Skulltaker tried to rise, but was dragged back down by the weight of the hound’s tail. Still stabbed into his side, the tail continued to pulse with venomous life even as the hound expired. The Skulltaker snarled, closing his hands around the plated, pallid extremity. The warrior pulled, exerting his prodigious strength. Flesh ripped, bone snapped and the tail was torn free from the beasthound’s carcass.

Feral growls greeted the Skulltaker as he regained his feet. A pair of goat-faced gors glared at him with inhuman hate, fingering their spears. Behind them, bleating encouragement, goading them on, was the massive centigor, its bronze axe gripped tightly in its claws. The Skulltaker glared back at the monsters, and then shifted his head, looking for his fallen sword.

The gors seized the moment of distraction, lunging at the warrior. Too late, they learned that they had been deceived. Whipping around, the Skulltaker grabbed the foremost by the waist and shoulder, giving no notice to the crude spear that shattered against his breastplate. In the same spinning motion, he twisted the brute’s head down and around. The Skulltaker’s momentum forced both man and beast into the path of the second charging gor.

Like the first, the primitive spear buckled against the warrior’s armour, snapping like a dried twig, but it was not the destruction of its weapon that broke the impetus of the beastman’s attack. It was the sharp, two-foot spike of its comrade’s horn crunching through its sternum that ended its assault. The weight of the flailing, dying brute snapped the neck of its killer, dragging both bodies to the ground.

Even as the two brutes fell, the Skulltaker was beset by their leader. Raging not over the deaths of its fellows, but over the loss in status and prestige that those deaths signified, the centigor reared above the man, kicking at him with its forelegs. A single kick from the monster’s hooves would be enough to shatter bone like eggshell, and the centigor added to the menace of its attack by slashing at the warrior with the cruel edge of its axe.

Grunting, snorting laughter rumbled from the centigor as it watched its enemy reel before its assault. With the heavy length of the beasthound’s tail still impaled in his side, the Skulltaker was scarcely able to avoid the ferocious efforts of his foe, even less to prevent its cunning stratagem of placing itself between the man and his sword.

The centigor’s brutal features spread in a toothy grin. It had seen the savagery of this warrior, and knew that here was a foe to be feared, even without a weapon. However, it also saw the venomous tail hanging from his body, and could see the dismembered extremity continuing to pump poison into him. How he had survived so long, the beastman did not know, but it was certain that nothing could stave off the effects of the poison indefinitely. When the man faltered, the centigor would rush him, smash the invader’s head with its hooves and carry the corpse back for the fires of the warherd, testament to its strength and power.

The moment was not long in coming. Retreating before a brutal sweep of the centigor’s axe, the warrior stumbled, hands clutching painfully at the disembodied tail thrust into his side. The centigor roared in triumph, springing at the Skulltaker. The next instant, its roar became a howl of pain. The man’s weakness had been a feint, luring the monster into recklessness. Tearing savagely at the venomous tail, the Skulltaker ripped it free, cracking it against the centigor’s head like a bludgeoning whip. The monster clutched at its face, the jaw nearly broken by the impact of the tail.

The Skulltaker seized on his foe’s distraction. Reversing his grip on the tail, he leapt at the centigor.

The warrior ignored the brute’s armoured torso, instead sinking the barbed, dagger-like stinger into the equine shoulder beneath. The venom sack continued to pulse with obscene and deadly life. The centigor’s howl of pain became one of terror. The bronze axe dropped from its claws as it tried to seize the gruesome weapon. The Skulltaker had chosen his spot well, however, and the centigor’s hands struggled in vain to reach the poison-pumping tail.

Only when the brute bent its legs and trapped the torn end beneath one of its hooves was it able to rip the plated extremity free. By then, it was much too late. Venom already pulsed through the beastman’s body, racing through its veins like burning fire.

Unlike the Skulltaker, the centigor was not immune to the beasthound’s poison. Foam bubbled from its mouth, pink with blood. Its eyes rolled back in its head and its limbs stiffened in a spasm of agony. Then the brutish creature toppled, crashing to the ground like timber. Its hooves drummed wretchedly against the loamy earth.

The Skulltaker did not watch the death throes of his foe, but the remnants of the centigor’s pack did. They lost all taste for battle when they saw their leader fall, scrambling back into the murk of the forest, desperate to escape this new, grim terror that had invaded the Grey. The Skulltaker did not try to stop them, nor did his wolf-like mount pursue. As he recovered his screaming sword from where it had fallen, only one thought was on the warrior’s mind: to find the creature he had come to kill, not the mere leader of a small hunting band, but the chieftain of the entire warherd, the beastlord Nhaa.

Lifting himself back into the bronze saddle of his steed, the Skulltaker knew the survivors of the ambush would carry word back to their chieftain. The beastlord would be ready when he came to collect its skull. It was of small consequence. The will of Khorne would not be denied.

Sul sorcerers stood within the hide walls of Hutga’s yurt for a second time, and this time the Tsavags were compelled to entertain three of their duplicitous allies. Enek Zjarr had brought both his apprentice Sanya and Thaulan Scabtongue, the messenger with the faceless helm. Today the sorcerers were all bluster and rage, Enek Zjarr furious over his treatment at the tomb of Teiyogtei. Dorgo noted with some amusement that the kahn had come without his sacred naginta. Indeed, Yorool had already posed the question of whether they met with Enek Zjarr or one of his doppelgangers.

‘Do you think I would risk Soulchewer to your capricious moods a second time?’ the kahn snarled. ‘Be thankful that I still need the Tsavags or I would have you answer for your treachery!’

‘Treachery?’ laughed Togmol. ‘The Sul could teach the gods new meanings of the word!’

Hutga waved aside the warrior’s outburst and the smouldering hostility of the Sul. ‘You played us an ill trick at the tomb, sorcerer,’ he said. ‘I believe you, however, when you say that you still need the friendship of the Tsavags. Otherwise I do not think the prospect of open war would keep you from trying to capture the shards of the Bloodeater.’

‘A Sul would never fight in the open,’ Dorgo commented. ‘He would use his spells and daemons to achieve victory.’

‘Your pup speaks out of turn, Steelskin,’ Thaulan warned, his voice echoing from behind his golden helm.

The khagan glared at the black-robed mystic. ‘The truth never sits easily on the ears of a Sul,’ he said. ‘We have had our taste of how your kind gives battle, so do not pretend that my son’s words offend your honour. A Sul has none.’ Hutga shifted his huge body beneath the layers of furs draped across his throne, staring again into Enek Zjarr’s cruel features. ‘The question remains, sorcerer. Why do the Sul continue to need the Tsavag?’

Enek Zjarr stroked his long moustache, his eyes narrowing into thin slits as the mind behind them considered the chieftain’s question, deliberating upon how much he should disclose to his allies. ‘The Black Altar is the only place where the Bloodeater may be restored: the furnace of a daemon’s soul, the very place where the great king Teiyogtei crafted his mighty weapons. To destroy the Skulltaker, the Bloodeater must be taken back to the Black Altar.’

‘This much you have already told us,’ Dorgo said, interrupting the sorcerer. Suddenly it came to him why the Sul still needed them, why they did not try to seize the shards of the sword and make the journey on their own. ‘The Black Altar is sacred to Khorne! Sacred to the Blood God. Your magic will not work there!’

‘Because our powers could not be called upon in Teiyogtei’s tomb, do not presume that we would be impotent before the Black Altar,’ hissed Sanya, fire glinting in her dark gaze.

‘You would not care to take the chance,’ said Hutga. ‘You would not risk your one hope of killing the Skulltaker on such a gamble. That is why you still need the Tsavag, to defend you against any guardians you encounter.’ The chieftain shook his head in disgust. Such cringing, duplicity was something even the lowest Tsavag would shun. A man might not live with honour, but at least he could die with some manner of respect.

‘The Black Altar lies within the Wastes,’ Thaulan said, ‘in lands soaked in the Blood God’s power. Any sorcery will be, at best, hindered by such malevolent energies.’

‘So even the mighty Sul must put their trust in blades and brawn,’ sneered Togmol.

‘The Skulltaker is a threat we all share,’ replied Sanya acidly.

‘And that is the only reason I have granted this audience,’ said Hutga. The chieftain bent his head to one side, leaning into Yorool’s cowled face. The khagan and his shaman spent several minutes in whispered conference.

‘Very well, sorcerer,’ Hutga said after consulting Yorool. ‘We will go to the Black Altar. The menace is shared by all our peoples, a truth that even your lies cannot deny, but this time we will share the danger equally.’

‘No,’ declared Enek Zjarr. He raised his hand to petition the angry Hutga for time to explain. ‘You and I must stay behind with our people. If the other tribes were to learn that we had gone, they would smell weakness and strike our lands. What good would it serve to save the domain from the Skulltaker only to lose it to Zar Ratha and the Vaan? No, khagan, we must stay behind. We must send a small band of our people, the best of the Tsavag warriors and the best of the Sul warlocks, large enough to brave the dangers of the Wastes, but small enough not to attract the notice of the worst the Wastes have to offer.’

Hutga nodded, seeing sense in Enek Zjarr’s words even as he tried to see past them for any hint of a double purpose. ‘I will allow one of your sorcerers to lead the way,’ he said. ‘Pick whichever of your minions you like.’

He looked aside to his son, pointing at Dorgo. ‘My son will lead the expedition and one of our shamans will accompany him, to ensure your representative is not the only one bending the ears of the gods.’

‘It is agreed then,’ Enek Zjarr said, his voice a thin sliver of threat rather than concession. ‘Sanya will serve as my surrogate in this venture. I will instruct her in the craft she will need to lead your son to the Black Altar. Choose your warriors and have them ready in all haste. The Skulltaker will not wait long for our heads, Hutga Khagan.’

The three Sul stalked away from the camp of the Tsavags. The Tong had not allowed the sorcerers to bring their daemon steeds into the camp this time, forcing them to leave the glowing, disc-like abominations in the marshland well away from both man and mammoth. Enek Zjarr ranged ahead of the others, leaving Thaulan Scabtongue and Sanya to confer alone.

‘You are certain you can do this?’ Thaulan asked the woman. Much depended upon her, and though she had been closer to their kahn than anyone, privy to more of his secrets than even the council of hierophants, Thaulan still had his doubts.

Sanya reached into a pouch on her belt, removing from it a long, clawed digit that smelt of burnt flesh and dried blood. Red and leathery, the thing had never belonged to any human hand, but had been cut from the fist of a daemon. ‘This will guide the way,’ she assured Thaulan. ‘Enek Zjarr called the bloodletter from the Hunting Halls especially for such a purpose. He would not risk invoking a daemon of Khorne unless he was certain of the potency of a talisman such as this.’

Thaulan nodded his golden head, reassured somewhat by the conviction in Sanya’s voice. ‘The kahn has trusted you with many of his most potent charms,’ he said, a sour note in his voice.

‘Jealousy ill-becomes you,’ Sanya said, running a slender finger along the smooth surface of the faceless helm. ‘Enek Zjarr paid much for my favours, more than he expected.’ Her hand fell from the faceless helm and rested against the side of a hide bag dangling from her belt.

‘Is there anything so dangerous as a woman’s ambition?’ Thaulan wondered aloud. ‘I could almost feel sorry for our kahn.’

‘Do not let his doppelganger hear you,’ warned Sanya. ‘Already it shows signs of believing itself to be the man whose shape it wears.’

‘Enek Zjarr has destroyed dozens such simulacra before,’ Thaulan said. ‘This one will be no different, now that it has served its purpose.’

‘Everything has its purpose,’ observed Sanya, ‘the Skulltaker, the Tsavags, even the Blood God. It is how those purposes serve the Sul that matters. It is the only thing of consequence.’

For the denizens of the Grey, the centre of their world was the herdstone, a great slab of green star-stone. The herdstone was ancient beyond the reckoning of any within the warherd, for even their shamans kept no written record of their history. It had been the token of Kug, the beastlord who had first sworn loyalty to Teiyogtei Khagan and whose name was still revered by the beastmen. When the other tribes had driven the warherd into the Grey, the gors had carried the herdstone with them in their retreat, for Kug would not leave it behind in the lands of men.

In the myths of the gors, the herdstone endowed them with strength, and allowed their shamans to commune with the gods. They made offerings of food and metal to the huge rock, their chieftains etching their names and deeds into its sides. Heaps of bone were littered around the thirty-foot high stone, the rusting ruin of armour and weapons mixed among the piles of offal and dung that the savage creatures left in supplication to the dread powers of Old Night.

Only the strongest, most privileged of the gors were allowed to make their encampments around the herdstone. It was a place of status and honour among the brutish creatures, who believed that the beasts birthed near the cyclopean stone would be favoured by the gods, born stronger thanks to its power. For all the primitive savagery, the feral, fractious instincts of the beastmen, they respected the herdstone with fanatical fervour. From the lowest to the mighty wargors, they would die to protect it.

Cunning, possessing neither love nor loyalty for its people, Nhaa had told the warherd nothing that it had heard at the council. There was nothing to be gained by telling the other brutes about the Skulltaker, sharing the fear of that name with them. Some shaman might take it in mind to meet with the dreaded warrior and offer him Nhaa in exchange for the lives of the rest of the warherd. Nhaa could easily believe such possibilities, because that was what would occur to its treacherous mind were their roles reversed.

Instead, as soon as the warning had reached Nhaa that the Skulltaker was abroad within the Grey, the beastlord had summoned the scattered encampments of its kind to the herdstone. With no talk of protecting their chieftain, it was the defence of the herdstone to which Nhaa rallied its kind. From all across the Grey they came, scrawny brays in their dozens, satyr-like ungors, porcine tuskgors, bestial centigors, brutish beasthounds and other, even less sane things that had emerged from the wombs of gor cows. Mightiest of all were the hulking, bull-headed minotaurs, each towering over the largest of the gors, twice the size of any human warrior, however fierce.

The minotaurs in particular would never have answered any call to protect Nhaa. The blessings of the herdstone had set them above the rest of the warherd and so they became the guardians of the megalith, devoted to the stone in a manner beyond that of even the shamans.

Nhaa considered the twisted host of mutant creatures, children of the dark gods and their corrupt power. It was not an army such as the Vaan or the Seifan might boast, for there was no drill or discipline among them, but it could be depended upon to fight mercilessly with no thought of plunder or quarter to distract it from its rage. Blood and slaughter were what moved the warherd when it marched into battle. Such purity of thought would serve them well against a foe like the Skulltaker.

There was one other beast upon which Nhaa was counting. The Skulltaker had killed Lok, had butchered his way through the diseased ranks of the Veh-Kung and Bleda’s daemons, had even turned the ambush of beastmen into a one-sided massacre, but Nhaa had a champion it was sure not even Khorne’s chosen one could defeat.

The ground trembled and the bones strewn about the herdstone shivered as though life were quivering through them once more. Even Nhaa’s milky eyes could sense the dark shadow that filled the herdstone’s clearing. The beastlord’s nostrils drank in the scent of its prize champion and a braying bark of laughter rolled past Nhaa’s fangs.

‘Korg,’ the beastlord hissed, and the name was taken up by the beastmen around Nhaa. Soon it became a chant that rose from every member of the warherd able to shape it upon their tongue.

‘Korg!’ a thunderous voice bellowed, the word sounding like two mountains smashing together. The ground shook again as a foot the size of a Tsavag yurt smashed against the ground. ‘Korg!’ the voice boomed from above the clearing once more.

It had been born, like all the other misshapen things in the clearing, but the power of the gods had shaped it like no other. It loomed sixty feet above the clearing, dwarfing even the huge herdstone. Its hooves were like boulders, its shaggy legs thicker than trees, and its arms, bulging with muscles the size of small hills, dangled to its crooked knees. It had a monstrous head, its horns spiralling out from its brow to a length of twenty feet, its teeth the size of mammoths’ tusks and its pallid eyes bigger than chariot wheels.

‘Korg!’ the giant thundered and the warherd repeated its cry. Korg shook its shaggy head, reaching down with an immense hand to rip a full grown pine from the ground. It lifted the tree high, and then clenched its fist tight around its trunk. The pine exploded beneath the pressure, showering the warherd in splinters.

‘Korg!’ the monster shouted again.

Nhaa grinned as it watched the giant work itself into a frenzy. Let the Skulltaker come. Korg would soon be picking its teeth with the warrior’s bones!

CHAPTER TEN

Trees shivered as the giant’s steps pounded the earth. Each fall of Korg’s immense hooves sent a trembling boom rolling through the forest. Birds rose skittishly into the air, scattering before the giant’s path. Such small game as lingered in the Grey scrambled through the brush, driven from their burrows by the quaking footsteps.

Ahead of the giant, the bestial shapes of brays and ungors crept through the mists, stalking through the bush in search of their prey. Korg’s senses were no less keen than those of the smaller beastmen, but its primitive brain was far slower interpreting the information conveyed to it by those senses. The brays would react faster to an unusual scent, an incongruous sound or a disturbed patch of earth. Then they would be able to guide Korg to the man who had invaded their territory.

Nhaa followed close behind the giant. The beastlord was determined to see its creature destroy the Skulltaker, to smell the blood of Khorne’s executioner as it dripped from Korg’s fingers. Then Nhaa would know it was safe, that the menace to its life was gone. Then the chieftain could turn its mind to other thoughts, such as expanding the range of his warherd beyond the confines of the Grey.

The tribes already decimated by the Skulltaker would be easy prey for the gors.

The pack had not gone far into the wilds of the Grey before ungor scouts gave voice to a chorus of sharp barks and growls. They had caught the scent of the human, had found his trail in the spongy ground. Nhaa howled back at the beastmen and they set off at a run to bring down the enemy.

Korg bellowed and followed the smaller beastmen, the giant reacting on an instinctive level to the excitement of its brutish kin. Nhaa raked the blades of its fighting claws together, salivating as its cruel mind considered the Skulltaker’s destruction. If Korg left enough of the man, the beastlord intended to claim his head as a trophy.

As Nhaa pursued the lumbering giant and the prowling beastmen, it did not occur to the chieftain to wonder at the direction of the chase. The Skulltaker had first been seen close to the edge of the Grey, and then his trail had been discovered no small distance from the herdstone at the centre of the forest. Now, the warrior’s scent led them back towards the edge of the Grey once more.

It was a question that might have risen to prominence in a mind less feral than Nhaa’s.

The answer to that question came with a bleating scream. The first cry was quickly followed by other animalistic shrieks of pain. Nhaa froze as it heard the screams, the chieftain’s body growing tense as it tried to discern from what quarter danger had struck the beastmen. Through the haze of mist and the milky veil of its vision, Nhaa saw a bray vanish, sinking into the earth. A sharp squeal of agony rose from where the bray had been, carrying with it the tang of fresh blood.

Understanding came quickly to the beastlord, and it knew the deadly trap into which the man-scent had carried them. Nhaa had expected the Skulltaker to explode into the midst of the warherd like a blood-crazed Vaan berserker. It had not considered that the warrior would use craft as well as brawn to claim his prize for the Blood God.

Nhaa began to back away, drawing towards where the man’s smell was weakest, where the Skulltaker had not lingered to dig pits to claim his hunters. Carefully, testing every step, Nhaa retreated into the pines.

Korg was slower to understand what had happened than its chieftain. To the giant’s brain, the screams told of battle joined and its plodding pace quickened. The giant rushed forwards to confront the enemy that Nhaa had summoned it to kill, eager to feel the human’s bones crack inside its fist.

Not once did the concept of danger occur to Korg, for the giant had never encountered anything that could threaten it. Even the smell of blood, the sight of beastmen writhing in shallow pits, their bodies impaled upon crude wooden stakes, did not impress the giant. When Korg’s hoof landed upon one of the concealed pits, it broke through, crushing the wooden spears beneath its thick mass. The giant grunted at the trap, barely slackening its pace to lift its foot free from the shallow hole.

The giant lurched onwards, stumbling as its hoof smashed into another pit. Korg growled its annoyance, a sound that shook nearby trees. Distracted, Korg did not see a dark shape rush out from the mist, a shaggy fur cloak draped around wide, powerful shoulders.

No war cry, no shout of aggression or warning came from behind the figure’s skull-shaped mask. Only the rattle of armour accompanied the warrior’s charge. The first Korg was aware of the Skulltaker’s attack was when the champion’s black sword slashed at the enormous brute. The smoking steel screamed as it ripped into the giant’s leathery flesh, biting deep into the tarsus above its hoof. Greasy blood bubbled behind the blade, strips of fur and meat hanging from the jagged tear.

Korg’s immense jaws opened in a howl of pain, and the giant bent double, reaching down for its injured leg. The brute’s hands clamped around the bleeding, trying to press the wound closed. Its nostrils flared at the smell of its own blood and at the lingering trace of the scent that was already vanishing back into the mist.

The Skulltaker had not lingered to prosecute his attack against Korg. The warrior knew that to try to stand in open conflict with such a foe was useless. After making his strike, he had withdrawn back into the shadows to await a new opportunity.

Korg was not alone in witnessing the Skulltaker’s attack. Witnessing the warrior’s retreat, Nhaa felt emboldened by it. The man knew fear, and it was his turn to feel terror. The beastlord loped towards the giant, snapping orders to the brute.

‘Follow!’ Nhaa howled, pointing a claw at the retreating warrior. ‘Korg! Follow! Kill! Kill!’

The giant lurched back to its feet, its face twisting into a snarl. Korg reached towards the nearest pine, its massive fist closing around the trunk. Almost without visible effort, Korg ripped the tree from the ground. It pounded the pine against the ground, knocking clumps of earth from the tangle of roots. The giant roared, its anger rippling throughout the Grey.

‘Follow!’ Nhaa repeated. ‘Kill!’

Korg lurched after the beastlord, stripping bark from its makeshift club as it lumbered on. The giant wanted a tight grip when it brought the weapon crushing down into the man who had hurt it.

As the scent of their prey grew stronger, Nhaa allowed the giant to range ahead. It would serve no purpose for the chieftain if Korg were to kill the man after the Skulltaker had already claimed the beastlord’s head. Nhaa had not reigned so long as chief of the warherd by taking chances it could just as easily pass on to others.

The giant limped on through the fog, sniffing at the air for its prey, its enormous eyes watching for any trace of motion within the misty shroud of the Grey. Slowly, Korg stopped, the giant’s head lifting as it drew a deep breath down its nose. Its brain processed the information of its senses lethargically. The same heaviness of thought conveyed itself into the giant’s enormous body as Korg turned to glare at the pines to its left.

Something moved in the branches of a tree taller even than the giant. Korg was just raising its huge club when that motion launched itself at the brute. Sharp, stabbing pain flashed through the giant’s body as daemon steel crunched through flesh and bone. The Skulltaker kept a tight hold upon his sword as the blade ripped into the giant’s breast.

Momentum and the warrior’s armoured weight dragged the edge down, digging a wide gash down the monster’s breast and ribs. Bone splintered, muscle tore and veins burst beneath the champion’s screaming blade.

The giant’s howl was deafening. The pine club dropped from its hand, crashing against the ground.

The Skulltaker ripped his sword from the wound, falling to the ground thirty feet below. An instant after his leap, Korg’s huge paws slapped at its chest, trying to crush its tormentor. The giant’s fur dripped with gore, the brute swaying drunkenly as the ten-foot long gash bled copiously, but the Skulltaker had missed his mark. Intending his steel for the giant’s heart, he had missed the vital organ by a foot and more.

Wounded but not slain, Korg’s fury was terrible, elemental in its magnitude. The giant’s hooves smashed into the ground, trying to stamp out the man who had struck it. Narrowly, the Skulltaker leapt from the path of the descending pillars of bone and fur, his blade scraping ineffectively against the solid hooves.

Korg bellowed again, one immense hand shooting downwards to seize the lone warrior. The Skulltaker spun as the huge clawed fingers reached for him, the black edge of his blade licking out, slashing through a finger larger than his own leg, all but severing it from the monster’s hand.

The giant howled again at this fresh wound, recoiling instinctively from the blow. It lifted its hand to its face, intending to lick the gushing cut. Korg did not smell the tiny figure clinging to the dangling flesh of its mangled finger. Too late, the giant’s shocked senses registered the sensation of the Skulltaker as he pulled himself onto the back of the hairy fist. Before Korg could swat the man, the Skulltaker’s sword flashed out, cutting across the giant’s snout.

The giant’s hands clapped automatically to the deep cut against its sensitive nose. As the huge paws shot upwards, the Skulltaker jumped. Armoured gauntlet and spiked boots fought for purchase in Korg’s mangy, shaggy hide. The Skulltaker struggled to keep his hold on the giant’s shoulder. Even as he felt air rushing past him, as he felt Korg’s hand swinging down to slap him from the giant’s body, the Skulltaker’s sword licked out.

Flesh and fur parted like parchment beneath the gnawing edge of the blade. A stream of bright crimson spurted into the gloom as the smoking daemon sword severed one of the giant’s thick arteries.

The giant’s fist threw the Skulltaker through the air as though he’d been struck by an avalanche. The warrior crashed into the pines, branches snapping and bursting beneath his weight as he plummeted downwards.

Korg clenched its mangled hand to its neck, trying to staunch the arterial blood streaming from its wound. The giant reached down, reclaiming its abandoned club. Bellowing and roaring, the brute lashed out, smashing down the trees where it had thrown the Skulltaker. Ancient pines cracked and fell beneath the giant’s blows, the earth trembling beneath its pounding hooves. Korg’s rage and pain clawed at the sky like the roar of an angry mountain. The entire vastness of the Grey seemed to tremble before the giant’s wrath.

Yet with each passing instant, the strength of the giant’s blows lessened and the power of its smashing feet weakened. The club fell once more, bouncing against the loamy earth as it tumbled from slackened fingers. Korg’s steps became awkward, its body swaying with every effort to move.

Blood continued to shoot from between its fingers as its enormous body continued to pump fluid through its severed artery. Spots danced before the giant’s eyes and dull ringing sounded in its ears. Korg lurched forwards again, and this time its legs buckled beneath it. With a quaking crash, the giant slammed into the earth, trees splintering beneath Korg’s massive body. The forest shuddered when the giant fell, a dire echo that rolled through the whole of the Grey.

Nhaa crept towards the fallen giant, unable to believe that Korg had been struck down. The beastlord could hear the giant’s heavy, laboured breathing as air rasped through its immense lungs. Nhaa had heard the Skulltaker crash into the trees when Korg threw him. It had seen the giant’s rampage through the same trees, smashing and crushing everything before it.

Even if Korg had been slain, there was still every reason to believe that the giant had served its purpose.

As Nhaa drew closer to the giant’s body, the laboured breathing finally stopped. The beastlord’s senses were overwhelmed by the stink of the giant’s blood. Everywhere, the crimson stain of Korg’s life was spread across the ground in streams and puddles. As the sound of the giant’s lungs faded, Nhaa could discern another sound, a sound that had been drowned out by Korg’s breath. The beastlord backed away from the sprawled carcass, fear shining behind its milky, swollen eyes.

The faint rattle of armour grew. Nhaa could see the Skulltaker emerge from behind the giant’s corpse. This time his sword had not failed to strike the monster’s heart. The man’s body was torn, mangled by his brutal fall through the trees, but where Korg had weakened with every step, the Skulltaker grew stronger. Nhaa could see bones knitting together and wounds close. The torn armour of the Skulltaker melted together, forming once more into smooth crimson plates.

Nhaa backed away, the dreaded fighting claws fastened to its hands feeling small beside the awful power of the warrior. The Skulltaker glared at the beastlord, the eyes behind the champion’s mask terrible in their cold promise of doom.

‘Run,’ the Skulltaker’s grinding voice hissed. The black blade was a smoking ember in his hand, lines of fire showing beneath its surface as it consumed the blood that stained its length. ‘Run,’ the champion repeated as Nhaa turned and fled from him. ‘You cannot hide from doom.’

The sun stood bright and burning in the brown, dusty sky as a lone mammoth lumbered across the plain. The Barrens of Nuur were named for the enormous lake that had once filled its expanse. In the aftermath of the king’s death, the powers of the gods had turned the lake to steam, leaving behind a terrible desolation of dust and ruin.

Few things even tried to force an existence from the parched, unforgiving wasteland. Biting winds tore across the Barrens, polluting the air with choking dust. Ghastly wind-daemons whirled across the sunken basin of the ancient lake, threatening man and beast alike with gruesome death. Beneath the caked layers of dried mud, gigantic toads yet slumbered, twisted and perverted by the mutating touch of the gods. The slightest tremor in the ground was enough to rouse them, to bring them bursting up from the earth in a frenzy of rapacious hunger.

Qotagir had assured Dorgo that at least they would not need to fear the toads. The amphibians were ravenous, but not stupid. They knew that a mammoth was too large to eat, and knowing that, they would keep to their underground burrows. Wind-daemons, of course, were another matter. They would need to trust to the spells of their shaman, Yorool’s apprentice Gashuun, and perhaps the magic of the Sul sorceress Sanya. Dorgo did not find such recommendations reassuring.

The presence of the Sul witch might be a necessary evil, but it did not make Dorgo any happier about the fact. The Wastes beyond the domain were a sinister land, a place where distance and time were not constant, but mutable, forever in a state of ebb and flow.

The further north one travelled, the closer to the Realm of the Gods one came. These lands were governed by the whims of the gods, where a mountain range might rise overnight or a great forest might crumble into a bleak desert in the blink of an eye. There were no maps of such lands, thought and desire were the only guides a man could call upon to lead him where they would, desire and, perhaps, the sorcery of a witch.

Dorgo had seen the gruesome talisman Sanya claimed she could use to guide them to the Black Altar. She had displayed the daemon claw, not to reassure the Tsavags, but to remind them of her power, of the power of her tribe.

As watchful of treachery as he and his tribesmen were, the sorceress was even more so. She knew that Dorgo and the others would just as soon be rid of her. Her safety depended on a careful balance of need and threat. The Tsavags needed her sorcery to reach the Black Altar, and if that was not enough, she took pains to make the Tong understand that killing her would be a costly undertaking. For the moment, Dorgo saw no way to easily circumvent either problem, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep looking.

Gashuun was the youngest of the Tsavag shamans. His presence in the expedition was one of necessity, a counterbalance to the Sul sorceress. If or when Sanya betrayed them, the Tsavags would find it reassuring to have magic of their own to call upon. Gashuun was a sinister, ghastly creature. His mammoth-hide robes could not quite hide the bumpy welts that bulged from his skin. The shaman went without helm or hood, his scalp shorn so that it was as bare as an egg. His features were sharp, almost rodent-like, with cunning eyes that seemed to transfix a man’s soul with a single glance. A distorted, half-sized copy of that face protruded from the back of his skull. This second face was fully functional, its eyes always watching the shaman’s back, its mouth muttering an accompaniment to his rituals and prayers. When he ate, Gashuun shared his food between both faces, favouring neither.

In addition to the shaman, Dorgo had been provided with twenty of the strongest warriors in the tribe. Led by the powerful Togmol, each of the warriors was the scarred veteran of dozens of battles. Their hide armour was reinforced with scales of copper and iron, and their swords and axes were forged of bronze. The finest weapons and armour the Tsavags could produce had been lavished upon the men, each according to his need. Dorgo appreciated the great honour his father showed him, allowing him to lead such men.

Ulagan and a pair of his best scouts had been included to compliment the warriors. The expedition could scarcely hope to carry all the provisions they would need, and Ulagan’s people would be invaluable at hunting game when the need arose. There was also the unspoken reason for their presence. If Sanya led them false, it was hoped that the scouts would be able to lead them back to the domain.

Finally, Dorgo was given Qotagir, the Tsavag mammoth master, and Devseh, the strongest beast in all the herd. Devseh towered over even its fellow mammoths and possessed a fierce spirit that made it a terror upon the battlefield. Its shaggy pelt bore the scars of hydra claws where it had been mauled by a beast of the Gahhuks, an attack even few war mammoths could have fended off. Devseh had done more than fend off the hydra, it had trampled the reptile beneath its enormous feet, grinding its bones into the soil of the Prowling Lands. It was a measure of the importance of their task that Devseh had been chosen to carry them into the Wastes. In times of war, Hutga rode Devseh into battle. Of all the men in the tribe, only Qotagir could claim true control over the fierce brute.

Dorgo could see Qotagir, sitting in the ivory cage lashed around Devseh’s neck, a gold-studded goad clutched in his leathery hands. The mahout seemed as tireless as his beast, constantly whispering an old Tsavag chant to calm the mammoth and soothe its dislike for the howdah strapped to its back. After his experience in the Crumbling Hills, Dorgo was more than happy to be back riding in the howdah rather than leading up front in the cage.

The collection of warriors, hunters and sorcerers that had been placed under his leadership were scattered throughout the howdah. There was little space to move, bundles of food and skins of water piled everywhere, some even hanging over the sides of the ivory-walled howdah to slap against Devseh’s shaggy hide.

Men were sprawled everywhere, catching such sleep as the rocking, lumbering steps of the mammoth would allow. Gashuun sat upon a raised wooden platform, consulting his bones and painting mystical symbols upon a sheet of tanned hide. A few warriors slept in the very shadow of the shaman, muttering uneasily in their slumber as Gashuun’s magic intruded upon their dreams.

As cramped as conditions were, however, no man intruded upon the rear corner of the howdah. There, beneath a tarp of black silk, the sorceress Sanya had established herself. She had brought with her some quantities of strange powders and herbs, and arcane equipment of glass and copper.

The warriors had a grudging respect for the rites of Gashuun, but had nothing except fear for the uncanny sorcery of the Sul. Dorgo wondered how much of her effect on the men was deliberate and how much was genuine. Even for a sorceress, Sanya looked too young to be steeped in such evil.

At least one member of the expedition had failed to be impressed by Sanya’s sinister airs. Dorgo walked between sleeping warriors to where Ulagan stood, leaning against the swaying wall of the howdah. The scout was looking at the silk veil at the rear of the platform, a hungry gleam in his eye.

‘You should get some sleep,’ Dorgo advised the scout, clapping him on the shoulder.

‘Who can sleep knowing that is down there?’ Ulagan asked, pointing his chin at the makeshift tent.

‘Two days away from your wives,’ Dorgo laughed, shaking his head.

‘I’ll be worse when it is three days,’ Ulagan said. ‘Witch, assassin or daemon, she’s a fine looking woman.’

‘Better to take a viper into your bed than a Sul.’

Ulagan smiled at Dorgo. ‘Now you sound like Togmol,’ the hunter said, laughing. ‘If I’d known you’d turn out like that grim oaf, I’d have left you to the zhaga!’

‘You’re liable to get turned into a zhaga if you start pursuing a witch,’ Dorgo said.

‘That wouldn’t be so bad,’ Ulagan replied after a moment of consideration. ‘Not a bad life, being a zhaga. Nothing to do but eat and breed.’

‘And worry around when some bold Tsavag hunter is going to turn you into boots,’ Dorgo pointed out.

Whatever answer Ulagan had for Dorgo’s observation went unspoken. The silk veil of the tent was pulled back violently, Sanya rushing from the confines of her seclusion. Warriors stumbled to their feet as the woman sprang past them, making for the fore of the howdah. Ulagan blanched, wondering if perhaps the sorceress had been reading his lecherous thoughts with her spells. She ignored him, however, fixing her gaze on Dorgo.

‘Danger threatens us already,’ Sanya told him. ‘I have sent my familiars abroad and they have seen much. A menace rises from the south, pursuing our course!’

Dorgo felt icy fear crawl down his spine. Did she mean the Skulltaker? Had the champion of Khorne somehow discovered what they were doing and was coming to stop them? He fought to control his fear. He had seen the monster once and survived. To save his people, he would do so again.

‘The witch seeks to panic us,’ snarled Togmol, rising to his feet. The warrior’s hand clutched the haft of his axe. ‘There is nothing chasing us. Is your magic so potent that it sees where our shaman cannot?’ He pointed at Gashuun, still crouched upon the raised platform, consulting his bones.

‘He looks to the path ahead,’ Sanya said. ‘I look at the road behind.’

The woman’s words made a grim sort of sense to Dorgo. He moved to the side of the howdah, gripping the ivory guardrail and leaning over. He looked into the distance. He could faintly see something on the horizon. A dust storm, which Qotagir claimed was common enough in the Barrens. Yet he was slow to dismiss it, given Sanya’s warning. The cloud might also be caused by a large number of riders striking out across the Barrens. He turned back to the woman. She smiled as she saw the question in his eyes.

‘Yes, they are riders,’ she answered. ‘Men on horses and in chariots. How they discovered us, I do not know, but discover us they have.

‘The armies of the Seifan are on the march.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fierce war cries split the air as thundering hooves pounded through the dust. Dozens of squat, sallow-faced riders, their wolfish bodies covered in heavy furs and lamellar armour, galloped through the parched landscape, waving sabres and axes above their heads. Behind the riders, chariots of wood and copper raced through the Barrens. Each of the wheeled platforms carried two men and sported vicious blades that projected from the hubs of the iron-banded wheels. Tattered banners of wood and bone rose above the chariots, their horsehair talismans whipping crazily in the wind.

The Seifan seemed as numerous as lice to Dorgo as he watched the human vermin pursue them across the desert. Vicious opportunists, even in this moment of crisis, the Seifan had seen a chance to advance their power. There could be only one reason for an attack in such force: the Seifan knew the Bloodeater had been recovered and they knew it was in the possession of the Tsavags and their Sul allies.

At first, Dorgo had hoped that they would be able to outdistance the Seifan. Qotagir assured him that while the horses had greater speed, Devseh had greater endurance. Over a long chase, the steeds of the Seifan would tire and lose ground to the mammoth. Unfortunately, the Seifan had no intention of prolonging the chase. The horsemen and charioteers lashed their mounts mercilessly, closing the gap between hunter and prey with each breath.

As the Seifan closed, the Tsavags responded. Short throwing spears rained down on the attackers. Riders and horses crashed through the dust, their broken bodies tripping those who followed close behind. Devseh lashed its massive head from side to side, knocking Seifan ponies into the dirt with its enormous tusks. Yet for each Hung warrior who fell, ten others took his place. They charged fearlessly at the mammoth, slashing at its legs with cruel axes and curved swords.

From the chariots, spearmen cast their javelins at the Tsavags. The Tong fighters took shelter behind the walls of the howdah until they realised that they were not the spearmens’ targets. Each cast was directed at Devseh, the spears biting into the mammoth’s shaggy hide. Many slipped free, unable to penetrate deep into the thick flesh of the brute, but others stabbed deeper, securing their barbed heads in Devseh’s sides. Long ropes of woven horsehair dangled from the embedded spears, dragging through the dirt as the mammoth sprinted across the Barrens.

Screams echoed from the desert as Gashuun threw balls of clay at the chariots. Where the strange projectiles struck, black smoke exploded in a billowing burst. The men and horses who passed through the smoke emitted screams of agony, their flesh cracking and flaking away from their bodies. The other riders skirted around the smoke and the twitching wreckage of those who had been claimed by it. Whatever terror the shaman’s magic provoked, it was not enough to make them turn back.

Not to be outdone by Gashuun, Sanya stood upon the raised platform at the centre of the howdah. Arms flung wide, she called upon the terrible gods of the Sul, hurling curses down upon the Seifan. She flung a bolt of white light from her palm. Striking a charioteer, the light became flame, roaring as it devoured the man, twisting and changing his body with its unholy power even as its heat consumed him. The spearman riding in the chariot threw himself from the platform, deciding that broken bones and a shattered skull were preferable to the doom that had claimed his tribesman.

More riders galloped around the mammoth, slashing at Devseh’s flanks. Dorgo hurled a javelin at one of the horsemen, his missile punching through the man’s chest. Shrieking, the rider toppled from his horse. As he rolled across the ground, the dirt exploded. A huge, shrivelled shape pulled itself from the ground, its gash-like mouth snapping at the wounded man, closing around his midsection. Quick as its appearance, the warty bulk of the toad retreated back beneath the ground, intent upon its meal.

New shouts of alarm brought Tsavags rushing to the left side of the mammoth. Seifan riders had seized the dangling ropes, using the tethers to pull themselves from their saddles and climb the side of the beast. The Tsavags could see the cruel, broad features of the Hung, their faces painted with stripes and whorls as they made war against the Tong.

Spears stabbed down at the men, frustrating their climb. One Seifan, pierced through the shoulder, lost his grip on the rope. Slipping free, he shrieked as the pounding feet of the mammoth smashed his body.

Gashuun’s shouts announced still another threat. Some distance away, a lone chariot thundered across the Barrens. Unlike the rest of the horde, this chariot made no effort to close upon the mammoth. Unlike the rest, this chariot was drawn not by a horse but by a fanged, two-legged reptile. The lone occupant of the vehicle made no effort to control his strange beast, instead his focus was upon the prayer wheel he held. Clad in the skins of daemons, the man waved his hands over the prayer wheel, his thin voice scratching at the heavens.

In answer to the Seifan mystic’s spell, an orange haze formed above his chariot. Dark shapes appeared out of the haze, hovering over the Barrens on leather wings. They were not hawks nor bats nor serpents, but abominable combinations of all three. Even from a distance, their daemonic presence could be felt and the malevolent intelligence in their piercing cries could be heard: furies born from the mindless void between the worlds of gods and men, feral daemons summoned to work the will of the Seifan.

At a gesture from the shaman, the furies flew at the mammoth, streaking through the sky like dusky meteors. They easily avoided the Tsavags’ hurled spears, and the thrown spell-spheres of Gashuun.

Croaking their malicious laughter, the furies descended upon the howdah, ripping and clawing as they came. One warrior was lifted into the air, his arm clenched in the fanged beak of one fury while another daemon chewed at his scalp. Another warrior fell over the side, his face slashed away by the sweep of a daemon’s claw.

Gashuun crumpled in a puddle of his own entrails, his body rent by the talons of swooping horrors. Togmol stabbed at the shaman’s killers, his spear skewering one daemon through its leathery back. The fury’s flesh oozed away from the impaling weapon, shifting and re-forming away from his spear.

The creature snarled at the man, slapping him with a backhanded sweep of its claw. Togmol reeled back, catching himself before he could slip over the side of the howdah.

Dorgo and Ulagan were forced back by the shrieking daemons, pressed towards the raised platform. Here, at least, Sanya’s sorcery was keeping the furies at bay. Dark ribbons of flame snaked from her splayed fingers, burning daemons from the sky.

Yet the woman’s eyes could not be everywhere. A fury dropped down onto the howdah, creeping towards her on taloned feet. Dorgo leapt at the daemon before it could pounce, slashing at the creature with his sword. Metal sliced through the leathery wing, biting at the scaly shoulder. The fury hissed at the warrior, enraged by this little man who had the temerity to strike it. Claws slashed at Dorgo, striking for the man’s throat. Dorgo raised his sword to block the attack. The blade shattered beneath the daemon’s touch, fragmenting like rock beneath a hammer. The impact forced Dorgo back. Staggering, he knew he could not fend off the monster’s next attack. The fury threw itself at him, pouncing like a sabretusk.

Black lightning seared through the fury as it leapt, sizzling through its unnatural substance. The reptilian visage of the daemon contorted with pain, green ichor vomiting from its mouth. The thing slumped to the floor of the platform, its body collapsing into reeking muck as its life force fled back into the void.

There was no time to thank Sanya for her intervention. The sorceress had already turned her attention to the other furies, daemons that now displayed greater caution in avoiding her spells. Moreover, the daemons were not the only menace that faced the men on the howdah. The furies had driven the Tsavags away from the walls of the platform, had distracted them from their efforts to prevent the Seifan from mounting Devseh’s sides.

Half a dozen painted Seifan warriors were at large upon the howdah, giving battle to the already beleaguered Tsavags. Dorgo could see a pair of them rushing towards the mammoth’s neck, intent on stopping the beast by killing it, or Qotagir, or both. The old mahout was turned around in his cage, jabbing at the would-be slayers with a long ivory spear, preventing them from gaining purchase on the treacherous footing of Devseh’s neck.

A roar of rage snapped Dorgo’s attention away from Qotagir’s distress. Another Seifan warrior was climbing over the side of the howdah, but Dorgo recognised him. He had seen the moustached warlord at the ill-fated council of the tribes.

The murderous, armoured invader was no less than Tulka, kahn of the Seifan. The chieftain recognised Dorgo in turn and remembered the son of his hated rival Hutga. Even more importantly, Tulka knew that Hutga would have trusted the Bloodeater to no one else.

‘Give me the sword, pup,’ Tulka growled. The chieftain’s fat-bladed dadao clenched in his fist, his frosty hair dripping from the skirt of his helm. There was nothing but contempt in his eyes as he stared at his enemy.

Dorgo spat at the warlord’s feet. ‘Come and take it, nag-fondler,’ he cursed. ‘If you think you can!’

Tulka smiled as he noted the warrior’s empty hands. The chieftain of the Seifan was loath to risk himself in battle. When he could, he allowed others to take those risks for him, but the challenge of a weaponless warrior was one that appealed to his cruel spirit. Battle was distasteful to him, but murder was an indulgence he regarded with the keenest appreciation.

‘You’re going to die, boy!’ grinned Tulka. ‘I’m going to pass water on your bones before I leave them to the jackals!’

‘Big words for a coward,’ Dorgo sneered. His hand clutched at his belt, feeling the hidden pouch and what had been concealed within it. Above all else, he knew that the Seifan could not be allowed to gain possession of the Bloodeater. That would spell the doom of his people as surely as the Skulltaker’s rampage.

Tulka lunged at the Tsavag warrior. Overconfident, goaded by the warrior’s baiting words, the murderous warlord reacted precisely as Dorgo expected. It was not the careful charge of a warrior that impelled Tulka forward, but the enraged rush of a maddened beast. The warlord did not need caution or skill. No chieftain of the domain had ever fallen in battle, not to any mortal at least. He would not fear an armed antagonist, how much less did he care about an unarmed one?

The slashing sweep of the kahn’s fat-bladed sword was powerful, but sloppy. Dorgo ducked beneath the flashing bronze edge of the dadao and then drove upwards as the blade passed over his head. He pinned everything on one desperate attack. If he had guessed wrong, he would pay for his mistake with his life. Tulka would not miss again.

The bronze sword clattered against the floor of the howdah, falling from nerveless fingers. The kahn’s eyes widened with disbelief, his mouth gaping in shock. A jewelled sliver of daemonic metal gleamed behind the teeth. Dorgo had put all of his strength in that one mighty thrust. Hidden in his fist, the shard of the Bloodeater had been driven beneath the warlord’s chin, punching up through his mouth and into his brain.

For an instant, Dorgo feared he had guessed wrong. Tulka remained standing, as though rejecting the injury he had been dealt. Every Tsavag had heard stories about the invincibility of the chieftains, about how they recovered from even the most ghastly wounds. Dread filled Dorgo as it seemed that Tulka would do the same.

The instant passed. The clamour of battle faded away as Tulka crashed to the floor of the howdah. Those Seifan still fighting on the mammoth’s back screamed in terror, scrambling over the sides and sliding down their ropes. The furies shrieked, fleeing into the sky, vanishing as they retreated towards the horizon.

Dorgo released his relief in a great sigh. His gamble had won. He had reasoned that any weapon strong enough to destroy the Skulltaker would be powerful enough to kill a chieftain. Even a shard of the Bloodeater had been enough to settle with Tulka.

‘That’s one pig that won’t be stealing any more women,’ snarled Ulagan. The hunter sported an ugly gash across his forehead where the claw of a fury had struck him, but otherwise he’d come out of the battle unmarked. Six of the warriors could not make that claim. Taken by Seifan axes or daemonic claws, their spirits would not leave the Barrens.

Dorgo leaned over the kahn’s corpse, struggling to pull the ruby shard from his head. He gratefully accepted an iron knife as it was handed down to him. Quickly, he cut away at the throat of the corpse, exposing enough of the sword sliver to allow him a firm grip on it. Dorgo deftly pulled the shard free, wiping Tulka’s blood from its translucent edge. He handed the knife back, only now realising that it was Sanya not Ulagan who had given it to him.

‘Quick thinking,’ the sorceress told him. She stared at the corpse, seeming almost to delight in the sight of the chieftain’s carcass. It was the echo of the hateful glare Dorgo had seen her direct against the Suls’ own kahn, Enek Zjarr, at the tomb of Teiyogtei. ‘You’ve prevented this expedition from failing before it has even begun.’

‘We’re not free of them yet,’ warned Togmol. The massive warrior gestured to the lake-bed below. Dead warriors and dead horses littered the expanse, and here and there the broken wreckage of a chariot was scattered across the ground.

Away from the bodies and debris, the Seifan riders were regrouping, waving their weapons angrily over their heads. The berating shouts of their leaders carried over to the men in the howdah. Fired by hopes of replacing their fallen kahn, the boldest Seifan warriors were urging their fellows back into the fight.

‘Maybe we can still outdistance them,’ suggested Dorgo. He did not harbour any great hope of escaping the determined riders, much less with Devseh weakened by their spears and blades. When battle was joined again, there would be no chance of throwing the Seifan into disarray by felling their chieftain. It would be a fight to the finish, a fight where the sheer numbers of the Hung would ensure their victory.

Sanya pointed at Tulka’s corpse. ‘Give them the body of their kahn,’ she said. ‘You can’t outrun them. Our only hope is to give them something else to occupy them.’ The sorceress frowned when she saw the confusion on the faces of the Tsavags. ‘Don’t question, just do,’ she swore. The sound of hooves pounding across the desert was already rising once more.

Shrugging his shoulders, Dorgo helped Togmol to lift the dead kahn from the howdah. A heave sent Tulka toppling over the side of the platform, to crash in a cloud of dust on the plain below. The Seifan riders ignored the body, thundering past it, intent upon the fleeing mammoth. Dorgo shook his head. Sanya’s plan had failed.

Then a shout went up from one of the rearmost Seifan riders. The dust had settled enough to give the man a clear look at what had been thrown down from the howdah.

Seeing the chieftain’s body, the rider dropped from his saddle, scrambling towards the corpse. His shout had been heard by the others. In quick order, they turned their steeds around, racing back to the body. Men sprang from their saddles, running through the dust to reach Tulka.

Angry yells and filthy curses rose from the Seifan as the marauders began punching and kicking one another.

Dorgo realised that they were fighting over the corpse. Nor were the Seifan confining their internecine conflict to fists. Screams of pain, and the clatter of metal striking metal sounded from the feuding mob. All thought of the Tsavags and their treasure had been abandoned. Incredibly, the only thing that seemed to concern the Seifan now was Tulka’s body.

Dorgo turned a questioning look on Sanya. How had she known?

‘An old tradition,’ she said, answering his unspoken question, ‘common to all the tribes, though most are less injudicious about its secrecy than the Seifan, allowing only their shamans to keep the hidden truth. To become chieftain of one’s tribe, it is necessary to eat the heart of the old chieftain, to consume his strength and power, to become the flesh of Teiyogtei.’ Sanya nodded as she saw the revulsion on Dorgo’s face. Among even the Tong, cannibalism was taboo.

‘Yes, even the Tsavags pass on their legacy in such a fashion,’ she continued. ‘If you would lead your people, one day you must eat your father’s heart and draw his power into your body: the flesh of Teiyogtei, a tradition unbroken since the breaking of the horde. The king’s warlords drew his power into themselves when they bore his broken husk from his battle with the Skulltaker. Knowing their king was dying, they cut his heart from his body and divided it among them. Each drew Teiyogtei’s strength into himself, becoming one with the flesh of the king.

‘That is what the Skulltaker hunts, Dorgo. He hunts the flesh of Teiyogtei, to destroy the last trace of the king.’ Sanya’s eyes grew hard, her hands balling into fists at her side. ‘With every skull he takes, the power of Teiyogtei fades from the domain. When it has passed completely, the Blood God will consume all. Earth, flesh, water and sky, all will be sacrificed to the hunger of Khorne.’

The clearing of the herdstone stank of fear and blood. The twisted masses of the warherd had retreated to the imagined safety of the treeline, their bestial faces peering out from behind the foliage to watch doom descend upon their home.

Some had not retreated, staying behind to protect their sacred herdstone. Their remains were splashed across the ground, torn asunder by the invader’s smouldering blade. The warherd’s shamans were among the dead. The horned sorcerer-priests had struggled to fell their human enemy with spells of death and ruin. Their efforts called lightning from the mist, evoked green flames that blackened the earth, and summoned dreadful winds that stripped bark from the pines with their unseen touch. All the savage magics of the beastmen were called down upon the man’s head. Yet it was the Skulltaker, not his enemies, who still walked the Grey.

Spells crashed against the Skulltaker’s crimson armour, shattering like ice against stone, casting sparks and embers of frustrated magic across the ground. Curses fell upon the champion of Khorne and turned to scarlet ash, sliding from the smooth plates of his mail.

Hexes struck at his soul and were consumed, burned away by the malice of a hungry god. Then the shamans died, their protective charms and amulets useless against the black sword, their magical wards and talismans broken by the shrieking steel. Their brutish bodies were cut down like wheat, their spirits devoured by the ravenous blade.

The destruction of the shamans had broken the feral courage of the warherd. Nhaa’s bestial army had evaporated, slinking into the shadows, tails curled between their legs. Only the huge minotaurs remained, determined in their primitive way to defend the herdstone even with their last breath. Against any other foe, Nhaa would have been certain that the bull-headed monsters would be victorious. Against the Skulltaker, against a man who had killed the giant Korg, the beastlord had no delusions. Strength, force, savagery, these would not be enough to kill the human. Nhaa paced behind the fearsome line of its minotaurs. If raw power was not sufficient to stop the Skulltaker, perhaps treachery would be. After all, even kings died beneath the knives of traitors.

The minotaurs stamped the earth, pawing the ground with their hooves, bubbly froth dripping from their snouts as they anxiously awaited the approach of their foe. The smell of blood had all but overwhelmed their tiny brains, sending violent urges snaking through their gigantic frames.

Twelve feet tall, each minotaur was sixty stone of primal fury waiting to explode in an orgy of bloodshed and carnage. Their paw-like hands opened and closed impatiently around the hafts of their weapons: great axes of sharpened bone, and clubs of knotted wood and pitted stone.

Only the snarled warnings of their chieftain kept the brutes from charging their enemy on the instant. Nhaa didn’t want the minotaurs to attack the Skulltaker piecemeal. Together, they might have some small chance against the champion, or at least provide enough of a distraction to allow Nhaa the opportunity it was watching for.

The Skulltaker marched through the mangled wreckage of the shamans, his boots sloshing through the muck of pooled blood and offal. A wounded shaman tried to crawl from the warrior’s path, dragging its body through the sludge with a mangled arm, bleating pitifully. The Skulltaker did not break stride as he walked past the crippled beastman, simply reversing the grip on his sword and stabbing the point through the creature’s neck, ending its pathetic ordeal.

The sight of the shaman’s callous execution snapped the already fragile restraint of the minotaurs. Snorting and bellowing, the huge monsters charged, their weapons raised, their horned heads lowered. The ground shook beneath their ploughing hooves, like the rolling quaking of a stampede. Even the faintest gleam of intelligence was washed from their eyes as brute fury took hold over them.

The Skulltaker stood, implacable, immobile before the oncoming rush of the minotaurs. The warrior’s arm swept forwards, driving the black blade into the lowered head of the first minotaur, piercing its skull with a sickening crunch. He ripped the sword free, spinning around as the lifeless bulk of the monster smashed into the ground in a spray of blood and brains. In the same motion, he dropped into a crouch, bringing his sword scything through the knee of a second minotaur. The brute bellowed, toppling as the slashed bone of its leg snapped under the weight of its body.

The Skulltaker did not give the maimed creature a further thought. He was already turning to face a third. The smoking edge of his sword screamed as it chopped through the monster’s horn, sending it dancing through the air. The minotaur roared, bringing its huge club of bone and stone smashing down. The earth beside the Skulltaker exploded beneath the tremendous impact, but the man avoided the crushing blow. His sword licked out at the monster again, hacking through its wrist. The minotaur’s paw leapt from its wound in a gush of blood, flopping to the ground. The monster’s body lurched to one side, the weight of the bludgeon it held in one hand dragging its entire mass away with it. Before the minotaur could recover, the point of the Skulltaker’s sword was burrowing through its ribs, skewering its heart.

A fourth minotaur crashed into the Skulltaker while he dispatched its fellow. The brute’s horns caught the man, sending him flying through the air. The minotaur did not give the stricken champion time to recover. Rushing onwards, its head lowered, its horns lashing from side to side, the beast smashed into the prone man, trying to grind him into the dirt with its horns. The warrior’s body was battered and mangled beneath the minotaur’s savagery, bones cracking before the brutality of the monster’s attack. Armoured hands clutched at the minotaur’s head, wrapping around its horns in an effort to fend off the assault. The monster’s powerful jaws snapped at the man sprawled beneath it, the fangs scraping against the darkly stained armour of his breastplate.

Probing hands slipped away from the minotaur’s horns, groping desperately at the monster’s face as they dropped away. There was purpose behind the desperation. Even as the minotaur mauled him, Khorne’s champion thought not of escape, but of attack. Armoured fingers pressed brutally into the minotaur’s beady yellow eyes, stabbing into them like iron knives. The minotaur threw its head back, howling in agony as the wreckage of its eyes slithered down its face.

With his enemy’s attack broken, the Skulltaker turned to find his sword. His vision settled on the quivering body of the third monster he had killed, at the smoking blade still buried in its side. There was blood dripping from his armour as the warrior dragged himself back towards his sword. Broken bones ground together, and ruptured organs pumped pain through his body. No mortal could have endured the mauling delivered by the beast, but it had been many lifetimes since the Skulltaker had known mortality. Every limping step brought the Blood God’s power surging through him, mending flesh and knitting bone. Khorne had legions to die for him. The Skulltaker was marked out for a different purpose.

From near the herdstone, Nhaa watched the Skulltaker hobble away from the last minotaur. The beastlord’s eyes narrowed with cunning when it saw that the man had lost his terrible sword, as its slippery mind contemplated the obvious gravity of the Skulltaker’s wounds. Nhaa scraped the blades of its fighting claws together, knowing that it would never see a better opportunity. Cautiously, the chieftain began to circle the battlefield, watching for its chance.

When it had circled around to the warrior’s back, Nhaa struck. With panther-like speed, the beastlord rushed at the human. Only a few feet from the Skulltaker, Nhaa leapt into the air, hurtling at the man like a missile. Nhaa slammed into the Skulltaker’s back, its fighting claws tearing through the warrior’s armour, impelled by the chieftain’s momentum. Nhaa’s growls ripped through the clearing as its bronze claws dug deeper into its foe’s body. Sadistic ferocity twisted the gor’s bestial face as it wrenched the claws around in the wounds it had dealt, widening the gashes in its victim’s back. Nhaa almost forgot its disappointment that the warrior did not cry out as it felt the man’s blood running down its arms.

The Skulltaker slumped to his knees, lurching forwards as the beastlord’s fighting claws burrowed into his flesh. Nhaa leaned down to maintain its grip on the failing warrior. The gor’s fangs gleamed in a feral snarl. More than just the instinctive man-hate of the beastmen, Nhaa exulted in its victory as a display of its power. The Skulltaker had slaughtered and killed his way through the lands of the human tribes, unstoppable as the fist of Khorne, but he had not prevailed in the Grey. In the Grey, the doom bringer had found his doom.

Metal hands locked around Nhaa’s throat as the beastlord leaned over the warrior. The chieftain’s eyes went round with panic, and the snarl slipped from its face. The grip around its neck was not the weak, fragile clutch of a dying man. It was a grip of steel, fingers of iron tearing at the beastman’s flesh. As it felt those fingers tighten, as it felt its skin rip, as it felt its neck being twisted, Nhaa understood the enormity of its mistake. Weak, battered, broken, the Skulltaker was still more than the beastlord could overcome.

A loud crack announced the breaking of Nhaa’s neck. The gor’s horned head sagged obscenely against its shoulder, sightless eyes staring emptily into space. Nhaa’s body crumpled to the ground, crashing beside that of its killer.

Long minutes passed. The near-blind eyes of the warherd were focused upon the clearing, fixed upon the still, unmoving shapes of their chieftain and the terrible warrior who had slain it. Slowly, with tenuous, anxious steps, the bolder elements of the tribe began to filter out from the trees. The gors advanced towards the dead bodies of chieftain and champion, sniffing at the blood-drenched ground.

Then the gors were scrambling back to the trees. One of the bodies moved, rising from the ground. The Skulltaker did not even glance at the retreating beastmen. Instead, he closed his bloodstained hands around the bronze claws still stabbed into his flesh. Slowly, painfully, he ripped Nhaa’s blades free from his body. The Skulltaker stared down at the chieftain’s broken body, letting its bladed arms flop back against its chest.

The Skulltaker consider Nhaa’s carcass for only a moment. The warrior set one of his armoured boots on the beastman’s chest, and closed his hands around Nhaa’s curled horns. The Skulltaker leaned down over the monster, and then exerted his tremendous strength, pulling at the horns while his boot kept the body pinned in place.

A wet, tearing sound rose from the corpse. With a final, furious tug, the Skulltaker ripped his prize from Nhaa’s shoulders. The lingering beastmen gave voice to their terror as they saw the champion lift Nhaa’s head into the air. They fled, scrambling back into the depths of the Grey, praying to their savage gods that they would be spared the fate of their chief.

The Skulltaker ignored the frantic, scrambling noises that rose from the forest around him. He was still weak from the minotaur’s mauling and Nhaa’s treacherous attack. It would take him a long time to heal from such injuries, to recover his strength after such a trial, but he would not be idle while he rested.

Dragging Nhaa’s head by its horn, the Skulltaker stalked towards his sword. Soon, a fourth skull would dangle from the chain lashed across his body, a fourth offering to the Blood God’s rage.

Silence reigned within the great hall. Obsidian walls cast eerie reflections across a floor of polished ebony. A great crystal, three times the size of a man, rose from the centre of the floor, suspended in the air by unseen chains of force. The smooth, globe-like skin of the crystal glowed with strange lights that burned from within. The glow was captured by the black stone walls of the chamber, shining across them in great, sprawling images. The scenes projected by the crystal played like moving tapestries along the black walls.

A sombre group of men watched the images cast by the crystal. Cloaked in robes of black, their faces dark, their expressions grim, the elders of the Sul knew the gravity of what they witnessed. The Skulltaker had claimed another head and with it brought the entire domain of Teiyogtei one step closer to oblivion.

‘Nhaa has fallen,’ declared one of the sorcerers, his plaited beard streaked with golden thread. ‘The Skulltaker has another offering to place before the Skull Throne.’

‘And now Tulka is dead,’ observed another, his eyes stretching from his sallow face on leathery stalks. ‘One less for the Skulltaker to hunt.’

‘Tulka does not matter.’ This time the words came from the gold-masked Thaulan Scabtongue. ‘His power has passed into his lieutenant. The Seifan still have a chieftain, one who has eaten the flesh of Teiyogtei. With the power he has consumed, the heir of Tulka inherits the deathmark that lingered over his predecessor. The executioner must yet collect four skulls before doom descends upon our land.’

‘The flesh of Teiyogtei is all that keeps the Blood God from devouring the domain,’ cautioned the gold-bearded sorcerer. ‘Without that link to the great king, there is nothing to defy Khorne’s hunger. It is a dangerous game we play, Thaulan. The risk is great.’

‘The reward is greater,’ Thaulan replied. ‘Even as he serves the Blood God, the Skulltaker serves the Sul. With every skull he claims, our enemies are diminished.’

‘But if he should kill all the chieftains…’

‘Death is not enough,’ Thaulan said. ‘He must have their heads, trophies to bear back to the Black Altar. Only then will Khorne be satisfied.’

‘Then everything depends upon Sanya,’ the stalk-eyed Sul announced. ‘Our one hope for survival rests with her and a clutch of half-witted Tong.’

‘Not our hopes,’ corrected Thaulan, ‘but our ambitions. We have seen the power even a shard of the Bloodeater possesses. When it is reforged, even the Skulltaker will be destroyed.’

‘What of the Tsavags?’ objected gold-beard.

‘Sanya will attend to them,’ Thaulan said. ‘She made provisions that were not in Enek Zjarr’s original vision.’ The faces of the assembled elders lifted into cruel smiles. Their kahn’s treachery and cunning were infamous throughout the tribe, but that of his consort was impressive even to the Sul. They could leave the Tsavags to her devious plan. The mammoth-rider was never born who could see through the deceptions of the Sul.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A purple sky hung overhead, sprawling across the heavens like an angry bruise. Black clouds boiled through the haze, flickers of lightning burning behind their sombre depths. The clouds moved independent of the howling wind, scattering in every direction as they slowly rolled across the sky. The wind was a fierce, biting gale driving down from the north, shimmering flickers of energy trapped within its coils, dragging the essence of the gods with them as they raged their way southward.

This was the edge, the borderland between the world of mortals and the Wastes. There was no name for this place, this desolation saturated in the malignity of the gods. Perhaps it had once been a part of the Barrens of Nuur, perhaps it had once been a forest like the Grey or a place of towers and gardens like the Crumbling Hills. Now it was nothing, a blight that stretched away to where the black gloom of the clouds reached down to consume it. The ground was parched, grey and lifeless beyond even the desiccated lake bed of the Barrens. More than lifeless, it was a cursed place. Great hills littered the landscape in lonely piles of black stone, as though shunning the company of their fellows. They were almost shapeless, these hills, like piles of oozing mud or the molten stumps of mountains.

More than the black hills, the grey earth and the purple sky, the borderland was dominated by the mouldering shine of bleached bone. The plain was covered in skeletal heaps, broken bones scattered as far as the eye could follow, betokening some ancient slaughter beyond imagining.

Qotagir guided Devseh into the field of bone. The mammoth’s strength was waning, despite the efforts of the Tsavags to tend its wounds. The Seifan had been vicious in their attack, and it was a testament to the endurance and tenacity of the beast that it had been able to travel so far without being allowed to stop and rest.

To stop would allow the Seifan riders another chance to overtake them. They had lost half of their number fighting against the Hung. A renewed attack would finish them. There was no choice, they had to press on and hope that Devseh could endure.

The decision seemed to have been the wise choice. They had reached the borderland, a place no Tsavag had gazed upon for generations. They could feel the power of the gods flowing down from the north, and smell the clammy taint in the air. In many ways, they were reminded of the otherworldly aura of Teiyogtei’s tomb, an eerie sense of dread that tugged at the back of the mind, goading it towards violence. Even Devseh felt the sensation, the mammoth’s temper flaring in trumpeting outbursts and mindless attacks against boulders and piles of bone.

‘He must rest soon,’ warned Qotagir, calling back to the howdah from his ivory cage on the mammoth’s neck.

Dorgo looked back at the Barrens, watching for any sign of dust rising from the dry lake bed. The desolation was silent, as dead as the land before them. If the Seifan yet pursued them, the Hung were still far off.

‘Try to find some high ground,’ Dorgo told Qotagir. They would be in bad shape if they lost Devseh, but their condition would be worse if they failed to spy the Seifan crossing the Barrens.

Dorgo continued to watch the land pass away behind them as the mammoth slowly lumbered towards one of the crude piles of rock. The warrior’s skin prickled with dismay as he saw grotesque red weeds sprout from the grey earth behind them, erupting in a rough line that matched Devseh’s footsteps.

He cast his eyes downward, watching the ground as the mammoth plodded on. Blood continued to trickle from some of the animal’s wounds, splashing to the lifeless earth in drips and spurts. Wherever the blood struck the ground, the scarlet grass fought its way up through the grey dirt and scattered bone.

It was an eerie, ugly sight, made even more uncanny by the hideous, writhing life displayed by the weeds. They were like bloody fingertips trying to claw free from a shallow grave. Dorgo shuddered at the image, trying his best to banish it from his thoughts.

‘You look troubled, warrior.’

Dorgo started as the soft voice intruded upon his grim imaginings. Soundlessly, Sanya had crossed the platform to join him at the side of the howdah. The confidence and arrogance of the sorceress, the bold superiority that she had lorded over her Tsavag companions since they had departed many days ago were gone. Once again, she had the haunted, frightened look that Dorgo had seen at the tomb.

‘Far less than you,’ Dorgo replied. He shook his head, making a contemptuous gesture at the patches of writhing weeds. ‘This is a filthy land,’ he said.

‘The Blood God’s touch hangs heavy here,’ Sanya said. Her eyes narrowed as she studied Dorgo’s face. ‘You can feel it too. The air is heavy with the Blood God’s malice and the Blood God’s hate. The earth lusts for blood, the sky screams out for pain.’ She pressed her hands to her head, pressing her long dark locks against her ears, and screwing her eyes shut in an expression of suffering. ‘This place knows we are here. It wants to destroy us, to devour our flesh, our souls.’

‘It will be cheated,’ Dorgo scowled. He spat into the grimy dirt below. A red weed poked up from the grey ground, but found spittle less sustaining than blood. It withered as quickly as it sprouted, leaving only a brittle yellow husk behind. ‘We did not brave the Barrens and defy the Seifan to add more bones to this desert.’

Sanya’s face twitched into a less than reassured smile. She turned away from Dorgo, watching as the huge mammoth continued its drive across the desolate grey earth. Bones crunched beneath its laborious steps, providing a strange accompaniment to its heavy, rasping breath. The Sul watched as a stretch of broken ground came into view, a region pierced by hundreds of tall, slender poles. Not poles, the sorceress quickly realised. Stakes. With that realisation, the sorceress understood that if this place was without name, it was not without history.

‘This is where it happened,’ she whispered in a voice subdued with awe.

Catching the woman’s tone, Dorgo took leave of his careful vigil of the retreating Barrens. There was little enough about this quest that was to his liking: the enormity of his task, the grave consequences for failure. Most of all, he disliked the company of the Sul sorceress. A witch was unpleasant enough to be around, a Sul one was worse. Even after their battle with the Seifan, Dorgo found himself watching Sanya for the smallest warning of treachery. He distrusted every display of emotion, and every trace of feeling in her voice. He disliked riddles, disliked challenges that went beyond strength and courage to solve.

‘Where what happened?’ Dorgo asked suspiciously. Sanya’s surprise seemed genuine, but he knew that the Sul wore their faces like the Muhaks wore their masks. It took a craftier mind than his to know for certain what was really going on behind the visible display.

Sanya ignored the caustic challenge in Dorgo’s question. She pointed to the field of stakes, to the broken ground beneath them. The litter of bones was heavier here, mixed with old pieces of crumbling armour and the splintered wreckage of axes and swords. Heaps of skulls, piled far too orderly to be some caprice of the elements, grinned at them from between the stakes.

‘This is where Teiyogtei Khagan brought his army down from the Wastes and into the Shadowlands,’ Sanya said, ‘where the great king led the Tong in battle against the Dolgans.’ She waved her hands at the piled skulls and the sinister, spindly wooden stakes. ‘The Dolgans were the first tribe to oppose Teiyogtei when he emerged from the Wastes, the first obstacle to his dreams of conquest and empire. The king’s horde met the armies of the Kurgans here in a mighty conflict that raged for a week and a day. When it was over, the Tong built mounds of skulls to honour Khorne for their victory. They cut down an entire forest and fashioned these stakes to stand over their offerings and upon each they impaled a Kurgan captured in the battle.’

The sorceress’s eyes were vibrant, feverish as she recounted the ancient slaughter, and Dorgo was reminded again that the Sul considered themselves the legitimate heirs of Teiyogtei as did each of the eight tribes of the domain.

‘When the last Kurgan was impaled,’ she continued, ‘the Tong built a great statue of bloodstone to honour their king, that he might forever watch over the battlefield he had won.’

‘Be sensible, witch,’ Dorgo scoffed. ‘Hundreds of generations have passed since Teiyogtei led my people down from the Wastes. How could sticks and bones endure for so long without collapsing into dust? It is a battlefield, I grant, but it has nothing to do with the king!’

‘Time is a deceit that does not exert its tyranny in the Wastes,’ Sanya snapped. ‘The gods decide what fades and what endures in the places that feel their touch. Mountains crumble while trophies offered to the Blood God remain through the ages. Who are you to question the power of the gods?’

Dorgo bristled at the woman’s scorn. Devseh was passing between the narrow ranks of the wooden stakes, snapping them as the beast pushed its bulk down the narrow path. Skulls fell from their stakes as the mammoth’s pounding footsteps disturbed them. Dorgo felt the menace, the eerie unseen hatred of the place, crushing down around him. He felt the mouldy touch of antiquity, the long ages since the crash of axe and shield had echoed across the plain. Still, he defiantly clung to his denial of Sanya’s claims.

‘If this is the battlefield, then where is the statue of Teiyogetei?’ he demanded.

Sanya had no need to answer his question. The broken wreckage of a great colossus was strewn at the base of the hill that Qotagir was guiding Devseh towards. The bloodstone from which it had been carved, at once both crimson and black, was sprawled across the grey earth like pools of frozen gore. Dorgo could see the snapped pillar of a leg, the jagged stump of an arm. The chest bore the familiar outline of lamellar armour worn by Tong khagans. The decapitated head was proud, its features powerful and stern, the spiked circle of the Blood-Crown stretching across its brow. Intact, it would have towered two hundred feet into the air. Now it was only so much rubble, dwarfed by the hill behind it and the bleached mound that loomed beside it.

Dread pawed at Dorgo’s heart as he looked upon that mound. It was a mountain of skulls, making the trophy piles beneath the stakes look like the work of children. Thousands, no, millions, of heads had been taken to build the morbid monument. The skulls of men, beastmen, giants and ogres, wolves and tigers, and beasts without number or name had been cast into the pile. Upon the forehead of each was branded the rune of Khorne, the fell symbol of the Blood God.

The icy crawl of fear made its way down Dorgo’s spine as he looked once more upon the shattered colossus of Teiyogtei Khagan. Broken into eight pieces, only one had been further defiled. Carved into the dark forehead of the statue was the crossbar symbol of Khorne.

Dorgo knew that he looked upon the work of the Skulltaker.

Qotagir urged Devseh to its knees some small distance from the toppled colossus. The mammoth snorted in protest, but did as it was told. Closer to the ground, Dorgo and the others riding in the howdah began tossing gear and supplies down from the platform. Their task completed, the Tsavags and their Sul ally followed the equipment, lowering themselves over the shaggy side of the mammoth and dropping the remaining distance to the grey earth.

There was no time to unfasten the howdah from the huge beast, and once the last of the passengers was clear, Qotagir goaded his charge to lie down on its side. Devseh gave no argument, slumping wearily against the ground. Qotagir tossed aside his goad-stick and rummaged around the packs of supplies for the ointments and salves that the expedition had brought with them. Even as the mahout rushed back to tend the mammoth’s wounds, Dorgo could see red weeds sprouting up all around the injured beast.

The Tsavags began to explore their surroundings, gazing with superstitious awe at the mound of skulls and the broken image of their ancient king. Dorgo called out to his men, snapping quick orders to keep them from wandering off. He sent Ulagan to climb the nearby hill. The scout had the sharpest eyes of any in the small band and would have the best chance of spotting any Seifan crossing the Barrens. The hunter wrapped his wormy arm around the haft of a long spear and set out at a jog for the pile of melted stone.

Dorgo watched the hunter for a space, and then turned away, walking towards the broken bulk of the colossus. Surely magic had gone into the construction of such a monument, for no mortal hand could build on such a scale. As he rounded the cracked shoulder of the statue, he found himself gazing upon a massive base of granite, the snapped feet of the colossus still thrusting up from the top of the cyclopean slab. Sanya was standing before the base, staring up at it with an expression of barely restrained terror. Dorgo wondered what her witch’s senses were telling her, what hideous vision her eyes alone could see.

Approaching the sorceress, Dorgo discovered that she was not gazing upon the statue and its granite slab. Set before the feet of the colossus was a single tall stake. Unlike the others that peppered the borderland, this one was made not of wood, but of bronze, its tip still wickedly sharp and cruelly barbed even after so many years. It stretched twenty feet into the air, and much of its length was caked in a crust of blood and filth. There was something sinister and ominous about this lone spike. Dorgo did not wonder that it had seized Sanya’s attention.

‘This is where the seed was sown,’ Sanya said, her voice trembling. ‘The king planted the seed of his ruin here.’

Dorgo nodded, understanding the woman’s fear if not her words. Looking at the bronze stake was like staring into the unblinking eyes of a zhaga, waiting for that cold gaze to betray the instant the giant lizard would strike, knowing all the while that it would never give any warning. The warrior felt every sense crying out in alarm, felt the lurking unseen danger of the borderland gathering around him. In some way he did not understand, the bronze stake was the focal point for all the evil of this place.

Dorgo reacted to the threat in the only way he knew. In one fluid motion, he tore his sword from his belt and brought the weapon crashing against the metal stake. He felt fire course through his arms as his blade struck the unyielding bronze. Darkness flared before his eyes, and a grinding shriek like the murmur of a murderous wind filled his ears. As he collapsed to the grey, dead ground, Dorgo felt his mind slipping away, vanquished from the lands and the time that he knew.

He could not explain how he knew he was still in the borderland. The miserable melted hills were no more, in their stead were mighty mountains with tree-lined slopes and strange snake-birds hovering around their summits. The earth was sandy, coarse and pallid beneath a bright, gleaming sun. The distant boundary of the Wastes was lost behind a billowing veil of scarlet smoke. The air was hot and dry, lacking the taint of blood and ruin. Dorgo knew he looked upon the borderland as it had been, long ages past.

A great host of warriors stood beneath the trees, bodies encased in armour of blackened iron chased with gold, leathery faces turned to the scarlet veil. They were Kurgans, drawn from the tribes of the Yusak, the Gharhars, Avags and the Tokmars, united beneath the wolf banner of the Dolgans, the mightiest host the Shadowlands had seen in a thousand years. Dreams of blood, visions of hate and slaughter had drawn them here, lured to this desolation by their hundreds and thousands to answer the siren call of hungry gods.

The words of shamans and seers had brought them to this place, but it was the will and power of one man, the Dolgan Zar Vrkas, that had forged the disparate warbands into an army. A hundred warlords had fallen to the Dolgan’s axe, but with each defeat the warriors of each chieftain had sworn their allegiance to the wolf banner.

The Kurgan host watched and waited all through the hot hours of the morning sun. They waited for the prophecies of their shamans to be fulfilled. They waited for the great horde that would emerge from the Wastes to test the strength of the Kurgans.

When the sun hung high overhead, the vigil was ended. A mighty horde exploded from the scarlet smoke, screaming their war cries, and chanting the names of their gods. As the dreams had foretold, the dreaded Tong had once more been unleashed upon the Shadowlands. They were as vast as an ocean, numbers beyond counting, stretching across the horizon: horsemen on shaggy ponies with fanged jaws and flaming eyes, infantry in armour of leather and bone and huge war mammoths that shook the earth. At their head rode a warrior wearing a helm of gold and a crown of crimson.

The Tong horde was like a crawling sea as it spread into the borderland. Even the Kurgan host was dwarfed by comparison, less than a pebble in the path of a titan. Some among the Kurgan host lost heart and turned to flee. Their fellows cut the wretches down to a man. Death was better than shame.

The Kurgans wheeled towards the slopes of the mountains, trying to use the broken terrain to counter the riders of the Tong, but the hulking warriors, encased in their mail of iron, covered the ground slowly. The riders were upon them before they had covered half the distance.

Behind the riders came the mammoths and after them the infantry in their armour of polished bone and boiled skin. The Kurgans fought with the vicious tenacity of doomed men, sparing no thought for survival or victory, devoting their efforts solely to the pursuit of carnage.

The battle did not last for the week and a day of legend, but when the Tong stood triumphant upon the field, not a man among the horde failed to appreciate how sorely their victory had been won. For each Kurgan slain, three of the Tong had spilled their blood on the sand. Hundreds of ponies and dozens of mammoths had been felled by the Kurgans before they were broken and butchered by the vengeful horde.

Almost to a man, for as Teiyogtei Khagan, the great king of the Tsavags, walked through the battlefield, his attention was drawn to one last scene of violence playing out on the field of slaughter.

A cluster of Tong warriors had surrounded a lone Kurgan, jabbing at him with their spears and swords. The Kurgan was a huge brute, towering over his tormentors. A breastplate of black iron encased his chest, and a heavy bearskin cloak hung from his back. Scars and wounds notched his arms and legs. His helm had been knocked from his head, exposing a scarred visage of wrathful defiance.

Even the king paused when he felt the Kurgan’s fiery eyes turn towards him. Those eyes promised death, and even with his horde all around him, Teiyogtei felt a tremor run through his body as he met that gaze.

The Kurgan roared, swinging the great axe he held in a wide, sweeping arc. A Tong spearman’s arm was split in two by the cleaving stroke, the swordsman in front of him slashed from thigh to rib. The Tong warriors spat vengeful curses on their foe, converging on him in a stabbing, thrusting mob. The battleaxe hacked through armour, chopped into flesh and crushed bone. Screams of agony replaced curses and shouts. The mob of warriors relented, recoiling from their awful foe, leaving five of their number maimed at his feet.

Teiyogtei knew that this could only be Vrkas, the zar of the Dolgans, leader of the Kurgan host. He pushed his way through his warriors, confronting the defiant zar. An awed hush swept across the battlefield as the Tong watched their king square off against the murderous Vrkas. Teiyogtei knew that this was the true challenge Khorne had set before him: not the massacre of an outnumbered Kurgan army, but the defeat of this mighty warrior, this man so terrible that he caused a king who had vanquished daemons to know fear.

Vrkas did not wait for the king to close upon him. The Kurgan rushed Teiyogtei, chopping at him as he emerged from the circle of warriors. The king narrowly dodged the blow, but the Tong warrior beside him was not so fortunate. The blade of the axe buried itself in the man’s chest. The dying warrior clutched desperately at the weapon that had killed him, bloody froth bubbling from his mouth.

Teiyogtei lashed out at Vrkas while the Kurgan’s axe was still enmeshed in the dying warrior’s body. The Bloodeater raked across the zar’s breastplate as he feinted to one side. With a display of raw, savage power, Vrkas ripped his axe free, flinging the dead Tong at the king. The body collapsed at Teiyogtei’s feet, tripping him up as he lunged again at the Kurgan.

Vrkas charged the unbalanced king, bringing his axe hurtling down in an overhanded stroke. Teiyogtei slid around the hurtling blade, catching the stroke along his shoulder instead of his head. Armour and skin were sliced away by the cleaving edge, blood spilling from the ugly gash. Vrkas recovered quickly, cracking the butt of the axe handle into Teiyogtei’s stomach as the king backed away. However, the lacquered armour protected the khagan, absorbing the brutal impact.

Teiyogtei swung his jewelled blade at the Kurgan’s face, driving him back as he lunged once more to the attack. Vrkas’s scarred face was made still more horrible as it twisted into a snarl of frustrated bloodlust. The king took note of his enemy’s fury and used it against him.

He swung the Bloodeater in a wide arc, a blow Vrkas easily parried with the haft of his axe, but the Kurgan was unfamiliar with the preternatural sharpness of the king’s daemon-forged blade. The haft of the axe splintered beneath the stroke, the wreckage of the weapon spilling from the Kurgan’s hands.

The king rushed the reeling Vrkas before he could recover. Again, the Bloodeater flashed out as Teiyogtei slashed at the man. This time the blade caught him in the side of the head. Had Teiyogtei struck him with the edge, he would have shorn Vrkas’s skull in half. Instead, the king caught him with the flat of the blade. Fiery eyes rolled back as the Kurgan fell to the ground, stunned by the bludgeoning impact.

Teiyogtei stared down at the insensible zar. No clean death for this one, this man who had made a king know fear. Tong warriors were already felling the forests to carve stakes for those Kurgans that had been captured during the battle. These wretches would be impaled, condemned to a slow, lingering death above the field of battle. They would allow Vrkas the dignity of his position as leader of the army. His stake would be higher than the others, forged of bronze instead of wood. There the zar would die, his body a ruin of pain and suffering, the gods weary of his cries for mercy.

Vrkas hung upon his stake for many days, his blood lubricating the shaft as it slowly worked its way through his belly and out through his back. Flies gathered around his wounds, vultures circled overhead, and jackals lapped at the puddle of gore beneath his lofty perch.

Any mind but that of the zar would have accepted death, would have welcomed its cold caress as a release from his pain. Something stronger than death, something stronger than life or flesh burned inside his heart. When, days after he had been impaled, the Tong horde continued its southward march, Vrkas used that inner fire, allowing its strength to flow through his wasted, maimed body.

Inch by agonising inch, Vrkas pulled himself up the stake, dragging the bronze spike through his body. It was more than mortal strength that fired his muscles and made him numb to his pain.

For an entire day, Vrkas worked his body up the gory shaft. It was night when he reached the top. Free from the stake, he let his wracked body fall to the ground, smashing into it with an impact that shattered half of his bones.

Hours passed before the broken wreckage began to move again, dragging itself across the bloody battlefield. Vrkas did not crawl south, after the lands of the Kurgans and the departed Tong. The fire that burned inside him, that sustained him, drew him north, towards the smoky veil. There he sensed an even greater fire calling out to him, a fire that burned with flames of hate and the need for revenge.

Vrkas’s hatred dragged him onwards, past the borderland, guiding him to that greater hate: the timeless rage of gods and daemons.

Sharp, biting pain pulled Dorgo from the ghastly vision of the past. Blood was oozing down his arm from a shallow cut puckering his flesh. Togmol stood before him, wiping his knife clean on his fur cloak. Dorgo reached for his blade, but froze as his foggy brain became aware of the sounds filling his ears: shouts and screams, the pained trumpeting of Devseh and something else, an abominable sucking sound like a child slurping dregs from a bowl.

‘You would not waken,’ Togmol started to explain, but Dorgo had already dismissed the hulking warrior from his thoughts.

He reached down and recovered his sword from the lifeless dirt, stunned to see the blade deeply notched where it had struck the bronze stake. Sword in hand, he started to race back through the jumble of bloodstone rubble, running towards the sounds of violence. Togmol called after him, the big Tsavag cursing lividly as he chased after Dorgo.

Rounding the broken head of the colossus, Dorgo found himself looking on a scene born from a nightmare. The loathsome red grass he had noted before had grown into huge, ten-foot tall stalks of oozing, writhing foulness.

Frond-like tentacles twitched around the tip of each stalk, each frond marked with slobbering, sucking mouths along its length. The huge weeds were all around Devseh, their tentacles canvassing the mammoth’s shaggy body, wrapping tightly across the beast and holding it fast. Devseh seemed to be visibly withering as the hellish plants gorged themselves upon its blood.

More hideous still were the smaller, shrieking bundles that twisted and struggled across the ground, trapped inside cocoons of tentacular vegetation. While Dorgo watched, a Tsavag warrior attacked one of the cocoons, hacking at it with an axe. Where the blade struck the leafy appendage, pulpy black syrup exploded, spraying across the grey earth.

Everywhere the filthy sap struck, bloody fingers of grass sprouted from the ground. They did not grow with the slow, eerie grace of their predecessors, but burst into full murderous size with a rapidity that was almost faster than the eye could follow. The warrior who thought to rescue his fellow was surrounded in an instant by slobbering, ravenous weeds that lashed at him with their slimy limbs.

The man fought against his hideous foes, but every blow simply spattered more sap across the ground, birthing more of the horrors. Soon, he was pulled down, his body criss-crossed by sucking, gnawing tentacles. Muffled screams struggled against the suffocating mass clapped around his head.

Dorgo started to rush towards his trapped tribesmen, but was restrained by a firm clutch upon his shoulder. He spun to find Sanya at his side. The Sul’s expression was grim, forbidding, her eyes as hard as chips of steel.

‘There is nothing you can do,’ she told him, her voice pitiless and commanding. ‘This land has claimed them.’

Dorgo pulled away, glaring at the sorceress. He fought down the impulse to strike her down, knowing that to do so would doom his people.

Seeming to read his thoughts, Sanya smiled. ‘If you die here, the last hope of your people dies with you. Throw your life away trying to save men who are already dead and you abandon the entire domain to the mercy of Khorne and the Skulltaker!’

The woman’s words ripped into Dorgo like the fangs of a viper, his agony all the more keen because her’s was the poison of truth. If he fell here, if the Bloodeater was lost, the Tsavags were lost with it. He had seen what the Skulltaker was. He knew there would be no mercy from such a creature, not for his people, not for anyone.

‘You’re not going to listen to the witch?’ Togmol demanded. He clenched a long axe in his fists, every muscle in his body twitching with the urge to attack. When Dorgo did not answer, Togmol cursed him and made to lunge past his leader. Dorgo caught him by the arm, spinning Togmol back around.

‘Don’t you think I want to attack that filth?’ Dorgo growled, his voice bristling with violence. ‘Rescue our kinsmen, or avenge them if they are dead? But the witch is right, we would be damning more than ourselves if we tried! The entire tribe is depending on us.’

Togmol cursed him again, spitting at his feet, but the big warrior made no further effort to charge into the writhing field. Like an angry panther, he stalked away.

Dorgo watched him, and then reluctantly turned back to face the weeds. The cocoons strewn across the ground were still, the fronds pulsing as they drained every last drop from their victims. Devseh was all but lost beneath a layer of leafy tentacles. Qotagir continued to scramble across the mammoth’s body, trying to cut away the foul appendages. His efforts were worse than futile, spattering more blood and sap across the ground, encouraging still more stalks to sprout from the earth. Dorgo felt even more sharply the guilt and self-loathing that his decision had forced upon him. There was no way to reach the old mahout, no way to rescue him from the bloodsucking weeds that surrounded him. Dorgo forced himself to turn away before Qotagir saw him. He knew that if he met the doomed man’s gaze, the memory would haunt him all his days.

They would find the Black Altar. They would remake the sword of Teiyogtei. The Skulltaker would pay for the men devoured by this filthy land. This Dorgo swore by all his ancestors and the one god who favoured oaths of vengeance and blood, the same god the Skulltaker served: Khorne.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Yorool knelt over the hairy, sallow-faced messenger, a thin-bladed knife in his warty hand. The shaman stared into the man’s quivering features, watching sweat drip down his face. The Seifan’s features were rough and evil, twisted with all the sneakiness and cunning characteristic of the tribes of the Hung. Blood crusted the man’s face, matting his slender beard. Thin threads of lizard gut pinched the Seifan’s eyes closed, rendering him as blind as the formless denizens of the Screaming Swamp.

With deft, practised strokes, Yorool cut the thread binding the messenger’s eyes. The Seifan blinked painfully as vision returned to him. He found himself standing within the savage splendour of Hutga’s yurt. Blinded, he had been conducted through the Tsavag encampment to his rendezvous with their chieftain. The Tong were taking no chances with the Seifan, ensuring that he could not bring back reports to his masters about Tsavag numbers and readiness for battle. If he dared to try to slip beyond the confines of the yurt, if his eyes once settled upon the size of the encampment, his hosts would cut him down. It was no less than any tribe would do once it had assumed a war footing. Centuries of strife and conflict had made even the slowest inhabitants of the domain cautious.

Hutga glowered at the wiry Seifan messenger, wondering at the purpose of his visit. In the days since the Bloodeater had been taken from the tomb of Teiyogtei, much had changed in the domain. There were stories of an attack against the Gahhuks, and reports of beastmen fleeing the Grey in great numbers.

The Vaan, it was said, were marshalling their armies. The balance of power in the domain was in turmoil such as it had not seen in many an age. Uncertainty was in the air, colouring the land as much as the gory doom promised by the Skulltaker. Hutga knew Enek Zjarr had been wise in his council. Dire as the threat of the Skulltaker was, even that grim champion of the Blood God was but one of many threats to their people.

Days had passed since his son had departed on his desperate quest to find the Black Altar and remake the sword of Teiyogtei, the only weapon to ever vanquish the Skulltaker. Hutga knew it was too soon to expect word from the expedition, but the knowledge did nothing to ease his fears.

The Wastes were a land of nameless horrors and unspeakable nightmare, where reality was bent and twisted by the whims of the gods. The ancestors of the Tsavags had called the Wastes home, had survived and even prospered in the forbidden world between the Realm of the Gods and the mortal coil. Many generations had passed since the Tsavags had come down into the Shadowlands, however. Time had worn them down, eating away at the fierce strength that had once been theirs. Now they were more like the Kurgans and the Hung than their Tong ancestors. Stronger perhaps, but Hutga wondered if any in his tribe were strong enough to endure the Wastes.

Perhaps it would have been best to accept fate and keep Dorgo with his people, to face the Skulltaker when he came, and to die with such courage as would not shame their ancestors. Then, at least, there would have been someone to see his son’s death. The thought of some lonely fate claiming Dorgo as he struggled across the Wastes was more forbidding to Hutga than any of his fears for himself and his tribe.

The khagan’s face curled into a snarl as the Seifan messenger abased himself before the chieftain’s throne. Hutga was not fooled by the man’s display of deference and humility. The Seifan were a sly breed, better than jackals when it came to sniffing out weakness, and the opportunity to glut themselves on easy prey.

‘I have neither time nor patience for the grovelling of worms. What brings a Seifan rat slinking into the territory of men?’ Hutga growled.

The messenger lifted himself from the hide rug stretched before the throne. He faced the chieftain, abandoning his fawning subservience. ‘Rat’, Hutga had called him, and there was something of the vermin about the sharp nose and narrow eyes of the man. Like a rat, there was a petty viciousness in the messenger’s gaze, the sullen fear of an animal that knows its enemy is too powerful for it to overcome.

‘I bring greetings and honour from the Seifan,’ the messenger bowed, ‘to our brothers, the mighty Tsavags.’

Hutga shifted in his throne, pulling the furs tighter around his chilled body. One of the iron nodules jutting from his forearm brushed against the arm of his chair with a dull metallic thump. As though he did not have enough to occupy him, from the discomfort of his flesh to the discomfort of his thoughts, he also had the unwanted irritant of hollow praise from a Hung to annoy him.

‘The Tsavag are no brothers of the Hung,’ Hutga said, his voice low with warning. ‘Our sons are not suckled by jackals, our men do not scurry around in the shadows like spiders. There is more valour in the bandy-legged ponies of the Seifan than there is in the craven swine who ride them. Call me “brother” again, cur, and Tulka will be looking for your head in the Prowling Lands.’

Hutga’s words made little impact on the messenger. On the whole, the Seifan were a people with too few illusions of pride to take offence at a man’s words. Only when he heard the name of Tulka mixed into the khagan’s abuse did the messenger react. His thin lips spread in a coy smile.

‘The mighty khagan has not heard then?’ the messenger asked. ‘Tulka is no longer kahn of the Seifan.’

Hutga leaned forward at the statement, heedless of any advantage the Seifan might find in his show of interest. The chieftain’s mind was afire with questions and fears. Had the Skulltaker struck again? Was Tulka’s head among the champion’s trophies? With each tribe the Skulltaker struck, Hutga knew that the time left to the Tsavags grew shorter, and the chances against Dorgo finding the Black Altar and returning became longer.

The messenger did not fail to appreciate the chieftain’s sharp interest. There was a sadistic mockery in the way he allowed silence to stretch after his report. ‘He was killed,’ the Seifan elaborated, noting that he most certainly had Hutga’s undivided attention. ‘A disagreement among the leaders of the tribe. Shen is our new kahn.’

Hutga’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. If the Skulltaker had struck, then there could be no new kahn, certainly not a legitimate one. It made sense for the Seifan to claim otherwise, that Shen had taken rule of his people in the manner laid down by tradition: Tulka, slain by his lieutenant, his heart cut from his body and eaten by his successor, the power of Teiyogtei passing into Shen. Yes, it made sense for the Seifan to profess such a deceit. Had they not been pillaging the lands of the leaderless Muhak with wanton abandon? It would also explain the reason a messenger had been sent to the Tsavags. Shen was trying to maintain the illusion of strength before rumours of disaster could spread.

‘You lie,’ Hutga told the messenger. Panic flickered across the messenger’s face, the despair of a liar caught in his lie. Strangely, the khagan’s next words dispelled that panic, instilling a new boldness in the Seifan’s demeanour. ‘Tulka was killed by the Skulltaker, not Shen. The Seifan are without a legitimate kahn, their lands and people free to be taken by those tribes still tied to the blood of the king.’

‘Shen is our kahn, as true as the flesh of Tulka. It is the Skulltaker who is the lie!’ hissed the messenger. ‘You are right to suspect deception, Hutga Ironskin, but it is not the Seifan who have betrayed you!’

Hutga rose from his throne, stalking towards the wiry Seifan. The smaller man retreated a step, and then a second as he felt the chieftain’s angry stare boring down on him. ‘Speak plainly snake,’ Hutga demanded. ‘I know the Skulltaker has returned to the domain. The Muhaks and Veh-Kung have already felt his blade, aye, and maybe the Gahhuks and beastkin too! Perhaps even the Seifan!’

The messenger stopped retreating. He thrust his sharp face forwards, like a weasel peeking from a hole. ‘Yes, the lords of the Muhaks and Gahhuks, the Veh-Kung and the warherd have been slain,’ he admitted. ‘The eyes of the Seifan are everywhere and they see much. Our scouts have seen the monster who struck down the tribes.’

‘Then you know that the Skulltaker is no lie,’ Hutga snapped.

‘The monster is real,’ the Seifan agreed, ‘but who has said it is the Skulltaker?’

A sick chill rushed through Hutga’s body, his eyes gaping as the enormity of the Hung’s suggestion struck him.

‘There are only the words of Enek Zjarr to tell us that this killer is the Skulltaker,’ the messenger continued. ‘Some may choose to believe the kahn of the Sul. Tulka did. Shen did not. It can be reckless to put faith where it does not belong.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hutga asked, trying to keep uncertainty from his voice.

‘I ask you, great khagan, which is more to be believed? That the Skulltaker, the same monster that was vanquished by Teiyogtei, has returned after so many generations? Or is the truth that someone, someone steeped in sorcery and magic, has called up some terrible daemon to strike down his rivals, hiding its true nature behind the myth of the Skulltaker?’

‘You say that the Sul are behind these attacks?’ Hutga asked, his mouth becoming sour with bile as he considered the enormity of such a deceit. The meeting of the chieftains, the violation of Teiyogtei’s tomb, even the expedition to find the Black Altar, were they all nothing more than elements in some grand scheme by Enek Zjarr?

‘Has this monster attacked the Sul?’ the messenger challenged in turn. ‘The Desert of Mirrors is closer to the lands of the sorcerers than those of the Gahhuks. Why did this monster not strike the Sul when it had finished with the Veh-Kung? Unless of course it had no intention of attacking them.’

Hutga digested the Seifan’s claim. It made for a cold, vicious logic. In the past, none of the tribes could prevail against the others. Too evenly matched, even when one was weakened, that very weakness would draw the others in to prevent the victorious tribe from gaining an advantage that could be used against them. An outside force, however, a murderous power that was beyond the tribes, a chieftain could exploit without fear of reprisal. It was just the manner of crooked scheme that would appeal to a Hung tribe such as the Sul.

The messenger watched the play of thought and emotion on the khagan’s features. ‘Shen seeks alliance with our bro… with the Tsavags, alliance against the Sul and their treachery. With the host of the Seifan joined with the war mammoths of the Tsavags, Enek Zjarr will be made to answer for his evil!’

It was the enthusiasm of the Seifan that rekindled Hutga’s suspicion. His excitement was too exuberant, his anticipation too keen for someone proposing war against the dreaded sorcerers of the Sul. In all the centuries known to the lore of the shamans, never had any army laid siege to the floating castle of the Sul.

No, it was something else that excited the messenger. If Tulka had been killed by the Skulltaker, if Shen was the false kahn Hutga suspected him to be, then the Seifan would want protection, the kind of protection an alliance with the Tsavags could offer.

Hutga shook his head. That was only one possibility. Another occurred to him, and the more he thought about it, the greater his suspicion grew. There was one tribe the messenger had failed to mention, one that he seemed to ignore completely.

‘What of the Vaan?’ Hutga demanded. Only because he was watching for it did he see the momentary flicker of anxiety cross the man’s face. ‘How do they figure into Shen’s plots?’ The chieftain’s voice dropped back into a simmering growl. ‘Shall I tell you, dung rat? The Seifan will ride with the Tsavags against the Sul. They will let my people do most of the fighting, let the blood of the Tsavags buy the victory. Then, when the Sul are destroyed and the Tsavags weakened, the Seifan will unleash their true allies, the Vaan, against us!’

‘You see plots where they do not exist,’ protested the messenger.

Hutga’s knobbly finger pointed at Yorool, motioning the shaman forwards. A slim Tsavag girl followed after the disfigured shaman, a wooden bowl resting in her hands, needle and thread resting in the bowl. The messenger blanched as he saw the two approach.

‘You ask me to distrust the Sul and in the same breath you ask me to trust the Seifan,’ Hutga snarled. ‘Both your peoples are Hung, and only a fool trusts the Hung. Tell Shen and Ratha that my people are not listening! I will not march the Tsavags to the slaughter! Tell your masters that if they want the blood of the Tsavags, they will fight to spill every drop!’

The khagan gestured and warriors converged on the Seifan, pulling him to the floor. Yorool bent over the prone captive, retrieving the thread and needle from the girl. Hutga slumped down in his throne, only half-hearing the messenger’s screams as the shaman sewed his eyes shut once more.

Ugly thoughts boiled behind Hutga’s lidded eyes. Thoughts of treachery and war played through the chieftain’s mind. The Seifan and the Vaan would not remain idle. Ambition had stirred them, ambition to seize control of the domain. They had set themselves against the Tsavags and the Sul. The Seifan might slink back into the shadows now that their gamble for easy victory was undone, but the Vaan would not let them. A course chosen, Ratha would not let his ambitions be frustrated merely because they required open war. Indeed, the Kurgan zar would relish the opportunity to win through force of arms what the deceits of the Hung had failed to capture.

The marshes were poor ground on which to fight the Vaan. Their numbers, their discipline and quality of arms would overwhelm the Tsavags and their mammoths in the sucking mire.

Against horsemen like the Seifan, the marshes were a defence, but Hutga knew they needed better ground to face the Vaan, somewhere that the greater numbers of the Kurgan could be contained and made manageable. He would move the tribe into the mountains, to the network of valleys and ravines called Ikar’s Refuge. There they could face the Vaan with some hope of victory. To stay in the marshes would mean a massacre.

His decision made, Hutga turned his mind to the Sul. Simply because he had seen through the Seifan scheme did not mean that he could discount what they had told him around the Sul. Was it possible that Enek Zjarr had called up the Skulltaker with his sorcery, that it was the command of the sorcerer not the will of Khorne that the monster obeyed?

Hutga did not know enough about magic to know what was possible and what was not. Against his better judgement, he had allowed his hope to be married to the words of Enek Zjarr. If it was all a lie…

He would send riders to the Sul. There were questions he would have answered. He wanted to know what Enek Zjarr would say about the Seifan claims. He would hear what speeches the sorcerer would make to reassure him. He needed to hear these things, to know if they were truth or lies. If they were lies, then Dorgo was trapped in those lies, a captive of the Sul as surely as if they had cast him into the dungeons of their fortress.

The smooth slopes of the stumpy hill made climbing difficult. There were no sharp edges to grip, no sure handholds to support a man’s weight. Every foot of the climb was a matter of luck and chance, with a long fall to the plain below as the price for relying too much upon capricious fortune. Even so, Dorgo preferred to take his chances on the reckless climb and the clean death of a broken neck to lingering upon the blighted plains of the borderland.

Filthy red grass continued to sprout across the ancient battlefield. Suckled upon the blood of their victims, the crimson weeds burst with loathsome life. Pulpy flowers bulged from their stems, spitting barbed spores into the sky. As the spiny spores drifted through the air, blood dripped from their spikes, staining the grey earth. It did not take long for new sprouts to burst from the ground in answer to the summons of the drifting spores.

Where the abominable plants had been clustered around the carcass of Devseh and the Tsavag warriors, who had fought to free the beast, now a crawling carpet of red weed was spreading throughout the plain. Dorgo could almost feel the vampiric hunger of the plants as he looked at them. Better a fall to destruction than the slow sucking death promised by the vile vegetation.

The warrior’s few remaining comrades shared Dorgo’s feelings and followed his lead up the slopes of the hill. Dorgo had only three following him: Sanya the Sul witch, the huge Togmol, and Ulagan the scout. Ulagan had not been present to observe the hideous struggle against the weeds, but he had been sufficiently impressed by the grave expressions of his tribesmen to accept their abhorrence for the plain. Ulagan had been the first to try climbing the smooth slope, attempting to reach the height to keep a watch for the Seifan. He had just given up on the attempt when he found Dorgo and the others rushing towards the hill. Their alarm convinced him that he should try again.

Long hours passed as the four survivors endured the dangerous ascent. The earth below them was alive with writhing crimson foliage, their wormy fronds quivering excitedly whenever a loose stone was knocked down the hillside. There was no illusion that it was anything but death to fall, but the prospect of a clean death of broken bones and shattered skull was in doubt. To fall, alive, into the trembling tendrils of the red grass was a thought that almost paralysed them all with fear.

No thought, beyond escaping the red grass, had driven Dorgo to start the climb. So it was with great surprise that, as his hand discovered an uncharacteristically flat and even shelf of rock and he pulled himself over its edge, he found himself on a level rise, staring into the yawning cavity of a deep cave. He waited for the others to join him before approaching the opening. There was a rank, evil smell drifting out from its depths. Dorgo was not certain what could be worse than the red grass, but he had little desire to find out.

The others shared Dorgo’s opinion of the cave when they joined him on the rocky shelf. Ulagan inspected the ground, finding scrapes and marks on the rocks that told him they were not the first to find this place. Whether whatever had disturbed the rocks was man or beast, Ulagan was unable to tell. That something had been there was all he could say.

Sanya crouched close to the ground, removing the daemon-finger talisman from her belt. The clawed digit flopped to the rocks where she dropped it. The woman’s voice fell to a spitting whisper, struggling with sounds meant for no mortal voice. The finger twitched in response to the sorceress, scrabbling against the ground as though trying to crawl towards the cave. Sanya smiled and recovered the grisly talisman.

‘What do you find to be so gleeful?’ demanded Togmol, glaring at the witch.

Sanya pointed to the cave, favouring Togmol with her most withering sneer. ‘Even a brute like you must appreciate our predicament. The plain has blossomed with the red scourge. To try to cross it would be certain death. To stay on this hill, however high we climb, is only to invite a slower death for want of food and water. Either way, we do not help our tribes against the Skulltaker.’

‘And you know another way?’ asked Dorgo. ‘Your magic has found a way past the weed?’

‘The talisman Enek Zjarr made will point the way to the Black Altar,’ she told him. ‘It cannot be deceived by time or distance, and will always point true. I have consulted the daemon’s spirit, asking it where we should go. You saw where it pointed.’

Togmol laughed, shaking his head. ‘It is a poor enough choice to listen to a witch,’ he said. ‘Now we would trust her daemons?’

‘It would not lie,’ Sanya said. ‘Only its finger is here with me. If the daemon were to betray me, it knows what the Sul would do to the rest of it. There are tortures which even a daemon can be taught to fear.’ She looked across at each of the men, waiting for them to agree. Slowly, reluctantly, Dorgo and Ulagan nodded their heads.

‘We can’t follow her!’ protested Togmol. ‘March blindly into that cavern! Anything might be lurking down there!’ He rounded on Ulagan, tugging at his arm, pointing at the scarred stones. ‘You said you had no idea what made those marks, whether man or beast!’ He released his hold on the scout and turned to Sanya. ‘The witch means to lead us into a trap!’ he accused. ‘Lure us into the jaws of some daemon’s spawn!’

‘Enough!’ growled Dorgo. Togmol’s protests were becoming more panicked and ridiculous with each breath. He wondered at the warrior’s unrestrained display of fear. Togmol was one of the most renowned battlers in the tribe, a man who had faced enemies countless times in combat. Even the red weed had failed to make the man back away, yet he was almost overcome with terror. It was something more than the cold, evil stink of the cavern, something more than fear of daemons and monsters. Dorgo tried to appeal to the faltering warrior’s reason.

‘If Sanya meant to deal us false,’ he told Togmol, ‘why wait until now? The Sul could have attacked us on the Barrens as easily as the Seifan, and much more effectively.’

‘I’m not going down there,’ Togmol insisted, backing away and shaking his head.

‘Let the coward rot,’ Sanya snarled. ‘I am the only one you need to guide you to the Black Altar.’

Dorgo spun around, glaring at the woman. ‘I’ve left enough men dead in this forsaken land, I won’t leave any more behind!’

Sanya scoffed at his outburst. ‘You should be thinking of your tribe, your women and children, the ones who will be destroyed if the Skulltaker isn’t stopped! Beside that, what do the lives of a few warriors matter?’

Dorgo clenched his fists. The witch was right, and he hated her for it. Togmol had been a friend since before he was old enough to hunt his first zhaga. Leaving Qotagir and the others to the red grass had been loathsome enough. Abandoning Togmol was something that made his flesh crawl. The lives of his entire tribe, the trust his father had placed in him, his friendship with Togmol could never overcome these things, but that understanding did not make it any easier to do.

‘Please,’ Dorgo said, appealing to Togmol one last time. ‘There is no other way.’

‘Go then,’ Togmol told him. ‘I won’t stop you, but I won’t go with you.’

‘The tribe is depending on us,’ Dorgo said. ‘Whatever might be down there, it can’t be worse than what will happen if we leave the Skulltaker free.’

Dorgo’s words seemed to reach through Togmol’s fear. For an instant, the big warrior’s jaw became set in a grimace of determination. He forced his body forwards, following Dorgo as he led him towards the cave. Then, as the mephitic smell washed over them, as the shadowy gloom of the cavern closed around them, Togmol’s resolve broke. The warrior turned and retreated back to the shelf.

‘No good,’ Togmol said. ‘I can’t go down there.’

‘We have to,’ Dorgo replied. Already Sanya and Ulagan had passed them, their outlines only dimly visible in the shadows that filled the cave. ‘There’s no other way.’

Togmol smiled, nodding his head in grim agreement. ‘I can’t follow you,’ he said, ‘not if Khorne’s hound was snapping at my back. The gods watch over you, my friend. Fix that gaudy bauble and when you sink it into the Skulltaker’s gut, tell the bastard that Togmol is waiting for him in the Hunting Halls.’

The gods watch over you as well, Dorgo thought as he turned and strode back into the cave. The evil stench of the place was overpowering, the shadows almost alive in their suggestion of malice. What feeble light existed within the cavern was provided not by the clean brilliance of the sun, but by the sickly green phosphorescence of glowing clumps of moss. The exact size of the cavern was difficult to determine, the roof lost somewhere in the darkness, the walls largely indistinct suggestions of shadow pockmarked with patches of luminescence.

The drip of water falling from stalactites echoed from the unseen walls. A furtive, scratching noise tugged at the edge of Dorgo’s hearing. The cavern played strange games with the sounds, making it impossible to tell if whatever made them was smaller than a rat or larger than a wolf. Dorgo was reminded of the indistinct marks on the shelf. Clearly, whatever had made them would be an inhabitant of this black netherworld. He fingered his sword, but could take no comfort in the cold metal in his hand. This close to the Wastes, there was no guarantee that whatever haunted the darkness would respect sharp iron enough to die when it was struck.

‘This way,’ Ulagan said, his faint whisper crawling into Dorgo’s ears. He could just faintly make out the scout, a dim shape where he blocked the luminescence of the glow moss. He thought he could see the hunter’s hand extended before him, a feather dangling from his finger. It was an old trick, used to find the direction of the wind. Here, in this black ever-night, Ulagan was trying to use the same system to discover a current in the air, a current that might lead them through the cavern.

Dorgo followed Ulagan’s lead, taking hold of Sanya’s arm and guiding the woman. He wasn’t going to risk losing her in the dark. Too much depended upon her. Too much had been lost just to bring her this far.

The current Ulagan followed proved to emanate from a broad-mouthed tunnel at the rear of the cave. The opening stabbed down into the hill at such a steep angle that they were forced to stretch their arms wide and brace themselves against the walls as they made their descent. Dorgo could still hear the furtive, slithering whispers, sounds that almost seemed more suggestion than observation. The evil stink of the place rose as the tunnel stabbed its way deeper and deeper. Dorgo was reminded of the zhagas of the Prowling Lands and their musky reek.

At last, the tunnel became reasonably level. Where before it had plunged straight into the hill, now it became a winding corridor, twisting and doubling upon itself in a maddening confusion of switchbacks and intersections.

Ulagan suddenly called a halt. Dorgo was uncertain why the scout stopped so abruptly. Then he saw where the man’s hand pointed. Glow moss littered the floor of the tunnel in heaps. Something had scraped it from the walls, creating patches of almost perfect blackness. The reptile stink was more pronounced as well.

Dorgo drew his sword, backing away from the sinister patches of darkness. Sanya caught his alarm. He could hear her fumbling among her amulets and charms. Ulagan lowered his spear, his ropy tentacle slithering around the haft to secure his grip.

The furtive, scratching sounds returned, and this time Dorgo knew that they were no trick of his imagination. He could hear something scraping against the earthen floor of the tunnel, something that took laboured, hissing breaths, something that came not only from the tunnel ahead of them, but from the passageway behind.

Yellow eyes winked open, shining from the nearest patch of darkness, reflecting the glow of the phosphorescent moss. Another set of eyes appeared beside the first, and then a third. Dorgo could see other eyes shining from further down the tunnel. The scrape of bodies surging down the passage behind them caused shapes to rush at them from the darkness ahead. Dorgo did not waste any effort trying to number their foes. It was enough to know that they were few against many.

Too many.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Snapping, snarling, hissing, the fiends of the dark fell upon Dorgo and his companions like a black tide of shadow. Dorgo lashed out with his sword, feeling the blade chop through something too soft to be human flesh, like cutting into boiled mutton. Runny treacle, stagnant and cloying, spurted from the body of the shadow he had struck, spattering his face with syrupy filth. Dorgo gagged at the revolting stench, the smell of spoiled fruit and sour wine. The ichor burned where it touched him, sending a fiery numbness through his face.

The haunters of the tunnel did not relent, surging over the ruin of their mangled kindred to close upon the stunned Tsavag. Dorgo rallied against the lethargy the smell of the creature’s treacle evoked in his limbs and in his mind. Through the warm, fuzzy cloud that closed around his thoughts, Dorgo imagined the vision of his people, of his father, being butchered by the Skulltaker. The hideous rune of Khorne flared from the helm of the Skulltaker, shining like sunfire in his brain.

It was Dorgo’s turn to snap and snarl and hiss. His blade flashed through the gloom of the tunnel, hacking and tearing into the delicate meat of the things in the dark. Bubbling cries, half-human moans of death and agony, echoed through the blackness. A flare of purple fire blazed from somewhere behind him and a new smell filled the passageway, the stink of something burning in its own fat and the rancour of scales crumbling into ash.

Dorgo heard Sanya gasp in fright, and he wondered what she had seen by the light of her spell. Then there was no time for questions as the nameless, hissing horde descended upon them once more.

There was something, some vile suggestion of speech and intelligence in the susurrus that whispered through the darkness. Dorgo had the impression of arms and faces striking at him from the shadows, felt crude clubs of bone crack against his mammoth-hide hauberk. He felt claws clutch at his hair, stumbled as something thick and wormy tried to coil around his leg. Fangs ripped at his arm, sinking deep into his flesh as they stabbed through his armour. How many had he cut down? It seemed to him like dozens, hundreds, yet still there were more. Were these degenerate things men? Were they even mortal?

Sanya’s voice rose in a piercing scream. Dorgo struggled to free himself from the clutching press of horrors clustered around him, clinging to him like flies on a carcass. Across from him, he could hear Ulagan struggling to do the same. It was more than their need for the sorceress, the desperate knowledge that without her the Skulltaker could not be stopped. The fact that she was human was enough to goad them on, to strive against the clawing mass of their numberless foes. Nothing human should be abandoned to such a fate.

Trying to reach Sanya was like swimming against the tide. Her screams became faint, distant as she was borne away by her attackers, carried off down one of the side passages. The effort had taken a terrible toll on the two Tsavags. Their bodies were masses of cuts and bruises, battered and clawed by the violent attentions of the things in the darkness.

With hideous clarity, Dorgo understood that the only reason they were still alive was because the things didn’t want to kill them. They had some other purpose, some vileness beyond ambush and murder in store for these men who had invaded their forbidden world. The realisation made Dorgo fight all the harder to free himself from the weak, wormy limbs that clung to him, trying to pull him down. His hand was an iron fist moulded around the hilt of his sword, defying the claws that strove to tear the weapon free.

Again and again, Dorgo felt his legs buckle, felt his strength ebb. His endurance was failing against the merciless assault, and he knew that soon he must succumb. He spat curses on his foes, damning them by gods and ancestors both. Raspy laughter hissed from the throng. They knew that their victory was at hand.

A fierce war cry roared through the blackness, drowning out the diseased mockery of the creatures. Dorgo’s flagging spirit lifted as he heard that piercing shout: a Tsavag war cry, the blood-howl of a Tong warrior. The shout was followed by the sound of metal sheering through flesh, and the whimpering moans of the things as their bodies were ripped apart by the avenging blade.

Dorgo felt the clinging grip around his limbs abandon its hold abruptly as first one and then all of his attackers retreated into the darkness. A rustling, crawling noise fled down the tunnel as the creatures slithered back into their holes. With the retreat of the monsters, the meagre illumination provided by the moss on the walls was able to reassert itself, no longer blocked by the bodies of the degenerate horde.

By the feeble light of the moss, Dorgo could see Ulagan leaning against the opposite wall, his spear a broken shaft around which his tentacle was coiled, his normal arm dripping from a grisly gash in his shoulder. The scout’s face was purple with bruises, one eye swollen shut. While he watched, Ulagan spat a tooth into the passage, and then stooped to recover it, fearful that some witch might collect it and use it to enslave his soul.

Dorgo did not need a mirror to know that he was in little better shape than Ulagan. He could feel every cut and bruise flaring with pain as he moved. Somehow, despite the beating they had suffered, Dorgo felt that their rescuer managed to look even worse.

Togmol stood almost in the very centre of the tunnel, his eyes so wide with fear that they looked like they belonged to an owl, not a Tsavag warrior. His breath came in short, hurried gulps, and his skin was so pallid that it was almost corpse-like. Togmol barely registered the presence of the men he had saved, looking instead at the walls and ceiling, turning his head in quick, panicked jerks. Finally, he dropped his broad-axe, slapping one palm against the wall and another against the ceiling of the tunnel. Veins popped out in his neck as Togmol exerted his tremendous strength against the unyielding stone.

Cautiously, Dorgo stepped over to Togmol, laying a reassuring hand on his shoulder. The warrior flinched at his touch. A flicker of reason edged its way into the fear-crazed eyes. He relented in his vainglorious effort to widen the narrow tunnel.

‘Our lives are yours,’ Dorgo told Togmol. ‘If you hadn’t come down after us, we’d be lost.’

Togmol only briefly glanced at Dorgo as he spoke. The warrior’s eyes kept straying back to the moss-splotched walls. ‘Find something else for me to kill before I regret the choice,’ he said, every word pushed through clenched teeth.

Dorgo nodded grimly. He could see how greatly being down in the narrow, suffocating tunnels was taking its toll on Togmol’s courage. Cheen the Deceiver, it was said, placed within every brave heart some terrible secret fear, a weakness that the god could exploit if ever he sought the man’s ruin. In the grip of his fear, every breath was an effort for Togmol, an ordeal the other Tsavags could only imagine.

‘Have a look at what you’ll be killing first,’ said Ulagan. The scout had draped a bunch of moss over the splintered end of his spear, fashioning a weird flameless torch. He held the improvised light over one of the creatures killed during the battle. It was nearly man-sized, lean and wiry with long thin arms that seemed almost boneless. The head was wedge-shaped, pulled into a flattened snout. Even in death there was a crazed depravity in the thing’s beady pink eyes. Slender curved fangs protruded from the wide mouth, while the nose was only a pair of holes set between the eyes. The body was a greasy grey, coated in fine scales that felt at once smooth and cold.

The first corpse Ulagan inspected lacked legs. Beneath the creature’s trunk was nothing but a snakelike tail as thin and wretched as the rest of its degenerate body. Others were more human in their form, though all were stunted and starved, gangrel things from some obscene world beneath the borderland.

The loathsome sight of the abominations impressed even Togmol, distracting him for the moment from the pressing closeness of the tunnel. Dorgo spat, his skin crawling with the knowledge that such creatures had touched him.

‘We might have to fight more of them to get out of here,’ Ulagan warned, noting the disgust on Dorgo’s face.

‘We will fight more of them,’ Dorgo agreed, his voice sharper than steel. ‘They’ve taken Sanya. We have to get her back.’

Ulagan cursed, kicking the ophidian skull of the closest creature. ‘Harpies take that witch!’ the scout snarled. He pointed to the passageway behind Togmol. ‘The snakes took her down there.’ He turned and stabbed his finger in the other direction. ‘The current is coming from that way. Let the worms keep the Sul slut!’

Dorgo stalked towards the scout, grabbing his hide tunic and pulling him close. ‘No one is running,’ he growled. ‘The life of the tribe depends on us bringing back a weapon that can kill the Skulltaker. To do that, we need Sanya!’

‘How do we do that?’ Ulagan returned, shaking free of Dorgo’s grip. ‘The animals scattered in every direction when they fled! How do we find the ones that took the witch?’

‘They didn’t scatter in every direction,’ Togmol said. ‘None passed me when I attacked.’ Ulagan scowled as Togmol spoke, but Dorgo failed to appreciate the importance of his words. ‘If any of them withdrew back down the tunnel, they did so before I arrived,’ he explained. ‘The only ones that would have had cause to do so would be the ones carrying off a captive.’

The explanation brought a flicker of hope to Dorgo. He turned back to Ulagan, gesturing at the floor of the tunnel. ‘Some of them were wounded. You can follow their trail?’

‘The way out is the other way,’ protested the hunter.

‘If we do not find Sanya, there is no way out,’ Dorgo corrected him in tones colder than the murk of the tunnel.

Hutga looked across the valley behind him at the assembled warhost of the Tsavags: nine-hundred warriors and their families, over a hundred full-grown mammoths and a dozen more too old or too young to bear the tribe. It was a gathering that had been drawn from every encampment across the territory of the tribe, a gathering such as had not been seen since before the days of Hutga’s great-grandfather when the dragon Kohba had invaded the domain. Many were dead before the dragon was brought down, and long was the mourning.

He hoped this gathering would not have such tragic echoes, or perhaps he hoped it would. For there to be tears, there must be men to shed them. That meant that the tribe would survive. It was survival that they were fighting for, survival against a force that the Seifan and Vaan were too foolish to see. There had been a Skulltaker. He had been the ruin of Teiyogtei Khagan, the greatest scourge to ever strike against the domain and the people of the Horde. He had returned, returned to claim those who had taken the flesh of Teiyogtei, who wore the tatters of his crown.

The valley of Ikar’s Refuge backed into the mountains, into passes only the Tsavags knew. The tribe could fend off even the army of the Vaan for months if they had to. It would be a hard fight and many of the old and the young would die from the privations they would be forced to endure. Holding off the Vaan would not be the problem. Beating them was the problem.

The khagan sighed as his tired eyes scanned the horizon. Where were the Sul? The messengers he had sent to the sorcerers had returned. They had promised to aid their allies, to meet them at Ikar’s Refuge. With the magic of the Sul, the Tsavags could beat the Vaan and the Seifan. Retreating into the barren passes would be unnecessary.

A shout came up from the lookouts at the mouth of the valley. Hutga started, leaning forwards on his throne as he saw the men scrambling down from their perches among the rocks. Before they could finish their descent, black shapes swooped down on them from the darkening sky: furies, called up by the black magic of the Seifan. The Sul had waited too long to bring aid to their allies.

Hutga roared at his tribesmen, ordering everyone to climb into their mammoths’ howdahs. War was upon them sooner than they had expected. Men hurried to load their families onto the platforms of ivory and wood. Ropes were cast down, and food and water pulled up onto the backs of the huge shaggy beasts.

Hutga scowled at the confusion. Men who fought fearlessly could still know panic when the lives of their women and children were in peril. He wondered if it would have been better to send them ahead into the passes, but realised that leaving them undefended would be an even worse burden to place upon his warriors. The Seifan were a slippery enemy, one that could be anywhere.

Hutga’s mistake had been believing that the Hung would not attack without their Kurgan allies. Craven scavengers, he had expected the Seifan to wait until the Vaan could march with them. He had not reckoned upon them acting alone.

Riders appeared at the mouth of the valley. Hutga could see the horsehair standards of the Seifan rising over the host: hundreds of horsemen, dozens of scythe-wheeled chariots. Shen, or whoever was master of the Seifan, had mustered the entire tribe for war. Hutga spat as he saw the Hung assemble. For all their tricks and bravado, the Seifan were overly bold. Numerous as they were, they did not consider the strength of the Tsavags. Each of Hutga’s warriors was worth five of the cringing jackals of the Seifan. Each of the Tong’s mammoths was worth a hundred of their horsemen. It had been too long since the Seifan had faced Hutga’s people in open battle. The Hung would pay for their inexperience.

The boom of drums thundered across Ikar’s Refuge, and the roar of bronze horns echoed from the heights. The riders of the Seifan drew aside, making way for the marching columns of their allies. A crawling carpet of black armour surged into the valley, skull-tipped banners flying above their massed ranks: the Vaan, in the past, a force mighty enough on its own to unite the tribes of the domain against it. Now, that balance was broken. Ratha smelled the long-frustrated destiny of his people in the wind.

Hutga cursed as he climbed up the side of his war mammoth, abandoning his throne in the grass below. He had underestimated the cunning of the Seifan. Even as they sent their messenger to him, the Vaan had been on the march, near enough to support their allies when Hutga rejected their treacherous scheme.

Perhaps that had been their intention all along, to goad Hutga into gathering his people into one place where they could be vanquished in one fell swoop.

Retreat into the passes was a bitter choice. The Seifan riders would be able to overtake the mammoths in the short run. Giving battle to the Seifan would cost the Tsavags time, time that the Vaan would use to bring up their warriors. Hutga thought little of the fighting abilities of the Seifan, but he knew better than to dismiss those of the Vaan. Fighter for fighter, they were the equal of the Tsavags, Hutga conceded bitterly. Vaan spear-launchers would reek havoc among the mammoths, and with the Seifan cavalry to cover for them, it would be desperate work to fight a path to the fiendish Kurgan weapons.

Hutga cast his eyes to the heavens and cursed again. Where were the Sul? The sorcerers had just as much to lose from a Vaan victory as the Tsavags. Ratha would spare nothing to destroy his most hated rivals, and with the Tsavags defeated, there would be nothing to prevent him from bringing the full fury of his tribe against Enek Zjarr.

Hutga shuddered as he suddenly considered why the Sul hadn’t come. It need not be treachery. Perhaps they didn’t come because they couldn’t come. Perhaps the sorcerers had abandoned their allies because they were beset by a worse foe.

It was too much to believe that a small thing like war would make the Skulltaker idle.

A gigantic cavern yawned below them, stretching it seemed to the edge of the world. Forests of glowing moss dripped from the walls, and hung from the ceiling in drooping clumps. A great river of black water crawled through the cavern sluggishly, gurgling loudly as it dropped into a deep pool, a sunken lake that sprawled across hundreds of yards at its widest point. It was from the lake that the cold, rancid smell of primordial evil emanated, filling the tunnels with its corrupt stench. A fell luminescence shone from far beneath the black waters, a soft dim light that was at once alluring and repulsive.

Above the rush of subterranean waters was another sound, a tumult to chill the blood of even a Tsavag warrior. It was a hissing chorus of debased voices raised in a slithering chant, like a nest of vipers singing praises to their reptilian gods.

By the glow of the moss, the men could see a vast throng of pale, scaly things writhing and swaying to the discordant harmony of the chant. Gazing upon it was like looking at a leprous sea of deformity and corruption, an idiot ocean of abomination and degeneracy. Had these things been men once? It was a horror to strike loathing into any man’s heart.

The gods were capricious in their gifts and terrible in their wrath, yet to see such evidence of their horrific power as these snake-men was as humbling as it was terrifying.

Dorgo steeled his heart, gesturing beyond the swaying, hissing mass of snake-men to the crude altar beyond them. Cut from some sickly green stone, veined with strange ores of purple and alabaster, the altar was crafted in tremendous proportions. Twenty feet high, nearly twice as long, it looked as though it had been carved by giants.

Strange, twisted shapes adorned its sides, crude inhuman figures that cavorted around the altar in scenes of grotesque lasciviousness. The carvings leered out from the stone, mocking, enticing, daring those who gazed upon them to look away.

Lashed across the top of the altar, looking as tiny as an infant upon the oversized stone, was Sanya. Her cloak and raiment had been torn away, leaving her body bare before the serpentine eyes of her captors. Two snake-men, hideous in their deformities, sat upon the altar beside her. Each held a hollowed skull in its hand, into which they dipped their scrawny claws. When the claws emerged, they were stained black with oily pigment. Carefully, hissing their vile litanies, the serpent-creatures painted crawling runes on Sanya’s skin, consecrating her flesh in some abominable rite.

‘Waste of a good woman, even if she is a stinking backbiting Sul,’ swore Ulagan. ‘But that puts an end to it. There must be hundreds of them down there!’

‘These things fight like rats,’ growled Togmol. ‘I won’t run from vermin.’ The big warrior was a little more at ease in the vast cavern, though he still cast suspicious glances at the rocky roof overhead.

‘Vermin or men,’ Dorgo snarled, ‘we can’t let them keep her.’

Ulagan glared at his companions, incredulous at what he was hearing. His tentacle-arm twitched angrily around the splintered length of his spear. ‘We don’t have a choice!’ he snapped. ‘There’re three of us and an entire mountain of these things! You say we need to rescue her or we’ll never find the Black Altar. I say how will we find it if we’re dead!’

‘Togmol is right,’ Dorgo said. ‘These creatures are poor fighters, no match for men.’

‘They did a fair job in the tunnels,’ protested Ulagan.

Dorgo’s eyes turned from the altar-stone and the swaying snake-men. The three Tsavags had entered the cavern through a narrow passage that opened upon a shelf of rock. The shelf overlooked the cavern like a balcony, projecting some distance into the vast chamber. Unlike the slopes of the hill above this underworld, the walls were rocky and jagged, offering easy handholds for anything less twisted in shape than the snake-men. Whether because they feared no enemy in this holy of holies or because they were unable to descend from the shelf, the snake-men had placed no sentries. Every degenerate in the cavern was focused upon the obscene ritual.

‘That is because they surprised us,’ said Dorgo. ‘This time we surprise them.’ He did not give the scout time to voice new protest, partially because he feared Ulagan’s words might sway him from his purpose. For all his brave words and display of self-assurance, Dorgo had few delusions about their chances. Still, the gods sometimes favoured the hopeless, at least if they were bold in their rush to self-destruction.

Dorgo scrambled down the jagged cavern wall like some toe-clawed zhaga. His grip failed him before he reached the floor. The warrior braced himself, falling the final ten feet. He could feel the impact in his bones as his feet smacked into the rocks below, his knees buckling as they absorbed the shock. The instant of numb confusion quickly passed, and in a flash his sword was back in his hand, his eyes glaring at the reptilian throng. Whatever noise his violent descent made, it was lost in the hissing chant of the snake-men.

A clatter of stones and curses announced the end of Togmol’s descent. The big warrior landed in a jumble of limbs and obscenities, his broad-axe clattering across the rock floor. Embarrassment more than pain coloured Togmol’s face as he rose from the ground and scrambled to recover his axe. Even the din caused by his fall had failed to impress itself upon the snake-men. Dorgo stared in disbelief at the creatures as they continued to sway and hiss. The things had to be deaf not to have heard Togmol fall!

By contrast, Ulagan landed on the ground with a grace and silence that shamed his companions. The hunter rolled his eyes as he watched Togmol jog back from recovering his weapon, and then turned towards Dorgo. ‘I still say this is madness,’ he whispered.

‘Put as much energy into killing as complaining and we’ll do all right,’ Dorgo told him. He gestured with his sword at the swaying, serpentine shapes. The throng was only a hundred yards from them, yet they hadn’t shown the slightest sign of noticing the men. Maybe they weren’t deaf. Maybe they were so mesmerised by their ritual that they were oblivious to everything else. Either way, the snake-men would regret their lack of caution. ‘These worms won’t know we’re here until we send a few heads rolling across the floor.’

‘What then?’ Ulagan challenged. ‘You don’t think we can kill them all, do you?’

‘No, but I’ll have fun finding out,’ growled Togmol. He cast one last, worried look at the ceiling overhead, and tightened his grip on his axe. A bellowing roar erupted from the big man’s lungs and he charged towards the snake-men.

Dorgo grinned at Ulagan, happy that the die had been irrevocably cast. There was no more time for thinking, for weighing every decision, for considering every move. There was only carnage and the feel of flesh beneath his blade.

‘You heard the man!’ he shouted at the scout. Dorgo’s feet pounded against the uneven floor as he raced after the charging Togmol.

Even as Togmol rushed at them, the snake-men gave no sign of reaction. They continued to hiss and sway, writhing in the throes of some debased fervour. The Tsavag was upon them, his axe cleaving through a wormy neck to send its wedge-shaped head flying through the gloom. The things around the butchered reptile gave no notice to the slaughter, but continued to hiss and sway.

A second snake-man was cut down, and then a third. Dorgo was among the monsters, his sword stabbing through the buttery flesh of the abominations. Ulagan howled the death chant of the Tsavags, thrusting the ruin of his spear into scaly backs, and raking the edge of his weapon across sinewy necks.

A dozen or so of the reptiles were cut down before Dorgo became aware of the scent. Sweet and seductive, at once horrible and wondrous, it drowned his senses. His head swam and his eyes watered. He heard the dull clatter of metal against stone as Togmol’s broadaxe fell from his slackened grip.

Ulagan crumpled against the ground, shuddering in the clutch of some ecstatic fit. Dorgo fought to tighten his hand around the hilt of his weapon, but he could feel it slipping through his numb fingers.

The snake-men upon the altar had finished painting their slithering sigils upon Sanya’s skin. They looked down upon her would-be rescuers, a hollow amusement shining from their cloudy eyes. The strange power that held their kindred, the terrible force that exerted itself against the Tsavags, did not seem to affect these two.

Priests or sorcerers, the foul power did not hold them within its coils of desire and devotion, mindless slaves to their ardour. One of the snake-shamans took notice of Dorgo’s efforts to retain hold of his weapon. The observation increased its cruel amusement. Its claw began to glow with a pearly light and as it swept its talon through the air, a burning rune was scorched into the emptiness above the altar. It was a sign that Dorgo knew: the horned sun, the mark of Shornaal, the Prince of Forsaken Delight, the Great Tempter.

Like all of the greater gods, Shornaal was a force to be feared as much as worshipped. He could destroy a man from within, using his secret desires, the denied passions of the flesh to corrupt and overwhelm. A mighty warrior became drunkard, lecher, root-fiend and worse under his consuming touch. Old joys faded into bitterness, old pleasures became empty as those bearing his mark forced themselves ever further to find new experiences to replace the small delights that no longer stirred their spirits.

Shornaal promised much to those who bent their knee before him and abandoned all other powers, but in return he demanded everything. Debased and vile, the snake-men had found the final foulness wearing the chains of Slaanesh.

Dorgo felt the god’s seductive power flooding through him, the burrowing whisper of Shornaal’s voice in his mind. Mocking promises, enticing lies, and a thousand depraved images called out to all the vileness in his soul. The warrior could almost feel his soul being leeched from his body as it reached out to the phantom delights of Shornaal’s hollow kingdom. Dorgo forced what little remained of his will into his hand, into the slackened fingers that still brushed against the hilt of his sword.

His arm hung limp at his side, the sword dragging against the ground beside him as he stumbled towards the altar and the black pool beyond. With every rock it scraped against, every faltering step, the sword threatened to spill from his numbed touch. Dorgo knew that if he lost the weapon, he lost his only anchor to reality, his only protection against the sweet lies of the voice crawling through his soul.

The luminescence in the pool began to grow more vibrant, as though something was rising from the black depths of the subterranean lake. It burned with the same pearly light that had surrounded the claw of the snake-man, and as it rose, Dorgo felt the seductive perfume of the cavern grow stronger and the words and urges of the voice grow fierce and demanding. The hissing chant of the snake-men became a deafening susurrus, their swaying contortions frenzied.

The black waters of the pool bubbled and boiled as the light continued its rise. Dorgo’s entranced march had brought him past the altar, past the gloating serpent-priests and their captive. He felt the icy water of the pool splash against his feet, yet even this sensation, the knowledge that some loathsome doom was about to consume him, could not break the siren-spell that held him.

Blindingly, the light burst from the depths. It was light without form or shape, burning like some carnal star in the dark below the world. Water crashed around it, swirling in a spout of violence and fury. If the light was without shape, the tempest was not. Wraithlike, bodies took form within the coils of the tempest, contorting and writhing in lascivious obscenity, a spectacle of revulsion born from the madness of a depraved god. These were the spirits of those trapped by the lies of Shornaal, bound forever in the emptiness of their corruption.

The swirling water spout rose from the pool, wrapping itself around the shapeless luminescence. Tighter and tighter, faster and faster, the water and the spirit-shapes bound within it closed around the light, binding it within a shell of foulness. The light infused the waters, leeching the darkness from them, turning them from black to yellow. The liquid shape became firm, solid, a thing that looked to Dorgo to be flesh and bone. With horror, he realised that this thing was not unknown to him. Many terrible daemons were recorded in the legends of the Tsavags, but none so foul as Ya’sheen, the Yellow Worm.

It was more serpent than worm, a great viper with six eyes of glistening pearl and a vast body, smooth and shiny with slime. What Dorgo thought were knots of purple veins showing beneath the daemon’s smooth flesh proved to be the writhing figures of its slaves, locked in their unending abominations. The daemon’s face was pulled into a tapering snout, narrow and somehow insect-like. A great, lash-like tongue oozed from the thing’s toothless mouth, flicking through the darkness.

The tongue of Ya’sheen flashed across the water. Dorgo felt its sting against his cheek as it whipped around his head. The oily, slimy evil of the thing made his flesh crawl with foul excitement. He could actually feel the envy of the snake-men, the resentment of Togmol and Ulagan, that he had been embraced by this living fane of Shornaal. Dorgo knew he was lost, knew he was damned, and knew that he did not care.

The wetness of the daemon’s tongue slithered through his hair, down his face. He felt its dampness against his mouth, against his eyes, against his mind. Thoughts and memories drained out of him as the daemon drank them, savouring every experience that had marked his young life. He saw his first love vanish into the daemon’s hunger, and the face of the first man he had killed devoured by the daemon’s appetite. Every meal, every smell, every touch, all of it faded into the Yellow Worm’s lust.

Then the daemon shuddered. Dorgo could dimly see the twin rows of eyes on Ya’sheen’s head darken, fading from pearl to amber. Beads of crimson trickled down its ophidian face, tears of blood. The tongue, once so warm and enticing became dry and leathery. It recoiled from Dorgo, shooting back into the daemon’s tapered snout. He felt his memories crash back into his mind. First among them was the one that had struck the daemon with such horror. It was the memory of a lone warrior with a skull-faced helm and bronze antlers that formed the rune of Khorne.

The returned memory was clouded by the perception of Ya’sheen. Where Dorgo had seen a man, the daemon had seen the power within. Dorgo could see a great shadow surrounding the Skulltaker, and a ravenous hunger that made the appetite of Ya’sheen tawdry by comparison. There was rage and fury and havoc, and the iron stamp of terror and carnage. Now Dorgo understood. He knew what it was that hunted his tribe.

Slackened fingers became a fist of steel around the hilt of his sword. No longer did the seductive musk of the Yellow Worm hold him in its clutches. That power had been burned from his mind by the image of the Skulltaker. Before the wrath of that power, the fury of Khorne, all the lies and promises of Shornaal were but wisps and illusions.

The Yellow Worm reeled from the hostile force it had drawn into itself. A thing of emotion and thought, the memory it had drawn from Dorgo was more deadly than any blade. The daemon did not bother to discard its shape, to become once more a thing of light and shadow. It sank back into the depths with shameless abandon, the clinging stink of its terror filling the cavern.

Dorgo spun as something launched itself at him from the side. His sword crunched through the breast of one of the serpent-priests. The creature scrabbled madly at him as its syrupy blood bubbled from its chest. Dorgo ripped his weapon free as the dying monster flopped into the turbulent pool, sinking after its fleeing god.

All around the cavern, the hissing chant of the snake-men had been broken. A cacophony of fear echoed from the glowing walls, the near-mindless terror of degenerate horrors that had forsaken the right to be called men. Bound body and soul to the seducing musk of the daemon, they were similarly consumed by the daemon’s fear. A slithering, wailing mob scattered into the gloom, pursued by the vengeful blades of Togmol and Ulagan. The routed snake-men offered no resistance to the Tsavags. It was butchery, not battle.

Dorgo leapt up the uneven blocks of stone that formed a crude stairway behind the altar. Alone of the snake-men, the priests had been immune to the numbing perfume of their god. So too had they proven immune to Ya’sheen’s terror. One had ended its life gamely on Dorgo’s blade. The other moved with more cruel purpose in its mind. It had guessed why the men had invaded its sanctuary, what they had hoped to accomplish. It did not know how Dorgo had hurt its god, but it knew how it could hurt Dorgo.

The serpent-priest was poised above Sanya, a dagger of bone in its hand. The thing turned its head in the warrior’s direction, its scaly lips pulling back in a contemptuous sneer of hate. Dorgo despaired as he saw the monster’s arm sweep downwards, striking for the woman’s pale breast.

The bone dagger never struck. Before it could sink into Sanya’s heart, a blaze of sapphire light gathered around the snake-man’s head. The snake-man seemed to soak up the burning light, absorbing the blue brilliance into its skull. An instant later, the skull exploded, splashing blood and brains across the altar. The priest’s body collapsed against Sanya, twitching and writhing as life drained out of it. Dorgo kicked the squirming carcass off the woman, watching as it fell over the side of the platform.

‘Get me free!’ snarled Sanya. The sorceress tugged at the strips of scaly hide that bound her to the stone. Dorgo smiled at the woman. For a moment, he was almost able to forget that she was both a Sul and a witch.

‘I’ll look better with this filth washed off me,’ Sanya complained, scowling at him.

Dorgo’s sword slashed through the thongs, freeing her arms. He left the legs for her to see to. He pointed to a disordered heap lying beside the altar, the jumbled pile of her clothes and equipment.

‘Your belongings are over there,’ Dorgo said, turning his back on Sanya. He started to climb down, to catch Togmol and Ulagan before they chased the snake-men too far into the tunnels.

‘Sanya?’ he called out. He looked back and saw the woman watching him. There was something uncomfortable about her expression, and he reminded himself again that she was a Sul.

‘If you take a bath, I’d advise against dipping into the pool,’ he said, and then hurried to find his kinsmen. Facing all the snakes under the mountain was safer than the things he was turning over in his mind.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hutga could see the enemy forces fall into formation as they marched into the valley. From his vantage point high in the howdah of his mammoth, he watched in brooding silence as the Seifan horsemen and Vaan infantry manoeuvred through the narrow gap between the hills.

The presence of the Seifan riders meant that he could not withdraw into the maze of passes deeper in the mountain range, a rearguard would need to stay behind to keep the horsemen at bay while the rest of the tribe lost themselves in the labyrinth. Once in the passes, the Tsavags could fight the running battle that Hutga had envisioned when he brought his people into Ikar’s Refuge, but to do that, they had to hold the Seifan back long enough to allow such an escape.

The Seifan spread out across a wide front. A small number of chariots were scattered along the centre and right flank, a ploy to gull Hutga as to where the Hung were concentrating their strength. With his view of the enemy deployment, he could see the heavy numbers of war chariots gathering behind a loose screen of cavalry on his left. Unused to fighting the Tsavags and their mammoths, the Seifan kahn didn’t appreciate the better view of the battlefield the height of the towering beasts afforded the Tong. He would learn soon enough, Hutga thought, snapping orders to his warriors, redeploying his men to meet the brunt of the Seifan attack.

Hutga saw something else the new kahn had failed to take into account. The infantry marching forwards to support the Seifan were light skirmishers, warriors with much poorer armour and arms than the regular Vaan force. He could see the muscle-swollen masses of Muhaks and the tattooed faces of Gahhuks among the skirmishers.

Ratha wasn’t committing his best troops to the fight, he was sending forward the dregs of his army: slaves, prisoners and refugees. The heavy troops, the true fighting force of the Vaan was hanging back, moving into the valley at a snail’s pace, content to allow the Seifan and the conscripts to draw further and further away.

The Seifan weren’t the only ones with a mind towards treachery. Zar Ratha was too cagey a warlord not to see an opportunity when it presented itself. He saw the coming battle as a chance to rid himself of both the Tsavags and the Seifan. He would let the Hung engage the mammoth riders and bear the brunt of the fighting. Deceived by the presence of the skirmishers, in the thick of battle the Seifan would not realise until too late that the Vaan army was not with them. Even if they did realise Ratha’s strategy, it would be too late. The Seifan would be trapped between the iron wall of the Vaan line and Hutga’s mammoths. There would be no escape for the Hung.

Hutga knew, then, that Ratha’s skirmishers would start the battle, seeking to force the Seifan into action before they had any opportunity to discover the zar’s ploy. The Vaan would allow the Tsavags and Seifan to slaughter one another, and then sweep forward in a wall of iron to cut down the exhausted victor.

With their spear-throwers and long axes, and the devilish tactic of scattering iron caltrops across the battlefield, the infantry of the Vaan would be the true fight ahead of Hutga’s mammoth riders. A war mammoth was, at its core, a weapon of terror, depending as much upon the panic it could inflict upon an enemy’s ranks as it did upon its immense size and strength.

Looking out upon the sea of blackened iron that was Ratha’s army, Hutga could not imagine the formidable force shattering like some ill-disciplined rabble. Iron resolve was the weapon in Ratha’s arsenal that the Tsavags had to fear more than any other.

Yet, even as Hutga looked upon the imposing army, he saw confusion rear its head among the rearmost ranks. Warriors scattered, pressing back into the valley, pushing the forward ranks deeper into Ikar’s Refuge. Shouts of alarm and, yes, fear, sounded from the rearguard, drowning out the furious commands of war chiefs and officers. Something had happened; some new threat had emerged to sow disorder among Ratha’s disciplined troops.

Hutga dared to hope that Enek Zjarr and the Sul had finally arrived. Striking at the rear of the Vaan, Ratha would be trapped, caught between the mammoths of the Tsavags and the sorcery of the Sul. As the rearguard of the army continued to scatter, however, as the solid ranks of the Kurgans began to disintegrate, Hutga felt a knot of terror rise in his throat.

The mouth of the valley was strewn with Vaan corpses, dozens at the very least, but it wasn’t sorcery that had felled the warriors, it was steel. Not the steel of a rescuing army, but the steel of a lone man, a red phantom that stalked relentlessly through the ranks of the dead.

Another army had arrived, an army of one, an army called the Skulltaker.

After the brooding horror of the snake tunnels, Dorgo thought there was nothing beneath the clean sky that could be so abominable. He was more wrong than he could have believed possible. When Ulagan led their small group out of the other end of the tunnel, following the draught of air, Dorgo knew that they were no longer in the Shadowlands. However strange the borderland had been, it had still been a place at least anchored in reality as a mortal mind understood it.

What he looked out upon was madness. The sky was burnt orange, the clouds lazily drifting across it like splotches of rust. The sun was red, casting a crimson shadow across the land. Such a land Dorgo had never seen, a vast expanse of apparently endless marsh, its unmoving waters revoltingly blood-like in hue. The warrior reflected that a blood-bog was not the most impossible thing chronicled in the legends and myths of the Wastes. The thought did nothing to put him at ease.

The tunnel opened out upon the slopes of a mountain, despite the impossibility of ascending to such a height when every tunnel in the underworld had been descending. It was an even stranger formation than the hill they had entered in the borderland. The mountain was black, its stones sharp and displaying angular facets. It seemed to be constructed of obsidian, though Dorgo resisted calling it such. Certainly no natural mountain had ever been formed from pure obsidian.

From his vantage point, Dorgo could see the sprawl of the land for leagues in every direction except south, or at least where south should be if the strange red sun was where it should be. He could see nothing he recognised, not even the faintest speck on the horizon that might be the weird borderland they had left behind.

‘We are in the Wastes,’ Sanya told them, as if there were any doubt. She fingered her amulets, taking some visible comfort in their promise of protection. ‘Watch your thoughts as well as your feet,’ she advised as she started to climb down the sharply faceted slope. ‘A misstep in either can be death, and worse than death.’

Dorgo watched Sanya start her descent. At least her ordeal in the tunnels hadn’t diminished her arrogant self-assurance.

‘I’ll give her some thoughts,’ Ulagan hissed. The scout was watching Sanya with a great deal less detachment than Dorgo. There was a lascivious gleam in his eye as the woman made her awkward descent. Her robe had been torn to tatters by the snakemen, and the crude garment she had improvised from the remains left little to the imagination, though it seemed that the scout’s mind was still willing to accept the challenge.

‘Haven’t we enough trouble already?’ Dorgo asked, sighing.

Ulagan smiled at his leader. ‘Not of the right kind,’ he said. The wiry scout almost doubled-over as Togmol’s huge hand slapped him on the back.

‘When she turns you into a toad, I promise to step on you,’ Togmol said. The big warrior was almost jubilant to be out under the open sky again, even if it was a different sky than the one that hung over the lands of their birth. ‘Though it might be hard to tell,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

Ulagan curled his lip in a sour expression of distaste, and then suddenly became alert. He started forwards, staring at an outcropping of rock. His wormy tentacle slithered across the sharp facets of the obsidian, eyes peering suspiciously at the stone.

‘What is…?’

Dorgo never finished asking his question. A shape, a phantom form rose up from within the stone, like some ghostly fish rising from the depths of a black ocean. It was pale and putrid, dripping with blood and slime, only a mocking semblance of decay proclaiming its kinship to anything that might once have been alive. Dorgo got the impression of a great, limpid eye, of a leathery, snout-like beak and flabby reptilian claws. Then he was much too busy to see anything more.

Ulagan screamed and lurched forwards. Dorgo could not be certain if the scout had slipped or been pulled. The impossibility of his distress was enough to confound the warrior. By some incredible process, Ulagan had sunk into the obsidian, and was being dragged down into its black depths!

Dorgo seized the hunter’s waist, throwing his arms around the man as he desperately tried to pull free. Already, Ulagan’s right shoulder had vanished into the black face of the rock. The force pulling on the hunter was immensely strong, and Dorgo could feel his feet sliding as he was dragged after Ulagan. The man’s face was sinking into the stone, his screams becoming muffled as he faded into the shiny obsidian facet.

Powerful arms wrapped around Dorgo’s waist. He heard Togmol roar as the big warrior threw his strength and weight into a massive effort. Inch by agonising inch, Togmol’s brawn tilted the balance. Slowly, Ulagan began to emerge from the ghastly angel trying to devour him. First, his terrified face emerged, and then his vanished shoulder. Finally, the ropy length of his mutated arm was free, but it was not alone.

A slimy, leathery claw was clenched tightly around Ulagan’s limb, fingers like bloated slugs tearing into the man’s flesh. The snout-like beak pushed free from the face of the rock, snarling and spitting its ghastly hunger. Dorgo could see the thing’s swollen eye staring at him from the shadowy world within the stone, could feel its evil malignity glaring at him with timeless hatred.

Then there was a resounding crash, like the roar of an avalanche. The stink of ozone filled the air and a terrible, slobbering shriek stabbed at the Tsavags’ ears. The men fell to the ground as the terrible grip on Ulagan’s arm was broken. The scout looked in alarm at the dismembered claw still fastened to his limb. Panicked and disgusted, the hunter brushed the offending filth from his body. On the ground beside the empty face of obsidian, the severed trunk of a snout-like beak dripped and oozed.

‘I said to watch your thoughts,’ Sanya scolded the men. One of the amulets around her neck gave off a purplish glow as whatever power the sorceress had invoked withdrew back into the talisman. ‘The Wastes have their own kind of life. Some of it feeds on flesh, some of it feeds on emotions and ideas. All of it can bring death. Remember that if you want to survive.’

The Tsavags watched in silence as the sorceress turned and began to pick her way back down the slope. The strange episode and its stranger conclusion had impressed them. Even Ulagan was not likely to soon forget the witch’s power, whatever her other assets might be.

Togmol looked out across the blood-bog, the trackless waste of sucking mire. The big warrior scowled and shook his head. ‘Maybe we were better off staying behind and fighting the Skulltaker,’ he said.

Gazing out across the desolation, staring up into the threatening sky, Dorgo could not help but wonder if perhaps his friend was right.

Zar Ratha’s ire rose with every passing breath. It was inconceivable, intolerable, that his carefully laid plans should be jeopardised in so outrageous a fashion! The attack against his rear had been an eventuality he’d prepared for. No dregs from the slave-pits watched the mouth of the valley; he’d positioned a band of two hundred of his finest axemen to form his rearguard. Although he doubted the Sul would move to rescue their Tsavag allies, it was still a possibility that he had taken into consideration. The sorcerers relied upon the terror of their magic as much as its intrinsic power, much like the Tsavag and their mammoths.

The Vaan were a breed taught to forget fear, the emotion burned out of their bodies before they were old enough to wield their first sword. There was no room for weakness, no allowance for timidity in the Vaan. They were a warrior race, men who knew neither mercy nor pity, taught that death in battle was the only glory a man could ever claim. When a man accepted the honour of death, he forgot fear.

Now, the Vaan were remembering what they had forgotten.

A lone warrior, a sinister apparition armoured in crimson, prowled through the ranks of Ratha’s rearguard like a raging lion. Butchered, bleeding hulks of Vaan axemen were strewn in his path, a bloody litter of the dead and dying. He was one warrior, yet he’d slaughtered his way through dozens. Every slash of his smouldering blade visited ruin upon another Vaan fighter, splashing severed limbs and spilled entrails across the ground. Men who had stood fearlessly against giants and ogres, who were prepared to defy the black sorceries of warlocks and daemons, faltered before the awesome spectacle of a single champion as he carved a gory furrow through the iron wall of their formation.

The Skulltaker. Ratha heard the name pass in an awed whisper through his army, saw fear worm its way into the eyes of his men. The rearguard broke, scattering before the advance of their terrible foe. Their panic threatened to infect the rest of the tribe as they fled. Men looked anxiously to their chieftain, weapons slipping in sweaty hands.

Ratha chose a frightened face, and then drove his axe through the coward’s skull. He kicked the mangled carrion from his blade and spat on the twitching corpse. ‘Dogs! Whoreson swine!’ the zar thundered. ‘Stand your ground! You are Vaan, the mightiest breed to ever crawl from the womb of woman! Stand fast or be damned by your ancestors as craven vermin!’

The chieftain’s rage, boomed over the ranks of his army, but Ratha could sense that even shame could not unseat the fear that had taken root in his men. It was something that was almost tangible, like frozen fingers rushing down his spine. The zar bellowed in fury, calling upon the Blood God to steel his heart, to enflame the courage of his men and bring destruction to their enemy.

The last of the rearguard had broken, leaving a field strewn with the mangled husks of their abandoned comrades. Ratha felt pride as he saw another band of warriors move into the opening, huge brutes, bearing massive flails of chain and spiked iron. They were men who had been trained for battle against the Tsavag mammoths, to strew caltrops in the path of the gigantic beasts as they charged. These were men who had accepted their grim charge with an almost eager fatalism, desiring nothing more than to enter the Hunting Halls with the blood of such magnificent adversaries fresh upon their weapons.

The Skulltaker vanished from Ratha’s sight as the mammoth-cripplers surrounded and rushed him. The clatter of arms, the roars and screams of battle rose from the crush. Long minutes passed, and with each lengthening moment, Ratha’s heart grew black with doubt. A single man, and his mammoth-cripplers took so long to kill him? One man against a hundred of the Vaan’s elite? It wasn’t a question of battle, it was a matter of slaughter! Yet still the clash of weapons, the meaty smack of metal slashing through flesh, the screams of slayer and slain rose from the centre of the Vaan attack.

At last, a gurgling shriek wailed from the melee. The mammoth-cripplers pulled back, pulled away from the combat swirling at the middle of their formation. Impossibly, the Skulltaker still stood, his smoking sword shearing through the arm of one warrior, and then slashing through the chest of a second. A third turned to flee, only to have his back cut through like a twig. His crippled body flopped to the blood-soaked earth, moaning in agony as he tried to crawl away from his killer.

Even from a distance, Ratha could see the terrible rents and gashes in the Skulltaker’s armour. Blood, black and foul, drooled from his wounds. Ratha snarled in satisfaction. Whatever the champion’s terrible power, he could be hurt, and if he could be hurt, he could be killed.

Then the wounds began to ooze closed, the armour flowing together like water, sealing itself, making itself whole once more. In the space of only a few breaths, the Skulltaker’s grisly figure was as unmarked as newly fallen snow. For all the violence visited upon him, even the closest of the Vaan could find no sign of injury.

The mammoth-cripplers broke, fleeing in such frantic disorder that even the lowest of the tribe’s goblin slaves would have felt shame. They scattered like a mob of frightened rabbits, breaking in every direction without order or reason. As they broke, so too did much of Ratha’s army.

The zar raised his voice in a roar. He would kill this monster. He would show the mongrel dogs who had dared call themselves Vaan that this thing was no demigod. It was nothing more than some foul sending of the Sul, a trick conjured up by their sorcery. Ratha would send it back to the hell from which it had been called, and then he would seek out the cowards who had shamed their blood!

Ratha’s snarled orders brought a small group of warriors to his side, men encased in steel rather than iron, steel engraved with the runes of Khorne. Immense collars circled their necks, and upon these bronze bands still more runes of dread power had been etched. Each man bore a huge axe of cold-wrought iron, and upon these blades again appeared the skull-rune of Khorne. These were Ratha’s daemon-killers, men chosen to bear the most sacred of the tribe’s arms and armour, weapons that would guard them against any daemon’s fell might.

The chieftain led his small force through the broken ranks of his army. He had to act quickly, and kill the supposed Skulltaker while there was still a chance to restore order to his host. There would be time enough for retribution later.

The crimson-armoured champion cut a path through the rout, adding to the carnage with every sweep of his sword. A scarlet stain followed him as he pushed through the disordered ranks, cutting down those who turned to face him and those who turned to flee with equal abandon. That they were men did not interest the Skulltaker. That they were in the way did.

Daemon-killers plunged through their fleeing kinsmen, pushing and hacking a way clear for their chieftain. Callously, they marched over the broken bodies of fallen men, showing as little regard for them as the Skulltaker had. Men inured to the worst horrors any mortal might be called upon to face, the misery of their kin was not enough to reach the last shreds of humanity clinging to their souls.

A daemon-killer pushed his way through fleeing axemen only to find himself suddenly facing the skull-masked figure that had provoked such terror. Before he could even raise his axe, the daemon-killer’s head was rolling across the ground. The warrior behind him fared somewhat better, bringing his axe sweeping at the Skulltaker’s legs. The champion darted back, the edge of the axe just scraping against the metal skin of his greaves. Then the Skulltaker’s black sword was stabbing forwards and the daemon-killer dropped, choking on his own blood.

Another half a dozen daemon-killers were dead or dying before the Skulltaker relented. The ghastly figure drew back, waiting while Ratha cleared the last of his fleeing tribesmen. Another dozen daemon-killers stood with him, but the zar waved them aside. Since it had come to this, he would be the one to strike the monster down.

‘I am Ratha, zar of the Vaan,’ the chieftain growled. ‘I understand Khorne has sent you to test me, to take my skull if I am unworthy.’ Ratha laughed and spat at his enemy’s feet. ‘Better than you have tried, monster,’ the chieftain boasted, ‘but Ratha is still here!’

The zar spared no more words, but charged at his foe. Ratha’s axe crashed against the Skulltaker’s arm, splitting the vambrace, staggering the champion. The Skulltaker’s sword struck along the chieftain’s midsection, chewing through his armour and cutting into his belly.

Bleeding, Ratha stumbled back. He expected the Skulltaker to seize the opportunity. His axe came slashing low as the Skulltaker pressed his advantage. The join between the plates guarding the Skulltaker’s knee was torn, hanging in a twisted knot of red metal. The axe swept on, biting into the champion’s knee. Ratha howled with glee as black blood spurted from the wound.

The Skulltaker’s sword was not idle, sweeping down in a cruel thrust that might have spitted the chieftain’s throat. Ratha twisted his head from the murderous stroke, his warrior’s instincts serving him better than his fury. The smouldering sword shrieked as its edge tore through the chieftain’s shoulder, tearing the iron armour as though it were parchment and digging a deep wound in the zar’s shoulder.

Ratha toppled in agony, blood spraying from severed veins. He caught the Skulltaker’s vengeful return with his axe, barely blocking the monster’s attack. He stared in disbelief at the molten notch that had been gouged into the bronze edge of his weapon. He started to understand just what it was he fought. Now, Ratha understood the terror of his warriors.

The attending daemon-killers rushed to their chieftain’s aid. Against any other enemy, Ratha would never have questioned their victory. Against the Skulltaker, he never doubted their defeat. A man raised with iron in his blood, reared on discipline and war, weaned on battle and destruction, Ratha found it within himself to feel sorrow in the useless sacrifice.

All too soon, Ratha saw the Skulltaker turn away from the last of the daemon-killers. The gruesome champion pulled the man’s axe from where it had embedded itself in his side. For all the runes of violence and doom that had been cast into the blade, the wound it left behind closed as quickly and completely as those of any other weapon.

Ratha cast one last look across the valley. His Vaan were dispersing into the hills, fleeing in disordered knots and mobs. The Tsavags and Seifan were likewise fleeing, the Tsavag to the far passes, the Seifan galloping into the western foothills, heedless of who or what they crushed beneath their hooves. Ratha sneered at their retreat. Run however fast, however far, there would be no escape for them. Hutga and Shen would meet the Skulltaker, but they would meet him as cowards, not as men.

Ratha lifted his axe as the Skulltaker approached him once more. Blood poured from his wounds, and strength faded from his arm, but the chieftain would not be denied. He would die fighting this monster to the last. Khorne would accept nothing less.

‘Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows,’ Ratha said, reciting the mantra so oft repeated by the Vaan shamans.

‘Khorne does not,’ the Skulltaker’s grinding voice growled. His sword came crashing against Ratha’s axe. So powerful, so vengeful was the blow that the weapon was torn from the chieftain’s hands. Ratha was thrown to the ground by the violence of the strike. The Skulltaker loomed over him, his screaming sword raised high.

‘Khorne cares not,’ the Skulltaker repeated, ‘but I do.’

The sucking blood-bog was behind them. It had not fallen away, vanishing slowly into the horizon. Such sanity was unwelcome in the Wastes. The oozing fields of gore had disappeared as quickly as mist before the morning sun. One moment, the Tsavags’ boots were slogging through the quagmire, the next they were crunching through the gravel of a bleak expanse, all colour sucked from the land by the angry sun.

Except, there was no sun. The crimson sky with its fiery tyrant darkened and faded, to be replaced by a starless blackness too dark to be called night. The blood-soaked sky did not vanish with the abruptness of the bog, but its retreat was too unseemly to betoken normality as Dorgo understood it. Impossibly, without star or moon, with only the black tapestry of emptiness above them, the world around Dorgo remained vivid and clear. Without source, without reason, there was light, a fiery glow that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. Even the filthy green luminescence of the tunnels of the snakemen seemed wholesome to him beside this eerie brilliance.

The air was hot and thick, dry and smothering at the same time. There was no breeze, no wind to bring relief. It was as though the atmosphere was tense, coiled into a knot of restrained savagery, brooding upon the moment when it would strike.

The men trudged on, following the lead of their macabre guide. Sanya held the weird talisman she had been given by Enek Zjarr before her. The crimson talon of the daemon stood taut at the end of its little chain, pointing straight as an arrow into the distance.

Pointing to what? Sanya claimed it was guiding her to the Black Altar, but Dorgo wondered if anything could be trusted in this strange, horrible world. He remembered the warning she had given them, that the Wastes were governed by desire and fear, not mortal concepts of time and distance. Want something badly enough, and it would find you. Fear something greatly enough, and it would seek you out.

The daemon’s talon was their token, their key to this ghastly world where the power of Khorne saturated sky and earth. It would navigate their fears and distractions for them, driving them to the place they needed to find, but even a daemon had to be cautious walking through the domain of a god. However great their need, they could not hurry their passage lest powers far greater take notice of their presence, powers that respected neither tokens nor keys.

Across the range of his vision, Dorgo could see great mountains rising from the emptiness, mighty mounds of colourless enormity that loomed against the lightless sky. He felt a chill run through him as he saw the mountains approach.

His eyes studied them with a crawling revulsion, seeing but not understanding details too distant for his consciousness to grasp. The mountains were rugged, with crumbling cliffs and shattered peaks, strange outcroppings jutting from their faces without pattern or purpose. Somehow, he was reminded of squat ugly thorn bushes stretching limb and talon into the dark in the hope of snagging some passing victim.

Limbs and talons: shock gripped the warrior as his mind understood what his eyes gazed upon. Towering over this forbidden world of burning darkness, the mountains were not things of rock and stone. They were skeletal heaps, gigantic piles of death and ruin, the spoils of unimaginable carnage.

Dorgo could see bony arms protruding from the sides of the mountains, and smiling skulls peering from the cliffs. He felt his reason falter as he tried to conceive a number that might contain all the death he looked upon. How many had died to rear these skeletal ziggurats?

Dorgo looked away hastily, his brain pounding inside his skull. It was with new eyes that he looked upon the pallid earth and the gravel he ground beneath his boots. Horror renewed its hold over him. What covered the ground was no more stone than the mountains that rose above it, but fine shards of crushed bone. Aeons had hardened the splinters into a crude mockery of rock, but Dorgo was not deceived. He cast his gaze again across the sunless expanse, at that enormity that stretched into the infinite unknown.

This was slaughter beyond anything Dorgo could understand, challenging his very sense of existence. He knew that this was but a glimpse of the terrible power men tried to bind with names and titles, tried to contain with legends and prophecies. What was he, what were the Tsavags, the Tong, the whole of the domain and the Shadowlands beyond, beside such power? A power, that, in his madness, he had thought could be opposed.

A flash of pain against his cheek removed the fog of terror that gripped him. Dorgo found Sanya glaring at him, her face twisted into a furious snarl.

‘Idiot!’ she spat. ‘Khorne is not merely the god of blood and slaughter. He is the lord of terror, the king of doom! As the master, so too the slaves!’

Dorgo could faintly hear a sound rising from the silence of the bone-field. It took him only an instant to recognise the noise as something howling, something hungry, something evil.

Sanya spun around, turning her fury on Togmol and Ulagan. The Tsavags were staring into the distance, trying to find the source of the howl. More terrible than the cry of the biggest wolf, more hideous than the roar of troll or tiger, the sound pawed through their souls to claw at the most instinctive fear in a man’s heart: the terror of prey for its hunter.

Other howls sounded, scratching at the ebony sky. From all around them, the lupine cries pierced the twilight world, singing of fang and claw, singing of meat and flesh. In his mind, Dorgo could see them, loping through the darkness, their scaly paws crunching across the bony litter: lean and ravenous, their jaws agape, tongues lolling against their wolfish faces.

Cruelty beyond the simple predator gleamed in their eyes, a pitiless wisdom horrible and malignant. Heavy manes matted with clotted blood flowed across their racing, dog-like bodies. Fleshy frills dripped around their collars of blackened bronze, and upon each collar, a single rune, smouldering like flame: the skull-rune of Khorne!

‘Run you spineless maggots!’ Sanya shouted at the Tsavags. ‘Your fear calls out to them! We must run, and beg the gods that we find the Black Altar before the fleshhounds find us!’

The sorceress did not waste further words. Turning, she raced away, desperately following where her talisman pointed. Dorgo did not linger, nor were Togmol and Ulagan slow to hurry after the woman. Whatever doubts and suspicions they harboured against her, the howls of the daemons drowned them out.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Terror drove Shen Kahn through the narrow mountain passes, down into the flatlands. The Seifan retreat was a rout, riders and chariots scattering in every direction as they emerged from the valley. Shen made no effort to control their flight. Things had gone too far to worry about leadership of the tribe and control of the domain. Now the only thing that Shen held in his heart was fear for his life.

Ratha had been cut down, butchered by a monster, who had carved a bloody path through the ranks of the Vaan. It was beyond belief that a single creature, be it man or daemon, could kill so many, even less when its victims were the elite warriors of the Vaan. Shen tried to cling to his conviction that the killer was no more than some daemon conjured up by Enek Zjarr, but he could taste the lie in his thoughts. He knew. However much he tried to deny it, he knew. The Skulltaker had indeed returned, this time for the heads of Teiyogtei’s heirs.

Screams rose from the valley behind him. Shen turned to see men and horses, their eyes wild with fright, bolting into the flatlands. For a moment, his gaze rested on the fugitives, and then his eyes turned to the thing that pursued them.

The Skulltaker was once again mounted upon his wolfish beast, the canine monster charging out from the shadow of the mountains in great loping bounds. Shen’s desperate hope that the killer would pursue Hutga and his Tsavags turned bitter in his mouth. There was no question, the Skulltaker had marked him as the next to die.

‘Faster!’ roared the warlord, snarling at the charioteer beside him. Already, the man was lashing the gasping horses with a ruthlessness born of panic. The big animals, a hand-and-a-half taller than the shaggy ponies ridden by most of the tribe, galloped frantically through the long grass of the flatlands.

‘If I push them any harder, their hearts will burst!’ complained the charioteer.

Shen glared at his tribesman. The man was afraid, but not nearly afraid enough. It wasn’t his head the Skulltaker meant to claim!

‘Then maybe they are pulling too much weight,’ Shen said coldly.

One of the kahn’s hands seized the reins of the chariot horses. The other slammed into the charioteer’s side, burying a fat-bladed knife in his side. The warrior gasped, shuddering as Shen drove the knife deeper. The murdered man clutched feebly at Shen’s armour, and then slumped to the wooden floor of the chariot. Shen wrapped the reins around his arm, and then grabbed the charioteer’s head, using height and leverage to tip the man headfirst from the chariot. The dying warrior smashed into the long-grass, tumbling end over end in a sprawl of snapped limbs and shattered ribs.

Shen struck at the horses, urging them on. The whip snapped at their flanks, drawing blood from their savaged flesh. The kahn looked back, horrified to see the Skulltaker’s weird steed closing the distance. Seifan were fleeing in all directions, but the grim killer never wavered. Something beyond mortal senses told him which of the fleeing riders was the man he sought.

If the Skulltaker would not chase his minions, Shen knew he must look elsewhere to find the time he so desperately needed, the chance to escape this domain and leave the killer behind.

The answer appeared before the fleeing kahn’s darting eyes. The flatlands gradually sloped downwards as they stretched away from the mountains. Eventually, they sank into a watery mire, a blighted region shunned by Hung and Kurgan alike: the Swamp of the Devourer.

Shen could see the edge of the swamp, where the long-grass stubbornly struggled to survive in foetid shallows. The sickly green vapours of the swamp clung thickly around the scraggly clumps of grass, like strangler’s fingers wrapping around so many throats. Ugly trees, tall and thin and barren, thrust up through the scummy waters, like some sinister wall separating the foulness of the swamp from the world beyond.

Many were the tales of horror told about the swamp, evoked around the winter campfires: stories of ghastly death and fates worse than death, accounts of loathsome creatures neither daemon nor man. None were more terrible than those told of the Devourer, a thing that was not a beast, but rather the living malice of the swamp.

It lurked behind that wall of trees, waiting for what flesh dared to intrude upon its forsaken realm. It did not consume its victims with tooth and fang, but sucked them down into the mud to rot and fester in the living muck of the swamp. A man was alive when his body was dissolved in the belly of the Devourer.

Shen weighed the horror of the swamp against the horror of the Skulltaker. It was a choice of evils, but Shen was reminded that men had escaped the swamp to carry their stories back to their tribes. From the Skulltaker, there was no escape.

Yelling at the horses, Shen wheeled his chariot around, plunging into the muddy dampness of the swamp. He watched the rancid waters with a keen eye even as he urged the stallions to greater effort. Where the long-grass struggled to grow, there the water was shallow. Where it was absent, where only floating scum rose above the water, the ground had dropped away in deep sink holes.

Water sprayed from the wheels of the chariot, surrounding Shen in a curtain of stagnant filth. He struggled to watch the surface of the swamp, trying to keep track of where it was shallow and where it was not. The horses neighed and snorted in protest, upset by the rancour of the swamp. Shen’s whip cracked out again with vengeful fury. Less concerned with the danger ahead than he was the danger behind, Shen had no patience for the timidity of his steeds.

Disaster was quick to overtake the fleeing kahn. Reckless and desperate, he had gambled too hard on his flight into the swamp. Where a man might have navigated a safe path between the patches of shallow muck, there simply was not room enough for a chariot.

Equine screams rose as one of the wheels slipped into an unseen hole. The copper-bound wood splintered from the lurching impact. The chariot, its balance lost, crashed and slid through the slime, pulling the horses as they had pulled it. The ruined chariot spun around, and then slipped from the shallows into one of the sinkholes that peppered the terrain. The panicked horses were dragged after the reeling carriage, their hooves flailing uselessly at the mud.

Coming to rest, the chariot sank in the deep water, scum bubbling as the mire sucked it down. Shen released the death-grip he had taken upon the armoured side, springing clear as his refuge disappeared. He found himself hip-deep in muck and slime, every step an effort as the sludge beneath his feet clung to him.

Shen could see the horses struggling in the shadows, trying to keep the chariot’s weight from dragging them down with it. He reached to his belt for his dao, intending to cut the beasts free. He might have lost his chariot, but with a horse under him there was still a chance he could lose the Skulltaker in the swamps.

The Hung’s face went white as his fingers closed on emptiness. He looked in disbelief at his belt, finding only a torn strip of leather flapping against his waist. The sword had been torn free during the violent crash. Shen did not think of the history, the tradition the sacred weapon represented for his people, nor even the supernatural power the weapon possessed. He thought only of the weapon he could have used to keep himself alive, something that was lost to him.

Shen had almost decided to tear the leather tethers binding the horses with his bare hands when a new sound intruded upon the screams of the horses. It was the splash of something moving through the stagnant waters, something big, moving at speed. The kahn did not turn to look. Coming from the edge of the swamp, where mire met flatland, there was only one thing it could be: the Skulltaker’s ghastly steed.

Shen bolted into the swamp, no longer watching for patches of shallow and the scum-covered sinkholes. He splashed through the reeking pools with crazed desperation, hardly slowing when he sank to his knees in stagnant water, or sloshed through flooded pits deeper than his waist. Escape! Escape was the only thought drumming through his brain, the shivering mindless terror of the prey. Every second, every breath was a small triumph, his entire existence collapsing into these insignificant instants of cheated death.

The kahn’s hands groped at a clump of rotting long-grass, pulling him from a rancid pool onto another rise. The scraggly trees of the swamp had thinned, forming a sort of clearing, a solemn circle surrounding a bleak morass of brown, lumpy mud.

Some warning instinct made Shen recoil from the muddy expanse, some primitive alarm of danger. The mud rippled, trembling with a wet spasm of unspeakable loathsomeness. He could see the quivering muck sloshing away, parting as something thrust its way up from the stinking heart of the swamp. He did not need to see more. In escaping the Skulltaker, he had found the Devourer.

Shen backed away, hardly daring to breathe as the obscene lord of the swamp oozed up from the depths. A hint of something black and oily showing beneath the dripping mud was enough. The kahn turned to find another way through the maze of trees and sunken pits. He froze as his eyes left the Devourer’s pool.

A mounted figure stared back at him, the lips of the Skulltaker’s wolfish steed curled in a silent growl, exposing its gore-crusted fangs. The expressionless mask of the killer’s helm gave no hint of the thoughts hidden within. Shen gave a little cry of horror as he saw the chain of trophies stretched across the champion’s chest, the skulls of the chieftains who had already met their doom.

The skull of Zar Ratha, still wet with the Kurgan’s blood, grinned at Shen, seeming to welcome the onetime ally of the Vaan.

For a moment, hunter and quarry looked upon one another, each man waiting for the other to act. Shen’s heart pounded against his bones like a hammer, his limbs tingling with fear. He could not tear his eyes away from the Skulltaker’s trophies, from the chain that would soon be wound through the empty sockets of his own skull.

The instant passed. Slowly, the Skulltaker dismounted, dropping from the back of his fearsome beast. He drew his black sword from its sheath, the weapon’s sizzling voice hissing through the stagnant vapours. Each splashing step sounded like the tramp of a giant to Shen. As he advanced, the trophies rattled against the Skulltaker’s armoured breast, seeming to beckon to the doomed Seifan chief.

Screaming, Shen turned and tore back through the trees, back to the pool of the Devourer. Death, any death, was preferable to the grisly fate the Skulltaker promised, to join the skulls of the vanquished in shame and defeat. He could not beat the Skulltaker, Shen knew it was madness to even try, but he could still cheat the monster of his victory.

The thing that had been rising from the pit was clearer now. Mud had dripped off its ghastly bulk, puddling around its enormity. Shapeless, formless, it was like some great quivering mound of blackened meat, its surface pitted with oozing sores. Devoid of eye or ear, or nose, it still detected Shen’s presence, lurching through the muck towards the crazed Seifan, undulating like some rogue wave upon a stagnant sea.

His horror of the Devourer lost, Shen threw open his arms as the immense, oozing slime reared up before him, pulsating with vile hunger. Pseudopods of dripping jelly burst from the thing’s black mass, wrapping around the kahn in a burning embrace. Shen could feel the acidic excretions eating through his skin as the tendrils pulled him back to the Devourer’s body.

In all the eons of the abomination’s existence, Shen wondered if any of its victims had laughed as they were consumed.

The dripping tendrils collapsed back into the Devourer’s body, dragging Shen with them. As the chieftain struck the oily skin of the creature, he sank into it, feeling its burning touch wash over him. Inch by inch, slowly, hideously, he was absorbed into the monster, absorbed into its formless bulk to be consumed.

Suddenly, the slime trembled, shivering with a motion that was outside its mindless urge to feed. Shen could feel its pain all around him, even through the wet, searing agony of his own body. His suffering intensified as the Devourer’s acids increased their labours against the engulfed kahn’s flesh.

Again, the substance of the Devourer trembled, shuddering like water before the wind. Strangely, the burning around Shen lessened, the wet embrace of the slime weakening. Something more solid than the amorphous coils of the Devourer closed around Shen’s arm. He felt iron fingers fumble at his partially digested flesh, sinking into the burnt meat, and tightening around the bone beneath.

Shen did not know if he was pulled free or if the Devourer simply relinquished its prey, its shapeless mass sliding away from him like spray dripping from a stone. Through the one eye that had not been blinded by the slime’s acid, he could see it sinking back beneath the mud. The clearing was splattered with clumps of oily darkness, some still quivering with the last echo of life.

The firm hold around Shen’s arm released him and the raw debris of the kahn’s body flopped obscenely into the mud. The Devourer’s acids had worked havoc on Shen’s body, leaving muscle and fat glistening where his skin had dissolved. Patches of bone stood stark beneath weeping wounds. Blood and bile seeped from his exposed stomach, dripping into the ruptured entrails below.

The Skulltaker did not care about Shen’s wounds. The killer looked down upon the twitching wreckage of the chieftain with a merciless gaze. He had not charged the oozing mass of the Devourer to save his life, nor to preserve his rule had the Skulltaker carved his way through the burning bulk of the monster.

There was enough reason left in Shen’s tortured body to know despair as he saw the Skulltaker’s black blade come chopping down.

Dorgo’s muscles felt as though they were on fire, every pounding crash of his boot against the grisly field of bone sending a spasm of pain shooting through him. Endurance, even that of a breed as rugged and strong as the Tsavags, had its limits. He knew that he was quickly reaching his. Ulagan was already faltering, falling behind with every breath. Stronger than either of his tribesmen, Togmol was only now starting to show signs of fatigue.

Sanya, somehow, kept ahead of them all. The Sul woman’s lithe figure pranced before them, nimble and graceful as a doe. Dorgo knew that she was using her sorcery to strengthen her, no bandy-boned Hung was the equal of a Tsavag, much less one of their women. She would not be the first of her sorcerous kin to use magic to overcome the natural power of better men.

Or was it sorcery? The chilling howl of the fleshhounds screamed from the distance, but not so distant as before. Sanya knew better than all of them the kind of daemons that stalked their trail. She knew the kind of death they could expect when the pack fell upon them. Perhaps it was knowledge, not magic, that lent speed to her feet.

The pack! Dorgo’s weary eyes scanned the bleak horizon. They should be able to see the hounds, or at least pick out their dark shapes from the bleached terrain. There was nothing. Even when he looked in the direction from which one of the howls sounded, there was nothing.

Sanya had warned that the Wastes were partly mortal in their essence, lacking the true etherealness of the world of the gods. Were the fleshhounds hunting them not from the Wastes, but from that other existence, that shadow realm just beyond the mortal coil? Hunting them from their phantom world until they tired of the chase and chose to claim their prey?

Dorgo looked back at Ulagan and felt a pang of pity for the hunter. Ulagan had saved his life in the Prowling Lands, but there was nothing Dorgo could do to help him now. Ulagan’s face was clenched in an expression of mortal terror, greater even than Togmol’s claustrophobic misery in the caverns of the snake-men. He knew the ways of predators on the hunt. He knew that they invariably singled out the weak, the stragglers. He tried to keep up with his companions, to keep from lingering behind, but his flagging strength betrayed him. He knew he would be the straggler, the easy kill that would draw the predators to him, but would they go for the easy kill?

Wolves in shape, the fleshhounds were more than beasts in mind. Daemons of the Blood God, dogs of Khorne, they were spectral manifestations of the Skull Lord’s savage hunger. Beasts would go for the straggler, allowing the rest of the prey to escape. Daemons, however, had the intelligence to take both the weak and the strong.

Ulagan suddenly pitched and fell, sprawling in the gravelly litter of bones. Dorgo slackened his pace, jogging back to help the failing hunter to his feet. From somewhere beyond his vision, the hungry howls of the hounds drew closer.

‘Leave him!’ snapped Sanya. The witch had stopped when she saw Dorgo turn back. She stood, hands pressed against her hips, drawing deep breaths into her starved lungs. ‘He won’t make it.’

‘We didn’t abandon you,’ Dorgo retorted, scowling at the woman.

Sanya’s face split in a withering sneer. ‘You needed me. You don’t need him.’ Togmol rounded on the witch, fingering his broadaxe. She met his hostile gaze and smiled. ‘Let the pack have him and we buy ourselves time.’

‘We’re not leaving him,’ growled Dorgo. Ulagan sagged limply in Dorgo’s arms as he helped him up. The howls sounded closer, more excited and eager.

‘Then we’ll all die here,’ Sanya told him. She glared at Dorgo, matching his rage, defying him to tell her she was wrong.

Togmol snarled something at the witch and slowly stalked away from her, moving to help Dorgo with Ulagan. The dazed hunter lifted his head weakly, cheered by the approach of the big warrior. Dorgo started to give voice to his gratitude when he saw Togmol’s axe lash out. The wide blade chopped down into Ulagan’s leg, splitting it to the bone. Savagely, Togmol ripped his weapon free. The stricken Ulagan toppled from Dorgo’s grip, rolling on the ground in a ball of pain.

Dorgo’s sword was in his hand, the point sweeping towards Togmol’s throat. The big warrior blocked the strike with the haft of his axe. ‘Leave him for the hounds,’ Togmol warned. The words only outraged Dorgo further. Again, the sword slashed at Togmol’s body. This time he retreated before the blow, scorn in his face as he backed away.

‘We have to worry about more than rescuing our kinsmen or avenging them if they are dead,’ Togmol said, his voice pained. ‘The entire tribe is depending on us. If we don’t bring Teiyogtei’s sword to the Black Altar, who will save our people from the Skulltaker?’

Dorgo stared at his friend in stunned silence, struck dumb by the ghastly irony of Togmol’s words. He remembered telling Togmol the same thing when he would have rushed into the red weeds in a hopeless effort to save Qotagir and the others.

The words were being thrown back at him and he hated the cruel wisdom in them. The tribe was depending on them, his father was depending on them. Beside that burden, even the debt he owed Ulagan counted for nothing.

Slowly, Dorgo nodded, returning his sword to his belt. He did not look back at the crippled hunter, pretending that he could not hear the man’s desperate pleas. The howls of the daemons drew still closer. First Sanya, and then Togmol started to run again. They did not look back.

Dorgo could hear Ulagan’s cries turn to curses as he ran away. The hunter cursed them by gods and ancestors, heaping prayers of ruin and death upon their heads. Dorgo tried not to listen, every word twisting in his gut like a dull knife.

Then, suddenly, Ulagan’s voice was gone. The howling of the daemons was gone. The landscape and even the sky, seemed somehow different, as if they had stepped from one room into another. Dorgo looked back, amazed and horrified to see neither the abandoned hunter nor the gruesome mountains he had studied with such anxious eyes for so very long.

‘No reward without sacrifice,’ Sanya said, laughing. The sorceress cast aside the guiding talisman, the daemon finger crawling obscenely through the bone shards, dragging its chain behind it. Beside her, Togmol was gaping at something on the horizon, struck dumb by some awesome sight.

Dorgo did not understand her glee, any more than he could understand why she had thrown away her talisman. Only a few yards separated him from the witch. He closed the distance with cautious, wary steps, watchful for some new treachery. Within a few paces he saw it, and he knew without being told that he gazed upon the Black Altar.

How a few paces could have hidden it from his sight, he did not understand, some trickery beyond mere distance, that much was certain. It appeared in the manner of a conjurer’s trick, winking into sight as soon as Dorgo stepped near enough to pierce its unseen veil.

He had thought the colossus of Teiyogtei was immense, now Dorgo understood that it was a dwarfish runt beside the enormity that the ancient king had tried to ape. It looked taller than the mountains, taller than the sky, a black cyclopean effigy rearing into the heavens, gigantic and eternal. It was folded into a crouch, crumpled on its knees. Its chest was thrown back, its hound-like head lolling against its broad, powerful shoulders.

Thick, mighty arms dangled from those shoulders, the clawed hands brushing against the ground. Immense wings, like the pinions of some gargantuan dragon, were folded against its body, flattened against its sides. The giant shape was covered in great plates of armour, their surfaces crawling in runes and etchings. The entirety was carved in a strange, brittle-looking stone, blacker than pitch and dull as rusting iron.

The evil air of horror that exuded from the thing was like an ugly whisper, the lingering stink of something rotting away. Dorgo could see that the statue’s breast was ripped open, cut in the manner of some ghastly wound. From where its heart would be, a fiery crimson glow shone.

‘It must have taken a thousand tribes to build this,’ Dorgo gasped in open wonder.

Sanya shook her head. ‘No, it only took one man.’ She pointed at the gigantic shape. ‘This is no statue. It is the carcass of Krathin, the bloodthirster, he who was called the Lash of Khorne. Long ago, before he was a king, before he led the Tong down from the Wastes, Teiyogtei slew Krathin in a battle that shook the heavens. From his husk, Teiyogtei built the Black Altar, fuelling it with the vanquished spirit of the daemon.’

‘That glow where its heart should be,’ Dorgo observed, ‘that is where the Black Altar is.’

Again Sanya shook her head. ‘That is where Teiyogtei placed the door. The Black Altar is beyond.’

Togmol stared up at the enormous daemon, wincing as he considered the dizzying height at which the horned, dog-like head rose from the broad, armoured shoulders. ‘We have to climb up there, don’t we?’

‘Unless you think you can fly,’ the sorceress told him.

Stragglers were still descending from the mountains long into the night. The panic and confusion of the battle in Ikar’s Refuge had sent the Tsavags racing into the passes and valleys, desperate to protect their families. Only the rearguard had lingered long enough to see the breaking of the Vaan host, the butchery visited upon them by a monster from the mists of myth. If there had been any doubt in Hutga’s heart that the killer stalking the domain was in truth the Skulltaker, it died with Ratha.

Maybe it was the lack of doubt that filled his mind with woeful thoughts. Hutga had been reared on legends about Teiyogtei Khagan, the great king of the horde. He had heard all the tales of his mighty deeds and fierce battles, of the armies and monsters he had slain, and of the daemons he had vanquished. Later, grown old in the traditions of his people, grown strong in his power as chief of the tribe, he had come to question all the old stories. If Teiyogtei had been so mighty, how could a lone warrior be his nemesis?

Now he believed again, for he had seen that nemesis. What hope remained for Hutga and his people lay in the lingering power of their ancient king, in the faith that a weapon that once struck down the Skulltaker would do so again. There was no other way. The spectacle of slaughter he had seen in Ikar’s Refuge was mute testimony that force of arms could not defeat the Skulltaker. Something more than mortal strength and steel was needed to destroy the destroyer.

Hutga thought of the Sul and their magic. Steeped in sorcery, the Sul were a power apart from the mortal world. Theirs was a power far beyond the mean spells of shamans and warlocks, a power second only to that of the gods, but was it enough to protect them from the Skulltaker? Hutga had seen the limits of Sul sorcery at the tomb of Teiyogtei. Even Enek Zjarr was helpless before the malign power of Khorne, unable to work his magic within the sanctuary of the Blood God. Against Khorne’s champion, how much trust could even the Sul place in their sorceries?

Was that why Enek Zjarr had not come? Not from fear of the Vaan or the Seifan, not from some secret alliance of treachery and deception with the chieftains, but from fear of the Skulltaker. Enek Zjarr said that he had used his magic to spy upon the Skulltaker, to see him strike down Csaba and Bleda Carrion-crown. Had the sorcerer seen the approach of the Skulltaker here as well? Was that why he and his people cowered in their floating citadel?

Hutga looked at the bedraggled, frightened faces of his tribesmen as they marched their mammoths down from the mountain. Never had he seen his people look so broken, so desolate.

‘We will seek out the Sul,’ Hutga decided. He turned to his sub-chiefs. ‘Spread the word among the people. We will wait an hour, no more than two, for others to come down, and then I want the entire tribe on the march.’

‘To Enek Zjarr’s castle?’ one of the Tsavag war chiefs asked. There was a haunted, crushed taint in his eyes that it pained Hutga to see.

‘Enek Zjarr stays behind his walls,’ the khagan explained. ‘Clearly he thinks they can protect him.’ Hutga’s face split in a fierce grin. ‘I mean to have him extend that sanctuary to his loyal allies. Or I mean to hold his heart in my hand.’

The savage words seemed to bolster the withered spirits of the war chiefs as they walked off to spread the khagan’s orders to the rest of the tribe. Yorool, however, was not deceived by Hutga’s hollow words.

‘Enek Zjarr has abandoned us,’ the shaman pointed out. ‘That Seifan jackal was right when he said that every head the Skulltaker claims helps the Sul.’

Hutga nodded, troubled to hear Yorool voice his doubts. ‘With Ratha dead and the Skulltaker on the trail of the new Seifan kahn, only the Tsavags stand between Enek Zjarr and control of the entire domain.’ The chieftain rubbed his arms, trying to ease the chill from his metal-ridden skin. ‘I don’t know. You saw the Skulltaker. Do you think even Enek Zjarr could control something that powerful?’

‘He does not need to control him to profit from his works,’ Yorool said.

‘You forget,’ Hutga replied, ‘the Skulltaker wants Enek Zjarr’s head as well as mine.’

‘That,’ Yorool observed, ‘may be the reason he sent your son to reforge the Bloodeater, not to protect the domain or the Tsavags, but to protect Enek Zjarr.’

Ice crept into Hutga’s eyes, the cold fury of a father who has risked his son for a lie. ‘We’ll discuss that with Enek Zjarr,’ he vowed, ‘and if I don’t like his answers, the Sul will discover that the Skulltaker isn’t the only one who can kill.’

Dorgo and his companions passed through the open chest of the dead daemon, into the boiling light glowing within its corpse. The world around them was washed away by the burning, hellish glow. As the angry glare blinded them, they could feel their bodies being pulled and clawed by wraithlike hands. The air in their lungs became a stinging ash, the sound in their ears a sullen roar. Heat, infernal and searing tore at them and around their hearts a cold malice of timeless hatred closed its phantom talons.

There was no stepping back, no time to relent the desperation that had brought them to this place that was not a place. The mortal world evaporated around them, steaming into the nothingness of beyond. Blind, deafened, wracked by the malevolence of another reality, they continued their crawl through the daemon’s charred husk. Groping, stumbling, they fought back the terror that burrowed into their brains, exciting forgotten, primitive fears.

Slowly, vision returned to their tormented eyes, the hellish glow lessening into a gory crimson light. No more did they stand within the tunnel-like wound in the daemon’s chest, but upon a narrow ledge of red-veined rock, overlooking a vast pit filled with bubbling molten fire. Great tongues of black flame licked up from the depths, shooting hundreds of feet from the churning surface of scarlet magma, bringing with them the stink of burning blood. The walls of the pit were like the terrain of the horrible boneyards surrounding the monstrous carcass of the bloodthirster. Pale and bleached, things made of bone instead of stone formed a latticework of megalithic bones interwoven in grisly union. The walls of bone descended far into the pit, far overhead they stretched until at last they formed a rounded cone, through which a sky of bruised, ghostly stars could distantly be seen.

Immense chains of bronze stretched across the pit. Anchored into the walls, each link in the chains was bigger than an ox and covered in dark runes of vile aspect. The chains were spaced evenly around the funnelled walls, eight in number and none less gigantic than its fellows. Where the chains met at the centre of the pit, they were anchored to a structure of blackened metal, a building cast in the shape of an immense skull with sword-like antlers. The mouth of the skull gaped wide, but whatever was within was concealed by a veil of shadow and smoke. Only the chains anchored in the walls supported the structure above the boiling surface of the pit far below, and with each blast of black flame from the pit, the skull-shaped building swayed slightly as it was buffeted by the elemental fury below. A curtain of smaller, mortal-sized chains dripped from the bottom of the structure, sporting a wild array of metal hooks and buckets. Ugly, shrivelled things hung from some of the hooks, grisly in their charred suggestion of human forms.

This, Dorgo knew, was their goal. This was the Black Altar, the spectral forge where Teiyogtei crafted his mighty weapons. Where the Bloodeater had been made and where it must be remade if he would save his tribe from the Skulltaker.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It took more courage than Dorgo thought he had left to step out onto the closest of the monstrous bronze chains. Feet planted on the surface of the horizontal link, arms wrapped through the loop of the vertical link, he felt the entire chain sway under his weight. Below him, at an almost impossible depth, the boiling fury of the pit sent bursts of heat and fire searing up at him. The metal was hot, unpleasant if not intolerable beneath his touch. The leering, horned skull of the Black Altar seemed unimaginably far away, as if the structure had retreated from him when he set foot upon its moorings, or the funnel cone had grown in its dimensions in response to his intrusion.

Dorgo shook his head, rubbing at his eyes, trying to force the cruel deceit from his vision. In the Wastes, Sanya said, belief was its own reality. Believe he could never reach the structure and he never would. He struggled to force his senses to perceive his surroundings in a new way, but it was impossible to discredit what his eyes saw, what his flesh felt.

The chain shivered again. Dorgo saw Sanya creeping out to join him on the link. She had torn strips from her robe to wrap her hands against the hot metal. For all her knowledge of the gods and their secret powers, the sorceress looked even more anxious than he did, regarding their perilous crossing.

He might have felt some sympathy for her, if the memory of her cold, dismissive acceptance of the loss of Ulagan and the others wasn’t so fresh in his mind. He needed Sanya’s knowledge, her arcane art, to reforge the Bloodeater. That was as far as his sympathies went. It was better to trust a viper than a Sul.

Dorgo carefully edged his way along the first link, keeping one arm wrapped in the loop of the vertical link. For a perilous moment, he dangled over the pit as he stepped from one link to the next, his legs not quite able to traverse the gap between the two horizontal surfaces. He tightened his hold around the loop of the vertical link, pulling himself across with his arms until his groping feet touched metal once more. He sucked a stinging lungful of air into his body, trying not to look down as he released his hold on the vertical loop and lunged for the next link.

For a horrible instant he was unbalanced, and then his flailing arms caught at the hot bronze, throwing themselves around the loop in a fierce embrace. He’d made the crossing between two links in the chain. His heart felt like a diseased lump in his breast when he looked at how many more lay between him and the Black Altar: a hundred, perhaps twice that.

Despair wracked Dorgo’s mind. He could never do it, never cross such an awesome distance. It was beyond endurance, beyond the endurance of any man. Then the image of his tribe flashed before his eyes: men, women and children strewn across a desolate landscape, butchered and torn. The crossing might indeed be beyond human endurance, but he would make it anyway.

Togmol’s voice cried out from behind him, warning Dorgo and Sanya to brace themselves. The big warrior stepped out onto the bronze chain, following Dorgo’s example as he made his crossing from the first link to the second. The two Tsavags grinned at each other, revelling in their pathetic accomplishment like youths returned from their first hunt. They could do this. They would do this.

Dorgo looked back at the first link. Sanya was poised at the edge of the horizontal surface, but was unable to repeat the example of the burly Tsavags. Powerful in mind and magic, the Sul were weaker in body than the puny runts the Kurgan tribes left out for the wolves. Repeating Dorgo’s feat of pulling himself across the emptiness between links was beyond her strength.

‘Stay there,’ Dorgo warned. He turned his body around with desperate caution, and started to retrace his steps.

Togmol caught hold of his arm. ‘What are you doing?’ the warrior demanded.

‘I’m going back for her,’ Dorgo said.

‘Leave the witch,’ Togmol snarled, making certain his words were loud enough for Sanya to hear. ‘She got us here, that is enough. We can work out how to use the Altar for ourselves.’

Dorgo shook his head. Togmol’s suggestion appealed to him, cried out to all the petty bitterness in his soul, but he knew he could not take the chance. Too much depended on their success. Togmol groaned in disgust as Dorgo crept back across the link, and then pulled himself over the gap and back to where he had started.

‘I can’t,’ Sanya started to tell him. Dorgo waved aside her explanation, pushing her back to the rocky ledge. He began removing belts and straps from his armour and gear, dumping the heavy mammoth hide on the ground. He glanced at Sanya, and then tore at the heavy chain around her waist.

‘Remove that and anything else you don’t need,’ he told her. ‘Anything like cord or rope, you give to me.’

Hesitantly, timidly, Sanya began to discard the many charms and amulets she bore. Lead flasks of strange humours, tomes of spells bound in serpent-skin, strange foci of every description and shape soon littered the ground. Besides her torn robe, she wore only a single charm, a silver representation of the Eye of Cheen the Changer. Dorgo nodded in approval when the woman finished stripping away her excess weight, and then glowered at her as she stooped to retrieve her bag.

‘Leave that with the rest,’ he scolded.

Sanya glared back at him. ‘If it stays, so do I,’ she snapped.

‘It looks like it weighs more than the rest combined,’ Dorgo snarled.

‘That is my worry,’ Sanya told him, defiantly standing her ground.

The warrior glared at her, furious at her idiotic obstinacy. What was so important that she would risk both their lives and those of their people? Dorgo took a menacing step towards her, tempted to seize the damned thing and throw it into the pit. He relented only when he saw Sanya edge towards the lip of the shelf, her intention clear. If the bag went, she would follow it.

‘It’s my worry if I’m going to carry you across that damned pit!’ he growled, backing away.

Sanya stared at him for a moment, as though not fully understanding what he had said. Briefly, a look that could almost be described as gracious came over her pretty face. Quickly, it vanished and the usual expression of smug arrogance returned. ‘I have abandoned much of my magic already,’ she told Dorgo in a withering tone. ‘I will not leave it all. The bag comes with me, or you can try to puzzle out the secrets of the Black Altar for yourself.’

Dorgo lividly cursed the woman’s stubborn insistence. He looked away from her, testing the strength of the cords and straps he had collected from the discarded gear. A few snapped under his brutal efforts, but others held fast. He coiled them around one forearm. Turning back to Sanya, he scrutinised her from head to foot, appraising her as he might appraise a mammoth calf. He felt confident that he could carry her, even with the bag, but the distance they would have to cover was not to be discounted. Dorgo felt sick at the thought of trying to cross the chain with the added strain on his muscles, but there was no other way. She had to get across.

Dorgo stepped in front of the sorceress. ‘Onto my back,’ he said. ‘Grab me from beneath the arms, clasp your hands behind your neck.’ Sanya didn’t question the order, but pressed herself against his body. Dorgo took one of the cords from around his forearm, tying Sanya’s wrists together. It was an awkward process, relying upon touch rather than sight, but he would rather have the pressure against the back of his neck than have a choking knot around his throat.

‘Legs,’ he said, slapping his belly. He felt Sanya’s weight drag on him as she shifted her body to comply. The sorceress’s slender limbs wrapped around him, crossing over his midsection. With her arms secured, he took the leather length of his belt and lashed Sanya’s legs together crosswise against his stomach. He could feel every curve of the woman pressing against him as he made the strap tight. He almost forgot the kind of creature she was, sorceress and Sul. Then he looked again at the bronze chain and the boiling pit and remembered exactly what she was: dead weight.

He stood for a moment, taking a few experimental breaths, making certain that the bindings would not restrict his breathing. Dorgo let himself become accustomed to the added burden of the woman. Tied to his back like a Muhak mother’s baby-basket, Dorgo hoped he had done everything he could to prepare. With a last prayer to gods and ancestors, he stepped out onto the first link, slowly edging his way back across the ghastly span.

Togmol shook his head as he watched Dorgo retrace his path with Sanya tied to his back. A blast of black fire set the entire chain swaying, forcing both Tsavags to grab desperately at the vertical loop of the strange bridge. Togmol swore. Dorgo was mad trying to cross with the witch. However long their chances were of deciphering the Black Altar alone, the chances of making the crossing with a Sul sorceress hanging off his body was even worse.

Dorgo motioned for Togmol to move ahead. The big warrior understood what his friend was telling him. They had both felt the way the chain had swayed when they moved. Coupled with the fiery temper of the pit, it was an added hazard they could do without. The idea was to move in sequence. Togmol would press ahead to the next link, and then Dorgo and Sanya would follow. They would keep an empty set of links between them, so they did not risk unbalancing one another when they made the desperate scramble from vertical link to horizontal.

It would make for a slow, tedious, backbreaking crossing. One look down, however, was enough to vividly display the price for haste.

Hours seemed to pass as they crossed the swaying span. How many times they had nearly been knocked from the chain by a tempestuous blast of force from below, how many hideous moments of terror had stolen upon them as their hands and feet desperately struggled to secure a hold as they lunged from one link to the next, none of them liked to consider. Whatever favours or fortunes the gods owed to them had been spent a hundred times over in the perilous crossing. None of them dared hope such indulgence would continue to the end.

The end was near, however. Only twenty links separated them from the grisly blackened skull that loomed above the pit. Closer, they could see its strange contours, its angled cheekbones and glaring sockets. The horns were etched with savage runes, and the teeth filed into spear-like fangs. From the depths of the open mouth, they could see an angry, infernal glow, burning with a sanguine light.

There was movement in that light, something dark and fearsome. Dorgo had the impression of several men moving around in the shadows. Then the shapes emerged from the black recesses of the structure into the hellish light of the pit, not men at all, but a grotesque semblance of human form. They were tall, their bodies swollen with muscle and strength, their skins leathery and crimson. There was nothing human about their heads, elongated skulls with barbed curls of black horn coiling against their sides. Their faces were cruel and inhuman, bleached fangs grinning from wide mouths, blood-black eyes staring from the pits beneath heavy brows.

Dorgo felt Sanya gasp in fright. ‘Bloodletters,’ she hissed. ‘Armsmen of Khorne!’

The daemons crept to the edge of the open jaw, smiling with vicious mockery at the men struggling so hard to cross the distance to reach them. One of the monsters stared full into Sanya’s pale face. It lifted its hand, splaying wide its talon-tipped fingers. With a growl, it folded one of the digits against its palm. In using the finger of a daemon to guide them here, Sanya had not considered that she was betraying their intentions to that same daemon.

The bloodletter snarled something to its fellows, something that brought feral barks of amusement from the daemons. The beasts advanced upon the bronze anchor chain that Dorgo and his comrades were crossing. With an incredible display of brute power, the daemons grabbed hold of the bronze links and began to tug at the chain.

Slowly at first, the Tsavags felt the effect of the daemons’ efforts. The chain began to lurch upwards, then outwards, and then down, in a terrifying rolling motion. The men tightened their holds around the vertical loops, screwing shut their eyes as they endured the ghastly ride.

After what seemed like hours, the daemons tired of their sport. Neither of the men had lost his hold, no satisfying scream had risen from the pit as the impertinent mortals fell to a fiery doom. Instead of stepping away from the chain, the daemons waited for its momentum to subside, fairly drooling in wicked anticipation. Just as the chain became stable again, it once more shuddered from the attentions of the bloodletters.

The daemons were crawling out onto the chain, leaping from link to link with a contemptuous ease that sickened the men watching them.

Togmol began to retreat back along the chain, hurrying to keep ahead of the bloodletters. The entire span swayed and bounced as the daemons howled in anticipation of the blood that would soon stain their claws: worse than the buffeting caused by the spurts of flame from the pit, worse than the jouncing violence of their lunges from link to link, Togmol nevertheless did not falter in his hurried, desperate retreat. As he passed Dorgo, however, there was no fear on the big warrior’s face, only a resigned determination.

‘Hold fast,’ Togmol warned in a low voice as he crept past. Then he was gone, lunging for the horizontal link behind Dorgo’s. The warrior landed with a grunt, his legs sliding out from under him. Togmol’s hand coiled around the loop of the horizontal link. It took his full strength to lift himself back onto the swaying surface. All the colour was drained out of him when he again had the hot metal beneath his feet. He crouched there, his entire body quivering from the terror of his near-accident.

Dorgo turned away from his friend, alarmed by Sanya’s warning shout in his ear. Ahead, the bloodletters had drawn much closer, scuttling across the links like great red rats. Their eyes shone with murderous anticipation, and their jaws gaped in hungry excitement. Six links separated them from their prey... five.... four.

Togmol’s roar snapped Dorgo’s head away from the daemons. He saw the big warrior, his broadaxe raised high, his legs wrapped through the loop of a horizontal link, drive his weapon crashing against the chain. Dorgo could feel the impact shiver through the entire span. He could hear the bloodletters snarl in sudden alarm. Then Togmol’s axe struck again, and Dorgo understood his warning to hold tight.

The link shattered beneath Togmol’s second blow. The chain snapped in half, sending the span behind Togmol’s axe shooting down and back, crashing against the wall of the funnel. The span before the bite of the axe swept forward, towards the skull-shaped dome of the Black Altar.

The tension of the chain gave it considerable momentum, cracking it like a whip through the emptiness beneath the structure. Dorgo felt his body cut and torn by the nest of hooks and chains beneath the Black Altar as the thick bronze length passed through them. Shrieks echoed from the cavernous walls as loathsome red bodies hurtled into the abyss. The bloodletters had not kept a tight enough grip on the links as they swarmed across the span to reach their prey. They paid for their hubris, splashing into the molten fire below.

Dorgo closed his eyes, biting down on the pain that wracked his body as the momentum of the bronze chain sent them crashing again and again through the nest beneath the Black Altar. Finally, the chain began to slow, its motion becoming lethargic and measured. When it finally stopped, Dorgo opened his eyes again. He could see the edge of the structure above them, a dark lip of twisted fangs around which the anchor of the chain was looped. Twenty links still separated them from their goal, and what had been a terrifying crossing, now became an even more horrifying vertical climb.

He looked down to thank Togmol for his quick thinking. Dorgo went cold when he saw only a set of empty links below him. The big warrior had somehow lost his grip during the violent episode, joining the daemons he had dispatched to a fiery oblivion.

‘We still have to reach the altar,’ Sanya reminded him, as though reading his thoughts.

Dorgo continued to stare at the empty chain and the boiling pit below. He wondered how much was too much. How much could be sacrificed before the burden was too great, the victory too small? He shook his head in disgust. A bitter victory was still better than defeat.

‘Why not?’ he decided with a sigh and began the long, laborious climb to the Black Altar.

Pyre-Rock, it was called. It was not hard for any who looked upon the sky castle of the Sul to understand why it had been so named. Once, the dreary dust bowl that sprawled between the wooded foothills and the stagnant pits of the Devourer’s swamp had been the capital of Teiyogtei’s kingdom. A great city had once stood here, its towers rearing up into the night, its battlements stretching a league and more around its houses and courtyards.

It had all gone. Not even a hint of rubble was left to show what had been. The city had been razed in the war that followed the passing of the king, as each warlord tried to assume command over all the domain. As the capital, as the city Teiyogtei had built, the settlement became a powerful symbol in the wars for domination.

The first to hold it had been the Sul and they had used the city as a formidable stronghold to prosecute their campaign of conquest. Alliance between the Vaan and Tsavags had spelled their undoing, however. After a terrible siege, the thick walls had been breached and the raging Vaan had put the city to the torch.

The conflagration quickly spread through the wooden structures, engulfing entire districts in the blink of an eye.

Even with their sorcery, the Sul had been unable to stop the destruction. Every flame they quenched was reborn elsewhere by a Vaan warrior’s torch. In the end, the sorcerers retreated to the alabaster walls of their palace, leaving their common tribesmen to perish in the flames. They combined their magic, bending it towards a single purpose, but not the salvation of the city, the salvation of themselves. Instead of extinguishing the raging fires, they encouraged them, exciting the flames higher and higher.

The conflagration swirled through the city, turning on the berserk warriors of the Vaan, driving them back. Only the white palace was spared. Outside its walls, the fire burned fiercer than anywhere, melting the earth, and gouging a deep furrow into the bedrock upon which the foundations had been set.

In a moment of awesome power, the palace was torn free from the earth, and carried up a hundred feet into the smoky sky, supported upon a pillar of white fire. The soot from the dying city rose up and swept across the palace, staining the alabaster walls an ashen grey, imprinting upon it forever the stench of death and destruction.

The pillar of white fire was still burning, generations later. With their common men gone, the Sul became a tribe of sorcerers and witches, perpetrating the most obscene rites to preserve their power and their sanctuary, the sanctuary that Hutga, desperately, prayed they would share with the Tsavags.

The mammoth-riders approached the eerie pillar of smokeless flame, gazing up at the grey walls above them. The mammoths stamped and snorted in alarm at the taint of fell sorcery. The men in the howdahs could feel it too, a clammy foulness that slithered across their skin and sickened their senses. Babies wailed and children cried, old men made the signs of the gods and women hid their eyes from the sinister fortress.

The power of the gods was a strange and terrible force, a thing to be revered and respected. Sorcerers like the Sul were the ultimate in blasphemy. They did not wield their powers through service and humility, but exulted in their magic, believing that they were masters, not servants or slaves. They met with daemons as though they were equals. They appealed to the gods not with prayers, but with pacts and plots, schemes that each sorcerer ultimately intended to twist to his own benefit. Madness was too small a word for such vainglorious pride.

Yet these madmen were his people’s final hope to escape the wrath of the Skulltaker.

Hutga stared at the silent, lifeless walls. Where were the sorcerous dogs? Had the Skulltaker already been here? Had he somehow made his way into the floating Sul fortress and taken the head of Enek Zjarr?

A snarl crawled onto Hutga’s face. No! This was simply more Sul trickery! Enek Zjarr might not be controlling the Skulltaker, but he meant to profit from him. The Tsavags were the last obstacle in his complete domination of the land. Why wouldn’t he abandon his allies, when it served his purposes?

‘Enek Zjarr!’ Hutga roared, his voice so loud that even the mammoths swayed uneasily at the sound. ‘Enek Zjarr! Show yourself you lice-suckling dung-worm! Hutga Khagan would hear more of your lies! He would hear more fables about Bloodeaters and Black Altars!’

The chieftain’s voice echoed across the empty landscape, startling a few rock rats from their holes. At first, only silence answered his roar. Then he saw motion behind one of the frosted windows of the palace. The portal slowly swung open. The faceless gold mask of Thaulan Scabtongue looked down at him.

‘Why does a dead man howl outside my walls?’ the sorcerer challenged Hutga. ‘You should be making peace with the gods before you see them. Beg them to forgive the weakness of the Tsavags and maybe they will even allow such a wastrel mob into the Hunting Halls.’

‘Dog!’ Hutga shouted, brandishing his spear. ‘Whoreson spawn of serpents! I won’t lower myself to speaking with your vile kind! Fetch me Enek Zjarr, I would speak with that treacherous liar!’

‘He will not speak with you, Hutga Ironbelly,’ Thaulan sneered from behind his golden visage. ‘Enek Zjarr communes with the gods. He has no time to waste with Tsavag vermin!’

Hutga’s face turned crimson with rage. He leaned back, pulling his arm back to cast his spear at the mocking sorcerer, caring little that he would lose the sacred weapon in doing so. Yorool’s panicked grip on the weapon was the only thing that stopped the murderous impulse. Sullenly, Hutga wrenched the spear from the shaman’s grip. He let the bronze shaft fall to the floor of the howdah, scowling with disgust at what he had almost done.

Above him, Thaulan laughed. ‘Play the warrior, Ironbelly, if you think that can save you!’

‘Traitors! Traitors all!’ Hutga hurled the words up at the palace as though they were stones. ‘You have used my people all along! What have you done with my son?’

‘What we told you,’ Thaulan said. ‘He has gone with Sanya to find the Black Altar and reforge the one weapon that can kill the Skulltaker.’

‘Liar!’ Hutga snapped. ‘You never intended to destroy the Skulltaker!’

‘For one who came here to seek sanctuary for his people, you are most ungracious Hutga Ironbelly,’ said Thaulan, his tone icy with contempt. ‘No man is the friend of the Skulltaker and only a fool would try.’

Hutga collected himself, despising the pride that had made him give voice to his rage. He had come here as a beggar, not a warlord. Whatever treachery Enek Zjarr had worked against them, the Sul were the only hope his tribe had left.

‘Forgive my words,’ Hutga said, almost choking on his shame. ‘They were unjust. I ask Enek Zjarr’s indulgence.’

‘There is no sanctuary here for you,’ Thaulan called down. Some sorcerer’s trick caused his voice to carry to even the most distant of the Tsavag mammoths, ensuring that even the oldest ears heard him. ‘But grovel all you like if it soothes your soul.’

‘Do not condemn my people because of my harsh tongue,’ Hutga implored.

‘I condemn them because of their stupidity,’ Thaulan hissed. ‘I condemn them because the Tsavags have stood in the way of the Sul for too long!’

‘Let me speak to Enek Zjarr!’ Hutga insisted.

‘He will not speak to you, Ironbelly,’ the sorcerer repeated.

‘Damn you!’ Hutga roared. ‘At least take in the children!’

Thaulan’s malevolent laughter was like the yap of a jackal. ‘Keep your brats, they’ll make fine sport when the end comes. I will tell you one thing, though, Hutga Ironbelly. Enek Zjarr was sincere when he said he needed your help to destroy the Skulltaker. You ask where your son is and I shall tell you. He is in the Wastes. Even now, he approaches the Black Altar.’

Hutga blinked in disbelief at Thaulan’s scornful words. ‘Then he is alive? There is hope?’

‘No, Ironbelly,’ Thaulan said. ‘There is no hope for you. The hour is already late.’ The sorcerer’s gloved hand lifted, pointing from the window, out across the dusty plain. ‘For the Tsavags, it is later still.’

Hutga turned, following the direction of Thaulan’s gesture. Nearly every man in the tribe was doing so. What they saw sent a tremor of fear running through the entire company. In the distance, a dark speck could be seen moving across the landscape: a lone rider.

‘The Skulltaker comes,’ Thaulan hissed, a vile note of expectancy in his tone. ‘The Sul have already taken steps to protect ourselves from him. Can you say the same, Hutga Ironbelly?’

The sorcerer’s laughter was still dripping down on his ears as Hutga ordered the tribe back on the march. There was no sanctuary for them here. He had been a fool to think there would be. There was no escape for them. No matter where they ran, the Skulltaker would find them.

Hutga looked back at the gold-masked shape staring down from the palace. Maybe it was already too late, but if the Tsavags were to die, at least they could do so without jackals for an audience.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dorgo looked down from the fanged ledge of the Black Altar, watching as streams of dark fire burst from the bubbling surface of the pit far below. Somewhere in that inferno, Togmol had met his doom. He’d traded his life for Dorgo’s and Sanya’s, and for the chance to save the Tsavags. Dorgo was not going to let his friend’s sacrifice be in vain. The Skulltaker would die and Dorgo was going to make it happen.

Sanya stood away from the warrior, massaging her cramped limbs in the shadow of the structure’s overhanging jaw. The Sul rubbed the chafed skin where the cords had dug into her flesh, trying to ease the stiffness from her body. Satisfied at length, she set her skin bag down, opening it to ensure that its contents were still safe. She glanced back at Dorgo, studying the solemn warrior. What little warmth was in her eyes turned cold. She fingered the talisman around her neck, the talisman she had stolen from Enek Zjarr. It was one of the most potent items of power possessed by the Sul, said to be carved from one of Great Cheen’s fiery tears. With its power coupled to her own, even a strong, brave Tsavag warrior was an insignificant obstacle.

The woman frowned, looking again at her bag. She let her fingers slip away from the amulet. No, she decided, Dorgo still had a part to play.

‘Dorgo,’ she called to him. The distracted Tsavag slowly turned around at the sound of her voice. ‘We mourn our dead later,’ she told him, injecting sympathy into her words.

Dorgo nodded and stepped away from the fang-lined edge. He joined the witch in the shadow of the upper jaw. A wide corridor stretched before them, perhaps twenty feet across and at least half as high. Ten feet in, the darkness of the corridor was cut off by great panels of bronze that shimmered with an inner flame. Sanya approached the sealed doorway, peering at it with her eyes only a few inches from the hot metal plates.

Dorgo watched her with suspicious interest. He didn’t know what the witch was looking for, but he knew she’d better find it. From where he stood, the bronze portals looked as solid as a wall, betraying neither gap nor hinge.

At last, Sanya ended her study, stepping back, a knowing smile on her face. She reached beneath her tattered robe, producing a dagger that had been fastened around her thigh. The appearance of the weapon gave Dorgo a start. He hadn’t realised that the woman had carried the blade.

Sanya approached him, holding the dagger in her fist. ‘Hold out your hand,’ she said. Dorgo hesitated, shifting his gaze from the woman’s cunning eyes to the ugly iron blade in her hand. ‘What pains you, warrior? Afraid of a little cut?’

Knowing it was stupid, but feeling the sting of insulted courage, Dorgo held out his hand to the sorceress. Sanya grabbed his wrist, twisting his hand so that his palm was facing upwards. With a swift, deft stroke she brought the edge of the dagger slicing against Dorgo’s skin. Blood bubbled up from the cut, but Dorgo did not feel it until his eyes told him it was there.

‘Place your palm against the door,’ Sanya told him.

Dorgo hesitated for a moment, trying to read Sanya’s intentions, trying to imagine what black sorcery she would use his blood for. He shook his head, almost laughing at his suspicions. It was much too late to distrust the sorceress. He stepped boldly up to the bronze panel. He could see what looked like dancing flames writhing inside the metal, could feel the hot shimmer of the door reaching out to him.

He reached back, in turn, slapping his bloodied palm against the panel. Instantly, he pulled his hand away, the heat of the door searing his skin. He looked down at his singed palm, finding that the hot metal had cauterised his cut. Dorgo cast a foul glance over his shoulder at Sanya.

‘You might have warn–’ He never finished the admonition. A sudden intensification of the heat emanating from the door drove him back. He could see the bloody mark of his palm fading into the bronze, rushing through the panels like poison through a vein. He shielded his eyes as the glowing shimmer of the door grew blindingly bright. He heard a strange sound, like raindrops splashing against stone. As the glow started to abate, he opened his eyes, marvelling at the sight that greeted him. The thick bronze portals were melting, disintegrating like wax under a flame. The molten metal pooled, slowly draining out of small notches in the floor.

‘What magic is this?’ he hissed, astonished by the eerie display.

‘The only magic Khorne respects,’ Sanya said. ‘The magic of blood sacrifice. The one key that would open this door.’

Dorgo looked back at the bronze panels. They had nearly completed their disintegration, their residue already largely drained away. Beyond, he could see a large round room with walls of black iron. Loathsome etchings in the metal displayed riotous scenes of slaughter and carnage, abominations of such savagery that even Dorgo was shocked as he saw them so vividly and laboriously depicted. Then his eyes were drawn away from the walls to the thing that squatted at the very centre of the room.

It was as much like a well as a furnace, a great round stump of what looked to be charred flesh. Its upper surface was open, an empty hole ringed with tooth-like projections. Beneath the teeth, a faint ember of light smouldered from the depths of the opening.

Dorgo knew that this was the forge at the heart of the Black Altar, the place where Teiyogtei had made his weapons, the gifts that would buy the fealty of his warlords, the tools to carve a kingdom from the Shadowlands. Behind the strange forge, a nest of chains and pulleys hung above a gaping hole that stared straight down into the bubbling pit below.

Dorgo jumped over the last dregs of molten bronze and approached the forge with tremulous, awed steps. He could feel its power calling out to him, demanding to be used. He could feel its unimaginable hate tearing at his mind, filling it with visions more terrible than those engraved on the walls.

‘The soul of Krathin,’ Sanya gasped, crossing into the chamber. There was a feverish, almost lustful gleam in her eyes as she spoke the name of the bloodthirster. She approached the forge, sweat dripping down her face.

Dorgo felt a wave of murderous jealousy thunder through his brain. Kill! the emotion told him. Kill! Kill! Kill! His body shivered with the effort of holding back, denying the roaring urge that burned in his veins. That part of him he understood as intelligence and self railed against the mental command, fighting to keep control of his rebellious flesh. That part of him that was instinct and feeling was already enslaved, exerting itself to snap the fragile rule of his reason.

As he fought, Dorgo saw Sanya turn towards him. Her dagger was once more in her hand as she slowly strode across the chamber. He could see nothing but crazed bloodlust in her eyes, nothing but murder on her face. This time, he knew, it would not be his hand she cut.

Sanya’s other hand slowly, tremblingly, lifted to her neck by inches and degrees, so slowly it almost seemed the hand wasn’t moving. Dorgo felt his desperate effort to keep control of his body start to slip away, to drain out of him the way the bronze doors had vanished into the floor. If he failed, he knew he would surge forwards in a berserk rush. He could see his hands grabbing either side of Sanya’s face, wrenching her head full around and snapping her neck like a twig. If he didn’t fail, Sanya would sink her dagger into his chest and bury it in his heart. The image ran through his mind again and again. Either outcome would suit the malevolent power of the Black Altar equally well.

Only a few steps separated Tsavag and Sul. Dorgo felt fear oozing into his thoughts as the moment when the dagger would strike drew ever closer. Like acid, it gnawed at his desperate hold over his treacherous body. He felt his body lurch forwards, his hands curling into beast-like claws.

Then Sanya’s free hand closed around its objective. The woman’s fist clenched tightly around the amulet she still wore, the silvery rune of Cheen the Changer. Horror flashed through her eyes, unseating the bloodthirsty hatred that had filled them. She gave a sharp bark of fright as she saw Dorgo lunge towards her. Like a striking adder, she dropped her dagger and grabbed his wrist.

Instantly, Dorgo felt reason restored to him. Something growled through his body as it recoiled from a bright, searing energy. He could feel its frustrated wrath as it was driven out, like a lion cheated of its kill. Then it was gone and he was master of his flesh once more.

Sanya and Dorgo stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, watching for any hint of the murderous madness. At last they were satisfied. Sanya released her hold on his wrist and drew away from him.

‘I hadn’t expected it to be so strong, not after all this time,’ she said, almost apologetic in her tone.

Dorgo didn’t look at her, but kept watching the walls, trying to find the source of the attack, some hidden lurker that had cast a spell upon them. ‘Wasn’t it you who said that time is without meaning in the Wastes?’ Dorgo replied acidly.

Sanya gave him a thin smile, irritated that a brutish mammoth rider made the connection, more than irritated that she had never considered it. ‘Whatever you think you’re looking for, you won’t find it,’ she told him. ‘There is only one shape the spirit of Krathin can wear now.’ She gestured to the grotesque forge. Dorgo could see the charred mass of flesh crawling with some abominable inner motion, like worms writhing in a corpse. ‘When Teiyogtei slew the bloodthirster, he had bound the daemon’s spirit into a shape that would serve him and imprisoned it within the Black Altar.’

‘It still lives?’ Dorgo asked, repulsed by the suggestion.

‘No,’ Sanya said in an almost soothing voice, though Dorgo could not be certain if it was his or her fear that she was trying to allay. ‘It is not alive, but a daemon does not die the way we understand death. Just as it would be wrong to call it alive, it is wrong to say it is dead.’

‘What is it then?’ Dorgo scoffed, annoyed by the sorceress’s riddling words. ‘Sleeping?’

Sanya shivered visibly and he saw that her effort to quiet her fears was ruined. Her reply was a singled word, hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Waiting.’

Dorgo didn’t like the word. He didn’t like the memory of the ferocious urge burning through his veins. He didn’t like the image of the colossal, bestial shape they had climbed, alive in its full malefic magnificence, dripping with a timeless lust for destruction and terror.

‘What is it waiting for?’ he asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer.

‘What it must never have,’ Sanya answered with a shudder, ‘not if the Sul… and the Tsavags are to survive.’ She forced her features to harden. ‘It will never ascend,’ she declared. ‘Teiyogtei enslaved it and a slave it will remain.’

‘But, this place,’ Dorgo said confused. ‘The Black Altar… I have seen it. I know it. When I struck the stake in the borderland… the vision I had. This is where… where Vrkas became the Skulltaker. The daemon used its power to make the Skulltaker.’

The ghastly forge trembled with excitement as Dorgo spoke the dreaded name. Somehow, the impression of a faithful dog wagging its tail at the sound of its master’s voice suggested itself to the warrior as the writhing worm-meat of the forge shivered.

‘Krathin deceived Teiyogtei,’ Sanya told him, averting her eyes from the grisly display of quivering flesh. ‘When the king enslaved it, the daemon’s spirit swore to serve the mortal. Teiyogtei only understood his mistake after the pact was made. The forge would serve the mortal. Not an individual mortal, but the mortal world. Yes, Teiyogtei could use the daemon’s power to forge his mighty weapons, but so could any other man. The daemon’s revenge upon Teiyogtei lay in that deceit.

‘When he discovered his mistake, Teiyogtei built the Black Altar to imprison the physical essence of Krathin’s spirit, swearing bloody oaths to Khorne to hide and protect the forge from those who would use it against him. Teiyogtei broke those oaths, using the power of the Blood God to build a kingdom instead of the mountain of skulls he had promised. In retaliation, Khorne allowed the spirit of Krathin to reach out from its prison to find a mortal with a hatred of the king equal to its own and bring that hate to the Black Altar. What Krathin found was Vrkas.’

In his mind, Dorgo could again see that strange scene from long ago, the terrible vision that had reached out to him from the dim mist of years when he touched the bronze stake in the borderland. His people vanquished and destroyed, defeated in battle and denied the honour of a warrior’s death, impaled and left for the vultures, the hatred Vrkas felt for Teiyogtei must have burned like a beacon to the daemon. That hate had bound them together, had given Vrkas the strength to pull himself off his stake and crawl through the horrors of the Wastes until he stood before the Black Altar.

Vrkas’s scarred face glared at him from those stolen memories. Dorgo felt the pride and fury of the outraged warlord. He knew that this man had sacrificed his very humanity in the name of vengeance. Somehow, the forge had transformed his mangled, dying body into the engine of slaughter that men called the Skulltaker. How pleased the vanquished daemon must have been to serve Vrkas and unleash the Skulltaker upon the world.

Dorgo forced himself to look again at the loathsome forge. It almost seemed to be smiling at him, the toothy grin of a wolf watching its prey. ‘If this… thing made the Skulltaker, how can we trust it to remake the Bloodeater?’ Dorgo tore the leather strap binding the pouch that lay against his side. He tossed it in his hand, feeling the shards of the blade slap against his skin. They were so close to what they had come so far to do, yet their desperate mission seemed more impossible than ever.

‘It will obey us,’ Sanya said and her tone brooked no question. ‘It tried to keep us away to the last, but it failed and we are here. It cannot refuse us, the pact of Teiyogtei binds it. It must serve any mortal who commands it.’ The excited crawling tremor of the forge abruptly stopped. The sorceress glared triumphantly at the horrible thing.

‘It must serve us,’ she repeated. ‘It must reforge the sword of Teiyogtei.’ Cruel venom dripped from her voice, striking at the imprisoned daemon with sneering contempt.

‘It will give us the weapon that will kill the Skulltaker!’

Fear gripped the domain and all within it. From the emptiness of the Desert of Mirrors, to the abandoned vastness of the Grey and the broken husk of Iron Keep, every creature that walked or crawled, that slithered or flew, knew the cold grip of terror. Doom was reaching out with talons of steel to claim what it had once been cheated of. Upon the desolation of the steppes, desperate men fought to escape the shadow that had fallen around them. Reckless, frantic, goaded by horror, they fled across the vastness, and behind them, death gave chase.

The earth quaked with the rumble of stampeding behemoths. Fields of saw-edged knife-flowers were trampled flat by the gigantic creatures that ploughed through them. Trumpeting, bellowing, the mammoths of the Tsavags fled across the rolling steppes, infected by their masters’ terror.

Men clung to the walls of the swaying, rocking howdahs, knuckles white in their frantic efforts to keep their hold. Some failed, their grip faltering beneath the bone-grinding tremors that rose through them each time the immense feet of the mammoths smashed into the earth. The bodies of these unfortunates pitched over the sides of the low-lying howdah walls, crashing into the ground in battered heaps. Impelled by panic and the momentum of their gigantic frames, the mammoths following behind ground the wretches into paste beneath their pounding feet.

The beasts showed no sign of fatigue, even though many leagues separated them from the eerie fortress of the Sul, where the strange chase had begun. Mountains of muscle and strength, to the prodigious stamina of the war mammoths had been added the volatile fuel of fear. The combination created a blind rush that the mammoth riders had abandoned trying to control.

Hours of strain, the unending violence of the impact tremors jolting through the mammoths’ bodies, took their toll upon the howdahs. Never designed for such prolonged abuse, some of the platforms began to disintegrate as tethers frayed and bindings snapped. A wreckage of ivory and wood littered the herd’s path as pieces of the howdahs broke away. Some howdahs lost only a few bits and pieces, others had entire planks and walls tear away, carrying with them screaming Tsavags to be pulped by the thundering charge of the herd. A few mammoths lost their entire howdahs, the thick leather straps around their bodies breaking, causing entire platforms to shift and overbalance the beasts.

Men and mammoths alike smashed into the earth in a pile of broken bones and pained cries, cries for help that none of the Tsavags could answer.

Behind the mammoths, the lone, lupine shape of their pursuer steadily gained ground. Faster than the herd, possessed of a savage endurance that defied belief, the wolf-like beast prowled in the shadow of the Tsavags, carrying its rider ever closer to his prey.

Hour upon hour, the beast closed the distance, the smell of its blood-soaked fur driving the mammoths still more wild with fear, the evil aura of its rider overwhelming the desperate occupants of the howdahs with almost mindless terror.

An instant of blood and horror found the Skulltaker among the herd. The smoking length of his black sword was in his hand as his wolf-like steed raced among the towering behemoths.

Like a woodsman felling a tree, the Skulltaker brought his sword slashing into the leg of a mammoth, tearing through the shaggy fur and thick, leathery flesh to scrape against the bone beneath. The mammoth reared up in pain, its trunk groping plaintively at the uncaring sky. Then the mangled leg buckled beneath it, sending it crashing into the ground.

Other mammoths staggered and stumbled as the flailing giant slid into them. Some fell, others turned around, abandoning the herd in their pained confusion. Men were thrown from the bucking howdahs, smashed between the bodies of the lumbering brutes. Screams and the anguished trumpeting of fallen mammoths added to the turmoil, scattering men and beasts like birds before a storm.

The Skulltaker’s gruesome steed charged into the upheaval. When the bulk of a fallen mammoth reared in its path, the beast sprang, its claws digging into the shaggy hide as it lighted upon the living obstacle. The mammoth spun its head towards the beast, swatting at it with its trunk, trying to gore it with its tusks.

Before the wounded mammoth could concentrate its efforts, the wolfish beast was leaping again, pouncing like some rock lion onto the flank of a fleeing animal. Again, sharp claws sank into leathery flesh, latching onto the hurtling mammoth like some enormous tick.

Men cried out in horror as they saw the brute beast and its fearsome rider appear behind the howdah. Most cowered with their families, trembling in their terror. A few, reckless or crazed, jabbed ineffectually at the killer with their spears. The Skulltaker ignored them all, disregarding even the pained thrashings of the mammoth as it tried to dislodge his steed. The grim mask of the Skulltaker’s helm looked across the thundering herd, studying the desperate rout with the chill stare of the true predator. From the vantage point of the mammoth’s towering back, he was allowed the view he needed.

A kick of the Skulltaker’s boots and his grisly mount retracted its claws and sprang away from the bellowing mammoth. The hound-like beast crashed heavily against the shaking earth. It paused for only a moment, and then the beast was running through the moving canyon of shaggy flesh.

With great, loping bounds, the Skulltaker’s steed bore him through the maddened herd, darting between the smashing legs of the mammoths, dodging the flashing tusks and flailing trunks as they passed each brute.

Ahead, the Skulltaker had seen what he wanted: the banners and trophies, the steel-ringed tusks and tattooed ears of the khagan’s mammoth. Dimly, he could remember when he had last seen the war-steed of a Tong khagan. Revenge denied was revenge savoured.

Through the smashing, crashing, stomping panic of the herd, the air filthy with dust and dung, past the tattered wreckage of howdahs, and over the ruptured paste of crushed men; onward, onward to rage and ruin and revenge.

The Skulltaker’s steed emerged from the press of the herd. Its jaws snapped irritably at the air, trying to blot the taste of dust from its mouth. Then it spun, racing a parallel course to one of the mammoths at the fore of the herd, the mammoth with painted ears and steel-ringed tusks.

Gradually, the wolf-beast slackened its pace, allowing its prey to close upon it. Throwing spears crashed into the dirt around the beast, but its preternatural agility foiled the aims of desperate men. A fiery vapour burst into life around the wolf and its rider, and then vanished just as quickly, broken by the power of the runes the Skulltaker wore.

The wolf-beast sprang backwards as the mammoth’s spiked tusks swept towards it. The beast landed in a crouch, every muscle tightening into a steel coil. Then it sprang again. This time the creature leapt in an almost sidewise motion, twisting its body as it jumped.

Once again, the wolf-beast’s claws dug into the shaggy fur and leathery flesh of a mammoth. This time, however, its rider was not content to stay in the saddle. Even as his steed secured its gruesome footing, the Skulltaker was moving, jumping from the back of his beast and into the bed of the howdah.

The impact of his armoured body smacking against the platform as he landed caused the entire structure to shake.

A Tsavag rushed at the invader, struggling to keep his footing as the mammoth’s body shuddered beneath him. He swept a sickle-bladed axe at the monster’s horned helm, roaring the battle cry of his ancestors. The warrior never finished his charge, his arm and shoulder cut from his body by a single hideous sweep of the Skulltaker’s shrieking blade. The shuddering corpse toppled against the wall of the howdah, and then pitched into the dim blur of the landscape, whipping past the mammoth’s hurtling bulk.

The Tsavags stood frozen in shocked silence, hands closed around the trembling walls of the howdah. It was not merely fear of being thrown from the crazed beast’s back that held the men.

Confronted by this fiend from legend, the graphic display of their kinsman’s slaughter held them in an icy grip. The Skulltaker lifted his gaze from the transfixed warriors, staring up at the raised platform and the hulking figure of the man he had come so far to kill.

Hutga Khagan glared at the Skulltaker with the steel courage of a man who knows his doom is upon him. The chieftain cast aside his fur cloak, exposing his muscular chest and its nodule-like metallic growths. He gripped the polished haft of his ji, the wickedly keen spear-axe that had been gifted to the first warlord of the tribe by Teiyogtei. The broad spear-point and the cruel crescent of the axe-blade behind and beneath it shone in the failing light as dusk descended upon the domain.

Hutga thought it ironically appropriate that this fight should happen now, as the day died away and night stretched its black fingers over the land.

The chieftain could feel the daemonic force within his weapon surging through his veins as he drew its power into his body. Enough to overwhelm any mortal foe, he knew it would not be enough to destroy the Skulltaker. Seeing Ratha cut down made Hutga understand how delusional such an idea was. No, he could not win, but he wouldn’t crawl either. He’d give the monster a fight that the Skulltaker would remember.

‘Do your worst,’ Hutga spat at his foe.

The Skulltaker’s grinding voice echoed from behind his mask. ‘I won’t have to.’

As he uttered the mocking insult, the Skulltaker was in motion, stalking towards the raised dais with broad, hungry steps. Hutga felt his stomach turn sour, horrified by the Skulltaker’s grace and ease, the surety of purpose and motion. The Skulltaker might have prowled the unbending floor of a marble hall rather than the jostling, swaying surface of the howdah, apparently oblivious to the threat of being thrown by the mammoth’s frenzied charge.

A scrawny, miserable figure interposed itself between the Skulltaker and his intended victim, clutching an ivory support to keep his balance. Yorool screamed at the monster, the names of gods and daemons dripping off the shaman’s tongue as he called upon powers he was forbidden to invoke.

Black coils of energy whipped around the Skulltaker, surrounding him in a writhing shimmer of profane power. The planks beneath the Skulltaker’s boots turned brown, withering with rot. A warrior standing too close was caught by the gnawing unlight. His skin turned white, crumbling from his bones as the curse of years consumed all the days yet to come. The dust collapsed against the floor of the howdah, dust and a few miserable bits of decayed bone.

The Skulltaker forced his way through the cloying, devouring unlight, like a swamp troll trudging through a quagmire. No sign of leprous rot, no trace of crumbling decay marked his armour as he won his way clear of Yorool’s magic. There was no hint of weakness in his step as he moved towards Hutga’s throne.

The black blade came scything down before Yorool could call upon another spell. It bit through the shaman’s cowl and his disfigured face, splitting him from crown to jaw. The Skulltaker wrenched his weapon free in a brutal spray of teeth and brains, kicking the slain shaman from his path.

The butchery of their shaman broke the grip of terror that held the Tsavag warriors. Men rushed the Skulltaker in a howling, vengeful mob. Several lost their footing as the mammoth’s pounding feet sent tremors rushing through the howdah. Men screamed as their bodies were sent rolling across the platform, smacking against the walls and crashing through the wooden sides. Some kept their footing, managing to stumble and grope their way to their foe. Spears and axes ripped at the monster, and swords stabbed at his body. Only one blade struck true.

The Tsavags backed away from the Skulltaker once more, leaving three of their number strewn at the monster’s feet. They backed away, not in fear, but in awed respect. Their weapons had glanced harmlessly from the Skulltaker’s armour, unable to reach the man inside. However, the daemonic mail had been unable to thwart one weapon. The dagger-like tip of Hutga’s ji transfixed the monster’s throat. Something stagnant dripped down the bronze shaft, something too old to still be called blood.

Hutga stared in open-mouthed wonder, unable to believe what he had done. Then the Skulltaker lifted his hand, grabbing hold of the bronze haft. Defying the weight of the man at the other end of the weapon, he ripped the blade free, pushing it away with what could only be contempt. Hutga nearly fell as the ji was thrust back at him, and stumbled back several paces, his back almost colliding with the ivory edge of the howdah.

Only the lift of the mammoth’s leg and the rise of its body as it rushed on across the steppes prevented the khagan from falling over the side.

The Skulltaker stalked after the chieftain, hacking apart the bodies of the few warriors who half-heartedly tried to attack him. Hutga could see the rent in the throat armour slowly oozing closed again. The chieftain felt despair bite into his heart, and then he remembered the monster’s contemptuous words. It didn’t matter if the thing couldn’t be killed, Hutga Khagan would die on his feet, not his belly!

The chieftain charged at the approaching Skulltaker, the ji flashing at the monster in a blinding display of jabs and thrusts, of spinning attacks where he brought the crescent-edge of the axe grinding against the armour plate, followed with a bludgeoning blow from the club-like counterweight at the other end of the spear.

The Skulltaker struck back at him, but Hutga was always able to interpose the bronze pole between his body and the butchering sword.

So it continued, the desperate contest between mortal man and timeless monster, the chieftain keeping the Skulltaker’s sword at bay, but never able to land a telling blow of his own. A delicate balance of thrust, parry and block had been established. Both combatants watched for the moment when that balance would tip.

Hutga shouted in triumph as he saw that moment come. The Skulltaker’s recovery from a thwarted strike was sloppy and slower than before. Hutga seized the opening, jabbing at the Skulltaker, and then twisting his ji so that the tip of the black sword was trapped in the small slot between axe-blade and pole.

Hutga twisted his weapon again in a manoeuvre that he had practised many times on the field of battle. Trapped in the slot behind the axe-blade, the wrenching motion would tear the sword from the Skulltaker’s hand, disarming the monster.

At least, that is what Hutga thought would happen. He had not reckoned upon the otherworldly strength of his enemy or that of the terrible weapon he bore. Instead of tearing the black sword from the Skulltaker’s hand, the wrenching motion caused the edge of the screaming blade to bite through the bronze pole, tearing through it with disgusting ease.

Hutga reeled back, horrified to find himself holding nothing but a bronze pole. Grinding his teeth together in rage, he rushed back at his foe, striking at the horned helmet with the clubbed end of the shaft. The Skulltaker barely seemed to move, but his black sword came chopping down just the same. Hutga howled in agony as his hand leapt from its wrist and flew across the platform.

The chieftain clutched his bleeding stump to his chest, despising his weakness. He’d lost his hold upon the wreckage of his ji in that moment of shock and pain. The surge of the mammoth’s body beneath him sent Hutga stumbling back, struggling to find his footing. A few of his remaining warriors rushed the monster. Others jumped from the back of the mammoth, more willing to chance the pounding charge of the herd than the Skulltaker’s blade. The mahout in the ivory cage on the mammoth’s neck was one of those who chose to jump, leaving the immense animal with only its panic and pain to drive it on.

A flash of daemonic steel, a spray of blood and screams, and Hutga was alone upon the runaway mammoth, alone with the Skulltaker. He cursed himself for a fool as he cowered before the monster. He understood now that his enemy could have ended the contest any time he wanted. The Skulltaker had been playing with him.

The chieftain struggled to stay standing, but blood loss was making him dizzy. The mammoth’s panic sent an endless tremor through the howdah, rattling planks in their fastenings, and twisting the floor beneath his feet.

The thick, fear-tainted reek of the mammoth’s sweat washed over the chieftain, a sickly odour that sapped his resolve. Despite his efforts, Hutga slumped to his knees. The Skulltaker stared down at him. Hutga glared back at the monster, peering into the fiend’s burning eyes.

Suddenly Hutga knew what was staring at him from behind the sockets of the Skulltaker’s mask, what was encased within the monster’s armour: hate, pure and cold and terrible. He could feel that hate burning into his body, burning into his soul. The timeless rage of the immortal, the icy fury of a thousand lifetimes, all bore down upon the beaten Tsavag chief.

‘End it!’ Hutga snarled. ‘Take your trophy!’

He closed his eyes as the Skulltaker drew back his sword.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The bestial roar of the forge boomed within the iron walls of the Black Altar, drowning out even the boiling din rising from the pit far below. After so many centuries of neglect and loneliness, the daemonic presence of the forge seemed almost eager to work once more, anxious to bind a shard of its evil into a weapon and send a part of itself out into the world again, even if that weapon was going to be used to frustrate its vengeful lust.

Dorgo worked the complex nest of pulleys and chains. He hauled buckets of what looked like molten pitch, but which stank like burnt blood, up from the pit, pouring it into the yawning mouth of the forge. Impossibly, the emptiness within the fleshy forge never seemed to fill, consuming bucket upon bucket of the fiery broth. He could feel heat rising from within the darkness beneath the sharp teeth of the forge, could feel it growing to blistering intensity, but where the magma-like liquid vanished to, the Tsavag could not say.

Sanya watched Dorgo work, her eyes carefully studying both man and forge. She listened to the roar of the forge, concentrated on the clawing touch of heat against her soft skin. She waited for a moment, for the fleeting instant when all her senses would be in alignment, for the moment when the daemon would be ready to do its work.

The moment came. With a sharp cry, Sanya called Dorgo away from the hanging chains and bronze pulley wheels. Her senses told her that he had fed the forge enough, that its fire burned hot enough to serve them.

‘Place your hand against the forge,’ she told him. The warrior stared at her, distrust in his eyes. Sanya laughed at his suspicion. ‘Getting the sword is only half the battle,’ she said. ‘I need someone to wield it, someone fool enough to challenge the Skulltaker.’

‘But not fool enough to burn his hand down to the bone,’ Dorgo growled back.

‘You won’t be burned,’ Sanya assured him, though there was a touch of uncertainty behind her words. ‘The daemon’s spirit requires physical contact to understand what we need of it, to receive its orders.’

Dorgo looked back at the pulsating knot of quivering flesh. He could see the shimmer of heat rising from its gaping mouth. He glanced at Sanya and scowled, clenching his fist and waving it at her. ‘Be warned, witch, I’ll still have one hand to strangle that pretty neck!’ The threat uttered, he walked to the edge of the forge and slapped his hand down against its lip.

His hand didn’t burn. In defiance of the heat and the buckets of molten fire he’d poured down into it, the fleshy surface was cold and damp, slimy like wet offal. It didn’t burn. The sensation that shot through his body was much worse than that.

He could feel something moving through him, crawling behind his eyes. His bones shivered from the deep, murderous growl of the daemon as its presence invaded him.

Then, in an instant, it was gone. Dorgo snatched his hand away and fell to the floor, retching in disgust at the spectral violation. He pulled away as he felt Sanya’s hands on his shoulders.

‘The touch of a daemon is vile,’ she said, her words heavy with the experience of abuse. ‘There is nothing so filthy in this world or the next as the petty splinters of a god’s magnificence. But they are a necessary evil, a bridge between mortals and the power of the gods.’ She pressed forward again, cupping Dorgo’s chin in her hand. This time he did not pull away. Her face was a soothing mask, her eyes limpid pools. There was invitation in the curve of her lips as she smiled down at him.

‘Come,’ she said, guiding him from the floor with the delicate pressure of her hand, ‘see what your suffering has done.’

Dorgo allowed himself to be led back to the forge by the enticing lure of the sorceress. The obscene feeling of the daemon crawling inside him, the bloodthirsty foulness of its murderous spirit was forgotten. He was oblivious to the heat and the stench, the clammy taint of evil in the air. All he could see was Sanya, the slender curves of her body moving beneath the tatters of her robe, the smouldering glow of the forge dancing through her hair.

A change had come upon the forge. The teeth lining its surface had gnashed together, forming a flat, circular disc of polished bone above the mouth of the forge. While he watched, a ripple of motion passed through the disc, the bone surface trembling like the skin of a pond.

A depression began to form in the centre of the strange anvil, a surface that soon bore the unmistakable outline of a sword.

‘Fit the shards to the shape,’ Sanya told him, letting her hand slide from his chin to the side of his neck.

The woman’s touch thrilled him, exciting him, making him forget all his doubt and suspicion. He could only dimly feel the heat rising from the forge, the mephitic haze that rippled across the surface of bone.

One by one, he removed the crimson shatters from their pouch, setting each piece of the Bloodeater into the mould. Somehow, he was not surprised when the pieces fitted perfectly into place.

Sanya led him away from the forge, as mouth-like orifices slobbered open all along its sides. The mouths sucked great draughts of air into the forge’s unseen furnace, feeding its hellish fires. The bone skin above the fire began to glow, first red and then white.

Dorgo was amazed when he saw the ruby fragments of the blade melt into crimson liquid. A fire so hot it melted gemstone was unimaginable. Dorgo had thought that the forge would somehow knit the pieces back together, bind them with some daemon’s trick.

He understood better now. The bloodthirster was too much of a warrior to allow a blade with such weakness into the world. The Bloodeater would be remade from its destruction, like the fabled fire dragon of Cathay. There would be no spider-thin fractures and weaknesses where shard joined shard, but a whole blade cast from a single ingot of ruby, just as it must have been shaped when Teiyogtei first forged it.

While the shards melted, knobbly tendrils of flesh began to ooze from the lip of the forge, rising like boneless arms above the glowing anvil of bone. The tips of the tendrils hardened, becoming stumps of black, shining stone. They were still for a time, waiting for the heat and the fire to do their work. Then, with eerie precision, the fleshy bludgeons came smacking down, pounding against the daemon-bone disc.

Despite the otherworldly surroundings, despite the horrific nature of forge and hammer, despite the impossible substance being worked, the sound that filled the Black Altar was jarring in its normalcy: nothing more than would rise from any mortal smithy.

How long the daemon hammers worked the molten ruby, neither Sanya nor Dorgo could ever say. Hours or days, time meant less than little in the bizarre limbo of the Wastes. At last, however, the hammers no longer struck against the anvil of daemon bone.

Exhibiting the same eerie precision, they were absorbed back into the fleshy substance of the forge. Gradually, the heat began to abate, and then a scorching, searing noise rose from the mouth of the disc. Blood, dark and stagnant, began to bubble up from the depths of the forge, slopping over the sides of the fleshy stump and running across the floor. The anvil and the blade were drowned beneath the rising tide. As steam rose from the mouth of the forge, Dorgo realised that the daemon was using this macabre method to quench the new-born blade.

When at last the bubbling tide of blood abated, Dorgo approached the forge once more. He found himself staring down into a pool of black blood that completely obscured the fang-like teeth and the sword they had held. He thought again of the depthless pit, the unfillable void into which he had poured bucket after bucket of fiery pitch. He felt a twinge of fear, imagining that yawning darkness.

The touch of Sanya’s hand against his arm reassured him. Boldly, he thrust his hand into the still warm mire of blood. His fingers groped through the blackness, brushing against the rough surface of the fangs. Then his hand touched something that was smooth and cold against his skin.

His fingers tightened around the unseen object, clenching into a firm fist as he pulled his arm back and ripped the reborn blade from its daemonic womb.

Bloody filth dripped from the Bloodeater, spattering the floor of the Black Altar. Somehow, the covering of blood could not hide the power and magnificence of the weapon he held. Dorgo knew that all the suffering, all the pain and violation, all the horror and fear had been worth it. He could feel strength pulsing through his arm, throbbing through his body.

He swung the sword through the empty air, shocked by how good it felt in his hand, as if it had always been there. A shimmer of power, like little sparks of crimson light, danced behind the blade as he thrust and slashed at unseen enemies. The warrior laughed, a pure sound, filled with wonder, the voice of a simple, child-like joy.

For the first time, it was not doom that ruled his heart, but hope. He had seen the Skulltaker, had seen what the champion could do. Dorgo had never truly believed that the Bloodeater could destroy the monster. Now, with the blade’s power flowing through him like a fiery river of strength, he did not believe anything could stand against him, even if it was the Skulltaker.

There was hope for his people and his father. There was hope for the entire domain.

‘The Skulltaker will die!’ Dorgo vowed, smiling as he gazed into the scintillating depths of his blade. ‘We will seek him out and destroy him!’

Sanya shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘If we stay here, the Skulltaker will come to us.’ She pointed at the Bloodeater clenched in his fist. ‘He will know what we have done. He will remember the sword that vanquished him once before. We do not need to seek him out, Dorgo, Hero of the Tsavags. If we wait, he will seek us.’

The wait was not a long one. Even as Dorgo was contemplating Sanya’s plan, trying to weigh its wisdom against his fears for his people, against the desperate need for haste that gripped him, a familiar and unforgettable chill swept through his body. He could see that the sorceress sensed it as well, turning to face the doorway where the bronze panels had once stood.

A figure emerged from the shadows, a hulking shape encased in crimson steel and a horned, skull-like helm. In its mailed fist, the black blade smoked and snarled. Across its chest, the chain of trophies hung, their sightless sockets staring blindly across the Black Altar.

There was a hideous, triumphant quality about the way the Skulltaker marched across the metal, blood-soaked floor. Sanya blanched, growing pallid before the imposing apparition, her arrogance and pride withering in the champion’s grim presence. She retreated behind Dorgo, placing the warrior between herself and the monster. The Skulltaker hesitated for an instant, his deathly mask studying the Tsavag warrior.

Dorgo brandished the Bloodeater, making certain that the Skulltaker recognised the blade he held. He could sense that the champion did. The Skulltaker would remember the power of that weapon better than anyone or anything, the blade that had vanquished him once before. If anything could make him know fear, it was this.

The Skulltaker turned away from Dorgo, looking past him to the Sul sorceress. Dorgo felt his ire rise. Did the monster think so little of him that he looked to the woman as a greater threat?

The Tsavag rushed the Skulltaker, a Tong war cry rising from his throat as he charged. The Skulltaker blocked the warrior’s stabbing sword, knocking the Bloodeater aside with a backhanded sweep of his smouldering blade. Dorgo heard the daemon steel scream in protest as the Bloodeater bit into its otherworldly edge.

Dorgo feinted a jab to his foe’s left, and then thrust at his right, stabbing at the join between torso and pelvis. Again, the Skulltaker’s blade came sweeping down, swatting aside the striking sword. This time the monster followed the block with a sweeping slash from his blade. Smoke stung Dorgo’s eyes as he ducked what would have been a decapitating blow.

The deadly dance began in earnest, thrust and parry, slash and block. The Bloodeater filled Dorgo with such strength that he barely felt the Skulltaker’s intercepting blade as it crashed against his own. He knew that if he could just get through the monster’s defences, if he could once stab his crimson blade into the body beneath the plated mail, that the Skulltaker would be finished. The power of Teiyogtei’s sword would destroy him as it had so long ago.

Against the strength of his arm and the power of his sword, Dorgo was forced to concede his vulnerability. The Skulltaker was far and beyond any foe he had ever faced, combining speed and power in a way that even a formidable adversary like Tulka didn’t come close to matching.

Unlike the champion of Khorne, Dorgo had no daemon-forged armour to guard his body. He had shed his armour before carrying Sanya across the pit. Beside the metal plates encasing the Skulltaker, he was as naked as a babe. It was a sobering thought, when the Skulltaker’s screaming blade came flashing inches from his skin, to consider how deep it would cut him if it struck home.

Dorgo’s sword crashed against the Skulltaker’s breastplate, scouring a deep gash in the dark armour. He quickly pulled back, turning aside the stabbing thrust of the champion’s blade with the hilt of his sword. Even as he knocked the deadly weapon aside, Dorgo felt his ribs explode with pain, the Skulltaker’s armoured knee slamming into him, pitching him to the floor. Hastily, Dorgo lifted the Bloodeater to block the murderous, descending strike of the Skulltaker’s steel.

Then he saw it, hanging from the chain alongside the other trophies lashed across the Skulltaker’s chest: a human skull, disfigured by lumps of metal protruding from forehead and scalp. Like all the others, it bore the brand of Khorne upon its brow.

Long-nourished hope withered and died as Dorgo saw his father’s skull grinning at him from the Skulltaker’s gruesome collection. They had found the Black Altar, and drawn the Skulltaker to them, but it was all done too late. Hutga Khagan had already joined the monster’s victims.

Seven heads: seven vanquished tribes. The strength and power that had filled him when he took up the Bloodeater faded as he felt his stomach turn. It didn’t matter that he had no proof of the thought that burrowed into his brain, he knew his suspicion was right. He knew which head the Skulltaker hadn’t claimed.

The champion’s sword came flashing down in a murderous sweep. The Bloodeater was all but torn from Dorgo’s nerveless clutch as he instinctively lifted his weapon to block the strike. The Skulltaker pulled back for another attack, towering over the fallen Tsavag like some gruesome avatar of death.

Suddenly, coils of blazing blue light crashed around the Skulltaker’s body, sizzling against his armoured plate. The champion spun, glaring at the almost forgotten sorceress. Sanya saw the timeless malice burning behind his mask as he stormed after her. Another blast of eldritch power smashed into the Skulltaker’s body. The monster kept coming, protected from the woman’s magic by the dread power of his god.

Sanya retreated, circling behind the forge, clutching her bag against her breast. The Skulltaker pointed a metal claw at the woman, an imperious gesture that brooked no defiance. He had nothing to fear from her magic, no spell known to man or daemon could penetrate the armour he wore.

Somehow, the sorceress lifted her head, all the hubris of her tribe etched across her features. ‘Work for it,’ she spat scornfully.

A bestial growl rasped from behind the Skulltaker’s mask. With swift, furious steps he closed upon Sanya. Desperately, Dorgo fought to his feet, determined to finish his enemy himself. Then he noticed something strange. Sanya had positioned herself behind the nest of pulleys and chains. Dorgo knew the spot well, having laboured so long to raise buckets from the pit. There should be a great hole in the floor only a few feet from where she stood, yet to his eyes, all that could be seen was the blood encrusted metal floor of the chamber.

Dorgo’s eyes were not the only ones deceived. The Skulltaker did not hesitate in his brutal rush towards the woman. His path carried him straight over the hole, the emptiness that Sanya had cloaked in her magic. With a great, wolf-like howl, the hulking champion, the blood-soaked slaughterer of the domain, plummeted down, hurtling into the burning pit far below.

‘That solves the problem of the Skulltaker,’ Sanya laughed, setting down her bag. There was an ugly, gloating quality to her voice, her features twisted into a harsh scowl. ‘It appears that we didn’t need the Bloodeater after all, just a bit of Mighty Cheen’s power employed in a judicious fashion.’

Dorgo wiped blood from his forehead, trying to keep it from running down into his eyes. He wanted to see the witch, wanted to see the terror in her eyes when she understood that she was going to die. He knew that she had worked some kind of enchantment on him, drowning out his suspicions of her with a slavish ardour. It was gone now, shocked out of him by the sight of Hutga’s skull hanging among the other trophies.

Sanya smiled when she saw the merciless hate in Dorgo’s eyes. She folded her hands together, contemptuous in her display of unconcern. ‘Try,’ she said. ‘Just try to strike me down. You can’t. Ever since we left the domain, I’ve been working my magic on you, whispering to your soul while you slept. You’d sooner destroy yourself than destroy me.’

Dorgo roared, rushing at the sneering Sanya. She continued to grin at him even as the Bloodeater came chopping down. Dorgo struck sure and true, aiming for the woman’s pretty face. Instead, he found his arm twisting around, the blade sweeping harmlessly past her shoulder. He tried again, chopping at her neck. The muscles in his arm grew tense, freezing solid the instant he pulled the sword back to deliver the blow.

Sanya stepped inside his murderous reach, her soft lips brushing against his cheek. ‘You see,’ she told him, ‘I have nothing to fear from you, my mighty warrior.’

‘You lied to me!’ Dorgo snarled, his rage only emboldened by the witch’s mockery. ‘You used us. You used my father and my tribe! You never intended to save anyone except yourself… Enek Zjarr!’

The name of the kahn of the Sul hung in the air, foul with scorn and disgust. Dorgo should have suspected, if he’d considered such cowardly deception possible even for a Sul. If the kahn could make doppelgangers of himself, surely cloaking his form in that of another would come easy to him. The Skulltaker hadn’t been drawn to the Black Altar because of the Bloodeater. He’d been drawn by the one thing he needed to complete his pact with Khorne: the last chieftain’s skull, the head of Enek Zjarr!

Hard laughter rippled from Sanya’s lips as she danced away from the glowering Tsavag. She shook her head, favouring Dorgo with a look that she might bestow on a drooling idiot. ‘Enek Zjarr?’ she laughed. ‘For too long I allowed that worm to use my body. Do you think I’d let him defile it further to hide from the Skulltaker?’

‘You cannot trick me, sorcerer!’ Dorgo snarled. He lowered his arm as feeling returned to it, further enraged by his frustrated helplessness. ‘The Skulltaker needed one more head. Tell me he didn’t need the head of Enek Zjarr! Tell me that isn’t what brought him here!’

Sanya nodded, condescending to applaud the warrior’s reasoning. ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed, ‘it was Enek Zjarr’s skull he needed, but I’m afraid someone already took it.’

Dorgo stared in disbelief as Sanya’s slender hand reached into the bag slung around her shoulder, the bag she had been so determined to keep with her. She pulled from it the secret treasure that she had carried with her for so very long: the dry, fleshless skull of Enek Zjarr, the rune of Khorne branded into its forehead.

‘He’s been dead since before we left the domain,’ Sanya told him, ‘murdered the very night we returned from the tomb of Teiyogtei. His weakness emboldened those who would see him fall. The legacy of Teiyogtei is such that no enemy can kill a chieftain, but as the king was slain by his warlords while he languished from his wounds, so his heirs may be brought to destruction by the hand of a kinsman. Enek Zjarr never saw the dagger I stabbed into him, but I assure you he felt its venom!’

‘But the Skulltaker would simply hunt for the head of the new kahn,’ Dorgo protested.

‘Not if there was no kahn,’ Sanya corrected him and the full treachery of that statement was like a physical blow to the Tsavag. ‘If no one claimed Enek Zjarr’s legacy, if none drew the flesh of Teiyogtei from his heart, then the power would remain bound in his corpse. The head of Enek Zjarr would remain the trophy sought by the Skulltaker. We Sul are smarter than the other tribes. We alone understood that our survival and that of our kahn were not the same. So long as the domain endured, we would endure. Once the Skulltaker killed the chiefs of the other tribes, there would be none to oppose us.’

‘And now the Sul will enslave what is left of the tribes,’ Dorgo growled through clenched teeth. ‘They will bring the entire domain under their rule.’

‘It is the destiny of those with wisdom to rule,’ Sanya said.

‘Not wisdom, witch,’ Dorgo spat. ‘Treachery and trickery! That is the coin the Sul know best!’

Sanya sighed, shaking her head sadly. ‘I could have used you, Tsavag. Thaulan Scabtongue and the other elders will need to be culled if I would be queen.’

‘And you’d make me your king,’ scoffed Dorgo.

‘Consort, perhaps,’ Sanya said after a moment of consideration. ‘After you’d disposed of the elders, of course. But I’m afraid you’d never bend sufficiently to my will. You’re too truculent, too headstrong to make a good slave. The strain of maintaining spells over you is one I can easily do without.’

Dorgo glared at the sorceress, feeling his hatred of her swell with each passing breath. Sanya was terrible in her airs of gloating triumph, revelling in the catalogue of deceit and betrayal that had brought her ultimate victory. All the death, all the suffering that had passed, all the carnage wrought by the Skulltaker, was immaterial to her. It was a mentality as loathsome as it was callous. Even ever-hungry Khorne appreciated each man’s death in his moment of dying.

Sanya strode back across the floor, the skull of her betrayed master in her hand. Slowly, she paced around Dorgo, her fingers playing through his hair. ‘Too bad,’ she decided at last. ‘I’ll have to find another tool to wield the Bloodeater for me.’ Her voice became as cold as a winter tempest.

‘Skewer yourself, dog!’

Against his will, Dorgo’s hands closed around the hilt of the Bloodeater. With agonising slowness, he turned the blade around in his grip, pointing the sharp tip of the jewelled sword towards his gut. He strained against the pull of his muscles, struggling against the dominating will that compelled him. Sanya laughed and he could feel her power over him lessen.

He tried to drop the sword, but even as he started to flex his fingers, he felt her will force them closed again.

She was toying with him, making him die by degrees, savouring the helpless terror of his mind. A more sinister torment it was hard to contemplate, where torturer and victim were one and the same.

A strange sight intruded into his terror. Past the trembling fists of his outstretched arms, Dorgo could see the nest of chains behind the forge. He could see them shivering, trembling with motion as though moved by some intangible wind.

Slowly, at first, then more violently, they began to sway. Initially, Dorgo watched the chains only to distract him from Sanya’s torture, but soon a horrified fascination gripped him. Something was climbing up the chains.

As soon as the thought was in his mind, he felt Sanya’s hold on him falter. The sorceress turned away, rushing to the edge of the opening behind the forge. Dorgo threw the Bloodeater from him, letting it clatter across the floor. He scrambled away from weapon and the sorceress, retreating from both with horror.

The sorceress waved her hands in arcane gestures above the metal floor, banishing the spell of concealment that she had evoked, exposing the gaping hole through which the chains passed. Her face turned pale with horror.

Sanya was too consumed by her fear to notice Dorgo’s escape. She was trembling as she backed away from the opening, shaking like a lonely leaf in a thunderstorm. A red gauntlet closed around the lip of the opening, followed quickly by a hulking body encased in armour. The Skulltaker’s metal mask glared at the sorceress, as pitiless as the face of Khorne.

Crackling lightning flashed from Sanya’s hand as she drew power from her amulet. The sorcerous energy shimmered and danced around the Skulltaker’s body, as harmful as summer rain.

The monster moved towards her, each step echoing like the tramp of doom from the walls of the forge. The hungry, surly roar of the forge hissed back into life, welcoming the Skulltaker’s return.

Sanya continued to back away, continued to unleash her deadly magic against the oncoming monster, but there was no pit to hide from the Skulltaker this time, and no trickery that could ensnare him.

Against the champion, Sanya’s magic was incapable of working any harm. It was the Sul’s turn to know how it felt to be powerless.

With a moan of horror, Sanya felt her back press against the iron wall of the chamber. Backed into a corner by the Skulltaker, she made a desperate lunge for freedom. The champion’s mailed fist caught in her flying hair, jerking her brutally from her feet. The Skulltaker ignored the fallen woman, interested more in the object that had flown from her hand to rattle across the floor. He stalked after Enek Zjarr’s skull, reaching down to pick it up from the floor.

Sanya shrieked, desperate courage filling her. She leapt at the Skulltaker, jumping onto his back, trying to pull him away from the fallen head. The champion reached behind him, closing an iron fist around the woman’s shoulder.

In a single, savage motion, he ripped the sorceress from him, bringing her slamming down in an overhead manoeuvre. A sickening, spine-snapping crack sounded as Sanya struck the floor. Even in her agony, the crippled woman tried to push Enek Zjarr’s head from the Skulltaker’s armoured fingers.

‘Stop him!’ Sanya shrieked as the Skulltaker gained his last trophy. The monster turned away, marching back to the howling forge. The fleshy stump of daemonic malevolence was gyrating and pulsating with excitement, its teeth gnashing in hungry expectation.

‘Stop him!’ Sanya screamed again, her desperate eyes fixed on Dorgo. The warrior could feel only the faintest tug of her will against his, the witch’s pain befouling her powers.

‘If he drops the skulls into the forge, it will be the end of us all!’ Sanya cried. Her eyes went wild with terror as she saw Dorgo turn away from the scene, moving towards the doorway of the Black Altar. ‘It will be the end of the domain! The land and everyone in it will be consumed, absorbed into the realm of the Blood God! Nothing will survive! Think of your people!’

Dorgo turned back. He watched as the Skulltaker dropped the first of his trophies into the greedy maw of the forge. The entire structure shuddered, gripped by some titanic tremor. The howling of the daemon’s spirit rose to an almost deafening din, the blood-stink of the chamber intensifying into an overwhelming reek. Dorgo could feel things scrabbling at the corners of existence, clawing for entrance as old walls began to fracture. Something colossal, a presence gigantic beyond understanding, was looming down from some unimaginable height, casting its shadow of terror across the world.

Dorgo stared into Sanya’s fear-maddened eyes. There was no pity, no mercy in his gaze, only a cold satisfaction. There was enough sanity left in the sorceress to know despair when she saw the ice in Dorgo’s gaze.

‘Everyone will die!’ she pleaded again.

‘Better death than a life of slavery under the Sul,’ Dorgo snarled.

The Black Altar trembled again as the armoured fist of the Skulltaker dropped another trophy into the slavering mouth of the forge. Dorgo struggled to keep his footing. There was no hope, only a choice of evils, but it was his choice.

Dorgo made his way back out onto the Black Altar’s jaw, deaf to Sanya’s wailing screams. He braced himself as the structure shook again, as pillars of black flame leapt up from the pit. He moved out along the jawline, climbing towards one of the immense anchor chains.

Whether he fell into the pit or was consumed by the rising flares, Dorgo could take comfort in one thought.

When the Skulltaker dropped his last trophy into the forge, the Sul would know the choice that Dorgo had made.

Somehow, Dorgo was able to cross the horrific pit. Even in the oldest of his tribe’s legends, even in the tales of Teiyogtei, Dorgo had never heard tell of such an impossible escape. Choking vapours, pillars of fire as tall as mountains, the bucking violence of the chains and their scalding heat, such odds even the boldest liar to assume the mantle of shaman would not have dared to tell. Yet, by the grace of what gods Dorgo did not know, somehow he had reached the other side.

He had emerged from the glowing light set into the breast of the bloodthirster’s corpse, scrambling down its charred husk even as it crumbled away beneath him. Dorgo had barely reached the ground before he saw the enormous body collapse, falling in upon itself like a burning log. Even then, the dissolution of the carcass was not complete. The shapeless chunks continued to fall apart, disintegrating into dunes of blackened ash.

Dorgo stared across the horizon, struck numb by the horror that beset his eyes. The landscape of piled bone and skeletal ground was changing, shifting in subtle, uncanny ways. Mounds of bone resolved into familiar peaks. Trees and rivers began to manifest into phantom shapes. Dorgo found that what he looked upon was horribly familiar, that he looked upon hills and mountains that he knew from the lands of the Tsavags. As Sanya had warned, the domain was being absorbed into the realm of the Blood God.

It was not a clean, pure sort of transference. The arrangement of hills and forests was erratic, far different from the way they had existed in the mortal world. The ghastly landscape the places of the domain intruded upon was not banished, but horribly merged into the substance of mortal stone and mortal tree. The strange image of the lands around the domain being stretched to cover the hole where the kingdom of Teiyogtei had once been suggested itself to his mind and would not be unseated. The domain had not been conquered. The realm of Khorne had not expanded.

The domain had been absorbed, consumed, torn from the mortal world and scattered through the spectral borderland of the Wastes. It was conquest in a deeper, more terrible fashion than the cruellest warlord could understand.

Dark clouds gathered in the sky, scarlet lightning flashing through their sombre veils. Red, pasty drops began to weep down from the clouds, a rain of blood. Dorgo could see stretches of the bone-littered Wastes bubbling and frothing as crimson pools spurted up from beneath the earth. All colour drained away as the crimson gore covered the land. The ground was lost beneath the rising tide of blood. Dorgo sloshed through the growing sea, rushing to gain one of the surrounding hills. A roar that was not thunder rolled through the desolation, and he thought again of that hungry howl in the depths of the forge.

Fierce winds tore at the heavens, sending the blood-rain splashing down in nearly horizontal sheets. Dorgo felt the sting of the drops sizzling against his skin, hot with an unholy fire. Tremors shook the earth, great geysers of black flame erupting from beneath the expanding sea of blood. Terror, brutal and malignant, scratched at his mind, hissing words of doom into his soul.

Dorgo at last reached his hill, scrambling up a surface that was slick with blood: trees covered in thorns, grass as bloated and obscene as that of the borderland, rocks with the sinister suggestion of bony arms. Nothing, not even in the most abandoned reaches of the domain had ever been so malevolent, so eager for a man’s blood. He could almost see the thorny arms of the trees reaching out for him, could almost feel the skeletal rocks clawing at his feet.

Always, there was the pulsing, pounding rage pressing against his skull, turning his brain crimson with thoughts of murder and savagery. Death, destruction and carnage, and the lust to exult in slaughter and ruin, pawed at his mind, trying to twist it, to consume it as the Wastes had consumed the domain. Dorgo screamed, trying to keep his last, tenuous hold on what he knew to be himself, trying to keep from being absorbed into something else, something monstrous and ancient and eternal.

The sea of blood continued to rise, swallowing the hill below him. Dorgo climbed higher, ever higher, fighting his way through brambles and brush alive with knife-edged thorns. The stinging rain became a burning deluge, welts rising up from his scalded skin as it struck him.

Then, with impossible abruptness, all was silence. No rain fell from the sky, no rock clutched at his foot. The terror and the bloodlust withdrew from his mind and soul, draining away. The wind became only the faintest breeze and the bellowing roar was a dim whisper. Dorgo found his gaze drawn back across the swollen waters of the sanguine sea, a sea more vast than anything he had ever seen, where only a few peaks and rises disturbed its surface. His attention was fixed, not to the mountains, nor even to the ocean of darkened gore. What he looked at was beneath those grisly waters, a heap of ash drowned beneath the waves.

Tears of blood fell from his eyes, blood burst from his ears and ran from his nose. He bit his tongue as his mouth opened to scream.

The surface of the sea erupted with a violence beyond that of the geysers, lifting in a great explosion that sent tidal waves rippling in every direction. Immense, gargantuan in its dimensions, the reborn daemon rose into the black sky, its leathery wings fanning the air in great lethargic beats. Molten bronze dripped from its massive hooves, fire falling from its claws. Armour, black and ancient, writhed with the torments of the souls trapped within. Hound-like jaws opened in a victorious howl that ripped across the world, finding its echoes in murders and outrages in a thousand lands. Baleful eyes, black as pits of blood, glared at the heavens with a hate more ancient than time.

Slowly, the apparition faded, vanishing into the ethereal kingdoms of gods and daemons.

Dorgo held his head in his hands, understanding the horror that his revenge against Sanya and the Sul had unleashed. Krathin the bloodthirster, the Lash of Khorne, was free.

EPILOGUE

Dark waves of blood lapped against the skeletal shore of Dorgo’s refuge. Except for a few scattered islands peaking above the crimson ocean, the Tsavag warrior was alone. Only the biting wind stirred the black sky, and only the sound of sluggish waves sloshing against the shore interrupted the silence.

Dorgo paid little attention to the barren world around him. He was locked in the awful realisation that he was the last of his people, the last of the Tsavags. Everyone he had ever known, everyone he had ever loved, respected or admired was gone. Even his enemies had been consumed by this ghastly world of blood and terror: the Vaan, the Seifan, even the Sul. All were gone. In the desolation of his heart, even hatred was denied its place. There simply was no one left.

The clatter of something striking the rocks beside him snapped Dorgo from his gloomy reflection. He spun around, gasping as he saw what had been thrown at him. Upon the rocks, shining with a dull inner glow, was the Bloodeater. The warrior lunged for the weapon, seizing it in his fist. He could feel its strength and power surge through him, pouring fire into his soul. He was alone, but he was also alive, and while he was alive, he would fight. To do less would shame the memories of his vanished race.

Dorgo rose from the ground. He saw a ghastly shape waiting for him at the top of the sunken hill. Blood from the dark sea dripped from the thing’s leathery crimson flesh and sizzled from the length of its smouldering sword. Great talons blacker than obsidian tipped its long, cruel hands. Bestial, reptilian paws supported it, hooked claws splayed wide to maintain purchase upon the blood-slicked slope.

A heavy cloak woven from numberless skulls tumbled from its shoulders, whipping about its body in a charnel breeze. Bronze armour encased its chest, the ancient metal pitted with the marks of battle and the runes of Khorne.

Its head was twisted and savage, four great horns stabbing out from temple and crown, notched and curled with infamy and spite. Its face was a merciless, skull-like visage, crimson skin stretched tight across daemonic bone. Dorgo was reminded of the ghastly bloodletters that had menaced him upon the anchor chain, but looking into the thing’s pitiless eyes he saw a hate that was beyond any mere daemon’s gaze.

‘The ember-like eyes stared down at the Tsavag and he knew the enemy for what it was. Dorgo did not know what terrible metamorphosis had consumed the last vestiges of the man who had been Vrkas. He did not know what inhuman malevolence had been poured into the vengeful champion in his moment of triumph. He could not guess at the abominable marriage of mortal and daemon, the fusion of living flesh and eternal malice that had created the horror which now glowered at him. His mind would not understand the strange path that had led the monster back to him, a spectral trail through forgotten lands and forgotten ages.

It was enough for Dorgo to recognize the daemon, to put a name to its timeless rage. The name of Skulltaker.

‘Your gods have spared you, monster!’ Dorgo spat, finding a terrible joy as hatred was restored to his heart. ‘Now they demand an end to our contest.’ Dorgo slashed the sword of Teiyogtei through the stagnant air, savouring the feel of it in his hand. This time, there would be no distraction, no interruption. The shock of Hutga’s death could not overwhelm him now. This time, it would be a fight to the finish.

‘Come, monster,’ Dorgo snarled. ‘I’ll send you to join your daemons!’

The Skulltaker’s claws crunched against the bony shale as he descended from the high ground. There was no hesitancy in his march, no doubt or question, only the grim resolve of a man who had long ago accepted his fate.

‘No gods,’ the Skulltaker’s grinding voice spoke. ‘No witches. Just warriors.’ He paused in his descent, lifting his wailing sword in a sombre salute. ‘Just warriors and steel.’

As the two warriors charged across the desolate hillside, crashing together in a crush of muscle and metal, both knew the outcome of their battle mattered little.

The Blood God would not care from which carcass the blood flowed.

APPENDIX

Tribes of the Horde

Using the daemon weapons forged in the hellfire of the Black Altar, the great king Teiyogtei Khagan bound the loyalties of eight mighty chieftains and their tribes to his cause. With this mighty horde, he set out to do what no mortal king had ever accomplished: to carve an empire from the fractured wastes of the Shadowlands.

Tsavags

Teiyogtei Khagan’s own tribe the Tsavags are of the Tong race, a savage people dwelling in the heart of the Chaos Wastes themselves. Grotesquely mutated, possessed of strength and endurance far beyond lesser breeds of men, the power of the gods saturates the flesh of the Tong. Keepers of the mighty war mammoths, the Tsavags were great among their people even before the rise of Teiyogtei. Swept up in the king’s vision of conquest and glory, the Tsavags formed the nucleus of what would become his horde. Fierce and proud, fired by their connection to the legendary king, the Tsavags remain a powerful force within Teiyogtei’s shattered domain.

The Tsavags practise ritual scarring, carving marks into their flesh to denote their lineage and accomplishments. By this token, a member of the tribe will recognise the status of a kinsman simply by observing the signs carved into their face.

Sul

A breed of sorcerers and mystics, the Sul are of the Hung race, sallow-skinned horsemen of the east. The dark power of magic burns within the souls of the Sul, twisting and corrupting them from the womb to the grave. Treacherous, cunning and opportunistic, the Sul are loyal to none but themselves. Their magic gives them powers over both the mortal and unseen worlds. Daemons bow before them and beasts hearken to their words. The Sul do not see themselves as servants of the gods, but rather as exploiters of their power. Their fealty to Tzeentch is a matter of convenience, invoking the Lord of Change to protect them from the wrath of lesser gods and daemons. But even the Sul are not so arrogant to believe that such patronage does not come with a price.

Vaan

One of the many tribes of the dark-haired Kurgan race, the Vaan are the most numerous of the tribes of the domain. Militaristic and highly disciplined, the Vaan have ever been willing servants of Khorne. Skilled tacticians and strategists, the zars of the Vaan approach war as a sacred sacrament, believing that carnage without victory is offensive to their god. The Vaan maintain legions of goblin slaves to work the extensive mines and forges that writhe beneath their land. Their warriors sport mail of blackened iron and bear weapons finer than anything born in the crude fires of their rivals. If not for the Tsavags and the Sul, the entire domain would long ago have fallen beneath the iron boots of the Vaan armies.

Seifan

Another of the Hung tribes drawn by the promises of Teiyogtei Khagan, it is said that the Seifan are a people born in the saddle. They measure their wealth in the size of their herds, and they breed the fastest steeds in the domain, fierce animals fattened on flesh and blood. In battle, the Seifan employ scythe-wheeled chariots of wood and bronze. They do not favour any of the gods, but worship each in his turn according to the tribe’s need. Without concept of conscience or honour, the Seifan are dangerous enemies and equally dangerous allies. Their power in the domain lies not from sorcery or force of arms, but from an uncanny facility for playing one foe against another.

The Warherd of Kug

Inhuman beastmen, the Warherd takes its name from the ancient beastlord who swore fealty to Teiyogtei Khagan. Feral, savage monsters, the beastmen found themselves with few friends when the horde disintegrated in the aftermath of the king’s death. Driven into the mysterious wooded expanse of the Grey, the beastmen have long nursed their primordial hate for the races of man. Generations of dwelling within the lightless depths of the forest have rendered the beastkin all but blind, but the mutating influence of the forest has given them new senses in compensation. The beastmen have become the foremost of the terrors of the night, raiding the lands of even the strongest tribes, slaking their savage hunger for human flesh.

Gahhuks

A tribe of Kurgans, the Gahhuks are deadly enemies of the Seifan, viewing the Hung horselords with a bitter enmity born of spite and envy. Horsemen themselves, the Gahhuks see the Seifan as their most immediate rivals in the domain and vie with the Hung for control of the grasslands. The hulking steeds of the Gahhuks bear little resemblance to the shaggy ponies of the Seifan and are bred for raw strength and power rather than speed and endurance. The Gahhuks practise a grisly death-cult, each man forced to slay a rival before he is accepted as a warrior of the tribe. The flayed skin of the vanquished rival is a token of the warrior’s status, stretched across a wooden frame and worn across the back when the warrior rides into battle.

Veh-Kung

Of the three Hung tribes who swore allegiance to Teiyogtei Khagan, the Veh-Kung have strayed the farthest from their origins as horsemen and nomads. Defeated by their rivals, the Veh-Kung were forced to seek sanctuary in the macabre Desert of Mirrors, a weird realm infested with the noxious power of Nurgle, the Plague God. Decimated by the invisible pestilence exuding from the crystalline landscape, the Veh-Kung swore to embrace the worship of the Crow God if he would spare their lives. Nurgle was as good as his promise, and no longer did the Veh-Kung die from the plague all around them. But the god did not spare their flesh and the Veh-Kung became debased, ghastly creatures.

Confronted daily by their decaying reflections in the crystalline spires of the desert, the Veh-Kung burrowed beneath the shimmering sand, carving a network of tunnels beneath the desert to hide not from the sun, but from their own hideous transformation. Now they eke out a troglodyte existence, scratching a starveling subsistence from their unforgiving home. The legacy of their ancestors and their origins upon the eastern steppes is a mocking memory that serves only to remind the Veh-Kung how far they have fallen and to heighten their despair.

Muhaks

The Muhaks are a tribe of Kurgans renowned for their immense strength, if not their subtle natures. Grotesquely swollen with inhuman growths of muscle, the Muhaks more resemble ogres than men. Infamous as cannibals, the Muhaks wear the skins of their victims as visible displays of their strength and power. Even among the fierce tribes of the domain, the Muhaks are seen as vicious barbarians, as dangerous as rabid trolls. No tribe has been spared the depredations of the Muhaks, but exterminating the brutes is a task that even the Vaan hesitate to consider, knowing the losses such a campaign would incur and knowing that the other tribes would be quick to exploit such weakness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

An extract from The Tyrion & Teclis Omnibus.

Tyrion sat on the edge of the wall of his father’s villa, legs dangling, enjoying the sense of danger. Behind him lay a twenty-foot drop and the one in front of him was even steeper, for the ground sloped away downhill. If he fell from here he might break a limb on the rock-strewn ground below.

The late winter sun burned bright in the clear blue sky. It was cold this high in the mountains of Cothique. His breath came out frosted and he felt the chill through the thin cloth of his tattered tunic and his patched woollen cloak. In the distance, he could see a troop of mounted figures riding up-slope towards the hilltop villa.

Strangers were rare in this part of Ulthuan. Very few people ever came to visit them. Most were passing hunters dropping off part of their kill as a tithe for hunting on his father’s lands. One or two were highland villagers who came to consult his father about a sickness in their family or on some minor matter of magic or scholarship.

Things had been different when his mother was alive, or so Thornberry claimed. The house had been busy then, when his parents had arrived to occupy it for a summer season or two, escaping from the heat of the lowlands. Sorcerers and scholars from all over Ulthuan had come to visit it along with his mother’s rich relatives. People had liked his mother and were prepared to travel to even this remote place to visit her.

Tyrion was in no position to know. She had died during the difficult birth of himself and his brother and he had never known a world with her in it. There was one thing of which he was sure – none of the locals except his father could afford a horse, let alone a warhorse.

Tyrion’s eyes were keen as an eagle’s and he could see that the strangers were mounted on steeds even larger than his father’s, caparisoned in a way he had only seen illustrated in books. Most of them were carrying lances. He could not imagine what else that long pole with its fluttering pennon might be.

The truth was he did not want it to be anything else. He wanted them to be knights, glamorous warriors such as he and his brother were always reading about in their father’s old books. He wondered if this were somehow connected with his birthday, which was tomorrow, although his father appeared to have forgotten yet again. He felt somehow that it was. It seemed right.

He sprang up, balanced on the thin lip of the wall, then walked along it to the roof of the stables, arms held out from his sides to maintain balance. He let himself in through the large hole in the slates and dropped down onto the support beam. The dusty, musty smell of the old building filled his nostrils along with the warm animal scent of his father’s horse. He ran along the beam, grabbed the rope he had left knotted round the edge and jumped.

This was always the best part, the long swing to the ground, the dizzying sense of speed as he careened downward and let go, landing rolling in the bales of hay. It always made him smile.

He raced out of the stable, past the startled Thornberry. The wrinkled old elf woman watched him with a look almost of embarrassment on her face, as if young Tyrion’s energy somehow baffled and upset her.

‘Strangers are coming,’ Tyrion yelled. ‘I am going to tell father.’

‘Hush, young Tyrion,’ said Thornberry. ‘Your brother is sick again. You will wake him.’

‘My brother is already awake.’

Thornberry raised an eyebrow. She did not ask how Tyrion could know that. Tyrion could not have answered her anyway. He had no idea how it was possible that when he was in close proximity to his brother he could sometimes tell whether he was asleep or awake, happy or sad or in great pain. To tell the truth it always seemed strange to him that others could not. Maybe it was something to do with them being twins.

‘He is now – with you making all that noise,’ said Thornberry. Her tone was grumpy and she was trying to make her face stern but her gaze, as always, was kind. Nonetheless, as always, she managed to make him feel guilty.

He raced upstairs, and ran into his father’s chambers.

His father held up a hand for silence. He was standing over his workbench, peering at something through the eyepiece of a magna-scope. ‘Hush, Tyrion, I will be with you in a moment.’

Tyrion stood there almost bursting from his desire to give the news but he knew his father was not to be hurried when he was about his studies. To occupy himself he gazed round the room, taking in his father’s huge library of books and scrolls, so beloved of Teclis, the jars full of pickled monster heads, and odd chemicals and weird plants from the jungles of Lustria and the rainforests east of Far Cathay.

His gaze was drawn as ever, and no matter how much he tried to avoid it, to the gigantic, terrifying suit of armour that stood on its wire frame in the corner. It looked for all the world like some monstrous golem waiting to be animated. His father claimed that this armour had been forged in the magical furnaces of Vaul’s Anvil for their legendary ancestor Aenarion and that it was broken and dead now, needing magic to bring it back to life and grant it power and make it once again fit to be worn by a hero. Tyrion was not entirely sure of the truth of this but he hoped it was the case.

It was discoloured around the chest and arms where his father had repaired the ancient damaged metalwork with his own hands. In those places the armour did not have the patina of age it had elsewhere.

It was his father’s life work to make the armour whole again. He had dedicated a lifetime of scholarship to it, ever since he had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father before him and so on back into the mists of time. Family lore had it that the armour had been presented to their ancestor Amarion, by Tethlis himself, as a reward for saving the life of his son. It was their family’s most precious heirloom.

As far as Tyrion knew his father was the first of his line who had tried to remake the armour. So far his efforts had proved fruitless. There was always just one more thing needed, one more piece of rare metal, one more fabulous rune to be re-discovered and re-inscribed, one more spell to be re-woven. Many times Tyrion had heard his father claim that this time, he would do it, and always he had been disappointed. It had cost his father his not-inconsiderable fortune and his life’s energy and it was still not complete.

Tyrion studied his father now and realised how frail he was. His hair was fine as spun silver and white as the snow on the peak of Mount Starbrow. A mesh of wrinkles spun out from his eyes to cover most of his face. The purple veins stood out thinly on his hands. Tyrion looked at the smooth skin of his own hands and saw the difference at once. A life of failure had aged his father prematurely. Prince Arathion was only a few centuries old.

‘Tell me what you came to say, my son,’ said his father. His voice was calm and gentle and remote but not without a certain mocking humour. ‘What brought you into my workroom without even knocking?’

‘Riders are coming,’ Tyrion said. ‘Warriors mounted on warhorses.’

‘You are certain of that?’ his father asked.

Tyrion nodded.

‘How?’ His father believed that observations had to be tested and justified. It was part of his method of scholarship. ‘Not just book learning’ were his watchwords.

‘The horses were too large to be normal mounts and the riders carried lances with pennons on them.’

‘Whose pennon?’

‘I do not know, father. It was too far away.’

‘Might it not have been more useful, my son, to wait until you could see it? Then you might have been able to tell me more about who the strangers were and what their purposes might be.’

As always Tyrion could not help but feel that he was somehow a disappointment to his gentle, scholarly father. He was too loud, too boisterous, too active. He was not brilliant like Teclis.

His father smiled at him.

‘Next time, Tyrion. You will do better next time.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘And fortunately I have a spyglass here in my study that will allow me to find out the information you missed, despite the fact these aged eyes are not as keen as yours. Run along now and tell your brother. I know you are dying to give him the news.’

Teclis lay in the great four poster bed, covered in piles of threadbare, patched blankets. The room was so shadowy that it was impossible to see how moth-eaten the bed’s canopy was and how old and rickety the room’s furnishings were.

Teclis coughed loudly. It sounded as if a bone had come loose inside him and was rattling round in his chest. He twisted in the tangle of covers and looked up at his brother with bright feverish eyes. Tyrion wondered if this time Teclis was really going to die, if this illness would be the one that would finally claim him. His brother was so weak now, so feeble and so full of pain and despair.

And selfishly Tyrion wondered what would happen to him then. He felt the echoes of his brother’s pain and his weakness. What would happen when Teclis went on the dark journey? Would Tyrion too die?

‘What brings you here, brother? It is still light out. It is not yet reading time.’

Tyrion looked guiltily at the copy of Maderion’s Tales of the Caledorian Epoch that lay on the chipped table beside the bed. He walked over to the windows. The drapes were fusty and smelled of mould. Cold air whistled in through gaps in the shutters, despite the torn shreds of sacking he had stuffed into the gaps. There was no place in the old villa where Teclis could escape the cold that seemed to leech all vitality from him.

‘We have visitors,’ said Tyrion. Interest flickered in Teclis’s eyes and for a moment he seemed a little less listless.

‘Who are they?’ The tone was a dry echo of their father’s, as was the question itself. Tyrion wondered at the resemblance. For all his weakness Teclis was very much their father’s son, in a way that Tyrion never felt himself to be.

‘I don’t know,’ he was forced to admit. ‘I did not wait to check their heraldic banners. I merely ran in with the news.’ He could not keep the sullenness from his voice even though he knew his brother did not deserve it.

‘Father has been subjecting you to inquisition again, I see,’ said Teclis and was wracked by another long, horrible paroxysm of coughing. Laughing was sometimes a mistake in his case.

‘He makes me feel stupid,’ Tyrion confessed. ‘You make me feel stupid.’

‘You are not stupid, brother. You are just not like him. Your mind runs in different channels. You are interested in different things.’ Teclis was trying to be kind, but he could not keep a certain satisfaction from his voice. His twin was eternally conscious of his physical inferiority. His sense of intellectual superiority helped balance that. Normally it did not trouble Tyrion but today he felt unsettled and insecure. It did not take much to put him off-balance. ‘Battles and weapons and such are what interest you.’

The tone of his brother’s voice let him know exactly how unimportant he considered such things in the great scheme of things.

‘One of the riders at very least is a warrior. He carried a lance, and his armour shone brightly in the sun.’

At first Tyrion thought he was making up the latter detail but even as he said it he realised it was the truth. He had observed more than he thought. It was a pity his father had not questioned him about that detail.

‘And what of the other riders?’ Teclis asked. ‘How many were there?’

‘Ten with lances. One of them without.’

‘Who would that be?’

‘I don’t know, a squire perhaps or a servant.’

‘Or a mage?’

‘Why would a mage come here?’

‘Our father is a wizard and a scholar. Perhaps he has come to consult him and the warriors are his bodyguard.’

Tyrion saw that Teclis was twisting events to suit his own views and fantasies. He wanted one of those riders to be a scholar and the others, the warriors, to be in the inferior position. It stung. He felt like he should say something but he could not think what, then Teclis laughed.

‘We really are country mice, aren’t we? We sit in our rooms discussing strangers who may or may not be coming to visit us. We read of the great battles of the Caledorian Age but some horsemen in search of a night’s shelter are a source of great commotion to us.’

Tyrion laughed, glad that he was not going to have to argue with his brother. ‘I suppose I could go and ask them what they want,’ he said.

‘And rob us of a delightful mystery and the anticipation of its solution?’ Teclis asked. ‘We shall have those soon enough.’

Even as he said the words, the great gate bell rang. There was something ominous in its tolling, and Tyrion could not help but feel that it heralded some massive change, that for some as yet unknown reason, their lives would never be the same after today.

The great bell tolled again, as Tyrion raced down into the courtyard. He got to the gate at the same time as Thornberry. They stood facing each other for a moment, each waiting to see what the other would do.

‘Who goes there?’ Tyrion shouted.

‘Korhien Ironglaive and Lady Malene of the House of Emeraldsea and her retinue. We have business with Prince Arathion.’

‘And what would that business be?’ Tyrion asked. He was overwhelmed by the glamour of those names. His father had talked of Korhien. House Emeraldsea were kinfolk of his mother’s, merchant princes of the great city state of Lothern, where the twins had lived when they were small children. What could they possibly want here?

‘That is for me to discuss with Prince Arathion, not his doorkeeper.’ The elf’s voice sounded impatient. There was definitely something martial about it. It had the clarity of a great bronze horn intended to ring out over a battlefield.

‘I am not his doorkeeper, I am his son,’ Tyrion replied to show he was undaunted, even though he was a little.

‘Tyrion, open the gate,’ said a gentle voice from behind him. Tyrion turned, surprised to see his father there. He was wearing his finest over-cloak as well, and a torque of intricately worked gold on which were set certain blazing mystical gems. ‘It would not do to keep our guests waiting. It is uncouth.’

Tyrion shrugged and put his shoulder against the bar of the gate. It raised easily for he was very strong for his age. He stepped back as the gates swung open and found himself looking up at the mounted strangers. One of them was the tallest elf male Tyrion had ever seen, as tall and broad as he was, with a great axe over his back and a sword strapped to his side. In his hand he did indeed hold a long lance. Over his shoulders was a cloak made from the hide of a white lion. Tyrion was thrilled. He had never met a member of the Phoenix King’s legendary bodyguard before. What could such a one want here?

Beside the White Lion was a female elf in a beautifully woven and cowled travel gown. Her expression was haughty, her amber-eyed stare piercingly direct. She wore a number of glowing amulets that marked her out as a mage. A lock of long raven-black hair emerged from beneath the cowl of her cloak.

Behind them a group of riders sat, mounted on caparisoned horses. All of them wore the same tabard and had the same emblem on the pennons of their lances; a white ship on a green background. A line of spare mounts and pack mules straggled out behind them. It looked like quite an impressive expedition.

Before Tyrion could say anything the White Lion had planted the lance in the earth of the gateway, vaulted down from the saddle, strode across the courtyard and swept his father off his feet in a massive hug. Much to Tyrion’s surprise his father did not object, he was laughing merrily. It was the first time Tyrion had ever seen such a thing.

He glanced at the woman to see if she was as wonderstruck as he, and noticed that her expression was sour and disapproving. She looked around the courtyard as if she were inspecting a pigsty. Her horse was smaller than the warriors’ but even more beautifully accoutred. She caught him watching her and frowned. He met her gaze though and held it till she looked away.

‘Korhien, you old warhound, it is good to see you,’ said Father.

‘And you, Arathion,’ said the warrior, slapping his father’s back with a force that Tyrion feared would do him injury. His father winced under the impact but made no protest. It suddenly occurred to Tyrion that Korhien and his father were friends. It was a novel concept. In all the years of his childhood, Tyrion could not recall his father showing affection to anyone or anything, even his sons. ‘How long has it been?’

‘Not since you retired here, after Alysia...’ Korhien said, and the way his expression changed showed he knew he had made a mistake even as he spoke. He closed his mouth. A wave of sadness flashed across his father’s face and he looked away into the distance.

‘Lady Malene,’ said his father at last. ‘Welcome to my home.’

‘So this is where my sister died,’ said the woman. ‘It is not a very... prepossessing place.’

Another faint shock rippled through Tyrion’s chest. This woman was his aunt. He studied her even more carefully now, wondering just how much she resembled his mother. Now that he looked closely he saw that some of her features bore a resemblance to Teclis’s and even to those he saw in the mirror. She was staring at him just as hard. There was hostility in that gaze and something else he could not make out, curiosity perhaps.

She held out her hand and looked at him again. It occurred to him that she was a lady who was not used to mounting or dismounting a steed without aid. He felt tempted to go and help her, but something in him rebelled against it and after a moment, he realised why.

It would be servants who would aid this woman, and he was most definitely not her servant. She saw the knowledge strike him, and she smiled coldly, dismounted gracefully and strode over to where he stood. She walked all around him inspecting him the way a mountain housewife might inspect a calf she was thinking of buying. Tyrion did not like the way she did it.

‘Do you like what you see?’ he asked.

‘Tyrion,’ his father said, his tone disapproving. The warrior laughed. The elf woman’s response surprised him.

‘Yes, very much,’ she said. ‘Although its manners could be improved.’

Korhien laughed at that too. Tyrion felt his face redden. He clenched his fists defiantly, not used to being mocked by any but his father or Teclis. Then he saw the funny side and laughed himself.

‘You look like her when you laugh,’ Malene said, and there was a sadness in her voice that reminded him of his father sometimes. ‘Alysia was always a merry soul.’

Alysia had been his mother’s name, and it was obvious from Malene’s tone that she missed her. It occurred to him that perhaps this proud, cold woman might be something like he would become if Teclis died, and he found he had a certain sympathy for her then.

‘Are we going to stand out here in the dust all day?’ asked Korhien, ‘Or are you going to ask us in and ply us with some of the fine old wines in that cellar of yours you always boasted about.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said his father. ‘Come in, come in.’

It was the first time Tyrion had ever heard about fine old wines in their cellar. It was certainly turning out to be an interesting day. The riders still sat on their horses, impassive, as if waiting to charge. There was a sort of menace in their stillness.

‘Perhaps your retainers would care to join us,’ his father added. ‘It seems like a very large party for a social visit.’

Tyrion did not miss the quick look of warning that flashed between Father and Korhien.

‘The roads grow dangerous again,’ Korhien said. Tyrion sensed that he would like to have said something else but was constrained by the presence of the others.

What was going on here?

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
Palace of the Plague Lord first published in 2007.
Blood for the Blood God first published in 2008.
Wulfrik first published in 2010.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Alex Boyd.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.

Warriors of the Chaos Wastes © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Warriors of the Chaos Wastes, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78030-860-9

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